{"id":5278,"date":"2015-08-27T19:00:06","date_gmt":"2015-08-27T19:00:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gregglory.com\/wordpress\/?p=5278"},"modified":"2023-07-08T10:19:42","modified_gmt":"2023-07-08T10:19:42","slug":"the-giant-in-the-cradle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/posts\/the-giant-in-the-cradle\/","title":{"rendered":"The Giant in the Cradle"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"GiantinCradleCvr\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Purchase from Amazon<\/a><\/p>\n

A miscellany by\r\n\r\n\r\nGregg Glory\r\n[Gregg G. Brown]\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nPublished by BLAST PRESS\r\n\r\n \r\n<\/pre>\n
\r\nLife exists to pay attention to other people.\r\n\r\n\r\nI silently laugh at my own cenotaph,\t\r\n    And out of the caverns of rain,\t\r\nLike a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb,\t\r\n    I arise and unbuild it again.\r\n~~P. B. Shelley\r\n\r\n\r\nThis\r\n is a race to beauty,\r\n\t\t     and I\r\nam an engine quick\r\n\twith fire.\r\n~~Daniel Weeks\r\n\r\n\r\nI pursue the vireo's theme.\r\n~~Lord Dermond\r\n\r\n\r\nPitiless verse?  A few words tuned\r\nAnd tuned and tuned and tuned.\r\n~~Wallace Stevens\r\n \r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nINTRODUCTION
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nThe summer sun\r\nKnows when its bright business \r\nWith buds is done\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nSummer comes warmly into our lives, a promise of autumn’s plenty.  A surfeit of all our globe can give of daily joys expands in a benign inflation of lighted hours.  Night herself calls us forth to wander under soothing breezes, zophtic zephyrs–and we walk into our dreams with ease.  Constellations keep us company, just as, during the day, fleets of trees in full sail share their leafy magnificence with us–the fresh shade of dark branch and leaf, their chipper chatter following us as we wend our way.\n<\/p>\n
\r\nGregg Glory\r\nAugust 2013\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nSECTION: VALE OF DESPOND
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\n\r\n \r\n<\/pre>\n
\nTHROUGH NIGHTS ENDLESSLY VAGUE
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nThrough nights endlessly vague\r\nA voice arrives\r\nEmbalmed\r\n\r\nIn embellishing smokes.\r\nSpeak vividly,\r\nMy blind\r\n\r\nFriend in chartless darks;\r\nSpeak bleedingly\r\nTo me\r\n\r\nAs I bleeding lay,\r\nEnslaved, raving.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nTO FORGET ABOUT THE SELF
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nThis spirit of mine is something unstudied, \r\nInexorable and white, alive in solemn permanence.\r\n~~Lord Dermond\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\nA wind that moves through the self \r\nThe self had left behind and abandoned\r\nOn the shore of no more.\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\n(The 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\nThere is 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\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nWHEN DARK KNOCKS
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nEvening is here, and the house is cold\r\nWith a coldness darkened beyond what eyes behold,\r\nA peculiar, unusual dark I neither name nor know,\r\n\r\nA dark inside the darkness of the cold,\r\nA dark beneath the dark of space,\r\nA below-dark or beyond-dark or before-dark\r\n\r\nOut of which the dark of space\r\nBegins its becoming nothingness,\r\nIts peculiar, unusual dark\r\n\r\nWherein pleasantest monstrosities adhere,\r\nAdhere and grow gigantic--\r\nHeavy drapes blown-in in the storm's besetting onset,\r\n\r\nKnocking one candle dark in the swooning room,\r\nOr swinging darkly out to outer space \r\nIn the wind of stars,\r\n\r\nThrough which the universal edifice slowly swoons\r\nIn its own peculiar, unusual dark--as if\r\nThe shadow of a shadow thrown against\r\n\r\nThe shadow of that from which it had come.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nA CELEBRATION
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nOnly when wisp and whim\r\nBellies the shakily belied\r\nSail's starch-white brim\r\nDo we live unburied--\r\n\r\nAlive to time, to time's\r\nIntemperate, inveterate ticks--\r\nThe icy sublime\r\nOf life's penultimate lick.\r\n\r\nSo, take of this cake\r\nWith me, mon ami: birth-day\r\nOr death-day, take; take\r\nThe risen wheat, say\r\n\r\nA voluble salutation\r\nFor your, for my, salvation!\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nABOLISHED BLUES
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nAbolished blues\r\nLeave as craven night\r\nCrowds the nude\r\nSky'slight--\r\n\r\nRemain cerulean,\r\nMemories, brilliant tints,\r\nFlashed shy-eyes'\r\nLoitering emoluments.\r\n\r\nLook at me, listener,\r\nFlash tightened whites,\r\nBlanks unstained, unstirred,\r\nAwaiting pupils' coalblack night\r\n\r\nTo draw in raked nakedness\r\n\u00acOur bleak meeting.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nAT THE ‘MYSTIC CAPTURE’ TAPESTRY
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nAlmost perfect there,\r\nHer finger tracing\r\n\r\nThe fainted maid\r\nUnavailing,\r\n\r\nThis palest miss\r\nBlonder than sunshine--\r\n\r\nUnicorn twists\r\nOf braids trail fire\r\n\r\nDown her blood-velveteen\r\nFlat dress-back--\r\n\r\nHer hand the maiden's,\r\nRaised to bring back\r\n\r\nLife to the trapped beast--\r\nNo longer Death's.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nTWO MIMES REMOVE EACH OTHER’S GREASE-PAINT
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nHer sourceless smile arrives\r\nIn intimate glitters,\r\n\r\nHer lips suavely parting\r\nIn intenser shine.\r\n\r\nAbove, eve's lone lamp, the moon\r\nRemoves a mood.\r\n\r\nHis hand upon her shoulder\r\nIntends a sense \r\n\r\nBetween them, attar of essences \r\nSincerely sieved,\r\n\r\nIntends a sense more intense, \r\nInterior and profound.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nANNIVERSARY ORCHID
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nThe orchid sits\r\nin its mat of moss\r\n\r\nits laddered neck\r\nclick-clipped\r\n\r\nby small claws\r\nto slim rigid wire\r\n\r\nupholding\r\na\r\n\r\npurple triple\r\nknot of blossoms\r\n\r\nvelvet\r\nopen\r\n\r\nas the mouths\r\nof Chinese lions\r\n\r\nsculpted\r\nso loud\r\n \r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nA RETIREE REGARDS THE FAIR FIRE FAILING
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nSoul's a moment's melody\r\n(As Mallarme reported).\r\nEach breath is every sigh recorded,\r\nOne tear is all the sea.\r\n\r\nLucid glycerins distill, intend,\r\nAll God may mean by being:\r\nLoving nearly to the pain of seeing,\r\nForgiving even the end.\r\n\r\nLess than Time attempts is this \"I\"--\r\nBurnt between the matchstick's start\r\nAnd pumiced embers morosely blown--\r\nCondensed intense in each spark of eye.\r\n\r\nIt is a malady a moment,\r\nThis soul--and then, neant.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nSUPERFLUITIES OF THE SUPERHUMAN
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nA butterfly pinned to a windmill.\r\n\r\nBlas\u00e9 laserings of watery light.\r\n\r\nThe adze of an angry word.\r\n\r\nA cannibal dining on a sainted eye.\r\n\r\nA man battling his inner hatchets,\r\n\r\nHimself a hollow cello.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nFISHY CIRCUMAMBULATION
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nA guttering wind going round\r\nBeats the windowed walls\r\nOf the Brooklyn Aquarium\r\nWhere swart, flared fish going round\r\nFlourish\r\nLike flowery candy in a dish.\r\n\r\nCrowds of slackmouthed onlookers watch\r\nEight slack-legged octopi watch\r\nCrowds of onlookers going round \r\nThere\r\nIn Brooklyn's dainty air.\r\n\r\nIn a world of choices,\r\nSuch variorum of voices,\r\nTo continually choose\r\nTo choose not to choose--\r\n\r\nTo neigh nay to no\r\nAnd sneeze nyet to yes\r\nWhile the crowd confines\r\nOur going round and around,\r\nMutes the vocus of our natures.\r\n\r\nSo many colors\r\nGoing round and around,\r\nWithin others, and ourselves within,\r\n\r\nWhile frenzied fish bash \r\nThe circular glass\r\nUnhelped by any wind.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nCONVERGENCE BEFORE AND AFTER
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nLife may be magnanimous,\r\nThe sleek making way of water reeds\r\nBefore a smooth canoe.\r\nIt may be.\r\n\r\nOr life perchance is tragic,\r\nA limitless march, march, march\r\nTo the restriction of a pinnacle.\r\nIt may be.\r\n\r\nThese two modes of life\r\nAre one, in sum.\r\nThe tragic will navigating North,\r\nThe lazy wanderer wading South.\r\n\r\nWhat happens to the one,\r\nHappens exactly to the other.\r\nDeath, or some other bother.\r\nIt may be.\r\n\r\nWhen, in this light, we look\r\nAt ourselves, we disappear\r\nInto the necessitous intimate\r\nStaring there in the mirror.\r\n\r\nIt may be. \r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nSECTION: BUTTERY MUFFINS
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nQUIETUS AT DAYBREAK
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nSnow loiters coyly in scraps,\r\nAnd winter lies \r\nUnremembered.\r\n\r\nThe edges of shadows at dawn,\r\nTinged blue,\r\nRecall a greater darkness\r\nOf which they are the moiety.\r\n\r\nWhen summer arrives at last,\r\nWhen green spring is in the grave,\r\nWhen summer comes out\r\nFrom under heavy covers,\r\nQuilts over-laden with imagery,\r\nWhen summer leaves, and snow\r\nFeels bright in autumn air--\r\n\r\nWill you remember the summer days,\r\nDays we burned through together?\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nCURIOUSER DISCLOSURES
\n<\/h2>\n
 \r\nStrolling in a random mood, random clouds\r\nDisclose a sky unpatterned, whereon I brood\r\n\"How life behaves, how the world is made!\"\r\nStriding hills disclose apportioned woods\r\nBrushed bare of bush--a dell within the wood\r\nDiscloses its roughened tongue of telling green;\r\nKneeling in the roughened grass, politely parted,\r\nDiscloses dandruffed jimson, butterweed and chives;\r\nAnd one long flower's uttering bud, mussed and tussled,\r\nDiscloses saffron tassels, with brilliant pollens laid;\r\nAnd pollen's golden wand, waved and handled,\r\nDiscloses slyly a tensile spine where florid saps\r\nFlow slow along the intruding thumb, and stop. \r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nSTONE BOUQUET
