Aug 282011
 
There's a dark deep down in ordinary things
Resists our bringing them into view,
Or else in bringing them what light we bring,
As if to ask the question 'Who are you?'

I do not know what answer I would make
Being myself, and, so, invisible--
Although I know when I give or when I take,
Outfitting my days as I best am able.

There's a dark deep down in ordinary things
Resists us, the way a mirror pushes
Until we're left again with things as things,
Alone among our daylit doubts and guesses.

I am one keeps to himself, and although
I do, I do not keep the dark alone.

Aug 282011
 
As snow and snow will in snowing meet,
What slid down danced into a wild sleet
And randomly clung, each to each, 
Resisting ocean's disassembling touch           
That undoes the individual who falls
And in that fall returns to ocean's all.
There was nothing there in what was of sky,
No help of light to help say why,
Only usurpation's snow-deadened hiss
That ended each self-formed singleness
Distilled from upper vagueness and the cold.
They did not fall because they had been told.
They fell because there was nothing else to do
But fall, and this the ocean knew.


Aug 282011
 
It lay self-entangled, curled as ramshorns,
--And pushed the belly into being mother--
Who, to be herself, had first to the Other,--
Which looked as if it didn't want being born.

Its sideways was more, and worse, than backwards.
It had to be sawn out to be itself a lamb,
Startle the clover and bleat "I am."
The bowie knife came handy without a word.

A tense scarlet torn sort of giving-in,
A clattering shape cauled on scattered straw,
Ungainly upright legs besides the ewe's,
Shook me wet and bellowed out of pain.

What had come too soon would need a mother's milk.
I pulled all night through wetness with raw silk.


Aug 282011
 
I look into the portions of my thought, cold and dull.
Wheel in wheel unsettles the quiet mill asleep
And puts an uneasy harness on all I feel.
The river like a clock runs fast and deep.

Soon there will be paper, deep and white.
Wet slush from the chute, heaps of pulp and dust,
Driven by the living water to be a blank in sight.
A haaing gear gives my cheek a buss.

I pole a belt to the drive shaft, and all begins--
Horses in wheels turn, turn in their dreams;
Floorboards shake with purpose, dark and dim.
The razor nibs of the saw-wheel start a seam.

I weep, weep for sleep and do as I must.
I look into the cold dull portions of my thought.

Aug 282011
 
The provident power of hurt and harm
The provenance of an eye ingathers,
(Its certain witness of a moment's charm
That lightly changes a life forever),
Bluely demonstrates in this morning glory
That measures us, our smallness and our fear,
With too blue an eye to ever bear
Until a touch of night shuts its story.
Then we dream, with a certain sort of blue rue,
And wonder in sleep's deep wanderment
If the sun will show us what to do
Or if dreaming can tell us what we meant.
An eye perhaps has followed us all day through,
But we do not know the eye's intent.

Aug 282011
 
Having grown long words in fieldgrass daylong,
I stepped into a wooded brook to dip
Ink-worded hands into the snickering quips    
Offered up by the silverquick stream;
I wondered just what the water had meant to mean,
Whose loose stones insist the water into song.

Many times I had lost what footing I had felt,
Suddenly cried out, or laughed in despair,
By hard wet things beneath thrown over,
Raw agony raised to the eloquence of a welt;

And, with water in my mouth, I'd often remarked
The sincerer operations of the lark,
Spilling a slippery noise above taciturn rocks 
That break bones and never forget.


Aug 282011
 
Three dark junipers shadow where time stood,
Representative of my brothers and
Myself, from earth and water grown to good
Plain wood on the township's public land.

Huddled under them by the neighboring pond
Fireworks cracked to color July the Fourth;
We then, as I now, beside the dawn-like mud
Stood every year we'd been on earth,

Three stranger brothers our divided folks
Reaped as seedlings from the brick adoption house
Into a home too shy and shamed for such a name.

Now torn away ourselves to spouses
And lives, from rooted things by time unyolked,
I stand between the trees without a name.


