Ocean Seeping Eyes

Unde igitur suavis fructus de amaritudine

vitae carpitur gemere et flere et suspirare et
conqueri?
Augustine, Confessions

For Heather

OCEAN SEEPING EYES

Nicola Masciandaro

OCEAN SEEPING EYES

Nicola Masciandaro
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons AttributionNonCommerical-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of
this license, visit: http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by-ncnd/3.0.

ISBN-13: 978-1508968207
ISBN-10: 1508968209

Only the unendurable stillness falling from your eyes

Makes this lone world breathable. It undoes my still life
Into a new alien silence no black death will ever quell.
The moon is so jealous of such light. All day she hides, reading
How humans think her into their obscurest sighs, simply not
To forget that everything in the end may still be alright.
When the world ends, as it suddenly has, there will still be
Not enough time to meet. Now children play ever younger games
With their own bones, sing like birds above dusty golden streets.
My hope is not for you or me. Tis for the weird tidal wave
That will liquefy time and drown space in a spiral abyss
Of endless . . . a perfectly still, truly perfect tsunami.
Survival is a curse we abandoned too long ago to the born.
This still birth happens without us, in X, a crosswise space
Of blackest unseen glancingour immense secret forsworn.
That which is swallowing today never dies. A real serpent,
It flies darker than anything, piercing every place, swerving
Atoms beyond the black specular curve of the cosmic sky.
Listen to me because I am not to listen to. Hear me
Still as I cannot speak truth, only words meaning nothing,
Nothing more than a knowing of anything none ever knew.

II

Hang me by the heels until your pail is overfull of my tears.

Not from me does this liquid come, limpid crystal water
More self than minewhole sea seeping through two small spheres.
Once in a dream I drenched my whole body in weeping. The drops
Cascaded down in constant flowing from the crown of my head,
Washed the universe into oblivions deeper than sleeping.
Give me a lachrymatory for my birthday. I will fill
And empty it diurnally in terminal futile attempt
To cool the overhot coals cracking open the hearts clay.
Or preserve all the saltwater in a deep secret cellar.
As miracles happen it may spontaneously become
Wine enough for everyone to laugh their heads off forever.
Not that there is reason to worry over how things turn out.
Tear itself alone is the deep truth and everything else
Beginning with these words is abysmally open to doubt.
Tears prove truth the only way possible disproving all things
Including themselves, distilling the real and illusory
Into singular oneness of an evaporating syllable.
I see the bucket is barely starting to fill. Please return
As infrequently as you wish, for I am happy to hang
Here plunged upside down in deep sorrowit is my will.

III

Bury me in the floor of your temple, embalm me in

Your skin. Whatever happens, find a fate to so enwrap me
Inside the most inner boundary of all that you are in.
Lifeless things also miss you. So communicates the floor
On which one rolls nearly all day weeping, blindly wondering
How union will ever become itself forever from two.
To the ocean bottom I sink until it becomes ceiling.
To the sea floor I float and drown to a degree that no one
Who has never done so will find at all appealing.
Time now to say anything, find the nothing there is to say.
Here is the place honestly to embarrass yourself, to floor
The lone audience with feats of being a self-eating clich.
To watch your life fly out the window from the safety of home.
To walk flying through your fear of falling with the chaotic
Accuracy of an auto-targeting predator drone.
One day we will forget how to spell our names. O lovely mess
Of sitting close on the serene floor of unlocked syllables,
Knocking over all towers of Babel with our tiny games.
Someone prays no one to think who my verse is for. He falls
All the way down, kissing the closest horizons black abyss,
Prostrate in paradise, upon the un-enclosure of a floor.

IV

Everything is upside down, hanging by a thread. Only tears

Flow in the right direction, only weeping is alive, here
In the realm where nothing is real, where life is truly dead.
Not here enough even to be falseexcessive zero. This
World is . . . never mind what anyone alive says about it,
Never think again to bury your brain-void in that pillow.
From where I lie, the live teardrops rise. One after another
They follow the golden filament, spiral to the unknown,
Like ants ascending a subtle liana into your eyes.
On the one hand, I want each one to arrive. On the other,
I need the salt of my life to corrode the perilous cord,
Snap this small universe into ultimate swan dive.
Never more alive, the whole body cries. So I feed its heart
With opposing hopes of climbing and falling, growing memory
Backwards into a future formed of arborescent sighs.
We all know what will happen. The totality of these tears
Return to their source the moment I implode in paradise,
Like a marine Marysas, or the men in Under the Skin.
Let this undo surprise at not being alive. It is scrawled
By a life making all else less than dead, pressed by the puppet
Hand of one whom only the entire ocean will ever revive.

