Squaring the Circle
(Selections from)
(shaken from the refuse
under the
roof)
John Campion
Sky
meteor
seeds
phylotactic reach
fires oceanic grasses
in the mouth between mountains--
individual bison
imitate the collective
herd
spreading prairie culture--
humans
articulate
till
xtian
ego
fencing the Large
dams
association.
*
*
*
Star-shaped
fused with minerals
from the sky's belly
America fell.
Many
hot spots
poured from Her lips
great ones out.
Exposing the swollen surface...
Zero
lying down sky
quadrant the 1st Mother is born
when milk enters the ear
paddlers set three stones,
our cooking fire;
from the cracked turtle,
maize emerges
to shade us.
Umbilicus drags beneath
the fire drill
smoke rises
e S
e t
r o
h n
T e
P l a c e
from the ground
into the
Heart of Sky
fearing self-inflation
fogged the mirror
took us
a
part a little
to give
reason
for thanks.
so
came separation
and memory their union
by keepers
to mark the place
came later
called prayer.
Above
we tell our
selves
the Serpent
Rainbow
twins
shape
the
Earth
--canyons
mountains
oceans--
ruddering
in
the with
vortex their
of the cross c --songs (a periplum)
l move along the line of hills
i and valleys re-creating
t
s
MUSIC
How happy
my hood is full.
A baby big as a tiny walrus
smiles with two teeth.
During the moon of popping trees
crazy wisdom
drew the illusory man
into a very red cloud.
Every thing is made of shadows.
Though he walk over dead soldiers
to the top
and take a million pictures,
Custer will never be real.
I throw dust upon the body
and dream myself into the world.
The stone behind my ear keeps me real.
But
I will never give my picture
to the likes of you.
bright moment
the lovers fall
a
part
darkens
us
.
Our machine
has
a brain
wings
legs
and a mouth
that clacks
a train
c a d a
v e z
c a d a
v e r
over the wall
memory of the animal
we kill in the Maestranza.
Wandering Horseshoe Canyon
shrouded with figures
rising from cliff faces
we seemed
archetypal travelers.
You were so fecund
horseflies could not leave
your blood alone.
We ran for a mile
up the canyon,
biting flies
streaking your chalky legs
red.
Humiliation rose, but I
could not keep them from you
no matter
how I swatted or cried
for your predicament.
Was that why, later
at my door, when you denied
knowing me much less
wanting to write my name
in your belly or feed our child
with the milk of your blood,
you looked so bloodless?
*
*
*
After rough passage,
underneath,
floating in the toilet bowl,
ballplayers
Hunahpu and Xbalanque
defeat the Lords of Death.
At Sand Creek
the bloody 3rd
beat out the children's brains
like dogs
preserved the women's privates
to showcase at the opera
where shouts rose
for a final curtain.
In the tent
you checked the zipper
3 or 4 times a night
slept with a knife at your side
to cut your way out
like a C section.
The time you woke
(inverted Ishmael)
proclaiming
the door was gone
I could not hold you.
You held it backward
still
managing to
knife a slit up the wall
before pushing
your way through.
I should've taken it as a sign.
but then I guess I
was distracted by the
way you sucked blood
off your thumb.
She is a sow
cooked in the belly.
Earth comes from Her.
We offer
the skirt of Pele
--hips moving the sacred hula--
Her breath
Geo-
thermal
holy place
we're born.
Thieves by night
go to rob Her.
Look at the inner parts
you may not take
whatever's hot is mine
you may not take
whatever's hot is sacred.
The forest whispers and cries.
the bruise you burned
in my arm
flowered
for a month
blue as a morning glory
black as your word
wound
that never heals
Under the heads of swallows
necks of swans
on the backs of geese
under tongues of reindeer
only in the giant's belly
he finds
the runes
to tack
the prow & stern.
Vainamoinen
strings maiden's hair
on the Kantele plays
through the dark wooded valleys
the wolf, yea,
the wolf runs.
Something coming down:
Grenada
printing "Gold is excellent."
Rodrigo de Borja buys Rome with Fernando's.
Weigh anchor off Palos Boats
"Dis cover and Acquire" stuffed
gunwale
land that does not exist deep
Quijote y Cortes Tilting with
Sephardim
carpenter cooper caulker grommet
sawbones Pinzones y Col¢n
provisioned a yr
marineros 4 moons earnest
W from Canaries
Norward return
"...In the name of all the slaves that can be sold..."
copper round the neck
keeps the executioner away
that and suicide;
it sucketh milk at the breast.
