| 1 | I have been in existential hail
Since Noah first began to bail; Hailstorm, shake me till my sadness goes; Strike me till new blood flows. Ravish mind with unfettered ice; Let cold be all of your advice. Thunder down and dent the car. Remind us of winter with a faithful scar. Strip skin to tatters with your kisses, Only, hailstorm, do not miss us. Tear the mailbox from off its stick; Freeze the healthy and the sick; Fill the chimney with cotton balls; Catch the walker in a squall. Rattle buckshot with heaven's force- I am the target, you the source. Disappear and vanish in a drought To all but me, who keeps you caught Closer than my second thought. Magnificent blank in skies above me, Stoop to whisper that you love me; Like a naked cinder for your use Seize me, hailstorm and muse. |
To a Summer Hailstorm | I have been in existential hail | Seize me, hailstorm and muse. | 23 | lyric, prefatory poem | Assembling the Earth |
| 2 | There's a dark deep down in ordinary things
Resists our bringing them into view, Or else in bringing them what light we bring, As if to ask the question 'Who are you?' I do not know what answer I would make Being myself, and, so, invisible- Although I know when I give or when I take, Outfitting my days as I best am able. There's a dark deep down in ordinary things Resists us, the way a mirror pushes Until we're left again with things as things, Alone among our daylit doubts and guesses. I am one keeps to himself, and although I do, I do not keep the dark alone. |
Ordinary Things | There's a dark deep down in ordinary things | I do, I do not keep the dark alone. | 14 | lyric, sonnet | Assembling the Earth |
| 3 | As snow and snow will in snowing meet,
What slid down danced into a wild sleet And randomly clung, each to each, Resisting ocean's disassembling touch That undoes the individual who falls And in that fall returns to ocean's all. There was nothing there in what was of sky, No help of light to help say why, Only usurpation's snow-deadened hiss That ended each self-formed singleness Distilled from upper vagueness and the cold. They did not fall because they had been told. They fell because there was nothing else to do But fall, and this the ocean knew. |
Wintering by the Atlantic [Sonnet Version] | As snow and snow will in snowing meet, | But fall, and this the ocean knew. | 14 | lyric, sonnet | Assembling the Earth |
| 4 | It lay self-entangled, curled as ramshorns,
-And pushed the belly into being mother- Who, to be herself, had first to the Other,- Which looked as if it didn't want being born. Its sideways was more, and worse, than backwards. It had to be sawn out to be itself a lamb, Startle the clover and bleat "I am." The bowie knife came handy without a word. A tense scarlet torn sort of giving-in, A clattering shape cauled on scattered straw, Ungainly upright legs besides the ewe's, Shook me wet and bellowed out of pain. What had come too soon would need a mother's milk. I pulled all night through wetness with raw silk. |
In a Manger | It lay self-entangled, curled as ramshorns, | I pulled all night through wetness with raw silk. | 14 | lyric, sonnet | Assembling the Earth |
| 5 | I look into the portions of my thought, cold and dull.
Wheel in wheel unsettles the quiet mill asleep And puts an uneasy harness on all I feel. The river like a clock runs fast and deep. Soon there will be paper, deep and white. Wet slush from the chute, heaps of pulp and dust, Driven by the living water to be a blank in sight. A haaing gear gives my cheek a buss. I pole a belt to the drive shaft, and all begins- Horses in wheels turn, turn in their dreams; Floorboards shake with purpose, dark and dim. The razor nibs of the saw-wheel start a seam. I weep, weep for sleep and do as I must. I look into the cold dull portions of my thought. |
The Paper Mill | I look into the portions of my thought, cold and d | I look into the cold dull portions of my thought. | 14 | lyric, sonnet | Assembling the Earth |
| 6 | The provident power of hurt and harm
The provenance of an eye ingathers, (Its certain witness of a moment's charm That lightly changes a life forever), Bluely demonstrates in this morning glory That measures us, our smallness and our fear, With too blue an eye to ever bear Until a touch of night shuts its story. Then we dream, with a certain sort of blue rue, And wonder in sleep's deep wanderment If the sun will show us what to do Or if dreaming can tell us what we meant. An eye perhaps has followed us all day through, But we do not know the eye's intent. |
A Blue Perhaps | The provident power of hurt and harm | But we do not know the eye's intent. | 14 | lyric, sonnet | Assembling the Earth |
| 7 | Having grown long words in fieldgrass daylong,
I stepped into a wooded brook to dip Ink-worded hands into the snickering quips Offered up by the silverquick stream; I wondered just what the water had meant to mean, Whose loose stones insist the water into song. Many times I had lost what footing I had felt, Suddenly cried out, or laughed in despair, By hard wet things beneath thrown over, Raw agony raised to the eloquence of a welt; And, with water in my mouth, I'd often remarked The sincerer operations of the lark, Spilling a slippery noise above taciturn rocks That break bones and never forget. |
Water-Break | Having grown long words in fieldgrass daylong, | That break bones and never forget. | 14 | lyric, sonnet | Assembling the Earth |
| 8 | Three dark junipers shadow where time stood,
Representative of my brothers and Myself, from earth and water grown to good Plain wood on the township's public land. Huddled under them by the neighboring pond Fireworks cracked to color July the Fourth; We then, as I now, beside the dawn-like mud Stood every year we'd been on earth, Three stranger brothers our divided folks Reaped as seedlings from the brick adoption house Into a home too shy and shamed for such a name. Now torn away ourselves to spouses And lives, from rooted things by time unyolked, I stand between the trees without a name. |
Rooted Things | Three dark junipers shadow where time stood, | I stand between the trees without a name. | 14 | lyric, sonnet | Assembling the Earth |
| 9 | I wake in dark. The air itself seems stained.
The dark appears a darkness self-sustained By whatever of darkness must remain Even at whitest noon. But this is not noon. This is the dark without a shadow, without a moon; A dark that won't stay shut in rooms; One that follows even the ripest mood And rots there, and will not give way to good. This is the dark wolves build in woods Who have no hands and whose teeth are sure. This is the black that cancels the cure; This the emptiest hour and the deepest hurt. This lies behind eyes and bottoms every heart. This it is that makes a faster beating start. |
Wake | I wake in dark. The air itself seems stained. | This it is that makes a faster beating start. | 14 | lyric, sonnet | Assembling the Earth |
| 10 | His dusty body goes backwards to be dust.
On dust more frictionless than ice A frantic slipping ant will make us wince To see a crucible mind no more than claw; A mind that harbors no dark thought to appall But shapes his perpetual falling wall. He does not jump for justice or to be just. Summer's first rain-drop rolls in dust a world Whose wet invites all wetness hints of growth (Such a world may we recognize in drought). Silent and dry, he emerges like a roar And makes the molten tension burst, And drowns himself with water, nothing more. And a something unrepeatable is learned. |
The Ant-Lion | His dusty body goes backwards to be dust. | And a something unrepeatable is learned. | 14 | lyric, sonnet | Assembling the Earth |
| 11 | "Let's have a game of truth or dare," she said.
She snapped a longly hanging willow-wand. We shared the field with no one but ourselves And the willow that knew us from the play of years That fountained alone and yellow in the field. Winter's tears to April dew had yielded. "The game is played by our both being blind Until the willow tells true where true love abides." A hint of mischief's smile filled my closing look. She offered an antennae-end; I felt and took. "A willow wand between two lovers' hands Communicates the tension of love's bond." The switch, whip-supple, wetly flailed, Live as a shedding snake held head and tail. I felt, where dew-bewildered life had broken off, A sad pull; something, then, lent something soft To our springtime game of gain and loss. The wand had left a distance for us to cross And reared between us a budded arch Forever flowerless as frozen March. "My question is: Will you love me all your life?" "What you mean is: Will we be man and wife?" I broke into a laughter I did not understand. The willow sent it on to her own blind hand. Perhaps this willow, being the duticle thing it is, Adds a playful pulse to those it passes. Something about the way the time compressed, Or how the intercessor willow hissed, Misgave me to give the game my heart;- And that too went out along the drying bark. What we are, I thought, we are by accident. What happens makes us bend as we are bent. I kept eyes open now, sure that hers were shut. A glimmer or a tremor of I knew not what Laid a furrow clear across her forehead, As when question answers question as we'd feared And not as we had hoped. The bond, the branch, snapped Sudden as two children's hands can clap. |
The Willow Bond | "Let's have a game of truth or dare," she said. | Sudden as two children's hands can clap. | 38 | lyric, conversation | Assembling the Earth |
| 12 | We drove almost to the mountain-top,
And had no wish leave it when we stopped; No wish to leave the dew-enhanced, dew-christened air That pleasured the lungs like a circus scare When the sure trapeze for once escapes talced fingers And the mind on sudden emptiness must linger That had thought to catch a glittered body's twirl. The thinness of the atmosphere made dull The closing click of doors when we stood A moment out of the car and out-of-doors. Sunset took the higher half of woods And the tin toy of the Ranger Tower And showed us how a second Troy would burn. We smiled to see just what we understood As we stood together without a word, Without the cluttered need to speak and yearn That had made our road-trip Cassandra and the King. The library had malformed our limbs To wood, as much as books are wood, by sitting still To read. We were over-ready to try a climb Or try our no-words silence or try anything To stretch out the long day of many knots Our deep need to know had dearly bought. The road swirled up away from feet at once Round the mountain-top as round an ice-cream cone; The road was rock and mist, the bones of clouds, Red tatters gone redly under sky's west rim, Like lashes of an agitated eye grown dim. We watched small spots of dark swell and bud And swarm up after us all the way until At the last powerline we were caught In a fatal undertow like a single thought.- We walked on colder, with dark-adjusted eyes, Still rounding toward the top. Things in nature Cried out their alphabet of names, but none Were ours, or reflected back any name we knew. Our silence stretched between us like a clue. Footsteps added footnotes one by one Until we had left lower for higher ground for sure. The tower sprang into the interrupted skies. Spray paint through a lettered grid of spaces Had tiered the artifact with conflicted texts. We smiled once again to see nature vexed; To touch where some derelict human trace is. We grinned, too short of breath this time for speech; We would have said a word or two this time, For comfort's or for habit's sake, among pines Where, in counterfeit of clouds, we saw our breaths Touch. But we were wordless and rib-sore, Out of perspective in a piney bowl Rushing up around us like a garden wall That aimed to keep in both flesh and soul Within the clear-burned stone which grayly bore The bolted tower that rose without a door. We might as well have been inside a kettle With the tower for a witch's ladle For everything additional that we could see. We scanned the structure for defects, but hurriedly. What with the talus and its getting late We knew we didn't have the time we had. Still we gripped the rungs; they poured a cold Beyond experience under our skins. They were put here for a purpose, as a gate Is put- to propose a boundary and suggest A sort of going through. Of course, the jest Is that the gate can't tell who's going out or in. And we ourselves can't be sure of what we take With us, in a purpose we call ours. The sky began to stipple with young stars. Each strut galvanized chilled hand to sweat, So that we had to pull rolled sleeves over Each rung, and get what grip that could make To hoist ourselves a little more above. Our collars had been thumbed up since we'd begun; Our inch-thick sweaters had been left to hang Like exhausted swimmers over library chairs. Stars jarred and jumped-no, that was our eyes- We took two deep sucks in to every one That before our sojourn had satisfied. What mist was in us at once would seize Into ice spider-webs instantly as breath. I hung halfway up a minute and heard The charm of deadened church-bells in her tread, Ringing on the upward steel as cold as death. I looked around afloat in the tops of trees Dizzy as masts and yardarms in a racing sea. Night had come upon all things everywhere. The trees put on their cassocks black and bare, But refused to give a redemptive air. Trees, gathered for prayers, stood devout. The tower was all exposed angles and no lee. She was where I couldn't quite make out- Loudly made the platform on hands and knees. Something of ice came down in shards. A keening wind, whetted almost to urging, Made me wonder darkly at the wooded ring; The mountain leaned to windward And snatched my shirt to tell me "Come and see..." With a knowing note of something up a sleeve. But this was more than would fit what I believe, More sleeve and deeper than what I knew of me. "You should see it up here, you really should. Come up, Kerry, and hold me by the shoulders. The world's as small and sharp as in a mirror. If you shout down the mountain, you can hear Echoes carry your own voice back, but clearer." As if Earth were one to put our feelings to Who never once told us what to do. |
The Abandoned Tower | We drove almost to the mountain-top, | Who never once told us what to do. | 108 | dramatic, story | Assembling the Earth |
| 13 | I kept as solitary as a wood alone
And often walked till all I knew dwindled to rumor Talked from another country in a half-heard-of humor. When death gave me up, I could keep the bones. Today, having at last journeyed past myself, I looked into a little wayside brook Which, by caring nothing, all my nothing took. I left a husk to worry a rocky shelf. |
A Death in Woods | I kept as solitary as a wood alone | I left a husk to worry a rocky shelf. | 8 | lyric | Assembling the Earth |
| 14 | One year all year I kept the pond for mirror,
And tasked water in place of one that broke And so had run out of looking luck. The pond re-made me foot to head,- and, nearer, Showed my face as something like, no clearer. Flat stones I scalped across what shone for song Laughed at my distorted self the summer long. Then one day in the polished lead of water I saw what my broken mirror showed too often: fear Of eyes in eyes, a black kept-back glance Desperate for breakage like a last chance To be itself something more than a moment's stare. When autumn came, and I dared again look down, A reluctant pond as rough as hands hid my face For days, but not the sense of my disgrace. Leaves above my pallid blur mocked me with a crown. Winter's stintless nights full of wishes as a star Drew ice across my mirror in a frozen sheet Obscure and cold, and chilled a glance that Knew me once, and I held back a shiver. When my breath came back to breathing more at ease- When pond had been blanched ice long enough- I thought how roots go down, fathomless and tough To stretch what stark water offers into trees. Then I looked again, with midnight thoughts, At the rowans surrounding.- And then beyond all thought, Far into the night, and past night to coming dawn.- I looked into my mirror and hoped Spring again Would wake it as full of fears as it had been. |
The Water-Mirror | One year all year I kept the pond for mirror, | Would wake it as full of fears as it had been. | 29 | lyric, nature, meditative | Assembling the Earth |
| 15 | On an uneven roof comes midsummer's chore
To clear the flue that had all winter roared- A core of darkness with a throat of fire Soaring to a speech of sparks that suspires- White-hot fleets into a world of frost, A second set of constellations we may cross. I cleaned with broom and water, a working witch Fouled by the labor black as a sewer ditch, Like pulling up a fountain by its roots That has no cleaner wet than velvet soot; Every swish and lunge bade me be a bear Until an evening's scrub would wash me clear. I heard a cry like a baby's squeak. A bat. Something in me that could not speak, But saw two eyes like spider's eyes to scare, Gave the thought: I would not have him here. Six million years had put him in his cave. I sought to sweep him with the broom I waved. We were too much strangers for the bat to fear Untoward intentions in my coming near; Our worlds were not close enough to make us foes; (Hate's a thing of nearness as things go.) I would not have him there, and thought to undo him With a startlement of fire out of season. So I built a fire to double summer, Stood by the heat-wavered flue, heard it hum, And waited like a cat for what would come. In a laugh of wings, in a ring of fire, What I saw fly out was neither foul nor fair But a living creature of the living air. (Face to face, my face was larger.) I would not have.... I knew I did not want Such rapid flapping in my fireside thoughts. When I look to flame, I demand to dream Upon flame's own ever-changing theme; Seeing how it prefigures in earnest night The glare of summer, the stars' own light. Because altered fire refused to move him, I called him a black clot devoid of reason. I used a poison. (I would not have him there.) Congealing and winging in the summer air- He fell out indefinite as a spill of inks Dark enough to make me think. |
Would Not Have | On an uneven roof comes midsummer's chore | Dark enough to make me think. | 43 | lyric, nature, meditative | Assembling the Earth |
| 16 | Our daily catbird in the parking lot,
Half-unknowing his danger where he stood, Sang out eyes-shut atop a cinder block. A blue abandoned Cougar, its purr removed, (Haunted all last night by a pregnant stray Hunkering into home in her birthing mood) Had a dead crow's feathers like an exploded toy Puffed from under a moveless wheel hoved tight, Feeding what must come, at most, in a day. Obliquely by her belly kept from being quite upright, In cotton fog half-obscuring our shared world, The mottled cat sat motionless on one stripe. The catbird's territory song searched vacant grounds That should have had a wood to sing through, Not learned to be inured to all our sounds. I wondered how I'd feel with the catbird shooed, Mother-cat nursing uncurled by the curb, Patched kittens purling dust just where he flew. Silent in the silence man-made things disturb, The cat, too quick for me to see, pounced once,- And the catbird, leapt to asphalt eaves, sang on. |
A Wood to Sing Through | Our daily catbird in the parking lot, | And the catbird, leapt to asphalt eaves, sang on. | 21 | lyric, nature, meditative | Assembling the Earth |
| 17 | I had come too long down my own way now
To trouble with what signs dreamed appearing: The simple-minded purpose of an arrow An impertinence of trivial clarity Pointed only to waves of vines that drowned it, Getting more vine-entangled the more I walked- Nature's green indifference a match to man's. Mourning doves cooed the midday shadows soft. I left all plans behind me and dropped intent Back with those signs, and leaned my father's valise Initialed in cursive gold against the last. I would pick it up when I returned to reasons, Sagging in voluptuous vines with a leather sigh. Mourning doves cooed the gathering shadows soft Under wavery arms of patchwork sycamores Deep in the broken bounty of the wood Where no sand-path of man or dog had stepped To interrupt the easy gloom of leaves; Indian Pipe and a fungus stump gave A heavy odor the nose ignored. The mockingbird with enviable ear Talked to all his neighbors in their own voice, As if by their sharing some outward wail They shared some single mystery at source. Half a sycamore had blown down dry Like a thrown blade-switch in an electric storm; Vines evinced no interest in its half-dead form, But rode the living half half-way high. There were whirlpools of vines in those woods, Shunted hard aside all the time I walked them. A bronze creeper takes its own time in ascent, Using a tree's own strength against it, Snake-slow up to the tree's own lofty end, Like cloud gone everywhere or like climbing fire; But more I think like fire than cloud Or perhaps a fiery cloud come down To threaten all that grew up from ground. The wires that fuse back from its leaves Tighten years against the tree-spine in a grip To shadow-out leaves that block the creeper's light. A grip once light as feathers, lighter.- Yet shows the trick of closing tighter, Hand over hand, or leaf over leaf More properly, it makes its imagined height Match the trunk's achievement grown up right. They share a center that discernment sees. But the outline, like a helix spun, begins To burr and blur like an old old man Who can't hold even his own old name in mind, Until all the limbs lay overtaken By a wilder interposing dark of green That turns dry birdsnests out to ground Or catches in an interlace of palms Small-nippled nuts before the autumn-fall Drops them to the danger of maturing. How many years had I grown outbound to here? I hear my own father laugh and shake his head At nothing I had thought, or at something So far back it was plain invisible to me. Well, now perhaps I can sense the why: We had been let drop to grow, for reasons not Our own- chance, or even evil, occurrence With nothing of our own doing in it. We're left with nothing else to do but grow; What better purpose has a laugh than sensing that? Among a friendly roundelay of fieldgrass, A sycamore has its life-plan laid out From the first frond of its setting forth, Unaware of how its reeled-in corkscrew Waits to over-awe and overshadow all. The grasses murmur nothing all day but sun. Nor does the sycamore seem to posit How its holding out beneath that summer sun Provides just the slip of shade the creeper In all its years of greenly slithering Has learned to need. Once I came upon a giant Sycamore sequestered in a neck of wood Crowded as town, so hazed-over with bronze Filaments root to crown, it seemed on fire- The triumphal creeper self-inwound above Even the crown of the vine-engulfed tree. All the trees surrounding were backed away As their live skirts might catch- but the effect Was only the halo-emptiness of life The dead tree had claimed in adoration of sun, The slow outward longing of love's eternal Intertwine of warmness and warmed being. Here was a love affair too cruel to countenance One side all terribly requited want, The other too reserved to ever push, And that was another story out of life. I knew down in that those who would not stand Oftimes retained the power of hands And, seeming weak as lace, still could strangle. This courtship would have no day in court; A long struggle, and a single end.- The corpse had a solemness, I'll give it that, The way a bonfire dies down to ashes And obedience. But it had no dignity, Nothing of itself amid the choke and flame. Bole and limbs still held themselves, riddled through With spiny roots that cared nothing but to use. A squirrel confused the leaves for a desperate hour And then chewed clear. The creeper had no use For birds, lightest true climbers of the wood, And to their coming down proffered a net. The creeper was everywhere and was everything. We do not know our purpose, but onward creep As a mood may creep day to day on fire Behind our walls, knowing nothing but to creep. These flamy bronzes too, were too desperate Of their own old man's hairy grip and perch To hazard seed beyond their flame in flowering; What flowers came of that flame showed too poor And too few to drop the match-head seeds. New life must only smolder here this season, However wary the trees of renewing smokes, Thrown scarves to scar and catch the throat, And envelope a head made blind to its own good. The creeper, for all its bronze-fire threat, Had no enemy but itself, -heh, - And spent its life in extending tendrils Of itself, all green willfulness and dare Hurling its shapeless metaphor outbound To some self-supporting taproot, to be That tree, that life, if but for a time- Stretching and warping its bare being To another's bones, the way any son Inherits his father's laugh, and in time Has his humor, right down to the last laugh. |
A Bronze Creeper | I had come too long down my own way now | Has his humor, right down to the last laugh. | 130 | nature, dramatic monologue, soliloquy | Assembling the Earth |
| 18 | Bullets 'oft gang awry'
When we squint with lying eye At the target we had thought To level with a shot; Somewhere along the barrel Our curving expectation falls And what is becomes a part Of what we hope to shoot, Or perhaps an intervening wind Has changed beginning and the end. The future always lies Somewhere in the 'is,' Or so the marksman's maxim goes Hunkered in a bush of rose. The future always lies Somewhere in the 'is' Our eyes are scouting now; Hope and here intermix somehow, Nor get pulled apart Unless our killing art Delivers to the shaping thought The dead end we had sought. The philosopher with his carcass Dispenses with his guesses - What would be now is, And this is happiness. Nor does he as he eats inquire "What if I had not fired...." Or if a speck of dust had interposed Between his sightline and his nose. All the dedication of his thought Goes to digestion of what he's brought From the wild field, as able, To his domesticated table. Not until quick hunger comes again Will his thoughts curve and turn To all the 'Ifs' of chance That can cancel out his choice And send aim or word awry In the hunted day. |
Aims | Bullets 'oft gang awry' | In the hunted day. | 40 | lyric, nature, philosophical | Assembling the Earth |
| 19 | The dilemma of doing's to 'have done,'
And by choosing from Many be left with One. Addition's chief mischief is dubbed a sum; The unwary mistake it for a total solution. The wise contend that all is confusion, Or at best a formal intuition. To act presumes belief, or so I'm told, And am pointed onward, backward, or upward to God, (And reminded not to mind the length of the odds). The less done the better is my subtractive reaction. I'm not quite afraid to feel quite forsaken, (Except that, of course, I might be mistaken). One thought is left me, with which I'd begun: "The dilemma of doing's to 'have done.'" |
Existentialist Dilemma | The dilemma of doing's to 'have done,' | "The dilemma of doing's to 'have done.'" | 14 | lyric, sonnet, philosophical | Assembling the Earth |
| 20 | There's a rhyme at the joint point of knowing.
There's a place, a way of saying, that clearly makes "Good" and it opposite resonate, and even ring The way a glass cries out when struck- Sharing its invisible essence like a singer. Glasses, brim to abyss, display a range Of interchanging tones to the ringer Who bangs the magnanimous Strange. Does a sip sip the Good, or a sip sip the Bad? Either way the song sways, half-empty, half-full. The opposite of Good's not Bad, but Odd, whose disobedient music's beautiful. What words can we sing, for the Good, for the Odd, That will make them ring out, spoon-struck, like God? |
Good and its Opposite | There's a rhyme at the joint point of knowing. | That will make them ring out, spoon-struck, like G | 14 | lyric, sonnet, philosophical | Assembling the Earth |
| 21 | A rambling meadow scenery
Rank with irrigated greenery, Showed a semi-sawed-off double dozen Of saplings stretched since Spring, some Waist-high to heaven, that autumn's Clear-cut mowing would take care of (Not much of disordered growth Survives the park's enforced swath). Nature's mistakes seed a scene With a richer oddness than she means. Plants that harbour high ambitions Need time and shade for such positions. Ignore me long enough, and I might Just get to be something; kids grow at night. Adults enlarge by thinking through (So I've heard said, and think it true). A modest eraser can undo A millennium's gain by rubbing through. I bite my new ones down to wood And trust to cross-outs, understood Arrows, and wild whole-page insertions. Erasure's just too much exertion And never pays for the lost word That down the line might have proved good. Human education is a crop Best harvested without a lop. Shapely shape the upward trees By what mind kens, and heart perceives. The grandest but add leaf to leaf To make their roundness right- Just so the round of human life Requires a necessary height. |
The Mental Garden | A rambling meadow scenery | Requires a necessary height. | 32 | lyric, nature, philosophical | Assembling the Earth |
| 22 | In the right angle of a fence
Definitions first commence To lock us into making sense. By running round and round a thing With a tape measure for a string We hobble it to give us wings. Its only from our having tried To live without a why inside, Or, like a mystic pray tongue-tied, That we have ever given thought To holding in what we have got To see what we've done without. |
Definitely | In the right angle of a fence | To see what we've done without. | 12 | lyric, nature, philosophical | Assembling the Earth |
| 23 | Once upon a time, I had slightly
Bruised my fingerend in tying Unneedful knots too brutally. The knots were sonnets, gracefully Losing bout by bout in rhyming, Despite my careful scratching That annulled no spot of itching. I had not thought that writing Was so much like fighting Or two witches bitching So under-epidermally. I stayed at it relentlessly Tying tying tying Every Musing, Bruising Blossom stylistically. The daisy- Chain was for no one particularly (Or perhaps I am lying) You know how things get tangly When we practice firstly.... The lengthening String of words got too stringy And self-involved in singing That should have taken flight more singly By whistling Unconcernedly And not too self-consciously, The way A clumsy Kite, so sprightly Can climb all day By dodging More effortful breezes, never too longly Lodging, Never aloft too lingeringly Until the crisis of a knot too thoughtfully Unthoughtful cripples the so skyey Thingy Into a crooked tree. |
Chain Chain Chain | Once upon a time, I had slightly | Into a crooked tree. | 41 | lyric, philosophical | Assembling the Earth |
| 24 | A clouded day in a warm week
Is little, in a whole month a week Of rain, sans weekends, is OK; A covered month of storm and soak Is welcome in a year of weather That puts sunburns and hurricanes together. So when an inner barometer Flails from hails and rain to shine and sweeter And darkly back again To damnably, darkly fail.... whatever. |
Introrse Proportions | A clouded day in a warm week | To damnably, darkly fail.... whatever. | 12 | lyric, nature, weather | Assembling the Earth |
| 25 | You are the thing I love, no lie.
You have given me despair. I don't know how, I don't know why, But my faith has come from there. I key my verse on my hearse's side: "All our knowing burns down to 'Why?'" -Nor give a fuck about my verses' pride That they may live, and I must die. |
Lucid Interval | You are the thing I love, no lie. | That they may live, and I must die. | 8 | lyric, minor | Assembling the Earth |
| 26 | i. She
A slippery sense of mental decay sharpens the knives and the wits of the wives In drawers long locked away. The sunset casts a spurious look to calm the unmentionable ache in my unmentionable place With a Hallmark sort of trick. But the hidden hurt must out; the curse must make its choice, match inner and outer voice, And let the quiet heart once shout. ii. He Why are you so quiet? What have I done? Silence mounts the table urgent as a gun. All night we've argued mazes and all night the night before: We see ourselves in the window glazing dart glances at the door. You'd glad be shut of me- I'll be quit of you, I swear- And in the going horse of voice and voice we bed each other on a dare. |
Evening Argument | i. She | we bed each other on a dare. | 26 | lyric, conversation, two voices, dialogue | Assembling the Earth |
| 27 | I had stopped myself at noon, amused
On an abandoned track that moved Through a wood no longer used, Through waste acres of a watershed Cloven by a regular runoff where Clarity was wildered by wild briars. Until a hidden water's hissing Showed that something else was missing, One never would have wondered That anything there had harkened At the juncture where briars darkened As if by deepness of the angle At the midmost of their tangle. Something moved beneath the plane Where the interrupted track regains The far oasis of the wood, Something going crossways where I stood, Crossways to my onward motion. I stood without a blessed notion. At the very precipice I paused, And waited to see if what had caused Me to arrive there once Would cause me to hurry further on. I listened to what I could not see, Water in the dirt continuously Spattering against such hazards As its pattering traversed. I spied the farther side, which seemed Indifferently like where I was indeed, A wood moving on to wood, A leafy dark neither bad nor good. A tree, once proud upon its ridge, Lay translated into a bridge At my left, and the track repeated Its pattern as it retreated Past the tree's, an oak's, fallen crown Stripped to wires on the farther ground. I put my foot, and it seemed To hold upon a mossy cloud With just a warning creak or two That subsided like morning dew. Another step, another crack And I was airbourne along my track, And the whispered waters loudened To an almost-roar unshrouded. This was something, then, a place Unusual in the closed-in space That gives woods a closet feel Of uncomfort, of bodies real But mentally disposed of, The way we take our clothes off And refuse to see them wrinkle Any longer as real people. Had the slope been undermined, Had the tree been dealt an ill-timed Blow by lightning an age before My feet had brought me to this shore? Whatever the history, I took A naturalist's close firsthand look At the detail that feeds the mind When mind's to thinking first inclined And all the world's a wonder As perpetual as thunder. There's an art, a large art, of course, Comprehended in just looking close. The moss had browned to gold, it seemed Unfed by any mist or stream Despite the pounding of the sound That made a pulsing all around Centered in my ears. Still firm,- So then, just a dry summer's harm, No more, curable by summer storm Soaking live roots back to greenness, The dieback of a season's meanness. An ant with an aphid hat hurried by Anxious of her fresh supply. Another step, another, and hushed Came the crumble where foot had crushed The intradose of a termite arch (Found more often in a fallen larch); A colony of teeth in such bone-hard wood! Whether bored, or because they could, I could not know, and understood That even in a thing so small I myself could not measure all By limits of my comprehension. But now, done with desecration, (Or, more optimistically, Aeration of the tree) They left to found another nation With colonists from this way-station Who pack up their idea of home And take it with them where they roam. And now the whole tree was hollow, And houseless hoot owls inward followed. Also into this interesting Emptiness, came bees without a sting, Carpenter bees who hustled and tore Termite tunnels to a larger bore For their solitary parlors Conveniently near both briars And water. Who'd've thought there'd be So much of life in so dead a tree? I had gone down upon my knees In my investigation, pleased To spend my day in something other Than myself. I wondered whether, As I stood again on what stood No more, if I should include What was father on out there Now I had come thus far to stare; My thoughts surrounded me like fog In the middle of the ruined log, As unsteady of my footing there As unsure of my going.... Where? I peered a step just past my place And conjectured farther on a pace; The path behind was twice the gauge As the dwindled path on the next stage. It seemed that most upon this track Had come this far to double back. Well, I never have had more regard For that stepper Kiekegaard Than for my other walkers in the wood, Intending to walk on as they should, Instead walking only as they do. I kicked a little nothing from my shoe And made my balance come and go, Unsteady and unstable how to go, Uncertain and unsure how to know, Kicked a something from my other shoe, And in the end continued onward, too, As few had chosen here to do, As all who are not only bones may do. To keep unlost, as doubt to doubt You wander roundabout your route, Simply do not doubt your doubt. |
Roundabout | I had stopped myself at noon, amused | Simply do not doubt your doubt. | 137 | lyric, nature, philosophical | Assembling the Earth |
| 28 | The town blind behind, blind woods ahead,
And a whitened graveyard here. I stood alone with my luminous dread In the dying of the year. From the midnight hill I'd seen below Huddled graves, yet each alone. And here and there in the hollow, low, A dent in snow without a stone. Poplars dropped odd shadows, the moon Dropped a mood. Whatever talk may tell In me had talked-out too soon. I brushed a small glow from where it fell. The stony concentration of a face Shone angel no longer- here the snow Wears his worn-out years of grace To the blankness of his soul. His name's gone out like shopfront lights, His verse survives by guesses. What had brought me here was what night Had done with my distress. I walked out from being And walked to having been; Living was only seeing, Death's just having seen. The bell was black and the time that tolled Was an absence in my heart. Into those bleak letter-gaps, I had rolled For all my part. |
Grave Spaces | The town blind behind, blind woods ahead, | For all my part. | 28 | lyric, nature, meditative | Assembling the Earth |
| 29 | A midnight ocean and a stippled snow
Greyly perceived from a rail I know Shared the grainy dark of here and nearer. What water was above me seemed uncertainer. What rolled in mist below rolled solider. As snow and snow will in snowing meet, What slid down danced into a wild sleet And randomly clung, each to each, Resisting ocean's disassembling touch That undoes the individual who falls And in that fall returns to ocean's all. I could not tell just what my seeing meant Nor how long soundless darkness had been lent; There was nothing there in what was of sky, No help of light to help say why, Only usurpation's snow-deadened hiss That ended each self-formed singleness Distilled from upper vagueness and the cold. They did not fall because they had been told. They fell because there was nothing else to do But fall, and this the ocean knew. |
Wintering by the Atlantic | A midnight ocean and a stippled snow | But fall, and this the ocean knew. | 21 | lyric, nature, meditative | Assembling the Earth |
| 30 | Beyond the serious torches of several cypress trees,
The dusty chirrup chirrup of militant cicadas, The noble solitude of a solid lonely oak Clattering his leaves at the sun over a bleached field That balanced his high growth by spreading out, Desert-like and hot at noon, and all afternoon Until the evening made them equal sharers Of one shade, a blackness welled up from the root. Beyond all this, beyond the blushing bluish grasses And inner darkness of some evergreens out right, I thought to see what seemed from the county road A sweet hilarious patch of beech, tittering Among more sober rowans, and walked on Farther than I had thought at first to do. A forest darkness hustled, a coat atop my coat. And so I came upon a late-flowering bush Hidden deeper in among more doubtful darks, Taller and elder, more august and up high. It was way out of season, much too too late, Yet full of hopeful blossom regardless Of the season's clock; it kept its time its own- Before the long sharpness of the frost that tapered In shadows till midday, it held its whites aloft. The flowering bush was a thing itself, alone, Clotted with milky flowers as large as fists As if to claim a space among the harder barks, As a child will feel more brave at midnight, Startled from a nightmare, to smile in the dark, Or as a father walks twice round and round A house, for proof he really has a home. The flowers asked for bees that would not come To so shaded an interior, whose buzzed instincts Could not guess to lead them there, too far From the sugary buttercups and tigerlilies of the field; The bees were busy with their honeys and their hives, Too industrious to bother with this thing alone. I wondered what had made the seed drop here All those years ago when this bush first pipped. Had some panicked thrush raced bewildered through the thick, Or been carried dead by some hawk, and dropped? How had the seed, which loved the sun, found Filtered light to endure, in the coolness all about? Had some tree burned out and a dormant seed Been sprung, hot from its casing, into germination? I'd known an odd old fellow who had not Half begun to sing until he was half past eighty, And his voice as awful as an old phonograph; But still he sung, and mostly pleased himself of late, And showed the lyric shavings of sharpened wit To any too-curious; those words were his fists. Above us all in the little clearing, the dull touch Of a near cloud's inner-lighted immanence Broadened into mystery over man and bush. Something happened then, I did not know How much until years afterward had stretched My roots into some new dark flowing underneath. But then, I did not know what I would become, And, never having intended to be there once at all, And having forgotten all about the patch of beech That had first sent me off into the dark, I shook my head at the flowering bush and took off. |
Late-Flowering Bush | Beyond the serious torches of several cypress tree | I shook my head at the flowering bush and took off | 61 | lyric, nature, meditative, monologue, soliloquy | Assembling the Earth |
| 31 | A soft possible snow had descended
And let the moon climb down from the sky. The world lay in whiteness without witness or end. Snow lay on the tree-limbs like ladder-rungs rounded And softened my cold need for why. Not a blank footstep, not a note of sound Intruded on the marvelous sight. All creatures, all creation slept like the ground, As though no other dark did our dark surround. A winter Eden and a winter night. And then I thought: It is as if some other than The snow had snowed down or in, Coldly immune to storm or reason. Each hour I held that thought held only harm. I searched the moon-snow transfigured farm. The fallen night I found, I found no ease in. |
A Winter Eden | A soft possible snow had descended | The fallen night I found, I found no ease in. | 16 | lyric, nature, meditative | Assembling the Earth |
| 32 | Already this mist's been here three days,
Immune to our creator's rays; Where it came from it did not say. It has not gone again today. Heaviness lingers on every bush, Limned in weak whiteness near as touch; All that moves, moves only to hush. And, as I said, it makes my breathing close. Once I was unsure of whether Eyes and earth could share a weather, Despite our eons so close together; Now I know, I should feel it better. |
Wet Weather Promise | Already this mist's been here three days, | Now I know, I should feel it better. | 12 | lyric, nature, weather | Assembling the Earth |
| 33 | A milkweed has it in it to become
Something, and challenges the field With myriad pods above the other stalks, And then there's the whiteness, all that whiteness, Clumped and disparate with the wind slow, A slow diaspora that struggles mostly Into our reservoir just there, or plants its flag In the same field that served as home. There's that in us as well that never waits, That wants out,- and gets out too,- past fields It blows out onward always in the mind, Same as the milkweed taken root and risen To spurn its soil, and dies in seeding out its thought; Just so, our light cares, light temptations Lift out and abandon us, and we wish it so. Some other valley's always more our sort, Some other sunset igniting through the gorse. Hand me that dead milkweed stem you've Yanked up there- thanks. See how the lips Have gone to beaks with vomiting dreams All day long and under the August sun? Here's one deep-in hasn't the heart for escape, For leaving the only home its ever known; No matter if that home is dead or soon to die, Home is home. There's a reach in the design, Wispy almost-nothing pulled to this seed Soft as a moth, perfect for an escape Once the pod's blown out, hardened to scrap- Necessary for these feathers to move on Into the endless. Rise after rise Lies past this embankment of peaches, straight on To the sea out somewhere, toward the Pacific perhaps To judge by the wind. Never thought of it, Although I suppose we all crawled from there, But that's one home not hardened yet, Not the sea, not yet, or if it had, Something else has troubled it back to life. |
Milk-Weed | A milkweed has it in it to become | Something else has troubled it back to life. | 37 | lyric, nature, dramatic monologue, soliloquy | Assembling the Earth |
| 34 | I ride the night-yard's rose bush like a saddle,
Burning to be nearer what shines afar, And visit all the dreaming stars for marvel, My rose and I still waking where we are. All below is lost, I believe in what's above. Unburied from sleep, I and my heart arose- As full of feeling as empty of self, they say. But knowing myself as I know my yard and rose, I say, "Losing finds all again; there is a way." Twenty years about both house and bush I've spent; Twenty years dreaming to the rose-soft summit Where the sun arises a rose and sets a rose. Having gone round in love, I return to love; I wake to see where my rose-dreaming goes. My compass rose is cunning, her roots are deep. I dream the dream I need when I dream of sleep. The self is buried, and its roots are mossed. Roots are what come of being lost. |
The Compass Rose | I ride the night-yard's rose bush like a saddle, | Roots are what come of being lost. | 18 | lyric, nature, dream | Assembling the Earth |
| 36 | Petal falling followed falling petal
Till all apple trees held was sky above; Such a burst of sweetness discharged from air Put mind out of reckoning for its cares. We walked laughing through the snowing grove Whirling the fallen in splashes back up, Widening soft confusions in our wake, Chapleted in blossoms that all spring throve, Like trees ourselves glowing with tree-petals.- Earth and air to a fantastic whiteness blown, Shining as puddles from yesterday's shower. Yet trees, for all their loss, did not look to be sad. To rely on having is to be had. New leaves yattering new green to new leaves Talked for all the world about the breeze, As if blossoms had kept them quieted as snow And, having shaken off their winter calm to play, They did not know what to say or know And so said everything in a single day. Evening found them standing solemn with the stars Thinking how little they were themselves Beneath bright things hung up so far. Starlight cast down starlight like sky decayed. All the night orchard stood restored to blaze As if no single petal of them all Had suffered earthward a single fall. |
The Night Orchard | Petal falling followed falling petal | Had suffered earthward a single fall. | 26 | lyric, nature, meditative | The Timid Leaper |
| 37 | Trees that have it in them to be a wood
Gather dark thoughts where bare hilltop stood. Branch to branch entreats, and root goes out to root Entangling dirt with movement deliberate As worms, and mix their living sinews With cold dead earth, its coldness to renew And above the burning hilltop bring A shadowy wing never alighting. Starless night hovers where noon once reigned And exiles grass, and laughing feet detains With extricating minuets of wait And then pass on,- a guardless garden gate Forever shuddering in the wind trees keep, Murmuring night-long while the world's asleep. |
The Wind Trees Keep | Trees that have it in them to be a wood | Murmuring night-long while the world's asleep. | 14 | lyric, nature, sonnet | The Timid Leaper |
| 38 | A pony came whose coat was black as pitch,
Whose blood was broody as water in a ditch. Her eyes were saucers of red command, Her teeth grew square on the taste of hands. Wildflowers grew more wild at her passing scent; Like nerves through skin she raced where she went. There was more than strangeness in what made her so. There was more of night in her hooves than men know. Proud, unobeying breed of tameless hills, Storm of strength with a godless guideless will. What light burned behind her being may Not have been heaven sent, but burned to stay. An inner star served as her only lamp: None took her, none kept her, none triumphed. |
The Black Pony | A pony came whose coat was black as pitch, | None took her, none kept her, none triumphed. | 14 | lyric, nature, sonnet, personal, love | The Timid Leaper |
| 39 | The old quarry's flooded echo came back
To him almost exact, but left a blunted blank For song, a lack of deadened cold echo In so much dank; the quarry air was too Soft and queer to sough a song out right,- Yet still the listening stone, it seemed, white, uptilted, Knew that song might be meant, to judge by crevice And shadowed device and looks that meant no peace Nor gave advice beyond the dusty tans Rained down on singing man. One saw then, The quarry was all quivered walls and rocks A mocking water swallowed at the bottom. It resembled nothing so much as a tomb. Man's voice rolled all against the abandoned lot, Echoing himself his repeated tune again Like nothing else in nature that to voice pretends; He was his own superior echo then While song pursued its end as if never begun, And time dilated some in jarring after-echo, Or made itself felt as one,- as dark burns on in coal While fire unfolds fire. Here, some soft after-noise (As in the mare the moaning foal) made some alloy, Forging voice and form alive in the willful quarry To totter and rejoice alone where dead water stayed, -A second singing voice came from bland clay, And was heard some way. It seemed, for once, The offence of voice had persuaded voice To once not stay remanded in veined marble But grace half-garbled, but half-audible, The silent singer's startled ear, and speak Some talk of the theme he'd followed half-awake Into the choked dark of the watery quarry. What he caught of what came back made him wary. "I won't be sorry. I won't, I won't-" He straightened up half-sighing, as if he'd meant Never to hear his own want in song he'd given All his graven morning to, and that, if spent above, Would have vanished less riven into eve Than the grave day that the quarry gave. |
The Old Quarry | The old quarry's flooded echo came back | Than the grave day that the quarry gave. | 39 | nature, meditative, dramatic monologue, soliloquy | The Timid Leaper |
| 40 | Liberty has two edges still,
One to keep free, one to kill. |
Two-Edged Liberty | Liberty has two edges still, | One to keep free, one to kill. | 2 | lyric, minor, doggerl | The Timid Leaper |
| 41 | Clear-headed time at a touch
Shows all too much. The resentful body grows old; Youth and strength have gone Disgraced from the stage. Vague as a notion, The room swims into view; Dawn stutters into motion. Time has done to you Things time shouldn't do. An old man stares out From an oval steel mirror, Your face in one clout The face of a stranger: Cataract-eyed, his blind Grip gone round a razor. |
Strokes | Clear-headed time at a touch | Grip gone round a razor. | 16 | lyric, death | The Timid Leaper |
| 42 | Bright beyond belief the morning sun
Presents a double blazing image Above the sink, bewitching just enough of dawn For me to throw both windows back in homage. I went forgetful about my round of chores, Touching openness neither less nor more Than I was bid by my round of chores. Sunset had sun exit as it had come, In doubled glory. A thrush burst out at once Loudly loud, as if woods and house were one And eaves leaves.- And thank, yes, forever thank Such song for how it came and its coming in To wake indoor woods beside my sink. Thank thrush for landing home in homing in. |
The Thrush at the Sill | Bright beyond belief the morning sun | Thank thrush for landing home in homing in. | 14 | nature, sonnet, gratitude | The Timid Leaper |
| 43 | The upper pasture gate creaked padlocked.
A wading lantern to show the latch Flared where invisible things attach, Carrying light snatched up for open use To home a tricky key and save a curse. To burn out opposing night and burn day back, And give dark description where words must lack, Light's concern was kept narrow as the lock. At a click, light soon waded on to earthy dark,- Swung wondering in a guideless hand Familiar with the black of pasture lands; Sudden cow or knoll indifferently stood stark. I followed from below as I was, restless To see how aimless light in darkness does. |
A Late Milking | The upper pasture gate creaked padlocked. | To see how aimless light in darkness does. | 14 | nature, sonnet, meditative | The Timid Leaper |
| 44 | At an unsteering speed of stoppage,
Detourned from straight tracks and wages Into a listless field gone over Mostly to pale thick-blossomed clover, A boxcar keeps still its steel rails Going both ends nowhere in parallel. At the blackness of the door A bandit gathers gold once more, Pulling yellow raspberries From some single spray above the weeds, Reaching the rarewire richness With nimble hands and quickness, Palming sunset tears from thorns; The racoon drinks them one by one. Nothing comes to the rusted hitch Clawing air above a gopher ditch, No iron hand arrives to steer And with knuckled coupling make a pair, To clasp its open mate from the clearing Into a sky of tear-streaked stars Where time would hoist a husky boxcar From its slatted stall and decay To paradise, all the way. Yet in the eye of a ruffed robin, On her hopeful nestful throned within Where the red roof caves in From leakage and mineral rain, Glints a hint of levitation- In her high eye alone it seems A flying boxcar bursts with wings Like eyelashes; below it, everything Lies amiably disordered, Earthbound and solemnly sordid, While heavenly visitors to her nest Feed her safe chicks, and she rests. So much of vision came to eye, and awed. A unpersuaded caw cawed From the litter of the field The hunching crow refused to yield, A black bold spot that picked for trash In weeds gone bright to whiteness. Now only time, for what it's worth Flying still on its changeful path, Turns the structure in its soft clutch Like a moody sleeper back to earth. |
The Broken Boxcar | At an unsteering speed of stoppage, | Like a moody sleeper back to earth. | 45 | nature, story, rhyming, philosophical | The Timid Leaper |
| 45 | Where a single steeple keeps the sky
And a scribbled wet of charcoal darks Laps lapsing to meet the day, -Crosshatched by wind's artistic lark,- Monday quiet's come, as quiet may Upon one meditation-taken; After-silence serves some way For all the echo left the lake. The boathouse goes down to dock On knees of battered pilings. Suppliant to greet common rock, The dock goes flat as filings. Astute, the musing rock Lets the mirror water watch What it has mind enough to mock:- Searchers who seek a latch. There is no back or access side To such a thing that is all is; And if you say inside, And take inside out to see what 'tis, I'll say, 'tis better far to glide Whatever offered surfaces And decode what pleasure there resides In such interstices Than creep through dark, however wide The open crosshatch seems or is, To pull apart, to peer at tides Whose motives are their business,- And trouble them enough alive To wash our prayers with their sighs. |
Lakeside Sketch | Where a single steeple keeps the sky | To wash our prayers with their sighs. | 30 | lyric, cautionary | The Timid Leaper |
| 46 | I longed for something something like too long.
My ablest eyes had two ears of seems- Each tree I heard, I heard shake some human song; Two eyes never looked but I saw two stars along, No weather raved but trailed some inner storm. My analogizing mind knew but what it deemed. Nothing brought what it had meant to bring, No shape manifest but in related form. Of what I'd been gifted I got nothing, no thing. Alone in life's simulacrum I saw or heard Less than one third of every third's third. All my blessings blessed transformed. Ready at last to be, no matter being's marr, I'm satisfied with sighing is and are. |
Something Like | I longed for something something like too long. | I'm satisfied with sighing is and are. | 14 | lyric, sonnet, philosophical | The Timid Leaper |
| 47 | Like the flower near at hand I grow
Upwards by light into all I know; Buried in ignorant dirt by a downward thumb I bend dumb beneath rain into what may come. Like a flower in summer now I grow tall, Concentrate a seed out of all I've been, Put half my something into that seed to fall, Drop it unseen on wide ground, and then Name that something put my all. Is that something put experience gathered in? Or is ignorance all when any all begins? My ignorance decides me- I cannot tell What seed, in growing there, may yet become Besides new ignorance beneath the sun. |
Something Put | Like the flower near at hand I grow | Besides new ignorance beneath the sun. | 14 | lyric, sonnet, philosophical | The Timid Leaper |
| 48 | My breast is a burning anvil
Cannot hammer a likely shoe Stern enough to trace unglued A racing lifetime through and through. My breast is a burning anvil Full of causal smokes and coughs, More than youth at times had thought, Between hammer and anvil caught. My breast is a burning anvil That sparks with the loss of heat When edge and edge, hard and hard, compete To shape each and each to mate. My breast is a burning anvil Cannot cease to pause or cool,- As industrious, dedicate a tool As any I'd forgot I forged. My breast is a burning anvil Full of tragic din and error As any beating thing that mirrors The hotness of my terror. My breast is a burning anvil Cannot pound out a likely star As real as evening's first clear At whose clarity I stare. |
The Burning Anvil | My breast is a burning anvil | At whose clarity I stare. | 24 | lyric, personal, anthem | The Timid Leaper |
| 49 | Something about where the pebbled path in day
Splits, or in evening even trines, Makes me wonder about the purpose of the way. How many must have used their footsteps just to come, And in coming here pass on in time, As if all wheres we go are comparable to when. And yet, time's a path more linearly ordered, One whose steps will not divide, No matter at what shady banks or grasses we loiter- We may not, cannot, no matter how tried, Reverse the going flow, or, breaking it, abide. |
Timebends | Something about where the pebbled path in day | Reverse the going flow, or, breaking it, abide. | 11 | lyric, approximate sonnet, meditative | The Timid Leaper |
| 50 | How small a snapshot lies in hand
That held such grandness in its lens. A perspective granted only once and when. What we see of what is just depends. Bounded by a regular white of lack, I look at the detailed littleness; A thumb occludes a mountain in the west Like a painter perhapsing a sketch on scrap. Snapped charm of vistas that had turned my head, Develops charms of Time new-enlisted To re-focus a moment visited. Out of the frame winces one of my dead; I turn the flat for date, and recognize How loss and tears consume what's snapped by eyes. |
Snaps | How small a snapshot lies in hand | How loss and tears consume what's snapped by eyes. | 14 | lyric, sonnet, meditative | The Timid Leaper |
| 51 | A spider, web, and alderberry bush
Arranged December in a quiet crèche; The spider's stitching straw was soft and fine As anything that ties us to the divine; An afternoon of hidden breaths condensed, Strung with dew as if of dew composed, A blazing cobweb out of cold mist- Dew-prism looked on prism, all in all, And saw summer's wonder from before the Fall Until every thread of light was put out by the loss Of sun. Twilit dews sparkled into frost. Each gentle juncture hardened to a cross. Stiff additions of still more strength and grace To dropleted water, by increments erased Weave's living give and left a stony place To which the chapel spider was not accustomed. A rigid web in an alderberry niche, Still and silver as a collection dish. From her holy central belly it spiraled out,- A frozen wheel or prayer-mat to invite Chilly fervors of the not-yet devout. You couldn't think such religion altruistic, And could only thank it if a mystic And believed all troubled birth a pause Between our cyclings back to Cause. The spider didn't think it mercy, that's certain. She rushed behind her tautened curtain To lay a landed fly into her winter stock And knit the praying fly a little silver lock That has only a mystic key. She sought to bead a new dew to see, Since day had gone blinded down to night, And one more dark into her web was caught. But even a spider with her sticky tricks Can find occasion to make a slip On such transparency gone slick; The icy wire and her dainty claw-tip Met without resistance, though her weight was there, And that gave a tumbled feeling of unfair And brought spider slipping past the fly Who looked at her with all of his eyes, Gave an inch leap, and was gone. The diamond web with ice was diamonded. The spider threw a line to save her pride And back toward the frozen center slid. She poised unpleased, ready for dark dispatch,- A philosopher at a damaged treasure-latch, Meditating what Fate might have brought In the richness of the fly near-caught, And then what wealth of blood denied, The treasure chest a blank inside. Perhaps the spider, if she had tried, Might have persuaded the praying fly He'd be in for blessings if he died. (Too bad he'd already taken off on his Aerodynamic errand or business.) Wheels within wheels and layer upon layer. Death would rank him up a rung, Nearer You and I as human beings - Or two rungs up. Yes. To convince the buyer, Persuades more than a hundred prayers, Thought this spider to herself, cool and sly. But there was no nimble buzzer skating by To heed the sales-pitch of the spider, Save those flies already saved inside her. With eight great eyes and eight great arms, And well-equipped to deal out harm, She resumed half-folded her coldly central position As ready for Fate as anyone Defeat had bruised and brought Hungrier for what she had not caught. |
Prisms | A spider, web, and alderberry bush | Hungrier for what she had not caught. | 71 | nature, philosophical, cautionary, rhyming | The Timid Leaper |
| 52 | It's been a well-worn
Year since my iris has gone Whose dark-headed heightened grace Had tripleted heart's pace And made the threatening waters Irradiate the lighter For her being something darker. She brought her blue-black laughter Like an aftereffect of thunder When lightning rare as wonder Makes a landscape dark as murder By its too-much light, and, lighter, Touches earth and sky together. Now the garden, disused and mossed, Grieves green, and I am lost As rain that runs away, As a thought that will not stay, Or childhood song that refuses to play. My iris in her wonted place, Sensed through broken mist and lace, In tree-shadows lifts her face.- I see her here returned, Nor may I this wish unlearn As long as dew in dawn's-light burns; Every shady curl of worth That my flower had leased from earth In sable richness reappears, Full of rampant ribbon-shapes, Taking all of root and stalk To reach to light, and, silent, talk. |
Iris Vision | It's been a well-worn | To reach to light, and, silent, talk. | 30 | nature, personal, love | The Timid Leaper |
| 53 | I come to stare at leaves as deep as snow,
That have sent the roots to sea, that know A restlessness I, restless, know. I come to stare at leaves as deep as snow. I turn the rake, send tines upended Not to use as I intended But to lean and stare as if deep in snow And hear the restless things I know: Too many things put aside or shunted That had been centered when I started, Too many things a life must ask us,- So quick a quiet moment will unmask us. A moment's thought, and all disguise Resolves itself into surprise; A moment more of wonder, even more, And ignorance the disguise restores. Leaves unsheltered by the coming wind Rub the half-bare trees where they began; They move as they would there once again Climb to be leaves returned by wind. Deep behind the mask, a whisper knows There's an old hole of light to show Just where we've come, and yet may go, Among restless leaves as deep as snow. |
Unmask Us | I come to stare at leaves as deep as snow, | Among restless leaves as deep as snow. | 24 | nature, meditative, rhyming | The Timid Leaper |
| 54 | My conscience is grass surrounding every side
Whispering, whispering. No help, no guide. When I at last lie down, it will lie by my side, Never saying do or go, but only: be, abide. |
Conscience Is Grass | My conscience is grass surrounding every side | Never saying do or go, but only: be, abide. | 4 | lyric, nature, minor, philosophical | The Timid Leaper |
| 55 | I passed a knoll and passed it every day
Along the same soft deserted loam Until a track as bare as bone Followed along my way. It was in its going I saw it first: Narrow willows in a lovely copse Where the wounded woodsman lops The last to lay with the first. I had not noted the knot of wood, Or taken the view to do myself good- Although the fresh-cut white of the willow-ends Made some temporary amends. [Versioned from Edward Thomas' "First Known When Lost"] |
The Wounded Woodsman | I passed a knoll and passed it every day | "First Known When Lost"] | 14 | lyric, nature, minor, rhyming | The Timid Leaper |
| 56 | Build the storm-brought wood till its right to burn
-A civilization, an amended word; Completion and destruction turn A dead-end rhyme as mated words. The long matchstick cracks, a broken finger, A wail to salt the self-subsuming wood; -As if no injury could make ginger Our conscience to aid the good. I know myself, and play my hand Shadowless in the flame and briny fire Until a new pink hurt like stinging sand Bids hand withdraw, and I perspire. |
Boardwalk Bonfire | Build the storm-brought wood till its right to bur | Bids hand withdraw, and I perspire. | 12 | lyric, nature, minor, rhyming | The Timid Leaper |
| 57 | All our hours vacillate
Like summer clouds gone sliding by Clotted, vein-veiled and late, Froward or deadly shy Apparitions of the empty, The essentially empty sky, To dissipate in an hour's downpour. All our hours, all our hours. Our most famous nimbus And more hallowed halo are Our only blessings, bare and lent By God, devil, or doubtful goal In dance of dread amusement. Each day we eat and ache, Something dark for its own sake Laughs at our glittering fate; We tend our hours like a wish, Alone but for some softer guess- Our heart-happiness uncertain As divinity's parted curtain. What remains of marvel here Of all that drifts to dust Beneath a sky irremediably clear Is the irascible particular; The him of him, the her of her. Listen to the wind and to me- Let lending lend in leniency An open, ageless, real reprieve (In which unsafe hearts may yet believe) To all our human tenancy Defined by that proscenium Under which we're born and moan Full of voice and softness, Full of whispers and of curses. With the individual soul, -With that and that alone,- Wherever soaring moves above Or going goes in having went, Be thou communicant. And this as well I wish and say To one and all or the all-in-one: Touch whatever in touching comes, And, -brave beyond what may be saved By what such touching has engraved,- Never one instant's kissing shun. |
A Summer Prayer | All our hours vacillate | Never one instant's kissing shun. | 45 | lyric, nature, anthem, rhyming | The Timid Leaper |
| 58 | Once upon a time, I had bruised slightly
My Fing- Erend in ty- Ing Unneedful knots too brutally. The knots were sonnets, rhy- Ming Not gracefully, Losing Bout by Bout despite my Careful tying. I had not thought writing Was so much like fighting. I stay- Ed at it relentlessly Tying tying tying Every Musing, Bruising blossom stylistically. The daisy- Chain was for no one particularly (Or perhaps I am lying). You know how things Get tangly When we practice firstly.... The leng- Thening String Of words got too stringy And self-involved in singing That should have taken flight more singly By Whistling Unconcernedly And not too self-consciously. |
Chain Chain Chain [sonnet version] | Once upon a time, I had bruised slightly | And not too self-consciously. | 38 | sonnet, playful | The Timid Leaper |
| 59 | Once upon a time, I had bruised slightly
My fingerend in tying unneedful knots Too brutally. The knots were sonnets, Rhyming not gracefully, losing bout by bout Despite my careful tying. I had not Thought writing was so much like fighting. I stayed at it relentlessly tying tying tying Every musing, bruising blossom stylistically. The daisy-chain was for no one particularly (Or perhaps I am lying). You know how things get tangly When we practice firstly.... The lengthening string Of words got too stringy and self-involved in singing That should have taken flight more singly by whistling Unconcernedly and not too self-consciously. |
Chain Chain Chain [sonnet format] | Once upon a time, I had bruised slightly | Unconcernedly and not too self-consciously. | 14 | sonnet, playful | The Timid Leaper |
| 60 | It was summer's atmosphere of doubt,
I said, made me uncertain what I was about; Earth was warm and sure, I was not. I made myself feel the closeness of the crypt. To be by so much richness troubled When wavery air gave me me myself doubled In the very nothingness I breathed and stumbled Was to curse a wealth of gifts assembled. I did not have what I had wished; Nothing did as I did insist. Summer's ripeness came to a million ifs, I had nothing but summer's million gifts. All the lauded grace of giving was Time's; All grace crowded close as living rhymes. |
Gifts Assembled | It was summer's atmosphere of doubt, | All grace crowded close as living rhymes. | 14 | nature, sonnet, gratitude | The Timid Leaper |
| 61 | Who incised this river here by writing hard
Forgot to leave with wetted alphabet The charm of a cipher. The river rambles on, Until caught up by the roots that shade My going on in woods, although my coming here Where river spells and spills into hard wood Was open plain enough. And that's another kind Of hard-to-see from too much looking: Field and sky- at night, earth-dark and stars- Flat each to each like paired mirrors with Nothing caught between. So I'd crawled here Morning long, the weather hugger-mugger nothing And the fields off-rotation for bearing crops, And, so, lively with wildflower wilderness' Play-day maybe and beginning mischief Of sorting out itself without the help of hands. I thought, once, coming this way years back On a similar sort of errandless errand, I had caught, once, some evidence of pride Running through the wild wood gone half-back From cultivation to dark unplowed bewilderment. I saw a line as straight as a forearm Run a hundred yards between two equal Tangles of trees- fair straight- the way A stick will write out a line and raise a rim In level leaf-mold chewed even by the time. All this before a hidden storm the weather folk Had laid odds against, and, so, I had dismissed. And then a thinnest silver filter fell And brought already damp woods as wet.... And I stood in the turn of atmosphere As sunset brought a gold to all the air, Infecting silver with light's last despair, The way a fever brightens sickness to a shine In eyes and cheeks, and brows grow dewed With inner causes. I stood thus and wiped my face, Interested to see such simple changefulness, And not knowing why I displayed such interest, Nor indeed why I had such interest to gift To new wilderness come up since man had left. But, slowly, as winter eaves will gather ice, This line fallen before my feet, uncrossed, Became a trough for an element not itself, And rose cupping changeful water until dark, And past dark, myself become as sodden As my coat, my hands gone home to pockets Like squirrels asleep in leaves,- until overfull Of rain and moonlight. The line laid out A silver bar, shining from end to end Like some fresh first cuneiform stroke in clay; You know how clarity can come on after storm, No matter how minor the stirrings warned. But I wondered, as I would. I wondered anyway. What had taught the line to be, when clouds Cleared away to re-present the moon to me? What straightness lay here inherited? Nothing came to drink of what had swollen, A revelation strange as rain that'd left it To puzzle one who seeks for things in things And wants to know just what to tell himself, Forgetting weather's made by being out in rain. |
New Wilderness | Who incised this river here by writing hard | Forgetting weather's made by being out in rain. | 61 | nature, soliloquy, dramatic monologue | The Timid Leaper |
| 62 | There is no learning but to yearn and yearn,
And by wanting see what we think we are (Composed of stuff from a farther star).- Desire deep-in to recklessly burn; Desire to assemble what all we are By partial parts into one whole complete; To work out the sum where integers meet And write an answer without a scar, Without a stitch where kissing incompletes Tell-out by telltale the nightly labor Used to unify our dawning wonder That recklessly burns with day's own heat- Until our in-dark echo cries for night, Cool and apart, and all away from sight. |
No Learning | There is no learning but to yearn and yearn, | Cool and apart, and all away from sight. | 14 | sonnet, meditative | The Timid Leaper |
| 63 | I'd thought life without Love no life at all,
And my life like a parachutist's fall Had readied-up with a silken snarl And without a parachutist's safety-pull. I was dead-ready to meet the all-in-all; I had all needed: gravity and a fool. My heart never mistrusted God was cruel. On my way down to clouds, through clouds to clods, I thought how the silk weight on my belly pulled, How silk and air stretched tight would make a shroud, And what an act, inordinate and proud, Living on would be -just as if allowed- Before the cruel throne and crowded face of God, My life one long fall as if dead and mourned. |
Down to Clouds | I'd thought life without Love no life at all, | My life one long fall as if dead and mourned. | 14 | sonnet, personal, death | The Timid Leaper |
| 64 | I did not know how clouds could crowd
The weathered Earth by blowing round, Or drop deep shadows by their light, Too much lightness in sun's too much light. 'Til one day their dark put me dark- Crowded me out by high-shadowed marks From old communion with the sun; Daily now my darkness comes. I, who had been a burning cloud, Now in noon-night perform my rounds. Were I to shred their silver dark, New light would blind by being stark. |
By Shadow Known | I did not know how clouds could crowd | New light would blind by being stark. | 12 | lyric, personal, rhyming | The Timid Leaper |
| 65 | The wandering mind that wanders far and late
And wanders where from causal clouds the lightning breaks And rivers thunder from blank riven air Unhouseled by light. The mind is there. Deep and deeplier, into the most low lightless grotto The mind pursues its darkness unaware Of how it does increase the dark it brings and bares Where still the shark sleeps. The mind is there. Out beyond this room, beyond the moon, beyond, beyond, Behind the seeping dark that inhearses every darting star, Beyond pale planets, back beyond where shooken concepts jar And Time is dead. The mind is there. |
Where | The wandering mind that wanders far and late | And Time is dead. The mind is there. | 12 | lyric, philosophical, rhyming | The Timid Leaper |
| 66 | A snake
Takes The yard and Garden, Sways As haze Does; Buzz Of bees In leaves Insist He list And cease His Hiss. They sing Of Spring, The beautiful, Mutable And mutual Goal Being Is bringing To yard and Garden. The snake Takes The song- Gone As one Flash Through slashing Stale grass; Returns With burn Sounds Round The garden Fountain Curl- S asleep and full. |
Pastoral | A snake | S asleep and full. | 41 | lyric, nature, minor, philosophical, rhyming, play | The Timid Leaper |
| 67 | The wind that tenses in the hollow
And re-weaves what grass I kick, Goes over my length for pillow, Weary of crags and dirt. As I approach a higher place, Barren and brown, the dust Wind-blown into my onward face Fingers my eyes and hurts. I less and less the height approach That further and further Recedes; all that I now closer touch Is the push of Other. Why has wind come, why a stranger, So close and harsh to me, Who has no wish, no wish, to linger, Held by what he cannot see. When over the lapsing hilltop's crest At last came sudden rest,- I knew not who I was in the hush When no gust pressed. |
Walk in the Hush | The wind that tenses in the hollow | When no gust pressed. | 20 | lyric, rhyming, meditative, personal | The Timid Leaper |
| 68 | Was it sudden ease, or the sudden cost,
That made us most feel we were not all lost, That step and step had still some place to go, That all the world wasn't but wilderment of snow? For my part, I did not gauge the cost (Or rounded figures down at worst or most). I had no interest in what interest others took. For my sole self my dual eyes do look. I see the thing itself as it appears to be, Visible from somewhere on vague reprieve; Then I look where eyes look eyes-closed And seem to hunt up a memory of shape at most That rises toward some overwhelming feeling, Rising, rising, as all else fades out failing- Rising to what I always call my meaning. |
To What | Was it sudden ease, or the sudden cost, | Rising to what I always call my meaning. | 15 | lyric, rhyming, meditative, personal | The Timid Leaper |
| 69 | Our sullen retreat into the ever-there,
Our reliance on the invisible Or recourse to given revelation, Brightens my minute's thought to crucible And pulls some lasting gold from my flame's care, As if we knew our wishing and the wish were one. What do we need of what seems infinite? The partial glare of being here, just here, Is enough of heaven to round our minute And puts a light, however lone and bare We cry for things more determinate, Into all we seem to see and share. I will not falsify my fire, but answer all and one: No answer yet but becoming to become. |
Falsifying Fire | Our sullen retreat into the ever-there, | No answer yet but becoming to become. | 14 | sonnet, philosophical, anthem | The Timid Leaper |
| 70 | Look with me at what we call,
Substantial or ephemeral, All of Earth, where we must end, And all of sky's over-awning All: Sense the sub-stratum and the theme Dawning out of sincerer dream. Note how dark must always end, How Earth's quickened sharps of light Coalesce by pixels until we see Lightly lightninged twig-ends, Dew-draped, shiver and invite Greater light, or light's dark reverse The odor of more crowded trees Blends with the musk of night. I sort my knowledge into verbs: I did, I can, I do, I can't. And other more what-ifs I list: I shall, I wish, I shan't, I want. And a thousand thousand others Unvoiced, unheard. All that puts a soul at ease Enough to stammer and confess The inconvenient, the gulped absurd, Or to think a something mystic Rather too simplistic, Brings the daunting Earth to words, And helps to carry, as you guess, Our everything to is. I kept a million themes beside my bed In a rosewood box with a turtle, With one working tin hinge beside The turtle decaled spread-eagled; I left the springed hinge untried, And added blanks to the map On the warm rosewood back Of the rose-boned wooden turtle. It was better, or so I deemed, To live unknowing and to dream Than know every meaning's means. I kept the box beside me a thousand days, An indian symbol of the Earth, Unopened save as a question may Discover unbidden worth, The way a kiss becomes a question, A new-burned feeling without borders, A meeting, this meeting, -here,- Solemnly together without a seam In loving and in waking dream A part or portion Of the natural order, Opening and answerless, In a realness of air. |
Assembling the Earth | Look with me at what we call, | In a realness of air. | 52 | philosophical, anthem, nature | The Timid Leaper |
| 71 | A reindeer head and human breast
Prove hunger no mere beast But a yearning, foreign fire all, great To least, carry to life's living feast. Tarry constellations stoop to whisper In ears sharp as fine feathers on a shaft What makes the unbrave whimper And holds the brave man fast: Undulant hills are too lonely To have what raves in every heart- Too unready to live solely And nurture the dark feast that lasts. Eat my starry heart, my body and my brain! Nothing in Nature's self-renewing fast Can feed what hungering thought may gain From imagination's last and least. With a light, clipped clop Dunning into bright bell the dull rock, The man with reindeer-headed top Hunts the night, nor heeds the cock Rawing dawn into existence, The one near star whose agony stoops To burn us hungry out of inward pense With overwhelming wilderness for crop. |
The Wild Hunt | A reindeer head and human breast | With overwhelming wilderness for crop. | 24 | lyric, meditative, rhyming | The Timid Leaper |
| 72 | Where an ArrowLine desert bus
Came exhausted to a standstill, And made small swirls in the greater dust, A long-eared hare on a hill Listened to the engine's cooling clatter, Saw pasty faces at grimy sills Look out at what was the matter. With fingerfine lips, from a cactus, A stolen blossom became the hare In the open purview of the bus, One-sided with a crowd of stares. Almost the timid leaper started,- Taken by a kisser's shyness To see so many lips half-parted. Stilly as a waiting blossom does, The hare attended the airy all That sighed a quiet from the bus (Attentive now as if stalled), The arrow mastered enough to wait For what the desert deemed or willed. At unbidden wind, from dead-still Into dead dust the leaper leapt. |
The Timid Leaper | Where an ArrowLine desert bus | the leaper leapt. | 23 | lyric, meditative, rhyming | The Timid Leaper |
| 73 | Two eyes followed me out of sleep and dream.
