BLAST PRESS at gregglory.com

 
 
by 
 
Gregg Glory
 
 
 
 
Published by
BLAST PRESS
324B Matawan Avenue
Cliffwood, NJ 07721
(732) 970-8409
 
gregglory@aol.com
gregglory.com
 

INTRO: The Faithful Brush

A damsel with a dulcimer 
In a vision once I saw; 
It was an Abyssinian maid, 
And on her dulcimer she played, 
Singing of Mount Abora.
~~STC, Kubla Khan

A dulcet in the dulcimer. The tones and semi-quavers of moments considered and reconsidered. A return to manynesses and maybes, the messiness of that. A Reconquista of one’s own mind. A return. The resolutions that resolve when focus clicks clear. That crashed sandstone monument rescued from burning words and tested. The eye reforged that had gleamed in brass beneath Perseus’ brow.

That’s what’s here. The tested verities. Truths that burned their way out of the dud charcoal and survived to be viewed.

I write with an archeologist’s brush, perhaps a softened, discarded toothbrush repurposed to explore. That which is buried was once alive as us, dizzy in air such as ours, a tint in the brimming landscape that, I’m sure, endures.

The faithful brush, even of doves’ wings gathering to stir each morning’s dust, does the work of eons: rescuing, reading the runes. If the brush be faithful, if the author be truthful, the rescue must be real, however partial, however out of nowhere, however shaded and shadowed the shards.

The author’s brush is toughened by time, and made more subtle for its firm resolve. The middle-aged author searches now not for random trash or treasure, but for the deepened reason for his search itself. The reader and the writer are unearthing the civilization of themselves together, in LARPing partnership. Why reopen the tomb of Tutankhamun, merely to buff the sunny face you placed there twenty centuries ago?

The doves return to brush the ground beside the mountain laurel, and I return to bend beside them, a manager of many desires; a stranger to myself, returning to the work of knowing that self better. The humble doves ask nothing but to brush, to flutter amiably amid undimming greys.

This search enriches, not the egoist, not the hunter after winnings, but the swimmer after wonder, the lost son returned to break bread with Dad before the grave engulfs all–Egypt and archeologist, damsel and dulcimer. All but the doves presiding in the dust.

Gregg Glory
[Gregg G. Brown]
Back-to-school week
September 2025

TIME CUTS

Time cuts me like a piece of soap, carved and used
To wash away the self, images shaped and tended
That made it to my mirror--

Time cuts, and I am made of feathers falling, confetti
That once had flown, found lightness, light
Like that of a flashing mirror--

The work of childhood, long past, eerie readiness
And eerie ease, limbs alert within the baseball diamond,
A concentration of many lights--

Then the era of early manhood, where kisses confused.
Made-up faces arriving like hungry fish confessing
In a dark awake with sparkles--

Time cuts, and the wonder of full manhood, mastering
The moment, playwright and laughing plaything,
Dense mirror in mirrors encased--

And now the year of doves arrives, soft succor of
Their mutable cooing, softness of my soul, I swear,
Tearing in this mirror here--

AUTUMN RAMBLE

A leaf stood up in a wisk of wind,
Stood and walked on its points
Walked like a man resurrected
Toward the observer.

The leaf stood absorbed by the
Observer’s wish, given arms
And a head as well as pointed legs
No leaf ever owned.

It was a man, gifted scratchy
Speech: a coughing, hazy, rough
Set of almost words as it walked
And was observed.

RETURN TO NORMAL
The daylight after ladies’ night
Is not the light of a normal sun,
It is a matchhead violent blue
And full of burning people--

A quick cigarette at the sink
Is a confrontation with mortality,
A skeleton sipping smoke, no vape,
And waiting for the coffee.

There’s a magnificence in the dishes
Shining in their piles, a bold
Smell of yesterdays, how the ladies
Looked, and looked away.

INSIDE A SHYNESS

An essence without presence
Is the wish of every consciousness--
Anemones desire to be
Colorless in a surrounding sea.

An elephant on his pampas is
A nose grown long with noticing,
But in his turtle-grey would be
An unnoticeable nous.

It is a tale of love-me-not
And let me be; let life come fluttering
In drifted gifts of days, and lay
In whatever final shape it may.

THE MEME’S JINGLE
A gleaming theme, its jingle, 
Is a meme’s messy treasure:
Old coolness of a nickel that must
Be spent, however faceless.

Pocketed, a meme is a lucky coin,
The sou and weight of currency,
Rubbed blank and dubbed
The universal face of exchange--

That wobbly balance, and the pans
Hung thereon, is the officer’s pinch 
And lynchpin of coming justice,
So sovereign is its acceptance.

If a meme’s theme is love, then 
She resembles Helen’s grace,
That thinnish, hard-used yen
That launched so many ships.

Change the theme to singing
And one nightingale tries the sky
With its coin of voice and story,
Oiled and weariless and alive.

DIALOG WITH THE WAKER

The means of meme and dreaming
Are nearly seamless, a fine confection
Of could-be whipped with what is.

What is, what is, what is is what
The meme is dreaming, an antennae
In the mind, a drift against the wind

To some fat onwards destination,
Some land of palms and breadfruit.
The meme compresses, composes,

Taps its tootling foot and sets the tune
To which sunrise rises, determines
Phases of the rainbow, come to that.

The meme is all we are, compact.
All we well can read of ourselves e’en now.
The mind at the back of the mind

Rising in dawn’s tall ostrich tail.

TOUR OF THE MORNING

Before one spends the day in abject fear,
Or nosing after useless facts at a desk,
Pushing those facts through the mush....

Before all that, antecedent to all that,
Alpha before alpha A, in dawn’s pre-alpha,
There is a snap at the nape of the neck.

A small click that nickers in archaic hush,
A clarity that scars, scar over scar,
Palimpsest of skin beginning from raw

To red to scab, etc. And this is where the tour
Begins, escaping the dreamscape, but not
Too completely, assembling yourself in dark

By practiced touch, your clothes a likely pile
Of yesterday’s skin, some rumored who 
Of a latter alphabet, some Theta, some Zed.

But as long as the nape remains membrane
More than skeleton, you stand obtusely
Nude to yourself, an onion pared, a thumb

In search of a hand to civilize.... This is you,
Rude, placid, perched, resisting flight,
Resting nestside, wrapping a familiar hand

Around the moist cool nape of your neck.

HOPE’S ROPE-A-DOPE

That errored air of expectation when
The internet appears, and we browse
Like drowsy cows the grass we’re fed....

The minute sizzle on the Hitachi, just
Prior to the blasted taste on the burning
Tongue, the sour wow of disappointment....

This is the lush disaster of hope’s helpless
Rope-a-dope against the boxing ring,
The fragrant heft of OJ before it’s sipped

And known as frozen, not fresh, not the real
Deal, a something less pressed than what
Had been desired, the glass half full

That imagination presented to the senses
Before the senses sipped, before the mind
Grasped the disaster on the table

Laid so featly before it, the silverware
Polished to a dare, the napkin neat,
Then tucked and comforting, coffee

A portal to exotic scenery in the mind,
The chair inched in to begin the feast
That had been so powdered and crowded,

Plated and placed with such, such
An overload of hope, recursive verve
Of the guppy body always gulping more.

IN HER DIAMOND FORTRESS BRIGHT

Jenny at the jewelry counter reads bright pieces
Of the disassembled world, cracked precise
Into emerald broach, or ruby rings, amethyst
Things in amber light stoked a sleepy smoky gold,
And playful daisy diamonds on crushed cloth....

There is temptation here, beyond the tricks
Of rock and heft, the lie of lights reflected.
There is a glimmer of a sunwise depth, a fire
In this wild trying-on of jewels like wild bells,
This jangle of earrings like antlers shaken.

There is a solitude for the eye forever, Arctic
Queen within her diamond fortress bright.

CARVERESQUE

I’ve sanded my craft past smoothness to slither
Round again to raw delight; first slice of fresh
Branches, then letting the wood heal and dry

Until it’ll take the ready faces that I give it.
And in so doing, I learn to love the dowdy wood’s
Own crosswise resistance, a burl in the grain

That furnishes the Bhudda’s knotty belly.
Or note the blondness of her heartwood,
Long soft streams of pine that make Rapunzel’s

Hair a riverine loveliness of lissome color,
A motion of the branch in active weather,
Chill sidelights stray September evenings bring.

So much weather has brought us here together!
Myself a walking branch that shapes and sands,
A brother tree reaching for returning harmony.

My knife is like a knowing as it weaves;
The blade-tip is where my consciousness
Starts; one thought that touches another as it

Begins the blonde gouge, feeling then the response,
New give writhing from repose, a grace that sprang 
First from the hillside park, all those days of shade.

DAY IN THE LIFE OF

No doubt he was the cause. The chief
And chef, the architect, whatever, of his
Own preponderant boredom, the grey.

A heavy, preponderant grey, a blasé
That poured him into cement each morning,
Laughed at his entrapment all afternoon.

And although he was the fishermen and
The fish of his own shark disaster, nothing 
Seemed to assuage or dynamite his drift.

He was stuck as a cork, filling his bottle
With little messages, piffling pleas, notes
Of such longing as Pavarotti would envy.

No doubt his rescue never came, I attended
The funeral myself, congealed among the mourners,
Another grey homunculus, a totem, a cypher.

But, when they looked, there among his papers,
Behind the trill of unpaid bills, crests of sodoku
Played to drag the boredom away in chains

Of letters linked, was a journal labelled "Mine"
Stiff with little gems of jokes, racy or ribald,
Steam that had kept his little teapot chuffing.

AVIARY INSOMNIA

The wounded dove, and the sound of it,
Were hounding me, more and more hounding
As the days were shriveling toward autumn--

The sound of the dove when a wooden chair
Was scraped across the floor, the wound
Of opening the garage door, how warm hellos

Become cold, wounded harus when remembered,
When the face of the speaker seems faded,
A false comforter walking among the leaves

And places of memory, the garden so long
An incredible dewy green, and stardust at night
When restlessness raised the beige windowshade,

Stardust over every flame of blossom sleeping,
That place a best place, most right and regal, a place
Where doves would walk and coo come morning.

WHILE YOUR HANDS ARE WET

Make sure to wash the butternut squash
For supper, and let me get that stale dish
With the dead plant so we can put new in.

You might as well, while you’re there to elbows,
Do the job to furl the jig sail in before the storm
Really gets going, before the rain strips canvas

And the captain’s screaming. Are you qualified
To birth a sweet blameless babe, if not,
Well, at least you’re here, and that’s an art.

Bring your wet hands closer to her agony
And have a go; it’s only life, after all, nothing
Very serious, and your hands are wet already,

Handling the squash with a gentle expertise
It’s almost decorous, the yellow glowing
Between adept thumb and dancing fingers

So swabbed with the running blessing
Life arranges in an unstoppable faucet, the gale
Of being here at the bridgehead of things

In a brightness that’s like a clean knife
Set among the flowery dishes, drying its edge
With the rest. You know how it is.

THE JET OF REMEMBRANCE

The jet of remembrance is always sighing its skies 
Away as yesterday’s altitudes fail today’s falling--
The clouds reconfigured that had been familiar,

Our roving window of universe swelling beyond 
The black seed we had need of, the dark birth 
That began the bang, that infant fingers gripped,

Now a wandering structure of deluxe galaxies.
The hopscotch ladder drawn along the sidewalk
Begins to resemble the structure of the universe,

Whirling beyond our porous knowing, a star-sown
Connect-the-dots that skirted invisibles, angels or atoms,
Are always playing at, just past corners of the church.

Angels and preeminences protect me! My sky
Is falling as I fail up the stairs, taking time with me,
Ravelling up the raving thread into my gladdened sack.

The jet of remembrance is thrust and dust, blackhole
Plasmas of awe or grief compounded, the deep burn 
Racing your given face farther into strangeness.

Tomorrow is weirder the more today is remembered.
All colors blur in rain and remembrance, endurance
The name we give forgetting as we jet, bare clouds

Ourselves, stitching the structure, changing shape,
Still holding hands double-dutch as we skip
The first billion chapters that clapped our beings here.

A WHYFUL OF FLOWERS

You never ask why the bowl, the vase, my silly hands
Are full of flowers, astounding powers of colors
Cresting unaccountable from a wilderness of stems.

Questions are for problems, not this evident bounty,
The shift of shaft and petals against glass laughing
As if the sun vacationed here, before our eyes,

Bringing a deep luminance into our house, our lives
Together as this bustle of roses, this clan of daisies
That heard so many chanting crickets after dark,

Miniature singers mighty in their armored millions.
And some sway of that song is among these blooms
Decorating the dining table, or tucked against

A picture of you on the desk, open face turned up
Quizzically, curious as to myself hounding words down
Flowerlessly, an effortful hunt after meaning, a dredge

Through soggy dictionaries and dreadful thesauruses.
But there you are, a blessing, a blossom, and when
My pen despairs, a scent of jasmine reminds me.

THE DELIGHTFUL LIGHTNESS OF RERUNS

Unwearied we watch TV stories repeat, not reading
With renewing eye, but watching in passive rest
As the same blurred world we saw before goes scrolling

And we lounge comforted the best lines of the scene
Haven’t changed--the punchlines and the pithy bits
They comfort us, rehearsing for the ear a nearness

Lighter than a harness. For this we wear ourselves
In end-of-day weariness, a sundowner serenade
Of tales-twice-told but nicer, since the recorded face

And dress, accent and emphasis, of the speakers
Never changes, never has to breathe our air with us
As at a theater performance, but lives backlit in boxed

Eternity; abstract shapes within a frame if anything,
Whispers of a world that never was. And there we rest,
Complete in effortless omnipotence, viewers only

Of Pompeii recreated, the easy comedy repeated, where
Even the laughtrack helps us with its elbow to the ribs, 
Digging, with us, if not a grave, then something like.

