When I consider what to say to you alone,
      No pause or reprise of rhetoric's tricks
      Helps untouched heart or utter soul exist
      Half as much as a mere embrace has done.
5     Each embrace endorses soul's serenity,
      A gush of love beyond vocal posturings,
      Past a Casanova's cribbed quotations,
      Or earnest Adamic plea of surety.
      A mere embrace alone is full of sugars,
10    Fatly replete, stuffed with life itself,
      Holding the eternal circle of ourselves
      Arm in arm beyond each pinch of harm.
      When I consider what to say, and see your face,
      I'm struck to silence...beyond a mere embrace.

      Apollo lunges and Daphne pants, pants,
      Thinking only of her moistened choices,
      And how the god demanded her at once
      Without the pass and parry of a dance,
5     Without a titter from her, or low voices
      Conspiring to prove the world a dunce.
      How had he thought to enter her without
      Flattery?  Would a god stoop to assault
      And battery?  Perhaps she had not heard
10    How he drove his charioted star about,
      How the sky bent blue, to him alone devout.
      (Perhaps she thought the sky the moon's ward?)
      Too bad.  For when she ached into a tree
      He ripped her limb from limb for his victory.

      As the hawk returns to the hand, or blood
      Beats back to the heart in quick surges,
      So I had hoped you would return for good
      To this hand held out still in love's long pledge.
5     Wings that beat transparent against the sun,
      Eyes that every star of night inhabits,
      Heart that knows the whole universe as one,
      Know my love curls in clover, a still rabbit
      Who chews the ruminant leaves of thyme
10    With humble patience and a moistened eye;
      When tired of all the sky and every clime,
      Return to me, and by my quiet lie.
      But if you should with hook of beak or claw
      Climb down to kill, I will obey your law.

      My melancholy muse meditates, mulls without cease
      Rumors of demise, demesnes of decrease
      As fire-fingered freaks of evening flame
      Flare glory along the Catskill skyline's rock crease
5     And die to dithering greys, fisted blacks.
      A neighbor in the near-distance roasts
      Runt apples rumbled from the roof in a blaze 
      Of sage gone to seed, weed trees and dry roots.
      The apples are sweet, and of sufficient tooth 
10    To give them dreams of nectar and of ruth.
      Bear what dreams may come in spreading night 
      And sleep the long hours inured to fright 
      That comes to tell us nothing;  nothing true.
      Two mood rings roll along the bedstand, blue.

      Do not sit rickety on a pedestal,
      Come down among the crowds, elbow your boy
      With friendly nonchalance, whirl a whirl
      At the square dance among long fields of soy.
5     Come down and speak with daily dunces, love,
      Have a word with the puffy car dealer
      Beyond negotiation's give and shove,
      Past the signature for your 4-wheeler.
      Stroll along where snooty Hasidim step
10    And share the air's generous embellishment;
      If a dog does bark at you, give back a pip;
      All the jawing world's subject for your wit.
      And, dear, new-won to re-join this ruckus,
      Confound our carping silence with a kiss.

      Come, the bones of the roses shed blood for us,
      Fires cool near the nearness of our kiss.
      Fire and rose are seared red by our touches,
      Blood comes from the earth wherever we pass.
5     We're the lightning ones, shattering and happy!
      Cruciform we make indelible Xs
      With our bodies, moaning the bone-lonelies
      Til blood roses fall from our ecstasies.
      Rivers go up in fountains of flame
10    Whenever we shiver through their night wets,
      Calling ourselves by each other's names:
      Rose-marrow, air star, river fish, heart dirts.
      Come to this small, domed tent by the roadside,
      Come throw your candle on the bonfire.

      Counting soundless candles in uncounted hours,
      I saw the lady of my dreams possessed,
      In naked raiment sleeping unperplexed.
      Two voiceless breaths in confinement there
5     Were all there was of what stirred the air,
      As crooked candles left the ceiling lit, but bare.
      Crenellations of the sultry moon
      Sent long waves of light to other rooms,
      Other breathers, other eyes half-shut to other cares,
10    And left these eyes to love our circles as they were.