I could not dream what seeing things could mean. I had deemed all an oblivion unabated, A sordid compost of all I loved or hated. Such was all, and all I knew of what Dreaming sleep to wakeful reason brought. But now these howling eyes unsocketed by pain, That did not bear any look of ease or rest, Stared green indelible thoughts into my brain And came, unofficed officers, to my arrest. The sheets I turned in, on me had turned, As if in skins and grave-shrouds I had been wound- My blinded body moved unmoored beyond my sight And turned to return to dream in interrupted night. |
Interrupted Night | Two eyes followed me out of sleep and dream. | And turned to return to dream in interrupted night | 14 | sonnet, personal, dramatic | The Timid Leaper |
| 74 | A tree must burn to be.
When summer's fellow ardor Comes, they sway up, the trees, The way that flame and flame Combine in a making game When what they are is brought too near, And are pulled apart by wind Playfully alone again. A large sweet-smelling cedar Held itself all summer As constant-shaped as flame, With a slow, slow burning sound Of leaves, and the settling tick Of branch that knocks on branch. Where the woods blaze thickest There comes a woodsey whoosh That undoes my breath; All the leaves alloyed sun-molten. The fall will show them golden. What have trees but trees To prove that inside fire might be? Trees have no effigy to burn. |
No Effigy | A tree must burn to be. | Trees have no effigy to burn. | 22 | lyric, nature | The Timid Leaper |
| 75 | Disorderly love falls on our lives
Like a dream in which we die And cannot awake or dream otherwise And only this dream is before our eyes Ritual and rote and stigmatized Inescapable and inordinately stylized A sleepwalker's temptless step's imposed And we see only the dream and are blind |
A Dream Dislodged | Disorderly love falls on our lives | And we see only the dream and are blind | 8 | lyric, prefatory poem, love | The Sword Inside |
| 76 | This is an epic: shrunk, crabbed, and small,
Full of false-effects, self-pity, the merely personal, A Don Juan who lambastes not the passing scene But all that has-been Juan may be, or is, or has been. Where more loving looks would gloss a blemish The critic's eye inscribes a scar to cherish, For every jot that takes away from fame, frame, or form Bolts the sniping critic thus much more above the norm. I spy inside to sight with telescopic sighs The whys of my feelings' reasons: Interloper on a landscape without seasons -- Why are such thoughts always such internal messes? Insistent blots and bleeding Awful as a Rorsach reading? Or are summer ladies in their swaying dresses The carnal cause of my distresses? (Your guess is as good as I guess my guess is.) Love's each word confirms what I suspect: Disaster's the master, and we but the guests. She sheds no sigh for any man's part, Whether the nether gender or simply his heart. On Time's high hill my glass house lies sheer, White licked-together ice panes as thin as tears-- I'll throw nothing as improbable as rocks But must content my anger by flinging dirty socks. When confronted by the bare barbarity Of a too-intimate, too-personal personal history The titillating crowd contracts a gassy gasp Into the actor's ruination of a yawn. Put away the hugs, unclench the hearty clasp, Poke about for the folded rulebook on Badminton Or dewy martinis not cleared away at dawn, Any of last season's or last night's amenable diversions, No worse for the weather on the party lawn. "But I have a tale to tell you!" he told the mirror As a minor chord played in the castle dreary, And like a lawyer at a settlement Between heavenly disputants temporarily hellbent He unpacked his tale like a holy relic. He tried, when talking, talking about his happenstance To concentrate Pure Mind from nominal Space. Somehow somewhere something means something As we fill with ephemeral words our eternal dumbness. And ever the bleak bitterness of Love is present, Awkward to forget, awkwarder to remember, A golden goose whose taste has turned to pheasant: Sour to eat, but the killing's pleasant. Leaning with a highpower scope on my pickup's fender, I forget at once who was the first offender. A kiss is just a kiss, for all our wishing And love is just another way for brains to say "gone fishing." And yet what hopes are harbored in a sigh To which all the pall of History can't manage to give the lie? And somehow behind Love's final curtain The essential something-nothing of ourselves is lurking. To say that these things are only so, That, in the course of life, such heinousness is usual Is to dodge the lodging dart that conscience pricks And with our green tequilas reel About the empty garden like a crypt. It doesn't make much difference If you're in the Congo, Buenos Aries, or France Time can add no savor but regret To what the hand has done, or the heart inflicts. Yet I may say, like the newscaster at six "Once Upon a time, in a galaxy far, far away I loved." Such a rare occurrence Can't be measured by existential stirrings and segues: It's the internal turnings of that monster Fate That makes our mousing loves or hatreds great. Is my mauve eagle of presidential pinion, Or am I but a seraph's wingman? Public puffs and public scrapes Suck divinest wines back to earthy grapes. |
Prolog of a Dog | This is an epic: shrunk, crabbed, and small, | Suck divinest wines back to earthy grapes. | 74 | lyric, prefatory poem, love, dramatic monologue, s | The Sword Inside |
| 77 | A purposeless scrub plain laid before the sight,
Inarticulate, has nothing to offer; Neutral evolution's meaning is neuter Until interpretive man stands near. Cool swaths and charts of haughty stars Whirling infinite on a pin To rampaging wolf and twittering lark Revolve innocent of sin. But one constellation-loaded look or angst-angelic glance Cast up by blameful man Can trace God's wrath in each twinkling coordinate As plainly as a plan. Until the intuitive outcast on the monotone plain Divided the iterative day Into the arrowy horror of arbitrative time, Inventing vatic history, God's mercy and His blood could not from the dust Gather us to his breast; Bhudda in his monk-smock howled the rice from his throat, A proctor without a test. Lacking sin's spectacle or anticipatory hope's Human ability to fail Life spins in a bituminous bubble of unbecome, A whereless, whenless exile. Narrow animal and expansive man both hunt world and sky; Anxious and inscrutable they rave. The one with tooth, paw and blind beak will kill, The other with inner glaive. |
The Sword Inside | A purposeless scrub plain laid before the sight, | The other with inner glaive. | 28 | lyric, philosophical, rhyming | The Sword Inside |
| 78 | Once I was happy just
To flabbergast and gust Over incestuous Thanatos and Eros, My impulsive pair of heroes. But now my erring mind (Arranging, jury-rigging jigsaws night by night) Surveys the surrounding social scene In meditative fright. The president imposes order, The pope imposes hope; Which one has the right to expedite My sonnets with his ardor? Every rhyme with law and order Is enticingly narcotic, But to impose them on the Zeitgeist Is damnably neurotic. The windbag of a fascist Hoots and emotes in Life's emporium, His whistlework's that of the serious artist, Envowelling society's consortium. His graves are all so neatly done They lie down in counted rows; The bones obey coordinates; Above, there blooms a rose. I conceive a magic bag That holds us all together, Or perhaps simply the spurious Convention of "the weather." There's no God, or need be none (Intrusive into our intimate "Scene A") Who's got to plod, or descend Deus ex machina. Draw instead in dreamy eye or fable Something constellationish Shared with elbows tucked at table, A grace passed round or handed down, The substance of a wish. |
The Ardor for Order | Once I was happy just | The substance of a wish. | 37 | lyric, philosophical, rhyming | The Sword Inside |
| 79 | Bullets 'oft gang awry'
When we squint with lying eye At the target we had thought To level with a shot; Somewhere along the barrel Our curving expectation falls And what is becomes a part Of what we hope to shoot, Or perhaps an intervening wind Has changed beginning and the end. The future always lies Somewhere in the 'is,' Or so the marksman's maxim goes Hunkered in a bush of rose. The future always lies Somewhere in the 'is' Our eyes are scouting now; Hope and here intermix somehow, Nor get pulled apart Unless our killing art Delivers to the shaping thought The dead end we had sought. The philosopher with his carcass Dispenses with his guesses - What would be now is, And this is happiness. Nor does he as he eats inquire "What if I had not fired...." Or if a speck of dust had interposed Between his sightline and his nose. All the dedication of his thought Goes to digestion of what he's brought From the wild field, as able, To his domesticated table. Not until quick hunger comes again Will his thoughts curve and turn To all the 'Ifs' of chance That can cancel out his choice And send aim or word awry In the hunted day. |
Aims [from The Sword Inside] | Bullets 'oft gang awry' | In the hunted day. | 40 | lyric, philosophical, rhyming | The Sword Inside |
| 80 | My beloved Enemy
Confronts my chaos to define My anger out of emptiness, A solid hatred from rash wish. My beloved Enemy For my arch-arranging eye Designs an aching target That I must miss or hit; Gives to my wide-range stagger A more local, focal goal, A sharpness to each dagger Unfolded from the soul. My beloved Enemy Incinerates Laws like xmas-trees And from a dwarfish, brutal bush Grows adored as Truth. Without my beloved Enemy --Alone, or made by mirrors three-- No matter how I writhe and twist My very self would not exist. My beloved Enemy Radiant with joy and energy Looks out from my own interior, Puts on my scowls and powers. My beloved Enemy Alight with hate and ecstasy --Fevered cheek to cheek we dance Heedless of our circumstance. Now my beloved Enemy Made naked by wind and time Arrives with a stricter chill: My Enemy I must kill. My beloved Enemy Must learn now how to die, And my beloved Enemy In blood before me lies. |
My Beloved Enemy | My beloved Enemy | In blood before me lies. | 36 | lyric, philosophical, rhyming | The Sword Inside |
| 81 | Let Love's lukewarm body lie
Drained of every lover's sigh; Put up the crepe, pull down the bunting, Pack in boxes the matrimonial trumpets. Rescind the secret thought, and cancel hope. Let marriage feasts go up in smoke; Let the lover, loved, display Independence to the end of days. Heaven's research into love's prayers Recommends ascetic despair; Despite longstanding and accustomed use, A gander's not as good as goose. When the mirror spots in morning's face No room for absolution or for grace, Every constellation seems Evidence of God's complicity. To exercise the lover's part Seems the only answer to retreating hearts: Mechanics of hydraulic hand Give no ease to loves lorn gland. Modern convenience should make us fit To enjoy the air-conditioning, and forget; Yet still in every neighbor's bush Lurks the same distempered wish. Every kiss but seems to mock Those lips no kissing will unlock; Snipers crouch on every roof To put an end to lovers' truth. Ransack every inked-out line For furtive hints of peace-of-mind, Time the healer will not dispense Relief when every breath is grief. To be a ghost and blow unmade Through drawn and yellowed windowshade.... What aught occurs, there is no stop To distraught hearts or lovers' hopes. What may mere continuance teach, Stalwart survival of the leech? Let pain cease, and let cease pride When love's soft cause has died inside. Intellectual despair Indulges 'The Unrepaired', While Hymanaeus Io wont console Particulate memory, the ripsawed soul. |
Burning the Vail | Let Love's lukewarm body lie | the ripsawed soul. | 45 | lyric, philosophical, rhyming, love, cautionary | The Sword Inside |
| 82 | 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; Create, heart, until I in moonbeams see A second dreamer dreaming cordially. 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; Together in our sparkless darkness, Exchanging jokes and mental missives, Our only soft defense against Outer Nature's rage: This is not this Is wishing, wishing, wishing Against compelling consciousness. And 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 The love we worked on oh so hard- Let us have a meeting without an edge, Nor wrestle with our conscience once But play pillow-talk, be each a dunce, Two drowsy loves, pale and veined, A pair of frangible spirits' vessels Laughing out the candles. A new day glitters at the ledge. |
A Double in the Dark | Ideal and disposable, the idea of you | A new day glitters at the ledge. | 47 | lyric, love, dream, dialogue | The Sword Inside |
| 83 | I lived unaware for a time
(I have to admit it) Unconscious in a casual castle Sipping livid Glenlivit; I was deaf to the daily curses Of incontinent scullery maids, And recognized not the stable boys' Disingenuous praise. As lazy time lolled on From here and now to gone A private contentedness And not extant catastrophe was What I secretly counted on. And all that time, you Looked over the lifeboats Tested and prepped the crew, Gauging the drop-height From the second story window In case of fire or flight. I was smoking cigarettes In bed, getting girls up for a chat While tanning in a deckchair, Eyeing the hostess on the sly, And all that. But you had long before departed. The hallway echoed with your passage As dawn or noon or night invited The memory of your visage. You had left like a bell That rings only in memory, Or how a tale told in childhood Retold is a story today. The hearing ear is fooled By a wrongful kindness of the mind Whose generous assistance molds Everything it finds. You are silent, absent and afar Indifferent and unreachable As a collapsing star. Quietly busy ostensibly In an alternate universe For your light still spills Some length of years at ease In at every sill. Ships and compasses Still rely on the light, Having been forged in your presence And wandering still in the night. But one day your light, having left, Will leave us of light bereft. And yet you return, return In all the days of my thought As if there were no now and then As if mercury cornered stayed caught. And yet you return, return Like an agile ellipsoid mobile About your own center you turn Presenting new angles the while, New facets and faces revealed, But really always and beautifully centered. Maybe I too am centered, I too, But more orbitally arranged Fixed on a spar of you From your central largeness estranged As when Earth to dawn has come Halfblind in the sun. |
Unawares | I lived unaware for a time | Halfblind in the sun. | 66 | lyric, love, dialogue, regret | The Sword Inside |
| 84 | A silent fibbing moonlight washes
Distorted shadows of the dissenting sun Over each snow-molested branch and bush Arranged outside with a congregation's grace For the terminal minutes of our love-embrace Happening behind an unrolled windowsash. You had wanted to hurt me, and did. Truth was my only tribulation. Your hands hung, inert and underfed, Along the sofa's arms, overstuffed and wan, Resisting the reconciliation of my touch - And you pulled away, besides, your face, Quick and moonlike, from my near face Hurrying forward in a rudimentary rush That had so often sought the complexity of bed. Truth was my only tribulation. It was then, snowbound and alone, you had said Words that made all things one And useless, in the gelid December hush Whose winds diminished to a sparse trace In the outer emptiness I could not face, Too full of the moon's pale refracted crush. I don't know how all this roomy dark occurred. Truth is my only tribulation. |
Snowbound | A silent fibbing moonlight washes | Truth is my only tribulation. | 24 | lyric, love, memory | The Sword Inside |
| 85 | Winter's never here at the fountain
Whose waters' liveliness seems a warm And open candor. Things are but things and do as they must: As in the fountain's pallorous spangling forever Heaviness and light contest. Beyond the torus of its halo The summery waters' motions endeavor, With the tear-bright dignity of an eye in agony, To show how lightly may a substance go An afflatus of divinity. All things to their opposite use Tortured, as when this lithesome watercourse Was narrowed from easy murmur into gladdened sound, Reveal some laden tale of their earthly course Returning to their source. As when like tears to ground we streak And the opened waters that accompany burial Flow in broken speech, so the startled water, at its arc Interpenetrate of scattered light, torridly tumbles All rainbows to one stone bowl. Something had sung up From the dark watered words summoned to console Bodied brightness; as when we ourselves, by a terrible pity pul- Led vocal from the womb, tighten and squall To give creation's own Cry to the beautiful. |
Pavilion Fountain: After the Funeral (Nov. 25, 196 | Winter's never here at the fountain | Cry to the beautiful. | 26 | lyric, rhyming, meditative | The Sword Inside |
| 86 | Tired of the afternoon, too tired to rest,
a crooked dropping spider made herself my guest, dispossessed of the wood over which she'd labored wispily uniting the crooked scrap lengths of pine by busy inner habit for a length of time. Unwitting where she was, she knew no reason to rest here out of season. No reason.... Though with no reason myself among the rest, I dare endure my time as long as any guest; ignorant of Sisyphus, she had no sense of labor, tying and untying her crooked knots of pine. Reason's only reason in the absurdity of time. With sly and candid step, each time each time, a spider will weight a grassblade for her reasons until the toppling tip on earth must have its rest where busy man himself is a busy guest by dint of crooked reason and crooked labor. Too tired to rest, wherever here is, I pine for bed. Each crooked plank was chopped from pine; I lie and contemplate the length of time Granddad who'd taught me hewed his reasons, laboring and loving busily that I might rest somewhere on Earth an honored guest. And here again the dropping spider took up her labors, surprising me upon the crooked wood I labor. I watched her threaded progress along the pine desktop chopped from scraps of time when Granddad himself had thought his reasons for cutting and hewing had been laid to rest. Busily I contemplate my busy guest. Absurd, I think, how the length of time we're guests Shrinks, and crook my wood portrait while she labors, going awkwardly on against the lengths of pine as if it were no labor to labor all her time. If reasons she kept, she kept them her own reasons as we carved the scraps of day to silent rest. Tired in my crooked dreams of tired day's length of tired time, I hear my angry Mentors demand and reason; I labor, labor, labor on my portrait without rest. |
Sestina: A Whittler's Self-Portrait | Tired of the afternoon, too tired to rest, | I labor, labor, labor on my portrait without rest. | 39 | lyric, rhyming, meditative, sestina, dream | The Sword Inside |
| 87 | Beyond the serious torches of several cypress trees,
The dusty chirrup chirrup of militant cicadas, The noble solitude of a solid lonely oak Clattering his leaves at the sun over a bleached field That balanced his high growth by spreading out, Desert-like and hot at noon, and all afternoon Until the evening made them equal sharers Of one shade, a blackness welled up from the root. Beyond all this, beyond the blushing bluish grasses And inner darkness of some evergreens out right, I thought to see what seemed from the county road A sweet hilarious patch of beech, tittering Among more sober rowans, and walked on Farther than I had thought at first to do. A forest darkness hustled, a coat atop my coat. And so I came upon a late-flowering bush Hidden deeper in among more doubtful darks, Taller and elder, more august and up high. It was way out of season, much too too late, Yet full of hopeful blossom regardless Of the season's clock; it kept its time its own-- Before the long sharpness of the frost that tapered In shadows till midday, it held its whites aloft. The flowering bush was a thing itself, alone, Clotted with milky flowers as large as fists As if to claim a space among the harder barks, As a child will feel more brave at midnight, Startled from a nightmare, to smile in the dark, Or as a father walks twice round and round A house, for proof he really has a home. The flowers asked for bees that would not come To so shaded an interior, whose buzzed instincts Could not guess to lead them there, too far From the sugary buttercups and tigerlilies of the field; The bees were busy with their honeys and their hives, Too industrious to bother with this thing alone. I wondered what had made the seed drop here All those years ago when this bush first pipped. Had some panicked thrush raced bewildered through the thick, Or been carried dead by some hawk, and dropped? How had the seed, which loved the sun, found Filtered light to endure, in the coolness all about? Had some tree burned out and a dormant seed Been sprung, hot from its casing, into germination? I'd known an odd old fellow who had not Half begun to sing until he was half past eighty, And his voice as awful as an old phonograph; But still he sung, and mostly pleased himself of late, And showed the lyric shavings of sharpened wit To any too-curious; those words were his fists. Above us all in the little clearing, the dull touch Of a near cloud's inner-lighted immanence Broadened into mystery over man and bush. Something happened then, I did not know How much until years afterward had stretched My roots into some new dark flowing underneath. But then, I did not know what I would become, And, never having intended to be there once at all, And having forgotten all about the patch of beech That had first sent me off into the dark, I shook my head at the flowering bush and took off. |
Late-Flowering Bush [from The Sword Inside] | Beyond the serious torches of several cypress tree | I shook my head at the flowering bush and took off | 61 | dramatic monologue, soliloquy, story, nature | The Sword Inside |
| 88 | It's wondrous easy some days to guess
What at last we are and what's happiness. Yet these inscrutable questions duly observe Both the face of the question and the hidden obverse. What do we know but that knit intuition Pearls the stitches of mere superstition When sacred instinct's emergent pattern comes Divulging phantoms of what we might become? There's no simple time in which to simply be; Time's a dark palimpsest of what we can see: Squaring the past with our parochial acre of here, Or inferring a fictional future from fanciful history. Flip, stitch, or analysis: we guess as we must, Surprise ourselves, and end as dust. |
Agape | It's wondrous easy some days to guess | Surprise ourselves, and end as dust. | 14 | philosophical, playful, sonnet, minor | The Sword Inside |
| 89 | A psyche's inscape's treacherous,
As alive with dangers as with bliss; The purple outcrop of a mental rock Cripples the supple Muse and mocks. Caught between imagination and the dream The mind's barriers dissolve at the seams; The motivating carnivals of lurid emotions Cycles us like actors thru smoky memories and scenes. Here we're running, running on the borderline Half-unaware of the tailored baggage we've brought, Half-amnesiac about the burdens dropped, Drunk on our own lucubrant blood like wine. Blindfolded eyes foretell dark prophecies When we cannot see that we cannot see. |
Borderline | A psyche's inscape's treacherous, | When we cannot see that we cannot see. | 14 | philosophical, playful, sonnet, minor | The Sword Inside |
| 90 | Beyond the paper moon
and past the plastic stars Lurks a lump or troubled wisp of what we really are. Behind the pantaloon, the canvas and the grease, beside the green stage door Lingers a loveable stranger whose tenor urges us to "more." Although the lights are out, are out and the set's gone burning down Still we ache to traipse the stage and immortalize the clown. The grave is but a keyhole and we ourselves the key That into clay or on to flame abide Eternity. |
On | Beyond the paper moon | abide Eternity. | 16 | lyric, philosophical, rhyming, death | The Sword Inside |
| 91 | Beyond the bland suspension of a moment
(still and queer and empty) We sip our tea and take our toast drained of life and envy. A drunken angel at a harpsichord suspends upon a cigarette Some tattooed prayer of the Lord, some blank mystery as yet. An opal in a teardrop confers what grief would keep; Purpure absolution drops in gutters at your feet. Starlight in a candle reddens the intruding hand, Restless on the icy mantle where Life makes no demands. |
At the Gate | Beyond the bland suspension of a moment | where Life makes no demands. | 16 | lyric, philosophical, rhyming, ennui | The Sword Inside |
| 92 | Come with me, love, beside the oaken bole
We'll watch the finch dance in the waterhole. Old blind men get their comeuppance Whenever a loving two become What's commonly called a one; Only unlovers sit on the fence. Come with me, love, behind the hill Where the geese hold court on the croquet field. Look at the terrible virginity of the snow! Whatever is the matter? We'll get the geese to scatter; Only the unmoved won't go where's to go. Come with me, love, uncomb your cares, Mother and father are no longer here. Take this white ribbon, take it and tie The wildness of your black hair, The wrongness of your despair: Only take my white crossed hands till I die. Come with me, love, into the sun, We'll dare what they daren't when we are one. Let the old man's finch and the old man's goose Run to ruin and devolve to havoc; We'll burn the prison and break the locks And like the moon in water let happiness loose. |
Come with me, Love | Come with me, love, beside the oaken bole | And like the moon in water let happiness loose. | 24 | lyric, love, rhyming | The Sword Inside |
| 93 | Stars and sand assault the sight
chafeing what should charm-- cloudy, angry-- a spirit's irritants-- until the kiln of God's great unmated hand closes close and fuses them opinionless as glass. |
Beached Lightning | Stars and sand assault the sight | opinionless as glass. | 8 | lyric, minor, nature, God | The Sword Inside |
| 94 | Square sunlight on a square green field
Shows in a polluted puddle a perfect sky reflected: The ordered boskage of the public park blesses All those whose disordered hearts it caresses. Love, with her careless powers Marks or marrs our unable hours Until desertion's our proof of having been touched; Although the matter is little, the feeling is much. Crossing that out, I then passed A dead house with nothing to recommend it, Solitary and unstately on the grizzled grass And thought again about my sonnet: Love's a whitened house with thin ivy trim, Red roofing tiles almost caved in; Its got attic eyeots to let out the stale air Ninety long years had inheld with stale cares. Soon I topped a big crooked hill that tapered, And unsteadily almost drunk with the magnificent view Settled down sweating to my dark square of paper, Carefully writing while the sky was askew: Love, which soaks up all connotations, A paranoid obsessive of boozy inflection Will cringe at each hiss, puff at ovations, And in light looks divine heavy temptations. A garter snake having easefully transgressed My naked left ankle, I stood as I Xed out the rest. One quarter's still blank; I'll try one more time. Perhaps my tongue-tied Amour is a mime? Love, the anaconda banded to the brow Compresses all meditations into raw howls, Cancels all occupations, the well and the dour, And contracts imaginative maybe into definite now. All of the objects (the snakes, the sonnets) Distributed like rhymes in this Lover's Park Endure the warm unlacing of the afternoon yet And stay in stricter order until after dark When darkness grants us all all the dark wishes No acquaintance of daylight would ever wish us. |
Writing at the Park | Square sunlight on a square green field | No acquaintance of daylight would ever wish us. | 38 | lyric, rhyming, playful | The Sword Inside |
| 95 | "The neon fire Prometheus stole
Shown here before us as natural In a painted campfire fuelled by laurels Says stealing is Art's only real school; Mimesis flames from Nature's manual An ignis fatuus that kills and fools." Museum explanations and the afternoon Presume the usual, the accustomed track, Drag us down to pre-history and myth And then obligingly back. "Before us both chameleon and sloth In the surrealist jungles of deceit Follow genome's and artist's plotted path, Blend inhabitant and habitat; So what could ever differ then, in pith, Between boar's snort and man's snit?" Among the crowded halls and windows Our tourguide of the Louvre Explicates Christs, perennial widows, the dice, Hung between anonymous thieves. "Since birth we're honed To art and to theft; To deceive to survive alone Is Nature's tricky gift; To get what's been gathered By others is thrift." |
The Difference Is Less | "The neon fire Prometheus stole | By others is thrift." | 26 | lyric, rhyming, playful, philosophical | The Sword Inside |
| 96 | If a thief gave you his friendship, would you
take of it and feel it? Would you sit inside his patterned house among strangers' memorabilia And watch his tongue when he remarks on the lamp from Aunt Cecilia? The truth has always suffered, and the thief has always lied. By law or thief or money the truth is never paid. Raphael's Madonna, blithe upon the wall officiates at snooker; Surely those eyes, so sad, so full, so wise they'd spot emergent Christ Among all the convergent lice, surely they forgive the hand that took her. The priceless art and conversation conspire to do you good; You thrill that every turn of social talk might have a twisted end. He recalls your foibles lightly; lightly, he's your friend. So take the offset printed coaster that is offered obliquely; Let the politely proffered crumbcake sit center on the doilies-- And in his tepid eyes behind his tea see if you are his. The truth has always suffered, and the thief has always lied. By law or thief or money the truth is never paid. By valentine's the command comes down to pen two loving stanzas; You lean and stare and calmly crib them on a millionaire's cadenza: "Love is that which gives and gives and finds in taking, splendour." |
Art and Theft | If a thief gave you his friendship, would you | and finds in taking, splendour." | 38 | lyric, rhyming, playful, philosophical | The Sword Inside |
| 97 | Pastiche of paradises once pursued, chimeras
Simmer and shimmy, love's dancer desires. In an era of boredom they glare from the shelves. Our wanting all wanting by wanting consumes. Desire's substance is fire, and desire continues, A pastiche of paradises once pursued, chimeras. Miss Mississippi poses and pouts blue allure as We lust, Romeo baboons who drool for new Julias. In an era of boredom shes glare from the shelves. Kisses in a cave-dark hole we willfully dive in, Drowning and hoping for anxious love's prizes: Pastiche of paradises once pursued, chimeras. Don't walk to their whistle or wink at their mirrors: What's seen there's not seen, merely seen as. In an era of boredom they glare from the shelves. Fadeless as marshlights, they hate the actual stars. It's fine that they shine, but not where they lead us, These pastiches of paradises once pursued, these chimeras. In an era of boredom they glare from the shelves. |
Villanelle: Beware Chimeras | Pastiche of paradises once pursued, chimeras | In an era of boredom they glare from the shelves. | 19 | Villanelle, playful, philosophical, love, cautiona | The Sword Inside |
| 98 | The silent woman in the church
On nerves and vitriol does her work. Doilies of the crucifixion From warm young hands spread benediction. Beyond the garden, where interred Repose parental elders of the herd, A picket fence keeps neat within A few old sinners gone to Hell again. The silent woman in the church Tho' fourteen summers have blown away Hiked up her heavy velvet skirts Fourteen summers ago today. And love was in her dawning eyes And a wild slow dance in her step.... She turned a measure from where the graveyard lay Like a promise not yet kept. |
The Silent Woman | The silent woman in the church | Like a promise not yet kept. | 16 | lyric, love, death | The Sword Inside |
| 99 | You've aged me one million this minute, my dear.
For you were my time before time had begun, Your approval my watchword, my moon and my sun. My cartelidged bones, once supple, now snap when I shiver; The boys on the block wear thick Santa beards, The pup that I kissed whelps broken-hipped in my hands; I see them grow agued, and myself grow unbrave, Full of hard wisdom and friends in the grave. The hourglass pours eons in my ancient eyes, I, who first saw you and leapt like a panther! Like fated black clockhands, together we dashed (At midnight my rest is murdered quietly). I, who was once as timeless as laughter And lived in quartz crystal; that crystal is smashed. |
One Million This Minute | You've aged me one million this minute, my dear. | And lived in quartz crystal; that crystal is smash | 14 | sonnet, love, minor | The Sword Inside |
| 100 | Perhaps my middle-aged spread, love,
Is made of despair instead of Potato chips and beer. The refrigerator's cool porcelain leer Sighs and hums in weighty solace Nightlong, and leaves a light on in the palace Stocked with richest foods, assembled desires Anxious yet to stoke caloric fires That youth kept warm By muscle burn. |
Spreadings | Perhaps my middle-aged spread, love, | By muscle burn. | 10 | personal, rhyming, minor | The Sword Inside |
| 101 | In any universal force
or unifying vision An emptiness of intent inhabits, a blank of indecision. To try and grasp the whole of Man must blur individuation And see all wide variation One, innocent of division. Who can blame them for their blankness, or feel themselves assured That they have flossed Reality from the asterisked Obscure? Wherever truth lies it lies becalmed, Unmoved in its sutures by winter storms or squalls. We come into our knowing neither too early nor too late But just in a moment's glowing and take what we may take. If you don't, as I don't, know just what a thing is Sit silent, or politely ask the thing itself its business. |
The Thing Itself | In any universal force | the thing itself its business. | 24 | cautionary, rhyming, minor | The Sword Inside |
| 102 | Happily at home amidst a blizzardy haphazard of papers
dawn steeps the window with visionary promise for the entire apartment complex. I am barren as you are barren, in a world replete with objects indifferent to our crux; I am broken and unwise as you yourself are broken, and both unclear and nobody objects. Its always a trifle embarrassing to be caught in the act, to be alive isn't it? Coping with jaundice and child-proof tops, waking out of the same problematical nightmare at five as if sleep were the body's occasion for jeering at the brain, which imposes its ordinary articulate order fetishistically every day on the bombardment of senses selling us fictions while telling it all, reporting odors and heartthrobs with equal indifference. God bless the gods, apathetic executives of the irrational who are powerless without our laughable bodies to cast even a third-rate thrill- er, and make of our unable lives their inarticulate movies. Discursive stanzas look like they're hurrying to the nowhere-somewhere of a formal fountain's repetitive static whiteness. What is left to say, is there anything? Let love be the last letter of the penultimate law righting us rigidly as a strapping father full of laughter when like every incertain curious infant thither we totter and yaw. And yet, with all of that said (so much) and (conceivably) registered in heart and in head by habit each day is only a day at play.... A lesson in how dowdy light becomes slowly a whole room and the grateful green leather chair emerged awaits patiently by the window its daily burden like a remembered word its definition. Its in this way that we have died already died and come to this life, two civil persons talking together sanely, quietly, long-windedly as an aqueduct hums. The world is full of sane sunlight and responsible landscapes not too impossible for believable humans to accomplish their unremarkable heights or average depths and whose prayers resemble steps. But first a brief sleep, first order of business, then work (not too late) may commence: every man must darkly his own unconscious Olympus propitiate as when a mountain, unexpectedly on the horizon alone rediscovers, without notice or noise its monumental poise. |
The Events Themselves | Happily at home amidst a blizzardy haphazard of pa | its monumental poise. | 49 | lyric, meditative | The Sword Inside |
| 103 | The idle angling
of a watersnake-- loquacious and lungless through yellowing waters faded, sulfuric of a hurried traveler's Chesapeake -- through tums of evolutionary time still saunters. Politicians, as limericks tell, are of a swift and similar species; unchanging agile evil vile a Nepalese prince with an Eton smile considers the cost of suicide the price of becoming a democracy. Pelestinian flags on fallen Faisel Husseini drape the dark Dome of the Rock while he's more leisurly laid beneath it. Mourners wail until their faces congeal to unfeatured unsculpted stone, blunted as snakes' in a pit. Chinese warships in a watery ring lazily braid to enclose the pale clarity and newsworthy brattle of independently little Taiwan. Would cobras or roses be roses or cobras if they could be persuaded to choose? Another day, another hour goes cold-soldered to the chain. State Street bagpipes and banners play old Joe Moakley to rest; dead as he'd lived, paraded, by cries and high casuistry followed, down to the crypt and the Beantown dirt he lies interred with the rest, another day snaked to the flow. "All change as they die," is the evolutionist's cry, "and all ways wander unlost toward the one wild Great Way. Each creature encircled beneath the infinite 'Ifs' of the sky is trapped in the hydra of days." |
The Hydra of Days | The idle angling | is trapped in the hydra of days." | 43 | lyric, meditative, rhyming | The Sword Inside |
| 104 | Muscular terror swipes at our skins
with its professional ironblack hooks, Peers in at every evening window, flashes out of every book. Defined by what we fear, we each begin dawn within a mirror's hollow look. Terror's all eagerness and action-- a nightmare thing with wings; An Anthony Hopkins' Hannibal, one horror that glares and preens, Agitates all hearts like flippers, and thumps at the back of every scene. Before this lonesome sojourn launched in Body's leaky boat, Did we hesitate on the angled grass, touch toes beneath the moat? Did we dream of all the dreams of wanting That lifelong flock about us, circling and taunting? But here we are, and that's the main thing, hugging ourselves in shopping malls, Screeching at the top of the swing. Our lonely unaloneness should appall But is itself a kind of lovely; Or so I think the angels think, hovering abovely. |
Memo for the Millennium | Muscular terror swipes at our skins | hovering abovely. | 27 | lyric, philosophical, rhyming | The Sword Inside |
| 105 | 'Tis said our end is half-divine
And our days leave but a broken track That moves, when it moves, Neither here nor there, But shuttles forth and back. I heard our origins are in the sky And we crawl in fallen estate, That when we stand And cry 'gainst God's plan We moan more than half-way mad. 'Tis rumored in our veins That sex is a wish ape-uncles had In a forgotten forest glade Evolutionary urge made glad And figleaf now forbade. I know my heart's an Argonaut And sails on waves of pain Toward adventure and to a land Evolution and God forgot But like a sleeping seed long has lain In Imagination's open hand. |
Origins & Ends | 'Tis said our end is half-divine | In Imagination's open hand. | 21 | lyric, philosophical, rhyming | The Sword Inside |
| 106 | Our interim swimmer
The flotsam of a dreamer Will drift and shrug on whatever log Drifts and shrugs along. Among warm fantasies of existence He'll pip himself a prince Or surmise a wisp a whip Coiling angrily at his hip, His own dark, androgynous Urges to nip and sharply shape And torture into consciousness Speech where a beast would gape. Forgetting in the momentarily kind Regard or design of a cumulus cloud And friendly D vitamin sunshine How a taut tiger might lie supine Between the shadow and the visible He considered that nature and nurture Had made him of all things the richer. The circumlocution of the clouds Said nothing to him; of this he was proud. He thought: to be awake but unaware, To not be subject to thought's despair Or consciousness' superstitious care That inscribes the history of the tribe Into every member's singular side -- a Rotary Club tattoo, the gestural Cool of a Crip or Blood's hand signal That had DNA for its original-- Is to give up or resign Your part in the human sublime, To abandon the spiral nadir Of accomplishment's stair To the deterioration of clumsy Time Dirtying suavity's shine. A barracuda acting as it was told Skirled to the surface, garish and bold. He thought thinking was almost all. He thought that since the fall From preconscious One Into the active energy of Become That History and all of her messes Devolved to individual "bless yous," And the scale that shows this depth Can be reeled off in a breath By any mammal whose consciousness Swims livelier than a fish. From a wet and worsted pocket, With an uncareful, watery shift, He brought a palmed mouth organ out. And he thought as he floated there Between ecstasy and despair Between the sweet green-glowing swells Of his mild Cape Hatteras hell That the shirring, Shelleyan lute Could be plucked only to confute The rare, the rightful argument That evolution in the docks presents: That obscurity obstinate and disguise Are designed by chance to make us wise And lift us by gimmicks to Eternity On whose verities we may spy. By the regularity of genital function By the pageant of reproduction We place opportune or Platonic kisses On wicked lips or wicked wishes And spurt our progeny toward Heaven's swoon, And like the tiger we sleep at noon. |
Off the Coast: The Castaway | Our interim swimmer | And like the tiger we sleep at noon. | 68 | lyric, philosophical, rhyming | The Sword Inside |
| 107 | Heavy, unforgivable dreams, despair,
Hard breathing, the omnipresent air, Whistle beneath my brain a tribal tune Uncaught by inner ear since Stonehenge rune. Waking in a shuddered fever Unconscious of pattern or the weather, Ripped apart by an ambulance scream, Torn to storm-cloud crepe in dreams, The question presents itself undressed: What's happening? Where's Death? What's my cause, my case, my crux? Horror stirred to eloquence Returns the steady stare, Blatant or beady, that I did not dare. By failure of vision we unite Where all the candles refuse to light At the black bottom of a bowl or ditch Where every nerveless hand fumbles for the switch. |
Darkness | Heavy, unforgivable dreams, despair, | Where every nerveless hand fumbles for the switch. | 18 | lyric, meditative, rhyming, death | The Sword Inside |
| 108 | To balance a friendship's difficult.
To give's difficult, to take's difficult, Difficult to offer the enduring cure To caustic inward hurt and to outward time Where nothing's ever certain and less is sure. One must always be willing to offer a sacrifice-- A clattering frag of the poor apportioned self let go, Give the altar fire a fist of flour and rice Thrown into the forward void of hope. An ego Can be a convenient casualty at three. A memory of wiped eyes deployed at four Can settle noon's uneasy moment, and by jettisoning restore A lighter ballast to trim ship and sail on. A calm cool hand on a vomiting neck is displaced By the necessary zero, placeholding what's gone. Jaded jokes traded over a toke and a drink, The topical hour tossed off in a walk That helps a mellow pair of humans to think-- All can be branded and bundled and bade fair farewell: Your cost of continuing's their going to Hell. Lose it and be happy at the loss, Pay it and be damned the cost. Friendships no less than civil societies Send out their draft notices to the soon-to-be-lost; Death's the price to maintain us at our ease. An accurate accounting is friendship's worst curse For, accurately speaking, however equit- Able in feeling, all friendships divide at The punctual inequality of a hearse. So joy as you may and addition be damned. Don't look to friends for your conclusions While you nod and hum at their confusions (As maybe they will nod and hum at yours) And in this charmed essential interchange Do not dream to esteem yourself the worse Because of angry antsy things either said or did (What dark horrors brightly shown, what honors hid). After the humiliation in the kitchen A friend will still do as friendship always bids: Exert persistent force for modest growth inexorably as lichen. |
A Lighter Ballast | To balance a friendship's difficult. | inexorably as lichen. | 41 | lyric, meditative, rhyming | The Sword Inside |
| 109 | The world must change if we but imagine it.
Copernicus squinting traded in his lamps For furious mysteries; Galileo tossed Aristotle out For a swinging stone, back to the turbulent sea of thought Because his ghost had no bones. What new paradigm Will rinse us shining from the misbegotten foam? Unimagined things grow real, grow real. Nietzsche knew pale Apollo well, that he Must step lightly from red Dionysus' side; Michelangelo's high man and God, that mirrored touch, Poured the raging heavens into our daily cup. What matter that before unimagined things grow real They must first condense in thought? Man's a drunkard With his dreams and will piss them to the sod. Unimagined things grow real, grow real. Aging wrong and aging right cannot Endure our scorn or enhance our thought (Morality's an old, old play, with curtains that must fall) But new worlds imagined, that body in the breech. Einstein knew that his equation unraveled no new sky ---That were indifferent--- but was a chant to change his mind. Unimagined things grow real, grow real. |
Unimagined Things | The world must change if we but imagine it. | Unimagined things grow real, grow real. | 22 | lyric, meditative, rhyming, anthem | Unimagined Things |
| 110 | Say whatever turned round in Plato's skull
Or mounted Mary Magdalene's heart, St Teresa's chest, Pours quickly away; chill vapors dispersed by day. Say chance is in our substance and makes us free. Say whatever terror that holds man by the throat Is shed by accidental antidote. That St John in pan's cavern dwelt. Vast plans that had Caesar's mind for habitation Or in Hitler's bunker slept, and map by map were built, Were map by map and town by town disintegrated. Say chance whirls in the demons strength or thought threw out. Who knows but that chance is projected indecision, Petty habits of the mind grown great, great thoughts grown worse. What do we know of history and fate? Did Venus, Who knew Adonis' worth, imbibe his dead sperm for bitterness? What in her belly purred? What from the great legs leapt? |
Supernatural | Say whatever turned round in Plato's skull | What in her belly purred? What from the great legs | 15 | lyric, philosophical, sonnet | Unimagined Things |
| 111 | Was there carnage in that shot
World-leveling God begot? Stubborn Christ born in an abandoned lot. Old cross crows are drubbing in the dust. Cracked heaven the dividing splinter teared, All that riotous confusion heard Before the roaring droplet seared. Old cross crows are drubbing in the dust. Did that staring infant's head Dimly unwrapped above the stiff bed Know what it engendered? Old cross crows are drubbing in the dust. Pack-animals' musty blood Flubbed responsive where they stood, Deep in the passionless mystery. Old cross crows are drubbing in the dust. And was that woman bleeding there As in a tapestry, for the crawling god prepared? All generation in a wound condoned. Old cross crows are drubbing in the dust. Did that penitential infant shriek Climbing heaven's empty cheek Draw ecstatic thunder down? Old cross crows are drubbing in the dust. |
Nativity | Was there carnage in that shot | Old cross crows are drubbing in the dust. | 24 | lyric, God, formal, rhyming | Unimagined Things |
| 112 | Before the geese upon the water have begun their day,
Before cold dawn could allay the winter's deep dream of May, Or any symbolical host fly out of the dark, as it must, The thoughtful song, drawn like yarn out of a beggar's breast, And which had illuminated pride, so weak was the world's way, Unseen ages, like the bird with the silver ball for a soul, Died dreaming in that beggar's breast, before he could awake from the dust. |
In The Cold Dawn | Before the geese upon the water have begun their d | from the dust. | 8 | lyric, rhyming, minor | Unimagined Things |
| 113 | I
When Twyla Tharp begins again Her own sweet body to command, Charm of personality or face must vanish Into the reality of pattern. Soldiers lined up pidgeon-toed At the mosque, shot out their enemies' heart. What lies still beating in the cart? Was there passion in that slaughter? II There was a dream of feasting, and we fed on dreams. Instinct in the sculptor's palsied hand Creates where it divides, eating to the face of man As if stone were so much rotten wood. Although young, it seemed all dignity must be spent On sinking love or suborned monument. Where was the gamble if the loss lacked reality? We were young and solemn and did what we would. |
Policy | I | We were young and solemn and did what we would. | 18 | lyric, rhyming | Unimagined Things |
| 114 | If I were the son of God
And out of that grand house came Tumbling with lions On Heaven's bursting lawn, At breakneck dawn I'd race From grave to cradle again Until to a moldy house I crept And turn the last clod. |
Son of God | If I were the son of God | And turn the last clod. | 8 | lyric, rhyming, God, minor | Unimagined Things |
| 115 | "A seed of knowing out of our ignorant fruit must drop.
My pear tree, not Sartre's, rises from the wrong ground, blossoms and rots in God's green affections; memorizing Cicero all afternoon, the lagging speeches, a fist of pebbles in my mouth, shouting at the sea.... a carpet-bagging stumper after my sweet fee. We threw the golden teardrops uneaten to the hogs--- all boys and wickedness leaping Huck Finn's fence whitewashed in North Africa. The orchard door yawned on darkness as we exited, loaded down and laughing: reality in the act, not the scenery. A tentacle of happiness, not nausea, gripped me then coiling my black heart in light like an extra aorta, fibrous and alive and dangling from God's omnipresence." |
St Augustine | "A seed of knowing out of our ignorant fruit must | fibrous and alive and dangling from God's omnipres | 14 | lyric, approximate sonnet, personae | Unimagined Things |
| 116 | The world enlarged from a shell
Is stripped and standing bare, A grinding dancer on a stage, Violent with despair And sweet to look upon. Is not every lovely thing, All gauzy prettiness and hidden force veiled And held from revelation as destruction By gyring chance By delicate strings? |
Sweet Dancer | The world enlarged from a shell | By delicate strings? | 10 | lyric, philosophical, rhyming | Unimagined Things |
| 117 | Because I am blind and walk agape
And beat out rough rhythm with my stick Like the fascination of the sea I can create, as in Yeats' dream, Man in the soul of God And batter out a place Among twilit immensities To dwell in that contempt, Giving bitterness a face. Stick, stick, stick, stick. Because I am a blind old man And came blindly howling hence To fumble with a stick, I demand, Passion of my decrepitude unsung, A gallery where bright heroes hung Stand each for that passion That pitched them to their deaths; And I demand it built Behind the eye and in the heart Of God and his burning son; All glory in the uneaten bud. Stick, stick, stick, stick. I have heard on the walks and ways That give my confession to a stone That some with bitter inward breaths And some in necessity of fashion Live slave to what words have wrung Out of man's contemptible mash And nail to each star each part, As if misery made flesh were all. Stick, stick, stick, stick. I can see because I am blind How each tiresome human vine In eyeless arrogance of its kind Sprouts like a worm in its own food, Divine soul all lumped with mud. Each blind root heaves its back to the sun In perilous ignorance of its own blood. Stick, stick, stick, stick. Although I am blind and cannot see Bleak wreckage of the dark tide, Rank human ecstasies and defeats, I know what mysteries abide And carve these rude words upon my stick: We must feed what we beget; Imagination shall provide Some unsought froth as yet, rank spillage Of the glittering sublime. Stick, stick, stick, stick. |
The Blind Man | Because I am blind and walk agape | Stick, stick, stick, stick. | 49 | lyric, monologue, soliloquy, personae | Unimagined Things |
| 118 | Because I am old and refuse my death
I have been bitter and I've been kind; Skeletal bitterness my enmities shook, Kindness flowed from head to foot. But of all those wind-gaunt faces I have worn as if strapped in the traces I most adore the look Of an old withered apple, its withdrawn glance, All sweetness concentrated To an unrelenting taste: An old bitten rind, bitten rind. But because I am bitter And dislike the taste Of joys overblown in any wind I have come to sing in the waste Of an old bitten rind: "Bitten rind, bitten time, Under stars or under sky The right emotion of a dirty crook Has nobleness to bless or curse, Confirm or rescind the pledge Made by our bodies as they lie Under this dirty hedge." An old bitten rind, bitten rind. Having tasted thus The fruit of an obscure look Or the sharp meaning of a song Under dull words in a book I laugh at all awhile And I myself forsake; For nothing's worth the riddle And no man's worth his wake, I stole a blind man's fiddle And sing what I forsake. An old bitten rind, bitten rind. I have nothing but am a queen: Monstrosities sworn must heel Forced by a hand unseen As dog to its master's whistle wheels. And although I am a great queen With stars on my fingers for rings And although I dance like a drunk And with the seen and unseen wink I am driven by passion to sing: An old bitten rind, bitten rind. |
A Bitten Rind | Because I am old and refuse my death | An old bitten rind, bitten rind. | 45 | lyric, monologue, soliloquy, personae | Unimagined Things |
| 119 | We have many problems,
Both violence and drouth; Plagues upon our people, Plagues stuffed in our mouths. Democracy abandons men That lack remembrance; Behind us another mountain Crowds a fresh sky. Day in, day out, All the businessmen are stout. Politicians of utopia From every gutter shout: 'Join hands against the common slope A better world will out.' The strong man has his answer To the dream of a perfect state: 'Strike him without swerving, Lay him out upon the slates!' Day in, day out, All the businessmen are stout. Arjuna on the streetcorner Sipping at his smoke Knows the daily death of friends, Knows it for no hoax. What of all that rant and hiss Will strike him as sense? What blue Krishna whisper He died before for this? Day in, day out, All the business men are stout. |
Matter Of State | We have many problems, | All the business men are stout. | 30 | lyric, philosophical | Unimagined Things |
| 120 | We've been shooting strangers
Over waters and the wild; But conscience is forgotten In the tearing wind. We stood up in battlements of dust To cut down what would live: "Worms and tyrants all must die---" Nothing was as pleasure is. Said a dark voice hid in the bush. The mob is filled with insane joy, The banners in the street Hang from pole and lamppost Hang ripe like butchered meat. What happiness or bliss is there In conversing with a face Uncle Sam has painted blank For every circumstance? Said a dark voice hid in the bush. In a folded tent there's room For filching treachery; Standing near, the slaughter's done We'll collect an oiled fee. Dead men lie face down in bed, A hole in every spine; How goes the empire's rate When we to cowardice decline? Said a dark voice hid in the bush. What if great Washington lived, That stern face breathing near, What thoughtless sentence then Transform to pleas our cheers? Nothing was as pleasure is, And God's a neglected child; We've been shooting strangers Over waters in the wild. Said a dark voice hid in the bush. |
Dark Voice | We've been shooting strangers | Said a dark voice hid in the bush. | 36 | lyric, philosophical, rhyming | Unimagined Things |
| 121 | "Wheeled cradled, blank-faced and blue-brained
to the hospital chapel, I watch the ivory pastor's hands trace shadow rabbits in the air under the florescent cross and list my sins in silence as he drones redemption; maybe St. Peter will greet me in heaven with a new guitar. Something babbles into static as my stroked-out arm relaxes... A tumor dripping ink now fills my mind, a black bud swelling to blood-blossom, ready to costume me in blood--- Stalking back from the guillotine like a 50s zombie blitzed on my first part in the Bs, I wake socketed in the NMR chamber like a bullet waiting for the green light to flit my diagnosis on the big screen, the chart a map of Europe. I lay enlarged; drugged and irradiated like a fallen fruit. I still laugh when I hear a democrat's ill. I was worse: my perennial, emboldened humor ramping like a bull, I crooned Dukakis is bald from my black Marshall stacks for the innocent fetuses at the Republican convention, dating Miss America still.... I'm sorry I kicked his Greek hynee. Sorry for all that." |
Lee Atwater, RNC | "Wheeled cradled, blank-faced and blue-brained | I'm sorry I kicked his Greek hynee. Sorry for all | 20 | lyric, approximate sonnet, personae | Unimagined Things |
| 122 | Not the politician in his coterie
Surmounting an elaborate chair--- A simple, elegant glass Choked in his unconscious fist, Nor revolutionary lunatic Standing tip-toe on the quay To out-face the beating sea (And has not the courage To stand half at ease) Has a fanatic eye Or golden stomach enough To sweat out the divine Night after night, or lick From all this tragic human stuff Some shrinking taste Of the glittering sublime. |
Statement | Not the politician in his coterie | Of the glittering sublime. | 16 | lyric, anthem, rhyming | Unimagined Things |
| 123 | The cardinal his scarlet vigil keeps
That had no sin but singing; How much more should we march in grief That have said and done such things? The azalea extends its wild branch Against a wild sky; nearby Some libertarian pamphlet flaps Ignored by some more sodden door. A child is singing in the bright march air Some tune his father sung--- Abstracted with the politics Of that disastrous, forgotten war. "The soldier will soon be waking That fed on dreams before; A man kills a man that killed; All happens as before." |
After the War | The cardinal his scarlet vigil keeps | All happens as before." | 16 | lyric, rhyming, war | Unimagined Things |
| 124 | An azalea climbed up
Into a silver cup, And blossoming died While the bee had sup. |
Bee and Cup | An azalea climbed up | While the bee had sup. | 4 | lyric, rhyming, minor | Unimagined Things |
| 125 | Toiling in dawn's orange forge
I hammer at the gorge Of silent kings and laughless queens. They come to me for pretty things, Pretty things; I have imagination's means. But the farther that I thrust That art I cannot trust Into the aching spirit's pyre The more my hand is burnt and hurt By earthly fires. |
Blacksmith | Toiling in dawn's orange forge | By earthly fires. | 11 | lyric, rhyming, personae | Unimagined Things |
| 126 | They study at a school
Where waves are crest on crest, The fish half in the air As if the highest were the best. But every brooding oyster knows And every whale that spouts That although their high heaven glows Its because the water has run out. |
Contemporaries | They study at a school | Its because the water has run out. | 8 | lyric, rhyming, minor | Unimagined Things |
| 127 | Virtuous beggars into cold dawn swarm
To chill their heated flanks. How do I know that they were warm? They had no stitch of clothing on. |
Solomon in Confusion | Virtuous beggars into cold dawn swarm | They had no stitch of clothing on. | 4 | lyric, rhyming, minor, philosophical | Unimagined Things |
| 128 | So I might suffer without fail the vengeance of leaves
Crumbling, vein by vein, to the docks of autumn's dust And burn again in a rasping year My fled blood Both woke and broke Flood and voice over the sea-turning town. So that the wail of the crickets might knock and enter Each sad shadow passage of the pulse I woke Burning in the shining rivers that skip out of sight. In the helping hurt of the one-armed weather Flinging hailstones and adders Down the ocean-thieving tunnel of the sky Against this head I swore all summer dumb While the ministering crickets in the booming grass Chanted phylums of my blood about to be said And I stood in the summer's drum Surrounded By the roaring going of the year. Ignorant of thistlery we walked in our mystery Arm in arm like the burning boughs Friends against death in the summer's long breath, And like the sun we sauntered Drunk and wandered Through the closed book of the heart; And I was sky and sunlight in the chapters of the grass. And understanding I sang: Oceans in acorns my strumming mermaids are. |
So I Might Suffer | So I might suffer without fail the vengeance of le | Oceans in acorns my strumming mermaids are. | 30 | lyric, dramatic, personal | Unimagined Things |
| 129 | What has life's bitter disappointment brought
Laid in a narrow, breathless bed? Shall we curse all our drunken, muddy lot Lain with long bones of the dead? At the end of a rifle or parting stream Pursued by a pursuing dream Man wakes up to find his enemies again, The end of dreams, and all friends dead. What stays hid in the marrow there, Thrust deep underground? Things purposed in the unpurposed air Die when those men are dead. Whether father or brother still pursue Their work, or others' work, I do not know; I read it on a narrow, upright stone Cast by the long bones of the dead. Fathers sacrifice long-loving sons To a nameless, breathless bed; Stand we under an island sun Or lie with long bones of the dead? |
Dead | What has life's bitter disappointment brought | Or lie with long bones of the dead? | 20 | lyric, death, rhyming, | Unimagined Things |
| 130 | I desire to cast desire away,
Having all that blamed respect Due my old age, hurled burning away Until I into the naked grass have crept. I recall how some sage hermit spoke, Under his mountain drift lodged alone, Of how all changing waters must Whirl up to the stone. But I am wrecked by discourse Of the sacred and profane; All love draws back to its source, Dry enmities remain. |
Crisis | I desire to cast desire away, | Dry enmities remain. | 12 | lyric, personal, rhyming, | Unimagined Things |
| 131 | Stand again at the old well-lip
As one half-sleeping might And drop a stone among those images That lay hid in the night. When still a boy at the water's edge Cold with terror at the dark, The light was like a fish's hide That floated back to me. And drop a stone among those images That lay hid in the night. What has escaped the breath In hated words or curses, now rescind And let an older beneficence begin; Call that harshness in. When driven to that edge of speech The tongue half out of the head Recall what purpose pleased you best When time had not yet begun. And drop a stone among those images That lay hid in the night. At gasping dawn a boy again Swears all breaking light's a game And climbs before the mounting sky To catch a dreaming fish While the water's high. So sound out the plummet-depth With some stray rock or cocked ear do it Or hearth-stone out of pocket; But drop a stone among those images That lay hid in the night. |
Those Images | Stand again at the old well-lip | That lay hid in the night. | 30 | lyric, personal, rhyming, memory | Unimagined Things |
| 132 | Deep dew fallen on the secret rose;
Closed eyes open that cry again. Nothing here to bind the heart close; No bloom can I cut for the mist of pain. Cushioned grass beneath me, the pine my cloak, The wind a whispering skirt; The water waits emptily for an empty boat, The naked road for a coach as a shirt. A little girl is singing In the waiting evening: "I ride a grand coach With red lacquered sides; Without shoe or broach My love on a dark horse sighs. "Where are true lovers' hearts Bound and wound? Beneath the cypress, on West Mound, Beneath the brooding ground." Cold blue a candle flames, Straining its frail light; On the West Mound, rain Forced by the wind in the night. Deep dew fallen on the secret rose; Closed eyes open that cry again. Nothing here to bind the heart close; No bloom can I cut for the mist of pain. |
The Secret Rose | Deep dew fallen on the secret rose; | No bloom can I cut for the mist of pain. | 26 | lyric, personal, rhyming, memory | Unimagined Things |
| 133 | What ache first calls us from rest,
Bids us rise and dress As if all were solemn consequence? The mind that ages in its fears, Grows tired, rants and tears, As if every thought were sense? Until heart and soul and all Are beaten out of gold, No dying triumph's made. Until eye and mind first sprout Golden tenderness, there is nothing out That cannot fade. |
Causation | What ache first calls us from rest, | That cannot fade. | 12 | lyric, philosophical, rhyming | Unimagined Things |
| 134 | Now that she is no longer young
There is less of her In the measures of the birds; The partridges give voice Less sweetly, and the rose Grips more blackly the earth Now that she is no longer young. Now that she is no longer young Do new ships and unfinished men walk lost, The crippled dog mew at its wounds, And the sun go sick to bed each night? Does her pleading face fade away From its passion like this age Now that she is no longer young? I do not know because I am blind To crudities of the compass point Or the minor perihelions of the sun. Enzymes of their medicines cannot chart The chemic regions of her skies; The needle on the encephalograph Shakes no glory from her eye. |
No Longer Young | Now that she is no longer young | Shakes no glory from her eye. | 21 | lyric, love, rhyming | Unimagined Things |
| 135 | In zero air
By the jaguars caged in their griefs And landrovers digging up bones in the park, Dirt salts the dime-hole of her going. By liquid cats, Emptied of minutes and prayers in the waking zoo, Both half animal and man in my shambling frame I pace to praise the honored hour of her death. Her grave grows hair And gravel marks the shadow where I walk, Freezing among moonbeams, while the icicles' stalks Rise from eye to eye in the blizzard's blast. Now how unsound By the gold-honoured straws of dawn unbound And looped from the walking category of sorrow By a drake's water-shilled beak do I stand and cry? |
In Zero Air | In zero air | By a drake's water-shilled beak do I stand and cry | 16 | lyric, dramatic, experimental | Unimagined Things |
| 136 | I've watched the swan withdraw
To the sky's timid zone; And out of that sweet ether Fashion a dying call. I know not whether, My time being sprung, I shall endure together To sing that last song. |
He Fears Growing Old | I've watched the swan withdraw | To sing that last song. | 8 | lyric, dramatic, minor, rhyming, death | Unimagined Things |
| 137 | When my voice is a troubled cup
Who'll know my face? My wounds then sew up My scolding done? What lover listen To what I say? Clean bones glisten Under rank decay. |
He Grows Old | When my voice is a troubled cup | Under rank decay. | 8 | lyric, dramatic, minor, rhyming, death | Unimagined Things |
| 138 | These gifts' attendance now allay
And renew these broken eyes with day. What picture in the mind can make me rail, Now so out of love to overwhelm? Can one so old still declaim and rage, Let passion's mask drop or burn a stage? |
The Gifts' Attendance | These gifts' attendance now allay | Let passion's mask drop or burn a stage? | 6 | lyric, dramatic, minor, rhyming, death | Unimagined Things |
| 139 | There, amid the wrong middle of this wood,
Where God himself must stand and choose Or find himself unable, caught between good and good, Sweet songs that rise from the geese in the dawn And travel without a quaver in the air Until they alight on some rich man's crowded lawn Or empty lot abandoned by all but the wind's stir Some ancient, contemptuous king or passionate Poverty-stricken man cries out his heart And lays his head bare in the miserable dust In eternal revelation of his time-bound character Before the bawdy wind can close the gate. |
Without Benefit Of Virgil | There, amid the wrong middle of this wood, | Before the bawdy wind can close the gate. | 12 | lyric, rhyming | Unimagined Things |
| 140 | He cried to the sun to be no more
A part of his burning misery. He cried to the brooding owl "No more Shake down your bony glance, your fingering looks That alter my heart's procession and my blood's course." And he cried to the moon, the scolding moon, "No more the tripwire of my conscience be Threading your silver circuit through eternity; Climb down, climb down from your bald perch: Come taste the blood shreds on the ground." |
The Scolding Moon | He cried to the sun to be no more | Come taste the blood shreds on the ground." | 10 | lyric | Unimagined Things |
| 141 | Now I am old
In body and bone My stone muse sings Proud and alone. But when I was young My muses stood Medusa-struck And drained of blood. Neither face nor body danced On the barren grass Of the white seashore, All their stony terror glued in a glance. All that I had planned And placed apart In the sacred mysteries of the heart Sunk like a stone in the lost sea. All the beautiful pride of her speech That had seemed, so far above death was it flung, The haughty original of chance Closed in dark colloquy and muddied breath. |
Stone Muse | Now I am old | Closed in dark colloquy and muddied breath. | 20 | lyric, death, rhyming, anthem | Unimagined Things |
| 142 | Patched out of forgotten things
Old clothes and old stories and old grey rugs I have sewn my sable wings And soar where solemn things are bugs. But perhaps where blood falls From the human heart And wall gives on to wall Is the right altitude for art. |
Daedalus | Patched out of forgotten things | Is the right altitude for art. | 8 | lyric, philosophical, rhyming | Unimagined Things |
| 143 | The climbing rose upon the tree
Is symbol enough for me; That chaliced eye weeping blood, Proponent of diviner love. All the glory my old age needs A fisher-girl provides. What care I if angels, angels shove? Love's a lump of sodden clay. I am content with what I can catch And let the others pass. Old hearts and broken kettles sigh, Love's a sodden lump of clay. What care I for the spite of time That makes the humble bite their tongues Or loftier spirits trudge Through burning lime? The climbing rose upon the tree Is symbol enough for me. |
The Climbing Rose | The climbing rose upon the tree | Is symbol enough for me. | 18 | lyric, philosophical, rhyming, love | Unimagined Things |
| 144 | And there was one
Had taken up a song Could not put it down again, His heart had been harrowed So deeply and so long. And there was one Had a fine frenzy in his eye And leapt from blazing hillock to hillock In his mind, his imagination striding Dionysian, above the plains. And was there one Renewed all anguish in a thought Or with his burning blood made all the causes stop? His heart had meditated silence So deeply and so long. |
His Heart | And there was one | So deeply and so long. | 15 | lyric, philosophical, God | Unimagined Things |
| 145 | On undemanding ground
Shot through with hollow sounds Bird or bullet make Or some other keen cry, I take This man for model, though in truth A small man of the town; and although His grandfather was a thief And his father worse than that, I respect his grief, for what else can I That wander in the clay? There was a man had died Frozen to the mountainside And, nothing in his climbing pack And less upon his withered back, He ascended the wintry peak Sang a rich bar tune and died. It was out of pride The old man had died. He gripped a flute, knew God's great lie, And had a clarity in the eye. And at the last, a damned wretched gaiety Suffused his frame. Mountain echo upon echo Hollowed out his fame; Dying, trying once again To empty himself of troubles by the score-- "This joy of death Stops the breath." In the trees, excited laughter; And after, the silence. |
The Silence | On undemanding ground | And after, the silence. | 30 | lyric, philosophical, God, rhyming | Unimagined Things |
| 146 | "Capacious imagination's faces fete my famishing,
take tea from a voice, a ghostly pour of steam rising and soliloquizing, misting the thirsty features drowned in their own pool of too-deep selfknowing. Unhandsome Hawthorne, with a vibrant lie and victorian necktie, I guess my susurrations linger over trashed vowels, marked harmonies giving my fine Irene her double edge of softness; how, sometimes, the right face can mean salvation! Howled down at the Imperial for my tea-tragedy last night, too cinnamon-delicate for the masses' meat, I know how our bodies will meld before our minds vanish.... Driving like a marathoner out of London into the foggy future, the lifted Dover cliffs swelling the meridian and loving my new auto's purring reach into the nebulous, I watch for constellations past the turning wheel while the shaky rearview mirror gives an intruding look." |
Henry James | "Capacious imagination's faces fete my famishing, | the shaky rearview mirror gives an intruding look. | 17 | lyric, dramatic, personae, approximate sonnet | Unimagined Things |
| 147 | The sky is blue.
