EMPIRE WILDERNESS

Orpheus

Bronze wires choiring,
Orpheus
lifts his fire-lyre

spilling and splitting the air with fire,
dark Orpheus�
bronze-choiring wires.

His ill lips sized to song, higher
and higher with mourning force
he lifts his fire-lyre

as aureate rocks crack, expiring
like colors rupture flower-tress
or bronze choiring wires.

As the firm-fleece of the hill
     fractures from its muddy sods and mires
as chill-silted as agonizing oils wrung
              from the plangent eyes of Orpheus
        who sifts his wound-bright lilt
     of lamentation, lift-
ing his fire-lyre.

No song stuns back the dead from their stunted grave
     no matter inspired, uninspired.
Tired words work the flat absent world, so would the world
     be re-ordered and regress as Orpheus could not but must yet desire
             and desire
as bronze-fired wires choir
as he lifts his lyre.
________________________________

Pierrot in Despair

after James Ensor

I.

Among grotesque tints of painted features
Hung amongst swollen looming features
I am pierrot, middleman of masks
Centered slightly like a bright balloon

My blue clown shawl cuffing my frame
A sheath of tears stuffed with stiff enamel
Streaming sunlit waves with no beneath
Cliffs of foam and heat nothing underneath

My hair stroked and scribbled to a curl
Is a mute and tragic rag of fiery worms encurled
Teemingly inscribing one another
Like bubbles fastened to the fissures of a reef

While ingratiating colors swirl and circle
In deteriorating pageants blue and pink
While red and purple twist deliciously
Like demons and preferably no soul exists

While comfortably surface buries surface
From lizard eye to girthy birdsack throat
And costumes flounce in spraying gold
As if light were bouncing golden bodies

Where bodies lack and perennial smiles
Limply play a crook and stilly play
While comically and still and my
I am pierrot middleman of masks

Off centered slightly like a bright balloon
Among inhuman laughing fellow creatures
Ape and peacock, gesticulating ostrick
Otter and baboon between esurient giraffe

II.

And yet the sundry threat of oriental flowers
Lost upon a black impolishable head of hair
Tilts along the spleenful spineless choristers
Miserable as air, confused as clumps of sugar

Hello Harlequin many crayoned poses
Your many lips asway malignant roses
And aren�t those shoulderless onlookers
Cold Harlequin? less than cold onlookers

O stanched, luminous and heckling
Motionless mouths are gaping as
Laughs and breaths are struck like
Gyring snakeskins contending for the fuck

Petty Punchinello what�s with such winces
Weak-muscled winces rinsing off the rims
Of mangled eyes and mangled orifices
Celebrate poor fellow here�s some cake some sex

Threading through morassive magnet colors
Threaded blue and white and pink and red
These impish colors simply preening colors
Of those around me sounding brassy stares

Here�s a comet like your eyes chewing
The blank flailing of your pupils spewing
A pastry tail of space and uncontested viewing
Here�s Columbine Margot Him or Her Mr So and So

A bell-capped sage with hands
Around a woman�s hidden breasts
And milk-winds blowing briefly
The misgrafted sallow yellow air

Sexless divers dancing through dissolving
Arching bentback waves and through the arching
Bent-back waves, the dancers hop and skirt
The foamless waves and where are you Pierrot?

III.

We the lunar ballerinas lugging forehead lanterns
We the dreamy paralytics asphyxiating noon
As we are too dramatic stern and ravenous
As we drowse in dozes furnished for a second�s room

But you were unencumbered a petal�s pleasant scent
A bit a bit of stone but unharmed as yet
Heading harsh through fixtured arms of wind
Yet blessed with pertinence restraint a plume

We blue sonambulists juggling dumb desires
Legless as fog or pencil scraping dully traipsing
But you were inchoate and holy tumbling smokily
A bit of cavity a bit of child�s spool a bit of moon

And unwaveringly undulating soft eyes umberly
Breezes surged you were onward backward urged
And there should be some way there is no which way
In our stepping tipping tracking tracing

To recover you that fragrant fragment exhaling
And we or I with stained thirsting am not exhalted
The memories perambulate percussive eyeing
But are blotted maligned by indifferent stoppings

And there�s this throbbing locomotive lusting
Anterior to speaking superior and weakly streaking
Like smashed rinds rinsed on winded stems dwindling
Down and stooped in stupor torn now stupid trembling tender

O I cannot claim I remember slightly I remember
Slight instances and nuances like whisped clouds coughing
Winnowing in azure waftings but gentle a fuzz of dandelion dander
What proud pretty eyes like weedy grammars sprouting

I am a bit unremembered not wake ayet but meshed
Within the thorn and thicket of my thwarted willing
Like the cricket clinging to the softhill bushes
By the freshet river with its fawning feeling thrushes

O you with spry arrival you the warm concealing
Not bruised nor ruined nor ruminating ruing
A hand a calyx clasped and after a period of taxing
Pollinating a period of indefinite decisions relaxing

We adorable menaces we without evening circus entrances
We whimsily laboring wounded fumbling
I was pale and clownish and you were noonray summer
I was cold a bit and we were gentle airs betrayed somewhere

IV.