I fear I fail to remember, I forget. Everything is

Twisted into simplest horrornot this, not thisall is fog
Omnipresent, one far unscalable diaphanous net.
Always further I remember, far too much. Across horizons
This eye intersects within itself more than will be known.
Inside the oblique sphere of every line our glances touch.
Forget that I never not knew, forget me. So far too long
Have I already lingered, am lingering still on the shore
As if it were not, as ifas if it were (not) itself the sea.
Now dive on the count of three to the bottom of tears. Leap
Into the black starlight of the nearest far, the abysmal
Ocean of love swimming beyond itself under all fears.
Less I remember more I know. All things are far too clear,
Too obvious to think about, suffused with a blinding candor
Like death coming to a victim right before the final blow.
There, where all speaks without me, there. Here, only one thing
To do, burning forever in the midst of all else: weep tears
On its unimaginable feet and dry them with our hair.
Is not written he who writes. On the day you at last meet him
It will still be first, in faraway newness past fantasy,
On an earth lit by itself, moonlike, beneath suns of nights.

VI

My eyes are submarine caverns, seeping what they cannot see.

Are your limbs anemones? If they are, what is the chance
Of understanding them, or ever again falling asleep?
There is also music in this sunken, floating tomb. It sounds
Like a spiral mountain, or a crystal storm, or organ fugues
Conducted to a pale embryo in our dark mothers womb.
If only the caverns could talk, these void spheres speak. If only
My eyes comprehended all they project, saw the cinema
Of each atom, all suns and galaxies . . . Instead, they leak.
I see no space for a real kiss here, no truth. For lifetimes
We grope in speechless caverns, finding less than oneself to eat,
Tasting nothing other than the dull sting of my own tooth.
Still you are here, silent in the blacker cave of blackness
That speaks a name. As if I care what anyone thinks, as if
Anyone has understanding of what is never the same.
The drops that keep me up forever are like shimmering gems.
By losing all of them I will eventually, impossibly, win,
Namely: overflow with wine more drunk than Rumi for Shams.
Until then, you will have to listen to me. Or not, and just
Walk on, not worrying at all, much less about what babbles,
Drowning in its own breath, down near the bottom of this sea.

VII

There is nothing worse than not weeping, for you. And for you,
What is worse, weeping or not weeping? Tell me now to yourself
What is really the case, tell me a silenceyoursthat is true.
Without tears I see nothingblank! Without drowning in that
Liquid invisible light, suffocating in pure silence,
There is only this, hooded and bound, inching along a plank.
I know you know all that these words plainly mean. I know you know
I know all that I want to say. And I know you know I know you know
All that stays unsaid, touching the razor loop of silence so keen.
So that not weeping cannot not open into weeping higher.
So that one only floats still further upon the spiral sphere
Of all tears ever wept, rising like a flame from ones own pyre.
This morning my tears took a straight line, plumb. No doubt silence
Drew itwould have split everything like Bulleh Shahs alef
If I was not so thick-headed, if the heart was not so dumb.
One wept tear seeds a million unwept more. When the eye retains
The ocean, I will gaze worlds past silence from my pupils.
Closed all the way open, I will no longer peer from the shore.
For the moment, tearlessness seversa dry torture tearing
All things from themselves . . . until suddenly now the spring flows
Forth again into vision, and all is well, worse than ever.

