{"id":5280,"date":"2015-08-27T19:01:08","date_gmt":"2015-08-27T19:01:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gregglory.com\/wordpress\/?p=5280"},"modified":"2023-07-08T10:19:42","modified_gmt":"2023-07-08T10:19:42","slug":"the-maybe-plagues","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/posts\/the-maybe-plagues\/","title":{"rendered":"The Maybe Plagues"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"maybe-plagues-thumbnail\"<\/a><\/p>\n

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

 <\/span>\r\nby Gregg Glory\r\n[Gregg G. Brown]\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nPUBLISHED BY BLAST PRESS\r\n\r\n \r\nCOPYRIGHT \u00a9 2014 \r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\r\n\"Evolution is too slow a process to save my soul.\"\r\n\t~~Darby Crash\r\n \r\n\r\n\"I'd rather be a poet any day and live on guile and beer.\"\r\n\t~~Dylan Thomas\r\n\r\n\r\nI with all my winding torch of days\r\nKept trust, kept flame;\r\nThe runner's green wand I passed on\r\n\"The past\" my only name.\r\n \r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
MAINTAINING THE MAGIC<\/h2>\n
There is a magic to poetry; it cannot be all puzzle boxes and puns. The big-browed scholar of Finnegan’s Wake must finally be frustrated. And, as important, the child in Joyce’s choices, and the kid in ourselves, must feel like we are genuinely playing. Billy’s roar behind the bushes must be the Snark’s flabbergasting cry. The bread and wine must be the blood and body. Let all the magic happen, or no poetry really is.<\/p>\n
Poetry explores the world without and the door within. It raises the hackles on the beast in your soul, and sends you out with the naturalist’s net and bottle to catalog the thousand mysteries of the backyard. Objective experience, and the subjective registering of that experience, and the transformed re-voicing of craftily chosen, artfully deployed, mosaic bits of that experience is a process common to all art. We discern subtle connections (Eliot’s “objective correlative” perhaps) by walking this worn path with fresh eyes; connections assert themselves in our flesh and consciousness, connections hang from the flowering tree like butterflies.<\/p>\n
These connections, discerned, touched and exploited in creative expression, are never fully understood. They are not a blueprint, a thesis, or a theorem. But, they are closer to our living consciousness and our daring dreaming sleep, than any other sort of ordering that humans do. They participate in the gift of inspiration, and play in the new fields discovered there. One reason they remain so open is because of the interrelated nature of imagination and invitation.<\/p>\n
Imagination fluoresces at borders. Like auras or fronds, its edges are fuzzy. The inspiration that leads (or is followed to) a new invention or a new formulation of scientific principle is different from poetry only in degree. In many ways, Dante even followed poetic inspiration far down this path–but his material was religion, the divine, which is essentially poetic in its ability to seek expression (as distinct from science, which seeks manifestation and demonstration); making the invisible world visible is an endless search for correspondences. Poetry stays in the tidal pools of an ocean of possibilities; it opens the door. This is how it maintains a true connection with the human on-looker, with human desire, with the all-too-apparent limited nature of our existences. Even Dante was not his own guide; his great poem needed Virgil’s invitation so that we could experience Dante’s wonder and awe as God’s design was increasingly revealed canto by canto, Purgatorio to Paradiso.<\/p>\n
The more stretched we are, the more connected we feel; that is one secret. The stretch increases contact in both directions–through the door of the self, and out into wider experience. Whitman stretches with his lists and variation–his emphatic empathy declaring that “thou art that.” Tat tvam tasi. Emily Dickinson stretched by the wild length of her rocket flares–making one thread of image encompass the earth and on into the afterlife, yet still be pulled from her own worn, homely shawl; the robin was her auditor, the buttercup her confessor. My own, more formal (and more manic), declaration of this principle might be: “Oceans in acorns my strumming mermaids are.”<\/p>\n
Every break of a line is a border; every rhyme is a border; every deliberate ambiguity. And poetry, like the noble intestine, like the manifold folds of the brain, maximizes the numbers and unencumbered extent of those borders–so that the subjective feeling of crossing borders, of inspiration, is maximized. The monsters in the mist must be real; the saints must be accessible to our human appeals.<\/p>\n
Gregg Glory\r\nMay 20, 2014\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
A DISCARDED LYRE<\/h2>\n
\r\nBelow a T'ang moon hanging,\r\nOn double dragon smoke\r\nI take fleet flight to Wales\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
To the tut-tutters among my myriad readers, I say–yes, there’s a bit too much strutting, too many bones, too many graves yawning gravely in the poems here. Luminous moons number in the millions, and ghosts gather at the dinner table in a feast more featly attended than Banquo’s banquet. But, so what? There are whole necropoleis of vampire literature illuminated from where Stoker’s lightning struck. I much prefer the “rage for order” and the orderly rage of accreting the viable language of our day–rather than continuing to execute in blind rote the wilding attacks after “the new” that distorted so much of the early modernists’ efforts. As Browning puts it in the underrated Balaustion’s Adventure (which is itself an example of historical imagination, and the value of transmitting (via memorization) the words and virtue-values of earlier artists), where Sophokles is described as contemplating re-telling the story of Admetos and his wife Alcestis, which subject had been famously treated by Euripides in his play Alcestis,<\/p>\n
\r\nThey say, my poet failed to get the prize: \r\nSophokles got the prize,--great name!  They say, \r\nSophokles also means to make a piece. \r\nModel a new Admetos, a new wife : \r\nSuccess to him!  One thing has many sides. \r\nThe great name!  But no good supplants a good, \r\nNor beauty undoes beauty.\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
Here we see an instance of editing to improvement rather than dismembering to impairment. “No beauty undoes beauty.” Have humans changed in 20K years? Not much. The “farmshed’s [still] full of wisdom.” The latest diet fad has its adherents eating as all people did back in the paleolithic era. Perhaps I’ll have to eat my words, but at least my words carry the old nutritional value they had when we sang in caves, hopping in firelit gratitude around a broken bear’s skull.<\/p>\n
Gregg Glory\r\nMay 5, 2014\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nPOEMS\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
TO<\/h2>\n
You, my several, severed,\r\nGentle selves, limned with wishes--\r\nIn the dawnwash of daybreak delivered\r\nWhen 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
IN BEGINNING WIND<\/h2>\n
In beginning wind\r\nWhen the skimmed sea flats emerge into light\r\nAnd caw-telling gulls descend from their windings\r\nTo strut on day's sands in awkward delight\r\n\r\nOut of the blind tides,\r\nAccept the sea gift forwarding on offering foams--\r\nSee the lean sun's gild winning wide\r\nOver night's severing assertions.\r\n\r\nOut of rowing waters\r\nWhere prayer begins and praying ends\r\nGreet with singing praise the braided mermaid daughters\r\nFanning landward on green fins.\r\n\r\nIn awe's dawning\r\nLove where silver standing waves uprise in halo\r\nAnd clouds ponder cherubic from abodes above\r\nAt this day's sandy birthing.\r\n\r\nBeat on unrelenting \r\nOh morning come glorying from chaos and mayhem\r\nBeat on beyond the dusk wind's sheeted lamenting\r\nSail me windward and onward amen.\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
BAREFOOT AMONG IMMENSITIES<\/h2>\n
Flowers in their shackles are born to die;\r\nGreen and blind they writhe.\r\nMan strides blithe, \r\nHis day increases,\r\nBarefoot among immensities.\r\nHunchbacked in my bag of dreams,\r\nInterred in the dirty mushroom dark,\r\nA whole man crouched in a wolfing skin,\r\nI come tumbling upright from nightmare,\r\nWild from flower-red wombs and Ozarks\r\nOf dreams that never end.\r\n\r\nAnimals like men are made to dream,\r\nAnd run in dreaming day. \r\nNeedled to day-\r\nLight I awake\r\nAroused from sleep's sensual rut;\r\nI grow alive from grave to groomed\r\nIn the mirror's terrible square:\r\nA wreath of hailstones about my neck;\r\nA smile snakes ear to ear;\r\nMy eyes bone-dry asterisks are\r\nIn the bright of the morning star.\r\n\r\n\"Life, life rife with hours and dangers,\"\r\nIs the cry that aches \r\nIn my throat;\r\nAm I a flower, a blind sun writhing,\r\nOr dreaming animal unconscious as teeth?\r\nI reach for immensities and powers\r\nI wore in my dreams like a coat.\r\nI arise to daybreak's damnation\r\nAnd I weep at the breaking light--\r\nA fallen star among rank straw,\r\nBarefoot in my animal manger.\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
THE RUCK OF SEX<\/h2>\n
In the flood-blooded ruck of sex\r\nWhen opened veins\r\nCry out the cock-cursed witches' hex\r\nAnd hazel pains\r\nOf the smiling vagina's sprawl beginning to wax\r\nBlood-flooding open\r\n\r\nWhen we crawling two cross and cry out\r\nElectric, alive\r\nIn the bed's church, heterodox and devout,\r\nPraying as we lie\r\nWhile the sucked pale moon scuttles out\r\nCrabwise in skies\r\n\r\nWhen we growl God-glad in warped bed's cage,\r\nDevourers \r\nDevout in dark tiger pounce and lovers' bright rage--\r\nWhat shocks shakes shoves\r\nBetween we blood two on the semen-draped stage\r\nThat is not love?\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
MY PAPER BOAT<\/h2>\n
\r\nMy paper boat the page\r\nWithout paddle without wind\r\nMoves through worlds strange as faces:\r\nI winch up my anchor of solitude\r\nAnd sail into oceans of others.\r\n\r\nBarefoot among the stars\r\nI dance with the constellations,\r\nFace to face with their blankness,\r\nAt home among the spaces\r\nAnd anonymities of time.\r\n\r\nSince the beginning of when\r\nOn past tomorrow's tomorrow\r\nWhen suns are all dying of sorrow,\r\nOut of kilter with places,\r\nNo face do I know for my own.\r\n\r\nMy kite a scribbled sheet\r\nWith a glued cross for a spine,\r\nA diamond to find the wind's direction\r\nAnd be blown on out of time,\r\nI feel the tug of your heat.\r\n\r\nStrange have been my travels, dear, \r\nThrough countries of the sky, \r\nThrough seas of galloping strangers,\r\nThrough time's riddling lie.\r\nStrange have been my travels, dear. \r\n\r\nBut time at last is wise, and I \r\nReturn to counties dear and near,\r\nReturn to anchor where my page began:\r\nTo ponds and lilies of your eyes,\r\nAt home in the home of your hand.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
TO SLEEP PERHAPS<\/h2>\n
\r\nDog-tired at day's-end I creep \r\nWhipped, blind between dead sheets\r\nAnd bark a prayer for sleep. \r\n\r\nSunset drops its scald of fires,\r\nAnd prowling hours howl me down to drag\r\nMy fellowing pillow to sleep's empire. \r\n\r\nWrung eyes shut, and day is severed. \r\nThe wagging moon wanes and begins to weep: \r\nIt shall be night and sleep forever. \r\n\r\nDreams in their millions they shall be said.\r\nAll that blossomed plain as daisies \r\nIn daylong light shall be nightlong hid. \r\n\r\nDreams high as hay-ricks they shall be heaped, \r\nAnd dreams hatch snakes from the pillow's egg \r\nThat hissing and rising leap.\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\nArisen on passion's hidden hooks to sleep's\r\nWither of insistences.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
WHEN DEATH TRUMPETS<\/h2>\n
\r\nWhen death trumpets from the lily's horn\r\nAnd the timid ribbons grief's fingers knot\r\nAre bound bone-white on breast and brow,\r\nWhat praise will rise from the little church\r\nWhere dead fleets land a boxy prow\r\nUnder skies flashed black with finches?\r\n\r\nThe crowd at the altar splits like gun smoke\r\nGoing each their own way from death;\r\nGrey trailings who pennant the morning breeze,\r\nThrown back to life like cod half-choked.\r\nLife swerves, renews its fatal failings,\r\nBut what praise can resurrect our ease?\r\n\r\nStill, I'll speak in my pain's distraction.\r\nWhat I bury here in the grave's waves\r\nSails off unseeing to houseless seas,\r\nAnd my dry, wry mouth seeks satisfaction\r\nIn whistling praise of her days\r\nUnblackened by finches and graves:\r\n\r\n\"Love was her meat, and love her bone.\r\nHer animal self moved in love's groove,\r\nWith love she kept company though soul-alone.\r\nSuch praise as I have I give to her who gave--\r\nAll her days destroyed and nights undone.\r\nLove's house she built where now I grieve.\" \r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