Stockholders' PAID
suns of gold
moons of silver
Arawak
Maya
Aztec Inca
Pequot
produce of Earth
crystal ball
shot like brains in water.
"Why do you prefer to take what you may have by love?"
"Whoever resisteth
shall receive damnation."
"What cheer?"
Numinous glyphs
like Giordano
shine
through the trial of faith--
With the True God came the beginning of misery, forced debt
enforced with lies, the beginning of vexation, strife with
robbery and violence, strife with blowguns, the beginning of
trampling on the people, the beginning of individual strife.
Give yourself up to the Katun when the flowers of love go to
the highest bidder. If you do not, you will be moved from
where your feet are rooted and gnaw fruitlessly at the trunk
for nourishment.
Thus he who truly understands the danger will accept the
truth of the New Order and go off to the privacy of the
woods to practice.
the brains of sky
copal
bright
with smoke.
time
capital
parcels
infinite
space
Unless you're already infected
with clinical gaze
(endopolic as cops)
lift a city man-hole cover
and perceive the infrastructural
hydraulics of class war.
Outside
--the streets--
listen
to lizard talk of young girls
--skipping Mentu's rope--
health
line,
song
of magnetic roads:
"I had a little bird
and its name was Enza
I opened a window
and in-flew-Enza."
New disease
vectors:
media
klan
fascism
sweat shop
chemattacks
the assembly line
Salamanca Eggheads damn
Isabella's confessors
whispering in an ear:
pair gestate
till the bloody show at Grenada
throes Jews and Moslems
into foreign gardens.
Admiral of water
Vice
roy of land
1st to Canaries,
w/o spices
banks crave,
Lord direct me to
gentle people
give all
can be made free by
tribute, slavery,
auto
de
fe
at San Salvador
moon on white cliffs
a daughter sings
"let it shine."
Haiti
hard rock
mines
the Nativity
with wreckage of La Santa Maria.
Bigots
astonished at
classless egalitarian...
Iroquois
Philly 1744
advise end
to internecine squabbles:
Union w/o executive,
Speaker--by acclamation--
serves a day.
Great Oral
recorded in wampum belts
&
string;
written
Law
narrows
intention.
Faithkeeper
Turtle Clan
lives at Onondaga;
his passport is
Hau de no sau nee.
The accommodating valet
mocks
his mirror,
the dog
his master.
We flatten heads
to join our god,
coin the body coming forth
in labor.
The libidinous
goosestepper
exhibitionist
to the end
provokes the shopgirl
to hail the fuhrer.
Dick
taters
rize
from duh mash
es.
White Puppeteers
egg
gandy dancers
down the ties
tuning tracks:
Suzy wear a red dress
Suzy wear a blue
Yonder come Suzy
Think what you can do.
&
Birmingham aint no ham at all
You oughtta see the ham my gal can draw.
Where She cries
a world
dancing don't do nothing
but slave spirit
cage the body.
So long have we suckled
fear of freedom
is
the
body's armor
our lingua franca.
Goetic magi
with portolani
powder compass and will
fetishize the vortex.
Cadging invitations
we listen
to the terrible silence
between bodies,
as the peasant x
changes
affection for affectation
the artist
surrenders the key to
C O P S & C L E R K S.
Ships carried exotica
and the pest
whose vector's the flea
and host the rat.
Macro
parasites
--Genghis,
Venetian trade, & Etcetera--
made the poor delicious;
rulers welcomed
a heavenly curb
on reprobates
revolutionaries
& Jews.
The Church offered salvation for a price--
while the Pope
(in safer Avignon)
converted dice to rosaries,
with the whip of God,
pious S & M'ers
took the streets chanting,
"when Adam delved
and Eve span."
Here
salmon ran full and red
and we ate together
till our bellies sang.
Then the white
brought his money
and many other things.
Now
we live on stamps
and must increase the dosage
as their doctors say.
But nothing
can rid us of the disease
or call the fish
to return
from the Other Side of the World.
They're dancing in the snow
by the thousands
Lakota
adorned with images of sky
round
the sacred
pole.
Kicking Bear
Hunkpapas
taught
the vision of the END
that scared the beejesus outta dem
CAUSE
they thought it might work since
they deserved
after what they done to themselves first
and Indians second
SO
called out the COPS.
Having sacrificed the underneath
we can not
leave them alone
though Paiute Wovoka's thunder
can not call the buffalo back
nor make US
disappear.