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nI\r\nIs there, in all this trash \r\nOf destinations, of places seen and places repeated\r\nLike last year's film, last year's roses, last year's weather \r\nAnything for the spirit to extract, \r\nExtract and raise high and chant about? \r\nAny glitter to be picked from the waste of days, \r\nAny gold cloud built, any monument of twigs? \r\nIs there anything to whistle up from the repeated place, \r\nAn eon's verdure or stone bouquet?           \r\n\r\nII\r\nIn the repeated place, in a repeated time \r\nMust cold bouquets like fountains still renew \r\nAnd renew again their spilling blooms--\r\nAs in a height of speech in a vented space, \r\nAs if death itself were only heightened speech \r\nIn a vented space, or an old horn abandoned in a field, \r\nThe hunt decayed, and the trumpet rusted \r\nThat had brightened speech, and not quite out of sight? \r\nIs there any bower to be had?  Or only \r\nRepeated scenes stuffed with repeated speech \r\nCrisp adjectives must keep forever fresh--\r\nPerpetual ecstasy, and still unfinished rooms, \r\nRotted flowers racing back to bloom?\r\n\r\nIII\r\nThe pile of days like a pile of cards \r\nTips one more card blankly onto a pile of blanks. \r\nWhere is the change of hue or lilted modulation, \r\nThe mutability in the rose that turns \r\nRipely from rose-red to rose, to a few \r\nGreen, wrecked leaves laying spattered in the path, \r\nSparse litterings, wretched shrinkage \r\nOf a grander theme that pushed, and with the push \r\nOf birth had pushed, teasing lustrous harmonies \r\nOut of rocks that tinkled for a time, spritzed fresh, \r\nLisping a damaged planet's name to space?   \r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nTHE CHANGE TO SUMMER
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nListen, mes amis, \r\nFor the change to summer.\r\nDry pines are bristling.\r\nChristmas is forgotten.\r\nApril's incipient blossom\r\nLays rotted.\r\n\r\nThe canvas hammock smiles,\r\nPinned up and greatly weighted.\r\n\r\nOne by one,\r\nThe summer stars, pink and rayed,\r\nEnter eventide elated.\r\n\r\nAnd the frisson that one feels\r\nBarefoot under the stars (one by one \r\nLeft uncounted)\r\nIs not exactly unrelated.\r\n\r\nWinter's interiors and castles, \r\nWarmer rooms and whiter views,\r\nPile up discarded \r\nIn the summer mind\r\n\r\nAnd so summer returns to life\r\nBetween extremes--\r\nNeither dewy Spring \r\nNor stiff December--\r\n\r\nRotund orator of repeated suns,\r\nHalcyon mind increased and crested,\r\nProfoundest player of cards,\r\nPurveyor of flippant fun.\r\n\r\nSummer comes, itself\r\nExtreme in sunshine,\r\nRaconteur of revels, afternoon pomps \r\nOf tea, sloe gin fizzes\r\n\r\nPiling up and up--\r\nAs neglected dusts infect\r\nMinutest corners\r\nOf a sleepy eye.\r\n\r\nBut listen, too, mes amis, \r\nAt how, afar off, \r\nBeyond acutest blues,\r\nThe apt ear hears, inherently hears,\r\nAutumn's tom-tom.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nLOOKALIKES
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nTo know himself was to know the world.\r\nSo Axl thought, and his central sin condoned.\r\nThe reflected world was omnipotent mirror,\r\nAnd not importunate guest.  So Axl surmised,\r\nAnd found himself amenable to a thought so wise--\r\nA tuxedoed waltzer whirled, red carnation at-the-ready.\r\nWho else was welcome to this solo cotillion?\r\nWith each yawn, Axl awoke to his own wedding day,\r\nMost blessed of days in a world that blessed him best.\r\nNo undue strain arced across his crystal-ball brow,\r\nThings had worked out for him before, as now:\r\nWhere Axl's hand shot out, blind, golden knobs appeared.\r\nFor any emergency disguise, he grew sufficient beard.\r\n\r\nAxl lived and died in ornately mirrored rooms.\r\nNo awkward prisms arched each mirror's edge.\r\nNo stranger bird of paradise got in, panicked,\r\nAnd beat blue wings about his heart, or threw\r\nConfusing wings of angels in his face.\r\nHe spun, at cordial intervals, the mottled globe\r\nIn his room, and saw only his own pale head revolve.\r\nThus was Axl in his castle, amid the central fix of facts. \r\nIn a world that is mirror only, pool only, lambency only,\r\nTo what whirligig apotheosis might spinning Axl jump?\r\nFingertip to tip, he pressed against the giving surface\r\nOf all he knew and willed.  Liquidly in to elbow\r\nHe sank without a thought--now shoulder to shoulder\r\nPressed, and, now, nearly cheek to cheek he sank. \r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nMEANWHILE IN TEANECK
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nSummer hunched in the muddy rucks \r\nOf Teaneck.\r\nWilson strayed, sluggishly,\r\nInto the weedy garden beside his home.\r\n\r\nWilson was not a part\r\nOf the windy morning beckoning,\r\nNor of the warty gourds he watered--\r\nTiger-orange and dirty brown.\r\n\r\nThere was no mystery \r\nIn the knotweed where Wilson kneeled \r\nTo which he alone possessed \r\nThe clearest key.\r\n\r\nRed-purple vines crouched close.\r\nScalloped curtains blew. \r\nAnd the cabin at his back, sluggishly,\r\nBlazed ethereally whiter.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nDUNE-BUGGYING IN PANAMA CITY
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nThe moon understood\r\nFrom where she shone,\r\nDemure, removed,\r\nHow sun's assertions\r\nTantalize and amaze.\r\n\r\nSandy intonations\r\nSift with the drifting beach,\r\nIntrude, without intention,\r\nAll the hazy forenoon\r\nAnd twilight after.\r\n\r\nStriding into the eye,\r\nA man stands half lit\r\nWhere time washes shore,\r\nCovering, uncovering,\r\nRuddy wish and silvery fish.\r\n\r\nHe stands tonelessly,\r\nWhistling nothing\r\nAmong the shifting grains,\r\nAlert servant of the\r\nReverberant surf.\r\n \r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nPAINTING AFTER DARK
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nThe stars above were eld creations, crabbed\r\nComma-marks in a grammar God abandoned, \r\nNo longer the shining indices of fate\r\nNuns on reddened knees named holy--\r\nFlayed things set burning for their shameful part\r\nIn the faded pattern, medieval masque.\r\nYet still they hung mistily aloft past the barbecue grill,\r\nMarking dark coordinates by their nuclear light--\r\nA graph-paper for physicists and their fancy pens,\r\nSmartly charting tricky diktats of their will.\r\n\r\nDaub by daub, the stars, as magic charms,\r\nHad been painted on revolving spheres.\r\nAnd, daub by daub, my ox-hair filbert brush\r\nTransfers their fire from globbered palette \r\nTo the steadily-easelled blank that I had brought.\r\nI painted blind, unpained by too much sight or light\r\n(As I noted had been the Great Dauber's habit,\r\nGranting accidental freedom by parsec and mile).\r\nFrom the quibble of a quark to quasar buoy-bells\r\nThe cosmic scale was sound, tanging only\r\nWhen the chromic pestle bongs the mixer's brim,\r\nAping Tuvan semi-tones while my placid page\r\nFills insensibly with stars, and, daub by daub,\r\nI strike what strokes of charcoal nothingness\r\nHeaven presents.  I work without lamp or limit,\r\nToiling toward each outward edge from whichever\r\nCentral locus my accidental tent has pitched.\r\n\r\nI squint into the rolling dim, and begin.  The vault\r\nIs splattered with patterned blanks itself:\r\nIntrusive bougainvillea disarm Orion.  Looming \r\nOak leash Cygnus' feathered neck with leafy loops.\r\nEvery starry fable is fractured by a fault.\r\n\r\nAnd there, in the middle of all light, all shadow,\r\nClimbed the cragging outline of a midnight ziggurat.\r\nShadow by shadow, tall stars gone dark\r\nLeft the saw-tooth chop-out.  I painted as I perceived,\r\nTrue to tempera and temperament.  Yes, there\r\nIt was, inking out wholesale swales of stars,\r\nRich galaxies gone dark, the zig-zag ziggurat!\r\nNo punched-out pyramidal obelisk had ever arisen\r\nMore straightly-rayed--granite sample of stark\r\nAEgyptian sunbeams.  The ziggurat sprang\r\nChainsawed from the sky, a stepped rainbow \r\nAgainst Cosmos, and of the cosmos part, blackly blent.  \r\nWhat was interposed between high stars and yard\r\nThat drew me there to draw?  Had daub\r\nAnd desire torn new knowledge from the skies?\r\nWhat would show still standing when the great star \r\nCame at adequate dawn, and illuminated enlarged \r\nMy brune page?  Would the giant ziggurat\r\nBe risen above Poughkeepsie like a circus tent\r\nDense with ecstatic dancers, as at a feast? \r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nSOLAR SOJOURN
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nWhispers of solar sojourns\r\nTrouble my sleep--\r\nThe resplendent bitter brights,\r\nBare ferryings from dawn to dusk.\r\n\r\nNight's doughtier recriminations,\r\nAlso, trouble my sleep:\r\nDark matter and matted pillows,\r\nDowny throws torqued tight\r\n \r\nAfter the squeaked release\r\nOf magnificent dreams.\r\nThose celestial rodeos\r\nLassoing old Cygnus there--\r\n\r\nOr others, darker-hued,\r\nLeaving me abandoned, bundled, sweated out\r\nAmid spotty silks\r\nAnd disastered caftans flayed.\r\n\r\nToo much dark or too much light!\r\nI do not know which trouble to choose.\r\nI say, \"Let the cyan dawn ascend\r\nAnd shatter me.\" \r\n\r\nOr, softer, sleepier, \"Let the navy night \r\nArrive.\"  Anything, anything other \r\nThan this continual, nocturnal-diurnal \r\nRumination.\r\n \r\nI say, \"Come sun, come light!\r\nBring intensely\r\nThe prickly press of piercing fact,\r\nResplendent sheets of divulging day....\"\r\n \r\nAch, they trouble my sleep. \r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nPEASBLOSSOM, COBWEB, AND MUSTARDSEED MOB THE MOON-PICNIC