      I appear in the crosshairs
      Of time and space
      --Just out of range--
      That look on my face.
5     The moon falls on its knees,
      Ineffable, frozen;
      In a sad pail of water
      Left out by the roses.

      Dear body, a colossal passion
      Has galloped through you and left you fenceless;
      Fenceless and borderless--through your own treason
      That tore the stakes from the sky and, pitiless,
5     Watched it float off with the horizon.
      There are no angles or inches to you
      At all now.  Now you are drowning;  now gone.
      Of all that was you, not a single blue
      Vein remains.  Dear body, you are bodiless;
10    You do not shudder or squirm anymore.
      What bloods composed you evaporate vaporless;
      Whatever pains nailed you to here are no more.
      She has left you with nothing, not even a note
      To blow through your hollows, as once
15    You shouldered on each morning your blue coat.

      Dear spitfire sparrow whose heart hammers fast,
      Whose wings churn emptiness towards the light,
      Who fills with silver song the vacant vast,
      Herald an enduing love each dawn from night!
5     Cry down from harsher skies some mercy's dram
      To green an ocean tarred in indifferent darks
      That has no bright hint of what one love's love can,
      That's never seen a sun lunging from a spark!
      Sweet white ribbon swinging between the trees
10    As happiness blurrs you and my tears blind,
      Take up love's song and Beatrice reprise
      Whose breast sparked paradise in damned Dante's mind.
      Sing until what singing saves is sane
      And all my dark wet dread but unlighted gain.

      Disuse, ill-use, and less, linger in mind,
      Bitter after-dregs of lust: coil and swarm
      Of tremblant bodies that beat love's drum warm
      Now emptied of gestures gentle and kind.
5     . . . So far from the pinnacle of a kiss
      Have we fallen;  threshed, discardedly thrown
      From Empyrean peaks to a bowl of down,
      From fittest prospects to runt ends of this:
      A dead-end day spent in wandered wastage,
10    Touched looks that leave two lovers more alone
      Than when confined to daydreams on the phone;
      Night's disconnect comes more in regret than rage.
      Anticlimax teases like a serenade
      As less and less we conspire to be glad.

      How many stories does the moonrise retail,
      Waiting for dreams to pearl-inlay the detail?
      Night's mysterium awaits
      The lute, unplucked, patient&.
5     Dark becomes a color too obvious
      To see among looking's over-crowded oblivions.
      Free dreams on an inner eyelid lie,
      Straining to detach and enter a sky.
      The dawnline's a focused loss
10    Of potential, definition scrimmed from nothingness.
      Here's an horizon razored from space,
      The finned edge of a pit or a grimacing face:
      Over the edge go dreams, lutes and dusks,
      Long shadows of an improvised mask.

      Trashed by the psychic static of hurricane Katrina,
      Our love end-runs the levee's leakage;
      In hope's paper boat folded on the flood
      Bobs our buoyant good beyond all breakage.
5     Beyond the missed clasps of disaster's trance,
      Past pain's barbed fillips and routine "ah!s,"
      We two now trudge in love who once did race
      Beyond what bounds our meaning's measure could:
      Novices, not novitiates, among stung unknowns.
10    Come, stand a little near.  Nearer to Thee
      We trundle curdled milk and mismatched sneakers
      To the tumbled dump.  Humbly we beseech Ye.
      Closely come to loving wonders all un-won;
      Let not love, new-won, take us for idle speakers.

      The blackened streetlamp's stubborn light
      Illuminates invisibly the empty sea,
      A something precisely impossible to see.
      A something in you, in me.
5     The evening's clamped, inverted bowl
      Pretends the stars are pining down, and stare.
      But their burning eyes are otherwhere;
      Only you and I are here.
      Only you and I are here,
10    And something stubborn that stares and stares,
      That dropped us open into evening's emptiness.
      Something neither you, nor I, can guess.

