Aug 272015
Plain poems of experience, with a twist of eloquence
by
Gregg Glory
Published by
BLAST PRESS
THE FROG
What's wrong with this picture? Scads of lilies raised above the muck the scum floating on golden pond --sheer light-- on one a fat frog croaks-- Bhudda! Bhudda! to the weeds and sky eternally his eyes are old-fashioned key-holes-- under sticky webs lilies crimp-edged deep ceramic green pie-plates-- above each waves a streaked pink-white blossom held up by nothing save love and in that no sense of error ever
TO BED
Such tenderness! turning the lamp red with a shell shade down to a darkness so complete I see the moon untouched stars beginning where the shadow of her hair no longer glows
DETAIL
To love--to that intimate measure alone my life, monklike is dedicated. How long has it been? Too long. No more long hairs stuck in the vacuum.
THE RAIN
Especially because the blue ipod randomly zeroes in on our song, a Belle and Sebastian number, my tears roll hot and rainlike down the window as if outside a Florida hurricane continues, blurring all
THE LIE
And so there is a lie a very damnable lie --so what!?--it's all one lie after another and then a muddy grave-- heavy boots of the mourners thick with grief-- while still a week later daisies grow right where her face had been
TWO SOLDIERS
Look beyond these stick trees just past their thorny bramble see a jet investigates heaven pristine blue like the dome blown apart-- so blue with the one swollen chalky marr where human curiosity has so amply intruded
THE COMPANIONS
to Dan Weeks
Two dogs mangy manes a-shake follow this river for frogs. First one then the other stops the friendly lips serious a moment, long black and still a line of fresh paint hastily applied below the snowcapped teeth. Ah! rings in the water declare something a few feet out. Is it? No matter--leap! The froth around them ecstatic! snapping! and then slow to drink . . . . They return poised to the riverbank as if they chased every raindrop. The river continues and they continue to follow it.
THE THAW
Brow of snow on the small hill melting Thoughts come and go shadows on the brow seasonless And sooner or later more sooner it will be summer And night and moonlight on the small hill whiten
IN SPRING
there are the soggy remains of winter buckets tipped over and then lost to us this world in the first deep rush of snow that now, like an impossible sweat has returned to the moss & soil pores so that bloated the earth begins to relax sink down and decay
THE CAMP-OUT
Burnt dirt charred where the cherry fire exploded Irish whiskey dancing around the bonfire shoes off shirts untucked! Bratwurst dripping greasy brown sweat into baked beans in an iron pot Unpacking, the car doors up like beetles' wings our hands by accident on the same latch touch !
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
EXCAVATION
Nothing expands until the whole sky is loneliness Into this (nothing) a palmtree leaf forlornly unfurls Heraldic if you will have it be so important
NEW WALL
Concrete the blocks carried hod by hod and form-molded until they will bear it stiffened are stronger but less impressionable --To what purpose? Paint them if you must tropic pink and tawdry blue
VIRGINAL
Somehow again she is here! White upon the white sheets, she is here! Praises are tepid when she coils before me speechless beckoning upon the white sheets with a heat--so strong!
THE AIRMAN
bends and ties his shoes loop- de-loop
THE BOX TURTLE
christlike waits for death on the open road loving the open sun and hot asphalt by the empty sidewalk no one watches his toes curl and uncurl in the pink heat-- repeated in the orange stamp on his back and his hard tooth-yellow belly his small ancient eyes close in ecstasy as the sun engulfs his shell --from the furtive culvert below a galvanized safety rail he stepped slowly slowly a million years or so each step nothing in his mind but the sun
FARMER ED
Early the fields are broken and turned-- early from Lakewood Sanchez' bus Before obscure faces breath steams blue --and white coffee steams Seen things need feeding if later they are to be sold Already farmer Ed is cursing --the whole sit- uation is fucked Dawn pales-- spreading stalk by stalk the least color Neatly the trowel goes in again and again neatly Ice skims the dented pail-- too, the brown furrows
THE BATTERED TREE
Once evergreen a firm cypress vitally upright as living flame storm after storm housing grackles quick woodthrush and inquisitive cats now shows golden brown branches some soft as age spots amid deep greens and lower a bare dead wing of sticks one child yanks to attack another in the sunny yard so hard the whole tree shakes.
