Tempered nothings By Gregg Glory [Gregg G. Brown] Life itself, hurrying past, too swift to stop, too sweet to lose.... --Willa Cather Published by: BLAST PRESS 324B Matawan Avenue Cliffwood, NJ 07721 gregglory@aol.com gregglory.com
Lilies and roses, the death of love hard-garnered from the wasteful earth that fulfills summer's glory with autumn's kiss to blacken buds once white with hope
The ideal of perfect Love, even if never actually or fully manifested remains a part of the human potential. Ever since the notion was first formulated near the end of the Middle Ages, drawing together so many threads of he human fabric--instinct, desire, altruism, reproduction, spiritual aspirations--Love has become one of the permanent recurring goals of the human condition. It is different from socialism's ideal of the Perfect Man in this: it does not require that perfect Love ever actually exist here on Earth. It is enough that it remain and ideal or goal to have its shaping effect on current events. This is not the case with socialism's Perfect Man ideal; with the Perfect Man, it is the end that justifies the means; its ethical content is empty. Love, even when "achieved" remains a goal, an object to strive toward, since no one can ever love another perfectly. And love itself retains the character of a motivator, an internalized ideal driving action as well as an outward goal or destination. In terms of social concepts, Islam's "jihad" also apparently shares these same characteristics. But only when Jihad is understood with its mystical connotations intact can it remain full of ethical import, for it is an expression of what we might call "love of God." The difficulty comes because this love has a communal social aspect where "perfect justice" is to eventually be made manifest in the community, or "Umma." But Jihad also has the connotation of an inner "struggle for truth." And such an inner struggle can have no obvious end; at best, a series of plateaus described by previous explorers of the inner landscape. Romantic Love gains its practical value as a shared ideal that helps to shape and strengthen individual bonds; by achieving this modest goal on a regular basis, Love helps to provide, or sketch out, meaning in the lives dedicated to its ideal. Each participant is part of that larger world. It has no final, static destination, such as "Justice for all," but simply maintains itself as a goal, like Plato's "The Good." One can never love too much, or have too much love. In a very different way, one can never have too much Justice; for once "justice" has been achieved, no more justice can be applied. Its character as a goal or an ideal disappears, and it simply becomes reality. And Reality, as we all are too sharply aware, is not the destination of romantic Love.
Gregg Glory [Gregg G. Brown]
Feldspar flecks find God's ground Flush with spring flashings, rainrun acres Gunwale-awash in gutterspill, goutings Wonder-wet with melt-marr, molten makings Growing grousey graves'-grass grey in twilight; Unhouselled souls stir inchling, stem-stretch Twig-timbrels tautly aching, arch in arch, Unreal yet resurrected in raintime runoff; Many man-taking markings make me mourn so, Seeing how light intends the least things be limber: God pours his pity on graceless things.
Spring's chaos's come, when thawed snakes braid And Sun's bold boots stroll dusts as cozy As the pelvic bed where our mortared bones are laid (In mortal mixing snug love mists hazy); And every nosy bud shoves a shaggy muzzle Into the motley glory old God abandoned, Romping with folly's pollens and playful fuzzes Above winter's withered sticks cracked to ground. Alone where mowers have managed the meadow, Tramping past tidied detritus thrifty blades array, Shamble-shanked, my aimless stride displays A mulish insistence for day-dreamy rambles, A wish that all the world's walked fallows would follow My cragged return to disordered brambles.
Let cauled heart know what all soul would find, Then throw the folded shadow to the ground-- Disclose, beat by beat, one glowing coal No dark could daunt forever: self's own soul Whose hour is ever at the very dawn, Whose heaven's always green as the richest lawn. Only soul's sight within that shapes sights without Could let us become, by doubt, devout-- This spark that circles without thought of toil Seeks a new sunrise in every inch of soil, Says we are all of sheerest marvel shaped Who grew to awkward Man from aweless Ape; And even Earth's conception felt no discontent Whose seeds fell warmly, were warmly meant.