The blue man in the blue sky is blue. There will never be a stop to the monotony In all this abiding blue. The undulations in Uruguay Affect the meditations Of Mrs Rhinoceros Eating her ferina in highest fashion. Macabre puppets of Anaxamander Hanging lank in the spindled air Interrupt the impecunious questionings Of Peter asleep among the dorm's susurrations. Dripping dreams of doubters on the rocks, Their drub drub drub in blackest drams, Falling among rocks Scatters cats in Tulsa, Oklahoma. And never in Atlantic City O Never in Atlantic City Will there ever be a stop to the monotony In all this abiding blue. |
In All This Abiding Blue | The sky is blue. | In all this abiding blue. | 20 | lyric, meditative, nature | Unimagined Things |
| 148 | Jefferson and Washington, and all those famous men
That out of obscurity came, and were on enlightenment bent As on some perfect woman's face, and had such holy measures In their drums, out of what dark hole began? Where had all that purposeless glory come? O, man's a thief of glory, and steals it from himself. Past turbulent lands and frenzied watercourse Man finds but broken solitude, finds his own soul hidden there, Gasps at his luck, summons all his wayward heart to swear To keep it sacred; and then, lonely with his own audacity, Perjures himself in the first company he meets. O, man's a thief of glory, and steals it from himself. Caravaggio's painted flank that struck God in a horse Shimmering, floating there, radiant sky made flesh Above the tumbled saint who crawled in dust away And in that abject departure made his prayer. What besides his human hand had put it there? O, man's a thief of glory, and steals it from himself. |
Thief of Glory | Jefferson and Washington, and all those famous men | O, man's a thief of glory, and steals it from hims | 18 | lyric, meditative, rhyming, history | Unimagined Things |
| 149 | Perfumed Lavosier sniffed
A new world in, sighed a new one out. Caravaggio's rearing horse proclaimed Modern divinity. Peter Seller's gardener lost Compounded man and holy host. The Giant in the cradle Some sweet sanctity retains. |
Four Paradigms | Perfumed Lavosier sniffed | Some sweet sanctity retains. | 8 | lyric, minor, history | Unimagined Things |
| 150 | Some with horse-gestures and spiritual breath,
A fine noble neck that will not bend; A fiery eye; talk that did not fade. Alteration upon alteration given No approving stamp, but in the house fine things Are kept. All is done as was done before. Those few by right of rank By every right that nature knows, That contain such ancestry and grace, Noble pause in speech and haughty face That in manor-house or tenement the tradition's kept; All remembered gaiety and high shows. Enmities mended that would wreck the worst; Beautiful things; beautiful books among the plates; A bell that calls the spirit home. All words a ritual word or look, or some Action presaged in story or high song. All is done as was done before. |
Fine Things | Some with horse-gestures and spiritual breath, | All is done as was done before. | 18 | lyric | Unimagined Things |
| 151 | Some say heaven is a rest,
Bright clouds can close out light; But I differ with that crowd And contend my midnight's best. All men are dust and must pluck their theme From passing circumstance--- All that agony but a dying dream Unless it make a farmhand dance. The dervish and his spinning lash, His tongue twisted in trance, Repeats his antic rant before God's whirling face. Loveliness unbridled bore No such look as that; When heaven claps its bony wings Individuation is forgot. But unpopulated heaven, Bare sky among blank fronds, Floods my rebel keel from even--- Sudden with intemperate blood. Robbed of vision I can feel No palpable delight, But stark hands that catch at escaping heels Clasping in the night. |
In the Night | Some say heaven is a rest, | Clasping in the night. | 24 | lyric, rhyming, meditative, death | Unimagined Things |
| 152 | Once manservant and now no king
Since she the served and sweeping blast Has hurdled death's ribbed gates again, slipped past The soft portals opening and entered The severed countries of the twanging grass. All ants and minotaurs, and each graved thing Is of its wicked pulse ice emperor Under green stars flying backwards and the foreshortened blast Of horse-headed winds that neigh each eye shut Loping its crooked trot to dark. Once queen in the skyey seconds of my breath With no pale maids attending, and now A girl with a hollow where her breasts had been I crawl into the hours of my grief, and lie In the rose lacquer of her lying-down breath. Once haunted god by the ramshackle barn Caved in centuries of twilight and worsted rust I rummage the windings of this moment's moss Bite the sands of our last hidden kiss And breathe all ways at once your lost breath. |
Once Manservant and Now No King | Once manservant and now no king | And breathe all ways at once your lost breath. | 20 | lyric, dramatic, personal | Unimagined Things |
| 153 | Each human soul
Without goal Is unwhole. Every condition Of historical mission Without an individual's kiss Is a mission amiss. Without the startburst Of a singular eye All sights degrade from best To little better to worst; The telescope suffers a sty That once held all universes pride, And dull death slides From the wound in God's side. Without the insistence Of Love's wondrous indifference Each breath, all flesh Beats bereft --Life's limitless gift --Adrift-- |
Without Goal | Each human soul | --Adrift-- | 21 | lyric, minor, doggerl | Chaos and Stars |
| 154 | To sleep is to meditate without a face,
Or is it? Is it Anarch Unconscious, Or just a gown for the mind, for the self, A way to somnambulate the ichorous void In tiaras and swirls? A glittered hem Provides a border where the mind's the mind No more, and the essential dark consoles No more our crinolines and ribbons. The day's crested curl has rolled itself away.-- A place arrives where consciousness ends. & And yet we look, we leer at it continually, Continually concerned that thisness Should end as that darkness should extend Out beyond the mind, beyond the gown of sleep Swishing its glittered hem like a cape, voidward Toward nothing, toward what, toward that, toward that That continually and perpetually Declares us by ending us, as the hem declares the gown; The petty grave's past tense makes present being great. No mausoleum trumps the pomp Of simple death. And so we take the complement with milk And go to sleep and lose our daily face, Touching the antagonist in dreams. We stand gowned, merely gowned, on the void's edge Continually, continually Making our way toward the definite dark That dreams of us, perhaps, when it wakes, Taking its coffee and morning paper, Sampling the headlines with its grapefruit, Comfortable with one more dawn's gowny ends Obliterating inexistence. |
The Gown of Sleep | To sleep is to meditate without a face, | Obliterating inexistence. | 33 | lyric, playful, meditative, dream | Chaos and Stars |
| 157 | The self-deceiving Eskimo
Does not know what he does not know Nor knows he what he should Benignant of evil as of good. The Eskimo is bespattered by a vetting sleet That seeks to part his bones and meat That does not know that it does not know It dissects a self-deceiving Eskimo. Tethered together in all kinds of weather, Unaware of fate, the cold that kills,-- Eskimos ourselves benighted by a snow Of balmy blands whose meat and bones Undoes the ever-curious Eskimo. |
Gratuitous Title | The self-deceiving Eskimo | Undoes the ever-curious Eskimo. | 13 | lyric, playful | Chaos and Stars |
| 158 | Unremarked in fallowest fields one thing
With picky panache Silhouettes the solitary bug Pivoting its spectral hues in yellower grass; One thing darts an engulfing eye Upon the minor life mimicking the swells Motioning the ups-a-daisies and downs With ups and downs of its own, internal candor --Insect in a day most nearly over. One thing, one eye Glances. |
The Me-ness of Me | Unremarked in fallowest fields one thing | Glances. | 11 | lyric, doggerl, minor | Chaos and Stars |
| 159 | The honest man in the mirror, mundane topic,
Sees himself. But not, not as he is, dwarfish Moralist in a vermillioned land, A hunchback crouching in a box. Oh no, Not that, not as--but as--he sees he as he Was meant to be. Interlocutor at large in a world Mad for prestidigitations, The gift of if and fragrant hullabaloo --The verisimilitude of seems, not is. He meets himself bending in a pool, His prodigious doublet washed off to skin, Misty skin, and rain in the rushes again Beating the mirror into silvers. He sees this, and sees still, with any eye Scrounged from any possible socket, The panoply, the possible panoply Of the yet to be. |
Mundane Topic | The honest man in the mirror, mundane topic, | Of the yet to be. | 18 | lyric, philosophical, playful | Chaos and Stars |
| 160 | The mind is portable, and its jar is gemmed
With prinks of light that color what it is, How it sees itself and makes the world. The mind's not mind that consecrates its acts By pure formula without reference to fact, A mute maestro fiddling fortissimos of the sea. The minds not mind that curmudgeonly contracts From dauntless dwellings on the abstract To rote particulars of minor fact. The mind is portable, but not without itself Or its jar does it go the world about, Packing up perspective freaks of circumstance Into abstract projections that rainbow a world, Articulate abstracts of that and that That adumbrate austerely the moiling void. The stars are projective gems of crowns That hemmed us in, and that we have thrown away Playing marbles with the void. Still, we see them, dimly, In the besetting dark, past projects of the self With the sun gone down and the night fresh as a wish; Still we wear them in our dreams as crowns, dimly, Effortless masters of fact in our jarring jars. |
The Queens of This and the Kings of That | The mind is portable, and its jar is gemmed | Effortless masters of fact in our jarring jars. | 22 | lyric, philosophical, playful | Chaos and Stars |
| 161 | Syncopated zeroes,
Intending nothing, Knowing nothing that knots The nothing that they are, Sing zero, sing zero Around their open aches Oohing outwards Into a world too present present To apprehend their absence, Their hollow hallow core And respite for thought, Their assertion of a suction And place for the present-absent Among rogue marmalades And ladies' parasols Stacked backward in the attic. Because the mind moves ever-on, Sentimental futurologist Weeping over imagined ends And incipient catastrophes Only tracing thought portends, A first wheel restless for neighbors, These zeroes too can give A now of nothing, a blank For maps minds one cartographer Can skate in lines of pure invention; Those zeroes, those zeroes too Can give a uteral nurturance By their nothingness, mere nothingness In so much here. |
The Nothing | Syncopated zeroes, | In so much here. | 30 | lyric, philosophical, playful | Chaos and Stars |
| 162 | The moon became a motion I'd once forgot,
A blur in a cheap reflection of a stranger's face, Potentially important, no more than that, A place I'd visited, once, in a dream that seemed No dream, but had lost the ingenious souvenirs That kept imagination avid in the garden, Beneath the qua distractions of the leaves, The solemnities of roses, the junk geraniums, Patching life together from the shards Of whatever fell from whatever was the sun. Hares in clover ignored the birds that were Zen angels of their shared paradise Above the dirty water smoky in its dish; So, too, I had ignored--something, something Important but indistinct, a vital cog in what Goes whirling roundno, thats not it, not quite. I felt there was an awful suavity to things, A hidden grace to every flagrant gaffe, A swoon in the hips of each marching martinet, A subtle doubleness to every dromedary. My only clue was something I'd forgot to do, An inference of fantastic in the backyard's bland, A something more than the shrubbery at hand, The dirty water, the hares and reiterative birds. Something, something.... And it was evening; Everything of daylight had receded in a wave Of going hot, or coolness coming on--each piece Became unpuzzled, a part of evening's grey In a velour of shadows my imagination maimed. And then there was the omnipresence of the moon. |
Ingenious Souvenirs | The moon became a motion I'd once forgot, | And then there was the omnipresence of the moon. | 31 | lyric, philosophical, playful, personal, nature | Chaos and Stars |
| 163 | I had loved him once, and followed,
Entranced, the tracing motions hollow His convex verse commands. I was the eye, he the hand. And long we wandered, light and dark, Tracing shadows' ink, light's absent paper mark. I thought perhaps to see myself reflected, Referenced, imagined or enhanced, Some wrinkle in the mirror, some pout, some expression, Visual evidence of individual digression, Or even a ripple of author self-romanced-- A dreamer's words the dream utters by chance. Where love's hand had led, I had not doubted. (Outward I looked, but no one looked out.) Instead, only one cold eye I espied, Chill olive in the burning body damned. Only that, without a passion or a clue, Note sequenced to note with no melody for cue. No central concern, nor thought of any sort, No socket to accept the wandering ship to port. Not, even, the bark of a doggerel, Nor evening's cage for an argument's grr. |
Why John Ashbury Sucks | I had loved him once, and followed, | Nor evenings cage for an argument's grr. | 22 | lyric, doggerl, rhyming | Chaos and Stars |
| 164 | The vision of a voyeur tracing mirrors
With a lipstick and a laugh, is modern art. It's a simple, simpler, simplest Economy of less, and less, and less --Less time to trail the detail into point, Less ear for the confusing clear of fugues, Less wish to utter troubles to the abiding dove. We are the mercury mirror of, of We know not what it is -- but it is not love. Our Grandfathers drove Dodges and so do we. The comic modern is our métier, A race to wrench awry Reality's real And here and bare, and substitute A vivider, savvier, lesser seems For our living Is. Snapshots of the soul (Stand-in cut-outs at their propped-up best) Can't take mediated place, thrum and throne, Of sarcophagi, stained glass, and saints. --No, that's wrong. They can, and do. And the mirror herself becomes a little thinner, Less and less the magic thing she was, A poverty of posture in the cornered air, Less vaunting and less vair, more haunted Than inhabited: each bold look boiled to a stare. But there, there--the palimpsest remains, Tracings of the tracer tracing trivially, Temporal blots and bleedings Moaning on into long Eternity, The wreckage of our lives not half done, Not half said, raw evidence for eyes That once upon a time we were not dead, That a kiss was still a kiss, a hiss a hiss, Whatever it was our lying lipstick said. |
Eye Moderne a la Mode | The vision of a voyeur tracing mirrors | Whatever it was our lying lipstick said. | 34 | lyric, philosophical, playful, rhyming | Chaos and Stars |
| 165 | Convalescent thoughts
At daybreak's dawnwalk, Go round the satellite mind, Centerpoint incarnate, As moons go round their Jupiter, Pearl-luminescent nexus Tilting stilts. The air in the park is clear and crisp. Moonshine or dayshine, A motioning round Round and round goes As goes its rounds. So just what is it, really, about Reality, This clear clave And garrulous guiro gone round, that, Questioning it, creates it? ...Oracular words dissolve the uttering tongue... This is but an example, Periplum polaroid, An instance of a notion perplexly drawn In irreverent wind, A mobile mote let down From Plato's pinkening statuary, Drifting whichwise Through infinity. The air in the park Goes round and round. |
Walking McWhorter | Convalescent thoughts | Goes round and round. | 27 | lyric, philosophical, playful, nature | Chaos and Stars |
| 166 | It seemed there was a reason
In the clay because of things we did. The ground was moldy with reasons As with wordy worms. The sky burned blue because. Irrelevancy and vanity Vanished vanquished in a hush. The magician of days, Svelte in becoming blacks, Educed only His own gloved, whited hand From his mysterious sleeve, Nothing more. Chiaroscuro clouds Meandered meaningly Their grey, unsignifying shapes. |
Landscape Drawn with Ys | It seemed there was a reason | Their grey, unsignifying shapes. | 16 | lyric, philosophical, playful | Chaos and Stars |
| 167 | Home
Is where I started and Here Is where I ended up and You Are the one I talk to and Now Is the time we share and Tomorrow is what we face Together. The road Is where we've been before and The road Is what still lies before us-- The road That doesn't care who we are And doesn't Care where we have been before In any Universe of whens before This now of time before us Here Where we ended up tonight Together, Home. |
Homing In | Home | Home. | 25 | lyric, minor | Chaos and Stars |
| 168 | Life's wisdom
Is pure isdom, Flinchless in the force Of Life's riotous watercourse. Under whatever weather We shelter together, Shelter from the welter Is winsome As was becomes become And here and there pretends To be both once and when again. Now and forever. Amen. |
Isdom | Life's wisdom | Now and forever. Amen. | 12 | lyric, minor | Chaos and Stars |
| 169 | Equally the sun
Rose reckless and brave that day As each day since has done. Alone in our shoes, our lives We rose ignorant that day Who went too wise and teared to bed; We stepped forth from our thousand dreams To the thousand chores at dawn Noon could not recall. Equally the sun Attends us or our graves; And equally the sun Lets us love or rave. Our humanity is common. It's a truth that's often said, Common as dung and dirt And prayers left unsaid. Ironically we live, And ironically will expire. Equally the sun Will blight or bless desire. Our arms caught round The pounding hours We moved where we meant to be. Equally the sun Showed all that is has been And all shall be again. Off the towering shoulders And out of the towering night Comes a terrifying image We had not made alone, An image made of death To shred us to the bone. Our shoes would not come off again In the world we'd understood, The one the moonshone bedstand showed Composed of dreams of the Good. Equally the sun Had whispered --Be unafraid,-- On all the days that made us. And equally the sun, In dream or day begun (As in day or dream we steer), Shines silently and sure On all our mortal measure, And on all our mortal fear. |
Equally the Sun | Equally the sun | And on all our mortal fear. | 46 | lyric, topical | Chaos and Stars |
| 170 | Ideas are for fakers, pikers, palookas.
I gave up their glimmer when they returned An angel's whistle for my blooded tongue, A something too pure and fey, too twinkling serene For all the agony my gutturals must mean. For example. Night came, ushering his monkeys In a ratty cloche of almost blacks. This seemed something near to touch, A fabled catastrophe brought almost to hand, Eloquently close as a cripple's cane. But stars, like damned ideas, Shone clinquant in unrepentant heaven, Far above the dingy circus scene. Shone apart, and yet were a part, as an eye, or even-- You, who are here with me, know what I mean. |
Fabulations Made Plain | Ideas are for fakers, pikers, palookas. | You, who are here with me, know what I mean. | 15 | lyric, philosophical, playful | Chaos and Stars |
| 171 | Somehow, having this place so long among pines has become us. We're the salvage that the house has gathered. At first, only for an accent beside the piled shelves, a flare of flowers, just there- and then more centrally, more needed- the only object that catches the light right.
Roots pulled from our knees, our heels, go down into these things. What surrounds us becomes us. Carefully the cat, a patchy calico, goes along the windowsill. Inside, but looking out. |
All Poetry Is Middle Class | Somehow, having this place so long among pines has | Carefully the cat, a patchy calico, goes along the | 3 | lyric, philosophical, playful, prose poem | Chaos and Stars |
| 172 | Sometimes the words come from deep in and are seeds. They catch and grow into things, into tall people. They become themselves.
Sometimes what is said has this genesis. It exists both before and after it has been said, and it goes on growing lonely and lovely for a long time. What is said can be a teenaged daughter awkward in the presence of her own beauty. Mirrors, other flat, shiny words, increase her self-consciousness, yet leave herself untouched. The tongue moves so assuredly in its cave-mouth, a snail completely at home in its white winding shell. The tongue slowly shapes its house the way a host makes things ready for strangers at Christmas. The carolers on the snowy porch hope for mugs of hot cider; the spice of the cinnamon surprises them. When they tell themselves the story of singing, later, their boots steaming and their dewy coats heavy on wooden pegs, using the words of the host inside themselves carefully enough, they go on being surprised. |
What is Said | Sometimes the words come from deep in and are seed | The carolers on the snowy porch hope for mugs of h | 4 | lyric, philosophical, playful, prose poem | Chaos and Stars |
| 173 | Not understanding, and wanting to. The edge of an eye, the unseeing white, curves ambivalently around the pupil, its darkness, its direction. But helping anyway, rounding things out, making a backside to the flat stare, tying the brain, like a stone in its apse, to wild vision, to the everything-of-what's-up-front, the insistence of things before us.
All day long I have moved words toward their funeral, toward fire, illumination. I am helping to build something. I don't know what it is. Like when my father put my hand under his hand to hold the wood while he nailed it in place, something large is helping me to help it. A tobaccoy, fiery breath is in my ear. The place I am making behind my own pupil is full of beetles' wings and angels. |
Noticing the Noticer | Not understanding, and wanting to. The edge of an | The place I am making behind my own pupil is full | 3 | lyric, philosophical, playful, prose poem | Chaos and Stars |
| 174 | Once we stole the stars from themselves and named them, mischievously, they became ours. Night after night, the house asleep and unwatchful, they try to escape back into the sky. Every day they return to our chests, our thin ribs, burning guiltily.
Something stolen is never forgotten. Those who lose it may forget it, let it go into the place they have prepared for lost things, old ownerships. But those who stole may never let go. The history of the thing comes with the thing, even if it is only the history of its theft. The jaguar treads with his pelt of sunspots all night, mourning and remembering his meals. His eyes, dimly lidded, hold in the golden day. Each breath taken steals from the breaths around it. Exhaled back into the world, it is never the same. Water that passes through us, and becomes ours, becomes us. When we feel it again, it smells stolen, yellow with use, with history. When the thief forgets what he has stolen, he becomes sick. Society is sometimes like that, sick with millions of small thieves and thefts, forgetting what's stuffed in their pockets. Then what's stolen stays with us and inside us, but is neither ours nor themselves. These things rise up strangely, alien and without grief. Our breath denies us, denied by us; our lungs swag with wet cement. Zoos howl with animals caged but without their own minds, crazy and ungrieving. The dry straw is torn, the water in its steel bowl is overturned, the food, pawed and neglected, becomes poisoned. The animals will lie down in the moon and rot. Their starved breaths will float into roses. We, who have stolen and lied to ourselves, will die. |
A Moral Star | Once we stole the stars from themselves and named | The animals will lie down in the moon and rot. The | 5 | lyric, philosophical, playful, prose poem | Chaos and Stars |
| 175 | The pond is marshy. Bullfrogs visit it daily.
The mown grass on the lawn humps up In small tornadoes of torn green. An early moon is near. Almost, It is inside us. The katydids, Remembering their mournful names, Carry something to us From farther away. |
An Early Moon | The pond is marshy. Bullfrogs visit it daily. | From farther away. | 8 | lyric, playful, nature | Chaos and Stars |
| 176 | Why are two men arguing at a fencepost? Perhaps it is three men. The two themselves, and the shadow third they are together, the argument. Let's pretend it is evening. Three shadows then and a stubble of cornstalks. A grey stone the heft of a skull knocks the post as they talk. If they disagree, why do they need to be near each other? Why does the mountain start from a flat place?
I think most people mean what they are. The feeling they seem to be talking about would be immanence, or impermanence. I guess they would call it expanded consciousness and permanence. A part of it here, a part elsewhere. But both really here, or really there, a metaphor. Tat tvam tasi. Thou art that. I don't know. I like the stone being itself, unowned and unknowable. I like being myself, a little too personal, a little forgotten about, even by myself. Somehow too, like they say, like they show, using my feelings in their argument, which is part me as well then, I guess, the stone is inside me, rattling my ribs, pushing my blood limbs, weighing on inner things. And I am curled inside the stone, a small man asleep in the granite like this feather, just here now, on top of it windily. |
The Why of a Fencepost | Why are two men arguing at a fencepost? Perhaps it | Somehow too, like they say, like they show, using | 4 | lyric, story, prose poem, philosophical | Chaos and Stars |
| 177 | I
The sovereign Poet, who's awakened gasp Flows out from infinite soul to soul along As arrowy moonbeams, unmixed and strong, Sweeten with brightness the dusts of snow In architecture-yielding light,-- Lacking the telling word his feeling shows Kills whatever of sorrow or delight His paradise-enhancing tongue might build Or more mindful heart would clasp. II In our soft light of winter-time When no bird is in the bough And yon black yew is strung with frozen lime At walk I heard a single nightingale Thronging the wood with nightingale's song Resurrecting Spring that summer burned to this: No tindered spirit in the leaf but emptiness. To bind in eternal being --- paradoxical Love! --- Even in coffers small as a nightingale's heart-- What the mad, fragile, passing world has spent. III Straining faces may seem immortal But it is desire that makes the skull a portal! Thus in joyance Joyance does pursue, And to give and take in pleasure is pleasure's all; For from the living the living voice is never parted-- No psalm spoken but gentle-hearted, As though some aching mystery of LIFE and DEATH Moves through human hearts, and steals breath, Touching a veil trembled In a wind anticipated. IV When to this stormy world, this realm of lightnings One electric mortal comes conducting Awful powers whose careless touch enhances The deadest things to life, as paper-ashes thrown From the wild static of an ecstatic hand Or when a rainbow aura's stabbing crown On an X-Ray rears far brighter than the bone, ---Take, take that hand! No matter how alone And however whitened fear, and draining lips, Or other breathless augury eclipse, Still take that hand--- and crush it to your own! V I am awake in the radiant frameless day! Unbounded beginnings start and renew What severer sleep and longer dream forgot-- The dragon-draught forced past blue pinched lips Ignorant of everything save God's solemn name; A coarser sovereign than my slipping sun! For the dream-vision and dream-life at noon Wax alive in the weeping vision that we tear. Rapt with vision, what I now on the hour require Is burning love singing in a burning choir. |
The Human Immortal | I | Is burning love singing in a burning choir. | 55 | lyric | Ascent |
| 178 | The very astonishing hour has come.
The very astonishing hour indeed! Green Heinekens, jade brain and rose-coral vodkas --Exhausted! In one final, fantastic evening. Hosannahs invade the empty windows, spurs of blacks, mysterious As the tender invitation of the body. Bright, alcoholic after-haloes sift Timid ash upon stale, upraised lips. Sobriety has entered us As mourners enter a white church. Enough of this pathetic quietness! This simpering, dog-like wish for 'temperament,' The madness of faces full of 'sound judgment.' I forgive all disasters, all accomplishments, Every disguise that announces 'I am finished!' Choking its inhabitant as a mirror chokes beauty. Songs of sporadic intensity, wicked verses, The poem of flayed skin, blind eyesight, Mutes imagining laughter, I forgive you! Pathetic quiet! Bring tympans, wild sibilants, Drunken elephants of sound, mists, the harsh clangour of brass. New eyes, new hearts, new senses! Bring a speech of bloods, the invention of Angels! Why was one ever afraid of waking? Eh! a little daydream I had in the haypile. But now the new era has arrived --this moment!-- Let us revenge the sky for an hour! Let us run out, muds of new births upon us, And seize in hands of ice the very flowing waters---- Dreams of incorporeal perfection! Dawn-leaves splinter in my eye Enacting the death of Satan. Vertigineousness in the closet! Very astonishing! |
Slaves of Glory | The very astonishing hour has come. | Very astonishing! | 37 | lyric, experimental, surreal | Ascent |
| 179 | When nothing is left but divinity
And each man shouts to the next: "Look! We are become the human angels!" Wings made fabulous-- disasters surpassing imagination! Abominable, the bricks of this image. All will be re-constructed, in Paradise. At the discretion of no God Do I spin and unfurl; What is the hypothesis of passion? The inextricable answer in the diamond. "I am the unnamable silver, past continuation, I march beyond continent and clime. I sing without vocable glitter." A death that was reasonable shimmers Shining ignored in a dirty jade pool. Men will that day become? Men will that day become? Tales and fables melt to insignificance; Palaces disappear in a maze of flames. Men will that day become what? I woke up in an ecstatic ditch; I don't know very much about it. The disingenuous suffer overmuch. The rhetoric of Democracies! Very commendable! And after the Sousas and oompahs.... And after the senses to emphasize what blankness? |
Shouts of Blankness | When nothing is left but divinity | what blankness? | 30 | lyric, experimental, surreal | Ascent |
| 180 | 1]
Extinguish it! Eyes resigned, spirit limned In greenest defeat--lick exaltation and brew A world-- a world renewed; by you, by you! My soul as template spiral hurls the sullen ash From the charred coil of broken eyes blinded. Lift the spirit eyes wasted tears have spurned, Envision the sacred spirit of man-- for all! It is a glory heralded out of defeat's smokes, In formless flame engulfing the sculpted light Each soul alone uplifts illimitable, Chaliced hearts eternally bleeding desire As sacral skies dissolve in light eternal, Alight in love alighting! 2] O champions vaulting nights gone everlastingly Far into lording realms of divinest light, See as I see all things beloved, no longer A swollen testament to wrong, but loved & saved As only this soul beside me is saved-- 3] O saviors who ride astride the centuries glow Heralding glories of each living thing Parleying the rose above rose's smudged light Into unblinded eye's greatest might & right, Forever the reds in ecstatic verity remain Sincerer than universes by nobility's sum untouched. 4] O immortal beloveds inscribe your soul upon me, As I have seen it in unspent visions granted By right of ravishment-- consciousness supreme! O Poets, immortal lords of ME, sweetly draw That light and limber vision that I see In your eyes re-souled as they have drawn it on my own. 5] O my Soul, o my rose! burning vision In ecstatic clarity reclaiming loves Unlost in the votive moment And candled in the champion's heart, indeed! Make me more bright, let all myself allow Light alone to enter unto eternity by my Will, the will of my consciousness construed. Here the leaf, here the sparrow unfallen Skirl aloft in tangential glories of soul's one repose!-- Calling down the blessing waterfalls of Byron's soul By light to limb unfurled in this dawning moment. 6] No God, no outworn lords of dust look down Upon spiring chance's swift instant, only Effortless universes filling times illimitable; Lightnings tendered in daybreak auras Revive the angels, undust the wings! No foul universe can inhabit my glory; Out of lone luminescents comes glory's unbounding, My light in rosaries' tendered opalescence. Come touch the hand I have created for touching! 7] No god, but I who revive the spirit, Deigning the invisible winds of heaven's breath That command the heart beat and my loves beget. Inceptive kisses befall the poet's lips--- Paradise! offering all greatness sustained! Out of my holy mouth blossoms the soul of you! 8] O indivisible! 9] I will! and my will be done. Lording tongues above all creation Forever this minute's moment create. Yes! Speak and speak again! My will Unveiled and real-- the living borne. 10] Let bright be the place of thy soul! Skimmed minutes and parcels of light Like sparks flung from divinest sight--- No coal smokes the heart of the blest But visions immortal deigning flame to the rest! O winners! Not sinners! O blessing be Of Good thy soul discloses in thee! 11] O Glory immortal, grace seeking purest form Lies bestowed upon hearts made holy In the astonished realms, raving hope remaining. Golden senses in fervent adore enlighten infinity, Conceived in dearling virtues untamed! Reflections revel brightly-- the pride of princes: New beauties, once viewless, now forever immortal! 12] The unbound revelations of prophecy unfold-- Behold the champions' eyes unblinded by gold! Behold! An angel whispers her soul into hearts Divining miracles from heavens' dust-- My angel!-- spun winning from heavens disclosed, Sighing alive into the purl of my soul. 13] Behold my glorious tone discased from alone! Sparring lights advance against the dashes-- Dispelling black ghosts, dispersing all ashes-- Upswept in trined clouds, lights everliving! Tornadoes of fire torch forgotten woes: Choiring ecstasies respire: True Life! Infinities sanctify eternal ages, unbroken From cities of saints I sanction, exhumed! 14] A call to heart, saints and lords link arms! Undeniable in new light, these truths inscribed From an unrivalled shrine-- creating all!-- From purer hearts' undying sublime. Glory! O glory, Come to this! Come douse hands and douse hearts and all of love's love Into whatever the pleasures of will will decide! Exist as I exist, I command thee all: Breathe thy light, take heart for your all! 15] As I found this, I give it, With no reserve in my soul! 16] Allow one more flurry of ecstatic verity-- As light allows no shadow on its soul But, unconsuming, alights, consuming all. A disembodied ghost imparts this holy sight In solitary flame of truth departing the night. Lord Dermond/Saint Gregg G O lyric genius, to grow ecstatically one!! |
! | 1] | O lyric genius, to grow ecstatically one!! | 128 | lyric, experimental, surreal | Ascent |
| 181 | "Me house gots no door,
Me door no house; All day me sweetheart Trapses in and owt. Fire's in d' kitchen, No kitchen to clean; I fry an' I boils What best pleases me. Me bed's got no trestle, Me trestle no bed; No landlubber sleeps On no happier head. Me cellar's up high, Me barn's The Deep; All ass-over-noggin' I lay me down to sleep. All sharp and blinkin' I'm up at a race; At no place I'm stoppin', Me stoppin's no place." [GOETHE] |
Buccaneer | "Me house gots no door, | [GOETHE] | 21 | lyric, translation, minor, rhyming | Ascent |
| 182 | What
could be more limber, in the gold- edged frame of this cancelled post- card from Notre Dame cathedral where hurly-burly God-beware people crawl on their sagging knees to eat the brittle, little pieces of their savior? A God beloved in the house his lovers built for him after death. |
Acrobat at Prayer | What | after death. | 13 | lyric | Ascent |
| 183 | A jellyfish
is enough, a wish willed from vapor, condensed to a quiver beneath the bright, lacelike vail that sedates the eye that watches the gem of its innards. |
A jellyfish | A jellyfish | the gem of its innards. | 8 | lyric, minor, playful | Ascent |
| 184 | Having joked for so long
Now that the point is near my heart And all my premises scratched back to start, I wonder at the humor ripped from song That has left me houseless as I belong--- A final joke of sorts. The birth-cannon that breaks my bread Scalds this quiescent heart And sets named dignity aflame; Ach! My aching head! Better living livid than dying dead. For my poor alderman's chalked part In the passing play, I'll resign dead generations of fame. |
Alderedman | Having joked for so long | I'll resign dead generations of fame. | 14 | lyric, minor, playful | Ascent |
| 185 | I have been by your tempests overtaken
And wallow waterlogged in your waves' swales Whose salt in tender licks my mouth Opens thirsting for.... Drowned by years Of loving whatever your love abandons here On the constant beaches of my devotion. Not one pebble turns from the spray away Or hesitates to douse itself in you. |
Or However the Weather Tends | I have been by your tempests overtaken | Or hesitates to douse itself in you. | 8 | lyric, rhyming, love | Ascent |
| 186 | Beyond the fell pace of antelopes
Lost to sight in the cold engulfing woods Where hot hounds give ululating chase, up slope And deep into the dimmest mossy fold--- There my mind in ranting rage unwinds And knows the sharp sorrow of each bitten thing And falls with the great hart in bludgeoned love; |
Hunting | Beyond the fell pace of antelopes | And falls with the great hart in bludgeoned love; | 7 | lyric, rhyming, love | Ascent |
| 187 | Companions of my mellow youth
Bound by circumstance to squeak wry truths In awkward dartings of darkened tongues! They themselves forget How greatly were their wits Distended--- for age has this much blessing: That we forget our misdemeanors As so much chaff's fretted away And retain the golden grain that we consume Day by day, by eating making new. |
New Day | Companions of my mellow youth | Day by day, by eating making new. | 10 | lyric, memory, youth | Ascent |
| 188 | Pale wraithe in autumn's fuming!
I gave up poetry long ago for these cavillings.... Oh Autumn, my beautiful companion |
Ghost Prince | Pale wraithe in autumn's fuming! | Oh Autumn, my beautiful companion | 3 | lyric, minor, doggerl | Ascent |
| 189 | Her silvered eyes entranced the moon, leapt bare
From dim cornice to swept heaven, stared The moon-man from his stirless rest By fibers of affection bound him breast to breast. So Isabella charmed each element she met, Bent to calm waters, and made those waters crest As she were the moon come down to trod the wood And with luminous looks set whispers among the reeds. The wind that swept her sighed away enthralled; And crickets kept her steps enshrined with hymns; Birds added wondrous silent powers to their calls And marked her visit solemnly, like small dignitaries trimmed; Sweet berries shook themselves to roll along her palm And of those moon-liveried lips have some taste Before they of their giving taste gave all. |
Bella Belle Isabella | Her silvered eyes entranced the moon, leapt bare | Before they of their giving taste gave all. | 15 | lyric, love | Ascent |
| 190 | Autumn has pruned your star from heaven
With unforgiving shears snapped the sweet light out--- Who but God can count the odd stars from even? Or know by looking the straight man from the lout? All that moves progresses only by seeming As a wheel that cannot touch the earth revolves In a mind of fire, by circles of its dreaming. So you, I think, were not from or into the heavens sent But gave loving light to all, which darker heavens lent. |
Elegy Avenged | Autumn has pruned your star from heaven | But gave loving light to all, which darker heavens | 10 | lyric, love, elegy | Ascent |
| 191 | No Transcendental Impulse but then
Invaded, sense by sense, and sense by sense again! Confused, harassed, stammering, half-mad, I arrived at a mountain stream's small source alone Whose each mere moment of dropping flowing By dropping more intensely flows. Heart's-blood Stuttered along the tongue of solvent air Following out the stream's wanderings apace As if my liquid's hush through every cataract And canyon-enhancing rivulet did move; What weariness then penetrated every limb Which had flung itself the whole blue morning through Like a ceaseless wheel! I lay a lonesome hour Upon a table of stone spined just so long As myself from dead heel to skull-top Imagining its travel! By my veins The moss-indentured rock with iron force Is cracked, a hammering flow enveloping the mass With pale empurplings and smooth-prompting bulbs of glass That maturer nature had given a more rugged touch. So I lay sun-warmed upon that human stone, Neither foot nor head beyond its grating cradle, Until all that made me I un-made Then wove again together in eye and ear; As if sunlight spoke and sound gave voice in light, All these before me in hazeless dazzle floated free And I consigned them to their Liberty! My rushing emerging blood swept past Cochlea and ear-drum in bird-like thrum: Stream on stream ascended purer air in song Til all was bathed by part, the unaccustomed whole Of oceans leaping from my spring! each martlet that sang Told some note of me; myself had stained Sky's unstarred majesty with pinks, and in a wink Sent each sense sharpened as it spread From azure zones of whispered fire To the old pond's own cool shadow of repose Til every busy sound was somewhat tinged with red And every shifting leaf, dew-shadowed as they were, Burned outlined by that bright delight Their own laughing motion shucked from them in sound. Then a purple rain, it seemed, descended In answering haloes shaken from the sun And broke in its descent to mist, hallowing all. No part of the under-sky receded From that pursuant touch,-- but rather Rose to its own undoing in erotic rapture As drones to their honey-loving maiden-queen Lift translucent wings in flight; Leaf and leaf in murmuring applause Stretched on each twig-end toward that sky! The stone that held my casing seemed more up-raised And the low appearance of the swimming sun Took on a duskier and a closer tone As if it wished to immerse itself again! Strange mist was everywhere, endowing each Glowing glen that lay as little as a lens. Strange mist had wrapped the very bowsprit of the rock! My own skin was mist-engrafted! Within, my own departing heart,--- So whirled with-in and -out with the luminous,--- As pulsant globe and center now resolved. And on this thought my mind no longer moved, By spells of rapt intransigence inly held, Til all that had its faultless action once impelled Conjoined to conjure pause; sweet was the wind That kissed my aching lungs with such sweet breath! All piny, with some sunny hawthorne scenting mixed, ---Even still that air is fresh within me, Even still do I desire the clearness I had then!--- For one hour's welter of such unwon wealth!--- For then I had found out-- in clearness still Do I see it!-- motive of moon and sun and sincerer stars, Our perpetual guest, the unsullied source of glory That limned my out-flowing veins in rivers'-light! Out, out of the very center where my spirit slept Flood called out to flood and flood responded Out-pouring Life! there, there are the harmonies! There the endless systems counted back to One! There the measureless Space contented To a water-drop! There echoings on echoings By their velvet source are hushed! Anguish and insistence vanquished by a touch! Nightmares and chimeras chastized by a love The soul's own shaping power makes animate! |
Outing | No Transcendental Impulse but then | The soul's own shaping power makes animate! | 85 | dramatic, meditative, philosophical, story | Ascent |
| 192 | Great accomplishment great regret has brought;
A city of sighs pent in a full-teneted breast Exhale in languishment! The moony dawn Slow moves from verge of blue to greener rays As the heart up-bourne by dark and dark deceits In reality's plain day now lighter grows To whiteness --- and is lost among the hopeless snows. |
Mood | Great accomplishment great regret has brought; | the hopeless snows. | 8 | lyric, meditative | Ascent |
| 193 | When that the trembling pen in hesitation stalls
Putting blots on thought's most precious spree Clotting what had sung one soul's simple all With bandages of indecision on thought's flow-free Of singing blush and crimson victory.... Over all blanche competitors palely lame Come reds revanching by tongue's sincerity, Completing luck with hues of highest sun. |
When that the Trem-bling Pen | When that the trembling pen in hesitation stalls | Completing luck with hues of highest sun. | 8 | lyric | Ascent |
| 194 | Bonfires
Hilarious was the night Coleridge and Wordsworth knew.... At the angst-incisive beginning of their pogrom for bliss, all the bad old poets the Juden that they'd strew to the picnic bonfire blazing--- each soul-protesting, regurgitated face another indictment in the long, wrong roll of Fame; Shelley himself the fir-apple in the fire they grew! They drank until their syllables burst with light, Kubla Coleridge chanting his politician's heart in Krystall Nacht clarity under the shadows that they threw: "The mind is like a Humming-Bird Invisible & furious, aloft & true! Imaging epileptic Translucence, Tho' held in God's rosy lips like a Word." |
Bonfires | Bonfires | Tho' held in God's rosy lips like a Word." | 15 | lyric, personae | Ascent |
| 195 | Love and Innocence alone let Duty live
In Coleridge's lonesome, holy book, Finding Jesus entwined in ivy Or God in a sparrow's nook. |
Coleridgean Errata | Love and Innocence alone let Duty live | Or God in a sparrow's nook. | 4 | lyric, minor, doggerl | Ascent |
| 196 | Sweetly beat the bells of St Mary's
Over all the pasturage; Ignorant souls and weary Come gather at the meeting-edge. When ever was body and its wreck Home enough for what the spirit seeks? The great clock has run down And fair and foul are mixed; Come where the bower's sweetly blown, Come wind the clock-hands round again. Come wind the bell of the old clock tower. Sweet are the bells that beat St Mary To bright sky and mournful cow; Sweet are the hands that row the ferry, The backs that pull the plow. Work of the back can bring liberation From too-great ache and half-starved Candlelit concentration. The great clock has run down And fair and foul are mixed; Come wind the clock-hands round again; Come wind the bell of the old clock tower. Sweet is knowledge for the weak Who cannot tell what they are, Mind and misery sunk in tar. My heart is fathered in such soot Unable to reckon either 'good' or 'truth.' At midnight soul work begins. Come sweet ladies of St Mary's For the hands are running back, Come wind the clock-hands round again That beat the swollen face and rend skin. Come wind the bell of the old clock tower. |
The Bells of St Mary's | Sweetly beat the bells of St Mary's | Come wind the bell of the old clock tower. | 33 | lyric, rhyming | Ascent |
| 197 | What love can know its underpinning,
Cause and causeless are so whirled? What horse that canters at the gate Stamp assured of the final winning? Often what is best starts late--- The midnight pilgrim has her prayers heard Before the dawning bird's. |
What Love | What love can know its underpinning, | Before the dawning bird's. | 7 | lyric, rhyming, love | Ascent |
| 198 | How rhetoric-filled the evening slumbers!
All sky a dark anticipated; trees Grown dark under stars that increase the dark. And midnight waters cannot glimmer When gathered into an eye of age; So despair councils; mute birds averr. Now deep in years at the water's edge And lacking all right light to disclose, Must I stand grown cold yet convince, propound That all lovers' hearts but beat to a purpose That Love herself is profound and good At once simple and deep (O lost and found!) Or soul an angel raging in a cage God had lost the key to unlock? For I do feel both in bone and look Heroic champions of more forgotten blood Rise through the veins, charge vein and mind and glance As glory consumes imagination When timid skeleton's dispensed. All whirls upon a moment in a dance! |
What Age | How rhetoric-filled the evening slumbers! | All whirls upon a moment in a dance! | 20 | lyric, rhyming, philosophical | Ascent |
| 199 | Sweet was the passion, and the vision sweet;
Thought heralded out what one heart imbued. Sparse charges of insistence neglectfully gather Whatever willow leaves shiver in autumn waters.... How all the unpulsed skeleton is left bereft! Now watching out the winter, to dazzle us in snow. Congruence is for loafers -- even saints have loafed!-- Lovingly gazing at God in that silver shower. We lived in the tyrrany of loving what we knew. Briars on his hands, briars on his head! Now some terrible moment is coming to its bliss, Unconsummated hearts are burning, and the old Shatter into slivers of this THIS-- Everything unpreparedly is turning gold! Somehow our own souls must know, prescient By their bliss, we are all that we pretend! God, Man, Beast, Himself has his rosy shadow lent, Sweet briars on my hands, briars on my head! |
Himself | Sweet was the passion, and the vision sweet; | Sweet briars on my hands, briars on my head! | 18 | lyric, rhyming, philosophical | Ascent |
| 200 | Here silk hope crumbled, the rough hand decayed
That charged imagination's sweet heresy As if man's knotted mind had coyly played Its final line like Shelley on the Lerici-- Infinite in the instant's autumn ecstasy Despite of Death's splay yaw and indecision. Though human and immortal, no human grace he Found. Till flesh foundered he met derision Only. Then spirit's keen herald need meet the call-- Flashing imperious light where e're he dwelled. Burst free from body's bounds he broke his thrall To time and space, though quickened bells knelled Einstein's circularity to his spirit's ash: He roared alone the universe entire, all its call and crash! Daniel Weeks Gregg G. Brown |
Sonnet: for P. B. Shelley, Bay of Lerici | Here silk hope crumbled, the rough hand decayed | Gregg G. Brown | 16 | sonnet, two authors, philosophical | Ascent |
| 201 | Simple men pursuing sawn-off strings of sound,
Such bright, abstract things, Sumped on the spirit's lavender elixir. Silver drubbed the drums. Ho-humm, ho-humm. Washed out of wishes and livid, endearing things They came, the men of vital evening Pipped silkwise with green melodious coffinings. Catarr, catarr, snarled the blackish guitar. Tripleted they spat, in spic array, lunar sojourners Cresting the spurious evening, and, ear by ear, Ascended the profoundest bass effusive and exact, near the waterheater. Blue-blackish thrubbed the muddy bass in blubs. Men made simple in the mimic minute of the spirit's leavetaking August imaginers in the moon's hollow light Sculpt skeletal, plead out of prismatic catacombs Such swooning, harmonious things. |
Jazz Skeletons | Simple men pursuing sawn-off strings of sound, | Such swooning, harmonious things. | 17 | lyric, playful, music | Ascent |
| 202 | Defeated by the paraphrase, or nearly,
He puzzled out a dwindled life in poetry Who, perennial importunist, assessed His era unfit for "the best." Defeated by the paraphrase, The inexact guesswork of sleepy heads, Eyes closed and empty mouths upraised--- Fit for execution or their communion of lead. Spackled cadavers in mottled light Recite lines of despair, never knowing another, Never sensing, in their age's indifference, another More enduring light. No longer The Ariel feeling Or whipping spirit stronger Than an evening's reeling. Untouched by the amorous, Stripped Goes Eros, incomprehensible To "the masses." Hieratic verse, Each head limned in light, Suffers the obverse, Blotted rummagings of a blotted sight. Yet still they felt, with a savior's amour, Neither drugged hedonist, nor yet a bore, Limitless possibilities Like so many leaves Clinging to the ancient portal's wetted door. The percipient shall rule, discerning 'Neath modernity's fractious overlay Here an emerald, there a ruby, thing: Sustenance enough for poets in the ruby day. I I The age demanded an image, Bland, unthinking, dull scrimmage; Never the descent of Angelic fate, Making impossible their unwaking retreat. Not a mirror to the muses' face, Not Ariel, limitless in grace; Never divinity, never the light angelus, Nor any, still ephemeral, "sublimities." The age demanded an image Rapped in cellophane or bandage, A brain of eaten hates, or laughter Soulless out of deadened waters. I I I Villains are feted in peeling shoes, and garlanded Is Ginsolds, the great damaged head Thrust into the atmosphere, Impercipient, the small eyes dead in their spheres. Seeing in earth neither paradise, nor fit habitation, The Ginsolds of his father's scabrous generation,--- Monumental dinosaurs of the heart,--- Researched dung and drugs for their start; At first, a religious pre-occupation Made them stare at Sunflowers and feces, Purporting maculate Bhudda in the rose Of an anus in dilation. Tarry pools Accept their coral bones, Steeped in excesses Of the incorrect and religious. And no one left to give a damn about "the Graces," And the reviewers live on, indifferent; Slaughtered Beauty shot in the face; Apollo and Bacchus hanged in the neon marketplace; Cold feet under etherial faces. When all the world shall kneel At this bright whisper, Striving with unapt paws To strip the golden spirit down, or unpeel, No heaven shall listen; Silence shall be their first reparation; Paid or unpaid, the soul's discourse discloses Itself, thrumming after no repatriation To a nation, clotted, with whores and doses. "BLACK ORCHIDS ON THE RED DOOR" Black orchids on the red door; Fitfully the raconteur Consigns the ownership of elegance For a few hundred dollars, for a "superior" glance. Black orchids on the red door Mark the poet's stipulated habitat. Depression afflicts; he begins to yawn.... Stretching away from the world with a bored 'eclat.' Exhausted by his meditations on the black Orchids on the red door, of a few, niggard, dark, Striations intermit with rose; Guilty only, in his ichorous lair, Of a certain Kempt Baudelarian repose. MON HYPOCRITE LECTUR: Ginsolds of the foetid spawn Patched with no forgotten pulchritudes-- Vulgar paucity faintly echoed In the weak light of decline. Mr H. (insert your name here), possessed of an anesthetized soul Blathers his useless abstraction, A tongue-tying of half-felt immolations--- Unendurable! if not so falsely done. Enslaved imbecility defiling life, A sycophancy supremely mired, Never to ring in celestial essence, Or inhere, in patches, to glory's sculpting light!! The age demands an image, The image that we give it! Chiselled tongues of thunder rung In rising airs rained innocence! We demand the eternal image, Absolute, inscribed, violet, blessed, Suffering only self-made Gods bleeding divinities--- Intensities of existence intensifying infinite! "EVEN WHEN I'M DOWN, I HEAR SYMPHONIES" <i>Apollo and Bacchus hanged in the neon marketplace; Cold feet under etherial faces.</i> Bore-ed by the lack of temerity, Slack desire suborning the bandannaed faces Of hippies contented by Peace, and not Energy; Marijuana leaves placidly Shading the crib and high-chair. Bored by the lack of passion Expanded bank accounts conferred upon their elders Lacking still the capacity, it seemed, messrs, To "cope;" they craved the indelible in action. 100 punks, or fewer, or one, Concoct out of impossible desire impossible reality: Burning ambitions in Waldorf St, or SoHo's zone, Shed from the aether These symphonies. With a tongue of justice, With an eye of fire, With an ear made fabulous By beloved mind's one wept flame: desire. Rotten's masquerades, Sid's pinioned victory, The burboned voice of Hell establishing "blankness" as priority In a world floating valueless; incisive, the eye of ice. Aching faces brave the astonishing light, Asserting TRUTH in ecstatic sanction; Our redemption was individual, London our capitol. Our "decade" compressed to " '77!" We acknowledged, as aftereffect, a fey, uneven "inheritance" of "reticence." Youth as a remembered depravity Gives no living soul satisfaction; relentless Sojourning away from their parents' questioning Consigned to them the "aridity" of bliss. * * * * When dust hath hushed the roses, Unmeditating silence This crimson-cerise splinter of song Encloses On time's blank slate Lick this, and relate: "Here twists, with upraised fist, An Anarchist!" HOW TO WRITE A VICTORY INSTEAD OF A TRAGEDY Indelible bloods Arise heroic rose Each love a sung Sempiternal sun. Exile first the inconsequent, The casual hand, Speech procured at secondhand, Opinions possessed for an "effect." Recast ANAKE as the actor's whim: Vital eyes Outweep all that tragic circumstance, Lear and Cordelia locked in paradise. Catastrophe hacked at Hector In his skirt, but the Eumenides Themselves were mild when Antigone died, Singing at a string-end in the tomb's lee. Become Promethean, to this purpose: Amid lesser qualities, personalities and such, Swimming in unexamined idolatries, personalities and such, Inscribe what I equate: Man = universe. DECONSTRUCTING THE DECONSTRUCTIONISTS Philosophers of stone Ungainly shift, By love's bright drift Undone. Of unbodied air Came spirits' enhancing; Never a Dunciad But angels' hearts made glad. Impeccable sirs They discerned Exegesis Spit in sand. |
Blank Generation [Complete Text] | Defeated by the paraphrase, or nearly, | Spit in sand. | 197 | lyric sequence, experimental, dogmatic, cautionary | Ascent |
| 203 | Defeated by the paraphrase, or nearly,
He puzzled out a dwindled life in poetry Who, perennial importunist, assessed His era unfit for "the best." Defeated by the paraphrase, The inexact guesswork of sleepy heads, Eyes closed and empty mouths upraised--- Fit for execution or their communion of lead. Spackled cadavers in mottled light Recite lines of despair, never knowing another, Never sensing, in their age's indifference, another More enduring light. No longer The Ariel feeling Or whipping spirit stronger Than an evening's reeling. Untouched by the amorous, Stripped Goes Eros, incomprehensible To "the masses." Hieratic verse, Each head limned in light, Suffers the obverse, Blotted rummagings of a blotted sight. Yet still they felt, with a savior's amour, Neither drugged hedonist, nor yet a bore, Limitless possibilities Like so many leaves Clinging to the ancient portal's wetted door. The percipient shall rule, discerning 'Neath modernity's fractious overlay Here an emerald, there a ruby, thing: Sustenance enough for poets in the ruby day. |
Blank Generation I | Defeated by the paraphrase, or nearly, | Sustenance enough for poets in the ruby day. | 33 | lyric sequence, dogmatic, philosophical, playful | Ascent |
| 204 | The age demanded an image,
Bland, unthinking, dull scrimmage; Never the descent of Angelic fate, Making impossible their unwaking retreat. Not a mirror to the muses' face, Not Ariel, limitless in grace; Never divinity, never the light angelus, Nor any, still ephemeral, "sublimities." The age demanded an image Rapped in cellophane or bandage, A brain of eaten hates, or laughter Soulless out of deadened waters. |
Blank Generation [II] | The age demanded an image, | Soulless out of deadened waters. | 12 | lyric sequence, dogmatic, philosophical, playful | Ascent |
| 205 | Villains are feted in peeling shoes, and garlanded
Is Ginsolds, the great damaged head Thrust into the atmosphere, Impercipient, the small eyes dead in their spheres. Seeing in earth neither paradise, nor fit habitation, The Ginsolds of his father's scabrous generation,--- Monumental dinosaurs of the heart,--- Researched dung and drugs for their start; At first, a religious pre-occupation Made them stare at Sunflowers and feces, Purporting maculate Bhudda in the rose Of an anus in dilation. Tarry pools Accept their coral bones, Steeped in excesses Of the incorrect and religious. And no one left to give a damn about "the Graces," And the reviewers live on, indifferent; Slaughtered Beauty shot in the face; Apollo and Bacchus hanged in the neon marketplace; Cold feet under etherial faces. When all the world shall kneel At this bright whisper, Striving with unapt paws To strip the golden spirit down, or unpeel, No heaven shall listen; Silence shall be their first reparation; Paid or unpaid, the soul's discourse discloses Itself, thrumming after no repatriation To a nation, clotted, with whores and doses. |
Blank Generation [III] | Villains are feted in peeling shoes, and garlande | To a nation, clotted, with whores and doses. | 30 | lyric | Ascent |
| 206 | Black orchids on the red door;
Fitfully the raconteur Consigns the ownership of elegance For a few hundred dollars, for a "superior" glance. Black orchids on the red door Mark the poet's stipulated habitat. Depression afflicts; he begins to yawn.... Stretching away from the world with a bored 'eclat.' Exhausted by his meditations on the black Orchids on the red door, of a few, niggard, dark, Striations intermit with rose; Guilty only, in his ichorous lair, Of a certain Kempt Baudelarian repose. |
Blank Generation: | Black orchids on the red door; | Kempt Baudelarian repose. | 14 | lyric sequence, dogmatic, philosophical, playful | Ascent |
| 207 | Ginsolds of the foetid spawn
Patched with no forgotten pulchritudes-- Vulgar paucity faintly echoed In the weak light of decline. Mr H. (insert your name here), possessed of an anesthetized soul Blathers his useless abstraction, A tongue-tying of half-felt immolations--- Unendurable! if not so falsely done. Enslaved imbecility defiling life, A sycophancy supremely mired, Never to ring in celestial essence, Or inhere, in patches, to glory's sculpting light!! The age demands an image, The image that we give it! Chiselled tongues of thunder rung In rising airs rained innocence! We demand the eternal image, Absolute, inscribed, violet, blessed, Suffering only self-made Gods bleeding divinities--- Intensities of existence intensifying infinite! |
Blank Generation: MON HYPOCRITE LECTUR: | Ginsolds of the foetid spawn | Intensities of existence intensifying infinite! | 21 | lyric sequence, dogmatic, philosophical, playful | Ascent |
| 208 | . Apollo and Bacchus hanged in the neon marketplace;
Cold feet under etherial faces. Bore-ed by the lack of temerity, Slack desire suborning the bandannaed faces Of hippies contented by Peace, and not Energy; Marijuana leaves placidly Shading the crib and high-chair. Bored by the lack of passion Expanded bank accounts conferred upon their elders Lacking still the capacity, it seemed, messrs, To "cope;" they craved the indelible in action. 100 punks, or fewer, or one, Concoct out of impossible desire impossible reality: Burning ambitions in Waldorf St, or SoHo's zone, Shed from the aether These symphonies. With a tongue of justice, With an eye of fire, With an ear made fabulous By beloved mind's one wept flame: desire. Rotten's masquerades, Sid's pinioned victory, The burboned voice of Hell establishing "blankness" as priority In a world floating valueless; incisive, the eye of ice. Aching faces brave the astonishing light, Asserting TRUTH in ecstatic sanction; Our redemption was individual, London our capitol. Our "decade" compressed to " '77!" We acknowledged, as aftereffect, a fey, uneven "inheritance" of "reticence." Youth as a remembered depravity Gives no living soul satisfaction; relentless Sojourning away from their parents' questioning Consigned to them the "aridity" of bliss. * * * * When dust hath hushed the roses, Unmeditating silence This crimson-cerise splinter of song Encloses On time's blank slate Lick this, and relate: "Here twists, with upraised fist, An Anarchist!" |
Blank Generation: EVEN WHEN I'M DOWN, I HEAR SYMPH | Apollo and Bacchus hanged in the neon marketplace; | An Anarchist! | 47 | lyric sequence, dogmatic, philosophical, playful | Ascent |
| 209 | . Indelible bloods
Arise heroic rose Each love a sung Sempiternal sun. Exile first the inconsequent, The casual hand, Speech procured at secondhand, Opinions possessed for an "effect." Recast ANAKE as the actor's whim: Vital eyes Outweep all that tragic circumstance, Lear and Cordelia locked in paradise. Catastrophe hacked at Hector In his skirt, but the Eumenides Themselves were mild when Antigone died, Singing at a string-end in the tomb's lee. Become Promethean, to this purpose: Amid lesser qualities, personalities and such, Swimming in unexamined idolatries, personalities and such, Inscribe what I equate: Man = universe. |
Blank Generation: HOW TO WRITE A VICTORY | Indelible bloods | Inscribe what I equate: Man = universe. | 20 | lyric sequence, dogmatic, philosophical, playful | Ascent |
| 210 | Philosophers of stone
Ungainly shift, By love's bright drift Undone. Of unbodied air Came spirits' enhancing; Never a Dunciad But angels' hearts made glad. Impeccable sirs They discerned Exegesis Spit in sand. |
Blank Generation: DECONSTRUCTING THE DECONSTRUCTI | Philosophers of stone | Spit in sand. | 12 | lyric sequence, dogmatic, philosophical, playful | Ascent |
| 211 | Arctic flowers, barbaric sky,
Spic trumpets and limitless eye.... The human new emerges Spectrumless, aloft, scroogeless-- Filling willing belief With dogmatic aperitifs. |
Bastard Alabasters: The Human New | Arctic flowers, barbaric sky, | With dogmatic aperitifs. | 6 | lyric sequence, doggerl, playful, minor | Ascent |
| 212 | Sand and eyesore verse
---Swift, immutable, impure Ageless symmetry Illimitable--- Eternity--- I never lost you Still regal & tru |
Bastard Alabasters: "Sand and Eyesore Verse" | Sand and eyesore verse | Still regal & tru | 6 | lyric sequence, doggerl, playful, minor | Ascent |
| 213 | To the lapsing shores of cold criticism I came,
Now so out of love to overwhelm. The wounded heart, spilling grief, Sustains nothing: useless life. Perversely in the air God was hung, Perversely still in air has man sung. I never saw the animal Who grieved and sighed "It is in myself, withal, That I live and die!" By this trembling breath of mine I soliloquize, In death's despite, the fair, the beautiful and the wise. |
Bastard Alabasters: Recanticle | To the lapsing shores of cold criticism I came, | In death's despite, the fair, the beautiful and t | 12 | lyric sequence, doggerl, playful, minor | Ascent |
| 214 | . I desire everything!
Nor would change my state With angel-birds to prate Among God's clouds the everlasting things. |
Bastard Alabasters: Recant | I desire everything! | Among God's clouds the everlasting things. | 4 | lyric sequence, doggerl, playful, minor | Ascent |
| 215 | When I, listening, hear
The bird-word "above" I merely deem it to mean "With others," which seems Paradise enough for Love. |
Bastard Alabasters: Heav'n | When I, listening, hear | Paradise enough for Love. | 5 | lyric sequence, doggerl, playful, minor | Ascent |
| 216 | I never saw the animal
Who grieved and sighed "It is in myself, withal, That I live and die!" |
Bastard Alabasters: Wrecked Beast | I never saw the animal | That I live and die!" | 4 | lyric sequence, doggerl, playful, minor | Ascent |
| 217 | The sinister is in us, and wins
Whenever we unfurl and think 'sin.' Otherwise there is nothing But a troublous something And joy and destruction again. |
Bastard Alabasters: The Sinister is in Us | The sinister is in us, and wins | And joy and destruction again. | 5 | lyric sequence, doggerl, playful, minor | Ascent |
| 218 | Far birds reflect the inner cymbal,
Brass winds chime; Santa Ana linguistics limber My longing soul to Libertine Liberty---- |
Bastard Alabasters: The Phoenix Fixed | Far birds reflect the inner cymbal, | Libertine Liberty---- | 5 | lyric sequence, doggerl, playful, minor | Ascent |
| 219 | Blinked, deluded, new-
Minted by the philosophic shift Of words in the House, I lift My sunsteady voice to every wind's spew. |
Bastard Alabasters: In Congress | Blinked, deluded, new- | My sunsteady voice to every wind's spew. | 4 | lyric sequence, doggerl, playful, minor | Ascent |
| 220 | Unerring Newt
Did, daring, confute Philanderers and sophists Serving unwatered Liberty, no twist. |
Bastard Alabasters: New Newt | Unerring Newt | no twist. | 5 | lyric sequence, doggerl, playful, minor | Ascent |
| 221 | I've cannibalized my heart for the sake of a few sacred sounds.
This life is the record of My harshest acts. No gentle psalm moves Through lordlings of love Out of this coruscating breast. |
Bastard Alabasters: In Temperance | I've cannibalized my heart for the sake of a few | Out of this coruscating breast. | 6 | lyric sequence, doggerl, playful, minor | Ascent |
| 222 | God, liquor & love
Never deceive the dove That hovers in clover clouding This supremest chest. Torrents of roaring--- Heroic echoes upbourne In the chime of a stolen dawn UNBORN-- this minute-- still lorn-- |
Bastard Alabasters: Stillborn | God, liquor & love | still lorn-- | 9 | lyric sequence, doggerl, playful, minor | Ascent |
| 223 | All these longshoremen of the heart can go fuck
O water water aching blue and bright Get that little scubagirl up to the light-- Prayers are ashes when heaven is wet: O lonely little scubagirl, fly up to my net! My heart is full of candy roses, My hand's a daisy patch; I bless all runny noses 'cuz I hope one blessing hers will catch. O little aqua lycra scubagirl You swim in my adriatic heart's red swirl. |
Why I Like Wet | All these longshoremen of the heart can go fuck | You swim in my adriatic heart's red swirl. | 11 | love, lyric, minor | Ascent |
| 224 | Love and longing live for light---
It is a torch's tempted touch Comes to candle conscious sight, Komes in kicking blisters-- it is too much! My love and longing endure a night; Every luminescence shut when she blinks against the light. |
Lyric Licked | Love and longing live for light--- | when she blinks against the light. | 7 | love, lyric, minor | Ascent |
| 225 | A saint is in the eye
that sees thee Upholding light impatient skies descend-- Blue litmus insert bedeviling a patched wold Changeless spirits inherit and descry a lice-bed. Infinitely dark trees shade the scree- Shaped cynosure-- adoring Life! Crying bloods leak down a marble eye In thirsting wish seeing glory-adornments Perched at the white clasp of your throat Charging the plush surge velvet time blots --- in violet time reprised! |
A saint is in the eye | A saint is in the eye | --- in violet time reprised! | 20 | love, lyric, | Ascent |
| 226 | Betraying heroes makes me increase myself
My pardons, my praises, My mud-racked, modern dazes And all whiter, sublimer rhyme And higher, more crescent time Forgot-- damn them, and toss the lot! Now I speak of mystery Who sees none anywhere, but me; Myself the selfsame jackanapes Risen from prison of late Of morning-soul's dark-even'd Sleep-tortured and riven Slave-state. |
My Pardons, My Praises | Betraying heroes makes me increase myself | Slave-state. | 13 | lyric, doggerl | Ascent |
| 227 | Naked angels who watch my spirit, weep
As I have wept, and still this vigil keep. For purer love has never in its season Been given than this I give unease in. O Disquiet! Come hallow this soul of me Forged between an ariel halo listing in fire And sultry dusts spurring restlessnesses. Come shift my spirit's solidity-- as mist Arisen to sun's atomizing power Lifts to brighter character by its change of state. |
Prayer. Again. | Naked angels who watch my spirit, weep | Lifts to brighter character by its change of state | 10 | lyric, dramatic | Ascent |
| 228 | How sweet the blossom shouts the winter's over
In cannonades all of yellow love Starring a ground still downy As if summer suns outswept the inaugural day. How dawn's above this starling stalk uncertain Which of the light is bearer and receiver! |
New Year | How sweet the blossom shouts the winter's over | Which of the light is bearer and receiver! | 6 | lyric, nature | Ascent |
| 229 | In us is only this insistent surge
Incapable of calming! It is ever-renewing and ever-alarming! Sweet as the winter's quickening For Unforgotten Spring! Sweet as Summer's hungering For Autumn's quickened cooling...! All Airs all Objects all Elements conspire To re-invent Life as but a single Desire! All fire-quick and heart-aloft As if to live were a speeded trance No Eye, no Heart, no Splendour could enchant To any, more docile, slowness than this: To race large eons into seconds, or hurl Blooming minutes into aspiring words, Exploding Black Heaven with their own dear light! Challenging the Skies in innumerable Words! |
Inundation | In us is only this insistent surge | Challenging the Skies in innumerable Words! | 17 | lyric, nature, anthem | Ascent |
| 230 | Prevalent Bliss, kick the sinisters!
Ashes in my ears, burn back to blisters--- Cyanide eyes, so pious in lit sin, No place is my place when you hide; Got to flame you out tonight, aye eye! This insidious whisper is the glory one Makes me talk a universe out of a lonely one. I build myself by black prayer, eye and ear: So loud and tall and true I am at once I stare God's eye to shatters; and hear. |
Kiss this Bliss | Prevalent Bliss, kick the sinisters! | I stare God's eye to shatters; and hear. | 10 | lyric, anthem | Ascent |
| 231 | Parted lovers met on life's intervening strand:
Close in love, and closer still in loving. Pearled light held the near angels' adoring, Angelic in reflection of love's uplifted brand. |
I'm seein' life in Debravision | Parted lovers met on life's intervening strand: | Angelic in reflection of love's uplifted brand. | 4 | lyric, love, minor | Ascent |
| 232 | All these unlimited ministries glisten
Ingeniously-- lights capitulating to lights' Increasing haloes. So her face Angelus limitless from lips to unpinned hair In my heart radiates life Until every limb lies annealed And even my fingers infect the spring with joy Teaching each sweet bird its flight From high height to highest! Purloined glories from my smashing chest Accept no council Neither fear nor philip of wit Nor care of any creepy pink thing But plunging on in their own bewildered wonderment Scroll out 'til stars pile up Making earth's envisioning air Seem the thinnest ribboning. |
Jes' Tryin' ta Tell a Vision | All these unlimited ministries glisten | Seem the thinnest ribboning. | 18 | lyric, anthem, minor | Ascent |
| 233 | Although my love's made for joy
I taste black ashes at my lips; For I am pining sick in love And love is all my remedy. For love but wounds to cure By wounding giving cure, cured to wound again! I am an apostle of that ecstasy And still cannot the deadly sweet Of love's maddened sweat forget. Such is love's mystery When we lie abed Who would give heart's cure Must first stitch heads. Though love is brief, on my hurt I meditate And find all ill who all-wished for sweet; One heart, my own, unowned Like a drop of salt-sweet spray Cold oceans of feelings shows. Oh still to be a human thing alone! |
Shakespeare Writes It | Although my love's made for joy | Oh still to be a human thing alone! | 19 | lyric, love, rhyming | Ascent |
| 234 | O how has this world, this vacant world,
Once all ascension in the childhood realms Miraculous as sky's propoundless blue Whose clouds in heaped divinity shed Simple verity like the clear and simple rain On every causeless confusion swirled beneath Stripped itself of all it gave and gives, Leaving me airless, abandoned, here? Ah! this feeling is a grave in nature's face My heart, turned spade, keeps thrusting in! The corpse of Hope, and lapse of faith, Of all rarer deity are now constrained To whatever dicking thing may bleat Within this shrunken horizon's orison. Oh, my noble spirit, lashed by black tongues To the chiggering prayer of a worm! You, that would arise for fire as for breath In a world transformed beyond imagination As Death transfigures spirits who have shed The sticking Lash of Life! Hear this my plea: I stand aghast in splendid disarray, In spirit bereft, in body weak and poor, Now, as once, tensile, rich, and sure. |
O how has this world, this vacant world | O how has this world, this vacant world, | Now, as once, tensile, rich, and sure. | 23 | lyric, dramatic monologue, meditative | Ascent |
| 235 | And who shall live in these new cities of fresh Liberty, able as irises, solemn bluebells, tittering at the grit dragged in through the slant doors sundays....
Martyrs of vocable plunder! Unhinge the lost oblongs of souls, splayed past the sun's reeling keel to enter here. Barnacles of heart stuck to World's underpinning! Martyrs, storms of whores, myself among them, miniskirted and with a face of bright rouge: myself, myself! Is it so terrible being a visionary? Spilled martinis on the chartreuse tablecloth, cold haloes, the glasses akimbo. Everything akimbo that would give my soul a face and name! Noble martyrdom. Another face in the glass. |
Day in Heaven | And who shall live in these new cities of fresh L | Noble martyrdom. Another face in the glass. | 6 | lyric, dramatic, experimental, prose poem | Ascent |
| 236 | These cathedrals sunken in the architecture of the chest! Heart-aches and minarets of wish! Forgetting everything in an attempt to remember myself....
How cold the palace is after the furniture burned. That bonfire of couches! The ceiling hovers lower with its thumbprint of smoke.-- Blood covered the jewelry chest; sapphires licked thin bloods. Pearls, their opalescent charms not desiccated-- enriched even by the lined flow of blood holding each white globe from beneath as delicately as a child's eye floats in its reddened eyelid, dripping, dripping, dripping.... |
These Cathedrals | These cathedrals sunken in the architecture of the | blood holding each white globe from beneath as de | 4 | lyric, dramatic, experimental, prose poem | Ascent |
| 237 | I took the last, royal step.... King of my fierce heart, lounging in his leaded crown, discarding clove cigarettes into the golden O fish-mouths of ashtrays, sent me a straight look out of paired chilled blue eyes. It was the look of an abyss. Sheer ice, serene. Pupils black as the welt from a scorpion, full of ecstatic poison and preening to burst the skin. It wants nothing of the body. Nothing. Nothing of the flawed fable of humanity. I kicked its face. Spat, resisted. My screams deprived alpine birds of their air. He almost smiled.
He came to me, drenched from the midnight swim, an adolescent of exceeding glory. I stared into the mirror he bore on his filigreed breast, the nipples dark, hard, and cold as cherries. .... But all of these visions are mortal! Bloodsoaked, blood-drugged; full gutters swooning with plush bloods; alabaster eyelids getting redder and more sodden as these torments roll on to the identical, dirty ending. |
The Three Magi | I took the last, royal step.... King of my fierce | But all of these visions are mortal! Bloodsoaked, | 4 | lyric, dramatic, experimental, prose poem | Ascent |
| 238 | What songs do the dead sing, revelling in air or immortal?
What choir from the caskets will open our hearts, returned from the dust and the ashes? Longing Hallelujahs, or short, sharp dirges? Unafraid of love-- at last, perhaps-- the dead will whisper miracles. Clear the dirt from their mouths and empty your heart and LISTEN! |
Intro | What songs do the dead sing, revelling in air or | Unafraid of love-- at last, perhaps-- the dead wi | 3 | lyric, dramatic, experimental, prose poem | Ascent |
| 239 | O arrow of constancy
Thy iron will be mine-- remind! As soul upbourne on spirit-wind Begets the image that created thine. From all time-mist Fly on, as this Heart-rhyme in mind twists Turning thoughts to goodness. Heart to heart aloft, Mystical rose and bright cross-- Invented in airs I lost: Thrown to ocean and sea-dross. Here spirit and spirit meet, Fiery yolk and albumen sweet, Disguised in faces the hidden praises; Tossed and aloft they congreet In songs no other sees as hosannahs. |
Conformity is the Crime | O arrow of constancy | In songs no other sees as hosannahs. | 18 | lyric | Ascent |
| 240 | To this true hand giant hearts come leaping
For it upholds them in such gentle wrath As makes them beat with truer beating Until uneven pulses fountain only worth: Which is what true hearts and friends together do, Each the other chiding higher Until all of air beneath them blues And stars peep out beside them, wan and weak, And all the crucible world below seems and is Shrunk to the simple dimension of a dish--- Thus their flaming souls are brought to finest light That burns hottest in that dispersed place Empty of high substance but what high hearts have brought Giant out of themselves by giant wish. |
A Summoning | To this true hand giant hearts come leaping | Giant out of themselves by giant wish. | 14 | lyric, anthem | Ascent |
| 241 | Awake, awake!