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nThey light no starry candles beneath the torpid moon,\r\nHovering, haloed lamp to their late feast--\r\n\r\nThe hot moon loads ladles, tops tippler's cups\r\nWith variable silvers 'til dull water burns.\r\n \r\nTwittering sprites pursue the moon's endless agenda, \r\nFinger-cymbals tittering, scarves awhirl.\r\n\r\nMincing laughter, or something remotely more,\r\nBlends with bluing bush and shadow.\r\n \r\nDo dusty moth and pearly cricket attend\r\nThe midnight manner of their tucking in?\r\n\r\nShhh, shhh, whispers little mouse to downy owl,\r\nYellow-eyed. The moon is becoming clouds now.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nA ROMAN RUMINATION
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nVoters wear a mask\r\nFierce tangerine, outrageous orange.\r\n\r\nThey say: I am Sam.  \r\nI am Theodore.\r\n\r\nThey have no names for sure\r\nBeyond manqu\u00e9 monikers.\r\n\r\nThey swear they would not dare\r\nUndo the true of who is who.\r\n\r\nSwears Sam.  Swears Theodore.\r\nBehind masks outrageous orange.\r\n\r\nHistory is a feathered mask\r\nAs light as that.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nBACCHUS SURVEYS SEACAUCUS FROM HIS SUMMERY HAMMOCK
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nHe prodded the planet for fun and profit, \r\nRattled fusty vines for mustiest grapes \r\nTo break like bubbles on his rouge tongue, \r\nPurplest Bacchus of the Garden State. \r\nThe straw he sipped at dripped divinest dews. \r\nAround him argent clouds convened, \r\nAttending wetly at the cordial where he nipped, \r\nCottony pulps of his wine-violet ideas.\r\nA maker of the weather, he prepared \r\nHurricanos in his heart, tornadoes torqued\r\nFrom regretful tears, while he adroitly ducked \r\nBeneath streaked skies split with epic lightning\r\nHis own imagination dreamed and drew down. \r\n\r\nOf creation and of creation's pang\r\nHe was the singer, and of that terror sang.\r\nThis he did swinging amid his champagne dregs,\r\nAnd from those dregs distilled the magic beans--\r\nGrew tall, until all the rolling world below\r\nWas his red rubber ball, gripped and peeled.\r\nThe sun between his rosy forefinger and sore thumb\r\nHe spun, and smiled as it twirled.\r\n\r\nHere leaned a mountain, not a man. \r\nGreat birds wheeled beneath his brambled brows. \r\nWaterfalls leapt from his chin in frisking drool. \r\nTo sense a transparence within the clouds \r\nLike thunder swallowed, his big teeth illumined--\r\nThat was what he practiced;  his feet \r\nFell away below to forest elf-boots, olive moccasins \r\nSoftly clomping crimps of the shell-pink Palisades. \r\n\r\nBeyond the boisterous baying of day, he made, \r\nMad with laughter, the very game he played: \r\n\"Imagine reality,\" he cried to the crisp Atlantic \r\nSweeping to his side, the she-sea upswelling frothily \r\nTo fetch 'tween trident teeth the fatal bone, the poem,\r\nHer impassive master had tossed to the Azores. \r\nPromethean lips imparted surpassing pearls\r\nIn hiccups, bubbing toward the clouds they blew\r\nIn monotonic dream-bubbles of cartoons;\r\nHis electric hair was flying fire, unreeling auroras \r\nFrom here to Delaware. \r\n\r\n                           The poet is his world:\r\nThe vatic voice, his song assigned to wood or cliff\r\nIndifferently, whole planets popped like gumdrops \r\nInto his manic maw and ruminated raw \r\nLike so much milky cud.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nIMPATIENCE WITH THE OYSTER
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nLook here, oyster, there is only\r\nThe oily thisness of confabulation,\r\nThe thin verities of antique fabliaux.\r\n\r\nAll that wintriest widows conceive\r\nComes, at clattering last, to pass.\r\nThe ugliest dog bites himself in sleep.\r\n\r\nThe surpassing pain of paradise, pique\r\nOf profoundest pierrots and philosophes,\r\nPricks Parsifal and his weeping grail.\r\n\r\nCome, come, my oily ocean rock,\r\nSplit wide, lug up from your limpid guts,\r\nOne tear-bitter pill of pearl.\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nTHE CHANGING OF HATS
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nThe changing of habits, old hats or sprung spats,\r\nOccurs first within the orbit of brims.\r\nThere's more passion than fashion\r\nIn the changing of hats;  less wink of red ribbons,\r\nThan exultation, elation.\r\n\r\nThe changing of hats, or birch soda for gin,\r\nClaims animus assuaged, old habits dismissed.\r\nBut what we are is wicked, and kicks.\r\nAmong tatty racks of offended tiaras,\r\nOld habits, old hats, stay only playfully away--\r\n\r\nAwaiting inner haloes, hidden horns \r\nTo reassert their sway.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nTHE CAP OF CONSTANT LOVE
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nWear again, and gaily wear, O\r\nUnchaperoned, the cap of constant love;\r\nFish it out with dirty fingers--\r\nThe dusty cap\r\nThat flaps in your back pocket.\r\n \r\nDear duffer, drabbling\r\nIn Tuesday's mauve-mangled dusk,\r\nFatly fit upon your itchy bean, your patchy pate,\r\nThe forgotten cap \r\nYoung nights extruded in memorable grass.\r\n \r\nBe it papier-m\u00e2ch\u00e9 or toilet tissue,\r\nBeribboned bonnet, or low sombrero,\r\nLet its ostrich feathers fan the fickle\r\nNaysayers' intrusive noses.  \r\nFa-la.\r\n \r\nWear such lapsed cap, such crumpled crown\r\nGaily atilt,\r\nOr straighten its ancient injured bill--\r\nBut let, oh let, your mauve brain be haloed\r\nConstantly, constantly by love.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nSOPRANO INTERLUDE
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nLate, late to the untame game, I come\r\nReviving live instances of you:\r\nYou unrefined, bare singer in an eve\r\nVividest at its disappearance--\r\nA quintessence of quiet dusk\r\nFringe-draped upon a ball of moss,\r\nInept referent for what\r\nHas left us, for what is left us.\r\n\r\nSunset's golden orts depart; \r\nMere mud, mere earth remain.\r\nSing jingling on your rock of dark,\r\nSing and let the jagging chandelier of stars\r\nFall ringing round your ears--Let fall\r\nThe full curve of universe surrounding:\r\nCinctured circle of your sight,\r\nOutward round of an inward eye.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nSUMMER AMONG LEMONS
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nFleshly fruits fatten unpicked\r\nIn the rattling trees, a little\r\nDusty in a stumbling summer day\r\nToo dryly severe and savage \r\nTo dance naked at naked noon.\r\n\r\nNoon had come upon us, an oppressor\r\nPressing our red feet into the creek,\r\nAnkles crossed under crossing waters,\r\nEyes lampblack squibs beneath a brim\r\nOf straw--slugs beneath a wet, lifted rock.\r\n\r\nNight rouses us, streaming out together\r\nBarefoot over the uncut ragweed,\r\nLoving only barren moon and cool orchard\r\nIn the unrehearsed dark.  Nothing\r\nTo think about there as we stand\r\n\r\nTogether, ripening.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nAN ACHY MEDITATION
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nLove lives in the blooded mouth,\r\nUncouth cougar of lamented dreams,\r\nEater of hearts, tearer of eyelids.\r\nLove wears no mink tippet, sips no tea;\r\nLove tattoos sailors' tongues with rum.\r\n\r\nLove doesn't shuffle off a tomb, shoved,\r\nBut gathers what light stone angels there\r\nDiscard--disregarded ambers of the grave.\r\nLove eats and dies in any light,\r\nUnappeasable pursuer of piquancy.\r\n \r\nLove is blunt, and shuns the wispy stars'\r\nMincing finesse--flying witchwise\r\nAt midnight, where horn-dark trees\r\nStick-up like brooms in the battered moon\r\nAnd crick and crack with lover's static,\r\n\r\nCackling fantastic tropes of utter sun. \r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nWHAT THE MOUNTAIN SAW
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nThe gasp for affirmation that afflicts\r\nThe antlike likes of Sir Edmund Hillary\r\nGoing \"Hoy!\" and \"Ho!\" uphill \r\nTo victory or nothing--crisp crack of pike\r\nAnd piton hiking the unbearable beard\r\nOf my mountain frown.  Songs of many men,\r\nUndauntable purveyors of a universal \"Yo!,\"\r\nRoar orange as their hasty campfire fades\r\nFrom red to fulvous daffodil to insipid mist \r\nIn the diluted atmosphere, chant cheerily \r\nWith diminished tongue and dessicates breath, \r\nChant \"Hoy!\" and \"Ho!\" in their cleated clogs\r\nTo victory or nothing.\r\n\r\nIf I am lofty Olympus or arid Everest,\r\nWhat matter?  So long as my jagged sides\r\nAre slatted with ambition--Not for the sole self alone,\r\nMeasly participle of the universal panache,\r\nBut ambition of the self's evincing hope, glad glide\r\nOf muddy spirit toward the unfeigned ephemeral,\r\nThat lance of sunlight that caps the highest hill.\r\n\r\nPhilosophy's inadequate to tragedy.\r\nIts ordered sighs and yipping \"Yeps\"\r\nMake no address of solace to the crimped heart,\r\nHeed no note of despair's cold \"Nope,\"\r\nCorral no harmonies from a criminal hurt,\r\nStir no elegance of elegies in Charlie's charcoal husk--\r\nFlashed to ashes whilst stretched relaxing\r\nWith a pocket book of dusty sermons\r\nOr bien pesant bon mots.\r\n\r\nOne man, at his merely human height,\r\nAmbitionless as purple aster in a tub,\r\nSaying neither yea nor nay as he creeps up\r\nMy rocky garments, my rippled gear--\r\nOne man who creeps without belief or wit,\r\nWho yet creeps up and up to see what's what\r\nWhere winds tear pious pinetrees oblate, that \r\nOne man enthroned among my bald hairs,\r\nCasts thrown shadows ably as a cape,\r\nCasts, from his little dithering if,\r\nAn individual dark\r\n                    of vast magnificence. \r\n                                 \r\n\r\n                                 \r\n<\/pre>\n
\nDEFEAT IN THE AFTERNOON
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nYou, timid discourser of despair:\r\nSay torn clouds like ragged lambs\r\nMiserably impinge upon\r\nA ramping sun of yellow summer,\r\n     Lion-wild, his great\r\n     Gold mane a-shake!\r\n\r\nSniff-snaffer of etiquette, thou:\r\nSnub the afternoon's warm doings,\r\nLaugh at the passing riff-raff of light,\r\nGuffaw at the twinkling mica flakes\r\n     That flicker upon Hopatcong,\r\n     Lake of icicle licks!\r\n\r\nWait silent beside my shoulder awhile:\r\nFollow my finger where clay hills rise,\r\nLifting a gem-green foam of trees--\r\nIrreverent altar, wave of purest dirt,\r\n     Offering scent of earth-sacrifice \r\n To noses, in bowls of reddest clay!\r\n\r\nOK, OK.  Go be defeated, Ricardo,\r\nHater of this habitable weather,\r\nDespiser of our venerable sphere\r\nThat rolls on from chaos to chaos,--\r\n     A huge dog's toy cussedly tossed\r\n     For what outsized jaws to fetch?\r\n \r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nTHE PINTA PINES FOR CORDOBA’S SHORES