How many stories does the moonrise retail, Waiting for dreams to pearl-inlay the detail? Night's mysterium awaits The lute, unplucked, patient. . .. Dark becomes a color too obvious To see among looking's over-crowded oblivions. Free dreams on an inner eyelid lie, Straining to detach and enter a sky. The dawnline's a focused loss Of potential, definition scrimmed from nothingness. Here's an horizon razored from space, The finned edge of a pit or a grimacing face: Over the edge go dreams, lutes and dusks, Long shadows of an improvised mask.
Pain blooms At the vibrant sting-tip, Researching its acres Of possible conquest, The settled lands.-- Not one ell will rebel, beloved. There is a sting A very distinct, insect sting, A red fibulating sting. A new queen Chooses new constellations, New fissures in old darknesses; And the continents realign To their prim allurements; All eyes Go up, up. . .. Prairie fires of stories discuss the goddess: Rapid and ruinous As a new moon Adorning the dimness with whips of light, Drawing each grassblade Out of oblivion With her trailing kisses: Silver sliver, silver sliver. Restless trees creak; The towns lie awake in their beds, Breathing their finitudes of time-- Uncalm in cool sheets. Cats' eyes inhabit the night's pallors; Each wind waits unbegun, As an army in veritable darkness Awaits your first word To leap.
Goddess, twist My heart no more; Give me this, this, I ask no more. Just Lissa's love, Aphrodite, grant me: Her heart well-enslaved And audibly panting. You who shape-shifted Fair Helen's strong heart, Giving stung Paris A victory of sorts. Just Lissa's love, Aphrodite, grant me: That her wrists always move In ways that enchant me. O goddess who flooded Sappho with lovers, Just Lissa, hot-blooded, Give me forever. Just Lissa's love, Aphrodite, grant me: Who all men enslaves, No need to thank me.
The toneless confusion of the bees Tunes to a static blankness all I see: A garden, blossom-burdened, beneath sweet trees. When night and the encroaching moon slide nigh, Your striding image shoves those cold roses aside And all my thoughts are zeroed to a sigh. Every golden comb that hangs, to be complete, Must with terror and pleasure compete, So mixed is spirit and the heart's meat. Now the moon is down and the heart raves: All the bee-slaved honey that I have I gave to her, and again would give, That she might my essence sieve.
Three times was I a fool for love: For a boy, a man, and a teen. As a girl, as a woman, and in-between A fool, a fool, a fool I was for love. Three times blessed, three times cursed, All before my thirty-first. First a lad with an open face Bade me love, and my heart did race; His heart like a cloud that shifts and strays Blew me about, and then blew me away. I was a fool, and I would not see A boy is a boy, and ever shall be. Then a teen, or two, or ten Bade me love them as I was then, Young and lovely, but my heart was fickle: Love was a game of slap and tickle. I was a fool who played gaily Thinking my heart would ever be free. At last a man, made dark and tall, Stalked straight to my soul And bade me stand by both altar and cradle, And stoop and stir my heart with a ladle. And I a fool, a fool, a fool so free Gave love, and give, most solemnly.
My solitary days are waning; Such solicitude I shun; Companionable night is gaining And shuts out the single sun. When that desert light at last is out And the stars like dew appear, At midnight my mouth shall find your mouth And kiss the whole night through.
Counting soundless candles in uncounted hours, I saw the lady of my dreams possessed, In naked raiment sleeping unperplexed. Two voiceless breaths in confinement there Were all there was of what stirred the air, As crooked candles left the ceiling lit, but bare. Crenellations of the sultry moon Sent long waves of light to other rooms, Other breathers, other eyes half-shut to other cares, And left these eyes to love our circles as they were.