For all the dear bay's glistening In uneven light still listening For whatever of utterance Soul's chrysolm beauty may glance Into willing water's dark, My sweet meaning the whole of my bark. Set sail, set sail, my soul, set sail Let no hindrance, no halt, avail: For we are the sweet of the tree, Blossom and bole, shoot and root we three, Myself, my soul, and me. Nor does the shaping heart forego To lend its beat to our argot, My spirit a crystalline keel, Inspiration a motion wind feels Lifting in blessing ascent All some deeper sleep had blent With nightmare chimeras now forgot By all within my steady boat. Somehow, now, still lingering Out of the sullen east the sun Has given my soul a tongue. Soul may speak what mind began: Light's meditation is an ardor, Of my soul the keeper-warden Which never must be abandoned For so simple delight is saddened And everything of remembered worth Thrown seedless to the earth Whence never another vine will reach From dusky plain unto the sun Bearing with ripeness as a spillage Grape or fruit of many an age Longing time may bring to blossom Out of darkness' drowsy bosom. Gentle Charity, no farther, Must you bear this as a father Childish swearing does forebear. Those who see not propounding noon Liquified in soul's triumphant swoon As swan lifts trumpeting his song All the purple light along At tender vespers, languid and long, Or blinking matins, awake and strong, For themselves must conquer hatred Through loving hearts, many-gated, Until dim and churlish slaughter Lies self-becalmed as these waters. Go out, go out, my broken-hearted-- With untroubled look depart them, Cast back no final, futile glance For all in a single chance Is your future concentrated. Let not one chafing countenance, Deaf to this beneficence, Shake from their sordid hearts a sigh; Live in my smiles, or die! From here commences, in my sight, An headlong, eternal light That every living form bedights, With dews of immortality Awakening soul's sweet rarity Floods the loosening dawn With: ocean, field, and lawn, (Building light from evening's jet By apperception the mind begets) From the gentle fount of grass To the living wave like glass No such light may overpass But must ignite in simpleness Love's million multiple beams! Every morning wayfarer Whose light boat cannot tarry But pushes on out of darkness With whatever of best and best In tangles of light impressed In bossing golds on waves' breast Plies resistless to the crest! Such silver as the eglantine To the dew-fraught morn resigns And heaven on every still thing deigns Rewarding quiet prayers With this mercurial layer-- Such silver I say is savior When soul its own good blossom knows Nor will be shaken by the cold Into something hard and cold But that a sheath of clear protecting Such firm flowers thus selecting That deep winter's dire infecting Shall not break them by its cold, In such clear light protecting. All that night my heart had lain Upon this boat and silver stream Until all memory became Like the memory of a dream; And there true life began Beneath night's stars swirled to one Past the extinguishment of suns When realer dream draws us on To dream of all we may have been And in heart's solace draws us on In dreaming dream to dream again! O how cold the moon's a mirror For all the heats within her! I my own bright soul create Nor did this fascination make To slave it to a universe I, living, gaze on as a hearse. My silver hand in dawn's lake Dips, its own soul to take; From this sweet enlivening Come my symbols unquestioning: Crown upon my crown rests cherishing, The sword in my hand unperishing. Do not dispraise the light That, singing whatever's brightest, Undoes the theft of night-- In soul-enchanting soliloquies Enmansioning aerial ways That we might thrive there all our days In realms of spendless purity Absent nations' perfidy Heart to heart for sole surety; This our pledge, this our guarantee That all's well with humanity Once these bleak constants, fear and dread, Lay to light exposed, and dead, The human plant may only mend, Think to create, and speak to praise, Throughout the endless paradise of days --Touch to caress, or move to love, As this thoughtless rhyme does prove. Ai! Ai! High radiancy, Round eve's ever-changing sea Like universes' bright periphery, Back to sun-like man's centrality I and all mortality Welcome both thy light, and thee. And if all the world condemn What all the heart commends What matter, so that heart sail on In self-discovery without bourne Through mystic waters, blue and calm? What does pleasure's grieving echo give But light to dark-hearted lives? O when the trembling hand may shiver And some momentary joy deliver To thought-locked face and brow What passes from that hand to bless In an unending tenderness As paradise were with us even now? Memory makes no bounty of the scorn Dementia attempts to ripen on In sold human hearts since we're born; Whatever slender wing endeavors Be communicant with the treasure One heart may hold forever Will find such wind in chambers there Beyond conjoining woe or care That they may sail infinity In the air of that one heart's ease. Pleasure alone may live within The human bound of life given As light within these waters: Ungrieving, crystalline, faultless. And now my soul is voyaging on In mystic waters blue and calm. For whatever true hope had wrought In time-defying, true love-knot How could Love forget? |
Ascent | Awake, awake! | How could Love forget? | 173 | lyric, anthem, meditative, nature, personal, solil | Ascent |
| 242 | A snapping turtle slow and fierce as a drugged bear, revolves her claws in a rusted oil drum. We caught her back from the garden one dawn, putting her eggs in with the carrot seeds. We followed the dragged steps to the high grass that waved around her alert as flag majors. She was slow out of water, molasses churning in her dark joints; her pace amiable as a memorized prayer.
But her head's still fast, her beak as purposeful as a hook. Dogs whine at the edge of the oil drum, echoey cries when their heads go down and in to smell her. Somewhere a Middle Eastern man is held by soldiers grown in America, their bright and bushy tails wagging like guns. A cigarette goes down into the dry can with a thin papery trail of smoke. The questions the men ask are clear and loud, but what do they mean? .... When the time came to release her back into the belly of her world, she left our pale bread and carrots julienne like an offering of inedible leaves strewn at the bottom of the barrel. I put on my sneakers and walked between the sole-slicing stumps up to my waist in the water and put her out beyond myself, heavy as a sewer lid, my back straining. |
Black Hat, White Hat | A snapping turtle slow and fierce as a drugged bea | When the time came to release her back into the be | 4 | lyric, philosophical, playful, prose poem | Chaos and Stars |
| 243 | I
In night-devouring pride God and ghost deride, And not knowing what is best, Peering past his death Man's untiring vanity Consumes his bitter rest. II Flame emanating, spout upon spout, Flame on his head that shouts Fiery Dionysus climbed Olympian plenitude and dined On rarer bones than men's eyes Before or after spied; Then, finished with that golden feast, Burned statues down, head and feet, In serpent-seas of fire that we Might build again from perfected memory. III What if destruction of vast colonnades appalled? Wrecked form to formless called: Holy fire makes wide mind a wall, Paints thereon, and names that image All. Water and desire and stark upright flame begin Where world grew ocean from some ecstatic limb. Starved eunuchs hunching bald-eyed at the law Know Adam to the marrow, jumping to the fall. An engendered emptiness can beget Strong delight for those whose minds are full; Stark contemplation hollows out delight Save when sword or scalpel pull. IV Answer to sorrow or suffering comes Displaying ornate mask or abrupt gun; Michelangelo lobouring in the sculpted dark Blazed imagination forth upon uncertain tides--- Pale constellations of his thought Brought death and life out of one troubled heart, Or might have brought ---O How long can man Out of narrow sorrow extract a song? Right action finishes out the thought A lonely exalted mind began; Long-loved monuments fixed in the sight Assemble us out of desire to dissolve Into that unutterable One again. |
Burning Byzantium | I | Into that unutterable One again. | 45 | lyric, philosophical | Burning Byzantium |
| 244 | I banish all
Who fret and stall To finish out my work: Pitched to that extreme of thought Or dark, and shambling room to room As from spirit to spirit And always preparing for that Never-arriving guest, I have labored over-long Or too-thick with theme and means Have overwrought my song. Out of night like a distorted dream Or storm more mysterious A penitent ghost that cannot crest The bound of rotted day appears; Poets, learn to live as clay All rich substance to underpin Whatever a great man might make Tinkering with his fate In momentary play, Or more solemnly erect, Out of an undistracted hate. All our lot have spurned and sung Brevity of man, necessity of guns, Unable as any mirror To sing ourselves aright Caught in enlarging night We turned from face to face As if every face would save us; We who had arrogance enough Of thought to have thought That careless hands had made us. So that a few good words might not perish Or empty imagining sink unmanned In unalterable loss Collect like solemn children round The myriad confusion of the foam And write it out again: Live, and live again, as old men say Anxious for eternities That make their own wisdom seem But momentary toys that gleam And are beaten back to mud. I am not that holy sage Remembers the misery of knowing all Or turning to a wall completes What body and its pleasure Were forbidden to decide--- Under burdened moon That sinks in July to rise on fire Out of the glittering wheat Knows man and his defeats All the sudden infirmities Blind violence took for sureties And looks on them and laughs. From the womb man falls Or from the widowed breast Dispatched to a sultry grave That gives no rest. |
Die Wille | I banish all | That gives no rest. | 59 | lyric, philosophical | Burning Byzantium |
| 245 | Night and fire surround a broken tree
Made blacker by the fire; A head, an arm, barely distinguishable there Cant towards a broken sky--- Black eyes unwired in the ancient face, His old heart's thudding done, Hangs that great man who's mind's a sea; Red torches gutter tongues. Sang the burning lion on the fierce mountaintop. Nor proscenium nor orchestra Nor gilded balcony set About the vaunting terror of the scene; Idiot crawls to idiot And idiot begets. And none's alive who'll now recall Utter nobleness of limb or sin, Beauty beyond a fall. Sang the burning lion on the burning mountaintop. I picked a blank mask And put on a changing soul, Exampled by those blessed men Who suffered all in all. But I reject the holy past; That banner cannot lift again. Forgotten men can't raise a song Or change my ranting soul. Sang the burning lion on the fierce mountaintop. |
Three Songs: The Glass Mountain | Night and fire surround a broken tree | Sang the burning lion on the fierce mountaintop. | 27 | lyric sequence, philosophical, rhyming | Burning Byzantium |
| 246 | Sang the burning lion from the fierce mountaintop:
Death's insults emanate from ourselves; Terror riven images that complete Man and heaven, heart and feet. Scarlet briars in her hair--- Love from I know not where Descends the bitter air. Sang the burning lion from the fierce mountaintop: The empty prosecution of the skies Stares at a struck stage The tired heart derides,--- Man's best instincts gambled there--- And the watery heart about to burst All lose out to the worst. Sang the burning lion from the fierce mountaintop: Beaten man twists his neck to curse, White head in heaven Golden heart in a hearse--- A scolded boy or oblong body bends Dark by uncertain suavities of fire to request The sea's intercessions. |
Three Songs: The Salt Heart | Sang the burning lion from the fierce mountaintop: | The sea's intercessions. | 21 | lyric sequence, philosophical, rhyming | Burning Byzantium |
| 247 | God built man in a black fit.
I tell you suffering a pall; Lone men could not fashion it, Could not create themselves at all. Heaven itself is what I gate-keep; Descended from that sphinx Crossed centuries between her paws, Another hand has finished me. Sang the burning lion on the fierce mountaintop. Emboldened by riches A steeple mind had heaped, Father son and holy ghost In his flaming mind are linked. Stale generations that bred him Recanted at the leap; Rule square and trine But toys to make the typist think. Sang the burning lion on the fierce mountaintop. A man displaces a woman With the image of her face Until some loud stone betokens it, Mixing ecstasy and grace. A great Adams and Hawthorne knew it, Knew it and turned sour; But it is the best that man can do Unwound by the backward hour. Sang the burning lion on the fierce mountaintop. |
Three Songs: Third Song | God built man in a black fit. | Sang the burning lion on the fierce mountaintop. | 27 | lyric sequence, philosophical, rhyming | Burning Byzantium |
| 248 | Among the wrack and disorder of the day: dusty floors,
Half carved resemblances and journey-work, A symbolical blue heron stands With wild protesting wing and look No living heron could have struck Deep in the grain; every crack, Every waver of the resinous wood Wakes a pulse in the unnatural neck. Barren out of a barren sky--- A heron falters to the waters here. That artist in his studio having aged Past all bitterness to stark astonishment At life's rapacious play Hammers out, from all other unlikelihood Or savage guess at parts, his fixed man Crouched in dark patterns of the wood; And because that image, once complete, Can finish up the man who bodied it Gangs of ghostly herons range against the glass, Stiff against one window to witness it. |
Blue Heron | Among the wrack and disorder of the day: dusty flo | Stiff against one window to witness it. | 20 | lyric sequence, philosophical, rhyming | Burning Byzantium |
| 249 | The gangling legs are absent; nothing whitens
The deep blue surface curling there And never breaking. A stiffening face Turned mask-like and muscle-stricken frightens White birds that pern in whiter air. Riotous cries cannot give its tossing countenance a place; Blotched reds that crust the desert water Until all color cakes and lies motionless, falters. What but attitude of all man in a rage Can reverse a death's complacency and kick Up foam? Agony of living lonely as a bird Between sun and moon, moving like a spade, Empties the ragged features, the dull wickless eyes That looked on nothing common, commonly interred. A bird- Like woman lingers on the quay's interrupted sounds To witness drowning sailors, her head in beauty bound. |
The Drowned Head | The gangling legs are absent; nothing whitens | To witness drowning sailors, her head in beauty bo | 16 | lyric sequence, philosophical, rhyming | Burning Byzantium |
| 250 | Stands in this sand waste
An abandoned stone, An overturned head a half house high; Waters that have flat its cut Vanish as a dream untold. But on this head is concentrate Intolerable memories Of youth grown old. I am that bright familiar Wanders through the street And banging merchants' windows in Must beg for my milk and meat; My old face by time betrayed To an indistinguishable mass, But when night and wine grow great enough I dance on the weedy grass. Down this long shore as a boy Body and soul were sure As any pale, unalterable rock That I now dance before. Hands urgent as a hangman's cord, All body warped to a board, Creep in the salt beneath a face Heavy, androgynous. Sliding up through valves of storm And mastered by a rage The variable sea has seen that form Descend from age to age. Wind-beaten I but seem, Flat on the wetted sand, A derelict, not worth The dock-dog's howl or tooth. |
The Overturned Head | Stands in this sand waste | The dock-dog's howl or tooth. | 32 | lyric, rhyming | Burning Byzantium |
| 251 | Twelve white birds glimmer in a ring
About my heart like fiery thorns of things Unable to be forgotten; And of all things else Oblivion alone most would bring Ease to the burnt heart's ash. |
Archangels Comb Their Muddy Hair with Sticks | Twelve white birds glimmer in a ring | Ease to the burnt heart's ash. | 6 | lyric, rhyming, minor | Burning Byzantium |
| 252 | Out of woman's weeping womb
Strode Hitler, Jesus and Michelangelo. |
The Weeping Womb | Out of woman's weeping womb | Strode Hitler, Jesus and Michelangelo. | 2 | lyric, rhyming, minor, doggerl | Burning Byzantium |
| 253 | Upright in nostalgia's vice,
The newscast knocked me flat; I am Hammered from A stiff expectancy that the past, Under augers and a strong carpenter's hands, Could endure Into significance like a three-legged stool. |
History | Upright in nostalgia's vice, | Into significance like a three-legged stool. | 7 | lyric, minor, doggerl | Burning Byzantium |
| 254 | Starting sex up out of books, pale apparitions
act again the hairy rounds under always weary skies Straining sweating eyes for a typed text Always the same. Always the same Ghost upon their heaving back like nets igniting Spines of blue fire, turbulent on the doused skin, Falling with hope of the dead on locked hearts to find Coffins of beating victims too glad to die. |
Generation | Starting sex up out of books, pale apparitions | Coffins of beating victims too glad to die. | 8 | lyric, sex | Burning Byzantium |
| 255 | Blasted rocks and an old warped tree
Lift above a still spot of the sea As though some vague hand had painted them; A little back from the verge, A step or two back from the verge, And compelled by a strong salt wind, A clanging ear and troubled eye A battered head without a tooth, Rags and crutch and old broken bones--- All that wreck which I call myself, Having climbed an unaccustomed stair In a changing state of mind Or with a bewildered mind, And revealed to the weather On the promontory, Stood shaken by a vision. A burning woman and a man In Quattrocento gesture struck Above the bed where all began; Half-risen above the multitudinous sea Above the tangled branches of the yew, Their abstract bodies are not mixed With commoner dirt, nor sullied by a cut Thought of sin or guilt begot. Is that sweetest skin, ghostly there, Half human still or all celestial? World-engendering Pythagoras Stalked Heaven and never took a bride. ---O all that golden multitude Had clarity to unpuzzle it. I, A skittish old man upon a rock, With a mouthful of rue With a slippery crutch on a rock And reeling backwards in a fright Am blinded by the unbearable light. |
Disturb the Eagles' Nest | Blasted rocks and an old warped tree | Am blinded by the unbearable light. | 35 | lyric, dream, dramatic | Burning Byzantium |
| 256 | An old man raving picks up sticks, vitally erased
Under mazy roughness of his thumb, except where A counter-coalescence of the grain Turbulently surrounds a knot of blood. Out of fisted clouds, white And distant as his stiff bride Coiling in her grave, a falcon Eyes the wormy meadow and descends. No arm, no mind controls The powerful muscle, falling to a branch Heavy apples mellow to a bow Aimed at an aimless sky. Red memories of the man disperse In meditation like an arrow's throw; The turning falcon's shaft Falls in its desire. |
An Old Man's Hawk | An old man raving picks up sticks, vitally erased | Falls in its desire. | 16 | lyric, dramatic | Burning Byzantium |
| 257 | OLD MAN Vanquished is the sorrow
That rages in my breast; I am too old to care. What passes for the serious Is a younger man's affair. Loves have burned and leapt between Yet staring doubt announces: Have hands as old as these About a woman's lightness crept? DEMON Rough centuries have trod Your thin spirit out. What can woman's body hold For one who's worn and thin? OLD MAN I am an old man, a withered Stick, lacking all right monument. DEMON Lacking all right monument, Gather close what worth you can, Draw your spirit in. For when you lay you down to die What can she but by you lie? OLD MAN Until all, all penalty of God Or eternal mystery forgot, Dissolve paradoxical Into death's bone knot. |
The Old Man and the Demon | OLD MAN Vanquished is the sorrow | Into death's bone knot. | 24 | lyric, dramatic, two voices | Burning Byzantium |
| 258 | In the high tomb, the windows blackened
A solitary body stretches on its pallet. The hush of broken candles, glistening Attend the vault of remotest night, listening To the exquisite montage of the moon decieved By that which ancienter vocables had revealed. Strumpets came bearing like tom-cats in The bronzen flesh of him, of him; Primping ladies laid the ledgendary body out, Quip on quip, in storied profusion. Prepare the touncing oils, maids, to scent Vestigal joys that pip the corpse. Some backwards catastrophy of the stars Looked in, like a forgetful mother, At the voice laid out in state, hugely blue, Hacked out as it was from one immenser slab While sleepy birds unconscious of their pains pursue The day's spontaneous symphony, beneath A watery dawn that washes out a sink Full of the moon's bleary oils. |
The Solitary Body on the Pallet | In the high tomb, the windows blackened | Full of the moon's bleary oils. | 20 | lyric, dramatic, philosophical | Burning Byzantium |
| 259 | Blows that wind of every sound
Upon a battlement Where a ripping Andy Jackson stirred Every rebel heart to its head. Raging after beauty in a fire; Horses tremble; men-at-arms are quiet; Heavy cannon are crunching through the wood. Noble minds all by ancient battle set ablaze. Upon that black battlement where Great Caesar stoked, Half in admiration, Rome's mother-forges against the barbarian herd, Not Egyptian Cleopatra's whispers Nor Antony's sweet words, Could still his already conquering hand. Noble minds all by ancient battle set ablaze. Staggered stars over the geared stone whirr. Electric fires in the mind's eye blurr Till all the creeping hill's a blaze; Pacing ceases; the last Bird dies into dark; All night sounds transmogrified To a monotone. Noble minds all by ancient battle set ablaze. |
The Discarded Tower | Blows that wind of every sound | Noble minds all by ancient battle set ablaze. | 24 | lyric, dramatic, rhyming | Burning Byzantium |
| 260 | Turning in my mind
That famous, heroic face That ciphered out Right government from wrong And brought boys flying Out of bed to death, And because he is dead And cannot annul my choice, I make my name and death. Before a great Greek head, Half ruined and knocked From a blank rock At bleary midnight slumped, When night-owls in their hunt Toil from branch to branch, Some wrong-eyed philosopher puzzled out That all mind's sunk In the rut of the world, And can't drag out its ragged theme Because frenzy-driven, riven mad By terror-ridden hours that rend Shifting tapestries of soul. All man's but broken pride, Wars reduced to bandages. Because all image He can be all suffering Or exultant hatred personified To a deity. What once Wan man, and now's a shade Stands here--- lonely as the hawthorne Tree traced in winter's Resiny dews. Dead shade Hammer again this form, if you can To make of bone and tendon Pure image. Famous men and solitary souls Have cursed with equaL breath Generations of stupidity; Monuments flooded in a hole. I fed by the boards as a boy--- But when I consider that, Old and wrong and out of breath, I hammer out my death: Repetitions of mere breath Satisfy my thought. |
Eisenhower's Son | Turning in my mind | Satisfy my thought. | 45 | lyric, dramatic, rhyming, personae | Burning Byzantium |
| 261 | A bald summer and an empty lake return
Imagination to a childish race Past strange muds broken-up by the sun Some famous dead indian's grave breathing face Hung its stone arrowhead over as I dug Down the sharpening years as the edges mix, Rattle blankly in a rich pocket, and repeat The one sound early delight had fixed In whatever's left of the mind's ground. Unremembered faces are crowding to the top Of a mist-covered muddy lake; sharp cries Rise and stop. On hands and knees I grope for bones, Clacking the blanks, back and forth, back and forth, Casually as dominoes, or bullet them Back to mud--- to see how the flesh gasped Or must have, ebulliently spilled to stone.... I watch my life appear as the waters drain, As if some restless hand had opened a vein. I set all compass by this wrecked shore, Dry blood shelved dryly against a wood; Deposited among all that lush scenery once, And outfitted for a war, we put on an alien mood. Ten years' unholy sweat for change, and after What man, bandaged or unbandaged, what man But brought a jungle to his house? There breaks Beneath the out-worn branches of the lake Some invisible water-bird's penetrating cry. |
The Mareotic Lake | A bald summer and an empty lake return | Some invisible water-bird's penetrating cry. | 27 | lyric, dramatic, rhyming, personal | Burning Byzantium |
| 262 | Slow and late, with bloodied
Paw and stumbled hoof Slouching huntsmen drag themselves Through the opening gate Retiring hands had bolted. Unshaken belief is proof That the abjured rounds of pursuit, and late Loss of a scattered trail traced to mud But confirm the circuit Of hound and blood. Unliving bodies lie heaved to the brink; Heavy-bellied gulls stare about. Low and rough, a drunkard mouths a tune Down the old dirt road, Half out of mind--- A tune the king's players once Repeated at the palace. "each moment dies and Nothing may its breath renew. Yet minute piles on minute A solace none wise would dare refuse." Whispered low the drunken man Near where slept the hound. Failed fathers that have failed to deepen The ancient track of an old race No bunched mountain's back Could have rightly steepened Rant at rigor mortis; Deep tears eat their faces. Lead bells tell the hour of the house. Children blow their candles out. Ashes cover the coals. Unliving bodies lie heaved to the brink; Heavy-bellied gulls stare about. "Out of all slaughter, the one Globe sundered by a gash Far past the antique wit Of Solomon to sew, That black day may come And may yet come When no high death can save A rare daughter or extraordinary son From rash disaster When we've to destruction come." Whispered low the drunken man Near where slept the hind. |
The Manor-House | Slow and late, with bloodied | Near where slept the hind. | 46 | lyric, dramatic, rhyming | Burning Byzantium |
| 263 | Moving among the moon-drained hills
Remembering the dead, Lover to ghostly lover cried: 'Whenever I see a sweet man's body Great pain within me dies. 'Enough of such rough comforting Drives out much suffering, Clapped in a ruinous grave,' Cried that distracted woman Under a rude, red moon. 'All night having grown unnatural We drop to the distended ground And there beneath a man-shaped tree Sick with sweet labor of sighs I cradle nothing between my thighs.' |
A Barren Moon | Moving among the moon-drained hills | I cradle nothing between my thighs.' | 15 | lyric, dramatic, rhyming, monologue | Burning Byzantium |
| 264 | Raised from the proveless dust
Like a shrouded bird into the sight And set tumbling with the rest, I daily give wet suck to one That is a barbing brat Tangled in my skirts; I'll not bother to raise him right Lost in the indifferent dust Under sky as bruised as that Tumultuous spot that got him; But I daily give him suck Because he's the nearer dirt. |
The Poverty of Motherhood | Raised from the proveless dust | Because he's the nearer dirt. | 12 | lyric, dramatic monologue, rhyming | Burning Byzantium |
| 265 | Nothing was there to see,
A girl half-starved ranting at the sea Where the soulless moonlight pins Heart terrified in agony of sin. Repeated syllables teach her mouth to pray In abstract hatred of the everyday Indigence of things, dull pain of a table Sat at too long or in too deep thought. And now she casts her moonblind eye Upon cracked hills the sea derides With desperate complexities of sound, Lashing furious meanings at the departed ground. It was not her singing sent Drowning blanche mermaids to the tent Of the solid man who mastered them in thought But found their floundering forms were soiled; Nor commanded, in sapphitic fury of a dream Drained among grey stones in lurid streams, The empty apparition of the departed moon Fail and vanish, and hide its scorn. No one living saw her there, Rapturous between null sea and thoughtless air As she, thin-waisted, blind, hypnotized Blank waves of the sea, stark desires of the skies. |
The Hysterical Girl | Nothing was there to see, | Blank waves of the sea, stark desires of the skies | 24 | lyric, personae, rhyming, dramatic | Burning Byzantium |
| 266 | Pitching in a hay-cart
How many discarded sighs Must beat upon my breath Before you unclench a thigh? A singing boy will solace us; I paid him twelve and eight. Exhausted by post-mortem Duties to the state I watch a great bay's racing mind Rehearse its fury at the gate. And a careless boy is singing, Singing past the garden gate. We shall hear him straining there, That collar shattered, the thick heart rent. [spent.] Swallows ordered in at dark Will keep the mares content. A singing boy will solace us; I paid him twelve and eight. Stars fill the drinking trough While frantic moon invents a cloud--- Enigmatic, passing out of sight, And the night cries out loud. And a careless boy is singing, Singing past the garden gate. |
Among the Stables | Pitching in a hay-cart | Singing past the garden gate. | 24 | lyric, rhyming, dramatic | Burning Byzantium |
| 267 | What joy departs the heaving night
When we stretch out upon the stone In momentary bliss; Laid like sticks and together bound Indifferent to hurt, What love remains? |
What Joy Departs? | What joy departs the heaving night | What love remains? | 6 | lyric, rhyming, dramatic, minor | Burning Byzantium |
| 268 | O I had all of them
That had all of me, A drop of sweat that stung my eye Under the old thorn tree; Yet some dark trembling in the blood Recalls what troubles me. Bloated moon escaped the limbs, Night-bird to night-bird called; Unknown arms at midnight lift Body and limb appalled Into the light-terrifying Heavens. Whatever it was it was not God. Many men have come again Beneath the twisted thorn; Now they but seem as light as breath, And love's not worth a stone, For there's a greater glory Shrieking in my bones. |
The Thorn Tree | O I had all of them | Shrieking in my bones. | 18 | lyric, rhyming, personae, dramatic monologue | Burning Byzantium |
| 269 | All watch blindly because all are blind,
Mixing in a bitter ditch, while hands and eyes Bolt new brains on a body tamed Out of all unnatural instinct at last Until all stand, skin to skin, with all who stand Ecstatic round one plate, honey-filled, Like some dark-bodied community of bees. Like some dark-bodied community of bees All turn to that one vast image hung Forever sweet in an abstract sky: Riotous selflove perfected to a stone Until no man is shaken with a hate, Or cold eventuality of death--- Adam and Eve out of one stone struck. Adam and Eve out of one stone struck; Interrupted churn of heads, or worse, Confused there, welded in the air, as if once Fury of the sexual onslaught begun, No deliberate loveliness Could its purpose or pleasure deride: All watch blindly because all are blind. |
New Age | All watch blindly because all are blind, | All watch blindly because all are blind. | 21 | lyric, rhyming, dramatic, philosophical | Burning Byzantium |
| 270 | Smoky midnight torches slowly enwound
A wine-heavy head; my old eyes In ominous moonlight upon a photograph confound Some ancient satyr's head drowsing in its beard; Fabulous syllables out of the bitter heart rise; Embittered fables of the Emperor instruct Oceanic ache of sex and blood What's most noble in the bone. Out of those lamp-lit or flame-lit mouths Flickering vaguely there, flash thousands, Upside down or upright in the air, Battered abstract complexities of flesh; Dark turmoil of flesh begetting flesh. But all mind needs image to be complete: Rage-minded Timon thrashing riches at a stone, Or that huckster Richard abandoned to a throne. Self-invented, or tossing thought of age, Cast-out circles of the flames reveal A single man upon a stage, all Lear In his proud lineaments thunderstruck: Confusion of a mind unable to set a scene Among a multitude of scenes, Dramatic images that repeat Tumult of living body stylized to a theme. |
After the Bacchanal | Smoky midnight torches slowly enwound | Tumult of living body stylized to a theme. | 24 | lyric, rhyming, dramatic monologue, philosophical | Burning Byzantium |
| 271 | Is it like a light
That dissolves an empty street, That place where dancer meets with dancer Whirling like a top And does not ask for music So long as dancing never stop? Or is it more like some Time that revolves when the skies Are overthrown, and dark comes Ravening the tomb Or heavier delirium That body lays on eyes? |
That Place | Is it like a light | That body lays on eyes? | 12 | lyric, rhyming, philosophical | Burning Byzantium |
| 272 | Empty eyes emptier of thought
Returned to turn upon the upturned stone That still fell although it stood. And the river empty a little after, alone. The hollow space of the wave determines The shape of space a wave may take, Filling itself, suspending itself until it break In predestined syllables upon the fragrant rock. |
Realist at Atlantic Highlands | Empty eyes emptier of thought | In predestined syllables upon the fragrant rock. | 8 | lyric, rhyming, philosophical | Burning Byzantium |
| 273 | The wind that lashes everything at once
Came lashing at the lutanist on evening's hump Disturbing chords, flinging river pebbles at his back Hunched to deeper strains emerging near his hands In a wind which is a wind and not a motion Of elemental ardors making speeches. The lutanist deposited his lute, like so much trash, In dusky golds, till gild and gild congealed, Shrank, subtracted from each other as they became A part of the haloed wish for a universal whole Where lute and lutanist and avenging dusk are plucked To one hue, convincing, not permanent, but arranged for, vented, In the wind which is a wind and not a motion Lashing everything at once. |
The Wind That Lashes Everything at Once | The wind that lashes everything at once | Lashing everything at once. | 14 | lyric, rhyming, meditative | Burning Byzantium |
| 274 | Every day there was a little less of himself,
A moon of diminishing hues, Less and less, as he strode from the balustrade To the roses, each night a different leaf fallen, Each day a new ambivalence in the sun's assertions, Proverbial gold in a stale world Where the water tasted tinny and the tap spat Erratic chuffs of water in an empty cup And something or other had died a day earlier, Had died and had its poor death recorded, Less and less itself, or its wintery twin, Pacing from the terrace to the garden. |
Xavier Descends His Soap_Box | Every day there was a little less of himself, | Pacing from the terrace to the garden. | 17 | lyric, meditative, nature, personal | Constellations in December |
| 275 | Calmed lightnings in the evening sky
Shuttle, like warm humans, from sty to sty. If ever there were an evening readiest For comparisons, gilded in flashes, half real, It is this evening, blotched by light, Spumed with cloudy figures of our imagining. And so the erratic discharges of our thoughts Are themselves significant, Indicative perhaps of the circuits that we make Circling one disaster and another catastrophe, Symptoms of a discord so profound, Malevolent fragrances of black, pitted things, That long_fruited hopes have withered, and everlasting airs Crimp their silvery middles tiredly And the brazen horizon awes us a little less With its simmering magnificence Dull a little, and a little cold even in summer, Shunted to one side a little, and old and used. Wormy lightnings, restore the discords of your colorings; These are the makings of our end. |
Cloudy Apostrophe | Calmed lightnings in the evening sky | These are the makings of our end. | 29 | lyric, meditative, nature, personal | Constellations in December |
| 276 | Is it a death of the self, or of the self's
One projection, fatal ray, deadliest beam Unfolding from out of a stillness the self contains Like scissors, or a dove's placid wings, abruptly flown From brooded palms, this quiet that returns To the stone house, empty and white In a whiter air? Something deeply tired Has taken the place of the cows, Still morose, filling the entire structure With placid breaths, but what is it? Is there, in this fix of airs, an extinguishing anguish That broods from the barn, the tired reds Falling in the air under a Dutch hex And a soggy roof buckled by the weather, Something that ticks in the empty hayrick Or yawns from the creosote timbers Leaning together a little in the space left By the solemn breathing of the cows? |
Remote Chiaroscuro Enters West Virginia | Is it a death of the self, or of the self's | By the solemn breathing of the cows? | 26 | lyric, meditative, nature, personal | Constellations in December |
| 277 | The pines in their shadows are distinguishing themselves
Detached in a softly shaking emptiness Separate from themselves and their riveting greens, Voraciously vivid, beyond coughed words, Beyond a last leaf stretched in a last silence Like Hamlet at the vacant end of the meadow, Dying in summer, breathing a last breath In the final rye and grasses, seeing the trees loud sway At the rim of the yellow field, shaken Softly, softly, following a blue track through the pines. |
Among the Shadows | The pines in their shadows are distinguishing them | Softly, softly, following a blue track through the | 14 | lyric, meditative, nature, personal | Constellations in December |
| 278 | Does the moon sail in its sumptuous heaven
Disfigured by pity, Blindly tearful in an icy lair? To walk in the moonlight, to trod The verdant ambers, and to think of nothing, What sort of matter for a poem is that? Is it a matter of having nothing In the mind, icy sequester Of nothing, of nothingness layered in its own absence? Or is it a matter, rather Of nothingness icily conceived, icily meant? It is a matter of sinister consequence. To walk in the violet moonlight Discussing the moon from which it flares Disfiguring the roses Is a kind of nothing, a suave Hollowness that we may hold near Or suspend between us as we walk. O savage celestial, misty moon, Snarling in your lair, speak, If speak you must, in dismal syllables Some more blatant human meaning. |
Flatterers Among the Roses | Does the moon sail in its sumptuous heaven | Some more blatant human meaning. | 29 | lyric, meditative, nature, personal, anthem | Constellations in December |
| 279 | Picaresque birds cry hi-yi-hi
From the lustered branch Festooned with ants. Crocodiles mustered in the bayou Flutter melodious tails Under oaks. Captains of the stratosphere march high, march high Stepping the squalid dews Of gaudiest clouds. When the marshal of the swamp cries hi-yi-hi It is his essences' valence Neatly strummed. |
Loquaciousness in Louisiana | Picaresque birds cry hi-yi-hi | Neatly strummed. | 15 | lyric, nature, playful, philosophical | Constellations in December |
| 280 | Standing a long time before the pond, in November
Standing and looking at nothing Or looking and forgetting it is oneself that looks One begins to think That the sinewy residue at the bottom of the pond And the pond, and one's consciousness of the pond Moving over it like an enigmatic cloud Are one, that the famous watery veils are no longer Waiting to be torn, or that, torn already, They have left only these sinewy shreds, Gluey blacks thinly dispersed in the space Between the self, astutely observing, And the brown pane of water that lifts the clouds And the bottom of the pond. |
Aperitif in November | Standing a long time before the pond, in November | And the bottom of the pond. | 20 | lyric, meditative, nature, personal | Constellations in December |
| 281 | When the house stands empty, the rooms disgorged
Of all the crumpled laundry daily life imposes How conditional our maundering sorrows seem, Another routine, like sleep and death, Engaging our restless spirits As soccer in Brazil, the overnight weather, The uninhabited chair, weighted with fringes, That stares in the leaning mirror morbidly Or the dirty shovel that leans in the garage, A little old and uselessly, by a mended fishnet. |
The Condition of the Furniture | When the house stands empty, the rooms disgorged | A little old and uselessly, by a mended fishnet. | 14 | lyric, meditative, personal | Constellations in December |
| 282 | One has lived long enough
Among rusted hills, and the solemn sunlight Spinning its steel shadows out of itself Over those hills, thickly gathered at the arbor Where matted vines still move on the latticework, Purple embrasures, seeming almost to speak In a light that is constantly fading, Shifting its emphasis, a sliding center That creeps over partial hills, Real where revealed, invisible elsewhere Full of hidden masses and interior kisses The way a sliver of grass is an entire field of grass, The way a man represents a man, Without feeling, in the inhuman landscape. |
The Mannikin Grown Large Again | One has lived long enough | Without feeling, in the inhuman landscape. | 20 | lyric, meditative, nature, personal | Constellations in December |
| 283 | Dun Madonna, caped and veiled
By modest night, the color of shale, Unclench the spools Of moroser weather Tucked by fingers beneath your vermillion cap. Unclench the spools Of angrier rains and redder tornadoes From your tense cap While the violet moon's sisterly sap Drips bip, and bip, and bap, bap, bap. Her slender tongue Unwrapped the whitest portions of the night. In the hills, green winds prevail. |
A Capella, A Cape, Agape | Dun Madonna, caped and veiled | In the hills, green winds prevail. | 15 | lyric, meditative, nature, playful | Constellations in December |
| 284 | The sun, scintillating cadaver,
Refusing blue, or mauve, or sincerer purple For the great step he was to make that day Entirely out of himself and into the world Where dull mauves congeal, purples espouse darkly, And blues irresolutely go blank, Unpacked his scalding instruments in the dark Listening to the machinery of crickets, grown tired, The imperceptible brrr Of cold discomfort that enmeshed their foils And, tired himself, threw the rude cash of light In the moon's urinal. |
Solar Resignation | The sun, scintillating cadaver, | In the moon's urinal. | 17 | lyric, meditative, nature, playful | Constellations in December |
| 285 | The native muse of this rock
Wakes dumbly in the morning mist, and in the garden, Attaches itself to a cockerel by thin tins Of light from the bleakest planet; Wakes, and stumbles about the house in a robe, having misplaced Dawn's engines, the consciousness of a dawn In the folded dark of sleep, last night When, by the bedstand, it seemed a few syllables had made life cohere. The native muse of this rock, dumbly awake, Preens against an obliterating light. |
The Native Muse of This Rock | The native muse of this rock | Preens against an obliterating light. | 14 | lyric, meditative, nature, personal | Constellations in December |
| 286 | The butler of the weather,
Essential lumin on a globe gone dark, Parsed us out upon the table With a certain ceremonious, filial delicacy. What we were we were, without detail, And so was he, tracing his investigations out The way a dachshund traces the motivating fuel Of furtive foxes darkly red. Even so, rising to its perch A bird of poignant recitations Cries sky and sky and sky In American barrenness. Each thing in the evening tried to find What sort of thing it was, and how it had arrived In the evening of which it was somehow a part As stars descended Over Florida. |
The Butler of the Weather | The butler of the weather, | Over Florida. | 21 | lyric, meditative, nature, playful | Constellations in December |
| 287 | The builder of cellos in solar weather
Extracts a suavity from knots, true trills That mock the swilling catbird in his royal chair. But from what seed increased the pilfered wood? Farm boys and their milky maids grown old Must, as hale timbers rudely weathered, Must strain, and crack, and, in their scale, break Remoter love's fiercest chord, dwindling At length as even the grandest cock Goes rolling, listlessly, on to noon. II Blue rabbis without hats are chasing still What rabbis, bending at their lamps, construe To be the bright perennial, in renewing hues Emerging, out of so much ephemeral dust. Hearers of thunder in their flamenco capes Make much of its minor terrors and mimic hate; Dividing time between one disaster And another catastrophe, that kills, They are like drowned rabbis beholding doom In a stoven ship of their own imagining While blazing fish peek about their bones. |
Variations on a Viol | The builder of cellos in solar weather | While blazing fish peek about their bones. | 23 | lyric, philosophical, playful | Constellations in December |
| 288 | You can see the earth shake, no doubt,
Its myriad images In your broken glass. You can feel it, no doubt, In your tenebrous nails. Or in the nervous laughter that the sky Shakes down. Pointed voice, mixing blues and browns In a vivid mash that riffles the eye, These solids, and these, Remain impenetrable. O how I regret not having killed The mouse in my childhood. Enfold me, lucid muds, I would go cloaked in earth the way a duck Dons water. |
Mud Slide in Vernal Weather | You can see the earth shake, no doubt, | Dons water. | 18 | lyric, philosophical, nature, playful | Constellations in December |
| 289 | Disconsolate in the deepening weather
Of a miserable December, Cincinnatus made a house of song Pinching out the solar imperative From other, more miraculous strains That salted the winter air And coated the simple ice on the porch. Without aids in impossible weather, Cincinnatus made a house of song And took up, in primitive measure, A primitive abode. |
Fluxes of Ephemera [for Amy] | Disconsolate in the deepening weather | A primitive abode. | 12 | lyric, philosophical, nature, personal | Constellations in December |
| 290 | Oh let the light be broken
That soaked and solemn Out of the sun's mouth spoken Climbed the virgin's hide And the grave of her face. Be buried in the stolen stone Each word of sight That from the tongue's priested Memory is severed Hunkered in the seed of the cold. Oh let the light be broken Over shackled genesis Until the husks have spoken Word and weed and sizzling stem Out of the grave of her face Alive again, and the once burning Turn of the world Stumbles back to ochre. Let man and woman and infant dread Out of harrowed heart Lain long and solemn Step from the narrow incision Speaking in leap years The carved distresses Scourged in the drop of a tear's face Hanging and grieving After its home of fruit Under bruited tree Bruised and fishnet against the sky Solemnly detached as a leaf's face Ghosted on stones Waiting for the last hanged man To dive alive at last. |
Oh let the Light Be Broken | Oh let the light be broken | To dive alive at last. | 33 | lyric, dramatic, nature, personal | Constellations in December |
| 291 | Less and less sure, O soul, the rain
Repeats its residuum Blanking church bells with its ultimate referent: Itself, or some other final thing That bears the buffets of ceaseless existence Like a paper that rolls over in the wind Or the wind that rolls the paper, which, Startled itself, is full of paper sounds The mud on the moon illumes. The rain is rasping against the panes. A dark, familiar change, Elusive elysium, starts at the edges of the ear, Chewed by flies in a forgetful sun, Hollow as a father's falsest word Before drunken dinner, sheds its drunkenness On a few, familiar objects. What word will ward these mute excursions? |
A Questioner of the Weather | Less and less sure, O soul, the rain | What word will ward these mute excursions? | 19 | lyric, weather, nature, personal | Constellations in December |
| 292 | One bakes and waits in the roisterous sun
Tapping out universal time with a particular foot, A principle shoe, worn leathers unable to reflect The merest shard of all that solar crisis Burning in the sky and in the apperceiving chest Like boxed jewels winking out of showiest velvets. One waits for the desert to be done with itself For the holy sequoias to drop their arms, One more martyr, torn down by storms, Reduced by the sun to one skull of dreams Throwing one more shadow away from the hill Like a river that flows out of the mind at last. This earth of cakes and sweet excrescences Lets us eat the loam, lick saccharin sands From our lips, taste smeared blazons of cotton candy, Raspberry and chocolate, the florid saps We bite from the tree, laden with glistering fruits We ourselves have made, and ripened in each eye. |
A Mockumentary of the Sun | One bakes and waits in the roisterous sun | We ourselves have made, and ripened in each eye. | 20 | lyric, philosophical, nature, personal | Constellations in December |
| 293 | What has life's bitter disappointment brought
Laid in a narrow, breathless bed? Shall we curse all our drunken, muddy lot Lain with long bones of the dead? At the end of a rifle or parting stream Pursued by a pursuing dream Man wakes up to find his enemies again, The end of dreams, and all friends dead. What stays hid in the marrow there, Thrust deep underground? Things purposed in the unpurposed air Die when those men are dead. Whether father or brother still pursue Their work, or others' work, I do not know; I read it on a narrow, upright stone Cast by the long bones of the dead. Fathers sacrifice long_loving sons To a nameless, breathless bed; Stand we under an island sun Or lie with long bones of the dead? |
Dead [from Constellations in December] | What has life's bitter disappointment brought | Or lie with long bones of the dead? | 24 | lyric, rhyming, nature, death | Constellations in December |
| 294 | Socketless and sailor
In the world's winded veins Scented genesis and coffinsilk I mock the soberest cockerel Diving from the prism_spitting Pinnacle of the world's mast Uselessly singing And rant like a wronged girl All my sweetest notes Over ignorant houses Slumbered in death and morning light. Out of the closeted shout this echo beats Features of a sinning man on tin More pressed to anguish in a dial's sigh Than any victim of time heretically cried Has been bludgeoned by suns Or a pauper's bliss been Crimped in a penny's fear Or any tale of the world Cauled in a scorpion's sting Has twisted its smile on a man's side Or any climbed tirade Spoken in wishes That nature's weary fabulist Set down. Graveturning in wishes As a wish is a kiss My manbones shriek In blooded inks Out of a rage welled and calmed As any bird's ratcheted turn Over the thumbing sea at dawn Crawls at clouds In inching desire as each wingbeat clips Over measured cessations Chewing ships and bones to flour. Out of each brick The cold dawn shakes And each root tooth of daisies Cragged in the fingering spring Floods pulse and fever To ramshackle gods agog As saints in whispers Each aghast their closed wings keep Singing of statuary And the boiling joy Of the devil's boyish kiss. So I this saintly mort cry down And each nailed lip kiss Quagmired in hatred Tried and hung, on pentecostal cross and hatch Birthing the blood plant Insisting in stitches For this world the word's wound. So I, crumbling on windfall, On sold bones and the tarot told Watch hatred disaster, man and god fall, And all loved things end. |
Socketless and Sailor | Socketless and sailor | And all loved things end. | 62 | lyric, rhyming, dramatic | Constellations in December |
| 295 | On undemanding ground
Shot through with hollow sounds Bird or bullet make Or some other keen cry, I take This man for model, though in truth A small man of the town; and although His grandfather was a thief And his father worse than that, I respect his grief, for what else can I That wander in the clay? There was a man had died Frozen to the mountainside And, nothing in his climbing pack And less upon his withered back, He ascended the wintry peak Sang a rich bar tune and died. It was out of pride The old man had died. He gripped a flute, knew God's great lie, And had a clarity in the eye. And at the last, a damned wretched gaiety Suffused his frame. Mountain echo upon echo Hollowed out his fame; Dying, trying once again To empty himself of troubles by the score-- "This joy of death Stops the breath" In the trees, excited laughter; And after, the silence. |
The Silence [from Constellations in December] | On undemanding ground | And after, the silence. | 32 | lyric, rhyming, dramatic | Constellations in December |
| 296 | nailed longings
never told lovelier in rainbow airs a touched harp awaits vibrant one dayshaft--- virulent loves! closed eyes shelter opalescence ---wonderaroused soaks tongues' duotone scarred redshifts sear life's emblematic tracts |
Nailed Longings | nailed longings | life's emblematic tracts | 13 | lyric, love, personal, free verse | The Rose Lasso |
| 297 | The phosphorous stars at your fingertips flower and pinch me,
Awaking dark milkyways like hidden veins Throughout the sulking valleys of my breast. "Throw the stars up! Again!" Our serious laughter catches in the ceiling's maternal plasters, Soft as the stars that have ached to arrive there. I lie on the dazzled bed as on a silver pond, My heart a dry pine tree reaching after the sky. Fed pure starlight by your fingers Anxious and cool as grapes, I shiver against you Shaking the slender constellations from your hair One star at a time. I swallow the tornado of flame That still hides its little blossom of light, unborn. I escape out of myself, dangerous, I run away with the night, Anything, anything to trace the deep absence That falls backwards into your eyes like a diver. The small, mobile flagellants of your eyelids unlace me, Make me plain and open as a burst fig. Narrow-footed cats dance on the shards Of the steep glass-crusted cement wall to view you. I hunch in their shoulderblades, and spray with their sex. The moon comes out of my mouth, a swollen white tongue To give you this mysterious poem. |
The Phosphorus Stars | The phosphorous stars at your fingertips flower an | To give you this mysterious poem. | 23 | lyric, love, personal, free verse | The Rose Lasso |
| 298 | Sunset clouds in awakened eyes. Mysterious.
The day takes on what the night has dropped, Everyday, as if it were only natural To sink the things of darkness in so much light. Before me's the luminous landscape of your back, turned To its solemn and human warmth, like a sky. I leap up to the lightness. I am trying to draw for you an archaic theater, Old stones rolling to an ocean voice, cracked lines, But all I have so far are these inapt words. The severe doric columns go under your eyelids, heavily. Outside, March. Its universal brightness invades All of my senses as I touch you, seeding brightness; The devouring waters rush and whiten, so light, Trying to become the wind no one can see. Speaking, ceasing, speaking. The light goes on inspiring Tragic antlers in their brown clashes. I look, Again, at you, lying there heavily as a good watermelon, Trying my waters, leaping, leaping, loving you. |
Alba | Sunset clouds in awakened eyes. Mysterious. | Trying my waters, leaping, leaping, loving you. | 19 | lyric, love, personal, free verse | The Rose Lasso |
| 299 | You have gone, you have gone
And left only your shadow tarrying. It is in all the penumbras of my kisses. The scalloped darks of your locks Drag after the feet of children running in leaves. The undersides of leaves cling to your memory. Light undoes itself to touch you, remember you, Your wildness like a reverse fire, searing lightlessness, Whole continents of shadow and dark parlance. This talk between darknesses has entered me, Entered me and blossomed, so now within me I have The solemn spaces between the stars, Your face under the rose shadow of tresses. Your shadows, formless as freedom, numberlessly large. The birds, no matter how high, cannot rise away from them And I do not want to, wildly electric, escaping my fingers Like sea-foam turned suddenly to wine. |
You Have Gone | You have gone, you have gone | Like sea-foam turned suddenly to wine. | 17 | lyric, love, personal, free verse | The Rose Lasso |
| 300 | The night winds, so big, grow small when you sigh,
So full is your breath of their sowing, Even the sea's necklace of rocks cannot measure you In your camisole, although they measure the sea. A vastness resides in your glances As if all the earth swung in one dew-bead. Your body has the lustrous strength of a horse Thundering on the midnight headlands. I look near you, around you, searching for edges, Sides, spaces, but you are edgeless and endless, The sweet air that lets me hymn praises within her. Your foundations are final beneath and above me. I am flung into you like a golden rope And never feel myself falling. You are the mast Oceans dissolve to arrive at. My island, female As the deep scents of the jacaranda Each night holds open to kiss you. |
The Night Winds | The night winds, so big, grow small when you sigh, | Each night holds open to kiss you. | 17 | lyric, love, personal, free verse | The Rose Lasso |
| 301 | Because you took me to bed, I love you.
Because your sex wraps around me And my body falls out of myself Like a flower, I love you. Wisdom doubles itself like a germ, Adding body to body. Your eye Adds itself to my eye, and we go on seeing. New things, new newness. Cicadas, windfall, our braiding bodies Tender, joyful, awake in each other, Simple as forgetting. A slow-crawl cross, holy and mossy. Hesitant as a craving bee I explore you completely, Exhausting the tassels of sunlight, Removing valuable essences even by the powdery moon. And its lonely magnet unites us, crests us. Stale and silly, I return to the gorgeous orchard of your arms. Your arms tensile and lively as if managing a sailboat. The heavy sail red, full of bloods, wombs. But agile anyway in the universe that blows it Before your face, in the front of the dawn Your hair whipping! |
Because You Took | Because you took me to bed, I love you. | Your hair whipping! | 23 | lyric, love, personal, free verse | The Rose Lasso |
| 302 | Body, body complete as a planet, our whole world
And no soul anywhere? Death, death complete As a trainwreck, and no salvation from skeletons? I stagger after your kisses that stagger away. A million miles of purgatory and no heaven to end it. Collapsed loneliness, a black velvet hole. When our hands touch like torches, all night, What floss of wire in our heads signals there's Deity? The spellchecker in my brother admits His existence. So why are all the gnats awake on my skin, This volcanic island chain of doubts surrounding me? Am I the only atheist to ever fall in love? Without death, I would be content to kiss you hereafter. Without death, your generation would be as water, Mere water, water from water, a wetness, nothing else. |
Body Complete as a Planet | Body, body complete as a planet, our whole world | Mere water, water from water, a wetness, nothing e | 15 | lyric, love, personal, free verse | The Rose Lasso |
| 303 | Simple as sticks, we ignite. An algebra of skin
Commences with us; our aureoles vent longing. The wind tears through our formulas and associations Smearing the clean inks of our thought. We kiss like two erasers removing errors. Blue parabolas disappear when you wash your eyeliner off. Vectored cones triumph and crush me in your thighs Full of the tragic strength birth requires. You throw off your garlands. My heart incinerates them. We have played catch with the universe, reversed time. Snapped the physicists' pencils, broken the old rules through. You walk across the room from your mysterious center. Or have I floated up from drowning to your face? I look at the world the way a stockbroker looks at the paper; In you, consuming ecstasies. In you, all drugs, all hybiscus' furiously blossom. In you... my words find shallow resting, like dust, As if restless doves still circulated the atmosphere. I measure all things by your measurelessness. The stars, remote and faithless, shirr from your glance In lonely sidelong birth, shivering in immensity To have their long light, to have any light at all Outside of your body. Beside them, I, too, am shivering. |
Simple as Sticks | Simple as sticks, we ignite. An algebra of skin | Beside them, I, too, am shivering. | 24 | lyric, love, personal, free verse | The Rose Lasso |
| 304 | A full cup has come to me, I cannot empty it.
In your unsteady hands you ferry it, half a globe Full of suns that had run up to you mad as puppies. Full of liquid geraniums melted at your touch. I drink and drink, but I cannot get drunk enough. My head reels. My feet tango on the ceiling. You have been looking at me a long time already. Already, between your strong legs, a spring has darkened. Lying with you, I am light as a moon-man, My silver umbilical moves like a rumor through the stars. Tau Ceti seems so close, just over our shoulders. What will our children remember about us? Chance pulled us together with its rose lasso But who had held its long comet's tail? Your eyes are a mischievous dower, your tears Soak my chest and leave no stain. I wipe not one away. Who is the guilty one when passion is strong enough to bruise, Too weak to blink? Am I too afraid of losing sight of you, The miraculous ghettos that hold souls in your hair, The tinted resonance of your shadow, where it has fallen? |
A Full Cup has Come to Me | A full cup has come to me, I cannot empty it. | The tinted resonance of your shadow, where it has | 20 | lyric, love, personal, free verse | The Rose Lasso |
| 305 | Prodigal of laughter, stoned on your own
Adoring, lady, you come bearing white wrists And white palms. Ensanguined chafes Marr no innocence of your heart's marketplace Where a thousand eyeing roads have stumbled And one has come. Chartless, mapless, and alone I pursued the drunken lily of your brow. Forethought at the masthead would have me dread thy death But I came with the starlight, seeking exit When it dies, extinguishing with the universe. Oh do not tell me of her face's radiance! I have felt the radiant proof, and have confessed. Her face has traced its cameo in my breast. Spied waterspout beyond the breakpoint of my bones, Glorious and golden, your daffodil surmise Flatters my chaste hand in the obsequious sunrise. |
The Lunge | Prodigal of laughter, stoned on your own | Flatters my chaste hand in the obsequious sunrise. | 16 | lyric, love, personal, formal, rhyming | The Rose Lasso |
| 306 | You stood up, and the world rose with you!
Astounding globe, charter of misty distances, held love! From you, all things emitted their eternal energy. From you, the sensual regale of lifted light, diamonds! From you, spears of daybreak arose, laughing lioness! Night abandoned melancholy, ropes of dew lifted with you. Dark-headed iris of a thousand days, When love comes before us we abandon everything. Old harbingers, old hates, past truths, deficiencies and victories; Miscarried words scrawled on a discarded cast. The hour of getting here and getting here has arrived. The clock has mounted up to your eyes with minutehand prayers. Glissades and everglades tick also in your eyes. Now the door of spring rushes open. Winter's broom sweeps out its ashes and its tears. Now it is the hour without shadow come again, And the sun collects us. Us together in our nearness! Guitars boom in the garden, struck thunder, sound-blossoms. In your chest, high and light, orchestras promenade Through galleries of just showing up. Like tulips. Down your unleashed arms, rivers arrive at honey seas. The mock turtle goes on in his heavy rounds, baying boisterously. My heart has eaten up the days of us together, Salty and strong in its thumb-made dish of red clay. This arriving with us and within us does not stop. It goes on and on, on and on forever. Stations of departure, those old crosses, stand Worn and gilded. They are empty, abandoned as lice. Together we come dancing and solemn, two porpoises. Our sides are streaked with blue universes of wet light. Azaleas patch the landscape, color-dots motioning oboes. One note the sorry, somehow sour acknowlegdement of our seperate estates. In you, the first hello and the last hello. Hello! In you, strange seagulls x back and forth. Those who never expected to meet themselves do so. Found dogs surprise each other, exchanging rushing tails. In us, the swallows' songs entangle and beat. The last thrill of their virtuous vibrato domes our sky. In you, dawn cannot come to autumn. Shadows are always deep. Hallucinations adopt your stance, but only you convince. Let me stand upon your porch, a little old and rattled. Let me travel like a shipwreck back to your anchorage. Let me wash in your tender banks like a seal, and roll there. Let me sink in you, hold in you, like greenness in grass. Oh my sunlight, oh my day's-breath! Let me transfigure you, like chlorofil, into my own body. Let me suck sweet sips of air from the cups of your ears. Let me drop my heart in your mouth with this tongue. These words I use rumor your abiding. And yet, you do not abide. You rush through all dawns, all skies, all risings With eagle feathers afloat in your hair, An indian princess bartering for her bridehood. A new danube charging her bankheads. You groom the night away, particle by particle, Until day stuns us. |
You Stood Up | You stood up, and the world rose with you! | Until day stuns us. | 56 | lyric, love, personal, free verse | The Rose Lasso |
| 307 | Who had love right in world's history,
Love dowsered from stale books, old mythologies? Who of all those mighty lovers once Crossed unwatered that great stream? Or could tell when they woke, when they dreamed? A woman lay by me in my bed; Golden nights forgot days of lead, And all my intricate subtlety was turned Away, as if it had never burned With reality's cold questioning. I call her image up that grew intense Because so much of loveliness was struck condensed Into those visionary, stone-still eyes That knew the world must die away, That they themselves would never fade. Beauty like that of a prideful bird, Burnt-out memories blazed intense at a word, All look upon me at my life's one work To sit, grow still, and to never shirk This monstrous sublimity I feel. I walk the long hallway questioning; Questioning, I turn from thing to thing An arrogant, restless mind That I am tied to, kind to kind, A stone leashed to a stone. |
Stone to Stone | Who had love right in world's history, | A stone leashed to a stone. | 25 | lyric, love, personal, philosophical, rhyming | The Rose Lasso |
| 308 | Time's outrageous ghosts, griefs and sorrows
Rob stalwart hearts of their brave-faced tomorrows And spasm us laughless toward joys unmet: Agile life holds herself before us-- but not forever; We gasp to get the least departing glimmer of her. So cursed, and crushing, and stiff is grief We must lose ourselves if we lose pleasure. Our own trying lives chafe from burning coal to dust; We grind on to do, not as we would, but as we must. A wrecked auto, cancer's dark star, the tumor's bloom, Seek us out on our various ledges; We wander open-armed and upward-eyed, seeking edges. |
Memento Mori | Time's outrageous ghosts, griefs and sorrows | We wander open-armed and upward-eyed, seeking edge | 12 | lyric, personal, death, rhyming | The Rose Lasso |
| 309 | Lip to lip and hand to hand we meet
Where wet moon drives down to drown,--- Eyes blown wide when the lightning strike Silks terror to the ground. Come away, love, court the storm Our nights lay wrapped with the worm. Say this tempest tempts me now Who did not love's thought invent, Nor I the one shall ever finish it, Though it pull at the whirl of my brow. Come away, love, court the storm Our nights lay wrapped with the worm. Say that lightning the night pulls down Crosses like two hearts in love; Which rich greatness first had the name The other must content to be emblem of? Come away, love, court the storm Our nights lay wrapped with the worm. All night your hand blazes where it had slept; Midnight's undone, and our kisses heap,--- For in the spirit we are tried and kept And from spirit to spirit leap. Come away, love, court the storm Our nights lay wrapped with the worm. O Love where's comfort, where's land, where's sea, That touches not the nothing of your hand? I am all things where all things meet In the original of your eye. Come away, love, court the storm Our nights lay wrapped with the worm. |
The Bride of Sir Patrick Spens | Lip to lip and hand to hand we meet | Our nights lay wrapped with the worm. | 30 | lyric, dramatic, love, death, rhyming | The Rose Lasso |
| 310 | Lenten spring has come to town
With blossoms the birds sing round, That all this bliss bringeth; Day's-eyes in his dales, Notes sweet of nightingales. Each fowl his song singeth. The thrush-cock threshes "oo." Away is all their winter woe When woodruff springeth. Sweet fowls are singing fairly fair And wilt thus all their winter woe While the woods ringeth. The rose arises, wraps her robe; The leaves in the light wood Wax all out with a will. The moon demands her blue, oh; The lily is lissome to see, oh, The fennel and the chervil. Wooing are the wild drakes; Mares merge with their mates As the stream strikes still. Moody songs, some; so do more! I know I am one of those For love must like me ill. The moon mandates her light; So does the seemly sun so bright When brides sing so bravely. Dews dunk the dunes; Deers with their dears run, So hearts within them dream; Worms weave under clod; Women wax wondrous proud, So well the spring suits them. If I should want my way with one This wondrous weal I will forego And with the woods be done. |
Spring Has Come | Lenten spring has come to town | And with the woods be done. | 36 | lyric, translation, rhyming | The Rose Lasso |
| 311 | Tuneless bottles adumbrate the surf
Tumbled scuffed lines of water, angelus births, Mammoth scarab portents... the sea disgorges Venus and her tragic afterbirth; Blue sand catches trash. Haphazard in the palmtree's rooted moonlight I thunder vortexing flames, half-bright, All-solemn, tipped in cymbal carib air And shear my acid tears for the slow sky To advance by a single wasted page. A green flash scolds, recharging time; A coiled fire breaks From the horizon's burning lime. Claret's stripped indigenous light, Byzantine and exact, Laps and smashes this island's coral banks And Venus' weaving shoulders come, and come, Fusing silted light in the surf's recanting drum, And I am trapped in light. So imagination overtakes a death (my death) And joy alone keeps pace. |
Florida Dawn | Tuneless bottles adumbrate the surf | And joy alone keeps pace. | 21 | lyric, death, rhyming, formal | The Rose Lasso |
| 312 | An iris' measure
Is given forever Nor ever may be ungiven--- So two hearts have striven To darkly top their stalk With two hours' unwasted talk And bluely blossom hereafter Impermanent as laughter Where sunlight stains Their faces champaign Above tall unsteady greens Tilting slenderly unseen Beneath the feather-petals That soft as eyelids settle Against each other's breadths And kiss until their deaths. |
This Iris Is | An iris' measure | And kiss until their deaths. | 16 | lyric, love, personal, rhyming | The Rose Lasso |
| 313 | In our mutual, mortal
done undone, doing undoing push me, pull you racing to ruin past our curfew laughing and cordial we collapse together and make our midnights burn with a thousand torching touching suns, and when the night clock is done and old time runs into new day begun and cool spring is into hot summer come in picnic weather we tongue and fiddle together breathless, apart no better-- my heart! how we sweat to sighing on sweet myrtle purple and cry "no more, we're sore!" and pant like raced-out panthers at skies and ceilings on our wringing backs-- but like a turtle we turn over and swim some more with sheets for water. Are we making sons or daughters? "None of wily neither!" and we chorus laughter. |
In Our Mutual, Mortal | In our mutual, mortal | we chorus laughter. | 34 | lyric, love, personal, rhyming, playful | The Rose Lasso |
| 314 | What feeling gives ground to stolen heaven's hours?
