from

TiP TOE SOT

Richard Meier 

from TiP TOE SOT

The bottles in the mini-frig rattle
as the compressor ins-and-outs, I was
radiant walking without a limp
noticing the flecks of yellow warning
paint ground by feet off the stairs
mixed with a scattering of lavender
salt meant for the ice that was no
longer there on the landing.

The bells at Covent Garden is a
phrase then the room rotates slowly
around the eyes. An itch in the palm is
a narrow pin going in and out while
the sunlight through the hackberry
and the lid

coruscates inside the eye. Making
present something not present can be
perverse, perversity a type of lie, and
so it is in kind with overacting while
acting is the thing itself including
pretending, pretending itself.
Holderlin says tragedy is fire and the
commingling (size and no size, though
he says god + human or human +
nature) and a rage at the oneness that
leads to separation. It’s all one I am
thinking. Whistling holds water then
loosens coordination

promising witness that also redirects.
Mountain streams hear each little
insect that aspirates when visible links
trickle down outofsight. Crotch falls
through crotch, the bell opens and
rings.

Yesterday morning when the man in
#7 stopped talking I noticed a
completely different relation in the
sound of the train whistle than I had
had to his voice. Beep of a car being
locked, cars passing, unidentified hum,
crackle in right ear, sea gull shriek.
Without names a locus of sensations.
A fir tree behind a house grew out of
the roof. The house a horse with a
green-cloaked rider.

Northern shovelers a pair in the sun at
the widening open water

out the mouth of the river, the male
brown white green blue, female
mottled brown, the bills very wide and
tilted down swam out past a branch
meeting its reflection at three points
going into the water.

A bird flies out of the hemlock tree
interlaced with the mulberry tree and I
see the sun in the river blown
upstream and a

canoe floating down through my arm
pit. Two woodpeckers land in the
maple, circle the circumference of a
branch and ascend. This is a scratchy
somatic picture of the pain + tightness
in my body right now + earlier, left
glute meeting hamstring, band across
lower back, right calf, left shoulder.

When the body doesn’t align itself
to the page and the page doesn’t align
itself to the body, when the alignment
isn’t complete, there is a conversation.
A finch balanced on the gutter, then
the O of wood dangling from a wire,
then the clothesline, then the basket
of sticks, then the wind chime, and of
those things the moveable ones,
clothesline, O of wood, wind chime,
basket of sticks, began

this way and that in the energy
transferred from the body of the
finch. Celery, the knife thumping the
board, the shadow of the hemlock
moving on the still curtain, I am
thinking of the December day the
snow piled on the head of a cardinal a
thistle a tulip a goldfinch.

A man in a gray hood, a woman in a
black hat, a leaf running up the
sidewalk behind them. Yesterday by
the river Lisa said she needs to make a
will and when I woke James to dress
rehearse Lear he said he in a dream
was measuring his script with a ruler
and counting his

cats. I think I was making a will, he
said.

After he ate we sat on the daybed
opposite ends facing one another to
do the first third of Lear. He put his
feet on my stomach because they were
cold. He told me he’s noticed how
susceptible to flattery Lear is
throughout the play, the slightest kind
word from the Gentleman Knight and
he changes his mood. I was thinking
he should keep a long list of things he
notices about Lear.

Where is it dark enough to see the
Milky Way? Now the road is white
too. Something loves hearing how
snow leaves itself comes back settles
then departs. O the books—trees
complement growth of many things
and also tip to toe and then a book on
Tao how great spirits in the region of
lakes + rivers become lake + river
spirits. The gods come down + then
aren’t gods but the things that come
down in the nerve endings deciding
not to move.

Sot, of all things, each has crystals and
will be seen according

to that array. A man who can’t sing
well will sing freely, not knowing
where he errs and a man who sings
well is bound to do so. Suppose the
singing birds musicians, several of the
Ss backwards in the field, the willow
tree is longer than my toe. A singing
lesson. The tiger

behind the phonograph knows.
Continuity, the first Wednesday noon
sirens begin, one a second after the
other, so rising and falling pitch is
dissonant, at its loudest moment, with
its selves divided. Dream wills taste
legal, so shapes have only possible
testimonies indicating many aspects
stay trapped, holding something in
mouth, tasting its thrush leaving, the
startled consummation.

Lozenges of reflected dark glass grids
on a north-facing brick wall before
noon and later the train shadow
angled NW to SE erasing one by one
along that line the bent squares of sun
coming through the elevated tracks.
The movement of the pen counters
the movement monitor bracelet or
chip inserted in the hand, someone
said. Thump of doors closing on
spring-loaded hinges. Shaded land and
sun striking a breakwater 100 yards
out. Four apples touching in a dish.

Lear covered in ferns last night and
today his hand holding two small
sheets of ice held stuck together, the
point of the ice about to touch the
water where the reflected hand had its
natural hues, earth tones oranges
pinks browns, and the one in the air
burned or rather dazzled in the eye,
erasing itself by its whiteness in my
eye who looked. The moment he
leaned forward from the fool’s
question, Thou canst tell why one’s
nose stands I’ the middle on’s face?

another world appeared, something
he’d found in the grass, an ant or a
mouse, he’d bend to it later,

between the actors and the audience,
the stage and the seats, and it was in
that place he saw he’d done wrong,
saw his mistake as an overlooking of
that space, the same one Cordelia felt
when she refused to speak, into which
she spoke her refusal,

which found its voice in the howl
howl howl howl directed at the stage
as Lear carrying Cordelia back through
that space and feeling the life in it
made that sound.

But it was also there facing the
audience, leaning out and over her, the
feather moving where the glass didn’t
fog.

The mouse it is Lear better bends
down to see and then to feed. The
wood duck opens and closes his beak
rapidly between the muskrats and the
mallards. The female has white around
her eyes that come to a point and she
is the first to climb out onto the ice.