Deluges

Is there no valid language for Chaos? Or does Chaos only produce a sort of language that reduces and annihilates?

—Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation

 Atmosphere passes a sentence    declares altered sequences
drastic light forecasting a sissonance       as wave’s periods shift
asking mouths to inhale cloud’s meanings lit in roiled inscriptions
Who is namer       within air’s turbulent realms       assigning being’s place
This weather’s breath speaks obscurity       annunciates mouthless
  obscure event’s arrival       sky deepening its burdens       At sentence’s end
rain will begin its own sentencing       so easily pass sun into memories
city’s gleam into flat iron light       as a before’s       held within word
  brief on tongue’s searching muscle       Like that       world’s changed
often beneath such gentle beginnings       soft veiling mists       dews
breezes fluttering curtains of droplets       Not all ruin has heralds
  cacophonies       may arrive in silks       drama demurring to whispers
vaporous saturations weighing air     pressing damp on skin       violet
tinctures in skies       fog’s breath coalescing on wide leaves anointed
  in weather’s touch to bodies       processes unfurled in fluttering wings
Long since wet       a season’s drought       heat of summer’s wilting sear
now tongues delight in surfaces moist with shine       receptive
  to pleasure’s abbreviations     with petals relearn laughter’s textures
waking to sip from stems again       flushed green after patient months
forgetting amidst celebrations       who carries what names
  inscribed to whose flesh       lineages lost in growth’s rapt tangles
Then a faint bell’s ringing       rain drives air to blues     horizon effaced
cloud’s prism depths obscure what solar key was left       beckon
  an assertion signalled in steady patter on leaves       pushing boughs low
water’s surprising weight       mutable force accumulating unnoticed
after dry time’s want of water       forgot torrents       surplus
  now ministering to soil’s ask for saturation       washing this world’s
eased boundaries into sentences suspended       solvency into nouns
broken free of roots       wreathed opaque in bloom’s ability
  to pass on events without verbs         silent but for hummingbirds
Each being arrives without name       with thirst’s desire into earth’s air
clamours bliss by flagrant episodes of licks       asks taste’s enough
  before too much       ecstatic to partake       without need to grasp
fractions afloat on balmy currents       pathways sinuous in orchards
bathing vapours instilled with fragrant molecules rising
  out life’s respirations       perspirations       presence revealed in wakes
witnessed in rain’s wavering patterns upon garden’s combed meadows
listening       felt along with chirps amidst oak branches       flickers
  seeking shelter     stirring blossom’s fall from crabapples       lilacs
to signal by silent raptures       confound tenses by water’s lack of coherence
formulate grammars as if continuity flowed away from summation
  To brush a pink petal from a cheek     where a word would regenerate
now’s was into breath’s after     juices     flesh into resonant errors
tensions anticipatory of cessations       filled by water’s fall
  asking enough       having no say       despite all methods of restraint
rains continuing into afternoon       until evening collapses into night
cloud’s starless canopy lit electric from beneath     a soaked body
  now glad to pass thresholds into dry interiors       to rest       to await
what comes after rain’s sentences have passed to other shores       dreaming
little falling tears of light behind eyes’ shut lids       celestial showers
  sliding down out distant orbits       veiling a day’s residues into vision’s
memory reconstituted into voices       who speak a word that glistens
at dialect’s diaphanous edge       blushed allure within ratios
  this one       this word they want to say       are saying     this one
word’s never saying     never spoke     not forget but make obscure
shelter within foliate processes       against a mind’s inundations
  that wreckage left of day’s pains       pleasures       washed by dreams
their fragments bound to flood’s driftless grammars       where consequence
disperses towards elegies       What’s happened       what word’s name
  turns in sleep’s gyres       made work of remainders       nerve’s deltas
spreading their tangled patterns of sediment       What’s happened
made terrestrial     unreachable under soils         seas except
  where imagination’s reach extends       gathering out muck’s debris
closed petals bountiful in churning waters         amidst life’s refusals
plastics and spit       static floral celebrations arranged within swirl
  a noun’s assemblages joined by time       being stilled to be spoken
as names precipitate out event’s flamboyance       without declaration
dream’s relations decomposed into wreathed shrines of blossoms