ABOVE THE GRAVE’S GRACES<\/h2>\n
\r\nHooped high above the crumbled grave's graces \r\nIn my snowy crowsnest post, I see her crawl \r\nSmall below, spot her telltale witching walk\r\nUntying the whorish knot in my boysome thighs--\r\nCrimped bright by wishes to mix with the minxes\r\nAnd all their suitable goods that engorge my eyes\r\nHanging out on their wires of want and haven't.\r\n\r\nThere stray the ladies subtle as sphinxes,\r\nWild as cats, mild as ministers.\r\nWhatever it was in their minds to be\r\nThey became, promethean as the sprawling sea,\r\nPowerful as flowers, enticing as chives,\r\nThe ladies into whose pirouetting lives I'd dive\r\nAswim in swung loveliness of their milky knees.\r\n\r\nOh good were the nights we walked and went\r\nIn summer fun under a halfway moon\r\nOur jolly wild way through red azaleas;\r\nThe bowing peaches plucked themeselves\r\nAnd rolled for the eating along our rice-white palms.\r\nMy heart like a plum plumped for her eyes;\r\nWe knew it was better to be merry than wise.\r\n\r\nI I\r\nIn the undressing dark we were goddess and god\r\nAnd the sword dance we did was on all fours.\r\nEncephalitic clouds jigged to the moon's old score,\r\nFiddler and fumbler among our human halves.\r\nI was stiffer than whiskey in the moon-blind night,\r\nMy luminous eyes glued to her minxy moving,\r\nMy wooed blood hissing to my doomed undoing.\r\n\r\nAnd there in a glamour of her giving-way\r\nMy heart fell dumb-a-tumble down heaven's stairs \r\nAll the way to love, to love, to love.\r\nLove's high knobbed hill reared where we paired,\r\nLove's blue sky leered bold washes of wishes;\r\nLove's landscape escarpments I could no more escape\r\nThan wine its musk crushed from the grape.\r\n\r\nEvery tale of the town told love's trials\r\nAnd birds blended voices with her's awhile\r\nFor never again came coo, cuckoo, or caw,\r\nNor fluffed sheep's leap, nor seesaw creak,\r\nBut there too cooed her harmonic law,\r\nHer swayed hips' riches in all daisies and faces,\r\nThe bass chord thumbed of all times and places.\r\n\r\nDown in the town she abates the grave's fever,\r\nBlows cool the forehead of the mortal weather,\r\nLaying wreathes of ease on the dying griefs--\r\nAnd with the outlined eyes of her pawing sex,\r\nHer Sheherezade fingerends cling to laughing cymbals,\r\nUntil all the terrible trouble, thump, and taunt of life\r\nRings tingling tamed to one thrum of love.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
WHEN I AM BONES<\/h2>\n
When I am bones I'll have no fleas\r\nMy marrow gone I'll whistle free,\r\nWhen eyes have melted I'll see no wreathes\r\nNor hear in earholes the sad trombones\r\nGathered at my spaded acre.\r\n\r\nWhen buried hunchbacked and sacred,\r\nWhen grave weeds hiss at foot and wrist\r\nAnd no psalms calm my pinching chest,\r\nPennyeyed blind I'll seek the skull sail\r\nOf Charon's fatal craft on the Styx.\r\n\r\nAnd when one day I'm bones no more\r\nWhen no whistle lifts and no root knuckles\r\nAnd I am less than I was before\r\nConception sailed me to mothering shores,\r\nStill will my small flea words jump and struggle.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
GRIEF, BRIEF TAKER<\/h2>\n
Grief, brief taker, unfather me now.\r\nSadness, unmother me.\r\nGraveward I've faced the advancing waves\r\nOf advancing seas.\r\nToo long the tick's arc, the second's digital flip\r\nHas lighted me theeward\r\nGrief, unwarded from your casual blows,\r\nThe stealing weather\r\nThat washes fair faces to bone.\r\nSadness, old mother,\r\nDrop the salt bottle that put tears in my eyes\r\nAll my undying days;\r\nDrop the long needles that engender my sighs.\r\nSadness, unmother me.\r\nGrief, brief taker, unfather me now.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
THE TEMPERS<\/h2>\n
Pummeled I groan from boy to bier,\r\nOn my head the hammer of fifty years;\r\nWhite sparks that from my being flare\r\nHiss to show the blacksmith that I care.\r\nShaped to suffer what weights are heaved,\r\nWhat heats the pestered forge unsheaths;\r\nI came to love what met my flame,\r\nTempered by the love they claimed.\r\n\r\nNow I cool old;  I wait for starless night\r\nWhere my still fire may seem a little bright.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
BLACKBERRYING<\/h2>\n
Beside an old hooped blackberry's spiked bush\r\nBuzzing with berries quick-thick as bees,\r\nI heard strange sighs, felt bully births bleed\r\nWith patient breath in that dew-white hush.\r\nI'd gone out gloved and booted at calm dawn\r\nTo pick among thickets what black wealth\r\nFanged fingers could find for my crooked mouth--\r\nAs apt for last singing as a dying swan.\r\nWhen my cheap bucket began to waggle and fail\r\nToppling with riches, and oppressive noon\r\nSwooned too full of summer's sultry buzz,\r\nI laid heavy in the heathery feathery grass \r\nAnd watched stretched-out full clouds sail by. \r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
THE NIGHT VEILS<\/h2>\n
Night, weave me a veil and cover me soft away\r\nFrom hard eyes' pry-spies;  seamstress, weave me now\r\nFar from stars' prisms a place of hiding night;\r\nFrom narrow arrow tongues, from angry pins\r\nOf pierced fierce saying, veil me soft away.\r\nAlthough I should love to shine oiled as the sun\r\nAnd gamesome come among flocks of crowing cocks\r\nAnd though my throat shouts like a bird to be heard \r\nAnd my enameled feathers preen, bitter light\r\nIlluminates my accusers' sear and scorn.\r\nI am peeled and revealed, weak in my puling bones:\r\nA hooked, cadaverous worm pinned in pain.\r\nTo be known, to be heard, shreds the subtle veils;\r\nStands bold-faced upon the past to catcall now,\r\nFleshes in brave skin all pins all arrows fletched with light,\r\nCauterizes all wounds, yet without enduring cure.\r\nShall I stand gaudy-prowed, upright and pure? \r\n\r\nNight, drop your dark threads;  weave me a soft, safe veil.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
RUN THROUGH WOODS<\/h2>\n
\r\nRun through woods where woods run wild\r\nWhere waters of life limn the still moon pool\r\nAnd birds of every marvelous feather\r\nCry Alive, alive at last, alive forever<\/em>\r\nIn a believing fever abruptly cooled\r\nBy a blowdown blessing wind.\r\n\r\nRun through woods though running must end\r\nAnd the shadow-domed forest dissolve to light,\r\nYour bird-quest pecked to dickering questions,\r\nCrying Why oh why time's devastation<\/em>\r\nIn a shutting autumn that must close in night\r\nIn the saddened manner all things end.\r\n\r\nRun till the moon comes runs you down\r\nThough lightning stream as mad as milk\r\nAnd thunder shiver where wonder had struck\r\nAll the child-long days of your winning luck\r\nWhen the old moon-shroud shone pearl-sewn silk--\r\nCry with the birds in the deep wood hidden:\r\n\r\nI fletch my wayward soul toward heaven.<\/em>\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
WHAT CAME MY WAY<\/h2>\n
\r\nWhat came my way, windily dying,\r\nA pleasant face swayed over giving knees\r\nObedient hands adamant to please\r\nA mouth singing arias in crimson ohs\r\nEyes that shined crying robin's-egg blue,\r\nI laved with love without trying.\r\n\r\nWhat came my way, dying of stardust,\r\nA squinting face mad for abstractions\r\nBent intent to beakers of boiling equations\r\nHurried hands exact as smacking rulers\r\nLips that kissed over grimacing molars,\r\nI loved with true love as a lover must.\r\n\r\nWhat came my way, dying of windfall,\r\nThe veins of her face as heavy as rope,\r\nPained, drained of all but a cadaver's hope\r\nPiecemeal to assemble the true resurrection \r\nTo wake to eternity in a diamond mansion,\r\nI gave rivers of prayers and love's waterfall.\r\n\r\nWhat came my way once so windily\r\nI loved once, and once loved sinfully;\r\nWhat came my way once so dustily\r\nI loved once, and once loved lustfully;\r\nWhat came my way once only, dying, dying--\r\nI loved, and love still.  I love without trying.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
ONCE<\/h2>\n
Once in springing winter's yearning\r\nSledding my shed days down the glistening hill\r\nFrom white heights of the sun's turning\r\nTo where trickle minutes glint and spill,\r\n\r\nAll I had begun to breathe and rawly be\r\nIn the rayed amaze of my logturning race\r\nMerciless vanished into responsible seas;\r\nMelted to salt was my hour's grace.\r\n\r\nTwice in the mature assurance of doing\r\nWhen I paid my bills duly and nightly wildly wooed\r\nMillion-pleated shimmering skirts of my choosing\r\nAs though my noontime had no doom,\r\n\r\nAll I had managed to gather with scythes and give\r\nIn the muscled playdays of my manhood's prime\r\nSighed from their silos in grain-golden waves;\r\nMy laughing lovers swept on into time.\r\n\r\nThrice when at the pleated weeping bedside\r\nHovering love went striding from the room\r\nHarped into narrow light at the grave's thin side,\r\nI heard the night-note hid in my hammering noon--\r\n\r\nAnd all my sledding came down on my back\r\nAnd snows of rosaries I continually said\r\nKept not a flake, not an ash, of those tears from my track;\r\nI vanished beneath seas and the seas' dead sands.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
THE COZY OWL<\/h2>\n
\r\nThe cozy owl hoos, the tit-mouse peeps\r\nForever in woods they forever keep.\r\nThey're in heaven just where they are,\r\nThe night as still and soft as stars.\r\n\r\nThe trees are lightless, deep as death,\r\nThe sky as pearl as winter's breath.\r\nThe field for the mouse is summer's feathers,\r\nThe air for the owl is windless heather.\r\n\r\nMouse in the barn ferrets out the oat,\r\nOwl from the rafter ferrets the tit-mouse out.\r\nSilent as seances, the owl falls-to,\r\nImmense the joy of his floating so.\r\n\r\nThey're in heaven just where they are,\r\nClaws and teeth as sharp as stars.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
TIME WAS ROUND AND WINDING DOWN<\/h2>\n
\r\nO time was round and winding down and running away to graves\r\nWhen new new year's eve reared from the fleet defeat\r\nOf December done, no night rememberers of Christ come\r\nThrough the long tunnel of the new year's breaking track.\r\n\r\nDowny towers of January snow shag both bush and branch\r\nIn glitter stillness the minutes wait until all minutes stop.\r\nFebruary finds none merry and March comes round\r\nA wet, whipped hound, an everything month with a lion's mouth.\r\nSteep cries the creeping clock, punishing, punishing,\r\nAnd December's mercies vanish.\r\n\r\nO time was round and winding down and running away to graves\r\nWhen Spring came singing thorough tulips swinging, \r\nIn the dew-raw dawn of the baby year.  April's dripping \r\nLips lick the last icy eve, and winter eve drains to day,\r\nTill May comes baying tame in the tender green of trees,\r\nWalkways pink with cherrytree drifts.\r\n\r\nO June and her rumors!  every seed's ripe grew true\r\nLoaded hours unfolded red, brimful full as honeydews.\r\nJuly saw life's celebrants, undimmed, rear bright as stars\r\nAnd life sang easy in a million backyards.\r\nOld August sweated swarthy with his layabout breath,\r\nAnd no one moved, hoved home in simmer and sloth.\r\n\r\nO time was round and winding down and running away to graves\r\nAs sweet September saw sad dogs barking mad at school bus windows.\r\nDooms of October boomed through the trees\r\nAnd autumn fell broken as the many-voiced sea,\r\nWashing summer rinds to the feathering waves.\r\n\r\nNow November chimes white again, ringing its icicle dimes,\r\nSticks stark as daggers, brown before thrown snow begins \r\nAnd December stumbles to the resurrecting stage, the saving season\r\nWhere sailor hope climbs winter's cross-spar to spy\r\nOlive-leaved Spring somewhen far-off in the scenting wind.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
THE TENDRIL WIND<\/h2>\n
\r\nThe tendril wind\r\nBegins, far away in thin\r\nCornstalks that I had walked\r\nOh eons ago if a day,\r\nPelting the path with my man's sway,\r\nCounting the trounces of foot and foot,\r\nWiping my face with playful soot\r\nAs though I were the storm \r\nTo come.\r\n \r\nBigger than death and ditches,\r\nRipping through my stitches,\r\nFerocious as scorches,\r\nInfinite as scythes,\r\nSweeter than salmon skies,\r\nSolomon-wise my dancing eyes--\r\nAnd not some laughing worm,\r\nI twist thin\r\nIn the tendril wind.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
IF WIND WERE ICE<\/h2>\n
