Thomas Lowe Taylor -- At The Margin

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.
Rain stains the window in darkness pinging hard against the glass
while swirls of energy rail over the roof like sponges at dawn
claiming the night’s heirs from their own songs, the coastal dunes
reline these grassy knolls into their own eminent strains of being

shoreline distances between nothing and nothing else remain
strong along the tide’s lining of the hollow core of the margin’s
lane among trees on their sides and piles of vegetable ruin
where the open hours reside inside green and blue again.

I’d clung along these leftovers at the edge of this plain next to another
plane of gray against a gray which is not the same, but moving forward
among what’s been left by a continent straining toward completion
in hourly dimensions leaning left and forward in one motion..

You’d been the page itself whose words were grains of sand winding
among untitled monuments the wind whistling against your face,
stinging rows incite the sense of standing in the face of nothing
which is the nature of your sign and gesture along the arcade.

Outside, chaos un-tamed by what’s been the light source itself,
song, movement and time collide against the tides moving one on one
as unconverted remains strewn beside tire prints from big trucks
as the feet of angels trail beside the forward constancy of motion

impel thought in its similarities toward a recognition of air
and color specific in the charges laid against unknown
substances striking your face and hands like unwelcome dinners
set around the table with no one in mind and then abandoned.

You become me in this haven the elements deny themselves,
disorder remaining in its own destination from the center
blazing inside itself like a sign and outpost of the known
into location and faction torn from time and the space it has..

A series of accidents, a series of mistakes belittle your witness
what cascades across the margin’s opening in the darkness of the storm
and call you down into the origin of a safety you think surrounds
your partitions, called by the name you give doubt in its own term.


This wound betrays your stasis, walls moving in the sand beneath
your feet seem pulled down into the water, clams swimming
beneath your stains of sand, billowing inert forces penetrating light--
the door is open and calls to you entering into your own destiny.

This is the hour at hand, the blast from the black edge of the world
inhabits your own unknown hand, hesitant on these keys
at best believing you stand and hold what’s been ignored too long,
a sentinel at the peak of the house relives your building and song,

and lets the dizzying spin of thought’s storm become a wandering tide
the loom and weft of the woven ride this hour gives in claiming
anchor and palm, their own distances rising throughout the wind’s hours
thrown among the rolling dream which comes against your thoughts;

a broad gust reams the window tight against its frame and juncture
in the night’s beating streams and shores flat and firm along the way,
scheming in between what’s known and what’s not and then dreamed away
too soon to leave and too late to cry a silent prayer into the graying sign


..
This is what fell across the day today. A white spear of torturous air descending,
the wind always comes at you from somewhere else and then goes on
white puffs of vegetable foam run across the sand in front mindlessly,
parallel lines of white and gray and brown and white and blue and brown.

Names are the night’s right, from cloud to time the stars between.
what’s not given in less internal rhyme from door to door against the blue
which leans into the edge’s mass from what’s within to other destinations outside
or not marked to these diverse claims you make for your own rote purposes.

A day would becalm its pages holding forth in their own styles too much
to hold you down against the pressure of the words themselves & ask
too much, their own styles given out like a formula or a set of tasks
to clear out instructions made on the edge of the page at the margin.

Your hand lies across the bed holding a hackeysack of green and white
which gleans particular from being let into the room, not against you
but held and firm, she wanders through the pastures of mind in a lesser tune
and makes the dance to round as if it had landed on the surface of your mind.

A dream calls you into wet lines across the front of what is seen and leaves
as you claim your stories from acres of wood and refuge along the tide
and marks the air between us not mentioned nor flavored from any absence
among other treasures left like signposts into unknown disturbances.

Matter clings to the side of the bowl, your nutrition in question as if stolen
from later airs they’ve clouded up the beach and harbor in these landings of light
defining the hour in what is sent for restoration or for an intent challenge
spoken not as some diatribe--the truth is what is called forward.
.
New, uncertain terms are neither clarity nor the color red--
inclement ridges furrow the plain, their waters floating underneath calm;
deciduous carriage hears the man with two noses dancing to a wild refrain
& clings to your hope that this will not dismantle too sharply or too soon.

Future machinery comes into usage and denial of the time you spent alone,
not mentioned but still coming in underside the flattened coast,
a fragment out of place removing everything else from passion or hope
to cling and rule beside the hours’ motives in their common field.


…
They drop a rubber ball through small net-covered hoops at either end
and flow back and forth with pure juice and a determination unseen before,
holding themselves above the play of forms and sentences we call a book
nor left among other stars where the beaches erode and foam away at night.

A line grows out in front and then out extends into the unwinding sea
a grid into unknown darkness filled with organisms and breaths
coming as they do from interior marks along the floor and ceiling,
an incandescence creates a pathway into structure and form like memory.

You called me down from silence through unbroken layers of roots
between what is above and what lies beneath your heart’s feet
along the wash of light and time coming through the tide again and again
to mark the mind of your dream like blue and green and red mists.

This forgotten density of remove and stain neither clears the air
nor calms from beneath what cannot be removed nor claimed from
any other line along the sand inside your hand yet not recalled nor left
behind in the hurry to get from this precarious layer to a place of safety.

Night’s barrier the pinpoints in the sky through the empty dark ceiling,
reliquary to air’s dominion in the discourse of the heavens and the line
along which no transparency folds or spasms into something new and fine.
Longer signs enfold and eclipse yet call you forward here at the margin.



….
Axe no dendrite plain and simple struts these after hours
intense emptiness of forgetfulness strikes you in the wind
swirling off the sand looking like fog that blinds your eyes
foam of the hour curling less remote than the distance ahead.

Fog no hopeful truth its own dominion present in your heart
another rope to the infinite which calls you forward again
leaning throughout your memory’s time like a trimming
or a loot on the plane of insignificance you call your own days

,
your own dishonor came too soon to be recognized for what it was
a silent edge on the mirror of forgiveness, your own face unrecognized
by the followers behind you crowding up into the figment of the mass
which is no other than your other breaking into a billion future scenes

or blood on the sands of the hallway, imperial magnificence a stolen bribe
and the raw meat of the sacrifice clings to the rug in the upper hallway
where the silent weepers hug the wall without sound or pity in their quiet
houses of the holy abandoned and then reground by the stones of time

at edge and screen, no specific moment stands out, yet the scene recalls
what it is in the name of silence a matter misting outward calls again
your colors red and blue and green an invention of the eye’s mind
which flames and flutters its film among the plenty of the hours.


2.14.6