      For all my constant heart, I've constant dread 
      That follows me round and notes words I've said:
      When rude to those who do love me well,
      When kind to cruelty which cannot care,
5     When lofty to the lowest, who can tell,
      And to attentive love simply "not there,"
      I fear my offence fellows me past death.
      Green between graves my conscience slithers loath,
      That would rather gather clouds without a care
10    But that he founders where I fall, I fell,
      Slunk to death whose life was sparse and spare:
      Ill-fed by me, by me kept most unwell.
      So nightmare interleaves each love-word we've said,
      And conscience spikes with nails our love-bed.

      Here we are again, and as groundlings go
      Stiff-armed through a hazy maze of souls
      Treading round life's "merely thus" and "just so,"
      Hope-fed wanderers without a goal.
5     Though blind and timeless as dreaming egos,
      Though blitzed and witless as new-birthed foals
      Who stumble upright without knowing how
      We touch each other while shouldering shoals.
      Two swimmers, caught in clasps, will drown
10    While paired porpoises dauntlessly play
      Their thousand doubtless hours almost as one,
      Touching but as frolic bids them stray.
      So we, blind rounds encased in caustic cares,
      Should play at light and sight, however unaware.

      The toneless confusion of the bees
      Tunes to a static blankness all I see:
      A garden, blossom-burdened, beneath sweet trees.
      When night and the encroaching moon slide nigh,
5     Your striding image shoves those cold roses aside
      And all my thoughts are zeroed to a sigh.
      Every golden comb that hangs, to be complete,
      Must with terror and pleasure compete,
      So mixed is spirit and the heart's meat.
10    Now the moon is down and the heart raves:
      All the bee-slaved honey that I have
      I gave to her, and again would give,
      That she might my essence sieve.

      Goddess, twist
      My heart no more;
      Give me this, this,
      I ask no more.
5     Just Lissa's love,
      Aphrodite, grant me:
      Her heart well-enslaved
      And audibly panting.
      You who shape-shifted
10    Fair Helen's strong heart,
      Giving stung Paris
      A victory of sorts.
      Just Lissa's love,
      Aphrodite, grant me:
15    That her wrists always move
      In ways that enchant me.
      O goddess who flooded
      Sappho with lovers,
      Just Lissa, hot-blooded,
20    Give me forever.
      Just Lissa's love,
      Aphrodite, grant me:
      Who all men enslaves,
      No need to thank me.

      I ask a question, nor know how it must go;
      Not what love is, nor why, nor when, nor if,
      Nor countless other lovers' queries sown
      Upon the field of stars in breathless guess.
5     No.  Although my question comes no wiser
      Than poor petitioner to ring-rich lord
      Or clueless king surrounded by advisors,
      And comes but as words seeking a word,
      Still I'll ask the air and hope you hear--
10    Who, though made but for yourself, give satisfaction
      To eyes that quest for beauty, or ears
      Alert for that triple-trill perfection.
      Still I ask:  Will you, all love, have all me still?
      And stilly sit, attentive to your will.

      I have made myself small as a pine nut,
      A pine seed in the great conflagration
      Of your departure.  Each step away shut
      A vault, another door slammed like a gun.
5     The hours and aches of your going away
      Fill me with inflammable shame, topped off
      With fumes and rumors day by day by day
      Just as a gas can accepts the last drop.
      And tall in the trees, a wilderness of fire
10    Lays waste the timbers of our old love house
      And eats the raw logs laid up by desire
      To build by the field a child's playhouse.
      But my spirit's made small as a hot pine seed
      And will stretch a forest, though it rest in weeds.

      I search for pages with a blankened stare,
      Ice flow whitenesses for my dying love;
      Rank catarrh of the air-conditioner
      Repeats its hoarse assessment of my case:
5     This room's too cold a place for keeping doves
      Who's song's reduced to a stiff, beaked face.
      Still the long dry sob of love goes on and on,
      Tepid dashes and staccato decimals,
      An S.O.S. that radioes the sun:
10    Drip one molten tear on my punctual small!
      Pity the parrot who knows your lines by heart,
      Solar source of life and heat, and yeasty lusts
      That drop our brains into the shopping cart
      Sterile green beside the frozen peas and lists.