\r\nIf wind were ice, November-locked\r\nIn transparent cubes of square air,\r\nInvisible but real as winter's despair,\r\nIf shear hills were told \u2018no taller' by the crack\r\nOf the whittling wind knifing\r\nDiamond summer down to rhinestones,\r\nWould man in his troubles hunch huddled,\r\nAlone before the ruddy fingers of his fire?\r\nWould he hear the crossed, cracked sticks \r\nOf winter rip in air's transparent box?\r\n\r\nIf wind were ice when November knocks,\r\nYawning trees would creak and settle down to sleep,\r\nRestless a final time in the weather's windy knots\r\nBefore ash and elm turn their backs for good\r\nOn icicle wind that can crack them dead\r\nAnd go to sleep together as a naked wood.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
THE WIND PERSISTS<\/h2>\n
\r\nThe wind persists--\r\nIts kiss a hiss,\r\nKnocks on boxes,\r\nBackwards bleating,\r\nThe trees unseating,\r\nThe swing untwisting.\r\nThe slapped gate yapping,\r\nIts lock unlocked,\r\nGapes and shuts,\r\nClacks slats to bits.\r\n\r\nThis chimney hisses,\r\nThe winds persists.<\/em>\r\n\r\nPushed puddles dimple,\r\nMarred mud wrinkles;\r\nSingle shingles whip,\r\nWanton windchimes clap.\r\nClouds grim and grey\r\nUnbolt the baying day--\r\nTorn fingertip twigs tangle,\r\nScratch pathless patches,\r\nFlick flattened dirts, flung\r\nSigns unhung,\r\n\r\nThe leaves insisting\r\nThe winds persist.<\/em>\r\n\r\nWild wind feathers\r\nHer hair behind her.\r\nThe terrible weathers\r\nShiver swing tethers,\r\nFlap seats to branches;\r\nRipe rain rings down,\r\nUnburies the ground,\r\nSounds bells in gutters,\r\n\r\nSlippery mutters\r\nThe wind persists.<\/em>\r\n\r\nA house unhinged\r\nChases the wind--\r\nA sting, a scream,\r\nA body blown,\r\nThe unknown sown.\r\n\r\nThe mind a mist....\r\nThe wind persists.<\/em>\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
THE BOOK OF MOONLIGHT<\/h2>\n
Love doesn't come rowdy and crowding\r\nInto our lives, but glides in silver stealth,\r\nWrites like ice skates its argent lines\r\nOn hearts that had been frozen else.\r\n\r\nLove brims its inches full of moonlight\r\nSoft into the cups of lovers' hearts,\r\nLeaves its misty trailings like a sigh\r\nOver the dawn pond's beginning light.\r\n\r\nLove is not the drum of nature's duty,\r\nWhich mates and makes a beauty--\r\nWhere wily weasels squirm and twist\r\nMad as affection's fist.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
TWO LOVELY LOVES<\/h2>\n
Two lovely loves roost in May's mulberry tree\r\nMimed alive from the conspiring slime\r\nThat lulled and told the dinosaurs to sleep;\r\n\r\nTwo helicopter tufts of orchids, flowers\r\nSublimely arise on the dividing branch of day\r\n--Whereunto I aim myself\r\n\r\nA bone arrow arriving late to two beauties.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
LIGHT’S TIDINGS<\/h2>\n
\r\nLight-crafted clouds remind me of seas,\r\nSeaweed seasons winter rakes from me,\r\nMe (once we) conniving waterlessly,\r\n\r\nWordlessly in the lonely going-on of white\r\nWhittled December, ice-hemmed January nights,\r\nNights jammed deep in my heart's lace ice.\r\n\r\nIcy clouds drown my voice in this noiseless waste.\r\nWas it your voice the sealess winter void replaced?\r\nI pace in silence, all my soul a seaweed sprawl.\r\n\r\nLight-crafted clouds remind me of seasons\r\nWe'd once walked two, by those roaring seaside\r\nTides all summer, one long uttering waterslide--\r\nTied in love, you by my side, and I by your side tied.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
MY SWEET SOOT<\/h2>\n
\r\nBurn souls black, my sweet soot, kept\r\nWept bright,\r\nMy dark imagination locked in keyless chest--\r\nWhat Whitman called his Fancy.\r\n\r\nMy sour flower, till clear a little\r\nEarth's lintel,\r\nHades' entryway and heaven's foyer,\r\nClear this away and that away--\r\n\r\nMy sprung song, tattle at the gate\r\nLate tales\r\nTurned and tuned until they tell all,\r\nAnd, revealing all, are all.\r\n\r\nMy fletched foot, fly sprained\r\nGain height,\r\nTake the kept chest with you upward--\r\nSoar blazing, my eyes my galaxies.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
IN ORDINARY GLORY<\/h2>\n
\r\nThe old dog died under a collapsing wheel.\r\nThe innocent turns of his breath\r\nRevolved no further then.\r\nThis was a dog's death.\r\n\r\nThe old dog young had been a child's companion,\r\nChampion in his chasing turns\r\nThat hounded the summer weather.\r\nNow he must be buried or burned.\r\n\r\nNever among muddy puppy days and yips\r\nWhen we rolled green as grass\r\nDid I imagine his final going,\r\nThe silence in the house.\r\n\r\nThese hands that threw the unfetched stick\r\nSomehow in air still turning \r\nAre empty now he no longer leaps\r\nIn ordinary glory.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
HOUND AND BOY<\/h2>\n
\r\nCrouched in the cotton-batting grass\r\nCozy as roses in a love-pinched cheek\r\nAnd babbling baptism of a summer's day,\r\n\r\nI say my ways my world my forgotten selves\r\nWhen young as a pup and pipping proud\r\nI played with tufted grasses and the days went round.\r\n\r\nI found myself and my pointing hound\r\nReady for pheasant in the long splay meadow.\r\nAlert at a minute's click we stalked\r\n\r\nAnd ran down the rising side of the great sloped hill.\r\nWe traced our racing in the tall ribbon grass\r\nFollowing with our falling the pheasant's fear,\r\n\r\nIts loping trot, half wing half claw, the bird\r\nFlew to shadow where the pebble stream whirred,\r\nFlushed in a flash onto bent bush and wood.\r\n\r\nThe hound stood troubled in the chittering stream;\r\nThe twice-sniffed tracks slipped in the water's sheen\r\nLeft taut nose taut gun hung uselessly.\r\n\r\nNo mortal union of man and beast, my hound and me\r\nAll eyes all ears for the willing chase, all those marble days\r\nOf my flyaway youth when killing knew no death.\r\n\r\nNo minutehand arrow in those flung days\r\nFollowed far beneath the blue-clad eastern clouds,\r\nThe spattering charms of the swift-passed rains.\r\n\r\nNo hour collected us before long nights called cool,\r\nAll happiness said in the old hound's cry\r\nThat sang us sermons and psalms to our summer bed.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
THE BEAR IN THE CIRCUS<\/h2>\n
\r\nThe bear in the circus\r\nA rollicking shambles\r\nDances in cages for afternoon crowds\r\nBetween bright lights and bullwhips\r\nWith a rolling drunken gait\r\nAmong cheers grown fantastically loud.\r\n\r\nMuzzled and mated and tamed\r\nHe whirls balls on the end of his nose\r\nBetween peanutshells and sawdust \r\nWhipcrack and organ-grind\r\nFor crackerjacks and fist-given meats\r\nUntil crowds rise out of their seats.\r\n\r\nThe bear in the circus\r\nA tutued buffoon\r\nDancing among spotlights and blackness\r\nOn a turnedover tub \r\nTwirls for hotdogs and popcorn,\r\nBurst laughter and plummeting hands\r\n\r\nUntil the ringmaster bows goodbye\r\nAnd night unbundles \r\nDown the swinging tent eaves\r\nThe spider-dropping dark of shutoff light\r\nWith a sound as round as seasurf\r\nRough and lovely;\r\n\r\nAnd the bear shuffles off in his furs\r\nReturning untamed to black forests\r\nWhite pines and wine skies\r\nWild stars pricked trim as pinspots\r\nPast cage stale straw and old water\r\nAnd shambles on into dream.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
THE BADGER IN WINTER<\/h2>\n
The badger in winter\r\nIs walking his dreamscape\r\nIn coffindark torpor\r\nIn yellow fallow forb\r\nHis fierce face tucked in his tail\r\nHis tail laid soft as milkweed seed.\r\n\r\nThe badger in winter\r\nIn the cove cave of his burrow home\r\nLaid warm against snows on the sandy plains,\r\nAgainst the shark-finned wind\r\nIn downcast loam,\r\nWalks his dream summer faraway gone.\r\n\r\nDeep in the seed of his needing\r\nHalfway warmed from torpor\r\nHe remembers the flattened grey grasses\r\nTall in their summer disguises\r\nIn fields were he snuffled and wagged\r\nHis striped head like a hungry pennant.\r\n\r\nA badger backed in a corner\r\nNearsighted and clawing for air\r\nRears like a miniature bear\r\nRagged teeth intense to attack\r\nHis mind alone as the winter\r\nHe sleeps through on his back.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
THE TAUNT THAT TUGGED<\/h2>\n
\r\nThe taunt that tugged the president\r\nPulled havoc down, that tagged him weak\r\nPinched flinches from his sensitive eyes.\r\nTall from the podium he kept speaking.\r\nNo silence broke the whispering bones\r\nBuried hushed beneath the token words;  \r\nMinisters and senators kept their quarrels home;\r\nItching dissent slept like a covered bird.\r\n\r\nTall from the podium he kept speaking.\r\n\r\nWhat was told was not what there was to tell.\r\nNo drone roamed, no attack tank rolled.\r\nVanished as ashes were Crimea's liberties,\r\nSmall crosses sucked beneath the black sea's hatch.\r\nTorn corners of his treaties rubbled to rounded,\r\nShredded edited on the contested ground;\r\nThe old ordered world's illusions, ruined, fell\r\nDead as kites, as needles from the imagined sky.\r\n\r\nTall from the podium he kept speaking.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
THE ZOOKEEPER’S WIFE<\/h2>\n
He comes home smelling of animal,\r\nHis shirt all stiff with musk.\r\nHow do the does endure it?\r\nThe rank of his reek is incredible!\r\nI sniff at his neck in the dusk.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
THE PIG<\/h2>\n
The pig in his trough, of course,\r\nIs live, vibrant, vivid, virile;\r\nThe critic in his pigsty's piss, unless\r\nHe praises you, his hero.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
TWO BUTTERFLIES<\/h2>\n
Dance, dart in daring airs, \r\nPart for buttercups, prancing pair\r\nOver wheat's real fields of gold.\r\n\r\nGod's dancers, these shining\r\nPsyche's bees, emblems busily nothing\r\nDoing, really, fluttering flakes of gold.\r\n\r\nMomently only, they here sink\r\nOr there are, immortal moment's winks;\r\nGo, having given our eyes real gold.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
I IN MY DIFFICULT SELF CONFINED<\/h2>\n
I in my difficult self confined,\r\nA figurehead in any kind of weather,\r\nFeel the flesh fail, \r\nMy blunt body blown about\r\nIn moon's-blood shouldering the prow.\r\n\r\nI in the wind's stir untended,\r\nA feather unfathered in unkind weather,\r\nBlow, burn unblessed,\r\nDying of indecision;  crushed, cursed by all\r\nThe maybe plagues.\r\n\r\nI from my difficult self unbound,\r\nA thrifty theiver of the weather,\r\nShift the kissing sticks\r\nJove tossed crossing to the blundering waves;\r\nI emblazon my desire with a lightning look.\r\n\r\nI in my infinite self confirmed,  \r\nA watchman of rocks in whiskey weather,\r\nFeel Babylon's wormy stars\r\nStill drill real into my pinnacled pride \r\nFor all my woeful mouth's wanting eternity now.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
HASTE, MAKE HASTE<\/h2>\n
\r\nHaste, make haste and break this door down\r\nThat keeps taste and sight and sigh contained\r\nIn one animal man.\r\n\r\nSpeed, speed to crack the doomsday locks\r\nThat prison me in tongues while my jailor's key\r\nJangles in nightlong song.\r\n\r\nFast, fast unleash the keeping wires that press\r\nMy stained teeth with blame, that once\r\nLeaked a live language.\r\n \r\nQuick, quick, pickaxe this cadaver here\r\nWho holds my moldy manbones black by the throat\r\nAnd keeps heaven dead.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
THIS INDOMITABLE DAY<\/h2>\n
Extinct are all my cradle days,\r\nThe owl-rocking nights of mother-love\r\nWhen the moon looked in at the open bays\r\nFrom the forever-in-shadow grove.\r\n\r\nDead and clamped as brakes the rolling \r\nRaces between we three furious brothers\r\nFreestyling downhill until our voices\r\nDwindled on out of grace.\r\n\r\nAnd dumb beneath mournful ocean blues\r\nSquall the sung promises of lovers;\r\nDeep among reefs, like griefs they sink\r\nWhich no one shall recover.\r\n\r\nBut what of today, this indomitable day\r\nArrayed fragrant as the sun?\r\nWhat rocking, what racing, what graces may\r\nStay, more than what had come?\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
IN A BATTER’S CAGE OF KISSES<\/h2>\n
In a batter's cage of kisses, I pray:\r\n\"I delight in the little bigness of things-- \r\nThe male and female of the falling weather, \r\nThe thunder's caresses, the hurricane's feathers.\r\nAnd I delight in the little bigness of time-- \r\nMagnifying maggots to their true snake's size \r\nOr ogling saints small from their hail of stars,\"\r\nUntil my wayside prayer sparks, \r\nIgniting angst and thanks. \r\n\r\nDragged by the hair to gratitude \r\nIn morningtime's lucky ache of love, \r\nI take up my holy task to tell: \r\n\r\n\"The pentecostal whip of my missus' kisses, \r\nThe sweet pinch of being in a flea's swell tail, \r\nThe saccharine queen sex who thralls all \r\nThrough life's unforgiving gale,\"\r\nTill morning and meaning break in my molten soul \r\nGotten and golden and whole. \r\n  \r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