When flower piles on flower, and bower Bursts its bounty with too much love of glory Sending the heaven-ascending flowers Down to ground to end their sun-fed story, Then we see how sullen sudden surfeit shows That, finding no resistance to its moltless growth, Will, in writhing upward, fallow fall--slow To the earth, making shadows of its own. Even so, unlooked-for hope can tangle As it goes, a kite beyond its string's Self-tightening, trailing bows of woeful Love, enveloped in nothing's everything. Unreaped ease on ease propels our lot aloft, Perspectiveless, if we cannot count the cost.
This old whore with windmill legs, my heart, Because it cannot love takes a speaking part Detailing the racy vices that brought it Sopping here, dripping in a two-piece, tits Every which where, desperate to be stared at, Desperate to stare. Too frail and fat To do much more than moon about the bar, My heart gets ripped on sips of distilled tears. "Do you know that outfit's last year's haute monde? The ice inside your eyes is not overtly fond Of mewling kittens or bombshell blondes-- Why not just out with it? Tell them there, Arrayed along a rainbow from violet to sere: No eye eyes your zero from the empty mirror."
When fogs come crafty down the mountainside And quell the summer's green in mumming mists, Pulling light into their hill-killer blindness, Then all my night's in new bright dark espied And all I had thought hid in nightmares dead Is come again unaccountable as cold, A softly omnipresent nameless dread That steals whatever warmth dawn had willed. And blind again at dawn in the soulless cold, I see my rapture-nightmares in brightness rolled And confront the sourceless something of my soul: Hill on hill within, revealing valley, Valley, valley, does nothing to allay My sense that sense itself must this nothing sully.
Like the sunless moon I live on borrowed light, A lesser flame enslaved to finer fire. Now a new-dark nothing at formless midnight, No sunbeam falls to show my full profile. Unless the buried sun renew her glory, Sighing revelations from her banished light, My shadow will still tell a shadow's story, Who rounds on fullness most when in your sight. Although I pace to complete my circuit In thoughtful dark, whispering with ghosts of thoughts Whose only shadow in the shade of pits, Still come, still shine into my self-made trough. Generous and ageless come, blessing all, Brimful with hope in burning baptismal.
She's a strong little wench with a tight bod Who moves it amusingly at my nod: Back upon my soul's pole, or forth to froth. All the ways she moves, no move is loss. Each way she shimmers is sheer gain to me Who, by losing all, get more than greed. So we argue with arms, and with legs amend, Until in salty shimmer we agree And in a molten moment unbegun Two, who as woman and man began, Hammer, anvil and tongues reforge as one When heat's enough, and gladdened hearts just can. If this accord's accounted a chimera Then let me in illusion lie and "ah. . ."
We who pant and part in night's divine design Lard the stars with tissues of our lies Spitting hymns and oaths of "evermore" Till all darks daunt or are blindly malign-- Full of the guilts we spritzed at the skies, Chanting fabrications by the score. Will you sit a little while beside me Anyway? Put your hand into my lap, Let me have my way? A little while beside me Lay, and a little love let dribble in our laps. Lie with me a little while, tell a fib To the fibulating stars that hear our hearts; Its not as if they weren't used to our raw squibs, Or its worse than what we told ourselves to start.
Those who mock to harm our love's delight Shake down scolding looks from imperious heights That love alone, aux deux, transmutes to royal: Thus uncrowned was I till plucked from the soil. Your solid eyes invested me with dreams, And saw me kingly who had pauper's seams; Your mouth that said my name loosed appealing bells And rang me up from my thrown-down well. Now steadfast in our fortress of delight We x-ray out low mockers from our tight height, And listen to no breeze that is not loyal And blows us blonde kisses from brune soil. Locked alone above together where all things are clear, We long to fall to where mixed things adhere.