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.
RURAL CAPE HATTERAS
Here, among the deep sea-sway, a continuance of the thin green pines reaches to the shore and lets its spiny promptings dip and lash into the salt. It was the horizoning storms that were to be watched and mostly underneath our soaking shirts to fear. Then the often creaking cells of the resilient bending boughs would snap. Such times a man couldn't dream for the quaking of his bowels. Such times a man can't think of his wife for fear of his children.
THE ONSET
trees creak in the winds' rebuff birds go to ground obediently as choristers in feathered robes-- a storm encircles the house slate sky-slats close in until the horizon is only a wet cat shivering under the dull porch --she looks out-- her world like a lover in love is only big as her skin
DAWN IS IT
From a basement crack at the back of the condo a suede head emerges-- an orange cat yawning
PICKING AFTER RAIN
In rubbers on the wet grass carelessly soaked dungarees we shove through the heavy bushes for blackberries --how under heaven do they grow gravid and ripe? What fills the cells full of some inner wolfish night with a vintage juice? What grips our bones and stretches them long with a bitterness we can no longer hide from our wives? Perhaps it is our old friend Sun a cloud as if on cue discloses
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
4 SNOWFALLS
1.
The snowfence strains
with the big blizzard
strangely large
2.
Rounded by snow
the church steeple
gives up pointing
stridently
3.
On bare stalk
sideways above
thick drifts
a chickadee chitters:
green fields were here
4.
Down out of midnight--
first flakes
through the black window
--Starfall
THE BREEZE
new sweat breaks you open so pityingly you notice it the breeze
PEOPLE
It's interesting -- somehow so often they show up just to unhelp
PISSING IN THE SNOW
one finds among the melting crystals the impartial pattern common to any work of art
THE CRAZY LADIES OF NEW JERSEY
make love on the usual mattress wedged between the parkinglot and the parkway
THE SUSPENSION
bridge being by its nature incomplete at either end without anchors heavily laden and the wide context of connection of place to place like a man webbed to his life birth to death pegged feeling traffic tickle across him as he sways daily going nowhere-- Watch the wind now playfully wake it singing!
THE HUMMINGBIRD
A clear windless day appears the field all large yellows save for 2 deep lilies near a black puddle doubling their sourceless white in darkness deep within clear nectar puddles curiously fragrant the day golds --What wind? a ruby hummingbird sucks (sips) here is the effort of stillness
THE GIFT
thank you CPH
In the flower box Kalanchoe and Kordana rose-- one a cluster of honey bulbs succulent leaves low round and open as a cut thumb The rose a rose in miniature armed to the teeth with pink beauty again and again I say it-- to the teeth! a bundle of pink torches-- A funeral procession in a cedar box borne darkly to the sea's brink lay down that box lay down I say by the iron palings open to air-- Word by word the gift unfurls and here we are dancing again with Gertrude Stein-- the dirt, now sotted black with the tears of many women and many men too who have died to make this day happen
THE WIND
strikes whites
whistles stiff
at corners
beats windows
shut-
ters flapping
back black
and white
a piston's hiss--
no female
to this
striving ever
bitter prison-
break
toward light
toward dark
desperate finger-
ing each crack
freez-
ing-
ly
until, almost, a
word is in it
avarice
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
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
THE EELS
make an art of it swollen lonely and old finding the Sargasso Sea after many changes chasing sex at last a last gasp of lust propelling them many-bodied to the hot waters eyes engorged against the sea-slime writhe wriggle rictus of bodies black ropes dropped to boil in the water-weeds no tract left for digestion every wet ounce straining in one direction one only folding and unfolding until to the observer they compose a single mass a tangle urging forth from chaos an egg--they make an art of it.