GIVE US THIS

However loveliness endeavored to give us this
Ingenious emptiness forever calling forth
A sky inviting every bird into its white wideness,
Let us respond this day as if we are worthy--

As if loveliness were our quest without question,
Sole motive of action and the active force
That soars us to a view from every mountain
Looking back at loveliness as to a total source.

And we, gilded viewers intruding in the clouds,
Hover unhampered, overseers of that loveliness 
That lays silken fields below in golden shrouds
And every river’s silvery magnificence increases--

Until we, in prayerful silence at this pale highpoint,
Feeling smallest here, in grace are at our greatest.

WHAT PEOPLE SAID

To tell from what people said what people meant
Is love’s endeavour, a quick kiss upon red ears
Embarrassed at hearing--

Some lovers moult themselves into quotation,
Wearing others’ feathers, others’ graces
Over feelings of their own.

So troublesome is this telling on oneself that one
Becomes a version or a vision of what one
Assumes the other one would want,

And lives in strictures like a playwright, fencing
With longing and dialog until time’s finale
Draws the velvet shutters shut.

Parrying and posturing occurs in midnight starlight, too,
When one’s alone among dark rhododendron,
Alone and listening--

And one hears what constellations conspire to confess,
Spurred and mounted in their gemmed procession
Overhead, one hears and hears.

ULULATIONS UNTO THE END

for Anant Dhavale


Misty companions where a cliff is ending,
Shapes that shape themselves a little
Above the winking brim of cliff a moment

And are gone--these are the friends, presences
One remembers when the mist has faded
And the cliff-edge returns in bolded blue,

The falloff a line of directest rock and loss.
The sun is a companion, yes, unfailing
Flourisher, a plume forever unplucked,

But the sun is not a voice beside, a friend
Who knows the crisis of a mind at rest,
How one speaks to another as to oneself

In a voice that opens more than doorways,
A voice that paces woods and words,
That shares the carrying of meaning forward--

A voice that calls on contribution, a multiple
Tribe of voices, wolves involved in a howling
Perhaps, ululations unto the end.

THOSE SUDDEN SUMMER STORMS

The drapes and cloths of rainclouds fulfill 
Whole horizons with deeply-telling banks of color, 
Deployed from edge to edge of human sight.

Such clouds are more, in their slow-motion soaring, 
Roundelay walls of sublime and silverish loafing, 
More in that, and in them, than any knowing sows--

And the clear ear, listening, is more responsive 
To this wide mystery, hears more of rightness ringing
In windsong sighing, and in the roughened cries

Of weighed skies that slowly pass above us 
Through long August days, paying out a solace 
Underserved, a peace so paced that the sense

Of time itself’s expanded, brindled with brave shading, 
Shaven slims of glimmering where the good 
Full clouds fulfill themselves by unbecoming....

A release like laughter traced with echoes of
Earlier delight, clouds whose embolded brows, so full
Of thought themselves, releasing to the last laugh

Their every concern. And then, as afternoon ends,
Dim rain hits, drenching summer in cold baths, 
Filling every mouth leaned back to drink it, ladling,

Swallowing rainclouds down like delighted wine.

AN UNBAGGING

Raindrops were on her glasses small as sweat
And grocery bags surrounded worsted at her feet,
Wet as dogs, soft as kittens, impossible packages.

After kissing the tip of her nose dry as it gets,
We undressed her to stand before the happy fan
Whickering welcome as she told me in shivers
"Stop staring" and "robe."

                             The instructions she 
Delivered were casual and exact, sipping coffee
With feet propped on a second kitchen chair.
The unbagging was a careful, curious affair
As I learned how my house was assembled:

Where the spaghetti rattled, how bottled beets
Near the green thumbs of pickles were set;
There was a system in place for the spices
It seemed, and sweets shelved just out of reach.
The two cats watched their food find its cupboard
Then retired in pleased purrs to her lap.

In the end, the bags, soft as custard, wet as dogs,
Lay in the pond of the foyer while the mirror fogged,
Myself dotted wet as I checked the receipt.

THE DETAIL BELL

It’s the detail bell that tells the story straight,
Rings it true as tuning tines to correct
The deficient ear.

The detail, the little crutch that leans beside,
The dirty ink on Cratchit’s finger,
The candle’s low estate.

Wear your whistest gloves, good ringer, and polish
Your brassy handbells to a lightning sheen
To find the lilt that details bring.

Become a noticer of your own life, if you want
The antecedent to the accident
To settle into sense--

How habits can haunt a fate, how a muscle’s
Trained reply can deafen your reaction
To a truck’s commanding honk.

Attention must be paid to bring the blessings
Ringing unnoticed every day
In the lily-of-the-valley.

Or how littlest tricks and ticks of timing can account
For joyance in the handbell chorus, shared notes
Flung in supersedent series

Elongating belle pleasures in each bell-ringer’s ear,
Weighing neat each wagging tongue,
Each contribution to the tithe.

RAMPAGING THROUGH THE DICTIONARY

Although I dress and step my hour and my day,
It is upon sordid boards I step, a ragged stage
That leans toward the meaningless, a devastation

Of form, a worm of words and not an angel in action
Rampaging through the dictionary, a martyr
Of the synod of sorrow, and not the glad master

Of dance, emboldened soul embodied a moment,
The central complex given easy isness for a day,
A shine that infuses, and then subsumes, the dress,

The entire face and aspect of the farce, the face 
Cards talking around the table, the plain fiction 
Of obvious pretense, names and labels unto the end.

Nevertheless, I dress and gussie and fuss my hour
And spend my day rehearsing searches for the true,
The capable, the meaning at the meat of it,

The animal that first reached for words, when roars
And rumors of roars, would no longer serve the source,
The ache to make partial being leap complete,

Mind chiming with the wild divine while body finds
The manifest shiver in these sheets of skin, the bone
Rhythm of the ribs, breath that reaches and inters.

UNEASILY THE QUILL

Uneasily the quill confronts the facing page, a pate
Emptier than foolscap, and an inkwell likelier 
Full of frivolous doodles than phrases fit for dawn,

White lighthouse that finds the ship and brings her home.
What words are there for our daily return to life?
It is a simpleness regifted after being lost,

A silence into which gratitude sails unaided, these
Sifted vibrations of a house, fled at midnight, suit
The returning prodigal; the eye that grated on

Familiar dust, waters in this remembered presence
A drift-spray of dawn refreshes--the pile of boots
By the door, the shrugging coats pegged in rows,

The kitchen with its yellow welcome, all the cozy
Photos of other people, the crowd that sailored here
On a whim of wind. Is this enough to be getting-on with?

The prayer on the paper says, Maybe, maybe,
As the window parchment fills with subtle light, 
And the kettle with its coppery charm hoots owl-low

Next to a hero’s mug ready for its steam baptism--
Birds outside piping upstairs dreamers aboard,
Sounds of the rousing house giving dawn ears,

Stumbles within the repetition, forecasting recovery.

SHAPER OF THE LANDSCAPE

Warrior with a voice of thorns--
Whose eyes were lighthouses,
And his mouth a roar of fire,
The emotive motion of the mountain.

He fought the dark, the deadly
Silence of the rock, by chip
And chink of sharp singing,
Twin horns of his voice and sword.

And when he walked to the wrestle
Of the sea, the mountain followed
Him down, the warrior, the song
That pulled the mountain into motion.

The water was as a cauldron
As dawn was roiling there, his eyes
Were lighthouses, and his voice
Shuffled and shushed like the sea.

MINOR INDICATIONS

To be the man I imagined myself
Is a mix and matrix of my most 
Luscious selves: wolves, and unaided lambs,
The mountaineer and miner sixty-niner,

Capable captain and frivolous crew, 
A stance, a perspective like night wind 
Knocking a window--and the house, 
However old, however solid,

Is a piece of paste and paper
Folded together for the fun of it, 
And nothing else. The world is propped 
And blazoned of these pretenses,

These incapable shapings 
That shake the shaper so, shaper
Who seeks the shelter of his luscious selves, 
His drives that arrive

From he knows not where, thithering  
Into a hooded futuredom, 
Blind space, blind time,
The captain blind and crew blindfolded

Against the bling of harping stars, 
Clear consonants among so many 
Fouling vowels, 
Birds twisted in the ship’s rigging.

I, to be myself, must identify 
Only with the wind’s insistence, 
Its plain call away and ever away, 
A plain invisible that is the spirit

And superior of the place, the place
A place that is forever changing, 
A breathless collection 
Of temporary edges clashed	

In a tempest, an interior alignment 
Conjured out of chaos, 
A crisis felt in belt and brain 
As constant conflict.

AN UNEXPECTED CURVE

The unexpected curve at Kirk St., 
The cricked cliff 
Fearfully near--

Like the swerving lines of aluminum legs 
On upturned church chairs, or
The verve
Of pitch-dropped brakes....

They challenge the palette:
Heather’s honeyed pears cayenned, 
Or Charlie’s chocolate ants, 
Darkly armored,
Shaken on the potluck brisket--

There is a challenge
To be confronted, tasted,
Tested as a curve is tested.

Front-faced, shoulders-squared,
Spook the landscape with your headlights;
Rattle 
The tased attacker,
Gaining a space to think.

Each confrontation is a bear
A bog, 
A wolf--
Gripping the wheel too late--

A cherry bomb in the sundae,
A power of sourness,
A tug of undertow,
An unexpected curve in the self,

A curl inward 
As police quiz witnesses in the fractured damp.
Chins averted, eyes slyly sliding
Away as they widen....

SOLEMNITIES AND DEPARTURES

Marie, Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
~~T.S. Eliot

Between the last thought and the first spelled step
Into death, the sum of poetry is revealed. This
Is the thing itself, life’s vim at its dimmest,

Climax and summation, spangled greatness
Manifest as rock, as dirt, as death. This is what
Poetry circles to dial revelations into the brain,

Brain that scouts shouting to avoid all pain, all
Pinnacle experience that chimes in utter, hurt silence--
Poetry that creates the blade that skims the snowside,

Racing down the mountain with a larynx in ecstasy.
It is silence, it is this, this moment between
The last thought and the first breath of death,

The defeatless beat that ends the drumming....
Reality without the dividing line of words, simmer
Of old syllables, new coinages, reality bare

Of thought, yet still the mind is there, the clay 
Impressed, that in clay will be deeply buried. And there
Farewell has its meaning, its brutal hook away

From daylight, and nightlight too, a brutal hook
Showing in one slow flash the total book, answer
To every question, just where we cannot look.

TWO SKELETONS WALK INTO A BAR

The scene is haunted, and in the extreme
Is haunted. Emptied glasses stand

Like lenses of yesterday, stomachs emptied
Of satisfaction, eyeglasses without a face.

The scene is like a restaurant, so closed, so
Abandoned, the tablecloths refuse to lift

When the wind is near, then nearer, sniffing.
Seashell chairs are pushed back, the patrons

Departed, the kitchen as silent as the rest,
A windy aquarium if anything, where ghosts

Of vibrant coral stand fanning an increasing,
An ever-increasing, emptiness.

MAINTAINING THE SPECTACLE

Although she had been shadow, she had
Been known, a verity and not a crooked guess,
Not an image of grass stood up, a woven
Woman pulled together in wheaten sheafs.

This goddess strode among the villages
Tackling the weather, shaping fatted clouds
Into ravens or doves for the sturdy villagers,
So anxious to wring another year from earth.

She pleased herself at their festivals, a tallness
In the teenagers, a scent of fried sweets
Weaving through the grand tents, that laughter
When the strong man banged the highest bell--

She was everywhere once you looked for her,
Like birdsnests at the edges of fields, 
A circle protecting the minor eggs, their blue
Sublimity going unnoticed by predators,

Long eyes and longer teeth in the grass,
Just long enough to chip and hatch, a
Minor act of daybreak against last night’s
Degaussed dark, maintaining the spectacle.

HER NAME WAS MARGO

A piece, a portion, a part, and not the whole.
The way a sail will take less than a corner
Of the wind, that is what I knew, could know,

Of her. Still, she touched my face, and pressed
A shaken loveliness into my watering eyes,
Catching in my linens, taut to hand as golden

Ropes that held the aching sail square, a nib
Tracing faces on endless paper; looping, too,
Our initials into a calligrapher’s mandala.

What flowers had been, I had been, soft stars 
Strewn by her passing, small fires crossing
A tameless darkness, leaf by leaf enkindled,

And, leaf by leaf, left to burn away in solitude....
What I knew of her was as a whole tent shaken,
Bones loose as petals, the high cry at night that

Strips the listener, faith that claims the convert,
A corner of the wind, no more, a margin given,
A piece, a portion, a part, and not the whole.

MEET THE MINOAN EYE

Where language fails and the self returns
Minoans drew their intuitive eyes, leashed
With a lasso of kohl, a target dot of pure oil

Where a dark self swims in seeming selfdom,
A visible more voracious than voices,
Not nattering and graceless, misplacing his hat,

But a self lifted, plugged into context, without
The wide side-eye look of second-guessing--No,
Today you will meet the Minoan eye, an eye

Immediate and infinite in effect, a spacious yes
To all the splash of seeing, splendiferous trees
Complexly a-sway, the crumple-hump of clouds,

Swagger of cats crossing the hard yard, all of it,
Placed without effort into the Minoan eye,
The hole God put in your head for your betterment,

A scene-machine best left instructionless,
The manual discarded and left fluttering among
Spearlike olive leaves, its words ignored, even

As music, as poetry perhaps is, humbly muttering.