MAN IS STATUE<\/h2>\n
\r\nMan is statue to the act unfolding,\r\nAlone must watch new worlds unfurl.\r\nThe unstill sea against its shingle\r\nConfounds his gems and wreckage.\r\n\r\nTo do, to be, is Hamlet's question,\r\nUnstilly told to the breaking sea;\r\nLove is a verb who's germy gestation \r\nUnfurls worlds that break to be.\r\n\r\nThe act unfolding is a falcon's strike,\r\nThe beak dashed blank to being's white cry--\r\nAnd the moment alone, no more dreamed\r\nBut done, arcs arrow vowels to the sky.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
IN LEGENDARY DARK<\/h2>\n
In legendary dark\r\nAmong old stories roared\r\nAround the dying fire as the fire\r\nWas kith to the lithe\r\nFire of her eiderdown eyes.\r\n\r\nOh mother softly adored\r\nIn all your sainted ways\r\nOf maybe praying\r\nAnd flyover loving\r\nCalling us \"angel doves,\"\r\n\r\nGone you are with the droves\r\nOf wing-wrestling others\r\nFlown all the way at once\r\nFrom earth's darks\r\nTo heaven's angles.\r\n\r\nAnd there she plays in fields\r\nOf undying light\r\nMartyr and mother\r\nAs all of them are\r\nChased in the storm-soaring\r\n\r\nHaste, the speedy unwaiting\r\nForever is.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
SHALL<\/h2>\n
Shall my love's saying soul\r\nAssail the running sands?\r\nShall her timeless hand repeal\r\nLaws of the flying weather,\r\nClickering rains that drown my ears?\r\n\r\nMy love's tongue shall wring\r\nSugars from the hourglass;\r\nWhat clouds compose she shall mock:\r\nHer flung hand shall winnow\r\nWet ghosts of the clock.\r\n\r\nShould my love turn and say\r\nHer soul's weathers in my ear,\r\nI should unwind the cloudy leaks,\r\nRain sand hours out of hand;\r\nAnd one heart should flood all lands.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
THIS ISLAND MAN<\/h2>\n
This island man\r\nIn his lighthouse watches\r\nAnd lets the disturbed ear hear\r\nStrangers rowing over\r\nThe silentest crest\r\nOf a sea at peace with itself--\r\nStrangers in lifeboats gaily pursuing\r\nWhat I cannot pursue myself.\r\n\r\nO stranger rowing over\r\nClasp you an arrow or glass?\r\n\r\nNever in all my handholding days\r\nWhen the trees shadowed my friends,\r\nDid I know myself the island I wore\r\nSkirted with simmering flesh\r\nDense and deep as sand;\r\nStars as silent as ministers\r\nWatched my days unclasp.\r\n\r\nO stranger rowing over\r\nClasp you an arrow or glass?\r\n\r\nNow the stars like spectators\r\nCrowd my lulling shore,\r\nWhile I, alone in my clothes,\r\nLet days, birds and hours pass\r\nQuiet as a radar's sweep.\r\nShall I go to the boats,\r\nUnloading my griefs, or keep\r\nEye and ear in my lighthouse locked?\r\n\r\nO stranger rowing over\r\nClasp you an arrow or glass?\r\n\t\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
LANDED BY LOVE<\/h2>\n
I who would love hot am ribboned cold\r\nBy flying knives of your sighing;\r\nI who would live all my blonde, baby days am old\r\nSolomon in his windings,\r\nTrussed for dead and my meat heart sold\r\nTo buy my bindings.\r\n\r\nAnd this alone is love, and love alone is this\r\nIn our modern charnelhouse;\r\nAs winding worms, plunged crucified to fish,\r\nRise resurrected in fishes' bowels--\r\nIn love alone persists our one presentiment of bliss\r\nWindy as a rose.\r\n\r\nKicked crawling by paradox who would kiss the truth,\r\nI fly to you sighing;\r\nBitten to blood stitches by beauty's tooth,\r\nI kiss you where you're lying.\r\nAnd O I'd trade rose and heart and all for your charnal mouth,\r\nBut O I am dying.\r\n\r\nAnd this alone is love, and love alone is this\r\nWhich leaves us bound or binding;\r\nThe timid touch of love, that once coughed soft as whispers, \r\nWails its unwinding--\r\nI swallow again the reeling worm that love hooks with\r\nAnd fly to you sighing. \r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
ONE MATED AND ANGELIC EVE<\/h2>\n
One mated and angelic eve\r\nWith the book flared across your knees,\r\nEyes guided eyes and, nose to nose,\r\nAmbushed lips began to brush and be.\r\n\r\nStiff ministers of a cultish creed\r\nWe repeated the stolen words,\r\nPuked up tongue and black and naked need\r\nUntil our needing heard.\r\n\r\nI knew any bell's praise from your lifted lips\r\nWould sound my soul awake;\r\nI knew each bit of bitch, like a searing nail,\r\nWould seal my damaged fate.\r\n\r\nTogether with stars and eyes and book half-open,\r\nWe paid with pain for what we left unspoken--\r\nWe traded hands and nimbly led\r\nEach other back to bed.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
SEWN TOGETHER<\/h2>\n
Sewn together in a pouch of purrs\r\nHand on breast and mouth on thigh\r\nWe cannot make our moaning words\r\nOr hiss a thesaurus into our kisses' sighs.\r\n\r\nEach stroke of sex that turns us double\r\nOr kinks our Xed zones to a core\r\nOf double yolks where trapped tongues bubble\r\nAbout the regions our mouths rub sore,\r\n\r\nUndoes encyclopedias of saying,\r\nErases summations to addition's first tick\r\nAnd cancels accounts we could be laying\r\nWith the hollow of a kiss' lick.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
DOUBLECROSSED<\/h2>\n
Doublecrossed 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\nAnd all the cold wonder\r\nOf 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\n(Unless such nothing is)--\r\nWe hold seed and snow in eye and hand;\r\nIn bone and feather breed;  our flight\r\nTells all and nothing less\r\n\r\nThan Christ-crossed oblivion.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
THE WOUND THAT SPRINGS IN THE BRAIN<\/h2>\n
The wound that springs in the brain like a spring\r\nGabbles and bathes the skull's tough turf\r\nWith its billion babylon babblings: griefs--\r\nThe scummed flood within unending.\r\n\r\nHow to tap to touch to cure the bone wound\r\nThat grows horned and hard by its being sown\r\nA wizard hazard of once-love seared to burns,\r\nA heart unstrung to shreds from its beginning good--\r\n\r\nTo console to care to bear the stone bravely\r\nThat grinds pink steeples to damnation's dust,\r\nTo save the raving brain from its mournful spurt,\r\nTo salve with grace the holy core till such touching saves?\r\n\r\nIn the bedtime deadtime of the day's darling going,\r\nI see the white nurse rise like nightfall\r\nOver the hill's swift wave over houses over all\r\nOver each of us with her coverlet of stars undoing\r\n\r\nEvery unshrived grief of the mind's undoing.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
A CREATURE OF WHATEVER TROUBLE<\/h2>\n
A creature of whatever trouble\r\nIs cartilage and mischief--\r\nTrimmed in skin and the smile's lie\r\nThat all shall be kin 'til kinship dies.\r\n\r\nA creature of whichever wish\r\nIs eyelashes and ifs,\r\nEntrancing Time in evening's dish\r\nWith coddling dreams and such.\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\r\n<\/pre>\n
NOW THE BRAIN IS CLAY<\/h2>\n
Now that the burning brain is clay\r\nAnd the body's sodden veins are glue,\r\nElbow and bone have gone soaked to sod,\r\nAnd I lie sandlocked, spine and foot,\r\nUnstirred by the insistent stars.\r\n\r\nLove has nothing to wake the dead\r\nThough the dead are waiting to wake.\r\nI'm stiff as mittens lost in a snowstorm,\r\nNo burning for heart or for head,\r\nThough hearts at my wake are aching.\r\n\r\nDay's gone down on the chilling chapel\r\nAnd stone shadows pool east of forever\r\nWhere we grave men wrestle the gods;\r\nEternity flees,  all triumph dispelled \r\nTo the white gold of a maggot's egg.\r\n \r\nNight and death have put daylight out of favor.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
SAMARITAN’S PURSE<\/h2>\n
Once in seething time, I came into my curse:\r\nA friend unfriendly wore his face reversed.\r\nAnd all my friends, the small fry fishes, \r\nSieved themselves from the chaos bay.\r\n\r\nAnd the lone moon sang its fluted bone;\r\nAnd night's tooth conned the meat of day;\r\nAnd safe in my shallow's hollows, I\r\nWorked out corrupted wonder's why.\r\n\r\nLong in my wondering den then,\r\nCrying among rainbow shoals of corals\r\n(Each the quick color of a friend),\r\nI banded in briars my heart with hurts\r\n'Til cursed and closed in mental hearse\r\nI heard the helpmeet of my wound's verse.\r\n\r\nHer samaritan's purse snapped ripe,\r\nAnd rosy were all her monies' colors:\r\nThose folds red-gold and green as apples.\r\nWith her tender hand salving soft and softer,\r\nBinding the wound where wonder once was\r\nHealing with hushed touch scars' stars, she\r\n\r\nPaid my way out from hurt's solitude to awe.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
BIRTHDAY POEM<\/h2>\n
The soul's weary weather--all heavenslight after \r\nThe plumed owls' hoo, after starry cries stoppered above \r\nThe black trees' stirless shadow\r\nRise spendthrift from clear silences of night, \r\nOr come roaring down light-crafted clouds\r\nTo drown \r\nMy nickering wicked ways and proud.\r\n\r\nHooded and hooved, my mazy footsteps arrow-trod,\r\nI walk awake yawning dawn's cadmium floods\r\nAnd break today's milky veils--\r\nI tear all my spider's swagged bag of guilts\r\nDragged from nightmare silts and dreaming dread\r\nTo scrawl \r\nThis crippled, ink-black shred.\r\n\r\nI've spent my whole of love on a half ragtag child's \r\nGreen and runaway, grave-going hand I held\r\nThrough the roaring tread \r\nOf the wild weather.  Blown down breakneck winter's steps\r\nIn dead trumpet air, my forgotten weathers \r\nCome round together\r\nAnd flood my flashing morning-mourning eyes.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
PLANGENT STAR<\/h2>\n
Plangent star and argent ache,\r\nIdeal I reach toward and cannot take,\r\nPerfection's perfection without defect,\r\nUnblemished apple eden-made,\r\nDean and master of my scribbled days:\r\nShakespeare bearded, brightly rayed--\r\n\r\nStar apart from earth's infections,\r\nStationed steady above life's stone jetty\r\nWhere my words lie washed, assailed\r\nBy stale time--to dirty foam burst,\r\nBroken tidal pools my hearse.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
SLIP, SLIP FROM KISSING<\/h2>\n
Slip, slip from kissing, thou,\r\nPart from parting, too,\r\nAccept that all that is but seems,\r\nAccept my image accepting you\r\nIs more than mirror, less than dream.\r\nAttachments are the Bhuddist's sins;\r\nSins avowed invent the lens\r\nThrough which the sin is sin--\r\nMore than mirror, less than dream,\r\nAccept that all that is but seems.\r\nAccept my leaving is but staying,\r\nAnd my love a kind of praying.\r\n\r\nI stood upon a departing prow\r\nAnd knew the moving wave\r\nStayed in whirlpools of a now;\r\nIt was myself I could not save\r\nDeparting on the departing prow.\r\nI would keep here, kissing you,\r\nUpon the storm-molested shore\r\nCounting sand grains, counting stars\r\nAs long as numbers added more,\r\nAs long as you're the you you are,\r\nMore than mirror, less than dream,\r\nAccepting all that is but seems.\r\nSlip, slip from kissing, thou,\r\nPart from parting, too. \r\nLOVE'S TOO DIFFICULT \r\nLove's too difficult to love,\r\nThat hard unguarding of hearts;\r\nI look at you, and see what's above--\r\nOf those heavens I have no part.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
TEARS<\/h2>\n
\r\nTears melt unmanaged from her cornered eyes.\r\nTears untamed infect her dusty cheeks.\r\nTears fall like hair and cover her faint feet.\r\nTears too tired to hide tell something here has died.\r\nTears intense as terror, intent as saints,\r\nTell a tale of living too long unwell.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
IN KNEELING SANDS<\/h2>\n
In kneeling sands my whittled savior\r\nGives first his whole love and then his whole life:\r\nClicker of minutes in a clockless land\r\nOf blood the red of eyes the whites\r\nOf day the turning touch of night\r\nOf fever the calming palming hand\r\nOf marriage the untempted wife\r\nOf giving the savoir faire of favor.\r\n\r\nThis best of whoever I was and am\r\nThis holy most carved from my sheepish least\r\nThis model who troubles my conscience the most\r\nWho sees most within where I wander most lost\r\nWho knows when I don't what I most might be\r\nWho throws my bevy of devils into the sea--\r\nOf love the whole shadow and holy ghost\r\nPinnacle of paragons, the one man undamned,\r\n\r\nTo you I kneeled once among seagulls and doves;\r\nTo you I kneel still, invulnerably loved.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
BY MILKY WAY<\/h2>\n
