Mar 162017
 

EPIGRAPHS

Yes, and I ain't saying you ain't pretty 
All I'm saying is I'm not ready 
For any person place or thing 
To try and pull the reins in on me 
~~Mike Nesmith, Different Drum 

Unfaith in aught is want of faith in all. 
It is the little rift within the lute, 
That by and by will make the music mute.... 
~~Tennyson, Merlin and Vivian 

The first harp came from an empty turtle.
~~Robert Bly, Meditations on the Insatiable Soul

For I am made of stardust, and it hurts. 
~~Jennifer E. Stahl

 

Dimming the Lights


The Western World is giving up its heights, but its long unspoken depths are not so easily put aside….

The grandness of day and civilization recede. We are in the twilight of the gods, now, reentering realms discarded since The Church was the sole authority on science. Unprepared for the transition, but having thoroughly abandoned reasoned discourse, empirical methodology, and the idealism of Enlightenment systems, we glare into our subconscious with iPhone flashlights–and the litter is a mash of ancient rites and yesterday’s emails that we are wholly unprepared to untangle.

We have an incompetence in living with our unconscious depths that will not be easily shaken. Our politics proscribe forms of wrong behavior, (and prescribe forms of right behavior) without any comprehension, or any attempt to comprehend, the breadth of human experience. Each side races to shrink hosannas and tragedies into some rigid public liturgy; any deviance in individual recital is seen as disobedience to the herd norm. Yet these litmus tests are so narrow and empty they cannot encompass the brainwaves of an amoeba, let alone the million prismatic instances of genius and peril that constitute just a single human life.

These are atrocious generalizations, but I feel in desperate need of a map, any map– and what greater generalizations are there than a map’s North, South, East and West? These poems begin to reclaim the dark of sleep, the deeps of unconscious material, for the use of individual guidance toward meaning and action in the broader world. When the buildings have gone down in flames, when the roads are empty, and traffic cops are pointing everywhichway with the feverish inconsistency of spinning tops…well, one must do what one can to re-establish an inner order that hugs the whole of one’s experience. The inertia of dreams is a good place to begin because they go back in time and temperament to the earliest human societies and circumstances. Dreams can provide a kind of inertial guidance system for the burnt-out modernist–anyone suspicious of the narrow “naked truths” on display in every shopfront, on every blogpost, every idiot bumper-sticker slamming its brakes in front of us.

In our private dark–sleeping, dreaming–we may still find a way to put our faces toward the dimming light.

Gregg Glory
November 25, 2015






POEMS


These Words Are On Fire

These words are on fire--on fire in you-- 
On fire really, literally, not like in a story 
Or some metaphor for life, but really burning 
In the sugars of your brain; in the caloric heat 
Of your expressive breath, too, these words 
Are on fire, exhaling my ontological being 
Like bones thrown on a campfire, scraps 
That flare in the conflagration of your night,
The fire alarm that is your life today 
Clanging and busy with every human misery 
And mystery, every human thing that you are. 
Your thoughts scatter and leap in sparks,
Engulfing your neighbors and lovers and children 
In the emergency that is your life. 
And into this conflagration, this catastrophe, 
Word by careful word, you have thrown me. 
Taste my happy ashes on your lips.

 

 

*** FINDING A LIFE RAFT ***




A Wash of Light

A wash of light soaks through the frozen-over windshield:
It's enough to write poetry by while the car warms.
Grievances, violences. My mind is full of angry violins
--Scratching attacks, mad growls of tones.

Fingers warm, my speedy breathing disappears
Into the general heat of the moist, closed-in space, writing....
The sun resembles a snowball through the cloudy windshield, 
A cold headlight coming on through incomplete dawn. 

Last night was here so recently!  Lying straightened in bed, 
Feathers of darkness fell all along the asphalt shingles above my body.... 
As I write, a baby's aggrieved cry becomes an inaudible coo, 
An old man's life-grief moults into acceptance....  

We come to welcome the sleek black of our scuffed coffin
The way we'd welcome an unexpected wedding guest
Who shows up late and anxious, pigeon-toed at that,
But all dressed up and ready in his rented tux.  

 

 

Looks in a Dying Eye

Dark veins open, and a shadow goes forth over whiteness, 
An eel moving out of its cave over clouds of coral; 
Sea winds sound in the ears of shoals of living fish; 
No air, and no rowing home to shore ever again.

 

 

Scanning Headlines for Mercy

The needles of terrorists' bullets are burrs on our eyes.
Blind with pain, we slap our heads frenetically.
We lodge the bullets deeper with curses repetitious as prayer.

 

 

A Bone Horn

Marrowless, this black-ringed femur, 
Rigged to blow one resounding note forever 
Crowing the winner's standing exultation
...Lies where Indians left it on their mountain.   
  
Around the long horn unburied by rain, a few pines  
Gather, dark mourners on a ring of bland rocks. 
A low wind shrugs through heavy serapes. 
  
I pick up the tarnished roadside bone, delicately wipe 
Particles of dirt until it gleams in my bare hand-- 
A tube now only, without meaning, 
A dead white weight of death and silence.

 

 

Holding Onto Grief with Both Hands

Who was the one I was grieving for today?
I went to the mountain forest to find the body. 
I walked straight up those hills until it was night, 
Held a candle over my head in the dark and wept. 
I followed that river down out of the mountains 
Where valley slopes slow like white flocks landing.... 
With both hands, I held to the earth for my only comfort, 
And the wind there whispered: "Nothing is saved."

 

 

Feathers

The graveyard air is faultless--clear 
White stars shine through it, crisp sandgrains 
Still wet with huge intimacies of the sea. 
Wave after feathery wave, they sift loose shyly....  

