Birth defies belief. Love brings grief. Death, relief.
Reaching After Realness
I ask: how do I make my dented self
beautiful
with this old pencil?
~~Daniel J. Weeks, Self-Symphonies
Our legs look broken when light bends them in the swimming pool. Once our heads are under, immersed in the experience of wetness, the illusion disappears. Our legs are restored to us in their wholeness, where they can be repurposed as impromptu fins to propel us elsewhere. Which of these sets of legs are our “real” legs? The broken set, the restored set, or the Aquaman set?
Entering a poem is like entering that other, underwater world. We are restored to a wholeness the pain of life and its deceptions has convinced us is missing. But, we can only hold our breaths so long before our imaginations burst! And still we go down like clockwork into the dark otherwhere of metaphor, easing past the shallow end of simile, our imaginations and lungs aching. However dangerous the journey, we will not be denied our diving, our entry into depths.
The act of writing is a way for poets to break the surface tension, to transform and explore with all of their sets of legs at the same time–water-skimmer and octopus at once. The act of, not just imagining, but creating the distortion of a written record, a pool for others to enter, is part of the mystery. This writing things down, however, is not what may be called a clarification; that’s a mistake many neopyhte divers make, arriving back at the deck of their exploration vessel with the bends.
Let me propose that both imagination and reality are equally real, equally imaginary. A grown-up Velveteen Rabbit has a smoking habit, perhaps; perhaps the dourest accountant over-charging on our tax prep is a weekend balloonist– or, more daring yet– a plummeting parachuting enthusiast.
Whether this need for othering ourselves, appropriating the ocean’s indigo, pretending a purpler sky, being winged in imagination whenever we watch a bird in flight, is the result of an evolutionary symbiosis of inner and outer selves or some kind of meshuggeneh co-dependency, I cannot tell. But I know that it cannot be otherwise. Real or unreal, one hand will always be reaching after realness–a stuffed, velvety rabbit dangling from the other hand. •
Gregg Glory July 4th, 2017
I Confused by Honeysuckle, Childhood Misunderstood
Memory is liver than sight. ~~William Carlos Williams, Shadows
Night, Night
I sneak out to the fluid night Sky bedizened and soft grass Forever under my walking Trees besides assaying the hush Easing my looking, my seeing, Stealth in each threading step Holding stones I ache to unown Throw where vastnesses hide A lurker unloved among cosmos Among toads sowing yawps Into a black that is matte, that recedes As far as pupils' going knows Blue iris shuttered on nothing But stars' particulate light Fine as dust distilled Falling in my hair, on my face... As if the green, rackety backdoor Fixed and taped against winters And loosened each year for spring When mellow all comes welcome in, Now as I pass through to dark, Creaking the lintel, begins again To show the old summer places-- Constellations sleep had forgotten Opening straight into outerspace. •
Tree of Death
I climb the tree of death My father climbed, his tree Growing in the cistern of a pool Drained for a winter longer Than any he knew before Where his bald cranium nailed The roots with a cross of blood. The tree grew with weeping, Dad, And I am climbing it, limb over limb From that empty pool, the cross That lifts from your skeleton Once quick with fat and wit Fleshed with a scorn of smiles Lies that made you rich as sin And lost your sons forever-- How you derided the sticks of time! The sticks lift above me as I climb A brachiform blot on the stars, The knock in the ribs the heart keeps My only guidepost. •
The Niagara of Mothers
The maternal smell of water, That arrogant brake where The Falls drop into nothingness... Pillar mirrored by pillar and all Roaring white a colossal edifice In motion. Where an edge Should appear blindness remains My hands empty before me Reaching. Billows explode like ghosts Panting ripping toward the past, The strained water--rapids Giving and failing like mothers Everywhere, and you No different, no worse. Mother, I would eat every lie, Every truth, to see for one minute You again! A crowded brace Of mossy wreckage is teething The rubber bow before me: The glass plank hanging Over nothingness, deafness Roaring and then-- •
A Visit
divine sparks or burning calories
bodies and souls are on fire
The so-little graves of parents And the parents before them…. Are they only doused flames The used-up candle wax sloughed Off, or resistless matches Held bravely aloft in the dark Tom Sawyer in his pirate cave Digging at crevices for treasure? I close my eyes for sleep And my flashlight finds you Instantly alive as Polaroids In pantsuit and dungarees, Bitching your way toward divorce Even now, even in death Even in the dreams I sought For solace. I toe the muddled Earth between them carefully Mother here, Father there Looking for daisies among the weeds. They lay there looking up and Talking: Pity us! Let the past Drop from our bones like teeth Drip from our bones like wax Or fade at least to pastel at last So that you may paint your days By what wayward light you find And not these childish flares-- Vituperations, curses, our Forever unfinished bonfire! •
Sprung
A spring resists its winding A road would rather be left alone A ballerina's slipper doesn't need A restless foot to complete it-- Entropy has ensigns of its own Signposts of rust, dusty accretions A look worn to translucence Like the detective's trick mirror Awaiting its awful candidate.... Fifty has given me a face Thin as a sail, as changeable Wanting only its original Darkness, the rubber bathtub That squealed me here, applying Disasterous brakes in a panic, Leaning into soft headlights That showed the indifferent road The ballerina's empty slipper And 10,000 empty days ahead-- But what could I do about it Sprawling in the icy nurse's hands The red spring in my belly Already loaded tight? •
An Overturned Canoe
Under an overturned canoe We kept tacked in lieu of a dock On the edge of the old reservoir Welled like a waterbead overbrimmed, A height of welted skin but cool To the touch, I found my breath Echoey with surfaces among the ribs Of the overturned canoe. Fibrous light rooted in somehow Casting lines above me as I breathed In all that hollowness no one Visited but me, the lines strange As neon hieroglyphs racing bright Over my hands as I reached up Tangling in their starry business That swam the sky inside with me, An intruder in the web. •
What Drought Brought
When our reservoir was holding Its breath, low, baring a shamble Hash of sticks, spills of pebbles, Dead trees like ribs of black water Or inverted umbrellas lost Straying in a storm that stayed, I'd slide on my dungareed ass To walk along the sandy skirt And saw how water corroded The world, the whole overcast woods Hanging precariously revealed As cloud bellies, wattles of roots Lumped above the nothingness I walked, fringed with iffy dust… Fragments of the caveworks still Wet with birthing and shy of light. I'd spend hours kicking stones All around the res's tender rim Wide as an eyelid limned in sand Getting the secret feel for once Where water had lapped and stripped Underground things unshadowed And made uncomfortably known-- Trees that couldn't run succumbed Spending years sometimes just leaning Over the horrible mirror. •
Seasons in the Sun
