{"id":8633,"date":"2025-10-05T12:28:09","date_gmt":"2025-10-05T12:28:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/?p=8633"},"modified":"2025-10-05T12:39:47","modified_gmt":"2025-10-05T12:39:47","slug":"a-return-to-doves","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/posts\/a-return-to-doves\/","title":{"rendered":"A Return to Doves"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

\r\n\r\n <\/em>\r\n \r\nby \r\n \r\nGregg Glory\r\n \r\n \r\n \r\n \r\nPublished by\r\nBLAST PRESS\r\n324B Matawan Avenue\r\nCliffwood, NJ 07721\r\n(732) 970-8409\r\n \r\ngregglory@aol.com\r\ngregglory.com\r\n \r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
INTRO: The Faithful Brush<\/h2>\n
\r\nA damsel with a dulcimer \r\nIn a vision once I saw; \r\nIt was an Abyssinian maid, \r\nAnd on her dulcimer she played, \r\nSinging of Mount Abora.\r\n~~STC, Kubla Khan\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nA dulcet in the dulcimer. The tones and semi-quavers of moments considered and reconsidered. A return to manynesses and maybes, the messiness of that. A Reconquista of one\u2019s own mind. A return. The resolutions that resolve when focus clicks clear. That crashed sandstone monument rescued from burning words and tested. The eye reforged that had gleamed in brass beneath Perseus\u2019 brow.\n<\/p>\n
\nThat\u2019s what\u2019s here. The tested verities. Truths that burned their way out of the dud charcoal and survived to be viewed.\n<\/p>\n
\nI write with an archeologist\u2019s brush, perhaps a softened, discarded toothbrush repurposed to explore. That which is buried was once alive as us, dizzy in air such as ours, a tint in the brimming landscape that, I\u2019m sure, endures.\n<\/p>\n
\nThe faithful brush, even of doves\u2019 wings gathering to stir each morning\u2019s dust, does the work of eons: rescuing, reading the runes. If the brush be faithful, if the author be truthful, the rescue must be real, however partial, however out of nowhere, however shaded and shadowed the shards.\n<\/p>\n
\nThe author\u2019s brush is toughened by time, and made more subtle for its firm resolve. The middle-aged author searches now not for random trash or treasure, but for the deepened reason for his search itself. The reader and the writer are unearthing the civilization of themselves together, in LARPing partnership. Why reopen the tomb of Tutankhamun, merely to buff the sunny face you placed there twenty centuries ago?\n<\/p>\n
\nThe doves return to brush the ground beside the mountain laurel, and I return to bend beside them, a manager of many desires; a stranger to myself, returning to the work of knowing that self better. The humble doves ask nothing but to brush, to flutter amiably amid undimming greys.\n<\/p>\n
\nThis search enriches, not the egoist, not the hunter after winnings, but the swimmer after wonder, the lost son returned to break bread with Dad before the grave engulfs all–Egypt and archeologist, damsel and dulcimer. All but the doves presiding in the dust.\n<\/p>\n
\r\nGregg Glory\r\n[Gregg G. Brown]\r\nBack-to-school week\r\nSeptember 2025\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nTIME CUTS
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\n\r\nTime cuts me like a piece of soap, carved and used\r\nTo wash away the self, images shaped and tended\r\nThat made it to my mirror--\r\n\r\nTime cuts, and I am made of feathers falling, confetti\r\nThat once had flown, found lightness, light\r\nLike that of a flashing mirror--\r\n\r\nThe work of childhood, long past, eerie readiness\r\nAnd eerie ease, limbs alert within the baseball diamond,\r\nA concentration of many lights--\r\n\r\nThen the era of early manhood, where kisses confused.\r\nMade-up faces arriving like hungry fish confessing\r\nIn a dark awake with sparkles--\r\n\r\nTime cuts, and the wonder of full manhood, mastering\r\nThe moment, playwright and laughing plaything,\r\nDense mirror in mirrors encased--\r\n\r\nAnd now the year of doves arrives, soft succor of\r\nTheir mutable cooing, softness of my soul, I swear,\r\nTearing in this mirror here--\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nAUTUMN RAMBLE
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nA leaf stood up in a wisk of wind,\r\nStood and walked on its points\r\nWalked like a man resurrected\r\nToward the observer.\r\n\r\nThe leaf stood absorbed by the\r\nObserver\u2019s wish, given arms\r\nAnd a head as well as pointed legs\r\nNo leaf ever owned.\r\n\r\nIt was a man, gifted scratchy\r\nSpeech: a coughing, hazy, rough\r\nSet of almost words as it walked\r\nAnd was observed.\r\n\r\nRETURN TO NORMAL\r\nThe daylight after ladies\u2019 night\r\nIs not the light of a normal sun,\r\nIt is a matchhead violent blue\r\nAnd full of burning people--\r\n\r\nA quick cigarette at the sink\r\nIs a confrontation with mortality,\r\nA skeleton sipping smoke, no vape,\r\nAnd waiting for the coffee.\r\n\r\nThere\u2019s a magnificence in the dishes\r\nShining in their piles, a bold\r\nSmell of yesterdays, how the ladies\r\nLooked, and looked away.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nINSIDE A SHYNESS
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nAn essence without presence\r\nIs the wish of every consciousness--\r\nAnemones desire to be\r\nColorless in a surrounding sea.\r\n\r\nAn elephant on his pampas is\r\nA nose grown long with noticing,\r\nBut in his turtle-grey would be\r\nAn unnoticeable nous.\r\n\r\nIt is a tale of love-me-not\r\nAnd let me be; let life come fluttering\r\nIn drifted gifts of days, and lay\r\nIn whatever final shape it may.\r\n\r\nTHE MEME\u2019S JINGLE\r\nA gleaming theme, its jingle, \r\nIs a meme\u2019s messy treasure:\r\nOld coolness of a nickel that must\r\nBe spent, however faceless.\r\n\r\nPocketed, a meme is a lucky coin,\r\nThe sou and weight of currency,\r\nRubbed blank and dubbed\r\nThe universal face of exchange--\r\n\r\nThat wobbly balance, and the pans\r\nHung thereon, is the officer\u2019s pinch \r\nAnd lynchpin of coming justice,\r\nSo sovereign is its acceptance.\r\n\r\nIf a meme\u2019s theme is love, then \r\nShe resembles Helen\u2019s grace,\r\nThat thinnish, hard-used yen\r\nThat launched so many ships.\r\n\r\nChange the theme to singing\r\nAnd one nightingale tries the sky\r\nWith its coin of voice and story,\r\nOiled and weariless and alive.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nDIALOG WITH THE WAKER
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nThe means of meme and dreaming\r\nAre nearly seamless, a fine confection\r\nOf could-be whipped with what is.\r\n\r\nWhat is, what is, what is is what\r\nThe meme is dreaming, an antennae\r\nIn the mind, a drift against the wind\r\n\r\nTo some fat onwards destination,\r\nSome land of palms and breadfruit.\r\nThe meme compresses, composes,\r\n\r\nTaps its tootling foot and sets the tune\r\nTo which sunrise rises, determines\r\nPhases of the rainbow, come to that.\r\n\r\nThe meme is all we are, compact.\r\nAll we well can read of ourselves e\u2019en now.\r\nThe mind at the back of the mind\r\n\r\nRising in dawn\u2019s tall ostrich tail.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nTOUR OF THE MORNING
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nBefore one spends the day in abject fear,\r\nOr nosing after useless facts at a desk,\r\nPushing those facts through the mush....\r\n\r\nBefore all that, antecedent to all that,\r\nAlpha before alpha A, in dawn\u2019s pre-alpha,\r\nThere is a snap at the nape of the neck.\r\n\r\nA small click that nickers in archaic hush,\r\nA clarity that scars, scar over scar,\r\nPalimpsest of skin beginning from raw\r\n\r\nTo red to scab, etc. And this is where the tour\r\nBegins, escaping the dreamscape, but not\r\nToo completely, assembling yourself in dark\r\n\r\nBy practiced touch, your clothes a likely pile\r\nOf yesterday\u2019s skin, some rumored who \r\nOf a latter alphabet, some Theta, some Zed.\r\n\r\nBut as long as the nape remains membrane\r\nMore than skeleton, you stand obtusely\r\nNude to yourself, an onion pared, a thumb\r\n\r\nIn search of a hand to civilize.... This is you,\r\nRude, placid, perched, resisting flight,\r\nResting nestside, wrapping a familiar hand\r\n\r\nAround the moist cool nape of your neck.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nHOPE\u2019S ROPE-A-DOPE
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nThat errored air of expectation when\r\nThe internet appears, and we browse\r\nLike drowsy cows the grass we\u2019re fed....\r\n\r\nThe minute sizzle on the Hitachi, just\r\nPrior to the blasted taste on the burning\r\nTongue, the sour wow of disappointment....\r\n\r\nThis is the lush disaster of hope\u2019s helpless\r\nRope-a-dope against the boxing ring,\r\nThe fragrant heft of OJ before it\u2019s sipped\r\n\r\nAnd known as frozen, not fresh, not the real\r\nDeal, a something less pressed than what\r\nHad been desired, the glass half full\r\n\r\nThat imagination presented to the senses\r\nBefore the senses sipped, before the mind\r\nGrasped the disaster on the table\r\n\r\nLaid so featly before it, the silverware\r\nPolished to a dare, the napkin neat,\r\nThen tucked and comforting, coffee\r\n\r\nA portal to exotic scenery in the mind,\r\nThe chair inched in to begin the feast\r\nThat had been so powdered and crowded,\r\n\r\nPlated and placed with such, such\r\nAn overload of hope, recursive verve\r\nOf the guppy body always gulping more.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nIN HER DIAMOND FORTRESS BRIGHT
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nJenny at the jewelry counter reads bright pieces\r\nOf the disassembled world, cracked precise\r\nInto emerald broach, or ruby rings, amethyst\r\nThings in amber light stoked a sleepy smoky gold,\r\nAnd playful daisy diamonds on crushed cloth....\r\n\r\nThere is temptation here, beyond the tricks\r\nOf rock and heft, the lie of lights reflected.\r\nThere is a glimmer of a sunwise depth, a fire\r\nIn this wild trying-on of jewels like wild bells,\r\nThis jangle of earrings like antlers shaken.\r\n\r\nThere is a solitude for the eye forever, Arctic\r\nQueen within her diamond fortress bright.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nCARVERESQUE
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nI\u2019ve sanded my craft past smoothness to slither\r\nRound again to raw delight; first slice of fresh\r\nBranches, then letting the wood heal and dry\r\n\r\nUntil it\u2019ll take the ready faces that I give it.\r\nAnd in so doing, I learn to love the dowdy wood\u2019s\r\nOwn crosswise resistance, a burl in the grain\r\n\r\nThat furnishes the Bhudda\u2019s knotty belly.\r\nOr note the blondness of her heartwood,\r\nLong soft streams of pine that make Rapunzel\u2019s\r\n\r\nHair a riverine loveliness of lissome color,\r\nA motion of the branch in active weather,\r\nChill sidelights stray September evenings bring.\r\n\r\nSo much weather has brought us here together!\r\nMyself a walking branch that shapes and sands,\r\nA brother tree reaching for returning harmony.\r\n\r\nMy knife is like a knowing as it weaves;\r\nThe blade-tip is where my consciousness\r\nStarts; one thought that touches another as it\r\n\r\nBegins the blonde gouge, feeling then the response,\r\nNew give writhing from repose, a grace that sprang \r\nFirst from the hillside park, all those days of shade.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nDAY IN THE LIFE OF
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nNo doubt he was the cause. The chief\r\nAnd chef, the architect, whatever, of his\r\nOwn preponderant boredom, the grey.\r\n\r\nA heavy, preponderant grey, a blas\u00e9\r\nThat poured him into cement each morning,\r\nLaughed at his entrapment all afternoon.\r\n\r\nAnd although he was the fishermen and\r\nThe fish of his own shark disaster, nothing \r\nSeemed to assuage or dynamite his drift.\r\n\r\nHe was stuck as a cork, filling his bottle\r\nWith little messages, piffling pleas, notes\r\nOf such longing as Pavarotti would envy.\r\n\r\nNo doubt his rescue never came, I attended\r\nThe funeral myself, congealed among the mourners,\r\nAnother grey homunculus, a totem, a cypher.\r\n\r\nBut, when they looked, there among his papers,\r\nBehind the trill of unpaid bills, crests of sodoku\r\nPlayed to drag the boredom away in chains\r\n\r\nOf letters linked, was a journal labelled \"Mine\"\r\nStiff with little gems of jokes, racy or ribald,\r\nSteam that had kept his little teapot chuffing.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nAVIARY INSOMNIA
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nThe wounded dove, and the sound of it,\r\nWere hounding me, more and more hounding\r\nAs the days were shriveling toward autumn--\r\n\r\nThe sound of the dove when a wooden chair\r\nWas scraped across the floor, the wound\r\nOf opening the garage door, how warm hellos\r\n\r\nBecome cold, wounded harus when remembered,\r\nWhen the face of the speaker seems faded,\r\nA false comforter walking among the leaves\r\n\r\nAnd places of memory, the garden so long\r\nAn incredible dewy green, and stardust at night\r\nWhen restlessness raised the beige windowshade,\r\n\r\nStardust over every flame of blossom sleeping,\r\nThat place a best place, most right and regal, a place\r\nWhere doves would walk and coo come morning.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nWHILE YOUR HANDS ARE WET
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nMake sure to wash the butternut squash\r\nFor supper, and let me get that stale dish\r\nWith the dead plant so we can put new in.\r\n\r\nYou might as well, while you\u2019re there to elbows,\r\nDo the job to furl the jig sail in before the storm\r\nReally gets going, before the rain strips canvas\r\n\r\nAnd the captain\u2019s screaming. Are you qualified\r\nTo birth a sweet blameless babe, if not,\r\nWell, at least you\u2019re here, and that\u2019s an art.\r\n\r\nBring your wet hands closer to her agony\r\nAnd have a go; it\u2019s only life, after all, nothing\r\nVery serious, and your hands are wet already,\r\n\r\nHandling the squash with a gentle expertise\r\nIt\u2019s almost decorous, the yellow glowing\r\nBetween adept thumb and dancing fingers\r\n\r\nSo swabbed with the running blessing\r\nLife arranges in an unstoppable faucet, the gale\r\nOf being here at the bridgehead of things\r\n\r\nIn a brightness that\u2019s like a clean knife\r\nSet among the flowery dishes, drying its edge\r\nWith the rest. You know how it is.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nTHE JET OF REMEMBRANCE
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nThe jet of remembrance is always sighing its skies \r\nAway as yesterday\u2019s altitudes fail today\u2019s falling--\r\nThe clouds reconfigured that had been familiar,\r\n\r\nOur roving window of universe swelling beyond \r\nThe black seed we had need of, the dark birth \r\nThat began the bang, that infant fingers gripped,\r\n\r\nNow a wandering structure of deluxe galaxies.\r\nThe hopscotch ladder drawn along the sidewalk\r\nBegins to resemble the structure of the universe,\r\n\r\nWhirling beyond our porous knowing, a star-sown\r\nConnect-the-dots that skirted invisibles, angels or atoms,\r\nAre always playing at, just past corners of the church.\r\n\r\nAngels and preeminences protect me! My sky\r\nIs falling as I fail up the stairs, taking time with me,\r\nRavelling up the raving thread into my gladdened sack.\r\n\r\nThe jet of remembrance is thrust and dust, blackhole\r\nPlasmas of awe or grief compounded, the deep burn \r\nRacing your given face farther into strangeness.\r\n\r\nTomorrow is weirder the more today is remembered.\r\nAll colors blur in rain and remembrance, endurance\r\nThe name we give forgetting as we jet, bare clouds\r\n\r\nOurselves, stitching the structure, changing shape,\r\nStill holding hands double-dutch as we skip\r\nThe first billion chapters that clapped our beings here.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nA WHYFUL OF FLOWERS
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nYou never ask why the bowl, the vase, my silly hands\r\nAre full of flowers, astounding powers of colors\r\nCresting unaccountable from a wilderness of stems.\r\n\r\nQuestions are for problems, not this evident bounty,\r\nThe shift of shaft and petals against glass laughing\r\nAs if the sun vacationed here, before our eyes,\r\n\r\nBringing a deep luminance into our house, our lives\r\nTogether as this bustle of roses, this clan of daisies\r\nThat heard so many chanting crickets after dark,\r\n\r\nMiniature singers mighty in their armored millions.\r\nAnd some sway of that song is among these blooms\r\nDecorating the dining table, or tucked against\r\n\r\nA picture of you on the desk, open face turned up\r\nQuizzically, curious as to myself hounding words down\r\nFlowerlessly, an effortful hunt after meaning, a dredge\r\n\r\nThrough soggy dictionaries and dreadful thesauruses.\r\nBut there you are, a blessing, a blossom, and when\r\nMy pen despairs, a scent of jasmine reminds me.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nTHE DELIGHTFUL LIGHTNESS OF RERUNS
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nUnwearied we watch TV stories repeat, not reading\r\nWith renewing eye, but watching in passive rest\r\nAs the same blurred world we saw before goes scrolling\r\n\r\nAnd we lounge comforted the best lines of the scene\r\nHaven\u2019t changed--the punchlines and the pithy bits\r\nThey comfort us, rehearsing for the ear a nearness\r\n\r\nLighter than a harness. For this we wear ourselves\r\nIn end-of-day weariness, a sundowner serenade\r\nOf tales-twice-told but nicer, since the recorded face\r\n\r\nAnd dress, accent and emphasis, of the speakers\r\nNever changes, never has to breathe our air with us\r\nAs at a theater performance, but lives backlit in boxed\r\n\r\nEternity; abstract shapes within a frame if anything,\r\nWhispers of a world that never was. And there we rest,\r\nComplete in effortless omnipotence, viewers only\r\n\r\nOf Pompeii recreated, the easy comedy repeated, where\r\nEven the laughtrack helps us with its elbow to the ribs, \r\nDigging, with us, if not a grave, then something like.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nGIVE US THIS