      I trifled with the trouble of a poem today,
      All day lacing syllables or their lack,
      Twisting word into word until words stayed,
      Giving freely what my shyer soul held back.
5     How like words our awkward pauses stoop,
      Saying "wait" like a falling leaf unshook;
      That we might fall on even as we stop,
      I'll write each love-look down in my love-book:
      How our bodies wooed as wild water went,
10    How whiphand and hip undid innocence,
      How love was more than what our lips had sent;
      How what was was wasted reticence.
      I listen to the dropped stone intone:
      Silence says nothing between we two alone.

      If my love first bristled rife with thorns
      A hedgehog whose hidden heart beat true,
      Or if my love no wonderment could ken
      Beyond the near dog star, whose sole blaze she knew,
5     Or if her mien plumped ponderous as bagged cement
      But goodness in her stolid looks was meant
      I'd not protest a poke whose purpose kissed
      Nor shirk her smiting smile, but be smitten,
      Nor once critique the false laugh that lisped
10    But stuff my ears with sighs of sweetest wish. 
      And the shining sharps of stars I'd thought forgotten
      In her true love's tears would pool unbroken.
      This erudite test I'd pass was never sent
      Since your untutored beauty beauty lent.

      The story of loving goes on,
      A confused cloud in the stream,
      A troublous nothing that makes
      The world but a passing dream.
5     High deeds of the great dead gone by
      Clamber but to the sill;
      Love light as an errant breeze
      Unsettles her locks and her will.
      She stands in her chamber unwearied,
10    Her soul poised at a thought:
      "A thousand days shall I stand here,
      Stirred in my innermost part."
      A thousand days are passing by,
      The moon unravels again;
15    Her eyes are fixed upon nothing,
      Her eyes cold as the wind.
      Her soul has seen her love's own soul,
      The world but a passing dream;
      She waits for the veil of years
20    To fall in the troubled stream.
      And there beyond the world's wracked cares,
      Past waters and words and deeds,
      There stands steady her love's own soul,
      His eyes cold as the wind.

      Three times was I a fool for love:
      For a boy, a man, and a teen.
      As a girl, as a woman, and in-between
      A fool, a fool, a fool I was for love.
5          Three times blessed, three times cursed,
           All before my thirty-fist.
      First a lad with an open face
      Bade me love, and my heart did race;
      His heart like a cloud that shifts and strays
10    Blew me about, and then blew me away.
           I was a fool, and I would not see
           A boy is a boy, and ever shall be.
      Then a teen, or two, or ten
      Bade me love them as I was then,
15    Young and lovely, but my heart was fickle:
      Love was a game of slap and tickle.
           I was a fool who played gaily
           Thinking my heart would ever be free.
      At last a man, made dark and tall,
20    Stalked straight to my soul
      And bade me stand by both altar and cradle,
      And stoop and stir my heart with a ladle.
           And I a fool, a fool, a fool so free
           Gave love, and give, most solemnly.

      Seeking reassurance, yet reticent to touch,
      Like the anemone retracting with her sting
      Your barb's unslung by tenderness, or such
      Tension as tears ope' a tender thing.
5     But saving grace is not a salve to calm
      And salvation bears its viciousness on wings;
      Recovery's own pain becomes its balm
      When what's vile's reversed by virtue's sting.
      So in this onslaught on your open heart
10    When harness pinches and help's hands come rough,
      Still gird yourself to give your every part;
      Know what dives downwind is no churlish chough
      Sent to peck black each softest thought--
      Know what comes to rescue you is love enough.