How strangely the artifacts of childhood Grow in grown imagining! When work Lapses like a gasp at dusk, a red wagon Rolls by the blue inflated pool Suzy splashed in, her puffy hair in knots. After dinner, among the table's bric-a-brac, Eyeglasses aside, the trees we ran through rise Acre on acre between the plates, games Of chase and war, indians and aliens. Vying like twin stags in the forest brake We pawed and clashed, cracking dead branches For antlers, bleeding after the prize Of who Suzy would take to the antic dance Beside her pink plastic Barbie player that spun Her one black record scratched to static: Seasons in the Sun. •
The Golden Keyhole
We hid crouched, bunched to see What Sally had got on and what Took off, all those summer Days ago when no one knew Anything about girls, or boys Being dogs who wagged our tails And punched each other quietly Away from Sally's bathroom door Her brother had corralled us toward With stories beyond our ears Of slope and dip and fluffed cleft Darkly lapping like a wave Crashing us to pieces while We kneeled in mute accord Breathing the golden keyhole's steam. •
Little Red Wagon
when the thirst for love first came
it was not calm or tame
Pell-mell and hell-all down the hill The little red wagon we rode on Skirted roots that promised gashes Skittled swaths of pebbles in a spray As the hill steepened its deepness And the battered path narrowed, A yellow ribbon in a dowdy wood Dappled for hand-held dawdling The naming of leaf and birdsong Not this rattled race to a quick crash Her smile big on my shoulder To nibble an ear while I steered With flailing handle in hand A gasp pushed back to teeth Jarring our muscles in dusts With an aftertaste of toothpaste And foretaste of ecstasy As we wheeled the last hairpin Squealing until the tears came-- And laughter after as we tugged Disheveled shirts and skirts back To playtime's regular order. •
Penumbras
The grass burned with summer's green. We burned like grass With an end-of-school-fooling- Around-the-playground fire Waiting for the eclipse. A midday moon was coming Like Pac-man to eat the sun! Our science class stood in a circle Holding squares of smoky glass-- Horizons looked a moonscape Our tree a hooded visitant The school a blade of cave. At first the world went dimmer A weeping edge of cloudburst Closing one slow eyelid over us... And then coldness seeping, a wave A snowy wind from nowhere Hastening through the grass. Half the sky turned turquoise, Lapis lazuli wetted by a cloth Before we caught the sun Begin its blinking off: Its penlight kept getting whiter And smaller than a soul While a line of midnight skirmishers Advanced across the field; Our school was disappearing fast Under the eclipse's dome! When we were fully underwater The birds forgot their song-- The silence kept us looking up At wild ill-lit fins of sun Surrounding a dot of blackness, A circle like ourselves. •
Cutting Copper, Welding Voices
When the welder's laser torch Puts a blue tongue to the throat Of pipe length, a thin scrying Hisses pixel dust out of the pipe As it reddens in its vise-- When the cut is almost through When ruddy heat at one end Hurries hot air through the flue Dark arroyos of longing open A soft moaning loosening A low vibrato bass note Coming from the whole length Of scissored copper tubing The hopeless hollow sobbing Of a boy Not wanting to be heard. •
Handmedowns
Daily our fights like falling axes Felled love that buds in brothers Love that holds small hands like hafts Chopping winter wood in unison, Love that shelves all razorthin leers Of anger too high to easily reach-- Instead he teased snakestrikes over Nothing, over lies and pride, An inch chalked on a doorframe, His fist with a reach like a whip A slap that sounded like laughter On cheeks red as slaughter Until trust like a crumbcake was Eaten, and your mouth full of spiders Cursed the dapper little fellow You first hugged, first learned to walk behind In his bleached and patched handmedowns To playgrounds and ponds and friends Who waved and climbed while you waited Alone, a little ignored, looking up Under high masts of sycamores His voice calling all pirates to battle And everyone in the neighborhood Crying ‘Aye, aye!' but you. •
The Realness of Velveteen
At 7, the Velveteen Rabbit told me Real is a thing that happens to you Inflating himself off the page Left ear, right ear, a fuzzy balloon Squealing alive into raw moonlight Decolorizing my room like Black-and-white TV into moon Valleys and moon hills, the fish A moon fish circling her lunar bowl. Two big feet thumped bopping Onto the polished floor, his rabbity Glance vulnerable as bubbles-- I looked down in surprise unfolding Sleepy in my bluebird PJs Watching his whiskers twitch Unrolling my arm to hold his hand (Or had he reached up to slap His long velour paw into mine?). Howsoever, barefoot together Floating over whirlpool bedsheets We became realer and realer and realer Like clouds do when their shadows Darken your house, a shiver arriving In the middle of limitless day And walked out the window talking. •
Confused by Honeysuckle
Where tentworms had set up the dog Plunged through blindly his nose afire after The wet stick chucked amongst all them flowers Gowning down to grass like a giant's wig Old Dukey stuck with that ratsnest cobweb Blob of gossamer grossness, a felt patch Battened in his mane and over one eye While I hold him steady carefully combing Silken gauze off in knots from his pelt-- A mistake yes I'm sure of it for my part The throw all awkward at elbow and wrist Can't blame the stupid dog too bad really Dumb dog's just gonna sit there and watch me Catch it with the switch when Dad checks on us: Don't worry Dukey I won't hit you for it Confused with honeysuckle is all we were Really if you think about it fair and square The honeysuckle luminous today That had been beige grey just yesterday A riot of blossom and the scent like candy Amid what yellow galaxy of stars-- As soft goodness as any nighttime Mommy kiss When pillowy dreams come sifting in like mist And now this unaccountable mess jesus My hands all full of broken silver threads The comb wrecked and suddenly I can feel The worms' irritated circling on my hands. •
Cold Burial
One melancholy duty with a shovel Was chipping free bodies of birds Who threw themselves like snowballs Against our bank of 4x6 ft. windows Sunset after sunset thinking They're flying home to nests they know Through what looked a bit of woods Real trunks repeated back in glass Hanging over a gorgeous splash Of frozen reservoir so white We played there wearing sunglasses, Cool skiers in ads for spearmint gum. Every evening like fireworks Birds thumped stopped against the view, Strange fish flat to aquarium walls Leaving behind halo puffs of dust Lingering like fingerprints, then Flying off shaken and confused In a tangle of awkward wings Not ready to abandon air. Others hit the snow jingling, Icicles dismantled in a wind, Small ribald scribbles of color laid At odd angles like a swimmer Photoed in Sports Illustrated, then Hopped afoot in one blink, one twist Flying away with a warning: Not all woods are woods indeed Nor home always where we expect Flying fast to beat the night And save our necks for sleep. Next day I always found the worst Popsicled overnight, and carried Now by me to the frozen pile A pyramidal igloo sort of pile Bigger every day until spring When wetwork and a proper hole Began to be dug--until then I Nestled them gently down with "Sorry" And a shovelful of fresh snow. •
Greggo the Great
I still remember when I first Saw a fan of cards like a wingspan Flutter from a magician's tuxedo: One fan, two fans, dozens fluttering, And from his upturned hat Into which a pitcher of milk Had threaded, doves--doves white As milk, their fantails crested Like wheels of cards appeared From the nowhere of elsewhere Black potentialities and spaces Emptiness like a new moon hiding The full moon in its shadow-- The trick of it invulnerable And real. Afterward, backstage, I ran up to him, up to Gordo the Great, who simmered with the smell Of aftershave and success And asked if I, I too.... "If you, too, can be a magician?" He flicked a business card For his downtown magic shop From behind my ear with a whisk And a wink, into my palm, saying "The first thing you need, kid, Is a really good stage name." •
