(or, “Cloudlets”)
by
Gregg Glory
Vulnerability is my shield,
And my flag’s Humanity.
Óur évening is over us; óur night
‘whélms, whélms, ánd will end us.
-”Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves”
by Gerard Manley Hopkins
Published by
BLAST PRESS
324B Matawan Avenue
Cliffwood, NJ 07721
(732) 970-8409
gregglory@aol.com
gregglory.com
To 3
To forget about the self 4
A creature of whatever trouble 6
Wrung from the walleyed wait of the womb 7
Doublecrossed by the terror of birth 8
Dreaming of sleep 9
Gallant as a cloud, proud 10
Daylong in the waist-high weeds and ivies 11
Warm and capable hand, how cast 12
The wish of an if 12
As a cloud 13
When in the word’s wound 14
Samaratan’s Purse 15
A perch for the wind 16
To find in feeling, meaning 17
When a wandering impulse from Heaven 17
When death’s thrifty summons 18
When contrary winds 18
So few tears 19
When in an hour’s perjury 19
A Statue in the Park 20
I in my difficult self confined 21
When threads are cut that held us close 22
I who stood on sand and said 23
Round landscapes of strangers 24
Now the brain is clayed 25
When heartbreak, leaden, unlids 26
Not until the September is past 27
When into the mouth the death cry comes 28
From out the tomb like a cloud 29
Azrael 30
Vivid Aftereffects 31
Terms 32
The sum of all the soul 33
Dusky Page 34
Memorial Anomie 35
Battle Ditty 36
Too much of poet’s sojourning 37
You, my several, severed,
Gentle selves, limned with wishes—
In the dawnwash of daybreak delivered
When sleep’s gone over to ashes,
I write my soul’s shelving shore
On eyelids and tears.
Come, while the saying’s braying
And the farmshed’s full of wisdom
Lowing to be milked by however praying,
Come walk the dawn’s ways, and some
Of your gentle heart’s heats share
With mouth and ear.
Together in the forevering grace
Of day brought burning from its source
Let’s let simplest and supremest play
Nor ask the sun to go another course
But with hands crossed as lilies
Dissolve into love.
This spirit of mine is something unstudied,
Inexorable and white, alive in solemn permanence.
---Lord Dermond
To forget about the self at the self’s
Uttermost extent; it is the self
Made a self at last.
To survive in vigor
The confinement of the eye,
The glistering pinhole through which
The self is summoned
As by a bronze gong
Until all the air is peacock feathers
Is one way—in wild trial—
That the self, and its amiable
Particulars may be forgotten.
Cheered onward in a doubtful dark
By numerous rumoring murmurs
And silken sibilances, as if
Drawn on by a forceful river
Tumbling a blind man downstream
To the sound of thickening confusion
Is another way for the self to go,
On and on, on and on,
In dark discovery.
To feel our broadening sexual silks
Pulled and pulled, as through
A pinhole, through the self
And out of the self and into
Another, and that self flowing
And pulling as if a river until
Our colors lay piled and swollen
Before our adoring, a silken sail
Full-bellied with desiring
And with desiring only—a wind
That moves through the self the self
Had left behind and abandoned
On the shore of no more.
Dead or dreaming, the self
Disappears, and in its place,
In the place of the self spilled out
Of itself, displaced and streaming,
The self that had left its eye behind
Like an abandoned portal,
The self that had had an ear
And has an ear no more, bereft, as it was,
Among night voices in a dark place,
The self that had had a sex
Torn away in a shimmering wind
Until the self has a self no more, —
Only this, this fathomless
Wildness without a where
Without a how, without a why,
Only this this,-in the place of that,
Nearby, nearly here,
In the place of the place and in place of it,
A contemptuous wind
Crawls like sludge
Over motley rocks.
A creature of whatever trouble
Is cartilage and mischief,
Trimmed in skin and the smile’s lie
That all shall be kinship ‘til kinship dies.
A creature of whichever wish
Is eyelashes and ifs,
Entrancing Time in evening’s dish
To coddle dear dreams ‘til sun comes undone.
