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Wild Onions
Authored by
These poems occur within the punctuation of a pause, in the incompleteness of a phrase broken across the spine of several lines of verse. Like the tense energy of a bullwhip that gathers to a crisp crack that then echoes in the listeners ears…. HIEROGLYPHIC Delicately its stem off and shout she as before exactly she
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Assembling the Earthdark nature poems
Authored by
A victim of depression during the composition of these verses, I noticed an inability or unwillingness to assign purpose within myself-I was lax and ready to suffer unmitigated disasters with little more than a shrug and a tear. This is really a rather hopeless state of affairs-as a number of the poems outline. I remained staunchly impressed, however, with Dame Nature’s capacity to excite the recognition of meaning within myself. As meaningless and adrift as I may have been, I could not help but notice that Nature still evoked in me the wry acknowledgement of a more masterful hand in the pictures I kept seeing-both before me and within me. "No Wood to Sing Through" shows the adaptability of natural instincts and impulses. It was inspired by my observation of a catbird still thriving without its native habitat, and by my own reflection that I was seeing something meaningful-even when my depression had revoked my self as any inherent source of meaning. Something was helping meaning to survive even in the brain of someone who refused to acknowledge any meaning. Something in me wanted, at least, for meaning to survive-or, more exactly, for the expression and acknowledgement of meaning to continue happening, despite my conscious wishes. This is a form of nature’s nurturing weather-it is harsh and humbling. Can’t I be meaningless if I want to? Don’t take that shred of self- definition away from me! But, opposite of Sartre perhaps, it seems that meaning remains contiguous with essence, even when that essence wishes to exile meaning. It is this co-created weather of inner and outer that is charted in this volume of verses.
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Of flares, of flowers142 erotic sonnets
Authored by
From the Intro: This assemblage of sonnets is neither a trumpet of blind praise, nor a morose ogling of the pains of passion. It is more on the order of an exploration of the situation of love. Of being subjectively in love, and, more objectively, of loving someone besides oneself. So, there are eager rehearsals of coming joys and somber reappraisals of old impious passions both in this collection. The biographical circumstances are simply that I had an intuition that I was on the cusp of some new union with love; there was a dating service, fresh faces and swaying ladies; a kiss occurred, other details. Spring has arrived with its brash boings and raindrop doings! GGB, March 15-April 15, 2012 My other books on CreateSpace are:
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The Hummingbird’s Apprentice
Authored by
I leaned lazily against the dirty ductwork, my rump in a rumpus of dry leaves, beside me a stack of Cicero (Loeb’s ed.), Auden, some modernist trash. I looked past my tilting sneakers to see the edge of the roof of the Guggenheim Library. A mix of field and woods front leafy Cedar Ave., a terrain that cradled my college days. This is where I ate my way through french fry piles of poems, feasts of history, big burgers of science, and lemonade gulps of art. With the open sky above me, a good book beside, and a building full of poetry behind-the world was my oyster! ROADSIDE WINE Pull off 71 suddenly, onto
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Plain poems of experience, with a twist of eloquence
by
Gregg Glory
Published by
BLAST PRESS
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
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
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.
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
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
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
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.
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
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
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 !
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
Black and yellow the segmented stalks show the winds to be against them as frozen they beat on to turn the page
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
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
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!
bends and ties his shoes loop- de-loop
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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
From a basement crack at the back of the condo a suede head emerges-- an orange cat yawning
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 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
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
new sweat breaks you open so pityingly you notice it the breeze
It's interesting -- somehow so often they show up just to unhelp
one finds among the melting crystals the impartial pattern common to any work of art
make love on the usual mattress wedged between the parkinglot and the parkway
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!
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
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
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
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
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
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.
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
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
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
The old upright in the empty gym distils moonlight on its keys She played slowly eyes shut a lunar tune while I stayed
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!
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.
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! 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 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?
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?
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
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.
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?
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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!
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.
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."
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.
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.
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 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.
By Gregg Glory
Copyright © 1990 Gregg G Brown
published by
BLAST PRESS
The world must change if we but imagine it. Copernicus squinting traded in his lamps For furious mysteries; galileo tossed Aristotle out For a swinging stone, back to the turbulent sea of thought Because his ghost had no bones. What new paradigm Will rinse us shining from the misbegotten foam? Unimagined things grow real, grow real. Nietzsche knew pale Apollo well, that he Must step lightly from red Dionysus' side; Michelangelo's high man and God, that mirrored touch, Poured the raging heavens into our daily cup. What matter that before unimagined things grow real They must first condense in thought? Man's a drunkard With his dreams and will piss them to the sod. Unimagined things grow real, grow real. Aging wrong and aging right cannot Endure our scorn or enhance our thought (Morality's an old, old play, with curtains that must fall) But new worlds imagined, that body in the breech. Einstein knew that his equation unraveled no new sky ---That were indifferent--- but was a chant to change his mind. Unimagined things grow real, grow real.
Say whatever turned round in Plato's skull Or mounted Mary Magdalene's heart, St Teresa's chest, Pours quickly away; chill vapors dispersed by day. Say chance is in our substance and makes us free. Say whatever terror that holds man by the throat Is shed by accidental antidote. That St John in pan's cavern dwelt. Vast plans that had Caesar's mind for habitation Or in Hitler's bunker slept, and map by map were built, Were map by map and town by town disintegrated. Say chance whirls in what strength or thought threw out. Who knows but that chance is projected indecision, Petty habits of the mind grown great, great thoughts grown worse. What do we know of history and fate? Did Venus, Who knew Adonis' worth, imbibe his dead sperm for bitterness? What in her belly purred? What from the great legs leapt?
Was there carnage in that shot
World-leveling god begot?
Stubborn Christ born in an abandoned lot.
Old cross crows are drubbing in the dust.
Cracked heaven the dividing splinter teared,
All that riotous confusion heard
Before the roaring droplet seared.
Old cross crows are drubbing in the dust.
Did that staring infant's head
Dimly unwrapped above the stiff bed
Know what it engendered?
Old cross crows are drubbing in the dust.
Pack-animals' musty blood
Flubbed responsive where they stood,
Deep in the passionless mystery.
Old cross crows are drubbing in the dust.
And was that woman bleeding there
As in a tapestry, for the crawling god prepared?
All generation in a wound condoned.
Old cross crows are drubbing in the dust.
Did that penitential infant shriek
Climbing heaven's empty cheek
Draw ecstatic thunder down?
Old cross crows are drubbing in the dust.
Before the geese upon the water have begun their day, Before cold dawn could allay the winter's deep dream of May, Or any symbolical host fly out of the dark, as it must, The thoughtful song, drawn like yarn out of a beggar's breast, And which had illuminated pride, so weak was the world's way, Unseen ages, like the bird with the silver ball for a soul, Died dreaming in that beggar's breast, before he could awake from the dust.
I
When Twyla Tharp begins again
Her own sweet body to command,
Charm of personality or face must vanish
Into the reality of pattern.
Soldiers lined up pidgeon-toed
At the mosque, shot out their enemies' heart.
What lies still beating in the cart?
Was there passion in that slaughter?
II
There was a dream of feasting, and we fed on dreams.
Instinct in the sculptor's palsied hand
Creates where it divides, eating to the face of man
As if stone were so much rotten wood.
Although young, it seemed all dignity must be spent
On sinking love or suborned monument.
Where was the gamble if the loss lacked reality?
We were young and solemn and did what we would.
If I were the son of God And out of that grand house came Tumbling with lions On Heaven's bursting lawn, At breakneck dawn I'd race From grave to cradle again Until to a moldy house I crept And turn the last clod.
"A seed of knowing out of our ignorant fruit must drop. My pear tree, not Sartre's, rises from the wrong ground, blossoms and rots in God's green affections; memorizing Cicero all afternoon, the lagging speeches, a fist of pebbles in my mouth, shouting at the sea.... a carpet-bagging stumper after my sweet fee. We threw the golden teardrops uneaten to the hogs--- all boys and wickedness leaping Huck Finn's fence whitewashed in north Africa. The orchard door yawned on darkness as we exited, loaded down and laughing: reality in the act, not the scenery. A tentacle of happiness, not nausea, gripped me then coiling my black heart in light like an extra aorta, fibrous and alive and dangling from God's omnipresence."
The world enlarged from a shell Is stripped and standing bare, A grinding dancer on a stage, Violent with despair And sweet to look upon. Is not every lovely thing, All gauzy prettiness and hidden force veiled And held from revelation as destruction By gyring chance By delicate strings?
Because I am blind and walk agape
And beat out rough rhythm with my stick
Like the fascination of the sea
I can create, as in Yeats' dream,
Man in the soul of God
And batter out a place
Among twilit immensities
To dwell in that contempt,
Giving bitterness a face.
Stick, stick, stick, stick.
Because I am a blind old man
And came blindly howling hence
To fumble with a stick, I demand,
Passion of my decrepitude unsung,
A gallery where bright heroes hung
Stand each for that passion
That pitched them to their deaths;
And I demand it built
Behind the eye and in the heart
Of God and his burning son;
All glory in the uneaten bud.
Stick, stick, stick, stick.
I have heard on the walks and ways
That give my confession to a stone
That some with bitter inward breaths
And some in necessity of fashion
Live slave to what words have wrung
Out of man's contemptible mash
And nail to each star each part,
As if misery made flesh were all.
Stick, stick, stick, stick.
I can see because I am blind
How each tiresome human vine
In eyeless arrogance of its kind
Sprouts like a worm in its own food,
Divine soul all lumped with mud.
Each blind root heaves its back to the sun
In perilous ignorance of its own blood.
Stick, stick, stick, stick.
Although I am blind and cannot see
Bleak wreckage of the dark tide,
Rank human ecstasies and defeats,
I know what mysteries abide
And carve these rude words upon my stick:
We must feed what we beget;
Imagination shall provide
Some unsought froth as yet, rank spillage
Of the glittering sublime.
Stick, stick, stick, stick.
Because I am old and refuse my death
I have been bitter and I've been kind;
Skeletal bitterness my enmities shook,
Kindness flowed from head to foot.
But of all those wind-gaunt faces
I have worn as if strapped in the traces
I most adore the look
Of an old withered apple, its withdrawn glance,
All sweetness concentrated
To an unrelenting taste:
An old bitten rind, bitten rind.
But because I am bitter
And dislike the taste
Of joys overblown in any wind
I have come to sing in the waste
Of an old bitten rind:
"Bitten rind, bitten time,
Under stars or under sky
The right emotion of a dirty crook
Has nobleness to bless or curse,
Confirm or rescind the pledge
Made by our bodies as they lie
Under this dirty hedge."
An old bitten rind, bitten rind.
Having tasted thus
The fruit of an obscure look
Or the sharp meaning of a song
Under dull words in a book
I laugh at all awhile
And I myself forsake;
For nothing's worth the riddle
And no man's worth his wake,
I stole a blind man's fiddle
And sing what I forsake.
An old bitten rind, bitten rind.
I have nothing but am a queen:
Monstrosities sworn must heel
Forced by a hand unseen
As dog to its master's whistle wheels.
And although I am a great queen
With stars on my fingers for rings
And although I dance like a drunk
And with the seen and unseen wink
I am driven by passion to sing:
An old bitten rind, bitten rind.
We have many problems, Both violence and drouth; Plagues upon our people, Plagues stuffed in our mouths. Democracy abandons men That lack remembrance; Behind us another mountain Crowds a fresh sky. Day in, day out, All the businessmen are stout. Politicians of utopia From every gutter shout: 'Join hands against the common slope A better world will out.' The strong man has his answer To the dream of a perfect state: 'Strike him without swerving, Lay him out upon the slates!' Day in, day out, All the businessmen are stout. Arjuna on the streetcorner Sipping at his smoke Knows the daily death of friends, Knows it for no hoax. What of all that rant and hiss Will strike him as sense? What blue Krishna whisper He died before for this? Day in, day out, All the business men are stout.
We've been shooting strangers
Over waters and the wild;
But conscience is forgotten
In the tearing wind.
We stood up in battlements of dust
To cut down what would live:
"Worms and tyrants all must die---"
Nothing was as pleasure is.
Said a dark voice hid in the bush.
The mob is filled with insane joy,
The banners in the street
Hang from pole and lamppost
Hang ripe like butchered meat.
What happiness or bliss is there
In conversing with a face
Uncle Sam has painted blank
For every circumstance?
Said a dark voice hid in the bush.
In a folded tent there's room
For filching treachery;
Standing near, the slaughter done
We'll collect an oiled fee.
Dead men lie face down in bed,
A hole in every spine;
How goes the empire's rate
When we to cowardice decline?
Said a dark voice hid in the bush.
What if great washington lived,
That stern face breathing near,
What thoughtless sentence then
Transform to pleas our cheers?
Nothing was as pleasure is,
And God's a neglected child;
We've been shooting strangers
Over waters in the wild.
Said a dark voice hid in the bush.
"Wheeled cradled, blank-faced and blue-brained to the hospital chapel, I watch the ivory pastor's hands trace shadow rabbits in the air under the florescent cross and list my sins in silence as he drones redemption; maybe St. Peter will greet me in heaven with a new guitar. Something babbles into static as my stroked-out arm relaxes... A tumor dripping ink now fills my mind, a black bud swelling to blood-blossom, ready to costume me in blood--- Stalking back from the guillotine like a 50s zombie blitzed on my first part in the Bs, I wake socketed in the nMR chamber like a bullet waiting for the green light to flit my diagnosis on the big screen, the chart a map of Europe. I lay enlarged; drugged and irradiated like a fallen fruit. I still laugh when I hear a democrat's ill. I was worse: my perennial, emboldened humor ramping like a bull, I crooned Dukakis is bald from my black marshall stacks for the innocent fetuses at the Republican convention, dating Miss America still.... I'm sorry I kicked his Greek hynee. Sorry for all that."
Not the politician in his coterie Surmounting an elaborate chair--- A simple, elegant glass Choked in his unconscious fist, Nor revolutionary lunatic Standing tip-toe on the quay To out-face the beating sea (And has not the courage To stand half at ease) Has a fanatic eye Or golden stomach enough To sweat out the divine Night after night, or lick From all this tragic human stuff Some shrinking taste Of the glittering sublime.
The cardinal his scarlet vigil keeps That had no sin but singing; How much more should we march in grief That have said and done such things? The azalea extends its wild branch Against a wild sky; nearby Some libertarian pamphlet flaps Ignored by some more sodden door. A child is singing in the bright march air Some tune his father sung--- Abstracted with the politics Of that disastrous, forgotten war. "The soldier will soon be waking That fed on dreams before; A man kills a man that killed; All happens as before."
An azalea climbed up Into a silver cup, And blossoming died While the bee had sup.
Toiling in dawn's orange forge I hammer at the gorge Of silent kings and laughless queens. They come to me for pretty things, Pretty things; I have imagination's means. But the farther that I thrust That art I cannot trust Into the aching spirit's pyre The more my hand is burnt and hurt By earthly fires.
They study at a school Where waves are crest on crest, The fish half in the air As if the highest were the best. But every brooding oyster knows And every whale that spouts That although their high heaven glows Its because the water has run out.
Virtuous beggars into cold dawn swarm To chill their heated flanks. How do I know that they were warm? They had no stitch of clothing on.
So I might suffer without fail the vengeance of leaves
Crumbling, vein by vein, to the docks of autumn's dust
And burn again in a rasping year
My fled blood
Both woke and broke
Flood and voice over the sea-turning town.
So that the wail of the crickets might knock and enter
Each sad shadow passage of the pulse
I woke
Burning in the shining rivers that skip out of sight.
In the helping hurt of the one-armed weather
Flinging hailstones and adders
Down the ocean-thieving tunnel of the sky
Against this head
I swore all summer dumb
While the ministering crickets in the booming grass
Chanted phylums of my blood about to be said
And I stood in the summer's drum
Surrounded
By the roaring going of the year.
Ignorant of thistlery we walked in our mystery
Arm in arm like the burning boughs
Friends against death in the summer's long breath,
And like the sun we sauntered
Drunk and wandered
Through the closed book of the heart;
And I was sky and sunlight in the chapters of the grass.
And understanding
I sang:
Oceans in acorns my strumming mermaids are.
What has life's bitter disappointment brought Laid in a narrow, breathless bed? Shall we curse all our drunken, muddy lot Lain with long bones of the dead? At the end of a rifle or parting stream Pursued by a pursuing dream Man wakes up to find his enemies again, The end of dreams, and all friends dead. What stays hid in the marrow there, Thrust deep underground? Things purposed in the unpurposed air Die when those men are dead. Whether father or brother still pursue Their work, or others' work, I do not know; I read it on a narrow, upright stone Cast by the long bones of the dead. Fathers sacrifice long-loving sons To a nameless, breathless bed; Stand we under an island sun Or lie with long bones of the dead?
I desire to cast desire away, Having all that blamed respect Due my old age, hurled burning away Until I into the naked grass have crept. I recall how some sage hermit spoke, Under his mountain drift lodged alone, Of how all changing waters must Whirl up to the stone. But I am wrecked by discourse Of the sacred and profane; All love draws back to its source, Dry enmities remain.
Stand again at the old well-lip As one half-sleeping might And drop a stone among those images That lay hid in the night. When still a boy at the water's edge Cold with terror at the dark, The light was like a fish's hide That floated back to me. And drop a stone among those images That lay hid in the night. What has escaped the breath In hated words or curses, now rescind And let an older beneficence begin; Call that harshness in. When driven to that edge of speech The tongue half out of the head Recall what purpose pleased you best When time had not yet begun. And drop a stone among those images That lay hid in the night. At gasping dawn a boy again Swears all breaking light's a game And climbs before the mounting sky To catch a dreaming fish While the water's high. So sound out the plummet-depth With some stray rock or cocked ear do it Or hearth-stone out of pocket; But drop a stone among those images That lay hid in the night.
Deep dew fallen on the secret rose; Closed eyes open that cry again. Nothing here to bind the heart close; No bloom can I cut for the mist of pain. Cushioned grass beneath me, the pine my cloak, The wind a whispering skirt; The water waits emptily for an empty boat, The naked road for a coach as a shirt. A little girl is singing In the waiting evening: "I ride a grand coach With red lacquered sides; Without shoe or broach My love on a dark horse sighs. "Where are true lovers' hearts Bound and wound? Beneath the cypress, on West Mound, Beneath the brooding ground." Cold blue a candle flames, Straining its frail light; On the West Mound, rain Forced by the wind in the night. Deep dew fallen on the secret rose; Closed eyes open that cry again. Nothing here to bind the heart close; No bloom can I cut for the mist of pain.
What ache first calls us from rest, Bids us rise and dress As if all were solemn consequence? The mind that ages in its fears, Grows tired, rants and tears, As if every thought were sense? Until heart and soul and all Are beaten out of gold, No dying triumph's made. Until eye and mind first sprout Golden tenderness, there is nothing out That cannot fade.
Now that she is no longer young There is less of her In the measures of the birds; The partridges give voice Less sweetly, and the rose Grips more blackly the earth Now that she is no longer young. Now that she is no longer young Do new ships and unfinished men walk lost, The crippled dog mew at its wounds, And the sun go sick to bed each night? Does her pleading face fade away From its passion like this age Now that she is no longer young? I do not know because I am blind To crudities of the compass point Or the minor perihelions of the sun. Enzymes of their medicines cannot chart The chemic regions of her skies; The needle on the encephalograph Shakes no glory from her eye.
In zero air By the jaguars caged in their griefs And landrovers digging up bones in the park, Dirt salts the dime-hole of her going. By liquid cats, Emptied of minutes and prayers in the waking zoo, Both half animal and man in my shambling frame I pace to praise the honored hour of her death. Her grave grows hair And gravel marks the shadow where I walk, Freezing among moonbeams, while the icicles' stalks Rise from eye to eye in the blizzard's blast. Now how unsound By the gold-honoured straws of dawn unbound And looped from the walking category of sorrow By a drake's water-shilled beak do I stand and cry?
When my voice is a troubled cup Who'll know my face? My wounds then sew up My scolding done? What lover listen To what I say? Clean bones glisten Under rank decay.
I've watched the swan withdraw To the sky's timid zone; And out of that sweet ether Fashion a dying call. I know not whether, My time being sprung, I shall endure together To sing that last song.
These gifts' attendance now allay And renew these broken eyes with day. What picture in the mind can make me rail, Now so out of love to overwhelm? Can one so old still declaim and rage, Let passion's mask drop or burn a stage?
There, amid the wrong middle of this wood, Where God himself must stand and choose Or find himself unable, caught between good and good, Sweet songs that rise from the geese in the dawn And travel without a quaver in the air Until they alight on some rich man's crowded lawn Or empty lot abandoned by all but the wind's stir Some ancient, contemptuous king or passionate Poverty-stricken man cries out his heart And lays his head bare in the miserable dust In eternal revelation of his time-bound character Before the bawdy wind can close the gate.
He cried to the sun to be no more A part of his burning misery. He cried to the brooding owl "No more Shake down your bony glance, your fingering looks That alter my heart's procession and my blood's course." And he cried to the moon, the scolding moon, "No more the tripwire of my conscience be Threading your silver circuit through eternity; Climb down, climb down from your bald perch: Come taste the blood shreds on the ground."
Now I am old In body and bone My stone muse sings Proud and alone. But when I was young My muses stood Medusa-struck And drained of blood. Neither face nor body danced On the barren grass Of the white seashore, All their stony terror glued in a glance. All that I had planned And placed apart In the sacred mysteries of the heart Sunk like a stone in the lost sea. All the beautiful pride of her speech That had seemed, so far above death was it flung, The haughty original of chance Closed in dark colloquy and muddied breath.
Patched out of forgotten things Old clothes and old stories and old grey rugs I have sewn my sable wings And soar where solemn things are bugs. But perhaps where blood falls From the human heart And wall gives on to wall Is the right altitude for art.
The climbing rose upon the tree Is symbol enough for me; That chaliced eye weeping blood, Proponent of diviner love. All the glory my old age needs A fisher-girl provides. What care I if angels, angels shove? Love's a lump of sodden clay. I am content with what I can catch And let the others pass. Old hearts and broken kettles sigh, Love's a sodden lump of clay. What care I for the spite of time That makes the humble bite their tongues Or loftier spirits trudge Through burning lime? The climbing rose upon the tree Is symbol enough for me.
And there was one Had taken up a song Could not put it down again, His heart had been harrowed So deeply and so long. And there was one Had a fine frenzy in his eye And leapt from blazing hillock to hillock In his mind, his imagination striding Dionysian, above the plains. And was there one Renewed all anguish in a thought Or with his burning blood made all the causes stop? His heart had meditated silence So deeply and so long.
On undemanding ground Shot through with hollow sounds Bird or bullet make Or some other keen cry, I take This man for model, though in truth A small man of the town; and although His grandfather was a thief And his father worse than that, I respect his grief, for what else can I That wander in the clay? There was a man had died Frozen to the mountainside And, nothing in his climbing pack And less upon his withered back, He ascended the wintry peak Sang a rich bar tune and died. It was out of pride The old man had died. He gripped a flute, knew God's great lie, And had a clarity in the eye. And at the last, a damned wretched gaiety Suffused his frame. Mountain echo upon echo Hollowed out his fame; Dying, trying once again To empty himself of troubles by the score-- "This joy of death Stops the breath." In the trees, excited laughter; And after, the silence.
"Capacious imagination's faces fete my famishing, take tea from a voice, a ghostly pour of steam rising and soliloquizing, misting the thirsty features drowned in their own pool of too-deep selfknowing. Unhandsome Hawthorne, with a vibrant lie and victorian necktie, I guess my susurrations linger over trashed vowels, marked harmonies giving my fine Irene her double edge of softness; how, sometimes, the right face can mean salvation! Howled down at the Imperial for my tea-tragedy last night, too cinnamon-delicate for the masses' meat, I know how our bodies will meld before our minds vanish.... Driving like a marathoner out of London into the foggy future, the lifted Dover cliffs swelling the meridian and loving my new auto's purring reach into the nebulous, I watch for constellations past the turning wheel while the shaky rearview mirror gives an intruding look."
The sky is blue. The blue man in the blue sky is blue. There will never be a stop to the monotony In all this abiding blue. The undulations in Uruguay Affect the meditations Of Mrs Rhinoceros Eating her ferina in highest fashion. Macabre puppets of Anaxamander Hanging lank in the spindled air Interrupt the impecunious questionings Of Peter asleep among the dorm's susurrations. Dripping dreams of doubters on the rocks, Their drub drub drub in blackest drams, Falling among rocks Scatters cats in Tulsa, Oklahoma. And never in Atlantic city O Never in Atlantic city Will there ever be a stop to the monotony In all this abiding blue.
Jefferson and washington, and all those famous men That out of obscurity came, and were on enlightenment bent As on some perfect woman's face, and had such holy measures In their drums, out of what dark hole began? Where had all that purposeless glory come? O, man's a thief of glory, and steals it from himself. Past turbulent lands and frenzied watercourse Man finds but broken solitude, finds his own soul hidden there, Gasps at his luck, summons all his wayward heart to swear To keep it sacred; and then, lonely with his own audacity, Perjures himself in the first company he meets. O, man's a thief of glory, and steals it from himself. Caravaggio's painted flank that struck God in a horse Shimmering, floating there, radiant sky made flesh Above the tumbled saint who crawled in dust away And in that abject departure made his prayer. What besides his human hand had put it there? O, man's a thief of glory, and steals it from himself.
Perfumed Lavosier sniffed A new world in, sighed a new one out. Caravaggio's rearing horse proclaimed Modern divinity. Peter Seller's gardener lost Compounded man and holy host. The Giant in the cradle Some sweet sanctity retains.
Some with horse-gestures and spiritual breath, A fine noble neck that will not bend; A fiery eye; talk that did not fade. Alteration upon alteration given No approving stamp, but in the house fine things Are kept. All is done as was done before. Those few by right of rank By every right that nature knows, That contain such ancestry and grace, Noble pause in speech and haughty face That in manor-house or tenement the tradition's kept; All remembered gaiety and high shows. Enmities mended that would wreck the worst; Beautiful things; beautiful books among the plates; A bell that calls the spirit home. All words a ritual word or look, or some Action presaged in story or high song. All is done as was done before.
Some say heaven is a rest, Bright clouds can close out light; But I differ with that crowd And contend my midnight's best. All men are dust and must pluck their theme From passing circumstance--- All that agony but a dying dream Unless it make a farmhand dance. The dervish and his spinning lash, His tongue twisted in trance, Repeats his antic rant before God's whirling face. Loveliness unbridled bore No such look as that; When heaven claps its bony wings Individuation is forgot. But unpopulated heaven, Bare sky among blank fronds, Floods my rebel keel from even--- Sudden with intemperate blood. Robbed of vision I can feel No palpable delight, But stark hands that catch at escaping heels Clasping in the night.
Once manservant and now no king Since she the served and sweeping blast Has hurdled death's ribbed gates again, slipped past The soft portals opening and entered The severed countries of the twanging grass. All ants and minotaurs, and each graved thing Is of its wicked pulse ice emperor Under green stars flying backwards and the foreshortened blast Of horse-headed winds that neigh each eye shut Loping its crooked trot to dark. Once queen in the skyey seconds of my breath With no pale maids attending, and now A girl with a hollow where her breasts had been I crawl into the hours of my grief, and lie In the rose lacquer of her lying-down breath. Once haunted god by the ramshackle barn Caved in centuries of twilight and worsted rust I rummage the windings of this moment's moss Bite the sands of our last hidden kiss And breathe all ways at once your lost breath.
“Tiou, tiou, tiou, tiou- Spe, tiou, squa- tio, tio, tio, tio, tio, tio, tio, tix- Coutio, coutio, coutio, coutio- Squo, squo, squo, squo- Tzu, tzu, tzu, tzu, tzu, tzu, tzu, tzu, tzi- Corror, tiou, squa, pipiqui- Zozozozozozozozozozo-zozo, zirrhading- Tsissisi, tsissisisisisisisis- Dzoree, dzoree, dzoree, tzatu, dzi- Dlo, dlo, dlo, dio, dlo, dlo, dlo, dlo, dlo- Quio, trrrrrrrrrrr- Lu, lu, lu, lu, ly, ly, ly, ly, lie, lie, lie, lie- Quido didl h lulyfie- Hagurr, gurr, quipio- Coui, coui, coui, couri, qui, qui, qui, gai, gui, gui, gui- Goll, goll, goll, goll guia hadadoi- Conigui, horr, ha dia diadill si- Hezezezezezezezezezezezezezezezeze couar ho dze hoi- Quia, quia, quia, quia, quia, quia, quia, quia, ti Ki, ki, ki, io, io, io, ioioioio ki- Lu ly h le lai la leu lo, didl io, quia- Kigaigaigaigaigaigaigai guiagaigaigai couior dzio dzio pi.”
~~transcription of a Nightingale’s song made by a French Composer
Gregg Glory
Published by BLAST PRESS
Petal falling followed falling petal Till all apple trees held was sky above; Such a burst of sweetness discharged from air Put mind out of reckoning for its cares. We walked laughing through the snowing grove Whirling the fallen in splashes back up, Widening soft confusions in our wake, Chapleted in blossoms that all spring throve, Like trees ourselves glowing with tree-petals.-- Earth and air to a fantastic whiteness blown, Shining as puddles from yesterday's shower. Yet trees, for all their loss, did not look to be sad. To rely on having is to be had. New leaves yattering new green to new leaves Talked for all the world about the breeze, As if blossoms had kept them quieted as snow And, having shaken off their winter calm to play, They did not know what to say or know And so said everything in a single day. Evening found them standing solemn with the stars Thinking how little they were themselves Beneath bright things hung up so far. Starlight cast down starlight like sky decayed. All the night orchard stood restored to blaze As if no single petal of them all Had suffered earthward a single fall.
Trees that have it in them to be a wood Gather dark thoughts where bare hilltop stood. Branch to branch entreats, and root goes out to root Entangling dirt with movement deliberate As worms, and mix their living sinews With cold dead earth, its coldness to renew And above the burning hilltop bring A shadowy wing never alighting. Starless night hovers where noon once reigned And exiles grass, and laughing feet detains With extricating minuets of wait And then pass on,-- a guardless garden gate Forever shuddering in the wind trees keep, Murmuring night-long while the world's asleep.
A pony came whose coat was black as pitch, Whose blood was broody as water in a ditch. Her eyes were saucers of red command, Her teeth grew square on the taste of hands. Wildflowers grew more wild at her passing scent; Like nerves through skin she raced where she went. There was more than strangeness in what made her so. There was more of night in her hooves than men know. Proud, unobeying breed of tameless hills, Storm of strength with a godless guideless will. What light burned behind her being may Not have been heaven sent, but burned to stay. An inner star served as her only lamp: None took her, none kept her, none triumphed.
The old quarry's flooded echo came back To him almost exact, but left a blunted blank For song, a lack of deadened cold echo In so much dank; the quarry air was too Soft and queer to sough a song out right,-- Yet still the listening stone, it seemed, white, uptilted, Knew that song might be meant, to judge by crevice And shadowed device and looks that meant no peace Nor gave advice beyond the dusty tans Rained down on singing man. One saw then, The quarry was all quivered walls and rocks A mocking water swallowed at the bottom. It resembled nothing so much as a tomb. Man's voice rolled all against the abandoned lot, Echoing himself his repeated tune again Like nothing else in nature that to voice pretends; He was his own superior echo then While song pursued its end as if never begun, And time dilated some in jarring after-echo, Or made itself felt as one,-- as dark burns on in coal While fire unfolds fire. Here, some soft after-noise (As in the mare the moaning foal) made some alloy, Forging voice and form alive in the willful quarry To totter and rejoice alone where dead water stayed, -A second singing voice came from bland clay, And was heard some way. It seemed, for once, The offence of voice had persuaded voice To once not stay remanded in veined marble But grace half-garbled, but half-audible, The silent singer's startled ear, and speak Some talk of the theme he'd followed half-awake Into the choked dark of the watery quarry. What he caught of what came back made him wary. "I won't be sorry. I won't, I won't--" He straightened up half-sighing, as if he'd meant Never to hear his own want in song he'd given All his graven morning to, and that, if spent above, Would have vanished less riven into eve Than the grave day that the quarry gave.
Liberty has two edges still, One to keep free, one to kill.
Clear-headed time at a touch Shows all too much. The resentful body grows old; Youth and strength have gone Disgraced from the stage. Vague as a notion, The room swims into view; Dawn stutters into motion. Time has done to you Things time shouldn't do. An old man stares out From an oval steel mirror, Your face in one clout The face of a stranger: Cataract-eyed, his blind Grip gone round a razor.
Bright beyond belief the morning sun Presents a double blazing image Above the sink, bewitching just enough of dawn For me to throw both windows back in homage. I went forgetful about my round of chores, Touching openness neither less nor more Than I was bid by my round of chores. Sunset had sun exit as it had come, In doubled glory. A thrush burst out at once Loudly loud, as if woods and house were one And eaves leaves.-- And thank, yes, forever thank Such song for how it came and its coming in To wake indoor woods beside my sink. Thank thrush for landing home in homing in.
The upper pasture gate creaked padlocked. A wading lantern to show the latch Flared where invisible things attach, Carrying light snatched up for open use To home a tricky key and save a curse. To burn out opposing night and burn day back, And give dark description where words must lack, Light's concern was kept narrow as the lock. At a click, light soon waded on to earthy dark,-- Swung wondering in a guideless hand Familiar with the black of pasture lands; Sudden cow or knoll indifferently stood stark. I followed from below as I was, restless To see how aimless light in darkness does.
At an unsteering speed of stoppage, Detourned from straight tracks and wages Into a listless field gone over Mostly to pale thick-blossomed clover, A boxcar keeps still its steel rails Going both ends nowhere in parallel. At the blackness of the door A bandit gathers gold once more, Pulling yellow raspberries From some single spray above the weeds, Reaching the rarewire richness With nimble hands and quickness, Palming sunset tears from thorns; The racoon drinks them one by one. Nothing comes to the rusted hitch Clawing air above a gopher ditch, No iron hand arrives to steer And with knuckled coupling make a pair, To clasp its open mate from the clearing Into a sky of tear-streaked stars Where time would hoist a husky boxcar From its slatted stall and decay To paradise, all the way. Yet in the eye of a ruffed robin, On her hopeful nestful throned within Where the red roof caves in From leakage and mineral rain, Glints a hint of levitation-- In her high eye alone it seems A flying boxcar bursts with wings Like eyelashes; below it, everything Lies amiably disordered, Earthbound and solemnly sordid, While heavenly visitors to her nest Feed her safe chicks, and she rests. So much of vision came to eye, and awed. A unpersuaded caw cawed From the litter of the field The hunching crow refused to yield, A black bold spot that picked for trash In weeds gone bright to whiteness. Now only time, for what it's worth Flying still on its changeful path, Turns the structure in its soft clutch Like a moody sleeper back to earth.
Where a single steeple keeps the sky And a scribbled wet of charcoal darks Laps lapsing to meet the day, --Crosshatched by wind's artistic lark,-- Monday quiet's come, as quiet may Upon one meditation-taken; After-silence serves some way For all the echo left the lake. The boathouse goes down to dock On knees of battered pilings. Suppliant to greet common rock, The dock goes flat as filings. Astute, the musing rock Lets the mirror water watch What it has mind enough to mock:-- Searchers who seek a latch. There is no back or access side To such a thing that is all is; And if you say inside, And take inside out to see what 'tis, I'll say, 'tis better far to glide Whatever offered surfaces And decode what pleasure there resides In such interstices Than creep through dark, however wide The open crosshatch seems or is, To pull apart, to peer at tides Whose motives are their business,-- And trouble them enough alive To wash our prayers with their sighs.
I longed for something something like too long. My ablest eyes had two ears of seems-- Each tree I heard, I heard shake some human song; Two eyes never looked but I saw two stars along, No weather raved but trailed some inner storm. My analogizing mind knew but what it deemed. Nothing brought what it had meant to bring, No shape manifest but in related form. Of what I'd been gifted I got nothing, no thing. Alone in life's simulacrum I saw or heard Less than one third of every third's third. All my blessings blessed transformed. Ready at last to be, no matter being's marr, I'm satisfied with sighing is and are.
Like the flower near at hand I grow Upwards by light into all I know; Buried in ignorant dirt by a downward thumb I bend dumb beneath rain into what may come. Like a flower in summer now I grow tall, Concentrate a seed out of all I've been, Put half my something into that seed to fall, Drop it unseen on wide ground, and then Name that something put my all. Is that something put experience gathered in? Or is ignorance all when any all begins? My ignorance decides me-- I cannot tell What seed, in growing there, may yet become Besides new ignorance beneath the sun.
My breast is a burning anvil Cannot hammer a likely shoe Stern enough to trace unglued A racing lifetime through and through. My breast is a burning anvil Full of causal smokes and coughs, More than youth at times had thought, Between hammer and anvil caught. My breast is a burning anvil That sparks with the loss of heat When edge and edge, hard and hard, compete To shape each and each to mate. My breast is a burning anvil Cannot cease to pause or cool,-- As industrious, dedicate a tool As any I'd forgot I forged. My breast is a burning anvil Full of tragic din and error As any beating thing that mirrors The hotness of my terror. My breast is a burning anvil Cannot pound out a likely star As real as evening's first clear At whose clarity I stare.
Something about where the pebbled path in day Splits, or in evening even trines, Makes me wonder about the purpose of the way. How many must have used their footsteps just to come, And in coming here pass on in time, As if all wheres we go are comparable to when. And yet, time's a path more linearly ordered, One whose steps will not divide, No matter at what shady banks or grasses we loiter-- We may not, cannot, no matter how tried, Reverse the going flow, or, breaking it, abide.
How small a snapshot lies in hand That held such grandness in its lens. A perspective granted only once and when. What we see of what is just depends. Bounded by a regular white of lack, I look at the detailed littleness; A thumb occludes a mountain in the west Like a painter perhapsing a sketch on scrap. Snapped charm of vistas that had turned my head, Develops charms of Time new-enlisted To re-focus a moment visited. Out of the frame winces one of my dead; I turn the flat for date, and recognize How loss and tears consume what's snapped by eyes.
A spider, web, and alderberry bush Arranged December in a quiet crèche; The spider's stitching straw was soft and fine As anything that ties us to the divine; An afternoon of hidden breaths condensed, Strung with dew as if of dew composed, A blazing cobweb out of cold mist-- Dew-prism looked on prism, all in all, And saw summer's wonder from before the Fall Until every thread of light was put out by the loss Of sun. Twilit dews sparkled into frost. Each gentle juncture hardened to a cross. Stiff additions of still more strength and grace To dropleted water, by increments erased Weave's living give and left a stony place To which the chapel spider was not accustomed. A rigid web in an alderberry niche, Still and silver as a collection dish. From her holy central belly it spiraled out,-- A frozen wheel or prayer-mat to invite Chilly fervors of the not-yet devout. You couldn't think such religion altruistic, And could only thank it if a mystic And believed all troubled birth a pause Between our cyclings back to Cause. The spider didn't think it mercy, that's certain. She rushed behind her tautened curtain To lay a landed fly into her winter stock And knit the praying fly a little silver lock That has only a mystic key. She sought to bead a new dew to see, Since day had gone blinded down to night, And one more dark into her web was caught. But even a spider with her sticky tricks Can find occasion to make a slip On such transparency gone slick; The icy wire and her dainty claw-tip Met without resistance, though her weight was there, And that gave a tumbled feeling of unfair And brought spider slipping past the fly Who looked at her with all of his eyes, Gave an inch leap, and was gone. The diamond web with ice was diamonded. The spider threw a line to save her pride And back toward the frozen center slid. She poised unpleased, ready for dark dispatch,-- A philosopher at a damaged treasure-latch, Meditating what Fate might have brought In the richness of the fly near-caught, And then what wealth of blood denied, The treasure chest a blank inside. Perhaps the spider, if she had tried, Might have persuaded the praying fly He'd be in for blessings if he died. (Too bad he'd already taken off on his Aerodynamic errand or business.) Wheels within wheels and layer upon layer. Death would rank him up a rung, Nearer You and I as human beings -- Or two rungs up. Yes. To convince the buyer, Persuades more than a hundred prayers, Thought this spider to herself, cool and sly. But there was no nimble buzzer skating by To heed the sales-pitch of the spider, Save those flies already saved inside her. With eight great eyes and eight great arms, And well-equipped to deal out harm, She resumed half-folded her coldly central position As ready for Fate as anyone Defeat had bruised and brought Hungrier for what she had not caught.
It's been a well-worn Year since my iris has gone Whose dark-headed heightened grace Had tripleted heart's pace And made the threatening waters Irradiate the lighter For her being something darker. She brought her blue-black laughter Like an aftereffect of thunder When lightning rare as wonder Makes a landscape dark as murder By its too-much light, and, lighter, Touches earth and sky together. Now the garden, disused and mossed, Grieves green, and I am lost As rain that runs away, As a thought that will not stay, Or childhood song that refuses to play. My iris in her wonted place, Sensed through broken mist and lace, In tree-shadows lifts her face.-- I see her here returned, Nor may I this wish unlearn As long as dew in dawn's-light burns; Every shady curl of worth That my flower had leased from earth In sable richness reappears, Full of rampant ribbon-shapes, Taking all of root and stalk To reach to light, and, silent, talk.
I come to stare at leaves as deep as snow, That have sent the roots to sea, that know A restlessness I, restless, know. I come to stare at leaves as deep as snow. I turn the rake, send tines upended Not to use as I intended But to lean and stare as if deep in snow And hear the restless things I know: Too many things put aside or shunted That had been centered when I started, Too many things a life must ask us,-- So quick a quiet moment will unmask us. A moment's thought, and all disguise Resolves itself into surprise; A moment more of wonder, even more, And ignorance the disguise restores. Leaves unsheltered by the coming wind Rub the half-bare trees where they began; They move as they would there once again Climb to be leaves returned by wind. Deep behind the mask, a whisper knows There's an old hole of light to show Just where we've come, and yet may go, Among restless leaves as deep as snow.
My conscience is grass surrounding every side Whispering, whispering. No help, no guide. When I at last lie down, it will lie by my side, Never saying do or go, but only: be, abide.
I passed a knoll and passed it every day Along the same soft deserted loam Until a track as bare as bone Followed along my way. It was in its going I saw it first: Narrow willows in a lovely copse Where the wounded woodsman lops The last to lay with the first. I had not noted the knot of wood, Or taken the view to do myself good-- Although the fresh-cut white of the willow-ends Made some temporary amends. [Versioned from Edward Thomas' "First Known When Lost"]
Build the storm-brought wood till its right to burn --A civilization, an amended word; Completion and destruction turn A dead-end rhyme as mated words. The long matchstick cracks, a broken finger, A wail to salt the self-subsuming wood; --As if no injury could make ginger Our conscience to aid the good. I know myself, and play my hand Shadowless in the flame and briny fire Until a new pink hurt like stinging sand Bids hand withdraw, and I perspire.
All our hours vacillate Like summer clouds gone sliding by Clotted, vein-veiled and late, Froward or deadly shy Apparitions of the empty, The essentially empty sky, To dissipate in an hour's downpour. All our hours, all our hours. Our most famous nimbus And more hallowed halo are Our only blessings, bare and lent By God, devil, or doubtful goal In dance of dread amusement. Each day we eat and ache, Something dark for its own sake Laughs at our glittering fate; We tend our hours like a wish, Alone but for some softer guess-- Our heart-happiness uncertain As divinity's parted curtain. What remains of marvel here Of all that drifts to dust Beneath a sky irremediably clear Is the irascible particular; The him of him, the her of her. Listen to the wind and to me-- Let lending lend in leniency An open, ageless, real reprieve (In which unsafe hearts may yet believe) To all our human tenancy Defined by that proscenium Under which we're born and moan Full of voice and softness, Full of whispers and of curses. With the individual soul, --With that and that alone,-- Wherever soaring moves above Or going goes in having went, Be thou communicant. And this as well I wish and say To one and all or the all-in-one: Touch whatever in touching comes, And, -brave beyond what may be saved By what such touching has engraved,-- Never one instant's kissing shun.
[sonnet version] Once upon a time, I had bruised slightly My Fing- Erend in ty- Ing Unneedful knots too brutally. The knots were sonnets, rhy- Ming Not gracefully, Losing Bout by Bout despite my Careful tying. I had not thought writing Was so much like fighting. I stay- Ed at it relentlessly Tying tying tying Every Musing, Bruising blossom stylistically. The daisy- Chain was for no one particularly (Or perhaps I am lying). You know how things Get tangly When we practice firstly.... The leng- Thening String Of words got too stringy And self-involved in singing That should have taken flight more singly By Whistling Unconcernedly And not too self-consciously.
[sonnet format] Once upon a time, I had bruised slightly My fingerend in tying unneedful knots Too brutally. The knots were sonnets, Rhyming not gracefully, losing bout by bout Despite my careful tying. I had not Thought writing was so much like fighting. I stayed at it relentlessly tying tying tying Every musing, bruising blossom stylistically. The daisy-chain was for no one particularly (Or perhaps I am lying). You know how things get tangly When we practice firstly.... The lengthening string Of words got too stringy and self-involved in singing That should have taken flight more singly by whistling Unconcernedly and not too self-consciously.
It was summer's atmosphere of doubt, I said, made me uncertain what I was about; Earth was warm and sure, I was not. I made myself feel the closeness of the crypt. To be by so much richness troubled When wavery air gave me me myself doubled In the very nothingness I breathed and stumbled Was to curse a wealth of gifts assembled. I did not have what I had wished; Nothing did as I did insist. Summer's ripeness came to a million ifs, I had nothing but summer's million gifts. All the lauded grace of giving was Time's; All grace crowded close as living rhymes.
Who incised this river here by writing hard Forgot to leave with wetted alphabet The charm of a cipher. The river rambles on, Until caught up by the roots that shade My going on in woods, although my coming here Where river spells and spills into hard wood Was open plain enough. And that's another kind Of hard-to-see from too much looking: Field and sky-- at night, earth-dark and stars-- Flat each to each like paired mirrors with Nothing caught between. So I'd crawled here Morning long, the weather hugger-mugger nothing And the fields off-rotation for bearing crops, And, so, lively with wildflower wilderness' Play-day maybe and beginning mischief Of sorting out itself without the help of hands. I thought, once, coming this way years back On a similar sort of errandless errand, I had caught, once, some evidence of pride Running through the wild wood gone half-back From cultivation to dark unplowed bewilderment. I saw a line as straight as a forearm Run a hundred yards between two equal Tangles of trees-- fair straight-- the way A stick will write out a line and raise a rim In level leaf-mold chewed even by the time. All this before a hidden storm the weather folk Had laid odds against, and, so, I had dismissed. And then a thinnest silver filter fell And brought already damp woods as wet.... And I stood in the turn of atmosphere As sunset brought a gold to all the air, Infecting silver with light's last despair, The way a fever brightens sickness to a shine In eyes and cheeks, and brows grow dewed With inner causes. I stood thus and wiped my face, Interested to see such simple changefulness, And not knowing why I displayed such interest, Nor indeed why I had such interest to gift To new wilderness come up since man had left. But, slowly, as winter eaves will gather ice, This line fallen before my feet, uncrossed, Became a trough for an element not itself, And rose cupping changeful water until dark, And past dark, myself become as sodden As my coat, my hands gone home to pockets Like squirrels asleep in leaves,-- until overfull Of rain and moonlight. The line laid out A silver bar, shining from end to end Like some fresh first cuneiform stroke in clay; You know how clarity can come on after storm, No matter how minor the stirrings warned. But I wondered, as I would. I wondered anyway. What had taught the line to be, when clouds Cleared away to re-present the moon to me? What straightness lay here inherited? Nothing came to drink of what had swollen, A revelation strange as rain that'd left it To puzzle one who seeks for things in things And wants to know just what to tell himself, Forgetting weather's made by being out in rain.
There is no learning but to yearn and yearn, And by wanting see what we think we are (Composed of stuff from a farther star).-- Desire deep-in to recklessly burn; Desire to assemble what all we are By partial parts into one whole complete; To work out the sum where integers meet And write an answer without a scar, Without a stitch where kissing incompletes Tell-out by telltale the nightly labor Used to unify our dawning wonder That recklessly burns with day's own heat-- Until our in-dark echo cries for night, Cool and apart, and all away from sight.
I'd thought life without Love no life at all, And my life like a parachutist's fall Had readied-up with a silken snarl And without a parachutist's safety-pull. I was dead-ready to meet the all-in-all; I had all needed: gravity and a fool. My heart never mistrusted God was cruel. On my way down to clouds, through clouds to clods, I thought how the silk weight on my belly pulled, How silk and air stretched tight would make a shroud, And what an act, inordinate and proud, Living on would be -just as if allowed-- Before the cruel throne and crowded face of God, My life one long fall as if dead and mourned.
I did not know how clouds could crowd The weathered Earth by blowing round, Or drop deep shadows by their light, Too much lightness in sun's too much light. 'Til one day their dark put me dark-- Crowded me out by high-shadowed marks From old communion with the sun; Daily now my darkness comes. I, who had been a burning cloud, Now in noon-night perform my rounds. Were I to shred their silver dark, New light would blind by being stark.
The wandering mind that wanders far and late And wanders where from causal clouds the lightning breaks And rivers thunder from blank riven air Unhouseled by light. The mind is there. Deep and deeplier, into the most low lightless grotto The mind pursues its darkness unaware Of how it does increase the dark it brings and bares Where still the shark sleeps. The mind is there. Out beyond this room, beyond the moon, beyond, beyond, Behind the seeping dark that inhearses every darting star, Beyond pale planets, back beyond where shooken concepts jar And Time is dead. The mind is there.
A snake Takes The yard and Garden, Sways As haze Does; Buzz Of bees In leaves Insist He list And cease His Hiss. They sing Of Spring, The beautiful, Mutable And mutual Goal Being Is bringing To yard and Garden. The snake Takes The song-- Gone As one Flash Through slashing Stale grass; Returns With burn Sounds Round The garden Fountain Curl- S asleep and full.
The wind that tenses in the hollow And re-weaves what grass I kick, Goes over my length for pillow, Weary of crags and dirt. As I approach a higher place, Barren and brown, the dust Wind-blown into my onward face Fingers my eyes and hurts. I less and less the height approach That further and further Recedes; all that I now closer touch Is the push of Other. Why has wind come, why a stranger, So close and harsh to me, Who has no wish, no wish, to linger, Held by what he cannot see. When over the lapsing hilltop's crest At last came sudden rest,-- I knew not who I was in the hush When no gust pressed.
Was it sudden ease, or the sudden cost, That made us most feel we were not all lost, That step and step had still some place to go, That all the world wasn't but wilderment of snow? For my part, I did not gauge the cost (Or rounded figures down at worst or most). I had no interest in what interest others took. For my sole self my dual eyes do look. I see the thing itself as it appears to be, Visible from somewhere on vague reprieve; Then I look where eyes look eyes-closed And seem to hunt up a memory of shape at most That rises toward some overwhelming feeling, Rising, rising, as all else fades out failing-- Rising to what I always call my meaning.
Our sullen retreat into the ever-there, Our reliance on the invisible Or recourse to given revelation, Brightens my minute's thought to crucible And pulls some lasting gold from my flame's care, As if we knew our wishing and the wish were one. What do we need of what seems infinite? The partial glare of being here, just here, Is enough of heaven to round our minute And puts a light, however lone and bare We cry for things more determinate, Into all we seem to see and share. I will not falsify my fire, but answer all and one: No answer yet but becoming to become.
Look with me at what we call, Substantial or ephemeral, All of Earth, where we must end, And all of sky's over-awning All: Sense the sub-stratum and the theme Dawning out of sincerer dream. Note how dark must always end, How Earth's quickened sharps of light Coalesce by pixels until we see Lightly lightninged twig-ends, Dew-draped, shiver and invite Greater light, or light's dark reverse The odor of more crowded trees Blends with the musk of night. I sort my knowledge into verbs: I did, I can, I do, I can't. And other more what-ifs I list: I shall, I wish, I shan't, I want. And a thousand thousand others Unvoiced, unheard. All that puts a soul at ease Enough to stammer and confess The inconvenient, the gulped absurd, Or to think a something mystic Rather too simplistic, Brings the daunting Earth to words, And helps to carry, as you guess, Our everything to is. I kept a million themes beside my bed In a rosewood box with a turtle, With one working tin hinge beside The turtle decaled spread-eagled; I left the springed hinge untried, And added blanks to the map On the warm rosewood back Of the rose-boned wooden turtle. It was better, or so I deemed, To live unknowing and to dream Than know every meaning's means. I kept the box beside me a thousand days, An indian symbol of the Earth, Unopened save as a question may Discover unbidden worth, The way a kiss becomes a question, A new-burned feeling without borders, A meeting, this meeting, --here,-- Solemnly together without a seam In loving and in waking dream A part or portion Of the natural order, Opening and answerless, In a realness of air.
A reindeer head and human breast Prove hunger no mere beast But a yearning, foreign fire all, great To least, carry to life's living feast. Tarry constellations stoop to whisper In ears sharp as fine feathers on a shaft What makes the unbrave whimper And holds the brave man fast: Undulant hills are too lonely To have what raves in every heart-- Too unready to live solely And nurture the dark feast that lasts. Eat my starry heart, my body and my brain! Nothing in Nature's self-renewing fast Can feed what hungering thought may gain From imagination's last and least. With a light, clipped clop Dunning into bright bell the dull rock, The man with reindeer-headed top Hunts the night, nor heeds the cock Rawing dawn into existence, The one near star whose agony stoops To burn us hungry out of inward pense With overwhelming wilderness for crop.
Where an ArrowLine desert bus
Came exhausted to a standstill,
And made small swirls in the greater dust,
A long-eared hare on a hill
Listened to the engine's cooling clatter,
Saw pasty faces at grimy sills
Look out at what was the matter.