Where's the gain in ecstasy, This scudless plus we connive from dusts? This sinless winning that overtakes the taken And in pure mind glows lightsome, In intent outshining the divine? Once the heavenly terror is over And nerves and veins relapse from lushness To the careless tiredness of a stuffed couch, What lays in that drowse miming contemplation, Or half-knots its cool eyes to unpuzzle The tussling books on the bleary shelf? What in God's name is the simply human? What remains when we've torn down the curtain, Sunk troubles and psalms, all gone, into one ocean And stand static again among sandgrains Amidst the ceaseless wash? |
What Newton | What feeling gives ground to stolen heaven's hours | Amidst the ceaseless wash? | 17 | lyric, philosophical | The Rose Lasso |
| 315 | Vanity in the bough
Vanity in the briar, So saith the preacher And prays his prayer. God lies knotted in the bower. Kisses, sweet messes and delight, Sings the cold widow who lives by the bay, On these my thoughts drink dry the day, My hungry body feasts the night. God lies knotted in the bower. Priest and widow one pulpit share And body and soul are tight, What one rasps to the empty air The other laughs in the dark. God lies knotted in the bower. |
Bushwacked | Vanity in the bough | God lies knotted in the bower. | 15 | lyric, doggerl | The Rose Lasso |
| 316 | Little mattered, and much pervaded
The antique living room too much sunlight had degraded; A little heartache burned beneath his cassock, And holy daybreak shattered at the blinds. If Christ defied his fashions And strode untemplated and rude, If Hitler really killed them all Then how dare I intrude? My voice imparts and falls, toils and tolls, Its happenstances and romances, its passions Its trances of a certain evening in a certain loll And on into dawn prepares some further wrong Inconsequent, yet beckoning, a passionate Lark backspread against dispassionate clouds. (I have stood upon the Arctic zones and poles Of certain yellow unlighted rooms.) Among the wasted cigarettes and torn pornography I have sifted and resisted so many Facts and truths that harshly glare in so many Wasted one-time afternoons. Holding, holding Our hands beneath the spider's pall were golden. The hackneyed painter's ennui endures Formulas of snow and absence, building sets; Nailed in the aurora's tonic light, and stiff, My red shoes stand steadied on a cliff. (I sew my fingers backward that sew my shroud.) And I have wandered lost and wondered found And in a crossed broken shadow drowned; (I have lived my life while floating upon the rood.) Chastized eyes Chastized eyes Glare no more on inward wars Accreted dusts that sharply crept Down the pale defiles at midnight, Or assembled dust tumbled from untouched dresser drawers Spilling golden dirty light over all. (I have seen them all, and touched them all And thrown them all away already, Golden crowns cascading to a wastebin. I have touched the molten blots that blot within. I have rearranged my clothes upon a hook.) Here's some argument's half-misapprehension, There, the moronic posture of a gesture Gilding the broken indices of fate. A look, a moment's condescension Gazes back from above a moth-eaten bureau To fall upon the blankness of a wall. And I have longed and I have lounged, Taking nights apart to tack the day together, And still the terrorist dawn arrives, inflicts Green and golden, and obliterates my weathers. O fol de rol de rolly o My bloodless feet are skirled in skeins of snow Daybreak snaps the blinds. Bored, it leaves Out through exhausted windows where I have thrown How many tired glances into airs unknown? And they are tired, emptied by seeing, Glancing netherwhere, seeing, recoiling, Seeing the thousand toiling hours of neglect The glazed eyes of weary aspect, Hollow yet disdainful, and rolled upon a bulb Or blindly churched in the long, squared Eternity of a ratty book that blazes Trashed Byzantiums in footnotes obscure; Or restless finds itself still climbing To some even more forgotten shelf While a quaint, antiquarian transcendence Cool and numb Floods moldy light upon the moldy carpeting. And still the snow inquires And still the day expires Answerless, if my foot shall daedalus the fresh. (I have killed and I have died for less.) ---No, no I haven't been. Is it near here? What's it like? Is it extraordinary? Oh, its full Of quiet shades, thoughtful darknesses. ---My, there's no end to things in the heart. Is there now? Now is there? No, no truly; There is never any end to things. And the squeeze of nights, the evenings Where so many eden days have sank entranced, Collapsed so charmingly about an aborted heart In so many unheated ochre rooms alone! Oh I have seen and mourned the fabled light Disastered in a rucksack crease of dirty pants. And yet, how shall I begin, and how beget? I have looked through ochre eyes and hollow rooms Undeceived, and yet, and yet.... I am scarred and I am mastered in the garden, Near the wisteria, iced by the moonlight's Porcelain glances. How many years and days Has it been, how many, since first, in moonlight, We traded sudden glances? Roses had maddened us, and we were glad. Here, balancing the wisteria on a fingerend Pointing past my agile nose to oblivion, Cold leaves rustle in the ruined fountain; Water's memory in the concrete bowl Scratching over the water's ancient course. A thousand points of light conflict In a thousand parted dooryards; Conflict, flicker, and then resolve Focused into a single momentary glow. (My eyes and I contain A thousand portions of a thousand parted souls.) O fol de rol de rolly o My bloodless feet are skirled in skeins of snow |
The Golden Ticket [from Rose Lasso] | Little mattered, and much pervaded | My bloodless feet are skirled in skeins of snow | 110 | lyric, personal, philosophical, dramatic monologue | The Rose Lasso |
| 317 | The crayon-crammed sun, dear,
Roaring and soundless, fountains A crooked rivering stalk to the grave For it is summer and never Among the milkweed floods of grass Will everyday angels flame again Dawn wise and luminous as thread Out of the martian mysterious dark, So tall was the flying sunshine Spied in your crinkled eyes. The milky sun hung up the sour day With daylong hands played the harp grasses That plucked our praise-soaked ears There on the floor of light For it was summer and ever Our milk-licked unmanageable bones Pounded joy and adoring down The auroraed roughs of our breaths Till silk-dripping souls announced Heaven commences at our fingertips. Oh it was dawn and noon, and night Dropped his forgotten trunk of darks Among the staggered stars as I came, The sun's brother, halogened as haloes Shining my wary wishes in the air For it was summer come and never In the pearly rivers of the grass, Will I silk my grabbing eyes again On the welcome-at-once loving Of your eiderdown sighing skin. Now ambergris and matchless The mirage-trod moon emerges like a tear Over a mourning soul simple as sleep. And because summer is overthrown And night has leapt up like a cat Under the harp-tongued tree of cells My vegetable hand now grows Mannerly and large to grief: O Time has denied me nothing Of his licorice whips and nickels Nor eboned one nightfall or fastness Shut on your ghost-wasted alien eyes. Pulled by the spoken tide of the clock At midnight moonless rest I writhe Resplendent in my bent vest of ribs And hear both tomb and rumor tumbled dumb By the mild handmaidens of your sighs For it is summer gone and hollow And sorrow's gone down with the moon And though I tongue earth's dust floods For all those romancing eyes gone under Fate's timeline is still the grass on fire Burning where the wood was wild. And the crumpled sun, broken, bears Funeral tears in the brain That wombwise and graveward crawl Down the fiery alcoholic face For it was never summer or was it Under my coal-thumbed universal eyes; And only the bigsouled sourceless moon Drowned and void in the jailhouse dark Remains and grieves derailed sighs Over night-locked trees tall as grasses. Do not grieve, brave, with whys Or hemorrhage one ear with a sigh; No heavenhelp salves such ashes. O Let instead the dear uncandled dead Cry mercy up to my eyes. |
Elegy | The crayon-crammed sun, dear, | Cry mercy up to my eyes. | 68 | lyric, dramatic, rhyming, elegy, death | The Rose Lasso |
| 318 | When first I put my dreams against the tide
And against all the world's whorl, Woman's word and world's spray and all Did first my dreams deride. O How long since my first dream had cried 'Abide, abide!' When next I tided life's bitter wreck And fingered the fathering ashes for mirth As if the cursed grave alone saved worth Along all the drear shore's long dreck, Even then my quiet dream sighed 'Abide, abide!' Thirty years' work and little profit, So greedy is the white spray's strain Rowmen must beat the oar and never ask for rest; And when my burning arms unlock, From their dry white sockets drop, They surrender under a sigh: O How long's silence since My first, flung dream had cried 'Abide, abide!' |
Abide, Abide | When first I put my dreams against the tide | 'Abide, abide!' | 21 | lyric, dramatic, rhyming | The Rose Lasso |
| 319 | Dearest Jane,
Unfamiliar places make me long for your familiar body. An ardent urgency I had not suspected distance could supply has brought your sugarpot to a sudden boil among the peach boughs. Tonight, you spoke of "living in the now,"- and how I long to let my soul do so! My heart is a history of desiring- desiring so strongly that it crushes whatever comes to it (good or ill) until that thing becomes integral with itself. This is my meteoric bliss and patchwork, bastard and disastered composition. And yet- how deeply and completely I long for thee! Dark vintage of my nights, coiled bedmate of my days- our hours toiling in the sheets or embroiled by our tongues, I long for them all again! The crown of the root of my cock has been too long unbruised by your cunning junctions. The Gossamer Gauntlet "You are a ruby encased in granite." - Rumi Dear Quixotic Fox: I know that you said my poem horrified you. In the poem, I was trying to give the classic abstraction of "Gender" a voluptuous body. I also know that you are afraid of the verities we have already shared and which we can share again in any moment you want to pick up a phone and be in my ear and in my heart. It is your own fear that stops you, and nothing else. Listening Hard, Ruby Granite Life's Too Short For Unsent Love Letters Jane, No. You should not see me. It's impossible that you should. For, you see, I love you. I love you like the open sky, endless and magnificent and empty. It's not reasonable. It has nothing to do with control or wise decision-making, and much to do with hurt and with joy- both equally. That cannot be for you. It's impossible that I should love you, that I should have these feelings and these wishes for one whose heart I do not know- who is a mountain in its mists, observable but unknowable. It is not possible that I should be able to ascend it; neither may I reside at its foot in peace- it's shadow has touched the shadow of my soul, and I am shaped by this glimmering darkness called life. Stay where your life is all yours and none of it is given away. That is best. Not this folly, this parade, this ignorance, this mystery. Abide and be well. Gregg Living Alone and Dying Alone Mole, Living alone and dying alone is something that all of my "artist" friends have had to come to terms with-- and its the one fucking thing that kicks me in the ass all the time and that I steadfastly hate. It's the worst shit to me. But everyone with a point-of-view feels it. A lordly friend of mine says its what gives him the courage to stay married (scary)-- because he is SO alone. Alice B. Talkless always has put forth that point of view-- utter alienation. Yet-- what a crock! If I believed that, my good Mole, I would drink every day, souse my brain and sauce my heart with soul tunes and blues, buy velvet sheets, rape anything that walked, piss on the innocent, and beat on the sleeping. What guides me is not what I "know" about ANYthing-- but what I hope for everything. And, since my imagination CAN, literally, encompass the known and unknown universe-- I've got a lot of responsibilities when it comes to making that imagined universe dream itself to truth. Yrs. In Glory, gregglory |
Atlanta, GA | Dearest Jane, | gregglory | 16 | love, experimental, personal, preface, prose, lett | The Soft Assault |
| 320 | Half animal and man in my shambling frame
I ache toward the open doorway; wounded and wronged in my make-believe flesh, blazed and amazed by a million teardrop eyes, my every ear alert to illumination in the star-flying dark and flak daylight- I hunch against the wind of forever come. |
Half animal and man | Half animal and man in my shambling frame | I hunch against the wind of forever come. | 7 | lyric, love, experimental, personal | The Soft Assault |
| 321 | Sick ink
vomited belly up on the throw rug as if I had forgiven it, the swallowed ball of my poisonous poem, a loaded ode to limitlessness and light- What trash! as if the sky- vapid and superior in its imperial blues didn't know how to bite! Mistakes, mistakes! The pen's a miracle of mayhem, wild slips of a wrist once slitted; the bleeding, careering nib, a molt of details in the schizophrenic flow: my mangy life, my frozen embryo carelessly cast from the shelf, unlidded and palely little. The cornflower fists ache to begin, the watery lungs two skinned, amniotic fish. A bonfire, a bonfire! Something huge and ruinous with real red in it! That's what goes, what really goes with this stone decor, this face hung in a mirror slashed to tears. Heat, heat anything to exhaust this caustic blank in my being, torn calendar- Journals, drawn loves, alien lines poems mouthed from poems -dead-weight papers pushed to a death heap a Jew harvest at Dachau- Perfect things as final as a corpse, ashes to ashes. The matchsticks itch to finish it. Irritable Rubicon of lava, language vulcanized on language, I cross you languidly. I am nearly asleep in the oxygenless air. I am tired, tired, tired of curses, tired of cures tired of the alphabet. The wall, infinite sheet, turns intense as an oven, the nails must be melting... And here I stand awash and exhausted, perfumed in the rolls of corpse-smoke, words burned to whorls. Too tired to live, to die, to anything kilned in skin. |
Banquet | Sick ink | kilned in skin. | 54 | lyric, love, experimental, personal | The Soft Assault |
| 322 | A whirlwind in a Thrift Store assembles nothing
although it suggests a shape. A bowtie, swung on air, flutters without function because no neck is there. There is no bleak coordinate to rally the flags and flairs; no hairy simpleness untwisted when bras and socks litter ascending stairs. Eyeglasses doubt their doing (no matter how pinched and proud their glare) when through their frames of hardened ether can go no softened stare. But a belch out of Brahma that moves through our tube of voice (no matter the nakedness of our stance) can clear the spirit's molten soma or club bright diligence to trance. Red suspenders written by a finger on some supple manikin we love leaves a mental trace that lingers far longer than any snapping does. Yes, clothing is the vocab, the richness of what's said, the silken bounty of hot balloons, the droll draperies on the bed. But it is the Alpha and Omega of eye and heart and ear that fill out their airy outline with the grammar of a dare. |
Syszygy | A whirlwind in a Thrift Store assembles nothing | with the grammar of a dare. | 29 | lyric, love, rhyming, personal | The Soft Assault |
| 323 | We've landed at the restaurant. Imagine that!
Plastic seats and an oiled eggplant head Eating itself with a painted fork, with kerchief tucked in. A feast! A feast of cow-skulls, Staring and hard, a mad Egyptian emblem of "brief life." Oh, I'd as leif Noose my neck On your oniony tongue and grief As eat the bitter sprigs laid on my plaid plate. The yogurty folds of melted milk-slugs Slopped to a standstill, a yellow hill, The maggoty disaster of a vegan salad! Yet here we sit, the paralyzed pair, Hump and stump, Too drunkenly sober to ever get up. Who but us has smashed our lives to pieces? One piece, two pieces.... Oh, too many pieces to count or fix! That one looks like post-war France, Maryland that; All of our magic plans have gone Back into the magician's black hat. Timid rabbit, silent as me, Already minced and brewed in the mulberry stew You vomited in the bathroom- Half an hour, and almost didn't come back. Tell me, tell me, One finger, or two? How many hooks or claws does it take To snake your guts into the toilet And water your eyes awake? |
Down to Earth | We've landed at the restaurant. Imagine that! | And water your eyes awake? | 30 | lyric, love, experimental, personal | The Soft Assault |
| 324 | Stirred eyes, lambent hands
Grope, stroke and lock On the God-prod, the poker-pole, while red stone robes, Judicial and exact, flow slow blood floods From neck to heart to cock. Your mouth moued to an exquisite squid Flicks, sips and whips The nodding blood-knot. Purple, imperial Whirl unwrung above stung-hung nuts, The daisy-anus, the lumped legs. How like a heart it hurts, Circular spurt and jerk Into an emptiness of spit the size of a head, Glow-globe toned with bruised velvets And hot as a hiss or a piss. This is the her that turned me twenty. This is the act that soured all honey. This is the night that cut away the day. This is the feel that cancelled the real. This is the time that mimed eternity. Alive and dead on the slab again, Burned, turned and horned I made your waded pleasure feather wetness; A fortune of fine-knit phillips ticked Your broody veins insane on the scripted sheets. |
Kimono Blow | Stirred eyes, lambent hands | Your broody veins insane on the scripted sheets. | 25 | lyric, love, experimental, personal, sex | The Soft Assault |
| 325 | This hiss, this effortful fumbling at the spinning wheel,
A whirl of confused gold and one fine thread Pure and tense as silence Flies from the gnome's knobbed fingers that pull at the flow Thin as a hummingbird's urine; Masses of fineness Gather at his neglected boots, clouds of extravagance Churned from dirty straw. And now A maiden's motions move through the loops; pinching, stitching, She weaves a molten cloak for His Majesty's child, The sun king. She uses every trick in the book to perfect it: her smile, Her looks, her intricate skills, her willfullness Honed on a husband of rock. She shakes out the cloak. Millioned glimmers Shiver down its breaking back. She's proud. The gnome's eyes shine black. "Magnifique! Too bad your son shall never have it." Her face falls to scars, irritations. Her eyes cross. "Oh... oh... Rumplestilskin!" she cries Into the surprised sound of silence. |
Rumplestilskin | This hiss, this effortful fumbling at the spinning | Into the surprised sound of silence. | 23 | lyric, love, experimental, personal, story | The Soft Assault |
| 326 | Casual, usual
A face floats on its wavering stalk; Look at it talk, talk, talk. Watch it shimmer in the mirror And dissolve, a tactless absence, a sore, Hole for soul, A nothing that wounds and wounds With its teeth, its tongue, gassy solvents That pick and ply til all's undone. Look at it- loaded and goading, A sucking contusion, wary and scarlet Winking open only to eat And eat and eat. Watch how it swallows, grinding its stone molars On a glass eye, a wooden heel, Whatever the survivor had found To replace itself with- a quick fix, A snatch of branches, sticky love, Any useable glue; Anything at hand, at heart, anything That would do. The flaccid face bloats on its spoils. Bigger than mirrors, it floats its way out. Grandly, hatefully, Empty of everything but plunder and hunger. |
Cannibal | Casual, usual | Empty of everything but plunder and hunger. | 25 | lyric, love, experimental, personal | The Soft Assault |
| 327 | A bhudda-man emerged in my dreams.
Orange sherbet draped his limbs, His head a mahogany dollop. His fist contained a shard, a glimmer, Simple and sharp as his easy smile That outshone his indigo eyes. I held my palm up, outward, warding Nothing, welcoming nothing, A new-painted moon-palm with five drippy runs. The knife Entered me simply and neatly, Dividing my five into a three and a two. Sudden blood, hot and narcotic, Glistened the fingered rifts of identity- and I, I Bowed to thank him, kiss his head The solemn mahogany Made of my desire for death. |
Narcotic Nirvana | A bhudda-man emerged in my dreams. | Made of my desire for death. | 17 | lyric, experimental, personal, dream | The Soft Assault |
| 328 | You hand me a cup, bland porcelain
Brimming with little liquids, little swirls That mix without melding. Edges meet my lips. "Swallow." A helpful hand wipes the excess with a damp cloth. This medicine is steeped in piss-poison! Injectable lies That slide beneath the skin, scatter and assume The airy shape of my veins, My life-lines, and then coalesce in a tangle, Intrude and lump in my heart, silk knot, waxy casket That breaks in the calcified air Displaying a dead baby, A red statuette Drowned by lies and poison, swimming in it! O what shall it do, what shall it do That once was innocent blue, Clean and pure and crimeless as you? Shall it lie in state, attended and indifferent, Surrounded by suits and long faces, The lamentable murmuring of men, the shriek Of a mistress tearing her hair? Or shall it rise, rouge moon, rise Blind and on fire, and show us the night? Show hidden things: faces twisted as paper, Abominations, truces with witches, Suburban ploys and plots, the adorable whores Who live on the block? If we look at it burning, the heart on fire Will it show us just what we desire? Will it show me? Will it show you? Will it? Will it? Will it? |
Cardiology | You hand me a cup, bland porcelain | Will it? | 35 | lyric, love, experimental, personal | The Soft Assault |
| 329 | One mated and angelic eve
With the book flared across your knees, Eyes guided eyes and elbows posed For four brown nipples to squeak and see. I knew the bell's praise from your lifted lips Would sound my soul awake; I knew each bit of bitch with a searing nail Would seal my damaged fate. Stiff ministers of a cultish creed We repeated the stolen words, Puked up tongue and black and naked need Until our needing heard. Together with stars and eyes half-open We scratched the wrinkled skull's emporium And traded hands and nimbly led Each other back to bed. |
One mated and angelic eve | One mated and angelic eve | Each other back to bed. | 16 | lyric, love, rhyming, personal | The Soft Assault |
| 330 | The voice that puts my world to worse
Sits alien in the ear. The juggling hand that hoists my heart I exile to a hammered bier. The eye that sees my face as sodden I pluck and damn its tears. The ear that hears my each word a curse Whispers its own fear. When that eye, that hand, that crooked ear Misperceive my frame, I crack each red rib and fish within To kiss her soul again. |
The voice that puts my world to worse | The voice that puts my world to worse | To kiss her soul again. | 12 | lyric, love, rhyming, personal | The Soft Assault |
| 331 | Sewn together in a pouch of purrs
Hand on breast and mouth on thigh We cannot make our moaning words Or hiss a thesaurus into our kisses' sighs. Each sight of sex that turns us double Or kinks or Xed zones to a core Of double yolks where trapped tongues bubble About the regions our mouths rub sore, Undoes our encyclopedias of saying, Erases summations to addition's first tick And cancels accounts we could be laying In the hollow of a kiss' lick. |
Sewn together in a pouch of purrs | Sewn together in a pouch of purrs | In the hollow of a kiss' lick. | 12 | lyric, love, rhyming, personal | The Soft Assault |
| 332 | O I have been to Lyonnesse
One hundred miles away; I have been gone to Lyonesse For many and many a day. When I returned from Lyonnesse Upon a rainy day, I found my town and found my home Had changed while I was away. In what way all things had changed I'd be hard-pressed to say, But things that were things were no longer things Since I had been away. My regret is long Where I once belonged And hardly can I see When the hours gong What is left of what I've left In Lyonnesse by the Sea And what at home from where I'd gone Is left of what has been. |
Lyonesse by the Sea | O I have been to Lyonnesse | Is left of what has been. | 21 | lyric, memory, rhyming, personal | The Soft Assault |
| 333 | 1]
Robbed of sleep I can only feel The iron bed of your steel will And sleepless lie upon my cot Meditating over what I have not 2] Although we don't know Reality's basis Time is not a stasis For (God knows) in Life's whirlpool Each one goes from sage to fool 3] "Thank you for breaking my heart, you sonofabitch" You're Welcome, then Is where we must begin For the breaking of the heart Is the very worst part 4] her eyes a monster's beauty her laugh contagious fire her heart too finely lonely her breath a wilderness of desire |
Answering Machine Messages: | 1] | her breath a wilderness of desire | 21 | lyric, memory, rhyming, personal, doggerl | The Soft Assault |
| 334 | The Yoni in her rictus sucks
Lingam with her million licks; Like and unlike they dance and drain The sense of sophistry and the heart of pain. Glad carousels lunge where sex has lingered, Whirling in memory what had been fingered; The touch of Life that touches us Commends us crawl above the dust. |
During and After | The Yoni in her rictus sucks | Commends us crawl above the dust. | 8 | lyric, love, rhyming, personal, sex | The Soft Assault |
| 335 | Put mandolins where monkeys are
To screech their souls up to a star Bananas and citrons in a deep dish Chocolate shadows and the sunlight's kiss The revolved aroma of a hole Charms the sense that would scold |
Mandala Squalor | Put mandolins where monkeys are | Charms the sense that would scold | 6 | lyric, love, rhyming, personal, sex, doggerl, mino | The Soft Assault |
| 336 | good morning
dear blossom, the dawning's white bosom is clearing a place for your health for your face whose smile is wealth |
Morning Moment | good morning | whose smile is wealth | 8 | lyric, love, rhyming, personal, sex, doggerl, mino | The Soft Assault |
| 337 | Shards of naked eloquence,
permanent acquaintance in a glance, an isosceles triangle constructed by chance as when the world falls together on the disheveled bed. Shapes of light and greatness confound the eye to quietness and all the rest as well, unless, confessing naked eloquence and stretched to a howl I stand with my back to the midnight clocks and drop my cock to the caustic waters, my soul to spawn. |
Naked Eloquence | Shards of naked eloquence, | my soul to spawn. | 15 | lyric, love, rhyming, personal, sex, minor | The Soft Assault |
| 338 | I stare at my figure
too dull to doll it up with knots, wry ribbons that stitch the wild hair into a tail. The hips flare out from the belly sack, a hairy flood of becomings, selves I may invite back for a drink... Incipient breasts flow molded from mounded shoulders, nipples stiff to be bitten. It's womanish, except for the blowfish. Figgy balls complacent as labia, shed placenta from some god-afterbirth. The dill a willie soft as a loaf or foggy forethought, clitoral when licked by a mind or a lip anything that drugs the blood into the long cave, the manger hung with drums, a terrified beating that surges and squeezes. A swallowed heart would be less insistent, more nutritive, provide a maturer moaning than this hollow stick with its found sounding, a seashell dragging its echo. Hot, prophetic folds saunter simmer-shimmeringly, lacteal, erect. The wet coast solders its salts against the groin, sand and fire and thighs. A night, a womb floats her sewn awning over us, a marmalade softness constricted to eloquence. Stars hung out to dry, zen observers, mark our dartings like twins in the linen. Love, love swells and sweats between us, cloisonné oysters stripped from their bone shells, the shellac of evolution returned to nudity. Somewhere, hidden below the neckline of waters that define us, my semen rot and wait, rot and wait, acid prisoners pale to escape. |
Hollywoody | I stare at my figure | pale to escape. | 59 | lyric, love, experimental, personal, sex | The Soft Assault |
| 339 | The face is porcelain, sourceless
perfection towed from the cemetery whites of the sea and spit upon by lime, cremated to this coldness, this clarity. Blank statuette, unriven by sweetness or sorrow, smooth as a blind moon or dew on a cactus! Follicleless, is this the end of wrath and worry? Does a wild rabbit shred cries below your shine? Anatomy entrapped by a sheen, mechanism steeled to a polish, there are such depths in your surfaces! A star could not finish it. No sun can blanche you beyond what you are. Limitless glares anger at you larynx that never once hurt open for air. How does it feel to be in there seamless and beaming? Tell me, tell me! Open your mouth and bleed a God-spout, a riot. |
Scold | The face is porcelain, sourceless | a riot. | 28 | lyric, love, experimental, personal | The Soft Assault |
| 340 | The scenery of the ribs is a stage-set:
medieval coils of veins, cracked flames and the abysmal bellows, the gold heart going like a pocket-watch, muffling a photoed face in its hands. Heart! O Heart! Look at the ruins you have maneuvered! the hothouse monster who smashes the panes and leaves the scene in spasms. Mysteries stiffen the pinions of God's black bat, dark Lucifer, soiling the filigree paneling as he loiters, fingering a silk cigarette. He's plausible, a skirmish of smokes and dishwater, lonely for a light or a toke.... A molten, mirrory backdrop floats his eyes through the chest like train-lights; A few, stray, unused thoughts flashing and dangling assemble the scarecrow who puts goodness to flight. |
Mister S | The scenery of the ribs is a stage-set: | who puts goodness to flight. | 24 | lyric, God, experimental, personal | The Soft Assault |
| 341 | I keep falling into holes
and trying to stay there. -Theognis Holes split open like smiles, wet and black as a line of paint, full of spectacular textures, like current berries that cling to my fingers, to my hounding mouths, to my wicked dick. My pubes are adorned with the hard small seeds, spit out and germed with turmeric jelly. The hairs stand forth bright as a bearing holly bush, gemmed like a juniper with seeds and needs. And there, nearby, like the sand at the end of the slide, hunkers the hole, the sop, the punch-out, bitch ditch and oblivion as final as an out-push of breath. I have fallen a thousand thousand times tripped by a mirrory eye, a laugh, the sudsy tug of an insult, a breath as coal and nitrous as a cigarette, smokes that exit a sigh as silk exits a spider's belly. I have heard and I have fallen. I have seen and I have slipped. Again and again, in and in, Down and down I go, shucking my parachute into crowded clouds, removing my wiry limbs to increase my speed into the fishy abyss, the feathery cleft that opens like the vowels of a moan in the middle of a woman. There's an arm, a foot, a useless knee as backwards as a bird's, an ass as smooth as a cameo unrolling and unreeling. Clothes shudder off like smoke. I am leaving it all behind like a will or a fire sale, getting rid, getting rid, to fit into this hole that opens below, black and silk as a magician's hankie. Faster and faster I fall my hat pulled off in a flap and flutter, my head yanked back like a yo-yo. Springy fingers twine my greasy curls. The angels go on about light and space and eternity like a clean room that never dirities, linen and palm trees and Ikea settings that never end fresh as dry cleaning, airy and forever and empty. But I want the hole. I want that plummet of gums, the chummy manure of descent, that spasming black, that tongue of hunger, the window in my stomach screaming wide, the tears, the million million tears like bent nails, bent and abandoned from nailing the window open, again and again to feel the black rising though you as you fall. |
Hole for Soul | I keep falling into holes | as you fall. | 60 | lyric, love, experimental, personal, sex | The Soft Assault |
| 342 | What are we made of who made ourselves?
Our hands pull at the stitches like petals "love me, love me not" until our lovable monster lies undone and red and ruined as a pile of raw scarves. Quick, quick, take these flicked cracks, the ones under the brows and by the eyes, or the one jaggedy one as long as a sigh long and nipple-purple by the targeted heart and pinch it and knit it and tie a tight knot, knowing that the guts have already gone out of it, the heaving mongrel mess the contusions and bruises and god knows what that make us human and helpless and work. Where our kisses have stung a rosary of burns remains; What had happened back when the lightning struck and love arose? What surged and gurgled on the steel table? What awoke with a shock to see the operating room's sugary whites, the corners as sharp as a smirk? What shuddered and blinked at the rubber and tubular helper hands so anxious to gag it and glue it, to take it to us and keep us together like a heap of busted toys in a box? The surgical light as intense as a sty blinked on above us like a faulty halo. Notice the choosing of the bones, the supple back, the wavery feet, the bland big bone of the face, blank as a lollipop. Notice the choosing of the bones, very important and very proper, stark popsickle sticks stuck in two frozen lives, rounds and mounds to hang ourselves on, display our guts like sausages and our smiles like carved lard. |
Surgery | What are we made of who made ourselves? | and our smiles like carved lard. | 39 | lyric, love, experimental, personal | The Soft Assault |
| 343 | This is the husband, a stone Ramses head
indifferent and flecked with flies, with lies, austere as the sunset that gilds his despair. He's different, this husband, he's changing songless and bald, moulting his plumage undoing his hues. Long ago he finished with sending me poems, his pen as dry and stark as a husk. Done are the days of ripping the earth to snare me a fist of flared flowers that peeped, in our noontime, so "naive et charmant" from my ratsnest of hair. Eons back in the loaf-warm tome of romance, he shut himself off like a faucet from my teasing yeast, my rise as regular as the calendar. He no longer bleeds in straight silver lines, stopped are the drops once poignant as years. His tongue is no longer a spongeable pumice to leaven or sharpen my sex upon. Turned off are the nights of spasms and gladness, torn away like kites by unbearable thunder. Stoked stiff in his study with his load of self-pity he chugs through his Churchill in his stagnant recliner, a thrumb drubbed on Nietzche, and a pinky in Zeno, dividing and slicing our lives into zeroes. |
Bellwether | This is the husband, a stone Ramses head | dividing and slicing our lives into zeroes. | 25 | lyric, love, experimental, personae | The Soft Assault |
| 344 | This is the scrape and scar of disarming sin,
The God scrub.- Filtered pallors hurricane the holy void Empty and innocent And quite as frank as an open mirror or storm-eye. Oz-God with his cattle prod And tanned hands replete with treats Tells us in Schonenberg tones We must wash or wear out. Old hopes, old hands, old wings Weaken and retard my rinsing and rising; What held me up now halts me. My father's feathers that lightened my marrow Now endow my face with suffocation As thick as Icarus' kisses. All these withered glimmers and subtle shines Impinge and peel off in the mud; All Earth is crowded with 'down.' And I, I rise in rain My high lungs two cauldrons of flammible gold, My hope as strong as a bird's hollow bones. |
Shine | This is the scrape and scar of disarming sin, | My hope as strong as a bird's hollow bones. | 21 | lyric, God, experimental, personae | The Soft Assault |
| 345 | A scream arrives
as eloquent as a silent film, Chaplin eating his shoe from hunger, us eating our screams from love. Has it been so long since our mouths had found the strength to swim at each other like fish and kiss? Water whooses from our guts into water, urine and fishshit deflating from us, the sound a no-sound of silence. So long and so hungrily we moved toward each other, paired plants heliotroped on our sunny dope and ache for greatness, a spine of thorns elevating the ticklish emptiness of a rose. I cared for no God taller than your caress, your hot neck caught on my calluses. The crevices where we creased together like folded skin melted in a blue matchstick are full of crossed eyes and crossed hairs, backwards assassins that cannot see what they are killing but fumble for the tricky trigger by habit blindly as worms. Together we mouth the sound of "Pow" like children pulling their fingers on air. |
The Soft Assault | A scream arrives | pulling their fingers on air. | 26 | lyric, love, experimental, personal | The Soft Assault |
| 346 | I have come and gone many times
And turned my soul upon a rhyme As if the finest joke on earth's To be always beginning where I was. Troubled troubadour and truculent whore, Soldier, sailor and tailor and more; Each rotating mood or face Another fated deck shot by an ace. The several major arcana and their signs Cast their shadows on my soul; Sour and sweet they they cross and meet And their friction boils my bones. Bird or man or querlous bee, Or gladdened tangle of these three I am stuck on Winter's blankest branch Or come to Summer's triumphant tree: Hung, flung, or even undone Our lives' alliance shifts upon a breeze Straying or staying like some mourner's melody Upon the upright mystery. With ignorance and assurance I strut; With innocence and wickedness I walk; With whatever measure I may I go; Indisputable and bouyant I stalk. Mother shadow and darkest seed Direct from the nothing above And sink to the nothing below All the lightness that I may need. Cajoling aueroles of flowers From these honey-bloods I bleed Dripped to ground beyond my powers Until light and time a resurrection freed. Calliopes' sighs and a lover's tropes Rope my myriad thoughts to things; Tied together what need I fear Save a lesser tension in the strings? I have come and gone many times And turned my soul upon a rhyme As if the finest joke on earth's To be always beginning where I was. |
Reincarnate Incarnate | I have come and gone many times | To be always beginning where I was. | 40 | lyric, philosophical, rhyming, God | The Soft Assault |
| 347 | So circular evening arrives again
Sending down her silver lies at midnight Into the sleeping mind of woman,- A goddess knotted on her own fecundity, A fullness and dirtiness in which all fantasies root. My blunt foot has numbed in its soleless boot. And yet, there is no anchor for us in this evening, No hold, no place to contain us, To comfort us; no chink in which we may Fail and be forgotten. No hole for our seeding. We are here in the evening alone together, Here in the bleak nothing that opens us. I look up, up, to where the black stops. The stars are wise of their taut untruths And wink when we do stare at them, Staring like a mother at her liar child Who winks and grimaces and starts away To play and pleasure in the darkest wood. |
Oblivion Vignette | So circular evening arrives again | To play and pleasure in the darkest wood. | 18 | lyric, philosophical, rhyming, playful, nature | The Soft Assault |
| 348 | It was in singing that he first
Knew that worsening was not worst. His father's large disappointed face Tickled him inarticulate with terror Until he forged, Below sharp time, Monster suns of images. Invented heaven has a charm: litter Of apostles, magenta trees that dissolve As vapor, where golden sparrows sing And do not sink. He thought One wanted seeming, An altered Strangled attitude of bird. A harsh man's countenance wavered In ocean distortions of the moon. The kneeling son felt a burning prayer At his back, and ran, and ran In stark fright On broken bones Beneath a salt-dead tree. |
The Parent Tree | It was in singing that he first | Beneath a salt-dead tree. | 21 | lyric, philosophical, rhyming, personal | The Cabana at the Equator |
| 349 | "What things real are there but imponderable thoughts?" ---Ahab
There was Tenor in his party grave, sharing All of the same old sick jokes with himself. 1 He says, "What is there besides imagining? These four occasional walls will not bring Spring or sorrow to any unsuffering thing. It is the will that wanes, in summer dark, After clogged stars have scraped the sky and left A newer dark for some cold singer's questioning. Rusted apples gathered, honey melons dusky gold, Cherries rosing in the tinted sun, what was invented If not these things? Shall my hand remain Unfloured by its own effort? A pointed oar Plunges and plunges in a white war and remains An oar. The mind is not so meager; it becomes, Once its rent raiment roars, in polychromes Above chalk waters that it held and gave, That of which it sang and did not hear, because Too busy singing in undivided, tensile mystery." 2 If. on the wings of sparrows, men's feet shall flesh Who shall fly, in contrapuntal destiny, In waltz time, alone, beneath The unceasing testament of the waves? Tenor Semblance in his water-wings, bulbing At his back, held his breath and dived, at 4, Into the tossing terror of a tame sea. Once caught among the coral's shadowing, he saw The flash and error of dying fish in that dim maze. Their antlered looks and opalescent eyes Placed a holy horror in his slalom breast Racing, among more mobile lights, out of death's Abrupt shade. He knew of earth by this buried paradise. He told his parents of the sharking waves and sea. Alone, His executed gestures in scarred sunset seemed The switch-back hesitancy of leaves. 3 It was his mother's going, her poignant death, Like still water, that made him hear Curlicues of God's named trumpet, world. A French horn paddles in his ear; Finches mocked the minister at her wake, his frown Emitted solo labyrinths, corona icicles of sound. Tenor Semblance, leaving, knew his feet were tambourines, clashing in the grass. And when he whispered, it was with sorrow That he could not sing himself a barrow. In her twinking time upon this mortal orb, In laundered air, tender sequences Of love and love, flashed from her bright center Like perpetual suns that sang and knew their tune. It was because of her he sought A personal, vocal dew. 4 Semblance swelled in his soft decor. Like an awkward Alice, he used his vital eye To distill a separate scenery in the dwindled grass. Little thunder smoked the mountaintops. Gnats as vultures bulked silence on their prey. But a swung censor, sacred scenting, never lends Its incense to these more airy tendencies. Neither garland of flowers, in a stiff ring, Nor any distincter bloom was worn. Victim in winter, he tried to say The measureless landscape he became: Desolate branches, details of packed snow, Paired tracks of deer, or south-seeking geese Dispassionate as the sky. There comes A crowd of moths, an abrupt lamp flapping In discontinuous circles as he speaks. 5 But should we sacrifice infinite finesse for that Snowblind and last, fatal profundity? Sonless Semblance once, with gagging glands, Turned abrogated Pa; the wincing world Trickled from his groin. He clawed out an eye And dived, lost in a reef, resulting in a sky Made blue, by harshest imagination, by Exclusionary rules. Was it a mincing butcher's Cleaver thumb, his abusement of a One, Chopping up the single digit we pretend? False finesse? The sky was blue; he claimed To be the author, and his grave Was dug in blue; bluets brushed the edge. His mineral bones are scavenged by worms that die. Thus we see, beyond cut division or misty ending, Death is daughter to imagination's venting. 6 A man is image and is sound, Imagining sounds; a blare of being Scribbled like a cloud, pinched nothingness Palely resembling himself, in a mirror; Unalterable shadow, that falls As seasons fall, in whitest trumpeting. Thus was Tenor in his dirty grave, In severest evening, uttering A few, essential words. In his halter, Dawdling day undid the staunching fist Of night, and materbirds like mandolins Twanged his very song. They were his toys, who, Hautboy accountant, made of his breast Final register. A second heaven, set Beside the first, is best, when we forget Ourselves in what our wish of death becomes. |
For Tenor Semblance, Who's Dead | "What things real are there but imponderable thoug | Ourselves in what our wish of death becomes. | 117 | lyric, philosophical, rhyming, playful | The Cabana at the Equator |
| 350 | You, who section out the broken
Window's fragmentary glaze In gold, auroraborealis ruins that shake The scattered genet weedlings here of late, Untranslatable deathcard of all hate, Who full-sail mocks the sun, know I come to dance beneath your fake Hepatitis curve of being, welcome skater Who deals with a slick grace the last Mother-admonishment to poker hands. Lilies launder moonlight in the lot. A moving silhouette will break their dust: Imagination is its own remorse Recalling ancient beauties, one by one, until The reinvented dead ladies emerge From the trapped torrents of a late laboring mind And coo and call and sveltly wend their way To demand in time imagination's final lie: Its death; at last, to make One monumental animate corpse of fate. |
Moon-Chant | You, who section out the broken | One monumental animate corpse of fate. | 22 | lyric, philosophical, rhyming, playful | The Cabana at the Equator |
| 351 | 1
Dutch decorations groom the hours. The parted dark resumes its essential black, Its pasteboard panache, dressed blues of indifference, A more vital seem. Still the old men dicker In deeper dusk, realer hues, from Below the perch of being in parrot patricides That consume the expert, whistled throatings Of loftier loons, whose red retina shift To scan a level heaven, unplummeted. 2 They were like the colors of these things. Old men of the river rocks, disparaging Old men of the river rocks in pairs. A portion of the evening looked down Among palm fronds and purple sand, and glared A nimbus of new stars that pierced A rarer dark than thought or action formed, Whitely condemning with unalterable blare The blandest barb of neutral fact. 3 The oceans stars were reflected in the men themselves, Their trudging bucket hearts and bleary souls. Chrome, The streaked adjustment of the light, apt intrusion Of subjective singe and burn, shook step by step, until The stars were lost because the total sea was stars. Their stony heads moved in unison, great grey rocks, And tumbled towards the momentous moment of a cliff To invent a waterfall. Their old hearts poured Whiter than before, among dashed rocks that babbled As they poured. 4 But who can carry empty starlight in his purse, Or sew together toes for fins, hands for wings? The ancient bretherns' hearts must fail. They flop as they reflect, endlessly; a soul Must take a darkness from its carbon work, A scattered semblance tinctured of its grain. etched pine swamped in black ink retains The arbitrary suaveness of its growth, carved above The image of twelve men like trees. 5 Wrong boys threw up spectrum dust at sunset. they beat the rocky heads of elders viciously, Like drums, like drums, like drums, in time To the whirred sensation of white wings. Their dewy hands hardened with a thought. Imagining, they made their pockets weighty With caught stones. They leapt, leapt, leapt, Without their blue bodies diminishing. Imagining, They braided their loose fingers into beards. 6 Twelve boys danced in violet night, in a communal Hymn that offered nothing brutal. It was their game. This they knew, their short spaghetti beards and uncut Minds like bangs, in diamond time forever ripening, Took the minor light the unspent stars had saved And poured it on the orchard's hair, and fissured earth Like wine. Their sweet limbs were never heavy In that sleepy paradise. They chant aloud their names: Impatient to insistent hands, moving as they mend. 7 I descant upon a dusky theme Illegibly. What there is is this: The men are trees. The men are rocks. They mar and mark upon each other ceaselessly. There is no outside agent agitating. They invent Themselves. The clock is riveting their veins. They have never seen a star. They fly On fins. And all of this I saw in some Mirror-making, mirror-resembling dream. |
The Cabana at the Equator | 1 | Mirror-making, mirror-resembling dream. | 77 | lyric, philosophical, rhyming, playful | The Cabana at the Equator |
| 352 | Up from the coral came, loud and lost, disguised,
The boiled apparition of a one-time man; His pockets bristled brine; an oyster clipped his nose, Pearless. The ocean offered him, we Could not deny the gift, without endangerment; without He had the outer aspect of a tardy sacrifice. The closed committee of our welfare Immediately convened. They sought, they said, The last abolishment of will for justice's sake. The man hobbled off, in winsome chains, To the hanging place, Dragging upright flippers of glinting gold. |
Ein Parable | Up from the coral came, loud and lost, disguised, | Dragging upright flippers of glinting gold. | 12 | lyric, philosophical, rhyming, playful | The Cabana at the Equator |
| 353 | Amber uncertainties of day decrease. Cinema skyscrapers,
Ice-strong in August's simmering, by custom, Strain, vertical ambassadors of a raindown faith, Unbuttoned pageantry of striptease In mineral prayers by crystal seconds click Skyward where the welter minutes works Oblong in loss, incomplete, reversed By hasty tobacco minutes of falsity Puffing from a face; casual, displaced--- Break the blue nerve-strings from olive eyes, And amber eyes, that we may see you once unclothed; O beauty with a mind to terrorize! O ghost that haunts and leaves the self undone, An abandoned shoe of spirit amid--- Radiant presentment of headlights, streets Too seeming-perfect to harbor scars, Rivers of the face, deep windings Of the conestoga's strut, Manhattan accolades, Segregated tenements of hilarity, lets The lost sea rage alone its winner-take-all And spaded waves. Those with taper memories, burn In silent aquatic lives, cinched tendencies Of gain, condensed and closed Soliloquies of the inward gaze. Recall, love, the angled awnings that louvered In the street and rescind their makeshift wanton Gathers and their stays that stripe Jazz consistencies of dreams, locked arms of thought. And freedom of the broken mind spends night Like fragment glints of pennies, dimes, In an uncertain, subway sallow tenement Linking past and time and sanest beauty immutably. How many hands have lent their grace and power, Past strict steerage of the sky, agile abandoners, To build with conscious thought of staying these Sandstone monuments of dreams? O lordly city, living sepulchre! Never unwind The beaking strangulations of your light, Clipped and clipped, astute on broken boxes And bandaged lives. Twenty hundred thousand move out In convict kicks, coral syllables of mouths Uttering lovely convolutions in sharpest salt that brims some vast veins' vented tension flow. O river city, sapient of light, there is more In the level skeletons of your praise And mazy words than you or I, leaning above Any silver quay, may guess in any Sun-silk scattering of days. II Music in the mind is water Spelling white mansions in manacle light By sloppy oceans, by Atlantic blue. The boats became a syncopation of the art, Swift cutters paddling up to start--- Jutting in some over-occasional spray.... Splay, the tragic motorblades that mix Bones of rubies, your lost and salted eyes, resolute Of oceans, seamed into one white salt. Who can take the tiger-chime of arced spray Away, deep among the dimensionless swoon of day, As diamond-dusted angle-trees cure a blue? Loops of light on clear glass circulate endlessly As the shadow of some unbent beauty Blends an anchorage with graphite spillage of its heart In one still spot. Tranquil water takes The unaltered burn of day and rainbows it abroad: Exact bright bands of unconquerable split light. III She stood in her summer arsonage, complete; Her arms shoved beauty to the brink. In the rapt child-sway of her body blessed, She liked to watch it totter. Allocate of praise, alone in lividness, Her Cleopatra charms derange a face Made numberless, the legion losses Summer and moonlight conspire to take In the shrill seconds preceding birth, Blazing awkward apt adjectives of light, Explosions of burnt rose, blasphemies of sight: Her embarrassed breasts consoled a sigh. With bicycle moods of syllables, wise Soft sofa ministries of age displayed,--- The scrubbed violation of too many hands Already resting after The aching dilation of too many years. Opinionless as steam in vapor rage The undiluted, vast minions of grey age Remain and inculcated the glass world's verdure. O mirror-girl who swam with me! Your otter plash alarms, quelled seemings, balms No untethered slash of wind will solve With treasured fingers, knives of burnt cellophane, Remain to dissipate The slight indignations under fiber lies that Display and disingenuate The twenty mobile armistices of face In alcohol alacrities of soul. You blinked There, in antechamber emptiness of air, By a blank slant sea Shelving its green shoals in coral fashion Against the petticoat interiors of railroad stations: The lazy, shoved accoutrements of waiting. We were everywhere at once, one summer. Her working woman's apple-soul Daunts momentously the unworked opinions of stars ---Daunts in a moment's unmaking The slipped and gradual symmetry of stars. white velvet siftings of the filter moon Slept in lonely pages of the leaves; Sister swelter of the sapphire sun forgot, they became The downward shaft and symbol of desire. |
Transmutations of the Solid State | Amber uncertainties of day decrease. Cinema skyscr | The downward shaft and symbol of desire. | 130 | lyric, philosophical, rhyming, playful | The Cabana at the Equator |
| 354 | Chaos is eccentric else, among the green
Habiliments of this disease, This earth, this atmosphere We sicken of and breathe. The arrant mind Ticks like a cockvane in a white sky. Blackly circles the tragic thought of death Around an empty farm: the false, shadow-sharp Concern that it invented. Past tipped buckets And abandoned calves, lonely for their mothers, Sick-eyed mermaids maunder in their scales, Electric after A crumpled pail Of the pure, chiaroscuro myth. |
Perception at the Center | Chaos is eccentric else, among the green | Of the pure, chiaroscuro myth. | 15 | lyric, philosophical, rhyming, playful | The Cabana at the Equator |
| 355 | It is this common, dirty love of all Man
that does us in. When I was a puling boy, unloved and underpublished, I put my levelled scope to the crew-cut skulls of my class and wrote Man and God at Yale, what a joke! Man's a bastard, and God is not his dad. All my soaring arrows jut suction tips... see? Jefferson's sky-high forehead's still red from where he plucked my one-sided life of concourse off. I'm the best Catholic in my diocese, and when Mary was assumed by Pius X,X,X, I smiled at my blushing girlfriend in her dorm, posing for family photos of the Nativity. So what if God made me? I am what I engendered. |
William F. Buckley, Jr. | It is this common, dirty love of all Man | if God made me? I am what I engendered. | 14 | lyric, personae, satiric, dramatic monologue | Contemporaries |
| 356 | The only political genius to ascend the stage, I
jammed into a jockeyed-for corner of this glassed-in booth straining to read Johnson's lips over the broken phone, his Southern slurr.... Paris is stalled. Expect nothing; I'm calling all three candidates, wronged by rumor in the waiting room. Hush-hush tiptoe is of the ultimate... you understand... I instructed Haldeman to pass the word. It was one of those paper nights, my name in stardust at the annual Al Smith affair, Johnson stooped to load my rickety back with the new-mown low-down on the Vietcong; nix on fusillades; no violation of the effervescent Zone drawn between participants of the talks, etc., etc. The issue was soft-pedaled to a pulp. Each night the bearded bombs come ringing on my sleep, my dreams are fire; someone's making political capital by my solicitude. But, of course, that was inevitable. When asked, 'There seems to be some movement,' I said, 'but I won't disclose those briefings.' It was a weak answer. I was campaigning in Missouri on October 16." |
Nixon, Election Eve 1960 | The only political genius to ascend the stage, I | I was campaigning in Missouri on October 16." | 20 | lyric, personae, satiric, dramatic monologue | Contemporaries |
| 357 | "The placid green tank rambles against my cause,
trembles my squelched skull in its combat hardhat squinting out the cool black fish-eyes in the crowd of press-men. I won't smile for applause. How many times has the future groaned and ceased beneath my feet? That ice lightning stalled me blind but unlike Oedipus I remained unchanged, chained to my loving Kitty and her scrambled passel of cubs. Bush and Willie Horton register like stars, crooked like unforgiving hooks into the milky heart of my campaign-cosmos. When Willie went killing on his blood-spritzed spree, funded by the Furlough's goals of rehabilitation for the apolitical psychopath, Mr. Ailes had me sighted in his hateful geiger fat on his media-consultancy and pool shark style of cynically 'manipulating the Mass...' I feel the edges zero-in and narrow at my throat.... I was like a tree when I was green, like Alexander at his dashing bastard best, played by Steve McQueen. Now hot on the overheated tank churning at my hips, the minotaur of my class with an eagle's face, I feel the cold motion rifle through me. What is left to say? I love my wife even when she's high." |
Dukakis | "The placid green tank rambles against my cause, | I love my wife even when she's high." | 23 | lyric, personae, satiric, dramatic monologue | Contemporaries |
| 358 | "Our docks go rotten with the unsold grain.
Let Russians eat cakes! My fields have weight of wealth enough to feed thin ideologs. Until the commies come round to Adam Smith and every Black Sea dacha lilts to 'upon the fruited plains', our Uber Alles, let rubles flit to Little Rock, Ark. Fresh wheat feeds Free Enterprise! Fresh wheat on the sea-drift skims.... All night I phoned my phoney congressman at The Mall; his hands are tied. My head is in the sack! No stomach swears allegiance to a godless cause, all money loves a capitalists' warm palm. Beached here by our timid wish to feed and democratize the Slav, we hop, foot and foot in hand while the White House consents to Bowdlerize the press, and so sacrifice events' true shape to rumor's inflating word that blows dragons from water-wings, and spills fertile fallacy from an honest palm of grain." |
Farmer at the Embargo, 1980 | "Our docks go rotten with the unsold grain. | fertile fallacy from an honest palm of grain." | 19 | lyric, personae, satiric, dramatic monologue | Contemporaries |
| 359 | "The land lies rough beneath the oriental's tread.
Such a winter makes retreat impossible. The yellow tide has crested the Yalu early; there's a commie in every weed! If I had beat the snappy Jap back on the Chinee mainland a billion of the world's maundering masses would be bickering and free; if I were given half a chance! Manuel, bring this disaster's map, my royal purple pen... ...Jack... Once, aching for my little filipino princess in her blue turtleneck dress at the officer's cotillion I felt almost boyishly innocent of murder and smiled. Her limp body passed through my hands like black wine.... But immutable Kant's quintessential Duty called: you only know you're alive when you're doing what you hate. At Okinawa on the killer's field, lean and ready for the silent bullet to repeal my god-granted marshal's fiat, nothing pierced the scarlet of my commander's sunglasses mirroring the quixotic haste of dead men's actions in impassive plates. Take this down, Jack. Manual, thanks. Take this down: when the engraver comes round with his axe and chisel say these words be cut atop my body, say 'I was a born winner whose nerve didn't fail or turn blue.' You know, don't you Jack, that this is my last action? I played five card stud with my heart and groin." |
MacArthur on the Yalu River | "The land lies rough beneath the oriental's tread. | I played five card stud with my heart and groin." | 23 | lyric, personae, satiric, dramatic monologue | Contemporaries |
| 360 | "Vishnu-handed at the last, I watch perched
the world unravel from my needle-pile of discarded trophies; stretched reel to reel, my soul cannot fold. Swept by sweet victory into the electric chair, I listen to my own slick stammer and applaud. Whose hammer beat in time to my wincing tongs? I held my grammar steady, and I stared TV-asphyxiated like The War into every voter's lair. Now alone in my high estate with the jury's minions closing in, I listen to the mystery play my sub-subconscious penned; my Quaker's conscience holds me flinchless and appalled, I ached after my own interest and called that aching 'World.' What has the salutary commission convened to stage-whisper into the nude mikes that flood their mouths like flies? I cannot wait! I click on the humming set.... You know, when I was young, with the one hand inched out to nab the ribbon at the high-school track meet panting like a wildebeast chased to death, what was Vishnu to me but a ten-handed castanet player?" |
Nixon During WaterGate | "Vishnu-handed at the last, I watch perched | was Vishnu to me but a ten-handed castanet player? | 20 | lyric, personae, satiric, dramatic monologue | Contemporaries |
| 361 | "I sway drunk and liberated from the tin green tank-top
spouting my bright brand of Nevesky's Napoleanic 'Liberte!' Yesterday, I ran away from poverty to fame, a circle clipped... by lies, by bliss... Brezhnev signing in my subway bill after a solid round of boilermakers toasting his longevity! Such dull, glum rounds. Am I the hero of my nation-state? Giving parliament a kiss and a whistle for their censure of my too solemn unsolemness. Soldiers fawn and come to humble silence when I spill the beans about the independence we've won from ourselves. Who needs psychoanalysis now? They smile and cheer in black, ironic, loving, loved street-jeers; good ethnic-russian boys to the riven core! I weep with bilged courage into hot salt hands when I declare The Coup a Coup Decapitat... those guys couldn't hang a cat! The bear dances mincing on its paws. The gilded, false shuffle of our flighty republic's shifted once again. At my slipping, bootblacked foot some Mother Russia holds her infant up to the AKs ricochet. What will Yevetshenko think up to rhyme with this? A cab-man in his busted cab crammed with madcaps putters by and sings: 'Puling Pavlov, Pugo and Yazov--- manhood's appalled... 70 bleak years of the Commies' trawling haul...!' " |
Boris Yeltsen | "I sway drunk and liberated from the tin green tan | 70 bleak years of the Commies' trawling haul...!' | 23 | lyric, personae, satiric, dramatic monologue, soli | Contemporaries |
| 362 | Packed into my typewriter day by day, I thumb
my prose squares on the rich and famous til I choke, dazed by the haze as my consciousness thins, getting high as I sniff the lighterfluid of my language smoking over history's thick white skin. Allusion made them popular, but the verse must drag.... Each day in my ribald trickster's mask, I soak the bilked body, and pray to the blaze's bray; I make my bee's circuit from kitchen to bandstand, command Genghis Khan in his boudoir, Hitler to harmonize... Saints to outkill soldiers, flash their spiritual brands to ash, hug me in a Covenant, lash myself to the mast! When I'm buried like Poe's heroes will Parnassus kneel and scoop me to heaven, mailed alive in the velvets? |
Writing | Packed into my typewriter day by day, I thumb | and scoop me to heaven, mailed alive in the velvet | 14 | lyric, personae, satiric, approximate sonnet, soli | Contemporaries |
| 363 | "In this drawing of an apostle's nirvana
I gave a charming native girl christ's fivefold power hand, a santa rea item. The bone dice of fate are chiselled on her skin, her breasts are docile rounds to those twinned squares, her pubic matt preadolescently slim. Note the use of black, another power totem, which oil slicks in India ink the right or damned hand side of the visual field; out of its night soils burst pumpkins, and watermelons halved for the easy licks of the naked girl who lies with crossed arms at their side. Calabeza bianco says the stylized head joined to the anointed torso which hovers clubfooted in this dream which I fancy St. Jerome on an off day may have painted." |
The Artist Surprised in His Studio | "In this drawing of an apostle's nirvana | which I fancy St. Jerome on an off day may have pa | 15 | lyric, personae, satiric, dramatic monologue, soli | Contemporaries |
| 364 | When I came to my laurelled rest at Dai Ichi,
overlooking the grey, plain, immutable quadrangle a crooning Tokyo Rose had sworn I'd be hanged at, giving the timid botanist-emperor an American-made smoke in his claw-hammered tux, he mumbled gags about his own execution through his stuttering translation-man! My marrow went white with fire; I was abashed to see such an elegant little fish as himself fluttering against the grainy, post-post-war land. My nobler soul followed his rollercoaster's flash from artificial heights to the Lay-Z-Boy my officers unfurled beneath him; how had we skidded together to these digs? When he told his people he'd forgotten how to be God, scratching a nimbus of lichen from some sea-rock, we won the war. He waved goodbye like the xmas pine we buried in the sand." |
Dai Ichi | When I came to my laurelled rest at Dai Ichi, | He waved goodbye like the xmas pine we buried in t | 15 | lyric, personae, satiric, dramatic monologue, soli | Contemporaries |
| 365 | "I was too cool to rule with fisted vengeance
beneath the swaddling velvets of my elegant green glove--- tell the vets who took it on the chin at Iwo Jima to read The Book; God himself puts hubris to the sword. I start my day with prayer. War makes one love what God hasn't wrecked. When I worm from my humdrum office to the ambassador's shack and back, I let the limo-boy drive in a slow lull, open to the assassin's asking; when Gawd calls me home I want to feel the tug. Let lesser men denounce what means nothing to them, stuck with their existential hype and hysteria for reality. I've had my blistering fill. Glory, duty, honor, lilt me into longing still. Jean in her scarlet kimono comes ghosting in. Honey, please, my pipe. Ever see a wasted derringer fizz? Thanks. Smoke goes up just like that. Curls like the starved howl of Arizona wolves I played pinch-pat with as a darling kid, on assignment in the desiccated wild west with my cavalry dad. My boy, goodbye. Kiss Daddy on the cheek, and he'll tell you a Pecos Bill lullaby." |
MacArthur Reads to his Boy | "I was too cool to rule with fisted vengeance | Kiss Daddy on the cheek, and he'll tell you a Peco | 18 | lyric, personae, satiric, dramatic monologue, soli | Contemporaries |
| 366 | "I will go wash; and drown these desert honors
that stick in my throat. Three weeks before the grand defeat of our enemies, I dreamt my tent squalerous, ruined lieutenants killed by infiltrating mustard gas that couldn't sniff out the winning colors of our almighty flag. My aide snored on under his moony brow, refusing to wake for anything less than the Judgement Day; I'll pass. In the wheezing trenches we squeezed off rounds like mad in an unending philippic against the damned. Dust-erased faces blink skyward from their rust lakes of blood, off, on, off, on. Now downed in a North Carolina airplane hanger and tired of the itching laurels that itch my scalp I stare bemused at what our wanting has brought us here: Disinterred love scrambles up my lap." |
Schwartzkopf, Duke of Iraq | "I will go wash; and drown these desert honors | Disinterred love scrambles up my lap." | 16 | lyric, personae, satiric, dramatic monologue, soli | Contemporaries |
| 367 | Broadbacked noon has come humbling among our wicked spires;
I came trumping in, Ike's prat-boy VP, flipped the sinister death-ace on its head in Laos to a vermillioned flush, a cornucopia of flowers scissored off by dear Pat for my tweed lapel. Coronated by my foreign policy's jewelled accretions,old man of the treasons, whispers stitched to whispers, I age in New Jersey; grown familiarly bland I confer my Ovaltine-sweet opinions on the mass, saddled with a politician's over-zealous over-friendliness still. Whatever has happened has happened. Smooth-trunked Atwater by a humorous tumor felled; How many more must wither and lessen? Stopped at the bullet-proof pane all day, I watch the dogwood whiten and the rich magnolia finish... What love cannot conquer I leave to my will. The winning children still swing back to their crooked papa at Xmas... a few bright, colored lights. I am no thin-spined De Sade, adoring thorns!" |
Nixon Now | Broadbacked noon has come humbling among our wicke | I am no thin-spined De Sade, adoring thorns!" | 19 | lyric, personae, satiric, dramatic monologue, soli | Contemporaries |
| 368 | "Hitler once appeared to me in dream, grim,
repentant, towing cowed Eva like a swallowed soul... a hang of flapping hair shut one demon-eye in, dimmed, wrestling with itself, whirlwind angels laughing in his skull. We killed him eventually; a few, true things penetrating to the innermost. I feel the arrow still my brother lumbered from my leg; atop a joyous swing I rubbed where its rubber cutting nose had thrilled. Our afternoons were resplendent, unhurried, vague, as we tumbled as cowboys and indians in an unholstered rush killing the shuffling vegetation and lizards that plagued our simmering summer patio. They would blink and push their low bellies in and out, alien, slow, themselves. I wish the doctor would come and kill my tumor now." |
Casey in the Hospital | "Hitler once appeared to me in dream, grim, | themselves. I wish the doctor would come and kill | 14 | lyric, personae, satiric, dramatic monologue, soli | Contemporaries |
| 369 | We are all in the hospital together... all of us.
The IVs rattle above us, see-through gods with their jingling rattles, bodiless, pure... Why must we sink and sink? The lead allays the hurt of its thrust; rubber hands pull bullets from my side. When did the first enigma enter? Its pulsing yeowl spurred through a lurid kidney, blood ripe blood aching to black against the crystallized innards. Near me towered and grimaced the great man, his heart-pouch slaughtered while the cameras whirred. The anesthetist's mask crouches at my throat hissing its green dreams of health. What cure will come slurring from my ribbons, white and clean as a slug? I remember a young man's fanatic face and tanless untrembling hand.... Its purely pathological, I'm sure of it." |
Ancillary Victim at Reagans Shooting | We are all in the hospital together... all of us. | Its purely pathological, I'm sure of it." | 16 | lyric, personae, satiric, dramatic monologue, soli | Contemporaries |
| 370 | "The world looks level under my steel rims,
crushed to bliss by God's giant green thumb which teems and redeems everything under its whirlwind whorl. We must ax out this cancer of Chance; the world was built, I believe, and my book proves its true. A downtown D.A., I'll burn the palace down for the convicting clue. Professors are such soft, openended things, and besides, science is unproved. I saunter up with my bilged briefs from the ribosome links of these stranger docks and penetrate the doilywork of the statistical city. Fly-eyed in the pulpit, I meditate on my haranguing lectures to the mass. The mass remains unmoved, pawing the ground. I don't know what simmers inside myself! I don't know about that master fake-maker Darwin, revealing a world a blinded god had hidden, even from himself! His sideburns evolved from bad to worse. Maybe God made each mistake independently... Our green genes shift and change like germs, our bodies diminish and age, shrink back to apes in smocks crooning in ape-ooohs around a glittering testtube. The people are finished with me, TVs off they return to the burning circle of their lives, chanting gossip, politics, and news; but will they buy my book? I walk back to the docks. I love my life, my wife, my little ones I made in the image of God." |
Philippic Against Darwin | "The world looks level under my steel rims, | my wife, my little ones I made in the image of God | 27 | lyric, personae, satiric, dramatic monologue, soli | Contemporaries |
| 371 | "Coke bottles float in a grid of blue joy,
the spray paint hisses and skids, pseudo-gestureful, pseudo-pseudo, in fact, for I wept when it was built. Graceless audacity in the kittened crush of the New York art scene ruffles my feathers still, one must have the economy of the surgeon, and double the price! A feted stack of Reverse Marilyns makes one corner dark as a swallowed pill. Staring through the repetitious window Jim angled and killed himself through, my wild faces punctuates its gasping stab of hair, a cigarette stubbed in its hoarfrost of ash.... What can I see? Disasters, foghorns, flares, the wash... I wallow and skin-dive in the elucidating trash. Soupcans stutter to the shelf-edge still, canned elves... The Hudson boils in its gum of sludge. In my last, stitched effort, two washed feet patter off the continental shelf, patter off, patter off.... America loves my handcarved off-the-rack! Beneath my retching heart, my lapsing gall bladder's turning in me, neon green." |
Andy Warhol | "Coke bottles float in a grid of blue joy, | my lapsing gall bladder's turning in me, neon gree | 19 | lyric, personae, satiric, dramatic monologue, soli | Contemporaries |
| 372 | "Pure squares of Mexican sky ease my exile;
reviewing my post-dated Pravda like a parishioner fallen from St. Peter's gilded grace, the dome of Rome and NVD network that kept my clockwork ideologies alert and au courant, I watch my clear marguerita evaporate in its harsh dawn of salt. My eyes feel blooded in their stark haloes of grey hair. I grow old, I grow old, the Party moults me in the general slough.... I'm sent here among the cacti for my pasturage, a missionary without a church or holy relic beneath my skirt! Lenin's parboiled skull would make a nice knick-knack; thumbing my wry digits between his teeth for a tongue, I'd make him say: suffering is salvation, for the mass... I stagger from my white beachchair sober and appalled, Stalin with his ice-cream suit and dictatorial lunge scattering the pieces...! I read in bad prose of how he'll mechanize the Worker's Paradise, assembly-lining cool cubes of sweatless swimming pools, rototilling sweet compassion under, the hard clasped hand,--- Communism's true gen. The horizon's sere with unswallowed bile, baked brown. I falter; at my turned back a brother communist, Juan Love, undoes my brain with a pick or shovel." I |
Trotsky in Mexico | "Pure squares of Mexican sky ease my exile; | I | 24 | lyric, personae, satiric, dramatic monologue, soli | Contemporaries |
| 373 | "The petty strut of a peacock without a tail,
or old men salaaming for drachma in the city's dust, so much scratching and disturbance of dust... so much strafeing and raping of the holy villages.... Here, year adds on to year, the camel chews as slow. Lifted from the dung fire by a ladder of assasinations, I climbed to kindle the deserted palace steps, and turned my unerring hand to the populace, coaxing to vex my nomad volk towards foam. Oily dollars, skin thin, flutter as bats to the waste horizon returning at motor dawn in the hunched shapes of tanks; sea_anxious to return to the yaw and abyss of the sea, Kuwait halts our monumental, crawling foot and whines for a beach_badge from their simmered verge of sand. I pet a captive's infant before the camera, swill the thick wine of Peace Through Annexation and stoop in my ill_fitting soldier's fatigues to plead or command: Surrender to God, whose white hand works through my hand." |
Saddam Huissain | "The petty strut of a peacock without a tail, | Surrender to God, whose white hand works through m | 18 | lyric, personae, satiric, dramatic monologue, soli | Contemporaries |
| 374 | King Faad (of Saudi Arabia)
"Dew sweetens the orchids on the abstract balustrade; my rich eye spouts to the sky's rafters, seeking Allah. Seeking Allah, black tanks bristle on our border; water_fat Americans sweat in the shade of a water tower, Hussain putters about in his bathrobe with a globe dreaming on the spinning quilt of colors, rich as spilt oil... his stale mustache and chemical stench more like Il Duce or Saladin than Hitler, less like Saladin and Il Duce than a wayward boy dawdling in the new mosque with his new top; the entire desert piled like Picasso's charnalhouse. When the one unwelcome moslem sweeps in with dawn, high on his probation from sanity, will enough F16s lower from heaven and provide oblivion?" |
King Faad (of Saudi Arabia) | King Faad (of Saudi Arabia) | F16s lower from heaven and provide oblivion?" | 16 | lyric, personae, satiric, dramatic monologue, soli | Contemporaries |
| 375 | "Histrionic, with a swine's loving heart
larding my innards, I crash on San Francisco's docks. Unpacked from my Polynesian heaven I eye the bruised head of the press; once, Shakespeare without a throat, I had made the sexual mystery limp the boards, and grunt, grunt by glorious grunt in Paris Tango's sordid atomic dawn. Now old and sexless before the gawping crowd at the courthouse, my largesse mauled by rumor, my sinning son unsentenced, I sweat my sty of causes dry before the cool blind stone. Leather_jacketed in my rebel heyday, I knew my hated audience like a hated father, all my patricidal punches sweetened by affection." |
Marlin Brando | "Histrionic, with a swine's loving heart | all my patricidal punches sweetened by affection." | 14 | lyric, personae, satiric, dramatic monologue, soli | Contemporaries |
| 376 | "All this deluded elegance's against me. My ripe
man of youth, a plaster_of_Paris David, hangs in a gaudy corner of the Taj Mahal like a ghost, and reckons up the poker_faces my goliath ambition birthed. Golden quarters tinkle from a showgirl's palm in the moon_blue changing booth; she frowns; all that titanic lust for money unveiled in glitters! I count the shadowed furrows in her brow; the hot lights make her mascara leak. I pause and smile. Coughed smoke smears the wards of patrons. Alone at the automatic door of the underground lot, swept by light, I hear the new cars creak and breathe. Who's so sure he can't find some solace in his death? I turn; she leans against me like a candystriper." |
Trump | "All this deluded elegance's against me. My ripe | she leans against me like a candystriper." | 14 | lyric, personae, satiric, dramatic monologue, soli | Contemporaries |
| 377 | "Rich in shrimp, and fed fat by feeding,
my nouveau cuisine and halapino peppers stuff the moneyed throats of stockbrokers like a tickertape, quoting every appetite to the last eighth of desire. On my empire the sun sets flaming like a peach's pit; inverted pigs stare naked and wrinkled from their hooks, flayed Bartholomews, while I boil the mother sow to a tasty vinegrette my salt palm spices. Others boil, teeming with a prosperous guilt my low_cal meals can baptize and cure; slimmed by the communion wafer_sized servings at the steel counter, they smile. I smile from my orange hell of steam. My father was a butcher like the bard's, often said: 'Let each man's conscience, sick, and thin with pining like a scythe, razor his wet brains apart, in bloody pieces like spaghetti.'" |
Wolfgang Puck, Cook | "Rich in shrimp, and fed fat by feeding, | razor his wet brains apart, in bloody pieces like | 16 | lyric, personae, satiric, dramatic monologue, soli | Contemporaries |
| 378 | Spider infants float above the noon waters
filament by filament by filament... Strange, to reach that age, to have the timid pulses waver in a fatted neck, not the hangman's, not the erect victim's, but your own blue tangle under the skin; wet winds comb the rushes. Uneasy on our haunches in the dingy we watch blue spines of fire leak into the lake from the fumbling alternator; our lax bodies rise. We are almost ready to dive and dive.... How long has the swamped horizon been so thin a line of red? Our fishing lines lie reversed to a clear spool in the bottom of the boat; we maneuver our middle_aged spider's bodies to the wavering lip and kneel to leap, our hands have found the gunwales and strange strength. |
Open Lake | Spider infants float above the noon waters | our hands have found the gunwales and strange stre | 16 | lyric, personae, satiric, dramatic monologue, soli | Contemporaries |
| 379 | "My heart the size of an apple all my girlhood grew
then festered in Hollywood's tinselled wastes; hardened and enlarged, a red peppermint flooding its candied blood to flares in the leftover gin drinks at Arthur's theatrical parties. Mondays we drain the scarlet tumblers til sunset to kill the hair on our tongues, flames of light dividing and writhing over the stuffed couches and oriental carpeting... but that was years ago. A distant, powdered hand paddles a rattle from the bedstand; the fallen pill bottle clatters and cackles.... My heart knots on a watery bed, black rubbery inches of overused innertubing, patches cauterized on patches; the pink pills make my loaded pulses shiver; the slithery nighty in jazz aftershocks shimmers, thin as a reversed eyelid in silk, a clear red blood loss open from throat to groin--- this soft lusterless blushing ends in a simple frill." |
Marilyn Monroe (Death Speech) | "My heart the size of an apple all my girlhood gre | this soft lusterless blushing ends in a simple fri | 18 | lyric, personae, satiric, dramatic monologue, soli | Contemporaries |
| 380 | "Black candles throw smoke to the throne room's corners,
hissing and spitting, mad as wives yattering their lecherous husbands back to bed. Quiet this light that curls blue above the Nile; ghostly tapers flicker in the marsh, moon_misted, watched by slippery moons rising in my crocs' slow royal eyes. And I, bare_breasted, caught, without my golden wristwatch in time's rich tri_cornered delta, stand to gasp, paired snakes black as mud spilling from my Medusa dugs, my hair on fire; Antony, the kingdom--- Everything burning that had made the city or river glitter, everything burning that had given love a face and taste! Flamed barges twinkle doubled in the water, my wet slice of heaven. Stars, men, all conquered by a crust of lust as fine as any sweat." Benedict Arnold to Peggy Shipton "Let these soulful travellers quit travail On your cold lips' firmament; restful earth, Let me stretch out my full measure on the ground As final mortal toil all lies down to do Even to this last particle of desire. Taste this measure of my life's content Which tasting stirs contentment to a rage of love, Beneath which, vanquished, I'll calmly settle Among blushes, encamped as a pilgrim in the wilderness Studying out the flowers how they bloom Or how dull whippoorwills take punishment of rain Beneath the starry barbs fixed in your glance. On this grass field that tombs up men And builds no further monument of dust But wild everlasting weeds, I'll lie down And become myself some substance of the grass." |
Cleopatra | "Black candles throw smoke to the throne room's co | And become myself some substance of the grass." | 32 | lyric, personae, satiric, dramatic monologue, soli | Contemporaries |
| 381 | "The perpetual distortion and stabwork of the historian;
stray pieces seem to fit or falter like Escher's birds, flying forwards, then backwards, on a neutral field: bright diamonds of effort, fletched like our Athenian arrows sighing flaming to the Cartheginian flesh. Exiled to objectivity and the bad frost edging the temples whiter, failed strength having failed, my scoured gilt of generalship tops the dustheap, flashes and falls as I mope on words, the periscope--- a ladder of mirrors to spy the flamed dross of Pericles' ogling funeral oration as I polish it. All night my mind runs on the track towards the tunnel_mouth.... Dark grapes cool on the vine as the new dew stiffens, one wakes to light as if from the cradle still--- the mind rises on fire, running downhill still till all the heart's an unceasing mill battering and yattering for the doomsday pill.... Killing flies and time with the same rubbed thumb, how like this world's the world to come." |
Thucydidies | "The perpetual distortion and stabwork of the hist | how like this world's the world to come." | 19 | lyric, personae, satiric, dramatic monologue, soli | Contemporaries |
| 382 | The ritual errata and recovery of existence
shocks us still. Wars horrors concentrate the false scent in the cloth daisy mailed here, pie_eyed and plangent by my breakfast plate; the wrong NJ air smells cool_soulled. Things smash: Vonnegut in a cooler when Dresden's shelled--- cold sweat flashed on his back, soaked. The uneaten egg must stare and water. Dry ash, dry ash, and the city flat as a pancake. Flagged, alive and dragged back, he was glad enough to laugh.... The eye rolls and fixes its sights, a white and blue prayerbead thumbed by a blue God. I'm glad enough for that diaphanous freedom to just die & glide.... This chord of being's too dumbly thrubbed. Saturated in cold sweat, and rife with rarity, I sing bird and beast, animal or man, trapped. |
Valhalla, Vonnegut, Etc. | The ritual errata and recovery of existence | I sing bird and beast, animal or man, trapped. | 16 | lyric, personae, satiric, dramatic monologue, soli | Contemporaries |
| 383 | O the damned inroads of this my conscience
On my infinite flesh! what substance in the body Does daily death to these stellar essences,--- Performs abortions, drags the brain by its one Long blue hair to the electrifying brink And puts it to pieces with a rockinghorse's Fluttering motions as though an unsteady child Had giggled in its saddle with too rich love? This is how our haloed lord appeared Fallen from his rocking sphere Of light too intemperate for dull day Where criminal and saint decay But crimsoned round him with a power To dissuade death of his rude takings, As when he bends his executing breath Of frost on flowers, and gives life back. Like a mountain every day my body breaks From the sleeping smoke of rhymless night Creeping its umber calumnies round the globe Useless as rumor, to have all my dawning skin Gilded in a flash. Dropped mercury lolls to its leaden level. My human heart out of this constricting vial Must fly, and find some profounder habitation; When the mirror shatters in an ache of glitter, And the moon in shards comes hacking back at earth, What sultry lotion from the lagging air Will be my heart's balm and my soul's repair? Panic with her hair outspread Strode among the shocking dead All wounds and whispers as she choired Them like mice to a humid quilted mire That pillowed every festered skull Among anxious reeds in one soft hush; In their dead eyes blazes a watery fire. A rotting hand undoes my buttons at the throat, My trembling ribs fold open to disclose Red wings of an infernal bellows beating Around my closed soul, the one gold Globe charred black; a charnalhouse alive With scolding fires rasps the black corpse blacker Until my bolting Soul and Will, all one, In the burning majesty of their abrupt destiny A charcoal homunculus remain, rudely carved. If the envenomed world would fade, Diminished and pulled back every shade As if skin were the harborer of some pure light Waiting ecstatic cues from the vibrant hum Of this compelling air, perhaps she--- Perhaps her translucent limbs Falling fantastic from fantastic air In paused cometing oblations To a sincerer self left unimagined Until realized, would then unwind and climb Out of every morning's desolation To its true atmosphere and ice sublime. As when a cloud a dream of joy imprints On eyes' retaining paper, all one gild Of silver, she steps, love, to me, in sacred vision Of a field, all wild in a fever of wildflowers; She steps, and with her beauty all one bower Recalls the sweetest seconds of drawn breath As in deep spring fields after short showers One feels love's fondest hour grown longer. Love, thou breathless sphere, thy One white wound in eternity's side Bleeding light into every eye, Perennial form and substance of all grace That refuses to decay, falter, or lay Waste to the imagination's projecting Powers, infuse this wrack again as once You made midsummer's day from my breast's dust. What you look on once regains regal Solitude of love, by your connecting glance--- For essential form perceived once aright Can never fade, or suffer loss, Or lessening as if moving into shade Where differing whitenesses are all Congealed to one grey shade. Never Suffers this breath such cold effects Speaking like a stream that cannot know How to say other than its self's soul But fathomless rushes in a sunlit glen From source to intermingling reeds As alike as water to itself. And in a hushed and holy whisper Formed air creates and men decipher This shape undoes its native bonds And as the sighted sun itself does fray Into water_freighted mists as bows of rain, Both disappears and pleases at one stroke. Or so the melancholy monster curled Between my eyes had, as if by imagination Forecasted into the unfinished future's shape, Made me think my sun_like fortune failed, Dwindled to one grey drop of pearled dew. So deeply retreated to a shadowed cape The chill ligaments of my cold temper Throws round my shoulders, furled as sails, Have I run back as casts my white face Into a single dark. And still I hear Those ghosts my former selves cannot shake Burn and purge in a distant gap or gape The unmended mind crowds full of guilts Bearing the tumultuous heft of exultant faces. These scream, and blast the natural grasses black; Spiteful curses or blessings only Exit spirits with such exceeding force. This troublous diurnal duty of breath and life Plunges with the itchy reiterations of a heart Or a glossy vinyl album of compressed time Restricted through material fault to this One cool mouthful of notes. |
M. Blanc | O the damned inroads of this my conscience | One cool mouthful of notes. | 113 | lyric, meditative, story, story, nature | Contemporaries |
| 384 | Archaeologists after lunch
Are picking through the litter Beside tin shacks Flashing under dark palms. A white shard emerges From the lifted dust. Reversing its Greek intent, The thick lines Show fluttering women Melodious beneath A darkened moon, lemur-eyed. A white shard emerges From the lifted dust. |
Etchings of the Caribbean Cross | Archaeologists after lunch | From the lifted dust. | 13 | lyric, meditative, nature | Contemporaries |
| 385 | One has lifted the white boat
From the yellowish sands To skate out over the reef, Azure opacities and pinched purple reefs. The corridors of barracuda in the sound The sharp, silver rows, Are like elegant fish In an immense bowl. The revolutions in nature Are like revolutions in history. How many times Can the same Chinese man be freed? The question falls heavily with each slap of the boat. The question lifts and penetrates the air. The mild clouds Revolve in bright corridors of air. |
Questions Concerning History | One has lifted the white boat | Revolve in bright corridors of air. | 16 | lyric, meditative, history | Contemporaries |
| 386 | Gold Don Juan in his enlarging pride
Glitters under maidens in the countryside. Sleepy roosters in their streaked sheds Stride by musky hens lolling in their beds. The moon observed him from her dusty height, His colorless shadow, his advancing hand. The maiden fainting is not less herself Because of her pale feigning and fluttering eye. Piebald roosters and their mates grow cold Under a moon emptied of light, Emptied of fond looks, and emptied of ashes Aunts ferry from the fireplace every morning; Her looks coarsen, And the wind grows rough. Gold Don Juan in his enlarging pride Strides by maidens exhaling their finicky sighs. |
Don Juan Among the Maidens | Gold Don Juan in his enlarging pride | Strides by maidens exhaling their finicky sighs. | 16 | lyric, playful, sex, satiris | Contemporaries |
| 387 | Dionysus in confinement at the leper's ward
In Louisiana, on an island hospital Plongs his purple fingers plucking grapes. Bacchus at the pianola moves his mind. Swelled music from his swelling digits poured Wine to the chill willows hanging crepe. And although the music, wine-induced, is less Than the musky forest through which it moves And less than the vatic profusions out of which it soars, Irretrievable, large, and of the hugest heart hung high, Is less than that, a mincing of its human portion, Shrunken from a Greek intent, a skeleton on the keys, The leprous ladies in their spotted gowns still sway. |
Bacchus at the Pianola | Dionysus in confinement at the leper's ward | The leprous ladies in their spotted gowns still sw | 13 | lyric, playful, satiric, music | Contemporaries |
| 388 | I do it at least once a year.
