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?
5     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
10    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;
15    A man kills a man that killed;
      All happens as before."

      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.
5     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
10    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
15    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
20    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.
25    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
30    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
35    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.
40    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
45    Could fit itself inside. "It's hard, oh, so hard
      To just laugh and laugh enough to die."

      An azalea climbed up
      Into a silver cup,
      And blossoming died
      While the bee had sup.

      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
5     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.
10    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?
15    Back-handed, I handed it back.

      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.
5     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
10    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?
15    What rosin will we soften on our souls?

      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
5     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
10    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---
15    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!
20    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
25    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?

      "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
5     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
10    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!
15    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
20    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.
25    Now lost and dazed beneath the white camellia,
      I meditate at lunch-time on the sacrosanct and familiar."

      In this year of peace, thwarted blockages,
      no gangs of children clot
      the open door
      as Stalin or Lenin anymore;
5     the costume's faded.
      At Fort Monmouth where
      our iron eagle stares
      blinkless eastward
      to the Atlantic churning and its grey sleet,
10    their spattered laurels rust
      and haemorrage in a truss
      of antique victories.
      Winter hovers nearer, and you madden.
      The orange,
15    too-large, too-humorless,
      fangs on the pumpkin-goblin
      sharpen and glitter in the dark.
      A blackbird shifts on the orisoned bough;
      Our ramrod
20    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
25    tablets that they'd doled
      to fog and finish
      your everlasting fire.
      Forty in an hour
      refused to soak
30    your burning for the afterlife
      to dimness.
      On the neat brick wall
      useless as Homer's chorus,
      or Linus telling Charlie Brown a joke,
35    the old generals sit,
      deprived like you
      of the ecstatic quaver
      of their insanity
      and fold their hands.
40    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
45    the unexpected
      bread begins to stick
      and sugar in our throats."
      The black
      rinds harden and go sour.
50    Perhaps now we have
      a futile hour
      to donate to the mad.

      "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
5     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!
10    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."

      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.
5     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:
10    "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
15    on the inner windshield as I drive;
      too soberly drunk to tend or exhaust inspiration.

      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
5     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,
10    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."

      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
5     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."
10    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.

      We were almost alone
      in the divided hospital room.
      Flowers on the wallpaper reminded us to cheer up.
      We couldn't see the traffic
5     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,
10    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.
15    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
20    as eternally as ever
      while you were dying.
      "Go, Spot, go!"

      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
5     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."
10    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
15    in our lives, the pauses between our words.

      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.
5     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
10    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.
15    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
20    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
25    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.
30    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
35    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
40    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.

      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;
5     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;
10    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.

      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
5     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.
10    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.

      The fish swizzle
      from sunspot to sunspot
      and wound to wound
      in the habit of compassion.
5     The smaller one takes
      the untidy rags
      of ephemeral flesh
      from the larger one's goitered middle
      and vanishes.
10    Children look down
      with their tangle of snags....
      Obstruction helps us
      by keeping our desire real.
      The old fish
15    Leontes and me
      abandoned by love
      and inspired by hatred,
      the small fish consuming the great.
      Obliquely beneath the tangle
20    is there still
      a waver in the water?
      The big fish,
      trailing his pennants of flesh,
      brave, failed, bleeds a somber puff
25    of tired blood into the pool.
      It stumbled in the water,
      the old you
      still regal and true....
      dragging a discolored fin
30    through the increasing clouds;

      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.
5     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
10    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.

      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
5     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....
10    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.

      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
5     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....
10    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.

      Awake in the backwards wash
      of summer's unending afternoon,
      a few, slow children crawl
      at the curly-headed monster of the sea
5     roaring into fizzles at our feet.
      Nosing the overgrown, unused
      scrap land at the shore end
      of the lapping pier.
      Nearby, an empty-headed
10    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;
15    when the waters race
      ankle-high on every shore
      shaking the soft dune grasses
      intelligence floods the flow....
      In the flapping shelter
20    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
25    of the Kyoto Japanese restaurant toss
      their planetary, red light back
      and forth across
      the wash.
      Alone and undecided
30    I stand at the rail and look on graffitied rocks
      painted with the alternating
      hegemony of a thousand
      tiny lives and huge nights.

      Unevenly the party yachts contend
      Against windy effulgences and mud...
      Foghorns blast our darkness, and stuttered flares
      Move with the moving simpleness of girls.
5     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
10    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,
15    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.
20    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;
25    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;
30    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
35    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
40    And rush of screamers go hurtling overhead
      And die to silence in the silt.
      Something solid
      Moves in the mud.

      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
5     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
10    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
15    a bluejay's egg unhatched, still unhatched.

      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.
5     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
10    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.
15    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
20    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
25    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
30    That lay hid in the night.

      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.
5     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;
10    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.