VIII

I follows I up the mountain, unable to move. Now push

Me to where I may follow, roll me down to the steepest path,
The inexistent one where we climb with nothing to prove.
Heart-sound to heart and breath-scent to breath, I followed. Now
Beat I on the black gate of my own mouth, begging it to open
Into some eternal level of eating that will never be swallowed.
Never think a moment I will forget. Nay each syllable
Of spoken silence will remember more than all, recalling
In utmost inner scream everything that cannot happen--yet.
Keep following your sigh to ghazal street, where the gazelles die.
I am there in the dust, on a breeze stirring the ghetto palms,
In the light now gently seen, not touched by too-human eyes.
Keep following tears to the sea floor. There where boundaries
Between eyes and tears and thought and being will never exist,
Where extremophiles dance carelessly near lifes burning door.
Best to fulfill by escaping the fate of Lidwina. Best
To follow the better worst, to outsurvive ones own grave
And sport freely, far more astonishingly, like Christina.
Still, I do fear all this is only wisdom of a victim soul.
Good thing nothing is mineparadise against my will
This is, a walled garden severing singulars into a whole.

IX

Do not hesitate to eat my flaming heart, fear consuming

Its golden ember fire. Nothing will alter its true substance,
Nor defile the whole of which it is far greater than a part.
The world is a grave, this we always know. Is there something
Else here, past impossible to describe, a thingless thing
Sweet and strong like the breath of a panther, ancient-new?
I see you wing through the crystal window, coming or going
I cannot tell. Still, there is the river of the whole vision
Flowing, a neither-here-nor-there total unstoppable swell.
That is why my eyes are swollen, why I strangle myself on
The breath of your name. Because all is far freer than it thinks,
Because I needs to lack the whole, deny-affirm the selfsame.
Please make poetry stop, kill it in its sleep. I do not know
How much more of it I can take, how many more tears
Blindness, blind to everything other than itself, can weep.
If only a way to spontaneous and omnipresent
Surrender. If only everything would simply give up,
Stop cutting itself off from the glory of its splendor.
Do not worry. Not antithesis, this is less than sub zero
Consolation. In a weird way that escapes me I am
Wholly free, in bliss, the indifferent source of all temptation.

Being able to do something is nothing. It is not you

Who ever does, but a softer, irresistible instant breeze,
Something happy and forlorn, a weird trustless trusting.
Deep in the zone of tears, who cries for whom? Is anyone there
At all while I swoon to the floor, tasting the sweet salt
Dregs of myself on the rug of the overfamiliar room?
The total solipsism of tears touches the feet of God.
Or so I think in prophetic folly of my pathetic
Fallacy, hearing the no of my own reason as a nod.
I weep over myself weeping for you. Personally I
Seduce each syllable of silence from the ocean, coaxing
It into vapor of unknowing, then distilling the cloud to dew.
To exit melodrama through itself, to dive. Thats the kind
Of appalling imperative I am following these days,
The general command of trench warfare keeping me alive.
At the end of the day, of life, of the universe, there is
Little impressive about tears. There is only the endless
Fleeting taste of a permanence that will never pass into years.
Please wipe your mind-slate clean of these pale rainbow hues.
Nothing was, is, or will ever be written on the black slate
Of the soul, another do-less doer, a mere who knows who.

XI

I tell myself thisnot the way it is. Here a man walks

Alone in spiral circles, looking for a scent that hunts,
Haunted by a center that makes him no longer his.
Looking for where it happened, for blood. See my feet know
Where to walk without me, touching just what they must,
Abandoned to simple easy skill, stepping on frozen mud.
Everywhere I walk is snow, blinding white. Where is the red?
Where is the open secret portal to the site, a bed of earth
Where she severed my skull forever in the middle of night?
The few drops of oxygen in questioning are not enough
To sustain life. And now there is gas in the veins of thought
Because of love, constant murder without victim or knife.
Now there is walking in a circle that goes everywhere
Antarctic perishing, freezing of breath, hyperopic dreams
Of sublime crystal thrones and prism-castles in the air.
Step by step by step the story goes. When apocalypse comes
He will be still be walking straight to the center of the bombs
White death, as if it were the empyrean, his own celestial rose.
My secret is mine, or so I say. When the last step is taken
And these wise feet refuse to go, neither here nor there will
It be, neither yesterday nor tomorrow, not even today.