      Love fell in by the window where
      Moonlight wrestled;
      The long, the lonely bed was empty
      Of all but care.
5     She is gone who I would have here,
      Intimately castled;
      Lonely in bed alone I lie,
      Wishing she was here.
      Her echoed softness still enforces
10    This drift of dreams;
      Moonshine moulting on the floor
      Undoes the lover.
      Love cannot escape its crisis
      By means or seems;
15    Lonely in bed alone I lie,
      Wishing she was here.

      Love is a silence that neither looms nor locks
      But travels with us openly lovely
      Even unto the very edge of doom&.
      It will not swerve in the loud lee of rocks
5     But carries all folded in its snows
      Come down clear from very Everest
      Luminous as knowing without a goal,
      Holding wild commotions calmed to its white breast.
      But if I may into this stillness speak
10    And give love words enough to fill a book
      That needs only silence and good love-looks,
      Or murmur wonder into a rocky crack,
      I'd say knowing you is knowing all
      And give my tongue rest to heed your eyes' call.

      Never told how to unlove, dear lover,
      I piston on as piston did begin,
      Unrolling landscape's long hills and coverts,
      Rivers gathered at the roots where my eye swims.
5     So we travel on in loving leisure
      Affrighted by no false shadow of a cloud
      That moults its very being at wind's pleasure.
      So we move to our dancing's measure,
      Each synced step uncovering new ground
10    No matter that the steps are all the same.
      Our palms meet, and at your back's my firm hand
      Unmoving as we turn and turn again,
      Two travelers passportless in the land,
      Holding hands as we turn and turn again.

      This lithesome, wistful wastefulness,
      The poet's proposition "I is...."
      The relative silence of the inarticulate pang,
      The hand half-ruminant
5     That will twitch to write....
      There is no center to the soul
      Who's numb circumference
      Is ghost and goal.

      Once again inessential silence seeps
      Cold down marauded bones, icicle spine,
      Whose pains remind that heart did blip,
      That holistic heats had been yours and mine,
5     A sun shared between us on a plate
      Bright enough to make a blind man weep.
      That sun had been a burning song, my dear,
      Singing what we sweated out in ripe sheets
      Whose voice got husky as we grew nearer--
10    Whose now a forgotten knot of darks--
      A nocturnal imprisoned pall of blacks
      That once, eyes shut, burned our retina with heats.
      How blind, how deaf, to shout and song we've grown
      Who've pulled down hosannas for our very own.

      Feldspar flecks find God's ground
      Flush with spring flashings, rainrun acres
      Gunwale-awash in gutterspill, goutings
      Wonder-wet with melt-marr, molten makings
5     Growing grousey graves'-grass grey in twilight;
      Unhouselled souls stir inchling, stem-stretch
      Twig-timbrels tautly aching, arch in arch,
      Unreal yet resurrected in raintime runoff;
      Many man-taking markings make me mourn so,
10    Seeing how light intends the least things be limber:
      God pours his pity on graceless things.

      She's a strong little wench with a tight bod
      Who moves it amusingly at my nod:
      Back upon my soul's pole, or forth to froth.
      All the ways she moves, no move is loss.
5     Each way she shimmers is sheer gain to me
      Who, by losing all, get more than greed.
      So we argue with arms, and with legs amend,
      Until in salty shimmer we agree
      And in a molten moment unbegun
10    Two, who as woman and man began,
      Hammer, anvil and tongues reforge as one
      When heat's enough, and gladdened hearts just can.
      If this accord's accounted a chimera
      Then let me in illusion lie and "ah"

      Silence sits between us eerily easy
      For the most part, an enchanting chantless
      Alba, moon to noon, with nothing busy
      But our mutual dumb harmonies.
5     When clouds intended by a crowded look
      Fulminate upon the paleness of our brows--
      Silence holds them there, and they'll not be shook
      Till we give our thoughts a candid hour.
      So silence by reflection arbitrates
10    And holds us to ourselves, while locked in love;
      That you are you, and I am I, no gate
      Between two orchards can summon trees to move.
      So silence touches us, and the connection's valid
      Whether cheeks are flush or the forehead's pallid.