Is this perhaps what you seem or see
Into my wealthy gaze the arc the stolid arch
Drift and gleaning naught beneath
A dangling cursive brow

And there�s a wind-mill slanting slumped
Three o�clock time burning its burly
Anthracite the plush sail blades these my
Sky anchors my crook crosses where

Chalk clouds break the high navies where
Yoke and gas toss their passing captioned
Checkered sashes a bow-tie breathing torn
Or orange banded on the head worn

Enveloping orange on the forehead�s horn
I am pierrot undistinguished teeth like a grin
Expands like dusty lungs of an old accordion
I am pierrot Mr So & So

Gleeful glad and wasteful
A separated arm wound around
Its imagined shiny tin-imagined waist
Wasting with tinker loves resounding

How indistinguished my present face
Curling brine on snarling hinds
Irritated tits the it of our placement
How it sounds

How there was a where or wonder
Of some sordid usual sort moon lover
But here without the stomach guts
Or heart to grunt against grapple

There can be no disgrace but buts
To ameroliate pontificate I held
A pool of colors garden garland
Enchanted and I chanted love love

I dinted at the fleck russet stem
A skin shrapnel of a human an apple
Caves and contours our teeth imprint
Where we read the red of passion

Yet for the play of acting little action
Thinking is a lid we open for its eyes
Wait for waiting do or doing did
Consumation in daylight conjugating

Declining when lavish ciderpresses
Or ancient barrels come to barter
Suckled puckering but I never handled
Any barrel I�ve bore no leaflet�s lustre

I have bottomed through no bundles
Nor quote no core�s consumption
What impressed me I finessed surely
I quarreled with the laurel ate alone early

Now the dark season�s harvested off
Augers orange red and cider amber
Have slipped the wayside so soonly
What I resume does not resume me

Here�s the world of wedless wedful
Butchers bakers bunchmen hungry
Luck is the thing that hurts hinders
A joy until there�s humbled cinders

And so there�s not much sowing
Woe without the helping women
Upfront in blue and white
None suspects the chickadee in winter

With woot-woo woot-woo
A lonely swing its swinging
But always in its scrape bringing
The melancholic mating singing

No more singing for a bit now
Leave the onlookers to their onlooking
Let the colors sift to their unleaving
Clouds stroll pour perfume and roll

While I am pierrot
No single harm middleman of masks
A bright bright bright
Balloon

___________________________________________________________________________________

Caresses

after F. Knoffph

I.

Incessantly ours Oedipus
With cipher stare
And lips of hushed angelicus,
The valley salutes you,
Valley of rich mauves
Which dissolves drenching tints
Of sallow sky and bolder-rust
Drying sop from pockets
Of cracked ashen dirt and dust�
Salutes you, Oedipus,
While you seclude yourself from speech
Like an undecipherable script�
Here, where few sonorous weeds spar
The voluptuous deserted earth;
Where pillars pair as if a face urged up
And doubled by its surface�
Where you wear your royal air,
Combustible mirage
Like a bocage of cypress about a heady body
(Symbol of that second matrimony.)

Elusive as you are, King,
Modest in sackcloth gown, mirthed
With imperial slanting limb, sceptered hand
With proud blue orb and perked azuring wings
You stand your stance assuredly.

II.

Illustriated, her furred flank
Glares, hungry of form.
Ensnaring iridescently, splotched
As if a sea with limbo eyes�
Her myriad secrets she collects
That swill into blurring circles
That disc and dot her maculate akimbo tail
As it swells like a grin, erect
Into the air by each frail hair, sects
Of beige and brown, amber, black and pearl.

And arresting as her inviolate caress is,
The lenient iodines drowsing at her mouth,
Trembling eyelids of pulsant sleepfulness
Against the magnificent motion of stagnance
Which your reproaching shoulder upholds�
She cannot claim nor keep you, Oedipus.
Desire holds no trophy but itself.
Your alabastor torso, pale and clear,
Leans only momentary as her souvenir.
She cannot lift her staunched haunches
Couched in leaps and coiling hoits,
Nor this agile paw to your cool waist
May she fully wrap around you, tilting
Richly as you are, landscape loitering.
For all of you is keen and calm
With self-asserting awe, impervious
To her glossy embassy of muscled fur,
Her supple tyranny attempting touch.
Pure and lavish and she is
In twilight purs of pourous dreams,
Her pulling pulse is stronger.
But you, who are so awake
And have heard and saw
What no man has seen or saw
Have nothing but a womanly embrace
To fear, not a leopard nor a woman's claw.

O do not turn your cryptic jaw yet, King,
As your eyes or hers search an other
She will entice and lull
Among the somnambulist landscape
Where siroccos stir
The dizzy hollows scraped of blood�
As Oedipus sieves sideways, still without word,
Whose eyes rest as if annulled.

___________________________________________________________________________________

Sonnet

� � � �Fondfulness like cool frondage ponds spill up.
� � � �Sunlight shafting vegetable-fruit surplus
� � � �of berry-lace and fiq-quilts nectars cusp.
� � � �This was Apollo for Hyacinthus.
� � � �And after arrow struck�after song trembled
� � � �off lyres as ululant as lipped flames�
� � � �the god heard hollow hurt dismember-bleed
� � � �his memory, now lost, aimlessly maimed.
� � � �Apollo, (larch with interminable dark...
� � � �unfelt soul disappointed of center)
� � � �your conscious point, bereft of shadow arc,
� � � �wound, warning heat here no longer enters�
� � � �staggers, knowing you cannot understand:
� � � �querulous fletchings flown out of these hands.
___________________________________________________________________________________

His Hands

� � � �And here is where I dwell.
� � � �Appellate palms of cool applause.
� � � �A glaze of gauze
� � � �And tender acrobatic words,
� � � �These and theirs: ruddy pearls.

