Friday, November 25, 2005

Tangerine Dream

This Man, That Woman

. . . . . They send clandestine smiles across the plaza,
this man, that woman. They are still new
to one another. Her husband suspects

nothing. His wife is not so sure, and her
suspicion hisses like steam rising from
the city's sewers all around him.
It is like a yellow stain on a white shirt,
like underserved praise for a two-bit actor
who killed himself in a parking garage

and whose fingers retain the citrus smell
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . of a peeled orange.

. . . . . A beautiful young Jewess travels by
bus, wears square shoes, thick stockings, her hair tied
tight, like wool, bound beneath a scarf. She is

happy to have a seat to herself, sits
alone, stares through a window at the
drudgery of an endless highway, dreams

of a future marriage and a rabbinical scholar
she kissed goodbye. She is in America,
on a bus now. Suddenly, she understands
that things will never be the same. As the
bus turns into its terminal point she perceives
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . the scent of citrus.

Saturday, October 15, 2005

Spill The Wine, Dig That Girl

Gertrude's Stone of Was Being and Was Not Being
In Vino Fecundus Gerundus et Terra Caput Mortuum

I had something that was falling out of me. Something there was that kept falling out of
me. It was leaking out of me. It had always been leaking and falling out of me.
There was some time that this something was not leaking. There was a time
it was not drained out. There was a time it was not falling, that the
ground was not calling. But then that time came. That time was always
coming. That time knew its time. That time knew it was time. It was
a time that had always been coming so that even when something
was not falling, leaking, draining out of me it was always falling, leaking
draining out of me. It was not something coming out of me,
not something simply coming out of me. It was falling,
always falling, though not always. It was leaking. This was
a forceful leaking, like being drained. It was something
that was being drained from me and called downward,
to the ground. This calling by the ground was constant.
This call was not always constant but when it called
it always was calling. The draining was forced by
something pushing in on me. This something pushing
in on me had always been pushing. There was never
a time it had not been pushing. This pushing pressed
the draining which was always falling to the ground
that always had been there. This ground that
always had been there existed before it was
not there. It existed in a time that did not
exist. Its existence was not in time. Its
existence was not time. Its time never
existed, this thing that always was.
There was a time I once was. I was
once in a time with something
leaking out of me. It was
always leaking out of me.
I always was. Was is
always. Was is me,
was always me.
Was is. Is
was always.
Never was
was never.
Was was.
This was
the was
that was
falling
out of
me,
press
ing out
of me
always,
never
not
being
drained
out of
me to
be re
ceiv
ed in
to the
ground
that
always
was
even
when
it was
not,
when
I was
not.
These two always coinciding.

Sunday, October 09, 2005

Hickory Dickery

Church Mouse's Observations
On Sex and the Mythic Suburb
When He Was Just Fifteen
.
Loved boy, demon dreaming, run through
an emasculating mill of hours,
boards piled up, planked, trafficked in 4²
religion, waiting on a driving nail
with brambles in his hair, roots turned
from will to function, a piercing on
a civil lathe, dizzying cries out
of dark wood to a foolish track of
silence, a polis of quiescent vows,
sawdust, at last desired, somewhere,
in some way, as someone, someday,
a last tryst with light,
Persephone dragged down to the dark
of an accustomed compromise,
Lethe's tidal give and take