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nHowever loveliness endeavored to give us this\r\nIngenious emptiness forever calling forth\r\nA sky inviting every bird into its white wideness,\r\nLet us respond this day as if we are worthy--\r\n\r\nAs if loveliness were our quest without question,\r\nSole motive of action and the active force\r\nThat soars us to a view from every mountain\r\nLooking back at loveliness as to a total source.\r\n\r\nAnd we, gilded viewers intruding in the clouds,\r\nHover unhampered, overseers of that loveliness \r\nThat lays silken fields below in golden shrouds\r\nAnd every river\u2019s silvery magnificence increases--\r\n\r\nUntil we, in prayerful silence at this pale highpoint,\r\nFeeling smallest here, in grace are at our greatest.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nWHAT PEOPLE SAID
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nTo tell from what people said what people meant\r\nIs love\u2019s endeavour, a quick kiss upon red ears\r\nEmbarrassed at hearing--\r\n\r\nSome lovers moult themselves into quotation,\r\nWearing others\u2019 feathers, others\u2019 graces\r\nOver feelings of their own.\r\n\r\nSo troublesome is this telling on oneself that one\r\nBecomes a version or a vision of what one\r\nAssumes the other one would want,\r\n\r\nAnd lives in strictures like a playwright, fencing\r\nWith longing and dialog until time\u2019s finale\r\nDraws the velvet shutters shut.\r\n\r\nParrying and posturing occurs in midnight starlight, too,\r\nWhen one\u2019s alone among dark rhododendron,\r\nAlone and listening--\r\n\r\nAnd one hears what constellations conspire to confess,\r\nSpurred and mounted in their gemmed procession\r\nOverhead, one hears and hears.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nULULATIONS UNTO THE END
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nfor Anant Dhavale\r\n<\/em>\r\n\r\nMisty companions where a cliff is ending,\r\nShapes that shape themselves a little\r\nAbove the winking brim of cliff a moment\r\n\r\nAnd are gone--these are the friends, presences\r\nOne remembers when the mist has faded\r\nAnd the cliff-edge returns in bolded blue,\r\n\r\nThe falloff a line of directest rock and loss.\r\nThe sun is a companion, yes, unfailing\r\nFlourisher, a plume forever unplucked,\r\n\r\nBut the sun is not a voice beside, a friend\r\nWho knows the crisis of a mind at rest,\r\nHow one speaks to another as to oneself\r\n\r\nIn a voice that opens more than doorways,\r\nA voice that paces woods and words,\r\nThat shares the carrying of meaning forward--\r\n\r\nA voice that calls on contribution, a multiple\r\nTribe of voices, wolves involved in a howling\r\nPerhaps, ululations unto the end.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nTHOSE SUDDEN SUMMER STORMS
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nThe drapes and cloths of rainclouds fulfill \r\nWhole horizons with deeply-telling banks of color, \r\nDeployed from edge to edge of human sight.\r\n\r\nSuch clouds are more, in their slow-motion soaring, \r\nRoundelay walls of sublime and silverish loafing, \r\nMore in that, and in them, than any knowing sows--\r\n\r\nAnd the clear ear, listening, is more responsive \r\nTo this wide mystery, hears more of rightness ringing\r\nIn windsong sighing, and in the roughened cries\r\n\r\nOf weighed skies that slowly pass above us \r\nThrough long August days, paying out a solace \r\nUnderserved, a peace so paced that the sense\r\n\r\nOf time itself\u2019s expanded, brindled with brave shading, \r\nShaven slims of glimmering where the good \r\nFull clouds fulfill themselves by unbecoming....\r\n\r\nA release like laughter traced with echoes of\r\nEarlier delight, clouds whose embolded brows, so full\r\nOf thought themselves, releasing to the last laugh\r\n\r\nTheir every concern. And then, as afternoon ends,\r\nDim rain hits, drenching summer in cold baths, \r\nFilling every mouth leaned back to drink it, ladling,\r\n\r\nSwallowing rainclouds down like delighted wine.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nAN UNBAGGING
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nRaindrops were on her glasses small as sweat\r\nAnd grocery bags surrounded worsted at her feet,\r\nWet as dogs, soft as kittens, impossible packages.\r\n\r\nAfter kissing the tip of her nose dry as it gets,\r\nWe undressed her to stand before the happy fan\r\nWhickering welcome as she told me in shivers\r\n\"Stop staring\" and \"robe.\"\r\n\r\n                             The instructions she \r\nDelivered were casual and exact, sipping coffee\r\nWith feet propped on a second kitchen chair.\r\nThe unbagging was a careful, curious affair\r\nAs I learned how my house was assembled:\r\n\r\nWhere the spaghetti rattled, how bottled beets\r\nNear the green thumbs of pickles were set;\r\nThere was a system in place for the spices\r\nIt seemed, and sweets shelved just out of reach.\r\nThe two cats watched their food find its cupboard\r\nThen retired in pleased purrs to her lap.\r\n\r\nIn the end, the bags, soft as custard, wet as dogs,\r\nLay in the pond of the foyer while the mirror fogged,\r\nMyself dotted wet as I checked the receipt.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nTHE DETAIL BELL
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nIt\u2019s the detail bell that tells the story straight,\r\nRings it true as tuning tines to correct\r\nThe deficient ear.\r\n\r\nThe detail, the little crutch that leans beside,\r\nThe dirty ink on Cratchit\u2019s finger,\r\nThe candle\u2019s low estate.\r\n\r\nWear your whistest gloves, good ringer, and polish\r\nYour brassy handbells to a lightning sheen\r\nTo find the lilt that details bring.\r\n\r\nBecome a noticer of your own life, if you want\r\nThe antecedent to the accident\r\nTo settle into sense--\r\n\r\nHow habits can haunt a fate, how a muscle\u2019s\r\nTrained reply can deafen your reaction\r\nTo a truck\u2019s commanding honk.\r\n\r\nAttention must be paid to bring the blessings\r\nRinging unnoticed every day\r\nIn the lily-of-the-valley.\r\n\r\nOr how littlest tricks and ticks of timing can account\r\nFor joyance in the handbell chorus, shared notes\r\nFlung in supersedent series\r\n\r\nElongating belle pleasures in each bell-ringer\u2019s ear,\r\nWeighing neat each wagging tongue,\r\nEach contribution to the tithe.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nRAMPAGING THROUGH THE DICTIONARY
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nAlthough I dress and step my hour and my day,\r\nIt is upon sordid boards I step, a ragged stage\r\nThat leans toward the meaningless, a devastation\r\n\r\nOf form, a worm of words and not an angel in action\r\nRampaging through the dictionary, a martyr\r\nOf the synod of sorrow, and not the glad master\r\n\r\nOf dance, emboldened soul embodied a moment,\r\nThe central complex given easy isness for a day,\r\nA shine that infuses, and then subsumes, the dress,\r\n\r\nThe entire face and aspect of the farce, the face \r\nCards talking around the table, the plain fiction \r\nOf obvious pretense, names and labels unto the end.\r\n\r\nNevertheless, I dress and gussie and fuss my hour\r\nAnd spend my day rehearsing searches for the true,\r\nThe capable, the meaning at the meat of it,\r\n\r\nThe animal that first reached for words, when roars\r\nAnd rumors of roars, would no longer serve the source,\r\nThe ache to make partial being leap complete,\r\n\r\nMind chiming with the wild divine while body finds\r\nThe manifest shiver in these sheets of skin, the bone\r\nRhythm of the ribs, breath that reaches and inters.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nUNEASILY THE QUILL
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nUneasily the quill confronts the facing page, a pate\r\nEmptier than foolscap, and an inkwell likelier \r\nFull of frivolous doodles than phrases fit for dawn,\r\n\r\nWhite lighthouse that finds the ship and brings her home.\r\nWhat words are there for our daily return to life?\r\nIt is a simpleness regifted after being lost,\r\n\r\nA silence into which gratitude sails unaided, these\r\nSifted vibrations of a house, fled at midnight, suit\r\nThe returning prodigal; the eye that grated on\r\n\r\nFamiliar dust, waters in this remembered presence\r\nA drift-spray of dawn refreshes--the pile of boots\r\nBy the door, the shrugging coats pegged in rows,\r\n\r\nThe kitchen with its yellow welcome, all the cozy\r\nPhotos of other people, the crowd that sailored here\r\nOn a whim of wind. Is this enough to be getting-on with?\r\n\r\nThe prayer on the paper says, Maybe, maybe,\r\nAs the window parchment fills with subtle light, \r\nAnd the kettle with its coppery charm hoots owl-low\r\n\r\nNext to a hero\u2019s mug ready for its steam baptism--\r\nBirds outside piping upstairs dreamers aboard,\r\nSounds of the rousing house giving dawn ears,\r\n\r\nStumbles within the repetition, forecasting recovery.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nSHAPER OF THE LANDSCAPE
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nWarrior with a voice of thorns--\r\nWhose eyes were lighthouses,\r\nAnd his mouth a roar of fire,\r\nThe emotive motion of the mountain.\r\n\r\nHe fought the dark, the deadly\r\nSilence of the rock, by chip\r\nAnd chink of sharp singing,\r\nTwin horns of his voice and sword.\r\n\r\nAnd when he walked to the wrestle\r\nOf the sea, the mountain followed\r\nHim down, the warrior, the song\r\nThat pulled the mountain into motion.\r\n\r\nThe water was as a cauldron\r\nAs dawn was roiling there, his eyes\r\nWere lighthouses, and his voice\r\nShuffled and shushed like the sea.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nMINOR INDICATIONS
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nTo be the man I imagined myself\r\nIs a mix and matrix of my most \r\nLuscious selves: wolves, and unaided lambs,\r\nThe mountaineer and miner sixty-niner,\r\n\r\nCapable captain and frivolous crew, \r\nA stance, a perspective like night wind \r\nKnocking a window--and the house, \r\nHowever old, however solid,\r\n\r\nIs a piece of paste and paper\r\nFolded together for the fun of it, \r\nAnd nothing else. The world is propped \r\nAnd blazoned of these pretenses,\r\n\r\nThese incapable shapings \r\nThat shake the shaper so, shaper\r\nWho seeks the shelter of his luscious selves, \r\nHis drives that arrive\r\n\r\nFrom he knows not where, thithering  \r\nInto a hooded futuredom, \r\nBlind space, blind time,\r\nThe captain blind and crew blindfolded\r\n\r\nAgainst the bling of harping stars, \r\nClear consonants among so many \r\nFouling vowels, \r\nBirds twisted in the ship\u2019s rigging.\r\n\r\nI, to be myself, must identify \r\nOnly with the wind\u2019s insistence, \r\nIts plain call away and ever away, \r\nA plain invisible that is the spirit\r\n\r\nAnd superior of the place, the place\r\nA place that is forever changing, \r\nA breathless collection \r\nOf temporary edges clashed\t\r\n\r\nIn a tempest, an interior alignment \r\nConjured out of chaos, \r\nA crisis felt in belt and brain \r\nAs constant conflict.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nAN UNEXPECTED CURVE
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nThe unexpected curve at Kirk St., \r\nThe cricked cliff \r\nFearfully near--\r\n\r\nLike the swerving lines of aluminum legs \r\nOn upturned church chairs, or\r\nThe verve\r\nOf pitch-dropped brakes....\r\n\r\nThey challenge the palette:\r\nHeather\u2019s honeyed pears cayenned, \r\nOr Charlie\u2019s chocolate ants, \r\nDarkly armored,\r\nShaken on the potluck brisket--\r\n\r\nThere is a challenge\r\nTo be confronted, tasted,\r\nTested as a curve is tested.\r\n\r\nFront-faced, shoulders-squared,\r\nSpook the landscape with your headlights;\r\nRattle \r\nThe tased attacker,\r\nGaining a space to think.\r\n\r\nEach confrontation is a bear\r\nA bog, \r\nA wolf--\r\nGripping the wheel too late--\r\n\r\nA cherry bomb in the sundae,\r\nA power of sourness,\r\nA tug of undertow,\r\nAn unexpected curve in the self,\r\n\r\nA curl inward \r\nAs police quiz witnesses in the fractured damp.\r\nChins averted, eyes slyly sliding\r\nAway as they widen....\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nSOLEMNITIES AND DEPARTURES
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nMarie, Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.\r\n~~T.S. Eliot<\/em>\r\n\r\nBetween the last thought and the first spelled step\r\nInto death, the sum of poetry is revealed. This\r\nIs the thing itself, life\u2019s vim at its dimmest,\r\n\r\nClimax and summation, spangled greatness\r\nManifest as rock, as dirt, as death. This is what\r\nPoetry circles to dial revelations into the brain,\r\n\r\nBrain that scouts shouting to avoid all pain, all\r\nPinnacle experience that chimes in utter, hurt silence--\r\nPoetry that creates the blade that skims the snowside,\r\n\r\nRacing down the mountain with a larynx in ecstasy.\r\nIt is silence, it is this, this moment between\r\nThe last thought and the first breath of death,\r\n\r\nThe defeatless beat that ends the drumming....\r\nReality without the dividing line of words, simmer\r\nOf old syllables, new coinages, reality bare\r\n\r\nOf thought, yet still the mind is there, the clay \r\nImpressed, that in clay will be deeply buried. And there\r\nFarewell has its meaning, its brutal hook away\r\n\r\nFrom daylight, and nightlight too, a brutal hook\r\nShowing in one slow flash the total book, answer\r\nTo every question, just where we cannot look.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nTWO SKELETONS WALK INTO A BAR
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nThe scene is haunted, and in the extreme\r\nIs haunted. Emptied glasses stand\r\n\r\nLike lenses of yesterday, stomachs emptied\r\nOf satisfaction, eyeglasses without a face.\r\n\r\nThe scene is like a restaurant, so closed, so\r\nAbandoned, the tablecloths refuse to lift\r\n\r\nWhen the wind is near, then nearer, sniffing.\r\nSeashell chairs are pushed back, the patrons\r\n\r\nDeparted, the kitchen as silent as the rest,\r\nA windy aquarium if anything, where ghosts\r\n\r\nOf vibrant coral stand fanning an increasing,\r\nAn ever-increasing, emptiness.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nMAINTAINING THE SPECTACLE
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nAlthough she had been shadow, she had\r\nBeen known, a verity and not a crooked guess,\r\nNot an image of grass stood up, a woven\r\nWoman pulled together in wheaten sheafs.\r\n\r\nThis goddess strode among the villages\r\nTackling the weather, shaping fatted clouds\r\nInto ravens or doves for the sturdy villagers,\r\nSo anxious to wring another year from earth.\r\n\r\nShe pleased herself at their festivals, a tallness\r\nIn the teenagers, a scent of fried sweets\r\nWeaving through the grand tents, that laughter\r\nWhen the strong man banged the highest bell--\r\n\r\nShe was everywhere once you looked for her,\r\nLike birdsnests at the edges of fields, \r\nA circle protecting the minor eggs, their blue\r\nSublimity going unnoticed by predators,\r\n\r\nLong eyes and longer teeth in the grass,\r\nJust long enough to chip and hatch, a\r\nMinor act of daybreak against last night\u2019s\r\nDegaussed dark, maintaining the spectacle.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nHER NAME WAS MARGO
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nA piece, a portion, a part, and not the whole.\r\nThe way a sail will take less than a corner\r\nOf the wind, that is what I knew, could know,\r\n\r\nOf her. Still, she touched my face, and pressed\r\nA shaken loveliness into my watering eyes,\r\nCatching in my linens, taut to hand as golden\r\n\r\nRopes that held the aching sail square, a nib\r\nTracing faces on endless paper; looping, too,\r\nOur initials into a calligrapher\u2019s mandala.\r\n\r\nWhat flowers had been, I had been, soft stars \r\nStrewn by her passing, small fires crossing\r\nA tameless darkness, leaf by leaf enkindled,\r\n\r\nAnd, leaf by leaf, left to burn away in solitude....\r\nWhat I knew of her was as a whole tent shaken,\r\nBones loose as petals, the high cry at night that\r\n\r\nStrips the listener, faith that claims the convert,\r\nA corner of the wind, no more, a margin given,\r\nA piece, a portion, a part, and not the whole.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nMEET THE MINOAN EYE
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nWhere language fails and the self returns\r\nMinoans drew their intuitive eyes, leashed\r\nWith a lasso of kohl, a target dot of pure oil\r\n\r\nWhere a dark self swims in seeming selfdom,\r\nA visible more voracious than voices,\r\nNot nattering and graceless, misplacing his hat,\r\n\r\nBut a self lifted, plugged into context, without\r\nThe wide side-eye look of second-guessing--No,\r\nToday you will meet the Minoan eye, an eye\r\n\r\nImmediate and infinite in effect, a spacious yes\r\nTo all the splash of seeing, splendiferous trees\r\nComplexly a-sway, the crumple-hump of clouds,\r\n\r\nSwagger of cats crossing the hard yard, all of it,\r\nPlaced without effort into the Minoan eye,\r\nThe hole God put in your head for your betterment,\r\n\r\nA scene-machine best left instructionless,\r\nThe manual discarded and left fluttering among\r\nSpearlike olive leaves, its words ignored, even\r\n\r\nAs music, as poetry perhaps is, humbly muttering.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nTHE STONE BIRDHOUSE
