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Lord Dermond – The Mortal Words

May 042021

The Mortal Words

“I am the master of the flaw. Nothing I do is very good, is very talented,
but the way I recover from it is exquisite (extraordinary, astonishing, endearing,
profoundly endearing, fairly beautiful).”

– R. Hell



... and so she stands still
like a rose among realness
imperceptible.



By Lord Dermond
[Daniel B. Dermond]




Published by:
BLAST PRESS
324B Matawan Avenue
Cliffwood, NJ 07721

gregglory@aol.com
gregglory.com

The Eternal Muse


In my soul, she lingers softly
within the tenebrous haze and
is now embodied by remoteness.

Eyes, that clutch sweet lavender
from the rain perfected skies,
passionately embrace all time
as veiled perdition dies....

Inventing her solace, my angel
consumed a heart, not her own
as I dreamed of her- adored her
so divinely and unknown.

She will shine and hypnotize
in cruelly naked radiance
for his distending gaze.

Unforgiven


Returning to the sanest of light
I do not escape trembling drowse

   and recollections-regret!
   My bloodied eye foretold,
   compelled to disturb this
   sinister grace. Remaining
   as I will in hourly veils
   awaiting the vilest soul.

Ode to a Young Girl


Entering upon this sanctity
swept in by her uncertainty
I peer inside a broken sense
to reveal my shattered self.

Tides asunder, I loved her eyes
clear as night in bloodless skies
green like all her souls eternal,
she possesses all my whys.

Lone wraith of laughter, she
sends color to my pale cheeks
as I have loved and hated thee
and scorned my own defeats.

Your sweet mouth, Intoxication-
I revel on your cold salt tears
that quench my fire, a sorceress
mad, in sun-reddened tresses

hurled to the sky! an angel has
penetrated all this divine impurity-
that tempts her by passion and fears
of dreaming, and I too, who confesses.

Sweet girl, lithe-limbed in
this heart’s own creation- she is chosen
to drown in my shrines of sacrifice, when
sometimes I hear my own blood has frozen.

Her Hyacinth Eye


Her hyacinth eye,
O’ grandiloquent nimbus.
An eye canted, ebullient
to the moonblind sea
ethereal, incessantly clenching
untilled verity.
Below enamelled sky, opulent
eyelids in a pondering
ballet
of dispersed echoes
memories enchained,
like suffused litmus pools
espousing melancholy
to impinge my soul.

Violet Sublime


From the moment of her leavened inception
upon a placid beam, eclipsing bloods
she rendered, her countenances redeemed.
She swims in strangled magenta pediments
that wend reinvented themes.

Her sapient manacles of emollient light
bend her blues! by dilation or those
vast minions of rage that will rule
and bring God to this wisdom created
among her legions of coral rue.

She poured herself to reflected unison,
complected in the insistently starred
night of lighthearted prosody that
embraced her falling soul and elusive
light, playing to her fictive schemes.

Does our icy conception sequester and
congeal my maundering spirits, imposed?
Unwrapped mists that her imaginings construe
enfold me and pinch this disconsolate eye
with a most ephemeral hue.

Evening on Church Street


Pentecostal chimes summon saffron
lights unfold rose in stone
and shed these frail inceptions,
our priested tear concedes.
A tinctured church hoists
the cloistral barb and recedes
to the impatient weather-prophet
who deludes the gradual moon.

‘Impatient souls renewing tongues
imposed angels conjure thy tune,
a braided ear inhales its ceaseless
cry amid temporal swoon.’

...and so said Miss Straw
   who strummed to us all,
   with a love for words
   and stories of the dead
   wisteria she cared for
   it troubled her so, orison
   with unbuttoned head.

She held a poem to her heart.

Patti’s Prayer


Her cool jeweled eyes met upon
a tug of lure, born of a sea
and sky that conspire all time,
foam blanking the effulgent stone
wave lapse into minuets of mime.

The ocean swells upon crystal
sands and drops its sweet jade
like blame to the sullen shells.
Rimed wine left the stale taste
of Jesus on her lips and remained
as stars lie to naive skies and
kiss veins in shy spores of light.

"Tonight it is clear
a good night to die
or ride the virulent tide-
ride desires of sea and sky
and purge my resurrection."

The Wake


It’s hard to rend ritual
that enflames my soul,
when all is lost! alas
(hope and the like)
rusted bloods of retort.

"Generations upon generations came
on humps of wood with twisted brain."

Purged heads stuffed
with gods, no centuries
to hide my pain.
Waters blanche my spirit
at both ends
like Chinese fingertraps.

Chalice in terrified hands
they sing...

"Generations upon generations came
on humps of wood with twisted brain."

The Monumental Grunt


She bathed in balded moon’s
Warm poultice, with quavering
Lip to the scarlet hissing

She bleeds essential form
In the rife sunlight, pearled
And plucked.

Melodious light, insurgent
On mended eye, exhaling pride
To unbidden suns, filial-

Eyelid in lecherous oration
Like a rend communion wafer
Limpid by the ruck.

Hesitancy of procession,
My vengeance of memories decay
And dissuade.

O’ Manifesto


for the girl of a laughter unheard 

I
O’ elusive angel. What purpure penitence
does she so eloquently bequeath unto me
in a love without bound but so unrequited?
My sanctified soul’s but a tendinous shell
coiled and pearled from within her as indigo
silks, spired in the blessed elements
that evolve among our intricate divinities.
My dried eye, slow rising in credent regale
the solemn temperance of her crescive blues,
to summon up the virginal tear, she bestows
jeweled testimony with a shard marbled fist
speaking sacral tongues in infinite bliss.

II
O’ lone one. What pondering mind will try
to disfigure her in all this radiant still?
She was found in sabellian rue, glories!
bound in ciphered light, sacramental
and forever among cerulean vagrancy,
the exalted night for her reified raillery.
Her vision enwounds like a velvet glove
and cradles the hallows of this profane skull
no centuries confined upon her to rely as
she swims within a purest of sky, entrancing
my memories that in a lingering song die-
as she, obedient to beauty’s last
passing breath, pilfers laughter in a prayer.

III
O’ girl not my own. Why denied this embrace,
with I bereft of your most vermillion grace?
Your suspended essences which dance eternally
play upon this loneliest of face, as you evolve
in sweet orchid muses, from the dusts of the sea,
the incessant intellect of the living wind’s plea.
Eyeballed moon casts its glinting wink upon
dawn’s foibles, inclined to sleep among the ilex,
ancient trees that imbrue hope on a hollow soul.
You exhale revelation that God has consumed to
anointed perfection that conspires your moods,
as I held you intently- alone and exhumed.

The Holy Men


Holy men descend
With souls too nil
In forlorn eloquence

From false distil
Our dried wines,
Are full of heart

Opaline eye shy
Lyra spied upon
A sonorous moon

My dead memory
Of delicate nymphs
Sister of thorn

Forests of green
Without deceit,
My veins darken

Venus, barbarous
In endless skies
Sister of clarity.

Renaissance Man


I 
It was in his laughter
that he had known
that all that was
was not his own.

He stared into time
with a dissipated face
that tricked the minutes
with a slow forced grace,
until he remained
above the highest sky,
aerial suns sent solace
from a heavenly sigh.

The angels descend
and the antlered oak climbs
like open bones, shaking in mime
as the tottering wren sings
in roisterous altitudes
his remembrance brings.

Let the oceans’ repeal
the sad moon’s cold tug,
the lost burning prayer
Despair, O’ Despair.


II
Sunlight stumbles to consciousness
in the rudely blued luminescence
as the sacred light coheres
among bruised and showy oaks,
that deepen in the green tears
of summer’s long cloak.

The sainted strains of coral sea
that salts the air, mockingly
in the dream’s eternal glide
the incendiary keepers
tame our uncertain tides.
Disconsolate shards of a wave
recede on the tables of blue,
with coruscate delicacy that perishes
within the lung-dead spumes.

His furtive stares are darkly said
rolling in winds like rimpled leaves
that shriek existence in wishing reds
out of all this rage, still spilling free,
over thumbing sands to a silent sea
the world’s calmed blossom had to be
his last token rose and godliest plea.


III
Escape! and let this day be shattered
that spent its hordes in trembling shreds,
out of all the desolate days that mattered
and disturbed the sleep of sleeping heads.
The innocence of your step is ghosted in time.

Each tongue of night returns
to priested ears seeking
words from the wise,
and severed recollections
from the old world of lies.

The words and the trees
are hanging in steam
of the blades of his face
finding their fruit,
alive against the sky
detached and solemn
in a grave-struck place.

Retire, and let this day be done
that left you senseless, a call of the dead
from within your will, you shall regain
the rise sublime, with all your fears shed.
The cradle of your soul is freed from all pain.

Charred Remains


Our aspiring minds
lost in flux, rolling up
the soured detail
save dying.
Hollow; rolling a stale
poem on stone ears
he persists.

How much is lost?
Echoes shelving recollection,
ringed with words, it remains
crashing to excrement-
and does not cease

untouched by roar.

Your face.
A flower opens
bride of terror
Shall your rose close
screaming with light?

Alight the striking!
in slanted freshness,
be presumed present
in careworn splendor
semi-naked.

recover, recover!

Evening Litany


Blackness shed its stare on all
Closed by the moon’s big hole
     Whose glow is idle.

The mind flowed, smothered in bloods
The children with eyes on a man
     Unseen hands kill.

The stroke of repentance seeks a
Strong heart, till soon it lies
     In the silken lair,

Whitely flourished and knowing torment.
The funeral candles’ flames ascend,
     Promising salvation

As they huddle into this stroke of grace,
The fires of Hell unveil dead memory-
     Burying indigence.

Solemn vigil sways the slow evening rout
Of crescent tongues and aging flesh,
    A fulvous multitude

Whose disembodied shudder blindly rises
In a song of remembrance, passing
     From look to look.

Alexis Trailorpark


Alexis watched the sea renew its salty bloods,
The sinless welling of the blessing waters

That taunted her to rejoice in ringing infinity.
Pinkened roses edged the weedy grasses

Weeping to the sultry blush of fertile skies.
Such beating upon her breast as the clouds

Noble crepe lined a tender lullaby, dreaming.
Melancholy winds, deep in thought on sands

Wild and solemn as a living voice, considering
The oceans that she held in her hands.

She stared into the night of aimless dignity
Punctuated with longing, bareheaded stars

Tenderly straining to atomize an answer
To awaken her sleep twisted heart.

Rushmore at Sunset


I 
Beyond the clearing of unspoken contemplation
darkness absolves lowered sun’s furious stare
tragically abrading a fluent circle of tongues.
The glow remained, an imagism of stillnesses,
spurning the obstinate measures of hired will
awakening in the all-sudden melancholy of doubt.
Golden flowers knew no bounds; jasmine dream
slept petals overturned watery world’s scheme
while sinking into the dying eye of blackness.
The suncured day grew into a few pale syllables,
blinking its retiring rose upon those living
rivers of quartz that arose unto Dante’s view.
Light uncorrupted by its concession to night,
the blush-touched mirage set desire on the rock
imploring man’s profundity in a granite sprite.

II
Eyes inviolate, unshaken in their prideful vision,
are like wired red torches at a moment’s imagining
swarming the ages to see what strain the peerless
pursuit of those absolute truths shall bring...
The rimrose earth remains in its risible dance,
the tilted pirouette with a lunatic perfection,
proudly affirming the sacred fires born of stone
that are raging unashamedly in a free man’s mind.
Vivant winds repeat their hymns, nimbly shouting
to the rocks and the lonely dusts of incessancy,
awaiting radiant grace and man’s conquering hand
that carved its soul, tracing in the dead shades.
A shining divination of Minerva bled, on cliffs
and from the curls upon heaven’s white head, to
purify all eternity that springs from her breast.

Speaks To the Soul of Man


I
Must we live among this suffering still
that calls the dull ache of sacrifice forth
by a series of doubts or by folly bring
the nodding flowers to wink at the sea?
A man’s intellect is his supreme mastery
that revels in a blink or in oceans that be;
the spirits of sweet Shelly must ring free!
And from every airy spire that a man adorns
with fiery vision and torrents of thought,
shed these inhibitions that touch our grace
and spurn no beauty within thy golden wraith.
For these are divinities of highest testament
that consume fervent choirs in tender embrace,
the solemn shades of our untendered sacrament.

II
Shy sunlight became the masonry
its variations on a single theme,
the inexhausted symphony screams
to the sculpted heart of reason.

Our dreams are as the centuries bringing
their struggle to the elements, awaiting
their final expression upon this sight,
welding the courage to face a lifetime.
I refuse to quell this mind to serve
in sacrifice upon your altar, if only
for the sake of some ghosts in heaven;
for consciousness is not born of some
dull erudition of wood nor the evil you
dread facing and terror of its proof.

The loves that we keep so divinely,
indelibly holding our sacred bound
remove the slimmest whimper of doubt.
A lone soul crying upon the mountain
tonight is blessed in these old eyes,
that have seen the tortures of the wise
and pleas of solace to the dimmest decree.

III
The lucid sunlight blinks its minutes
upon stale ground and shifting trees
that smear their reds and golds and greens
to the silence of your sighs, opposing dreams.
O’ insolent tendency! and sorrowful guilt,
the hopeless mythic endowed corpse and ghost
to know the unknowable, no soul in revelation
speaking from your freedom’s deathbed I say:

“To love a man for his virtues on high
 is noble and human, your emotions divine.
 Fight for your life and the virtue of your
 pride, the raving goddess of your purpose.”

“To you who think the mind a passive effect or
 are unwilling to wish, must recapture your soul!
 for you are but an omnipotent spiritual embryo,
 O’ ye of burgeoning faith.”


IV
Upon these burrowing lives I must leak light!
as the shallow moon pursues its own ignorance
obscuring the glory of summer’s proud song
that swells sublime within independent minds.
The exalted flowers beckon bright at lisping sea
as desire returns, magnitude of my will unreviled,
and rise, rise rises to this youthful sanctity.

so go on and remain certain in your stead with
a mind unobstructed- eye to eye in opposing fires
with utterance in the  skies of uncorrupted rose,
resolved to every solemn circumstance now dying
in the intemperate rages of wandering nights.
Fall will return to pronounce your crimes as
moody heavens pour peerless judgments upon all
this forgiveless grace, our leaning benevolence.

The Unknown Beheld


Arisen to the temptress cloudcrack
of a lonely autumn day, skittering
in alternating floods of sunlight,
undeciding flows bending graciously,
throwing out a limb for the ivies.

I sit idly in heaven’s cloudy palm,
divinity living in unsubdued grace
with fire in the eyes of the beaten,
until bodies are but a visible flame
in the voices enfolding our darkness.

Cunning night galled dead vanities,
craving forgiveless in godly respite
and bent toward a choiring foretold,
the inviolate bending of stars leak
in anonymity like colored enigmas.

Winds rub the sea’s winnowing knee
as I dived heedless tides of infancy
only to find my heart out of praise,
tumbling through our blue-salt seeds
and shivering among the roving spray.

In Sight


Does my ripened eye, glistering
In tearful moonlit hold,
Disguise its blinded hollowness?

We tread beneath a thriving sky,
A desert of roses dusting the brow
Of one more flowing skull,

To exult the torn shadow, something
Rising from our loss of conscience
Or the unmeditating of a heart.

One recalls with disinterred shame
The faint glissade the soul intends,
Stripped cold in our misting rains,

To soothe and purl the elusive char
Of presaging joys, mothering salvation
And perishing in the laudable hour.

Our semblant souls ache and yearn
As from the wrath of all human hope
We breed eternal dreams.

Gone Dead


My hands made numb, the salve
For my soul gone dead, all by itself
Dancing warm alone, alone,
Likely to die by crucifixion’s ply,
Pushing its vile on tideless stone.

More, no more the lusted lip sings
(memories fade the singular dream)
How do I soot the raw edge again?

Retiring rain drops spiritual head
All to drain of the sensual rale,
The sinking eye stares cold
Black shot, half itself, flat
Or gone dead.

To Recover Yourself


The trick of it is to cradle
The small glass tit of hope,
That no longer exists, trying
To milk a dream from nothing.

Rise if you must, inhibitions
For the drowning of a prayer
And behold a coma’s leggy soul,
Dust churning unsung umber.

Swill the rebus of coral gist!
Pinchblades all desiring a rive
In the jubilate of curing seas,
I am the womb of faineant stasis.

The divorce craved the miraculous
In the torrent of naked vocables.

Ragged Senses and Sundered Selves


Ragged senses and sundered selves
Remain faithless as I, no more alone
Than bones feeding the sodden fold,

Shining through things so often true
That shackle me where sunlight blooms,
My unknown selves hiding in the deep

Of a mansouled tomb, the black blessing.
Wind bled endlessly from shattered hills
Like living prayers of the unborn root,

And mankind’s fathering creation too;
Waves crowd closer as I move to death
And shed sullen husks of salty breath,

Crouching in the eternal flames of dawn
That grow from the dead angelus flames,
Warming the seeds of a humbling youth

As the salt pounds in my waking wrist.
Wandering upon these soulless shores
Light breaks upon her watering heart,

Pushing tides below the oil of stars
Staining a night with monstrous wits,
My spirit clouting the quaking roar.

The dreaming darkness assumes a mood
In a hush of divinity, heart of scars,
Or the haunting afternoons gone astry,

The ring of receding devotion endures.
Wedding pearls the waters of solitude,
Shedding the scuttle in the furies of clay

That forsake her dismay, unabating awes
of the sea’s disparities of nimble blue.
I lure her shadow beyond undying recall.

Ritual Winter


A ritual in the winter of the soul
Sheds light to limb; the red cloud
Assembles on the fluid grave.
An infancy of anchored pickthorns
Twined the moon-bitten rocks; bloods
Forewarned the headless night.

The winds of winter chill the bones
Of Eve; the grey crested seas
Prowl over watering wounds,
In the drowning eyes of unfed womb,
Choking dry kisses as life leaks down,
Lost within the weeping ruin.

A ritual in the winter of my soul
Speaks to the newborn rose, undying
Within its freezing skins.
The sea-born wringing of the senseless
Christens the stillborn heart,
Whispering to the intemperate dead.

Once More for Alexis


She is set ablaze
  All within.
The blankless sun

Pinned a pearl drop
Upon the hollow blue,
Radiant pinions swoon

In crystal vision
  She consumed.
The heavens round,

Angelic spheres arising
Encircling each moment,
Is no less painless.

Fluency of holy shadow
  Born to stone
Pours incessantly

In rarified repose,
Her eternal flames
Of fury abound.

She is beautiful,
  To be seen
As beautiful by me.

Full of Grace


Black airs haunt
The unnested child
Empty as a prayer

 ‘full of grace’

God! My soul’s perjured,
Mourning her glass coffin

My black eyelids
Awaiting the judgment.

 ‘full of grace’

Into the spiritual
Of the golden ball,

Graves of roses
Pinning up the moon.

Hail Mary,
 ‘full of grace.’

Death of the Kiss


When full skies hinge the fields once more
Swallowed up in their graze of nerves,
Uncocking the magic bones or fire,
A matter of fluids that sucked me dry
And fused its sight upon burial stones,
The sun unscrewed the night’s turning tide.

Though blind mother’s dawn was nearly drawn
And all those plum voices, rerobing my birth,
Assumed the witnessing hiss that cannot atone,
Nor bend nor burn the air-banged bride
That, unfired to her seedless vine
Had hung her cross by mother’s eye.

Remember me who struck the nodding shores,
The ghost who strode a sea’s snapping rim?
and did not suffer, the unentered skull
That refused to smile but could not cry,
That sipped mortal bloods from unknown rivals,
Steered cold laughter as upgiven hearts died.

Death glided by but soon spun its bud
That palmed beheaded trees in the deadweed,
Bent in the tilting sundries of infant scripture
That are flowering in the late galleries of snow;
Under known cloud strokes of the celebrated skies
Fate unwound endlessly and left me all alone,
Alone and faithless with her dying christs.

The Aftermath


I can only liken it to
Childhood...

"Now this won’t hurt
a bit."

My last Halloween
Caught in Fitkin,
Water on the brain,
Gilding stillwells.

Torn into the truth
In moon-clung silver,
Tapping the spine,

I watched the goblin
Masks of death,
I shall retire
The artist within.

"Now you’ve done it,
raised a spineless liar.
How are you the better
for it?"

My gaze falls unto heaven,
Wonderously lumbering
This mood,
Watching from without.

Life By Fire


Silence abounds the white-fire tides
Those misting swells bend the corals.
The noblest seas and bloods arising,
Unsoil the blues of the holiest light,
The centuries gave form to lost truth!
Proclaiming the moon by torch-lit ring,
Prometheus inherited god’s twelve golden
Flames, he lit the eyes of a lost angel
By oiling the condemned wing.
Undoing the reins of a higher love,
The rose goddess unbound Ypsilanti,
Her venerable soul so perfectly sings
To crackle the crown napping bramble.
Euphonies bloomed the unearthen skull
Dance O’ Soul of a primal solitude!
Balancing creation atop sky’s vanity,
She consumed mother’s eye of its sea,
The immortal waters of time.
The living testament burning within,
Recalling a tale from under the rib,
Auguries kiss the virgin spring hymn.
Alas! Atlantis beckons resplendently,
No lone bloods rust upon the damned.
I am the center, orange, peeling---
The flesh of Lazarus began revealing,
Revealing itself to the revived choir,
Wristing in the purloined fires.

Round Her Mortality


It was in the harangue of winter
When heavens bore their humble ode
To the sea’s eloquent tint and rove,
Pleasuring in the pauses of rapture.
Music abounds in the deepening glow,
The roar for love; I cannot conceal
Who I am alone, so forever alone.
The awesome shades of unseen grace
Fled the mysteries of amorous air
Like a sunbeam or the dead thoughts
That visit memory from sea to sea;
The human heart and spirit willing,
Spin like her shining starlit bead,
Or the tender hues of vital beauty
That consecrate this solemn moment.
Skies composed a thin veil of tears
Within a desolate rainbow, dreaming
Daylight in the hearts of ever more,
Bleeding life in congregating vapor
That encircles those vain endeavors.
Uncertain moments echoing eternity
In the immortal strains descending,
Become mute in our liquid sleeping,
Lined with grief and twisted heads.
Winds reply to the bluing fountains
That lorn the yearning lip once more
Or seek the mimes we pined in murmur,
As we discover the shadows of remorse
Through the intricate change of days,
A quickening of morning immersed us,
In a strike of earth’s bursting tide
Drowning her forever in sacred lights
That lamp the renewed moment of joy, 
We thirst for the spiritual dawning.
Profuse wings settle their red ghosts
Out of all these holier abandonings,
Rising out of the autumn afterbirth
With a saddened rose, her atmosphere
Had left its wound, visible as mist.
Her thin caress must live once more,
The burning kissed from eternal lips
That can never depart or sound again
Through rock or heart or trodden den,
She’s fled to a kindred heaven, fled!
Azure lids and delicacies of breath
Were cold among our purgatorial fall,
Aching for the soul’s aqueous knells
That chimed sweetly when beauty died.
Weeping clouds grab the sanded wave
Bidding the taste of salt-sadnesses,
Strenuous tongues cold rising rung
The haunting excrescences of revelry
Disconsolate angel’s upward firing,
Whispering unto heaven’s emblazoning.
The moon soothed the blissful tune
A sound of pureness, forever free,
Like a saint worming the icy dream,
Embracing the witless with melodies.
Ethereal hands deceived the vermeil,
The longing of her ocean’s strains
That risk the bride’s shrinking scream,
Beset with her darklings of miracles
Gathered into the crescent of tears
To touch the ripples of melancholy.
Cruel as it may be, a reaping decay!
But chooses no other god to roam for
In the tremulous presence of truth
That recalled what fell rings,
The hearts of flowers, half opening.
Flint-like, stars dimming asunder,
Bowing to the children, washed away
In the raven dwellings of innocence
Where night returns, no tempest spent,
Or on the bloody stones of remembering,
The virgin who killed lost sentiments
With the careless rage so momentarily
Held as to pretend godhead confessions,
Wielded in the deep deadened turmoil.
The twisted tree is hewn from greys
Like a hidden river of orisoned air
Laughing in rapt inflections of veins
Pulsating under the moonbound lair;
Its jubilant hands extending beyond
The thresh of untempered horizons,
Dipping into the sea’s despairing,
The poinsettial blowing of her love
Washes into this immaculate sleep.

The Dying Sea


The barbarous tasseling of dawn
Chills the sun’s feckless effluence
With careless hands that duly scribe
Its stuffless expiation and imbibes
The choiring paradigms of ‘dulia.’

Tumult, the moon lit idioms rose
In bedlamite strings of bullion,
The inviolate sacristan has borne
Earth’s paradise, whispering unto
The Cherubims, forsaking the eye.

Scriptures encarved the permanent
Tears of silence tumbling blindly
In the swilling waters of the heart,
Lost lights burning the skinning
Tides, slitting the tuneful throat.

Dispersed innocence hailed summer’s
Sprig, spurned from within a longing
Unlamented urn of esurient heraldry,
Dazzling immortality in leafy whispers,
The spirit rekindles its wakeful rose.

Purgatorial orations ride upon golden
Tongues in the lordly dwells of elegance,
Violent souls dream of death’s kingdom
In a shapeless void, to lift the gates
Of the unknown sea.

=

Searching in the narrow veins of thought
That hover ‘round the transient mould,
Awake! elemental as the windless bloods
Stealing upon a sky, raising the fires,
Inspiring blush on the brimming head.

A moment’s ornament, worlds not realized
In the darkness of our choking graves,
Relinquished man’s unspent mortality
From the indemnifying hollows of the
Dying flame, exhaling a tender spirit.

The incantations of the unwatched dreams
Immerse themselves in red-crescent spheres,
The unerring wilderness of an untamed heart.
The verdurous souls pour, and the haunting
Eye sheds no violet, I can no longer see.

I can no longer hear those begone woes
Or the gallows sense of ineluctable time,
Embalming some viewless plot or glide
That beams divinely in the mocking eye,
With shining wiles, unwilling to sleep.

Can I ascend from this blackened gyre
To ride upon the flames or flower?
Let no agonies curl from my breast
Or break to save an untold prophecy,
Chilling the lifted sea.

Farewell Girl


Her mutinous glance
Comes to vision,
Eyes that mollify

Endlessly, the night’s
Stony endurance, misting
The pliant blues,
Christening the ocher.

Her raveled lavender
Will walk forever,
Acquiring the gods!
Of vermillion whorl.

Sun, the yellow
Spur smoldering
Ceremoniously
In uneven seasons,

Dissipates the wry
Horizon,
Seas insinuate.

Lost girl, elusively
Leaves in light
Circles of air,

Disappearing on
A wave’s gentle
Turning.

Resurrection


The blind winds have striven
In their clarion verse,
Floating in the filigree
Of unseen awakenings
Like the wintry leaf
Breathing in empty airs,
Uplifting lone heads.
Clouds, like tiny fists,
cleave to starlit harmonies
In life’s thorny hour,
To weave a dream, thought
Or unconstrained memory.
The heart’s faint echoes
Writhe in the flux,
Rendering immortal strains
From intimate treading
Of our bloodiest waters
That salt the torrents
Of a skull’s purest breath.
The fiery tear ministers
No pain, enduring purblind
Crimsons; angel of melancholia
Rousing the unbound ages,
The living stream of evermore.

The Epitaph


The poised white faces
Murmur in piteous mouth,
The brows of azure
Climb the Almighty
Into the raftered airs.

Standing in repose
Of God’s golden fire,
Never shall it happen,
This young man’s repair?
Consumed in tall thought,

I weep in suns of comfort,
Worshipping a sinned image
Filling my head,
Unchilding the blaspheme,
Naked on undinal seas.

Soul to Solitude


The lost mourning of my
Unsoiled eyes,
Divining the unwrinkled sun
Of darkening bone, break
Upon the violet sea’s shake,
Blessing the threadbare spirit.
The blue-winged trees
Are ridden to sleep,
Rain-rung and always rising.

Her4 death was composed
In the gardens of progeny
With marble hands,
I sought the obsequies
Of a more solemn rose,
A beauty reborn
Of our heavenly root,
The blossoming elegies
‘O’ innocence of youth.’

The Witnessed Prophecy


All gentle innocence converged
upon this one sight.

The spellbound sea enshrouded
her reverent perceptions, inspired
to awe and held in stillness
with blackened eyes, eternal.

A heart consumed of holy fire
for all whose soul had met,
in naked revelation, upon her
does this autumn sky beget?

Fingers of the sea, tenderly
assumed the contours of her sole,
imprints upon departing sands
the shapes of dreams too visible.

Her time wounde3d eyes emote
their scorn, and hold fury as
she’s descending, blinded by a
moon halo, so goldenly remote.

Eyes, and the complexities therein
collect the momentary hues within her
tender rainbow and are cleansed in
the waters of a purified heaven.

Rapturous skin, as a shell
made smooth, whitened in the
ageless hands of the sea, she
sings among the moonlit tears.

She, from all her hallowed anguish,
reveals this living apparition!

‘Twilight Lake’


The air grows to sugar.
The anemic trees

Are drained, mouthing
Beneath the sky’s
    cracked lip

Toneless and austere,
    inheriting
Heaven’s unstrung yellow,

Dusk impounded cruel
Fluencies of sight,

Needling the eye,
Blind to abrading red
    tumuli

Pinching the black stone,
The rose-cut bluster.

Pondering the silence,
Wind rived the grey
    waste

Of the bay
Insolent head, unaware.

The Laughing Tragedian

‘fOR tHE cOLTS nECK pOET’

Your fatal assertions are astutely made.

A voracious flower grips the black essences
Of a rich recital, blessing the breath of life
As the ranting imperative of a tearful infancy

Unfolds us blindly in the thundering tirade.
Forgathered tongues shed devilforked lights,
Bleeding infinite blues from reds spines of fire,

Carving their eloquence from a cold vacant mouth
In the soulful compliance of your conscience construed.
Elegance purged the unimaginative scribbling,

Etching the awes of a Greek intention,
Sculpted in ligaments from eternity’s limb
That climbs to find your symphony unfinished.

The philosopher, tucked in the holiest whisper
Above the warm bloods of uplifting profusion,
Asks questions of all this substanceless grace,

The unclouded spirits of your ritual perceiving.

The Yearling


Tainted dreams leave me
Bloodied and red-blessed,
Displacing pitiless tears.

Bodiless wisdom loosed
The tongueless myths 
And elixive wicks,
  imageless.

Too much is lost,
  unrecoverable
And brutally endless,

I walk beneath
Paring earthskins
Commanding god-tang,
exiled white hands.

The night desecrates
A sky of indolent
  flint

Clouding my veins
Of gritted indifference,
Capes of light
Lick the bitters.

The Haunting Summer


Water illumes in the dwindling skies
Skittering like sorrow, from eye to eye.

In the solar suavity of evening’s stare,
Fading and falling to ash, unreal,

It is lorn night with a forgone light,
Crimped with espousals of poignant white.

And so the dealiest of our imaginings
Is fiercely real, but like a flash of rain,

the tearful elocution of a profound soul,
So thinly torn, idly shaking sticks

To brood pursuance and weather a feeling,
The thrown stone drips, imposing cold tears.

Those silvery hopes, restoring old magnificence
Place their frail sequel upon the everlasting head.

N. Y. C.


The sapphire dreams shall daunt this moment
flowing in lone spokes of ambivalent light,
breathing their life into our minds of fire
with the sapient veins still severed by sight.

Threads of desire will haunt the bone-bent
skull pinching the shoals of holiest torrent.

We must try learning to launder the impure
hearts of our memory and the endless elusion
of the new night’s warm broach, pinning its
romanticism on the dried heads of autumn.

Catching my burnt tears in a vertiginous lilt
of bluebell emulsions on a smooth-throated sky,
with dead expectations and a veil of grey smoke
that choke my praises in the black wedge of nigh.

The eternal


Trees line the shapeless marrow
like dead Braille as our perilous divers
hardened in the arterial waters
of the hourless grail.

Images roar from the desolate claw
mystifying all this ageless jibe,
the keeper of our virgin tide
that drums on stone.

Free all your water-gods!
erect among the unrelenting rose,
the blood stringed hills lie
where she will grow.

Wasted plenty in brotherless dust,
a blackened rind or citric bide
that boxed my love, gristled
in her velvety bale.

Innocents


White dressed and wholly mortal,
Death set upon my glass heroine
By chipping at my soul,
So bare when she died.
The grave like the seas
Drown our ills,
Bloods bending a tide
Of lunar silences,
Tangled in distemper.
Praising blind origin,
The unbidden ascension
Endured so, to mourn
Forever our following
And her christening down.

The Deviled Breast


The deviled breast
And shawls of night
Shale the dry
Hatchlings of fire,
Housing the shroud
And feeding the spry
Tide-swung ghost.

The toe-snubbing sea
Grooms the solid eye,
Loved to a dullness,
And absolves no rain
By our watering sight
In waves that forked
The moonbled cries.

My Grief Lies Deep


My grief lies deep
In unanswering skies,
Those lime innocences
That dark veins unwind.
Delusive nights of autumn
Sung, raping the senses
As vagaries chilled
The flame that raves
Infernal sinfulness,
Wed to heaven’s dead.
Strangers stir under lids
Of slowly spoken light
In the lull of the hour,
rapt on torrid thrones,
Hindering the silences
That spiral to oblivion.

Angel of Winter


Darkness stamped its womb-eyed heel
On the invisible winds poising lordly moons;
Mortal ribs grew as my famine flew
From gracelessness unto a rendered death
That fades from around her holy face.

A repetition of the soul in continual airs,
Torn over rags as your wily sins shed
Bloods of white, so scrawled in tune,
Shooting up the frozen angel’s wintry spoon,
Torn contraries of the always blue flame.

Dry eyes lash a sweetly tear-stained cheek
As the sky raised its virtue unto heaven’s head,
Undoing leafy veils to kiss her mortal wells
As perfection heaves and nobility escapes
Our thinning sleep; your forever is dead.

Womb of Deceit


My past hangs over me
like a time worn cliff,
beaten and made hollow
by winds’ cruel fist.

More like the cave
hiding secretly below
the baleful old tor,
once holding shelter
for the mystic Indian
Who dared not venture.

His sepulcher of days
removed his soul, the
wounded medicine man
who razed his senses.

Whispers of the Eternal Leaves


We walked together down a path of green,
the cumulus leaves turned their veins up
unto a sauntering sky with its cloud like
fat white spiders who spin their silken soul.
The path seemed to float among sunlight
as we came upon the shining river of time
flinging its silver minutes into our hearts,
awaking to flee the silence of our rhyme.

Surrounded by autumn’s burning of dreams, we
consigned to always be as one. A love rejoiced
in by the voice of the leaves that sings and
soars in a violet reprieve. A thunder-struck
rock floods the rivers long breath, drowning
the aimless passage of the mystery fields,
to the sea as it sleeps in infinity; free
to fling salts among the wind dumb trees.

Alas! we would never be alone again, no sad
bloods against the head of tomorrow, light
had leaked its prayer upon a burning thistle
and opened pour hearts on this finger-locked eve.
Unconscious skies elude the clearest eye, truths
uprising within their tide, as prose, all night
blowing pink and white among the flambeaus reeds,
a glistening face glows in the torch-lit breeze.

Every delicate leaf I mourned promised its
miracle to me--and to us, as we awaited the
heart-shaped rain of spring. Life’s offering
exhibits no irony on the untrodden path as sly
dryads seek their fortune within the tacit rose.
But she is the mistress of these virgin lands,
an endless uniting of here and eternal, of
all those mystic choirs that sway in her grace.

I speak to you at the end of the path as
we stare into the sea’s pensive wave and
emulous remittances of a multitudinous sky.
Mourning echoes call up forever’s faint ear
in the boundless fertility of my unused heart,
as light falls out from the tremulous rocks.
We look ahead to the remainder of nature as
age and ages return their certain intervals
with irresistible horizons that linger above
the mingling of seas; we exist in reminiscence.

The Mortal Words


Everything I seem to touch dies as desolation
Unwinds among these mind entering elements.
Do my suffering baptisms propel a new moon
Of upending blues that grows to lax stature,
Performing the sleepless rotations that feign
My slavishly glued tombs of pursuant hauteur.
The falter child found joy among sunflowers,
Pollinated with racemed vision, of one grace
That had the recurrence of an unbidden cortege.
The one bluest day of my childhood, ogling the
Prosperous orange, I climbed cliffs and rolled
In nobility as the crimsoned sphere paused above
Spring fields, the sincere majesties of the air
That inhales life from within a celestial chest.

You no longer look at me like your son, a child
Writhing in the candled filaments of your hooded
Glances that squint at blacker souls in undone
Calumnies, the mortal words pronounced so well.
The old day drops its breathless yellows to the
Colossal pine pennants of recovery that quilt the
Dead earth warmly within a lost watching hour.
Infinite seas refuse to decay, my heart flubs—
The greys and greens of sharpened persistence,
All at once, my purgatorial loss of solitude,
Gilded in whiteness that still retains my dreams.
Regain the burning soul! out of shapeless ash,
The eternal voice can never diminish or hush.

Speaking of the wind a prosperous spring curses,
Violence creates drama with my restricted eye
As I dwindle and die in one lonely lost whimper.
Within the rushed and dusty days, found amiss
In the mind’s collect, we forgive secret lies of
Collusive time, a lurking cry in veils of smoke.
We watch the melancholy hours repeal these days,
Concealing themselves in life’s deeper strains,
As if by receding spirits that tomorrow retains
Or by spilling of guilt retaining yesterdays,
Watery hands close grip around my senses and in
Sun-like fortune that is exultant in our darkest
Heart, we shall find the strength of unborrowed
Will that slowly repurchases a shiny new soul.

I continue pursuing the vireo’s theme, closing
Within the intimacies of an aimless air dancing.
the soul continued in soundless motion, striding
Toward torment to find its palmary regale that
Uprose before me in the greeting circle of hail.
The clouds conspire to close upon me, altering
Untillable silting on the bleakest of sands that
I sink into with a bewildered knee, o’ terminus.
Wandering in sleepless nights of retrospection,
The pinging light buffets my past parturitions
As I watch the roiling waters oscillate wildly.
I, the extoller of the exhibited principle, orb
Swallower of the eternal march, repeat peerless
Chants that ring, deathless throughout the ages.

Exploring the inward, O’ celabrateur of bygones,
Purporting the heroism of conquerors and kings!
Who rant to the masses with a spiritual flame,
The vivifying cry they carry lovingly with them.
Bludgeoned by the motherly hands of unpent hope,
Flaunting the spar with the living Achilles, for
The sake of each perfect childhood kiss, I’m held.
Will you seek the plexus of rolling words or find
The limbus where pulpits descend, touching a psalm
As you touch a friend, giving its body back again?
The aria of the ecstatic atmospheres, I sing here
Uselessly with leaves rustling at my feet, or at
The liquid rim of life, with the sea pushing white
Upon the shivery land below the pyro-blue crescent.

Will you never understand me, and these languishing 
Rhymes, although they are so hard to follow or admit,
The spirit that I see lightly rising, can no one see?
Moving in the breath of rousing unrest, I ceaselessly
Envision the corpse of me and the burial of my words.
Murmurs and echoes still summon me with their charm
Invoking a sadness inherent in the tympan of waves,
The sources of my perpetual rains, so faint-so far.
I shall create like a ‘Vesuvius Man’, summoning an
Angel to this hallowed land, the proving grounds of
My glass soul that glitters with a radiance unknown.
The sun sets, and the sea’s waves lapse into silty
Tides, ebbing and quelling the universal time as I
Return like slim Silvanus to the silk-cotton trees.

At the End of the Path


Grant me a wisp of sunlight
From the silent undulations
	of blue,

Playing in momentary splendor
Upon the softness of your face

As you leave and are leaving.

	‘There is no divinity
	only a hollow longing.’

The gentleness of our caress
Warms my stubborn beatitudes

As I inhale your tender spirit
	with a crushed lung;

I use every breath of my being.

So now you leave me, your warm
Rings encircling my empty soul
	unseen, unheard.

On the Rap

[Essays], Introductions, Rehearsing Repetitions on the Rappahannock

Dec 272020

Riverside reflections on writing “Rehearsing Repetitions on the Rappahannock”

The Rappahannock River’s switchbacks cross a flattening Chesapeake basin to the sea. On the old map in front of me, the unfolding river moves with a flourish of quill-quickened calligraphy—a declaration of blackness fattening toward a monumental invisibility beyond Virginia’s rich shores….

The multifarious fantasies of river-watching reach out to jaded consciousness, fingering perhaps the sad man’s brain-sac after experiencing the the riprap ravages of tragedy….

There’s comfort and confrontation in the repetitions of ripples. Like the sighs and rhymes and glottal agonies of actors repeating their run-on lines, the ripples kiss and disperse—both welcomed and dismissed by inviting consciousness….

The waves rise and ride the rude fire of sun’s tumbling over the hill, creating green brims of their own in liquid display. Hills and waves are much alike, and the tired mind finds itself in finding out the degrees of their similitude….

Yes, there’s a lot more of lucent than lunacy in “the patient good of going nowhere” as even the most ingenious ages attest. Indeed, this sitting in the coracle of consciousness and watching the objective world and subjective mind interpenetrate is what makes us humans such superb interpreters! But interpreters of what and to what, well….

This poem is about the satisfactions of being a knot in that web. About remaining supple while the evidential pulse of existence passes through the tree of ganglia above your neck. About knowing without knowing for sure….

On the rap,
Again,

Gregg Glory
2020

Disappearing Acts

Sep 022020

 

Gregg Glory
[Gregg G. Brown]



Published by BLAST PRESS


Copyright © 2017 by Gregg G. Brown

Stuff and Nonsense

Dark Poet, your pen scratches at the heart of life. ~~Antonin Artaud

Nonsense is often the most sensible kind of sense. This is counterintuitive, but trust me for a moment as we proceed. This is no three-card monte. Nor is it like the wonderful magic of Emmett Kelley the clown sweeping his spotlights into a single circle, and then putting that circle in his pocket, patting his pocket and smiling like Einstein after he’d eureka’d light into a corner.

Nonsense reveals all of us—our self, our situation—in a single pop of recognition as we are trampolined from our usual assurances and then forced to regain our footing, to regain our meaning, on the fly. Like an old-fashioned photographer’s flash powder, we are exposed to an extreme of light, with no visible space left for secrets or lies. This is part of the odd exhilaration of nonsense. And, don’t get me wrong, nonsense isn’t some sly encyclopedia where all hidden truths are stored and we must simply discover the index—oh, no. Rather, the puzzles that nonsense reveal are genuinely unsolvable. Gregor Samsa will never come back from being a cockroach; his transformation in the story “Metamorphosis” has simply revealed the pickle he was already in, but didn’t know that he was in.

What nonsense reveals, at its best, are genuine mysteries.

And, like Gregor Samsa, the character in the poem “Nagging Question,” who wakes up with a pile of feathers at his feet after having torn his pillow apart in his sleep, all he can do with a true mystery, once it has been revealed, is to go back into the realm from which the mystery emanated. Gregor cross-examines his family situation, and the character in our poem returns to the realm of sleep and dream. But, with new, perhaps sharper, questions in mind with which to confront the mystery that has been revealed. Or, it may be, with no questions at all, simply with one’s eyes widened.

This process resembles the scientific method, except for the fact that there is no control group. What variables could nonsense ever control for? There may one day be a science of comedy, but never one for true mystery. The only control group we have in poetry is every other poem ever written. Their mysteries abide, and it is into them that we go to confront those mysteries again and again—and to find more of ourselves more truthfully (or at least more fully) revealed.

 
   [With] the pillow exploded uselessly between
         your hands
   And what looks to be a chicken carcass
   Piled in an inscrutable white mound
   Headless between your bare feet [...]
   There’s only one place for you to find your answer.

Gregg Glory
August 28, 2017

Other
(How To Be Invisible)

Disappearing Act

The shaggy sea wagged its big, wet tail.
I walked right into its open mouth 
And was never heard from again.

Culprit

This entire time
I’ve been stealing peaches
That look like my face.

My hand’s shadow
Grows crooked over their innocence
As if I were shaving them.

Soft as they are,
They talk softly in my pockets together,
Accusing me of many crimes.

Ruby Woo

I knew a girl who began disappearing
From her feet up.
First her toes faded out, then her heels,
Her arches were twin bridges to nowhere.
You could still hear her clicking down the sidewalk,
But she no longer stopped at the shoe store
To windowshop.

Her knees gave her some trouble
And you could see the kneecaps gleaming
Like little cat skulls.

She was so relieved when her ass finally disappeared
She threw a big party and danced all night
But mostly alone since no one was sure 
Exactly where her feet were, or if she still had any.

Last week I went around to visit
And had to let myself in.
She was just a pair of lips on a throw pillow 
On the couch.  I spoonfed her a little chicken broth
And blotted her dry.

She talked a lot, various histories and opinions.
We talked over each other quite a bit,
And I wasn’t sure if she could hear me.

On my way out, she asked me
To apply some lipstick for her, ruby woo.
But, I couldn’t oblige.  I’m all thumbs.

The Poet Wild

 for Joe Weil

An echoing bear snuffles woodward.
His head sways heavily back and forth,
A shovelful of earth.

The bear has eaten the world.
His eyes are full of sorrowful stars
Typed like whited-out asterisks.

The bear pours out his voice,
Black licorice poured on roaring waters.
It echoes in the earth and air.

Reading in Eden

The books are more like trees.
Tall, with letters like people bending.
You run across the pages naked,
Roll endlessly into the binding laughing
At your clumsiness, the pages like cream,
The sun warm applause on your back as you struggle.
The flat people around you stare wide-eyed as Egyptians,
Silent, your foot caught in the plot.

Evaporating Lines

The magician disappeared into his hat.
The rabbit had hopped off long ago,
But, there was his shadow.

*

I am ferried everywhere on the back of an ant.
A leaf, an aphid.

*

I am disappearing like a silk scarf pulled through
     a ring.
A small hole, an ear.

*

Disappear with me, the best is yet to be.
Quoth Browning, quoth God.

*

I ride in upon a magnificent wave of birth, raving
    and foamy.
When I retreat back to death, I leave behind
A salt grit, a stink.

A Hard Wind

A hard wind is bending 
The wintry world.
Tree after skeletal tree 
Seems tentative
That had been solid 
As wainscoting before.
Walls holding in, 
Windows looking out.

Blue corners of the sky 
Are being torn.
The straight line of the horizon 
Weeps like eyes 
Bowing downward 
At their sad corners.
Sad world.  
And no tissue big enough.

Life

Life is shit
They all said.
But, they didn’t
Really mean it.

Life is suffering
The wise man said.
But, he
Didn’t really mean that.

Life is… is… is...
Unavoidable!  one blurted.
And they 
All laughed at that.

The Reader

Politely, devoutly, 
With head bent down, the reader 
Asks permission of the text:
May I see what my imagination
Has already cooked up?
Can I smell the key lime pie, 
Lick the great comedian’s face?

Loyally, I wanted to kill Issac, too, 
But I stayed my hand.
Isn’t that right, little book?  
Didn’t I chase a white whale 
And feel the harpoon’s spur?
I kissed with Eve, 
And I hissed with the snake.

The pages fell over me 
Like wings, like ashes.

Pages spangled 
With ant-like letters.
Walrus words thundered 
Into the sea 
After the good fight,

Their white tusks 
Hidden underwater, 
Their eyes mysterious,
Human as a mermaid’s.

Riding Fido

The last time around I was a flea for sure.
Dodging the dog’s teeth, the dirty claws of his foot.
Mounting the spine of an eyelash to make love
Or see the endless dogscape.  How the world moved
With the slow gait of an elephant, tilting
Precipitously as a great sailing ship in a storm.
Such vistas of grass and sky and dingy living room furniture!
The dog was splendid, a saber-toothed bear in battle
Who slept all afternoon after a meal.
Speaking of which, there was always plenty to eat,
You bet, steaks of skin and gobbets of blood to spare.
Pull up a chair.  Hair of the dog and all that.

Words Without Music

Whenever I think 
Things are going too great,
That the total amount of joy 
Is adding up 
To one fantastic finale, 
One oceanic applause line,

I stop eating for a fews days.

Just to remind myself 
How things really are, 
Or usually are,
Or are often enough, 
Or were once,
Just to remember those things

That come to mind as your stomach shrinks.

Like carrying a goldfish 
Home in a bag with a leak.
The fish flips 
Harder and harder 
In a smaller and smaller 
Corner of the plastic bag

As its gills get bigger and bigger.

Under the transparency,
Red and agitated
As a cut under a fingernail,
You feel them
Desperate against your palm,
Golden under your thumb.

God’s Hooks

Who could’ve put the stars up to it?  
Shining up there like God’s hooks.

Bait for what fish?  A soul in a gown?

Only our satellites have gotten so far.
Tossed burning from the Earth 
In a dash of hope, like poetry.

They send back pictures of vastness.
Same as the view from here: vastness.

Who knows?  Maybe we’re already hooked, 
Already being reeled in.  Our invisible line to God 
Already tightening, already shortening.

Eventually, even the satellites we sent blink off,
Drawn out of black water and eaten raw.

How to Be Invisible

Look like yourself.
Find the average wavelength of conversation
And neither exceed it nor cut it short.
When strangers approach you assume
That they are looking at something 
Over your shoulder.
You’ll almost always be right.

Try to go around feeling
Like you’ve just stolen an apple,
Or a dozen, your sweater pockets bulging.
Carry on with an anonymous air of savior faire
Pasted on your face
As you exit the supermarket.

Getting married can be very effective.
You’ll be talked to half as often,
And couples are twice as hard to see in a crowd.
Soon, you’ll be like a cloud no one remembers,
A misty uninsistent thing.  After a few years, 
She won’t even know you’re there.
But, trust me, save it for a last resort.

And don’t ever, ever call the police.
They’ll just take your fingerprints
In ten little puddles of ink,
And you’ll have to start 
Filing them off daily.

One last piece of free advice
To feel invisible as fishing line, as sky,
As all those assumptions you make.
Don’t buy a dog.  Seriously,
Whatever else you do.

Dogs never let you forget
That you are loved.  Loved utterly.

Objects

Water

Water.  
I keep trying to think of it.

I only get as far as thirsty.

Consider a Stone

It’s already too late.  Whatever lava
Roared like a furnace in the Permian period
And made it a stone, has been stopped cold.
A stone is a stasis.  Chipped littler and littler
By gossipy neighbors nipping at its reputation.
Locked in grey skin and quiet, there’s endless time
For regrets—like after getting married or arrested.
I’d say it’s a frozen tear, but that’s too lachrymose.
In your hand, there’s weight enough for murder.
When you put one up to your ear, you realize
At your feet everywhere roil fossilized bubbles,
Drowning men crying for help.

Pinpricks

Remember that movie Hellraiser?
All those pins pounded in his skin?
An army of darts.  

When something creepy happens
We get those same
Pins, prickles of intuition.
Hackles raised as if we were
Reverting to wolves.  

There’s a parable I know about that,
But I’m too tired to tell it—
Trying to get back to sheep, I mean sleep,
Turning over and over again
As if basting in an oven.

And all those pins digging in
Right where the wings
Are starting from my shoulders.

Cages

Step right in, ladies and gentlemen--
Gilded and ribbed, there’s
A cage for every occasion.
One for being born
Nubile and pink, soft cordons
Confused in the wet umbilical.
A cage for work, oh yes,
All varieties, from rust
To resolute platinum.
A cage for marriage
Red with love, red with strife.
Rattle them, my inmates!
Make sad music with your cup!
Sway when the master walks with you
Down the streetlamped way.
A cage for every occasion,
And a cage for happiness, too,
Fit as a shoe and able to dance
A whirligig jig or two.
One last cage, a bonus cage,
A cage of stars for your soul
Where the mind peters out
In the dark, far, far before
Its ragged hands reach the bars.

Spoon

A spoon lays down 
Like a droplet,
Or buries its head in the soup 
Like a ostrich.

In the mouth, it’s like 
An extra tongue
Wrestling 
For a dollop of ice cream.

Confined all together,
They clang in the drawer.
A folded xylophone,
A music of muffled intent.

Turned over, a flock
Of silver peahens arrive,
All of them pecking
For a beakful of feed.

House

How can I be alone in my house
If I’m not alone in my soul?

Folded together from memories
A house imitates a home:

The buried dog’s outstretched skeleton,
The cozy oven, Christmas omelettes.

In the empty street the houses
Blow about like paper lanterns.

The windows wisely lock me in.
The trees keep count against the panes.

My mind’s not right, when so much night
Pours ink upon my sins.

Voices vanish, yet whispers stir—
A fly that lands upon the skin.

Time keeps to the clock.
I was, but now am not.

Wiping My Lips

The seamstress is feeding
Bat wings into the sewing machine,
Doves’ wings, pecking
My stitched initials.

The finished handkerchiefs
Flutter at my neck,
Crouch in my lap,
Kiss me after dinner, a peck.

Once I got this set of six,
Mixed, semi-transparent,
Just clouded enough to keep
Me embroidered.

Buttonhole

Come to me, little blue button.
Stop up my gaping smile.
Be held and whole.
Serve our warm closure,
Sure as a handshake.
Let’s survive another loveless day
Together, hugging.

Electric Fan

A whispery fan 
Brushes 
My exposed skin
With coolness.

Its brushes rush
Over me
Eagerly 
As dog wags.

I can’t quite
Make out
Whatever it keeps 
Insisting.

Its blowdart
Has missed and
The propellant breath
Is delightful.

Whatever it’s saying
I’m sure that
Eventually I’ll 
Agree completely.

White Threads

A needle traveling
In the dark is not
More mysterious
Than I—

Seeking its splinter 
Of light, it’s gap
In the night
From which

It can emerge
With its
Terrifying face
Intact.

A needle is less 
Insistent 
Than a question.
It pricks,

But it doesn't 
Gnaw.  There’s 
A politeness in needles
I hadn't considered,

Pulling their surgical 
White threads
Again and again 
Through my skin.

Chairs

Once I saw a man make a pyramid of chairs.
A dozen, perhaps.  Gangly, ungainly cane chairs
Threaded together somehow, linked leg to leg,
A strange assemblage Duchamp would’ve painted,
And hoisted in one elegant lift to his chin!

Our hands applauded in a burst of gunfire.

He continued to stand like that for some time.
Arms out, eyes fixed on the swaying chair bottoms
Which made a sound like trees in winter.
They twirled like a chandelier hung over his nose,
A little smile spreading under his mustache.

The Far Side

The windows are falling.
They are pieces of sky falling.  Or pieces of air.
At first glance, a window seems like a kite stuck
    in a tree,
Something simple, a thin pane of clarity trembling—
There to help us feel the tug of flying.
That’s what windows are, in essence, 
This sense of something falling that keeps on falling.

We fall through windows with our eyes,
Arriving at the far side of walls, in open space.

Words have windows in them, too, vowels and ladders,
Invisible squares we fall through to an otherness.
We sit reading in an attic with Anne Frank
Or a tree suddenly grows in our Brooklyn.
Our parents faces change when we look at them,
And we are no longer who we were before.
We have fallen through this invisible thing.

TV Remote

It’s a Rosetta Stone by design, a solution stone,
A Stonehenge with the eld symbols still visible 
On its tall, crooked tooth.
Combine them at will and light appears
Square and docile before you, a rag quilt
Pulled blurrily over the entire room, a cloak
Of fire
That gives a ghostliness to the life
You inhabit.

The Rosetta Stone in your lap
When held before you like a wand
Will help you to make sense of the ghosts
Thrown like sheets all about the room,
Your life now softened by their omnipresent glow.
It will help.  You will find it helpful.

Two Supplicants

Shoes take the first step.
They come to us like petitioners,
Their tongues turned out for a drop
Of holy water, the impish benediction
Of a toe.

They wait below the waterline of our attention
To embrace
The calm presence of an arch,
The elastic pressure of a ball,
The flat command of the heel.

After a while, years maybe,
Having given their soles to our direction,
We peel them off like grapeskins and 
Examine their pulpy interiors dark as clotted grottoes,
Rank as dead fish.

And then we discard them
Without noticing even once
How perfectly, like supplicants, they have taken
Our image inside themselves, the weight of our identities
Shaping them and breaking them at last.

The Washing Machine

Its face is a Charybdis 
Full of soiled underthings.
We come to it as to a confessional,
Shed our daily skins like dirty snakes
And pour ourselves in for punishment
To leave with a watery burden.

Refreshed, we drag the burden
Out and pin it on the line to dry.
The human figures dance, though the sky is grey.
Soon the sun looking down makes us
Ashamed, and we pull our old sins back on,
Clean-smelling, one leg at a time.

Thing

The name of the thing is Thing.
But it’s really a hand in a box
That shuts itself in with a lid.
Sometimes it pops out of another box
Or shuts another lid, after helping
To hold a nail or straighten a tie.
Thing’s shadow-puppets are dramatic and informative,
A kind of one-handed hula.  Today,
Thing loops a lariat, or is it
A noose, and leaves it neatly coiled
On the old-fashioned table for later use.
Now, what am I to make of that?
Thing dances a little, gives a firm OK.

The Beginning of Spiders

Not, certainly, a splat of teriyaki on the tile
Which then wriggles and walks away.

Not that shadowed corner of dark crinkles
You ignore at the edges of your eyes.

Nor spider veins that invade the body, spikes
Of blue midnight, cracks of live lightning!

None of these is how spiders started,
Those inveterate inhabitants of nightmare.

Spiders, with their crowd of eyes like pustules 
Of blackberries, began just the way you did.

Just the way Socrates got started all those millenia
Ago: by cell division: wheels within wheels.

Like Socrates, spiders may be given poison
To drink.  Unlike Socrates, they’ll bite you first.

Green Apples

Sweet isn’t the word I’d use—
A parrafin, a first bite of sour gum
That never gets chewy perhaps.
Juice like a fourteen year old’s kiss, syrupy, thin
Waterfalls down your chin as you laugh
And go in for another green bite.

Thoughts are green like this apple.
Timeless, bright, with a circle of brown seeds hidden
In all that sour whiteness.

When my stomach is full as a fist,
I reach back into the packing crate
And start whipping them against the side
Of the Eden Orchards barn.

Shadow Puppets

All night spent practicing
The flop of rabbit ears,
They grey trunk of an elephant,
The giddy-up of a horse.

Later, there’s the legs
Of two lovers dancing on the wall,
Getting the narrow feet to leap
And land just right.

Around 4 a.m the lamp
Tilts a bit drunkenly.
Or is it the yellow moon
Leaning in on the fun?

Last thing I do
Before dawn takes the wall
Is work on the little, square
Eye of a crocodile.

Paper

Alone as a dot
In a snow-filled meadow
Your pencil tip 
Sheds black feathers
Like an old crow.

The sheet is ice
Or desert,
Void or supernova.
It doesn’t say which
And you don’t ask.

You slide down whiteness
Holding hands
And stop on tiptoe
To acknowledge 
The endless cliff.

Sex

Difficult Clasp

It is when you were absent,
Visiting your mother, or missing,
That night most advanced
Its absence.

But it was when night was gone
And you were here again, that
You, wearing your hat or not,
Were most absent.

Solving for X

Lab tables of fireproof resin
Kept partners paired
In their experimental setup,
X and Y chromosomes gleaming.

The Bunsen burner’s flame
Like a needle between them,
And a walnut crucible balanced
On young tongs.

It was delicate, wasn’t it,
The way her curl
Was drawn like smoke
To the blue fire?

My fingers still sting
Where I patted her out,
Leaving a small scar
Visible behind her ear.

Exes

Long ago she stopped asking about you.
Stopped making inquiries into your welfare.
Or wondering what you were doing right then
As she puréed the skinned tomatoes from the garden
And poured another tall afternoon Bloody Mary,
Falling asleep in her trashy novel on the chaise lounge
Where you’d made love to her with careful athleticism 
Letting the little wheels help ribbon the rhythm,
Her face turned aside for an imperative sidebar with God
All while you’re cursing and grinning like a demon
     possessed
To the cool applause of the pool.

Dinner Engagement

My tongue loops over my tongue 
Slipping into a slippery knot
As she shifts out of her dingy peacoat
And sits down to dinner with
Me again.

Her hazel eyes are to die for
But I resist their deadly insistence,
Cooling my heels and blowing my soup
While daintily she slurps her minestrone
Like a lizard.

Finally we’re alone on the roof
Holding hands with the moon—
Hot as two dinner rolls, making out,
Buttering, unbuttoning her tight top,
Tying the knot.

Romance

Gussied up, the broom
Wags its golden wig
Over the debris, the dust, the days
That have fallen to the floor.

I like to think of it as a romance.
The broom, beautiful and slender
Picking up after her drunken husband,
The lout in dirty work boots

And no time to talk.
But, years ago he would sing Johnny Mercer tunes
So beautifully to her in the car.
Like I say, I’m a romantic.

Cherry Lozenges

Here she comes again
Handing me another
Cherry lozenge because
My throat’s stuck coughing
Like a motorcycle choke.

She comes back a bit later
With spoon after spoon
Of blown-on broth, and a
Palm on my teakettle forehead
Like cool water.

Whatever patience is
It has a face like hers,
Bending over a car wreck
Like a tree bending over a river, 
In its leafy hands a wrapper

And a cherry lozenge.

Editor’s Note

How, if it happens all the time,
Can it count as being a surprise?
This moonlight 
Alive in dark rhododendrons,

This tension in a whisper,
If it’s you whispering in my ear?

Third Attempt

Ducking, dodging 
The swipe at my puss 
Like a pro I land 
A kiss like a fly
Six-legged, delicate 
On your apple cheek.

Time

One by One

The senses arrive
With daylight,
Like birds 
Lining up to sing
On a wire.

They take the small 
Seeds of dawn
Into their alert beaks
And break them

While the pale shells
Pile fluff
Between the claws.

Too-Early Morning

Sunlight makes everything grow up.
Yet still the night comes, is coming again
Even though it is barely past pink dawn
And the friendly mirror is waiting for me
To comb my unruly hair like a good boy.

The cereal is waiting there in its white box,
The patient milk in its red carton.  Spoon, bowl,
In their dark drawer and closed cupboard wait
Like springs in a clock. Tick and wait, tick and wait
For the morning the owner winds down, and rust

Covers the clock.

Knifefight

Between the stabs of rain,
I remain.

Vernal Equinox

The first cigarette of the morning drifting
In through the open window.  Ah, Spring!

Life Forms

A few disheveled 
Bits of scenery.

A bus that drives by
In the mid-distance.

The little girl’s bicycle waiting
For her return from school.

Every day this neighborhood
Becomes a moonscape.

I’m the only alien left
Typing on my magic box:

The man in the moon
Made of shadows and craters.

The sundial ticks,
My nose grows longer.

The Bite of Memory

Bite your fingernails.
Bite the clouds,
If you’re up for it.

You could spend hours practicing
Biting smiles in faces,
Spitting out the seeds of teeth.

Your mouth will empty itself
Eventually,
A bucket done with fetching.

Look, in one day you’re old,
Maybe even a little lonely.
You will be bitten back.

The River Forever

Watching the snaky surface of the river forever,
Dim in the river valleys, light on the river crests,
I ask myself: “Is the river moving downstream, or is it
I who am moving down rivering time forever?” 

The river only hisses, shows me snakes of sunlight
That writhe in a pile like spilled lines of mercury,
Seemingly going nowhere, the striving river flowing so.
I—who?—watching the snaky surface of the river forever.

Death

 
   Hurry home, dark cloud.
   ~~ Charles Simic

Just Like Heaven

That little corner in my dream
Where the buildings are made of Legos:
A pretense of an apartment, a town, a country.
Little brick dogs sniffed other brick dogs.

People shook hands like constructing a friendship.
The clouds were a heavy, discolored white, drifting...
Large rudderless cruise ships or giant squarish sheep.
My best friend was there, his face a grey diagram.

He had died some years before, but here he was.
The clocks moved their crooked, blocky arms.
It was always the same day, again and again.
It was my favorite place.

Loitering After the Funeral

Misfortune scrawled her phone number on my hand,
Curled my fingers shut slowly, my hand in hers,
And whispered: Call me.

Bad luck follows me like toilet paper sticks to your shoe.
You never know that it’s there, trailing whitely,
But everyone sniggers as you go by.

Sadness isn’t so horrible if sad things are happening.
There’s a congruence to it, not some hangman laughing
At the radio as he pulls into work.

Tragedy, frankly, is more than I can lay claim to for myself.
Even on my bleakest, blackest days, I’m not tragic.
Rained out, sure.  But tragedy is art.

This isn’t art.  Wheedling a cop out of a ticket on the way
To the funeral home, shoes clubbed with mud
     and crying
Because your friend or mother has died.

Dead Feathers

Children circled around to look inside the wheelbarrow
At the dead owl, its eyelids blue like Grandmom’s,
The dead feathers speckled, not yet full of fleas leaving.
There’s a solemness in the little ears like marked pages
Never to be returned to, never to be read again. 

The claws are amazing, longer than a lady’s red fingernails,
Tines still sharp at the end of their forks.  

Tommy looks under one eyelid, bravely touching it;
The great eye seems alive between his fingers,
The head just about to swivel 180 asking “Whoo, whoo?”
That’s when Steve backs off toward the woods, 
Uninterested.  

From his back pocket there dangle
The two rubber arms of his slingshot.

So That

 for my Dad

I don’t remember what he called himself.
Lank as a construction crane,
He passed through town like a hook through a fish,
And taking the town with him so that
I’m missing him terribly at an empty table.

The four corners are the four corners of a map
That’s all Sahara, blank as a sandbox.
He’s nowhere now, the back of a Möbius strip.
The toys have run off to play with the neighbors,
The child who smiled here has died.

I feel this answerless vastness, not even an echo,
Like spending all day counting graves,
Walking to where two iron fences meet
And turning back through graves again, through
A few trees, a wind like a scratchy record.

Long After

Long after you are dead
—Yes, you are dead—
As your head lies in a bridal veil
Of galaxies, and your feet 
Have rotted through your shoes,
And everyone you knew is written off 
And has written you off,

You will begin to find
A way back, a secret hole
That leads to your old self,
No matter how far you have gone
No matter how dead you are,
Like waking up still drunk
To the acrid smell of coffee.

Spare Parts

 
   One passed in a fever.
   One was burned in a mine.
   One was killed in a brawl.
   ~~Edgar Lee Masters

It came with less surprise, less and less,
With each iteration plucking
Eyes out of those wayward dolls.

Now they are lined up naked
Blind and dead,
These waxy cadavers of the field.

Time had been as broad as daylight, 
Fiery as wine.
They ran around the house like secondhands.

Now, no houses will be built in this field
Except little stones ones leaning on crutches,
Grooved with names

Evening fingers touch and pluck.

The Quotidian

Morning Routine

Cut a slip of door
Open to find the light
Spill like a lampshade
Into day.

The sun’s an old man
With his beard on fire.
Quick, before it goes out,
See everything.

The Statistic

A chalk stick figure 
Written on the blackboard
Jumps off to sit beside you 
On the train to Long Island.

You worry he’ll rub off 
On your suit sleeve.
But you ride out together, 
Eventually leaning back,

Crossing your legs in sync.  
You two are much alike
You decide, whistling tentatively 
As the scenery passes.

The chalk figure 
Picks up the melody easily, 
Its lips 
A perfect circle, 

And you harmonize until 
He rises at the next stop 
To hop off, his slim center bend
Leaving a white dot on the seat.

Winter Waltz

Winter picks its way carefully
Over the rolling summer meadow,
A big fat ball of snow
On stilts.

If you stand under the winter 
You get rained on, 
Cold and salubrious 
As a fever bath.

If you follow the winter
All summer and into the fall,
Tracing its tipsy steps
Blue shadow by blue shadow

You’ll wind up back 
In the meadow, only this time 
Everything’s sheeted white
Like a corpse.

Wrap yourself up in the sheets
And start rolling!
Don’t forget to grab the stilts
On your way out.

Blood Light

Small reddening lines creep under the curtain,
Cracks in a delicate shell.
Dawn is welling like a cut, a blood light
To walk dogs by, piss quietly beside the sea
Before the dark tide of tourists unpack.

I follow the dog as I follow my body outside
As we go beyond the scalloped alcove of curtains.

For now, the rocks are still sublime, green outlines
Like pensive bottle shards huddled close
And the sea fitful between them.
White spray lifts in bliss, in blessing
As the small moment passes. The dog tugs my leash.

Dim Air

God must be at home in this muddle.
Dim air heavy, a hot muggy wig
As Suzanne says, her blond hair
Limp and damp, a slap of yellow paint.
Dots of sweat fit for a goblet 
Pinprick her fatal forehead,
Clear and lickable as champagne 
Poured down in glimmering lines.
My beer is blind and wet with sweat.
Insects were born for this hot, humid glue
That has me losing my dry binding
Until I fall apart soft and crumbled 
In your hands again, Suzanne,
Neither God nor insect.

Night and Day and the Poet

The painter looks up at night’s enormous suave.
The singer listening to the choir of stars is calm.
The poet is unhappy in the sweaty bed.
He counts the fleas in summer’s threadbare fleece
Groaning on arthritic knees.

By day, the painter packs a lunch, details the regatta
Like a thousand flags blazing all at once in the sun.
The singer is trilling and making her tea.
The poet waits for the mail, but it’s always late.
The box sticks out its silver tongue,

Eloquent beyond his labored sonnet
Lying misspelled in the cluttered grass.
As they trot back down the drive,
The dog looks up at him with hope 
But is always disappointed.

A hundred birds erupt from the bushes as they pass,
    singing mightily.
Shut up! the poet screams at nature and himself
And goes in to lie down on the threadbare bed.
I know, the poet decides finally, sweatily,
I’ll just write down whatever the birds were saying.

The Optimism of Opening a Window

What’s out there,
I find myself asking
Like irregular clockwork.

I’m stuck in this
Air-conditioned stasis
Listening to flies.

Such know-it-alls!
Cruising the fruit bowl
Or praying on the television.

And then I spot a thumbprint 
Of sun on the windowpane.
Let’s touch it!

A moment of pain,
An almost sizzling gold
Mixed with Bhuddhist orange.

Pure Arithmetic

Thousands of invisible mice
Are pulling the shadow of the barn
Eastward as the sun drops West.

Millions of unfindable doves 
Race upward with matchsticks in their beaks
To light the wicks of stars.

Billions of underwater sleepers
Lie swimming in their beds
To arrive at island dreams.

Endless

The children have been playing 
Their endless games
Of hide-and-seek, 
Waterslide, hop-the-sprinkler

Like so many flowers 
Uprooting themselves 
From the field
And running around 

Screaming in endless joy
Under a sky 
Scuffed with clouds
Or endless blue

Over a yard called home, 
With father and mother 
There
Endlessly tall

Cleaning up the icky barbecue,
Packing up fork 
And plate and 
Enormous soda bottles

As sunset sets 
And everything goes slightly
Lemonade-tinged.
And the children at last

Are called in by their 
Roundelay of names
For the endless walk back 
To the house and to bed.

Usual Procedure

The songs of birds are for other birds, mostly.
So I figure that laws are for lawyers to obey, mostly,
And taxes for accountants to pay, etc. etc.

Leaves seem so at home in trees, why do they depart?
Clouds move from place to place so peacefully, then
A zipper of thunder, and they pour themselves away.

Are the birds lamenting the leaves’ hasty departure?
Are the clouds paying their taxes all-at-once?
Lawyers stamp around on the damp ground,
     looking satisfied.

Walking Later On

Countless pebbles 
In the darkening road 
Look perfect
As statues’ eyes—  
Blind white,
Round as clocks.

As we walk together 
The late afternoon 
Closes them shut,
And evening leaks 
Upward like rust 
On an empty shed.

The pebbles chuckle 
Like hens, even though 
They are just eggs.
Leaning here, we find 
Time for silence 
Despite ourselves.

The country sky 
Opens, unfolding 
Its somber umbrella
As we continue 
In the small rain 
Of pebbles falling.

Getting Lit

Over the summer tavern with its rocking chairs
A cheap electric string tenses in the wind
And then relaxes back into a lighted smile.
The clear globes have one filament of brain each
Like a jellyfish, flashing dimly yellow
Above dim patrons dipping into beers:
A row of bar birds, like those ones you see
With little tophats and thin beaks of glass.

Drinks are emptied, and laughter shoulders
Pamela high enough to nab some bulbs
And pitch them against the swinging tavern sign
With the plosive softness of puff mushrooms
While glitter gathers beneath it in the dirt.
A stray dog whines and circles excitedly.
Above them darkness recedes, who knows how far?
The moon seems close enough to unscrew.

In Praise of Moon Rocks

All the grasses like green minutehands
Are keeping westerly.
They stop when the frost arrests them
At quarter to midnight.

I want to feel the grass barefoot.
I step outside
Through moonflower wings of faintest gauze
And sliding glass—

Or through flies’ wings, and the frozen buzzing
Of metal grinding backwards,
I think when my feet crackle the miniature shivs
And a shiver undoes my back.

I proceed to the old garden patch
Guarded by stones.
When I pick one up and inspect it closely,
Dense as a brain in my palm,

I’m holding a moon rock.

Commute

The 6 a.m. train coming on is a lion’s roar
With a mane of carbon sparks.
We ride inside an electric eel
And read the illegible graffiti of frogmen.

Cold tunnels appear and swallow our longings,
Holding us in echo after echo.
When the station platform arrives like a diving board
We rewind onto it

Graceful as exclamation points!
We swim off to work.

Lesson

The teacher erases the blackboard so carefully!
So carefully, so completely.
The equation that explained time and motion,
The history of East Texas—gone!

What’s left is this presence from behind the stars.
A black potentiality, a malice
Demanding never to be marred again,
Chalked, degraded, colored-in.

The first letter, an I, lands like a feather
From a passing tern.
Soon the whole silent universe is crusted over
    with feathers:
Crabbed letters, a line of hunchbacks, rockettes.

At the end of the day the teacher
Exhausted with explaining everything once again
Removes all evidence of herself
And goes home, wherever that is.

Snow

Everything was peaceful at first.
The wheelbarrows brought in the whiteness
Silently overnight—and everything looking clean 
Like a napkin before the soup course.

Little by little during the day, the edges
Get a bit soggy, or a corner tears open
Revealing the black, dank eye
Of a log in the woodpile.

More and more of the napkin
Gets dirtied by passing cars, by lipstick, by soup.
Random dark spots appear on the x-ray
And start connecting like cancer.

Soon, all that’s left of whiteness
Is a grimace or a grin here or there—
A stray piece of spaghetti
Stuck in your teeth.

The final photograph in the series shows everything
Exactly as it was before the snow
Began to fall all over itself.
But now, everything’s miserable, cold and wet.

Stealing Kisses

 
1.
Winters I talk to the mendicant fly on the wall
Of metaphysics, starry-rayed emanations,
The sunlight falling filtered and pale.

2.
Each spring I grow a new leg, or two legs,
Just for dancing, for running
Up to new lips to steal a kiss.

3.
In the fall the leaves do all the talking.
I practice being a beetle, opening and closing
The valves of my coat.

4.
In summer—have I said what I do in summer?
In summer I drink wine
And let my beard catch my meditations.

History

  
Whether the knife falls into the melon or the melon onto the knife, the melon suffers.
~~African proverb

Conjuring a Yawn

Before the world turned
Into a computer screen,
I watched leaves play
In the scuffed yard.

Each leaf was a little country
On a map, an outline,
Or a man standing up
Like a shadow,

Arms and legs wide.
Sometimes at sunset
The man, the country
Would flare up on fire,

Burning incandescent red
(A sacrifice, an emblem)
Before rejoining
The dark conversation.

Once, a wind came.
The whole sea was burning.

Hitler’s Gardener

Ah, here they are now,
Fresh from their decapitation.
For your vase,
For your buttonhole,
To bring out the blue in your eyes.

Day After Tomorrow

The police artist is drawing my face
In charcoal, line by line, in grim brimstone
For a stranger, one who attended the ill-
Attended impromptu poetry reading
Under a chilly streetlight flickering
Where we used the forbidden words 
With facile ease as in the old days:
She is as in a field a silken tent.
Genders, pronouns, she, he and all that.
The stranger hadn’t seen much, though, 
Just a zee zaying zomething, a blur 
Like a face wearing a beard or sprouting one,
Two feet, or maybe one was fake, the stranger 
Hesitated to say: other-abled, some color
Or other.  Yes, yes, I think zee was a shade.

Watching Rain

Watching rain gathering in a street gutter
As it picks up twigs and leaves along the way,
Little by little, on a growing gush of silver,
The hurrying water twists like a wet
Towel as it swans down the drain...
As it goes cavorting down the black grate
Like oil returning to the dinosaurs, bearing as it does
A red ant rowing a broken stick to oblivion, looking
For all the world like Christopher Columbus.

Picture from Life

The newspaper unfolds like a bird
Flapping, squawking, almost extinct,
Its chicken scratch of facts
Passive as mirrors passing
On the side of the glassworks van
Developing pics of sidewalk life
In their instant emulsions.
A slouchy kid, a happy couple strolling.
An armed guard with his rifle
Tipping the lids of garbage cans.

Good News

It always feels like you have to go too far back
To find any good news to report.
Men all across Germany shaving their Adolph mustaches
Just before the Allies roll into Berlin.
The breadlines getting shorter as the war machine
    cranks up.
Chamberlain’s “peace in our time,” the pages flapping
As he descends the long gangway of the cruise ship.
The war before that ending, the one to end all wars.
Then there was the invention of canned foods,
But that made the Civil War drag on, I think.
Or was that Napoleon driving a bayonet through Europe?
In any case, the French Monarchy was toppled at last,
And there was a moment of holiday in Paris
Before the guillotine was trotted out for L’Terror....
At least the king’s old chief of secret police kept his job
After the revolution.  That’s something.

The Way of the Dodo

Without fuss, friendly, meaty, flightless,
They make their dim-bulb way
To the sailor’s tin dinner plate.  They talk 
Among themselves of evening things,
How pearly grey a rainy skein of sky is,
How docile the nest with its beloved egg!
So many good eons gone by scratching
Among roots for adorable grubs, edible
Bugs—scratch-scratch, whistle, coo and cackle—
As among them long white legs angle, and night
Comes, ever so gently, swinging its club.

Story Time

The story where the boy set sail for the South Seas
In an overturned hat.

Or the one about the old woman who lived in a shoe,
Her children tightening the laces.

That one where all the animals stood around talking
After killing the farmer.

How about the Chinese protester and the tank?
The flea who ran away to the circus?

Reminds me of the story where the mad composer
Conducted a beautiful sunset.

Or the story where the surgery was a complete success
But you died anyway.

That story.  And the one after that.

Sleep Perhaps

A Man Asleep Under His Hat

 
for Charles Simic

Everything’s normal at first.
The trees are just trees,
His dog is not a wolf,
The wife is not an electric chair.

So slowly it is unnoticeable 
The flowered wallpaper
Becomes a waterfall
Of beautiful roses.

Then, a waterfall of thorns,
Then blood,
Blood with teeth 
Salted in,

Hands trying to swim,
Butchered feet drowning.
The smell is atrocious
And abiding as an abattoir.

The wolf wakes up
And starts chewing on everything in sight,
The wife clicks on
And her voice is 10,000 volts.

The hat shifts 
In the sunlight,
A hungry fly 
Lands on his nose.

Nagging Question

The last feathers fall like slow licks of snow,
The pillow exploded uselessly between your hands
And what looks to be a chicken carcass
Is piled in an inscrutable white mound
Headless between your bare feet.

What the hell had you been doing in your dream?
The blue pajama stripes lead nowhere, the feathers
Curled up like questionmarks everywhere else.
You lie back down carefully, no pillow now.
There’s only one place for you to find your answer.

Sleep

Sleep unfolds a staircase from its magic bag.
I walk into its countryside in the ceiling,
Elbowing clouds awkwardly away.
My head pops out of an especially fluffy one,
Impertinent, pale, as if on a pole.
This is where I’ll unpack my suitcase
And set up shop for the holidays.

I lay back on the couchy cloud’s flying carpet,
White plush like a plucked sheep,
And look up where the observatory roof splits open
Abruptly, serenely
Into a perfect square of stars—
As if the night sky were lifted there just for me,
For my dark and my dreams.

Nighttime

 
if the night is long remember your unimportance
    ~~ W. S. Merwin

Four walls of tissue paper
And the stars behind;
Eye in my bed, a stone,
Alone and blind.

Days come like forkfuls of food
I’m forced to eat;
Night shines a moment, red wine
Acid when I drink.

Night opens a little door at the foot
Of my bed.
I follow its black thread
Spooling in my chest.

Dreams come like forkfuls of cloud
I’m forced to eat;
Dreams of doors and stars
And shining thread.

A Student of Insomnia

The table walks 
Like a pterodactyl 
In my dreams,

Steps its highheel 
Spikes on one nipple
Then the other—

Until I stop it 
Cold by dumping 
Granite study books

Quarried
From my backpack 
On its sweptback wings.

These earliest vertebrates 
With the power 
Of flight,

I read.  I read 
About their voices 
Of torn aluminum,

Their extinction, 
The dissecting table, 
The surgical table,

The butcher’s block, 
The map table
War rooms use, 

With battle units
Pawed like pawns
Around the globe 

By rapier 
Croupier sticks.
The kitchen table’s 

Wings 
Give an indolent 
Flap.

Mom’s tropical plant 
Elongates 
To a green beak.

I panic, 
Double down on elbows
And eye the clock.

The Doorknob

The doorknob keeps saying ‘turn me.’
Then when I get outside, I look back
At the other doorknob saying ‘turn me,’
And I am tethered by my mind
Inside.

Night folds me in its leathern wings,
And I fold myself in my nest.
From my bed I often hear a voice,
The doorknob’s plaintive squeak saying
‘Turn me.’

And my mind goes there, I am neither 
Outside nor inside, myself nor
Someone else, sleeper nor dream.
I turn all night in my bed,
A doorknob.

Pantsless Naps

Only two more words.
Two more,
And I can swing myself 
Off the hook.

After all this banter,
This panting—
The pantsless naps and
Apelike perspicacity:

Carving poems in a boulder 
With a toothpick,
Blowing hundreds of clouds
Into the perfect

Shapeless shape.
One, two,
Then sleep:
THE END.

Stuff and Nonsense

[Essays], Disappearing Acts, Introductions

Sep 022020

Dark Poet, your pen scratches at the heart of life.
~~Antonin Artaud

What nonsense reveals, at its best, are genuine mysteries.

 
[With] the pillow exploded uselessly between your hands
And what looks to be a chicken carcass
Piled in an inscrutable white mound
Headless between your bare feet [...]
There’s only one place for you to find your answer.

Gregg Glory
August 28, 2017

Wild Places

[Essays], Introductions, Thistle Wins

Sep 022020

Once all wilderness was innocence. Later, all wilderness was sin. What does it say about wilderness, that it could be both sin and innocence—a space of condemnation and reprieve—at once? What does it say about us, limber interpreters of vastness? Every day someone takes a snapshot of themselves with the Statue of Liberty on his shoulder, or the moon upheld in her palm, the violent grandeur of the universe turned by metaphor and pixel-flash into a beachball.

Now we find our wildness in suburban glimpses: long weekends away to a campsite, the unwonted sting of a bee. Yet we were made by wildness; we were wolves before we mellowed to dogs. When observation and observance sharpen beyond the roar of words we soothe ourselves with, the tickertape of conscience and prayer unspooled to silence, we can see the action of life plain. The constant taking, the inevitable greed, camouflage, and waste inherent in all things.

The sun knows nothing but to burn. The salmon little else than to breed and feast. Our arteries are red with burning, veins blue with hunger. A paranoid, irascible eye sees many raw things civilization has regretfully gilded; an eager ear—with its vestigial muscle for turning still intact—may yet attune itself to the strangeness of what is. Listen.

Parables are everywhere is our daily doings if we listen, the ear of consciousness arranging random notes and facts into pattern, the flare of consciousness illuminating new mosaics in the old catacombs. Life itself, in all its accident and happenstance, is transformational because our consciousness is partial.

We can’t see all sides of an object at once like a cubist artist. We cannot even experience ourselves consistently across the daily divide of sleep; at best we are strips of stuttering film. We bridge these gaps with memory and imagination. And reality is the perpetual testing grounds of that self-invention—and poetry, at its finest, with its honest looks at what is—is the checklist for that reality. Words are the net we use to draw reality into us. So use that net, anxious to add meaning to your ultimately unknowable life—the omnipresent wilderness.

Gregg Glory
April 1, 2018

Venus and Vesuvius Intro

[Essays], Introductions, Venus and Vesuvius

Aug 252020

Vivid Ovid. His humanizing tales of metamorphosis (if you’ll pardon the pun) in the literally alien context of the interaction of gods and people have drawn the eyes and admiration of readers for eons. How often I longed to trace with my own tongue the temptations and graces of such tales! Who wouldn’t want to be master of a matter so fantastical, so outlandish—and yet still be able to draw homey homilies from the consequences of such fables? Daphne praying to be turned into a laurel tree rather than endure a rape in the god-clutches of a “divinely maddened” Apollo; or the unfaithful Jupiter stashing his part-time squeeze, the ravishing beauty Io, not in some kept-woman’s studio apartment, but in another living form by transforming her…into a cow—albeit a beautiful cow. And Ovid’s touch of detail that makes both god and man acknowledge their wayward foibles, their vulnerability to desire. Such is our condition: half angel, half satyr. What, ultimately, could be more compelling than this poetic recognition of our limitedness adrift in the infinity of our desire?

Always it is against chaotic Nature that human success in the arts in measured. Versailles with its to-the-millimeter immaculate gardens, Jesus with his cracking of Lazarus’ catacomb—leading the experienceless child within each of us on to eternal life, the absence of Death. But Ovid’s fables transmute nature to nature, violating the continuity of life within life as it proceeds from the womb to tomb—rather than through some transvaluation of all values via a post-death resurrection, or the living-death deletion of meaning that narcissistic nihilism provides. Ovid’s metaphor is metaphor emphatic, metaphor literally embodied (were such transformations to actually occur anyplace beyond the agile chambers of the mind). This makes him a prankster in some respects, a comedian of life’s myriad deceptions and switcheroos, slips and oopses. Instead of the authority of Justice (or the inevitability of the furious Eumenides) appearing at the end of a tragedy, enforcing cosmic meaning by the rending apart of life’s tender fabric, we have instead the inescapable acknowledgement of a rueful chuckle forced from the aghast reader at the transformation’s literal unreality and too-intimate horror. To be moved at all by the pageant Ovid presents is to acknowledge our own culpability in the lusts and greeds he lampoons. Yes, I, too, would so covet, so fail of my ideals, so mangle my heavenly morality with my mortal mischief. There, lacking the grace of God, go I; every I that I can imagine being or becoming, in all my rhymes of form and story.

Existentialism is one moral response to the nothingness modern man confronts now that we’ve blown the Holy Ghost from the churches—the stained glass left colorless and drained of ecstasy. The bareness, the thisness, of place, of Everyman in every place, replaced the altar that had once signaled the savior’s triumph over the reality of Death. The very sepulcher became the resonant cross, embossed with neither promise nor stoic resignation, but instead enriched with the simple elaboration of emptiness itself. Ever more intricate become our minuets above the void. As Mallarme noted: “The beautiful, gratuitous, turns into the ornamental, repudiated.” Mallarme’s For Anatole’s Tomb is a restful counterpoint to our innate desire’s torturous wish for the infinite, desire’s tensile beauty making every moment its own gravesite, its own elaboration of the endless dust and nothingness we face. I like the moral stance emblemized in the Pagan torch-passing of praise and memory a bit better myself: an endless relay of meaning lit to life by the burn of magnificent poetry. Such a contingent arrangement must strike modern artists as too hopeful, too communal an enterprise after the wick of self-conscious Romanticism was ignited. But, don’t bet on it! Romanticism itself is a response to the stocks and manacles of Kant’s “no you can’t,” the vivisecting separation of object and subject—a spastic cast of empirical dice—and nothing more than that.

Is it any wonder that Shakespeare took up Ovid as a foil for his first funning with verse? Titus Andronicus pushes the dry coracle of black humor into the slick swamp of tragedy in an ever-modern mash-up going nowhere. Existential titters accompany the gruesome and aghast pies stuffed with human flesh as they are served up piping hot and tucked into with an ignorant will. Who does not eat of Life with the same ignorance as the rapists Shakespeare depicted at the table, pinkies up and kerchiefs to chins? I, too, like the wily Bard, love Ovid in all his miracle and mayhem. So much mayhem!

Our current crop of graphic novels and grim heroes are of Ovid’s mold. Think of today’s Batman, the caped crusader, the Dark Knight, transformed by a desire for justice into a nightwinged bat, who turns his midnight vengeance into a secular grail tipping over with blood. Catwoan, Aquaman, Doc Oc—all half-breeds wandering bewildered in landscapes of existential angst. I, too, had wanted to honor with the sweat of inspiration and the grace of rhyme of one of Ovid’s raving fables, but as I toured the crazed slop-house of the Greek gods, the Roman gnomes, as Ovid had carved and enlarged them, I was struck by the fiery violence his tales told of—and, I admit, I was afraid to retail such gory goods in my modest mall of art.

I turned the prized pages of my Ovid over once again. Even the fable of fey Salmacis, I noticed, with her “weak, enfeebling streams,” ends in a dual-sex hermaphroditic unity that is still illegal in many countries. The lovers’ tentative rapprochement has some of Absurdio’s hesitant desire in its outlines—an expression of being’s ignorant need to be, and therefore be loved. So twined together is our self and our sex. Salmacis and Hermaphroditus was almost the tale I re-told. What if Absurdio met a wet, eight-armed Venusian princess in her tidal pool of green chlorine? The denouement was still too horror-genre for me to proceed with that story, but the delicacy of Salmacis and Hemaphroditus’ meeting was a model for Absurdio’s first grope toward hope—the challenge and comfort that concupiscence provides:

The boy knew nought of love, and, touched with shame,
He strove, and blushed, but still the blush became;
In rising blushes still fresh beauties rose;
The sunny side of fruit such blushes shows,
And such the moon, when all her silver white
Turns in eclipses to a ruddy light.
The Nymph still begs, if not a nobler bliss,
A cold salute at least, a sister’s kiss;
And now prepares to take the lovely boy
Between her arms. He, innocently coy,
Replies, "Oh leave me to myself alone,
You rude, uncivil nymph, or I’ll begone."
—J. A.