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nIt was altogether a land of summer, untroubled,\r\nMild in the mystery of distances unassailed--\r\nBristling with pines, ferocious badgers, fiercer minks,\r\nCougars, claws, jays of harshest tongue.\r\n\r\nToo much each new sound pursued... a hollowness,\r\nA blank at their back like an unsigned check,\r\nWordless cries marking each new-discovered bay \r\nAnd pinkening, unascended peak, X and X.\r\n\r\nDid adventure hoard a meaning of its own\r\nBeyond the fatal diagrams of Cordoba's maps,\r\nThose candles intensely gathered, that pointed beard and hand?\r\nIn the blanco moonlight, drained of meaning,\r\n\r\nStoats in dampened bushes paused, and then stirred.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nHEIGHT OF SUMMER
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nHere is the day, the bridal day undaunted;\r\nHere noon, at highest noon... hesitates...\r\nThe height of summer, at its crest arrested,\r\nHeld between warm hands to kiss--\r\nThe levitated real at pause in sun's perfection;\r\nPaused because we cannot see, cannot imagine\r\nBeyond such ripeness--as a tear unspilled,\r\nBrimmed to the rich roundness of a world,\r\nA whole world held in little in its little globe:\r\nLe soliel triumphant, hesitant, yet not beyond\r\nThe hale wholeness and circumference of our sphere.\r\n\r\nHere Wally waited for a change that surpassed\r\nSurrender, that grew grander than honeycomb tombs\r\nOf profoundest vested men in their nacre gloom,\r\nWrit in the minty script of ceaseless leaves\r\nArisen without thought of autumn in their sap,\r\nWithout a death hissing in their desire, nor any\r\nBelated \"maybes\" in their numberless noise of \"yes,\"\r\nNoise of summer unceasing, green forest\r\nTo green seas unceasing, zones of summer \r\nArranging rays of summer sun outright--\r\nOut, out, beyond star-strung dews of night.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nA PROSE DAY IN AUGUST
\n<\/h2>\n
\nThe dry flute of winter increased from timid drip-drip to the welcome rivulet of spring’s quickening quartet, spring waters roughening to thunder, the voluble thunder, of summer.  A summer stuffed beyond the pinched anemone prinks of spring, the quacks and pranks of compact ducks merely returning with downy chicks to the muddied mill pond.  Summer starts with lime-dust on the leaves, a cauterized neck in the garden, rabbits, hunched as rabbis, attacking a rutabaga patch, nibbling naughtily the taut squash blossoms with impolitic tooth.  Fulvid summer now in row on row of mowing is moving, loudened gusts assert, oboes blow by to join the tempered strings of violins sizzling busily as sheeted rain, the rage of fallen dots obliterating the composer’s roughened lines limping beyond the old swirled treble clef.  Now, even at night, the mood of drums is more than the mind resists, the mind alive in a realm of overwhelm, beauty besetting its dripping boat, the thunder-sheet shaken, bronze, the strong trees, oak, hazel, hawthorn, maple, large, at last laugh awake in an ecstasy of daytime fry and nighttime bake that pulls them, note by note, up from the roots until all the wood-doves coo in a shade as deep as Mahler’s moods.  And still the sounds of summer pour on, roar on, irritant transients of piccolos settled down to balmy roundelays blissful as beer, calm cellos, the fat notes of gubbinal horns returned from their silver soaring to soft-tinted rest, a-nuzzle in the underbrush, being to be, and be in the domestic dimness of satisfaction fulfilled–or, if not fulfilled, held anyhow in the mercy of afternoon light after a nap, alarmed only by august disgorgings of gorgeous gongs, the winter ruts deepened by summer’s goings-on, the long byways mossy now, rife, rife every step of the way, with life.<\/p>\n
\nLAMENTABLY THE SPRING
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nBeyond the boisterous good of lemongrass\r\nAnd past timid wrongs of sassafras,\r\nHer frigid footings go.\r\n\r\nHer trails their silver scarves let down\r\nAmong autumn's bearded boughs;\r\nHer laughter's in the berries now.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nEVENING OVERCAST AND NO MOON
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nIt has been too long since I began again\r\nTo seek speech or light for all within me-- \r\nThe venting evening overcast and no moon\r\nDivvying the heavens between dark and dark;\r\nToo long has silence like a deadened seed\r\nBred desolation within my hollow ear.\r\n\r\nSpeech after long silence begins where first \r\nThe loudened wave may be vivisect, yet live.\r\nTo see as new, nude Prometheus might,\r\nA lesser dark must split a dreaming seam\r\nIn the all-encompassing all-too-solid night;\r\nA lemon shim of dawn must crack and come\r\nBefore any fuller day of sun.\r\n\r\nThe halo of some first syllable, first sight,\r\nResistlessly spread in black enclosures of the night,\r\nRevives the angelic exemplar of all that may be\r\nSeen or said, all sight or sound may carry\r\nBy its enlarging, thinning rings of self: self\r\nEver-expanding, a blue balloon enlarged beyond \r\nThe sky, whose crimsoning confides all that dawn\r\nImplies, more than keenest noon intends.\r\n\r\nAnd so, the evening overcast and no moon,\r\nIn place of giving speech or searing sight,\r\nWe have our mid-night quiet time together,\r\nThe absent moon another listener at the table\r\nBetween us, the table invisible under our elbows.\r\nTogether we eat the moonlight of remembrance\r\nIn a silence we cannot parse or chant apart,\r\nIntensely unified by our clodden ears--\r\nA poverty of null-maddened imagination \r\nCovering over our duskier selves with clouds. \r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nTHE STARS AFFIXED IN ABERDEEN
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nThe way summer nights round down to a hue,\r\nA single color of final manifestation, fixed,\r\nWhere imagination and reality are one--\r\n\r\nStars drawn, line by line, into the story, into tale and fable.\r\nHorses or men, or half-horses reared, become\r\nArrowy men shooting stars through the astral spheres....\r\n\r\nHow sky's dulcet dark permits our dovish conjurations\r\nTo be true!  How, for a moment, the imagined you\r\nLowers herself before me on her hands, how I \r\n\r\nRear, half-horse, half-star, beyond swept horizons\r\nOf soapstone shoulders no daylight adorns;\r\nHow, for once, dark selves and dark desires occupy\r\n\r\nThe same perceived place, apparent time.\r\nHow night and we, in the romp of summer,\r\nRound down from trio to duo to one\r\n\r\nTransparency of liquid chalk, one outline of love.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nBITS OF LINT
\n<\/h2>\n
 <\/span>\r\n1.  Looking Up\r\nHe looked up at constellations constantly,\r\nSeeking in heightened happenings above\r\nThe redolent love of family: faces squarely there,\r\nSomehow related, frank with curiosity.\r\n\r\nNot burning metal raining out of solar air,\r\nHulking harried fates at his scarred carcass--\r\nBut love, as in the dawning sorrow of a mate\r\nSpooning her sugars across the breakfast plate\r\nWhile our local sun above the blazing table\r\nPlays theater-manager for their private fable.\r\n\r\nAnd also acts, more minorly, as one of the suns \r\nIn some far-off creature's caging constellation,\r\nTelling alien tales sagely in strange tongues\r\nFor other lovers revolving around other suns.\r\n\r\n2.  The Constellations\r\nThey were the silver-wire basket in which\r\nHis whole fruited world had fit and rattled,\r\nOrbiting one sun augustly, feeling less enclosed \r\nThan cared for by star-scriven stories there,\r\nEtched in old-timey deeps of time and space,\r\nTrouping spacetime's operatic litterings--\r\nA child's good-night tale densely stenciled\r\nWith Italianate-intaglioed colored lettering.\r\n\r\n3.  Himself\r\nWhen, looking down, stars saw him as he was\r\nWhat did they see?  A bunny in his hole\r\nSquinting at yellow-white pebbles in the sky?\r\nOr, as he was, magic rabbit popped from an old tophat, \r\nDid they see, with wan eyes, only those things \r\nHe himself had imagined for them to see:\r\nA blue world;  himself;  himself as marble-master,\r\nWith so many mortal mootings left unsaid,\r\nSo many starry yarns left unwoven,\r\nA man of gasping laughter, his bare belly furred,\r\nLicking wisps of frosting from a bowl\r\nTickled constellations rolled around in merrily.\r\n\r\n4.  What Crows, What Specters\r\nWhat heavenly crows, what peering specters \r\nPoked and ogled the oblivious baby? \r\nA giant in his cradle rocking rapidly, happily\r\nHimself, watching what ribald repetitions chanced--\r\nNoting slyly, as stars' spidery mobile spun above,\r\nHow tapping \"time\" and tripping \"rhyme\" dance \r\nRound earth's blue ballroom constantly, the way\r\nPaired mirrors emulate infinity on facing walls....\r\n\r\n5.  Tinily Enough\r\nAt tin summer's midnight edge\r\nOf his small wood's blue empire, man stood:\r\nA minx of meaning in a world awry.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nFINICKY PARAPHRASE
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nOpaque campadre, come gaze with me.\r\nAt sky's highest hardest blank, look--\r\nLook where August's ochre moon's gone down\r\nBeneath apportioned heaven as to a tomb,\r\nDead to all the world.  And dead, too, \r\nTo you and to me--unless in finicky paraphrase\r\n \r\nOne's voice might arouse, might resurrect...\r\nUntuck the lunar ogre from her starry bed--\r\nRevived by no cold cloth of dawn, gelid gem,\r\nRevived instead by what one voice intends:\r\nBy a few words in an ear, as, silverful shavings,\r\nOr, more moody, less morose, pregnantest glow.\r\n \r\nIf imagination may amend what summer's\r\nFinal evening hour--too warm, too insistent--\r\nFor all its buttery largesse let fade to stars,\r\nThen you and I may look, and look again\r\nWith longest look, at the moon gone down. \r\n \r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nVELLUM