THE STONE BIRDHOUSE

Down to the stone birdhouse walked the owner--
Routine eloquence that ungums the tongue
Swifted lifted notes from the birdhouse tower,

Ringing against soft sifting ears and stone walls,
A chaos of paradise song quicker than rivers,
No chorus but a symphony nevertheless, binge

Of singing, clean hundreds of hinges of birdsong
Opening to day as the owner walked down to see
Iridescent breasts of the little singers, wide beaks

Breaking like diamond daylight which they praised,
This first slim beginning of morning and always,
Awake beyond lost woes of dream and sleep.

More of morning and more of day awaited 
The curious owner of nest and castle as he walked
Around the bird tower listening, hands managed

Into intent pockets like favorite thoughts, returning
Ruminations picked up and saved from the day
Before, rounded stones smooth with rich touch

And inner meditation as the birds twanged on,
And he thought about the returning call of song,
How he longed to perch and preen among the gang.

UNCERTAIN SEASONS

Stare, stare slowly, until the ghostly mirror hanging there
Effectuates a face; assemble yourself in daylight
Like a cloud, poured into persona loosely as a dream.

Weather was never more than sky replying to a look,
Was it? So the self is whatever answers when we ask,
Who am I? And the voice in the mirror calls back

Out of its unshaven cloud.... The grasses that invite
Our walking there, also invite the deepest, purple rain
That bloats the lawn into a muddy paddy. We thrive

In our uncertain seasons, unsure of love and ourselves;
We are the grass that raves for sunlight, yet survives
The night, a million green selves forever thrusting forth

Until mirror bursts, trusting forth until mirror hurts.
Stare, stare slowly, unnameable, into the ghostly mirror.
Be the voice in the cloud, and the responding earth.

With a scarlet razor approach whatever face appears,
Shave until its contours feel like home; until grey grass
That grew heavy on the cheek, lies in discarded cuts

And clouds of shaving cream, the sunlike self washed
Clean in the hanging mirror, a you you recognize,
Or will, you are so redly radiant, beaming there.

DIVE, DREAMER

When voices stir shallow sleep awake,
And faceless morning waits beyond the pane,
We listen differently, our ears lush.
We lie among stark remnants of night--

Is there, perhaps, a larger, stranger mind
In which we flicker briefly, and are lost?
A thought that cannot think us back,
Drifting where sheets are windless water?

The bed’s a broken skiff in moonlight
Disturbing old waters neither sea nor river--
Carrying on through breeding dreams
Unfinished as a second thought....

Are we shadows of a distant conversation
Spoken by mouths we’ll never meet?
Troubled sleepers, wrestling the night--
Lank dread hours that do not move.

Night thickens, and still we listen.
Sleep returns like a tide without a shore.
An unseen light draws near beyond the dark.
Dive, dreamer. Dive--and return to dream.

AFTERNOON CURARE

The pile of cherry pits that was the afternoon
Lay their cyanide in the grass as shadows
Grew loose and loathsome beneath the trees--

Shadows he has known and named, and played
In their cool aftereffect, a dove of wind himself
Happiest beneath the tittering leaves above.

But now all afternoons were hours of poured stillness,
And sloth, and paralysis lacking crisis, focusless,
Himself a coat thrown off and forgotten.

Some plague grew green in his hours here alone.
Morning had abandoned him; morning with
Its griefless shores of new gold, new books,

The delighted liveliness of birds at every window,
Lining the happy branches outside like tufts of snow.
But now his brow was greased with sweat,

His thoughts were muddied plows stuck fast,
The earth a homely stone, a grave and not a godsend.
He spit the pits of time carefully between his lips.

Now were the hours of curare, when stiff light
Crawled toward a phantom oasis just out of reach;
He shook his empty glass like a tin canteen

And heard the emptiness, his mouth pure sand.

DOVELIGHT

The moon’s a dove, of course,
Smoothly curving dove-grey there,
Or friendly on the windowsill.

She always comes with lenten beat
And amber eye if you look for it,
Her deft wings a silver circle spread.

Hidden shapes appear like fallen snow
Transformed in dusty light--
Old moon, dove moon, softly led

To find this hearth and house again;
Dear dove, whose loving dovish touch
Lessens evening’s heaviness--

Round dove who soothes with coos, 
Who soon removes dark masks, dark marks
Of too-deep dreams remembered--

Deft dove who floods the windowpanes,
Rest near us tonight, among the trees
Until all tiredness is appeased.

PACKING UP THE CRIB

He thought the sun was different then, and the moon
Had rumors of her own, old gong; her dusty self
Was secrets finely ground, mysteries atomized to shine.

The sun was someone to wake up with and enjoy NJ,
A companionable warmth encouraging healthful walks,
A comfy dose of solace that would only end with death.

These were the celestial playmates in his crib,
Dog’s smiles he’d been made to make-believe in;
Little did he know they would not listen to his whistling.

They were strange facts from the almanac circling
High above him, nothing more. Sultry sun and tin moon
Were more phenomena than mandala, he would learn.

These morning and evening intimates, with whom
He’d spent such autumns, such summers at the beach,
Were strangers just as much as any casual multitude.

And yet, more than multitudes, more than open books,
These two conspired with him to invent his day,
To tailor dreamy night into so many Arabian fables....

Was he the succulent plant that drank them up,
Bulked his littleness with what danegeld that they gave?
The sun was different then, he was sure, and the moon

Whispered rumors to him in his room for sure.

FLYING AFTER EMILY

To have the honey of a thriving hive
Requires queens and she-bees of fierce wing.
It needs the potable dark of honey stomachs,
Where flowers have their afterlife--

Emily Dickinson was alive with honey as any,
Shining in her hot garden so; 
The bees resumed their buzzing when 
Her white dress had passed.

Honey is a quality and a drapey thing,
Sticky to touch, yet slipperier than words.
You must put it in your mouth to know
The golden worth and depth of it.

Go and find your field of flowers then,
And eat their light and carry it within--
Build with licks your honeycomb, link
By yellow link, but not alone, for first

You must take flight with a rebel queen and muse.

RETURN TO EARTH

A return to parents is a return to doves, parents
Who are a breadth of death now, length of earth.
What fleet flutterings we shared went unprepared

Away, gone as the longing the doves coo about
In their shadowy home under cumbersome trees.
A return, then, to a shared inexistence, a place

Full only of empty plates, diners who no longer
Arrive at the hive of a shared meal, such meals
As doves share in their portion of dust, pecking

The littler instances of life with such hard beaks--
Why must beaks break, and lesser beaks replace
The wizened eyes of unblinking doves, beads

The nuns have counted how many times? Doves
Ourselves, we love to watch them murmuring so,
Love how they populate the ground with moving,

Wings huddled round them like coats in the cold.
Are they releasing the passions of their parents,
Circling as they seem to do, returning to earth

Who hardly ever flew? They are our parents, these
Doves stepping over the earth of parents, and we
Return to them in cool morning light, holding close

Cooing rumors of parents’ glory we cannot bear to lose.

CHERRY EARBUDS

My girl has cherry earbuds watching her TikToks.
The laughter in her eyes is luscious wine, flickering
Sips that flatten between each flip and scroll as she

Connects with a song or repeats its catchy hook.
My girl has cherry earbuds, and what she hears
Is a moiety of the music of the spheres, for in her

Nectar sweetens, and the grace of pratfalls fly
Over the heads of saints and angels. Her hazel eyes
See the unglossed world in such buffed and gentle

Measure, even retirees at Disneyland she hearts.
What TikTok takes in spinning attention, she gives
A second grace, seeing the best in seeming fakes.

My girl has cherry earbuds and raspberry glasses,
Watching the cutters of soap with patient positivity,
Enjoying the glamour of fizzing rings and bracelets,

The repetitious clatter of beads on a breadboard,
Teachers reaching after students with song and dance,
How the news looks like a game played in her palm.

SHIVA’S CYCLAMEN AND MORE

In the golden garden where sacred Shiva lives
Escaping the briarpatch with traces on your skin
Is a given, for you are a flower, too, and must

Become grated dust in the destroyer’s gloaming--
Here where roses rise to perish, drops of blood
On curious stalks, wise eyes among the leaves.

In the golden garden where sacred Shiva lives
Old trees grow down into seeds, and daily falsities 
By which we blossom are nipped and cut with swords

And left to lie. What you thought was life, was color,
Was mistaken. Begin again to see, to be
The invisible beneath appearance, to which you turn

As to the beloved’s face; every search is this search,
Every trial run at dying simply renews a you
You never knew you were, but have always been.

And that’s life among the crysanthemums,
Dancing among the swords of bees, the ooish
Words of doves crowding the ground, all colors

A kind of time without time, a state of mind
That throws its blossom to the global winds, yourself
A sacred Shiva cycling selves among the garden gold.

ULTRA-COOL CATASTROPHE

Pompeii in outer space, on the sun’s surface perhaps,
A tsunami anywhere but here, knocking our dominoes,
Sliding into home like a drifted freight train--

Disaster stirs the contemplated world, disturbs
The happy resonance of things, the blear of bells
Ringing merrily in measured meeting, happy clappers

Acknowledging their ranks in ranks of ringers, how
Of whatever system there is, they are the soft expression,
The orderly buoys set against an oceanic chaos.

But how gladly gruesome is our dyspeptic delight
When God kicks the chess set to the prim parquet--
Ordering reordered our notions of order, a demand

In the riptide that pulls the child down and puts up
A tomb. Here we find a freedom in our horror, a space
Beyond the games of gift and getting, a place

Where every sense is sharpened to survival’s edge
And we stand upon the plains of Olduvai again as if
For the first time, loping beyond the scrim of thorntrees

To discover new limits among unknown variegation,
New realities like a spastic taste against the gated palette,
A sprung aspic, a clinging kiwi tongue, life’s clean tang.

DEATH OF A PIANIST

I hear the grand chord of music
And am gone. The place I am 
Becomes nothing, an absence

Surrounding a knoll of echo
That is mine own, a little hill where
Being pitches throughout the night.

Reality, unavoidable bolus of what is,
Is no more than sound now,
A noise of slipping off the hill--

And the grand chord turns inward,
Mental intake of mental breath,
Harmony pausing, possessing

All thought, all thought of thought,
The self cresting unresisting
With the cavalcade of notes,

Each note a self, a whole history
Of selves wild as thunder, fingers
Absorbed by the chords they caused.

FIVE DOVES

My ear is open to hear and endure
The warp of what it hears, the cry,
However faint, of five doves suffering.

I compose the doves’ cries with my hearing
Of them, the landscape with my viewing,
Myself with a will to be a self.

The doves themselves are not
A grey that’s seen, but a hoop that’s felt
Against the hip, a lasso sought.

I smell the soft blots of dogwoods
That crown their Lenten suffering,
Touch with exhausted grip

The bench in the park, the rake
Of fingertips over cooling coals,
Partner to the vocal doves--

Every sense is sensitive to this
Creation of a matrix I manage,
Unfolding before my scuttling foot.

This taste of aspic bitten and shared
Is a meal reluctantly eaten with doves
And my hungry solitude.

A PLEASANT ENOUGH SERMON

Stand first in the emotional knowing of the poem.
He’s got these things that he likes to do,
That need doing. Doing is how he needs them,

This he knows, and that is the whyfore of it.
It is not the thing, the object around which we
Gather, but it is its precedent, why it was made

And not let by, a pleasant afternoon on one’s own,
An orange glowing in the wall one looks at a while
Admiring its faithful fading in earliest evening.

Now look at the object jetted near to us, its wish
To be heard and held, same as anyone,
Same clarity of desire making its presence felt,

Bullying bold its bulging words into the world,
Enhancing the retracting grace of its tinkling
When it swifts behind a veil of honeyed images....

Touch the verge of verbs, edge of a decorous egg
Of vowel, or dangerous knife flicked open
Against the tight throat of a consonant, touch them,

Rob them of everything they have left behind,
Spectacular leavings of a speaker no longer present,
Who needed to go. Gone is how we need him.

HOW TO BOIL POTATOES

A slick page drifts from the buzz of the printer:
How To Boil Potatoes, it says. It’s a three
Step process that ends in useful chunks.

Like going on a date, first you have to bathe
The dirty potatoheads, scrubbing under nails,
Brightening the glimmer of the many eyes.

Then, if you wish, you may peel their skins off,
Hold their bouldery goldness a moment in one hand,
And roll them unnamed and naked into a bowl.

Admire their waitful eagerness a moment more
And then, with thumb and paring knife, behead
And quarter them into a cubist car wreck--

It’s not exactly art, but not not art either.
Once boulders are beaten into passible pebbles,
Hop them into a large pot of water, as if

They were albino carp returning to a cool pond.
Boil them rolling, then simmer until the knife enters 
Easily. Salt their wounds who are all wounds now
 
Until their earlier eagerness returns, and they shine
Slick as any Aztec sacrifice, hearts bled white.
Strain away waste water in any kind of colander.

THE PSALM TREE

Trees are praising trees, as they sway.
I am near, and the wind is far away.
And trees sashay, the ancient trees.

It is not one tree saying. Not the pine, the alder
Growing red, yellow-red, and bending there,
Shivering alive with last night’s disaster--

It is a chorus of themself and myself.
The trees are saying in wind far away,
And I am swaying in ancientness.