hard to remember what the world was
before she alighted like the moon,
like a dark screen, lit by the sun
ever riding at her heel, the lustrum
of her back meteorotically always
just beyond, beyond the sun and the crater
she cleaved in loved boy's yard now gone to
seed, overgrown like a jungle where
cats roam about the face of a fallen
buddha; lovingly they pad the earth
in carpets of peaceful invention;
loved boy throws rocks at the sun,
sun turns to a river where loved boy
drinks, memory blanked by her sweet
elixir, one sip and forever gone
desert emerges in the bed
where loved boy swam, wild rapids
turned to sand, gleeful accelerations
between silted banks of refusal,
waters robbed of holy wars, baptism
of thistle, purged eddies of loveless nights
where fish that try to spawn go belly up,
rich effulgence stripped, putrefied,
dried bone cast in the heat of shoal
and sand where statuary crumbles,
toppled totem in a dying forest,
illusion lamented, a longing
cleansed, hot wind glides along, her name
rustles leaves, a creeping fire, fissure
rubbled pyre panging for her touch
he straddles the ghost of a future promise
ridden out of fitful sleeplessness;
dreams, like shells, litter a blanket
in a solitary field, a boy
understands an upturned nose smells fear,
he's outsourced to an ignorant safety
of distance and memory that divides,
conquers, like a book fallen on its side,
a museum shelf's glass-housing, a scream
and a shard of nail beneath, listing among
days that do not know his name, loved boy
totters like a calf, like a plunger in
the trunk of her father's car, his ghost
flush against the back of the sky
where night picks away at an ancient hole
cherchez la femme, loved boy
of a motherless house and a
spattering of maypoles, suburban
sex and all still moments in between,
letting go and freezing in a
mid-day and cautionary sequence
of return, eruptions of bread and seed,
a(r)morless armies and a drink
expel a constant howling, it's a drink
he can't afford, he turns onto his side,
heart tympanic in his ear, memory
of taste, saliva on a wooden tongue,
though he was of the earth he was
of the earth too late, stopped
creating, quit weilding language skyward
gods tortured him with lovers,
his mind a constant hum, thoughts mere
impositions, broken apart,
one got away as the other
was being eaten, he remembers
her like snow not far from an ocean
and he feels like a fat man leaning
over a countertop, a glass jar
fired without love wedged into
memory; she likes to describe being
ravaged to her friends, there are boys
she will not name, and one, like wine
sharpened on the tongue, metal on a strap
in a house where love went bad, a midnight
meeting of regrettable constancies.

Thursday, September 01, 2005

Tramps Like Us . . .


Headline Reads: Fisher King
Spies Beautiful Woman. Quote:
"Stunning Really, Running Past"
.
Beautiful lady jogging by,
Her name's a run-on sentence.
Say it once--you'll never stop.
.
I know.
.
Her footsteps sound like fast-held
secrets paved out beneath the surface of the streets.
Lightning feet thunder through my sleep-dreams,
their crescendoed rumbling startles me
out of every wandering daytime distraction. At night
her toes are painted red, but here, in roadways,
she charges along past flooded meadows, pounds her
way up wooded hills, her knees take the weight of
every punishing descent. I watch from a distance,
from my porch, each early Otis evening.
.
I hurry through tasks in order to keep the appointment. Dry the dishes--quickly! Pare the hedge and tie the bundled branches fast. On those nights she does not come I wane, teeth set on edge, so I listen to the things she's left behind instead.
.
A reticent music rises,
something like the beating of wings
that fights its way out of her head and
into her body whenever she runs past.
On some other night I may hear
the barking of a dog, a dark fury, or
black grace where she has trammeled the
Western Massachusetts ground beneath her feet.
.
At times, although I cannot see him, I know
a man appears out on the road where she runs by.
He writes on a pad with a pen,
composes tonal poems that sound like babies
crying through a neighbor's window left ajar.
.
I know.
.
I see
that she is incomparable,
that she is a collection of impenetrable
clouds laden with the weight of gray whose
running is a dance in just the same way light
turns into water or bodies become anger,
entropic flower safe against thieves--
and behind the smoke of desire
a consummation of light in her eyes.
.
Very nearby, fear crops the hedge
of a churning syncope and leaves
forecast limpidity that only a rain
of bloodied lips can revive. After,
her breath clears like acorns
falling through the approach of an
elemental autumn and the miasmic
ether of her beating heart fades, she
grows steady and beautiful and whatever
was frightened is pressed from the
tabernacles of her eyes and her sculpted,
wild limbs, wrapped together in
her driving run, in the gathering of her steps,
chugging, pushing, pulling, spun impassionata,
fire-orchid sucking air out of a broken shelf life
until four turn into two, and the two turn into one
beautiful dancer, gliding with certainty like a
hunter poised to strike a story needing to be told,
an expansive rendering suddenly impossible to contain
under the constraints of a constant muse that leaves an
indelible mark tattooed on an arm.
.
Beautiful lady running,
perhaps you did not intend
to open this ancient wound,
but now the field is flooded
and I am one in a series of
dead, gray trees patterned like
religious pages in a decorous
book . . . unless you come.
Run past and speckle me in
dappled blues and greens
and every thickly-muscled
world between the scarred
oaks of the need we feel.
It is like girls talking in a park,
a gathering of boys on bicycles,
a cajoling, cruel mimicry by the wind
of a wooden horse and a sign that reads,
"Do Not Enter," set against the night that
falls just before we crawl back inside our lives.
.
I know.
.
Her name's a run-on sentence I cannot stop writing.
She kicks all stops away, jettisons the parsed chaff,
punctuates the sweet air with her breath. Say
her name and you are only the approach of something
already gone, the salted pillar of a Friday night
high school dance, a cracked chestnut on the ground,
the scent that lingers in the air after a girl goes
running by, yearning piled up like blocks of an
unanticipated blue and yellow knot of time
where lovers spend themselves like screeching tires
in a town where evening flashes in the sky like a horse
crossing an empty parking lot whose white lines of
demarcation are spirited away by the ascending
winds of what we choose, or refuse.
.
I know.