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nAgain the page propounds its blandest blank,\r\nHabitual, blas\u00e9--void original of habitation--\r\nZoo's cage without a zebra, mind's tundra.\r\nIts ski-slope, a-tilt, unlined, emptied of warm cabins\r\nSlipped downslope like a glittery negligee,\r\nLike nipples slipped from the foamy cone\r\nOf a breast, emerges with virginal candor:\r\nBare, focal force of having never really been kissed.\r\n\r\nSo notes, so words, fall dismissed from the endless page--\r\nUnzipped from history, from all the too long\r\nTomps of pomp, pharaonic phrase by phrase,\r\nIllimitable lists of inimitable insistences, \r\nVeritable plagues of earnest meaning--too much,\r\nToo resolutely, too earnestly meaning meaning--\r\nThe diminishment of demarcated thought, nailed down,\r\nDefined, the house a house by penned precept\r\nAnd never really home, the page\r\nTyped and doodled, an ape of aptest palimpsest,\r\nCatastrophes of happenstance made the measure\r\nOf the possible, enforcing form on fantasy,\r\nDraining the dearests dreams dram by dram,\r\nDimming the mystery.  \r\n\r\n                     Scrape the language\r\nBack to scrap, until every inward ululation\r\nBest pursues its own iota of annihilation;\r\nSyllable by syllable, strip each baying bell\r\nOf its ding an sich of ding-dong-ding,\r\nSubtraction returning inordinate thought\r\nTo grandest mayhapses and greenest might-bes--\r\nBone's cold potency re-fleshed to a baby's smile,\r\nThe bitter ribbon of sky refreshed, without its\r\nWild graffiti of constellations, scribble of stars--\r\nThe sea once more deep with unnamed animals,\r\nThe forest vert with infinite variety,\r\nEach furred eye a planet, each tongue dumb.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nA CLOUDY DAY AND NO RAIN
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nHow long had one waited for revelation?\r\nFor a lash to whip the spirit to its utmost,\r\nTo enfroth chaos as a whale's fluke flaunts the sea?\r\n\r\nHow long had one awaited revelation, \r\nAwaited and been found wanting, waited beyond\r\nKnown answer or any wish for knowledge?\r\n\r\nThe hour of revealing love, reviling hate\r\nIs at hand--the enviable hour, veritable prick\r\nOf second sweep and minute barb and hour\r\n\r\nHand tripled.  Louring clouds unfold foil,\r\nTarnished light over the childhood house.\r\nEcstatic revelation pours out, bare and poised.\r\n\r\nHow long one has stood pounding erasers\r\nAnd considering the abyss, pondering improbables,\r\nMysteries and their majesties, the glassy scales\r\n\r\nOf wind-chimes rearranged, made major,\r\nPromoted through September air as rainbows--\r\nEnlarging pirouetted splits and pli\u00e9s of spectrums  \r\n\r\nUntil all sky is filled with dance, with a single dance, \r\nA dancer who dares and darts, lurid purple-blacks to blues,\r\nFrom blue to honey-yellowings to lucent chalks\r\n\r\nAt one with wispy trailings of the clouds. \r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nEYE FOR AN EYE
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nBetween our two oceans, what isthmus intrudes?\r\nWhat canal, like a liquid ladder, lets dark confluences\r\nTouch and merge, and more than merely merge,\r\n\r\nBecome one in identity, one in intent?  What prayer\r\nVaults the dewy devotee among cloudy towers\r\nAt the edge of the ocean, at the edge of the sky?\r\n\r\nBetween burn and backburn, eyes' fire is leaping.\r\nThrough fields of grainy difference, keen eyes are reaping--\r\nWe stand ablaze in the hay our eyes have harvested.\r\n\r\nIn our nearness, my eye and your eye attempt to touch....\r\nBut only in our idea of an eye--a primitive pupil, \r\nA principle black tack centering \r\n\r\nIrritable iridae and their multitudinous hues--\r\nOnly in imagination may we meet, \r\nAnd, eye to eye, give the pleasure that we seek. \r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nIN LOCO PARENTIS
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nTo sit in the absent father's solemn chair,\r\nGrey with flowers, that he left behind\r\nIs to sit again in the absent father's lap.\r\n\r\nSo, too, to take up his tapping pipe\r\nAnd to puff long thoughts all the purple afternoon\r\nIs to rekindle the father's mind amid his ashen grave.\r\n\r\nNotice, the pollarded oaks grow more nobly\r\nFor their nicks.  So, too, like velvet antlers wetted,\r\nGreen thoughts effloresce from your pained brow.\r\n\r\nYour brow which is \"so like your father's\r\nAt your age.\"  Or would be, were comparison possible\r\nIn the August evening's lingering light, eons on\r\n\r\nFrom father's final step through the cool foyer door\r\nWhere, in a corner, his ratty umbrella leans unmolested--\r\nAbstract blacks cordially folded like a spider,\r\n\r\nCobwebbed in the shadowless light of stars.\r\n \r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nMORNING WITHOUT MEDICATION
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nI arise from bed without any book\r\nAnd look out,\r\nAnd turn the silvered pages of my world.\r\n\r\nAugust's gilding's almost gone, gar\u00e7on.\r\nThe milk stales;\r\nThe after-breakfast plates rattle abstractly.\r\n\r\nOur blue sky whitens toward September incrementally.\r\nIncrementally, Mard\u00e9e,\r\nOur bones remember winter's shrunken edge.\r\n\r\nToday the sun's bald pat of butter's blancher\r\nThan yesterday,\r\nAnd yesterday's is blancher than the day before's.\r\n\r\nSummertime unravels toward autumn's disorder\r\nLeaf by leaf.\r\nTattered sounds louden in the morning chill.\r\n\r\nWhen summer's robe lies crumpled, what remains?\r\nPray, Mard\u00e9e, of all\r\nThose citron hours, what bright rind abides?\r\n\r\nI am like one whose misty death, inevitable, arrives\r\nAs vapor pours,\r\nAs a footnote arrives after revelation.\r\n\r\nIs not this orange globe, this sun, here and now,\r\nMore to me\r\nThan the inoperant orb of distant November? \r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nLUCID LOOKING
\n<\/h2>\n
\n“…man is insular and cannot be touched.  Every man is an infinitely repellent orb, and holds his individuality on that condition.” ~~ Emerson\n<\/p>\n
\r\nSummer fumbles brown within me. \r\nUnignited bloods merely flow as\r\nSummer batters the repellent orb of me,\r\nSlow-floods the basement of my being bright.\r\nFulminate furors of sun and power now\r\nTo extremities stretch: fingertips itch,\r\nTempted to catch, to cage the charring star\r\nFlaming blameless in his mercurial circuit.\r\n\r\nHis shine is in me divinely, or so it seems,\r\nMy bloods tumbling from brown to sheen\r\nAs summer decants its blazed extremes.\r\nI am made mighty, a Dionysus supreme\r\nLapped in sultry skins of beaten bronze,\r\nUnrepentant for my daylit minute\r\nAs gorgeous summer cartwheels blue above\r\nAnd my lucid orbs, engaged, engorge.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nVILE TIDINGS
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nArms-at-hips, I stand upon this cresive hill\r\nSurveying June as a nameless river spills\r\n\r\nAnd the empty field rolls on, intensely bright,\r\nSpeckled by no spitter-spat of night.\r\n\r\nIn this brightest space of land, in this\r\nEmpty field grown emptier with light,\r\n\r\nVile tidings shiver in the shadows of the grass,\r\nGrass green as glass, as translucent--\r\n\r\nAt the heart of each blade, at heart,\r\nA shadow, thin as an eyelash, starts,\r\n\r\nStarts and grows long as the light that makes it,\r\nA doubling of light by light's black absence.\r\n\r\nThe field is full of shadings half-perceived,\r\nSmall caresses of a brush loaded with ebon,\r\n\r\nDefining, crying out, night, night,\r\nAs the sun bristles past the cresive hill. \r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nSAYINGS OF THE END
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nWho was it who first was saying\r\nThe sayings of the end?\r\n\r\nWho first knew that luminous summer \r\nWasn't forever, wasn't irrevocable recovery?\r\n\r\nThat the child running home from the wood's verge\r\nArrives at an empty house?\r\n\r\nWho was it who first saw\r\nOur true inheritance is of light?\r\n\r\nLight skitters over the malleable rill,\r\nOr in metallic edges of the snow.\r\n\r\nLater, a sharp wind clears the hill,\r\nSaying in shrill grasses there, autumn.\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nDRY SEPTEMBER
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nIn dry September air, a redefinition begins\r\nAt the difficult edges of summer leaves\r\nBrightening from irradiant green \r\nTo red, as in the crevice of a new wound.\r\nAt the edges of the difficult leaves before us,\r\nAt the edges of our sense of the leaves,\r\nAt the edges of our senses, \r\nLeaf and leaf begin a new clarification,\r\nSharply red, in the dry September air.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nA DECEMBER MIDNIGHT
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nWinter's friendly hand,\r\nCold and sure, an aged friend.\r\nSurely, surely an aged friend.\r\nOne come to bring bad news,\r\n(Rattling the plaintive windowpane politely)\r\nWith a little tea and wry laughter--\r\nHow we're caught up by the heels\r\nBy disaster.\r\n\r\nSurely the cold, clear\r\nPanes that frame the empty bright\r\n(Letting in the brassy stars\r\nAnd chimes of crippled icicles),\r\nShow winter's friendly hand\r\nIn the solid steam that lifts\r\nFrom the little tea, the window's minor\r\nFrost occluding night.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nFINALLY, NIGHT
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nSleep is forgotten, and emptiness presses.\r\n\r\nAbout the abandoned house, a bitter trim\r\nOf snow-become-ice stiffens the gutters,\r\nShines an outline of once-human habitation\r\nIn steel, sterile light--a still trace\r\n\r\nOf that which had flowed with human warmth \r\nAll summer, and all through rueful fall endured....\r\nIt shines beyond winter's feeblest branch\r\nFar into the chill annihilation of final skies.\r\n\r\nThose remote familiar stars, the human \r\nOutlines of constellations' pallid myths,\r\nCongregate their austere silvers all together,\r\nAnd, all together, they coldly turn away.\r\n\r\nThey have other planets to look down upon tonight.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nTHE GIANT IN THE CRADLE
