Annotations for Voice: Reading

i

that petal's veins
rift blue
pared with razor

edge
tired eyes against the
gold dust, daisies

in a jug dyes
slowly into water
seeping pink.

ii

moon drops
early

roused rocks
dry already a
fire fly

threats rain it
flickers
greenlight over
night
sink's
rust.

iii

white hood of a white
pickup parked on
green

trucks can be
steam risers, lettered
white

hollyhocks

of a sun a whirl,
cezanne, in a

tall tree.

iv

like it
flowers hai

l outside our
back door stars

saw as worm
clots trod

morning

glories in deeper
small shells.

made tenuous
love is not
the line's run into
fishwater pulls up

nothing, loses

whatever named tree
silk or wet sleeves
hustle sky

love a word
without roots, light
bends a line going under
water as forms do, that wait to be gript

provocative extent a
jerk
not to be measured

no
sky bends down shoulders'
force the
fluttery tree
burns against it

growth measured form
shoulders care for
such extent.

down be
low the river
blows

caught
in its stride ice
sharpened houses
fishing for

out
the house, love's
tyrranized yr mouth
throws up gates

hold?

if you think
so then let's
go or let

some rapid's in the ditch

yr cheek how
light pinkens on the in
side step
thru windows &

sun its starred
tongue!

the ways we've taken any
ways congeal &
glitter.

lynne who has been
shoveling snow

wet hair a cold the
cold gleams you wet
fortune's turned

yr card given
crystals reflect you
rains enrich
yr finger ex
tended wants to know

you type?

showing you my fingers do
walk their, speak hair caught
dropt water barrettes
better than a million
movies kept

when they tore off the
roof rain bowed the
tractor's claw dug walls fell
a pack of cards topt
the whole

hell

o face you aren't
accustomed to look at life
savers you
offered me lime
greens yr mouth

bird dropt in, linnet
how's yr new house?

moon accoutered
faces
home in on
field mist

wheels float the
pavement
pillows back

we can expect
crickets

but the windows
close to tight
sided lanterns

shield our ears our
inexplicable hurry

as moth furred faces
toward light

"sun rises moon
rises too
in the east"

white
they stand long
leg'd in grass

their shadows in
star'd under
earth.

so
good the
morning ghostless
peaches here

bear room now
sun's
done jealousy
as a wreath

bread tastes
sweet, peaches
fur to
hands' feel

all that's ripe
is.

i

these imprints
periods be
speak an anger
presses

keys

till such dark
holds the house
flares up a draft or

draught you spelt it
letting
in a wind no man
Stands the "trees

are all turning . . .
brown & yellow from the
draught"

as if the land were

an empty
hole with no
obscure fog
to mend it turns

integrate a
rime of hard like
lihoods these

days mean nothing looks
but looking out in fine
drizzles

draw me
to
the eucalyptus

leaves

i

who moves as she
can will or choose
the body of her

wordless downspine the

choice's non
existent place a
star vertebra's
sun does
glow/grow a pace

contractions measure

extent as the upshot of her
radiance/raindance/dalliance

timing of a sort
of pleasure

ii

her

means are made
light of

iii

energy coiled
at spine
tip you touch
hisses

heat
too in
friction

that I want & not
wanting turn
sinister
(half of the moon lies

but that's no star
light

all of a piece

iv

left is what I'm glad of some
times tired love
should be so mouthed about
this area of our
habitual pull, scarcely
luminous by such day dark is
what I love you in

after all given to
sun

in you (that, coming
stars in
eyes' night

v

gravity lies in
yr weight, mass, under
stand

pull exerts a continual
skin to skin weather in
ternal or out
(as you said it'd
orbit:

how little that is, love, I do
go from you.

this door I thought
went under
(ground being
no house, or

door that was a thought
caught, creeks, houseless
in the wind on weak
hinges
left a

jar's a limb one
live oak on
another.

ab
sent ab
sunt

frogs in
short grass hands
turn off the hose

hop in
simul
taneous thot/

jumps you there
where it stays
hot nightlong

hours till dawn down
the dropt wind's audible
steps now as walnuts
hit
ground.

Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote The droghte of March hath perced to the roote, And bathed every veyne in switch licour Of which vertu

McClure reads Ghost Tantra 51 (51). As in many of his printed poems, McClure centers the Ghost Tantras down the page's middle, an aesthetic strategy Davidson regards as beastly in its own right: "McClure compares the physical shape of his poems to biological organisms. Instead of returning to the left margin, the line asserts itself boldly as a free image, connected to the other lines like ribs to the spinal column" (86). In light of McClure's performance, Davidson's observation that this meaningful shapeliness makes the line not "a score for the voice" but "a separate object among other objects" takes on curious significance. By what means can we account *both* for the line's printed objecthood *and* the sonorous objecthood captured and audible, in this instance, on digitized tape? Even more to the point, how can we account for the historically-specific performance of McClure's recitation--his expressive re-citation of a printed text on June 16, 1976, the dynamic relation between page and speech, his "reading voice"? I have taken advantage of the fact that McClure's recitation precisely reflects the printed version to respect the poem's printed lineation in my transcriptions below. Ideally, the critical act of reading and listening simultaneously will evoke the tension at the heart of McClure's reading voice.

I LOVE TO THINK OF THE RED PURPLE ROSE

IN THE DARKNESS COOLED BY THE NIGHT

We are served by machines making satins of sounds.

Each blot of sound is a bud or a stahr.

Body eats bouquets of the ear's vista.

Gahhhrrr booody eyes eers noze deem thou.

NOH. NAH-OHH

hrooor. VOOOR-NAH! GAHROOOOO ME.

Nah droooooh seerch. NAH THEE!

The machines are too dull when we are lion poems that move & breathe.

WHAN WE GROOOOOOOOOOOOOOR hann dree

myketoth sharoo sreee thah noh deeeeeemed ez.

Whan. eeeethoooze hrohh.

SILENCE THE EYES! BECALM THE SENSES!

Drive drooor from the fresh repugnance,

thou whole, thou feeling creature.

Live not for others but affect thyself

from thy enhanced interior--believing what thou carry.

Thy trillionic multitude of grahh, vhooshes, and silences.

Oh you are heavier and dimmer than you knew

and more solid and full of pleasure.

Grahhr! Grahhhr! Ghrahhhrrr! Ghrahhr! Grahhrrr.

Grahhrr-grahhhrr! Grahhr. Gahrahhrr Ghrahhhrrrr.

Ghrarrrr. Ghrahhr! Ghrarrrrr. Gharrrr. Grahhrr.

Ghrahhrr. Ghrahr. Grahhr. Grahharrr. Grahhrr.

Grahhhhr. Grahhhr. Gahar. Ghrahhr. Grahhr. Grahhr.

Ghrahhr. Grahhhr. Grahhr. Gratharrr! Grahhr.

Ghrahrr. Ghraaaaaaahrr. Grhar. Ghhrarrr! Grahhrr.

Ghrahrr. Gharr! Ghrahhhhr. Grahhrr. Ghraherrr.

A voice flew out of the river as morning flew out of the body of night, a voice sending out from the night of the sleeping. Morning: a voice in its own voice, naked, made of the whole body and the whole life. But without anything. Breath. Breath of the fire love. Smoke of the poems, voices.

In our period, they say there is free speech. They say there is no penalty poets, There is no penalty for writing poems. They say this. This is the penalty.

When I wrote of the women in their dances and wildness, it was a mask, on their mountain, god-hunting, singing, in orgy, it was a mask; when I wrote of the god, fragmented, exiled from himself, his life, the love gone down with song, it was myself, split open, unable to speak, in exile from myself. There is no mountain, there is no god, there is memory of my torn life, myself split open in sleep, the rescued child beside me among the doctors, and a word of rescue from the great eyes. No more masks! No more mythologies! Now, for the first time, the god lifts his hand, the fragments join in me with their own music.