With fingerfine lips, from a cactus,
A stolen blossom became the hare
In the open purview of the bus,
One-sided with a crowd of stares.
Almost the timid leaper started,--
Taken by a kisser's shyness
To see so many lips half-parted.
Stilly as a waiting blossom does,
The hare attended the airy all
That sighed a quiet from the bus
(Attentive now as if stalled),
The arrow mastered enough to wait
For what the desert deemed or willed.
At unbidden wind, from dead-still
Into dead dust
the leaper leapt.
Two eyes followed me out of sleep and dream. I could not dream what seeing things could mean. I had deemed all an oblivion unabated, A sordid compost of all I loved or hated. Such was all, and all I knew of what Dreaming sleep to wakeful reason brought. But now these howling eyes unsocketed by pain, That did not bear any look of ease or rest, Stared green indelible thoughts into my brain And came, unofficed officers, to my arrest. The sheets I turned in, on me had turned, As if in skins and grave-shrouds I had been wound-- My blinded body moved unmoored beyond my sight And turned to return to dream in interrupted night.
A tree must burn to be. When summer's fellow ardor Comes, they sway up, the trees, The way that flame and flame Combine in a making game When what they are is brought too near, And are pulled apart by wind Playfully alone again. A large sweet-smelling cedar Held itself all summer As constant-shaped as flame, With a slow, slow burning sound Of leaves, and the settling tick Of branch that knocks on branch. Where the woods blaze thickest There comes a woodsey whoosh That undoes my breath; All the leaves alloyed sun-molten. The fall will show them golden. What have trees but trees To prove that inside fire might be? Trees have no effigy to burn.
This quick collection saved my life.June 29th - July 28th 2001
Gregg Glory Published by BLAST PRESS http://www.gregglory.com gregglory@aol.com
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 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
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. 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 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? 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. 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 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. 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. "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. 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, 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. 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 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 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. 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 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.
A purposeless scrub plain laid before the sight, Inarticulate, has nothing to offer; Neutral evolution's meaning is neuter Until interpretive man stands near. 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 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 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, 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. 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.
Once I was happy just To flabbergast and gust Over incestuous Thanatos and Eros, My impulsive pair of heroes. But now my erring mind (Arranging, jury-rigging jigsaws night by night) Surveys the surrounding social scene In meditative fright. The president imposes order, 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, 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, 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. But I conceive of a magic bag That holds us all together, A something simple like the spurious Convention of "the weather." There's no God, or need be none (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 Shared with elbows tucked at table, A grace passed round or handed down, The substance of a wish.
Bullets 'oft gang awry' When we squint with lying eye At the target we had thought To level with a shot; 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 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. The future always lies Somewhere in the 'is' Our eyes are scouting now; Hope and here intermix somehow, Nor get pulled apart Unless our killing art Delivers to the shaping thought The dead end we had sought. The philosopher with his carcass Dispenses with his guesses - 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 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. 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 In the hunted day.
My beloved Enemy Confronts my chaos to define My anger out of emptiness, A solid hatred from rash wish. My beloved Enemy For my arch-arranging eye Designs an aching target That I must miss or hit; Gives to my wide-range stagger A more local, focal goal, A sharpness to each dagger Unfolded from the soul. My beloved Enemy Incinerates Laws like xmas-trees 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 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. My beloved Enemy Alight with hate and ecstasy --Fevered cheek to cheek we dance Heedless of our circumstance. Now my beloved Enemy 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, And my beloved Enemy In blood before me lies.
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.
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
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,
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
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.
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
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....
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
When love's soft cause has died inside.
Intellectual despair
Indulges 'The Unrepaired',
While Hymanaeus Io wont console
Particulate memory,
the ripsawed soul.
Ideal and disposable, the idea of you Rustles beyond my moony shoulder, Amorous shadow of fictive love, A dream demanded by the dove. 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; 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 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; 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 Against compelling consciousness. And our breaths' most secret heats, Sirocco on rose-darkened sheets, Whisper the stories of our souls Where conceptual contrapuntal kiss 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 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 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, A pair of frangible spirits' vessels Laughing out the candles. A new day glitters at the ledge.
I lived unaware for a time (I have to admit it) Unconscious in a casual castle Sipping livid Glenlivit; I was deaf to the daily curses Of incontinent scullery maids, And recognized not the stable boys' Disingenuous praise. As lazy time lolled on From here and now to gone A private contentedness And not extant catastrophe was What I secretly counted on. And all that time, you Looked over the lifeboats Tested and prepped the crew, Gauging the drop-height From the second story window In case of fire or flight. 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. 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 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 Whose generous assistance molds Everything it finds. You are silent, absent and afar Indifferent and unreachable As a collapsing star. Quietly busy ostensibly In an alternate universe For your light still spills Some length of years at ease In at every sill. 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, 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. 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, 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 As when Earth to dawn has come Halfblind in the sun.
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 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, 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 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 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.
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 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 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 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 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 To give creation's own Cry to the beautiful.
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 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; 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 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; 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, 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. 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. 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.
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 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 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. 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, 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, 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 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; 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, 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? 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 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 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 That had first sent me off into the dark, I shook my head at the flowering bush and took off.
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. 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; 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.
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. 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 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.
Beyond the paper moon
and past the plastic stars
Lurks a lump or troubled wisp
of what we really are.
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
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
That into clay or on to flame
abide Eternity.
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.
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
confers what grief would keep;
Purpure absolution drops
in gutters at your feet.
Starlight in a candle
reddens the intruding hand,
Restless on the icy mantle
where Life makes no demands.
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 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! 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. 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, 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.
Stars and sand assault the sight chafeing what should charm-- cloudy, angry-- a spirit's irritants-- until the kiln of God's great unmated hand closes close and fuses them opinionless as glass.
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. 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 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; 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, 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. 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 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 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.
"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; 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 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; 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, Hung between anonymous thieves. "Since birth we're honed To art and to theft; To deceive to survive alone Is Nature's tricky gift; To get what's been gathered By others is thrift."
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
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
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
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
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;
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,
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;
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."
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. 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. 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. 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.
The silent woman in the church On nerves and vitriol does her work. Doilies of the crucifixion From warm young hands spread benediction. 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 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.... She turned a measure from where the graveyard lay Like a promise not yet kept.
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; 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, 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.
Perhaps my middle-aged spread, love, Is made of despair instead of Potato chips and beer. The refrigerator's cool porcelain leer 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 By muscle burn.
In any universal force
or unifying vision
An emptiness of intent inhabits,
a blank of indecision.
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,
or feel themselves assured
That they have flossed Reality
from the asterisked Obscure?
Wherever truth lies
it lies becalmed,
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
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.
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
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
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
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
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?
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)
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
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.
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)
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 faded, sulfuric of a hurried traveler's Chesapeake -- through tums of evolutionary time still saunters. Politicians, as limericks tell, 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. 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 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 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. 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 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 toward the one wild Great Way. Each creature encircled beneath the infinite 'Ifs' of the sky is trapped in the hydra of days."
Muscular terror swipes at our skins
with its professional ironblack hooks,
Peers in at every evening window,
flashes out of every book.
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;
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
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,
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
But is itself a kind of lovely;
Or so I think the angels think,
hovering abovely.
'Tis said our end is half-divine And our days leave but a broken track That moves, when it moves, Neither here nor there, 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 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 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 But like a sleeping seed long has lain In Imagination's open hand.
Our interim swimmer The flotsam of a dreamer Will drift and shrug on whatever log Drifts and shrugs along. 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 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 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. 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 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-- 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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.
Heavy, unforgivable dreams, despair, Hard breathing, the omnipresent air, Whistle beneath my brain a tribal tune Uncaught by inner ear since Stonehenge rune. 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: 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. 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.
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
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
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
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:
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;
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.
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
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:
Exert persistent force for modest growth
inexorably as lichen.
This quick collection saved my life.May 20th -- June 10th 2001
Divers missives to absent others
BY
GREGG GLORY
[GREGG G. BROWN]
Published by BLAST PRESS
Copyright © 2014 Gregg G. Brown
In nature there is nothing melancholy.
~~S.T. Coleridge, The Nightingale
Bear witness for me, whereso’er ye be,
With what deep worship I have still adored
The spirit of divinest Liberty.
~~ S.T. Coleridge, France: An Ode
...of lovers and friends
I still can recall
Neuro-science and linguistics have found, more and more, that the portion of ourselves that we recognize as uniquely our own, that we carry with us as the turtle his horn-bone home borne upon his back, is the story of our life that we continually create and edit. It is this most portable portmanteau companion, this kitchen gadget of enlightenment and self-definition, this word in our own ear, that is us to us. In Shakespeare, the most vile Iago gets in-between the naive Othello and his perception of what his love is, what his love means; Iago takes the place of Othello’s own consciousness by his whispered innuendo. If Othello had been more mature in love, as he was in war, he would not have been so malleable to another’s voice, another’s vindictive agenda. He would have recognized Iago’s stratagem for what it was–Iago’s implanted concept of love was simply war by another means. And so we are all vulnerable to the virus of other voices, other selves. Indeed, we change ourselves through the same methods that Iago infects Othello, but usually with less ulteriority in our motives. (As an aside, a situation in which this is not the case, in which we self-consciously adopt a new posture towards our current reality, is when one voluntarily submits to the re-programming of a twelve-step, diet, or other self-help or self-improvement campaign.)
We live in a mist of continual whispers. And these whispers bring us news of the world, and arm us, Galileo-like, with telescopes to view our inner landscapes: our pasts, our nattering presents, our dreams and desires–all at once, or in a movie-montage series that takes on the serried wheels of the kaleidoscope for its deployment and re-deployment of pattern in the search for meaning. Childhood faces, lovers breathing intensely close, the lick of an insistent pet, all compete for their place in the panorama, their time in our arms at the square-dance of selfhood. What fiddler calls the tune? Will we always respond, stomping in time to the quibbling ifs that life presents? This is all process, the creation of context from which our daily self emerges: the hourly display of faces from which Shakespeare chose his masks, and where Dickens lived amid Pickwickian semi-visionary laughter.
Layer on layer of this-was and what-ifs bring us the twists of our private narratives–not the blatant debasement of power-narratives and privileged perspectives and voice that Derrida derived, but the rich exploration of ears of the self, the continual God-slog of “the examined life” that Socrates instilled into the DNA memes of the curious West.
The parable of the parable teller is simply this: that our attention, our focus changes, and the parable-teller, like Chaucer chuckling gently from on-high, remains aware that the change is occurring. Coleridge in “Frost at Midnight” demonstrates well the process of place and inner space. First he is alone in a frosty midnight; then, looking at the fire, he recalls other scenes, and in one of those recalled scenes, he remembers wishing for yet another presence, another context. In “The Lime-Tree Bower My Prison,” Coleridge imagines the walk his friends are taking and describes that walk. Similarly, Stanley Kunitz imagined the first moonwalk–and when hearing and seeing reports of that walk in actuality, Kunitz claimed he didn’t need to change a syllable of his poem since he had “already walked on the moon” in his imagination. In this same way, we invent the self we are and the details of our lives that stand out for us and become incorporated into the currently active self we are always oh-so-busy experiencing. In poems that follow here, there are usually at least two stories told side-by-side–a current context of speech in which the narrator is speaking or being caused to write, the context of the person being addressed as imagined by the narrator, and the remembered details of events experienced in the past by the narrator (often a past memory of being with the addressee). And all this symphony of whizzing whispering brings the speaker to new views of the self he could be, the creature he is creating in his lab of solitude.
One of the ablest spaces for this refreshing and re-experiencing of the self is in our nests, our tidy homes, with the latch shut and the world feeling far-off and safe. Here there is no imperiling snap and swap of swordplay, no train bearing down on our vulnerable colony of cells. Home means comfort, and ease, and feet up on the couch as we break out the stereoscope and review what wisdom is given to us as our portion of the greater mystery. There’s a warmth in the hearth, a harvest in the home, that no other domicile can quite capture or match, whatever its majesty may be. Niagara Falls or zip-line volcano tours will have to stand beside and wait in memory when the yellow light of a suburban home beckons the leg-tired jet-lagged traveller home. Home to zoning-out, home to the spatter of expected talk, home to regular rounds of coffee, the simple fellowship of your nearby hand, denizens of ease in winter’s sparkling twilight.
And so the parable perpetuates itself in an onslaught of ontologies, tabulations, diaries, vivid minuscule distinction upon distinction without end. Frame within frame, story within story, the multiple perspectives switching with an effortless turn of the tongue, the change of metaphor made flesh, the story made bone and standing up, a stacked skeleton that had been rummaging the veldt on all fours. Do we remember the perspective of the lungfish, the metaphor that had us leap to land, grow hand and hoof, still carrying the seas within us?
Gregg Glory March, 2014
Go, little heart, into a song That flies away the while, Chirruping with the dashing catbird there Who flits through a country stile. My eye her errant ecstasy Follows along a dotted line.... Stretched to cotton majesties of cloud Where she disappears like Time. When my song comes singing back To me, from frosty Everest returned, Note how my voice at highest pitch remains Till I'm ashes in an urn.
My Jenny, my jewel, the house echoes with your wintery tread, a diamond rolled loud on an overturned aluminum canoe; you walk about like one who is school-tired to the point of ill-temper, a scholar flopped among her hundred books. How often I recall my own school days in dry colloquy with old professors, ghosts of poetry who remain spirit-limber in my reminding mind--strong with witch-words that evoke in me heaven-pastures where angels nod don-like over tomes cloud-lovely and limned with golden words as if sunset were always nigh, yet never setting into that charlike dark beyond the page where thumb and gilding meet and part. And so I see you, conversing briskly with rows of unknowing pupils, tipping cups of milky knowledge into empty mugs.... Here beneath our roof of snow you move in moody silence, heavily, from chair to chair, arranging tests and essays like a stack of X-rays shimmering to heart and bone of your young charges now dimly abed and dreaming--while wild outside the February wind whistles wickedly, and I sit meditative in a half-daze of dream, remembering with the flickering wind just how young (how young!) I once was in poetry--knowing only that I didn't know the myriad ways of verse, but loved all that poetry somehow made me feel--as a child knows nothing, but knows that love is there in the downward glow of its mother's downy face. If I could contain so much of ignorance all at once, surely one day my knowledge could grow as great? The book has flattened on my lap that kept me wondering while you worked-- airy fancies that troubled old Coleridge: his fire's stranger-ash floating over flaming bars as he watched lost in thought in his humble Cot, all his guests asleep, his singing-self a stranger like the rest! Here, the wind-berated moon huddles low over apartment eves; each push and punch of night-wind tells--not of strangers beyond the sill, but how alone we are when we are ourselves! I see my ignorance with sleepy eyes and measure new ignorance by those stars ranged primly distant, too far to touch their fire--almost too far to see.... What passion keeps them steady in their skies, astral marks that tell us where we are? When it's all too much for me, too many confusions and cavilings railing in my brain, all I can think to think, or think to say as the Little Dipper sinks and darkness greys confusing eye and atmosphere, is that a flame grows narrow at its tip. Jenny, I look about me once again, rising itinerant until I find my final bed beyond these rooms we share and shape with life. Nearby, you bend to the stuttering stove, a companionable grace in increasing night, quiz-work kept neatly stacked at the long table, and strike a fresh match to the unprimed grate-- over-watching the tiny flame with as careful eye as God might over-watch the infant heat of Adam in early earth's so-cold bowl-- and soft! within the iron grate, with whisper sweet, bluely ignites the tender pilot light, set to burn as long as attendant gas serves as wick to what your human hands had clicked awake.
Little Michele, little friend, little missed miss, I'm readying a flapping knapsack to meet the changes time has made to friendship, and to hug what cannot change or pall until death entreats a final retirement to all. Little Michele, who first unveiled the graven paths of Yosemite to me, the deep crisp chiseled sky squared above mendicant hikers filing up the Great Falls' narrowing way! Falls whose mists surround me still, wooly polyester fluff of a winter coat near as hair, as white as my new beard now puffs in mirrors. Sleep keeps you in Sacramento, at rest from day-long hospice rounds where time lies blanketed in neat-tucked beds, while I wake in winter-gripped New Jersey where houses huddle together against slush, marooned amid mirrored sheets of old ice that sweat slick at noon only to find the moon skating re-hardened silvers nigh midnight when all the over-busy Garden State is silent. It is out of such silence that I write, my bamboo desk turned tundra by the racing moon that pulls at my recalcitrance like a leash. I resist these dim hours of witting speech when need and time conspire to eke forth words for one both dearly near and distantly absent-- Right now, I'd rather sit speechless with thee, brimful of meaning tears and politely quiet, there in the granite dell where age elides to age, our feet stuck out dry before the campfire, pines leaning in inquisitive with the burst faces of old men shouldering down for warmth, myself yearly learning their wrinkled ways.... A tin wind tat-tats at the window-frame as I adjust my worn robe and note the snow aswirl with words against the blackened panes; how nature moves no matter how still we seem! Even in this dead of night, I think again what times we spent along the reeling shore-- bright trash wrestling the tideline, wrangled wrappers skidding in the static grip of sand, a benediction in the beating surf perhaps as we pointed out new futures for ourselves beneath the dome of stars--the varied constellations' lines growing real as we traced them, the faces of two strangers maturing into friends. Shall we walk and talk that way again when California flits beneath my jumbo's wings, after the soft halt and hiss of wheels on tarmac when your round mellow face emerges smiling from the airport parking lot? After our fellowship of decades, I'm coming out for your investiture as chaplain. Long you tramped the dismal ways of youth, pathless, a-thrist, seeking in granite lanes for a seed--your spirit at last made plain in hospice corridors: hands and long-tried lives held to their denouement, as when a low corner in close woods is turned and Half Dome rises revealed, a pale presence otherworldly as a planet, yet placed in the same precincts as us, sharing the same oft-shouldered air, in vestments streaked by spring rain that scents all afresh. So your chaplaincy seems to me, your old friend winter-gripped and griping lonesomely, getting to know again your slender grandeur-- the presence of a life made complete by purpose. A life brimmed, and, at the brim, over- filled till the light within quivers, quivers even when some infinitesimal breath overplays its tautened surface howsoever gently. So, too, are you full, little Michele, so stretched with love and life divine, a filled cup of teary dews scooped from roaring falls that navigate craggy canyon rocks with white work; filled, too, with dews salted by New Jersey's ocean where a child's barefoot steps stitched minuets many sunny days beside the prolonging surf-- a young woman's hand I held in the dew-light of the quick eternal moon as we walked companionably at peace before the dawn.
A snowy day brings us rarely close, in domestic
confine caught, the sizzle-slip of small hail
sliding from the eves in beaded curtains
until beamed rainbows ring us round
and the canceled day is filled with more than light.
When hot coffee whistles in its pipping pot
the day displayed seems open to us
and closed to the humming hustle of all
the outer world at once.
We two
consider our chance to read, catch up,
make patterns of extended feet entwined
with layabout mirth on ruffled covers
confused as ski trails. We look outside
and see, beyond the pane fogging at our faces,
how hurrying snow comes, obscuring all
but us, our inner vision's variableness--
the vast differentials of our too-human light
that kindles immanent behind kind eyes
that view their refuge of two complete,
and with how steady, how stroking gaze
swim eons in an hour, two who know
eternity in a kiss where wedded lips
consign and keep all aspects of their love.
Wrapped in whiteness as within a cloud,
rosy nose to nose and breath to breath we breathe,
the wildered world beyond our known globe
of filial affection left unseen, as if within
the whitewashed castle walls of a lightbulb
we two commenced in love, and in love continue--
blind to ugly outer circumstance, blares and scares,
seeing only, touching only, our mutual hearts'
intimate disturbances, whose orbit is our sum.
Love doesn't come rowdy and crowding
into our lives, but steals with silver stealth
into living eyes and lips, and with softest brush
writes its miracle in silent subtleties,
limning argent inches of moonlight on the soft
receptive pages of each heart's bound book.
Love leaves its milky trailings like a sigh traced
in innocence upon a cheek by a child's finger
warbling blameless upon her parent's chest.
Love is not made alone by Nature's doing,
though it moves among Nature's byways and shades,
lingers along Nature's lemon lanes at sunset,
or, more gorgeously, more fully and less fitfully,
strolls boldly below each midnight moon
whose cheshire sliver catches in a maple branch.
Quick as mischief, you slip the sash up,
smiling wild as the shivering air invades,
and laughing grab me back, and, simple,
look upon the winter swirl outside. And so
we hold hands at the now open window,
letting large new snow touch and dissolve
on our upturned faces, feeling our heat
and the cool emptiness of other lives beyond
our small life together. Here we clasp,
here we feel each peck and speckle
on our hands and hearts, two renegades
who await each day with sly patience,
nor rush to tomorrow when snow today stops the clock,
and time is made all quiet as an owl asleep.
Once again the world is gifted white when wily April shoots should show tenderer green to eye and wanting heart.-- How brittle the perfect dryness of the air! Every inch of existence primly trimmed with just an airbrush dust of snow, flat as eyesight in a photograph; the perfection of new Nature, stilled. Life's ever-active riverflow of being contracts molasses-like to one chill pond, stopped in pre-sentiment of what pebble? The million-thronged trees' unbudded candelabra, the fine artifacts of grassblades glassed and frosted in a frozen breath, transform from windowsill to edgeless space in this final winter etching, this landscape postcard all in white and pencil-grey outline held in single view as I awake with daybreak. The house is silent as the dawn. Already Jenny's made her weary way to school, burdened with a bustling brood whose seasons reel through one long unrepeating era, young buds who will not sleep or freeze until their age is in its autumn-time. Before me is this image of life suspended, a moment held fresh as in a crystal ball stamped with a year and place, and handed over, with all its little glitters in a tempest. My eye inspects what whiteness is presented: what unexpected extra blank at the back of last year's calendar! What clock put wrong; what skipped day resurrected! At my eye's periphery brood "houseless woods" where I send my grieving soul to dwell. Coldly I brood on all my love has lost, what friendships stripped that'd been the shred that kept my poor humanity's modesty intact which had been stick-figure naked otherwise. And on lovers lost in unloving spite, I brood: lovers lost to other moons, other moods. Of those inevitable shrivings shorn by death: the loss of parents, the storm of mourning. My mind's a crowd of moaning ghosts; their razor keening strikes unanswered. I can imagine no one who will know me here, here in the heart of hurt, but you. And so I write to you, CPH, remembering days unnumbered of comfort and of calm, of sympathy dripped in intravenous balm; I sit in meditative state like a static dream until all that is is only seems. Like an anchoress rudely caught in her cell of thriving thought you come, a lady-maiden, to my reviving hive, honey-laden. A lady white in a sparkled gown across the frost, across the frozen ground, you glide unspeaking to my icy window, and I am left in speechless mists-- a traveller without a tale to tell, unwelcome come to the Magic Mountain, a little engineer enmeshed in the kicking cogs of my own circumstance! I reach for meaning in my winter world and recall your caution, often sung with a little cornered smile and saddened eye, "First there is a bridge, and then there is no bridge," for how our connections come and go, how what we mean today may seem meaningless tomorrow, how light may fade and dark may grow.... Long our converse might have been today! Many the complaints I've harbored home, many the restless thoughts that pester glum tongue and pain-spiked skull. Instead I find myself in ensorcelled silence, quiet as real around me as a deadened pulse, all the world without neither snow nor spring, time itself neither then, nor now, nor anything. And yet, having added my misery to thee in absentia, and thinking of such speeches past as my catastrophes have cast into your ears, and of such listening as you have often given, whole-hearted--whose only recompense was to weep in fulsome sympathy, I feel fresh, unburdened, although no secret has escaped my scraping pen.
Tonight I write you, Daniel, and cannot expect
quick reply, or even any the logic-laden world
would count as counter-speech! Many the years
that have smoothed thy unsoothed grave, and given
unsure rest to you and those you loved;
stray waves of darkling violets shadow
the stone that brackets your too-trim dates,
that keeps a night-dim weight of white
on death's uneasy guest.
Tonight I drove toward shore, the moon untombed,
and lean in summer damp debating words
to bury here beside you, as each year I do.
Melancholy mission! Yet, with one so missed,
a comfort comes springing among the mists
of hurt--and words that feed the tubers
and the blooms that make the funeral dunes
their only home, may dissolve in service
where living words do fail....
Dammit, Daniel,
forgiveness too eludes the language that I bring
to pile beside a corpse too gross to contemplate.
Long ago I ought to have been done with tears
and tirades, gashes in a golden mask as fine,
as final, as Tutankhamen's. A beetle crawls
across my naked ankle until it tickles;
a gust of laughter bursts within me, and the echo
flattens against the small stucco church,
rough as sea-rock. Who else is left to share
the visions we had voiced, pirouettes
of young spirits untiring as the playing spray?
And so I come to you, you the older brother,
appealing to you for wisdom--even from
a stone gone mossy. Carved in memory,
I see the beginning kiss that came to stand
tall as your two kids, Troy and Pat,
whose limber adolescence sails as swift
as a catamaran's twin-hulled lullessness.
I have their father in my memory kept
packed bright and tight against the acid
of childish questions.
"Lord Dermond,"
I'd called you--how many times across the years--
laughing-serious at the rightness of the royal
sound that crowned you above the cut of men
peering out their dusty place to lie and die.
Across the years we moved together,
bound not to night but to noon
as we loaded down the leaf-weight
of our birch-bark canoe, throwing
its long blade into the dirty light
of old Bowie Place's muddy reservoir
where many an ancient branch bent to stir
reflectless shadowed waters, for us
as for the chanting indians who paddled
and left their slate arrowheads aslant a brook
for us to find and finger, with still-stinging-sharp
edges to blood an unwary thumb.
Long the weightless hours drowned
in that floating stillness! Long the lists
of lines sent echoing into the dusk,
hands alternately dragging, sweeping,
piling high light-lines of freshest wet
while poetry rolled boundless within us
and boundless trumpeted into nature's
leafy overhang. No hand, no stirring,
now you rest forever who had sculled
those waters--how many times?
Our paddles lie rotted behind the house;
and rotted out among the moss-backed oaks
the very vessel that had sustained
the high talk that made our friendship leap--
the reel of mutual thought unwound
like fishing line to catch what pulled us
heavenward and homeward.
Our kicked-off Keds crossed clumsily
in the uneven gully of the craft, running
no more than an angel's sandals might,
anchored crossed in passing clouds above.
Paradise had fallen with the late shafts
of butterfly afternoons; page upon page
of distaff poems we let drift about the boat
serene as swans in the brown current; flare
of sunset, and then, soaked, they swirled
black and unmoving on some low tarn of tar.
Night's dark amplitude had found
no fit answer to the sky's starred expanse.
Now my own prow creeps to ground again
on your death's bleak bank of bonded marble....
My beak of meaning gawps in agony,
a cadaver cannibal attempting to eat at
your sculpted David's sepulchred and whittled flesh.
The dune grass that springs afresh about you
whispers sweet of mere eternities unmet
that I shall never meet--as I shall never see
you again, good friend gone, befriending yet
my orphan heart tonight, keeping one
solitary flame aloft till greeny dawn.
These passing shapes and shadows please,
but cannot ease what mind of mine attends
the salt-sharp night, these ragged knees
kneeling in the hard sea-grass, in the wet
that leaves your grave at sea, and me at sea,
and makes the misty moon an albatross to shoot
with what words I yet may aim at heaven.
La! an old man's thoughts, an old friend
lying before him, unadorned in dead earth--
I chew old bones of thought, while away
in the crash and wash of the restless surf, cloud-hid,
a gull's hungry cry pierces repeatedly.
Another old poet, old friend, I conjure: a second Daniel to write to, while I sit at my pondering pints, pink with drinking-- my ruminative mind returns to me a hundred hundred hours merrily heaped with cocksure colloquy, pecking in the shade of the lion's den, two aging pagans hailing Pan. How often we mocked the very teeth of death with foamy vows outrageous as their sudsy birth. At midlife, our fortunes pile up silver dust to fill our untrimmed temples, a wealth of thoughts enriched by alpine crowns of time, as if wreathing clouds consented, trailing harmless sparks, to be our thinking caps! Years are mounting as we mount the years: our sacrifice is to live, and remain alienate from pop culture, embracing what was great. To linger on Olympus in our skivvies, our discarded skis set beside the fire; exchanging grapes with the gods, while midnight purrs plush, is triumph enough for us. Sway-stacked and furred with congenial dust, familiar books look out from under ragged racks of antique antlers and bad gags at this seaside pub-- the creak of memory loud underfoot, a tub of button daisies declaiming spring beneath the wind-waved sign: Ron's West End. At this cratered sea-cliff's visionary height, summer nights, still softly unborn, and windy winter's diminishing end both blow round our glowing table talk, whispering wisdoms between the elbowed mellow beers and bossy Brunhildas who rule the roost as if Chaucer never died, nor no clock ever tolled a verse beyond Falstaff's everlasting thirst. We'd talk until our literary prattle mounted, instance by little instance, to tallest universals: "Little Man's imagination floats, lotus-like, seeming unbound in the water blaze, and yet at its root, mud and blossom are integral; even thus is our little man's imagination integral with Nature's nurturing phenomena--" Cheerly we keep the "Al-Ron-Quin's" covenant of converse, alarming charm of riposte and counterpoint displayed around the flash and yellow leer of mugs. Wordsworth's here emending mumbles, Hamlet hums and haws 'til the deed is done-- both dissed and up-ended by our roaring joy in favor of old Coleridge and fierce Lear, one divining lines of logic in the infinite, one wrangling bare humanity on an empty heath, barking heartfelt metaphysics with a fool. And so we argue high midnight through to closing, and press each other's contention to a peak. And so a heightened speech is piled, word on word, and green on green, in the natural admonition of an oak tower- ing over lesser growths. Just as in humid June we'd climbed far Nether Stowey's stones in scrambled haste, short-breathed, up beneath the governing shade of woods so old and dense all stirring sound was damped until the hill's bare cap opened in a swirl of sky--blue and white and misted. The mountain where we stood, and stand, (the round high hill where Coleridge crowed until a last disaster buried him beneath), pours roundness down its sides, mossy coombs unmoving as the sweating stones they covered: green beyond the memory of green, everlasting as the grass where Coleridge strolled in glee. How long our conversation that day unrolled, laughing unmannerly as we hopped the brainy turf above horizons where the sea sketched white a limit to the vista, and to the sight-- and all the open dome of heaven was mute, God's own silence by piety magnified. What awful power moves unseen within us, blowing potent gusts through us, until we're left consigned unprepared to pinnacles unguessed? As music crests and crests to its crescendo, so poets' lives rise to one resounding note. Outside Ron's, the sea scowls pewter, too, an echo of those lonely Stowey views, agile as a drunken dutchman's fermented brew. Here, too, Dan, the decay of light and time declare a limit to the sight; here the sea flashes crested in the softly silver eve, and our old talk billows hollow with the surf, hazarding new splashes at night's darkest onset. Above, the unmoored moon--which calls heart and head and all to dream--repeats impermanent feats in the expanding scale all dreams distort and no knowledge amends. Our littleness is echoed like a fractal's edge in the universal pattern--as yet unspoken! And so the jazz of chatter happens, again and again: sophisticated, false; brave, benighted-- The dissolute smoke that clouds the moon, the dull confusion of stop-motion, photo-emulsion skies, where memory and meme are meeting this eve, is North-Star sharp by midnight, and we see how monkeys fed on evolution's bread row on the auroraed sea below, parting lights with makeshift paddles, as if the whole Milky Way could sit reflected in the pond out back! And indeed it does sit there, when we remember to look with Galileo's lens, or rheumy Rousseau's ruminative glance.
The rain's continuous throbbing pours roaring as a cataract. Inchling Spring is edging towards its green strength again and my thoughts turn to roots--To you, brother, I turn my slow thoughts, plough- like--to the soil where my brothers and I were sown to growth beneath a beating sun. Long before angry time had made us men and carved hard marks in cheek and character, we'd discovered an old abandoned well that held hidden light below a wounded wooden lid wreathed in leaves gone black with mold and oldness. How strange the intense interest each ragged crack contained, lightning-shaped shadows just open enough to let dropped rocks knock echoes up to our ears! How strong the burning noon allowed slim glimmers of the sharded sky to reflect into our nook-invading eyes. Wild as fox kits, we'd swat afternoons away with races through the castle-high trees of Dad's estate, crying 'cuckoo, cuckoo' back at birds we'd startled from their naps-- coming round again at eve's cooing onset to the well that had not left our thoughts alone for an instant. Down the deep well we boldly brayed our loud-sounding secrets, our canvas dungarees kneed a filthy khaki with the daylong play of dirt. What each said was wrung lowing into a deeper register than either knew or recognized--it was as if our future voices resounded brownly back in the brawny familiarity of manhood from the receiving deep of that black well. How cool we thought it all was back then, our piping voices booming back like bulls. Sworn secrets and youngsters' oaths we hallooed a hundred times into the dark before the dinner bell of an inverted bowl and wooden spoon orange with squash stuff rang us back to Mom's steaming table. What oaths, and what secrets we dropped into the welling earth, let our lives and thrivings show, fruit of buried truths. Outside, the storm is still coming on, a bleak conveyer belt of darkness on the news stretching back half a dozen states. My regrets, too, go far into our past, shadowing the many memories of life that trained our vines to twine as close as twins-- two brothers blessed, and best of brothers too for a time when time was young. What has made us break with what we were, untwine what sun and childhood had braided? Is not this night, spent undreaming and alone, contiguous with the ten thousand darks that have marched in line before tonight? The sound outside is like a wall, a thick wet against the walls of my condo-abode. Yet there is a silence in the flailing rain, as if too much sound must cancel sound, and repetition wash drummed distinctions to silence in the night. So, too--too full of memories I write, and all that's past transforms from stories lived and told, to one reminding tone of feeling sounding over all. I listen down the well of years, and hear how time has brought us onward and light- ward, through a void we did not understand-- bands of doppler effect expanding blandly into the numb enamelling of now. Outside, a ripple of hitting wind unveils how the universal rain, invisible, still keeps ringing down in loud-dim chains, links of the unknown mating then and now. These days we nod or share a cordial laugh at politics, renew some well-chewed gristle of family gossip--secrets no one but us still keeps or cares to hear about. Despite the change of costume that flesh and accident have rendered to body and embodiment, I see us crowded round that boyhood well even now. You at a steep fantastic angle as you lean agéd but dapper on the silver orthopedic cane a reckless SUV leapt a Jersey barrier like a salmon to deliver to the shady eddy of a hospital bed, your body pooled crooked as a questionmark. Me, thick-waisted with grim reading at my remote IT management screen, thickening eyeglasses aiding my old-man myopia; me, thick-tongued despite my serial confessions of pen and of poetry nimbly repeating: "me!" Soundless I hold you, folded round by arms as I take my Easter leave of thee and Holly-- a half-dozen empty, river-green Heinekens gracing the lace placemats. We two old brothers wait a beat, twined deep in the years steeped between us, our now silent vows echoing well in hidden hearts.
Now, when cherry and apple boughs begin
to swing weighted double and triple with blossom
like hard-arced deep-sea lines pulling
marlin and swordfish and blind leviathan
up hungry from oblivion by mouth and hook,
O mothering, all-consuming sea, I enter the wide
grove to pace awhile and speak my piece.
Now, when orchard air betrays no too-rich scent
of ripening death, too-ripe life--no loaded orbs
hang glistening all the harvest-moon midnight
as when I sang easy between the bee-busy trees,
too alive to sleep those onward autumns through--
now I remember and honor the hours the days
my Mom's proud ghost walked and prayed.
Now, Mom, when of we two only one
may play a speaking part, I seek you out
in Spring among these oft-deserted aisles
of souls whose sails flag plainly on the wept sea
of massy grasses not yet scotched and cut,
unevenly alive, each green blade its own green height
at Holmdel Cemetery.
Now I in the prompt of warmth
walk an evening vigil I cannot choose but chase
so many mourning hours beyond departure.--
Still you stand at the kitchen counter, peeling
glad apples, small russets, pears, lambent carrots,
all picked by your brazen squad of boys in the sun,
washing each, rolling each in careful hands
until their inner shine shows showered in the
sink-rinse, all laid white on the cutting board
or minced into copper-bottomed vats for quibbling soups.
How many and intricate the apple-hours we tolled!
Your hair its own silver feast of blossom-curls
damp in the happy chatter of meal prep
where boiling things poured pellucid, spouting
through colanders I held unably at any angle,
standing at your elbow, low, listening
to water fillip and drip, tipping the big yellow
bowl, your sharp wit apt as the paring knife
dancing against your thumb.
I never knew you,
the dark-haired darling who danced
in your father's Welsh eyes. I knew you alarmed
and laboring lion-hearted in a hospital bed,
small hands at the chained triangle
to leverage and lift yourself to some easier breath
that didn't come. But I knew you best, and know
you still, in a wordless kaleidoscope of worlds
where each small turn changes all, the pattern
resplendently renewed by light, the pattern
of broken chips and needy details, rainbows sawed
to pebbles--as when light through leaves
entertains and blinds, so I see you, Mom:
a hand, a heart, an eye alight.
And so I walk,
myself shelving shore without ship or mystery,
swept haphazard among coral shoals of memory,
tunelessly whistling in the ruminative night,
tapping a foreign California apple in my pocket
as I count out time to no song I know,
hum no uplifting lyric to the unnameable tune,
alone at your elbow, just we two,
and the April moon standing mute.
Winter's roughened touch has left us, though still in dreams we find its echo, harsh remembrancers that we are, recalling all by pain and indignity. Having set alarms to catch the current moon at full, she arises from her slumbers, aroused and drowsy, trailing gossamer glories of her nightgown into the dim unlit living room. She stands silent beside me, we stand blandly, woozily wooed to do, to be, in all the accident of time together-- ourselves and in love--searching for the red moon with our pajama bottoms off, the whole quiet room luminous as a dish of water, surrounding curtains caught in a fabulous haze as almost-fog envelopes us, has us feel as if we exist within a cloud, our breaths heavily lunged as if still asleep, eyes squinted and salty as cracked pistachios and every window glowing cold. Like a captain, her hand shading out brimming halogen lights of the lot, Jenny breathes against the glass, slow one, slow two, and searches the skies for any trace of rouge. We are looking for that rare, red moon evinced from a thousand sunsets at once when earth trails her infected fires like a kiss across the silver deserts of Diana's moon, too perfect-pure to blush back at us. I had hoped, as we turned and pliéd about the room that I, that we, would stumble across the moon as I had once before stumbled into such looking luck when walking alone the still edge of a wood I came across a sleeping dappled fawn quiet as leaves, curled simple in an unattended nest. My walking-stick stopped like a secondhand tricked at the loss of time, my eyes gone wide in delight to see this dim thing that seemed but shadows of the sun, sun-flecked, white-floating spots of indifferent light, the dappled overcast of a low- hanging dogwood tree confusing all, confusing me, until the creature curling there seemed no more than an intensification of the grass, brown-white below, before me, its fallen breath a breathing of all the earth herself, those long careful legs snipped together like sleeping shears, the paired ears leanly alert: focused, still and present, upon myself even as my whole attention fell to it--our mutual life of a moment's dewy duration--and then led on by a sort of baby-snort, a twitch around the muzzle, I came all at once to see--those eyes! I cannot tell their oil-depth, their ink-heart-- how all the dappled mini-cosmos round our wooded cove was distilled to highlights in those grand eyes, yet not diminished, not in the least diminished, as I stared. And I came, in time, as my wildered consciousness grew more natively attuned, to know that I who watched was watched, that all I had thought was hid in me was plain as paper: all deeds known, all recorded there-- all no more than a single spark of light in the dark surface of that fawn's calm eye. In all our moon-excitement, did I say how we found the ground that April at three a.m.? The ground of crocus bud and of daffodil newly come to their spring bloom, first bloom sweet as Easter candy newly caught unwrapped? A whiteness as of a wedding-walk was gifted everywhere. A still, sudden frost, an April frost, was over all. As if, because we'd missed the rouge moon, this other, lesser blessing was bestowed--yet more than bestowed if I think on it aright--strewn like bales of dogwood petals littered everywhere. We never found the moon that night, nor any tippler's tainting tint of pink in all that cloud-strewn, cloud-molested sky that stayed a starless haze, although we stared, finding our orientation by iPhone app and guess, standing together on the little balcony there, listening to trees meekly creak in their sleep as all light drifted down to our upward eyes. Softly, her sudden hand was at my back-- her breath a wordless whisper in my ear. I knew, despite the sky's cloudy recalcitrance, all I'd found.
A bee drones in the cowslip Not more happily than I, Who into your honey mouth has slipped And let the hours by. Long I thought that blue most true Of saddened evening skies, Till you winked ope' horizons new In azures of your eyes. Now I wing to courts of love And press my buzzing case Bow by bow before the purple judge Who whirls me by the waist.
Earth never grieves! ~~Thomas Hardy
I'm tired of living backward, carping "It should have happened like this." Nobody's left who gives a crap. Not her, not me. I don't give a piss. I can't think about her face. And I shan't Think how things should have happened, but didn't. Her face wasn't exactly pretty, exactly pale. More sallow, celery yellow, stale-- Like hungry roots had sucked her blood Back into impatient earth. I loved her once, as I thought I should. I loved her in my body, in my breath. Now, I'm tired in my bones, my marrow Stuffed with regret and meat and sorrow.
It isn't difficult, dying perennially disappointed. There's a comforting ooze that cozies okay, Down here at the bottom. Promise. Why fidget in time's indifference anyway? Lie calm in your slippers like the rosy anointed, Note the replete applique of your surplice. Perhaps a fashionable coffin will ease your unease. Get your tomb topped by a flattering bust-- No more nude, embarrassed mirrors. After all, dying leaves no one else to please. You needn't, you must not, fear her; Death's just being ground resolutely to dust. Repeat after me: whatever was said, was said. Lovers only say lovely things in the night Freed from harsh, photographic light. Repeat after me: whatever you did, you did. You'll get on alright, my dear, my dunce, When you learn to love your ignorance. It isn't difficult, dying perennially disappointed. And, let's be honest, it's not as if you shot For the stars--and almost, but never quite, made it. Please, drink your tea while it's still hot. Around the next corner is a bus with your name on it. When we bury you, we won't inter your sonnet. Promise.
As near as breath can be to ceased And still inspire, She, solitary, tended Her failing fire-- To the sipping ventilator tethered. Her hands are not quite blue as yet; The ironic, flowered gown Half rumpled, half patted-down.... Her honied forehead wet-- Bathed in freezing sweat.
The devil is red, his wings red flames. Guilt harrows the heart, pulls shut its little gate. Eden had a gadfly Adam couldn't name. The devil is red, his wings red flames. Blue is the sea, to drown your sin and shame. So love your brother; Able be kind to Cain. The devil is red, his hellish wings aflame. Hurt harrows the heart, shuts its slutty grate.
A colt in the downfall Will whinny and jerk As if each flake Were pins of hurt. Its brown coat shivers With galvanic grace, A whistling whinny Escaping its face. When done with wheeling In circular panic, It waits while the whiteness Becomes emphatic. Breathing steam in fits, Neither cursed nor blessed, It stands too still-- Listless, indifferent.
Spring days come smelling Of thawed dog; Rivers unfreeze; a fringe Of flowers crowns the bog. Park chains relax and life arrives, All ages and every look; Life invites the worm to wriggle, The fish to leap its brook. New lovers find the river As rivers find the sea; With picnic hampers and beer They leisurely fish or leisurely pee. "Spring must give way to summer, What's good must give way to great," So they think without a thought And fish where they did skate. "It's roses, roses all the way," Laugh the lovers young. They dangle lines from warping docks And with casual thumbs Shove small-hearted worms on hooks. "Just look at how they strive!" They say, and drop them in the drink. The old say nothing, having lived.
There's a turning in turning-in When dreams seem almost possible: The bed untucks, and we fall in Without fuss in the evening drizzle-- It's then that the landscape of a pillow, Its hills and valleys creased and curled, Give our giant, sleepy eyes a world Inaccessible tomorrow. The day gets lost like a blown balloon Bursting adrift above the Atlantic-- A casement ope's, and, eftsoons, Extruded dreams are real as plastic: Me the hero, you adorably bereft, Adrift on a lifeboat from the Titanic-- Death-aware, but not too tragic. All in all, it's nearly something perfect.
I stood unlost where the orchard breeze Pushed too-long limbs unevenly. My desire had shaped this stand of trees, Laid apples out in careful, measured Eden; Cross-referenced to find the best of breed; Spread by hand the enchanted seed. I kick tussocky humps, ungainly trip Over years of ungathered gold retuned to grass. A mom, sick, bed-ridden, had stopped the snip- Pers that trimmed, the tan hands that passed And paused beside each apple like a beloved face, Ready to roll the unblemished to their place Beheaded in the picker's tipping basket.
Killing time after work, I take the public boardwalk to get back to our seaside carrousel bulking abandoned on a sandy Asbury bank where a month of Sunday sales circulars chase each other like kids on summer break, playing Mother-may-I as the wind says stop or go, hissing "Yes, you may" politely as a snake. This whole scene's some kind of shipwreck mistake-- the old CASINO sign neglected to NO, myself tilting blear-eyed on the swarming deck.... The electric arcade sign's pulled almost down, its underpowered arrow pointless, dim, lost, as the sullen lemon horizon sours to sunset, day's entertainment done. Our dumb sibling fistfights broke out here once; perhaps when the wrong kiddie ride was chosen, and father took sides. Or was it mother? Goodbye to scenes of joy and innocence, dropped cotton candy, crying when you didn't win. A moody shadow uncoils from its corner as I duck the "Keep Out" tape's red border where eternal chargers wait at parade-rest ease-- resigned to dust, resigned to time's disorder: floor-tiles split by fistful tufts of marram grass, random bald patches checkering the ponies' gilt while popcorn saltiness blows in from the sea, that roaring gorge impossible to fill.... Such gold and grandeur makes one think of our insufferable need, unrelieved, for knight and steed; noblesse oblige, et al. It's my "Charlemagne"--and your "Wonder-Horse," say these plastic plaques beneath the hovering hooves, Charlemagne's eyes chipped blind and colorless. Darkness streaks through a broken window neighborhood urchins had deemed too gladsome, too rainbow-colored, for their self-despising lives; such aimless boredom chucked the breaking brick, left royal gelding and princess mare unridden, the bright brass ring unclaimed. What survives beneath this smashed stained-glass gone black, past time's accumulation of details, dusts? I mount the mare amid stable shambles, peer in a cracked funhouse mirror that reflects no recoverable image of our old asylum. Even the rats have decamped, eager to shit outside, enjoy the ocean, and eat the meat that creeps in crabs. I snare shivering reins and trace the finery of the bridle's hurtful bit-- the pain in painted flesh that repeats the colt's breaking, the trainer's coercive love.
Of course retirement's a prize, The wreath at the end of the race, A box filled with Time, all sizes-- Days of unhurried pace. Your less-firm face...is expressive; Each grin encompasses a grimace. Castrophes fade to comeuppance. Checkers is better than chess. The primrose promise of a rainbow Feels suspect, a joke out of Duchamp; However blurred the fiddler's bow, More sit than stomp. Age's bitterest despairs Lie whittled to grey shavings; Our afternoons to quiet raving Contract in isolate air. We know the hourglass' quicksand brocade Will catch us in its wrinkles; That we will not be saved From the sinkhole. Life seems, not sears-- We have veered wearily to where At a voyeur's balustrade we stare And leak no tears. Aggravated vanities are all that's left Of what had swelled. Reality wriggles, unbereft, --Will not be quelled.
“…in a house of such prospect, that if, according to you and Hume, impressions & ideas constitute our Being, I shall have a tendency to become a God–so sublime & beautiful will be the series of my visual existence.”
~~Coleridge, in a letter to Godwin
A sleepless swain of fifty, with a brief romantic notion
May retrace a track so dear.
~~Thomas Hardy, The Revisitation
"One boy you can get some work out of,
Two boys more.
Three boys, none."
~~Dad's rule of thumb
Working through sunsweat and neckburn,
We unrolled a fence against rabbits,
Against animal life conniving and hungry,
Against raccoons and clever black hands.
Against the vindictive eating and shitting of birds,
We worked with our father all summer.
We were impaling our vegetable kingdom
On the graves of the grass we had buried.
With chipped rototiller and rust-red tools
We bit at what had remained unbroken,
Churned arrowhead up, tore taproot to loam--
Dad's spat tobacco as brown as his coffee.
With raw shoulders turned to the wheel,
With shovels like diamonds scraping
Layer after layer of untrammeled dirt,
We called forth the spirit of seed
With spray hose and angry commandment.
With sky our indifferent accomplice,
And time our old friend and enslaver,
Our trowels dibbled like stitchwork
Tearing the mother's side just enough.
Our bleeding was part of the bargain,
Knee and knuckle and elbow,
Bright splinters left burning like auras.
Late, late in the day, our sun-dragged
Boots kicked off into brambles,
Sunhats tossed down by pond-blackness,
The mud medicinal, efficient,
Covered us to knees, and our gossip
Was smiles creased behind wheat grass.
Frogs boomed cool and obtrusive,
Echoes of wood and of shadow
Where peep toads woke to their work
As night fell on our dreams and dominion.
On pillows as wide as those fields
Our dreams saw tomorrow's tomorrow,
Saw sunflower and carrot and rhubarb
Burst plaintively furiously perfect
Behind chicken-wire straight as a razor,
The field churning all colors in sunlight,
The dirt lifting life in a triumph:
The bones of our enemies bleaching,
Squalid tomatoes impossibly red,
Staked pea-pods that rattled out victory.
Our old buckets were full of new freshness,
The trembling of too-much brightness--
Burnt cheeks were hitting cool linens,
Our faces delighted and keen.
The flat-bottomed rowboat Swung through daft cattails Higher than our heads-- Dry hotdogs, clubs almost, poked On primitive spear-ends While the boat made wavery water-echoes Unevenly level From our communal rowing. The estuary was dawn-fresh, wet As we slid by; my father, my brothers, and I-- Four hulked shadows quiet in the smell of burnt coffee. Our breaths steamed like our cups, Hands cold around the weird weight of 4-10 shotguns, The river all lazy Ss of yellowy light Rich as streaked paint, the eely detailing On my brother Gil's busted-up Ford Mustang. An ear-splitting squeak Odd as a strangled doll's Flared from Dad's palmed duck-call, Held close as a harmonica, the army-surlus Coat elbows tucked to his heavy sides neatly As our holstered oars. "Hup!" he said, lifting his shotgun quick. Ducks exploded from the dark cattails, Wings expansive as flamenco dancers' arms, The white underwing vulnerable as eyelids, The pale bikini triangles Of fourteen-year-old girls As they rattled skyward, Calling forlornly in their rubber voices. "Hup!" he said again, The blast leaving us deaf as statues, Our amazed eyes still, widened white, mouths Broken open as cattails grazed us, And we skimmed to where the water had shot up When the duck fell. In after-blast silence, The duck's humping of the water seemed hypnotic, The touch of a masseuse to an ancient scar, Working the stiffness out Finger by finger. Gil pulled it into his lap like a doused shirt, The web feet raincoat yellow, the blood Swirling with spilled coffee, and handed him to me By the neck, his flapping nearly stopped. "Wring his neck. He's in pain now." I cried and let the musky bundle fluster me, My hands full of green-golden, blue-molten feathers, The wild eye small as a pencil-tip, as black.
Jammed in with the other chucklehead kids Elbow to elbow along the blonde wood bench, We listened to our smock-draped art teacher Prattle on unmocked, Dipping old hands in a big water bowl, wetting her thumbs, Digging mean-faced into a skull-ball Of gooey grey clay Until she, and we following puppylike, Held up hands dry as moondust Before faces streaked with smiles and tempera. She showed us how to mold a thumbed cup With hands too little to palm a football, How to perch the harp-shaped handle Like a sipping hummingbird To the completed cup's fine side, --Fingertip-push-and-smooth-it-out-- Until, looking up at her, I could see Honeyed nectar Loading the tumbler I was tasked to shape that day. As the worked clay squirted Between my worm-white fingers, I remembered The model of humanity in science class, A plastic invisible woman Limberly naked and displayed on the windowsill. Afternoon speared her crystalline, Lung and tongue, Illuminating the swift delta veldt Tucked unseen Between assertive thighs, Her veins ribbons from heel to hand. And I remembered, There, among the blue tubes And red pipes and ribs like playground slides, The plum heart lodged, Awkwardly unglued, but lit a sweet pink When pinned by daylight-- And I noticed, looking down at my hands, How my own clay lump was heartish, Lobed like her's, like her's Heavy and wet. I slimed and shaped my raw thumbed cup In a fever-fervor, glazing runnels of water Over twining layers of aorta and vena cava. I rushed to paint my heart alive and leave it To be made glossy by fire in a silver kiln Warm as a giant can of Sterno Until I carry it home another day To lay before you, waiting for you To fill my handmade heart With honey.
He spat the words. "Go get it." I approached tree-fringe and felt The willow, green and supple, Lay knots across my knuckles, My throat a knot of guilt. I've forgotten what misdeed Left me standing blank, My father at my back, His breath as loud as bees. I returned in tears and dread. The willow-wand I held Waved more fishing-rod than flail Passing hand to hand. I determined not to flinch, Not to give my Dad an inch. I thought only of the flensing switch, How it would lay into my fear And tear. And tear.