  dripping oils     grime and sludge of sleep’s waters       their fragrances
inebriating senses by signs       revealing       revelling in being of air
tuberose strung on heliotrope       sewn to rose enlaced to lily
  jasmine twined to gardenia       woven to carnation knit to plumeria
dismembered incidents syntaxed into cohesions       scent kin of speech
measured by vapour’s lift of molecules       slid on airs to tongues
  particulated bodily emissions coming to rest       inhabitations asking
who’s namer     who’s named      who assigns claims who is     what’s undone
in submarine phantasms rupturing time’s power       order’s testimony
  waking’s grasp loosened by fascinations     before a rise again into weather’s
rained sentences still falling     heavier now     patter turned to thrum’s
continuous drumming       crescendoes finding no summits
  a climate’s disdain       sluicing down sighed mockeries of measures
record’s expectations fractured with a shrug       past windows on streets
what’s puddle begins to brim       river’s width swells past familiarity
  until a question echoes       of what floods crept during night’s reprieve
Fogs whisper over waters in morning’s haunted quiet     a city’s stilled silence
waiting for rain’s cessation to begin       eyes made watchers     witness
  to an avenue’s ordinary trees turned remnant artifacts       concrete towers
made isolate citadels in a swelling sheen       not to be rushed or halted
trialling slow certainties refusing absolution       settling to edicts
  born in a sphere’s watery laws       hostile to form’s presumed solidities
arraigning civilization’s terms in coiling whorls       whose grammars
seize names       sever them from time       returning what’s bound
  into mutable unfolding rhythms       speaking of what cannot be told
inundations murmuring into houses       when saying       refers to no thing
but cloud’s unanswerable reckonings       parking lots made wave’s ripples
  when to feel a sphere’s aspirations of name-less speech ascribing durations
makes sense erupt       what’s common fragmenting into estrangements
now that eyes take in street’s signed names       vanishing under gyres
  when there’s no easy ways out       from what was so casually begun
property’s clear edges diffracted into blurs       demarcations dispersed
melting what’s built into fluid raptures without boundary     Caught
  tidally returned to lunar sequences       arrhythmic instigated alterations
colliding in convenience stores       water’s ardor bearing no specific intentions
only gentle missives       merciless undoings       sureties abbreviated
  to urgencies       not for weather       but for who’d believe the force of names
who view from within windows       muddied cascades down stairways
see water rising in basements       mall’s tiled interior courtyards
  turned pools for waterfall’s plunge off balconies       subway tunnels
become aquatic caverns       dark rushings beneath a city’s submergence
Who see       marking how dumbly       how easily     everyday’s changed
  what was before’s earth’s made after’s water     within this nudge of time
what was air’s past’s made water’s future       What seemed to be sure enough
for extractions of general principles     revealed brevities mistaken
  for regularities       bewildering evolutions as predicates         as if chaos
wasn’t prime agent in a fluid world       as if mastery were possible
its invested titles of permanence     its order’s formal illusions
  secure while flows uproot     vapours degrade steel’s prepositions
washing away what’s proprietary     into riotous foaming annotations
weather’s churn       swallowing plots     acquisitions     properties
  dissolving names’ presumptuous definitions     until an ask shimmers
in confusion’s textures       that what’s valuable in being lives outside history
past noun’s adhesions       weightless       ungraspable by nation’s covenants
  dispersed       as fragmentary feelings       nerved clamours afloat on tides
drifting     seeking shelter together     creaturely at mercy       without
supremacy       transmuted within rain’s solvent surging decisions
  Then panic comes       a swim between sunken cars       no rescue near
surrendered to aid’s uncertain probability     reaching hands     without
name but as body living     belonging divested to retch and gasp
later pulled into a boat’s strange stillness       there rest     recovery     asked
to grant whatever help can be given     to others found in devastation
  to stretch hands towards offered hands       attempt at least to sound
small ordinary notes of care       counter what scripts grasp at bodies
their harm’s traces legible and not       chemical deposits in lungs
  viruses in blood       secretive diluvian methodologies of memory
this civilization’s unleashed poisons inscribed into flesh       throats
bathed in muck       mouth grime-choked past ability to purge
  at work ‘till a drained body folds into night’s dreaded impossibilities
finding there only weather’s breadth       surreal amendments glimpsed
