{"id":5262,"date":"2015-08-27T16:40:41","date_gmt":"2015-08-27T16:40:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gregglory.com\/wordpress\/?p=5262"},"modified":"2023-07-08T10:19:43","modified_gmt":"2023-07-08T10:19:43","slug":"nobody-poems","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/posts\/nobody-poems\/","title":{"rendered":"Nobody Poems"},"content":{"rendered":"

Nobody Poems
\n(or, “Cloudlets”)<\/h2>\n
 \r\nby Gregg Glory\r\n \r\nVulnerability is my shield,\r\nAnd my flag's Humanity.\r\n \r\n\u00d3ur \u00e9vening is over us; \u00f3ur night\r\n'wh\u00e9lms, wh\u00e9lms, \u00e1nd will end us.\r\n-\"Spelt from Sibyl's Leaves\"\r\nby Gerard Manley Hopkins\r\n \r\nPublished by\r\nBLAST PRESS \r\n\r\n \r\n \r\n \r\n \r\n<\/pre>\n
To<\/h2>\n
\r\nYou, my several, severed,\r\nGentle selves, limned with wishes--\r\nIn the dawnwash of daybreak delivered\r\n(When sleep's gone over to ashes),\r\nI write my soul's shelving shore\r\nOn eyelids and tears.\r\n\r\nCome, while the saying's braying\r\nAnd the farmshed's full of wisdom\r\nLowing to be milked by however praying,\r\nCome walk the dawn's ways, and some\r\nOf your gentle heart's heats share\r\nWith mouth and ear.\r\n\r\nTogether in the forevering grace\r\nOf day brought burning from its source\r\nLet's let simplest and supremest play\r\nNor ask the sun to go another course\r\nBut with hands crossed as lilies lay\r\nDissolve into love.\r\n \r\n \r\n<\/pre>\n
To forget about the self<\/h2>\n
\r\nThis spirit of mine is something unstudied, \r\nInexorable and white, alive in solemn permanence.\r\n---Lord Dermond<\/em>\r\n \r\nTo forget about the self at the self's\r\nUttermost extent; it is the self\r\nMade a self at last.\r\n\r\nTo survive in vigor\r\nThe confinement of the eye,\r\nThe glistering pinhole through which\r\n\r\nThe self is summoned\r\nAs by a bronze gong\r\nUntil all the air is peacock feathers\r\n\r\nIs one way--in wild trial--\r\nThat the self, and its amiable \r\nParticulars may be forgotten.\r\n\r\nCheered onward in a doubtful dark\r\nBy numerous rumoring murmurs\r\nAnd silken sibilances, as if\r\n\r\nDrawn on by a forceful river\r\nTumbling a blind man downstream\r\nTo the sound of thickening confusion\r\n\r\nIs another way for the self to go,--\r\nOn and on, on and on,\r\nIn dark discovery.\r\n\r\nTo feel our broadening sexual silks\r\nPulled and pulled, as through\r\nA pinhole, through the self\r\n\r\nAnd out of the self and into\r\nAnother, and that self flowing \r\nAnd pulling as if a river until\r\n\r\nOur colors lay piled and swollen\r\nBefore our adoring, a silken sail\r\nFull-bellied with desiring\r\n\r\nAnd with desiring only--a wind\r\nThat moves through the self the self\r\nHad left behind and abandoned\r\n\r\nOn the shore of no more.\r\nIs that another way, a wayless way\r\nOf want and wont?\r\n\r\nDead or dreaming, the self\r\nDisappears, and in its place,\r\nIn the place of the self spilled out\r\n\r\nOf itself, displaced and streaming,\r\nThe self that had left its eye behind\r\nLike an abandoned portal,\r\n\r\nThe self that had had an ear\r\nAnd has an ear no more, bereft, as it was,\r\nAmong night voices in a dark place,\r\n\r\nThe self that had had a sex\r\nTorn away in a shimmering wind\r\nUntil the self has a self no more,--\r\n\r\nIs only this, this fathomless\r\nWildness without a where\r\nWithout a how, without a why,\r\n\r\nOnly this this,--in the place of that,\r\nNearby, nearly here,\r\nIn the place of the place and in place of it.\r\n\r\nA contemptuous wind\r\nCrawls like sludge\r\nOver motley rocks.\r\n \r\n \r\n<\/pre>\n
A creature of whatever trouble<\/h2>\n
\r\nA creature of whatever trouble\r\nIs cartilage and mischief,\r\nTrimmed in skin and the smile's lie\r\nThat all shall be kinship 'til kinship dies.\r\n\r\nA creature of whichever wish\r\nIs eyelashes and ifs,\r\nEntrancing Time in evening's dish\r\nTo coddle dear dreams 'til sun's undone.\r\n\r\nO creature picked of which and what,\r\nAll elbows and ears,\r\nTake of this trouble its whatever worth\r\nAnd wish the wisher kin until\r\n\r\nHis wish full is of death and earth.\r\n\r\n \r\n<\/pre>\n
Wrung from the walleyed wait of the womb<\/h2>\n
\r\nWrung from the walleyed wait of the womb,\r\nMarooned to a prayer from god's grave side\r\nAnd all community of the duly good,\r\nAn apple unpinned from its savior branch,\r\nI fall as I fell, have fallen, will fall\r\nEach rainy inch in angst against gravity.\r\nBorn moonblind to majesty and mystery\r\nAnd deaf to reverenced heaven's sighs,\r\nAlone on the lovely ground crowded with brothers\r\nAnd blitzed by a gracing despair, I rot\r\nBlood-ripe and rosy beyond my own reach.\r\nAgainst this windy time will I stand again\r\nWho fell to a world wrung dumb by pain?\r\nI inch each word in angered prayer to a leaf.\r\n \r\n \r\n<\/pre>\n
Doublecrossed by the terror of birth<\/h2>\n
\r\nDoublecrossed by the terror of birth\r\nInto the troubled thrum of becoming,\r\nUneaseful in our mirth,\r\nWhen summer's feather moults to winter's bone---\r\nWe wake in cold wonder\r\nAt snow's undoing.\r\n\r\nWrenched upright, awry by our thrown bones--\r\nUncramped from the comfortable hunch\r\nInside neutral mother\r\nAnd stretched to stand in decisive day,\r\nThrown to thrones in the hissing wheats,\r\nWe bleed into seed.\r\n\r\nShambleshanks unpacked on a walk as long as thought,\r\nOur knowing as nothing as nothing else\r\nUnless such nothing is---\r\nWe hold seed and snow in eye and hand;\r\nIn bone and feather bred, our flight\r\nTells all and nothing less\r\n\r\nThan Christ-crossed oblivion.\r\n \r\n \r\n<\/pre>\n
Dreaming of sleep<\/h2>\n
\r\nDreaming of sleep in a tear-tugged thrub,\r\nHammocked in heartstop, my picayune pulse\r\nCharts angina and angst incarnadined\r\nAnd slows my blood woes to was.\r\n\r\nDumbly in dreams my aspiring vine\r\nClimbs moon and sun---in calms, in gusts;---\r\nI arise on passion's hid hooks to this\r\nWither of insistences.\r\n\r\nSaid the unopened poem in my buttoned heart:\r\n\"Too dumbly comforted you lay your limbs\r\nWet upon the sandy shoals of pain,\r\nToo fell, too full, too grievy and grim.\"\r\n\r\nNow hung christ-crossed on an electric cord\r\nAnd stabbed by life's lethargic thorns,\r\nI bleed my soul's mutinies to the seething sea,\r\nA leviathan on a rock, stillborn.\r\n \r\n \r\n<\/pre>\n
Gallant as a cloud, proud<\/h2>\n
\r\nGallant as a cloud, proud\r\nBefore all the eyes of earth, death\r\nNo more niggly than a gnat, hat\r\nNever humbly in hand, upstand-\r\nIng I was born.\r\n \r\nFeathered in fiery skin, sin\r\nA stranger to my heart-knot\r\nI ran graced, and I crowed, crowned\r\nBy loud Love's crying spires\r\nAll my lengthening youth.\r\n \r\nOutfitted with a suit of ruth, death\r\nMy wages on my way, away\r\nI gave day to moon-soothing night, lit\r\nBy my scholar's candle, dull-\r\nWitted with ignorance and loss.\r\n \r\nO I knew nothing, nothing\r\nIn my pinnacled prime, time\r\nMy wings and my hearse; terse\r\nTime clocked me back to one; gone\r\nWas my youth like a cloud.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