THE HORSESHOE CRAB
moves so that among myriad fast foams she creeps leaving a perforated trail behind sleepily in gravid sand back to the leaping sea Humped above the scumline she halts squats lays her hidden egg-clutch --Gulls bugs at a bonfire dive and feast upon them as she retreats echo by echo to the sea-- Believe it or not like an old pair of crossed shoes casually deliberately thrown away they mate in the surf! one atop the other lovers full of blue bloods
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
INSTRUCTION
Hair slicked, ties clipped my brothers and I stepped past the open church door into the cool basement Sunday school taught us about camels, pasted stars and songs sung while picking our noses furtively Standing for our parents, small bellies out, breathing, prayers came to silence while we waited at the white steps We peered toward the pulpit dim among purple shadows where one day mother would lie dead and straight
PIANO MOON
The old upright in the empty gym distils moonlight on its keys She played slowly eyes shut a lunar tune while I stayed
OLD DAYS
This day, ravaged by blue memories lined up, blue bottles above the kitchen cabinets collected and dusted and empty. What connects these transparent vessels, old days inverted and emptied of their content? For what, patiently are they waiting? Spring is gone that had me drunk with optimism. Now the summer light, stagnant, humid with stale drink, comes rolling through the screen crowded with gnats from the yellow fields laid out like pats of bad butter churning with dirty life, new life, pushy, crashing the glass out, upsetting the aesthetics, summer comes boldly kissing!
AUGUST
Unscreened weatherworn
the doorjamb melts
into what I remember
was our private yard:
the flowers on the tree
(some red, some white)
have blossomed into leaves
sung green.
The chickadees
twitch among trunks
searching for pebbles.
The young birds eat them up
and eat whatever else they find
which pleases them.
--By some hidden wind
they ruffle to walls
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.
SEASONAL
There sidewise from the breasting prow between the hushed and vertical bob and weave of whitest icebergs there is the winter sea beneath it all still green.
HO-HEY!
Ho-hey! the wind is blowing in sweetly before the rain-- A tuberculosis of dust lines the shelved books heavily, heavily. Too long have I crouched among them humming, and I only come to my summer years! The swaying trees face the wind and sway. Ho-hey! the retriever's nose is aptly lifted. My fingertips are grey with the grey dust. What is this bitterness that fills my lungs? The smutted screen rattles for attention, and the strong old trees' new greens shudder for what is coming. --The wind is blowing sweetly in: still it is all just Ho-hey!
THE GREEN ACORN
The cocked rock which now is stiffened was once, believe me, supple mud-- jeweled dragonflies sipped at it ferns lifted intricate fans in the paleozoic breeze just as, all elbows once, I had played in mud puddles with my prized avocado-colored ball. How then came the rock to crack, condense and become this crumb of death held slightingly aloft, the breeze still biffing fresh, (slightingly, slightingly) in the agile boy's sling- shot--dead-aimed at a grey unstirring squirrel creasing his teeth on a green acorn?
I INSIST
Write a poem, Buckaroo!
It's only Levinworth, hard
labor if you don't. Break the big
rocks into smaller rocks day
by day filling your lungs with stone
dust until you can't sing--at first
you get stronger straining
your back like a trout arching
homeward uppa waterfall until
after awhile the rhythm beguiles
you you don't notice how numb
your hands are how the sun has made
you old in one afternoon and
all the water isn't enough to slake
what thirst arises!
Now who put
a moon in my sky and why
am I standing on this high mound
of small stones--tears of the moon?
THE MIRROR
Why must I stand up and goddammit yawn Tossing sheet to sheet between sleeps Smell of bad breath and hollowed pillows Drooling facebunched saltsand crusty-eyed Cloud fragments of dreams real as echoes Arm-in-arm the taste of your hair floating Only birds and broken made-up music In each ear nose snugged to an elbow Somewhere outer a foot dangles cold No matter how much I love you darling My honeyeyed life-partnered dearest Life was much better not looking at it
SNOWFALL WALKERS
As in this post-dusk dark we talk and wander Along a lonely path half-silver in the gloaming, I notice all the glitter that we gather Concentrates along the hard edge of the frost The softening sky let drop, and lost, And which shines tonight like a fallen ladder Through confused woods,--and on, toward a sadder Moon alone aloft who stays a stranger No matter how deep or dark our ranging.