Wednesday, August 17, 2005

Love, love me do

Oxyparoxysm
.
I am not available for love,
. . . . . not amenable to being touched;
. . . . . do not try (try!), don't ask of me (ask!)

Monday, August 01, 2005

Touch of Gray

Confectionary
.
Is it a bad thing
to eat an entire
. . . chocolate crumb cake,
. . . . . . not in one sitting but maybe
. . . . in the course of a day
. .. all by myself
. . standing inside my aloneness
with nothing more than "sweet"
. . . . . . "chocolaty" abiding there?
.
At day's end, cake eaten,
I collect its crumbs into a corner
of the box, tip it up, and the sugary remnant
tumbles with sweeping finality
. . . . sweetening my lips and the spaces
. . . between my teeth.
.
My imaginary wife enters, touches my hair,
says I'm getting gray.
.
"It's powdered sugar," I say.

Wednesday, July 27, 2005

A Time of Confidences

Harvey
.
. . . and I remember
. . that summer
. when Harvey took me
down those old crumbling
. . . . gray stairs
. . . . to where the honeysuckle blossoms
. . . . . were ripening.
. . . . . He picked a golden blossom
. . . . . . . . off a dangling green vine,
. . . . . . . . and orangello pollen
fell about and dusted Harvey's fingertips.
When he plucked out the middle of
. . . . the blossom
. . . . . and touched it
. . . . to my tongue
. . . . . . . I tasted
. . . . . . . . . Yellow!

A time of Innocence . . .

Wheels Of Time
.
Crystal hale
. . slicks down the streets
and ices over
. . a small red tri-cycle
. . fallen on its side
in the clean white snow.

Tuesday, July 19, 2005

What a time, it was . . .

Alimental Ode Full
of Sexual Lonliness
.
If it was not tranquil, it would be gloomy;
If it was not a prodigious quiet, it would be a
parsimonious silence; If it wasn't a family tree, it would be
a bend sinister; If it was not a siphoning off, it would be
only viscous pitch; If it was not beating its wings
everywhere, it would be an abandoned dog, on Galapagos,
waiting to feed its progeny with eonic recumbence,
and, looking forward to finding the next right sized meal.

Sunday, July 17, 2005

Time it was, and . . .

The Train Cars

Two empty train cars
pose
on once silver rails
linked together
at the hip
like docile old women
sitting
arm in arm
in the park
feeding pigeons at noon

Thursday, July 07, 2005

The past is just a goodbye

When She Would
-
These are my children:
footprints in sand,
oils, traces of fingers, lips, discarded
on the marked surface of a drinking glass,
-
breaths breathed swallowed by wind,
waste washed down a pipe, rust,
flecks of skin in light,
dancing detritus,
desiccations,
dust
-
wrappers dropped behind.
-
These, the ghosts
that lived with me,
hints-of-things embraced.
-
You should have known their mother.
Deeply,
I craved her,
deeply, the way a man misses life
when he thinks of her,
the way a string yearns for vibration,
music plucked from sense like
a ripe pomegranate
a flash of light
that's how she came to me
when she would.

Wednesday, July 06, 2005

Teach your children well

Close As I Can Come
-
This is one
of my children,
your children,
their children's
children,
bequeathal
preceding me from out of the numerical
constructions of the Arabs.
-
At work I float in my chair,
hovering ephemera
barely seated there,
anywhere,
but especially there.
-
I am always crowded.
I'd like to rest.
I'd like to be solid,
just for a day, or even
an hour,
but I am passing even as
I am being
born.
Can Euclid tell me what that means?
It feels like something.
Something I am not.
I think I should be that,
not this,
concentric rings of if-onlies.
The scriptures are the same to me
even if I read
in Latin or in Greek,
in Aramaic, Sanskrit, or
In-Between-Gray-Lines.
That's as close as I can come.