Flowers of air with lilac defining air; buildings of air with walls defining air; this May, people of air advance along the street; framed in their bodies, air, their eyes speaking to me, air in their mouths made into live meanings.

I lived in the first century of world wars. Most mornings I would be more or less insane, the newspapers would arrive with their careless stories, the news would pour out of various devices. Interrupted by attempts to sell products to the unseen. I would call my friends on other devices; they would be more or less mad for similar reasons. Slowly I would get to pen and paper, make my poems for others unseen and unborn. In the day I would be reminded of those men and women, brave, setting up signals across vast distances, considering a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined values. As the lights darkened, as the lights of night brightened, we would try to imagine them, try to find each other, to construct peace, to make love, to reconcile waking with sleeping, ourselves with each other, ourselves with ourselves. We would try by any means to reach the limits of ourselves, to reach beyond ourselves, to let go the means, to wake. I lived in the first century of these wars.

My eyes are closing, my eyes are opening. You are looking into me with your waking look. My mouth is closing, my mouth is opening. You are waiting with your red promises. My sex is closing, my sex is opening. You are singing and offering: the way in. My life is closing, my life is opening. You are here.

You come from poets, kings, bankrupts, preachers, attempted bankrupts, builders of cities, salesmen, the great rabbis, the kings of Ireland, failed drygoods storekeepers, beautiful women of the songs, great horsemen, tyrannical fathers at the shore of ocean, the western mothers looking west beyond from their windows, the families escaping over the sea hurriedly and by night– the roundtowers of the Celtic violet sunset, the diseased, the radiant, fliers, men thrown out of town, the man bribed by his cousins to stay out of town, teachers, the cantor on Friday evening, the lurid newspapers, strong women gracefully holding relationship, the Jewish girl going to parochial school, the boys racing their iceboats on the Lakes, the woman still before the diamond in the velvet window, saying “Wonder of nature.”

Like all men, you come from singers, the ghettoes, the famines, wars and refusal of wars, men who built villages that grew to our solar cities, students, revolutionists, the pouring of buildings, the market newspapers, a poor tailor in a darkening room, a wilderness man, the hero of mines, the astronomer, a white-faced woman hour on hour teaching piano and her crippled wrist, like all men, you have not seen your father’s face but he is known to you forever in song, the coast of the skies, in dream, wherever you find man playing his part as father, father among our light, among our darkness, and in your self made whole, whole with yourself and whole with others, the stars your ancestors.

There were three of them that night. They wanted it to happen in the first woman's room. The man called her; the phone rang high. Then she put fresh lipstick on. Pretty soon he rang the bell. She dreamed, she dreamed, she dreamed. She scarcely looked him in the face But gently took him to his place. And after that the bell, the bell. They looked each other in the eyes, A hot July it was that night, And he then slow took off his tie, And she then slow took off her scarf, The second one took off her scarf, And he then slow his heavy shoe, And she then slow took off her shoe, The other one took off her shoe, He then took off his other shoe, The second one, her other shoe, A hot July it was that night. And he then slow took off his belt, And she then slow took off her belt, The second one took off her belt.

They found him in the fields and pulled him back to music. Caddie said my teeth are gone. They bought him teeth. Bunk Johnson's trumpet on the California early-May evening, calling me to, breath of, up those stairs. Calling me to, look in to, the face of that trumpet. Experience, and past it his eyes. Jim and Rita beside me, we drank it. Jim has just come back from Sacramento, the houses made of piano boxes, the bar without a sign and the Mexicans drinking, we drink their trumpet music, and drank that black park beneath the willow trees. Bunk Johnson blowing all night out of that full moon. Two towered church. Rita listening to it. All night music said I'm supposed to despise them. Tears streaming down her face said don't tell my ancestors. We three slid down that San Francisco hill.