Aug 282011
 
I wake in dark. The air itself seems stained.
The dark appears a darkness self-sustained
By whatever of darkness must remain
Even at whitest noon. But this is not noon.
This is the dark without a shadow, without a moon;
A dark that won't stay shut in rooms;
One that follows even the ripest mood
And rots there, and will not give way to good.
This is the dark wolves build in woods
Who have no hands and whose teeth are sure.
This is the black that cancels the cure;
This the emptiest hour and the deepest hurt.
This lies behind eyes and bottoms every heart.
This it is that makes a faster beating start.


Aug 282011
 
His dusty body goes backwards to be dust.
On dust more frictionless than ice
A frantic slipping ant will make us wince
To see a crucible mind no more than claw;
A mind that harbors no dark thought to appall
But shapes his perpetual falling wall.
He does not jump for justice or to be just.

Summer's first rain-drop rolls in dust a world
Whose wet invites all wetness hints of growth
(Such a world may we recognize in drought).
Silent and dry, he emerges like a roar
And makes the molten tension burst,
And drowns himself with water, nothing more.
And a something unrepeatable is learned.

Aug 282011
 
The dilemma of doing's to 'have done,' 
And by choosing from Many be left with One. 
Addition's chief mischief is dubbed a sum;

The unwary mistake it for a total solution.
The wise contend that all is confusion, 
Or at best a formal intuition.

To act presumes belief, or so I'm told,
And am pointed onward, backward, or upward to God, 
(And reminded not to mind the length of the odds). 

The less done the better is my subtractive reaction. 
I'm not quite afraid to feel quite forsaken, 
(Except that, of course, I might be mistaken).

One thought is left me, with which I'd begun:
"The dilemma of doing's to 'have done.'"


Aug 282011
 
There's a rhyme at the joint point of knowing.
There's a place, a way of saying, that clearly makes
"Good" and it opposite resonate, and even ring
The way a glass cries out when struck--

Sharing its invisible essence like a singer.
Glasses, brim to abyss, display a range
Of interchanging tones to the ringer
Who bangs the magnanimous Strange.

Does a sip sip the Good, or a sip sip the Bad?
Either way the song sways, half-empty, half-full.
The opposite of Good's not Bad, but
Odd, whose disobedient music's beautiful.

What words can we sing, for the Good, for the Odd,
That will make them ring out, spoon-struck, like God?


Aug 282011
 
Once upon a time, I had slightly
Bruised my fingerend in tying
Unneedful knots too brutally.
The knots were sonnets, gracefully
Losing bout by bout in rhyming,
Despite my careful scratching
That annulled no spot of itching.
I had not thought that writing
Was so much like fighting
Or two witches bitching
So under-epidermally.
I stayed at it relentlessly
Tying tying tying
Every 
Musing, 
Bruising
Blossom stylistically.
The daisy-
Chain was for no one particularly
(Or perhaps I am lying)
You know how things get tangly
When we practice firstly....
The lengthening 
String of words got too stringy
And self-involved in singing
That should have taken flight more singly
By whistling 
Unconcernedly
And not too self-consciously,
The way 
A clumsy 
Kite, so sprightly
Can climb all day 
By dodging
More effortful breezes, never too longly
Lodging,
Never aloft too lingeringly
Until the crisis of a knot too thoughtfully
Unthoughtful cripples the so skyey 
Thingy
Into a crooked tree.

Aug 282011
 
A midnight ocean and a stippled snow
Greyly perceived from a rail I know
Shared the grainy dark of here and nearer.
What water was above me seemed uncertainer.
What rolled in mist below rolled solider.

As snow and snow will in snowing meet,
What slid down danced into a wild sleet
And randomly clung, each to each, 
Resisting ocean's disassembling touch           
That undoes the individual who falls
And in that fall returns to ocean's all.
I could not tell just what my seeing meant
Nor how long soundless darkness had been lent;
There was nothing there in what was of sky,
No help of light to help say why,
Only usurpation's snow-deadened hiss
That ended each self-formed singleness
Distilled from upper vagueness and the cold.

They did not fall because they had been told.
They fell because there was nothing else to do
But fall, and this the ocean knew.