Thursday, June 09, 2005

What's The Word? Jo . . .

Word
.
I lay these with the runes of time,
storied reasons culled in rhyme;
ruins cracked on rocky shores,
words laid to rest on ocean floors;
.
Sharp shards of husks and shattered skulls,
hard shells bored by beaks of gulls;
seas erode the sands of odes,
like sleuths unfolding secret codes;
.
Words mine all Mystery till she gives
the secret space where Beauty lives.

Tuesday, June 07, 2005

Song Remains The Same

Buddha Kisses
.
The voices of your kisses
swell my lips with
echoes,
haunt them,
speak all over them,
again and
again;
.
they are piled up in rows like
chanting schools of monks
convened before a
golden buddha sitting
.
neither pleased nor displeased
.
very much at ease with what he hears.
.
Suddenly one of them breaks into
uncontainable
song.

Saturday, May 28, 2005

Ch ch ch ch Changes

Petrarchan Phases
.
small change is drastic, a catastrophic shift in
the balance of the way things had always once
been, diminished undulations of a passing life
gone in incremental devastations, never again
to hear music in just the same way, or to bite
into an apple with the intrinsic candor of a
polished red abandon, a bell gone forth to find
its clarion source in brassy closure, once
relished vigorously, an arrival that is never
more, never less, than a radical return, the
sound of clanging in cloth pockets and
a specified end, a singular cold
.
on cold giving way to freeze in the lea, an
expansive icing of care, so that what had once
been is remembered as warmer in a world of
what has become,
the thing giving birth to the world that is.
perhaps it is me that has changed or perhaps
the universe has stopped whirling, altered its
course, quit on fiat and on waiting for the
conflagration culminating in the end of
tiresome samsaric revolutions that drain joy
from living.

Friday, May 27, 2005

I'd Pay The Devil To Replace Her

An Old Lament Made of Mud and Sky
.
Oblique corona of absence, black, wailing wind, dust storm of lament, bleak light, the feet that carried her away, out of a crumbling rotunda of stones, are pressed in mud, sun-baked stones
.
undone by love's eroding promises, withdrawn are the passionate invitations of a full woman whose roundnesses my fingers crave, my lips measured the distances between her supple upturned ends,
.
her scent is gone, her salt no longer sharpens my slackened tongue, the tongue that read to her, recited verses, sung her name, same tongue now stained purple with wine of grapes, cracked lips on which only interminable mumbling splutters,
.
reason's gone, blank, dumb and lightless,
a fist shakes, relentlessly, at the sky.

Wednesday, May 25, 2005

Honesty Is Such A Lonely Word

Decomposition
.
It has been a year of surgeries. I
nurse self inflicted wounds. I have to claw
around for a word. I've cut the throat of
every word I've ever known. There has been
a rockslide in my body, an avalanche
of words has given way. It crouches against
a hillside like a cat backed onto its
haunches. Granite, snow-like, flutters in mid-
air. I mark each flake, each tiny dust-grave
with a cross of incremental self-betrayals--
inaccessible word. Former friends, past loves,
take flight, shove off without me. I retain
.
nothing of their unctuous fire. I lie in
a sullen plot of falsity. Words shuck me
like a pea. They walk past me at a slow
and tidy pace. I may never be heard by
passersby whose conversations recall what
once had been, what had been said by whom.