II
Earthquake Minor,
Middle-Age
Explained
... bet w/ humanity
not against it
that's the kind of animal you are
not a robot, an angel
~~Jacko Monahan, One-Legged Poetry
Showering
The world slides off in steam Not fire, not ice; sweat runneled To a drain, and that is all. Skin snaps like a fresh umbrella And I am lily-new, lily-white In a rainfall of feathers Delighting the aging body Fold by fold that leap by leap Cartwheeled backyard sprinklers Hammered puddles in rubbers Through every storm that boiled Into cloudburst.... The world's no more Than a sentence away from youth, From death. This rain has come before. •
Shaving
I run the razor on my face And wood shavings appear Around my bare feet, gathering, gathering, As the mirror's camera records My changes. Whoever I am Becoming requires this quick Cutting away of old selves Face by ragged face, the razor Sharp and smooth, etching Occasional detours into highways The way a river basin ravages Itself into existence, in a new Groove among the ancient hills. My past lies in bleeding curls, Frets my wet feet--my ankles Are covered! And my jagged face Is guessing its way out of its Riverine box, a man's face Not yet ready for death Slaps aftershave on a totem That slept in the treetrunk's grain All the days until yesterday… It's rich itch of potential Bearded by bark, by years Adding ring on ring of routine In active indifference. Today, My palm wipes condensation Like drawing a curtain-- With a shiver of hatchets A new, raw face arrives Chopped into the pole's Resurrected top. •
The Bag of Oranges
Looking up through blue drafts My drifting boat spins, Knocks through narrows From the weedy wreckage Of an industrial wharf Wheeling to where breakers open In the flat-bottomed bowl Of simmering ocean. I left the dock I don't know when Confident as a oarlock A bag of emergency oranges Hauled along for safety's sake If the wind grew frisky (Their scent a sack of sneezes). Now sky in endless arcs Roofs my journey Of hairpin skids and lapses Where water and weather Give no more guidance Than a drowning man's Weathervane arms-- I see that I am lost But not how I got here, Sense I am moving But not my motive. My rowboat's boundless arrow Spins like a broken compass; The bag of oranges At my feet Is nearly empty. •
A Dance?
The average hours of usual day. Of course it is a dance, of course. •
Holy Mackerel
for Gabor Barabas
Shellacked to a bullet sheen Set mantelpiece high and aimed For the Azores or thereabouts Where fins inhabited life Eye more than a glass bauble Scales more glittering than paint Alive to plunge and feel the weight Of water water everywhere, a bliss Of frisson shuttling the sea's loom As I pace the shallow fireplace Weaving memories like wires Recalling taut strike and strife Tapping my pipe in Morse code Tossed between ashes and ocean A fisher admiring his rigid prize Visitor eye to museum eye Archeologist and the mummy-cloth, Fingers flush against Pharaoh's belly Lingering where silvering scales Fall that flashed a fist for years A wake arriving after each flash A thousand wakes together like a flag Woven in meaning and motion Invisible threads thrashing, streaming Pulling the living garment wet From the rack--supple, shoulderless Slim as in a dream but real Their choir of buried voices Liquid in every ear. •
Turtle Poem
An old turtle crossed west A primordial stretch of highway, wide Where cars came on in thunder Under sun's dead lightning whiteness. Time lay flat beneath his feet That liked a sempiternal heat Stepping to keep his slow appointments Made before his egg was digged And left mooning in the earth. He is as a wheel of fire Eating the strangeness of time Eagerly in mincing licks! For hours he walks the asphalt Pushes grass with his hawk beak Seeking mud and reeds and release In doppler ripples of the old pond Where he sighs sinks down and shows Shyly until nighttime only His nostrils above the waterline. •
Crossing
and the seagull flying like a crucifix
~~Emanuel di Pasquale
Walking into my long morning Shadow where I stretch Where tarry pilings stand Like me, like me charcoal-touched By shadow, anchoring A walkway flatness for my foot Where sand is slipping always And water winning landward Throwing coins of tideline light, I saw an arrow's smallness A seagull's crooked cross Crossing me with shadow wings (With shadow wings endowing) Where forward wind had slowed Him, then he lifted slowly over The glassware of the sea Taking my dark wings away To rumors only ocean knows And keeps in a deepness more Than me--though ocean deepness shone More homey, more close-in, more Interior after Our long morning walk. •
Dream Split
My head a bowling ball again Trying to make the split for the win Fingers stiffed in mouth and eyes Her engagement ring in my nose Then screaming red down the lane The room ass-over-tea-kettle spinning Blond boards blood-slippery, waxed A mile long before I knock Pins apart, skinning my forehead (That'd been kissed to sleep last night) To its nobbled and native skull The one x-rays show rivered With fine lines and cracks, the plates Where thought first stitched to thought Hanging my face like a grass skirt From its ball, a curtain which winks Showing live eyes, dead teeth and the whole Vaudevillian rigamarole That directs my life like a puppet show Has me bleat ‘love' and mew when scratched Obey all traffic signs, dodge hazards And generally walk erect when My recalcitrant head's attached And not hefted on elbow and aimed A pinball flippered in an unknown game Rolling, rolling, rolling. •
Metabolic, Metaphoric, Metamorphic
Paint slops, and there's a daisy. Another slop, and the reedy stem Fattens to a skeleton a brush Emboldens into form, into firm Outlines on a canvas, all those Acres of whiteness that yet need To be invented like the night Gestating day in its egoless cradle To see what shapes darkness dreams Revealed filleted by the dagger day, And changing even then through shadow Rotations as a sundial tells the hour And events defeat imagination And love and hate and envy, pride Deride their painted lineaments Besotted by chaos as Rorschach blots Until dreams carve the mystery again, Put paper people at their marks Assign the scripts and invent the day Like a play that only needs rehearsal, Conviction that the fiction's real this time-- And we awake fresh as paint to watch Day go incorrigibly awry. •
A Jazz Enjambment
A jazz voice never listened for Emanates in syncopation From behind the closed door Inside a littered taxicab Stale as wet cigarettes I duck to enter. "Where Are you headed?" the driver Says over the river of radio The two voices braiding In my ear live and lithe Inviting as in a new-spun Dream a night journey From the low-watt dimness Of the shut door behind me On to where the roadway Lies slick and glistening, Whispers of earlier rain leaving The black wide pupil brimming With overmuch of emotion almost Save that the jazz voice busking Broken hearts brings strange Comfort, pain easing pain Telling me whatever dream Is rolling like a tear tonight Has rolled this way before.... Forlorn elms and watchful skies No strangers to what muted me To what had those radio voices Unspool like talking smoke I could inhale, inhale, inhale. •
The Entire Sky
The gentlest racket
The rattle of a doorlatch
Opening to beach fireworks
Come so soon again
While my quiet world grew
Warm as two rheumatic hands
Holding my face all those
Cold years ago.