Daylong in the waist-high weeds and ivies<\/h2>\n
\r\nDaylong in the waist-high weeds and ivies\r\nI ate the wonderfully buttery summer's bread,\r\nAnd bright as tears on sleeves I played  and frisked\r\nAnd forgot the wolf in the clock.\r\nAnd windy summer ran out of the morning\r\nAnd the stag-breasted dew each dawned day\r\nRode running and riotous from the cool of the moon\r\nUnwound from the darks of mouse and fox.\r\n\r\nThen the others, the pummellers\r\nCame unashamed with their wronging love,\r\nWith sham-battering hands and scolding mouths\r\nThey gave away anger for their deepest, hurt truth.\r\nWith red apple hands, with bones twice broken,\r\nThey strode hero-headed over the blown-down time,\r\nOver the greeny edge of the faraway weather,\r\nTopping sun and cloud of the tumbledown town.\r\n\r\nDeep in the heartwood home, and hunched and knotted,\r\nAs full of fears as a tit-mouse's shivers\r\nI kept the woods home that kept me hid\r\nIn the bone-lonely branches of my bloodred ribs.\r\nAnd dawn in its trial of summer survival\r\nTurned red in the remembered air,\r\nAnd summer's sun crept crabwise until it was moon,\r\nAnd I heard the sun's hours ride down to their doom.\r\n\r\nAll about the sold home and understood wood,\r\nBeyond the dog-drowning stones that cried aloud\r\nIn the midnight riverbed's spattering blacks,\r\nDown in my hallowed home's owlly hollows\r\nWith my pockets full of leaves and string and talisman rocks,\r\nVowelling dogs howled to adder and frog,\r\nAnd fired childhood crashed shamed as ashes\r\nWhile my hands grew knots to stop the clocks\r\nAnd all the everlasting woe of Time.\r\n\r\nBut oh the woods were golden in their burning prime.\r\n \r\n \r\n<\/pre>\n
Warm and capable hand, now cast<\/h2>\n
\r\nWarm and capable hand, now cast\r\nAgainst yourself in this crimping cramp,--\r\nFolded under, knuckle and finger,\r\nFist-forced to fight all foldings;\r\n\r\nSpider on a mirror how you pray,\r\nAll self-reference in sinew and deity;\r\nAge salts the joints fluid youth found mighty,\r\nSteadfastly tossing treasure to trash.\r\n\r\nHand beyond starlight still remote,\r\nFlick from cyclops Time the mote\r\nTorn from history and hope to this:\r\nA present absence less final than If.\r\n \r\n \r\n<\/pre>\n
The wish of an if<\/h2>\n
\r\nThe wish of an if \r\nIs a backwards future;\r\nBeyond the moment's present use,\r\nThe grand seducer is seduced.\r\n \r\nIf in plain vagaries I am vain,\r\nIn rich reality I'm just me.\r\n \r\nForgive me, listeners\r\nIf this mothering infant tongue \r\nOffends your sense:\r\nLife is my only defense.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
As a cloud<\/h2>\n
\r\nWhen man-draped blood dripped\r\nMyself down from heaven with a dropping cry\r\nSpilling this body from pained hip's lips\r\nCrying life, life to live, life alive,\r\nDid any other come dumb a-tumble,\r\nRiding my shoulders, a capable wonder?\r\n \r\nAnd roaring unlovely all lonely's lessons,\r\nA dripping waxwork with a burning wick,\r\nMy bone-alone prayers wrung, sung in session\r\nWhere echoes creep cold to double and mock:\r\nIs it I alone who lives, who dies,\r\nUnlovely in my body's sack of lies?\r\n \r\nUpright in the everywhere-nowhere now\r\nWith something-nothing thrown on shoulder and brow,\r\nAnd naked if I only knew how,\r\nThe I behind I unfurls a brown shroud\r\nDote-silent now as twice aloud-loud,\r\nIncapable as a cloud.\r\n \r\n \r\n<\/pre>\n
When in the word’s wound<\/h2>\n
\r\nWhen in the word's wound another rumbles\r\nAnd letters push the pen like a ouiji's divot,\r\nArcing after funerals for what remains\r\nCrowding to reunion with our split selves;\r\n \r\nWhen in the blood's barometer another thumps,\r\nTapping tell-all largesse from our bottled small,\r\nChurning brights of vision from eyes too-tight shut\r\nAgainst storm and batter of the brainy weather;\r\n \r\nWhen as in the beginning there is love and wonder\r\nTrailing down each treasure of a tock\r\nAnd bastioned happiness lays everywhere easy as sand\r\nAlthough ocean tear her heart out on a rock;\r\n \r\nThen shall we love those who loved us never?\r\nCarry Christs in our shirts like a pack of matches?\r\nThen shall we fathom the deedless darks--\r\nWhen not a hand, not an eye, stretched back to touch\r\n \r\nThe burning vigil tears of our watch?\r\n \r\n \r\n<\/pre>\n
Samaratan’s Purse<\/h2>\n
\r\nOnce below a time an evil fizzed\r\nA sizzle missile on a stick of strike;\r\nA friend unfriendly wore his face reversed,\r\nAnd the sun come up rose down to the dike\r\nAnd the maker's waters fell skywise to drown\r\nThe small of hope in a calypso clown.\r\n \r\nAnd all my friends, the fishes, sieved\r\nThemselves the fry from the chaos bay;\r\nAnd the long moon sang \"auld lang syne\"\r\nAnd night's tooth conned the meat of day;\r\nAnd safe in my shallows hollows, I\r\nWorked out corrupted wonder's why.\r\n \r\nAnd long in my wondering den\r\nAmong rainbow shoals of corals\r\nEach the quick color of a friend,\r\nI branded in briars my heart corralled--\r\n'Til cursed and closed in mental hearse\r\nI heard the helpmeet of my burnt hurt's verse.\r\n \r\nThe samaratan's snapped purse opened ripe\r\nAnd rosy were all her monies' colors;\r\nIn folds of golds as green as apples\r\nHer tender hand moved softly and softer\r\n'Til touch salved cool the carpet stars\r\nAnd I walked beyond where ashes' blacks are.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
A perch for the wind<\/h2>\n
\r\n  \r\nWhose bones I break bear the ash \r\nBreath first tongued in soot; \r\nWhose back I bare endures the lash \r\nOf days as quick as coals. \r\n \r\nWhose tongue I suck between two gasps \r\nOf bare babe's cry and skull's knobbed crack \r\nVowels a violent void that snaps \r\nBabe, grave and groin in our kisses' black. \r\n \r\nWhose wormy, wasted soul I owned\r\nFilched infinity from moldy bloods; \r\nAnimal and man I dug for sup \r\nAnd killing and kissing gave forth God.\r\n \r\n \r\n<\/pre>\n
To find in feeling, meaning<\/h2>\n
\r\nTo find in feeling, meaning\r\nMere feeling never can provide,\r\nAnd when a meaning's felt\r\nIt fills the ignorant heart\r\nWith humble knowing of its grace.\r\nWhen heart and head have thus\r\nEach the other fed, the whole\r\nComes to the accord and godhood\r\nOf its good.\r\n \r\n \r\n<\/pre>\n
When a wandering impulse from Heaven<\/h2>\n
\r\nWhen a wandering impulse from heaven\r\nVisits the daily mind of man, lending\r\nSome alien hatchling who eyes up the sun,\r\nOur faithfulness is born in ignorance.\r\n \r\nA wetted shadow robs us of rest,\r\nKnowing neither the mystery of birth\r\nNor the disappearing gulf into which we're poured.\r\nOur dying height is but the eagle's nest.\r\n \r\n \r\n<\/pre>\n
When death’s thrifty summons<\/h2>\n
