Ideal and disposable, the idea of you
      Rustles beyond my moony shoulder,
      Amorous shadow of fictive love,
      A dream demanded by the dove.
5     Shapeless bloods within me, grant
      Dark nurture to this faithless plant;
      Heart, beat on in dreamland to create,
      Where a pink and rumpled pillow lies,
      Nerves that throb in sympathy;
10    Create, heart, until I in moonbeams see
      A second dreamer dreaming cordially.
      New eyes open, asleep yet silvery.
      Confessional moonlight's idyll
      Which previously had bridled
15    In dry daylight's talk and squawk
      Now lets our human arms console
      Each other till the feeling's whole.
      Let rosy midnight flicker on
      Neon until the ending dawn;
20    Together in our sparkless darkness,
      Exchanging jokes and mental missives,
      Our only soft defense against
      Outer Nature's rage: This is not this
      Is wishing, wishing, wishing
25    Against compelling consciousness.
      And our breaths' most secret heats,
      Sirocco on rose-darkened sheets,
      Whisper the stories of our souls
      Where conceptual contrapuntal kiss
30    And simpler carnal lips may meet.
      A new moon glimmers in the room.
      By careful compact with the night,
      Tangled breaths and traded hands
      And tangoed bodies no longer stand
35    But lie as loving strangers might
      Acquainted with mysteries of delight.
      Side by side let us abide
      Before that darling blonde, the dawn
      Explodes and leaves in shards
40    The love we worked on oh so hard-
      Let us have a meeting without an edge,
      Nor wrestle with our conscience once
      But play pillow-talk, be each a dunce,
      Two drowsy loves, pale and veined,
45    A pair of frangible spirits' vessels
      Laughing out the candles.
      A new day glitters at the ledge.

      Disorderly love falls on our lives
      Like a dream in which we die
      And cannot awake or dream otherwise
      And only this dream is before our eyes
5     Ritual and rote and stigmatized
      Inescapable and inordinately stylized
      A sleepwalker's temptless step's imposed
      And we see only the dream and are blind

      To balance a friendship's difficult.
      To give's difficult, to take's difficult,
      Difficult to offer the enduring cure
      To caustic inward hurt and to outward time
5     Where nothing's ever certain and less is sure.
      One must always be willing to offer a sacrifice--
      A clattering frag of the poor apportioned self let go,
      Give the altar fire a fist of flour and rice
      Thrown into the forward void of hope. An ego
10    Can be a convenient casualty at three.
      A memory of wiped eyes deployed at four
      Can settle noon's uneasy moment, and by jettisoning restore 
      A lighter ballast to trim ship and sail on.    
      A calm cool hand on a vomiting neck is displaced
15    By the necessary zero, placeholding what's gone.
      Jaded jokes traded over a toke and a drink,
      The topical hour tossed off in a walk
      That helps a mellow pair of humans to think--
      All can be branded and bundled and bade fair farewell:
20    Your cost of continuing's their going to Hell.
      Lose it and be happy at the loss,
      Pay it and be damned the cost.
      Friendships no less than civil societies
      Send out their draft notices to the soon-to-be-lost;
25    Death's the price to maintain us at our ease.
      An accurate accounting is friendship's worst curse
      For, accurately speaking, however equit-
      Able in feeling, all friendships divide at
      The punctual inequality of a hearse.
30    So joy as you may and addition be damned.
      Don't look to friends for your conclusions       
      While you nod and hum at their confusions
      (As maybe they will nod and hum at yours)
      And in this charmed essential interchange
35    Do not dream to esteem yourself the worse
      Because of angry antsy things either said or did
      (What dark horrors brightly shown, what honors hid).
      After the humiliation in the kitchen
      A friend will still do as friendship always bids:
40    Exert persistent force for modest growth
                inexorably as lichen.

      It's wondrous easy some days to guess
      What at last we are and what's happiness.
      Yet these inscrutable questions duly observe
      Both the face of the question and the hidden obverse.
5     What do we know but that knit intuition
      Pearls the stitches of mere superstition
      When sacred instinct's emergent pattern comes
      Divulging phantoms of what we might become?
      There's no simple time in which to simply be;
10    Time's a dark palimpsest of what we can see:
      Squaring the past with our parochial acre of here,
      Or inferring a fictional future from fanciful history.
      Flip, stitch, or analysis: we guess as we must,
      Surprise ourselves, and end as dust.

      Bullets 'oft gang awry'
      When we squint with lying eye
      At the target we had thought
      To level with a shot;
5     Somewhere along the barrel
      Our curving expectation falls
      And what is becomes a part
      Of what we hope to shoot,
      Or perhaps an intervening wind
10    Has changed beginning and the end.
      The future always lies
      Somewhere in the 'is,'
      Or so the marksman's maxim goes
      Hunkered in a bush of rose.
15    The future always lies
      Somewhere in the 'is'
      Our eyes are scouting now;
      Hope and here intermix somehow,
      Nor get pulled apart
20    Unless our killing art
      Delivers to the shaping thought
      The dead end we had sought.
      The philosopher with his carcass
      Dispenses with his guesses
25    - What would be now is,
      And this is happiness.
      Nor does he as he eats inquire
      "What if I had not fired...."
      Or if a speck of dust had interposed
30    Between his sightline and his nose.
      All the dedication of his thought
      Goes to digestion of what he's brought
      From the wild field, as able,
      To his domesticated table.
35    Not until quick hunger comes again
      Will his thoughts curve and turn 
      To all the 'Ifs' of chance
      That can cancel out his choice
      And send aim or word awry
40    In the hunted day.