\r\n\t\tWe wrote it\r\nFeelingly in the fallow following water\r\nWe scratched it quick in quicklime\r\nTumbled words running in the sun only, all out of order,\r\n\t\tWords of life and rhyme.\r\n\r\n\t\tBy the water\r\nLemony and brown and warm and lovely\r\nUnder the still, tall trees of noon\r\nWe raced and rambled our hours our days unlonely\r\n\t\tStraying late and soon.\r\n\r\n\t\tLittle, little we knew\r\nHow silkily stalking our walks our woods was death\r\nSly and lithe in regular sneakers\r\nWhile blind in the minutes of our timeless eyes the path's\r\n\t\tPattern paced water that had no equal.\r\n\r\n\t\tWe connected all\r\nThe faraway whites of the uncaught conning stars\r\nWe drew and called them by name\r\nTold ourselves the tumbled stories, the high adventures,\r\n\t\tTales of whence they came.\r\n\r\n\t\tBy Milky Way's\r\nWhite beard, by the sky's clotted unnavigable river\r\nBeneath raven-tressed trees of midnight\r\nWe followed the constellations' endless chapters forever\r\n\t\tCompanions of their light.\r\n\t\t\r\n\t\tLittle, little we knew\r\nAnd less in our wold's heavenly wandering cared\r\nThat Orion drew his sword\r\nThat death through the pensive leaves yet wandered near\r\n\t\tAnd listened to our words.\r\n\r\n\t\tWe rowed on\r\nDazzled in the wayward spray of the clapping waters\r\nMute swans upon the surge--\r\nWe felt, not knew, the wavery rilling river's cool disorder\r\n\t\tWhere its swelling branches merged.\r\n\r\n\t\tWe let\r\nThe whelming carry us, the whelming water carry us\r\nEndlessly onward as verse\r\nWhile tree and bush and burning day went blurring in the rush\r\n\t\tOf the passing universe.\r\n\r\n\t\tDeath swanned\r\nBeside, rowing in the rapid waters' surging, hungry\r\nAnd beautiful as tears;\r\nThe bucking canoe at ease eventually beneath us, steady\r\n\t\tAs the sun's one stare.\r\n\r\n\t\tWe penned\r\nThe happenstance pattern of our pacing days\r\nWith quicklime wits of reason\r\nLost in the lovely the lemon the brown, the water's lonely mazes\r\n\t\tWhile summer fell out of season.\r\n\r\n\t\tBeside the vocal\r\nRiver raving, beside the crimped dusk's cold darkening\r\nBeneath lean trees stripped of leaves\r\nWe heard the softening drip of winter voices harken\r\n\t\tTo frost's disordered breaths.\r\n\r\n\t\tOur days erased\r\nWith willful ease erased like slipped mistaken words\r\nErased, while sounded the river-water\r\nBehind us, and before us on the flood flowed the world\r\n\t\tWith death pattering after.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
ALL SUMMER IN A DAY<\/h2>\n
\r\n     \"One boy you can get some work out of,\r\n     Two boys more.\r\n     Three boys, none.\"\r\n          ~~Dad's rule of thumb\r\n<\/em>\r\nWorking through sunsweat and neckburn,\r\nWe unrolled a fence against rabbits,\r\nAgainst animal life conniving and hungry,\r\nAgainst raccoons and clever black hands.\r\n\r\nAgainst the vindictive eating and shitting of birds,\r\nWe worked with our father all summer.\r\nWe were impaling our vegetable kingdom\r\nOn the graves of the grass we had buried.\r\n\r\nWith chipped rototiller and rust-red tools\r\nWe bit at what had remained unbroken,\r\nChurned arrowhead up, tore taproot to loam--\r\nDad's spat tobacco as brown as his coffee.\r\n\r\nWith raw shoulders turned to the wheel,\r\nWith shovels like diamonds scraping \r\nLayer after layer of untrammeled dirt,\r\nWe called forth the spirit of seed\r\n\r\nWith spray hose and angry commandment.\r\nWith sky our indifferent accomplice,\r\n\r\nAnd time our old friend and enslaver,\r\nOur trowels dibbled like stitchwork\r\n\r\nTearing the mother's side just enough.\r\nOur bleeding was part of the bargain,\r\nKnee and knuckle and elbow,\r\nBright splinters left burning like auras.\r\n\r\nLate, late in the day, our sun-dragged\r\nBoots kicked off into brambles,\r\nSunhats tossed down by pond-blackness,\r\nThe mud medicinal, efficient,\r\n\r\nCovered us to knees, and our gossip\r\nWas smiles creased behind wheat grass.\r\nFrogs boomed cool and obtrusive,\r\nEchoes of wood and of shadow\r\n\r\nWhere peep toads woke to their work\r\nAs night fell on our dreams and dominion.\r\nOn pillows as wide as those fields\r\nOur dreams saw tomorrow's tomorrow,\r\n\r\nSaw sunflower and carrot and rhubarb \r\nBurst plaintively furiously perfect\r\nBehind chicken-wire straight as a razor,\r\nThe field churning all colors in sunlight,\r\n\r\nThe dirt lifting life in a triumph:\r\nThe bones of our enemies bleaching,\r\nSqualid tomatoes impossibly red,\r\nStaked pea-pods that rattled out victory.\r\n\r\nOur old buckets were full of new freshness,\r\nThe trembling of too-much brightness-- \r\nBurnt cheeks were hitting cool linens,\r\nOur faces delighted and keen.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
TREEFORTS<\/h2>\n
As brothers we rode the high treetops\r\nWhere fields fell away forever.\r\nThe pines were not weeping with time.\r\nThe clouds stood still for the runner.\r\nAs brothers, we rode the high treetops.\r\n\r\nWe swam where water was giving,\r\nWhere light was dappled with deepness.\r\nWet rocks all echoed our chorus,\r\nAnd the river ran on in its sleeping.\r\nWe swam where water was giving.\r\n\r\nWe sang till we called out the stars,\r\nTill trees of our nighttime were shining.\r\nWe perched in their arms proud as owls,\r\nForever among clouds and flying.\r\nWe sang till we called out the stars.\r\n\r\nKnock wood, we were loving and living,\r\nAnd life was just as it seemed--\r\nThe fields fell away forever, \r\nAnd night was an endless dream.\r\nKnock wood, we were loving and living.\r\n\r\nThrough light that was quick as kindling,\r\nThe river ran on with a shudder.\r\nAll our days passed away like a dream.\r\nWe climbed every night like a ladder,\r\nThrough light that was quick as kindling.\r\n\r\nAs brothers we rode the high treetops.\r\nWe swam where water was giving.\r\nWe sang till we called out the stars.\r\nKnock wood, we were loving and living,\r\nThough the light went quick as kindling.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
HALF ANIMAL AND MAN<\/h2>\n
\r\nHalf animal and man in my shambling frame\r\nI ache toward the open doorway;\r\nWounded and wronged in my make-believe flesh,\r\nBlazed and amazed by a million teardrop eyes,\r\nMy every ear alert to illumination\r\nIn the star-flying dark and flak daylight--\r\nI hunch against the wind of forever come.\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\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\r\n<\/pre>\n
WHOSE BONES I BREAK<\/h2>\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 own \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\r\n<\/pre>\n
WIZE ZERO<\/h2>\n
\r\nChained to a walking coffin full of talk\r\nStuffed glistening with wormy words\r\nBursting from socket and wagging jaw,\r\nMy living bliss ashed to bony calcium,\r\nI meditate the rickety syncopation of the clock,\r\nThe wise zero that sums a twitching life:\r\nTime's iron hands, flags, drag \r\nRound the flat globe face to mock\r\nA farcical carcass self who stiffly lisps\r\nDusty sayings of a nothing mouth--\r\nThe blundering tongue gone gagging blue,\r\nMy mouth of thistles thick as glue,\r\nMy speech a lesion spill, a drawl of scars,\r\nMy loves the licked stamps of faces.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
WHEN THREADS ARE CUT<\/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 die: 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\r\n<\/pre>\n
THE VOICE THAT PUTS MY WORLD TO WORSE<\/h2>\n
 \r\nThe voice that puts my world to worse\r\nSits alien in the ear.\r\nThe jugging hand that hoists my heart\r\nI exile to a hammered bier.\r\n\r\nThe eye that sees my face as sodden\r\nI pluck and damn its tears.\r\nThe ear that hears my each word a curse\r\nWhispers its own fear.\r\n\r\nWhen that eye, that hand, that crooked ear\r\nMisperceive my frame,\r\nI crack each red rib and fish within\r\nTo  kiss her soul again.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
ELEGY<\/h2>\n
The crayon crammed sun, dear,\r\nRoaring and soundless, fountains\r\nA crooked rivering stalk to the grave\r\nFor it is summer and never\r\nAmong the milkweed floods of grass\r\nWill everyday angels flame again\r\nDawn wise and luminous as thread\r\nOut of the martian mysterious dark,\r\nSo tall was the flying sunshine \r\nSpied in your crinkled eyes.\r\n\r\nThe milky sun hung up the sour day\r\nWith daylong hands played the harp grasses \r\nThat plucked our praise soaked ears\r\nThere on the floor of light\r\nFor it was summer and ever\r\nOur milk licked unmanageable bones\r\nPounded joy and adoring down\r\nThe auroraed roughs of our breaths\r\nTill silk dripping souls announced\r\nHeaven commences at our fingertips.\r\n\r\nOh it was dawn and noon, and night\r\nDropped his forgotten trunk of darks\r\nAmong the staggered stars as I came,\r\nThe sun's brother, halogened as haloes\r\nShining my wary wishes in the air\r\nFor it was summer come and never\r\nIn the pearly rivers of the grass,\r\nWill I silk my grabbing eyes again\r\nOn the welcome at once loving\r\nOf your eiderdown sighing skin.\r\n\r\nNow ambergris and matchless\r\nThe mirage trod moon emerges like a tear\r\nOver a mourning soul simple as sleep.\r\nAnd because summer is overthrown\r\nAnd night has leapt up like a cat\r\nUnder the harp tongued tree of cells\r\nMy vegetable hand now grows\r\nMannerly and large to grief:\r\nO Time has denied me nothing\r\nOf his licorice whips and nickels\r\nNor eboned one nightfall or fastness\r\nShut on your ghost wasted alien eyes.\r\n\r\nPulled by the spoken tide of the clock\r\nAt midnight moonless rest I writhe\r\nResplendent in my bent vest of ribs\r\nAnd hear both tomb and rumor tumbled dumb\r\nBy the mild handmaidens of your sighs\r\nFor it is summer gone and hollow\r\nAnd sorrow's gone down with the moon\r\nAnd though I tongue earth's dust floods\r\nFor all those romancing eyes gone under\r\nFate's timeline is still the grass on fire\r\nBurning where the wood was wild.\r\n\r\nAnd the crumpled sun, broken, bears\r\nFuneral tears in the brain\r\nThat wombwise and graveward crawl\r\nDown the fiery alcoholic face\r\nFor it was never summer or was it\r\nUnder my coal thumbed universal eyes;\r\nAnd only the bigsouled sourceless moon\r\nDrowned and void in the jailhouse dark\r\nRemains and grieves derailed sighs\r\nOver night locked trees tall as grasses.\r\n\r\nDo not grieve, brave, with whys\r\nOr hemorrhage one ear with a sigh;\r\nNo heavenhelp salves such ashes.  \r\nO Let instead the dear uncandled dead \r\nCry mercy up to my eyes.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
HER INCANDESCENT BODY<\/h2>\n
Her incandescent body \r\nTender under told time's one gigantic tick\r\nIncinerates hours and fables by swept, kept licks--\r\nMolten beneath the moon's white story.\r\n\r\nTake all my lorn light unshorn (to you only belonging)\r\nTwist flame and flower and winking spring\r\nInto the midnight ivy of your dark, swung hair\r\nAnd into the blended candle's long eye at dawning.\r\n\r\nTwist every strand of the wild, wild air\r\nInto the midnight ivy of your dark, swung hair\r\nUntil Love jumps out from spuming earth\r\nAnd mounts the lost, cross ways of my breath.\r\n\r\nAll-at-once lovely in your loved eye,\r\nAwkward and able, spry and awry,\r\nMy burning body like a shouted cross I move\r\nAll-at-once lovely in your loved eye.\r\n\r\nNow out of sparring breath\r\nI pause to praise and honour all her ways:\r\nWhirled brave alive again from her inward world,\r\nI sing all loves sprung from her beginning word;\r\n\r\nAnd deep in the sacristy of her candle-hot breath\r\nI lay down my moons and worlds for the honor of her days. \r\nOne by one the unspoiled stars spill from her side.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
WRUNG FROM THE WALLEYED WAIT<\/h2>\n
Wrung 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
I WHO STOOD ON SAND<\/h2>\n
I 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\nThe wry wink is dead that fetched me manifest\r\nFrom darks surrounding shore and star;\r\nNow landward ho the shapeless foams\r\nRemake my manless nothingness.\r\n\r\nNever again will I crawl into a star\r\nAnd 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\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
IN THE DARK<\/h2>\n
I held my child's hand down to the grave\r\nAnd traced his comet's roaring going with my breath,\r\nSorrowing sorrow until the sea's moon gave\r\nIts thousand salt prayers up in sprays\r\nScattering the brine-shrived gulls on the shingle\r\nTo spread stars aloft, and each a different way,\r\nAs the waves fell down from their mingle\r\nAnd found a thousand moons in their crossways splash\r\n\r\nAnd told my broken, washed heart hush.\r\n\r\nO I was a dying moon in the ocean's rove\r\nAnd with her million wants my wants still move,\r\nTo her breaking crescent I still squeak my eye\r\nThat dissolves in her fabulous crooks;\r\nLocked frost-cursed in my own godawful life\r\nI freeze grieving past midnight's strife, \r\nUntil night on a moonstruck gravestone breaks\r\nAnd harrowing dawn gives my soul a saint's look\r\n\r\nAnd shines on all my wonderful lies like love.\r\n\r\nOut of the four-ways Jordan of my heart\r\nOut of the splendid cincture of my pricking ribs\r\nOut of the mercury furnace in my brain\r\nOut of my own dear hollow bailiwick rolling\r\nI walk stalking my bones' marrow-trail\r\nScout brawling galaxies from my blind bloods\r\nRide my star-fashioning veins to black skies--\r\nAnd, stepping the pulsing pathways of the stars,\r\n\r\nI take my place among the meteors in the dark.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