� � � �Here is where I dwell.
� � � �Wound phosphorous hands that district
� � � �Fevers and open quiet hieroglyphics,
� � � �Italic grazings which we drift through�
� � � �Or erotic.

� � � �These hands that cannot hold me.
� � � �Strewn immaculate with blur-flaw.
� � � �Brushed with ruse and rift
� � � �With gloss that does not lack
� � � �Its occluded call.

� � � �These hands that cannot hold me
� � � �Which fill no fist but wistfulness.
� � � �Too tentative for syllable.
� � � �Blent no more than indifferent,
� � � �Curved with wrists of promised room.

� � � �Reach and rush... Ambivalent percussion...
� � � �They that neither write nor expel
� � � �Like sunflushed wildflower closing upwards.
� � � �These that do not hold me, cold memory.
� � � �Where I am held.
___________________________________________________________________________________

At a House in Iruk

Dear is the memory of Enkindu, beloved of our King Gilgamesh.
Gilgamesh groaned, he was growing tired and more tired
for such a once warrior. He slept most always now.

Memories of warm arms, and times of almost vegetable embrace
like bramble or private ivy lacings and then all those past unbroken hours
were still tumbling in his mind the way thick-moss uncovers
and covers-up the umber of the trunks, places of rocks. Stones.

Enkindu's kind kinship and enkindling face,
bright as the manner of green cockles
spilling, looped in, tossed over and across,
inward curling outwards � he couldn't quite
put the image fully in or out of his head.

Twilight's half-dim was his dreamland now,
banded together with grimmer images where stout barks
and shadows cast thin leafy arms about.
Yet the echoes were harmless as they were dead.

Yawning, Gilgamesh imagined himself thrashed
like the splintered oak his friend and he broke
and blasted open.
He felt still as the brilliant frill of fractures
dried in the sapless leg-branches and twisted fringes of
old woodbeam.
Roots uprooted, he seemed
heavy with irrelevance, years-on-years menaced.

A lovely glimmer of rough age remained in him
like the makings of a nest abandoned in a tree.

Polished with sere-trellis shade, dilapidated and unmade, resin
and pollen transfiguring the frail leaf-strings like granulated fibers
of emptied mealsack grain, surprised by elements, too many seasons,
frayed with light, the severe and gentle all the same.

Gilgamesh, stripped into an ink untimely,
removed from consequence, longed and called for
what he finally believed was only a name.

________________________________________________________________ ___________________

The Relay Station

after John Ashbery

We sleep in private homes now, forgetting
the laundry or whomever's name. Snow
comes and blankets,
nothing about the outdoors
being lonely except that it's the outdoors.

The same doors are opened. Piles
of ghosted marginalia end up on the end,
where they belong.
A cord or two's tangled. Songs
drift. Soon, or even sooner than that,
what's tucked inside isn't dark

in the sense of darkness, but resting
like the-uncle-we-loved's hat.
Peter and Abby sweep the bin in.
Time goes like a stone.
Semi-precious, at that.

Wide tracks of things we've thought about
a frieze cooled off, waiting for us to
track them down again one day.
Until a key is minted, loaned.
I or someone else hums something.
Tissues are collected. Dust settles.
Our trust is renewed and renovated,
like faucets, because fate is set that way
and today � never happening �
one day is an imposter
that will not be looked on as anything
but what fell between a casuality of sorts.
Woods or wares, as it were.

News comes. Furniture
plays furniture. If what we exchange
rumbles slightly in too much quiet
then it meant this for you. Afternoon
grievances or friends to be arranged.
Tea steam purring from the kettle almost.

________________________________________________________________ ___________________

Requiem: Prologue

in memoriam Christopher J. Catanese

Come, laurelled mourners of the lovely dead
and prior spirits poured immortally
to memory immemorial, mother
my mouth, richly suspirate my loss,
inaugurate with auguries my song.
Lend my elegy to lethargy
nor argue me from doubt devouring, fate

as I am faithless with� yet grant what gifts
will lift my requiem, reliquary
wreath of grieving. Require me no God
yet consecrate some flame�s dark genesis �
I, who hunger here by gorged shadow glades
and know a full ingratitude, having
no greeting of eternal gates to hope

for him, whom I loved most, am most without
to love, divested of imperfectively,
unaccustomed to a tomb�s terms. Yet let
me sing graciously perennial pure words
and be fed with knowledge unknowable.
Breathe, invest and transmute each ill syllable
bright with indestructibility, lovely as he was.

________________________________________________________________ ___________________

Poem for W.B. Yeats

Spilling open as bounded petals
Mature their blooms through air,
I saw a wraith alloyed as metal
Cohere into a corpse, blood stare
Dimpled like shadows of candle flame
Over a damp muskwood�s dim frame:
William Butler Yeats� face
Bespeaking iniquity and ire, and disgrace.

While he spoke nothing, I believe
I read within his eyes a passage
Inscribed with weariness, fever,
Beset by blank, heavy with age.
As if a torn-mortality carried him
Out of his grave with ghosted limbs.
Within his wrinkled face-lines
I read desire, absence, time�s stink. Time

Appointed in the crushed incense
Of his pupils. Periods of heart-mess.
All properties of images and sense
Dashed. His infinite unbelovedness.
Yet a plangent spew of starlight glistened
Off sore joints and bruised skin. I listened.
What tenable talk could the master share?
And shirking, his rough nerves grating air,

(The air a chill shot hung shrill with mist),
Brilliant words replaced his acrid lips
Until luniferous swans became his fists
And space was music as wine is sipped.
I saw, or read, a goldbird glut with chords
Beneath a woman�s window where fog poured.
I saw hours of love�s pliant pleading
Transformed silently: plaintive reeds singing.