      If a thief gave you his friendship, would you
           take of it and feel it?
      Would you sit inside his patterned house
           among strangers' memorabilia
5     And watch his tongue when he remarks
           on the lamp from Aunt Cecilia?
      The truth has always suffered,
           and the thief has always lied.
      By law or thief or money
10         the truth is never paid.
      Raphael's Madonna, blithe upon the wall
           officiates at snooker;
      Surely those eyes, so sad, so full, so wise
           they'd spot emergent Christ
15    Among all the convergent lice, surely they
           forgive the hand that took her.
      The priceless art and conversation
           conspire to do you good;
      You thrill that every turn of social talk
20         might have a twisted end.
      He recalls your foibles lightly;
           lightly, he's your friend.
      So take the offset printed coaster
           that is offered obliquely;
25    Let the politely proffered crumbcake
           sit center on the doilies--
      And in his tepid eyes behind his tea
           see if you are his.
      The truth has always suffered,
30         and the thief has always lied.
      By law or thief or money
           the truth is never paid.
      By valentine's the command comes down
           to pen two loving stanzas;
35    You lean and stare and calmly crib them
           on a millionaire's cadenza:
      "Love is that which gives and gives
           and finds in taking, splendour."

      Beyond the bland suspension of a moment
             (still and queer and empty)
         We sip our tea and take our toast
              drained of life and envy.
5        A drunken angel at a harpsichord
              suspends upon a cigarette
         Some tattooed prayer of the Lord,
              some blank mystery as yet.
         An opal in a teardrop
10            confers what grief would keep;
         Purpure absolution drops
              in gutters at your feet.
         Starlight in a candle
              reddens the intruding hand,
15       Restless on the icy mantle
              where Life makes no demands.

      Stars and sand assault the sight
      chafeing what should charm--
      cloudy, angry--
      a spirit's irritants--
5     until the kiln
      of God's great unmated hand
      closes close and fuses them
      opinionless as glass.

      A psyche's inscape's treacherous,
      As alive with dangers as with bliss;
      The purple outcrop of a mental rock
      Cripples the supple Muse and mocks.
5     Caught between imagination and the dream
      The mind's barriers dissolve at the seams;
      The motivating carnivals of lurid emotions
      Cycles us like actors thru smoky memories and scenes.
      Here we're running, running on the borderline
10    Half-unaware of the tailored baggage we've brought,
      Half-amnesiac about the burdens dropped,
      Drunk on our own lucubrant blood like wine.
      Blindfolded eyes foretell dark prophecies
      When we cannot see that we cannot see.

      Let Love's lukewarm body lie
      Drained of every lover's sigh;
      Put up the crepe, pull down the bunting,
      Pack in boxes the matrimonial trumpets. 
5     Rescind the secret thought, and cancel hope.
      Let marriage feasts go up in smoke;
      Let the lover, loved, display
      Independence to the end of days.
      Heaven's research into love's prayers
10    Recommends ascetic despair;
      Despite longstanding and accustomed use,
      A gander's not as good as goose.
      When the mirror spots in morning's face
      No room for absolution or for grace,
15    Every constellation seems
      Evidence of God's complicity.
      To exercise the lover's part
      Seems the only answer to retreating hearts:
      Mechanics of hydraulic hand
20    Give no ease to loves lorn gland.
      Modern convenience should make us fit
      To enjoy the air-conditioning, and forget;
      Yet still in every neighbor's bush
      Lurks the same distempered wish.
25    Every kiss but seems to mock
      Those lips no kissing will unlock;
      Snipers crouch on every roof
      To put an end to lovers' truth.
      Ransack every inked-out line
30    For furtive hints of peace-of-mind,
      Time the healer will not dispense
      Relief when every breath is grief.
      To be a ghost and blow unmade
      Through drawn and yellowed windowshade....
35    What aught occurs, there is no stop
      To distraught hearts or lovers' hopes.
      What may mere continuance teach,
      Stalwart survival of the leech?
      Let pain cease, and let cease pride
40    When love's soft cause has died inside.
      Intellectual despair
      Indulges 'The Unrepaired',
      While Hymanaeus Io wont console
      Particulate memory, 
45                                    the ripsawed soul.

