Departed Quantities

DEPARTED QUANTITIES
(A) Quantum Epic
JOHN DOLIS
BLAZEVOX[BOOKS]
Buffalo, New York
Departed Quantities: (A) Quantum Epic
by John Dolis
Copyright © 2020
Published by BlazeVOX [books]
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without

the publisher’s written permission, except for brief quotations in reviews.
Printed in the United States of America
Interior design and typesetting by Geoffrey Gatza
First Edition
ISBN: 978-1-60964-363-8
BlazeVOX [books]
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Kenmore, NY 14217
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21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10
A
Even historiological disclosure temporalizes itself in terms of the future.
Martin Heidegger
["Loquere ut videam te"]:
Eye turns to I, and I

to turns ( )musing self.
I sing of stars and night,
what matters, hence,
what signifies the body
in its self-contained opacity,
the body turned to what alone
makes sense. For reference I cite
the silent void, the indeterminate,
the circumscription of things
remote, things lurking
at their textual fringe,
a vision distantly peripheral yet near
as context is to name. I sound
the backward echo of reply,
rebind the hollow void,
initial-bound abyss. I speak
of word and wind and wound
what clouds the pointed tongue,
of breath, flame flickering,
the instant resignation catechized,
of homonyms and synonyms
of suns and sons. I knit
cosmology and genealogy
11
technology and teleology,
a fabric specious to the final knot,
an increment of memory, recuperation
set aside, reserved. I risk
internal heterogeneity,
plurality. I dare
destroy identity,
the word at its unguarded point,
an epochal event eclipsed 'till now.
I do not sing taxonomy,
gratuitous directory of signs,
but point [back] to myself: expose
how the acoustic image
inexplicably resounds my sense.
An idyll signifier, I alone carve out
the cleft of consciousness,
a gaping speculation set
against the vacant reaches of eye/sight.
Insinuare sonos oculis: I marvel

at the light task which indubitably lies
ahead: disrupt the mind's eye thus,
so that it quivers on the brink: I shudder
at the thought. There is no contradiction here.
Thrills undulate my own design
constrict the cryptic plunge,
the pulse of life writ large.
Such is its impetuous conscription,
strong-arming the hidden vein
to surface, saturate this body whole:
illuminated manuscript (the Paris phrase).
See, also, how I paint
with minium, already lose the thread
and forfeit the idea, remaindered, etymologized
to these diminutive appearances,
to ghostly forms of supposition,
of address, mere specters,
formulae: (a) speaking
12
picture of the mind that circulates,
disseminates the epic
swan song of my silent aspiration,
bent, inclined toward taciturn mutations
and forgetfulness (forget fullness),
recuperated here in gemlike flecks,
frail, insubstantial miniatures, mélange
of moments: amber, marble, canvas
and the like: petite contrivances, bocage
of fluxions, backdrop noise. I struggle
to recall the muse but too am caught
in speculation, specularity,
a mote of probable response:
thus I would die into the picture hitherto
regarding which this piteous lament
might serve as the inscription
[of its self]. So I address
myself, the ethos of regret
in ( ) deciphered form,
technique of epigraph,
and do, as speaking pictures,
listen to the vital lines. I feel
that to recuperate myself sufficiently
I should reduce this present and most final
point toward some original event,
a moment self-employed,
where time falls from its hinge.
But where, then, to begin:
ahead of things, before oneself,
where debt, in its totality, commences:
yet belated, misconstrued, evasive
to the end?
13
B
For I am under the same accusation with my Saviour—for they said, he is

besides himself.
Christopher Smart
You created
this resentment in order
to torment and quarrel
for in the sum of likenesses
your jealous eye incurred duplicity,
assented to a numinous design,
reduced, hereafter, vis-( )-vis
eternity, the integer [our chance]
to series: a binomial indignity,
the inverse mode of flux.
Could I but take this calculus to heart
all distance would again depart wherein
the object does object to objectivity.
As distance figures pretense at a point,
and dumbly gathers to itself
all lines no longer parallel, so dawn becomes
an issue to recuperate: the difference takes time
historicizes one event
to three, ecstatically
proposes the accomplishment of self.
I stumble on the thought,
this parabolic tangent of recursion:
fertile delta so confined to length and breadth
and height that it is singularly right
I share the measure of your suffering
[though not the punishment:
14
these images that shatter hence
what language can collect],
invoke a finite flow, lie low, swallow
this sterile deposit, geometric ingenuity, and fall
to scanning what beneath my feet might lie.
How long since have you thus lived
in the memorized moment, thinking
of the flower in cerulean blue? It lingers
where the eye attempts the mind, beyond
the spectral image of your nose
and signifies the exit point
whereby the world leaves off,
enacts the grand adieu.
Before this plain transparency

