✷
HOW PROFOUNDLY UNINTERESTING LIFE
How profoundly uninteresting life is in the uncaring light
in the fierce oncoming light.[23] Things are and are not. Like water
dreaming of itself. The leech gatherers circle a bleeding
metronome. The sky loses consciousness.[24] Unholy
as a sunlit candle I have long felt secretly dead
beneath the banyan’s magnificat. An epiphyte. The thing
is dead. All things destroy themselves or are destroyed. Eyes
in the shape of eyes. The shallowest iris on the emptiest
eye.[25] How unprofound all utterance. What’s spoke unlaws belief.
An eye unmoored. Nothing deader than a fish or wish when spoke.
Garish garnish. Artichoke. Everything is in meantime.[26]
There’s no anticipation in family life. Where when the death
you might have died belongs to you no longer?[27] Is no more
than a duskshot mackerel sky’s iridic mirific? Gone
tomorrow.[28] Last light’s valance the valence of failance sprent
over everything. Pardine time. Sweet sorrow. Incivism
by dint of living to intimate life’s stupidity
its eminent unlivability. And yet recidivism’s
cupidity until quietus immanent the querent
quiets down. Your imminence one’s imminence approached approved forgot
as everything is meant to be forgot.[29] A dove sounding time.
Like I losing I until what’s left remains remains. Always remains.
✷
Always one horse watching. Always one albino turkey.
A winter gleaning from the farmer’s trail past the second
field to a third one thought was woods not tilled enclosed
and bulrushed by a sun enhaloing haecceity. Compline
’skipped. Instaurate. From vespers to lauds. A witchinghour aubade. One’s
tektitic quiddity and quale the empyreal hearth
and heath. ’Snowdjinnous gratuity uttered. Alterity.
Halcyon eavedrip sparktear and snowshelving roofs—
icesheathed chains released the Mobil hoarding creaks ferrous
and inviting as against the fulgent sky a heron
furcates homing sandhills. Somewhere a horse is far
enough to float and yet remain equine among horizonal
’snowdjinnous glitter. Vim. A four-in fielded knollwicked grazer
enjoining enjoining ad infinitum joyous in unpurposing.
✷
An endling’s labor’s furthest daena is the daeva
of the repanded edge past quantum’s metanoic skepsis.
Theopathy. To live in it as it until untilling
even what one has not is taken, life is found
dead, even farthest elsewhere founded found dead no matter
how brown the sun embowered by the storm is and is
to be, no matter the barkless sycamore hulled vestal
against the darkling tree line farthest from the road. Wherenow
the jolt of possibility remanded. Wherenow the veiny map
itself the key against the darkling trees, earthended sun a moment
a maumet taxigold as half the sky unstorms embowels becomes
benighted. The world will offer itself to you to be unmasked.
It can’t do otherwise. In raptures it will writhe before you.[30] An endling.
✷
A chamfered eye chamfering taws a sky of contrails floaters
and agate agape sundogs’ downpour of dowsers caught
like virga coruscant and mise en abyming every such
January Saturday too blue and blimpful to believe
beyond the tawse of trees above the tare of chaff. The wish
to die’s to understand. More dazzling than the sun the star
beside the sun.[31] The bluing hour wherein kitchen lamps
and dome lights alight coeval with absconding dusk, no warmer
moment than the justlit life within the darkling homes beneath
a lastlit sky’s penult sigh nonetheless the grand finale’s nature
morte vivante, each windowed tableau a holon the night to come.
