Alfred E Majko
3546 N Paris Av
Chicago, IL 60634
773-625-6269
847-240-8951
see:
Title (date written) (category) order of composition (submissions)
The tree... (Juvenilia) 1 |
14 |
Lykanthropos, doomed to cruelness... (Juvenilia) 2 |
16 |
An old dog's snoring rhythm... (Juvenilia) 3 |
17 |
The Girl (Rejecta) 4 |
18 |
The Visit (Rejecta) (Jan-Feb 1973) 5 |
19 |
Mists of a Dream (Juvenilia) 6 |
20 |
Zero (Doubts) 7 |
23 |
Safety from the Storm (Around 1973) (Juvenilia) 8 |
24 |
A Pause (Doubts) 9 |
25 |
Remembering (Rejecta) 10 |
26 |
Happy New Year (Rejecta) (1978-1979) 11 |
27 |
Just Whistle a Happy Tune (Rejecta) 12 |
28 |
The Professor Explains some Duties and Responsibilities to his Sleeping Students (Rejecta) 13 |
29 |
Inspired (Rejecta) 14 |
30 |
Decay (Rejecta) (June 29, 1980) 15 |
31 |
Osiris (Rejecta) 16 |
32 |
New Year's Resolve (Rejecta) (1979-1980) 17 |
33 |
Autumn/Winter: The Fall of Snow (Rejecta) 18 |
34 |
Year's End (Rejecta) (1980-1981) 19 |
35 |
Christmas Carol (Rejecta) 20 |
36 |
The clear crisp sickle of the waxing moon, (Rejecta) 21 |
37 |
The laughing orb of full-faced moon (Rejecta) 22 |
38 |
The final quarter of the monthly moon... (Victoriana) 23 |
39 |
You're hidden by the sun's magnificent glare... (Victoriana) 24 |
40 |
You are beautiful beyond compare. (Rejecta) 25 |
41 |
Merlin's Gleam (Rejecta) 26 |
42 |
There's such a thing as a pregnant moment (Rejecta) 27 |
45 |
Ogygia (Victoriana) 28 (Poetry before 1994) |
52 |
Actaeon (Victoriana) 29 (Poetry before 1994) |
53 |
Satire (Victoriana) 30 (Poetry before 1994) |
54 |
After Dinner (Rejecta) 31 |
55 |
Driving Home (Rejecta) 32 |
58 |
Pantheon of Spring (Decadence) 33 (Poetry, Bitterroot before 1994) |
59 |
Ganymede as Lucifer (Decadence) 34 (Poetry, Bitterroot before 1994) |
60 |
The Inspired Moment (1981) (Unkempt) 35 |
61 |
"I write the words for Castor, brother thane; (Rejecta) 36 |
62 |
Fragments 37 |
63 |
The cloying tunes cascade upon our indiscriminate minds... (Decadence) 38 |
66 |
Literature's lonely escapade... (Decadence) 39 (South & West before 1994) |
67 |
Cerberus (Rejecta) 40 |
68 |
Polyneices / Eteocles (Rejecta) 41 |
69 |
Rounds (White Goddess) 42 |
70 |
A Meditation (Rejecta) 43 |
71 |
Vision (1981) (White Goddess) 44 |
72 |
Kipling After the War (Decadence) 45 |
73 |
They Hover (Unkempt) 46 (South & West before 1994) |
74 |
Waiting (White Goddess) 47 (South & West before 1994) |
75 |
Red (Decadence) 48 |
76 |
Anabasis to Carthago (Decadence) 49 |
77 |
The Climbers (Unkempt) 50 (Blue Unicorn before 1994) |
78 |
A Soul (Unkempt) 51 (Blue Unicorn before 1994) |
79 |
With how sad steps, O Moon, you climb the sky... (Decadence) 52 |
80 |
On Entering a Church (Unkempt) 53 |
81 |
Splashes experience's wave... (Decadence) 54 |
82 |
A crisp and chilly night I walked and knew... (Unkempt) 55 |
83 |
The Mirror (December 30, 1981) (Decadence) 56 |
84 |
Romeo 57 (Kenyon Review April 15 2001) |
85 |
Sphinx 58 (Kenyon Review April 15 2001) |
86 |
Sonnet 59 (Poetry, Bitterroot before 1994, Kenyon Review April 15 2001) |
87 |
The Beach 60 (Kenyon Review April 15 2001) |
88 |
Aesthete 62 |
89 |
The Elements About Etna 63 |
90 |
She's a...He... 64 (Kenyon Review April 15 2001) |
91 |
In straight lines flares the sun... 65 |
92 |
The thin tangent of aestheticism... 66 |
93 |
Musing on the Fin de Siecle (after visiting Paris April 9, 1982) 67 |
94 |
Vehemence 68 (Kenyon Review April 15 2001) |
95 |
To B - 69 (Kenyon Review April 15 2001) |
96 |
Storm A-brew 70 (Kenyon Review April 15 2001) |
97 |
The Twain 71 (Kenyon Review April 15 2001) |
98 |
A Sonnet 72 (Kenyon Review April 15 2001) |
99 |
Chiaroscouro Tree 73 (Kenyon Review April 15 2001) |
100 |
I want to chuck this all in a hurl... 74 (Kenyon Review April 15 2001) |
101 |
Let's Go! 75 (Kenyon Review April 15 2001) |
102 |
To K - 76 (Kenyon Review April 15 2001) |
103 |
K - 77 (Kenyon Review April 15 2001) |
104 |