XII

Sunk in memory of eyes, world is turning marine. Too drunk

To talk about it, I swim now in pure drowning, drinking in
The sinless delight of underwater sighs, so dark and green.
Deeper into themselves the orbs flow. A sponge from beyond
Vision is soaking all things into seeing, ocularizing
Every lucid surface into blue, self-observant glows.
It is obvious now why you are not here: for the express
Purpose of seeing you everywhere, of plunging my whole
Three-fold body faster through the pupil-portal without fear.
Any who see what is happening will faint. Whoever
Comes across this uneasy, incommunicable gazing
Will have no idea what to think, no image at all to paint.
I see no way backto where? What way or method for turning
Round is possible for a coral-boned being, a sunken ember
Of soul-flame bubbling its self away in spiral spheres of air?
He was seen once, when you never stopped looking. Now his eyes
Are liquefying all things in the sun of that glare, enflaming
The earth into a cauldron sea, this long turbulent cooking.
No wonder I sink to depths, fly far below. The air above
Is too hot to breathe, and were it possible to survive
The inverse journey, there would be nothing, no place to go.

XIII

All I would say, all I would feel. More than the anemone
Hears in a sirens song, than the mermaid may conceive
In her most secret mind, more than sea-longing of the seal.
The ocean is only infinitely compacted layers of sky
Dying for itself. All day it drowns in stratospheric loveSickness, hungry like a shark recalling once being a sylph.
Snow is the sea reminding you to weep. Too much I see
From my window, view never mine where too much is thought,
Where thinking everyday resembles the worst possible sleep.
Fact is, none of this is for me. So what? If this specific
Death-by-individuation event were not happening
Someone might still be reading cosmic pessimism by ET.
Perhaps there is a real party somewhereparadise! The wine
Must cost a fortune in freedom, the beauty beyond belief,
And the song supremely synthesize all aspects of fire and ice.
Now love in me tells poetry not to go to hell. It flattens
This soul called mine into a kind of lace, an ornament
Unintended, gentler than anything you will ever feel.
Lower than earth or water, Nicola isalaslava.
As for what remains, who knows? Search your own heart,
Follow the sigh from the empyrean into your vena cava.

XIV

Because nothing is enough equals everything is too much.

So the next time anything happens, notice how everyone
Is wearing a black executioners hood, and how they blush.
You and I will meet once the body resurrects from me. That
Will be the day, the way there will be no more stupid fuss
As to who is who or why it mattersonceto not be free.
Today melted timeanyone else feel it too? They say that
Awakening has this uncanny aspect of not being
Able to distinguish between your false and my own true.
The moment I welcome spring in every form, dragons appear.
Does that mean anything? I mean anything less than that love
Whose hyper-human summit ignores every cloud, forgets all fear?
Cosmos was destroyed at the moment of creation. All
That we experience now of the universe is simple
Loneliness, the long waking sleep of its pure preservation.
There is no greater fortune than this, none. There is nothing
Anywhere that will ever compare to the thrill of such speed,
The infinite acceleration of what will never have begun.
As if the maker of this possesses a voice! Therefore hear
All the more nearly what is spoken, with both ears growing
Into the ground of silence, where the word is without choice.

XV

Drop the umbrella of time, let it fall. Let the shining sun
Eclipsed be by the light of the darkest sky, the one that
Restores space to being a supreme minimum of the all.
How I scream beyond hearing today. Thats how it should be,
Given there is only silence, simply this unhearable tune
Shattering the air per se like glass and blowing it all away.
Crystal this wound is, deeper than matter. Impenetrably
It shines with a kind of frozen solid fire, a mirror-like pain
Crucifying every color in the sweetness of its laughter.
Now see that my body is only a seventh shadow. So where
Does that leave tears? Are they a mere penumbra or the clear
Sap of our deepest unseen sea, its darkest transparent glow?
Hold me beyond myself, in safest danger of striving. That
Is where I am anyway, playing in all-owning poverty,
Killing being killed on the battlefield beyond surviving.
Worse the worlds arrows do is whisper your name. And this
Is no different from the best, namely, to record in sheer delight
The never-ending day one glance realized the hearts secret aim.
Let the whole universe whizz by, what do I care? Nothing
Erases that which long ago erased all erasing. No light
Will ever darken the ancient blackness, the one never there.