\r\nWhen death's thrifty summons sums my life and me,\r\nWith swift erasure reckons every hope\r\nOne with the all-nothing past's unborn to-be,\r\nAnd, dead unlived, live damned in Time's scope,\r\nHow then shall my accounts accounted be?\r\nWhen bright expectations of my skies\r\nA crematorium become, and clouds\r\nThat had impostured castles as siftless ashes die,\r\nWhat shall stand, howsoever soft or proud,\r\nWith lying life above when I at last do lie?\r\nWhat besides my dog-dug bones shall sound,\r\nWhat clacking tongues make noise of me aloud?\r\n     If only you do not follow me too fast,\r\n     I am content my small nothing shall not last.\r\n \r\n \r\n<\/pre>\n
When contrary winds<\/h2>\n
\r\nWhen contrary winds make havoc with our hopes\r\nAnd a word unwound wounds against our wish,\r\nAll we were becomes the plaything of a trope,\r\nThe telling and untelling of privy visions.\r\nAnd all we were to be in times hereafter\r\nIn all the endless real of dreams undreamt\r\n(Which from the day's affairs and minor laughter\r\nTransform into important night's portents),\r\nAll the all of all our lives unlived\r\nIs piffed to flinders in a scoping void\r\nThat follows our undoing even unto the tracks of a gnat\r\nA moment's wind or quieting in eve's coming cold\r\nWill silver over quick as that.\r\n     When all this in my mooning mirror comes to pass\r\n     One thought of you amends the ruins in the glass.\r\n \r\n \r\n<\/pre>\n
So few tears<\/h2>\n
\r\nSo few tears to tell the story;\r\nHave they gone away, like the edges of papers\r\nTrailing papercuts, and the most excited letters lost\r\nOn the margins of the undersheets?\r\n \r\nSometimes a freshness will surprise us first,\r\nA frittery coolness or itch against the cheek\r\nAs strange as the dream it wakes us from, the same\r\nSense of the seminal real, shorn up by fragments the same.\r\n \r\nEach tear had risen like a purpose,\r\nTipped with passionate wetness from obliterated sight.\r\nLove is blind; so, too, grief and care,\r\nThe silly joy of remembering just how, just where.\r\n \r\n \r\n<\/pre>\n
When in an hour’s perjury<\/h2>\n
\r\nWhen in an hour's perjury some hinted truth\r\nIs caught, and what had stung in coldness \r\nIn pillowing warmth remains, \r\nHolding the soul below the bone,\r\nAlmost I can forgive my human stain--\r\nAlmost I am the thing that I am not,\r\nAlmost I in lightness and in light am propped.\r\n \r\nMy eyelashes then are limned \r\nWith clarifying dews;\r\nAmbition and regret lay neglected\r\nIn the grass, to never again be new.\r\nForever windward my face amends its smile;\r\nForever forward my eyes seek their trial,\r\nStalking the light. \r\n \r\n                            Strike and stroke its rays!\r\n \r\n \r\n<\/pre>\n
A Statue in the Park<\/h2>\n
\r\nBeauty in the eye is immaterial,\r\nThe frayed edges of an ancient curtain,\r\nOld swaying silks chisel-cut in stone,\r\nPhidias' fingers in a remembered breeze,\r\nOr slender toes in overgrown summer grass.\r\nFeet and heart go spasmodically fast\r\nIn the uncut grass at discovery's edge;\r\nLips once pinked to touch another's,\r\nBrittle as glass, yellowed of youth,\r\nTwenty-two centuries of dumb longing undone,\r\nTil time becomes only the memory of youth,\r\nChipped blasphemy of a once living form.\r\n \r\nOnly her kiss' caress can guess this truth.\r\n \r\nDan Weeks & Gregg Glory\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
I in my difficult self confined<\/h2>\n
\r\nI in my difficult self confined,\r\nA figurehead in any kind of weather,\r\nAmenable as inches in the spigot-spit rain,\r\nFeel the flesh fail, whisked to whim,\r\nAnd the grave damned abstractions all \r\nAdd up to grim.\r\n \r\nMy blunt body blown about,\r\nPierced by ports who had swum seas\r\nOf moon's blood shouldered to the prow,\r\nI stand unblessed in the sun's red crest,\r\nDulled and chained to now by all \r\nThe maybe plagues.\r\n \r\nForwarding my drowning right up to my neck,\r\nNo matter the thrifty theft of the weather,\r\nGuest or ghost or soulless guess devout,\r\nA watchman of rocks in the whiskey weather\r\nFull of wrestling reefs and wormy stars,\r\nI crack the crowsnest\r\n \r\nOf my pinnacled pride right down to the worsted prow,\r\nShifting the kissing sticks on the mute deck--\r\n \r\n \r\n<\/pre>\n
When threads are cut that held us close<\/h2>\n
\r\nWhen threads are cut that held us close,\r\nWhen the snapped hand snips the ribbon,\r\nThe veiny net that pulled round wrist and bone\r\nShredded is.\r\n \r\nWhen lungs surrender to a liquid ill\r\nAnd drowned men dead we fodder fish,\r\nThe rose-red sea that we had swived\r\nArid is.\r\n \r\nWhen words have ceased to traffic truth\r\nAnd goose to goose give gossips' proof,\r\nOur mutual tale told in the mirror\r\nSheeted is.\r\n \r\nAlien we stand who shared one knocked breath,\r\nOne saying syllable for our daily prayer,\r\nOne look, one heart enduring Time's\r\nOmnivorous is.\r\n \r\nAlien we died: out of syllables, out of breath,\r\nCrossed as words, incompatible as knots,\r\nAnd no more face-to-face face each other\r\nIn grave is.\r\n \r\n \r\n<\/pre>\n
I who stood on sand and said<\/h2>\n
\r\nI who stood on sand and said\r\nThe God-word aloud in my shivering pride,\r\nWatch mansion and turret rook beneath the tide\r\nThat roars above my body's fevers.\r\n\r\nInstead of dwelling in forever\r\nI came to the crooking shore of here\r\nAs the last darks broke and dawn recalled\r\nHeats that create the damned and the dear.\r\n\r\nNow cool and straight as eve's dark grace,\r\nNow lumped as fever's lesions,\r\nI stand unmanned, unmade, in the shriving space--\r\nA shadow man born of shadowed son.\r\n\r\nI who was sky and wind before the stars shone\r\nBefore earth filled with grave and tower,\r\nBefore my star-marked unmaking stand\r\nAlone and voiceless in unsaying sands.\r\n\r\nOh never again will I crawl into a star\r\nOr dawn across ages to a planetary birth.\r\nI am undone in both seed is and shared are.\r\nI have no claim to make but death's.\r\n\r\nThe wry wink that fetched me manifest\r\nFrom darks surrounding shore and star\r\nIs no more an eye at last, at last\r\nAnd landward ho the shapeless foams\r\n\r\nRemake my manless nothingness.\r\n\r\n \r\n<\/pre>\n
Round landscapes of strangers<\/h2>\n
\r\nPinned to minutes and the clock gone mad,\r\nRound and round its stranger's face,\r\nRound the hours sane as grace,\r\nRound landscapes of strangers,\r\nI go ghosted and gone in the flying dark\r\nAnd this strangeness has no end.\r\n \r\nI'd be lost if I could be found,\r\nIf found unlost at last I'd nail the heart\r\nHome with the hammer of the soul.\r\nBut no nail shines, no hammer moves,\r\nNo home comes kissing from a cloud.\r\n \r\nStrip the gilding from the stars,\r\nLet hands tear down the dark dim griefs\r\nThat moored the heaven-faring lights;\r\nLet hands build chapels as they move,\r\nWanderers wide round stranger and sky\r\nIn this strangeness that has no end.\r\n \r\nNow I wander through cool body's shroud\r\nDistant as touch in a statue's hand\r\nA blownback bit without sail or keel;\r\nNo nail glows, no hammer moves.\r\nHands were made to fashion as they feel.\r\n\r\n \r\n<\/pre>\n
Now the brain is clayed<\/h2>\n