Apollo lunges and Daphne pants, pants, Thinking only of her moistened choices, And how the god demanded her at once Without the pass and parry of a dance, Without a titter from her, or low voices Conspiring to prove the world a dunce. How had he thought to enter her without Flattery? Would a god stoop to assault And battery? Perhaps she had not heard How he drove his charioted star about, How the sky bent blue, to him alone devout. (Perhaps she thought the sky the moon's ward?) Too bad. For when she ached into a tree He ripped her limb from limb for his victory.
Dear spitfire sparrow whose heart hammers fast, Whose wings churn emptiness towards the light, Who fills with silver song the vacant vast, Herald an enduing love each dawn from night! Cry down from harsher skies some mercy's dram To green an ocean tarred in indifferent darks That has no bright hint of what one love's love can, That's never seen a sun lunging from a spark! Sweet white ribbon swinging between the trees As happiness blurrs you and my tears blind, Take up love's song and Beatrice reprise Whose breast sparked paradise in damned Dante's mind. Sing until what singing saves is sane And all my dark wet dread but unlighted gain.
The speckled rose is rarest, by my guess, Dappled darks best freshen what is bright, Heaps of praise heave higher by the less, Granting palled palates foretaste of delight. So you gloss your glory with your faults As each shadow lends an excellence to light Supreme above low dimnesses traversed Till every ray adorns a peak at height. Without a breaking edge what is the dawn? A downy nothing, yet not the night, An in-between half-darkness, all unknown; Only faultlines trace what's definite. So I see, in what you most would hide, No blot of shame but starts a mark of pride.
Come, the bones of the roses shed blood for us, Fires cool near the nearness of our kiss. Fire and rose are seared red by our touches, Blood comes from the earth wherever we pass. We're the lightning ones, shattering and happy! Cruciform we make indelible Xs With our bodies, moaning the bone-lonelies Til blood roses fall from our ecstasies. Rivers go up in fountains of flame Whenever we shiver through their night wets, Calling ourselves by each other's names: Rose-marrow, air star, river fish, heart dirts. Come to this small, domed tent by the roadside, Come throw your candle on the bonfire.
If my love first bristled rife with thorns A hedgehog whose hidden heart beat true, Or if my love no wonderment could ken Beyond the near dog star, whose sole blaze she knew, Or if her mien plumped ponderous as bagged cement But goodness in her stolid looks was meant I'd not protest a poke whose purpose kissed Nor shirk her smiting smile, but be smitten, Nor once critique the false laugh that lisped But stuff my ears with sighs of sweetest wish. And the shining sharps of stars I'd thought forgotten In her true love's tears would pool unbroken. This erudite test I'd pass was never sent Since your untutored beauty beauty lent.
Three months of hours dance drowsy round our loves A triple crown of hours triple won From life's fierce traffic, shove and counter-shove Of self-chasing commerce till day is done. Slow as in a liquid all of light composed Pink pearls that pressed behind our lips did kiss And left a lineage of love-drops dosed With downy dream-time's fretless wistfulness. Each hour augured eons unattained, Long daisy-chains of bliss soft-tied to bliss Leading us on as does a wedding train Toward pallid horizons half-left in mist. To contemplate this past brings present rest, Knowing the yet-to-come such past suggests.
What's stagnant stays, overstays its welcome, Silt riches greening the victor's cup; I hope to amputate what will not strengthen, To vomit back what wasn't nutrient sup. So much for my formal meditation: "Divide and conquer," the same wastrel scrawl That emanated from the instructor's pen To rebuff my vast juvenillian bawl: Poems piled on poems, a swamp turned tar, Excretions and skittering ditties Of loves too plural for a concentrated tear. Somewhere among the calcified fossils lies A skull that wept at what was a star And stayed too long looking for your heart: the prize.
Your fog's darkness dims my simple pin of light Come in at pen-point, unrolled in inky leisure, By black defining the whole wash of white-- By dividing nothing taking measure Of all's unhampered everything and more. What we are is more than prudent store Of facts, of events unscrolled in order, Sequential ticks of a circular clock That round on nothing's zero once again-- As if to begin again were to begin, Or to swirl a wand around undid a lock That never did clicker for a key. So your fog's a face that hangs half-lovely And I a lighthouse loom round its majesty.