Before
did Shaman become Jaguar
black flashing through.
Before
the wash was pure
brimming silver with fish.
Two year we see new stars moving.
Two year a road
learn measles & flu
hear explosions
along the line--
fish die
Jaguar skulk away.
Shaman sickens.
No one gathers medicine.
We are not afraid.
If settlers come
we will kill them with our blowguns
and our lances.
Teotihuacan
teaches TLALOC-VENUS.
Under
Great Jaguar Paw
--Spearthrower Owl--
's brother,
Smoking Frog in barbarous regalia of TIKAL [378]
tears
garments of gods
(war to the death)
from the sky
becomes usurper king Uaxactun.
Curl Snout--Stormy Sky's father & Great Jaguar Paw's son--
rules Tikal under
aegis of Smoking Frog.
Ballcourt marks TIKAL Over
Uaxactun
in TEOTIHUACAN style.
Head/dress Sacrifice [557]
Those who live by... AXEWAR
CARACOL turns TLALOC-VENUS on TIKAL.
Flint-Sky-God K utilizes [645]
shrunken heads
dangle from soldiers' hips
our mothers of invention.
Marshes of Tigris and Euphrates
cutters' rib
reed houses
float above mud islands.
A woman prepares
fire
feeds
her ovens
bread.
Beating hands do not keep from the flats
men making super paths
bulldoze
mangroves,
memory of hundreds of thousands;
some
wipe off the birds.
40 times the double-cross Valdez
desert air smudges
black waters absorb white sun
dolphin vortices
grebe and cormorant drown.
Crabs suck dark reservoirs.
Tongues
from which no words come
reach out;
tide brings in the news
south to quick red shrimp.
For millennia
fish are trapped at the ebb.
No need to gather grasses
or lower nets in this
salt low sea.
The war is water.
Tube worms bend the verticals.
Hecatombs of plankton
waste in the shade.
Coral stars
await
the black death.
Barracuda move
below
one who rises in the sky will not speak.
Cuttlefish
flicker with heat.
Nothing
compared to passions
above.
Slick invasion
in breeding time.
The toilet takes two years to flush.
Urchins tear
platforms
(anchored at seabed)
covered with algae and sponges.
Fish pulse
in dusky light.
Sea snakes wriggle the black.
An archway collapses--
filterers
choke vomit,
detergents kill.
Toxins seep in crevices
to green turtle eggs--
soldiers remark
the musical ballet of tanks
like females
leave tracks behind.
Her clutch
hatch alone
suffocate on tar balls.
Of great price our Pearl--
Virgins stiffen the thought;
effluvia tongues deeper.
Off shore
spring water rises.
Do not bother
to go fill
your bottles.
Like Mussolini
he's draining the swamps.
Now we will not bomb
the dikes
diverting water
from marsh people
suffocating with dust.
Skin
Trade
adjunct to cod
many cared not
for
iron and steel
arms
some, yea
to shift
balances
converted beaver
moose otter muskrat fox raccoon mink marten lynx
flooding
sacred space
with
pandemics of
whelks &
quahogs.
_________________________________
To have cowries is to have words.
Where are the sticks that contain the gold?
Spaniards trail
canyons to the sea
(silver upward inland
with vulcanism).
Debased wampum
purchased right livelihood
in the market
narrowed ranges
cut wholesale
white oak--planking
black oak--underwater piles
cedar & chestnut--exposed
pitchpine--pitch, turpentine, rosin
white pine--
MAST
nailed with a doubloon of 12 signs
this pole exudes unctuous
lucre
our mock trabajador
grinds property rights
from the sampo.
New World Order
confines vision
in the narrowest trough.
The red streak Mars
cut a cross
a refrangible number
God sets up
mathematics
in nature
as a king
laws in his kingdom,
makes sure some demon
doesn't make wrong numbers
add up right.
Cogito
the ultimate I
isn't
the world's body
denied
for clear & distinct I-
deas
to s h i n e
stripped of
objects are
the conquest
IS
the object of reason.
Unmagical realism--
mechanics
di
vested
magi
for
philological grease monkeys,
Calvinist
assault on the Brothers;
stake burnings
extricate theurgic.
Ex
dreamer DESCARTES
the visible
's march against
Bohemia
trumpeted
the end of the noumenon--
hair
billowing
denial
over the city
extreme discipline
masquerades as
Maximum Therapy.
Dreams
violate the principle of
non-contradiction.