      Come with me, love, beside the oaken bole
      We'll watch the finch dance in the waterhole.
      Old blind men get their comeuppance
      Whenever a loving two become
5     What's commonly called a one;
      Only unlovers sit on the fence.
      Come with me, love, behind the hill
      Where the geese hold court on the croquet field.
      Look at the terrible virginity of the snow!
10    Whatever is the matter?
      We'll get the geese to scatter;
      Only the unmoved won't go where's to go.
      Come with me, love, uncomb your cares,
      Mother and father are no longer here.
15    Take this white ribbon, take it and tie
      The wildness of your black hair,
      The wrongness of your despair:
      Only take my white crossed hands till I die.
      Come with me, love, into the sun,
20    We'll dare what they daren't when we are one.
      Let the old man's finch and the old man's goose
      Run to ruin and devolve to havoc;
      We'll burn the prison and break the locks
      And like the moon in water let happiness loose.

      Heavy, unforgivable dreams, despair,
      Hard breathing, the omnipresent air,
      Whistle beneath my brain a tribal tune
      Uncaught by inner ear since Stonehenge rune.
5     Waking in a shuddered fever
      Unconscious of pattern or the weather,
      Ripped apart by an ambulance scream,
      Torn to storm-cloud crepe in dreams,
      The question presents itself undressed:
10    What's happening? Where's Death?
      What's my cause, my case, my crux?
      Horror stirred to eloquence
      Returns the steady stare,
      Blatant or beady, that I did not dare.
15    By failure of vision we unite
      Where all the candles refuse to light
      At the black bottom of a bowl or ditch
      Where every nerveless hand fumbles for the switch.

      Beyond the serious torches of several cypress trees,
      The dusty chirrup chirrup of militant cicadas,
      The noble solitude of a solid lonely oak
      Clattering his leaves at the sun over a bleached field
5     That balanced his high growth by spreading out,
      Desert-like and hot at noon, and all afternoon
      Until the evening made them equal sharers 
      Of one shade, a blackness welled up from the root.
      Beyond all this, beyond the blushing bluish grasses
10    And inner darkness of some evergreens out right,
      I thought to see what seemed from the county road
      A sweet hilarious patch of beech, tittering 
      Among more sober rowans, and walked on
      Farther than I had thought at first to do.
15    A forest darkness hustled, a coat atop my coat.
      And so I came upon a late-flowering bush
      Hidden deeper in among more doubtful darks,
      Taller and elder, more august and up high.
      It was way out of season, much too too late,
20    Yet full of hopeful blossom regardless
      Of the season's clock; it kept its time its own--
      Before the long sharpness of the frost that tapered
      In shadows till midday, it held its whites aloft.
      The flowering bush was a thing itself, alone,
25    Clotted with milky flowers as large as fists
      As if to claim a space among the harder barks,
      As a child will feel more brave at midnight,
      Startled from a nightmare, to smile in the dark,
      Or as a father walks twice round and round 
30    A house, for proof he really has a home.
      The flowers asked for bees that would not come
      To so shaded an interior, whose buzzed instincts
      Could not guess to lead them there, too far
      From the sugary buttercups and tigerlilies of the field;
35    The bees were busy with their honeys and their hives,
      Too industrious to bother with this thing alone.
      I wondered what had made the seed drop here
      All those years ago when this bush first pipped.
      Had some panicked thrush raced bewildered through the thick,
40    Or been carried dead by some hawk, and dropped?
      How had the seed, which loved the sun, found 
      Filtered light to endure, in the coolness all about?
      Had some tree burned out and a dormant seed 
      Been sprung, hot from its casing, into germination?
45    I'd known an odd old fellow who had not
      Half begun to sing until he was half past eighty,
      And his voice as awful as an old phonograph;
      But still he sung, and mostly pleased himself of late,
      And showed the lyric shavings of sharpened wit
50    To any too-curious; those words were his fists.
      Above us all in the little clearing, the dull touch
      Of a near cloud's inner-lighted immanence
      Broadened into mystery over man and bush.
      Something happened then, I did not know
55    How much until years afterward had stretched
      My roots into some new dark flowing underneath.
      But then, I did not know what I would become,
      And, never having intended to be there once at all,
      And having forgotten all about the patch of beech
60    That had first sent me off into the dark,
      I shook my head at the flowering bush and took off.

      Muscular terror swipes at our skins
              with its professional ironblack hooks,
      Peers in at every evening window,
              flashes out of every book.
5     Defined by what we fear, we each begin
              dawn within a mirror's hollow look.
             
      Terror's all eagerness and action--
              a nightmare thing with wings;
10    An Anthony Hopkins' Hannibal, one
              horror that glares and preens,
      Agitates all hearts like flippers, and thumps
              at the back of every scene.
      Before this lonesome sojourn launched
15            in Body's leaky boat,
      Did we hesitate on the angled grass,
              touch toes beneath the moat?
      Did we dream of all the dreams of wanting
      That lifelong flock about us,
20            circling and taunting?
      But here we are, and that's the main thing,
              hugging ourselves in shopping malls,
      Screeching at the top of the swing.
              Our lonely unaloneness should appall
25    But is itself a kind of lovely;
      Or so I think the angels think,
             hovering abovely.