I settled, perhaps a touch too reflexively, upon the pageantry of Pygmalion’s tale. After all, the story had been exampled brilliantly by Shaw, and there’s even a musical modeled from its bones—though fleshed with sexism and an elitist tone of triumphalism (to which I am not, confessedly, adverse). This story has no goopy, blood-bludgeoned ending, no comeuppance, no disastrous consequence where Nature regains the reins of Justice and executes the feckless nabob who knew well enough into whose guarded garden he had trespassed. No, here Venus stoops to conquer, and extends a merciful pity on her inspired subject. It is the love story of the artist and his object, his sculpted creation, a female mate conjured from pure desire and art’s millimeter-mania for perfection. Yes, a fine tautology to lead me down the garden path. What post-modern word-whittler could resist the inevitable levels of self-reference, the circumference of innuendo bound to grow Falstaff-fat? And, with luck and cunning, perhaps my Absurdio could be as happy a sinning creation as my fellow Ovid-fan Shakepere had managed? To what Mediterraneanesque setting would my gods and goddesses descend? What glamorous goods would press against my alluring shop window?

The main item in the inventory of Venus and Vesuvius, as you will soon plainly see, is an adolescent male I have dubbed Sir Absurdio. Absurdio is left alone on the planet Venus where he was born, the only son of two intrepid scientists appointed to explore our over-heated solar neighbor. Why he has been left so tragically alone, and at such a crucial age, our tale will unfold. I myself was so ill as a teen with an ulcerative onset conjured by the psychic injuries of my parent’s divorce, that I missed the last two years of my American high school experience. I grok some aspects of Absurdio’s puzzling solitude. No friends from our 3,000-strong clan of Marlboro Mustangs possessed the fortitude to visit a lonely, pimple-ridden writer-to-be in the forested enclosure of his one-boy farm-forest prison. The only friends who favored me with their presence were Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Ben Bova, Phillip K. Dick, J. R. R. Tolkien, Terry Brooks, Stephen R. Donaldson, and other luminaries of the imagination’s intergalactic parsecs. They are the reason I placed my Ovidian vale in outer space.

Now, if you’ll strap on your muse-provided jet-packs, let’s zoom to the moon—and beyond!

Gregg Glory, August 2013.

American Descants (Government//Works)

American Descents (Government//Works)

Aug 252020

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Venus and Vesuvius

Aug 242020

A curiouser and curiouser work of science-fiction narrative poetry

 

Gregg Glory
[Gregg G. Brown]


COPYRIGHT © 1998 
PUBLISHED BY: BLAST PRESS

His kind heart was obedient to truth's troublous pulse. 
 [*troubling]  


I have not loved the world, nor the world me; 
Never flattered its rank breath, nor bowed 
Patient knee to its pale idolatries, 
Nor coined my cheek with smiles, nor cried 
Aloud in worship of an echo; none of the crowd 
Deems me one of such a throng; among them 
I stood, but not of them--- in my furled thoughts 
Shrouded, which were not their thoughts, and had I not 
Defiled my mind, I still might myself thus subdue. 
 
 
Beyond a mortal man impassioned far 
At these voluptuous accents, he arose, 
Ethereal, flushed, and like a throbbing star 
Seen mid sapphire heaven's deep repose; 
Into her dream he melted, as the rose 
Blendeth its odor with the violet,--- 
Solution sweet: meantime the frost wind blows 
Like Love's alarum pattering the sharp sleet 
Against the window-panes; St. Agnes' moon hath set.  
          --- J. K.,  St. Agnes' Eve

The Poem

[On Earth]
A tale strange, soft-focused, distant, then clear,
My dark muse eyes me, sullen-silent as the night
A ruined foil flashing back fabulous suns
Should I take up the Author’s patrolling pose?
I sigh, my ruffian hearers, whose ocean silence beats
[on Venus]
Enigmatic clouds crimped a divine skyline.
All this, and more: honey-blood serenades
Sad years sequestered Absurdio to his mournful room
His pubis, freshly ringletted with dirty thoughts,
His curdling thighs unbundled boings and sprang,
He cramply encamped in a humid, drenching tent
In the hell-lit incline of his velvelour lax-o-boy,
The see-through water of his ice-light heart,
Cold skies collated from his wish-index nipped him.
She, the sphinx, the minx, discovered was,
Her maiden, sundial, shattered hand ticked up,
A lonely cloud, flumed crimson, bounded by
Absurdio was shanghaied by his consciousness
Never would one lunar hair of her crisp coiffure
Genuine Absurdio in patient prayer genuflected,
Absurdio resumed his restless tour
A strain, a stain was upon everything like black snow,
Astronaut Absurdio tumbled,— uncapsuled, lost
Desire freeze-framed him in his vouyer’s foyer,
Peeping through a hiked skirt of curling Alpine pine
Should he bridegroom first with attendant touch
He touched, or his seeming hand seemed to touch,
The furred head, moribund, profound, turned
“Forgive my flash of hubris, while I loiter to insist,
“I wonder just what happened to this merry pair
“What catastrophe’s haphazard track did they pace,
“Timeline.” Absurdio sighed against his hammock’s
Absurdio, desire’s soldier, soldered on
Spilling balm into the mini-labyrith of his brain.
Her (was she warm?) form poured in oblagattoes;
Created conscious again in his dream-ripple,
As if to dissipate, a distraught wisp
Deciphered sounds now entered her transparent ears
Yet where was this wizard woman’s twinkly spark
There was always some sort of gangly changing going on
A freckled Mrs. Frankenstein whose veritable veins
Her happenstance phantom, her tech-lechery
For this sceptred instant, grinningly alive
Love herself had jokingly sponsored their sparring war
And the nasty narrator choked on their lifesaver

Condemning shadows quite. — A. & C.

“Stop moping!” she would cry: “Look at the harlequins!”

“What harlequins? Where?”

“Oh, everywhere. All around you. Trees are harlequins, words are harlequins. So are situations and sums. Put two things together– jokes, images– and you get a triple harlequin. Come on! Play! Invent reality!”

I did. By Jove, I did.

— V. N.

[on Earth]

1
A tale strange, soft-focused, distant, then clear,
As when a movie cures myopia, or a drear
Nightmare that startles us, shelters;– or sordid dream’s
Thematic shadows get ripped by a flashlight pen
Oblivious to mood and setting. Such a tale, my friends,
As Satan commences in blasphemy, with commentary,
But listening saints can hear in holy choir,
I begin, here, with you, though it changes in an hour.

2
My dark muse eyes me, sullen-silent as the night
Whereon with insect wings she glides, flapping late.
Exotic quixotic, I depict her on my verses’ vase
Inverting the immortality her throne supposes.
The castled moon below her, she’ll glare on,
Past marbled Mars to veiny Venus, if she must
In that post-lunar landscape sift gold words from dust.
My dragged heart blackens and thuds its tars. What roses,
What Sols I scribble, she dictates. I am her pawn.
I am too mild-modest to unveil the thundered stars.

3
A ruined foil flashing back fabulous suns
Whispers lightnings in my wilted breath. Strip-
Teased away from the Ultra-nutribar I eat
To aura languid limbs in rugged health, the slashings
Shatter my dry attentions into balmy tears.
I teeter too near dissolution to feel the fear.
The velvet chitter of my needleteethed pets,—
My pens, my peers, my pellucid, inventive cheres
Pallidly rattle in the inky stand. They hold my soul
In the slangy, charmed embrasures of their Latinate script,
Their nibbed hubbub of syllables and shivery tongues.

4
Should I take up the Author’s patrolling pose?
Hover ponderously, an editor’s eyebrow
Above witchy Reality? Or ride, randily astride,
My meditative pen? Amused, my muses?
Perhaps, a precocious Iago moulting mirrors,
I’ll lose my ahhing audience in appalling smokes—
A magician of the moment consoled by disappearance.
Tranquil, lamplit in night’s lousy shroud,
My selves assemble at the clarion bic-click
That drum-taps my unruly soul’s tribal pow-wow
To warrior order; even my fibulating, lying heart
Capitulates, fisting the spurious spirit-spear
Of its found rhyme, off-rhyme, rhyme again.

5
I sigh, my ruffian hearers, whose ocean silence beats
My aching soul’s sharp shoals to eloquence;
I sigh, and, if you’d spare an ear to hear me,
Take my caddish, candied language from me; mug me!
Or, if you’d be vooshed to Venus, succumb to me,
Turn the cheap keys of your failing spirits over
To me, a hoarse, corrupt rocket-car,
Tar-catarrhed in ineluctable sin, and begin.
Harrum. I sigh. —Oh skip it, skip it!
Skip this daft narrator’s gnarly part;
Such naughty nihilism ill-becomes me. Instead,
I return the guilty pearl of our veiled tale noir
To you, viewers. Vide, lecte, dears. Now start.

* * *

[on Venus]

6
Enigmatic clouds crimped a divine skyline.
Lacy ices drifted on acid, carbolic pools.
Lurid skies, vague purple or angst incarnadined,
Shone on no birds twanging tangled lutes.
Spilled dusts of galaxies in staid starlight burned.
Intricate dusts hurly-burlied burning snows
Blown to walking nightmare by outre genomes.
A fetid, festal energy spooned from sherberty clouds,
Lime bright, or mocha coffee brune, or confusedly infused
With venusian magenta, a trying shade
For human retina unused to alien marvels.

7
All this, and more: honey-blood serenades
Of ochre-aquamarine, a sheer fantasy’s phantasm
Poured the gorgeous poisons of a world of hues
On our young, shiveringly young, hero: Absurdio.
His tintinnabulating spine rived, racked with spasms;
His single organism sizzled in Venus’ puzzle.
Down in an unpleasant dome he homed. Absurio dozed,
Ruminating ruin on his quiet couch; half-deranged
His tender head rested, like an exhausted comet.
Such a new, human arrival among the strange!

8
Sad years sequestered Absurdio to his mournful room
Alone, as only a circus clown minus patsy may be found,
Leap-frogging loneliness in life’s third, unattended
Ring. His parents (in previous incarnations now
Photographically enhanced) had evaporated by mistake,—
Measuring tinselly elements at an underground lake
Of caramel kerosene, and smoking during break.
Wretched, abused Absurdio rewound the fatal video
Until their surprised incinerated faces aged to silvery frays.
And now, eons later, alone, adolescence pounced.

9
His pubis, freshly ringletted with dirty thoughts,
Like a haloed moon arose. In the winsome autumn
Of recent nights, It came upright, red-shafted, huge,
A crooning bone pronged among wronged sheets—
A blushful lighthouse’s thirsty straw agog a spermy sea—
The perfectly predictable consequence of testosterone
Spritzed by time’s Tom Thumb into both boy and man.
His hands grew awkward, strong, with hardened palms.
His bearding chin squared beyond childish qualms.

1 0
His curdling thighs unbundled boings and sprang,
Pirouetting poignant manipulated triplets
Upon the pulsing pointer of his moaning groin
As he swam Pan’s ancient, ardent australian crawl awash
In the Caribbean crucible of his sweat-swaled dreams;
His sleepy teeth ground against giant, tiaraed teats.
Wounded by his own desire, Absurdio spawned
Unseemly lesion-dots on his knotted pajama bottoms,
Paler than the snaily paisleys already winding there.

1 1
He cramply encamped in a humid, drenching tent
And coughed awake still aching, torqued in shrunken pants.
His furring, burgeoning body’s once lucent form
Clouded toward stormy adulthood’s horny, knuckled norm.
Only the marginal innocence of his virgin lips,
—Pouted to receive an apparition’s dissolving kiss,—
Retained their fulsome, petulant, purplish childishness.

1 2
In the hell-lit incline of his velvelour lax-o-boy,
One saw a cowling shadow parachute slo-mo from his skull
In the delineated darkness of a filmed dream.
His silent eyes, closed to heaven, endured
A durable pair of bug-ugly goggles, snapped
Primly in place by a pinkish plastic tether at his ears.
His nimble, impaitient thumb drubbed adagios
Against his impaitient, tempted temples. Ohs
Yawned from below his sweet, nasal declivity;
The VR headset warped, a double bow upon his brow,
Poised to twinge and whang its dodgy target,
Those red circles centered on just one misty wish.

1 3
The see-through water of his ice-light heart,
Fuel-injected by the rude roar and vodka-boil of sex,
Was doubled in the VR goggles’ shotglass apparatus.
In tonight’s tittering iteration of his single,
Searing dream, where was the girl, the She? Let us
Scan the fake, pick the pixels, lozenge the rengas
Of programmers’ pop-eyed loops, swallow suns
Or do whatever, whoever, however need be done
To spotlight in life’s divided cell the primogenic One.

1 4
Cold skies collated from his wish-index nipped him.
An earthly Arcadia appeared; a galvanized valley
Tinny under aluminum heaven, was sourced
From whacked smacks of aberrant bits of static,
Enhancing his whims with imagination’s majesty;
Inverted mountains, tipsy on their starch peaks,
Ranged still lakes loaded with shotgunned verbaneum;
Mossed redbreasts creeped across the angled lawn
Mooing at woodpeckers who chewed trees of lead;
Star-flowered vines screwed absent-present oaks of air
And purled like invisible trellises, going nowhere.

1 5
She, the sphinx, the minx, discovered was,
A downcast abandoned statuary whose ass ascends;
A shadowy mute among the academic ivy’s gloss,
Her stiff stone skin was one exquisite blank
Compounded of rare lights bleeding as they fell
Through other, farther, fainter taintless lights,
Defining whiteness. So, above. As for below
Her nether half a blue fluid ink remained,
A disfigured shadow semblance that attached,
A skittish circus tent, to her body’s upper whiteness.

1 6
Her maiden, sundial, shattered hand ticked up,
An apostle pointing at a sky-blue book,
Shafting through Nature’s monstrous greenness
With a simple whiteness summed of simpleness,
As if to spill a bell. Attendant hours tolled
Cumulus-slow through soft forenoon’s sways
Momenting toward the slave existence Absurdio had always
Intended to be hers. His cola-fouled breath he held,
Dithering her splendid image with his swan-soft,
Slightly perspiring palm atop the swervy curve and cup
Of the alarmingly mobile, docile, swift control ball.

1 7
A lonely cloud, flumed crimson, bounded by
The imitation-shape of her complex suavities,
Half-geared to swell a summer rainstorm’s tears
In puddly, ploppy pluvial benediction upon
The evil coeval heat of his hot delirium.
“O half-groped, untouched, doped isotope
Of this radon-free semi-demi-reality! All if, if, if!
Will you never swivel or pivot ever
From your smooth stagger-pattern on the TV
In vivid splinters? A decadent Miss’ shaggy quiff?”

1 8
Absurdio was shanghaied by his consciousness
To a heroin-incertain fairyland of ifs. Poor Ab!
No angelic integers or numeric mumbles ever spazzed
Original anger or new-budded love
From the mutant look of her elect electrons’
Seamless electric face. Thrill and chance,
Those boiling bodings that hurt the nerves,
Braked their roulettes and rollercoasters, moped —
Exiled by inconsequent conquest’s certain grace.

1 9
Never would one lunar hair of her crisp coiffure
Split off, twirl, or dangerously dawn orange
Like the burnt inhaled singe of a spliff. Never, p’fft!
All love was dead, desire defunct, hissed flat
In the monumental deflation of the sure.
Where was to be the wrenching fix, the heady remedy?
What cure could toy his totem-world to stark reality?
Absurdio plunked his whole mind in his heart
And thought. And thought. And thought. Could it hurt to pray?

2 0
Genuine Absurdio in patient prayer genuflected,
In patient prayer did patiently inspect his knees;
Any glance listing against those lucent eyes
Saw God reflected, a profounder Blank in blankness.
Deep in the gothic fundament of their tombs
Responsive saints spun shriveled, shrived cadavers
To hear the holy moistness of so undevout a mouth
Spout “God.” And yet, no rent heaven yawned
Anointing him with day, nor remade what he was,
Nor she, the ecstatic static and the playful clay.

2 1
Absurdio resumed his restless tour
Of the prismatic computer’s chilly rainbow rooms:
Phony noon presided in tangerine, heart-rending hues
Over the local, erotic focus of his loves.
A spouting, sympathetic cloud maneuvered near
And passed on again into frisky sunshimmer;
A clammy aftertouch of lemony shadow lingered
On the moat-dark undersides of fractal leaves.
Snoring backwards in his spraddled chair
Silly birches flickered streaked with oval droops of cool,
While galloping Cupid’s reigning love-thoughts trot
Down his sleepy cheeks and trace
A crystal bridle drawn by drool.

2 2
A strain, a stain was upon everything like black snow,
And felt more wicked ice within his stalactite heart
Than raw outward aberrance dared to show.
An iridescent darkness, a deepness of absence
Soiled the unpointoutable apparent to his witness soul.
Her dimpled elbows, simple bends, digged
Into the soft argyle turf with wounding runes.
In her empty, happy lap, sidelong sifted sapphires
Of quiet light dashed and spilt their milky stars,
Spattering trace evidence of some slight, damp want.

2 3
Astronaut Absurdio tumbled,— uncapsuled, lost
Among Beauty’s forlorn flotsam, a jetted jerk
Whose sour foreknowledge coffin-mittened dripping hands
Clenching and unclenching in a madman’s clasp
After stark Snow White who twirlled eternally repelled
From the lurching, avid lunges of his untutored touch.
The magnet-magic that created her kept her from his crush.
Then his naked, nasty, gnarled, marooned left foot
(Or was it thonged and handsome, a Greek god’s ped?)
Intruded, thus, into the afternoon’s spooled storyline.

2 4
Desire freeze-framed him in his vouyer’s foyer,
A randy stallion-statue displayed above his mare,
Plumply morose in his recreated shyness, same as ever.
What further use was doubt— unless by addition’s error
He wished to subtract himself? He became devout, dissevered
All annoy of anguish from his mirror-minon
Dunce, each ounce. His on-screen he was there, here,
The really reel, real deal. And yet…. (and yet!) And yet,
The wet, generated earth still presumed to bountifully bouy
His calculated weight. This dream ‘he’ within a dream
Dispersed his doubts of truth with hopes of joy.

2 5
Peeping through a hiked skirt of curling Alpine pine,
Absurdio sunk binoculate eyes against her buck
Naked, pale, and blue-washed bod, drunkly tipped
Against Venus’ fin-de-fawn and sine curve vale.
A sun-crouched lioness, but blue-lipped, she lay
Keeping her cold secret, at once lit hottentot hot
And known freon-cold to the potential touch.
Our boy, the trembling man, only then began, at first,
By frittery extentions of his film-self to engulf
Her palpable sides with his ghost’s caresses.

2 6
Should he bridegroom first with attendant touch
Her shoulder made lemony by sunlight, sponging his lust
On what was some Venus Eve’s first, bitterest, citrine brine?
His space-gloved hand went floating toward her
Side,— the sly, slippery side nearest, dearest him.
Intermittettent abscences were eradicated, bit by byte,
Solving sober Zeno’s ouzo-drunken paradox
In the gross, closed glance of Absurdio’s dreaming eye,
(Though God’s ultra-fine squint might more acutely stutter)
Closer to her faux female beavery smoothness
By pixel-quantum amplitudes of dotted light brightening
Toward the ultimate touch of her molten shoulder.

2 7
He touched, or his seeming hand seemed to touch,
A pebble-cool graininess of skin for one firm instant,
As if heaven had been reached by pounce and poise;
This hesitant touch faze-shifted to a hasty dissolve
—Sugary sands sifting sinuously
Though tightening fingers crooked to close at last
An empty angry fist upon her nothingness. He gasped!
A hatted rabbit in a worn mauve waistcoat laughed;
Its albino eye from a daubed laurel’s closure
Laughed, as that funny-bunny Fate has always laughed
Whenever overreaching man guessed his guesses sure.

2 8
The furred head, moribund, profound, turned
And spake: “What neglected nail spurs these pauses,
Pulling slurring the nimble wiggle of our narrative thread?
Do I skip a blip in my story, hoary hearers?
Has consumation’s consumme soured to confusion?
Flip back a windy, lefthand page, sages, and see.
Returned, dears? Me too. I’m here, waving gravely.
Tain’t so easy to dismiss a self-eulogizing myth, is it?
This story’s story is insular and thick with tricks.

2 9
“Forgive my flash of hubris, while I loiter to insist,
Exonerating myself like a murder defence’s memoirist:
But I’m guiltless, guiltless! My omniscient narrator’s
Rumored Diety is in fine effect. I’m winged
Jove-King of these greek acres of pasty pages.
Bored of my bon homme odyssian maundering? Well, then,
Page down, my d(r)ear, inscrutible cherubs,
Pass my unflattering flounce of digression’s procession
And surpass in a click the dark prow of my tale.

3 0
“I wonder just what happened to this merry pair
The He and She of everyone and everywhere or when
During her gentle dissolution’s final cue?
Did she, nameless, moan cognomens in the approaching
Pinch of his garrolous, approaching claw?
Did she shudder like clawed rainbow trout when she saw
The roaring boy-bear’s troglodytic unencumberd maw
Lathering after her innocent, undressed tresses?
Or did her thin skin whip him, a scorpion pinned?
Did formaldehyde smear her wincing sides?

3 1
“What catastrophe’s haphazard track did they pace,
Hand in hand around the rosy road’s fated bend
Skipping to some bland fabulist’s quickly scripted ‘The End’?
Among what sunset’s sullen yellows did he reap
Her raped, awakened wheats, if he did? Or did
She winnow her weeping self away, flossed dust,
Ere his sly scythe could sigh thro’ her flaxen fields?
—But, I’m done with this stuttering narration’s
Nervous tick, and clock you back to our mainline’s

3 2
“Timeline.” Absurdio sighed against his hammock’s
Narrow netting,– for so much potential so absolutely lost
Must give one pause. His ungainly goggles
Crested a slicker pate, slid syruped perhaps,
On a ski-slope nose crinkled at some sodium
Odor, or perhaps a tinge of things ranker and fainter.
Absurdio cursed. Gangly in her dropped socks, her half-
Strangled form performed, in soliel-licked imagination,
Astericked tricks beyond conception. —A-hem,
The sinuous mystery of that trapped tadpole, Desire,
Increases in the pale, ectoplasmic tale below:

3 3
Absurdio, desire’s soldier, soldered on
His mountain-rhymer’s gogs again, divinely tighter
To his thrusting skull, blotting out svelt Venus’
Ambient, intermittent light. Slowly those eyes
Settled into stellated iris-wideness, as inside
His interior landscape darkened by degrees,
And nightrise, calm and serene, came caressing
His openness with her ever-maiden obscurities.
He scanned half-doubtingly about. And she
Was there, scarcely visible, a luminous intrusion,
A pressure of touching light that arced and ached,

3 4
Spilling balm into the mini-labyrith of his brain.
The setting exactly trite and tragic as before,
Ressurrected when he thumbed ‘Restore.’
Ilex trees, or their avuncular, venusian
Mulberry mirror doubles, dappled lashy elongations
On the foreshortened, deforrested ground of his being
In leopard blotches. His smaller, computer-generated
Self stepped sprightly a miniaturized horizon,
Lent a tightrope-walker’s lightness nightly
By a sparse, spectacular gravity that doubled
The veiny, vulnerable, fluer-de-lis neck-lengths
Of the arising flowers that haunted dawn.

3 5
Her (was she warm?) form poured in oblagattoes;
Her breasts’ concupiscence floresced and finished
In attentive nipples; he shivvered, diving
Inner-spacewards again, unstoppable, blushed
By the program’s thoughtful prop of rose backlight.
A soapy sigh scrubbed from his bubbling lungs;
How he tautly longed to eye her mufflered infinite!
That which hung encoded, skiffed and scudded, behind
Scratched cataracts of her teeming, purblind eyes.

3 6
Created conscious again in his dream-ripple,
Delux-outfitted in apple pants and a velour-
Lined waistcoat swarming with swan buttons,
Potted and puffed, germily germinating Absurdio
Bloomed, attempting the Tristian romantic manouver
But abandoned by the stern narrative frame
Of a contrite Christian’s uber-grace.
His hands, as pawns, nakedly displayed
His emotions’ opening gambit in a dream-slur
Of utter lovliness. He touched, she shuddered,

3 7
As if to dissipate, a distraught wisp
Or shy butterfly flittered from a lepidopterist’s
Urgent lurch, more cuffed than coaxed;
A cranky collapse inaugurated by the drastic lack
Of available, unavailing, RAM space.
She shivered, but held. Her spongy shoulder
Underwent a faint shimmer, as if conscious-
Ness were being beamed aboard. Her patient skin
Was still all ash and shale, but her awaiting hair
Lost its stiff crispness, gained a honey-tone
And the delectable bubble-bounce of “body”.

3 8
Deciphered sounds now entered her transparent ears.
A distant bird minced its watery treblings
With the gorgon terrors of her first, lurid heartbeat
In her registering brain. A pale breath escaped,
Although Absurdio would’ve sworn he had not heard
Any inaugural breath tipple and enter. Her eyes reared
To know what stun had touched her as they flared
Into wet, instamatic life. Their pristine prisms
Socketed a world within her newly permeable skull.

3 9
Yet where was this wizard woman’s twinkly spark
Among all the engrossing chaos of her fabulous mass?
He had not yet eyed within her eye that smarmy,
Human cloud of becoming fogging her skyey iris
Which marks troublous love’s trembling, intrepid step
Contra-distinct from lisping lust’s insipid limp.
Not yet, not yet. His playful paradise was still
Too innocent in its ivied, idyllic clarity
To boast of that human ruination dubbed Love.
Stars crossed gaily, like kites, in night’s meadows above.

4 0
There was always some sort of gangly changing going on
Within the weathery swirl of this inner world
Beset by the dramatic setting of Romance’s
Hurrying hurricanes and tortorous calms.
Her addled belt slipped at his toying touch
To couch in the creative vulcan valleys
Of her slippery thighs. His dizzy head
Danced, lassoed with animate, singing stars,
As in Disney-visions where cool cutlery
Carols hausfraus and bold boy hunters subdue, solo,
Lugubrious bull-moose. He was in love, she lived!

4 1
A freckled Mrs. Frankenstein whose veritable veins
Pulsed bloomed beads of blood up her supple neck.
Living swans lounged in her frowning brow;
Honey lozenges waterfalled her scuffy alto
Into azure pools of purer contralto. She spoke!
Her new words, her first, purred: “Absurd—….”
But he had already stopped her half-
Articulate baby talk with the sweeter understanding
Contained in a kiss he hoped unending.

4 2
Her happenstance phantom, her tech-lechery
Semblable, spasmed by benign self-deceit,
Flowered into frissoned being on his primped lips.
He let the solipcistic kiss linger, linger,
As a royal rosepetal will huddle on kinked, kingly lips.
The gamey wind was game to applaud their parading,
Clapping aspen leaves whose whirl on them was hubbed.
What they knew somehow was what was love.
Of the universe’s immensest aviary, they knew
That they themselves were the central doves.

4 3
For this sceptred instant, grinningly alive
In their sparkling cave and sprinkled spire,
Absurdio and his girl were joyously joined,
Twin instances of some remoter, scumbled One,
Identical startled arcs of a single desire.
A stately elm jigsawed the rooted stars
With wagging shadows, while moonlit music tooted.
Oh, they kissed and kissed until heaven split,
And split again in moody, Mandelbrotian, fractal fit.

4 4
Love herself had jokingly sponsored their sparring war
Of embraces, each deep cincture tighter and tighter.
Her teasing taffeta said slurring, silken mumbles
Against his entranced hips burning rope-burn sudden
At her cloistered damsel’s clotted knot veiled within.
She did not hesitate, but with rapid hand
And palliative tongue urging extra surges
Moved with the remover to remove.
Had History’s grainy memory vouchsafed their names
Their wantonness had been famous. As is,
They tickled and tilted, strained and parted;
And strained again, until joy’s jubilant hulahoop
Rattled to napping quiet at their intermixed feet.

4 5
And the nasty narrator choked on their lifesaver
Halo (rubyfruitier).

finis

Unused Bits

 
[for climax] 
On her home-town Mon Venus, the swarthy pitcher mounts 

Against death's delerious impact and mossy Time's 
Verdant verdict, that takes back (not yet, not yet!) 
Our personal, rag-tag, tattered, hole in the ground 
With wild mounds of lushness. Held winceless

Youth Youth Youth

Aug 242020


 

First Works 

Copyright ©1994 by Gregg G. Brown 

Published by 
BLAST PRESS

Diminution

 Smaller than a shut nut in its
 Candy can skin, 
 The silken icecube melts, 
 The compact cricket swells to distant hymns, 
 And the tough grass suffers into seed. 
 
 (It is a bantam birth.) 
 
 Many of the big things in this world 
 Can be described as 
 Small. 
 
 The delicate ballet of 
 Mountains bowing low 
 As bathtub waves between 
 The popsickle peaks 
 Is 
 One example, 
 
 But there are many others. 
 Many many; ask the brilliant 
 Corn-kernel sun, and he 
 Will tell you. 
 
 I myself will tell you and tell you 
 Until finally, balled like a baby, 
 I diminish into happiness.

April Mechanical

 Organized neatly between the
 divisive particles of air 
 near the old scratched moss 
 of some ending season 
 
 grey beneath green as 
 anxious among concrete park 
 benches it spreads, the air, 
 blue in imitation of the 
 
sloshing fountain water, the water 
not an expression of thought 
but rather in its deepening 
stance a mirror for 
 
angry clouds cherry-red 
with the long brittle atoms 
of a slashing sun, a few 
rough trees deport 
 
their skinny limbs 
into the jealous sky, naked 
to speak to us with their 
completely unhinging buds

Quote

'She who hesitates is
lost," she declared.But 
what is there to 
lose?Only innocence 
 
in the small pale and 
not completely impartial turn 
and plod of her delicately 
dancing feet.Only notice 
 
the impartial fervor 
of that tilting lily-head 
against whose stone we (approximately 
may measure ourselves. 
 
Our faults lie open 
and are described in an 
amazing minutiae by those 
thin dim cracks between 
 
the feathered petals.They 
only serve to emphasize 
the fact with their apparently 
indifferent oblivious blooming

Cold Moles and Dreams are Roots

Creative as the curl of candles, 
When they burn, the going deeper 
Of winter shrews or summer friends 
Asleep and burrowing out their 
Blankets.That calmest of thinking trees, 
The dream, divides and redivides its sunken 
 
Cells; placenta tentacles lie down 
To the birth of buried baby 
Shrews, hatched in dreaming imagination; 
And the dreaming sleepers scuttle, crab- 
Like on their hands, lid-full eyes 
Dull as old spoons.Disordered bits 
 
Of life rise to fill their empty 
Minds as grey and pearl as parachutes.Star- 
Nosed moles furrow through their drowsy sight, 
And crab-like on their hands they dig 
And dig between the different darks 
 
Of night and sleep.Rooting for 
The peace of meals kept deep in dirt. 
Oh, turn the naked number down! the failing 
Sleepers cry --- flustered fingers still 
Half-dragging through the sheets.... 
 
And the red sled, snaky arm without fingers 
Ferries its bald insanities back 
To the cluttered basement of old dreams.Yet, 
Nothing sinks but clatters when it lands. 
And the long awaiting eyes, cool as a moist 
  Mole's nose, wake at last and eat the day.

A Bar of Ivory Soap
Sitting Near the Faucet

Just manufactured.Its original skin has been thrown away.It is no
Longer needed, the pure self has emerged, Virginal and white.White
white white!Expansive plantations of snow or one dimensional
lilies.The souls of St. Francis of Assisi and Thomas a Beckett look
something like this, I have been told, Precise in its new rims it is
the magic castle from a distant story.In the high dark window there
is a tiny, elegant woman waving and waving.

Destination

I have thought of heaven, often,
And of hell, 
 
Everyone is hurrying to get there, 
To be in the big rooms with the wide floors, 
And the carpeting up to your armpits, 
And the smooth marble corridors 
As empty as thought. 
There are no urns to clutter up 
Your mantelpiece, and to become, by dote, 
As big as a baboons chest 
And as blue as his anger. 
 
Everyone is hurrying to get there and see 
Just how big 
The windowpanes are.

Night Lures (I Am Sleeping)

Softly, 
The moon blues, 
Substanceless as any dead day. 
Like the loyal marsh at Baybridge who jingled 
And who I liked 
In the high August frosts and mists. 
It was like a large drunken friend waiting 
For me to find the misplaced knees and socketless stray arms 
And admire them.And wait. 
The ground there was soft 
As broken-in shoes. 
I used to 
Bank off those marshmallow shores, 
My father's shallow boat clipping neatly under me 
 
Under a cool noon.I 
would like to have my stomach launched into 
Me like that again. 
 
The grey-green water lies all around me. 
 
Two catfish leap 
But do not dazzle. 
They hover in the timorous mid-air. 
Their fins half blue from shadows. 
A fine detail of foam follows like a sketch 
  Their fast bodies 
The shapes of moonhills. 
The white commas of their undersides pause silently 
Before me.I love to watch them in their 
Paradox.They are helpless 
In their joy. 
From behind one reed thin as a needle 
A blue fly's head pokes. 
Curious with eyes 
It is amazed at these otherworld avians 
As wet and smooth as washed stones. 
 
I landed home empty-handed.

The Eagle has Landed

Ralph, the man who saw with feathers spread, 
Leaned his bones over (they were golden in the dawn 
And said: 'I'm not an eagle am I?' 
 
“No, you're not.” 
 
Vertebrae, vertebrae 
In arch of back to circle rolling. 
The red rolled east.It was a perfect morning 
For flight.His beak was red in this bent light. 
His beak was red shaped 
And ready. 
 
“'Tis time for bed, my Ralph, 'tis time to sleep.” 
 
Ralph was gleaming golden in his forward shoes. 
'Am I not an eagle?' His arms were lit like down 
In this light, The man put fingers spread 
And leapt.

The Dark Roots

Hugeappletree 
appetite big enough 
to eat 
all your own 
fruit-- 
 
The sun 
circular on the leaves 
and echoed 
in the production-- 
the 
dangerous droplet 
 
An apple, 
it will suffice 
in one bite 
to dissuade you 
thinking of the sun

from out the tomb like a cloud

Above this town where I lay sleeping 
young happily birds convulse minutely 
one tremendously blown hilarious 
green leaf of wind (in ochres of eve 
it is dying) come suddenly finally up 
from compactly hysterical graves.Bliss 
fully mindless is of these faces 
on the pickets these sweatless heads 
in dole attire; these pink purple blades 
 
who are flying who are the dentings 
my footfalls have said along the edges 
of day and crisply space and down down 
dwindling once wells of when remit (for 
it is summer and pregnantly snowingly dusk)

Display Against Society

One day, cloudless, 
Refined to a clarity, to one colour 
        as with a wall, 
The famous international explorer, 
Saint Jacque, to escape the strictures of his race, 
Leapt (formally dressed) 
Off of three bridges, leaping 
With triple-reenforced rubber bands Celastics") 
Gripping his British African ankles. 
‘I go to save all men,' indignant, jumping, 
'After the manner of the Afriks.') 
 
His tux-tails catching the airs wings, he went. 
 
Be pulled up just short 
Of the water (or the rocks) whichever 
Was appropriate in whichever case. 
       And after, when I proposed: 
Why why (the background sistrums sheathing 
Sounds with sounds) 
His teeth cried out (smiling): 
To feel as if alive.

NOTE: The ritual described here is taken from a reclusive tribe in the Congo where it is a rite of passage for young boys intended to make them independent of the shrewdness and courage of women, the story being that a woman ones, to escape from her husband into the arms of her lover tied vines to her ankles and jumped from a cliff; the husband was too scared to follow, thus making good her escape and happy her life. (Now a common sport in North America.)

Last Year

the dogs were in the house and sniffing 
the last decayed amours of left lasagna; 
clack and tap the toes, fur stuck out 
between the friendly pads the entire 
summer, no other noise, 
everyone dead or gone, vacationing with cameras 
to return with a foreign inspiration; 
'thank you,' and my thin lips vomit at the grace. 
To no other sound but the happy clacks 
and hanging, painted tongues 
I wrote; I even wrote: 'the flowers nod 
and peck like too many a sun.' 
Today: 
'the day grows down in dismayed capitulation.'

India

An idol 
tall as three big men 
curving lines 
 
bridge 
of the great green nose 
to the still arches 
 
drawn without motion 
above the poignant half-sad 
lips with the same 
 
memory of 
decayed gardens princes 
lazy about the 
 
common grounds smiling 
at the women to the women the women only 
faintly portrayed 
 
by the best artists 
linens 
close about their bodies thin 
 
unfraying silks 
on them about them 
unconsciously 
 
as the air itself 
or breathing 
lightly 
 
the final descending lines 
of the chin 
raising 
 
the ogling eyes 
of visitors here gathered 
strangers to the courtly 
 
past lust 
back upwards thereby 
putting 
 
the whole 
face into focus assembled 
block by block

Ritually

the amoeba 
squeeze and bulge 
their green and 
thinly syncopating 
bodies while, 
at their sides, 
there are (beating) 
the smoothly 
flagellant supplicants.They 
will suffice.

Mated Pheasants

Their carriages are upright
in a dry green.They stand 
at once passionate and familiar, 
 
His beak is respectful, level, 
rather than diffident in uptilt, 
his tail a downward sloping tube 
 
like a story.His face is bright 
and remembers everything, one formidable claw 
hangs, while flat the other holds him 
 
steady to the earth, hangs gloved 
in dust immeasurably.While she 
in straight grass stands 
 
Popped-up from an unexpected bush.

12 Bowie

Here and now the kindly frost invites 
The snow.Ice along the large pond 
Buckles for breath in he thin season 
Over spacious spans of silence.The pipings are 
Hushed, the geese put to flight and quiet. 
Grass does not grow but waits 
With a small eternal presence, the mantle 
Warm and lightless.It is a white lid 
To a green furnace, waiting.Patience is long 
Along the meadow along the pond along the frozen, 
Drift-thick ice.The oaks with the sharp melting current 
Are patient, through their trunks, the tilted hills' 
Green soldiers, bent for the calling, the sea 
Straining its wide tides.All are patient all 
Are waiting.But shortly 
Their patience 
Will snap.

At the Theater Doors and Almost In

Again and again.The tickettaker's hands are
Emphatic.Her shirt is red 
Above the useful elbows.In her small hands 
The last cries of startled paper 
 
 Unger. 
 The thin red tongues that dribbled out 
 Of the faceless window 
 Are shredded and shredded. 
 
 Her careful fingerends 
 Are red with little screams. 
 And at my back a blank anonymous bear 
 Reminds me of duty. 
 
 Slowly, I offer up 
 My tiny victim.In close air.At last, 
 At last, I stumble towards the common dark 
 Without a tongue.

The Timid Stars

 
 It is
 among the stars 
 that I stick my shaggy head. 
 They sag and turn crimson, 
 sag in a sky 
 
 bruise blue 
 because winter has struck 
 straight across 
 (negligently) the heavy 
 blood-filled breasts in stretched cotton. 
 
 Has struck 
 as they shiver 
 (appreciatively) has struck shining 
 like a bronze cymbal.

The Seasonal Dead

 
 Winter kills the cruelest of the deer,
 the ones that want to live, freezes 
 their heart-stubble, runs them  
 past the dawn grey fields 
 and trips them up on the subtlety of a stream, 
 solid with its fear.They lie down dying 
 in the rising floe; the stag, the fawn, 
 and the doe, collect their shivers severally 
 and blanket their wet fur 
 with the whitening glass.See 
 Their dark long legs are so softly 
 bent that they extremely seem to be 
 too much alive to be an accurate model of death. 
 They fly with sinking passion to he snow.

How We Die

 Perhaps
 It is like walking straight upwards 
 From a clear shore 
 Until the wren's singing 
 Is only water.And we float about freely, 
 Completely under. 
 
 Or, perhaps, 
 Flying and stinging like wasps, 
 We leave half of ourselves dragged out behind us, 
 Beating and hurting.

TV

Multifarious on the miniature screen 
the tiny greyish teardrops trickle 
out of sympathy; out of luck 
they land in a ponderous conflagration 
like butane-drenched strange paratroopers 
invading every eye. they only come 
to liberate the lusterless, glitterfy the gone, 
unwanted melodies curled uptight asleep 
in moldiest mind.Melodramatic 
the chromatic tube revivifies its display. 
All the misconceptions of real-life rant 
in flesh-tone undeniability.The biggest baritone 
saunters to his place, steps upwards 
at the Met, decked in best brightest tent array, 
 
to sing until his face dissolves to truth.

June

The abyss in the iris
Darkens. 
The lilac's cones shrivel, 
Impotent nubs. 

And the waterfall wings 
Of grackles gnash, 
Impatient as teeth 
For something to eat. 

Blossoms or buds hang 
Lazy as puppets 
In their nets, or masses of colored balloons 
Tied to vulnerability. 

Rubbing their silk heads to static and still can't think! 

Everyone breathes beneath 
Wide woven hats, -- 
Lying, breathing, 
Lame as shot seals on the lawn furniture. 

And everything is hot. 
The garden is is still and hot. 
And the conservative gardener buzzes about planning, planning 
For next spring's eruption. 

A uniformity resides 
In all this damp lessening, 
inexorable and 
Irretrievable 

As ants or gold lice, tiny and metallic, 
Ticking past the plastic petals. 
The entire arrangement 
Walls and withers, 

Tribally. 
The folded flowers scream. 
White as live eyes, the trees 
Scream, steaming. 

The magnolia's 
Fists sweats.

After July

The one cop
cracks his beat, tuesdays, 
thursdays... the tapped cracks blurr into the blue, 
days join years, rim to rim 
a used pile of hubcaps rise 
to topple the sky. 

He lowers his eyes. 
He frets the shiny lower buttons 
off his coat, in the off hours, 
in a silver-tinged sort of 
maternal sublimation. 
For him 

the end 
of labor, and the quench 
of thirst, lie bound-- a single note-tone-- 
in a fist-sized, pawable 
golden glob of pocketwatch. 
We wait 

for the crinkled, 
the time-worsted, the failing 
cusp of a summer's end, expiring 
in teacups.Your mother's 
handstitched, colorful, orange and yellow, gingham quilt 
wilts with August. 

Nearby, some butterflies, 
a handful, hover over 
the midtown intersection parking lot 
of our pin-sized Pepperell village, watching 
the sky-dark cop 
endlessly circle himself, wishing 

that they had stings.
 

Contents

Slate Steps Descend the Hill

The blue stones
drop away from the self 
like ash 

dumped from an open freight car 
going 
a hundred miles an hour 

easily

Aside to a Crying Child

Do not fear.
The globe in your room 
Has no place to be going. 

Its greens are gold, properly arranged; 
Its browns 
Mountains of dried sugar.

Thinking About a Dead Man
I Wonder Why the Fireplace
Looks Emptier than it Ought to

Have you ever seen
The dark trolleys 
Transport the ashes 
Of a leaf 
Into a hole in the valleys of the moon? 

I have. 

It is a small hole waiting 
On the moon's 
Reverse side.

Pissing in the Snow

one finds among
the melting crystals 

the impartial 
pattern common 

to any 
work of art

Falling

In the tympany of the shattering glass there
is this: there is this photographic effect, It
occurs when, dimmed and fugitive, I see my own raw
face new as a pound of freshly ground beef in one
of the shaken raindrop particles faltering. (They
falter because they have forgotten the balance of
air.They are senile as snowflakes.) It is this
effect that makes me measure and measure the
millimeters of my pupils’ shufting. (They are black
as a circus seal’s fur, and wet as sweat.) It is
a little like what I think it would be like to find
a mirror at the bottom of the lake in which I am
drowning, The window bleeds its little glitters
down.They shine like pennies out of a shotgun….

The Holly Tree

 
The holly tree
as a figure 
not 

of dance (since 
that is too gross-- 
too many 

arms like tentacles 
hanging their appeals 
straight out) 

instead as, each leaf 
green against the sharp frost 
equally 

an equation 
it is conceived perfectly 
divisible 

by that love 
which makes the berries 
hard small 

and almost 
exactly round 
grow red

Seasonal

 There, sidewise from the
 breasting prow, between 
 the hushed and vertical 
 bob and weave of the 
 whitest icebergs, there is 
 the winter sea beneath it all 
 still green.

Foxhounds

 A trumpet whistles and the slow, 
 paced doily-work of discovery begins. 
 Soft, snow-petalled dogs descend 
 from higher ground to astound the dell 
 with the multitude of their white bodies' shuffle; 
 So many crowd into the little hollow 
 that the hand-held sky, time's mirror, 
 leaks a salty supplication to their lust. 
 They ground the dying grasses down to dust. 
 The ascending, coal-soft noses tender towards 
 the pay; the fox works well their mouths 
 of blackness into foam. 
 Abundance will reward most laborious chase. 
 Living feet stamp and paw the fertile ground.

The Gardener’s Lot

 This blade of land
 engendered by the sun 
 dances round and around 
 like everything-- 
 like you I exact 
 and supercilious 
 of all forms, even 
 flowers, for christ's 
 sake, bluebells 
 hollyhock, clover 
 goldenrod, sprints 
 of purple something 
 
 and, of course, the 
 wild carrot, even 
 the wild carrot, how 
 do you manage it'.? 
 Were not all things 
 in some measure 
 constructed (with 
 welds of cells in this 
 case, perhaps) you 
 could not overbear 
 them so with your 
 tweedling eyebrows 
 -- agh! how 
 can you stand 
 yourself! mirrorwise-- 
 look at it! looking 
 at you.Wont you 
 splash, red-handed, 
 into it?Won't you 
 break a cracker 
 and make it flesh? 
 Turn the pool to wine! 
 The way it stares! 
 
 Well, then, stand 
 there (ox/ ox/ 
 pool) dirty and 
 locally misshaven you 
 ugly cuss! --and 
 get stabbed by the 
 rust-colored sun 
 increasing on the 
 hill's edge.

Contents

Staring at My Face in a Hushed Brook

 On my knees I deeply kneel 
 to all you who are wailing and wallowing 
 before the fallen wall 
 and in it 
 
 Oh there is someone trapped 
 in those clouds there purely serene 
 
 As (lithely) I kneel 
 to kiss the mute stranger 
 he explodes

What the Mountain Saw

 Embryo of blossom is dissected
 and without shame-- removed 
 
 to a further Light 
  one where guts 
 and stuff is not displeased by the eye 
 not made to squirm or plead 
 against the logic of sight, with their only 
 velvetvoiced argument, which is that they 
 were always here 
always cupping 
 their premature round faces-- to heaven 
 or storm without regard 
   until like tissue 
 they let their countenance fold 
 into dimness 
down to spring.

Do Not Know

 
 We do not know what 
 to do anymore--- 
 the high, evening voices 
 of the crickets 
 silver again 
 to grass.Grass and time. 
 
 A small, humped 
 frog is croaking 
 above the circle of his 
 
 swimming.Everything-- 
 everything is left 
 undone, 
The small, 
 red, perfectly predicted 
 perfectly in place, red 
 line of thought still ties 
 the 12 fat apples 
 to a bending limb. 
 
 3 dogs at a hollow distance 
 bay 
 to shake the leaves.

Watching Trees After Rain

In this sunset I am alone among many trees, the day a light stonygrey.
They don’t sway, but like a thousand notes of music they seem too deliberately
articulate their leaves in a mass, visible green chorus. Each leaf at its base
diverges to return in a point, the many pinnacles loping to their purpose;
they slouch down so low that a few of them almost touch the ground. The dark,
firm springs of wet pines straighten their voices like efficient women.
And in a steady glowing small, face-like leaves burst softly forward in slowly
growing fountains.The roundness of some of them sings to me like fishmouths,
silently and purely their praises go upward.

Night

 Darkness is not 
 a going of light but a coming of light 
 only 
 it is too solemn for us to see

The Stone in Water


It is the round 
beauty 
of all things 

immaculate immobile immute- 

able to the last 
syrupy 
drop 

of that fine 
liquid 
which we drink into drunkenness 

on those lovely 
shaded nights 
of 

the black curtains 
hanging down 
like stars' beards 

whiskery to infinity 
The truth

My Blue Period

"I sti11 live inside an icon of despair,
abuse the abutment for my failing hands 
that once would gesture music; I grow 
into my age, see icecubes marching by 
like icebergs and notice theirflat shadows 
spinning to diminishment 
in the exaggerated weaflness of my 
mind, my lights lefting out like twin pack dogs 
lost to snow.There is no settlement 
of objects, half-arraigned and now 
abandoned to decay.There is 
no happiness here of the clean straight line. 
My abstract mind falters into particulars 
... it's the light that turns the lampshade round."

In Living Rooms

The
piano glassy 
the clock 

From 
a time of 
grandmothers 

And 
widows grayly 
done dancing 

Are 
clicking round 
sonorous moments.

Lying

Lying
up In a hayloft 
my dreams fill the owl rafters 
with thin loops of gold. 

A few float down.

Sequence

I. Somnambulance

The mourning does are lying in leaves
For summer bleats and funeral ash. 
Somewhere shipwrights are planning for ghosts.

II. Aftereffects of Silence

Singing, I thought there was a second 
Voice behind me. 
Only one dove was bowing.

III.Promenade

In a forest strung with lanterns 
Night was slowly staring in after me. 
It stirred with a flutter of gigantic wings.

IV.Pre-Evening Autumn

The mourning doves in thousands septembered 
Themselves to my yard and never departed. 
The sun rained all that day.

V. Lesson:

The best notes are musical 
And exact; two doves 
On a dogwood at sunset.

VI. Post Christi

Twelve silent doves are sifting in the snow 
And wishing they were white-- 
With their feet crossed.

VII.Pre

The bald and aging Socrates 
Was last seen sleeping among mourning doves. 
Their slipperless feet were cool,

VIII.An Eye at the Window

The extra room provoked much controversy 
Until, in the stifled minute it takes lilies 
To be imagined, the dove moved in.

IX. Intimations of Salmon

I knelt my mind behind a thin steeple 
And embroidered the sky with memories of sea. 
They are even here.

X. Image of Transparency

The moons settled themselves in a red cradle. 
The woman settled herself along with them, they 
In her arms.It was snowing doves all that evening. 

Contents

On the Neighbors Having Lost
a Daughter My Father’s Words

 'Who told them to swallow down their sorrow? 
 This year as much as last the rain will dig 
 New gullies near the roadside- even without 
 Their help.So what's the use of holding back 
 A g ief?They don't moan, but they still shuffle. 
 What's a man to do with relations 
 That won't cry?Beg it out with salt? 
 I won't pity them.Pity's too mean a thing 
 For living creatures, and, besides, its a sham 
 Emotion: it only makes the hawthorn wither. 
 And they themselves wouldn't even see.--- 
 Damn it, I myself have lost a son. 
 You remember that year, in late declining 
 Summer; we took down that small net 
 Of trash trees hemming in the garden. 
 Just their shadow would have killed off half 
 The crop that demanded al I the sun. 
 He left the sticky tree-stumps alone to stare, 
 A little like some human faces, 
 And then clomped off into a rain of maples. 
 Who could put out the details of his last 
 Living day?Do they think they own disaster7 
 Yet how anxiously they horde it!As if 
 Their slack jaws and ground-geared eyes could feed 
 On such distresses.It has been a year already. 
 I wish that they would just cut out the show.'

Marina

1. Almost, Marina, Almost

Once, walking in the garden by the wood-- so close
Under leaves, the ponderous weight of unlighted leaves 
On trees, I overturned the mandrake root and found 
It'd grown in two; remember now, remember7 One for 
Me, for you? 

0 my daughter 
My daughter 
I have no boat to build. 
Zodiacs must come, they go, I yield. 
There are the seas-- no, no longer. 
Only time to slaughter 
0 my daughter 

Hold my dry hand, lean lean, as the dandelion bloom 
Of skeleton inflates; all is withered, each vine strangling, 
Dangling, collapsed within.All is late; 
Hold my dry hand 

Ice uncovers Icicles and cold lays on to cold. 
Spices of the Orient in my mind take hold. 
I remember now 
I remember how; 
Surgeon, scalpel, suction tube, then a pill for ease... 
0 my daughter 0 

You have bit the mandrake root, does April stir and 
Start in fits?Is twice too much for prayer? 
Layer on by layer, each thought uncovers brain; 
There is no pill for ease of pain. 

The mandrake is an ancient root 
Wearing none butwrinkled suit. 
And now and now and now 

I shall hold your dry hand now 
For I have not held have not held it long. 

Zero may be warmed to naught, my daughter, 
Zero may be warmed 

My daughter

II. The Gardens

In the shadowed garden, dim
Remembered strains 
Played among the acorn shells, and left 
Dampened hands on the plastered grain. 

Jonquils died in torrents 
That summer, how I regret 
Time's contingency, and Death's. 

We had letdown the curtains 
That sheltered away the sun, 
And shelved it, 
Long ago.The house had tinkled like the rickets 
With the wind, long and orange 
Out of the west Our shadows 
Grew into the trees like years, that summer. 
Our blue hands turning blue, until 
They were the trees and the trees 
Were still. 
 
All the days were beautiful, 
And all the children sang. 
And all around the widening block 
The gossips snickered in; 
And all their blathering, chattering talk 
Could not 
Prove the littlest sin. 
A box is a box is a box. 
Not even the littlest sin. 
 
I might go back outside, given 
Satisfactory incentives towards that move.I might 
Reverse one summer's indiscretions, dear, 
If the picketfence of autumn 
Had not come.And only come to show 
How round the circuit of our fears 
Is expressed in every apple.I might 
Have dressed the dolls with leaves again 
And set upon a stage 
Their small white forms in the white sun's 
Glare.

The Abandoned Farm

All's astir.The slick, sick heat
of vegetating August lights the leaves 
with growth.The upright quizzical, 
Fire-white picketfence rails 
at its own perfection.Even 

the starved copper cock 
twirls and reflects he sun. 
Even the big red barn is actively bleeding 
cheap red paint in gallons 
to stain the soil. 

All day 
the cockleburrs sway and crack 
with misery, there are too many 
in their school; their sheer, high numbers 
the barnyard green. 

The fur-thick, dark-eyed groundhogs graze 
and waddle in the fields like cows 
now; free from shotgun-blaze 
anxiety, they lower their square heads to sup 
on farmers bones. 

Once, 
the dolled-up, rickety barn was gorged 
on spoon-fed hay.Its golden maw 
glittered edible riches, 
pure as a tat, fat duchess and all decked-out. 

The heavy hay 
would creak and rustle in the barn, 
and the land was gold.The torn mouth 
stands and stutters emptily, its innards 
whittled hollow 

by poverty and rot. 

The penny-colored 
weathervane crows and crows in the whistling wind. 
The saw-tooth boundary of the picketfence 
is lost in a sizzling 
sea of weeds.

August

Unscreened weatherworn 
the doorjamb melts 
into what I remember 
was our private yard: 

The flowers on the trees 
(once red, some white, all 
green) have blossomed 
into leaves sung at noon 
drooped by four. 

The chickadees twitch 
among trunks for pebbles. 
The young birds eat them up 
and eat whatever else they find 
which pleases them. 

By some hidden wind 
they ruffle to wails 
in the usual hollows together 
with a few early leaves. 
Yellow and sun-white predominate. 

These are the colors 
of fullness and wait.But 
somehow my shrill eyes 
are missing you among 
all 
August sways on 
the stem because it is warm 
as flowers go.

After July

The one cop
cracks his beat, tuesdays, 
thursdays... the tapped cracks blurr into the blue, 
days join years, rim to rim 
a used pile of hubcaps rise 
to topple the sky. 

He lowers his eyes. 
He frets the shiny lower buttons 
off of his coat, in the off hours, 
in a silver-tinged sort of 
maternal sublimation. 
He sees 

his patriarchal, 
moon-sick mom in every 
overripe, mindless bag lady creeping 
by like a bee, down the antique, tinselly street 
the shower blossomed blacker.His mom still hones 
the compact, lunar silverware 

every day at three.Nothing changes. 

One woman runs 
and ages.The black and yellow bags 
balloon around her like a raft.His mother's older. 
The traffic-light mud-dauber dabbles in adobe. 
The sweet air stares and stales. 
Nothing blossoms. 

His hands 
tick and scuttle like stop-motion wasps 
looking for the honey-drop watch.At noon 
the unprofessional, octagonal sunday school 
lets out like a pregnant cat.  The bleating 
bells tell. 

The tooth-smooth 
legs and necks of children 
nod, pollen-heavy and thin 
as goldenrod.He cannot remember 
the ridiculous number of years anymore.The vernal 
season's shorter. 

Nearby some butterflies, 
a handful, hover over 
the midtown intersection parking lot 
of this pin-sized Pepperill village, watching 
the sky-dark cop 
endlessly circle himself, blinking 

their still-wet wings like wings.

Message Towards Morning

“Hey... shush!Rattle
of the half-starved bird, beak-bone 
clatter and snap of the throatless young, 
cry of the crow, the grossest crow, subtle 
after-echo in the back-wash; 
stilted king-fisher breaks glass, again 
shatter of the placid 
silver shingle of the pond, level, flat, 
beaten down with completion as 
up he comes!The air complex with industry, the shrill 
sound of the jay, oriole, blackbird, cricket-call 
singed feathers in the after-light, 
the pocked, pregnant moon in stately decline.'Just 
quiet down and get to work.”

2 Watercolors of 4 Birds

Jade-smooth the green
Head a mallards defines 
itself its limits 

against the frayed edge 
of a faded 
paper sky 

as together with her he 
climbs upon her 
blue wing 

foot to feather foot 
to feather to 
escape with their bodies 

from 
a scattering 
of just exploded cattails

II The Pintails in Spring

Black and yellow
the 
segmented stalks 

show the winds 
to be 
against them as frozen 

they beat on 
to 
turn the page

The Spectrum is Discerning

Roses huff out of the afternoon train.
They cry 
At the dye 
Of the blue blue sky:

'Come, 
And we shall fuse you 
Into our red red selves 
Like 
Shot diamonds 
Into water. 

We are dead plain 
As in an empty room the strange 
Echoes 
Of 
Painted tin cans clapped 
Together.' 

Winnowingly, the terrible eddies 
Utter 
Themselves, seductive, 
Against the listening skin 
White 
As a rabid rose.

Herr Professor

The stars revolve on darkness. 
A green moon thaws the black sea. 
And the beautiful regular young women 
       pat and pat their hair 
In anticipation of the spring. 

But none of this interests him. 
He drops his eyes.He has 
'Already read about all that.'

Mendel’s Garden

Ordained by necessity
--- the necessity 
of mathematics--- 

the blossoming sweet pea plants lie 
red pink white 
in rows 

orderly by a neat man well 
placed and spaced 
but not 

overly so the sex 
fused in them 
in 

the modest veiny petals 
center of the 
display 

there are those tall short and 
ones round and wrinkled 
the peas 

themselves encased the ovum 
grown fat with potential 
the seeds 

dangling cocooned in green 
from the stalks 
the stems 

the sepals dried up out 
of the attracting 
juices 

a withering 
revealing 
the fruit 

near these over a few 
feet a simple step 
bending 

ready at hand to put in the seed 
in his quiet black 
suit white 

collar strapping his 
neck hiked up 
to the jaw 

to put the seed 
to bed the 
man 

a cleric who named the traits 
himself dominant 
and recessive

Magnolias in New Jersey

Deep between the conifers dark as deacons,
And near the thawp and clump and utter of new-born grackles, 
And back round the minarets of foxglove like a picket fence 
They slacken their buddings to stars. 

But somehow it is vain, with the bloom of universe surrounding, 
And my feet cold and sunk in growth, 
And the spiritual white and pink-white leaves in bulbs fermenting, 
Somehow to lie and breathe into the upwards evening is vain.

Illness is a Calumny

I want you to know
Every day, twice a day, 
My heart turns blue. 
The shell of my skull 
Blackens to fragments. 

There is nothing not left. 
The tulip tree begins to talk, 
And I begin 
To listen. 
There is nothing anymore to keep 
The pearly ears of crickets from hearing 
What I think of you: 

The frozen shapes of tadpoles quicken 
In the edges of the ice. 
Soon enough, ' 
Their long black minds will turn 
Green with growth. 
And cats will quicken to eat them. 

My body lies to me, sometimes 
Three times a day.

Seeing It Is Evening I Watch the Mill Men
Being Let Out from Work

He breaks the wind with his shoulder.
He ducks into apples for home. 
Or hunger, 
He threads a blackeyed bluejay 
Through his skin. 
He is out of luck.His heels have thinned. 
His long, lonely face 
Sags, the color of a chipmunk's rib. 
His once dark hair is trying to lighten 
Into heaven. 

The effort fails. 
His strong, shy chest will blink 
Into the hard, open slit of the waters, 
Or the sky, 

He tries and tries 
To begin to breathe, 
But, 
The lake is as heavy as buffalos. 

There is nothing left here. 
He starts along the orange fields and 
matted grasses 
For apples.

Cranes in the Back-Yard

Suddenly-- in the middle of what was
the only green and subtle meadow that I knew, 
a dozen cranes or so with jagged wings 
settled their legs in beads of old snow. 

A dozen heads or so with accentuated necks, 
are staring me again, down twenty-four years like eyes, 
and I begin to see;-- they are stained so white 
that I think their wingtips cannot be as black as they are. 

Then, and slowly, their wide arms begin to beat 
until legs like straws let their linkages down 
above the lush wave that presses my throat 
so I cannot think except to gaze at their feet 

not touching the earth the least.

Piccolo: Notes of a Suicide

I. Entant with Needlepoints

Twice I stitched and watched her 
Sewing.The images of the horse and man 
and curling trees were imperfect.

II.Prelude in December

When the snowball diminished beyond 
The circle of my eye 
I was diminished.

III.Adagio

The sun was a long slow line running through 
Rows of willows shaking their leaves in rows. 
A single green light transfixed the time.

IV.Minuet Under Glass

The myriad black-headed chickadees flocked 
Through whiles and whiles of a white sky. 
Still this was not enough.

V. Tablecloth quartet and Mints

The dining room was a room of space 
Holding four minds like circles in squares. 
The meal was vivid with a sauce.

VI. The Through Nine Panes Bridge

The upright piano commonly lent notes 
To the couch.At once we found 
That the azaleas were blooming.Were red.

VII.Fugue In Green

Pacasandra on the lawn exchange colors 
Of themselves between themselves, shrewdly. 
Their bodies In multiples are expanding.

VIII.Wine at the Cotillion

The woman is softly, at night in the 
Dark in the stars, waving her veins at me. 
The quilt is a quilt that is warm.

IX. Jazz Dance of August

Now the snowballs are falling 
And like moons are falling.And I am increasing 
Beyond my own eye like winter.

X. Explanation

I once have seen the quiet energies 
Of a world building with the littlest hands 
One thread on a web in the comer.

Anna, Eighty-Six

 “Oh, is he a persian?  They have a tendency 
 towards deafness.He's alright yet? That's good. 
 He's beautiful.I suppose you've had him fixed; 
 that makes them grow.It's like a plant 
 that's all circusy and wide 
 in the extent and circumstance of its foliage. 
 Ever seen an elephant-ear?Have no roots 
 at all.Half my first husband's breath would find 
 such a one crunched over, in green and disarray. 
 Al 1 headstrong and hurrying to out-race their limitations. 
 I know them.Oh, you have water here!Is it 
 a reservoir? And dammed up to the south?Yes, 
 we caught sight of that on coming here.What 
 an out-bound view!All slow anger turned to slow froth....” 
 

>

Tete da Femme

This lady is dead, I think,
her marble eye set straight 
into the eye of the viewer 
like a target.Her high nose will bridge 
the concept of her forehead 
     like an arrow! 
Her ear is round, and hangs 
as perfect as a cracker. 
Her mulberry lips 
are barely there and are not touching 
the tightly limed forward cut 
of her face.Here the brightness, 
which is too much for the checkerboard scores 
of her scored face to contain, 
meets with the absolute black 
of India ink that corners the edge of the page. 
Definition.Outline of darkness.The light 
enclosing like oxygen 
the rigidly formal cardboard grains 
of the symbolized female features 
of her face, in profile, in 
detail, in the profoundly crooked rivers 
of her darkly commaed hair. 
Just who is she?Tapped by some large hand 
into the tiny alleyways of the gopherwood... 
Squinting for a close-up, one guesses that 
perhaps she was a prophetess.And one sees 
that, at the center of the heart-shaped 
bulge in her head, there is 
a blankness, a clarity, a 
moment of resolution--- 
I Ike on the flat back of the served cure 
of a Moses-pill.Or in 
the carved hollowness of a period 
at the end of a sentence put 
on a rock, There is also, 
in this portraiture you will notice, 
a deep scar running 
below her eye 
       and above it.

Wild Azalea Blooming

 Only the test monotone pattern 
 Can touch your still cry. 
 Rival little red necks, little white lips. 
 
 You are unstoppable!Yet constrained in a place 
 From a pure prism hefted and chopped 
 To a block of a wheel. 
 
 A wheel wounding itself outwards. 
 Blooming to death. 
 Little red sticks stabbing the eye, proceeding 
 
 Away from the eye as well.At once. 
 Your bodies, 
 Disposable, 
 
 Are clear in memory 
 To December. 
 Brightly you travel 
 
 Under a small grey wood. 
 Each thin skinny 
 Clarion is color of dolor too.

The Bullfight

 The furry neck of the bull is 
 black, the sky a grey in this 
 black and white of a color lithograph, 
 Avant la Pique, the point of which 
 in a blunted splinter does not 
 advance or pretend to be 
 the concentrated nozzle 
 of any future or sequence of events, 
 unpredictable and true as above 
 the nail-shaped head of the matador 
 it tilts in a sequestered white- 
 ness like the bands of his 
 arms the v in his chest and 
 the downturned paintbrush ends of his feet. 
 There is besides this a knuckle 
 in the center of the leg of a horse 
 the picador has with careful aim 
 chosen for the day's events 
 and which is tall and solemn and sure 
 of its place in the scheme 
 overall.There is as well a cape 
 poised black above the well-dark bull 
 like avoid somewhat sheltering 
 the sight of the first blow (which is tied 
 by custom and thought, to the 
 last) from his, In this picture grey, 
 eye.

Melancholia

 Grey, dead-grey & black
 are the requisite composites of this composition; 
 sad Durer had looked too long 
 in mirrors, seen too many vicious invocations 
 of the holy hand upon the plainest blades 
 of grainy growing grass.Poor Durer 
 he has seen too many hollow olive 
 eyes; has stared too much at the imported monotone 
 African masks filled brimming and still ringing 
 with authentic bellowing sighs 
 and horror-filled innocent tears 
 from behind the widening whites of the eyes. 
 Pitying Durer in the savage dark 
 of accustomed thought saw the red in black.

Hieroglyphic

Delicately
she bends 
to readjust the rose 

its stem 
too thick the petals 
about to fly 

off and shout 
but, having initially 
advanced, 

she 
fails at everything 
the frail limbs disposed 

as before exactly 
everything 
unchanged 

she 
smiles they are 
too beautiful

sonnet

When (singing to the silent wide of your
eyes) I find that small almost innocuous birds 
have dealt with the thunderous evening increments 
by shedding their shells (into your eyes) orange 
speckled crying (for to breathe is to die) will you 
my most sweetly taut unstrummable note 
(placid in pride of your calm) will you (I 
want to know) take my new unfolding hands 
spread for a dismal uncommon febuary sun, 
sky dancing in the light of forever, breezed 
with original ironicless laughter, cackling dawn, 
and sew them up with a seamless surgary 
meticulous, as a rose locked away in its leaves 
eternally fruitless unbudded disaster or what?

When Into the Mouth the Death Cry Comes

When into the mouth the death cry comes 
Unamazed and odorless, 
Crammed by the ticking fingers of perpetual crime 
Down the rattling throat to sound 
An agony of conscience in the unshelled ear 
Of too much unlived living 

Then will the eyes start up blind 
And hair sprout hands for the head 
Then the unmuffled will of the stilling heart 
will damn activity, haul up dock to decision, 
Bless the unpaid mind with rest, tell toes to grow into feet, 
Knuckles reverse to blunt, loved palms, 
Shoulderblades dwindle to wings, 
Red ribs uncage to drop dead lust, 
And lagging heart kick all away 
To fall to a faraway sky, 
And all of these be mine.

These Atlantic Letters

1. From Brussels

The clematis in my window winds the wounded birch, and hangs
heavy with rain, this day of days- 
Your glad letter come back to me in the flat black crystal 
of your luxurious ten-dollar ink (bought 
in Brussels, shipped by clinking caseloads 
home somehow through evenings, the fat 
Atlantic waters hissing twice as dark.Will 
these waters burn?The glowing ocean oil thickens 
like a welt.Who can haul your miles, 
vainglorious spout and womb 
of history?Who, who, who?) 
These electric letters fly to reach me like a shock; 
they try but cannot read my white eyes boiled up 
like eggs, And you, in sympathy, writing: 
‘The silence today again has made me see.’

2. In Milan

“Statues rise like specters out of the blank sand
and bang the nose with their black batteries 
of dark pollution-dirt and rot, 
Oh, it's not like living was 
when we were young!Its not the same 
at all.My two beach feet flatten-out to overfill 
our honeymoon shoes, I look down 
this alleyway, past the piazza place I stay, 
and reckon up the centuries.What dewy crime 
or ruby mind cracks this asphalt 
like a face? 0 Milan, Milan, 
your buildings fumble into plots 
like popes shot down by time—you are dying; 
but you still breathe.... All the rest is gravy.”

3. From N.J.

The ragging rantings reach me, from your hand
like a fleshy kiss, lovers in the park 
so much disillusioned they clam their eyelids shut 
and think of Wagner's autumnal, crashing 
ocean music sandblasting out their inner ears. 
Its nerves.The paper that you use, dear, is tan 
and perfect as a Florida dawn; it shows 
to disadvantage the snow-white spiders of 
my hands --- webbing, webbing through your 
thin script; let me link it closer 
to the leaf-work of my veins, bleating 
only to themselves it seems, of late appallingly 
as sheep, I flat-down the third creased valley 
of the New Mexico plains, and read:

4. The Postcard

The congenital hoarfrost moonlight makes
this 3x5 of paradise a jail. 
Its edges catch, and ruddy people shine 
along the sunny beach, the sunny Florentine, 
fragrent with smiles.... 
Dear heart, dear life, you glare and goggle 
before my eyes with the faint flash and upward fade 
of fireflies: I miss you.And you 
dance on toes with skull-crossed death 
against eternity.... You bow & plead 
that your poor dress is stained, and then stand off to stare 
and lounge through crowds, the dying match.The vacationists 
are primed and primped for ecstasy, they 
drop hot hands to a warm salt sea.

5. In Florence

She speaks: ‘One dark night, unjust soul's repose
sunk in a midnight past my midday's cure, 
I rattled blind down corridors, stuffed 
my loud bright watch beneath a pillow 
to keep the silence out (the between ticks tick). 
I danced with mirrors, slept in blinks, 
threaded whiskey like a life-line to my glass. 
I spun our wedding ring to gold globe 
and waited the balance out; how it rang against the stone! 
I cannot think; the one world whirls.... 
The world's pink ears are crammed with speech; 
I, I, I, I, becomes a hollow sound, you 
infect my eye, enlarge to a troll.... 
My bruised head floats in a goldfish bowl.’

6. Near the Hudson

The palisades are golden in this light;
a washed bowl shines, bending heaven 
to its single-serving size.All the green leaves 
have rainbowed out to sea.It is September. 
The worst cold stays forecasted by the grass 
looking over, bending back 
from its view of the bottom of the cliff; 
one's attention's held, these days, 
by some old whittler's shavings as they pass 
and darken in the dew.Everywhere the clouds 
meditate shrunk foreheads into snow; well, 
it is almost snow.... Now it is an eye, this bowl, 
staring like a clock, knowing nothing not its own. 
Little comfort stays here, little goes.

Contents

Sun Song

 Where are you going? 
 Where are you going? 
 Velveteen hills are rusting to silver. 
 
 They grow old.Sweet dews gather and drop 
 Numberless, 
 Then brighten to burn, little caustic stars. 
 
 The rickshaw mantis' kneel and rust. 
 Sadly, they are singing 
 Without voices. 
 
 Their stiff attached wings, the colors of oil, 
 Vibrate, 
 Machete late lawns leap and shudder, 
 
 Taut as an eardrum against you, 
 You answer. 
 You answer. 
 
 Green knees bend and bury themselves, 
 Clean in dirt, 
 New at an acid altar.

Freezing Autumn Willowtree

 Green, the pure prismatic color
 left its little stalling footprints 
 in the edges of the leaves.

The Change

 Behind a square stucco
 church (where daily there is 
 praying) a buttercup 
 
 lifts crookedly 
 
 its crown announcing 
 by its nature 
 
 the fall.Little 
 singing sacraments droop 
 and drop down leaf 
 
 by leaf 
 drawn to the ground 
 by a force 
 
 one opposite that 
 which pulled the petals upward 
 yellow to heaven

El Gato

 
 Mouth open 
 red 
 as a hawk's 
 
 the pout of sleep 
 limed 
 around the small 
 
 wide eyes all 
 almostall 
 gone as she lifts 
 
 the smooth head 
 seen 
 in no carving 
 
 at last 
 
II. 
 at my shirtbutton blue 
 as a sky 
 it nods 
 
 my 
 red carnation 
 nods 
 
 almost in sleep 
 equal to her 
 vastly silent roar

Polemic

 Cross over, cross over
 Without 
 Utility or art. 
 
 Nothing is of any use anymore. 
 
 I tell you. 
 
 I saw three grasshoppers 
 Sifting on a leaf 
 Until, until 
 Until 
 They had eaten it up, 
 
 I dreamed I was the king of the world 
 And rode the seas for horses. 
 I dreamed I was the king of the world 
 And rebuilt all the churches. 
 
 I saw three grasshoppers 
 Living in a dream. 
 They sat on a leaf, 
 They ate it up.

Visiting

 The Saturday cold rattles like a candy wrapper.
 The thin air 
 Weights my lungs with honey.A blue stew. 
 
 The old ford mourns skyward, 
 Heaving its wheels in circles. 
 We halt so slowly 
 
 It is almost flying.We fall out 
 Sideways; our petals drop and blanche. 
 I am so heavy 
 
 My feet 
 Almost touch the floor.The familiar 
 Fears near. 
 
 We are almost there. 
 The dirty mausoleum squats on the hill 
 Like a birthday.It's so big 
 
 It's obscene.Green 
 Laurels hunch in the corners like shadowy dwarves 
 Awaiting the signal to push.... 
 
 The starched arch, snow-simple, bent 
 Floats above our silly heads. 
 Counting: Two-hundred ten, eleven, twelve 
 
 And my father's father arrives. 
 We glide in ghost-clothes about the grave. 
 This is a family day.The inherited rings 
 
 Click and skim 
 As loves the shapes of hands pass over 
 The deep, square-edged name. 
 
 They rub and rub, 
 An eternity.Quiet. 
 They are finally clean. 
 
 When everyone else has gone blindly, 
 Over the blunt edge of the curved world, 
 Striding like heroes 
 
 Why am I left, weightless and colorless, 
 To stop 
 The flat slat light the tossed urn burns?

Behind 12 Bowie

Canadians lap and settle here through the equinox
Pond rough or pond white, they ruffle 
Skinny shanks in lank air.Indian memories 
Follow the goldfinch.Old mole brown and 
Groundhog grey the arrowheads.Webs find 
The old leaves soft below the Rowan red 
And Oak not.Coincidence labors in the clay, 
Turning red green and green red, at home 
Along the plough's length of idle irony.Poor 
White boring of the dove, And the dogwood 
Its white echo.The placid confusion of evening 
Is on, white on the spread webs, the 
Soft furled soil cooling.Again.

Not Until the September is Past

Not until the September is past 
And the grave dead all lie, unshakled, unburied, 
Alone in the frost's mouth 
(All dying done, all berthing begun) 
And every crooked, ear-marked child is led, 
By the dimming blood of a failing hand, 
To play away from the clock's haunts 
 
And stars are incited to shrink again 
The cragging moon's corruptible sphere 
To less than a pinnacle’s pinched inch of sky 
(Not until the September is past) 
And every weed grows down to die 
Up where the miracle dead were tossed 
In a frozen field gone over to snow 
 
And the cold wind in a cold throat like glue, 
Dying of wanting; and the blossomless trees 
Lift their skirts to let me fondle 
The bark-notched knees of autumn's parts, 
Sold old home of my father's wants, 
Will I catch cure in the cuckold wind 
For inextricable laughter and hate.

A Mosquito’s Wing Along the Rail

It silvered where it had fallen
where the wind played it back and forth 
and the top of the lake considered it bluely, 
and the man rustled his feet on the porch 
 
As if they were leaves.Every moment separately 
considered the veiny object and drew 
the object in comparison with itself; 
the rail paint peeled and flapped 
 
In those places where it could flap, 
the wind and the lake crusted themselves 
with silver, the wing replied from where 
neglect had lain it And the man rustled his feet 
 
in repetition.

End

XXX Sonnets

Aug 242020

 
Character poems of then-current events and personal romantic sonnets
 

 
By Gregg G Brown 
 
Copyright © 1991

Published by 
BLAST PRESS

Jonathan Miller, U.S.M.

"It is night. Date-palms are rocking on the leash 
Of Time, the hurricane, that straddles our defeat 
With two-legged winds, and stalks the dusty town 
With a sheriff's clinkered heels until we're mown 
Down by our ambitions to police the world. 
Tonight the Mid-East's bunkered sandlots lash 
Dynamos of fire into the throttled air to crash, 
On cindered houses abandoned years before. 
The generals' camouflaged tent is staked 
In the vampired heart of our affairs of state; 
Our bloodless motive moves in for the spider-kill, 
Touching each fly-fat thread centered on our ill. 
 
All things are playthings, and the roar 
Of the black ocean here consumes our speech at night, 
Lifting its frail levities in a matchstick's 
Minute light. God knows I was not born to kill--- 
Who grew up in Indiana's tidy wheatfields tilled 
By machines as patient as mothers, giant-wheeled, 
That came sighing with sweet scythes when autumn cooled, 
Keats-like, and the silo's sundial shadow 
Met itself in the empty auguries of the meadow. 
Unhoused thousands are beating to our copter's mill; 
Prayers raise them cresting to their crescent moon 
And Allah's sweet-water paradise filled with girls. 
 
These are God's sufferers and wear his brand 
Of salvation creased in skin and hand; 
Doling out bags of rice and reconstituted milk 
From the throbbing helicopter's side, half tilt- 
Ing into the begging sea of faces, I wish 
For a lunatic's rare absolution of my guilt, his bliss. 
Stigmata almost washed away by weeping still 
Eat into the innocent wrists. Now, at Easter, 
They hold their small hands up, robbed 
Of all that held them, tongue-tied, to earth, 
And rise like moons, balloon-willed, lovely, free 
At last, to their creatured deaths; until we die 
Nothing stops the cresive wanting of our breath."

Schwartzkopf, Duke of Iraq

"I will go wash; and drown these desert honors 
that stick in my throat. Three weeks before the grand 
defeat of our enemies, I dreamt my tent squalerous, 
ruined lieutenants killed by infiltrating mustard gas 
that couldn't sniff out the winning colors 
of our almighty flag. My aide snored on 
under his moony brow, refusing to wake 
for anything less than the Judgement Day; I'll pass. 
In the wheezing trenches we squeezed off rounds like mad 
in an unending philippic against the damned. 
Dust-erased faces blink skyward from their rust lakes 
of blood, off, on, off, on. 
Now downed in a North Carolina airplane hanger 
and tired of the itching laurels that itch my scalp 
I stare bemused at what our wanting has brought us here: 
Disinterred love scrambles up my lap."

Nixon Now

"Broadbacked noon has come humbling among our wicked spires; 
I came trumping in, Ike's prat-boy VP, 
flipped the sinister death-ace on its head in Laos 
to a vermillioned flush, a cornucopia of flowers 
scissored off by dear Pat for my tweed lapel. 
Coronated by my foreign policy's jewelled accretions, old man 
of the treasons, whispers stitched to whispers, 
I age in New Jersey; grown familiarly bland 
I confer my Ovaltine-sweet opinions on the mass, 
saddled with a politician's over-zealous over-friendliness still. 
Whatever has happened has happened. 
Smooth-trunked Atwater by a humorous tumor felled; 
How many more must wither and lessen? Stopped 
at the bullet-proof pane all day, I watch 
the dogwood whiten and the rich magnolia finish... 
What love cannot conquer I leave to my will. 
The winning children still swing back 
to their crooked papa at Xmas... a few bright, colored lights. 
I am no thin-spined De Sade, adoring thorns!"

William Casey

"Hitler once appeared to me in dream, grim, 
repentant, towing cowed Eva like a swallowed soul... 
a hang of flapping hair shut one demon-eye in, dimmed, 
wrestling with itself, whirlwind angels laughing in his skull. 
We killed him eventually; a few, true things 
penetrating to the innermost. I feel the arrow still 
my brother lumbered from my leg; atop a joyous swing 
I rubbed where its rubber cutting nose had thrilled. 
Our afternoons were resplendent, unhurried, vague, 
as we tumbled as cowboys and indians in an unholstered rush 
killing the shuffling vegetation and lizards that plagued 
our simmering summer patio. They would blink and push 
their low bellies in and out, alien, slow, 
themselves. I wish the doctor would come and kill my tumor now."

Warm Tomb

Dad, high on inscrutability and his unconscious drive 
toward the meretricious, undoes the buzzing crust 
that baked him in place and disinterrs himself to give 
one final, lacerating lecture; weeds crush his memorial bust 
with an enduring, gorgeous green he'd scorn. 
Fearing the CIA and copper Kremlin in his West VA cave, 
his fevered eyes dripped in a marsupial's querulous skull 
as he cradled a shotgun's bucking butt to his shaved cheek 
rummaging for snagged fowl on the waste acres of his estate. 
"Interlopers... Boys, when the world inverts this time 
and the kikes come howling for your heart, nothing will be saved." 
His fat breathing heaved, "buy gold coins." 
What we cannot remember cannot save us. Blinking and appalled, 
I dream that the sun is one of us, like my dad, 
foredoomed, fated, monstrously alive. 
Disasters livened him, the minor death 
of a fly, stumbling and stumbling against the windowpane; 
the gross head all eyes, one damaged eye, limned in light. 
Dust leaps from the stone I skip, dust falls... 
I circle back: dust laps his grave.

Middle Ground

Abandoned by our party in the garden park 
of Avon, I feel you shaken 
with a queasy stiffness; brackish 
as our garbaged New Jersey beach 
something's rising, radiant-spiked, 
rising, rising, to burst as light... 
Rocketing up from your ulcer's pit 
I ask myself, what is it, what is it? 
O how often have your hysterical, profound 
distemperate electricities hit ground! 
 
Spliced fire shams and sparks 
the matchstick held between us in the dark. 
Now undone by age, the spooky, loved 
hegemony of our plush masonic torch 
putters into mush in the gutted mud 
of the here and now, fading vivant, untouched. 
Still here after thirty remorseless years 
and too weak to laugh ourselves to tears, 
we lean like water against the sand: 
No world will hate what we cannot stand. 
 
Still posting for our finished race 
we stand outlined, awaiting grace 
that creeps against the boardwalk 
and seethes between the planks that cut our feet. 
Once, aching with a haltered wish to win 
and chalked white by spindly dawn 
we cantered to our easy beginnings and scoffed 
Bruno Latini on the loser's green. 
Remember winning? Scarred by crusts 
we cannot forget, that cannot forget us. 
 
Once, swelled by dreams, we labored down 
the awkward, parnassian slope, and stumbled 
crown over crown when we attempted Ararat... 
Religion had us stoned, overloading 
our middleaging ballast, filled 
with stones; they sat soldierly, 
round, white, yellow, white, alone. 
Look at what our childish 
urgent hands have crushed! 
An Atlantis lays buried between us. 
 
When the fatal plane zeroes on my heart, 
faint Fay Ray with cactus drink in hand, 
unerring in the air, amazed, alert, 
will you, love, move where I hurt, 
or like the gruesome Gorgon sprouting hooks 
spit useless fire still, caught in the traffic's brawl? 
Conspicuous the loss of consciousness.... 
rehabilitation the final joke of our crowd. 
Concentrating on the unmediated throb 
I think of you, myself, eyeing the prop.

Election Day, Nov. 7, 1988

(A dying New Dealer looks askance at the changing of the guard)

"All night the grating visions. Curled 
in my electric bed against the prating arias of wind 
I watch my country go tiptoe towards the whirl 
.... The President's domineering, branded hip's unpinned 
by his eight typhooned, bleary years at the mast. 
Our older brother's younger rung squat-thrusts to the oarlock, lashed 
by the gold oar snapping from his grasp, spinning in quicksand... 
One Yalie summer nicknamed him, The Antidote. 
Unplugged by my heavy coronary, I lay lapsed, small. 
A tongue-red heart comes bleating like a wart 
sawn-off in the intern's dish, anxious to clasp my held-out hand... 
The anesthetist drops his mask. Mailing in my vote 
I weep for America's wrong, unflagging heart 
marooned like rescued Crusoe in the hospital."

Edvard Shevardnashze

"Lenin in his tomb is white and weary. 
Before the world exploded into shards 
His voice was the bull-roarer, and it soared 
In waking syllables above the dreaming dead. 
Life's green branch is snapped above the boulevard 
Where we march shouting, and the stick 
Is in our hands whose slurring fire flamed 
The Kremlin's egg-shell spires back to ash. 
The ruling house is rubble rucked with tars; 
Tsars' bones cluck where dinosaur skeletons are. 
 
Smooth-skulled tanks from one-eyed turrets stare 
And move out like mastodons from their simple pits of ice, 
Rolling up the capitol with a wish to kill and eat 
The man-shaped offspring that teethed on mother-meat. 
It is incessant springtime now, and a rash 
Of bursting apples cracks the wintered bough 
Stunned by expectation and by prophesies; 
When I resigned Gorbachev to his statesman's fate, 
Telling off the congress with a blue face, 
What, love, rattled to the empty chute? 
 
Now we saunter and talk by the renewing river 
That sighs and shifts and corkscrews through Gorky Park 
Where the ferriswheel is shivering to its height 
And Moscow skaters wobble new-foaled, released 
From their eternal moment when Stalin stopped the stream, 
His mustache powdering like a giant Jack Frost pleased 
To see his humid hometown freezing into dream. 
Churches hold their quiver of new crosses up to light. 
Marooned in the humming populace of the Platz, larks 
Disperse with the bright bells beating like a gun; 
 
By starred asters starred children lamb and race 
Past buoyed parents walking, and cannot wait 
To see themselves staring up from the water's face. 
Dripping workers grown cold in soldered light 
Rivet the future's extinction together bolt by bolt... 
The Comintern's cragging inmates stare and scream  
Like storks in pilgrim plumage from their bobwire nest 
Topping the charring stacks; how long will stapled feathers stick? 
When the atom bomb blisters and their faces melt 
Before the torn waters of the burning lake 
What will rise in ecstatic showers to dissipate?"

“All those who in roaring triumph died…”

All those who in roaring triumph died 
Must live in us, and, living, must suffer still 
Some bright ache of sacrifice enforced 
By a doubtful will. Aim no spade at that 
Chaste composure gods guard in forgetfulness. 
Remember the Fates' forgiveless testament, 
Nailing Prometheus to his crag at dawn 
For high hubris that was man's first sin; 
Or nodding Narcissus, winking at his twin 
Among gold flowers loaded with their own sweet dew, 
Until beauty like a surgeon's knife 
Had sawn him out of life to adorn a pool.

When we lie with the hot worst of our beings spent

When we lie with the hot worst of our beings spent 
And may with the tired betters of our natures speak 
Conferring solidity to what had been lent 
When passion's cry had come amidst our squeaks, 
How can all our honest talk supplant the boast 
Perjured lust had disinterred with sighs 
Or gird our tropic with an icy coast 
Who had viewed spare reality through panting eyes 
That embroiders fine over grievous faults 
With threads of desire, spurring false shapes from dross, 
By peck and pull of the seamstress's wanton art 
Covering our many minor shames with one gross? 
When we into a twinned couplet twist our spans, 
Our bodies' rhyme is more than others can.

Nothing is in a little space confined

Nothing is in a little space confined, 
And, once, confined, is finished in its effects; 
Not so the love that your eyes divines, 
In speculation out-vying philosopher's packs, 
In dwelling on what has no inward bound-- 
The sovereign rarity of a single soul-- 
Blessed with magnifying power to catch sounds, 
Showing your dimmest whisper true to all; 
That love which your eye to all eyes shows 
In universal application spills, 
Healing sick knots of hate that in loved bowers grow, 
Erasing from men's sins their stain of ill. 
As there is no staying of the sun by obstinate night, 
So there is no caging of such love's light.

When, all insecure, before howling mountains

When, all insecure, before howling mountains 
Thrown, I make my breviary all of pleas 
And pull a dark choir of fears from one tone: 
That you forbid with "No" my devoutest "Please." 
When begging poorly after with my poor bowl of want 
Some thrifty grain of your rich rice to eat, 
I repeat my fervent graces for that sup 
Until all my kneeled body a trembled flare 
Of stark uncertainty resembles, 
My hopes all poured in the concentration of a cup 
That I might from the spices of your eye unpent 
Some seasoning of affection by my heat. 
But whether it is a matter of soul or bowl, 
The sum is this: from your least grows my all.