Sombre... 78 (Kenyon Review April 15 2001) |
105 |
Our Last Night 79 (Kenyon Review April 15 2001) |
106 |
Country Kin... 80 (Kenyon Review April 15 2001) |
107 |
Shattered on the sharp points of her broken beauty... 81 (Kenyon Review April 15 2001) |
108 |
When tired eyes take a voyage of delight... 82 (Kenyon Review April 15 2001) |
109 |
Descent 83 (Kenyon Review April 15 2001) |
110 |
The grinning Baboon 84 (Kenyon Review April 15 2001) |
111 |
Dream on Polyhymnia 85 (Kenyon Review April 15 2001) |
112 |
Of the Basilisk: Eye to Eye for all Time 86 (Kenyon Review April 15 2001) |
113 |
What is it that I wish... 87 |
114 |
Dies Illa (April 30, 1983) 88 (Kenyon Review April 15 2001) |
115 |
Gone 89 |
116 |
At the Door 90 (Kenyon Review April 15 2001) |
117 |
The calm of peace... 91 (Kenyon Review April 15 2001) |
118 |
Hear not the breathing of conspiracy in secret places... 92 (Kenyon Review April 15 2001) |
119 |
A bubble's sphere is... 93 (Kenyon Review April 15 2001) |
120 |
O rose-wind wrapped clouds... 94 (Kenyon Review April 15 2001) |
121 |
This sudden chill (Rejecta) 95 |
122 |
Hunter 96 (Kenyon Review April 15 2001) |
123 |
There's a bull-footed god in the park, 97 |
124 |
New breathing life (1988) 97.1 |
125 |
In the hallway mirror (1988) 97.2 |
126 |
Beauty has a heart (1988) 97.3 |
127 |
Our daughter we've called Katie, 97.4 (February 7, 1989 12:50 am) |
128 |
Rush of night of air... (August 30, 1994 1:35am) 98 |
129 |
The Brightness of air... (July 21, 1994) 99 |
130 |
L'Audace, Toujours, L'Audace (July 6, 1996? or 1994? 11:30 pm) 100 |
131 |
A Ram Amongst the Briers (1995) 101 (Cosmic Debris January 1996, Kenyon Review April 15 2001) |
132 |
Natural Sex (1995) 102 (Kenyon Review April 15 2001) |
133 |
The Father's Death (1995) 104 (Kenyon Review April 15 2001) |
134 |
Dignified to be single (1995) 105 (Kenyon Review April 15 2001) |
135 |
Dead End (Rejecta)(1996) 106 |
136 |
Mooning Baboons (Rejecta) (1996) 107 |
137 |
No Man (1996) 108 (Anamnesis March 2001) |
138 |
Snow (1996) 109 (Anamnesis March 2001) |
139 |
Dream (1996) 110 (Anamnesis March 2001) |
140 |
"You are more Houyhnhnm than Yahoo" (1996) 111 (Anamnesis March 2001) |
141 |
Waterbug (Rejecta) (1996) 112 |
142 |
Landscape (1996) 113 (Anamnesis March 2001) |
143 |
Rains Miserably (1996) 114 (Anamnesis March 2001, Boston Review June 1, 2001) |
144 |
Sunlight Dabbles on the Shadows (Rejecta) (1996) 115 |
145 |
Canis Comatose (1996) 116 (Anamnesis March 2001) |
146 |
Trembling Fear (1996) 117 (Anamnesis March 2001) |
147 |
Sacrifice (1996) 118 (Anamnesis March 2001) |
148 |
The Whirlpool and the Stone (Rejecta) (1996) 119 |
149 |
Empti-day dream of day-glo light (1996) 120 (Anamnesis March 2001) |
150 |
- stasize (1996) 121 (Anamnesis March 2001) |
151 |
|
|
151 |
Pencil dictate this fainting dream (1996) 122 (Anamnesis March 2001) |
152 |
I come (1996) 123 (Anamnesis March 2001, Boston Review June 1, 2001) |
153 |
Eye of the Beholder (1996) 124 (Anamnesis March 2001) |
154 |
High Way (1996) 125 (Anamnesis March 2001, Boston Review June 1, 2001) |
155 |
Passion of the odors (1996) 126 (Anamnesis March 2001) |
156 |
Mystery of the whispers (1996) 127 (Anamnesis March 2001, Boston Review June 1, 2001) |
157 |
Canyon Fall (1996) 128 (Anamnesis March 2001) |
158 |
awake arise (1996) 129 (Anamnesis March 2001) |
159 |
Summer Noon (1996) 130 (Anamnesis March 2001) |
160 |
Blue-white Black (1996) 131 (Anamnesis March 2001, Boston Review June 1, 2001) |
161 |
Overtime (Rejecta) (1996) 132 |
162 |
Sun dog aft of western ring (1996) 133 (Anamnesis March 2001) |
163 |
In the deep space where is the blank (1996) 134 (Anamnesis March 2001) |
164 |
Circles (Rejecta) (1996) 135 |
165 |
When father kissed me with his craggy lips (1996) 136 (Anamnesis March 2001) |
166 |
His Love is Forlorn (1996) 137 (Anamnesis March 2001) |
167 |
Preciosus (Rejecta) (1996) 138 |
168 |
Our Friday (1996) 139 (Anamnesis March 2001) |