Thursday, April 28, 2005

Un-Sexual, Un-Healing

Oh, That I Were a Dog
( Where I are Plural )
.
It has always seemed unsustainable,
this lying side by side,
this sliding in and out daily,
hourly,
like teaching or selling,
acting is less of a performance art
--the stage floor subsumes,
is less of an
"other."
I have never been able to make due
beneath the weight of sheets,
the confinement of thighs,
the heavy allure of breasts,
breasts of varying size and tenor,
beautiful, yes, but
the gravity of being a man,
the multitude of beds,
open thighs,
fingers,
toes,
lips, yes, lips . . .
such cumbersome light
this losing one's self,
this becoming a tongue
writhing in the dark.
A part of me wants to make love to
every woman, every woman I have known,
or met, or that has walked a little while
in the earth, women tending gardens,
women healing the world, women
knotting a kerchief over the eyes of
Justice, but even that part of me has doubts,
reservations.
It seems too much for me, this lying here
with you, my stomach asks me what it is all
about, my nose juts forward, suggesting this
is the smell of mother or those long-legged
sisters of my father who, by nature, coddled
and enticed. I remember their limbs,
what their skin smelled like, how their hair
fell along the cheek I set against their
shoulders. Safe arms of incredible women.
You lack the ephemeral nets of those girls I
consumed at the newsagent stand.
They turned into birds and clouds, flight itself,
yes, whatever I asked them to be they became,
and I did the same for them. But, this lying here
with you is so palpable, filled with fleshy rolls
and scars and unexpected patches of hair,
every manner of imaginable alteration.
Your body makes me fear my own.
It is a body I have feared from very early times,
from centuries far removed from this bed,
your walls, the drawers that secret away your
pleasure life, and the closets of your chosen
wardrobe, your desired reds and golds.
Desire enters every choice you make, every
meal you decide to eat, leaves it mark on every
orange peel your fingers tear, every place your
bare foot touches, remains behind every time
your hand wraps around the doorknob to your
apartment, infuses every sweep your tongue
makes over your lips, fills every labored breath
you breathe as you sweat in the park, walking
vigorously, jiggling beneath your loose clothing,
wishing a man of my caliber could lie still, one
night, beneath your canopy, hold and take what
is his, give you his own desire as if nothing else
grew from the earth as it spins under the stars
that shine even as they remain invisible in the
day, the day of a thousand failed loves, the light
of self-conscious stains, of awakening, axis of
light that so diminishes the interminable appeal
of a boy let loose upon the earth, dabbled on by
well-meaning women, and by entrepeneurs who
imprint early monolithic self-doubt on every
perfect being.
Oh, that I were a dog.

Wednesday, March 23, 2005


This newborn fire

Little red rooster

.
January, 1958, The Year of Brother Rooster
.
This newborn fire
scampers across the yard,
stamps the ground with
hardscrabbled feet,
skinny, orange-scaled, tipped with nail.
.
Inside the house the mother's belly erupts in
Procession, through the window groans may
be heard, the air inside is full of sweaty faith,
serious business, women's work.
.
Somewhere, someone has written
an efficient volume on the
dismemberment of your lovers' bodies;
beneath the glare of a consumptive interest
you are, like a wick, gone out of yourself.
.
But, you are no black wick, resplendent
in your quick, provincial plumáge, muted
only by the dust spurred ascendently into
the air where it hangs around you like an
antique atonement with wood and wire and
the cackling of your thorny brood.
.
Brahma bird, you dance a firery dance of
love. Inside a woman labors. You have
announced the death of gods,
proved prophesies,
are born to war.
.
Blood cauled priest of the red carbuncle,
sturdy, turgid bird,
prodigious and possessive lover whose
heat the egging bodies of your charges
crave, plain white lovers press themselves
against your fire.
.
Behind the house, a silo full of grain, and
beyond that then the trees that lift the
January sun. Through the window the break
and snap of midwifery is heard. In the yard
the rooster's call is raised. Through a blowing
curtain, a nascent yowl springs forward. A gasp.
Exhaustion and relief.
.
The rumpled hens of morning pass the word,
garbled pidgin spreads from roost to roost,
infiltrates the busy air like droppings
everywhere, like feathers plucked, like blood
and semen, like bodies intertwined in the
cracked shell of a summer night.

Friday, March 18, 2005

Love me two times times two

.
Love Is Never Having To
Say You're Crushed
.
I don't know that I have ever been
as in love with anyone as I have
been with you. There was that
golden girl, the one with the cello
standing in the corner of her room,
the one whose hands were sculpted
by Michelangelo, a love many years
old, much distanced now. And, even
that cannot compare.
The quality of that dream love was
that of children playing. But,
our love
--it feels like life and death,
quite adult you know--like a blade
edging meat from bone, precise and
earthy,
our love.
Plans fold--you must fight very
hard to hold yours up against
our love.
I know it will not be. I have chosen
too, another thing,
some-thing-not-this-love.
It was too big for us,
our love.