My silent love is ripped by warring thoughts

My silent love is ripped by warring thoughts 
That troop to rebellion from my crowded heart 
And from my tongue's enemy camp cry all my cause. 
Armies in my veins raise blushing fires 
To burn me out of hiding towards your tender smile. 
But since I am so modest shy of light, 
And like the gloomy groundhog room in caves, 
My dark eyes may never touch your pure sight 
Or caress with lurid roll the motive of your sighs 
Which like a bonfire from space, neatly tucked 
Beneath quilted clouds of opposing rain, 
Burns obscured, or lies damped to dross unless 
Your dripping eyes these fired words drift across.

The wasteful sun wakes blinking in morning’s weeds

The wasteful sun wakes blinking in morning's weeds, 
Stoking bland buds until they burn as leaves 
Adding shade while the sun must spend his seed, 
And end generation in a spilling breeze. 
Crowded near the generous golds you smear 
Greedy plants, like myself, stand wiped by light, 
Offering hungry faces that all in green appear 
To feed on molten surplus of your beams. 
Do not with banker's measure judge too hard 
All those who live in interest of your sight; 
Such scales would swing me too lightly into clouds 
And judge my weighty love a zero dram. 
Paymaster of all my joy's fees, with me descend 
Or cycle skyward, where all our wages end.

Time has set his eating stamp on your kind face,

Time has set his eating stamp on your kind face, 
Infecting more deeply what each day's renown 
Promotes, until he has all smooth grace consumed, 
Raking acid trenches where flowered fields had blown. 
But you shall be revenged on what thief time can take, 
For though every flower dies that in April had its head, 
And woodpeckers mark seconds while they make, 
And blossoms burst, their shriveled petals shed, 
And mountains wash eventually to sea,  
They have nothing of what your soul intends--- 
For effortless beauty cannot from you leave 
That have in mental gates stored beauty others lend. 
In your mind revolves an uncorrupted rose, 
As in a glass ball, whose petals cannot close.

Out of time’s cramped oblivion let

Out of time's cramped oblivion let 
Your gentle nature shake glad tomorrows 
That goes all honied now with sorrow 
And walks in shrouds of sighs blaspheming heaven 
That ever spiked such bitter in your palette 
Which only youthful sweetness had leavened. 
Do not tread in anger at the skies 
Which melt and change indifferent to men 
And all their waste of importuning cries. 
Return to dewy looks of love again 
And let the sad house of death, draped with pall, 
The merry carpenter delight reframe 
And with each love-look build new chapel halls 
Arched against the tart recurrence of your pain.

Who can mourn what time has stripped bare

Who can mourn what time has stripped bare 
And left standing with an empty purse? 
If you cannot breed sighs for fleas, by time's char 
Defaced, and drained, weep not for me, nor curse 
That my descending bier, like the locust, 
Must hibernate some days in winking earth. 
My long shadow still scuttles on the crust 
In these crabbed figures you now rehearse; 
As long as men use some ounce of breath for speech 
My weight will not be all in bones dispersed, 
But may by their moist utterance some white heaven reach. 
All things in all things somewhat mingle; 
Death, whose wreath is thorns, but compounds the tangle.

Let me not drape with too much dignity

Let me not drape with too much dignity 
The little sinful wishes of my will; 
For when I come cajoling from the wanting sea 
That beats within me, my dripping wishes make me chill. 
But even so, all sogged with indecisions, 
And trailing everywhere dark seaweed thoughts, 
My desires throng past watery hesitations 
To overpress your protesting shore of rocks. 
Then the cold squid that wraps my tepid heart 
Contracts, urging me all my wickedness retract, 
Who blusters lack-breath still among your parts 
While my inner sense eyes the sea's retreating tract. 
So it is I have come to love too all-sudden 
And with sighing whim walk backwards, begging pardon.

When love’s swelling wound is by conscience pricked

When love's swelling wound is by conscience pricked 
And all the propping stilts like lily stalks 
Are with comic's timing out from under kicked, 
What is left that may be bandaged by our talk? 
Attraction's balloon, which gave us mild rise, 
Has had all its static power neutered 
By our cross looks, and no new-issued sighs 
Come lowing from our bellows here abed. 
Our tender wide swaths of kind regard 
Are stapled through by compelling argument 
Until we, bloody-fingered, but prop shards 
Against the next assault on our separate sinking tents. 
Still, when I feel you lying here, I think 
There's fire in us yet to swell our loves 
And all our rubber war of hatreds shrink.

Have I not, laden with my melancholy

Have I not, laden with my melancholy 
Dose of liquid dreams, poured all out at your want 
And gilded laughter on my lips' disease 
Til your lips Midas' taste? And have I not 
A little nation of desires spent 
In the sovereign country of your thigh? 
Or the fission of all my atoms burnt 
Like a penny candle, extinguished by your sighs? 
And have I not, the gold of owning love 
Out of my pockets picked, made towards you 
With all the winking signals of a delighted ship 
No matter what tars in my ballast moved? 
Still I'll burn my tars, and my weightless body wreck 
If you'll still prove a catching coral for my wrack.

Although you shrink in all the world’s commend

Although you shrink in all the world's commend, 
My eye, being so bound below, must see your state 
Exalted forever, and in lisping wish hear commands, 
Training all my weak powers to stand as your prelate. 
Although you wish stern winds in changed motion blow, 
Or face themselves, and in opposition end, 
They shall bend and stop as your desire goes; 
Although you wish time's ruin to suspend 
And keep vital death inactive that yearns to kill 
Or erase all your age's scars back to birth, 
Each small wish shall be the everything of my will, 
Overturning Atlas and his tipsy earth 
By my modest course; for what your least dream has said 
Speaks prophecies to my ear of lead.

You had grown quiet in a snowy field

You had grown quiet in a snowy field, 
Stood a little near the fence, did not move 
But led sleeping flakes on your blushing tongue to yield 
Their bodies back to water, misting love. 
How like those little crystals, though in large, 
My solemn wishes harmless fall on your magnificence 
To dissolve in the huge waters of your marge 
And, losing all themselves, add nothing to your sense. 
For you are more, in your silent warmth, 
Like constant earth that wears seasons for her veils, 
Changing summer green for autumn's gaiety,-- 
More constant, more true, more everything of worth 
Than the fretful melts that touch your least detail 
And must, with touching, the seasons of their being interchange, 
Losing their winter dignity in your kissing spring.

You into every raging ache of nature

You into every raging ache of nature 
Extend some modest drop of placid bliss. 
Have I not seen the self-conflicting features 
Of some close friend melt to joy at your sweet kiss? 
Have I not myself myself reviled, 
Meditating bruises in a moody wood 
Where mild leaves hiss seeming accusations 
And all my discontented soul moved hooded 
By low-flying thoughts, until you stepped brightly by 
Whistling secret smiles from my black shards? 
Each good that thrives steals some good from you, no lie. 
Until you stooped in grace, with leaning eye 
Peering from heaven into my sad case, 
And turned all my wrath to froth, I was waste.

Sweet delight that perishes on the hour!

Sweet delight that perishes on the hour! 
How many more, to amend your faded score 
Of graces, must here attend and pass? 
Cakes left at Diana's virgin temple cannot sour 
Nor marching corruption force that holy door 
Blossoms have stopped up; those flowers are of glass- 
And sacred plantings cannot die. Although sore 
To go with you, and not one extra empty minute 
Be commanded to rehearse, I must die 
Now sometime after rarest bliss has left 
A lonely globe abandoned by delight 
Where birds twitter riches to impoverished skies 
Dumb of answering song. O, look, the light 
Is lashing westward once again, extending night.

Bronze eyes that stare unmoving at the sun

Bronze eyes that stare unmoving at the sun 
While living glances wince, can no more stare 
At that which dances here beneath, and runs, 
Shouting dying cries to the deafened air. 
No sinking eye can raise re-lauded 
What went hissing down, no monument of tears 
Fountain forth what sadness mixed with water. 
Memory must her crowded chariot forbear 
And carry nothing, until statued grief 
By gradual time has her banded sands dispersed 
To stand no more; those distraught features lapsed. 
Distemperate art but paints a shadowed wreath 
Not real roses, nor can pinch dull clay to breath 
As spent as Adam's, and nothing near his worth.

Prometheus Bound

"Do not think my penitential silence pride 
Or arrogant stubbornness. It is not. 
No, it is a consuming meditation 
That works in me when my mind considers 
The subtle hurts that load my outcast state, 
And of how in past time my estimation 
Showered ignorant honors on my jailers, 
Gilding their crimes before their doing of them. 
But enough; of what your hearts know how should I speak? 
Listen to mortal suffering,-- how I 
Spied them fumbling with their helpless wits, and helped. 
It is a tale briefly told. Not to scold 
Erring man, but to show how much his stature's grown. 
In their uncouncilled sight first spread vain webs 
Of woven pride that gave far-seeing judgement 
Close cataracts, obscuring heinous crimes. 
And into their young hearing they had poured 
Not mellow summer songs gathered from the air, 
But stuffed deaf ears with brays of their own praises. 
They were not men, but instead resembled 
The shapes we see in dreams, mingling all. 
To their burrowing lives I broke some light 
That had been darker else. Like timid ants 
They lived and ate, and kept house in foul caves. 
Neither stars of winter nor the presaging scent 
Of springtime did they know by counting moons, 
Nor was laden summer by signs revealed. 
But every matter was pursued in ignorance, 
Full of wrong causes, false heads and false tails, 
Inverting logic until I came and gave 
Risen stars names and mapped their difficult settings. 
I ferreted out the art of numbers 
That put in the simple scope of man's discretion 
The control of nature, and lettered rude mouths 
With speech that made but oohs and ahs before, giving thus 
Discursive memory its mothering talk 
That nursed the nine. By my gentle bough 
Beasts came lowing to the yoke and plow 
To perform with docile thanks hard labor 
Men laid idly by. I made them love the rein 
Who move lordly chariots with prideful steps. 
And from the burning tongues of gods brought down 
Stolen fire 
All these fool's arts I made for man alone 
Who can't glue together some salvation for himself. 
But when gods threat, saving devices perish 
And cleverness holds up stumps, not hands, to pluck 
This downcast body from its tortured state."

Among Fugitive Hills

Caught in sweat under a May moon's baleful eye, 
Trembling in his stripes, the rapist's case 
Twists against him: cops are rooting in the cleft 
Where he has hid, and has bloomed his mortal joy; 
White was ever the webbed habiliment 
Of innocence, of youth not yet betrayed 
By aching age, the body stretched and splayed 
That had known quiet concentration for a toy 
And stared down blowing hours at a spider's weft. 
A spotlight loiters up the cliff in searing zigs. 
 
Red sirens in a burning forest moan, 
Stage left; another crooked mountain over, 
Another tragedy. Our killer in the brambles 
Mumbles curses, thumbs a furious bee 
Out of his dirty ear, and spits against night clover. 
Scratched like Christ, but cynical-tired 
As prosecuting Pilate, he must pause and puff, 
And stain the winter hawthorne that upholds a spray 
Of indifferent spring, swelling the sublime 
With idle odors under a star's demurring haze. 
 
But round again, like a repeating hymn 
Flashed the indicting needle of their light 
Pinning him, an ape-man up a tree, pinned 
Him who thought to leap and bite and still escape. 
Every downstream salmon dreams the ocean's home, 
Their first mistake. The manhunt's gripping snare 
Inches in, a time-lapse bullwhip zeroed on a tiger's nose, 
To ring an empty hawthorne hollywood moonlight spots. 
He'd fled nimbly bleeding from the hot 
Pursuit, but left his card; in an oozed gash 
Of one snapped limb, it read: "Fred, Illusionast."

To A Young Man

I 
Close up the grave that called you idly by 
And bid you linger who, lingering, must fall. 
Although death's embassy out of tulips blows 
And spins fine madness from the spider's crowded eye 
And purls about the dusty adder's tongue 
Hissing salvation, and is by soft promise pressed, 
Do not listen; Ay, although it reason  
With a multitude, and fix the staring crowd 
On the last things, and make each one a ghost,  
Out of straining vapors traced, do not;  
The mournful tones of those forgathered tongues 
But make a solemn moan of bone to bone. 

II 
First stitch love to every circumstance, and sail 
The round horizon through, sunset-stained, 
To flat heaven, which holds all joys in one wide view... 
Then melt scars from the very hardness of all life 
And be resolved to a contented water-drop 
Before you question death. Was there ever sound 
Of trammelled corpses startled laughing from the ground? 
Although you tear at eyes decayed, begging see, 
And from dead tongues crave lavish answer, 
That can never come; those hearts are sunk through bursting ribs, 
Unmanned by living wind those lungs, that once 
Shouted down the busy sky's testament of thunder. 

III 
Walk a humbler track, kiss pilgrims' dust, 
Set your laurel down to shade a sleeping bee, 
Or leave some lonely sacrament in a hilltop wood 
Where it may go to seed in the depthless shade 
And sprout new sanctity to untutored wilderness. 
But first shake off those saddest looks that weight an unwiped brow, 
And lift clear smiles to those now clouded lips 
That indulged love, and from passion's unwearied kiss 
Grew frenzied, to touch, and stretch, and touch again, 
The final mystery with whitened lips. 
Then drown the hop-toad sorrow in anonymous wine, 
Let afternoons unravel in the sun, and rest, 
And drowse in each moment's uninstructed joy. 
 
Ay! Throw stones at your accusers' mirrored scorn 
And see yourself perched in their curled frowns no more. 
Life was a happy adventure first, where dewlaps sang 
In an undiscovered dale in secret Arcady 
Where grass was higher than our eyes. Once again, 
Though embattled powers and misted storms profane, 
Race to meet that child cringing in the din. 
 
[ NOT USED  II ]
 
When a man stares in his face, 
By rich deceit and intricate age undone, 

Teach the spirit that is your rich inhabitant 
To foster lilies 
For your portioned bed, to sleep and wake upon.

Kennedy’s Inauguration Night, Nixon

 
"Eisenhower was a rube, I know, I loved 
to watch his pinned medals glitter against the sun, 
out-shining heaven in our low human eyes; 
even a deaf man hears the exploding power of a gun 
that's pointing at him. So I heard 
that hissing voice escape from a head bald as a tire. 
Unshaved in my happy rush to greet him at ugly dawn's 
each initiation, I kneeled and scraped 
the dog-lickings from my master's unwashed plate, 
revelled in the white-house grease, and after that 
displayed to my warm house-mate the tired, flat 
unscolded coating of my obsequious tongue 
unleavened by any pentecostal haste, or arching stab 
of truth's spirit, that catches fire on the worst dross 
to drag a grand thing back to its humble embers 
topped by a smoky spire. I would brood my ruins. 
But I knew how to keep my acid grumblings down. 
One knew what one was and what one wanted to be. 
But how did one know what wanting was worth? 
Have I closed up too much of what I ought 
to have left seething open? Was I too-much a mouse 
waiting for the lion's roaring chance as I peered 
out from my walled hole? The drain-hole 
that saves a whelming lung could suck my zest; 
I crest the world's wash, and watch 
the lancing TV-eye mount my blubbered burn, an Ahab 
on his wild whale, ready to needle me open again 
and sip my ambitious innards into its downward din. 
Around me grin and whiten the papers' lettered teeth. 
O Horatian mouth, drooling sibilants, o 
ocean hunger raising the rage of insistent seas 
that grind all my lifted fakes of paint to one grey truth, 
please forget me, a shrimp among your inks, a tired tale 
to regale dry old maids with, not a storming nation.  
After my quiet time I shall cut flesh 
to tailor my new suit with, all golds, 
to implore the masses' adoration. Eh, Checkers? 
so, absorbent nation, swear in your Kennedys and Johnsons; 
i swear, before the world has spun its globe to mush 
under a forgetful sun, I'll come back to win, 
surprising the reeling competition with a smile as thin 
as a knife-edge, and grind 
these snowy pediments under my heel to dust. 
But for now, turn in your watered sleep, bury me 
far back behind the advice column, or cramped ads 
for toothpaste. Sleep, o recumbent nation, 
while dreams are cheap. When teased into the arena 
by Fate's fickle feather once again 
and treated traitorously by our desires 
until we long for the approach of the lions, 
lying in the dusty sun, we listen to 
our overdue bruises mumble invective against us."

End

Novellas

[Poetry]

Aug 232020

Of flares, of flowers

Jun 222020

Loving one face, and the soul that animates it
142 erotic sonnets

RIVER READ TALKING INTRO FOR “OF FLARES, OF FLOWERS”

As talking apes, we handle the matter of urgent mating in a way quite different from our hairier cousins. For us musing humans, loving someone seems to be equal parts artifice and fascination. We love someone, first, not for who they are, but for whom we make them out to be through the mists of dim recognition–across the roomful of phony fog and the pulsing rainbows of the disco ball. This fascination, combined with the artifice of who they present themselves to be, is just the initial sauce of the gourmand’s smorgasbord of attraction and affection we term “love.”

And where the imagination latches its mollusk, it secretes its magic–transforming the rottenest rowboat into Cleopatra’s bejeweled barge.

The courtship between two adult humans contains, on average, one million words–roughly 100,000 more words than Shakespeare’s complete plays. This is the titanic effort that the imagination brings to bed with us. And from this art, we weave the dreams of our sexual lives, our tenderest expressions of affection. And, indeed, we weave our own families.

How we imagine love is important. To be raw, to be vulnerable, to weave our dreams of love in utter nakedness, is important. It’s what we talking apes do. We do it incessantly and, in all the animal kingdom, we do it with an artifice and fascination compounded mainly of words.

This human intrusion of the heart and cock into one’s interpersonal affairs can be awkward, embarrassing, and nearly impossible to winningly negotiate.

GGB
July, 2012

SONNETS LIST

THE FALL

Ah, the small
Cavity
That takes my all....
No gravity
Could keep me down--
When I smell
Your downy mound....
I fell, I fall!

TWO, WE TWO

It's just a little while
We've been two, we two.
Too long myself a solitary,
Self-possessed as a dromedary--
And landscape as bleak.
Too, too long my lonely hills
Slanted-- all drift, sift and seethe.
No wet roll or rill, no river
Rushed oceanward open-armed,
Dissolving all the river's crazy
Hermit-cackle to one tongue's
More marmoreal, vast
Unknowing murmur.

Blips

I am desperate to love you, to know you,
Like a bride who burns off her wedding dress,
Like lips waiting, misshapen, to kiss.

Kisses fell out of us like water falls,
Bursting to earth and deafening the onlookers!
When we kissed, we could hear the sea crashing around us.

But where are they now, those slippery kisses?
What's left of their vast wetness?
No child has grown between us.

Even a puddle leaves its residue of mud,
Some softening of the way
Despite whatever volume of traffic.

Stirring the syrup of your sweet sweet life,
Letting the licks insist their way into me, inside me,
Surely my lips remain sticky? 
 
How many feet have been here before us?  Every foot.
Every pace of the path is hard with old passages, old passions.
Every route is known;  no star blinks undiscovered--

Except by us, two blips on the periphery,
Elliptical with longing, our lips chapped by the long wintering over,
Too stiff and dry to even whistle!

Our veined and florid maps are still tucked in our backpacks.
Our tents are not yet ready to unroll with sleep.
My eyes keep blinking, keep looking, no matter how dark the way.

There's still so much to see, I think,
When your hand brushes mine under the pine trees,
And the sound of our walking fades into the background,

And I close my eyes to breathe.
If love is, then love is what happens
When you forget where you're going.

SONNETS

Assist me, some extempore god of rhyme; for I am sure I shall turn sonneteer. ~~ Shakespeare

All my life my heart has yearned for a thing I cannot name. ~~ Andre Breton

Desire too cosmic and too close to name
A vibrant nothing and a tortured shame.
My all, my fall--which in one syllable I'll tell
If you beside me, dear, will ride
     the black thunders to Hell.

Sonnet 1 My eyes are weary of looking for lovers

My eyes are weary of looking for lovers
In every face, every cinch of the hips,
All the coffee, the talk, that passes my lips;
Tired of my solitude under cold covers.

A day is a long time, an hour, even a minute
Without you, stranger who will melt my heart,
Who will hear the doves beating in my chest
And fold herself into my arms like a shirt.

Arctic winds cross my forehead,
My hands chill and splayed as a penguin's orange feet
As I wait on this ice floe for the one I must meet,
One who will ignite my nights with lavender heat.
Who are you, hands held before you toward my hands' use....
A sleepwalker?  A zombie?  A mistress, a muse?

Sonnet 2

This is the first morning of the first day.
Even the grass looks like its being born,
Its green is so tender, matching your eyes,
As we learn to walk together down the unworn path.

Birds hesitate, amazed by the songs in their throats,
The wild corollas of sound at their command--
Even the mocking bird, even the warbler, hesitate,
Testing bright notes in the new sky and new land.

The trees look as young as fresh pea-tendrils.
Today, water is closest to happy tears.
Smiles cover our faces like big chrome grills--
The first hour of the first day of the first year!

I look over at you in your coat and your broach,
Ask your name, and, slowly, approach.

Sonnet 3

My backpack is weighted with lilies and candles.
I cross argent mountains and oceans to reach you.
I throw a tasseled rug before you
And stare into wide eyes no longer dull,
Passing the carafe until dawn fills us
With rock-candy colors, and our smiles are tired
From talking too animatedly wired
While night cloaks his blue frills around us.

How long have I walked to find your country?
How long had I slept till I dreamed of you?
How long has my desire kept me swimming?

Toward you, toward you, my dear, I am swimming!
My breath breaks the surface seeking shores of you!
Coming home to your eyes, I sing "‘Tis of thee!"

Sonnet 4 I know you minimally only

I know you minimally only,
The way a head knows hair: an invisible halo,-- 
The way a sleepwalker knows life: fully lonely
As a blind hand walking across a mirror.
I know you only as a keel knows water:
I divide and unite your surfaces endlessly and seamlessly, 
Never knowing the wet of your green interiors.

But I know you will know me completely.
You will know me without any deceit,
For deceit's too weak to withstand your winds--
The hurricanes that live in your laughter 
Announcing: "It is she!"  And I'll stand
Open to you totally, a book without a binding,
And our eyes will share tears simple as water.

Sonnet 5 Let us play a game then, you and I

Let us play a game then, you and I.
Let the table be raised beneath the sky,
Let the drums be drummed, and on it lie.

Smoky women bear their burning tapers nigh,
Dwarves with gongs come clanging, by-and-by.
Everyone take your seats, let the last one in,
The ceremony of sex is about to begin.

My hand finds you, your hand unknots my tie,
Lips as lithe as fishes sip, and we let slip
Our final disguise.  Now at last in naked night
We plunge the utter dark with light caresses.

Touching the matter to the heart, they bless us.
For you and I are nothing when this is,
When we are one thing, one mass of blessings.

Sonnet 6

Magnolia petals on a tank... fall lightly...
As they fall... on everything, being
The pink delirious things they are.

Philosophers in their overcoats construe
More meaning than meaning thinks its due,
Being the grey barristers of the real
They be.  But you, sweating in your spring attire,
Visit devastation on the sweet magnolia tree,
Declawing its blossoms... and trimming the wings
Of birds as they return to their warm abode.

For you the poet unfolds his ode.
For you the tank stutters in its tracks.
For you the petals in my stark heart
Fall in flattering loveliness... for a start.

Sonnet 7

It's enough.  To play with scarves in summer air
Is enough. The weaving and the waving
Of their colors in the fresh summer air
Is enough.  There is no more to be waved 
Or to be woven than what has already occurred.
No past is prologue when the moment's all.
Look how brightly the colors wave and curve!
The summer air is here, and that is all.

The summer air is heavy in the mind,
The mind is old and full of dusty thoughts:
How this becomes that, how the child crawls into the man;
Colors wave and curve, and I calculate their sine.
--Ai! You cover me with a hundred scarves uncaught,
And the summer air is bright with omen.

Sonnet 8 What is time, and how is it our own

What is time, and how is it our own?
I will not recognize the clock hours maybe,
So bee-like diligent to my task I am,
Or, grown slowly thoughtful looking out to sea,
Time slips by lightly that would govern me.
My time feels most my own when you and I
Together spend the gold moments given:
Pointing at Venus in her drape of sky,
Or doubling-up downright--with laughter shaken.
Or when moony looks imbue you, dear,
(If I'm not mistaken) the way a clear
Pond becomes clouded with the thought of rain
Or a mother disappears into her child's pain.
We keep time most when we give all our own.

Sonnet 9

The fierce being you would have spring from you
Will yet spring.  The life your life trembles to beget
Is waiting in your snowy body curled.

She shall from your eyes drink the honied fire,
And her breath your breath will yet sustain,
Inspiring in her unborn eyes a thousand worlds.

The new-made woman who will step like brightness
Too bright to look at--dances in your likeness
When before the mirror you test your tresses.

This phantom of your future self shall come yet:
And every diamond be her birthright,
And every river flutter like her caress.

Oh little mother frowning brownly so,
Let one small smile be born upon you now.

Sonnet 10

If Cezanne painted you, what village would you be?
What pair of Monet's haystacks, soft,
And glistening in sunlit serenity?
To me, too close, you are a crosshatch, crossed
With empty diamonds and abrasive lines,
A certain blotchey rosacea of the soul
Yanking your kite-string down from the divine;
From the eternal you wither into the small.

Here is where we meet, knees beneath the table,
The traffic staticy, the world unstable
That goes zagging through the fog beyond us.

In our discussion's no accordance--
We're as different as figs, as cracks
In the Old Masters, two needles in the haystack.

Sonnet 11

The blossoms that stood out on the branch
Now blow along pavement wet with runoff;
Fall gave way to winter, and winter now to March
When early flowers crowd and then fall off.
It is almost too much of the coming thing,
This blizzard of blossoms after blizzard in earnest
Before the azalea really get going--
Such hazardous blooming should be in jest.
Almost too much... with the excited whites
Boating toward oblivion in the gutter
Where the storm drain lurks, all appetite,
And the dark beyond the grate is utter.
There's much to consider while we sit as one,
Touched blonde by the sun,--but no longer young.

Sonnet 12 Calm as ponds let yourself be today

Calm as ponds let yourself be today.
Leadeth thyself to lie down, shut off the TV,
Hear the million bees murmur rumor of plenty
While kids race at recess in unharried play.
Peace, peace be on your sensitive eyes,
Your fingers steady as new radial tires;
Put up your feet, you're off the highwire,
Each exhale sails another balloon to the sky....
May contentment come and tuck you in,
Pull the clean sheet right up to your chin,
Sing lullabies and lieder until you believe
No one you know will ever again grieve.
Today take this prayer, and light a tea candle:
Whatever comes your way you can handle.

Sonnet 13 Dancing makes a motion of its own

Dancing makes a motion of its own.
My ears are dense with music of the known;
What notes the moment's inner ear can sow!
How like a planet a swaying body goes:
Orbiting we dance, and in such dancing flow.
Is there a blessing in these moves that move us so?

My mother used all her days to make amends,
Yet all her days were not enough to spend.
What moves in us moves without an end,
A dance between the register-marks of stars
Whose spheres revolve high music to the ears.
--We keep turning to become just what we are.

Is there a blessing in these moves that move us so?
Dancing makes a motion of its own.

Sonnet 14 I would have you grow invisible

I would have you grow invisible,
Shrink down and disappear like blotted tears,
Like wine consumed in hungry drops, or winter
Snow become fantastical in melting March,
Leaving the green hillside patched with wet.

Do not change your petals for a branch
Curved low with many weighted fruits;
Burn, flash to ashes, and let those ashes blow
Till no grey shred of your greatness waits
Behind, till all colors that compose you are undone.

Become some transparent, wingy thing
They tell about in churches when they sing.
Take all you are with you when you go.
Still, I cannot unknow you.  This I know.

Sonnet 15 Return to me naked, I would have you so

Return to me naked, I would have you so
Always and everywhere, like the nude prow
Of a wooden ship, announcing where she goes
With splashes white as catastrophe, and as loud.

Why have you left me for laundry and chores,
Your sails lifted, your hand saluting for shade?
Why have you left me?  For now you are gone:
The bed unmade, and my heart unmade.

Wherever you go primly sailing now
Through cute boutiques or old bodegas
I will wait, for I know that night must follow
And your bare moon burst before my window-glass.

For this new Life where we squall unadorned,
Return to me naked as you were naked born.

Sonnet 16 You have such a subtle, neutral scent

You have such a subtle, neutral scent,
Like a show-pony before she's ridden hard,
Before good use turns her breathing scant
And she makes a wanton break-out toward the stars
That leaves the sturdy fencepost rent.

Cleanly we begin, easy in our reins and chaps,
Taking the wide acreage at a simple cant
Until the rocking saddle slaps.

Then I cleave to you and cleave in twain
The sweaty mystery of your sex;
Molten mists of joy and pain inextricably mix.

Raucous across the finish line,
We pant and pause and smell as one
To what rank stench our hard riding's come.

Sonnet 17 Love me fiercely, though nipples bleed

Love me fiercely, though nipples bleed
And lips need stitches where your lips have passed;
Love me fiery until love's pyre is dead,
The bonfire soaked, the man-in-the moon undressed.
The heat that creeps through lovers' veins
Ignites silently in eyes and furtive looks
Until a shared surrender in the brain
Incinerates discretion, undoes every hook.
Do not wait for the duration of a zipper
But love me instantly, as steam loves the cold air,
Hot as torches in huge candelabra.
Burn me until for burning there is no cure,
For no love comes when lust's coal-red is gone:
No mother-love, no nurse's hand, no one.

Sonnet 18 You open for me, a luminous anemone

You open for me, a luminous anemone;
You bloom in intense interior colors
And wildly give out strong scents of the sea.
Are you plant or animal in your passive pleasure?
I peel you blandly at my manly leisure,
Exploring your deep promise of treasure:
The shine in your eyes is silver with glee.

Holding our breaths, we bodysurf white combers,
Looking left and right in the tumbling lea
Until the grating sand our grace encumbers
And we land half-dressed on the bedded beach.
You hand me a towel, if one is in reach,
And out-of-breath smile and shyly stretch:
This is the treasure toward which we lumber.

Sonnet 19 Each night my mantra sounds your name

Each night my mantra sounds your name
Which in going round undoes itself in sound
Until all syllables go circling the same.

Night-owls hoo you, dark winds whistle you, clouds
Spell out what letters tout you, only you,
Until all alphabets jumble just the same
In going round, beading prayers of your name.
Crickets crick you, and lapping water begs
The shore until all oceans go echoing your name....
Faces whirl and blur, merging as they do,
Until all faces are your face, identical as eggs.

This mirror-maze of gladness has no end:
Beauty is not beauty that shares not your name.
All surfaces reflect you, only you.

Sonnet 20 Eros’ rose shed red shreds of petals

Eros' rose shed red shreds of petals
On your bed, your eyelids, and your long lips--
Pressing silence to the secrets that we keep,
Just we two, alone as Adam at the Fall.

Twins in sin, how redly aches our double-loving
(Spiking with sin-cinnamon our apple pie)
As mouth-to-groin and groin-to-mouth we lie,
Lengthwise mirrors of all our loving's trouble.

Each slap and grapple leaves temptation's trace
Trailing red rose petals of fingerprints
Across the landscape of your ass and face.

And, like a gardener in his pints,
I pull the thorns aside for only this:
To find two lips, your rose, upraised to kiss.

Sonnet 21

When the tongue darts tart to the aspic place
Ranging round the brown aromaed hole
Seeking solace between fundament and face,
By licks outlining the awkward tale of souls,
I know myself a slave of lust, and lave
The merry mistress of my cock with praise
No higher than my lust himself does rise
To be a sunk spelunker in your caves.
Round and round we go, and soul to soul
We play bandit and the badman night and day
Stealing happiness from the world's decay
Whose carnival commands us stand in sadder roles.
Through the work week, daybreak to dusk,
I dream of our theater, the husk of your musk.

Sonnet 22 The soft musk of your pale downy neck

The soft musk of your pale downy neck,
Apple-dappled depth of orchard's wealth,
Wreathes through our low-hung boughs of breath
As we share warm whispers and shining cheeks.
The bed about us is tumbled as the Andes,
White-peaked bedlam of a stormy ocean
Frozen when exhaustion paused our oars again
And breath returned to calm our pantings.

Soft the musk of your downy neck, my peach.
Soft the teased traceries of tongue and tongue
Vying redly with teeth and lips and gums
To bite the splendid fruit our loves unleash.
The endless hours move in one slow sigh--
Opening on a downy dawn as warm as thighs.

Sonnet 23

Love--Love thundering, love underlined
Declares itself no louder than your whisper
Whispered in a moment unrefined
Until my beaten heart is a burning blister--
Along with other parts best left undefined.

The small things you say to me at midnight
When the drapes are drawn and shutters tight
(And day a rumor of remembered sight)--
Those things you say become my private light
And blaze behind my eyes in sheer delight.

Although small and quiet as two bugs
Sitting aslant a ruby leaf in spring,
Our love's not less that chummily hugs
And waits till dark to say the wildest things.

Sonnet 24 I’d trade prayerbeads for millstones

I'd trade prayerbeads for millstones
If stone could grant what lips have wished
And manifest for my solitude
All the weight of kissing I have missed,
Blessing my bed with your beatitude.

All the burdens of the awkward ox
I'd shoulder as my own if only
Hours, not days, remained till I unroll your socks
Next to mine, white stripes on the lonely
Divan pushed back and piled with busted boxes.

Here I wait in a penitent's house,
Whose heart's all roses and runaway kites,
Whose curse is time--who has kissed eternity
And tossed her socks next to mine.

Sonnet 25 Why is love my measure and my means

Why is love my measure and my means?
My talk, my trouble, my idle thought obscene,
My crisis, my crux, my cri de coeur supreme?

Of all the arrows fitted for my ample quiver,
Or wrinkled routes eked out by many rivers,
Why is my sea love, love my apple ever?

Flowers come as varied as their seeds began;
Varied fall the fruits, and many the works of man;
Endless are our melodies, destinies, and dreams.

But my drum, though struck by a thousand hands,
Bangs one love, my harp--though by an angel band
Commanded--pleads love alone through every golden strand.

For you are my love, my sun and my seed.
Toward you I grow, who answers my every need.

Sonnet 26

Who were you before we entered the trees
Of our being together?  What creatures walked
Under the umbrella of your shadow?
Who has been made cool in your shade?
And why, besides death, would they leave?
You with your brow of hard bread, threshed wheat,
Your breasts full of the scents of strawberries and dough,
Your thighs some mysterious spring has darkened?
Did you exile those others who walked with you?
Did you send them naked down the hillside at midnight,
No lantern in their hands, the path thorny and burnt?

How glad I am they are gone, or, better, dead! Oh!
No one should touch you save one most supplicant.
Only one being born should enter your cunt.

Sonnet 27

Out of the bitter snow, I came rattling in.
Out of melting March, muddy and wet,
Shaking like a harassed dog, I came in.
I came in when summer was not summer yet
And the soft air gave me leave to wander
All night long and stare into the starry sky,
At one with the celestial order.
And when the nights were hot and the grass was dry
And all the world slept out-of-doors
To hear the night things stirring, I came in.
Out of all nights, and out of every weather,
Harassed, tempted, or implored, I came in.
And now that autumn's nip is here again
(And you still beside me) I'll stay in, stay in.

Sonnet 28

Go until the earth lies between us, pregnant,
The curved horizon blue as a whale's back
And every constellation different.

Go until your memory is black
With absences where I had been the stars
That shooed your ship home from her wanderings.

Go until the sound of talk is strange, far
From your childhood chants and gabblings;
Where ABCs are cuneiform on the blocks.

Go until time itself has come unsprung
And the hands go whirl-a-gig on the clock.
Go, go, and retreat not back one rung.

For there's nowhere where you are that I am not,
Seeing what you see--and what touches you, I touch.

Sonnet 29

The soft fall of flares, of flowers, once the orgasm's
Over... the body's empty tube through which no music
Is moving--a sumptuous trumpet dumped in the museum
As if no hand no mouth had ever crossed it.
Who could imagine it rampaging erect,
This piece of rusty history, tucked
Where the bodies of dead moths collect,
Churning to silvery dust as I walk?

Too long have you been unbedded by me
Whose arms once held you like a river
And covered you buoyantly with balsam and kisses
Falling in flakes from heaven forever
To dissolve in yourself, in your sea,
Your wet spring tenderness unending and green.

Sonnet 30

For you, I would be little as the rain, and fall on you
From everywhere, on your eyes and in your hair
Until you turned your mouth up to the blue
To drink me in in the drenching air.
For you, I would be as patient as the earth
And follow your steps everywhere to feel you go and come,
Dancing on my skin until the red dust covers us both.
I would feel you plant grass in me with your strong thumb.
For you, I would be as ecstatic as the sun,
Radiant everywhere, and happy everywhere too,
Like the abrupt smiles of very old women
Who know the sun wants to own them, but keep the night alone.
But, oh, for you, I would be the nighttime too!
And all the stars, and wrap you up in sleep in my glittering poncho.

Sonnet 31

Love has nourished us like a beet root, red,
Or a sweet potato pulling candy from the dirt.
From one look at you, I know that all I ever said
Has taken root, my tendrils alleviating the hurt
Others placed inside you the way a bullet 
Lodges in a tree but does not kill the tree--
A tree whose slow rivers of sap, sweet
Maple syrup, flow from too deep a mystery
To ever stop until they end in blossoms.
And those blossoms are your two eyes
The color of new leaves, of wings fallen from locusts
Who no longer want to take to the sky
To sing, but have come down with us among the roots
Giving us their dark hymns and dreams of truth.

Sonnet 32

What is this enigma that has ruined my sleep?
This thought that repeats like an epileptic stutter,
Lightning always striking the same place, two times, twenty?

Sometimes the sway of a dress will make me weep,
The cough of a shoe on the sidewalk,--
If it is your shoe, your feet that do the walking.

A hundred times I have been in love, and never
Have I lost even one minute's sleep,
No matter how beautiful the woman, no matter how deep 

The loves that swam up from my heart to attend her
Like aquarium fish when dinner is sprinkled,
Their small mouths all Os, hungry and unfed.

What is this enigma that has ruined my sleep?
Sometimes the sway of a dress will make me weep.

Sonnet 33 How one goes on wrestling with destiny

How one goes on wrestling with destiny!
Trying so hard to throw away one beautiful thing
That has fluttered to your feet like litter, a free gift.

Here I am, hunched over the trash can, wrestling,
Uncomfortable, angry even, with what has come to me freely:
Priceless platinum the world has thrown after me,
Chasing me down with free armfuls of ecstasy
While I try so hard to throw away one beautiful thing--
Miserably, miserably with my angel wrestling.

Life is not a medicine to swallow, it is a feast!
Just open yourself to being blessed, you will see!
The trash will throw itself away, only you will be left
Standing, shining like an angel's wings,
You, who tried so hard to throw away one beautiful thing.

Sonnet 34

My heart clicks on and off, a sacred searchlight
Sweeping the skies for your spark and your light
Until our X-ed rays meet in a singular spot
The way stars press their faces against the glass,
Mocking the world with their peculiar taunts:
Here we are above you, pure and pristine!
You below can never wear our radiant gowns,
Trapped in your tragic habit of being human.

If only you and I were perfect, untouchable, one!
The rest of the world would be nothings and no ones
--Only we two in the immensity of space,
Locked alone in our looking face-to-face--
Not even minding the other stars' conversation 
Arranged in their envious constellations.

Sonnet 35 Whose face this is I think I know–

Whose face this is I think I know--
Though time has hurried with his plow
(Leaving alive the eyes);  the face is strafed,
Scored with ruts and roofed by snow.

Had some magic mirror come and chafed
My younger self with this injured image of her face,
I could not have shuddered with more surprise
At my darling's disordered fate.

Nothing so wild in wild surmise
Would I have conjured for my eyes
Who now at breakfast contemplates the wreck
Time has drifted to my side.

Still, her eyes, measuring my old self as we sit,
Demark no damage to my aspect.

Sonnet 36 Every day the poet sat down and thought

Every day the poet sat down and thought.
That was his first mistake.  Each day he spent
Knotting and unknotting until it caught
Itself, half a line.  Each month his rent
And bills piled up higher than his epic
On the cetaceous era undersea--
No vorpal sword on that went snicker-snak.

The protozoa had proto-souls, you see.
He had convinced himself, now all he lacked
(In time's green-golden ache and sway)
Was a readership that had his back,
The discerning few he would show the way.

A note was found among his apartment stacks
In neat pink script: "Going, not coming back."

Sonnet 37

Adam and Eve, by their garden wall surrounded,
Met with the snake innocently enough,
Heard his insurance pitch, had a laugh,
And went back to touring their miraculous grounds.

Unexpectedly, the snake came back again,
Here and there in the shrubs with a hiss,
Insinuating that, inferring this,
Until the nightmares and migraines began.

Then he disappeared, gone in a smoky wisp,
And Adam and Eve relaxed, had a snack,
Ignored the prickling mounting up their backs
Implying there was something important they'd missed.

Almost, they made it.  But their brains, too big
Not to wonder, pulled them under.

Sonnet 38

I kiss your statue, fervid while you vacillate.
Your lips are perfect, poised; mine insistent,
Never satisfied, lonelier with each deep pressing,--
Imagining the dark with you undressing,
Dropping your bra on the carpet, panties flung
Higher than the highest note a soprano sings.

But you, being a statue, remain composed.
Hands, once warm as bread, lie gracefully reposed.
Take my spark, my soul, my all!  But do not stay so cold.
I keep kissing your coldness, growing old.

I hope I am not too rude to one not quite alive,
One toward whose loveliness my whole life has fallen,
Leaving my own dead pedestal behind, praying my passion
Is love enough to bring you back to life.

Sonnet 39 How can tonight come without you her

How can tonight come without you here?
Where will I go to bury my sorrow
When I am alone and the single stars come clear
From behind their invisible cloud as out of a barrow?
Without your face close, your hair, your breathing,
How can I endure the darkness yet to come?
One night alone feels like a civilization ending,
The pottery shattered, upended the throne.
When my hands reach out for the small
Thumbhold on your hip, no bigger than a rose
Petal that in our house's garden has fallen,
What will my hands hang onto instead, what emptiness?
Must I walk alone through the long midnight in sorrow,
Without even the company of my shadow?

Sonnet 40

The wind insisted nothing, came to my face
With the frittery gentleness of nothing.
I had not noticed were I running a race
Or had head bent down, pensive, on some one thing.
But I was doing nothing, and so found grace
Given by the wind out of nothing.

The wind was slightly misty, as I recall,
With filaments of seaweed threading the bare
Blowsy breath that passed down the empty hall
And touched my cheekbone hanging there
Blank as a bank of paper, or a roll
Of scripture with no writing anywhere.

And then in the nothing air there hung, as I recall,
Your perfume, too;  and from that nothing, all.

Sonnet 41

When I create my love for you in my heart,
Secretly, it's a black alchemy, a recipe
Without directions, accomplished all out
Of order.  Eat of it anyway!  Eat every pie.
There is a deliciousness in this mystery
We consume, one that has us lick our fingers
And wipe round our lips with our tongues.

Discard every question but how to linger
In the slow soft light that gently comes
After our tumultuous lovemaking.
All the candles of heaven, falling stars and comets,
Have been hushed in our mutual taking.
Now is the time of quiet, and the time 
Our murmurs slur most toward the sublime.

Sonnet 42 How should I write a poem of love

How should I write a poem of love?
I, who am selfish, small, and alone?
"First, stuff your craw with caviar and doves,
The best of the best, stolen gold and emperors' bones."

I listened to the voice and ran everywhere
Stuffing myself with rarities and riches.
Surely if one is stuffed with beauty up to here
One's speech will be all eloquence and wishes.

But, no.  I did not know it then
But what I needed most was nothingness--
That empty feeling, that utter lack
That would let me be filled with you again and again,
Like a vessel whose emptiness keeps holding more kisses,
And hears in your voice every morning the morning lark.

Sonnet 43

All day long I have followed this sad dog.
My love for you, mangy and clumsy, wanders
Down windy alleys, snooping through gutters.
And now it's 4 A.M., and where is the dog?

One day I had gotten mad and kicked it out.
Out of my house, and out of my heart, perhaps.--
My great love for you must wander in the street!
What I'd fed so tenderly must survive on scraps.

Soon enough, I missed its nails on the floor;
Its needy whomp into the bed when thunder uttered;
Even love's wet dingy smell when the rain would pour
I missed, and missed utterly.

Come, help me tonight, whistle out loud;
My love is bound to find me, now I'm no longer proud.

Sonnet 44 I can’t have you every day, can I

I can't have you every day, can I?
My stomach will get swollen, sour, and tight,
As if candy-gorged on Halloween night.

I can't have you every day, can I?
You would blow through your lips "Oh, alright."
But, in your heart, you'd be bored and uptight.

I can't have you every day, can I?
Beating a drum too often can blister a thumb.
How much more gently, then, when loving someone?

I can't have you every day, can I?
You can't be hungry every single day, can you?
I want you so bad, but you must tell me what to do.

"When you doubt that I would be with you,
Look into my eyes, and see: All I see is you."

Sonnet 45

So much time has gone by, sliding and washing
Away, the little waves piling into the larger....
Before you, my life had fallen asleep.
Now I am awake, a little of me is waking,
Like bubbles inching to the top of the lager.
Who knew how years go by, that one could sleep so deeply?

Together in bed, we yawn and slap our eyes;
Dawn opens the curtain with a sunny spear.
I feel as if, when we walk, my head scrapes the sky.
Our feet are leaping like deer!

Together our nights are pink and warm,
The stars are the tips of a baby's fingers.
We hold hands and walk across the night lawn;
Somehow the moon looks down at us, laughs. Awake, we linger.

Sonnet 46 Lovers always meet each other twice

Lovers always meet each other twice.
First, in animal excitement, pupils wide,
Stamping and pawing and rubbing their sides,
They leap into each other's mouths; it's nice.

Later, if they continue consuming each other,
A day comes when their hands are on the same handle
And they turn the wheel together, humbly,
And their eyes, once wild and hungry, grow tender.

It is this tenderness that holds the baby
In the womb;  the womb that's made of tender netting.
It is this tenderness that weaves the nest,
That tells us "yes" instead of "maybe,"
That gives tonight's moon the light it's shedding.
It is in this tenderness you and I may rest.

Sonnet 47

You are sleeping, a hill where night-snow falls.
No longer do you laugh and become a cloud,
Cotton pinched between the nurse's able fingers, helping all,
Letting the blood of others enter you, clotting
Their wounds or applying alcohol before the needle.
Now you are purely sleeping, your breath apples,
Your great shaggy hair-river up in a mop.
Tell me, am I remembered in your dreams?
There where you fly above the world without a cape?
Am I a one-eyed giant crunching bones?
How I would like to crouch down and enter your dream-tunnels
And patter in the water after you, running.

Sonnet 48

A little pale shy wetness, a little slit
Is all it is;  not even a flower is so shy--
Not edelweiss on its rocky sit,
Nor bold button pom, nor lazy calla-lily.
Yet through this keyhole (and with this minor key)
A prism of delight may print its rainbow
On all the sky, and all of space, and me.
How fretfully you guard what nowhere shows
But is secret with the secretness of souls--
Invisible until given in gift outright
And then a purple palimpsest, a slippery miracle,
Perpetual desire emblazoning darky night.
All of this you gave, and are giving yet
To one who never can, nor shall, forget.

Sonnet 49 If you must go today, shed your skin

If you must go today, shed your skin
Like a snake, folded over in silken pleats.
I want to roll always in your musky and fragrant muslins.
I want to cover my pillows with you, and stitch moccasins--
My face on your rosy breast, my feet in your feet.
Your skin pours over me, cream from the pitcher 
Dousing me head to foot till I'm swimming
In white memories of touching you, deeper
And deeper. You, not God, are my soul's keeper.
With your beauty, your nearness, your softness, I am brimming.
I smell that one spot behind your ear, you know,
Every time I close my eyes to pray.
Every time I close my eyes--as now--
You are there, luminous in naked ecstasy.

Sonnet 50 Say it once and best, unlike the lark

Say it once and best, unlike the lark
Who goes on going on repeating,
Refreshing voice beyond the boundaries of the park
Far into horizon's pale receding.
Say it once and let that once stand fast,
Unlike the sea seducing the long seashore
With repetitions of a caress that does not last
But, mutable and moving, touches less and more.
Say it once, once only, unlike the sun
Whose heartbeat breaks each day from night's breast
Burning as if no other billion days or beats had come,
Warmly consoling all beneath, man and worm and beast.
Say it once, then let all saying rest.
Say "I love you,"-- not first, not last, but best.

Sonnet 51

Grief is not part of us, part of this loving.
Grief no longer eats our bodies, cracking bones
And finding in our marrow we are lonely.
That grief is gone which had kept us alone.
The griefs that blasted us have blown through
Leaving the house refreshed, the shutters tested,
The waste of tears pooled coolly in the foyer.

New light in the garden exalts wet roses' colors.

Now we discover each other with dry eyes
Looking clearly at each other's shoulders,
The tilt of hips, cuffed hair, crooked smiles,
All of us that shows us solider.
You look at me as I at you must look:
Evenly level, starting to open the book.

Sonnet 52 Venus is bending now above the bow

Venus is bending now above the bow
Of earth, her body shedding Venus-light
Into spirits which had been ember-low,
The burned-out mascara of the night.
Venus goes stalking among the other stars
Winking in their little admiration
That so great a lady would come so far
To let them be gems that hem her graces.
Venus lets me follow too, as, slowly,
We walk beyond the dusk together
Into whatever the evening is evolving--
The sunset wind that kicked is now a nothing-feather.
When Venus descends to us, rayed so ably,
Cupid's bivouacked in the bushes, surely.

Sonnet 53 In your mouth there glows a holy rose

In your mouth there glows a holy rose;
Two sun-red roses are your fiery eyes.
When your palms turn up, they hold roses
Warm and red, blushing and alive
As your two cheeks, where two more roses open,
Or the rose-loveliness pinning back your hair
So that roses orbit you like cherry moons.
And when you weep, the roses all despair.

So like roses are your noble knees, when up
From scrubbing you run to greet me
And kiss with your rose-mouth--an open cup
Full of rose-blood, which rosy perfumes wreathe.
And when your rose brow shadows a look that knows,
My soul is lost in folds of rose.

Sonnet 54

You come to me encased in a shell of light,
Light dripping from your wet fingertips
Until swept sparks gather on the mat like sweat,
A slow swirl of flame rising to our hips--
And we in the center of this focused rose
Touch like torches our incandescent arms
And fall into the whirl of liquid pulses
Beating to our hearts' bruised alarms.

Here in the center of light is love
And silence.  Only your face floats above
The burning candle end;  only your eyes and mine,
Dear, in all the ardent fire remain.
Only here, in the light's heart of is,
The earth releases her captives, and we rise.

Sonnet 55

Your feet are wounded doves walking home,
Your hair a current of motionless water;
Melancholy your eyes, dark daughter,
And your high forehead is a sandstone dome
Irritable winds etch and erode.

This is your catalog, but not your ark.
What you are continues, unwinding like a road
Blessing dusts are paving for your good;
What you are reaches out beyond the wind,
Beyond strange stars, far past the last spark.

The familiar grip of your loving hands
I love, and because your hands know well
My intimate recesses intricate as bells,
I love and follow you beyond the wind.

Sonnet 56 You come carrying gifts no other knows

You come carrying gifts no other knows
But me, who loves you the way a seafish
Loves the sea--until my body lives in you entirely,
Transparently--waving in your waves, like so.
The gift of your body is the first gift,
Round and good, a spicy hand-pinched empanada
Floured and left to sizzle until ripe--la!

--No, not your body, just your ears are first.
You listen like a mouse, full of tiny attentiveness,
Hearing in my most minor word the major chord;
This is a gift--I throw off my melancholy shroud 
Under your lemony canopy of giving.
You stand at the prow, your heart straight out like a flag,
Flying forward to new continents from my crags.

Sonnet 57

Your heart's composed of grey mourning doves
Cooing in circles under the dogwood tree.
Come, my nunnish sis.  Come, break open to love,
Alight upon the budded branch you cannot yet see.
Let light interpenetrate you like honied waters
Or as when lime and garden dirt are mixed;
Let corn stand golden in the blackest rut;
Let seed and need be one;  let the roaring sun be fixed.
If there's something in the roadway, pick it up.
Let your pockets hang fat as a puppy belly;
Love itself, and love alone, fills fullness up.
--Is that a dime glinting in the gully?
In my heart, too, a bird is circling, dear,
Its wings fanned wide for loving--or despair.

Sonnet 58

Black butterflies crowd the white church with shadows.
Secretly now I speak, who had been plain before
Fear and pain had come and nailed my door.

I am lost in a world of truculent shadows.
I only approach what's real in whispers,
I am mute before the others.

All that was solid is now thrown shadows.
The black butterflies land on my heart and fold their wings,
My tongue forgets to sing.

Love has webbed my ardent hands with shadows.
My hands, once full of eloquent caresses,
Are folded now in wings of blackness.

Do not follow me into this twilight,
Love, for after such a dusk must come the night.

Sonnet 59

Someone has written your body on the grass
In long erotic brushstrokes loaded with dew.
You shine on green blades that shimmer as we pass
Sighing thigh and eyelash as only you could do.
The trees' great roots tangle enticingly
Romancing the dark fructification of earth
As I romance you in the grass blades,
Erect in the dirt as iron filings pulled toward magnetic North.
 
How I want to roll in you, breathe in you,
Bury myself in you,--pull the lawn up like a coverlet
And sleep in the deep mystery I see is you
Always and everywhere, even in death's regret:
When you are gone, let my bones on your bones
Lie lingeringly--against death's cold alone.

Sonnet 60

When love spills white on her cloudy breast,
And stormy brows blow clear of steamy Os,
And aching Ahs breeze to their windy rest, 
I, new-calm, quiet to calm's no-moan.

The placid window opens to a sky
Where I float alone, unclouded now,
And listen to my lying mistress, fly-
Ing in her far Afghanistan, unfollow-
Ed by harrying lust, the insistent prick-
Ling that turns moist "Maybe" to "Hurry, yes!" 
O how we seeded love's tempest to light-
Ning desire!--which lies beside, a deflated gust.

So we lie apart who had shared one heart
And, pant for pant, had each played the stormfront's part.

Sonnet 61 After the white heat has left the pen

After the white heat has left the pen,
The tower come to grief, and all our loving
Ceased, there will be time for turtle-doving
And all the public petting couples plan.
After the bed has ceased creak-quaking,
And reddened knees and slipping toes uncurl,
There will be time to be just boy and girl
Laughing at our nasty pelvic snaking.
After the sweet tipping, love and shove
Of two bodies burning to be one,
The shouting out to God and His holy son,
There will be time to count all the stars above.
But now I say, looking over at you again,
Let stars remain unnumbered till time's end.

Sonnet 62 The lamp burns in the corner of my room

A lamp burns in the corner of my room,
Evilly-eyed.  Somehow, today, my happiness
Is playing hide-and-seek with me gloomily.
Newspapers pile up.  The room's a mess.
Only over the bed is there a memory
Of wings, scarlet happiness, ecstasies
We shared on the fitted sheets of ivory.
Those afternoons come to me now.  Too clear.
My head rattles like a tin can full of pebbles:
The pebbles are hard eyes of yesterdays I've seen,
From the mildly annoying to the incredible.
Remembering you, our joy, makes me sadder than I've been
In a long time, a long row of odd days,
Ragtag and worsted-ended, without your golden rays.

Sonnet 63 We drive on beautiful white roads until

We drive on beautiful white roads until
The lake is a single blue eyelid;
Strange fish leap, straining their scarlet gills,
Keeping their watch on humankind.
We are so young, we people of the earth,
The other creatures don't understand us
With our prayers and wars--but they and we both
Mount the lovers' excited crucifix.

The turtle, the bluejay, and even the jellyfish
Sting and huddle--and skim through the mighty sky--
When we lie down together as I wish.
And you, too, craven and wanting and sly,
Cozying over with your pearl skin and fur dish,
The hollow in your side where we meet and say goodbye.

Sonnet 64

Though stuffed with joy, I'm starved for joy;
For you I have devoured every jot,
Jammy and seedy as raspberries.
My ecstatic skin incinerates acres, the starving fire
Of joys consumed by their own desire!
For you I am made hungry as the sea,
Drinking every river to the lees.
To my gullet goes all treasure, all junk!
Greedily I gorge on diamonds and rust,
Old anchors, the amber delicacy of sunsets.
All goes down to my soul with a clank.
For you, I eat empires and dandelions equally--
For you, I have made myself open and empty,
Starved to taste, with my being, all of your being.

Sonnet 65

In you I discover the sea, am lost in waters,
Smelling the bitter brine that floods from my cock,
The sharp salt exfoliates of our Maker
That shiver hoarsely in the sweat of our fuck.
With you, I grab at the reeling gunwales
And almost fall overboard each day;
Every night, biting smiles from the dark, we assail
Each other with our shark-bodies--saw and sway!

Below you, I am drowning.  My hands go wide 
As I look up, loving the sky's last uncertain bright
As the green water's weight breaks me inside.
There's only you at the surface, only you in the light.
Let me live this adventure, dear woman,
In your body, by your side, as a man.

Sonnet 66 Your eyes are two moondrops, two bowls

Your eyes are two moondrops, two bowls
With silvery goldfish going lazily inside;
Your white hips are built like a waterslide,
And I go down with no owlish thought of rescue at all....
Let me dive in your wetness and paddle refreshed!
Whatever apples the sea offers
Your breasts give me also in our affair;
Our affair of noon shadows and shaded flesh.
Lie with me on the salt beach of our bodies,
Stretch out into the sand of many hands
And dunes of restless thighs, neither land
Nor sea really, as we are neither soul nor body only.
Whatever we are, we are in this air
Together;  this liquid land and hard sea, together.

Sonnet 67

Our wings are straight out, our wingtips just
Touch as we move motionless over the whole
Earth as we glide without diving over the whole
Map of creation, silent and colored-in, just us.

What do we see from the great height of our love?
Millions crawling over the earth and over each other, larvae
Feasting on their mother's corpse in a red furrow.
There's more to this earth than our hovering.

I'd rather fly beside you, lashing our hook-beaks,
And starve on the air currents like a dying leaf
Than dive for the fattest lamb, the most ripe beef
If we must walk among those whose lives are crooked.
Can't these fools see that love is a straight line?
Love stretches straight from your taut heart to mine.

Sonnet 68

In you I taste my death, your mouth the open
Corners of my grave, damp clay ochre and dun;
Your arms like gravediggers hold me round
And lower me helpless to the sucking ground.
Here, in your mouth, live the roots of many things,
Many ripening vines;  incantations and songs;
Buried in you are deep emeralds, mines of nickel and lead,
Rivers of ore coursing among the buried.
So much comes so deeply from touching you,
Breathing you in;  even in this final suffocation, you
Remain dark and compelling--of you I can see no end,
Although the earth you are composed of has an end.
You are measureless, endless and supreme--
A depth beneath which no man may dream.

Sonnet 69 When you kiss me my face changes

When you kiss me my face changes, like a face stamped on a lollipop when it’s licked. Gradually the face smears to a flatness and disappears, and the tongue gradually becomes the color of the face that is no longer there. So you are slowly becoming the color of my soul, and I am forgetting my face lick by lick. Lick by lick, I begin to resemble the smooth personless joy of a red balloon–until (perhaps deliberately, in a fit of hungry ecstasy) you bite through me to the white sweet stick at my core. And no one knows me any more than the washed-up skeleton of a dead whale, picked clean by diving gulls and rolling back-and-forth in the acid waves.

Sonnet 70 Are we sowing daughters when we seesaw

Are we sowing daughters when we seesaw?
Is any throng of sons arising from our private aching,
The back-and-forth of our terrifying loving
That silences to shame the puma and the daw?
Is it enough to just be here and be just us?
Doesn't "fairest nature desire fair increase,"
Isn't your body a longboat full of empty seats
Where antsy children clamor, like on the bus?
Isn't there something in the flower of ourselves
That desires to be plucked like the heavy magnolia,
Plucked and held up, despite the streaks of purple melancholia?
Is it enough for love to just ask these questions?
Our fears exchange a look of blackest ice;
A shiver comes, and then a kiss;  it will suffice.

Sonnet 71

You have filled me the way a jug of wine is filled;
Drop by drop your tears have shed: pale joy, dark grief
Replacing fear and solidude and sorrow with belief
--Almost I could not believe, almost my wound of doubting killed
The new true universe we two have willed.

Out of my sadness, shedding the black crown
In the alabaster dust at your feet, on my knees
I have made this pilgrimage through many trees--
Out of the night dances on the wintry lawn,
Out of the first spring day arrived in streaks of dawn.

And now I am here, and you are here,
And we drink from the heavy clay jug we've been filling.
Night and day we drink to the dregs, and there, my silly,
We are empty and happy as a ring tossed in the air.

Sonnet 72

How often have I turned the pages of your book,
Reading your braille nipples, commas round your mouth--
Your eyebrows the astonished parenthesis of a look
Damp delight engenders for us both.
I read in the firelight stirred by your fingertips:
How you yearn to be warm bread and warm earth
Rising and restless, the air whipping!

There are so many marvelous stories to touch
As I run my tongue across your fragrant words,
Swashbuckling over the mossy moat of ooh and aah
To reach the climax: castle, cave, treasure or fabulous bird.
And there in the dogeared dark of bed and book,
The phoenix erupts like a hydrant!  Ah, fabulous bird!
And your eyebrows almost contain your fireworks look.

Sonnet 73 Let us hunt among smallnesses for love

Let us hunt among smallnesses for love:
The tapering end, held tight, of the elephant's tail,
Or how a condor's aiming wing ends in a single quill--
They way your nose reaches me before your lips from above.
These little things, littler and littler,
The kindness one might extend to a mouse;
It is in these small wonders that we build our house,
You and I, meeting alone, thumb and thimble.

Notice the tininess of quiet:
The ballerina leaping in the barn by herself
--So small a gesture--or the inchling elf
Who goes on tiptoe to view love's riot.

Prayerfully, we fold ourselves into bed,
Close our eyes, and dream the littlest dream in one head.

Sonnet 74

Mysteriously each day flares and disappears,
Stars are thrown over us in a glimmering net
And we swim in our dreams through an unforgettable wet
Until dawn ignites its sheet of crimson paper.
Everything goes up in the fire, daily;  vagueness
Has my kisses mingle with others' kisses;
In a week, my face is merging with the visage
Of a half-dozen half-remembered masterpieces....

When oblivion unplugs the phone, and the line goes dead
Your friends discuss the stranger whom they loved;
Who you were has come and gone like a matchstick's red;
Those who swore you oaths forget your voice.
Since you and I must succumb to such severe severing,
Let's play today as if today we were forevering.

Sonnet 75

Come to me, come to me, wild rose who grows
Apart--I climb the thorny mountain,
And I tread the thorny path to know
The thorny secret of your thorny heart.
Bitter the wind and long, long the way
To come to the dancing brook, your fountain;
The thorny rock I climb both night and day.

And there at your root I slept, a day and night,
And dreamed a pilgrim dream that has not
Gone away: O little mountain rose, who bent
And said the words my heart still hears: Come to me--
Come to me, walker and stranger, come drink
Beside my rocks and my roots, come drink
My dreams and kiss the bitter thorn of me.

Sonnet 76 A thorny ladder wraps the mountain

A thorny ladder wraps the mountain
As I stride to attend your musky rose;
I come for your body's garden, mossy and open:
Of your musky skin, I breath the rose.
I climb the ladder as I climb you, daily
Heaving my weight up toward your unconquerable eyes,--
My heavy regrets, my dank past, my disguises.
Hurrying, I plunge into the thorns.  Ai!

Suddenly, the angry angel's red-hot rapier is everywhere,
Hissing into my neck, my lungs, my sides, 
Lancing the blue coil of my intestines.
Will loving you and climbing you leave me dying?

From the highest rock you bend, dusky rose;
I attend your soft musk's music, and I arise.

Sonnet 77

Death, I don't get it--Death seems like a fake
When (right next to you) my eyes snap awake
Like blinds rolled up in the alert light of dawn.

Everyone's always mooning over some grave,
Some president or lover or bloke awfully brave
--At best I manage to stifle my yawns.

Microbes and cancers and blanks on the map
Steal time from their eyes they'll never get back.
Why don't they get wise and do what I do?

Building big monuments is hard on the back,
And who cares what's there in the blanks on the maps?
So why don't the world shut up and just love you?

They'd see crystal-clear how Death was a fake
When (right next to you) their eyes snapped awake.

Sonnet 78

We're here to celebrate a life of dust.
We're born passing away, as we must.
Dying we crawl to our parents' knees,
Choking clutch our holy rosaries.
Crippled we round the bases at stickball,
Hamstrung pitch pennies against the back wall.
We count our raises on fingers of bone;
The dying crowd cheers, but we're still alone.

Nothing and no one can stop the sands shift-
Ing down the hourglass and over the cliff;
We're dead at our prayers, and dead at our song;
Dead in the mirror; dead all the day long.
When across the bed your kiss comes like a knife,
I open my mouth, I surrender my life.

Sonnet 79 Bury me standing and pennyeyed

Bury me standing and pennyeyed,
A pagan and a fighter I have died,
Nor expect to be alive again--
So loving you must have an end.

Although intimations came and went
Of a meaning more eternal when we kissed,
I kept to my convictions and now am spent.--
Light a penny-candle if I'm missed.

Don't imagine that from heaven I would frown
If you still cavort and canter like a lass;
Something there is that loves a clown,
And I loved you when I saw you last.

So leave a stone and raise a glass to me,
Who when he kissed you, kissed you;  as it was meant to be.

Sonnet 80 I am cut, and in my heart is planted

I am cut, and in my heart is planted
A grafting of your luxurious bough--
Some gesture you made, some grace half-granted
Rinsing kitchen mangoes beneath the faucet.

Your eyes were black and hungry, your mouth too,
As you shook out of your pants--
Round the rickety chairs we wheeled, rich and slow,
A sweet molasses movement in our dance.

The mango juice oiled your open breasts
Olive-toned and slanted, and the green smell of tea
Rose wreathed from your hair--I lost my breath
And rode your slipping hips for certainty.

And now from the grafted tree that grows,
I shake a thousand hours of our mangoes.

Sonnet 81

We've been kissing till our lips are chapped 
And happy, our eyes hypnotized from a gazing-fest
That out-stared the sap in their sockets.
Too long we've lain with sex on the brain
And the groin--oh, the groans!--we must stop it.
We need to rest, shut up, get dressed,
And see if the blue world still rolls outdoors.

Sore as a sigh, we depart on our lark,
Creaking weak keisters to the car:
The movies, the mall, or Seaside Park?
We drive until five on our dutiful tryst
And ask: Did a longer day ever exist?

We laugh as we dash madly back to bed
Where we align half-divine and (half the time) head-to-head.

Sonnet 82 Voyeurs at the wall of Abelard

Voyeurs at the wall of Abelard
And his heaving Heloise heard love made,
Forged from iron fires groaning hard
Where bellows hiss and the hot poker's laid.

Cleopatra paddling on her barge
Proffered pink enticements to Antony
While excited slaves looked on with eyes quite large
And the sinuous Nile slinked into the sea.

When Salome threw her seventh veil away
And shone before Herod as God intended,
Unashamed as sunshine at midday,
Even John the Baptist lost his head.

So ardent are our toe-to-toe romances,
Prudence peeps between her fingers at us!

Sonnet 83

I would break over your body like a wave
Every night, over and over, over your back,
Your hair, dissolving into the shadows I crave
That inhabit the nape of your neck.
I would bear you distances to hidden sands
Like pirate booty, alone beneath the palm trees;
I would not share you, even with the moonlight, on our island!
To me you have come, to me remain.  To me.
I open your heavy chest and count the treasures there:
Zion and Taj Mahal in a single body!
Your lips are memorable as a cut lemon;
Your tongue persuades me to love's duty....
Tonight I break upon you a million ways
And break and break until my breaking stays.

Sonnet 84

I tie you to the chair and feel the rough
Of wood and soft of skin compete and play
For where my wet attention goes and stays,
Although the sport's sniggered at as uncouth.

Still, there is a time to bring the rope and bind
The love-object to her astute pedestal
And grant her darkest wish therewithal:
To feel assured that mating's sting is blind.

I with she and she with he and they with them
Play a roundel merry Mozart could commend,
So difficult's't to parse the beginning from the end
Until the music stops and draws the curtain.

I would tie you to me more gently, though:
Be thou the butterfly on which my breezes blow.

Sonnet 85

Dear, I am jealous of you, the way a pearl
Is jealous of the moon.--Vanity, my girl,
Has brought me singing here beside you
Although I am small as a child's first "O."
Teach me your light, how you throw yourself
Over every roof and field, and all the items on the shelf,
Detailing the dust on the clock... even its hands you enhance--
Infinite and infinitesimal at once!

I stay stung inside myself like an eyeball,
Greedy to see, yet selfishly pearled as a shut shell.
How can I break open like a moon-gleam,
Traveling the nothing, and giving even dogs dreams?
Teach me your light;  its depth, its height--
I would crest with the sea-wave, and give lovers light.

Sonnet 86 Desire rifles me, disorders my innards

Desire rifles me, disorders my innards,
Chars my hugging arms to black, helpless studs,
Untongues the eloquence of my familiar patter
And leaves my heaving soul standing mute.
I'd shredded myself to spastic tatters
Disobeying love's laws and rescinding old statutes,
Frisking suspects for tinder to ignite with desire--
Desire the fever that burned down my house.

I was wrecked with wanting until you came, 
Plain as a square of sunlight on the oaken floor....
Then I saw: how overwrought and strange my pain!
How simple to acquit desire's rave and roar;
Desire is nothing when love is--which, fussless,
Overpours the brim desire desires.

Sonnet 87

Life, I hold you up and look through you,
A clear pane of ice skimmed from a puddle
Held only a desperate moment in the muddle
Until fingers go numb and you slip through....
Only a moment, and what I saw
Was the color and contour of conchs,
The sweet center of a woman's haunch
Open and thirsty--for a man's peck, a lover's paw.

Life, if you have a meaning, what else
Is it?  Today a man and a woman are meeting,
Words pass between them, a sleet of bees,
Until night finds them naked as a racing pulse.
Life, share with me all of your secret whispers.
Wife, kiss me with your fresh lips like cinders.

Sonnet 88

I try to go to sleep, but can only think.
Strange shades of death assault me,
Drown me in their inks, squids of the sea
Constricting the peaceful measure of my soul.
A tomtom is rapping in my awake ears
From inside the cork corridors of my skull;
Whatever's left of me is not my will,
Just this red repeat of sound that sears.
I watch the animated faces go by
In a silent film, every mouth sealed with cellophane;
Are they laughing haphazardly or crying out in pain?
I watch the animated faces go by.
The moon rolls into my room, a bloodshot eye.
We stare the night out.  We do not blink.

Sonnet 89

Being here, meeting you, my life, well, my life
Is feeling complete.  I almost don't want
To jinx it by saying so much about my life.
Almost, too, I don't want what I want.
How can his be?  We are two humans,
Alike as mirrors facing each other,
Same sets of hands, toes, same talk, same tongues, lungs
The same, and yet.... I feel your alien center out there.

Your pride and determination to teach well,
How love has sucked you up like a vacuum
And now you are afraid.  All this I feel,
And myself going around humming Te Deum.
Being here, meeting you, my life, well, my life
Feels complete. And yet, almost, I don't want my life.

Sonnet 90 Life, they say, occurs in the caesuras

Life, they say, occurs in the caesuras,
The pauses when passion's breath is breaking
Or the mired eye at dawn is mildly peering,
And lovers lie replaying their old overtures.
Life is what's happening when it's not,
When nothing much is foremost in our thoughts,
A finger caught in some stray weft of webbing
While over Miami the blue moon is ebbing.
Life, elusive fish, is not captured when it's caught;
It's not the adding and subtracting of pensive thought
Or any other species of abstract thinking.
Life is just the waits between the blinking.
So long as I lollygag (between the birth pang
And oblivion) with you--I'm content to hang.

Sonnet 91

I am blind, blinded, a lost mole escaped out
Of his long house, for now my home is in your self;
In you, my soul falls up out of itself
The way a lotus floats over its roots.
In you, I am so close to being air, to flying!
You pull my umbilical cord through my mouth,
And in my center forms a silver pool of truth;
Almost, in you, my me, my I, is dying.
We are together as the cords of a twisted rope.
Together, we turn back from frogs into tadpoles;
Soon we'll be egg-sacks, then a single egg, pale.
We kiss with our mouths open as if saying "Hope."
You, who have my sight, my life, my sighing,
Come be blind with me beyond our dying.

Sonnet 92

Your hands prepare a night for us together--
Candles and glasses, the eats chopped and prepped;
How carefully, how thoroughly, I am in your debt!
The bed turned down, the rum-topaz light soft as feathers.
A hundred times I have walked around you, sighing,
While you hung up the moon and arranged the plates,
Preparing even the corners of our life until very late.
And all I can think to do is undress you, and kiss your feet, crying.
My gratitude fills me, like wetness in cactus--
Don't let my sharp whiskers deceive you!
Inside I am sweet and full of grateful dews.
That you should live our life so intently.... Without practice
You throw love everywhere like streamers from a spotlight,
And happiness explodes in me like a burst piñata.

Sonnet 93 When you abide beside me I am calm

When you abide beside me I am calm,
All my tempests by temperance overtaken.
Life's hazards hurry in, but not their harm;
Although my leaves do rattle, no root is shaken.
When my hot forehead meets with your tender palm
My fever breaks, my delirium mistaken.
I do not know what others do, madam,
But with the seal of your solace I am so blazoned
I feel myself a lion who was a lamb,
Yet mellow in my marrow as a Shaker.
I hope to be no more than what I am:
Gratefully alive, and grateful for thy Maker--
For nothing could surpass, in the world to come,
Than this I have, when I by thee awaken.

Sonnet 94

When I am feeling troubled and at a loss
For no other reason than I'd forgot
My own reasons for getting too hot,
She comes to me with a cool compress
(And rustles near me in her silken dress)
And manages without managing at all
To manage away my worry with her skill
And save me from my own self-caused duress.

And for this aid I have no help to give,
None at all, but school my truant gratitude
To look on her with love,--me, whose natively rude,
And petty too, and, so, condemned to live....
Then she comes again with her talk, her touch,
Her tender balm, making smooth the rough.

Sonnet 95 She is a compass needle going round

She is a compass needle going round,
And seems in all her spin and waver
More like something lost than something found.

Still, how the blue point endeavors!
And will not be put off her trying harder
(No matter that she'll earn no extra chevrons).

What lodestone rubbed to make her so endure?
Something there is perhaps in her being pinned
To house and job and child and filling the larder.

For round she goes, feeding us and filling bins
With fine fidelity for one so scattered,
So torn between her going out and coming in.

Still, she knows her North despite all hazard
--As if loving us were all that really mattered.

Sonnet 96

You held my hand and held me back to make
Me stay, who would have walked on without a thought
To reach the ready bench past the woodland brake
And there sit content, and have no further thought.

You held me back, and pointed without a word--
There, between the slant and screen of trunks, 
A fox returned to her nesting brood, 
Her mouth blooded, and in that mouth a skunk.
Such dedication had the young ones yip
And tear at the striped carcass, black and white,
Love had brought dragging for their sup--
And kept the mother-skunk from her kits.

You held my hand, and may you always
Be so wise of eye and wise to nature's ways.

Sonnet 97 Have you ever wanted to fly

Have you ever wanted to fly?
There was a frog who wanted to fly
And got his chance.  First, he was lonely,
And cried at the pond's edge in his great loneliness.
His voice was like a drum.  Other frogs
Covered their ears.  Dragonflies flew off in fog
To avoid the cacophony. What was the frog lonely for?

I'll tell you.  He was lonely for the sky
--Just that.  That's where his froggish dreaming was tacked.
Low, low in his frog-throat, who knows why,
The great loneliness gathered, like the great
Tension of a bowstring pulled back.
And out of that came the frog's dark cry
Like a lover's lament.  He was in love--just that.

Sonnet 98 Love comes sneaky like the coyote

Love comes sneaky like the coyote,
Stealing hearts left trashed and discarded;
Love cannot enter a gate when guarded
For love is soft and secret as midnight smoke,
Easily spooked by a too-attentive hoot
Or too-oft remembrance of an antique hurt.

But let down pride and let down vigilance
And love like moss on every root will grow;
Love will come slinking by for kitchen scraps
With eyes as big as moons in a puddle's overflow--
Love will live on iffy maybes and a half-perhaps.
Once love's pennant's pitched upon the parapet,
She waves her colors gaily, victorious in surfeit.

Sonnet 99 Because my dreams know you, I do not

Because my dreams know you, I do not,
Because I do not know my dreams.  Sad eyes
Come glancing, and then suddenly hide themselves
In the blackness of wells, in a pine board's knot.
In my dreams there are rumors of your beauty,
And I follow the noble words like stepping stones
Over the abyss, my old bachelor home--
Sweep me: winds, words!  I weave songs of fealty.
I curl around what you might be, white lady,
Like a dog around a stove, the tongue around "love."
How everything below curves toward what's above!
Every plant and every eye is trained on the butane sky.
And so, white lady, whenever you want
You may appear here, as my dreams you already haunt.

Sonnet 100

Break like an oak, or keep faith forever--
Die in the harness, your heart a furnace of effort:
The oath of a bull is not the oath of a feather.

Love with your will and not your body only,
The way virgins married Vesuvius alive
And died in a silence terribly lonely.

Condors mate with their wild kind on the crags
As sky and rock mate in ravening winter,
Their high crying caught in the wind's brag.

Come take me, maiden, with your Amazon mind!
Come kiss lips till lips blaze and splinter!
Come ravish the man who climbs to marry your kind!

The oath of a bull is not the oath of a feather:
Break like an oak, or keep faith forever.

Sonnet 101 Shameless is my mistress wetly caught

Shameless is my mistress wetly caught,
Wily in her seeking freedom thence--
Demure when spanked as though she would be taught,
Yet still runs wild at her third offense.
Who could teach much to such wantonness,
Frenzied to be free, when freed all frenzy still?
Unbidden, she'll curl upon a lap to rest--
All things her way always is her only will.
She charms at first with an off-hand gesture,
Comes for pets, is damned attentive;
Your good opinion seems her only pleasure….
Next day proves her unretentive.
How can one instruct such a flitting wisp?
No way but enjoy each shimmer as she shifts.

Sonnet 102

For three dates you remained a mermaid to me,
Swimming away and flashing your tail.
I didn't even know if you had two legs, and the sea
Kept foaming right up to your navel.

When would I feel your slick body climb into bed,
Your clothes lumped in a disordered heap,
Your half half-sinking, taking ballast aboard,
And you naked as a newly-sheared sheep?

Something was fishy, my little mermaid;
Was our romancing faux or spurious?
The course you set was cunningly laid,
And my suspicion kept me curious.

But then you swam up, and sailed home to my bed,
And wrapped your legs around my head.

Sonnet 103 My love is not a river, but it is

My love is not a river, but it is
In the river, flowing among the yeasty curls,
Wetting itself in the wavery spray and the spritz
Playfully as an otter with two balls.
My love is not grand like a church bell
Forged lovingly from parishioners' pennies,
Calling in the blackclad faithful to solemnly kneel;
(But my love does have a tongue for you, Jenny.)
My love is not as vast as the Great Plains'
Majesties--fertile and broad and deep;
But my love does peep like a prairie dog, is game
To pop up and play hide-and-seek.
My love is a funny sort of thing, and a small:
A paper plane thrown in a cathedral.

Sonnet 104

Other constellations have all flashed to ash--
Old photo-bulbs, popped and nude,
Heaven's eons reduced to interludes
Since your starry being has come to pass.
I doodle the lines of your constellation, dotting spots
That limn your chin or trace your waist
With my hands and mouth, pausing at each place
To braise my pallor on your burning body's hot.
My ardent lips come back bruised and burnt
As burls, and tears shine hard where lust had lurked--
Surprising eyes, and leaving me unsure how this works.
Loving is not loving that will not learn to hurt.
Now I lay me down on the grassy floor
And memorize stars that are all yours.

Sonnet 105 File me down to an unbearable essence

File me down to an unbearable essence,
Pinch me tight like ground spices, and haul
My granular essence up to your curious nose.
Inhale my sharpness;  love is at the core.
It has taken me a long time to arrive,
A long time I paddled in love's tanning vat
Disputing causes, examining the sieve,
Adding up my love-lists like an accountant.
But now I am soaked, dunked, drenched, a whore
Wholly open and wholly possessed;
I love all of you, your least eyelash adore;
I love you stripped, or bathing, or dressed.
Love is at my center, love up to the teeth;
Now love me too--quick--or love must come to grief.

Sonnet 106

Your love's locked up in her intricate castle.
High, high the parapet!  In the moat, a crocodile.
I slip into the black water anyway, the way
The moon slips into your mouth when you raise it, singing.
My desire for you has made me brave--
Not brave to conquer, nor to save,
But brave to kiss you and to be kissed
Regardless of what the interference is.

Bold lions lean yellow in your feline eyes,
Crouched to kill with womanly surmise;
In your mouth, ten thousand snakes lie limply curled--
Ready to haunt and hiss at a word.
All this I dare who never dared before:
I throw down my heart before your farthest shore.

Sonnet 107 In the mist, in the rain

In the mist, in the rain,
Comes illimitable pain;
Here your face remains a memory
Of insuperable agony....

We who had been lovers, closer
Than diodes anodyne and chosen
Now separate like trees in fog,
Dull white columns half-sogged

Until I and all I feel
Is insubstantial, ephemeral....
I myself a ghost
Invisible in mist, lost

Without you as my anchor, dear,
My source, my succor.

Sonnet 108 Play the sistrum softly, softly

Play the sistrum softly, softly. 
Her image glides all ghostly
When the refrigerator hums
And dead of night is come.

I am haunted by her now
Who knows the strength and hour
Of her presence, of her power--
Oh ghost at once sweet and sour!

Illusory, frightful,
Hysterical, delightful,
The woman in the mirror
Haunts and appears.

On my shoulder like a parrot
She hops, my ghoul, my Pierrot!

Sonnet 109 As hypnotic as a living fan of coral

As hypnotic as a living fan of coral,
As delicate in their blue aurorals
The veins on your legs wave their traceries,
Sturdy pillars of impious ecstasy.
You climb aboard me, and I sink beneath
Breathless as a turtle swimming in a reef;
Chains of bubbles from my hooked lips
Enclose my moans of sinful happiness, 
Audible only when they pop open.

So I sigh with the sea....  Do I sigh in vain,
Evoking only my lady's harsh laugh?

O My lady of marble with marbled thighs,
Punch me, crush me with desire til I sigh
Your praises upward in a silent prayer of pain!

Sonnet 110

Love, so great an emblem, a divinest thing
Like Himalayas beyond Himalayas' aspiring:
So tall, so fierce--an Amazon from the moon
Loitering on the porch between us now it's June.
Love, once remote beyond ebony pearls of Cathay,
Strolls by with baskets of daily laundry;
Love sits knit in the pearl of "purl one, purl two"
As we lounge of an evening with pay-per-view.
Love, when I was ignorant and young,
Lay locked in a castle beyond my tongue
Which knew not the secret keys of a kiss:
Holding hands in the rain, the nearness of bliss.
So long have I stood imagining wings
Who, knowing you, flies over everything.

Sonnet 111

I thought I knew just what to do with you:
Keep you in a box on my Friday night shelf,
Feed you snickers and movies and romantic fluff
About stars in your eyes and kisses like wine
And other such fabulous stuff.

But, oh, how mistaken!  My heart was taken
When your body spooned glued to mine.
My will swam away under a tidal wave
To tropic, Tahitian moons. I thought I knew
You, I thought I knew me. But, today,
I am a man lost at sea, the sea gorgeous,
A man on an island washing away under his feet....
And I need you, in your wooden canoe, to come
And take me to wherever you came from.

Sonnet 112 Grey’s anatomy and all that crap

Grey's anatomy and all that crap:
Bodies blueprinted and expertly dissected,
Drawn and quartered from arse to cap
As that curious scalpel the eye directed.
No diagram can master what you are:
Lusty stardust fallen to our sphere.

Here, you present yourself humanly:
Swearing at the buckles on your mackintosh,
Spilling the last soggy bag of groceries,
Stamping your rain boots free of fresh slush.
That's the you who you are--whose eyes see deep,
Whose breath is half roses when you're half asleep,
Whose kiss is integral, and whose calm arms are just
The skinsoft thing that wakes the whole of my lust.

Sonnet 113

Miscreant Time has spelt his troubles plain
On papery forehead and chill cheeks eaten
By the wind.  Lacing my sneakers at dawn,
I ran, once, and raced the wind unbeaten.
While still a boy by the barefoot pond,
I saw my face resolve past hanging fronds
Unlined by any lesson of the Lord's;
All was still penny-a-wish and open hope.

Now past my zenith, on the far shore lodged,
Where snows heap up and the hillside steepens,
I reach weakly across the wrinkled gorge
To one who keeps my heart within her steeple.
Will you take this hand and creak on crutches?--
There's a place past the peak where the church is.

Sonnet 114

Love cannot choose, but knows it is chosen
To undertake all that love can endeavor:
Hurl rocks from the heights, or love you forever,
Whichever is hardest, more burning, more frozen.
One big love is better than any half dozen;
One Mississippi masters ten cataracts--
Those, my lover, are simply the facts.
Love cannot choose, but knows it is chosen.
A hunchback haranguing the town with his bell,
A lady pirouetting herself off a cliff,
Hamlet pondering Ophelia's sweet "If...."
That man with the Nose who knows words all too well;
They all knew nothing, but one thing knew then--
Love cannot choose, but knew love chose them.

Sonnet 115 Although my joy with pain is blistered

Although my joy with pain is blistered
And I choke on every luau larded at my feet:
Purple whortle-berries, vintage of San Griet,
Still I eat, still drink to life and leisure.
Each hike I take toward some higher good,
Each leap I make, induces some new seizure;
Each trial into undiscovered pleasure
Leaves a trail of bodies through the wood....
Still I trod, having found no higher God
Than duty to what beauty here appears--
Leaves that come and go throughout the year,
Milkweed seeds drifting slowly from their pods.
Whatever cost our private Christmases incur, 
I'll pay the pain, so long as you and I continue us.

Sonnet 116

Death will take you, and I will bless you: "Go."
Not like demented Edgar shall I wander and weep,
Clasping for golden sandgrains on the margin of the deep
Where every wave is saying, sweep, sweep, sweep.
No, no.  Not in tragic sadness all alone
Will I face the inevitable lightning:
Your face yellow, or wan, dead and frightening 
Down in the dark new box black with lacquering.

Instead, I'll stand happy and mad as the rain,
Watching the deep drops, like sucked gumdrops, fall
On the gathered mourners, and wetly roll
Prescient and perfect and round as crystal balls.
My time continuing, your time remains,
For I will praise you, darling, till you are come again.

Sonnet 117 If I were without whoever you are

If I were without whoever you are
Would I feel the loss, and miss it?
The spoon licked clean, the talk at the bar,
The bree and crackers, the hand at whist?
If I were without whoever you are
Would your memory enlarge to a shade?
Would you haunt me at midnight with a twanged guitar,
Misplace my keys, ruin parades?
Would I bury my head in your pillow,
Sniff the drawer where your sweaters were left?
At movies, would I weep like a willow?
Would I feel like a victim of theft?
Who would it be who was driving my car
If I were without whoever you are?

Sonnet 119

Tell me, does love have sorrow for its marrow?
Is a dandelion lovely only
Because its baldness leaves us lonely?

When the player prates "Tomorrow, tomorrow..."
Or the expired milk curls its lip,
Their change of state makes us moue and weep.

Is it the same with love and her tears--
Wiping our noses or blinking them back
Stops our hearts as if under attack.

O, look in the mirror with that look of fear:
The horseman is coming to trample our dears.
The x-ray, once backlit, the cancer is clear.

The test returned positive from the hospital staff,
Our hearts are in our throats, and we cannot gasp.

Sonnet 119

Death holds lovers who forget each other,
Who pretend the soft pulsings in a wrist
Everlastingly unroll.--Death's cold furs
Wrap up those proud hearts' hot velvets
In a chill no quilt can conquer.

It is no idle boast of coffins
To say they box us best that box us last.--
In satin trim and eternal dim
We kiss goodbye our past.
No lovers' squalls within such walls remain.

So hold me now, and thou to thou,
We'll build a house of love and pillows
Plumped with such subtle human powers
Death's retreat will last our lifetimes' hours.

Sonnet 120 Sitting there so saucily thoughtful

Sitting there so saucily thoughtful,
Your firm legs a-dangle, uncrossed,
Your eyes milky and mildly unfocused
As your lips taste tart thoughts that are lustful:
What pictures are you painting in your mind?
Do azure sands unfurl below tan skies?
Do proud men crouch between your thighs
Flashing dark looks beneath hair wildly curled?

You sit on your tall fantasist's throne
Cruel and adored, the barstool worn flat
From daily use (chopping carrots and all that),
A woman who shy-slyly transforms her home
Into Pan's Cavern, where white firelight dances,
Anonymous hands strip us, and we grow frantic.

Sonnet 121

I'm not quite sure I quite know quite how
Or quite why you love me even now.
After so many leerings and pairings,
So many hesitations and darings,
Assignations, arrangements and trysts, 
Allurements, procurements and back alley kisses,
Still you return, still make me feel missed.

At each meeting the mystery deepens,
Yet no abyss intervenes with its weeping,
No catastrophe clatters, no shinbone shatters,
In fact, almost nothing at all's the matter!
Only you and I standing in the clear air,
No moon romancing the contented pair
Waiting for nothing else to appear.