Grandmother,
You kept this house swept
For company, the model boats
In naval trim as Granddad had,
Fresh zinnias on the tabletop,
Lemonade twisted by hand
And left sweating--once
A bee struggled to his sweet
Death in the glass-cut pitcher
Like Snow White in her glass
Coffin, but a bee instead.
Tonight, the entire sky
Will whistle and celebrate
While I stand on the bare porch
Of this now disordered house.
My life feels abandoned,
A boat spinning from its dock
Into darkness, the tide out,
The stars a chaos overhead….
So I think to turn back inside
And slide into sleep when
The first crack arrests me, and
The whole bowl of the sky
Fills with zinnias. •
Questions Are Beautiful
The wry neck of a swan Wrenched into a questionmark Answers as the beautiful always do A question with a question: --Are you graceful only on the water? Can you read what's written there? --Does your flight echo the soul's after death? I've never died before, have you? Still as a lotus on the pond They float like clouds, like blossoms Mirroring heaven, while beneath Black feet revolve dark, strong webs. Taken altogether they are An image of contemplation That pushes the mind's mirror With black feet, strong dark webs. Fifty-five years and the pond remains Crowded with beautiful swans And questions; here the sunset grows More lustrous as the minutes pass, An ember edging the water's tongue. Half-lifted swans batter their wings, Shoulders like a swimmer breaking free, Necks straight out into darkness. •
Earthquake Minor
Notice of it came like a nail Jerked from a new-cut two-by-four A spiral squeal as if the walls Were papier-mache, fingered At the seams, tossed unloftily As last week's overtipping trash That hit the kitchen floor rolling, A pup obscenely frisking; Water hiccuped in the goldfish Bowl, lensing the orange fish Into a convex abstract. A neighbor at her balustrade Shouted "Earthquake!" her infant Swaddled close and looking up Babyishly at a cloud. •
Botanical Gardens
A thousand swats of water Stagger leaf to leaf In the Botanical Garden dome The jungle flora breaking Into blossom like a swimmer: Helliconia, orchids, monkey brush, A thrashing passionflower Stigmata-red and starred, Glow among moroser leaves As we navigate the catwalk And consult our heavy guidebooks To ogle this pulpy Venusian Terrarium in Brooklyn As stranger voices skreak, and Hidden wings restlessly emerge: Macaws, cotinga, oropendolas Unlimbering their leider To tattoo our eardrums as we Climb a ladder stairway up among Throngs of heavenly feathery hosts Whose language is not our own-- Clear panes of sky have exiled Pure spirits with us sinners Condemned to eat the bread and Birdseed sweated from our brows So hot to hear them singing Enchantments like a new beginning Before brother beset brother Before a sword bolted the gate, Turning slowly the great green leaves Wherein we read their world. •
The Parachutist
"Love is letting go," I hear, Slapped through the cutout Into a sprawl of cloudwrack Imprecise as serried dreams. The air pins my limbs back And pressures a rictus grin As I swallow curls of screams: Such beauty! Such beauty! Idealized shadows hang blue As Plato's ruthless smile Enlivening the skies. Below, The world's laid out like a grave Ploughed for seed, all that Iowa Loam beneath clouds' pageantry, The wind so loud it is silence. I never felt my body more than In that moment of first falling; My eye all eye, my stomach A helium balloon, hands claws Legs stiff in a sculpted vice. I realized all I was was a clod Of earth--misplaced, tossed up-- Out of my element among White spires, candelabra touched By some genius of whimsy As I fell my way back home. •
Rembrandt’s Faces
Are the most human, rueful And ruined of masterpieces Chafed into paper with a sad Wit too aware of time and time's Humiliating erasures, pulling From the wreck the sensual Wrinkles of Diana at Her Bath, Her rust-colored puckers piled Like a couch too long sat upon Thoughts too deep and grave to give Voice to their sorrow, words to marrow Until only a Zen charlatan's Shinbone flute is left tootling The haunting airs of fieldhands Which Rembrandt also drew, noting A muscular rangy strength Bundled arms and thighs bursting Bunches of blood grapes unpicked Weighty with harvest, while in those Hands so sensitively rendered hangs The black heavy arc of the scythe Swinging the wheat headless, Stroke after stroke of sketched wheat Under a crayon sun. •
Walking the Talk
Conversations rise around Us like hossanahs Flock after the Ark Of the Covenant-- A blessing that bathes The ears that see The souls it blesses. Words for the mendicant, Words for the wife, words For the ticket-taker Standing at attention at The theater of your life. Weavings, meanings, they Hammock us in wholeness, Two peas in a pod Of words, words, words. Asleep or swaying We huddle together In our sheltering web-- Not one, not one thread Of our woven home Would I snap. Together We've talked the decades real, Together our time Abided. Together We pull the needle clean Of the housing shroud; Together hoist up To our narrow, old Shoulders the Covenant. •
In a Parkinglot
Workmen in orange vests Hammer at a cracked drain Seeking beneath the grate The vat blackness where water Like a shadow goes only Lately its been sitting here Stiff as a mirror the sun Beats his gold face upon. •
Landing in Bed
a country far away as health
~~Sylvia Plath
Illness, Illness, a brimful life Cancered, ulcered, reduced, abridged To a flat plate of licked gruel Stinks and sinks and embarrassments Unending as a diaper rash, The grinding doing of others who Orbit you, you who were Pluto, a Planet demoted to a sick cot Down a few organs at last count, A chore for the devoted. You issue mewling protests, how Even memories go icky grey In the daily wash, how only the steel Bedframe is real, the mealy Pillow yellow with unworked sweat While dreams of drowning drip-drip To wake you in a gasp of tubing, Walls cubed as an Escher etching Receding in series, a white mirage.... The whole house of cards kicked Flat on its back--and you too, clueless, Sure to the end that death's just That fuzzy, unfazed after-light After a flash. •
Michigan Lumber, 1886
The saw blade worked white to lick Dust from the living core of wood. Held taut between us double-dutch It's rhythm slithered like a lullaby Of bees cozied in closed peonies. Sweat that felt the wind kept wary For what might come to pinch our work, Turn the day to waste and wreck the blade. The tree was balanced now on less than half Of what had held it lofty all those years Before we came to use its strength for houses. With a nod we doubled rhythm now To surprise the pine that couldn't run away And keep our luck to leeward. We'd apprized It'd fall between two garland oaks And lay obedient to be timber. At a crack, We knew we'd psalmed the solemn child Asleep, and sang our saw blade backwards With a twang to watch all sleepy nature sway Like a woman dancing for her man A moment--and then the horrible crash like Tearing ears. And silence like a blanket after that. •
