Friday, November 04, 2011

Those sweet talking nights . . .


7th Floor, Berkeley, Asbury Park, November 4

I return from the hotel lobby
with hot coffee. The
oceanfront window is open
and I send love to the sea that is
constantly salt-scrubbing everything it touches.
It washes itself as it washes the earth and its
creatures. The bed is rumpled, and my lover is
off to begin her day. Her body haunts the white
sheets of memory and touch. Everyone needs to
be touched. In a just world every bed would be
rumpled and every morning, this one morning,
hot coffee, goodness everywhere.

Wednesday, November 02, 2011

Time it was and what a time it was . . .



Day of The Dead, 2011

Maybe the reason we call it fall,
is owing to the fact that in the
autumn trees dissemble,
the sun, the birds, withdraw,
make their homes in more
distant quadrants. Everything
falls away.

I have always been afraid to think that
life has more to do with “visitation” than it
does with “residence.”

So in this day, this autumn day, I collect all my
bruised goodbyes, and in that colored round
I forage.

I find much leaving,
a space where fall seems all,
that, and grace, and gratitude.

Wednesday, May 25, 2011

You, and [then . . .] I

At Rest, At Last

You invite me to re-enter my body after a near-
life-long absence. You: visceral spirit whose arms
are strong, whose bones clink together when you
speak of God, you whose flesh glows red whenever
you recall the great and ancient Ones residing
everywhere in everything,
tiny particle-gods
making up the air and the dirt
whose life the sprung crocuses, purple and yellow, fling out
toward the sun in exchange for the fire it returns,
blazingly, into the vast and expanding walls of
its otherwise dark and hollow frame. And I,
aflame with the firey particles of God,
you and I, aglow, remain,
as if made entire in a kiln.

So I—my dear muse—and my body (stranger for so long)
elicit the enfleshed songs of love, songs rejoining and
mixing with the spheres, rejoicing in our bodies, your
thighs, your own tender and vast universe between
the nested places you call me to, home, free to rock in
ecstatic forms of prayer that culminate in relishes of
silence, like a scream, a scream, sounds like your name,
dripping from my lips, earthbound, discovering air to all
celestial fire, breathing, chanting our eternal fleshy song
—we, taking and receiving, uncharred, burning.

Sunday, March 20, 2011

Calling me back home

Lazarus, Me

You’re calling back into being, me,
after so many little deaths, huge caverns of little graves;
you’re forcing goodbyes that have festered in their incompletenesses
for far, far too long;
calling me forward you say, “receive my love,”
you, calling me to your embrace, calling me out of the night thick with lonelinesses;
and I am reminded
to return the lightness that you bring,
the heart you bear to me,
thank you.
slipping between bright sheets, me;
sliding in from the other side, you;
us returning now, wondering where we’ve been before,
wondering if there ever was a when or there, invisible and disappearing years in which we were not always
present and together.

Thursday, February 24, 2011

There's so much you have to go through . . .

Dear Father

I fell asleep while reading Keats. I woke not long ago, thinking of my mother and then my father, and while still in half-dream and talking, repeating the line several times, I addressed him in this half-dream world of half-selves, “I am so sorry not to have been writing you all these many years and months, my own dear father." Next I began to write. "But I was so angry when you left—helplessly abandoned—a hopeless fledgling not able to bear himself up with his own wings. What you did was not fair—life has been no fairer—all these many years, as I say. And still, a part of me understands and forgives you. I talk about you with people as if my memories are fond and as if I loved you. It is as if that fledgling bird-boy is both alive and dead—a thousand fantastic lifetimes in an unrecoverable past, an unfinished work beyond any hope of completion. And so the chasms that open up inside of me are vast, unnavigable—disparities between selves that have been introduced to one another only because they all exist within the same scarred and broken frame—else they’d be strangers living on different continents, different parts of the world entirely. They share frivolity and sadness, and the bird-boy within—the one with whom it all began—thinks he may have missed out on much you might have offered. There is no way for him to know now, of course. Part of him was relieved that you were not to return, and another part of him—well, it was not another part of him after all. By the time I found you, an older boy with arms like a strong man, with the shoulders of an athlete, with the scrabbled stomach of a laborer, had risen up alongside the tender fledgling, and it was that elder me who was not very pleased—awkward, burdened and put upon to have found you once again. These two, the bird-boy and the mannish boy of great physical prowess, (but hollow, without a knowable inner-life)—one born malformed, the other robbed blind, never knew how to say anything to you at all. It was the same for the older fellow who came to live inside of me a little fa(r)ther down the road, that poorly married and then divorced fat man who sat on the side of the bed when you were in the hospital dying, age 62. Sometimes I think the tumor at the base of your brain kept you from all those fragments of a me. And here I am now, one or two lifetimes even further along, another partitioned self or two added to the mix—the me now only nine years younger than when you died and talking with you here, now, fumbling, uncertain that there is--that there ever was--anything at all to say. Year after year it grows increasingly burdensome to be reaching constantly inside for a self only to come up empty all the time. It is like never being fully born, only half-alive, and always ill-equipped at best for most everything there is to do in a day or a lifetime. The only reason that I exist at all is because a dear friend who knows all of this has told me that she’s been talking with you when she prays, has suggested to me that I might once again take up the faith of our fathers—funny phrase—for I have taken up that exact faith, the faithless, undependable, and overly-critical man who meant so much and gave so little. (I don’t know if that’s fair, but let’s hash it out.) I had a “great expectation” too, once, that you would have long ago helped me learn to walk. But today I limp, mostly alone now, mostly alone for all these years, except for this new friend I mentioned. I do not want to tell you her name. She has, like God, many different names, but they are not like the names of our fathers. They exude instead a strong and womanly strain—I simply call her 'healer'—at least that’s what I’ll leave you with for now. Besides, I believe she’s already told you her name inside the temple of her God, before the tabernacle where she has prayed for your release, and mine. Or maybe I will call her 'loving woman,' even as I come to you and write to you now, these many years later, my own 'dear father.'"

Friday, February 18, 2011

I lived inside till I almost died

She was a Believer and Now


i loved when I did not know i loved

because, unaccustomed, i was loved . . .

a cocoon of warm air curled around us suddenly, on a winter night, swirling with the ocean sounds; there, on the boardwalk, this amazing woman laid her hands on my back and hip. we chose to believe the warm breeze that developed did so out of loving touches honored by the god of heavens and of oceans, and although i did not really believe those things, she did. She was a believer but i was earthbound, heavy, joints giving out. She sent her love into them. And though they were not healed that very night, i loved when i did not know i loved

because, unaccountably, i was loved . . .

she, loving healer. and i foundered for being loved by her, pierced and drowning,

because, undyingly, i was loved . . .

unfathomably, i was loved.

Sunday, January 09, 2011

Send in the clowns

A Little January Music


To be unshaped by the crooked world
is to be misshapen;
To be untwisted is a
curse not easily broken.
"Woundless" is a freakish silver rail that stretches
for miles in burgeoning green-beginnings that remain
their own ends.

Broken
is the order of the day,
outside of which, what have i to say,
or you, what you?

Seasons come, and come, and come.
What is seen or heard?
That snow falls in winter, and nights are long.
That summer months are fleeting.

Between these, all allusion and metaphor,
undoing and undone.

The only thing for me
is me,
or you,
what you?

With all these twisted years and
breaking selves is myhistory comprised,
expendable, glass-tinkling lives,
except for one who bids me breathe but one more breath,
the hope of one more breath that you implore,
the hope of you and not much more
desired, despite the seasons, despite such misshapen
expectation, your hand in mine, perfect,
inside a winter railway station.