169 |
Lil Drummer (Rejecta) (1996) 140 |
170 |
The pale sky rises (1996) 141 (Anamnesis March 2001) |
171 |
Sacrifice of youth (1997) 142 (Kenyon Review April 15 2001) |
172 |
Rwanda (1997) 143 (Kenyon Review April 15 2001) |
173 |
eyes upon alit with grace (1997) 144 (Kenyon Review April 15 2001) |
174 |
Our pilgrimage to the stars (1997) 145 (Kenyon Review April 15 2001) |
175 |
lil lee arches backward on the mattress (Rejecta) (1997) 146 |
176 |
the distant roar in the pall of noon (1997) 147 (Kenyon Review April 15 2001) |
177 |
this room's window bowls against the blackness of the night (1997) 148 (Kenyon Review April 15 2001) |
178 |
His greatest madness was lost love (Rejecta) (1997) 149 |
179 |
Weather (1997) 150 (Kenyon Review April 15 2001) |
180 |
Sleep in Partners (1997) 151 (Kenyon Review April 15 2001) |
181 |
The Touch (Rejecta) (1997) 152 |
182 |
Particularity (1997) 153 (Kenyon Review April 15 2001) |
183 |
Corn's grey sentinels stand along a tear's trail (1997) 154 (Kenyon Review April 15 2001) |
184 |
The green glass cries when the sun (Rejecta) (1997) 155 |
185 |
Lazy hands float sky whence (Rejecta) (1997) 156 |
186 |
Fire. (1998) 157 (Kenyon Review April 15 2001) |
187 |
Pixels white and black nearly hum. (1998) 158 (Kenyon Review April 15 2001) |
188 |
The looks show that I've lost it, (Rejecta) (1998) 159 (Sun Times January, 2001) |
189 |
At the kitchen table the young male's (1998) 160 (Kenyon Review April 15 2001) |
190 |
There are shadows in the water-world (1998) 161 (Sun Times January, 2001; Kenyon Review April 15 2001) |
191 |
There the conic shades where the walls meet, (1998) 162 (Kenyon Review April 15 2001) |
192 |
Even in sun I see the dark side of things, (1998) 163 (Kenyon Review April 15 2001) |
193 |
Those silk-hairs bend down coyly (1998) 164 (Sun Times January, 2001; Kenyon Review April 15 2001) |
194 |
I once thought of (1998) 165 (Sun Times January, 2001; Kenyon Review April 15 2001) |
195 |
So gray are the billous clouds (Rejecta) (1998) 166 |
196 |
Where the lush ferns bristle (Rejecta) 1999 167 (Sun Times January,) |
197 |
If I were my brother (1999) 168 (Kenyon Review April 15 2001) |
198 |
Down a deep well (Rejecta (1999) 169 |
199 |
All the flat world underlines the gray mass (Rejecta) (1999) 170 |
200 |
Winter Coat (Rejecta) (1999) 171 |
201 |
Adventure (1999) 172 (The Alsop Review February 2001; (Kenyon Review April 15 2001) |
202 |
Looking for Something to Read (2000) 173 (Kenyon Review April 15 2001) |
203 |
The Church Organ Plays While He, Watched, Prays (2000) 174 (Kenyon Review April 15 2001) |
204 |
March Grey Bodes Winter's Last Storm, to a Student's Notice (2000) 175 (Kenyon Review April 15 2001) |
205 |
An Incident of Road Rage, interrupted by a Sky Object suddenly seen (2000) 176 (Kenyon Review April 15 2001) |
206 |
The Rain as I Drift Asleep seems Sad to me (2000) 177 (Kenyon Review April 15 2001) |
207 |
Shale-grey the sky that hangs (2000) 178 (Kenyon Review April 15 2001) |
208 |
Shadows do not play (2000) 179 (Kenyon Review April 15 2001) |
209 |
At the Ice Rink (2001) 180 |
210 |
The Cashier at the Check-out Line (2001) 181 |
211 |
Not Afraid of Flying (2001) 182 |
212 |
Pep Talk (2001) 183 |
213 |
Waiting Room (2001) 184 |
214 |
Melody and Rhythm (2001) 185 |
215 |
Dark Presence of the Sharpest Eyes (2001) 186 |
216 |
Entrants (2001) 187 |
217 |
Child Care (2001) 188 |
218 |
Dusky Afternoon (2001) 189 |
219 |
Down to the shore where the water is (2001) 190 |
220 |
I make a slice of time (2001) 190 |
221 |
Down to a place in the street I pass (2001) 191 |
222 |
Mimic lines splay from out (2001) 192 |
223 |
In a murky scene (2001) 193 |
224 |
What is the purposelessness of it (2001) 194 |
225 |
Culled together gathering dust (2001) 195 |
226 |
Lip-limned with saintly nimbus (November 16, 2001) 196 |
227 |
Like a train in a nimble line (2001) 197 |
228 |
Somnolence enwraps me (September 11, 2002) 198 |