      My solitary days are waning;
      Such solicitude I shun;
      Companionable night is gaining
      And shuts out the single sun.
5     When that desert light at last is out
      And the stars like dew appear,
      At midnight my mouth shall find your mouth
      And kiss the whole night through.

      Spring's chaos's come, when thawed snakes braid 
      And Sun's bold boots stroll dusts as cozy 
      As the pelvic bed where our mortared bones are laid 
      (In mortal mixing snug love mists hazy);
5     And every nosy bud shoves a shaggy muzzle 
      Into the motley glory old God abandoned,
      Romping with folly's pollens and playful fuzzes 
      Above winter's withered sticks cracked to ground. 
      Alone where mowers have managed the meadow,
10    Tramping past tidied detritus thrifty blades array,
      Shamble-shanked, my aimless stride displays
      A mulish insistence for day-dreamy rambles,
      A wish that all the world's walked fallows would follow
      My cragged return to disordered brambles.

      The quality of silence quite changed twice
      From superfluity of feelings rare,
      A crystal breeze caught in mountain air,
      To caverned cold and soundless ice.
5     There is no beauty quite like that caught
      In quiet moments beyond all thought,
      When two humans share all life has brought.
      Terror too divides the silent scene
      When the quiet heart in contentment preens
10    Before contempt that unspoken seethes.
      The quality of silence quite changed twice.
      Ignorant as a lark in pre-dawn's vair,
      My light sought out a light that had always been there,
      But dawn was undone by what silence dared.

      The speckled rose is rarest, by my guess,
      Dappled darks best freshen what is bright,
      Heaps of praise heave higher by the less,
      Granting palled palates foretaste of delight.
5     So you gloss your glory with your faults
      As each shadow lends an excellence to light
      Supreme above low dimnesses traversed
      Till every ray adorns a peak at height.
      Without a breaking edge what is the dawn?
10    A downy nothing, yet not the night,
      An in-between half-darkness, all unknown;
      Only faultlines trace what's definite.
      So I see, in what you most would hide,
      No blot of shame but starts a mark of pride.

      Pain blooms
      At the vibrant sting-tip,
      Researching its acres
      Of possible conquest,
5     The settled lands.--
      Not one ell will rebel, beloved.
      There is a sting
      A very distinct, insect sting,
      A red fibulating sting.
10    A new queen
      Chooses new constellations,
      New fissures in old darknesses;
      And the continents realign
      To their prim allurements;
15    All eyes
      Go up, up....
      Prairie fires of stories discuss the goddess:
      Rapid and ruinous
      As a new moon
20    Adorning the dimness with whips of light,
      Drawing each grassblade
      Out of oblivion
      With her trailing kisses:
      Silver sliver, silver sliver.
25    Restless trees creak;
      The towns lie awake in their beds,
      Breathing their finitudes of time--
      Uncalm in cool sheets;
      Cats eyes inhabit the night's pallors;
30    Each wind waits unbegun,
      As an army in veritable darkness
      Awaits your first word
      To leap.

      There was a devil and I knew his name,
      knew his name, knew it oh so well.
      His name was pride and we had a fine time, 
      had a fine time, all through the afternoon.
5     Down came the devil and shined my shoe, 
      shined my shoe, smiling all the while.
      I saw his horns curl above my corns; 
      my shoes shone bright as a big brass horn.
      A girl and her curls zipped and whirled, zipped and whirled,
10    and the beat beat faster than any old how;
      I swore 'fore I died she'd be by my side, 
      by my side, all the while she whirled.
      We danced all night under the dark, dread pines, 
      dark, dread pines while the moon was blue.
15    The fiddle was frisky and a little bit tipsy 
      beneath the star that followed me home.
      Oh pride was the devil that I took to the dance, 
      took to the dance, deep in the dark dread pines.
      "You go home with the one what brung you here, 
20    brung you here, deep beneath the pines."
      So I left her there in the shining square 
      tucked deep in the dark, dread pines.
      And my head hung down as if I had drowned 
      as I walked along alone.

