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.

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.

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.

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!)

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.