Terrestrial Illuminations, Part II, No. 14
Duane Locke

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A furled purple flower leaps from a bush of sticks.

I was thinking about the meeting of René Char and Martin Heidegger.

It was a thought that was no thought; it came vividly without a content.
It had no representation or masks.

A pine warbler’s yellow flashed through the tall, uncut grass. I was happy
And became un-cut grass.

I began to recall why Lyotard said: It is impossible
To write what one wants to say.

What comes out is an approximation.  A speck of unconcealment with a blur
Of concealment. A tail wag without a bird that is impossible to become mobile
Without aviary corporeal pulsations.

An approximation is thrown into the world, and is interpreted by approximations
Of the approximation.

There are no poems, only interpretations.

There are only our approximations and the listener’s or reader’s revisions,
Rebirths, or murders.

Words are not the realities they are rumored to represent.

There is something other—an alterity without altars or vocabulary.
Without arbiters and carousels.

The other is no thought.

No thought is the most powerful mode of thinking that people have.
Ostensible thoughts, familiar thoughts, are self-deceptions.

Words are not orioles among oranges on days of misty rain in Sorrento,

But are smoke signals from a fire that never was lit to flame.