I trifled with the trouble of a poem today, All day lacing syllables or their lack, Twisting word into word until words stayed, Giving freely what my shyer soul held back. How like words our awkward pauses stoop, Saying "wait" like a falling leaf unshook; That we might fall on even as we stop, I'll write each love-look down in my love-book: How our bodies wooed as wild water went, How whiphand and hip undid innocence, How love was more than what our lips had sent; How what was was wasted reticence. I listen to the dropped stone intone: Silence says nothing between we two alone.
I search for pages with a blankened stare, Ice flow whitenesses for my dying love; Rank catarrh of the air-conditioner Repeats its hoarse assessment of my case: This room's too cold a place for keeping doves Who's song's reduced to a stiff, beaked face. Still the long dry sob of love goes on and on, Tepid dashes and staccato decimals, An S.O.S. that radioes the sun: Drip one molten tear on my punctual small! Pity the parrot who knows your lines by heart, Solar source of life and heat, and yeasty lusts That drop our brains into the shopping cart Sterile green beside the frozen peas and lists.
Here we are again, and as groundlings go Stiff-armed through a hazy maze of souls Treading round life's "merely thus" and "just so," Hope-fed wanderers without a goal. Though blind and timeless as dreaming egos, Though blitzed and witless as new-birthed foals Who stumble upright without knowing how We touch each other while shouldering shoals. Two swimmers, caught in clasps, will drown While paired porpoises dauntlessly play Their thousand doubtless hours almost as one, Touching but as frolic bids them stray. So we, blind rounds encased in caustic cares, Should play at light and sight, however unaware.
Seeking reassurance, yet reticent to touch, Like the anemone retracting with her sting Your barb's unslung by tenderness, or such Tension as tears ope' a tender thing. But saving grace is not a salve to calm And salvation bears its viciousness on wings; Recovery's own pain becomes its balm When what's vile's reversed by virtue's sting. So in this onslaught on your open heart When harness pinches and help's hands come rough, Still gird yourself to give your every part; Know what dives downwind is no churlish chough Sent to peck black each softest thought-- Know what comes to rescue you is love enough.
Never told how to unlove, dear lover, I piston on as piston did begin, Unrolling landscape's long hills and coverts, Rivers gathered at the roots where my eye swims. So we travel on in loving leisure Affrighted by no false shadow of a cloud That moults its very being at wind's pleasure. So we move to our dancing's measure, Each synced step uncovering new ground No matter that the steps are all the same. Our palms meet, and at your back's my firm hand Unmoving as we turn and turn again, Two travelers passportless in the land, Holding hands as we turn and turn again.
I ask a question, nor know how it must go; Not what love is, nor why, nor when, nor if, Nor countless other lovers' queries sown Upon the field of stars in breathless guess. No. Although my question comes no wiser Than poor petitioner to ring-rich lord Or clueless king surrounded by advisors, And comes but as words seeking a word, Still I'll ask the air and hope you hear-- Who, though made but for yourself, give satisfaction To eyes that quest for beauty, or ears Alert for that triple-trill perfection. Still I ask: Will you, all love, have all me still? And stilly sit, attentive to your will.
Silence sits between us eerily easy For the most part, an enchanting chantless Alba, moon to noon, with nothing busy But our mutual dumb harmonies. When clouds intended by a crowded look Fulminate upon the paleness of our brows-- Silence holds them there, and they'll not be shook Till we give our thoughts a candid hour. So silence by reflection arbitrates And holds us to ourselves, while locked in love; That you are you, and I am I, no gate Between two orchards can summon trees to move. So silence touches us, and the connection's valid Whether cheeks are flush or the forehead's pallid.