ROUND LANDSCAPES OF STRANGERS<\/h2>\n
Pinned to minutes and the clock gone mad,\r\nRound and round its stranger's face,\r\nRound the hours that ache for grace,\r\nRound landscapes of strangers,\r\nI go ghosted and lost in the flying dark.\r\n\r\nIf found unlost at last I'd nail the heart\r\nHome with the hammer of the soul,\r\nLet hands build chapels as they soothe.\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\nWanderers wide round stranger and sky\r\nIn this strangeness that has no end.\r\n\r\nNow I move in my 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
NOT UNTIL THE SEPTEMBER IS PAST<\/h2>\n
Not 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 birthing 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
When 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\r\n<\/pre>\n
SPEECH IS MISCHIEVOUS<\/h2>\n
Speech is mischievous, a golden compass drawn \r\nAcross unmeaning skies;\r\nSpeech exiles stars to constellations, pins\r\nFabled limbs to nets of stories;\r\nNo matter how Andromeda shakes her chains\r\nShe's penned inside the teller's page.\r\n\r\nSpeech is mischievous, a tattling bottle tossed\r\nAcross the sawing sea;\r\nIt hectors and pleads: Let me not be lost!\r\nRead me, though I tremble like the leaves!<\/em>\r\nSpeech each human voice confines in glass,\r\nEach human heart to myth dismisses.\r\n\r\nSpeech is mischievous, quoth the rowing poet\r\nAt sea on the blanking page;\r\nChained through lip, by starstruck anklet clipped,\r\nHe brays: Truth's my hammered swage!\r\nGospel bottle, netted sea and star\r\nStay where I say they say they are.<\/em>\r\n\r\n\r\n===Previous Edit===\r\nSpeech is mischievous, a golden compass \r\nDrawn across unmeaning skies;\r\nSpeech exiles stars to constellations, pins\r\nFabled limbs to net and story;\r\nNo matter how The Bear may circle and rage\r\nHe's penned inside the teller's cage.\r\n\r\nSpeech is mischievous, a tattling bottle tossed\r\nLost on a sawing sea;\r\nIt hectors untold nails into each holy cross\r\nThat decks the bleeding tree;\r\nSpeech each human voice confines in glass,\r\nEach human heart to myth dismisses.\r\n\r\nSpeech is mischievous, quoth the rowing poet\r\nAt sea on the blanking page;\r\nChained through lip, by starstruck anklet clipped,\r\nHe brays: Truth's my hammered swage!\r\nGospel bottle, tree and netted star\r\nStay where I say they say they are.\r\n\r\n===Previous Version  ===\r\nSpeech is mischievous, a gold compass drawn\r\nAcross unmeaning skies;\r\nIt exiles the stars to quadrants, pinning them\r\nNetted into story;\r\nNo matter how The Bear may circle and rage\r\nHe's penned inside that telling cage.\r\n\r\nSpeech is mischievous, a tattling bottle tossed\r\nLost on a sawing sea;\r\nIt hectors nails untold into the holy cross\r\nTo deck the bleeding tree;\r\nSpeech the human voice confines in glass,\r\nThe human heart to myth dismisses.\r\n\r\nSpeech is mischievous, says the knowing poet\r\nAt sea on the blanking page;\r\nChained through lip, by silver anklet clipped,\r\nTruth's his hammered swage;\r\nGospel bottle, tree and netted star\r\nStay where we say they say they are.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
WHATEVER SPARRING LIGHT MARRS<\/h2>\n
Whatever sparring light marrs and death amends\r\n             Pluck from the warring \r\n             Hollows of my hand;\r\nWhatever of cooing good life plunders to extend\r\nAnd we wrestle like drunken divers to breakage\r\nPull from the sounding mellows of my mouth\r\nUntil death that takes all gives my stone tongue back.\r\n\r\nWhatever of love creeps from the lying wind\r\n             Blows my coal, \r\n         Lashed eyes to tears;\r\nWhatever care cracks from the cormorant docks\r\nOr discovering sorrow divots from the feathering shore\r\nAnd makes life spasm in the teeth of time\r\nSights down the red waters of my blood.\r\n\r\nComfort and mother in my manhood hums\r\n             And I break\r\n      In the tide's sprawls awake;\r\nMy black veins wreathed in the sea's last knock\r\nI strut my shivers to their grave-finding breath\r\nUntil, moon-man and bone-man, I rub my salt face off\r\nAnd lie down dying with my brother coral in the dark.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
PAUPERS IN THE BLOOD<\/h2>\n
Paupers in the blood purse of the heart\r\nLay their elaborate \r\nShillings on the table;  cardsharks pitched \r\nIn the night-dealt tavern\r\nSpade their aces on the circus-lit flat.\r\n\r\nTime has sold my windy winnings to a torch\r\nAnd I listen as they burn;\r\nDesperation's lip mimes dumb prayers to the hands;\r\nTucked and crossed\r\nAgainst age's gales, I kneel in the fiery kirk.\r\n\r\nOh I'd lay any dollar in this sailor's booth\r\nTo get back half my wage\r\n(Pained from all the paying days of my death that toss\r\nAnnihilation's light),\r\nFor one heavenhued hour of my Gamorraed youth.\r\n\r\nNow gambled out to the last most \r\nMoan of my soul\r\nAnd stretched to my shroud on the checkered cloth,\r\nI fury my winnings\r\nTo the Bermuda wind, and all my cruel wishes scatter.\r\n\r\nDaybreak's word clatters drainward with my bloods\r\nDown to cluttered noon;\r\nAnd there my heart's argosy, almost golden in the hand-\r\nHold of my ribs\r\nRepeats and repeats and the seas rise and break.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
SHELTER THE SIGHS<\/h2>\n
Into earth's rude shelter slide my sighs \r\nWho goes, dead at last, a cold unknown, \r\nFar from the killing dale, the blistering hills, \r\nFeet first to paradise, and Eden a muddy hole. \r\nInto earth's rude shelter slide my sighs. \r\n\r\nWho can love who has not love's tongue, \r\nThe syllabic kiss that sucked me cipher? \r\nIn my green glut of utterance once\r\nI sighed the mustard canker from the rose.\r\nWhat loving hand will now caress my crass? \r\n\r\nLife was miracle articulation once \r\nSweeping the little dale and choiring hills; \r\nLife in the rose sang to its thorns:\r\nThere are no skeletons in Eden.<\/em>\r\nNow life and death confound, all drowned,\r\n\r\nAnd sighs shall shelter all. \r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
STARS IN THE CELL<\/h2>\n
Deep in the wandering ways of the blood\r\nDrill my veins to their dust mouths;\r\nStars in the cell say \"Love\" and burn\r\nThe kin-kept eons out of hand;\r\nTalk of the body may bless the tongue's lie\r\nAnd all the interminable blisses;\r\nFunneled by birth to a burning chalice\r\nI drink my red liquors though I am dust;\r\nCrabbing life outwits death but once\r\nThen scrabbles back to its sea-sucked hole.\r\nThirty stretched years touch me to the poles.\r\n\r\n      A Mardi Gras grin spins at my lips\r\n      And the moon grins crazily down.\r\n\r\nMuch I wonder at the bleeding need for love\r\nThe mission of kisses, assignation's hours,\r\nWhen we meet and pair off to die;\r\nBoth tongue and groin I wear like a star\r\nAnd walk star-struck to the place of ashes.\r\nMuch I wonder at the wrinkled sun,\r\nAmoeba or man, no blind difference given,\r\nHis acid shine drives all wases to once;\r\nMuch I wonder, at my death-ripe age,\r\nOf the worded brine spit from the wasted lip,\r\nThe low tongue's lie that sums us up:\r\nThe fairy tale told down the bone.\r\n\r\nMuch I wonder at crossed hands' touched cup\r\nBowing the long faces together to kiss;\r\nWhen the heart-drum kicks in another's stomach\r\nMuch I wonder at the restless licks;\r\nAnd still I move both tongue and groin,\r\nRear star and eye out of one cracked joint.\r\nPrayering hands and downturned head,\r\nCircle-earth globed in a robing womb,\r\nFlood and world of farenheit waters,\r\nDive their deep ends in a watershed birth\r\nFlumed down the shallows of her thighs.\r\n\r\n      A Mardi Gras grin spins at my lips\r\n      And the moon grins crazily down.\r\n\r\nAnd then I wonder at my crawling luck\r\nThat spreadeagled hopped the flaming bush\r\nFingering luminous maggots in the meat;\r\nSpurred on by the spine's insistent dusts\r\nInto the whaled oceans of another\r\nThe burning bell tower went clanging mad\r\nUnder a star-cracked sky in my scarring eye\r\nAnd all the parishioners jumped ship to die;\r\nAnd, a drowning wick in its wax ruins,\r\nI told myself twice the lie of life\r\nAmong rafted congregations of my blood\r\nThat swam their red ways to death.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
A SPLENDID BOAT<\/h2>\n
We thundered through the hours' alleys,\r\nSailing your mother's wicked midsts\r\nWhere no one sees--\r\nChisel and balsam we built a ship,\r\n\r\nYour trim invitation to life's ocean.\r\nWe carved you from the future's clouds\r\nWith our bodies' motions;\r\nA mermaid prow from formless shrouds \r\n\r\nLanded in our harbor laps, uncurled\r\nThe ball of vivid whites you are,\r\nMy seafoam girl--\r\nTwin lightnings in your skyey eyes,\r\n\r\nA naked god astride your splendid boat.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
LET THE LIGHT BE BROKEN<\/h2>\n
Oh let the light be broken\r\nThat soaked and solemn\r\nOut of the sun's mouth spoken\r\nClimbed the virgin's hide\r\nAnd the grave of her face;\r\nLet life snap the traces,\r\nBring rut and germ alive\r\nRough to the making place.\r\n\r\nBe buried in the stolen stone\r\nEach word of sight\r\nThat from the tongue's priested\r\nMemory is severed\r\nHunkered in the seed of the cold;\r\nForget the drab, dim failures of life\r\nTo bring redeemed to time\r\nThe infant's climbing vine\r\nAnd churn the grape to wine.\r\n\r\nOh let the light be broken\r\nOver shackled genesis\r\nUntil the husks have spoken\r\nWord and weed and sizzling stem\r\nOut of the grave of her face\r\nAlive again, and the once burning\r\nTurn of the world\r\nStumbles back to ochre.\r\n\r\nLet man and woman and infant dread\r\nOut of harrowed heart\r\nLain long and solemn\r\nIn sleeping seeded love\r\nStep from the narrow incision\r\nWhere quilted corn is laid;\r\nSpeak life in leap years\r\nFrom the carved distresses\r\nScourged in the drop of a tear's face\r\nHanging and grieving\r\nAfter its home of fruit\r\nUnder bruited tree\r\nBruised and fishnet against the sky--\r\nScourge the yearning source,\r\nScotch the wanton innocence\r\nOf the virgin's crumbling pride\r\nAnd step into any light.\r\n\r\nSay the grief and say the life\r\nSolemnly as a leaf's petrified face\r\nGhosted on stones.\r\nAbide, though abiding cancer all,\r\nWait, though waiting will not help,\r\nFor the last hanged man\r\nTo dive alive at last.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
SO I MIGHT SUFFER<\/h2>\n
So I might suffer without fail the vengeance of leaves\r\nCrumbling, vein by vein, to the docks of autumn's dust\r\nAnd burn again in a rasping year\r\nMy fled blood\r\nBoth woke and broke\r\nFlood and voice over the sea-turning town.\r\nSo that the wail of the crickets might knock and enter\r\nEach sad shadow passage of the pulse\r\nI woke\r\nBurning in the shining rivers that skip out of sight.\r\n\r\nIn the helping hurt of the one-armed weather\r\nFlinging hailstones and adders\r\nDown the ocean-thieving tunnel of the sky\r\nAgainst this head\r\nI swore all summer dumb\r\nWhile the ministering crickets in the booming grass\r\nChanted phylums of my blood about to be said\r\nAnd I stood in the summer's drum\r\nSurrounded\r\nBy the roaring going of the year.\r\n\r\nIgnorant of thistlery we walked in our mystery\r\nArm in arm like the burning boughs\r\nFriends against death in the summer's long breath,\r\nAnd like the sun we sauntered\r\nDrunk and wandered\r\nThrough the closed book of the heart;\r\nAnd I was sky and sunlight in the chapters of the grass.\r\nAnd understanding\r\nI sang:\r\nOceans in acorns my strumming mermaids are.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
IN ZERO AIR<\/h2>\n
In zero air\r\nBy the jaguars caged in their griefs\r\nAnd landrovers digging up bones in the park,\r\nDirt salts the dime-hole of her going.\r\n\r\nBy liquid cats,\r\nEmptied of minutes and prayers in the waking zoo,\r\nBoth half animal and man in my shambling frame\r\nI pace to praise the honored hour of her death.\r\n\r\nHer grave grows hair\r\nAnd gravel marks the shadow where I walk,\r\nFreezing among moonbeams, while the icicles' stalks\r\nRise from eye to eye in the blizzard's blast.\r\n\r\nNow how unsound\r\nBy the gold-honoured straws of dawn unbound\r\nAnd looped from the walking category of sorrow\r\nBy a drake's water-shilled beak do I stand and cry?\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