Sonnet 122 What can summer add to what our winter

What can summer add to what our winter
Love has found?  The heat and desperate damp of days
Leaning from the sill with a sangria pitcher,
Moonlight looming through a greasy lens,
The stacked smoke of apartment grills
Confusing fuzzy flavors and leaving palettes burnt,
The noise of neighbor kids grinding by on big wheels
Floating through summer screens green with bugs and lint.

Oh summer is one-thousand annoyances
Compressed into ninety sweaty nights
While Bennies scoop up spots on all the beaches....

Love me to the depth, love me to the height
Of all the loving any human heart has vowed.
Only, do not wait for summer;  love me now.

Sonnet 123

I like to watch you try the new words on your tongue,
Mouthing "missus" and the house address
Strange as Demosthenes with his pebble-tongue.

All of this had come of your trying "Yes"
Once before the parson's congregation:
A new household, and a man, and all this strangeness.

New wife, is all your world a wedding?
Is stepping past a traffic light like passing arches garlanded?
Is love brand new, or just the Sears bedding?

Your married life, you say, began in childhood
Dressing dolls;  in middleschool there came petting;
Then all the mercenary ads in "Modern Bride"....

Knock the domestic idols from the shelf!
Step in, my merry love, and be yourself.

Sonnet 124

The world is packed tight with Kreons and Medeas,
The Antigones go wobbly, the Electras are mad;
Tragedy springs bubbling from each tongue-tip, you'll see,
The good are driven into the arms of the bad.
Helter-skelter harpies darken the trees;
It's chaos at home and confusion abroad--
The sad children are all abandoning God,
They sing no more carols and never say "Please."
When the good life has gone from golden to black,
When virtue is threatened and evil triumphant,
When all the old dears are under attack,
What kind of love can two lovers want?
We lock eyes and lock horns and threaten a fight
But coo soft as doves when we spend the night.

Sonnet 125

I burn through muses like Estes rockets--
Skirts and faces whirl in a grand fandango,
The shipboard romances tucked in a pocket
Real and unreal as a fabulous go-go.
"Love" crumbles at my lips, a communion wafer
Eaten when blood and wine are not enough,
Nor I transformed by what I have quaffed.

Love's no drug to make us feel safer;
It's a razor on which we willingly tango
To a personal oblivion we have crafted
Cunningly, from basement to rafters.
And in this morose house, my soul
Winds the empty stairs and surveys the windows
Hoping I do not know what I know.

Sonnet 126

Would you buy me a backyard full of dreams?
I see the fence, pale, a little rattled.
I see the tiger-lilies growing boldly along the seam.
I see the mole's house, by his round door the dottle.
There's room enough for vegetables, some bamboo,
A clothesline dancing from the house to the tree,
Maybe a swing below a low branch, too.
I see us there, happy, and the huge moon makes three.

So many dreams vibrate above this square of ground;
So many terrible, lovely things live in our bodies.
When will this dreaming and wanting have an end?
After long enough, even pure dreams seem shoddy.
Would you buy me a backyard full of dreams?
Stand beside me, just here.  Do not dream.

Sonnet 127 You had grown quiet in a snowy field

You had grown quiet in a snowy field, 
Stood a little near the fence, did not move 
But led sleeping flakes on your blushing tongue to yield 
Their bodies back to water, misting love. 
How like those little crystals, though in large, 
My solemn wishes harmless fall on your magnificence 
To dissolve in the huge waters of your marge 
And, losing all themselves, add nothing to your sense. 
For you are more, in your silent warmth, 
Like constant earth that wears seasons for her veils, 
Changing summer green for autumn's gaiety, -- 
More constant, more true, more everything of worth 
Than the fretful melts that touch your least detail 
And must, with touching, the seasons of their being interchange, 
Losing their winter dignity in your kissing spring.

Sonnet 128 Where do the birds go when it rains

Where do the birds go when it rains? 
Their wings like little snippers are still,
Black wings, yellow wings, grey wings, again
And again they flash... and, like knives, are still.
Again and again the pain of tears is falling;
All over the world and my block it is raining,
On the little birds especially--in their walls
Of bushes, their deep green bushes, they're wailing.

A bird wails with silence, for a bird
Is born to be always singing;  it is not born
To be silent in the rain, in a bush, like a word
Unspoken.  So much silence!  My heart is torn
With words I have not spoken, cannot speak
When you look at me like rain beginning to break.

Sonnet 129

I do not love you the way fire loves wood
Although my heat's as great, my hunger greater;
I do not love you as saints crave the good
Although my devotion's deeper than saint's prayer.
Not by any measure of heart, hope, or greed
Does my loving come round to loving you;
Not by comparison's calipers does my love exceed
What others' love may be for those they do.
No;  it is by excess of gentleness 
And superlatives of softest care,
By exquisite forethought for your happiness
That my love arrives when you are least aware
And prepares the wide ground with downy flakes
For your descent from clouds into the love I make.

Sonnet 130

At sunset, how it all runs away from one,
Day slips by day slippery till days are done;
Whatever we were is not what we become.

"Old age should rage," but we are infant beings
And do not know our ends and meanings--
Carved from scrap, and, erected, leaning.

What comes to us and comes of us is scattered;
We moon by mirrors as if mirrors mattered
--But the self is fugitive, identity shattered.

We are a rift in the jazzman's riff,
A glass-bottomed boat lazily adrift
Sighing into slender reeds that whistle rough.

And so, our only music's not our own
But time's, whose ticking hands leave none alone.

Sonnet 131 Love is a corpse, nothing but a corpse

Love is a corpse, nothing but a corpse
Of joy, of memory, until the next minute
Lips incinerate, fire goes up in the copse,
Fire-fingers through the furze spread enchantment,
And the body, momentarily present,
Manifests for its own self-destruction:--
When what is you has escaped its vent
And enters me, hissing whispers of perfection.

So long and lovingly do we circle 
In this clasp, scientists at our instruments
Hooked to reality's terrifying lure,
The self at the telescope knows not where it went.
The fishing line cuts until soul's bones show
That cadaverous look, that ecstatic glow.

Sonnet 132

That night you sang to me shines in me now,
Long streamers of notes poured from a bucket;
I am wrapped in your song, the long hair shadowy,
Completely contained in your voice as in a locket.

Move your voice over the fluid night,
Lift hosannas from your throat like fireflies,
Sparks flung arrowlike from the flames' light
When green wood goes yearning to the campfire.

Now your voice is dark, black pools in a cave,
Liquid with the deep auguries of earth,
Baptismal of beginnings, the underground nave
Where songs spring among the first things of life.

You carry me around your neck, your voice full;
I flow with you into everything beautiful.

Sonnet 133

Shivery as a delicate dart from a blowgun
You entered my blood, and my blood responded.
Shivering, I leave behind my lonely skin
And dance entranced where I had only wandered.
Now my heart's set loose among the stars....

I visit the constellations, my neighbors;
The Plieades are in my arms, not strangers;
Andromeda's my roommate, borrowing my car
To drive the dark wilderness behind your eyes.
And there I am, too, licking, flickering.

O, such wildernesses!  Beyond known skies
I gather the fiery flowers continually,
Fattening my basket, fat to overflowing
With just you, all the you I am knowing.

Sonnet 134

Everywhere people are looking to the heavens
For perfection, for completion, for
A patch to cover the holes in themselves.

Even the man, the woman at an auction,
Bidding low and hoping for a bargain,
Are looking for a cheap perfection.

The ears of the fox twitch again and again,
Alertly aware of the wind's siftings,
Nose lifted to sniff a vulnerable perfection.

Even the vole, even the sandflea sings
This song of seeking that will not hush.
This song is revolving through everything

Slowly and grandly as gravity's deep crush....
Somewhere, with great perfection, you holster your toothbrush.

Sonnet 135 I pull you open and divide the loaves

I pull you open and divide the loaves
Of your lovely body over and over--
You are shared and consumed, our molten moves
The everlasting communion of all lovers.
Your shoulders rise whitely as round hills,
Your buttocks tell of eternal life,
How all the long loving that we spill 
Goes on flowing for centuries, life
After life.  On your bedstand a handful
Of earrings, a litter of glittering
Such as might flutter from a beautiful
Night--a splash of discarded things, of rings--
Meaningless with no central singleness to adorn,
The pin in the pinwheel where our motion is born.

Sonnet 136

Love comes apart, like shards, in the hand,
Defies the twine of the newspaper bundle;
Decrepit as autumn, love creeps toward the cold
Dissolution entombed in earth's snowy mantle.
When the body departs, love departs;
Love does not endure among the bones.

Love is the flesh's unconquerable throne,
An elegance of kisses, a masterpiece of hearts.
Two hands, when they cross, build cathedrals;
Two hearts, when they meet, come to summer
In an instant, like ringing a bell.
Love, in this life, is all life's shimmer.

So take this hand.  Today, take this hand
And kneel with me, and knead our daily bread.

Sonnet 137 If I am living, I must be loving

If I am living, I must be loving.
As air enters the lungs, as words exit the mouth,
My diamond toward your diamond is craving--
Twin lights entwined as self within self,
Shine within shine, our beauties exchanging.

How lightly we touch the deep-hidden beacon
That flares unwearied, unwary of loss,
A lighthouse that gives all to all who may come:
Illumination's essence, simple, unglossed--
A lamp where we read our hearts' simple tome:
Loving is living with the extravagance of grass.

Extravagant we shimmer as dew shines in the grass!
As dew lives a moment (and that moment must pass)
Our loving is dew, and must vanish at last.

Sonnet 138

Crying out in my wounds, I do not find you.
Crying out in midnight misery, you are gone.
Crying out from inside the mountain, I hear no reply.
Crying out from under seas of tears, I drown.
Is there nothing to find in this thin agony?
Has pain no standing with love's ecstasies?
Sweet, sweet the shame of wanting you only.
Sweeter than honeysuckle is being unworthy,
Being a bark-wasp on the great tree of your beauty,
Being the dust blown about by your eagle's wings.
I crawl before the thrown light of your glance,
I shrivel like burning tissue to nothing.
Crying out of my emptiness, I empty myself--
Breathing in at last the nectar of yourself.

Sonnet 139

An infinity of needles stick in my thumb
Whenever I try to write this love,
This cargo of roses, this boxcar of honeycombs,
All the things unearthed by your eyes from above.

When you and I talk, it is two rivers meeting,
The white ropes of foam go on riding
Together among many rocks, our silver notes greeting
The silver sky--and our laughter keeps striding.

When you and I sleep, our dreams exchange clothes
And we stand up in each others' shadow-world
Like puppets unfolded from a magic chest of souls--
Our faces gigantic in rouge and wood.

Only in dreams, where our strings tangle,
Can I write like a river alive with sun-spangles.

Sonnet 140

Let love's little sunbeam into your heart;
Do not fear love's indelible dart
Whose impact, whose crater, can blow hearts apart.

Let love's little sunbeam into your heart;
Let blossom love's seed in your most indwelling part
Whose wild vines kudzu the field where they start.

Let love's little sunbeam into your heart;
Don't yelp when love's hammer and tongs make you smart,
Reconcile pain and love and all that.

Let love's little sunbeam into your heart;
Through stained-glass parables and great works of art
Love comes crashing until bright glitter results.

Let love's little sunbeam into your heart
And we'll endure every turn, till love flips our cart.

Sonnet 141

Put your hand in the thorny conflagration,
Jump in with your whole body and soul!
Leave not one shred of indecision
Unburnt in the bonfire love engulfs.
Our love is both the light and the heat.
Strangers warm their naked feet, their faces
Blazed bald from the glare of two undefeated hearts.
Dark is driven out;  all the spotlit night-opossums 
Snooze confused;  bats hang dazed in their belfries,
Waiting for stars to pinhole evening's curtain.
None of them know a star has fallen by the highway
Singing and whistling unbearable matins.
Jump in with your whole life--right now!
To your great soul this fire is a small flower.

Sonnet 142

In the tripping tick of time it's taken
This fist of flowers, these cut daisies
To wither brown in their cobalt vases,
I've tapped out my hymns of being shaken.

You found me wild among old shadows
And with careful eye overlooked my petals:
Trimmed, arranged, and displayed me gently 
In vibrant vases of your own.

Now my carnations red and jonquils yellow
Branch and bunch as you would have me
(Who from moody singleness hath saved me).

But will you still love a wild thing so mellowed?
Do not discard me when I am brown and drear--
Let me be wild again, tucked behind your ear.

CODA: The Night Janitor

Each eve, whatever came for me to push
(Mash notes, tissues, cups) I was content to crush--
Not caring its meaning or intent.
I thought all that nosed me thus irrelevant.

I had a schedule and sought to keep it
Tight.  When dust purled about me, I'd sweep it
Out of sight.  Litter of the day in piles
Fed the starry furnace basement-style.

My fire did not care my fire's source
So long as burning never lost its force;
My face sweat as I handed in the trash,
Reddening when words their hidden cache

Of light revealed.  So I spent my nights.

Ode to an Earlobe

O to the ear, entering in in lullaby lilt
Goes O against the sweet strength of eardrum
And hums O down the lovely length of the ear tube.
O starts the sound with my mouth on your earlobe
And O goes the round of your mouth with a moan
And O go our days, each round into the next
O of the time that O is dwindling!

O is the end of the flute that is sighing
And O is the lambent moon that is prying
O upon our loving by waves that are trying
To reach O your toes in sand-spray waving
O with the ecstasy of our slow loving
To moons of our eyes O-open and crying
While lying down together and sighing--
O you say, O God, am I dying?

Leda After Lunch

The park had invited us, we did not wait
But walked out, out beyond the sound of gates,
Our hands unhinged and dropping to our waists.

I held my lover down and gave her gall.
She turned her angry face to the half-fallen wall.
"Life is good," I crowed, rowing her home.

For a minute in her midst, I was not alone.
Haunches on heels, I left her quiet after that--
Watching her breathe, retrieving my hat

Rolled past my grasp in the flattened grass.
"Life is good," she sighed, she swore,
And slit her eyes and said no more.

The Unnameable

This is the color that crawls along chasms,
That spurns the moon and mocks good luck
In laughing spasms.

This is the color that counts down to null,  
Reverses years, and peels the skin
From the skull.

This is the color of grimace and grime,
Of "murder most foul" 
And troubled times.

This is the color that steals pens' souls,
Lays waste the vastest fields
And heighs the Devil home.

This is the color bells hide in their bellies,
That creeps in cracks and smells
Of napalm jelly.

This is the color that empties every eye,
That pitches tents in tumors
And blots out the sky.

Fossils

May 012020

INTRODUCTION

The Burning Rock

The river mingles its stubborn lament with the sea.

~~Pablo Neruda

I tend to acquire insights about what I’m writing as I write.

A nation becomes itself as its history unfolds, displaying more and more squares of its map of meaning.

Poetry and prose wash up against each other. As do history and imagination.

Sea and continent work together even while at odds to shape the world’s totality.

The pilgrim’s foot defines the path to God, and begins by leaving home.

Just so, poetry walks its path through prose.

Our general sense of things comes to us somehow in the great grab-bag of prose accounts and facts:

The dirty litter of newspapers, the broken ballyhoo of blogs, cocksure conversations at the bar sitting elbow to bended elbow with uncrowned laureates.

But our sense of what these things mean to us comes from selection and arrangement of the mosaic facts.

Inspiration and insight arrive together to complete the picture jumbled in the puzzle box.

It is when we kneel alone with our ignorance that the church’s spire rises to its height.

And that’s the poetry of it.

Irreducible and unique, yet blatantly commonplace as love:

The unpainted masterpiece brimming in the palette’s rainbow….

As fire lies unstruck in the flint, so poetry lies asleep in prose.

And when that fire is awakened, the rock burns.

Gregg Glory

a windy March day, 2020

Fossils

(Discovery of the Burgess Shale)

On the broken mountaintop a moment’s, ahh, sun has granted softness.

The family unpacks on broadcloth a questionable picnic.

Aren’t they funny with their red noses and long scarves, bearing the inhospitable airs?

I turn my back, a weary Walcott, and pull off hat and gloves to push snow from a black and newly baptized trilobite.

Here’s the old green seafloor carbonized and pushed into the skyline like a torch!

Several trilobites, all strangely legged, gleam in the sweat of the peak; odd fauna surround them, unseen in eons, flat as chalkboard diagrams.

Here’s a family of fossils that needs looking into, and no mistake.

I look over the long shady shale slope of Burgess Pass, and I see a wave of rock cutting the scene in two: it’s slow canted arch a humpback breaching.

Bald Eagle

Calm the golden eye that kindles the recalcitrant sun.

Sam stands on a strong passage of branch at the Chesapeake Bay bird preserve, his claw a hanging gauntlet….

A million years and more he roved the northern continent.

A million years before totempole arose, before Indian hand had carved hooked beak and wide eye, or handed his feathers around as rare honors, sewn in band and cap.

On my donated dollar, his arrows, shield and olives give flat testament to his potency.

His scream is like an emergency brake failing downhill, wheel within wheel.

A child pushes a button to play a brief documentary.

The kiosk startles into tinny life: can a strapped camera capture what this eagle stares and sees?

To Sam, the scaled hide of a fish is so different from the lake wave breaking….

“I break these eyelet glitters to eat and conquer!

The fish flies dancing in my cage of talons, rippling mightily!

I start to rip the red seam of life upon the hooded rock!

When I myself am ripped into the sky, from the root of nest and mate removed, the wind will remember the soft crown of my feathers.”

Flint, Jasper, Chalcedony, Chert

(Discovery of the Clovis Spearheads)

Along my brown thigh the new stone lingam lances.

Flakes, torn tears of rock, drop steadily beside my feet, a gilt litter.

Knock knock, knock knock.

Pecking with the hard beak of the precussor, my Clovis point begins to show its bow, the arrow of a Valentine heart.

In skinned skiffs they made their way here, tracing the frost rim of the ice age Pacific, paddles bladed as my tapped jasper leaf. Single file as beads on a shell necklace, perhaps….

Limitless strokes dividing the cold water, as this spearhead will divide lives.

Sunset floods the valley town, showing the bold desert mesa’s flossy erosion.

We read at night about the boy scout who found the first pile of knives beside a Mammoth graveyard—here in New Mexico, not far from our school camp—almost a century ago.

I see his eyes glinting, the careful lantern flame held close to the cliff face.

I feel his breath in my ear, the knock of his teeth as he smiles.

The Mississippian Birdman

Etowah copper, flash and response in a drowsy sun.

I wear my hammered plate and tug on my falcon beak.

I wear winged divinity at my brow, penny-bright and priceless; a little birdman, parrot-man, falcon.

Earrings blazon and drip from my lobes, live fires swinging snakelike.

My feathers, stitched and laced, are the birdman’s busy wings grown fourfold shiny as the locust’s.

Proud my clipped step, clawing the owned earth.

Heaven makes me, heaven takes me.

Here I parade for the mausoleum’s jubilee, bucking and crying with a wet mace in one hand and a fresh death’s-head in the other.

Here the fathers are buried with all their cries.

I cry out: fathers!

Cry out with me, shaking rattle and clapstick.

Do you feel the god beginning to awaken?

Step behind me, if you are mine, mound-builders, maize-masters!

Carry your master to the house of his fathers, cocooned in noon robes.

Go down, dead king, if you would return with the spring corn. Down, down.

Let nine bones mellow and flesh tallow.

Let rain overrun each sightless socket.

Regal spirit, follow me! Follow me and twice-born be!

Hear the mound breathe; beat your coppery wings, dead king, beat the cymbals crashing, feather on feather.

Feel the moulting clouds, all coppery now, low, and heavy with new birth.

Jump up into those clouds:

You are god with me now.

COMES COLUMBUS

Comes Columbus

Celestial choir! enthron’d in realms of light,

Columbia’s scenes of glorious toils I write.

The four corners of this portrait show stars and elbows and a trackless blank above.

An etching of an etching, it poses the captain restless and pointing: sheer stars to steer a ship by, the fate wheel of a brass nocturlabe in his fist.

The etching’s small fine lines throw a Hercules fur over his left shoulder, engrave finger-thick erosion runnels in cheek and forehead.

His full beard and hair, famously blonde, turned fright-wig white at thirty, pleading before queen after queen for cash.

His eyes, confused by distance and desire, couldn’t quite make out a new continent at first—reaching after rubies through a grid of lattitudes.

All his life he reared before the sail like a seahorse, a salt tang in his nostrils.

His scheme was to outflank the Ottomans, snip the Silk Road with scissoring ships, and rake rich spices home for Spain.

On Hispaniola, Columbus found the people credulous and easily led to God; the Taino he deemed fit for slavery, and whipped them for their benefit.

When dicey centuries rolled to ’76, Phyllis Wheatley in her parlor saw the radiant real:

“Gen’l Washington, I write today to say, I’ve met our foundling nation’s goddess; her name’s Columbia!“

Hard years and hard luck broke Chris’ sailor’s body down. And King Ferdinand stiffed him in the end.

His unsettled tomb toured the Caribbean, cradling uneasily to rest in Havana until the Spanish-American War, which sent him back to Seville at last.

St. Anthony Painted on Buffalo Hide

Last night buffalo steak and boiled beans in blood gravy.

The Mojave braves, lean as cacti, barter sheafs of buffalo rawhide balanced on their heads, fat satchels of pemmican.

“These we found easily,” they tell brother Oñate. “They knelt to our arrows as if to river water.”

They gathered round the holy writ like naughty boys, pointing and laughing at “chicken scratches” we tell them are words of God.

I unpack scraped, cured rawhide (how it shone blank beside the candelabra!) ready for pigment and picture to praise the Lord.

All night I kneel before the ornate retablo altar, knead soul and heart in meditative prayer.

The mission tower stands silent as a spent candle.

There are no candles now but the hollow moon through the door….

How shall I bring these hard desert men to Christ?

My eyes pause at the open bible’s vellum pages, veneration on veneration, until leaning shadows resemble St. Anthony reading beside me, words on his tongue and words in the air.

Is it himself or myself who is saying:

Pure from the book sprang Jesus like a bird.

At dawn I arrange my workspace, shuffle the ready hides, bring brush and bone point to bear.

Soon enough, St. Anthony and baby match my vision, stained and dried.

Umbrella clouds above his tonsured head repeat the saint’s naked arch of skull.

The uncrying baby is a scumble of pale highlights, a rayed halo of clay yellows targeting his little beauties.

It was desert for Jesus as it is desert for us, surrounding and simplifying.

And pictured there, too, on the flayed skin, is the book, the center of all.

The book I shall teach them to read.

Pocahontas’ Portrait in the
Baziliogia, a Booke of Kings

Princess Pocahontas stands transformed and poised in this good brown book of monarchs.

Her capitol dome hat of stiff black felt seems tall as a cathedral cross.

Her only feathers are a three-plume ostrich fan bound in a brass handle, held ready like a scourge.

Her husband, Mr. Rolfe, has baptized and married her and brought her to London’s court in a coat of shiny finery.

The book shows her level gaze and long nose, staring away the centuries; her page, cresting a smooth hill of pages, has been turned open by a gloved docent’s hand. It presents her as the British empire’s wife, an attractive travel ad for voyagers and investors.

Golden tobacco promised gold in earnest, if wild colonial natives took to God.

Did she roll big cigars and smoke among her pals back home in old Virginny?

Is this lordly woman the same who laid her bare head, ear to ear, to save a battered Captain Smith?

The kidnapped princess who married her captor and stopped a war?

Compassion and curiosity have carried her effortless across the Atlantic’s intervening sea.

When King James kisses her hand, she curtsies like a queen and carries on.

From the Mother Rock

Plymouth Rock lies cemented that had been split.

It’s traveling half had neighbored a Liberty Pole when the Boston massacre occurred.

Here a buckled shoe lightly alighted and leapt onward to fallow cornrow fields, where man and maid bent steadily as sandpipers to pocket the providential grain, singing perhaps “He chastens and He hastens” as the burlap fattened.

Like a moonrock, it seems less impressive than pressed upon.

Bland and dated, Corinthian shadows cross its bulk, while busy visitors stare down a moment and are gone.

None now linger, as none then lingered.

When Thomas Faunce at 94 pointed out the place his father had pointed out, did he think:

It’s the aftermath of having been that makes a remnant regal.

Dozens of bits of this great grey brain sit in municipal veneration, deeding ideas of freedom to mayor and citizen.

Should we pulverize the mother rock and spritz from sea to sea her sacred dust to seed our children’s children’s thirst for liberty?

One cold Monday ago—on the anniversary of the Mayflower Compact—a weird smear of red graffiti disfigured the stone in a maelstrom of blood.

Today, the humming powerwasher’s work is nearly done, its beige high-pressure hose laid down and leaking lavishly….

Plymouth Rock lies renewed to a sea-bright sheen, as if ten dozen tongues had taken some dim midnight communion here.

I smell the restless sea, hear the Boston schoolboys’ quick cavalcade of feet arrive, and think:

Perhaps the old rock’s provocations are potent yet.

Slave Shackles

At first glance, I would have thought these a section of wrought iron garden edging, ornamental protection for potatoes and yams.

Heavily and brutally made, and now discarded as too primitive.

Reaching out to read the card beneath the case, I see that they are “slave shackles, circa 1650.”

Were they found in a plantation swamp, locked around an escaped skeleton’s wrists?

Bending down to read the fine print, the context of fact and history, the DNA of deeds, I see that these are leg shackles of the Middle Passage.

Suddenly, I’m lying down in a wooden boat, rocked and dark.

My ankle, raw as if incessantly pecked, is locked, not to my other ankle, but to the dead leg of a stranger.

His agony has come and gone, although we sang him what choral palliative we could.

When our midday deck hour comes to eat and breathe salt air, I must carry him up, his cold arm across my shoulders.

After the scandalous whack of a hammer, I see him thrown over the rail into the sea.

In a moment, he is lost to the waters’ churn, a lash of whites; I turn my back and begin to chew….

Stepping away from the dusty museam display, my mouth retains a taste of starchy roots.

Americae Nova Tabula

(Blaeu’s 1648 map)

All this had been blankness.

The parchment had been, so carefully, scraped and left empty.

Every sign of animal and first use had been negatively removed with the hypnotic movement of hands holding edged tools.

Onto this structured blank, halo-like inks outline the known continents.

Green, red, a kind of soft gold.

Into these halos, like a loss of innocence, sink the wrinkled parachutes of nations, roiled black at their edges as if burnt.

America, says one, with the Great Lakes drawn and named.

They are no bigger than a string of beads, a string of lights laid toward the still blank interior.

America, says another, with Brasilia sticking out its cauliflower ear.

The oceans are Mar del Zur and del Nort, gridded with curving squares.

Fanciful ships, dark as curls of wet wood, fly flags of many nations, carousing head-to-head with sea monsters.

Minutely calligraphied names of places fringe the coasts like hairs on a balding head:

Jamestown, Bolivia, several Rios, Chesapeake.

And strange places, too, unknown today. Norem Bega and El Dorado are two.

There are no whales in these scrolled and denoted oceans, although they must have been met with, their pulsars of plumes greeting the intrepid sails.

The hunt was not yet on for them: forehead and fluke, the secret node of ambergris lumped in the sperm whale’s brain like Aladdin’s lamp.

Around the outer edges of the map are many windows.

Each one contains a married pair of tribesmen in their native garb.

The king and queen of Florida are here, and are so designated.

Two nude Peruvians, with their small child between, gaze outward in quiet ease.

Although, none of the trio are smiling.

Washington’s Coat

There’s much to-do with uniforms:

Dressing for dinner, and dancing while the band waltzes.

Gives the men a little tidy dignity when setting them before the cannon-mouth, clothes-pins set before a hurricane.

Dark blue and buff, Washington’s uniform wears a long double row of coinlike yellow-copper buttons down the front; more coins circle each heavy cuff, dual rings of fire.

It has a spilt tail, squared and nothing like the devil.

If a lizard stood in this coat, with a tri-cornered hat, it could cross the Delaware in easeful dignity, rowed over unquestioningly by a boatful of happy continentals.

But make no mistake, it was no easy day to stand in this uniform:

Face-first toward the fire of vigilant enemies, your deep blue back crowded by resentful subordinates.

The wool collar is a tall rise-and-fall design, elegant as a waving hand.

A white smoke-explosion of ruff crowds the throat.

All-in-all, I feel afraid of the fearsome hours this coat has seen.

Watching an elegant Major Andre hung, dropping the sword.

A Crab-Tree Walking Stick

“Let the sword of the hero and the staff of the philosopher go together.”
(of Franklin’s cane donated with Washington’s sword)

A revolution in the air swirls a discarded broadside.

The war is over; the air whips itself delicately, without tirades.

A heavy man passing by is tapping the ground with a lightning rod, searching for stray voltage.

No, it is a walking stick, and the man is Dr. Benjamin Franklin, the American. He seems trussed in his suit like a turkey, gabbling and bouyant.

He holds his walking stick up to the streetlight, and twirls it slowly, amusingly. What is it? His eye makes its examination: no crown tips the cane.

Instead, it is topped with a miniature gilded version of Franklin’s fur cap. The famous raccoon cap, all the way from New Jersey!

I can see how it was:

He has departed an intimate party with the dowager Duchess of Deux-Points, and she has given him this fine cane.

Three of them laughing after the war, kissing Parisian champagne.

And she says, holding the cane out in her white arms:

“For the lightning-rod maker, black lightning to walk by.”

A Row of Conestoga Wagons

The Conestoga wagon is sea blue with red wheels, and is a convertible.

It followed the Iroquois trail from Philly to Augusta, roaring where moccasins had crept.

Chaps with Irish brougues and clattering German accents rolled through the Shenandoah to Carolina beaches.

Wild pine trees and new emptiness welcomed them.

A child would have to be lifted up, hoisted, into the dark belly of the wagon, like the sacks of coal or pig iron that would make the return journey to mill and forge, hunching forgotten among roped bundles.

Families that moved on the southern route disembarked to run callused thumbs along the shadowy veins in tobacco leaves.

Or they’d start a plot of cotton, puffs of follicled mist encased in husks that cut.

The wagons look, with their tilting brims, like a row of old maids nodding off, crosstitch hoops sliding to the porch floor.

The huge rear wheel I stand beside arcs above my head, almost higher than my arm can reach.

It is the fierce aftertrace of a red sparkler lit and whipped at midnight….

The hub, deep with grease, puts out an impossible circle of crimson fingers.

Each finger is arthritic, stiff, yet eager to grip the earth.

The highway we took here filled the same wheels’ gouges with asphalt.

Eli Whitney, Lost at Court

Eli is lost at court among a forest of marble pillars.

And lost among great, shelving foam-blades—

Papers filed in suit and counter-suit, an endless watery clash of claims and adjudications.

Eli arrives with his patent, pristine in his briefcase.

His face is still an egg of hope; this judge, this time.

Under his sweaty arm is clamped a working model of his fabulous cotton gin.

It is squarish, made of stained brown wood, with a metal works of many rows of little teeth:

Baby vampire teeth, or the interior cob-end of corn kernels dried hard and pulled out.

There’s a neat mail-slot crowning two rows of the toothed wheels where raw, seedy cotton is fed in.

The idiot-proof turn of a crank draws in the mottled mass and threshes it.

As it disappears, you see the last hairs of a mad professor as he is being stream-rolled….

And out falls the cotton, pure as a cloud!

The little old man, all heavenly now, is ready for the spinning jenny.

Industrial and full of torque, the jenny will twist, tug, insist.

The surprisingly tough hairs get pulled into harp strings.

John Deere’s Steel Plow

John Deere walks the magnificent, empty, saffron fields.

He wants to see the earth thinking, furrows of thought teasing a faithful forehead into that hill there, frown lines of contemplation there along either side of the dry path, the compressed lips of the roadway.

Seeing the mud earth turned in the Midwest is like peering beneath a turtle’s shell.

Wooden, and even iron, plows break in this soil: hapless Vikings before an Irish tower.

John screws a steel sawblade to his plow’s moldboard, or remembers how a steel needle ruckles the soft leather, or had a dream of surfing these fields on steel feet.

He tries his luck, calling hup-hup to the cold horse.

The spoon-curved edge sails through the pie-crust—

A wave, thousands of years old, and heavy with the weight of unadulterated evening curls up from the plowblade….

To a giant it would be like black walnut shavings from a whittle knife.

Scroll upon scroll of earth flows, and John Deere walks behind.

He brings the scrolls of night up into the sunlight, kneels gently beside the good wound.

He thumbs plump crop seeds into night’s open book before moving on.

He whispers an encouragement, rises, whacks dirt from his knees.

Imaginary Value

With mahogany leaves hinged by brass, Jefferson’s portable desk opens green surfaces in butterfly fashion.

To one side, a drawer for inks and instruments.

Blotches remain in the pockets, indissoluble.

The top wing, lifted, drops peglike feet into cleanly chiseled grooves.

It is here, under the lifted wing, that the airstream catches, and words take flight.

Here the pinched quill returns to plumage, and Rodin’s thinking man leans transmogrified into history.

The desk is small, meant to sit on the lap—like a grandchild, or, more ardently, a lover.

Jefferson chuckled to imagine that his desk could one day be carried through the streets, a sainted relic of the Declaration of Independence, ‘selling America to Americans.’

The green unfolded felt gives a sense of reassurance, of open fields and playtime.

Anything could happen on this strip of earth!

“When in the course of human events….”

Santa Anna, Santa Ana

The Santa Ana winds wear a blue coat with red piping, the sleeves flying!

The headless collar is red as a red coal blown by a bellows.

The red piping defines the coat the way electric coils define a stove.

The coat’s skirt is unusually full, as if it is dancing; a runner’s legs could turn full circles underneath it. It hides General Anna’s prosthetic leg comfortably when he sits astride his horse.

Hot winds hit the neighborhood and toss trash cans recklessly, cymbals in a whirlwind.

The general’s cool eye begins its fierce descent to the Alamo from hundreds of miles away.

Texans are refusing to pay taxes to Mexico City. They obey no one, as this wind obeys nothing.

Leatherbacked, they hunch in the soon-to-be ruins of Alamo Mission.

Davy Crockett’s raccoon-tail is blown straight back, the whites of his eyes dry pebbles.

He thinks about Santa Anna’s prosthetic leg, how one night Texans will steal it and ride away.

General Anna’s coat has gold leaves clutching his throat with their delicate fernprint of authority.

Car doors attack exiting commuters when Santa Ana blows his horn, the whole street whistling.

All the valley vegetation dries stiff, as if surprised and pressed flat in family bibles.

In this wind, no bird does more than hang on tight. The bushes rock all night.

This wind blew Thoreau into a Massachusetts jail cell.

Across his lap, flapping pages of Civil Disobedience.

Sunstones, Moonstones, and Starstones

“A woman clothed with sun, the moon under her feet, upon her head a crown of twelve stars.” Rev. 12:1

This sunstone, two tons large and dislodged from a pillar-top of the tornadoed Morman temple at Nauvoo, smiles past martyrdom and mayhem.

The big stone has condensed and fallen from the old dreams of Joe Smith.

It stands abandoned in the grass like a table to play cards upon, square and accessible, the festive picnic having moved elsewhere.

Its cheeks glow roughly golden, stone rays from its head a frightwig of light.

The brow is broad, blank and fresh as a pie crust.

Open eyes the size of plums address the earthbound sinner, encouraging ascension.

A chiselled weave of waves accepts the sun-face up to its cheeks.

Behind this blithe face, a white temple rose unmolested, Joe pointing the cornerstone home.

Marriages looked out from the apex, hands and hearts crossed in the sealing room.

Baptisms occurred at the basement font upheld by a dozen carved oxen, kneeling and mild.

Touching the long block gives the walker’s palm a warm place to rest:

The view rolls off a green bluff and out across the endless Mississippi….

Many weeks walking brought the Mormons here from Ohio, following Joseph, listening carefully for new inspiration while getting run out of town, wrapping their bibles in their night clothes; walking barefoot through many fields, moonlight under their feet, the stars climbing away as if from the tipping wing of a plane—

My fingertips notice two little angel hands above the plump sun.

The tiny fists hold out a pair of lilylike trumpets, simple as noodles, announcing salvation.

Dead Reckoning with Lewis and Clark

On the all-purpose compass all points point northwest.

Like all explorers, the compass is drawn to a place it has never seen, the hill over the horizon:

El Dorado, Shang Ri La.

The needlelike compasspoint holds forth like a bird dog’s nose, its tail end quivering sympathetically.

The flat riverboat’s crowded with instruments, science-eyes peeled and packed like eggs in a carton.

Hydrometers and brass scales, plotters, planispheres and a theodolite.

But always at my waist, my compass.

However turned, the compass always seems to know where its going.

Its silver furnishings gather the sky and clouds, pool them in small corners.

The improvisational zigzag of our going on is oddly matched by its precisely demarcated face:

Quadrant and degree of our ignorance.

No where’s the wrong way, really, so long as we denote the newness.

The river is leaping up as if to eat us, white teeth hidden in white foam.

All the emptiness on the map is filling up with living things!

We leave chief Twisted Hair smoking his pipe on the riverbank and prepare to portage our boat over the continental divide.

A clear night under stars; the camp is quietly tired.

Our catalog is full of unknown fowl, leaves of undiscovered greenery, the austere looks of landmark rocks and their latitudes.

I unfold my legs before the tent and look carefully into my notebook while falling asleep to the night river’s placid sounds:

Start afresh with whoever you are today. Stay astray.

John Bull and the Golden Spike

“All aboard the John Bull, from South Amboy to Camden, all aboard!”

John Bull, that’s a nickname for England, where the train was designed and bolted.

And where it bolted from, of course, to settle at our museum, dustless and admired.

This wood-clad steam engine of 1831 is made of pounded black iron.

Note the clang bell atop and front candle lantern, still a-glimmer, like you seen in Westerns.

Look around folks. Look at this place, strange as a spaceship!

Used to come here by myself, like being in church, the great arches, and all these wrecks of time, small and little before some great thing, like when the shark hunters first see Jaws rise from the waters.

I was a shy wildflower when I was a kid, now I talk all day long for a living.

Always loved old John Bull here, such an odd one, the back end like a cooking pot, and all these rivets warting the surface, but inside its pure fire.

Grandpa let me know that one of my forebears assembled this beast, like Dr. Frankenstein with a wrench as long as your arm, crawling all over him inside and out.

That’s when I determined to work right here in the museum, whatever it took.

I brushed up on my elecution:

Must’ve watched The Music Man about a million times, singing as I walked to school—that scene on the train:

Why they say, when the man dances, the piper pays him, yess sir, yesss sir.

Anyways, the first tracks were split and laid right here in NJ, creosote piano keys strewn over marsh and meadow.

Some lamely askew, some torqued almost too tight for passage….

Had to have front-end guide wheels riveted on just to keep the engine earthbound, flanged and pierced together by a fixed axle to rotate in unison.

A sound like a coffee-grinder preceding the tuck-ah-tuck-ah-dah of fisting pistions—

Sometimes I think how such extra wheels might grip me to my track.

Now lean back, no, way back:

You see the black stack, a crown-cut open top, crimped like Jughead’s hat?

Loads of white smoke boils out, like a barn on fire, when John Bull’s stoked and rolling.

Startled birds sprang away for miles hearing such clank and caterwaul.

Stray dogs ran like barefoot boys to catch the eager wheels, their wild eyes spinning.

—It was all the filthy lucre that Mr. Stevens made that induced the others.

Money, money, money had them squint and scramble, spreading lines of track like crowsfeet.

Minnesota wheat traveling East; timber, ore, cattle, you name it.

By God, what haulage! Cash for the hogshead, cask and demijohn.

Cash for the crackers, and the pickles, and the flypaper.

No canal mule could match such burning speed.

Eventually, the war between the states (that’s what the South called the Civil War) induced Congress to scheme the Trans-Pacific rail into existence, a belt of rail steel from shining to shining….

A bribe to keep California in the Union, that some nowadays want pushed out.

Might just earthquake off along the San Andreas fault anywise for all such dithering.

But how that Golden Spike must’ve shone in Utah sunshine!

At Promontory Summit (a reduplicative name don’t you think?) all those mute coolies standing by—pardon me, that’s what they called them then.

A million silent men hearing trussed-up industrialists give ten-cent stem-winders. In oratory-English, no less. Ha!

But when the suits were done talking, in went the glittering spike, blow by blow, like a golden tooth in a million-mile smile.

Must’ve let out one helluva golden bell-tone, too, while being beaten down.

Hitherto unknown, y’know?

Colt’s Repeating Pistol

The exhibition piece shows a tranquil tableaux:

A father and his sons target shooting; he corrects their aim with badger-patience. “Squeeze, don’t pull,” he says.

They like to watch the apples explode.

“Not today, Satan!” they shout.

The hexagonal barrel’s rifled, twirled like a candy cane inside.

Handle’s just chunked wood, even on this velvet-held piece so liberally engraved.

The hammer, fully pulled, stows back into the handle like a secret.

The pistol is a form of fist.

It carries the energy of the fist forward in space, and eliminates the fist’s target.

Anger is foreshortened to triumph; defense translated to salvation.

The human body is not able to process such disjunction.

It staggers; it bails; it destroys memory and attention in an attempt to rediscover balance.

I look back at the display, the long pistol vivid in its velvets.

Overhead, clouds scud. The hill’s an etched line.

Only the bullets are all the same, the same repeating fist.

Same blunt nose, same horrible velocity.

The genius of Samuel Colt was in the manufacture, the elimination of piece-work.

He used swappable interchangeable parts; eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth.

Now everything’s like that, a million hands turn one wheel.

I like to think that interchangeable parts do not reduce us to interchangeable people.

That an indignant rebelliousness grips us, wakes us with its bleak scream.

We had this game Operation when I was a kid, using tweezers to pick the clown-patient apart.

Sometimes you’d lose a shinbone, a funny bone.

A wishbone was useful, snapped short.

Once we used a dead fly for the heart.

In the Middle of Everything

(the discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill)

It could be from the moon, this strange, flippant flake. A flake no bigger than a dead wasp’s wing, a gold front tooth. Some broken golden feather of the moon has fallen all the way to the tailrace at Sutter’s Mill.

Like the miracle of the dividing loaves, this gold flake called forth unshakeable belief in 1849.

Fluttered luckily from the great wings of the summer moon, harvest moon, the August moon, it lay in the muddy runoff, a shard of reflected light come back to us, warm and human.

Once weighed and assayed, it became a human flashlight shining the way for millions to come to California.

Chinese, Australian, free blacks, and gluts of proffered Europeans from Back East all followed the yellow dot of light to Monterey, west of all the hills, pinnacles and divides of the Rockies, the striped pajama valley of the Grand Canyon….

California, the great fruit-laden Eden, the blue echo of Mexico resounding in papaya, mango, avocado.

Like falling out of bed into paradise is how old folks described it, and meant it too.

Someplace where it’s always noon and summer, and never a rush.

With a pan and steady stream, any hands could sift free such flittery spillages of lost moonbeams!

The famous flake itself looks like a cornflake, a stray bran flake tossed from the box and painted; edges raggedy, little points and descents, flattish, neither round nor not round.

Found like God in the middle of everything, and seemingly by accident.

A quick-eyed magpie picks it up, leaves it glittering in its nest, a mirror for blank eggs; fallen from the nest and into the grass, a kitten pins it playfully; lionlike she leaps and waits, mistaking its shimmery littleness for a bug.

Once, not too long ago, behind this abandoned mill house on the dusty hill, something new flew up out of the earth, leaving behind it a golden feather floating rapidly down a dark stream.

Martha, the Last Passenger Pigeon

“Away! away! Bess; I long to pepper them.” ~~Fenimore Cooper, The Pioneers

Passenger pigeons once showed the beautiful unity of the new world, inking warm noon skies with masses and masses of darkness.

North to south and back in infinite loop, an endless migration.

The hardcore bolus of moving birds, quick as gazelles in their flying, was shadow involving shadow, shade beneath shade, an evening ocean’s variation held above one’s head by a wilderness of wings….

Pigeons do not coo like doves, nor cluck like chickens.

They descend to chew milky grubs or the laden ears of wheat, pressed to earth in golden circles by the limitless weight of landing and lifting.

All landscapes are a vista of living things, but such aliveness often slides by unnoticed. When the passenger pigeon flock loomed overhead, its aliveness was undeniable, thunderous, dark.

A hassling gale shuddering through many unslung sails—

And from all those millions, billions, a single female left caged in the 1914 Cincinnati zoo.

And when she died, she was resurrected: stuffed and groomed.

Her red eye stares out like a target, scanning skies emptied of her kin.

Martha’s spotted, lovely brown-grey cape flows from a rounded head and dead-round eye.

Hers are the softy dots of the common ground pigeon, a leopard splash of blots loosely flung.

Her beak seems no more than two whittled chopsticks, no longer snapping and clipping.

Martha flies commercial now, accompanied by a museum butler, a stasis of loneliness touring the states on her petrified perch.

In aisle eight, I look down at my backlit Kindle and continue Fenimore Cooper’s “Pioneers.”

Shadowy bodies cover Lake Erie like a lid, the sun itself reduced to a yellow marble beneath innumerable wings.

“Away! away! Bess; I long to pepper them.”

Lockstep Lockstitch

(I.M. Singer’s sewing machine)

The stitches are so close together!

They lie together like sleeping eyelids; quiet mouths of oysters shut against a grainy tide.

The sewing machines rattle all together in the vast warehouse, the window-light diffuse
and sealike.

How many hands had grown crabbed and scarred sealing the cut halves of garments together, each half no more than a paper doll, hiding our nakedness?

And now this machine spits stitch-stick-stitch so perfectly, so effortlessly!

The bobbin thread and head thread twine their DNA, arrow and hook guiding them.

Rescued from the Triangle factory fire, hundreds of similar machines were left piled in Greene Street like dinosaur skulls, bull skulls, as an ambrosia of smoke went heavenward.

Looking around the factory, one waits to hear the hiss and cease of steam brakes.

But there’s no train here, nothing so rapid or strange; no open door orange with fire, no cloistered steam urging motion.

Just these ladies, hunched like suburban cyclists, pumping the foot peddles, looking attentive and tranquil, palming shaped waves of cloth, wave after wave through a narrow place where the silver chicken foot hangs immobile, calling forth a charybdis of stitches, one by one helping the line of sleeping eyelids to appear….

The whole room thrums like a kind of choral dormitory, Jesus’ mansion of many rooms.

Albert Beirstadt’s Among the Sierra Nevada

First it was a dream. A misty mountain peak like a downsweep of eagle’s wings.

Not like those Chinese mountains painted wave over wave, humped and hollowed limestone hallows.

These are mountains made to endure revered, fracturing the air.

And not all in one day did we make it here, dragging easel and inks and paint-prep packed in Philadelphia.

A dusty ride west longer than death, through white alkali deserts, a hardpan crucible of heats.

And then, all at once, opening beyond the horses’ heads: a level lake, diamond-alive.

Back East the viewers lean away from the stage curtain as the golden cord is pulled, an umbilical to the wilderness West.

They see at a gasp what I’d ridden hard to observe, labored long to swat into spectacle.

What’s the sweptback business of these pines, says one, darkling in the margins?

How attentively stall the buck and doe at the water’s open edge!

Just seeing the big cliff, I can hear the waterfall, a limitless water-pump let run all evening….

And suddenly, I feel their shoulders beside mine in the cool air of the lake.

Gilded vests, Norfolk jackets and pagoda sleeves, mix amid the extravagant grass everywhere green as a pool table.

Quiet does and bucks, they watch cliffs sink to the water, reflect as deep as they climb high.

And those skies over all—over plains and grass and trees and even the sharp wig-white mountains—how they curl and preside, like a Momma’s love perhaps.

The sky opens, ever-present, where pinked clouds part their fogbound camera shutter, widening in pupil-like reveal.

That sky, not as blue as rumored, but mottled a subtle blue-white, an abeyance of dark more than a presence of light, drawing the eye into a theater-like lens of attention.

A milky amalgam lumped on a paint blade, and then drawn clean, quick against the palette—

King Kamehameha III’s Feather Cape

Pencil-grey smoke slides from a trail of green cloaks thrown over the ocean, each a blot or close curl of a comma. Each one an island.

Over the many islands, tossed discarded into immense waters, many birds are flying, ocean bound, or hunkered to landmasses, island-hopping.

King of these islands, Kamehameha III, walked forth in a robe of bird feathers, full of flightless equanimity, each feather shining tied to the under-net of his cape.

Many birds donating to become an ornament that had been flighty, alive.

Feather on feather as if grown from the egg, this cape extends its pattern into open space.

The pattern is a series of swept curves, a litter of grass leaves, corn husks: red, black, yellowish-white as teeth, blown onto the big semi-circle smile of the cape, itself a sort of grounded wing.

Catch an ‘i’iwi by the toe,

pluck two feathers and let him go.

Weave each ‘o’o feather tight,

and your ‘ahu’ula cape shines bright.

Made sacred by intent and labor, this exquisite cape drapes easily over the shoulders, enlivening the wearer with visions of flight.

The birds now are silent, some of them extinct, beings beyond bodies, sans skeletons, unless the cape moves. And then you are the skeleton, and wings are everywhere, rustling winds….

So many birds netted! Same nets used to fish, same hands to pluck and release.

The constellations changed over their heads as they flew away, as new men came ashore, pointing high and renaming the stars in this world where mountains burned.

The whole chain of islands is a whipcord of fire, fire seething in the leveled cups of volcanoes.

Kamehameha, his arms folded, beneath the closed loop of the rope clasp, became a cone in this cape, a great auk puffed and resting.

His eyes look out, birdlike, horizon-zoned, aware of infinities and his small place within them, his royal glance touching each island in turn, feathers fallen in ocean amber:

Maui, Oahu, Kauai, Lanai, Niihau, Kahoolawe, Molokai, Hawaii.

“What Hath God Wrought?”

Alive is too strong a word.

But, the telegraph’s arched brass back is suddenly not dead.

The telegraph clacks like a thrush cracking a snail; a staticy squall of clacks, soon over.

The boy in a visor takes down many letters rapidly, and they resolve themselves into words.

The slant of sunlight, a bent fin of high yellow, is the same as it was.

The device screwed to the table returns to its intent inertness, a bee asleep in its honeycomb.

The quiet grows rich, the beak of the telegraph is still, the bee’s sting invisible.

Oysters the world over still lave hidden pearls with iridescent layers.

But soon, too soon, the whole world will fit on the head of this pin.

Electric Speech

(Alexander Graham Bell’s box telephone)

He also made a phonograph: reedy, ghost-grey whispers in our ears, hovering weirdly near.

The principle’s the same, eardrum and requiem. All shaped air.

The box telephone has a heavy U magnet that abuts the membrane screwed at compass-points to the wood frame.

Wires trail out the back like discarded puppet strings, two lashed strands of copper.

It doesn’t seem like much, and you can hear the interior magnet ticking when you talk.

You talk into a short black cup like a blind confessional, or Greek prayer-hole going down to the dead.

The cup fills up with your words.

Lips pour words out like a dolphin-face fountain, and the telegraph line drinks them up.

Electric speech, Bell called it.

Alexander was also fond of saying how we often look “so long and so regretfully upon the closed door.”

There’s an ear for every secret, is another saying.

Young Bell’s mother grew deaf as he grew.

Her ears are everywhere.

American Buffalo

It’s their nostrils up close you notice right away: steaming in cool morning, misty and noisy.

Large animals put such a volume of air through their lungs!

In and out go the bellows, keeping the fiery fits of life lit up.

In much-changing light, excited hooves and horns ring against the metal fence.

The buffalo leap nimbly in their pen.

The dancers’ hooves gouge beaten ground into a sort of mud fingerpainting.

Each split hoof stamps a pair of angel wings until the ground is crowded with wings.

If they were deer, it would be nothing special, a dance in the grass.

But the buffalo, with their great shaggy heads bearded as wise men, and satan-horned, gambol toward the high aluminium fence intent as apparitions, hairy ghosts stamping and huffing in the oncoming light.

Seeing them in a row of six, gamely nimble, limber, effortless, they seem more like a chorusline wearing beards and Russian hats than anything else I could name.

Together they dance, huge faces hanging close together, clipped hooves polished as tap shoes.

Their glassy brown eyes as they dance seem rare and wild, drunk as maenads chasing the scent of a sinner’s blood:

Strange glad eyes, large and moist as espresso cups overrunning with luminous oil—

It’s not a look of sympathy any more than a cat’s or snake’s is.

It’s alien, and you are alone when you gaze into the face of this beast.

They stare into years before mankind arrived, before the riotous rush to the cliff.

They stand, uneasy at dawn, locked up, looking back on eons of easy grazing….

Sitting Bull’s Ledger Book

On rainy days, Sitting Bull drew in his sketch book.

It was an unused ledger book for facts and figures, additions and debits and getting to zero.

But Sitting Bull drew in it.

It had green covers, green as an accountant’s eyeshade.

Retired to the cavalry outpost at Fort Randall, Sitting Bull kept crayons and pencils with his green ledger book.

Mostly he drew old battles he’d been in, personal victories over other indians, other tribes made quiescent under his feathered spear.

Here’s Sitting Bull riding his red pony that’s been painted to resemble a crow, the eternal victor of every battlefield, with a yellow beak drawn along the horse’s muzzle, and wild claws at every hoof.

His spear is simplified to a single line with a bulb of blade touching the enemy’s shoulder as if he were being knighted.

Sitting Bull has an ornate eagle headdress on, the feathers pulling back a long ways past his shoulders tight as violin strings.

His hands and feet are black buffalo hooves, for the buffalo spirit is in his sweat-work, their thunder in his coming down upon Assiniboine, whose arrow is not yet cocked and who leans backward into white space as if clumsily akilter.

Both of their faces are placeholders, eyed blanks.

They are neither ecstatic nor decimated.

In some of these, Sitting Bull has drawn himself wearing a long sash that’s tied to the dirt, staked to stay in place until the battle’s won.

The rain outside continually descends, dropping zeroes and ones.

Remember the Maine! Or, Clean Bright Work

Bugles carry on over the spillway hill, bent by winds.

Navy buglers practicing: Attention, Bear A Hand, Admiral’s Barge, Belay.

But that night in Havana, all those nights ago, no Abandon Ship was blown.

Only the rending sound of metal, unimaginable.

After a century or so, they dredged up this green bugle, bulged as a squash, corrosion-pocked.

When the mind goes to sea, it follows a bugle’s call, the quick sound lancing far from shore.

Was this the bugle Teddy Roosevelt followed up San Juan Hill?

Wet notes risen from water that called those men to battle?

This bugle, once lost at sea, has been dredged back to us, one of Neptune’s wormy seashells, full of storms and covered with spaghetti curls of rust.

Beaten down by the hooves of the ocean, chewed flat by the sea’s jaw….

If living lungs and a pair of tomato cheeks moved breath through this bugle today, what old note would sound?

Would sighs of the dead be audible, sodden voices drowned?

Could such a mangled bugle blare, it might repeat: Captain’s Gig, or Carry On.

Getting there from Hatteras, the milky sailors were young and talkative, busy, buffing every blazon of brass when the bugle called: Clean Bright Work.

But those sailors died in their dreams, sleeping, when the ammunition magazine erupted beneath them, ripping the ship.

The place where they laid down a final time, bellies content with navy beans and canned pork, is under the level bay now, the intact flag rescued the next day from a still-risen mast.

A room of men swinging in womblike ambience, abeyance, hammocked and trussed, the Cuban waters sushing, pushing….

New Year’s Eve on Christie Street

(Edison’s electric light bulb)

The nippled bulb sits in its rippled socket. A circuit is complete, a pattern set.

From then until today, only variation and experiment; a truce has been called with novelty.

Carbonized bamboo, later tungsten, heats up its isolated void, throwing incandescent glories.

Meanwhile, in 1879 New Jersey, night has fallen over a long snake of street, heavily lipped—a jar of utter darkness lidded and inverted.

Each electric bulb, vacuum sucked and sealed, is held poised in a moonlike globe, lined up jars of not-dark, fireworks pulled to the ground, lashed by wires and tamed, awaiting only the itch of an electric match.

All afternoon and twilight the trains caterpillared from Atlantic City, tilted full of walking questionmarks…and then the switch flips.

And faces, hovering above shawl or overcoat in one cloak of ink, disembarked by hurried trainloads into the anonymous dark, look up all at once, each face individual and astonished.

Hundreds of Adams and Eves holding hands in a new world.

New Year’s Eve on Christie Street is a solid block of light, an illuminated cube.

And with the New Year lights, morning birds began to sing at midnight.

From here on in, nights go by alike as daytime.

From here on in, midnight glares and gleams, eager with gleanings.

Artificial light electric on the night page.

Statue of Liberty. Interior, Daytime

Inside the spaceship, a million rivets are visible.

People wearing green foam liberty tiaras from the souvenir shop shoulder past, hurrying to the heights, but I am enamored of this interior view.

The iron framework is everywhere, an inescapable skeleton evident as a spiderweb as you make your way to the central pole that gleams like a rocket on its dawn launchpad.

Here it is: an incredible stair, bending its helix upward to a skyline-defying tiara.

Here am I: treading the ascending DNA stairs with ringing steps.

I walk the kite’s tail, hear the harbour winds against her skirts.

Madam’s copper skirt is wind-bitten, bringing salt scents to her interior, tatting the rivets as the silver stairway sways.

Far above, the lined brains of hair make a dome over us, greeny tilled fields full of sweet roots.

Among the roots, many visitors.

The green dress hangs like leaves from the central iron tree, Eiffels’ strutted steps.

Imagine the resounding ringing as they clobbered her together!

The work complex as a cathedral, ladders and wrenches the length of your arm.

Many workers hunched like swinging cuckoo figurines among the gonging carillion tones.

At each juncture of copper and iron, the ingress of seawind generates electric sparks, only stopped by doped asbestos; each cloth wrapped and placed as if against a fevered brow.

Outside, the face hangs heavy: pharonic, platonic.

I look out from the brow of her corona, a band of portholes beneath the wicked spikes, darting rays of electric thought….

An electric lightbulb in her upraised hand was the first plan, a lighthouse Edison-bright and limitless.

I think that she should be on the head side of the penny.

The Story of the Room

Well, you know, I just painted on. I went on―without design or sketch―it grew as I painted. And toward the end I reached such a point of perfection―putting in every touch with such freedom―that when I came round to the corner where I started, why, I had to paint part of it over again, as the difference would have been too marked. And the harmony in blue and gold developing, you know,
I forgot everything in my joy in it.

~~James McNeill Whistler

Brought stick by stick to America, there’s more to Whistler’s Peacock Room than I could tattle in the time I have. Just look:

Dash-dot-dash of light—two golden peacocks on a field of blue—improbable combatants—

One low, his gorgeous tail downswept, calligraphy beak attacking the other’s vulnerable feet, gilded lightning-strikes trined to ground.

The other, dancing fantastically on higher ground, the great peacock tail fully open, lordly, unsustainable as a cloudscape.

Their battle, it appears, is eternal.

Two equally compelling patterns of gold on a blue field racing to dynamic equilibrium….

Every inch of their viciousness made vigorous by the effete penlike strikes of the artist’s brush:

The artist is the third peacock, invisible and effervescent.

We stand in a room of his design, and witness a battle of his conceiving, deceitful and delightful as water-dazzle.

All around us rises a frame of bamboo shelves, sleeves of glitter unrolling on every side, and on every shelf a blue and white plumped pot.

And the notable pots have scenes and designs of their own:

Little towns besotted with sideways trees, or souls pushing themselves down some Chinese Styx.

And then, dead center among the sky-dots the pots imply, there stands, lounges, appears, the Princess from the Land of Porcelain, in her hand a fallen flower—

Dark hair upswept, her eyes are open and waiting.

Her bodice is snug above a red belt, a sash, the only other primary color in the room.

Her off-shoulder robe, more than floor-length, is being shrugged on or slid down, a waterfall itself of gold.

If one finds a spur of museum rail on which to lean, the princess seems to be watching the eternal contest of the cocks—

Is she lost amid the blues, or distracted by the molten lambency of their golden tones, perfect feathers the artist has let rip beneath the endless arch of all those dead eyes in the paired, raised and vanquished tails surrounding watching….

Tin Lizzie

Wheels and ruts have been rolling on for a long time.

The road curves and hugs the hill’s hardness, a lasso lain against a bull’s dewlap neck.

The Model T roadster turns through parting hemlock and is gone, part of history’s landscape.

If a turtle had wheels, it might look so.

Wrenched together on a player piano’s rolling assembly line, each finished and buffed Model T was driven straight to the sales lot, its pistons tocketing musically.

And there they waited quietly, platoons of turtles sunning themselves.

When we drive, what’s hidden in the trunk rides with us: a beach chair from last summer, a gallon of anti-freeze, books we had meant to read, lives we had meant to live or leave behind.

When it rains, we feel safe, cozied by the upholstery, by the rain’s bumbling drumming.

Shaped vaguely, also, like a homberg bonnet, bourgeois, middlebrow and pedestrian (except for the wheels, which resemble circular insect spectacles underneath the homberg), every family could leave their factories for a drive in the country.

Every Sunday families rolled like circus seals into a car and rolled down the windows and rolled away.

There’s a lot of them still out there, the old Model T Fords.

Their dusty interiors are rotted out, or immaculately kept up with new foam rather than horsehair—the hair of its enemies subdued and stuffed into the seats.

The black ones remind me, too, of mother bears.

But ferociously fast, rolling up out of the river to kill you for the last salmon.

Helen Keller’s Pocketwatch

Time touches my face with spiderwebs.

I run through the clock’s circle, and dance with its hands.

I am the fly that plays in the strings of time.

In my pocket, I carry its small wheel.

The arrow, ornate tattoo, goes round the cardinal stubs of the dial, handles of the captan’s helm.

I go over its swayback swirls with my thumb, its shy guiding steadiness pointing.

I feel the secondhand heart of the clock, the whisper of ticks at each fingertip.

My pocket holds this little god, and I hold hands with god:

The color of 7 a.m. is coolness, the wide window awake to birds.

The mood of noon is cutlery clanking, the tickling feel of glassware.

The breath of 3 p.m. is heated, hot heaviness of naptime in my ear.

When nighttime comes ladling its 8 p.m., and 11 p.m. grows pillows for dreams—

I swim where invisible things are real, my arms feathering into wings.

We’re all at ease in the everything breeze, afloat in adoring waters.

I go up slant shores on hands and knees, and curl at the foot of a wrinkly tree.

I go down softly among spiderwebs, my heartbeat the only ticking.

Bakelite beside the Delaware

The river snaked and zazzled through scrimshaw trees on our drive up to “New Hippie.”

Its suave glimmer rides beside us, slithering hither and thither.

Our eyes glide slyly away from each other, hidden and lit with an obscure hope we refuse to name.

Walking through the decorous town, we breathe air like us:

Invisible and crisp, autumn colorful, autumn wonderful.

Tired after a while of watching one particularly bright offshoot of water grow dim-dark as it disappeared beneath a local mill wheel, we turn into the thrift store “Love Saves the Day” at the end of the street.

Old clothes, old games, old things. And bakelite. Many items made of bakelite.

They stamped out infinite numbers of eagle’s wings, as needed, or poker chips, kitchenware, jewelry, pipe stems, children’s toys, firearms, or chess sets:

This one from the 1930s has men of mottled green and smoky orange arrayed on its checkerboard.

I pick up a green art deco knight wearing a slick racer’s helmet.

Rubbed closely, he gives off a soft smell of formaldehyde, some constituent hint of bakelite.

On the counter top sits a small black-and-white photo of the first Bakelite machine, the boiler of primordial soups, birth-Valhalla of all these things….

It looks like the ugliest ornament on the Christmas tree, Darth Vader’s Easter egg.

Leo Baekeland, the “Dutch Vulcan,” hobbled about his lab chained to this forge to make beautiful, useful things for his demanding mistress.

Or so I imagine, running my fingers through a twirl of earrings.

Thumb-big bolts sit allied to the egg’s waistline, a ring of iron welts or welded warts, brothers to those on either side of Frankenstein’s neck.

There’s an iron wheel at the top of the egg that steers its fetid chemistry, full of phenol and formaldehyde, willful as the wheel that drove Nemo’s Nautilus to its leagues-deep doom.

It’s an object of fairy tales, this black ovoid with its pressure gauge, its steel door that shuts the buck-toothed children in.

Out of this soft-boiled dinosaur egg fallen from its Eden nest, out of this pot the witch used on Hansel and Gretel, out of the hellish guts flowed a noble black poo: endlessly malleable bakelite, the stuff of dreams!

For instance: bracelets, all colors, clacking like pelican bills when Carmen Miranda danced.

Necklaces and gewgaws, and every kind of black power knob or electric socket.

Electric plugs and telephones were made of this stuff for years, utility hiding its inherent glamour.

Rainbow bakelite awoke in us moderns the royal lust for bright things, bright things.

We became indians willing to sell Manhattan for $24 worth of sea shells, every woman a Cleopatra, every man a Darius.

A bakelite radio, brilliant as a marble bathtub, plays seductive jazz from the far side of a flapper mannequin, carefree in her beads.

The antique mannequin has bakelite bracelets riding up one arm until the arm is a ringed snake vomiting forth a white hand-mouth.

“Oh, I want those, all of them!” And her eyes are delighted.

NOT FAR AFTER THAT

The Wing-Walker

Some force, animal-born, is slippery, edgy,

Impatient, greedy… for new heavens

~~Robt. Bly, Meditations on the Insatiable Soul

Slapping the side of the The Spirit of St. Louis, notice how it looks a bit like a sharpened pencil with wings and a tail attached.

Lindbergh wrote his name in the skies with this plane, with bold loops and cursive surprises.

When an arm emerges from a cloud and taps your shoulder, you go—

He periscope-peeped over the tonnage bulk of mounted engine as if flying a submarine, turning the craft sidewise to orient on homefields and runways.

Stepping along the diving board wings of WWI surplus biplanes at 23, “Lucky Lindy” never looked down. He was a wing-walker, a showman, a parachutist detached as a breeze. True story.

By 25, he’d become pure spirit given horsepower and wings, carrying this heavy thing into heaven….

Out in the middle of the Atlantic ocean, the bolted floorboards reverberate continuously as if, somewhere nearby, people are dancing. A family shindig, a square dance or barn party.

The Spirit of St. Louis owns the afternoon, its swift pointer’s nose pushing forward among doilies of clouds.

And all along underneath, the ocean is rolling. It isn’t hurrying to get to Paris to be part of a champagne celebration, blind in the flash of cameras. The sea is already everywhere, grey in the twilight, its surface a heaving pattern of ever-changing hills. Beneath those hills many eyes watch a loud light cross overhead in the dry sky, a wayward star moving East.

Soon enough, night rises from the darkening swells. Soon enough, it is so late it is early. His thoughts go out ahead of the plane into the nebulous moistness above the chill Atlantic, feeling fragile and weightless as milkweed seeds….

When the black ice comes on with a ripping creep, he dips The Spirit deep until dead wheels taste a serrated hightop of waves, and skeins of ice chunk off into salt water.

Around midnight, the touchdown. An end to dark heights and sleeplessness, the soundless roar of the engine still eerily omnipresent.

Parisians tore fuselage and pilot to ticker-tape with bacchanalian abandon in a French farmer’s field.

Paraded and feted, “Lucky Lindy” walked the wings of his nation, defying earth’s fallen curve—

He flew up there, fearless, a babe in a bassinet, a hundred miles an hour with the windows open.

Her Mink Coat

So, she became a kind of angel of my redemption through her art…. Marian Anderson, on that particular day, opened the doors of my prison, and I walked out a free man.

~~Ossie Davis

Her mink coat runs up and hangs from her shoulders, a friend leaning close.

Exiled from Constitution Hall, Eleanor Roosevelt resigned from the D.A.R. to stand by her side, a silent friend.

And seventy-five thousand others around the reflecting pool, seeing themselves there.

When Marian sings, her voice is a flight of arrows over the long crowd.

She stands on the highest step, the mic sparkling like a jeweled hairpin.

Her hands shape the notes, brown doves helping new doves to fly.

What was the song? Oh, it was opera. Ecstatic, untrifling.

Every story was in the melodious, broken story of her singing.

And other songs, too, “Tis of Thee,” and “Gospel Train:”

Here comes that gospel train. Get on board,

Get on board, there’s room for many a more—

Over her shoulders sat the giant white shadow of Lincoln, seated and solemn where all others stood milling, his beard of milky bees from some still-promised land.

And the piano right behind her, beautiful inkblot, running its palindrome of sounds, mixing the differing keys in large harmony.

A Fireside Chat

In the White House, the instrument, a broadcast mic, sits like a trophy, banded above by a label of commercial ownership, CBS, NBC, perched at an angle on a solid brass stand heavy enough to break a toe.

The dingus itself is unimpressive—an improbable hockey puck with a lion’s tail trailing to the floor. But this is the miracle device, the microphone that will send one voice to twenty million ears, and more.

Radio gathered us together back then, brought us within the circle of invisible voices heralding prayer or pastime.

We move an empty chair over by the fire, and a friend sits in it, ready for his little visit.

He tells us his concerns and plans, and we listen as if they were our own concerns and plans.

His voice carries us into matters we had thought extraneous to us, but which, as we listen, as we curl into the story, slowly become our own.

It is your problem no less than it is mine. Together we cannot fail.

He emits a jokey moral, slightly acerbic point, and we decide to take it the right way, as it was meant, his voice is so silken-solemn and relaxed:

“The man who strikes first admits that his own ideas have given out.”

Eventually, he gets around to history, to the endless perspective of time, and where we might stand in such a landscape, and from where we sit, listening, we seem a part of his vista.

…the way of thought of a nation whose origins go back to Jamestown and Plymouth Rock.

At some point, his storytelling transforms into a passionate plea. He may need our help, and we listen with a new cautiousness, and with renewed concern, to his advocating and insisting voice as he eventually gets to the evil incident that’s really bugging him.

On this tenth day of June, nineteen hundred and forty, the hand that held the dagger has struck it into the back of its neighbor.

We’ll have to stand with him, or abandon our friendship. There’s no middle ground this time, however endless and friendly he seemed at our first invitation—when the chair was cold and we let his voice begin without expectation….

I call for effort, courage, sacrifice, devotion. Granting the love of freedom, all of these are possible.

A quiet manifests after he finishes, and we rise from our seats, glancing around uncertainly.

We look outside where the variable firelight bleeds through a tall window.

There’s a wing of wind going by, disturbing our home, and we notice our own figures stretching before us, the silent fire at our backs.

Our bodies wavering on the ground in inconstant light remind us of the strange shapes a flag makes when shadowed on the lawn.

This Land

So much of singing is praising, and preparation for praise.

God made some notes look like little birds on a wire with a single wing.

I wasn’t prepared to cry so much at the sound of voices together.

When the choir of my childhood put on their blue robes and looked up, it was like hearing the rims of fifty wet glasses rung with fifty fingers.

Our singing teacher had a John Denver blond bowl-cut and loved how we could manage “This Land Is Your Land” on the first go.

Now, I look down at the delicate paper, brown as a moth wing.

The letters are cursive, strong as an oar in the water.

Woody Guthrie had licked and affixed ringsavers around each punched hole in the ruled paper.

The fog was lifting, a voice came chanting

A museum is a place for dead things still living, I guess.

It is a kind of book you can walk around in, poking your nose at the out-of-print exhibits.

Next to the paper is the shellac master record, a thin 78 with a hand-written label.

Its grooves shine blackly in the low light.

At the push of a steel display button you can hear his voice through the grate, flat and nasally.

Some of the old words are just wrong, crossed wires that zapped the bird wingless.

How could I hear him now if there were no private property, private effort?

Who would’ve run the recording studio, pressed the records?

I listen to the redwoods’ rustle, the gulf stream hustling past. I walk that endless skyway.

Children are lifting their faces everywhere, still living I guess.

About the Author

(picture)

Night, Night

Feb 112020



Birth defies belief.
Love brings grief.
Death, relief.

Reaching After Realness

I ask: how do I make my dented self 
         beautiful 
with this old pencil? 
     ~~Daniel J. Weeks, Self-Symphonies

Our legs look broken when light bends them in the swimming pool. Once our heads are under, immersed in the experience of wetness, the illusion disappears. Our legs are restored to us in their wholeness, where they can be repurposed as impromptu fins to propel us elsewhere. Which of these sets of legs are our “real” legs? The broken set, the restored set, or the Aquaman set?

Entering a poem is like entering that other, underwater world. We are restored to a wholeness the pain of life and its deceptions has convinced us is missing. But, we can only hold our breaths so long before our imaginations burst! And still we go down like clockwork into the dark otherwhere of metaphor, easing past the shallow end of simile, our imaginations and lungs aching. However dangerous the journey, we will not be denied our diving, our entry into depths.

The act of writing is a way for poets to break the surface tension, to transform and explore with all of their sets of legs at the same time–water-skimmer and octopus at once. The act of, not just imagining, but creating the distortion of a written record, a pool for others to enter, is part of the mystery. This writing things down, however, is not what may be called a clarification; that’s a mistake many neopyhte divers make, arriving back at the deck of their exploration vessel with the bends.

Let me propose that both imagination and reality are equally real, equally imaginary. A grown-up Velveteen Rabbit has a smoking habit, perhaps; perhaps the dourest accountant over-charging on our tax prep is a weekend balloonist– or, more daring yet– a plummeting parachuting enthusiast.

Whether this need for othering ourselves, appropriating the ocean’s indigo, pretending a purpler sky, being winged in imagination whenever we watch a bird in flight, is the result of an evolutionary symbiosis of inner and outer selves or some kind of meshuggeneh co-dependency, I cannot tell. But I know that it cannot be otherwise. Real or unreal, one hand will always be reaching after realness–a stuffed, velvety rabbit dangling from the other hand. •

Gregg Glory
July 4th, 2017

I Confused by Honeysuckle, Childhood Misunderstood

Memory is liver than sight. ~~William Carlos Williams, Shadows

Night, Night

I sneak out to the fluid night 
Sky bedizened and soft grass 
Forever under my walking 
Trees besides assaying the hush 
Easing my looking, my seeing, 
Stealth in each threading step 
Holding stones I ache to unown 
Throw where vastnesses hide  
A lurker unloved among cosmos 
Among toads sowing yawps 
Into a black that is matte, that recedes 
As far as pupils' going knows 
Blue iris shuttered on nothing 
But stars' particulate light 
Fine as dust distilled 
Falling in my hair, on my face... 
As if the green, rackety backdoor 
Fixed and taped against winters 
And loosened each year for spring 
When mellow all comes welcome in, 
Now as I pass through to dark, 
Creaking the lintel, begins again 
To show the old summer places-- 
Constellations sleep had forgotten 
Opening straight into outerspace.          •

Tree of Death

I climb the tree of death 
My father climbed, his tree 
Growing in the cistern of a pool 
Drained for a winter longer 
Than any he knew before  
Where his bald cranium nailed 
The roots with a cross of blood. 
The tree grew with weeping, Dad, 
And I am climbing it, limb over limb 
From that empty pool, the cross 
That lifts from your skeleton  
Once quick with fat and wit 
Fleshed with a scorn of smiles
Lies that made you rich as sin 
And lost your sons forever--
How you derided the sticks of time! 
The sticks lift above me as I climb 
A brachiform blot on the stars, 
The knock in the ribs the heart keeps 
My only guidepost.          •

The Niagara of Mothers

The maternal smell of water,  
That arrogant brake where  
The Falls drop into nothingness...  
Pillar mirrored by pillar and all  
Roaring white a colossal edifice  
In motion.  Where an edge  
Should appear blindness remains 
My hands empty before me 
Reaching.  

Billows explode like ghosts  
Panting ripping toward the past,
The strained water--rapids  
Giving and failing like mothers  
Everywhere, and you  
No different, no worse.  
Mother, I would eat every lie, 
Every truth, to see for one minute 
You again!  A crowded brace  
Of mossy wreckage is teething  
The rubber bow before me:  
The glass plank hanging 
Over nothingness, deafness  
Roaring and then--          •

A Visit

divine sparks or burning calories
bodies and souls are on fire

The so-little graves of parents 
And the parents before them…. 
Are they only doused flames
The used-up candle wax sloughed 
Off, or resistless matches 
Held bravely aloft in the dark 
Tom Sawyer in his pirate cave 
Digging at crevices for treasure? 
I close my eyes for sleep 
And my flashlight finds you 
Instantly alive as Polaroids 
In pantsuit and dungarees, 
Bitching your way toward divorce
Even now, even in death
Even in the dreams I sought  
For solace.  I toe the muddled 
Earth between them carefully
Mother here, Father there
Looking for daisies among the weeds.
They lay there looking up and 
Talking: Pity us!  Let the past 
Drop from our bones like teeth
Drip from our bones like wax
Or fade at least to pastel at last
So that you may paint your days
By what wayward light you find
And not these childish flares--
Vituperations, curses, our
Forever unfinished bonfire!          •

Sprung

A spring resists its winding 
A road would rather be left alone 
A ballerina's slipper doesn't need 
A restless foot to complete it-- 
Entropy has ensigns of its own 
Signposts of rust, dusty accretions 
A look worn to translucence 
Like the detective's trick mirror 
Awaiting its awful candidate.... 
Fifty has given me a face 
Thin as a sail, as changeable 
Wanting only its original 
Darkness, the rubber bathtub 
That squealed me here, applying 
Disasterous brakes in a panic, 
Leaning into soft headlights 
That showed the indifferent road 
The ballerina's empty slipper 
And 10,000 empty days ahead--

But what could I do about it 
Sprawling in the icy nurse's hands 
The red spring in my belly 
Already loaded tight?          •

An Overturned Canoe

Under an overturned canoe 
We kept tacked in lieu of a dock 
On the edge of the old reservoir  
Welled like a waterbead overbrimmed, 
A height of welted skin but cool 
To the touch, I found my breath 
Echoey with surfaces among the ribs 
Of the overturned canoe. 

Fibrous light rooted in somehow 
Casting lines above me as I breathed 
In all that hollowness no one 
Visited but me, the lines strange 
As neon hieroglyphs racing bright 
Over my hands as I reached up 
Tangling in their starry business 
That swam the sky inside with me, 
An intruder in the web.          •

What Drought Brought

When our reservoir was holding  
Its breath, low, baring a shamble 
Hash of sticks, spills of pebbles, 
Dead trees like ribs of black water 
Or inverted umbrellas lost 
Straying in a storm that stayed, 
I'd slide on my dungareed ass 
To walk along the sandy skirt 
And saw how water corroded 
The world, the whole overcast woods 
Hanging precariously revealed 
As cloud bellies, wattles of roots 
Lumped above the nothingness 
I walked, fringed with iffy dust… 
Fragments of the caveworks still 
Wet with birthing and shy of light. 
I'd spend hours kicking stones 
All around the res's tender rim 
Wide as an eyelid limned in sand 
Getting the secret feel for once 
Where water had lapped and stripped
Underground things unshadowed 
And made uncomfortably known-- 
Trees that couldn't run succumbed 
Spending years sometimes just leaning 
Over the horrible mirror.          •

Seasons in the Sun

How strangely the artifacts of childhood 
Grow in grown imagining!  When work 
Lapses like a gasp at dusk, a red wagon 
Rolls by the blue inflated pool 
Suzy splashed in, her puffy hair in knots. 
After dinner, among the table's bric-a-brac, 
Eyeglasses aside, the trees we ran through rise 
Acre on acre between the plates, games 
Of chase and war, indians and aliens. 
Vying like twin stags in the forest brake 
We pawed and clashed, cracking dead branches 
For antlers, bleeding after the prize 
Of who Suzy would take to the antic dance 
Beside her pink plastic Barbie player that spun 
Her one black record scratched to static: 
Seasons in the Sun.          •

The Golden Keyhole

We hid crouched, bunched to see 
What Sally had got on and what 
Took off, all those summer  
Days ago when no one knew 
Anything about girls, or boys 
Being dogs who wagged our tails 
And punched each other quietly 
Away from Sally's bathroom door 
Her brother had corralled us toward 
With stories beyond our ears 
Of slope and dip and fluffed cleft 
Darkly lapping like a wave 
Crashing us to pieces while 
We kneeled in mute accord 
Breathing the golden keyhole's steam.        •

Little Red Wagon

when the thirst for love first came
it was not calm or tame

Pell-mell and hell-all down the hill 
The little red wagon we rode on 
Skirted roots that promised gashes 
Skittled swaths of pebbles in a spray 
As the hill steepened its deepness 
And the battered path narrowed, 
A yellow ribbon in a dowdy wood 
Dappled for hand-held dawdling 
The naming of leaf and birdsong 
Not this rattled race to a quick crash 
Her smile big on my shoulder 
To nibble an ear while I steered 
With flailing handle in hand 
A gasp pushed back to teeth 
Jarring our muscles in dusts 
With an aftertaste of toothpaste 
And foretaste of ecstasy 
As we wheeled the last hairpin 
Squealing until the tears came-- 

And laughter after as we tugged 
Disheveled shirts and skirts back 
To playtime's regular order.        •

Penumbras

The grass burned with summer's green. 
We burned like grass 
With an end-of-school-fooling-
Around-the-playground fire 
Waiting for the eclipse. 
A midday moon was coming 
Like Pac-man to eat the sun! 
Our science class stood in a circle
Holding squares of smoky glass--
Horizons looked a moonscape
Our tree a hooded visitant
The school a blade of cave. 
At first the world went dimmer 
A weeping edge of cloudburst 
Closing one slow eyelid over us...
And then coldness seeping, a wave
A snowy wind from nowhere
Hastening through the grass. 
Half the sky turned turquoise,
Lapis lazuli wetted by a cloth 
Before we caught the sun 
Begin its blinking off: 
Its penlight kept getting whiter 
And smaller than a soul 
While a line of midnight skirmishers 
Advanced across the field;
Our school was disappearing fast 
Under the eclipse's dome! 
When we were fully underwater 
The birds forgot their song--
The silence kept us looking up
At wild ill-lit fins of sun 
Surrounding a dot of blackness, 
A circle like ourselves.          •

Cutting Copper, Welding Voices

When the welder's laser torch 
Puts a blue tongue to the throat 
Of pipe length, a thin scrying 
Hisses pixel dust out of the pipe 
As it reddens in its vise-- 
When the cut is almost through 
When ruddy heat at one end 
Hurries hot air through the flue 
Dark arroyos of longing open
A soft moaning loosening
A low vibrato bass note 
Coming from the whole length 
Of scissored copper tubing 
The hopeless hollow sobbing 
Of a boy 
Not wanting to be heard.        •

Handmedowns

Daily our fights like falling axes 
Felled love that buds in brothers 
Love that holds small hands like hafts 
Chopping winter wood in unison, 
Love that shelves all razorthin leers  
Of anger too high to easily reach-- 
Instead he teased snakestrikes over 
Nothing, over lies and pride, 
An inch chalked on a doorframe,
His fist with a reach like a whip
A slap that sounded like laughter
On cheeks red as slaughter
Until trust like a crumbcake was
Eaten, and your mouth full of spiders 
Cursed the dapper little fellow 
You first hugged, first learned to walk behind 
In his bleached and patched handmedowns 
To playgrounds and ponds and friends 
Who waved and climbed while you waited 
Alone, a little ignored, looking up 
Under high masts of sycamores 
His voice calling all pirates to battle 
And everyone in the neighborhood 
Crying ‘Aye, aye!' but you.          •

The Realness of Velveteen

At 7, the Velveteen Rabbit told me 
Real is a thing that happens to you 
Inflating himself off the page 
Left ear, right ear, a fuzzy balloon
Squealing alive into raw moonlight 
Decolorizing my room like 
Black-and-white TV into moon 
Valleys and moon hills, the fish  
A moon fish circling her lunar bowl. 
Two big feet thumped bopping 
Onto the polished floor, his rabbity 
Glance vulnerable as bubbles--
I looked down in surprise unfolding
Sleepy in my bluebird PJs
Watching his whiskers twitch
Unrolling my arm to hold his hand 
(Or had he reached up to slap
His long velour paw into mine?). 
Howsoever, barefoot together 
Floating over whirlpool bedsheets
We became realer and realer and realer
Like clouds do when their shadows  
Darken your house, a shiver arriving 
In the middle of limitless day 
And walked out the window talking.        •

Confused by Honeysuckle

Where tentworms had set up the dog 
Plunged through blindly his nose afire after 
The wet stick chucked amongst all them flowers 
Gowning down to grass like a giant's wig 
Old Dukey stuck with that ratsnest cobweb 
Blob of gossamer grossness, a felt patch 
Battened in his mane and over one eye  
While I hold him steady carefully combing 
Silken gauze off in knots from his pelt-- 
A mistake yes I'm sure of it for my part 
The throw all awkward at elbow and wrist 
Can't blame the stupid dog too bad really 
Dumb dog's just gonna sit there and watch me 
Catch it with the switch when Dad checks on us: 
Don't worry Dukey I won't hit you for it 
Confused with honeysuckle is all we were 
Really if you think about it fair and square 
The honeysuckle luminous today  
That had been beige grey just yesterday 
A riot of blossom and the scent like candy
Amid what yellow galaxy of stars--
As soft goodness as any nighttime Mommy kiss
When pillowy dreams come sifting in like mist
And now this unaccountable mess jesus 
My hands all full of broken silver threads 
The comb wrecked and suddenly I can feel  
The worms' irritated circling on my hands.        •

Cold Burial

One melancholy duty with a shovel 
Was chipping free bodies of birds 
Who threw themselves like snowballs 
Against our bank of 4x6 ft. windows 
Sunset after sunset thinking 
They're flying home to nests they know 
Through what looked a bit of woods 
Real trunks repeated back in glass
Hanging over a gorgeous splash 
Of frozen reservoir so white 
We played there wearing sunglasses, 
Cool skiers in ads for spearmint gum. 

Every evening like fireworks 
Birds thumped stopped against the view, 
Strange fish flat to aquarium walls
Leaving behind halo puffs of dust 
Lingering like fingerprints, then 
Flying off shaken and confused 
In a tangle of awkward wings 
Not ready to abandon air.
Others hit the snow jingling,
Icicles dismantled in a wind,
Small ribald scribbles of color laid 
At odd angles like a swimmer 
Photoed in Sports Illustrated, then 
Hopped afoot in one blink, one twist 
Flying away with a warning: 
Not all woods are woods indeed 
Nor home always where we expect 
Flying fast to beat the night 
And save our necks for sleep.

Next day I always found the worst 
Popsicled overnight, and carried 
Now by me to the frozen pile  
A pyramidal igloo sort of pile
Bigger every day until spring 
When wetwork and a proper hole 
Began to be dug--until then I
Nestled them gently down with "Sorry" 
And a shovelful of fresh snow.        •

Greggo the Great

I still remember when I first 
Saw a fan of cards like a wingspan 
Flutter from a magician's tuxedo: 
One fan, two fans, dozens fluttering, 
And from his upturned hat 
Into which a pitcher of milk 
Had threaded, doves--doves white  
As milk, their fantails crested 
Like wheels of cards appeared 
From the nowhere of elsewhere 
Black potentialities and spaces 
Emptiness like a new moon hiding  
The full moon in its shadow-- 
The trick of it invulnerable  
And real.  Afterward, backstage, 
I ran up to him, up to Gordo the 
Great, who simmered with the smell 
Of aftershave and success  
And asked if I, I too.... 
"If you, too, can be a magician?" 
He flicked a business card  
For his downtown magic shop 
From behind my ear with a whisk 
And a wink, into my palm, saying 
"The first thing you need, kid,  
Is a really good stage name."          •

II

Earthquake Minor,
Middle-Age
Explained

  
      ... bet w/ humanity 
      not against it 
that's the kind of animal you are 
      not a robot, an angel 
      ~~Jacko Monahan, One-Legged Poetry

Showering

The world slides off in steam 
Not fire, not ice;  sweat runneled 
To a drain, and that is all. 
Skin snaps like a fresh umbrella 
And I am lily-new, lily-white 
In a rainfall of feathers 
Delighting the aging body 
Fold by fold that leap by leap 
Cartwheeled backyard sprinklers 
Hammered puddles in rubbers 
Through every storm that boiled 
Into cloudburst.... The world's no more 
Than a sentence away from youth, 
From death.  This rain has come before.        •

Shaving

I run the razor on my face 
And wood shavings appear 
Around my bare feet, gathering, gathering, 
As the mirror's camera records 
My changes.  Whoever I am  
Becoming requires this quick 
Cutting away of old selves 
Face by ragged face, the razor  
Sharp and smooth, etching  
Occasional detours into highways 
The way a river basin ravages 
Itself into existence, in a new 
Groove among the ancient hills. 
My past lies in bleeding curls, 
Frets my wet feet--my ankles 
Are covered!  And my jagged face 
Is guessing its way out of its 
Riverine box, a man's face 
Not yet ready for death 
Slaps aftershave on a totem 
That slept in the treetrunk's grain 
All the days until yesterday…
It's rich itch of potential  
Bearded by bark, by years 
Adding ring on ring of routine 
In active indifference.  Today, 
My palm wipes condensation 
Like drawing a curtain--
With a shiver of hatchets 
A new, raw face arrives 
Chopped into the pole's  
Resurrected top.         •

The Bag of Oranges

Looking up through blue drafts 
My drifting boat spins, 
Knocks through narrows 
From the weedy wreckage 
Of an industrial wharf 
Wheeling to where breakers open 
In the flat-bottomed bowl 
Of simmering ocean. 
I left the dock I don't know when
Confident as a oarlock
A bag of emergency oranges 
Hauled along for safety's sake 
If the wind grew frisky
(Their scent a sack of sneezes). 

Now sky in endless arcs 
Roofs my journey 
Of hairpin skids and lapses 
Where water and weather 
Give no more guidance 
Than a drowning man's 
Weathervane arms-- 
I see that I am lost 
But not how I got here, 
Sense I am moving 
But not my motive. 
 
