Anne Waldman

Martha Diamond Keys to the City

Entanglement:

 

Martha a diamond of entanglement

 

Torque past A

 

Torque.   past   city’s cape

 

Yellow

 

Yellow a hogan.   Torque past

 

Stamina of heads that are buildings our windows and mannerisms

Mystic index, the necessity of shelter buildings and mannerisms of torquing

an outer shield, Martha Diamond

 

Pure what you see around the bend, corner

the willful

And conversation? In the paint outer

 

Attitude? shell

 

A budding of mind of windows that is beauty is a brush past

 

Suspicion of beauty

 

Suspicion of determination

 

Are eyes rising from your white of a building, not silent not ghost

And mirrors that are entanglement doors doors and energies the way the wind

gushes in

in display of dual mind insisting

it must move & we are deep

We are in the hidden love of our city

 

the gold noir city

 

a cinematic symmetry

Syncretic wheel of things

 

Philosophical what Diamond says of

 

History and time

 

What she says of

 

The shape of things in time

 

A tree like the architectural of cities human architecture for how we rise our

shadows up, dolmens

Wisdom, Diamond says

 

For a dying civilization

 

Or painterly joy, frisson!     Paint is the sacrament, meant the holy grail:

 

Drams of weird angle in relation

The mind of the woman inside act of paint in relation what I would not do for you

 

This is willfully a slash in act of relation

 

Fury & love of paint

And nowhere a robotic person is found

In clear intention checking the guard rail, as with

 

Things form the logopoeia ID

        Trying the night a guard sleeps on her,

Duties, make a wish on her magic ride, wish

That the image rises

And the music takes over

 

The little paint elves

 

This the guard. Stray lashes are forms

 

Flesh and matter in figures of absence

 

The trembling city

 

Stanzas in Meditation (Stein). A grooved dimension in emergency. What we live

 

Her primordial newsless-ness her good news, her being Diamond stanzas

 

I thought to say something about the canvas trembling, about to bend and bow

 

Kiss the ground

 

And coincidence

 

Thoughts if others intrude

 

Her flames, the flares

 

The people-less street

 

The fur of flame

 

Fur protecting flame

 

The shape inside

 

A spinning top

 

A Spanish dancer as with a modernist

A whirling dervish as with eternity

 

The light between our apartments from the streetlight we stood for,

Working in our generation

 

Nourished in our day

 

Remembered who we were coming up out of, a tomb, of men of war

 

What you hear is what you write in the roar of the vibratory art of Martha Diamond

 

Ark of light

Wild strokes the gates to the center of this hold on pulse

 

Writhing paint protecting the shapes within

to burst to burst I’ll say this for her spot on

 

Tombstones for heaven what they will remember of us

 

Our keys to the city keep the tangle of the gongs the tangle of the reins

 

Crest of the wave, riding it, girl Martha

 

Vertiginous passion for living deliberately.

 

Line With Ted Berrigan from Godfrey

I break the shaft of my spear over my knee and kiss a patch of concrete

—John Godfrey

never snorted Exact identity who were we? the back room at Schjeldahl’s He Said that way not trousseau in downtown the bright scarf walked on fine lines but in belief in a way in form You were always giving women A way at the altar math of excavation similar to Wrath forecast neuronal pathway Ok, orbit new zone comfort.    DMT round daughters of moon practice his beautiful sonnets, Berrigan, very gainly as crucible through legend circulates street & persons entonces y ahora

Poet, professor, performer, librettist, founder of poetry communities, and cultural activist Anne Waldman is the author of over 60 plus volumes of poetry, poetics and anthologies. Waldman co-founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics program at Naropa University. Her most recent works include the libretto for the (2024) opera/movie Black LodgeBard, Kinetic (Coffee House Press); and Rues du Mondes, (Apic Press, 2024). She co-edited New Weathers: Poetics from the Naropa Archive (Nightboat). Her essay on the Beats and Naropa appears in Tendrel: A Meeting of Minds, (Trident Books, 2024). More at annewaldmand.org