of severed edge, forgotten sense,
sounds lost to patch-work fields
[as from a plane, or glass
distractedly placed on the ear],
revisions animated by (a) breath
[as I remember one who died],
measured in finite lengths: light
conversation most likely talking
of Michelangelo . . .,
before this fallen understanding we

could see [in] the dark. No windows
to the soul, your eyes reflected nothing
but the black, the void between
affective poles of metamorphosis.
But you forsook the darkness for the right
to be in view without the need
to calculate the other
as a consequence of mass: all men
to all things whatsoever,
what we lacked we loved and found
a wholesome joy, the fragmentary gaze.
Still you insisted
15
it was further back, secreted, lurking "there,"
positioned naturally, like sitting ducks
[you shamelessly announced]
for all the world to see,
suggested that we name all things,
inscribe the circumscriptive night, be
certain of our place.
And when my sight began to fail
I asked you what it was.
"Here," you quipped, "the sun
glasses will help." Do you remember?
"They protect the places ['two,' you said,
to be exact] where things smart: our eyes
have not adjusted to the bright:
light brings the blood to surface: these reflect the glare."
How you've forgotten or dismissed the plane of sense
in this abrasive din, and in the dim
remembrance of what might have been
prefigured the device
your idle talk obscured
while to the dialogue
a severed speech cut in.
And in the naming of the thing
I harkened to the plural you
preferred, referring it to "they"
when all the world needs say it's one
can't be a plural object less
of course it represents
the thing it would disguise
whereby it singly comes to stand for two.
No matter: I delay no more:

come stand here where the light falls full.
I now release you: run to the illusion
you so desperately thirst, incubus
of the mirror, and with the Sirens to dream
project repose, drink the bloated image
quench the margin's brink. So sinks
16
the figure into ground, determinate without
periphery. In order to recede you need
but hand it over with your glance.
The sign appears: its rightful place requires

I look into your eyes to see it gouged
against this slate of soul. Here, I will
help you put it on, and you will
feel no pain: then we will
carve our signatures into this tree—
consign their lonely shape to something sizeable,
substantial, that has mass, a monument
commemorating signs that iterate themselves—
before you flee this mise-en-scène, defenestrate
the scene of our initial disfiguration.
From that time be assured:
it measures precisely three
and one-quarter inches on each side.
17
C
The retina, after being acted upon by light or darkness, is found to be in two
different states, which are entirely opposed to each other.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Amber sounds embrace the drift,

they twinkle, sputter, gleam continuously;
like waxing moons, they glow inaudibly
above the silent sheen of candle wax;
whispers rumor, gossip speculates
the hidden cost of things, sea breezes
coast on cordial waves
row after endless row;
lit candles light the sea,
and tip toe to a secret
place; they touch, alight upon, illuminate
( ) word too "close" to see;
invoke an unvoiced, tongue-tied spectacle
where love-entangled limbs embrace,
waft heated ambergris:
as ship wrecked sea men swim

as amberjacks
fly up side
down yet
discontinuously
so silence all
in amber floating sound.
18
D
The senses delight in things duly proportioned as in something akin to them;

for, the sense, too, is a kind of reason as is every cognitive power.
St. Thomas Aquinas
Collected pose, the rational

for "one" has many names;
it knows of multiplicity
by rumor, thus itself,
order of uniformity: "they" say
that "one does this"
and "one does that":
perpetually one speaking to
the one to whom one would be
heard, already spoken for;
thus, ratio preserves integrity;
the figure goes to ground,
original property of zero.
A frenzied gesture: image trace

for "own" disrupts the one;
the integer surrenders its domain,
a designated place
divided ( )gainst itself:
a fickle wound unwound,
resorption of parentheses, a pharmakon
to what assures me, in the end,
time's arrow holds its course,
is running right.
Had we but world enough and time
19
this insufficient increment, a wisp
of spectral wings, a butterfly effect,
would whisper drafts tempestuously sinister,
suggest a crease upon the symmetry of self,
a serpentine quietus: hush.
Meanwhile, I occupy the void,
this icy aspirated solitude,
and settle loneliness as if
it were a fatal issue, upshot
of a feather fallen sound
[No! I've not killed her, rather,
to be contrary, instilled an elegant proclivity,
(a) leaning toward the left
which does not show up in the mirror]
and, in the literal translation,
Geht zu Grunde. Oh earth
return, and when you recollect
my story it will be
as something other than a nail
on which to hang a picture:
spirit of Antaeus laid to rest: what matters
single-handedly amounts to this.
At times before the dawn I feel