My rowboat's boundless arrow  
Spins like a broken compass; 
The bag of oranges  
At my feet 
Is nearly empty.          •

A Dance?

The average hours of usual day. 
Of course it is a dance, of course.          •

Holy Mackerel

 
          for Gabor Barabas

Shellacked to a bullet sheen 
Set mantelpiece high and aimed 
For the Azores or thereabouts 
Where fins inhabited life 
Eye more than a glass bauble 
Scales more glittering than paint 
Alive to plunge and feel the weight 
Of water water everywhere, a bliss 
Of frisson shuttling the sea's loom 
As I pace the shallow fireplace 
Weaving memories like wires 
Recalling taut strike and strife   
Tapping my pipe in Morse code 
Tossed between ashes and ocean 
A fisher admiring his rigid prize 
Visitor eye to museum eye 
Archeologist and the mummy-cloth,
Fingers flush against Pharaoh's belly 
Lingering where silvering scales 
Fall that flashed a fist for years 
A wake arriving after each flash 
A thousand wakes together like a flag 
Woven in meaning and motion
Invisible threads thrashing, streaming 
Pulling the living garment wet 
From the rack--supple, shoulderless 
Slim as in a dream but real 
Their choir of buried voices 
Liquid in every ear.          •

Turtle Poem

An old turtle crossed west
A primordial stretch of highway, wide
Where cars came on in thunder
Under sun's dead lightning whiteness.
Time lay flat beneath his feet
That liked a sempiternal heat
Stepping to keep his slow appointments
Made before his egg was digged
And left mooning in the earth.
He is as a wheel of fire
Eating the strangeness of time
Eagerly in mincing licks!
For hours he walks the asphalt
Pushes grass with his hawk beak
Seeking mud and reeds and release
In doppler ripples of the old pond
Where he sighs sinks down and shows
Shyly until nighttime only
His nostrils above the waterline.          •

Crossing

and the seagull flying like a crucifix
~~Emanuel di Pasquale

Walking into my long morning 
Shadow where I stretch 
Where tarry pilings stand  
Like me, like me charcoal-touched  
By shadow, anchoring  
A walkway flatness for my foot 
Where sand is slipping always 
And water winning landward 
Throwing coins of tideline light, 
I saw an arrow's smallness 
A seagull's crooked cross 
Crossing me with shadow wings 
(With shadow wings endowing) 
Where forward wind had slowed  
Him, then he lifted slowly over 
The glassware of the sea 
Taking my dark wings away 
To rumors only ocean knows 
And keeps in a deepness more  
Than me--though ocean deepness shone  
More homey, more close-in, more 
Interior after 
Our long morning walk.         •

Dream Split

My head a bowling ball again 
Trying to make the split for the win 
Fingers stiffed in mouth and eyes 
Her engagement ring in my nose 
Then screaming red down the lane 
The room ass-over-tea-kettle spinning 
Blond boards blood-slippery, waxed 
A mile long before I knock 
Pins apart, skinning my forehead 
(That'd been kissed to sleep last night) 
To its nobbled and native skull 
The one x-rays show rivered 
With fine lines and cracks, the plates 
Where thought first stitched to thought 
Hanging my face like a grass skirt 
From its ball, a curtain which winks 
Showing live eyes, dead teeth and the whole 
Vaudevillian rigamarole  
That directs my life like a puppet show 
Has me bleat ‘love' and mew when scratched 
Obey all traffic signs, dodge hazards 
And generally walk erect when  
My recalcitrant head's attached  
And not hefted on elbow and aimed 
A pinball flippered in an unknown game 
Rolling, rolling, rolling.         •

Metabolic, Metaphoric, Metamorphic

Paint slops, and there's a daisy. 
Another slop, and the reedy stem 
Fattens to a skeleton a brush 
Emboldens into form, into firm 
Outlines on a canvas, all those 
Acres of whiteness that yet need 
To be invented like the night 
Gestating day in its egoless cradle 
To see what shapes darkness dreams 
Revealed filleted by the dagger day, 
And changing even then through shadow  
Rotations as a sundial tells the hour 
And events defeat imagination 
And love and hate and envy, pride 
Deride their painted lineaments  
Besotted by chaos as Rorschach blots 
Until dreams carve the mystery again, 
Put paper people at their marks 
Assign the scripts and invent the day 
Like a play that only needs rehearsal, 
Conviction that the fiction's real this time--
And we awake fresh as paint to watch 
Day go incorrigibly awry.          •

A Jazz Enjambment

A jazz voice never listened for 
Emanates in syncopation 
From behind the closed door 
Inside a littered taxicab 
Stale as wet cigarettes
I duck to enter.  "Where  
Are you headed?" the driver 
Says over the river of radio 
The two voices braiding 
In my ear live and lithe 
Inviting as in a new-spun 
Dream a night journey 
From the low-watt dimness  
Of the shut door behind me 
On to where the roadway 
Lies slick and glistening, 
Whispers of earlier rain leaving 
The black wide pupil brimming 
With overmuch of emotion almost 
Save that the jazz voice busking 
Broken hearts brings strange 
Comfort, pain easing pain 
Telling me whatever dream 
Is rolling like a tear tonight 
Has rolled this way before.... 
Forlorn elms and watchful skies 
No strangers to what muted me 
To what had those radio voices 
Unspool like talking smoke 
I could inhale, inhale, inhale.          •

The Entire Sky

The gentlest racket 
The rattle of a doorlatch 
Opening to beach fireworks 
Come so soon again 
While my quiet world grew 
Warm as two rheumatic hands 
Holding my face all those 
Cold years ago. 

                         Grandmother, 
You kept this house swept 
For company, the model boats 
In naval trim as Granddad had, 
Fresh zinnias on the tabletop, 
Lemonade twisted by hand 
And left sweating--once 
A bee struggled to his sweet 
Death in the glass-cut pitcher 
Like Snow White in her glass 
Coffin, but a bee instead. 

Tonight, the entire sky 
Will whistle and celebrate 
While I stand on the bare porch 
Of this now disordered house. 
My life feels abandoned, 
A boat spinning from its dock 
 Into darkness, the tide out, 
The stars a chaos overhead…. 
So I think to turn back inside 
And slide into sleep when 
The first crack arrests me, and 
The whole bowl of the sky 
Fills with zinnias.          •

Questions Are Beautiful

The wry neck of a swan 
Wrenched into a questionmark 
Answers as the beautiful always do 
A question with a question: 
--Are you graceful only on the water? 
Can you read what's written there?
--Does your flight echo the soul's after death? 
I've never died before, have you?

Still as a lotus on the pond 
They float like clouds, like blossoms 
Mirroring heaven, while beneath 
Black feet revolve dark, strong webs. 
Taken altogether they are 
An image of contemplation 
That pushes the mind's mirror 
With black feet, strong dark webs. 

Fifty-five years and the pond remains 
Crowded with beautiful swans 
And questions;  here the sunset grows 
More lustrous as the minutes pass, 
An ember edging the water's tongue. 
Half-lifted swans batter their wings, 
Shoulders like a swimmer breaking free, 
Necks straight out into darkness.          •

Earthquake Minor

Notice of it came like a nail 
Jerked from a new-cut two-by-four 
A spiral squeal as if the walls 
Were papier-mache, fingered 
At the seams, tossed unloftily 
As last week's overtipping trash 
That hit the kitchen floor rolling, 
A pup obscenely frisking; 
Water hiccuped in the goldfish 
Bowl, lensing the orange fish 
Into a convex abstract. 

A neighbor at her balustrade 
Shouted "Earthquake!" her infant 
Swaddled close and looking up 
Babyishly at a cloud.          •

Botanical Gardens

A thousand swats of water 
Stagger leaf to leaf 
In the Botanical Garden dome 
The jungle flora breaking 
Into blossom like a swimmer:
Helliconia, orchids, monkey brush, 
A thrashing passionflower 
Stigmata-red and starred,
Glow among moroser leaves 
As we navigate the catwalk 
And consult our heavy guidebooks 
To ogle this pulpy Venusian 
Terrarium in Brooklyn 
As stranger voices skreak, and
Hidden wings restlessly emerge: 
Macaws, cotinga, oropendolas 
Unlimbering their leider 
To tattoo our eardrums as we 
Climb a ladder stairway up among 
Throngs of heavenly feathery hosts 
Whose language is not our own-- 
Clear panes of sky have exiled 
Pure spirits with us sinners 
Condemned to eat the bread and 
Birdseed sweated from our brows 
So hot to hear them singing 
Enchantments like a new beginning 
Before brother beset brother 
Before a sword bolted the gate, 
Turning slowly the great green leaves 
Wherein we read their world.          •

The Parachutist

"Love is letting go," I hear, 
Slapped through the cutout  
Into a sprawl of cloudwrack 
Imprecise as serried dreams. 
The air pins my limbs back 
And pressures a rictus grin 
As I swallow curls of screams: 
Such beauty!  Such beauty! 
Idealized shadows hang blue  
As Plato's ruthless smile 
Enlivening the skies.  Below, 
The world's laid out like a grave 
Ploughed for seed, all that Iowa 
Loam beneath clouds' pageantry,  
The wind so loud it is silence. 
I never felt my body more than 
In that moment of first falling; 
My eye all eye, my stomach 
A helium balloon, hands claws 
Legs stiff in a sculpted vice. 
I realized all I was was a clod 
Of earth--misplaced, tossed up-- 
Out of my element among  
White spires, candelabra touched 
By some genius of whimsy  
As I fell my way back home.          •

Rembrandt’s Faces

Are the most human, rueful 
And ruined of masterpieces 
Chafed into paper with a sad 
Wit too aware of time and time's 
Humiliating erasures, pulling 
From the wreck the sensual 
Wrinkles of Diana at Her Bath, 
Her rust-colored puckers piled 
Like a couch too long sat upon 
Thoughts too deep and grave to give 
Voice to their sorrow, words to marrow 
Until only a Zen charlatan's  
Shinbone flute is left tootling 
The haunting airs of fieldhands  
Which Rembrandt also drew, noting 
A muscular rangy strength 
Bundled arms and thighs bursting 
Bunches of blood grapes unpicked  
Weighty with harvest, while in those 
Hands so sensitively rendered hangs 
The black heavy arc of the scythe 
Swinging the wheat headless, 
Stroke after stroke of sketched wheat 
Under a crayon sun.          •

Walking the Talk

Conversations rise around 
Us like hossanahs 
Flock after the Ark 
Of the Covenant-- 
A blessing that bathes 
The ears that see 
The souls it blesses. 
Words for the mendicant, 
Words for the wife, words 
For the ticket-taker 
Standing at attention at 
The theater of your life. 
Weavings, meanings, they 
Hammock us in wholeness, 
Two peas in a pod 
Of words, words, words. 
Asleep or swaying 
We huddle together 
In our sheltering web-- 
Not one, not one thread 
Of our woven home 
Would I snap.  Together  
We've talked the decades real, 
Together our time 
Abided.  Together 
We pull the needle clean 
Of the housing shroud; 
Together hoist up 
To our narrow, old 
Shoulders the Covenant.          •

In a Parkinglot

Workmen in orange vests 
Hammer at a cracked drain 
Seeking beneath the grate 
The vat blackness where water 
Like a shadow goes only 
Lately its been sitting here 
Stiff as a mirror the sun 
Beats his gold face upon.          •

Landing in Bed

a country far away as health
~~Sylvia Plath

Illness, Illness, a brimful life 
Cancered, ulcered, reduced, abridged
To a flat plate of licked gruel 
Stinks and sinks and embarrassments 
Unending as a diaper rash, 
The grinding doing of others who 
Orbit you, you who were Pluto, a 
Planet demoted to a sick cot 
Down a few organs at last count, 
A chore for the devoted.
You issue mewling protests, how
Even memories go icky grey 
In the daily wash, how only the steel 
Bedframe is real, the mealy 
Pillow yellow with unworked sweat 
While dreams of drowning drip-drip 
To wake you in a gasp of tubing, 
Walls cubed as an Escher etching 
Receding in series, a white mirage.... 
The whole house of cards kicked 
Flat on its back--and you too, clueless,
Sure to the end that death's just 
That fuzzy, unfazed after-light 
After a flash.          •

Michigan Lumber, 1886

The saw blade worked white to lick 
Dust from the living core of wood. 
Held taut between us double-dutch 
It's rhythm slithered like a lullaby 
Of bees cozied in closed peonies. 
Sweat that felt the wind kept wary 
For what might come to pinch our work, 
Turn the day to waste and wreck the blade. 
The tree was balanced now on less than half 
Of what had held it lofty all those years 
Before we came to use its strength for houses. 
With a nod we doubled rhythm now 
To surprise the pine that couldn't run away 
And keep our luck to leeward.  We'd apprized  
It'd fall between two garland oaks 
And lay obedient to be timber.  At a crack, 
We knew we'd psalmed the solemn child 
Asleep, and sang our saw blade backwards 
With a twang to watch all sleepy nature sway 
Like a woman dancing for her man 
A moment--and then the horrible crash like
Tearing ears. 
And silence like a blanket after that.
•

The Haskell Invitational

for a quintet of poets

A constellation of friends 
In a Pegasus configuration  
Abet my summer writing jag 
As a fence abets a horse's 
Jumping form, legs strained 
To effort and flight, flashing 
Most where crossed 
Highest where hindered 
In the muddy brown stream 
Of his strong running 
From the starter's gun. 

Beyond their stoppages 
I canter in circles,  
The sacrosanct circuit  
Their stars have lit for me: 
Speech like a bettor's prayer, 
The finish-line a typewriter ribbon  
That breaks against my breast 
When a poem's intoning  
Is done. 

Each critique sticks 
Like a jockey's whip 
And foams my lips, the blinders 
Tight beside my eyes that
The little man above me might
Wear a new hat, I a hoop 
Of flowers like a yoke. 

All night I watch my brothers 
Revolve in races of their own, 
Myself a glimmering participant-- 
Summer's final star, perhaps, 
Shining under a coronal 
Flare of tail.          •

Circumloquacious

Clouds rumble their thunder bubbles 
Piling nimbus on nook and crag 
On etiolating white tendril where 
Shadow shoots like a handkerchief  
Patting away effort and sweat 
With cool assurances of talk. 
I talk my way around the lengthening day 
A simmer of indifferences
Affinanced to the lazy scuds above
Reluctant to come again to ground 
The dark of earth, the insistence  
Of grass... I am a brush that moves  
Among watercolor clouds.... 

Such afternoon summeriness  
Has left me leaning  
On dreams, the rifted  
Fabric of skies 
Tall as my leaning eyes.          •

Cry of the Cat

The cry of the cat 
Fat as a baby's cry 
Pricks me from sleep 
Up the long slope of day 
A ladder of witless pegs 
And serial embarrassments--
The stubborn self shudders away, 
A red stain licked on thick
Bruising splinters. 
Quickly everything is gotten  
Ready and dispensed with; 
Speedily the road rewinds 
From work to home. 

The cry of the cat 
Takes my coat, seats me.
Like a grinning cannibal I 
Dine on the dinner of myself: 
My heart a purple plum 
Gone splayed with waiting, 
A liver in ribbons, lungs 
Two worthless wordless sucks 
Of grey breath, a foot 
Coy and uncallused as 
A princess' palm.
I eat until the sky 
Is black.          •

Smoking the Pipe

Pulling open the tobacco bag 
To a stir of leaves 
Autumnal brown but moist 
As breath, the careful 
Mouth of the pipe 
Roots among rummage 
For a shovelful of coal 
I bring to my lips 
The bit between my teeth 
As a feather of fire 
Comes instantly close 
Enough to start a star 
In the bowl of Cosmos 
That had been blackness only 
While I inhale 
The furious engines 
As deep as lungs can go 
Without remitting breath 
From lips as round as song 
Which sends a signal 
Of heavenward smokes 
In spiral galaxies, a wreath 
Of woven laurels 
I dream may yet come 
As I shut my eyes 
To taste it all again, 
Redolent and resonant.          •

Dark Cypresses

Dark cypresses without sound, 
Soft upright voids, lofty flames 
Erasing the mission of light 
Standing as you do for night 
No matter how burnished the day,
Cut-outs hanging substanceless! 
Where are you going, where arriving? 
You black pantlegs on the march 
You dancers moving in plush rows 
In shoeless midnight dancing 
Touching the dreamer's cheek 
With moon shadow and snow shadow 
Drawing darkness from what depths-- 
Vaporous chill of damp earth, 
Living earth we know nothing of 
Who wander its surfaces like grass 
Noisy and dry in our myriads 
Like grasses perishing innumerably 
Full of the empty sounds of wind 
Passing, passing  
Beneath your great, grown silences 
Dark cypresses without sound,
Under sigils of your bonfire.          •

Among the Whales

Far off the port-beam sightings 
Of sainted spray, feathers 
High as houses, rollicking 
Toward the tourist powerboat 
Like quilled teams 
Of Shakespeare's copyists 
Hammering away at Hamlet. 
Soon enough their acres 
Of skin were all around us, 
A smell of industrial rubber 
Enclosing us in a dome  
As the spouts circled. 

Hills of humping muscle,  
Ailerons of fatal flukes 
Dark as midnight soil 
A midnight rain had wetted-- 
Sheets of living tissue 
Near enough to slap, it seemed, 
And we enraptured in the dream. 
Down came the feathered 
Waters, the bowing plumes  
Of drum majors among us 
Dancing a disparate rhythm 
On the slick deck.

And it was hot, hot as a kiss,
Hot as blood the spume spray
Splatting about us in blots
Viscid as afterbirth, 
And we grinned like kids 
Shamelessly running, running
Through tumescent sprinklers-- 
No awe, no shame at all in all that 
Fantastic whiteness blown 
Hissing around us.          •

III The Curve of Her World: Love’s Conundrums

[Women] will do what they can once again to warm our gut and heart ~~John Logan, Dawn and a Woman

The Seneca Doe

The white Seneca doe is rare 
And here;  she nibbles on a swale 
Of cantilevered grass half past 
Its greenest age, more stale than hale--
Even so, the eaten grass becomes
A part of whiteness, swift whiteness 
Stepping quick like a compass tip 
In tentative exactness 
Measuring the left-alone landscape 
Two miles off the highway way 
Amid a mix of wood and field 
This buttery day I came to sit 
Stiller than a cenotaph 
And watch the Seneca doe awhile 
Go eloping with my hopeful soul 
Paper-white and puppet-limber 
Leaning through tree shadows like a ghost 
To eat and depart forgotten 
Had I not come in expectation 
To eye her oil-dark watchful eye 
In silence, and count the motions 
Of her lips as if anxious myself 
Of a lover's kiss, or writing 
Now of what I saw and did not miss, 
A lover's kiss recounting.          •

The Lost Rib

Flow gently, sweet dreamer who 
Lies beside wandering lost 
A lax magellanic cloud 
Of impulse and perception 
Shimmering rivery in summer 
With a sheen upon which desire 
Floats downstream sweetly 
Unswattable as starlight 
Reflected in water.  Desire, 
Is that what had the lost rib 
Run off by herself and grow up 
Into this unknowable companion? 
You would laugh to hear me  
Say it, but it was written  
Before we were born--a story 
More relatable than the news' 
Imaginings that twitter 
At us unprompted!  Un- 
Prompted as the dream that 
Seizes you curling your 
Fingers like ribs in tension 
Of a new birth;  what child 
Are you shuddering into life? 
Your eyebrows bow, approach 
And meet each other where 
A stream appears between them 
Dark in a pale brow, pinch 
And pang of the new-- 
Not novel, but new again, new 
To us, the forbears of a dream…. 
After a while your breath 
Slows re-regulates relaxes 
And it's as if the new thought
(New as you lying here was 
To me) was always here 
A ripple rubbing the stream 
Something for moonlight to touch 
Cascading beside me when I'm 
Prompted out of sleep;  or not, 
Always shining your own way 
Onward through what bonnie braes 
Sweet dreamer, flow gently.          •

Birds of Summer

Ladylike birds gather summer 
Like a brace of arrows 
Snapped in a fist, 
Their fetching feathers fletched, 
Their beaks stone arrowheads 
Out of pre-Colombian mists 
Darting at a spillway of seed, 
Eating the grain I gift them 
With the quick attention 
Of surgeons plucking shotgun pellets 
A childhood accident had left 
Inside my scarred left knee 
Keeping me bent-legged 
As a bird up any stairs, 
My ascent slow, unfeigned 
On wounded and winded wing 
To where Jenny sits at table 
Grading boughs of assiduous sheets 
Her student flocks have gathered-- 
Birdscratch of pencilmarks, false 
Flights and failed landings-- 

Her face in a nest of lamplight 
Looks up at my entrance, 
Offers me the golden grain.          •

The Curve of Her World

Tears that pepper her cheeks 
Refresh a softness in her gaze, 
Give back grace now the monster 
Sorrow has swum away to sea 
To bother other deeps, other shes 
While my darling thoughtfully 
Walks barefoot back ashore to me 
From over the curve of her world
Spatted amazed, pinching her top 
Back into place, even smiling 
And almost meaning it, meaning 
To mean it in the near future, 
Her face a new polaroid  
Shaken slowly into focus-- 
A dolphin of shadow darts 
Into tidepools of her eyes 
Come from her lone sea-sojourn 
Not all the days ahead will keep 
From circling the boat of us 
As she approaches my hammock 
Swinging like a hanged man which 
In tarot simply means ‘change.'        •

Without Thought of Harvest

One summer we were proud 
To watch our overmuch of flowers 
Overpour their beds and out- 
Match the virtue of their stems: 
Downward nodded every head  
As if golden damozels  
Were bowing in rows.  It was  
An avalanche of flowers! 
Some tidal wave had landed 
And left the coastline richer-- 
Flower on flower beyond bounds 
With woes of colors cresting 
With splendid displays of petals 
Until overfull of feasting 
We closed our eyes to rest them 
As if blind inside the rainbow 
Dumb with a moment's prayer 
Amazed at what summer had made 
Of our refusal to be of use, 
To stop and stoop and pluck 
To sell at a corner stand 
At two dollars a bunch 
Sharing our garden bounty 
With the whole neighborhood,
Refusal to dazzle
With blossom and art the household 
Vases left shelved, closeted in dust 
 That last year blazed the tables-- 
How instead this untended gift,  
This unweeded bounty, had burst 
Without thought of harvest.          •

The Housewife

Nature frightens us into love.
~~Richard Poirier

I kiss my husband's cheek, 
A fine grit that acts like teeth. 
Every day I wear away another 
Layer in a kind of decay until
I wear a face like a knob. 
Turn me, I'm too smooth to complain! 
I fall backward like an open door, 
An empty rectangle you lean on-- 
Come in, I'll lead you everywhere.          •

Bandamages

I feel that she might just be 
The medicine that I need 
The bland to allay my acids 
The dagger to scissor my spasms--
Her blasé cloud covering 
A sun of pain like a figleaf,
Tinsel edges forge-orange
A spiky halo hinting fire. 
But a bandage is not a cure 
For self-harm, self-alarm, for
All the selves I peel back, rank 
Tooth and sputum in a dish
Sordid splats of blood, of blood. 
Still, I feel that she might be 
The balm-calm bee in a mad hive 
Dancing the buzzing huzzahs 
In my mazy eyes to hush 
Me to sleep like a spill of inks 
Blotting out the bastard day 
To dream and dream again, the dream 
Forgotten as they always are 
Telltale shreds of mist diminishing… 
The bandage renewed as the 
Wound's renewed, my hacked scabs 
Growing spider legs 
Tearing themselves off and running.         •

The Mistake

Love has torn my life in two: 
Before and after the--then glad, now sad-- 
Mistake as I have come to call it, 
Defining my eras by error as 
I look back upon my footsteps' track. 

Love had pulled me through the needle's eye 
And stitched me witless with desire 
Told my tale upon a pillow seam 
And rocked my soul from its lonesome groove, 
Locked in a dance I could not unchoose. 

When the ship of me then foundered sundered, 
My wreck picked to ribs by bony crows, 
Naked I arose to mosey onward, 
A worm escaped from Eden's apple. 
A gate slid shut with a sound of oceans.
•

Fiancée

A tourniquet of love 
Enwounds my finger now 
Like honeysuckle holding up 
Its triumphant yellow bloom 
On a dead net of twigs 
Too long alone with the sun. 
This ring of elfin silver 
Braids my knuckle white, 
Brands me with a lash of fire, 
Connects beyond abandonment 
Another's troubles with my own. 
My fear that love would loosen 
Like teeth, and leave me to worm 
My way to death alone, 
Our small ceremony atones-- 
Hands held lightly, like branches cross- 
Ing, two pines that share a shadow 
In acidy sandy soil for all 
Their lives, bristling against the weather, 
Pinecones cuffing like coughs 
When wind beats them sideways.          •

Spines of Light

The black conveyer belt 
Hauls rivers of diamonds 
To a mouth of slush, 
A slurry of vomit 
Only patience can screen-- 
Patient implausible fingers.  
Some raven that lives in  
Midnight with a beak  
Like a drill-bit pecks  
Earth's holocaust crust 
To perch upon a finger 
One tear of the sun.  

It takes a diamond 
To find a diamond:  
The three-faced drill 
Cores stone and coal  
Seeking a vein  
Of light, a ripple 
In the earth where  
A finger, a snake  
Of sunlight died, 
Crushed multifaceted 
Into permanence-- 
Spines of light.           •

Juliet Manqué

The moon pulls me from bed 
Like taffy in my long gown 
Tittering slipperless on marble; 
Its wide craters effervesce 
Champagne I drink pinkly
Pearling my snub nose. 
I am pitiful and alone. 
My legs ache for embraces 
Like a bad tooth--pull me
Out, pull me up, dentist moon!  
This pain's too intimate  
To forget, too stimulant 
To ignore, painted wet 
With every cup of breath, my 
Loose arms open like a noose 
To hug the tainted stone flying 
Away, away from love, from me.
Come down!  Come down!
You foolish light!  I am your perfect lover-- 
A windowed prisoner pressing 
Her moon-face to the glass.          •

The Beauty

She cut off her nose 
And offered it up. 
She trimmed her ears 
And offered them up. 
She kissed her lips numb with a shot-glass 
And offered them up. 
Her skin broke out from her makeup, 
But that was to be expected. 
She punched her feet into guillotine shoes 
And offered them up. 
She prayed on a yoga mat 
Until her back broke. 
She despised her eyes as too small 
And offered them up. 
She coaxed her nails into claws 
And offered them up. 

She offered them all up 
Again and again in ritual 
Until there was nothing left 
Until she was finally beautiful.          •

Streamers

Hazel streamers from your eyes 
Entangle in ribbons from mine 
According to Renaissance lore-- 
Love pulls us through the eyes 
Feels the ganglia tugging taut 
As rainbows arise between us. 
I hold your nipples like a rosary 
Sensitive this week as eyelids 
While always this prayer is rising 
To dissolving lips a red scarf 
Thrown over the bedroom lamp 
Burning swollen as a heart.          •

Finding Fossils

I hugged the ignorance of stone.
~~ Stanley Kunitz

She lies next to me sleeping 
Quietly alive, foot off 
One end of the double bed 
Steadily paddling home  
On a pool-float, her breast  
Milkily over the summer sheet 
Draped loose in summer heat 
That breath might sustain an ease 
And stillness enter at last to rest 
As at last she rests, yes, while I  
Remember her ceaseless wheels, her  
Doing that goes like a hummingbird 
In circles of forward and back 
Around the daylit apartment 
Around work and it's circuits 
Pacing the corners, igniting  
With fingertip tricks and a match 
Candles when evening loving comes 
And touching stretches, being thrums 
Until at last this sleep arrives 
Slows the breath undoes the eyes-- 
Her able hands for once so calm, 
A fernprint on a stone.          •

Dream No More

Wordlessly you rise wary 
Into day, pitch awake 
On an L-elbow, pried eyes 
Carnivorous for coffee while 
Birds pinch your face with their 
Enviable singing outside, 
The flimsy scrim of screen 
Inundated by waves of sun 
Defining you out of darkness 
Like a rediscovered key 
Picked out by drunken headlights 
Last New Year's Eve, or last before-- 
And you moan into the mayhem 
Of consciousness again 
Pressure of bladder and bowel 
How feet flatfoot the earth after 
Flying for hours in nightgowns 
Knowing nothing but wind 
The occasional cloud-fluff 
Stars everywhere like friends.          •

Needlework

I mend an image worn 
By sitting, by fluffing, by naps: 
A spatter of nasturtiums 
In a delightful but unnatural pattern 
Printed on the drugstore's  
Two-dollar needlepoint kit 
In 1983.  Now I mend 
A confusion of nasturtiums 
Back to crimson, petal by petal, 
A task for Ariadne 
My spidery fingers finesse 
In evocations of thread. 
My heart dreads 
I shall not survive to renew 
This pattern again-- 
Some stranger's backside will come 
To endorse all I've done, 
All I've left undone... 
My basket of needles long sold 
Garage sales ago. 
I pause my pace 
And stare at the half- 
Resurrection in my lap, 
How the new infects the old, 
How the old degrades 
Beautifully as a sunset 
By Turner perhaps, or some 
Byzantine icon touched 
By too many lips.          •

IV Tightropes: More Formal Poems

Wisdom changes hands among the wise. ~~Sophocles, Oedipus Rex

Trying

Gently, without hurrying, try it: 
     Be the bowl of shadow in the valley, 
     Go with the river over knowing stones 
     Smooth as a catfish belly. 

Let pine trees breathe needles in your hair: 
     Follow that compass where it points, 
     Walk until your feet are padded, 
     Your toes as black as a fox's. 

The wind is trembling to begin it: 
     Are you ready to be led by the nose? 
     Forget your own life and inhabit it! 
     Gently, without hurrying now, 

Try it.          •

Tightrope

Walking curb edges for practice 
The tracks of departed trains 
I've sought, I'm always seeking 
A kind of balance in the brain 
An equipoise, a perigee, a grace 
Where thought and its subject 
Equally displace 
Each other (and themselves) 
On principles of mutual alliance 
The way Earth pulls back  
Her punch into the sun, and sun 
His enthusiasm contains 
To less than hellish flame. 
So that survival might feel 
Restful, I beaver at my niche: 
I count my words like beads 
Into the sorting dish: red, 
Blue or black, alive or dead, 
I've all the signifiers assigned, 
All the labels that I need 
To have my cusséd abacus succeed 
--To keep my accounts unsettled 
That entropy would nettle. 
I count the wordy beads: 
Charity, dignity, hope; 
Keeping your head up is like nothing 
So much as walking a tightrope.        •

Water, Water

…deep dark surroondin’ darkness I discern
Is aye the price o’ licht.
~~Hugh MacDiarmid, Milk-Wort and Bog-Cotton

Downcast as thoughtless waters' face 
When a stormfront steals the light
I boot the edging muck and wail at fate 
A boxer simmering for a bout; 
But when the spry sun cast coins 
In cash on bricolage waves 
My spirit like a new-washed face 
Shines benign, myself am salved and saved. 
Well long lying I've watched for dawn, 
Well known the subtle cups the moon 
Pours on darkling waters' scorn,
Sibilant ease in which night is born….
And oftener still felt sprigs of spray 
Whip, dot and whisker me for spite 
Turning my inmost grouse of thought 
To imp-laughter and wet delight. 
A thousand hours down on elbows, low, 
I breathe the skirl of air from off 
The dance, the mantling of the lake-- 
Shavings, glintings of light and self.        •

One Afternoon

The sun swarming on my upturned face 
Warms me into place. 
If ever I moved from where now I lay, 
Love, it was not today. 
Long hot summer holds me so hammock-snug 
Gott could call, and I would shrug. 
I'm a cat whose paws overstretch its stoop; 
Night is when I leap!          •

New Places

I thought we were going somewhere new, 
A place undiscovered, at least by us, 
Where new day would startle us quietly 
And new night silently confound. 

But there were all the old stars above us. 
We hadn't taken the turnpike far enough 
To reach escape velocity, despite our losing 
Home and cell phone coverage along the way. 

All around us, trees kept on being trees, and  
Although the land crept up the sky somewhat 
More than usually for us in old New Jersey, 
The clouds came down to meet it just the same.
•

A Map of Bones

Tiptoe on the mountaintop was not enough. 
Some part of me sparked up crying: more sky, more sky! 
My eyes swept the flowered hills, and the gulfs 
Where the water went, and sometimes hazed, 

And none of it, sparkle or living quilt, was enough. 
Inside me, full of burning teeth, was the eater of days, 
Dissatisfied dipsomaniac of incalculable thirst 
Dragging me from mountaintop to top 
  
For vistas so magnificent they hurt. 
The body follows its map of bones, laying out 
Fingertip, fingertip, fingertip--or tilting 
The pelvis upright to see how we're not alone  

As we walk the flat unpatterned plains between 
Thunderclaps of mountains that help us up, 
Whose stone bones grow so long that they poke 
Through the scenery.          •

The Dancers of Sleep

The dancers of sleep hold flames in their hands. 
We follow them down into caves, under the earth. 
Stones glare into existence, bursts of incredible light. 

Tall blade-shouldered creatures fearless in daylight 
Walk like Egyptians down the dusty path clapping hands 
To awake the napping bats entangled in edges of shadow.          
•

Reluctance

All day the steeple bells 
Harangue an empty sky. 
The sky is crowded with clouded 
Now, and will not answer why. 

The trees themselves are swinging 
Like bells held up to skies. 
The sky is silent and itself 
And will not answer why. 

The birds compete with tinny 
Bells alert in tree and sky. 
The sky is blue, alarmless 
And will not answer why. 

A man comes late on silent feet 
Between trees and bells and sky. 
The sky he looks at satisfies; 
He will not answer why.        •

Day and Night

Into the woods we ran at ten like Indians. 
Into the pond we dove at twelve like crocodiles. 
Into the grey fields we walked at thirteen 
Holding hands until stars nosed close 
     And loneliness fled. 

II 
Before the old fire's fine red we sit, and stare 
Into the old years we've passed together here. 
Into our old eyes unbidden rise grey tears 
And old stars come down close to us 
     And loneliness flees.          •

This Soil

The soil is ready before I am ready. 
Already a youth's beard of weeds 
Greens the garden plot, and March 
Just barely by. 

This soil has turned up old arrowheads before. 
When the hoe tapped a hardness more than stone, 
I bent and cut a finger open 
Down to the bone. 

This soil loves a tender thumb pushed in, sighs 
At the tamp of my palm under our one sun, 
The gurgle-tinkle of water from the rusty can 
A baby's cry. 

The soil boils with vegetables all summer long. 
I stoop like a mother, attend to weeds 
And pack my ratty baskets to a crown  
While singing songs. 

This soil needs turning under, now winter's here.
Hoe, rake and shovel lean idly in the shed. 
Dry leaves blow among the picked stalks lisping 
Death's easy hiss.          •

The Trouble with Simple

Simply put, is the loss 
Of detail that staring entails 
Until a total blur besets 
The doilywork, and only 
Loops of cloud remain. 

The trouble is where to begin 
Sanding the filigree finial, 
Erasing the Hindu panoply 
And awakening the grain 
Of Amish monotheism. 

The trouble is when to stop, 
When polishing reflects the polisher, 
When steel and stone, spoon 
And moon, are one--and only 
A mirror to your circles. 

The trouble is with hummingbirds 
And bees and butterflies, all those 
Eccentric improbable flights stopped  
Cold, or reduced to arrows, or 
Gravity's earthy entropy. 

The trouble with simple, simply 
Put, is how one keeps forgetting 
To edit, adding totem on totem  
To the pole, chop by magnanimous  
Chop, in beneficent indifference.          
•

Skinny-dipping

Childhood's millpond margin smells of peat; 
The black water drowns thirty feet; 
Millenial mulch slowly sifts to silt, 
Soft on my ankles as tongues of guilt. 

Our laughter echoes to where woods turn wise 
And dark beyond intelligence; 
The pulpy water we swallow and spit 
With shredded swimming light is gilt. 

Arms to arcs, we frogleg to the mill-wheel, 
Catch an edge where supple water spills, 
Turns small voices to shouts against the rush 
Of liquid Time's naked churning push 

Piggy-backing shoulders, while the stone lip 
Syllables oblivion, invites a slip.-- 
We grind ourselves red-handed as we grip 
And watch the jagged water jump.          •

The Homestead

The house that had me call her home
Where I went from pip to grown
Showed me, among her nestling trees,
Our reservoir's sparkling restful ease
Where a thousand flattish stones were skipped,
Quizzed the surface of what is with ripples
Then sank to nothing known by man or wish
Who would not plunge awhile and be fish.
This house that had my childhood kept
Has herself grown double with subdivision
And invited others into her provision
To hear new voices slide from treble down
And down and down and right on into ground.
•

Time-Piece

Time, faceless, stares all faces 
To tatters;  unarmed, disarms 
Quick bullets with slow rust;   
Legless trips the sprinter 
With age's crutch;  breathless, 
Breathes first and last. 
Of all songs the tempo, time; 
Of all debates the winner.  Time 
Furls the trimmest sail, marches 
Crowncrest mountains down 
To hills, pounds hills to sand, 
And sand to I know not what. 
Killer unkillable, time;  death 
That dies not.  Time is free  
That imprisons me, that,  
Senseless, robs me of sense--is dust
That drowns my every word 
In oblivion and silence.          •

Bouquet

Where our engagement flowers have fallen 
Flares awaken, soft forceful eyelids  
Like light-stitched depths of gems held close 
(As this amethyst ring in earth was held, 
Loved for the fireworks it reflects: 
Diamond-pointed lotus petals--perfect.)
•

Fox and Rabbit

She knew all 
And I knew naught; 
Thus the Fox 
The Rabbit caught.          •

The Gift Refused

My mistress is throwing away her scarves 
That had wound in her tresses like tentacles 
Tightening coils of beauty like the stars 
In the black of her night hair, heavy and full.-- 
One by one they flutter in bright spirals 
Dropping to the pebbled earth below her, 
A pile of starshine like vines in piles 
Throbbing with wind only, no longer her fingers. 
"Out of my hair, threads and deeds of yesterday; 
Out of my house, Tommy, whatever you say."
•

The Pig of Day

VanGogh's hills arise like muscles 
Blended with broken sky--a blue 
Of veins and midnight tears and 
Much else besides.  A wand loaded 
With oils random enough to curse 
Clarity from eyes' wilderness of use 
Until the pig of day had ravaged him 
Calm with truth or tooth.          •

Minatory

Age is a nylon stocking 
Pulled distorted over the face 
The waxen features melt and fall 
The under-eyelids distort 
Like gutters torn from the roof 
Their salty waters tumbling 
Past a warty demeanor  
Into weak neck-drapes tacked back 
To showcase the final act 
--A farce, a tragedy, whatnot. 

Chase the kisses you once reviled 
In your most secret heart. 

Your grave's turned down like a bed, 
Grasses pulled up to the chin; 
The time you had is passed, is passed 
Never again to begin. 
Your last supper is laid with wine, 
Fillet the time most finely; 
Taste the avid meat upon your plate, 
Tuck in, tuck in! 
Tear the knotted nylon from your chin 
That faded lips may part: 

Chase the kisses you once reviled 
In your most secret heart.          •

What Scent

What scent is this but dust: 
Lilacs in their manifold bloom 
Bluebells dangling from vein-thin stems 
Red roses reaching up in wrath 
Thistles with their blistering hats 
Dogwood eating its feast of whites 
Moonflower showing her face at night? 
Inhale, inhale, till lungs burst! 

Here's silly Annie, not two, not yet, 
Old Stan crotchety in granddad pants, 
What scent are they, what role fulfill? 
Marjorie panting on the pink bedspread 
All those kisses new love's been fed, 
What scent they, for breathe we must? 
What you, what me if't comes to that, 
What scent are we but dust?          •

Deceptive Airs

I 
Spring again has brought 
Such loveliness, such access 
To one's pores 
How can one conceive 
Of death the ogress, or guess 
One's rotten to the core? 

II 
Oppressive summer sweats 
Too aggressively, undresses 
Our thoughts of nimble ambling 
Through woodlands and the wild-- 
Reduced to indoors and nude 
In a tub of ice cubes: 
Less adventurous, more umbilical. 

III 
Autumn's rousing storms 
Reminds the body of its bones 
Drops fruit in wanting buckets,
Blonds trees, hawks walks; 
With every wand'ring breeze 
Fills bellies fee free 
With a salesman's generosity. 

IV 
Winter's icy indifference 
Deepens the sense of deception-- 
The false clarity age manages, 
But only in its cage: 
Trees scribbled with a writer's rage, 
The sky an empty page.          •

Like Cake

"God's a phony," my professor said, a hipster.
"Even the news is fake.  Prayer never works." 

At midnight I drink my Pabst, kneel 
And throw the dice;  prayer never works.

I emptied my pockets and took my hat;
Pulled over halfway home;  prayer never works.

"Three hundred dead" the newscast said.  
I sobered in the dirty dotted light.  

"Sarin gas smells like incense at first,"
The translator said, "like cake."  

By daybreak, my eyes a sandpaper glitter,
I hear myself say: "Gregg, prayer never works.

Put a prayer in every word you make." 
•

Playing in the Orchard

You had run up into an apple tree 
In a springtime game of hide-and-seek. 
All the world was empty as you hid from me, 
And I ran down aisles of apples for a peek 
Of your skirt disappearing, or a shoe fallen off 
Into the green green grass, empty and soft. 

It was apple-blossom time, and time 
Told me you were lost, the last year's 
Apples weighty and rotten on the ground, slimy 
Beneath my hurrying feet.  In fear 
That you were lost to me, I collapsed 
Beneath the scent of blossoms in the air. 

I was looking up... it was the nearest thing to heaven...
A soft blindness of flowers everywhere... 
I looked up... it was heaven... and you were there!
•

The Hummingbird’s Apprentice

Hummingbird's Apprentice

Feb 042020


Gregg Glory
[Gregg G.  Brown]

Under the first stars, there by the back gate, secretly, I
Would relieve myself on the shamed and drooping hollyhocks.
~~ Don Justice

...an irritation of pearls...
~~ Emari DiGiorgio

Roadside Wine

Pull off 71 suddenly, onto
a wide shoulder of dust and grass.
Yellow loads of honeysuckle
weigh down a length
of brown barbwire fence
like a wave of honey breaking.
Excited, splash ankle-deep 
into the unhurrying surf
full of velvety bee sounds, and select
one perfect blossom.  It is
so sweet in the slow afternoon.
And, where you've cut your thumb,
a thrill of air catches.

COUNTING THE STONES

Summers Ago

Our house was not a house until we built it--
Cobbled together like lincoln logs,
	Pegged, dovetailed by pain,
		By tragedy
	Where the corners stain
And the past gets lost, frays to fog
Surrounding nothing until the house was built.

Here, eons flit quick as mayflies--fireflies
Flooding summers ago the orange-rusted screens
	With night light, untouched
		By tragedy....
	Or so we had thought
As we looked upon the shining scene,
Our faces lit with the glow of new-born bodies.

A Batch of Blackberries

Blossoms along the briars, then waterfalling 
Berries the barnstorming birds beak up, berry 
By berry, like jugglers swallowing beachballs,  
Eating ripeness to the core.  We picked    
And pawed through hooping crooked aisles, picked 
Pecks and bushels box by box, till the cart up-  

Ended its gorgeous, uneven load.   

Hands speckled purple with theft and blood, 
We said grace in the evening kitchen,  
Mom kneading, then flattening, the dark pies fresh,  
Crimping crusts and stabbing little V-birds  
Neat as her needlepoint stitches  
Above the hot talkative core of berries inside.

Counting the Stones

Always I count the stones
Flagging the mausoleum walls
Smooth-bore as a musket barrel
To find where Mom is housed.

Flowers poof from trumpetlike tubes
Screwed in along grey walls;
Here errant bees half-drowse
Beneath one skylight's encasing blue.

My sneakers squeak weakly.
I'm almost ready to go home
Right away.  To sit upright, alone
On my red, narrow balcony

Until the eerie eaves at sunset
Flare tears from eyes they castigate
--And I go inside to escape
The scattershot dusk.

Grief House

an unfathering

This is the house that grief built:

Mute and shuttered in morning sun,
Painted in place, dead end of the street--
A still life dark-shingled with welts.

This is the house that grief built:

Old closets half-full;  old belts, hung ties.
Kids elbow the sill, close oil-laden eyes,
Asleep in a house asleep in the silt.

This is the house that grief built:

An ordinary house if anyone looks,
Newspapers in piles, the phone off the hook--
Unfinished, uneased from easel and stilts.

A portrait uneased from easel and stilts.

Tough Cutting

Tough cutting the thorny rose-shrub stems
Short to fit a pouting vase while mouthy blooms
Put their tongues out to the empty room.

Your absence pricks, a resisting briar.   
I suck the blood that comes--to quiet fear,
And taste myself what heart to lips may bear.

If green thorns toggled must auger hate,
Who's to say love's rose is not as great?
Tears release from me what would hesitate.

Each rose is soft as skin, nodding sure
And warm as a love-wiped tear,
Close as you yourself once nodded near.

Daily we twist stem and stem more twin in love,
Cultivate a trellis beside a sunny grove,
And train our cultured roses to rise above.

On the Porch Swing
(With My Widowed Aunt)

What I remember most
(Beyond the rack and creak)
Was how the sun got lost
In memories of ghosts....

Her voice had the shake
Of wind in a weathervane,
Trees isolated by a lake
Before the rake of ice-storms.

Father gone and brothers, then
(As if such conversation were the norm)
The dark years of pain
Intensest before morn.

Just Once

I don't know exactly what to make of it. 
Out in the early frost, a yellowish, dull  
female cardinal hops, eyes black as coffee, 
her feathers patchy with winter hunger. 
She hunches at the feeder as at a fire 
and snaps whatever bursts from the dark seeds-- 
then wipes her beak on her stale overcoat 
and takes off.  Just once, I'd like to jump 
off my porch and out of my own life like that.

The Lost Sun

It seemed dawn was coming out of glimmering black,
Like music lifted from a scattered page of notes
And a few straight lines to help the lost sun back.

No, I don't think the sun particularly like Hamlet,
Too much itself, and, so, blinded and lost.
I think the end of night deserves its little speeches yet:

Here and there a lover's alba, cracked and strained
With adolescent rage, a cheater's charley-horse.
Song anyway is all of a piece with pain,

The vertigo of a wildly spinning top
That brings the blood to our fingertips, makes voices hoarse.
We want it to go on and on, or desperately to stop.

Hangovers

a middle-aged alba

Lace lifts like ladies' hems
Up sunlit hillsides--
Last of the evening chill.

A muffled alarm, then

Light's beaten 
Stark along spindly tree spars,
Masts of burning bark.

Coffeeless, craving, sore

Out of sleep's black seas
Eyes wrestle to shore,
Unsaved--

The tears, the light, the loss.

Evening at Last

There was less there there
Than there seemed.  Diminishment's

The word, maybe, for how
Sailboats on the Navesink

Butterfly along lemon rinds
Of Sol's oracular light.

I and my mortality
Diminish with the harbor-bay;

I remember how tender acne
Ached where now I'm grey.

All the day I'm left with
Feels brief and hot as breath.

How half-sides of buildings, at sunset,
Darken and congeal--

As if dark rain poured forth
From torn gutters, red, and real.

Where I Sit

The quiet accumulates
Visibly.  Invisibly, I mean--

Like a weight of dirt
Deep in the heart, moist.

On my lap the embossed album,
Bound and fading, of Polaroids.

Dad had clambered here, as a
Kid, on this ticking porch;

Like a weight of dirt,
The rocker's metronome, now.

Ripples of time accumulate
Toward the lake-rock where I sit:

Mostly it's memories, the quick
Eyes of the dead ones, now.

They look at me with all the slow,
Awful power of sunset.

Aquatic Life

All night the hum of the aquarium 
breathing, the soft babeo
of the electric respirator 
hitched at the back of the tank, 
the last fish in there a widower. 
He swims around his sand castle 
day and night in circles,
nibbling flakes of manna that fall 
in slow gold from a mercury ceiling,  
spinning like a mad flamenco dancer, 
gills flaring in aggression displays, 
rushing the mirrory walls of his life.

The Enormous Teacup

I slip into an enormous teacup 
broad and smooth as an Olympic pool, 
simmering, minty and tinted. 
Faint greenish steam curls 
my heavy hair as I backstroke  
toward the regulation diving board 
white as a horizontal monolith-- 
I am impatient to be perfect, 
to lift from the dazzling waters 
and jackknife and disappear 
beneath its opaque surface.  
The tannic tea surrounding me
is warm, like blood, like I am
swimming in my own blood. 
I open and shut my body into the flow 
like a diamond, like one of those 
origami fortune-tellers 
kids knead in easy fingers, 
happy with random answers.

The Hummingbird’s Apprentice

Stand still like the hummingbird.
~~Henry Miller

If only I could stand 	
still like that hummingbird 
looking carefully into one honeysuckle 	
blossom like a bargain shopper, 
tipping the small blossom forward 	
until it, too, was bowing. 

(If only I could be 
patient, patient!) 

Just that one, 
as if those thousand other flowers weren't 
bursting like gunfire all around--
as if the hummingbird itself 
had nowhere else to go 
on invisible wings.

The Years

His mind is bright and empty as the sky. 
His head is shiny too, as are the shoes 
He polishes each and every Sunday. 
Life makes sense in the Great Accounting. 
When, one day, the ambulance arrives  
To ferry him prone to the hospital, he notes 
In one corner of an almost clear sky 
A crow whisking the clouddust.

Apple, Bowl, and Book

Arranging a few, nude things (apple, 
bowl, and book) on a flat table 
in the flat light of Tuesday morning--
one way one day, and another way 
the next (bowl, apple, and book), 
and pushing his paint against them 
steadily as sunlight over everything 
(book, apple, bowl), the painter's 
irreducible poverty (self, self, and
self) intrudes on his objects (bowl, 
book, and apple) and saves 
rags of them on a rag of canvas. 

When done for the day, having run 
out of evasions, he wipes the sunlight 
from his sticks with a rag, and drowns 
them in turpentine.

Afterburn

Tired of my own thoughts 
I turn out the light 
watching my wrist disappear 
with a hairy flicker. 
There's that afterburn at first, 
the wire inside the bulb 
still burning with self-importance 
keeping me light-blind 
for forty blinks, and then 
just as I settle in for sleep,
I spot through the window slats 
that scintillant blue bowling ball 
the moon.

Far in Winter

I have gone as far in winter as I care to go.
Hard frost, harder than a farmer's hands,
Is swirling in from far northern lands--
Harder than my dim intent to pace
Far afield through empty winter spaces.

I have gone as far as wind and feet allow.
I have slid alone down frozen hillside lanes,
Passed pond and ditch spidered by icy panes,
Spyed clouds' unearthly faces blanche as snow.
I have walked until all walking lost delight--

Far, far, until clabbered skies blazed skin-white,
Indifferently applied as universal night;
Too far for hands to reach and rest in touch,
Or tell if they themselves are smooth or rough.
I have gone as far in winter as I care to go.

December Woods

I stop and wait in winter's wet mid-night. 
Snow-dust is sifting on upturned face and pine. 
A desolate wind sweeps up sleep and haste
And confronts me with the waving woodland waste. 
(How sighs magnify to owls when you are lost!) 
December owns these winter woods alone: 
Her zero laughter gives dead leaves a shake, 
Her cold moan shivers choirs of stunted cones.
I weep, and wait for her in secret delight. 

Slow as the passing of some hypnotic wand,  
I watch inching ripples of the lead-dull pond 
Huddle dark waters to a solid field of white.... 
How one touch of ice turns our world divine!
December knows the bones in molten water's core.
Knows the ice in water.  That tears are nothing more.

Duck Pond in Winter

Now set in winter brown, the old pond in spring
	Livened these reedy woods gone flat,
		Scuffily ensconced 
		In frozen leaves that once 
Greened the summer skies with leafy wings, 
As if wild ducks in lush squadrons circled it.

Yearly a new mother lands and incubates her brood
	Under a dun feather muffler warm as suns
		Until her breaking eggs
		Toddle on webbed legs--
A duck who loves, and whose love does good
By being mother to what gold pufflings come.

Now, a splotchy Fall has sent them flying
	Off in maiden flight to scenes uncertain--
		To southern ponds
		Comfily ensconced
Beneath balmy constellations.... At home,
Her crosshatch nest uncoils, hurriedly abandoned.

Hunter’s Lament

Am I to lie 
ashamed among cattails
if, before ducks
V away in winter
with their rising
scale of notes
and scattershot
choral creaking
of wet goodbyes,
if I
want their small
long-nosed faces
to stay?

Advent Calendar

Departure, now, instead of arrival.  Dad's 
Vaulted the ICU's sterile rungs, 
Where December visitations had dragged us 
To watch a father drowning in his lungs. 
Beyond all this stubbled haste of Jersey freezes 
He's climbed into a greyness of light-polluted stars 
--Each pin of past light striving to stay sharp 
And remain named.
                  "Me!  Me!"
                            Two nieces  
Battle beside their first advent calendar--pulpy,
Saw-toothed, oversized, glue-glitter daubed 
And draped with ropes of hopeful popcorn 
Laddering a stylized Christmas tree.  A light-up  
Star crests dark waves of evergreen, 
Twinkling as if that battery will burn forever. 
Every day, two breathless nieces applaud  
A new surprise behind a hidden door.

MUSIC FOR BEGINNERS

Being Born

You wake up in a coffin, at night, 
Sliding downhill one hundred miles per hour. 
That's how it feels.  It's dark, the air sour. 
There's a vague sense of friction.  After 
Some fumbling around, you discover 
One box of matches. 
How many do you get to light?

Music for Beginners

The baby grand, bulbed
Like a black, half-cracked
Heart, throwing the throb
And beat of exposed strings
Reverberating....

V-thighed on the long black
Bench stuffed with squiggled sheets
Of Music for Beginners,
Impressionist drips of quarter-notes
Arching and arching....

How the swaying metronome
Danced (neither slow nor swift),
Mocking ambition patiently....
My small thumbs at rest
On G and middle C.

The Go-Round

At recess we raced to the go-round
Painted color-wheel slices of color,
Pushed galvanized handrails hard
Until our schoolyard world was blurred.
Laughter rang out like lightning
And wind in our ears was shards
And only the circle stood still, and
We longed to enter that stillness.
Our feet ran out of our shoes,
Impatient to rise from the ground....
And in that grace of levitation 
We each took turns at center,
Leaping like flags for the heart
--To be the source of all colors,
Of the go-round's big pinwheel, the pin--
Skies spinning like carnival art.

Counting Stones (2)

Carefully we counted stones
No bigger than their eggs--
We aimed to break the bones
Of sparrows
Wing by wing.

Feeling brave and hurtful
Beneath the swinging tree
Three brothers formed a circle,
Nesting
Knee to knee.

Though pity shook my hand
I took good aim to knock
Each sparrow's nest to ground,
One by one
With careful luck.

Going Long

Helmet to helmet in the high school huddle
tight as a nest of snake eggs, the quarterback 
said "Count ten and turn around.  Trust me."
After the snap, everything went silent,
the small stadium crowd that surrounds us
uniform as a tub of popcorn, silent.
Other players grew mute, dull as a blur.
I went deep into grass, grass silent as snow, 
running down a long and lonely plank 
that narrows as it goes, all life's details  
shifting off the pounding plank like sand
shimmering into silence, my leaps 
all one pounce of now.  I passed line after 
line of quicklime, looking only ahead,
my heart sounding out the seconds to ten,
uprights bright as a tuning fork before me,
going long.

Yard Work

Leave your yard to weeds 
one summer, till grass 
springs higher than your armpits 
and woodchucks go boldly by 
right up to the porch. 
Have dandelion wine in barrels, 
and violet and primrose stew; 
cut flowers by bushel and peck:  
arrowhead, aster and balsam, 
bayberry, beardtongue and wild 
carrot like cartwheels of lace. 
Cardinals and swifts in trees 
will whistle your days unsilent 
and saw-whet owls sweeten each eve 
as switch grass and creeper appear 
in your sideyard gone over 
to meadow and downs. 
Where now you have footpath 
and pavement, let wildness 
come up from the root. 
May shy Adam-and-Eve orchids 
visit the shadows you've sown, 
holding hands in forsythia shade-- 
and where now you walk  
on owned acres, by August 
you'll be swimming to noon.

Black Keys

A proposition on the keyboard 
Comes back inquiring, a minor E, 
Or resolving major chords, giving thanks.

The afternoon enlarges sash and cord,
An intimate of misery and of me
As yellow loneliness falls and fills my lap.

When I look at nothing, I feel adored--
An expansive Narcissus of the sea. 
I hear only, in my hunched piano's plunks

(After the final heightening of a pause), 
The ocean's application of applause.

On the Open Prairie

Rice grains of rain pattern feathers on the dry
Sides of silos here, red and full of rye.
In the open prairie, all we know is sky.
Yet live on we must--on earth alone and dry.
Somehow you know the whole thing's a ball
Beneath your feet, and you can feel it roll.
Every day I travel on, waiting for a wall.
Then night comes, that shadow there, and its hole.

Road Trip

We traveled in our car
Whole school summers
Forgetful of the calendar
From wonder to wonder:
The Natural Bridge's catlike camber,
Spelunking Crystal Caverns with lanterns,
Singing in chasms together,
Swimming in Delaware rivers,
Sleeping in camp by those waters
Enchanted and nimble as laughter;
Ducking impossible weather
In the concrete lee of an under-
Pass, Dad smoking as he leaned by the car;
We spat from speeding windows, 
Balanced flat rocks to slide off the fender
(And full sodas forgotten on T-bars),
Screaming through tollbooth and tunnel;
Counting crazily crippled deer
And license plates stamped Nevada,
Swinging past capitols in order,
Kentucky, Tennessee, Carolina;
Shopping at "South of the Border" 
For Ace-Safety firecrackers
And double fistfuls of sparklers.
Never was summertime lovelier 
Than those summers we wandered together.
We kids got happier and happier
While Mom's matchstick face, dumbstruck,
Flickered
Darker and darker and darker.

Momlets

I can see my son, aproned, up early, 
training among his chef tchotchkes,
selecting eggs with effective fingers 
and rolling the oval winners into a bowl. 
Next, he gathers his spices, pinches 
tipples on his tongue to test them quick, 
and says ‘oh' or ‘no' to each. 

Two real-life princess dolls bowl in, 
dandelion-headed and sleepily slippered, 
standing suddenly seriously silent as totems. 
"Dad's kitchen is all business," 
whispers one to the other in litany. 
And Dad has them help, of course, 
even the whipping, even the delicate 

Egyptian procession of raised bowls 
over their princessly heads to the stove 
where Chef does the final fluffing.
His long arms akimbo, he trawls for air 
to fold into the scramble, the Momlet, 
his swimmer's arm lifting and going around 
and around again--going for distance. 

I see him there.  I see my son.

Dance Impromptu, Aged 12

There really wasn't alot to it:
Girls too shy with us to laugh
Corralled by a battery phonograph
--And, here and there on the wretched grass,
A pink and tinsel pirouette.

Tulle Girls

Girls are not like us, no.
They watch impatient behind taut veils
Of soft thoughts, as we come and go
With our pockets full of rocks.
Girls are not like us, no.

Almost Lost in the Ladies’ Department

On department store safari, at four,  
I scoped out translucent loose folds 
of whispery flowerprints, deep meadows 
of hanging pastels, and lacy clouds 
of padded bras and ladies' legs 
staunch as departmental mannikins
or the infinite limbs of grazing giraffe,
their shopping voices elated, angelic. 
I ran awkwardly in my new black shoes 
zigzag through disheveled grasses 
of matching pantsuits, a pampas of 
pantsuits flowing higher than my head, 
my lazy hand rippling the materials 
like a tailor between appointments, 
like a zebra sampling a strange stream, 
killing time, growing older by moments,
a pygmy among these women's things,
until I arrived at the end of a long, 
open aisle, my hand clanging a gang 
of faintly skeletal empty hangers 
ringing on their rack after the season, 
like Christmas bells swinging in July, 
like waterbuffalo ribs from past monsoons,
and, brave and out of breath, confronted 
myself amiably at the back of the box-store 
in an empty dressing mirror, tall as the sky.

Origami

14 folds and you have a butterfly
ready to float from the tabletop
amidst the snippings, the open hands
and astonished face of the girl who made it.
The whole secret of life folded right there
so quietly beneath her as she sits.

Arranging Chairs

In here early, arranging chairs in lanes,
The otherwise empty room's a spray
Of local artists' ocean watercolors
By local docents netted in place, prismy
Mists and dark wakes so ably arranged
Familiar things grow haloed and strange
--A broken white fence, now luminous, or
Sea stones folding under a wave.

In Right Field

Planted in a green corner of heaven
	I watched patchy grass
		And I counted
Intricate, parched clouds as they passed
	Serene in solitude.
Then, as now, old shapes soon forgotten.

Skinny Beanie, our speediest pitcher
	Curtailed the sharp claps
		Of opposing homers
Till into Death's ant-lion trap Old Beanie slipped
	And kept slipping forever.
Then, as now, Death our speediest pitcher.

Playing right field has always allowed
	Me to lean back and sit out
		Whole innings--
Keeping watch in green solitude, content,
	Looking at clouds and counting.
Then, as now, the world passing by in its shroud.

In Darkness

Late into autumn we boys slept on the porch, 
Listening to October's stiffening crickets 
	Compose their last passes 
		At minuet masterpieces 
		In darkness, 
The invisible slim river still tuning its flute, 
Our dreams as baroque as a monarch's. 

Zipped to the neck whenever night temps blew 
Low, we kids kept up chirping and peeping--
	Lazily nested in chaises, 
		Whistling boy wishes  
		In darkness
Until clouds snugged the moon off to sleep
And we woke, cold, mufflered in the drifted snow.

STAR RISE

Identities

I pull my life down off the shelf. How many fisheyes in the jar? How many stars, like fisheyes, in the sky? The night around me is dark, no matter how I stare. I, too, am a star. Inside. A fisheye full blazing with wet possibilities. Lover, brother, poet. My cold fisheye looks at the night sky through waves of rivergrass, subtle panes of flowing streams. Pushing onto land, I gulp muddy breaths. Running on all fours, I hunch into my dinosaur suit. Later the next day, I ache upright, feeling my ape shoulders burst back from their hunch. Long I walk with my brothers on the blazing plains, racing after buffalo and elk. Or we go leaning our nets together into the rich river, pulling. Tonight we are poets, we sing of stars, sharing the fish around the fire. Singing. The fire falls into the dirt, its near star gone dark. I turn to you under the warm skins piled deep. You stare silently. We wear our masks as lovers now.

Night Thoughts in a Time of Quiet

Night pine-tree sweeps, shush-shush, 
Against the window like a bird asleep, 
All song calmed to intermittent cheeps-- 
Half-conversations halfway overheard. 

A stranger lays beside me in my bed. 
Her body is a blazing blossom, her head 
Full of whistling voices frail and cold-- 
And hard to hear, my love, so hard.

Star Rise

When dinner bells stopped clapping
after our parents' court-ordered partings
lonely as ship horns mourning, 
one east, one west--we would each
duck out in darkness, tiptoe stowaways, 
into newly empty backyards.
Too young to kiss, or even hold hands, 
we met at the fencepost to stargaze. 
I was sad, and you were sad, and
neither of us said so.  Stars rose 
like sails around us, the dome 
of the planetarium cracking.  And then,
invisible as grass, our two little voices 
stippled the sky with stories.

The Black Dog

looks up with questionmark ears 
at the blonde woman who,
a little sad maybe at being 
almost forty and the dew still 
frosty on the ivy in early May, 
stops walking the dog briskly 
to sit in meditated misery 
a moment too long, or longer, 
on the bench's flat slatting--
and who curls up into a sudden smile 
when the dog whines and water- 
falls into her small 
lap, plop, 
generously alive, 
its black tail pumping.

Guitar Lessons

A wife is playing her guitar 
with inexpert authenticity. 
She is neither too loud nor too bad, 
like an old parrot that learns slowly 
to repeat a crackerjack punchline 
or an embarrassing string of expletives 
the owner leans in to repeat each night, 
pouring encouragement along with birdseed 
and fresh water into the cage's cup. 
Even so, her guitar is getting worn out, 
like a shoe one always dances in, 
like a husband's face smiling as he listens.

Balance and Air

First love never leaves us. 
Like a first bicycle, all balance 
and air, we learned to go downhill 
blind, with our hands out wide 
as if flying were forever ours. 
After the fall, a flash of pain, a flag 
of blood, and the bones jerk back 
into the body, like a handlebar 
wincing ribs when the wheel turns 
unexpectedly over a stubborn pebble. 
And later, you peel the bandage back 
from an inflated knee, biting a lip, 
to check the wound's "progress." 
And, even later, absentmindedly, 
while sitting on a folding chair 
at the school dance, waiting to ask 
or be asked into the moving circles-- 
you roll a fingertip over the scar's hub 
the shape of your own private nation. 
It leaves something with us.  Even 
years later, when we see someone else 
skid or stop short, our breath 
catches as if we ourselves are falling.

Stealing Little Things

and the cup ran away with the spoon

I'll confess:  sometimes I steal from restaurants.
Oh, not much;  a cloth napkin for the hell of it.
Something both fine and tough that lays in the lap
and feels like quality when you kiss it.
But now I'm afraid Jenny's caught my old habit.
Slick as a jewel thief last night after the movies,
she palmed a real big soup spoon under a pile
of casual paper napkins right into her open purse.
Smooth as glass, not even a guilty twinkle in her eye.
This morning I've washed it for her and set it
shining in a stolen dessert cup with crenellations
purpling all around the lip like a sticky jellyfish--
that mint ice cream and oreo crumble was so good!
The washed spoon with its big plain silver tongue
stands like the Seattle Needle in the glass, twirls
just the least bit, flashing:  welcome to town!

Catnip

He was catnip to the ladies, they all said so, 
licking their paws when they saw him, 
washing their small faces adroitly, 
or rolling smoothly over onto their backs, 
switching their tails.

Bleeding Hearts

Above the weathered bench, 
Swaybacked where I sit 
And damp with summer night, 
An archer's bow of branch 
Drops its heart-shaped blossoms   
Steady as a sleeper's EKG or some 
Drip off a leaky faucet: 
Heart, heart, heart, heart.

The Neighborhood Peacock

The peacock's stubby stiff-legged strut 
chops short along downy lawns gone over 
to puffy dandelions, as hook over hook  
row the steady tines of his claws.  His high
eye rises, a tower, an outpost, a lighthouse 
above whitecaps, and one sees then that he 
is all eyes, a carpet of eyes, a sail of eyes, 
a sky unto himself of sheer irised iridescence--  
seeking a portly peahen on which to squat 
his rainbow glory, Odysseus upon Penelope. 
It is for her that his neck bends and his beak 
cracks, and the seed of his dandelion cry goes forth, 
filling rainy afternoon yards with his loneliness.

Licking the Frosting

The long night is being carefully frosted 
By day, like a butterknife spreading vanilla icing 
Over a round new moon of devilsfood cake 
While she yawns wide as a sea-lion pup waking 
--Dressing slowly, nakedly in her mirror  
Where dawn-colored curtains flutter.  
  
Her hand disappears into her jewelry box 
And, frosted with lights, her fingers emerge,  
One light on each fingertip like a constellation: 
The Starfish.  After a moment, her ears appear  
Dangling dark earrings like bats drifting  
Out the cave of sleep and into our morning  
  
That sits above blue bowls of Frosted Flakes  
Before we each skate off to our workdays 
Synchronized as Olympic champions.  
But, for right now, she takes a sleepy  
Pirouette in her mirror and approves: 
Of our lives together, the sweetness of our night.

The Pillow

The pillow where you last were laying 
keeps a spoon's impression of your head 
and even a swirl, a dimple, of your ear 
as if this pillow were a seashell, where 
a thousand voices enter which we later hear 
as the constant susurration of the sea. 
Can you hear me among them if I whisper 
so close my sipping warms your pillowcase 
while the rain goes on snoring in its gutter, 
and all the house closed up in a sort of sleep? 
I love you, yes.  But what I whisper now 
is something other, something just for you.

&Nbsp;

Winter Nights

Nights accumulate, turn December.
Turn Xmas, with its sparkly galaxies 
Of discarded wrapping.  The fire's chaos
Recalls other heats, other faces....
And, shaken, sparks traces of your long departure--
Last Independence Day at the park,
Fireworks' wild sunshine in your eyes
In hot summer dark.

THE EAT LINE

Turning Forty Alone

Life is empty.  A wind rises sideways
until my pant legs stand out, twin rudders
steering nowhere.  Between one housefront  
and the next, irritated lightning, 
brief and naked.  Rain, a thousand miles  
of zippers unzipped at once.  Puddles  
swell like bruises and connect their black
softnesses, as they did for Noah.
Forty years I've been on this dark voyage.
The straw is stale, the bursting stalls
fecund with rancor. The lions, male and female,
have slipped their tethers and roam the galley
all night, roaring and shaking with hunger.
Their matted manes are thick as rat's nests.

Breakfast on the Patio

Early memories have an edge of tragedy,
The trace of a child's hand
On construction paper, faded.
Or the half-loops of letters, so rudely
Learned, living forever unfinished--

Time behind crouches near one then, 
Ahead lies far.

The coffee's graceful steam unfurls
And morning stones glisten like stars,
An irritation of pearls.

“In the Widening Gyre”

The worrying leaf twists,
Its race arrested--

Maddened leaves repeat it
In iterant wind.

Down the long hill at sunset, one more
Leaf doodles and cavorts--

Now doubly, trebly muddled in a ditch: 
Murmurous leaves.

Three Martinis

 
for Joelle
1. 
The first one is cool, refreshing as a cucumber, 
A meeting sweetness lapping at the back of the throat 
As if sugarcane dripped off a fat icicle, and then 
The slow burning to the waterline of your little boat. 

2. 
Now a power growls and routs small talk, dissent; 
Convictions gather like a curtain pulled, mauve, 
Revealing the pitted shallowness of daily talk, 
The world set to rights as easily as this olive. 

3. 
At last simplicity arrives, looking through life itself 
As through a clarifying piece of glass, this 
Glass, contentedly in fingers twirling triangles-- 
Contemplating it filled, and its present emptiness.

The Eat Line

Nimble goats tremble on split tiptoes
Eating knots of pine and holly, leaf and branch
As far as fingering tongues can go
Toward heaven for their lunch.

Loosed to clear Sandy Hook's woods
Of poison ivy, their saliva drips, they say,
Immune to poison, and that's all good
We say, going out ourselves to play

Splayfoot on barren beaches.  I spread 
The checkered cloth, pour figgy semillon
Below the "eat line" where they've passed,
Coppice chewed flat as a billiard green.

The Outboard

Motor's propeller coughs, catching seaweed, 
The intake valve gritty with chaff, the starter flooded, 
An unwell something moaning under the hood, 
Catching and stuttering loudly when it should 
Slur tigerlike, leaping purring for wavepeaks 
In choppy Keyport Harbor's uneven arena. 

The men, popping beers and flyreels, 
Lean back, deckchair masters from mast to keel; 
They survey the costal waters like a lunchbox 
Stuffed for munching while the boat knocks. 
They're happy.  Their spouses, tan and sheen, 
Watch children thrash trash off the stern: 

Survivors in a drowning world, careening and green.

The Retired Sheriff

Saturdays he sat on his porch in his old uniform, 
Old like satin slippers stained and torn 
But worn anyway as the last fancy thing   
To go anywhere in, but he never did--
A general blown out of his war, gold braid 
And buttons so much parlor-curtain finery.   
Even his silver revolver was a kind of watch fob 
(Thirty years service, Bob, and thanks) 
Spun by a restless tic in his wrist  
That wouldn't quit--the watch hands shivery,  
And the bullet chambers usually empty.

Bad Dreams

He drools like a cow, that one.
All night in his sleep, mumbling
Nightmares, an old knife of stone
Whittled by sea and season
To the one dread:
Wife and kids over the cliff, tumbling,
And his dog dead.

Still Life With Sunflower

A still life still requires faith
That life itself has stopped
Just for you, your fist of brushes,
Your dripping pots of gauche
Fetishist yellow-red.

Minotaur Eyes

Eyes almost closed beneath his hat
The old smoker blows gold smoke out,
His agate eyes almost sedate.

Eyes half-shut.  You've heard the phrase.
It isn't done to keep smoke out
But to keep dreams in, as in a maze.

On Winning the Pulitzer

My darling friends, I am afraid
This once-worthy prize is unmade--
This glittering thing has gone to shit.
A bad generation ruined it.

And, indeed, my winning here
Has me question many years--
Makes me doubt what value, use,
My life's devotion to the muse.

The Metaphor for Ordinary

The metaphor for what's ordinary 
Ticks rickety, and breaks its wicker back, 
Cracks sciatic with the dumbass weight  
Of my emphatic Great Aunt Kate. 

The ordinary's too circular for metaphor, 
A bridge to the same side of the stream 
Where everything is as it was before 
And no balloon squeaks loose from its dream.

’68 Brought the Riots

'68 brought the riots (we needn't speak 
Of them), arriving in a crash of days
Washing away the city's soft authority, the meek
Back-and forth of beach cleaning machinery....
At least we suffer no more the illusory 
Union of then and now--that tomorrow's kids 
Are the same as yours, that yours today
Are you....  Too apparent's the decay.
No fashionable derelict genteel twilight
Fades us towards this stripped finality,

This painted concrete scratch-graffitied grey.

Swallowing Castles

Strong clear brilliant air drawn into the mouth in a moment. A special flavor of life, like the south of France. The dusty maybe of Marseilles. The long wet unrolling tongue of the Mediterranean Sea. Sweet dollops of cloud-stuff hardened to minarets. Minarets made sweet by the singing of prayers during the Middle Ages’ Muslim occupation and shrunk by forgetfulness to the size of a lozenge. A lozenge that moults my throat awake. Awakes me to think of melting time and swallowing castles.

Through Mullioned Glass

The bird, a blackbird, flies
Up--words tear at his wings:
"A crooked cross in damask skies"
Or some other flitting fret or fraying
Its vapid purplish flapping bethings.
Some black clash of shadows
Where blue bleeds in at the window.

Blind Feathers

 
White blind feathers, wintry February,
Stale cereal fluff dumped from a box.
We stare at the unlocked locks.

Reading Light

I read, midnights, until the haloed lamp
	Flares meaningless,
Charon's guidelight on Styx's everlasting damp.
Words once fit for granite no more affix,
	The storyline dead;
The sculptor's hand grown bony,
The lover by love abandoned.

The looming book in my hand's a wick,
	Flaring, spluttering--
Burns words, rotten words, until I am sick.
My eyes dry, drugged, bug-eyed, drained,
	My life illegible.
I sit alone beneath an S-shaped lamp
To which I feel inextricably chained.

Sentences

for Dan Weeks

Sentences trick us out of time's traps
The way a song will go back around
And around on itself to the beginning.
Songs and words, especially drum-taps--
Those dry discrete silences in sound,
Change how long each quiet seems
As if time only lived inside the drum.
Music and writing are much alike. To begin,
You first must stretch the skin out tight.

The Days

Days falls together like brushed curtains.  
Dawn and evening flutter together   
In silence, interlacing their delicate edges   
--Light comes up one side of a grassblade  
And goes down into dusk on the other.  
That's how it is, too, when I remember 
Suddenly, washing dishes, my name,  
And the sink shines with an identity:  
That's mine.  And all the yesterdays  
Come snapping into place like played cards, 
And tomorrow's a fan of questionmarks 
Laid down beyond the kitchen curtains   
By a hand that flutters them lightly 
In my field of sedge and flat grasses,    
Interlacing their delicate edges.

Packaging

I pile brown Christmas boxes, stiff
With stuff: ribbons, tinsel, elves, lights
Untwinkling and tangled--
Hooped in a humped death-wreath
Giving no glistering whiff

Of merriment.  Wires and briars
Hang black where torus roses had made holy
The tree's abstract angles.
How noble!  How dopey!  How phony!
As if Christ hunched curled in a plastic star.

SEEKING THE FATHERS

Appalachian Spring

Lace lifts like ladies' hems
Up the sunlit hills--
A memory, almost of snow,
Dissolves with evening's chill.

Sticks of light beat time
On spindly spring trees,
Flat zags of lightning,
A storm in morning calm.

Every day, as out of a cave,
My eyes wrestle to shore--
Unshaved,
I want to see still more.

Circles

Father scuffled off to his daily office 
Where racks of coolly efficient fluorescents 
     Left his smiling features half-effaced,
          A circle 
Seen briefly in a cavern, at a distance.
At home we kids were laying out the plates

And fanning out the flatware for family dinner, 
Our hour of bad jokes, day tales and talks. 
     We debated rawly, sheer beginners-- 
          Our circle 
Of faces a boardroom of love's assurances 
Over potatoes, Mom's burgers, asparagus stalks.

Swimming Lessons

Our childhood redwood house stood surrounded 
By dry leaves in a time of dryness.
So Dad placed beside each bedroom window 
A rolled-up field fire ladder, and assessed us
As we spidered out of windows backwards,
At ease and ready to catch us dandling, 
Chewing his raw black tobacco chew. 
"Whole damn place is no better than kindling." 

Down the short tilted hill through oak trees 
Lay Swimming River reservoir--its scratchy tangles 
Skated over winterlong, doing loops--which soon
Grew warm and treacherous as a betraying hand 
With June, its rich mud silt as quicksand. 
Dad surveyed those greenish waters warily, 
His lips pursing and going still like ripples. 
"Boys, tomorrow there'll be swimming lessons." 

Saturday he took us, one by one in puffy trunks, 
Into a cool space of water he'd backhoed clear  
(One drought last fall) of underbrush and stumps 
Sharp enough to shred whatever entered bare.  
One by one, he had us straighten out at once 
As if flying, and practice the long Australian crawl,
Turn our heads and spit out breaths of water--
Holding us up entirely at sternum and solar plexus.

The Adulterer’s Dream

Something he had swallowed earlier  
coiled in his belly, and sat there 
aimlessly striking his stomach walls 
and making him gulp like a toad 
for night air.  His wife looked at him, 
her hair piled high and pinned for sleep, 
with twenty years of love and pity 
while he gulped and gulped, his eyes 
helpless, and out of his wide mouth 
leapt lie after lie, and the snake.

Divorcing

When Mom was done with yelling
At Father on the phone
Waving gestures in the air
Breast-stroking for some shore
That receded more and more,
She continued telling the cat
In a voice like water breaking 
About both this and that
Until cat would purr asleep
In the exhausted swimmer's lap.

At the Dock

My father's head,
the classic cannonball
tan and slick and fringed
with foamy tufts of grey,
spat black tobacco juice,
ate raw oysters, nipped the tips
off green jalapenos
and cursed easily as he chewed,
cutting the small bait--
having a grand time, 
it seemed, in the world 
of freedom and fatherhood.

Between his bare red feet
a bucket of crushed ice
cradled long-necked naked beers
sweating freely, floating
until he walked away.

The Bronco

 
...our closeness is this:
anywhere you put your foot, feel me
in the firmness under you.
		~~Rumi

Dad rounded us up weekends, happy, 
to his Dad Ranch, permissive as a belch,
with an occasional locked door or verboten 
shotgun only Dad could manage sanely. 
The old blue Bronco snorted down 
the long unweeded drive, siphoning us 
boys off, a skim of childish excess, 
to buggy wild dunes in South Jersey. 
Dad steered a fireworks pinwheel 
spinning dizzy between his hands, 
leaping wave after wave of sand-drift 
all night, headlights hitting the tall grass 
like lightning, thunder cracking under us 
rev after rev like hooves, the moon 
skimming the night's grey undulant surf 
as if chucked hard, our stomachs light 
as laughter in our throats, we grinning  
even when smacking the roof with our 
little league ballcaps and wet palms, 
riding bareback our parents' dark divorce 
scared as cats in a carrier.

The Busted Greenhouse

Radiance of light-strobed clouds,
a crinkle of thunder, and then
hours watching rain stitch and slicken
down the cold prow of the greenhouse roof.
The wet smell like a captain's frisky deckrail 
racing through the stiff chop 
against other slant yachts on an inland sea--
the shores gorgeous forests of flowers.

At times, there'd be stars,
And leaves flat as soot against hanging glass.

I put my head through the blown doorframe:
you can hardly tell there'd been
any windows at all.

The Craftsman

for Tom Pedersen

This is the door at the front of the house, 
the one that goes everywhere and always 
comes home.  This is the craftsman 
who works on the door with his wood-plane, 
trimming and smoothing it continually  
to a flatness, his mind like an adze. 
He carefully screws new butterfly hinges 
flush with the doorframe, oiling them quiet. 
He trues up the top of the door in the 
doorframe, checking with level and thumb. 
He tests the lock, then leaves it open. 
He stands back a pace, looks his work over, 
hands on hips, and hat brim pushed back: 
closely, carefully, critically.  He spots 
something, licks his thumb wetly,  
like a lollipop, unselfconsciously, and 
pulls it from his mouth with a low snap. 
He spit-shines the doorknob, spinning it 
buff, his red kerchief cradling the knob 
like a hand-sized hammock, until both he 
and the door fit distorted and brassy 
in the small curves of its world.

Freshening the Day

The porpoises were beautiful, their grey skin shining like plastic in the morning light.
~~Det. Harry Bosch, The Narrows by Michael Connelly

Rain on charcoal shingles
makes roofs shine pearly grey,
like the slowly turning backs 
of whales that have swallowed 
whole families alive. 
Spring trees put out their leaves 
in the waving spray, and laughter
falls like mist in the dim dawn.
Sidewalks whiten and renew themselves, 
straightening their ties, ready again 
for the old routines--
A father running late, returning 
to work under still-pink floods;
fresh clouds lifting over domed strollers 
gleaming wet as birthing calves;
alert dogs following the pack, noses
tense as harpoons in the spray;  they 
tighten their leashes, anxious to piddle.

Cart-Wrangler

The cart man returns to our parkinglot,
lowing his cattle-car song in morning air
as he backs into a primo spot and starts
routinely jostling the sleepy carts to life.
He heaves them into his beat pickup,
his ancient varsity jacket scraped soft
from hugging the heavy carts up and up.
The carts nudge together unevenly as cows,
their grey faces skeletal and condemned.
Most of them expect nothing, in for the long haul,
but occasionally one breaks free, rollicking
off the truck in a mad rattle and hoofing it
as far as the dumpster.

Black Rat Snake

Why such evil in the world, 
asks everybody and the Bible. 
Outside, by my garden hose 
a cold shed snakeskin   
rejoices in the causeway breeze,
a single-fingered glove 
for an absent injured hand, 
weightless as dried froth, as airy 
and helpless as a weathervane. 
Gray lifeless hose, your sole  
inhabitant has slithered off 
effortless as a stripper's zipper-- 
you the discarded clothespile. 
Whatever kept you company,
intimate as a ballroom dancer,
has bulked too thick in snak- 
iness to linger in you any longer,
your diamond-patterned mask.
It's gone, a child's taffy shadow 
pulled toward dark horizons. 
I touch the rocking feather
still curled as if to strike 
fearfully with the toe of my boot--
How quickly life escapes!  
I see how, at first, the living skin
must have split no more 
than a tear duct swelling-- 
and then all at once 
like a leathery egg, 
from snout to shoulder, hissing.

Meadow

A grasshopper floats off my palm 
Like a prayer... then, its tin helicopter 
Ditches, the splayed skids stir 
My skin with itches: to swipe, to swat. 
--How little things, even the green things 
Of meadows, can vex a morning's balm! 
I wipe the tidy corpse off like that, 
Small as a bullet casing. 
Now I can return to fields and nature, 
The grasshoppers shifting in the grass 
Endless 
As a thousand hands at prayer.

A Frozen Waterfall

Swing with me down a winter river 
on sneakers, zing past a grandstand 
of widowy birches petrified forever 
washing their sudsy hair in the stream. 
In the circle of their nakedness is 
a frozen waterfall, tall and white, 
with a patriarch's great fall of beard. 
Studying the topless columns, I see instead, 
in their myriad crenellations and odd 
glittering rockwork organic as a vapor trail, 
the uncut pages of a book--of what 
secret litany of nature the lexicon? 
I find myself crossing over, pulled as if 
those furious waters still exhorted motion. 
I pat the tall rough face of page-ends 
sealed beyond the genius of knives, 
impenetrable as a meteorite's message, 
and rub a few blind valleys like braille....
Only Spring will read this story, 
after long winter writing has loaded its rifts, 
calling forth, tear by hidden tear, a waterfall.

Rearview

Beyond whatever trouble brought me again
(Past circumstance, ennui, a wish fulfilled)
I drive by the white mailbox a final time 
Forgetting even the address that led me here,
The map that was less map than maybe
This once, minor hopes that would not let me be:
Years of loving Dad and getting nowhere,
Defending my life as if it were a crime.
Beside me rolls field after field, untilled--
The road behind shaky, small and clear as pain.

Dad’s Navy Cap

Stowed back behind a slipped stack 
of power-equipment instruction manuals, 
Dad's navy cap from the war, wilted white, 
looks a sort of ruined sandhill now 
with a thin black brim for a shadow 
and miniature crossed gold swords, sewn, 
recessed under a dented-in ledge  
like a shallow cave in a sandy river bank 
eroded deeper by all that water gone 
under the bridge, years of echoing hurry 
belowdecks in the engine room among 
rolling waves of steam and steel, 
come ashore to this quiet spare bedroom closet 
with its dusty mirror and its 40-watt bulb 
triggered by a dirty string. 
Turned over, there's one old spot of blood-- 
a dead crab washed to the crest of a dune, 
just where the inside of the cap  
touched the peak of his skull.

Casting Lines

I stepped, a tenderfoot, into the pebbly stream after Dad, 
Reeling as he taught, casting out from 
My center as if toward nothing, 
Feeling light as the 
Fly. 

Now wicked twists of river water press me as I pass 
To deeper ranges with my casting, where if you 
Try to stand in utter stillness 
You feel that you could 
Fly. 

Why was I always wading so slowly, so far behind Dad 
All those years ago?  Still ahead of me today in 
Memory I see him striding, reeling in, 
Fall-lit leaves streaming  
By.

Laundry List

The ice cold stares of neighbors
click across you like fridge lights.
Washing machines neat as teeth
line one cement-block wall beneath
a whole row of closed windows.
A flare of florescent cleaner like a tongue
lays cut in two by red rubber cart wheels....
The scrambled contents of their lives
empty hurriedly into the loud Charybdis
mouths of machines: a pillowcase,
yellow with age, tons of undies,
a child's bed padding princess pink,
shirts waving farewell, yoga pants 
pantomiming embarrassing positions....
Lives stuck in spin-cycle listen for a bell....
Dryer sheets flicker in corners of the room
like stubborn
popcorn husks, eternal and inedible.

Burning Wasps Nests

Unsholdering his shovel, Dad pointed 
to a unnoticed hole, down 
in the meadowy dirt, in the field 
behind our house--little more 
than an ambitious ant-mound really 
with a perfect circle centering it. 
We could hear what went on below: 
small muffled buzzing huzzahs 
like a covered pot of spaghetti 
or the sleepy voices of dead folk 
still warm under desiccated grass. 
Dad took the gas can from me, 
its fluent scent flaring clear light 
into our nostrils, and giving a pinch 
like hunger somewhere in our bodies. 
The matchstick arced and landed, 
a lady jumper with her hair on fire:
gasoline flames came like a whiteness 
that's hard to see--but the heat 
had us stagger back, Dad's hand 
on my shoulder like a broad blade. 
I just stood there, staring at where 
those scrambled buzzing voices 
rose more and more angrily, like 
the deepening sizzle of an unwatched 
pot, its jittery lid shimmering.

Workbench

He kept his grandfather company summers
by the beat-up workbench in the garage,
a piece of fine dovetail sticking halfway
from the red vise--a kite's-wing of Icarus'
in for repairs.  He shook a coffee-can of nails
real loud, and sang loud, too, the one tune
they knew together, "That'll be the Day," 
to keep his grandfather entertained 
while old careful hands swept curls 
of sawdust to the floor among gluepots 
and chisels fine as infant fingernails. 
The wide blond grain of the bench
was blasted smooth as a turtle's back 
by hundreds of restless broken things of grace
dragged there and clamped in the vise
until they were useful again.

Going Bald

Stray hats perch here all seasons, 
like birds who abandon their nests 
of stuck-up feathers (and one egg 
whenever I duck out of the weather). 
Where once a loyal brown dog lay curled, 
guarding hearth and home genially 
unless tangled with, the August sun  
scalds me through an open skylight, 
and cold slaps bone every December. 
In a gilt-edged mirror at the stylist, 
I can just about squint Caesar's laurels 
into existence, tilting weirdly above my ears. 
After a shower, with my two-days' beard 
shaved, my face is born again, pink  
out of the steam, while above eyebrows 
my pate rises mottled and bald,  
a tombstone with a single date.

The Jellyfish

Below my knees, the sea
wavers my feet into fins
spied through a stormy porthole.

Wobbly toes grind sandgrains
as if each minuscule stone
were the whole world.

How many summers, Dad,
had we cast ourselves breathless
into such endless days?

The incoming tide
makes me sit down--hard--
as if I were drunk.

Ghosts of jellyfish
hem my waistline, frail
as collapsed lungs

until I'm transparent.

Seeking the Fathers

Searching for the fathers
of my baffled heart, I hid
my head in long books of poems
that were forever ending
too soon.  Once, I was a modern
Native American standing silent
beside that affable man William Stafford,
leaning together among polite prairie dogs.
Once, kneeling in deer-soft dirt,
I counted countless red streams of army ants
Bobby Bly knocked from old gopherwood.
He smiled, and we listened
to our spirits whisper in the grass.

Each volume in the columned hall
stood slenderly beside me, my arm
draped lazily around its lettered spine.
I found many fathers under the yellow suns
of those aging, open pages--
we fished whole summers barefoot together,
casting our lines, our lives, one word 
at a time: word, word, word.