      My beloved Enemy
      Confronts my chaos to define
      My anger out of emptiness,
      A solid hatred from rash wish.
5     My beloved Enemy
      For my arch-arranging eye
      Designs an aching target
      That I must miss or hit;
      Gives to my wide-range stagger
10    A more local, focal goal,
      A sharpness to each dagger
      Unfolded from the soul.
      My beloved Enemy
      Incinerates Laws like xmas-trees 
15    And from a dwarfish, brutal bush
      Grows adored as Truth.
      Without my beloved Enemy
      --Alone, or made by mirrors three--
      No matter how I writhe and twist
20    My very self would not exist.
      My beloved Enemy
      Radiant with joy and energy
      Looks out from my own interior,
      Puts on my scowls and powers.
25    My beloved Enemy
      Alight with hate and ecstasy
      --Fevered cheek to cheek we dance
      Heedless of our circumstance.
      Now my beloved Enemy
30    Made naked by wind and time
      Arrives with a stricter chill:
      My Enemy I must kill.
      My beloved Enemy
      Must learn now how to die,
35    And my beloved Enemy
      In blood before me lies.

      Our interim swimmer
      The flotsam of a dreamer
      Will drift and shrug on whatever log
      Drifts and shrugs along.
5     Among warm fantasies of existence
      He'll pip himself a prince
      Or surmise a wisp a whip
      Coiling angrily at his hip,
      His own dark, androgynous
10    Urges to nip and sharply shape
      And torture into consciousness
      Speech where a beast would gape.
      Forgetting in the momentarily kind
      Regard or design of a cumulus cloud
15    And friendly D vitamin sunshine
      How a taut tiger might lie supine
      Between the shadow and the visible
      He considered that nature and nurture
      Had made him of all things the richer.
20    The circumlocution of the clouds
      Said nothing to him; of this he was proud.
      He thought: to be awake but unaware,
      To not be subject to thought's despair
      Or consciousness' superstitious care
25    That inscribes the history of the tribe
      Into every member's singular side
      -- a Rotary Club tattoo, the gestural
      Cool of a Crip or Blood's hand signal
      That had DNA for its original--
30    Is to give up or resign
      Your part in the human sublime,
      To abandon the spiral nadir
      Of accomplishment's stair
      To the deterioration of clumsy Time
35    Dirtying suavity's shine.
      A barracuda acting as it was told
      Skirled to the surface, garish and bold.
      He thought thinking was almost all.
      He thought that since the fall 
40    From preconscious One
      Into the active energy of Become
      That History and all of her messes
      Devolved to individual "bless yous,"
      And the scale that shows this depth
45    Can be reeled off in a breath
      By any mammal whose consciousness
      Swims livelier than a fish.
      From a wet and worsted pocket,
      With an uncareful, watery shift,
50    He brought a palmed mouth organ out.
      And he thought as he floated there
      Between ecstasy and despair
      Between the sweet green-glowing swells
      Of his mild Cape Hatteras hell
55    That the shirring, Shelleyan lute
      Could be plucked only to confute
      The rare, the rightful argument
      That evolution in the docks presents:
      That obscurity obstinate and disguise
60    Are designed by chance to make us wise
      And lift us by gimmicks to Eternity
      On whose verities we may spy.
      By the regularity of genital function
      By the pageant of reproduction
65    We place opportune or Platonic kisses
      On wicked lips or wicked wishes
      And spurt our progeny toward Heaven's swoon,
      And like the tiger we sleep at noon.

      Beyond the paper moon
              and past the plastic stars
         Lurks a lump or troubled wisp
              of what we really are.
5        Behind the pantaloon, the canvas and the grease,
              beside the green stage door
         Lingers a loveable stranger
              whose tenor urges us to "more."
         Although the lights are out, are out
10            and the set's gone burning down
         Still we ache to traipse the stage
              and immortalize the clown.
         The grave is but a keyhole
              and we ourselves the key
15       That into clay or on to flame
              abide Eternity.

      You've aged me one million this minute, my dear.
      For you were my time before time had begun,
      Your approval my watchword, my moon and my sun.
      My cartelidged bones, once supple, now snap when I shiver;
5     The boys on the block wear thick Santa beards,
      The pup that I kissed whelps broken-hipped in my hands;
      I see them grow agued, and myself grow unbrave,
      Full of hard wisdom and friends in the grave.
      The hourglass pours eons in my ancient eyes,          
10    I, who first saw you and leapt like a panther!
      Like fated black clockhands, together we dashed
      (At midnight my rest is murdered quietly).
      I, who was once as timeless as laughter
      And lived in quartz crystal; that crystal is smashed.

      'Tis said our end is half-divine
      And our days leave but a broken track
      That moves, when it moves,
      Neither here nor there,
5     But shuttles forth and back.
      I heard our origins are in the sky
      And we crawl in  fallen estate,
      That when we stand
      And cry 'gainst God's plan
10    We moan more than half-way mad.
      'Tis rumored in our veins
      That sex is a wish ape-uncles had
      In a forgotten forest glade
      Evolutionary urge made glad
15    And figleaf now forbade.
      I know my heart's an Argonaut
      And sails on waves of pain
      Toward adventure and to a land
      Evolution and God forgot
20    But like a sleeping seed long has lain
      In Imagination's open hand.