My dead live here, talking in their sand house 
Under the groundhog's old mossy hole. 
Oak roots knuckle outward, sheltering the soft door.

Their voices are light as paper shifting in darkness. 

For a long time I stand still as a star--I listen 
As if the dead were delicate, held in a child's palm, 
Lips parted with curiosity, a feather. 

 

 

A Tree Fallen Into Water

I walk straight out along the fallen trunk still solid 
With the life that had left it years ago, before I was even born. 
I put my arms out for balance, walking down toward the calm water 
And then over it, my bare feet feeling the hard beaks of bark ridges
       that run like seams down an old man's face. 

Where water touches the long trunk, some gets sucked 
Into open seams, like an eyedropper preparing its dose. 

Smaller branches radiate smoothly out from the main body
As if to keep the fallen tree's balance over dark water. 
There's a charge, a power in the water, like the cold potential of snow,
That touches my face when a breeze wrinkles it.

Kneeling down to drink, I see those branches that reach below the clear 
Surface of the black reservoir are slick with green algae, green moss.

 

 

The Sense of Defeat

The field mouse with berrylike eyes has bedded down 
For the day.  Carefully placed leaves cradle 
Ears that could be flooded by an eyedropper. 
What music is small enough to entertain his dreams? 

For years I've watched the same great tree in the yard 
Divide and subdivide its massive wheel of roots until 
Even tiny blossoms can bend it down in spring. 

What is greatness or smallness in living things? 
A single match can burn down an entire house! 

Surely there's that which I desire as the tree desires the sky, 
As the mouse desires his contented littleness in his hole. 
What, besides friendship, and a few things more?

 

 

The Unseen Quarry


“the mountain seemed… raw materials of a planet dropped from some unseen quarry”~~Thoreau

   
1. 
The mountain pinnacle has seashells in it. 
The climber's powdery hand touches once-living swirls. 
With his feet on the old ocean floor a mile underwater
He sees a hundred miles of our world easily. 

2. 
Peering with a glass-bottomed bucket along the shore, 
A child sees his bare feet touching mountain snow. 
The snow is soft and warm as in his dreams. 
Small tinselfish swim between his naked legs above the snow. 
For the moment everything seems calm and clear.

 

 

To

Lie down in the soft ‘no' of the snow forever.

 

 

Two Small Poems on My Shadow

My shadow leaves trails of smoulderings... 
Wherever light has fallen through me 
Focused by my magnifying glass. 

.   .   .   . 

When sundown comes yawning its shadows...
When I and the tree and the grass-crested hill are one... 
It's just my shadow waking up to dream.

 

 

Thursdays Mostly

A man who is suffering invites friends over. 
A small bottle of rum sits dark as a pupil 
In the green felt circle of his poker table. 
Kings and queens are taken up and put down in silence. 

The men might be sleeping under straw hats, 
Bobbers nodding unnoticed between bare, rough feet. 

Dark summer blows in through a window....
And the men hear the night train passing 
With a sound of jail doors sliding shut 
On row after row of the condemned.

 

 

Seasons of Men

Each day men drink the rich griefs of their lives 
Silently after work--each word widowed 
In the half-light, winnowed in elbowed bars 
Crowded with the grunts and hups of football. 

Other men, ones with the delicate balance 
Of rarefied ballet dancers, make parabolas  
Explode at half-field--one extended finger enough 
To call the drilled ball down from heaven.... 

Enough to hold the pigskin seed in the belly 
And feel beaten men fall all about and upon you 
Heavily as grain-sacks. Enough to know they're defeated, 
That you and the grass and the held seed have won.

 

 

The Way Back

She bent around the fender, low, 
Filling her eyes with the injured wing--
Snap and struggle;  slow, then slower... 
Her eyes all tears and shining. 

I stood quiet beside her, knocked 
A slender Pall Mall from the pack--
Silent till the burning reached a knuckle, 
The hum of the engine gone slack: 

"The sun's getting gone, dear."
Her shoulders tightened at that. 
She folded herself back in the car 
And we drove that way all the way back.

 

 

Waking Up Screaming

We wake, pulled by our hairs into the light, screaming. 
Every one of our hairs is standing up and screaming! 
The dream we had loved is dead, but we are alive....
Hair roots, curled in their dark, hear muted echoes 
Of the never-ending grief daylight brings us. 

All day, dreams without a dreamer run loose. 
In brain dark, in mind dark, uncut thoughts 
Grow shaggy and obscene. Thoughts wrestle 
Inside us, hairy bears fierce and dark.  Hairy hands 
With long yellow nails smack the dream belly.... 

When we rejoin our dreams, lying back in the spitting vat, 
They scream all night, jungle parrots nobody hears.
We ourselves are deaf to them, to the dark 
Magnetic thoughts, the inner things we think 
While our eyes rest and our hair is pulled inward, 
Reverse lightning folded back time-lapse into earth-black 
Clouds;  the brain, heavy and hairy, raw as a blind potato.

 

 

The Getaway

All day it was night inside me.  I was a shuttered 
Building, my sides afternoon red, with only 
Flash touches of deep night showing 
In windows--black eyes turning shyly away 
That had been bold the night before.... 
                                        And then 
Night arrives: night from under eaves falls
Cold into cornfields: my hidden self
Rides out into it: escaped darks everywhere
Cut only by squares of window-light....
Quiescent grass is laid open by pallet knives 
Of yellow pigment like a tire skid--fugitive lights
Now the loud car of day has made its getaway.

 

 

White Beak of the Moon

I wake at midnight. 
There, through the dim window, is the 
Fiery haunch of the moon! 