Swordfishing

     Let my boat have neither anchor nor motor
     ~~Emanuel di Pasquale

When they were running good
you could spot their sails
like dinosaur aileron
above the spoiling waves
tenting nerve-grey and blue.

Our new boat, a fast fiberglass
hull, was christened "Mutha II,"
and replaced an old wood 
Hacker-Craft, "The Pastime"
for our swordfishing adventure.

Each handsewn belly-bait
carried weight enough to drop
long hooks to the ocean floor
where swordfish often loiter
for prey dragged by the Gulf Stream.

Every Christmas we were pulled 
to hear the hissing line
to feel the arch and snap
of heavy fishing wire
disappear in our boat's shadow.

And to witness all alone
on the ocean with our father
strapped in leather harness
and reeling for the kill
how swordfish fight and die.

ESSAY

Seeking the Fathers

 
Beginning to fabricate the music of poetry

Starting Out

It was back in college that I really began to take on poetry as a life-mission. Every serial killer has his first blooding, and mine took place in the leafy precincts of Monmouth University (née College). It was there that a trio of instructors really set out the map I was to wander for the next thirty years, exploring the Hundred Acre Wood of literature, leaving my own poems scritched into the easier pines, or a duck marker where the trail splits to show which direction I’ve gone. Thomas Reiter, Prescott Evarts, and Robert Rechnitz were the three that did me the most good overall. And, although I don’t mention him here, Bob Sipos and his Shakespeare seminars and knack for interdisciplinary studies gave me two of my lifetime hungers, one for anything to do with the Bard, the other for science in combination with literature.

Seeing Skies

I leaned lazily against the dirty ductwork, my rump in a rumpus of dry leaves, beside me a stack of Cicero (Loeb’s ed.), Auden, some modernist trash. I looked past my tilting sneakers to see the edge of the roof of the Guggenheim Library. A mix of field and woods front leafy Cedar Ave., a terrain that cradled my college days. This is where I ate my way through french fry piles of poems, feasts of history, big burgers of science, and lemonade gulps of art. With the open sky above me, a good book beside, and a building full of poetry behind–the world was my oyster!

On overcast days, or when the librarians were marching about, whistling me in from my aerie on the roof, I’d lean against the doorway at the top of the second floor’s curving staircase. The staircase had an ornate Swastika trim that flowed up alongside the marble steps and was cast (I hoped) before the rise of the Nazis, when civilization had already been rescued once so that F. Scott Fitzgerald could pen his Jazz Age prose for my delectation. It was nice to lean there at the top of the turning stairs, and read, and look through the long window at the bending cypress trees (fluttery as flame-drops) all spring, or to imagine hearing the wind shake snow from them in winter while the old heating registers creaked.

Occasionally I’d see Dr. Reiter or Prof. Prescott Evarts in the “poetry hallway” that led to the staircase–rows of tall bookcases filled with narrow volumes, like a quiver flush with arrows. I’d have to fold my legs into my chest to let the tromping professors pass, who’d offer only a laconic greeting while I’d proffer a phrase from some poem that was trying to absorb me body and soul.

Seeking the Fathers

Back then, I was seeking the fathers. The long beards who could sensiblize this enticing chaos of experience, with its shaggy roots entrenched in history, and its mystery made gritty by dirty Time. Of all the fellows I came across who seemed to hold this sort of full focus that could harrass chaos into the momentary clarity that I longed for, was Thomas Reiter–a poet, I think now, looking back, more of precision than of delicacy.

He had the tall, inquisitive look of a microscope, with a focused intelligence that could reduce callow poems to a tear-stain on a lab slide, each line investigated for signs of microbial activity. Gawky in glasses, Dr. Reiter spread my too-tall-by-half pile of high school scribbles before him on his cramped office desk, post-it notes stuck here and there, and announced that he would proceed by a method of “divide and conquer” to guide me out of my juvenile shallows, and into the Odysseyan deeps that a man might sail for several lifetimes.

He saw the junctures where past wisdom and present experience overlap. And at that overlap, always there burns the bright arclight of the sculptor’s welding torch. Inflection points, capacitances and resistances (as Dr. Reiter might say), all come within the domain and to the mindful moment of the artist–whose hands guide the welder’s fire, whose fingers impress new patterns in the steel. Layer upon layer pressed into palimpsest, and palimpsest hammered into meaningful mandala. It is the completeness and complementarity of his patterns that allow Dr. Reiter’s welded Iron Giants to come to life–and to stay alive. Every capillary has been laid to its destination as surely as any mile of rail. A shield for Achilles made with American hardware. But not made with the willful loss ideology uses to shape its tin minions; ideology that can only cut to create, snipping experience to fit its blinders; ideology that mistakes the narrow road for the wide landscape. Instead, the craftsman works with the simple, slowly learned, touch of humanity. That is the artist’s way: adjusting, assessing, remembering all the while. Such strength of touch we learn from watching our fathers work every day.

And Dr. Reiter loiters along my skyline yet, a shaper of the landscape.

Excellent Faces

Prof. Evarts always remained a mystery to me–or retained his mystery, perhaps I should say. Tall, with close dark curls grey at the temples, he has a passion for excellence–and for excellence alone. And here I think is his true poet’s touch: he never wavered in his ability to even silently emanate that dedication. In his poems, he casts his heart continually back to the Greeks–as who must not who seeks for excellence? He saw, and shows, how this pursuit of attainment and mastery is what sets our humanity most nobly alight. In his person, the man seems simplicity itself, with some humorous inward gleam withheld–or held within, more than withheld. But, like a prize grouper in his weedy redoubt, when some tempting excellence fins by, he nabs it without fail, adding to his hidden store.

What’s the secret that lies behind every face? Where do the rubbery strings that tie on our masks attach? Something of that esoteric knowledge is what a useful culture can impart to its devotees. And any useful human culture must believe in the best of the humanity of which that culture is composed. Teachers are the intermediaries here, being shaped themselves by the best of the past, and shaping that which is yet to come. It is a moral course, whose compass is composed of Euripides’ “warm droppings of human tears.”

The self-contained individuality of Evarts’s stance toward life and culture (or a life of culture), has taken me decades of rocky yearning and mossy slip-ups to really begin to appreciate. It’s a life-lesson from an old classics prof of mine.

A doze is a light sleep
the mind dips into,
then wakes from, achingly,
into little Iliads
  ~~Prescott Evarts, "The classical world," 
             in The New Criterion, November 1994

The Importance of Being a Proscenium

Dr. Rechnitz taught me that “Literature is an education of the emotions,” and I’ve noticed that when you read a book openly, getting involved with the characters and letting your imagination be deeply invested, you actually become capable of feeling things, of being sensitive to feelings, that you didn’t even know you had! You really are inventing yourself–your capacities and imaginative possibilities–every time you crack a spine (not to re-evoke the serial killer simile). Like Christian aping the words of Cyrano under Roxanne’s window, we grow eloquent within ourselves when we kiss genius. For words, spoken or viewed, do all their golden alchemy within us.

Dr. Rechnitz also directed plays at the college theater, and is now, since his retirement from teaching, responsible, with his indispensable wife Joan, for the Two River Theater in Red Bank–just the most beautiful theater built in New Jersey in the last fifty years. And when I saw him in the context of the stage, I got hip to the fact that for Dr. Rechnitz, “all the world’s a stage.” Everything, as in a poem or a well-ordered novel, has meaning in three basic ways: what it is in itself (either as essence or fact), what it is in relation to others, and what it pretends to be to itself or others. You see this in Odysseus, who wears many masks on his voyage home to Penelope, but never loses mastery of his essential (still mysterious to us) self. And with Dr. Rechnitz, it was seeing a different version of himself under the proscenium that clued me into how our awareness guides not just how we see the world but what we see of the world–how large our perspective can be. It’s related to growing with that “education of the emotions” stuff.

There is a criticality, a reserve, in even the most audacious clown. Ask the French about the slapstick genius of Jerry Lewis–they get it. Our essence, understood and held by ourselves within ourselves is always under observation by a part of us that doesn’t exist in any single discrete moment of time–but is the “wisdom” (for lack of a more boisterous term) of all our time of acting and observing. This gives the interior quality of good actors, and of happy people engaged in creating meaningful lives for themselves. It’s an open secret, a fun, doubling sub-plot with the power to intensify the main action.
And for letting that cat out of the bag, my thanks, Dr. Rechnitz, wherever you are.

* * * * *

Years later, outside the Two River Theater, I had parked and debarked to see part of the cycle of August Wilson plays they were putting on that season–Jitney, I believe. A long late-model sedan pulled in behind my car, and began a series of seesaw adjustments in attempting to parallel park–first gently crushing into my back bumper, then backing into the bumper of the Jeep behind it. After observing a few of these poolball style bankshots, I leaned in to the passenger side of the car and saw a bank of modern ‘park-assist’ technology displays brightly arrayed in the dash of the car’s dark interior; recessed screens showed in dynamic color each bash of the sedan into my car’s duct-taped bumper like the radar display on an aircraft carrier; and the picture-in-picture safety cam spotlighted a grainy close-up of my old torn Ramones bumper-sticker.

“Gregg G. Brown!” A staticy voice burst from the driver’s side. It was Dr. Rechnitz, grinning gamely as his gold sedan slipped into reverse for another bash at the Jeep.

“Would you like me to pull forward?” I asked as the passenger, the ever-lovely Joan Rechnitz, further lowered her power window with a near-silent zzzzt.

“You’ve got to see this August Wilson play,” continued Rechniz. “It’s a magnificent American original. And no need to move your car–this boat has auto-park.”

“I’m on my way in. I’ll let you know how I like it.”

“Yes. Do that. Do that. You won’t regret a minute.” And he went back to studying the wild displays, digital sweep and counter-sweep lighting up his circular eyeglasses.

I stepped back out of the crash zone, and kept a backward eye on the sedan’s awkward tipping and turning, expecting to hear the Jeep’s car alarm larruping behind me at any moment. At the next play the following month (not King Hedley II), I left my book of literary essays, Vindictive Advice, at the box office, saying only that it was “for the Doc,” and saw an email acknowledgement pop up in my inbox a few days later. I assumed the note would be something in the form of a UPS receipt, one you sign sloppily for the downstairs neighbor before accepting a questionable package wrapped in plain brown paper–and no return address.

The note was indeed brief, but far from perfunctory.

How, he wondered, had I gone from being the homely noticer in the back of the classroom at Monmouth to the well-read raconteur evidenced in the pages of my book? I felt deeply complimented by Dr. Rechnitz’ note. It had not been too many summers before that I had suffered the slings and arrows of 2,000 rejection notes from poetry magazines–without a single acceptance or even a paternalistic pat on the back. And here, in this small note, was acknowledgement of years of literary effort. The note even included a touch of that real writer’s compliment in its bob-tailed paragraph–envy, glittering in its bitter rarity. I felt embarrassed, but glad. I didn’t know what to do with his praise:

The bell's tongue
Struck me dumb.

Dr. Rechnitz’s note had managed to park me twenty-five years into the past, back up onto my perch on the Guggenheim Library roof, the view renewed, a fresh bucket of icy oysters by my side in the summer sun.

Scrutable Totems and a Human Heightening

What exactly did I learn from these guys? Let me talk about the poets, since I think I covered some of what I gleaned while in the good graces of Dr. Rechnitz. From Dr. Reiter, I learned (or observed) how a poem can set itself up as a generator of paradox, or mystery. By that, I mean that the circumstances a poem places before the reader recreate the moment in the poet well enough so that the reader, too, must try and manage his way into meaning from what is presented. Hmm… Let me try again. Wallace Stevens has said that “a poem must resist the intelligence almost successfully.” I think what I saw in Dr. Reiter’s techniques is that that resistance can be ongoing in the poem, can remain in resistance to any sense of settled ending.

Dr. Reiter manufactures artifacts that embody the dilemmas they explore. They are scrutable totems of immense experiential value–and you could say of explanatory power if you are willing to include being, manifestation, as a form of explanation. If the story and its details can be set up the right way, with enough technique, enough craft, and enough justice to reality, the elements that the poet exposes to the reader go on making the poem long after the poem is over. It’s like striking a cymbal. You haven’t just hit a circle of brass, you’ve touched the nature of the cymbal and evoked it into resonant interaction with the world at large. So, Reiter would be able to set the scene–a plowed field, and country grave-marker, for instance–and turn the description, or evocation, of each of these elements toward a meditation of the relationship between living and mortality in a way that wasn’t a one-off noticing. The elements themselves, in their arrangement, remained deeply provocative. Like an ethics problem or a moral fable, but full of the super-sensible subtleties of poetry. And this is what life confronts us with all the time. And this way, life insinuates itself into the poem, and the poem has heightened life.

Dr. Reiter’s work is difficult to excerpt because of this well-crafted relatedness of parts, a sort of perfection in sum that resists summation, but here’s a few lines from “Sodbusters,” whose circumstance is described just above (ellipses are mine):

Say the child died that first winter
....
Say Matthais Bell kept 
clear of the new stone
that spring the prairie blazed with space
....	

Say year by year he plowed closer--
not that he forgot
how the boy's hands were the color
of freshly opened apples
....
I see him turning the earth
beside this graveyard where the prairie
compass  marks the meridian
with its deeply divided leaves.

And it is also with this matter of a heightened life that Prof. Evarts’ poems most impressed me–as well as his whole demeanor. Exemplars, standards, a larger life seem always very near him, like presences. If anyone I know knew where Sophocles was hanging out on the down-low, it’d be Evarts. And by having a ready and eloquent access to these past exemplars, Prof. Evarts constantly calls us to our better selves–not some phony more moralistic self in any narrow sense–but in the very real sense of being ever-alert to our highest excellence. Don’t be good, be great. And he always seemed to have a long enough perspective to avoid the pitfalls of Romantic subjectivity–where the greatness is in what the ego, the I, is feeling–and if you couldn’t feel it too, you are just some kind of lame lumpen-proletariat. No, it’s actually a kind of heroic ideal, a human faith in human faithfulness, if you will. That our capacity to act matches our possibilities–and that the work to move in the direction we are heading is life’s one joy in some final way.

     The snail, inch by inch, climbs Mt. Fuji.

And Evarts just always knows which way to Mt. Fuji! Directionality, combined with work and not accepting less than your own very best effort, creates a life and a poetry of excellence. A note that always plays true. I know this sounds a bit like a business seminar, with the way they wobble on about ‘excellence’–but I mean it in the olden way of the Greeks, the becomingness or arête, with man as the measure of all things. Less an appeal to ideas than an appeal to a comprehensive human experience that includes ideas. In this way, ideas are neither excluded nor exclusive. Ideas are simply another, and necessary, ingredient in the meatloaf.

Gregg Glory
[Gregg G. Brown]
April, 2015

Coda: Persistence

The sea comes into the rock.
The rock mocks the sea.
The sea comes into the rock
Until the rock ceases to be.

Secretly the book is being readied. 
Obstructions and obfuscations 
Are being blown up and shredded. 
The book, the words, are come! 
Beat thou a merry drum! 
Don a motley cap, and a gown fine-beaded. 
The book, the words, are come! 
Beat thou the drum!

Uncivil Hours

Oct 072019

Let us! my dear friend, console ourselves for the unsuccessful efforts of our lives to serve our fellow creatures by recollecting that we have aimed well.
~~Dr. Benj. Rush to John Adams about the day they signed the Decl. of Ind.

Battle Lines

Nor cringe if come the night: 
Walk through the cloud to meet the pall, 
Though light forsake thee, never fall 
From fealty to light. 
     ~~Melville, The Enthusiast

Long I’ve plotted an epic poem, a poem to stand in relation to my native country as those broad stripes stand in relation to our flag. The subject would have to be the Civil War, of course; it was then, as at no time since the Revolution, that the country grew articulate in self-definition. Lincoln was the poet we elected president. The Civil War generation was the most letter-writing cohort of warriors America has ever produced. Brother fought brother, fathers took up arms against their sons, and slaves escaped to return fire at their former masters–and then forgive them when they stood in post-war relation to each other as citizens.

And when articulation failed, and all the buzzwords of secession and abolition grew sharp as bayonets, the forges of war found their tongues, and vile shrapnel was vomited in Shenandoah’s sleepy dells. The Civil War, like every war, found its heroes on both sides of the battle line; unknown men arose who proved equal to their times and mastered the moment presented them.

* * * * *

On a personal level, as I contemplated my (potentially calamitous) approach to a Civil War epic, I found myself confounded as much as coddled by the breakneck immensity of resources available to investigate the old wounds of yesteryear. All things lead to all things via the lightspeed factcheck that Google presupposes. And where facts were in dispute, the very best disputations were available–along with interactive 3D battlemaps, and endless chances to reengage and rejigger the results with computer game simulations or alternative history sci-fi. As a poet, I am most drawn to pipe-smoking and twiddling long strands of grass between my thumbs. Books are fuel for mules; how much more senseless was a digital dive into the cacophonous black hole of internet archives.

Still, in all, I did a fair amount of death-grip gazing into backlit screens, and mumbling over luminous words in book after book. I felt the hair-raising chill of listening to surviving veterans cry out a final Rebel Yell on YouTube from a 1923 reunion, each man aimed at the microphone and camera and instructed by a friendly fat man to “Do your worst, Grandpa.” And then one last cry in unison, and every cat in the house snapped to look at the speaker as if at a ghost. I’m sure a dog would have returned the unearthly howl.

* * * * *

How, exactly, I asked myself, was the Civil War that “most American of all America’s wars” after the Revolution itself? Where, exactly, is the anchoring pin in this crazy pinwheel of deeds? The Gettyburg Address? The glum dignity in the surrender at Appomattox, where Lee surrendered his sword while Grant attempted polite small talk to ameliorate the sting of defeat his fiercest foe surely felt? I take some comfort in Yeats’ statement (who midwifed modern Ireland into being in many ways), when he said “It is always necessary to affirm and to reaffirm that nationality is in the things that escape analysis.” Perhaps all my moody brooding was for naught. I should be content to be a teller of tales, a stenographer of fact. In any case, hesitation on my grand project was no longer an option–whatever America was and whatever being an American meant would be an emergent quality that arose from dream and poem. So, I’d better start writing.

* * * * *

You may have noticed that you are not holding an epic poem in your hands. That ambition my muse has decided to deny me in this round at the foundry. But, page after page, you’ll find flickers whisked together; you can follow muddy footprints to Shiloh, or pace over an acre of Petersburg’s siege as I have done. Whether these poems are equal to their theme, the reader must discover. Every poet has his Zoilus, as they say, and if mine is reading this book today or is yet to be born, I do not know. Still, there’s something here that time has folded and put in my pocket.
I give it to you.

Gregg Glory
May 5, 2019

True and Untrue;
or, The Facts of the Matter

	I hadn't seen a piece of soap in a year.
	     ~~John T. Wickersham

Yeats’ “affable, Falstaffian man” is as much a part of the story of his Irish civil war as those great public events of the rebellion in poems like “Easter 1916.” No one wants to distort the facts, but even a selection of facts slants the story. And poetry is more than mere story, it is the soul of every story. Poetry tells the facts why they must be true. Like the formula of the alchemist, or the equation of the quantum mechanic, poetry arbitrates, through exploration and discovery, the bounds of our reality.

The historian has a hard road, and must site map and affidavit for his every step. A poet, when his soul’s alight, burns away the tightrope that he treads. These poems seek a meaning in-between these stark extremes. Helen and the burning tower is no more evocative than Lincoln in his tophat. Well, not necessarily. The eye that weeps the tear, floods the landscape. A nation’s history is crafted by its participants; they see, they feel the meaning of the thing. For one’s truth to become a public truth, it must resonate–in both emotion and in fact. History is no free ride for those with an ax to grind, for those who would delete the subjectivities of the past with their Buzzfeed-fresh agenda.

Accordingly, my approach is hedged round with doubts. I’m trying to find the seed of things in the desiccated plant on the sill. Sometimes, a very personal approach, a singular story, helps flesh the skeleton whose hand I hold while he tells his dead man’s tale. Sometimes, it is only through the torrent of future events that some aspect of the past has grown significant. And here, the mirror is watery. I fret and pull the threads of fate; I squint and wipe the ocean from my diver’s mask, hoping to reach the beach.

Quotation and epigraph abound in these poems to lessen the culpability of Clio’s amanuensis. Lee and Lincoln are brought to the docket to testify on their own behalf; or words recorded by others are introduced to damn or indemnify the figure on trial. Such a strategy has its own half-life, and the phrases used can cut against the organic unity of the poem even as they apply a thin veneer of authority to the proceedings. Rhythm is the one vitality that no poem can do without, and my slinky attraction to quotation can leave me in the unenviable position of a mynah bird, eerily reiterating the last words of a murder victim.

There are several other common dangers in this sort of poeticization of history. One can succumb to the expert’s hip elision, a habit of reference that only communicates to those already “in the know.” This is already a danger in poetry generally, which prefers by far to implicate than to provide evidence. With factual antecedents, the danger of missed connections increases, and the poem’s secret limbic system is liable to go offline or develop incoherent buboes. “Only connect…” was James Dickey’s rigorous dictum, and maintains its imperative strength to this day. It is ignored at the author’s, and, more importantly, the reader’s, peril.

In this collection, abortions along the highway to an epic birth, the language alternates rather harshly between a creampuff softness and the bony planks of bare narrative. In “Night Ride (Toward Gettysburg),” there is so much dreaminess that the rider on his horse literally falls asleep! The entire poem is a subjective guess, almost wholly an invention born of one small act of fact. The epigraph to the poem tells the fact: completely exhausted regiments fell asleep in their saddles while riding toward the next day’s battlefield. And this detail, to me, was the seed, the soul, of the contrasting humanity and inhumanity of war–in all times and places. Still, there’s a queasy awkwardness I feel in filling out a page that history left blank. These men in blue and grey, and all the others, slave and civilian, are my national companions, and I am loathe to touch their suffering as if it were my own.

And sometimes, of course, the stars are gone and the moon is down.

As a kind of dry repentance for my sins of invention–a Lenten giveback to God above–there are a number of passes at narrative verse in these pages. These can feel too simple, “ripped from the headlines” as the TV movies say. A pristine example is “The Midnight Ride of Abraham Lincoln,” which is just literally Ward Hill Lamon’s report of Lincoln telling Lamon the story of his nail-biting escape from a gunman, gussied up a touch and poured into a vacant vase of verse. Lincoln is a master storyteller, and I couldn’t improve upon his shaggy dog tale if I had two MFAs.

An ampler, and more typical, example of the process of transition from history to poetry is available in “Pieces of the Old Battle Flag.” It is practically unrhymed, and virtually without invention. I changed John Wickersham’s name to Ned. He left his own narrative about coming home from the war, and I read it in B.A. Botkin’s collection of Civil War tales and folktales. Its simplicity and reality left me trashed with tears. My poem, direct as it is, manages to miss a great deal of his easy poignancy–and yet it is my best attempt at a teetering retelling. I left all the symbols in de minimus outline, and make the reader rip his humanity on the hard edges of the words. There’s very little “mood music” to queue up the reader’s response. Even reading it out loud, the old-fashioned sound of it is more like a grandfatherly wheedle than a poem. And yet it stands, returned to the page even as John/Ned returned to the uncomprehending arms of his family.

Between fact and abstraction, there is certainly room for legitimate invention–coloring inside the lines, as it were. But how different from the satisfaction of Milton’s Satan, standing shaggy-legged and monstrous against a Deity of perfection! I’m as reconciled as a pendulum to my method.

As for a third kind of poem, those that have grown truly unfashionable, anthems of anything other than naked identity, I can refer most reassuringly of all to the historical record. Many are the casuistries and verities of that distant day. Even the nimble Timrod parsed out his “Ethnogenesis,” mad with reified abstractions to unseat the Northern tyrants from their “evil throne.” But, to me, the “terrible grumble, and rumble, and roar,” of that poetry, like Thomas Read’s “Sheridan’s Ride,” has more in common with the verified goodness of verse than the many idiot rants that assail my ears in the New Yorker, each one banking on the slim authority of “my truth” to avoid a scrupulous accounting of their faults. These are my chosen battle lines, where poetry and history meet and conflict.

I have squared off in my corner, and will defend my stance against all comers. And so I can say, with unironic vigor:

    Assemble! 
Ghosts of a time not yet made witless....

	GGB

Uncivil Hours

What tragedy befell us in those days 
Is not mine alone to toll, to tell--
A thousand voices, a million all 
Wailing in abominable chorus could not 
Convey the terror, anxiety and waste 
Of those dead days. 

Whatever one man can carry 
Out of Hell, I'll carry to tell you. 
What words cannot do, let bones 
Knitted by raw time at the breaks 
Display in mute witness.  

                         Assemble! 
Ghosts of a time not yet made witless, 
Armies whose worn shoulders show 
As increasing mist, gather without regard 
To blue or grey, and let your old voices 
Roll coldly now that once had the hot 
Imprint of youth.

TROUBLE AT THE FORD

All wars are boyish, and are fought by boys.
     ~~Herman Melville

The Abolitionist Congregation

And about this time, I had a vision–and I saw white spirits and black spirits engaged in battle, and the sun was darkened–thunder rolled in the Heavens, and blood flowed in streams.
~~Nat Turner

The preacher in his pulpit blazed: 
"One God for them and us! 
Never once since the seventh day 
Has God divided races-- 
It's man by man we're saved 
Or damned and thrown to Hades." 

A peace surpassing passed among 
The Boston congregants; 
They knew a truth and knew it strong 
Beyond all argument. 
They stood in choir and raised great song 
Above collars starched and neat: 

"Let salvation's mustard seeds 
Be blown among the nations--
Where it grows their taste shall be 
Sharp for generations. 
Let war pour forth the blood we need
To hasten our germination!"

Why the Confederacy Became

Fanaticism is inculcated in the Northern mind and ingrained in the Northern heart, so that you may make any compromise you please, and still, until you can unlearn and unteach the people, we shall find no peace….
~~Overheard at Virginia’s secession convention

Attack our ways and wound our own
Who'd brought Jefferson and Washington
And all those famous firsts to stirrup--
Rebel men who would not give up
Beating pell-mell into the dawn
Virginian steeds, and would not stop.

Now that revolutionary dawn
Grows stale and cold in Northern hearts,
Tyranny grinds with iron wheels
All minds and every thought.
How can they who hammer and cog
Find valor in a ball of cotton?

To no king nor any petty liege
Shall rebel spines bend what brave
Steel runs through them yet: let
All come!  Let gamblers place their bets! 
Before the first Virginian grieves
Yankee widows will pace and fret.

The War Comet;
or, Oola’s Prophecy

You see dat great fire sword, blazin’ in de sky? Dat’s a great war coming and de handle’s to’rd de Norf and de point to’rd de Souf, and de Norf’s gwine take dat sword and cut de Souf’s heart out.
~~Oola’s prophecy, as told to Lincoln

A shadow at the bedroom window 
Tall without his stovepipe hat; 
Long his looking at the ragged coal 
Of the fiery sword of comet. 

His tan hand patted a padded pocket    
In time to a nameless tune; 
A time was coming to grasp the sword, 
And the time for peace near gone. 

The comet flickered, weak and wily, 
While clockhands met in prayer-- 
His eyes upcast to skies to read 
What was written there in fire. 

What moved one heart would move a million; 
Both for and against, it flashed; 
The man in the black coat turned, and turned 
Again, in the shadow of fire and ash. 

Restless fingers in his pocket then 
Moved upon the restless words: 
He hath loosed the fateful lightning
Of his terrible, swift sword.

The Anaconda Unwound

Winfield Scott takes McClellan aside after a White House winter dance

Comes the winter as came the summer, comes war 
As sure across the Potomac when spring unhinges-- 
All's a dance, McClellan, verily a dance.  Dash and pause, 
And pause, and dash.  I've seen it snake across the years, 
Wily or swift, snap-jaw or anaconda pressure-hold, 
Mate and checkmate as the tables turn, as time 
Reveals the pattern waiting in the dance. 
When the Whigs put me up for president in '52 
Our notions for the nation were leggiero, 
Lightly, lightly, the high baton mocking the drum's 
Hard-tapped time;  but the country then was all 
Lilt and liberamente, the dour South already skittish 
At school-marm abolitionists preaching through their teeth
Sturm und drang drama from Northern pulpits. 
And Time the snake hissed me out of office:  
Ssstay a sssoldier, Sscott, await the drat of duty's drum  
When time's old do-si-do comes round again. 
--Yes, yes, as you say, tonight's cotillion  
Was an elegant affair, you the prettiest man, 
McClellan, ever to show a leg upon those boards. 
The ladies smiled as if some young Napoleon 
Had asked their hand, and turned a tune with them. 
Fine times, fine times, but as I was saying--
The plan, the plan that stays unstated says: defeat!
Must return to the topic, as the snake to his coils.
I've heard time's sad lento movement unroll 
As well;  spent a dead year imprisoned in cold 
Canadian irons, legs listless that had been restless.
In 1812, I little knew, and less guessed
How such lento languishment led on in time
To hazardous pizzicato punch and push:
At Lundy's Lane, one fighting night above Niagara,
Troops unready for the Brits' fire and bitumen-- 
A blaze of blood to end all advancing, 
Rifles' firelight a flame of snake in the waters,
The falls a sourceless roar around us: war! 
The dead spilled everywhere like Indian beads.... 
I would not have such red spillage now. No, 
Dash and pause is the plan, a sidewinder waltz. 
Wait, and work the odds, then pitch the table  
Hard enough, and the most stubborn marble rolls. 
Confine the Confederates from advance, cinched 
Hip-by-jowl in our close contredanse--slow 
The fiddle, and slow the fife--here at Washington. 
Then twenty loaded gun boats, and forty more of men 
To sweep the Mississippi's spine quite clear, 
A slithering pas-de-deux, in one blasting pass; 
And make what blockade we can at oceanside, 
Threading in ships-of-the-line at adagio speed. 
Soon you'll see, without the terrible expense 
Of invasion and defense, the dance'll come 
Back round to us.  Cotton will go rotten on their docks! 
Plantation men are money men, McClellan, 
Those fire-eaters will be in a fix but quick, 
With cold water hosing down their backs! 
It all winds round to politics--the dance 
Of dash and pause, the slink and strike of snakes. 
If, by gunboat and blockade, we impose a pause-- 
Dash against dash must annihilate in peace, 
As self-meeting ripples cancel when they kiss. 
Let's spare our southern brethren and ourselves. 
I would not raise my hand against my feet; 
The dance is not a dance that has no steps.... 
Let us lace our anaconda constrictor  
Around the rebel states, and let the pauses 
Pull them home by inches to our loving arms.

Choosing Sides; or,
Mark Twain Enters the War, Almost

If the bubble reputation can only be obtained at the cannon’s mouth, I am willing to go there for it, provided the cannon is empty.
~~Mark Twain

Here at Hannibal, Zeb, unhurried waters
Ain't much in a fit, so let's us not rush 
As war turns its great gears--let time loiter, 
Turn the riverboat wheel like a paint brush, 
And see what water greenesses unfold.... 
  
War's not such a thing as we've been told 
Reading chivalrous tales of Ivanhoe 
And gettin' on a horse dressed up like a stove. 
What it is, though, I don't likely know. 
Saw little kids parading, yelling ‘Jeff Davis!' 
  
Since there's not yet no song for all this  
Whatever it is the country's doing, tearing  
Itself to nothing like a worried bone. 
What dog's got us in its teeth?  Go wary, 
Zeb, them Union men mayn't leave us alone 
  
As we row along to Memphis.  At home 
They'll be busy choosing sides, picking teams 
For all this folderol of flags and hats. 
Take the bend easy, who knows what dreams 
We may disturb at the blockade, or what-- 
  
(A cannonball smashes the pilothouse windows out.)
  
"Good Lord a'mighty, Sam, what'd they mean by that!?"

A Parade of Gallantry

“I am Henry Wilson,” said he, “United States Senator;” but the teamster, perfectly unmoved by the announcement of the dignity and importance of his petitioner, cried out, “I don’t give a — who you are,” and lashing his mules, sped on his way.
~~Cornelia McDonald

"A parade of gallantry, surely," she said, 
Servants fetching fourth the wrapped roasted 
Chicken and basket of champagne to pop the cork 
When push becomes shove, and those rapscallions 
Run high-tailin' it home.  "They look so small, 
Even in the opera glass, our men, Henry--
Have a glance where dusts are gathering some."

Unfolded by their picnic, idle congressman and wife
Thought a day of arms would settle a ten years' strife
And snug closed the fraternal argument sprung
Open among wide America's battalion of brothers.
"There's a snap, hear it? And some skinny pink fingers
Amid the cotton balls. Must've crossed Bull Run, swung
Left into their scattered flank. Soon we'll see, dear.
Pass the asparagus, thanks." 

                             Sometimes a little cheer
Rose among the checkered blankets, ragged and thin
As half of Congress applauded itself, the creek 
Thickening with skirmish, and, after a few hours, 
Ghostly and sickening, the Rebel Yell, 
As if from those about to die and win.

The Traveling Darkroom; or,
Mathew Brady Carrying a Camera

Eyes that… stare too wide to close.
~~ W. D. Snodgrass

A spirit in my feet said ‘Go,’ and I went.
~~Mathew Brady

More dark!  More dark!  Let's see at last 
What war has left upon my plated glass. 
Carrying my heavy camera to the front, crumbed
In dust, I frame the conflict with an artist's thumb.
Here at Bull Run the NY fire zouaves 
Put a sword in my hand that I might preserve 
Life and limb a minute longer when the Federal line 
Collapsed snakelike, a windtorn kite's dead twine. 
Each plate I rescued from the field of battle, 
Slimed with collodion like a salamander's 
Skin, mirrors in miniature the exploding world:
Shells like sunbursts, spasmed faces angry and bold.
I follow troops in my long duster;  a black tent,  
My traveling darkroom, dragged on horsecart. 
That's where alchemy becomes advertisement, 
So newspapers can print what war has wrought. 
With exposure, light passes through a glass 
Darkly and excites the emulsion, as 
God shining down upon the soul does. 
Bathed in ferrous sulfate, I bring forth those 
Final images of modern men from time's 
Gluey muck, shuffle the glass cards, and then 
Fix 'em like an insect pinned in my collection. 
The mortician's touch of potassium cyanide-- 
Too perfect to change!  Let's see what verified 
Heroes come jumping from this chemic pool, 
The square of ruby light catching me coolly 
Red-handed at my work.  When John Q. Adams 
Sat in studio with his lion's mane, 
I felt Franklin's lightning beat my fist and let 
The shutter drop on history, my best 
Camera lens the doll's eye of posterity.   
From the first, I pledged to my country 
To save the faces of historic men and mothers 
So we citizens might recognize each other. 
Something's coming through now, shapes of shapes. 
I see the tilde of a zouave officer's flying cape--
Would-be blue blurs are moving over clearer 
Figures grinded to a stillness nearer 
The killing ground... are these all dead bodies? 

In cartes de visite I made my first real money; 
I told departing soldiers packing their haversacks 
Down at the recruiting station: Tell your Mom that 
"You cannot tell how soon it may be too late."

Trouble at the Ford

Sometimes by losing a battle you find a new way to win the war.
~~Donald Trump

Did that dread-sick blue-grey couple spin 
Drunk about a cracking axle? 
Broken music of the grand battle 
Swings mud-laden boys around again 
Where Bull Run stream breaks the land 
And a gambler nation lays its longshot hand. 

Congress came with cakes and wine, 
Gallantry to make fine ladies swoon 
Shot and counter-shot done by noon, 
Checkerboard kings crowned by dying men. 
But the dancers of that great game 
Were blind, and soon enough grew lame. 

Soon confusion enfiladed every line, 
Filleted the Union on their back 
Reversed them down their beaten track 
As if all clocks rewound the time; 
Although new blood flowed by the old Stone Bridge 
Defeat was all men had to give. 

10,000 men in grey gave hellish chase; 
10,000 blues threw down their guns 
To ease the striding of their run--
A wild rebel yell bid them haste 
While summer ladies whipping parasols 
Raced pell-mell through Congress' halls.

A Bedside Whitman

Bacchus-browed, bearded like a satyr, and rank.
~~Bronson Alcott’s description of Whitman

Two boat loads came about half-past seven last night. A little after eight it rain’d a long and violent shower. The pale, helpless soldiers had been debark’d, and lay around on the wharf and neighborhood anywhere.
~~Whitman, The Wounded from Chancellorsville

Whitman loped through hospital wards 
His brotherly shoulders huge and stooped 
Over the endless injured. 

Whitman bending through hospital wards 
Wiped the weeping white-hot iron brows 
Of heroes held down. 

Whitman sat attentive in the hospital wards 
Big spry hands cradling an inch of pencil stub 
Taking restless dictation. 

Whitman walked the rounds in hospital wards 
Dripping water careful as communion wine 
Where dry mouths chirped. 

Whitman exited backlit hospital wards 
Nightly beneath the rapid stars 
Striding, striding, striding.

HIGH PISGAH

I sit with Shakespeare, and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm and arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls. From out of the caves of evening that swing between the strong-limbed Earth and the tracery of stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension. So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the veil. Is this the life you grudge us, O knightly America? Is this the life you long to change into the dull red hideousness of Georgia? Are you so afraid lest peering from this high Pisgah, between Philistine and Amalekite, we sight the Promised Land?
~~ W.E.B. Dubois

Reenactors

We come in clothes of yesterday to save tomorrow's history. 
With lifesavers of facts, we enter Heraclitus' stream 
And run time backward until we see fons et origo of 
Today's catastrophe.  With Thucydides we wade to war 
And drive our wayward Volvos home by GPS and guess; 
Here, Lee. There, Buell camped or tramped, tents speared 
Heavenward in plea and supplication--a million Iphigenias 
Sacrificed upon the bow when confounding headwinds blew 
Us back upon ourselves, pledges that've rattled packed 
Since Adams and Hancock fled the Redcoat flood to Concord. 
Words must amend what time upends. So we, doughty 
In our woolen socks, with crates of hardtack rations bought 
By ApplePay, are walking words buttoned up to do some good 
On Instagram and Facebook, where kids will laugh at Dads. 
"We inhabit the post-apocalypse of Lincoln in blue and grey,"  
I say beneath my Union selfie. "We're the zombies of that day!"  
Young emoticons undercut me with memes and zingers 
As I pace my final picket circuit and whistle back to camp: 
"We will rally from the hillside, we'll gather from the plain..." 
And wild in the woods, when the moon intrudes on shoulders 
Tapping us back to a fantastical past, it is for us alone 
The campfire hustles, the smell of rashers real in air, 
Cold muskets carefully at-ready, our scripts pre-written 
Who believe no more in God or Fate.  Are we the men  
Our forbears were, wakeful where they slept? Tomorrow's  
Tableaux vivant tautens invisibly in dreams, the battle lines 
Drawn in ready dust, the punch and counterpunch of armies 
Arresting rest, until we, too, fill our diaries with prayers. 

"I do not know what comes, my dear, for me, although I know
Great forces constellate about this present nexus, with only 
Inches of river between the drowned man and the saved. 
I remember you, the farm, our home;  and you again, my love."

To the North Star

When I found I had crossed that line, I looked at my hands to see if I was the same person. There was such a glory over everything; the sun came like gold through the trees, and over the fields, and I felt like I was in Heaven.
~~ Harriet Tubman, crossing the Mason-Dixon line

Follow me, follow the North Star 
That parts the Red Sea darkness, 
That makes us strangers at freedom's shore   
Arriving proud and chartless. 
  
Woods are full of sounds tonight: 
Every owl a hooded accuser, 
Invisible rivers galloping hot 
Are horses of bounty hunters. 
  
Brothers, we were not called to birth 
To live and die by starlight;
Cast into a cage, or worse,  
We were born to run tonight. 
  
Toward no stray star we climb, 
But follow unhesitating 
The northernmost that abides, 
Its steady fire not forsaking. 

Ben, don't be the runaway horse  
Who losing his way returns 
To the master's gate perforce,
Half-tangled in his reins. 

You won't find love awaits you,
Harry, calm words and a patted snout, 
But a whip and a hiss that you 
Had ever ventured out. 
  
Keep the trail and keep your feet, 
Through root and wreckage spur;  
If we lose our way we'll navigate 
By the sturdy Northern Star. 

It's one star that snaps our ropes,
One freedom that we chase,
One freedom's constellation trace 
In footsteps of escape....
  
Once past the Pennsylvania line 
Where choirs of stars stare down,   
The jewel of all that shine     
Will be our hallelujah crown!   
  
And there, as kings and queens we'll dance 
Who never dreamed of scepters-- 
Ben and Harry, please, just this once 
Follow me, follow the North Star.

GETTING TO GETTYSBURG


The broken light, the shadows wide--
  Behold the battle-field displayed! 
  God save the vanquished from the blade, 
The victor from the victor's pride. 
     ~~Ambrose Bierce

The Rebel Belles

If you knew my brother, I’m sure you would not fire upon him.
~~A Warrington belle, down at the Green Hotel

Southern girls circle floors in their hoops, 
Rebel belles who obligingly dance, 
Slim fingers stoppered in ears 
When "Battle Hymn" music is heard. 

Caught in the crossfire of chance, 
Deftly circling floors in their hoops, 
The rebel belles were ladies first 
When partisan cannonballs burst.   

Whatever victory, whatever defeat, 
Love waltzes on pass after pass....
Damsels circle floors in their hoops, 
Their dancecards folded and neat.

Heavily their families' hearses 
Driven with seven fine horses--
In defiance of death they dance, 
Circling worn floors in their hoops.

The Quiet Man

Afterward, men could remember nothing more than the fact that when he came around things seemed to happen.
~~ Bruce Catton, Grant Moves South

"Well, he had a hard look, and soft way of talkin', is all." 
"He weren't nothin', just a slouch hat and no rank 't'all." 
"When old Colonel Souse was howled out of camp, Grant 
Sauntered in with a shrug and said ‘Guess I'll take command.'"
"The fairgrounds were a fair place to preach and practice 
Discipline: first, last and second place, as they say." 
"Them Illinois farm boys was sweat into an army 
That long summer, parading every sunset after 
Daylong drill and drill again, under a brunt sun." 
"Springfield to Quincy is about a hundred miles 
Footsore marching.  But we'd be damned, if the gov'ment 
Wanted to send us to war by freight car, we'd walk." 
"And walk is just what that danged Grant had us do, 
Whistling to keep awake: Jordan Am a Hard Road to Travel." 
"Our feet taught us more than any Army Manual." 

Years later, in his memoirs, the quiet man explained: 
"Give anyone, even a volunteer, a reason good enough 
And he'll follow you to hell, smooth as Aristotle; 
Common soldiers are as smart as town folk, you bet."

Night Drill

[He felt] strange in the presence of men who talked excitedly of a prospective battle…with nothing but eagerness and curiosity apparent in their faces. It was often that he suspected them to be liars.
~~Stephen Crane, Red Badge of Courage

Out of the old wood with whicker and stamp 
A soldier's horse escaping camp--  
‘Coward!' cries the owl, the moon balloon-huge 
Caught in branches bare as a dirge. 

The rider listens for the picket's hist 
Then taps his horse onward to grassy mist--  
A burnt shadow moving in a cowl of milk, 
Steps soft-fallen as a kiss on silk. 

Soon enough, reeds arise and the river wakes, 
Silver manacles clasp the horse's shanks; 
The far bank lifts a lover's face, 
Heart and foot find quickened pace. 

Horse and soldier race in moonlit circles, 
An empty lasso whipping endless; 
Fires from camp catch the deserter's eye, 
Stars sunk in woods from a fallen sky. 

The solider faces the remembered camp; 
His halted horse shakes his reins and stamps. 
Slowly the river's cold molasses is recrossed. 
"Who goes there?" comes the picket's hist.

Another City Night

What hospital nurse has not a bone ring or trinket carved by her men in the ward?
~~Jane Woolsey, Hospital Days

He passed away with less than a whisper-- 
That agony more than mortal finally 
Relieved.  The cap he kept at bedside here 
So regiment friends would know more readily  
Their campmate "swaddled like a darned baby," 
I place upon two hands I hold and cross: 
Perfect, white, elegant as a lady's; 
Hands that kept his captain's charger glossy. 

I fold his last letter home, told through gauze, 
Read back aloud to get the humor right, 
Imaging his mother's laugh, his father's brays. 

Outside has come another city night, 
City lights granting summer air a haze--
Not these tears, I swear, though I bite my lip.

The Plank Bridge; or,
Major Pelham’s Overnight Bridge

We used to dance a great deal too. You didn’t get an idea of how strong he was until you danced with him–that was grand…. There wasn’t a single line of hardness in his face. It was all tenderness, as fresh and delicate as a boy’s….
~~Bessie Shackleford

SHE 
His face is a splendid boy's alight on his bay, 
Youthful and edgeless, sun of a million rays. 
HE 
Between our grey houses meander grey floods 
That disfigure her shoes with grey Georgia mud. 
SHE 
Summer days are running, and I run all the more 
To trouble the mud that lays wet at his door. 
HE THEN SHE 
"Come dance in the parlor, come sing one more song."  
"Night rain is coming, and I soon must be gone."  
HE 
So I built a plank bridge, an oak rainbow of wood, 
That her feet may stand spotless as Noah's doves stood. 
SHE 
At dawn came a bugle, and grand cannon in town; 
I heard his bay racing as I reached for my gown--
HE 
To war, my horse, to war, now clamor the planks 
To save all our dear ones, for whom we give thanks. 
SHE 
I saw him once more as he crossed his plank bridge:
Through his face in the coffin--a bullet's red ridge.

Master of the Monitor

All my underclothes were perfectly black. I had been up so long, and under such a state of excitement…my nerves and muscles twitched as though electric shocks were continually passing through them. I laid down and tried to sleep–I might as well have tried to fly.
~~Dana Greene, executive officer

The ovoid deck is tidy, trim and flat, 
A shard of soul steamrolled for war 
And riveted to a central spar--
The turret's a kind of revolving hat. 

I am bound by iron as she is bound, 
Having sworn lucre and limb and deed  
Obey what martial duty decrees 
And not the useless bright cry of the hounds. 

With bit and whip and serrated spur
I chased bloodhounds through columned trees
Chased patter of possum and fox and me
In the flying hours before the war.

At sea I'm less than a socketed eye, 
A man of gears and grinding oars  
Who sees the world through slits, nor soars 
When he hears the useless bright cry of the hounds.

A Balloon on the Loose

an episode of the civil war

It was a weird spectacle–that frail, fading oval gliding against the sky, floating in the serene azure, the little vessel swinging silently beneath, and a hundred thousand martial men watching… powerless to relieve or recover. We saw [Gen’l Fitz-John Porter, without a pilot]… no bigger than a child’s toy, clambering up the netting and reaching for the cord.
~~George Alfred Townsend, Campaigns of a Non-Combatant

A balloon suddenly relieved of its gas will always form a half sphere, provided it has a sufficient distance to fall in, to condense a column of air under it. A thousand feet, I presume, would be sufficient.
~~Thaddeus Lowe, Chief Aeronaut, Union Army Balloon Corps

In July when spiders fly swinging in their sacks, 
I go ballooning above the Rappahannock. 

I unsnare sandbag ballast and snag a cable. 
I swing beneath a ball, half-silver, dawdling. 

At the mistaken snap of a rope, I go soaring. 
Soldiers look up to see myself unmooring

Into snaffling clouds, webbed and horrible. 
Ten thousand gasp like safety valves in mourning. 

I drift witnessed.  I cross opposing lines. 
Rebel rifles pop and flower and flak the sky. 

But I am a cloud, a cork, and unbridled I climb. 
Eight-eyed and alone, I write and I spy. 

Richmond hills and Richmond men wave vividly   
Beneath my rapping knuckles, mapped and tiny. 

The town lays squared and gridded, a waffle. 
Front lines are scars in the grasses' ruffles. 

Confederates swarm like dots in a great restless etching 
Of a final edition still being written. 

War draws two sides together in a pucker, 
The last inch all shyness, each waiting for the other. 

Ascent throws the ball into opposite winds, 
The silken sack turns sulkily north now; now flattens. 

Ten thousand gesture and lightly cry "the valve!" 
I spider the netting.  I trigger the latch. 

A white hissing goes up in hues of ovation. 
I land harsh, my chute torn open in nettles and thatch.

One Unday in Shiloh

Lord, when thou wentest out of Seir, when thou marchedst out of the field of Edom, the earth trembled, and the heavens dropped, the clouds also dropped water.
~~Song of Deborah, Judges 5:4

(What like a bullet can undeceive!)
~~Herman Melville, Shiloh: A Requiem

We saw Shiloh church and marched to the bells. 
Nothing was littler than that spire toward God. 
The guns were thunder, and their fire was Hell. 

Was Sherman still sleeping when we came to call? 
Pews were still warm in the April dawn's cold. 
We saw Shiloh church and marched to the bells.

Through pasture and wood, that Sabbath appalled. 
We whipped 'em in pieces to Hornet's Nest road. 
Our guns were thunder, and their fire was Hell. 

We fought with their rifles, slept under their steeple, 
Shadows ourselves after such loss of blood. 
We saw Shiloh church and shots rang the bells. 

"We'll lick 'em tomorrow," rose Grant's voice from a well, 
His cigar pointing back where old Shiloh church stood. 
The clouds were thunder, and their rain was Hell. 

They came on at daybreak, backlit and fell. 
They pressed their advantage, and we cursed our God.    
We ran from the churchyard whipped by the bells. 
Their guns were thunder, and the fire was Hell.

Bread and Tears

Union troops on the road to Gettysburg

The land rolled rich in Maryland 
Golden miles of unmolested grain 
A yeoman God had tilled and laid 
In endless rows on endless plains. 
A farmer came with bales of bread:
Undivided loaves, yeast-burst 
Risen crusts like handfuls of sun. 
     "Walk up, boys, and get your rations! 
     Bread and tears, tears and bread." 

The land seemed hurtless, hale and fed,
Combers rolling gold and green
To feed them all in amassing peace 
Till time and tide and all were one.
Farmer and wife stood upreared as trees
Over the loaves' uneven crests,
Soft bricks pugged and fired and fresh. 
     "Walk up, boys, and get your rations! 
     Bread and tears, tears and bread." 

The farmer's wife was an apple of sun,
Had kneaded and kept the fire just so 
Before the hours of night were done.
"Oh, boys, ye don't know what's before you!
I fear there's many will be mangled soon-- 
Lee's whole army is dead ahead 
And there'll be terrible fighting then." 
     "Walk up, boys, and get your rations! 
     Bread and tears, tears and bread."

Sharpshooter in Repose

They couldn’t hit an elephant at this distance.
~~Union General John Sedgwick just before being shot
by a sniper at Spotsylvania

Cornered in a coign of vantage, my eye is well 
Hidden, dark as a crack in cold boulder rock--
Along my rolled rifle's endless track 
A lead ball bead sweats unshelled, 

An angry star decanted into atmosphere 
And thrown into blood as into an ocean; 
It stops the salt sump of a heart at once 
Against the edgeless engine of its sphere.  

I'd played high among these old orange hills 
Endless days;  looked lazily out to dream, 
Or sip a cracked clay pipe of cornsilk crimson 
In the shelter of summer hours spilled. 

Those boys I now knock down with thunder 
Climbed alien trees and sang in another school 
That marched them down my hollow valley, all 
Unready to touch the lightning in my finger 

Pinched in a small, steel trigger.

Unfolding Harper’s Weekly

The Constitution of the Southern Confederacy has been published. It is a copy of the original Constitution of the United States, with some variations.
~~Harper’s Weekly, The Two Constitutions

No fool but thinks this fool war's a foil 
For his private thought, grievance and toil 
Of thousands a canvas for his picaresque.
Only his tongue's motion gives his mind its rest.

Longfellow in His Study

Longfellow in his study, reading the "terrible news"
Penned no epic about the mess, whose terror 
And error
He so intimately knew.

The Rebel Yell

Others live on in a careless and lukewarm state–not appearing to fill Longfellow’s measure: ‘Into each life, some rain must fall.’
~~Mary Todd Lincoln

My Lank Abe stands commanding where coalblack shadows spar;
Heavy Chaos covers us over, a blanket without stars--
War is folding over my heart, and over all my days;
War is wearing our beautiful country away.
Men in thousands are marching, grey and shadowy,
Their roiling horses thundering, thundering from afar.

At silky midnight the medium returns, with crystal ball
And long tin trumpet floating ghostly in the gaslit pall;
And Willie's lisping voice buzzing there--to the life!
Each dim word returns to my breast like a knife,
Each dim dawn returns to the sound of the marchers' marshal fifes.
The coffin that carried my heart away was waxed and small.

Battleside at noon in our folding chairs, we watch the long lines 
Approach and cross, blue and grey, threads on a loom divine;
Threads red and mud soon enough, soon enough.
Always now my wronged, longing heart is crying out: enough!
Always it is Willie I see atop the high chargers, out riding in the rough;
Always I hear his hollow voice arising--in every Rebel yell.

Cherry Ripe

I will not be afraid of death and bane,
Till Birnam forest come to Dunsinane.
~~Macbeth

At the head of the snake, song broke out:
"Cherry ripe, cherry ripe, ripe I cry"
And various haloos resounded, wry
Laughs as fellas skedaddled about
Over fieldstone walls, sniping cherries, pop
Pop pop back at men still marching,
Whipping to hand sharp camp hatchets:
"Cherry chop, cherry chop;  chop, chop, chop." 

Loaded down limbs swung red minie-balls
Like Christmas come to Dunsinane,
And cherries flying and mouths open
And a hail of wet spit pits over all!
Cherries for the officers riding without stop,
Cherries for the soldiers marching,
Singing handy with their hatchets:
"Cherry chop, cherry chop;  chop, chop, chop."

Antlered now, and merry, we descended
Between declivities of hills, ripe ripe
Ripe as the master sergeant's stripes,
Toward a valley town defended--
Tired ourselves of singing as we looped
The final little hill we rounded
And their distant cannon sounded:
"Cherry chop, cherry chop;  chop, chop, chop."

Night Ride
(Toward Gettysburg)

Whole regiments slept in the saddle, their faithful animals keeping the road unguided.
~~J.E.B. Stuart

At first the harness' small jangle-and-dangle and ease 
Played smooth music through the moody close wood; 
But after the harsh rasp of moonless miles these 
Musics offended, an unrelenting irk-itch of sound. 

I pulled down my slouch cap, pulled up my coat collar, 
Crossed reins over pommel, lost worry to darkness, 
And let my horse follow what horse he would follow 
Until turns turned again to blue moonlight through leaves. 

I dreamed when I dreamed of the slap-dash of the sea, 
Restless crests of the waves, the deepness of being. 
Dolphin and merman, finned and webbed, we rode the sea's 
Symphony: not flying, not falling, just floating....

A whinny of raindrops woke us much later, shook horse 
And rider out of their doze, mists raising fine steam 
From hillside's frail dawn, the clopped trail drawn loose--
First from the forest, and last, mile by mile, from my dreams.

The Midnight Ride of Abraham Lincoln; or,
The Tale of the Two Old Abes

A nearly verbatim transcript made by his friend Ward Hill Lamon. The Oval Office, midnight

I have something to tell you, Ward! Lock the door.
You know I always thought you an idiot 
Fit for a strait jacket for your apprehensions  
Of my personal danger from assassination.  
You also know the way we skulked into this city
In the first place, has been a source of shame 
And regret to me, for it did look so cowardly!
Now, I don't propose to make you my father-confessor 
Or acknowledge a change of heart, yet I am free  
To admit that just now I don't know what to think.... 
Tonight, about 11 o'clock, I went out riding 
Old Abe, as you call him, to the Soldiers' Home  
Alone, and when I returned to the foot of the hill  
Leading back, I was just jogging along  
At a slow gait, immersed in deep thought,  
Contemplating what was next to happen  
In the unsettled state of current affairs,  
When suddenly I was aroused--lifted, I may say  
Out of my saddle as well as out of my wits--  
By the report of a rifle, and the gunner  
Not fifty yards from where my contemplations  
Ended, and my accelerated transit began.  
My erratic namesake, with little warning,  
Gave proof of decided dissatisfaction 
At the racket, and with one reckless bound he
Unceremoniously separated me from my eight-dollar plug-hat,  
Without any assent, expressed or implied,  
On my part.  At break-neck speed we soon  
Arrived in a haven of safety.  Meanwhile I was left  
In doubt as to whether death was more desirable  
From being thrown from a runaway federal horse,  
Or as the tragic result of a rifle-ball fired  
By a disloyal bushwhacker in the middle of the night.
I tell you there's no time on record to equal that  
Made by the two Old Abes on that occasion.  
The historic ride of John Gilpin, and Henry Wilson's  
Memorable display of bareback equestrianship  
On a stray army mule from the scene of battle  
At Bull Run, a year ago, are nothing in comparison,  
Either in point of time made or in ludicrous pageantry.  
My only advantage over these worthies was
In my having no observers.  I can truthfully say  
That one of the Abes was frightened on this occasion,  
But modesty forbids my mentioning which of us  
Is entitled to that honor. This whole thing seems farcical.
Yet, here's the hat, and that's the hole!  No good  
Can result at this time from giving it publicity.

Out on a Scout

Let’s slip out on a scout; I’ll ride your horse, and you can ride mine.
~~J.E.B. Stuart to his clerk, Eggleston

He was enamored of my horse 
And we rode, I supposed then, 
For the pleasure of riding our course 
On an animal which pleased him. 

As stars were beginning to fade 
We leaned in and had a race; 
The war before us no more than a road, 
Danger a wind in our face. 

Our paces blurred pines as we passed 
Beyond the pickets' caution; 
We rode into dawn at the last 
Like mist over the mountain. 

The general gazed only forward, 
His form like a balancing cat's; 
He spoke to me as we sortied, 
His unearthly voice detached: 

"What are scouts who peer and run 
But sparks thrown off a match? 
And battle lines little more than one 
Spark that happens to catch?"

Little Round Top

I have never returned to Emmitsburg, but it would astonish me very little to hear that the two armies had gone to Gettysburg to fight on account of the miracle performed by St. Joseph, intervening in favor of these pious damsels.
~~ Colonel Philippe Regis de Trobriand, remembering the
nuns of St. Joseph’s Convent of Emmitsburg, a few
miles away from Gettysburg

Ten thousand angels upon a pin 
Whirlwinded little "Round Top" whistling 
Death by the minute fifteen decades ago
Where our placid picnic spreads its afternoon 
Visiting green Gettysburg again-- 
Pickett's charge drawn inevitably up 
As an anchor from the sleeping sea.... 
Ten thousand angels in infernal clouds 
Flashed bayonets like wingtips in the smoke 
Where I rummage for a final cigarette 
To put our wine and sausages to bed, 
History re-folded neat as napkins in our basket.
We shotgun stale heels of bread-ends downhill
To the instant screech of skirling birds.
The knuckled minie ball you roll perhaps 
Had pinned some farm-boy soldier through the hand 
Or aced a captain's eye from its socket.... 
But the lounging lemon clouds surrounding us
Show nothing of the web in which we're stitched 
In the skinned wind of the world.

Lee’s Retreat

Seventeen miles the badgered men 
Bent greyly southward, beaten back-- 
Ambulance and stretcher burdened full 
Past Lee, who stood upon the track 
Murmuring those words like water: 
      "You fought nobly, none better; 
       I'm sorry; the fault is mine for all."  

Gettysburg grew small, turned blue 
Behind them, cannonade and crack 
Of rifles silent as the hills; 
Letters home filled with the endless wreck  
Of lives interred by slaughter: 
      "You fought nobly, none better; 
       I'm sorry; the fault is mine for all."  

Lincoln's words had not yet arisen 
To redeem the crisis, ruin and rack, 
To give to men drowned red, who fell, 
Some rippled pulse of meaning back-- 
Only those words that fell like water: 
      "You fought nobly, none better; 
       I'm sorry; the fault is mine for all."

IN MEDIAS RES

What’s dying but a second wind?
~~Yeats, Tom O’Roughley

In Medias Res

A runner arrives at Lee’s side after the failure of Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg, July 3, 1863

My heart is pinched, my eyes are dead 
With great sweat as the battlefield shrinks 
Littler than this folding tabletop of maps. 
The high ground's denied us, cemetery 
Ridge and seminary ridge and the twin 
Roundtops bristling blue above our grey 
Fog of men twisting listless in the valleys. 
Long the thought and long the march 
That brought us raiding north through cherry 
Lanes, and wheatfields rife with grain. 
Tomorrow revolves the calendar round 
To Independence Day, and we may yet 
Set new fireworks in American skies! 
The lines of battle are a hash of graphs, 
All our rebel arrows bending back 
Like fountain spouts to their hidden source. 
Defeat is a beginning too!  The hazard 
Cast and failed returns the dice to hand.... 
Choking smokes boil gold with sunset, 
God's driving rays divided and feebled 
As troops of angels fall uncaught to Hell. 
Whip the stolen swine toward Richmond! 
Vast patchworks of cattle low homeward, 
And endless bins of raided goods are gone 
Down south to clothe our bare necessity. 
What we've garnered here will keep us 
In peaches through the wailing winter, 
And blot war office ledgers black.  Even 
Jeff Davis' rail-thin visage will fatten 
By the thickness of a smile when these 
Long columns are totaled and summed. 
Pickett!  I see the charge I ordered, 
Noble and doomed, following your sword 
No more than a glint above the tarry tide 
Of blood and men, and death and men. 
I thought surely--

Lincoln

A long frock coat, a stovepipe hat
Straight as a core of coal,
A long black ribbon at the top,
The ax-drawn face hanging there
As if Old Testament prophets
Had burned to a single stare.

	Ghost to ghost, those shoving men
	Push heaven to the ground.

Gettysburg incurred a debt
Blood's spontaneous blot put out;
That no wrong word, no marring phrase
Or disjointed look would come
He held a vigil of long silence--
All the simpleness of a sum.

	Ghost to ghost, those shoving men
	Push heaven to the ground.

Because the Union had grown sick,
That fine, long hand atrophied
That had put the British from the field
And shovelled back the Styx,
A single, revolutionary mind
Clacked truth from the burial bricks.

	Ghost to ghost, those shoving men
	Push heaven to the ground.

"All men are created equal,"
A troubled voice had said it;
Calm lightnings play the mortal storm
Where dead limbs had bled it.
Flies flit and alight among the faces
Torn by universal wishes.

	Ghost to ghost, those shoving men
	Push heaven to the ground.

VICKSBURG AND AFTER

We’ll teach them dancing fine and neat
With cannon, sword, and bayonet.
~~Dixie All Right

And the Master Runned Away

The scritch-scritch of the chickens 
Is just the same 
As the scritch of chickens 
Yesterday. 

"Them Union tramps is tampin'  
Down on Vi'kberg this very night,"  
Ol' Master said, and sure enough 
De thunder was a fright! 

His fine buff travelin' hat 
Settin' on its peg 
Was gone when the moanin' come--  
Guess ol' Master used his legs! 

Smoke and mist on the river 
Blow this way n' that; 
But I never seen my master run 
Till his peg lost its hat. 

The scritch-scritch of the chickens 
Ain't the same 
As the scritch of chickens 
Yesterday.

“I Am a Verb”

The fact is I think I am a verb instead of a personal pronoun. A verb is anything that signifies to be; to do; or to suffer.
I signify all three.
~~U.S. Grant

I am a verb. Wait, waiting, to wait. 
Vicksburg terrifies me to my fingertips,  
A sawmill blade set spinning to split  
Me intemperately in two, if I 
Cannot mollify this gnat impatience,  
Invisible and ever-present against my skin. 
Impatience!  I hear the word only as a mad  
Imprecation against my rolling going on. 
Was McClellan's awful caution a virtue then?
God Himself could not command that man 
Out of his dithering, hither-and-thithering 
Of flying supplies, and men cemented 
To their posts, shining boots to a pupil-sheen. 
All the logic of supply is "scarcity."  
Pile high the warehouse against the day 
Bitter shots ring among the shoe-stuffed shelves-- 
Let epaulettes lie in golden ranks unearned; 
Tons of bullets packed like peas for porridge; 
Headless hats that wait in safety for the rain.... 
Not I, not I.  To live cossetted in a scabbard 
When war's molten lava is at the gate-- 
Boots!  The way this cold and slowing river  
Meets us, mud and current to the knees, 
Claims our long boots with a loving suck 
As my forward scrim of men attempt 
A snoring corner of Vicksburg's embankment. 
Look at the scene night and river give me: 
Sixty-thousand Confederates stoppered-up 
In walls as great as Troy's, cannons a lance 
Of steel to keep me back.  To wait, to watch, 
While each least imp of breeze implores the bell, 
Ring!  Ring says the hammer to the anvil-- 
I the hammer, Vicksburg the only anvil. 
I am the fire, Vicksburg the limitless tinder! 
I the guillotine, Vicksburg the hapless head. 
I am a verb--
They also serve who can't stand to wait.

Cannon Are Ringing Out;
or, Melt the Bells

Melt the bells, melt the bells,
… transmute the evening chimes
Into war’s resounding rhymes
~~F.Y. Rockett, written when Gen’l Beauregard appealed
to Kentuckians to contribute bells to melt into cannon

Bells, not bullets made of dullard stuff, 
But bright metal hammered alive enough 
To leave red forges quick with sound 
When lifted far enough from ground, 
When into belfries above choirs lifted. 

To the cause, the cause, they fall conscripted, 
Torn from skies their songs had christened 
By hands no longer paired in prayer 
To deform their voices' joyful playing, 
To bring their singing beings to the fire. 

Broken bells beaten new defend the town, 
Iron echoes of their sounding rounds 
Ring fire to the bloody ground, 
Keep every enemy at bay but time.
Time remembers the silver lilt of chimes.

Morgan’s Great Raid

Those who swam with horses, unwilling to be laggard, not halting to dress, seized their cartridge boxes and guns and dashed upon the enemy. The strange sight of naked men engaging in combat amazed the enemy.
~~Bennett Young

Hoist Morgan on your shoulders, boys, 
And round the campfire drag him-- 
Bragg orders us to stay, 
And today we disobey him. 
Drink to John Morgan and to Duke, 
Drink champagne from your boot! 

Rain delayed us, picking daisies; 
Tom Quick broke his right rein arm, 
Such omens won't detain us. 
Morgan's raiders, swarm! 
Drink to John and drink to Duke, 
Drink champagne from your boot! 

We break for Brandenburg 
To ferry the swift Ohio river; 
Such wild crossing's easy, urged 
By Kentucky's blue defenders.  
Drink to John and drink to Duke, 
Drink champagne from your boot!

2.

We moved rapidly through six or seven towns without resistance, and tonight lie down for a little while with our bridles in our hands.
~~Bennett Young

Ellsworth, knot the telegraph lines 
With false report and false surmise-- 
To sit such fine horses is to ride 
Streaming dawn astride an arrow!
Burn the bridges and pester flocks 
Where hens pile eggs and barns are stocked;
Trace Kentucky's hump through Ohio's wilds, 
And leave the rich fields fallow. 

Guard Indianapolis and Columbus, 
Like statues stand at empty doors. 
We'll raid defenseless shores 
Subterfuge and guileless ruse 
Have left, like magic casements, open. 
Our fingers grow rings, and our saddles 
Go belled;  ham hangs from our bridles, 
Who on no kindnesses depend. 

Down Jackson streets in ladies veils 
(To defeat July and make it mild), 
With cobalt bolts of stolen cloth 
And goods of equal lustre sail 
The lightning regiments of death. 
With railyards wrecked behind, and more 
Devastation on call before, 
They strike with steel and stealth.

3.

As the red flames created by the great burning timbers rose skyward, they illumined the entire valley, and in the flickering shadows which they cast for several miles around… huge, weird forms….
~~Bennett Young

Bridges burned before us, and bridges burned behind. 
Men asleep on horses, and the horses falling down. 
Rivers, rivers, rivers, and the Ohio running high. 

The chase is on in earnest that'd been but seek-and-hide. 
No time to cook the stolen meat, or brush proud horses down. 
Bridges burned before us, and bridges burned behind. 

"Axes to the fore," the cry goes wide and high-- 
Another narrow roadway, and every tree chopped down. 
Rivers, rivers, rivers, and the Ohio running high. 

Pot-shots from the farmers, their wives leave poisoned pies. 
Man and horse move hollow-eyed, and night and day are one. 
Bridges burned before us, and bridges burned behind. 

The brazen bugle's revellie blows ugly and unkind. 
"Our last day in Ohio, men, in Virginny's our next town."  
Rivers, rivers, rivers, and the Ohio running high. 

At last we're at the river;  all is black and we are blind. 
Are Union gunboats churning round Buffington Island now? 
Bridges burned before us, and our bridges burned behind. 
Rivers, rivers, rivers, and the Ohio running high.

Snowball Salute

Snow came with Christmas, filling the camp with quiet. 
Sharpshooters trespassing skillful through the woods 
Licked snowflakes from their frozen sights and were silent. 
Morning began with coffee in the tin, and was good. 

Hardtack, foraged fowl and a garnish of shucked peas 
Done with before our prayers were said, or thought of-- 
A dishrag of brownbread shining the plate with ease 
As Major Anderson began to stir: "Look smart, boys, look smart." 

He marched us dizzy double-time, and we had a hunch: 
Here strutted a martinet in a polished boot, 
A ten-cent picture soldier not worth a punch-- 
Till Old Billy hatched a plan to ferret out the truth. 

Major Anderson tiptoed tautly along the drawn line, 
His beardless cheek shaved close as a new spring apple, 
His black Maine hat as he passed, a target "as fine 
As it was tall," hissed Billy as he bent grinning to scrape 

A quick snowball from the scarves the night had left-- 
Not too powdery--and flicked it, and it burst and popped 
Off the major's hat with a hop, which his gloved hands caught 
Beneath a reddened face pursed and contemplative and soft. 

Then a staticy laugh cracked at the back of the group        
And ran like lightning through a frozen pond, smiles 
Unzipping everywhere, laughter's thunder following up 
Until even the major was laughing after a while. 

His eyes glittered down the elated line: "Atten-hut!"  
And all laughter clamped shut like a splint. "Tell you men what-- 
I think you snow-ballers need a wee bit more target 
Practice. Y'un's nearly missed me! Bill, why'n't you paste your hat 

On that fence post yonder."  Billy did the whipped-pup walk 
And carefully placed his brand new two-dollar Hardee hat 
As we shouldered arms, watching him brush the black nap 
Goodbye. "I suggest you men aim at the bugle crest." 

And we did as Major Anderson suggested, the whole troop. 
In a minute, wasn't much post, let alone hat, left but scraps. 
Myself, I guess I clipped the bugle's loop.  As for the truth? 
Well, let's just say, after that day, Old Billy always "looked sharp" 

And snapped the first salute.

Jefferson Davis on His Sick Bed

Your letter found me in the depth of gloom… disasters have shrouded our cause.
~~Jefferson Davis, New Year’s Day 1862

It is the old story of the sick lion who even the jackal can kick without fear.
~~A Davis supporter

Varina, here, hand the hissing stack of papers hither. 
I've more correspondence going out by pony to Bragg 
Mired in Murfreesboro, his ranks fanged with vipers. 

The Union's first retreat has mired and snagged, 
Casting black iron from the heights across Stones River 
To spike and sink all hopes of once-boastful Bragg. 

Whatever else gets that gimlet man so hated, 
Where he puts his screws they anchor and bite, 
Keeping thin timber to timber sturdily mated. 

Take this poltice of words for Polk, too.  May the sight 
Of it renew the sweetness of a friendship abated by
Distance, and help him take Bragg's burrs more lightly. 

How go the Cumberland roses we planted last spring? 
I have not been up once this week of days, helping 
Deepen earth, or prune to health the tender things. 

If only Bragg's first telegram hadn't heralded victory! 
How much more bitter the dregs, more dark the clouds 
Hang on us now--those once blinding skies an effrontery 

To this minute's remembrance of them!  Cry aloud, 
Dear Varina, as I must make these inks crawl and cry, 
Each cold word drawn out to web the page in blood.

Harriet Tubman in Ecstasy

Tubman underwent brain surgery in Boston’s Mass. Gen’l in 1898 to alleviate sleeplessness, pains and ‘buzzing’

If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.
~~Emily Dickinson

I'll bite my bullet, doc, if you but bite your tongue! 
I've seen a man in tearless pain grimace lead 
Nearly in two while the surgeon took his leg. 
What served for his anesthesia will serve for me. 
My brain cannot sleep, and all I've seen disables 
My eyes from closing--visions and varieties 
Of reality beyond a mortal's power to name. 
I'll point and be silent before the throne of God. 
Take your knife and knowledge and carve 
A little darkness in my skull where sleep may dwell, 
And I curl there like a possum, too, at noon. 
All my life I've had the sleeping fits, sleep 
Slipping under my eyelids day or night; 
At least, since that overseer knocked a knot 
Of iron against my head when I wouldn't nab 
Augustus as he took to his heels in flight. 
"Catch your own fish," I told him plain, and he 
Answered plainly, too.  It wasn't too long after that 
That visions came unbidden, green-edged 
And lively as a willow in a windstorm, 
A million ribbons breathing, beating, 
And on each a hidden meaning writ revealed. 
Some things are more than the thing they seem,
Said one.  A man's tongue will look more purple 
When he lies, inscribed upon another ribbon. 
Oh!  I feel you now, the clapping clack of bone 
Where the top of my head is coming off! 
Old brains, greet the very air! Pray you find 
Your cupful of oblivion again when sealed back in. 
Sweet the cerebrations of ignorant sleep. 
The surgeon touches a node of me, and I 
Smell candles.  I see the faces of my brothers 
As I try and talk them North.  Follow me, 
Ben and Harry, follow the North Star.  No matter 
The miles, we'll find the rainbow's end, I've seen it. 
And now I see them turning back defeated, 
And feel myself turtle on, small and hard 
As this sour bullet between my teeth. 
Again and again the lighting divides my mind. 
Each strike emancipates a moonlit escapade. 
Varied and vivid the hands I held, traipsing 
The underground railroad house to house 
To Canada after the 1850 compromise that kept 
Blood off the streets a while, and my people 
Staked and abandoned in a Southern sun 
A decade past their liberation date!  Follow me, 
To the green land above Mason-Dixon's line, sky 
A color unrecorded in the dreams of the unfree. 
Again the finding knife intrudes, and another 
Memory rears searing--down the Combahee 
River we are raiding, those tall good soldiers, 
Faces dark like mine, solemn over Union blue, 
And I commanding, salvaging slaves by the boatload, 
Unrivaled behind-the-lines spies every one. 
"Part the waters, Moses!" I heard the babies cry. 
Women running with a child at hip and little ones 
Worn round their necks like grain sacks. 
I still laugh to see that woman who slung a pig 
In a bag, and led a second on a leash, black 
And white Beauregard and Jeff Davis as we 
Named 'em on the creaky crowded steamer. 
How those pigs did wrestle and cavort! 
Over 700 Gen'l Rufus counted. Over 700 saved 
And brought by creek and stream to Freedomland. 
A wind is running through me, surgeon, and 
A scalpel of wit unrolls the final writ of ribbon: 
Women's suffrage, a voice and a vote. 
That, I'll lend my life to, too, and gladly  
Emancipate sister after sister to vote  
The Republican ticket, straight.  "Listen folks,"  
I'd say, "I freed thousands of slaves in my day,  
And could have freed thousands more, to boot, 
If only those poor souls had known that they  
Were slaves."  Me and Susan B. can see all people 
Share essentialities from fingertips to spine. 
I'm sure you understand, my friend, who's held 
A battering human heart in the bareness 
Of your human hand.

Stars Above Tennessee; or,
The Ragged Stars

I see the stars at bloody war
~~ Mad Tom’s Song

Terror and courage and the rest 
Arrive and don't tell why; 
Ten thousand good men lost 
In one toss of arms. 
Terrible the day today, and 
Graveyard night the same. 

In the lee of a watery ditch 
Beset by sweat and worse, 
The cavalryman unhorsed 
Drinks from the moon hitched 
At his waist and sighs: 
May tomorrow never come.

May night unroll forever
Its ragged battle-flag;
May day and its great heat
Never crease horizon's rim.
Roll me up in your rag of stars,
O night, cool and everlasting!

Landing in the Crater

The rich grain was standing high in the surrounding fields. The harvest was almost ripe, but the harvesters had fled.
~~Horace Porter, Grant’s aide during Petersburg siege

It was the saddest affair I have witnessed in the war.
~~Ulysses S. Grant

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;
Or close the wall up with our English dead.
~~ Henry V

"Go on in and see what the matter is."  
So the miner went, hunched, with a candle in his hat 
Tracing the exhausted ash of a fuse, 
Facing extermination if a spark 
Should show ahead in the low-beamed tunnel. 
Could the fuse prepared have sputtered out? 
The coughing candle showed a zone of hole, 
Soughing almost soundless in interred dark. 
At last the tail of fuse, inertly unlit 
That had paused the thousands set to attack 
Twisted back and forth in the miner's fingers 
Insisting a new length of fuse into place 
And rolling back two hundred feet to find 
Colonel Pleasants rapping a pack of matchsticks 
Against his fidgeting thigh. "Have at it, sir."  
Thist! went the matchstick and hist! went the fuse 
Sparkling uneasily into the interior gloom. 

Hark! An expectant stillness enfilades the field, 
A hush as was before the world was made, 
And us no more than cosmic dust, a breath 
Unbreathed, a nothingness from nothingness 
Bequeathed.  So stood all on tiptoe in predawn 
Dark, dawn herself but a secondhand's sweep away. 
Sharp the intake of breath, a boiling pan, 
When every Union eye perceived the blast 
--Clean as a cutout from the now dawning sky-- 
A volcano of ruin moving like a freight train 
Voluminously upward, and lightnings 
Veined eyeball-like within it, roving painterly 
Spikes of angry orange throughout the mass 
Great as a cathedral of spewed earth, 
Great as an Iceland geyser filled with arms and legs 
And cannon bright as gilded toothpicks, 
Spinning compass needles gone to Hell. 

"Forward!" cried the sergeant, and the captain. 
"Forward!" cried the colonel, and the general too. 
And forward went the men into a crater 
Frowsey grey with endless dusts, till they 
Were grey themselves and looked half burnt-up, 
Unsure with every step they were not ghosts 
Hovering above a pock-marked moonscape; 
Aberrations of a living grave dug by fire,
Poor soldiers caught in a whirlpool of flame
Or Inferno's undertow;  walking dust
In a waste landscape of the unlabeled dead, 
One face the same as the next in the end. 
The crater unmanned the redan and left 
A scar, raw and bleak, between bewildered 
Confederates gawping gape-mouthed at dawn,
Unsinging grey kingbirds as they clung
To the fractured walls they held, grey wings
Toward a screeching sky, flightless, lit up 
Themselves by sunrise, and sighted by 
The busy shells of Union men bristling blue 
Along their enemy redoubt, a hundred guns 
Strong, and just one hundred yards away. 

"Thirty feet deep if an inch, I'd say. Thirty feet 
Of dirt and death, an open grave if we 
Don't mush on and take the little hill, that green 
Mount behind the lines of all their battleworks
History hasn't quite spiked full of tombstones
And victory or defeat will paint white as bones--
Blanford cemetery, an oasis in the air, 
Plain, with an easy excess of unturned grass,  
Still filigreed with leafing trees, and a view 
Full-on of downtown Petersburg, street by 
Street as if snapping a map.  And there we'll 
Point directions out with artillery and bayonet 
Eviscerating resistance from our crowned 
Crowsnest, our precipice of destruction." 
So high officers prophesied and prayed, 
So stood looking at the Crater's smoking gash 
Full of hope and silence-- 

                             But in the pit 
Fools were standing, gulled and moored, not led, 
Not guided and inspired;  acres of riflemen 
Wild to attack, but hamstrung on the leash 
Incompetence had necked them with, as if 
An ominous noose had been laid out by fate. 
The Crater was too deep to leap once entered. 
Later, many men were unburied here, chained 
And damned, if black, or doomed to Andersonville 
And blamed for war's forlorn continuance. 
But here and now, all's a roar: confusion! 
Shut from that happy pasture behind the lines, 
Thousands churned in the gulping hole, cliffs 
Of sand surrounding them, drowning them-- 
Tumult of guns, horrible faces half buried 
Throughout muddy waves of earthen wreckage. 
People, even here, in this hole, found heroes 
Equal to the horror, the hallelujah  
Of brave souls rearing to their uppermost, 
Doves outspread against the shotgun's buckshot. 

Traverses, hidden trenches, a ruin of wood 
Spavined the Crater and men madly crept 
Sheer walls to bear their muskets against 
Fear-stuck foes in grey who, slow, reconvened  
At the precipitous lip, as at a pool  
That invited diving in, brimmed with blue. 
Shot, and rocks, and mortar soon poured down, 
Hot terror deboning the bluecoats' cool. 
Officers shouted themselves hoarse, swinging swords, 
Offering themselves to the fire to upend 
The soupbowl of soldiers and take the hill 
"Up there!" a quarter-mile, or less, green 
And trim, a haven like unto heaven then.
When the colored troops marched the rim's flanks 
(At last released to fight who had trained first),
Fast and keeping good order in the maelstrom
They mustered at the Crater's far end 
And most of those below began to follow them 
Halfway to the graveyard, through sniper fire 
Laughing at their lateness to the task. 
Their battering forward soon boomeranged--
Bare-knuckled though they fought, they failed.
Back the black men tumbled to the cauldron, 
Attacked by an encircling scythe of grey
That stabbed them surrendering, or shivved 
Like crabs those who showed black backs to them.
Black regiments at their crest were halted;
Back they were turned, one upon the other,
Unsaved by fate, by luck;  returned they were,
The brave few following, all were returned--
Pushed, rushed into the pit, into the pit
Crushed as waves by waves are crushed till only
Seas are seen, are heard, one great clap of
Chaos, one being, one terrible discord. 

Carnage incontestable was occurring 
Cartridge after cartridge in the Crater, 
Yet not far off stood Colonel Pleasants, 
Hip against the battery's small wall 
Worrying his watch fob in distracted thought 
Sorry perhaps for having started it all
Listening to a fellow miner from Schuylkill 
Listing how he'd "Blow the damned fort up quick" 
With sufficient shaft and charge to do it. 
With that, Colonel Pleasants surveyed the scene: 
Battlements like interlocking teeth faced  
Battlements--a trench war grim and endless  
Chewing men and munitions to a cud, 
Swallowing all.  Was there a place these two 
Ferocities touched, an incisor that he 
Fearlessly could tug?  The engineer walked 
Zigzags day and night with his theodolite  
Digging practice shafts with bayonets, camp picks 
Hammered to a miner's measure for deep 
Untrammeled work--it could be done, by God! 
Here as near as kissing came the eager walls, 
Here the slope would drain, the high ground be obtained 
If but the enemy's pale fang was pulled, 
If abatis and barbican were culled. 
Why not begin in earnest, get the brass behind it?  
The way was plain as day, and today the day. 
Swiftly flew the work, there yawned the gap. 
Without meaning to, the colonel's feet 
Danced a tango step, and the loop returned 
Dancer and dance to face unpleasantness: 
The boys were overwhelmed by bruising blows; 
The soil was eating up the fellows now, 
Consuming what the firefight refused; 
One son made a motion of obeisance 
And pulled a dead man from the mire, laid 
Hand over hand in a crossed last rest. 
Damn all the generals who let them 
Slam forward only to teeter into the pit: 
Damn Ledlie, damn Burnside, damn Ferrero!
Damn them, damn them, damn them, damn them! 
Damn all generals who conspire to kill 
All men on every side for all of time: 
Jolly devils who only long for death, 
Death before them and death behind.      

Death was on the minds of men the night before, 
Stitching names and regiments into their coats, 
Such as who could.  The black troopers singing 
Songs belonging only to themselves, fires' 
Long shadows and tall light casting over all 
A beautiful and solemn mahogany, 
The soulful sounds drawing awkward men 
To quiet attentiveness to hear how goes 
The spirit of men meant for the first push, 
Meant to lift up arms against oppressors 
Wanton in their crimes.  How then sang these men? 
Their voices lifted up as one vast organ 
Choice and melodious praising creation-- 
Bitterness had no purchase in their souls, 
Little cared how plantation days wore away 
Simple dignity with outrageous assault. 
Civilly they faced their final day, and sang: 

I know moonrise,
I know star-rise--
    Lay dis body down.

I walk in de moonlight,
I walk in de starlight--
    Lay dis body down.

My soul and your soul
Will meet again one day--
    When I lay dis body down.

The Peacemakers

Over the rebel parapet near the old mine crater came a white flag, with a bugler to blow a parley…. By the mysterious army grapevine, word went up and down the rival lines: the Confederacy was sending a peace commission to meet Lincoln….
~~ Bruce Carton, A Stillness at Appomattox

We desire peace at any sacrifice save that of honour and independence.
~~Jefferson Davis

Let us discuss securing peace to the people of one common country.
~~Abraham Lincoln

Late came the day,
                    and the sulky cattle lowing. 
Late the table laid,
                    and late the peace-seeds sowing. 

Three men step across
                   Southern battlements;
Three men arrive,
                   and Union lines must part.

Three cheers arise,
                   arise in ragged grey;
And three hoarse cheers more
                   in soiled blue reply.

Down Hampton Roads
                   a riverboat rolls waiting--
Lincoln's long shadow there
                   in the picture window sitting.

And last there came
                   dovewhite ladies in a row.
Late, late in the day,
                   and the sulky cattle lowing.

Three men gone away,
                   and weeping ladies waving.
Late, late in the day
                   the peace-seeds sowing.

Mrs. Bickerdyke’s Battle;
or, Milk and Eggs

When one surgeon dared to ask where she received permission to do what she was doing, Bickerdyke retorted she was given orders by ‘the Lord God Almighty. Have you anything that ranks higher than that?’

Hospital days and hard tack, 
Chalk milk and sour eggs 
Were the bane of Mrs. Bickerdyke 
Mopping brows and counting legs. 

In the Union's Memphis hospital 
Each sheet was straight and whole; 
Quick-attended was each man and boy 
Until he died or rose. 

"Milk and eggs, milk and eggs!" 
Cried every feeble mouth; 
But milk and eggs could not be had 
In the war-torn, war-poor South. 

Mrs. Bickerdyke was small, was fierce, 
And had a soul of ‘sterner stuff;'  
With iron spine, eyes clear of tears: 
"We'll soon have enough." 

The epauletted surgeons scoffed,
"Those enemy lines are garrote wire 
Pulled tight at supply line necks." 
But those who coughed knew well the while 

Who would fill their cups and plates: 
"The milk will be as a river, 
The eggs a flotilla upon it-- 
Mrs. Bickerdyke will deliver!" 

Through the rifles of Johnny Reb 
Her tracks ran frail as lace; 
At the slaughterhouse of Chicago 
Mrs. Bickerdyke unveiled her case: 

"Our blue men lay wounded, wanting 
No more than milk and eggs; 
Throw wide your pantry doors, Chicago 
And give me what I beg!" 

Thirty days she was gone away 
To siphon milk and gather eggs; 
On the thirty-first her train arrived 
Lowing, topped by cackling crates. 

Mrs. Bickerdyke beamed, wreathed 
In haloes of hissing steam: 
"These are Union cows, boys, 
And loyal, abolitionist hens!"

Quiet at Camp

Without music there would be no army.
~~Genl. Robt. E. Lee

The campfire throws faces, form after form: 
Faces adept at battle, or unready for the first charge 
Rise and recede in the unsteady flame. 

No time for thought when the lieutenant calls, 
When the barrage hails fate into your lap. 
All's disarray;  endless disturbance of a waterfall. 

But now the tents are pitched, the camp at peace; 
Exhausted soldiers lie fallen in a snow of sleep, 
A calm rustled darkness of leaf on leaf. 

Indelible things have fallen to every boy and man: 
Sins of ages a few torn years must mend--  
Shoulder-to-shoulder the blue, unready regiments stand. 

But now no fife of patriots taunts the heart, 
And all the soft fire's lofty murmur is gathering in 
Face after face: angry, ecstatic, mute.

A Nest of Copperheads; or,
Capt. Hines Takes a Holiday

Chicago graveyard. Democrat convention, 1864

Millions for defense; not a dollar or a man for aggressive and offensive civil war.
~~Clement Vallandigham, founder of the Copperheads

[My escape with Morgan] owes something to the fact that I had just completed the reading of Victor Hugo’s “Les Misérables,” containing such vivid delineations of the wonderful escapes of Jean Valjean….
~~Capt. Thomas Hines, Confederate raider

Close your eyes and swear the oath, Vallandigham, 
The Peace-Knights of the Golden Circle need you. 
Hand me that tracing paper, Beall, we've got 
Another Democrat voter mouldering in his grave here, 
Shrapnelled to smithereens at Antietam, looks like. 
Repeat after me, Clement, "I hereby swear: surrender 
Before war. Peace above prosperity, and the defeat 
Of Abraham Africanus above all!"  Well done, now 
Take off that blindfold, here's charcoal and paper. 
I'll unfold a plot complete, my sixty stout 
Confederate conferees and me tidily devised 
Last month in Toronto.  We've arsenal enough 
For Rock Island penitentiary and the six thousand 
Good men in grey snaffled harmless there. Six thousand! 
You know I snaked John Morgan out of the Ohio Pen, 
Well, I'll charm this passel of greybacks free as well. 
Just keep listening and collect those votes for peace.
Cold feet, Clem?  Think what mighty shoes we'll fill
After such long years of wearying, rearing war!
Copperheads, don't those liberty pennies on your lapels 
Mean anything in this degraded age?  I'll need 
Five hundred minuteman Chicagoans, any who 
Avoided Yankee service on principle will do. With them, 
Moonlight and luck, we'll have six thousand merry 
Raiders ripping up track and blowing up armories 
From Lake Michigan to the Mississippi in no time. 
Howdy-do, the Union will sure sue for peace then, 
McClellan run into Washington on the peace plank 
Vallandigham has penned with widows' tears, 
A bald eagle feather for a quill--all his hiss 
Of rights everlasting, rights to secede and breathe free. 
Gather me those papers, Buell.  Here, hand over. 
Look at these new votes we've stacked nigh high 
As a Gutenberg bible to swear a president in upon.