      Winter's never here at the fountain
      Whose waters' liveliness seems a warm 
      And open candor. Things are but things and do as they must:
      As in the fountain's pallorous spangling forever
5     Heaviness and  light contest.
      Beyond the torus of its halo
      The summery waters' motions endeavor,
      With the tear-bright dignity of an eye in agony,
      To show how lightly may a substance go
10    An afflatus of divinity.
      All things to their opposite use
      Tortured, as when this lithesome watercourse
      Was narrowed from easy murmur into gladdened sound,
      Reveal some laden tale of their earthly course
15    Returning to their source.
      As when like tears to ground we streak  
      And the opened waters that accompany burial
      Flow in broken speech, so the startled water, at its arc
      Interpenetrate of scattered light, torridly tumbles
20    All rainbows to one stone bowl.
      Something had sung up 
      From the dark watered words summoned to console
      Bodied brightness; as when we ourselves, by a terrible pity pul-
      Led vocal from the womb, tighten and squall 
25    To give creation's own 
      Cry to the beautiful.

      This is an epic: shrunk, crabbed, and small,
      Full of false-effects, self-pity, the merely personal,
      A Don Juan who lambastes not the passing scene
      But all that has-been Juan may be, or is, or has been.
5     Where more loving looks would gloss a blemish
      The critic's eye inscribes a scar to cherish,
      For every jot that takes away from fame, frame, or form
      Bolts the sniping critic thus much more above the norm.
      I spy inside to sight with telescopic sighs
10    The whys of my feelings' reasons:
      Interloper on a landscape without seasons
      -- Why are such thoughts always such internal messes?
      Insistent blots and bleeding
      Awful as a Rorsach reading?
15    Or are summer ladies in their swaying dresses
      The carnal cause of my distresses?
      (Your guess is as good as I guess my guess is.)
      Love's each word confirms what I suspect:
      Disaster's the master, and we but the guests.
20    She sheds no sigh for any man's part,
      Whether the nether gender or simply his heart.
      On Time's high hill my glass house lies sheer,
      White licked-together ice panes as thin as tears--
      I'll throw nothing as improbable as rocks
25    But must content my anger by flinging dirty socks.
      When confronted by the bare barbarity
      Of a too-intimate, too-personal personal history
      The titillating crowd contracts a gassy gasp
      Into the actor's ruination of  a yawn.
30    Put away the hugs, unclench the hearty clasp,
      Poke about for the folded rulebook on Badminton
      Or dewy martinis not cleared away at dawn,
      Any of last season's or last night's amenable diversions,
      No worse for the weather on the party lawn.
35    "But I have a tale to tell you!" he told the mirror
      As a minor chord played in the castle dreary,
      And like a lawyer at a settlement
      Between heavenly disputants temporarily hellbent
      He unpacked his tale like a holy relic. 
40    He tried, when talking, talking about his happenstance
      To concentrate Pure Mind from nominal Space.
      Somehow somewhere something means something
      As we fill with ephemeral words our eternal dumbness.
      And ever the bleak bitterness of Love is present,
45    Awkward to forget, awkwarder to remember,
      A golden goose whose taste has turned to pheasant:
      Sour to eat, but the killing's pleasant.
      Leaning with a highpower scope on my pickup's fender,
      I forget at once who was the first offender.
50    A kiss is just a kiss, for all our wishing
      And love is just another way for brains to say "gone fishing."
      And yet what hopes are harbored in a sigh
      To which all the pall of History can't manage to give the lie?
      And somehow behind Love's final curtain
55    The essential something-nothing of ourselves is lurking.
      To say that these things are only so,
      That, in the course of life, such heinousness is usual
      Is to dodge the lodging dart that conscience pricks
      And with our green tequilas reel 
60    About the empty garden like a crypt.
      It doesn't make much difference
      If you're in the Congo, Buenos Aries, or France
      Time can add no savor but regret
      To what the hand has done, or the heart inflicts.
65    Yet I may say, like the newscaster at six "Once
      Upon a time, in a galaxy far, far away
      I loved." Such a rare occurrence
      Can't be measured by existential stirrings and segues:
      It's the internal turnings of that monster Fate
70    That makes our mousing loves or hatreds great.
      Is my mauve eagle of presidential pinion,
      Or am I but a seraph's wingman?
      Public puffs and public scrapes
      Suck divinest wines back to earthy grapes.