The Haskell Invitational
for a quintet of poets
A constellation of friends In a Pegasus configuration Abet my summer writing jag As a fence abets a horse's Jumping form, legs strained To effort and flight, flashing Most where crossed Highest where hindered In the muddy brown stream Of his strong running From the starter's gun. Beyond their stoppages I canter in circles, The sacrosanct circuit Their stars have lit for me: Speech like a bettor's prayer, The finish-line a typewriter ribbon That breaks against my breast When a poem's intoning Is done. Each critique sticks Like a jockey's whip And foams my lips, the blinders Tight beside my eyes that The little man above me might Wear a new hat, I a hoop Of flowers like a yoke. All night I watch my brothers Revolve in races of their own, Myself a glimmering participant-- Summer's final star, perhaps, Shining under a coronal Flare of tail. •
Circumloquacious
Clouds rumble their thunder bubbles Piling nimbus on nook and crag On etiolating white tendril where Shadow shoots like a handkerchief Patting away effort and sweat With cool assurances of talk. I talk my way around the lengthening day A simmer of indifferences Affinanced to the lazy scuds above Reluctant to come again to ground The dark of earth, the insistence Of grass... I am a brush that moves Among watercolor clouds.... Such afternoon summeriness Has left me leaning On dreams, the rifted Fabric of skies Tall as my leaning eyes. •
Cry of the Cat
The cry of the cat Fat as a baby's cry Pricks me from sleep Up the long slope of day A ladder of witless pegs And serial embarrassments-- The stubborn self shudders away, A red stain licked on thick Bruising splinters. Quickly everything is gotten Ready and dispensed with; Speedily the road rewinds From work to home. The cry of the cat Takes my coat, seats me. Like a grinning cannibal I Dine on the dinner of myself: My heart a purple plum Gone splayed with waiting, A liver in ribbons, lungs Two worthless wordless sucks Of grey breath, a foot Coy and uncallused as A princess' palm. I eat until the sky Is black. •
Smoking the Pipe
Pulling open the tobacco bag To a stir of leaves Autumnal brown but moist As breath, the careful Mouth of the pipe Roots among rummage For a shovelful of coal I bring to my lips The bit between my teeth As a feather of fire Comes instantly close Enough to start a star In the bowl of Cosmos That had been blackness only While I inhale The furious engines As deep as lungs can go Without remitting breath From lips as round as song Which sends a signal Of heavenward smokes In spiral galaxies, a wreath Of woven laurels I dream may yet come As I shut my eyes To taste it all again, Redolent and resonant. •
Dark Cypresses
Dark cypresses without sound, Soft upright voids, lofty flames Erasing the mission of light Standing as you do for night No matter how burnished the day, Cut-outs hanging substanceless! Where are you going, where arriving? You black pantlegs on the march You dancers moving in plush rows In shoeless midnight dancing Touching the dreamer's cheek With moon shadow and snow shadow Drawing darkness from what depths-- Vaporous chill of damp earth, Living earth we know nothing of Who wander its surfaces like grass Noisy and dry in our myriads Like grasses perishing innumerably Full of the empty sounds of wind Passing, passing Beneath your great, grown silences Dark cypresses without sound, Under sigils of your bonfire. •
Among the Whales
Far off the port-beam sightings Of sainted spray, feathers High as houses, rollicking Toward the tourist powerboat Like quilled teams Of Shakespeare's copyists Hammering away at Hamlet. Soon enough their acres Of skin were all around us, A smell of industrial rubber Enclosing us in a dome As the spouts circled. Hills of humping muscle, Ailerons of fatal flukes Dark as midnight soil A midnight rain had wetted-- Sheets of living tissue Near enough to slap, it seemed, And we enraptured in the dream. Down came the feathered Waters, the bowing plumes Of drum majors among us Dancing a disparate rhythm On the slick deck. And it was hot, hot as a kiss, Hot as blood the spume spray Splatting about us in blots Viscid as afterbirth, And we grinned like kids Shamelessly running, running Through tumescent sprinklers-- No awe, no shame at all in all that Fantastic whiteness blown Hissing around us. •
III The Curve of Her World: Love’s Conundrums
[Women] will do what they can once again to warm our gut and heart ~~John Logan, Dawn and a Woman
The Seneca Doe
The white Seneca doe is rare And here; she nibbles on a swale Of cantilevered grass half past Its greenest age, more stale than hale-- Even so, the eaten grass becomes A part of whiteness, swift whiteness Stepping quick like a compass tip In tentative exactness Measuring the left-alone landscape Two miles off the highway way Amid a mix of wood and field This buttery day I came to sit Stiller than a cenotaph And watch the Seneca doe awhile Go eloping with my hopeful soul Paper-white and puppet-limber Leaning through tree shadows like a ghost To eat and depart forgotten Had I not come in expectation To eye her oil-dark watchful eye In silence, and count the motions Of her lips as if anxious myself Of a lover's kiss, or writing Now of what I saw and did not miss, A lover's kiss recounting. •
The Lost Rib
Flow gently, sweet dreamer who Lies beside wandering lost A lax magellanic cloud Of impulse and perception Shimmering rivery in summer With a sheen upon which desire Floats downstream sweetly Unswattable as starlight Reflected in water. Desire, Is that what had the lost rib Run off by herself and grow up Into this unknowable companion? You would laugh to hear me Say it, but it was written Before we were born--a story More relatable than the news' Imaginings that twitter At us unprompted! Un- Prompted as the dream that Seizes you curling your Fingers like ribs in tension Of a new birth; what child Are you shuddering into life? Your eyebrows bow, approach And meet each other where A stream appears between them Dark in a pale brow, pinch And pang of the new-- Not novel, but new again, new To us, the forbears of a dream…. After a while your breath Slows re-regulates relaxes And it's as if the new thought (New as you lying here was To me) was always here A ripple rubbing the stream Something for moonlight to touch Cascading beside me when I'm Prompted out of sleep; or not, Always shining your own way Onward through what bonnie braes Sweet dreamer, flow gently. •