ELEGY
Old man Mike grieves his cats. Cat-catchers nabbed the strays from the condo quadrangle. His saved one, Baby, orange behind the sliding glass door silently meows an air-conditioned meow. With pious solicitude Mike politely guides me to the near ally, shows how coarse wind draws strong between the calico bricks, how his flowered sun-chair unfolds. His white hair lifts and frets. --I'm tired now. I want to sit. Who'll tell the moon about Mike now the cats no longer loll and yeowl all hours in the grassgreen yard?
ACADIA
The stars saw it happen, the sea doesn't care--O-gape mouth always roaring: More! More! Here in Acadia the sea is cold that was boiling. Black as a chou's tongue, scarves of volcanic rock flowed burning--a silent heat! Prehistoric birds circle in the updraft for killed trilobites--a cookout-- All the land made death's; the near sea, too, dead, her back turned away riverlike. No white grains of beach among the granite. Cool eons until lichen like stars began to dot it, winking pink, yellow, dull grey-green in death's despite, in death's despite gripping the naked tongue whispering: More! More!
LAMENT
It's very easy going too far--and the regrets after, dragging a dead stick through silt until the stirrings make opaque what had been. Bucket after bucket I pour into my garden gullies still all just black dirt till here and there weird ears of new leaves stick up. I expect to wait out the spring after all what else am I doing, what else have done? After all he was worth it once wasn't he--and perennials come back year after year the same way as if they forgot.
THE GARDENER’S LOT
This blade of land engendered by the sun dances round and around like everything-- like you! 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.
THE APPROACH
I am not a cat in slipstream motion step pause balance as if born untippable on this tableful of bright jars-- I am a ghost or less, all eye and no mind of Emerson despite my oneness of un. Speak nothing. Again it is there, the green emperor beetle exact shape of my mouth.
THE WEED
Behold me! Spiky leaves foist off the importunate poor with sour milk. Burly through the concrete I crack! Dowdy, dull and living alone, I have no zest for aesthetics. My talons pinch the earth, suck deep, choke those tenderer comers, the pansy pink and their fellows frail. Strong, strange, my own, I am.
THE EMPEROR BEETLE
Love this rotten wood as I love it--stick your whole head in the stink, be all jaw to eat of it, forelegs anchors to keep hunger from sliding out of range. Gorgeous! a grub has been worming woozily and's fallen asleep so sweetly it is delicious, an unspoiled blossom of the rot. Caw!--Get off, crow! I own this boggy log. You are not so big yet; yet I imagine other woodpiles leaning just short of collapse nearby nearly teeming with grubs. Caw! Caw!--Come on, you, break open your back and fly.
CATFISH HOLLA
Be mud with me-- Asleep in the hot muck except for our gills purring heated curls of water, in, and, out, -- Reeds will brush your whiskers infinitely endless bamboo screens-- Here and there in the dim stir a crawfish begging for it or small snail with shells too soft to resist!--glory it is to loaf in the mud, swim in the blood of the sun forever and ever and ever amen
WILD ONIONS
Rounder than grass, higher, tufted tribes--
Green in a field of green, my root
fattens to bitterness
--Bitter, ha-ha!
Even without kissing, you are bitter
--Love's loser, you!
--No hand comes
to pick me
--Cow-teeth piss on your meat!--
Oh, I am lonely!
--Look at my mop, long
and green, green
--Blend and bend with us--
No time to be sorry for yourself
--in this wind
--whoo-ooo!
--Oh, poop, I never liked
my stink
--No? Me neither, yours--
Small, white, and underground, my secret
heart--For me myself, these thoughts--
I'm not sharing
--Selfish prig
--Shut-mouth
snob, that one--Aloof
--Still, she smells
--Same as the rest of us, strong garlic
--Pssst!
I can read her mind--(She kissed me once,
hee-hee)
--Who wants to be dull grass? --
Dust-seeds, every face the same--Bleh--
I am strong, plump, an innertube tuber!
--Night carries our scent far
--Lovers sneeze
who lie with me
--Cow-pats rot scentless here--
Eat of me and breathe fire!