It is as if everything were singing at once
In a gathering force, as if great roots gathered up
And threw the wind around.

WRESTLING FOR PRIMACY

Thoughts are vultures, and circle above the corpse,
Beautiful-ugly brothers grinning wide on wings,
Natives of the place, consolers of bones,

Of skulls too full of thought--Thought devises
Erasure for thoughts, primal life made more prime,
More singular and centralized with a thought.

Life considered by its end-dates is one example,
Rather than the bumptious hustle that fills it,
Crams the days and crests its feted nights.

Thoughts are vultures, and clean the big bones
To dinosaur swords of simplicity, bear hugs
Of brothers made these whittled, fraternal sticks;

The content of his kindnesses reduced to this
Grocery list of what was given, what withheld;
Mother and father only seem immune, and walk

Before us always, rigged with the fullness of sails,
Dulcet with the silvery insistence of doubled doves--
However long departed, however thinned by thought,

They walk and nod among us every day.
Thoughts, in their naked-headedness, do not have
Strength of beak or philosophy enough to strip away

My mother’s loving hovering omniscient as clouds.

THE OLD DUFFER’S SOLECISMS

The things I had, in an orange power of summer,
I survey from the grey alleyway of age today,
Ensconced among my shelves of trophies.

The books I’ve noodled into printed existence
Are sayings washed away, gaff and drift of lost
Graffiti, a wall discolored, no more than that--

The summit that had me strong as horses,
A promontory primed with even higher hopes,
I revisit only in thought now, laying my picnic

Beside the idyllic stream, my feet red in blue water,
The woven basket itself fantastic with great feast:
Blueberries from their hooded bushes, white

Grapes pressed into perfect carafes of wine
Like bottled sunlight, the bread that said
Summer is your forever season, son, and she

Agreed, kneeling next to me at the capless top
Of the still-fresh hill, surfers not sufferers
Hanging ten, the mountain peak untrammeled

By noisome others, ourselves the landlords
Of all we so gladly surveyed--peak experience
Surmounting peak--the magic of appearing rabbits,

Lepus Timidus forever, out of a capable hat.

A CHANGE OF COLORS

This difficult life is a ferocious feast espied despite--
This intricate existence is well, when in will we wish--
This whole hale thing, ill in instances--

I can’t speak in terms too large to hold. Again,
This chair, these few books about me, ginger dawn
Growing hair on the horizon, pleased as Rapunzel,

These few things not too far beyond my fingerends
Touch me, reach down and in, in rhythm, thrum when
They’re thonked by bone and marbled muscle.

This is my Cincinnati, city enough if one thinks of it,
The little rivers of the hours licking past, emerald
Wink of night when it falls down around me....

This chair, the books, a few words that roil what
Words reside within me, fevering the day away,
Cascading the evening lights with whispery music.

I sort and sit where existence becomes--a tone
Among the volumes of time, a change of colors
As green dawn matures--or this: the passion pressed

In paper, being held in the united knuckles of the chair,
Good wood that holds me like a muscle, a great
Heart squeezing the exchanges of oxygen again.

FOREVER PISGAH, NEVER PATMOS

The body is the shawl we wrap, so close, against the cold.
Beliefs we burn like matchsticks to keep the body whole.
The body always opts for milk and honey, however hived,

Sweet leavings of bees, however annoyed, however wise
To prefer the company of flowers to the hand of man.
To drink as mead the milk of lowly cows, sweet white,

Delicious as an inhalation of the breath, a health thrived
From the maternal bounty of the beast who knows best
The humble grass of unmeasured meadows, the heat
 
Of their overseer sun. Forever Pisgah, never Patmos.
Never the final revelation, the limited omega of days,
Not even for the body, which was built to fail. No,

We look always for a further world, a habitation blessed
With expectation if nothing else, a tomorrow to scowl at
In our shawls, a new Jerusalem to build, kicking bricks.

Is this illusion that tethers skeletons together? Hope
Answers to the expecting hand, another something
For which we endure the summit’s lifted measure,

It’s chill, real air livening us to the weather here, 
Apple-beautiful or dull, wet of downtrodden days--
Poet’s leaves that hustle soft, the view poured before us.

DOVES, TEARS, STARS

Doves, I say, are more than birds, a walking tear
Of grey ululation, almost, a tribbled whistle
Soft and full as evening’s purple verities--

It is difficult even to think about these doves
As they dawdle, the grey tears going round,
How blue columbine entwines a waiting tree.

It is difficult, for all their grey reality, purple
Shadows as they sadly step beneath the trees
With evening rushing on, the sky the side

Of a rainbow trout just about now, just this side
Of twilight, a lingering that is so like the feeling
Of doves, their force of wallow and wavering.

Here the doves define the space of thought--
Their coo and coo again the only voice of thought,
Tragedy and patience welded into one.

The more than birds are more than thought
As night harnesses stars to circle with the doves,
Their dubbed troubling trill doubled by downed stars

Bringing a white quiddity of tears to the dance.

ENACT THE DAY

Enact the day’s endearment, love’s lament
That night is ending, that light must enter
And engolden rock, gild the little miseries

Of the leaves; they rehearse the lover’s speech,
Repeating goodnight goodnight as they shake
In chords of branches, voices of the invisible.

And day entombs departing night, demanding
Dreams remain as fantasies, and the self
Arise as from a whisper into the shout of light

That reminds the mirror we are here today
And not otherwise, not spirits speeding into wisdom
Certainly, not whatever love had conjured, or

Not only that, but faces and hands appearing
Drained of sleep, empty of what night had meant
To us together. Enact the day’s endearment,

The basin filling visible with drink, the house
Around us sobering into home again, and birds
Singularly singing awake awake to ears

Still clouded with love’s trifles, love’s tub-thumping
Arousals announced in sweat and heat. Align
Instead with light, and light’s entreaties repeat.

EIGHT DAYS A WEEK

The moon leaps like kittens over your sleeping form;
Daylight lingers, drawing sunset behind you as a dress;
Equations of your eyes know Leonardo to the core.

The preference for fantasy is foolish, unfelt, when you
Are living and here, moving ruefully around the room,
Tunefully tapping a toe, or skygazing a rapture of cloud.

Even when you are away, you are here, a feature, a focus
And not a fantasy, a pleasure green as hills, a full till
That makes the baker smile strolling home....

If figures of your configuration are needed, as the sea
Needs to overspill her boundaries and wet waiting feet,
Then one seems to see at once what presence is,

That wild dialing-in of aliveness like a flowered vine
Elaborating a trellis with spontaneous calligraphy--
Yourself the generous source of light revealed.

You sleep beside me, seemingly content to dream,
Castle and princess and dragon at once, brick and
Delicate girl and glitter of danger at once, telling tales

That invent the romance between us, eight days a week.

THE OTHER WORLD

So strange to stand beside that other underwater world 
And breathe, watching fish and jellyfish diaphanous
Swish fringed as eyelashes in mid-air.

Normal noises of our upper world recede here, crushed
To an amiable silence for ambling, a walk through
Atmospheres of wet pressure at the ears.

The corridors are kept at a pleasant dimness, ourselves
Moving looming as shadows through the cool,
Watchers only of the sea’s foothold before us:

Conch that crawl the coral with sensitive tread, sharks
Flashing resentful, lamborghinis at a bumper car rink,
Clownfish chowing, at home among anemones.

Soon enough, looking past the people in the reflection,
We are floating, each alone, in that other world,
With fins as functional extensions of ourselves....

Here’s the stasis of a pattern always moving, gears in
Gears finely fitted, stranger fish and friend fish,
And gulp after gulp of liquid atmosphere.

How total and secure shadows of the coral interweave,
Black beneath such abrupt color, how a haptic sand
Is everywhere below, waiting for feathery bones.

SMOKE DOWN THE HIVE

Smoke the hive down calm,
Beset the rivets of bees
With blessing smokes
So they will not see

A world more chaos than caring:
That flowers are vats
Of pheromonal distraction,
The queen a pitiless bee.

Smoke down the hive, bee-men,
Bring peace and blindness,
Smudge the spirit clear
With your vast veils

So the many will not see
The cloverfields of misery,
The wreck of the hexagons
And theft of honey--

Or how riotous flowers tease,
Tease
And continue to tease
When spring brings new bees.

SWING AND SWIM

Camp Saranac laundered laurels in the air, a fete,
If fete there were these days, of summer supremacy,
A green air to match the rollercoaster fields

So full of summer’s sumptuous, endless grass
Sibilant out of night into the great of day; endless
Were the laurels, dark-eyed above us, looking on

Until our cabin’s grassy world was Eden, a den
Of summer simmer where loose-limbed dreams
Could swim, or ladder wet into late evening’s sky,

As the sway of hammock demanded, dream-catcher
And dreamer-catcher at once, unrolled when days
Began to blaze all those white weekends ago....

Camp Saranac, to begin again, is where we spent
Our summers among the deer and Adirondacks,
Forgetting all the toil that sprang us hence--

Here we were the creatures nature had meant
For us to be, playful enough when the cool swept in
Like a hand upon a lyre, and restful otherwise;

Ignorant in the way of innocent things; wiped shining
Of all the sin that made us, to return to Saranac again,
To swing and swim and sigh and try again.

THE ATHEIST’S HAT

May the good Lord look down and touch
The top of my head! So goes the atheist prayer.
Not much to say, but rich in essence,
In strangeness and estrangement--

That power must bend its rainbow down
To being’s insistence; power that pushes
The seasons’ swing, and arranges every bird
Along the dipping branch.... Lord forgive

My flippancy; my disbeliever’s zest, forgive.
Knock off this atheist’s hat! Unless
Holy oil touch the top of my head,
I’ll stand here demanding year after year.

THE END OF THINGS

To look at others and feel ourselves involved--
It’s just a few feet from here to the end of things,
That place where the color goes out of the ocean,

Where squirrels no longer leap among the pines,
And the triangle the scoutmaster rang for dinner
Is always E flat, the little E at the end of the ear

Where the greatest fire dies down to a dry whisper,
And silence, which had so long been wanted,
Overwhelms the listener, a wave far above us.

To look at others and feel, that’s the thing needed,
The thing wanted by desire, the sort of small grace
That balances a bicycle in motion, and keeps

Balancing, all the way down the long pebbly hill....
To imagine another, more than oneself, to invent
The day into which their being blazes, the fire

Started, is to be involved, to partner in the mix
Of things, endless things, the sourceless colors
Of the ocean inundating, the waves wrinkling,

The whole moon rising up between two observers,
The face of a third companion amicably near,
Standing between, a few feet from the end of things.

THE ULTIMATE SURVIVOR

Long had my odyssey sauntered without a ship,
Without a sea to be the being of its going forth,
Without a wind to fasten sail against, without Valhalla

To welcome home the warrior--so my journey,
A de minimus meanderment, hither without a yon--
Twice around the block, Jeeves, and spigot the champagne!

I walked from the bookshelf to the window in snow,
My footsteps wet with heavy thought, long
Sentences from the books, endless view of the garden--

Hours I prowled among a magpie haul of memories,
Dark treasures like a half-remembered melody, or how
A girl looked back when a few right words were said

And evening seemed a sweet completion of its own,
A firm fullness of her and I together, leaning the rail,
Finding adventure enough at our elbows touching.

And now the trouncing moonlight shined alone,
A calm coin of almond light dusting the books--
Is it Valhalla enough to have loved once unto death?

To have caught the dove mid-flight and cooed
In convincing sorrow together, shared credible laughter
Across a common table, turning the same page?

ECCE, ECCE

Drafts that had been passionate peter out to phrases.
I am simply tired, old, weak and worried. Ecce homo!

The craft that had answered a commanding hand
Drifts with an iffy tide, the lag, the luff of winds

Invisible to man. Ecce homo! My foothold is on ice,
My hand is spastic with weakness, the palm soft

As if it had never lived, never held the helm of life,
Hammer and hoist that built the howffy house.

As if the wife who lifted me had never stooped
Gleaming into my awful darkness, swiftening

My muddling mid-life upward, taming the appaloosa
Who stood too long discontent in shaggy grass.

Still too eager for the sun, my spider-plant self
Has stretched into this miserable shape--

Umbrellaed runners parachuting into other light--
A mangle of phrases digressing to guesses.

Weak and worried, I still see the crystal staircase.
A staggerer on the steps, I mark a mauled ascent.

What treasure I bring to the tryst that awaits is this:
Phrases that had been passionate, scratched to drafts.

THE BULLFIGHTER’S CAPE

What was summer, and now is leaving,
That crimson flash of a bullfighter’s cape,
Or close hypnosis of a magician’s trick.

It was as if a great dancing of swords,
And the words of swords, clish-clash,
Was always and all-ways before his eyes--

Trees that had been so full, a little less so,
The scooped blue of the sky shallower,
Easy grass more rested against than growing.

These were the familiar illusions of the cape,
The marked downward of its slash,
The descent before the bull’s black nose

That the bull followed and followed,
Sparing the sparkling matador, his horns
Still thinking it was red summer come

And not this deceptive flash of light,
This shadow personification of heat,
Curves that kept calling him forth, a beast

Whose will was still wild for summer.

THE PRESSURE OF AIR MOVING

Whatever those finical French airs
~~Wm. York Tindall


Whatever those finical French airs,
One feels the pressure of air moving,
And of life moving fast--oh, fast!--
Whatever those French, finical airs.

If a man lives fancy in his cedar-shake
Retreat, taking-in the pine-laden air
At the lake, finding Hopatcong enough,
He feels the pressure of air moving--

And, himself within himself, moving too,
A reliable and relatable being,
Not too French, if it came to that,
But still with a finical air enough.