The Walkers' backyard was green as emeralds, Each grassblade fire-lit in dawn-light, The smell of summer come completely into our bodies As we drank down the last of the Captain Crunch cereal, Pure pearly milk sugar-laced, gravid with sweet. A squeal of Keds against the flooring And out the banging screendoor like milk-pod seeds We floated to the line up, saluting, stiff-backed, Our ankles uneven with socks' lax elastics. Davy Walker paced up and down Before the at-attention boys, Black curls close as secrets against his skull, Oldest and always leader, Alertly at home in the winner's circle, Calm as an ancient Greek at Salamis, as lucky-- Blue eyes tucked tight as dual pilot lights Above freckles, below a pale Tyrone Power brow. We knew what was coming, once everybody was picked And an opposing general assumed command At the Costigan's swing set: Dirt bombs, forts under the picnic table, Clear cricket cries of "I'm hit!" Lobbing pine cones and counting ten, the grenade Pin sticky and sharp between tense teeth; The possessive assertion of "fire in the hole!" Laughter behind a maple tipping off an attempted ambush, Choruses of "ka-pow" and "brrrbht!" machine-gunning Across the fenced backyard filled with lines of kids, Kids clean-limbed and pale, Bright shorts and dirty Adidases, Knees scuffed with maneuvers among the leaves. I hid beneath lilacs, wet leaves for a face, A crooked dry cottonwood stick my fine rifle, A spur of knot at the trigger. The day hums bloodless blue; above, a scythe Swings an electric-arc of sky. Count to a hundred and then begin. My mind is green As marines, those two-inch plastic ones Molded hot in one go-- Stray flares finned leaflike along a seam, Auras you could touch. Auras I cut, Trimming the small soldiers clean, shaving rifle and knife, Cutting off weird ears of translucence With a Red Cross pocketknife, squinting Into the miniature Hulk faces going "Hoo-ra!" Still hiding, I could feel myself going green From fingertips to face, Invisible but alive.
The Res opened up in waveless acres Humid as moss, a brown clay color of eyes Wide with surprise. Our dock was a tumble of driftwood, Gnarled spars nailed And creeping into the tame lanes of runoff That gathered in this wooded pinch of land Owned by the water company. Down we went, loving to swim Underneath the glimmering thing, Below the splash and hash of daylit sounds, bird cries And brothers' blatant yelling at fish-pops far off. I held my breath best of the three of us, Enjoying the nervy push of air That I kept wrestled inside Like a hit off a joint. Under the dock's dark, I could see Water bobbing like a workman's jaundiced level; Floating in those shadows, my dunked head a cork Light as Pinnoccio in a web of strings. Both brothers' legs dangled aslant the field of light As they chuckled about pitching no-hitters all summer, Dreaming endless baseball and knuckle balls. Up on the hunkered bundles of dock-wood, lines Of reflected light jumped like colored strings, Casting me in their net. My ears below the surface, I dunked Lower still, opening my sight to the algae-rich shallows. A beautiful orange pebble-stone the heft of a fist Fell from my throw in super-8 slo-mo Until soundlessly cradled again in puffing mud. Plowing forward like a pale mole, my arms motion-ing akimbo, I hit the limber fence of my brothers' million legs, Keeping me under the dock, the dark. Their legs were alive as oars in the water, Blocking my bulleting exit, Again and again like a game-- My clean yearning squirm from mud to air, My blood beginning to lust for breath, My lungs now lobed with wet cement, Heavier than souls in the scales of Osiris. My eyes felt smeared heavy with grease, The Res gaining a density of gel in my quiet fight. I smiled to feel the real need of air, The water thick as the runoff grease Mom kept In a coffee tin under the sink, God knows why. I couldn't see anything. I wished I had my X-Ray specs To reveal a way up, a way out of the dirty churn Of water, water everywhere.... ...ring, ring around...ashes, ashes...we all fall down...he hit his head...and wished he was dead... and couldn't get up in the morning... How long had it been now between... the metronome ticks? My under-legs felt cool on the flat black piano bench While Miss Naylor's veined hands arched Next to mine in mime, playing silently Our Silent Night as snow fell outside.... But, wait, wasn't that last winter? My heart is in my cheeks, in my eyes, Hammering like a hummingbird-- A cold confusion feeds on me, My swollen elbows are wobbly, numb. I close my underwater eyes, Swallowing loaded prayers as I kneel In the soft, the slick, the silt. Before me vast invisible hands find a swivel-space Between Gil's long awkward legs, and I know which way To torpedo. "Please," I cry, my tears warm in the backwash As a bubble goes goofy out beside my nose, A ticklish, licking trail of stale air, "Please...."
As brothers we rode the high treetops Where fields fell away forever. The pines were not weeping with time. The clouds stood still for the runner. As brothers, we rode the high treetops. We swam where water was giving, Where light was dappled with deepness. Wet rocks all echoed our chorus, And the river ran on in its sleeping. We swam where water was giving. We sang till we called out the stars, Till trees of our nighttime were shining. We perched in their arms proud as owls, Forever among clouds and flying. We sang till we called out the stars. Knock wood, we were loving and living, And life was just as it seemed-- The fields fell away forever, And night was an endless dream. Knock wood, we were loving and living. Through light that was quick as kindling, The river ran on with a shudder. All our days passed away like a dream. We climbed every night like a ladder, Through light that was quick as kindling. As brothers we rode the high treetops. We swam where water was giving. We sang till we called out the stars. Knock wood, we were loving and living, Though the light went quick as kindling.
An essay on revising “The Willow-Switch” from epic to acerbic
This is a good example of revising down to detail to create the meat of feeling in the reader. The original draft of the poem presented here is the result of a lot of its own revisions, but the sense of a story told only from the child’s point of view, out his fear and resentment, is all over the poem. The story is a bit oversold, with the father playing the villain’s part, his teeth black with tobacco. Who wouldn’t hate this beast?
In the revision, the father is a main actor, but is not held as exclusively blameworthy of the event transcribed by the poem. In the revision, the speaker remembers feeling a “knot of guilt,” even if the reason for the punishment has faded. In the original, the reason for the memory loss is part accidental, and part active repression. The child, now grown, doesn’t want to revisit what seems to be some horrific event–and there is no real blame attached to the speaker; he’s innocent as daisies. While fine enough, the reader disengages with every loss of emotional complexity. Details allow the readers to bring their own response to any given scenario. If the author is able to hang back, yet be deeply re-engaged with the experience the poem relates, he can have some of the perspective of a director of a play sitting in the back row of the theater, waving his arms at the scene, the ultimate spectator.
On rereading the original version of the poem out loud, I found myself getting miffed at the whiny sense of victimhood that the speaker was demonstrating. Now, I don’t like to be mean to kids any more than the next guy, but this kid was both bawling and blameless; too much protestation left a whiff of suspicion in me as a reader. So, since I liked the poem–and love being done with things–I hesitated to start a wholesale revision. Instead, my editor’s eye began to look for details that just didn’t add up. And, instead of glossing over them with a friendly “eh, so what, it’ll do” attitude, I let the inconsistencies prickle. The editorial itch began to build. Well, goddamnit, what was that business about the Dad undoing his belt? This is a poem about getting switched on the backside, not being spanked with a belt. I had had doubts about it before, and let concision win the decision, leaving the final detail as agnostically simple as I could manage with the bland line “Belt unhitched.” But now, simmering with my editor’s misanthropy, that compromise wasn’t enough. I’d have to deal with that detail if I wanted to lazily continue letting the poem wallow in its welts. I unhitched my editor’s belt, and got down to work.
As it turned out, one of the last things I was able to usefully address was the first thing that had prompted me to edit the thing: the belt detail. It was late in shrinking this poem down that I came up with the “knot of guilt,” like a scarf tied too-tight, as the rip-rhyme for the simple “felt” and as the replacement for that dangling “belt.”
The first detail I excised, to bring the poem back into the main relationship of the moment it creates, and away from a cozy sense of joining in the reader’s condemnation of the punishing father, was each of the “tobaccoy teeth.” The kid in the poem would be well-used to his father’s tobacco use, and probably thinks blackened teeth look cool. The sense of menace in this detail is completely adult, imposed retrospectively by the speaker. So, snip-snip went the editing shears. In a trice I was left with a single line in place of an entire stanza:
He spat the words. "Go get it."
Being bit of an inveterate formalist, I thought I should balance out any singleness at the start of the poem with a one-line stanza at the end. I took a look, and it seemed that luck was on my side–the last stanza was already a single line. With the poem losing space for excursions and digressions (after all, I’m no high-flown Dickinson with her cochineal wheels and zipping trips to Tunisia “an easy morning’s ride”), I saw that the whole retrospective stuff about the photobook, which I had been at such pains to embellish with savory verbal details like “Kept bald by fresh erasures” just had to get deleted. Down came the red pen, and washed the spider out! I still had “What had prompted censure / Has faded to a blank” which itself had been an edit of moving from an abstraction of “pain” toward some more specific, though still unnamed, occasion for punishment via willow-switch.
I played with eliminating the whole idea of not remembering the reason for the punishment. Just stay in the moment; let that be enough. That’s the thought that had me finally untangle the second stanza from its belt-nightmare. That belt had grown as troublesome as a wig-fitting for Rapunzel. I imagined approaching the willow tree as a child about to be punished. I clipped “hair” out of the description as too fanciful and romantic for a kid whose main experience of hair is smelling the barber’s aftershave, and threw the lifeline to the waves as too literary for the slim poem to save. This second stanza felt great now–forthright–but it was only three, maybe two, lines long! Perhaps I could trim the periwigs of the other stanzas down to three, or maybe four, lines apiece. That way, if I had to, I could reabsorb that harsh first one-line stanza into the body of the poem.
The third stanza was already down to two lines, and hung on only because it added a mystery to the reason for the punishment. And that’s how things long ago recalled as an adult often feel–significant, sharply etched in memory, but with the reason for it all faded grey, a dead appendage. I decided to shut the father up, take away his petty advice to “stop crying.” After all, most dads aren’t “The Great Santini,” and his speech made the poem too much about him.
Now I had the bones of a good poem.
ORIGINAL POEM WITH INITIAL EDITS:
He spat the words. "Get it."His blue-black chaw a seetheBetween tobaccoy teeth.Dad repeated, "Get it.Or you'll get the belt."Like hairthe willow switches Hung, laying their supple Knots alonglifeline andknuckle;While, lightly, his leather-stitchedBelt unhitched.What had prompted censure Has faded to a blankIn my life's photobook--A dead spot bored in circumstance,Kept bald by fresh erasures.I walked back in tears and dread, The willow-switch flailingLimber as a monkey's tailThat I handed to his hand."Get over now, son," he said."And stop crying." Then and there,I determined not to flinch, Not to give my fear an inch. I thought only of the flensing switch, How it would lay into my fear And tear. And tear.
by Gregg Glory
[Gregg G. Brown]
PUBLISHED BY BLAST PRESS
COPYRIGHT © 2014
"Evolution is too slow a process to save my soul." ~~Darby Crash "I'd rather be a poet any day and live on guile and beer." ~~Dylan Thomas I with all my winding torch of days Kept trust, kept flame; The runner's green wand I passed on "The past" my only name.
There is a magic to poetry; it cannot be all puzzle boxes and puns. The big-browed scholar of Finnegan’s Wake must finally be frustrated. And, as important, the child in Joyce’s choices, and the kid in ourselves, must feel like we are genuinely playing. Billy’s roar behind the bushes must be the Snark’s flabbergasting cry. The bread and wine must be the blood and body. Let all the magic happen, or no poetry really is.
Poetry explores the world without and the door within. It raises the hackles on the beast in your soul, and sends you out with the naturalist’s net and bottle to catalog the thousand mysteries of the backyard. Objective experience, and the subjective registering of that experience, and the transformed re-voicing of craftily chosen, artfully deployed, mosaic bits of that experience is a process common to all art. We discern subtle connections (Eliot’s “objective correlative” perhaps) by walking this worn path with fresh eyes; connections assert themselves in our flesh and consciousness, connections hang from the flowering tree like butterflies.
These connections, discerned, touched and exploited in creative expression, are never fully understood. They are not a blueprint, a thesis, or a theorem. But, they are closer to our living consciousness and our daring dreaming sleep, than any other sort of ordering that humans do. They participate in the gift of inspiration, and play in the new fields discovered there. One reason they remain so open is because of the interrelated nature of imagination and invitation.
Imagination fluoresces at borders. Like auras or fronds, its edges are fuzzy. The inspiration that leads (or is followed to) a new invention or a new formulation of scientific principle is different from poetry only in degree. In many ways, Dante even followed poetic inspiration far down this path–but his material was religion, the divine, which is essentially poetic in its ability to seek expression (as distinct from science, which seeks manifestation and demonstration); making the invisible world visible is an endless search for correspondences. Poetry stays in the tidal pools of an ocean of possibilities; it opens the door. This is how it maintains a true connection with the human on-looker, with human desire, with the all-too-apparent limited nature of our existences. Even Dante was not his own guide; his great poem needed Virgil’s invitation so that we could experience Dante’s wonder and awe as God’s design was increasingly revealed canto by canto, Purgatorio to Paradiso.
The more stretched we are, the more connected we feel; that is one secret. The stretch increases contact in both directions–through the door of the self, and out into wider experience. Whitman stretches with his lists and variation–his emphatic empathy declaring that “thou art that.” Tat tvam tasi. Emily Dickinson stretched by the wild length of her rocket flares–making one thread of image encompass the earth and on into the afterlife, yet still be pulled from her own worn, homely shawl; the robin was her auditor, the buttercup her confessor. My own, more formal (and more manic), declaration of this principle might be: “Oceans in acorns my strumming mermaids are.”
Every break of a line is a border; every rhyme is a border; every deliberate ambiguity. And poetry, like the noble intestine, like the manifold folds of the brain, maximizes the numbers and unencumbered extent of those borders–so that the subjective feeling of crossing borders, of inspiration, is maximized. The monsters in the mist must be real; the saints must be accessible to our human appeals.
Gregg Glory May 20, 2014
Below a T'ang moon hanging, On double dragon smoke I take fleet flight to Wales
To the tut-tutters among my myriad readers, I say–yes, there’s a bit too much strutting, too many bones, too many graves yawning gravely in the poems here. Luminous moons number in the millions, and ghosts gather at the dinner table in a feast more featly attended than Banquo’s banquet. But, so what? There are whole necropoleis of vampire literature illuminated from where Stoker’s lightning struck. I much prefer the “rage for order” and the orderly rage of accreting the viable language of our day–rather than continuing to execute in blind rote the wilding attacks after “the new” that distorted so much of the early modernists’ efforts. As Browning puts it in the underrated Balaustion’s Adventure (which is itself an example of historical imagination, and the value of transmitting (via memorization) the words and virtue-values of earlier artists), where Sophokles is described as contemplating re-telling the story of Admetos and his wife Alcestis, which subject had been famously treated by Euripides in his play Alcestis,
They say, my poet failed to get the prize: Sophokles got the prize,--great name! They say, Sophokles also means to make a piece. Model a new Admetos, a new wife : Success to him! One thing has many sides. The great name! But no good supplants a good, Nor beauty undoes beauty.
Here we see an instance of editing to improvement rather than dismembering to impairment. “No beauty undoes beauty.” Have humans changed in 20K years? Not much. The “farmshed’s [still] full of wisdom.” The latest diet fad has its adherents eating as all people did back in the paleolithic era. Perhaps I’ll have to eat my words, but at least my words carry the old nutritional value they had when we sang in caves, hopping in firelit gratitude around a broken bear’s skull.
Gregg Glory May 5, 2014 POEMS
You, my several, severed, Gentle selves, limned with wishes-- In the dawnwash of daybreak delivered When sleep's gone over to ashes, I write my soul's shelving shore On eyelids and tears. Come, while the saying's braying And the farmshed's full of wisdom Lowing to be milked by however praying; Come walk the dawn's ways, and some Of your gentle heart's heats share With mouth and ear. Together in the forevering grace Of day brought burning from its source Let's let simplest and supremest play Nor ask the sun to go another course But with hands crossed as lilies lay Dissolve into love.
In beginning wind When the skimmed sea flats emerge into light And caw-telling gulls descend from their windings To strut on day's sands in awkward delight Out of the blind tides, Accept the sea gift forwarding on offering foams-- See the lean sun's gild winning wide Over night's severing assertions. Out of rowing waters Where prayer begins and praying ends Greet with singing praise the braided mermaid daughters Fanning landward on green fins. In awe's dawning Love where silver standing waves uprise in halo And clouds ponder cherubic from abodes above At this day's sandy birthing. Beat on unrelenting Oh morning come glorying from chaos and mayhem Beat on beyond the dusk wind's sheeted lamenting Sail me windward and onward amen.
Flowers in their shackles are born to die; Green and blind they writhe. Man strides blithe, His day increases, Barefoot among immensities. Hunchbacked in my bag of dreams, Interred in the dirty mushroom dark, A whole man crouched in a wolfing skin, I come tumbling upright from nightmare, Wild from flower-red wombs and Ozarks Of dreams that never end. Animals like men are made to dream, And run in dreaming day. Needled to day- Light I awake Aroused from sleep's sensual rut; I grow alive from grave to groomed In the mirror's terrible square: A wreath of hailstones about my neck; A smile snakes ear to ear; My eyes bone-dry asterisks are In the bright of the morning star. "Life, life rife with hours and dangers," Is the cry that aches In my throat; Am I a flower, a blind sun writhing, Or dreaming animal unconscious as teeth? I reach for immensities and powers I wore in my dreams like a coat. I arise to daybreak's damnation And I weep at the breaking light-- A fallen star among rank straw, Barefoot in my animal manger.
In the flood-blooded ruck of sex When opened veins Cry out the cock-cursed witches' hex And hazel pains Of the smiling vagina's sprawl beginning to wax Blood-flooding open When we crawling two cross and cry out Electric, alive In the bed's church, heterodox and devout, Praying as we lie While the sucked pale moon scuttles out Crabwise in skies When we growl God-glad in warped bed's cage, Devourers Devout in dark tiger pounce and lovers' bright rage-- What shocks shakes shoves Between we blood two on the semen-draped stage That is not love?
My paper boat the page Without paddle without wind Moves through worlds strange as faces: I winch up my anchor of solitude And sail into oceans of others. Barefoot among the stars I dance with the constellations, Face to face with their blankness, At home among the spaces And anonymities of time. Since the beginning of when On past tomorrow's tomorrow When suns are all dying of sorrow, Out of kilter with places, No face do I know for my own. My kite a scribbled sheet With a glued cross for a spine, A diamond to find the wind's direction And be blown on out of time, I feel the tug of your heat. Strange have been my travels, dear, Through countries of the sky, Through seas of galloping strangers, Through time's riddling lie. Strange have been my travels, dear. But time at last is wise, and I Return to counties dear and near, Return to anchor where my page began: To ponds and lilies of your eyes, At home in the home of your hand.
Dog-tired at day's-end I creep Whipped, blind between dead sheets And bark a prayer for sleep. Sunset drops its scald of fires, And prowling hours howl me down to drag My fellowing pillow to sleep's empire. Wrung eyes shut, and day is severed. The wagging moon wanes and begins to weep: It shall be night and sleep forever. Dreams in their millions they shall be said. All that blossomed plain as daisies In daylong light shall be nightlong hid. Dreams high as hay-ricks they shall be heaped, And dreams hatch snakes from the pillow's egg That hissing and rising leap.
Dreaming of sleep in a tear-tugged thrub, Hammocked in heartstop, my picayune pulse Charts angina and angst incarnadined And slows my blood woes to was. Dumbly in dreams my aspiring vine Climbs moon and sun in calms in gusts, Arisen on passion's hidden hooks to sleep's Wither of insistences.
When death trumpets from the lily's horn And the timid ribbons grief's fingers knot Are bound bone-white on breast and brow, What praise will rise from the little church Where dead fleets land a boxy prow Under skies flashed black with finches? The crowd at the altar splits like gun smoke Going each their own way from death; Grey trailings who pennant the morning breeze, Thrown back to life like cod half-choked. Life swerves, renews its fatal failings, But what praise can resurrect our ease? Still, I'll speak in my pain's distraction. What I bury here in the grave's waves Sails off unseeing to houseless seas, And my dry, wry mouth seeks satisfaction In whistling praise of her days Unblackened by finches and graves: "Love was her meat, and love her bone. Her animal self moved in love's groove, With love she kept company though soul-alone. Such praise as I have I give to her who gave-- All her days destroyed and nights undone. Love's house she built where now I grieve."
Hooped high above the crumbled grave's graces In my snowy crowsnest post, I see her crawl Small below, spot her telltale witching walk Untying the whorish knot in my boysome thighs-- Crimped bright by wishes to mix with the minxes And all their suitable goods that engorge my eyes Hanging out on their wires of want and haven't. There stray the ladies subtle as sphinxes, Wild as cats, mild as ministers. Whatever it was in their minds to be They became, promethean as the sprawling sea, Powerful as flowers, enticing as chives, The ladies into whose pirouetting lives I'd dive Aswim in swung loveliness of their milky knees. Oh good were the nights we walked and went In summer fun under a halfway moon Our jolly wild way through red azaleas; The bowing peaches plucked themeselves And rolled for the eating along our rice-white palms. My heart like a plum plumped for her eyes; We knew it was better to be merry than wise. I I In the undressing dark we were goddess and god And the sword dance we did was on all fours. Encephalitic clouds jigged to the moon's old score, Fiddler and fumbler among our human halves. I was stiffer than whiskey in the moon-blind night, My luminous eyes glued to her minxy moving, My wooed blood hissing to my doomed undoing. And there in a glamour of her giving-way My heart fell dumb-a-tumble down heaven's stairs All the way to love, to love, to love. Love's high knobbed hill reared where we paired, Love's blue sky leered bold washes of wishes; Love's landscape escarpments I could no more escape Than wine its musk crushed from the grape. Every tale of the town told love's trials And birds blended voices with her's awhile For never again came coo, cuckoo, or caw, Nor fluffed sheep's leap, nor seesaw creak, But there too cooed her harmonic law, Her swayed hips' riches in all daisies and faces, The bass chord thumbed of all times and places. Down in the town she abates the grave's fever, Blows cool the forehead of the mortal weather, Laying wreathes of ease on the dying griefs-- And with the outlined eyes of her pawing sex, Her Sheherezade fingerends cling to laughing cymbals, Until all the terrible trouble, thump, and taunt of life Rings tingling tamed to one thrum of love.
When I am bones I'll have no fleas My marrow gone I'll whistle free, When eyes have melted I'll see no wreathes Nor hear in earholes the sad trombones Gathered at my spaded acre. When buried hunchbacked and sacred, When grave weeds hiss at foot and wrist And no psalms calm my pinching chest, Pennyeyed blind I'll seek the skull sail Of Charon's fatal craft on the Styx. And when one day I'm bones no more When no whistle lifts and no root knuckles And I am less than I was before Conception sailed me to mothering shores, Still will my small flea words jump and struggle.
Grief, brief taker, unfather me now. Sadness, unmother me. Graveward I've faced the advancing waves Of advancing seas. Too long the tick's arc, the second's digital flip Has lighted me theeward Grief, unwarded from your casual blows, The stealing weather That washes fair faces to bone. Sadness, old mother, Drop the salt bottle that put tears in my eyes All my undying days; Drop the long needles that engender my sighs. Sadness, unmother me. Grief, brief taker, unfather me now.
Pummeled I groan from boy to bier, On my head the hammer of fifty years; White sparks that from my being flare Hiss to show the blacksmith that I care. Shaped to suffer what weights are heaved, What heats the pestered forge unsheaths; I came to love what met my flame, Tempered by the love they claimed. Now I cool old; I wait for starless night Where my still fire may seem a little bright.
Beside an old hooped blackberry's spiked bush Buzzing with berries quick-thick as bees, I heard strange sighs, felt bully births bleed With patient breath in that dew-white hush. I'd gone out gloved and booted at calm dawn To pick among thickets what black wealth Fanged fingers could find for my crooked mouth-- As apt for last singing as a dying swan. When my cheap bucket began to waggle and fail Toppling with riches, and oppressive noon Swooned too full of summer's sultry buzz, I laid heavy in the heathery feathery grass And watched stretched-out full clouds sail by.
Night, weave me a veil and cover me soft away From hard eyes' pry-spies; seamstress, weave me now Far from stars' prisms a place of hiding night; From narrow arrow tongues, from angry pins Of pierced fierce saying, veil me soft away. Although I should love to shine oiled as the sun And gamesome come among flocks of crowing cocks And though my throat shouts like a bird to be heard And my enameled feathers preen, bitter light Illuminates my accusers' sear and scorn. I am peeled and revealed, weak in my puling bones: A hooked, cadaverous worm pinned in pain. To be known, to be heard, shreds the subtle veils; Stands bold-faced upon the past to catcall now, Fleshes in brave skin all pins all arrows fletched with light, Cauterizes all wounds, yet without enduring cure. Shall I stand gaudy-prowed, upright and pure? Night, drop your dark threads; weave me a soft, safe veil.
Run through woods where woods run wild Where waters of life limn the still moon pool And birds of every marvelous feather Cry Alive, alive at last, alive forever In a believing fever abruptly cooled By a blowdown blessing wind. Run through woods though running must end And the shadow-domed forest dissolve to light, Your bird-quest pecked to dickering questions, Crying Why oh why time's devastation In a shutting autumn that must close in night In the saddened manner all things end. Run till the moon comes runs you down Though lightning stream as mad as milk And thunder shiver where wonder had struck All the child-long days of your winning luck When the old moon-shroud shone pearl-sewn silk-- Cry with the birds in the deep wood hidden: I fletch my wayward soul toward heaven.
What came my way, windily dying, A pleasant face swayed over giving knees Obedient hands adamant to please A mouth singing arias in crimson ohs Eyes that shined crying robin's-egg blue, I laved with love without trying. What came my way, dying of stardust, A squinting face mad for abstractions Bent intent to beakers of boiling equations Hurried hands exact as smacking rulers Lips that kissed over grimacing molars, I loved with true love as a lover must. What came my way, dying of windfall, The veins of her face as heavy as rope, Pained, drained of all but a cadaver's hope Piecemeal to assemble the true resurrection To wake to eternity in a diamond mansion, I gave rivers of prayers and love's waterfall. What came my way once so windily I loved once, and once loved sinfully; What came my way once so dustily I loved once, and once loved lustfully; What came my way once only, dying, dying-- I loved, and love still. I love without trying.
Once in springing winter's yearning Sledding my shed days down the glistening hill From white heights of the sun's turning To where trickle minutes glint and spill, All I had begun to breathe and rawly be In the rayed amaze of my logturning race Merciless vanished into responsible seas; Melted to salt was my hour's grace. Twice in the mature assurance of doing When I paid my bills duly and nightly wildly wooed Million-pleated shimmering skirts of my choosing As though my noontime had no doom, All I had managed to gather with scythes and give In the muscled playdays of my manhood's prime Sighed from their silos in grain-golden waves; My laughing lovers swept on into time. Thrice when at the pleated weeping bedside Hovering love went striding from the room Harped into narrow light at the grave's thin side, I heard the night-note hid in my hammering noon-- And all my sledding came down on my back And snows of rosaries I continually said Kept not a flake, not an ash, of those tears from my track; I vanished beneath seas and the seas' dead sands.
The cozy owl hoos, the tit-mouse peeps Forever in woods they forever keep. They're in heaven just where they are, The night as still and soft as stars. The trees are lightless, deep as death, The sky as pearl as winter's breath. The field for the mouse is summer's feathers, The air for the owl is windless heather. Mouse in the barn ferrets out the oat, Owl from the rafter ferrets the tit-mouse out. Silent as seances, the owl falls-to, Immense the joy of his floating so. They're in heaven just where they are, Claws and teeth as sharp as stars.
O time was round and winding down and running away to graves When new new year's eve reared from the fleet defeat Of December done, no night rememberers of Christ come Through the long tunnel of the new year's breaking track. Downy towers of January snow shag both bush and branch In glitter stillness the minutes wait until all minutes stop. February finds none merry and March comes round A wet, whipped hound, an everything month with a lion's mouth. Steep cries the creeping clock, punishing, punishing, And December's mercies vanish. O time was round and winding down and running away to graves When Spring came singing thorough tulips swinging, In the dew-raw dawn of the baby year. April's dripping Lips lick the last icy eve, and winter eve drains to day, Till May comes baying tame in the tender green of trees, Walkways pink with cherrytree drifts. O June and her rumors! every seed's ripe grew true Loaded hours unfolded red, brimful full as honeydews. July saw life's celebrants, undimmed, rear bright as stars And life sang easy in a million backyards. Old August sweated swarthy with his layabout breath, And no one moved, hoved home in simmer and sloth. O time was round and winding down and running away to graves As sweet September saw sad dogs barking mad at school bus windows. Dooms of October boomed through the trees And autumn fell broken as the many-voiced sea, Washing summer rinds to the feathering waves. Now November chimes white again, ringing its icicle dimes, Sticks stark as daggers, brown before thrown snow begins And December stumbles to the resurrecting stage, the saving season Where sailor hope climbs winter's cross-spar to spy Olive-leaved Spring somewhen far-off in the scenting wind.
The tendril wind Begins, far away in thin Cornstalks that I had walked Oh eons ago if a day, Pelting the path with my man's sway, Counting the trounces of foot and foot, Wiping my face with playful soot As though I were the storm To come. Bigger than death and ditches, Ripping through my stitches, Ferocious as scorches, Infinite as scythes, Sweeter than salmon skies, Solomon-wise my dancing eyes-- And not some laughing worm, I twist thin In the tendril wind.
If wind were ice, November-locked In transparent cubes of square air, Invisible but real as winter's despair, If shear hills were told ‘no taller' by the crack Of the whittling wind knifing Diamond summer down to rhinestones, Would man in his troubles hunch huddled, Alone before the ruddy fingers of his fire? Would he hear the crossed, cracked sticks Of winter rip in air's transparent box? If wind were ice when November knocks, Yawning trees would creak and settle down to sleep, Restless a final time in the weather's windy knots Before ash and elm turn their backs for good On icicle wind that can crack them dead And go to sleep together as a naked wood.
The wind persists-- Its kiss a hiss, Knocks on boxes, Backwards bleating, The trees unseating, The swing untwisting. The slapped gate yapping, Its lock unlocked, Gapes and shuts, Clacks slats to bits. This chimney hisses, The winds persists. Pushed puddles dimple, Marred mud wrinkles; Single shingles whip, Wanton windchimes clap. Clouds grim and grey Unbolt the baying day-- Torn fingertip twigs tangle, Scratch pathless patches, Flick flattened dirts, flung Signs unhung, The leaves insisting The winds persist. Wild wind feathers Her hair behind her. The terrible weathers Shiver swing tethers, Flap seats to branches; Ripe rain rings down, Unburies the ground, Sounds bells in gutters, Slippery mutters The wind persists. A house unhinged Chases the wind-- A sting, a scream, A body blown, The unknown sown. The mind a mist.... The wind persists.
Love doesn't come rowdy and crowding Into our lives, but glides in silver stealth, Writes like ice skates its argent lines On hearts that had been frozen else. Love brims its inches full of moonlight Soft into the cups of lovers' hearts, Leaves its misty trailings like a sigh Over the dawn pond's beginning light. Love is not the drum of nature's duty, Which mates and makes a beauty-- Where wily weasels squirm and twist Mad as affection's fist.
Two lovely loves roost in May's mulberry tree Mimed alive from the conspiring slime That lulled and told the dinosaurs to sleep; Two helicopter tufts of orchids, flowers Sublimely arise on the dividing branch of day --Whereunto I aim myself A bone arrow arriving late to two beauties.
Light-crafted clouds remind me of seas, Seaweed seasons winter rakes from me, Me (once we) conniving waterlessly, Wordlessly in the lonely going-on of white Whittled December, ice-hemmed January nights, Nights jammed deep in my heart's lace ice. Icy clouds drown my voice in this noiseless waste. Was it your voice the sealess winter void replaced? I pace in silence, all my soul a seaweed sprawl. Light-crafted clouds remind me of seasons We'd once walked two, by those roaring seaside Tides all summer, one long uttering waterslide-- Tied in love, you by my side, and I by your side tied.
Burn souls black, my sweet soot, kept Wept bright, My dark imagination locked in keyless chest-- What Whitman called his Fancy. My sour flower, till clear a little Earth's lintel, Hades' entryway and heaven's foyer, Clear this away and that away-- My sprung song, tattle at the gate Late tales Turned and tuned until they tell all, And, revealing all, are all. My fletched foot, fly sprained Gain height, Take the kept chest with you upward-- Soar blazing, my eyes my galaxies.
The old dog died under a collapsing wheel. The innocent turns of his breath Revolved no further then. This was a dog's death. The old dog young had been a child's companion, Champion in his chasing turns That hounded the summer weather. Now he must be buried or burned. Never among muddy puppy days and yips When we rolled green as grass Did I imagine his final going, The silence in the house. These hands that threw the unfetched stick Somehow in air still turning Are empty now he no longer leaps In ordinary glory.
Crouched in the cotton-batting grass Cozy as roses in a love-pinched cheek And babbling baptism of a summer's day, I say my ways my world my forgotten selves When young as a pup and pipping proud I played with tufted grasses and the days went round. I found myself and my pointing hound Ready for pheasant in the long splay meadow. Alert at a minute's click we stalked And ran down the rising side of the great sloped hill. We traced our racing in the tall ribbon grass Following with our falling the pheasant's fear, Its loping trot, half wing half claw, the bird Flew to shadow where the pebble stream whirred, Flushed in a flash onto bent bush and wood. The hound stood troubled in the chittering stream; The twice-sniffed tracks slipped in the water's sheen Left taut nose taut gun hung uselessly. No mortal union of man and beast, my hound and me All eyes all ears for the willing chase, all those marble days Of my flyaway youth when killing knew no death. No minutehand arrow in those flung days Followed far beneath the blue-clad eastern clouds, The spattering charms of the swift-passed rains. No hour collected us before long nights called cool, All happiness said in the old hound's cry That sang us sermons and psalms to our summer bed.
The bear in the circus A rollicking shambles Dances in cages for afternoon crowds Between bright lights and bullwhips With a rolling drunken gait Among cheers grown fantastically loud. Muzzled and mated and tamed He whirls balls on the end of his nose Between peanutshells and sawdust Whipcrack and organ-grind For crackerjacks and fist-given meats Until crowds rise out of their seats. The bear in the circus A tutued buffoon Dancing among spotlights and blackness On a turnedover tub Twirls for hotdogs and popcorn, Burst laughter and plummeting hands Until the ringmaster bows goodbye And night unbundles Down the swinging tent eaves The spider-dropping dark of shutoff light With a sound as round as seasurf Rough and lovely; And the bear shuffles off in his furs Returning untamed to black forests White pines and wine skies Wild stars pricked trim as pinspots Past cage stale straw and old water And shambles on into dream.
The badger in winter Is walking his dreamscape In coffindark torpor In yellow fallow forb His fierce face tucked in his tail His tail laid soft as milkweed seed. The badger in winter In the cove cave of his burrow home Laid warm against snows on the sandy plains, Against the shark-finned wind In downcast loam, Walks his dream summer faraway gone. Deep in the seed of his needing Halfway warmed from torpor He remembers the flattened grey grasses Tall in their summer disguises In fields were he snuffled and wagged His striped head like a hungry pennant. A badger backed in a corner Nearsighted and clawing for air Rears like a miniature bear Ragged teeth intense to attack His mind alone as the winter He sleeps through on his back.
The taunt that tugged the president Pulled havoc down, that tagged him weak Pinched flinches from his sensitive eyes. Tall from the podium he kept speaking. No silence broke the whispering bones Buried hushed beneath the token words; Ministers and senators kept their quarrels home; Itching dissent slept like a covered bird. Tall from the podium he kept speaking. What was told was not what there was to tell. No drone roamed, no attack tank rolled. Vanished as ashes were Crimea's liberties, Small crosses sucked beneath the black sea's hatch. Torn corners of his treaties rubbled to rounded, Shredded edited on the contested ground; The old ordered world's illusions, ruined, fell Dead as kites, as needles from the imagined sky. Tall from the podium he kept speaking.
He comes home smelling of animal, His shirt all stiff with musk. How do the does endure it? The rank of his reek is incredible! I sniff at his neck in the dusk.
The pig in his trough, of course, Is live, vibrant, vivid, virile; The critic in his pigsty's piss, unless He praises you, his hero.
Dance, dart in daring airs, Part for buttercups, prancing pair Over wheat's real fields of gold. God's dancers, these shining Psyche's bees, emblems busily nothing Doing, really, fluttering flakes of gold. Momently only, they here sink Or there are, immortal moment's winks; Go, having given our eyes real gold.
I in my difficult self confined, A figurehead in any kind of weather, Feel the flesh fail, My blunt body blown about In moon's-blood shouldering the prow. I in the wind's stir untended, A feather unfathered in unkind weather, Blow, burn unblessed, Dying of indecision; crushed, cursed by all The maybe plagues. I from my difficult self unbound, A thrifty theiver of the weather, Shift the kissing sticks Jove tossed crossing to the blundering waves; I emblazon my desire with a lightning look. I in my infinite self confirmed, A watchman of rocks in whiskey weather, Feel Babylon's wormy stars Still drill real into my pinnacled pride For all my woeful mouth's wanting eternity now.
Haste, make haste and break this door down That keeps taste and sight and sigh contained In one animal man. Speed, speed to crack the doomsday locks That prison me in tongues while my jailor's key Jangles in nightlong song. Fast, fast unleash the keeping wires that press My stained teeth with blame, that once Leaked a live language. Quick, quick, pickaxe this cadaver here Who holds my moldy manbones black by the throat And keeps heaven dead.
Extinct are all my cradle days, The owl-rocking nights of mother-love When the moon looked in at the open bays From the forever-in-shadow grove. Dead and clamped as brakes the rolling Races between we three furious brothers Freestyling downhill until our voices Dwindled on out of grace. And dumb beneath mournful ocean blues Squall the sung promises of lovers; Deep among reefs, like griefs they sink Which no one shall recover. But what of today, this indomitable day Arrayed fragrant as the sun? What rocking, what racing, what graces may Stay, more than what had come?
In a batter's cage of kisses, I pray: "I delight in the little bigness of things-- The male and female of the falling weather, The thunder's caresses, the hurricane's feathers. And I delight in the little bigness of time-- Magnifying maggots to their true snake's size Or ogling saints small from their hail of stars," Until my wayside prayer sparks, Igniting angst and thanks. Dragged by the hair to gratitude In morningtime's lucky ache of love, I take up my holy task to tell: "The pentecostal whip of my missus' kisses, The sweet pinch of being in a flea's swell tail, The saccharine queen sex who thralls all Through life's unforgiving gale," Till morning and meaning break in my molten soul Gotten and golden and whole.
Man is statue to the act unfolding, Alone must watch new worlds unfurl. The unstill sea against its shingle Confounds his gems and wreckage. To do, to be, is Hamlet's question, Unstilly told to the breaking sea; Love is a verb who's germy gestation Unfurls worlds that break to be. The act unfolding is a falcon's strike, The beak dashed blank to being's white cry-- And the moment alone, no more dreamed But done, arcs arrow vowels to the sky.
In legendary dark Among old stories roared Around the dying fire as the fire Was kith to the lithe Fire of her eiderdown eyes. Oh mother softly adored In all your sainted ways Of maybe praying And flyover loving Calling us "angel doves," Gone you are with the droves Of wing-wrestling others Flown all the way at once From earth's darks To heaven's angles. And there she plays in fields Of undying light Martyr and mother As all of them are Chased in the storm-soaring Haste, the speedy unwaiting Forever is.
Shall my love's saying soul Assail the running sands? Shall her timeless hand repeal Laws of the flying weather, Clickering rains that drown my ears? My love's tongue shall wring Sugars from the hourglass; What clouds compose she shall mock: Her flung hand shall winnow Wet ghosts of the clock. Should my love turn and say Her soul's weathers in my ear, I should unwind the cloudy leaks, Rain sand hours out of hand; And one heart should flood all lands.
This island man In his lighthouse watches And lets the disturbed ear hear Strangers rowing over The silentest crest Of a sea at peace with itself-- Strangers in lifeboats gaily pursuing What I cannot pursue myself. O stranger rowing over Clasp you an arrow or glass? Never in all my handholding days When the trees shadowed my friends, Did I know myself the island I wore Skirted with simmering flesh Dense and deep as sand; Stars as silent as ministers Watched my days unclasp. O stranger rowing over Clasp you an arrow or glass? Now the stars like spectators Crowd my lulling shore, While I, alone in my clothes, Let days, birds and hours pass Quiet as a radar's sweep. Shall I go to the boats, Unloading my griefs, or keep Eye and ear in my lighthouse locked? O stranger rowing over Clasp you an arrow or glass?
I who would love hot am ribboned cold By flying knives of your sighing; I who would live all my blonde, baby days am old Solomon in his windings, Trussed for dead and my meat heart sold To buy my bindings. And this alone is love, and love alone is this In our modern charnelhouse; As winding worms, plunged crucified to fish, Rise resurrected in fishes' bowels-- In love alone persists our one presentiment of bliss Windy as a rose. Kicked crawling by paradox who would kiss the truth, I fly to you sighing; Bitten to blood stitches by beauty's tooth, I kiss you where you're lying. And O I'd trade rose and heart and all for your charnal mouth, But O I am dying. And this alone is love, and love alone is this Which leaves us bound or binding; The timid touch of love, that once coughed soft as whispers, Wails its unwinding-- I swallow again the reeling worm that love hooks with And fly to you sighing.
One mated and angelic eve With the book flared across your knees, Eyes guided eyes and, nose to nose, Ambushed lips began to brush and be. Stiff ministers of a cultish creed We repeated the stolen words, Puked up tongue and black and naked need Until our needing heard. I knew any bell's praise from your lifted lips Would sound my soul awake; I knew each bit of bitch, like a searing nail, Would seal my damaged fate. Together with stars and eyes and book half-open, We paid with pain for what we left unspoken-- We traded hands and nimbly led Each other back to bed.
Sewn together in a pouch of purrs Hand on breast and mouth on thigh We cannot make our moaning words Or hiss a thesaurus into our kisses' sighs. Each stroke of sex that turns us double Or kinks our Xed zones to a core Of double yolks where trapped tongues bubble About the regions our mouths rub sore, Undoes encyclopedias of saying, Erases summations to addition's first tick And cancels accounts we could be laying With the hollow of a kiss' lick.
Doublecrossed by the terror of birth Into the troubled thrum of becoming, Uneaseful in our mirth When summer's feather moults to winter's bone And all the cold wonder Of snow's undoing. Wrenched upright, awry by our thrown bones-- Uncramped from the comfortable hunch Inside neutral mother And stretched to stand in decisive day, Thrown to thrones in the hissing wheats, We bleed into seed. Shambleshanks unpacked on a walk as long as thought, Our knowing as nothing as nothing else (Unless such nothing is)-- We hold seed and snow in eye and hand; In bone and feather breed; our flight Tells all and nothing less Than Christ-crossed oblivion.
The wound that springs in the brain like a spring Gabbles and bathes the skull's tough turf With its billion babylon babblings: griefs-- The scummed flood within unending. How to tap to touch to cure the bone wound That grows horned and hard by its being sown A wizard hazard of once-love seared to burns, A heart unstrung to shreds from its beginning good-- To console to care to bear the stone bravely That grinds pink steeples to damnation's dust, To save the raving brain from its mournful spurt, To salve with grace the holy core till such touching saves? In the bedtime deadtime of the day's darling going, I see the white nurse rise like nightfall Over the hill's swift wave over houses over all Over each of us with her coverlet of stars undoing Every unshrived grief of the mind's undoing.
A creature of whatever trouble Is cartilage and mischief-- Trimmed in skin and the smile's lie That all shall be kin 'til kinship dies. A creature of whichever wish Is eyelashes and ifs, Entrancing Time in evening's dish With coddling dreams and such. O creature picked of which and what, All elbows and ears, Take of this trouble its whatever worth And wish the wisher kin until His wish full is of death and earth.
Now that the burning brain is clay And the body's sodden veins are glue, Elbow and bone have gone soaked to sod, And I lie sandlocked, spine and foot, Unstirred by the insistent stars. Love has nothing to wake the dead Though the dead are waiting to wake. I'm stiff as mittens lost in a snowstorm, No burning for heart or for head, Though hearts at my wake are aching. Day's gone down on the chilling chapel And stone shadows pool east of forever Where we grave men wrestle the gods; Eternity flees, all triumph dispelled To the white gold of a maggot's egg. Night and death have put daylight out of favor.
Once in seething time, I came into my curse: A friend unfriendly wore his face reversed. And all my friends, the small fry fishes, Sieved themselves from the chaos bay. And the lone moon sang its fluted bone; And night's tooth conned the meat of day; And safe in my shallow's hollows, I Worked out corrupted wonder's why. Long in my wondering den then, Crying among rainbow shoals of corals (Each the quick color of a friend), I banded in briars my heart with hurts 'Til cursed and closed in mental hearse I heard the helpmeet of my wound's verse. Her samaritan's purse snapped ripe, And rosy were all her monies' colors: Those folds red-gold and green as apples. With her tender hand salving soft and softer, Binding the wound where wonder once was Healing with hushed touch scars' stars, she Paid my way out from hurt's solitude to awe.
The soul's weary weather--all heavenslight after The plumed owls' hoo, after starry cries stoppered above The black trees' stirless shadow Rise spendthrift from clear silences of night, Or come roaring down light-crafted clouds To drown My nickering wicked ways and proud. Hooded and hooved, my mazy footsteps arrow-trod, I walk awake yawning dawn's cadmium floods And break today's milky veils-- I tear all my spider's swagged bag of guilts Dragged from nightmare silts and dreaming dread To scrawl This crippled, ink-black shred. I've spent my whole of love on a half ragtag child's Green and runaway, grave-going hand I held Through the roaring tread Of the wild weather. Blown down breakneck winter's steps In dead trumpet air, my forgotten weathers Come round together And flood my flashing morning-mourning eyes.
Plangent star and argent ache, Ideal I reach toward and cannot take, Perfection's perfection without defect, Unblemished apple eden-made, Dean and master of my scribbled days: Shakespeare bearded, brightly rayed-- Star apart from earth's infections, Stationed steady above life's stone jetty Where my words lie washed, assailed By stale time--to dirty foam burst, Broken tidal pools my hearse.
Slip, slip from kissing, thou, Part from parting, too, Accept that all that is but seems, Accept my image accepting you Is more than mirror, less than dream. Attachments are the Bhuddist's sins; Sins avowed invent the lens Through which the sin is sin-- More than mirror, less than dream, Accept that all that is but seems. Accept my leaving is but staying, And my love a kind of praying. I stood upon a departing prow And knew the moving wave Stayed in whirlpools of a now; It was myself I could not save Departing on the departing prow. I would keep here, kissing you, Upon the storm-molested shore Counting sand grains, counting stars As long as numbers added more, As long as you're the you you are, More than mirror, less than dream, Accepting all that is but seems. Slip, slip from kissing, thou, Part from parting, too. LOVE'S TOO DIFFICULT Love's too difficult to love, That hard unguarding of hearts; I look at you, and see what's above-- Of those heavens I have no part.
Tears melt unmanaged from her cornered eyes. Tears untamed infect her dusty cheeks. Tears fall like hair and cover her faint feet. Tears too tired to hide tell something here has died. Tears intense as terror, intent as saints, Tell a tale of living too long unwell.
In kneeling sands my whittled savior Gives first his whole love and then his whole life: Clicker of minutes in a clockless land Of blood the red of eyes the whites Of day the turning touch of night Of fever the calming palming hand Of marriage the untempted wife Of giving the savoir faire of favor. This best of whoever I was and am This holy most carved from my sheepish least This model who troubles my conscience the most Who sees most within where I wander most lost Who knows when I don't what I most might be Who throws my bevy of devils into the sea-- Of love the whole shadow and holy ghost Pinnacle of paragons, the one man undamned, To you I kneeled once among seagulls and doves; To you I kneel still, invulnerably loved.
We wrote it Feelingly in the fallow following water We scratched it quick in quicklime Tumbled words running in the sun only, all out of order, Words of life and rhyme. By the water Lemony and brown and warm and lovely Under the still, tall trees of noon We raced and rambled our hours our days unlonely Straying late and soon. Little, little we knew How silkily stalking our walks our woods was death Sly and lithe in regular sneakers While blind in the minutes of our timeless eyes the path's Pattern paced water that had no equal. We connected all The faraway whites of the uncaught conning stars We drew and called them by name Told ourselves the tumbled stories, the high adventures, Tales of whence they came. By Milky Way's White beard, by the sky's clotted unnavigable river Beneath raven-tressed trees of midnight We followed the constellations' endless chapters forever Companions of their light. Little, little we knew And less in our wold's heavenly wandering cared That Orion drew his sword That death through the pensive leaves yet wandered near And listened to our words. We rowed on Dazzled in the wayward spray of the clapping waters Mute swans upon the surge-- We felt, not knew, the wavery rilling river's cool disorder Where its swelling branches merged. We let The whelming carry us, the whelming water carry us Endlessly onward as verse While tree and bush and burning day went blurring in the rush Of the passing universe. Death swanned Beside, rowing in the rapid waters' surging, hungry And beautiful as tears; The bucking canoe at ease eventually beneath us, steady As the sun's one stare. We penned The happenstance pattern of our pacing days With quicklime wits of reason Lost in the lovely the lemon the brown, the water's lonely mazes While summer fell out of season. Beside the vocal River raving, beside the crimped dusk's cold darkening Beneath lean trees stripped of leaves We heard the softening drip of winter voices harken To frost's disordered breaths. Our days erased With willful ease erased like slipped mistaken words Erased, while sounded the river-water Behind us, and before us on the flood flowed the world With death pattering after.
"One boy you can get some work out of,
Two boys more.
Three boys, none."
~~Dad's rule of thumb
Working through sunsweat and neckburn,
We unrolled a fence against rabbits,
Against animal life conniving and hungry,
Against raccoons and clever black hands.
Against the vindictive eating and shitting of birds,
We worked with our father all summer.
We were impaling our vegetable kingdom
On the graves of the grass we had buried.
With chipped rototiller and rust-red tools
We bit at what had remained unbroken,
Churned arrowhead up, tore taproot to loam--
Dad's spat tobacco as brown as his coffee.
With raw shoulders turned to the wheel,
With shovels like diamonds scraping
Layer after layer of untrammeled dirt,
We called forth the spirit of seed
With spray hose and angry commandment.
With sky our indifferent accomplice,
And time our old friend and enslaver,
Our trowels dibbled like stitchwork
Tearing the mother's side just enough.
Our bleeding was part of the bargain,
Knee and knuckle and elbow,
Bright splinters left burning like auras.
Late, late in the day, our sun-dragged
Boots kicked off into brambles,
Sunhats tossed down by pond-blackness,
The mud medicinal, efficient,
Covered us to knees, and our gossip
Was smiles creased behind wheat grass.
Frogs boomed cool and obtrusive,
Echoes of wood and of shadow
Where peep toads woke to their work
As night fell on our dreams and dominion.
On pillows as wide as those fields
Our dreams saw tomorrow's tomorrow,
Saw sunflower and carrot and rhubarb
Burst plaintively furiously perfect
Behind chicken-wire straight as a razor,
The field churning all colors in sunlight,
The dirt lifting life in a triumph:
The bones of our enemies bleaching,
Squalid tomatoes impossibly red,
Staked pea-pods that rattled out victory.
Our old buckets were full of new freshness,
The trembling of too-much brightness--
Burnt cheeks were hitting cool linens,
Our faces delighted and keen.
As brothers we rode the high treetops Where fields fell away forever. The pines were not weeping with time. The clouds stood still for the runner. As brothers, we rode the high treetops. We swam where water was giving, Where light was dappled with deepness. Wet rocks all echoed our chorus, And the river ran on in its sleeping. We swam where water was giving. We sang till we called out the stars, Till trees of our nighttime were shining. We perched in their arms proud as owls, Forever among clouds and flying. We sang till we called out the stars. Knock wood, we were loving and living, And life was just as it seemed-- The fields fell away forever, And night was an endless dream. Knock wood, we were loving and living. Through light that was quick as kindling, The river ran on with a shudder. All our days passed away like a dream. We climbed every night like a ladder, Through light that was quick as kindling. As brothers we rode the high treetops. We swam where water was giving. We sang till we called out the stars. Knock wood, we were loving and living, Though the light went quick as kindling.
Half animal and man in my shambling frame I ache toward the open doorway; Wounded and wronged in my make-believe flesh, Blazed and amazed by a million teardrop eyes, My every ear alert to illumination In the star-flying dark and flak daylight-- I hunch against the wind of forever come.
Gallant as a cloud, proud Before all the eyes of earth, death No more niggly than a gnat, hat Never humbly in hand, upstand- Ing I was born. Feathered in fiery skin, sin A stranger to my heart-knot I ran graced, and I crowed, crowned By loud Love's crying spires All my lengthening youth. Outfitted with a suit of ruth, death My wages on my way, away I gave day to moon-soothing night, lit By my scholar's candle, dull- Witted with ignorance and loss. O I knew nothing, nothing In my pinnacled prime, time My wings and my hearse; terse Time clocked me back to one; gone Was my youth like a cloud.
When man-draped blood dripped Myself down from heaven with a dropping cry Spilling this body from pained hip's lips Crying life, life to live, life alive, Did any other come dumb a-tumble, Riding my shoulders, a capable wonder? And roaring unlovely all lonely's lessons, A dripping waxwork with a burning wick, My bone-alone prayers wrung, sung in session Where echoes creep cold to double and mock: Is it I alone who lives, who dies, Unlovely in my body's sack of lies? Upright in the everywhere-nowhere now With something-nothing thrown on shoulder and brow, And naked if I only knew how, The I behind I unfurls a brown shroud Dote-silent now as twice aloud-loud, Incapable as a cloud.
Whose bones I break bear the ash Breath first tongued in soot; Whose back I bare endures the lash Of days as quick as coals. Whose tongue I suck between two gasps Of bare babe's cry and skull's knobbed crack Vowels a violent void that snaps Babe, grave and groin in our kisses' black. Whose wormy, wasted soul I own Filched infinity from moldy bloods; Animal and man I dug for sup And killing and kissing gave forth God.