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nDown to the stone birdhouse walked the owner--\r\nRoutine eloquence that ungums the tongue\r\nSwifted lifted notes from the birdhouse tower,\r\n\r\nRinging against soft sifting ears and stone walls,\r\nA chaos of paradise song quicker than rivers,\r\nNo chorus but a symphony nevertheless, binge\r\n\r\nOf singing, clean hundreds of hinges of birdsong\r\nOpening to day as the owner walked down to see\r\nIridescent breasts of the little singers, wide beaks\r\n\r\nBreaking like diamond daylight which they praised,\r\nThis first slim beginning of morning and always,\r\nAwake beyond lost woes of dream and sleep.\r\n\r\nMore of morning and more of day awaited \r\nThe curious owner of nest and castle as he walked\r\nAround the bird tower listening, hands managed\r\n\r\nInto intent pockets like favorite thoughts, returning\r\nRuminations picked up and saved from the day\r\nBefore, rounded stones smooth with rich touch\r\n\r\nAnd inner meditation as the birds twanged on,\r\nAnd he thought about the returning call of song,\r\nHow he longed to perch and preen among the gang.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nUNCERTAIN SEASONS
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nStare, stare slowly, until the ghostly mirror hanging there\r\nEffectuates a face; assemble yourself in daylight\r\nLike a cloud, poured into persona loosely as a dream.\r\n\r\nWeather was never more than sky replying to a look,\r\nWas it? So the self is whatever answers when we ask,\r\nWho am I? And the voice in the mirror calls back\r\n\r\nOut of its unshaven cloud.... The grasses that invite\r\nOur walking there, also invite the deepest, purple rain\r\nThat bloats the lawn into a muddy paddy. We thrive\r\n\r\nIn our uncertain seasons, unsure of love and ourselves;\r\nWe are the grass that raves for sunlight, yet survives\r\nThe night, a million green selves forever thrusting forth\r\n\r\nUntil mirror bursts, trusting forth until mirror hurts.\r\nStare, stare slowly, unnameable, into the ghostly mirror.\r\nBe the voice in the cloud, and the responding earth.\r\n\r\nWith a scarlet razor approach whatever face appears,\r\nShave until its contours feel like home; until grey grass\r\nThat grew heavy on the cheek, lies in discarded cuts\r\n\r\nAnd clouds of shaving cream, the sunlike self washed\r\nClean in the hanging mirror, a you you recognize,\r\nOr will, you are so redly radiant, beaming there.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nDIVE, DREAMER
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nWhen voices stir shallow sleep awake,\r\nAnd faceless morning waits beyond the pane,\r\nWe listen differently, our ears lush.\r\nWe lie among stark remnants of night--\r\n\r\nIs there, perhaps, a larger, stranger mind\r\nIn which we flicker briefly, and are lost?\r\nA thought that cannot think us back,\r\nDrifting where sheets are windless water?\r\n\r\nThe bed\u2019s a broken skiff in moonlight\r\nDisturbing old waters neither sea nor river--\r\nCarrying on through breeding dreams\r\nUnfinished as a second thought....\r\n\r\nAre we shadows of a distant conversation\r\nSpoken by mouths we\u2019ll never meet?\r\nTroubled sleepers, wrestling the night--\r\nLank dread hours that do not move.\r\n\r\nNight thickens, and still we listen.\r\nSleep returns like a tide without a shore.\r\nAn unseen light draws near beyond the dark.\r\nDive, dreamer. Dive--and return to dream.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nAFTERNOON CURARE
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nThe pile of cherry pits that was the afternoon\r\nLay their cyanide in the grass as shadows\r\nGrew loose and loathsome beneath the trees--\r\n\r\nShadows he has known and named, and played\r\nIn their cool aftereffect, a dove of wind himself\r\nHappiest beneath the tittering leaves above.\r\n\r\nBut now all afternoons were hours of poured stillness,\r\nAnd sloth, and paralysis lacking crisis, focusless,\r\nHimself a coat thrown off and forgotten.\r\n\r\nSome plague grew green in his hours here alone.\r\nMorning had abandoned him; morning with\r\nIts griefless shores of new gold, new books,\r\n\r\nThe delighted liveliness of birds at every window,\r\nLining the happy branches outside like tufts of snow.\r\nBut now his brow was greased with sweat,\r\n\r\nHis thoughts were muddied plows stuck fast,\r\nThe earth a homely stone, a grave and not a godsend.\r\nHe spit the pits of time carefully between his lips.\r\n\r\nNow were the hours of curare, when stiff light\r\nCrawled toward a phantom oasis just out of reach;\r\nHe shook his empty glass like a tin canteen\r\n\r\nAnd heard the emptiness, his mouth pure sand.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nDOVELIGHT
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nThe moon\u2019s a dove, of course,\r\nSmoothly curving dove-grey there,\r\nOr friendly on the windowsill.\r\n\r\nShe always comes with lenten beat\r\nAnd amber eye if you look for it,\r\nHer deft wings a silver circle spread.\r\n\r\nHidden shapes appear like fallen snow\r\nTransformed in dusty light--\r\nOld moon, dove moon, softly led\r\n\r\nTo find this hearth and house again;\r\nDear dove, whose loving dovish touch\r\nLessens evening\u2019s heaviness--\r\n\r\nRound dove who soothes with coos, \r\nWho soon removes dark masks, dark marks\r\nOf too-deep dreams remembered--\r\n\r\nDeft dove who floods the windowpanes,\r\nRest near us tonight, among the trees\r\nUntil all tiredness is appeased.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nPACKING UP THE CRIB
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nHe thought the sun was different then, and the moon\r\nHad rumors of her own, old gong; her dusty self\r\nWas secrets finely ground, mysteries atomized to shine.\r\n\r\nThe sun was someone to wake up with and enjoy NJ,\r\nA companionable warmth encouraging healthful walks,\r\nA comfy dose of solace that would only end with death.\r\n\r\nThese were the celestial playmates in his crib,\r\nDog\u2019s smiles he\u2019d been made to make-believe in;\r\nLittle did he know they would not listen to his whistling.\r\n\r\nThey were strange facts from the almanac circling\r\nHigh above him, nothing more. Sultry sun and tin moon\r\nWere more phenomena than mandala, he would learn.\r\n\r\nThese morning and evening intimates, with whom\r\nHe\u2019d spent such autumns, such summers at the beach,\r\nWere strangers just as much as any casual multitude.\r\n\r\nAnd yet, more than multitudes, more than open books,\r\nThese two conspired with him to invent his day,\r\nTo tailor dreamy night into so many Arabian fables....\r\n\r\nWas he the succulent plant that drank them up,\r\nBulked his littleness with what danegeld that they gave?\r\nThe sun was different then, he was sure, and the moon\r\n\r\nWhispered rumors to him in his room for sure.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nFLYING AFTER EMILY
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nTo have the honey of a thriving hive\r\nRequires queens and she-bees of fierce wing.\r\nIt needs the potable dark of honey stomachs,\r\nWhere flowers have their afterlife--\r\n\r\nEmily Dickinson was alive with honey as any,\r\nShining in her hot garden so; \r\nThe bees resumed their buzzing when \r\nHer white dress had passed.\r\n\r\nHoney is a quality and a drapey thing,\r\nSticky to touch, yet slipperier than words.\r\nYou must put it in your mouth to know\r\nThe golden worth and depth of it.\r\n\r\nGo and find your field of flowers then,\r\nAnd eat their light and carry it within--\r\nBuild with licks your honeycomb, link\r\nBy yellow link, but not alone, for first\r\n\r\nYou must take flight with a rebel queen and muse.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nRETURN TO EARTH
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nA return to parents is a return to doves, parents\r\nWho are a breadth of death now, length of earth.\r\nWhat fleet flutterings we shared went unprepared\r\n\r\nAway, gone as the longing the doves coo about\r\nIn their shadowy home under cumbersome trees.\r\nA return, then, to a shared inexistence, a place\r\n\r\nFull only of empty plates, diners who no longer\r\nArrive at the hive of a shared meal, such meals\r\nAs doves share in their portion of dust, pecking\r\n\r\nThe littler instances of life with such hard beaks--\r\nWhy must beaks break, and lesser beaks replace\r\nThe wizened eyes of unblinking doves, beads\r\n\r\nThe nuns have counted how many times? Doves\r\nOurselves, we love to watch them murmuring so,\r\nLove how they populate the ground with moving,\r\n\r\nWings huddled round them like coats in the cold.\r\nAre they releasing the passions of their parents,\r\nCircling as they seem to do, returning to earth\r\n\r\nWho hardly ever flew? They are our parents, these\r\nDoves stepping over the earth of parents, and we\r\nReturn to them in cool morning light, holding close\r\n\r\nCooing rumors of parents\u2019 glory we cannot bear to lose.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nCHERRY EARBUDS
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nMy girl has cherry earbuds watching her TikToks.\r\nThe laughter in her eyes is luscious wine, flickering\r\nSips that flatten between each flip and scroll as she\r\n\r\nConnects with a song or repeats its catchy hook.\r\nMy girl has cherry earbuds, and what she hears\r\nIs a moiety of the music of the spheres, for in her\r\n\r\nNectar sweetens, and the grace of pratfalls fly\r\nOver the heads of saints and angels. Her hazel eyes\r\nSee the unglossed world in such buffed and gentle\r\n\r\nMeasure, even retirees at Disneyland she hearts.\r\nWhat TikTok takes in spinning attention, she gives\r\nA second grace, seeing the best in seeming fakes.\r\n\r\nMy girl has cherry earbuds and raspberry glasses,\r\nWatching the cutters of soap with patient positivity,\r\nEnjoying the glamour of fizzing rings and bracelets,\r\n\r\nThe repetitious clatter of beads on a breadboard,\r\nTeachers reaching after students with song and dance,\r\nHow the news looks like a game played in her palm.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nSHIVA\u2019S CYCLAMEN AND MORE
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nIn the golden garden where sacred Shiva lives\r\nEscaping the briarpatch with traces on your skin\r\nIs a given, for you are a flower, too, and must\r\n\r\nBecome grated dust in the destroyer\u2019s gloaming--\r\nHere where roses rise to perish, drops of blood\r\nOn curious stalks, wise eyes among the leaves.\r\n\r\nIn the golden garden where sacred Shiva lives\r\nOld trees grow down into seeds, and daily falsities \r\nBy which we blossom are nipped and cut with swords\r\n\r\nAnd left to lie. What you thought was life, was color,\r\nWas mistaken. Begin again to see, to be\r\nThe invisible beneath appearance, to which you turn\r\n\r\nAs to the beloved\u2019s face; every search is this search,\r\nEvery trial run at dying simply renews a you\r\nYou never knew you were, but have always been.\r\n\r\nAnd that\u2019s life among the crysanthemums,\r\nDancing among the swords of bees, the ooish\r\nWords of doves crowding the ground, all colors\r\n\r\nA kind of time without time, a state of mind\r\nThat throws its blossom to the global winds, yourself\r\nA sacred Shiva cycling selves among the garden gold.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nULTRA-COOL CATASTROPHE
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nPompeii in outer space, on the sun\u2019s surface perhaps,\r\nA tsunami anywhere but here, knocking our dominoes,\r\nSliding into home like a drifted freight train--\r\n\r\nDisaster stirs the contemplated world, disturbs\r\nThe happy resonance of things, the blear of bells\r\nRinging merrily in measured meeting, happy clappers\r\n\r\nAcknowledging their ranks in ranks of ringers, how\r\nOf whatever system there is, they are the soft expression,\r\nThe orderly buoys set against an oceanic chaos.\r\n\r\nBut how gladly gruesome is our dyspeptic delight\r\nWhen God kicks the chess set to the prim parquet--\r\nOrdering reordered our notions of order, a demand\r\n\r\nIn the riptide that pulls the child down and puts up\r\nA tomb. Here we find a freedom in our horror, a space\r\nBeyond the games of gift and getting, a place\r\n\r\nWhere every sense is sharpened to survival\u2019s edge\r\nAnd we stand upon the plains of Olduvai again as if\r\nFor the first time, loping beyond the scrim of thorntrees\r\n\r\nTo discover new limits among unknown variegation,\r\nNew realities like a spastic taste against the gated palette,\r\nA sprung aspic, a clinging kiwi tongue, life\u2019s clean tang.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nDEATH OF A PIANIST
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nI hear the grand chord of music\r\nAnd am gone. The place I am \r\nBecomes nothing, an absence\r\n\r\nSurrounding a knoll of echo\r\nThat is mine own, a little hill where\r\nBeing pitches throughout the night.\r\n\r\nReality, unavoidable bolus of what is,\r\nIs no more than sound now,\r\nA noise of slipping off the hill--\r\n\r\nAnd the grand chord turns inward,\r\nMental intake of mental breath,\r\nHarmony pausing, possessing\r\n\r\nAll thought, all thought of thought,\r\nThe self cresting unresisting\r\nWith the cavalcade of notes,\r\n\r\nEach note a self, a whole history\r\nOf selves wild as thunder, fingers\r\nAbsorbed by the chords they caused.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nFIVE DOVES
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nMy ear is open to hear and endure\r\nThe warp of what it hears, the cry,\r\nHowever faint, of five doves suffering.\r\n\r\nI compose the doves\u2019 cries with my hearing\r\nOf them, the landscape with my viewing,\r\nMyself with a will to be a self.\r\n\r\nThe doves themselves are not\r\nA grey that\u2019s seen, but a hoop that\u2019s felt\r\nAgainst the hip, a lasso sought.\r\n\r\nI smell the soft blots of dogwoods\r\nThat crown their Lenten suffering,\r\nTouch with exhausted grip\r\n\r\nThe bench in the park, the rake\r\nOf fingertips over cooling coals,\r\nPartner to the vocal doves--\r\n\r\nEvery sense is sensitive to this\r\nCreation of a matrix I manage,\r\nUnfolding before my scuttling foot.\r\n\r\nThis taste of aspic bitten and shared\r\nIs a meal reluctantly eaten with doves\r\nAnd my hungry solitude.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nA PLEASANT ENOUGH SERMON
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nStand first in the emotional knowing of the poem.\r\nHe\u2019s got these things that he likes to do,\r\nThat need doing. Doing is how he needs them,\r\n\r\nThis he knows, and that is the whyfore of it.\r\nIt is not the thing, the object around which we\r\nGather, but it is its precedent, why it was made\r\n\r\nAnd not let by, a pleasant afternoon on one\u2019s own,\r\nAn orange glowing in the wall one looks at a while\r\nAdmiring its faithful fading in earliest evening.\r\n\r\nNow look at the object jetted near to us, its wish\r\nTo be heard and held, same as anyone,\r\nSame clarity of desire making its presence felt,\r\n\r\nBullying bold its bulging words into the world,\r\nEnhancing the retracting grace of its tinkling\r\nWhen it swifts behind a veil of honeyed images....\r\n\r\nTouch the verge of verbs, edge of a decorous egg\r\nOf vowel, or dangerous knife flicked open\r\nAgainst the tight throat of a consonant, touch them,\r\n\r\nRob them of everything they have left behind,\r\nSpectacular leavings of a speaker no longer present,\r\nWho needed to go. Gone is how we need him.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nHOW TO BOIL POTATOES
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nA slick page drifts from the buzz of the printer:\r\nHow To Boil Potatoes, it says. It\u2019s a three\r\nStep process that ends in useful chunks.\r\n\r\nLike going on a date, first you have to bathe\r\nThe dirty potatoheads, scrubbing under nails,\r\nBrightening the glimmer of the many eyes.\r\n\r\nThen, if you wish, you may peel their skins off,\r\nHold their bouldery goldness a moment in one hand,\r\nAnd roll them unnamed and naked into a bowl.\r\n\r\nAdmire their waitful eagerness a moment more\r\nAnd then, with thumb and paring knife, behead\r\nAnd quarter them into a cubist car wreck--\r\n\r\nIt\u2019s not exactly art, but not not art either.\r\nOnce boulders are beaten into passible pebbles,\r\nHop them into a large pot of water, as if\r\n\r\nThey were albino carp returning to a cool pond.\r\nBoil them rolling, then simmer until the knife enters \r\nEasily. Salt their wounds who are all wounds now\r\n \r\nUntil their earlier eagerness returns, and they shine\r\nSlick as any Aztec sacrifice, hearts bled white.\r\nStrain away waste water in any kind of colander.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nTHE PSALM TREE
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nTrees are praising trees, as they sway.\r\nI am near, and the wind is far away.\r\nAnd trees sashay, the ancient trees.\r\n\r\nIt is not one tree saying. Not the pine, the alder\r\nGrowing red, yellow-red, and bending there,\r\nShivering alive with last night\u2019s disaster--\r\n\r\nIt is a chorus of themself and myself.\r\nThe trees are saying in wind far away,\r\nAnd I am swaying in ancientness.\r\n\r\nIt is as if everything were singing at once\r\nIn a gathering force, as if great roots gathered up\r\nAnd threw the wind around.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nWRESTLING FOR PRIMACY