Sherman’s March to the Sea

See here, [Gen’l] Cox, burn a few barns occasionally, as you go along. I can’t understand those signal flags, but I know what smoke means.
~~Wm. Tecumseh Sherman

Sherman stalked the dining room,
Lush upon a high Atlanta hill; 
The wallpaper, ornate and still, 
Writhed fire in the reflected gloom. 
Bayonetted cotton floods the street 
With pale, incandescent heat. 

Shouted voices spread the news 
But could not outrun the light 
Flicker-cast toward Georgia night 
Of his march's burning fuse. 
What shone revealed, what dread, what grace, 
In each illuminated face? 

Sherman strode the cold seashore 
All night beneath starfire--
His hooded eyes a mystery 
Homeless, aimless, and alone. 
He paused where firepale waters rushed, 
Heard his prayer, hissed, and did not rest.

Backward Flag

…a sudden figure, a man, raises himself…stands a moment on the railing, leaps below to the stage…catching his boot-heel in the copious drapery (the American flag), falls on one knee, recovers…
~~Whitman’s report of Lincoln’s assassination

How I have loved the old flag, can never now be known.
~~John Wilkes Booth

The flag curls over like a wave of the surf, 
Over its lines a cold fold of stars, enough 
To show what sky can be when night is come: 
Red alive as rockets in the fabrics dim, 
White stripes welcome as oceans breaking home. 

Catch me by the heels who can, or catch me not at all. 

How split, how hate-estranged we've grown, old flag, 
Stripped of half your stars, your red stripes but rags 
To bandage bloodied men or bury them--
Fife, drum, and solemn bell are all your music now. 
Flown, blown apart, we two, who once together flew. 

Catch me by the heels who can, or catch me not at all. 

I'll stitch myself into the national scene, 
Rehearse my lines and look the part--I preen 
To patch divided stripes and each stray star return. 
Nothing but love, love alone bade me do this: 
Fire, jump, and shout ‘Sic semper tyrranis!' 

Catch me by the heels who can, or catch me not at all.

Mary Chesnut’s Diary

I do not write often now–not for want of something to say, but from a loathing of all I see and hear. Why dwell upon it?
~~ Mary Boykin Chesnut

Darkest of all Decembers ever has my life known, 
Sitting here by the embers, stunned, helpless, alone.
Lay aside, faithful pen, and write no more; 
Richmond is bleak as a cauldron of burnt teeth. 
I'll close my eyes awhile, and lie prone 
Until some sweeter thought arises. I remember... 
The canopied bridge to Mulberry, tree  
After tree alive with yellow jessamine  
And with cherokee rose writhing wild  
On post and pillar, as we rode to James'  
Father's placid estate, Colonel Chesnut 
Erect and spectacleless at eighty,  
A fine speech on his lips about his visit  
Preaching generosity and Jesus  
Down at the Wateree Negro Mission. 
"I preach to them as to my own, young James, 
Our prayers made knee by knee to God above."  
When long life at last sent him onward, 
The plantation rained with tears, and all 
Was lamentation and appreciation 
For one who'd filled his cup of life with grace. 
Old Scipio was first among the pallbearers 
Who'd "dressed him in life, and dressed him dead." 
And night came, and a soothing singing came  
Up to the manse from the little slave cabins.

Pieces of the Old Battle Flag; or,
Hoe-cake and Hominy on the Way Home

My sisters that night made me underclothes from their skirts.
~~John T. Wickersham, in his homecoming narrative

A bugle broke night's silence as the colonel arrived,
Drunk we thought, tilting on his stick-thin brindled mare;
"The war's done, boys. Head on home."  And in a few strides

He was gone himself.  Kelly had his knife, and then and there
Began to parcel out the battle flag which had never veered
To ground, although three good colorguards weren't spared.

Some men wiped tears, some crept quiet from camp, hunched
As if unspined, but no one raised their voice to sing our anthem
A final time, nor have I heard it since, that song which once

Marched us from Missouri's shores to the vale of dread Antietam.
We soon enough were counted, and paroled to wander hence 
Barefoot to Memphis, or ride the Delta Darling steamboat down 

From the point of its departure. I rode until they threw me off, 
Unconscious on the docks of I knew not where, but not home. 
Alone and light-headed, I heard a colored woman close enough to scoff:

 "Po' devil, and Sunday comin' too," who led me like a lamb 
And fed me hominy and cornbread--of her poor portion half 
Until three weeks of days nursed me back to what I am: 

A sinner on the roadway with a hoe-cake in his hand. 
"Honey, don't you go it, you'll for sure die if you do."  
"Ninety miles to the Missouri line, I must try it if I can." 

Not a barn was left standing, not a town unburned, no, 
Not a cow in any pasture, nor a white man in the land. 
Not a black man played the stranger, but gave me kindness, too; 

Rough food to keep from fainting, sweet hands to bind my feet. 
Some went to hunt their masters, some heading for the North, 
Every one of them my better, to my shame and my regret. 

One night, near expiring, under the rainfall's gentle wrath 
I saw a lamp that beckoned me, deep in wood and sleet; 
On hands and knees I made it, too weak to try the latch; 

Within I heard them praying, a muffled forlorn grace, 
And put my ear the nearer who had not given thanks; 
Words, it seemed, imploring, to see their loved one's face 

Lost to war's disorders when taken from their ranks.
With their prayer ended, I knocked and entered, felt the fireplace
Warm me like a brandy that relieves the fever's shakes.

"Bacon and rye coffee," I heard.  "This man is almost dead!"
The voice was my own mother's, and my sisters circled near;
Father, serving coffee, cried: "Why, it's our own dear Ned!"

They embraced me all in all their arms, shed relief-fed tears.
They bathed me in hot water, and closed up every wound.
To God I give my every thanks, who took away my fears.

CONFEDERATE STATUES

In freedom's cause their voices raise, 
And burst the bonds of every slave; 
Till, north and south, and east and west, 
The wounds we bear shall be redressed. 
     ~~ James M. Whitfield


Let us cross over the river, and rest 
under the shade of the trees.
    ~~Stonewall Jackson

Christmas Eve in Whitneyville

An invention can be so valuable as to be worthless to the inventor.
~~Eli Whitney

Easily a thousand times I'd touched a cuff, 
Flexed the luxury of a high thread count 
And dropped, as though left drowning in the surf, 
An empty sleeve without a second thought. 

Only now, in Whitneyville on a visit, 
Piling my cart with bales of breathable shirts, 
I think about the town's history, how it's stitched
Day to day in time's continental drift. 

How, quick as a cat, Eli's nimble gin 
Clawed free a thread, crystalline from end to end, 
And that thread reached out across lost time 
To wind me in these sheets for bed....  

Did Eli know his cotton gin would bring 
Us here together among the shining aisles-- 
He and I, and Southern slavers in a ring? 
And, by their rings, black slaves in lowly file? 

I dream of fields of cotton, brown and white, 
And dusky figures bending in a singing row, 
And colored sunset moving on toward night 
Where only sleeping darkness is allowed. 

I lie alone among the cotton clouds, 
Drifting in the droning surf of central air, 
My sleeves lifeless as my premie shroud. 
I hear my heavy breathing claw the air.

Reviving the Wreck; or,
The Raising of the Monitor

It was like finding a palace, with all its conveniences, under the sea.
~~Nathaniel Hawthorne

The sea is full of sobbing 
Yet into the sea we go, 
To find that historical darling 
A tin ship from long ago. 

We fight (as they fought, perhaps, 
Who unlimbered cannon and tracked 
The foe) who (amid salvage and scrap) 
Wrestle seaweed and wrecks. 

With mask and fin descending, 
We delve disguised to the depths
To uncharm the storm's spellbinding 
Upending you to death. 

Here's the Monitor that made such noise  
Harassing Merrimac on the James;
It lists in a funk of silt and weeds, 
Rusted, contrite, and tame. 

History's filigree of detail, 
Its palimpsest of scribbled layers,
Shows stripes of filtered light mottling
A hulk abandoned by prayer. 

The darkness of Hatteras' stream
We pierce without wit or pity, 
And the glance of our trifling beams 
Reveals a sunken city. 

Here glimmers a little Manhattan,
The keel quaint 6th Avenue
With Wahoo and Bluefin pedestrians,
The whole glozed over in roux. 

All war and the waging of it 
Must come to this they say--
Two skeletons in an inverted turret 
Where minnows are wont to play. 

For weeks we belt and balloon and inflate 
To heave the iron whale by inches 
From the heaviness of its fate; 
Yet in my chest, a rebellious fish 

Quivers with questions and guesses: 
To itch at the layers of mystery, 
To reveal in detail what had been messy, 
May change what was of history.

To scrape through the dark unknown 
With an arrow of light forlorn,
With new instruments of our own.... 
Would we survive such inspection? 

Let Davy Jones entertain his guests,
Let leviathan still swallow Jonah,
Let Eve's innocence stay lost,
And disturb not Shakespeare's bones.

In the Field of Lost Shoes

They faltered not, but kept the line.
~~About the adolescent VMI cadets who marched through heavy mud, losing their shoes as they advanced on the enemy at New Market

We planted palm-sized flags in uncounted rows 
As wind taunted them taut-- 
The colors almost gone to watercolor now 
Winter's passed and spring pants. 

The field still marshals blue and grey, although 
The skirmish lines are lost....  
Where wildflower and meadowgrass grow long 
Memory simplifies to mist.

Confederate Statues

Draw the sword and throw away the scabbard!
~~Stonewall Jackson

To stand and stand and stand 
When every knee would fawn; 
To be a statue, resolute, 
That greets the pinkening dawn. 

No more can one man master 
Than his own traitorous feet; 
No more's expected, wanted, 
Than refusal to retreat. 

So Stonewall stood, and stands 
Granite and complete; 
Each fieldstone laid by careful hand: 
Duty, honor, brave intent.

Lee’s Return

When sullied world is gone, or rent
Hidden meanings like hidden ghosts arise.
That Lee might live the thought fidelity,
To defeat or victory indifferent,
A world's measure of gain and loss
Lies in his sword's ceremonial cross.

	O nothing but a passion burns
	Mourned countries to their soot.

Spotless Appomattox first and last,
Lee's ruinous duty, and after
Kent's canon that shook the stocks,
Who served a sane, distracted Lear
Because he knew a royal soul was one 
Human before humanity had come.

	Long, long lay the shadows on the grass;
	Uniformed men flit and pass.

How many of the undiscerning multitude
When Lee passed there had thought
His great grey face all gravity,
Stone blossom of a moral root.
What first might drive a man
To live an abstract thought?

	 O nothing but a passion burns
	 Mourned countries to their soot.

Courthouse shadows judge the field
Where Lee both tried and failed;
A lonely, exalted thought that still
Drives restless as a nail.
O How had Athens come and gone
Without one such man?

	 Long, long lay the shadows on the grass;
	 Uniformed men flit and pass.

Some books I read while writing

There’s a million books out there about the American Civil War. This is one of the facts that daunts, rather than tempts, the fidelity-minded contemporary writer. Some of the books I treasured, and mauled, the most during my journey through these sparse traces of poems are listed below. Of special note, to me, were the compendiums of contemporary accounts, tales and folklore (B. A. Botkin), or books that threaded a narrative together mainly through excerpts from eyewitness accounts, contemporaneous newspaper accounts, and official battle reports (Eisendchiml and Newman, Commager). I also enjoyed the robust and well-known popular history narratives of the war that use such accounts to bring their retellings to life (Catton, Foote, McPherson, Brown). You won’t regret picking up any of the titles below in addition to (or instead of) the little poetry book in your hands.

Civil War Treasury, B. A. Botkin 
Civil War, San American Iliad, Eisendchiml and Newman 
The Blue and the Grey, Henry Steele Commager 
Bruce Catton's Civil War 
Shelby Foote Civil War Trilogy 
Patriotic Gore, Edmund Wilson 
Vicksburg 1863, Winston Groom 
Battle Cry of Freedom, James Mcpherson 
Gettysburg, Noah Trudeau 
Life of Johnny Reb and Life of Billy Yank, Wiley 
War Stories, Ambrose Bierce 
Words For the Hour, poetry, Barret and Miller 
Poets of the Civil War, J. D. Mcclatchy 
Embattled Rebel and Tried by War, James Mcpherson 
Embattled Courage, Gerald Linderman 
Ironclad, Paul Clancy 
The Battle of the Crater, Charles River Editions 
Sherman's March, Burke Davis 
Dee Brown's Three Main Civil War Books 
Landscape Turned Red, Stephen Sears 
Don't Know Much About the Civil War, Kenneth Davis 

Any book by Douglas Southall Freeman

Helps to keep a good battle atlas at your elbow, rather than internet maps.

Reaching After Realness

Introductions, Night, Night

Sep 042019

I ask: how do I make my dented self 
         beautiful 
with this old pencil? 
     ~~Daniel J. Weeks, Self-Symphonies

Gregg Glory
July 4th, 2017

Thistle Wins

Apr 282018

A book of poems

Gregg Glory [Gregg G. Brown] amazon.com/author/gregglory gregglory.com

Wild Places

Gregg Glory
April 1, 2018

   
Shy in their herding dwell the fallow deer 
...spirits of wild sense... 
Printless as evelight, instant as dew. 

John Drinkwater

After Thin Winter

My tongue fell like a gravestone, flat 
Into silence, when I heard the darting lark, 
An amplitude of bees at the azaleas in spring 
And the mad abandon of frogs in their croakeries 
As the kiln sun outlined fingerling icicles, and snows 
Receded.  What was killed at Christmas was made ready, 
Made mud and substance for new life at Easter, 
Elegant as grass dancing from the fundament. 

What songs I had cribbed in my dab, crabbed hand 
All winter long in my grey oyster’s cloister 
Blandly abandoned their pearls in my mouth; 
What I had deemed gospel is proved uncouth. 
Only silence and stillness can I bring to what’s given, 
The badge of eager ears my only sign of office, 
A wideness of eyes my warrant for living, 
A narrow nose my keel, and sighs for my sails.

River Dazzle

The sun hooks the eye— 
A fishingline of light
Teases daubs, gobs 
Of unready tears 
From the prone fisherman. 

The arc of history, the arc 
Of his lazy cast, are 
Identical to God’s, one 
More blind parabola among 
Many hits and misses. 

Still, he watches his bobber, 
Sun of its own solar system, 
A clownish bellybutton  
Pinned in its gravity well, 
Helpless as a marble. 

Something beneath bites; 
His wary, wired eye sees 
No more than Schrodinger 
Trapped outside the bottle 
He fishes to investigate. 

The bobber is an eye- 
Ball in a troubled socket 
Nippling the rubber sheet, 
Inflicting wrinkles, crowsfeet, 
And no nest to home in on.

Salmon Run

Baby salmon are born simple fillips of thin light,
Thumb-smears of ectoplasm, long eggs 
Unfurling into elegant flags of tails 
That plump through long late spring luxuriously 
As any mat of pasta filigreed with fins. 
The racer spritz of underbelly speckles 
Makes her indivisible with the river, devotional, 
A sweptback speedboat divoting the current
Lambing the surface with sunny braids of wooly foam, 
Then, dive after dive, memorizing each shadow grotto, 
By lounge and lunge investing the homeplace with myth….
Sleepy or ecstatic she swims, until the day comes 
When salt first touches the innocent lip 
Alerting galvanic gizmos in the svelte groin 
And the salmon, in mass chorus, beg the river 
To lead them away, like following the grain of an etching. 
Away from childish eddies, from mild tideless nights, 
Away from reeds in their tactile millions, from oniony beds  
Of emptied fish eggs;  away, away and down 
To the silver-slippered whaleroad of the sea! 
Down to the breakers and badlands, borderless lagoons, 
Completing, with raw luck, a Pacific circuit  
As round as the world  Magellan imagined, 
Where each nimble slit face will bleaken into a claw, 
Each corvette exterior ripen to bitter red 
And only the sly survive.

Constitutional

Bales of daybreak scatter broken hay—
Shreds of light the early parkground
Feeds the eager eye, waking ringing birds. 

Golden gears of day get going, annoying 
Drunkards and latecomers, laggards 
Too timid to escape their asylum of dreams. 

The foot crunches cinders on the cold park path 
As woods enclose the walker in dew-dim green, 
Ears and eyes awake for what brambles disclose: 

A syrupy dewlap repeating to its mate, 
The bitter gabble of a squirrel on high, 
How the referenceless blue of sky intrudes. 

At a stop where rubber joggers stretch 
He sits, a chalky bubble doming at his feet 
A moment’s irritated digging reveals 

To be the stark arched catacombs of a skull.

Woodpecker

The woodpecker hammers in deafness,  
An arpeggio of ellipsis dots 
Turning the trunk into a thunderous drum 
Loud as a cloudburst, a wail of electric 
Lightning in the downpour of his beak, 
Itself a splinter of the woodpecker’s brain 
His single nail of intention drilling 

A rabble of insects from the desert wood, 
Fleets of them fleeing Egypt, half-grown wings folded 
Like packs on the refugees’ backs 
Seeking Sinai beyond the impassable banks— 

A place of sacred song, bonfires and worship, 
Their stump wings become angel feathers 
Themselves grown golden in face and limb 
Raising all their hallelujah voices in song together 
A circle of safety and praise “Hallelujah!” 
And only the tamed accompanying tumble of drums 
To remind them of the woodpecker.

Two Pike Beneath the Rail Bridge

for Mat Spano

A snake of shadow doubles in the water— 
A grounded pike in his cold redoubt, his 
Troubled blur of darkness underneath him 

Rolls over motes of stones like a cut kite-tail, 
In a water-flight of greedy feeding, snap and 
Strike after strike into terrorized small fry 

That blaze his evilly thin needle teeth with blood, 
Curling broody clouds into lake-light and weeds 
And obscuring the dumbshow action of a life. 

II
The weight of the pike, black as a wrenched rail spur,
Meditates in his mysterious underworld, gleeless 
And deeply green as a Christmas bough— 

I am life! I am knife!  he seems to say, scissoring 
His blunt course beneath the taut causeway, 
A troll below the ebony river’s surface, shadow 

Inside shadow, his deathly inches glistening ink 
As he writes the page of life black as himself 
Or his shadow-self, the self that guides the knife.

Moment of Silence

The little brown hen, beheaded 
Ran about the dusty clucking yard like an abortion 
Her spur of blood a race flag  
Stippling the yard with dark dots, beautymarks 
For a full minute.  The other hens stopped clucking 
And left their feed unattended to watch, 
To feel the dark sprinkler pass by batting them— 
Their eyes vaguely gathered, vaguely lit. 
All scratching hushed, and the sun stopped. 
For a full minute I think it was, yes.

The Duck, Shotgunned

The duck, shotgunned 
Caught the full volley of pellets, 
Steel circles like pilled thimbles 
Spreading inner fire with a hundred matchsticks 
Struck in the smoking under-feathers, 
The trim wings wide, as in delight mid-flight  

But here is suffering and ripping, 
A million zippers stripping skin, 
All your fingernails blown off in a single twinge 
And nerve and blood left to baste in air, 
Bathe in pain 
Forever.

Death of a Housefly

This is the basis. A faceted particle 
Bearing its pair of window-wings, a fractal 
Reflecting Nature’s majesty in grim miniature. 
A dot of the universe made blood and hair, 
The infinitesimal start of the Big Bang’s buzz. 
The nodule, the nada. 

This dead housefly 
Practiced spastic pratfalls through the rooms— 
A black note following what conductor’s wand? 
Among damaged fruit and unguarded ears 
It made its itchy way. 
Stumbling, staccato, on tiptoe. 

I watch the billion connections blossom 
From his rainbow bowl-of-gumballs eyes 
To my duller ones, practiced and lidded. 
Do you see, the fly whispers, how alike we are? 
Were you a gnat, I would swat you, fly says. 
As you are, I sip blood from your hairy walls. 

The dead housefly flitters from the counter 
To the floor in summer’s mangy breeze. 
Its universe is over, its finale played and applauded. 
I negotiate broom and dustpan in procession, 
Knock the little bugger into the too-full dustbin 
And ring shut the metal lid like a cymbal.

Metal Detector

A flying saucer on a stick swings back and forth 
Over the dirty beach, the dribble of grime 
That marks the tide’s high assault, the clamor 
Of a slug’s cold unwanted kiss. 

The flying saucer swings, and swigs of sound 
Filter a staticky hash through my cupped earholes, 
The sound post-apocalyptic, waiting for the bright bing 
The inimitable click that signals a tossed coin, 
The fine wire of a hairpin, the lost Mayan gold 
Of a forgotten money clip.

A Wheel of Hooks

Turns in the eagle’s flying eye, zeroes down 
To peg a live shadow in the grass,
Haul it sputtering to nest.

Two chains of hooks its feet
Dangle shaggy dragnets 
Over
Sumptuous innocuous indolent meadows.

A hundred hooks gather into feathers, 
Climb the frigidaire air barb by barb,
Clawing against gravity to flight.

A hook, too, is the prowlike 
Bastion of beak 
Battering ribs with its stick, incising 
Designs into totem, 

Curve after curve

In the bloodied broken side of its prey.

Slender in the Grass

Snakes are boneless trombones sliding slender in the grass. 
Their alphabets are all hisses, “Asss to Zsss.”

Their eyes, like birds’, are liquid wax droplets of black, 
Pools of dark rumor and wells of ancient observation.

They ride the damp ground like a whip writhing to stiffness, 
Thwacking desperate cracks in the dirt to attract a skinny mate. 

A snake’s razor mouth widens to a gulp when any beetle lands near, 
Its split rainbow back a Swiss Army knife of displayed wings. 

When rains come, churning and flooding the ripped field, they swim, 
Their lengths alert S’s suddenly alive as kitetails in the teeming wind. 

They know no road but hunger, and sleep their meals down for days, weeks, 
Giving back to the damp uncaring ground a mouse’s intricate skull, 

A spittle of skeleton, forever ivory and wideeyed.

Setting

Where to begin?  A confusion of thorns 
Besets the setting sun with a hash of prison bars; 
Night’s limber elements are rising from the earth 
Reanimating darkness, giving limbs to missing light, 
Raising a black wave over our heads 
Cricked down for evening prayers, then a meal. 

But for now, all is still confusion— 
The old barn taut with disintegration, its hard 
Lean away from light;  the tempest of songbirds 
Arriving noisily to nests in the sun’s abatement; 
The raccoon’s paw awake to darkness and theft; 
Thrills of a million moths detaching themselves 
From the sloped sides of trees, their daily guards. 

The eagle, the snake, the hawk, the dog retire. 
In their place, night’s minion, the hidden thrust, 
The secret grasp—oh, death by any other name, 
Death by a thousand stratagems—all recorded 
In the reflective eye of the cat at the window.

Cadaver in Vastness

Time the hammer and time the anvil 
Claws raw gobbets from the cadaver. 

A quiet of observation invades the hills, 
Wraps the sliver viewer in vapor. 

The child’s dog had run away down the road 
No farther than here; 

Here were no green ingots of gravehills, 
Just one dog rotted to a husk, 

A blackened comma stuck out beyond 
His tongue’s final saying. 

The cliffs, quilt-patched like coral, 
Still melt in immeasurable mists; 

Trees swing their long beards over the brook, 
Fish alive among their barky toes. 

But here at the dark roadside, a cavern 
Axes dead halves of a ribcage 

Into darker futures, a vastness 
Realer than stars.

Lizard Evening

The lizard in the ditch, his brain a chip 
Turns his chipped eyes to the sun 

The lichened rock he spraddles is pocked 
With stars of greenish lesions 

A harshness of stars is in his twenty 
Fingerends roughed for gripping 

He is sure of nothing, not even gravity 
As he glares at the universe from his rock—

Along his spine a constellation gathers 
Like a trail of bulletholes in God….

The lizard in the ditch, impatient for flies 
Slowly splits his jaw, spits his split tongue 

As if to lap up the sun, its tunnel of cauldron 
One changeling flame at a time 

Until night comes, however ugly, and only his 
Spine of stars is shining

Watching Wildlife

She’s surprised, her eyes foolish, owlishly large, 
Twin fishbowls slopped with infinity, her mouth 
Dropped doll-like open in a pinkish, pale gash 
A slash touch of drool spooling a corner. 

What is it that she’s watching?  A second moon 
Shouldering out from behind the first 
We know so well, like our own splotched hand 
Familiar and veined and always available? 

No, not that.  It’s something closer to home 
Like a threat, a chainsaw hiccupping off a nail, 
Its blade loud and wild, a deadly blurr, 
A blaze of steel thorns throbbing sparks! 

She watches so carefully, so pitilessly, a poised 
Tan animal about to pounce perhaps, 
Watchful of her victim’s teeth, array of claws,  
Hidden stings, woodpecker’s beak like a sewing machine, 

The power of muscles thumping a bone skull like a club. 
Yet she herself is still, fearless—
Alone, empyrean, detached, fatalistic, 
A girl standing at the edge of her own green yard, 

Ambivalent, balanced.

Vultures

Flesh was never less alive 
Than in their claw-hammer mouths,

Gobbets and blobs dripping from beaks 
Wry as fishhooks.

The spurring rabbit the truck wheel had winged 
Left nailed to the asphalt

Now a grim etching by Durer, tendons aghast, 
Gashed open like a surgeon’s how-to

To the slow thoughtful desecration of the doctors 
Hunched around their diagnosis.

Thistle Wins

The icy field is stiff with thistles, 
Pencils jammed in a holder, grey bristles on a chin. 

Thousands of bareheaded golf balls rolled to a stop, 
Each beheaded head bedizened with pins. 

How long did it take for these roots to creep? 
These spiky knobs to rise like fists? 

Each hidden root connects to another root, root to root, 
A starchart under the earth’s dirt. 

I stand here alone as winter makes us alone: 
Banging my hands for warmth, stamping my feet. 

If I had a mirror big enough 
I could show this overrun world its face.

River Waving and Waving

A stillness is in it.  Leaden.
Even though it is waving, waving continually 
It’s always with the same, tame, martinied 
Glassy indifference.  Green-eyed, squatting, squalid
As a toad, as lipless gelid. 

A fresh-water jellyfish or squid laid on a board 
Would look as lively, as livid, lurid. 
All day loping the gaping bank, its wound of water—
Summertime anglers, day-campers 
Never too far from stoves and faucets, 
The womb of home. 

I put my hand into river coldness.
I drop a baited hook into its goop. 
I stoop for smooth dull stones to throw at it.
Or reach into the silver house with a threaded wish
To catch flesh I de-shingle and eat— 

The red welt of fish-wealth 
                          held in the fire’s fingers 

As evening gains in the trees 
And darkness erases faces. 

Szzz—Too hot to touch!  This 
Frying sliver of river. 

But stabbed with a stick, I bring it up 
Greedily between my teeth.

Bats in a Cavern

Here’s no light but an echo of light 

Light like a black ear flapping 

Small-boned bodies flapping in a known womb-cave 

The whole place the scraped inside of an eye, waiting 

And the sprawled dawn-cry comes, a thousand cries 
Skreaking and streaking like train cars— 

Twice a thousand ears eating dawn like an egg! 
A black egg, viscid and filling 

All is known, all is revealed, x-rayed by those cries 

The bugs the guano the catacomb litter

Their little fur chests line up like soldiers 
Glued to the gleaming ceiling of the cavern 

Clawing the raw stone 

One thousand faces split and dripping

Gnats

Less than a thimbleful will make you lose the will to live. 
Gnats attack at the interstices
Where sweat lives under an eyelid, a slick
Lick of paint no one could mistake for tears.
A peppering of infinitesimal bodies
Intent on your discomfort, they fly into hinges
Of elbows and knees
Giving their gamey smell when crushed 
Of rotted olives.  Too small to wipe off
They remain, a grit of pulverized guts
Waiting for the laundromat’s absolution,
The shower’s cloudy powerwash.

Song Sparrow

The sparrow, wrestle-breasted arrow of song, 
Indignant arc lamp of day, sky’s-spy, deliverer of God’s notes 
To mute mortal ears, lug jug-handles on the wine pot— 
How like a spook you move in the thin limitless air. 
How beyond deftness your swiftness.  Sheer circles of light! 
And in an endless ring you are singing—phrases, prophecies, 
The moulting basketloads of insects yet uneaten! 
And the sun comes through your mouth, too;  the sun, 
And all the crying stars of yestereve, tearpricks in the blueness. 
Constellations align to your wingtips, grasses part at your 
Passing, nature and songster at one in the dewsweep. 

No more clotted gobblings of domestic turkeys, blind clucks 
Earthbound and beaten to repetitious hawkings of mere sound, 
Bruised wattles hanging diseased over all song, any singing. 
Here is a choir of velvets and visionings, long lusterful sighs 
That folds the sky in your pocket, all in one fluffed breast. 
It seems to have no nest, but when the nest is found, 
Tucked like an ear under a crest of rosebush, or suddenly 
There beneath a worsted whorl of fieldgrass, with old bandages 
Of eggs, cast off crepe from the birthday party, sharp discardings 
That gave rise to this, to you, gripping your perch, 
The striped bullet head bent back in laughter!

Nesting Swallows

Stars turn blue in the untended bucket 
While belly sleeps and wing slopes. 
The day was yours, tin beak, 
The night I keep, says eyelid asleep. 

The nest rides quiet like a lip of wave, 
The evergreen ever-vigilant of its dark shade. 
There’s nothing to see between the sheaves 
Of branches, except the feathery skin 

Of the wind 
At last at rest.

Rockface

A war-wind licks the tattered rocks 
Frosted with lichen stubble, spare faces  
Visible above green beards. 

The remains of a farm, of a home 
Washed, tumbled to a lumbar spine of fallen wall 
Spoiled by a seafoam stain. 

All the lives here are bone again, are green
Mouldy birthmarks, are mottled handprints flimsy 
As a kindergartener’s Thanksgiving turkey. 

Shamrock sigils of vigils past and failed—
Hail fellowships birthing only this mint rot, this 
Nothing of wind warring wind 

And lichens’ fading greying faces.

Prickers

Prickers stick to rough jean cuffs covering scuffed work boots. 
Unshaven stubble shows the stiff imprint of age, 
Gaunt gristle of days lived and forgotten, an old sailor’s youth 
Sailed grey among cows and seas of grass. 

I pull at them at the stone churchyard doorstep, slap 
Stubborn stubble on worn and faded cuffs. 
My long heedless stride got me here, gathered green days 
To this scruff of stars washing round my ankles. 

Prickers gather thick as ticket stubs in a bottomless pocket, 
The washed-out dates distorted and mangled.  All my life 
I’ve come alone through these fields to this frigid steeple 
Like a compass needle that always comes round to North. 

And these with me, least eminences of the neglected field, 
These rustling pricker-weed seeds with small arms lifted astonished— 
Ferrying always with me on my open journey, sticking it out,
Until I cast them 

In miserable heaps to the doorstep.

Landscrape

He stood alone, wild in the merry-go-round junkyard.
Jagged stacks of tires creaked a rubbery babble,
Oily water caught rank in the empty rims.
Where had they driven, these rearing carnival-wheels?
What seen, these charcoal eye-holes outlined in bruise?
Miles they’ve revved and spun, millions of miles,
Miles going round and wearing out, like hearts.
And now: a bird pulls out a bit of wire,
The hasty scamper of a rat keeps dry in mysterious rain.
A weed reaches its thread through some wheel-hole,
Waiting for fate’s snip-snip in the afternoon sun....
Wheels ridden to strips against earth’s wheel,
Paired gears kissing and grinding in lifelong marriage,
The little gear worn through like a wound, dirty,
A wound too old now for even a bandage,
A wound no longer bleeding, really—
A wound where the sky leaks in,
And a swindling
Wind whistles
 
 



To hatch a crow, a black rainbow 
Bent in emptiness over emptiness 
But flying

Ted Hughes

You, Over There

Something happened to you, over there. 
A snowy owl invests your shoulders 
With hunches, black minnows drown 
Your eyes, between the transfixed cross
Attached at your brows—the stiff track
Of a crow’s kinked foot in night snows.

Graveyard Ravens

Not to die.  Not to die. 
The small worm-eye of the raven is so black 
It is blue.  Blue-black, flattening its wings 
Against a nude sheet of snow, legs 
Of tree roots still dark, unconquered by the frost. 
The raven looks about, a small shirr of dust 
Drifting from his black forehead, his eye 
Of outerspace—without star, without moon. 

He hunches in his overcoat under a juniper bush. 
To be a raven is to never die, he thinks. 
How many coffins I have stood atop!   His wings 
Spread like an evil phoenix, a mourner’s umbrella. 
To him, a tomb’s as good as a barn.

To the far left, far from the bee-gatherings of cars, 
A pack of ravens scuttle in the margin of a ditch 
(With a sound, if it could be heard, of cards shuffling)
Eating some earthly remnant, some essence 
Of snake, a whipcord pulled to death 
Laying its blood-tar scar against new-fallen snow. 

They are in no hurry, as the snake is not.
They are seven judges at a trough unburying justice. 
They dig up old pasts into new light, new stabs 
Adorning an ancient halo’s glory radiant as irises— 
That arrangement of spears around a central nullity: 
A void, a hunger.

All Is Calm

for Anna Moran

It was in winter that she left us, 
Her grey good voice gone still. 
Her laughter that caught us has kept us, 
Although her laughter has gone still. 
Her hands that held our own and patted, tutted 
And cajoled, upon her breast lie still. 
Snow like drumtaps on her coffin fell, 
And snow is falling on her calm grave still. 
Winter has entered, and she has left us. 
We gather remembering and grow still.

In Memoriam

Twelve mourning doves walk abased in dust 
Soft as nuns at their small solemnities, 
Their tan wings folded back to balance 
The hiccupping strut that takes them back and forth, 
Nodding their sidelong eyes with white lids 
Disturbingly human, though no bigger than  
A pinky’s fingerprint, cooing docile as ghosts 
All together where the old dogwood dapples petals, 
Each claw-fingered step pawing the ashen earth. 

II
Twelve mourning doves are cooing in a ring,
Soft doxy voices that touch and soothe, such soft
Wood-night wood-dark wooing forgetfulness
Under dogwoods dropping pleasant last petals
Under a gun-metal morning
Under the weight of stars
Disappearing blue.

Winter Crows

A crush of snow and the house settles, mellows. 

A roofline of unshaved icicles greets a morning hangover 
Challenging the cold adjustment of dreams 
Their dark ache of song that passes the night hours. 
There’s something tremendous in a world erased overnight, 
Like listening to Wagner backwards or exploding dud ordinance. 
The afternoon funeral looks stark as the Donner party, 
A line of crows milling around the golden corncob. 
Afterwards, there’s an undeniable deaf amnesia— 
Something gracious has been mislaid, and then forgotten. 
You never knew so much weight of what is could be, 
That wings could be so heavy, could drag so low. 
Conversation stopped the day before last, afraid of more news: 
Cousins insane, grandmothers crippled and punctured, 
Divorce served with thin slices of the Christmas beast 
And a gravy of tears.  And now the power of snow 
Shows itself in our guarded, hunched, held-close looks. 
Our hands are unable to dig out and find each other. 
Something vestigial in us is waiting for spring 
But we do not remember what a sparrow sounds like 
Or the shaggy look of a new tulip, blood buds of a maple tree. 
The house creaks like a warning shot, and a step breaks 
While carrying out fresh trash;  the blender burns out, 
Innumerable bulbs are pinched and replaced, or left 
To add a new shadow like a shotgun blast;  a totemic  
Crow bestrides the balustrade like an inkblot.
Time dilates;  we live in the pupil;  we skate in circles 
Waiting for nothing, hands on our ears, eyes closed, 
Fingers no longer crossed in our nylon mittens. 

We had not lived here till the first loved thing had died here.

April Fool

The years are burying our friends,
And the beastly bees coming back in Spring
Are buzzy again, the floods of flowers
Trying on new dresses for new caskets.
And the air, sweet as it is, is sour to me—
A lone survivor smelling my way 
                              Amid fresh wreckage.

Now I know what poetry is for the widower said

Now I know what poetry is for the widower 
Now I know what poetry is for 
Now I know what poetry is 
Now I know what 
Now I know

Hitting Seventy

My spidery jalopy body 
Mad hair scuppered and scalped in patches 
Eyebrows of pig bristles, hands daft crabs 
Muscle stripped to bait, a gristle-brisket 
Hung from this skeleton of hooks 

All mornings hate my face, spitting 
Sunfire in my eyes to emasculate dreams 
To reason me awake like a razor dancing
In the splay hands of an anarchist ex-wife 
Pointblank as the ceiling 

Last night’s smoky martini longboat 
Rivers away through a hazard of stars—
Puffed to nothing, interstellar dragon-smoke—
The stolen opium of Chinese poets 
Drowned in their emerald slippers 

Worm-white, I face stacked racks of stairs 
The mute unbearable glaring of pets 
And reeking garbage-trucks of pitiless chores 
With the featherless soul of a beaten pillow 
Cored mauled punched ignored

Black Dish, No Cut Peaches Fine as the Sun

Black leaves in black water in a black bowl. 
There is, in it, more than a stir of waters, 
More than black leaves going round, the brim 
Wetted by whatever the interfering finger does. 
Whoever had eaten here has left the bowl 
To weather.  Was it myself who sat and ate 
Fat-fingered peaches dripping with sun? 
Or was that some other, now that autumn’s come? 
Black leaves in black water in a black bowl 
Sit on the midnight veranda still as thieves.

The Harp Player

Wounded, the flying chords work their salve 
Deeper into the ear canal, 
A mix of melody and grindstone—
The rhythmic pistons of a piano  
Upended, gutted, on silver display 
And stroked like an infarcted heart 
Until the pain leaves the strings 
And the audience cries at the beauty of rescue  
While the song whirls on….

And the harp player, proud and dark 
In his trim dinner jacket 
Turns away from your fraught tears 
And deeplier, and deeplier,
Hunches around the wing of his harp.

Hurry, Hurry

Hurry, hurry  the grasses say.   
They point the easy way, 
Hands over their heads 
Like divers finding the pool. 

Swiftly, swiftly the meadowlark 
Lances from the grass 
Easy into skies, swaying 
His wingtips as he goes. 

Calmly, calmly the sunset 
Sets the field afire.   
If my days like grass must burn, 
Let night like larks aspire.

Crooked Hickory

"To myself I told a lie, 
I gave it all my heart. 
And to that lie I’m loyal 
That lies within my heart. 

I cannot unwind the coil 
I wound with all my strength. 
She was young who bent it, 
And I am old at length. 

The lie that lies within me 
Has daily shaped my days. 
And to that lie I’m loyal, 
Although I would part ways."

 



                       I felt uplifted, 
Like champagne in a thin, bright glass 

Ted Hughes

Cows’ Hooves

Cows’ hooves stand, planted apart, in earth
While flanks gild blank statues in the sun’s
Afternoon onset, rank spillage yolk and gold.
They jaw cud the way chain-smokers smoke,
The way old husbands snore while soupy brown eyes 
Loom and ruminate, beautifully lashed orbs 
Seeing all... or seeing nothing.... It’s hard to tell.

Horse Lessons

The dawn field was a single whistling white, 
Endless star-white grass 
As my feet held steady 

Against the gigantic pull of earth. 
I stood like a horse watching the sunrise 
Emblazon the land, picking out the stripes of grass 

One by one, and blessing them 
As dawn went on toward day, and the horses 
Paraded out led by children 

And the time for lessons pinched me into speech. 
Pommel and throatlatch;  cantle, stirrup;  bridle and bit. 
Giddup, giddup, 

And the whole line of us rose into motion like a wave, 
The grass it’s endless sirrahs intoning, 
And still cool, still sheltered 

By some shadow of night’s arrested rest, 
The rustling unhaltered rest of stalls—
Standing still in limb and spirit, eventide divine.

Spider’s Lesson

The spider diagrams a sentence punctuated by death. 
Death to the fly that tries a new language. 
Death to the butterfly pining for thistles’ pins. 
Death to the moonblind moth tumbling moonward. 
Death to the ant marching astray. 
Death to the inchworm one inch at a time. 

When her sentence is finished, rolled up and eaten, 
She embarks on another before night comes vamping. 
Her spindle seems limitless, and glistens. 
She rides the lines that terrify with a swift spidery bliss. 
Her grammar is immaculate and intricate as the OED. 

She latches each line with her embroiderer’s glue,
Shaking her insides dry in the sun.

When her final web blows forth, 
Shining skull-white with it’s pirate’s sail, 
Even she is impressed.  Even she, seeing the benign design 
Big as a spread-fingered open-handed hello, 
Has second thoughts.

Feral Cats

There’s a skunk skank you notice first, a burn 
Of urine marking a boundary like napalm—
Beneath a porch, at the disastered end 
Of an abandoned barn, or where a quiet alley 
Narrows its waterway and tiptoe weeds 
Grow leggy after sunlight, the sky a blue trickle. 

Next, a bomb of exploded songbirds, never ravens, 
Their notes gutted that had drawn feral eyes, 
Old souls broken open as rotted ashcans and left 
Pocking the concrete apron with shotgun blacks, 
While at their queasy leisure in a patch of sunlight
Stray rain-matted cats daintily lick their paws.

Cleaning the Bones

for Linda Johnston Muhlhausen

Slumped at her typewriter as at a toothy skull
In an elephant graveyard where dry savanna cracks 
And a wrinkle of valley invites the eye to descend,
The writer examines her soul like a dentist
Poking the broken white keys til it hurts
And prying the hurt out for a good gory look,
The roots a bit bloody and the roof caved in.
She tastes the cracked enamel with her pointed tongue,
Sucks at the hole in the skull for blue eons
Where flesh is wet and tender as a jellyfish,
Translucent and useless as unset glue— 
The elephants’ ribs a risen house around her
Until thinking fails and her pink pain returns.
Stooping with loupe and a diamonddust drill
She makes a new tooth out of any old thing:
A pebble, a lost marble, a thumbnail, a screw.
Bent like a grandmother washing an infant 
She rolls it left-right, she watches she etches
She polishes the simulacrum with exquisite skill
And screws the new tooth in with tongs and a grimace
In the place in the skull where the old tooth smiled
Perfectly white and perfectly dead.

In a Wood

Strip me of language that I might hear
The owlet’s cry climb limb to limb 
Uncursed by human questioning. 

In nakedness of hunger or plumed with joy 
Let the V-sharp beak declare, 
Unhelped by any too-human ears. 

Let every ghostly echo some human word 
Displace;  let the death of a mouse 
In the leaves be the mouse’s death. 

Banish my striving mind, invisible life! 
Let sap infuse my veins and a bark enclose 
This too-insistent skin. 

Slowly I leech into the buoyant night  
As the unknown owlet regains its perch, 
Open eyes diaphanous as moons. 

The forest, full-tenanted, surrounds us
With wooden moans, twangs and strange
Sighs I myself begin to imitate.

Cycle of Force

Tadpole grew angry at the slimegreen pond
And legged it onto land.

Frog was wroth with his dry mudbank 
And humped into the water.

Maggot in the egg hatched mad at God 
And helicoptered off the great, dead face. 

Tongue abandoned its big-mouth chalice 
And leapfrogged after the fly.

Missus laid her suds-bag of eggs, 
Windy reeds bent to the ground….

“Our pond is mirror-fresh, is cool,” 
She sang, until 

Bullfrog sun beat it crucible.

The Raccoon’s Nose

The nocturnal raccoon’s a clown of course 
With his merry bandito black butterfly mask 
Working the comic implications of moonlight and trash 

As he rummages through compost buckets 
Like reading a daughter’s diary, yesterday’s dirty coffee 
Casting a grainy grit haze over all the spoiled goods. 

His magician’s hands ferret out wands of hot dogs, 
Madcaps of eggshells, the delicious simmering mess 
Still to be made of last night’s abandoned dinner! 

And that old thief the moon has vampire fangs tonight, 
Grinning at his mischief, the quick work of chaos 
Hands divorced from conscience can make 

As if, in the minute it takes to return from brushing one’s teeth 
A miniature twister had landed on the back porch 
And pried life’s pasteboard scenery apart at the seams.... 

He waddles to the hollow half-sun of a grapefruit 
And sips its pink innards delicately as high tea; so delicately 
You’d swear there was the ghost of a tophat between his ears.

The sweep of his ringed tail is spiffy as refrigerated minks, 
His bandit’s mask’s a mere costume for the evening’s masquerade—
Rayed starlight hung up in splendid chandeliers above us, 

The ornate parquet flooring swept dustless for the dance 
As I bow to you through the sliding glass door 
And you bow to me, too, detaching the purple aperitif 

Of a discarded grape from its wiry dead stem.

Sixpenny Nails

The paling east belied the hurricane’s arrival
As if harrying shadows had long since lapsed
That were only coming up from behind in the west;
Already a cloudweight of clotted darkness
Owned the rest of the sky, and, in it, lightnings!
And water like a tidal wave, a wet apron held
Out before the belly full of aching waters.

Already a thin ringing ran through uneasy gutters,
A teetering high-pitched scree that made the dog look up—
A squealing like metal wheels was rolling through the whole house,
And the aluminum shutters wouldn’t latch for shit.
We hurried with nails and plywood where we could,
Beating out the light, keeping ourselves shut in
To live out the time where we’d creeped safe.

Our neighbor, a carpenter, helped drive the nails
As we held up our hands steadying the awkward wood
Until all that was left was to make coffee and wait
It out, wait it out, while the carpenter napped 
On the couch.  The wife petted the dog anxiously;
The dog tilted his ears at the ceaseless screed outside,
Myself quiet as a candle burning down when a long 
Gust suddenly had us all leaning east with the house, 
Counting ourselves and our luck when it finally passed
And the roof settled back like a windswept hat.

“Sixpenny nails,” was all the carpenter said, 
Turning back to sleep in the appalling weather, 
His shoes mud-knocked clean beneath a chair,
The house hanging on but just barely.

First Things

First, lemon lengths of light trim the gables.

The snow is easy still as if still first-fallen, 
All airy whiteness on eyelashes laid 
With the rods of trees black-wet beneath, a river 
Of wood roads, paths winter-asleep, though March is making 
The solid ground give out smoky wisps of new grass—
The cold is best, you decide, swallowing glass,
First gasp in a world of limitless ice, limitless slips 
As concrete steps stretch out and the day’s hunt calls.  
And all this as the dawn just gets going, the furious orange
Retching up like a swimmer finishing his lunge 
His lionhead shaggy above the pool’s clean edge 
Red knuckles hoisting the weighted shoulders
The dripping face averted as if too horribly strong. 

Dawn’s razorback breach has made its showing for today.

Barn Burning

A smash of fire ran mad fingers over the skeletal barn. 

Stiff-faced horses had raised stone heads how many years, 
Great-grieved Agamemnon masks, old wood masks of Troy, 
Hankered nosefirst in clunked buckets of morning oats 
How many years?  How many years had dark-cheeked 
Dignity strapped on a mummer’s gas-mask, 
Chewing handsful clouts of oats while slow eyes feast 
On dawn’s no-man’s land of rank grass pasturage, 
Dawn’s fist a misty cauldron in the bolt-hole valley 
Where sun wrestles roadflares all along one edge 
In daily ghostly flameless burning how many years 

Knuckling white the weedy line between sky and earth.

Phalanx House

Damp shadows follow you through hairy woods 
Trailing—oh, a thousand things—as if a mist 
Bloodied, a mist made wine, made dark, made night. 

And through those shadows push spidery hands 
Making way for some lost face, crowning shoulders, 
As if walking here you were a stranger being born. 

In the middle of these trees arises a ghostly house 
Of grey timber, each plank knotted at its core, 
Its fieldstone chimney slipped like a old man’s back. 

Hampered daylight fills the tomblike home 
With strands of grey, and shows a battered mattress 
Where teenaged summer nights convene. 

Quiet heat, like a holstered gun, dots forehead 
And neck… and starts an itch of wonderment at all 
The echoed life that once raced these halls,

Or ran barefoot upon the hill, or rolled a hoop, 
Long before any long shadow of wood took root 
And raised up leafy tabernacles, and blotted all.

People Beating the Fieldgrass

Everyone with a stick, or a cane, or an umbrella tightly rolled
Is walking methodically through the fields beating the grass;
Drowning in wild alfalfa, bullgrass, bluestem up to their armpits
Their voices carrying the lost name like a repeated wave

Susan Susan Susan Susan 

They tilt and straighten and walk and cry through the grass,
Swinging wildly at the unmanageable weeds, the everywhere
Interference of green and seed and tears twenty-four hours
Have thrown in their faces as they pace and peer for darkness

Susan Susan Susan Susan 

For some shadowy clot of curled being forgotten at the root,
Dressed in gingham and bedded down exhausted, or tripped
On a grey hidden risk bulking blind in omnipresent grass,
Some black current having carried her where no ten year old

Susan Susan Susan Susan 

 



The moth said: 
I am too shy,
 Too. 
In love to speak.

Beach Dig

Look what wampum we have gathered! 
Here where we honeymooned all those moons 
Gone by... shells burning in the sunset.

Again this year we walk the wide surfline—
Shells scurry to our hooked inlet,
Pried by tide and intent into wet pockets.

I fish a nickel’s-worth of wisdom out 
And turn your smile into a hook of chuckles,
Digging after delight like digging oysters.

We trail the sound’s tideline on the lookout 
For what the year’s vastness has left draggled,
Glints of glass in the endless backwash.

Such a wealth of seawrack and stink! 
Backs bent like hooks to troll for treasure
We hold on, hands hooked together.

Love Undid

Sordid love undid
Its ribbons and buckles

Left its pants collapsed
In prairies of desire;

Where buttocks tussled
Love was sunburn

A red all-over slap
That cools like a sore tooth.

Love came roaring
With its juggler’s chainsaw

Its hissing hot kisses,
Its tongue of raw fire.

Love crashed 
Its charring stars

Into your chest and mine,
Our mire of human

Snicked alight 
Like matchsticks.

Wedblocked

two weeks before

By this point, I thought we’d be gasp-laughing, 
The marriage corvette hitting seventy without a hitch 
Our faces wasted with spring sunshine and wild smiles, 
The unrepeatable in-jokes that couples conspire: 
Memorizing lewd news to appall old Aunt Ida 
And zap Uncle Chuck into a champagne spit-take, 
Or doodling Acapulco details of our honeymoon
Drolly on napkins at midnight rendezvous.  But,

Winter snows buried our playful April to the roof! 
We, who’d thought to kindle time ’til our May bonfire 
A matchstick at a whack!  Frozen roads skid caterers
And budgets off track, timetables plowed under— 
Cold curses crash, chatter vile links in an icy chain 
That grapnels our nuptials with anvil force, winch- 
Ing us crippled toward some drooling giant’s 
Hinged maw, jaws-of-life prized 
Endless as a waterfall, awful as passed gas.

Dimwelter

In the dimwelter of evening we met for a swim. 

The gawp of the lake aping the moon’s smooth light 
Took our floating bodies with a silver swallow
As we swept our smiles filling with pushed water 
Into easy depths, trailing wings behind us as we 
Paddled and lunged, our hair returned to womb-wet, 
Your elbows now and then vivid with drips as a gutter 
Overpoured in storm and wind, the cold clean of it 
Cutting me into pure halves like a new pear, 
A pool of oblong moving shadow now, circling 
Wordless when dim clouds came obscuring the moonbolt
That had been riveted so brightly above us— 

The stars coming singly clear when we stopped.

For the Love of Buttercups

For the love of buttercups in a field of buttercups 

We take our watery walk slowly in good boots, 
Glimpse sparse splatterings of streams here and there 
Amid the blat of frogs.  Simmered mists lessen westward 
As day ignites those golden buttercups hard yellow, 
And hinting love makes way for plain statement— 
All sepal-soft affection turned ardent seed. 
Pale tender bulbs survive the flinch of winter here 
And bring their crayon yellow to another summer 
(Keeping blossoms true even in months of floods)
Lifting their buttercup’s branching crowns in air 
Like fleets of saffron monks on backs of elephants
As if no other season than their summer ever was, 
No colors worn but their summer’s burning brands,
Blond chalices lapping open around our moving knees
Where we dodge humped tussocks in old boots 
And hold old hands like two roots entwined until 
Some seeping inner mist arrives, veiling face and eyes 

For the love of buttercups in a field of buttercups.

Sunflowers

We sat in the burning fields and shared a sunflower. 

Tall around us leaned the velveteen cornstalk shafts 
Of sunflowers by the mile. Jenny held the fallen god 
Like a pie plate in her open lap, the heedless seeds 
Black as tacks, teeming as ticks, getting picked 
One by one between index and thumb, eating their meat 
Like smashed bugs with staccato teeth and tongues. 
The sound of the fields was as a cat in a grocery bag, 
A papery bigness the dry leaves weaved into canopies 
That frittered the sun—the suns—nodding their lead heads
Into bearable shreds of threaded light and shadow. 
Some of the sunflowers were still descending comets, 
Their yellow petals coned into harmless arrows, 
Their grin of seeds still hidden and small as a fist; 
Others, though, gave us the full black lamp treatment: 
Intense and downturned as saints at prayer 
Watching the sacrifice of their fellow at our hands, 
Pinching eyots of flesh that dribbled to our lips, 
Our raw fingers busy as boll-weevils, our eyes 
Themselves going dark as the million feeding seeds 
We ate and wiped antsy on our long blue dungarees, 
Standing at last amid a devastated harvest 
Of shells and whispering stalks, 
Silent with germinating thought— 

Done for the day that was not done with us.

The Fox’s Pelt

We woke to your skin on fire, feverous with dream. 
But day was docile, the sky a heating-duct grey 
As you shaved carrots skinless that odd afternoon 
A fox ran through the kitchen—on hard scrambling nails 
And subtle paws, his sharp mate-musk stink sticking 
Where spindle-legs, black-burnt matchsticks 
Had passed;  ears alert, nose an arrow, eyes begging-wild
As a starving child’s, his tail a lit roadflare. 
He shot, disoriented, past you: instantly loud, 
Perhaps rabies-mad, like BBs scattered on glass. 

All nerves, you said he’d run so near his pelt 
Airbrushed calves as you peeled—and your face 
Carried a strange look into evening after that. 
A preoccupation with the map of outside sounds, 
Hoots and windchimes, whinging dogs, paused you, rapt. 
Except for a pinch of laughter here and there,  
I’d’ve said you’d sent your lover an unanswered text 
You were so otherwhere and otherwise.   
                                       And when 
I settled your faux fox pelt around your shoulders 
To escape suburban boredom for the theater, 
You touched the clean fur like a child’s scraped cheek 
And bit your lip, and pouted in the car, watching 
For some red flash in headlights that never came.

Stars, Tears

Stretched-out night taps at the tattling sash.

Night like a dog wants to go for a long stroll,
Tugging the cool coiled leash of me to get going—
And I go, myself restless and dreamless loping
Into my slip-on shoes, nabbing the worn
Walking stick as the door clicks shut behind me and
Night is everywhere at once like cold raindrops:
On my skin and in my hair I feel the instant ice
Of high stars;  their frost, their freedom.   And I
Look up as if asked by the minister done with prayer
And step onto friendly gravel, and beyond that,
Picking a worn path that crackles through the field
Like wild glazing on a shard of pottery.

Taking my first breath at last I taste this tear.

Postcoital Olive Grove

Here I lie on a shield of dust

Beneath a black-green dapple of olivetrees,
The sun in patches alive as fireants
Over my beloved as she snores, sotto voce,
The wine rolled emptily out of reach
As steep hills fall away to a scent of hidden seas
And my forgotten pipe burns, itching my fingers,
My teeth fresh and shivery as if smiling,

The white plate bare of all but a few grapes.

 



     A fire was lit, the wood spat.
Robert Macfarlane

Day’s Catch

Between tremendous white acts of clouds 
The sky cleared,
Bare planks of an emptied stage. 

The day is unwritten that would speak there, 
Act aloud 
Into the blue gape, the sky’s splendid gob of light

A blue umbrella opening over our knot of fishing boat,
Green-gunwaled, 
We’d untied into the broad morning stream:

Rainbows ran away from the deeply crooked prow, 
Uncatchably sailing ahead 
Of the painful pant of oars;  those bold, effortful strokes. 

To the enviously easy sound of the river we gave up 
All sound of words, 
Watching blobs of bobbers distort, listening only 

To the silent howls of fish we hauled wobblingly 
Over our knees 
To lie swollen beside our muddy wellingtons.

River Otters

Play keeps the otter on track for survival, 
Sweeps her back on her back 
                       for the key routines 
Of diving for meals, basking for supper. 

She’s got the alert look 
                  of a janitor on the hunt for trash, 
her variable mustache never settled 
                              beneath her nose 

But forever twitching and twigging to some 
Undiscovered opportunity for fun—
Entering intimately the zippered water
Swat-wheels of paws fanning liquid sunlight
Riding the wide slide 
                 of a heavy wave 
Or pairing in play 
Fight midstream, two-eyed pirates 
Without a plank.   

An otter’s her own rodeo, 
               her laughing lariat 
Hilariously cast 
to capture 
    a tragic moon and cinch it into smiles. 

Always at wrestling rest with water, the otter 
Laps the stolid, waterlogged log 
                                  eared with fungus 
And slaps curls of surf 
                like a panjandrum 

As she comes round and round 
And goes around again, 
Easy as leaves in autumn wind. 

She’s never less than slick, 
                   a weight of laughter 
Oiling her pelt, keeping her 
                   slim and wealthy. 

She’ll eat a fresh-bitten fish like eating a mirror, 
Endlessly eager after silver and blood, the good new stink
That fattens her milk for pups when they come 
Mewling into the grassy holt under willows—

Blind naked and crawling longwise to find furred teats, 
They’ll ride their ready mama 
                               all night like a raft.

O Indigo!

Up from the bottom  
Of my belling boat, I saw 

Sky, only sky. A quick electric 
Cut pale as paper. 

Around me loured the sounds 
Of sky, white whispers 

Like smoke unrolling,  
The shifting sheets 

Of making a fresh bed. 
Such air! 

Unreeling invisibly over me— 
Nothing but indigo, 

One indigo cube, cut 
By my inward gunwales,  

My bolt-hole 
Unanchored as a cloud...

Swiffering west, west, west 
As the stream hisses

As my fresh eyes dream
Of only this one

Huge acre of blue.

Arrival by Water

The skiff put in with a harsh hush of gravel at the island’s edge. 

Nobody noticed the fog’s snug hoodie with the broken woods before us 
Opening on the campsite, the ashen eye of the old put-out fire 
Centering where we would raise the spider web tents and hunker down 
For a long week of stories, the tipped glint of eyes in a sleeping bag, 
Days spent loping about the island’s sandy pines and warped shrubbery 
Or reading in the drifting skiff among junkyards of stumps 
And the loud flap of herons fishing.   

                            Sparks sang in the campy air 
That first night, casting strange ensigns in the edge of sight 
As we gathered our civilization to a knot of masks hunched 
Grimly around the burning socket of earth, the terrible tribute 
Of twigs pulled and piled skyward, the orange ingot of log 
Sacrificed like a length of man clipped and thrown away 
Where the frightwig fire climbed, feeding 
Our meaningless stories with death’s spat light. 
Kathy heaved away into distressed shadow, and Dan 
Sheared off after her with a joke, their tent argument eventually 
Shivering with reconciliation as Manny chuckled ‘Life!’ 
That was the first day. 

                          The water wrinkled like a face 
In front of the prow, and that was the second day. 

                                         Third day in, 
We set out for food more than what the river would give 
Willingly to our lines and time out of its silver mouth and 
Into ours;  there were small deer and wild pigs scattered 
Shotgun throughout the tossed wreckage of woods, 
And we would tackle and prepare one or go hungry 
We swore, shaking on it after the tar of morning coffee. 
Dan, Manny, and myself, Samuel, headed east to start 
Our circuit of the island heading toward a swampy dip 
That attracted birds, since even a duck would serve, 
Plucked and picked clean, while Jen and Kathy stayed 
To clear the breakfast char away and order camp, 
Scoffing at our oaths and waving us away with laughter. 

Once beyond the distracted clatter of camp, we hushed 
Into a pack, Manny taking point as we arrowed into woods, 
Tuning booted steps to silence as precisely as monks: 
No confusion of intentions invests our steps.

Kitchen Duty

Smoke discloses 
The campfire’s claws 
Roped close 
To our greasy offal. 

If life is light 
It grabs such cast-off 
Daintily, 
Chews clawsfuls.

Grasslands

There’s less seen, although the seeking is ceaseless. 
The olivey fibrous tough stalks find needles of shadow 
Even when orange noon crouches in the valley licking. 

A flotilla of mice could be passing, washed in grasses, 
Invisible as whiskers, a rustle in the rough pampas. 
A fox, a squirrel, a snake here and there swaying S-like 

And still there’s no hissing insistence but endless grass. 
Like a paper screen behind which a dancer disrobes, 
The grass seems flat, yet folded, yet flat.

Catfishing

Myself flat in the water-mirror, with the hanging jowls
And hooded eyes of time, am made rainbow-wavery, irised
By the river’s uneaseful striving, acres of stained glass 
Finned with strafing rain and clubbed morning light
Where hidden fish in seeming millions jump blind
After duplicitous raindrops instinct craves into insects
Until brawny brass clouds  are bundled off the map
And my baited line laces whippets 
                             in water’s renewed calm,
Begging for fish-morsels to bite and crimp
Fighting jaws on a bended hook joyed deep
Into a catfish’s prow of snout, barb and shaft deep,
Pulled mastered home by fisted reel, my miniature
Mill-wheel of undoing.

                     At length I clambered ashore,
At length felt the knife’s finesse deftly
Enter without flicker or spur the sudden
Blood guts spreading gushed for thumbs
Peeling the eatable fish to its depths.

Its heart-spigot spat incessantly, stressfully red
Until my steel puncture found its bubble, and red
Waters ran away from the wound with a dying flush
As flesh lapsed;  lungs and bladder;  intestine, crop and liver—
Food for flies on the cracked, caked-dirt bank,
The sudden blood a Y-river to trip-up cascaded ants 
Busily bulked at the stream of life falling stinky there,
A snarl of amber snakes dropped drowned from clouds,
My green waders holding me whole in eely skin.

Deadened River

Here among the dead
Sun’s  hard discards 
Lies an excrement 
Of mud unleavened

Where the river leaves 
Off lapping, leaping,
For August heaviness—
Lethargic shallows that trap

The trespasser’s shoe, 
Mark him mid-thigh 
With handprints of mud
As he labors for the grey shale 

Shore, the vivid crevasse 
Through which, slipshod, he entered 
This endless kingdom of mud
Glistening and viscid, 

Lacquered tomb of frogs 
And pizzicato flies attending 
The deathbed of glittering fish
Greenly gasping 

Slashed gills amid a tinder
Of leftover rainbows.

Underworld Turtles

The slow, snapping, fatal hook-faces 
Withdraw beneath peaty murk, guinness-dowdy stout; 
Stellae of stumps jut up their ancient wood turtlenecks, 
Interrupting radar ripples the ancient heads send out—
Long antediluvian thoughts, green only in sap, in blood 
As old water uncoils to flatness. 

Daisy-dainty mossflowers crown the right-hand stump, 
Deeply ambiguous as dew, yellow-white as sunnyside eggs. 

I sit stiff in the splinter canoe until turtles return 
Blipping the surface like rain beginning,  
                             eye drill-holes black as the underworld 
In ratty light that skirts the island’s belt of mulchy decay. 
They arrive bald as ambassadors, bold as monarchs
From their dipped-in-oil underkingdom, leaf plantation
Of soft coffee grit that finds the cracks in graves.
To what side of experience are they wet stepping stones? 

II
Cornea-bulbed backs rise darkly coated as frying pans,
Stub flippers studded with badger-cleats fanned out 
Wound-strike ready, forever extended as a garden tool
Beneath the camouflage of river—its mirror deceits
Part and parcel of the shadow-play turtles stage.

Poked heads are wizened critics’ barbs, brainlessly sharp.
Will they sort the worthy and unworthy, like Anubis?
When winter steps to the river, fetching its cape of ice, 
These creatures bury themselves hind-first
In muskrat burrows, settle-in in lump-mud debris;
They lodge naked beneath rotted eye-arches of logs,
Cozied dim in the underworld under summer’s business—
Occasionally guessably visible below thick mid-season ice, 
They roll out of hiding like heavy wheels of revelation churning,
Swimming slow and white as ghosts 
                           beneath the flying skaters’ feet.

Meeting a Deer

A scumbled scuttle, a tamped fusion of hooves 
Rattles my attention from a slouchy doze 
Aslant a twig-burst hawthorn were I’d found 
An old oblong of sunlight to coffin in an hour, 
While noon leans onward like a runner sketching  
Light-trails toward a dash of yellow ribbon: here
A deer, disconsolate, nuzzles sweetgum leaves, 
Eating green stars steadily unto Kingdom Come;
I see before me fine-grained flecks of  flank 
Like a hazy TV left on long past the last show…. 

Her head is shy and broadly-spaded as a snake’s, 
The leaflike ears alert, the one dark eye I can see 
Potent as an eclipse—umplummable, purplish  
Depthless blacks, while her lips work the sweetgum 
And I wait without motion, floating raftless
And buoyant in my Dead Sea nap—so close I inhabit 
The trembling huff of her nostrils, sour and warm, 
Her limber length trim as an unpulled scull
At rest for this waste minute tide-bereft,
Weaving and unweaving in the woods’ waves.

Moon Owl

A snowy owl puts himself alone in a room with the moon.

He is silver as a Christmas basket, and the moon hangs silver too
High up in trees’ intricate netting, ribbing the night absences.
They present, from a certain oblique angle beneath them,
A pair of wary skulls absolute in their terrible whiteness:
Death and his hungry buddy divine retribution, perhaps.
Both of them fly at us in the engineered silence of ages
On wings of light like devouring angels, gowned and ornate.
Witness them, the feathered one and the bald one up there:
Both of them honeymooning or playing space chess or whatever

Alone in a room together that we call heaven.

A Deepening Sea

Mar 172017

EPIGRAPHS

Seas and seasons on the edge of wetness

"Either you decide to stay in the shallow end 
... or you go out in the ocean."
--Christopher Reeve

                     .. all that we are
destined to know, that the water is cold
and deep, and the sun penetrates only so far.
~~Jim Harrison

TIDAL POOL

Look into the tidal pool that stands so small,
Licked into existence by its ocean mother; 
Look how sea and sky can stand together 
In the salt circumference of its circle. 

When at its edge and peering in, the dark 
Feels absolute.  But, with a little waiting there, 
What was all sky or night begins to clear.
--Look, a starfish, beating like a heart!

I Am an Anemone

A belated report from a seer of being

Living with the sea and surf is every New Jerseyan’s native inheritance. There’s a scrim of winning, of life triumphant, that inheres to such wild and wetted borderlands between the ocean and the dunes that no temporary imposition of boardwalk, beach badge, or scootered police force can ever fully erase. Last year one of the big movies was The Martian, based on a sappy book and executed with boku budget and zero imagination. Their Martian was a man stranded on the red planet, its only inhabitant. Do you want to visit aliens? See a consciousness estranged from our fingers and lungs? Look no farther than under salt water. Here are animals and plants endowed with an elemental difference from our landbound neighbors.

And there, of course, under the sea, we began our evolution to becoming the landlords of dry earth–prince of predators and queens of the eating regime of life. At least, of life on land. Is there another us still swallowed by the sea, still wrapped in a tube of fishy muscle and zooming through the blue? Some watery mirrory reflection of the zest to know all and to impose ourselves on all that we humans have?

When I watch a fish twitch at the end of my hook, its face all made at angles to reduce drag and be an engine in service of its Shopenhaur-like will-to-live, I see my own eye going from glassy to arid as it expends its final minutes on the grass. We are efficient in our environment, and strangers elsewhere. When we succeed in life or business beyond the home, after the lame dorm, strong in our suits and boardrooms, or ably outfitted with a plumber’s wrench and toolkit, it is the old world of going home for the holidays where we feel the most estranged from our daily selves. It is there, among the cranberry sauces and filleted turkeys, that we gasp after the mastery the aquarium of work and our married lives provide.

But still we go home. Still we outfit ourselves with our juvenile social graces, or a newfound awkward silence that puts parsecs between us and our siblings at the dinner table–the green skirts of the christmas tree feeling as alien now as once they were the epitome of comfort and safety.

And so, as a species, we are divers and explorers of our personal pasts, of our nations and tribes, of our civilizations, and even of our previous incarnations as beings zinging along under the sea. It is to that cold water we return equipped with diving gear and lights brighter than sunshine, recording new home movies of the old kelp patch, weighted at the belt to keep us on our visit, the old family, finned and eely, nearly unrecognizable.

I am an anemone–as good an underwater emblem for a writer as anything–a colorful eater of facts and dreams, a living sitter waving prayerful tentacles before this mixed magnificence given again and again until, finally, we start learning to see.

And to see, of course, we must first outfit our minds and hearts with open curiosity. Not to know the answer that will be divulged. Life is no simpering SAT test, but a real engagement with what is. And whatever is, is us.

For this voyage, let us be in love with fins and sinuous things; with the starkly sharp urchins, the deep sulfur inhabitants of poisoned vents, the wild things that neither roar nor fly. Let us be baptized in salt water, and raise our heads again from that furious, wet source of being that first broke us out of dim nothingness into suffering and ecstasy.

Gregg Glory
Feburary 14th, 2016

POEMS

* The Tide is Wide *

Voyage off beneath the trees 
O'er the field's enchanted seas 
Where the lilies are our sails 
And our sea-gulls, nightingales. 
~~James Whitcomb Riley

Into Morning’s Quiet Overcast I Looked

Into morning's quiet overcast I looked:
I saw a great grey bleak of sea-borne seeming, 
A pewter-cold and winter-empty snowlight that shook 
Into a wide wayside ditch, that was left sullying  
Until the sun the somber doleful ocean overtook--
Breaking light like a run of fishes surfacing. 
Then, every curve of every wave looked up, 
Brightness burned in every tilted cup, 
Brightness lifting where endless dim had been: 
Brightness, brightness in everything.

The September Bee

All along the machine-sweeper's leveled beach 
As along a lolling dog's long tongue of sand, 
Or mile-long emory board of luminous grit, 
I scuffed barefooted, belated, half 
Working on a late September tan. 

A bayberry bud which night had shut
Held tight to something undisclosed, 
Something daylight's tapping hadn't resurrected, 
That moved untouched in little starts and fits; 
I heard a dull interrogatory buzz--

Something of summer left unremembered  
Stirred inside the clenched flower-ball; 
Something smaller than a bloom gone rigid. 
When I shook that something into my palm 
A something almost dead, almost golden rolled.

Out in a Rowboat

Out in a rowboat above fluorescent bones of coral 
I saw a sunken world waver as I passed; 
Rainbow fish and glimmering squid shone floral 
As the beat of my oars broke the water's glass. 

I was the furthest thing imaginable to them: 
An angel in the taunting surf with repeating wings--
As though I'd fallen bone-dry from desert heaven 
To be a backlit stranger above their swimming. 

What they were to me, I hesitate to say. 
The water that kept them, kept them estranged. 
What enters us truly comes from such a long way, 
What they were was what I could not name: 

Dense urchins rolling dark along the sandy floor, 
Alive with needles as a knitting circle; 
Sea-lilies waving at a beckoning shore; 
My own long shadow waving as it wrinkles....

Painting Seascapes

There are images and images in the shifting witness
Of the sea, in all that wetness yet unanticipated-- 
Shape on shape in pilings-on of whiteness 
That heap rocks blank until no color taints. 

The artist's canvas there is pure as grass 
That grew in Eden before Eve had fainted-- 
Save when Noah set forth in dockless darkness 
And God's skies a single swipe of blackness painted.

Pugilist at Sea

Up over the side came arms of salt water to deride
The insolence of setting forth in so low a thing 
Where green angry seas swell over-high,
Ready to swat what sculling flies try landing. 

And still the sailor tossed and tried, and still 
Found hard laughter in sails rabid winds unfurled-- 
Hands at hips, his face swept wet against 
The massed contempt of all that brawling swirl. 

Then night came round, and calm came round, 
And all the water round laid down a mirror  
Pearled only by his little boat, and the only sound 
Was himself cursing at the shrouds, as at prayer.

The Wounded Boat

Coming in blind by feel and raw belief 
Through a coral-crowded sound alone, 
Silence is no part of her who lays beneath
The grieving whitecaps of this skiff. 
She is as a child's lone slapping moan, 
More real for being an unseen reef 
Panicked hands must guess at through the foam 
Of moonless midnight--the only shore a brief 
Invisible applause of leaves that signals home.

The Happiness Mast

The yawing mast above us is 
What happiness is within us. 
See it leaning like a needle does 
To touch the water as it sprays! 

See it stiffen toward the skies 
As if to find among those clouds 
Godhood's enigmatic prize. 
Of its own seeking it is proud! 

Climb some midnight with limber daring 
Into the crowsnest at the top. 
And there--for a moment's scaring-- 
Feel your breathing stop.

Brevity Blesses

Brevity blesses 
By the littleness of its 
Hash of guesses. 

* 
A door ajar is more, in its intention, 
Than a thousand precepts' edification. 

* 
A limegreen wash of dawn, 
Daylight's eternal line of red 
Bisecting sky and sea, 
And day and night--and me. 

* 
All the limits of the lake's wide circle 
Sink superseded by the circle of the sea. 
A headlight's preening lamp is little-- 
Is least--when turned to face immensity. 

* 
Joggers stamp past on the sandy path; 
Yellow dogs follow them, oblivious; 
A startled bird;  a shaken branch and bush; 
--And then the windless returning hush.

Ideas

What was it that accidentally I'd thought? 
What, if anything, accidentally caught? 
Whatever came, whatsoever caught, 
I found I had to carry in mind alone. 
I had no other pocket it could call home. 

Ideas are a nothing that we always need. 
For all earth's endowment of dirt, they are seeds 
Light as kelp-spore, a minute's freight that breeds 
All we are into all of light we see, 
Breeding upward reach from dark inward need.

The Turnstile’s Lament

The weak ‘sweep, sweep' of marram grass 
Is enough to make me think of all who pass
(Waltzing barefoot as they collect their badges) 
Out to the sighing surf, out to where they wade
Half-mermaid atop green waves for saddle,
And all the sea a sweep of pasturage.

I myself, a sweeper of the edgeless stage, 
Turn in the wind, and am turned again, 
My own weak 'weep mocking as I turn in pain 
To the beaten sound of wet sandgrains  
Where enfeebled night kneels and cloaks the day.
And all must leave, but the grass and I must stay.

* ‘Come In, Come In’ *

If we were the sea, we'd always be dancing... 
Rhythm from beneath and a breath from above, 
Foam of all those stories rolling inside us at once.

Family Album

They were familiar things in familiar places, 
Photos and postcards and long Xmas letters. 
Names known down the bones, houses called home, 
Dogs who, when called, always came running. 
Old fishing spots that stayed shaded all afternoon, 
That always walked catfish to the dinner table. 
Newspapers snapped back in Dad's wide lap, 
A porch hammock swung in summer-long napping. 
Skinned knees, a broken tooth, and brotherly love 
Tied tight to small fists as red boxing gloves.... 
Or dawdling at funerals while Mother was crying 
And Dad and Uncle Jim both restlessly pacing, 
Tying black ties that didn't really need tying. 
They were familiar things in familiar places, 
Familiar as pain in family faces.

‘Come In, Come In’

The coming storm  
Works its shoreward will until we hear 
Bands of tangled lightning sear 
And hurry near. 
Afternoon rain pats my doubled-over shoulder, warm, 
And lightly touches hands below rolled sleeves  
As if to say ‘Come in, come in, 
Before the last light dies,
Before final night arrives.' 

I leave trowel and pitchfork where they stick, 
Our acre subsumed in quick eclipse. 
Soon rain roars cold against an upturned cart-- 
Hammerheaded darts 
Thrown too hard to dodge or miss. 
All that light allowed to be
Kept at bay is bearing down,
That kept at sea the sea
That's come knocking now.
Soon lot, house, and all seem lost at sea, 
An empty pilothouse surmounting a silver surge, 
Battered branch and clothesline whistling dirge 
For all of me. 

Moonless windows moan and strain 
To be let in, let in, 
To not be witness to how outer storm and outer night 
Bend low to blow out every light. 
Crouched in our basement hiding place, 
Thrown shadows fasten cloaks around our heads 
Crowding eyes toward eyes. ‘When all is done and said, 
This is home, our home' we would doubtless insist 
If pressed for definition of our case. 
Cradled candles elongate cheek, chin and face 
Flickering underlit 
Like lightning in an uncertain fist.

The Driftwood Collector

All along the wind-honed blade of bay 
A nor'easter from upstate's conveying treasure 
Where sand was warm enough to roll in yesterday 
And water peaceable, and sleep a pleasure. 

Driftwood's floating in from a near hurricane; 
Osiris limbs that have drifted for years 
Hurry now to reassemble upon the plain: 
One foot stomping, one arm swimming clear 

Of all the crosswash late-season storms impose 
To lie in oafish somnolence on a beach, 
Turning up worn beards and weather-beaten noses 
Like trophies, themselves the prize they never poached. 

Before I retired, there was a log all knew 
Had been doing a dead-man's float a hundred years 
Past the point--and if no wiser, no worse anyhow, 
And bears him up no less then his first year 

When death pushed him rootless water-ward 
And time drained his strength like an hourglass 
And left him grey, and more useless than a board, 
Hissing where he is when the wind stiffens-- 

Should he ever drift to beach to my collector's luck, 
I'll lever him off, and paddle out upon his back.

The Surfers

When I walk early, for hours and hours 
      Upon the beach alone, 
I watch my shadow shorten through the morn; 
      I throw a stone; 
I watch it skip at first, then sink and sink. 

Sometimes a surfer, wet-suited in the dawn 
      And on his own, 
Sits high upon a single wave unevenly alive 
      As if half-enthroned, 
The sea all-colors under him, a swell of gasoline. 

The breaker he rides in will be immense, a wall 
      As wide as eyes can go. 
Is it loneliness that has him paddle out 
      As far as he does? 
Alone myself, I ride my dryer hill.

      I always wave hello.

A Wordless Conch

A wordless conch held at my ear 
Was a sea-snail's hollow caul; 
It endlessly sighs of landless wastes, 
Pulling air into its bowl. 

Smaller shells in double handfuls 
Come up in triumphant palms, 
A ladle dipped at elbows 
Dripping from nature's cauldron.... 

How many inching lives in shells 
Have footed home to death 
To give our morning walk this beach-- 
As grand a road as Rome's? 

Emptied of their residents 
The little mausoleums arch, 
Scalloped worn catacombs--
Fleshless in the flashing wash.

Pilings

I'd thought to put my acre of ocean true, 
To right-angle the waves with a path for shoes, 
A promenade for boatmen to steady ashore, 
To find their way dry again, if lost before. 

The pilings we pitted deep into grey sand 
And (aware of parables from the holy land) 
We stayed that sand with marine cement. 
(Our pilings would not be wrenched from it.) 

Four-by-fours and long two-by-sixes next 
Were spun betwixt pilings to cast a rigid net 
To keep the sway-boned sea from dancing past 
When hurricane or waterspout would come at last. 

I stood back from the work and declared it fit; 
Looped my floating hopes fast with rope to it; 
Cracked my back and thought of no more than bed. 
There I dreamed the years of use that lay ahead.... 

Came the storm, and stood the pitted pilings fast; 
The boat by its noose was saved, swamped but clasped. 
The beach itself was wooed away and hammered back-- 
All I'd thought sure and trued was flat collapsed,

No more than piled sand and rope gone slack.

Wintering by the Atlantic

A midnight ocean and a stippled snow
Greyly perceived from a rail I know
Shared the grainy dark of here and nearer.
What water was above me seemed uncertainer.
What rolled in mist below rolled solider.

As snow and snow will in snowing meet,
What slid down danced into a wild sleet
And randomly clung, each to each, 
Resisting ocean's disassembling touch           
That undoes the individual who falls
And in that fall returns to ocean's all.
I could not tell just what my seeing meant
Nor how long soundless darkness had been lent;
There was nothing there in what was of sky,
No help of light to help say why,
Only usurpation's snow-deadened hiss
That ended each self-formed singleness
Distilled from upper vagueness and the cold.

They did not fall because they had been told.
They fell because there was nothing else to do
But fall, and this the ocean knew.

Flotsam-Mood

I hold myself treading mid-ocean mid-June, 
Almost lost among soft flashes of lashless eyes,
Loose ribbons of wrinkling waves that rise
And through oscillation bend and bend
Again, ending even with where they began,
Myself a pendulum to their motion
Of living hill and sunset ocean--
A golden head lolling in golden swells
That lap the iron tilt of buoy-bells
Swinging ringing their unattended knells.
But who am I, in green abeyance held,
Absent village clock and cocooning field?

Flotsam in the great swallower, I,
A mote of bladdered seaweed beneath the sky
Flow myself outflung over rippled sands,
Themselves unrolling in a treeless land
Where nothing is and no thing walks 
But scuttles on points and pincers in the dark;
Here my bouyed bones must sink, and sink to stay,
White as the flippant foam confused in play.
Like a criss-cross flag I'm blown about--
Shoreward winds first draw me in, then point me out, 
Uncertain to which country I am flown devout:
One horizon mesmerizes which creeps toward sea,
The opposite arc of cliff calls equally,
Myself the pupil spot in horizon's round,
A fleck of naught between deeps and ground.
Not lost, unfound in all that swells surrounding.

I float alone on the ocean's groaning--
From fathoms down lifts a gaping sounding,
As if a whale's lung, mid-rib, were sawn
Into a mouthless mouth too widely open,
Blowing hair into eyes with rough inhuman shush.
Lipless lips purse: sighing prayer, giving curse.
I know not which I'd rather hear in the hush
As wave berates wave in the subsuming wash....
If I address what holds me weightless,
With head and heart so nearly stateless,
I can't be sworn for either evil or good
As original author of my flotsam-mood:

"O Swallower, belched blanched from what
Depth beneath your cold swash and cut
Do I rise, a bubble in blown glass cupped?
What answer will you make, but swallow all
To that treeless dark where answers fall?
Your great green page folds and unfolds on every side;
On every side you pulse; I am kissed, pressed--
A shifty bookmark anchored in your aching wide:
Marking what, beside what poignant passage placed?
'Mid ocean's tassels tossed crest to crest
By your wrestler's wet, intensive tenderness,
I stretch spreadeagled as blank bells confess-- 
Unsure of outcome but with a strength to bless."

Reading Lines in the Sea Foam

The continuous white line of the surf 
Overwrites what was written there first  
With more of the same.  More of the same 
Mid-sentence message: sans beginning, sans 
End, an incessant erasure of sea and sand, 
A crescive hissing as if, as if playing a game. 

So I walked, myself a man in the middle, 
As irresolute as unfinished, lulled 
By the sound, calmed by seeing my footsteps 
Misspelled as I passed, or stood looking on, 
Leaving nothing behind to trouble one 
Who followed tidelines, reading where I have read. 

If confusion arose which line was preferred  
The sea never, never slowed for loss of words, 
As unhesitant in writing as erasure. 
Indeed the beating thing seemed to be to be, 
To keep even the pace of newness with waste-- 
Profligate perhaps, but oh so assured.

* And Savior Came There None *

The toil of all that be 
Helps not the primal fault; 
It rains into the sea, 
And still the sea is salt. 
~~A E Housman

My Dream of Reefs

More mossy than the stillest wooded pond, 
More grotto than all those Roman fountains, 
Quiet as a night without any end-- 
My dream of reefs, the sandy waters under them.

Roll On, Combers

Roll your rifle-barrels to the beach, 
Roll with steely reaching. 
Roll on, combers. 

Jericho of unfinished walls 
Roll on, I praise thy roar and fall. 
Roll on, combers. 

Crash dice against the jetties, 
Roll bones against our bleakness. 
Roll on, combers. 

Come thunder, come coil of storm, 
Roll on, voice of throats unborn! 
Roll on, combers. 

While time billows and music floods 
Roll on, repeat the resounding chord. 
Roll on, combers. 

Roll as you have always rolled. 
Roll on, toil, moil of echoes. 
Roll on, combers, roll on.

A Sailor’s Prayer

Let all not be but rock and fate, 
A necklace of broken backs 
Hung round the nearest outcrop. 
Let mercy guide me and my mates, 
Let ease enter with every tack 
Against stripping wind's constant strop. 

I guess all prayer's beseeching, 
A word into the wind, a keen 
Fear for what may come unasked. 
Hands in prayer clapped are reaching 
From wave's trough into the unseen, 
Two oars with lonely rowing tasked. 

I give thanks when the water's calm, 
The moon like a pearl upon it 
And all the slap of waves soft applause. 
Thanks I give to the Helmsman 
From Honolulu to Narragansett, 
Thanks for each wild swell and pause.

Fisherman’s Complaint

"Spray's no place to keep home in, 
Not for us, who, true, came from wet-- 
But must live dry with fingered fins."
"And ears dry that'd rather hear music."  

"I'll sing all day, if you'll pull the net!"  
"Grab your side and heave, and we'll 
Sing together and call that music."  
"Oh, heave-ho, the day-o--Aw, hell 

I've no song for the work today. 
Janice hates the smell of fish 
When home I tromp.  And that's the way 
I'm getting to get, too... fish." 

And so they trawled the silence in 
Until the sinking sun's oil slick 
Was well past its orange and golden 
Wallowing--the bay black, a drained sink.

And Savior Came There None

I bared my chest and brought 
Myself to the bitter brink; 
I stepped into two rubber fins, 
Strapped on a silver mask. 

Through a tube so narrow,
My breath both came and went; 
A sound like someone drowning 
To my two ears was sent. 

Beneath a watery curve of sky 
I began to dive and glide; 
Sudden worlds of sunken wonder 
Appeared bursting at my side. 

Sandscapes of stranded castles,
All colors and every size; 
Swift fins of fabled angels 
Rushed silent before my eyes....

What was home now I was here 
A weightless angel like the rest? 
Oh, that my restless breath would cease 
And I be more than guest!

Down and In

I fell into a deepening sea 
As a star falls out of the night; 
I fell to unskinnable knees 
From a too-urgent height. 

The cold that I encountered 
Flowed around me--within 
My star's carbon burning embered,
All shining at an end. 

The seaward insistence of rivers 
Became ocean's dread suck inside. 
I rolled among those silvers;
I sank into those tides. 

Now down, and in, and dark, 
I hang like a lantern suspended.
Deprived of wire and spark, 
The sea inevitably enters.

* Diving for Pearls *

Alone 'mongst Indians in Canoes, 
Sometime o're-turn'd, I have been 
Half an inch from death, in Ocean deepe, 
Gods wonders I have seene. 
~~Roger Williams, founder of 
    Rhode Island colony

Into the Deep Blue Sea

The handshake of an electric eel 
Could make a postcard politician feel; 
The Sun Fish, that seems but half a fish, 
Makes bullet-passage with its half-swish; 
Jellies that congregate maintain at noon 
A delicate transparency of moons; 
Sharks that mark the green sea-swath 
Inspire fear with props of fin and froth; 
The melodramatic dark of the Manta Ray 
Swings more cape than cutlass in the bay; 
The nippy urchin rolled on his hairy spines 
Won't be soon confused for a ball of twine; 
Flying Fish that scissor off Catalina 
Out-leap the terrible teeth of barracuda. 
For every ocean-going predator there is another 
Who knows an older (and bigger) brother. 
In this marine realm of fight and fight 
The old sun's sword cuts but filtered light-- 
Our salt-stung eyesight goes only so far below 
The sine of wave and gemmy billow.

Although the wide ocean's vast is vast, 
Our ignorance sailed it centuries past 
--Our ignorance vaster than oceans! 
And still for our ignorance we have questions: 
Not how wide our unknowing spreads, 
But how deep it still can poke its head. 
To trawl and sound and step the depth of seas, 
First we name our ignorance ‘mystery.'

The Tourist

The sea before he entered it was swift, 
A rift of bright like an abalone shell. 
Down in, its dance and glimmer grew more dense, 
Grew nigh invisible, a fist enclos- 
Ing like glue, a push of rippled weight 
Buckling his legs behind, or else a silent pull... 
Waters willing him wade in deeper yet. 
Crenellations of the waiting reef were 
Circle on circle of green shingles piled, 
A pagoda for fishes' flittering sleeves, 
Keen to keep their wisdom and their world their own. 
Still he stooped to investigate what gaps 
Gave access, what recesses might show as  
Open when poked, kneeling almost where 
The darkness gathered him forward hunched, 
Wreathed with fronds or waving fans of coral, 
Spying spectacularly with his camera and flash 
--A startlement of light that washed all back 
As when cosmos first from nothingness was hurled.

First Dive

Now down, I took my breathing easy, as I was taught. 
Still, I flinched at fins swiving past my arms, 
Watched dumb as trailing bubbles belled through wet light 
Where wide tides walked. 

Ocean's wounded sound was silence.  That enveloped all. 
That tempered each crested crash of surface waters. 
That tucked me under--dull quiet--into an unrung bell 
Of amniotic salts. 

Slowly, what had galled, gelled into new norms.... 
Lassoes of shadow cinched, then pooled, without menace. 
New, hushed harmonies sang out when schooling swarms 
Divided round the fault 

I interposed by standing there, a weighted fence. 
Immersed in those bold blues the ocean knew, 
I felt at once insignificant and immense: 
A full and empty vault.

Beneath Actinic Light

Down into a darker level of the sea 
I sank with oxygen and spotlight; 
Lead-weights buckled like a studded belt 
To keep pants up, kept me sinking free. 