the still mood hollow
in the fold where, in the distant past,
you would lie next to me; how even
those emaciated words I gather up
like danger, indiscriminately
sound their sense, the echo
to regard, to recollect how naked
how wholly full they filled the night,
fulfilled what might we had
appropriated from each other.
20
E
Words are like the film on deep water.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
What am I to write to you or how

am I to write or what indeed I am
not to write at this time lingers
in abysmal pools beneath an opaque surface calm.
It will not stop the plot no matter what
conspiracy may prompt this ban on mourning.
Angled differently, the fact remains
that you may never understand
the vortex, coriolis force of symmetry,
compelling me to hide, seclude [myself]
in more divided waters, to invent
diversions on this island fastness
where my little fishes nibble privately,
and where the lengthened mark of shadow
augurs an accord that cancels out
decrepit hours in the pond.
If brought to trial for tears
you would but whet my altered hunger
knowing this vertiginous display
addressed the charge of maigre for another,
and has nothing new to say except perhaps
to replicate your meager public voice.
These vitreous signs no longer speak
nor can they ripple discontent
within the pool, as I sublimely cast my rod
obliquely toward the little ones
21
fastidiously schooled to swim
an angle that severely prods
this tangent of submerged desire.
Thus, fishing makes the senses clear, broadcasts
an hermeneutic that supplies the sinker
to whatever lures your fetid taste
for motherhood maternally grunts out
as but the end of what this intercourse
suggests itself. And "hasten them, come
unto me" damn well denotes exactly that.
Ergo, your problem masquerades as exegesis.
Steering the solitary course

I ( )void the mainland where you roam
in search of the dead meat, where
yesterday's price of corn provoked riot.
To brook the diet of inconsistency
reiterates the absent discourse
of negation, this sedimented lack
outlining the lacuna of hunger,
and settles the issue of a new grain
with substance more than dough.
Just so, as has historically been catechized,
the angler cannot lose
that which he never, in the first place, owned.
Throughout these past few days I've thought

of one, my dearest friend
and drinking comrade through
this dull protracted rain,
besieged, here, on the island,
and the corollaries of that state funeral.
I know by heart your last remark to him:
"Come to my bed one night," you said,
"I'll teach you how to like the women
more than anything: he only likes the fish."
Still I ignore your baited breath
disguise the ( )spirated sigh, and
22
sound a single sough beyond
the withered leaves that gather
the Cumaean side of this parameter.
When least suspected I'll strike clean
and swift: then feed you
to a lustier desire inhabiting
the Tiber's turbid recesses.
Of course, I'm mad, insane quite probably:

I am no longer probable
so long as monkeys finish
Shakespeare's sonnet sequence and begin
the bible's prophecies. To this effect, then,
count yourself among the current flood
of suicides amid this chit-chat
of forgetfulness. For here and now
the present reign torments your guilty drought;
it drenches my disdainful, icy dread
with dark relief from gestures
no "one" could absorb
beneath these psychic burns that boil
within like skin about to burst.
The heart has reasons
[of which] reason, on its own, knows
not a thing, no thing, nothing:
the final ratio lies in the balance
such that human being might be more
than we deserve, though infinitely less
than we can dream. I will outlive the line
and cast its literal demise
amid the rise of a [con]figured s[ ]n
internally exposed: the blood
that issues in the wake of one
both drowns the other and remains
its ground, delineating links of iron necessity.
And as the evening and the morning
star but designate the same event,
how Hesperus and Lucifer originate
23
from one horizon's blaze: so Venus
toward her source too gazes on the nape,
now on the brow. The pain to which
you are subjected from my isolation
merely conjures up the faintest echo
of the desolation that bespeaks my mind.
24

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(A) Quantum Epic

Published by BlazeVOX [books]

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without

Printed in the United States of America

Interior design and typesetting by Geoffrey Gatza

p ublisher of weird little books

Even historiological disclosure temporalizes itself in terms of the future.

["Loquere ut videam te"]:

Eye turns to I, and I

Insinuare sonos oculis: I marvel

For I am under the same accusation with my Saviour—for they said, he is

Before this plain transparency

before this fallen understanding we

No matter: I delay no more:

The sign appears: its rightful place requires

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Amber sounds embrace the drift,

as ship wrecked sea men swim

The senses delight in things duly proportioned as in something akin to them;

St. Thomas Aquinas

Collected pose, the rational

A frenzied gesture: image trace

Had we but world enough and time

At times before the dawn I feel

Words are like the film on deep water.

What am I to write to you or how

Steering the solitary course

Throughout these past few days I've thought

Of course, I'm mad, insane quite probably:

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