      This old whore with windmill legs, my heart,
      Because it cannot love takes a speaking part
      Detailing the racy vices that brought it
      Sopping here, dripping in a two-piece, tits
5     Every which where, desperate to be stared at,
      Desperate to stare.  Too frail and fat
      To do much more than moon about the bar,
      My heart gets ripped on sips of distilled tears.
      "Do you know that outfit's last year's haute monde?
10    The ice inside your eyes is not overtly fond
      Of mewling kittens or bombshell blondes--
      Why not just out with it?  Tell them there,
      Arrayed along a rainbow from violet to sere:
      No eye eyes your zero from the empty mirror."

      Those who mock to harm our love's delight
      Shake down scolding looks from imperious heights
      That love alone, aux deux, transmutes to royal:
      Thus uncrowned was I till plucked from the soil.
5     Your solid eyes invested me with dreams,
      And saw me kingly who had pauper's seams;
      Your mouth that said my name loosed appealing bells
      And rang me up from my thrown-down well.
      Now steadfast in our fortress of delight
10    We x-ray out low mockers from our tight height,
      And listen to no breeze that is not loyal
      And blows us blonde kisses from brune soil.
      Locked alone above together where all things are clear,
      We long to fall to where mixed things adhere.

      Three months of hours dance drowsy round our loves
      A triple crown of hours triple won
      From life's fierce traffic, shove and counter-shove
      Of self-chasing commerce till day is done.
5     Slow as in a liquid all of light composed
      Pink pearls that pressed behind our lips did kiss
      And left a lineage of love-drops dosed
      With downy dream-time's fretless wistfulness.
      Each hour augured eons unattained,
10    Long daisy-chains of bliss soft-tied to bliss
      Leading us on as does a wedding train
      Toward pallid horizons half-left in mist.
      To contemplate this past brings present rest,
      Knowing the yet-to-come such past suggests.

      We who pant and part in night's divine design
      Lard the stars with tissues of our lies
      Spitting hymns and oaths of "evermore"
      Till all darks daunt or are blindly malign--
5     Full of the guilts we spritzed at the skies,
      Chanting fabrications by the score.
      Will you sit a little while beside me
      Anyway?  Put your hand into my lap,
      Let me have my way?  A little while beside me
10    Lay, and a little love let dribble in our laps.
      Lie with me a little while, tell a fib
      To the fibulating stars that hear our hearts;
      Its not as if they weren't used to our raw squibs,
      Or its worse than what we told ourselves to start.

      Let cauled heart know what all soul would find,
      Then throw the folded shadow to the ground--
      Disclose, beat by beat, one glowing coal
      No dark could daunt forever: self's own soul
5     Whose hour is ever at the very dawn,
      Whose heaven's always green as the richest lawn.
      Only soul's sight within that shapes sights without
      Could let us become, by doubt, devout--
      This spark that circles without thought of toil
10    Seeks a new sunrise in every inch of soil,
      Says we are all of sheerest marvel shaped
      Who grew to awkward Man from aweless Ape;
      And even Earth's conception felt no discontent
      Whose seeds fell warmly, were warmly meant.

      No matter what the weather
      The world is far colder, dear
      When we are not together.
      No matter the change of days
5     Nothing really feels quite the same
      As when you by me may lay.
      No matter how trim the wind
      That sails us to eternity's end,
      It's empty without you, my friend.
10    No matter how wet the week,
      My thirst your high geyser seeks
      That soaks me till I'm weak.
      No matter how blown down by snow,
      Or how lively the old Eskimos,
15    Without you I must leave them and go.
      No matter what wonders has the Fall,
      When each leaf increases the beautiful,
      Without you it's dulling and null.