\r\nNow the brain is clayed,\r\nNow sodden veins are glue,\r\nElbow and bone gone soaked to sod,\r\nAnd death's a sovereign moon,\r\nI lie sandlocked, both spine and foot,\r\nUnstirred by the insistent stars.\r\n \r\nNight and death have put daylight out of favor. \r\nShipwrecked on a tear and dry as chalk\r\nDay's gone down on the chilling chapels\r\nWhere grave men wrestle among the gods;\r\nEternity flees triumph in a maggot's egg,\r\nAnd the moon shines down like death.\r\n \r\n \r\n<\/pre>\n
When heartbreak, leaden, unlids<\/h2>\n
\r\nWhen the paraffin coffin's wronging box,\r\nLeaden, unlidded lies unlocked\r\nAnd out of slowly sowing soul inwound rolled,\r\nTwined and twinned in winding sheets \r\nOf the bloodblack body's shroud\r\nThe heartbroken ghost like leaven flies--\r\n\r\nWhat then shall stand in the haranguing sands?\r\nHarrassed and houseless, unshrouded and crowdless,\r\nWhat mood doomed ghost in mist-shifted night\r\n(Or quenchless kiss quizzed from soul's naught knot\r\nSighing life never could quite unlatch)\r\nFlies riven and shriven in the haranguing sands?\r\n\r\nNow risen and simple and unadorned\r\nIn the doorless moon (and dead and bettered \r\nBy our dying damn) we hold to the bold lie,\r\nSlipped from the shellacked lip to the shelled ear\r\nUp the tongue-tripping ladders like a thief\r\nMoaning unknowing what once-living kiss implored.\r\n\r\nStands in winds in sands in silences\r\nThat in us that trumps all bones or guesses\r\nThat lies down never in the manger's knot\r\n(Straw raw insistences of gods unbegot)\r\nThat that moves ruth-ready to the sea-shoved shingle\r\nWhere are and were and will-be may mingle:\r\n\r\nHuman and ruminant in the unready new,\r\nSole holders of somewhat we dare not possess,\r\nWe stand dead who had not stood in truth,\r\nIllimitable amidst our humanness.\r\n \r\n            \r\n<\/pre>\n
Not until the September is past<\/h2>\n
           \r\nNot until the September is past\r\nAnd the grave dead all lie, unshakled, unburied,\r\nAlone in the frost's mouth\r\n(All dying done, all berthing begun)\r\nAnd every crooked, ear-marked child is led,\r\nBy the dimming blood of a failing hand,\r\nTo play away from the clock's haunts\r\n \r\nAnd stars are incited to shrink again\r\nThe cragging moon's corruptible sphere\r\nTo less than a pinnacle's pinched inch of sky\r\n(Not until the September is past)\r\nAnd every weed grows down to die\r\nUp where the miracle dead were tossed\r\nIn a frozen field gone over to snow\r\n \r\nAnd the cold wind in a cold throat like glue,\r\nDying of wanting; and the blossomless trees\r\nLift their skirts to let me fondle\r\nThe bark-notched knees of autumn's parts,\r\nSold old home of my father's wants,\r\nWill I catch cure in the cuckold wind\r\nFor inextricable laughter and hate.\r\n \r\n \r\n<\/pre>\n
When into the mouth the death cry comes<\/h2>\n
\r\nWhen into the mouth the death cry comes\r\nUnamazed and odorless,\r\nCrammed by the ticking fingers of perpetual crime\r\nDown the rattling throat to sound\r\nAn agony of conscience in the unshelled ear\r\nOf too much unlived living\r\n\r\nThen will the eyes start up blind\r\nAnd hair sprout hands for the head\r\nThen the unmuffled will of the stilling heart\r\nWill damn activity, haul up dock to decision,\r\nBless the unpaid mind with rest, tell toes to grow into feet,\r\nKnuckles reverse to blunt, loved palms,\r\nShoulderblades dwindle to wings,\r\nRed ribs uncage to drop dead lust,\r\nAnd lagging heart kick all away\r\nTo fall to a faraway sky,\r\nAnd all of these be mine.\r\n \r\n \r\n<\/pre>\n
From out the tomb like a cloud<\/h2>\n
\r\nAbove this town where I lay sleeping\r\nyoung happily birds convulse minutely\r\none tremendously blown hilarious\r\ngreen leaf of wind (in ochres of eve\r\nit is dying) come suddenly finally up\r\nfrom compactly hysterical graves.  Bliss\r\nfully mindless is of these faces\r\non the pickets these sweatless heads\r\nin dole attire; these pink purple blades\r\n\r\nwho are flying who are the dentings\r\nmy footfalls have said along the edges\r\nof day and crisply space and down down\r\ndwindling once wells of when (for it\r\nis summer and pregnantly snowingly dusk)\r\n \r\n \r\n<\/pre>\n
Azrael<\/h2>\n
\r\nA flung, unbodied fragence, she,\r\nSpicing our bounden mortality,\r\nA swished phosphorescence in our mundaner air.\r\nMoon-mother and mater, creator and queen,\r\nWry jeweller! The aurora gown you wear\r\nIs made of deeplier aspect than mere seems.\r\n \r\nEmboldened by the dazzle of the dream\r\nWe approached in humble aspect toward her dawn.\r\n \r\nShe slowed to come among us as we were,\r\nSimple in her simple habit; fresh, unpearled.\r\nUnbosomed from our mortal selves we whined\r\nAfter death's very concupiscient tit\r\nAnd eyeless ached for the pity we had had\r\nAnd no more would have, folded in her gown of gore.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
Vivid Aftereffects<\/h2>\n
\r\nI turn my visage in the fog\r\nTo the scene of my demise:\r\nThere, in the nothing, I was wise;\r\nHere, in eternity, I am fog.\r\n \r\nAbsolute and contemptible\r\nMy whim now wanders witless space,\r\nA focus in idiot vagueness,\r\nTemporary and discreditable.\r\n \r\nSuch is the sum of human worth!\r\nA self-involving wheel that grinds\r\nNothingness to the end of time.\r\nLook to yourself and know its truth!\r\n \r\nA shudder in a whisper,\r\nA spinal chill beside the tomb,\r\nCues music in another room\r\nNo dancer ever enters.\r\n \r\nEverything I am I fear,\r\nAll I was I disrespect;\r\nA skeleton of acid aspect\r\nPins me with a glance to here.\r\n \r\nVaguely ceremonious dust\r\nSweeps corners of an edgeless plain;\r\nTo feel at all is to feel pain;\r\nPain abolishing and absolute.\r\n \r\n \r\n<\/pre>\n
Terms<\/h2>\n
\r\nIncapable judgment,\r\nCharmless incoherence,\r\nDamnable indolence,\r\nA welcome internment.\r\n \r\nHappy are we who rot and look\r\nNeither to the left nor right;\r\nDirectionless uncentered sight\r\nThat sees like a remembered book.\r\n \r\nHere and now and gone\r\nEach page of my prison singes,\r\nTurning edges, mirrors, mirages:\r\nBurnt promise of smoky 'beyonds.'\r\n \r\nAn incapacity as soft\r\nAs mothers flushing infants' eyes\r\nEnds each blind alley that I try,\r\nSuffocates with wings of moths.\r\n \r\nExits dissolve in fur or foam,\r\nEvery gleam reveals a worm;\r\nEach ending of a timeless dream\r\nInaugurates a longer term.\r\n \r\nHere I wait in wetness\r\nDisconsolate and endless,\r\nPenetrant and airless,\r\nGuessing and guestless.\r\n \r\n \r\n<\/pre>\n
The sum of all the soul<\/h2>\n
\r\nThe sum of all the soul\r\nIs lazy exhalations,\r\nSmoke rings in rings in rings\r\nAnd their derivations.\r\n \r\nSo says the brune cigar\r\n(Burning wisely the while)\r\nLetting shooken cinders char\r\nFrom the clear kiss of fire.\r\n \r\nSo the smokes of poems\r\nInsinuate a smile;--\r\nDismiss thisness, singer,\r\n            should you debut,\r\nReality's vile.\r\n \r\nToo-precise a sense erases\r\nLiterature's half-guesses.\r\n \r\nMallarme<\/em>\r\n\r\n \r\n<\/pre>\n
Dusky Page<\/h2>\n