\n<\/h2>\n
 <\/span>\r\n \r\nI\r\nPerhaps it is no occasion for a poem,\r\nBeing alive, and so much of the world gone over\r\nTo death.  Being alive ought to be to be, to\r\nOblately be, like the reflecting pool at Versailles\r\nWith its zillion squiggles of fiery lines, heedless\r\nOf the poem's primped trumpeting, spritzed for its\r\nEnlivening, pinch and kiss of a nasty aunt,\r\nMentholated smoke blown in the occasion's face.\r\n\r\n....so much has gone over already, so much....\r\n\r\nOur whole world will go over to death,\r\nAnd all of the poems will have worn out their heels\r\nSlowing us stuttering down the backward hill.\r\nBarefoot at last, we pirouette over a wormy log\r\nInto the bleak hole our hale love of Earth prepared,\r\nLong ago, for us--for us alone, that hole. For us,\r\nAnd all those bones not yet born.\r\n\r\nWhat can the most fertile couplet fructify\r\nWhen all that lives must also die?\r\n\r\nIf it is not for ourselves or for the dead\r\nThat life must be enlivened, then why\r\nCry \"libert\u00e9!\" at all?  Why inaugurate the wish \r\nLife could be bounties of loosened roses, \r\nAnd not hard bright bales of tears?  \r\nOr, if it must be tears, unwillingly wept--\r\nRuddy tears that have roses at their core.\r\n \r\n\r\nII\r\n\"Liberty\" is too big a word to read aloud,\r\nAmong all the printed trash of papers crowding out\r\nThe cafe clatter, coffee cups gone cold,\r\nThe morning rage that accompanies opining apes\r\nWho spare no detailed love for inch-high dreams.\r\n(Still, rhyming Jack nodded among his Harriman's teas,\r\nSeeking biggest visions in that gentle steam and seethe.)\r\n\r\nSleep, to them, is release from obligation,\r\nA vacation from invective, light's extinction, perdu.\r\nTheir moon's no mistress of inventive eye,\r\nDoodling woozy outlines of pallid paradise\r\nAs she parades, en nude pointe, about the parkinglot.\r\nNo, no.  Sleep is their escape, purely and practically,\r\nAn oubliette to oblivion for the day's rubbish,\r\nA hole where magic casements ope'\r\nOn pools of dirty oil.\r\n\r\n(Perseverant Jack, to grow his giant, thumbs the seed\r\nInto his very ear until the broken cradle bleeds,\r\nResponsive to sharp imagination's seethe and need.)\r\n\r\nClairvoyant voyageurs of the quaint quotidian, \r\nThey read their minds in the paper every day:\r\nLife is puerile in a purple haze, \r\nA titanic catastrophe, capsized\r\nBeside an iceberg.  And no rowboat home.\r\n\r\n \r\nIII\r\nShall garish maidens in naked garrisons go forth,\r\nWeaving wheaten garlands as they march\r\nDown silhouetted avenues to make us free?\r\nCan billeted gangs of regimental bicyclists expunge\r\nThe uneven levity of our solitary repose?\r\nHow can all the multiples of men amend,\r\nOr lunatic doubling of naked ladies' leagues allay,\r\nThe single niggling sin that haunts my breast?\r\n\r\nPolitics is but passion personified, a hasty mask\r\nStrapped gas-mask grim on the gagging populace,\r\nWithout so much as the pleasant pressure \r\nOf one's own fingerpainting fingerprint applied--\r\nSwiftly slid orange along the disguising nose,\r\nThe weakly-inked imprimatur of a primitive.\r\n\r\nAnd yet, it's among the olestra mass, we pretend,\r\nOur single fate discerns its predestined end.\r\n\r\nHow much better to laugh behind a damasked hand\r\nAt secret meanings whispered by the grass,\r\nOr build up a minaret but cricket-high, and lean\r\nAnd worship there in solo loneliness,\r\nThan to huff a bicycle among the numbered blanks,\r\nOr giggle belittled in the garlanded herd.\r\n\r\n\r\n \r\nIV\r\nCome instead into the forlorn solitude of self,\r\nSultriest interlude of self and self, the self\r\nDoing little more when midnight booms\r\nThan romancing the forgotten moon,\r\nDancing dunce-like on the dunes in the silky light,\r\nAlone among the waxy blooms that shine\r\nUp at her radiant round, their sultry mother.\r\nDown all the lonely aisles of neglected time,\r\nCome loiter here among the leaves' arsenic pallor.\r\nMake up a game for one, where time plays\r\nLullabies into a pinking conch's soft-echoed ear,\r\nMysterious residuum of your own rose pulse.\r\n\r\nWalk at ease along the forgotten beach \r\nOf self, the self's returning tide half black,\r\nHalf white in moody moonlight, and no oar.\r\nHere on the beach, tallying the sea-drift,\r\nThe self like a wisp of smoke ascends,\r\nYes, ascends, invisibly to heaven.\r\n\r\nWhat use now the orgy crowd and clamping mask?\r\nNo null numbers can add up all your sum.\r\nAlone with the veritable surf, alone with no one,\r\nNo parade of pretense to hurrah you high\r\nAnd keep warm the solitude hid inside--\r\nMater moon must mother you, as she the leaves.\r\nBathe by that light, dive in the veritable surf\r\nArching back-and-forth before you argently.\r\nSwim until you are not what you were.\r\n \r\n\r\nV\r\nPublic men in a public time, large-armed,\r\nWhat have they to do with love, the double\r\nSolitude to which all consummate desire comes?\r\nWhispered vows and private pets as soft\r\nAs raindrops, preach from no soapbox pulpit\r\nTo captivated crowds, but singly lick\r\nWordy seeds into receptive ears of earth.\r\nUnloving laws of the public men, large-armed,\r\nBind all affections, communal to a common postern\r\nPast affection's expiration.\r\n\r\n   Who can inhale a scent,\r\nHowever intensely tart, however vast,\r\nWaving winds have whipped away?  So loves \r\nAnd lovers go sinuous through our lives--\r\nTwinned rivers escaped beyond our bending,\r\nFar past poets' suasive sigh or snit fantastic.\r\n\r\nLaws, too, are nothing in the heart's demesne,\r\nA febrile fence erected for leanest leaping,\r\nAdvice for ears reddened by their own desires\r\nObedient to an inner sing-song no orator can echo.\r\n\r\n  \r\nVI\r\nRuined statues in the park offer no roses \r\nTo the eye--but to the eye within the eye, \r\nThe eye that lets the eye apprehend \r\nBoth stone and rose?  To that eye, \r\nNo violence may be done.  No thumb\r\nMay muscle it out, no lid lure it blind\r\nOr blank its vision of the human things it sees.\r\nMilton penning paradise and Homer eating grapes,\r\nSightless yet serene, saw into the raw marrow\r\nOf what we are:  human--ruined or noble.\r\nRight to the withered pith of us their bone orbs\r\nDissected fault and fury:  spun Ulysses\r\nRecklessly round the sea's ceaseless sink,\r\nOr rang old Lucifer down from curtained Heaven\r\nTo opine alone in the bituminous pit.\r\n\r\nIf no more blessed by being than merely human,\r\nHow, my hearts, account for love's intrusion?\r\n\r\nDoes such second sight come, as Vishnu advises,\r\nBecause we and all things are One?  Why, then,\r\nThe universe, however wide, would lack its mystery, \r\nAnd tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow\r\nIts surprise.  No elation scintillates when we kiss\r\nNo one but ourselves.  No satisfaction crows its kill\r\nIf vengeance but defangs the mirror's face.\r\nWe know the inward rose of others\r\nBy the softness of our own....\r\n \r\nVII\r\nHere the beautiful sounds of the sea walk beside.\r\nPebbles mumble and crested waves assert;  echo\r\nUnderstates the case.  And you, and I, walk beside.\r\nPersuade me, limitless sea.  Give me an identity\r\nTo be, someone too lovable to drown\r\nIn your green wish and wash, your blonde\r\nSummer utterances, golden yodels, sweet sweeps\r\nOf beach--blue beguiler of my own inviting!\r\n\r\nIf sea-shanties prime your immortal flood,\r\nMay my tears, too, be provident for good.\r\n\r\nI want to know just what to do, just who to be\r\nBeyond the cozy monuments of warm mortal love.\r\nShine my broken glass in your swift foreverings.\r\n\r\n\r\n \r\nVIII\r\nWhitman moved among squat hospital cots,\r\nHis salt beard bright beside unseasoned breaths.\r\nHe poured no balm of runic ode, but cool carafes\r\nOf water for the broken soldiers' ease, sopped blood\r\nFrom wounded piteous faces, knelt and prayed\r\nHand in hand for a salvation he did not really feel\r\nRemotely possible.  Hand in hand, he never told\r\nThe heavy news that \"der Gott ist Tod.\"\r\nThey fought and died in youthful simpleness.\r\n\"Liberty\" was a word as wide as they,\r\nA torso-word, a wound-word, a death word\r\nWorth living for through all the battling stars\r\nNight-belching cannon or Springfield long-bores\r\nCould crack, pouring out their milky smokes\r\nNo somnambulating symbolist could unfocus.\r\n\r\nThe rose-shell ear of the exploded soldier\r\nRemains the excellentest vase for prayer's flowers.\r\n\r\nMyths are the poems of our intenser angels,\r\nSpread-winged griffins among molten smokes,\r\nConstellations constantly re-telling all, line by line,\r\nAs they look down between dark-parted stars.\r\nIt is in these stories, as they swerve, that we share\r\nOur remoter solitude and sublime source,\r\nCommand with chants ruggedest happenstance,\r\nFan piquant fable to flaming grace, and partake\r\nOf the painful wrenchings of our fate.\r\n \r\n\r\nIX\r\nReality is permeable to our taut investigations.\r\nThe melody of one rose is all symphonies.\r\nThe experiment of a single tear is every tragedy.\r\n\r\nOur integration, the integration of poetry\r\nAnd reality, is simple as a sugarcube dropped\r\nIn dark morning coffee, or the milky smoke\r\nOf cream, sweet interfacings of Havana fields\r\nAnd Columbian highlands ground down,\r\nLump and liquid....\r\n\r\nThe poet on his balcony, in dim moonlight,\r\nUtters his liminal sibilances \r\nFor his gilded ear alone, one candle at his back\r\nIn which phosphor pages freshly flare;\r\nNot for all the humdrum roll-call of humankind\r\nIn their chiffon sleeping gear and plummy dreams,\r\nDoes he sing low to stars embedded in his lids.\r\nHe speaks for himself, but not to himself,\r\nFrank affabulations of the summer moon,\r\nHonied orb to which all men, lovesick, stick--\r\n\r\nMoon, let my inky invocation be\r\nSworn with every susurration of the sea.\r\n\r\nAnd so star-clad sugars of self-wish mix\r\nWith mud-mad grandeurs of our rooted world,\r\nThose velvety blood-blacks affianced, via me,\r\nWith saccharin siftings of the spooning moon. \r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nSECTION: LOVE’S SUMMERY BUSINESS