Chained to a walking coffin full of talk Stuffed glistening with wormy words Bursting from socket and wagging jaw, My living bliss ashed to bony calcium, I meditate the rickety syncopation of the clock, The wise zero that sums a twitching life: Time's iron hands, flags, drag Round the flat globe face to mock A farcical carcass self who stiffly lisps Dusty sayings of a nothing mouth-- The blundering tongue gone gagging blue, My mouth of thistles thick as glue, My speech a lesion spill, a drawl of scars, My loves the licked stamps of faces.
When threads are cut that held us close, When the snapped hand snips the ribbon, The veiny net that pulled round wrist and bone Shredded is. When lungs surrender to a liquid ill And drowned men dead we fodder fish, The rose-red sea that we had swived Arid is. When words have ceased to traffic truth And goose to goose give gossips' proof, Our mutual tale told in the mirror Sheeted is. Alien we stand who shared one knocked breath, One saying syllable for our daily prayer, One look, one heart enduring Time's Omnivorous is. Alien we die: out of syllables, out of breath, Crossed as words, incompatible as knots, And no more face-to-face face each other In grave is.
The voice that puts my world to worse Sits alien in the ear. The jugging hand that hoists my heart I exile to a hammered bier. The eye that sees my face as sodden I pluck and damn its tears. The ear that hears my each word a curse Whispers its own fear. When that eye, that hand, that crooked ear Misperceive my frame, I crack each red rib and fish within To kiss her soul again.
The crayon crammed sun, dear, Roaring and soundless, fountains A crooked rivering stalk to the grave For it is summer and never 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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; 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 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.
Her incandescent body Tender under told time's one gigantic tick Incinerates hours and fables by swept, kept licks-- Molten beneath the moon's white story. Take all my lorn light unshorn (to you only belonging) Twist flame and flower and winking spring Into the midnight ivy of your dark, swung hair And into the blended candle's long eye at dawning. Twist every strand of the wild, wild air Into the midnight ivy of your dark, swung hair Until Love jumps out from spuming earth And mounts the lost, cross ways of my breath. All-at-once lovely in your loved eye, Awkward and able, spry and awry, My burning body like a shouted cross I move All-at-once lovely in your loved eye. Now out of sparring breath I pause to praise and honour all her ways: Whirled brave alive again from her inward world, I sing all loves sprung from her beginning word; And deep in the sacristy of her candle-hot breath I lay down my moons and worlds for the honor of her days. One by one the unspoiled stars spill from her side.
Wrung from the walleyed wait of the womb Marooned to a prayer from god's grave side And all community of the duly good, An apple unpinned from its savior branch, I fall as I fell, have fallen, will fall Each rainy inch in angst against gravity. Born moonblind to majesty and mystery And deaf to reverenced heaven's sighs, Alone on the lovely ground crowded with brothers And blitzed by a gracing despair, I rot Blood-ripe and rosy beyond my own reach. Against this windy time will I stand again Who fell to a world wrung dumb by pain? I inch each word in angered prayer to a leaf.
I who stood on sand and said The God-word aloud in my shivering pride, Watch mansion and turret rook beneath the tide That roars above my body's fevers. Instead of dwelling in forever I came to the crooking shore of here As the last darks broke and dawn recalled Heats that create the damned and the dear. Now cool and straight as eve's dark grace, Now lumped as fever's lesions, I stand unmanned, unmade, in the shriving space-- A shadow man born of shadowed son. I who was sky and wind before the stars shone Before earth filled with grave and tower, Before my star-marked unmaking stand Alone and voiceless in unsaying sands. The wry wink is dead that fetched me manifest From darks surrounding shore and star; Now landward ho the shapeless foams Remake my manless nothingness. Never again will I crawl into a star And dawn across ages to a planetary birth. I am undone in both seed is and shared are. I have no claim to make but death's.
I held my child's hand down to the grave And traced his comet's roaring going with my breath, Sorrowing sorrow until the sea's moon gave Its thousand salt prayers up in sprays Scattering the brine-shrived gulls on the shingle To spread stars aloft, and each a different way, As the waves fell down from their mingle And found a thousand moons in their crossways splash And told my broken, washed heart hush. O I was a dying moon in the ocean's rove And with her million wants my wants still move, To her breaking crescent I still squeak my eye That dissolves in her fabulous crooks; Locked frost-cursed in my own godawful life I freeze grieving past midnight's strife, Until night on a moonstruck gravestone breaks And harrowing dawn gives my soul a saint's look And shines on all my wonderful lies like love. Out of the four-ways Jordan of my heart Out of the splendid cincture of my pricking ribs Out of the mercury furnace in my brain Out of my own dear hollow bailiwick rolling I walk stalking my bones' marrow-trail Scout brawling galaxies from my blind bloods Ride my star-fashioning veins to black skies-- And, stepping the pulsing pathways of the stars, I take my place among the meteors in the dark.
Pinned to minutes and the clock gone mad, Round and round its stranger's face, Round the hours that ache for grace, Round landscapes of strangers, I go ghosted and lost in the flying dark. If found unlost at last I'd nail the heart Home with the hammer of the soul, Let hands build chapels as they soothe. But no nail shines, no hammer moves, No home comes kissing from a cloud. Strip the gilding from the stars, Let hands tear down the dark dim griefs That moored the heaven-faring lights-- Wanderers wide round stranger and sky In this strangeness that has no end. Now I move in my cool body's shroud Distant as touch in a statue's hand, A blownback bit without sail or keel; No nail glows, no hammer moves. Hands were made to fashion as they feel.
Not until the September is past And the grave dead all lie, unshakled, unburied, Alone in the frost's mouth (All dying done, all birthing begun) And every crooked, ear-marked child is led, By the dimming blood of a failing hand, To play away from the clock's haunts And stars are incited to shrink again The cragging moon's corruptible sphere To less than a pinnacle's pinched inch of sky (Not until the September is past) And every weed grows down to die Up where the miracle dead were tossed In a frozen field gone over to snow And the cold wind in a cold throat like glue, Dying of wanting; and the blossomless trees Lift their skirts to let me fondle The bark-notched knees of autumn's parts, Sold old home of my father's wants, Will I catch cure in the cuckold wind For inextricable laughter and hate.
When into the mouth the death cry comes Unamazed and odorless, Crammed by the ticking fingers of perpetual crime Down the rattling throat to sound An agony of conscience in the unshelled ear Of too much unlived living Then will the eyes start up blind And hair sprout hands for the head Then the unmuffled will of the stilling heart Will damn activity, haul up dock to decision, Bless the unpaid mind with rest, tell toes to grow into feet, Knuckles reverse to blunt, loved palms, Shoulderblades dwindle to wings, Red ribs uncage to drop dead lust, And lagging heart kick all away To fall to a faraway sky, And all of these be mine.
Speech is mischievous, a golden compass drawn Across unmeaning skies; Speech exiles stars to constellations, pins Fabled limbs to nets of stories; No matter how Andromeda shakes her chains She's penned inside the teller's page. Speech is mischievous, a tattling bottle tossed Across the sawing sea; It hectors and pleads: Let me not be lost! Read me, though I tremble like the leaves! Speech each human voice confines in glass, Each human heart to myth dismisses. Speech is mischievous, quoth the rowing poet At sea on the blanking page; Chained through lip, by starstruck anklet clipped, He brays: Truth's my hammered swage! Gospel bottle, netted sea and star Stay where I say they say they are. ===Previous Edit=== Speech is mischievous, a golden compass Drawn across unmeaning skies; Speech exiles stars to constellations, pins Fabled limbs to net and story; No matter how The Bear may circle and rage He's penned inside the teller's cage. Speech is mischievous, a tattling bottle tossed Lost on a sawing sea; It hectors untold nails into each holy cross That decks the bleeding tree; Speech each human voice confines in glass, Each human heart to myth dismisses. Speech is mischievous, quoth the rowing poet At sea on the blanking page; Chained through lip, by starstruck anklet clipped, He brays: Truth's my hammered swage! Gospel bottle, tree and netted star Stay where I say they say they are. ===Previous Version === Speech is mischievous, a gold compass drawn Across unmeaning skies; It exiles the stars to quadrants, pinning them Netted into story; No matter how The Bear may circle and rage He's penned inside that telling cage. Speech is mischievous, a tattling bottle tossed Lost on a sawing sea; It hectors nails untold into the holy cross To deck the bleeding tree; Speech the human voice confines in glass, The human heart to myth dismisses. Speech is mischievous, says the knowing poet At sea on the blanking page; Chained through lip, by silver anklet clipped, Truth's his hammered swage; Gospel bottle, tree and netted star Stay where we say they say they are.
Whatever sparring light marrs and death amends
Pluck from the warring
Hollows of my hand;
Whatever of cooing good life plunders to extend
And we wrestle like drunken divers to breakage
Pull from the sounding mellows of my mouth
Until death that takes all gives my stone tongue back.
Whatever of love creeps from the lying wind
Blows my coal,
Lashed eyes to tears;
Whatever care cracks from the cormorant docks
Or discovering sorrow divots from the feathering shore
And makes life spasm in the teeth of time
Sights down the red waters of my blood.
Comfort and mother in my manhood hums
And I break
In the tide's sprawls awake;
My black veins wreathed in the sea's last knock
I strut my shivers to their grave-finding breath
Until, moon-man and bone-man, I rub my salt face off
And lie down dying with my brother coral in the dark.
Paupers in the blood purse of the heart Lay their elaborate Shillings on the table; cardsharks pitched In the night-dealt tavern Spade their aces on the circus-lit flat. Time has sold my windy winnings to a torch And I listen as they burn; Desperation's lip mimes dumb prayers to the hands; Tucked and crossed Against age's gales, I kneel in the fiery kirk. Oh I'd lay any dollar in this sailor's booth To get back half my wage (Pained from all the paying days of my death that toss Annihilation's light), For one heavenhued hour of my Gamorraed youth. Now gambled out to the last most Moan of my soul And stretched to my shroud on the checkered cloth, I fury my winnings To the Bermuda wind, and all my cruel wishes scatter. Daybreak's word clatters drainward with my bloods Down to cluttered noon; And there my heart's argosy, almost golden in the hand- Hold of my ribs Repeats and repeats and the seas rise and break.
Into earth's rude shelter slide my sighs Who goes, dead at last, a cold unknown, Far from the killing dale, the blistering hills, Feet first to paradise, and Eden a muddy hole. Into earth's rude shelter slide my sighs. Who can love who has not love's tongue, The syllabic kiss that sucked me cipher? In my green glut of utterance once I sighed the mustard canker from the rose. What loving hand will now caress my crass? Life was miracle articulation once Sweeping the little dale and choiring hills; Life in the rose sang to its thorns: There are no skeletons in Eden. Now life and death confound, all drowned, And sighs shall shelter all.
Deep in the wandering ways of the blood
Drill my veins to their dust mouths;
Stars in the cell say "Love" and burn
The kin-kept eons out of hand;
Talk of the body may bless the tongue's lie
And all the interminable blisses;
Funneled by birth to a burning chalice
I drink my red liquors though I am dust;
Crabbing life outwits death but once
Then scrabbles back to its sea-sucked hole.
Thirty stretched years touch me to the poles.
A Mardi Gras grin spins at my lips
And the moon grins crazily down.
Much I wonder at the bleeding need for love
The mission of kisses, assignation's hours,
When we meet and pair off to die;
Both tongue and groin I wear like a star
And walk star-struck to the place of ashes.
Much I wonder at the wrinkled sun,
Amoeba or man, no blind difference given,
His acid shine drives all wases to once;
Much I wonder, at my death-ripe age,
Of the worded brine spit from the wasted lip,
The low tongue's lie that sums us up:
The fairy tale told down the bone.
Much I wonder at crossed hands' touched cup
Bowing the long faces together to kiss;
When the heart-drum kicks in another's stomach
Much I wonder at the restless licks;
And still I move both tongue and groin,
Rear star and eye out of one cracked joint.
Prayering hands and downturned head,
Circle-earth globed in a robing womb,
Flood and world of farenheit waters,
Dive their deep ends in a watershed birth
Flumed down the shallows of her thighs.
A Mardi Gras grin spins at my lips
And the moon grins crazily down.
And then I wonder at my crawling luck
That spreadeagled hopped the flaming bush
Fingering luminous maggots in the meat;
Spurred on by the spine's insistent dusts
Into the whaled oceans of another
The burning bell tower went clanging mad
Under a star-cracked sky in my scarring eye
And all the parishioners jumped ship to die;
And, a drowning wick in its wax ruins,
I told myself twice the lie of life
Among rafted congregations of my blood
That swam their red ways to death.
We thundered through the hours' alleys, Sailing your mother's wicked midsts Where no one sees-- Chisel and balsam we built a ship, Your trim invitation to life's ocean. We carved you from the future's clouds With our bodies' motions; A mermaid prow from formless shrouds Landed in our harbor laps, uncurled The ball of vivid whites you are, My seafoam girl-- Twin lightnings in your skyey eyes, A naked god astride your splendid boat.
Oh let the light be broken That soaked and solemn Out of the sun's mouth spoken Climbed the virgin's hide And the grave of her face; Let life snap the traces, Bring rut and germ alive Rough to the making place. Be buried in the stolen stone Each word of sight That from the tongue's priested Memory is severed Hunkered in the seed of the cold; Forget the drab, dim failures of life To bring redeemed to time The infant's climbing vine And churn the grape to wine. Oh let the light be broken Over shackled genesis Until the husks have spoken Word and weed and sizzling stem Out of the grave of her face Alive again, and the once burning Turn of the world Stumbles back to ochre. Let man and woman and infant dread Out of harrowed heart Lain long and solemn In sleeping seeded love Step from the narrow incision Where quilted corn is laid; Speak life in leap years From the carved distresses Scourged in the drop of a tear's face Hanging and grieving After its home of fruit Under bruited tree Bruised and fishnet against the sky-- Scourge the yearning source, Scotch the wanton innocence Of the virgin's crumbling pride And step into any light. Say the grief and say the life Solemnly as a leaf's petrified face Ghosted on stones. Abide, though abiding cancer all, Wait, though waiting will not help, For the last hanged man To dive alive at last.
So I might suffer without fail the vengeance of leaves Crumbling, vein by vein, to the docks of autumn's dust And burn again in a rasping year My fled blood Both woke and broke Flood and voice over the sea-turning town. So that the wail of the crickets might knock and enter Each sad shadow passage of the pulse I woke Burning in the shining rivers that skip out of sight. In the helping hurt of the one-armed weather Flinging hailstones and adders Down the ocean-thieving tunnel of the sky Against this head I swore all summer dumb While the ministering crickets in the booming grass Chanted phylums of my blood about to be said And I stood in the summer's drum Surrounded By the roaring going of the year. Ignorant of thistlery we walked in our mystery Arm in arm like the burning boughs Friends against death in the summer's long breath, And like the sun we sauntered Drunk and wandered Through the closed book of the heart; And I was sky and sunlight in the chapters of the grass. And understanding I sang: Oceans in acorns my strumming mermaids are.
In zero air By the jaguars caged in their griefs And landrovers digging up bones in the park, Dirt salts the dime-hole of her going. By liquid cats, Emptied of minutes and prayers in the waking zoo, Both half animal and man in my shambling frame I pace to praise the honored hour of her death. Her grave grows hair And gravel marks the shadow where I walk, Freezing among moonbeams, while the icicles' stalks Rise from eye to eye in the blizzard's blast. Now how unsound By the gold-honoured straws of dawn unbound And looped from the walking category of sorrow By a drake's water-shilled beak do I stand and cry?
Heed the webbed hand walking in the corner Coiling its oil of silks; Attend decay, the devil in the flower, The spider in the milk; Tell to the tolling look in the clock's face How your love's forever; Inform the acid winds of your rock of grace As you together shiver; Known to the moon are your proud, puffed cries, Your spindrift web of inks; Counted in Atlantic's cracks lie heroes' lives That slick and sink. Stride dying, my mayflies, along the dead flower's rim Heedless in your ruin; And skate the tickling ice that bursts your veins My merry skeletons!
Once manservant and now no king Since she the served and sweeping blast Has hurdled death's ribbed gates, slipped past The soft portals opening and entered The severed countries of the twanging grass. Once queen in the skyey seconds of my breath (With no pale maids attending), and now A girl with a hollow where her breasts had been-- I crawl into the hours of my grief, and lie In the rose lacquer of her lying-down breath. Once hooved god of the haunted barn And of my wicked pulse ice emperor, I drop the grey reins of my crossed-hearts loss, And drop my head unlead to the mealy moss To bite again the grass of our last, hid kiss And breathe all ways at once your lost breath.
In the beginning clock, love and wonder Trailed down each treasure of a tock And bastioned happiness laid everywhere easy as sand Although the ocean tore her heart out on a rock. But when in our word's wound another rumbles, When stranger letters push the pen like a ouiji's divot, When in the blood's barometer another thumps, Tapping largesse from our bottled small, Then shall we still love who loved us never? Carry Christs in our shirt like a pack of matches? Then shall we fathom affections in the deedless dark-- When not a hand, not an eye, stretched back to touch The burning vigil tears of our watch?
In the flicker of wicks in an evening's shiver
When the old ghost moon rides out full to rave
I hear your weeping quiet,
my dear, my dear,
Praying before the tree'sface to be heavensaved.
By the river'slight nightly silvery slithering
In the three-quarter's moon I come riding forever
To sit at the feet of your star,
my dear, my dear,
Praying to be your quiet prayer's answer.
Sodden in the trickling flickering flow
Of your halfmoon silent tears trailing graceward
I breast and crest your prayers,
my dear, my dear,
Attendant to your prayered words in the wood.
Intent to touch, to wipe away the tears, the stars
In the slender of the moon's blue embers
I bring this silken cloth,
my dear, my dear,
Kneeling where you kneel and remember.
Together in the new dark's togetherness
Where no moon intrudes on your quiet star
We press our answering bodies close,
my dear, my dear,
Lip to lip in our river of prayer.
A singer in the weather Scented genesis and coffinsilk In the world's windy veins, I mock the soberest cockerel Diving from the prism-spitting Pinnacle of the world's mast Uselessly singing, And rant like a wronged girl All my sweetest notes Over ignorant houses Slumbered in death and morning light. Out of this closeted shout, my high echo Beats features of sinning man on tin. Pressed to anguish in a dial's sigh, A victim of time heretically cried, A singer in any weather Bludgeoned by suns My pauper's bliss cries Crimped in a penny's fear. My any tale of the world I cunningly sing Cauls in my scorpion sting Twisting its smile on wry man's side-- Graveturning in wishes As a wish is a kiss My manbones shriek In blooded inks, Alive to day's crack, and all The marrow-harrowing rue Light's brightness sings. Alone in my limber prayer, I climb the dawn's sides And trade tunes with the tide's tirades Shining in singing red As the blood sun comes. I climb this iffy steeple to sing Out of a rage welled and worsened As any bird's ratcheted turn Over the thumbing sea at dawn Crawls after clouds In inching desire, as each wingbeat clips In measured cessations, Spiraling among the sky's spires While the weary sea below Chews ships and bones to flour. Out of each brick The cold dawn shakes awake And each root tooth of daisies Cragged in the fingering spring Floods my pulse and fever, Feeds my singing mettle To ramshackle gods agog While saints in whispers Each aghast their closed wings keep, Plastered to statuary-- Never feeling, always fearing, The boiling joy Of the devil's boyish kiss. So I this saintly mort cry down And each nailed lip kiss Quagmired in hatred Tried and hung On pentecostal cross and hatch Singing in my steeple, Birthing the blood plant That grows from my vowels, Insisting in stitches For this world the word's wound. So I, crumbling on windfall, On sold bones and the tarot told Watch hatred disaster, man and god fall, And all loved things end.
All above the belling town Day-doubling dawn awoke: The steeple soar and scabbing Clouds (whose mimic thunder spoke Satin ashes in a gathered mouth, Whose bugle bray unstuck time). Watch as daylight takes the town: A stranger who marks himself and marks His endless singing in a blackbird's book Stutters past with a crossed, lamped look, By weed-eating hours slipped And slipped. The storied dark Dwindles to dawn shadows. Seagulls simple as stars find a sky Turned blue. And the clouds, radiant As spokes, mouth strange mercury to make The packed sky Cry with the birds' cries. All above the belling town By a thumb-sucked sea-pool, By the marshing beach, the stranger stood-- And stamped in anger to blankly join The dance; stranger to the clouds Come down, who escaped the told dark Where nightmare stars gather gear, Escaped to tell, to tear From his blackbird's book White blind silence from the green hill's side. And the high lightning of his mind, Past flashed mumbles, past the drum of grief, Repeats in watered streets where rainbows quell Their origin in asphalt, not gold. Upward houses Tower the vocal dark, tall towards An obscure moon, made pale by syllables Bandied beneath his brow, teller of the light, Who steps and sweats alone from cancelled night. In a shoal of sound beneath etched waves In the dawn-doubled now of the town appears That impossible pinnacle miracle with a downswung strut: Man.
We made new syrup in the crisp of Christmas. The long dark walk under sugary stars Through black maple woods stippled with buckets Hung on clotted faucets stabbed in every tree, Trudging noseward toward a warm sweet scent In crunchy rubber boots and wetted mittens Until the golden door under the tin shed roof Opened on suddenly summery snow, and we saw The great long room--one simmering pan Hot sweet and close as the world was cold: Icicles hanging off the wall were sugar, And the tipped tree sap was life and water. We stood in the heat's mouth and shoved logs in Fingertips red in the down-low glare, Moved loving paddles through the gold-brown skin, Nostrils fringed with the blood of maples, The blood of maples on eyelash and lip, There in the secret sweet hot church of life; Life pinned and poured, life of miles around, Sweet in bleeding the golden blood source That untapped stayed dry, cracked, dark.
Daylong in the waist-high weeds and ivies I ate the wonderfully buttery summer's bread, And bright as tears on sleeves I played and frisked And forgot the wolf in the clock. And windy summer ran out of the morning And the stag-breasted dew each dawned day Rode running and riotous from the cool of the moon Unwound from the darks of mouse and fox. Then the others, the pummellers Came unashamed with their wronging love, Sham-battering hands and scolding mouths And gave away anger for their deepest, hurt truth; With red apple hands, with bones twice broken, They strode hero-headed over the blown-down time Over the greeny edge of the faraway weather, Topping sun and cloud of the tumbledown town. Deep in the heartwood home, alone and knotted, As full of fears as a tit-mouse's shivers I kept the woods for home that kept me hid In the bone-lonely branches of my bloodred ribs. And dawn in its trial of summer survival Turned red in the remembered air, And summer sun crept crabwise until it was moon, And I heard the sun's hours ride down to their doom. But oh the woods were golden in their burning Beyond the drowned stones that cried aloud In the midnight riverbed's spattering blacks; In my heart-held woodhome and owlly hollows With my pockets full of leaves and string and talisman rocks, My vowelling dogs howled to adder and frog-- While all about in the understood wood House and wood flamed in woe everlasting.
When heartbreak, leaden, unlids The paraffin coffin's wronging box, And out of the slowly sown soul, inwound rolled, Twined and twinned in winding sheets And the bloodblack body's shroud, The heartbroken ghost like leaven flies-- What figure stands by the grave's haranguing sands? Harassed and houseless, unshrouded, What mood-doomed ghost in mist-shifted night, What quenchless kiss quizzed from soul's naught knot A sighing life could never quite unlatch Flies riven and shriven from the haranguing sands? Now risen simple and unadorned In the doorless moon (and dead and bettered By its dying damn) it stands on crookshanks-- The bold lie told to shelled ear from shellacked lip Slips up the grave-plot's tripping ladder like a thief, Moaning unknowing what some once-living kiss implored. It stands: in witness-winds, in sands, in silences. It trumps all bones or guesses. It lies down never in the manger's knot (Straw raw insistences of gods unbegot). It floats unmoated to the sea-shoved shingle Where are and were and will-be may mingle: Human and ruminant in the unready new, Sole holder of what we living dare not possess, Illimitable amidst its humanness.
Said the unopened poem in my patted heart: "Too dumbly comforted you lay your limbs Wet upon the sandy shoals of pain, Too fell, too full, too grievy and grim." Now hung christ-crossed on an electric cord And stabbed by life's lethargic thorns, I bleed my soul's mutinies to the seething sea, A leviathan on a rock, stillborn.
…let [the mariner] be called from his hammock to view his ship sailing through a midnight sea of milky whiteness–as if from encircling headlands shoals of combed white bears were swimming round him, then he feels a silent, superstitious dread.
~~Moby Dick, The Whiteness of the Whale Intending now to sing I hear how the mounting sky's Wool-soft words and haranging sighs With sotto voce insinuations sly Sing above my blind inhaling skin Whitely trilling beyond my trying Crabbing God's fittest notes For its impinging winds, remote From what breathings I may bring-- Such winds' gentlest trebles Intend a tempest's troubles Prouder than my poor endeavors, Clipping my attempting wings. I slouch in unmanned silence, A wounded mute lashed for penance, Leashed dumb by choking chance, Alone and palely listening To blue heaven's gonging choir Tumbling tones, hurrahing airs Impale me to a chair-- Hearing joy unceasing ringing So suavely move those sounds Come clapping from the clouds As though all silence drowned As drowned is my own singing That aches to lilt and lift uncaged Flying wide from page to page As down the raging ages From cloud to cloud go singing Jungle lyrebirds, whose range Encompasses the common and the strange, Chainsaws and angels. To dwindled silence clinging, Chained to mum nothingness, Void and vacuous, A singer singingless, I am a clarinet uncaressed Who should orison self-arising With honied mysteries on my lips And at holy fountains sip Where burning benedictions ripple Until, sulfurous or inspiring, With gabblings low or hosannahs rising, All speech and song and sounds Break at my beak, round With assailing breath and proud With every whichway singing In a blare-bloom boom of being Big as old sun's simmering At noontide midyear's shining-- Until I soar unsilent Radient beyond tension and intent My crested phoenix song unpent And so burst my muted being By dauntlessly daydreaming, Be fortissimo by seeming, By aching and by teeming, And, in intending, sing.
a play
SCENE
[describe waking town]
MRS 1
I am one missus, and she’s another. We keep the high secrets of the town to ourselves.
MRS 3
In the summer it’s packed with tourists.
MRS 4
In the winter its cold as ashes.
MRS 5
Empty as a milkbottle.
MRS 1
I like the winter sea.
MRS 3
All the cheap establishments jammed with commerce.
MRS 1
So little to do but keep our secrets from ourselves.
MRS 3
There’s Timmy.
MRS 4
And Billy.
MRS 5
My Marjorie and Alex.
MRS 3
And Doris and Alice my blessed twins.
MRS 4
All the boys and girls in their goings and comings tumble about the town today as everyday. All alive and alone in the holiday sun. All the boys and girls….
MRS 1
And my Shawn. [pause]
MRS 3
I never saw such a beautiful boy.
MRS 5
And there he is in the front door now. [Light appears on an empty doorframe.]
MRS 1
Mind yourself; you’ll bake red as a roast, your nose fat as a radish and your armpits still pale.
SHAWN
Aw, Mom.
MRS 1
Finn, who is in the stodgy process of owning half the sleepy seaside town— from the sky-stretching white of the sleepy church steeple to the rotted docks snoring in the deep blacks of the ocean water— keeps a canary by her bed by her window to sing her asleep and awake.
MRS 4
Pip, pipe! Oh, it runs like a zipper up and down my spine. Pip, pipe! By the grace of God, I can hear it in my own house plain as the telephone.
MRS 5
Pip, pipe! The mean spitting chatter that pings from the shrunken golf ball of its chest! I mean…. I’d sooner believe an oak exploding from a pea.
MRS 1
My little Shawn himself is attached to the wretched thing, for the sake of throwing rocks.
MRS 3
He dawdles to a stop under the sill.
MRS 1
He imagines the lilac skull in his hands. He examines the eyesocket and all the orbiting, rayed lines of its empty sight. He tries on the bone wings skinney as widow Maggie’s spinsterish fingers, and takes a quick, panicked flight around the room with the uncaged bird.
MRS 4
That wild boy.
MRS 5
That dear chimp.
MRS 3
Flying a skeleton around my good sitting room!
MRS 4
[correcting] Flapping the white hollow bones himself.
MRS 3
That wild boy.
MRS 5
That dear chimp.
MRS 3
…Babystrollers ominous as whirlybirds on the dank planks of the warped boardwalk resound to the strong march of his eleven-year-old heart. In the silk ash rags of dawn, floating on the female sea, Benny the town bounceabout is jogging against the light for the recuperating sake of his heart and thighs. He pauses on the thundering boardwalk to salute Shawn in his Raider’s cap while last night’s date still lies topseyturvey in his bungalow bed.
MRS 5
Over the dunes and down to the receiving sea progresses young Shawn, all cartilidge and sneakers, with his battlescarred knee— flips round the wide corpse of a dog examined on elbows all yesterday, curls across the scolding seashelf of small speckled rocks, talking in washes, leaps conspicuous spikes of dunegrasses, bristling in swishes on the white spine of the continent, and, removing carefully the blood dot of his red Raiders cap, tumbles sunlovingly into the blue mutable surf.
MRS 1
That’s how Shawn walked in the acres of his knowing. His eye was as tall as the clouds in the sky; and sweet and simple were his curses and wishes.
SHAWN
Look at me. I’m a rum-runner smuggler that has come to this pirate’s cove with a tasty blade in my teeth.
MRS 4
He emerges from the surf.
TIMMY
ARRGblabbldiiigrrrrahhhh!!!!
MRS 5
Shawn arranges the whirls in a winking pond full of the ghostly bodies of jellyfish panting beneath the swirled surface flaming in glitters.
SHAWN
Ghost! It’s a ghost.
TIMMY
The creepy spirit of dead Mr Finches.
MRS 4
The scolding schoolmaster of the ill-educated town drawn to a study of stamps and empty seashells.
MRS 3
Passed away with his snoot in his books. He bends like a weary reed, quiet as an indian ambush, and glares like the sun into the tidalpool full of stones and blotched coral. He paddles the water with his coin-enjoying palm ready to buy Tony Andagili’s icicle licks with the warm quarter his mom had outfitted him with among the hydrangeas at breakfast. Wet sands slither through his fingers and a sandy cloud opens under the smoked glass. And the pinkeyed jellyfish squishes past his angry hand and pumps into a little dark hole small as a pupil in skirted distress. Shawn is tired of playing with ghosts and turns tiredly away from the opaque pond.
SHAWN
O I am a pirate that’ll slit your gizzard!
MRS 4
He shouts, running like an alleycat to where Timothy Turves is whistling through grassblades in the windy lee of the bluff.
SHAWN
I am a pirate that’ll slit your gizzard!
TIMMY
Oh.
SHAWN
Prepare for a doom of ferret’s teeth and shark’s gullets.
TIMMY
I am prepared for my doom.
SHAWN
March to the plank. [Timmy marches to the nearest rock]
SHAWN
No, that rock. That rock.
MRS 3
Timothy scissors his yellow arms in the air, balletstepping to the flat rock that’s the plank in his duck jacket.
MRS 5
He believes in the eternal veracity of his demise.
MRS 4
His head is full of cowboys and heroes.
MRS 3
Samurais and sixshooters and noble endings.
MRS 5
He stands prepared.
MRS 4
He totters on the rock.
TIMMY
his hands go out before him.
MRS 5
His heart full of death, he hops in the water.
MRS 4
Dead as a doornail.
MRS 3
Extinguished as matches.
MRS 1
But like a seabird he gets up.
TIMMY
ARRBLBBLLRR!
MRS 4
He shakes his head like a fish. [pause, the boys pantomime burying treasure]
MRS 3
Boys bury treasure.
MRS 4
And dig it up in the dark.
MRS 1
Patrick Kinney and me in the nude snow past the harvest hills and farmers asleep in their coats, milking the moon-bellies of splaylegged cows, spent a heated evening in the blank, snowwhite, snowblind night of my first, and most silent, marriage. God, in the toasty loaves of his arms I felt somehow loved and listened to at once. He chest roared and rolled and yearned like a furnace while his sparking eyes stared and smiled under muddy brows thick as cigars under the star-stabbed sugar-dome of the seasprayed night sky swirling above midges and winter and our soldered embrace hid in the quiet dark of the bed. On that syrupy evening, above green thistles and below the timed departures of the sobbing stars, making one by one their queued exits, was the sweet sodden lump of my Shawn conceived. Time stabbed and passed. Patrick Kinney knew the child was made that night, that that was the night of creation. Dandelions and frostbite, whispers and kittens, the years themselves came rolling in and out and I heard not a word from that travelling man. Shawn’s shape by that time had changed and he’d grown into a fine young thing.
MRS 4
They rose to race on bicycles humming down to the drumming boardwalk. They were caught, for a moment, with the wheels and spokes like spiders, in the amber sunset before I lost sight of them.
MRS 3
They leapt, my Timmy and your Shawn, about the rocks all afternoon being pirates and werewolves as the sun fell in blazing licks and they ate their jam sandwiches.
MRS 1
They bulled about the foxtails in the tarry marsh and practiced their howls for the moon.
MRS 3
Which one grew fur?
MRS 4
Which one got big teeth?
MRS 2
Did their snouts stretch out long as foxes’?
MRS 3
Did their child’s ears tuft?
MRS 4
Pads harden over their palms?
MRS 2
Did their hearts shift in their ribs?
MRS 4
Did their howling bring down the moon?
MRS 5
Yes yes yes. All the magic happened. The crabs creeped sideways from the sea; they cooed to the moon as sister and mother, low and fat in the rum-black sky of summer. Their swift claws knew the sin of blood, and sandpipers and infants dripped from their fangs. The moonlight on the snow frail as eggshells.
MRS 2
Or ashes.
MRS 3
And pale and yellow as eyes, she listened to the high wild cries of their hearts.
MRS 5
But soon enough they all tumbled exhausted to home and their warm human beds after supper.
MRS 1
And there is Shawn’s burrow under the burying dark, under the burning sun, in the grave ground by the park where my people are.
MRS 2
The boys have come running over hills bunched as mittens, hunched against winds and wails and schoolmasters’ ghosts. And against the slap and sigh of the sea which buries us all they are hunched. In their shivvering boyskins bluecold under blankets they watch the clouds change shapes as they fall asleep.
MRS 1
Imagine my Shawn while the moon’s winking bone is still flying over marshes and midges, indulging our wishes, and the deep sea cradles up to the shore. Imagine my Shawn, boneweary eleven, closing his skyhigh eyes on the couches of heaven— after a day full of mysteries and spices and unassailable seas. Imagine my Shawn, in his britches and stitches, his brittle blood and rough laughs, climbing to sleep over pirate treasures in the feathered quilt we’d all sewn together.
MRS 4
All the world drowned in the sound of sleep.
MRS 1
And there’s my Shawn sleeping.
MRS 2
Dogs and fishes skip through his skull.
MRS 3
Trilled bug-thumpers fly east to west and spring to winter in his sloshing noggin.
MRS 5
A rubbed thumblestilskin unknown, unnamed.
MRS 2
He watches a bird with a clock in its belly.
MRS 3
He watches a clock with wings for hands.
MRS 4
He watches Mrs. Finn's blind canary, Sam. Birdslayer. Prestidigitator. Jellyfisher. Finch mincer. Moonhowler. Captain of tidepools. King of green hills. Prince of beaches. Sweet as an apple. Turned over in dreaming. Crying in sleep. As if wounded and bleeding. Noseful of weeping. Bleared eyes shut. Sweet as an apple. Pale and sleeping. [END]
A miscellany by Gregg Glory [Gregg G. Brown] Published by BLAST PRESS
Life exists to pay attention to other people.
I silently laugh at my own cenotaph,
And out of the caverns of rain,
Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb,
I arise and unbuild it again.
~~P. B. Shelley
This
is a race to beauty,
and I
am an engine quick
with fire.
~~Daniel Weeks
I pursue the vireo's theme.
~~Lord Dermond
Pitiless verse? A few words tuned
And tuned and tuned and tuned.
~~Wallace Stevens
The summer sun Knows when its bright business With buds is done
Summer comes warmly into our lives, a promise of autumn’s plenty. A surfeit of all our globe can give of daily joys expands in a benign inflation of lighted hours. Night herself calls us forth to wander under soothing breezes, zophtic zephyrs–and we walk into our dreams with ease. Constellations keep us company, just as, during the day, fleets of trees in full sail share their leafy magnificence with us–the fresh shade of dark branch and leaf, their chipper chatter following us as we wend our way.
Gregg Glory August 2013
Through nights endlessly vague A voice arrives Embalmed In embellishing smokes. Speak vividly, My blind Friend in chartless darks; Speak bleedingly To me As I bleeding lay, Enslaved, raving.
This spirit of mine is something unstudied, Inexorable and white, alive in solemn permanence. ~~Lord Dermond To forget about the self at the self's Uttermost extent; it is the self Made a self at last. To survive in vigor The confinement of the eye, The glistering pinhole through which The self is summoned As by a bronze gong Until all the air is peacock feathers Is one way--in wild trial-- That the self, and its amiable Particulars may be forgotten. Cheered onward in a doubtful dark By numerous rumoring murmurs And silken sibilances, as if Drawn on by a forceful river Tumbling a blind man downstream To the sound of thickening confusion Is another way for the self to go, On and on, on and on, In dark discovery. To feel our broadening sexual silks Pulled and pulled, as through A pinhole, through the self And out of the self and into Another, and that self flowing And pulling as if a river until Our colors lay piled and swollen Before our adoring, a silken sail Full-bellied with desiring-- A wind that moves through the self The self had left behind and abandoned On the shore of no more. Dead or dreaming, the self Disappears, and in its place, In the place of the self spilled out Of itself, displaced and streaming, (The self that had left its eye behind Like an abandoned portal, The self that had had an ear And has an ear no more, bereft, as it was, Among night voices in a dark place, The self that had had a sex Torn away in a shimmering wind Until the self has a self no more)-- There is only this, this fathomless Wildness without a where Without a how, without a why, Only this this,--in the place of that, Nearby, nearly here, In the place of the place and in place of it.
Evening is here, and the house is cold With a coldness darkened beyond what eyes behold, A peculiar, unusual dark I neither name nor know, A dark inside the darkness of the cold, A dark beneath the dark of space, A below-dark or beyond-dark or before-dark Out of which the dark of space Begins its becoming nothingness, Its peculiar, unusual dark Wherein pleasantest monstrosities adhere, Adhere and grow gigantic-- Heavy drapes blown-in in the storm's besetting onset, Knocking one candle dark in the swooning room, Or swinging darkly out to outer space In the wind of stars, Through which the universal edifice slowly swoons In its own peculiar, unusual dark--as if The shadow of a shadow thrown against The shadow of that from which it had come.
Only when wisp and whim Bellies the shakily belied Sail's starch-white brim Do we live unburied-- Alive to time, to time's Intemperate, inveterate ticks-- The icy sublime Of life's penultimate lick. So, take of this cake With me, mon ami: birth-day Or death-day, take; take The risen wheat, say A voluble salutation For your, for my, salvation!
Abolished blues Leave as craven night Crowds the nude Sky'slight-- Remain cerulean, Memories, brilliant tints, Flashed shy-eyes' Loitering emoluments. Look at me, listener, Flash tightened whites, Blanks unstained, unstirred, Awaiting pupils' coalblack night To draw in raked nakedness ¬Our bleak meeting.
Almost perfect there, Her finger tracing The fainted maid Unavailing, This palest miss Blonder than sunshine-- Unicorn twists Of braids trail fire Down her blood-velveteen Flat dress-back-- Her hand the maiden's, Raised to bring back Life to the trapped beast-- No longer Death's.
Her sourceless smile arrives In intimate glitters, Her lips suavely parting In intenser shine. Above, eve's lone lamp, the moon Removes a mood. His hand upon her shoulder Intends a sense Between them, attar of essences Sincerely sieved, Intends a sense more intense, Interior and profound.
The orchid sits in its mat of moss its laddered neck click-clipped by small claws to slim rigid wire upholding a purple triple knot of blossoms velvet open as the mouths of Chinese lions sculpted so loud
Soul's a moment's melody (As Mallarme reported). Each breath is every sigh recorded, One tear is all the sea. Lucid glycerins distill, intend, All God may mean by being: Loving nearly to the pain of seeing, Forgiving even the end. Less than Time attempts is this "I"-- Burnt between the matchstick's start And pumiced embers morosely blown-- Condensed intense in each spark of eye. It is a malady a moment, This soul--and then, neant.
A butterfly pinned to a windmill. Blasé laserings of watery light. The adze of an angry word. A cannibal dining on a sainted eye. A man battling his inner hatchets, Himself a hollow cello.
A guttering wind going round Beats the windowed walls Of the Brooklyn Aquarium Where swart, flared fish going round Flourish Like flowery candy in a dish. Crowds of slackmouthed onlookers watch Eight slack-legged octopi watch Crowds of onlookers going round There In Brooklyn's dainty air. In a world of choices, Such variorum of voices, To continually choose To choose not to choose-- To neigh nay to no And sneeze nyet to yes While the crowd confines Our going round and around, Mutes the vocus of our natures. So many colors Going round and around, Within others, and ourselves within, While frenzied fish bash The circular glass Unhelped by any wind.
Life may be magnanimous, The sleek making way of water reeds Before a smooth canoe. It may be. Or life perchance is tragic, A limitless march, march, march To the restriction of a pinnacle. It may be. These two modes of life Are one, in sum. The tragic will navigating North, The lazy wanderer wading South. What happens to the one, Happens exactly to the other. Death, or some other bother. It may be. When, in this light, we look At ourselves, we disappear Into the necessitous intimate Staring there in the mirror. It may be.
Snow loiters coyly in scraps, And winter lies Unremembered. The edges of shadows at dawn, Tinged blue, Recall a greater darkness Of which they are the moiety. When summer arrives at last, When green spring is in the grave, When summer comes out From under heavy covers, Quilts over-laden with imagery, When summer leaves, and snow Feels bright in autumn air-- Will you remember the summer days, Days we burned through together?
Strolling in a random mood, random clouds Disclose a sky unpatterned, whereon I brood "How life behaves, how the world is made!" Striding hills disclose apportioned woods Brushed bare of bush--a dell within the wood Discloses its roughened tongue of telling green; Kneeling in the roughened grass, politely parted, Discloses dandruffed jimson, butterweed and chives; And one long flower's uttering bud, mussed and tussled, Discloses saffron tassels, with brilliant pollens laid; And pollen's golden wand, waved and handled, Discloses slyly a tensile spine where florid saps Flow slow along the intruding thumb, and stop.
I Is there, in all this trash Of destinations, of places seen and places repeated Like last year's film, last year's roses, last year's weather Anything for the spirit to extract, Extract and raise high and chant about? Any glitter to be picked from the waste of days, Any gold cloud built, any monument of twigs? Is there anything to whistle up from the repeated place, An eon's verdure or stone bouquet? II In the repeated place, in a repeated time Must cold bouquets like fountains still renew And renew again their spilling blooms-- As in a height of speech in a vented space, As if death itself were only heightened speech In a vented space, or an old horn abandoned in a field, The hunt decayed, and the trumpet rusted That had brightened speech, and not quite out of sight? Is there any bower to be had? Or only Repeated scenes stuffed with repeated speech Crisp adjectives must keep forever fresh-- Perpetual ecstasy, and still unfinished rooms, Rotted flowers racing back to bloom? III The pile of days like a pile of cards Tips one more card blankly onto a pile of blanks. Where is the change of hue or lilted modulation, The mutability in the rose that turns Ripely from rose-red to rose, to a few Green, wrecked leaves laying spattered in the path, Sparse litterings, wretched shrinkage Of a grander theme that pushed, and with the push Of birth had pushed, teasing lustrous harmonies Out of rocks that tinkled for a time, spritzed fresh, Lisping a damaged planet's name to space?
Listen, mes amis, For the change to summer. Dry pines are bristling. Christmas is forgotten. April's incipient blossom Lays rotted. The canvas hammock smiles, Pinned up and greatly weighted. One by one, The summer stars, pink and rayed, Enter eventide elated. And the frisson that one feels Barefoot under the stars (one by one Left uncounted) Is not exactly unrelated. Winter's interiors and castles, Warmer rooms and whiter views, Pile up discarded In the summer mind And so summer returns to life Between extremes-- Neither dewy Spring Nor stiff December-- Rotund orator of repeated suns, Halcyon mind increased and crested, Profoundest player of cards, Purveyor of flippant fun. Summer comes, itself Extreme in sunshine, Raconteur of revels, afternoon pomps Of tea, sloe gin fizzes Piling up and up-- As neglected dusts infect Minutest corners Of a sleepy eye. But listen, too, mes amis, At how, afar off, Beyond acutest blues, The apt ear hears, inherently hears, Autumn's tom-tom.
To know himself was to know the world. So Axl thought, and his central sin condoned. The reflected world was omnipotent mirror, And not importunate guest. So Axl surmised, And found himself amenable to a thought so wise-- A tuxedoed waltzer whirled, red carnation at-the-ready. Who else was welcome to this solo cotillion? With each yawn, Axl awoke to his own wedding day, Most blessed of days in a world that blessed him best. No undue strain arced across his crystal-ball brow, Things had worked out for him before, as now: Where Axl's hand shot out, blind, golden knobs appeared. For any emergency disguise, he grew sufficient beard. Axl lived and died in ornately mirrored rooms. No awkward prisms arched each mirror's edge. No stranger bird of paradise got in, panicked, And beat blue wings about his heart, or threw Confusing wings of angels in his face. He spun, at cordial intervals, the mottled globe In his room, and saw only his own pale head revolve. Thus was Axl in his castle, amid the central fix of facts. In a world that is mirror only, pool only, lambency only, To what whirligig apotheosis might spinning Axl jump? Fingertip to tip, he pressed against the giving surface Of all he knew and willed. Liquidly in to elbow He sank without a thought--now shoulder to shoulder Pressed, and, now, nearly cheek to cheek he sank.
Summer hunched in the muddy rucks Of Teaneck. Wilson strayed, sluggishly, Into the weedy garden beside his home. Wilson was not a part Of the windy morning beckoning, Nor of the warty gourds he watered-- Tiger-orange and dirty brown. There was no mystery In the knotweed where Wilson kneeled To which he alone possessed The clearest key. Red-purple vines crouched close. Scalloped curtains blew. And the cabin at his back, sluggishly, Blazed ethereally whiter.
The moon understood From where she shone, Demure, removed, How sun's assertions Tantalize and amaze. Sandy intonations Sift with the drifting beach, Intrude, without intention, All the hazy forenoon And twilight after. Striding into the eye, A man stands half lit Where time washes shore, Covering, uncovering, Ruddy wish and silvery fish. He stands tonelessly, Whistling nothing Among the shifting grains, Alert servant of the Reverberant surf.
The stars above were eld creations, crabbed Comma-marks in a grammar God abandoned, No longer the shining indices of fate Nuns on reddened knees named holy-- Flayed things set burning for their shameful part In the faded pattern, medieval masque. Yet still they hung mistily aloft past the barbecue grill, Marking dark coordinates by their nuclear light-- A graph-paper for physicists and their fancy pens, Smartly charting tricky diktats of their will. Daub by daub, the stars, as magic charms, Had been painted on revolving spheres. And, daub by daub, my ox-hair filbert brush Transfers their fire from globbered palette To the steadily-easelled blank that I had brought. I painted blind, unpained by too much sight or light (As I noted had been the Great Dauber's habit, Granting accidental freedom by parsec and mile). From the quibble of a quark to quasar buoy-bells The cosmic scale was sound, tanging only When the chromic pestle bongs the mixer's brim, Aping Tuvan semi-tones while my placid page Fills insensibly with stars, and, daub by daub, I strike what strokes of charcoal nothingness Heaven presents. I work without lamp or limit, Toiling toward each outward edge from whichever Central locus my accidental tent has pitched. I squint into the rolling dim, and begin. The vault Is splattered with patterned blanks itself: Intrusive bougainvillea disarm Orion. Looming Oak leash Cygnus' feathered neck with leafy loops. Every starry fable is fractured by a fault. And there, in the middle of all light, all shadow, Climbed the cragging outline of a midnight ziggurat. Shadow by shadow, tall stars gone dark Left the saw-tooth chop-out. I painted as I perceived, True to tempera and temperament. Yes, there It was, inking out wholesale swales of stars, Rich galaxies gone dark, the zig-zag ziggurat! No punched-out pyramidal obelisk had ever arisen More straightly-rayed--granite sample of stark AEgyptian sunbeams. The ziggurat sprang Chainsawed from the sky, a stepped rainbow Against Cosmos, and of the cosmos part, blackly blent. What was interposed between high stars and yard That drew me there to draw? Had daub And desire torn new knowledge from the skies? What would show still standing when the great star Came at adequate dawn, and illuminated enlarged My brune page? Would the giant ziggurat Be risen above Poughkeepsie like a circus tent Dense with ecstatic dancers, as at a feast?
Whispers of solar sojourns Trouble my sleep-- The resplendent bitter brights, Bare ferryings from dawn to dusk. Night's doughtier recriminations, Also, trouble my sleep: Dark matter and matted pillows, Downy throws torqued tight After the squeaked release Of magnificent dreams. Those celestial rodeos Lassoing old Cygnus there-- Or others, darker-hued, Leaving me abandoned, bundled, sweated out Amid spotty silks And disastered caftans flayed. Too much dark or too much light! I do not know which trouble to choose. I say, "Let the cyan dawn ascend And shatter me." Or, softer, sleepier, "Let the navy night Arrive." Anything, anything other Than this continual, nocturnal-diurnal Rumination. I say, "Come sun, come light! Bring intensely The prickly press of piercing fact, Resplendent sheets of divulging day...." Ach, they trouble my sleep.
They light no starry candles beneath the torpid moon, Hovering, haloed lamp to their late feast-- The hot moon loads ladles, tops tippler's cups With variable silvers 'til dull water burns. Twittering sprites pursue the moon's endless agenda, Finger-cymbals tittering, scarves awhirl. Mincing laughter, or something remotely more, Blends with bluing bush and shadow. Do dusty moth and pearly cricket attend The midnight manner of their tucking in? Shhh, shhh, whispers little mouse to downy owl, Yellow-eyed. The moon is becoming clouds now.
Voters wear a mask Fierce tangerine, outrageous orange. They say: I am Sam. I am Theodore. They have no names for sure Beyond manqué monikers. They swear they would not dare Undo the true of who is who. Swears Sam. Swears Theodore. Behind masks outrageous orange. History is a feathered mask As light as that.
He prodded the planet for fun and profit,
Rattled fusty vines for mustiest grapes
To break like bubbles on his rouge tongue,
Purplest Bacchus of the Garden State.
The straw he sipped at dripped divinest dews.
Around him argent clouds convened,
Attending wetly at the cordial where he nipped,
Cottony pulps of his wine-violet ideas.
A maker of the weather, he prepared
Hurricanos in his heart, tornadoes torqued
From regretful tears, while he adroitly ducked
Beneath streaked skies split with epic lightning
His own imagination dreamed and drew down.
Of creation and of creation's pang
He was the singer, and of that terror sang.
This he did swinging amid his champagne dregs,
And from those dregs distilled the magic beans--
Grew tall, until all the rolling world below
Was his red rubber ball, gripped and peeled.
The sun between his rosy forefinger and sore thumb
He spun, and smiled as it twirled.
Here leaned a mountain, not a man.
Great birds wheeled beneath his brambled brows.
Waterfalls leapt from his chin in frisking drool.
To sense a transparence within the clouds
Like thunder swallowed, his big teeth illumined--
That was what he practiced; his feet
Fell away below to forest elf-boots, olive moccasins
Softly clomping crimps of the shell-pink Palisades.
Beyond the boisterous baying of day, he made,
Mad with laughter, the very game he played:
"Imagine reality," he cried to the crisp Atlantic
Sweeping to his side, the she-sea upswelling frothily
To fetch 'tween trident teeth the fatal bone, the poem,
Her impassive master had tossed to the Azores.
Promethean lips imparted surpassing pearls
In hiccups, bubbing toward the clouds they blew
In monotonic dream-bubbles of cartoons;
His electric hair was flying fire, unreeling auroras
From here to Delaware.
The poet is his world:
The vatic voice, his song assigned to wood or cliff
Indifferently, whole planets popped like gumdrops
Into his manic maw and ruminated raw
Like so much milky cud.
Look here, oyster, there is only The oily thisness of confabulation, The thin verities of antique fabliaux. All that wintriest widows conceive Comes, at clattering last, to pass. The ugliest dog bites himself in sleep. The surpassing pain of paradise, pique Of profoundest pierrots and philosophes, Pricks Parsifal and his weeping grail. Come, come, my oily ocean rock, Split wide, lug up from your limpid guts, One tear-bitter pill of pearl.
The changing of habits, old hats or sprung spats, Occurs first within the orbit of brims. There's more passion than fashion In the changing of hats; less wink of red ribbons, Than exultation, elation. The changing of hats, or birch soda for gin, Claims animus assuaged, old habits dismissed. But what we are is wicked, and kicks. Among tatty racks of offended tiaras, Old habits, old hats, stay only playfully away-- Awaiting inner haloes, hidden horns To reassert their sway.
Wear again, and gaily wear, O Unchaperoned, the cap of constant love; Fish it out with dirty fingers-- The dusty cap That flaps in your back pocket. Dear duffer, drabbling In Tuesday's mauve-mangled dusk, Fatly fit upon your itchy bean, your patchy pate, The forgotten cap Young nights extruded in memorable grass. Be it papier-mâché or toilet tissue, Beribboned bonnet, or low sombrero, Let its ostrich feathers fan the fickle Naysayers' intrusive noses. Fa-la. Wear such lapsed cap, such crumpled crown Gaily atilt, Or straighten its ancient injured bill-- But let, oh let, your mauve brain be haloed Constantly, constantly by love.