Do not sit rickety on a pedestal, Come down among the crowds, elbow your boy With friendly nonchalance, whirl a whirl At the square dance among long fields of soy. Come down and speak with daily dunces, love, Have a word with the puffy car dealer Beyond negotiation's give and shove, Past the signature for your 4-wheeler. Stroll along where snooty Hasidim step And share the air's generous embellishment; If a dog does bark at you, give back a pip; All the jawing world's subject for your wit. And, dear, new-won to re-join this ruckus, Confound our carping silence with a kiss.
Love is a silence that neither looms nor locks But travels with us openly lovely Even unto the very edge of doom. . .. It will not swerve in the loud lee of rocks But carries all folded in its snows Come down clear from very Everest Luminous as knowing without a goal, Holding wild commotions calmed to its white breast. But if I may into this stillness speak And give love words enough to fill a book That needs only silence and good love-looks, Or murmur wonder into a rocky crack, I'd say knowing you is knowing all And give my tongue rest to heed your eyes' call.
When I consider what to say to you alone, No pause or reprise of rhetoric's tricks Helps untouched heart or utter soul exist Half as much as a mere embrace has done. Each embrace endorses soul's serenity, A gush of love beyond vocal posturings, Past a Casanova's cribbed quotations, Or earnest Adamic plea of surety. A mere embrace alone is full of sugars, Fatly replete, stuffed with life itself, Holding the eternal circle of ourselves Arm in arm beyond each pinch of harm. When I consider what to say, and see your face, I'm struck to silence...beyond a mere embrace.
When silence as my aptest singing sits Perched atop old boughs of weighty song And all my voluble voice is simply fit For inner comment at what comes along Then I know our hours are most golden And have a tone of knowing something more Than rapid words that flit and flit may hold With all their chorus of singing by the score. Then I know a single note unsung And held in inner vibrato only Keeps the tune alone when all's unstrung And song without beginning lingers only. Then I look into your two eyes, dear one, And hear what symphony we have begun.
Once again inessential silence seeps Cold down marauded bones, icicle spine, Whose pains remind that heart did blip, That holistic heats had been yours and mine, A sun shared between us on a plate Bright enough to make a blind man weep. That sun had been a burning song, my dear, Singing what we sweated out in ripe sheets Whose voice got husky as we grew nearer-- Whose now a forgotten knot of darks-- A nocturnal imprisoned pall of blacks That once, eyes shut, burned our retina with heats. How blind, how deaf, to shout and song we've grown Who've pulled down hosannas for our very own.
When quiet whelms as blood blisters a wound Injury seems all the moment's meat A hurt beyond what howling vowels can sound Or what eons screaming might dare repeat. There in moveless red our faces reflect What surface tension keeps from further flow In sudden stillness without wet defect As if no pulse pushed wound or face from below. Now rushing rashness rests, quiet-conquered, And slurred cuts to coagulation tend And silence swells like the healing word That nurses' "shh. . ." and nannies' "hush" intend. The speechlessness that first fostered wounds Foretells flesh's restoration without a sound.
The quality of silence quite changed twice From superfluity of feelings rare, A crystal breeze caught in mountain air, To caverned cold and soundless ice. There is no beauty quite like that caught In quiet moments beyond all thought, When two humans share all life has brought. Terror too divides the silent scene When the quiet heart in contentment preens Before contempt that unspoken seethes. The quality of silence quite changed twice. Ignorant as a lark in pre-dawn's vair, My light sought out a light that had always been there, But dawn was undone by what silence dared.
For all my constant heart, I've constant dread That follows me round and notes words I've said: When rude to those who do love me well, When kind to cruelty which cannot care, When lofty to the lowest, who can tell, And to attentive love simply "not there," I fear my offence fellows me past death. Green between graves my conscience slithers loath, That would rather gather clouds without a care But that he founders where I fall, I fell, Slunk to death whose life was sparse and spare: Ill-fed by me, by me kept most unwell. So nightmare interleaves each love-word we've said, And conscience spikes with nails our love-bed.