And then the hollow berating of boots
Beating over beaten Dublin�s death-letting.
The bristling of a snaketail or a noose
By sleeping geese like pearl lettering
On a square�s stone-bench. And soon, dusky hills
Crucified in thunder, crimson mud, hilts
Of steel-resilient swords aglint with moonlight�
Yeats, ghostly as meter, returned darkbright.

More human now, his slumped white hair sighing
Down a crooked forehead, he mumbles, bows.
For all the affliction, rage and fury of his being
Disquiet flickers (like a page turns or a cow
chews the earth) softly over him, he seeks cover
Now as once he sought a lover. Love is over.
Retiring finally, again, into himself or his poems,
He seems how fire calls the dark, desiring home.

________________________________________________________________ ___________________

The Rhododendron

The rhododendron owes an ode this year
from last summer�s sere, deciduous blooms.
White-tapering-softs off, broke off and blear,
crust with rugulose and rust. Light was doom.
And the trusses, like sun-wrung welted wax,
collapsed under flat, green-flapped bush stubs, grasping
the dark soil so some turmoil could ask:
What here is more than shrub? When time�s ellapsed
do pretty bracts and campanulate leaves
act as no more than once bright companions
to a mind that loves life, although life leaves?
And yet beyond any animate reunions
of the dead, nothing can retract the grief,
nor fond white rondures that rang in the leaf.

___________________________________________________________________________________

Arrows

Into the puff and drama of my face
Susurrus bolders have chiseled precincts.
And noonshadow's tedium, lonelier than bells
Ringing the cotton blades of my back.

___________________________________________________________________________________

Saint Christopher

"Not to desire what we love should be immortal."
-Simone Weil

Striated in folds, his red gown flows
Like a firemuscle dipped to a flamelip,
While featherlegged, lame and limp his toes
Writhe wearily wave-enrhythmed steps, chipped

Foot he crosses with, among gold minnows
Mocking him in nimble dance, jubilant.
Anguished, his brown eyes close in lead repose.
And all is gold, barren and opulent.

O, cursed Saint, your finger-threshing staff
Gnashes your gnarled knuckles the heat will taint
As skylinen soiled sags, the infant laughs
And winds sift pitchless. But travel on, Saint,

Such eyes narrow like a craving chorus
Of rocks, wound-worn and darkly susurrus.

___________________________________________________________________________________

Cathexis

Through narrow pane unheard winds stretched,
A heave woods heaped to the horizon's slough.
And yet, whose voice? did I hear
Within those banked cedar ridges of tropes
And sacristies where emerald grizzled bark.

Elm, oak. And percussive cicadas croaking
Offed processions without the year's snow-passage
Cleared; leaving me dark to that champagne cleft of sky.
And brazen stars excreting their catastrophes,
Too-soon emerged for dusk
To intone . . .

Reticent, I watched the windowing blonde.
The sunset's brass that eagerly organed
Across spread ceilings . . . had since repealed from chant:
With metaphor unwilling, I could not spare
The worm its wriggling shuffle with the moss.

And then as that sliver of boreal sank
Between those rigid-leaf groves icely spruced,�
Beneath the damp fangs of branches, hill fogs,
My eyes finally embodied a glint (their own)
Seed of honey, milk root, and all bright things . . . There,

Down from the cedars, a rippling dim
Sluiced through glass heavier than night, than wind.

___________________________________________________________________________________

Resignations

Inchoate lily fronds, and tawny gloss
Splaying across a dim pond
While dilatorily he surveys himself,
Azurely lost
In thought upon the water's rim.

Torpor-limbed, his face is half
A mask of shadoweeds that stem
And drape the cornered air. Still tendrils
Of light bask
Through foliaged emerald fins.
Echoes arouse a slim rush
Opaque of sound.

Yet what may we ask of him, this Narcissus?
Whose potted alabaster eyes
Confabulate shade through amber �
Whose frail heft of self sifts
In fissures of supple tented waves,
Their dark ventriloquy adrift...

I am eyes and stare alone, his
Yawning image seems to say.
And waterwed, he, as with the surface,
Preens and stays.

Yet admit no matte of ebbing moonlight.
No lush garland of earth fragrant from stars.
His vision, two ribbons of froth, floats
Splendid in sloth, ever unwinding
Over clay moraines and tin fjords that crumble
Like a lazy knee around him.

In this hour, slick of mud, where suns
Are swallowed
Like a mustard seed, willows flay, where winds
Copulate spore and dander, he sees
Only communions of colors sexed
With wafting waterscents that are nothing else
But himself.

No pure possession may be dredged.
No blur or sulphur iris but his own.
This ground is sparse, engorged
On crags and parched, blank
As if the hollowed rondure of
An eye.
___________________________________________________________________________________

On the Face of Christopher Marlowe, 1585

Dank and of phosphorous hue
from your strict Cambridge frame,
each harsh cheek a white plum
cinched in a pink's slight pinch,
your complexion, blotched powder�
what deft obsequy will you hear?