--I am whiskey,
wild, free and writhing!--Ha-ha!
--Bite!
or be bitten!
--Let's take the field toward
the house and spoil the laundry with our B.O.
--Get yer sprout off'n me
--I am withered,
high on a dry dirt-lump
--I see the wood's edge,
a gauzy screen of birches
--Feel that wind!
--That dust!
--Spritzy as a spring shower,
ahh-ooo-ooooo…..
--I am not like these
other wild onions
--I am sweet, meaty,
and friendless
--I am lonely
--I am quiet
--I keep to myself among everyone--
but, shhhh… I don't want to
--Ooooo, wind!
--An earthworm tickles me
--Err-sorry,
I grew too boldly
--Take that, misery!--
Don't shove, I'll shove!
--Love, don't shove--
Har-harr
--You, you've pushed me into
the shade!
--Hah hah nah nah-nah--
I'll get you
--As if they mattered
--Oh, look
a damn cloud found us
--Rain, rain go-away
--La-la lah la la-la!
--I won't
--I won't
--I won't--
Be able to raise
--my voice
--my voice
--my voice--
Scattered drop drabs
--bip bip blip
--rain--
Now, louder!
THE CRY
Listen if you will care to how the whippoorwill goes on whistling irresolutely yet distinctly. So close to us this foreigner stranger than an enemy alien living half his life in the sky! Yet in his bone mouth and thorough throat twists a shadow of our speech. Whippoorwill! When I was a kid, an old Indian carving flutes at the county fair played the whippoorwill's song to a tee and told me as well how the song could hold a departing soul steadfast to the earth. Listen! A ghost of sorrow is haunting our woods even now as the whippoorwill collects bugs as well as souls for its young, moon or no moon. Even so I am tempted to believe the old Indian to believe his black eyes and braided hands so good at finding the flute's voice in the wood with his sharp thumb's-length of blade parting the grain impartially, and his exact imitation of the whippoorwill, so alien and so close. Whippoorwill, I, too would know you just as if your song mattered. I, too, am listening.
FORGET-ME-NOT
There is something hard in the world, unkind, stubborn, blasted black as a broken fingernail placed in danger of a too-great thwack! Every pebble is a pain worn smooth by lovely water waiting only for its proper shoe its hidden niche to strike! Pain . . . pain is greater than the imagination. Pain defeats the flow of poetry, rills its lyric surface, squats in its depths unperturbed by beauty. Sweetly the poem pretends otherwise, ineffectually but sweetly singing against the stone's grain just as though no sob would come. But the stone is there, hard. Death is a measure and settles it all at last. No hand, no voice defeats death. At least it is a cease from pain. If imagination then could speak . . . but then, it cannot. So it is only with broken voice with breath inswept between everlasting griefs the poem is known. Remember me, with all your troubles, remember me-- that's how most of ‘em begin sprinting sprained until the flowering baton is passed hand to hand and voice to voice and you and I are left in our pain sweetly with nothing of our own to sing but "Remember me."
THE CONDUCTOR
There is no time to tell all the tongue trembles to tell. One feels full,-- a milk-weed pod ripened to bursting! Through each throat courses a cataract. Words logjam one to the other perpendicular, locked in puzzlement but tumbling on anyhow . . . . There is no time to decipher all the mysteries words bring us every day. No time, no time to find the tune inwound in every utterance. Still, it persists, a pressure seeking pleasure in the onrush of words. No conductor's baton tapping, tapping can resist. On, on! Words wheeling about like birds shotgun-scattered; like notes displayed against a grey random sky. If only there were time to decode the order and make the heart --imperiled by the pushing-- slow down and unravel the rhythm. If only there were time for rhythm: the mind's pace slackened open for the vowels and consonants of speech-- a speech of the mind that only in retrospect perhaps discerns the glottal stop. Time in the mind minding time to slow or hasten each action at will allowing rhythm to begin and begin again and again until there is only time.