The window was black before the moon came by,
My thoughts buried in busy sleep. 
And now, in moonlight, I see 
A bird asleep in the juniper nearby, its white beak 
Under its wing, fierce songs under freezing feathers, 
Each feather dipped in the moon's ladled mercury. 

What are days that they become nights such as this? 
Already the answer is eating up the question.

 

 

Rolling Over at 3am

The moon--unstrange, unexpected, intrudes. 
There are no clouds.  Just a few 
Indistinct corners of dusty wisp lit up 
By the moon's nude bluish flashlight. 

I have chronicled my life
With the moon's comings and goings,
Which everyone can see for themselves!
I can't even see to swim in this rivery darkness!

 

 

Holes in the Life Raft

Mist hovers on the night lake like a life raft. 
Blue urgencies of the afternoon have faded, 
Pewter shades flatten the world to a picture. 

Onshore, my shadow and I play tag by moonlight, 
Chalky figures in a dim Rembrandt rendition. 
We touch first at one foot then the other: this foot, that foot, 
Then chase along the unchurned rim sand, water lapping, 
Then just hands touch as I cartwheel once--

Can't take this mortal coil too seriously 
While cranberry wine stays so cheap! 

Meanwhile, out on the lake,
Holes in the life raft appear and close without sound.

 

 

The Fractured Paths

Time has gone on for so long, I no longer know what to think! 
Angry drums of the car wheels flatten to shreds; 
A jaybird crouching in his hovel of branches 
Cracks a nattering song.... 

Day again;  and ochre, cerise and pink fingers 
Reenact Homer in the long trail of clouds 
Whipping past the back of the dark ShopRite.... 

Sun has not yet tarnished the lower waters of puddles. 

The surrounding dead no longer throng my dreams. 
The fractured paths they wander have returned to bed. 
They wait politely for me to finish up, their hands folded, 
At the edge of the grass.

 

 

Dust of Frost

Going out for my morning paper, I see 
The first dust of frost on the stone stoop. 
How quietly summer must've danced away!

 

 

The Slow Presences

The slow presences of winter clouds in these hills. 
What hand behind the cloth?  What windshield 
Keeps them from pressing into the earth?

 

 

*** JOINING HANDS WITH THE GRASS ***

 



I Have Been Driving Like Hell to Get Here

Pastels of pastureland flit rapidly past 
The window that closes over my life 
Like a dome.  Am I the motor of my own going? 

Doubts flick into my face, hands full of car-wheel 
As though carrying a doughy wet baby awkwardly 
From the pool to the sun-porch, slippery being, 

A freight of sunshine in my burning arms.

 

 

Some People Living on the Plains

Some people who live on the open plains 
Think like sailors.  
Their lives sail thorough waves of grass, 
Eye-high stalks of waving wheat, 
Familiar with squinting at horizons.  They sway-stand, 
Feeling earth unstable beneath them.... 

The barn enlarges like a frigate nearing, 
Horses gorgeous as mermaids, 
Dogs happy as sea-otters.  Even at noon 
They know they are alone on vast wastes, 
No sextant to show the way.

 

 

The Black Tadpole

The tadpole is bulking up its black bulbous head; 
Huge thoughts protrude and the eyes bulge. 
Its long tail, once subtle and swift as a ribbon, 
Reels in, shrinks to a cape, then 
A small triangle hood, a judge's black cap, 
Then no tail below hunched shoulders. 
The tadpole, a black rock, is all brain now. 
Like a rock's shadow it sits all day 
In the mud, motionless 
Until it leaps!

 

 

Poetry, The Oldest Human Endeavor

   
1. 
Don't write what you feel, that's not enough. 
Don't write what you see, you're being deceived. 
Write only what you feel when looking closely. 
That's best, though painful. 

2. 
Man is a herd animal. 
Follow the bent grass, and you'll find him 
Muddying the river, his head low, 
Drinking deep. 

3. 
I can see the first old shaman, way back, 
Holding up his chicken bone and singing about the universe, 
Firelight lasering about him.

 

 

I Am the Arrow

Nature points the poet, 
Willfulness tautens the bow. 
Love looses the arrow.

 

 

Being a Snowflake

Fleets of late autumn clouds are thinking, Down,
Crowds of trees and animals, Look up,
While each zagging snowflake sings, I am.

 

 

Standing on a Stone

There's a kind of hard sanity in a stone, 
A place to stand and look at stars.
A place for sleep beneath stars pinned inside 

The skull of night... smells of woodponds among pines,   
That small resonance of sap and stillness, black 
Abandoned reflections that go a hundred feet deep!  

I know my bones, and sleep on them, heavy. 
There's sanity in their steadfast ache, 
The tension of a blade swimming through muscle. 
  
Through many years of sleeping, and of dreaming, 
I've charted my inward stars and prayed beneath them, 
Cold knees on the stone, stars where stars are.

 

 

The Things Nearest

Today I tighten my daily tie and look 
At the things nearest in my untidy nest 
To hold them mindfully while day turns, 
For what's nearest is easiest to forget. 
I lay rough hands more roughly around 
Rungs of my bentwood chair, knowing how
All worlds flow through my ordinary room 
Worn every day around me like a favorite belt: 
Syria's sandy shadow on the calendar and 
Japan's swans on travel posters, keep pace 
With walls moving thousands of miles per hour; 
Swiss Alps sharpen long rows of pencils, oceans
Follow the same moon as my water-bottle. 

I watch the cat's world fall asleep on her paws, 
Her ears listening to a wilderness within 
Where untame things are flying, singing out 
Loud and alertly, and all within my room. 

 

 

Being Small Things

   
1. An Abandoned Oar

My days of rowing are over. 
I lie in the sand;  and the surf 
Never reaches me now.... 
Its long fingers of foam, 
Its cold flash along my spine. 