Your convoluted guise: impassioned,
numb; a stature refusing flinch
where ruddied oils milked your features
to a fine rose-silk, a tapestry
of Orient spice, the precious reds
and precious whites, whitest scents�

immediate, dismissible, alluring.
Your busheled brown hair strands
slouched flamboyantly, a dust,
a tanner's stain-stitched satchel.
Your strident eyebrows arched
as if a nebulous star's froth

tossed into a striding pony arc
coiled taut, tensile whiplashed bark.
Your sandfaded mustache halved
like a willow drenched half-under
the bright red bay of your lips
banked by an effeminate beard�

but these, not the colors I claim.
Rather, the eyelid-silting brown
seething its fixed brown stare,
a hard verb's glare, incensing grip,
a woodsmoke weaved tight to circle,
impenetrably hurt, diaphanous and bare.

In crawlspaces jut from the nose's
slope and the eye's wide slanting V,
the scratched flesh stanchions a tangle,
incredulous white shadows angling
underneath a diminutive, possessing blue
that edges, wrestles the left eye open.

This stark blue that tears the watcher's
from the background's dim, the collar's
flower-flap, the loose collar which wraps
around the narrowing, half-buoyant neck
but�in these hidden blue latitudes,
eschewed from tame concentric pupils,

a swift, chilled flame recedes where
a reservoir and lake's imagined, percussive
air warring while your gaze easily gazes,
spilling across a vast brow-cornered inch
to the eyes�a fabric of onyx rocks
that cast a stinging jag-tooth glint

from the water-crust surface. Concealing
nothing. Revealing nothing. Heaving
in thin heavy veils a petalled light
that weighs these waves to pyramids:
where no person lies, only a presence
split, a wretched semblance of water

rocks rendered with the rest of you,
come from some unknown artist's brush,
a dry, persistent routine gleaming
little of your indifferent sex... You, drowning
proud in fate's shrug, doom encusping
your rich aristocratic oxygenless pose�

yourself your Muse�an incandescent stare�
a solitary, dead, time-orphaned stare.

___________________________________________________________________________________

Man Out of Sea

I built a man out of the sea today.
Clay waves, hurricane flotsam and jellies
Sopping into these palms� quiet caverns�
I held seaweed and basalted sponges,
Pellucid crustaceans, their brisk bones
Bound by my tiring hands, then sculpted him.
I borrowed undulating crepes that arch
The plunging sea�s wide diminished breast
And fettled light the sternum, moldering
Oysters off the ocean�s bottomless muck
Until the chest developed through to limbs.
Concatenating a spine from dozens
Of drying seawreck planks, the whole took shape
And so I hollowed sockets, bestowed gold
Searing from the sun�s enameled margins,
Horizons of no shore�this, for his eyes!
From lichen clouds I whittled complexion,
Soon my sea-creation refined, complete.
Slicing the salty dune-crust reeds, edging them
Forearm through finger, pungent coral caked,
I combed a gaze meanwhile from crystal sands;
Gathered lightning echoes, crabs� wires.
I stored diggers� feet and other string bits
Of the sea then tied these straws: a shawl of hair�
The day breaks off. A beak�s shadow scours
The surf. Mammoth gulls crookedly careen.
My sea-man stands stoic as the rich-silk sea,
Moonglow, ink of veins; no gaps remain.
What scuffed vox winds I�d caught are lost,
With uncompromising choice I refused
To give my man of sea a voice. He cannot
Move�yet think of all the chaos up from where
I sledged him! Now: mine, ordered,
Scavenged-together, kelp-enjointed,
Tangled with pier-net skins, barnacled rust.
And so I built a man out of the sea today.
How useless he is. Inhuman. Yes, beautiful.
___________________________________________________________________________________

Interrogation of Eyes

after Elizabeth Bishop

There are too many textures here; the liquid colors
tie too densely in fibrous threads,
and the overpopulation of glassy brown browns
seems a simulacrum of varied lake shapes and shades,
textures of wild cloth, private tongues.
�For if these rinks, these wordy froth divots
aren't enspooled yet with purpose,
in a longer glance, as attention pivots,
they likely will be.
But if the colors of brown keep spilling, commingling,
the hues look like opaque swathes of integrated moods,
melancholic and mute.

Think of the pupils: compact periods.
Will someone ask if the banded irises are casual oak?
Which striation delineates the age,
or is it too obvious to occupy minutes
in these windows without exterior?
What so urges, as long as light soaks
the mind, so one is eager to feel palpably
what one only sees?
The ocherous, blank coronas?
To gage matriculating praline tones
quiet as a river rhetoric,
reflecting here
among lazy spirals, refreshing nonetheless?
As eyes, creating their sensation,
create almost airs of their expression.

How regrettable not to indulge these
exact of lens, lash-exaggerated; which divulge
nothing but shy electricity
in swift, feint strokes.
�Nor notice how a person's underneath
while the body exudes
beneath treasured brown eyes
and miniscule lashes
that unuttered thing, interior, impersonal.
(In another century the eyes were garrisons
for metaphysical comparison.)
�Nor study each eye's ring of brown,
aloof isles waving white emphasizes,
pew-gleaming, afternoon-thin, thewed
with rope complexion, fissured by veins.
�And regardless their meaning's presence
these surge vitality with talismanic resonance,
delicate shavings plush as prairie materials,
chalked and seasonal; beige and angled
in 'whethers,' 'maybes' and 'either-ors'.
�Not to garnish pathetic scripts
blinking eyelids gild upon open eyes.
�Nor interrogate what others miss:
these so much like thrifty local rainbows
and vocal undertows, calm innuendoes:
and it may be the metaphors we capture
have captured us, revealing the imperfect:

How preoccupations are our truest pleasures,
physically impressing finer symmetries
than imagined realms of fair, imagined weather,
where fuzzed words ripple for themselves.