Thursday, March 10, 2005

Life's a long song

Heart Song
Today is a day for a song.
An elucidatory song that draws you
and I further along toward our
destinytions, a song that rings
unbroken until each can say,
finally, "I am my own country."
First we listen, and after we hear,
we sing--
auricular sidereal tarrying at the
speed of sound, a song sung
somewhere between light and
solidity, composed of each, a great
Mass of praise meant for no one in
particular except the poet-praiser,
moved to sing simply because he is
moved at all.
This is the miracle, read in pages
of a day and flung outward, toward
the sea, a churning-wave-song, a
sound not unlike that unsufferable
cat whose purring sleep-song rises
out of a basket of blankets, sifts
through soft savannah grasses,
along heavy chains constructed of
bone and conjured in the muffled
ease of dream where feet pound
earth, elder sages heal the sick,
where otters hunt great salmon,
where, along the banks of a silver
river the rising smoke of funeral
pyres builds and joins in billowing
clouds of passing, where fruits
grow fat and fall at the feet of
children, children laughing,
children singing, "Gone, gone,
gone to the other shore, gone
together
to the other shore . . ."
A diadem song to stand against
the visceral gods of carnage.
These children dance. They tie
flowers in their hair. And in their
voices, in their one voice, they sing
an unceasing song, "Gone, gone,
gone to the other shore, gone
together to the other shore.
O Awakening!
All hail!"

Monday, March 07, 2005

Loosing in the sky with diamonds

Mine, Not Yours--Fear and Anger, Lust
and Possession, Murder--of Course

I will take twenty minutes now,
not to think or ponder, not to regret
nor brood nor fear, but just to say

I hurt, that I have entered an ugly
time, the dark thing that has always
stood between you and me. And,
because its mere potentiality was
what stretched your distancing arm,
I thought I'd call it forth--a stupid,
angry thing to do, I know. But I could
not bear being shut away by you
because of something that did not
happen, as if betrayed for holding
onto light, unrewarded for fending
off the dark (as if that was not its own
reward).
I walked to the morning sun,
but this darkness would not budge.
Who invited this thing that stars shun
into my life? What sentient being said,
give him wine to drink until his feet are
thick with darkness?
If only I could extrapolate light from a
sticky piece of warm rice, the red-gold
light of tea made from forty-seven roots
of sorrow. Having sipped it, a man may
step inside its center.
After that I can say, God, I release you.
Ex-wife, I release you. Mother, father, I
release you. Teacher, you are released.
It is a lesson learned. Letting go so as not
to lose one's grip. Twenty minutes are up
so I must end now.
But you, best girl ever, you are harder to
let go of than the rest. Loosing you may
take another twenty minutes yet.

Wednesday, March 02, 2005

Rain Maker

Shaman

My name is Joaquin Tirado, and I have just arrived back from the dead. For me, this is just a little night walk to the thatched huts of the elders. They are not the kind that whisper behind the backs of children. These ancestors know the stars and the sky and the brown earth beneath our feet are only a universe riding a body of sand. They speak in sparse, accented lyric.

Myself, I take a little wine each morning. Though only a youth, I live in an old body, worn. I can tell you there is a moment when the Deep unfurls its tipped, penumbrous head, in fields of things best left where they stand, tall stalks of the dead, heads weighed and bent like the fat seeded pods of November sunflowers. There I am a black bird sheltering beneath their husks. They tie the smallest whispers, laments and stories of love, stories of love to my feathers. As I fly up and away, back to my own, these rain from my bird-body like little torches. I have been told that from the ground they look like stars.

Saturday, February 26, 2005

He bends to pick a Dogen

Scenes From The Met
On a February Tuesday,
Kasyapa at Cristo's Gates


Near Marie Victoire Lemoine's Atelier of a Painter named LeBrun, a woman in a pair of oversized eyeglasses passes. She mistakes me for the corner of a house let by a crazy lady. Hans Memling's Woman With a Pink hangs near orange brocaded robes and a triptyched Gabriel,
poernucharisitic,
lost things, gaping putrefactions, open asses wrapped in white Carthusian albs, last things. Hermetic physiognomy in holy golden light, when tipped, ghastly typologie against a background of green, a green deeper than an emerald fish scale. There's an enormity of blue where city-workers place the snow.