Late, late to the untame game, I come Reviving live instances of you: You unrefined, bare singer in an eve Vividest at its disappearance-- A quintessence of quiet dusk Fringe-draped upon a ball of moss, Inept referent for what Has left us, for what is left us. Sunset's golden orts depart; Mere mud, mere earth remain. Sing jingling on your rock of dark, Sing and let the jagging chandelier of stars Fall ringing round your ears--Let fall The full curve of universe surrounding: Cinctured circle of your sight, Outward round of an inward eye.
Fleshly fruits fatten unpicked In the rattling trees, a little Dusty in a stumbling summer day Too dryly severe and savage To dance naked at naked noon. Noon had come upon us, an oppressor Pressing our red feet into the creek, Ankles crossed under crossing waters, Eyes lampblack squibs beneath a brim Of straw--slugs beneath a wet, lifted rock. Night rouses us, streaming out together Barefoot over the uncut ragweed, Loving only barren moon and cool orchard In the unrehearsed dark. Nothing To think about there as we stand Together, ripening.
Love lives in the blooded mouth, Uncouth cougar of lamented dreams, Eater of hearts, tearer of eyelids. Love wears no mink tippet, sips no tea; Love tattoos sailors' tongues with rum. Love doesn't shuffle off a tomb, shoved, But gathers what light stone angels there Discard--disregarded ambers of the grave. Love eats and dies in any light, Unappeasable pursuer of piquancy. Love is blunt, and shuns the wispy stars' Mincing finesse--flying witchwise At midnight, where horn-dark trees Stick-up like brooms in the battered moon And crick and crack with lover's static, Cackling fantastic tropes of utter sun.
The gasp for affirmation that afflicts
The antlike likes of Sir Edmund Hillary
Going "Hoy!" and "Ho!" uphill
To victory or nothing--crisp crack of pike
And piton hiking the unbearable beard
Of my mountain frown. Songs of many men,
Undauntable purveyors of a universal "Yo!,"
Roar orange as their hasty campfire fades
From red to fulvous daffodil to insipid mist
In the diluted atmosphere, chant cheerily
With diminished tongue and dessicates breath,
Chant "Hoy!" and "Ho!" in their cleated clogs
To victory or nothing.
If I am lofty Olympus or arid Everest,
What matter? So long as my jagged sides
Are slatted with ambition--Not for the sole self alone,
Measly participle of the universal panache,
But ambition of the self's evincing hope, glad glide
Of muddy spirit toward the unfeigned ephemeral,
That lance of sunlight that caps the highest hill.
Philosophy's inadequate to tragedy.
Its ordered sighs and yipping "Yeps"
Make no address of solace to the crimped heart,
Heed no note of despair's cold "Nope,"
Corral no harmonies from a criminal hurt,
Stir no elegance of elegies in Charlie's charcoal husk--
Flashed to ashes whilst stretched relaxing
With a pocket book of dusty sermons
Or bien pesant bon mots.
One man, at his merely human height,
Ambitionless as purple aster in a tub,
Saying neither yea nor nay as he creeps up
My rocky garments, my rippled gear--
One man who creeps without belief or wit,
Who yet creeps up and up to see what's what
Where winds tear pious pinetrees oblate, that
One man enthroned among my bald hairs,
Casts thrown shadows ably as a cape,
Casts, from his little dithering if,
An individual dark
of vast magnificence.
You, timid discourser of despair:
Say torn clouds like ragged lambs
Miserably impinge upon
A ramping sun of yellow summer,
Lion-wild, his great
Gold mane a-shake!
Sniff-snaffer of etiquette, thou:
Snub the afternoon's warm doings,
Laugh at the passing riff-raff of light,
Guffaw at the twinkling mica flakes
That flicker upon Hopatcong,
Lake of icicle licks!
Wait silent beside my shoulder awhile:
Follow my finger where clay hills rise,
Lifting a gem-green foam of trees--
Irreverent altar, wave of purest dirt,
Offering scent of earth-sacrifice
To noses, in bowls of reddest clay!
OK, OK. Go be defeated, Ricardo,
Hater of this habitable weather,
Despiser of our venerable sphere
That rolls on from chaos to chaos,--
A huge dog's toy cussedly tossed
For what outsized jaws to fetch?
It was altogether a land of summer, untroubled, Mild in the mystery of distances unassailed-- Bristling with pines, ferocious badgers, fiercer minks, Cougars, claws, jays of harshest tongue. Too much each new sound pursued... a hollowness, A blank at their back like an unsigned check, Wordless cries marking each new-discovered bay And pinkening, unascended peak, X and X. Did adventure hoard a meaning of its own Beyond the fatal diagrams of Cordoba's maps, Those candles intensely gathered, that pointed beard and hand? In the blanco moonlight, drained of meaning, Stoats in dampened bushes paused, and then stirred.
Here is the day, the bridal day undaunted; Here noon, at highest noon... hesitates... The height of summer, at its crest arrested, Held between warm hands to kiss-- The levitated real at pause in sun's perfection; Paused because we cannot see, cannot imagine Beyond such ripeness--as a tear unspilled, Brimmed to the rich roundness of a world, A whole world held in little in its little globe: Le soliel triumphant, hesitant, yet not beyond The hale wholeness and circumference of our sphere. Here Wally waited for a change that surpassed Surrender, that grew grander than honeycomb tombs Of profoundest vested men in their nacre gloom, Writ in the minty script of ceaseless leaves Arisen without thought of autumn in their sap, Without a death hissing in their desire, nor any Belated "maybes" in their numberless noise of "yes," Noise of summer unceasing, green forest To green seas unceasing, zones of summer Arranging rays of summer sun outright-- Out, out, beyond star-strung dews of night.
The dry flute of winter increased from timid drip-drip to the welcome rivulet of spring’s quickening quartet, spring waters roughening to thunder, the voluble thunder, of summer. A summer stuffed beyond the pinched anemone prinks of spring, the quacks and pranks of compact ducks merely returning with downy chicks to the muddied mill pond. Summer starts with lime-dust on the leaves, a cauterized neck in the garden, rabbits, hunched as rabbis, attacking a rutabaga patch, nibbling naughtily the taut squash blossoms with impolitic tooth. Fulvid summer now in row on row of mowing is moving, loudened gusts assert, oboes blow by to join the tempered strings of violins sizzling busily as sheeted rain, the rage of fallen dots obliterating the composer’s roughened lines limping beyond the old swirled treble clef. Now, even at night, the mood of drums is more than the mind resists, the mind alive in a realm of overwhelm, beauty besetting its dripping boat, the thunder-sheet shaken, bronze, the strong trees, oak, hazel, hawthorn, maple, large, at last laugh awake in an ecstasy of daytime fry and nighttime bake that pulls them, note by note, up from the roots until all the wood-doves coo in a shade as deep as Mahler’s moods. And still the sounds of summer pour on, roar on, irritant transients of piccolos settled down to balmy roundelays blissful as beer, calm cellos, the fat notes of gubbinal horns returned from their silver soaring to soft-tinted rest, a-nuzzle in the underbrush, being to be, and be in the domestic dimness of satisfaction fulfilled–or, if not fulfilled, held anyhow in the mercy of afternoon light after a nap, alarmed only by august disgorgings of gorgeous gongs, the winter ruts deepened by summer’s goings-on, the long byways mossy now, rife, rife every step of the way, with life.
Beyond the boisterous good of lemongrass And past timid wrongs of sassafras, Her frigid footings go. Her trails their silver scarves let down Among autumn's bearded boughs; Her laughter's in the berries now.
It has been too long since I began again To seek speech or light for all within me-- The venting evening overcast and no moon Divvying the heavens between dark and dark; Too long has silence like a deadened seed Bred desolation within my hollow ear. Speech after long silence begins where first The loudened wave may be vivisect, yet live. To see as new, nude Prometheus might, A lesser dark must split a dreaming seam In the all-encompassing all-too-solid night; A lemon shim of dawn must crack and come Before any fuller day of sun. The halo of some first syllable, first sight, Resistlessly spread in black enclosures of the night, Revives the angelic exemplar of all that may be Seen or said, all sight or sound may carry By its enlarging, thinning rings of self: self Ever-expanding, a blue balloon enlarged beyond The sky, whose crimsoning confides all that dawn Implies, more than keenest noon intends. And so, the evening overcast and no moon, In place of giving speech or searing sight, We have our mid-night quiet time together, The absent moon another listener at the table Between us, the table invisible under our elbows. Together we eat the moonlight of remembrance In a silence we cannot parse or chant apart, Intensely unified by our clodden ears-- A poverty of null-maddened imagination Covering over our duskier selves with clouds.
The way summer nights round down to a hue, A single color of final manifestation, fixed, Where imagination and reality are one-- Stars drawn, line by line, into the story, into tale and fable. Horses or men, or half-horses reared, become Arrowy men shooting stars through the astral spheres.... How sky's dulcet dark permits our dovish conjurations To be true! How, for a moment, the imagined you Lowers herself before me on her hands, how I Rear, half-horse, half-star, beyond swept horizons Of soapstone shoulders no daylight adorns; How, for once, dark selves and dark desires occupy The same perceived place, apparent time. How night and we, in the romp of summer, Round down from trio to duo to one Transparency of liquid chalk, one outline of love.
1. Looking Up
He looked up at constellations constantly,
Seeking in heightened happenings above
The redolent love of family: faces squarely there,
Somehow related, frank with curiosity.
Not burning metal raining out of solar air,
Hulking harried fates at his scarred carcass--
But love, as in the dawning sorrow of a mate
Spooning her sugars across the breakfast plate
While our local sun above the blazing table
Plays theater-manager for their private fable.
And also acts, more minorly, as one of the suns
In some far-off creature's caging constellation,
Telling alien tales sagely in strange tongues
For other lovers revolving around other suns.
2. The Constellations
They were the silver-wire basket in which
His whole fruited world had fit and rattled,
Orbiting one sun augustly, feeling less enclosed
Than cared for by star-scriven stories there,
Etched in old-timey deeps of time and space,
Trouping spacetime's operatic litterings--
A child's good-night tale densely stenciled
With Italianate-intaglioed colored lettering.
3. Himself
When, looking down, stars saw him as he was
What did they see? A bunny in his hole
Squinting at yellow-white pebbles in the sky?
Or, as he was, magic rabbit popped from an old tophat,
Did they see, with wan eyes, only those things
He himself had imagined for them to see:
A blue world; himself; himself as marble-master,
With so many mortal mootings left unsaid,
So many starry yarns left unwoven,
A man of gasping laughter, his bare belly furred,
Licking wisps of frosting from a bowl
Tickled constellations rolled around in merrily.
4. What Crows, What Specters
What heavenly crows, what peering specters
Poked and ogled the oblivious baby?
A giant in his cradle rocking rapidly, happily
Himself, watching what ribald repetitions chanced--
Noting slyly, as stars' spidery mobile spun above,
How tapping "time" and tripping "rhyme" dance
Round earth's blue ballroom constantly, the way
Paired mirrors emulate infinity on facing walls....
5. Tinily Enough
At tin summer's midnight edge
Of his small wood's blue empire, man stood:
A minx of meaning in a world awry.
Opaque campadre, come gaze with me. At sky's highest hardest blank, look-- Look where August's ochre moon's gone down Beneath apportioned heaven as to a tomb, Dead to all the world. And dead, too, To you and to me--unless in finicky paraphrase One's voice might arouse, might resurrect... Untuck the lunar ogre from her starry bed-- Revived by no cold cloth of dawn, gelid gem, Revived instead by what one voice intends: By a few words in an ear, as, silverful shavings, Or, more moody, less morose, pregnantest glow. If imagination may amend what summer's Final evening hour--too warm, too insistent-- For all its buttery largesse let fade to stars, Then you and I may look, and look again With longest look, at the moon gone down.
Again the page propounds its blandest blank,
Habitual, blasé--void original of habitation--
Zoo's cage without a zebra, mind's tundra.
Its ski-slope, a-tilt, unlined, emptied of warm cabins
Slipped downslope like a glittery negligee,
Like nipples slipped from the foamy cone
Of a breast, emerges with virginal candor:
Bare, focal force of having never really been kissed.
So notes, so words, fall dismissed from the endless page--
Unzipped from history, from all the too long
Tomps of pomp, pharaonic phrase by phrase,
Illimitable lists of inimitable insistences,
Veritable plagues of earnest meaning--too much,
Too resolutely, too earnestly meaning meaning--
The diminishment of demarcated thought, nailed down,
Defined, the house a house by penned precept
And never really home, the page
Typed and doodled, an ape of aptest palimpsest,
Catastrophes of happenstance made the measure
Of the possible, enforcing form on fantasy,
Draining the dearests dreams dram by dram,
Dimming the mystery.
Scrape the language
Back to scrap, until every inward ululation
Best pursues its own iota of annihilation;
Syllable by syllable, strip each baying bell
Of its ding an sich of ding-dong-ding,
Subtraction returning inordinate thought
To grandest mayhapses and greenest might-bes--
Bone's cold potency re-fleshed to a baby's smile,
The bitter ribbon of sky refreshed, without its
Wild graffiti of constellations, scribble of stars--
The sea once more deep with unnamed animals,
The forest vert with infinite variety,
Each furred eye a planet, each tongue dumb.
How long had one waited for revelation? For a lash to whip the spirit to its utmost, To enfroth chaos as a whale's fluke flaunts the sea? How long had one awaited revelation, Awaited and been found wanting, waited beyond Known answer or any wish for knowledge? The hour of revealing love, reviling hate Is at hand--the enviable hour, veritable prick Of second sweep and minute barb and hour Hand tripled. Louring clouds unfold foil, Tarnished light over the childhood house. Ecstatic revelation pours out, bare and poised. How long one has stood pounding erasers And considering the abyss, pondering improbables, Mysteries and their majesties, the glassy scales Of wind-chimes rearranged, made major, Promoted through September air as rainbows-- Enlarging pirouetted splits and pliés of spectrums Until all sky is filled with dance, with a single dance, A dancer who dares and darts, lurid purple-blacks to blues, From blue to honey-yellowings to lucent chalks At one with wispy trailings of the clouds.
Between our two oceans, what isthmus intrudes? What canal, like a liquid ladder, lets dark confluences Touch and merge, and more than merely merge, Become one in identity, one in intent? What prayer Vaults the dewy devotee among cloudy towers At the edge of the ocean, at the edge of the sky? Between burn and backburn, eyes' fire is leaping. Through fields of grainy difference, keen eyes are reaping-- We stand ablaze in the hay our eyes have harvested. In our nearness, my eye and your eye attempt to touch.... But only in our idea of an eye--a primitive pupil, A principle black tack centering Irritable iridae and their multitudinous hues-- Only in imagination may we meet, And, eye to eye, give the pleasure that we seek.
To sit in the absent father's solemn chair, Grey with flowers, that he left behind Is to sit again in the absent father's lap. So, too, to take up his tapping pipe And to puff long thoughts all the purple afternoon Is to rekindle the father's mind amid his ashen grave. Notice, the pollarded oaks grow more nobly For their nicks. So, too, like velvet antlers wetted, Green thoughts effloresce from your pained brow. Your brow which is "so like your father's At your age." Or would be, were comparison possible In the August evening's lingering light, eons on From father's final step through the cool foyer door Where, in a corner, his ratty umbrella leans unmolested-- Abstract blacks cordially folded like a spider, Cobwebbed in the shadowless light of stars.
I arise from bed without any book And look out, And turn the silvered pages of my world. August's gilding's almost gone, garçon. The milk stales; The after-breakfast plates rattle abstractly. Our blue sky whitens toward September incrementally. Incrementally, Mardée, Our bones remember winter's shrunken edge. Today the sun's bald pat of butter's blancher Than yesterday, And yesterday's is blancher than the day before's. Summertime unravels toward autumn's disorder Leaf by leaf. Tattered sounds louden in the morning chill. When summer's robe lies crumpled, what remains? Pray, Mardée, of all Those citron hours, what bright rind abides? I am like one whose misty death, inevitable, arrives As vapor pours, As a footnote arrives after revelation. Is not this orange globe, this sun, here and now, More to me Than the inoperant orb of distant November?
“…man is insular and cannot be touched. Every man is an infinitely repellent orb, and holds his individuality on that condition.” ~~ Emerson
Summer fumbles brown within me. Unignited bloods merely flow as Summer batters the repellent orb of me, Slow-floods the basement of my being bright. Fulminate furors of sun and power now To extremities stretch: fingertips itch, Tempted to catch, to cage the charring star Flaming blameless in his mercurial circuit. His shine is in me divinely, or so it seems, My bloods tumbling from brown to sheen As summer decants its blazed extremes. I am made mighty, a Dionysus supreme Lapped in sultry skins of beaten bronze, Unrepentant for my daylit minute As gorgeous summer cartwheels blue above And my lucid orbs, engaged, engorge.
Arms-at-hips, I stand upon this cresive hill Surveying June as a nameless river spills And the empty field rolls on, intensely bright, Speckled by no spitter-spat of night. In this brightest space of land, in this Empty field grown emptier with light, Vile tidings shiver in the shadows of the grass, Grass green as glass, as translucent-- At the heart of each blade, at heart, A shadow, thin as an eyelash, starts, Starts and grows long as the light that makes it, A doubling of light by light's black absence. The field is full of shadings half-perceived, Small caresses of a brush loaded with ebon, Defining, crying out, night, night, As the sun bristles past the cresive hill.
Who was it who first was saying The sayings of the end? Who first knew that luminous summer Wasn't forever, wasn't irrevocable recovery? That the child running home from the wood's verge Arrives at an empty house? Who was it who first saw Our true inheritance is of light? Light skitters over the malleable rill, Or in metallic edges of the snow. Later, a sharp wind clears the hill, Saying in shrill grasses there, autumn.
In dry September air, a redefinition begins At the difficult edges of summer leaves Brightening from irradiant green To red, as in the crevice of a new wound. At the edges of the difficult leaves before us, At the edges of our sense of the leaves, At the edges of our senses, Leaf and leaf begin a new clarification, Sharply red, in the dry September air.
Winter's friendly hand, Cold and sure, an aged friend. Surely, surely an aged friend. One come to bring bad news, (Rattling the plaintive windowpane politely) With a little tea and wry laughter-- How we're caught up by the heels By disaster. Surely the cold, clear Panes that frame the empty bright (Letting in the brassy stars And chimes of crippled icicles), Show winter's friendly hand In the solid steam that lifts From the little tea, the window's minor Frost occluding night.
Sleep is forgotten, and emptiness presses. About the abandoned house, a bitter trim Of snow-become-ice stiffens the gutters, Shines an outline of once-human habitation In steel, sterile light--a still trace Of that which had flowed with human warmth All summer, and all through rueful fall endured.... It shines beyond winter's feeblest branch Far into the chill annihilation of final skies. Those remote familiar stars, the human Outlines of constellations' pallid myths, Congregate their austere silvers all together, And, all together, they coldly turn away. They have other planets to look down upon tonight.
I
Perhaps it is no occasion for a poem,
Being alive, and so much of the world gone over
To death. Being alive ought to be to be, to
Oblately be, like the reflecting pool at Versailles
With its zillion squiggles of fiery lines, heedless
Of the poem's primped trumpeting, spritzed for its
Enlivening, pinch and kiss of a nasty aunt,
Mentholated smoke blown in the occasion's face.
....so much has gone over already, so much....
Our whole world will go over to death,
And all of the poems will have worn out their heels
Slowing us stuttering down the backward hill.
Barefoot at last, we pirouette over a wormy log
Into the bleak hole our hale love of Earth prepared,
Long ago, for us--for us alone, that hole. For us,
And all those bones not yet born.
What can the most fertile couplet fructify
When all that lives must also die?
If it is not for ourselves or for the dead
That life must be enlivened, then why
Cry "liberté!" at all? Why inaugurate the wish
Life could be bounties of loosened roses,
And not hard bright bales of tears?
Or, if it must be tears, unwillingly wept--
Ruddy tears that have roses at their core.
II
"Liberty" is too big a word to read aloud,
Among all the printed trash of papers crowding out
The cafe clatter, coffee cups gone cold,
The morning rage that accompanies opining apes
Who spare no detailed love for inch-high dreams.
(Still, rhyming Jack nodded among his Harriman's teas,
Seeking biggest visions in that gentle steam and seethe.)
Sleep, to them, is release from obligation,
A vacation from invective, light's extinction, perdu.
Their moon's no mistress of inventive eye,
Doodling woozy outlines of pallid paradise
As she parades, en nude pointe, about the parkinglot.
No, no. Sleep is their escape, purely and practically,
An oubliette to oblivion for the day's rubbish,
A hole where magic casements ope'
On pools of dirty oil.
(Perseverant Jack, to grow his giant, thumbs the seed
Into his very ear until the broken cradle bleeds,
Responsive to sharp imagination's seethe and need.)
Clairvoyant voyageurs of the quaint quotidian,
They read their minds in the paper every day:
Life is puerile in a purple haze,
A titanic catastrophe, capsized
Beside an iceberg. And no rowboat home.
III
Shall garish maidens in naked garrisons go forth,
Weaving wheaten garlands as they march
Down silhouetted avenues to make us free?
Can billeted gangs of regimental bicyclists expunge
The uneven levity of our solitary repose?
How can all the multiples of men amend,
Or lunatic doubling of naked ladies' leagues allay,
The single niggling sin that haunts my breast?
Politics is but passion personified, a hasty mask
Strapped gas-mask grim on the gagging populace,
Without so much as the pleasant pressure
Of one's own fingerpainting fingerprint applied--
Swiftly slid orange along the disguising nose,
The weakly-inked imprimatur of a primitive.
And yet, it's among the olestra mass, we pretend,
Our single fate discerns its predestined end.
How much better to laugh behind a damasked hand
At secret meanings whispered by the grass,
Or build up a minaret but cricket-high, and lean
And worship there in solo loneliness,
Than to huff a bicycle among the numbered blanks,
Or giggle belittled in the garlanded herd.
IV
Come instead into the forlorn solitude of self,
Sultriest interlude of self and self, the self
Doing little more when midnight booms
Than romancing the forgotten moon,
Dancing dunce-like on the dunes in the silky light,
Alone among the waxy blooms that shine
Up at her radiant round, their sultry mother.
Down all the lonely aisles of neglected time,
Come loiter here among the leaves' arsenic pallor.
Make up a game for one, where time plays
Lullabies into a pinking conch's soft-echoed ear,
Mysterious residuum of your own rose pulse.
Walk at ease along the forgotten beach
Of self, the self's returning tide half black,
Half white in moody moonlight, and no oar.
Here on the beach, tallying the sea-drift,
The self like a wisp of smoke ascends,
Yes, ascends, invisibly to heaven.
What use now the orgy crowd and clamping mask?
No null numbers can add up all your sum.
Alone with the veritable surf, alone with no one,
No parade of pretense to hurrah you high
And keep warm the solitude hid inside--
Mater moon must mother you, as she the leaves.
Bathe by that light, dive in the veritable surf
Arching back-and-forth before you argently.
Swim until you are not what you were.
V
Public men in a public time, large-armed,
What have they to do with love, the double
Solitude to which all consummate desire comes?
Whispered vows and private pets as soft
As raindrops, preach from no soapbox pulpit
To captivated crowds, but singly lick
Wordy seeds into receptive ears of earth.
Unloving laws of the public men, large-armed,
Bind all affections, communal to a common postern
Past affection's expiration.
Who can inhale a scent,
However intensely tart, however vast,
Waving winds have whipped away? So loves
And lovers go sinuous through our lives--
Twinned rivers escaped beyond our bending,
Far past poets' suasive sigh or snit fantastic.
Laws, too, are nothing in the heart's demesne,
A febrile fence erected for leanest leaping,
Advice for ears reddened by their own desires
Obedient to an inner sing-song no orator can echo.
VI
Ruined statues in the park offer no roses
To the eye--but to the eye within the eye,
The eye that lets the eye apprehend
Both stone and rose? To that eye,
No violence may be done. No thumb
May muscle it out, no lid lure it blind
Or blank its vision of the human things it sees.
Milton penning paradise and Homer eating grapes,
Sightless yet serene, saw into the raw marrow
Of what we are: human--ruined or noble.
Right to the withered pith of us their bone orbs
Dissected fault and fury: spun Ulysses
Recklessly round the sea's ceaseless sink,
Or rang old Lucifer down from curtained Heaven
To opine alone in the bituminous pit.
If no more blessed by being than merely human,
How, my hearts, account for love's intrusion?
Does such second sight come, as Vishnu advises,
Because we and all things are One? Why, then,
The universe, however wide, would lack its mystery,
And tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow
Its surprise. No elation scintillates when we kiss
No one but ourselves. No satisfaction crows its kill
If vengeance but defangs the mirror's face.
We know the inward rose of others
By the softness of our own....
VII
Here the beautiful sounds of the sea walk beside.
Pebbles mumble and crested waves assert; echo
Understates the case. And you, and I, walk beside.
Persuade me, limitless sea. Give me an identity
To be, someone too lovable to drown
In your green wish and wash, your blonde
Summer utterances, golden yodels, sweet sweeps
Of beach--blue beguiler of my own inviting!
If sea-shanties prime your immortal flood,
May my tears, too, be provident for good.
I want to know just what to do, just who to be
Beyond the cozy monuments of warm mortal love.
Shine my broken glass in your swift foreverings.
VIII
Whitman moved among squat hospital cots,
His salt beard bright beside unseasoned breaths.
He poured no balm of runic ode, but cool carafes
Of water for the broken soldiers' ease, sopped blood
From wounded piteous faces, knelt and prayed
Hand in hand for a salvation he did not really feel
Remotely possible. Hand in hand, he never told
The heavy news that "der Gott ist Tod."
They fought and died in youthful simpleness.
"Liberty" was a word as wide as they,
A torso-word, a wound-word, a death word
Worth living for through all the battling stars
Night-belching cannon or Springfield long-bores
Could crack, pouring out their milky smokes
No somnambulating symbolist could unfocus.
The rose-shell ear of the exploded soldier
Remains the excellentest vase for prayer's flowers.
Myths are the poems of our intenser angels,
Spread-winged griffins among molten smokes,
Constellations constantly re-telling all, line by line,
As they look down between dark-parted stars.
It is in these stories, as they swerve, that we share
Our remoter solitude and sublime source,
Command with chants ruggedest happenstance,
Fan piquant fable to flaming grace, and partake
Of the painful wrenchings of our fate.
IX
Reality is permeable to our taut investigations.
The melody of one rose is all symphonies.
The experiment of a single tear is every tragedy.
Our integration, the integration of poetry
And reality, is simple as a sugarcube dropped
In dark morning coffee, or the milky smoke
Of cream, sweet interfacings of Havana fields
And Columbian highlands ground down,
Lump and liquid....
The poet on his balcony, in dim moonlight,
Utters his liminal sibilances
For his gilded ear alone, one candle at his back
In which phosphor pages freshly flare;
Not for all the humdrum roll-call of humankind
In their chiffon sleeping gear and plummy dreams,
Does he sing low to stars embedded in his lids.
He speaks for himself, but not to himself,
Frank affabulations of the summer moon,
Honied orb to which all men, lovesick, stick--
Moon, let my inky invocation be
Sworn with every susurration of the sea.
And so star-clad sugars of self-wish mix
With mud-mad grandeurs of our rooted world,
Those velvety blood-blacks affianced, via me,
With saccharin siftings of the spooning moon.
The summery business of lying beside you Beside a bedside a fan in the dark-- The sweat of day recedes almost into memory. The fan blades circulate cozy hosannas of air. Almost, love comes out like stars between us. Almost, the sun and his sweat have gone Up the empty chimney.
The distant road is whispering. The air is softly, softly Stirring the peacock feather. In my morning mind The warm image of you Stirs softly, too.
1. Behind the apartments
The young gulls skreek and squeal
Over the old dump
Ripe with peelings, mangled cans.
They think, If I flew to the moon,
Enlivening its dusts with my wings
As they flash,
I could not be more satisfied than now.
In this, the young gulls
Preening high over the glittering dump
Are not deceived.
2. In his room
He nailed up a poster of the moon
From an old bijou.
And round shone that moon
Upon his wall.
His lap glowed slowly obscured
With drift, with stardust.
Not like a mouse Timidly hugging the wainscoting Did you meet the prismatic glitters Of July moonlight. Nor trailing scarves With threads of silver Did you attend Its slippered breeze-- Nor waving silvery scarves Threaded with prismatic colors Torn from passing rainbows. Oh, no. You came and sat On a flat wooden chair, Hard. And sweated all July. And stayed. You sat down hard On an old wooden chair, Sweating and wiping your face Prismatically.
I was a maiden first. Of crinoline And electric green, My gown. Then you came, Choice monsieur, With red eyes And heavy hands. The days broke open Like glass Like cymbals Like mirrors crashed. The days broke open. Like summer rolled over on his back, Open-mouthed with sleep, You came. In the hay, in the day, Heavily, heavily. Such hands, monsieur. And my gown Felt velvet, Grew red.
What I feel, here in this room with you As the walls drift into space, Obscure rhomboids.... More than your eyeliner of kohl, More than your lengthening hair Poured from its sumptuous bucket.... What I feel... is what escapes saying. The sound of the hurrying surf Fills my ears when you bend near. Your shoulder brushes my cheek.... The walls drift off into space.... What was it you were saying?
And would night come Not once but a thousand thousand times And each sad star above me be The burning shadow of your face Still would I want--and need--again A thousand thousand nights Of such unerring grace and sin
A quiet kiss is all I request While the blue moon rears so rare; Such double fullness fills my August As I imagine you quite bare. Two moons blunder by in one summer month, Doubling our lovers' light; Toward you I flutter like a moth, Encouraged by such burning nights.
Because you took me to bed, I love you. Because your sex wraps around me And my body falls out of myself Like a flower, I love you. Wisdom doubles itself like a germ, Adding body to body. Your eye Adds itself to my eye, and we go on seeing: New things, new newness. Cicadas, windfall, our braiding bodies-- Tender, joyful, awake in each other, Simple as forgetting. A slow-crawl cross, holy and mossy. Hesitant as a craving bee I explore you completely, Exhausting the tassels of sunlight, Removing valuable essences even by the powdery moon. And its lonely magnet unites us, crests in us. Stale, silly and small, I return to the gorgeous orchard of your arms. Your arms tensile and lively as if managing a sailboat. The heavy sail red, full of bloods, wombs. But agile anyway in the universe that blows it Before your face, in the front of the dawn, Your hair whipping!
More ardent, more loving, more longing, Now I know the color of your soul; How white the justice of your eyes, How mountain blue the ambition in you, How pale the shimmer of your sheer sincerity, And like the rose's red the love you give. In evening when my sight is dim And the fire casts the colors that it can, Snaring all shapes in its flares and fans Of shadow and intensity that alternate Between the cracking wood and iron grate: Steady glows the color of your soul. But beyond these tints and tinctures Of day or night, beyond what any sight Can by light looking give or get-- Clear as evening's air, as vibrant, dear, As tears composed of alpine snow, I know I know the color of your soul.
How I love this woman! Through the open door of my soul Into the wide fields of thee! You stand unashamed in dainty dignity, A fine mind and eyes unblinded, Fresh and ready as grass after rain. Out into the nude acres I go, Barefooted and bareheaded, anxious to serve Such swaths of white wildernesses! As a bee attends the minutest bloom, So I follow the shadow of your going And canopy all the Earth with song! My soul awoke one night with you, And still in legendary dark pursues This new star in the evening sky. High above forests, horizons, and Hell You shine divinely, adjusting your jacket Or pushing a button into your narrow lapel. I sing the visionary river Flowing wayward and seaward at once! The bark and chuckle of otters, I sing, The wet salt that shapes the beach-- I sing the long celebratory downhill race To the frigid lake beloved of ducks. . . . I sing landscape and inscape, Outside and inside, day and night, and you.
I present this infant child of Idumaean midnight, His pale wings powerless, plucked of flight: All night my study's closed window glowed With mirrored lamp's incense and burnished golds, Each sad pane, alas, by harsh frost ringed and stamped Until dawn's wide fingers calmed the ailing lamp --insubstantial angel-- Unveiling to my tired Dad's eyes: the babe a-beam, Night's afterbirth--gifted relic of a dream!-- Raising round my father's mouth a faint, queer smile In anemic silence; day's blue dews freshened by sunrise palms.... Oh Mary, Mary, cradling our daughter to your kisses --Cold feet so innocent!--Welcome, too, this three-headed brother! Sing "lullay, lullay" with viol voice and frail harpsichord, will you? Press with faded finger your fulsome breast, won't you? Please, bleed the sibylline whiteness of a woman's soul Between starvling lips, dropped from virgin skies.... Mallarmé
Virgin dawn's violet, ineffectual light.... What use the shuddering wings? Delicate inebriate... Shivering no fissures in the lake's hard haunt of ice-- Glacial transparencies flickering with effectless flights. Once swift and serene, his memories flitter: ill-lit, Magnificent, and without hope. He strains.... Never enchanted by chansons of Riviera suns, Never flying from winter's sterile dazzle. The long S-neck convulses--whitest, wintriest agony; Infinite space afflicts; the snowy swan denies, denies.... A horrible mire frosts the impeccable quills. Phantom of brilliance by brilliance confined To immobility--in his insolent trance icily fixed-- Sleet-sheeted, inutile exile of a Swan! Mallarmé
The moon despairs; seraphim in tears Dream among heaven-scented blooms, bows Tautly in hand, eliciting from the fatal viols Spectral sobs glissading azurest corollas-- That day of your first, blesséd kiss. O vision of love, return to me, martyr me! Lick, inhale old wines of that dear perfume, sadness, Left after regrets and deceptions depart-- Unrinsed leavings of the gathering Dream, Fortissimo moanings sunk in the heart That collects them, big as a sink. In disarray, I cast my wandering eyes Distraught upon the pavement pale.... And then--sunshine in your hair (on the street, At evening) appears, and your lilt-lit laugh returns: An apparition of the blonde fey with her bright cap Who once upon the sleepy beatitudes of enviable childhood Trespassed, trailing from pale fingers of her half-closed hands Shaken bouquets of milk-scented stars. Mallarmé
The sum of all the soul Is lazy exhalations, Smoke rings in rings in rings And their derivations. So says the brune cigar (Burning wisely the while) Letting shooken cinders char From the clear kiss of fire. So the smokes of poems Insinuate a smile;-- Dismiss thisness, singer, should you debut: Reality's vile. Too-precise a sense erases Literature's half-guesses. Mallarmé
Swiftly, gamely, mademoiselle
Made a wish to hear toned notes
Floating from my old wood flute
Revealingly.
Poignant practice in the park
Between our picnic and the flocks
Achieved some partial good
when I stopped
And stared at mademoiselle 'til dark.
This vain breath that I extend
To where my antique wood flute ends
By spastic clasp of crippled fingers
In incapable mimesis
Can't catch quite your natural and clear
Childish laughter that charms the air.
Mallarmé
Silks involved in balms of Time Where even fictive if expires Vaunt not the coiled, the native cloud Combed in your mirror's lens. Patriotic ranks of stagnant flags Exalt above the vacant street; Drowned by waves of your naked mane, I plunge to my eyes' content. Yet, no mouth may be sure Of the savor his bite procures Unless, regal and rampant, he insists, Amidst your immense coppery tufts, On expelling a diamond sigh: The cry "Glorie!" that he stifles. Mallarmé
All's quiet, except the silence; As at the fireplace I lean, Military slacks Redden against my shins. The invasion I await With virgin courage Is that of the baton a-tilt, The soldier's white glove-- Gilt or stripped It waits to strike--not Teutons But some ancillary menace, Some acquiescence one desires. Beat back this wild nettle: Sympathy before battle. Mallarmé
1.
Yes, all things increase in magnificence
When hammered with travail
And patience--
Verse, marble, onyx, enamel.
2.
Damn each false constraint!
Yet, that you may walk erect,
Your corset,
Muse, pull tight.
3.
Sculptor, renounce
Clay and stone, chisel and bit
When doubts
Unnerve the finger and the spirit.
4.
Hold to hard Carrara,
With Paros cool endure,
So rare,
Guarding the pure contour.
5.
Imprint bronze of Syracuse
That, firm and proud,
Never releases
Each trace fierce and charmed.
6.
And with a dread most delicate
Pursue the filament of soul
In agate,
Profiling perfect Apollo.
7.
Painter, despise pale aquarelle
And pin your palette,
So faint, so frail,
In unchanging flames enameled.
8.
Bunch and twist blue mermaids
Trenchantly a hundred ways
By their fishy ends
--Monsters of antique heraldry!
9.
Show in a nimbus triple-lobed
The Virgin, Jesus
And the globe
Blazing beneath one Cross.
10.
--Dust to dust.
The pastor intones
Talced white
Above white pews of skeletons.
11.
Art alone, robust,
Savors of Eternity; the ephemeral
Portrait bust
Survives the charnel.
12.
And the austere medallion
Plowed up by a laborer
From dirt and loam
Reveals an Emperor.
13.
Gods die and are interred;
But sacred, sovereign verse
Endures--
More mightily made than Death.
14.
Sculpt, carve, chisel;
Until the floating dream alone
Smiles
Within the resisting stone.
Théophile Gautier
Being A rhapsody Of the Scarlets' Star-lit Loving. (Varlet And Harlot Scarlet, To be exact.)
Witness This Thin Thing So living, So loving.
To my Scarlet Harlot: Try Harder With your Father. I'll float The moat. Post This note On your door. Love, your Scarlet Varlet.
Subtle sambas, Wriggling rumbas, Limber Latinas, Ay, cay rumba! Sweaty sweets, Nimble feets, Levitating, Titivating. But just From you, My muse, Have, I must Spanks And thank-yous.
Ounce said to Pounce: "Ouch! That's my head!" And Pounce replied: "Love hurts. That cannot be denied." Then Pounce kissed Ounce once and off to bed.
You've A duty To ennude Your booty. I've A bounty Of Quaaludes, My beauty To urge And edge Your booty To doublesome Troublesome Duty.
Wanting Haunts The heart: Gaunt Faces, Empty places. Till Death Takes us, Breath Vacates us, Wanting Haunts The heart, Hurts.
If Gifts Breed Bliss, Be greed. Take this: Hand Madam-- Live Grand, Love One Man. One.
Neck To neck We'd twist, Kissing And kissed. Unwound, Let-down, Such Clutches Are missed. Loneliness Sifts The dour Hours.
Before you Nothing To do No zing In anything. Since our meeting Too dizzy, Too busy, Ev'n for tweetin'. Sweetie, At dawn In your arms My heart Sparks.
Wildly Violetly Empurple My steeple! My mistress, My kisstress, Keeper Of hearts, Parts, And my wand'ring peepers Wonder No longer, Doubt no more: You, j'adore.
Alone Unhomed, My heart, Bone- Lonely Beats Apart, An egg Unshelled. In Hell, I beg: Come quick, Quick, Quick!
From the simple Grinful Of your darling Dimples To your sinful Eyefuls, My darling Darer, Your fancy Prancing And disco Hiprolls Show mucho Mojo.
Cat's cradle Weaving Waving Fingers Together. Play-doh Pounding Rounding Colorful Lumpfuls. Games Of love You've Made untame.
We're Here. One Year Our sum. Plus Night's Delights... --Shush! Ennui? Puh-lease! Still chill. You, me, Our "we" Fulfills.
Adam And Eve, Snake- Struck, Had No Luck. "Go Damned," Grieved Gabriel, "Until Reprieved."
My heart's A lark! All day I sway.... Feel Real Swell. My hips Dip The way An eel Swims-- So dark And thin.
Icicles, Thickened In vacant Intervals, Quicken When Tickles Begin-- Licks Likened To kisses, Kisses If wishes Were kisses.
To You My Spry Love Springs, Sings Above Death's Dearth. To You, Contralto, This solo.
I Fly Untried Skies Asking Everything It's Which N'what. But, T'love My wounded dove? Homeward, I'll Crawl.
Love, Duty Prove Beauty. Hate, Envy Berate Levity. Life, Death-- Brief Breath. You? What's true.
An elegance that pursues silence
by Gregg Glory
The gift of speech
Sentiment is the key. If the reader can be thrown strongly enough in a certain direction, or into a certain mood, then that feeling can create a connective web or atmosphere that holds the whole poem together: the web transformed into a nexus of human-centered meanings.
As with Wordsworth or Coleridge’s conversation poems, the reader is hip-checked by direct statements of strong feeling in the direction of the mood in which the poem will actually function as a poem and not merely a collection of statements. It is a wrestler’s work and no mistake. It is not the aesthetician’s golden ladder of words, nor imagination’s grand view, nor the jeweler’s precise chiseling of a potential diamond. It is a gross and direct appeal to the self-pitying piggy heart of common humanity that gives such poetry the emotive energy to soar. It’s the last weeks of an intense political campaign where rhetoric and competition have roiled winner and loser in a single vat. It is five seconds to go on the fifty yard line. Desperation, excitement, and commitment are all called up from the slop bucket of survivor’s guilt of evolution which has hazarded us this far.
But how to achieve this peanut-cracking rhetorical gore and gong-show ga-ga excitement in the current age, when rhetoric, speechifying, and fine sentiments have been frowned from the field of human communication? Only in television ads, charity appeals, and the Sunday sub-culture of evangelical shtick are such techniques still commonly employed.
Unless I was going to print my poetry on the side of a collection tin underneath the photo of an abused puppy, I was S.O.L. I thought to myself, How would Gomer Pyle propose to his lady-love and manage to be heard as more chivalrous than cartoonish? A proposal of marriage is a domestic moment of high drama in our reproductive lives, with a long shadow of consequences that hang from the act, casting back from the future a certain darkness or atmosphere upon the proposal’s moment. So, in imagination, I put myself into Gomer’s size twelve army boots and bent down on one knee. And shazzam! I saw Polly Pureheart a-blinkin’ down at me–so unbearably lovely in the moonlight near the babbling cr’k. And as much as I wanted to marry that Pureheart, and cherish and care for her, and hold her in my clumsy arms under the sighing weeping willow tree . . . . I, I, well, I just couldn’t say anything at all. I had been struck dumb by the immensity of the moment, and the intensity of my own feelings. The fear of rejection and the vulnerability of showing my truest soul were there as well, like a lump of flour in my throat. Yet, for all that, my intentions were clear to her, and Polly in her pity looked down with love in her eyes, and a simple, life-altering “Yes” on her lips. I was blessed.
What I took from this hillbilly vision was that clear intention–or direct statement of strong feeling– followed by silence, or a break from the intensity of that intention or feeling, can moisten the wry eye of the reticent reader, and cattle-prod a passive Polly into action. I wondered, with my personal penchant for potent possibilities and alternative scenarios, if a rhetorical question, sincere in the motivating gears of its feelings, could work as well as a bald blurt of hurt or happiness to create this space of silence in a poem– and which would then invite the reader to lean in and leer– not as a vampire umpire calling strikes– but as one of the dusty boys in pin-stripes ready to get dirty and knock some mud off of his cleats. I’ve tried this approach in the following poems too. (How’d I do?)
A question, such as
How can we talk about love when everything's wrong?
creates a silence of need and self-doubt projecting from the speaker. If the reader has ever felt a similar doubt or moment of confused longing, then, I figured, a space of receptive silence and co-creation will occur. The poem just may succeed its way into meaning.
A direct statement of strong feeling, like
It's going to take a very great person
To just stand there and love me.
creates a similar silent space. The adjoining observations about a menacing sky, an aggressive squirrel, and some quietly patient horses all give that sentiment its fertile dung in which to blossom. Exacerbating or contradicting–both–can call that statement into greater relief. The squirrel and horses have nothing directly to do with the feeling the speaker is bludgeoned by– and yet, in the explosive silence of embarrassed eavesdropping the criminal reader has been plunged into– these props take onto themselves all the concomitant feelings that the words of the poem refuse to provide. They are the willow tree and moonlight to Gomer’s gulping proposal, his brown eyes swimming with unsayable sentiments that must still–somehow–be understood if he, and, downstream, the species is to survive.
Will you take my hand?
GREGG GLORY Feb. 14th, 2009
This poem has no details If you won't carry water 100 miles in your hands. Break through the skim of ice In December, right behind that silent glass factory All one tall shadow on the Raritan. Watch your hands shiver. Feel your wet cuffs the first 20 miles Until the sky is a shard in your palms, And you fret about cutting your wrists Accidentally.
Kneel down in darkness Beside my dark. Flow your free hand Into the rolling stack. Each breath anticipates the next. Excited, we lean Nearer than the night. Nearer than the spur Of sparks about to start. Hold my hand. Hold this match with me.
I don't belong here, in this creation. The clear air flies around me, One frenzied blue wing escaping. The path up is all grey wrecked stones Made naked where the runoff comes bursting in Spring. They hint at the uppermost, topless spot All bald flat bold long rocks Veined with autumn-leaved vines and dry ivies. Now I can see what I have been pushing for until My head and shoulders are slick with afterbirth. Over the cliff, the landscape patches itself together. A bare, thin Cigarette smoke of veiled haze Puts a varnish finish to the valley. The Delaware lays like a wet, crooked stick Abandoned in a ditch. From up here, At the brownish prow of lookout rock, I can almost see my whole stupid life. Clouds assemble, whispering frigid things against me. I have no idea why nobody's here with me, Why I have no lovers at my age, Or why I'm tearing my loafers out on a mountainside, Scoring water off of strangers And trying to forget my face With my back Against this cliff.
Deliberately I drove until The only thing I was Was lost. Scrub pines hunched Like dwarf men under the lowering roof Of eggshell heaven, each man bent into his own Posture of Dantescan agony. I kicked uncomfortably Against the sterile pinecones large as a fist Or dud handgrenade until they rolled into the shadows Full of needles, with a sound like crumpled paper. The patient preoccupation that had bade me lose my way Loosened like pneumonia phlegm with every cracking kick. Now, at last, quite lost, I laughed! Not even my own troubles could find me here, Shadow-mottled as a forgotten fawn. Under a wing of vines, beside some swirl of wet, I sat contemplative in my self-forget. The vine-leaves' yellow eyes, all rimmed with red, Offered inedible tears of berries cheerily, Which, if I ate as offered, would let the sick inside Slide up slick as a roar. I smiled aside My wry temptation to see Just what it was was in me, And pulled my fingers from the vines like a half-plucked harp. I put away my need to know Just what had gotten lost when I had gotten so, To see it sized and sorted on some obscene plate Curiously served up For I and eyes to eat. Low above, on a white dry pine bough overhead, The sinuous weight of a great black snake Waits in its hisses.
Better off dead, I keep poking my pillow with my elbow, Looking for sleep-- The cold pleasure of unconsciousness,-- An apricot kept at the back of the fridge Sweating quietly in a lightless box Until the sudden click of dawn Bares its teeth.
There's something crappy in the sand along Belmar's shore. The grains are too big, or there's too much weird junk To run it Smoothly between your palms. Tar from the pier pilings sticks In your dungarees. And the Shark River inlet, no longer busy With chaotic traffic or crab traps Keeps spitting at you. Even the dying flounder From some old drunkard's afternoon haul Stares up at you to go. But you stay, Stuck on your perch and your thoughts-- A little helplessly. And when the oil rig lights twinkle on like an evening dress All along the bottom of the sky's deepening scythe of green, It's hard to know what to call it. If anything.
I feel trapped in my old life Like a hermit crab that won't abandon its shell It is so intensely curled Into its stiffened whorl of habits. The seashore wails and wails Its single, filial demand-- Repetitious as a herd of commodities brokers Shouting in their calico patchwork of blazers Until the final bell. How can I change if the sea won't? My yearning stands straight out like a flag, same as ever. Seaweed everywhere, Beaten brown and soft as a drenched felt hat, Fits itself alluringly To the suavities of the rocks, Adapting crash by crash by crash.
Nervous and warm as mice The skinny cot at Camp O Squeals with our comingling. Wet nose to nose, past midnight We whisper the dawn awake. How can we talk about love when everything's wrong? We touch through frayed fingerless gloves It is so cold. It is so cold, Our breath wets the cinderblocks And almost freezes. Our shoulders get sore, Facing each other in the dark. Light comes into the room Like a page turning out of its shadow. Before I could see your eyes, --Before I met you even,-- I would cry remembering them.
This keeps happening:
In the field outside
Mist gathers in little clutters
Unswept. It glitters and sags.
Nothing in my life is very tidy.
The stamp collection from when I was 12
Blows off the shelf in a windstorm
Of colorful, cancelled leaves.
I am older than I was yesterday.
When Lisa calls on the phone, casually blank,
I don't care. It hurts.
Shaving, I cut someone else's face.
The watery blear of blood flows away from him,
Down the well-formed hole in the porcelain
Made for the purpose.
The waters that tumbled us together Now are pushing us apart The way sometimes pond ice Will throw over an old tree (A decaying oak even) And give its roots unwanted air. Nothing is lost, and everything is changed. 2 What is the purpose of a fingernail? It feels nothing and keeps on growing, Even when you're croaked. The only time I ever noticed mine was when I lost one In a dumb moped accident. My thumb one. It was OK though, really, or at least It grew back long enough to cut me When I wasn't thinking. 3 Things keep turning out this certain way. The moon keeps meaning something angry and sad. I hate that. It makes me want to cry.
Yesterday's lime, and yesterday's, Split at the meridian, Mummifies in its little ceramic dish. Its green is almost white, And it is dry to the touch as an almond. Still, I remember when it was Fresh and bitter. Now, is there nothing else for the mouth to hold But these thin syllables? Every day, I wash my face Beside your dusty toothbrush, the black rattle. The sky is square and bright in the window. When a man's love is mocked away Death becomes beautiful.
Stars drag and spark. Cold ponds soften and go black in the March moonlight. Valedictory icicles fall ringing from the eves, Inhabiting my sleep. Deep in the fallow meadow's gopher holes, Near the golden hibernates Head down in their breathing dark, Spring ripens. Goodbye winter, goodbye love! Nothing shall remain fresh in this winter's-light Even one more day. I lift my arm As though it were a bough of evergreen waving. Nothing can save us at this point. And I Don't want to.
Some things are so proud. A giraffe, proud of its tallness, looks down with its wet stone brown eyes through Maybelline lashes keeping the dust of the sun out. Looks down on us as if we had fallen from the sky too and had forgotten how to get back up. We are the broken-hipped, the pitiable.
But the giraffe moves on, too proud to grow hands and help us back to the sky-world. Taking slow, liquid steps as though pushing against an ocean we can no longer feel, her concern moves forward to what concerns her. And the pale afternoon moon follows her, I notice . . . indifferent to clouds or poems thrown like rocks or bouquets to bring the moon down to us so we could touch it and wash it and swaddle it with big hands in fresh cotton like a newborn baby.
The giraffe is done with hands, done with distractions. There’s something else up there, something more important, something necessary. Something has made her spotted neck rise and rise for generations without losing the pull of its helium, the tautness of its string tugging on her shoulders, her nose high as if just above the waterline she has been pushing against all these eons refusing to drown, her lips outstretched as if dying of thirst to reach the tenderest, least green, smallest leaves at the tip-top of the thorn tree.
has a mouth full of feelers. It is careful about what it takes in, what it ingests for its own health. It has a hard shell and it traverses along its spines. Yet, for all that shell, those spines loaded with goading poison, it is delicate, delicate. An unwary foot can crush it, turning its delicately waving spines into fiddlesticks. It’s round as an eye, and as wet; a ball of lashes that can sting.
What comes to this underwater oddball floats to it, mostly. Always it is surprised by what drifts onto its radar. Its small, central mouth is always open; always it is saying: O, o, o, o. Quietly it lies and lives in a world full of fast monsters. Barracuda, all sinister grin, speed by the bristling urchin unmolestingly. It walks, when it does, the way a starburst would have to– carefully on its extended points.
To me, it feels hairy and lonely. This denizen of tidal waters and marginal sands that never ventures from its furry shell, leaves, at last, a washed up skeleton-ball children rattle by their ears. Shaken, it is still full of worry beads.
The excitement of waking up alone in the morning Has left me. The ceiling is closer than in my childhood, And less interesting. The yard outside is immaculate and empty. Nobody disturbs my snows. Looking at the frozen dogwood, weighted heavily down and down, Broken branches lay beneath like scribbled hieroglyphs, Wands encased in cold glass. Why is there pity without mercy? I think, Just as you start getting it right it all changes. 2. A starving coyote, new to the neighborhood, Trots from trash can to trash can, too weak To tip any over and put his muzzle In richness. His mouth is long and lurid as a croc's. His tongue lolls listlessly, Rainy red streamers from a bike handle. His eyes rave weakly as he darts between cars. Songbirds on the snowy fence whistle down at him Uncaringly. No one here has put out even one raw hamburger patty. He bounds with the weak lightness Of a birthday balloon weeks past its date. His fur knots, clumped glumly, And there's a wet patch that defines some ribs. All his life there had been enough. He was strong and had his teeth. Alleys and fields were places to shop for blood, Until now. He stops stooping at Mrs. Crenshaw's, Steals a little left-out cat food, dry. Crossing his paws in quiet light, He lays down carefully in a snowbank to dream And goes running all night long.
The stinkbug lay dead in the carpet. In the middle of the room, in the static white Afternoon, a dull dear dust brown,-- Scarab-shaped, but not as sacred. I carried her to the dustbin Without ceremony. The house creaked for a long time after that. I was lonely.
Listening is the pits. Admit it. But yet That long stretch of highway Asks nothing, is always silent-- Asking nothing in the dusty nothingness-- Until the littler kids get out at 3 o'clock. The white line goes on and on like a dare. Stumbling with drink, Steevio and me Switched forsythia whips And traded hot licks from a paper bag Back and forth. We kept kicking The yellow, distressed row Of blameless forsythia Uncharitably, very uncharitably. Some random car Had hauled ass through the urine-yellow hedge Last New Years. We ducked in And slipped down the slope jubilant with mud, Spilling everything. Our arms were numb and warm As after a fight. A delicate old cat skeleton Emerged like a yeowl From the black mud bank behind us. Blank white sockets stared From where the rear wheel had peeled it up. Stared As if we cared.