This is one called "Endless." Under the tall black sky you look out of your body lit by a white fire of the time between us, your body with its touch its weight smelling of new wood as on the day the news of battle reached us, falls beside the endless river flowing to the endless sea whose waves come to this shore a world away. Your body of new wood your eyes alive bark brown of tree trunks the leaves and flowers of trees, stars all caught in crown of trees, your life gone down, broken into endless earth no longer a world away but under my feet and everywhere I look down at the one earth under me, through to you and all the fallen, the broken, and their children born and unborn of the endless war.

How will you catch these clues at the moment of waking, take them, make them yours? Wake, do you, and light the lamp of sharpest whitest beam and write them down in the room of night on white— night opening and opening white paper under white light, write what streamed from you in darkness into you by dark? Indian Baptiste saying, We painted our dreams. We painted our dreams on our faces and bodies. We took them into us by painting them on ourselves. When we saw the water mystery of the lake after the bad dream, we painted the lines and masks, when the bear wounded me, I painted for healing. When we told in our dreams, in the colors of day red for earth, black for the opposite, rare green, white. Yellow. When I dreamed of weeping and dreamed of sorrow I painted my face with tears, with joy. Our ghost paintings and our dreams of war. The whole brow, the streak, the hands and sex, the breast. The spot of white, one hand black, one hand red. The morning star appearing over the hill. We took our dreams into our selves. We took our dreams into our bodies.

Indian Baptiste saying, We painted our dreams. We painted our dreams on our faces and bodies. We took them into us by painting them on ourselves. When we saw the water mystery of the lake after the bad dream, we painted the lines and masks, when the bear wounded me, I painted for healing. When we told in our dreams, in the colors of day red for earth, black for the opposite, rare green, white. Yellow. When I dreamed of weeping and dreamed of sorrow I painted my face with tears, with joy. Our ghost paintings and our dreams of war. The whole brow, the streak, the hands and sex, the breast. The spot of white, one hand black, one hand red. The morning star appearing over the hill. We took our dreams into ourselves. We took our dreams into our bodies.

Now green, now burning. I make a way for peace. After the green and long beyond my lake, among these fields of people, on these illuminated hills, gold, burnt gold, spilled gold, and shadowed blue, the light of enormous flame, the flowing, light of the sea, where all the lights and nights are reconciled. The sea at last, where all the waters lead. And all the wars to this peace. For the sea does not lie like the death you imagine; this sea is the real sea, here it is. This is the living. This peace is the face of the world, a fierce angel who in one lifetime lives fighting a lifetime, dying as we all die, becoming forever, the continual god.

Years of our time, this heart! The binding of the alone, bells of all loneliness binding our lands and our music, branches full of motion each opening its own flower, lands of songs, each speaking in his own voice. Praise in every grace among the old same war. Years of betrayal, million death breeding its weaknesses and hope, buried more deep more black than dream. Every elegy is the present: freedom eating our hearts, death and explosion, and the world unbegun. Now burning and unbegun, I sing earth with its war, and God the future, and the wish of man. Though you die, your war lives: the years fought it, fusing a deal world straight. We tell beginnings: for the flesh and the answer, or the look, the lake in the eye that knows, for the despair that flows down in widest rivers, cloud of home; and also the green tree of grace, all in the leaf, in the love that gives us ourselves. The word of nourishment passes through the women, soldiers and orchards rooted in constellations, white towers, eyes of children: saying in time of war. What shall we feed? I cannot say the end. Nourish beginnings, let us nourish beginnings. Not all things are blest, but the seeds of all things are blest. The blessing is in the seed. This moment, this seed, this wave of the sea, this look, this instant of love. Years over wars and an imagining of peace. Or the expiation journey toward peace which is many wishes flaming together, fierce pure life, the many-living home. Love that gives us ourselves, in the world known to all new techniques for the healing of the wound, and the unknown world. One life, or the faring stars.