\r\nSwiftly, gamely, mademoiselle\r\nMade a wish to hear the notes\r\nFloating from my old wood flute\r\nRevealingly.\r\n \r\nPoignant practice in the park\r\nBetween our picnic and the flocks\r\nAchieved some partial good\r\n                      when I stopped\r\nAnd stared at mademoiselle 'til dark.\r\n \r\nThis vain breath that I extend\r\nTo where my antique wood flute ends\r\nBy spastic clasp of crippled fingers\r\nIn incapable mimesis\r\n \r\nCan't catch quite your natural and clear\r\nChildish laughter that charms the air.\r\n \r\nMallarme<\/em>\r\n \r\n \r\n<\/pre>\n
Memorial Anomie<\/h2>\n
\r\nSilks involved in balms of Time\r\nWhere even fictive if expires\r\nVaunt not the coiled, the native cloud\r\nCombed in your mirror's lens.\r\n \r\nPatriotic ranks of stagnant flags\r\nExalt above the vacant street;\r\nDrowned by waves of your naked mane\r\nI plunge to my eyes' content.\r\n \r\nYet, no mouth may be sure\r\nOf the savor his bite procures\r\nUnless, regal and rampant, he insist,\r\n \r\nAmidst your immense and copper tufts,\r\nOn expelling a diamond sigh:\r\nThe cry \"Glorie!\" that he stifles.\r\n \r\nMallarme<\/em>\r\n \r\n \r\n<\/pre>\n
Battle Ditty<\/h2>\n
\r\nAll's quiet, except the silence;\r\nAs at the fireplace I lean,\r\nMilitary slacks\r\nRedden against my shins.\r\n \r\nThe invasion I await\r\nWith virgin courage\r\nIs that of the baton a-tilt,\r\nThe soldier's white glove--\r\n \r\nGilt or stripped\r\nIt waits to strike--not Teutons\r\nBut some ancillary menace,\r\nSome acquiescence one desires.\r\n \r\nBeat back this wild nettle:\r\nSympathy before battle.\r\n \r\nMallarme<\/em>\r\n \r\n \r\n<\/pre>\n
Too much of poet’s sojourning<\/h2>\n
\r\nToo much of poet's sojourning\r\nWith airy fancy captivating\r\nEye and ear and every thing,\r\nOur sense false sense believing,\r\nCan vault the real beyond our ken\r\nAnd all our wisdom, sum, and end\r\nMust be but to begin again.\r\nWhile in that cloud Delight suspended\r\nNothing kills and all are mended,\r\nThe dead arise for a final bow\r\nAs plays and players even now.\r\nIf ever error finds this field\r\nError must to mischief yield\r\nAnd all that seemed delight revealed\r\nBe changed to vice reviled.\r\nNo longer the innocence of If\r\nWhere no blind run ends in a cliff\r\nAnd every dagger of thrown suppose\r\nHits harmless as a falling rose.\r\nNo more mere pastimes of the mind\r\nWhere every evil's undermined\r\nAnd the very devil's to sport inclined,\r\nTerror trumped by laughter half-divine,\r\nWhere every blood-anointed sword\r\nShows no sharper than a pointy word,\r\nAnd each ghastly gambit of deed or cad\r\nEnds in misty triumph trimmed,\r\nAnd only surfeit seems enough.\r\n \r\n \r\n \r\n<\/pre>\n
END OF BOOKLET<\/h2>\n
\r\n \r\n \r\n<\/pre>\n
Confronting Semblable<\/h2>\n
\r\nTenor Semblance, who I made, made me.\r\nThumbed dumb from blue blatant clay\r\nAnd teased into my mirror's mirror\r\nTo instruct me how my art progressed\r\n(Or how, myself a spur of art, I digress)\r\nAnd how, caught-out by God, I might confess.\r\nHe was a helper hindered in his bones,\r\nA smoky topiary round my realest woods\r\nWhere dark stayed in, and Life was understood;\r\nA straw man made, I'd thought,\r\n            To enlighten and appall;\r\nA straw man who knew only\r\n            How to undie and fall.\r\n \r\nParing my fingernails in a rarefied room,\r\nI call him up with an invidious quip,\r\nUp from his grave heaven or paradisiacal pit\r\nDusky clay of a man morosely man-made.\r\n \r\nTenor notes. Curliecues,world.\r\nLove and love    no comma\r\n  waterwings bulbing  . J ust his waterwings\r\n============\r\npoetry must be epistimology--a connecting of things and meaning \r\nor else its mission fails. The act of connection MUST be moral \r\nand meaningful, WHAT is connected is less vital. Deconstructionists \r\nhave vitiated the very heart of the process. They say that words \r\nare incapable components of connection\r\n \r\n \r\n<\/pre>\n
Semblances<\/h2>\n
\r\nAnd now that life's awful unauthored hours\r\nHave left me foaming at the tap, fingered on or off,\r\nAnd like to die as like to live.\r\nWhat shall I do who's undone by his doing,\r\nTippling the passionate mathers to his lips\r\nOnly to go on sowing his own dull salty grave?\r\nI'll mock the solemn mirror with a glance of stony glass.\r\nI'll out-stare startled stars, with fingertip twist\r\nThe watery whirl that mangles all I ever was of is.\r\n \r\nBut what shall you do, dear, dear you,\r\nNoiseless interlocutor nosing the prosy page?\r\nWhat shall become of all your Platonists' hubbub,\r\nThis stitch that itches the reader's reticulated ear?\r\nShall the word you are beyond all silence\r\nPass away in reguritative snores?\r\nBehold: a trumpet in a storm, half-heard, obscured,\r\nSummons no symphony from static on its own behalf.\r\nClimb down, then, dear, onto the night grass--\r\nEscape across the countryside still damp beneath your lamp.\r\n \r\nYou too shall survive the slaughter, you too\r\nShall live again, with every vital face erased\r\nTo innocent \"pretend.\" Our illusions still pursue us\r\nUntil we turn and tell them \"boo.\" Our loves\r\nWill pant and pander after until we sigh \"it's you.\"\r\nEvery blobby bauble boiled up to mammoth memorial\r\nOnly waits to be forgotten and be playful bauble once again.\r\nThe you you were and the I I was\r\nAre strangers to our living, vivid, vital whys.\r\n(Its only just because. Pause.)\r\n \r\nWhen the hero's hour goes down, grain by grain,\r\nWho shall hoist them up once more in worthy memorial?\r\nBetter it is to be forgotten and to live\r\nThan die a perfect-pitch, unrepeatable divinity.\r\nBut die we must, musty soldiers of this sod\r\nAnd green lie down and come as bones to God.\r\nNever mind this pinch of heaven in our eye.\r\nIt too shall makes its quietus in a fallen grain.\r\nEven very heaven must slip down to us and die.\r\n \r\n \r\n<\/pre>\n
Neant<\/h2>\n
\r\nBaudelaire puts a pistol to his evaporated brain.\r\nTurquoise swans on his twin cufflinks glitter,\r\nPaddling toward the mirror where he moons.\r\n\"Here, in the nowhere that is my everywhere,\r\nnadir, I take aim at the gods who love and oppress me.\r\nWho knew that the internal exile of 'not belonging'\r\ncould be so bitter?\" Stale coffee gives his face its pained\r\nlook of being stricken, of being struck\r\ndumb from the inside where the words had come\r\nably bubbling as a spring of blood.\r\n\"My hand was a steel spring and the meter ticked\r\nlike rivets going in to the side of a ship;\r\nfaultless preparations for a voyage left unmade.\r\nNow sloppy in my silk slippers, I putter in the parlor\r\nthinking through the reams of old talk\r\n(Nerval's neuralgic nose pointing wayward toward\r\nsome pink maid's imagined castle window, \r\nHuysman's snickering figure thin as in a wishing glass)\r\nold talk that had ascended to the chandelier's burning bough\r\nand disappeared....\"\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
A Double in the Dark<\/h2>\n