I could be the wing of a plane, 
The fallen plank of a windmill, 
Exiled from flapping and skies. 
But I am an oar. 

I've spent my life filleting the deep, 
Raising small white scars 
On blue waters;  and then leaving, 
Handled by callous hands. 

I lie in the sand;  and the surf 
Never reaches me now.


2. Chandelier

I'm hung with small lights like crosses. 
My strong iron is strung on a string. 
My smile is gorgeous but frightening, 
I spread my fiery wings! 
Each hour is quartered with losses. 
Each night I'm lit up like a drunk. 
The strangers, a family, the darlings, 
Break bread beneath my sparkling. 
They leave me hungry and alone in the dark. 


3. The Bottle

Once the vodka's gone 
Down a drain, down a throat 
An eye looks in to check-- 
Enormous, Godlike, fringed with lashes. 
And I become clear, not hollow, 
Unless the way a bass is hollow 
It is so full of possible notes. 
A child finds me in the alley, 
Licks my lips, and blows 
A soulful whistle out of my belly 
For a few hours one afternoon, 
The sound unpronounceably lonely. 

Thrown into a passing river 
I float for a while, spinning, 
A glass-bottomed boat showing stones 
And weird fish flashing by 
Until I sink into invisibility. 


4. A Goldfish 

I confess my memories 
Are possibly possessed 
By madness: void, distorted, 
Erased like a chalkboard 
Some mysterious force 
Has powerwashed black. 

If I remember once 
Wanting some one thing,
It was to grow beyond 
All this childishness 
So I could finally play 
Forever--a sea-going fish

Who trusts the rising wave 
That surrounds him, 
That carries him with it. 


5. The Slow Eye of Things

Train yourself to look 
With the slow eye of things. 
Speak in such a way. 

In summer,
Include a garden's iron palings 
And the rust to come. 

In winter,
Sense the glimmer in the frost 
That aches for light's release.

 

 

This Living Forsythia

Along saffron branches beside wet asphalt roads, 
Tiny cups of flowers pop tenderly out....

Small flowers, mounds of yellow crayons peeling,
This living forsythia: a trembling, waterfalling fountain!  

The sound the wet road hears is a man  
Walking all winter who has stopped walking. 

I stand in shivering air filled to overflowing,
Singing suddenly with upturned mouth and eye....

Deep in the crosshatch of branches, way in, house 
Finches are already eating up the soft, delayed buds.

 

 

The Window Is Quiet

The window is quiet, but everything comes through it. 
I want to write like that. 

Sunrise trees emerge like Q-tips from the ear of the dark. 
When the mylar sky comes close, its colors run
Like pushing on a silvery balloon! 
What are we filled with, that this is what we come awake to?

The wind's yeowling.  Is it coming nearer to us 
Or following the dark, running away? 

Transparent's not the right word, exactly, 
Nor exactly wrong either. 
Look through the window;  no need to touch the glass.

 

 

Solitude Walk with Me

Tasseled lines of forest hills... watercolors 
Brushed onto screens of airy paper... banners
Of ocean light, wavy and green and mantling; 
How smooth, how rapid, their interchange of tones! 

These hills are seaweed floating over ancient stone, 
Solid seas up-risen that break both heel and bone. 
Six-thousand years of silent looking tell me: 
I am alone.

 

 

Watery Beings

Lice-like prayers pulse on the naked lips
Of mad imams... thoughts that move in regimentation... 
Death in the beetle's face, death in his spurs. 

Why not have thoughts that live like water drops-- 
Rolling everywhere like dogs, doing their own thing! 
Curious enough about existence to evaporate.... 

Bells are sounding everywhere, ripples running everywhere...
Days of rainfall... hosts of microscopic organisms 
Reenact evolution in every bead of water.  

 

 

Letting Secrets Out

Who has asked you here, and why 
Have you come running, wet and alive 
From inside your mother? 

Is there a secret you need to tell 
The rest of us panting here, run  
Alive out of our mothers too? 

Your eyes seem large with things 
And my ears are swirled to listen, 
Caves for words and owls. 

Bend close now, tell your secret 
To me, fly in among my wet 
Rocks and stalagtites, shake 

Wise silence off your wings, 
Let your secret become one  
Of my secrets too.

 

 

Our Winter Bodies

The sky is so clear today I could bite it! 
Cold drives our heads into our shoulders
Hunched far down like the turtle's, shyly reptilian. 
Rainbow scarves tesselate wildly before our eyes. 

We have settled into our winter bodies today. 
We huddle around banked embers in the chest; 
Our breath flares up, orange and oranger, 
As if to burn the brown and dusty leaves....

Beyond us lie great clarities: white town sidewalks 
Swept clear as a dog-path through old pines;
A globe of lake close by, clear and focused as a birdbath. 

When we are beaten into our winter bodies, 
Seeing things through an October mask, how loudly 
Worlds outside us go on rattling their leaves!

 

 

Bitten by Red Ants All Over

War comes.  The ant cannot imagine dying, 
Its red head beaded with the others around the savage queen's neck. 
The ant was hatched to march, to obey. 
Invisible swift scents of the leader pulse connivingly. 

For all we share with ants, let's depart from that. 
Keep your head when the drum stirs.  Look at the grass. 
Feel the timid air pass your heated ears, bathe your head. 
Sit in a circle, join hands with the grass for awhile.

