Geof Huth



wavelight, than which

Introit

Time for. Time to. We begin with it. A song to open. Modulate, modulated, modulating. The voice as a bucket inside which the sound sloshes. Summer is longer than the first day of autumn. We set boundaries between continuities, segregating the congregant from the celebrant. In nomine de. Our only father, imagination. Our Spiritus Sancti, merely what we cannot know. The Mass is a massing, massive, the bringing together at the beginning of all for being. Sleep in the pew, little poppet, for you will still be there tomorrow. So long. So long waiting. The wanting. The stare forth. All answers in staring. Look at the poem, innocent in its immutable shape. The priest against the wall & the eye’s stare create the halo about his head. The pierced feet on the crucifix wiggle. We come here, again, as we come here never again. In our memories. Candlelit. There is no ritual we believe in, so we invent others. The hand as it sculpts a letter out of ink. We call it an observance (how we watch), solemnity a form of transcendence, sleeping through a dream we never remember. Everything happens in sequence. As we watch. What we watch. Becomes. It is as it is. There, in the breach, we see it before it happens. We sing. The antiphon we recite, in cadence, incandescent, against the sound. It is all around us. Light, resonance, fragrance. The sharp cloud of frankincense clinking towards us, around us. Surrounding us, illuminated, echoed, scented, sent. We come. We come to. We come to this place, without a notion. In our palms we find them. Tiny desires we can shroud with our fingers. A winding sheet, unraveled, reveals. Tiny desires of letters resting against letters, the magical characters for meaning. How we hold it, in our hands, against our hands, on our skin. Stigmata, the only poems we cannot deny. Aroused & arisen. Give us over to it, each fragment of word. We do not comprehend, thus we know. We could count all the way to Z, with a little assistance. When we dance we hold palm to palm, the poems of our bodies pressed against each other. Lips. Soft against. The tongue licking red to glistening. Controlling the sound, as we sing, so we sing. Only surface matters. The word as image. The word as sound. Lip to lip, tongue to tongue, true song to true song, entangled, not sole. We dance, our eyes closed the better for us to see. Our ears deaf, so we can hear without interruption. Our lips pursed, their only currency silence. & from this the song arises.

one

Into & onto it as it was & would be, was & will be. That it is just as it is supposed to be, how the meaning of it could determine the reality of the scene, how one changed word could create another reality, one no less real than the first & one of the numberless.


two

& over it was upon what substance could extract meaning from that that remained after it all transpired. If what it were was substance beyond surface, it could mean as easily as it could mean, as invisibly as it could exist. That is how that became & began, & why the process, even when closely followed, belied exactly what it accurately was.


three

What for doing it can the done be done? If open to from & forming, can existence design meaning? It is from what it is as if there were within it whatever it is that it will have to be. For as it reigns, it reins in foreign lands, a bit beyond the measure of which it could become from what it began with, as if beginning were what mattered at the start.


four

To believe for is how the hope becomes believe because because there is not, as is often assumed, meaning for believing without belief itself being only the reason, if there is reason, expecting a need for logic to explain the why, whereas without there can be no expectation of relief, relief itself being merely the defining feature of all belief.


five

As there are two, there is one; as one is, so there are many. The doors through which perception extrudes define space as they allow space to be ignored. Never can it be as it seems because the seams show the artificiality of the experience, how without the body the mind ceases to continue, how the briefest thought can continue without end.


six

With & for, ever once & done, it made &, making, undid. How this is why the way as it was is &, therefore, will be. In regards to however it happens, it happens nevertheless. In time as out of time, within as outside, for to be is to be, & is is is, but are never are, there being not many that can be redone as the word expanded undoes itself as it shuts itself down.


seven

Without though within, forward yet backward, how it can be is as it is. Thus we sleep, so we dream: on. It is away as with what we are we make how we construct a sense greater than memory to remember forth whatever it is that it can make as it makes & moves on.


eight

Never once, but never twice either, it didn’t happen as it could not even happen. So it is: not. As it be: not quite. Because it was not, it was not as if it was or were or that some other being might otherwise inject into it some sense, like being, unlike a being. It is thus that it thus made what it made as it was made innumerable times before, in the open field, with eyes.


nine

Not quite but as it can be & is as it is, thus being, thus said or heard, in the hearing understood, withstood & accepted. It is not, as it is not but might be assumed to be, that there is some way to conceive as the understanding is being created as message that that message will remain, will endure, will continue forward as a footed boot through the steadfast mud.


ten

Waiting or resting through it is a way to move through stillness, to hope forward. However it doesn’t move, so it moves, contradicting laws & lays, & lying down as the means of standing up. Eyes forward beyond it & moving more that its body in space, a body in space, it extends as it attenuates & on.



eleven

The tendency is invariably towards action, action as movement, action as motion without purpose, action as itself, but that. Besides every action there is the bedside from which it rises, beside which it rests, waiting, as ever, to be. As the plaintive one calls, voice against the blank wall, a little warbling to the left, the motion to hear is silence, filling with the sound of action sounding & sounded forth.


twelve

It is. Is is just that. That is all it is, appearing before us, as siren & purpose, calling & calling on, calling for. Every trickle of it out makes itself be, & every being, every instance of that being, that being being, indulges reality with palpable fact—a tongue out to the air to taste the wind, & it catches cotton candy, but not the candy, sweet, not the spun sugar, dyed to a grandmother’s hair, but the cellophane, thin membrane, fact of the wrapped world, tasteless, & tasted.


thirteen

By the order of counting we know, in sequence, numbered out, how it goes. We measure as we count the music of it, every syllable of sound, the notch of note in the air, from the air, erring always true to the perceived form of its sound. That we know (what we know) as we know it (now) from the being of it forth into consciousness, small at first, then a collection of many smalls, a tangle like a melody, wrapped around us, our eyes rapt, knuckles rapped on the table, hard.


fourteen

Water when it becomes becomes air, ascendant, light, light through air, ascendant as it falls as droplet, air as droplets of rain. Taken as an event of the mind, droplets falling, if fallen, fell & became as they were, what they were, was. It is that the way it transpires, how it is, the being of it, is because was, had because will be, englobed. As it is, so it is. One water divided into multiplications of water, body of man, water, woman, water—ocean, seas, ocean.


fifteen

The perception of fingertips against the veins beneath a wrist as fingers upon a wrist is as the realization of moon as light upon the lake, broken into ripples, a canoe slicing through the moon. The green scent like water given to plant life, that green scent like earth, soil, a mound of humus, black between the fingers filtering through the soil’s black night with the moon revealing each fingerprint to the sky. Under the great hemlocks & black sky, like night, the night continues, & beyond.


sixteen

Memory in a vial, where it is, that container, stoppered shut, like a lens, curve before liquid, how it is, that it is, seeing, the sight of it, in place, as place, site, vision as it is, always is, in situ, at the place of, whereupon sighted to the lens sees, wavelight, than which, reception as perception, world as is, before one, becomes as seen it is, as it is seen it has been, is being, one sight, right, left eye dead it wiggles, right eye life it sees &, seeing, is.


seventeen

As it actually is as the content of it is, not as seen, conception, the seeing of it, rather than being, the. It is, though, that as that it is. Structure derides absence, requiring precision. It is as the making of it is. As the seeing of it as is is separate, -able. An apple left on a table, sitting on the right corner of a kitchen table, near the edge, is, in this case, neither apple as apple nor apple perceived. It is concept, that reality that is but by being thought, but by thought existing.

continued

 
 
 
 
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