      What's stagnant stays, overstays its welcome,
      Silt riches greening the victor's cup;
      I hope to amputate what will not strengthen,
      To vomit back what wasn't nutrient sup.
5     So much for my formal meditation:
      "Divide and conquer," the same wastrel scrawl
      That emanated from the instructor's pen
      To rebuff my vast juvenillian bawl:
      Poems piled on poems, a swamp turned tar,
10    Excretions and skittering ditties
      Of loves too plural for a concentrated tear.
      Somewhere among the calcified fossils lies
      A skull that wept at what was a star
      And stayed too long looking for your heart: the prize.

      When flower piles on flower, and bower
      Bursts its bounty with too much love of glory
      Sending the heaven-ascending flowers
      Down to ground to end their sun-fed story,
5     Then we see how sullen sudden surfeit shows
      That, finding no resistance to its moltless growth,
      Will, in writhing upward, fallow fall--slow
      To the earth, making shadows of its own.
      Even so, unlooked-for hope can tangle
10    As it goes, a kite beyond its string's
      Self-tightening, trailing bows of woeful
      Love, enveloped in nothing's everything.
      Unreaped ease on ease propels our lot aloft,
      Perspectiveless, if we cannot count the cost.

      When fogs come crafty down the mountainside
      And quell the summer's green in mumming mists,
      Pulling light into their hill-killer blindness,
      Then all my night's in new bright dark espied
5     And all I had thought hid in nightmares dead
      Is come again unaccountable as cold,
      A softly omnipresent nameless dread
      That steals whatever warmth dawn had willed.
      And blind again at dawn in the soulless cold,
10    I see my rapture-nightmares in brightness rolled
      And confront the sourceless something of my soul:
      Hill on hill within, revealing valley,
      Valley, valley, does nothing to allay
      My sense that sense itself must this nothing sully.

      When quiet whelms as blood blisters a wound
      Injury seems all the moment's meat
      A hurt beyond what howling vowels can sound
      Or what eons screaming might dare repeat.
5     There in moveless red our faces reflect
      What surface tension keeps from further flow
      In sudden stillness without wet defect
      As if no pulse pushed wound or face from below.
      Now rushing rashness rests, quiet-conquered,
10    And slurred cuts to coagulation tend
      And silence swells like the healing word
      That nurses' "shh" and nannies' "hush" intend.
      The speechlessness that first fostered wounds
      Foretells flesh's restoration without a sound.

      When silence as my aptest singing sits
      Perched atop old boughs of weighty song
      And all my voluble voice is simply fit
      For inner comment at what comes along
5     Then I know our hours are most golden
      And have a tone of knowing something more
      Than rapid words that flit and flit may hold
      With all their chorus of singing by the score.
      Then I know a single note unsung
10    And held in inner vibrato only
      Keeps the tune alone when all's unstrung
      And song without beginning lingers only.
      Then I look into your two eyes, dear one,
      And hear what symphony we have begun.

      Like the sunless moon I live on borrowed light,
      A lesser flame enslaved to finer fire.
      Now a new-dark nothing at formless midnight,
      No sunbeam falls to show my full profile.
5     Unless the buried sun renew her glory,
      Sighing revelations from her banished light,
      My shadow will still tell a shadow's story,
      Who rounds on fullness most when in your sight. 
      Although I pace to complete my circuit
10    In thoughtful dark, whispering with ghosts of thoughts
      Whose only shadow in the shade of pits,
      Still come, still shine into my self-made trough.
      Generous and ageless come, blessing all,
      Brimful with hope in burning baptismal.

      Your fog's darkness dims my simple pin of light
      Come in at pen-point, unrolled in inky leisure,
      By black defining the whole wash of white--
      By dividing nothing taking measure
5     Of all's unhampered everything and more.
      What we are is more than prudent store
      Of facts, of events unscrolled in order,
      Sequential ticks of a circular clock
      That round on nothing's zero once again--
10    As if to begin again were to begin,
      Or to swirl a wand around undid a lock
      That never did clicker for a key.
      So your fog's a face that hangs half-lovely
      And I a lighthouse loom round its majesty.