229 |
End of desiring, end of manic seeking (December 27, 2002) 199 |
230 |
Believe the line that marks (2003) 200 |
231 |
“Out of the depths I cry out” (2003) 201 |
232 |
So the splash of our togetherness (2003) 202 |
233 |
Jewel (2003) 203 |
234 |
Night and a soft breathing (2003) 204 |
235 |
Overadumbrate the clouds (4-5-2003) (Baghdad) 205 |
236 |
In the shadows of faces in unmasked leaves 206 |
237 |
Don’t know that I can forget (7-1-2003) (Magnolia) 207 |
238 |
This end of a built crudescence 208 |
239 |
The Wait 209 |
240 |
From dry words on a yellow page 210 |
241 |
To the influential wine I praise 211 |
242 |
Crazed unknowing pleasure in the pain 212 |
243 |
Reach out to where there is no warmth 213 |
244 |
A dance cavorts across a scene 214 |
245 |
The tree,
Once a strong pine,
Dropping sweets in silver twine
To a gay child's glee,
As its hues leaped wildly in his wide eyes,
Droops,
As crushed tinsel trails down from the branches doomed.
Lykanthropos, doomed to cruelness--
A weird wolf, man's worst friend--
He brings death.
He laughs in the bright light,
And howls,
Crawling on a bald hill, in doomed service to the moon.
An old dog's snoring rhythm
Seems quickened
By the clicking swing of the pendulum.
The clock tells
The dog to wake.
And the snoring animal bids the timepiece
To sleep, sleep.
The news
The clock tells
Is not new,
Just the same bad truth.
The quiet story
The aged animal whispers
Speaks of peace,
And time's defeat to sleep.
Soft.
Light green dress, pale blue eyes.
Pink cheeks, white neck.
She does not move.
She seems painted on that wooden bench,
Looking away from me,
Her brown hair,
Her pink arm,
Still,
Under quiet green leaves
Of a great, dark tree.
I smile.
A love of soft colors and soft sound
Stills me.
Then she laughs at me.
White teeth in a red mouth.
The branches of the tree sway in a gust of wind.
Her hair is blown about.
It is chilly,
And I hug my coat around me walking home.
Through the woodwork of a doorway surrounding the view,
I see
Children drawing: sticky crayons striking paper,
Gay eyes, mouths wide,
Young boys intent upon the joy
Of capturing
Their selves
As they color the blank world.
Now, they see me.
Fluttering about me, they shout at me,
Pulling me here,
Shoving me there,
Calling me: "Talk to me,"
Saying in many a
Way,
"We missed you."
I know these boys. I don't
Know their drawings.
Colors I see:
Feelings come upon while I was
Gone.
They are different.
And I am only a visitor.
I leave.
Through the woodwork of a doorway surrounding the view,
I see
Children drawing: sticky crayons striking paper,
Gay eyes, mouths wide,
Young boys intent upon the joy
Of capturing
Their selves
As they color the blank world.
The brilliant reality of any dream
Fades
And disappears upon waking.
I am told a story about
A boy who broke a window one summer.
I am shown a picture of
A boy whose front tooth is gone.
People tell me
These boys were me.
I sit in a yellow wicker chair,
Smelling pine trees,
Warm breezes messing my hair,
Dragonflies buzzing,
The water rippling under the wooden pier.
I stand on a street corner,
Cars jammed together whining and roaring
Up and down the neon street.
People pressing about me,
The smell of their bodies rising like steam.
Did I sit in a yellow wicker chair
And fall asleep,
Dreaming about
Noisy cars rushing through a city night?
Or did I stand on a street corner,
And close my eyes
Daydreaming about
Lazy dragonflies floating through a country day?
A woman says "Goodnight,"
And I go to a room.
Did she stand there and look at me?
Did her lips move and a familiar sound come to me?
Who was she looking at and speaking to?
I walked away from a friend because I forgot his name.
Then I forgot what I wanted to say to him,
Then I forgot him,
Then I forgot that I forgot him.
That little boy who grins toothless out of an old picture
Is not me.
Time has made him not me.
I feel cold, then I feel hot.
Was I cold once?