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nLOVE’S SUMMERY BUSINESS
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nThe summery business of lying beside you\r\nBeside a bedside a fan in the dark--\r\nThe sweat of day recedes almost into memory.\r\n\r\nThe fan blades circulate cozy hosannas of air.\r\n\r\nAlmost, love comes out like stars between us.\r\nAlmost, the sun and his sweat have gone\r\nUp the empty chimney.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nSHHH
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nThe distant road is whispering.\r\nThe air is softly, softly\r\nStirring the peacock feather.\r\n\r\nIn my morning mind\r\nThe warm image of you\r\nStirs softly, too.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nTWO MOON RHYTHMS
\n<\/h2>\n
 <\/span>\r\n1. Behind the apartments\r\nThe young gulls skreek and squeal\r\nOver the old dump\r\nRipe with peelings, mangled cans.\r\n\r\nThey think, If I flew to the moon,\r\nEnlivening its dusts with my wings \r\nAs they flash,\r\nI could not be more satisfied than now.\r\n\r\nIn this, the young gulls\r\nPreening high over the glittering dump\r\nAre not deceived.\r\n\r\n2. In his room\r\nHe nailed up a poster of the moon\r\nFrom an old bijou. \r\n\r\nAnd round shone that moon\r\nUpon his wall.\r\n\r\nHis lap glowed slowly obscured\r\nWith drift, with stardust.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nTREMOLO LIGATURES OF JULY
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nNot like a mouse\r\nTimidly hugging the wainscoting\r\nDid you meet the prismatic glitters\r\nOf July moonlight.\r\n\r\nNor trailing scarves\r\nWith threads of silver\r\nDid you attend\r\nIts slippered breeze--\r\n\r\nNor waving silvery scarves\r\nThreaded with prismatic colors\r\nTorn from passing rainbows.\r\nOh, no.\r\n\r\nYou came and sat\r\nOn a flat wooden chair,\r\nHard.  And sweated all July.\r\nAnd stayed.\r\n\r\nYou sat down hard\r\nOn an old wooden chair,\r\nSweating and wiping your face\r\nPrismatically.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nVORUBER, ACH, VORUBER
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nI was a maiden first.\r\nOf crinoline\r\nAnd electric green,\r\nMy gown.\r\n\r\nThen you came,\r\nChoice monsieur,\r\nWith red eyes\r\nAnd heavy hands.\r\n\r\nThe days broke open\r\nLike glass\r\nLike cymbals\r\nLike mirrors crashed.\r\n\r\nThe days broke open.\r\nLike summer rolled over on his back,\r\nOpen-mouthed with sleep,\r\nYou came.\r\n\r\nIn the hay, in the day,\r\nHeavily, heavily.\r\n\r\nSuch hands, monsieur.\r\nAnd my gown\r\nFelt velvet,\r\nGrew red. \r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nTHE ABLATION OF ABSURDIO
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nWhat I feel, here in this room with you\r\nAs the walls drift into space,\r\nObscure rhomboids....\r\n\r\nMore than your eyeliner of kohl,\r\nMore than your lengthening hair\r\nPoured from its sumptuous bucket....\r\n\r\nWhat I feel... is what escapes saying.\r\nThe sound of the hurrying surf\r\nFills my ears when you bend near.\r\n\r\nYour shoulder brushes my cheek....\r\nThe walls drift off into space....\r\nWhat was it you were saying?\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nAND WOULD NIGHT COME
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nAnd would night come\r\nNot once but a thousand thousand times\r\nAnd each sad star above me be\r\nThe burning shadow of your face\r\nStill would I want--and need--again\r\nA thousand thousand nights\r\nOf such unerring grace and sin\r\n\r\n\r\n \r\n<\/pre>\n
\nA QUIET KISS
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nA quiet kiss is all I request\r\nWhile the blue moon rears so rare;\r\nSuch double fullness fills my August\r\nAs I imagine you quite bare.\r\n\r\nTwo moons blunder by in one summer month,\r\nDoubling our lovers' light;\r\nToward you I flutter like a moth,\r\nEncouraged by such burning nights.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nBECAUSE YOU TOOK
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nBecause you took me to bed, I love you. \r\nBecause your sex wraps around me \r\nAnd my body falls out of myself \r\nLike a flower, I love you. \r\n \r\nWisdom doubles itself like a germ, \r\nAdding body to body.  Your eye \r\nAdds itself to my eye, and we go on seeing: \r\nNew things, new newness. \r\n \r\nCicadas, windfall, our braiding bodies--\r\nTender, joyful, awake in each other,  \r\nSimple as forgetting. \r\nA slow-crawl cross, holy and mossy. \r\n \r\nHesitant as a craving bee I explore you completely, \r\nExhausting the tassels of sunlight, \r\nRemoving valuable essences even by the powdery moon.\r\nAnd its lonely magnet unites us, crests in us. \r\n \r\nStale, silly and small, \r\nI return to the gorgeous orchard of your arms. \r\nYour arms tensile and lively as if managing a sailboat. \r\nThe heavy sail red, full of bloods, wombs. \r\n \r\nBut agile anyway in the universe that blows it \r\nBefore your face, in the front of the dawn, \r\nYour hair whipping! \r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nTHE COLOR OF YOUR SOUL
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nMore ardent, more loving, more longing,\r\nNow I know the color of your soul;\r\nHow white the justice of your eyes,\r\nHow mountain blue the ambition in you,\r\nHow pale the shimmer of your sheer sincerity,\r\nAnd like the rose's red the love you give.\r\n\r\nIn evening when my sight is dim\r\nAnd the fire casts the colors that it can,\r\nSnaring all shapes in its flares and fans\r\nOf shadow and intensity that alternate\r\nBetween the cracking wood and iron grate:\r\nSteady glows the color of your soul.\r\n\r\nBut beyond these tints and tinctures\r\nOf day or night, beyond what any sight\r\nCan by light looking give or get--\r\nClear as evening's air, as vibrant, dear,\r\nAs tears composed of alpine snow,\r\nI know I know the color of your soul.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nHOW I LOVE THIS WOMAN!
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nHow I love this woman!\r\nThrough the open door of my soul\r\nInto the wide fields of thee!\r\nYou stand unashamed in dainty dignity,\r\nA fine mind and eyes unblinded,\r\nFresh and ready as grass after rain.\r\n\r\nOut into the nude acres I go,\r\nBarefooted and bareheaded, anxious to serve\r\nSuch swaths of white wildernesses!\r\nAs a bee attends the minutest bloom,\r\nSo I follow the shadow of your going\r\nAnd canopy all the Earth with song!\r\n\r\nMy soul awoke one night with you,\r\nAnd still in legendary dark pursues\r\nThis new star in the evening sky.\r\nHigh above forests, horizons, and Hell\r\nYou shine divinely, adjusting your jacket\r\nOr pushing a button into your narrow lapel.\r\n\r\nI sing the visionary river\r\nFlowing wayward and seaward at once!\r\nThe bark and chuckle of otters, I sing,\r\nThe wet salt that shapes the beach--\r\nI sing the long celebratory downhill race\r\nTo the frigid lake beloved of ducks. . . .\r\n\r\nI sing landscape and inscape,\r\nOutside and inside, day and night, and you. \r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nSECTION: A TASTE OF TRANSLATION
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nA POEM IS BORN
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nI present this infant child of Idumaean midnight,\r\nHis pale wings powerless, plucked of flight:\r\n\r\nAll night my study's closed window glowed\r\nWith mirrored lamp's incense and burnished golds,\r\nEach sad pane, alas, by harsh frost ringed and stamped\r\nUntil dawn's wide fingers calmed the ailing lamp \r\n--insubstantial angel--\r\nUnveiling to my tired Dad's eyes: the babe a-beam, \r\nNight's afterbirth--gifted relic of a dream!--\r\nRaising round my father's mouth a faint, queer smile\r\nIn anemic silence;  day's blue dews freshened by sunrise palms....\r\n\r\nOh Mary, Mary, cradling our daughter to your kisses\r\n--Cold feet so innocent!--Welcome, too, this three-headed \r\n\tbrother!\r\nSing \"lullay, lullay\" with viol voice and frail harpsichord, \r\nwill you?\r\nPress with faded finger your fulsome breast, won't you?\r\nPlease, bleed the sibylline whiteness of a woman's soul\r\nBetween starvling lips, dropped from virgin skies....\r\n\r\nMallarm\u00e9<\/em> \r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nTHE SWAN
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nVirgin dawn's violet, ineffectual light....\r\nWhat use the shuddering wings?  Delicate inebriate...\r\nShivering no fissures in the lake's hard haunt of ice--\r\nGlacial transparencies flickering with effectless flights.\r\n\r\nOnce swift and serene, his memories flitter: ill-lit,\r\nMagnificent, and without hope.  He strains....\r\nNever enchanted by chansons of Riviera suns,\r\nNever flying from winter's sterile dazzle.\r\n\r\nThe long S-neck convulses--whitest, wintriest agony;\r\nInfinite space afflicts;  the snowy swan denies, denies....\r\nA horrible mire frosts the impeccable quills.\r\n\r\nPhantom of brilliance by brilliance confined\r\nTo immobility--in his insolent trance icily fixed--\r\nSleet-sheeted, inutile exile of a Swan! \r\n\r\nMallarm\u00e9<\/em>\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nDEUX APPARITIONS
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nThe moon despairs;  seraphim in tears\r\nDream among heaven-scented blooms, bows\r\nTautly in hand, eliciting from the fatal viols\r\nSpectral sobs glissading azurest corollas--\r\nThat day of your first, bless\u00e9d kiss.\r\n\r\nO vision of love, return to me, martyr me!\r\nLick, inhale old wines of that dear perfume, sadness,\r\nLeft after regrets and deceptions depart--\r\nUnrinsed leavings of the gathering Dream,\r\nFortissimo moanings sunk in the heart \r\nThat collects them, big as a sink.\r\n\r\nIn disarray, I cast my wandering eyes \r\nDistraught upon the pavement pale....\r\n\r\nAnd then--sunshine in your hair (on the street,\r\nAt evening) appears, and your lilt-lit laugh returns:\r\nAn apparition of the blonde fey with her bright cap\r\nWho once upon the sleepy beatitudes of enviable childhood\r\nTrespassed, trailing from pale fingers of her half-closed hands\r\nShaken bouquets of milk-scented stars. \r\n\r\nMallarm\u00e9<\/em> \r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nTHE SUM OF ALL THE SOUL