O creature picked of which and what,
All elbows and ears,
Take of this trouble its whatever worth
And wish the wisher kin until
His wish full is of death and earth.
Wrung from the walleyed wait of the womb
Marooned to a prayer from god’s grave side
And all community of the duly good,
An apple unpinned from its savior branch,
I fall as I fell, have fallen, will fall
Each rainy inch in angst against gravity.
Born moonblind to majesty and mystery
And deaf to reverenced heaven’s sighs,
Alone on the lovely ground crowded with brothers
And blitzed by a gracing despair, I rot
Blood-ripe and rosy beyond my own reach.
Against this windy time will I stand again
Who fell to a world wrung dumb by pain?
I inch each word in angered prayer to a leaf.
Doublecrossed by the terror of birth
Into the troubled thrum of becoming,
Uneaseful in our mirth
When summer’s feather moults to winter’s bone
And all the cold wonder
Of snow’s undoing.
Wrenched upright, awry by our thrown bones—
Uncramped from the comfortable hunch
Inside neutral mother
And stretched to stand in decisive day,
Thrown to thrones in the hissing wheats,
We bleed into seed.
Shambleshanks unpacked on a walk as long as thought,
Our knowing as nothing as nothing else
Unless such nothing is—
Holds seed and snow in eye and hand;
In bone and feather bred, our flight
Tells all and nothing less
Than Christ-crossed oblivion.
Dreaming of sleep in a tear-tugged thrub,
Hammocked in heartstop, my picayune pulse
Charts angina and angst incarnadined
And slows my blood woes to was.
Dumbly in dreams my aspiring vine
Climbs moon and sun in calms in gusts,
Arisen on passion’s hid hooks to this
Wither of insistences.
Said the unopened poem in my patted heart:
“Too dumbly comforted you lay your limbs
Wet upon the sandy shoals of pain,
Too fell, too full, too grievy and grim.”
Now hung christ-crossed on an electric cord
And stabbed by life’s lethargic thorns,
I bleed my soul’s mutinies to the seething sea,
A leviathan on a rock, stillborn.
Gallant as a cloud, proud
Before all the eyes of earth, death
No more niggly than a gnat, hat
Never humbly in hand, upstand-
Ing I was born.
Feathered in fiery skin, sin
A stranger to my heart-knot
I ran graced, and I crowed, crowned
By loud Love’s crying spires
All my lengthening youth.
Outfitted with a suit of ruth, death
My wages on my way, away
I gave day to moon-soothing night, lit
By my scholar’s candle, dull-
Witted with ignorance and loss.
O I knew nothing, nothing
In my pinnacled prime, time
My wings and my hearse; terse
Time clocked me back to one; gone
Was my youth like a cloud.
Daylong in the waist-high weeds and ivies
I ate the wonderfully buttery summer’s bread,
And bright as tears on sleeves I played and frisked
And forgot the wolf in the clock.
And windy summer ran out of the morning
And the stag-breasted dew each dawned day
Rode running and riotous from the cool of the moon
Unwound from the darks of mouse and fox.
Then the others, the pummellers
Came unashamed with their wronging love,
Sham-battering hands and scolding mouths
And gave away anger for their deepest, hurt truth;
With red apple hands, with bones twice broken,
They strode hero-headed over the blown-down time
Over the greeny edge of the faraway weather,
Topping sun and cloud of the tumbledown town.
Deep in the heartwood home, and hunched and knotted,
As full of fears as a tit-mouse’s shivers
I kept the woods home that kept me hid
In the bone-lonely branches of my bloodred ribs.
And dawn in its trial of summer survival
Turned red in the remembered air,
And summer sun crept crabwise until it was moon,
And I heard the sun’s hours ride down to their doom.
But oh the woods were golden in their burning
Beyond the dog-drowning stones that cried aloud
In the midnight riverbed’s spattering blacks;
In my wood-held home and hallowed owlly hollows
With my pockets full of leaves and string and talisman rocks,
Vowelling dogs howled to adder and frog,
While all about the sold home and understood wood
House and wood flamed trumped in woe everlasting.