Birds of Summer
Ladylike birds gather summer Like a brace of arrows Snapped in a fist, Their fetching feathers fletched, Their beaks stone arrowheads Out of pre-Colombian mists Darting at a spillway of seed, Eating the grain I gift them With the quick attention Of surgeons plucking shotgun pellets A childhood accident had left Inside my scarred left knee Keeping me bent-legged As a bird up any stairs, My ascent slow, unfeigned On wounded and winded wing To where Jenny sits at table Grading boughs of assiduous sheets Her student flocks have gathered-- Birdscratch of pencilmarks, false Flights and failed landings-- Her face in a nest of lamplight Looks up at my entrance, Offers me the golden grain. •
The Curve of Her World
Tears that pepper her cheeks Refresh a softness in her gaze, Give back grace now the monster Sorrow has swum away to sea To bother other deeps, other shes While my darling thoughtfully Walks barefoot back ashore to me From over the curve of her world Spatted amazed, pinching her top Back into place, even smiling And almost meaning it, meaning To mean it in the near future, Her face a new polaroid Shaken slowly into focus-- A dolphin of shadow darts Into tidepools of her eyes Come from her lone sea-sojourn Not all the days ahead will keep From circling the boat of us As she approaches my hammock Swinging like a hanged man which In tarot simply means ‘change.' •
Without Thought of Harvest
One summer we were proud To watch our overmuch of flowers Overpour their beds and out- Match the virtue of their stems: Downward nodded every head As if golden damozels Were bowing in rows. It was An avalanche of flowers! Some tidal wave had landed And left the coastline richer-- Flower on flower beyond bounds With woes of colors cresting With splendid displays of petals Until overfull of feasting We closed our eyes to rest them As if blind inside the rainbow Dumb with a moment's prayer Amazed at what summer had made Of our refusal to be of use, To stop and stoop and pluck To sell at a corner stand At two dollars a bunch Sharing our garden bounty With the whole neighborhood, Refusal to dazzle With blossom and art the household Vases left shelved, closeted in dust That last year blazed the tables-- How instead this untended gift, This unweeded bounty, had burst Without thought of harvest. •
The Housewife
Nature frightens us into love.
~~Richard Poirier
I kiss my husband's cheek, A fine grit that acts like teeth. Every day I wear away another Layer in a kind of decay until I wear a face like a knob. Turn me, I'm too smooth to complain! I fall backward like an open door, An empty rectangle you lean on-- Come in, I'll lead you everywhere. •
Bandamages
I feel that she might just be The medicine that I need The bland to allay my acids The dagger to scissor my spasms-- Her blasé cloud covering A sun of pain like a figleaf, Tinsel edges forge-orange A spiky halo hinting fire. But a bandage is not a cure For self-harm, self-alarm, for All the selves I peel back, rank Tooth and sputum in a dish Sordid splats of blood, of blood. Still, I feel that she might be The balm-calm bee in a mad hive Dancing the buzzing huzzahs In my mazy eyes to hush Me to sleep like a spill of inks Blotting out the bastard day To dream and dream again, the dream Forgotten as they always are Telltale shreds of mist diminishing… The bandage renewed as the Wound's renewed, my hacked scabs Growing spider legs Tearing themselves off and running. •
The Mistake
Love has torn my life in two: Before and after the--then glad, now sad-- Mistake as I have come to call it, Defining my eras by error as I look back upon my footsteps' track. Love had pulled me through the needle's eye And stitched me witless with desire Told my tale upon a pillow seam And rocked my soul from its lonesome groove, Locked in a dance I could not unchoose. When the ship of me then foundered sundered, My wreck picked to ribs by bony crows, Naked I arose to mosey onward, A worm escaped from Eden's apple. A gate slid shut with a sound of oceans. •
Fiancée
A tourniquet of love Enwounds my finger now Like honeysuckle holding up Its triumphant yellow bloom On a dead net of twigs Too long alone with the sun. This ring of elfin silver Braids my knuckle white, Brands me with a lash of fire, Connects beyond abandonment Another's troubles with my own. My fear that love would loosen Like teeth, and leave me to worm My way to death alone, Our small ceremony atones-- Hands held lightly, like branches cross- Ing, two pines that share a shadow In acidy sandy soil for all Their lives, bristling against the weather, Pinecones cuffing like coughs When wind beats them sideways. •
Spines of Light
The black conveyer belt Hauls rivers of diamonds To a mouth of slush, A slurry of vomit Only patience can screen-- Patient implausible fingers. Some raven that lives in Midnight with a beak Like a drill-bit pecks Earth's holocaust crust To perch upon a finger One tear of the sun. It takes a diamond To find a diamond: The three-faced drill Cores stone and coal Seeking a vein Of light, a ripple In the earth where A finger, a snake Of sunlight died, Crushed multifaceted Into permanence-- Spines of light. •
Juliet Manqué
The moon pulls me from bed Like taffy in my long gown Tittering slipperless on marble; Its wide craters effervesce Champagne I drink pinkly Pearling my snub nose. I am pitiful and alone. My legs ache for embraces Like a bad tooth--pull me Out, pull me up, dentist moon! This pain's too intimate To forget, too stimulant To ignore, painted wet With every cup of breath, my Loose arms open like a noose To hug the tainted stone flying Away, away from love, from me. Come down! Come down! You foolish light! I am your perfect lover-- A windowed prisoner pressing Her moon-face to the glass. •
The Beauty
She cut off her nose And offered it up. She trimmed her ears And offered them up. She kissed her lips numb with a shot-glass And offered them up. Her skin broke out from her makeup, But that was to be expected. She punched her feet into guillotine shoes And offered them up. She prayed on a yoga mat Until her back broke. She despised her eyes as too small And offered them up. She coaxed her nails into claws And offered them up. She offered them all up Again and again in ritual Until there was nothing left Until she was finally beautiful. •
Streamers
Hazel streamers from your eyes Entangle in ribbons from mine According to Renaissance lore-- Love pulls us through the eyes Feels the ganglia tugging taut As rainbows arise between us. I hold your nipples like a rosary Sensitive this week as eyelids While always this prayer is rising To dissolving lips a red scarf Thrown over the bedroom lamp Burning swollen as a heart. •
Finding Fossils
I hugged the ignorance of stone.