XVI

Everywhere I look, for someone never seen. Are my eyelashes

Your hair? That might explain why I blink and stare like this,
How I never stop starting to wonder, why my irises are green.
God is the non-existence of friends. So whoever is my friend
Is God. Get it? Do you understand that if you understand this
There is nothing at all over which to ever make amends?
I love youthat is how perfectly everything works. But who
Wants to believe that? Perfection seems to be surrounded
On all sides by miserable monsters, projecting pitiful quirks.
Guess who is the one I cannot think without thinking of? Now
Do you know who you are? I am sorry for only confusing myself
And everyone else further by attempting to talk about love.
How to keep the secret that will not stop talking? I do,
By letting nothing constantly happen, by listening to
The silence saying this is not it, now continue walking.
Someone knows whether it is stranger that you or that I
Exist. All day I hear that person telling me during a moment
Too long to last, an instant too eternally swift to persist.
This is written for that which listens in loving fear. But
It is spoken for another, screamed more quietly for none
But the one becoming ever present in the blur of tears.

XVII

No onenot you, not meknows how much I love, only silence.

The reality of it is so abysmally hidden, eclipsed
Behind everything in a kind of infinitely gentle violence.
To be hopelessly pinched between immoderate cogitation
And the need to stop the mind. That is the kind of infinitive
This life is, a breathing death of thinking (you) all the time.
When the shards lodged in my heart-flesh start to pinch, I weep.
And when the adjoining scar tissue grows enough to numb
The pain, it is off to bed to reopen the wounds in sleep.
Anyone who does not love to be tortured this way has not
Felt it. And anyone who does love to be tortured this way
Is either absolutely insane or a total idiot.
Madness of love instructs in love of madness, and contrariwise.
One nice effect of this loopy self-eating education is
To unveil the true charm of things I would formerly revise.
So that is what the real reality is, the unknowable truth?
Is itwithout is-ing or it-ing at allsimply the thingless
Thing refining in pure instant science whatever is uncouth?
By its grace neither I nor my words is sophisticated.
Even the maximum nobility needs its minimum,
A peasant to show off from where it never originated.

XVIII

Leave abandonmentthat is what it said. And the mountain

Was suddenly another mountain, not the one we must climb,
But another peak, on the sea, like a paradise isle of the dead.
Less peak than a vast living throne, less throne than a garden.
Yet still a mountain, higher than anything, lovely clean stone,
Adamant and breathing with something time cannot harden.
I cannot tell you how happy I am and do not know why.
From its inaccessible summit one easily dives flying in fall
Into the real Mediterranean and from there into the sky.
Intoxication at the thought of it cannot be separated from
The thing itself. Such is the nature of a realm, the real M
Where wine is kept in vessels none other than yourself.
Yesterday, for only a few seconds of yes, I opened
The friendliest invitation to die. And look what happens!
Today I am walking your limbs on the inside of goodbye.
To become permanently established past space-time
In a complete field of creative forces. That is the kind of
Obvious silliness one says while riding winged horses.
Human crossed with thought produces Daedalusa thing
Dying like sunset upon the horizon. Now multiply by X
You and mewhat do you get? A new species of Pegasus.

XIX

The tear trickling into my ear whispers no secret. It is

A secret itself, whispering what it really isthat this whole
Universe is only the solid shadow of missing everything in it.
There is a scent I remember, that was never a scent. It
Still is what it never was, the sweetest memory of itself
Filling the room of the world with a kind of floral lament.
And no lament at all. The roses of it are gold, and its gold
Is rosesroses and gold of an invisible order having
Zero to do with anything occurring before or after the Fall.
Forgive me for indulging in any other expertise. Know
That whatever it is, my heart is not in it, for there is
Only so much space from finish to start for losing the race.
All things whatever are pain (to me), a master says, except . . .
As if anyone worth his saltwater would desire it otherwise,
As if there is another way to rise from having so long slept.
Who wants to say anything anymore? What kind of illness
Causes a person to not stop exiting the home of oneself and stay
Out shivering in the cold, ringing the bell of their own door?
However circularly I stray, at least my bellybutton moves
Elliptically with me. Nothing shakes off the tears or the scent
That must be coming from own navel, underneath the sea.