Warm and capable hand, how cast
Against yourself in this crimping cramp,
Folded under, knuckle and finger;
Fist-forced to fight all foldings.
Spider on a mirror how you pray,
Self-reference in sinew and deity;
Age creaks the joints dull youth made mighty,
Steadfastly tossing treasure to trash.
Hand beyond starlight still remote,
Flick from cyclops Time the mote
Torn down from history and hope to this:
A present absence less final than If.
The wish of an if
Is a backwards future;
Beyond the moment’s present use
The grand seducer is seduced.
If in plain vagaries I am vain,
In rich reality I’m just me.
Forgive me, listeners
If this mothering infant tongue
Offends your sense:
Life is my only defense.
When man-draped blood dripped
Myself down from heaven with a dropping cry
Spilling this body from pained hip’s lips
Crying life, life to live, life alive,
Did any other come dumb a-tumble,
Riding my shoulders, a capable wonder?
And roaring unlovely all lonely’s lessons,
A dripping waxwork with a burning wick,
My bone-alone prayers wrung, sung in session
Where echoes creep cold to double and mock:
Is it I alone who lives, who dies,
Unlovely in my body’s sack of lies?
Upright in the everywhere-nowhere now
With something-nothing thrown on shoulder and brow,
And naked if I only knew how,
The I behind I unfurls a brown shroud
Dote-silent now as twice aloud-loud,
Incapable as a cloud.
When in the word’s wound another rumbles
And letters push the pen like a ouiji’s divot,
Arcing after funerals for what remains
Crowding to reunion with our split selves;
When in the blood’s barometer another thumps,
Tapping tell-all largesse from our bottled small,
Churning brights of vision from eyes too-tight shut
Against storm and batter of the brainy weather;
When as in the beginning there is love and wonder
Trailing down each treasure of a tock
And bastioned happiness lays everywhere easy as sand
Although ocean tear her heart out on a rock;
Then shall we love those who loved us never?
Carry Christs in our shirts like a pack of matches?
Then shall we fathom the deedless darks—
When not a hand, not an eye, stretched back to touch
The burning vigil tears of our watch?
Once below a time an evil fizzed
A sizzle missile on a stick of strike;
A friend unfriendly wore his face reversed,
And the sun come up rose down to the dike
And the maker’s waters fell skywise to drown
The small of hope in a calypso clown.
And all my friends, the fishes, sieved
Themselves the fry from the chaos bay;
And the long moon sang “auld lang syne”
And night’s tooth conned the meat of day;
And safe in my shallows hollows, I
Worked out corrupted wonder’s why.
And long in my wondering den
Among rainbow shoals of corals
Each the quick color of a friend,
I branded in briars my heart corralled—
‘Til cursed and closed in mental hearse
I heard the helpmeet of my burnt hurt’s verse.
The samaratan’s snapped purse opened ripe
And rosy were all her monies’ colors;
In folds of golds as green as apples
Her tender hand moved softly and softer
‘Til touch salved cool the carpet stars
And I walked beyond where ashes’ blacks are.
Whose bones I break bear the ash
Breath first tongued in soot;
Whose back I bare endures the lash
Of days as quick as coals.
Whose tongue I suck between two gasps
Of bare babe’s cry and skull’s knobbed crack
Vowels a violent void that snaps
Babe, grave and groin in our kisses’ black.
Whose wormy, wasted soul I own
Filched infinity from moldy bloods;
Animal and man I dug for sup
And killing and kissing gave forth God.
To find in feeling, meaning
Mere feeling never can provide,
And when a meaning’s felt
It fills the ignorant heart
With humble knowing of its grace.
When heart and head have thus
Each the other fed, the whole
Comes to the accord and godhood
Of its good.
When a wandering impulse from heaven
Visits the daily mind of man, lending
Some alien hatchling who eyes up the sun,
Our faithfulness is born in ignorance.
A wetted shadow robs us of rest,
Knowing neither the mystery of birth
Nor the disappearing gulf into which we’re poured.
Our dying height is but the eagle’s nest.