 

 

The Sunday Dog’s Appalling Bark

The Sunday dog's appalling bark, a cry of sows 
Endorsing the rooster's raucous hauling forth of day.... 
I peer up from the damp drainpipe of my dreams-- 
The earth dreams... of rust... gold unopened ores... veins....
I see the morning sun arrayed on its swaying stalk, 
The sky in a water-pail walking.  I open broken
Wooden pens, cross mud overstepped with hooves: 
Each dirt mark is a hoof's beaten circle, almost complete....  
All day dark heats of peat moss enclose deft hands, 
This richness burying... seeds... time burning.... 

Let the languorous resonance of the tower bell 
Tell the town asleep... what I cannot tell.

 

 

*** HIDDEN ROSES ***



Drumming in Mid-Ocean

Give it up.  Give it up! 
Throw your whole life out the window  
And watch it startle. 

Listen with the attentive ears of a bat, 
That blackness that captures. 
Imitate the loyalty of your own dog. 

A lot of things are happening  
Out there where weather gets started every day. 
Get wet in that. 

Sometimes, two patches of rain will meet
Mid-ocean
And become one drumming upon the deep.

 

 

A Door Closes

A door closes softly, and suddenly you 
Are gone, having considerately let 
Me sleep on and let yourself out. 

My dreams, which had been full 
Of the mild gold of Monet's haystacks, 
Drain away like mid-morning fog. 

I am left with a room precisely square. 
I am left with my discipline to continue 
My day, in the ordinary scent of me. 

I nose around the trail you have left 
Like a cat, in a pretense of indifference. 
I give up while watching the coffee cool 

And fail into my life for the millionth time.

 

 

Hidden Roads in the Rose

Beauty and mystery are so daunting! 
Abstractions vast as a landscape 
And no horizon home. 

You have left, and left a rose 
Behind you, for me to sleep with under 
My pillow, a trail of petals 

Frail as your departing breath: 
Something you said about dreams in the garden mind, 
A greenness we each keep secret. 

There's a closeness, a smallness 
In what you have left me;  this one thing, 
So privately left to me alone. 

All night I ride down the roads 
Hidden in the rose 
You have opened.

 

 

Finding Each Other

There's a glue that sticks us where we pause, 
A magnet that attracts, pulling the iron in 
Our blood into an invisible arrangement, lines 
Of force like patterns of a great history 
Dragging Hannibal's horses or trains of cold 
Cannon over the Alps.  

    			       That's how it still  
Is when our eyes meet, two bullwhips 
Tangling each other like a mad handshake 
Testing the wild pull of freedom--while love 
Comes with carrots, patting the long nose 
With its crooked white streak, and saying,
Softly as feathers, "Whoa, now, whoa."

 

 

Living Together

Something close and potent is in my life. 
I turn over grumpily in the hot bed 
And clasp her, a mollusk saved by a passing freighter!

 

 

Threads of Words

I notice we are speaking of nothing  
Again, our words returned tight to the spool, 

And the spool sits there, silver and glittering,
Waiting to unreel and catch what passes: 

A pebble of thought, a gesture renewed
From loving days that passed last winter.

Words arrayed fine as a bridal veil in the sun
Catch something living perhaps, small as a dot.

 

 

At First Light

I like you for no reason.  What's the cost 
Of liking first, and regretting only in case? 
If you live busily you may never discover 
Multitudes of bruises even the best 
Of us leave each other--the quick turn 
Away, the slow acceptance of a gift given. 

Think how hard it is to understand a car 
At first glance, all those moving parts 
Hooded and chromed.  Or how hard it is to see 
Flight in a fallen feather, love in parental 
Discipline.  At first light, looking 
Is a flurry of painful blinks.

 

 

Crossing the Middle Days in Starlight

When the husband meets his wife at first, 
He sees himself in her as she sees him: 
Long-boned and noble, a little brave. 
When husband and wife cross looks in their 

Middle days, days too busy, full of blurred words 
And busy hands--cool nights of rainwater 
Fill each others' eyes;  and there is grass, too, 
Growing calmly under their hectic feet. 

The idea of who you are bothers you less as 
You get a little older;  things go dim around 
You, the things within you still real as leaves 
Dancing, starlight on a tulip, the sss of a simmer. 

When the husband then meets his wife at last, 
He is in her eyes as he has come, finally, to be: 
Simple as a stone, a man standing on the grass  
They've grown under their feet, under warm  

Stars together every night of their lives.

 

 

Nets of Togetherness

How many words link our nets of togetherness! 
In a lifetime, a married pair will utter millions, 
All flavors, at every decibel blared or hushed; 
The nets of words cast, one over the other, 
Veil after veil, are full of sacred fish, the fish 
Jesus divided among his flock--their silver bellies 
Caressed by a thousand touches, bitten by a thousand teeth. 
Torches we have carried ten thousand nights appear 
Where nets of the lovers' mouths elongate to vowels, 
The stars still inside them, constellations and all.

 

 

Stars Falling in a Lion’s Mane

We picnic on fallen October hayfields 
As if pitched upon a lion's mane. 
The stubble is still soft, and grass pokes through; 
Summer is in our bodies like an electric coil cooling. 
The sun is risen far up from the gullies, 
The wine's still cold and fresh. 

We are far away from death, we two. 
Occasional clouds pass in white pairs; 
Night sleeps under a woolen blanket in Kyoto. 
We feel hot when the breeze dies down, 
And laugh out loud, spilling bright square  
Crackers everywhere like falling stars.... 

Flies nuzzle the jam jar sleepily, 
Making slow black circles around the red.

 

 

The Glass Antelope

I labored at the bellows until it was second nature--
The rapture of the rhythm came easily then,
Clear shapes opened over intense fire, the fire 
Going in gold and heavy as an ear of corn. 
I push the belly hollow with my nothing breath 
Like blowing a hunting horn over and over in the cold....
And then the tweezing pull of legs from the mass, 
Many pinches, quick, for the antlers limber 
As candelabra, lithe brachiform coral dancing
Crystalline, an ice-laden dogwood in winter.... 
Tuning the nostrils with a bit of scrap wood, a spike,
I trim the hot hooves with steel clippers last 
And stand it here before you, a glass antelope.