Sleek eyes, brown irises, loud lashes,
there's much owed beside description.
These eyes, stippled without stipulation, arrange languages�
whatever the sound, wherever the location?

___________________________________________________________________________________

The Seamstress

Two pins sprout from a thin thumb.
The slight flesh is teased, shred
at the cuticle's red base. How dumb
are her pale-green eyes, like the bed

they lie nested near a bleached wall;
she is fevered and gaunt. A sheet
covers her nape, breast and palm.
Over the crouched mattress, her feet

boneily jut�the warm color of calluses.
In a picture that hung, sometime ago,
a spinning wheel, draped in muslin,
spun as a dull hand obscurely sowed.

From this angle, the window frame
and the curtain rod, its hoops stripped,
resemble your bowl-shaped, tamed
physique. Dry and crusted as your lip,

the drinking flask is fogged from drafts
that shaft and frost the room's glass.
As you toss to your withered side, a laugh
or some echo of old times; of tea and bathes;

bread or soup; seems to strangle the air.
Down from the sill by the horses' hooves
a woman is hollering, her forehead bare,
oil-sooted and shineless like the star-starved roofs.

Madeline, you are limp as a rag.
Your skins twist, writhe in a cold sweat�
whether or not your breasts will sag,
age-riddled, or soon the sickness' fret

envelopes you and swells, Madeline,
you seem at last a sheaf of old poems,
Or a dusty novel's palimpsest: worn lines
Of words that are still now, too well known.

___________________________________________________________________________________

Portraiture From Rock

Out of this all comes, from the chasm and cranny
Of a boulder's sinew, leaves and floral shadows.
Marred anonymous ivy. Slag, pits and crags which collide
In a furniture of crater created by time's stone.
Gravel flecks and turgid sediments mashing
Their dirt threshings, calligraphic vines. Out of this
All comes, nature and chaos and inhuman language,
Weed-bespoken. And though the mind has seen its face
Not once, ever, in the spew and plangent vapor
Of boulders heaped hillside, encrust with grime,
Blind with organisms and the length of twilight,
One finds the crumbled, slump majesty of unalterable
Images: here where we imagine ourselves, stark
In the dark's sheath, naked but for tinctures almost of light.

___________________________________________________________________________________

Laocoon

While weed, shrub and rock
Stipple the hillsides
(Gnarled grass incipiently
Ablazed
By ruby winds) I mark my progeny's
Serpent hands.

And dawdling between chaffed rib coverts
Fangs dart their venom's white
Almost clasping
His forehead's sooty wrinkles, stitch
And grip with which I wrestle�
Though no squirm
Would unflex this agony.

Have you not read that bone scatology
Nor felt night's beetle garments
Bawdily descending... where buttocks
Are prostrate, laying bare
Ossific banners, where vision's poise
Tortoises and typhoons, congealing
The limbs' pink shell?

And so these rawhide hoops
Devour us, O precious Trojan�
Coming in clouds of copper
Among teethy sceneries.
Witness now this galloped intrusion
As your passion rends
Without conclusion.

Umbilically swelled from out of the sea
Each chain is pained with striation,
Disks completing bruised entrainments.
And yet, I would not plead for pity like a cruficix�
(Though some equable wood
Props against the city's dexterous amber.)

Whether enameled
By mirror or minnow, Laocoon,
Spare not the seer his joy-anguish
Enwrapt in arrows, swift mimics
Of the flesh. From the lawn's debunked many
Or single, most-emerald flange
Guide us, Redeemer, by thorn methods
The steep abyss into which we step
Blade by blade.

___________________________________________________________________________________

The Love Song of Saint Sebastian

There would be nothing more to say.
You would love me because I should have strangled you
And because of my infamy;
And I should love you the more because I had mangled you
And because you were no longer beautiful
To anyone but me.

I prated you with platitudes
Insouciant and dry as the sunlight overhead,
You, who stood like a word from my mouth.
After, enamored in the hayfield, we bled
Like a blaze of carrion and taloned shadows,
Cavalries of the South.

Soon, you will gaze as I have gazed.
At a man, something charred we created
Pacing between cypress and pillar.
At a flank from my torso happily fated
And at your own likeness insinuating its arrow�
My own or similar.

There would be nothing more to say.
You would love me because I should have strangled you
And because of my infamy;
And I should love you the more because I had mangled you
And because you were no longer beautiful
To anyone but me.

___________________________________________________________________________________

Locust

For Joe Weil

His stone shoes tipped askew on the curb�s hush,
The plump of poor men�s cheeks he saw bestow
A blushing crown. Their rasped voices he heard
Litter the streets with disreputable words.

And bottles break without sound of glass,
The stench of memory�s lips mouthing back
A tattered kiss, a perennial bruise;
Old ghosts compelling yet love�s stupor.

Then in the resigned yawn of a moment,
Its cordial pain unharmed by sentiment,
Solemn litanies rose from the sewer�s throng
And hallowed ears indulged a pulsing song.

The sparse table and dusty crib reminisce
No softer lullaby . . . His dreams grown numb,
Melody orphans him again to sleep:
Familiar bed he punctures like a drum.
___________________________________________________________________________________

Orizaba

for Hart Crane

The ocean's guilt gilded his own:
       Surgeless, the propellers unheaved their breathing
             Drone.

Waves�darkflecked as daemonic fins�
       Mouthed pleas�the chopping weight of limbs.
             Foamed discs

Thrown by starred refractions�
       Olympian arm�pulsing constellations�
             Anguished chants.