When death’s thrifty summons sums my life and me,
With swift erasure reckons every hope
One with the all-nothing past’s unborn to-be,
And, dead unlived, live damned in Time’s scope,
Then how shall my accounts accounted be?
When bright expectations of my skies
A crematorium become, and clouds
That had impostured castles as siftless ashes die,
What shall stand, howsoever soft or proud,
With lying life above while I do die?
What besides my dog-dug bones shall sound,
What clacking tongues make noise of me aloud?
If only that you do not follow me too fast,
I am content my small nothing shall not last.
When contrary winds make havoc with our hopes
And a word unwound wounds against our wish,
All we were becomes the plaything of a trope,
The telling and untelling of privy visions.
And all we were to be in times hereafter
In all the endless real of dreams undreamt
(Which from the day’s affairs and minor laughter
Transform into important night’s portents),
All the all of all our lives unlived
Is piffed to flinders in a scoping void
That follows our undoing even unto the tracks of a gnat
A moment’s wind or quieting in eve’s coming cold
Will silver over quick as that.
When all this in my mooning mirror comes to pass
One thought of you amends the ruins in the glass.
So few tears to tell the story;
Have they gone away, like the edges of papers
Trailing papercuts, and the most excited letters lost
On the margins of the undersheets?
Sometimes a freshness will surprise us first,
A frittery coolness or itch against the cheek
As strange as the dream it wakes us from, the same
Sense of the seminal real, shorn up by fragments the same.
Each tear had risen like a purpose,
Tipped with passionate wetness from obliterated sight.
Love is blind; so, too, grief and care,
The silly joy of remembering just how, just where.
When in an hour’s perjury some hinted truth
Is caught, and what had stung in coldness
In pillowing warmth remains,
Holding the soul below the bone,
Almost I can forgive my human stain—
Almost I am the thing that I am not,
Almost I in lightness and in light am propped.
My eyelashes then are limned
With clarifying dews;
Ambition and regret lay neglected
In the grass, never again to be new.
Forever windward my face amends its smile;
Forever forward my eyes seek their trial,
Stalking the light.
Strike and stroke its rays!
Beauty in the eye is immaterial,
The frayed edges of an ancient curtain,
Old swaying silks chisel-cut in stone,
Phidias’ fingers in a remembered breeze,
Or slender toes in overgrown summer grass.
Feet and heart go spasmodically fast
In the uncut grass at discovery’s edge;
Lips once pinked to touch another’s,
Brittle as glass, yellowed of youth,
Twenty-two centuries of dumb longing undone,
Til time becomes only the memory of youth,
Chipped blasphemy of a once living form.
Only her kiss’ caress can guess this truth.
Dan Weeks & Gregg Glory
I in my difficult self confined,
A figurehead in any kind of weather,
Amenable as inches in the spigot-spit rain,
Feel the flesh fail, whisked to whim,
And the grave damned abstractions all
Add up to grim.
My blunt body blown about,
Pierced by ports who had swum seas
Of moon’s blood shouldered to the prow,
I stand unblessed in the sun’s red crest,
Dulled and chained to now by all
The maybe plagues.
Forwarding my drowning right up to my neck,
No matter the thrifty theft of the weather,
Guest or ghost or soulless guess devout,
A watchman of rocks in the whiskey weather
Full of wrestling reefs and wormy stars,
I crack the crowsnest
Of my pinnacled pride right down to the worsted prow,
Shifting the kissing sticks on the mute deck—
When threads are cut that held us close,
When the snapped hand snips the ribbon,
The veiny net that pulled round wrist and bone
Shredded is.
When lungs surrender to a liquid ill
And drowned men dead we fodder fish,
The rose-red sea that we had swived
Arid is.
When words have ceased to traffic truth
And goose to goose give gossips’ proof,
Our mutual tale told in the mirror
Sheeted is.
Alien we stand who shared one knocked breath,
One saying syllable for our daily prayer,
One look, one heart enduring Time’s
Omnivorous is.
Alien we died: out of syllables, out of breath,
Crossed as words, incompatible as knots,
And no more face-to-face face each other
In grave is.