HEED THE WEBBED HAND WALKING<\/h2>\n
Heed the webbed hand walking in the corner\r\nCoiling its oil of silks;\r\nAttend decay, the devil in the flower,\r\nThe spider in the milk;\r\n\r\nTell to the tolling look in the clock's face\r\nHow your love's forever;\r\nInform the acid winds of your rock of grace\r\nAs you together shiver;\r\n\r\nKnown to the moon are your proud, puffed cries,\r\nYour spindrift web of inks;\r\nCounted in Atlantic's cracks lie heroes' lives\r\nThat slick and sink.\r\n\r\nStride dying, my mayflies, along the dead flower's rim\r\nHeedless in your ruin;\r\nAnd skate the tickling ice that bursts your veins\r\nMy merry skeletons!\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
ONCE MANSERVANT AND NOW NO KING<\/h2>\n
Once manservant and now no king\r\nSince she the served and sweeping blast\r\nHas hurdled death's ribbed gates, slipped past\r\nThe soft portals opening and entered\r\nThe severed countries of the twanging grass.\r\n\r\nOnce queen in the skyey seconds of my breath\r\n(With no pale maids attending), and now\r\nA girl with a hollow where her breasts had been--\r\nI crawl into the hours of my grief, and lie\r\nIn the rose lacquer of her lying-down breath.\r\n\r\nOnce hooved god of the haunted barn\r\nAnd of my wicked pulse ice emperor,\r\nI drop the grey reins of my crossed-hearts loss,\r\nAnd drop my head unlead to the mealy moss\r\nTo bite again the grass of our last, hid kiss\r\n\r\nAnd breathe all ways at once your lost breath. \r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
IN THE BEGINNING CLOCK<\/h2>\n
In the beginning clock, love and wonder\r\nTrailed down each treasure of a tock\r\nAnd bastioned happiness laid everywhere easy as sand\r\nAlthough the ocean tore her heart out on a rock.\r\n\r\nBut when in our word's wound another rumbles,\r\nWhen stranger letters push the pen like a ouiji's divot,\r\nWhen in the blood's barometer another thumps,\r\nTapping largesse from our bottled small,\r\n\r\nThen shall we still love who loved us never?\r\nCarry Christs in our shirt like a pack of matches?\r\nThen shall we fathom affections in the deedless dark--\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\r\n<\/pre>\n
ANSWERED PRAYERS<\/h2>\n
In the flicker of wicks in an evening's shiver\r\nWhen the old ghost moon rides out full to rave\r\nI hear your weeping quiet,\r\n                            my dear, my dear,\r\nPraying before the tree'sface to be heavensaved.\r\n\r\nBy the river'slight nightly silvery slithering\r\nIn the three-quarter's moon I come riding forever\r\nTo sit at the feet of your star,\r\n                                my dear, my dear,\r\nPraying to be your quiet prayer's answer.\r\n\r\nSodden in the trickling flickering flow\r\nOf your halfmoon silent tears trailing graceward\r\nI breast and crest your prayers,\r\n                                my dear, my dear,\r\nAttendant to your prayered words in the wood.\r\n\r\nIntent to touch, to wipe away the tears, the stars\r\nIn the slender of the moon's blue embers\r\nI bring this silken cloth,\r\n                            my dear, my dear,\r\nKneeling where you kneel and remember.\r\n\r\nTogether in the new dark's togetherness\r\nWhere no moon intrudes on your quiet star\r\nWe press our answering bodies close,\r\n                                    my dear, my dear,\r\nLip to lip in our river of prayer. \r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
A SINGER IN THE WEATHER<\/h2>\n
A singer in the weather\r\nScented genesis and coffinsilk\r\nIn the world's windy veins,\r\nI mock the soberest cockerel\r\nDiving from the prism-spitting\r\nPinnacle of the world's mast\r\nUselessly singing,\r\nAnd rant like a wronged girl\r\nAll my sweetest notes\r\nOver ignorant houses\r\nSlumbered in death and morning light.\r\n\r\nOut of this closeted shout, my high echo \r\nBeats features of sinning man on tin.\r\nPressed to anguish in a dial's sigh,\r\nA victim of time heretically cried,\r\nA singer in any weather\r\nBludgeoned by suns\r\nMy pauper's bliss cries\r\nCrimped in a penny's fear.\r\nMy any tale of the world\r\nI cunningly sing\r\nCauls in my scorpion sting\r\nTwisting its smile on wry man's side--\r\n\r\nGraveturning in wishes\r\nAs a wish is a kiss\r\nMy manbones shriek\r\nIn blooded inks,\r\nAlive to day's crack, and all\r\nThe marrow-harrowing rue\r\nLight's brightness sings.\r\nAlone in my limber prayer,\r\nI climb the dawn's sides \r\nAnd trade tunes with the tide's tirades\r\nShining in singing red\r\nAs the blood sun comes.\r\nI climb this iffy steeple to sing\r\nOut of a rage welled and worsened\r\nAs any bird's ratcheted turn\r\nOver the thumbing sea at dawn\r\nCrawls after clouds\r\nIn inching desire, as each wingbeat clips\r\nIn measured cessations,\r\nSpiraling among the sky's spires\r\nWhile the weary sea below\r\nChews ships and bones to flour.\r\n\r\nOut of each brick\r\nThe cold dawn shakes awake\r\nAnd each root tooth of daisies\r\nCragged in the fingering spring\r\nFloods my pulse and fever,\r\nFeeds my singing mettle\r\nTo ramshackle gods agog\r\nWhile saints in whispers\r\nEach aghast their closed wings keep,\r\nPlastered to statuary--\r\nNever feeling, always fearing,\r\nThe boiling joy\r\nOf the devil's boyish kiss.\r\n\r\nSo I this saintly mort cry down\r\nAnd each nailed lip kiss\r\nQuagmired in hatred\r\nTried and hung\r\nOn pentecostal cross and hatch\r\nSinging in my steeple,\r\nBirthing the blood plant\r\nThat grows from my vowels,\r\nInsisting in stitches\r\nFor this world the word's wound.\r\nSo I, crumbling on windfall,\r\nOn sold bones and the tarot told\r\nWatch hatred disaster, man and god fall,\r\nAnd all loved things end.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
ALL ABOVE THE BELLING TOWN<\/h2>\n
All above the belling town\r\nDay-doubling dawn awoke:\r\nThe steeple soar and scabbing\r\nClouds (whose mimic thunder spoke\r\nSatin ashes in a gathered mouth,\r\nWhose bugle bray unstuck time).\r\n\r\nWatch as daylight takes the town:\r\nA stranger who marks himself and marks\r\nHis endless singing in a blackbird's book \r\nStutters past with a crossed, lamped look,\r\nBy weed-eating hours slipped \r\nAnd slipped.  The storied dark\r\nDwindles to dawn shadows.  \r\nSeagulls simple as stars find a sky \r\nTurned blue.  And the clouds, radiant\r\nAs spokes, mouth strange mercury to make\r\nThe packed sky\r\nCry with the birds' cries.\r\n\r\nAll above the belling town\r\nBy a thumb-sucked sea-pool,\r\nBy the marshing beach, the stranger stood--\r\nAnd stamped in anger to blankly join\r\nThe dance;  stranger to the clouds\r\nCome down, who escaped the told dark\r\nWhere nightmare stars gather gear,\r\nEscaped to tell, to tear \r\n\r\nFrom his blackbird's book\r\nWhite blind silence from the green hill's side.\r\n\r\nAnd the high lightning of his mind,\r\nPast flashed mumbles, past the drum of grief,\r\nRepeats in watered streets where rainbows quell\r\nTheir origin in asphalt, not gold.  Upward houses\r\nTower the vocal dark, tall towards\r\nAn obscure moon, made pale by syllables\r\nBandied beneath his brow, teller of the light,\r\nWho steps and sweats alone from cancelled night.\r\n\r\nIn a shoal of sound beneath etched waves\r\nIn the dawn-doubled now of the town appears\r\nThat impossible pinnacle miracle with a downswung strut:\r\nMan. \r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
THE SYRUP HOUSE<\/h2>\n
We made new syrup in the crisp of Christmas.\r\nThe long dark walk under sugary stars\r\nThrough black maple woods stippled with buckets\r\nHung on clotted faucets stabbed in every tree,\r\nTrudging noseward toward a warm sweet scent\r\nIn crunchy rubber boots and wetted mittens\r\nUntil the golden door under the tin shed roof\r\nOpened on suddenly summery snow, and we saw\r\nThe great long room--one simmering pan\r\nHot sweet and close as the world was cold:\r\n\r\nIcicles hanging off the wall were sugar, \r\nAnd the tipped tree sap was life and water.\r\nWe stood in the heat's mouth and shoved logs in\r\nFingertips red in the down-low glare,\r\nMoved loving paddles through the gold-brown skin,\r\nNostrils fringed with the blood of maples,\r\nThe blood of maples on eyelash and lip,\r\nThere in the secret sweet hot church of life;\r\nLife pinned and poured, life of miles around,\r\nSweet in bleeding the golden blood source\r\nThat untapped stayed dry, cracked, dark.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
WEEDS AND IVIES<\/h2>\n
Daylong 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\nSham-battering hands and scolding mouths\r\nAnd 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, alone and knotted,\r\nAs full of fears as a tit-mouse's shivers\r\nI kept the woods for 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 sun crept crabwise until it was moon,\r\nAnd I heard the sun's hours ride down to their doom.\r\n\r\nBut oh the woods were golden in their burning\t\t\r\nBeyond the drowned stones that cried aloud\r\nIn the midnight riverbed's spattering blacks;\r\nIn my heart-held woodhome and owlly hollows\r\nWith my pockets full of leaves and string and talisman rocks,\r\nMy vowelling dogs howled to adder and frog--\r\nWhile all about in the understood wood\r\nHouse and wood flamed in woe everlasting.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
WHEN HEARTBREAK, LEADEN, UNLIDS<\/h2>\n
When heartbreak, leaden, unlids\r\nThe paraffin coffin's wronging box,\r\nAnd out of the slowly sown soul, inwound rolled,\r\nTwined and twinned in winding sheets\r\nAnd the bloodblack body's shroud,\r\nThe heartbroken ghost like leaven flies--\r\n\r\nWhat figure stands by the grave's haranguing sands?\r\nHarassed and houseless, unshrouded,\r\nWhat mood-doomed ghost in mist-shifted night,\r\nWhat quenchless kiss quizzed from soul's naught knot\r\nA sighing life could never quite unlatch\r\nFlies riven and shriven from the haranguing sands?\r\n\r\nNow risen simple and unadorned\r\nIn the doorless moon (and dead and bettered\r\nBy its dying damn) it stands on crookshanks--\r\nThe bold lie told to shelled ear from shellacked lip\r\nSlips up the grave-plot's tripping ladder like a thief,\r\nMoaning unknowing what some once-living kiss implored.\r\n\r\nIt stands: in witness-winds, in sands, in silences.\r\nIt trumps all bones or guesses.\r\nIt lies down never in the manger's knot\r\n(Straw raw insistences of gods unbegot).\r\nIt floats unmoated 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 holder of what we living dare not possess,\r\nIllimitable amidst its humanness. \r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
UNOPENED POEM<\/h2>\n
Said the unopened poem in my patted 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
IN INTENDING SING<\/h2>\n
…let [the mariner] be called from his hammock to view his ship sailing through a midnight sea of milky whiteness–as if from encircling headlands shoals of combed white bears were swimming round him, then he feels a silent, superstitious dread.<\/p>\n
    \t~~Moby Dick, The Whiteness of the Whale\r\n\r\nIntending now to sing\r\nI hear how the mounting sky's \r\nWool-soft words and haranging sighs\r\nWith sotto voce insinuations sly\r\nSing above my blind inhaling skin\r\nWhitely trilling beyond my trying\r\nCrabbing God's fittest notes\r\nFor its impinging winds, remote\r\nFrom what breathings I may bring--\r\nSuch winds' gentlest trebles\r\nIntend a tempest's troubles\r\nProuder than my poor endeavors,\r\nClipping my attempting wings.\r\nI slouch in unmanned silence,\r\nA wounded mute lashed for penance,\r\nLeashed dumb by choking chance,\r\nAlone and palely listening\r\nTo blue heaven's gonging choir\r\nTumbling tones, hurrahing airs\r\nImpale me to a chair--\r\nHearing joy unceasing ringing\r\nSo suavely move those sounds\r\nCome clapping from the clouds\r\nAs though all silence drowned\r\nAs drowned is my own singing\r\nThat aches to lilt and lift uncaged\r\nFlying wide from page to page\r\nAs down the raging ages\r\nFrom cloud to cloud go singing\r\nJungle lyrebirds, whose range\r\nEncompasses the common and the strange,\r\nChainsaws and angels.\r\n\r\nTo dwindled silence clinging,\r\nChained to mum nothingness,\r\nVoid and vacuous,\r\nA singer singingless,\r\nI am a clarinet uncaressed\r\nWho should orison self-arising\r\nWith honied mysteries on my lips\r\nAnd at holy fountains sip\r\nWhere burning benedictions ripple\r\nUntil, sulfurous or inspiring,\r\nWith gabblings low or hosannahs rising, \r\nAll speech and song and sounds\r\nBreak at my beak, round\r\nWith assailing breath and proud\r\nWith every whichway singing\r\nIn a blare-bloom boom of being\r\nBig as old sun's simmering\r\nAt noontide midyear's shining--\r\nUntil I soar unsilent\r\nRadient beyond tension and intent\r\nMy crested phoenix song unpent\r\nAnd so burst my muted being\r\nBy dauntlessly daydreaming,\r\nBe fortissimo by seeming,\r\nBy aching and by teeming,\r\nAnd, in intending, sing.\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