\r\nIdeal and disposable, the idea of you\r\nRustles beyond my moony shoulder,\r\nAmorous shadow of fictive love,\r\nA dream demanded by the dove.\r\nShapeless bloods within me, grant\r\nDark nurture to this faithless plant;\r\nHeart, beat on in dreamland to create,\r\nWhere a pink and rumpled pillow lies,\r\nNerves that throb in sympathy.\r\n \r\nNew eyes open, asleep yet silvery.\r\n \r\nConfessional moonlight's idyll\r\nWhich previously had bridled\r\nIn dry daylight's talk and squawk\r\nNow lets our human arms console\r\nEach other till the feeling's whole.\r\nLet rosy midnight flicker on\r\nNeon until the ending dawn;\r\nOur breaths' most secret heats,\r\nSirocco on rose-darkened sheets,\r\nWhisper the stories of our souls\r\nWhere conceptual contrapuntal kiss\r\nAnd simpler carnal lips may meet.\r\n \r\nA new moon glimmers in the room.\r\n \r\nBy careful compact with the night,\r\nTangled breaths and traded hands\r\nAnd tangoed bodies no longer stand\r\nBut lie as loving strangers might\r\nAcquainted with mysteries of delight.\r\nSide by side let us abide\r\nBefore that darling blonde, the dawn\r\nExplodes and leaves in shards\r\nTwo drowsy loves, pale and veined--\r\nA pair of frangible spirits' vessels\r\nLaughing out the candles.\r\n \r\nA new day glitters at the ledge.\r\n \r\n \r\n<\/pre>\n
Now my maturer powers have come<\/h2>\n
\r\nNow my maturer powers have come\r\nMy deadest days are on me.\r\nInspiration crucifies with the 'not yet done'\r\nLikeliest confederations fall to dust\r\nThat had risen assured before.\r\n'Philosophy' gives one something 'to write about,'\r\nThe saint reverts to a whore.\r\nProblems pursued in the minutest dark\r\nDawn displays to every fool.\r\nNothing comes that had not come before\r\nSave the freshness of a funeral.\r\n(Faces my faces had half-contained!)\r\nWaterlilies lie exhausted in the concrete pond;\r\nNo word is given in dream or bond.\r\nPaired thieves expire untroubled\r\nBy the Christ transfixed between them.\r\nAll goodness a flower endeavors to endue\r\nLies trodden in the uncolored mud.\r\nExhausted veins collapse, pale and unblooded,\r\nAll smiles unpeel to a skull.\r\n \r\nOld rooms, old thoughts, old hours\u2026.\r\n \r\nOld thorns I had thought removed\r\nReturn to resurrect their ribald pinch.\r\nEach placid glance of reassurance\r\nGiven on the cafeteria tiles\r\nRips me to the core. My thoughts out-age\r\nThe brain that cannot contain them.\r\nPills fill in for functions\r\nAlertness or dandelions had supplied.\r\nAsleep in my slippers at the whispering window\r\nI hear each ache of air repeat widowed, widowed, widowed.\r\nOld rooms, old thoughts, old hours\u2026.\r\nOld charms dispersed that had filled\r\nMy empty wedding bower\u2026.\r\n \r\n \r\n<\/pre>\n
Let Dame Melancholy<\/h2>\n
\r\nLet Dame Melancholy lounge on her oval throne\r\nBeneath the obscure sun's cold diadem\r\nMeditating midnight with her sole self alone\r\nHer richest mystery and self-single gem.\r\nThe riot of Spring is gone to ground\r\nAnd green luxuriance rots where it had preened--\r\nFrescoed gestures of the pure and the proud\r\nGo decayed to earth without hope or seed.\r\n \r\nJealousy at her feet with two leopards chained\r\nPawing the fallen oval bone to stone\r\nWhile she directs her greeny gaze\r\nAt overwhelming Other unable to be reined\r\nInto intensifying One. She fist-knots the leash\r\nIn a luring pull, luring by pull until\r\nLeopard and leopard in a twinned pool of spots\r\nContend, each with each in battled brawl\r\nContesting Time that drives all lovers home\r\nBeneath the hand that rules them yet, as though\r\nThey shared a single soul.\r\n \r\n \r\n<\/pre>\n
Flower i’ the crannied wall<\/h2>\n
\r\nflower i' the crannied wall\r\nwhose first visitant is heaven's sun\r\nwhose last kiss's administered by the moon\r\nlook for newer light and a softer kiss to come\r\nwhen a prince to-be in his initial blisses\r\ncomes whistling through his mother's coombes\r\n \r\nflower i' the crannied wall\r\nwhose bloom's so smooth where the wall is coarse\r\nlook to the moving moon to alter course\r\nand days decay to lightless dross\r\nand the timid rabbit never nibble leaf or love you give\r\nbefore boy's world shall suffer loss\r\n \r\nflower i' the crannied wall\r\nhis eternal shine shall cause\r\nall things that grow to grow because:\r\nnor shall ceaseless love suffer pause\r\nsave for laughter's 'for one and all.'\r\nNow, dear flower in the crannied wall,\r\nI must fromthem whose love to you shall shower soon\r\n \r\nblessed be(gosh!)<\/em>\r\n \r\n \r\n \r\n<\/pre>\n
BITS UNUSED<\/h2>\n
\r\n            The body's afternoon is gone\r\nAnd evening, witchlike and murderous,\r\nIs coming on.\r\n \r\nTempra for the flashing dash\r\nThe more than bright striking\r\nOf daybreak out of confusing night\r\n \r\n\u2026\r\nIf we give our thought up to a cloud,\r\nWhat matter if the light is torn?\r\nOne light note quick-tripleted\r\nIs worth a thousand thousand colder tones.\r\nThe wet substance of this nothingness\r\nOnce poured to us still pours\r\nThese lyric decrepitudes of the brain\r\nIn dark abandon under darkened skies\r\nUntil into a still, black pond\r\nOur looking creeps and finds a crawling cloud\r\n \r\n\u2026\r\nWhat are these things that follow you around\r\nlike rats following their mother's teats,\r\nstreaming milk as helplessly as an idiot drools?\r\n \r\nWhat are they? What could they be?\r\nAh, yes, that's right, that's what they are: memories.\r\n \r\n\u2026\r\nMy stranger hero wears no face,\r\nA staring star without star's stone stare \r\n[star-struck dark]\r\ncobbled as I can\r\n \r\n\u2026\r\nTonight I dreamed of petting a fish\r\nBorn ill to a world full of fuck and woe\r\n \r\n\u2026\r\nMy mansion rooks its turrets below the tide \r\nRooks my mansion's turrets below the tide\r\n \r\n\u2026\r\nMy death is on his hind legs, laughing hard\r\nThe goitered word\r\n \r\n\u2026\r\nby the playing water I played and prayed\r\nwith all the youth of my heart for hymn\r\na catechism of sticks and kites\r\nand a snake bite for sin\r\n \r\nand the summer sun tiptoe crept into the idle moon\r\nunproud of sight to see\r\n \r\n\u2026\r\nwhen all the frigid insistence of my life's griefs\r\nthaw apart\r\n \r\noh, they're getting to it, they're getting to it,\r\ndooming themselves slow and sure\r\n \r\nonce the crust was cracked,\r\nthe man himself was feast enough to last\r\nand lasted past the nattering\r\nand on into dream\r\n \r\nuneventful is\r\n \r\n \r\n<\/pre>\n
DRAFTS<\/h2>\n
\r\n<\/pre>\n
When heartbreak, leaden, unlids<\/h2>\n
\r\nWhen heartbreak, leaden, unlids\r\nThe paraffin coffin's wronging box\r\nAnd the sinister ministry of Time unlocks\r\nWhat slowly sowing soul inwound rolled,\r\nTwinned in winding sheets \r\nAnd body's bloodblack shroud\r\n \r\nWhat then shall stand in the haranguing sands\r\nThat quenchless kiss the naught knot\r\nWe never could quite catch or latch\r\nNo matter the manner of our sighing after\r\nOr grappling grace toiled in graceless laughter?  [moiled]\r\n \r\nNow dead and bettered by our dying damn,\r\nUnshrouded and crowdless and ruined and houseless, \r\nMere mood doomed ghosts in shifted night\r\nWe rise to our shriving in the haranguing sands.\r\n \r\nRisen and simple and unadorned \r\nIn the doorless moon, born and bold \r\nWe stand on crookshanks and the lie's why\r\nThat from shelled ear and shellacked lip\r\nSlips up the tripping ladders like a thief\r\nTo moan unknowing the all-at-once\r\nEverything-each our once-living kiss implored.\r\n \r\nStands in winds in sands in silences\r\nThat in us trumps all bones or guesses\r\nThat lies down never in the manger's knot\r\n(Straw raw insistences of gods unbegot)\r\nThat that moves ruth-ready to the sea-shoved shingle\r\nWhere are and were and will-be may mingle:\r\n \r\nHuman and ruminant in the unready new,\r\nSole holders of what we dare not posses,\r\nIllimitable amidst our humanness.\r\n \r\n \r\n<\/pre>\n