I who stood on sand and said
The God-word aloud in my shivering pride
Watch mansion and turret rook beneath the tide
That roars above my body’s fevers.
Instead of dwelling in forever
I came to the crooking shore of here
As the last darks broke and dawn recalled
Heats that create the damned and the dear.
Now cool and straight as eve’s dark grace,
Now lumped as fever’s lesions,
I stand unmanned, unmade, in the shriving space—
A shadow man born of shadowed son
I who was sky and wind before the stars shone
Before earth filled with grave and tower,
Before my star-marked unmaking stand
Alone and voiceless in unsaying sands.
Oh never again will I crawl into a star
Or dawn across ages to a planetary birth.
I am undone in both seed is and shared are.
I have no claim to make but death’s.
The wry wink that fetched me manifest
From darks surrounding shore and star
Is no more an eye at last, at last
And landward ho the shapeless foams
Remake my manless nothingness.
Pinned to minutes and the clock gone mad,
Round and round its stranger’s face,
Round the hours sane as grace,
Round landscapes of strangers,
I go ghosted and gone in the flying dark
And this strangeness has no end.
I’d be lost if I could be found,
If found unlost at last I’d nail the heart
Home with the hammer of the soul.
But no nail shines, no hammer moves,
No home comes kissing from a cloud.
Strip the gilding from the stars,
Let hands tear down the dark dim griefs
That moored the heaven-faring lights;
Let hands build chapels as they move,
Wanderers wide round stranger and sky
In this strangeness that has no end.
Now I wander through cool body’s shroud
Distant as touch in a statue’s hand
A blownback bit without sail or keel;
No nail glows, no hammer moves.
Hands were made to fashion as they feel.
Now the brain is clayed,
Now sodden veins are glue,
Elbow and bone gone soaked to sod,
And death’s a sovereign moon,
I lie sandlocked, both spine and foot,
Unstirred by the insistent stars.
Night and death have put daylight out of favor.
Shipwrecked on a tear and dry as chalk
Day’s gone down on the chilling chapels
Where grave men wrestle among the gods;
Eternity flees triumph in a maggot’s egg,
And the moon shines down like death.
When the paraffin coffin’s wronging box,
Leaden, unlidded lies unlocked
And out of slowly sowing soul inwound rolled,
Twined and twinned in winding sheets
And the bloodblack body’s shroud
The heartbroken ghost like leaven flies—
What then shall stand in the haranguing sands?
Harrassed and houseless and unshrouded and crowdless,
What mood doomed ghost in mist-shifted night
Or quenchless kiss quizzed from soul’s naught knot
Sighing life never could quite unlatch
Flies riven and shriven in haranguing sands?
Now risen and simple and unadorned
In the doorless moon (and dead and bettered
By our dying damn) we stand on crookshanks,
And the bold lie from shelled ear and shellacked lip
Slips up the tripping ladders like a thief
Moaning unknowing what once-living kiss implored.
Stands in winds in sands in silences
That in us trumps all bones or guesses
That lies down never in the manger’s knot
(Straw raw insistences of gods unbegot)
That that moves ruth-ready to the sea-shoved shingle
Where are and were and will-be may mingle:
Human and ruminant in the unready new,
Sole holders of somewhat we dare not possess,
Illimitable amidst our humanness.
Not until the September is past
And the grave dead all lie, unshakled, unburied,
Alone in the frost's mouth
(All dying done, all birthing begun)
And every crooked, ear-marked child is led,
By the dimming blood of a failing hand,
To play away from the clock's haunts
And stars are incited to shrink again
The cragging moon's corruptible sphere
To less than a pinnacle’s pinched inch of sky
(Not until the September is past)
And every weed grows down to die
Up where the miracle dead were tossed
In a frozen field gone over to snow
And the cold wind in a cold throat like glue,
Dying of wanting; and the blossomless trees
Lift their skirts to let me fondle
The bark-notched knees of autumn's parts,
Sold old home of my father's wants,
Will I catch cure in the cuckold wind
For inextricable laughter and hate.