~~ Stanley Kunitz
She lies next to me sleeping Quietly alive, foot off One end of the double bed Steadily paddling home On a pool-float, her breast Milkily over the summer sheet Draped loose in summer heat That breath might sustain an ease And stillness enter at last to rest As at last she rests, yes, while I Remember her ceaseless wheels, her Doing that goes like a hummingbird In circles of forward and back Around the daylit apartment Around work and it's circuits Pacing the corners, igniting With fingertip tricks and a match Candles when evening loving comes And touching stretches, being thrums Until at last this sleep arrives Slows the breath undoes the eyes-- Her able hands for once so calm, A fernprint on a stone. •
Dream No More
Wordlessly you rise wary Into day, pitch awake On an L-elbow, pried eyes Carnivorous for coffee while Birds pinch your face with their Enviable singing outside, The flimsy scrim of screen Inundated by waves of sun Defining you out of darkness Like a rediscovered key Picked out by drunken headlights Last New Year's Eve, or last before-- And you moan into the mayhem Of consciousness again Pressure of bladder and bowel How feet flatfoot the earth after Flying for hours in nightgowns Knowing nothing but wind The occasional cloud-fluff Stars everywhere like friends. •
Needlework
I mend an image worn By sitting, by fluffing, by naps: A spatter of nasturtiums In a delightful but unnatural pattern Printed on the drugstore's Two-dollar needlepoint kit In 1983. Now I mend A confusion of nasturtiums Back to crimson, petal by petal, A task for Ariadne My spidery fingers finesse In evocations of thread. My heart dreads I shall not survive to renew This pattern again-- Some stranger's backside will come To endorse all I've done, All I've left undone... My basket of needles long sold Garage sales ago. I pause my pace And stare at the half- Resurrection in my lap, How the new infects the old, How the old degrades Beautifully as a sunset By Turner perhaps, or some Byzantine icon touched By too many lips. •
IV Tightropes: More Formal Poems
Wisdom changes hands among the wise. ~~Sophocles, Oedipus Rex
Trying
Gently, without hurrying, try it:
Be the bowl of shadow in the valley,
Go with the river over knowing stones
Smooth as a catfish belly.
Let pine trees breathe needles in your hair:
Follow that compass where it points,
Walk until your feet are padded,
Your toes as black as a fox's.
The wind is trembling to begin it:
Are you ready to be led by the nose?
Forget your own life and inhabit it!
Gently, without hurrying now,
Try it. •
Tightrope
Walking curb edges for practice The tracks of departed trains I've sought, I'm always seeking A kind of balance in the brain An equipoise, a perigee, a grace Where thought and its subject Equally displace Each other (and themselves) On principles of mutual alliance The way Earth pulls back Her punch into the sun, and sun His enthusiasm contains To less than hellish flame. So that survival might feel Restful, I beaver at my niche: I count my words like beads Into the sorting dish: red, Blue or black, alive or dead, I've all the signifiers assigned, All the labels that I need To have my cusséd abacus succeed --To keep my accounts unsettled That entropy would nettle. I count the wordy beads: Charity, dignity, hope; Keeping your head up is like nothing So much as walking a tightrope. •
Water, Water
…deep dark surroondin’ darkness I discern
Is aye the price o’ licht.
~~Hugh MacDiarmid, Milk-Wort and Bog-Cotton
Downcast as thoughtless waters' face When a stormfront steals the light I boot the edging muck and wail at fate A boxer simmering for a bout; But when the spry sun cast coins In cash on bricolage waves My spirit like a new-washed face Shines benign, myself am salved and saved. Well long lying I've watched for dawn, Well known the subtle cups the moon Pours on darkling waters' scorn, Sibilant ease in which night is born…. And oftener still felt sprigs of spray Whip, dot and whisker me for spite Turning my inmost grouse of thought To imp-laughter and wet delight. A thousand hours down on elbows, low, I breathe the skirl of air from off The dance, the mantling of the lake-- Shavings, glintings of light and self. •
One Afternoon
The sun swarming on my upturned face Warms me into place. If ever I moved from where now I lay, Love, it was not today. Long hot summer holds me so hammock-snug Gott could call, and I would shrug. I'm a cat whose paws overstretch its stoop; Night is when I leap! •
New Places
I thought we were going somewhere new, A place undiscovered, at least by us, Where new day would startle us quietly And new night silently confound. But there were all the old stars above us. We hadn't taken the turnpike far enough To reach escape velocity, despite our losing Home and cell phone coverage along the way. All around us, trees kept on being trees, and Although the land crept up the sky somewhat More than usually for us in old New Jersey, The clouds came down to meet it just the same. •
A Map of Bones
Tiptoe on the mountaintop was not enough. Some part of me sparked up crying: more sky, more sky! My eyes swept the flowered hills, and the gulfs Where the water went, and sometimes hazed, And none of it, sparkle or living quilt, was enough. Inside me, full of burning teeth, was the eater of days, Dissatisfied dipsomaniac of incalculable thirst Dragging me from mountaintop to top For vistas so magnificent they hurt. The body follows its map of bones, laying out Fingertip, fingertip, fingertip--or tilting The pelvis upright to see how we're not alone As we walk the flat unpatterned plains between Thunderclaps of mountains that help us up, Whose stone bones grow so long that they poke Through the scenery. •
The Dancers of Sleep
The dancers of sleep hold flames in their hands. We follow them down into caves, under the earth. Stones glare into existence, bursts of incredible light. Tall blade-shouldered creatures fearless in daylight Walk like Egyptians down the dusty path clapping hands To awake the napping bats entangled in edges of shadow. •
Reluctance
All day the steeple bells Harangue an empty sky. The sky is crowded with clouded Now, and will not answer why. The trees themselves are swinging Like bells held up to skies. The sky is silent and itself And will not answer why. The birds compete with tinny Bells alert in tree and sky. The sky is blue, alarmless And will not answer why. A man comes late on silent feet Between trees and bells and sky. The sky he looks at satisfies; He will not answer why. •
Day and Night
Into the woods we ran at ten like Indians.
Into the pond we dove at twelve like crocodiles.
Into the grey fields we walked at thirteen
Holding hands until stars nosed close
And loneliness fled.
II
Before the old fire's fine red we sit, and stare
Into the old years we've passed together here.
