The crayon-crammed sun, dear, Roaring and soundless, fountains A crooked rivering stalk to the grave For it is summer and never 5 Among the milkweed floods of grass Will everyday angels flame again Dawn wise and luminous as thread Out of the martian mysterious dark, So tall was the flying sunshine 10 Spied in your crinkled eyes. The milky sun hung up the sour day With daylong hands played the harp grasses That plucked our praise-soaked ears There on the floor of light 15 For it was summer and ever Our milk-licked unmanageable bones Pounded joy and adoring down The auroraed roughs of our breaths Till silk-dripping souls announced 20 Heaven commences at our fingertips. Oh it was dawn and noon, and night Dropped his forgotten trunk of darks Among the staggered stars as I came, The sun's brother, halogened as haloes 25 Shining my wary wishes in the air For it was summer come and never In the pearly rivers of the grass, Will I silk my grabbing eyes again On the welcome-at-once loving 30 Of your eiderdown sighing skin. Now ambergris and matchless The mirage-trod moon emerges like a tear Over a mourning soul simple as sleep. And because summer is overthrown 35 And night has leapt up like a cat Under the harp-tongued tree of cells My vegetable hand now grows Mannerly and large to grief: O Time has denied me nothing 40 Of his licorice whips and nickels Nor eboned one nightfall or fastness Shut on your ghost-wasted alien eyes. Pulled by the spoken tide of the clock At midnight moonless rest I writhe 45 Resplendent in my bent vest of ribs And hear both tomb and rumor tumbled dumb By the mild handmaidens of your sighs For it is summer gone and hollow And sorrow's gone down with the moon 50 And though I tongue earth's dust floods For all those romancing eyes gone under Fate's timeline is still the grass on fire Burning where the wood was wild. And the crumpled sun, broken, bears 55 Funeral tears in the brain That wombwise and graveward crawl Down the fiery alcoholic face For it was never summer or was it Under my coal-thumbed universal eyes; 60 And only the bigsouled sourceless moon Drowned and void in the jailhouse dark Remains and grieves derailed sighs Over night-locked trees tall as grasses. Do not grieve, brave, with whys 65 Or hemorrhage one ear with a sigh; No heavenhelp salves such ashes. O Let instead the dear uncandled dead Cry mercy up to my eyes.
From the collection "The Rose Lasso"
Written by Gregg Glory [Gregg G. Brown]
More information available on gregglory.com.