From “I stand on sands”<\/h2>\n
\r\nNow cool and straight as eve's dark grace\r\nNow lumped as fever's lesions,\r\nI stand unmanned, unmade,\r\nStumped dumb in the shriving starlight--\r\nA shadow man born of shadowed son\r\n \r\n \r\n<\/pre>\n
The wish of an if<\/h2>\n
\r\nThe wish of an if is a backwards future\r\nLocked in its amber capsule sans repair;\r\nTo look back beyond the moment's present use\r\nIs to watch the grand seducer be seduced.\r\n \r\nIf in plain vagaries I am vain,\r\nIn rich reality I'm just me:\r\nComplex as an explosive sunset\r\nOver the once-shining sea.\r\n \r\nForgive me, listeners, born before my words,\r\nIf this mothering infant tongue offends your sense;\r\nThat infants live in word and world\r\nAs life to be is my only defense.\r\n \r\n \r\n \r\n<\/pre>\n
Whenever the feather [do not use]<\/h2>\n
\r\nWhenever the feather finish of wishes\r\nDulls to the rum, chained game of a maybe plagues\r\nAnd blessed sun's crested ever and now\r\nShunt's pride's pinnacle to a worsted prow,\r\nA figurehead in any kind of weather,\r\n \r\nI in my difficult self confined\r\nBeat bone and gum to wind however tried,\r\nShifting the kissing sticks on forever's mute deck---\r\nForwarding my drowning right up to my neck,\r\nAmenible as inches in the spigot-spit weather.\r\n \r\nWhenever flesh fails, whisked to a whim,\r\nAnd grave abstractions all add up to grim\r\nAnd the moon's blood broods shouldered to the prow\r\nFull of wrestling reefs and wormy stars\r\nNo matter the thrifty theft of the weather.\r\n \r\nI in my blunt body am blown about,\r\nGuest or ghost or soulless guess devout,\r\nPierced by ports who solely saw seas,\r\nBy fjords and fundament and a bold, froze breeze,\r\nA watchman of rocks in the whiskey weather.\r\n \r\n \r\n<\/pre>\n
Whenever the feather (Ronna edit)<\/h2>\n
\r\nI in my difficult self confined,\r\nA figurehead in any kind of weather,\r\nAmenible as inches in the spigot-spit rain\r\n \r\nI in my blunt body am blown about,\r\nPierced by ports who solely saw seas,\r\nAnd the moon's blood shouldered to the prow\r\n \r\nForwarding my drowning right up to my neck,\r\nNo matter the thrifty theft of the weather\r\nGuest or ghost or soulless guess devout.\r\n \r\n \r\n[Unused\r\nWhenever the feather finish of wishes\r\nBeat bone and gum to wind however tried,\r\nBy fjords and fundament and a bold, froze breeze,]\r\n \r\n \r\n<\/pre>\n
When a wandering impulse from heaven<\/h2>\n
\r\nWhen a wandering impulse from Heaven\r\nVisits the daily mind of man, lending \r\nCredence to our infant imaginings\r\nThat lean along a mountain's length, we've seen\r\nAt our dying height but the eagle's nest\r\nWhere some alien hatchling eyes up the sun.\r\n \r\nOur faithfulness is born of ignorance,\r\nA wetted shadow that robs us of our rest,\r\nKnowing neither the mystery of our birth\r\nNor the disappearing gulf or stream\r\nInto which we're poured. \r\n Why question then \r\nThe present fullness of our sorrow's dearth\r\nThe mournful life or joyful pulse that fills the years\r\nAnd overflows us \u2026 even unto tears?\r\n \r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
Letter: This is Mallarme’s poem “Feuillet D’Album”<\/h2>\n
\r\nDan:\r\n \r\nThis is Mallarme's poem \"Feuillet D'Album\" or Leaf of an Album.\r\nI've tried to make it as fun in English as it is in French.\r\nMallarme's long breaths held back are a difficult thing to\r\nachieve for us and would come out as more breathless than anything\r\nelse.  So, I've tried something else;  something more imagey.\r\n \r\nAlso, Russ is having a party at the Book Pit Saturday night.\r\nThese parties are always great and I'll be there.  Starts 7PM \r\nto ... BYOB.  Address is Wallace St, off Main, behind Dorn's photoshop.\r\n \r\nAlso, there's a fabulous fun family-friendly event at Jenkensin's\r\nin Point Pleasant to celebrate Brandi's 30th B-Day.  2PM onward.\r\nCarrie wanted me to extend the invitation to you and your whole family.\r\nLots of intrigueing poetry folks will be there as well, including\r\nRonna, Carrie, my roomie Stambaugh, and others.  Brandi, a published \r\nnovelist (My Intended, Harper-Collins), is anxious to meet you since\r\nwe've all gossiped about you.\r\n \r\nI should be calling you later today with this same info.\r\n \r\nGregg\r\n \r\n \r\n \r\nGregg:\r\nHere's the combined poem we did a few weeks back.  \r\nIt almost has the effect of alternating lines of chanted dialogue.  \r\nI must admit I've also used my own lines as a separate poem.--Dan\r\n\r\nThe frayed edges of ancient curtains,\r\nbeauty in the eye is immaterial\r\nold swaying silks a chisel cut in stone\r\nas Phidias's curtains in a remembered breeze\r\nand slender toes in the overgrown summer grass,\r\nfeet and heart going spasmodically fast\r\nbrittle as glass, yellowed of youth\r\nin the uncut grass at discovery's edge\r\nchipped blasphemy of a once living form\r\nwhere time becomes only the memory of youth\r\nwhose lips once pinked to touch another's,\r\nonly her kiss can caress any truth\r\nthe shock of human longing twenty-two centuries undone\r\ntragic-fantastic moment of one moment\r\n \r\n \r\n \r\n<\/pre>\n
When in an hour’s perjury eternal truth<\/h2>\n
\r\nWhen in an hour's perjury eternal truth\r\nIs caught and what had clung in coldness \r\nIn warmth remains, holding the soul below the bone,\r\nAlmost I can forgive my human stain--\r\nThe wrangled webs surrounding sink and rot\r\nUntil I in lightness and in light am propped.\r\n \r\nWith clarifying dews my eyelashes are limned;\r\nI see ambition drop and plod behind,\r\nAnd regret lay neglected in the grass\r\nAs far away from me--as yesterday.\r\nForever windward my face amends its smile;\r\nForever forward the mind must seek its trial,\r\nStalking the light. Strike and stroke its rays!\r\n \r\n \r\n \r\n<\/pre>\n
Father the smasher full of laughter and cash<\/h2>\n
