Back in the you us us are

Flight

I am punching holes in the walls of my life when you
enter inside lightly you lighting
my arms making them light. Tiptoeing. Seal
your mouth. Mine.
Eyes closed
You. I.
Together.
Rising.
Soaring.
Comes biting
Mid-March wind.

. . . scream of the butterfly . . .

Dumb Anding For My Poem Spun

So I'm trying

to get

this

thing

p
o
e

t
r
ying to repeat that
unfurling, hear
that unfurling
metaphear

old song
ancient listening
sound of the start of everything and
the first anding
and all I have to date are dull litanies,
no quick beam of a storied moon, just
the ludicrous lowery of my own tongue-
locked embodiement d-
yang-
. l-
. . i-
. . . n-

. . . . g-
ua w-here soul is

s
ou
n
d

some

thing

(
w
ha
t
?)

else

not

UN-
like a memory,
a past-his-bedtime-summer-boy,
peering out a flimsy wood-and-screen door, frame of a
musty green bungalow, nighted boy, dumbstruck, firstly
registering the rise and beat and rumbling trill, crickets calling,
lulling, scritching their lives away in impenetrable dark.

Sometimes a fantasy . . . .

Somnambulant Blue: Selkie Song

She walked past and was gone.
We have lived quietly together ever since--
in the lingering anonymities of imperfect timings,
the awkward semblances of her glimpsed face,
remnant of a voice she shook off her tongue like rain.

I wear it like a ring in my ear.
I drizzle the butter of it up and down my thighs.
It is what my body hears.

Something past surrender honeycombs her eyes--
soft light on topaz daffodils. She watches beyond
the quiet clarities of a tired poverty. It feels like
a stomach full of nothing to her.

So she draws the sea, like a hood, over her head, covering the
porcelain solitude of her face with the blue ink of sadness she
holds in her hands. There is a song, a loving rondo, that spirals
between her limned niche in the stars and her earth-manacles.

I sing it at night
while she sleeps in the curled nettle
of her magnificent, criss-crossed limbs.

Beautiful Boy

Freud and Darwin Talk With
Sharon Olds About Birth

Her legs had never been spread further,
It remains a fact--I split her farther than she'd ever been opened before.
I filled her completely and made her scream
and scream
and that may be why, at first,
she could not love me
the way I thought she should,
the way I thought the world should.

I believe she loved me even if not always or not

all at once.

I cracked her legs open, emerged
from between them, head first, so that she looked as though
she was being pitted. I was like a woodcutter, splitting
the heavy logs of her thighs for winter fuel.

I was a bean, polished and creamy with her;
I wanted to dance in the wine of her,
smear it around with the bottoms of my feet,
slather my round belly in its robust color, until her warm rust-
red oils went from hot to chill. I had stuffed her, and made a
fat sucking- sound when pulled out. I would have preferred
to remain in her warm wet folds.

Look, they said, and rubbed my body, my arms and thighs and
penis,
Isn't he wonderful?

A couple leaped from the South Tower, hand in hand. They reached for each other and their hands met and they jumped. So many people saw this as a scar burned onto our brains. But a man reached for a woman's hand and she reached for his hand, and they jumped out the window holding hands. I try to whisper prayers for the sudden dead and the harrowed families of the dead and the screaming souls of the murderers, but I keep coming back to his hand in her hand, nestled in each other with such extraordinary, ordinary, naked love. It is the most powerful prayer I can imagine, the most eloquent, the most graceful. It is everything that we are capable of against horror and loss and tragedy. It is what makes me believe that we are not fools to believe in God, to believe that human beings have greatness and holiness within them like seeds that open only under great fire, to believe that who we are persists past what we were, to believe against evil evidenced hourly that love is why we are here.

--Brian Doyle
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/faith/questions/epilogue.html

Great Gig in the Sky

Cold Pastoral Passing


Bright morning star blown bright on blue,
upended egg in vernal sky,
cool light, first star that I see tonight, fair

augerer of old--portentous,
beauteous morn, borne along the grey
berth of river down below, the clear night

fading, passing. And I walk on
through that momentous start of day
toward the allotted hour of industry.

Ticking tiers of morning promise
still star-romantic in my mind
as I unlatch the office door wishing

on that last fiery light I'd spied.
The day's bustle of arrival
distracts me but a little. I watch through

a window to the world outside,
great river of the cliffs, and blue

sky
. . . cleaved
. . . . . . . . by some
. . . . . . . . . . . sudden
cataclysm,

Nature sheared and thrust aside, keels
to mortal jet-streams of collapse,
portal to the wind, fiery fuselage

unleashed in one great upsurging ball,
ungirdling flash of upswirled black
and rising storm, incubating suns

sear the flesh, hot drizzle, smoke whorls
and chokes my eyes so I am blind
and only feel a hand reach out to mine.

Whatever madness comandeered
the wind, another life survived
this cold pastoral passing, fingers locked

in mine, small hope abreast in ruin,
so now we move, in tandem crawl,
from planes of unforseen apocalypse

to what feels like the cool expanse
of space where once there was a wall--
a ledge now fringed with wire and bent barbed iron

at which we take a stand until
our joined bodies apprehend
each churning universal law at play,

the governances of the spheres
that build behind and open out
before so that we need one knowing look,

no more, to write our destinies,
and then we thrust, still bound, to fly
and not to flee, our one last volition

where below the once idyllic
river now runs slick and people
swarm like windblown poppies, like blackbirds

taking wing, rolling in a turn,
they spin and dock as not to burn
while we fall, hand in hand, we two silk-worms,

friends fused, linked thinly by a strand,
hurled about like autumn leaves, gone
like Icarus, unnoticed, from the world.

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.

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.