DOWN BY SWANSEA<\/h2>\n
\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\na play<\/em>\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
SCENE
\n[describe waking town]<\/p>\n
MRS 1<\/strong>
\nI am one missus, and she’s another. We keep the high secrets of the town to ourselves.<\/p>\n
MRS 3<\/strong>
\nIn the summer it’s packed with tourists.<\/p>\n
MRS 4<\/strong>
\nIn the winter its cold as ashes.<\/p>\n
MRS 5<\/strong>
\nEmpty as a milkbottle.<\/p>\n
MRS 1<\/strong>
\nI like the winter sea.<\/p>\n
MRS 3<\/strong>
\nAll the cheap establishments jammed with commerce.<\/p>\n
MRS 1<\/strong>
\nSo little to do but keep our secrets from ourselves.<\/p>\n
MRS 3<\/strong>
\nThere’s Timmy.<\/p>\n
MRS 4<\/strong>
\nAnd Billy.<\/p>\n
MRS 5<\/strong>
\nMy Marjorie and Alex.<\/p>\n
MRS 3<\/strong>
\nAnd Doris and Alice my blessed twins.<\/p>\n
MRS 4<\/strong>
\nAll the boys and girls in their goings and comings tumble about the town today as everyday. All alive and alone in the holiday sun. All the boys and girls….<\/p>\n
MRS 1<\/strong>
\nAnd my Shawn. [pause]<\/p>\n
MRS 3<\/strong>
\nI never saw such a beautiful boy.<\/p>\n
MRS 5<\/strong>
\nAnd there he is in the front door now. [Light appears on an empty doorframe.]<\/p>\n
MRS 1<\/strong>
\nMind yourself; you’ll bake red as a roast, your nose fat as a radish and your armpits still pale.<\/p>\n
SHAWN<\/strong>
\nAw, Mom.<\/p>\n
MRS 1<\/strong>
\nFinn, who is in the stodgy process of owning half the sleepy seaside town— from the sky-stretching white of the sleepy church steeple to the rotted docks snoring in the deep blacks of the ocean water— keeps a canary by her bed by her window to sing her asleep and awake.<\/p>\n
MRS 4<\/strong>
\nPip, pipe! Oh, it runs like a zipper up and down my spine. Pip, pipe! By the grace of God, I can hear it in my own house plain as the telephone.<\/p>\n
MRS 5<\/strong>
\nPip, pipe! The mean spitting chatter that pings from the shrunken golf ball of its chest! I mean…. I’d sooner believe an oak exploding from a pea.<\/p>\n
MRS 1<\/strong>
\nMy little Shawn himself is attached to the wretched thing, for the sake of throwing rocks.<\/p>\n
MRS 3<\/strong>
\nHe dawdles to a stop under the sill.<\/p>\n
MRS 1<\/strong>
\nHe imagines the lilac skull in his hands. He examines the eyesocket and all the orbiting, rayed lines of its empty sight. He tries on the bone wings skinney as widow Maggie’s spinsterish fingers, and takes a quick, panicked flight around the room with the uncaged bird.<\/p>\n
MRS 4<\/strong>
\nThat wild boy.<\/p>\n
MRS 5<\/strong>
\nThat dear chimp.<\/p>\n
MRS 3<\/strong>
\nFlying a skeleton around my good sitting room!<\/p>\n
MRS 4<\/strong>
\n[correcting] Flapping the white hollow bones himself.<\/p>\n
MRS 3<\/strong>
\nThat wild boy.<\/p>\n
MRS 5<\/strong>
\nThat dear chimp.<\/p>\n
MRS 3<\/strong>
\n…Babystrollers ominous as whirlybirds on the dank planks of the warped boardwalk resound to the strong march of his eleven-year-old heart. In the silk ash rags of dawn, floating on the female sea, Benny the town bounceabout is jogging against the light for the recuperating sake of his heart and thighs. He pauses on the thundering boardwalk to salute Shawn in his Raider’s cap while last night’s date still lies topseyturvey in his bungalow bed.<\/p>\n
MRS 5<\/strong>
\nOver the dunes and down to the receiving sea progresses young Shawn, all cartilidge and sneakers, with his battlescarred knee— flips round the wide corpse of a dog examined on elbows all yesterday, curls across the scolding seashelf of small speckled rocks, talking in washes, leaps conspicuous spikes of dunegrasses, bristling in swishes on the white spine of the continent, and, removing carefully the blood dot of his red Raiders cap, tumbles sunlovingly into the blue mutable surf.<\/p>\n
MRS 1<\/strong>
\nThat’s how Shawn walked in the acres of his knowing. His eye was as tall as the clouds in the sky; and sweet and simple were his curses and wishes.<\/p>\n
SHAWN<\/strong>
\nLook at me. I’m a rum-runner smuggler that has come to this pirate’s cove with a tasty blade in my teeth.<\/p>\n
MRS 4<\/strong>
\nHe emerges from the surf.<\/p>\n
TIMMY<\/strong>
\nARRGblabbldiiigrrrrahhhh!!!!<\/p>\n
MRS 5<\/strong>
\nShawn arranges the whirls in a winking pond full of the ghostly bodies of jellyfish panting beneath the swirled surface flaming in glitters.<\/p>\n
SHAWN<\/strong>
\nGhost! It’s a ghost.<\/p>\n
TIMMY<\/strong>
\nThe creepy spirit of dead Mr Finches.<\/p>\n
MRS 4<\/strong>
\nThe scolding schoolmaster of the ill-educated town drawn to a study of stamps and empty seashells.<\/p>\n
MRS 3<\/strong>
\nPassed away with his snoot in his books. He bends like a weary reed, quiet as an indian ambush, and glares like the sun into the tidalpool full of stones and blotched coral. He paddles the water with his coin-enjoying palm ready to buy Tony Andagili’s icicle licks with the warm quarter his mom had outfitted him with among the hydrangeas at breakfast. Wet sands slither through his fingers and a sandy cloud opens under the smoked glass. And the pinkeyed jellyfish squishes past his angry hand and pumps into a little dark hole small as a pupil in skirted distress. Shawn is tired of playing with ghosts and turns tiredly away from the opaque pond.<\/p>\n
SHAWN<\/strong>
\nO I am a pirate that’ll slit your gizzard!<\/p>\n
MRS 4<\/strong>
\nHe shouts, running like an alleycat to where Timothy Turves is whistling through grassblades in the windy lee of the bluff.<\/p>\n
SHAWN<\/strong>
\nI am a pirate that’ll slit your gizzard!<\/p>\n
TIMMY<\/strong>
\nOh.<\/p>\n
SHAWN<\/strong>
\nPrepare for a doom of ferret’s teeth and shark’s gullets.<\/p>\n
TIMMY<\/strong>
\nI am prepared for my doom.<\/p>\n
SHAWN<\/strong>
\nMarch to the plank. [Timmy marches to the nearest rock]<\/p>\n
SHAWN<\/strong>
\nNo, that rock. That rock.<\/p>\n
MRS 3<\/strong>
\nTimothy scissors his yellow arms in the air, balletstepping to the flat rock that’s the plank in his duck jacket.<\/p>\n
MRS 5<\/strong>
\nHe believes in the eternal veracity of his demise.<\/p>\n
MRS 4<\/strong>
\nHis head is full of cowboys and heroes.<\/p>\n
MRS 3<\/strong>
\nSamurais and sixshooters and noble endings.<\/p>\n
MRS 5<\/strong>
\nHe stands prepared.<\/p>\n
MRS 4<\/strong>
\nHe totters on the rock.<\/p>\n
TIMMY<\/strong>
\nhis hands go out before him.<\/p>\n
MRS 5<\/strong>
\nHis heart full of death, he hops in the water.<\/p>\n
MRS 4<\/strong>
\nDead as a doornail.<\/p>\n
MRS 3<\/strong>
\nExtinguished as matches.<\/p>\n
MRS 1<\/strong>
\nBut like a seabird he gets up.<\/p>\n
TIMMY<\/strong>
\nARRBLBBLLRR!<\/p>\n
MRS 4<\/strong>
\nHe shakes his head like a fish. [pause, the boys pantomime burying treasure]<\/p>\n
MRS 3<\/strong>
\nBoys bury treasure.<\/p>\n
MRS 4<\/strong>
\nAnd dig it up in the dark.<\/p>\n
MRS 1<\/strong>
\nPatrick Kinney and me in the nude snow past the harvest hills and farmers asleep in their coats, milking the moon-bellies of splaylegged cows, spent a heated evening in the blank, snowwhite, snowblind night of my first, and most silent, marriage. God, in the toasty loaves of his arms I felt somehow loved and listened to at once. He chest roared and rolled and yearned like a furnace while his sparking eyes stared and smiled under muddy brows thick as cigars under the star-stabbed sugar-dome of the seasprayed night sky swirling above midges and winter and our soldered embrace hid in the quiet dark of the bed. On that syrupy evening, above green thistles and below the timed departures of the sobbing stars, making one by one their queued exits, was the sweet sodden lump of my Shawn conceived. Time stabbed and passed. Patrick Kinney knew the child was made that night, that that was the night of creation. Dandelions and frostbite, whispers and kittens, the years themselves came rolling in and out and I heard not a word from that travelling man. Shawn’s shape by that time had changed and he’d grown into a fine young thing.<\/p>\n
MRS 4<\/strong>
\nThey rose to race on bicycles humming down to the drumming boardwalk. They were caught, for a moment, with the wheels and spokes like spiders, in the amber sunset before I lost sight of them.<\/p>\n
MRS 3<\/strong>
\nThey leapt, my Timmy and your Shawn, about the rocks all afternoon being pirates and werewolves as the sun fell in blazing licks and they ate their jam sandwiches.<\/p>\n
MRS 1<\/strong>
\nThey bulled about the foxtails in the tarry marsh and practiced their howls for the moon.<\/p>\n
MRS 3<\/strong>
\nWhich one grew fur?<\/p>\n
MRS 4<\/strong>
\nWhich one got big teeth?<\/p>\n
MRS 2<\/strong>
\nDid their snouts stretch out long as foxes’?<\/p>\n
MRS 3<\/strong>
\nDid their child’s ears tuft?<\/p>\n
MRS 4<\/strong>
\nPads harden over their palms?<\/p>\n
MRS 2<\/strong>
\nDid their hearts shift in their ribs?<\/p>\n
MRS 4<\/strong>
\nDid their howling bring down the moon?<\/p>\n
MRS 5<\/strong>
\nYes yes yes. All the magic happened. The crabs creeped sideways from the sea; they cooed to the moon as sister and mother, low and fat in the rum-black sky of summer. Their swift claws knew the sin of blood, and sandpipers and infants dripped from their fangs. The moonlight on the snow frail as eggshells.<\/p>\n
MRS 2<\/strong>
\nOr ashes.<\/p>\n
MRS 3<\/strong>
\nAnd pale and yellow as eyes, she listened to the high wild cries of their hearts.<\/p>\n
MRS 5<\/strong>
\nBut soon enough they all tumbled exhausted to home and their warm human beds after supper.<\/p>\n
MRS 1<\/strong>
\nAnd there is Shawn’s burrow under the burying dark, under the burning sun, in the grave ground by the park where my people are.<\/p>\n
MRS 2<\/strong>
\nThe boys have come running over hills bunched as mittens, hunched against winds and wails and schoolmasters’ ghosts. And against the slap and sigh of the sea which buries us all they are hunched. In their shivvering boyskins bluecold under blankets they watch the clouds change shapes as they fall asleep.<\/p>\n
MRS 1<\/strong>
\nImagine my Shawn while the moon’s winking bone is still flying over marshes and midges, indulging our wishes, and the deep sea cradles up to the shore. Imagine my Shawn, boneweary eleven, closing his skyhigh eyes on the couches of heaven— after a day full of mysteries and spices and unassailable seas. Imagine my Shawn, in his britches and stitches, his brittle blood and rough laughs, climbing to sleep over pirate treasures in the feathered quilt we’d all sewn together.<\/p>\n
MRS 4<\/strong>
\nAll the world drowned in the sound of sleep.<\/p>\n
MRS 1<\/strong>
\nAnd there’s my Shawn sleeping.<\/p>\n
MRS 2<\/strong>
\nDogs and fishes skip through his skull.<\/p>\n
MRS 3<\/strong>
\nTrilled bug-thumpers fly east to west and spring to winter in his sloshing noggin.<\/p>\n
MRS 5<\/strong>
\nA rubbed thumblestilskin unknown, unnamed.<\/p>\n
MRS 2<\/strong>
\nHe watches a bird with a clock in its belly.<\/p>\n
MRS 3<\/strong>
\nHe watches a clock with wings for hands.<\/p>\n
MRS 4<\/strong><\/p>\n
He watches Mrs. Finn's blind canary, Sam.\r\nBirdslayer.\r\nPrestidigitator.\r\nJellyfisher.\r\nFinch mincer.\r\nMoonhowler.\r\nCaptain of tidepools.\r\nKing of green hills.\r\nPrince of beaches.\r\nSweet as an apple.\r\nTurned over in dreaming.\r\nCrying in sleep.\r\nAs if wounded and bleeding.\r\nNoseful of weeping.\r\nBleared eyes shut.\r\nSweet as an apple.\r\nPale and sleeping.\r\n\r\n[END]\r\n<\/pre>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Purchase from Amazon   by Gregg Glory [Gregg G. Brown] PUBLISHED BY BLAST PRESS COPYRIGHT \u00a9 2014 “Evolution is too slow a process to save my soul.” ~~Darby Crash “I’d rather be a poet any day and live on guile and beer.” ~~Dylan Thomas I with all my winding torch of days Kept trust, kept […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1001002,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1735],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5280","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-maybe-plagues","category-1735-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5280","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=5280"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5280\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7402,"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5280\/revisions\/7402"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5280"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5280"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5280"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}