      Tired of the afternoon, too tired to rest,
      a crooked dropping spider made herself my guest,
      dispossessed of the wood over which she'd labored
      wispily uniting the crooked scrap lengths of pine
5     by busy inner habit for a length of time.
      Unwitting where she was, she knew no reason
      to rest here out of season. No reason....
      Though with no reason myself among the rest,
      I dare endure my time as long as any guest;
10    ignorant of Sisyphus, she had no sense of labor,
      tying and untying her crooked knots of pine.
      Reason's only reason in the absurdity of time.
      With sly and candid step, each time each time,
      a spider will weight a grassblade for her reasons
15    until the toppling tip on earth must have its rest
      where busy man himself is a busy guest
      by dint of crooked reason and crooked labor.
      Too tired to rest, wherever here is, I pine
      for bed. Each crooked plank was chopped from pine;
20    I lie and contemplate the length of time
      Granddad who'd taught me hewed his reasons,
      laboring and loving busily that I might rest
      somewhere on Earth an honored guest.
      And here again the dropping spider took up her labors,
25    surprising me upon the crooked wood I labor.
      I watched her threaded progress along the pine
      desktop chopped from scraps of time
      when Granddad himself had thought his reasons
      for cutting and hewing had been laid to rest.
30    Busily I contemplate my busy guest.
      Absurd, I think, how the length of time we're guests
      Shrinks, and crook my wood portrait while she labors,
      going awkwardly on against the lengths of pine
      as if it were no labor to labor all her time.
35    If reasons she kept, she kept them her own reasons
      as we carved the scraps of day to silent rest.
      Tired in my crooked dreams of tired day's length of tired time,
      I hear my angry Mentors demand and reason;
      I labor, labor, labor on my portrait without rest.

      A silent fibbing moonlight washes
      Distorted shadows of the dissenting sun
      Over each snow-molested branch and bush
      Arranged outside with a congregation's grace
5     For the terminal minutes of our love-embrace
      Happening behind an unrolled windowsash.
      You had wanted to hurt me, and did.
      Truth was my only tribulation.
      Your hands hung, inert and underfed,
10    Along the sofa's arms, overstuffed and wan,
      Resisting the reconciliation of my touch
      - And you pulled away, besides, your face,
      Quick and moonlike, from my near face
      Hurrying forward in a rudimentary rush
15    That had so often sought the complexity of bed.
      Truth was my only tribulation.
      It was then, snowbound and alone, you had said
      Words that made all things one
      And useless, in the gelid December hush
20    Whose winds diminished to a sparse trace
      In the outer emptiness I could not face,
      Too full of the moon's pale refracted crush.
      I don't know how all this roomy dark occurred.
      Truth is my only tribulation.

      Perhaps my middle-aged spread, love,
      Is made of despair instead of
      Potato chips and beer.
      The refrigerator's cool porcelain leer
5     Sighs and hums in weighty solace
      Nightlong, and leaves a light on in the palace
      Stocked with richest foods, assembled desires
      Anxious yet to stoke caloric fires
      That youth kept warm
10    By muscle burn.

      Once I was happy just
      To flabbergast and gust
      Over incestuous Thanatos and Eros,
      My impulsive pair of heroes.
5     But now my erring mind
      (Arranging, jury-rigging jigsaws night by night)
      Surveys the surrounding social scene
      In meditative fright.
      The president imposes order,
10    The pope imposes hope;
      Which one has the right to expedite
      My sonnets with his ardor? 
      Every rhyme with law and order
      Is enticingly narcotic,
15    But to impose them on the Zeitgeist
      Is damnably neurotic.
      The windbag of a fascist
      Hoots and emotes in Life's emporium,
      His whistlework's that of the serious artist,
20    Envowelling society's consortium.
      His graves are all so neatly done
      They lie down in counted rows;
      The bones obey coordinates;
      Above, there blooms a rose.
25    I conceive a magic bag
      That holds us all together,
      Or perhaps simply the spurious
      Convention of "the weather."
      There's no God, or need be none
30    (Intrusive into our intimate "Scene A")
      Who's got to plod, or descend
      Deus ex machina.
      Draw instead in dreamy eye or fable
      Something constellationish
35    Shared with elbows tucked at table,
      A grace passed round or handed down,
      The substance of a wish.

      "The neon fire Prometheus stole
      Shown here before us as natural
      In a painted campfire fuelled by laurels
      Says stealing is Art's only real school;
5     Mimesis flames from Nature's manual
      An ignis fatuus that kills and fools."
      Museum explanations and the afternoon
      Presume the usual, the accustomed track,
      Drag us down to pre-history and myth
10    And then obligingly back.
      "Before us both chameleon and sloth
      In the surrealist jungles of deceit
      Follow genome's and artist's plotted path,
      Blend inhabitant and habitat;
15    So what could ever differ then, in pith,
      Between boar's snort and man's snit?"
      Among the crowded halls and windows
      Our tourguide of the Louvre
      Explicates Christs, perennial widows, the dice,
20    Hung between anonymous thieves.
      "Since birth we're honed
      To art and to theft;
      To deceive to survive alone
      Is Nature's tricky gift;
25    To get what's been gathered
      By others is thrift."