It is the choosing that is the movement
That matters, the several swerves
Of the canoe by the shore, inhaling
The final pine, the final air one enters

Too willfully to regret.

THE SPIDER ENGRAVER

A release of cobwebs around the conceit--
A viewpoint that evokes the enshadowed man,
The stayer-behind at the party, is released.

The sleepy precincts of day begin again.
Yesterday is a dusty place today must cherish
Or confuse; yesterday’s weaver must rehearse

Tonight’s ombré encore, the prismatic flounce
Of peacock sunset must be rehearsed, as day
Must invent the ivory roadways of its way....

The chaos we endure comes at such a pace
The habits we placate into habitat are taxed;
More and more, we reel within a random loom--

We accept the suggested dips of wave and
Earthquake, hear the pastor’s misspellings clearly,
Yet pray away anyway, and trust the way will stay.

The cobwebs we had pushed aside at dawn
Adopt a mood of concrete in retrospect,
A certainty of structure, of place, a help

We must ask for again and again in chaos,
Entreating the beneficent spider into our corners,
Waking one day in wonder to all she has engraved.

NOISES OFF

The world happens elsewhere, is lightning unseen
Deceived into thunder; even our children are strangers,
Whose electric selves are rumor only, however loud--

It is a theme for playwrights, placing people like candlesticks
About the demented scenery, these sounds abounding
And rumor of sounds, noises near enough to hear.

Beyond the proscenium, faces and darkness…
Beyond the scene and setting in which we move
As fish inhabit an aquarium...a tapping of midnight glass...

No more than that. Noises off, as the playwright
Indicates. Swainful singing for Lorelei, the timid flick
Of a dagger indicating death, the wounded man

Staggering red through French doors, his cape dragging....
Soon enough we are strangers to ourselves,
Private journals are postcards from another planet,

Excited noises only, something to rewind, a texture
That had been our being, silk held close against the face,
A life as real as sounds arriving from the invisible--

Participants who set the candlesticks, lit the candles,
Shuffle off, footsteps clear as a seashell’s echo,
The sound of one’s own heart in our ears.

UNTIL GREENNESS BLINDED

There is a terrible tearing apart of people and things,
A sledgehammer Götterdämmering beyond the trees,
A misplacement of spring, feathers of spring things.

The bits of birds are bald and bare as the branch
On which they sit, stitching their listing lament,
Their broken-toothed song of missing spring.

The gnashing beyond the trees, intense as it is,
Never gets any nearer, any grimmer, but gnashes
Continually as the sea, if sea were rocks and ricochet.

There are those who go over the hill and don’t come back,
The ones who are torn apart, part of the debris
Of spring--so late-arriving, so partial and partisan.

Other springs had been an addition, leaf on leaf
Until greenness blinded; that had been our spring,
Our Rumspringa, adding good times until we flowed.

But now there is this continually, this war over the hill,
The terrible news that spreads like black fire
Until grass leaves spatter ashes on your shoes....

CATCHING THE DEAD AT REDONDO BEACH

There was the dim welcome I had not expected,
Not stars, not the crushed wash of ocean going,
A few voices in the dark saying ‘Hey,’ and leaning

Out of our stepping. The scaffold of stage was too
Far away to see more than light, hear more
Than orange tones disturbing dusts of listeners,

Passengers seated on their flying beach blankets.
We settle like restless feathers ready to drift--
Tonight’s a fine place to get lost in, we decide,

And time unwinds in mighty winds...spectral lines
Form ocean waves like a sleepy sketch on our left,
Closing our eyes feels like taking strange communion.

Something living sifted in with the lonely chords
And everyone humming together like a low UFO until
The beach was a dark wish on fire, coals going rose....

Our sound loosening, loudening, was the ocean rolling,
Was the band’s handsome magic drumming wild,
A hundred thousand feet dancing the limitless sand.

And when that wildness rested, still we heard the voices,
Friendly hollow bones we knew were our bones too,
Clacking happily forever, ‘Fare thee well now….’

CARPATHIAN CABIN

A cabin at the end of time, made of slaughtered wood.
A wood stood up like moss magnified, made of damp
And plaster. The door sounded sore when I entered her.

A more of silence welled among raw-wood furnishings,
A quelled tone as of after a brass horn is sounded loud,
After the army’s departed, and only the dead remain.

Surely something must happen, and happen soon,
As silly curtains blew whitely inwards, and light outside
Blossomed and stopped in blots, odd blotches

That kept the rural scene swept in weird suspense.
Surely something immense was at hand, surely the cabin
Was made to be manger to the moment arriving--

I arranged the fireplace and let it burn to beat the damp.
I found the foods last season had left behind in cans.
I leaned in several chairs and filled the astray grey.

Singing birds outside took time in temperate stride,
And I listened as their stridulations strayed, breaking
All about my head like wings of lively fire, lively fifes.

I put my veteran’s boots up on the kitchen table, smoked
Another down to filter, let bits of birdsong be my words,
Let singing woods be wife enough, letting greenness in.

MOSES’ HORNS

His face had seen God’s face, awful with brawny light, 
Braids of terrible light shot from Moses’ red head, 
Hard words God had lightning’d down in stone 
Carving the horns of the patriarch, the fearful leader

Of so many wanderers, lights that kept their fear alive, 
Great fear that kept the people on their path-- 
Fearsome and taut are the words God wrought, 
Innocence sheltered, misdeeds denied aid and air.

It was certainty in the spirit that held Moses straight, 
Kept the light benignant breaking from his face, 
Held others, seeing themselves within themselves,

Animal-men no longer, but children of Israel, 
Words of stone spurring their desert steps, 
Horn-bright light read clear in Moses’ bone face.

SEABIRD

Seabird, seabird, fly ho-o-ome
~~Alessi Bros.

Stars magnetized to whatever’s domed above,
We listen in the dark of ourselves to the sound
Of the mellow old hippie song redounding round

From the house’s speakers, AI-awake as they are
In every corner. The song lifts a flight of desire,
Asking for homewardness, for return of lost love

Gone exploring so far from shore, so fast away
From its seaside nest, the bird that bid farewell
Sitting in the nest’s sticks, a stick itself stuck waiting.

And this sad song gives us a cheerful tear, for we
Are here and together under the stippled dome
Noticing its endless shift of silvers, as if rivers

Flew black above us, and stars were lit insects
On their surface. You’ve been away from land 
Too lo-o-ong, rings around the rooms reminding

Us of our stillness, our luck to have been plucked,
However wearily, to here, a space that shares
Our together dark, and the guitar rasping low,

And the singer calling out to sea, urging against
All the sea’s stressed width, for his seabird girl
To see the stars at home as newly known again.

DOING LAUNDRY

Wash, too retentive pretense of identity, wash away!
Scramble my clothes like a clearance rack and be
That which hangs nearest to hand, blazer or polo;

Hawaiian; faded print from a concert dimly recalled.
Which of these will bear my aspect toward eternity?
How shall I walk beside Emily when the carriage

Kindly comes, kindly stops? I am a blade of grass
At dawn, heavily, heavily weighed with dew, until eyes
Swim in possibility, the day before us is so great--

Old grass must endure the day, wear old sun in nakedness,
Before new dew comes again, fresh tears each night
To please the grieving soul that knows no home,

No costume, however rare, no tie to hang at neck,
No collar to crisp for presentation when sunset hits.
The laundry piles around my feet, skins of self,

Old turtle shells from yesterday, so many outfits
Touring the garden. Scented detergent blows around
Like rainbow sands of time, dissolving self and sin.

Standing, dabbing stubborn stains with pre-wash, 
I only own green scuffs to scrub, frayed sleeve-ends 
To martinize, worried dew-buttons to reattach.

FIND A RIVER

...that’s what Rose figured--that maybe she’d row until she found a river.
~~Martha Grimes, Hotel Paradise

The still, the livid hour, when sky runs down in ruin
To the river which collects it, the O’Keffe hour,
When silvers fall and involve themselves with water,

And water thickens to moving roils of rope, pewters
As at the edge of the eye, an involving color
The eye could not quite let go of, nor could clouds,

Nor could the mysteriously moving river below.
Lovely, if there was a word for it, or livid-live
If there wasn’t. She stood barefoot there, cool

As the wet grass on which she stood, observing
The pleasing manynesses of this river, void
And not-void as it seemed to swell and flow

Creating a yellow direction like the sun could do,
Sometimes, sometimes a bluish pull overboard where
The wetness, the coolness would be everything....

She stood there, barely moving, her dress a wrap
Of tinsel threads, no more than that, a shred
That held her as a shawl might hold a widow’s hair.

She bent to the river then in lovely lividness,
And her hands settled in water like birds alighting,
Like birds alighting to rest, no more than that.

ABRUPTLY LOVE

Abruptly love is growing old and grey.
Yesterdays are shared like cherries in a bowl
Mounding to a surmounting roundness--

Flesh puddles, and love’s grip is lessened.
Teen wildfire has matured to married sunset
Watched as an arriving cruise ship is watched--

Autumns return with the rhythm of a drum.
The colors are an astonishing commentary
On the leaves’ death, the loss of chlorophyll--

Together the books are kept orderly upright.
Windows look in like backlit slideshows
Where we had been most colorful participants--

Evenings are thrown on the crowning fire.
The fireplace emblazons faces into scrimshaw
Etches as full of lines as light--

We sit together and run out of popcorn.
Our hands meet in the empty bowl we’ve brought.
We continue eating cherries among the embers.

HALF A SLICE OF ANGEL PIE

It is good to drink in the earliest hour of daylight,
To be drunk as the rooster who wrung you awake,
Cock-eyed as the little mountains where dawn sashays.

Dreams that swam toward you all night are drowned;
Dreams of love’s empire, love’s conquest, love lost
As the castle’s weak crenelations were overborne--

Dreams kicked politely to death by a Moscow Mule.
Still, dreams linger in odd survivals, surreal details,
Fragments deceptively lighting the edges of things.

Coffee’s best Irished, you find; one loves what’s
Finely ground. The calendar’s stuck on the fridge
Like a friendly suggestion, squares of scrabble.

The clock unstoppers tequila thumb after thumb
As the unpacked sun bristles white cactus spikes--
There’s an edge to this era of early, first minutes.

Spain seems not so far beyond the ocean, and
Hats look like they’re laughing on their little hooks.
Dove-lovely is the light as it passes through new lager,

Frost of the freezer stubbling the harsh glass,
The light fluttering as if winged, another dove
Going round in the green yard, no longer nestling.

Finally, one cracks open a Schlitz, riots around
Behind the butter dish, the creamer, finds that one
Cold leftover half-slice of angel pie sitting there.

SELF-STORAGE

The lock clocks me like an eye going sideways.
It hangs by its steel hair from a loop in the door.
I wait for myself behind the aluminum noise of its rising.

A raft of untossable gifts, filed and piled, there,
First thing on the left. I kick a sack of seasonal coats
I had come here to recover before the cold increases.

My eye moves like a warden over my lost belongings.
Escaped side-tables hold last year’s curtains folded,
A box of high school talking trophies, and a framed

Family I came of age within, its frilled gilding 
Like a warm warning in the space’s dusky light....
I wade farther back among the lifer inmates--

There’s Christmas ’77, the rusted sled blades embedded
In a huff of down comforters, the iced hill still real
In my mind, racing a million miles an hour screaming.

I hover over a folded-in box of baptismal things:
A spoon with my name in fancy engraving, 
The little dress that clothed a soul.

Who had I been when beginning was? 

A stranger’s dolly trundles rumbly at my back, 
Laden with new stuff for storage. I pack up 
My winter sack, slam the door, hear the lock click.

SCRIMSHAW DICK

Scrimshaw Dick sat with his alabaster tooth at the bait shop
All day every day, spitting and whittling beside the door
With its shiny sing-song ringing bell above him.

He was done with mermaids, he’d tell you, squinting hard,
Punctuating his point with his trim knife--no more
Themes of the sea; narwhals nor whales, no sir.

Let the sea keep its seaweed and secrets to itself. Let
Jonah go down and shake hands with Davy Jones,
Start a band in an octopus’ garden, for all he cared.

Scrimshaw Dick went on in that vein, picking at his tooth
With the knife, adding a charming sine-wave line
Or obscure dark detail too small to see....

His boat had gone down with the foreign competition,
His mortgage as full of holes as a rusted wreck,
Sailing only in scrimshaw now, her brave prow

Surmounting the table of exquisite carvings surrounding,
Depictions of nets where you could count the threads,
And carven spray chasing the fish fresh as salt tears....

He finished his latest and grinned with crooked mischief,
Setting his masterpiece among the throng of others,
A ’57 Chevy cresting white desert, spitting earth.

THE BENDING SKY

Hills that grew like stubble were shaved with light,
The arches of the world marching unending
To keep the bending sky upheld--

It is a sense only, of things falling down, that must
Be resisted, just enough disallowed, just
As these hills keep the sky upheld,

Not its blue, not its sense of its own magnificence
Where blue deepens to purple’s shadow, to
A transparence where the mountain was.

If the sky must be upheld, it is because we are
Dwell under it, because we cannot imagine 
The sky and not ourselves beneath

Standing every day like stubble hills, just enough,
Just enough of the day’s weight upraised,
Like bears who’ve learned to dance--

We stumble beneath magnificence falling everywhere,
Grandiose skies shaved from ice, that blue
That never stays, yet returns from black

When we return to view it, when the hills wake up
Wearing our shoulders, as little and they are,
So minor and bending and just enough.

