Theodore Worozbyt poems

Gnosis

Turns out the radiologist didn't know thing one about radios. I stood there in my stocking feet and waited for the music to begin again. Being generally good with small motors I would mow and mow the lawn stoically with a white hand towel draped around my neck. I was stimulated by the reports of the optical scienteers. Because of the particular reflective and refractive qualities inherent in the molecular structure of the chlorophyll molecule, the wavelength perceived by the human eye as green is in fact repulsed by grass. Thus grass is all other colors. Impossible, impossible! was the catarrh violently discharging itself in the chambers of my thoughts. Grass and vert are green. Reading is black surrounded by white. If not, what? A barely perceptible hum underfoot that turns out to be electricity or some other invisible fluid? A basket heaped with unadjusted watches? The forests filled with white tigers. Fire came from god's beard. The sun rolled, a chariot wheel flaring its treads across the clouds. Starlight: angelic punctuation on the carbon paper of midnight. New York City sewers crawled with titanic alligators before debunkers in rubber boots stepped in. President Somebody was smoking an Egyptian cigarette and several papers didn't get signed before the prognosis began to resemble a trumpet: something gold around a hole.


When I Was Gone to Summer

When I was gone to summer green as paint, they came
and ground the vines to tangled piles.
A luna moth clung to the basement wall.

When leaves turned red as windows in my chest, they left
a bare tree, a tongue dulled
without a bell.

Where my eyes are shaped to the sea's shape, nerves took root
and wove into my hand.
A door grows glossy as blood in the last light,

clapboards creamy in the gloaming
where I had gone; the summer came, as green as paint,
and my hand turned incarnadine.

When I pinch a bit of dust
and so compress expired stars, let
the weight of a bird be the volume of my thought.


from Aphorisms I-XV

I
The most devout long to breathe the dirt's scent once more.
The cat runs faster at night; he sees you better.
Only the ordinary is reprehensible, but praise disgusts the just.
Wine is not drunk enough.
Be bitter but only about the Truth.
With a friend, poison is sweet; sweetness, with an enemy, poisons.
The colder things are, the slower, unless they are flowers.
You will never know the river wets your hair.
What is sweetness, that bees do not remember honey?
Work is wings.

II
If you would judge, then be a Judge.
If you would be judged, be just.
The color of a stone is darker in water.
To be loved, love no one.
The catacombs are not the end. Past them lies a wall.
I am an enemy to what I have forgotten.
If a bell rings, then a bell has been moved from its sleep.
Change admits error, but will prove correct in its assumptions.
Every antipole is itself. Every identity is another.

As I walked along the river, an old man carried a walking stick on his shoulder, as a soldier will carry a rifle. When we passed I greeted him, but he could not bring himself to answer, though I too am an old man, taking pains as I go.