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nThoughts are vultures, and circle above the corpse,\r\nBeautiful-ugly brothers grinning wide on wings,\r\nNatives of the place, consolers of bones,\r\n\r\nOf skulls too full of thought--Thought devises\r\nErasure for thoughts, primal life made more prime,\r\nMore singular and centralized with a thought.\r\n\r\nLife considered by its end-dates is one example,\r\nRather than the bumptious hustle that fills it,\r\nCrams the days and crests its feted nights.\r\n\r\nThoughts are vultures, and clean the big bones\r\nTo dinosaur swords of simplicity, bear hugs\r\nOf brothers made these whittled, fraternal sticks;\r\n\r\nThe content of his kindnesses reduced to this\r\nGrocery list of what was given, what withheld;\r\nMother and father only seem immune, and walk\r\n\r\nBefore us always, rigged with the fullness of sails,\r\nDulcet with the silvery insistence of doubled doves--\r\nHowever long departed, however thinned by thought,\r\n\r\nThey walk and nod among us every day.\r\nThoughts, in their naked-headedness, do not have\r\nStrength of beak or philosophy enough to strip away\r\n\r\nMy mother\u2019s loving hovering omniscient as clouds.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nTHE OLD DUFFER\u2019S SOLECISMS
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nThe things I had, in an orange power of summer,\r\nI survey from the grey alleyway of age today,\r\nEnsconced among my shelves of trophies.\r\n\r\nThe books I\u2019ve noodled into printed existence\r\nAre sayings washed away, gaff and drift of lost\r\nGraffiti, a wall discolored, no more than that--\r\n\r\nThe summit that had me strong as horses,\r\nA promontory primed with even higher hopes,\r\nI revisit only in thought now, laying my picnic\r\n\r\nBeside the idyllic stream, my feet red in blue water,\r\nThe woven basket itself fantastic with great feast:\r\nBlueberries from their hooded bushes, white\r\n\r\nGrapes pressed into perfect carafes of wine\r\nLike bottled sunlight, the bread that said\r\nSummer is your forever season, son, and she\r\n\r\nAgreed, kneeling next to me at the capless top\r\nOf the still-fresh hill, surfers not sufferers\r\nHanging ten, the mountain peak untrammeled\r\n\r\nBy noisome others, ourselves the landlords\r\nOf all we so gladly surveyed--peak experience\r\nSurmounting peak--the magic of appearing rabbits,\r\n\r\nLepus Timidus<\/em> forever, out of a capable hat.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nA CHANGE OF COLORS
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nThis difficult life is a ferocious feast espied despite--\r\nThis intricate existence is well, when in will we wish--\r\nThis whole hale thing, ill in instances--\r\n\r\nI can\u2019t speak in terms too large to hold. Again,\r\nThis chair, these few books about me, ginger dawn\r\nGrowing hair on the horizon, pleased as Rapunzel,\r\n\r\nThese few things not too far beyond my fingerends\r\nTouch me, reach down and in, in rhythm, thrum when\r\nThey\u2019re thonked by bone and marbled muscle.\r\n\r\nThis is my Cincinnati, city enough if one thinks of it,\r\nThe little rivers of the hours licking past, emerald\r\nWink of night when it falls down around me....\r\n\r\nThis chair, the books, a few words that roil what\r\nWords reside within me, fevering the day away,\r\nCascading the evening lights with whispery music.\r\n\r\nI sort and sit where existence becomes--a tone\r\nAmong the volumes of time, a change of colors\r\nAs green dawn matures--or this: the passion pressed\r\n\r\nIn paper, being held in the united knuckles of the chair,\r\nGood wood that holds me like a muscle, a great\r\nHeart squeezing the exchanges of oxygen again.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nFOREVER PISGAH, NEVER PATMOS
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nThe body is the shawl we wrap, so close, against the cold.\r\nBeliefs we burn like matchsticks to keep the body whole.\r\nThe body always opts for milk and honey, however hived,\r\n\r\nSweet leavings of bees, however annoyed, however wise\r\nTo prefer the company of flowers to the hand of man.\r\nTo drink as mead the milk of lowly cows, sweet white,\r\n\r\nDelicious as an inhalation of the breath, a health thrived\r\nFrom the maternal bounty of the beast who knows best\r\nThe humble grass of unmeasured meadows, the heat\r\n \r\nOf their overseer sun. Forever Pisgah, never Patmos.\r\nNever the final revelation, the limited omega of days,\r\nNot even for the body, which was built to fail. No,\r\n\r\nWe look always for a further world, a habitation blessed\r\nWith expectation if nothing else, a tomorrow to scowl at\r\nIn our shawls, a new Jerusalem to build, kicking bricks.\r\n\r\nIs this illusion that tethers skeletons together? Hope\r\nAnswers to the expecting hand, another something\r\nFor which we endure the summit\u2019s lifted measure,\r\n\r\nIt\u2019s chill, real air livening us to the weather here, \r\nApple-beautiful or dull, wet of downtrodden days--\r\nPoet\u2019s leaves that hustle soft, the view poured before us.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nDOVES, TEARS, STARS
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nDoves, I say, are more than birds, a walking tear\r\nOf grey ululation, almost, a tribbled whistle\r\nSoft and full as evening\u2019s purple verities--\r\n\r\nIt is difficult even to think about these doves\r\nAs they dawdle, the grey tears going round,\r\nHow blue columbine entwines a waiting tree.\r\n\r\nIt is difficult, for all their grey reality, purple\r\nShadows as they sadly step beneath the trees\r\nWith evening rushing on, the sky the side\r\n\r\nOf a rainbow trout just about now, just this side\r\nOf twilight, a lingering that is so like the feeling\r\nOf doves, their force of wallow and wavering.\r\n\r\nHere the doves define the space of thought--\r\nTheir coo and coo again the only voice of thought,\r\nTragedy and patience welded into one.\r\n\r\nThe more than birds are more than thought\r\nAs night harnesses stars to circle with the doves,\r\nTheir dubbed troubling trill doubled by downed stars\r\n\r\nBringing a white quiddity of tears to the dance.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nENACT THE DAY
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nEnact the day\u2019s endearment, love\u2019s lament\r\nThat night is ending, that light must enter\r\nAnd engolden rock, gild the little miseries\r\n\r\nOf the leaves; they rehearse the lover\u2019s speech,\r\nRepeating goodnight goodnight as they shake\r\nIn chords of branches, voices of the invisible.\r\n\r\nAnd day entombs departing night, demanding\r\nDreams remain as fantasies, and the self\r\nArise as from a whisper into the shout of light\r\n\r\nThat reminds the mirror we are here today\r\nAnd not otherwise, not spirits speeding into wisdom\r\nCertainly, not whatever love had conjured, or\r\n\r\nNot only that, but faces and hands appearing\r\nDrained of sleep, empty of what night had meant\r\nTo us together. Enact the day\u2019s endearment,\r\n\r\nThe basin filling visible with drink, the house\r\nAround us sobering into home again, and birds\r\nSingularly singing awake awake to ears\r\n\r\nStill clouded with love\u2019s trifles, love\u2019s tub-thumping\r\nArousals announced in sweat and heat. Align\r\nInstead with light, and light\u2019s entreaties repeat.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nEIGHT DAYS A WEEK
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nThe moon leaps like kittens over your sleeping form;\r\nDaylight lingers, drawing sunset behind you as a dress;\r\nEquations of your eyes know Leonardo to the core.\r\n\r\nThe preference for fantasy is foolish, unfelt, when you\r\nAre living and here, moving ruefully around the room,\r\nTunefully tapping a toe, or skygazing a rapture of cloud.\r\n\r\nEven when you are away, you are here, a feature, a focus\r\nAnd not a fantasy, a pleasure green as hills, a full till\r\nThat makes the baker smile strolling home....\r\n\r\nIf figures of your configuration are needed, as the sea\r\nNeeds to overspill her boundaries and wet waiting feet,\r\nThen one seems to see at once what presence is,\r\n\r\nThat wild dialing-in of aliveness like a flowered vine\r\nElaborating a trellis with spontaneous calligraphy--\r\nYourself the generous source of light revealed.\r\n\r\nYou sleep beside me, seemingly content to dream,\r\nCastle and princess and dragon at once, brick and\r\nDelicate girl and glitter of danger at once, telling tales\r\n\r\nThat invent the romance between us, eight days a week.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nTHE OTHER WORLD
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nSo strange to stand beside that other underwater world \r\nAnd breathe, watching fish and jellyfish diaphanous\r\nSwish fringed as eyelashes in mid-air.\r\n\r\nNormal noises of our upper world recede here, crushed\r\nTo an amiable silence for ambling, a walk through\r\nAtmospheres of wet pressure at the ears.\r\n\r\nThe corridors are kept at a pleasant dimness, ourselves\r\nMoving looming as shadows through the cool,\r\nWatchers only of the sea\u2019s foothold before us:\r\n\r\nConch that crawl the coral with sensitive tread, sharks\r\nFlashing resentful, lamborghinis at a bumper car rink,\r\nClownfish chowing, at home among anemones.\r\n\r\nSoon enough, looking past the people in the reflection,\r\nWe are floating, each alone, in that other world,\r\nWith fins as functional extensions of ourselves....\r\n\r\nHere\u2019s the stasis of a pattern always moving, gears in\r\nGears finely fitted, stranger fish and friend fish,\r\nAnd gulp after gulp of liquid atmosphere.\r\n\r\nHow total and secure shadows of the coral interweave,\r\nBlack beneath such abrupt color, how a haptic sand\r\nIs everywhere below, waiting for feathery bones.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nSMOKE DOWN THE HIVE
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nSmoke the hive down calm,\r\nBeset the rivets of bees\r\nWith blessing smokes\r\nSo they will not see\r\n\r\nA world more chaos than caring:\r\nThat flowers are vats\r\nOf pheromonal distraction,\r\nThe queen a pitiless bee.\r\n\r\nSmoke down the hive, bee-men,\r\nBring peace and blindness,\r\nSmudge the spirit clear\r\nWith your vast veils\r\n\r\nSo the many will not see\r\nThe cloverfields of misery,\r\nThe wreck of the hexagons\r\nAnd theft of honey--\r\n\r\nOr how riotous flowers tease,\r\nTease\r\nAnd continue to tease\r\nWhen spring brings new bees.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nSWING AND SWIM
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nCamp Saranac laundered laurels in the air, a fete,\r\nIf fete there were these days, of summer supremacy,\r\nA green air to match the rollercoaster fields\r\n\r\nSo full of summer\u2019s sumptuous, endless grass\r\nSibilant out of night into the great of day; endless\r\nWere the laurels, dark-eyed above us, looking on\r\n\r\nUntil our cabin\u2019s grassy world was Eden, a den\r\nOf summer simmer where loose-limbed dreams\r\nCould swim, or ladder wet into late evening\u2019s sky,\r\n\r\nAs the sway of hammock demanded, dream-catcher\r\nAnd dreamer-catcher at once, unrolled when days\r\nBegan to blaze all those white weekends ago....\r\n\r\nCamp Saranac, to begin again, is where we spent\r\nOur summers among the deer and Adirondacks,\r\nForgetting all the toil that sprang us hence--\r\n\r\nHere we were the creatures nature had meant\r\nFor us to be, playful enough when the cool swept in\r\nLike a hand upon a lyre, and restful otherwise;\r\n\r\nIgnorant in the way of innocent things; wiped shining\r\nOf all the sin that made us, to return to Saranac again,\r\nTo swing and swim and sigh and try again.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nTHE ATHEIST\u2019S HAT
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nMay the good Lord look down and touch\r\nThe top of my head! So goes the atheist prayer.\r\nNot much to say, but rich in essence,\r\nIn strangeness and estrangement--\r\n\r\nThat power must bend its rainbow down\r\nTo being\u2019s insistence; power that pushes\r\nThe seasons\u2019 swing, and arranges every bird\r\nAlong the dipping branch.... Lord forgive\r\n\r\nMy flippancy; my disbeliever\u2019s zest, forgive.\r\nKnock off this atheist\u2019s hat! Unless\r\nHoly oil touch the top of my head,\r\nI\u2019ll stand here demanding year after year.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nTHE END OF THINGS
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nTo look at others and feel ourselves involved--\r\nIt\u2019s just a few feet from here to the end of things,\r\nThat place where the color goes out of the ocean,\r\n\r\nWhere squirrels no longer leap among the pines,\r\nAnd the triangle the scoutmaster rang for dinner\r\nIs always E flat, the little E at the end of the ear\r\n\r\nWhere the greatest fire dies down to a dry whisper,\r\nAnd silence, which had so long been wanted,\r\nOverwhelms the listener, a wave far above us.\r\n\r\nTo look at others and feel, that\u2019s the thing needed,\r\nThe thing wanted by desire, the sort of small grace\r\nThat balances a bicycle in motion, and keeps\r\n\r\nBalancing, all the way down the long pebbly hill....\r\nTo imagine another, more than oneself, to invent\r\nThe day into which their being blazes, the fire\r\n\r\nStarted, is to be involved, to partner in the mix\r\nOf things, endless things, the sourceless colors\r\nOf the ocean inundating, the waves wrinkling,\r\n\r\nThe whole moon rising up between two observers,\r\nThe face of a third companion amicably near,\r\nStanding between, a few feet from the end of things.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nTHE ULTIMATE SURVIVOR
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nLong had my odyssey sauntered without a ship,\r\nWithout a sea to be the being of its going forth,\r\nWithout a wind to fasten sail against, without Valhalla\r\n\r\nTo welcome home the warrior--so my journey,\r\nA de minimus meanderment, hither without a yon--\r\nTwice around the block, Jeeves, and spigot the champagne!\r\n\r\nI walked from the bookshelf to the window in snow,\r\nMy footsteps wet with heavy thought, long\r\nSentences from the books, endless view of the garden--\r\n\r\nHours I prowled among a magpie haul of memories,\r\nDark treasures like a half-remembered melody, or how\r\nA girl looked back when a few right words were said\r\n\r\nAnd evening seemed a sweet completion of its own,\r\nA firm fullness of her and I together, leaning the rail,\r\nFinding adventure enough at our elbows touching.\r\n\r\nAnd now the trouncing moonlight shined alone,\r\nA calm coin of almond light dusting the books--\r\nIs it Valhalla enough to have loved once unto death?\r\n\r\nTo have caught the dove mid-flight and cooed\r\nIn convincing sorrow together, shared credible laughter\r\nAcross a common table, turning the same page?\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nECCE, ECCE
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nDrafts that had been passionate peter out to phrases.\r\nI am simply tired, old, weak and worried. Ecce homo!\r\n\r\nThe craft that had answered a commanding hand\r\nDrifts with an iffy tide, the lag, the luff of winds\r\n\r\nInvisible to man. Ecce homo! My foothold is on ice,\r\nMy hand is spastic with weakness, the palm soft\r\n\r\nAs if it had never lived, never held the helm of life,\r\nHammer and hoist that built the howffy house.\r\n\r\nAs if the wife who lifted me had never stooped\r\nGleaming into my awful darkness, swiftening\r\n\r\nMy muddling mid-life upward, taming the appaloosa\r\nWho stood too long discontent in shaggy grass.\r\n\r\nStill too eager for the sun, my spider-plant self\r\nHas stretched into this miserable shape--\r\n\r\nUmbrellaed runners parachuting into other light--\r\nA mangle of phrases digressing to guesses.\r\n\r\nWeak and worried, I still see the crystal staircase.\r\nA staggerer on the steps, I mark a mauled ascent.\r\n\r\nWhat treasure I bring to the tryst that awaits is this:\r\nPhrases that had been passionate, scratched to drafts.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nTHE BULLFIGHTER\u2019S CAPE
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nWhat was summer, and now is leaving,\r\nThat crimson flash of a bullfighter\u2019s cape,\r\nOr close hypnosis of a magician\u2019s trick.\r\n\r\nIt was as if a great dancing of swords,\r\nAnd the words of swords, clish-clash,\r\nWas always and all-ways before his eyes--\r\n\r\nTrees that had been so full, a little less so,\r\nThe scooped blue of the sky shallower,\r\nEasy grass more rested against than growing.\r\n\r\nThese were the familiar illusions of the cape,\r\nThe marked downward of its slash,\r\nThe descent before the bull\u2019s black nose\r\n\r\nThat the bull followed and followed,\r\nSparing the sparkling matador, his horns\r\nStill thinking it was red summer come\r\n\r\nAnd not this deceptive flash of light,\r\nThis shadow personification of heat,\r\nCurves that kept calling him forth, a beast\r\n\r\nWhose will was still wild for summer.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nTHE PRESSURE OF AIR MOVING
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nWhatever those finical French airs\r\n~~Wm. York Tindall\r\n<\/em>\r\n\r\nWhatever those finical French airs,\r\nOne feels the pressure of air moving,\r\nAnd of life moving fast--oh, fast!--\r\nWhatever those French, finical airs.\r\n\r\nIf a man lives fancy in his cedar-shake\r\nRetreat, taking-in the pine-laden air\r\nAt the lake, finding Hopatcong enough,\r\nHe feels the pressure of air moving--\r\n\r\nAnd, himself within himself, moving too,\r\nA reliable and relatable being,\r\nNot too French, if it came to that,\r\nBut still with a finical air enough.\r\n\r\nIt is the choosing that is the movement\r\nThat matters, the several swerves\r\nOf the canoe by the shore, inhaling\r\nThe final pine, the final air one enters\r\n\r\nToo willfully to regret.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nTHE SPIDER ENGRAVER