My melancholy muse meditates, mulls without cease Rumors of demise, demesnes of decrease As fire-fingered freaks of evening flame Flare glory along the Catskill skyline's rock crease And die to dithering greys, fisted blacks. A neighbor in the near-distance roasts Runt apples rumbled from the roof in a blaze Of sage gone to seed, weed trees and dry roots. The apples are sweet, and of sufficient tooth To give them dreams of nectar and of ruth. Bear what dreams may come in spreading night And sleep the long hours inured to fright That comes to tell us nothing; nothing true. Two mood rings roll along the bedstand, blue.
Trashed by the psychic static of hurricane Katrina, Our love end-runs the levee's leakage; In hope's paper boat folded on the flood Bobs our buoyant good beyond all breakage. Beyond the missed clasps of disaster's trance, Past pain's barbed fillips and routine "ah!s," We two now trudge in love who once did race Beyond what bounds our meaning's measure could: Novices, not novitiates, among stung unknowns. Come, stand a little near. Nearer to Thee We trundle curdled milk and mismatched sneakers To the tumbled dump. Humbly we beseech Ye. Closely come to loving wonders all un-won; Let not love, new-won, take us for idle speakers.
Disuse, ill-use, and less, linger in mind, Bitter after-dregs of lust: coil and swarm Of tremblant bodies that beat love's drum warm Now emptied of gestures gentle and kind. . . . So far from the pinnacle of a kiss Have we fallen; threshed, discardedly thrown From Empyrean peaks to a bowl of down, From fittest prospects to runt ends of this: A dead-end day spent in wandered wastage, Touched looks that leave two lovers more alone Than when confined to daydreams on the phone; Night's disconnect comes more in regret than rage. Anticlimax teases like a serenade As less and less we conspire to be glad.
As the hawk returns to the hand, or blood Beats back to the heart in quick surges, So I had hoped you would return for good To this hand held out still in love's long pledge. Wings that beat transparent against the sun, Eyes that every star of night inhabits, Heart that knows the whole universe as one, Know my love curls in clover, a still rabbit Who chews the ruminant leaves of thyme With humble patience and a moistened eye; When tired of all the sky and every clime, Return to me, and by my quiet lie. But if you should with hook of beak or claw Climb down to kill, I will obey your law.
I have made myself small as a pine nut, A pine seed in the great conflagration Of your departure. Each step away shut A vault, another door slammed like a gun. The hours and aches of your going away Fill me with inflammable shame, topped off With fumes and rumors day by day by day Just as a gas can accepts the last drop. And tall in the trees, a wilderness of fire Lays waste the timbers of our old love house And eats the raw logs laid up by desire To build by the field a child's playhouse. But my spirit's made small as a hot pine seed And will stretch a forest, though it rest in weeds.
Dear body, a colossal passion Has galloped through you and left you fenceless; Fenceless and borderless--through your own treason That tore the stakes from the sky and, pitiless, Watched it float off with the horizon. There are no angles or inches to you At all now. Now you are drowning; now gone. Of all that was you, not a single blue Vein remains. Dear body, you are bodiless; You do not shudder or squirm anymore. What bloods composed you evaporate vaporless; Whatever pains nailed you to here are no more. She has left you with nothing, not even a note To blow through your hollows, as once You shouldered on each morning your blue coat.
There was a devil and I knew his name, knew his name, knew it oh so well. His name was pride and we had a fine time, had a fine time, all through the afternoon. Down came the devil and shined my shoe, shined my shoe, smiling all the while. I saw his horns curl above my corns; my shoes shone bright as a big brass horn. A girl and her curls zipped and whirled, zipped and whirled, and the beat beat faster than any old how; I swore 'fore I died she'd be by my side, by my side, all the while she whirled. We danced all night under the dark, dread pines, dark, dread pines while the moon was blue. The fiddle was frisky and a little bit tipsy beneath the star that followed me home. Oh pride was the devil that I took to the dance, took to the dance, deep in the dark dread pines. Oh pride was the devil that I took to the dance, and he whispered in my ear: "You go home with the one what brung you here, brung you here, deep beneath the pines." So I left her there in the shining square tucked deep in the dark, dread pines. And my head hung down as if I had drowned as I walked along alone.