beneath murk glimmering with oil’s sheen       nebulous scaled shapes
  gliding slow       unleashed into new wilds between roses’ swaying canes
branched arms of lilac in bloom       cast shadows on painted swans
encircle a pink ornamental fountain       before flickering away
  as something larger approaches close behind       How’s story to be
told when tongue’s left dangling       inert       muted by deliriums
attempting to say what language cannot contain       stuttering
  against these borders of what’s not bad dream       but materialized
in sky’s crackling       apparent in cloud’s violets       as weather unfurls
as rain’s curtains shred to lace       concede a glare on ruin’s scenes
  as flood rises       taking no notice of control’s spectacular gestures
now that anything’s about to happen       a moment’s unfastened
from history’s sutures to time       by force registering itself
  to apply water like wind like flame until ruptures       acquittals
verdicts delivered by weather’s tribunals       entropic communions
laws in such disarray no report may gather into coherence
  shards       debris       remembered by whatever’s left for words to do
utterances birthed within erratic codices       season’s tormented rhythms
singing dissonant       insist their potency torn of shock’s cadences
  What could attend an everyday split by cataclysm       future of portents
without absolutes       a blank silence echoing in name’s vacancies
where no voices can be heard behind flooded barricades
  marking doorways       next after       finding few as days go on
fewer       even as rains falter at last       searching through nights
through evenings       crying out       trembling in sleep’s
  awful froth     hauntings even exhaustion cannot resolve to rest
floating bodies held within horrified visions       what was a home
made tomb’s stillness of torn petals suspended within dark glass
  oil’s black iridescences wrapping a face’s agonies       eyes blanked
of all possible shared afters       tongues returned to guttural origins
before this general silence     Who could make from this
  from words       from water       saturate in grieving testimonials
having seen what’s already arriving       born on gruesome accidents
soaked rotting reek of flesh of wood of plastic materials bonded
  by decay ’s violations       stench speaking what mourning has to tell
cursed days into nights into blighted days       joyless even as a river settles
back within its banks       exposing dismal tracts of houses slouched
  foundation’s ooze creeping illicit       no coherence in how’s whys slurring
breakages in cryings out       voice an instrument past grammar’s shells
no tell to this no say to groan out past       sleep’s succulations
  grasping out underwater       awake’s attempt to bind names to face
once once once is there’s again       before’s was living       after’s waters
coming     passing left filthgrimes       how’s body’s water marked
  whatever’s left of word’s deeds       law’s once just never aver’s again
how’s underwriters       engineered wordlaws       whosales policies       bloat
profit ’s ruin s       murderedbodies       after ’s leakage i in to before ’s
  obliterated imagines       sustained anguishes       imp licit neg li gence
sats blame no water’scrimes patterns       who patters’its floodgaspings
failtures where’s overflows before       knew care less logics profit
  where in darkchurn li lies were floating mauve       eyes still seeing
last last gasp vibrastory flesh ’sbells       blood rang struck bodies expire
bones shroud ed flesh’s aspir ation       words shroud lack’s scent
  masterry ’s grammars enabling harms       wrap theys     in weeds

bones in time speak who’s dead to all ’s within flood before      after gones
held breath held under breath’swant       any one who speaks now
  sees this all bound to i in coming       scries out sequential word’s hells
echloying       what err’s wet       water’s wants   coming it sucts all
gathersea’s blinding eternal ties       rose’s thorny
stalks       sway
  their saying’s mute solilo qui es       drowned   city’s dreams
lakes
one ’s this year ’s
tears   one ’s a year before there’ll be turns
 after errs until
ord
i in
airy as bird ’songs bran
ches over what errs     on third   dazings
on sixth on a whys
day ’s dawns     violates           to sing
      to charge     close       to bring augury eyes
sing’s breaths lack in i   i in to     how     how’s why
    suffocates can     not say
    any ’s past           names   air ’s futile hours       i’ll
     your our or earth ’s water ’s wants
   nameless   sly     lay   lies   name less lies   lay   say
say   seasonsings   of         little day dream’s     end of word’s
law’s   dry controllings
decay ’s     call   in goes     sing until breaks
   dismemorias
drown seasons of songflowers
 sedimentaries   diaries for     deathflowers
beneath waters   errancies        sent
law ’s owed to word ’s awe to reason ’s
   sentences said passing over who ’s       lost now