      Happily at home amidst a blizzardy haphazard of papers
              dawn steeps the window with visionary promise
                for the entire apartment complex.
         I am barren as you are barren, in a world replete with objects
5             indifferent to our crux; I am broken and unwise
                as you yourself are broken, and both unclear
                  and nobody objects.
         Its always a trifle embarrassing to be caught in the act, to be alive
              isn't it?  Coping with jaundice and child-proof tops, waking
10              out of the same problematical nightmare at five
                  as if sleep were the body's occasion for jeering
         at the brain, which imposes its ordinary articulate order
              fetishistically every day on the bombardment of senses
                selling us fictions while telling it all, reporting odors
15                and heartthrobs with equal indifference.
         God bless the gods, apathetic executives of the irrational
              who are powerless without our laughable bodies
                to cast even a third-rate thrill-
                  er, and make of our unable lives
20                   their inarticulate movies.
         Discursive stanzas look like they're hurrying
              to the nowhere-somewhere of a formal fountain's
                repetitive static whiteness.
                  What is left to say, is there anything?
25       Let love be the last letter of the penultimate law
              righting us rigidly as a strapping father full of laughter
                when like every incertain curious infant thither
                  we totter and yaw.
        And yet, with all of that said (so much) and (conceivably)
30           registered in heart and in head by habit
               each day is only a day at play....
        A lesson in how dowdy light becomes slowly a whole room
             and the grateful green leather chair emerged
               awaits patiently by the window its daily burden
35                like a remembered word
        its definition.  Its in this way that we have died already
             died and come to this life, two civil persons
               talking together sanely, quietly, long-windedly
                  as an aqueduct hums.
40      The world is full of sane sunlight and responsible landscapes
             not too impossible for believable humans to accomplish
               their unremarkable heights or average depths
                  and whose prayers resemble steps.
        But first a brief sleep, first order of business, then work (not too late)
45           may commence: every man must darkly his own
               unconscious Olympus propitiate
        as when a mountain, unexpectedly on the horizon alone
             rediscovers, without notice or noise
               its monumental poise.

      The idle angling
      			of a watersnake--
      loquacious and lungless
      			through yellowing waters
5     faded, sulfuric
      			of a hurried traveler's Chesapeake
      -- through tums of evolutionary
      			time still saunters.
      Politicians, as limericks tell,
10    			are of a swift and similar species;
      unchanging agile evil vile
      			a Nepalese prince with an Eton smile
      considers the cost of suicide
      			the price of becoming a democracy.
15    Pelestinian flags
      			on fallen Faisel Husseini
      drape the dark Dome of the Rock
      			while he's more leisurly laid beneath it.
      Mourners wail until their faces congeal
20    			to unfeatured unsculpted stone,
      blunted as snakes' in a pit.
      Chinese warships in a watery ring
      			lazily braid to enclose
      the pale clarity and newsworthy brattle
25    			of independently little Taiwan.
      Would cobras or roses be roses or cobras
      			if they could be persuaded to choose?
      Another day, another hour goes
      			cold-soldered to the chain.
30    State Street bagpipes and banners
      			play old Joe Moakley to rest;
      dead as he'd lived, paraded,
      			by cries and high casuistry followed,
      down to the crypt and the Beantown dirt
35    			he lies interred with the rest,
      another day snaked to the flow.
      "All change as they die,"
      			is the evolutionist's cry,
      "and all ways wander unlost
40    			toward the one wild Great Way.
      Each creature encircled
      			beneath the infinite 'Ifs' of the sky
      is trapped in the hydra of days."

      The silent woman in the church
      On nerves and vitriol does her work.
      Doilies of the crucifixion
      From warm young hands spread benediction.
5     Beyond the garden, where interred
      Repose parental elders of the herd,
      A picket fence keeps neat within
      A few old sinners gone to Hell again.
      The silent woman in the church
10    Tho' fourteen summers have blown away
      Hiked up her heavy velvet skirts
      Fourteen summers ago today.
      And love was in her dawning eyes
      And a wild slow dance in her step....
15    She turned a measure from where the graveyard lay
      Like a promise not yet kept.

      A purposeless scrub plain laid before the sight,
      Inarticulate, has nothing to offer;
      Neutral evolution's meaning is neuter
      Until interpretive man stands near.
5     Cool swaths and charts of haughty stars
      Whirling infinite on a pin
      To rampaging wolf and twittering lark
      Revolve innocent of sin.
      But one constellation-loaded look or angst-angelic glance
10    Cast up by blameful man
      Can trace God's wrath in each twinkling coordinate
      As plainly as a plan.
      Until the intuitive outcast on the monotone plain
      Divided the iterative day
15    Into the arrowy horror of arbitrative time,
      Inventing vatic history,
      God's mercy and His blood could not from the dust
      Gather us to his breast;
      Bhudda in his monk-smock howled the rice from his throat,
20    A proctor without a test.
      Lacking sin's spectacle or anticipatory hope's
      Human ability to fail
      Life spins in a bituminous bubble of unbecome,
      A whereless, whenless exile.
25    Narrow animal and expansive man both hunt world and sky;
      Anxious and inscrutable they rave.
      The one with tooth, paw and blind beak will kill,
      The other with inner glaive.