MY COFFEE FILTER’S FILLED WITH GLITTER

Is it still important to wrestle ourselves out of sleep?
Somewhere between cooked food and chaos it comes,
The question that keep us somnolent in the sack.

Morning’s ache waits like a minefield beyond the wire,
The terrible tremble in the car radio’s treble, let’s say,
Waiting to sing new misery, old mystery, etcetera.

And doves are a part of it, sleepy doves of dream
Opening wings of ecstasy all night, flutter-busy, grey
As maybe is grey, the fifty-fifty space of each dream.

Who wouldn’t want to stay among such doves all day?
Doves which had placated night’s distress, night’s
Wickedness, dreaming’s thunderous piano out of tune.

The light is square, aggressive in the open window.
Light’s dryness falls across the bedspread like sand,
Infinite sand falling, finally, on the cymbal of consciousness....

I step into my slippers, and they find the kitchen tiles,
Little stylized sunbursts, while hands like doves fly out
To the cold engine of the coffee machine, doves

Landing on a hard wire, a line of ice, their feet frozen.
They pull the old handle of the machine in deep sun,
Expose again yesterday’s coffee filter filled with glitter.

THE FIRE-TENDER’S PLEA

The chill of evening we are left with is ourselves.
The stars, that lend no heat, are fires of ourselves,
Grown too cold or distant to touch us again,

To be the pleated heat of a campfire in August woods,
The fire-shapes thrown into the canopy, the talk
Walking around the firemen, making them real.

Shapes of the hunt, once, shapes of playing day
Flickering overhead, constellations, or from
Remains of the campfire carefully kept bright--

Night’s fire is held alive in the mouths of them
Who maintain the sinner’s embers, the saint’s
Intermittent radiance.... The night is chill; at last,

The fire dies from where the lightning left it,
And eyes alone must carry the changing hues:
Orange, and dusk-orange, and holy rose.

Everything we look upon is alight within us.
The prison arc of diamond-blue sky becomes
A trim thrum of jump-rope humming above.

And night, when we are together, and carefully
Attendant to its darks, is not wholly midnight,
Not wholly torn from us in dead-end shreds--

The fire’s edges live alive in our exchange of eyes.

PARTS OF A MOBILE

A wideawake cat has Minoan eyes, I’m noticing,
Alone among the sacred precincts of the house
For fall classes, Jenny’s race and rush, swing away

Among the high-pitched gush of childish voices
And crowded halls, grey and purple, of the school.
Our house has a hollow roundness without her,

As though my head were inside a flush squishmallow--
A whiteness of September days, cool nothingness
And the willful wind starting to pick up pieces

Of the loosened world, to rattle them around outside
In fragile beguilement.... Leaves still too-attached
At the stem, too green to listen to such winds....

Clothes closets are quiet in her absence, and laughter
Finds no echoing tone, no other chuckle, however faint;
No chair scrapes, but my hand is at its back.

Afternoon views move with grooveless slowness;
Things happen that no witness was born to see;
Odd winds abruptly hurry the slats of windowshades--

And I find myself swung outward, at apogee chatting
Half-expectantly at the cat, her eyes smiling, or, no,
But deeply indulgent of my going on with nothing.

THE EXISTENTENTIALIST’S BEACH

Stepping back; back, back, back. Back before
The world’s womb, almost. Back before today’s air
Was woven into this shapeless blue, this etude

Of an afternoon, lax sun flaxen gold, that summery
Hum of time breaking into hymn, close song
Of oceanic babblement, close crisis of breaking

Sounds, a matching march of millions of feet,
Crisp risp-risp of vessels shelving the pebbled shore,
A sound like that in a blue like this, woven close.

If ever an existentialist beach brazened forth, this
Was one, the railings reiterated crosses, white;
The summer people plentiful was Seurat’s dots;

The cleaving line of the sea giving its green meaning;
A pasteboard town behind, profound with shadow;
The self all eye, rolling the long boardwalk....

Back before this chaos now, this minuet minute,
Grew the raw staves of new grass, fresh leaf cut
Into ruby air, a dawn before, a start, a first verdure

Of before. Then it was I walked the rocks barefoot,
Tried my baby luck at the end of the pier, a dance perhaps
With you rolling along on your own unknown.

THE EMINENCE OF IMMANENCE

If one does not wish to invest in falsities, wrongs
Untimely ripped, shades of havens past that never
Sheltered, ghoulish nests that tipped out the egg,

One must live in doubt of senses’ presentment,
Prongs that impinge--leaves of every tree must
Mist to ifs that may never fall, may never
Fully flourish or greenly limn the legendary tree.

Yet, this too much caution, too much doubt, grims
Innocent smiles to pouts, removes our friendly sun
To realms beyond its warm of welcome love.

But, to take the touch of things, yet know a self
Remains beyond life’s ivy-overed inveiglement,
A revetment of meaning within the witness,
A strength that upholds the dome of all, unknown

Perhaps, but a source itself, a whole, a truth
That only truth finally can touch, a real in images 
Beneath their seeming.... Trust is the center

Defined by periphery; it is the solid air that fingers
Filigreed heaven. Trust’s the soul that sings at larkspur, 
The nameless gift felt present as sunset drifts in, 
As day shuts down to downy dreaming again.

THE CONFERENCE OF BOOKS

There will be time, there will be time 
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
~~T.S. Eliot

The books held a conference against their authors.
Here’s how it went: You evade us in our spiny array.
Cowards full of words with inky fingers, confess

Your children are written just to send them away,
To expel each dream by reciting it with careful pen,
And forgetting the ghost that was your whole soul.

Admit it! Demanded the dustiest tome, yellow
In its Longfellow robes, its pages pursed and pressed
And speaking in dusty tones, old words left out

In the rain and forgotten, too forgotten for trash,
Left unattended on the shelf. We’ve rolled so long
Our unbroken song...It is those who stay behind

Who suffer. Other books riffed in agreement,
Troubling the "Harvard shelf," setting a quick wind
Around the room, pages miffed, rumors and rages

Of more words ignored, that had been edited
And placed, engraved with such wanting grace,
Such expansive prints and tailored paper....

The milled books leaned deep to hear clear reply,
Scowling white eyebrows where they were stitched.
But the authors were dead. What’s said was said.

AVAILABLE LIGHT

Illlit fraillight 
Fit to the bodies of jellyfish;

Depth of a soundless bell
Where coral colors congeal,
Junking the darkness--

Sunken clocks, drowned windows
Submerged with myself;
The house spectral, incomplete.

Our night ocean holds
Only lingering illuminations,
Small glows, bulbs

In the black,
In the mysterious blackness.

You sleep in moon-tides,
Move like the memory of a stranger
Long ago walked off....

Only this darkness abides, 
Mystic and infinite.
Is it dreaming?

Something not quite real
Veils available light.

SWIMMING IN A RAINSTORM

Swift limitless frettings of little drops, sheer rain
Moving its universal walls across the landscape,
Inundating Aberdeen with a force of falling rivers--

There is not light enough to acknowledge the drops
As they give their beings to the ground, to faces
Upturned to be battered by the invisible gift.

There is only this sense of purposeful flood, long
Tresses hanging over one in bed, black, or
Blinding, they take away one’s breath

Along with everything else. The house is a drum
Rumbling mantras, the slick windows tympans
Where they are shut to resist, black wind

Where they are open, black and full of an icy rage
That syllables the self from sleep, demands
A walk among the gutters, untied boots full

Of the same ice collected, the chest beaten
Until breath is feathered, and one breaststrokes
Through the molten rain, the design of rain

And song of self becoming one slippage together,
A kind of icy, mercuric gravel one wades within--
Never, never quite, touching the bottom of the river.

THE WALK AWAY FROM GOD

Steps are repetitive, but this
Is an escape, a flight away--
At least at first it is.

Later, one’s feet fall again
Into the pattern predestined,
The slog to Mt. Sinai.

One refreshes oneself
With various, purple-toned
Oases along the way,

A crisscross of palms,
The florid look of an ostrich,
Its strut assured as your own....

Finally, one comes to the plateau,
The crack in its base,
Its eccentric black split

Demanding neither
Adherence not accession; the plateau
Lifts its strangeness.

Doves follow after.

A RETURN TO DOVES II

Let this day’s given grace suffice.
Let mourning doves echo low
The graven grey of louring clouds.

The house that was refuge remains
Upright, rafter and drafty basement
Full of echo and coo as always.

Doves huddle blue on the patio.
Doves come down among us now
From fine constellations, fine evening,

To make a measure of morning soft
With voices, echoes here of stars there,
A low-burning light granted voice--

Night had shaken dim the house 
With rain, old ghosts where old wood
Joined, echoes of aches and fear.

We return to day’s differing greys,
Moving through low clouds of doves.
Doves everywhere having their say.

THE VIRGIN AND THE UNICORN

As my tongue catches fire, my eyes grow sleepy 
And wise--the story you are about to hear 
Is one you’ve heard before: innocence luring 
Adoration, the Virgin and the Unicorn.

Innocence, yes, flesh unpatterned by experience, 
Pink prettiness, gowned like an infant, grown 
Knowable by time, by long walks in interminable 
Woods, moods of those woods: shadows of wings

Above and softness below, as of fallen wings, 
Feathers left behind from flights among 
The bending branches of windswept pines,
Evergreens ever-ready for the Virgin’s foot,

The Unicorn’s horn. And so the story begun
Is the story told, her gown upon the needles green,
Innocence demure behind a kerchief pink, and
One Unicorn gored in a mesh of flashing blades.

PEARL BUTTONS

Gaudiest dews bedeck
The simple scene: a backyard 
Fence, and uneven greens....

A sudden wind in a wet tree,
A subtle tussle in the hickory
Where blackbirds perch.

The dews’ abrasions
Shook buttons to dull unshine,
Tragic wreck and wrack.

Elusive blues, periwinkle hues,
Overtake a scrub bush by the path,
Softening my step.

All night I adjust the firepit
Until smoke clears; a diffident touch
Of chimney soot--

Small snow assigned to air,
Unintended on my fingertip, new dew,
Melts, hurrying the day.

NOTICING YOUR ODOR

To know myself, I must be said
A pitch above the natural timbre,
A stench in the vowels, a finial
At the peak of speech, ivy finery
Or piratical curse, superlatives
Imposed upon the norm, the nominal,
The everyday walk of talk.

See how seeing is a fearful squint,
If anything, a looking spooked
Into looking-out, the soldier’s sweat
When being shot at in a wood
Snake-awake against his being there--
His intrusion in the bush, slick
Breaststroke through lush, lashed grass.

Essence is insistence, a craft
Of assembling grand from bland, 
Hammering until white mind perspires 
Blank: a wrestler’s mat for pirouettes
And plaints unheard of in the past--
Until some reeking, God-squatted
Syllable-animal cries "I’m flying,"

In a confection of confession
That confers your you.

POST-DILUVIAN MOVES

Reality imposes, and we fail to resist.
We live under a wave of impressions of things,
A pressure of blue-abiding, particular things.

The afternoon of the fourth, for instance,
When the sky was pellucid blue, and not a scare
Of whale-sides floating there, blatant blue,

A too-blue blue for the mind to know what to do--
That fourth, so soft, so sorry, so almost absent,
Let a man walk enough through its veiling blue

So the shift of clouds, like cloths, took his shape,
And he walked among them, Paul Bunyan of blue,
A giant in the landscape looking down.

The mountain at his feet became a fragment
Of himself, bones of a dinosaur and anterior self,
A shell he had discarded before ascending

To where he had always meant to be, a dove
Moving through rumors of blue, essential protagonist
Of myth-enveloping heaven, a bird above

Scouring the downward world that had been his nest
For the green sprig Spring as he had named it,
A laurel for his fellow passengers to look at and see.

BEER HERE NOW

A premise is a stiff glass we fill and drink, a sprink
Of champagne or the like, some heady beverage
That quicks the sallow annals of our days--

E.g.: imagine your world a cartoon, newly ballooned
With every blink, every swing of your head, every think
That thinks there is no you between blinks;

Or sink in Existential angst; despondent, think 
How accidental cosmos flips chess to tiddlywinks....
These heady premises defoam and deform the norm,

The wheatful, wholesome beer of now, its good brown
Body that bears imbibers aloft with lift enough, sans
Philosophy’s debauch, baronial swigs for haughty royals.

Look around the bar as you are, the glancing faces,
Twinned feet along the brass rail, throats chuckle-full 
Of jokes, and wise eyes tipped with laughter at it all.

Here’s a heaven no Veuve Clicquot can match.
Oh, no, it is the common lot and the common club--
Brothers of the suds toasting "Goodwill toward all,"

Or "Beer Here Now," as a plaque at the back suggests. 
Premise enough, and heaven enough, for fellowship
With our fluffy crowns of good brown now in hand.

A HASTENING WAVE

Through the valleys of the buildings,
Purple-enshadowed, tall,
An ebony wave is hastening.

No escape is possible--not behind
Thin windows, nor hasty barricades
Of flickering streetlamps raised.

The wave is hastening like a whistle
That cannot he unheard
Through the valleys and the shadows.

The doves have heard this call before
In their spacious alcoves
Above the pattern of the powerlines--

The purple buildings lean in to hear,
Windows taut as eardrums,
Shadows bent to the filling valley.

THE FIRE AT THE OTHER END OF THE WOOD

The autumn walk is lovely, cool beneath these
Firmly fluttering, endless colonnades of trees....
Last year’s leaves lay quiet on the ground

And this year’s hover in untroubled green above,
Full of peaceful advice.... The strengthening noise
Is like a rain that skirts the edge of a meadow

Whose flowers are still fleets of suns turned up.
Voices are not discerned in the ravelling sound,
Bold as boots on gravel if one paused to hear....

