Excerpt from The House Seen from Nowhere

TRANSPARENT LIKE THE AIR

          spirits love
          houses and also

          certain exemplary places

          (such as the rotten
          pilings off
          India Point)

          without necessarily controlling
          the intervening spaces

          they are nothing

          they have not returned

          (a primitive
          sign meaning ‘neither…nor’)

          they do not
          need to return I am
          still here I

          can bear only
          the figures light
          delineates not
          the light itself

          (unstable, un-
          determined, in a
          state of final ruin where
          ontology seeps in)

          clear things
          with dark
          addresses

          certain stones give
          birth to other stones

          (bodies we label
          heavy) some

          split into thin
          flakes tightly
          embedded a

          liquid

          petrified

          animals

          fallen down shafts the
          marrow of their bones

          frozen to this
          selfsame

          stone
          (opaque

          and then the flash
          of a bird’s wing) I

          go down the column