When into the mouth the death cry comes
Unamazed and odorless,
Crammed by the ticking fingers of perpetual crime
Down the rattling throat to sound
An agony of conscience in the unshelled ear
Of too much unlived living
Then will the eyes start up blind
And hair sprout hands for the head
Then the unmuffled will of the stilling heart
Will damn activity, haul up dock to decision,
Bless the unpaid mind with rest, tell toes to grow into feet,
Knuckles reverse to blunt, loved palms,
Shoulderblades dwindle to wings,
Red ribs uncage to drop dead lust,
And lagging heart kick all away
To fall to a faraway sky,
And all of these be mine.
Above this town where I lay sleeping
young happily birds convulse minutely
one tremendously blown hilarious
green leaf of wind (in ochres of eve
it is dying) come suddenly finally up
from compactly hysterical graves. Bliss
fully mindless is of these faces
on the pickets these sweatless heads
in dole attire; these pink purple blades
who are flying who are the dentings
my footfalls have said along the edges
of day and crisply space and down down
dwindling once wells of when (for it
is summer and pregnantly snowingly dusk)
A flung, unbodied fragence, she,
Spicing our bounden mortality,
A swished phosphorescence in our mundaner air.
Moon-mother and mater, creator and queen,
Wry jeweller! The aurora gown you wear
Is made of deeplier aspect than mere seems.
Emboldened by the dazzle of the dream
We approached in humble aspect toward her dawn.
She slowed to come among us as we were,
Simple in her simple habit; fresh, unpearled.
Unbosomed from our mortal selves we whined
After death's very concupiscient tit
And eyeless ached for the pity we had had
And no more would have, folded in her gown of gore.
I turn my visage in the fog
To the scene of my demise:
There, in the nothing, I was wise;
Here, in eternity, I am fog.
Absolute and contemptible
My whim now wanders witless space,
A focus in idiot vagueness,
Temporary and discreditable.
Such is the sum of human worth!
A self-involving wheel that grinds
Nothingness to the end of time.
Look to yourself and know its truth!
A shudder in a whisper,
A spinal chill beside the tomb,
Cues music in another room
No dancer ever enters.
Everything I am I fear,
All I was I disrespect;
A skeleton of acid aspect
Pins me with a glance to here.
Vaguely ceremonious dust
Sweeps corners of an edgeless plain;
To feel at all is to feel pain;
Pain abolishing and absolute.
Incapable judgment,
Charmless incoherence,
Damnable indolence,
A welcome internment.
Happy are we who rot and look
Neither to the left nor right;
Directionless uncentered sight
That sees like a remembered book.
Here and now and gone
Each page of my prison singes,
Turning edges, mirrors, mirages:
Burnt promise of smoky ‘beyonds.’
An incapacity as soft
As mothers flushing infants’ eyes
Ends each blind alley that I try,
Suffocates with wings of moths.
Exits dissolve in fur or foam,
Every gleam reveals a worm;
Each ending of a timeless dream
Inaugurates a longer term.
Here I wait in wetness
Disconsolate and endless,
Penetrant and airless,
Guessing and guestless.
The sum of all the soul
Is lazy exhalations,
Smoke rings in rings in rings
And their derivations.
So says the brune cigar
(Burning wisely the while)
Letting shooken cinders char
From the clear kiss of fire.
So the smokes of poems
Insinuate a smile;—
Dismiss thisness, singer,
should you debut,
Reality’s vile.
Too-precise a sense erases
Literature’s half-guesses.
Mallarme
Swiftly, gamely, mademoiselle
Made a wish to hear the notes
Floating from my old wood flute
Revealingly.
Poignant practice in the park
Between our picnic and the flocks
Achieved some partial good
when I stopped
And stared at mademoiselle ‘til dark.
This vain breath that I extend
To where my antique wood flute ends
By spastic clasp of crippled fingers
In incapable mimesis
Can’t catch quite your natural and clear
Childish laughter that charms the air.
Mallarme
Silks involved in balms of Time
Where even fictive if expires
Vaunt not the coiled, the native cloud
Combed in your mirror’s lens.