Having grown up some summers by the beach I always hear the ocean, wherever I am, Coming down out of a long tunnel From far away. Long mists hang around the gravestones, the even graves' grass, So much mischief night toilet paper. I'm here, Dad, can you hear me? Even the twigs break with a gracious softness underfoot It is so wet. The mist is on my face mysteriously. I am a mirror, here. My breathing thickens like the blood of a pear Running a long droplet along the paring knife Until my finger feels it. Baumer, Bowen, almost, almost. It's so wet, Even the souls of the place must be saturated with it. Even your soul, Dad. It's alright, I guess, Running into you here. I came all this way To damned Alabama, and you Waited. What else Are you waiting for In the flagrant dirt? At my back, a dull looped booming comes From the tunnel's other end.
Flowery Xs flip past the passenger window. Dan, Mom, Dad, Granddad, almost Geoff Who breathed suspended By steel and morphine and coma For a month in that room alone With the light boiling through the blinds Blindly Until the pain came back.
Anyway, it's like this, too. I am getting so old, so long in the tooth, Morality is finally creeping over me. What my life should be Is longer than what my life can be. Life is like an airport. Everywhere in the world to get to But you're stuck where you are-- Chewing peanuts at a neon bar. Anyway, my heart-meat Beats its somnambulist's drum. Anyway. I don't want to have to ask permission! Heaven is like this, see. A giant empty hanger, walls all windows Watching the skirl and stop of snows always. Nobody stays very long, And no layovers. I keep wanting to be dead, and I keep Wanting. Anyway.
Sepulchral Perth Amboy Rears past the Driscoll bridge White and final as any heaven. The Raritan overpass feels so high Only clouds Careen off the railings. Below us in the sky A shaggy hawk abandons the chemical bay To play in the updraft. His wings move like hands Too excited to ever stop clapping In loud gratitude. In the city, Lights stipple on Like fine rain across a pond. Sycamores and rowans Poke through the sidewalk, Tearing the concrete with careless ease. Tentatively, stray commuters Find homes among The towers. There's a shyness there I don't know how to know how To understand. Something in me loves this dark night And keeps on loving it. Somehow Never falling asleep again Feels right.
Two bees hurtle past me Toward the pink azaleas. Once, I was mystery enough To interest them.
Twice before like this: Dawn talked the wet hills white in Cliffwood. The catbird said allegiances to the air From a nailed and narrow balcony. There's a coolness in the nearby square of grass Where the exploited moon will wreck itself Exhaustedly Some evening soon. There, by the busted gutter Tippy yawning lifts his leg against And pauses, And paces past to the gum-gemmed pavement Black--beyond all knowing black, I swear-- Beneath its apparent glare.
Once, I was adrift On Cezanne's jumble of pastel icebergs, My feet swallowed in shadow. Stasis, not stillness, filled me then. I wasn't awaiting a kiss, Wet in my yellow slicker beside the empty mailbox. I didn't know which way to go in those days. Now I know the answer is Just go. And the landscape'll follow you like a loyal hound Licking bacon grease from your open fingers. The road goes all colors When you tread it. Far as I can squint, and past that. Change grew in me, unnursed, Like a seed of the sun Too hot to touch. Yet I swallowed it whole, sucking my lips, And it sits in my belly today Burning.
Far, far away . . . the steep mountain path, Skinny and tricky, 10,000 feet up. Green lichen inches over boulders and stone bridges; A waterfall stands suspended in mid-air, a bolt of blue silk. The moon waits in a deep pool, glittering. I climb into magnificence. A single crane will arrive. --Shide
Born soaking, man lives in the dust, A bug struggling in a sand bowl. He jumps up, reaching and scrabbling; Falling, his mouth fills with sand. Love comes sudden; a mist, no more. Immortality escapes his fingertips, Hunger and greed flow infinite within him. Months and years shift fast as a river; Wet again, he lies lonely and old. -- Hanshan
Out of the silence I am coming! Like a stone that has learned to cough, A little,-- A little, grey cough Next to the roaring, pouring roughhouse song Of the sea. Yet still, I am coming! The tambourine attached at my hip Shivers to be shaken--to be taken up And touched and whacked on the thigh Until its silver leaves fall like the forest in autumn: Each leaf a tinsel bell: vivid, dying, ecstatic!
There's not enough words to carry What has to be carried. Even the birds, With their sharp mouths full of unbelievable angels, Can't say anything about it. Above me, and above them, The sky. I can't look at it. It's bright as the reflection off a discarded can. A few tendrils of clouds Hone it to ribbons of razory blue. This afternoon, floating on the bronze smoke in my lungs, I lean back against the deep hillbank And let the grass carry me A thousand miles dreaming. A lone red ant Small as a spit-clean cherry pit,--no, smaller,-- Bites my knuckle, fiercely proud. I smile indulgently. And then another language altogether Crawls along my skin, hair by hair, Screaming: Wake up! And, at the same time, Walks like a water spill across a counter. There beneath all that blue blaze of sunlight, on that hillside, It is saying, saying distinctly As an owl's invisible wingbeat: Be still. Still.
The flies have died off for the most part. This time of year they lay uneaten In the small grey tents of their bodies-- Still too solid for the wind To take them with it. This time of year Frost discovers jewels in the unkempt grass. The spider's web blows unrepaired Among the ruby hoops of wild raspberries. All the song of summer is moving south, And I am moving too. The robin's nest tilts half-frozen in the storm drain, Unlamented. When sleep comes, Improbably, on my side in the crunching briars In sunny bare woods growing October cold, When sleep comes then, I go down To meet my shadow. And my shadow, From whatever burning place it lives its dark life And seeks release Comes to me.
Near midnight, I get up from bed Trailing smoky dreams from my pillow As I head to the toilet. Just past the open window, Dull With a darkness I do not understand, Dull As the blood in my slippered feet, Something tangles in the telephone line-- A starling trying to get through perhaps. It struggles to get free While I struggle to ignore it. We both succeed. . . . . My dreams are long gone As if they'd been dead forever. When I finally turn back toward sleep, Fragile laughter Titters in from the windchime.
Afraid of falling through too soon, I do not wait for what Waves back.
August comes, hot and open To our swayback porch, ticking in the afternoon heat. Even the old pasture horse is too sleepy to whinny And abandons apples to the bees Under the solitary tree's silhouette Dark as an iron filing. How can I cry when no one is watching? Who is there left to surrender to In this heat? Tears trail tears Until the only road is loneliness. And memory, that bitch-bastard, Is worse than handcuffs,-- A bright pair of water rings Sloppy on the formica. The little Glittery stars seem trapped there, And entirely beside the point. Outside, The decaying magnolia blossoms Soften and rot like burnt rubber. When the wind holds their flayed hands up, They seem small and useless: Broken jacks No little Jill will ever collect. Suddenly, A wind jimmies the screen door awake. And suddenly, The dirty flowers are everywhere-- In my lap, in my face, in my mouth,-- Crying Let go, let go.
For weeks now, Every night I go to bed As to a grave. My breath, a steam engine all day, Is knocked out of my body. My body winds into the sheets, Sour and heavy. When the harsh dream comes, I am crucified on a kite. Benjamin Franklin's lightning key dangles From my staked ankle. I pass over farms the colors of a mellowing bruise. Fucked-over farmers Lie stone asleep In the dainty, starved arms Of their wives. Their beards grow long into their pillows. Their red, heavy hands Pull at absent tools. Their breath stales. No horse looks up.
We had stopped talking an hour ago. Had stopped listening An hour before that. You know how it goes. With friends, everything is permissible and Everything hurts. We held the winter rail down by Belmar Hours maybe, As the light hail hissed Into the sand. Somehow, we thought, We can take it if the ocean can. The ocean was towering over the shore, Like it sometimes does, brown foam splitting Its pure, curved glass. No gulls cried on the rocks. Water slowly turned The color of evening. Breath chafed our lips, and kept chafing. 2. The dune grass was too sharp to sleep in, we knew. Mice curled featly in their nests, Scenting the airs' raw salts. The parking lot emptied out, Whitening as the dark drifted in. Newspapers, full of yesterday's news, Shuffled restlessly about. I began to feel How mangy everything human is. Everything humans touch, everywhere intrude. Ice slipped Over our eyelashes, and our ears Filled with little hailstones. To be honest, I can't tell if I was alone then Or if I am alone now. A german shepherd circled back to taste a dead cigarette.
Knowing and wanting to know Are two different things. I know what I want to know Is innocence. No matter how many times my boot with the hole Goes through the thin shimmer of prismatic ice Over the mud-tan road-puddle, I want it to be the first time. The first broken bone, the first bruise That blossomed fist-shaped on my face Blue-black to purple to yellow Was innocence. That first day, slides were all surprise. Clouds slide by dizzyingly Lying in Billy Costigan's backyard. The smell of grass and slickness in his sister's pants Leaves me serious and elated. Sudden things rush to my ears, And our tongues click through the ice.
Growing old can be OK, But you can't like it. Like stealing. The grizzled woodchuck behind the house Is so fat, he rolls downhill To his hole. He squeezes in seamlessly Like water through a narrow neck. When I hear my daughters scrape home late, Banging and forgetting the screendoor, My shoulders ache with kept-back laughter. Who knew that serried grey whiskers Looked like snowy pine trees on a round hill On my chin? The calendar fritters its paper numerals away In a time-lapse wind tunnel. There's a sound inside the house of echoes. Echoes move sounds around inside the house. Something strong Pulls a weighty object from my grasp. . . . The discontinuity seems friendly and appropriate, Like the popemobile. Days are lemony sun-moments, Nights harbor hours of whispery self-talk. So much has already happened! So many times already I've rolled down this same hill.
My country is lurching into another slick mistake. As usual, my country is making sex sounds as it does it: Oh, bam! ah.
Last night a poet slept in my living room. His hair was long as a river. His eyes made the corners light up Like a theater usher's probe light. No shadows lived there. It's as if a wild dog has slept here.
If you want to live in a civilization, You have to put the pieces together yourself. Every day. If the steeple leans, don't blame the wind. Hey, getting your hands dirty isn't the only part. Afterward, there's singing.
My friend Dan's a ghost now since Christmas. In this mist There's only a green line of fence Last night's rain did not dissolve. Then the falcon is there, Snowy in the humid morning warmth. He lets his silken shoulders shake. His compact head moves like a ball Rolling in your palm. His face is all severe eye, And one closed hook. When he stares my way, I can't guess what he sees. There is no time in him, Only flight that has not yet Risen to his wingtips. When he goes from the wet fence To the barn's peak, It's like watching an old man shuffle All his belongings in one gunny sack. Looking back in paler air, I have No memory of what we carry with us. No weight keeps me on the ground. There's almost nobody here.
The sky crowds my shoulders As I kick the stubborn tufts of grass in the field. It's too blue, or something. I don't like Living inside an eyeball. It's going to take a very great person To just stand there and love me. Across the grass, A gray squirrel emits its chuk-chuk challenge At a dog, head down on the ash trunk Darkened by night rains. The unmolested grass is long and wet. I consider how the horses Will come stand here all day, And all night And just take it.
Taking the Garden State Parkway north To a dentist appointment in Brooklyn, I notice the cauldron of fogs at Cheesequake Is all colors. The mist makes my glasses cry. I curse stubbornly, Wiping them clean at the filling station On the ratty, untucked hem of my shirt. The ugly gears in my car Wail and whine Like rabbis at a smoky wall. Somehow today, every day is too long to endure. It's only later I remember, falling asleep Under the pink floodlights of my apartment, How this awkward swan, Beating slowly, rose from the marsh Out of the soft fogs, his dawn wings Flashing sharply.
Come closer. Say nothing about this, Especially to the cops. Follow me following the stray dog track Through the close woods behind the undeveloped pastures of Freehold. . . . Nevermind the pine resin getting on your windbreaker, There's more, and worse, ahead. Wait a sec. There, over there. Stop a minute by this overloaded honeysuckle, And shut-up already. Can you hear that? For a moment, we are almost Silent. We wait. The dirt waits. Pearl globes pulse, on-off, through the forest awning. Duck down. Here, through here. Gathering sweetnesses in my bare arms, I make a benediction of taking your hand. There's a secret waterfall near here, Big with rain runoff like a pregnant deer Pattering through summer brambles. This is where all prayers eventually arrive, Flushing with ejaculatory force out of the black tar paper tube And splashing, frisky and sheeny, over jammed slate Until the light, and the light, Is beaten out of it. You say no good will come of this. And nothing does.
Stand on this wing with me. Hold my marred arm Until the scars feel like fingertips. The wind is in our faces so hard My eyes go dry with tears, And your smile runs like paint Behind a propeller. Is this what it feels like to be a bird? Deaf with the engines As the Earth veers off weightless and blue? Alone in our greatness together, We close our eyes.
Selections from an unfinished dialog
Innumerable inchoate feelings all seeking expression
and definition contemporaneously are here encoded for the
reader. But with myself, and with that art which I most
highly value, understanding precedes expression if what
is made is to be art at all. In these poems I was caught
in a curiously Edenic mode. I was surrounded and imbued
with a richness of griefs, and still had not one syllable
to name them. I had all the full feeling a human art could
cry to posses and none of the sensibility through which
to express it. The chaos of my grief had borne its lapidary
apple, but I had yet to eat of it and understand. Cynicism
is the crassest shortcut between a full heart and an empty
mind–empty but well-ordered. It is no coincidence that minimalism
is the reigning contribution of the latter half of the 20th
century to expression’s vocabulary. It is comprehension without
being comprehensive; it comprehends through vital exclusion;
it is a supreme form of denial and, as such, never makes a positive,
uncynical stand, and can never be ‘proven’ wrong. Invulnerable and
vapid, its objects glare in diminished insistence. Ashamedly,
I must say that this twerpy type of cynicism makes its debut in
lines of what follows here as well. Mostly in the toothless
conclusions of the poems there is the oversimplification of a scab,
and not the long-thumbed memory of a scar. Perhaps the elision of
a decade will help to sort my inner chaos into outer order; perhaps
selective forgetting and cowardly crowding-out of old memories with
new heartaches will perform the aesthetic grunt-work that poetry
demands and that my sensibility exhorts. But oh how my heart
cannot wait the decade out! Ruptured, not enraptured, I ululate
before my auditors–more full of sighs than songs.
Gregg G Brown
Nov 2, 2004
There are lots of questionmarks in these lines, as befits my ignorance. A friend of profoundly poetic tenor pointed out to me the other day that I also enjoy employing negative statements that imply or outline a positive poetic feeling. If I were to have written Hamlet, for instance,
To be or not to be, that is the question.
Might have sounded something like this instead:
Not to be or not not to be, is that the question?
In the poems that follow there is much that is doubted, and many an assertion will not come unattended by its qualifier. After all, what king would step forward into such august company as you yourself provide without his page? Good my page, let us go forth like Wenceslas and provide for our poor and hungry souls the meat and wine of poetry, cibum et vinum. Notwithstanding all the misfires and queries contained in here, I know with severe certainty, as if gripped by a divine hand of lightning, that the feeling is true.
I will not wait for some un-looked-for good to come, but will make my present its own sufficing memory.
Gregg G Brown
Jan 1, 2005
for Marie
She walked with me some while beside the wood, Knowing only what we neither understood: The way was dark; the path confused, but good. What'd tumbled down to make the walking trouble Came, at least, from above to have us stumble; At least, though lost, we were paired and doubled. All about us moved what we took as gloom, A dark in darkness beyond the dark of rooms --Unsure if ourselves or wood had bade it come. She sang in fallen night, the moon standing by, Sang of something farther on, past sky And night, past unanswered owl and me. Something settled round her then, some shine; A startlement in branches brought a shadow down; She was not the world's; nor was she mine.The Return
Pale and leery, alone in bed, Alone in bed, pale and leery, Unawake and lively-weary, Selfless as coming slumber numb, My speaking self a word of wind Sighing simply "Nevermind" Til I one nothing do become, Selfless, single, pale and weary. The slow lightning of moonrise, The cloudscape depths of pearl, Consecrate my mood and room, Entomb me like a knight-at-arms, Cross-handed, on his final pallet carved: My feet in pale armor sheathed, setting forth To no Jerusalem. Dead men wail In the woeful wind that pushes All aside from the frowning moon. The moon in bone-blank vision nearing, Cold and haughty, a dead man's face, Through the pulled-back curtain shines Pale and weary and alone. The quiet casement looking in Unquiet undream apprehends, Forlorn beyond the memory of friends: Here my human heart in dread Lingers loath on what had been said. How softly sounds the shell of sleep Calling our visions to its verge That had not otherwise been so deep; How softly sounds the shell of sleep! Traffic of splashes, remote yet near, Small edges blent to one static shush As even now the boat draws clear.... Softly, softly, Windemere. When our causes, obscure as eddies, At last had crested to their crisis, I failed the fathoming! My love I let recede when tolled the tide, An unwinning and a winless game, In violentest crash the green reef Cracking, killing. Hush! now the frowning moon's a man, Shadow from wed shadow departing, Nimble-light as moth-wings darting: You come in sorrow into the room, Ghost of exhausted meditations, And at the bed's foot look sadly down, All silvered-over as if in snow. Dear live ghost of my living ghost, Memory sacred, not serene! Self-salving waters of the breast That spill in richness mixed with dust, Sigh your human blessing in the night! Come, tears! Let your salt effluence Replace the bitter pourings of the moon! Here am I in my human minim, Unperspectivized man Too naked now to endure the cold Howsoe'er endued with warmth I once was. Let salt pelt out salt til salt alone Weeps into being our green souls. The nightmare, the scar, is here, here. Like a battery's pile grown large With potential charge-- would but some salt water Soak and connect their shocks! Those memories are high-piled That wait for charitable water To flood from my unfortunate eyes-- Then-- oh what mystery and what light! The shore recedes, and recedes the day, Softly, softly in sweet delay Until all shore is shorelessness And a damping fog is in the eye Turned outward-inward in the mist. And then, what wetness?
Version incorporating Daniel J Weeks’ suggested cuts above.
Longer Version below.The Return
Pale and leery, alone in bed, Alone in bed, pale and leery, Unawake and lively-weary, Selfless as coming slumber numb, My speaking self a word of wind Sighing simply "Nevermind" Til I one nothing do become, Selfless, single, pale and weary. The slow lightning of moonrise, The cloudscape depths of pearl, Consecrate my mood and room. The moon entombs me like a knight-at-arms, Cross-handed, on his final pallet carved: My feet in pale armor sheathed, setting forth To no Jerusalem. Dead men wail In the woeful wind that pushes All aside from the frowning moon. The moon in bone-blank vision nearing, Cold and haughty, a dead man's face, Through the pulled-back curtain shines Pale and weary and alone. The quiet casement looking in Unquiet undream apprehends, Forlorn beyond the memory of friends: Here my human heart in dread Lingers loath on what had been said. Oh! if only I then had known How small my love for you has been! And now this nightmare of regret Feeds my lifeblood to the moon. My sheeted semblance, silver-washed, In blood or moonlight palely caught Lies strict within my coffin-cot, Strictly lies in dead regret. How softly sounds the shell of sleep Calling our visions to its verge That had not otherwise been so deep; How softly sounds the shell of sleep! Traffic of splashes, remote yet near, Small edges blent to one static shush As even now the boat draws clear.... Softly, softly, Windemere. When our causes, obscure as eddies, At last had crested to their crisis, I failed the fathoming! My love I let recede when anger came, An unwinning and a winless game, In violentest crash the green reef Cracking, killing. Hush! now the frowning moon's a man, Shadow from wed shadow departing, Nimble-light as moth-wings darting: You come in sorrow into the room, Ghost of exhausted meditations, And at the bed's foot look sadly down, All silvered-over as if in snow. Dear live ghost of my living ghost, Memory sacred, not serene! Now I alone endure the contumely cold And taste recriminating bitterness; Remorse, regret; words unshared though said, Unphilosophic fiends! Here am I in my human minim Unperspectivized man Too naked now to endure the cold Howsoe'er endued with warmth I once was. Pale and leery, alone in bed, Alone in bed, pale and leery, Unawake and lively-weary, Selfless as coming slumber numb, My speaking self a word of wind Sighing simply "Nevermind" Til I one nothing do become, Selfless, single, pale and weary. Oh! that I had some moon-wroth tears To say in silence what I fear And feel! Had I inner rain enough I never would have fallen from us But ever-buoyant as our hopes Would have known my own love enough! Self-salving waters of the breast That spill in richness mixed with dust, Sigh your human blessing in the night! Come, tears! Let your salt effluence Replace the bitter pourings of the moon! Let salt pelt out salt til salt alone Weeps into being our green souls. The nightmare, the scar, is here, here, That I had pushed all day away As a child will forget his own Minor injustices at play. Forget but not forgive! Myself Self-damned, and now no tears will flow. Like a battery's pile grown large With potential charge-- would but some salt water Soak and connect their shocks! Those memories are high-piled That wait for charitable water To flood from my unfortunate eyes-- Then-- oh what mystery and what light! The shore recedes, and recedes the day, Softly, softly in sweet delay Until all shore is shorelessness And a damping fog is in the eye Turned outward-inward in the mist. And then, what wetness?In Amber
- i sing of him whose heart had hung
- i craned from pole to pole, with pale
- is it a death to know you gone
- but, yet, i’ve reconciled such loss
- i found little upon my mount
- when i am of my little life
- to rob a grave not yet stuffed
- hope that thrives in everything alive
- what resolution will recompense
- how many hours had snow blown
- an ache beneath the pain of years
- told i would not come to be beloved
- when the briar brave entwines my grave
- the book is closed and sleep has come
- forgotten friend! forgot beyond
- when the windowpane fills with light
- voiceless the vision vanishes
- in my heart, a false fable starts
- if some grave power left us here
- though parted by pernicious fate
- electra longs for her lone ideal
- i looked at life through stainless panes
- echoes of some diviner love
- can friendship live when friend has left
- then politics spilt its dirty milk
- enemies made by mild reproach
- life’s a marble in a bowl
- was it for those echoes alone
- you have moved in love to others
I sing of him whose heart had hung...
I sing of him whose heart had hung Above all struggle or wonder Of our broken woes. Far oh far Beyond our little lays he'd sung. Yet here's no death, no reason, and No loss. No loss? No loss but less Of friendship than I'd lief confess, A faded castle, fallen sand Built up upon imperfect hope Toward another sky. Lost, the dream; Lost the meaning once deemed more firm, The promise more than swami's rope. We'd had heaven's ascent held fast: What we'd reared in reckless dawn As though God's own brave secret shown, Looms a gibbet now dawn is past And sunless exile welcomes me.I craned from pole to pole, with pale Hurrying ear I sought the sound Of a friendship I had unfound, Lost in the maelstrom, in the gale. A song no longer sung, but known Down in where the singing starts, soft As an infant's finger held aloft To hold where the wild wind had blown. Where my limb was cut there grew A pain; where my shadow'd followed soft No image of myself now crossed. What I was was lost, was through. No zone of knowledge could commend Discovery of how I'd begun Nor tell me if I'd lost or won In this struggle without end. Now I knew I was lost; lost. Uncentered in the storm that blew Through all that was of me, all through. Lost is what I was-- at last, at last.
. . .
Is it a death to know you gone, Separation's wail at the verge Where tide on tide may pile and merge While I sigh unsolaced, alone? It is death, or death's live semblance To trade high love for sorrow's hole, To peer in pits for the absent soul, Braver laughter, a brother's glance. Yet others before have I lost, Their unsyllabled all made death's, Pilfered lives that in coffins rest, Nor can I reckon up the cost.
And, yet, I've reconciled such loss, Made grief my dish and my dessert, And lived to love again and cry hurt, Heedless of my passive loss. The hearse triumphal in the rain And heaven all one weltered bruise That threatens tears, nor offers dews, Takes hope from throats, gives hymns of pain. The author's pen cannot note the deed That seared the author into ash; He only sings how feels the lash: The sting, the wet, the heat, the need.
I found little upon my mount That mattered, neither goods nor goal; Sharp hurt came sharp upon my soul: A little arrow; it little meant. My eyes centered where they were sent, Zeroed on that nothing 'All.' Some nadir in the sphere, some pall Kept light from my looking yet. I was the shadow cast down at noon, Crushed by the heel that casts it; Weary of my little life unlit, The dark I knew knew I was no one. When a friend departs the sunny vale, When a cloud rolls over the hill, When water past pebbles ribs and spills, When sun beyond one sunset sails, Whose grief shall give that going song? Whose voice vaunt such diminishment? Whose richness re-give what had been lent? Whose keen increase such goodness gone?
When I am of my little life Bereft, and my soul in plumes Of darkness goes, as through a catacomb, None I leave behind in life Shall weep as I have wept. For I have known my second soul, A far braver, brighter soul, That looked within me, turned, and left.
To rob a grave not yet stuffed With friendship, only full of woe For one no longer friend or foe Or anything, though breath still puffs,-- And somewhere past horizons dim He lives on like a mute reproach In caustic quiet, silently loath To burst with bounty I need from him. Unanswering wall, unhuman hate --Or so I paint him, as I must, Who have no knowing from old trust, As though Christ transfigured my Greek fate. I stand before the empty hole I lay myself within the dirt I say a prayer for my hurt To maggots, and my breath is stale. If I were all of misery made And could confound my final hour With a tear, then no more power Would he have than a shade. Instead there's lodged the sovereign sting Of hope betrayed, hope that will not Die, though hope's death and gory rot Would stop the hole of my being.
Hope that thrives in everything alive Susceptible to inward gusts And outward groans and manly 'musts,' Hope that moves what cannot move or strive Keeps crimsons bright around my wound, That will not heal or cleave to kill; Damnation is: I was born to feel. Hope bathes these horrors with new words. Still, if he comes, even to curse The whole acquaintanceship of our days, No growling hour's pinched of praise Save when absence is our discourse. Come again, thou ravaging tide Who had a slope of easy friendship, A lope like a gull, a lazy hip, Till you rolled away and tore my side.
What resolution will recompense His companions for the pang Of his departure? What chimed gong Will make his going make new sense? How after harrowed grief resolve To live whole again? Does the leaf Shorn from the trunk that gave belief Ever re-ascend to former love? Here's no parable to mumble; We make our dying sounds above The grave that garners all our love: The open door unable To accommodate return. Let us gather where we are blown; Let us hold what we do not own But a moment, and make return.
How many hours had snow blown In at the unattended window, Snowing in to no more be snow, To flood the floor like thoughts none own? An echo came beyond the fall Of welcome foot or voice gone now; I followed soft to the night lawn --The street was empty, and the long hall.
An ache beneath the pain of years Brings pang and poignancy to the fore; What I feel was felt before Dear earth brought forth her sufferers. As when a dove shakes off the rain Whisking silver mists to haloes Suspended in cool fogs of woe, Thus softly I stand in shine and pain.
Told I would not come to be beloved I cried an unrecovered tear; Told 'death' was all I had to fear, I wept; wept to be so beloved. To've been in wind and run in sun, To've slept in shadelight til all's one, Doubling frolic with unbecome, Is love enough when day is done. If all into oblivion The body goes, trailing gestures Of absent soul in redder rose, I'm content to have once begun. Nothing did as I did expect. No quiet council of surmise Left me other than most unwise; A life grown rich in retrospect.
When the briar brave entwines my grave, And heart, kept cold, is fallow laid Beneath the green and twisted braid What rose will come to show me saved? What rose from all the horrored heart Will fly harried from the dour hole? What emblem of the buried soul Will rise to tell my harrowed part? If twixt rounds of panting fight or dance All is 'catch our breaths' to kill again And love is all love unspoken We're but two tigers in a trance Who pace and leer and wait to leap Who've lungs for roar yet none for love; Who toy and tear the departing dove And too late let our anger sleep.
The book is closed and sleep has come To lie beside me as I lay Thoughtless at the end of thoughtless day, A blessing of oblivion. I dropped the book that had told me: read, That had made a wonted offer As if neither knew the better: Knowledge is sorrow, living or dead. The mind too worn by day's report, The day too wronged by mind's own war, Apprehensions made real by fears That had lain still in latent thought Now wild as waking woes Ascend to startle sleep itself And mold from nothing nightmare's self; With silent step they come by ones: Wind at the casement inks with creaks What I had kept in lightest sketch, Through all the day of 'do' and 'fetch'-- Wind at the casement makes bold and bleak. Pale and leery, alone in bed; Alone in bed, pale and leery, Unawake and lively-weary, I hear a tune that tums with dread. The untended hurt, pushed away By strong strife of mind all day Tweaks and twinges as I lay; A small voice says what it has to say.
Forgotten friend! forgot beyond The soul of solace in the cold, Friend whose tale is yet untold Resurrect! and before me stand. Let memory chalice the ghost Spilled to rumors beyond recall; He lives yet, he did not fall, Yet his bodying has no host. What is this absent creature then Who lives to others, shares their views Of russet sunsets, yet eschews The gravid face of his old friend? Damned by discord, torn in twain, Yet present to the fervid pitch Of inner sense, a lively nothing which Makes all mem'ry the mem'ry of pain. Reveal! From shadow, gloom and gloam Stand forth! and be again alive; Here, where your memory still thrives, Your dear self has yet a home.
When the windowpane fills with light Sepulchral as a ghastly sail Full of dead wind that will not fail Despite the dark, despite the night, And skin and breath half swell with sweat-- Though in itself that has not been My own experience of sin-- Some knot inside the soul relents.... There in the insistent mist A burning mast in a gull-grey shroud Churns water and divides the cloud And rides the tide as I did insist. Be you friend or be you fear, Palely limber in the halflight, Almost fiction in false midnight, Stand pale beside my bed, be near. What you have to say, I would hear Who, rash and rough in life before, Sent from out this very door Your solider emissary. Wait, ghost, do not fade or fail! What you speak I will not unsay But hold in holy memory; I would hear, would feel, your tale.
Voiceless the vision vanishes, An untenanted guest again Far gone along the moonlit plain, Sourceless as our dearest wishes. I stand untongued beneath the blank,-- At the balustrade, I reach for dark, See nothing there to hand me back The loss of hope that's left me blank. Piteous moon, shed tearlike light On those who live below the clouds, On us who circle in our shrouds, Though no thing's worth its being bright. Better still that grief... grief has come And tears the hair and scrapes the eye, Better we ourselves should wish to die Than no feeling at all should come.
In my heart, a false fable starts That 'tween two friends, so fair, so fast, No rill of envy could ever pass, No trickle winter could make crack. Our summer was a million days That on two shared pulses shone; What was thought in the heart of one The other's tongue found fit to praise. Autumn's harvests had us chasing feasts In distant dales neither knew; The same sun and moon we saw Overlooked our separate trysts. December should have seen us come Sharing triumphs round the table Laughter-laden as a fable, Strong in joy to a single home. Too-far our wayfaring had swum, Crests and valleys and the green roar Held us apart forevermore, Derelict, adrift, who had clung. Iron frost the great granite breaks, Too-cold sap splits the broadest tree In solemn singularity; Alone falls the proudest rock.
If some grave power left us here, Solitary seekers in the night, Lonely voyeurs of the light, Shall we blaspheme what strength appears? Far better, broader, more intense To see the sign of good in things; Amid haphazard waywardings, Love what loveliness may commence. If ever a bright butterfly Has brought you unsuspected joy Neath the canopy dark destroys, Bless its shimmer and bless that sky. If ever before brown defeat Some glower gives some hint of glow, Or all you are's not all you know, Listen still to that heart, that beat. If ever when wind's against us Snarling sails that'd happily snapped You feel amidst the clip and clap One soft kiss blow, then don't resist. If higher than twin towers' crowns Your hopes have ever heralded Only to be trapped back and barred From achievement and from renown, Listen still to what hope had heard, Lift aloft for the light you saw In premonition of your fall; Seek heaven though it be in shards. More lies in our looking there With lovely eyes, tho' full of cares, With hearts that have not ceased to share, More of consequence than despair.
Though parted by pernicious fate And left no solace when you left, By your absence of solace bereft, Yet still I loiter by the gate, Looping hopes on echoes cool and slow Of your departure seasons past; When you went, you went at last By going where you had to go. Still I beside the gate am left, Still I lean and lick the dust; Still I wait, as still I must Until some change unpains my breast. The agile curfews of the night That wipe away the palest day And light's burning words lightly unsay Cannot cross out what you left bright. The moon that trod old empires down Or saw two loves woo, two loves despair Casts no changeful spell on my care That carves the ages on my brow.
Electra longs for her lone ideal Impatient with passion on her stoop, Unarmed before the vicious troop,-- Cries from poor girl's woe for her weal. Antigone, tender to her core, Going round and round in grief Mills herself but sad relief: To kill the state with grief too pure. What value vaunts from remorse, or worse? Justice, with adamantine edge Turns crystal from a shaken tear Solidified from sighs, or worse. In a breast gone god-abandoned What good does grief reveal? What idol does a tear revere? I have not earned what rosaries condone. Never another lie to 'get along,' To manipulate the powerless, To add confusion to their duress; Never deception from the strong, Never after venial convenience to strive But all must be benign transparency And facts alone the obduracy. I resolve to struggle and to live With difficult fact and effortful truth.
I looked at life through stainless panes. My friend and I then grew rife And in clumsy love had strife: Life's transparency in the littered lane Lay sharded. Never again Would sky suspend its peerless blue As though some heaven loved we two, For we two loved without sin. Each sweet self-enmansioned soul Came to battle in dire array But would not fight, yet would not stay --And each departed for obscurer goals. What finer, more enlightened path Might Life lend our wandering ways Than sheltered friendship as a stay Against galled wounds that make us wroth? What against gauche chance may make amends? What but friendship has the power To wipe the brow in feverous hour-- What else may ease us ere the end? Nothing else has friendship's function Nor can solace the absent pain Of friendship gone, not come again, Friendship faded to a fiction.
Echoes of some diviner love Reverberate a quartered heart Confusing fonted loves with lower wants, Donning longing robes of doves. There is something then in something gone, A talisman to shake again The index of eternal pain; A hole in every good thought won. The grief, the grief is fresh to me As yestereve when enduing mist All the upswayed landscape kissed, Showing in shining deep tears unseen.
Can friendship live when friend has left, When keel and sail are rudely stripped, A smiling skull without the lips, Love of its softness unpossessed? What new faces shall my face seek That found these fellow faces false? What mirror mimics faces lost? What redemption beyond such breaks? Does that departed friend, unseen, Unknown and homeless who's home's in me, Stop his step and think what we Once were, on all that once had been?
Then politics spilt its dirty milk And still its deadly little tread Marches across my wounded head, Itching the sutures though of silk. As though one caustic loss, relentless In its riptide on my pride Were not hurt enough, my side Was laved in vinegar and piss. The hand that'd helped now held my throat As though to show me how naive One ever was to believe In friendship's blotting antidote. So he fingered his own quaint cause Until his heats gave fervid birth To a dogmatic cross unearthed, A cross whose crosshairs sought my source.
Enemies made by mild reproach Never twice discover love (Like God, gone missing from above) Since the sin itself was mild enough. So I stare and swear in lonely rooms Filibustering dust bunnies, Each summation a swift surmise, Readjusting juries in the gloom. There is no answering passion In fractious pastimes of the mind Twirling and untwirling twine While sown unseen grow meaning's lesions. I am a shadow in a weft Of darks, a nullity who his own Nullity long long has known, And now no nothing here is left.
Life's a marble in a bowl: All agony but a rolling chance, The bullfight no longer a dance Of misdirection toward a goal. Life's a story with no moral; Condensation's circles yet No ring of meaning can beget. Race to rail against the choral Loves hossannaed by the mass Of men, who see their circle Flout timid time and weary wrinkle, Whose dreams go buried by the grass. Know that your own nothingness A nothingness stays, a felt Backdrop or dead pelt Stroked by hands half calluses. There's no lesson to be learned From all the tarnished marvel Of our mayhem, still the larval Stage of chaos for we damned. Impotent in the pouring wrack Of disaster's icy hail Stripping deep with red-hot flails Splintered skin that'd been my back. I stand in draining anger, Half-aghast to understand Myself am likewise but a man Dreaming Fate is not a stranger.
Was it for those echoes alone That your proud shout came and went, That my near airs with your name were rent? Was purpose pipping in the bone Ere clear breakage lamed the story, Castling attacks to faulty defense,-- Recovery all the recompense For our having augured glory? Unsmiling in slings and crutches, Fools blown brown by windy time Who'd been sheer kings of summertime Grimacing at lightest touches. Solemn cortège of cannons mum Roll evermore in breakless line: Wavy Life a funereal sine Unending, and airless, and come. Tacit disaster's stripped to trim belief, Memory turned to slave to serve The forward unknowns of our curve; This is given with what gives grief.
You have moved in love to others, To new unnull pursuits you go In restless faith those whiter flows Follow you to fuller waters. My faith's poorer, my grasp infirm Upon the tugging rudder That guides me to my uttermost; I fear I sail far more in harm Than in health. Where is your dear hand Steady on the trembling tiller?-- Steering clear to vaster endeavors Beyond horizons, past sight of land. Where I go's no more than where I am, Nor faith nor hope proffer roses To blank the claims of fear's supposes, Or dare me greater be than man. May bride and child and wealth be yours And all the winnings dreams suggest,-- If I were but an infrequent guest I'd deem myself the treasurer.
The Departed Friend
Even now the wrestling winter wind Struggles in the window's flaw And the charity of the sun is given over To night's empty menace. My fingers In sympathy with the very ice Whiten and grow longer atop my coverings, Hoisting the sheet simply as a wave. Wind at the casement inks with creaks What I had kept in lightest sketch, Rounding to flesh with roars and moans What I had kept in a whispering skull, Dawn to dusk inside my soul, Kept locked below some workaday hum Whose once-amusing tune now tums in dread. How can the body breathe when no hope gusts through, Panicking the shutters to the outward sky? So my body and my bed lay together stacked, Mortised mates: the cadaver and mortician's table. So I lay at the nadir-bottom of my thoughts That had been high bearers-up before,-- Frothy self-involving silvered clouds Radiant as watered stones in moonshine; Now down in the sultry sinkhole bottom Of a stirless pool no unburdening breeze will bless, Over-crowed by moss-black cypress trees Dripping no redemption from their dank, So I lay, as now I lie in mental projection: In the reeking warp and bursting of my coffin-box. Here, in the mire, my meaning is near My hidden wish insists I miss him, Cause and consoler of my misery! A foulish pool of moonlight at my feet Shifts and shapes into his living shadow, A sad long form too full of thought; I stare into the abyss that I have brought. I cannot speak, weak ghost, frail light Overmastering me! All my mind's But memory of our untold hopes! Shape of my friend who shaped me so! Dear ghost, do not go, but let me rehearse Our storied history to your toneless face; Face whiter than the day gone blind. Many hours had we trod the wood, near twins, In each other's sidewise countenance Discerning ourselves! After a little onward way At a fenny brook stopped up we stopped Restoring its foot-light laughter to the wood That under many an autumn's confusion of leaves Had clotted to brown silence. Heave Of hands as wet as their work, as cold unfrozen As vapored breath! At the stoppage's heart In the very bolus of the blockage's glut A dead raven wormed, fat with drowned maggots Eating the mealy flesh that could no longer Hold the wetted velvet of its feathers together. Its dead eye was as sunken as the pit Where we buried it. An office of farewell Performed perforce in mutual accord As like our old friendship together then As unlike our alien parting now, Never vetted in the abstraction of a vow. Vengeance and ire are exiles to this mood That even in the hurricano's house Leave their livid imprints. Oh ghost Called up from the waterspout Of tears unwept and inly kept Deliver now no elegy of division That sunders life from life And vanquishes the vivid phonemes of our dreams! O newly denuded world Bereft of friendship and benefit Shorn of scorn and sorrow both That have no object on which to act! No syllable will tell The night hauntings your each look has cast Deep into the telling silence of my soul. My soul! And what is that? A hollow word More echoed out by poets than looked into. But when at nighttime and for all the night I search the remorseful strains of memory To find some babble that will heal Beside the note "Forget"-- that and that alone I say is soul-- the willful welding Of has been and is. If I could recall it all Neither in melancholy nor high-hearted joy And leave not one instant back to rot I'd count myself a thing beyond a day. How often has the robin's song come to this sill And I noted it not? From that oblivion alone I begin. Her redbreast puffed with expectation And with mirth, and song trilled out as water Spilled serially over the serried rocks. Flow back up the stone along thou's song! Let memory's viol play you as a tune Worn true with loving, Made soft-edged by your worth, our youth. Communal comminglings of sun and moon If each were source and both reflectors. To've shared what we have given! Day gathers day in its trooping hoop And rolls on, agile and endless. Although the spontaneous waterfall May loiter at its foaming foot Distilling a stillness in the tumult's depth-- Even so the swelling pool will whelm the lip In moon as in noon, seeping the pristine banks In affectionate and curious insistence. So what we are flows to what We must come to be, until our ruddy drops Beset the universal ocean, whelmed To give, and give all, and end all giving. What cares the bee for the blossom's nuzzle? What cares she or knows she how her work In honey laid shall see a spring That she herself shall never know? Still the flower receives and the bee busily does Whatever whiteness the one or buzz the other, Mutually do they do, and mutually know not. And yet, were they to know, to think, to care What pause would press between the passions Of their touch? What bee might meditate Alone and unpollinated on some barer branch? What flower shut to dawn its streaked pinks So warmly showed to the showering rays before? The mind remembers each tweet each note And each soberer lowing of tuba or bassoon No matter how distant the conductor's commencing click May seem to present ears and hearers. All's memorial from the moment of its making To its last, dashing regretful recall. No matter how blithely frivolous we live Or howsoe'er delicate or fleet or half-materialized, How subtle-soft, how hard to catch or kiss, How almost nothing as a faded impulse unexplored-- Each unknowing moment of our fluttering is In amber laid. Now in my maturer melancholy I long for the native joyance of my youth: A sodden blossom beaten by the rain, I sprang to the sun at its first clearing, The skyey vault light-washed as a robin's egg, I, who now am a rude sturdy twig froze round As a hoop. Too many winters Has my heaven-intending form laid low, Frozen with distorted weight to whatever Brambles crawled along the ministering dirt. Physician! How can I find the cure I knew so well when I did not know I knew it! Now within me still I sleep, A hibernate creature gone to moody caves,-- And cave and creature both wander lost within me! I wander lost as Oedipus over earth, heartsore When his crimes had cracked him to his core. Wavy lengths of my hair sweat matted To my forehead, heavy with road-dust; Hair this wild year had left unshorn, Numberless as the fruitless thoughts That have pursued me-- my own phantom-- As when the mirror presses darkness on my eyes. Stars of eve, once the ready angels Of my bedtime prayers, twinkling on my hopes In looking wonder from the firmament, Now cast chilly chastisements on my course And make each way onward a mirror fouled By the ignorant chance that moved me hence. Onward naught and rearward naught And oblivion within! In such state am I caught. I am christened "Lost." My want of self Haunted memory returned re-cleared to me, As when in a clearest pool silver-laden I saw what the world saw was me. And when some minor upset rolls the pool And puts the silver salver into sine That self may still be seen in highlights and lows Distorted but unbroken as it goes Even unto the edges in an ermine flash. Be it a leaf that loures upon the plane Done with autumnal ripening Or narcissistic lock let down From avid, too avid, self-scrutiny The result is still This unstillness and its bends. I stare at the soft frost edges of the room, A moody amanuensis to the moon Until elegant as a weeping pine My soul steps from its sleeping source And all the air is fraught with mist. This image past of spirited play Wavers in a mirror rude: Slipshod appraisal of apprentice days When love for love's sake came half-amazed And gazed the neighboring fence half-along Staring daisies into blotched sun-spots And not the bright warm things they were Themselves alone. A demarcation has occurred-- one unloves another. A "cruel neglect and contemptuous silence ever since." How can I respond to this new, denuded world? Oh! Full many times I myself have seen The glory's crown that old Coleridge taught-- Self-enhancing shadow of a thought-- When round my fallen shadow's head A rainbow glory glowed in the snow As I trudged with my sled up the steep To the tipped top of the wintry hill Ready to plunge again like thunder down Into the gulf from which I'd come. Convoys to their various destinies post Finding their ways as they make them Amid that startlement of the waves-- And to find themselves have lost the fleet That sent them seaward into mists, Sharpest demarcation of their long self-pursuit. Now with more constant heart and firm resolve My face may bear what winds upbraid me-- Or is this but a lie I level at my will.... The ghost is vanished! The departed friend Filtered out the window without a syllable; I lift myself and follow to the frame. Is there some silver-tinged disturbance Adding its fretted lattice to the leaves Of the windy maples all about? I cannot speak so well as shout And fear my voice will only tell Dead and final as a parting bell. To the porch then-under stippled skies I feel the clear vigor of the cold Where a thousand stars like errless watchers Pin me to my outpost. There, there Hope deludes me with a moment's wish; It was perhaps some serried sound Of household dog turning round To return to his hunter's sleep in peace. But still some welling white is there Besides the moon's. I see it blur The boldened boundary of the field Crowded with unfound flowers gone to weed. Some shape is there--oh surely there-- Not all I know of one is departed yet Still some mere shred lingers to be loved And take of me forgiveness in the night. Block all jealousies--all wrongs--all time Beside the moment we wear now, A gown new and mutable to our mutual need. --One moment's presence is all I ask! "Come! Turn your back to me no more, come back!" I cry and the cry is like a thundercrack Inside my grieving skull. No more turn away! This night shall be as first light and life Come from the most high into humanity-- Only let it touch what most remains Of what we are this instant. The silver swells At the field's end, growing larger as my Charging heart! Ah yes! Companion prime Of hope and heart-high hero of my contemplation Turn to return! But wait! Tis gone, tis fled All that was of brimming light has burst And the iron balustrade cuts into my striking thighs And the alien field lays darkened and undewed. This single tear has dribbled down my face. One friend one loss one parting! Not if all the world were mirror for our woes Could ten thousand lines tell the tale: How heart is rent and soul must wail, How in conversation with a blank There is no love to conquer all our labors; Amelioration is stemmed, and dead's the tide That had flooded all our flotsam and our hopes. No expectation had been too heavy to be borne Along the continual susurrations of such a main. Dawn herself, and her twin, dusk, Came and went well-colored by the clarity and depth; The clouds that cooled and shadowed us Were themselves sustained By the liquid intercessions of watery faith. The question of a quisling, of love Lavished on a lesser thing, the friend departed Who had been Palestine, home returned And companion of adventure in a world of deeds, This artificial death and detriment Of two who had been connected At their very source! The isolated echo made moody and alone --Gone the solidarity of arms embraced Twins insistent as the signal sun To burn our beings brightly and as one. Now by sympathetic charm of grief All friendship comes to this belief: That those who now do love me well Shall leave me soon in abandoned hell; Like a rosary I keep these words Beside me, counted close, and counted Over again in each hour that I mourn. Vain words that rehearse this rose That goes away the way the sunset goes.Let us say no more
Let us say no more of affections at our door that flood and flit between heart and head between silence manifest and the unsaid, for those departed who live undead. Let us cry voiceless forever more who know no language can heal our injured cause whose unsuccess ungladly gives us pause, whose defeat's written out in eternal law. Let us, singing, through each cherished Christmas soar clear of friends and family, like a star that sees its freezing brothers from afar clinging to the deadened stems they mar. Let us in houseless nothingness implore no false civilities from our living loves who what they could of giving gravely gave and gave no more.
“When I was a child, I spake as a child….”
Gregg G Brown
Copyright © 1986
It was in singing that he first Knew that worsening was not worst. His father's large disappointed face Tickled him inarticulate with terror Until he forged, Below sharp time, Monster suns of images. Invented heaven has a charm: litter Of apostles, magenta trees that dissolve As vapor, where golden sparrows sing And do not sink. He thought One wanted seeming, An altered Strangled attitude of bird. A harsh man's countenance wavered In ocean distortions of the moon. The kneeling son felt a burning prayer At his back, and ran, and ran In stark fright On broken bones Beneath a salt-dead tree.
"What things real are there but imponderable thoughts?" ---Ahab There was Tenor in his party grave, sharing All of the same old sick jokes with himself. 1 He says, "What is there besides imagining? These four occasional walls will not bring Spring or sorrow to any unsuffering thing. It is the will that wanes, in summer dark, After clogged stars have scraped the sky and left A newer dark for some cold singer's questioning. Rusted apples gathered, honey melons dusky gold, Cherries rosing in the tinted sun, what was invented If not these things? Shall my hand remain Unfloured by its own effort? A pointed oar Plunges and plunges in a white war and remains An oar. The mind is not so meager; it becomes, Once its rent raiment roars, in polychromes Above chalk waters that it held and gave, That of which it sang and did not hear, because Too busy singing in undivided, tensile mystery." 2 If. on the wings of sparrows, men's feet shall flesh Who shall fly, in contrapuntal destiny, In waltz time, alone, beneath The unceasing testament of the waves? Tenor Semblance in his water-wings, bulbing At his back, held his breath and dived, at 4, Into the tossing terror of a tame sea. Once caught among the coral's shadowing, he saw The flash and error of dying fish in that dim maze. Their antlered looks and opalescent eyes Placed a holy horror in his slalom breast Racing, among more mobile lights, out of death's Abrupt shade. He knew of earth by this buried paradise. He told his parents of the sharking waves and sea. Alone, His executed gestures in scarred sunset seemed The switch-back hesitancy of leaves. 3 It was his mother's going, her poignant death, Like still water, that made him hear Curlicues of God's named trumpet, world. A French horn paddles in his ear; Finches mocked the minister at her wake, his frown Emitted solo labyrinths, corona icicles of sound. Tenor Semblance, leaving, knew his feet were tambourines, clashing in the grass. And when he whispered, it was with sorrow That he could not sing himself a barrow. In her twinking time upon this mortal orb, In laundered air, tender sequences Of love and love, flashed from her bright center Like perpetual suns that sang and knew their tune. It was because of her he sought A personal, vocal dew. 4 Semblance swelled in his soft decor. Like an awkward Alice, he used his vital eye To distill a separate scenery in the dwindled grass. Little thunder smoked the mountaintops. Gnats as vultures bulked silence on their prey. But a swung censor, sacred scenting, never lends Its incense to these more airy tendencies. Neither garland of flowers, in a stiff ring, Nor any distincter bloom was worn. Victim in winter, he tried to say The measureless landscape he became: Desolate branches, details of packed snow, Paired tracks of deer, or south-seeking geese Dispassionate as the sky. There comes A crowd of moths, an abrupt lamp flapping In discontinuous circles as he speaks. 5 But should we sacrifice infinite finesse for that Snowblind and last, fatal profundity? Sonless Semblance once, with gagging glands, Turned abrogated Pa; the wincing world Trickled from his groin. He clawed out an eye And dived, lost in a reef, resulting in a sky Made blue, by harshest imagination, by Exclusionary rules. Was it a mincing butcher's Cleaver thumb, his abusement of a One, Chopping up the single digit we pretend? False finesse? The sky was blue; he claimed To be the author, and his grave Was dug in blue clay; bluets brushed the edge. His mineral bones are scavenged by worms that die. Thus we see, beyond cut division or misty ending, Death is daughter to imagination's venting. 6 A man is image and is sound, Imagining sounds; a blare of being Scribbled like a cloud, pinched nothingness Palely resembling himself, in a mirror; Unalterable shadow, that falls As seasons fall, in whitest trumpeting. Thus was Tenor in his dirty grave, In severest evening, uttering A few, essential words. In his halter, Dawdling day undid the staunching fist Of night, and materbirds like mandolins Twanged his very song. They were his toys, who, Hautboy accountant, made of his breast Final register. A second heaven, set Beside the first, is best, when we forget Ourselves in what our wish of death becomes.
A dead cork moon erases, shams The swift subscription pediments of light--- Blanche magician's hand before a card, Eternal current voyager of sight, Endlessly inscribed. You, who section out the broken Window's fragmentary glaze In gold, auroraborealis ruins that shake The scattered genet weedlings here of late, Untranslatable deathcard of all hate, Who full-sail mocks the sun, know I come to dance beneath your fake Hepatitis curve of being, welcome skater Who deals with a slick grace the last Mother-admonishment to poker hands. Lilies launder moonlight in the lot. A moving silhouette will break their dust: Imagination is its own remorse Recalling ancient beauties, one by one, until The reinvented dead ladies emerge From the trapped torrents of a late laboring mind And coo and call and sveltly wend their way To demand in time imagination's final lie: Its death; at last, to make One monumental animate corpse of fate.
1 Dutch decorations groom the hours. The parted dark resumes its essential black, Its pasteboard panache, dressed blues of indifference, A more vital seem. Still the old men dicker In deeper dusk, realer hues, from Below the perch of being in parrot patricides That consume the expert, whistled throatings Of loftier loons, whose red retina shift To scan a level heaven, unplummeted. 2 They were like the colors of these things. Old men of the river rocks, disparaging Old men of the river rocks in pairs. A portion of the evening looked down Among palm fronds and purple sand, and glared A nimbus of new stars that pierced A rarer dark than thought or action formed, Whitely condemning with unalterable blare The blandest barb of neutral fact. 3 The oceans stars were reflected in the men themselves, Their trudging bucket hearts and bleary souls. Chrome, The streaked adjustment of the light, apt intrusion Of subjective singe and burn, shook step by step, until The stars were lost because the total sea was stars. Their stony heads moved in unison, great grey rocks, And tumbled towards the momentous moment of a cliff To invent a waterfall. Their old hearts poured Whiter than before, among dashed rocks that babbled As they poured. 4 But who can carry empty starlight in his purse, Or sew together toes for fins, hands for wings? The ancient bretherns' hearts must fail. They flop as they reflect, endlessly; a soul Must take a darkness from its carbon work, A scattered semblance tinctured of its grain. etched pine swamped in black ink retains The arbitrary suaveness of its growth, carved above The image of twelve men like trees. 5 Wrong boys threw up spectrum dust at sunset. they beat the rocky heads of elders viciously, Like drums, like drums, like drums, in time To the whirred sensation of white wings. Their dewy hands hardened with a thought. Imagining, they made their pockets weighty With caught stones. They leapt, leapt, leapt, Without their blue bodies diminishing. Imagining, They braided their loose fingers into beards. 6 Twelve boys danced in violet night, in a communal Hymn that offered nothing brutal. It was their game. This they knew, their short spaghetti beards and uncut Minds like bangs, in diamond time forever ripening, Took the minor light the unspent stars had saved And poured it on the orchard's hair, and fissured earth Like wine. Their sweet limbs were never heavy In that sleepy paradise. They chant aloud their names: Impatient to insistent hands, moving as they mend. 7 I descant upon a dusky theme Illegibly. What there is is this: The men are trees. The men are rocks. They mar and mark upon each other ceaselessly. There is no outside agent agitating. They invent Themselves. The clock is riveting their veins. They have never seen a star. They fly On fins. And all of this I saw in some Mirror-making, mirror-resembling dream.