We have to dream further, all the way to the fountain. We have to row centuries upstream, further than infancy, further than the beginning, further than the baptizing waters, to throw down walls between person and person, to join anew that which is separated. Life and death are not worlds opposite; they are one single stalk with two twin flowers. We have to dig up the lost word to decipher the tattooing on night, and to look face to face at noon, and tear the mask away.

Bleeding of the mountains, the noon bleeding, he is shot through the voice all things being broken. The moon returning in her blood looks down, grows white, loses color, and blazes and the near star gone. Voices of cities drumming in the moon bleeding of my right hand, my black voice bleeding.

Come: you are the one chosen, by them, to serve them. Now, in the evening of L’Amour and La Mort. Come: you are the one chosen, by them, to love them. The child perceives and the cycles are fulfilled. Man’s dead. Dead never to be reborn. The islands and waters serve another lord, new, better. His eyes are the flowering of light. He is beautiful. The child smiles at him in his tears.

Voices of all our voices, running past an imagined race. Pouring out of morning light, the pouring mists of Mil Cumbres. Out of the poured cities of our world. Out of the black voice of one child who sleeps in our poverty and is dreaming. The child perceives and the cycles are fulfilled. Cities being poured; and war-fire over the poor. Mist over the peak. One child in his voice, many voices. The suffering runs past the end of the racing, making us run the next race. The child sleeps. Lovers, students, this child, enter into our voices. Speak to the child. Now something else is waking: The look of the lover, the rebel and learning look, the look of the runner just beyond the tape, go into The child’s look at the world. In all its voices.

Whoever despises the clitoris despises the penis. Whoever despises the penis despises the cunt. Whoever despises the cunt despises the life of the child. Resurrection, music, silence, and surf.

No longer speaking. Listening with the whole body. And with every drop of blood. Overtaken by silence. But this same silence is become speech, with the speed of darkness.

Stillness during war, the lake. The unmoving spruces. Glints over the water. Faces, voices. You are far away. A tree that trembles. I am the tree that trembles and trembles.

After the lifting of the mist, after the lift of the heavy rains, the sky stands clear and the cries of the city risen in day. I remember the buildings are space walled, to let space be used for living. I mind this room is space this drinking glass is space whose boundary of glass let’s me give you drink and space to drink your hand, my hand being space containing skies and constellations. Your face carries the reaches of air. I know I am space my words are air.

Between between, the man, act exact. Woman, in curve senses in their maze, frail orbits, green tries, games of stars, shape of the body speaking its evidence.

I look across at the real, vulnerable, involved, naked; devoted to the present of all I care for. The world of its history leading to this moment.

Life the announcer. I assure you there are many ways to have a child. I bastard mother promise you there are many ways to be born. They all come forth in their own grace.

Ends of the earth join tonight with blazing stars upon their meeting. These sons, these sons fall burning into Asia.

Time comes into it. Say it. Say it. The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.

Lying, blazing beside me, you rear beautifully and up--your thinking face--erotic body reaching in all its colors and lights--your erotic face colored and lit--not colored body-and-face but now entire colors, lights. The world thinking and reaching.

The river flows past the city. Water goes down to tomorrow making its children. I hear their unborn voices. I am working out the vocabulary of my silence.

Big-boned man young and of my dream. Struggles to get the live bird out of his throat. I am he am I? Dreaming? I am the bird am I? I am the throat? A bird with a curved beak. It could slit anything, the throat-bird. Drawn up slowly. The curved blades, not large. Bird emerges, wet, being born. Begins to sing.

My night awake staring at the broad rough jewel, the copper roof across the way, thinking of the poet yet unborn in this dark who will be the throat of these hours. No. Of those hours. Who will speak these days, if not I, if not you?