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nA release of cobwebs around the conceit--\r\nA viewpoint that evokes the enshadowed man,\r\nThe stayer-behind at the party, is released.\r\n\r\nThe sleepy precincts of day begin again.\r\nYesterday is a dusty place today must cherish\r\nOr confuse; yesterday\u2019s weaver must rehearse\r\n\r\nTonight\u2019s ombr\u00e9 encore, the prismatic flounce\r\nOf peacock sunset must be rehearsed, as day\r\nMust invent the ivory roadways of its way....\r\n\r\nThe chaos we endure comes at such a pace\r\nThe habits we placate into habitat are taxed;\r\nMore and more, we reel within a random loom--\r\n\r\nWe accept the suggested dips of wave and\r\nEarthquake, hear the pastor\u2019s misspellings clearly,\r\nYet pray away anyway, and trust the way will stay.\r\n\r\nThe cobwebs we had pushed aside at dawn\r\nAdopt a mood of concrete in retrospect,\r\nA certainty of structure, of place, a help\r\n\r\nWe must ask for again and again in chaos,\r\nEntreating the beneficent spider into our corners,\r\nWaking one day in wonder to all she has engraved.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nNOISES OFF
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nThe world happens elsewhere, is lightning unseen\r\nDeceived into thunder; even our children are strangers,\r\nWhose electric selves are rumor only, however loud--\r\n\r\nIt is a theme for playwrights, placing people like candlesticks\r\nAbout the demented scenery, these sounds abounding\r\nAnd rumor of sounds, noises near enough to hear.\r\n\r\nBeyond the proscenium, faces and darkness\u2026\r\nBeyond the scene and setting in which we move\r\nAs fish inhabit an aquarium...a tapping of midnight glass...\r\n\r\nNo more than that. Noises off, as the playwright\r\nIndicates. Swainful singing for Lorelei, the timid flick\r\nOf a dagger indicating death, the wounded man\r\n\r\nStaggering red through French doors, his cape dragging....\r\nSoon enough we are strangers to ourselves,\r\nPrivate journals are postcards from another planet,\r\n\r\nExcited noises only, something to rewind, a texture\r\nThat had been our being, silk held close against the face,\r\nA life as real as sounds arriving from the invisible--\r\n\r\nParticipants who set the candlesticks, lit the candles,\r\nShuffle off, footsteps clear as a seashell\u2019s echo,\r\nThe sound of one\u2019s own heart in our ears.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nUNTIL GREENNESS BLINDED
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nThere is a terrible tearing apart of people and things,\r\nA sledgehammer G\u00f6tterd\u00e4mmering beyond the trees,\r\nA misplacement of spring, feathers of spring things.\r\n\r\nThe bits of birds are bald and bare as the branch\r\nOn which they sit, stitching their listing lament,\r\nTheir broken-toothed song of missing spring.\r\n\r\nThe gnashing beyond the trees, intense as it is,\r\nNever gets any nearer, any grimmer, but gnashes\r\nContinually as the sea, if sea were rocks and ricochet.\r\n\r\nThere are those who go over the hill and don\u2019t come back,\r\nThe ones who are torn apart, part of the debris\r\nOf spring--so late-arriving, so partial and partisan.\r\n\r\nOther springs had been an addition, leaf on leaf\r\nUntil greenness blinded; that had been our spring,\r\nOur Rumspringa, adding good times until we flowed.\r\n\r\nBut now there is this continually, this war over the hill,\r\nThe terrible news that spreads like black fire\r\nUntil grass leaves spatter ashes on your shoes....\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nCATCHING THE DEAD AT REDONDO BEACH
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nThere was the dim welcome I had not expected,\r\nNot stars, not the crushed wash of ocean going,\r\nA few voices in the dark saying \u2018Hey,\u2019 and leaning\r\n\r\nOut of our stepping. The scaffold of stage was too\r\nFar away to see more than light, hear more\r\nThan orange tones disturbing dusts of listeners,\r\n\r\nPassengers seated on their flying beach blankets.\r\nWe settle like restless feathers ready to drift--\r\nTonight\u2019s a fine place to get lost in, we decide,\r\n\r\nAnd time unwinds in mighty winds...spectral lines\r\nForm ocean waves like a sleepy sketch on our left,\r\nClosing our eyes feels like taking strange communion.\r\n\r\nSomething living sifted in with the lonely chords\r\nAnd everyone humming together like a low UFO until\r\nThe beach was a dark wish on fire, coals going rose....\r\n\r\nOur sound loosening, loudening, was the ocean rolling,\r\nWas the band\u2019s handsome magic drumming wild,\r\nA hundred thousand feet dancing the limitless sand.\r\n\r\nAnd when that wildness rested, still we heard the voices,\r\nFriendly hollow bones we knew were our bones too,\r\nClacking happily forever, \u2018Fare thee well now\u2026.\u2019\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nCARPATHIAN CABIN
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nA cabin at the end of time, made of slaughtered wood.\r\nA wood stood up like moss magnified, made of damp\r\nAnd plaster. The door sounded sore when I entered her.\r\n\r\nA more of silence welled among raw-wood furnishings,\r\nA quelled tone as of after a brass horn is sounded loud,\r\nAfter the army\u2019s departed, and only the dead remain.\r\n\r\nSurely something must happen, and happen soon,\r\nAs silly curtains blew whitely inwards, and light outside\r\nBlossomed and stopped in blots, odd blotches\r\n\r\nThat kept the rural scene swept in weird suspense.\r\nSurely something immense was at hand, surely the cabin\r\nWas made to be manger to the moment arriving--\r\n\r\nI arranged the fireplace and let it burn to beat the damp.\r\nI found the foods last season had left behind in cans.\r\nI leaned in several chairs and filled the astray grey.\r\n\r\nSinging birds outside took time in temperate stride,\r\nAnd I listened as their stridulations strayed, breaking\r\nAll about my head like wings of lively fire, lively fifes.\r\n\r\nI put my veteran\u2019s boots up on the kitchen table, smoked\r\nAnother down to filter, let bits of birdsong be my words,\r\nLet singing woods be wife enough, letting greenness in.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nMOSES\u2019 HORNS
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nHis face had seen God\u2019s face, awful with brawny light, \r\nBraids of terrible light shot from Moses\u2019 red head, \r\nHard words God had lightning\u2019d down in stone \r\nCarving the horns of the patriarch, the fearful leader\r\n\r\nOf so many wanderers, lights that kept their fear alive, \r\nGreat fear that kept the people on their path-- \r\nFearsome and taut are the words God wrought, \r\nInnocence sheltered, misdeeds denied aid and air.\r\n\r\nIt was certainty in the spirit that held Moses straight, \r\nKept the light benignant breaking from his face, \r\nHeld others, seeing themselves within themselves,\r\n\r\nAnimal-men no longer, but children of Israel, \r\nWords of stone spurring their desert steps, \r\nHorn-bright light read clear in Moses\u2019 bone face.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nSEABIRD
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nSeabird, seabird, fly ho-o-ome\r\n~~Alessi Bros.<\/em>\r\n\r\nStars magnetized to whatever\u2019s domed above,\r\nWe listen in the dark of ourselves to the sound\r\nOf the mellow old hippie song redounding round\r\n\r\nFrom the house\u2019s speakers, AI-awake as they are\r\nIn every corner. The song lifts a flight of desire,\r\nAsking for homewardness, for return of lost love\r\n\r\nGone exploring so far from shore, so fast away\r\nFrom its seaside nest, the bird that bid farewell\r\nSitting in the nest\u2019s sticks, a stick itself stuck waiting.\r\n\r\nAnd this sad song gives us a cheerful tear, for we\r\nAre here and together under the stippled dome\r\nNoticing its endless shift of silvers, as if rivers\r\n\r\nFlew black above us, and stars were lit insects\r\nOn their surface. You\u2019ve been away from land \r\nToo lo-o-ong,<\/em> rings around the rooms reminding\r\n\r\nUs of our stillness, our luck to have been plucked,\r\nHowever wearily, to here, a space that shares\r\nOur together dark, and the guitar rasping low,\r\n\r\nAnd the singer calling out to sea, urging against\r\nAll the sea\u2019s stressed width, for his seabird girl\r\nTo see the stars at home as newly known again.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nDOING LAUNDRY
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nWash, too retentive pretense of identity, wash away!\r\nScramble my clothes like a clearance rack and be\r\nThat which hangs nearest to hand, blazer or polo;\r\n\r\nHawaiian; faded print from a concert dimly recalled.\r\nWhich of these will bear my aspect toward eternity?\r\nHow shall I walk beside Emily when the carriage\r\n\r\nKindly comes, kindly stops? I am a blade of grass\r\nAt dawn, heavily, heavily weighed with dew, until eyes\r\nSwim in possibility, the day before us is so great--\r\n\r\nOld grass must endure the day, wear old sun in nakedness,\r\nBefore new dew comes again, fresh tears each night\r\nTo please the grieving soul that knows no home,\r\n\r\nNo costume, however rare, no tie to hang at neck,\r\nNo collar to crisp for presentation when sunset hits.\r\nThe laundry piles around my feet, skins of self,\r\n\r\nOld turtle shells from yesterday, so many outfits\r\nTouring the garden. Scented detergent blows around\r\nLike rainbow sands of time, dissolving self and sin.\r\n\r\nStanding, dabbing stubborn stains with pre-wash, \r\nI only own green scuffs to scrub, frayed sleeve-ends \r\nTo martinize, worried dew-buttons to reattach.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nFIND A RIVER
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\n...that\u2019s what Rose figured--that maybe she\u2019d row until she found a river.\r\n~~Martha Grimes, Hotel Paradise<\/em>\r\n\r\nThe still, the livid hour, when sky runs down in ruin\r\nTo the river which collects it, the O\u2019Keffe hour,\r\nWhen silvers fall and involve themselves with water,\r\n\r\nAnd water thickens to moving roils of rope, pewters\r\nAs at the edge of the eye, an involving color\r\nThe eye could not quite let go of, nor could clouds,\r\n\r\nNor could the mysteriously moving river below.\r\nLovely, if there was a word for it, or livid-live\r\nIf there wasn\u2019t. She stood barefoot there, cool\r\n\r\nAs the wet grass on which she stood, observing\r\nThe pleasing manynesses of this river, void\r\nAnd not-void as it seemed to swell and flow\r\n\r\nCreating a yellow direction like the sun could do,\r\nSometimes, sometimes a bluish pull overboard where\r\nThe wetness, the coolness would be everything....\r\n\r\nShe stood there, barely moving, her dress a wrap\r\nOf tinsel threads, no more than that, a shred\r\nThat held her as a shawl might hold a widow\u2019s hair.\r\n\r\nShe bent to the river then in lovely lividness,\r\nAnd her hands settled in water like birds alighting,\r\nLike birds alighting to rest, no more than that.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nABRUPTLY LOVE
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nAbruptly love is growing old and grey.\r\nYesterdays are shared like cherries in a bowl\r\nMounding to a surmounting roundness--\r\n\r\nFlesh puddles, and love\u2019s grip is lessened.\r\nTeen wildfire has matured to married sunset\r\nWatched as an arriving cruise ship is watched--\r\n\r\nAutumns return with the rhythm of a drum.\r\nThe colors are an astonishing commentary\r\nOn the leaves\u2019 death, the loss of chlorophyll--\r\n\r\nTogether the books are kept orderly upright.\r\nWindows look in like backlit slideshows\r\nWhere we had been most colorful participants--\r\n\r\nEvenings are thrown on the crowning fire.\r\nThe fireplace emblazons faces into scrimshaw\r\nEtches as full of lines as light--\r\n\r\nWe sit together and run out of popcorn.\r\nOur hands meet in the empty bowl we\u2019ve brought.\r\nWe continue eating cherries among the embers.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nHALF A SLICE OF ANGEL PIE
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nIt is good to drink in the earliest hour of daylight,\r\nTo be drunk as the rooster who wrung you awake,\r\nCock-eyed as the little mountains where dawn sashays.\r\n\r\nDreams that swam toward you all night are drowned;\r\nDreams of love\u2019s empire, love\u2019s conquest, love lost\r\nAs the castle\u2019s weak crenelations were overborne--\r\n\r\nDreams kicked politely to death by a Moscow Mule.\r\nStill, dreams linger in odd survivals, surreal details,\r\nFragments deceptively lighting the edges of things.\r\n\r\nCoffee\u2019s best Irished, you find; one loves what\u2019s\r\nFinely ground. The calendar\u2019s stuck on the fridge\r\nLike a friendly suggestion, squares of scrabble.\r\n\r\nThe clock unstoppers tequila thumb after thumb\r\nAs the unpacked sun bristles white cactus spikes--\r\nThere\u2019s an edge to this era of early, first minutes.\r\n\r\nSpain seems not so far beyond the ocean, and\r\nHats look like they\u2019re laughing on their little hooks.\r\nDove-lovely is the light as it passes through new lager,\r\n\r\nFrost of the freezer stubbling the harsh glass,\r\nThe light fluttering as if winged, another dove\r\nGoing round in the green yard, no longer nestling.\r\n\r\nFinally, one cracks open a Schlitz, riots around\r\nBehind the butter dish, the creamer, finds that one\r\nCold leftover half-slice of angel pie sitting there.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nSELF-STORAGE
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nThe lock clocks me like an eye going sideways.\r\nIt hangs by its steel hair from a loop in the door.\r\nI wait for myself behind the aluminum noise of its rising.\r\n\r\nA raft of untossable gifts, filed and piled, there,\r\nFirst thing on the left. I kick a sack of seasonal coats\r\nI had come here to recover before the cold increases.\r\n\r\nMy eye moves like a warden over my lost belongings.\r\nEscaped side-tables hold last year\u2019s curtains folded,\r\nA box of high school talking trophies, and a framed\r\n\r\nFamily I came of age within, its frilled gilding \r\nLike a warm warning in the space\u2019s dusky light....\r\nI wade farther back among the lifer inmates--\r\n\r\nThere\u2019s Christmas \u201977, the rusted sled blades embedded\r\nIn a huff of down comforters, the iced hill still real\r\nIn my mind, racing a million miles an hour screaming.\r\n\r\nI hover over a folded-in box of baptismal things:\r\nA spoon with my name in fancy engraving, \r\nThe little dress that clothed a soul.\r\n\r\nWho had I been when beginning was? \r\n\r\nA stranger\u2019s dolly trundles rumbly at my back, \r\nLaden with new stuff for storage. I pack up \r\nMy winter sack, slam the door, hear the lock click.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nSCRIMSHAW DICK
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nScrimshaw Dick sat with his alabaster tooth at the bait shop\r\nAll day every day, spitting and whittling beside the door\r\nWith its shiny sing-song ringing bell above him.\r\n\r\nHe was done with mermaids, he\u2019d tell you, squinting hard,\r\nPunctuating his point with his trim knife--no more\r\nThemes of the sea; narwhals nor whales, no sir.\r\n\r\nLet the sea keep its seaweed and secrets to itself. Let\r\nJonah go down and shake hands with Davy Jones,\r\nStart a band in an octopus\u2019 garden, for all he cared.\r\n\r\nScrimshaw Dick went on in that vein, picking at his tooth\r\nWith the knife, adding a charming sine-wave line\r\nOr obscure dark detail too small to see....\r\n\r\nHis boat had gone down with the foreign competition,\r\nHis mortgage as full of holes as a rusted wreck,\r\nSailing only in scrimshaw now, her brave prow\r\n\r\nSurmounting the table of exquisite carvings surrounding,\r\nDepictions of nets where you could count the threads,\r\nAnd carven spray chasing the fish fresh as salt tears....\r\n\r\nHe finished his latest and grinned with crooked mischief,\r\nSetting his masterpiece among the throng of others,\r\nA \u201957 Chevy cresting white desert, spitting earth.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nTHE BENDING SKY
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nHills that grew like stubble were shaved with light,\r\nThe arches of the world marching unending\r\nTo keep the bending sky upheld--\r\n\r\nIt is a sense only, of things falling down, that must\r\nBe resisted, just enough disallowed, just\r\nAs these hills keep the sky upheld,\r\n\r\nNot its blue, not its sense of its own magnificence\r\nWhere blue deepens to purple\u2019s shadow, to\r\nA transparence where the mountain was.\r\n\r\nIf the sky must be upheld, it is because we are\r\nDwell under it, because we cannot imagine \r\nThe sky and not ourselves beneath\r\n\r\nStanding every day like stubble hills, just enough,\r\nJust enough of the day\u2019s weight upraised,\r\nLike bears who\u2019ve learned to dance--\r\n\r\nWe stumble beneath magnificence falling everywhere,\r\nGrandiose skies shaved from ice, that blue\r\nThat never stays, yet returns from black\r\n\r\nWhen we return to view it, when the hills wake up\r\nWearing our shoulders, as little and they are,\r\nSo minor and bending and just enough.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nMY COFFEE FILTER\u2019S FILLED WITH GLITTER