Up from the coral came, loud and lost, disguised, The boiled apparition of a one-time man; His pockets bristled brine; an oyster clipped his nose, Pearless. The ocean offered him, we Could not deny the gift, without endangerment; without He had the outer aspect of a tardy sacrifice. The closed committee of our welfare Immediately convened. They sought, they said, The last abolishment of will for justice's sake. The man hobbled off, in winsome chains, To the hanging place, Dragging upright flippers of glinting gold.
Amber uncertainties of day decrease. Cinema skyscrapers,
Ice-strong in August's simmering, by custom,
Strain, vertical ambassadors of a raindown faith,
Unbuttoned pageantry of striptease
In mineral prayers by crystal seconds click
Skyward where the welter minutes works
Oblong in loss, incomplete, reversed
By hasty tobacco minutes of falsity
Puffing from a face; casual, displaced---
Break the blue nerve-strings from olive eyes,
And amber eyes, that we may see you once unclothed;
O beauty with a mind to terrorize!
O ghost that haunts and leaves the self undone,
An abandoned shoe of spirit amid---
Radiant presentment of headlights, streets
Too seeming-perfect to harbor scars,
Rivers of the face, deep windings
Of the conestoga's strut, Manhattan accolades,
Segregated tenements of hilarity, lets
The lost sea rage alone its winner-take-all
And spaded waves. Those with taper memories, burn
In silent aquatic lives, cinched tendencies
Of gain, condensed and closed
Soliloquies of the inward gaze.
Recall, love, the angled awnings that louvered
In the street and rescind their makeshift wanton
Gathers and their stays that stripe
Jazz consistencies of dreams, locked arms of thought.
And freedom of the broken mind spends night
Like fragment glints of pennies, dimes,
In an uncertain, subway sallow tenement
Linking past and time and sanest beauty immutably.
How many hands have lent their grace and power,
Past strict steerage of the sky, agile abandoners,
To build with conscious thought of staying these
Sandstone monuments of dreams?
O lordly city, living sepulchre! Never unwind
The beaking strangulations of your light,
Clipped and clipped, astute on broken boxes
And bandaged lives.
Twenty hundred thousand move out
In convict kicks, coral syllables of mouths
Uttering lovely convolutions in sharpest salt
that brims some vast veins' vented tension flow.
O river city, sapient of light, there is more
In the level skeletons of your praise
And mazy words than you or I, leaning above
Any silver quay, may guess in any
Sun-silk scattering of days.
II
Music in the mind is water
Spelling white mansions in manacle light
By sloppy oceans, by Atlantic blue.
The boats became a syncopation of the art,
Swift cutters paddling up to start---
Jutting in some over-occasional spray....
Splay, the tragic motorblades that mix
Bones of rubies, your lost and salted eyes, resolute
Of oceans, seamed into one white salt.
Who can take the tiger-chime of arced spray
Away, deep among the dimensionless swoon of day,
As diamond-dusted angle-trees cure a blue?
Loops of light on clear glass circulate endlessly
As the shadow of some unbent beauty
Blends an anchorage with graphite spillage of its heart
In one still spot. Tranquil water takes
The unaltered burn of day and rainbows it abroad:
Exact bright bands of unconquerable split light.
III
She stood in her summer arsonage, complete;
Her arms shoved beauty to the brink.
In the rapt child-sway of her body blessed,
She liked to watch it totter.
Allocate of praise, alone in lividness,
Her Cleopatra charms derange a face
Made numberless, the legion losses
Summer and moonlight conspire to take
In the shrill seconds preceding birth,
Blazing awkward apt adjectives of light,
Explosions of burnt rose, blasphemies of sight:
Her embarrassed breasts consoled a sigh.
With bicycle moods of syllables, wise
Soft sofa ministries of age displayed,---
The scrubbed violation of too many hands
Already resting after
The aching dilation of too many years.
Opinionless as steam in vapor rage
The undiluted, vast minions of grey age
Remain and inculcated the glass world's verdure.
O mirror-girl who swam with me!
Your otter plash alarms, quelled seemings, balms
No untethered slash of wind will solve
With treasured fingers, knives of burnt cellophane,
Remain to dissipate
The slight indignations under fiber lies that
Display and disingenuate
The twenty mobile armistices of face
In alcohol alacrities of soul. You blinked
There, in antechamber emptiness of air,
By a blank slant sea
Shelving its green shoals in coral fashion
Against the petticoat interiors of railroad stations:
The lazy, shoved accoutrements of waiting.
We were everywhere at once, one summer.
Her working woman's apple-soul
Daunts momentously the unworked opinions of stars
---Daunts in a moment's unmaking
The slipped and gradual symmetry of stars.
white velvet siftings of the filter moon
Slept in lonely pages of the leaves;
Sister swelter of the sapphire sun forgot, they became
The downward shaft and symbol of desire.
Chaos is eccentric else, among the green Habiliments of this disease, This earth, this atmosphere We sicken of and breathe. The arrant mind Ticks like a cockvane in a white sky. Blackly circles the tragic thought of death Around an empty farm: the false, shadow-sharp Concern that it invented. Past tipped buckets And abandoned calves, lonely for their mothers, Sick-eyed mermaids maunder in their scales, Electric after A crumpled pail Of the pure, chiaroscuro myth.
Plain poems of experience, with a twist of eloquence
by Gregg Glory
A voice wakes me with its pin Niggling in my ear. I can't quite catch the lapsing sense In the folding moan of words. The moon embalms the ocean. Enhanced stars are blown about the sky. The sea sneaks so close, I can hear Its little million feet. And there, beyond the crinkled cliffs, A splinter of sail. . . .
He thought at first he was Mark Spitz, Slickly triumphant in Speedos, Because the mirror kept its own counsel Between more amenable poses. Then he thought he was the Mutant X, Of a DNA not quite fixed,-- Because his brother used furious crayons In the TV's square glare. And last, he thought his death might be A captain's statue, heroic, unruined, Because the sun was shining blandly All that day.
The optimist without pants Supposes plagues of pantaloons Or, better still, intenser still Imposes strippages like chaps Above, beneath, or somewhere-- Nakeding the trousered things. The best of all possible pants Are numb and naked nothings. The philosopher's frosty fundament Sat fatly enthroned in a world Stripped bare of pants, but not Of their conception, their conceit. It was a world where no pants were And were never spoken of again.
All must come and dance, and dance With my friend, my friend Michele. Michele, Michele, wild, wild Michele who streams along the clay hills Wild as lightning, light as nakedness Or kindness; wild, wild Michele. Kind, kind Michele, who answers The dance's insistence With diffidence, lively, lively With her eyes, wild Michelean eyes So lively and kind, kind, her eyes--- Lamps in a deep place, and a dark. All must come, must dance, with my friend Wild, wild Michele; kind, kind Michele.
"What things real are there but imponderable thoughts?"
~~Ahab
There was Tenor in his party grave, sharing
All of the same old sick jokes with himself.
1
He says, "What is there besides imagining?
These four occasional walls will not bring
Spring or sorrow to any unsuffering thing.
It is the will that wanes, in summer dark,
After clogged stars have scraped the sky and left
A newer dark for some cold singer's questioning.
Rusted apples gathered, honey melons dusky gold,
Cherries rosing in the tinted sun, what was invented
If not these things? Shall my hand remain
Unfloured by its own effort? A pointed oar
Plunges and plunges in a white war and remains
An oar. The mind is not so meager; it becomes,
Once its rent raiment roars, in polychromes
Above chalk waters that it held and gave,
That of which it sang and did not hear, because
Too busy singing in undivided, tensile mystery."
2
If, on the wings of sparrows, men's feet shall flesh
Who shall fly, in contrapuntal destiny,
In waltz time, alone, beneath
The unceasing testament of the waves?
Tenor Semblance in his water-wings, bulbing
At his back, held his breath and dived, at 4,
Into the tossing terror of a tame sea.
Once caught among the coral's shadowing, he saw
The flash and error of dying fish in that dim maze.
Their antlered looks and opalescent eyes
Placed a holy horror in his slalom breast
Racing, among more mobile lights, out of death's
Abrupt shade. He knew of earth by this buried paradise.
He told his parents of the sharking waves and sea. Alone,
His executed gestures in scarred sunset seemed
The switch-back hesitancy of leaves.
3
It was his mother's going, her poignant death,
Like still water, that made him hear
Curlicues of God's named trumpet, world.
A French horn paddles in his ear;
Finches mocked the minister at her wake, his frown
Emitted solo labyrinths, corona icicles of sound.
Tenor Semblance, leaving, knew his feet
Were tambourines, clashing in the grass.
And when he whispered, it was with sorrow
That he could not sing himself a barrow.
In her twinking time upon this mortal orb,
In laundered air, tender sequences
Of love and love, flashed from her bright center
Like perpetual suns that sang and knew their tune.
It was because of her he sought
A personal, vocal dew.
4
Semblance swelled in his soft decor.
Like an awkward Alice, he used his vital eye
To distill a separate scenery in the dwindled grass.
Little thunder smoked the mountaintops.
Gnats as vultures bulked silence on their prey.
But a swung censor, sacred scenting, never lends
Its incense to these more airy tendencies.
Neither garland of flowers, in a stiff ring,
Nor any distincter bloom was worn.
Victim in winter, he tried to say
The measureless landscape he became:
Desolate branches, details of packed snow,
Paired tracks of deer, or south-seeking geese
Dispassionate as the sky. There comes
A crowd of moths, an abrupt lamp flapping
In discontinuous circles as he speaks.
5
But should we sacrifice infinite finesse for that
Snowblind and last, fatal profundity?
Sonless Semblance once, with gagging glands,
Turned abrogated Pa; the wincing world
Trickled from his groin. He clawed out an eye
And dived, lost in a reef, resulting in a sky
Made blue, by harshest imagination, by
Exclusionary rules. Was it a mincing butcher's
Cleaver thumb, his abusement of a One,
Chopping up the single digit we pretend?
False finesse? The sky was blue; he claimed
To be the author, and his grave
Was dug in blue clay; bluets brushed the edge.
His mineral bones are scavenged by worms that die.
Thus we see, beyond cut division or misty ending,
Death is daughter to imagination's venting.
6
A man is image and is sound,
Imagining sounds; a blare of being
Scribbled like a cloud, pinched nothingness
Palely resembling himself, in a mirror;
Unalterable shadow, that falls
As seasons fall, in whitest trumpeting.
Thus was Tenor in his dirty grave,
In severest evening, uttering
A few, essential words. In his halter,
Dawdling day undid the staunching fist
Of night, and materbirds like mandolins
Twanged his very song. They were his toys, who,
Hautboy accountant, made of his breast
Final register. A second heaven, set
Beside the first, is best, when we forget
Ourselves in what our wish of death becomes.
Lie there, my art -- Prospero
1
Ho-ho! From out his party grave, up-popped
The skeletal self that Tenor'd tamed.
Dewy longings drift half-wet, in ziggurats,
Down the dirty sticks of his dry fact,
Lending a silver-inlay to his polar bones.
Desire sniffs for roses through groutless nose-holes
And musty wines slalom a gorgeless gob.
Nothing of the lover, of the brother
Lingers here. I stick four mournful fingers
Through his clackers for a tongue, wagging
Idiot digits in mime Shakespearean.
No Yasunarian voice, Horatio, ensued.
No Ophelian sonnets rained in daisy-chains.
Lipless ivories inferred infernal grins.
Tongueless Tenor Semblance, disinterred,
Master-man and mirror-me, was DEAD! And I?
2
I am no Poet-Frankenstein, evoking souls
From wounded earth. For me, a hole is a hole
Is a hole. Love caressed, love cupped, love cuffed
Suckles living teats, not this bony xylophone.
Still, I loiter here half-longingly and toe
Pale parabolas of a pelvis furred with mold.
I, too, shall one day come undone, un-
Buttoned before the mawkish gawkers in the wood,
Dining on no niceties but dusty praise.
And you, and you. Bluets brush my boots,
Sans author in penless processional.
Tallied Tenor here, pure loss, is less and less,--
A condensate escaped in Gobi air.
What last farewell, or goodbye cry, can I
Cachinnate for such luckless kin?
Feral fate! The day, the hour, is late.
3
Though crass and cursed and cloistered
In a hole, my man of clay, who I made,
Unmade me. Iffy gift! Solitude still knows:
To live our lithest days in sackcloth is a sin.
My vampire mirror blings, bingeing on blanks.
I miss the mischievous elf I myself had minted,
Wry coinage of a brain love-benumbed.
Impresario of puppets, piccolo fish
Waving in a world wigged with sideways seagrass,
I command my scarecrow scalawag, Tenor
(Whom I marched off to death, alas) a last
Resurrection reappearance imagineer.
Coffin-lid, crack! Earth erupt and burp-up
Voodoo me, vanished voice and vair ermine.
Pffft! And see, through misty mazy day,
In his water-wings and goggle-gear. . . .
4
"Irksome apparition! Clavicle and skull
But prank the picked-out polychromes of life
More sullied dull. Pink is less pricked than pinky.
How can twanged canaries out-crow sepulchres?
Muddy mausoleums high-rise our tipping tropes.
No quip out-kids a skeleton's ghastly grin."
So I solemnized in my preacher's best.
But cut-rate Tenor in his rotted tux
Retailed another fable, made gritty
By eternal Time's half-sandy clasp.
"Birds of paradise in their jungle mung
Whistle fluent waltzes more queer than square.
When kisses come twitting 'tween the stars,
Their ache is more than mausoleums are.
The softest-rose of live lips out-quips
Clown-corpse midgets and their brazen cars. The curds
Of life are sacred, but only as we sip."
5
So I sat in puzzlement complete.
Head-hanging, feet-dangling, I weeped. I kicked
Spic hobnails against the grave's gouged walls.
I did not want to hum, or ham, the mournful measure
A mealy mouth had found. Must I have more to say?
To do, to be? Was wishing up to me?
Argent star and pentecostal ghost! It was.
The prolog past was mere evaporate because.
I zipped upon the slipping ice, slouch-hatted,
As I myself alone, floe to floe.
Tenor was my made-up man, my solo ghost;
Of his fragile form, I was holy host.
Vital tailor! Sledding immortality but slips
Us in our heart-stitched skins again.
Thus we see, beyond Death's batty beam,
Is is brighter than the vim of seems.
6
How, in all this claustric Ought, ought I
To utter and confess my consummate
"Ow to Joy"? Life is pain, and fidgets
As it sings. Dr. Formaldehyde in his lab-coat,
Peering in, thumbs an icy stethoscope to quiz
All coughs, all crimes. What Rabelaisian
Parable am I in? What sly reply does this
Inquisitive pin in my inflated thigh
Giggle to confide? None, none.
All my splendid spillages funnel down to One:
"Paradise is simple as the simple dew.
Blond Life, raw, unadorned,
Is apple enough when we feel adored.
--Settle quick the pipping kettle, Kate,
And kiss the kittens twice.-- Unintended
Heaven whistles wettest, when we forget
Ourselves."
How do we know we have arrived? No gate blows open, no trumpet swings wide Giving boogie-oogie oogie-boogie to the countryside. Our horses must feed on grass, or perish. So, too, our souls. Having gone down the long defiles All night, in a night that is not sure of ending, Our souls paw their bellies and howl. Even a ghost craves ghostly sustenance. Have we arrived then, when midnight creaks And starved souls howl at the wolvish moon? Or must we still, in our hunger, kneel and pray? Must a glittering track shiver in the sleepy pines For the last mile shimmied on our knees? Bend at that track, and drink with tragic hands, With hands encased in silver to their wrists. Drink and drink; drink deep, O traveler-- Tomorrow we must find this river again.
There is no foreign land; it is the traveler only that is foreign, and now and again, by a flash of recollection, lights up the contrasts of the earth. -- Robt. Louis Stevenson You are here to kneel where prayer has been valid. -- Little Gidding, Four Quartets, T. S. Eliot "O mind like a river!" -- Scott CarrollI He found her here and there;
With flare, afar; presidentress Of the dew and morning star. She was the river valley where he lived; Her a.m. sheen was more, more real Than dreamy creams his sleep had pearled. From invisible to veriest She shone in vermillioned morning mist On lungs, on eyes, and on the hairy grass. Her liquid shine, napalmed gold, Glossed immensest midnight's diminuendo. No nightmare alligators crawled Prickling plain or blue bayou Flattened from the mountains of a dream To the drear of here and nearer. Dry exegesis of our watery sphere.II Know, Noelle, this nothing that round
Us wends is not the nothing That follows when we descend Into each others' eyes. There We re-meet, there forget The ruddy ruts that shaped our feet. There our eyes are shiny rings Of tambourines, shaking as we sing. In the guttering firelight On the blackened beach, we sing; We sing the shining sea, the river's ring: Just there, just out of reach. "O salt and blood, o half-hewn thing, Propound, propound these nothings that we sing!"III When I wish upon a scrawl of star
Scribbled in my mistress' hair, I in splendid isolation look Into the nook of night as into a book, Where the green slope goes down into green eve To touch the emerald river's reprieve. . . . Then I consider, in my moody dark, The owl's coo, the fox's bark. Dooms of dovish dulcimers Pluck up the cold, the forceful chords Where the river's green thigh still thumps Such human, nocturnal warmth. . . .IV Here by the her of ocean,
She-sea ever-changing Against my fraying lea, feelings Are colors and paint the scene In delicatest pastels and pinks; Rollers ripe with rainbow inks Pivot round my radiant core,-- Oft-clouded, oft-kicked,-- rolling worlds Beyond my words. Let these rays, Resplendent raspberry and rouge And orange and cottony apricot, Colors from my core, my wealth, Add some pinching tincture to your health. And if the colors of my desire To touch cannot infect, do not Condemn my wanting such.V You stepped from the bus-stop
Into the sun; it is a death To know you are gone, are gone. . . . When the ding-dong bell dong-dings Is it your foot upon the stoop? Hi-yii! My imagination slips out The door and up to very heaven Flagrant as any tingling lark Into sunny realms we'd known Hours maybe, hands folded Like wing in wing at rest From frantic flight, and yet In that duel quiescence, what recompense! Silent ecstasies of skies made dense.VI Round and round, the circulating vast
Echoes the cold shadow that it casts. Round round dials the running hands Give chase, though no central sun Commands. Here's no heavenly cove, Perfumed and wreathed, rolling rich And blue beside our inside seas. Is it a death to stand without you On the riverbank, and look? The solitary sun revolves In bare space, tinting each Uplifted face. Is this enough Of love, of grace? What satisfies? Eh! Time, at best, provides An arid paradise.VII Am I a seed of fire or its soot?
Does dust or flame claim me for a root? Worms, lie quiet. Your bellies Give me pause. Digest your outcomes, I would seek a cause. Is imagination Phoenix enough for all this caustic ash? Let sun be stripped of its ocularity And spin, burning blindly Unpinned from beginning or end, Begat or begot In the blind vat of space. Burn, spin, and then, Spin and burn, burn and spin again! Rage, you fiery heavens, rage! Who destroys the Earth but burns a stage.VIII I meditate between the cracks,
And, knowing nothing, proceed to weed, To tidy into squares the things I need: The things, if given, I'd not give back. From my ivory dome upon the ivory hill Jack must tumble and follow Jill Until reality has touched them as they are: Children still, but blessed with scars, With maps that parse them into parts Frankensteinian and sparse.IX It's hard to say just what one feels
Following sunlight that exits the field. What one feels. . . is what. . . one says, So notes propose composed in haze. It is too much-- my page is damp: Wrappers splayed at a tarnished curb. There's no order to tonight's white stars Or to dawn's harassing tassels come up so far. A rhyme is a rhyme, is just what comes Going round and around as one does.X To say despair, despair, despair
Tearing our hair, our hair, our hair Has such a circular air! The eye contracted with weeping Sees only its own bleakening, Whatever the fun, the pleasure Available in an alternate measure Where the gyroscopic beat sways heart, sways Feet that had never felt Another shoe than despair, Its black and blare and shuffled stomp. O heart up-swayed and ladled-- Show shoe, grow hair, to tap, to there, With such a circular air!XI Let us attend these voices in the dark,
Vocal human bruises that leave a mark Even in the deadest night, Deeper empurplings in a voluptuous blank. What can they say? What can we hear? Sit attentive at the splashing pier; Watch stars fall from the enclosing clear. What words come dropping In the failing light? These, too, Are voices; this, too, is night.XII Past the charcoal doorway moon-white leaves
Rattle littery charms on winter's eve. Paper things ourselves blown into speech We can't quite catch what tumbles into reach-- A fidgeting wind whose fit refrain Says what had not been said again. As if words were any more ours Than winds', going their mournful courses, Saying what had not been said again: A fitful wind and a fraught refrain.XIII What one says is never what
One meant; our voice is merely leant. Our source, if source there is sans ostinato, Is the silence where all speech goes. What's done is done dumb at last-- All else is ache above the grave. No verbal sangfroid relieves What the heart keeps bitterly. Timidly the diarist Records the cause that sprained his wrist. Pick sticky words from the alphabet of vomit; All memorial's of no moment.XIV What transmits our pinch of if?
What throws the pale light of words And what catches it? What grinds it Into rote and lets it die, This highest longest note pulled Aloud from the violin of speech? Is there any resurrection to be had? Has this dissolution of desire, Fallen mask and fallen face, Left in thinning air a trace? Triumphs and catastrophes, Forgotten as last week's strawberries, Are fertile fictions we pursue To tears, to grace. Anything To keep the blankness from our face.XV Is there more to voice than its
Retreating sound, echoic gloss On love and loss? Tympani dimmed To a sweep of rain on the roof . . . . Bid adieu, adieu, fond ear, fond eye, To each eviscerated sigh-- Gold bullion of goodbyes pile high, And not one lace handkerchief's discased In warm memorial of departure, Tracing effervescences of past rapture. The tattered retreat of a lapsing wave Is all the Rappahannock gives, or gave.XVI On the river that flitters
And flutters and flubs, I float: Irreducible litter shorn of because. What I am, I am; what was, was. An ephemeral caliphate Scribbling down his fix of fate. . . . On a foolscap scroll that lolls, I write Wry words to puzzle the animal, Adumbrate the damned and pierce The ghost that keeps our feelings fierce.XVII The blue men march, march, march.
The green is gone, and brown remains. Is there a hupping repetition only In this becoming mud, oozy-oily? Each thing repeated, as if bereft, As if tearing our hair alone was left us. The muds shift, closing oily over The puddles of our tread, and over Our faces on that final, fatal day.XVIII One grows tired of the infantile,
The tamely true, the tritely right. One would rather a slap in the chops, An angry onion intensely teared, A uterine wrong belatedly revealed Among candles at the retirement home-- An explosion under the tea-cozies. Anything, oh anything, mein Gott! Anything but this maundering usual, This placid sunshine square on the floor, This tepid, interminable sequence Of will-be, was, and serenely is. Let some black lightning fork to earth That leaves the sky more mortal, torn.XIX After a time to be no more
The balm and butter of desire, Damned to dawdle and adore Tussled husks of cobs gnawed raw In a moonlight that was true, In the decapitated orbit of recollect. . . . What love, at best, should let drop No hammer and no forge Can resurrect. . . . the flight of a fallen leaf Whose gold is almost gone. Desire, the anaconda in the groin, Turns to stone the tenderness It had kissed, crimps in moaning tongs Tender hands prayer had held aloft And leaves, at best, a remaindered sigh -- A cruft.XX The visible world is made of
Ashes, chirriguresque ashes: Compact, compiled, complex, And incomplete without our moaning bones Singing hollow and alone Above dirty tides of dust and stuff The visible world is made of. The visible world is made of Histories grown rich in ruin: Reichs, Romans and religions gone down To soften our tumble into the now The visible world is made of. Yesterday's news and today's maybes And all the clocks that ever crossed hands In our walk from the mailbox To breakfast oranges and eggs Are ashes, ashes that sift From if to the gift The visible world is made of, The visible world is made of.XXI Patchy frost that stuccoes the Styx,
The frost at my temples, both touch death The way kisses confer fullness Or how a cheek upon our cheek Can suddenly give us the whole girl-- So I lean at autumn, the tree leans Touched by frost's disfigurement. I hunch into age's alpaca parka. All afternoon the river stiffens, All afternoon the river shoulders on Below, despite the stiff, the cold. And the children slide by smiling.XXII The whole stale globe is fixed
And finished. No spastic blanks Fringe or freak our maps. All we had desired, in one Cloudy shell is clamped, a cataract Eye clubbed by interior damps. Round and round a blue wash basin rolls The marble of our wants, our soul. How, inside this stormy island shell, Dare we pip a pearl? Discovery but brushes back the curls From brooding brow's proscenium to Hell. The conquistador's poise or plastic pose Can but woodenly suppose our more Consummate imaginings of rose.XXIII How tired one is of the umber river
Losing its green toward autumn. Is our real sum the sum Of what we have forgotten? Additions scrawled in margins Haste discarded at a truck stop. . . . Pages flap by the wetted sill, And the river writhes through rusty hills Like rotted moss, but liquiform. How tired and how feeble one has become Staring at shapes that will not stay; The river, as always, keeping low, Unregarded by animal or eye, A fluid whisper forced between rocks, A sum of nothings always the same-- If one could remember what went or came.XXIV The long hour's dread, the water's calm
Do nothing, nothing to defer The immortal, immoral and amorous fact Of love in a narrow coffin Stood up on end and talking Hour upon hour of the water's calm. The peace of infinite lakes, Hazards blue and hazes deep, The quiet claptrap of the shore And mopey pebbles rusticating Do nothing, nothing to deform Desire's deep, expressive needle. Eon on eon the coffin talks Of moony amours, and the long dread.XXV Do we make contact with a kiss?
On what do two lips meeting Two lips insist? Did Cleopatra Really kiss, who never climbed The ratty scaffolding behind the stars? Does love demand reality? O fools, is what we feel all folderol? Do hearts connect both ache and cause? Have we really any more Than a projectionist's panache, Lighting up our solitary dark With scenes? Dreaming in daylight What our lonely dreams may mean? I hunger for reality under pinking skies At one, at one, With the inward of my eye.XXVI The patient good of going nowhere
In the balloon of the mind (That something, half air, half real) Is, I declare, a laudable poem In the tone of time (that somewhen Of buzzing was and will-be). To live in circles, going nowhere In a clime that is timeless. . . . This circuitous circumlocution Of life, is life. And the poem of life is patient, good, And of articulate merit Like a muffled chime; the poem, Disturbed by chilly ripples from the mind, Hushes the shivering cymbal. Hush, hush, between heart and thumb Into a silence not yet manifest. And yet. . . . There's a music there, too, a stubborn thrub.XXVII I dream of infernal pallors,
Lily-dead smokes infesting Switchback rivers that snake The peace-bedizened landscape-- Full of river verve and tribal tums. Full, too, of the fulsome motions Of desire-- its bleak, expressive needs Coiled in the chocolate dark of dreams. I sketch red arroyos with my Fingerend, carve clouds with my breath, And roil the Rappahannock with swales of tears. . . . By inches I enrich the night grasses, Dibbling endless seed as carelessly As the storm-strong river veers.XXVIII In twilight the river came
Sighing, sweeping, fresh. Stuttering dawn flared palely, With just enough wick to scritch Midnight waters into day, and usher them Into glassy existence once again; Troughs and shadows among the gems Astound the verdant vertices. . . . Then dying afternoon struck heightened whites From the pulsing wave, over and over-- Too bright to look at, too hot To sit in the shade, feet in the water. . . . Now night's arriving eyelid seals the river All-at-once in nothingness. I am here, now, without it. Sighing, sweeping, fresh.XXIX The river is full of wet surprises.
Reaching in a hand, you pull back A hand, wet with the glistening wish To be all wet yet still be hand. Look at your wet hand, fingers dripping Blazingly glazed as if never dry, As if never needing to kneel again In the plunging wet, the enveloping mist. Shake hands with the evasive river, full. You are you. You are the river. Lean over yourself wetly, without Expectation, again and again.XXX Whatever rivers endeavor
To mean in their molten going, Erudite in their silvery swiftness, Knowing in their golden slowness, They mean without meaning, Without needing to mean meaning. Whatever rivers mean they elide, Wetly content to be wily river Once more, flowing without following, Going after what went before, Flow after flow like honey going Gold in its golden slowness, Its prow of now humped high, humped high, And goldenest too at its going down, Golden in its flowing going. Faultless the flotsam upon it.XXXI The history of a seed, blind tear
Crying an eye in the dirt, Unfolds a flower's talking stalk Without meaning among murky hills. Why this incessant spur to grow, To know, to dominate with words A landscape we cannot escape? To vomit, void our inscape Until all the dome of stars are seeds Of me, me, me, me, me? Blind need and blind tears, and less Fit purpose than this mustard seed That blindly grows its heats and dies Without complaint In a dirt that does not wait.XXXII Undulations of mud and river
Moss a hollow self cored of seed-- A self without a future self, Sourced to now alone, sans past, Sans progenitors, sans history. For him, the hollow one, river flowing River is enough. In this slatted light, The intermix of mazy leaves And slap-slap patterns on the Waterlogged log all the logy Afternoon now and always Is enough. This jelly yellow Light of the flow suffices,-- Flowing nowhere and everywhere, Now and always, In a land of undulous muds.XXXIII The reflective river, reflecting,
Reflects leaves, trees, themes, memes, Men and me, flat landscapes Of people skating round bonfires, Feasting high summer with buttery cobs, Raising a red barn in pilgrim hats, Or rolling hoops with clickety sticks; Mirrory people and their alluring concerns,-- Hacked from the fabulous, Greasy with pig and pie. As if sky and rock and river Reflected human magnificence alone And not some deeper current: Red, real marrow of the world's bones.XXXIV Rosy Rappahannock, dance on, dance on,
Supplest at your merging marge, Fluent shoe on softening sands. . . . Imagined dancers in their ritzy habiliments, Top hat and cane and folded gloves Solidify the watery waltz, Red-faced and breathless in cane chairs. A skirt skirls among moldy reeds Enhancing the dance with measurement Of step, swirl, step and stop; "Once upon a time" is primed, Enlivened from the vividest ick Where bullfrogs bow to damselfish Furling weedy gowns as they stop-- Stop in a static of silks and crinolines.XXXV To lie where the river ends,
To lie in the velvet moonlight Observing a landscape that is dry-- To hear the vulture's convulsive cry, To see how slowly the river ended here, Scraping dehydrated rocks, The licked whiskers of its own Envanishment, alone in being, Is a kind of final sumptuousness Of torpid nothingness. . . . Or, more morose, more awful, to hear The Rappahannock's oracular voice Grow indistinct at the ocean's verge, Suave murmurs gone down to a mauver Sea, full of desolate cries, Like a mother who loses her son Among seas of soldiers embarking at the station: Riding away, away, never to return Even in flashes of untrustworthy thunder, Makes a finish of heaven.
Cataracts, rapids and furious plumes Smoke at the waterfall's foot in one Purgatorial plunge. Hot clouds of chaos in a boiling sink Sterilize steel, and kiss the quick Motions of two hands. These two images of water, two images Of ourselves in austere imagination, Wetly flail. The yellow raft tips up at the blue, trembling lip Above the whole effortful journey In naked air.
Roguish locals on their jaunts Display the labial blasŽ Of conchs. They puff their roguish way Down the festooned avenues Ringing brass spittoons. Braggadocio furiens, Their chests huff high, puff hard To charm the curtained demoiselles-- Under surreptitious eyes Under brightest milky day.
Duelists remarking the shoreline's fair, Suave and snakelike grace, are debonair. To see Beauty in the tooth That loots you of your life, is truth. So they thought as they paced the sands And took the air, having shaken hands. Blessing gracious life's most gracious feast, Pinky to pinky, they tinked teacups With the beast. Redder sands rubbed hourglass Hands, ticking as their seconds ran. Debonair as dandies though they stood, The sizzing sea hissed in her maternal moods. No one attended their marginal funeral Save one awl-beaked dull-eyed slue-foot gull.
Hey you! Settle them with cigarettes Or with fabulous lassoes cast high corral The jittery arpeggios of choristers, A most disorderly sorority, drunk On song and wit as their hale hosannas Divot the friendly sky. The time for uncounted choirs of praise Zagging the azures in brightened blaze Is over. Call the kiddies to their vittles. Settle down around the plain broad board. Line the bench with fat behinds, and tuck The checkered napkins tight To quell the singers' appetites. Sit still like an emanation of content, At the end of singing, at the end of day. Let blue silk robes fall stately to stiff feet. Let there be, at last, a last reality, Without suggestion. A cold bean soup. Let leaden lentils lard the golden guts.
The annotationist's florid inscription confirms:
His songs were chiseled jagged
From grey granite crags,
Not smarmily charmed
From the skittish scampering of mountain goats
By afternoon noodlings on his flute.
His songs were sharp shavings
Of diamond symphonies
Titanium-lathed,
Not labial dithyrambs lisped
By moony romanticists.
Here is the rock's heart
Quartered, mortared, and staidly laid.
Here are the stacked bricks of grief
And cold colonnades of ladies' tears:
The grand, airless mausoleum
Of a windy soul.
A. Romance, Love
i. She = landscape; love and desire explain our place on the earth
ii. Landscape is just beyond lovers' concern and understanding; address to Noelle
iii. She = landscape; stars in her hair; harmonious completion on nature by
imagination in tune with desire; night has a human warmth
iv. Landscape = she; desire leaps out, coloring what is
v. She is missing; object of desire dies, yet desire remains; memory transforms
moment to sadness
B. Futility, Repetition
vi. Landscape is self-contained and repeats itself; will this be enough without her?
vii. Seeking after cause of all; trapped in objective world
viii. Organizing separated consciousness; imagination takes in what is, maps it
ix. Difficulty of saying what is in terms of self; repetition calms, gives clues,
reduces chaos of what is
x. Despair, repeat of moods, is our weather; links self to reality by sharing
repetition and circularity
C. Speech, Words
xi. Listen to outer reality; it too speaks as self speaks to itself
xii.Words are not just human; they are an expression of reality as it is as well;
refrains of wind
xiii. Silence sources the mis-match of words and reality; failure of final correspondence
xiv. How does speech work to encode our desire to connect with reality; do these words
interact with what is real or not?
xv. Questioning of what is heard; is it real, or mere self-projection?
xvi. Speaker finds his identity in writing down gestures of what is in a way that
sharpens inner feeling; feelings are the inner reality that matches objective reality
D. Aging, Death
xvii. Time marches on; self will die one day
xviii. Desire for contact with the real inside the limit of time
xix. Loss of attractiveness; but not death of desiring; this is aging; our hearts are
less supple in response to reality, tempted to be didactic
xx. Mundane reality is insufficient to the spirit's deepest needs
xxi. Age focuses desire; its force grows as its time diminishes
xxii. Nothing new in outer reality is available to be learned; connection with the
spirit of imagination replaces reaching out into the real
xxiii. Wish for certainty; weariness at the insufficiency of what reality has delivered
xxiv. Speech continues to express imagination's desire even in age's lengthening ennui
E. Meditation, Creative Urge
xxv. Imagination is considered as capable of tying together inner and outer reality
xxvi. Meditation = motion in the world.; the poem is an object
xxvii. Creativity is in all actions of the mind, shaping and even creating the
reality we experience
xxviii. Reality changes; we carry its impact with us even when reality is not directly accessible
xxix. Experience, approached by imagination, can continually refresh the spirit
xxx. Figurations of reality do not deform that reality; what is continually re-asserts
its completeness independent of imagination
F. Final Sequence
xxxi. Humility before the self-sufficiency of reality's self-creating process of Life
xxxii. Self in the now can be content in contact with reality
xxxiii. River reflects both reality and our wishes as they project into reality;
something there is that is deeper than words or desires
xxxiv. Reality dances on, we with it; reality is enhanced by our questioning of it, and
our re-imagining it; experience is sharpened
xxxv. Reality comes to an end; and, with it, the imagination completes its project of creation
by Gregg Glory Vulnerability is my shield, And my flag's Humanity. Óur évening is over us; óur night 'whélms, whélms, ánd will end us. -"Spelt from Sibyl's Leaves" by Gerard Manley Hopkins Published by BLAST PRESS
You, my several, severed, Gentle selves, limned with wishes-- In the dawnwash of daybreak delivered (When sleep's gone over to ashes), I write my soul's shelving shore On eyelids and tears. Come, while the saying's braying And the farmshed's full of wisdom Lowing to be milked by however praying, Come walk the dawn's ways, and some Of your gentle heart's heats share With mouth and ear. Together in the forevering grace Of day brought burning from its source Let's let simplest and supremest play Nor ask the sun to go another course But with hands crossed as lilies lay Dissolve into love.
This spirit of mine is something unstudied, Inexorable and white, alive in solemn permanence. ---Lord Dermond To forget about the self at the self's Uttermost extent; it is the self Made a self at last. To survive in vigor The confinement of the eye, The glistering pinhole through which The self is summoned As by a bronze gong Until all the air is peacock feathers Is one way--in wild trial-- That the self, and its amiable Particulars may be forgotten. Cheered onward in a doubtful dark By numerous rumoring murmurs And silken sibilances, as if Drawn on by a forceful river Tumbling a blind man downstream To the sound of thickening confusion Is another way for the self to go,-- On and on, on and on, In dark discovery. To feel our broadening sexual silks Pulled and pulled, as through A pinhole, through the self And out of the self and into Another, and that self flowing And pulling as if a river until Our colors lay piled and swollen Before our adoring, a silken sail Full-bellied with desiring And with desiring only--a wind That moves through the self the self Had left behind and abandoned On the shore of no more. Is that another way, a wayless way Of want and wont? Dead or dreaming, the self Disappears, and in its place, In the place of the self spilled out Of itself, displaced and streaming, The self that had left its eye behind Like an abandoned portal, The self that had had an ear And has an ear no more, bereft, as it was, Among night voices in a dark place, The self that had had a sex Torn away in a shimmering wind Until the self has a self no more,-- Is only this, this fathomless Wildness without a where Without a how, without a why, Only this this,--in the place of that, Nearby, nearly here, In the place of the place and in place of it. A contemptuous wind Crawls like sludge Over motley rocks.
A creature of whatever trouble Is cartilage and mischief, Trimmed in skin and the smile's lie That all shall be kinship 'til kinship dies. A creature of whichever wish Is eyelashes and ifs, Entrancing Time in evening's dish To coddle dear dreams 'til sun's undone. O creature picked of which and what, All elbows and ears, Take of this trouble its whatever worth And wish the wisher kin until His wish full is of death and earth.
Wrung from the walleyed wait of the womb, Marooned to a prayer from god's grave side And all community of the duly good, An apple unpinned from its savior branch, I fall as I fell, have fallen, will fall Each rainy inch in angst against gravity. Born moonblind to majesty and mystery And deaf to reverenced heaven's sighs, Alone on the lovely ground crowded with brothers And blitzed by a gracing despair, I rot Blood-ripe and rosy beyond my own reach. Against this windy time will I stand again Who fell to a world wrung dumb by pain? I inch each word in angered prayer to a leaf.
Doublecrossed by the terror of birth Into the troubled thrum of becoming, Uneaseful in our mirth, When summer's feather moults to winter's bone--- We wake in cold wonder At snow's undoing. Wrenched upright, awry by our thrown bones-- Uncramped from the comfortable hunch Inside neutral mother And stretched to stand in decisive day, Thrown to thrones in the hissing wheats, We bleed into seed. Shambleshanks unpacked on a walk as long as thought, Our knowing as nothing as nothing else Unless such nothing is--- We hold seed and snow in eye and hand; In bone and feather bred, our flight Tells all and nothing less Than Christ-crossed oblivion.
Dreaming of sleep in a tear-tugged thrub, Hammocked in heartstop, my picayune pulse Charts angina and angst incarnadined And slows my blood woes to was. Dumbly in dreams my aspiring vine Climbs moon and sun---in calms, in gusts;--- I arise on passion's hid hooks to this Wither of insistences. Said the unopened poem in my buttoned heart: "Too dumbly comforted you lay your limbs Wet upon the sandy shoals of pain, Too fell, too full, too grievy and grim." Now hung christ-crossed on an electric cord And stabbed by life's lethargic thorns, I bleed my soul's mutinies to the seething sea, A leviathan on a rock, stillborn.
Gallant as a cloud, proud Before all the eyes of earth, death No more niggly than a gnat, hat Never humbly in hand, upstand- Ing I was born. Feathered in fiery skin, sin A stranger to my heart-knot I ran graced, and I crowed, crowned By loud Love's crying spires All my lengthening youth. Outfitted with a suit of ruth, death My wages on my way, away I gave day to moon-soothing night, lit By my scholar's candle, dull- Witted with ignorance and loss. O I knew nothing, nothing In my pinnacled prime, time My wings and my hearse; terse Time clocked me back to one; gone Was my youth like a cloud.
Daylong in the waist-high weeds and ivies I ate the wonderfully buttery summer's bread, And bright as tears on sleeves I played and frisked And forgot the wolf in the clock. And windy summer ran out of the morning And the stag-breasted dew each dawned day Rode running and riotous from the cool of the moon Unwound from the darks of mouse and fox. Then the others, the pummellers Came unashamed with their wronging love, With sham-battering hands and scolding mouths They gave away anger for their deepest, hurt truth. With red apple hands, with bones twice broken, They strode hero-headed over the blown-down time, Over the greeny edge of the faraway weather, Topping sun and cloud of the tumbledown town. Deep in the heartwood home, and hunched and knotted, As full of fears as a tit-mouse's shivers I kept the woods home that kept me hid In the bone-lonely branches of my bloodred ribs. And dawn in its trial of summer survival Turned red in the remembered air, And summer's sun crept crabwise until it was moon, And I heard the sun's hours ride down to their doom. All about the sold home and understood wood, Beyond the dog-drowning stones that cried aloud In the midnight riverbed's spattering blacks, Down in my hallowed home's owlly hollows With my pockets full of leaves and string and talisman rocks, Vowelling dogs howled to adder and frog, And fired childhood crashed shamed as ashes While my hands grew knots to stop the clocks And all the everlasting woe of Time. But oh the woods were golden in their burning prime.
Warm and capable hand, now cast Against yourself in this crimping cramp,-- Folded under, knuckle and finger, Fist-forced to fight all foldings; Spider on a mirror how you pray, All self-reference in sinew and deity; Age salts the joints fluid youth found mighty, Steadfastly tossing treasure to trash. Hand beyond starlight still remote, Flick from cyclops Time the mote Torn from history and hope to this: A present absence less final than If.
The wish of an if Is a backwards future; Beyond the moment's present use, The grand seducer is seduced. If in plain vagaries I am vain, In rich reality I'm just me. Forgive me, listeners If this mothering infant tongue Offends your sense: Life is my only defense.
When man-draped blood dripped Myself down from heaven with a dropping cry Spilling this body from pained hip's lips Crying life, life to live, life alive, Did any other come dumb a-tumble, Riding my shoulders, a capable wonder? And roaring unlovely all lonely's lessons, A dripping waxwork with a burning wick, My bone-alone prayers wrung, sung in session Where echoes creep cold to double and mock: Is it I alone who lives, who dies, Unlovely in my body's sack of lies? Upright in the everywhere-nowhere now With something-nothing thrown on shoulder and brow, And naked if I only knew how, The I behind I unfurls a brown shroud Dote-silent now as twice aloud-loud, Incapable as a cloud.
When in the word's wound another rumbles And letters push the pen like a ouiji's divot, Arcing after funerals for what remains Crowding to reunion with our split selves; When in the blood's barometer another thumps, Tapping tell-all largesse from our bottled small, Churning brights of vision from eyes too-tight shut Against storm and batter of the brainy weather; When as in the beginning there is love and wonder Trailing down each treasure of a tock And bastioned happiness lays everywhere easy as sand Although ocean tear her heart out on a rock; Then shall we love those who loved us never? Carry Christs in our shirts like a pack of matches? Then shall we fathom the deedless darks-- When not a hand, not an eye, stretched back to touch The burning vigil tears of our watch?
Once below a time an evil fizzed A sizzle missile on a stick of strike; A friend unfriendly wore his face reversed, And the sun come up rose down to the dike And the maker's waters fell skywise to drown The small of hope in a calypso clown. And all my friends, the fishes, sieved Themselves the fry from the chaos bay; And the long moon sang "auld lang syne" And night's tooth conned the meat of day; And safe in my shallows hollows, I Worked out corrupted wonder's why. And long in my wondering den Among rainbow shoals of corals Each the quick color of a friend, I branded in briars my heart corralled-- 'Til cursed and closed in mental hearse I heard the helpmeet of my burnt hurt's verse. The samaratan's snapped purse opened ripe And rosy were all her monies' colors; In folds of golds as green as apples Her tender hand moved softly and softer 'Til touch salved cool the carpet stars And I walked beyond where ashes' blacks are.
Whose bones I break bear the ash Breath first tongued in soot; Whose back I bare endures the lash Of days as quick as coals. Whose tongue I suck between two gasps Of bare babe's cry and skull's knobbed crack Vowels a violent void that snaps Babe, grave and groin in our kisses' black. Whose wormy, wasted soul I owned Filched infinity from moldy bloods; Animal and man I dug for sup And killing and kissing gave forth God.
To find in feeling, meaning Mere feeling never can provide, And when a meaning's felt It fills the ignorant heart With humble knowing of its grace. When heart and head have thus Each the other fed, the whole Comes to the accord and godhood Of its good.
When a wandering impulse from heaven Visits the daily mind of man, lending Some alien hatchling who eyes up the sun, Our faithfulness is born in ignorance. A wetted shadow robs us of rest, Knowing neither the mystery of birth Nor the disappearing gulf into which we're poured. Our dying height is but the eagle's nest.
When death's thrifty summons sums my life and me,
With swift erasure reckons every hope
One with the all-nothing past's unborn to-be,
And, dead unlived, live damned in Time's scope,
How then shall my accounts accounted be?
When bright expectations of my skies
A crematorium become, and clouds
That had impostured castles as siftless ashes die,
What shall stand, howsoever soft or proud,
With lying life above when I at last do lie?
What besides my dog-dug bones shall sound,
What clacking tongues make noise of me aloud?
If only you do not follow me too fast,
I am content my small nothing shall not last.
When contrary winds make havoc with our hopes
And a word unwound wounds against our wish,
All we were becomes the plaything of a trope,
The telling and untelling of privy visions.
And all we were to be in times hereafter
In all the endless real of dreams undreamt
(Which from the day's affairs and minor laughter
Transform into important night's portents),
All the all of all our lives unlived
Is piffed to flinders in a scoping void
That follows our undoing even unto the tracks of a gnat
A moment's wind or quieting in eve's coming cold
Will silver over quick as that.
When all this in my mooning mirror comes to pass
One thought of you amends the ruins in the glass.
So few tears to tell the story; Have they gone away, like the edges of papers Trailing papercuts, and the most excited letters lost On the margins of the undersheets? Sometimes a freshness will surprise us first, A frittery coolness or itch against the cheek As strange as the dream it wakes us from, the same Sense of the seminal real, shorn up by fragments the same. Each tear had risen like a purpose, Tipped with passionate wetness from obliterated sight. Love is blind; so, too, grief and care, The silly joy of remembering just how, just where.
When in an hour's perjury some hinted truth
Is caught, and what had stung in coldness
In pillowing warmth remains,
Holding the soul below the bone,
Almost I can forgive my human stain--
Almost I am the thing that I am not,
Almost I in lightness and in light am propped.
My eyelashes then are limned
With clarifying dews;
Ambition and regret lay neglected
In the grass, to never again be new.
Forever windward my face amends its smile;
Forever forward my eyes seek their trial,
Stalking the light.
Strike and stroke its rays!
Beauty in the eye is immaterial, The frayed edges of an ancient curtain, Old swaying silks chisel-cut in stone, Phidias' fingers in a remembered breeze, Or slender toes in overgrown summer grass. Feet and heart go spasmodically fast In the uncut grass at discovery's edge; Lips once pinked to touch another's, Brittle as glass, yellowed of youth, Twenty-two centuries of dumb longing undone, Til time becomes only the memory of youth, Chipped blasphemy of a once living form. Only her kiss' caress can guess this truth. Dan Weeks & Gregg Glory
I in my difficult self confined, A figurehead in any kind of weather, Amenable as inches in the spigot-spit rain, Feel the flesh fail, whisked to whim, And the grave damned abstractions all Add up to grim. My blunt body blown about, Pierced by ports who had swum seas Of moon's blood shouldered to the prow, I stand unblessed in the sun's red crest, Dulled and chained to now by all The maybe plagues. Forwarding my drowning right up to my neck, No matter the thrifty theft of the weather, Guest or ghost or soulless guess devout, A watchman of rocks in the whiskey weather Full of wrestling reefs and wormy stars, I crack the crowsnest Of my pinnacled pride right down to the worsted prow, Shifting the kissing sticks on the mute deck--
When threads are cut that held us close, When the snapped hand snips the ribbon, The veiny net that pulled round wrist and bone Shredded is. When lungs surrender to a liquid ill And drowned men dead we fodder fish, The rose-red sea that we had swived Arid is. When words have ceased to traffic truth And goose to goose give gossips' proof, Our mutual tale told in the mirror Sheeted is. Alien we stand who shared one knocked breath, One saying syllable for our daily prayer, One look, one heart enduring Time's Omnivorous is. Alien we died: out of syllables, out of breath, Crossed as words, incompatible as knots, And no more face-to-face face each other In grave is.
I who stood on sand and said The God-word aloud in my shivering pride, Watch mansion and turret rook beneath the tide That roars above my body's fevers. Instead of dwelling in forever I came to the crooking shore of here As the last darks broke and dawn recalled Heats that create the damned and the dear. Now cool and straight as eve's dark grace, Now lumped as fever's lesions, I stand unmanned, unmade, in the shriving space-- A shadow man born of shadowed son. I who was sky and wind before the stars shone Before earth filled with grave and tower, Before my star-marked unmaking stand Alone and voiceless in unsaying sands. Oh never again will I crawl into a star Or dawn across ages to a planetary birth. I am undone in both seed is and shared are. I have no claim to make but death's. The wry wink that fetched me manifest From darks surrounding shore and star Is no more an eye at last, at last And landward ho the shapeless foams Remake my manless nothingness.
Pinned to minutes and the clock gone mad, Round and round its stranger's face, Round the hours sane as grace, Round landscapes of strangers, I go ghosted and gone in the flying dark And this strangeness has no end. I'd be lost if I could be found, If found unlost at last I'd nail the heart Home with the hammer of the soul. But no nail shines, no hammer moves, No home comes kissing from a cloud. Strip the gilding from the stars, Let hands tear down the dark dim griefs That moored the heaven-faring lights; Let hands build chapels as they move, Wanderers wide round stranger and sky In this strangeness that has no end. Now I wander through cool body's shroud Distant as touch in a statue's hand A blownback bit without sail or keel; No nail glows, no hammer moves. Hands were made to fashion as they feel.
Now the brain is clayed, Now sodden veins are glue, Elbow and bone gone soaked to sod, And death's a sovereign moon, I lie sandlocked, both spine and foot, Unstirred by the insistent stars. Night and death have put daylight out of favor. Shipwrecked on a tear and dry as chalk Day's gone down on the chilling chapels Where grave men wrestle among the gods; Eternity flees triumph in a maggot's egg, And the moon shines down like death.
When the paraffin coffin's wronging box,
Leaden, unlidded lies unlocked
And out of slowly sowing soul inwound rolled,
Twined and twinned in winding sheets
Of the bloodblack body's shroud
The heartbroken ghost like leaven flies--
What then shall stand in the haranguing sands?
Harrassed and houseless, unshrouded and crowdless,
What mood doomed ghost in mist-shifted night
(Or quenchless kiss quizzed from soul's naught knot
Sighing life never could quite unlatch)
Flies riven and shriven in the haranguing sands?
Now risen and simple and unadorned
In the doorless moon (and dead and bettered
By our dying damn) we hold to the bold lie,
Slipped from the shellacked lip to the shelled ear
Up the tongue-tripping ladders like a thief
Moaning unknowing what once-living kiss implored.
Stands in winds in sands in silences
That in us that trumps all bones or guesses
That lies down never in the manger's knot
(Straw raw insistences of gods unbegot)
That that moves ruth-ready to the sea-shoved shingle
Where are and were and will-be may mingle:
Human and ruminant in the unready new,
Sole holders of somewhat we dare not possess,
We stand dead who had not stood in truth,
Illimitable amidst our humanness.