\r\nFather the smasher full of laughter and cash\r\nteeth full of laughter\r\ncame his million ways\r\nto the dingy corners of my play\r\n \r\nAnd the woods hold home \r\nin their tickery darks\r\nowlled and hollowed hallows\r\n \r\nBight as tears on sleeves I played and gamed\r\nForgetting the wolf in the clock\r\n \r\nStumbling and troubled and the wood understood\r\nwonderfully buttery bread\r\nwonderfully shady sometime of summer\r\n \r\nO it was woods and darks and harm and locks\r\nMy brother was fist-man and kingsman\r\noutside the locking closets\r\nof my consecrated dark\r\n \r\nNothing was anything and my seeing was dreaming\r\nall about the house and wood\r\nWhere I sang to the frog and the adder\r\nand no dog snarled save every one at the last\r\nand tore both bone and skin\r\n \r\nAnd my father came pummeling\r\nwith his wronged love\r\nand his hands as red as apples\r\nand strong as bones twice broken\r\nover the greeny edge of the faraway weather\r\n \r\nI see him pickup sticks\r\nto bless his scolding mouth\r\nand sham-battering hands\r\nthat gave away anger\r\nhe hid for his deepest truth\r\n \r\nAnd oh the woods were golden in their burning\r\nand beyond their core of trouble\r\ncame the storm-stung stones\r\nthat cried in the riverbed all night\r\n \r\nThe moon was a rumor in the globes of my tears\r\nand its light full of laughter and cash\r\nheld me penniless amazed\r\nin the gossiping dare of the dark\r\nalone with the mouse and the fox\r\n \r\nWhen the stag-breasted dew of day\r\ncame with its million sword in the blades of grass\r\nblinding my miseries in a golden grip [silver grip]\r\nwith the days howling to run\r\ntheir wilding ways and proud\r\n \r\nAnd I kept the woods that kept me hid\r\nin the bone-lonely branches of my ribs\r\n \r\n \r\n<\/pre>\n
Stars in the cell about to be said<\/h2>\n
\r\nStars in the cell about to be said\r\nStrip the gilding from the stars\r\nLove and trouble(s), too soon, too much,\r\nLet honey hands follow an audacious eye\r\nImmaculate eye\r\nA mere watery-eyed mortal\r\n \r\n \r\nNow to find the line that nails the heart\r\nAnd hammers home the soul.\r\nUnposted from my able body's pin,\r\nMy soul's gone ghosting, grieving\r\nRound and round in autumn's leaves \r\nAnd autumn's skies, landscapes of strangers,\r\nAnd the strangeness has not yet an end.\r\n \r\nUntitled stars pouring through the shroud\r\nLight the dim griefs kept close as my face,\r\nAnd the moon's in my tears in the mirror's whisper,\r\nDistant as touch in the statue's hand\r\nHands had made in fashion as they feel.\r\nMy soul's all sighs through windows groaned\r\nAnd gone until it hears its line of home.\r\n \r\nNow I wander through the body's shroud\r\nSensing indifference and sins.\r\n \r\n \r\n<\/pre>\n
Round landscapes of strangers<\/h2>\n
\r\nRound landscapes of strangers,\r\nGhosted and gone, grieving, my soul\r\nFlies unpinned from able body's post\r\nRound tower and town and stranger folds,\r\nAnd this strangeness has no end.\r\n \r\nPinned to minutes and the clock gone mad\r\nRound and round its stranger's face\r\nUnable as any circle engine of feats or facts\r\nTo hero round the hours sane as grace.\r\nAll soul wants is to stop and act.\r\n \r\nLost I'd be if I could be found,\r\nA fired line that nails the heart home\r\nWith the hammer of the soul.\r\nNo nail shines, no hammer moves,\r\nNo home comes kissing from the crowd.\r\n \r\nDim griefs kept close as my shuttered face\r\nStrip the gilding from the stars,\r\nWanderers round both stranger and sky\r\nThey shine indifference down in the gospel dark\r\nOn each bleak sin and breaking.\r\n \r\nNow wander I through cool body's shroud\r\nDistant as touch in the statue's hand\r\nA blownback soul without sail or keel;\r\nNo nail glows, no hammer moves.\r\nHands were made to fashion as they feel.\r\n\r\n \r\n<\/pre>\n
The sum of all the soul<\/h2>\n
\r\nThe sum of all the soul\r\nin our slow exhaling\r\nof ring on ring of smoke\r\nlost in new rings rising\r\n \r\nshows that some cigar\r\nburning deftly for a spell\r\nallows the ash to separate itself\r\nfrom the clear kiss of fire.\r\n \r\nSo the choir of poems\r\nflies to the lip.\r\nExclude, if you begin,\r\nthe real because vile.\r\n \r\nThe sense, too precise, overstrikes\r\nyour vague literature.\r\n \r\nMallarme [trans. Dan Weeks]\r\n \r\n==============\r\n \r\nAll the soul's one thing:\r\n \r\nAll the soul's evoked\r\nWhen windily we exhale   [lazily]\r\nRing on ring of smoke\r\nFurther rings impale.\r\n \r\nThus attests the cigar we prop\r\nBrowning wisely the while\r\nIf its cinders but burn and drop\r\nFrom the clear kiss of fire.\r\n \r\nIf from choirs of romance\r\nIt drifts thus up to your lips,\r\nExclude-- should you commence--\r\nThe real because its vile.\r\n \r\nToo precise a sense erases\r\nYour vague literature.  [windy]\r\n \r\n \r\nAll the soul's but this:\r\nLazy exhalations;\r\nSmoke rings in rings in rings\r\nAnd their derivations.\r\n \r\nSo says the long cigar\r\nBrowning wisely while\r\nShook cinders burn and drop\r\nFrom the clear kiss of fire.\r\n \r\nSmoky poems\r\nDrift to lips bewhiles;\r\nDismiss, if you sing one,\r\nThe real, the vile.\r\n \r\nToo-precise a sense erases\r\nLiterature's half-guesses.\r\n \r\n[Smoky poems\r\nDrift up to the lips;\r\nSo the choir of poems\r\nDrifts against your smile;]\r\n \r\nSo poems' smoky choirs\r\nSilk twixt lip and smile;\r\nDismiss thisness, singer,\r\n            should you debut,\r\nReality's vile.\r\n \r\n \r\n[So the choir of poems]\r\n[--Silk twixt lip and smile;\r\n--Lilt to lip and smile;\r\n--drifts against your smile;\r\n--Insinuates a smile;\r\n--silk [slip] to the lips;\r\n--Drift to lip and smile;\r\n--drift to the lips;\r\n--Slip to lip and smile;\r\n--]\r\n \r\nSo the smokes of poems\r\nInsinuate a smile;--\r\nSinger, should you debut,\r\n            Dismiss thisness,\r\nReality's vile.\r\n \r\n \r\n<\/pre>\n
Battle Ditty<\/h2>\n
\r\nAll's quiet, except the silence,\r\nAs I sense before the firplace\r\nThese military slacks\r\nRedden against my legs.\r\n \r\nThe invasion that I await\r\nWith a virgin courage\r\nIs that of the baton-stick a-tilt\r\nIn the soldier's white glove---\r\n \r\nStripped or barked, it waits,\r\nNot to batter the Teuton\r\nBut to strike a second menace,\r\nThe aquiesence one desires,\r\n \r\nTo beat back this wild nettle:\r\nSympathy before battle.\r\n \r\nMallarme<\/em>\r\n<\/pre>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Nobody Poems (or, “Cloudlets”)   by Gregg Glory Vulnerability is my shield, And my flag’s Humanity. \u00d3ur \u00e9vening is over us; \u00f3ur night ‘wh\u00e9lms, wh\u00e9lms, \u00e1nd will end us. -“Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves” by Gerard Manley Hopkins Published by BLAST PRESS To You, my several, severed, Gentle selves, limned with wishes– In the dawnwash of […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1001002,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[516],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5262","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nobody-poems","category-516-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5262","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1001002"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5262"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5262\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7410,"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5262\/revisions\/7410"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5262"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5262"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5262"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}