Bundles of Connection

I beg more of myself
Than of any similarly muffled ear
To attune to the consonances
Of, say, Grand Central Station,
To the luminosity and heft
Of the everyday sphere,
As I sit in this basement
With my singular longing:
To make of our talk a dance,
To bring the aural relations
More tightly near.

What does a man love when
He loves a woman?
If no-self, if anatta,
Then what bundles of connection
Come begging me to attend?
Beneath the hubbub of the market,
The rise and fall of the yen,
We hear the distant humming
Of an electron zapping through a field,
Purring in the voice of a lover,
If only electrons made noise.

(I am on the train now—
Harlem looks like a rumbling
In the stomach, an indigestion),

Which direction the words spiral
Depends on which hemisphere
You watch them move;
I stand in the east, looking west,
Or is it the other way around?
Your flesh makes me perspire,
Your eyes thump me in the groove—
But what seethes forth from
Emptiness, sibilant and arresting,
Gives form to our conversation,
Recedes inside you into nothing.