He didn't wince. He rested�rested
        As each volley's strict fist slapped
             Its fond death-welcome against his chest . . .

Out at sea the sun's alien sheen liquored
        Iambic crests; the ocean's lid�coagulant wreath�
             Sealed in dim descent.

The stolid ship, its bow rift
        With bitter undertow, lumbered
             Back�his own replete echo

Obscured.

___________________________________________________________________________________

When

I have not come too late, too late to the house
upon this seldom street. When one is tired
and one searches why one is tired and cannot
sleep, perhaps one fears they have forgot,
forgotten how much to fear one�s self, or
when the night aborts without even a moon�s
retreat, when the flesh that hangs upon the prongs
of one�s dull ribs, heaves and heaves a little less
with each sequent breath, when the lungs traipse
like feet about, abhorring that they must go
where forced to go�then one walks, or
maybe, one never leaves one�s self. Still, I have
come upon a house on an unfamiliar street.
The shudders are blue and blue is not appeasing
when it is worn and worn enough
so that it looks faded, faded even if a light
easily seems to breathe an appearance new.
But it is a worn and faded blue, and I
am walking when the night drags on
And forgets itself. Once, I thought I knew this self.
Rather, I have forgotten how to fear myself�yet
I have not come too late. The house is hedged�
I mean to say, the shrubs around the house are hedged,
the house itself is no more than a stuck mixing of stone.
When I came to this street (and I do not know
its name), when I came to this house
and my chest lessened as if knowing, now,
I might rest; resting I feared I had come too late.
There is another house to the left, and surely one beyond
and beyond the one beyond; here, I�ll sit.
I�ll sit on the silent stoop. Here I�ll wait a face to greet
(and though I know not whose house this is)
if someone asks why I�m here or why I seem
to always eye with fear�if someone should
passing across the lawn ask anything at all,
easily passing because there is no gate,
I�ll say, or seem to say, I hope I haven�t come
too late.

___________________________________________________________________________________

Tonight

Tonight, branches of pines
                                  stem
    like a freezed motion of the brain�

                triads ands
                pentagons;
                                              the rustic
                                              run
                                              of
                                              quatrains;�

the sounds of latticed amber,
    trellised crimson and jaded crystals
drifting down
    to a concrete ear�
                prompting someone
                                   to say:

                these most casual
     rhythms
                                  delight ...

the rippled-puddles
    and their synoptic swells
forming a stream
                                   that     that laces round
    a series of a passer�s
steps,
                cast
                                   in a soft ink
    of rainwater�

When will
                                   the wind
     publish
the dying
    lull
                of these poems?

___________________________________________________________________________________

Sonnet

My love hath need of thought though thought not mine,
And thinking of her warmest thought untouched,
I picture chill my fingers near her mind
Until reflection finds herself debauched;
Then as a frost may thaw through weighty drop
By its own weighty crust becoming melt,
So I with sweat must squander thought and stop;
Pouring intentions off ne�er solid felt.
Ah, love, fickled ideal of intemp�rance
That draining from mine eye admonishes
Such dust that roused once clearest films if glanced,
A youth obscuring age�s blank polishes.
Without the flesh of names love comes to ought,
So should abstraction rob what remains naught.

___________________________________________________________________________________

Exposure

After a day of misting, finally
There is rain. Suede leaves
Garlanded over a thirsting gate
That won't rust.

The rain reads like desire, a thought
Tappering off, down a grid-slicked abyss,
That�awaiting�waits.

Three days this mist has rangled�
Boughs weighed less like altars
Than as a thin wax coated in mildew:
A bark darkly torn that is not paper.

You walk along my side, unmentioned,
A bare neck open like a sleeve
Unwrinkled. I have not mentioned
What distance doubly undermines
Yet photographs posess.

The rain picks up now. Not as shoulders
Extricating a sigh, but as another element
Apposing callow hands.

My knee shakes though it is not cold,�
About us an airy plume peddles
Into the dark quietus
Where we step.

This is the same
As saying a breath hurries from
A warm mouth: your own.

___________________________________________________________________________________

Elegy for Metaphor

Now in the random dark,
unexpected, but willed,
blazing in a frenzied blur
as if without frenzy,

there is no mention
of him or her.
No organ, no keys peddling
medleys of crucial frieze.

Whether it be preferred, reality
seizures like a bouquet of smoke,
arpeggioed onto foreheads
made almost of clay.

Think of it, for now,
as a dry sea that curves
with vulgar waves,
lips chalked with forgotten words . . .

Therefore, hum. Hum for surfaces choked.
Hum through handed frets on a loaned guitar.

___________________________________________________________________________________

'When Orient's Orisons minister to me'

When Orient�s orisons minister to me
And suns flake flame, dun-domed by clouded soot,
Opposite stars bow out with barely a foot;
When seagulls gallop cobalt crests of sea
And arias of wind arise, perfumed,
A crescent hand peals back a tide of white
As if a loosened hem,�nape-naked night
Collating currents� drifts, canvassing dunes
With hues of hoary foam; heckling fierce crabs,
Cragged shells, troughed rocks, dry shrubs that brittled swell
With morning warmth their clayskinned husk of hives;
And I, a nondescript voyeur, like scabs
Of seaweed�s skeins, decay; the ocean�s knell�
Bringing at dawn the dying breakers� dive.

