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Gregory Brooker
Spirit's Measure
2003

 

    Introductry note:
To translate the code of this book, I put to use the same method Joseph Smith used to translate The Book of Mormon, a method whose primary tools included two seer stones and a hat. Thus this book’s signs, symbols and episodes were received and translated and not by any other means.

The 1st Measure


                                                          Place seer stones into hat.
                                                          Look into hat for translation .

Spirit at its instrument—


                    This is your beginning:
                    sixty black spheres /Universal click


                    Memory of the first vision of a work
                    revealed upon reading a Golden Book


                    As your eyes are washed
                    and the other world restored anew,
                    your beginning is restored anew.
                    In signs this dispensation arranges you.

Spirit at its instrument—


                    Though the camera is turned away from him,
                    here is footage of Hart Crane in Los Angeles:

                    from the Stooges delivering ice
                    up the California millionaire's
                    one hundred steps
                    elsewhere in the city


                    to a round white ceiling speaker
                    playing in mono above the 80s office space
                    in everyone’s Century City
                    the theme from “Taxi.”

Spirit at its instrument—

                    A worldly white bloom your beginning––
                    cracked efflorescent sing.


                    Now an oak tree's century-realness is illuminated,
                    in its branches the year actual and invisible––
                    1930’s Kodaked snow on the sandstone walkway
                    that once flurried across the heights of Cleveland.
                    Before the tree, a youthful figure, posed for a photo.


                    While autos speed across whiteness on Euclid Ave.,
                    history’s flurry drifts your beginning…


Look up from hat


Of course––time returns a sort of poetry; and both have a way of moving West.

That was my grandfather standing there, the young insurance man. I remember a similar photograph of Hart Crane taken that same December in nearby Chagrin Falls––he is posed on a sandstone walkway at his father’s Canary Cottage, the very same snowfall lying in the crevices of the path that fell against my grandfather. You see, these photos had stopped in their eyes the future’s next unknowable second, which has now been released, which is also a sort of poetry.