      In any universal force
           or unifying vision
      An emptiness of intent inhabits,
           a blank of indecision.
5     To try and grasp the whole of Man 
           must blur individuation
      And see all wide variation One,
           innocent of division.
      Who can blame them for their blankness,
10         or feel themselves assured
      That they have flossed Reality
           from the asterisked Obscure?
      Wherever truth lies
           it lies becalmed,
15    Unmoved in its sutures
           by winter storms or squalls.
      We come into our knowing
           neither too early nor too late
      But just in a moment's glowing
20         and take what we may take.
      If you don't, as I don't,
           know just what a thing is
      Sit silent, or politely ask
           the thing itself its business.

      I lived unaware for a time
      (I have to admit it)
      Unconscious in a casual castle
      Sipping livid Glenlivit;
5     I was deaf to the daily curses
      Of incontinent scullery maids,
      And recognized not the stable boys'
      Disingenuous praise.
      As lazy time lolled on
10    From here and now to gone
      A private contentedness
      And not extant catastrophe was
      What I secretly counted on.
      And all that time, you
15    Looked over the lifeboats
      Tested and prepped the crew,
      Gauging the drop-height
      From the second story window
      In case of fire or flight.
20    I was smoking cigarettes
      In bed, getting girls up for a chat
      While tanning in a deckchair,
      Eyeing the hostess on the sly,
      And all that.
25    But you had long before departed.
      The hallway echoed with your passage
      As dawn or noon or night invited
      The memory of your visage.
      You had left like a bell
30    That rings only in memory,
      Or how a tale told in childhood
      Retold is a story today.
      The hearing ear is fooled
      By a wrongful kindness of the mind
35    Whose generous assistance molds
      Everything it finds.
      You are silent, absent and afar
      Indifferent and unreachable
      As a collapsing star.
40    Quietly busy ostensibly
      In an alternate universe
      For your light still spills
      Some length of years at ease
      In at every sill.
45    Ships and compasses
      Still rely on the light,
      Having been forged in your presence
      And wandering still in the night.
      But one day your light, having left,
50    Will leave us of light bereft.
      And yet you return, return
      In all the days of my thought
      As if there were no now and then
      As if mercury cornered stayed caught.
55    And yet you return, return
      Like an agile ellipsoid mobile
      About your own center you turn
      Presenting new angles the while,
      New facets and faces revealed,
60    But really always and beautifully centered.
      Maybe I too am centered, I too,
      But more orbitally arranged
      Fixed on a spar of you
      From your central largeness estranged
65    As when Earth to dawn has come
      Halfblind in the sun.

      Pastiche of paradises once pursued, chimeras
      Simmer and shimmy, love's dancer desires.
      In an era of boredom they glare from the shelves.
      Our wanting all wanting by wanting consumes.
5     Desire's substance is fire, and desire continues,
      A pastiche of paradises once pursued, chimeras.
      Miss Mississippi poses and pouts blue allure as
      We lust, Romeo baboons who drool for new Julias.
      In an era of boredom shes glare from the shelves.
10    Kisses in a cave-dark hole we willfully dive in,
      Drowning and hoping for anxious love's prizes:
      Pastiche of paradises once pursued, chimeras.
      Don't walk to their whistle or wink at their mirrors:
      What's seen there's not seen, merely seen as.
15    In an era of boredom they glare from the shelves.
      Fadeless as marshlights, they hate the actual stars.
      It's fine that they shine, but not where they lead us,
      These pastiches of paradises once pursued, these chimeras.
      In an era of boredom they glare from the shelves.

      Square sunlight on a square green field
      Shows in a polluted puddle a perfect sky reflected:
      The ordered boskage of the public park blesses
      All those whose disordered hearts it caresses.
5     Love, with her careless powers
      Marks or marrs our unable hours
      Until desertion's our proof of having been touched;
      Although the matter is little, the feeling is much.
      Crossing that out, I then passed
10    A dead house with nothing to recommend it,
      Solitary and unstately on the grizzled grass
      And thought again about my sonnet:
      Love's a whitened house with thin ivy trim,
      Red roofing tiles almost caved in;
15    Its got attic eyeots to let out the stale air
      Ninety long years had inheld with stale cares.
      Soon I topped a big crooked hill that tapered,
      And unsteadily almost drunk with the magnificent view
      Settled down sweating to my dark square of paper,
20    Carefully writing while the sky was askew:
      Love, which soaks up all connotations,
      A paranoid obsessive of boozy inflection
      Will cringe at each hiss, puff at ovations,
      And in light looks divine heavy temptations.
25    A garter snake having easefully transgressed
      My naked left ankle, I stood as I Xed out the rest.
      One quarter's still blank; I'll try one more time.
      Perhaps my tongue-tied Amour is a mime?
      Love, the anaconda banded to the brow
30    Compresses all meditations into raw howls,
      Cancels all occupations, the well and the dour,
      And contracts imaginative maybe into definite now.
      All of the objects (the snakes, the sonnets)
      Distributed like rhymes in this Lover's Park
35    Endure the warm unlacing of the afternoon yet
      And stay in stricter order until after dark
      When darkness grants us all all the dark wishes
      No acquaintance of daylight would ever wish us.