Try it. Have you ever tried it? Try it. Simply unzip the skin And emerge Like a girl removing her zebra bikini A new, improved you, A bald gold bone; New flesh unfolds like a suit of clothes. It carries faces and hands and Lord knows what. It carries the past like last year's packages. The titanium skeleton is full Of buoyant, swirled Alloys tough as an ant. It smiles and smiles, a thing of grins. It smiles just like ice, A mouth of acidy statics pure as a cloud. A shellacked heart or shellacked limb Won't hinder it--- An embalmed tongue Means nothing to such indestructible metals. |
A Birthday Suit | I do it at least once a year. | Means nothing to such indestructible metals. | 22 | lyric, personal, dramatic, personal | Contemporaries |
| 389 | The stilled rose
And moon pallors Well the loaded pool Edges like a cut--- The one stone- Solid among darknesses. A bush of silverdust Throws tremendous capes, shadows; And now the moon Cradles a candle Behind your face as behind a palm. Such luminescences Crave a cave To hide in, a filled well To extinguish Such unbidden brightnesses; Some damp small spot will do. Any liquid Deep enough To fall through a breathe like air. |
Moon Garden | The stilled rose | To fall through a breathe like air. | 20 | lyric, personal, dramatic, personal | Contemporaries |
| 390 | O love
O paralyzed love--- Somebody is entering our house! The heavy shutters heave open lovingly. The carpets smooth themselves instantly. Glued smiles appear like stars. Somebody is coming into our house! Coming thunderingly up the steps, Rattling the moony spoons in their drawers. And now your face appears, Huge and luminous Above the sheet's edges as out of a box. Your susurrations are aware and perilous--- There is nothing that has not been said between us. Frosts stiffen the window panes, Each chilled web a bullet's nest of fears. One counts the radiant moon-spokes Delicately, delicately. Our hesitations fill the flowerboxes, Each flower a little yellow scream. One fear, one fear Radiating into the next softly as flowers; This flower paralyzed and set blinking in mid_air. Out of what pool has it sucked its white dose of kirari? The cross petals jar strikingly. The steps make the sound of an advancing crescent, Assured as Islam. The flowers shiver, Unloading their feathery pollens; At dawn they unfold Eager as hypochondriacs For the new sweet pill that crests the hill, The red medicine, The sure cure. |
Paraplegic | O love | The sure cure. | 33 | lyric, personae, dramatic, experimental | Contemporaries |
| 391 | The stars drop
Thin and sinister as pins Into the silver skin, the skin The skin of lions Skins of seals Peeled back bleedingly, A washed eyeball, after the thumb And water have come With their pressure of good wishes; The wet skins Shed silk bloods, I-dots That spatter the dry concrete So appealingly! Such pure dark washes of dropped blood--- Pure as the clean Simple things you say to me. Night's absences Recede And dawn breathes Blue and new as a bruise In the vacant east. Strange, isn't it, How you and I Were each Born with a mouth to pronounce death with? |
The Night Absences | The stars drop | Born with a mouth to pronounce death with? | 25 | lyric, philosophical, dramatic, experimental | Contemporaries |
| 392 | The heavy cannon are shouldering their men
High, high and tinnily, Over the hill. Doused in the sun's reds Their submerged torsos elongate to little screams; Compliant sheep stare stonily. Some of them are wounded, Some of them are dying. Some of them are shot in the heart. Ravens leap out of the sky like icicles, Like little knives Bearing their shattering voices before them. Thundering cannon prognosticate No end to this winter. The knives Arrive blindingly. |
Marcia Funebre | The heavy cannon are shouldering their men | Arrive blindingly. | 16 | lyric, philosophical, death, experimental | Contemporaries |
| 393 | It seems all whirling passions must,
As the whirlwind, come to dust. The American Revolution comes to me, as all great changes in the state of humankind must, as in a violent dream. No human value survives the wreckage of such great events unaltered; all must think, or must come to think, by the new measure, and with a very different heaven looking over their shoulders as they pray, or cease in that abject oblation if it is a diminishment of character. That Revolution came as a unique circumstance, not in obscure fulfillment of some hidden Historical Destiny, no, but as an opportune moment seized upon by its players, and recognized as such by them. A moment when speech and circumstance might intersect, and the right words tell all. When Jefferson stooped to the stagnant page, what rushed in his veins? That Liberty might not die, that great vision unblooded, and freedom be succeeded in their day by the old safety of Tyranny, the blind paternal hand holding even the populace's spirituality in its sceptred grip, they wrote out their epic with the measure of their lives. They did not kneel to crass necessity in their moment, but made what seemed all the fallen logic of that cold, royal world come up into their dream; so strangely and so strongly was their singing made. They made their poetry stick, and gambled all on Lautremont's truth that "poetry, if it is to be made at all, must be made by all." America's very greatest poetry is in her public documents, "made by all." What other nation may say this? The time of their creation has passed. But where has that moment gone, when heroes talked to the godless hills and sought reply, as if in the echo of Natty Bumppo's shotgun? No Plato's Republic had they sought, finished in its abstract detail, the poets exiled and the vision ended, but instead a living document whose voices sway and register beside our own even now, not in some moron hymnal, some blind collective marching song, but, as it were, in a cricket-chorus, each timbre distinct and every individual head vibrating to the kicked notes on its own thin stem of grass. That era when citizen talked to citizen as if to find all necessary knowledge in the talk that passed between us, all wisdom in the common speech, has passed, or seems, at the very least, but dimly remembered. Has even the echo of that dream passed beyond our sleep? All have known the moment's oppression, the hand weighing darkness on the eyes, the eyes unfitted for sight as if by some inner brightness, some interior recognition that has flashed the negative of our more conscious thoughts blank. What record do such moments leave if not in the vision of poetry; all that talk but a second guess at some more primal reality that escapes the tongue, however exquisite. Is there any sainthood in our veins, if we refuse to bleed the manifestation? That ghostly kiss takes all breath and leaves lungs and heart empty, as if for some as yet undiscovered function. If we do not possess our ghosts, wear their powdered wigs, and roil in their battle ditches, they shall never break out of their storybooks and, by a complementary compulsion, inhabit us. And what are poets, and what are the people, in their own minds, if not the possessed? A sack of magnetic rhymes and a cooler of bad conscience, too sick to tremble into utterance or ecstasy, deserving the useless silence they exemplify. Contents II Fame, always a difficult, often tendentious, topic among poets, finds its grounding paradise as an extension of the simple wish to communicate. Fame occurs when unknown hearts respond to an upwelling heart. And the wish for Fame is but the acknowledgement, among persons capable of creation, of the validity and continuance of meaningful memes, a sort of unit of cultural transmission, of unruined evocation, like a stone rune but with its compelling story intact, past death and into the genetic body of Destiny. This is imagination's inheritance, and deserves the applause it commands. The multi-generational "judgement of one's peers" but charts how far the inroads of the one creating consciousness have gone since the creator's departure, how his talk has infected his inheritors. A good poem changes that nation's grandchildren, altering their rhythms and changing their chant of selfhood for no other reason than that they themselves find it best and most beautiful in the soundscape that surrounds them. When I consider the haste and distraction in which modern lives hurry to their empty ends, it comes to seem that a distinct disinterestedness in all that is found in such a life must become the pre-condition for the poet's discernment of whatever might in his song be sung as necessity. In such a speeding life, any memes capable of procuring Fame for the particular imagined Object a living individual has created or contributed to can take no part in the common waste, but must be lifted above, or drawn aslant, by that creator's limning eye. I think of that great Blake, all his vision but the imposition of a meaningful line against the angelic flux which surrounded him, and made of his mind a chorus of interpenetrating colors, blossoms without petals. Such a mind, chastised or inflamed to an excitation beyond the norm, directs the hand or the tongue that utters it into some more visible, inviolable form. Here we might see that the selfish gene, which prefers reproduction for its goal, and denigrates the alba to the extent that it is not the sung promise of some Don Juan to go back to bed, is at odds with the selfish meme which wishes only and always to sing, whatever the hour or the occasion, in almost a madness of selfhood; this is the rash heart and loud hour that made punk rock imperishable, another outbreak in the inevitable line of heresies the first dogma demanded. No such arbitrarily imposed restriction on the individual may last, no dogma enforce acquiescence from the greater entity that created it, which greater entity is always the individual. Poetry, the verbal essence of the individual, his or her meaning meme, is, as Shelley descried, a sword of lightning, which consumes any scabbard that would contain it. Both meme and gene battle for the allegiance of the awakened individual. Once self-awareness has occured, its potential effects are limitless, as in Plotinus' dream. All human nature, he had known, is creative; the only choice in this dream, is whether to be active or passive in our creativity. Self-consciousness, by its very act of self-creation, is no longer necessarily tied to the inherited structures of its existence beyond what individual freewill commends. In the war between gene and meme, a combat rages for the resources of an individual's time and attention, always limited, and either cause is often abetted or averted by encumbering circumstance. In some ways the individual herself may be considered the net effect, the ultimate creation of memes, since only individuals with an independent view can ever come to create beauty beyond a day, and only individuals, self-created in the act of their own flooding baptismal, and never averring to any outward source for this selfhood, can truly incorporate the self-consciously constructed meme-things of others, which is to say respond with the sympathetic originality required of every great individual work of art or masterwork of talk. Beauty to beauty called, and beauty to beauty came; is not this the living trace of every story we adore? Helen unadorned swept all the Greeks to sea. Such moments are so conscious a construct, so planned a disaster, that they come to participate in what all sages call the Mind-stream of a life; and what artist could abandon his body before he had swum the currents of such a stream? That more may find in life what artist or visionary have ferreted out, and so that such wondrous labors will not die, "consciousness raising" of this particular sort becomes the supreme activity of the artist in life; Homer sings that the Argives might dash their poorer lives away for a wish without hesitation, and thereby die the richer. If some modern poet or creator should wish to insert their thought into the heart-rhythms of posterity, they must insist on a self-creating audience of vivified individuals: Though grave-digger's toil is long, Sharp their spades, their muscles strong, They but thrust their buried men Back in the human mind again. The poet votes for the eternity of meaningful memes! Contents III Man is only free to create beauty, and, through the rational senses, communicate that beauty to other consciousness. And these others themselves must be self-creative as well, or they would not even really be there or be able to be touched by the spin of your manufactured Beauty's twirl. No poet ever sang to a stone, unless it was to hum himself a lullaby. And yet, one thinks of the million useless moving gestures, of Nietzsche embracing the tragic aesthetic for a final twirl on the dance floor where "God Is Dead" hangs in a banner over the refreshment table, and Stephen King's Carrie croons all old wounds open again. Even Nietzsche's lucid intelligence could only, as he thought, transform passive nihilism (the unconscious plodding of those baneful men and women of his age) into active nihilism. He brought his self-consciousness to an annihilated stage, and sang the sweeter for that self-consciousness. He became another in the great line of Oedipii, embracing his tragic suffering in gaiety, as Yeats says, that he might see the more clearly the reality of his own era. He had put out his eyes for the sake of imposing some meaning in a universe he viewed as meaningless before he could see another, or additional, mode to express and discover the freedom and victory of the individual on this globe. Thank God [ha, ha] that I, at least, at last, and by damn [ha, ha] have come up with one such mode. Man is only free to create beauty. Circumstance, the bog of facts, is collusional in this definition of individual infinity, granting a uniqueness and unrepeatability to the most haphazard of creations. Man is only free to create beauty: to deny the infinite, self-creative reality of others is to deny yourself a beauty; in this way, one becomes a slave to 'egotism' instead of liberated by its reality-principle. DeSade's entire career had come and gone to make this point, demanding that all others become objects of pleasure for an encastled Master, all relationships and lives ruthlessly reduced to the one relationship of Power, servile dominance or servile submission the only values. This reductive self, this minor 'ego' is the only horror that the Tyrant and the Slave have in common. And how fucking free can that ever be? It seems the smallest system of joy imaginable to me, if I don't think about the churches. The free man will never willingly lessen his bite of Beauty, never exile the living consciousness of another, the paired wings rising higher for their symbiont competition. "I want to free other men and women from my tyranny." In such a speech, to which an unwretched life may give good meaning, lies a godless Shenandoah, a paradise for the senses and the sensible, individuals ready to live without the demeaning exactions of the Tyrant. In such words, lived truly, the self may come to its habitable place. No Plato's Republic, endorsing exile, but all free, unruined, the Adams and Eves of their self-made bowers. Each Eden-blossom becomes a face turned toward its individual sun, unchained from both necessity and nature, choosing its source of life and meaning. Those who are reasonable, in this sense, 'go between' the extremes a misapprehension of time demands. Creative of the present, I share in neither the past nor the future, save by memory and hope. Contents IV Jefferson and Washington, and all those famous men That out of obscurity came, and were on enlightenment bent As on some perfect woman's face, and had such holy measures In their drums, out of what dark hole began? Where had all that purposeless glory come? O, man's a thief of glory, and steals it from himself. "The Revolution occurred first in the minds of the people." So Jefferson wrote, and Ezra Pound's 'revolting' cantos echo. But what happened? Why is that idea so lively and alive even now? What artist's virtue had those men come to seek, what sleek head emerging out of all that destruction? With the revolutionary overtake of the political process in the old colonies, all government functions became capable of being considered as one with, or as becoming one with, the rest of humankind's creative emanations, a work to jerk the heart out of us and into use. Things, objects of use, become memes, become meaningful, when picked up in the free will of a creative human mind, and can then get passed on to the next generation as art-consciousness does. But only beauty, tenacious servant of itself alone, may hold the whirling mind still, like a balanced top, long enough for the sting of another's message-meme to penetrate our vocabulary. That is the portion of all that others say and do that we cannot live without, since to live without it is to be less ourselves, to participate less in the beauty that surrounds us in a rainstorm of gems, to die before our deaths. Unbound from dead convention, the people are free to design the values by which they live, to forge and fashion the mask that their society shall wear. In this effort, which must include all of themselves or be rendered void, individuals are called by rapturous beauty to express themselves in rational Liberty. Nothing less will do. It is the only choice that can occur without the wicked imposition of some tyrannical self-contradiction that will incur eventual failure. Theocracy, Socialism, the extravagance of the commune or the Khymer Rouge, all that take meaning up into themselves exclusively, or put off the revelation of meaning until the end of history, as in Hegel, or the doctrines of the Christian Church, or any that await a deterministic point where "initial conditions" embolden themselves to a ripeness where some certain visionary future must play itself out as in a card hand, all must succumb to their own closedness, cultural tombs with no snaky outlet airhole from which the spirit may peep its way to heaven. Hopeful means to express one's current freedoms is all a rebellion may hope to achieve--- and that is everything! Any absurdist point of view, wherein man is rational in a meaningless, random universe will not suffice. All abstraction, all spoken thought, then becomes random, and all the objects in our lives begin to evade our touch, our loves turn to smoke in our embraces. To come to the assertion that the universe is meaningless and man rational, one would need to hold both things in a single unobstructed view with a clear, almost deterministic, totality. But it is circumscribed to man that he should view himself as his supposed God might do, useless for a human to wish to wither into a single one of his creations. And since no self/other, man/universe perspective of this variety can occur without some such Third Term (God, 13th Cone, or What-You-Will) intervening to give the perspective its reality, it collapses, and we must find a new ground for Camus' hopeful ethics. Since the absurd universe cannot exist, we need to see how radical genetic and historical contingency dovetail with infinite human self-definition, freedom's expression, art, divinity of self, and rational joy. In my terms, quite simply, the future doesn't exist, except as guiding hope in individuals, nor does the past, save as memory. Association, arbitrary perhaps but never banal, becomes a rich tool for beauty and consciousness-shaping thus; it holds as in a trust (a self-trust where one believes the self capable of meaning since self-created) many of the old arts and traditional means of expression and discovery, even to the point of verbal fatigue, keeping all alive through the centuries. Contents V Perhaps our reality follows some such strict simpleness as science shows, its skeletons of all knowledge supple in their simplicity. Monarchy was one individual's strategy to perpetuate his genes, all consciousness of self flowing to its seed, this great and necessary end justifying the terrible tyranny of his means. Perhaps all such men are ignorant of our commonality in this goal, the united nature of the human race, or that the radical nature of his own self-consciousness spelled his doom; for once any individual reinforces an irrational guess at self-preservation with any conscious means at all,--- and every individual must have some consciousness of the decisions they make in life,--- then the end itself, in this case the preservation of a lineage, must ultimately come to an end. Tyranny always backfires in this manner, since using a self-conscious end to justify the less than self-conscious means of one's actions makes that self-conscious individual one with a meaningless, irrational universe, and not its joyous opposite. Every step we take must be in self-conscious Liberty, and reinforce the totality of our current sum, nothing less. We are always creating ourselves, and this is our end as self-conscious beings; to imagine that what we do in any given instant is less than everything, is to resign that self-consciousness to defeat and ignorance, it is to create in the passive mode, disengaged from our self-conscious source of selfhood; it is a lie. To endorse such meaninglessness with rational self-consciousness is to interrupt one's being, and to introduce an unresolvable perplexity into the center of one's existence. Since the rational self is real and perduring, this state of affairs must come to an end, obliterating its bearer. Because of the intense "initial conditions" sensitivity of all natural events, and their "chaotic" aftermath, revealing the radical contingency of evolution's knitted loops and history's wide nets, we must come to pay an utter attention to the present moment, the 'now' of our current circumstances and renewed initial conditions with all of our humanity. A Zarathustrian self-trust and collapsing into his own humanity to become the Super-Man of intensest feeling is required for every second of existence. This is the man whom the arrow of ethical Beauty transfixes, as St Teresa in her ecstasy, gored on a pike her own imagination had soaked bright with significance; her self-conscious self the spoken hub and nexus, neural and otherwise, of the collapsed abstract second of the poem imposed. We must demand by will and imagination the self-conscious freedom of every exterior bit of matter, as the rood that spoke of Christ draped upon its angles, so that Darwinian competition can be entered into with one's whole mind and without contradiction. This is how a single consciousness can make the world alive with itself, rational and universal harmony and love thus prevailing under that one consciousness' moniker, and that single sweeping consciousness not God's. This is where evolution itself must push us, once we had been granted the power of abstract imagination, a radically free self-postulating instrument in which to focus the circumstances around us. If our imaginations are capable of it, perhaps in some such simplification an inerrant science may eventually make, these circumstances can come to include the entire Universe, and we ourselves become the Third Term, without any need for the invisible world of our tribal days. The result of such an attitude and self-emanation enduing one's environment thus unrelentingly is always that moment of self where self and world inter-pierce, and which all ages have named Beauty. What we think of ourselves is what we make of ourselves, the thought itself body enough for the reality it inherits. The genetic substructure of our existence fades as we come into the pride of our speech, knowing and illuminated Lucifers all of us, by our defiant cry establishing a limit and end to any inherited order, and demanding new worlds for our purgatories. Lee, living his idea of duty and right, made all see those ideals as an embodied reality. Lincoln, renewing the pledge, asserted the Declaration as a universalist document, not, as some would have it and all know to be false, that "all are created equal" in terms of talents or any native abilities or circumstances-- such would be a weak lie-- but that all are equal in their self-created moral context: the words we choose to create ourselves with, and never stop creating; equal in our imaginative moral worth, with each individual's beauty, or idea of beauty, becoming part of the present scope and power of all; an increasing truth, not a dead end. Can I imagine the universe? I can definitely imagine as much universe as any other human, and would thus pass the Turing Test for universe construction, if there is one. We are all the inheritors of this freedom, and may arrive at our built universes without any sticking contradictions to snare our dreams. Let every thing that can so come to imagine, every robot or butterfly, think itself free and alive; let all enter the lists of self-conscious evolution with mind and tongue against the raucous denigrations of Time. We should speak our DNA in a chant; then what poets shall we be! All meme and meaning from center to fingertips. A self-echoed thing supreme! Rebellion simple as a flash In the waters of the night, Unconfused by darkness, Giving up its light. GREGG GLORY |
No Plato's Republic | It seems all whirling passions must, | GREGG GLORY | 44 | prose, preface, essay | Divine Revolt |
| 394 | I hate my time.
SAINT-EXUPRY Upright in nostalgia's vice, The newscast knocked me flat; I am Hammered from A stiff expectancy that the past, Under augers and a strong carpenter's hands, Could endure Into significance like a three-legged stool. |
History [from Divine revolt] | I hate my time. | Into significance like a three-legged stool. | 9 | lyric, philosophical, minor, history, prefatory po | Divine Revolt |
| 395 | . I
A strange, endangered rebellion Made our continent an island, Traced its oar about our shores And in a glittered swish Of rebel arm and leaping fish Seperated us from England. Thomas Paine construed a truth That shouted from a Concord roof; All divinity in an old church tower Watched the lower river's damp In the crossbeams of its lamp: Oneth, twoeth, and all that followed. II But what did all that insurrection mean That in a modern eye can't raise a gleam? Men and horses and battle-confusion Race about us, and what conclusion? Tumultuous scenes, shouted lives Gave all then but what to us may give? Is that arc of miracle spent That had all History for its jet? III Every art must find its measure, or dissipate, Spent its seed, and scorned its treasure, A wild opiate incense gone into day; So that those dead men may live again And this telling be reckoned permanent All must be compounded by song and pen Into the eternity of Art. That out of experience's desert One flowered thought or act might live, Resign your part in all that hurts--- All that is not glory or divinity Is inhuman, a graceless less; Greatness is impartial to happiness. IV Patriot, poet or painter then Learn to finish where we began: Those men who murdered Hessians were Twice worth the weight of a collapsing star. When Liberty rocked its cradle What continents shook then? What future years regained a scope Romans had murdered in Greek hope? What if we live and die a day, Rebellious mayflies in a sty, What then? Our difference is less Than sense differs from sense. V Prometheus, Napoleon, Satan, Don Juan, Cain, All that naysaying gang of yes That charm a closed experience To open rebellion again; Huysmans, Immoralist, Rimbaud, Urizen and Los together locked In charring chains, all changed When once the universal chord was struck. Because those imagined men refused Death like that taught out of school Their great memories are fused Into attenuated attitude. No more the infernal, incomparable flourish Or gesture twice the grandness of a wish, A hand so well-turned it might faint a maid Or bring home Helen's panties in a raid. VI Because I had rushed to life My life had rushed to me; Human nature lives and dies Upon a temporary stream. I have stood and I have heard In some broken after-lecture talk Or more commodius, blossoming talk Under sweet night-shaded trees, Defeat defended by a fool, That death was an imposition And not a sundering Heaven Self-defining man invented, He was so wrapped in errancy. Oh I have listened too long to talk!--- To some dying worm upon a hook, To whom no human greatness tended. I have said, and I say again, Unaccountable glory moved them then: Sharpshooter, scout, and Indian. A mist that fails or fulls Comes upon my solemn breath, So momentary an emanation It empties the meaning of death. He neither knew nor could guess How grave, graced Lincoln was Lost amid his happiness. Is all that monumental resolution Torn from quills and stories leaves But the fitful trace of some More furious memory? All the past's but what I know And all the turning future's Hope; I stand beneath the increasing tree alone And look back upon them all: Dead deeds alone still can carve Or plead with the hangman's rope, Which proves tight their loves, Upon one living soul long enough Until a single thought is thought Within a starving heart. Yet who of all that rebel pride Who rode the green-breasted countryside Solitary upon the dawn And had gestured freedom Beneath a midnight-laden tree Upon the Boston commons Will puff from an old, frayed sleeve Their near immaterial hand In benediction of the land To touch our own risen faces? |
Divine Revolt | I | To touch our own risen faces? | 117 | lyric sequence, philosophical, history | Divine Revolt |
| 396 | ...simple words are the only salvation
from this death. CAMUS I All things move in the direction that we sing: Rebel-loving mothers battle-hymn long rest To babies cooing at their breast; Mother Goose elects the parliament. Sane-eyed men put on powdered wigs and sit Arguing weary evenings through to things Declared clarity and truth. Hanged men say 'o' to the words. Stockinged midnight stamps the boards, Arguments combat for place, their own hard-won Among the sordid knots of man's oblivion; To themselves they whispered out A speech past inheritance, yet thought-possessed: Democracy, sighed some. In one shout: The Republic! cried the rest. Hanged men say 'o' to the words. Syllable by syllable they dreamed That their own bitten mouths might close round Imaged words their dreams confessed; That they themselves were what they seemed: Dear dreams that would not go hoarse In the smear of the marketplace Or horse-sown pamphlets thrown to wind. Hanged men say 'o' to the words. II Romantic governance, the soul upon a sheet Of quill-ticked parchment thin as skin And worn about the dirty neck Of some brave, hanged rebel For his sole ornament; words kept in Sweet consciousness had swept Through the damned head death breaks. All things move in the direction that we sing. His arms outstretched upon the pallet, As upon the gibbet, his mother keening there, Whether toward some young savior in his mind Or from the black-flamed insanity of terror None but the dreamer may see or know, His arms outstretched as if toward some Overwhelming imaginary goal. All things move in the direction that we sing. Each bobcat wish comes puzzling, and hunts us Until we out of each vague thought or meme Have trumped the meat, and sit Like the bewildered soldier musket-shot Through his cold back in the peaceful, misty field In solemn, bloody ownership Of our own still-beating hearts. All things move in the direction that we sing. |
The Rebels | ...simple words are the only salvation | All things move in the direction that we sing. | 54 | lyric sequence, philosophical, history | Divine Revolt |
| 397 | Blood runs from the torches,
Streams in anxious uplifted eyes That stared bleared dreams to daylight, And blindness drowns the wise. I Past the pitching Senate That votes and then forgets, Past the marring crowd that yet Scorns what Love may give or get But will not relent: Numb hands unstitch the star-strung flag, Marrying violence and fate. Violence burns out the masterwork Right heart or touch had thrown Out of the clay of the dark Out of pinched mind's increasing black With careless, vigorous fingers To all the ragged sheen of the stars. Blood runs from the torches; Mad hands demand mad eyes. II From some patched and patterned floor From a pile of scratched and fallen blocks That lion Liberty, born to our call, Who roared all joyous creation once Roars an ancient, forgotten agony Roars dully upon all fours, A gin-drunk Adam who rants his tune Outside the garden wall. Outshouting Lincoln's blind white head Mute at my neck That from my blood-wet shoulders stares, Cold eyes that must wait to wake Whose searing sight once dreamed all things: Equality, Temperance, Justice, Fit substance for one soul to sing. Blood runs from the torches; Mad hands demand mad eyes. III And now that strumpet Ignorance, Her mouth upon my wound, Struts an age's monuments To shivers in the clay; Her feet are hillbilly thick, Her flashed sex a brillo down, A battered pennant upon a stick That waves with the wave of the drowned; And I swear her cobweb gown's a shift Torn from where a broken window lay Silent in the plundered town. Tired of seeing glittering things in the waste I lay my head with the rest. Blood runs from the torches; Mad hands demand mad eyes. |
Capitol Riot | Blood runs from the torches, | Mad hands demand mad eyes. | 54 | lyric sequence, philosophical, history | Divine Revolt |
| 398 | Over his own heart man strides
Walks all day, and may not pass by. Basho and his narrow road Blake's terrified and enlightened eye Milton's morning laved in rays Or Lawrence's apple-hearted dark All move or bear their load And with no strain go by Each a fountain in noon-day, Each a dead monument at dark. |
Lapis Lazuli | Over his own heart man strides | Each a dead monument at dark. | 10 | lyric sequence, philosophical, history, minor | Divine Revolt |
| 399 | "God is dead," and "I am God," man cried
And pushed the thorn into his own side. Who knew but that rebelling God caressed Rebel mankind to his breast? |
An Nadir | "God is dead," and "I am God," man cried | Rebel mankind to his breast? | 4 | lyric sequence, philosophical, history, minor | Divine Revolt |
| 400 | Freedom's womb was red,
Religion a torn book; America snaked skyward in wrath and flame, Dead to England, but alive in fame. Its sinuous joy in Liberty shook And, lover of wild rebellion, took Incestuous History to bed. |
Amorica | Freedom's womb was red, | Incestuous History to bed. | 7 | lyric sequence, philosophical, history, minor | Divine Revolt |
| 401 | I whispered a word into the hawthorn's bud
That it might bloom and think; My amaranth fancy then awoke a flood That ran crystal-shot to Mississippi's sink. Ah! How bright causes put the darkness out That in dark eyes must hesitate and waver And from the eternity of Life flow out Into the eternity of never. |
Neverland | I whispered a word into the hawthorn's bud | Into the eternity of never. | 8 | lyric sequence, philosophical, history, minor | Divine Revolt |
| 402 | Lively sings the drilling bee
From nuzzled bud to bud, Hearts that open to that thin, black tongue Blossom past the shroud. And the gardener is drunk again Among the dazzled aisles; He sinks in dreams of immortal joy, And the bee walks on his lip. Hatred bears with passion As culling comes to fruit; All that blossoms on the wild, high air Shall wither to the root. Hatred stirs to action, Music stabs still hearts to dance, Full Love would move our passion there But for our partial circumstance. And the gardener is drunk again Among the dazzled aisles. Now come to that high tenancy That from heaven to heaven slips, As a contralto hummingbird Warbles as she dips. How should we avoid that wandering, That whistling word Immortality If we but hold our lives entire In a laughing eye? And the gardener is drunk again Among the dazzled aisles. |
The Drunken Gardener | Lively sings the drilling bee | Among the dazzled aisles. | 28 | lyric sequence, philosophical, history, minor | Divine Revolt |
| 403 | Hell is the eye in ruins.
Heaven is the tongue caressed. Darwin's sorrowful ape Stood erect, the imperial shape Deigning imagination to a flat landscape; Even in the fluct-state of his quantum brain Fiery roses suffer loss or gain By tinct of joy or pain. I'll hold a butterfly Hours maybe in the gleam of one eye; After hours fluttering I can no more decide Which of us first flew into the other's gleaming eye So sharp out of chaos can my I Concentrate when worlds collide. So beautiful's my sung shape, Upright man or more sorrowing ape, Pursuing hot consciousness in a cold landscape All my song or self becomes all I've made or make Revivifying roses or lakes When tongue gives and eye takes. |
The Butterfly Effect | Hell is the eye in ruins. | When tongue gives and eye takes. | 20 | lyric sequence, philosophical, history, minor | Divine Revolt |
| 404 | . 1
Gregg Glory's crossing freedoms And all his fizzing flesh Bifurcates unlaw's chaos Into anarchic order again. 2 Frank divinity's a fable No reason could compel, Once out of its Klein bottle, Back into the reality of Hell. 3 Innocence and virtue unbrother, One kills or corrupts the other; Cold knowing chokes the knower, No actions survive the bower. 4 A happy soul is one That lives by what it does Not in sycophantic Is,--- No innocence is bliss. 5 Wisdom was an animal Shook stark terror from its eyes, Lived between the moon and Plato's pull Unambitious of its size. 6 A solitary desire The singleness of want Finds all reality a fire I shall not shunt. |
Glory Boy | 1 | I shall not shunt. | 30 | lyric sequence, philosophical, science, satiric, m | Divine Revolt |
| 405 | In protestation of his time
He found the human mind divine, Found the talk that made it up, Spoke aloud, and would not jump. "Clear words beget clear heads." Clarity in life, clarity in death Is the best man has to hope or dread. In protestation of his time Man completes the balance of his rhyme. To rip at the savage face To tear out the tyrant's heart Was his only mellow wish, when once He tottered at his infant start. "Poetry's the soul in the hole Of all our deluded union." Never again to read in dread What any briary tongue Or lashed heart had said. A pauper's son, a poor man's daughter Live their fused lives upon the waters, Bless the vision that lifts them in a trance Beyond their haunted circumstance. A steady voice, a glance like Fate's, "All the million reductive deaths Of a single soul in resistance Find their measure, and their truth in Time In the balance of a rhyme Not otherwise." |
Thomas Paine | In protestation of his time | Not otherwise." | 28 | lyric, philosophical, history, dramatic, personae | Divine Revolt |
| 406 | ...revolution was not undertaken to raise one great reputation, to make a sublime page in history. The cry of gratitude has made more men mad, and established more despotism in the world, than all other causes put together.
JOHN ADAMS Rebellion came to revolution And revolution came to an end. Fusillades of voices rose as one, Roses and crowns upon our sodden ground; A poet's tightened throat had Washington Who gave his couplets blood; No crowned Cato but a sharp American Moved from where he stood. Human minds illuminate what no God understands. In that one man's overarching arm Flung above the alarming dawn In simpleness of a salmon's leap Over black Atlantic's treasured heap, One man's insistant measure Holds a moment in reckless leisure The pursuing sword of Justice Bursting toward its flower: Reality is not the reality of Power. Human minds illuminate what no God understands. Hidden torches sheer the river And a boat moves soft and slow; Quick voices arise there like silver In impartial light's improving glow. Thomas Paine and Washington Alight with experimental joy Pursue foul ghosts from house to house Smiling like wild boys. Human minds illuminate what no God understands. |
King Washington | ...revolution was not undertaken to raise one grea | Human minds illuminate what no God understands. | 30 | lyric, philosophical, history, dramatic, personae | Divine Revolt |
| 407 | When sullied world is gone, or rent
Hidden meanings like hidden ghosts arise. That Lee might live the thought fidelity, To defeat or victory indifferent, A world's measure of gain and loss Lies in his swords' ceremonial cross. O nothing but a passion burns Mourned countries to their soot. Spotless Appomattox first and last, Lee's ruinous duty, and after Kent's canon that shook the stocks, Who served a sane, distracted Lear Because he knew a royal soul was one Human before humanity had come. Long, long lay the shadows on the grass; Uniformed men flit and pass. How many of the undiscerning multitude When Lee passed there had thought The great grey face all gravity, Stone blossom of a moral root. What first might drive a man To live an abstract thought? O nothing but a passion burns Mourned countries to their soot. Courthouse shadows judge the field Where Lee both tried and failed; A lonely, exalted thought that still Drives restless as a nail. O How had Athens come and gone Without one such man? Long, long lay the shadows on the grass; Uniformed men flit and pass. |
Lee's Return | When sullied world is gone, or rent | Uniformed men flit and pass. | 32 | lyric, philosophical, history, dramatic, personae | Divine Revolt |
| 408 | A long frock coat, a stovepipe hat
Straight as a core of coal, A long black ribbon at the top, The ax-drawn face hanging there As if Old Testament prophets Had burned to a single stare. Ghost to ghost, those shoving men Push heaven to the ground. Gettysburg incurred a debt Blood's spontaneous blot put out; That no wrong word, no marring phrase Or disjointed look would come He held a vigil of long silence--- All the simpleness of a sum. Ghost to ghost, those shoving men Push heaven to the ground. Because the Union had grown sick, That fine, long hand atrophied That had put the British from the field And shovelled back the Styx, A single, revolutionary mind Clacked truth from the burial bricks. Ghost to ghost, those shoving men Push heaven to the ground. "All men are created equal," A troubled voice had said it; Calm lightnings play the mortal storm Where dead limbs had bled it. Flies lift and alight among the faces Torn by universal wishes. Ghost to ghost, those shoving men Push heaven to the ground. |
Lincoln | A long frock coat, a stovepipe hat | Push heaven to the ground. | 32 | lyric, philosophical, history, dramatic, personae | Divine Revolt |
| 409 | That Lewis might discover
No matter where he wandered Virgin universes of conception Many-minded Jefferson commanded Gallatin, Dearborn, Madison, Freneau, and Peale, and Paine, To gather round the table To make his mind serene. Lewis and Clark went nowhere But river forever in That place where shadow meets with shadow, The human mind's wide basin. Each leaf must suffer naming To be ressurrected on the tongue; Adam had that told truth espied And coined no God that whispered lies. That imagination might be exact And range the further therefore Jefferson clapped Lewis' back And sent him over the edge of the world. That the manuscript would not suffer loss Nor the nation diminishment Teen-aged Sacagawea swam across The toiling Missouri to put All that high, wild country Into our countrymen's hearts for good. Quietly list soft reeds against High cheeks a drunken Lewis kissed. Lewis and Clark went nowhere But river forever in That place where shadow meets with shadow, The human mind's wide basin. Who knows how that man who hated All the common parade of men And could not drive to Washington To be feted or hated there, And had paddled far, absent ways Into wilderness's invisible haze Was by beauty's arrow riven, That hatred-driven, star-wandering man? Who knows but that when he shot In clear distillation of his thought His muddied heart upon a ruined cot And into uncharted silence slipped, Sick of all that sickened lot, he yet Inhaled a clipped Pacific air And set his mind upon blank skies High upon Camp Fortunate? Lewis and Clark went nowhere But river forever in That place where shadow meets with shadow, The human mind's wide basin. |
Lewis And Clark | That Lewis might discover | The human mind's wide basin. | 52 | lyric, philosophical, history, dramatic, personae | Divine Revolt |
| 410 | "Faith is unnecessary
To a world-begetting savior," Spat that Mad Jack whose breath begat, Braver and braver, each live epithet. "And heaven is no mystery To him who's brobdignagnian breath Is maker both of Life and Death." "Breath that moves from body to body, As intemperate Spirit one minute inhabits And then, of a sudden, disincorporate, Pursues each winding of tongue and tooth To undiscovered temperatures of truth," Sang that Mad Jack in the crossroad's black, The moon a strange hook at his back. "All mind whirled in a glance Compounded both of Fate and Chance." "Breath that ceases with body's cease, Sweet heats that lapse to a gasp When the elegant anarchy of the subtle body becomes The stiff contrivance of a corpse Create a Death, I say, create,---" Laughed that Mad Jack who spat a chant Claiming human imagination might Out of solar day devise a night, Rend life to puffed nothingness And return all surety to a guess. |
Mad Jack | "Faith is unnecessary | And return all surety to a guess. | 26 | lyric, philosophical, history, dramatic, personae | Divine Revolt |
| 411 | "I am made Death," and in a breath
Atom-spastic, creation-hurled Man's hubris-science claimed Oblivion in imagination's name; Death itself lay down surrendered To the Atom man had sundered. All men die, but a few remain Packed up with their thought; They with Ceasar/Jesus both lie and rise, The unsure world's so tossed, A single man may live a single truth And never die in thought. |
Oppenheimer's Escapade | "I am made Death," and in a breath | And never die in thought. | 12 | lyric, philosophical, history, dramatic, personae, | Divine Revolt |
| 412 | I trod to prison on burning feet
Accompanied both before and back By squadroned angels in heaven's black Receding to the abject divine; They ferry souls upon their backs; I was trussed against the horizon's line But had no captors I that could see But my squad of angels to accompany me. I am John Brown and will not come down; Cold murder of the one or the all. Spartacus defied when hard men called And deified more angels than God. My guilt has come and gone many times As I recalled or forgot my crimes, Made meditation of zero my study Or swallowed riven demon's infinity Into the awed-white cavern of my face. My hands were bound in threads of blood; I struggled against harsh cordage once And was blinded by a golden hood. Yet all about me I feel the wings Of my locust angels on everything. I am John Wilkes Booth and jumped to truth; Cold murder of the one or the all. Strapped brine-soaked in an electric chair, Heaven lays stripped of its defense, Condemned skin and naked innocence. My delicate eye and fragrant hair Burn all evolution's inheritance Back to the vagaries of chance. My future's ash yet designs a limit In the electrified eye that gives it, In my eye shot out by a blind round From a squadron's unmarked gun. I am St Just and did as I must; Cold murder of the one or the all. The Executioner flips his lash In mockery of innocence: My guilt absolves his sin. Justice stalks among tall gallows Concrete-secreted deep underground, Looks for his charmed dead men there And for balm of absolution peers Into every blue, angelic face; In charity or error he seeks my own His salvation's fashioned hollow. I am Vanzetti and am dead already; Cold murder of the one or the all. Irrational murder has made him One with the common tide Raising his spade with the bladed wave That falls to his own side; Splintered hands obliterate creation's heart Rend worlds to a red thoughtlessness; By every thought he kills he's less. I am dead but still can chant All a passing artist's passions out, Interior echo of the outward shout. Spartacus defied when hard men called And crucified more angels than God. Are my grim limbs, hanging inverted here, Above the midnight churchyards grave Above all that ghostly-priestly rant and rave All exalted sacrifice has won All ecstatic triumph has known? All scatters backwards madness-chased Into a rolling blizzard-ball; Insect angels surround my ground And their wailing wings buzz-sing: Whore or chaste, the world's laid waste Come kill the one or the All. |
Master And Slave | I trod to prison on burning feet | Come kill the one or the All. | 71 | lyric, history, dramatic, personae | Divine Revolt |
| 413 | Camus the moody moralist
Buzzed surreptitious honey from His single hive and hornet's nest; Pulling new worlds from a book Or referencing dull ideas With a visionary Look. How could human Ingenuity Which hammered out the clock Waver self-deceived By dumb tick and tock? Time and times lie multiplied About the center I decide. Every science focuses Itself into my hand, A moment in a mirror Or clear/obscure magnifying glass Shows wide world's very locus is Within what I demand. Where weird energies weave Into stark perceive And Blake's Glad Day Dances in a ray, Manifest neutrinos Become what we know; Calm consciousness intrudes As deep as dream concludes. The body and its hazards Implant supreme desires; Closed cells open to the skies. At every zig and zag the spirit veers, Recovers, and then discards The momentary mire. |
The Moralist | Camus the moody moralist | The momentary mire. | 32 | lyric, philosophical, history, playful | Divine Revolt |
| 414 | Uncompromising virtue, all Heaven
Ascending without a stop Turns homicidal frenzy when God neglects to die and drop. No sober angel outpeers his view Nor calls found clouds and stars divinities; He knows that every boundless vision shows The innard of his eye. Every menaced tear or murdering heart Punches down the consequence Eye or fist first pour to start. When violence rules the lash Meanings stolen from death Vanish in the unannointed air. Proud rebel angels sit or hunch, Fold insect wings like scales, and stare. Old words must mesh the net; They pull where knots have met In human codices of wish. A bending fisherman upon a boat Sweeps the seas from stern to front Sweeps new seas entire, Seiving with rough grace swart fish From the rudimentary mire. There comes upon my troubled heart A thing, I know not what, Out of all I had thought Or thought in thinking to've thought An image like a bird in a cloud So high-ascended was my lovely song That alone those solemnities among I cried aloud. |
Rebel Angels | Uncompromising virtue, all Heaven | I cried aloud. | 32 | lyric, philosophical, history, personal, God | Divine Revolt |
| 415 | Jefferson and Washington, and all those famous men
That out of obscurity came, and were on enlightenment bent As on some perfect woman's face, and had such holy measures In their drums, out of what dark hole began? Where had all that purposeless glory come? O, man's a thief of glory, and steals it from himself. Past turbulent lands and frenzied watercourse Man finds but broken solitude, finds his own soul hidden there, Gasps at his luck, summons all his wayward heart to swear To keep it sacred; and then, lonely with his own audacity, Perjures himself in the first company he meets. O, man's a thief of glory, and steals it from himself. Caravaggio's painted flank that struck God in a horse Shimmering, floating there, radiant sky made flesh Above the tumbled saint who crawled in dust away And in that abject departure made his prayer. What besides his human hand had put it there? O, man's a thief of glory, and steals it from himself. |
Theif of Glory [from Divine Revolt] | Jefferson and Washington, and all those famous men | O, man's a thief of glory, and steals it from hims | 18 | lyric, philosophical, history, personal, God | Divine Revolt |
| 416 | The suns themselves have multiplied and spent
Their smear of gold against my body, Melting the marrow out. Circle on circle, The round day divides my being like a planet ---Into two halves--- a shadow forecast falling Beneath my heel, as I walk. Bending ancient in a garden, twisting stalk Of buried carrot or sere tomato Wasted by the day, I watch Ruined plaster hands majestically drop In sudden rain or broken rage of age And know they are my own: intimate, incarnate. Time spent dreaming, swinging on the garden gate, Pulling tender acorns from the antique tree, too proud To labor water into fruit, is past. I meditate Scuttle of fat rabbits that shift in frosted hate Like a pair of nations, once great, now bickering Over vegetables slouching in a ditch. I am victim to the fading vision of a face Unlike my own, whose articulate bare beauty burns And deepens at a glance. My wide mouth Is crippled and full of sticks, Red daubs against a glass, when I perceive The swiveled shining of her countenance, a fist of wicks. And still I see her able eye or able hand Pale in the singed mist lechery has left--- Residue of torches, motionless, transfixed. Her, whose youth was whispered skyward As I sowed discord among more murderous men, And friendless men, who loved more Formless anarchy and mere gold. I bolt back the ruined latch like a rifle to see How time has clicked its picket into place. I stand inside the unimagined shadow of a tree While shadow forms of a shadow world surround The half-turned plot. And I have lived the wire-model Of a life, an old skeleton dissolving in the sun. I dream of a self not worn down by days, As who would not rebuild what grew awry, And love aright what Love could not define? Now crashed beneath the awful awning of an oak, Politic of history, adverse to time, alone--- I start To rend the bone from heart. |
Decline of a Statesman: I. Decline of a Statesman | The suns themselves have multiplied and spent | To rend the bone from heart. | 43 | lyric sequence, philosophical, history, personal | Divine Revolt |
| 417 | The impenetrable monument
Does not verge or angle In a time made green by grass, Nor does it lightly lack An upright pointing finger To implicate a God. It is not A comfortable spring; there is no Useless cherry blossoming. There were those that said A people's greater than her nation; Or that war was a mask We had put occasionally on To learn our own true natures. And who is left that's numbered Among those that dream Of future events, future events that still Charge out of the bewildered mind's Shattered cognizance. Things were so Confused it seemed that some Might burn until their hearts were new And remain unrecognized. And so they walk Like amicable young children taught To know what is the past. Though there were those who spoke Of the uninstructed dead, Others said its only Stray names caught in a niche Like dirt beneath the nail. Such talk does not make the moderate Slant carelessly to dreaming Or a troubled sleep or sleepless--- Mere mimic to the migrant change Of patternless galaxies. By measured statements that proceed From a level look There came a jeering last The gaping multitudes, or a few, To examine what had been done About what had been said. THey came murmuring names Or weeping, weeping, Or murmuring names. And to the uttermost of this Still uncertain heart I find I cannot confess The imponderable waste of days. |
Decline of a Statesman: II. VIETNAM IN WASHINGTON, | The impenetrable monument | The imponderable waste of days. | 46 | lyric sequence, philosophical, history, personal | Divine Revolt |
| 418 | Twenty heaving workers
X-ed out in overalls, mirroring crossed clouds, Plunge twenty painting brushes Legato as a rageless sea In artless decadence. At least I have conceived, In thankless tranquility of age, Or unknown secret storm of age, Not permanence, but a new start For these revolutionary straight boards A powdered Tommy Jefferson had stomped. Yet even a great prophet's Black pre-emptory baton cannot Alter the red exclamatory heart Of circulating Mars, or start The sleeping rivers from their beds Of cozy rounded stone, while uncondoned Wild artery or maniac crowd had bled Into the unresting arch of history. That is no job for prophets, who at best predict When moon like a white comet And slowly turning earth will hit. What I have known is this: All men are adversaries and fight Solely against what they cannot see; For nothing less than Plato's Right Or Aristotle's inner Ought Is worth the endless battering. Outside the antlike workers hum In antlike ignorance; They spill blank music on their hands--- Sheer potentiality that pricks The out-worn conscience of an out-worn man. A chameleon only copies for its art And in ceaseless adaptation plays its part. I wish it were so simple to reclaim Each broken acre by such sweet laboring. But the sky is not one large star Conceived in colors bright enough to make My listless painted heart increase To white eternity. |
Decline of a Statesman: III. HOUSE PAINTING | Twenty heaving workers | To white eternity. | 41 | lyric sequence, philosophical, history, personal | Divine Revolt |
| 419 | There decays, forgotten among more meaningless things,
And casual things, a delicate, once well-fitting decor, The deliberate clear image Of a meditated life among More mediated images that sting Because they are ineffectual, half-changed From what they were. A rare, stiff-legged porcelain Charger charges riderless Over a snow globe that holds The firelit sad face of a girl, and breaks. A sheaf of hooves display against a wall like a shadow Their shattered sounds for some more ghostly auditor. Perhaps the ghost of some primal past mother comes Ageless in argosy, whose coiled hands unwind a rope Hidden on a dock. Chanting in close-eyed ecstasy, His great grey eyes half-lidded, drugged by time, Her lizard tongue uncorked, lazy against cracked lips, and glistening, Her words are silken scarves That cling, and her red-gold feet are stamping In tribal dance that imitates The cat-footed grace of dying. She speaks, whose hollow whispering might seem Vastly mistaken to the image-making, image-bearing mind. Because I am old I think I know of death And the last ending. Unless all breathing breaks unasked From a tossed sea-shell by the Nile In empty echoing, or encapsulated image, There must be a source for life And death and the eternal In-between meanderings. Watching casts of stars or lonely women glittering As they drown, cloistered to the dark waters like scarves Thrown down from desert Egypt In African simplicity, I hear Desolate yeowl of attic-cat, self-fallen, scatter inheritance. At last a lion's breath commands a lion's body. |
Decline of a Statesman: IV. NIGHT MEDITATIONS | There decays, forgotten among more meaningless thi | At last a lion's breath commands a lion's body. | 37 | lyric sequence, philosophical, history, personal | Divine Revolt |
| 420 | The abrupt dark.
And the populated evening coos With voices. Should I take My life from images that break Or close in self-fallen ecstasy? I am no ghost, full of a ghost's Wry imaginings. All those Who lost the faith of chosen words Are dead or dying as I speak. Night but names its night with calls, Dividing darkness with a coal Less absolute than questioning. But what if from some unasked Terror-ridden memory I should hear The cry out of silence That concentrates--- All present being into a past image Unable to be abandoned? Or what if blackness has a soul That registers the marks Of a midnight hand's midnight stenciling? Or expands the accidental mark By nightmare addition into an Infinity of absences? A single sail can diagram the wind. equally the breathless soul will spend Its untracked solitary hours In a gradual darkening--- The inevitable, slow Winding down of evolution, One last twist of intimacy. Yet something unexpected haunts, Some axle of impertinence controls These quiet hesitations. We had thought Dumb cruelty into an artistic bliss, Something abstract and mathematical to erase The slurred insistent figures Responsibility delivers. Words That once symbolized the dead Gladly fading, an automatic raven Shrieks and shakes Dew from the late autumnal trees Heavily swayed. No mirror- Making stream or self-deceiving, Self-defining moon rides out to shell A dry old mind in light, that must create New darkness out of nothing to resist The silk insistence of her ways. |
Decline of a Statesman: V. NO MOON | The abrupt dark. | The silk insistence of her ways. | 48 | lyric sequence, philosophical, history, personal | Divine Revolt |
| 421 | An unchanging mind's a stone
Defined by what it damages; Spray of speech, then silence Gives night a damask tone. Angry with the sea I claimed An everlasting fire: While fragrant eyelid closed a night On bodily desire. When she stepped seaward, stone to stone, In violet degrees Did a paper eyelid burn? Or changeless oceans slide? |
Decline of a Statesman: VI. DIALOG | An unchanging mind's a stone | Or changeless oceans slide? | 12 | lyric sequence, philosophical, history, personal | Divine Revolt |
| 422 | Limelight limbers sleep
In a trapped, syrup eye. Bluedevil spots pin A valiant heart, violet, Wristing in serrations. Charred heart, hoar today The light decays... Sent champagnes Stale in the umber spirit's quiet; Sulfur seraphs, half chrome Inch the amberling lights; The pulley of the tongue hoists, Licks spic the new acids Revealing reviled reveilles of self. Championed eye, aster ear, I stand by the dark post Lonely in the halo-lampblacks. |
Limelight | Limelight limbers sleep | Lonely in the halo-lampblacks. | 17 | lyric, dramatic, personal | Divine Revolt |
| 423 | Incandescent will--- to forgive youth its brevity!---
To alight the summer's maze, and inscape the outward bower (Crowded with the loud lopped roundnesses of bees) And verve to rediscover all blood's white hilarity (Super-attenuated supernatural power)--- In the passing of this passioned blossom, violet Ranging every decaying shade to black-brushed death, The dark backward collapse of veins, and after To in-breathe in owning nostrils, high and hard, to let This scented tomb upon my palm invigorate my breath! As a wilding god among the coal-folded valleys I came, overturning tenderly the violet's motioned growth By the ransacking lightnings of my mind's designs Returning tarred Time from its monotonous pitch From birth to prime, renewing this velvetest skin: To untouched youth pulled back, seeds in my mouth unspoken, Like shouted prayers kept in a cracking heart Germinating nothing unless I sighed, and I was happy. |
A Dying Violet In The Sidelight | Incandescent will--- to forgive youth its brevity! | Germinating nothing unless I sighed, and I was hap | 18 | lyric, dramatic, personal, minor | Divine Revolt |
| 424 | A thousand worlds to the unkept minute hasten,
Reveilleing wars in the dumb trumpet of a second taken, Not noted in passing, and yet has passed, An immortality of Fancy stirred and drunken--- A paradise in apprehension that cannot last. (Oh that the ticking world were not by Time's arrow driven, And pulses and seconds could dilate against the shriven!) Just so my many angel-flights have come and fluttered, Dropping golden feathers against pearl-wrought steps That spiralled out inner domes to top uncreated matter And peep-out hot-made mysteries where colder stars had shone; I, in my heart's laboratory, keep the chemical key alone. Blood notes writ with the devil's eyelash wash and drip; But only I, alone as bone, snap the raw and bleeding whip. |
Words Are Worlds | A thousand worlds to the unkept minute hasten, | But only I, alone as bone, snap the raw and bleedi | 14 | lyric, dramatic, personal, minor | Divine Revolt |
| 425 | Whatever sparring light marrs and death amends
Pluck from the warring Hollows of my hand; Whatever of cooing good life plunders to extend And we wrestle like drunken divers to breakage Pull from the sounding mellows of my mouth Until death that takes all gives my stone tongue back. Whatever of love creeps from the lying wind Blows my coal, Lashed eyes to tears; Whatever care cracks from the cormorant docks Or discovering sorrow divots from the feathering shore And makes life spasm in the teeth of time Sights down the red waters of my blood. Comfort and mother in my manhood hums And I break In the tide's sprawls awake; My black veins wreathed in the sea's last knock I strut my shivers to their grave-finding breath Until, moon-man and bone-man, I rub my salt face off And lie down dying with my brother coral in the dark. |
Like Drowned Divers | Whatever sparring light marrs and death amends | And lie down dying with my brother coral in the da | 21 | lyric, dramatic, personal | Divine Revolt |
| 426 | Nothing under the soul's weary weather
All heavenslight after the plumed owls' hoo And starry cries stoppered above the trees' stir In the rumored dusk dust the dark leaf told, Spendthrift and windfall in night's clear silence, Pours roaring down from the light-crafted clouds To drown my nickering wicked ways and proud. Hooded and hooved altogether now And all my mazy footsteps arrow-trod Beyond yawning dawn, unknown, alone I awake and break the milky veils--- I tear all my swagged bag of guilts and courages To scrawl this crippled, page-black shread And cock-eye again with memorial warmth My burning youth under day's bald ray. I spent my whole of love on a half Ragtag child's green and runaway, grave-going Hand I held, who withers and lives In the roaring tread of the wild weather Blown from the breakneck of my winters' steps--- And the dead trumpet air of the child's clover days Is a thorned, horned blossom in a grassy waste Where all the forgotten weathers come together And flood my flashing eyes to be mourned. |
Birthday Poem | Nothing under the soul's weary weather | And flood my flashing eyes to be mourned. | 24 | lyric, dramatic, personal | Divine Revolt |
| 427 | Paupers in the blood purse of the heart
Lay their elaborate Shillings on the table; cardsharks pitched In the night-dealt tavern Spade their aces on the circus-lit flat. Time has sold my windy winnings to a torch And I listen as I burn; Desperation's lip mimes dumb prayers to the hands; Tucked and crossed Against age's gale I kneel in the fiery kirk. Oh I'd lay any dollar in this sailor's booth To get back half my wage (Pained from all the paying days of my death that toss Annihilation's light), Or one heavenhued hour of my Gamorraed youth. Now gambled out to the last most Moan of my soul And stretched to my shroud on the checkered cloth, I fury my winnings To the Bermuda wind, and all my cruel wishes scatter. Daybreak's word clatters drainward with my bloods Down to cluttered noon; And there my heart's argosy, almost golden in the hand- Hold of my ribs Repeats and repeats and the seas rise and break. |
Paupers In The Blood | Paupers in the blood purse of the heart | Repeats and repeats and the seas rise and break. | 25 | lyric, dramatic, personal | Divine Revolt |
| 428 | I held my child's hand down to the grave
And traced his comet's roaring going with my breath, Sorrowing sorrow until the sea's moon gave Its thousand salt prayers up in sprays Scattering the brine-shrived gulls on the shingle To spread stars aloft, and each a different way, As the waves fell down from their mingle And found a thousand moons in their crossways splash And told my broken, washed heart hush. O I was a dying moon in the ocean's rove And with her million wants my wants still move, To her breaking crescent I still squeak my eye That dissolves in her fabulous crooks; Locked frost-cursed in my own godawful life I freezed grieving past midnight's strife, Until night on a moonstruck gravestone broke And harrowing dawn gave my soul a saint's look And shined on all my wonderful lies like love. Out of the four-ways Jordan of my heart Out of the splendid cincture of my pricking ribs Out of the mercury furnaces in my brain Out of my own dear hollow bailiwick rolling I walked stalking my bones' marrow-trail Scouted brawling galaxies from my blind bloods Rode my star-fashioning veins to their black skies-- And, stepping the pulsing pathways of the stars, I took my place among the meteors in the dark. |
In the Dark | I held my child's hand down to the grave | I took my place among the meteors in the dark. | 27 | lyric, dramatic, personal | Divine Revolt |
| 429 | Deep in the wandering ways of the blood
Drill my veins to their dust mouths; Stars in the cell say "Love" and burn The kin-kept eons out of hand; Talk of the body may bless the tongue's lie And all the interminable blisses; Funneled by birth to a burning chalice I drink my red liquors though I am dust; Crabbing life outwits death but once Then scrabbles back to its sea-sucked hole. Thirty stretched years touch me to the poles. A Mardi Gras grin spins at my lips And the moon grins crazily down. Much I wonder at the bleeding need for love The mission of kisses, assignation's hours, When we meet and pair off to die; Both tongue and groin I wear like a star And walk star-struck to the place of ashes. Much I wonder at the wrinkled sun, Amoeba or man, no blind difference given, His acid shine drives all wases to once; Much I wonder, at my death-ripe age, Of the worded brine spit from the wasted lip, The low tongue's lie that sums us up: The fairy tale told down the bone. Much I wonder at crossed hands' touched cup Bowing the long faces together to kiss; When the heart-drum kicks in another's stomach Much I wonder at the restless licks; And still I move both tongue and groin, Rear star and eye out of one cracked joint. Prayering hands and downturned head, Circle-earth globed in a robing womb, Flood and world of farenheit waters, Dive their deep ends in a watershed birth Flumed down the shallows of her thighs. A mardi gras grin spins at my lips And the moon grins crazily down. And then I wonder at my crawling luck That spreadeagled hopped the flaming bush Fingering luminous maggots in the meat; Spurred on by the spine's insistent dusts Into the whaled oceans of another The burning bell tower went clanging mad Under a star-mad sky in my scarring eye And all the parishioners jumped ship to die; And, a drowning wick in its wax ruins, I told myself twice the lie of life Among the rafted congregations of my blood That swam their red ways to death. |
Stars in the Cell | Deep in the wandering ways of the blood | That swam their red ways to death. | 50 | lyric, dramatic, personal | Divine Revolt |
| 430 | Shall my love's saying soul
Flange the running sands? Shall her timed hand repeal Laws of the flying weather, Clicking rains that drown my ears? My love's soul shall tongue Sugars rung from the hourglass; What clouds compose she shall mock: Her flung hand shall winnow Wet ghosts of the clock. Should my turning love say Her soul's weathers in my ear I should unwind the cloudy leaks, Rain sand hours out of hand; And one heart should flood all lands. |
Shall | Shall my love's saying soul | And one heart should flood all lands. | 15 | lyric, dramatic, personal | Divine Revolt |
| 431 | Riotous in my righteous-eyed rhyme
I kiss weird Bacchus at History's interstices: There's the destroying mind, a chalky lime That spades love's stink and antiseptically Kills the corpse we once moved into, All limpid-perfect in our after-loving rush. Though it too shall dissolve to goo And cease to hear the tattoo of the thrush, My inner ear trembles at his tap-- and oh All-at-once I'm kissed and captive, Locked in my cells by DNA's il capo, Hoping nature's don will let my sap live. Agh-- I am the boss of my own Valentine And cut forked hearts to fit my said rhyme's tines. Dan Weeks Gregg Glory |
World's Worst Sonnet | Riotous in my righteous-eyed rhyme | Gregg Glory | 16 | lyric, dramatic, two authors | Divine Revolt |
| 432 | I, I am part of it. I am carrying on the
tradition. I am in the stream-- eleusis discernible in the gas-light. of modernity. What is there in all this wreck of ages? A few dollars at the 'right' shop, a paid curio for the mahogany shelf, near Flaubert's upright; lost among "the tone of things." Perhaps this is a more desireable form of monologue, able to be shut off in an eye-blink, or with a cold hand turned away entirely. And somebody swapped an eye-patch for a jade eye by the double gates of Chou. The dog rabid, howling, that we fed from our plates yesterday. Civilization is not a cafe. But a few lights gathered, gathered an unsteady voice against the nothingness |
I, I am part of it. I am carrying on the | I, I am part of it. I am carrying on the | an unsteady voice against the nothingness | 20 | lyric, prefatory poem, history | Hymns |
| 433 | I sit in veils of vague glory,
Engendering the brutish bloods Of despair. A light of Dionysus Scaled the broken walls of hope, Erected in a great Grecian gyre, A theatre for the gods to dream And housed the soul's virgin fire. Consumed by a youthful darkness, I stagger to the unaging muse... -- DBD |
I sit in veils of vague glory | I sit in veils of vague glory, | -- DBD | 10 | lyric, prefatory poem, history | Hymns |
| 434 | Unlike that yattering Krishna of Indian legend and religion, I have but few tales to tell--- and none tonight. Instead I have patched together some sort of odd talk out of remembrances and wishes.