Patriotic ranks of stagnant flags
Exalt above the vacant street;
Drowned by waves of your naked mane
I plunge to my eyes’ content.
Yet, no mouth may be sure
Of the savor his bite procures
Unless, regal and rampant, he insist,
Amidst your immense and copper tufts,
On expelling a diamond sigh:
The cry “Glorie!” that he stifles.
Mallarme
All’s quiet, except the silence;
As at the fireplace I lean,
Military slacks
Redden against my shins.
The invasion I await
With virgin courage
Is that of the baton a-tilt,
The soldier’s white glove—
Gilt or stripped
It waits to strike—not Teutons
But some ancillary menace,
Some acquiescence one desires.
Beat back this wild nettle:
Sympathy before battle.
Mallarme
Too much of poet’s sojourning
With airy fancy captivating
Eye and ear and every thing,
Our sense false sense believing,
Can vault the real beyond our ken
And all our wisdom, sum, and end
Must be but to begin again.
While in that cloud Delight suspended
Nothing kills and all are mended,
The dead arise for a final bow
As plays and players even now.
If ever error finds this field
Error must to mischief yield
And all that seemed delight revealed
Be changed to vice reviled.
No longer the innocence of If
Where no blind run ends in a cliff
And every dagger of thrown suppose
Hits harmless as a falling rose.
No more mere pastimes of the mind
Where every evil’s undermined
And the very devil’s to sport inclined,
Terror trumped by laughter half-divine,
Where every blood-anointed sword
Shows no sharper than a pointy word,
And each ghastly gambit of deed or cad
Ends in misty triumph trimmed,
And only surfeit seems enough.
And now that life’s awful unauthored hours
Have left me foaming at the tap, fingered on or off,
And like to die as like to live.
What shall I do who’s undone by his doing,
Tippling the passionate mathers to his lips
Only to go on sowing his own dull salty grave?
I’ll mock the solemn mirror with a glance of stony glass.
I’ll out-stare startled stars, with fingertip twist
The watery whirl that mangles all I ever was of is.
But what shall you do, dear, dear you,
Noiseless interlocutor nosing the prosy page?
What shall become of all your Platonists’ hubbub,
This stitch that itches the reader’s reticulated ear?
Shall the word you are beyond all silence
Pass away in reguritative snores?
Behold: a trumpet in a storm, half-heard, obscured,
Summons no symphony from static on its own behalf.
Climb down, then, dear, onto the night grass—
Escape across the countryside still damp beneath your lamp.
You too shall survive the slaughter, you too
Shall live again, with every vital face erased
To innocent “pretend.” Our illusions still pursue us
Until we turn and tell them “boo.” Our loves
Will pant and pander after until we sigh “it’s you.”
Every blobby bauble boiled up to mammoth memorial
Only waits to be forgotten and be playful bauble once again.
The you you were and the I I was
Are strangers to our living, vivid, vital whys.
(Its only just because. Pause.)
When the hero’s hour goes down, grain by grain,
Who shall hoist them up once more in worthy memorial?
Better it is to be forgotten and to live
Than die a perfect-pitch, unrepeatable divinity.
But die we must, musty soldiers of this sod
And green lie down and come as bones to God.
Never mind this pinch of heaven in our eye.
It too shall makes its quietus in a fallen grain.
Even very heaven must slip down to us and die.
Baudelaire puts a pistol to his evaporated brain.
Turquoise swans on his twin cufflinks glitter,
Paddling toward the mirror where he moons.
“Here, in the nowhere that is my everywhere,
nadir, I take aim at the gods who love and oppress me.
Who knew that the internal exile of ‘not belonging’
could be so bitter?” Stale coffee gives his face its pained
look of being stricken, of being struck
dumb from the inside where the words had come
ably bubbling as a spring of blood.
“My hand was a steel spring and the meter ticked
like rivets going in to the side of a ship;
faultless preparations for a voyage left unmade.
Now sloppy in my silk slippers, I putter in the parlor
thinking through the reams of old talk
(Nerval’s neuralgic nose pointing wayward toward
some pink maid’s imagined castle window,
Huysman’s snickering figure thin as in a wishing glass)
old talk that had ascended to the chandelier’s burning bough
and disappeared....”
