Thomas Lowe Taylor -- THE END OF SOLITUDE

fr Vincent Ferrini


I

Rome and the other falling
glimmers relentlessly, the view fades

and holds, we are among a density
and formation of fantasy-rhythms.

Decrease, love's name surprises, engaged.
The other popular sentences re-wind

have you moved across to hold my ear?
Alight, to grasp the turkey tightly,

and new names move forward, "air"
another density has this room removed,

let the one decide who has no passion,
we are hitting right & left to each other.


II

or would you
sleep
or would these entireties rest:
it is no beginning this image
Roughed to tongue, fire away, lets
inside the moon's
you are still moved, it
collapses still the same

But a room divides its walls
incessantly, provides leadership to
the moon's own name,
revolving vocabulary.

A setup.
This questing for
grand gestures
is too lean,
is inharmonious



III

arising a style out of the contrary
energies, they are moved throughout
by textural differences,
"she has my hope"
and the child's name
to celebrate the
reoccurrences of life
acknowledges death,
you are still the
food of absence is
too plain, and keeps
me trembling, inside
My fear collapsed, there are no others
in this poetry without content, where
I am no champion
but occupying myself
professionally:
Aha!


IV

Still, frame-maker, do we keep
the Avocational before us?
now this is
serious!
I mean, there is
voice, the a priori
& song, yr name
oh let me rise these weepings
are so vain & per -sonal
& you are my name:
but the art of letters is so
artless
when studied,
No, I am no system
but this
breathing
exercised and woolen,
woolen & worn.

V

I mean, there is the personal
vocal
doubled out
even,
from knowing,
and this posture of forgetting
wherein we speak,
what should we want
but our

Time, in speaking, to arrive
at the center & name of
who we are
and then
collapse,
remove,
escape,
these embraces we have sought.


VI

No-one has updated the craft,
you said,
no-one has questioned the
syntax,
not, I submit, even Gertrude,
though she swims she does not
speak,
& Charles, we have him
outlined by his Ambitions.
How is one to be a poet
& remain human?
. . . achieve
the anonymity from which the
poems speak,
who are we to want
after anything?

VII

There is also some engaging
to encounter out of les tours

speaker, mask, role & drum, these
shamanistic robes I have made:

out of what is contrary to speech,
the unwinding of prose gestures,

we are left, even here, with
prose couplets, aspirations to clarity.

cloud, the moon rings, oven, clasp
inside the dam of the heart's
remembering to close your ears
& see the line lunging out,

But hold, and skin
the tough team yields.


VIII

Another remembering submits to
plain-ness,
any style is borrowed,
she arrives at the heart,
the landscape
centers at
love's act
you are also
dead to life
&
unafraid
though it is in seeing
that the body gives
its way
to being.
no, there are no others in
this living...

IX

not exactly a
throw away
&
not exactly a
letter
&
not exactly an
advertisement,

though there is in any gesturing
after the cosmic, an adulteration
of innocence,
and no,
there is simply
what one has before him
as task & utterance, this
going-along


X

And this going-on, friend, is
not anything at all, some continuing
from which you are come, suddenly,
at this visible enterprise, yab-yum
of the ear's seeing.
But making the way clear
to memory is some further unfolding:
And a man would have his
love suddenly before him, ashamed to
see the plenty and exaggeration
of the Blood's wail & chatter exploding
from the sum & particle of the
vocabulary:
"but a way is made
then set",
and we are inside nouns,
and particular, and told.

XI

Any empty passing holds clear
to these musings of the familiar.

Let color decide, let the markings
of the earth declare themselves valid.

There are pathways in the mountains
and they make you crazy. Ah!

But the formalities are given way
to some subtleties, revived at last,

thrust, claim, these odors & pasts,
revival of the nomenclature, overt, mutual.

Any other density is remote.

Day decides where speech resounds.

The flaw, the gathering abstractions,
and "who you are" is possible.


XII

clear, the passage, clean & portable,
but read, these allocations, the mood,
of a shadow made name & song,
I flew past, the eye quickened.
Hay, green, more, slipped, green can,
a dot, less, even & more, to speed,
or collapse, from some alluvial
dream, but familiar, too, a
discourse, made image-less, fathom,
of word torn, her heart, meant,
she cried in memory, held me in
passion, I love her, we are
still there still, making light of it,
and the language rests where it
was dropped, the heart's oven door,
and a name made casually,
for effect, for life's new beginning.

XIII

Still, in these developments of irony
stages of persistence, there is no
comedy, only enough food, and
a verse which imitates the
psyche and loses the line.
which reparation made
scale might retrieve to
presence,
and make poets of the resting.
But still,
and sliding, a space defined,
point, center & name,
you are too
clever,
But a man's name is simple,
and love comes in at the end.


XIV

And practicing these simplicities, this
Absence, where problematical
is no less concise.
"Whereby"
conscript to love's acts.
allowing the imitative full reign,
naming deceit, catalog
of his faults,
transparent
throughout the same
wondering.

But polemic is that, and
this is
this.



Gloucester
April 20, 1974