Soon, this all becomes a blur. Soon, this contemplation of a skull, this dreaming Aeneus, this crucifixion and patrons all in ruinous frames, in pavilions of splitting arches, this aching in my back, this craving for wine assails the hall. Round bottom wrapped, trapped, tight denim moves past.

Sounds--

an accordion in the corner and a geometrical line of Ibo voices, bright flesh tones and ridiculous unintention, color-nuanced gouache, a 33rd canto sung by Ugolino, conducted by Carpeaux, chorused gift to Calais Burghers. Reliquary of a monstranced eye, from ass to Perseus and Salome, a Roman General and a daughter of Japhthah, Ajax and Theseus, collaborations brought to bear on a sublime disclosure, a taglined contrapuntal discourse.

Outside the museum benches line an enormous blue flourish, peopled benches and an emanation, the natal, soldered patois of enamel and pot-metal. I open my mouth wide enough to eat, and cry. Textiled park drying in the sun, cold orange breeze waving overhead, blowing like a function of memory, places and friends swallowed in emblematic saffron, an elite, chequered range of clutter on a path, chiffon of a gray tribunal.

If not for bareness there'd be nothing there at all. Five platformed chairs on an otherwise barren stage, Hecuban superfluity, frailty's glorious infiltration, wine of tears, peremptory peace that makes a guest of light, the light that precedes a gray capitulation. Throngs of people in a curtained park, strident smilers, prattling chatterers, rapacious joggers, limpid photographers, unceremonious twins, numbers of French, teens out of school, cold asses on benches, hats on heads, dogs, kids behind trees, an occasional sled, the

curtains lend the park their manufactured

tenor, despite all this celebratory noise.

Soon, crocuses.

Saturday, February 19, 2005

Lemon Rinpoche

Ash and Bone
I have not grieved on a page like this one,
never so eager a page, bare page of
days filled with red caps of sorrow cracked
against her pulp, page of ash and bone, a
magdelene page that expiates the issue of a
wound, sober page of a wiser knowing,
ground-page and root, a flow and purgative
remedy of tiny hours, a scrabbled page of
voices, body scored by storm-swept sand,
empty scabbard, full sword that
absorbs its mark in steel, this
lion page braving all the passing world.

Without any tears

Olds Mobile

I shredded an entire book of Sharon Olds poems, cut them out
and strung them from the ceiling with strands of yarn and tape.

Every time the wind sweeps through they flutter
weightlessly, not at all like matter.

Their chimes shimmer like lights on ears, oxygenate the house like the wave of a hand. These are poems that move out of lived-in spaces. Their bodies fly up in the essential aloneness of poems that connect, fleshy poems stayed by flimsy threads, the muscularity of poems that open, intrinsically, to a comedy of days and the incommunicable history of a life sung in jagged Mahlerian liber, this airy, tangled bivouac, tossed leaves encamped beneath the

momentary
elusive
harmonic
bridge of a line drawn, of bodies inside bodies, until they grow so heavy with the other that they threaten to pull the ceiling down.

Sunday, February 13, 2005

Let's hope it's a good one

Full Impact
He emerges from the tall reeds to straddle the tracks that split the town, east
from west, where the sounds of an approaching freight train fill the surrounding hills--
noises like a steel mill falling from the sky.
A bottle grasped in one hand, with the other he cocks and aims for
the blinding white heart of the charge.
He lifts the bottle to his lips. It is like trying to bear the terrible weight of history skyward. He manages to get off several rounds. A whistle sounds out of the catapulting light, the undetectable bang of white, the shattered bluster of air, blood and bone born like a hair in wind.

Saturday, February 12, 2005

Have a happy New Year

Brattleboro

Shadows of a curtain on a facing wall,
The tingling of a cut nerve,
A man without a bed buys a table frequented by ghosts,
A woman and a child cross the lot across the street each day at nine,
Medicine on a nightstand,
crumbs,
a pen,
Pregnant women read menus in a restaurant,
A forest hag exchanges redemption for a small white dog to whom she constantly tells lies, a dog that discerns the passing hour by the lengthening shadows of a windblown curtain on a wall.

And so this is Christmas

Late Dispatch

They say a writer must write everyday. They say the world is a brutal place. He puts faith in each proposition, each palpable fear. When he puts one and one together it becomes a daily practice full of redemption. Centered beauty arrests him, once,
draws him, again,
soothingly,
out of the complacent and the dull.