\n<\/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\tshould you debut:\r\nReality's vile.\r\n\r\nToo-precise a sense erases\r\nLiterature's half-guesses.\r\n\r\nMallarm\u00e9<\/em>\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nDUSKY PAGE
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nSwiftly, gamely, mademoiselle\r\nMade a wish to hear toned 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\nMallarm\u00e9<\/em>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nMEMORIAL ANOMIE
\n<\/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 insists,\r\n\r\nAmidst your immense coppery tufts,\r\nOn expelling a diamond sigh:\r\nThe cry \"Glorie!\" that he stifles.\r\n\r\nMallarm\u00e9<\/em>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nBATTLE DITTY
\n<\/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\nMallarm\u00e9<\/em>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nTHE DAGGER OF ART
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\n1.\r\nYes, all things increase in magnificence \r\nWhen hammered with travail\r\n     And patience--\r\nVerse, marble, onyx, enamel.\r\n\r\n2.\r\nDamn each false constraint!\r\nYet, that you may walk erect,\r\n     Your corset,\r\nMuse, pull tight.\r\n\r\n3.\r\nSculptor, renounce\r\nClay and stone, chisel and bit\r\n     When doubts\r\nUnnerve the finger and the spirit.\r\n\r\n4.\r\nHold to hard Carrara,\r\nWith Paros cool endure,\r\n     So rare,\r\nGuarding the pure contour.\r\n\r\n5.\r\nImprint bronze of Syracuse\r\nThat, firm and proud,\r\n     Never releases\r\nEach trace fierce and charmed.\r\n\r\n6.\r\nAnd with a dread most delicate\r\nPursue the filament of soul\r\n     In agate,\r\nProfiling perfect Apollo.\r\n\r\n7.\r\nPainter, despise pale aquarelle\r\nAnd pin your palette,\r\n     So faint, so frail,\r\nIn unchanging flames enameled.\r\n\r\n8.\r\nBunch and twist blue mermaids\r\nTrenchantly a hundred ways\r\n     By their fishy ends\r\n--Monsters of antique heraldry!\r\n\r\n9.\r\nShow in a nimbus triple-lobed\r\nThe Virgin,  Jesus\r\n     And the globe\r\nBlazing beneath one Cross.\r\n\r\n10.\r\n--Dust to dust. \r\nThe pastor intones\r\n     Talced white\r\nAbove white pews of skeletons.\r\n\r\n11.\r\nArt alone, robust,\r\nSavors of Eternity; the ephemeral\r\n     Portrait bust\r\nSurvives the charnel.\r\n\r\n12.\r\nAnd the austere medallion\r\nPlowed up by a laborer\r\n     From dirt and loam\r\nReveals an Emperor.\r\n\r\n13.\r\nGods die and are interred;\r\nBut sacred, sovereign verse\r\n     Endures--\r\nMore mightily made than Death.\r\n\r\n14.\r\nSculpt, carve, chisel;\r\nUntil the floating dream alone\r\n     Smiles\r\nWithin the resisting stone.\r\n\r\nTh\u00e9ophile Gautier<\/em>\r\n\r\n\r\n \r\n<\/pre>\n
\nSECTION: THE SCARLETS
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\n \r\n<\/pre>\n
\nTHE SCARLETS
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nBeing\r\nA rhapsody\r\nOf the Scarlets'\r\nStar-lit\r\nLoving.\r\n\r\n(Varlet\r\nAnd Harlot\r\nScarlet,\r\nTo be exact.)\r\n\r\n\r\n \r\n<\/pre>\n
\nDEAR TEMPTRESS
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nWitness\r\nThis \r\nThin\r\nThing\r\n\r\nSo living,\r\nSo loving.\r\n\r\n\r\n \r\n<\/pre>\n
\nTHE MUSKETEER TO HIS MISTRESS
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nTo my\r\nScarlet\r\nHarlot:\r\n\r\nTry\r\nHarder\r\nWith your Father.\r\n\r\nI'll float\r\nThe moat.\r\n\r\nPost \r\nThis note\r\nOn your door.\r\n\r\nLove, your\r\nScarlet\r\nVarlet. \r\n\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nUNTITLED
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nSubtle sambas,\r\nWriggling rumbas,\r\nLimber Latinas,\r\nAy, cay rumba!\r\n\r\nSweaty sweets,\r\nNimble feets,\r\nLevitating,\r\nTitivating.\r\n\r\nBut just\r\nFrom you,\r\nMy muse,\r\nHave, I must\r\n\r\nSpanks\r\nAnd thank-yous.\r\n\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nUNTITLED
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nOunce\r\nsaid\r\nto Pounce:\r\n\r\n\"Ouch!\r\nThat's my head!\"\r\n\r\nAnd Pounce replied:\r\n\r\n\"Love hurts.\r\nThat\r\ncannot\r\nbe denied.\"\r\n\r\nThen Pounce\r\nkissed Ounce\r\n\r\nonce\r\n\r\nand off to bed.\r\n\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nUNTITLED
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nYou've \r\nA duty\r\nTo ennude\r\nYour booty.\r\n\r\nI've\r\nA bounty\r\nOf Quaaludes,\r\nMy beauty\r\n\r\nTo urge\r\nAnd edge\r\n\r\nYour booty\r\nTo doublesome\r\nTroublesome\r\nDuty.\r\n \r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nUNTITLED
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nWanting\r\nHaunts\r\nThe heart:\r\n\r\nGaunt\r\nFaces,\r\nEmpty places.\r\n\r\nTill Death\r\nTakes us,\r\nBreath\r\nVacates us,\r\n\r\nWanting\r\nHaunts\r\nThe heart,\r\n\r\nHurts.\r\n \r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nUNTITLED
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nIf\r\nGifts\r\nBreed \r\nBliss,\r\n\r\nBe greed.\r\nTake this:\r\n\r\nHand \r\nMadam--\r\n\r\nLive\r\nGrand,\r\nLove\r\n\r\nOne\r\nMan.\r\nOne.\r\n\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nUNTITLED
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nNeck\r\nTo neck\r\n\r\nWe'd twist,\r\n\r\nKissing\r\nAnd kissed.\r\n\r\nUnwound,\r\nLet-down,\r\n\r\nSuch\r\nClutches\r\n\r\nAre missed.\r\n\r\nLoneliness\r\nSifts\r\n\r\nThe dour\r\nHours. \r\n\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nUNTITLED
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nBefore you\r\nNothing\r\nTo do\r\n\r\nNo zing\r\nIn anything.\r\n\r\nSince our meeting\r\nToo dizzy,\r\nToo busy,\r\nEv'n for tweetin'.\r\n\r\nSweetie,\r\nAt dawn\r\nIn your arms\r\n\r\nMy heart\r\nSparks.\r\n \r\n<\/pre>\n
\nAFTER CHURCH
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nWildly\r\nVioletly\r\nEmpurple\r\nMy steeple!\r\n\r\nMy mistress,\r\nMy kisstress,\r\nKeeper\r\nOf hearts,\r\nParts,\r\nAnd my wand'ring\r\npeepers\r\n\r\nWonder\r\nNo longer,\r\nDoubt no more:\r\nYou,  j'adore.\r\n\r\n \r\n<\/pre>\n
\nTRAVELING
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nAlone\r\nUnhomed,\r\nMy heart,\r\n\r\nBone-\r\nLonely\r\n\r\nBeats\r\nApart,\r\n\r\nAn egg\r\nUnshelled.\r\n\r\nIn Hell,\r\nI beg:\r\n\r\nCome quick,\r\nQuick,\r\nQuick!\r\n\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nUNTITLED
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nFrom the simple\r\nGrinful\r\nOf your darling\r\nDimples\r\n\r\nTo your sinful\r\nEyefuls,\r\nMy darling\r\nDarer,\r\n\r\nYour fancy\r\nPrancing\r\nAnd disco\r\nHiprolls\r\n\r\nShow mucho\r\nMojo.\r\n \r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nUNTITLED
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nCat's cradle\r\nWeaving\r\nWaving\r\nFingers \r\nTogether.\r\n\r\nPlay-doh\r\nPounding\r\nRounding\r\nColorful\r\nLumpfuls.\r\n\r\nGames\r\nOf love\r\nYou've\r\nMade untame.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n \r\n<\/pre>\n
\nANNIVERSARY
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nWe're \r\nHere.\r\n\r\nOne \r\nYear\r\nOur sum.\r\n\r\nPlus\r\nNight's\r\nDelights...\r\n--Shush!\r\n\r\nEnnui?\r\nPuh-lease!\r\nStill chill.\r\n\r\nYou, me,\r\nOur \"we\"\r\nFulfills. \r\n \r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nUNTITLED
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nAdam\r\nAnd\r\nEve,\r\n\r\nSnake-\r\nStruck,\r\n\r\nHad\r\nNo\r\nLuck.\r\n\r\n\"Go\r\nDamned,\"\r\n\r\nGrieved \r\nGabriel,\r\n\r\n\"Until\r\nReprieved.\"\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nUNTITLED
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nMy heart's\r\nA lark!\r\n\r\nAll day\r\nI sway....\r\n\r\nFeel\r\nReal\r\nSwell.\r\n\r\nMy hips\r\nDip\r\n\r\nThe way\r\nAn eel\r\nSwims--\r\n\r\nSo dark\r\nAnd thin.\r\n \r\n<\/pre>\n
\nHER SKIING VACATION
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nIcicles,\r\nThickened\r\nIn vacant\r\nIntervals,\r\n\r\nQuicken\r\nWhen\r\nTickles\r\nBegin--\r\n\r\nLicks\r\nLikened\r\nTo kisses,\r\nKisses\r\n\r\nIf wishes\r\nWere kisses.\r\n\r\n\r\n \r\n<\/pre>\n
\nSONNETTE
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nTo \r\nYou\r\n\r\nMy \r\nSpry\r\nLove\r\nSprings,\r\nSings\r\n\r\nAbove\r\nDeath's\r\nDearth.\r\n\r\nTo\r\nYou,\r\nContralto,\r\nThis solo.\r\n\r\n \r\n<\/pre>\n
\nIN ILLNESS
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nI \r\nFly\r\nUntried\r\nSkies\r\n\r\nAsking\r\nEverything\r\n\r\nIt's \r\nWhich\r\nN'what.\r\n\r\nBut,\r\nT'love\r\nMy wounded dove?\r\n\r\nHomeward, I'll\r\nCrawl.\r\n\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nUNTITLED
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nLove,\r\nDuty\r\nProve\r\nBeauty.\r\n\r\nHate,\r\nEnvy\r\nBerate\r\nLevity.\r\n\r\nLife,\r\nDeath--\r\nBrief\r\nBreath.\r\n\r\nYou?\r\nWhat's true.\r\n\r\n\r\n \r\n<\/pre>\n
\nTHE SCARLETS’ END
\n<\/h2>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Purchase from Amazon A miscellany by Gregg Glory [Gregg G. Brown] Published by BLAST PRESS Life exists to pay attention to other people. I silently laugh at my own cenotaph, And out of the caverns of rain, Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb, I arise and unbuild it again. […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1001002,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1733],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5278","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-giant-in-the-cradle","category-1733-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5278","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=5278"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5278\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7403,"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5278\/revisions\/7403"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5278"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5278"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5278"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}