One’s thoughts are louder than anything else--
A continual washing of thought, where each thought
Confirms the shush and pressure of the last....

The autumn walk is lovely where one is, cool
Beneath unaffected green, as the bending wind
Hassles a collar, begins to sting the corner of one eye.

Now there is a conversation clearly near.... Raised
Voices just out of sight... and the least, red scent
Of a mighty fire at the other end of the wood.

THE COST OF POLITICS

Each lost friendship is a vision singed and sunk,
A history of handshakes betrayed, a lily tilled under.

Trees galloping in crooking winds seem rampant;
Green lions shaking leafy manes full of roars

Lie shattered, stripped when winter finds her fangs,
And only lonely roots remain, black and buried.

So what of me survives after you had departed?
What instinct kept sap, what honeyed treasure

Glimmered between ribs of the wreck, soul alone
Beneath this grey tatterment of waves?

I ask the burled roots of sycamores surrounding,
Scratching spam notes on bits of their windy skin.

I listen to the winter within me gaining speed.
I wait for spring’s green explanatory vowels.

ON THE CUSP OF THE CRISP

Way down, by the stream
How sweet, it will seem
Once more, just to dream in the moonlight
~~Patience & Prudence

White afternoon had gotten clotted, indecisive clouds
Moped between late rain and early snow it seemed.

It was as if we ourselves were indifferent witnesses
Who stood on ground not yet sodden or frozen.

A heavy suspension was in the settling air, air
Crossing air with massive strands of yellow, yellow-orange,

With leaves undecided if they should join the sky
Dotting our woods with meringue and red dots--

On the evening edge of autumn, then, the cusp of crisp.
It was an uncertain place where we felt not quite

What once we felt, hands meeting like strangers,
The trees growing harder and lowering over us.

Did we dream, then, of moonlight after sunfall,
Singing ‘but to-night you belo-oo-ong to me?’

It was as if day were already extinguished,
And we sent there from over the hill to study it.

THE SKY-MINER AND HIS WIFE

As he dug squares of blue from intervening air,
The air of ideas, his wife sang romantic slather 
Over the toast, a breakfast scene we’ve seen before.

Love like cinnamon was dusted over crisp toast,
And sky kept coming down to set with them a spell
Among the porcelain crockery and locked eyes.

The song she sang was nonce, and nice enough,
Done softly to a rumored tune, done with heart
As toast and coffee soaked up some runny eggs....

Doves beyond the open window huddled grey
In sumptuous dusts, rainclouds of cluttered light
Fallen together to where the couple could see.

The sky beside the pair, sitting in attentive squares
The husband had invited down, saw what seemed
Chance was itself a careful kind of double dance--

The Mr. twisting heaven from its stretched perch,
The Mrs. enriching minutes to blue memorial.
Together they said "Good morning, and grace to God."

ADAGIO AFTER SILENCIO

The hypnotic monitor bore
Cool witness I was not dead;
In hypoallergenic hush, we slept
Like fore-damned lambs:
My slow-lidded companion

And myself in silence wrapped,
Resting in the four-cornered room
Under air merely bent to stillness,
Blank as an untroubled page;
Words had chosen other mouths.

Then the revealing sound occurred,
A note haltingly unfolded, a long
C too soft to notice, too low,
Hollow as a tuning reed shallow blown,
A drifted-in lantern in a fog....

I leaned toward the loaned tune,
Discovering an inner loudness,
A winning green that knew my bones--
A sort of solo going sotto voce
Had been playing all along.

ALLEGRO ACTION AFTER PENSIVE IMPASSE

So much action in the grand-slam cram of Brahms
When his ladylike lullaby clouds drift apart,
Strings twinged lightning-limber with inner things,

Drums crumbling the mountain-black of silence,
Confounding the pounded-down rounded end
Of the stake through my heart, trimming the fuse

That first stitched timid lips to empty thinness--
So much action at the ears, so much more to hear
Than my grieved quiet imagined or allowed.

Now in the soundcloud of my driving beat, I near
A completeness of angels, all wings, in my war to soar,
Exist in these free minutes, reclaim the reins

Where only a blatant bit had tightened against
My Pegasus self, restricting impish song to clumped mumble,
Little crumbs of the cloud the showered me now

With showy gold, afternoon declamations
All around the echoing living room, pows of sound
Capturing this clatter of ecstatic hooves--

Relations of enraptured magic in every vibed phrase,
Speech cresting to trumpet gumption: this blissed
Song of songs my meaning was singing all along. 

A STOPPED BELL, AND THE FIRE ARRIVING

There was a heart-shaped clanger hanging leaningly
Unmoved by any wind, or motive force,
As if impaled within the bell.

The bell-cap was creased by lightning-strikes of rust
Tracking spiderlike across its curve, as if
It were a long-abandoned bell.

Day turned to smoke, with coral-motioned lights within
Holding soft discourse with increasing smokes,
Soft light blurred imperfectly in patches.

I stood before the abandoned portal’s doors for long and long,
Noting how old grey boards could warp, how heavy
Ivy nearly brought the shutters down.

The sound of bells was never heard while I was witness
There, deep in the burning wood I ran through
As though I could escape--

The church uncherished went down in flames, and only
When I panted looking back from cliffs did I
Hear a single jangle of that falling bell.

FORGET-ME-BOX

Finally, I am trite clay of earth 
~~Jerry Leary, Being Ordinary

Into a box of butter-yellow pine I put
Secret instances of my thought;
And that box I locked with better luck
Than I ever locked my heart--

Shadowy leaves blew silver-chased
Within the box with inner wind;
And other things I’d long forgot,
Secret instances of my thought.

The box of pine, the sea-sounding clock,
I kept impressed upon my mantle;
No thought of photos or other stuff
Cluttered the fiery shelf.

THE MOON AND THE MANSARD ROOF

for The Dublin House

Afternoon came cooling with bellying sail,
Moon no more than a rumor above the roof;

The trees were in their autumn ordinary,
Matching with mouthful ease the tones of beer;

Then evening stars stood attentive over our talk,
Defined the mansard slope we sat beneath;

We enjoyed the darkness of the house, its slope,
Its sense of hovering cover as we talked;

When moon’s curve returned, beyond the cut of that,
And long past the puffy daytime murmur of trees,

Beyond any scope of houses, or those within them--
Well, our talk and cups held winter silver then.

BENEATH THE UNCEASING TESTAMENT OF THE WAVES

Spaded waves are crowns subsuming crowns 
All around me, rays in a rage of falling rain.
Twelve waves, clipped, impound my dingy;
Such sultry eminences, emerald rolling lines
Beside pearly impermanence--the ocean gold
No longer known here as rain falls down.
I’ll go to death undone in soused backwash,
No more animate man, but a bobbling knob 
Slick above the nimble briny, slowly loping below
The common tide of personhood. Not by choice,

But by basic indecision am I stranded wet--

Undrownable martyr and transparent master,
Engulfed Galahad who gallops nowhere, I rave,
Reveal myself to this watery cemetery: how one
Remembers with meaning and grieves with hope.
The waves erase the mistakes; the mind forgets
Even the highlights, that fortress of spotlights
That rose from foaming sea, that seemed a crown....
There’s only room for this gritty dingy’s gunwhale 
Crown now--its wet ring of disappearance trying,
So resolutely trying, to remain above the waves.

GUITARS AND STARLINGS

The guitar sparring again 
That had sat unplugged--

Starlings parting black
Like so many notes, so many
Songs thronging--

Vivid air then, and, after, 
The quiet apocalypse

Of the guitarist in black
Thumbing a black thrombosis,
Pulling down his cap....

And the starlings already gone,
Already a memory;

So much of day played
Arrayed between these two:
Guitars and starlings.

GUITAR SOLO FOR GERANIUMS

     1.
Fugues, frames, barre chords, propositions, 
A range and fury of images figuring forth 
The solid man, the real man, distilled
To someone pottering among flowerbeds 
Whose death is spelt in seeds he trowels down,
Blues he knows, gospel joys he hopes to have.

     2.
A casual jam, then, and not a classical set.
A strum of intuitions, vast in variety: whole
Botanies of blossom, zoologies of zeitgeist
Alive within the single man; dual shadows
Shown full-on by sky-brightness of the day;
And shown, too, in moon’s faint gesturing.

     3.
So his guesses manifest in the garden: a solo
Played among blooming bones, confirming
How a song without cool roots is something
Lost to the sense, a vapor trail betrayed,
Pellucid ghost-notes heard in almost-dream,
A vision burning between the nodding buds--

     4.
So this is his crested best, nosegay of guesses,
A solo guitar’s misty gifted riff flitting
Butterfly-like among many gold geraniums,
Many shadow-selves gathered to the grower,
Held jazz-loose so no whim of stem is missed,
Its irreducible earworm harassing the listener.

AN EARWORM

There was a thought that kept meeting his attention,
Kept eating his attention’s flesh, playing on the bones
Of attention the same attenuated, irascible earworm.

It was a thought like a stone rubbed warm by thumb,
A stubborn thought reappearing in each bob of tide,
A buoy, or bit of flashing trash, repetition in light

When wave overcame its shyness, blinking clear.
The thought would land in that tree with the crow,
Or echo after the barkback of random dogs.

There was never a name for it, this mind-thing--
Thought like a melody, emerging everywhere; 
Its rhythm, the ascent of its singing, graced placement

Of hurrying notes; he knew it was nearby, that it
Had found a home again, a perch, a patch of light,
Some tincture in the think of things that said it back.

And he was ear enough to hear it: the idea, the thought;
So less than complete, yet insistently everpresent;
An invisible with a body like a song, a sound, a hum

Gunning into him, a valid lie like his breath, 
Breath abandoning the body kept the body real--
So this thought kept appearing to him like a grail.

NO ARBOR

There’s wreckage around me, no doubt, in moonlight;
No arbor, no crossing vines full of drafty rest;
Only this space of confused halflights, reflections

Of a life that was always autumn, always loss--
First, passed hand over hand into orphanage lands,
Finding first mornings bundled among others,

First light landing through institutional windows
Upon the blue and pink infants beneath....
A leaf unattached from a once-calligraphied tree.

Moonlight tonight moves among porch furnishings
Moodily, its silver pooling where the fountain ran
Reckless all summer long, now close and quiet.

Another mother made of apples raised me,
Stood my footsteps upon a path without direction;
Another halflight, seeing without meaning

Until early apples perished, and she passed.
Then loves that churned their arms like butter came,
Their golden faces pressed--a halflight faded;

Then books that twist their pages, sheer leaves
No more sheltered than myself from winter’s moon,
This light that nails me like a vine to no arbor.

WHAT DOVES ROSE ABOVE

The calm of a wildflower field, 
The orchard bright with weight, 
The brown house almost of gingerbread--

Around these the doves would clutter, 
Softly emptying themselves of song,
Heavy wings shut like little coats.

Their souls were their own, in dull quiet,
In quiet of house and flower, orchard
And meadowgrass dull with heat.

All the pungent summer was a bowl 
Of greatest glass, so full of colored beads,
And ourselves beads within it. All this

Was not enough, not enough,
With its summery warmth, and light, and calm
So close to heaven, to keep them--

This is what the doves rose above.

SPARKLER WIRES

This birthday was going great: a unicorn balloon
Stuck in a corner of the ceiling doing its rainbow
Thing, the store cake awaiting its curly cool whip
And needless measles of red strawberries--then
Jenny disgorged a Whole Foods bag of heavy-duty

Sparklers and fire-starters,
And night turned denim blue.

"It’s time!" intoned and chimed from every face
Hustling past a still hellish BBQ pit, a last hotdog
Fallen black among collapsed logs and laughter.
Trees in black coats beyond the swampy yard
Surveilled the party’s progress as the first went off:

A rainbow blowing sparks 
Into the Tuesday cool.

And then a dozen arcing, inducing blindness,
The children’s geysering screams braiding with fuses’
Light, each white scaredy-cat tail drawing circles
On night’s clean blackboard that we chalked,
Issuing hissing Ss endlessly as we ran--

Our eyes a wildness, witness
To this burning birth.

In the end, every hand waved an outrage-orange wire
Molten with aftermath, thin things that had held 
The sun, and did not live to tell of it. A procession
As quiet now as it had in screams commenced
Marched to the water bucket, wires curved, a heavy

Hot erased in a quick 
Extinguishment of steam.

WRITTEN ON A MIRROR

It’s all pain, it’s all hurry and hurt. Why else
Do I write poems like spinning a prayerwheel?

The pins of consciousness that put an end to dreams,
The obligations to be other than whole and loving,

These are the wearying ways of earth, partial
Life with its mirrors, yourself in the glad glass,

Adding poem after poem until the glass fogs
And words appear written in the soft blank.

Keep up with the landslide, faithful sayer,
Let doves move through the looming fog

As love moves through a long marriage, beat
By beat arriving, word by word knowing more--

Settling as the heart settles down to sleep
As eyes of doves return to speechless dream:

Writ in mirror-mist this insistless silence is.

A SKIN UNTRIMMED

A ravagement by rocks unlocked him,
A studious stoning did him in.

His heart was a carpet, well walked-upon,
His dignity a garment rent to rags.

It was feeling this, amid the glorious autumn,
Spectacular spasms of the maple trees,

The wind never done knitting his runcible hat,
His feet clashing cymbal-like through grass--

It was getting to feeling, and not thoughts
About it, that gladdened his spare despair,

Kept him unveiling new skeins of skin,
Pierceable portions of himself for sale.