Method
goes about
debugging
the program
ticking off
nature's frangibility
Scientists
turn natives to profit
stretching the web of particulars
for maximum
yield
Knowledge
the indwelling consciousness of our distance from
nature.
Lakes cannot abide their depths
being plumbed.
The mythic sickle
cuts the line.
Old growth
music a barometer de-
scribes
a score
not unlike
Stockhausen.
Each
over time
in
habits
a physical
and acoustic niche,
a band
and frequency:
you the morning show
I the noon
she the evening.
Mus[-]k
or urine
marks
the boundaries.
Sound of an elephant
heart
shaking air
is silence
to us.)
Wine-dark water
layers
wild diversity.
Before
air filled with frog pipes,
crocodilians grunted
miles wide.
Pollutants
diminish
oceanic sound,
the biota above
and
below.
World a tuning fork
voices full of
water-
fall
head
"lift-up-over sounding"
canopies
tree
The Mu
sic endangered
Religion
thief of thunder
comes.
No one under 25 sings.
The Riflebird has
NOTHING
to say.
Star Nose
Mole Sampo
so full of IT
you put your nose
in everything, on the road
pointed
a star at,
Mother Earth Alone, blew,
dug in an auger,
rotated;
nasturtiums
relate, like each of us
in a field of forces--
now
we know
where we're at
we) gotta go.
At sight of the scorpion
he dropped the reins
and set fire to the universe
when animals jump into water
norms & measures
gush.
This tree
speaks all languages.
Let us cut it down.
Sitting in the conflagration
a golden boy
empties his ladle
full of ashes.
When she lifts Her skirt
and removes Her garment,
how fragrant
like the green corn
cooked in a pit.
She gives birth to
3 talking stones--
we place ears
to them
hearth of resurrection.
Coming to Earth
through a hole
she gathers loads
ah ha--
the grinding stone
makes flour again
comal
warms--
trees will not let us
escape.
Earth closes
its mouth
till we are
cooked
in the dish
as long as
the attic is centered
we may learn to raise another
under whose roof all may live.
Umumutani
thunder moves
the maidens
to rise up.
Rain
makes the pop corn
in my rain stick
fall.
vagina
&
penis
waxing
&
waning
day into night
rayas
of warp and woof
lead to the navel our
w o r d s
como los pueblos
rightly placed
k n o t s in the quipu
or pictures along the road
catch a calendar of
s t a r s
*
where the deluded
study uses of the garrotte
our looms
are closed;
under full
moon
sun
will break them open tomorrow.
Clinging in the face
NO THING
but
in relation.
To stake a claim annihilates
dread--while
deepening others
we become ourselves
when feelings match conditions
the gap
the spark leaps with synaptic faith
not disembodied.
Desire
to force reality
to happen
can not obscure
nor diminish.
With "form the shape
of content,
means and registration
equal"
work
in the world
is not debased
as counterfeit
in the Halls of Armor
and
Ornament.
Quang Duc's heart
never burned.
Between dirt and milk
stone
foundation for a temple of love
stone
and
stone
wrapped with a cord
from here to yonder
releases with words
from the sluices
firm as sex
light as a lotus
a field of blossoms
seen
all outward
at once.
When people speak
the language of their Gods
a creche
naturally selected
culture
an inflorescence
moves in an ecological niche
like rivers to the mill
roots connect underground
when you pull one up
a star
sky
the
from
falls
Reaching a lotus ladder--
ITZ
The Milky Way
our milled
corn
fertilized coral eggs
float
imago
the abandoned track.
With the old mother
the new calf dives in the water.
Born between Jesuits and Moravian Brethren
Sky
cross
Squaring the Circle
I open my mouth;
dew falls from heaven;
in return
I give dirt
pure and good.
Like Saturn,
serpent prokaryotes
midwife the future
swallowing.
Nature is
and our nature is
the opening of a Woman leads to
Xibalba.
The doors of the church must open to Her.
Only
one great thing
sings me
when I am
mindful.
Light changes
the desert
colors--
chewed
breath filled
cave paintings with
spittle
tran
substantiates--
and
everything in it
is medicine.
Walking Naming It--
the rocks
tell me
the beasts the planets the plants the water the wind--
we find our
selves
singing
the lines
here to yonder
Forest frames
time
the niches.
Your rhythmic weeping
sets a bird free.
Himalo, himalo.
I make the world
and it is finished.
Let it go.
Till we dance again
in Northern Lights
playing
with the head of the Walrus.
The woman
with Her dragon horse
divines the path
to paradise
end--for now