I AM HAUNTED BY NUMBERLESS ISLANDS
I am haunted by numberless islands.[1] It might have been the lighthouse
spark. When it comes landscapes listen, shadows hold their breath.[2]
When it goes it’s like the distance on the look of death, a seeing
that sees without seeing.[3] There is no change in life at death.[4] The face
of life is death—no scar but internal difference where the meanings are.[5]
Here the without is more within than the innermost beyond
all time and occasion.[6] Drink the dregs of the cup of trembling
and wring them out.[7] My illness has no form and is invisible.[8]
Awaken in our hearts a sadness that may not die. We tire
of the flame of the meteor before it can fade and flee.[9]
Art thou not it that has cut Rahab and wounded the dragon?
and dried the sea for the ransomed to pass over?[10] Angels softly peer
almost as if they care.[11] Around every profound spirit a mask
is growing continually.[12] Were nothingness thought of apart from its mask
it would become an idea. There’s a place within God where God
is not God himself. God’s being God entails having made himself empty.[13]
The eye with which I see God is the eye with which God sees me—
the uncreated I am. I flee from God for the sake of God.[14]
On the outer verge of your long seclusion peopling the world
with ugly shapes everything appears to lose its substance the instant
one grapples with it. So it will be with what you think so terrible.[15]
Peace comes dropping slow from the veils of the morning to where the cricket
sings. I hear lake water lapping in the deep heart’s core. A climbing moon
upon an empty sky and all that lamentation of leaves could but compose
man’s image and his cry.[16] All of this is man’s imagery that God
has entered into.[17] Blind blind swans. Dream on the pillow of another’s skull
until you wake to dream.[18] The vairy hartshorn ether enough
to brace the sun and its full moon this dawning of upsparked flurries
from night’s fine moulage noumenal upon all things as if
no longer the eye’s deposed apport but rather now in port
iridic decomposed and discomported as stillicide
from fanging gutters and beetled awnings notates via
iset elision less notable than last night’s snowy
redaction of rabbit blood and fur erasure. Retrenched take note
the notetake scrieve of worm script under bark on osteal bole
nearly readable beneath the sherbet light from the retable
through which upwells of snow oriflamme. By noon by God
it’s so sunny it must have gotten colder still. Swans angel
past like unpuzzled impossibilities. The poison
berries of summer remain bright as cardinals like tiny
icesheathed souls that die in spring having died long ago. The solstice
has been left. Soon the pull of February’s fineless light
so blue it echoes as if from the caverns of the skull
of the sun dulled and dislimn as a yellowy chad
among vastation’s finelessly blue magnificat. Certainly
it’s a sure bet the world will end. Though if that’s true it’s never
begun. A cosmic shutter drawn. Draw a cosmic shudder and feel utter
joy. What never was can never be annihilated. What has been
can never not have been so always is. A swan is both a swan
and an unpuzzled impossibility. You have seen
the bottom drop out of everything and felt lost. You have known
it was the top blown off and that you are the fineless world.
✷──────────✷──────────✷
1 W. B. Yeats / 2 Emily Dickinson / 3 Emily Dickinson, Keiji Nishitani / 4 Keiji Nishitani / 5 Matsuo Bashō, Emily Dickinson / 6 Keiji Nishitani / 7 Isaiah / 8 Vimalakīrti / 9 W. B. Yeats / 10 Isaiah / 11 Emily Dickinson / 12 Friedrich Nietzsche / 13 Keiji Nishitani / 14 Meister Eckhart / 15 Nathaniel Hawthorne / 16 W. B. Yeats / 17 David Eugene Edwards/ 18 Matsuo Bashō
23 Joy Williams / 24 Thomas Townsley / 25 Wallace Stevens / 26 Thomas Townsley / 27 Joy Williams / 28 Gary Indiana / 29 Joy Williams / 30 Franz Kafka / 31 Franz Kafka
"I AM HAUNTED BY NUMBERLESS ISLANDS" first appeared in The Poetry Lighthouse, October 2025.
A finalist for the National Poetry Series Award, the Sexton Prize for Poetry, the Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize and the Paul Nemser Book Prize, Joseph Harms is the author of the poetry collections Bel, Nous, Goety, Youel and Funest, which have been collected in Taps (Todos Contentos & Yo También Press); as well as the novels Ades, Baal, Cant and Wyrd, which have been collected in Evil (Expat Press).
