The Ensemble Exists

The Ensemble Exists
beginning microcosm

— Cecil Taylor, "—Aqoueh R-Oyo,"
liner notes to Air Above Mountains

it would have to be lost so thoroughly as to breathe
— Leslie Scalapino,
New Time

You say you have this
talent for the said.
To rest in that is
true—as in default
of sense beneath whose
crust run faults, cracks
full of serious,
obvious wet.

The habit of that subject is the plan
of a beyond which values a succession.
However all and each may speak of chance
employment, every character is one
and only one. Two or more at most. Here
we have a logic of the subject very
frequently violated. Our one man
(or two or more) for the occasion,
Dr. Lyon Playfair, for example,
takes gravity to specify each toe
on which he stands alert, a point en pointe.

Hold that representation. Admit only
the material as in reasoning only
to the real, as it really is. And there it is,
belief in metaphysical fictions,

which "man" means there must be
beneath this thing
incited contour.1

Or too late, if semiosis
will not be which sign is used.
Now such hypothesis seems
any number of reasons to be
recommended to the foldwise
irritation of the fissile ones
and twos who would pursue my
fondness for a measured stroll.

I study the varieties
of humanity that move me
and still retain the element.
Even a least, peripheral
sensation of pleasure, of
pressure, tongue sliding over
fissure, has its excitation
and molecular gridlock.

The principle with which one sets
this weight upon a true continuous
plumb, a line of chalked descent,

is named without appeal,
trafficking in outlines
on the bare, black asphalt,
just inside the simply there.

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Issue Two
Table of Contents