Poem

“For example, imagine the plight of the autophenomenologist who sets out to study the intentional objects that accompanied his engagement in wildly abandoned sex; he would end up studying the intentional objects of someone engaged in sex while simultaneously performing epoche – hardly the same experience at all.” Daniel Dennett, “Two Approaches to Mental Images.” Brainstorms, 185.

Preamble
Speedy Onan
(Blessed in his age)
Spills his delicate seed
Beside his wife’s behind,
But out of sight.

Ha! El-Shaddai takes note;
In time, Gehinnom’s guestbook’s listless pages, catalyzed,
flip and crack with age.
Which is funny, since
the whole thing was not to give birth.

Father Onan, give us tension,
Give us strength.

Let us create.

I.
Let me see past the walls,
Through the houses, possibilities
Rows on rows apart,
Through your blouse, skirt, pants,
And past the place where I am not,

Or back past the evening,
Through the steps I took,
Past where we were alone, a bit,
Through the outrageous veil of tame actuality,

Or through all time and laws of space –
In short, past all the physical supports –
Locks on our bodies, nothing more –
Past anything other than suggestions of motion,

Also, past your faults of height,
Your too-much hair,
Past here and there a bit more or less of this or that,
Past where you were wholly there –
Accidents all, accidents all –:

Past the fact that once nothing’s in the way of you and me,
then that’s in the way,
you alone
my thoughts’ mundane, gnomish fixture.

Then… then, perhaps what I really like
Is the way that
What I have stripped the scene to
Rests on my clear, glowing, pulsing eyelids;
Through the wall-less, naked, possible, timeless, spaceless, barely suggestive mental act,
I can still see those in back.
Still I can see my eyelids.

II.
My better half sends half-flaccid, unfathomable tendrils,
Dredged up from old-time psychology,
Jerking – explode, collapse, explode, collapse –
Through tensed muscles,
Out into the mental-lexical silk
of semantic space:

humey, human, predicament, boobs, david,
david, uriah, you, rapist,
ending,
reference, inscrutable reference.


Oh, uhu, awa, t-t, my God.
What was that twitch in my leg?
Huh – what did that amount to?
{Khaw-khem.} Yet is there a place on earth,
For all the things to which our dreams give birth?