 

 

Lake George Serenade

A Canoe Against Dark Water

The effort of one consciousness, or a mated pair, to hold together…the uneven weight of each foot entering a lake-borne canoe against the dark water….

1. Driving Away from Home

There's nothing here but strange sky, strange land. 
The leaves are in their autumn beauty, of course;
The trail up leads nimbly away from hotel hot-cakes; 
At our feet unrolls a lake named George. 

We drove up here because our home was crowded, 
Loaded down with familiar things: the bag of purrs 
That is the cat resting, the huddle of photoed friends 
Enlivening a shelf above my writing desk.

"You'd best not lie to us," they say;  and I look 
Numbly away, dismantling ice castles on the page.

 

 

2. The Hudson Walkway

The whole thing feels unevenly alive
As we step out onto it, the donated planks 
Ribboned with names of other walkers 
Who came here first and left their names 
Graffitied in charity. 

Below our feet: the river vivid
As ever, old rusty rail tracks tacking
Back and forth into history, bearing
(As we do the air) its heaviness
Slowly swaying under all.

 

 

3. Sensing Mists First Thing Today

Beyond your gold ass on hotel sheets at Ft. Wm. Henry, 
Mists settle in sullen crevices of the mountains, 
Pearl-ash dull over the too-long lake's aching sparks. 
What is there to do on this weekend away? 

I toggle the fireplace switch;  blue acetate flames 
Jump among log-shaped ingots under dim glass.... 
The early chill of this closed-down summer town! 

A showboat paddle-wheeler creaks at rest, 
Its great wheel covered like a useless swimming pool.

 

 

4. When The Bull-Wheel Turned

Back when the bull-wheel turned, 
When folks rolled up the mountain 
Waving from the gondola's cocoon, 
Anxious for a healthy retreat 
On Prospect Mountain--the view down 
Was very nearly the same as 
Today: yellow leaves mixed in 
With dwindled pine, bright lakes 
Teaspoons along the long valley 
Of the arterial Hudson River.... 

After Garfield was shot down by 
The measured bullet of an anarchist, 
After Little Big Horn hit the papers, 
Manifesting destiny, those folks 
Would take the coal-powered steam 
Bull-wheel railcar to the mountaintop 
Day after day for days for the 
Same long-range view as today:
Two-thousand feet above daily 
Stress, and not an extra step taken.

 

 

5. Flat Ice, Flat Clouds

Soon this November lake will be flat ice, flat clouds,
And fish dull creatures within it;
Red clouds reel by like a painted lampshade 
Lit somehow from deep within themselves.

...Graceless bare shortcuts crisscross the dead grass, 
Hurrying toward appointed coffins;
I remember the flat cackle of backfires, 
The broken-heartedness of rainstorms....

I think about the stopwatch of the heart 
For a while, the stuttering race it measures: 
How we paint the wide world with our eyes 
And read so intimately what's scribbled there!

My history is written on Egyptian tomb walls, 
Baked in the daily bread the Pharoh ate...
The Nile-side stone caught in his sandal  
That became sand.

 

 

6. Getting Ready for Dreams

All around the lake edge, night. 
Small dots of lights, long tails 
In the water; 
Wings brushing a face 
Hurrying away.

 

 

7. Saying Things Carefully

A winter rainbow showed up in clouds like a scar. 
"It's fake," says a friend who saw the snapshot 
Glimmering in my palm on my little phone. 

What do we know of beauty hung like crepe in 
the skies? 
Science will report "waterdrops and sunlight,"  
But is that what inflates my heart like a balloon? 

Is our idea of heaven just misremembered dreams 
Lifting invisible vapor into heavy, burnished clouds 
Until a rainbow like a scar flashes out at sundown? 

My friend touches my hand, warm blood in a glove. 
Our eyes roll together from screen to sky. 
We feel we are remembering a single dream.

 

 

8. Holding a Place (At Lake George)

September clouds open and close like an eye. 
Sunlight brushes over high hills softly, 
An eyelash of light on a dark cheek. 

How quietly the paddle-boat waits for a foot! 
When the foot comes in, too fast, there is such rumbling! 
And then the steady effortful heave across the lake. 

Two feet move like man and wife across the water. 
When one pushes down hard, the other is 
Lifted high up, a child on grown shoulders, 

And the whole open world is right there.

 

 

*** THE IMPOSSIBLE MESA ***



Standing in Ecstasy

Some days alone I am so happy 
My smile is a bowl of clear water 
Set out full on the sill, eating suns 
Or dimpled with plumed skies.
The black cat leans close to drink me.
She carries my happiness back inside her 
Right to the tip of her staticky tail!

 

 

A Long Star Ago

A long, long star ago 
Jacko folded together a house of paper
And pushed you through the low door, an aphid. 
  
How he fattened you up with green leaves! 
Leaves of verse Jacko kept dropping from his soft branch, 
Darkly, in his crowded house. 
  
And all the aphids sang together, 
Whirled their tiny proboscises in the air and sang! 
You sang, too, a little, 
  
About sweet mint Jacko pulled from his pockets... 
Swept up in wings of feathery boughs.... 
Until you were saved--fat enough to eat!