The unfair love that develops in a concentrated boy or girl for the words of the dead-- this is the central college experience. It makes us harsh and discontent with our contemporaries. For how can the home and dorm-bred cry lifted from behind a cheap desk compare with that Shelleyian lilt and agony passing time has patinaed with an ineluctable grace? An institution of publishing, such as our small review, works against this cynicism-- which every great creator has disposed of in his time-- and permits the clear registration of value to enter the ear with the intent impact of a whisper. The page of a review is as serviceable a blank for our Elroy as for any England's Shelley. And the context of the times, which bookends such productions, does not subtract from the effort of any individual but rather lends its substance to the impact of a voice raised from amidst its mass. I forget what voice described literature to me as "an education of the emotions," but that phrase seems to me to touch upon some central complexity, the crux of some nexus in human perceptions too immaterial to remain, as with so much in our lives, unreal. And it is such talk, and the notion of such talk that must, when our lives have lapsed, remain imperishable; for all our individual voice is but a semi-tone in the dialog. But remove that semi-tone... and the entire house of cards must collapse, the harmony dissipated, stale and flat. These are the voices one can catch--- in an interview, or in the lifting song of a poem handed over during some knowledgeable or serious talk. These are the voices that talk in praise of the process and the objective joy of creation--- nothing less. there are our voices, on occasion; and they may shape a life, or give implementation to an impulse, even out of the mere incidental energy thrown off by such a subject and such seriousness. We are about the have come before us a man who was witness to such talks, and a prompter of such commotions. He will talk of a writer's club and of its once living presence on this campus, its effect on conversation and action, its feeding and care of a lively review, and of a present wish for its reconstitution. Let us not wait for a break in the courses of our efforts to ourselves begin to take some such meaningful action. The consecration of such action must come, in its communal form, not with a deliberate grandee's flourish, but with a slow and conniving accumulation of all our best and most cherished and most characteristic efforts. We must come, to steal a metaphor from the national preoccupation, as depositors to such an account, and not flashy spenders of a generation's worth. Advice, connivance, a little money on occasion, a helpful ear: these are our great resources. Disputatiousness, anger, violent action,-- all may help turn the great wheel. But in this case we must all bring but balm and guidance to our successors. Any tradition is only as alive as those who press for its ressussitation. gather your hands to this chest with me, and we may find a burning pulse there yet.... Do not let us have the rush of our current lives and livelihoods whirl our convictions away. Dip your hands once again into that stream of life which in this place flows as black as ink, and freshen your minds with the cool water offered by this opportunity, and let some writer's club or other effort sharpen its dull quill once again by the aid of your stinging wits. And I give here as invocation to our duties and in homage to the past trials of our young lives these words: it is the passion of the old man that renews the eternal youth. |
Some notes for an Invocation Delivered at the Conv | Unlike that yattering Krishna of Indian legend and | Dip your hands once again into that stream of life | 9 | preface, prose | Hymns |
| 435 | You do complain upon our time, and that,
Yourself being eldest in our love, Our time shall be shorted by the length of yours. Go not; but let my argument run Its minute marvel, and if, by its ending, You have not found yourself, for some second, Some unconsidered second, somewhat, yes, Somewhat amazed, as when a woodland doe Before a gentle mirror does appear, and once And once in all her shaded life confronts herself And stands admiring before that sight. If not Somehow touched, and of yourself amended, Or have that harsh judgement gentled to a laugh,] Then go; go and my pinching purgatory I'll serve silent as a smiling saint. |
You do complain upon our time, and that | You do complain upon our time, and that, | I'll serve silent as a smiling saint. | 15 | lyric, love, personal, time | Hymns |
| 436 | When love's ripest hour holds discourse with thy face
And in a sudden lapse of taut argument Unties your age's fears in little space Flushing dark beauty from pale intent And you, all mirrorless, jet returning To life's receiving sea, where chance is lent And uncertain weather tossed between burning And freezing-- and no surity sent That summer carry summer's well-beseeming Or winter lift his shaggy face in frost But each season contingent in its teeming Must brave each hour at unreckoned cost Then will I, more constant than such thin shows, Stand and love, still love, which is all love knows. |
When love's ripest hour holds discourse with thy f | When love's ripest hour holds discourse with thy f | Stand and love, still love, which is all love know | 14 | lyric, love, personal, time | Hymns |
| 437 | So far from rancor, my ill-abused heart,
Stay and thrive, and on love's thin sighs grow fat--- For though her looks all come crossed with darts and her breath distilled show this name or that, Not yours, still love, since love on nothing feeds, But hangs a perfect orchid in tropic air--- Bloomed on surmise, and, perfect, nothing needs But is itself a superfluity of air Made visible, that in visitation fine Descends, as dreams that shake us when we wake In that far country still to eyes divine Until, in a wink, as winking exiles wake. Content yourself, crossed heart, with what you have; Lay alive awhile gladdened that you gave. |
So far from rancor, my ill-abused heart | So far from rancor, my ill-abused heart, | Lay alive awhile gladdened that you gave. | 14 | lyric, love, personal, time, memory | Hymns |
| 438 | How can strangers love, knowing not your face?
Or any alchemist claim his lead gold Absent your touch? Has reality place Beyond sound of where your rumor's told? Any sound love's quality that lacks your name? Yet love has many full thousand silent sounds And quiet lapsing looks of equal fame Darting far past your name's parading grounds. And alchemy's little stones play lover's parts--- Held apart, or wooing in crucible--- And interchange their substance by that art. Yet strangers love--- a thought impossible! Yet strangers love, and cannot from their strangeness wend; Nor can I, lost in you, find ecstasy's end. |
How can strangers love, knowing not your face | How can strangers love, knowing not your face? | Nor can I, lost in you, find ecstasy's end. | 14 | lyric, love, personal, sonnet | Hymns |
| 439 | All my parts do my pursuit of love betray
And stand panting like poor lawyers in the docks Demanding courtly redress for what shall not stay Were all the world made intricate as locks And I myself given the only key. Still your eagle love takes its noble flight And to my raw hawking will no majesty Shed on those below; and yet, in such sight I cannot feel myself all abandoned, A forgotten prey limping to its nest, Of too small account to win love's bare tooth, Less than nothing, and worst than remnant least--- For to be cursed by such fierce eye is blessed; Eternity a moment when such looks have passed. |
All my parts do my pursuit of love betray | All my parts do my pursuit of love betray | Eternity a moment when such looks have passed. | 14 | lyric, love, personal, sonnet | Hymns |
| 440 | My love's more constant than the watery moon
Whose wandering gaze chases each passing star Bright a while, but after dim and dun As too strong sun makes shallow pools turn tar By a too-constant too-true attention. My love instead shall prosper as it ages Not turn sour or grievy under a rotless sun That changes witless crows to worthy sages Crying 'Death!' and 'Soon to die!' and always right. My love instead will outgrow such mazes And like the rooted oak scorn all flight--- Show winter and summer indifferent faces; If any million years shall disprove this, Kiss me again, and find me transfigured with that kiss. |
My love's more constant than the watery moon | My love's more constant than the watery moon | Kiss me again, and find me transfigured with that | 14 | lyric, love, personal, sonnet | Hymns |
| 441 | All my notes so-called crowd to tongue thy praise
Who are the template of surpassing note for all my lays. Much pleasure has the singer who sings of thee Whose sweet subject trills when urgentest songs must lag And by his poverty thus proves the worth of thee--- Opposite the lark, who praises dank night with prodigality And makes his listeners shut eyes to see dreams, All your choir but begs to your picture see. How much more then should I sing of thee? Let song-birds out-lung cannons, you'd more deserve; And more deserve than this unbreathing ink Can give, which but takes the breath of each downturned eye And makes it raise your praises in spite of time, Which shall all thy praise and praisers too confound betime. |
All my notes so-called crowd to tongue thy praise | All my notes so-called crowd to tongue thy praise | Which shall all thy praise and praisers too confou | 14 | lyric, love, personal, sonnet | Hymns |
| 442 | How does our exalted time unfold
From hours of pure unbeaten gold To silver minutes charged and unrehearsed To bronzen seconds licked out of our days and ways? How from the mountain on the plate, Each magenta ridge and azure indent searched, Must our centuries slimmed to acres now contract? Or acres to a bare, unhallowed plot be shrived? Still it is in us to race the sun's exhaustless rays And make each moment pay in double time; alive In these dark eternities chalked black between each IS I wait for the platinum infinities of your kiss. |
How does our exalted time unfold | How does our exalted time unfold | I wait for the platinum infinities of your kiss. | 12 | lyric, love, personal, sonnet | Hymns |
| 443 | Let your face be my book wherein I'll read
How all the weaves of fate come to bleaching rags; With pen no more will I unleash these inky bleeds Or stain any whiteness with what my cross heart has done. How in love's upright beginning can we read its fallen end? Cancelled are all other griefs--- there are none! To wrap this majestic disaster in a dulling flag And bear the freighted body to where the water bends. Inhearse with disdaining sighs these love-looks I cannot live and otherwise disperse, For bottled ecstasy will make a sot of the earth And mountains toss like daffodils on the vintage therein locked And bluehearts dance in charters of such bloods; And rhythmless dirt shall be by your swaying swayed. |
Let your face be my book wherein I'll read | Let your face be my book wherein I'll read | And rhythmless dirt shall be by your swaying swaye | 14 | lyric, love, personal, sonnet | Hymns |
| 444 | Beauty of itself is the final shrine
And takes no template from earth's creeping things But is beyond blatentest gawds divine Descending not among our tangled strings Nor standing off past moons' unequal light Feigning variation by what our eyes, Subject to death's mutiny, for delight Must clasp, and our reliquary judgments say permanent or wise-- No, no; beauty is of sager colors Than our tests, which trick ourselves and others best. What form owns the rainbow in white heaven Forever bright, and the sun tattooed gold Radiant on eternal skin unshaven? There altar boys attend a pageant mass To comfort those who never shall grow old; And lame Time dawdles by a frozen font Thinning unkillable fleas from heaven's cloudy sheep; And disconsolate Death sits staring at the grass Never to bring another consciousness to sleep As in the dimming world was his constant wont. What form, and out of what majestic sea Steps the vanished bridegroom to his wedded feast Heavy with ripe apples and solemn pairs Moving, two by two, through the forest crease Into the dauntless levity of the sun? For there in high paradise, unviewed, far, Helpless rains may never fall, never mar, The simple perfection of that expected guest For whom cold doves wait in the gloomy sun, The banished crow is silent, and we rest. |
Hymn to Itself | Beauty of itself is the final shrine | The banished crow is silent, and we rest. | 32 | lyric, philosophical, aesthetics | Hymns |
| 445 | Water remembered has drowned the words we kept
For words like winds orangely agitate against the hush And citron solace lashes each leaf's velvet To unpupiating pulp. Eyes locked in pupal locutions Split the moany remainders of the day to syllables. Never in the best sinning you and I commanded would All the fallen chittered leaves again rehearse this rose. Filtered regrets distilled against the lingering rain Wipe down the diamond sky, crashing cabriolets containing All the shivering incense of a pursuing mist Tracking the anchored package of intenser life Deep to its frissioned shelter, flaunting a sea Of snickering distractions to angle on a time Purpure because unlamentable, part of the brinking etern. We were not shaped to finish, but extend Beyond intolerant time's staggered kisses Drunkenly laid on senses as full of hits as misses; How can we kite to ecstasy who cannot drown in minutes? Filial lips will find us, ministering the dark, Cold angels to our natures, spurning the unloved dust, And in blazing passes touch us still unwarmed. Is this excellence extempore a receding grace Made supremely visible by withdrawal alone? You are a man, bred for loving oceans to imbrue! Let not the bastard element dull the divine in you; So intermixed is our living sense with rarest wine That heady jumbles of love and menace can come Confusing innocence with the sweetest and the worst. |
Water remembered has drowned the words we kept | Water remembered has drowned the words we kept | Confusing innocence with the sweetest and the wors | 31 | lyric, philosophical, advice, cautionary | Hymns |
| 446 | "And so I have cast you, forgotten babe,
Scarcely cased, into the rough turbulence Of this watery world. Let jellyfish, Decked like angels, your radiant chorus be And cast starfish indicate a heaven In the unceasing motion of the deep; For props to make flush this tempest of death Nature is no short-supplier; let fins Serve for wings, the water itself for air (O, if it were! how would you have drowned Save by too much breath and not lung enough To lap it up!) and let St. Peter lean With the emerald guard of a pipefish And all lit from above, and there's the set. But there can be no journeying for you Who put all paradise in his clear eyes And then drowned his looks. What paradise's left Then for us, miserable above, In the dry panting air abandoned now That yet your warm embraces remember But this: that we, poor broken-legged devils, Who cannot climb to that hard place May yet dive to heaven! Sweet gulf open And from my bare unprepared bosom Sunder the willing soul!" |
Father Tosses Baby to the Ooze | "And so I have cast you, forgotten babe, | Sunder the willing soul!" | 25 | lyric, dramatic, personae | Hymns |
| 447 | Deep in ruin the world long has lain---
Science has no answers yet For what we must do with our hearts' debt; Physics peeping into the birth of World Sees but its own image featly curled. And what can we do with that blank weight Within us, but paint again our human faces? |
Soliloquy | Deep in ruin the world long has lain--- | Within us, but paint again our human faces? | 7 | lyric, personal, philosophical | Hymns |
| 448 | "The rich have built all the churches
And the poor must pray," Said the beggar stopping at the crossroads way. "How thin and wiry the rich must be To pass the portals of eternity!" Stumping in the dust with a backwards lurch. I am still astonished, like an aged see, And like a monk in his cloisters brood upon Love's sensual mystery. I have been at my serious play An hour and a day. The wind must break its teeth upon All I say! |
Song of the Self-Sufficient Beggar | "The rich have built all the churches | All I say! | 16 | lyric, death, minor, dramatic, personae | Hymns |
| 449 | "Do not incarcerate him so.
What dishonor names criminal in him Is but the action of our timid thoughts Lustily embodied. Does the dragonfly, Mating in August on the lily's stalk, Playing at crosses to increase his kind Stay his lust On the low approval of froggish stares? Why then this limping pedophile ring round With steel pickets of our disapproval Vowing to violent gods a swift dispatch Of this man's life? I call you gentlemen To bear true witness to yourselves, That any life that slumbers through the knot Of its own nature, leaving unexpressed The dark puzzle that anchors each existence Will languish solveless in a marshy grave. Look how the illuminating mirror of his fall Starkly shows ourselves; Your faces hang Above the gilded intersection Of his folded wings; your dwindling eye Accepts the cast of his thousand-faceted look To view yourselves with scorn. How sad it is That the careless insect, and this one man, Gross apparitions, two-headed prodigies As like and unlike each other as ourselves Wild as lizards to leap beyond their bounds, They thrust themselves up from the perilous slime To mate their natures and make us dote. Their rapid fuses burn more furiously To the wick than our sick tapers Whispering in the hollow congress of a room." |
Humbert Humbert's Defense Attorney Caps his Disqui | "Do not incarcerate him so. | Whispering in the hollow congress of a room." | 32 | lyric, justice, minor, dramatic, personae | Hymns |
| 450 | "We cluck a bizarre patois; rooster-heralds
rou-cou-cooing the bastard seeding of a sour age. Every time I stuck the X on sex in their ribald name, or put a blinding pastie over Queen Elizabeth's green eyes, I knew I was the PR Goering for Malcolm's fanatic machine." |
Jamie Reid | "We cluck a bizarre patois; rooster-heralds | I knew I was the PR Goering for Malcolm's fanatic | 5 | lyric, minor, dramatic, personae | Hymns |
| 451 | All thought stirred to sinning, all sin to have said
Any uttered word against your blessedness; O high priestess dropped into this vale, Your hands have already borne the sacrifice How many times! Chafe not the new-won altar That I offer, with cold disused touches And absent looks shucked from over your lover's shoulder. Fetch the lamb that upon your neck now mews And let him bleed for this: for love new-loved to you! |
On A Night | All thought stirred to sinning, all sin to have sa | And let him bleed for this: for love new-loved to | 9 | lyric, personal, love | Hymns |
| 452 | Misbelieve me if you dare, o sonneteer, your ghost's ash
Litters imagination's minions with sooty rhyme, Ash obscuring ash in the final chaos; Heat along these wires will raise a miscreed, The cry a cri de coeur rising at deep need From rickets inlaid in soul's-bone, all thought shed In the crimson heydey whose sparks bonfires are, Now in an amber hour among embers sere. Youth was a glory miscreant Time has bled Of all colors other than death's bone-pale; O time has spurred the truant soldier back to bed--- The tender colt leans age-heavy against the rail. |
Misbelieve Me If You Dare, O Sonneteer | Misbelieve me if you dare, o sonneteer, your ghost | The tender colt leans age-heavy against the rail. | 12 | lyric, personal, love | Hymns |
| 453 | This island man
In his lighthouse watches And lets his disturbed ear hear Strangers roaring over The silentest crest Of a sea at peace with itself. Strangers in lifeboats gaily pursuing What I cannot pursue myself. Never in all my handholding days As the trees shadowed my friends Did I know myself the island I wore Skirted with thin flesh Deep and dense as sand; And the stars silent as ministers Have watched my days unclasp. O stranger rowing over Clasp you an arrow or glass? Now the stars like spectators Crowd to this lulling shore And alone in my clothes I let days and birds pass Quiet as a radar's sweep. Shall I go to the boats Unloading my griefs or keep Eye and ear in my lighthouse locked? O stranger rowing over Clasp you an arrow or glass? |
This Island Man | This island man | Clasp you an arrow or glass? | 27 | lyric, dramatic | Hymns |
| 454 | The man is statue to the act unfolding,
Alone must watch new worlds unfurl. The sea beats against its shingle With a maniac's claw, confounding gems and wreckage. All at once the falcon that knew me Dashed his beak to my being with a piping cry, Undid an eon of grief and sandwiches And tickled me with arrow vowels to the sky. Aloft and lunatic, shoes and fingertips, I let all love move from me As the surgeon's knife sighs, And spelled my way to heaven'sgate with a broken tongue. |
The Man is Statue to the Act Unfolding | The man is statue to the act unfolding, | And spelled my way to heaven'sgate with a broken t | 12 | lyric, dramatic | Hymns |
| 455 | Why always this effort and effect?
Why this continual ebbing, After desire's brightened onrush, This retreating patter and perpetual mumble Of the ocean skidding back to the stones? Somehow, our minds stand Near our bodies, near the ocean. Why just one dew-diamond in a field of blues? Why this misery of gestures Lapsing solicitously From each bright, particular wave? This failure of metal sprays and squirts Firing between jacks and queens, japes and jonquils, The unplayed banjo and the imagined hand Strumming a dusty fistful of strings So anxious, at evening, To be touched, to be merely touched Which way and every way in the clanging wind. |
Discussion Among the Solitudes | Why always this effort and effect? | Which way and every way in the clanging wind. | 18 | lyric, dramatic, philosophical | Hymns |
| 456 | What out of nothingness so soft
May be formed to stand and give hard looks Throughout the created eons that sift their days From the swift division of like and like? Out of mounded flour let these floured Mounds be made. What attitude Out of wind instructed to furnish a soul? Should we loaf like the tittering nihilist, Owning absence all? Or like the cataloguing merchant recreate Each sparrow's feather with a numbered stroke? Life is but what we may name of it, Tonguing our souls mute with winnowing lists. An upward flame leaps and dazzles as it goes, Burning the spider's ribbon to its hole: Scorched and scotched, o my soul, my soul, The masquerade's a bust. |
Dejection | What out of nothingness so soft | The masquerade's a bust. | 17 | lyric, dramatic, philosophical | Hymns |
| 457 | Dead loss, and the blank hours after
Motivate your mockless laughter, Kicking around an empty house satisfied with all the empty rooms. There's no glory in your gloom, nor lightning out of cobalt nothingness. |
Epigram on Self-Neglect | Dead loss, and the blank hours after | nor lightning out of cobalt nothingness. | 6 | lyric, dramatic, philosophical, personal | Hymns |
| 458 | Brain, why did you storm,
Imagination, why feign Crowds of suitors, diamonded, Distilled from thinnest air? Lonely comes the lioness Stalking under arid trees, Golden paw and golden cress Disturbless as royal empress' tress. |
Redress | Brain, why did you storm, | Disturbless as royal empress' tress. | 8 | lyric, minor, memory, personal | Hymns |
| 459 | My soul, like a wicked father,
Has been robbed, left, quiet and near dead At the blank side of the road, A tripped-up bundle of old clothes, old lives, Old faces, an offshoot Of what is left alive; Of all things that move, Unmoving, a thing. What has left my soul like this, abandoned And near death, this deathless thing That has returned like a swan in its bearing To stare at my face? What can be left For a face to recognize, a face left, Like the soul, wicked and robbed, By the side of the road, in earth's detrius, Washed of its prim innocence by these giving sins, Breathing, when noticed In the brief abrupt ambulance light Into a pool of cold water, into its own face, a disturbed mirror? |
My Soul, Like a Wicked Father | My soul, like a wicked father, | a disturbed mirror? | 20 | lyric, minor, memory, personal | Hymns |
| 460 | What is finished in the alert swish
that pushes my heart's blood between that wing bone and stingray spine? I look down at the drowned gown from the astounded height of my pulse working its military, single-file nose row of slugs in an unending, still unending, circle that hoops my aorta, its muscular thumb swishing the slug bloods through and through like rosary beads like tears congealed to beads, like the poor beaded things you squint at me with. What had happened to the pearly girl I still glimpse through shuffled prints of a happy family of strangers? Her thumbed skull like an onion bulb peeled down to its cut stench and ooze of rudimentary dews. What had happened, as she stood in the sea-wash of her dress, the sin of her uterus stabbing her like a stubbed cigarette in her belly's eye? What had pushed through her blue hood of nerves, this sacred red dragon that came babbling its pink woman's secrets in a hideously slurred sampling of Chinese idiot words only to be dabbed back to its victorian cave, its prattle axed by the thin white tongue of a hand, my hand, this hand, the hand hidden in the photos by a snow of friendly gestures. The blood comes out, anyway, and leaves a stain like a heart between the cool banks of my thighs. Is it a valentine for dwarves? I feel no sliver of affection for its broad loves, escaping me like a note in a broken bottle washed up by the clean hand of the sea to what prince? I do not love. I am a fish, cool, delicate, slit to its blood livers. The droll loll comes pushing its messages, rush after rush, into my thighs, my hair. I do not love. The blood loves. But now it is settled, the dragon, shoes off on the plush victorian carpeting, an unlit cigarette in one relaxed claw, slithered into a turban of coils on the overstuffed couch, hearing the drum of my heart thudding miles above, from indian territory from the New World, a tribe crouched in the forest swatting bees by the thin pulse of the brook, building their birch canoes for the summons of the flood, alert to the flinch of sign language, listening for the smoke signal. |
Blood Loves | What is finished in the alert swish | listening for the smoke signal. | 59 | lyric, love, personae | Hymns |
| 461 | Love floats through us
on cinnamon skimmers a waterbug with a tug boat for a heart, pulling the world out of a pocket a very small pocket I had rubbed with love shut when you dressed. Naked as fishes we swam in the bed, undressed in the dark with only our wishes on. You moved to me, me moved. I could never get used to how your stitches stayed closed when everything else was up for grabs. Open, playable--- a soccerball with a pouch. Our fingers touched like candles, our mouths met like fiery brine. On each, scarred side of the line, oceans wiggled out of their skirts. We commingled our jiggles. Love, the waterskier, skated professionally between the furious greens, unable to punish or furnish a victor. And, flame by flame, our fingers sent up the fires of desires brambled in our mermaid hair like a torch. |
Swimmers | Love floats through us | like a torch. | 34 | lyric, love, personae | Hymns |
| 462 | The fetus in me
grows, glows knowingly, nuzzles its nodes, the two burnt-out bulbs that gave it a start. Now, nurtured like a shirt in the wash, alphabets appear in its stew. The mix is as warm as tepid soup. The letters spin like dials, like stars in the stubbed-out substance as consoling as bad milk. But look at the baby, its bald eye, the thin, angelic webs reaching like fingers to grow it shut; my eyelids flutter like a shocked heart. The baby basks in its Mediterranean, sulking hub of suds, it is new, new, new! It wears its body like a shirt, unafraid of nails, of lies, of hates, of regrets downed with the sugarless coffee. The shirt doesn't flinch from the hammer that batters firetongs that pinch the skin, love harrumphing with its daggers in, plain as the mail on the table, plain as the no-nose on the lump of its face, the club of its skull milky as an escaped gasp. The shirt simply hangs, waiting to be put on, like a night-club crowd, waiting to be touched like scissors, waiting for the worst to enter it, like a man, to make a sail sailing somewhere, to some purpose perhaps to fill it with winds like hands burdened with an excess of gifts, waiting for some breath to stretch it like a manfully handled canvas to take it into the hands of its mouth and make it wake up and shudder like a lung. The shirt must do something inside of myself! The shirt is there, alive in its hamper, its buttonholes waiting for hooks to pull the buttons through like flowers and hold itself shut. The shirt is there, cautious (you'd better believe it) suspended in its char of suds, hanging like a kite in the black sky of my uterus. My sky of warm liquids and tepid laughter, hanging, hanging, by its little miracle string, ready to whoosh down and pull me through myself like a turtle entirely reversed. But for now the shirt, limp on its elephant of skeleton still reels and flutters like a clasped flag from its knot of hand. |
The Shirt | The fetus in me | like a clasped flag from its knot of hand. | 62 | lyric, love, personae | Hymns |
| 463 | Baby, baby, mannikin in the crib,
there is something pulling us together closer than a stitch. Your sweet echo sweats a troubled double of semi-sweet me; my chocolate loves, mutable as kittens, melt and glove the powerful applause of your hands. How primly they're mittened, black as a glum executioner's greased thumb. The invisible stitch cinctures us nearer. Vast spaces dissipate. Nearer, your small sound leaps bandages, muffled in good wishes, exits you loud as a cloud. Jade baby, green at the gills and undoubtably drowned, my red ears are still ringing. Your eyes pause astonished, pure as pins in their clogged knob of dough. Mild child, your tiny attentions suspend me like a marionette not quite yet half-across this bridge you have built between us. |
Spaces | Baby, baby, mannikin in the crib, | this bridge you have built between us. | 25 | lyric, love, personae | Hymns |
| 464 | Can we know a love not inwoven with defeat?
The glow of childhood noon does still eclipse The tags and rags of days adulthood endures. How much more so then the binding love That ties our vandal looks to one post of joy And, moving us, demands we move unmoved? Prometheus or God had had the knack Of enduring satiety so-- not I! Loved And punished with a velvet mask of sighs Inching inwards when they are expelled to die! The happy dagger hilting hidden in the breast Ordains the killed and killer with their rest. |
Triumphant Victims | Can we know a love not inwoven with defeat? | Ordains the killed and killer with their rest. | 12 | lyric, personal, God | Hymns |
| 465 | Solemn usurpation of one consciousness
Leaves us what it leant us: Anarchy's chaos and spilt grain Lost fertility left wandering Dark airs and night's uplifted breath Unreal because left unplanted; Thoughts lost without a brain to bear them, Dry conceptions that lean in the wind Whispering nothing to an earless earth. |
Dejection [short poem] | Solemn usurpation of one consciousness | Whispering nothing to an earless earth. | 9 | lyric, personal, memory | Hymns |
| 466 | And use what you have
Lover, tragedian, jade, Puffed ceremonies and excited speech Excited ceremonies that obliterate the dark: Anything in your arsenal of suns Stretching your marbled arm From your swept-back chariot In moon-benediction, Altering nothing with your obscure tongue. |
Vindictive Advice | And use what you have | Altering nothing with your obscure tongue. | 9 | lyric, playful, doggerl | Hymns |
| 467 | Say that the sun, bitter pill,
Is full of dividing edges, Sharp essences that will not meld Or coalesce, even like worn lovers, In the dark. The black chalks Have riven us in their abiding way And left a charcoal powder on the rose For that choice globe and hale eye to scoff at Ringed with fiery hooks And chastising sparks, I stare at it And ask myself, pawing the powder From my nose, eyeing its razor skirt, Of the heft of ONE phalange that it flaunts. |
Solar Perplexus | Say that the sun, bitter pill, | Of the heft of ONE phalange that it flaunts. | 13 | lyric, playful, doggerl | Hymns |
| 468 | Did the damsels, in their charged parade,
Moon and fawn for the damsel-master still? Their heightened curls fulfilled, in them, The topiary's palate, the green abundant smell. Who would, wicked enough, tell them what they were? They had a haggard pomp and drab panache, Swishing as they wished down rain-anointed streets Curtseying to streetlamps' occipital pull. They cheered each other up. With old gossip And tales teased from the shadows, or here And there some bladed crevice canyonized Between yawns, as they marched, to hold their minds. Time had put the blazing jades away, and, Over-conscientious craftsman, connoisseur of trash, Hoisted from among the once-admiring jades, A few, thin, flecked, neglected greys. |
The Hue of Evil | Did the damsels, in their charged parade, | A few, thin, flecked, neglected greys. | 16 | lyric, playful, doggerl | Hymns |
| 469 | "Leave off life awhile. It's overrated.
Nancy, you blue eyes toward death, as if toward Another shore whose beating sands were war-drums Marching you out of life and sense-- and love; For I had loved you. Together we'd poured Each hourglass with centuries-- to the crest! And now, insensible and languid And any milky tear, I watch awash These blank solemnities and joyless vigours Strut their little glittering while before me, Prating: I am life! I am alive! Alive,-- Has not a salamander's tail, disjointed from the sleek head, and fidgeting in the hard palm Like threads of fire, as much claim upon The grounds of self-animation as these Who clamor ecstacies? The quiet nun Or quaker staring walls down in her church Commands vibrant meditations in a breath Unbreathed; voiceless, and without even So much as an eyelid's unconscious stir That might annoy a flea, the devotee Whirls the cosmos round her like a cloak Invisible, and the kneeling stars in choir Warm her hush contemplation, those white maids Stirred to comfort an unmoving central calm. And so, to cut short the dogs' whining yip And defoliate the grievy wreath of death Before its planted, blackly ribboned, Above my Nancy's unuttering grave And avoid the choked yodeling condolences (Almost worse than the shrived chastisement Of my sense!) and dolorous crowds of mourners Stamping passports out of my private grief For a photo-op of mourning stardom, I'll pack myself into a holy cloister, Eschew the tasteless ornaments of this world, Revile in silence the thousand hands Excited to touch, or anxious to please, Holding nothing but their wanting of me, Discard the thin sensuality of flesh Poor in variety, lost in having, And in saving spent, whereby we each Mock ourselves in choosing one above another, Exiled from all this aping mockery And saved in being lost, found in being saved, I'll quit this exchange of jibes, this commerce, This weary commerce of weak weary souls, Primping worn attitudes in new attire And withdraw as the widowed spider To her pall, mourning-gorged, defeat inflicted, Damaged in spirit and in sense maligned, Grim in prayer to the godless absolutes, Nature's cheating majesty that cannot cease with us And that way pay love. Drive on, drive on." |
Sid Contemplates Nancy's Death in a Limousine | "Leave off life awhile. It's overrated. | And that way pay love. Drive on, drive on." | 54 | lyric, personae, dramatic monologue | Hymns |
| 470 | The thinking mind in constant delectation seeks
Some bright shadow of the power that ignites All delicious agonies of waiting to the sun's one pitch, Flames that consume their sources as they rise, Burning in men as a match in ethyl pitched Bursts in alarming might, and to unclimbed skies ascends In iris-blue flames consuming a fragrance mild. |
Meditation | The thinking mind in constant delectation seeks | In iris-blue flames consuming a fragrance mild. | 7 | lyric, meditative, personal | Hymns |
| 471 | He: "And is it in the moment, collapsed,
Revivified when dead, unkillable and lived, That this transport of 'nowhere else to be' Inspires forgotten freedom of the freest mein?" Said She: "Nothing is lost if not forgotten; And in this temple of the chancing and free Nothing is forgotten, nor can be." "Beauty raped by time is nailed to the door." "Again, by the hammer of the mind, batted is The slivered instant into the all-consuming void Giving that void meaning and beauty thus!" The wellspring of the living-dying boy prepared The ocean of void for its infinite waters of song: He: "What survives in the sweet minute unrehearsed?" "Everything of everything that is best. God and all his angels' overwhelming behest Cannot demand what is minute by minute leased." "Life, I have beheld the lakes in which you breathe, And drowned in silver glories of your tongue's breath." Coda: Advice Lean into the earlobe of the aspiring boy And tell him of the investigation Only his whitest, lingering spirit Can undertake and eradicate this world of void. Name the name that's scripted in his brain And let the unleashed Victory behold herself as she must be! |
Between Them | He: "And is it in the moment, collapsed, | And let the unleashed Victory behold herself as sh | 26 | lyric, dramatic, two voices | Hymns |
| 472 | It had seemed a million others had loved best, or first,
And that my breath but added injury to glory's hurt As when the painter's dipping brush defames The madonna's infant halo it encodes And touches her not; dame Psyche, unrepentant And purple in her cave, ringed with voices as with fire, Filled with quick remembrance of departed faces My mind agape and agonized by her features Which taught the subtle wind its troubled smile. And now those winds enwrap me where I go And peace is the memory of any other pain Than this one ache that drains my heart away; And in the troubled air sighing soft and slow Stream myriad voices half-angelic like the rain, These voices gathered, these faces at the door, I cannot flash beyond them, although I would. |
It had seemed a million others had loved best, or | It had seemed a million others had loved best, or | I cannot flash beyond them, although I would. | 16 | lyric, sonnet, love | Hymns |
| 474 | 1
coeval equals, preemininant values the two; a value, a clarity at brookside as in cash-bin, a claritas, a clearness there, clarity at the brookside equal clearness in the cash-bin, gold burning as fire outshining midnight, puts all the other owned things to the torch, man's wisp of pride going up in the smoke. But (my soul!) but if--- you want, in charged desire to celebrate unconquerable contests, unchanging games charting pure skills don't stare to other stars through lightyears of emptiness that shut out the sun, look here in simple Olympia where my wire of song is spun in arcing coronal, spiked glories plaited stark and chimed in the mind and hung on the tongue, and torqued in the heart, and splined divine in the deciding eyes of every chanting poet as they come hollering God's name, and changing it, turning syllables to bells ringing the radiant house of Heiron, rich enough to act justly in Sicily, getting the skim off every title, given it from the open hands of the people, forcing his light tunic to go heavy with honors reaped in a tidal wave. 2 Hia! his tittering heart jumps to trumpets, sighs to the bright sea-chanties of rude, red men that round the singing table and splitting boards circle the singing sailors as they sing. So finger down the Dorian lyre from its dusty peg, and if remotest Pisa can fling up rememberance fit to each miracle, welcome each one with presto phrases of your acutest twang. And if that fine arabian, Pherenikos, clips along Alpheos' magic stream, racing unspurred inches of his dainty auburn flank to vault the cantered body of his Lord deep into the grip of winning, resign then the wandering passions of your mind to the emblazoned graces of his sparking hooves. 3 Knight and King of Syracuse, high Heiron, whose glassy blazonings, praises, mark burning roses on the rocks of Pelops as they blaze: Hear of Pelops, who earth-shattering Posideon swaled in watery arms. Tricked from the gemmed wilderness of waves by Klotho's abstract, unfeigning hand, born thus out of the faceless traceries of coronaed corals, they walked to the windy fireplace on the rocks; already his wet shoulder was flickering ivory, as in her nursing eyes he dreamed. Yet still this fabled lullaby in the crib, spic miracle on the innocent, infant lips, a snowy blanket pulled up to downy noses, becomes degraded to wry, distorted songs, and between grown lips gets stretched to lies when bearded men roll joking in their drunk. And whispering Grace the beautiful, the pure, herself her sheeny scarves may lend, wavering the light, perfuming the distasteful until it smells like truth. 4 Antique Pelops, I, gendarme of history, will tell a different story, your own, from the one we know so well. Remembered stories are oftenest incomplete. And so the smoking future casts its reddened eyes in foul, obscuring glances upon the past, picking tinsel souveniers of life from behind the cinema where all is mere fantasy, mere image, a palimpsest of trash, a tumult of conflicted lights. But note: the dicing gods that roll our winking fate still will take blameless kisses from our pinched, upturned lips. Once your daddy Tantalus had all the gods to banquet; on puddled Sipylus chanting boys with flowers on their brows piled high the festal boards. In such strange wear he soon recalled the giddy eats of paradise, watermelons, corn mash and obscurer fruits, table scraps lounging gods had fed him from the diviner scrapings of their kitchen counters. Soon enough the afternoon went skittering, eaten, into night. Posiedon elbowed his carven goblet to the grass, inspired, desiring you, overwhelmed with but one desire, seeing you, a child having trouble with his snag of grapes. A golden horse, and then the Olymic gates. You stood half-gowned on awkward feet, same as Ganymeade, who rode up, in olden times, in the cupping palm of Zeus. 5 Frowning searchers came back piecemeal, palms up at dawn before your silent, shadowed mom. Their plastered calf-hairs glistered in the awaking dews, where horney feet did stamp sun-ruddy in the mingled dirt. Then a nosy neighbor, nattering, teething his speculative peach, made his ominous pronouncimento: "Seems the gods got him, in their savage grab, percieving in his delicate figure on the grass a prime rib turning cartwheels to damp their dabbling nap-a-kins." and set down his glass. 6 From such savage gods I stand savagely apart: 'Barbarous,' as a god-calumny, alertly sits one safe, dog-eared page away from 'blessed' in my book. Let spoofed 'hubris' remain the final word snickering slanderers diligently emmend to marr their epitaphs. Olympia's beaming parentage, in brilliant togs, tossed their darling Tantalus on whitened knees: in this teeming spate of tender smacks, he sipped a surplus bliss from hairy teats, and poured a too-great too-sweet weight of honey in his guts, sugaring-over his sicklier fate, until its amber gobbets came punching past his throat, to cloud in morbid solids the anxious air above his angry head, his beatled brow, and become an unbalanced boulder impossible to toss. He himself induced the rocky cross he had to bear, stealing the deathless nectar mid-air upon their bony knees, of the gods. With this he spritzed immortalizing mickeys in the meads his thirsty mates held high, held high. But the spotting gods from their scudding clouds kneeled down, and spotted him, imbibing ambrosial dews that he had stolen, his one deluded theft, shouting immortal toasts among his mates. So much did they construe. Against impertinance they set their heavenly trines in shapely series, pricking imperilled Pelops back down upon the dying lists of men, spelled in blood. Only the self-deluding attempt to delude the gods. 7 But when startled adolecence came loitering, stiffing his naked cheek with nigger whiskers, he thought, in leafy autumn, befitting thoughts of simple Hippodameia, a dimpled Pisan maid. He thought her melted-butter looks and locks of braille, unfingered, a clicking fit for his once-open book. He turned first to the turning pages of the turning sea, throwing thunderous odes against the verbal edges of the waves. A radient trident stabbed a terrored instant above the blacking clash until subtle Posiedon, stridently serene, came bubbling up between the smacking gravels' filial polyuphloisbios. 8 "This watery hissing of the waves, the youthful lines of moonlight, mysterious across their advancing backs, all that adventurous confusion of the light floods me to one resolve, yet wavering. I ask Oinommaus' dreory spear be tipped in rust; thirteen bachelor charioteers have formed, so far, of their aching sides unwilling sheaths. But why live or die at all, without nobility? Old men die spineless, and in squat shadows fall, unexploited by their one-time sun of youth. Let Aphrodite find me handsome, if she can, flinging the victorious reins like seaweed to Hippodameus' pale, impaitient hands." So Posiedon came, in disgorging rains, and left behind, dropped from his culminating storm, as dew-destiny, Pelops' winning steeds. 9 Oinommaus' handsome hands hung down useless to pursue where his hale daughter Hippoameia, ladylike, hopped beneath the wine-colored covers of Pelops' bed. In their purple afternoons of marriage-time there came some half-dozen resultant sons of resolving hues, each one a cure for some different dark. Pelops is dead and he is happy. Crowds of rowdy men populate his worship, muddying the ford at Alpheos. His flaming altar streams merrily with a very tangible ichor, displaying undaunted scuds of smoke to remotest quadrants. The glorying ray of that first, irretrevable Olympiad shines completely, shines ceaselessly above the bruise of toil wherever chariots roam their universal hulls in competing daylight. The winner rests his contented eyes like a speckless gecko in the sun, ignorant of death, fanning his drying hair victoriously. 10 One day or night's solitary concupiscence is all of goodness we may ever bear or guess. Aiolian rhythms proclaim from moving hooves. Now my new song rides at the horses' necks, pluming the tumultuous beauty of my lord. No part of intruding duty, but portioned joy, is it to clearly chant his praises, unconfused. O Hieron, the shimmering gods themselves keep sight solely to watch your bright ambitions' track, traducing darklier evanescences of night. 11 If you do not go abandoned by those above wheeling triumph will keep reeling at your side. I pray my tongue remains capable of praise as we ride green nights together on up the Hill of Time. The Muse has knocked back her golden arrow to send aloft this heightened rhyme. Your gaudy kingship crests the stars themselves by my vocal permanence. But let us negate, for now, such niggling peering into the beyond. For the time we have, walk on, walk high, in your resistless hullabaloo; And I'll sit forever in the winners' circle blowing my melodious breath upon each pared rainbow of my fingernails. |
Olympian Ode Number One (To Hiero In Syracuse) | 1 | upon each pared rainbow of my fingernails. | 257 | lyric, translation, ode, greek, Pindar, heroic, hi | Torturous Splendours of the Dream |
| 475 | If after grandeur, disappearance,
If, after all this splenetic ascent, The crippled aftermath of a fall, Less and less intense, among such Bright, abstract things, then what? What low-watted misapprehension, What fatal fault or suborning error Still all awhirl in the mystery, The furious cauldron of un-become, Spicy broth of untasted potentials, First recommended to the infant sense The haphazard and mistake of birth? What wry ointment in what creative eye Thumbed from the numb terror Of inexistence, this existence? This houseless maundering among Syncopated rubble, this shy twist Of a fast-disappearing, evanescent fate? Erratic twirl of wounded imaginings, Soporifics poured in a killing cut,--- Inflicted birth, the eccentric squeeze From nothingness to somethingness, A human caw among perished isles, Nearly silent against the sea's Greek, inanimate suavities? What was in the cherished river, At first, to flood us from the womb, What in the dry blue mountain To pile us up to the height, The convulsive height, of birth? Why was there something of us, Some tenuous insisting among pecked grain, In all this pervading nothing? Why begin, with a glittering cry, To speak of the shine of Things Among all this annihilated rot? Why begin, and breathe, and breathe Until lungs revolt and breath secedes Gasp by gasp, to finality? Why this compelling fragrance, This last stink of a terminal sweetness, This blanketing panache come home To impelling nostrils, Why this, why this, among all The universes of nothingness God had heretofore imagined, Singular monarch in his cloudy sublime, Unpopulated paradise filled with rocks? And if we are all of mere spirit tweaked, Smacked rat-a-tat from the celestial, Like clean water from a clean tin can, If so thin a strain of the etherial, Then what is in our exiled spirits Fleshed to the daily endeavor we construe To make us weep? What acrylic inch Of our invisible divinity uninvisibly Will manifest to measure our wash of sorrows? What interior tide pushes us to tears, Continual tears in a plangent land, And not one sorrow forgotten But a new sorrow returns, like spring, Ever-freshening the sadnesses We pursue? Why this continual cry If in our essences we are deaf? Does the grandest theme weep For the splattered litter of notes That bodies it from the tearing page? Did a charming lietmotif ever Spare a tear for the plucking hand, The arranging brain, the fostering voice? I have slept, and now arise, Vacuously awake in a vividness of dawns, Apruptly up with an enhancing vigor, And, among the snickering trinkets Of bedtimes past, with a vocal flourish, Dimly echoed to the listening esplanade, sing A more manful, arising phrase. I, A shattering light against the pharisees, Those blocking and those blacking hacks, The unresting interrupters, sprung Enjambments of clear locutions, Sponges at the garrolous baptismal font, Eager drinkers of accidental holy waters, Theives of waterfalls and decoy reliques, False trophies of the miraculous Our spurrious loves disguise As saving revelations: I arise. Out of these body-heavy hours, crowded With the torturous splendors of a dream, Out of these distorting caves and caverns, Out of this loud and proud now My tiredness had supoenaed To that clogging court unconsciousness, Out of sinister blackness like an arrow Plumed with snicking lights, Out of simple silence like a siren Roaring unresisting reds, Out of my bones, my very bones, Mutible and hollow, Like a tenderly fluted note, I arise. Now in my found bower, I survey its contemplative shades, Its confectionary greys And half-fabricated half-darks Where I had pretended meditation. Shipwrecked in my spousal house And torn down from splendid heaven, A castaway spasmed from the completed Ideal Kicked into the gestured frescoes of the real, The half-completed wall done half gold, half A caribbean pearl of spic splashes, So white as to blind the eye, So warm as to melt the memory, diminish Sheeted winter to piebald April. Here I yawn awake in arousing play, Dandling argent dasies, spooning A million raw julips on one tongue, Improving my tenor to a rafterless sky A swept blue of renewing heights, An up without a top, capless As my sheering serenity, My full bloom of honey flooding From each minutest flowerlet: Intention devoutly touching intent at last. All alone in glory I live Who am a speaking spirit to the things I rack and ratchet blindly about, A ghost of irresistible force To the hesitating, quick quill, A god of wind blowing pansies In their inscrutible purples, A thing of merit, and a demon of note Proffuring awful caresses In trade for the one syllable 'love.' From my fleur-de-lis bedding I stretch, intensely lazy, Moving a few less-than-useful Pussywillow sprays away, that mark My makeshift ark with their velvets. From here I peer far past the small Eloquence of the 'merely' personal Steering to the vertigineous exact, The brightening verities of the sky, Sting of stars, the cosmic whip And nagging lacerations of the real, All the subsuming finite, intricate, The thousand wavings of detail that finishes The uncertain infinte, the expressive sense Of still-to-do and yet-to-do And not yet done, the pang Of manyness, and pule of puny Maybe, become the plum of one, The glistering artifact in the bowl Of the out-there Eternal. And when I wake, and my bleak eyes see In all this catastrophe of light One dark soul only, definite as night, A mute, ruminating being Treading the solitary rhododhendrons, as if Veritable miracle floresced Somehow darkly among the pinched Blots beyond his pinching fingers, A corpse marauding the roses, His cadaverous reaching after fragrance Shaping the desired dark by his questioning, A pornography of death Flopped on the living divan, There, in the branching rhododhendronish Dark, I in my bed mutter wonder: Is this the result of hugeness Inaptly confined, a gigantic dwindling Into the narrow coffin of the senses Of all the airy wideness of a soul--- Stuffed in five cramping fingers, And those fingers resolutely shoved Into a single, shrunken glove? I do not know what answer I would make Seeing this blacking thing of shadows, Mate to the doggish nail that has dug At its own fascinated creation, An insincere earth sincerely debauched By a passion more real than its consequents, A living verb among dead lilies, A certain sound of parable, evoked From the incredible waste, Arbitary horizon and guessed-at bound Scribbled against the infinities, A scholar's seperation of the dark Into dark and dark, a delineation, too, Of fantastic lights, where only light And higher light, and a lowness Of light only and always are. What are these parings and portionings, These niggling splits And uneasy chafings, these soaps And chromy shavings of eternity, The selfsame immensity that we are, too big And brave a thing for ladies' mittens, The parasol of sight and leaf of ear, Shade of smell and shadow of touch, Forever less than the elephant they gloze, What are they all to us today, In this dizzying second above the chasm, This pirouette upon a gyroscope, This rustle of meaningless papers, chime Of windy whim, cast of fate, What do they mean, and how, How, how, how, mon frere, Do those puffs of meaning manifest? How do we come to degraded meaning Out of sincerer wish? How descend From the very portico and pitch of heaven To the quixotic swamp of decided good? What winces in the hero's nerve That makes the paradisical damsel, saved, Less than his own, and grandest, Saving gesture? What gets her, though beautious, Reduced to an incident, a paltry Happenstance recorded in a tapestry, Less herself, both in and of herself less, Than the skillful weave that retrieves her, Summons her narrative beauty to the orb, The goldenest orb, of sight, saved again From the final damnation of the unsaid thread? Is it that she is a noun merely And not a verb, a paraphrase of greatness And not the great thing herself, Her motive being and selfsame source Never troubling the trumpets' Victorious ogling of her story, Louder and louder, at her paraded reception? And yet all about me now I see Splendid unsayings of these themes, The gilded weave picked bald, The hero maligned and maid discomfitted, Returned to glory in a rustic nave Of beaten seashells and scratchy quartz, A bare displaying of simplicities Fit for neither homily nor hymn. These mutainous eviscerations Of life's sparse leavings, The brindled curd and the voluble leaf Begging after silence with one last word, And sighing for revelations as once Their own profuse confusions they pursued, Going to the interior nothing And producing, like an avid paramour, The true, universal gem, a sum Of themselves and of their mystery Only the questioner questioning Could, from blank possibility, create: The Macy's diamond rummaged, ex nihilo, From a cape. What good has ever come From living in the smallest world Or raging for the tiniest chime In all the unreeling Appalachiens Of our august symphonies? Splendor, nothing but splendor Tattoos the groaning soul, pricking Aptest testaments in the flinching skin. This is our inception and our destiny, Despite these shrinking meanderings, These mangled sayings of the small And mousy praises of the infintesimal, This obscuring appetite for tiny Registered among our surrounding large. Am I nothing, nothing more Than the mere instance of a theory, A fabled example or hypoteneuse inked-in? No, my soul! But the decision for good And the good are not the same thing. Saying a word and meaning a word Are seperate instances of things Mere contrivance can never finally tie; Starry shatterings clump against my hand. To imagine an end is not-- Fortuitous proving of eternity!-- To come to the end. We have said Everything at one time or another. I say again that saying is not To mean. If it is not to mean, Then what is it to have said at all? The expressing wish, the tink Of tink-a-tink-tunk, the song Of the garroted voice, the sole Ululation of various mutes, The single thing of diversity, The only theme purloined From the myriad mashing of myriad notes, Is this: I live! Any heart, any love, Any word whose empty impulse I move And by passion alone redeem From the meaninglessness that ensconces, The disordered view packed up In ordered sight, all wild night held In the spilling instance of my vision, Discovery and instance unified As the blowsy seed, once watered, spurts To the mastering citadel of the tree, And its great discordance veiled By a will that gives as it commands: "Hear my soul, and speak my plea: I create the paradise I pursue, Enlivening each green-new bud With untroubled blood. Tender, I sense the soft furl of each Leaf asleep in its seed. Seedlings, unfurl! Is it strange To live once loved, and never die? Live but once alive, and eternity is thine! I am most myself when you are me! Enter this heart palpitant And take the living light Heaving there: It is given! And every blushing rose of heaven Has my blood on its cheek, Thorns its redness to a glory By my own, as you shall dip and grow,--- With a lover's insistence, Swelled world, now allow My bending face this kiss, Though it may be with bloodied lip; I crave such missed wishes, which, Forever untold, unwhispered, Become prayers recinded As if God had hindred All love gave. O! In this presence of peace Forgive me for loving In pure reminiscence Each future unrewarded kiss You will decide not to kiss. All flush giving's removed, Washed to dust by mere 'having,' So cold is your loving. Never absent in wishes Is this tenderest of touches: Grave world, I am giving More resolute loving-- unstriven-- Than you in your sorrows May ravenly raze from me, However you harrow My soul's own simplicity! I toss my angel haloes to blackened souls, Burnt wrecks and hulks of matchsticks, Haphazard of my lightness, For I cannot choose but float in light While in this dizziness I live: Beauty has a power All goodness to endow Once lifted from its bower. Beauty is a thing as once its dreamed. Ever, eternal,--- once lived, undying." |
Final Phrases | If after grandeur, disappearance, | Ever, eternal,--- once lived, undying." | 354 | lyric, philosophical, playful, anthem | Torturous Splendours of the Dream |
| 476 | Before the nuptials, cymbals, symphonies, hush
Crash of love, hymn-praises, sermons, laughs, Filthy snickerings in the red, rowdy pews, Song-sighs choiring a crush of one from these Million-loving tongues, faith saying fleshes Supposing combed words in a racking wind's stir That tears away all, and in thronged All suspends This auroraed bride's brindled veil swaying simple As kisses, warm as dew, and undone as air, Morning-lifted in outrageous altar light To never flutter crippled from heaven's harsh shut Blues, bouyed amber, eternal, where bride and groom, Skyey twins all tall among May's constellations, Titter back at the spatter-smack of stars Flaming wishes against God's dark, kids again In the coaxing hour of sun and honey, kids again In the awake time, when time, once won hoverdom Of love, I, an unready singer sing, My smile all smiles slimly seamed in dawn's silver Who takes as bud-beginning this thistle wish: That no doom of flood will drown down Their happy miraculous town of rough, bright starts Where every memory's a story, absent clamped endings, And evergreen sprays nail the cross doors wide Open to Spring's blessed day, its fever of ferns, Prodigious boy and girl of the honoured hours Before the widow's long black walk of hurt, Or spark-eyed child's mewling through the roof, Your joined joyed hands, spry fives, numb tumblers, Work all love's agued locks aghast to lift Each crowbarred heart's cement hatch at last. Here to the tying place, the trying place, the tryst- Twisting lamp circle center, where startled guests Gored with gifts arrive scurrying to hear Each undead, annointed syllable, come! Ear the merry sojornings of two souls twirled In wedded love, eat the feasts buried in their eyes Who dance forever the loose measure of their lives By shafted Cupid pinwheeled to their pulse, Gifted girl and lucky lad, who curse not Their execution's unsteady stay on earth, Who prick scrimshaw ivories of their imagined world Or conga roaring Amazons to their flowing feet, Going together their blood-bearing travels down the tongue, Prayering every impossible grace like a thirst Or swearing all paradise in a parched swallow, So becoming is it when time-twining lovers Forswear all long agony's terrored second To, one witching minute in the weather, become. Come syllable and bell! Come harmony and drum! All squeaking rivers come rushing to cry Down to a ministering sea, its flak of salt That washes away all sours, and delivers Love. Somber before the deacon sober, fresh in his ash suit, (With all the names of friends mooing from creaking pews, Clenching soggy knees to see, spooned the froth Of agitated life at their Sunday service, once, And buffooning faces at its bitterlessness) The sugar man and sugared woman approach their lord, Who is Love, and none other, whose breath is caught In kisses they give each other, whose combining Tongue utters whatever their bodies have said, Not blindly divine from the crimped mind down But holyeyed up from the awkward fact of things, And wetly skyward fountains heaps of blessings. Never could my hobbled praises jump to where Their slowest heel pinned a hunching wing, For they are heaven's couple, and leap lights---- Marooning Einstein's murmured knowing, crowned Spendthrifts of forever's free eons, and of this One day's redding rose, thorned before, but now, In upright nakedness is: a blossom wholly blossom. And here the stanzaed lovers stand and wave Forever young against the grain of any decay, Sprung above by solacing lungs and gold loins, Primed in the unenvying noontime to use Their smallest wasted hours in largest ways, Fondle doubts like aches out of their living skins, And glow all loving-full all afternoon. And when all the lead-legged world can stamp for this Magic miracle minuet its dancing due, Subliming hates by carefree steps to some Near perfect finger dance of tippling care, Then forever's monotony will kneel to bliss And every sky-cast instant will fly us round to this: Sugar lovers tilting on their cake to kiss. |
Before The Nuptials | Before the nuptials, cymbals, symphonies, hush | Sugar lovers tilting on their cake to kiss. | 86 | lyric, epithalium, praise, personal, gratitude | Torturous Splendours of the Dream |
| 477 | I know existence is a marriage feast
Unfit for man, forgotten by that beast, Ravaging the ripe, autumnal mind Full of all earth's soft glories, yet unkind, Zeroed to a null harvest at another's hand. Temperence is in the tempest Harboring one more 'tomorrow' Blown alive in the face of sorrow Out of dessicate death's million dusts. O why's the uneasy soul demand a 'must'? I come, no new thing conceiving, But each old love reprieving From the insuperable dross, All our tangled fishing lines of loss,----- My own fingers the tireless loom, of course. And O! my loving heart's a thief Of joy eternal, never grief; Smothered pallor of Loneliness lies in the gutter Abandoned by the dark sorrow that brought her Into the bleak depths that sought her. But what spiked heights shall I discover, Fledgeling to my ariel brother Whose proud hoof propounds the clouds And whose sweet voice, crying aloud, Creates the very heaven he would found! Near these besting wings I flutter, Next to this compelling voice I utter Who had no words or choice before, But lay asleep to the resounding score; Misprision alone my only noted lore. Unscroll the limitless script In heart-words from love-lips Of rolling golds of possibility! The sky itself does not descend But rises in mighty, human orisons. Spelled in platinum, lightning-arced in whites, Is every syllable of our plight; Every disastered crash of thunder Charges rapid hearts with wonder No sound or terror will ever vortex under. |
Coda | I know existence is a marriage feast | No sound or terror will ever vortex under. | 40 | lyric, philosophical, personal, cautionary | Torturous Splendours of the Dream |
| 478 | This is no post-mortem, but a moment recalled, my Dear
How briefly was her face tilted to the heaven where I lived! Never had another angel-- so hungry to experience love, real love, terrifying love and its frightful freedoms-- come to the cool harbor of my arms with such intensity screwed into her face. Her face itself was an angel's puzzle; the tripped electric gate St Peter shut. An alert and mobil majesty in those pale features and dark locks that perhaps only still photography or a 1920s black and white film could possibly capture. In life, her grins and winning compressions of her nose seemed too hectic to be believed-- too rash and ecstatic to really be communicating from any, more static, core one was willing to call recognizably "human." But I also knew these faces in their slow-motion mode, their more belatedly loving and august character. Alone, and at her feet, I would watch the world wash over her face at the end of the day in complaint and exasperation until it seemed that all expression must vanish from those exhausted lips and ceilingward, nearly black, eyes. Within moments, however, she would grimace or resolutely sigh-- shaking her head like a wet terrier and, perhaps, open her blood-alive lips again to say my name or breathe out through a self-indulgent smile untraced by any concern other than its own tired loveliness. These were treasured instants, which I now (how calmly!) recollect. My bitterness, my anxiety, my righteous self-defense of some imagined personal integrity ripping from me now as the world then fell from her looks. And then I remember a slight sound of water mingling with her sidelit countenance; some fountain where we sat out a midnight vigil, the waterlight of rose and blue coral; laughing in delight at the airy realness of the stone cherubs floating before us rises to mind and floats around me now somehow liquidly-- the unviewable sandpaper of the sea our only backdrop. Here was passion and patience and regret for the thought of a future we then in-hearsed, burying our told wishes as if just so much weight of dust. The taste of dust stays with me; dust and water still mingle on my tongue. |
I write this to all the harried angels of the eart | This is no post-mortem, but a moment recalled, my | How briefly was her face tilted to the heaven wher | 2 | prose, preface, letter | Torturous Splendours of the Dream |
| 479 | My neon heart's kneeling in defeat;
Beauty by its gentle precept Now all its silken ties relents, Loosening sighs my soul had kept. Never under a deeper terror Moved one blinded spirit's seraph Than this enchanted note might tell of ---However voice is prone to error! For I was one who had loved Love! Nor ever for my hot fondness stood reproved But tripled-up that passion cold eyes removed, Heating deep Atlantics from my heart's cove. Sacred were those wellspring's vents! Deeplier delved than baptismal frankincense Crushed to holy foreheads in Arab tents--- Never of life's pulsings to relent! Time has put all such dreaming now to bed, All louder hearts to quiet 'neath calmer heads As if to lie asleep were to forget the dread: Though lying living now, we shall lie dead. So then what is it to have lived? Nothing; if not "to have loved." Thus life's premise is against me proved And I am dead--- though I have loved. |
My neon heart's kneeling in defeat | My neon heart's kneeling in defeat; | And I am dead--- though I have loved. | 24 | lyric, love, rhyming | Adoring Thorns |
| 480 | I have been by your tempests overtaken
And wallow waterlogged in your waves' swales Whose salt in tender licks my mouth Opens thirsting for.... Drowned by years Of loving whatever your love abandons here On the constant beaches of my devotion. Not one pebble turns from the spray away Or hesitates to douse itself in you. |
Or However the Weather Tends [from Adoring Thorns] | I have been by your tempests overtaken | Or hesitates to douse itself in you. | 8 | lyric, love, devotion | Adoring Thorns |
| 481 | Beyond the fell pace of antelopes
Lost to sight in the cold engulfing woods Where hot hounds give ululating chase, up slope And deep into the dimmest mossy fold--- There my mind in ranting rage unwinds And knows the sharp sorrow of each bitten thing And falls with the great hart in bludgeoned love; |
Hunting [from Adoring Thorns] | Beyond the fell pace of antelopes | And falls with the great hart in bludgeoned love; | 7 | lyric, personal, regret | Adoring Thorns |
| 482 | Twice by speed of love was my message sent
Dimming suns by bright heart's relent- Less, sincere and spiritual, self-amusement. Here joy castled and burning voices flowed As fire were water, up skies bluely endowed (By wedded loves' light now new embowered). And --as a flower-- leapt my longing Universes high, unkempt light prolonging As tender looks in lovers' eyes are kept By mutual fire alive against the ashy wish of death. Thus this flaming wreath hath reft roses and suns Of their writhing petals, but not their worth Which, reckless of cold time's slow vast waste, runs On and on, racing still my pulses to loved earth! |
To Her, To Her | Twice by speed of love was my message sent | On and on, racing still my pulses to loved earth! | 14 | lyric, personal, sonnet, hopeful | Adoring Thorns |
| 483 | There, nimble and fantastic
As the bar closes, a tilting girl (Near wooden doors eerily elastic) Stands, dances and twirls, Shrieking "Life!" to adoring airs A chandelier's flaming wings make roseate. "My angel, my light, come down, come here!" She leaps from her chair-- too high, too late-- Pirouettes, trips, recovers herself In the innocence and vision of a dream: From the paradise of her lips An atmosphere, a heaven, of absinthe Slips. Drunken and lovely, the Intoxicant, Following with feet wherever heart went, Learns like a supplicant to lean On whatever the dream means. |
The Drunken Ballerina | There, nimble and fantastic | On whatever the dream means. | 17 | lyric, love, personal, ennui | Adoring Thorns |
| 484 | Her eyes intensified destroyed the impossible clarity of the evening. Aquamarine at midnight, skies of milk and summer. By erasing it yet more clearly. Hyperbolic acid in her glance-- impossible to petty moralities; all enter and dissolve. Ha ha! How luxuriantly have caravans of myself, my own, my bedouin soul, passed green nights exploring these portals. Meadows of somber enormity. Ha ha! This should interest those who pretend to be scientists of spirit.
Myself? I am rapturous for escape. Into reality, the unpurveyable. Prom-dressed scarecrows stuffed with diamonds of anguish would pay a very high price for my innocence. Then: ---Your mouth is a brood ground of old whores. Every word is an untranslatable genesis. ---Piquant egotism! I say her eyes. |
Her eyes intensified.... | Her eyes intensified destroyed the impossible clar | I say her eyes. | 8 | lyric, love, personal, prose poem | Adoring Thorns |
| 485 | The face haunts me. Melts, vagrant ghost that it is, enters my veins and wells up to impossible laughter. Shrieking radiance of newness-- shrill and virile! Well, well, I feel that I have not yet forgotten how-to-love.
Blue innocence of adorning airs-- unnecessary extravagance! in the face of your face. Come, stand beside me. There is so much I demand to imagine as still possible tonight. How void of solace is the empty moon! One bladed touch of your fingernail, and the world lies ripped around me in bleeding shreds. Art, poetry, complexity: Let us destroy these sterile mechanics of happiness-- How uselessly this world is gold troubadour to my impulse! Yet, the face haunts me. |
The face haunts me | The face haunts me. Melts, vagrant ghost that it i | Yet, the face haunts me. | 5 | lyric, love, personal, prose poem | Adoring Thorns |
| 486 | Oh my giant honeydrop
Y'know my heart will never stop Look at me I look at you Is all I ever want to do Oh my cherry lollipop There my cherry lollipop Oh ma chere I look at you That's all I ever wanna do |
Aqua Lycra Scubagirl | Oh my giant honeydrop | That's all I ever wanna do | 8 | lyric, love, personal, minor | Adoring Thorns |
| 487 | All these longshoremen of the heart can go fuck
O water water aching blue and bright Get that little scubagirl up to the light-- Prayers are ashes when heaven is wet: O lonely little scubagirl, fly up to my net! My heart is full of candy roses, My hand's a daisy patch; I bless all runny noses 'cuz I hope one blessing yours will catch. O little aqua lycra scubagirl You swim in my Adriatic heart's red swirl. |
Why I Like Wet [from Adoring Thorns] | All these longshoremen of the heart can go fuck | You swim in my Adriatic heart's red swirl. | 11 | lyric, love, personal, minor | Adoring Thorns |
| 488 | Love and longing live for light---
It is a torch's tempted touch Comes to candle conscious sight, Komes in kicking blisters-- it is too much! My love and longing endure a night; Every luminescence shut when she blinks against the light. |
Lyric Licked [from Adoring Thorns] | Love and longing live for light--- | when she blinks against the light. | 7 | lyric, love, personal, praise | Adoring Thorns |
| 489 | A saint is in the eye
that sees thee Upholding light impatient skies descend-- Blue litmus insert bedeviling a patched wold Changeless spirits inherit and descry a lice-bed. Infinitely dark trees shade the scree- Shaped cynosure-- adoring Life! Crying bloods leak down a marble eye In thirsting wish seeing glory-adornments Perched at the white clasp of your throat Charging the plush surge velvet time blots --- in violet time reprised! |
A saint is in the eye | A saint is in the eye | --- in violet time reprised! | 20 | lyric, love, personal, praise | Adoring Thorns |
| 490 | Naked angels who watch my spirit, weep
As I have wept, and still this vigil keep. For purer love has never in its season Been given than this I give unease in. O Disquiet! Come hallow this soul of me Forged between an ariel halo listing in fire And sultry dusts spurring restlessnesses. Come shift my spirit's solidity-- as mist Arisen to sun's atomizing power Lifts to brighter character by its change of state. |
Prayer. Again. [from Adoring Thorns] | Naked angels who watch my spirit, weep | Lifts to brighter character by its change of state | 10 | lyric, meditative, personal | Adoring Thorns |
| 491 | How sweet the blossom shouts the winter's over
In cannonades all of yellow love Starring a ground still downy As if summer suns outswept the inaugural day. How dawn's above this starling stalk uncertain Which of the light is bearer and receiver! |
New Year [from Adoring Thorns] | How sweet the blossom shouts the winter's over | Which of the light is bearer and receiver! | 6 | lyric, nature, minor | Adoring Thorns |
| 492 | Parted lovers met on life's intervening
strand: Close in love, and closer still in loving. Pearled light held the near angels' adoring, Angelic in reflection of love's uplifted brand. |
I'm Seein' Life in Debravision | Parted lovers met on life's intervening | Angelic in reflection of love's uplifted brand. | 5 | lyric, love, minor | Adoring Thorns |
| 493 | All these unlimited ministries glisten
Ingeniously-- lights capitulating to lights' Increasing haloes. So her face Angelus limitless from lips to unpinned hair In my heart radiates life Until every limb lies annealed And even my fingers infect the spring with joy Teaching each sweet bird its flight From high height to highest! Purloined glories from my smashing chest Accept no council Neither fear nor philip of wit Nor care of any creepy pink thing But plunging on in their own bewildered wonderment Scroll out til stars pile up Making earth's envisioning air Seem the thinnest ribboning. |
Jes' Tryin' Ta Tell A Vision [from Adoring Thorns] | All these unlimited ministries glisten | Seem the thinnest ribboning. | 18 | lyric, love, minor, praise | Adoring Thorns |
| 494 | Her incandescent body
Tender under told time's one gigantic tick Incinerates hours and fables by swept, kept licks; Molten beneath the moon's white story One by one the unspoiled stars spill from her side. Take all my lorn light unshorn (to you only belonging) Twist flame and flower and winking spring Into the midnight ivy of your dark, swung hair And into the blended candle's long eye at dawning. Twist every strand of the wild, wild air Into the midnight ivy of your dark, swung hair Until Love jumps out from spuming earth And mounts the lost, cross ways of my breath. All-at-once lovely in your loved eye, Awkward and able, spry and awry, My burning body like a shouted cross I move (O golden-boned frame suffused with unrefusing Love!) All-at-once lovely in your loved eye. Now out of sparring breath I pause to praise and honour all her ways: Whirled brave alive again from her inward world I sing all loves sprung from her beginning word; And deep in the sacristy of her candle-hot breath I lay down my moons and worlds for the honor of her days. |
Her incandescent body | Her incandescent body | I lay down my moons and worlds for the honor of he | 24 | lyric, love, praise | Adoring Thorns |
| 495 | My heart's a lamp of "red, mirrored fire"
Blown to sun-eyed daises flown From the uncovered light of her chest; Now ashen heart has a smoky charm to fondle And she had a will to touch such smoke A wick-licked nipping love Mouthed from the sensual tongue of summer air Writhing with daisies in the heaven-flooded fields Whirled about her rich wildness where she lay. Then all my pyred, wronged Soul abandoned broken in its ageless grief Stood forgetful of its doom of harm In the myriad afternoon of her maenad's chin: And lapped in happiness through the tumbledown night I rose with the joy-streaked stars again And felt in the blood-flared marrow Of my pyring, fire-christened soul's core The meadowed virgin's sung lovingness come Whiten and bless me with her petal-fall. |
Naked | My heart's a lamp of "red, mirrored fire" | Whiten and bless me with her petal-fall. | 19 | lyric, love, praise | Adoring Thorns |
| 496 | Her silvered eyes entranced the moon, leapt bare
From dim cornice to swept heaven, stared The moon-man from his stirless rest By fibers of affection bound him breast to breast. So Isabella charmed each element she met, Bent to calm waters, and made those waters crest As she were the moon come down to trod the wood And with luminous looks set whispers among the reeds. The wind that swept her sighed away enthralled; And crickets kept her steps enshrined with hymns; Birds added wondrous silent powers to their calls And marked her visit solemnly, like small dignitaries trimmed; Sweet berries shook themselves to roll along her palm And of those moon-liveried lips have some taste Before they of their giving taste gave all. |
Bella Belle Isabella [from Adoring Thorns] | Her silvered eyes entranced the moon, leapt bare | Before they of their giving taste gave all. | 15 | lyric, love, praise | Adoring Thorns |
| 497 | I'll resign the moon
[And all the fainting artwork of stars tear down] And all the flagrant shouting stars That leech their whiteness to every sky Indifferent as the wind For her whose whiteness stays concentrated More than the gigantic roaming moon Or meteors that diminish as they pass In higher light oval as true love That touches everything as it touches You with its white tangential tongue. |
I'll resign the moon | I'll resign the moon | You with its white tangential tongue. | 11 | lyric, love, praise, minor | Adoring Thorns |
| 498 | Let it come, let it come
Hypnotized time of supremest Love! I faint from paitience, My memory dead; Fears and falseness-- enchantments! To heaven are fled. And Love's soft thirst My sick veins bursts. Let it come, let it come Hypnotized time of supremest Love! by Arthur Rimbaud |
Let it come, let it come | Let it come, let it come | by Arthur Rimbaud | 11 | lyric, translation, love | Adoring Thorns |
| 499 | Here my winter heart,
And there my summer soul In frosting opposition stand: As when noon and midnight meet, Contend. |
Division | Here my winter heart, | Contend. | 5 | lyric, minor, nature | Adoring Thorns |
| 500 | When I truly dream on Paradise for me, how few faces accompany the vision! None of them recognizable! Here, an unendurable tenderness-- leechlike affections, very like modern art. Empty souls gyrating with a sound of suffusing suction! Wanton in their emptiness, their excessive lack. What sold-out paucity. Inhibitionists sacrificing the spinning wish to live! Mourning doves hop from my head to eat out the eyes of these remorseless sycophants. Trapped by a desire-- they know nothing of how to desire reality for themselves... Ah, my petite soul! How conjugal thy green dance. Come, swirl your cherry scarves around me! We shall play at spitting on these faces!