XX

How old you are, ancienthow old are you? Nothing I can see
Will answer, nothing I can say will speak, nothing I can hear
Will sound where the beauty of unbirth shines, the species true.
Be not afraid of being outside being and time. Is this not
The hour to downclimb the trees of ourselves and find a way
Up the deepest roots, ascending via individuations slime?
It is hardharder than I knowto fall for what only wants
Ones own death. And the easiest thing in the world. Nothing
Is softer and gentler and sweeter than its love-stirring breath.
Were it possible to make it any easierI would not!
Do not ask what has gotten into me, what kind of worm
Is striving to eat itself free from the blind hole of my rot.
The pupil in my forehead is starting to burn. The eyes
Within this crystal skull are beginning to melt the mask,
So that sooner or later seeing itself will be all that I yearn.
Or so someone imagines, peeping through black phantasms.
Far be it from so-and-do to tell you on zero authority
That the space between us will not forever remain a chasm.
Reality is reality, and that is totally fine. In fact,
Nicola cannot think of anything more astonishing,
Nothing whatsoever this bewildering and divine.

XXI

What wears life out like this, making it unfit for everything?
Yet strangely I feel more and more strong, as if weakness were not
Debility but the delivery mechanism of an unforeseeable sting.
There are not enough bees in this city. Are they turned off
By the general absence of real secrets in people, the way
Everybody goes around ugly thinking they are pretty?
I have seen a handful of flowers at most. The rest of us
May count ourselves successful if we manage to achieve
For a few minutes the magical status of compost.
Love is a waste of time, but I am more so. I think therefore
It best to dispend myself in hopeless hope that one day
The one-way bargain will somehow pay off, find a new low.
Not that I am not avoiding the lover-and-beloved trap.
We all know Beatrice saves Dante from himself out of a love
That needs to silence him, to shut eternally his rhyming trap.
Love is eloquence itself, and so has no need for it. Anyone
Trying to be eloquent about love has abandoned the post
And ought be dragged back, tied down like a raving idiot.
Life as a goat on a leash is not bad. Only when I hear
The voice of one who feeds this heart does leaping pain
My neckthe same one appointed to sever my head.

XXII

New universes born from the commingling of our dust? That

Is an odd sort of idea, a strange form of plan, as if one
Might ever foresee the monsters brought forth by cosmic lust.
How long will my refusal of birth last, where will it end? I
Am tiring of this degree of novelty, this surchaotic whim
Always nailing being further into itself round another bend.
Something big must have lost control before time to create
This still crashing head-on collision. The radical unity
Of such reckless endangerment is beyond division.
I know you want to believe that physics is not love, not
Really. But the overwhelming evidence that desire itself
Proves is making this and all other wants look very silly.
In the black beyond yes and no lies the illimitable truth.
Stars are its dimmest shadows and the abyss its eye,
Gazing itself right through each heart like a serpents tooth.
A friend is someone who hears the scream. I mean: a scream hears
And a hearing screams the sound, spiraling into silence
Through the opening ear-mouth of an immemorial dream.
Ergo, there is no love between things. Beyond force this force is,
Immediately past medium, hopelessly outside-in all between.
Music could care less what becomes of the dust on its strings.

XXIII

Our bodies come/came off like light coatstake your pick. If

The present tense this is an event, if past a story, and if both
There is a chance at paradise, of getting out of here real quick.
So much to learn from the little moon! See her body move
Through all phases of itself without relinquishing either
Side of pupil-being, fixed in the pure life-circle of a swoon.
Sages say corpora come and go as soul remains. Is that not
Your secret invisible sense of things, gazing the luna
Of your face into the forest from the window of a train?
We look into a mirror to see what it seesnothing. That is,
The nothing which everywhere gives sight to all, blinding one
In inescapable vision, finding me before everything.
Vertiginously dear are your words to me, as dear as the words
You never say. The heart aims eternally at the threshold
Where one and zero both get to enjoy having it both ways.
Nearby, on the verge where sound and body are one substance,
This mouth sculpts itself into a megaphone-receiver of
The primal scream. Or was it another whispering in my dream?
Now that we are finally here, lets tear away from ourselves
With a daring no one has any idea of. Let us all swim free
As pure air, like water evaporating from the tears of love.