I see a blue rug, then I look at the white ceiling.
Was there a blue rug?
I hear a mailbox cover slam, then I hear a fly.
What was it I heard?
You cannot put your foot into a river
At the same place twice.
A spider hangs in a dewy web,
Connected to his past and future
By strong strands.
He can move all over his life on any strand.
But if the web breaks,
The spider falls,
Crumpled in a ball,
Falling,
Nothingness surrounding him to his death.
I repeat to myself the story of
A boy who broke a window one summer.
I look at the picture of
A boy whose front tooth is gone.
I think of a yellow wicker chair and green pine trees,
Of noisy cars flashing by.
The strands are breaking,
Nothingness surrounding me to my death.
Falling, falling.
A woman moves her lips, looking through me into the darkness,
As sounds seeming to come from those lips
Rush past me through the darkness,
Rushing air past my ears.
Falling, falling.
The brilliant reality of any waking
Fades
And disappears upon dreaming.
I wonder
O
Is there a fall
A hill, a cliff
A wall
Where foottrails end
And wings silvery against
The blank grey sea
Envelope
A blistered heart
A finished mind?
A finished mind
Ah
That is a round
Round
A closed circle
Or oval
Or ellipse
Or skating wire hoop
Skittering down the lawn
The long cement road
slicing, sweeping, swishing
Alone wrong awry.
A rumbling thunderstorm rounds overhead,
Wickedly wrecking piles of leaves with gusts of wind,
Slashing the sky with straight streaks of water,
Slapping stone faces which walk the street.
Stooped figures huddling into the cold,
Letting the rain make tears on their cheeks,
Briskly dash home from work,
Sloshing the muck of little muddy swamps.
As depressing memories cloud my mind
With dark images of today's defeat
In the world of laughing mouths and sneering eyes,
I, too, dash over a syrupy pond of mud
And reach the dry safety of my porch
Silent in its voluminous void of people.
Hurrying to meet my appointment,
I stepped off a curb,
When suddenly,
The vicissitudes of life became like the gentle gusts of a summer breeze.
The sepulchral rut of quotidian toil leveled to a far-reaching plain.
I could see for miles the reddened faces of speechless people.
I could hear the distant crunch of feet on gravel.
Laughter and tears,
Fears,
Surveyed in a still fish-eye gaze,
Above yet within.
A momentary lapse it was,
Then,
Back again, the stampede of striving slammed up against me.
I walked across the street and went on my pre-arranged way.
The bright light
Glares at my pale face
From the blank page.
Whispered rumors of past events,
Fleeting glimpses of long-faded colors,
People sifting by,
People drifting away.
So, I write, remembering,
Quickly scribbling thin black scratches:
The long letters link up like lonely
Shoved-together snakeskins
Across the blank page.
A shout dissolves into silence.
A redness erodes to grayness.
People's faces exchange places.
I can not remember.
How was it?
Another year has gone
So now only this song
Remains
To drain
The balance of the sand
From mu life on this lonely stand
Where sharp teeth
And crushing feet
Pass
I whistle a tune from Bach -
What I hurt from I can't quite say -
I am alone
Yes
No surprise due to that
Fact.
But I whistle a tune from Bach,
And what I hurt from I can't quite -
I need some (...one...thing...)
Sure
No revelation there; everyone needs
Love.
Yet I whistle a tune from Bach
So what I hurt from I can't -
I feel like a (...robot...cipher...)
OF course
No special consideration due to me, as if no one else felt
Sad.
Indeed now I whistle that favorite tune to
Unhearing typewriters and copiers:
Therefore I realize my powerless speech
And
Being separate from all others I
Fully accept.
Let's say yes and no.
Let's measure the inches on a long flower.
Let's weigh the difference between green eyes and blue Mondays.
We come into a blank white room -
You see it's glare is blinding,
Blinding sunny emptiness of
White and almost white shouting back to you,
Reflecting back to you all the hopeless memories you've ever had.
There it is! Doesn't he know?
An error of dreams -
A wrongfull expectation of the future -
A mythological mercurial constancy in the "past to present"
Which to him necessitates the "future."
What a misconception!
I know what I don't say and
I know what I can't mold into a
Molding clay primitive humanoid object of veneration and despair.
O dull round brown
O;
Wide, spritely, fine extreme, blue?
No!
Serene
Sullen
Somber
A Colleen
A dull cow
Ululation
Pullulation
Putrefaction
Golden Isis
Radiates he yellow arms,
Downy white child hairs,
Around my stiff body:
Body,
A stele,
A lonely ash wrinkled with age midst a great gray plain,
A lone stone
Without rune or arabesque or character chinois;
Cenotaph
Empty to a child's temptation.
A winter's tale in mid-Indian autumn
A coldness of heart that needs
The snow's white fellowship,
The ice's clean numb feel.
Yet a fire burns inside -
A glow
Of past regrets,
future's fatuous hopes,
The present's not real.
Maybe I'll take that
Reckless trip in the spring.