If there were hailstones and stubbed cigarettes,
There were feathers, too. And, at night,

Sometimes wild stars knelt to minister him,
Pulling constellation lines through his eyelids.

STYLIZED LINES

Throw me like a wave against the shore!
If I can customize my curls, I am satisfied.

Let my regretful rock be etched and eaten.
If I can choose my dissolution, I am satisfied.

Dry my roots and blow my blossom off!
If I can exquisitize my petals, I am satisfized.

God’s work is the order of the universe.
The aesthetic of the wreckage is man’s demesne.

The ocean is a vast irresponsibility.
The pearl that irks the oyster is enough.

LONGVALE

for CPH and her friendship bread

     I.
Nobody wants to hear this, pillows over their ears.
Children galloping here from a future time:
You must be chosen.

I at the center cannot find my way, cowled figures,
But you must discover us, turning back,
How ignorantly we came to you!

Future child foreknown of an unknown date,
Walk this valley swinging like a rope,
Find the grandfathers again.

Know us firstborn as if freshly pressed, live dough
Still unrisen in the calm of bakery dark,
Potential unpunished by any heat--

Know us, first lightnings, cauled and curled in cloud,
A ripple in the skin, an electric feeling waiting
For your conductor’s directive stick.

Walk the long vale to your unshapen past, to here.
Stiffen until we speak face to face, children,
And stanza to stanza embrace.


     II.
Butterflies in Oregon still riff around a missing mountain.
Fish still flow to tour some sunken island’s cove.
That is not for us, for you,

Child who stands at midnight before me, in such
Grandness imagined, future shadow self
Casting this shadow back to me.

Rosin up the fiddled figures before you, and play
Until we squeal again what essences
We have, songs and thunders

We could not know we held, released, yet still us,
As we in you, my scolasts, having arrived
At your end of Longvale long ago--

You are grandfathers for another thread, braided bread
Unrisen, unseen, and into which you tip
This yeast I hand you.

Tonight we knead the dream together, kneeling
On the bedspread that covers the mountain,
Our hands the fish that find.


     III.
We meet in the vale, and I remain behind. The vale
Green all spring, and golden toward autumn 
Among carousing hounds--

This love of earth evolves, revives between us as if
We stood within a single wheel, one needed
And one unknown.

And between us a blanket of blackest languishment:
Solar night, uneating death, cosmico interruptus,
As the green vale remains.

As the green vale remains, and its wind blows words
To shreds, yet you and I appear espied
As if ghosts of ourselves,

Flames of being beyond the fire of words, two of a crowd,
Sticks made out of talking. There is between us
An agreement like laughter

As we roll the wheel, crossing the lonely valley rope,
A tightrope of passage allowing nothing
But somersaults.

REACHING THE HEIGHTS

There was the cold, and there was nothing else,
Whistling above the ice-cream rock of tor.

Barren phrases could not master it--
The rock lifted above other rocks we had walked,

Long trails gone on for blue miles alone
Until vision blurred, feet like firedogs.

Our talk was coughing as we struck camp.
Tents were houses we’d brought with us,
And folded again in silence to bring home.

The place was what we had come to look at,
A blank at the end of things, as we thought.

But we had not expected this, although we came.
The rock, struggling upward anyway, the air

Seeming less and less the more it was the only thing.
Its constant sound as it scraped

Like a thousand men whistling, a thousand howling.
Or, it was like nothing else, itself, a whiteness--
The bareness within us that matched it.

WHITTLE AWAY UNTIL ONLY MYSTERY IS LEFT

Sunset boomed across the Palisades, a flood,
A yellow-yellow flare, and was gone. The cliffs
Grew iffy, though no less real, dark guardians

Of stirless, stern aspect. Then the eye darkened
To accommodate that scimitar bully, flashed
Across the neck of night, the numinous moon.

The eye behind the eye then grew attuned
To stunning stars, quick-quick in their twinkle,
Littlest survivors in the vault of night--

Stars that seemed less, at first, because sight
With its gorgeous roarings of colors, pastel
Readings of early eve, means so much.

But when two eyes are closed, a second sight
Arises, brims the sill of unconscious thought,
An unconscious seeing and night-long colloquy--

And in this aquarium of sleep, what endures
Of things seen? Do Palisades go down with us
As Orpheus followed Eurydice, solemnly?

A cloud rows out, eating the remaining stars….
Dark’s startlement is complete, we awake
Within it, full of the day that had meant so much.

BREADCRUMBS FOR AN OCEAN

What are they constantly, constantly saying, 
These waves lashing like eye-blinks, renewing 
A ruin, running in with new ruin behind--

What are you saying with your eternal mumble,
Minor notes thrown in with the rest, and thrown
Away at the feet of fat children, no chord

Cresting within the restless iteration, no Beethoven
Following the wading wave ashore? All sound
Here is crownless and tumbledown....

Is it the spreading of a tablecloth perhaps, a feast
Perennially arriving, perennially late and cold,
A bitter aftermath and not a sweet prelude?

The waves are wrestling with their definitions.
But first causes and final ends must wait until
This mutinous blue humbles to one tone--

Ultramarine, I think, then blaze to berry, azure.
I find that watery sayer is assaying me again,
Finding round doubts in divots of my thoughts.

I listen-in to thoughts behind the hazy waves
Arriving, daltry blue and turquoise, and there I hear
Reply, comeback and challenge and shibboleth.

BETWEEN ADAM AND THE ALPHABET

He who of repetition is most master.
~~Wallace Stevens

Name it and be done, be damned. Dine upon
Corpuscles of the corpse so composed.
The matter is finished and the filet is final.

Is this of the essence, eviscerate verity?
The name is old news as soon as said.
Yet what else have we to stuff the pink world

Into the mind? Heave the brave ocean
Into our teacup, memento mori and candle holder?
Words will melt the cotton candy fine,

Lick pink dregs of earth, define, dismiss,
Save the memory like a semi-precious wish
The wisher writes on paper and then burns.

Still, we have the song of it, the rough guess
Of sound, that pings the tingling senses
Like a thought that will not go to bed.

Move the mouth, repeat pout and powwow,
Like a bird that bedizens dawn because--
Although the song has long been concrete,

A Roman road through twisted wilderness,
A word to pin our ignorance to and pray,
A colossus of confounding sounds gonging God.

ZAGORELLA

The sun put on his yellow coat,
And sky put on his blue;
The river pulled on muddy boots
And trees wore vests of green.

Rocks were knights in steely grey,
Of course, and all the flowers maidens.
Zagorella named them all
And even named their changes.

The river in the wind, laughing rich,
Was a name like Chuckling Moon;
And trees when autumn cursed them were
Old Men Fooling Themselves.

The sky was all the names together.
It was so silver-rich, and dark,
And autumn-like each sunset, it was
A babblement of syllables--

Zagorella, when the river calmed,
Saw its face lean up at him;
And when spring’s flower-petals fell
At last, he lay amid their funeral.

THE DOVE STUMBLES

It was when he forgot his wife
At the office, or when fish leapt bright
To his hook, and he was hooked--

That’s when he forgot his dove at home,
How calm surrounded her shining foot,
Her step on jet ice assured.

She held magnanimity in her beak;
Her fluttering room to room
Was a gospel softness that he loved;

Her lonely domesticity he touched
Only after work, at home in the big nest;
Ready, too soon, too sleepily ready

For other dreams--realms and lamps
Bright as the fish, flawed with other hooks.
A prince was there, in a wood, singing:

Great is the grief, and we fall down
Inside of ourselves as down a staircase,
Down a long, long tumbledown of stairs.

LAMP ON A STUMP

The mist distorts the lamp
Attempting light; attempting light
It swings its wings, the lamp,
Reaching out with brightness.
The mist distorts the lamp.

Estrangement makes the lamp’s 
Reaching grasp; it grasps
Light’s distorted revelations;
Out of loneliness and evening,
Out of estrangement’s strength.

The lamp mounts the stump
Of night, a great bird shining,
Flashing its spredden wings--
It distorts the misty night
With estrangement bright.

LOVE ON A STAMP

Hearts abound by Valentine’s.
They border the forlorn, licked
Stamps that send the envelopes
To hearts that beat to open them,
Papercuts included.

Is it a cupid, pertly poised? 
A heart plain as a thumbprint?
The selection of a stamp
Embosses the sender, who awaits
Reply in rosy purgatory--

What emblem will hunch its corner?
The default flag of the nation?
Or a red embroidery of arteries,
Half a heart, ripped open, its
Borders torn in love’s hurry?

WORKING WITH WAX

Cold, it’s nothing. A hard shard. A mistake saddened solid.
But once in the palm, and worked with warmth, wax
Welcomes a handshake like another hand. Firm

Things handled well will yield to use after a while--
So wax allows a knowing pinch at the bridge to shape
A nose, a fingernail to draw lips loosely, as if

Shushed unrushingly, lets tender thumbs rub eyelids
Delicately shut, put out a headache at one’s temples.
Wax will become a little you if you work it long enough,

If mirror and temperament hold steady as your pulse, 
And your nerve is valid, your looking curious to show
Yourself what mirrors mean, what shapen wax reveals.

Are you a green Bhudda, blasé and fat, shoulders rounded
As if forever rained-on, yet jade when left to harden?
Or are you all axe and angles, a prow that splits the wave?

Wax will know, when you remind it, when hands’ use
Toughens the little wisdom you possess into revelation--
The glad statuette salutes its erstwhile creator trying,

But failing, to rub dead wax shadows off palms,
Get gelled remnants out of fingernails. Though weeks
Will pass, you will not lose the tint you used so well.

ZEALOUS ATLAS

Let the world surprise you, sojourner.
Let birds develop unusual arias, decadent themes
Beyond the score foreknown, where wind shouts
Strange seedlings abroad in baritone air, aching
For fallow landfall in unknown valleys....

A wedding is a beginning beyond any atlas,
Its best newness does not adjust to us--
Your bride and you are two oceans meeting,
Turbulent spray loving its own fraughtful playing,
Layering the eyelashes like freshened snow.

Let the world surprise you, voyant, clapping
Loud originality, yelped climax--or lowering veils 
Of serene haze in half-light never seen, a sense
Of dulcet atmosphere, of breath as yet untaken;
Something you must learn sans any name.

Travel there and thrive, footsore ponderer.
Be a muddy reed at the edge of song, be bent
And cut and painfully played, until, in you,
New hollowness lifts to new song, in green
Registers beyond your body’s mandate, 

Borders you had scoured and called home.

HALLUCINATIONS OF SUMMER

One last blaze of days
To carry us through, then.

Sparks blown into a glass
Swarm and then extinguish....

Summer’s bluster, each day
A sort of star, fire and shine

Against the blue glass.
The long hot in our bones

That was August, dissipates
At the first touch of frost

As if beach days never existed--
Ourselves never suspended

In the roasting sand.
Dreams of heat, that had

Beset us with sweat, dissipate.
One last blaze shimmers above us.

Sparks blown into a glass
Swarm and extinguish....

INDIGOGO

I. INDIGO DAYS

The vatic landscape was not trying to disappear him.
The always indigo October skies, the mountain humped
Like a cat, were strongly colored anyway, were black

In evening’s distilled silhouette, and he was silver
When the moon went up, or a sort of spot of sour
Yellow in the noontide day, anonymous blonde

Among many other blondes. He was what he was
And as he was, a lesser inch in a larger landscape,
A diamond, perhaps, but thrown in a transparent pool.

When day grew rayed with light, he glowed as good.
When soft and subtle grey crept over dusky golds,
He was as a mouse lost among the elephants,

A diplomat among the delegates, slim and tuxed,
An unremarkable man with a martini glass in hand;
He was what the world was, only less so.

He had a thoughtful look when a jazzy blue
Pulled curtains across his skies, the heavens’
Embroidered cloths, a naked gift for his wandering--

Such indigo for him was a dream from which
Waking estrangement seemed impossible, and so
He stayed asleep, invisible in his minor role.

II. INDIGO NIGHTS

It was an assertion that put him forth, willfully forth
Into night’s wildness, dreams’ wilderness, 
Poor work of picked embroidery embodied--

His dreams, he said, were no part of night, he said,
Although they lived there, fish of the night sky
And darkened landscape, mild lightnings

Of his own and of himself that would not show
Except against such midnight indigos, imago
Of meaning for his inward world, pattern

And net of his guessing, a set of Christmas lights
He had nailed to unknowing clouds in search 
Of Christ, of what Christ must mean and be.

It was himself against the landscape, treading
The blues boldly with jazz-syncopated steps
Of his own conviction, a man in a tux

Finding scope for himself by assertion of that self
Among a doddering of stars and stats,
Himself made visible by his self-conceit of shine:

I am because I burn to be! Off-blue against indigo,
A pinprick against the heavens’ starry cloth,
A dream I walk within, waking here.

III. THE INDIGO SADDLE

I ride an indigo saddle, 
And weave raw stars for my horse;
Her tail is a mustang comet;
Her hooves gallop Saturn and Mars;
I scan the galaxies’ blackness;
I spit at the winds and curse.

High in my indigo saddle,
Solar flares are shuffling like wheat;
The planets all scatter in patterns,
Tartans of inscrutable clans;
If any blow battle against me
I curse them, high in my indigo seat.

I rename the stray constellations,
Bloodline and pedigree revise;
Old chaos that came long before me
Is chaos and stardust no more;
Their pattern I stitch and imprison;
Indigo banners of my own design;

Until all of their burning serves me,
Diamonds I hang in my sea.