Not until the September is past And the grave dead all lie, unshakled, unburied, Alone in the frost's mouth (All dying done, all berthing begun) And every crooked, ear-marked child is led, By the dimming blood of a failing hand, To play away from the clock's haunts And stars are incited to shrink again The cragging moon's corruptible sphere To less than a pinnacle's pinched inch of sky (Not until the September is past) And every weed grows down to die Up where the miracle dead were tossed In a frozen field gone over to snow And the cold wind in a cold throat like glue, Dying of wanting; and the blossomless trees Lift their skirts to let me fondle The bark-notched knees of autumn's parts, Sold old home of my father's wants, Will I catch cure in the cuckold wind For inextricable laughter and hate.
When into the mouth the death cry comes Unamazed and odorless, Crammed by the ticking fingers of perpetual crime Down the rattling throat to sound An agony of conscience in the unshelled ear Of too much unlived living Then will the eyes start up blind And hair sprout hands for the head Then the unmuffled will of the stilling heart Will damn activity, haul up dock to decision, Bless the unpaid mind with rest, tell toes to grow into feet, Knuckles reverse to blunt, loved palms, Shoulderblades dwindle to wings, Red ribs uncage to drop dead lust, And lagging heart kick all away To fall to a faraway sky, And all of these be mine.
Above this town where I lay sleeping young happily birds convulse minutely one tremendously blown hilarious green leaf of wind (in ochres of eve it is dying) come suddenly finally up from compactly hysterical graves. Bliss fully mindless is of these faces on the pickets these sweatless heads in dole attire; these pink purple blades who are flying who are the dentings my footfalls have said along the edges of day and crisply space and down down dwindling once wells of when (for it is summer and pregnantly snowingly dusk)
A flung, unbodied fragence, she, Spicing our bounden mortality, A swished phosphorescence in our mundaner air. Moon-mother and mater, creator and queen, Wry jeweller! The aurora gown you wear Is made of deeplier aspect than mere seems. Emboldened by the dazzle of the dream We approached in humble aspect toward her dawn. She slowed to come among us as we were, Simple in her simple habit; fresh, unpearled. Unbosomed from our mortal selves we whined After death's very concupiscient tit And eyeless ached for the pity we had had And no more would have, folded in her gown of gore.
I turn my visage in the fog To the scene of my demise: There, in the nothing, I was wise; Here, in eternity, I am fog. Absolute and contemptible My whim now wanders witless space, A focus in idiot vagueness, Temporary and discreditable. Such is the sum of human worth! A self-involving wheel that grinds Nothingness to the end of time. Look to yourself and know its truth! A shudder in a whisper, A spinal chill beside the tomb, Cues music in another room No dancer ever enters. Everything I am I fear, All I was I disrespect; A skeleton of acid aspect Pins me with a glance to here. Vaguely ceremonious dust Sweeps corners of an edgeless plain; To feel at all is to feel pain; Pain abolishing and absolute.
Incapable judgment, Charmless incoherence, Damnable indolence, A welcome internment. Happy are we who rot and look Neither to the left nor right; Directionless uncentered sight That sees like a remembered book. Here and now and gone Each page of my prison singes, Turning edges, mirrors, mirages: Burnt promise of smoky 'beyonds.' An incapacity as soft As mothers flushing infants' eyes Ends each blind alley that I try, Suffocates with wings of moths. Exits dissolve in fur or foam, Every gleam reveals a worm; Each ending of a timeless dream Inaugurates a longer term. Here I wait in wetness Disconsolate and endless, Penetrant and airless, Guessing and guestless.
The sum of all the soul
Is lazy exhalations,
Smoke rings in rings in rings
And their derivations.
So says the brune cigar
(Burning wisely the while)
Letting shooken cinders char
From the clear kiss of fire.
So the smokes of poems
Insinuate a smile;--
Dismiss thisness, singer,
should you debut,
Reality's vile.
Too-precise a sense erases
Literature's half-guesses.
Mallarme
Swiftly, gamely, mademoiselle
Made a wish to hear the notes
Floating from my old wood flute
Revealingly.
Poignant practice in the park
Between our picnic and the flocks
Achieved some partial good
when I stopped
And stared at mademoiselle 'til dark.
This vain breath that I extend
To where my antique wood flute ends
By spastic clasp of crippled fingers
In incapable mimesis
Can't catch quite your natural and clear
Childish laughter that charms the air.
Mallarme
Silks involved in balms of Time Where even fictive if expires Vaunt not the coiled, the native cloud Combed in your mirror's lens. Patriotic ranks of stagnant flags Exalt above the vacant street; Drowned by waves of your naked mane I plunge to my eyes' content. Yet, no mouth may be sure Of the savor his bite procures Unless, regal and rampant, he insist, Amidst your immense and copper tufts, On expelling a diamond sigh: The cry "Glorie!" that he stifles. Mallarme
All's quiet, except the silence; As at the fireplace I lean, Military slacks Redden against my shins. The invasion I await With virgin courage Is that of the baton a-tilt, The soldier's white glove-- Gilt or stripped It waits to strike--not Teutons But some ancillary menace, Some acquiescence one desires. Beat back this wild nettle: Sympathy before battle. Mallarme
Too much of poet's sojourning With airy fancy captivating Eye and ear and every thing, Our sense false sense believing, Can vault the real beyond our ken And all our wisdom, sum, and end Must be but to begin again. While in that cloud Delight suspended Nothing kills and all are mended, The dead arise for a final bow As plays and players even now. If ever error finds this field Error must to mischief yield And all that seemed delight revealed Be changed to vice reviled. No longer the innocence of If Where no blind run ends in a cliff And every dagger of thrown suppose Hits harmless as a falling rose. No more mere pastimes of the mind Where every evil's undermined And the very devil's to sport inclined, Terror trumped by laughter half-divine, Where every blood-anointed sword Shows no sharper than a pointy word, And each ghastly gambit of deed or cad Ends in misty triumph trimmed, And only surfeit seems enough.
Tenor Semblance, who I made, made me.
Thumbed dumb from blue blatant clay
And teased into my mirror's mirror
To instruct me how my art progressed
(Or how, myself a spur of art, I digress)
And how, caught-out by God, I might confess.
He was a helper hindered in his bones,
A smoky topiary round my realest woods
Where dark stayed in, and Life was understood;
A straw man made, I'd thought,
To enlighten and appall;
A straw man who knew only
How to undie and fall.
Paring my fingernails in a rarefied room,
I call him up with an invidious quip,
Up from his grave heaven or paradisiacal pit
Dusky clay of a man morosely man-made.
Tenor notes. Curliecues,world.
Love and love no comma
waterwings bulbing . J ust his waterwings
============
poetry must be epistimology--a connecting of things and meaning
or else its mission fails. The act of connection MUST be moral
and meaningful, WHAT is connected is less vital. Deconstructionists
have vitiated the very heart of the process. They say that words
are incapable components of connection
And now that life's awful unauthored hours Have left me foaming at the tap, fingered on or off, And like to die as like to live. What shall I do who's undone by his doing, Tippling the passionate mathers to his lips Only to go on sowing his own dull salty grave? I'll mock the solemn mirror with a glance of stony glass. I'll out-stare startled stars, with fingertip twist The watery whirl that mangles all I ever was of is. But what shall you do, dear, dear you, Noiseless interlocutor nosing the prosy page? What shall become of all your Platonists' hubbub, This stitch that itches the reader's reticulated ear? Shall the word you are beyond all silence Pass away in reguritative snores? Behold: a trumpet in a storm, half-heard, obscured, Summons no symphony from static on its own behalf. Climb down, then, dear, onto the night grass-- Escape across the countryside still damp beneath your lamp. You too shall survive the slaughter, you too Shall live again, with every vital face erased To innocent "pretend." Our illusions still pursue us Until we turn and tell them "boo." Our loves Will pant and pander after until we sigh "it's you." Every blobby bauble boiled up to mammoth memorial Only waits to be forgotten and be playful bauble once again. The you you were and the I I was Are strangers to our living, vivid, vital whys. (Its only just because. Pause.) When the hero's hour goes down, grain by grain, Who shall hoist them up once more in worthy memorial? Better it is to be forgotten and to live Than die a perfect-pitch, unrepeatable divinity. But die we must, musty soldiers of this sod And green lie down and come as bones to God. Never mind this pinch of heaven in our eye. It too shall makes its quietus in a fallen grain. Even very heaven must slip down to us and die.
Baudelaire puts a pistol to his evaporated brain. Turquoise swans on his twin cufflinks glitter, Paddling toward the mirror where he moons. "Here, in the nowhere that is my everywhere, nadir, I take aim at the gods who love and oppress me. Who knew that the internal exile of 'not belonging' could be so bitter?" Stale coffee gives his face its pained look of being stricken, of being struck dumb from the inside where the words had come ably bubbling as a spring of blood. "My hand was a steel spring and the meter ticked like rivets going in to the side of a ship; faultless preparations for a voyage left unmade. Now sloppy in my silk slippers, I putter in the parlor thinking through the reams of old talk (Nerval's neuralgic nose pointing wayward toward some pink maid's imagined castle window, Huysman's snickering figure thin as in a wishing glass) old talk that had ascended to the chandelier's burning bough and disappeared...."
Ideal and disposable, the idea of you Rustles beyond my moony shoulder, Amorous shadow of fictive love, A dream demanded by the dove. 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. New eyes open, asleep yet silvery. Confessional moonlight's idyll Which previously had bridled 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; Our breaths' most secret heats, Sirocco on rose-darkened sheets, Whisper the stories of our souls Where conceptual contrapuntal kiss 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 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 Two drowsy loves, pale and veined-- A pair of frangible spirits' vessels Laughing out the candles. A new day glitters at the ledge.
Now my maturer powers have come My deadest days are on me. Inspiration crucifies with the 'not yet done' Likeliest confederations fall to dust That had risen assured before. 'Philosophy' gives one something 'to write about,' The saint reverts to a whore. Problems pursued in the minutest dark Dawn displays to every fool. Nothing comes that had not come before Save the freshness of a funeral. (Faces my faces had half-contained!) Waterlilies lie exhausted in the concrete pond; No word is given in dream or bond. Paired thieves expire untroubled By the Christ transfixed between them. All goodness a flower endeavors to endue Lies trodden in the uncolored mud. Exhausted veins collapse, pale and unblooded, All smiles unpeel to a skull. Old rooms, old thoughts, old hours…. Old thorns I had thought removed Return to resurrect their ribald pinch. Each placid glance of reassurance Given on the cafeteria tiles Rips me to the core. My thoughts out-age The brain that cannot contain them. Pills fill in for functions Alertness or dandelions had supplied. Asleep in my slippers at the whispering window I hear each ache of air repeat widowed, widowed, widowed. Old rooms, old thoughts, old hours…. Old charms dispersed that had filled My empty wedding bower….
Let Dame Melancholy lounge on her oval throne Beneath the obscure sun's cold diadem Meditating midnight with her sole self alone Her richest mystery and self-single gem. The riot of Spring is gone to ground And green luxuriance rots where it had preened-- Frescoed gestures of the pure and the proud Go decayed to earth without hope or seed. Jealousy at her feet with two leopards chained Pawing the fallen oval bone to stone While she directs her greeny gaze At overwhelming Other unable to be reined Into intensifying One. She fist-knots the leash In a luring pull, luring by pull until Leopard and leopard in a twinned pool of spots Contend, each with each in battled brawl Contesting Time that drives all lovers home Beneath the hand that rules them yet, as though They shared a single soul.
flower i' the crannied wall whose first visitant is heaven's sun whose last kiss's administered by the moon look for newer light and a softer kiss to come when a prince to-be in his initial blisses comes whistling through his mother's coombes flower i' the crannied wall whose bloom's so smooth where the wall is coarse look to the moving moon to alter course and days decay to lightless dross and the timid rabbit never nibble leaf or love you give before boy's world shall suffer loss flower i' the crannied wall his eternal shine shall cause all things that grow to grow because: nor shall ceaseless love suffer pause save for laughter's 'for one and all.' Now, dear flower in the crannied wall, I must fromthem whose love to you shall shower soon blessed be(gosh!)
The body's afternoon is gone
And evening, witchlike and murderous,
Is coming on.
Tempra for the flashing dash
The more than bright striking
Of daybreak out of confusing night
…
If we give our thought up to a cloud,
What matter if the light is torn?
One light note quick-tripleted
Is worth a thousand thousand colder tones.
The wet substance of this nothingness
Once poured to us still pours
These lyric decrepitudes of the brain
In dark abandon under darkened skies
Until into a still, black pond
Our looking creeps and finds a crawling cloud
…
What are these things that follow you around
like rats following their mother's teats,
streaming milk as helplessly as an idiot drools?
What are they? What could they be?
Ah, yes, that's right, that's what they are: memories.
…
My stranger hero wears no face,
A staring star without star's stone stare
[star-struck dark]
cobbled as I can
…
Tonight I dreamed of petting a fish
Born ill to a world full of fuck and woe
…
My mansion rooks its turrets below the tide
Rooks my mansion's turrets below the tide
…
My death is on his hind legs, laughing hard
The goitered word
…
by the playing water I played and prayed
with all the youth of my heart for hymn
a catechism of sticks and kites
and a snake bite for sin
and the summer sun tiptoe crept into the idle moon
unproud of sight to see
…
when all the frigid insistence of my life's griefs
thaw apart
oh, they're getting to it, they're getting to it,
dooming themselves slow and sure
once the crust was cracked,
the man himself was feast enough to last
and lasted past the nattering
and on into dream
uneventful is
When heartbreak, leaden, unlids The paraffin coffin's wronging box And the sinister ministry of Time unlocks What slowly sowing soul inwound rolled, Twinned in winding sheets And body's bloodblack shroud What then shall stand in the haranguing sands That quenchless kiss the naught knot We never could quite catch or latch No matter the manner of our sighing after Or grappling grace toiled in graceless laughter? [moiled] Now dead and bettered by our dying damn, Unshrouded and crowdless and ruined and houseless, Mere mood doomed ghosts in shifted night We rise to our shriving in the haranguing sands. Risen and simple and unadorned In the doorless moon, born and bold We stand on crookshanks and the lie's why That from shelled ear and shellacked lip Slips up the tripping ladders like a thief To moan unknowing the all-at-once Everything-each our once-living kiss implored. Stands in winds in sands in silences That in us trumps all bones or guesses That lies down never in the manger's knot (Straw raw insistences of gods unbegot) That that moves ruth-ready to the sea-shoved shingle Where are and were and will-be may mingle: Human and ruminant in the unready new, Sole holders of what we dare not posses, Illimitable amidst our humanness.
Now cool and straight as eve's dark grace Now lumped as fever's lesions, I stand unmanned, unmade, Stumped dumb in the shriving starlight-- A shadow man born of shadowed son
The wish of an if is a backwards future Locked in its amber capsule sans repair; To look back beyond the moment's present use Is to watch the grand seducer be seduced. If in plain vagaries I am vain, In rich reality I'm just me: Complex as an explosive sunset Over the once-shining sea. Forgive me, listeners, born before my words, If this mothering infant tongue offends your sense; That infants live in word and world As life to be is my only defense.
Whenever the feather finish of wishes Dulls to the rum, chained game of a maybe plagues And blessed sun's crested ever and now Shunt's pride's pinnacle to a worsted prow, A figurehead in any kind of weather, I in my difficult self confined Beat bone and gum to wind however tried, Shifting the kissing sticks on forever's mute deck--- Forwarding my drowning right up to my neck, Amenible as inches in the spigot-spit weather. Whenever flesh fails, whisked to a whim, And grave abstractions all add up to grim And the moon's blood broods shouldered to the prow Full of wrestling reefs and wormy stars No matter the thrifty theft of the weather. I in my blunt body am blown about, Guest or ghost or soulless guess devout, Pierced by ports who solely saw seas, By fjords and fundament and a bold, froze breeze, A watchman of rocks in the whiskey weather.
I in my difficult self confined, A figurehead in any kind of weather, Amenible as inches in the spigot-spit rain I in my blunt body am blown about, Pierced by ports who solely saw seas, And the moon's blood shouldered to the prow Forwarding my drowning right up to my neck, No matter the thrifty theft of the weather Guest or ghost or soulless guess devout. [Unused Whenever the feather finish of wishes Beat bone and gum to wind however tried, By fjords and fundament and a bold, froze breeze,]
When a wandering impulse from Heaven Visits the daily mind of man, lending Credence to our infant imaginings That lean along a mountain's length, we've seen At our dying height but the eagle's nest Where some alien hatchling eyes up the sun. Our faithfulness is born of ignorance, A wetted shadow that robs us of our rest, Knowing neither the mystery of our birth Nor the disappearing gulf or stream Into which we're poured. Why question then The present fullness of our sorrow's dearth The mournful life or joyful pulse that fills the years And overflows us … even unto tears?
Dan: This is Mallarme's poem "Feuillet D'Album" or Leaf of an Album. I've tried to make it as fun in English as it is in French. Mallarme's long breaths held back are a difficult thing to achieve for us and would come out as more breathless than anything else. So, I've tried something else; something more imagey. Also, Russ is having a party at the Book Pit Saturday night. These parties are always great and I'll be there. Starts 7PM to ... BYOB. Address is Wallace St, off Main, behind Dorn's photoshop. Also, there's a fabulous fun family-friendly event at Jenkensin's in Point Pleasant to celebrate Brandi's 30th B-Day. 2PM onward. Carrie wanted me to extend the invitation to you and your whole family. Lots of intrigueing poetry folks will be there as well, including Ronna, Carrie, my roomie Stambaugh, and others. Brandi, a published novelist (My Intended, Harper-Collins), is anxious to meet you since we've all gossiped about you. I should be calling you later today with this same info. Gregg Gregg: Here's the combined poem we did a few weeks back. It almost has the effect of alternating lines of chanted dialogue. I must admit I've also used my own lines as a separate poem.--Dan The frayed edges of ancient curtains, beauty in the eye is immaterial old swaying silks a chisel cut in stone as Phidias's curtains in a remembered breeze and slender toes in the overgrown summer grass, feet and heart going spasmodically fast brittle as glass, yellowed of youth in the uncut grass at discovery's edge chipped blasphemy of a once living form where time becomes only the memory of youth whose lips once pinked to touch another's, only her kiss can caress any truth the shock of human longing twenty-two centuries undone tragic-fantastic moment of one moment
When in an hour's perjury eternal truth Is caught and what had clung in coldness In warmth remains, holding the soul below the bone, Almost I can forgive my human stain-- The wrangled webs surrounding sink and rot Until I in lightness and in light am propped. With clarifying dews my eyelashes are limned; I see ambition drop and plod behind, And regret lay neglected in the grass As far away from me--as yesterday. Forever windward my face amends its smile; Forever forward the mind must seek its trial, Stalking the light. Strike and stroke its rays!
Father the smasher full of laughter and cash teeth full of laughter came his million ways to the dingy corners of my play And the woods hold home in their tickery darks owlled and hollowed hallows Bight as tears on sleeves I played and gamed Forgetting the wolf in the clock Stumbling and troubled and the wood understood wonderfully buttery bread wonderfully shady sometime of summer O it was woods and darks and harm and locks My brother was fist-man and kingsman outside the locking closets of my consecrated dark Nothing was anything and my seeing was dreaming all about the house and wood Where I sang to the frog and the adder and no dog snarled save every one at the last and tore both bone and skin And my father came pummeling with his wronged love and his hands as red as apples and strong as bones twice broken over the greeny edge of the faraway weather I see him pickup sticks to bless his scolding mouth and sham-battering hands that gave away anger he hid for his deepest truth And oh the woods were golden in their burning and beyond their core of trouble came the storm-stung stones that cried in the riverbed all night The moon was a rumor in the globes of my tears and its light full of laughter and cash held me penniless amazed in the gossiping dare of the dark alone with the mouse and the fox When the stag-breasted dew of day came with its million sword in the blades of grass blinding my miseries in a golden grip [silver grip] with the days howling to run their wilding ways and proud And I kept the woods that kept me hid in the bone-lonely branches of my ribs
Stars in the cell about to be said Strip the gilding from the stars Love and trouble(s), too soon, too much, Let honey hands follow an audacious eye Immaculate eye A mere watery-eyed mortal Now to find the line that nails the heart And hammers home the soul. Unposted from my able body's pin, My soul's gone ghosting, grieving Round and round in autumn's leaves And autumn's skies, landscapes of strangers, And the strangeness has not yet an end. Untitled stars pouring through the shroud Light the dim griefs kept close as my face, And the moon's in my tears in the mirror's whisper, Distant as touch in the statue's hand Hands had made in fashion as they feel. My soul's all sighs through windows groaned And gone until it hears its line of home. Now I wander through the body's shroud Sensing indifference and sins.
Round landscapes of strangers, Ghosted and gone, grieving, my soul Flies unpinned from able body's post Round tower and town and stranger folds, And this strangeness has no end. Pinned to minutes and the clock gone mad Round and round its stranger's face Unable as any circle engine of feats or facts To hero round the hours sane as grace. All soul wants is to stop and act. Lost I'd be if I could be found, A fired line that nails the heart home With the hammer of the soul. No nail shines, no hammer moves, No home comes kissing from the crowd. Dim griefs kept close as my shuttered face Strip the gilding from the stars, Wanderers round both stranger and sky They shine indifference down in the gospel dark On each bleak sin and breaking. Now wander I through cool body's shroud Distant as touch in the statue's hand A blownback soul without sail or keel; No nail glows, no hammer moves. Hands were made to fashion as they feel.
The sum of all the soul
in our slow exhaling
of ring on ring of smoke
lost in new rings rising
shows that some cigar
burning deftly for a spell
allows the ash to separate itself
from the clear kiss of fire.
So the choir of poems
flies to the lip.
Exclude, if you begin,
the real because vile.
The sense, too precise, overstrikes
your vague literature.
Mallarme [trans. Dan Weeks]
==============
All the soul's one thing:
All the soul's evoked
When windily we exhale [lazily]
Ring on ring of smoke
Further rings impale.
Thus attests the cigar we prop
Browning wisely the while
If its cinders but burn and drop
From the clear kiss of fire.
If from choirs of romance
It drifts thus up to your lips,
Exclude-- should you commence--
The real because its vile.
Too precise a sense erases
Your vague literature. [windy]
All the soul's but this:
Lazy exhalations;
Smoke rings in rings in rings
And their derivations.
So says the long cigar
Browning wisely while
Shook cinders burn and drop
From the clear kiss of fire.
Smoky poems
Drift to lips bewhiles;
Dismiss, if you sing one,
The real, the vile.
Too-precise a sense erases
Literature's half-guesses.
[Smoky poems
Drift up to the lips;
So the choir of poems
Drifts against your smile;]
So poems' smoky choirs
Silk twixt lip and smile;
Dismiss thisness, singer,
should you debut,
Reality's vile.
[So the choir of poems]
[--Silk twixt lip and smile;
--Lilt to lip and smile;
--drifts against your smile;
--Insinuates a smile;
--silk [slip] to the lips;
--Drift to lip and smile;
--drift to the lips;
--Slip to lip and smile;
--]
So the smokes of poems
Insinuate a smile;--
Singer, should you debut,
Dismiss thisness,
Reality's vile.
All's quiet, except the silence, As I sense before the firplace These military slacks Redden against my legs. The invasion that I await With a virgin courage Is that of the baton-stick a-tilt In the soldier's white glove--- Stripped or barked, it waits, Not to batter the Teuton But to strike a second menace, The aquiesence one desires, To beat back this wild nettle: Sympathy before battle. Mallarme
by
Gregg Glory
Published by
BLAST PRESS
324B Matawan Avenue
Cliffwood, NJ 07721
(732) 970-8409
gregglory@aol.com
gregglory.com
All our nobility's munched blank by Time; impossible dreams fit simply in an unattended trash can topped by Gower's lugubrious head. Dead again in my dreams, repetitive as a horror flick, unfixed as a workaholic's mealtime or freckles on a cancerous face.... I worry about bothering to worry, the WHY of these needles my consciousness carries more to damn than darn. Why paper the slide to oblivion with sandpaper? The august face of a kicked-up possum's skull mocks my mutable deportment, my rubbery reckoning with the moment's emotions. Where now the surprised eye bright as a blackberry cell? O possum! Once, rooting for riccola in the compost bucket tipping its richness, a fly (always the same fly, same fly as ever) straddled the corpse of a rind on a mound of coffee grounds in a moonlight you are done with rummaging (and I almost done) , rubbing its hands.
Clear tape anchors the motorcyclist's window thrown up frivolously against the howl of "onward." Naked and splayed as an exhibited newt staked out flat as a collapsed tent on felt, I read the accompanying sign: "Here lies one dull as the other one--" It lacks the garish wet that one finds requisite for life. Frail light elongates lingeringly enough to define my diving bell, the clear weirdness of here. Here, without an onward. A here too full to ask: from whence? A here deaf with wetness, drenched with now, a prismed bubble.
The web of syntax fastens but does not fascinate, empty aria of here to there without the concrete context of content. I extend my fingerling claw to a thread.... "Filament, filament, filament," just like the old so-and-so's bag of beard threading the elements whisper-slipped from his brain-sac. The cotton candy pinks my mouth with glue. Why dot an I unless all connects to all, we know not how? Lying down together I say to you what you say to me until we hear it. A vivifying sample suspended clear in a petri dish twists forth its tentacular longing like a potato eye bursting to see.
Do I long for the life of the Young, unfurnished by loss? Every place new, yet familiarly full of itself, just as it is, and not disfigured by ghosts, by odd bits of old decor, absent everywhere save in memory? I settle on the stuffed settee with its price tag jammed in a cushion-crack. How what surrounds us drowns us! Even if the flow and flood's merely memorial, the happenstance and trash of a past no gloved hand has come to cart to the junkheap.... Invisible lines crowd before and behind me, tenants of Shelley's "Triumph of Life," a chain-gang spectacle of hope leading themselves in closed circle like Dante's damned, like caterpillars a-creep; step, wait; step, wait. My moment comes: the grey guard stumbles, I dash for the line, escape to a featureless plain or ice floe --either will do--a highway widened to destination, a pupil aghast at its own seeing.... myself a mote alone on the blacktop.
Hell, darling, stares at us across the breakfast table as we pass the salt and brimstone and snap the paper crowded with crowing cowards. We're chafed by the hurrying goers in the Tube, the racy lackadaisical others who groom themselves and consume food out of sight. Other places, other faces eat the intimate knowing of them; those who remain strangers to us, to me, really, my dear guest-stranger-- improbable possible lover full of shifts and slidings, unexpected music glad as a stack of glasses, tragic as matches. Lord, help keep these words elided from my speech! We eat our words and whey, sugaring the pus. Toast scolds my inner ear's inner aria . . . . Writing's just a wounded man's spastic tracks in the snow --a litter of gesture against littleness.
Dinner meats and beer after beer revealed a fostering affection flirting finny and familiar as goldfish washed from their bowl on the mantle by our tidalwave of talk. Your stories were reckless as guesswork, a blind detective smelling after footprints, his nose sodden with cold. I told my hummingbird heart's inner aria, flying backward and forward at once. Down at Der Wunder Bar, sipping lemonade, I telephoned my flaming doll to declare "I'm drunk!" like Zapatistas at the barricades. We watched The Charms punk and skunk frantic as ants, while you barracudaed through two more SoCo's and lime. "Hurry up, please, it's time, Hurry up, please, it's time." Square dawn's backwash through the frigid windowpane revealed our underwear, pink and blue, entwined like DNA at the foot of the bed, a pair of mating snakes tight as wrung laundry.
A purgatorial, picture-perfect Saturday afternoon pulls her pin-striped awnings down, lackadaisical and O.K. with limited sky and expanding shade. I twirl an umbrella drink and watch my toes roast in the zone below my cool equator's waist --all centaur once, now nulled to rubbery numbness. Too lazy to invent, I lie and note-take connections sifted out by Time, my editor and better. What rings against my enlarging ears still childish and complete? Full of a whistle's insistence and a tin drum's beat? "Only you," I would lie, but you are not here-- my dear encumbrance, taking the hip-weight of my own imbalance. I remember our days of ire and fire, burning out fierce seeds that germinate my present dark, surrounded by a shade that shadows out the lark. Do not come again. Do not! My downhill backyard is all otherworldly now, mounded snow and ice frothing at the plow.... Rest, remorseful shade. Take my sunglasses, explore the Everglades. Just do not intrude, intrude, intrude your half-tone tune into my afternoon. "Tu whit, tu whoo." How rudely forced. With my pink umbrella drink I'll beat you back! Guest ghost, how homeless you've made me-- second-guessing what the mirror insists, my hard-nailed words unpinned from referent. Time rolls me like the driftwood dead my enervation imitates. Oh la, olé.
You know me talking always, a Gatling gun of guesses shooting pillows into feathers.... As fine a time as that is, whirls and twirls of dusty angels, feathery stars, I want solider talk. Commandoes who shoulder through my slop of verbiage, triangulating sightlines on the night-goggled target. My dictionary thins, my words wasted by AIDS, helpless helpers flashed to ash. Alphabet blocks tumble from my molting mouth. We touch them together until the words glue.
I.... where have I gone this minute, anger edging like a blood iceberg loosed from the pack into the corner of my watery eyes? Sorrow insists on blindness, the not-here of imagination and remembrance, potpourri and drapes to enhance the zero hour decor. The iceberg is cold and hot, sweeping me off my sleepy feet, careening into wicked waters. The salt spray licks my face. Wary tears wake me wetly. I'm melting into the accommodating ice, the ice is beating like a heart. BAAAHH-DHUMM beats the drum of me. Newly limber and unfinished, I stand in my fandangled farragoes of frenzy, all outline now.
So little we ever do ever matters. Its only our penury helps us hope otherwise, wishing against the grain of common sense, crossing fingers because we can't cross the Alps. So little... and little else... and less.... Our terrariums nicker against the Ikea shelf--stone bubbles "anxious yet to burst." Sane only by dint of habit and the strange strength of plastic that keeps us in our confines and our confines whole. Tap tap, tap tap. We go on rolling toward a tumble that never breaks us, no matter the mess we're rolling in.
The exhausted wash of time travel comes over your concave face as I stumble and ram into your missus through the abruptly open door. Five years? More? Not a tick has matured your memory of me --my head pickled like a prize cabbage consigned to a clay Kim Chee pot in the plot out back. A ramshackle string of Xmas lights blinks the shape of Texas around an untenanted yard all tall weed.
[for Marah's 33rd] Like the cracking coal at Isaiah's lips Or shaft of little light at Mary's ear, Like Bodhisattva's sorrow of an afternoon, I am touched with speech, touching you. If these witched words but glitter in the vast Past out-stretched Time--which itself cannot last-- I am content to have come to yon Bo-Tree, To have flickered in an ear I found dear Or touched two lips burning to be near Whatever fire alights when you are here.
The big moon starts In ambushed grandeur from the grove-- A lurid stone for lovers and others Haunting the brune woods alone. Here's no night for careful words, Persnickety parsing of this and that, Gossipy gab like the hoot owl's hoo, Or long loose thoughts whittled to a quip. Here's a night the moon unpacks For phrases full as teardrops, For secret thoughts brought out and spoken While the white moon shines on unbroken. Here's a night for vows and roundels, A speech of misty insistences, and softest promise kept To one whose absence, like the moon, Circles round me yet. O absent-present! Phantom voice and face! Come, let these woods be your leaning-place, Let the night-brook murmur as you would do! Telling more of remembrance dear Than of remonstrance and fear. O ghostly tenor singing like the leaves A poem of nothing in the moony night Whose heavy air clinches like a kiss Sing on until my brookstone heart's made right And misses not one mark or beat for thee.
I woke to walk in a dark room, Navigating cradles, snuffed candles and corners, The ouch of a vacuum handle Or half-full tumbler of water New-wet in surprise on my thighs. Asleep in my pin-striped PJs, I knew my nothing was nowhere From zen class that afternoon. But this invisible here was still here Without the help of the moon. Oh what rhythm was there thrumming, Numb hum of the fridge and the heater, While I stood so unbecoming, A null pointer in raw blackness To bleakness and its lackness? Step, step, step, with a sway I swept, From nettled and nervous I leapt, From stalking myself in the dark To a questionmark on the carpet Dancing inch by inch to the light.
Our dancelike wishes haven't made us nimble but rather like a cloth anchor have us drag and dawdle until the rhythm of waiting is familiar. A stopped clock is twice right but lacks the feral finesse of a kidder's remark remarking a remark --the sometimes lightning of a laugh.... How had desire left us in a slippery tangle on our hill, the moon our only watchman making faces in a pool? How had we missed the train whose tracks we'd followed to every station, our fingers tracing the cracks in the map, occasionally in the same groove?
I stood before you anxious as a candle in a cupcake in the birthday girl's out-thrust pink palm hoping for your hot breath to put me out, me out, and start the dream of meaning --a timid lick at the icing stiffening in the crenellations.
A slipshod, soft-shoe waltz inattentive to daring and nearly too prim for whimsy started us soaring square by square by square.
We hang the windows with flat black felt. Night's the only hour for our fantastic angst. And this one's limitless, without a star to scar it. Flat black and drab black closed eyes enliven. We reach for the paddle first in the wake of dreams motoring onward strong enough, fast enough to keep our rowboat the wrong way round. Eccentric colors, the gauche wash of sunset are memory only in our ashy mysterium. Depth without thought, black without white, we struggle flubberingly for the longitude of some marker: a foghorn, a death.
There in easy strokes your animated portrait lies aslant --happily aslant on the table of memory. Kept in a crypt without a key to drag the thing from Death. My brain noses its sponge for the quirky gift of a squish-- a sound from the roundness no limber silence envelopes. One sound, one dropped rock or tock rippling out into the fogbound, oceanic vast.
The white, hard, plastic bench-- The locked door and chicken-wire window-- The rusted drain, the vaguely urinous steel toilet-- The sink, carved from carbolic soap-- the freezing hiss Of water to numb a face of tears. No mirror here to reflect the eye. Stasis, while the world rolls by Ten yards from the barrack's escape hatch. . . . There, in the night, light, liberty, Macadam and horns, cars shouldered together In their hurry and happiness, Loud as immigrants ganging a gangplank. Here, just stocking feet that point to Hell, Wadded TP to grind into each eye, A shiver assuring you you still exist-- Bare as a smashed bulb's electric wire-- Glowing all exposed now under null fluorescents. Grey-cuffed hands unlatch me, lift me, find my shoes. My time is done. I shuffle forward.
Unread books pile up like showdown shadows at noon. Arrogant words I cannot take back, take over, gather to a knot, and drop the sack. I hike from ignorance to ignorance, a mountain-climber perennially picking the incorrect peak. Now, old love, tomorrow some mania I can't quite manage to squash. Voices flap like bats deranging the dark . . . . Where now are the hard stars that used to pin me in place? I've fallen from the constellations like a high-school poster from the wall, a browned leaf in the mass-- No longer tethered to the visible, anonymous at last.
The printed repeats of post-modern modern living; pattern copyrighted by the wry eye, the deadbeat designer luft-lifted to religious legionnaire. A color co-ordinated rock chorus sings the setting pattern that labyrinths us to death. The wavy paisleys that doily-work the lifestyle-stylist's unbuttoned blouse into incestuous palimpsest make my head ache. The divine grind of the final line of the requiem's aghast ovation gladdens the lapse into silence. Will maggots fatten on my quill of coffin? Who else will eat my delectable inks? The handwritten record of a thing eeks out each etch until letters spider the eyes an unprintable black. Facsimile graffiti hang in the British Museum, the scrawl of royal prisoners gallowsed or gutted --one scratch of time memorialized before they were mud.
God's eye contracts, useless pupil, light tapered to a filament, sunless tunnel-end. The end of days is here. Night's arrow flies farther and farther into untempered dark. Black fogs filigree the horizon's brim, eating star-shards, cottoning the wattage. This is my mistress this zeroed hole of hours-- an abandoned well too broad for boardage. Echoes sour in the swallowing silts, spit inks infecting the gleaming trim of teeth-- the busted smile, chummed to scum and mockery. Such grins! My veins flash acid with the insult. Black suns behind my eyes blaze and arise.
I took away the candle's blackness and lit it. I took away the air's coolness and burned it. I took away her lips' emptiness and kissed it. I took away the cello's silence and played it. I took away this poem's sadness and had it.
Sitting outside a snow globe and looking in Sitting in a high airplane and looking out Sitting outside the toy store at Christmas and looking in Sitting on a sandy island alone and looking out Sitting sitting sitting and breathing in Sitting sitting sitting and breathing out
There's a snare in the faerie-dust. A blind exhilaration flounders at the peak, given sudden sight and no recollection of how eyes arise. History limits our daring by demarking just where and when we last catastrophied-- de-planing on some Utah salt flat when prepared for Parisian triumph. Such modest heights as homo erectus groaned to gain remain rosy and right to our reach-- just stretch enough, a human usual and useful.
How much would ever be enough to crowd-out doubt? Infinity's a pile of stackable chairs.... Always room for one more chair at the top, one more molded word. How little can we whittle attention to die convinced? The spotlight moves in the circus tent because all else is black and full of elephants. Love flatlines after the initial spike, and so is not cause enough to carry us. Uncle Tenzin, alert and loafing in his tennis shoes says this: Trim sail whatever the wind and begin.
Tense, but without a hinge to direct the tension, I ache for a doorway to anchor me, to make my ruination real, my ashes taste, to make the flint of my fiber flex and pinch me awake. I wait, vaporized napalm for the drift of ignition, the spark of a star chart-- the magnetized pin of direction in all this frittery wilderness, this haze of seeing only what stays, what repeats: staccato glockenspiel, black alphabets. Violence makes me visible, a steam arising out of the torrid void.
Fruittrees weighted with blodclots groan groundward.
Old autumn works my bones brown in the sunset. Another lamp is lessening. The last sky, and the last make envy inevitable. Such blues to cruise through! Flaked light flashes and flitters fallward, tumbled luminescence whose cry pries its beak black. . . . . Downed on the shushing swell of the Public Garden's plot of water, the swan floats with the puffed pride of an exile,-- a soul shorn from heaven, a crisp shaving whittled and whistled off of God's cloudy work table. Doughy children toss their sweaty fistfuls of manna at its profile. Too perfect, it sways the waves heavenward when it flees unlingeringly.
The end of the film rattles on its spool and only the light shows-- an image of death. Sprezzatura of sperm, with humans the only music from the swallowed notes-- lives born of silence. Civilization bets on being the coral bones shaping the latest scrim-scum of color-- ourselves above the dust. Division and cohesion rule the choice sets of our game theorem, procreation and death-- our pegs on the board. This leaf I eat tastes sandy, like everything since I sauntered from the tidal pool below.
Baudelaire put a pistol to his evaporated brain "Here, in the nowhere that is my everywhere, nadir, I take aim at the gods who love and oppress me." Turquoise swans on his cufflinks glitter; who knew that the internal exile of "not belonging" could be so bitter? Stale coffee gives his face its pained look of being stricken, of being struck dumb from the inside where the words had come ably bubbling as a spring of blood. "My hand was a steel spring and the meter ticked like rivets going in to the side of a ship; faultless preparations for a voyage left unmade. Now sloppy in my silk slippers, I putter in the parlor thinking through the reams of old talk (Nerval's neuralgic nose, Huysman's figure thin as in a wishing glass) old talk that had ascended to the chandelier's burning bough and disappeared...."
Cannibal children race and chime merciless against the flesh of age and time. Our soft bodies in gobbets get torn to feed their bright eyes, the tomorrows of their talk. Why not let them scissor us to ribbons? Brains may feed brains as thoughts feed thoughts. Brutal, the musky corruption of our hides once eiderdown and limber as a willow switch. Creased into the porch's awkward rocker, I talk until the stars seem plain enough to touch --the Dipper emptying its milkspill of fables.... a glitter of infinity good enough to drink. The child sleeps against my hairy shins; he'll have my hand-me-down brains and babble soon enough, he dreams. For now he must grow his razory mouthful of teeth.--I rattle quarters for the old raw one still wet beneath his pillow.
Like Poe's Purloined Letter, I find myself in public, plainly proffered. My back and sides and secret innards exist only as surmise-- the way a pious Chinese burns finial incense for the stacked racks of his crepuscular dead. Aging and insincere, each wayward wardrobe change announces a new soul, a new chance, grand as an imprisoned pasha or deliquescent drag queen haunting the docks. I maunder in the mirror, my fat face an overfull balloon hilarious with helium-- I recite Milton in pipsqueak in a jade smoking robe, too small to square up my embarrassment. I fit into my slippers the way a pearl lurks in a oyster, well-oiled irritant coated to a sulky glow. I am the hidden Imam of my household lolling in the fresh laundry, insouciant and clean as a cat. Never in my nowhere of days did I once suspect myself to be as guilty as I am.
In me need a dandelion weed hurts to push against this hush silent militant as dead, windless grass browned to burn to unlearn to unfeel in the empty field. Still, I will. Will wheel past dirt by dint of sheer need narrowed to seed and lifted dead to a whited head where a a list- less kiss floats motes out.
My song is just the same as a rock whistling down when thrown, or the same stone held unheard in shadow. To boil a kettle 'til articulation screams eviscerates the dark which water dreamed. Our moon makes night abound by its little light, a fey stone lamp that unshadows the map. Here you and I pause perplexed and like to die, weightless and wendless, ethereal and endless…. But what if all things of weight and dirt vanished with the Earth except we sing to drape the stone with a careful shadow and say the shadow casts the stone?
The sky's exquisite blacks starless expanse of acids a mobile of cut strings windless, airless, chaste void. My face reversed into a skull negative identity, sliced zero without the skin of thought, self shrived of subject. Sluice of sex, jerked pole, fish and its fatal hook a biology of bones masked by muscle the flint flirtation of pain.
Copyright 1990 by Gregg G. Brown
This Book Published By
BLAST PRESS
Every day there was a little less of himself, A moon of diminishing hues, Less and less, as he strode from the balustrade To the roses, each night a different leaf fallen, Each day a new ambivalence in the sun's assertions, Proverbial gold in a stale world Where the water tasted tinny and the tap spat Erratic chuffs of water in an empty cup And something or other had died a day earlier, Had died and had its poor death recorded, Less and less itself, or its wintery twin, Pacing from the terrace to the garden.
Calmed lightnings in the evening sky Shuttle, like warm humans, from sty to sty. If ever there were an evening readiest For comparisons, gilded in flashes, half real, It is this evening, blotched by light, Spumed with cloudy figures of our imagining. And so the erratic discharges of our thoughts Are themselves significant, Indicative perhaps of the circuits that we make Circling one disaster and another catastrophe, Symptoms of a discord so profound, Malevolent fragrances of black, pitted things, That long-fruited hopes have withered, and everlasting airs Crimp their silvery middles tiredly And the brazen horizon awes us a little less With its simmering magnificence Dull a little, and a little cold even in summer, Shunted to one side a little, and old and used. Wormy lightnings, restore the discords of your colorings; These are the makings of our end.
Is it a death of the self, or of the self's One projection, fatal ray, deadliest beam Unfolding from out of a stillness the self contains Like scissors, or a dove's placid wings, abruptly flown From brooded palms, this quiet that returns To the stone house, empty and white In a whiter air? Something deeply tired Has taken the place of the cows, Still morose, filling the entire structure With placid breaths, but what is it? Is there, in this fix of airs, an extinguishing anguish That broods from the barn, the tired reds Falling in the air under a Dutch hex And a soggy roof buckled by the weather, Something that ticks in the empty hayrick Or yawns from the creosote timbers Leaning together a little in the space left By the solemn breathing of the cows?
The pines in their shadows are distinguishing themselves Detached in a softly shaking emptiness Separate from themselves and their riveting greens, Voraciously vivid, beyond coughed words, Beyond a last leaf stretched in a last silence Like Hamlet at the vacant end of the meadow, Dying in summer, breathing a last breath In the final rye and grasses, seeing the trees loud sway At the rim of the yellow field, shaken Softly, softly, following a blue track through the pines.
Does the moon sail in its sumptuous heaven Disfigured by pity, Blindly tearful in an icy lair? To walk in the moonlight, to trod The verdant ambers, and to think of nothing, What sort of matter for a poem is that? Is it a matter of having nothing In the mind, icy sequester Of nothing, of nothingness layered in its own absence? Or is it a matter, rather Of nothingness icily conceived, icily meant? It is a matter of sinister consequence. To walk in the violet moonlight Discussing the moon from which it flares Disfiguring the roses Is a kind of nothing, a suave Hollowness that we may hold near Or suspend between us as we walk. O savage celestial, misty moon, Snarling in your lair, speak, If speak you must, in dismal syllables Some more blatant human meaning.
Picaresque birds cry hi-yi-hi From the lustered branch Festooned with ants. Crocodiles mustered in the bayou Flutter melodious tails Under oaks. Captains of the stratosphere march high, march high Stepping the squalid dews Of gaudiest clouds. When the marshal of the swamp cries hi-yi-hi It is his essences' valence Neatly strummed.
Standing a long time before the pond, in November Standing and looking at nothing Or looking and forgetting it is oneself that looks One begins to think That the sinewy residue at the bottom of the pond And the pond, and one's consciousness of the pond Moving over it like an enigmatic cloud Are one, that the famous watery veils are no longer Waiting to be torn, or that, torn already, They have left only these sinewy shreds, Gluey blacks thinly dispersed in the space Between the self, astutely observing, And the brown pane of water that lifts the clouds And the bottom of the pond.
When the house stands empty, the rooms disgorged Of all the crumpled laundry daily life imposes How conditional our maundering sorrows seem, Another routine, like sleep and death, Engaging our restless spirits As soccer in Brazil, the overnight weather, The uninhabited chair, weighted with fringes, That stares in the leaning mirror morbidly Or the dirty shovel that leans in the garage, A little old and uselessly, by a mended fishnet.
One has lived long enough Among rusted hills, and the solemn sunlight Spinning its steel shadows out of itself Over those hills, thickly gathered at the arbor Where matted vines still move on the latticework, Purple embrasures, seeming almost to speak In a light that is constantly fading, Shifting its emphasis, a sliding center That creeps over partial hills, Real where revealed, invisible elsewhere Full of hidden masses and interior kisses The way a sliver of grass is an entire field of grass, The way a man represents a man, Without feeling, in the inhuman landscape.
Dun Madonna, caped and veiled By modest night, the color of shale, Unclench the spools Of moroser weather Tucked by fingers beneath your vermillion cap. Unclench the spools Of angrier rains and redder tornadoes From your tense cap While the violet moon's sisterly sap Drips bip, and bip, and bap, bap, bap. Her slender tongue Unwrapped the whitest portions of the night. In the hills, green winds prevail.
The sun, scintillating cadaver, Refusing blue, or mauve, or sincerer purple For the great step he was to make that day Entirely out of himself and into the world Where dull mauves congeal, purples espouse darkly, And blues irresolutely go blank, Unpacked his scalding instruments in the dark Listening to the machinery of crickets, grown tired, The imperceptible brrr Of cold discomfort that enmeshed their foils And, tired himself, threw the rude cash of light In the moon's urinal.
The native muse of this rock
Wakes dumbly in the morning mist, and in the garden,
Attaches itself to a cockerel by thin tins
Of light from the bleakest planet;
Wakes, and stumbles about the house in a robe, having misplaced
Dawn's engines, the consciousness of a dawn
In the folded dark of sleep, last night
When, by the bedstand, it seemed a few syllables had made
life cohere.
The native muse of this rock, dumbly awake,
Preens against an obliterating light.
The butler of the weather, Essential lumin on a globe gone dark, Parsed us out upon the table With a certain ceremonious, filial delicacy. What we were we were, without detail, And so was he, tracing his investigations out The way a dachshund traces the motivating fuel Of furtive foxes darkly red. Even so, rising to its perch A bird of poignant recitations Cries sky and sky and sky In American barrenness. Each thing in the evening tried to find What sort of thing it was, and how it had arrived In the evening of which it was somehow a part As stars descended Over Florida.
The builder of cellos in solar weather Extracts a suavity from knots, true trills That mock the swilling catbird in his royal chair. But from what seed increased the pilfered wood? Farm boys and their milky maids grown old Must, as hale timbers rudely weathered, Must strain, and crack, and, in their scale, break Remoter love's fiercest chord, dwindling At length as even the grandest cock Goes rolling, listlessly, on to noon. II Blue rabbis without hats are chasing still What rabbis, bending at their lamps, construe To be the bright perennial, in renewing hues Emerging, out of so much ephemeral dust. Hearers of thunder in their flamenco capes Make much of its minor terrors and mimic hate; Dividing time between one disaster And another catastrophe, that kills, They are like drowned rabbis beholding doom In a stoven ship of their own imagining While blazing fish peek about their bones.
You can see the earth shake, no doubt, Its myriad images In your broken glass. You can feel it, no doubt, In your tenebrous nails. Or in the nervous laughter that the sky Shakes down. Pointed voice, mixing blues and browns In a vivid mash that riffles the eye, These solids, and these, Remain impenetrable. O how I regret not having killed The mouse in my childhood. Enfold me, lucid muds, I would go cloaked in earth the way a duck Dons water.
for Amy Disconsolate in the deepening weather Of a miserable December, Cincinnatus made a house of song Pinching out the solar imperative From other, more miraculous strains That salted the winter air And coated the simple ice on the porch. Without aids in impossible weather, Cincinnatus made a house of song And took up, in primitive measure, A primitive abode.
Oh let the light be broken That soaked and solemn Out of the sun's mouth spoken Climbed the virgin's hide And the grave of her face. Be buried in the stolen stone Each word of sight That from the tongue's priested Memory is severed Hunkered in the seed of the cold. Oh let the light be broken Over shackled genesis Until the husks have spoken Word and weed and sizzling stem Out of the grave of her face Alive again, and the once burning Turn of the world Stumbles back to ochre. Let man and woman and infant dread Out of harrowed heart Lain long and solemn Step from the narrow incision Speaking in leap years The carved distresses Scourged in the drop of a tear's face Hanging and grieving After its home of fruit Under bruited tree Bruised and fishnet against the sky Solemnly detached as a leaf's face Ghosted on stones Waiting for the last hanged man To dive alive at last.
Less and less sure, O soul, the rain Repeats its residuum Blanking church bells with its ultimate referent: Itself, or some other final thing That bears the buffets of ceaseless existence Like a paper that rolls over in the wind Or the wind that rolls the paper, which, Startled itself, is full of paper sounds The mud on the moon illumes. The rain is rasping against the panes. A dark, familiar change, Elusive elysium, starts at the edges of the ear, Chewed by flies in a forgetful sun, Hollow as a father's falsest word Before drunken dinner, sheds its drunkenness On a few, familiar objects. What word will ward these mute excursions?
One bakes and waits in the roisterous sun Tapping out universal time with a particular foot, A principle shoe, worn leathers unable to reflect The merest shard of all that solar crisis Burning in the sky and in the apperceiving chest Like boxed jewels winking out of showiest velvets. One waits for the desert to be done with itself For the holy sequoias to drop their arms, One more martyr, torn down by storms, Reduced by the sun to one skull of dreams Throwing one more shadow away from the hill Like a river that flows out of the mind at last. This earth of cakes and sweet excrescences Lets us eat the loam, lick saccharin sands From our lips, taste smeared blazons of cotton candy, Raspberry and chocolate, the florid saps We bite from the tree, laden with glistering fruits We ourselves have made, and ripened in each eye.
What has life's bitter disappointment brought Laid in a narrow, breathless bed? Shall we curse all our drunken, muddy lot Lain with long bones of the dead? At the end of a rifle or parting stream Pursued by a pursuing dream Man wakes up to find his enemies again, The end of dreams, and all friends dead. What stays hid in the marrow there, Thrust deep underground? Things purposed in the unpurposed air Die when those men are dead. Whether father or brother still pursue Their work, or others' work, I do not know; I read it on a narrow, upright stone Cast by the long bones of the dead. Fathers sacrifice long-loving sons To a nameless, breathless bed; Stand we under an island sun Or lie with long bones of the dead?
Socketless and sailor In the world's winded veins Scented genesis and coffinsilk I mock the soberest cockerel Diving from the prism-spitting Pinnacle of the world's mast Uselessly singing And rant like a wronged girl All my sweetest notes Over ignorant houses Slumbered in death and morning light. Out of the closeted shout this echo beats Features of a sinning man on tin More pressed to anguish in a dial's sigh Than any victim of time heretically cried Has been bludgeoned by suns Or a pauper's bliss been Crimped in a penny's fear Or any tale of the world Cauled in a scorpion's sting Has twisted its smile on a man's side Or any climbed tirade Spoken in wishes That nature's weary fabulist Set down. Graveturning in wishes As a wish is a kiss My manbones shriek In blooded inks Out of a rage welled and calmed As any bird's ratcheted turn Over the thumbing sea at dawn Crawls at clouds In inching desire as each wingbeat clips Over measured cessations Chewing ships and bones to flour. Out of each brick The cold dawn shakes And each root tooth of daisies Cragged in the fingering spring Floods pulse and fever To ramshackle gods agog As saints in whispers Each aghast their closed wings keep Singing of statuary And the boiling joy Of the devil's boyish kiss. So I this saintly mort cry down And each nailed lip kiss Quagmired in hatred Tried and hung, on pentecostal cross and hatch Birthing the blood plant Insisting in stitches For this world the word's wound. So I, crumbling on windfall, On sold bones and the tarot told Watch hatred disaster, man and god fall, And all loved things end.
On undemanding ground Shot through with hollow sounds Bird or bullet make Or some other keen cry, I take This man for model, though in truth A small man of the town; and although His grandfather was a thief And his father worse than that, I respect his grief, for what else can I That wander in the clay? There was a man had died Frozen to the mountainside And, nothing in his climbing pack And less upon his withered back, He ascended the wintry peak Sang a rich bar tune and died. It was out of pride The old man had died. He gripped a flute, knew God's great lie, And had a clarity in the eye. And at the last, a damned wretched gaiety Suffused his frame. Mountain echo upon echo Hollowed out his fame; Dying, trying once again To empty himself of troubles by the score-- "This joy of death Stops the breath." In the trees, excited laughter; And after, the silence.