Into our old eyes unbidden rise grey tears
And old stars come down close to us
And loneliness flees. •
This Soil
The soil is ready before I am ready. Already a youth's beard of weeds Greens the garden plot, and March Just barely by. This soil has turned up old arrowheads before. When the hoe tapped a hardness more than stone, I bent and cut a finger open Down to the bone. This soil loves a tender thumb pushed in, sighs At the tamp of my palm under our one sun, The gurgle-tinkle of water from the rusty can A baby's cry. The soil boils with vegetables all summer long. I stoop like a mother, attend to weeds And pack my ratty baskets to a crown While singing songs. This soil needs turning under, now winter's here. Hoe, rake and shovel lean idly in the shed. Dry leaves blow among the picked stalks lisping Death's easy hiss. •
The Trouble with Simple
Simply put, is the loss Of detail that staring entails Until a total blur besets The doilywork, and only Loops of cloud remain. The trouble is where to begin Sanding the filigree finial, Erasing the Hindu panoply And awakening the grain Of Amish monotheism. The trouble is when to stop, When polishing reflects the polisher, When steel and stone, spoon And moon, are one--and only A mirror to your circles. The trouble is with hummingbirds And bees and butterflies, all those Eccentric improbable flights stopped Cold, or reduced to arrows, or Gravity's earthy entropy. The trouble with simple, simply Put, is how one keeps forgetting To edit, adding totem on totem To the pole, chop by magnanimous Chop, in beneficent indifference. •
Skinny-dipping
Childhood's millpond margin smells of peat; The black water drowns thirty feet; Millenial mulch slowly sifts to silt, Soft on my ankles as tongues of guilt. Our laughter echoes to where woods turn wise And dark beyond intelligence; The pulpy water we swallow and spit With shredded swimming light is gilt. Arms to arcs, we frogleg to the mill-wheel, Catch an edge where supple water spills, Turns small voices to shouts against the rush Of liquid Time's naked churning push Piggy-backing shoulders, while the stone lip Syllables oblivion, invites a slip.-- We grind ourselves red-handed as we grip And watch the jagged water jump. •
The Homestead
The house that had me call her home Where I went from pip to grown Showed me, among her nestling trees, Our reservoir's sparkling restful ease Where a thousand flattish stones were skipped, Quizzed the surface of what is with ripples Then sank to nothing known by man or wish Who would not plunge awhile and be fish. This house that had my childhood kept Has herself grown double with subdivision And invited others into her provision To hear new voices slide from treble down And down and down and right on into ground. •
Time-Piece
Time, faceless, stares all faces To tatters; unarmed, disarms Quick bullets with slow rust; Legless trips the sprinter With age's crutch; breathless, Breathes first and last. Of all songs the tempo, time; Of all debates the winner. Time Furls the trimmest sail, marches Crowncrest mountains down To hills, pounds hills to sand, And sand to I know not what. Killer unkillable, time; death That dies not. Time is free That imprisons me, that, Senseless, robs me of sense--is dust That drowns my every word In oblivion and silence. •
Bouquet
Where our engagement flowers have fallen Flares awaken, soft forceful eyelids Like light-stitched depths of gems held close (As this amethyst ring in earth was held, Loved for the fireworks it reflects: Diamond-pointed lotus petals--perfect.) •
Fox and Rabbit
She knew all And I knew naught; Thus the Fox The Rabbit caught. •
The Gift Refused
My mistress is throwing away her scarves That had wound in her tresses like tentacles Tightening coils of beauty like the stars In the black of her night hair, heavy and full.-- One by one they flutter in bright spirals Dropping to the pebbled earth below her, A pile of starshine like vines in piles Throbbing with wind only, no longer her fingers. "Out of my hair, threads and deeds of yesterday; Out of my house, Tommy, whatever you say." •
The Pig of Day
VanGogh's hills arise like muscles Blended with broken sky--a blue Of veins and midnight tears and Much else besides. A wand loaded With oils random enough to curse Clarity from eyes' wilderness of use Until the pig of day had ravaged him Calm with truth or tooth. •
Minatory
Age is a nylon stocking Pulled distorted over the face The waxen features melt and fall The under-eyelids distort Like gutters torn from the roof Their salty waters tumbling Past a warty demeanor Into weak neck-drapes tacked back To showcase the final act --A farce, a tragedy, whatnot. Chase the kisses you once reviled In your most secret heart. Your grave's turned down like a bed, Grasses pulled up to the chin; The time you had is passed, is passed Never again to begin. Your last supper is laid with wine, Fillet the time most finely; Taste the avid meat upon your plate, Tuck in, tuck in! Tear the knotted nylon from your chin That faded lips may part: Chase the kisses you once reviled In your most secret heart. •
What Scent
What scent is this but dust: Lilacs in their manifold bloom Bluebells dangling from vein-thin stems Red roses reaching up in wrath Thistles with their blistering hats Dogwood eating its feast of whites Moonflower showing her face at night? Inhale, inhale, till lungs burst! Here's silly Annie, not two, not yet, Old Stan crotchety in granddad pants, What scent are they, what role fulfill? Marjorie panting on the pink bedspread All those kisses new love's been fed, What scent they, for breathe we must? What you, what me if't comes to that, What scent are we but dust? •
Deceptive Airs
I Spring again has brought Such loveliness, such access To one's pores How can one conceive Of death the ogress, or guess One's rotten to the core? II Oppressive summer sweats Too aggressively, undresses Our thoughts of nimble ambling Through woodlands and the wild-- Reduced to indoors and nude In a tub of ice cubes: Less adventurous, more umbilical. III Autumn's rousing storms Reminds the body of its bones Drops fruit in wanting buckets, Blonds trees, hawks walks; With every wand'ring breeze Fills bellies fee free With a salesman's generosity. IV Winter's icy indifference Deepens the sense of deception-- The false clarity age manages, But only in its cage: Trees scribbled with a writer's rage, The sky an empty page. •
Like Cake
"God's a phony," my professor said, a hipster. "Even the news is fake. Prayer never works." At midnight I drink my Pabst, kneel And throw the dice; prayer never works. I emptied my pockets and took my hat; Pulled over halfway home; prayer never works. "Three hundred dead" the newscast said. I sobered in the dirty dotted light. "Sarin gas smells like incense at first," The translator said, "like cake." By daybreak, my eyes a sandpaper glitter, I hear myself say: "Gregg, prayer never works. Put a prayer in every word you make." •
Playing in the Orchard
You had run up into an apple tree In a springtime game of hide-and-seek. All the world was empty as you hid from me, And I ran down aisles of apples for a peek Of your skirt disappearing, or a shoe fallen off Into the green green grass, empty and soft. It was apple-blossom time, and time Told me you were lost, the last year's Apples weighty and rotten on the ground, slimy Beneath my hurrying feet. In fear That you were lost to me, I collapsed Beneath the scent of blossoms in the air. I was looking up... it was the nearest thing to heaven... A soft blindness of flowers everywhere... I looked up... it was heaven... and you were there! •