 

 

Waiting Alongside Grassblades

Something is happening to the plain grass 
As it elongates on the grainy lawn. 
Perhaps something is happening inside, or at 
The invisible back of things as we see them.... 
Just look at those clouds, those purple Portuguese 
Man-o-wars, trailing their half mile of tendrils-- 
  
Perhaps the way puddled moonlight churns 
Dark under the dark dock, and knocks there.... 
Or how soulfully the heavy church bell waits 
All week for Sunday wildness.... Perhaps the way 
That happens, perhaps something like that 
Abides beside me, inside me, now.

 

 

Climbing Impossible Mesas

I climb broken steps of the desert mesa:
Broken teeth in an infected mouth. 
Wounded cactuses line my route, tall as crosses.
I look down, out, and see imperfection orchestrated: 
The broken clouds, the broken steps, the crooked river. 
I stand abashed and beaten: 
Waterfalls of impossible perfection!

 

 

Breaking Ice on the Horse Trough

Bits of sky tear off and run away from us.  
Whatever we thought reality was this morning
Changes:  the workboot that fit a left foot 
Cries its tightness going out to break 
Dawn ice on the horse trough. 

This morning is like other mornings; 
Sleep lets go of me, hands releasing the wrestler; 
The bed creaked and wept, and the floor  
Was so cold!   

Night horses come forward from the barn  
Stamping;  exhale bales of misty breath; 
Line up trembling at the black renewed  
Waters, and lower their long heads to drink. 

We enter a new reality together 
Out of the same forgotten dream.

 

 

Traveling Tired Miles from Home

Hypnotic trains are hurtling by night, 
Seed-like shuttles in an enormous loom. 
Silver miles of track weave endlessly. 
Moons watch metal webs appear overnight. 

The frail couple across from me 
Pales with cheap fluorescents. 

Their hands lie near each other, but do not touch; 
Their gloves have been removed and set aside neatly; 
Their old faces look up, hatched with lines and happy.

 

 

A Missed Step

Sometimes, walking with wide eyes 
On horizons, an unstoppered hole
Eats your footfall.  A gap in balance,
Quick pause almost falling, just before 
Quick recovery of your balance....
You are floating... you are air, all
Air, your fingertips chill, waving 
Air, your walking breath upended: 
Huffed out, or, worse, swallowed. 

‘Open' is a fool's word, you think. 
Then your slouched shoulders open, 
Feel suddenly the unhidden wings.

 

 

A Stone Cloud

A stone cloud moves, white majesties 
I ride like a wet rug all I dare--    
Among its oval moons, crocodile teeth 
Scraped and flat, I am chewed and tossed. 
God's wide spider eyes slide over me, 
Clear blue broken sky, until blood chums 
From my chest with a rusty smell of coffee. 
  
My old life lies piled by the screen door, 
Brown packages I'll never open now, griefs 
Too deep to tell.   I lay under a naked tree 
In shaded grass so terribly cold and thin; 
It touches like hair all over, my eyes closed. 
I hear a bird beat living wings in the branches, 
Singing red notes on so bare a thing.

 

 

Kicking Brown Leaves Around a Hickory Stump

There's an old hickory stump I go back to often. 
I sit there and think a good deal about the leaves 
Laid out before me if it is autumn, or the leaves 
Whispering above me if it's late spring or summertime 
And everything's talking fine, with the light rolling down. 

In winter, I walk back booted and covered. 
There's only myself to think about: two brown leaves, 
My hands, restlessly in my lap, the fields surrounding
Sometimes layered with silent snow everywhere 
Outside me, sometimes just within.

 

 

Sleigh-Ride in Central Park

It's Christmastime again, and you mount the city sleigh 
Around the claustrophobic park, all those dreary 
Oppressive grey summer things are gone 
Under a snapping cloak of December snow again. 
Each black trunk marks a magic circle in the snow....
Beams of darkness reach up and meet the sky-dark. 

Below you, the horse's wet hooves ring and knock. 
At what muddy door are they hammering? 
Where will you travel when the earth splits 
And light opens outward for blinded, aged Oedipus 
...Years past his suffering, in that slow-witted human 
Way maybe even the Bhudda never knew?

 

 

Looking-Up Moons

Tonight's moon is like looking up into the top of a lampshade 
Where the light draws a circle on the ceiling. 
When a lasso draws a cow down to earth to be branded, 
I think: does a moonbeam draw upward with such strength?
Tonight's moon is like looking up into the top of a lampshade. 

Someone goes on standing on their porch awhile longer: 
Barbed wire twinkles above the shaggy fieldgrass 
Bursting into its pollen-time with seedy passion. 
Sitting on a fencepost, I watch moon-mottled cattle travel 
Slowly toward water, brands blue on their haunches.

 

 

My Circles

My circles were small. 
Day, night. 
My context was milder than cream. 
My song, a stamping of bare feet. 
The mirror's tongue licked my face. 

At noon, I disappear in smoke, 
A spoon licked clean of its dollop, 
My poor body on fire, a flame 
Climbing up life's rope  
As along a fuse. 

To what white cloud am I traveling?

 

 

Minnesota Clouds

Brawling clouds that carry my breath, my name,
Are visiting Minnesota;  the violet seed I threw 
On snow last winter lingers in the cardinal's bones. 

What effect I have continues happening. 
What I have been is in my being still, beating 
Blessedly or damnably in my wrists. 

I regather thrown grain in a cloth bag, and pour it 
Golden down a funnel's throat;  kneading bread flour, 
My hands whiten in the dough, Minnesota clouds.

 

 

Long Clouds of Things

Lines of trees against the sky stand etched, scratched 
Blood and sap and ink;  and I am stretched, a saw nib  
Flush against white paper that eats attention. 

So, too, you are stretched and hatched, etched, 
Made visible against long clouds of things 
You love today and that are your life.

 

 

November Shadows

November shadows define themselves against my sides. 
They try to get inside me, affectionate black cats 
Making biscuits, and I the basket lined with warm flannel. 