THE CLIFF-HANGER
Spreadeagled on a cliff cemented in limbo clouds about him his waist wading in air on the rock's face- to-face with what holds on in this vertical world where fierce eagles nest with ease and low weeds wave without sweat finger by finger inching up- wards his breath backed into his nostrils gored dank bull-like no flower of the body no vista for eyes only effort, exhausting, forward hands aching red into their grip solely hanging in the air sheet lightning riveting his back pain by pain a spine made of pain the fetid anchor here always alone always sonless and fatherless both treading toward what plateau trapped above by quiet acres of sky, sky translucent, impenetrable.
THE SEA
female in her largesse unfinished in her striving yet sure, assured, assuring wave upon wave as wave upon wave she comes on-- no mere dram of the divine but drowning gallons of godhood, every day: action upon action multiform-in-unity she throws garbage all day every day at the immaculate beach! Blue pails, red shovels tarballs coughed up-- wanderlust wastage shoved home from the sea; she is no respecter of persons or property. What shards we have for her come back softened and frosted all their brightness now turned inward as cathedral glass can do haunting darkened pews. What has she shown them? Themselves a glorious wastage of light tumbled in a green breast whose furious love undoes them. See how they fail shape after shape thrown in to change her. The sea allows no options. Love her and submit until you yourself are shapeless as seaweed-- survive if you will by kissing her hem, an appurtenance to her permanence. The sea! a girl eternal as all girls are, wall upon wall she curls at her edges smilelike or sneerlike, a face that is always, to us, indifferent. Lay your naked keel upon her fertile flank or sail unknown regions swelling between her breasts in trumpeting discovery! Always, you will be flotsam to her surfaces glassy and drenching, an appurtenance to her vivid is floating fathomless as scum unless by your death you may a moment beautify her majesty. The ageless exuberance of the sea! Beached, I observe nothing. Trash comes to me in the skittering surf utterly transformed! I must surrender, I must love this morning, at once, before my nerve fails and my survival mind reminds me not to kiss too deeply her salty mouth. Insatiably I want to kiss you, dying of thirst as I drink, drink from your polluted brim! But the sea is not mine, she is her own insatiably. No embrace, however loose, may manacle her manyness, no arms, however loving, can grasp what she is or how she is or anything in the sessions of her sighing. Only surrender, surrender, can have any part of the surge and lapse that arrives dissolving at my feet. Immodest, immeasurable the motion of the sea whose only partner in the dance invisibly is the stone sea of the moon tide upon tide they pull and they press until whitecaps witness the consummation and breakage of their betrothal. To this ceremony we may only bring everything, may only throw everything away again and again, effectless flowers tossed into the surf! The bouquets adding nothing to the bride's beauty. A child on a rock, a stranger to the dance as yet, like a moron is crying "O, o, o" again and again wordlessly to pass the time. And yet, what has he lost? This is the ogre and the image of the ogre that lives in all men wordlessly. Men can create, truly, nothing and we are, truly, nothing. But in our anger, roused, we make ourselves tall, stalwart and ostrichlike in a pretense of bravery to outface the eternal grind and grit of the sea who loves us not-- our ugly heads tucked in the sand. This is all men and many women too, though fewer. The ogre groans to know his true stature miniscule before the sea. "O, o, o, o." After this wreckage of hopes what remains? Is love possible? Can an ogre even know love? What, after all, remains? If something persists if a possible love persists then it is not the love an ogre imagines-- it is not a love that receives anything at all. It is, if it is a love like that which prayer opens to us, giving over all to the suck and agony of this great wetness. Throw yourself in! you pray. Surrender to the dazzle hold back nothing no particle of all you have pretended to be yourself. Drown in the dazzle, if you must. There is only the pulse push and wash of the sea. Only her eternal grinding and gnashing persuades one of either heaven or hell. Only she may tell which,--and whichever it is we may only love. Having given all, we have given up nothing. Our shards in her embrace are not possessed untouched but transformed smoothed and redeemed released from our intentions to manifest what we could not have imagined.
THE LIVING MUSCLE
The song I cannot yet write bites my tongue till I taste iron. My song, my sound waits in my dumb tongue unsinging, unsaying . . . . Like the sound of the sea inside a seashell still too full of living muscle.
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