Maybe.
And then, in some lonely
Park,
I'll watch the early dew from
Light green leaves -
Its fall
In cool splashes
On the hard ground.
Alone
In the cold air that chills me to the bone
I watch the leaves that are randomly blown
Across the wide street of gray stone.
Then the snow begins,
Fluttering crystalline from the sky,
And softly cushions
The hard ground, as a lone cry
From a crazy crow
Pierces the crisp air -
The wind disturbs my hair -
As I turn and, moving very slow,
Walk home.
At year's end
Some do lend
Their serious souls to mend
The waywardness of the year's errant passing.
You might analyze
The curious misadventures,
The awful embarrassments,
The baleful, baneful blunders
OF your thousand wondrous tries.
But there is no hope
No foresight
No possible cope
On hindsight
To the thousand beauteous lies.
So I,
Awhile,
Will somewhat sedulously listen
To the christening
OF toasts
And the clink of glasses
And the chink of ice
Till passes
The cuckoo four times thrice
His awful boasts.
The trees in leafless traces 'cross the sky
So like some spiders' legs black lines describe.
And the snow with its whiteness and clamorous brightness
Contends with the air and disturbs the sweet quietness.
Cars, smoke, haze; trains, planes, and all confusion
Join with fury in frugal pollution.
These are the works of us men -
Those are the gifts of our god -
Together they sing of the end,
Lone he is, lone we trod.
The clear crisp sickle of the waxing moon,
Deeply entrenched in the darkness of western sky,
Sits in regal calmness, aloof and alone,
Without comments or censure on life's panoply.
But soon the dusty clouds surround and hide
This insensible smile, this unfeeling frown;
Yet again, it reappears, struggling 'gainst , with light,
The dark misty fog which emanates from the ground.
Its ray - fierce, bright, cold - burns
The smoke from earth, the haze of work,
'Til the ephemeral endeavor of every worm
Is evaporated by the cool serenity of the selene smirk.
Is this the perfect symbol of our doom,
Smiling, the half-orb in struggle against the gloom?
The laughing orb of full-faced moon
Sudd'nly 'pears in eastern sky,
Bright'ning 'way the goblins gray of gloom
Who the work of day to uncombine had tried.
The terr'ble shine, the horr'ble smile,
At dusky roofs, at murky walls,
Glares, wherein young men in acid bile
Tunble'n'turn in sleep's sick fits and bruising brawls.
But as it reigns in southern sky,
Comes o'er its face a yellow pall
In clouds from sulf'rous earth; then wolfish cries
Do madmen howl as homage to this eerie maw.
O Dian' queen, imperial Phoeb',
You herald Hecat's darkling mystery.
The final quarter of the monthly moon
In darkened sky is like a mortal gash
Of some huge monster-god, whose awful wound
Bleeds 'cross his blackened cope in starry splash--
Or like a tear in cape so thinly worn,
Its gauzy fabric lets through pricks of light:
A rent impatient time had rashly torn
To show behind eternity, star-bright.
This well worn pall of sequined sky drapes o'er
The fog entombed earth as tattered shroud;
And through the rip, as through a cut, does pour
Sweet starry blood upon the poor and proud.
This 'cisioned piece of keen-edged brilliancy
Forebodes the fiery sun"s intensity.
You're hidden by the sun's magnificent glare;
Yet strong enough, as when a shiny sphere,
To force the rounded waters' furious flare
Upon the rocky sand in churnings clear.
You ride invisible through sunbright day,
Unseen in darkling night 'mongst twinkling stars;
Thus hungry owls and nervous mice do pray:
Though your name new, some sure that dead you are.
Dead? Life still clings to desert plant whose root
Seeks cooling waters; cold Antarctic plain
Breeds mordant mosses; Dead Sea algae scoot
Through Sodom's salts; the Spring is Winter's bane!
And you, from seeming death arising, soon
At night will shine; a silver, crescent moon.
You are beautiful beyond compare.
There is no way that I can hope to have
Your sweetness next to my warm body. Dare
I speak my love unto the clouds? A slave
I'll be to your wild whimsies! Yes, I'll seize
Your reddening lips, and touch your heart; yes, take
Some liberties, and reaching ecstasies,
Make you my spiritual friend; mistake
Me not! I mean to experience with ease
Your loving kindness, warming mildness. Please don't
Be upset, or ill at ease; or please, please,
Do not withhold your friendly smile - I won't!
I love you, want to kiss you, hold you in
My loving arms - no sense at all of mortal sin!
Far from the fumy February city
Far into some preserve of woodland walked I,
Away from melting ices, splashes, slushes,
Away from winter's soupy, salty flushes.