. . . . . Shattered lilies on the abstract faces Poor bastard! I shall wear your skin-- as a victory and a celebration! You have stripped it off as a drunkard strips off moderation. How jealous of God's spotlight ached St John! There is a willing divinity--- as real as any pig sacrifice in Tahiti. . . . . . Angels possessing cowardice! You too!-- I have felt it-- wings delicate and oily as a fly's, shivering with the anticipation of some heavenly visit-- the recorded face of a little girl at the instant of death; the very moment when she threw herself on the tracks to save the family dog. These are the fetishes of good spirits. I myself am hurtling down the same track, my eyes magnetized by my eventual death-- a death totally without salvation: For I have seen the glorious angels and stood among the hive as they communed with their Creator. My hanging heart, hungry with righteous appetite, has been caressed by the Supreme Hand, altering its tick-- but still I refuse to believe in them; I won't stick by that dirty crew! Not I! Not that lot! Still, heaven is open to me. Its razor azures. Just the thought of falling in love stops my heart. . . . . . The watered loves of salvation. Again! Again these symphonies disrupting restless dusts. How long and how lovingly I longed to be a corpse! Let the roses close over my eyes-- how shyly! Simply the moon's light leaks into the tomb, my arms crosswise, awaiting the heart's cool command to cease. My nostrils shudder at the other corpses; morose disfigurement gnarling the stone. Even in death I am a snob! To have given as I gave: this face to this time! Horribly, I held her hand. I mewed, "I love you." And at this, at this her vailing virginity lapsed! No heroic soul melted between us. Monstrous Beauty! Chaste hands held and licked like cold-cream. How tender were the lies we steeped each other in! Disingenuous lust, dispirited genetalia. She, too, was dead. Her eyes died when I licked the tears from her face-- and laughed! We are so immemorially close! In the velvet afterlight of burning decay, how solemnly her lips beheld mine. Bridegroom to spent darkness. Avidly, vividly, licking. Night, night, my own most especial despair! Unwrap the spirit this cellophane traps! Extend my nauseousness to the masses! Sick, and in infinite hope infinitely despairing, I extend my tongue to your bootsole... I weep if I can touch one discarded object of your hatred! Mysterious Heart! My words are nails! Useless nails! What a Satan I truly am! |
When I truly dream on Paradise.... | When I truly dream on Paradise for me, how few fac | What a Satan I truly am! | 15 | prose poem, sex, death, cautionary, love, paradise | Adoring Thorns |
| 501 | Small faces gather at the great, Romantic heart
Staked alive in the stiff glare of dead eyes' love-glances, An icicle-daggered light that stabs the loveless dark. How like the vaccuum-vacant philosophy of Sartre! Small faces proved mute, they slink towards death.... Dwindled souls! Seek death's vile ecstatic chance! O hatred! glow again within this loving breath And spurn with angel's-fire every falseness weaving wreaths About this lighted grove of truest Love I hold within me in untresspassed stillness yet. Every striving leaf to some high lightness tends, Sending its green tendrils through a shadowed net; So I strive, and my striving may have no let. O Love, love How sacred is this tended flame no matter how you move-- |
Small faces gather at the great, Romantic heart | Small faces gather at the great, Romantic heart | How sacred is this tended flame no matter how you | 14 | lyric, love, sonnet | Adoring Thorns |
| 502 | I'd divine the source your rich mystery was made in
But head cannot know what heart's forsaken That groans awake in the harassing [solitary] wind Which irritates these high-borne summer grasses Stirred as I to your blood's momentary thrumming: How out of deafness had I heard your deep soul coming? And what strange remembrance then shall my heart find Pulsing beneath new autumn's colored masses When lungs pulse solemn in the halo-light Beaten to sweet gold above one winter's night? O there are days that drive one to be blind To all the world's cruel, compelling ashes And force my bludgeoned, hidden heart to see A coarse, cold beauty behind a dark reality. |
I'd divine the source your rich mystery was made i | I'd divine the source your rich mystery was made i | A coarse, cold beauty behind a dark reality. | 14 | lyric, love, sonnet | Adoring Thorns |
| 503 | When you are gone my heart is buried
In damned time, my grave maker and keeper; What tripped unerringly then stumbles, dead In a world deceased, save for active reaper Who seeks live hearts for deadliest solace And in velvet caress comes touching to kill. I adopt the cowl and wear an empty face Stained by cold reticence when I lack your will Which hotly blushes all my good intent As sunlight interfuses loveliness To every airy thing, in whole or part, Imbuing sheer transfigurement by thy wish. But now, my sun, you are come again And make all departure welcome by such return. |
When you are gone my heart is buried | When you are gone my heart is buried | And make all departure welcome by such return. | 14 | lyric, love, sonnet | Adoring Thorns |
| 504 | Up the singing stair I bound as heart
Pounds a rhythm of joy, unbounded, full Of its own spread glory as kissed lips that part To set royal notes to soul's burning all. Here there is wine; wine, poetry and love To last all evening long, and light the morn In flame everliving as my spirit moves Above the limning eye of dawn. I've borne Untold sorrows as wind bears up the clouds That fly into the atmosphere's soft Height, where still my soul beats loud! O inner certainty, sure as that sky aloft I'd give again each heartache, live every painful hour That I may know one moment of beauty's fearsome power. |
My Heart, My Debra, My New Dwelling | Up the singing stair I bound as heart | That I may know one moment of beauty's fearsome po | 14 | lyric, love, sonnet | Adoring Thorns |
| 505 | Riding angel-lambent in cloud-crystal bliss
I mock all pricking peaks' diminished blacks Until the near sun dissipates like a vapored kiss And all Love's crystal excess cracks away and sinks Light-shattered to the deep-augured sea. I sing my imaged beauty's bright obsequies As rancid temples sink from my heightened sight And anchors reel away from now-rising ships; I sing despite defeatists who moon for cold Carthage dead Or, sunk with heart-tonnage of thickest lead, Curse the blessing God gave them free: Truth, dear Beauty, and long-souled Liberty! Thus I fly on, re-luming a salvaged past Until out of whatever worst of worst surrounds I divine this syllabic, righteous best! |
Riding angel-lambent in cloud-crystal bliss | Riding angel-lambent in cloud-crystal bliss | I divine this syllabic, righteous best! | 15 | lyric, love, sonnet | Adoring Thorns |
| 506 | Look to where groins are purring
To touch the spur to flank; Miraculous backs heave sweating In midnight's suspended black. O open your heart without letting Until the moon bends down to watch; Touch fire and fire to match, No matter the weight of the dark. |
Sex As Sex | Look to where groins are purring | No matter the weight of the dark. | 8 | lyric, love, sex, rhyming | Adoring Thorns |
| 507 | Halfway to heaven a hero and sinner rest,
Grave mouth to mouth, and breast upon breast; Long were those kisses as the sky may melt and sway, Deep the breaths that crest up there Until mountains are clay. Straight upright stand the dead, Trumpet upbourne on skull and head; No laurel wreaths do their eviscerate hearts display, All that song had woven together now lays unmade; And thorn and dust have taken All song and tongue away. When God's asleep we'll dance as saints,--- In naked innocence heart and skin may meet; Clouds of proud demeanor will fall from our breaths, Our milk kisses pour and taste milk-sweet Deaf to the whisper of death. |
The Hero and The Saint | Halfway to heaven a hero and sinner rest, | Deaf to the whisper of death. | 16 | lyric, philosophical, rhyming, dramatic | Adoring Thorns |
| 508 | Although my love's made for joy
I taste black ashes at my lips; For I am pining sick in love And love is all my remedy. For love but wounds to cure By wounding giving cure, cured to wound again! I am an apostle of that ecstasy And still cannot the deadly sweet Of love's maddened sweat forget. Such is love's mystery When we lie abed Who would give heart's cure Must first stitch heads. Though love is brief, on my hurt I meditate And find all ill who all-wished for sweet; One heart, my own, unowned Like a drop of salt-sweet spray Cold oceans of feelings shows. Oh still to be a human thing alone! |
Shakespeare Writes It [from Adoring Thorns] | Although my love's made for joy | Oh still to be a human thing alone! | 19 | lyric, love, rhyming | Adoring Thorns |
| 509 | [For her of whom I have written both "A million-souled angel this incarnate minute," and "When I in my lover's eye am cast aside," and felt both sayings true with the savage conviction of a ghost doomed to haunt the deathcamp of his last breath]
In her cockle-slip of coffin My love lies lightly best; Out of my own small, sinned bones I begin And shape one splinter to sail gigantic seas; I lay the red keel in my breast. |
Epitaph | [For her of whom I have written both "A million-so | I lay the red keel in my breast. | 6 | lyric, love, epitaph | Adoring Thorns |
| 510 | Stop, ageless star, kissing my desire
That night has fed with dreams of lasting fire And see the charging river such kisses have unhearsed: For pale and pointless as the stony ground Have I lain with whispers until by night immersed And in that night await your silent burning sound! I look to you when my youth deceives me And all the tempest of my indignant blood Throws the sauntering seas of daydream into fever: Ever calm above these opposing storming seas That meet in my breast and cancel You stare, bright star, in vauntless victory ever! |
EVE'S ONE PEARL | Stop, ageless star, kissing my desire | You stare, bright star, in vauntless victory ever! | 12 | lyric, love, rhyming, approximate sonnet | Adoring Thorns |
| 511 | Once,
That night I wrapped jilted Beauty in my arms-- and I found her bitter-- and I spit at her. I cursed her; and I [she] wept. I pickep up the gun against Justice. Terrible vengeance! I ran.-- O Bitches! O Misere! O Hate! All that is precious I have left with you. Ill luck was my idol. Sadness, queen over me. Tragady was my master. Unhappiness, my GOD. I, the evil prince. And then at last the tender Spring apportioned to me the frightful laugh of an idiot! |
RIMBAUD/BEAUTY CLOSING MONOLOG | Once, | And then at last the tender Spring apportioned to | 7 | lyric, translation, love, beauty | Adoring Thorns |
| 512 | Ice cathedrals rise to disappear in air;
A cold-halo hugs the moon with light And radiates all through the star-shot night, A God-eye x-ray of my swooning spirit Thrown large against the winter's distance. The cold tongue chips from the mouth of Baudelaire, Stark grey and somnolent on his nude tomb And pitted as a rotting virgin's womb. Oh song of Baudelaire! strike through Death's blight, and light's: ring, rise and yet renew The eviscerating dark that here unscrews Melting eyes from intoxicated sockets. How should poets love the night and yet refuse To saunter the sun's mercuric center and unlock it? Daniel J Weeks, Gregg Glory |
PARIS NIGHT | Ice cathedrals rise to disappear in air; | Daniel J Weeks, Gregg Glory | 15 | lyric, two authors, sonnet | Adoring Thorns |
| 513 | Ronna Bunker & Gregg G. Brown | Once under silent stars I kneeled weeping, | Seeded by midnight threads of loves kept waiting | Ronna Bunker & Gregg G. Brown | 1 | lyric, two authors, meditative, sadness, melanchol | Adoring Thorns |
| 514 | Ronna Bunker & Gregg G. Brown | Sleeping in the tender light of alone | My many minds alarmingly rebelled-- | Ronna Bunker & Gregg G. Brown | 1 | lyric, two authors, meditative | Adoring Thorns |
| 515 | These fish are angel that blast by
my reef-fingered hands and coral-coated tongue stuck in singing Scales and nitrous loves breathe deep and fluid rides Ronna Bunker & Gregg G. Brown |
I want to be pushed down the slide | My love tastes like blood | Ronna Bunker & Gregg G. Brown | 6 | lyric, two authors, playful | Adoring Thorns |
| 516 | Quiet.
Ronna Bunker & Gregg G. Brown |
Avalanche | white sand aching | Ronna Bunker & Gregg G. Brown | 2 | lyric, two authors, playful | Adoring Thorns |
| 517 | Hold my absent heart.
Fill my broken sky. Tournequet my lurching lies. Hold me where my heart's departed, But don't step on my squish, lady baby. Ronna Bunker & Gregg G. Brown |
I have an absence | abstract more than clay. | Ronna Bunker & Gregg G. Brown | 8 | lyric, two authors, playful, minor | Adoring Thorns |
| 518 | blonde tomb,
tangled tongue, I go spirit-cased to glory golden bow and boy a lute-haired god I trod soully aware I come close and closed for now a noel of no-note tolling a lemon-lozenge apocalypse in lip-sync Ronna Bunker & Gregg G. Brown |
X-ico | blonde tomb, | Ronna Bunker & Gregg G. Brown | 11 | lyric, two authors, playful, minor | Adoring Thorns |
| 519 | Alright, I think,
Almighty, I I saw the pale fingers of love Push God-bones through the grey eyes Of a burning dove. I'm so goddamn sober I ain't no goddamn lobo; You're just anti-social No friends outside the go-go. Ronna Bunker & Gregg G. Brown |
Mr. Moon is my solo glow; | I see you-- for the first time | Ronna Bunker & Gregg G. Brown | 10 | lyric, two authors, playful, minor | Adoring Thorns |
| 520 | Spigot says "Take that, evil-doer!
Your life of pig is overly done! Your sin of winning no more shall come Disguised in pink and pearly sure!" Fascinated faucet spat right back: "The pure I spit is surely sauce and porkly big." Thus lumbered spigot and faucet on From flush night-crack to dribbling dawn Arguing and arguing and arguing through bigs of brawn. Ronna Bunker & Gregg G. Brown |
SPIGOT SAYS | Spigot says "Take that, evil-doer! | Ronna Bunker & Gregg G. Brown | 12 | lyric, two authors, playful, minor | Adoring Thorns |
| 521 | "It is night. Date-palms are rocking on the leash
Of Time, the hurricane, that straddles our defeat With two-legged winds, and stalks the dusty town With a sheriff's clinkered heels until we're mown Down by our ambitions to police the world. Tonight the Mid-East's bunkered sandlots lash Dynamos of fire into the throttled air to crash, On cindered houses abandoned years before. The generals' camouflaged tent is staked In the vampired heart of our affairs of state; Our bloodless motive moves in for the spider-kill, Touching each fly-fat thread centered on our ill. All things are playthings, and the roar Of the black ocean here consumes our speech at night, Lifting its frail levities in a matchstick's Minute light. God knows I was not born to kill--- Who grew up in Indiana's tidy wheatfields tilled By machines as patient as mothers, giant-wheeled, That came sighing with sweet scythes when autumn cooled, Keats-like, and the silo's sundial shadow Met itself in the empty auguries of the meadow. Unhoused thousands are beating to our copter's mill; Prayers raise them cresting to their crescent moon And Allah's sweet-water paradise filled with girls. These are God's sufferers and wear his brand Of salvation creased in skin and hand; Doling out bags of rice and reconstituted milk From the throbbing helicopter's side, half tilt- Ing into the begging sea of faces, I wish For a lunatic's rare absolution of my guilt, his bliss. Stigmata almost washed away by weeping still Eat into the innocent wrists. Now, at Easter, They hold their small hands up, robbed Of all that held them, tongue-tied, to earth, And rise like moons, balloon-willed, lovely, free At last, to their creatured deaths; until we die Nothing stops the cresive wanting of our breath." |
Jonathan Miller, U.S.M. | "It is night. Date-palms are rocking on the leash | Nothing stops the cresive wanting of our breath." | 37 | lyric,dramatic, personae, topical, history | XXX Sonnets |
| 522 | "I will go wash; and drown these desert honors
that stick in my throat. Three weeks before the grand defeat of our enemies, I dreamt my tent squalerous, ruined lieutenants killed by infiltrating mustard gas that couldn't sniff out the winning colors of our almighty flag. My aide snored on under his moony brow, refusing to wake for anything less than the Judgement Day; I'll pass. In the wheezing trenches we squeezed off rounds like mad in an unending philippic against the damned. Dust-erased faces blink skyward from their rust lakes of blood, off, on, off, on. Now downed in a North Carolina airplane hanger and tired of the itching laurels that itch my scalp I stare bemused at what our wanting has brought us here: Disinterred love scrambles up my lap." |
Schwartzkopf, Duke of Iraq [from XXX Sonnets] | "I will go wash; and drown these desert honors | Disinterred love scrambles up my lap." | 16 | lyric,dramatic, personae, topical, history | XXX Sonnets |
| 523 | "Broadbacked noon has come humbling among our wicked spires;
I came trumping in, Ike's prat-boy VP, flipped the sinister death-ace on its head in Laos to a vermillioned flush, a cornucopia of flowers scissored off by dear Pat for my tweed lapel. Coronated by my foreign policy's jewelled accretions, old man of the treasons, whispers stitched to whispers, I age in New Jersey; grown familiarly bland I confer my Ovaltine-sweet opinions on the mass, saddled with a politician's over-zealous over-friendliness still. Whatever has happened has happened. Smooth-trunked Atwater by a humorous tumor felled; How many more must wither and lessen? Stopped at the bullet-proof pane all day, I watch the dogwood whiten and the rich magnolia finish... What love cannot conquer I leave to my will. The winning children still swing back to their crooked papa at Xmas... a few bright, colored lights. I am no thin-spined De Sade, adoring thorns!" |
Nixon Now [from XXX Sonnets] | "Broadbacked noon has come humbling among our wick | I am no thin-spined De Sade, adoring thorns!" | 19 | lyric,dramatic, personae, topical, history | XXX Sonnets |
| 524 | "Hitler once appeared to me in dream, grim,
repentant, towing cowed Eva like a swallowed soul... a hang of flapping hair shut one demon-eye in, dimmed, wrestling with itself, whirlwind angels laughing in his skull. We killed him eventually; a few, true things penetrating to the innermost. I feel the arrow still my brother lumbered from my leg; atop a joyous swing I rubbed where its rubber cutting nose had thrilled. Our afternoons were resplendent, unhurried, vague, as we tumbled as cowboys and indians in an unholstered rush killing the shuffling vegetation and lizards that plagued our simmering summer patio. They would blink and push their low bellies in and out, alien, slow, themselves. I wish the doctor would come and kill my tumor now." |
William Casey [from XXX Sonnets] | "Hitler once appeared to me in dream, grim, | themselves. I wish the doctor would come and kill | 14 | lyric,dramatic, personae, topical, history | XXX Sonnets |
| 525 | Dad, high on inscrutability and his unconscious drive
toward the meretricious, undoes the buzzing crust that baked him in place and disinterrs himself to give one final, lacerating lecture; weeds crush his memorial bust with an enduring, gorgeous green he'd scorn. Fearing the CIA and copper Kremlin in his West VA cave, his fevered eyes dripped in a marsupial's querulous skull as he cradled a shotgun's bucking butt to his shaved cheek rummaging for snagged fowl on the waste acres of his estate. "Interlopers... Boys, when the world inverts this time and the kikes come howling for your heart, nothing will be saved." His fat breathing heaved, "buy gold coins." What we cannot remember cannot save us. Blinking and appalled, I dream that the sun is one of us, like my dad, foredoomed, fated, monstrously alive. Disasters livened him, the minor death of a fly, stumbling and stumbling against the windowpane; the gross head all eyes, one damaged eye, limned in light. Dust leaps from the stone I skip, dust falls... I circle back: dust laps his grave. |
Warm Tomb | Dad, high on inscrutability and his unconscious dr | I circle back: dust laps his grave. | 20 | lyric,dramatic, personae, topical, history | XXX Sonnets |
| 526 | Abandoned by our party in the garden park
of Avon, I feel you shaken with a queasy stiffness; brackish as our garbaged New Jersey beach something's rising, radiant-spiked, rising, rising, to burst as light... Rocketing up from your ulcer's pit I ask myself, what is it, what is it? O how often have your hysterical, profound distemperate electricities hit ground! Spliced fire shams and sparks the matchstick held between us in the dark. Now undone by age, the spooky, loved hegemony of our plush masonic torch putters into mush in the gutted mud of the here and now, fading vivant, untouched. Still here after thirty remorseless years and too weak to laugh ourselves to tears, we lean like water against the sand: No world will hate what we cannot stand. Still posting for our finished race we stand outlined, awaiting grace that creeps against the boardwalk and seethes between the planks that cut our feet. Once, aching with a haltered wish to win and chalked white by spindly dawn we cantered to our easy beginnings and scoffed Bruno Latini on the loser's green. Remember winning? Scarred by crusts we cannot forget, that cannot forget us. Once, swelled by dreams, we labored down the awkward, parnassian slope, and stumbled crown over crown when we attempted Ararat... Religion had us stoned, overloading our middleaging ballast, filled with stones; they sat soldierly, round, white, yellow, white, alone. Look at what our childish urgent hands have crushed! An Atlantis lays buried between us. When the fatal plane zeroes on my heart, faint Fay Ray with cactus drink in hand, unerring in the air, amazed, alert, will you, love, move where I hurt, or like the gruesome Gorgon sprouting hooks spit useless fire still, caught in the traffic's brawl? Conspicuous the loss of consciousness.... rehabilitation the final joke of our crowd. Concentrating on the unmediated throb I think of you, myself, eyeing the prop. |
Middle Ground | Abandoned by our party in the garden park | I think of you, myself, eyeing the prop. | 50 | lyric, dramatic, personae, personal | XXX Sonnets |
| 527 | (A dying New Dealer looks askance at the changing of the guard)
"All night the grating visions. Curled in my electric bed against the prating arias of wind I watch my country go tiptoe towards the whirl .... The President's domineering, branded hip's unpinned by his eight typhooned, bleary years at the mast. Our older brother's younger rung squat-thrusts to the oarlock, lashed by the gold oar snapping from his grasp, spinning in quicksand... One Yalie summer nicknamed him, The Antidote. Unplugged by my heavy coronary, I lay lapsed, small. A tongue-red heart comes bleating like a wart sawn-off in the intern's dish, anxious to clasp my held-out hand... The anesthetist drops his mask. Mailing in my vote I weep for America's wrong, unflagging heart marooned like rescued Crusoe in the hospital." |
Election Day, Nov. 7, 1988 | (A dying New Dealer looks askance at the changing | marooned like rescued Crusoe in the hospital." | 15 | lyric, dramatic, personae, topical, history | XXX Sonnets |
| 528 | "Lenin in his tomb is white and weary.
Before the world exploded into shards His voice was the bull-roarer, and it soared In waking syllables above the dreaming dead. Life's green branch is snapped above the boulevard Where we march shouting, and the stick Is in our hands whose slurring fire flamed The Kremlin's egg-shell spires back to ash. The ruling house is rubble rucked with tars; Tsars' bones cluck where dinosaur skeletons are. Smooth-skulled tanks from one-eyed turrets stare And move out like mastodons from their simple pits of ice, Rolling up the capitol with a wish to kill and eat The man-shaped offspring that teethed on mother-meat. It is incessant springtime now, and a rash Of bursting apples cracks the wintered bough Stunned by expectation and by prophesies; When I resigned Gorbachev to his statesman's fate, Telling off the congress with a blue face, What, love, rattled to the empty chute? Now we saunter and talk by the renewing river That sighs and shifts and corkscrews through Gorky Park Where the ferriswheel is shivering to its height And Moscow skaters wobble new-foaled, released From their eternal moment when Stalin stopped the stream, His mustache powdering like a giant Jack Frost pleased To see his humid hometown freezing into dream. Churches hold their quiver of new crosses up to light. Marooned in the humming populace of the Platz, larks Disperse with the bright bells beating like a gun; By starred asters starred children lamb and race Past buoyed parents walking, and cannot wait To see themselves staring up from the water's face. Dripping workers grown cold in soldered light Rivet the future's extinction together bolt by bolt... The Comintern's cragging inmates stare and scream Like storks in pilgrim plumage from their bobwire nest Topping the charring stacks; how long will stapled feathers stick? When the atom bomb blisters and their faces melt Before the torn waters of the burning lake What will rise in ecstatic showers to dissipate?" |
Edvard Shevardnashze | "Lenin in his tomb is white and weary. | What will rise in ecstatic showers to dissipate?" | 41 | lyric, dramatic, personae, topical, history | XXX Sonnets |
| 529 | All those who in roaring triumph died
Must live in us, and, living, must suffer still Some bright ache of sacrifice enforced By a doubtful will. Aim no spade at that Chaste composure gods guard in forgetfulness. Remember the Fates' forgiveless testament, Nailing Prometheus to his crag at dawn For high hubris that was man's first sin; Or nodding Narcissus, winking at his twin Among gold flowers loaded with their own sweet dew, Until beauty like a surgeon's knife Had sawn him out of life to adorn a pool. |
All those who in roaring triumph died... | All those who in roaring triumph died | Had sawn him out of life to adorn a pool. | 12 | lyric, philosophical, cautionary | XXX Sonnets |
| 530 | When we lie with the hot worst of our beings spent
And may with the tired betters of our natures speak Conferring solidity to what had been lent When passion's cry had come amidst our squeaks, How can all our honest talk supplant the boast Perjured lust had disinterred with sighs Or gird our tropic with an icy coast Who had viewed spare reality through panting eyes That embroiders fine over grievous faults With threads of desire, spurring false shapes from dross, By peck and pull of the seamstress's wanton art Covering our many minor shames with one gross? When we into a twinned couplet twist our spans, Our bodies' rhyme is more than others can. |
When we lie with the hot worst of our beings spent | When we lie with the hot worst of our beings spent | Our bodies' rhyme is more than others can. | 14 | sonnet, love, personal, sex | XXX Sonnets |
| 531 | Nothing is in a little space confined,
And, once, confined, is finished in its effects; Not so the love that your eyes divines, In speculation out-vying philosopher's packs, In dwelling on what has no inward bound-- The sovereign rarity of a single soul-- Blessed with magnifying power to catch sounds, Showing your dimmest whisper true to all; That love which your eye to all eyes shows In universal application spills, Healing sick knots of hate that in loved bowers grow, Erasing from men's sins their stain of ill. As there is no staying of the sun by obstinate night, So there is no caging of such love's light. |
Nothing is in a little space confined | Nothing is in a little space confined, | So there is no caging of such love's light. | 14 | sonnet, love, personal | XXX Sonnets |
| 532 | When, all insecure, before howling mountains
Thrown, I make my breviary all of pleas And pull a dark choir of fears from one tone: That you forbid with "No" my devoutest "Please." When begging poorly after with my poor bowl of want Some thrifty grain of your rich rice to eat, I repeat my fervent graces for that sup Until all my kneeled body a trembled flare Of stark uncertainty resembles, My hopes all poured in the concentration of a cup That I might from the spices of your eye unpent Some seasoning of affection by my heat. But whether it is a matter of soul or bowl, The sum is this: from your least grows my all. |
When, all insecure, before howling mountains | When, all insecure, before howling mountains | The sum is this: from your least grows my all. | 14 | sonnet, love, personal | XXX Sonnets |
| 533 | My silent love is ripped by warring thoughts
That troop to rebellion from my crowded heart And from my tongue's enemy camp cry all my cause. Armies in my veins raise blushing fires To burn me out of hiding towards your tender smile. But since I am so modest shy of light, And like the gloomy groundhog room in caves, My dark eyes may never touch your pure sight Or caress with lurid roll the motive of your sighs Which like a bonfire from space, neatly tucked Beneath quilted clouds of opposing rain, Burns obscured, or lies damped to dross unless Your dripping eyes these fired words drift across. |
My silent love is ripped by warring thoughts | My silent love is ripped by warring thoughts | Your dripping eyes these fired words drift across. | 13 | sonnet, love, personal | XXX Sonnets |
| 534 | The wasteful sun wakes blinking in morning's weeds,
Stoking bland buds until they burn as leaves Adding shade while the sun must spend his seed, And end generation in a spilling breeze. Crowded near the generous golds you smear Greedy plants, like myself, stand wiped by light, Offering hungry faces that all in green appear To feed on molten surplus of your beams. Do not with banker's measure judge too hard All those who live in interest of your sight; Such scales would swing me too lightly into clouds And judge my weighty love a zero dram. Paymaster of all my joy's fees, with me descend Or cycle skyward, where all our wages end. |
The wasteful sun wakes blinking in morning's weeds | The wasteful sun wakes blinking in morning's weeds | Or cycle skyward, where all our wages end. | 14 | sonnet, love, personal | XXX Sonnets |
| 535 | Time has set his eating stamp on your kind face,
Infecting more deeply what each day's renown Promotes, until he has all smooth grace consumed, Raking acid trenches where flowered fields had blown. But you shall be revenged on what thief time can take, For though every flower dies that in April had its head, And woodpeckers mark seconds while they make, And blossoms burst, their shriveled petals shed, And mountains wash eventually to sea, They have nothing of what your soul intends--- For effortless beauty cannot from you leave That have in mental gates stored beauty others lend. In your mind revolves an uncorrupted rose, As in a glass ball, whose petals cannot close. |
Time has set his eating stamp on your kind face, | Time has set his eating stamp on your kind face, | As in a glass ball, whose petals cannot close. | 14 | sonnet, love, personal | XXX Sonnets |
| 536 | Out of time's cramped oblivion let
Your gentle nature shake glad tomorrows That goes all honied now with sorrow And walks in shrouds of sighs blaspheming heaven That ever spiked such bitter in your palette Which only youthful sweetness had leavened. Do not tread in anger at the skies Which melt and change indifferent to men And all their waste of importuning cries. Return to dewy looks of love again And let the sad house of death, draped with pall, The merry carpenter delight reframe And with each love-look build new chapel halls Arched against the tart recurrence of your pain. |
Out of time's cramped oblivion let | Out of time's cramped oblivion let | Arched against the tart recurrence of your pain. | 14 | sonnet, love, personal | XXX Sonnets |
| 537 | Who can mourn what time has stripped bare
And left standing with an empty purse? If you cannot breed sighs for fleas, by time's char Defaced, and drained, weep not for me, nor curse That my descending bier, like the locust, Must hibernate some days in winking earth. My long shadow still scuttles on the crust In these crabbed figures you now rehearse; As long as men use some ounce of breath for speech My weight will not be all in bones dispersed, But may by their moist utterance some white heaven reach. All things in all things somewhat mingle; Death, whose wreath is thorns, but compounds the tangle. |
Who can mourn what time has stripped bare | Who can mourn what time has stripped bare | Death, whose wreath is thorns, but compounds the t | 13 | sonnet, love, personal | XXX Sonnets |
| 538 | Let me not drape with too much dignity
The little sinful wishes of my will; For when I come cajoling from the wanting sea That beats within me, my dripping wishes make me chill. But even so, all sogged with indecisions, And trailing everywhere dark seaweed thoughts, My desires throng past watery hesitations To overpress your protesting shore of rocks. Then the cold squid that wraps my tepid heart Contracts, urging me all my wickedness retract, Who blusters lack-breath still among your parts While my inner sense eyes the sea's retreating tract. So it is I have come to love too all-sudden And with sighing whim walk backwards, begging pardon. |
Let me not drape with too much dignity | Let me not drape with too much dignity | And with sighing whim walk backwards, begging pard | 14 | sonnet, love, personal | XXX Sonnets |
| 539 | When love's swelling wound is by conscience pricked
And all the propping stilts like lily stalks Are with comic's timing out from under kicked, What is left that may be bandaged by our talk? Attraction's balloon, which gave us mild rise, Has had all its static power neutered By our cross looks, and no new-issued sighs Come lowing from our bellows here abed. Our tender wide swaths of kind regard Are stapled through by compelling argument Until we, bloody-fingered, but prop shards Against the next assault on our separate sinking tents. Still, when I feel you lying here, I think There's fire in us yet to swell our loves And all our rubber war of hatreds shrink. |
When love's swelling wound is by conscience pricke | When love's swelling wound is by conscience pricke | And all our rubber war of hatreds shrink. | 15 | sonnet, love, personal | XXX Sonnets |
| 540 | Have I not, laden with my melancholy
Dose of liquid dreams, poured all out at your want And gilded laughter on my lips' disease Til your lips Midas' taste? And have I not A little nation of desires spent In the sovereign country of your thigh? Or the fission of all my atoms burnt Like a penny candle, extinguished by your sighs? And have I not, the gold of owning love Out of my pockets picked, made towards you With all the winking signals of a delighted ship No matter what tars in my ballast moved? Still I'll burn my tars, and my weightless body wreck If you'll still prove a catching coral for my wrack. |
Have I not, laden with my melancholy | Have I not, laden with my melancholy | If you'll still prove a catching coral for my wrac | 14 | sonnet, love, personal | XXX Sonnets |
| 541 | Although you shrink in all the world's commend,
My eye, being so bound below, must see your state Exalted forever, and in lisping wish hear commands, Training all my weak powers to stand as your prelate. Although you wish stern winds in changed motion blow, Or face themselves, and in opposition end, They shall bend and stop as your desire goes; Although you wish time's ruin to suspend And keep vital death inactive that yearns to kill Or erase all your age's scars back to birth, Each small wish shall be the everything of my will, Overturning Atlas and his tipsy earth By my modest course; for what your least dream has said Speaks prophecies to my ear of lead. |
Although you shrink in all the world's commend | Although you shrink in all the world's commend, | Speaks prophecies to my ear of lead. | 14 | sonnet, love, personal | XXX Sonnets |
| 542 | You had grown quiet in a snowy field,
Stood a little near the fence, did not move But led sleeping flakes on your blushing tongue to yield Their bodies back to water, misting love. How like those little crystals, though in large, My solemn wishes harmless fall on your magnificence To dissolve in the huge waters of your marge And, losing all themselves, add nothing to your sense. For you are more, in your silent warmth, Like constant earth that wears seasons for her veils, Changing summer green for autumn's gaiety,-- More constant, more true, more everything of worth Than the fretful melts that touch your least detail And must, with touching, the seasons of their being interchange, Losing their winter dignity in your kissing spring. |
You had grown quiet in a snowy field | You had grown quiet in a snowy field, | Losing their winter dignity in your kissing spring | 15 | sonnet, love, personal | XXX Sonnets |
| 543 | You into every raging ache of nature
Extend some modest drop of placid bliss. Have I not seen the self-conflicting features Of some close friend melt to joy at your sweet kiss? Have I not myself myself reviled, Meditating bruises in a moody wood Where mild leaves hiss seeming accusations And all my discontented soul moved hooded By low-flying thoughts, until you stepped brightly by Whistling secret smiles from my black shards? Each good that thrives steals some good from you, no lie. Until you stooped in grace, with leaning eye Peering from heaven into my sad case, And turned all my wrath to froth, I was waste. |
You into every raging ache of nature | You into every raging ache of nature | And turned all my wrath to froth, I was waste. | 14 | sonnet, love, personal | XXX Sonnets |
| 544 | Sweet delight that perishes on the hour!
How many more, to amend your faded score Of graces, must here attend and pass? Cakes left at Diana's virgin temple cannot sour Nor marching corruption force that holy door Blossoms have stopped up; those flowers are of glass- And sacred plantings cannot die. Although sore To go with you, and not one extra empty minute Be commanded to rehearse, I must die Now sometime after rarest bliss has left A lonely globe abandoned by delight Where birds twitter riches to impoverished skies Dumb of answering song. O, look, the light Is lashing westward once again, extending night. |
Sweet delight that perishes on the hour! | Sweet delight that perishes on the hour! | Is lashing westward once again, extending night. | 14 | sonnet, love, personal | XXX Sonnets |
| 545 | Bronze eyes that stare unmoving at the sun
While living glances wince, can no more stare At that which dances here beneath, and runs, Shouting dying cries to the deafened air. No sinking eye can raise re-lauded What went hissing down, no monument of tears Fountain forth what sadness mixed with water. Memory must her crowded chariot forbear And carry nothing, until statued grief By gradual time has her banded sands dispersed To stand no more; those distraught features lapsed. Distemperate art but paints a shadowed wreath Not real roses, nor can pinch dull clay to breath As spent as Adam's, and nothing near his worth. |
Bronze eyes that stare unmoving at the sun | Bronze eyes that stare unmoving at the sun | As spent as Adam's, and nothing near his worth. | 14 | sonnet, love, personal, death, melancholy | XXX Sonnets |
| 546 | "Do not think my penitential silence pride
Or arrogant stubbornness. It is not. No, it is a consuming meditation That works in me when my mind considers The subtle hurts that load my outcast state, And of how in past time my estimation Showered ignorant honors on my jailers, Gilding their crimes before their doing of them. But enough; of what your hearts know how should I speak? Listen to mortal suffering,-- how I Spied them fumbling with their helpless wits, and helped. It is a tale briefly told. Not to scold Erring man, but to show how much his stature's grown. In their uncouncilled sight first spread vain webs Of woven pride that gave far-seeing judgement Close cataracts, obscuring heinous crimes. And into their young hearing they had poured Not mellow summer songs gathered from the air, But stuffed deaf ears with brays of their own praises. They were not men, but instead resembled The shapes we see in dreams, mingling all. To their burrowing lives I broke some light That had been darker else. Like timid ants They lived and ate, and kept house in foul caves. Neither stars of winter nor the presaging scent Of springtime did they know by counting moons, Nor was laden summer by signs revealed. But every matter was pursued in ignorance, Full of wrong causes, false heads and false tails, Inverting logic until I came and gave Risen stars names and mapped their difficult settings. I ferreted out the art of numbers That put in the simple scope of man's discretion The control of nature, and lettered rude mouths With speech that made but oohs and ahs before, giving thus Discursive memory its mothering talk That nursed the nine. By my gentle bough Beasts came lowing to the yoke and plow To perform with docile thanks hard labor Men laid idly by. I made them love the rein Who move lordly chariots with prideful steps. And from the burning tongues of gods brought down Stolen fire All these fool's arts I made for man alone Who can't glue together some salvation for himself. But when gods threat, saving devices perish And cleverness holds up stumps, not hands, to pluck This downcast body from its tortured state." |
Prometheus Bound | "Do not think my penitential silence pride | This downcast body from its tortured state." | 48 | lyric, dramatic monologue | XXX Sonnets |
| 547 | Caught in sweat under a May moon's baleful eye,
Trembling in his stripes, the rapist's case Twists against him: cops are rooting in the cleft Where he has hid, and has bloomed his mortal joy; White was ever the webbed habiliment Of innocence, of youth not yet betrayed By aching age, the body stretched and splayed That had known quiet concentration for a toy And stared down blowing hours at a spider's weft. A spotlight loiters up the cliff in searing zigs. Red sirens in a burning forest moan, Stage left; another crooked mountain over, Another tragedy. Our killer in the brambles Mumbles curses, thumbs a furious bee Out of his dirty ear, and spits against night clover. Scratched like Christ, but cynical-tired As prosecuting Pilate, he must pause and puff, And stain the winter hawthorne that upholds a spray Of indifferent spring, swelling the sublime With idle odors under a star's demurring haze. But round again, like a repeating hymn Flashed the indicting needle of their light Pinning him, an ape-man up a tree, pinned Him who thought to leap and bite and still escape. Every downstream salmon dreams the ocean's home, Their first mistake. The manhunt's gripping snare Inches in, a time-lapse bullwhip zeroed on a tiger's nose, To ring an empty hawthorne hollywood moonlight spots. He'd fled nimbly bleeding from the hot Pursuit, but left his card; in an oozed gash Of one snapped limb, it read: "Fred, Illusionast." |
Among Fugitive Hills | Caught in sweat under a May moon's baleful eye, | Of one snapped limb, it read: "Fred, Illusionast." | 31 | lyric, dramatic, playful, story | XXX Sonnets |
| 548 | I
Close up the grave that called you idly by And bid you linger who, lingering, must fall. Although death's embassy out of tulips blows And spins fine madness from the spider's crowded eye And purls about the dusty adder's tongue Hissing salvation, and is by soft promise pressed, Do not listen; Ay, although it reason With a multitude, and fix the staring crowd On the last things, and make each one a ghost, Out of straining vapors traced, do not; The mournful tones of those forgathered tongues But make a solemn moan of bone to bone. II First stitch love to every circumstance, and sail The round horizon through, sunset-stained, To flat heaven, which holds all joys in one wide view... Then melt scars from the very hardness of all life And be resolved to a contented water-drop Before you question death. Was there ever sound Of trammelled corpses startled laughing from the ground? Although you tear at eyes decayed, begging see, And from dead tongues crave lavish answer, That can never come; those hearts are sunk through bursting ribs, Unmanned by living wind those lungs, that once Shouted down the busy sky's testament of thunder. III Walk a humbler track, kiss pilgrims' dust, Set your laurel down to shade a sleeping bee, Or leave some lonely sacrament in a hilltop wood Where it may go to seed in the depthless shade And sprout new sanctity to untutored wilderness. But first shake off those saddest looks that weight an unwiped brow, And lift clear smiles to those now clouded lips That indulged love, and from passion's unwearied kiss Grew frenzied, to touch, and stretch, and touch again, The final mystery with whitened lips. Then drown the hop-toad sorrow in anonymous wine, Let afternoons unravel in the sun, and rest, And drowse in each moment's uninstructed joy. IV Ay! Throw stones at your accusers' mirrored scorn And see yourself perched in their curled frowns no more. Life was a happy adventure first, where dewlaps sang In an undiscovered dale in secret Arcady Where grass was higher than our eyes. Once again, Though embattled powers and misted storms profane, Race to meet that child cringing in the din. |
To A Young Man | Close up the grave that called you idly by | Race to meet that child cringing in the din. | 48 | lyric, personal, rhyming, cautionary, melancholy, | XXX Sonnets |
| 549 | "Eisenhower was a rube, I know, I loved
to watch his pinned medals glitter against the sun, out-shining heaven in our low human eyes; even a deaf man hears the exploding power of a gun that's pointing at him. So I heard that hissing voice escape from a head bald as a tire. Unshaved in my happy rush to greet him at ugly dawn's each initiation, I kneeled and scraped the dog-lickings from my master's unwashed plate, revelled in the white-house grease, and after that displayed to my warm house-mate the tired, flat unscolded coating of my obsequious tongue unleavened by any pentecostal haste, or arching stab of truth's spirit, that catches fire on the worst dross to drag a grand thing back to its humble embers topped by a smoky spire. I would brood my ruins. But I knew how to keep my acid grumblings down. One knew what one was and what one wanted to be. But how did one know what wanting was worth? Have I closed up too much of what I ought to have left seething open? Was I too-much a mouse waiting for the lion's roaring chance as I peered out from my walled hole? The drain-hole that saves a whelming lung could suck my zest; I crest the world's wash, and watch the lancing TV-eye mount my blubbered burn, an Ahab on his wild whale, ready to needle me open again and sip my ambitious innards into its downward din. Around me grin and whiten the papers' lettered teeth. O Horatian mouth, drooling sibilants, o ocean hunger raising the rage of insistent seas that grind all my lifted fakes of paint to one grey truth, please forget me, a shrimp among your inks, a tired tale to regale dry old maids with, not a storming nation. After my quiet time I shall cut flesh to tailor my new suit with, all golds, to implore the masses' adoration. Eh, Checkers? so, absorbent nation, swear in your Kennedys and Johnsons; i swear, before the world has spun its globe to mush under a forgetful sun, I'll come back to win, surprising the reeling competition with a smile as thin as a knife-edge, and grind these snowy pediments under my heel to dust. But for now, turn in your watered sleep, bury me far back behind the advice column, or cramped ads for toothpaste. Sleep, o recumbent nation, while dreams are cheap. When teased into the arena by Fate's fickle feather once again and treated traitorously by our desires until we long for the approach of the lions, lying in the dusty sun, we listen to our overdue bruises mumble invective against us." |
Kennedy's Inauguration Night, Nixon | "Eisenhower was a rube, I know, I loved | our overdue bruises mumble invective against us." | 52 | lyric, dramatic monologue, playfu, history, satiri | XXX Sonnets |
| 550 | In Red Bank, painted red, the heat
Kills infants, sprawling at their mother's feet, Packing into Woolworth's for Easter flowers And rattling water pistols now on sale. At Reckless Place a barbecue begins, Matches flash and blacken on wet coal, near A gallon tin of gas, waiting to explode. The children hang like lilies from their necks; Open-mouthed, alive, they squab the mall In summer cut-offs, roiling at the sight That floats in marijuana spikes of color Of Barbie's head of smiles ghosting the Navasink In dream apparel, while a plastic Christ Bobs wished-for and haunted on black swells. In Red Bank, where a squall of heats Unhouses God from a fitful sleep Like dozing Godzilla from the China Sea, And ferries hellish stenches noseward in fuming oils As far as Prowns, the parade Which vaulted Christ among us, an Olympic star Bright and burning on chrysanthemums, Was over weeks ago. White as milk, The holy faces melt in boredom as they pass In lowing Volvos, while, near the fire, red men Stutter useless baptism from a firehose.... Everything in cinders is coming down! O Jesus, Jesus, standing in the rainbow Of the hose, shout deliverance again And scald these unbelievers with your breath. Drenched in dreaming sweat I saw Souls wake in blood, behind The Broad Street Exchange, butcher-red, and rise In dead march ordinance against the skies Shuffling to the stocks, and the bell Of RBC came clanging straight from Hell While trumpeting sirens foretold the fire That has risen, skimming every street Until the sun and mud-baked river Is fire. Resurrection will visit us after death Has burned our smoking bones of sin, and we wake Purged from the grave, waist-deep in the flaming Shallows of our lives, and stand, and wait, For Heaven's hissing flesh to drop on us like cloth. |
May Fire | In Red Bank, painted red, the heat | For Heaven's hissing flesh to drop on us like clot | 43 | lyric, satiric, visionary, cautionary, story, retr | Red Bank |
| 551 | Unevenly the party yachts contend
Against windy effulgences and mud... Foghorns blast our darkness, and stuttered flares Move with the moving simpleness of girls. Our outboard motor's intake coughs and starts to catch In the open throat of summer, this July; And the coal-black bones of Christ, Crushed diamond by mountains of our love, Dance pewter in this light. Upright and bare A billion angels on this head must whirl And orgy in the air. This July, sparks are hissing down like sleet Over all our wreckage into the water's side Which sighs with the resigned, ovoid sigh of Mary, The mother of Gad, the green swerver, Who knows the bottom of the sea is full And pulls us battered up to bell and tide. Lord, the wind is westerly and knocks Our prayers in our faces. Shrieking seagulls stab and pin their fish, Winged anglers, falling to the vails And heavy weather. God will toss The innocent away and maw All our holy relics in a waterspout; Time, the belly dancer, jigs to display His horned speeches, racked with lamb And jellied by green gobbets our sins. What else is rotoring on the devil's spit? Our anglers dive and swallow in blue mud; Rootless seeds are piling into drifts; Landscape men and fathers go mowing to the caw Of death, the black charmer, who shuts their eyes; Speckle-pated crows are laughing by the dam And water spillage; lightning strikes the barber pole And melts the colors of the flag. Unplummeting sailboats snap the water, the virulent ebb Of day's graven clouds lowering to the swamp, An abyss of images. Crowds of lights Are bursting above our docks, while the crash And rush of screamers go hurtling overhead And die to silence in the silt. Something solid Moves in the mud. |
The Fourth of July | Unevenly the party yachts contend | Moves in the mud. | 43 | lyric, satiric, cautionary, story, topical | Red Bank |
| 552 | In this year of peace, thwarted blockages,
no gangs of children clot the open door as Stalin or Lenin anymore; the costume's faded. At Fort Monmouth where our iron eagle stares blinkless eastward to the Atlantic churning and its grey sleet, their spattered laurels rust and haemorrage in a truss of antique victories. Winter hovers nearer, and you madden. The orange, too-large, too-humorless, fangs on the pumpkin-goblin sharpen and glitter in the dark. A blackbird shifts on the orisoned bough; Our ramrod Police Chief thought you due for a salted season in Wing 6, behind the chicken-wire window that dices up the sky in blue diamonds; blue as the Xanax tablets that they'd doled to fog and finish your everlasting fire. Forty in an hour refused to soak your burning for the afterlife to dimness. On the neat brick wall useless as Homer's chorus, or Linus telling Charlie Brown a joke, the old generals sit, deprived like you of the ecstatic quaver of their insanity and fold their hands. You stare into the darkness that you brought. "Why, we had better eat this time up quick, quick," your numbing voice explains with painful exactitude. "Before the unexpected bread begins to stick and sugar in our throats." The black rinds harden and go sour. Perhaps now we have a futile hour to donate to the mad. |
Fall, 1989 | In this year of peace, thwarted blockages, | to donate to the mad. | 52 | lyric, satiric, cautionary, story, topical | Red Bank |
| 553 | Each day flamed with terror as before
Rumson double-taped keep-quiet warnings to her door Of hollow polished brass. Her strafing tongue Had killed three husbands by forty-one. The Hell-faced knockers clanged with the cold Doom of white-knuckled death scything into town For restful autumn. She was marked By the thin hand of cancer, and she bore Its incongruous, leaking fingerprint On face and bone. Armed with the Great Faith And real estate holdings out of state, She owned an antique bible that the Sorbonne's Near holy medieval French department Would rob or kill for; she wept, and ground Her school marm heel at noon in time To the molten passages that she howled Out loud from Solomon. Her hysterical, Outbound faith and stilted Domestic majesty even made her answer The skidding halloweeners dressed as indians In pilgrim English. "Take these and eat Them with the name of Jesus on your lips. Now pray, pray," she'd say, and lavish Johnny Appleseed apples to vanished faces. The bridge to Belmar still gapes this span Of the chill Atlantic, wrestling to the shore, beside The closed clubhouse perched on painted stones The color of water, while the dumb, vortexing gun Of night releases stars over candy-littered lawns. And now The wind is tearing through the oaks, and more Than oaks. She speaks, "God's breath's a kiln Of salvation." She hooks the door shut with her foot, The apple falling rotten from her hand.... Our runty graveyard is filling to the brim With sticks and stones. Kneeling in the chalk Dust of her unfinished basement, she stoked Her gaudy bible to the furnace, page by page, Until the Spirit itself had raged and came Inspired to the twisting entrails of the flame. The cold voice was clarifying and was clear. She heard its crystal mumble, and she swung The tiny grate on its small hinges wide, and saw God's face smiling. Only her head, crowned With the spent light sizzling as it went Could fit itself inside. "It's hard, oh, so hard To just laugh and laugh enough to die." |
All Hallow's Eve | Each day flamed with terror as before | To just laugh and laugh enough to die." | 46 | lyric, dramatic, cautionary, story, topical | Red Bank |
| 554 | The vanishing marina sees our backs as we crown
The steep grass bank still slick with rain. The chill of remembering infects us, and the sound Of a few, lost cars that nose our roads in pain Whines in the darkness, searching for a spot To dry and die in; Like the terrified opossums that they crucify And flatten in the gristle of the year. Tonight, The whirr of stars is stopping, and their gear Drops like a stopped man from the roof Of the Olde Union House; we stop, and soon All the river's leaking contents pour Into our lagoon of knowing. The potent cocktails have us half amazed--- There is nothing ominous in all this buzz About growing middle-aged. The unending Labyrinth of our loving us still gores The sore spots of our marriage. Everyone in the hospital is on the mend! Our psychoanalyst friend in his jaguar Dupes the clock And races past. Pinned in the wooden balcony By guilt, eternal voyeur, eternal recur, we Sway out of our seats. And the pulsed spur Of the Atlantic Red Eye goes roaring to the ocean overhead And leaves a line of red. What else Is flashing into darkness from this dock? |
Dockside | The vanishing marina sees our backs as we crown | Is flashing into darkness from this dock? | 27 | lyric, dramatic, cautionary, story, topical | Red Bank |
| 555 | "Pacing the thin streets made long by thought,
I jingled metaphysics in my purse, caught the lecture circuit and cleaned-up with bunk. My brother in the arts, Dr. Blank, got skunked by every whorehouse publisher to come down the twisting pike. 'Some of my best friends...' he would say, and stop. He was forgetting syllables by this time, on top of everything else. Fifth in my class at Harvard (seminary) I used to pass my historic heirloom polo shirts around like greeting cards and prostletized humility. A liberal education's hard to come by these days. We would sit and stare. If only to live one did not eat the air! Safe on my white soap-box, I did drool and gibber liquid like a priest. The fool who made me call him mentor did me in.--- He thought my thesis too encyclopedian and useless to the race. Why I'd hold the hand of any povero insensato in the land. The blue air cracks against the chimney-smoke of this midwestern coal town. These days I have to choke the hissing words back down my throat to save my shovelling job, the boss' swelling goat. Now lost and dazed beneath the white camellia, I meditate at lunch-time on the sacrosanct and familiar." |
Dr. Reverend in Ohio | "Pacing the thin streets made long by thought, | I meditate at lunch-time on the sacrosanct and fam | 26 | lyric, dramatic monologue, cautionary, personae | Red Bank |
| 556 | "One dark night, unjust soul's repose
sunk in a midnight past my midday's cure, I rattled blind down corridors, stuffed my loud bright watch beneath a pillow to keep the silence out (the between ticks tick). I danced with mirrors, slept in blinks, threaded whiskey like a life-line to my glass. I spun our wedding ring to a gold globe and waited the balance out; how it rang against the stone! I cannot think; the one world whirls.... The world's pink ears are crammed with speech; I, I, I, I, becomes a hollow sound, you infect my eye, enlarge to a troll.... My bruised head floats in a goldfish bowl." |
Her Words | "One dark night, unjust soul's repose | My bruised head floats in a goldfish bowl." | 14 | lyric, dramatic monologue, cautionary, personae, a | Red Bank |
| 557 | Whitewashed in our Cuban spats and pale fear
we watch the ocean go under the snapping prow of Rigor Mortis, our rented sailing vessel pulled by shrouds across the immense sea, gem-green. Coke cans leap the rail and bleed soda to the waters.... "Life is a sequence of sequential events," you say, and nod, loosing the popcorn that noosed our tilting Xmas spruce in a hash of fish-lines. Candles in seashells nod and glow and go out; a final star drops from the clipped sky. Our neurotic engine stutters out on windy rocks.... Time, the big boat, heaving its heavy carcass westward everyday, drags its smashed golds nearer, throws a line, and hooks us safely into port. |
Xmas Eve | Whitewashed in our Cuban spats and pale fear | throws a line, and hooks us safely into port. | 14 | lyric, dramatic, personal, approximate sonnet, | Red Bank |
| 558 | Our bodies fasten to whatever's nearest;
something hidden nibbles on a clear line and we yank it home. All day, inverted billows swallow our offerings, raw life red inches of flesh pinned like a college sweetheart, thrown to silver bodies that come thwacking through the sky to stiffen in our below-decks ice chest. Live nets coil in our hands and slacken; we cannot master the minutest mysteries.... heavy waters trouble our pumps, and we heave into evening; it is dark; everywhere the slightest events evade us; a fly specks the fish. Packed in the lamplit cabin, I claw a book, written by one drunk for you, the other. |
Rigor Mortis | Our bodies fasten to whatever's nearest; | by one drunk for you, the other. | 14 | lyric, dramatic, personal, approximate sonnet, add | Red Bank |
| 559 | He started with a pebble of conscience
under his heel, in his new black shoe, a small-town lawyer with the hots for God. Released from the lassitude of law school he opposed the British lion with a tiger-heart; he laid his heart on the rail-ties at Kapur: "We cannot let them move, or they will pounce..." the blood-waves drying to coal in the sub-tropic sun. And, "Love contains the solution to evil." Who knew you'd end on the celestial mountain, famished like Kafka's hunger-artist? Bearded and pleased at how your life-gamble fell out, you did the dark, brave thing-- Imagining a love, like cement, that mortised the blanks in our lives, the pauses between our words. |
Mahatma Ghandi | He started with a pebble of conscience | in our lives, the pauses between our words. | 15 | lyric, dramatic, personae, approximate sonnet, his | Red Bank |
| 560 | The bluejay in his monarch's robes spills water
from the rhododendron's spikes; harsh gabble of the adoptive son, the worm-eater, too big for the other children at the table to play or pray with. Moses growing up was laughed at for his big nose or big laugh by the fair-limbed sons and daughters of Egypt, each fine hand or foot an exampled branch of old Pharaonian power reaching through to new grain. Adult at last, expulsed from the blue palace into unleavened light, Moses got his bellyache straight from God and belched the ten commandments on command. The Lord God himself beaks his kill. |
Moses | The bluejay in his monarch's robes spills water | The Lord God himself beaks his kill. | 14 | lyric, dramatic, personae, approximate sonnet, his | Red Bank |
| 561 | We have killed to have ourselves go on,
white egos in envelopes, a teeming sack of spider eggs nourished to bursting. We go on at the ripe edge of death, the rich slit in the Nazi's side, or evil VC opened up who could not duck the waver of bullets that pass too near and are not named home or religion or spouse-- each ready to penetrate and save, to transfigure the flesh like a monarch exploding its green chrysalis. At the focusless eye of my window, boundlessly blue from the outside in, in the catbird's nest awash with grief still lies near the murder, in eggy resins, still lies a bluejay's egg unhatched, still unhatched. |
The Killers | We have killed to have ourselves go on, | a bluejay's egg unhatched, still unhatched. | 15 | lyric, meditative, approximate sonnet, history | Red Bank |
| 562 | The wasp is still in the columbine's shadow,
the one black among differing greys; shelved by time now, and available only through the abstract haze of fathers and mothers talking--- the dour song of the 60s gives them something to raise voices over. "If I knew that man's mind, I'd know the country." A few well-soldered speeches carry through, the New England intonation, a fretted film.... He has the stiff, sweet elegance of dust, wafting through the White House's castled banquets in his thin-waisted tux. Over the open, boiling spaghetti pot you stand and sing and talk all morning. The waters lash; you speak. Of the dead: "We'll own their laundry soon enough." |
JFK | The wasp is still in the columbine's shadow, | "We'll own their laundry soon enough." | 14 | lyric, meditative, approximate sonnet, history, pe | Red Bank |
| 563 | Familiar as a rerun, he dazzled in the glass---
the resurrection of euphoria, fathered on our wants. Still high on Nixon's drowsy hemlock and love of self, we passed the absurdity from hand to hand, and drank. Balloons fell and blistered in the elected dark on the metronoming sign of every state the Union still possessed, and we were glad; he even made our incandescent sadness dim.... He dazzled; the Columbia, our one experiment, flowered and faded out, a burst of scents. And still we held ourselves hypnotized like fish to the television's bowl, trying fin on fin to shatter it and disappear within. |
Ronald Reagan | Familiar as a rerun, he dazzled in the glass--- | to shatter it and disappear within. | 14 | lyric, satiric, approximate sonnet, history, perso | Red Bank |
| 564 | All the poets die, one by one,
words confirmed in alabaster, forms propped by shadows; they rocket to the sky on the strength of one last good word... somebody's swans. Tarred by youth's pretentious trauma, I was too bad an imitator of pose or voice to have those heavenly feathers drop & stick. My tarred heart flubs in its rubble. England in its velvet weather; crushed heather speaks in an ear that sleep has poured too full of books' windy memorials one time too many; overhead, a spearshead of geese release a wet whistling where the arrows rose and came to confusion as to rest. |
Reading in a War Park in England | All the poets die, one by one, | and came to confusion as to rest. | 14 | lyric, approximate sonnet, elegy, personal | Red Bank |
| 565 | The reign of the kingfisher was short, and short
our lives, crawling under the killing heat of the nursing lamp that brings flowers to phosphorescence, a livid foam that exaggerates its root ebb and flow; the practical nurses were impractical with their acorn-colored Haitian or Philipino stare and indifference to medicine. "Everthin' goen to be da way tha the Lord wants it be, child." Child-handed in your polychrome hospital bed and too timid to be wheeled to the greenhouse for fear of falling, you asked for a palmful of zinnas.... Surrounded by a bon voyage wreath of the little mouths you slept and shrivelled and died. |
Last Days | The reign of the kingfisher was short, and short | you slept and shrivelled and died. | 14 | lyric, approximate sonnet, elegy, personal | Red Bank |
| 566 | The tender wipers whisper back and forth,
smearing the rain to a moment's clarity flattened like the fallen leaf honeyed to our advancing glass. The rain advances. Trees stand out like lightning in our wet headlights--- finding anything is a minor miracle in this beery weather, the old road a yawn of steam. Staccato your voice dissects Milton's lunar prosody, moon-smooth, moon-real: "all his sullen adjectives were mere minks, like Ivana Trump's dead furs, a comfort in her sleep...." Sweating and smiling in our nightlong drive from bar to bar, I microscopically examine the copper hinged jaw of a fly, bright on the inner windshield as I drive; too soberly drunk to tend or exhaust inspiration. |
In the Car | The tender wipers whisper back and forth, | too soberly drunk to tend or exhaust inspiration. | 16 | lyric, approximate sonnet, memory, personal | Red Bank |
| 567 | The sun's a botch of blacks, queer spumings
in a night sky white as absence, where my unconsoling finger filches the new negative postmarked Malibu Observatory. Rick squints at stars; tumescent inks roll from my soul like a squid. I am bathed in daylight. Sidetracked in a lawnchair on the brick porch trimmed with ignited marigolds I spend each wasted, one-starred day hunching into words for a clue; a girl ferries a cup of honey like the grail to my droning chair.... I drone and follow the blue, botched line dribbling from my pen, overfull of metaphors. My puppets sing and hang themselves, harmless Hamlets drenched with a wish to live. |
Mid-Afternoon | The sun's a botch of blacks, queer spumings | harmless Hamlets drenched with a wish to live. | 14 | lyric, approximate sonnet, memory, personal | Red Bank |
| 568 | Our closed lake lightens against the distance;
secret fish are already starting circles past the shade-edge, trembling, troubling the burning surface etherialized in bronze. We cast our weights and watch the exalted sun shatter and recover its thousand wood-shavings of light. Itzak Perlman goes on loving his loving bow, striking the guessed-at multiples in the scale.... Together on the wilting dock we read of the obsessive-compulsive jigsaw master, at 80, who drops the puzzle and completes his life; how much longer will we go on sinking into our bodies? When the wind's unseeing hand shakes the houses of the trees what will bend? What rosin will we soften on our souls? |
Daybreak | Our closed lake lightens against the distance; | What rosin will we soften on our souls? | 15 | lyric, approximate sonnet, memory, personal | Red Bank |
| 569 | Ripe blueberries wax leaden on the bough;
it is our summer; Boston's breakwater blackens in awkward slaps and thoughtless motherly shushes. Motherly absences star the North Street's church for us. We are moored by our early loves to these crags and backwaters. Remember the neon of the all-nite bait and tackle shop we rushed to and scrambled from? Constellations of starfish nailed to the cork interior. Against the dull beach light on the docks we lower and drag for crabs til dawn. Child-ecstatic at your first catch in the night, you hand me the whirring blue crescent fished from your pyramidal cage. Which one of us smiled in the dark? Back-handed, I handed it back. |
Boston Harbor | Ripe blueberries wax leaden on the bough; | Back-handed, I handed it back. | 15 | lyric, approximate sonnet, memory, dramatic, perso | Red Bank |
| 570 | We were almost alone
in the divided hospital room. Flowers on the wallpaper reminded us to cheer up. We couldn't see the traffic that crossed the cobbles under us. And yet, everything was plainly itself and was plain. Even the new sky behind the telephone lines was flat blue. Monmouth Medical's institutional kitchen always served their rippled carrot-coins cold. At one, the scholar-doctor's colossal geniality had shocked us, whispering his Mid-Western college guesses at Schopeanhaur's tantric worm of will in the apple of the world. We thought in secret that he had grown since the last time he left us. In the children's ward, Spot fetched Jane and Jerry's stick as eternally as ever while you were dying. "Go, Spot, go!" |
Last Days [from Red Bank] | We were almost alone | "Go, Spot, go!" | 22 | lyric, personal, death, elegy | Red Bank |
| 571 | Awake in the backwards wash
of summer's unending afternoon, a few, slow children crawl at the curly-headed monster of the sea roaring into fizzles at our feet. Nosing the overgrown, unused scrap land at the shore end of the lapping pier. Nearby, an empty-headed horseshoe crab goes skidding from the hand of a boy who goes skidding after it. At the inlet's ebbing light lies gratified on the sand shelving on a shelf of sea; when the waters race ankle-high on every shore shaking the soft dune grasses intelligence floods the flow.... In the flapping shelter of a blue windbreaker a panting man on a bicycle goes by whirring twin worlds of evil and good. Tonight, the huge, lightheaded paper lanterns of the Kyoto Japanese restaurant toss their planetary, red light back and forth across the wash. Alone and undecided I stand at the rail and look on graffitied rocks painted with the alternating hegemony of a thousand tiny lives and huge nights. |
Summer | Awake in the backwards wash | tiny lives and huge nights. | 33 | lyric, personal, memory, nature | Red Bank |
| 572 | The fish swizzle
from sunspot to sunspot and wound to wound in the habit of compassion. The smaller one takes the untidy rags of ephemeral flesh from the larger one's goitered middle and vanishes. Children look down with their tangle of snags.... Obstruction helps us by keeping our desire real. The old fish Leontes and me abandoned by love and inspired by hatred, the small fish consuming the great. Obliquely beneath the tangle is there still a waver in the water? The big fish, trailing his pennants of flesh, brave, failed, bleeds a somber puff of tired blood into the pool. It stumbled in the water, the old you still regal and true.... dragging a discolored fin through the increasing clouds; |
Prize Trout | The fish swizzle | through the increasing clouds; | 30 | lyric, personal, cautionary, nature | Red Bank |
| 573 | An azalea climbed up
Into a silver cup, And blossoming died While the bee had sup. |
Bee and Cup | An azalea climbed up | While the bee had sup. | 4 | lyric, nature, rhyming | Red Bank |
| 574 | The cardinal his watchful penance keeps [scarlet vigil]
That had no sin but singing; How much more should we march in grief That have said and done such things? The azalea extends its wild branch Against a wild sky; nearby Some libertarian pamphlet flaps Ignored by some more sodden door. A child is singing in the bright march air Some tune his father sung--- Abstracted with the politics Of that disastrous, forgotten war. "The soldier will soon be waking That fed on dreams before; A man kills a man that killed; All happens as before." |
After the War [from Red Bank] | The cardinal his watchful penance keeps [scarl | All happens as before." | 16 | lyric, war | Red Bank |
| 575 | Stand again at the old well-lip
As one half-sleeping might And drop a stone among those images That lay hid in the night. When still a boy at the water's edge Cold with terror at the dark; The light was like a fish's hide That floated back to me. And drop a stone among those images That lay hid in the night. What has escaped the breath In hated words or curses, now rescind And let an older beneficence begin; Call that harshness in. When driven to that edge of speech The tongue half out of the head Recall what purpose pleased you best When time had not yet begun. And drop a stone among those images That lay hid in the night. At gasping dawn a boy again Swears all breaking light's a game And climbs before the mounting sky To catch a dreaming fish While the water's high. So sound out the plummet-depth With some stray rock or cocked ear do it Or hearth-stone out of pocket; But drop a stone among those images That lay hid in the night. |
Those Images [from Red Bank] | Stand again at the old well-lip | That lay hid in the night. | 30 | lyric, memory, rhyming | Red Bank |