Ever since spring, I've been falling away from myself,
White petals liberated from a shaken dogwood. 
In summer, I danced at my own feet in the grass....

Now, many years after my mother's death, finally
There is no more heavy grief
In my body.

Now my shadow blows down the street like an escaped cape! 
It tumbles in the flattening winter landscape 
Hurried by an unknowable wind.

 

 

Kneeling Under Evergreens

Afternoon kneels down among sepia pine needles.
Where two needles join, a pair of working oars open
In the small wind of your breath. A minuscule boat
Rows rapidly out from the hard shoreline.... 
 
The boat departs the shallows of your shadow 
--It is heading into the deeps!  
 
Sounds of waves and the lost calls of sailors surround
The intrepid craft, waving its wild antenna in the spray....
The dark acidic water is an ocean of black ants!
They seethe body over body endlessly as dreams.

 

 

The Eye

I find an attractive rock in mud. 
I smooth it clean in the river near at hand;  
The rock's dark veins glow strongly;
More, the more thumb and water 
Hurry back and forth. 

Something rolls solidly in my palm; 
Something simple escapes my saying. 
--A white pine needle can't be the whole tree,
Can it?  Why should I have to explain God, 
Even to myself? 

Days later, I look down at the dull stone 
Dry and cracked-looking in my hand:
I remember the black slather of mud, the thin
Wetness of water--an eye of something 
Looks up from there.

 

 

Writing with Flashlights

Holding a blue ballpoint pen like a flashlight,  
You travel the darks of the page blank, empty.   
The flashlight held before you flickers off 
Unexpectedly a few times, like lightning: 

The forest around you is humid with low clouds. 
Your blouse sticks to your skin. 
You've forgotten why you're on this mountain. 
What are you looking for through the hairy trees? 

A sound stirs;  something illegible as night; 
You chase after it, past flowing bush 
And boulder, following your small cone of light 
Until dense woods break into baldness 

And you're alone with the clouds, wet and dark. 
The night sky eats all your light in an instant. 
Stars have been writing their sentence for centuries: 
This is why you were born.

 

 

Watching Driftwood in South Carolina

Tired with my old life, I come to the seashore 
And watch battered sticks drift in and out 
Of dirty tidal foam, cracked and gored 
With holes whose dark remains impenetrable. 

How I long to throw my life away!  To float 
Like those unsinkable sticks, but I fear the ocean 
Powerfully throwing me back and forth forever, 
My soul sucked into a small hole's impenetrable dark. 

Farther out on a spar of igneous rock, strange 
Yellow lizards skitter and hang upside down. 
How happy, inventing new ways to be happy 
On sunlit slabs of rock!  Why can't I live like they do? 

Staying warm on a wide skirt of stone, breathing 
In and out with my sallow belly, eating flies.... 
A black wave tumbles among the gravel at my feet 
Erasing flat lithe sounds of lizards' tails.

 

 

Mule Deer Breathing Near Night Pines

The mule deer shuffles with a wounded  
Leg, delicately, her injured limb lightly 
Upheld as a lifted puppet, all balsawood,
With one unlit spot over the backward knee. 

She pauses beside a big longleaf pine to stare, 
Eyes of dark oil full of private histories.... 
I feel how we both want to live, have the same 
Tug, intense, in our chests, the same cloth anchor 

Pulling steady against invisible tides. 
She flicks behind the shadowy screen of trees 
Before I notice two smaller deer dive behind 
The same heavy evergreen waves she has parted, 

Their mist breath fading as evening comes.

 

 

Rappelling into the Dark

Rappelling at night into darkness, 
Ebony-scarred seas chant like chain-mail
Beneath me.  I sense, not see, cool cave-mouths 
Open randomly, adoringly, along my route;
Sometimes my feet swing in, wildly as a bell,
Surprised hands grip the rope harder in prayer--
Each emptiness at my side as I descend 
Is an extra dark in darkness like a black star. 
Soon I will be at the bottom-most part 
Of the cliff!  Excitement rises like steam 
In my veins;  burning hands tremble on the rope 
And down I go, faster, faster into darkness! 
Soon the sizzling sea will be eating at 
My ankles, my feet treading water in the 
Origin of life!  I'll pull the cold salty water 
Up like wet socks--up, up all the way 
Over my head--until sleep comes and 
Sleep drowns me, and I am saved.


Speaking into the Glare of Puddles

I've looked too long the wrong way  
Down a collapsing telescope, held things 
Far from me that should hover fearfully near--
Wings of dragonflies active as eyelashes; 
The glare of puddles gone tomorrow; 
Raptures of grass the snow is always burying; 
Offered help's hand on a doorknob, turning; 
Spatter of tears kept under eyelids; 
A million refugee sighs;  despairs put off; 
Unwanted chores of the heart;  seeing only 
Tiniest figures of love crumpled in the wastebin: 
Brothers;  and father;  and mother;  and you.

 

 

Envoi

Stones to Hold You

This poem is made of stones to hold you 
At the bottom of the river--your clothes 
Loosen and float ghostly about you, weeds 
Close their luminous green curtains softly. 
Only the words have weight, only the words 
Stay on this journey beneath surfaces; 
Bubbles lift from your mouth as you say them....
 
Take these words, one by one, and put them 
Deep in your pockets--let knuckles whiten 
And go cold around their friendly grey eggness. 

Don't look left or right--plunge into the river! 
Take the persuasive curves right up to your elbows! 
When the bottom goes slack, keep walking! 
Keep going until cool rings of silence close over 
Your head, engulfing every word with brown swirls, 
Your blond hair drifting silently among the weeds.