There on a hill of moist and matted grass
I stretched myself full-length, secured at last
From urban worry, crowded hurry, watched
A tiny, thinly puffed out cloud - a swatch
upon the dying winter's bluish mantle -
In easy, lazy wand'ring o'er this ant hill
Of thawing earth. And then I felt a glowing
kinship between us two, an ever growing
Affinity, shared sense of sensitive
Perception. Gazed we on the world, alive
With steaming exhalations, seeping spring:
The bird, the worm, the dripping bough; the fling
Of biting wind still frosted by the snow
Which lay on lonely patches round below
The hill; the flattened grass, the soggy ground;
The grove and glade in yellow, gray and brown,
Which snuggled 'bout the hill; - we breathed these all,
Midst sound of gurgling spring and crowing caw.
Anon say I from out my cuneate eye
The dappled wimpling on the branched barks
Of sunlight's cloud-specked play off marbled snow.
I heard somewhere a sib'lant whisp'ring sigh
Amongst the twisting twigs and crackling grass,
Which lay, windswept, windtossed, by wind crisscrossed.
I felt a brush of mellowness along
My face; I smelled a dew of languor 'round
My head; there was no air to breathe at all
But dreamy indolence; and soon I sensed
The drone of buzzing insipidity.
Then thought I that there stood within the wood
Some unseen presence which did stare at me
With brooding melancholy, silently.
My mind, seduced by sleepiness, thus sprung
To labyrinthine thoughts of mythic Celt
and medieval magic: lovelorn Launcelot
and eager squire Gawain; pure Galahad,
The first true knight to see the Holy Grail;
Sweet Guinevere, so sorrowful a queen,
Who abbey ruled in her old age to brood
Upon a love lost knight and sea tossed king;
The awful tryst of bowlegged Mark's Isolt,
Inevitably evil Modred, wild
And willful Vivien, and Merlin's nap.
Why thoughts of glinting sword and spuming horse,
Of romance, lady, and heroic knight?
These times are hard and cynic'ly perverse.
Why misty dream when rolls the hearse steel-bright?
And even Alfred's Idylls sing of lost
Nobility, when craven knights unhorsed
Each other with contumely at that
Last Tournament: yea, this encrusted mantle
Of medieval, chivalric ide-
ealism upon a core of Celtic myth
and briny Saxon history - e'en this
Becomes in Alfred's hand a brooding comment
On petty human deeds and gloomy man's
Anxiety. There is no Christ, no Grail,
No God, no hope, no love nor loyalty
In this last century. Why dream, then? Why!
Mist, clouds, steam, smoke, vapor, fog, haze - all this!
It wets my face and cools my soul in bliss!
I know the cry is gone of "forward, forward,"
And Rizpah's son still wails along the downs.
But does it matter what I think or feel?
Chilean jackboot, 'Gandan tyrant, end-
less strife in Ireland, every group and end-
less army - crazed with nationality:
And earth still turns on bloodied axis, spins
Still round and round the grieving, golden sun.
What matter pessimism, optimism?
Think "slow and sure comes up the golden year."
And think that "prophet-eyes may catch a glory"?
Or muse upon "the little lives of men,
and how they mar this little by their feuds"?
No matter what philosopy, one's small
Lone life is led 'mongst friends and family.
So through the gloom, so like my world-confused
Soul, follow I those lights ("for man can half-
control his doom") thru day and night, the fog
Enfolded sun and mist entombed moon.
I woke up suddenly from thoughts of dreams
To sunny afternoon's branch-laced gleams.
Those earthly tones, those drips, that vap'rous stench:
So February winter did make blench.
And westward thru the wood still sensed I keen,
Now mut'ly hoar, the presence, still unseen.
I knew that fell on Merlin melancholy:
Maybe was he who watched my dreamy folly!
His silly dotage on the mistress vile
Did trick his pract'cal sense to foolish trial.
So passion clouds up all the evil way;
Yet passion tempts us by its gleaming ray.
Thru Merlin's grove and towards his face I'll go;
I'll follow, follow thru the melting snow.
I'll wander thru those woods cut with sun-knife
To family, friends, and, aye, artistic life.
There's such a thing as a pregnant moment,
When March's bellows billow the trees;
The swelling branches breathe in me a foment -
A cold from Winter's dying sneeze!
(Those branches swim in the air, unbudded,
Amidst the sewage of urban waste;
As if nature's skeleton sinks o'er-flooded
In the steely city's neon paste.)
This ballooning respiration
Suddenly 'comes quietness stilled;
The aching seconds pin-prick filled
To burst in this sudden with gasping deflation.
How clearly cold, unbearably brisk,
The flashing metal, the glinting steel,
The evil eye of the sun's bright disk,
How it all reflects with breathless zeal!
Should gloomy, darkened scene me scare,
Not this brilliant, clear-cut sight;
But I freeze unable a breath to dare,
For evil seems bred in this sun-bleached blight.
Within this silence now there sounds
A high-pitched sparrow titter-twitt'ring,
Or maybe starling bicker-bick'ring;
It trills; it fills with lilts these bounds.
Alone it discovers it's lone at last;
And utters in verse a song anew
To the gleaming sun's metallic hues,
Threat'ning the future, bemoaning the past.