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nIs it still important to wrestle ourselves out of sleep?\r\nSomewhere between cooked food and chaos it comes,\r\nThe question that keep us somnolent in the sack.\r\n\r\nMorning\u2019s ache waits like a minefield beyond the wire,\r\nThe terrible tremble in the car radio\u2019s treble, let\u2019s say,\r\nWaiting to sing new misery, old mystery, etcetera.\r\n\r\nAnd doves are a part of it, sleepy doves of dream\r\nOpening wings of ecstasy all night, flutter-busy, grey\r\nAs maybe is grey, the fifty-fifty space of each dream.\r\n\r\nWho wouldn\u2019t want to stay among such doves all day?\r\nDoves which had placated night\u2019s distress, night\u2019s\r\nWickedness, dreaming\u2019s thunderous piano out of tune.\r\n\r\nThe light is square, aggressive in the open window.\r\nLight\u2019s dryness falls across the bedspread like sand,\r\nInfinite sand falling, finally, on the cymbal of consciousness....\r\n\r\nI step into my slippers, and they find the kitchen tiles,\r\nLittle stylized sunbursts, while hands like doves fly out\r\nTo the cold engine of the coffee machine, doves\r\n\r\nLanding on a hard wire, a line of ice, their feet frozen.\r\nThey pull the old handle of the machine in deep sun,\r\nExpose again yesterday\u2019s coffee filter filled with glitter.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nTHE FIRE-TENDER\u2019S PLEA
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nThe chill of evening we are left with is ourselves.\r\nThe stars, that lend no heat, are fires of ourselves,\r\nGrown too cold or distant to touch us again,\r\n\r\nTo be the pleated heat of a campfire in August woods,\r\nThe fire-shapes thrown into the canopy, the talk\r\nWalking around the firemen, making them real.\r\n\r\nShapes of the hunt, once, shapes of playing day\r\nFlickering overhead, constellations, or from\r\nRemains of the campfire carefully kept bright--\r\n\r\nNight\u2019s fire is held alive in the mouths of them\r\nWho maintain the sinner\u2019s embers, the saint\u2019s\r\nIntermittent radiance.... The night is chill; at last,\r\n\r\nThe fire dies from where the lightning left it,\r\nAnd eyes alone must carry the changing hues:\r\nOrange, and dusk-orange, and holy rose.\r\n\r\nEverything we look upon is alight within us.\r\nThe prison arc of diamond-blue sky becomes\r\nA trim thrum of jump-rope humming above.\r\n\r\nAnd night, when we are together, and carefully\r\nAttendant to its darks, is not wholly midnight,\r\nNot wholly torn from us in dead-end shreds--\r\n\r\nThe fire\u2019s edges live alive in our exchange of eyes.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nPARTS OF A MOBILE
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nA wideawake cat has Minoan eyes, I\u2019m noticing,\r\nAlone among the sacred precincts of the house\r\nFor fall classes, Jenny\u2019s race and rush, swing away\r\n\r\nAmong the high-pitched gush of childish voices\r\nAnd crowded halls, grey and purple, of the school.\r\nOur house has a hollow roundness without her,\r\n\r\nAs though my head were inside a flush squishmallow--\r\nA whiteness of September days, cool nothingness\r\nAnd the willful wind starting to pick up pieces\r\n\r\nOf the loosened world, to rattle them around outside\r\nIn fragile beguilement.... Leaves still too-attached\r\nAt the stem, too green to listen to such winds....\r\n\r\nClothes closets are quiet in her absence, and laughter\r\nFinds no echoing tone, no other chuckle, however faint;\r\nNo chair scrapes, but my hand is at its back.\r\n\r\nAfternoon views move with grooveless slowness;\r\nThings happen that no witness was born to see;\r\nOdd winds abruptly hurry the slats of windowshades--\r\n\r\nAnd I find myself swung outward, at apogee chatting\r\nHalf-expectantly at the cat, her eyes smiling, or, no,\r\nBut deeply indulgent of my going on with nothing.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nTHE EXISTENTENTIALIST\u2019S BEACH
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nStepping back; back, back, back. Back before\r\nThe world\u2019s womb, almost. Back before today\u2019s air\r\nWas woven into this shapeless blue, this etude\r\n\r\nOf an afternoon, lax sun flaxen gold, that summery\r\nHum of time breaking into hymn, close song\r\nOf oceanic babblement, close crisis of breaking\r\n\r\nSounds, a matching march of millions of feet,\r\nCrisp risp-risp of vessels shelving the pebbled shore,\r\nA sound like that in a blue like this, woven close.\r\n\r\nIf ever an existentialist beach brazened forth, this\r\nWas one, the railings reiterated crosses, white;\r\nThe summer people plentiful was Seurat\u2019s dots;\r\n\r\nThe cleaving line of the sea giving its green meaning;\r\nA pasteboard town behind, profound with shadow;\r\nThe self all eye, rolling the long boardwalk....\r\n\r\nBack before this chaos now, this minuet minute,\r\nGrew the raw staves of new grass, fresh leaf cut\r\nInto ruby air, a dawn before, a start, a first verdure\r\n\r\nOf before. Then it was I walked the rocks barefoot,\r\nTried my baby luck at the end of the pier, a dance perhaps\r\nWith you rolling along on your own unknown.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nTHE EMINENCE OF IMMANENCE
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nIf one does not wish to invest in falsities, wrongs\r\nUntimely ripped, shades of havens past that never\r\nSheltered, ghoulish nests that tipped out the egg,\r\n\r\nOne must live in doubt of senses\u2019 presentment,\r\nProngs that impinge--leaves of every tree must\r\nMist to ifs that may never fall, may never\r\nFully flourish or greenly limn the legendary tree.\r\n\r\nYet, this too much caution, too much doubt, grims\r\nInnocent smiles to pouts, removes our friendly sun\r\nTo realms beyond its warm of welcome love.\r\n\r\nBut, to take the touch of things, yet know a self\r\nRemains beyond life\u2019s ivy-overed inveiglement,\r\nA revetment of meaning within the witness,\r\nA strength that upholds the dome of all, unknown\r\n\r\nPerhaps, but a source itself, a whole, a truth\r\nThat only truth finally can touch, a real in images \r\nBeneath their seeming.... Trust is the center\r\n\r\nDefined by periphery; it is the solid air that fingers\r\nFiligreed heaven. Trust\u2019s the soul that sings at larkspur, \r\nThe nameless gift felt present as sunset drifts in, \r\nAs day shuts down to downy dreaming again.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nTHE CONFERENCE OF BOOKS
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nThere will be time, there will be time \r\nTo prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;\r\n~~T.S. Eliot<\/em>\r\n\r\nThe books held a conference against their authors.\r\nHere\u2019s how it went: You evade us in our spiny array.\r\nCowards full of words with inky fingers, confess\r\n\r\nYour children are written just to send them away,\r\nTo expel each dream by reciting it with careful pen,\r\nAnd forgetting the ghost that was your whole soul.\r\n\r\nAdmit it! Demanded the dustiest tome, yellow\r\nIn its Longfellow robes, its pages pursed and pressed\r\nAnd speaking in dusty tones, old words left out\r\n\r\nIn the rain and forgotten, too forgotten for trash,\r\nLeft unattended on the shelf. We\u2019ve rolled so long\r\nOur unbroken song...It is those who stay behind\r\n\r\nWho suffer. Other books riffed in agreement,\r\nTroubling the \"Harvard shelf,\" setting a quick wind\r\nAround the room, pages miffed, rumors and rages\r\n\r\nOf more words ignored, that had been edited\r\nAnd placed, engraved with such wanting grace,\r\nSuch expansive prints and tailored paper....\r\n\r\nThe milled books leaned deep to hear clear reply,\r\nScowling white eyebrows where they were stitched.\r\nBut the authors were dead. What\u2019s said was said.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nAVAILABLE LIGHT
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nIlllit fraillight \r\nFit to the bodies of jellyfish;\r\n\r\nDepth of a soundless bell\r\nWhere coral colors congeal,\r\nJunking the darkness--\r\n\r\nSunken clocks, drowned windows\r\nSubmerged with myself;\r\nThe house spectral, incomplete.\r\n\r\nOur night ocean holds\r\nOnly lingering illuminations,\r\nSmall glows, bulbs\r\n\r\nIn the black,\r\nIn the mysterious blackness.\r\n\r\nYou sleep in moon-tides,\r\nMove like the memory of a stranger\r\nLong ago walked off....\r\n\r\nOnly this darkness abides, \r\nMystic and infinite.\r\nIs it dreaming?\r\n\r\nSomething not quite real\r\nVeils available light.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nSWIMMING IN A RAINSTORM
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nSwift limitless frettings of little drops, sheer rain\r\nMoving its universal walls across the landscape,\r\nInundating Aberdeen with a force of falling rivers--\r\n\r\nThere is not light enough to acknowledge the drops\r\nAs they give their beings to the ground, to faces\r\nUpturned to be battered by the invisible gift.\r\n\r\nThere is only this sense of purposeful flood, long\r\nTresses hanging over one in bed, black, or\r\nBlinding, they take away one\u2019s breath\r\n\r\nAlong with everything else. The house is a drum\r\nRumbling mantras, the slick windows tympans\r\nWhere they are shut to resist, black wind\r\n\r\nWhere they are open, black and full of an icy rage\r\nThat syllables the self from sleep, demands\r\nA walk among the gutters, untied boots full\r\n\r\nOf the same ice collected, the chest beaten\r\nUntil breath is feathered, and one breaststrokes\r\nThrough the molten rain, the design of rain\r\n\r\nAnd song of self becoming one slippage together,\r\nA kind of icy, mercuric gravel one wades within--\r\nNever, never quite, touching the bottom of the river.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nTHE WALK AWAY FROM GOD
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nSteps are repetitive, but this\r\nIs an escape, a flight away--\r\nAt least at first it is.\r\n\r\nLater, one\u2019s feet fall again\r\nInto the pattern predestined,\r\nThe slog to Mt. Sinai.\r\n\r\nOne refreshes oneself\r\nWith various, purple-toned\r\nOases along the way,\r\n\r\nA crisscross of palms,\r\nThe florid look of an ostrich,\r\nIts strut assured as your own....\r\n\r\nFinally, one comes to the plateau,\r\nThe crack in its base,\r\nIts eccentric black split\r\n\r\nDemanding neither\r\nAdherence not accession; the plateau\r\nLifts its strangeness.\r\n\r\nDoves follow after.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nA RETURN TO DOVES II
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nLet this day\u2019s given grace suffice.\r\nLet mourning doves echo low\r\nThe graven grey of louring clouds.\r\n\r\nThe house that was refuge remains\r\nUpright, rafter and drafty basement\r\nFull of echo and coo as always.\r\n\r\nDoves huddle blue on the patio.\r\nDoves come down among us now\r\nFrom fine constellations, fine evening,\r\n\r\nTo make a measure of morning soft\r\nWith voices, echoes here of stars there,\r\nA low-burning light granted voice--\r\n\r\nNight had shaken dim the house \r\nWith rain, old ghosts where old wood\r\nJoined, echoes of aches and fear.\r\n\r\nWe return to day\u2019s differing greys,\r\nMoving through low clouds of doves.\r\nDoves everywhere having their say.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nTHE VIRGIN AND THE UNICORN
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nAs my tongue catches fire, my eyes grow sleepy \r\nAnd wise--the story you are about to hear \r\nIs one you\u2019ve heard before: innocence luring \r\nAdoration, the Virgin and the Unicorn.\r\n\r\nInnocence, yes, flesh unpatterned by experience, \r\nPink prettiness, gowned like an infant, grown \r\nKnowable by time, by long walks in interminable \r\nWoods, moods of those woods: shadows of wings\r\n\r\nAbove and softness below, as of fallen wings, \r\nFeathers left behind from flights among \r\nThe bending branches of windswept pines,\r\nEvergreens ever-ready for the Virgin\u2019s foot,\r\n\r\nThe Unicorn\u2019s horn. And so the story begun\r\nIs the story told, her gown upon the needles green,\r\nInnocence demure behind a kerchief pink, and\r\nOne Unicorn gored in a mesh of flashing blades.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nPEARL BUTTONS
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nGaudiest dews bedeck\r\nThe simple scene: a backyard \r\nFence, and uneven greens....\r\n\r\nA sudden wind in a wet tree,\r\nA subtle tussle in the hickory\r\nWhere blackbirds perch.\r\n\r\nThe dews\u2019 abrasions\r\nShook buttons to dull unshine,\r\nTragic wreck and wrack.\r\n\r\nElusive blues, periwinkle hues,\r\nOvertake a scrub bush by the path,\r\nSoftening my step.\r\n\r\nAll night I adjust the firepit\r\nUntil smoke clears; a diffident touch\r\nOf chimney soot--\r\n\r\nSmall snow assigned to air,\r\nUnintended on my fingertip, new dew,\r\nMelts, hurrying the day.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nNOTICING YOUR ODOR
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nTo know myself, I must be said\r\nA pitch above the natural timbre,\r\nA stench in the vowels, a finial\r\nAt the peak of speech, ivy finery\r\nOr piratical curse, superlatives\r\nImposed upon the norm, the nominal,\r\nThe everyday walk of talk.\r\n\r\nSee how seeing is a fearful squint,\r\nIf anything, a looking spooked\r\nInto looking-out, the soldier\u2019s sweat\r\nWhen being shot at in a wood\r\nSnake-awake against his being there--\r\nHis intrusion in the bush, slick\r\nBreaststroke through lush, lashed grass.\r\n\r\nEssence is insistence, a craft\r\nOf assembling grand from bland, \r\nHammering until white mind perspires \r\nBlank: a wrestler\u2019s mat for pirouettes\r\nAnd plaints unheard of in the past--\r\nUntil some reeking, God-squatted\r\nSyllable-animal cries \"I\u2019m flying,\"\r\n\r\nIn a confection of confession\r\nThat confers your you.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nPOST-DILUVIAN MOVES
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nReality imposes, and we fail to resist.\r\nWe live under a wave of impressions of things,\r\nA pressure of blue-abiding, particular things.\r\n\r\nThe afternoon of the fourth, for instance,\r\nWhen the sky was pellucid blue, and not a scare\r\nOf whale-sides floating there, blatant blue,\r\n\r\nA too-blue blue for the mind to know what to do--\r\nThat fourth, so soft, so sorry, so almost absent,\r\nLet a man walk enough through its veiling blue\r\n\r\nSo the shift of clouds, like cloths, took his shape,\r\nAnd he walked among them, Paul Bunyan of blue,\r\nA giant in the landscape looking down.\r\n\r\nThe mountain at his feet became a fragment\r\nOf himself, bones of a dinosaur and anterior self,\r\nA shell he had discarded before ascending\r\n\r\nTo where he had always meant to be, a dove\r\nMoving through rumors of blue, essential protagonist\r\nOf myth-enveloping heaven, a bird above\r\n\r\nScouring the downward world that had been his nest\r\nFor the green sprig Spring as he had named it,\r\nA laurel for his fellow passengers to look at and see.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nBEER HERE NOW
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nA premise is a stiff glass we fill and drink, a sprink\r\nOf champagne or the like, some heady beverage\r\nThat quicks the sallow annals of our days--\r\n\r\nE.g.: imagine your world a cartoon, newly ballooned\r\nWith every blink, every swing of your head, every think\r\nThat thinks there is no you between blinks;\r\n\r\nOr sink in Existential angst; despondent, think \r\nHow accidental cosmos flips chess to tiddlywinks....\r\nThese heady premises defoam and deform the norm,\r\n\r\nThe wheatful, wholesome beer of now, its good brown\r\nBody that bears imbibers aloft with lift enough, sans\r\nPhilosophy\u2019s debauch, baronial swigs for haughty royals.\r\n\r\nLook around the bar as you are, the glancing faces,\r\nTwinned feet along the brass rail, throats chuckle-full \r\nOf jokes, and wise eyes tipped with laughter at it all.\r\n\r\nHere\u2019s a heaven no Veuve Clicquot can match.\r\nOh, no, it is the common lot and the common club--\r\nBrothers of the suds toasting \"Goodwill toward all,\"\r\n\r\nOr \"Beer Here Now,\" as a plaque at the back suggests. \r\nPremise enough, and heaven enough, for fellowship\r\nWith our fluffy crowns of good brown now in hand.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nA HASTENING WAVE
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nThrough the valleys of the buildings,\r\nPurple-enshadowed, tall,\r\nAn ebony wave is hastening.\r\n\r\nNo escape is possible--not behind\r\nThin windows, nor hasty barricades\r\nOf flickering streetlamps raised.\r\n\r\nThe wave is hastening like a whistle\r\nThat cannot he unheard\r\nThrough the valleys and the shadows.\r\n\r\nThe doves have heard this call before\r\nIn their spacious alcoves\r\nAbove the pattern of the powerlines--\r\n\r\nThe purple buildings lean in to hear,\r\nWindows taut as eardrums,\r\nShadows bent to the filling valley.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nTHE FIRE AT THE OTHER END OF THE WOOD
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nThe autumn walk is lovely, cool beneath these\r\nFirmly fluttering, endless colonnades of trees....\r\nLast year\u2019s leaves lay quiet on the ground\r\n\r\nAnd this year\u2019s hover in untroubled green above,\r\nFull of peaceful advice.... The strengthening noise\r\nIs like a rain that skirts the edge of a meadow\r\n\r\nWhose flowers are still fleets of suns turned up.\r\nVoices are not discerned in the ravelling sound,\r\nBold as boots on gravel if one paused to hear....\r\n\r\nOne\u2019s thoughts are louder than anything else--\r\nA continual washing of thought, where each thought\r\nConfirms the shush and pressure of the last....\r\n\r\nThe autumn walk is lovely where one is, cool\r\nBeneath unaffected green, as the bending wind\r\nHassles a collar, begins to sting the corner of one eye.\r\n\r\nNow there is a conversation clearly near.... Raised\r\nVoices just out of sight... and the least, red scent\r\nOf a mighty fire at the other end of the wood.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nTHE COST OF POLITICS