I passed a coral outcrop, color-flooded, 
And watched the atmosphere give up its glow-- 
A darkness swelling fresh from deep below 
Until the most innocent rock looked hooded. 

For sound I had a squeal of captive air, 
A tick-tick of equipment like a ladder round 
Clumsily fumbled going drunken down, 
With no soft rest of grass waiting there. 

Before a cave-hole I hung with bright device, 
The only apparition bearing any light 
So low below, to that deep under-height. 
I shined what sun I brought into the crevice: 

And there I saw a swirl or flash or spot 
Of more colors than my rainbow count  
Of red, orange, green, blue, indigo, violet-- 
A living ribbon of... I knew not.... 

I tried as many angles as I could access 
To see what went slippery behind dead coral, 
But left blind as I had been--without a moral-- 
Having shoved hand, eye, light into a recess.

No Upper Summer

Deep beneath all that light could bring of news,
Beneath empty sky, and beneath the heavy 
Wet of the Atlantic shelf's continental pew 
(Where light is crushed into a black mascara jelly 

And what is seen is felt by eyeless thew), 
Small volcano smokestacks erupt from rock 
And pour their sulfur poisons, hid from view-- 
Hid from everything one would be led to think.... 

Yet gathered round each bare and broken vent, 
Arrayed as bloom-petals around a central stem, 
Plume and worm and life are duly bent, 
Studying the steady heat as old men 

Study the hearth-fire in their winter dens. 
Life hangs, even here, as a clef upon its stave, 
Singing silent psalms to purgatory summer when 
No upper summer gives what buried earth burns and gives.

Diving for Pearls

The gold fan-coral waved soft as Gretel's locks 
And waved me onward, way by way, 
To pearl-oyster nooks in the pocketwatch bay;
Hidden places where none would look. 

Awash with calm beneath the sunny calm of day, 
With warmth that kept all doubt suspended,
My querulous flippers flapped me upended; 
Kept nose grounded and sandy-cloudy. 

An oyster bed I'd found there for just myself,
Oysters piled in unsliding mounds. 
I reached into the pearlescent hill's half-round 
For what I myself could grasp of wealth.

With sack slumped full and hard lungs demanding, 
I came up fast to the raft for air. 
I took my short knife and jimmied rims right there, 
Cracked pulled oysters with rough handling. 

I poked discarded purple guts for pearls,
Held soft sunlight cupped in shells--
Peeled mask and peered to see myself as well. 
What I saw reflected I would not tell.

Suspension, or The Diver

for Yvonne Montanino

A liquid weightless zero pull arrives as
She dismounts the boat into the moulting waves; 
Although she sinks herself as in a grave, 
Air would be with air and stay alive. 

All the push of nature pops her like a cork; 
To keep her curious nose nose-down is work. 
To reach toward treasure in the yeasty dark 
She rows against her buoyant heft, an anti-lark.

Dimmer blurs emerge as old light lets go 
And water-deepness keeps her dull below. 
Then, a burst of breath for pearly curtain, 
Turns orientation less than certain. 

No longer can she feel a down in bones, 
The globe surrounding an emergent zone 
Of everywhichway arrows, striped and finned. 
All's confusion, hazard, a map unpinned. 

There is nor up nor down, but all is round--
And she the center of the spun ball, no less. 
And then begins a small bubble in the brain: 
I confess, I must dive into this weightlessness

Again.

Swimming Around a Volcano

As if in search of revelation I
Descended, dived
Between dead cracks of an old volcano
Island abandoned
By all but reefs. The plunge undid me--
The world I entered 
Reeled unreal, slopes of black glass and ash:
Pleated cliffs 
That slid at every angle like fallen wings. 

And the sea was grass,

As in a psalm of inattentive shepherds lost
In strange valleys
Floods had closed.  Glad rayed fans of coral
Reached like wreckage--
Unpruned since the solitary cone had cooled
(Oh, an age ago
As far as new life proliferating might reckon),
Lifting their neon palms   
To desert heaven.  And, above heaven, silent,

God, absent and calm.

* Finding Lionfish Everywhere *

Full many a fathom down beneath
The bright arch of the splendid deep
My ear has heard the sea-shell breathe
O'er living myriads in their sleep.
~~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

A Transparent Heart

Unclouded I sit at my tideline task. 
Hipless jellyfish pulse, intricately limbed 
Between my knees, beneath my diver's mask, 
Bell-bodies beating slow as living chimes. 

Their white summer dresses but lightly veil 
A teasing rictus of richer innards: 
A plume of brain like a peacock's tail, 
A transparent heart that shows the sand. 

Here's one who feels a nothing in my hand, 
Whose string limbs curl their inching purple 
Around a curved inviting fingerend 
As if a morning reminder tied--and lapsed. 

All I had forgotten floods to mind suddenly; 
Expelled thoughts that had been supple 
Cloud my mask with breathing ill-at-ease, 
Complexing a day that had been simple. 

No longer can I play easy as they seem, 
Letting tufts of plankton, water, light, and all 
Pass through me as through an open transom-- 
My heart beating transparent, clear and small.

The Hermit Crab

When he lets his inner curl of anchor go 
Like a weightlifter giving all that gravity back 
And leaves his comma tracks incised in dough 
Pointing like a murderer to his abandoned shack, 
He drags all of himself there really ever was  
Across the sea floor's unforgiving foreign sands 
Into some striped or spotted larger emptiness, 
And there drops anchor, there makes his stand.

Cultivation

Damselfish are farmers: kill coral bald, 
Then plow an algae patch on the barren spot. 
They'll bite an intrusive diver waving by, 
Tap angry at mask and gear until they weary--
So keenly they tend what they raise on rock. 
Toward every threat they flit: diminutive, bold. 

Their bluff of territory they domesticate,
Chew wrong weeds away, howsoever small, 
And comb with care each ragged straggler spume. 
They fence close their field with a farmer's gait,
Name the milk cow, chime the children home.
They flit and flit unfailing, hovering over all.

The Clownfish and the Anemone

A clownfish, my dear, whose name is mirth, 
Lives laughing within neon harms of his host; 
Fans out orange scare-fins at butterflyfish; 
Grins his teeth and retreats--in home tentacles lost. 

The anemone herself, a squatting chalice, 
Throws her fist of poisoned arrow-arms to sting; 
And then into her central hive of malice 
Recalls sparred darts, her living victim entangling. 

Together they live, you see, together thrive-- 
The clownfish aerating and defending, 
The anemone parrying and providing-- 
A dance of two as intimate as anything alive. 

A dance as endless as a willful marriage; 
A dance, my dear, I daren't disparage.

Whales Falling like Leaves

An indigo shadow falls along the ocean floor  
That in shallows would be a beginning reef 
And start a coral flourish from a spoor 
And bring, in time, some tidy ship to grief. 

But here in deeps the ship of skeleton is cast, 
Lowering to be feed, and not to be fed, 
A blue whale corpse settling in at last-- 
A sleeping giant on a giant bed. 

And here for years will come the uncomely work 
Of claw and tentacle, enzyme and tooth; 
No bones left for an archeologist's pick, 
Who could admire such appetite for truth.

Wanting God in the Seaweed

Just beyond what grasp would give to want, 
Just where my shrunken horizon's foreshortened 
By kelp and eelgrass and water-logged sand, 
Till all I see's a greeny mix-and-mist 

Into which I adamantly wish to stretch and reach, 
And find beyond my finely granulated sight 
Something to hold to through the shade of night, 
Something to give assurance, however slight, 

However less a something than a pebble caught 
And kept in reminiscence in a handy pocket 
And petted for luck, or looked at like a locket, 
Something to calm the terror, as a beach 

By the ocean's attentive petting palm is laved, 
That keeps its variable fringe of whiteness crisp  
With the back and forth of wrist and whisk 
Of that invisible hand who never waved to me.

The Octopus’ Ghost

An octopus I had not known was there  
Jetted off--and left aloft his ink ghost 
Dancing eight tentacles in water-air 
Off a shoulder of coral, a foot at most 
In front of where I hovered unaware. 

It had, in ink, the shape of sagging brain-sac; 
It had the sly suavity of tentacles 
As well, believably beating in its track. 
Itself had long gone behind pinnacles 
Of dawning coral, and would not come back.  

With my own waiting sack weightless in hand,
I prodded a likely cranny or two, 
Hoping to cull home what now coiled hidden 
In rock and nook.  I poked, too, through what debris 
The octopus had left for hint about his den. 

What feasts from his dinner-plate were scraped! 
Crabs galore, as well as fans of scallop shells 
Like leaves blown in the wake of striding capes; 
An empty turtle rocking like a bell; 
Fish skeletons delicately draped. 

I wavered amazed, inked in my own surprise. 
What had I thought would happen here below? 
All morning I'd chased the octopus for prize, 
All morning observed camouflage and flow 
Of the watchful octopus, his goatlike eyes.

Finding Lionfish Everywhere

Watch the waving lionfish in deeply dappled light: 
His slender fins are batons conducting camouflage, 
Tricks of if adept at blinds as the coming on of night: 
Dimwit eyes see zip in passage of his wild extravagance. 

So he weaves, decieves, and is, with many gaudy brocades 
As a zebra's made to blend and be, a wave of the savanna; 
As aged great apes with false politesse share rare bananas--
Retitred prizefighters holding hands, retreating to shared shade.

The Goliath Grouper

What thoughts are gathered in a grouper's eye, 
Who watches quiet-gilled reef-life go by? 
Unstartled as a weedy rock, he juts 
A low slow-opening brown jaw that waits 
Until some swimming bits of mere scenery 
Focus into French Grunts, get bit as bait. 

What the grouper thinks, with his down-turned pout 
Jabbering wide between coral's teal rebuttal points, 
Is what's caught by him is caught for good, 
Beyond debate good Socrates understood. 
--His principle dissolves all beyond retort. 
Whatever he thinks, he lives by this inner acid.

Reaching After Stingrays

Stung by something about the whiptail ray 
(That mere leaning past my gunwale couldn't relieve),
Had me slither under water a little way 
To unsettle sand, and give the sleeping ray a shove;   
And note which way, if any, it might move. 

As sand spread flat on sand it was well-disguised; 
An anxious angler had naught to notice 
Who noticed not its eyebrow-pleated eye--
No more than a black marble made of ice. 
I laid a bare finger down to stroke its spine. 

My eyes went shut, as when prayer comes, 
Or trigger-pull releases a clapping shot. 
The last I saw was a shiver of skirts;  gone,   
The sudden nothing of a disturbéd spot 
Where sand had lain allayed--an untied knot. 

Its muslin, I'll tell you what, was mostly spurs, 
The petting of a sandpaper cantaloupe; 
Like hanging on bare-handed to a spar 
Too long, while your sailboat works a slope;
Compelled to keep on hanging on to hope 

Without the relief of a defining splinter 
To remind sore palms what has been survived.
For all my alien contact, I lacked a scar.
I forgot to watch it fly to new disguise--
The ray's rough touch so froze me mesmerized.

Schooling

We watched a barracuda through a drive of tuna 
Cull the moving grove like a narrow gardener 
Buzzing dewy hedgerows bloody with each pass. 
Like a needle neatly teethed it turned and passed, 
Its narrow head thrust neat as any tempered sword 
Into the passing banks of backs, the flanks of passing tuna. 

With more than death's blade it laid the silver sward-- 
With a tailor's attentive vim it slimmed the herd
And let the hardy swim on hardly swerved. 
You'd've thought it would've had to look more hard, 
Swimming thick through such puffed clouds of blood.... 
We let hard breaths escape we hadn't known we held.

A Symphony of Limpets

I touch cratered spots of dead-ember rock 
Where limpets live and carve their days in quiet; 
They've left round fingerpads for flutes, mocking 
The silent sea with music quite as mute-- 

And I imagine them going so, notes without sound, 
A moot music that moves me as I ponder it, 
A gnarl of icy current coming down 
Stiff against my neck, a thrill like Mozart. 

The limpets pulled themselves away to graze 
Dispersed among wet wonderments of rock.
Nightfall finds them home in full assemblage, 
Stone-gowned choristers in stone pews, their stops 

Shut up from the melodic play of day; 
Hunger's harried morning at rest in surfeit. 
Suckered to the deep rock's dimpled grey, 
They seem no more than a cluster of camp tents

Returned to fireless quiet and nightlong wait. 
Nothing's happened here, I know, and yet....

Spanish Dancer

a nudibranch ballet

An interstellar cloud as red 
As a flamenco dress' drape 
Whirled alive from heel to head 
While I gaped. 

Every pulse of its skirt 
To love was spur; 
A rouge that had the look 
Of blood in water. 

Staring at my Spanish dancer  
I balanced less on tarnished earth 
(Such constellations are so rare) 
Than heaven's turf. 

Vouchsafed a glimpse 
(Temporary, reddish, blurred) 
Of all that love could wish: 
Ecstasy's the only word. 

I longed to throw away 
Myself with such abandon.... 
Instead distilled I stay, 
To life condemned--

An underwater witness 
To all her flare and flash, 
Hung embalmed in wetness 
As if in ashes.

Pins and Needles

A rubber fin disturbed an urchin
With its wind, set it rolling on its pins
Until, irked itself, it came to a tottered 
Stop, its rayed array of clockhands locked--
As when a seamstress pins her pattern 
Until her stitching ticks tight each seam
And she shakes her gown in sunlight, and it gleams.
So all that lives seeks an equilibrium;
Like the talker who hammers hard his theme,
Only to stutter it home to a glottal rest.  
Thus the urchin squats, itself its own wild nest.

When We Were Lungfish

The sea is our cold underworld for sure, 
Stranded from us by interposing glass--
A transparency through which we once had passed, 
And once only, tenderfooting to the lure 

Of being safely beached out of water's danger,
Of being able to safely lay our eggs, and lie 
A moment unmolested before we died.
We were lungfish lunging lustily from water, 

Away from the sea's dire dread and hunger 
Which sizzled at our backs as we basked, 
Reminder of the fire with which all life is tasked
And to which, lungs burning, we went back under.

Sea Turtles in Moonlight

When our moon at perigee comes bobbing low,
And dots of turtle hatchlings get tottering
Toward eating surfs the moon's low blues arouse,
We wake to watch such evening things carouse.
We imagine magic moondust falling,
Silvering starting life with its enhancing glow....

But such light we love is made of nothing.
Such a moon--big, rare--is neither here nor there.

Life does what life must, despite moon's baleful dare.
Ridley sea turtles crawl flaring seaward,
Killer whales calve when aches come nearer,
No matter how far the moon is raised or lowered.
So, too, we swim into the dousing fate we share:
Forward, forward, however awkward toward.

Fiddler Crabs Walking Backwards at Sunset

A crab scrabbles in the sidelight like a hand 
Following the brown back-and-forth of tidal froth, 
Leaving crabbed cuneiform music in the sand. 

Broad-backed, elaborate in their armored masque 
They seem to play impervious to sympathy 
--Some Schoenberg concerto more like math 

Than music, tracing melodies beside the tuning sea 
That anchors their staticky abstractions 
With a patient mother's patient shush and sigh, 

A mother's low oboe-toned repetitions 
Calming crablike child-hands pulling at her hem-- 
A consonance like strummed guitar-strings coming then.

Treading Water in Mosquito Bay

the bioluminescent bay in Vieques, Puerto Rico

At midnight, the bay's a blue florescent iris. 
By day, nothing strobes the water but its sheen, 
Polished green like one large tropical leaf-- 
A royal palm, perhaps, or some other green. 

Later, sunset tips its bucket of jelly yellows, 
Drips its fist of melted crayons to belilac 
The unwary eye, as day goes wet away into the west 
And slews of broken inks bleed out veins of night. 

It takes a long while to notice, as one stands looking, 
The faint, hairy, spectral, disturbed bulb-glow begin: 
How slow to show that blue, like a deflated moon 
In the bay, or calm dead face tilted at the chin. 

Soon swift wakes of kayaks come with tails of white, 
And naked swimmers dim the eye, ephemeral  
Water-skimmers stirring a placid plate of lake--
Around their beating limbs, a phosphorescence: frail 

Wings and feathers.

* Crying Ahoy! *

When you and I and sunset go
Away and come back
Always there's the quick feeling "oh!
Never again just that."

Making the Breakers

I swam until my breath was near unreeled, 
My tired feet beginning to blue with cold, 
My wet face raw, freshly peeled. 

I was almost back to where breakers crashed,
In from the solipsistic serenity 
Of a farther sea's swollen wash.

I made the float's spare deck, and flung upon it, 
Scrabbled uneven in the sudden rocking, then
Felt hard waves hit as first I sat. 

All the horizon-line--where eyes would hold, could 
Hold in all the wave of world surrounding--
Was sea reeling, and so cold.

Impromptu Squall

The weathercock is the wisest man.
~~Emerson, Journals

The ocean flat as a ballroom
Lied an idle unswaying blue, 
Unmoving as a quadrille
Uncommenced, concealing still 
What turbulence might come. 
The storm's fox-trotting rim
Encroached smoky and smeared, 
A hem of darkness lapping near.

Despite our not wanting it
Bad weather came--it came anyway, 
Its thunders en pointe in a troupe. 
The little craft's tango yaw 
And debilitating rapid pitch 
Dipped us jaundiced to our gills;
Back-leading the lifted rail, 
We felt green horizons shift. 

Rod and line, set nodding, pressed
Step-by-step into clipped chassé; 
Still stronger weathers threatened near.
The captain tapped his radar clear--
Sweep and countersweep cried out 
Allemande left with a caller's shout:
Cloudbanks do-si-doing there, our
Dark partners bowing, fear to fear.

Versions in Runny Moonlight

I
The moon like a run of soldering on calm water, 
A silver seam between two broken shelving shards, 
A liquid line that welds the world together; 
What had been separate has come to oneness, hard. 

I I
Laying like a discarded satin tie, the moon upon the waters; 
All those bronze sheets of day torn off without a trace, 
Just this one loose dock-rope thrown from the departing boat-- 
A line of luminous paint on a dark and changing face. 

I I I 
A sparkling line of gunpowder leads to the furious moon, 
A barrel of spoons tipped into the slow smash of waters 
Beating on seas' wide knees a raggedy country tune.  Whatever 
Song has brought me here, I say: let this one bring me farther.

Joyriding the Night Sea

In the pulpit of a powerboat,
I pitched and passed the last black buoy.
I was flying at hazard past bay and float
Far into the dark, far past scraps of day.

The trussed hull slapped and rattled like a bow
Once the arrow's loosed, once the sprung string untwists 
Back into the normal tension life allows-- 
My thrashed spine raw as an archer's wrist.

Spray that left the bowsprit in a whip
Flash-froze my face to its forward task;
Whatever thoughts might keep an inward grip 
Left no outward trace as they passed.

Darkness was all, and darkness all I was.
Above, no puncture appeared for stars to shine.
Beneath, a deafening raging motor buzzed
Driving the fiberglass arrowhead

Blind into anything alive.

Meeting at Sea

How the running wave assaults the pebbles 
With polyuphloisbios on its breath, 
Sliding up in such hurried fluffed excitement 
You'd think the sea came reporting troubles. 
Yet the sea has no more to tell us two of death 
Than its usual haul of impermanence. 

No more floods from its mouthful bubbles 
Than yesterday's foam had told in brief, 
Or, indeed, what the day before that had meant. 
What I keep an ear for when we watch the wash 
Briskly sweeping the edge, is not belief, 
But to hear known news in doublement. 

The one cold comfort that comes with age 
Is how old saws still cut true with grief, 
How sighs race sands to bewilderment 
And go on sighing their wavery treble, 
Tide in and out sighing without cease 
In the same wet bliss as when first we met.

First Push, Then Pull

Sand flows slower through hands underwater,
Meets more resistance, as a child her dad's cheek 
Kisses more carefully unshaven. 

Time itself seems less pressed to palter 
When flowed along through a tide's enlarging lens, 
The hourglass turned and turned again. 

Here a stasis friction where edges met  
Seemed to rule us all that long first afternoon, 
Keeping us standing like fountain shadows. 

We were just ourselves it seemed, and yet 
Slower, like sand in tidal pools at noon, 
Warmer where the sun flows oblique below. 

In our tidal stillness we standing stood, 
The sea as salt within us as it was without, 
All push and pull at pause.  And that was good.

Together the Moving Waves

Together, quiet, we moved in the wake of waves,
Together found the rhythm of how we were made 
To be together, and be together saved. 

All afternoon we lived in all the play of shade 
And play of wet and light as rayed sunset 
Summoned us to dinner beyond the cove's glade. 

Together before pineapple and pork we sat, 
Two dim humans alight with love of all  
The love we had, and in that light we ate. 

We sat until the stars themselves began to fall 
Singly into the shingle of the sea 
And so made place for still new stars to fall. 

It was as if we sat at creation's knee, 
Two serious children thrown into the all 
And settled on the ocean's verge to be.

Chihuly’s Illuminated Spears

Chihuly's illuminated spears line the gravel walk, 
Tossed from a florescent urchin's stegosauric back. 

The Seattle night is wet and fresh, a champagne wash 
Frivolous and spastic as the sea's moulting crash. 

Inside the glass house, a signature warp of light 
Douses the house's sides like a blue-whale's flukes caught 

Turning screw-wise in twilight off some far Pacific isle. 
We dare a side-room.  Above, oddities bobble, quilled 

Radiant by strobes, directed lances of dapple-light-- 
As if we lived enreefed beneath such laser shapes of sight: 

Orange palm-fronds frozen lustrous in mid-unfurling, 
Razor aloe-limbs pronged and leaning gleaming 

Like licked licorice-sticks.  Nearby, purple fluted gourds  
Gangle at all angles: ripe, overripe, engorged-- 

Trumpets, too, of red sponges, while canopies of eyes 
Pop surprised from indigo skeins of rind--corkscrew rays 

Of yellow intensity, the abrupt structures of cell 
Automata, endless whims of fin and tooth, flares of hell 

A drowning man, a man sans land, knows all too well.

Envoi

The Quiet Tide

In the lonely presence of the quiet tide 
There's a wisdom the cawing gull derides. 
Look about you: in life, in death on every side. 
There is wisdom in subside, subside, subside.

* Essay *

Eye of the Devilfish

Finding large nature looking back. Grand Cayman, circa 1974

It was our first winter in paradise, as the flair-panted travel agent had named it. Perhaps, if our cranky memories could be searched, or sifted, we might be able to rehearse other names, other colors. It was a strange island spot, a stone in the ocean; a black volcanic liberated of its native Caliban until my dad winged in. Or maybe, dwelling in the distracted haze of the past, it is actually some type or taste of an involuted, infolded space, like a physicist’s undone laundry, and not the island haven the glossy brochure proclaimed at all, with no long stretches of unblemished sand tastefully spiced by ripe brown native boys singing hymnals after dark.

Whatever it was, our squeaking wheels touched it and our silver wings groaned when released by its buoyant being of their humid load of air. The airstrip’s attendant, whose dark trousers were enlivened by nimble piping, and who had rolled the streamlined stairway to our squat airplane’s door, lifted his blue policeman’s hat in greeting before hunching off with all of our crammed winter bags under his thin arms. He trundled them to the custom-officer’s desk in a cavernous aqua-blue room, disturbing the game of Caribbean solitaire in which he had been immersed (in that quaint island version, voodooic queen outranked staunch aces). A frowning queen of hearts pinned my still snow-booted toe as he gave our bursting bags the standard shuffle and no lurid contraband emerged.

The five of us had trouble getting all the cases through the far door that dawned on palms which our porter-cum-custom’s-officer-cum-police-chieftain had managed to wrangle to his dinged desk with a gibbon’s ease, and had to wave goodbye with only four stiffly wiggling fingers, all of our thumbs still stuck through slipping handles.

Once at the huts, adorably florescent and fashioned of an enduring type of concrete, we let our northern layers of zippered skin slither from us in a sweating frenzy that eventually pooled at our feet in a species of languid gratitude. Old skins and old whims (as represented by the fragrantly sticky multi-hued stain of a forgotten popsicle picked up at the Newark terminal and allowed to bloom thus darkly on my dark December coat) were left in a soggy stack by the front egress, not to be re-touched or re-donned until the last, lingering tick of the vacation had passed and we were ready to reassume the cold masks and colder duties of our remote, home, higher hemisphere.

My brothers and I, all boys, spent a few gummed moments twisting out of our snowpants and screwing back into our handy mom’s proffered shorts before racing out the pliant backdoor towards the hunkered gem of the ocean. Looking back down the cross-hairs of time’s telescope, I spotted the droning outline of my dad (already on the phone conducting his sinister business) and the docile, backlit slide of my mom, methodically filling the empty drawers with our horded summerwear, and efficiently slipping lifeless thing onto thin hangers. From the dark, angular closet, a ghost-white shirt shook its sleeves in parting as we scampered headlong down the sweetly simpering beach.

We were met at the drooling lip (or perhaps it was knee-deep on the lascivious tongue) of the peacock-blue sea by the two underaged representatives of a blonde quartet that composed the entire tidy family of one of my dad’s harem of business associates. The dissolving names of the two before us, standing in the photo, as it were, long and tan with white shorts, come galloping up from memory’s transmogrified mess, in one of its babble of reassigned languages–which correlates strangely (do not ask me how) with its hazy tendency to switch beloved heads and plop them on the glimpsed frames of IDless bodies, giving some blonde and tanned cousin a pale and darkly furred torso, or worse, wrenching some ebon-haired past-love with a classic nose and twinkling eyes onto the still grinding pelvis and shoulders of a cheap pick-up (one of those fated matings tinged with incestuousness) whose active legs were patched together by a starkly orange pubis–come galloping, as I say, these names, to the tip of my still remembering, still trembling tongue to tumble out in plain prose, this far from the original inspiration of the actual beach, as King and Courteous. Well, it is obvious that I have misplaced somebody’s bags and tags, but it is as close as I can get, squinting into memory’s dim box. As the men of the Fire League say, or chant at their bachelor barbecues, A hose is a hose is a hose.

It was not very long before the older of the pair, courteous King, not royally lonesome Courteous, got the idea of hopping into his bleached dad’s Boston whaler, the Sun Temple, and hailed the rest of us, still swirled in sand, to abandon our half-melted castles and sagging minarets and join him where the tingling, tangled water thumped his prow. We jumped from our tepid tidepools, abandoning our squids, and leaving cruelly declawed crabs in our wake, and slogged against the rising tide to reach the uneven gunwale out of breath.

As we whisked along the island’s edge, Courteous kept us entertained with stories of the family doberman pincher, often caught thrusting its whittled head into the neighbor’s mailbox to retrieve shampoo samples, or of Courteous’ own innumerable rescues from neighborhood hoods at the trained teeth of the dog, which died unattended at the end of its chain, barking at a lark. Soon we were looking into lunar reefs, navigating purple hazards, tooting creatureless shells that stank of brine, yodeling and crooning at top speed over the liquid undulance from which we had spilled out of bed as hubris-stuffed dollops of kaleidoscopic slime.

After an afternoon freshened by our escapades, we had wound up in a luminous little cove where the deep bottom sand pulsed blue in time to the lulling swells; monstrous turtles frolicked and played at semaphores with their four fleshly underwater wings. Our original excitement had quieted to occasional oohs by this time, and we were content to drift between measureless sea and measureless sky, or in and out of a fluttering sleep, trailing lazy limbs in warm sodawater.

There are rare moments, fugitive instants, that glitter with a recollected condensation when our span is wished up upon us again in sullen reverie, and time collapses like a circus tent down an unshakable centerpole, the radiant nodule of a nodding minute or sparked millisecond, reducing rounded shadows of events to mere flats, bringing us flush with the twilit distant past, erasing accreted differences between our current selves (a treacherous fiction) and the doomed, slavish selves that we were, which, although they seemed complete at the time, intense, capable, undecided, they must now repeat our ruinous film upon command, decisionless ghosts dissolving halfway up the same stairs forever, kicking out the stilts that keep our feet dry and separate us from the marmoreal, miasmic, mammalian mire of memory, reducing a vibrant now to a sanded then, collapsing space. Or, actually, I suppose, such magnetic moments enlarge us from our vague potentials and unrealized wholes into exact fractions, infinite in their compactness as failed stars–as opposed to the puny view which history with its crooked stack of flashcards affords. Well, however it is, one such zinging instant was about to descend upon me then, nine years old and in a boat, watching clods deform and defoam above me, my tingling hand grounded in live currents.

But what if this sacred event were merely baptized in tired bathwater and Mr. Bubble? So what! In my mind the constellation of differing blues takes on the fixed geometry of a premonition, a blue five of hearts licked to fate’s crinkled forehead, pale sky, robust blue trunks warmly pasted against me, neutral blue bench plank before me, hopeless blue cloud-shadow diffusing and re-fusing all around my lightly flecked, heavily targeted, heavenly blur-blue eye. I can see now that I was ready then for the unknown next. There was a faint wrinkle-wrinkle sound in the water. Coeur-hearted Courteous, I think, snorted, while stately King squinted with sleek regality at the horizon from his pose on the prow. I still had my bright eye on the everlasting. And then, out of nowhere, out of an illusionist’s hidden hat, out of the invisible ocean, it came.

Having no taste, or, at most, a fading aftertaste, or burp’s hint, for the bilious and overblown, I suppose that I should simply present my phenomenon, have done with it, and click to the next slide. Very well. enough ghoulish suspense. Dimensions: twenty-four feet if an inch from blunt front to whiplike stern, side to side another shadowy twenty perhaps. General shape: flapping diamond. Skin: slick, oiled oil in shaded, rough under magnification. Mouth: a surreptitious incision invisible when not gaping wide enough to swallow in one convulsive gulp a pumpkin the size of a human head. Gills (for it was, indeed, a creature of the sea I met): a terraced series of similar incisions, following the graceful flow of line of the calculate-in-the-direction-of-infinity sign in calculus (a lower-case italicized f minus its horizontal stripe). Have you got these disparate parts firmly in hand, or in mind, rather? Very well. Toss them and think gestalt, gestalt. Has the monster materialized from your foam, or is the puzzle still jumbled? Oh, all right, all right, quit tugging my sleeve, I’ll tell you, I’ll tell you.

Like Botticelli’s Aphrodite, flying from the hysterical slalom of the sleeping sea-soma, this awful shadow emerged, breaking the cursive crest of its sheltering wave, and sledded, an awesome twenty-four-by twenty of sea-beast, no more than four feet over our rickety deck. I recognized it instantly as the sweaty, living version of several smaller miniatures (all fearsomely detailed) I had seen printed dinkily in my well-thumbed Field Guide to Sea Lore. There it was called, in the all-caps title to its own article, THE MANTA-RAY OR DEVILFISH, by Wally Stevedore. The poor, lost fellow, out of his supportive element, seemed to sag and waggle a bit at his skinny tips as he loomed for that brief, hovering moment above the boat. Was there terror and fire? White cowardice in our young hearts and rubbery limbs? There was shade and sky, a shuttle of bright and dark that I now replay, a dripping instrument of the miraculous followed, in its pop-up appearance, by clinging tendrils of stage-smoke.

And then, poof! it was gone. The apparition dissolved that, probably, the tuna sandwich on Courteous’ breath (combined with our raw boy-smells) had called at a stroke from the zeus-azure depths. The placated boat, still sluggishly full of gas, wobbled like a robin’s egg cradled in the inquisitive palm of a girl with glasses; this palm was attached, I am, sure, to my ghost half-sister who never quite managed to get born, but who I have always had, in my head, the most stubbornly glowing image of (nimbused or coronaed by a lucky sunset touching her hair with its radiant bubble). My heart, wrecked and wronged by nine years of wear and tear and care, seemed, for the moment, drained and spacious, a tapped swamp relieved of its dreams. One could still see the awkward shapes of clouds going divinely by.

Here the hesitant gesture offered by the dissipating trunk of a swollen elephant-cloud uncurling towards a shy mouse- or grouse-cloud retreating into a misty skidmark. There, the missed clasps and forgotten hugs of busy vapors, demonstrating as in a classroom nature’s purposeless stridency and demand for estrangement. But closer to me than even those immaculate splotches, closer, and nearer and dearer, was the monstrous darkness that had hovered for its soaked moment over my soul, sea-musty and heavenly, silent and wet. And there it still hovered over my sunken kid’s chest, skin intact, unlike the one I had gaped at later, less willingly spreadeagled, and which I had taken an older, grotesque interest in, as if peering at myself in a queer mirror, dead an vivisected on a dock in Miami. Huddled together as we were under that cauled shadow, my monster and me, I myself having been almost bundled off into sleep by the sea’s queasiness, I felt, or think that I remember having felt, some gelatinous tentacle of the thing’s being reach down towards me out of that black diamond, and something slippery in me leap up.

Also, and this I have concealed until the penultimate minute, I had spotted, in that torpid solstice, folded in our communal awning of shadow, up in the instantaneous blackness that had come whispering out of the sea to bury us (or save us, as I once overheard in some terrorist ceremony at a Satanic Church revivalist meeting held, covertly, in my own basement–without my consent or foreknowledge–from my pinched position behind the umber altar where I had been laying ant traps, and stuck under an inverted cross where the carved blood flooded up), and in the backward abyss of memory still spot, the slow, maddened revolution of the great creature’s moist sustaining eye.

1991

A Raven’s Weight

A Raven's Weight

Mar 162017

EPIGRAPHS

It is salutary to deal with the surface of things. What are these rivers and hills, these hieroglyphics which my eyes behold?
~~Thoreau, Journal

Men think they are better than grass.
~~W. S. Merwin, The River of Bees

How can I be close to you if I’m not sad?
~~Robert Bly

SORROW IN A FALLEN FEATHER

Emotional suffering gives us access to the real world in a way that ideas, and even love, cannot attain

We turn death and generation into a fable of sacrifice. Plants are buried, and are honored in their going; the Crop King is executed, and from his everlastingly renewed body the spring stalks arise to be culled again. His death is willingly embraced by him, or by his stand-in chosen from among the farmers–and this freely chosen death is overcome, in the Christian story, by God’s intervention. Or the sacrifice is invested with meaning by the very act of undertaking the self-imposed burden of sacrifice. Perhaps the deadness of the death is overcome via the more pagan vehicle of the anti-wish-fulfillment of tragedy–their heroes marching off-stage with a chin-lifted “tragic gaiety.”

At a minim, in these stories of death, the dead have some future existence, some ongoing effect on the living who survive the sacrifice. They are ghosts, legacies, shapers of their children’s childhoods (and thus their later lives), fathers of countries, innovators and stage-managers of the theater of ideas in which our own living decisions seem to occur.

There is, however, a more reductive way of viewing these mechanics of life and death. A way in which immaterial ideas remain immaterial to the whole process of death and generation. In this view, death and life are entirely out of our hands, and are not even subject to some overweening concept, such as Fate. Death and generation are entirely out of our conscious control, contribution, or even comprehension. The grave is a wormy meat-locker, the womb a humid conveyer-belt on auto-pilot, churning and regurgitating material for the low grave’s open door. All the rest, all our imposition of pattern, our self-selecting and seeking of meaning, our elaborate institutions of culture, our games of play and mating, are no more than an con game that we play against ourselves–an inherently deceitful waste of time and effort.

No wonder no one has the time to read poetry books! Thin as they are, they make better coasters than guideposts; they are lies only, not metaphoric (or metamorphic) mile-markers limping off into the mists toward immanence….

There is one thing, however, that binds us to the earth in both of these scenarios. If we are meaning-making creatures who have impact and effect in our deliberate embracing of death, our use of tools, and our active management of history–or if we are simply whittled-down pegs, wooden-headed and wooden-footed as we hop the circuit and then hop off some cosmic cribbage board. And that one thing is sorrow. Grief over what is lost, or for that which is too soon to be gone, made irrecoverable by time and nature. In both cases, what is, is. And there is also that which will not always be as it is–or even always continue to be at all. The result of this fact is the unending sorrow that life presents to us. Tragedy or comedy, we cry at either when the curtain lowers, as the coffin to its silky mud, and the players disperse like invisible ink, all play-acting at an end.

Sorrow grounds us, keeps our beings seated on the earth. And it is through this special kind of on-going grief that we enter into our true understanding of life, and of the life of death. Sleep is our small daily adjustment toward incorporating unconscious revelations. When we are awake, it is sorrow that can let us break through the gates that hold the mind’s wild darkness away from day-lit acknowledgement–the gates that consciousness holds shut with our meaning-making, endless cognitions and wishes. Mary Oliver says, in her poem ‘Don’t Hesitate,’ that “Joy is not made to be a crumb.” So, too, with sorrow. We are not meant to sip the deluge. Sorrow, if it comes at all, arrives with tidal force–and the wideness of its bleak realization keeps our feet steady, blows the egomaniac mind down the staircase, and holds our elbows hard so that we must face each other in dire humility.

Poems grown from sorrow can perhaps gives us the momentary clarity to drop our pretense of control, the modern imperative that commands that we impose a single, often literal, meaning. Poems grown from sorrow let us sit abandoned among the dead leaves of grief. Poems can let us see the feather fallen from the raven’s wing, and can let us enter into the long dark tubes of mourning that flow so keenly along the detached shaft–the backbone of a feather that had once been capable of the terrors of flight.

Gregg Glory
December 25, 2015

POEMS

Let Us Praise What Is Arriving

Today is barely here, it is so delicately 
Arriving over the long scimitar edge 
Of Earth, a single blade of light, 
Beginning greyness and unfocused grace
Out of coughing darkness where  
God said nothing to us in a dream 
He was so busy with His wide dark wall 
Of sky, hoisting each wild star up there 
Like a kid with his stickers, just right.

* A RAVEN’S WEIGHT *

The Red Reed Flute

The reed flute is empty.  Think of that! 
There's no music in that hollowness, those 
Snipped weeds dried and arranged and tied. 

Where is the music?  Ask instead, "who speaks  
When I am talking?"  I am not my memories,  
Nor yet am I the I who I will be tomorrow. 

The flute is light and ready in my hands. 
Celebrants have gathered, the tent pole is raised;
Wine is on the lips of the barefoot bride! 

Move the emptiness of your speaking through 
The red reed flute's empty tube, again and again. 
You'll hear the music soon enough, secret whistler.

Writing These Poems Is Like

Stars vibrate wildly in a tin dish. 
I slide through the membrane of fire-- 
Wild ideas come at me, attracted by 
My burned clothes, the cinnamon smoke 
Of nearly dying again in my sleep last night. 

The icy awareness of 4AM empty streets 
Bathed in longing, their young lamps shining 
Tender as snail horns....  Who knew that stars 
Fell among us so easily?  A few old poets 
Stare about, aware as burrow owls.

To the Reader

I kiss your ear with the tongue of my lips,
An oyster going home to his pearl.

Under the Staircase

A non-white non-ethnic man crouched under the stairs 
Keeps mouthing indistinctly that I should stay asleep; 
His eyes are like those small puddles punched 
Among harvested corn-stubble fields in late autumn. 

Catbirds beyond the bedroom's freeze-sealed sashes 
Are singing in their sleep, under moving mounting shadowy clouds 
Calm as gathered cattle in their long night pens. 
I stand without waking and sing indistinctly, too.

The Donkey’s Nose

Look in a drop of water you will see your face there. 
The maple's snakes, its tendrils, its subdividing branches 
Become arms and hands and fingers when we do the looking. 

What's this hissing repetition that surrounds us like grass? 
This going on and on about the point, without being explicit? 
Is there no abstract, no definition, that we can look up? 

Stars, every night, fall into my upward eyes and live there. 
Every night, the coyote's lonely howl enters my doglike heart. 
Darkness imbues me until my skin is oil-black enameling. 

How many pieces of glass must we sift into the kaleidoscope? 
How many turns, how many patterns must we look at 
Before we see only ourselves there, displayed and dazzling? 

Thirst drives me every night to every well, an angry donkey. 
Stubborn, I nuzzle every gnawed-over weed again and again. 
I kiss a donkey's nose as it bends over the full trough of water.

Aren’t Dreams and Sleep Enough?

What is it that you must do with your life? 
Isn't it enough to sit alert on the porch at sunset 
In a swayback chair, drifting through NJ as through 

A dirty river on your flat raft of fantastical thoughts? 
To listen to Brandenburg No. 3, and weep a little, 
And spill some Ali Baba tale to your Scheherazade? 

Must you cobble a fable for the ages from your homey hugs? 
Passion leads to catastrophe or triumph, true enough. 
But life lives graveward always, where no laurels grow. 

Aren't dreams and sleep enough, when cool night bends down 
And pours her stars in your ears? Do you need to drink down 
The daylight too, insatiably as lemonade in August? 

Must you tell a tale of breathless loving with every breath? 
Must you hold your little love to you so close she coos? 
Must sun overrun the sun's gunnels to praise her, pattering  

Pellucid down your chest, your T-shirt soaked through? 
Must loving leave your lips too sticky for anyone to kiss?  
Is this what you have done with your life?

The Thirsty Vase

Always I raced outside to see sweet night come on, 
Long wheaten fences disappearing in a sweep of shadow 
Faster than a horse out-stretched in gallop. 

I used to need to know everything so badly, 
I never asked what came to fill me. 
I was an empty vase standing in the corner. 

Winds blew over my openness and gave my voice longing. 
Thirst pushed at the sides of my heavy vase, always 
Outward, growing just to hold more soaking hollowness. 

Stars were pouring in over the dim rim of clouds. 
My hands froze blue on the invisible porch rail waiting 
For the missing moon to veil my face with snow. 

What pours into emptiness so eagerly open? 
Has a spider, an evil, ever fallen in in some quiet hour? 
My vase has stood its corner now for many years, full. 

Lately, hoisting my vase up awkwardly on a balanced 
Elbow, I'm satisfied if my lips let pass no more 
Than the first touch of coolness on the tip of my tongue.

Shedding Our Wings

Every night we fall back to the rolling womb, nesting 
In cozy ovals we fell out of long long ago, before 
We were fools enough to think we could hang on. 

You see how the birds are, always hustling for twigs. 
A new nest every year, every year a better circle of twigs! 
Or another fresher circle softening an old arbor 

In a favorite tree.  We fly, we fall.  And sleep catches us. 
We go under dark waves as under a worn blanket. 
These worn waves are the tents we emerged from as infants. 

Lying down, there's a comfortable smell of shorn feathers, 
A defeat that feels like removing our shoes, resting our feet,  
Letting the invisible heaven around us hold us close awhile. 

How good it is to go home to the womb after a day of work, 
Shedding wings from our heavy shoulders, entering the egg. 
Sealing our eyes shut, bones yellowing to yolk....

Night Comes Swallowing

Sleep was telling me: run away! wake up! 
But night comes swallowing: my feet are water 
Swimming in a starlessness I didn't choose. 

I am Jonah, the dark everywhere like a mouth. 
For hours the whale's ambergris breath flows 
Over me and back, a field of wildflowers. 

A motion of my soul comes out of me at once, 
Dreams as elaborate as wet hairs on my body, 
My body braided with tattoos of dreams  

Stitching me, tick tick, into blood rosaries of stories, 
My own and eternal: story of the running son, 
The betraying brother;  stories of my colonies of cells.... 

I never escape the magnetic gullet of the night;
Never sail the whitecapped seas, loosely numinous-- 
No name, and my body riven by whale tracks....

Eating Black Bread

The ruined house; the broken window; the tired wan moon  
Blowing through, dumping dust and ash everywhere.... 
Ruined objects call out to the ruin in ourselves. 

Passing a graveyard on RT 71 certain days, I'll pull over 
To test the springy green of eternal grass, sizing up 
Scrolled tombs, plaques screwed in earth that seem so small. 

Those witches in Macbeth weren't all bad were they? 
They held up the ichorous cave's proscenium well enough,
Dull Macbeth scurrying through like a startled spider!

My body is the ruined house I inhabit, failing daily. 
Pallid moths follow me, eating my elbows to patches.  
Every door clicks shut behind me like a coffin lid. 

If I'm sad today, why do anything about it? 
Sorrow arrives as vividly as love, leaves craters as great. 
Living is just what you do with life while you're alive. 

Let me sit in windy ruins sharing my black bread with Macbeth. 
When I'm done with it, done eating and grieving at last, 
Haul me out with the moon's ashes.  Dump me anywhere.

Counting the Hawk’s Feathers

Watching the hawk circle, I watch myself. 
I am circling with that dark circle in the bright sky. 
I am a dot in the immensity moving, moving. 

Some part of the human eye is always measuring. 
Somehow, myriad rice-grains get counted, the check gets cashed. 
Somehow we fit our whole lives into a single grain.... 

When I see the hooping porpoises play, far off, 
I swim beside them, my forehead smooth, my fins bright. 
I am a comma in the immense ocean, curving. 

Icarus grew tired counting feathers, tried flying 
That human way;  and Archimedes made some measured 
Pretense of tallying each waterdrop in ocean's tub. 

Rumi, seized by ancient ecstasy, threw his calipers away! 
Mallarme gently beat azure sleeves against the infinite.... 
Reading them, one knows where the sea meets the sky. 

Later, touching the fine side of a sleeping porpoise; 
Later, seeing up-close the hawk's neat armor flowing; 
I know I'm not ready to swim, not ready to fly.

Whistles and Didgeridoos

I think of you more often than you think-- 
Here in my ivory tower, quietly whittling away 
At my balsa whistles and baritone didgeridoos. 

My bellybutton slowly grows furred with loneliness. 
All my hair is unkempt as a goat's beard.  My tough 
Mustache tastes its last meal for three days! 

Whatever shivery mirrors there were that I lived with 
Stopped talking to me when I started listening to rain 
Falling, river water rolling, the sky dividing day and night. 

And you are here with me among my little whistles. 
The sky at sunrise shows your face, and the rain 
Falling remembers your name: lispingly, lovingly. 

Alone in my house, I walk out when I want to, 
Talk aloud to no one when I want, and dance alone too! 
I have been carving the one sad low note left within me. 

I have been trying to give my lonely chest a voice, 
A name besides a sigh....  Last night in darkening rain, 
I rolled over and over, saying aloud your name.

A Raven’s Weight

The early sun's aroused, dousing the dusky torch 
Night carries alongside as the raven carries her wings,
Flapping black flames alongside her raven body. 

The tree in our yard, from all its dream possibilities--
Those small branchings tentative as a net of nerves--
Settles greenly into its familiar delta of Ys at dawn.

Dreaming, a raven's weight had settled on every bough.
Awake, slight shadows hung from leaves are all that's left  
Of the raven's restless wings; those wings are at rest. 

So you, who I dreamed of years before meeting, 
Arrive today as one woman on the bed in yellow light. 
And I love you as that one woman, that one choice. 

You hold yourself golden before me, pinning up 
The raven fabrics of your long night hair, choosing 
Your daylight faces like a favorite thought in the mirror. 

Love, I love to dream.  I love the raven night and all 
The cinquefoil-spotted mystery of high stars-- 
You know I do.  But I also love this day.  I love you.

Throwing Paper Planes Around the Room

Take these paper planes, these throwaway things I've made, 
And throw them away!  Press your fingers to your eyes 
And see the lithesome dazzlings you are made of! 

Why try and catch gliding words and get a paper cut? 
Better to run through the window, smashing it-- 
Join real swallows scissoring and levering their wings. 

Hold your breath, and dive into the waterdrop of being. 
Sail away, up among the smallest misty pins of stars, 
Grow into a sun that shuns them from the skies.... 

Don't study how to fly around in ecstasy, just do it! 
Butterflies have no how-to books crowding their cocoons, 
The veery-bird is virtuoso from the egg. 

If you're still having trouble, just laugh at yourself. Laugh 
Until echoes are a canyon all around, laughter the river. 
Look: you are the gorgeous gorge you have fallen into!

Leaving Prospect Mountain

Prospect Mountain had been tall and strong all morning, 
A great stone tent with red and gold pom-poms stuck 
All over, the climbing light a waterfall everywhere. 

Soon enough, the mountain was a cocked hat shrinking 
In the rearview, the valley mist growing dark: 
From white, to dirty steel, to blue, to almost black. 

Tonight's road comes reeling right up to the car 
And creeps under the wheels like a shadow-- 
A doe in stabbing headlights, ducking under. 

Moving on is like that;  like this, I guess: rolling over 
Whatever is right there in front of you, even if 
It is afraid.  Even if you, too, are scared.

Low Water

Let me be as low as low water, I pray. 
Let me fall from myself like shattered glass ungathered. 
Let me be humiliated totally, right now, while I live. 

See those trapeze artists spinning flawlessly in air? 
See their powdered hands that never miss the bar? 
See them stick the landing, slender feet relentless as pegs? 

They are passing like bleached sand through a narrow space 
And into the grave....  Whatever I am is not whatever 
I will become everlastingly in that last, lowly room. 

My feet are not slender, nor strong as tent pegs. 
My wrists cannot hold the bright bar I have caught. 
My days overwhelm me, and no dream consoles me. 

Let me be as low as low water, I pray. 
Let my ashes be mixed with sand and flung away. 
At least let non-existence not be a surprise!

Keel, Oar, and All

On my solo boat again at Gravesend,  without moon, 
Without moan.  No one to lullaby, no one to lie to me
--All cause and causes subtracted to none, abandoned. 

Sublimations and images fail me now, as heretofore have failed. 
I poke the slow black water with a stick, without a hat. 
I lie reflected no more in the tar below, the stars above. 

I am me without a me, here, in my weary, merry boat--
The fine night sky clearing, no sign of the crooked coast; 
Wetted darkness all about, and heart dark within. 

There's my demarcation, my border, my pulling line 
That orients me, prow and stern, even now, this night: 
Without and within are all my worlds at world's end. 

Shall I throw my bright bones about the indifferent stars, 
Or swallow yellow suns within, to thin this film of skin? 
To break without blood what's without and within? 

I pull in my little pole tonight and sit quietly athwart. 
I row not, and look not, and I refuse to sweat. 
What wind there is--is there?--will not wait.

Clouds Like Grey Mice

The sad day you were waiting for has finally arrived. 
Clouds gather like grey mice, and it is night 
Everywhere and always, and you are crying like a cloud. 

Late-autumn trees are mourning, too. Their black sap 
      is mourning. 
The seas of the leaves have washed into dusky grass. 
They mourn with their whole hollow bodies blowing at night. 

And stars come twinkling with tears, mourning, too. 
It is good to sit on the ground and be a heavy stone. 
I mourn.  The whole world is sad, and death is coming. 

Coming with a small hole to put on your forehead 
And stop you.  Just an infinitesimal black dot....
Some people you loved and loved are already dead. 

They lie under the leaves in their long tunnels, 
Like the tunnels of a long curved wave breaking. 
The wave is made of tears, and a wind rushes through it.

Rolling in Oceans

I am sick of time, and the rusted bell, and the still 
Cows welded to the still field like Hades' watchmen, 
And never getting to go down into the earth myself. 

If there is a meaning, a revelation, and not just this 
Interminable terminus--let me be at the lightning's point, the break 
Of the revealing wave where the whole ocean coheres. 

Windily I wind the clock stopped on the mantelpiece, 
Twisting time into hands and into the still bell. 
How long is't since the winter when storm undid us? 

The cows are in the sloping field, shadows so still 
On the rushing green stream, clouds on a kite string. 
I turn from the window to the mantelpiece again.

Again, I am standing in a room without revelation. 
The only lightning here bleeds from standard sockets, 
The only ocean is the salt blood flag waving in my veins. 

I am sick of time, and the rusted bell, and the still 
Gilded clock welded to the family mantelpiece,  
And never getting to go down into Hell myself.

Chasing the Needle

How happily the woodpecker walks up the rotted oak's bark, 
Striking dark star-holes with the needle of his hungry beak! 
It's the same hunger Galileo had looking at evening skies. 

When we follow the sewer's dark thread into dreams, 
Where we go doesn't matter, we always arrive at daybreak. 
What matters is that we feel the hard pull of the needle. 

When loneliness besets the hermit, replacing solitude, 
It's best to go square dancing down past the truckstop. 
Are you sad? Lift your boots!  If happy, stomp them down! 

Finding nothing, the woodpecker turns his head, flies off; 
There's more good rottenness deeper in the deep woods.... 
His wings flicker red-brown with whickering laughter. 

When your dream-thread doesn't emerge in daylight, 
Don't wake up!  Stamp your feet amid pushed-back chairs, 
Fly deeper into the strange stars of your sleeping.... 

Chase the hard needle, woodpecker, and it will feed you. 
Keep peeping, Galileo, new worlds are circling above you! 
Reader, keep flying into this poem as you fall asleep.

Riding the Wire

How hard it is to be influenced!  One was born alone, 
The body's arrow let go whining from mother's bowstring 
Long ago.  Already it is too late to move the target! 

One has blue eyes, or not.  A taste for salmon, perhaps,
A certain happiness in high-wire risks, a feel for pearls 
Or not.  Too late to unwant what one wants. 

A freshness visits the deep self, the turtle-self, so rarely! 
When Bach's B-minor mass moves through us, culminating 
In a joy of ruinous tears, how the turtle-heart rejoices! 

Our fletching feathers are calmed by the master's thumb, 
Our shaft of arrow hand-held to the pointillist target. 
We are not flying free, not arrows even, just turtles-- 

Blue-eyed or not, salmon pâté on our napkins, pearls 
Pleasing or chafing, cultured or native, nacreous or not: 
Our center, the target, was spotted by Bach long ago. 

We are turtles, wingless and slow.  Our turtle-hearts 
Beat excitedly as music heats the cords of voice. 
We are beads on those strings, riding the wire to the end.

Charlotte’s Children

I follow the spiders, like Charlotte's children, 
      floating away  
On their parachutes.  How I long to be saved! 
Webs of work, and love, and work, pin back my wrists. 

There is new life in the seeds of a watermelon, but not 
For that watermelon.  That one goes to rot and rind-- 
And from his black belly, the laughing blooms and vines! 

I long to escape the heat of the soil, the toil of the web. 
To find the moony children laughing for no reason 
In their sleep.  To laugh myself, and to retreat 

Contented to a corner.  But, how I long to be saved! 
To leap from the egg-sack high up in the corner. 
To float away like Charlotte's children, myself a child. 

I hold my own belly like a watermelon and laugh. 
Who would I be beyond my webs of work and love? 
Sunset comes to corners first, small watermelon 

Seeds of darkness;  then sleep seeded by dreams. 
In my dreams I follow the spiders, am a child. 
I have eight eyes and eight legs, and am flying!

Waiting in the Rain

When the rain comes to check on me, tapping 
Tip-tops of houses, reaching down to the green of trees, 
I hurry outside to let it have a good look.

The first drop feels like a pencil's tip 
Bipping the back of my neck, a schoolmate saying 
Pay attention, take a good look yourself. Look up!

Then the next drop, and the next, draw and re-draw 
My attention everywhere at once, and I 
Become so many mes I don't know where to look:

Maples whisking water-shimmer from bare prongs,
Weeds fantastical as Tiffany pins, the golden
Retriever looking up too, then right at me....

All the greater neighborhood... a drear, a blur.... 
I remember I was waiting for something, but what  
Was it?  And then I breathe in--and fresh!

* ENTERING A RAINDROP *

Diving Off Cloudbanks With an Albatross

 
Where the body leans, the mind is leaping. 
The diver prepares himself so beautifully upon his plank. 
The albatross like a floating cross stands still upon the cloud....
Two hands mildly dreaming below a glassine stream, 
Are they the water's thought or the water's body? 
Is that sunset shyly diving behind blotting pines 
A thought descending?  When I hear the waterfall, 
However far, however faint the chime, I, too, am falling.
Falling flotsam on falling clouds of the falling stream.

Cool Day in an Aspen Grove

We stand shoulder-to-shoulder admiring 
The wisp-white quick weak trunks of aspen trees, 
Listening to the simple wishes of passing winds. 
Beneath our feet, slow roots make a common net; 
We feel their long tendrils sigh a counter-song: 
Complex, contrapuntal, something dark of Bach's. 
But we don't need to sing the song, know the notes, 
Standing in the cool of the day admiring.

Lapping Angler’s Cove With Dad

Of all the maybe Dads I had imagined, 
This one stood elegant-legged as a stork  
And walked the cove's shallow rim with me, 
Water at his sandaled feet breaking brilliantly.... 
At the deepest cut, where a stream lost sand 
And water sounds thudded slow as blood, 
Hand over hand into the cove's curved mansion 
We swam, brushing the water's face to brilliance.

The Old Hands

Christmas is a pine tree that smells like aerosol. 
After school is out, after TV loses its snowlike luster, 
Dad carefully brings the old decorations down attic stairs 
Like Santa descending.  Mother coos and wipes a tear, 
Opening the box where the sweeping glass angel sleeps. 
Then photo decorations, macaroni ones, a few older 
Than the house.  Someone starts singing, an aunt 
Perhaps, Angels we have heard on high Sweetly singing 
O'er the plains.  Around the tree, Christmas is 
Our hands doing what the old hands have done.

Entering a Raindrop

First, there's the mist insisting its moist say: 
Into my hair, my cold clothes, speaking so softly 
I'm whispering to myself by the end of the day. 
Second, all those sumptuous puddles suddenly 
Alive over muddy grass that were absent yesterday 
--How they want to know what's inside my shoe! 
Looking up, there's nothing but blue clouds 
And rumors of clouds, inviting me in.

Learning to Be Alone

I give up listening to crickets, let 
Leigh Hunt and Keats have all that creaking! 
Instead, I listen to wind at the sash tatting, 
Or lean in a doorframe until the desire for conversation  
Passes;  I overhear scraps of rattling when the fireplace 
Grate sticks;  the faucet shushing until the glass 
Is full;  tears in the corners of my eyes as I drink; 
The sound of old slippers shuffling off to bed.

An Empty Milkweed Pod

It bites the palm. The dry wedge-spikes 
Bite, a ramming Greek trimaran. 
Look at the long open place for rowers 
Retreating back to the guiding stem.... 
No one is left to pull the shell forward, 
Gracefully darting through the Mediterranean-- 
Romans must have invited them away at spearpoint. 
Rows of unladen seats still dry, the ship tight 
But empty.  Everyone has gone on ahead.

The Threshing

Word has gone out to the war mothers walking 
In the field, gathering the fine grains of death 
In their skirts, pulling on the soft cottony flames
Of their sons' pyres, one by one, and holding them 
Penitent in long skirts before their wombs. 
How have the golden autumn fields become so full 
Of grieving fire, of mothers walking on broken sod? 
Their sons' faces are drawn in flame--in every 
Burning grain they gather their sons are talking.

Standing in Sadness

There's a sadness in standing alone  
All day, and a sadness within that sadness. 
Solitude comes to the fisher when he accepts 
The place he's standing, himself in the place. 
The frisky catfish follows the low hook 
Not because he believes in heaven above....
The fisher, listening to the squeal of waders 
Lives inside mud silence, sometimes just enough.

Who Rides Beside

Are we honest enough for the love we're given? 
That writes hearts, hard, in the paper?  
      That spells our name? 
There is one who waits beside us at the DMV, 
One who takes the reins when we crumple exhausted, 
And never asks the why of our having driven the horses
Too far into blinding snows that fall all night.... 
Look beside you now, unfold your wallet and remember-- 
The one who loves you is the one who rides beside.

The Sea Lion’s Rough Voice

The sea lion's rough voice promises that love 
Is dark;  that growls and low ripening squeals 
Will suffice all lovers on their sprawling rock--
No need for whispers when the sea takes you; 
You slide loud, all at once, into the spraying deeps! 
Champagne shoots the ocean liner from its launch! 
Moonlight discovers two among long night swells: 
Two sleek heads touching slightly, darkening.

The Bellowing Sea

Tired of work, I walk the boardwalk slats. 
The sea is sunburst yellow all around. 
The sea creams luxuriantly against the jetty. 
Wildly unzippered sprays;  sea kelp pulped 
Green in wide tidal pools below bent rocks. 
I have grown old;  in work;  in love; 
A downward monklike sunflower unseeded. 
I tire of the boards, jump down to gleaming sands.

Landscape

The hills, and the hills beyond them: 
Full of little towns, cluttered with people 
Looking back over the even, velvety hills 
As though their shadow-side were far away 
As the moon--unknowable, dense with dust. 
But the hills pile up like waves, like waves 
Arriving, hill after hill, and you're the shore 
Constantly lapped upon and lapped up and washed 
Away by all those hills, the clutter of people.

Stopping Reading, I Walk to the Shore

Standing at the slushy lake in a surprise thaw, 
The deep breast of the heavy water wants to rise.... 
Its dark edges are deeply luminous, murmuring 
As they clasp the raspy pebbles, push the small 
Whitish bodies with a darkness that breaks and scatters-- 
Just as that flock of pigeons on the dead hawthorn tree, 
With the sound of a thousand pages turning at once, 
Breaks and breaks and enters the evening sky.

Waiting for Hurricanes

Thrumming the boardwalk with my black toe  
Like an old softshoe dancer rehearsing, I hear 
A drumming sound like rain, and remember 
The deep swept fresh of it, holding this rail 
While bone-white ball lightning rolled the ocean, 
My face toward the hurricane's great rage, 
And I as mild... washed clean of salt.

The Four Humors

1. When Anger Comes

When anger comes, its red tides rising and breaking,
Temperatures rise with them, all the thermometers pop!
My blood's in a rage, my face will never be cold again.
Idiocy lands like a fly on my nose;  fingers ache
To tear each miniscule grey limb apart and fling it!
My head is chock-full of thundering drums!
Teeth interrupt the thick tongue, grinding blind apocalypse.
Mad mad mad!  There will never be an end to anger.

2. Thrown Down an Elevator Shaft

How sad, when I sit down, to keep going down 
Into boundless sorrow, rabbit-screams down an elevator shaft....
Tears that take away the breath, and keep weeping; 
The widower on a train no one will sit near.
Brown shadows of rot streak the dilapidated barn; 
Old dead hay spits out, and a shabby badger moves in 
Under the cornerstone. How heavy my father's casket was! 
Wherever I'm driving, I feel his weight in my wrists.

3. Stealing Second Base

Sheer happiness keeps the hummingbird going back and forth;
Babies slapping the bathwater;  millions of bubbles rising
So quickly in my diet coke, I can't keep from laughing!
Picking who goes first by trading hands on the bat;
Stealing second base while the pitcher fixes his cap....
On our second date, a sad movie, I kept smiling in the dark. 
When a dog finds his master again after many years
Of wandering, his heavy tail keeps on wagging!

4. The Coyote’s Mouth

When coyote's mouth is full of tailfeathers
Even the raven's eye shows its whites in fear.
The dead sound of the phone at 4AM, trauma calling;
Falling headfirst on a ball of needles, getting dumped.
The intimate terror when you've failed your children completely,
And they sail into life listing like a wounded boat....
The executioner will call your number one day
Too soon, a perfunctory voice from behind the counter.

What Bread Do We Eat?

What bread do we eat?  What water do we drink?
When light rises with the moon or with the sun, 
It's the dark curve of the hill that rises to meet it. 
Some dark stays buried in the hill with Arthur. 
His friends are dressed in moon livery and loyalty, 
And when they emerge, they jangle fishy scales. 
Lights along the riverbank show us fishes dancing, 
But within them a darkness is swimming. 
The bee is a dot of busy shadow going 
From light to light in the flowery field. 
When we eat the wheaten loaf, what do we eat? 
A dark yeast is buried in the bread.

Jumping Into Puddles

Look into a puddle on a moonless night. 
No moony reflection;  no gleam;  no face. 
Here lies the true, dark puddle;  no illusions. 
Darkness pulls away from you like a thread,
Deep into the center of Earth--a pupil 
Boring into the source of all thought;
Plato's black rat-hole out of the day-world....
I look a whole minute into the puddle's little
Oblivion--then jump over it, and on to bed.

* BUILDING A PROSY NEST *

Foxes Building a Nest

Turning around and around, building a nest, foxes make a place for their lives with the small black daubs of their feet. Birds use their mouths to carry fallen twigs and stale straw into the heavens, and build their own clouds there, threading carefully. Crows steal what they need, recognize the faces of those who do them harm, and appreciate having glittering things in their straw castles. An Austrian invented the waltz after observing the nesting behaviors of several kinds of animals. Turning around and around, the pair must carefully step where their partner has gone, tamping down a safe place for the two of them to dance arm in arm, face to face, the world outside their circle whistling past.

A Snail on the Stairs

It is morning. A green crevice gives him easy purchase to greet the wet day, his long uncoiled foot holding steady on a loose broccoli-like moss. When yesterday went to bed, and I came up these concrete steps in my daily tiredness, the snail was still at the bottom, swirling dangerously in the rain overflow, a pale comma in the weak stream of words the muddy drainage uttered. How simple for him to have drowned into silence! Instead, he is in possession of his green crevice, a Spanish conquistador in his snail helmet, holding the Mayan king hostage in his own temple for ransom. His horns go up gilded in morning light. Last night’s near drowning is utterly forgotten, the religion of fear and dread struck from the temple walls by dint of the sailors’ invading chisels. His tiny horns sound their brazen call at break of day….

Waltzing With Dragonflies

Circles appear in the pond’s lap; centered in each, a dot of color. Past my knees, a new circle starts, its color dot enlivening to wings. A dragonfly hovers and drops to the pond-top, our ancient swimming-hole… there are dozens here in the heat of the day. Many colors moving in many circles. Is this a living vision of the afterlife, done up by Dante? Instead of his great yellow rose moving its wheels, bloom within bloom, my miniature angels have exoskeletons. Wings sheer and stiff pass over the humid brown water in low circles; alighting, making prismatic rings. So much light and shape in this forgotten recess of the wood! The little guardians watch me warily, warily dart from my fingertips. Each circle evokes light from a dark surface. Is there sunlight hidden beneath the pond? They never answer, but settle on the dark water lightly; they drink the silence, looking everywhere wide-eyed.

A Heart Divided

The owl’s flat face is so large–a heart divided–the two dark moon-eyes blinking in systole and diastole. If a floodlight were suddenly clicked awake, a fiery torch tossed onto the high throne of the antlerlike branches, we would see the whiteness of the snowy owl. White as lice! White as beetle larvae! If a strong light came on suddenly beside me, I wonder, what would be seen? Have I done right by those who love me today? The purity of the owl’s downy, droplet-shaped body sits inverted. The narrow end of the teardrop sprouts two wiry black perching feet wrapped like Halloween decorations around the stripped walnut branch…. When the owl comes down, much later, alone in the silent night that we have turned away from toward our beds, its wings engulf silence; it is an electric engine of hunger honed to machinelike perfection. Only the howl of the shrew, if there is one, will be heard.

Leaning Out Over a Fallen Ash Tree

The risen roots stand out like a black-and-white medical diagram of human sinuses. The fallen ash tree has been dismembered, the tall elegant body that embraced the sky chopped and removed, and only this sleeping grey elephant foot remains. The dirt below the roots is black, beaten up; like rough seas at midnight, no moon to show the way over endless waves. Down in the deepest part of the hollowed-out bowl, something indistinct is burrowing, moving the crumbs of earth aside like an invisible root, exploring the exposed softness the fallen tree has left beneath itself, and from which it once grew mighty and leafy. Burrowing… or is it swimming, throwing up a dark spray? The small dark opening the movement creates is calling to me insistently, like an itch in my right ear. In an instant, I am determined. Wherever this low route travels, I’ll go.

Emptying the Landscape

Looking across the Delaware Water Gap, I see the mountain twin that matches this one. It’s like the raincoat of an old man turning away, his feet in the misty stream, his grey head bare, tufted randomly with cloudy hairs. He’s in the other world, past the switchback salmon tail of the emptying river. The trees up here are nothing now, sylvan forks stacked in a display case for the next feast. I settle irritably with my drawing pad on a great sloping rock hard as an emptied brainpan. Having ascended with friends, I am alone; they hiked energetically away, going over to the other mountain, leaving me to my art. I sketch their faces with broken fingers of charcoal: oval and lively, putting in ruddy touches with my thumb. I tilt back and let my thoughts flow out to a few black carrion birds, silent as priests, circling high.

Putting Spectacles Aside

I put down my glasses, and the world goes blond–a sunspot floating on the long wooden worktable, mottled by lobs of paint. I am tired of scrawling my way forward like a worm rubbing a branch, line by line. I am seated, dazzled, before a pile of sewing needles burning in Monet’s Giverny light, their eye-slits smeared shut by hopeless myopia. My consciousness hovers, carried in a canvas sedan chair, held up by invisible bearers. I am a gold haystack of heat, a nightbird drowsing on noon straw–only vaguely sensing the details before me. Is it enough to live among such fuzzy guesses, to navigate by instinct and inertia? I rub the runnels alongside my exhausted beak. I hear my avian pinions stir against the canvas vaguely, a sound of camelhair bushes and gesso. Beyond the golden ball of sunspot on the table, a blue hue-blur of sky wavers vaguely, a square of second-story window. Or is it a painting left half-finished? I remember hearing a bird hit it, when morning popped the apartment building out of night’s comforting shadow and into abrupt day. Its small beauty hit the pane hard–confused by reflections, determined to fly.

* from Chaos and Stars *

All Poetry Is Middle Class

It’s as if our house had shrunk around us in thickening drifts. Curious walls lean in like a solicitation, or, less importune today, a confidence no words betray. The place fills with things as with light, a thumb pushing the pale dough full.

Somehow, having this place so long among pines has become us. We’re the salvage that the house has gathered. At first, only for an accent beside the piled shelves, a flare of flowers, just there–and then more centrally, more needed–the only object that catches the light right.

Roots pulled from our knees, our heels, go down into these things. What surrounds us becomes us. Carefully the cat, a patchy calico, goes along the windowsill. Inside, but looking out.

Black Hat, White Hat

A snapping turtle slow and fierce as a drugged bear, revolves her claws in a rusted oil drum. We caught her back from the garden one dawn, putting her eggs in with the carrot seeds. We followed the dragged steps to the high grass that waved around her alert as flag majors. She was slow out of water, molasses churning in her dark joints; her pace amiable as a memorized prayer.

But her head’s still fast, her beak as purposeful as a hook. Dogs whine at the edge of the oil drum, echoey cries when their heads go down and in to smell her. Somewhere a Middle Eastern man is held by soldiers grown in America, their bright and bushy tails wagging like guns. A cigarette goes down into the dry can with a thin papery trail of smoke. The questions the men ask are clear and loud, but what do they mean?

When the time came to release her back into the belly of her world, she left our pale bread and carrots julienne like an offering of inedible leaves strewn at the bottom of the barrel. I put on my sneakers and walked between the sole-slicing stumps up to my waist in the water and put her out beyond myself, heavy as a sewer lid, my back straining.

What Is Said

Sometimes the words come from deep in and are seeds. They catch and grow into things, into tall people. They become themselves. Sometimes what is said has this genesis. It exists both before and after it has been said, and it goes on growing lonely and lovely for a long time. What is said can be a teenaged daughter awkward in the presence of her own beauty. Mirrors, other flat, shiny words, increase her self-consciousness, yet leave herself untouched.

The tongue moves so assuredly in its cave-mouth, a snail completely at home in its white winding shell. The tongue slowly shapes its house the way a host makes things ready for strangers at Christmas. The carolers on the snowy porch hope for mugs of hot cider; the spice of the cinnamon surprises them. When they tell themselves the story of singing, later, their boots steaming and their dewy coats heavy on wooden pegs, using the words of the host inside themselves carefully enough, they go on being surprised.

Noticing the Noticer

Not understanding, and wanting to. The edge of an eye, the unseeing white, curves ambivalently around the pupil, its darkness, its direction. But helping anyway, rounding things out, making a backside to the flat stare, tying the brain, like a stone in its apse, to wild vision, to the everything-of-what’s-up-front, the insistence of things before us.

All day long I have moved words toward their funeral pyre, toward fire, illumination. I am helping to build something. I don’t know what it is. Like when my father put my hand under his hand to hold the wood while he nailed it in place, something large is helping me to help it. A tobaccoy, fiery breath is in my ear.

The place I am making behind my own pupil is full of beetles’ wings and angels.

A Moral Star

Once we stole the stars from themselves and named them, mischievously, they became ours. Night after night, the house asleep and unwatchful, they try to escape back into the sky. Every day they return to our chests, our thin ribs, burning guiltily.

Something stolen is never forgotten. Those who lose it may forget it, let it go into the place they have prepared for lost things, old ownerships. But those who stole may never let go. The history of the thing comes with the thing, even if it is only the history of its theft.

The jaguar treads with his pelt of sunspots all night, mourning and remembering his meals. His eyes, dimly lidded, hold in the golden day. Each breath taken steals from the breaths around it. Exhaled back into the world, it is never the same. Water that passes through us, and becomes ours, becomes us. When we feel it again, it smells stolen, yellow with use, with history. When the thief forgets what he has stolen, he becomes sick. Society is sometimes like that, sick with millions of small thieves and thefts, forgetting what’s stuffed in their pockets. Then what’s stolen stays with us and inside us, but is neither ours nor themselves. These things rise up strangely, alien and without grief. Our breath denies us, denied by us; our lungs swag with wet cement. Zoos howl with animals caged but without their own minds, crazy and ungrieving. The dry straw is torn, the water in its steel bowl is overturned, the food, pawed and neglected, becomes poisoned.

The animals will lie down in the moon and rot. Their starved breaths will float into roses. We, who have stolen and lied to ourselves, will die.

The Why of a Fencepost

Why are two men arguing at a fencepost? Perhaps it is three men. The two themselves, and the shadow third they are together, the argument. Let’s pretend it is evening. Three shadows then and a stubble of cornstalks. A grey stone the heft of a skull knocks the post as they talk. If they disagree, why do they need to be near each other? Why does a mountain start from a flat place?

I think most people mean what they are.

The feeling they seem to be talking about would be immanence, or impermanence. I guess they would call it expanded consciousness and permanence. A part of it here, a part elsewhere. But both really here, or really there, a metaphor. Tat tvam tasi. Thou art that. I like the stone being itself, unowned and unknowable. I like being myself, a little too personal, a little forgotten about, even by myself.

Somehow too, like they say, like they show, using my feelings in their argument, which makes the argument part me as well then–somehow, too, the stone is inside me, rattling my ribs, pushing my blood limbs, weighing on inner things. And I am curled inside the stone, a small man asleep in the granite like this feather, just here now, on top of it windily.

* * * * *

A ‘Hello Kitty’ Ornament Swinging From an Xmas Tree

The kitty’s eyes are dead dot predator eyes as she swims through the turquoise tinsel on a tabletop Xmas tree. The pink hair-bow and pink jumper are the pink inside of a youngster’s lip, turned out to tease her brothers. The pink of sliced fish. Green and red box presents bulge seamlessly reeflike beside the oddly bulbed feet, her daubed gold nose dead center as a diver’s air-regulator. They shine squarely, full of the hope that keeps angelfish darting out from dark coral recesses–making hungry moues in sparse tropical waters. Under the blue intermittent light, Kitty’s ears slit alertly, sharp as a lieutenant’s salute, perfect white fins jutting from a saw-toothed barracuda’s long jagged back.

THE RED AND THE BLACK

On the bright poinsettia leaf is a beetle with a dark back! It is the Christmas Spirit. It’s black, hard as a thumbnail, and, in oblique light, has a rainbow sheen. The beetle walks like a small tank over awkward rocks–tilting first this way, and then that. I bend closer to the red star of the poinsettia, a white spaceman dipping down to scoop up a ladleful of sun to bring back to Earth as a souvenir. The beetle’s compass-point feet touch the inferno’s surface lightly, dancing on a star. The point of the leaf shivers under the weight of its dancing, the hurry of its feet through the red desert. Two black feelers, agile, insistent, tick over the hot sands like a pair of blind friends out for a stroll. Everything is new to them! This is the star that calls them to Bethlehem, two of the Wise Men traveling far to witness something important.

An Empty Wasp Nest

Picking up a paper wasp nest outside my front door, it is weightless as a burnt-out lightbulb. I see an array of cells that had been birth chambers for warriors, a miniature air force of living fighter jets. The white hospital corridors had burst into a fury of activity, and then were abandoned–alien babies clinging briefly to round sills, taking off to hunt and kill. A few doors remain unopened, smoothly sealed as missile silos. The papery nest dithers in my palm, a lobe of cauliflower, or the blown-out brain of the caveman who first discovered how to make fire…. When these flying bullets were sleek embryos hunkered in their dry catacomb, did slim unopened wings resonate against the monkish walls? I see in the illuminated holes a paper lantern used by Japanese samurai for going far down into the earth, seeking the cold depths of their warrior selves, exploring deep crystalline caverns by aggressive stabs of lantern-light. I lean in. I go down, far past the cave-mouth of my angry self. I hear squads of absent wasp wings humming….

Monarch Chrysalises on a Poplar Branch

Green as milkweed leaves curled into themselves, a half dozen chrysalis pods hang from a smooth grey poplar branch. The pods resemble chaise lounges for caterpillars swaddled against too much sun. The caterpillars have been rolled onto the narrow wooden deck of an immense passenger liner. They are on a long sea journey south, taken for their health, reading novels or dozing. The eye travels easily to the crown end of the chrysalis, closest to the branch, and a hand follows. A thumb runs gently along the light brown crown-bumps, waking happily napping passengers briefly. Cool fingers collect room signatures politely as mimes. The ship rolls on into a permanent fog bank besetting the Falklands…. When they arrive in Cape Verde a week later, it is revealed that they’re a class of traveling art students: they have been painting in their cabins at night, secretly, by painful candlelight. The students unroll their still-wet canvases, orange and black, on the docks of a new country. Everything will be different here! No more eating whatever teacher feeds them, acres of sour milkweed leaves. They flitter their translucent wares confidently in the shore air–as if they had already been discovered by a collector, as if they were already duly famous.

Albino Tigers in New Jersey

You look them over casually, then you’re straining, staring at twin presences behind the chain-link. Your looking moves through obstacles, and you are standing–no, lying–beside the big cats breathing evenly on worn earth. Near-sighted sensitive eyes follow their noses blindly, goldfish bowls dosed with bluish milk. Paws open like giant white rose petals, leaving spirograph clawmarks swirled in the packed dirt. There is nothing you could give them besides the flesh of your hand, the blood running in your limbs. You realize that you came here searching for something, but what is it? Their elegant bodies twine around each other with the huge laziness of power–fields of stripe and counter-stripe, white snakes folding into a Christmas bow; the ceremonial tree beside them stands stripped of bark, naked and exposed, a frozen barb of black lightning. Is it love? You feel your face blushing hard, a burning bush. Something surreal in your body blossoms outward, toward the furred beings before you, so comfortable, so at home in their natural world. Suddenly one mouth opens like a snapping turtle’s, red gobbets of tongue unfolding rawly in her heavy breath. She chews the hard bare dead tree root for practice, to clean her teeth. Blinded orbs sight you vaguely, uneasily; the nose lifts, a hungry image rising from within the mists of her crystal ball…. You remember the chains of the cage, link by link, and step back, safe.

Becoming a Meteor

My body feels weighted, sacks of wet salt-water cement formed into an identity: a cast-off David discarded in the garden. The face, all smooth possibility once, craters and snaps, a haze of fine lines, cascades of whited dryness. Magritte’s painting of a stone candle with a stone flame comes unbidden to mind. Deep inside my body, moist patches still struggle with an urge to change–to push out spikes and become a sea urchin, or go back to the cocoon of college for a decade and emerge an astrophysicist. Instead, I am learning the stillness of hard places from the skin in. Becoming one with the inertia of my trajectory from the cliff I flung myself off of years ago… arms outward like extended antennae, the steel ball of my being grudgingly confirming its decaying orbit. Red glares trail behind me, emanating from my hot skin for miles….

One for the Goalie

Out Riding

So many books--hardbacks, rugged and thumbable. 
How many times have I come here just to watch them 
Open and close, carefully as a field of butterflies. 
Or to fly away with them, riding their spines!

A Good Rainy Day

A white feather, bedraggled, on the wet doorstep. 
A good rainy day--no need for poetry.

So Many Stories

People have so many stories to tell about themselves! 
Sometimes a sadness in their story sends them down 
Into an oak's root, and they live among weevilly things. 
Our stories about ourselves can warp us, the way 
A prevailing wind keeps the mountain's trees bent over. 
My uncle, listening hard, bent so close the radio 
Static made him jump!  

If we were the sea, we'd always be dancing... 
Rhythm from beneath and a breath from above, 
Foam of all those stories rolling inside us at once. 

But people are not the sea--or, somewhat, but slower. 
We need words as grape vines need a stake. 
Sometimes, with words in their ears, people think 
They can fly, and the red roofs abandon them. 
But sometimes, somebody has a story about themselves  
That sends them out to catch you when you're falling.

Holding Stacks of Old Photos

An important, particular something I forgot-- 
Not a mortgage payment, or whether gas 
Left on was slowly turning our home into a bomb.... 
Important like smoky silhouettes of mountains 
You've been striving to climb your whole life, 
The missed step that sent you down in dust 
Covered in ignominy's dead clay for a moment. 
Remembering that you can't remember 
Your dead brother's face, your father's voice 
Loose with tobacco juice, or the name of the woman 
Who first showed you a woman's ways 
In that awful dorm of cinderblocks, the past.

Afternoons Fooling With an Empty Boat

As boys we'd watch the flat-bottomed aluminum boat
Pendulum on its yellow nylon tether in the water, 
Ringing against ground at either farthest arc--
Our bare feet dug stones in mud, ears and 
Lips bobbing at the waterline as we laughed 
To lift such eely smoothness, heaving with our feet: 
Our greatest stone a toe-clutched double-fister 
Swung in dripping triumph up between bent knees.

.  .  .  .

Other times, alone, I'd breast-stroke far from shore,  
Holding the rough tether like a bell-pull swimming  
Till I tired, face upturned on lucid sunlit sheets, 
And float exhausted,  
The empty boat and I circling each other.

Climbing Peach Trees in Childhood

Overhead branches shook in the wind, brushes 
For the sky's blue bottle--scrubbing restlessly until 
White clouds were nibbled away, and it was night. 

Our orchard moon was a white marble rolling  
Loose in the deepening sink of night--the wind 
Pealing alive with trumpets and speeches.... 

How we scrambled up those sweet scraggy trees 
All night, our hands reaching out like giants' hands, 
Touching worlds in every peach!

The Windy Hill

The windy hill is waving, 
Waving me onward 
Toward whatever lies under 
Its green dome, 
Its loop of purple shadow.... 

Perhaps a hidden hill 
Inside my body 
Is waving back. 
I don't know. 
But, I feel the wind.

A Box of Snow

I keep a box of snow beside me 
Made of winter days, of air 
Stamped cold like prismed tin, 
Of clouds as thin as hair. 

In the box lie frozen puddles 
We skated on in sneakers, 
Shoving off like seagulls 
From shiprails, taking a header 

Carefully into the wind. 
Our scarves as we wheeled 
Carved shapes of glass behind 
Us, invisible but real.

Shinny, or One for the Goalie

Crossed hockey sticks kept clacking; 
Like an open page, the frozen pond was wavy; 
We boys went at the puck like bees 
Around the proverbial daisy. 

Winter battered our faces pink, 
Left ice-crust on eyelash and tongue; 
Angling elbows grew raw from falls 
Attacking the goalie before his fallen log. 

A hacking scramble, then shouting 
Left Dave like a beetle, flat on his back-- 
His mittens knocked unknitted to bushes 
That surrounded our quick play with dark. 

Above us glazed the intermittent 
Asphalt bridge of the county access road. 
A car rolled by, windows down. 
All our music rose to it, and echoed.

Two Friends, One Bottle

They had discussed things a long time without going 
      to sleep. 
Curses had softened, somewhat unexpectedly, to "So what?" 
Laughter got the better of them both around three 
      in the morning, 
And followed them right up to the rooster's rosy cackle. 
Dawn spread out, a white flag, on the old bone of contention: 
They each grabbed an end, went to their corners, and slept.

Clubbing Harp Seals

Dressed for everlasting winter  
The men do it with methodical efficiency  
Walking calmly back and forth among the icefields  
Of dark large eyes, clubbing them so as 
Not to damage the beautiful
Spotted pelts.

Divorcing

Initials carved by lovers in a birchtree's heart 
Sink in like sap, strain to wavy lines until the heart 
Breaks open--and the paired letters, once linked and 
Ampersanded, swim off into the tree's slow history, 
A ring marked dark by a year of terrible drought.

Asleep in the Back Seat Through the Carolinas

Shadowy, shouldery parents are not talking still, 
Their backlit profiles separate and sober 
As important Egyptians laid in vinyl sarcophagi. 
Outside, miles of somber pines ashen into mountains 
And the sound of running water grows fainter than the wheels.... 
I nod off sitting under a dry beach blanket, 
Half-wrapped up like an old movie Indian 
And imagine them still talking--
Their unmoored voices rush through happy waters, 
High sprays of rapid laughter  
Leaping  
Whenever intervening rocks appear in the stream.

Maker’s Mark

The boy with tattoos down his arm like briars 
Climbing, briars creeping down, life-talons 
Creeping into pinched flesh, beaks eating....

The hard beak of Maker's Mark eats into me, 
Makes me see bleakly, intimately, the amber 
Illumination of day going damned into ashes.

The Old Old Man With Wild Hair

My coat is patched and touched with tears, 
My hands resemble the road of years. 
My head is light as a dandelion seed 
And drifts in dreams.... White memories 
Stick to the sap of the dark... seeds 
Grown into green crowns of trees 
From eely children, their games of chase 
And evade.  Some of those, though young, 
Have quit their drifting.  They wait for me 
Whitely in the lost mud of the road.  Almost, 
I'm ready to drift down and meet them....

Among the Burls

                    for Jax
All light is emptiness  
Until it intersects even  
The tender translucence 
Of a baby's fingernails. 

How like white rosepetals  
The little fingertips there 
Growing to brush the mother's 
Face, grasp the father's nose. 

When the light finally 
Settles among the burls 
Of the baby's blanket, it 
Feels solid, creamy and heavenly.

A Dream of Little Cabbages

My father came to me in a dream 
Holding a silver tea tray. 
On it, three heads of cabbage. 

I unwrapped each cabbage and saw 
Three baby heads inside, 
My two brothers and me. 

The baby heads blinked at me, looking.

Running in Dreams

Father is waking up in my dreams again 
Splendidly persistent after many years away 
His tobacco-breath sweet and tannic at once 
His small face gruff, gopher-furred, the eyes 
Black tacks pushed in by thumbs one tick 
Too far;  resiny, observant. 

All night I run through quicksand, 
My flipper-long feet lost under 
Granular surfaces curved as an orange 
Rind;  my voice pants hoarse in my ears: 
"Father, let me wake up this once alone. 
I promise to forget you forever."

To Say Snowflakes

To say snowflakes melting on noses 
Are chilly angels returning home, 
Or to believe a sailor wearing 
An earring cannot drown.... 

To sit alone together and talk, 
To pass you patted mud and say: 
Pancakes!  And you take the mud stack 
From me politely and say: delicious! 

What we say together is real that way 
For all the days our childhood is. 
And then the snow falls, and we're alone-- 
Years in the whiteness, the only witness, 

And all those cold angels going home!

Such Green Approval

1. 
My youngness thought forever was 
Days and days like that day. 
The even light in the grass, the youngness leaping 
Right to my fingertips! 

2. 
Riding my bike, I kept seeing white clouds  
Flying out behind.  And I was flying, too, 
Surrounded by gulls high in the air. 
It was as if I would never fall asleep again, 
As if I would never need to wake. 

3. 
Maple trees nodded alongside in rows 
With such green approval.  Even that red bird 
Singing on its dead-lightning branch 
The same phrase again and again.

A Birthday

A birthday is something you're given
Without having to ask for it. 
Suddenly you're here, crying, red, 
And everyone else is smiling and cheering. 

Fifty years later, you're counting  
Down instead of adding up.  Cheers 
Diminish, but so do the tears;
Everyone around the bonfire cake  
Singing and inserting your name....

There isn't much movement 
At the fulcrum, the center--
You can see as far forward as 
You've lived backwards.

Envoi:
Fox Comes Out

Fox comes out of greyness, a bright shadow 
Pacing filtered pre-dawn mists--his feet 
Neat black and his teeth neat white. 

His eyes and ears are lively all the time 
His low body lies arranged under the brush,
A pattern matching patterns in the shadows. 

No matter how many times the careful eggs 
Are laid away in the farmer's straw, this will happen: 
The black snout thin as a pencil nib, snapping, 

The soft nose doused in silky yolk.

Older Entries

The Mortal Words

The Eternal Muse

Unforgiven

Ode to a Young Girl

Her Hyacinth Eye

Violet Sublime

Evening on Church Street

Patti’s Prayer

The Wake

The Monumental Grunt

O’ Manifesto

The Holy Men

Renaissance Man

Charred Remains

Evening Litany

Alexis Trailorpark

Rushmore at Sunset

Speaks To the Soul of Man

The Unknown Beheld

In Sight

Gone Dead

To Recover Yourself

Ragged Senses and Sundered Selves

Ritual Winter

Once More for Alexis

Full of Grace

Death of the Kiss

The Aftermath

Life By Fire

Round Her Mortality

The Dying Sea

Farewell Girl

Resurrection

The Epitaph

Soul to Solitude

The Witnessed Prophecy

‘Twilight Lake’

The Laughing Tragedian

The Yearling

The Haunting Summer

N. Y. C.

The eternal

Innocents

The Deviled Breast

My Grief Lies Deep

Angel of Winter

Womb of Deceit

Whispers of the Eternal Leaves

The Mortal Words

At the End of the Path

Stuff and Nonsense

Other (How To Be Invisible)

Disappearing Act

Culprit

Ruby Woo

The Poet Wild

Reading in Eden

Evaporating Lines

A Hard Wind

Life

The Reader

Riding Fido

Words Without Music

God’s Hooks

How to Be Invisible

Objects

Water

Consider a Stone

Pinpricks

Cages

Spoon

House

Wiping My Lips

Buttonhole

Electric Fan

White Threads

Chairs

The Far Side

TV Remote

Two Supplicants

Other
(How To Be Invisible)