SEVEN MINDS
Santo Stefano / Castel del Monte / Autostrada Adriatica / Diso / Castro / London / Beloved
Santo Stefano
Stop: music, art, the excess of all not mind.
In Santo Stefano a stone mind thinks few thoughts,
at walking pace, and makes a simple argument.
The return of men and women who thought for you!
the return that doesn't come. No new memories now. Come to die,
but an abbreviation lingers in the mind.
Castel del Monte
Proud as a University, a book,
the lonely brain with its messages detained
and postal vans that circulate like enzymes
putting their yellow against an opening in the dome.
Up from the base, ruins: 19, 20
21st Century, where the articulated lorries
genuflect in lanes at a century of speed.
How noble the castle, infinite to itself its enigmatic thoughts!
Homes cascade down the hill like applause.
Autostrada Adriatica
An erratic signal gone
among pylons on a simplifying landscape.
Long past the hippocampus, seat of memory
we relax into a joyful celebration of mud.
Guitars sonorize the fuel stations, everything is awry,
and car blinkers steer into barriers, a drunken inversion
of the Great Age of Reason. Between the silver sea
and the silver sky we are thin as water. Everything must dissolve.
Diso
The democratic subject thinks, inward,
a cloister where nuns once prayed and kept aloof
from each other and the world beyond,
trims the night with light and descants on electric tape.
The courtyard, evolved, goes on as before.
The lady puts a sphere at his center.
Was there water on the roads or is that dull roar the sea,
or just another car, longing for the noise within?
Comune di Castro
Pigeons drop down like scholars' gowns
go ragged, draw up before the sea.
The castle here a thumbprint.
From the sea there is nothing, and then a creamy glaze.
Great spoon-leaved thoughts, cast out by stone,
armored and unread in the incoherence of age.
Olives shake loose like droppings, smash
into black puddles, ephemeral as a synapse.
Something closes on the human experience.
London
The city on mute, day flights,
sunlit expanses that come up to the brain
and make no claims. Archives in streets,
inconsolable, silent. Shame lives here,
like a memory of smog,
galleries, perfected terraces
laid out in a manual for proper thought.
There is the brain, the mind, between them Winter sun,
each outside of time, not making a unity.
Which to reject? The promising boy returns
in a metaphorical state. One says to the other:
if I could have told you so.
Beloved
and lover circle like ravens to feast on the Earth below.
Frailties of the wet human mind
with its daemons reaching up to be heard,
buffered like an asprin, sick as a fire.
No town at peace with itself but undergoes a complication,
reading the moon, sortes virgilianae, curling paperbacks
in cold sea, whatever absence can accomodate.
No true mind is found the same way twice. Greater than Tokyo,
Mumbai, Los Angeles, between eradicated courtyards they leave space
for cisterns, statues, grassy sunlight triangles. Electric cars go past.
TYPO
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