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nEach lost friendship is a vision singed and sunk,\r\nA history of handshakes betrayed, a lily tilled under.\r\n\r\nTrees galloping in crooking winds seem rampant;\r\nGreen lions shaking leafy manes full of roars\r\n\r\nLie shattered, stripped when winter finds her fangs,\r\nAnd only lonely roots remain, black and buried.\r\n\r\nSo what of me survives after you had departed?\r\nWhat instinct kept sap, what honeyed treasure\r\n\r\nGlimmered between ribs of the wreck, soul alone\r\nBeneath this grey tatterment of waves?\r\n\r\nI ask the burled roots of sycamores surrounding,\r\nScratching spam notes on bits of their windy skin.\r\n\r\nI listen to the winter within me gaining speed.\r\nI wait for spring\u2019s green explanatory vowels.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nON THE CUSP OF THE CRISP
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nWay down, by the stream\r\nHow sweet, it will seem\r\nOnce more, just to dream in the moonlight\r\n~~Patience & Prudence<\/em>\r\n\r\nWhite afternoon had gotten clotted, indecisive clouds\r\nMoped between late rain and early snow it seemed.\r\n\r\nIt was as if we ourselves were indifferent witnesses\r\nWho stood on ground not yet sodden or frozen.\r\n\r\nA heavy suspension was in the settling air, air\r\nCrossing air with massive strands of yellow, yellow-orange,\r\n\r\nWith leaves undecided if they should join the sky\r\nDotting our woods with meringue and red dots--\r\n\r\nOn the evening edge of autumn, then, the cusp of crisp.\r\nIt was an uncertain place where we felt not quite\r\n\r\nWhat once we felt, hands meeting like strangers,\r\nThe trees growing harder and lowering over us.\r\n\r\nDid we dream, then, of moonlight after sunfall,\r\nSinging \u2018but to-night you belo-oo-ong to me?\u2019\r\n\r\nIt was as if day were already extinguished,\r\nAnd we sent there from over the hill to study it.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nTHE SKY-MINER AND HIS WIFE
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nAs he dug squares of blue from intervening air,\r\nThe air of ideas, his wife sang romantic slather \r\nOver the toast, a breakfast scene we\u2019ve seen before.\r\n\r\nLove like cinnamon was dusted over crisp toast,\r\nAnd sky kept coming down to set with them a spell\r\nAmong the porcelain crockery and locked eyes.\r\n\r\nThe song she sang was nonce, and nice enough,\r\nDone softly to a rumored tune, done with heart\r\nAs toast and coffee soaked up some runny eggs....\r\n\r\nDoves beyond the open window huddled grey\r\nIn sumptuous dusts, rainclouds of cluttered light\r\nFallen together to where the couple could see.\r\n\r\nThe sky beside the pair, sitting in attentive squares\r\nThe husband had invited down, saw what seemed\r\nChance was itself a careful kind of double dance--\r\n\r\nThe Mr. twisting heaven from its stretched perch,\r\nThe Mrs. enriching minutes to blue memorial.\r\nTogether they said \"Good morning, and grace to God.\"\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nADAGIO AFTER SILENCIO
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nThe hypnotic monitor bore\r\nCool witness I was not dead;\r\nIn hypoallergenic hush, we slept\r\nLike fore-damned lambs:\r\nMy slow-lidded companion\r\n\r\nAnd myself in silence wrapped,\r\nResting in the four-cornered room\r\nUnder air merely bent to stillness,\r\nBlank as an untroubled page;\r\nWords had chosen other mouths.\r\n\r\nThen the revealing sound occurred,\r\nA note haltingly unfolded, a long\r\nC too soft to notice, too low,\r\nHollow as a tuning reed shallow blown,\r\nA drifted-in lantern in a fog....\r\n\r\nI leaned toward the loaned tune,\r\nDiscovering an inner loudness,\r\nA winning green that knew my bones--\r\nA sort of solo going sotto voce\r\nHad been playing all along.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nALLEGRO ACTION AFTER PENSIVE IMPASSE
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nSo much action in the grand-slam cram of Brahms\r\nWhen his ladylike lullaby clouds drift apart,\r\nStrings twinged lightning-limber with inner things,\r\n\r\nDrums crumbling the mountain-black of silence,\r\nConfounding the pounded-down rounded end\r\nOf the stake through my heart, trimming the fuse\r\n\r\nThat first stitched timid lips to empty thinness--\r\nSo much action at the ears, so much more to hear\r\nThan my grieved quiet imagined or allowed.\r\n\r\nNow in the soundcloud of my driving beat, I near\r\nA completeness of angels, all wings, in my war to soar,\r\nExist in these free minutes, reclaim the reins\r\n\r\nWhere only a blatant bit had tightened against\r\nMy Pegasus self, restricting impish song to clumped mumble,\r\nLittle crumbs of the cloud the showered me now\r\n\r\nWith showy gold, afternoon declamations\r\nAll around the echoing living room, pows of sound\r\nCapturing this clatter of ecstatic hooves--\r\n\r\nRelations of enraptured magic in every vibed phrase,\r\nSpeech cresting to trumpet gumption: this blissed\r\nSong of songs my meaning was singing all along. \r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nA STOPPED BELL, AND THE FIRE ARRIVING
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nThere was a heart-shaped clanger hanging leaningly\r\nUnmoved by any wind, or motive force,\r\nAs if impaled within the bell.\r\n\r\nThe bell-cap was creased by lightning-strikes of rust\r\nTracking spiderlike across its curve, as if\r\nIt were a long-abandoned bell.\r\n\r\nDay turned to smoke, with coral-motioned lights within\r\nHolding soft discourse with increasing smokes,\r\nSoft light blurred imperfectly in patches.\r\n\r\nI stood before the abandoned portal\u2019s doors for long and long,\r\nNoting how old grey boards could warp, how heavy\r\nIvy nearly brought the shutters down.\r\n\r\nThe sound of bells was never heard while I was witness\r\nThere, deep in the burning wood I ran through\r\nAs though I could escape--\r\n\r\nThe church uncherished went down in flames, and only\r\nWhen I panted looking back from cliffs did I\r\nHear a single jangle of that falling bell.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nFORGET-ME-BOX
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nFinally, I am trite clay of earth \r\n~~Jerry Leary, Being Ordinary<\/em>\r\n\r\nInto a box of butter-yellow pine I put\r\nSecret instances of my thought;\r\nAnd that box I locked with better luck\r\nThan I ever locked my heart--\r\n\r\nShadowy leaves blew silver-chased\r\nWithin the box with inner wind;\r\nAnd other things I\u2019d long forgot,\r\nSecret instances of my thought.\r\n\r\nThe box of pine, the sea-sounding clock,\r\nI kept impressed upon my mantle;\r\nNo thought of photos or other stuff\r\nCluttered the fiery shelf.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nTHE MOON AND THE MANSARD ROOF
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nfor The Dublin House<\/em>\r\n\r\nAfternoon came cooling with bellying sail,\r\nMoon no more than a rumor above the roof;\r\n\r\nThe trees were in their autumn ordinary,\r\nMatching with mouthful ease the tones of beer;\r\n\r\nThen evening stars stood attentive over our talk,\r\nDefined the mansard slope we sat beneath;\r\n\r\nWe enjoyed the darkness of the house, its slope,\r\nIts sense of hovering cover as we talked;\r\n\r\nWhen moon\u2019s curve returned, beyond the cut of that,\r\nAnd long past the puffy daytime murmur of trees,\r\n\r\nBeyond any scope of houses, or those within them--\r\nWell, our talk and cups held winter silver then.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nBENEATH THE UNCEASING TESTAMENT OF THE WAVES
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nSpaded waves are crowns subsuming crowns \r\nAll around me, rays in a rage of falling rain.\r\nTwelve waves, clipped, impound my dingy;\r\nSuch sultry eminences, emerald rolling lines\r\nBeside pearly impermanence--the ocean gold\r\nNo longer known here as rain falls down.\r\nI\u2019ll go to death undone in soused backwash,\r\nNo more animate man, but a bobbling knob \r\nSlick above the nimble briny, slowly loping below\r\nThe common tide of personhood. Not by choice,\r\n\r\nBut by basic indecision am I stranded wet--\r\n\r\nUndrownable martyr and transparent master,\r\nEngulfed Galahad who gallops nowhere, I rave,\r\nReveal myself to this watery cemetery: how one\r\nRemembers with meaning and grieves with hope.\r\nThe waves erase the mistakes; the mind forgets\r\nEven the highlights, that fortress of spotlights\r\nThat rose from foaming sea, that seemed a crown....\r\nThere\u2019s only room for this gritty dingy\u2019s gunwhale \r\nCrown now--its wet ring of disappearance trying,\r\nSo resolutely trying, to remain above the waves.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nGUITARS AND STARLINGS
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nThe guitar sparring again \r\nThat had sat unplugged--\r\n\r\nStarlings parting black\r\nLike so many notes, so many\r\nSongs thronging--\r\n\r\nVivid air then, and, after, \r\nThe quiet apocalypse\r\n\r\nOf the guitarist in black\r\nThumbing a black thrombosis,\r\nPulling down his cap....\r\n\r\nAnd the starlings already gone,\r\nAlready a memory;\r\n\r\nSo much of day played\r\nArrayed between these two:\r\nGuitars and starlings.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nGUITAR SOLO FOR GERANIUMS
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\n     1.\r\nFugues, frames, barre chords, propositions, \r\nA range and fury of images figuring forth \r\nThe solid man, the real man, distilled\r\nTo someone pottering among flowerbeds \r\nWhose death is spelt in seeds he trowels down,\r\nBlues he knows, gospel joys he hopes to have.\r\n\r\n     2.\r\nA casual jam, then, and not a classical set.\r\nA strum of intuitions, vast in variety: whole\r\nBotanies of blossom, zoologies of zeitgeist\r\nAlive within the single man; dual shadows\r\nShown full-on by sky-brightness of the day;\r\nAnd shown, too, in moon\u2019s faint gesturing.\r\n\r\n     3.\r\nSo his guesses manifest in the garden: a solo\r\nPlayed among blooming bones, confirming\r\nHow a song without cool roots is something\r\nLost to the sense, a vapor trail betrayed,\r\nPellucid ghost-notes heard in almost-dream,\r\nA vision burning between the nodding buds--\r\n\r\n     4.\r\nSo this is his crested best, nosegay of guesses,\r\nA solo guitar\u2019s misty gifted riff flitting\r\nButterfly-like among many gold geraniums,\r\nMany shadow-selves gathered to the grower,\r\nHeld jazz-loose so no whim of stem is missed,\r\nIts irreducible earworm harassing the listener.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nAN EARWORM
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nThere was a thought that kept meeting his attention,\r\nKept eating his attention\u2019s flesh, playing on the bones\r\nOf attention the same attenuated, irascible earworm.\r\n\r\nIt was a thought like a stone rubbed warm by thumb,\r\nA stubborn thought reappearing in each bob of tide,\r\nA buoy, or bit of flashing trash, repetition in light\r\n\r\nWhen wave overcame its shyness, blinking clear.\r\nThe thought would land in that tree with the crow,\r\nOr echo after the barkback of random dogs.\r\n\r\nThere was never a name for it, this mind-thing--\r\nThought like a melody, emerging everywhere; \r\nIts rhythm, the ascent of its singing, graced placement\r\n\r\nOf hurrying notes; he knew it was nearby, that it\r\nHad found a home again, a perch, a patch of light,\r\nSome tincture in the think of things that said it back.\r\n\r\nAnd he was ear enough to hear it: the idea, the thought;\r\nSo less than complete, yet insistently everpresent;\r\nAn invisible with a body like a song, a sound, a hum\r\n\r\nGunning into him, a valid lie like his breath, \r\nBreath abandoning the body kept the body real--\r\nSo this thought kept appearing to him like a grail.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nNO ARBOR
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nThere\u2019s wreckage around me, no doubt, in moonlight;\r\nNo arbor, no crossing vines full of drafty rest;\r\nOnly this space of confused halflights, reflections\r\n\r\nOf a life that was always autumn, always loss--\r\nFirst, passed hand over hand into orphanage lands,\r\nFinding first mornings bundled among others,\r\n\r\nFirst light landing through institutional windows\r\nUpon the blue and pink infants beneath....\r\nA leaf unattached from a once-calligraphied tree.\r\n\r\nMoonlight tonight moves among porch furnishings\r\nMoodily, its silver pooling where the fountain ran\r\nReckless all summer long, now close and quiet.\r\n\r\nAnother mother made of apples raised me,\r\nStood my footsteps upon a path without direction;\r\nAnother halflight, seeing without meaning\r\n\r\nUntil early apples perished, and she passed.\r\nThen loves that churned their arms like butter came,\r\nTheir golden faces pressed--a halflight faded;\r\n\r\nThen books that twist their pages, sheer leaves\r\nNo more sheltered than myself from winter\u2019s moon,\r\nThis light that nails me like a vine to no arbor.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nWHAT DOVES ROSE ABOVE
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nThe calm of a wildflower field, \r\nThe orchard bright with weight, \r\nThe brown house almost of gingerbread--\r\n\r\nAround these the doves would clutter, \r\nSoftly emptying themselves of song,\r\nHeavy wings shut like little coats.\r\n\r\nTheir souls were their own, in dull quiet,\r\nIn quiet of house and flower, orchard\r\nAnd meadowgrass dull with heat.\r\n\r\nAll the pungent summer was a bowl \r\nOf greatest glass, so full of colored beads,\r\nAnd ourselves beads within it. All this\r\n\r\nWas not enough, not enough,\r\nWith its summery warmth, and light, and calm\r\nSo close to heaven, to keep them--\r\n\r\nThis is what the doves rose above.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nSPARKLER WIRES
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nThis birthday was going great: a unicorn balloon\r\nStuck in a corner of the ceiling doing its rainbow\r\nThing, the store cake awaiting its curly cool whip\r\nAnd needless measles of red strawberries--then\r\nJenny disgorged a Whole Foods bag of heavy-duty\r\n\r\nSparklers and fire-starters,\r\nAnd night turned denim blue.\r\n\r\n\"It\u2019s time!\" intoned and chimed from every face\r\nHustling past a still hellish BBQ pit, a last hotdog\r\nFallen black among collapsed logs and laughter.\r\nTrees in black coats beyond the swampy yard\r\nSurveilled the party\u2019s progress as the first went off:\r\n\r\nA rainbow blowing sparks \r\nInto the Tuesday cool.\r\n\r\nAnd then a dozen arcing, inducing blindness,\r\nThe children\u2019s geysering screams braiding with fuses\u2019\r\nLight, each white scaredy-cat tail drawing circles\r\nOn night\u2019s clean blackboard that we chalked,\r\nIssuing hissing Ss endlessly as we ran--\r\n\r\nOur eyes a wildness, witness\r\nTo this burning birth.\r\n\r\nIn the end, every hand waved an outrage-orange wire\r\nMolten with aftermath, thin things that had held \r\nThe sun, and did not live to tell of it. A procession\r\nAs quiet now as it had in screams commenced\r\nMarched to the water bucket, wires curved, a heavy\r\n\r\nHot erased in a quick \r\nExtinguishment of steam.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nWRITTEN ON A MIRROR
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nIt\u2019s all pain, it\u2019s all hurry and hurt. Why else\r\nDo I write poems like spinning a prayerwheel?\r\n\r\nThe pins of consciousness that put an end to dreams,\r\nThe obligations to be other than whole and loving,\r\n\r\nThese are the wearying ways of earth, partial\r\nLife with its mirrors, yourself in the glad glass,\r\n\r\nAdding poem after poem until the glass fogs\r\nAnd words appear written in the soft blank.\r\n\r\nKeep up with the landslide, faithful sayer,\r\nLet doves move through the looming fog\r\n\r\nAs love moves through a long marriage, beat\r\nBy beat arriving, word by word knowing more--\r\n\r\nSettling as the heart settles down to sleep\r\nAs eyes of doves return to speechless dream:\r\n\r\nWrit in mirror-mist this insistless silence is.<\/em>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nA SKIN UNTRIMMED
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nA ravagement by rocks unlocked him,\r\nA studious stoning did him in.\r\n\r\nHis heart was a carpet, well walked-upon,\r\nHis dignity a garment rent to rags.\r\n\r\nIt was feeling this, amid the glorious autumn,\r\nSpectacular spasms of the maple trees,\r\n\r\nThe wind never done knitting his runcible hat,\r\nHis feet clashing cymbal-like through grass--\r\n\r\nIt was getting to feeling, and not thoughts\r\nAbout it, that gladdened his spare despair,\r\n\r\nKept him unveiling new skeins of skin,\r\nPierceable portions of himself for sale.\r\n\r\nIf there were hailstones and stubbed cigarettes,\r\nThere were feathers, too. And, at night,\r\n\r\nSometimes wild stars knelt to minister him,\r\nPulling constellation lines through his eyelids.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nSTYLIZED LINES
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nThrow me like a wave against the shore!\r\nIf I can customize my curls, I am satisfied.\r\n\r\nLet my regretful rock be etched and eaten.\r\nIf I can choose my dissolution, I am satisfied.\r\n\r\nDry my roots and blow my blossom off!\r\nIf I can exquisitize my petals, I am satisfized.\r\n\r\nGod\u2019s work is the order of the universe.\r\nThe aesthetic of the wreckage is man\u2019s demesne.\r\n\r\nThe ocean is a vast irresponsibility.\r\nThe pearl that irks the oyster is enough.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nLONGVALE