___________________________________________________________________________________

The Man With Young Thoughts

Sated, the young man thought
Of strips of marinated meat, skins
Of poultry, seafood grilled on skewers
And dipped in peanut sauce.
Appetite had collapsed.

Fascinated, his face propounded
Raw reflections. A jointed light
That thumbed the dry, tense hairs
Of his demurring brow.
His skin was silver, beauty itself
A silvery thing.

He inhaled the wine-whisk of words.
He danced in the mere
Movement of air, similarly
Subtracting moons and zeroes
(His hand never quite
Acquainting the page.)

�Must you always be listening
To your own voice?��time sprawled
While he thought of himself.
Nearby, a bus revved in its disquietude,
Sounding like the mirror
That sat before him. These things he knew.
These things he knew.

___________________________________________________________________________________

The Shadow That Was Not Himself

In an audience of selves, stored
In crystal jars of a blank eye,
The young man mourned for beginning things.
Ignatio. A herd of sheep exited his jaw.
Rhythm deserted his poems.

No desert caves, no wandering vines
Overgrown. The tufts of his hair
Were silver strands once, and silver
Honeyed, blinded. �Prepare for me
A place of watery foreheads, where
Vespers breathe with weight.

I initiate the Saint of his own scars,��
Old wax bound in old books weeping
Like a soothing black cloth.

The bones in his face were running.
(Though no whiskers had grown and none
Would grow.) Soon, a synod of smoke
Would converge below his ankle.
Soon, a dolphin would arch
The rim of his leafy ear.

___________________________________________________________________________________

weather obsoletes

It is not in failure�s failing
that we, rid of particular
fought-fors,

feel as such a fragrance
fermented with the false,
but rather in speaking its syllabic breathe.

Its sound is sound as a sea
is sounding by the scaffolding
of a vulgar shore, we who name

must endure a breeze
flecked with salt-bitten shells:
maculate canisters, hollowed husks

seasoning a grimy sand,
based in a tongue
scrapped by a numb moon.

And so the sea flailed a panoramic sigh
that seethed the mortulent Bather
in jovial knells, a discontinuity

of weather, the clouds decidedly
smiten chords linched
in lyric lightning.

The sweat-swam Bather unnamed
the ocean then, the canublar waves
as well, the swollen odours

flew through his nostrils,
impungently, he rebuked each
brisk spray of the hiccuping tide,

and forgetting his drenched
ankles, cooed a smile.
His ancored feet, his shore-

ward gaze � not a syllable
escaped, no words
lost.

___________________________________________________________________________________

Stranded in the Metro

Or lesser still, the flushed array of hair.
A salient hair that serves as mirror�floating
Absent subways, the arch and grain equivalence
Through shuttling bursts of steely dens.

Magnetic the pseudo-bone suspended
Above tracks�enameled manuscript of locks,
Of stubbled paint, pale shaven pale again.
I say again, a hair�s a snaking subway car.

And I have rode stray sheets of some ebbing
Forehead�s sweep, I have curved a chord of sound
Up from rumbled ground to some silver�s flint,
A blonde,�phalanxed whisker swording sight�

Partitioned cars charging electric slithers
As striated elbows bend straits of streets,
And pulleys toggle make-up lips and slips
Of weather bulletins�this invisible tug�

As cracked tinctures beam like eunuch stars,
Rimmed-rubber glass collates a crowd,�
Tundras of paper clips and staples
Idling over city rooms with scenic pictures

�maples, southern figures, gallant bushses, churchgoers
Passing inchoate gazes while sanguine slurs
(Menacingly mucked from chocolate flowers) flourish�
A certain maid with dark Absalom eyes . . .

Upon a burgundy�s burr hue, I ride now�
So comes another stop, another curving tuft.
The underground cannot cost in faces
But in iron and aluminum,�silken traces.

___________________________________________________________________________________

Walt Whitman Returns from Santiago

Tonight, he arises with the catapult of waves ... moon-seared, breeze-buffetted waves,
Tonight, he is the sweeping tulle of the ocean itself, his form fanning in bergs of fire,
                   borages of the unknown ... rivulets of smoke and streams of ice, knotted flesh,
                   surplice eyes that border the broad shoulders of continents.

[2]

His beard is bending as he re-claims the muscle and gravel of road,
His beard is bending like a wax cauterized from flecks of steam�d sun,
                    a wax gently brought up from the coast, the sepulcher�d homes ... fortresses
                    of sand, a wax that fills with gusto the newness of night into the onset of day.
His beard, unavoidable like tides breathing, is curled like chards of gold-burning diamond
                    set upon a grass of powdered dust ... creeps like a fog invading the landward,
                    the land dwelling, the meek roofs, dilipidated bricks, ash�d hearths.

[3]

And now, in every supple bed a sheet is flown open,
Now, old sleepers are removed and old dreams are removed,
Now, the dog that�s voice is hoarse that cannot welp is replaced,
Now, the dimensions of the home matter not,
Volumes of bricks and chimneys, painted fences and unpainted fences,
Houses with or without roofs, gates that chatter a cold tooth
And gates that make no noise in motion, all these are set aside,
Now, tonight, Walt Whitman slumbers with his belly bare across America,
His body is laid with ginger and laurel, jasmine and fragrances that delight,
His body is laid out, gaunt and as a strong breeze riffling the feathers of a lake,
His body is laid out, and we, some unholy bed, though trembling
And unworthy to know the hairs of his face and tallied chest,
We, a single white sheet that softens his ruddy back, quietly wait for another light,
We, who dare to wake him.
___________________________________________________________________________________