No matter what the weather The world is far colder, dear When we are not together. No matter the change of days Nothing really feels quite the same As when you by me may lay. No matter how trim the wind That sails us to eternity's end, It's empty without you, my friend. No matter how wet the week, My thirst your high geyser seeks That soaks me till I'm weak. No matter how blown down by snow, Or how lively the old Eskimos, Without you I must leave them and go. No matter what wonders has the Fall, When each leaf increases the beautiful, Without you it's dulling and null.
Love fell in by the window where Moonlight wrestled; The long, the lonely bed was empty Of all but care. She is gone who I would have here, Intimately castled; Lonely in bed alone I lie, Wishing she was here. Her echoed softness still enforces This drift of dreams; Moonshine moulting on the floor Undoes the lover. Love cannot escape its crisis By means or seems; Lonely in bed alone I lie, Wishing she was here.
The blackened streetlamp's stubborn light Illuminates invisibly the empty sea, A something precisely impossible to see. A something in you, in me. The evening's clamped, inverted bowl Pretends the stars are pining down, and stare. But their burning eyes are otherwhere; Only you and I are here. Only you and I are here, And something stubborn that stares and stares, That dropped us open into evening's emptiness. Something neither you, nor I, can guess.
I appear in the crosshairs Of time and space --Just out of range-- That look on my face. The moon falls on its knees, Ineffable, frozen; In a sad pail of water Left out by the roses.
This lithesome, wistful wastefulness, The poet's proposition "I is...." The relative silence of the inarticulate pang, The hand half-ruminant That will twitch to write.... There is no center to the soul Who's numb circumference Is ghost and goal.
The story of loving goes on, A confused cloud in the stream, A troublous nothing that makes The world but a passing dream. High deeds of the great dead gone by Clamber but to the sill; Love light as an errant breeze Unsettles her locks and her will. She stands in her chamber unwearied, Her soul poised at a thought: "A thousand days shall I stand here, Stirred in my innermost part." A thousand days are passing by, The moon unravels again; Her eyes are fixed upon nothing, Her eyes cold as the wind. Her soul has seen her love's own soul, The world but a passing dream; She waits for the veil of years To fall in the troubled stream. And there beyond the world's wracked cares, Past waters and words and deeds, There stands steady her love's own soul, His eyes cold as the wind.
A one-way waltz is all we've got, and-a One-way waltz is not love enough to live; For friendship leads and friendship follows, But always whatevers with our fellows. A memory marks its time upon a shelf, A dwindled nothing, a stationary elf, Frosted with dust, in dust diminished, Until the affection that placed it there is finished. If hand reach out to hand in timely dance, In all the whirled hazard of our circumstance, And palm meets no palm but passes touchless, Such hand's unfit but to carry torches. Then let torches burn what they cannot find, And find parade-rest for the whirring mind.
"Supposing Roses" is finally done--- each blossom hacked and thorn shellacked. What had grown lovely in my release from loneliness is now packed back into perfected sonnets ---raw squares that define and defile. Artifice filled out the feeling a kiss first insisted. I gussied up the ghost with dresses, rhetoric's high fashions, and, after, stripped the pickings at my sex's insistence. Naked and dated she lay there like a final draft. None of her winsome tussle was left in her. Inert and silent, she awaits a reader, the dazzling sequins of approbation, the instructor's star or apt remark, tender repeat of touch and tongue. Her backside's bare and brazen as an existentialist. What words she uses are more music than meaning. I lay beside her loosely--mute, inutile.