Arise, rice: I tend a rose: a rose and I.
               Reality is composed, uncomposed, composed: no ant for itself, beetle through compost, king/queen on the heap: reality ahop.
               Cherry trees without me and I without a kumquat tree.
               Now other things must be acknowledged: a magnificent black mare, a crow of many trades, a white and orange kitten who knows all the songs and is a first class mimic, a peach, a flea, a good credit rating, the google map app. 
               The riddle persists: who am I? 

 

From Tribunal by Lyn Hejinian, published by Omnidawn. Copyright © 2019 by Lyn Hejinian. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

We live in toppled times under a feat of tyranny; let’s not
fake getting lost, let’s do it, let’s not do it intermittently, let’s be
lost, disoriented and never to be bound so all can hear
the hiss of the adverbs we shoot into tyrants’ eyes, quivering
shafts slippery from limbs and aimed by eyes under feathered
lids. Our features are like stale bread, my headache bad
as a blueprint for butter. Windows: how stupidly the intensity
of glass returns to us the terror of love. Things diverge, separate
like the forks of the Eel River to which the competing lies
of two tyrants are but split stones shaken by earthquakes
of stupefying times, of minutes through a glorious forest, of women
who are personal friends, the flanks of a prevented rabbit: to scatter
and ambiguate, obviate, surreptitiously
flesh and hurry to find things to recombine.

From Tribunal by Lyn Hejinian, published by Omnidawn. Copyright © 2019 by Lyn Hejinian. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Birds hatch, eggs are laid, nests are built, trees branch, seeds
sprout: it’s always time. Time to recognize the sipping
self as girded shelf supporting stuff conducive to supporting self
recognizing time making its attempt to install
itself with all its belongings. They include forebodings
and long descriptions of the rifle butts that press
against the past shouldered by the men of firing squads
and the verminous skin of dogs with mange even at a very young
age outside cafes or on short chains as if their existence
were a prerequisite to mastering the arts of being
delicately human and a gambler with a passion for mortality
and substituting one value (vivacity) for another (history)
upon the heads of humans grotesque as the programs
they invent to send their opinions forward.

From Tribunal by Lyn Hejinian, published by Omnidawn. Copyright © 2019 by Lyn Hejinian. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

               Anti-determinative, interminable, incomplete—the poem has nothing to do with truth or value. 
               This poem, for example, is philosophical, in that it doesn't seek things to believe but things not to believe. 
               Every sentence records a stretch of becoming invented as it goes.
               It's decontextualization, rather than discontinuation, that time effects.
               Both time and decontextualization may generate obscurity but so too might structure, otherness, and particularity even more than entropy. 

From Tribunal by Lyn Hejinian, published by Omnidawn. Copyright © 2019 by Lyn Hejinian. Used by permission. All rights reserved.