Ideal and disposable, the idea of you
Rustles beyond my moony shoulder,
Amorous shadow of fictive love,
A dream demanded by the dove.
Shapeless bloods within me, grant
Dark nurture to this faithless plant;
Heart, beat on in dreamland to create,
Where a pink and rumpled pillow lies,
Nerves that throb in sympathy.
New eyes open, asleep yet silvery.
Confessional moonlight’s idyll
Which previously had bridled
In dry daylight’s talk and squawk
Now lets our human arms console
Each other till the feeling’s whole.
Let rosy midnight flicker on
Neon until the ending dawn;
Our breaths’ most secret heats,
Sirocco on rose-darkened sheets,
Whisper the stories of our souls
Where conceptual contrapuntal kiss
And simpler carnal lips may meet.
A new moon glimmers in the room.
By careful compact with the night,
Tangled breaths and traded hands
And tangoed bodies no longer stand
But lie as loving strangers might
Acquainted with mysteries of delight.
Side by side let us abide
Before that darling blonde, the dawn
Explodes and leaves in shards
Two drowsy loves, pale and veined—
A pair of frangible spirits’ vessels
Laughing out the candles.
A new day glitters at the ledge.
Now my maturer powers have come
My deadest days are on me.
Inspiration crucifies with the ‘not yet done’
Likeliest confederations fall to dust
That had risen assured before.
‘Philosophy’ gives one something ‘to write about,’
The saint reverts to a whore.
Problems pursued in the minutest dark
Dawn displays to every fool.
Nothing comes that had not come before
Save the freshness of a funeral.
(Faces my faces had half-contained!)
Waterlilies lie exhausted in the concrete pond;
No word is given in dream or bond.
Paired thieves expire untroubled
By the Christ transfixed between them.
All goodness a flower endeavors to endue
Lies trodden in the uncolored mud.
Exhausted veins collapse, pale and unblooded,
All smiles unpeel to a skull.
Old rooms, old thoughts, old hours….
Old thorns I had thought removed
Return to resurrect their ribald pinch.
Each placid glance of reassurance
Given on the cafeteria tiles
Rips me to the core. My thoughts out-age
The brain that cannot contain them.
Pills fill in for functions
Alertness or dandelions had supplied.
Asleep in my slippers at the whispering window
I hear each ache of air repeat widowed, widowed, widowed.
Old rooms, old thoughts, old hours….
Old charms dispersed that had filled
My empty wedding bower….
Let Dame Melancholy lounge on her oval throne
Beneath the obscure sun’s cold diadem
Meditating midnight with her sole self alone
Her richest mystery and self-single gem.
The riot of Spring is gone to ground
And green luxuriance rots where it had preened—
Frescoed gestures of the pure and the proud
Go decayed to earth without hope or seed.
Jealousy at her feet with two leopards chained
Pawing the fallen oval bone to stone
While she directs her greeny gaze
At overwhelming Other unable to be reined
Into intensifying One. She fist-knots the leash
In a luring pull, luring by pull until
Leopard and leopard in a twinned pool of spots
Contend, each with each in battled brawl
Contesting Time that drives all lovers home
Beneath the hand that rules them yet, as though
They shared a single soul.
flower i’ the crannied wall
whose first visitant is heaven’s sun
whose last kiss’s administered by the moon
look for newer light and a softer kiss to come
when a prince to-be in his initial blisses
comes whistling through his
mother’s coombes
flower i’ the crannied wall
whose bloom’s so smooth where the wall is coarse
look to the moving moon to alter course
and days decay to lightless dross
and the timid rabbit never nibble
leaf or love you give
before boy’s world shall suffer loss
flower i’ the crannied wall
his eternal shine shall cause
all things that grow to grow because:
nor shall ceaseless love suffer pause
save for laughter’s ‘for one and all.’
Now, dear flower in the crannied wall,
I must them whose love to you shall
shower soon
blessed be(gosh!)