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nfor CPH and her friendship bread<\/em>\r\n\r\n     I.\r\nNobody wants to hear this, pillows over their ears.\r\nChildren galloping here from a future time:\r\nYou must be chosen.\r\n\r\nI at the center cannot find my way, cowled figures,\r\nBut you must discover us, turning back,\r\nHow ignorantly we came to you!\r\n\r\nFuture child foreknown of an unknown date,\r\nWalk this valley swinging like a rope,\r\nFind the grandfathers again.\r\n\r\nKnow us firstborn as if freshly pressed, live dough\r\nStill unrisen in the calm of bakery dark,\r\nPotential unpunished by any heat--\r\n\r\nKnow us, first lightnings, cauled and curled in cloud,\r\nA ripple in the skin, an electric feeling waiting\r\nFor your conductor\u2019s directive stick.\r\n\r\nWalk the long vale to your unshapen past, to here.\r\nStiffen until we speak face to face, children,\r\nAnd stanza to stanza embrace.\r\n\r\n\r\n     II.\r\nButterflies in Oregon still riff around a missing mountain.\r\nFish still flow to tour some sunken island\u2019s cove.\r\nThat is not for us, for you,\r\n\r\nChild who stands at midnight before me, in such\r\nGrandness imagined, future shadow self\r\nCasting this shadow back to me.\r\n\r\nRosin up the fiddled figures before you, and play\r\nUntil we squeal again what essences\r\nWe have, songs and thunders\r\n\r\nWe could not know we held, released, yet still us,\r\nAs we in you, my scolasts, having arrived\r\nAt your end of Longvale long ago--\r\n\r\nYou are grandfathers for another thread, braided bread\r\nUnrisen, unseen, and into which you tip\r\nThis yeast I hand you.\r\n\r\nTonight we knead the dream together, kneeling\r\nOn the bedspread that covers the mountain,\r\nOur hands the fish that find.\r\n\r\n\r\n     III.\r\nWe meet in the vale, and I remain behind. The vale\r\nGreen all spring, and golden toward autumn \r\nAmong carousing hounds--\r\n\r\nThis love of earth evolves, revives between us as if\r\nWe stood within a single wheel, one needed\r\nAnd one unknown.\r\n\r\nAnd between us a blanket of blackest languishment:\r\nSolar night, uneating death, cosmico interruptus,\r\nAs the green vale remains.\r\n\r\nAs the green vale remains, and its wind blows words\r\nTo shreds, yet you and I appear espied\r\nAs if ghosts of ourselves,\r\n\r\nFlames of being beyond the fire of words, two of a crowd,\r\nSticks made out of talking. There is between us\r\nAn agreement like laughter\r\n\r\nAs we roll the wheel, crossing the lonely valley rope,\r\nA tightrope of passage allowing nothing\r\nBut somersaults.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nREACHING THE HEIGHTS
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nThere was the cold, and there was nothing else,\r\nWhistling above the ice-cream rock of tor.\r\n\r\nBarren phrases could not master it--\r\nThe rock lifted above other rocks we had walked,\r\n\r\nLong trails gone on for blue miles alone\r\nUntil vision blurred, feet like firedogs.\r\n\r\nOur talk was coughing as we struck camp.\r\nTents were houses we\u2019d brought with us,\r\nAnd folded again in silence to bring home.\r\n\r\nThe place was what we had come to look at,\r\nA blank at the end of things, as we thought.\r\n\r\nBut we had not expected this, although we came.\r\nThe rock, struggling upward anyway, the air\r\n\r\nSeeming less and less the more it was the only thing.\r\nIts constant sound as it scraped\r\n\r\nLike a thousand men whistling, a thousand howling.\r\nOr, it was like nothing else, itself, a whiteness--\r\nThe bareness within us that matched it.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nWHITTLE AWAY UNTIL ONLY MYSTERY IS LEFT
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nSunset boomed across the Palisades, a flood,\r\nA yellow-yellow flare, and was gone. The cliffs\r\nGrew iffy, though no less real, dark guardians\r\n\r\nOf stirless, stern aspect. Then the eye darkened\r\nTo accommodate that scimitar bully, flashed\r\nAcross the neck of night, the numinous moon.\r\n\r\nThe eye behind the eye then grew attuned\r\nTo stunning stars, quick-quick in their twinkle,\r\nLittlest survivors in the vault of night--\r\n\r\nStars that seemed less, at first, because sight\r\nWith its gorgeous roarings of colors, pastel\r\nReadings of early eve, means so much.\r\n\r\nBut when two eyes are closed, a second sight\r\nArises, brims the sill of unconscious thought,\r\nAn unconscious seeing and night-long colloquy--\r\n\r\nAnd in this aquarium of sleep, what endures\r\nOf things seen? Do Palisades go down with us\r\nAs Orpheus followed Eurydice, solemnly?\r\n\r\nA cloud rows out, eating the remaining stars\u2026.\r\nDark\u2019s startlement is complete, we awake\r\nWithin it, full of the day that had meant so much.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nBREADCRUMBS FOR AN OCEAN
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nWhat are they constantly, constantly saying, \r\nThese waves lashing like eye-blinks, renewing \r\nA ruin, running in with new ruin behind--\r\n\r\nWhat are you saying with your eternal mumble,\r\nMinor notes thrown in with the rest, and thrown\r\nAway at the feet of fat children, no chord\r\n\r\nCresting within the restless iteration, no Beethoven\r\nFollowing the wading wave ashore? All sound\r\nHere is crownless and tumbledown....\r\n\r\nIs it the spreading of a tablecloth perhaps, a feast\r\nPerennially arriving, perennially late and cold,\r\nA bitter aftermath and not a sweet prelude?\r\n\r\nThe waves are wrestling with their definitions.\r\nBut first causes and final ends must wait until\r\nThis mutinous blue humbles to one tone--\r\n\r\nUltramarine, I think, then blaze to berry, azure.\r\nI find that watery sayer is assaying me again,\r\nFinding round doubts in divots of my thoughts.\r\n\r\nI listen-in to thoughts behind the hazy waves\r\nArriving, daltry blue and turquoise, and there I hear\r\nReply, comeback and challenge and shibboleth.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nBETWEEN ADAM AND THE ALPHABET
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nHe who of repetition is most master.\r\n~~Wallace Stevens<\/em>\r\n\r\nName it and be done, be damned. Dine upon\r\nCorpuscles of the corpse so composed.\r\nThe matter is finished and the filet is final.\r\n\r\nIs this of the essence, eviscerate verity?\r\nThe name is old news as soon as said.\r\nYet what else have we to stuff the pink world\r\n\r\nInto the mind? Heave the brave ocean\r\nInto our teacup, memento mori and candle holder?\r\nWords will melt the cotton candy fine,\r\n\r\nLick pink dregs of earth, define, dismiss,\r\nSave the memory like a semi-precious wish\r\nThe wisher writes on paper and then burns.\r\n\r\nStill, we have the song of it, the rough guess\r\nOf sound, that pings the tingling senses\r\nLike a thought that will not go to bed.\r\n\r\nMove the mouth, repeat pout and powwow,\r\nLike a bird that bedizens dawn because--\r\nAlthough the song has long been concrete,\r\n\r\nA Roman road through twisted wilderness,\r\nA word to pin our ignorance to and pray,\r\nA colossus of confounding sounds gonging God.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nZAGORELLA
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nThe sun put on his yellow coat,\r\nAnd sky put on his blue;\r\nThe river pulled on muddy boots\r\nAnd trees wore vests of green.\r\n\r\nRocks were knights in steely grey,\r\nOf course, and all the flowers maidens.\r\nZagorella named them all\r\nAnd even named their changes.\r\n\r\nThe river in the wind, laughing rich,\r\nWas a name like Chuckling Moon;\r\nAnd trees when autumn cursed them were\r\nOld Men Fooling Themselves.\r\n\r\nThe sky was all the names together.\r\nIt was so silver-rich, and dark,\r\nAnd autumn-like each sunset, it was\r\nA babblement of syllables--\r\n\r\nZagorella, when the river calmed,\r\nSaw its face lean up at him;\r\nAnd when spring\u2019s flower-petals fell\r\nAt last, he lay amid their funeral.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nTHE DOVE STUMBLES
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nIt was when he forgot his wife\r\nAt the office, or when fish leapt bright\r\nTo his hook, and he was hooked--\r\n\r\nThat\u2019s when he forgot his dove at home,\r\nHow calm surrounded her shining foot,\r\nHer step on jet ice assured.\r\n\r\nShe held magnanimity in her beak;\r\nHer fluttering room to room\r\nWas a gospel softness that he loved;\r\n\r\nHer lonely domesticity he touched\r\nOnly after work, at home in the big nest;\r\nReady, too soon, too sleepily ready\r\n\r\nFor other dreams--realms and lamps\r\nBright as the fish, flawed with other hooks.\r\nA prince was there, in a wood, singing:\r\n\r\nGreat is the grief, and we fall down\r\nInside of ourselves as down a staircase,\r\nDown a long, long tumbledown of stairs.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nLAMP ON A STUMP
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nThe mist distorts the lamp\r\nAttempting light; attempting light\r\nIt swings its wings, the lamp,\r\nReaching out with brightness.\r\nThe mist distorts the lamp.\r\n\r\nEstrangement makes the lamp\u2019s \r\nReaching grasp; it grasps\r\nLight\u2019s distorted revelations;\r\nOut of loneliness and evening,\r\nOut of estrangement\u2019s strength.\r\n\r\nThe lamp mounts the stump\r\nOf night, a great bird shining,\r\nFlashing its spredden wings--\r\nIt distorts the misty night\r\nWith estrangement bright.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nLOVE ON A STAMP
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nHearts abound by Valentine\u2019s.\r\nThey border the forlorn, licked\r\nStamps that send the envelopes\r\nTo hearts that beat to open them,\r\nPapercuts included.\r\n\r\nIs it a cupid, pertly poised? \r\nA heart plain as a thumbprint?\r\nThe selection of a stamp\r\nEmbosses the sender, who awaits\r\nReply in rosy purgatory--\r\n\r\nWhat emblem will hunch its corner?\r\nThe default flag of the nation?\r\nOr a red embroidery of arteries,\r\nHalf a heart, ripped open, its\r\nBorders torn in love\u2019s hurry?\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nWORKING WITH WAX
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nCold, it\u2019s nothing. A hard shard. A mistake saddened solid.\r\nBut once in the palm, and worked with warmth, wax\r\nWelcomes a handshake like another hand. Firm\r\n\r\nThings handled well will yield to use after a while--\r\nSo wax allows a knowing pinch at the bridge to shape\r\nA nose, a fingernail to draw lips loosely, as if\r\n\r\nShushed unrushingly, lets tender thumbs rub eyelids\r\nDelicately shut, put out a headache at one\u2019s temples.\r\nWax will become a little you if you work it long enough,\r\n\r\nIf mirror and temperament hold steady as your pulse, \r\nAnd your nerve is valid, your looking curious to show\r\nYourself what mirrors mean, what shapen wax reveals.\r\n\r\nAre you a green Bhudda, blas\u00e9 and fat, shoulders rounded\r\nAs if forever rained-on, yet jade when left to harden?\r\nOr are you all axe and angles, a prow that splits the wave?\r\n\r\nWax will know, when you remind it, when hands\u2019 use\r\nToughens the little wisdom you possess into revelation--\r\nThe glad statuette salutes its erstwhile creator trying,\r\n\r\nBut failing, to rub dead wax shadows off palms,\r\nGet gelled remnants out of fingernails. Though weeks\r\nWill pass, you will not lose the tint you used so well.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nZEALOUS ATLAS
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nLet the world surprise you, sojourner.\r\nLet birds develop unusual arias, decadent themes\r\nBeyond the score foreknown, where wind shouts\r\nStrange seedlings abroad in baritone air, aching\r\nFor fallow landfall in unknown valleys....\r\n\r\nA wedding is a beginning beyond any atlas,\r\nIts best newness does not adjust to us--\r\nYour bride and you are two oceans meeting,\r\nTurbulent spray loving its own fraughtful playing,\r\nLayering the eyelashes like freshened snow.\r\n\r\nLet the world surprise you, voyant, clapping\r\nLoud originality, yelped climax--or lowering veils \r\nOf serene haze in half-light never seen, a sense\r\nOf dulcet atmosphere, of breath as yet untaken;\r\nSomething you must learn sans any name.\r\n\r\nTravel there and thrive, footsore ponderer.\r\nBe a muddy reed at the edge of song, be bent\r\nAnd cut and painfully played, until, in you,\r\nNew hollowness lifts to new song, in green\r\nRegisters beyond your body\u2019s mandate, \r\n\r\nBorders you had scoured and called home.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nHALLUCINATIONS OF SUMMER
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nOne last blaze of days\r\nTo carry us through, then.\r\n\r\nSparks blown into a glass\r\nSwarm and then extinguish....\r\n\r\nSummer\u2019s bluster, each day\r\nA sort of star, fire and shine\r\n\r\nAgainst the blue glass.\r\nThe long hot in our bones\r\n\r\nThat was August, dissipates\r\nAt the first touch of frost\r\n\r\nAs if beach days never existed--\r\nOurselves never suspended\r\n\r\nIn the roasting sand.\r\nDreams of heat, that had\r\n\r\nBeset us with sweat, dissipate.\r\nOne last blaze shimmers above us.\r\n\r\nSparks blown into a glass\r\nSwarm and extinguish....\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nINDIGOGO
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nI. INDIGO DAYS
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nThe vatic landscape was not trying to disappear him.\r\nThe always indigo October skies, the mountain humped\r\nLike a cat, were strongly colored anyway, were black\r\n\r\nIn evening\u2019s distilled silhouette, and he was silver\r\nWhen the moon went up, or a sort of spot of sour\r\nYellow in the noontide day, anonymous blonde\r\n\r\nAmong many other blondes. He was what he was\r\nAnd as he was, a lesser inch in a larger landscape,\r\nA diamond, perhaps, but thrown in a transparent pool.\r\n\r\nWhen day grew rayed with light, he glowed as good.\r\nWhen soft and subtle grey crept over dusky golds,\r\nHe was as a mouse lost among the elephants,\r\n\r\nA diplomat among the delegates, slim and tuxed,\r\nAn unremarkable man with a martini glass in hand;\r\nHe was what the world was, only less so.\r\n\r\nHe had a thoughtful look when a jazzy blue\r\nPulled curtains across his skies, the heavens\u2019\r\nEmbroidered cloths, a naked gift for his wandering--\r\n\r\nSuch indigo for him was a dream from which\r\nWaking estrangement seemed impossible, and so\r\nHe stayed asleep, invisible in his minor role.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nII. INDIGO NIGHTS
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nIt was an assertion that put him forth, willfully forth\r\nInto night\u2019s wildness, dreams\u2019 wilderness, \r\nPoor work of picked embroidery embodied--\r\n\r\nHis dreams, he said, were no part of night, he said,\r\nAlthough they lived there, fish of the night sky\r\nAnd darkened landscape, mild lightnings\r\n\r\nOf his own and of himself that would not show\r\nExcept against such midnight indigos, imago\r\nOf meaning for his inward world, pattern\r\n\r\nAnd net of his guessing, a set of Christmas lights\r\nHe had nailed to unknowing clouds in search \r\nOf Christ, of what Christ must mean and be.\r\n\r\nIt was himself against the landscape, treading\r\nThe blues boldly with jazz-syncopated steps\r\nOf his own conviction, a man in a tux\r\n\r\nFinding scope for himself by assertion of that self\r\nAmong a doddering of stars and stats,\r\nHimself made visible by his self-conceit of shine:\r\n\r\nI am because I burn to be! Off-blue against indigo,\r\nA pinprick against the heavens\u2019 starry cloth,\r\nA dream I walk within, waking here.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
III. THE INDIGO SADDLE<\/h2>\n
\r\nI ride an indigo saddle, \r\nAnd weave raw stars for my horse;\r\nHer tail is a mustang comet;\r\nHer hooves gallop Saturn and Mars;\r\nI scan the galaxies\u2019 blackness;\r\nI spit at the winds and curse.\r\n\r\nHigh in my indigo saddle,\r\nSolar flares are shuffling like wheat;\r\nThe planets all scatter in patterns,\r\nTartans of inscrutable clans;\r\nIf any blow battle against me\r\nI curse them, high in my indigo seat.\r\n\r\nI rename the stray constellations,\r\nBloodline and pedigree revise;\r\nOld chaos that came long before me\r\nIs chaos and stardust no more;\r\nTheir pattern I stitch and imprison;\r\nIndigo banners of my own design;\r\n\r\nUntil all of their burning serves me,\r\nDiamonds I hang in my sea.\r\n<\/pre>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
by Gregg Glory Published by BLAST PRESS 324B Matawan Avenue Cliffwood, NJ 07721 (732) 970-8409 gregglory@aol.com gregglory.com INTRO: The Faithful Brush A damsel with a dulcimer In a vision once I saw; It was an Abyssinian maid, And on her dulcimer she played, Singing of Mount Abora. ~~STC, Kubla Khan A dulcet in the dulcimer. […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1001002,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,1774],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8633","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-poetry","category-return-to-doves","category-3-id","category-1774-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8633","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=8633"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8633\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8639,"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8633\/revisions\/8639"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8633"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8633"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8633"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}