*In Fresh Daisies I Swam*

I was duller than the day
but the day grew within me
I broke the butcher's handle
and the sparrow came to sing and sit beside me
my length had grown with the fairness of lit
my quick wit beheld in the fortress of the grace
eucharistic blindness
awaking peter and soloman
saintly salamanders who slither in columns
filing with their bony fingers
sticking stickers onto envelopes
enveloped by the levies
a dreary tangle
down into the shadow maze
the bird sang out of tune
the sand in the throat
it was all away and gone
angel in the pyre
dream season awake and done
all away and gone
give berries to the lord
the present precedent
the French cloth grew long

viva strauss
human beings emerge from any account of semiotic structures as inveterate and promiscuous producers of signs. As the work of levi-strauss and others indicates, any aspect of human activity carries the potentail for serving as, or becoming a sign; we only have to ;activate; it in accordance with something like the above processes. As umberto eco says, a sign is anything that can be taken as 'significantly substituting for something else.' Accordingly, nothing in the human world can be merely utilitarian: even the most ordinary buildings organize space in various ways, and in so doing they signify, issue some kind of message about the society's proirties, its presuppositions concerning human nature, politics, econcomics, over and above their oevert concern with the provision of shelter, entertaintment, medical care, or whatever. all five senses can function as sign-producers or sign-receivers.