And carried upwards on the brown bird's song,
O'erlooking the rounded earth's contention,
Detached and distanced from all intention,
I proudly review the human throng:
Its tidal wave that's ebbing faint,
its feckless surf, its reckless spume,
Its bombast, rhet'ric, whimp'ring plain,
Its disease, its fever, its pus, its rheum;
Its televised knowledge of everything fast,
learning's three R's or listnings's three B's;
Whipples and Olsens 'lectronic'ly massed
To trance the cash, divertingly;
The Catholic boys in Belfast town,
the leagered Jew, the Arab's land,
The leftist's sneer, the rightist's frown
Chile, Yemen, Turkey, Iran.
- Detached and philosophical?
Hyperventilates anon,
Distant, intellectual,
The perspicacious superman!
The drifting up on the minds free wind
Is losing self in selfish muse,
Is 'magining one is free of sin,
Free of all the moiling brews.
Escape from ills and fears of ills
Is what I want. Anxiety -
No more! I'll dream satiety
Pretending warmth from life's swift chills.
Thus confront us the real? No, the dream's what I seek:
She who wrestles her will on my suppliant lawn
With her alabaster, her marbled cheek
Of the dearest pink like the rosy dawn.
But wait! This is no incantation of Keats,
No mesmerism Browning might plot.
Fact is, my loves, unrequited, 'come hates;
Enemy world, my love fulfilled not.
I cry at the world to cry at myself -
The disaster huge or my crossed stars small -
The eternal torrent, my inner squall -
Till no matter the loneliness left on the shelf!
Still I see what is clear and know what must be true
That the earth reflects man's miserable mien,
That blood is a waste when it reddens the scene:
Jurassic bird, mock th'repetitive fools!
Repeat those earlier verses, my cause,
Which sang of madding humanity's entropy -
Justifiable manic misanthropy! -
But why does my muse so suddenly pause?
Silence again: the expanded branch,
The unblinking eye of the sun without pity,
And the thinly stretched out metal city
Hold a sec' more in this transient trance;
Sudden' the bird lightly jumps in the air!
Bursting, the branches akimbo swing wild -
Shadowy woods o'er the city's clean glare. -
Rushing sweet sounds thoughout, unmild!
So o'er the earth, the Sisyph stone,
Ixion's wheel, unto the sun
In easy west'ring am I blown
On laughing wind's uplifting fun!
The deep,
Its wine-dark and broad back,
The frothing spume it casts far over the jagged rocks--
The snow-white droplets speckle the greens and blues and blacks
That checker it from the shore to the thin blue horizon's line--
Mirrors my mind,
Reflects my hope of far off lands,
Mocks the shallow depths of my soul;
As when, weary head on hand,
Staring across the bumpy waves, the billowy sea,
Watched for the merest hint of ship-sail,
Longed for the slightest whiff of hearth-smoke
(As seen in the distance in the cool evening's walk)
He, sad-eyed;
Then turned, as I
Lonily trudge to the urban cave,
To the cot where I sleep midst the city's snore.
A stag,
Through crashing leaves and snapping twigs,
Which scratch its sweaty skin in lines of deepest red,
Its deer's heart beating faster, faster in its new found fear,
Bounds,
In midair,
Its neck sweetly arched, head turned back, eye askance
(The magic droplets in delicate beads upon its forehead)
At the hounds,
Snarling, yelping:
Those dogs which once gave friendly paw
And loving lick in carefree sport
Before the fire in the hunters' lodge,
Now reaching the stag and mangling its flesh and spraying its blood on the
silent leaves and witless ground--
As the staggering animal falls,
As he catches the glimmer afar,
With a human awareness again,
Of whitened form, of secret beauty.
My eye in bitter view of this sweet world,
Unblinking, stares at what the sun's unfurled.
Its golden ray disturbs nightmarish dreams
And softly rips night's shade with violent beams.
Appear the warm caresses lover pass
From each to other: stranger-man to lass
Who seems to struggle, friendly cell mates for
A newmade bugger, john to faithful whore.
And there, the yearning prescience young ones show
When asked by grown-up what grown up they'll do;
Yet, soon, their dreams are done; their lives are led
Without remorse, regret--a slaked set.
Now see I worried fundamentalists
And ready riflemen arrayed against
The liberal decadents, and humanists,
Who, nervous, balk at "pro-life" fascist plans.
So go some of the millions before me.
They walk, I talk; and others, patient, hear.
I think I am futile; they think I'm nuts:
While my eye sees rudeness, my tongue spits crude.
To sight the shying muse before my end
By wending twisting alleys with my vision -
No wincing from the brightness of eyes' ken -
An open vista, sunbright lit, precision-
I see you smile, young friend - my prattling speech?
Oh please! Don't shy from conversation! Pour
Yourself another drink, relax. I'll teach
You by my own example: don't abhor
A confrontation. Matters not your tense
Emotions; what's important's how you see
The world. Develop, keen, a visual sense.
When this is done, where, then, anxiety?
Unware of snipings, cuts, and jealous hates,
Unheeding critics' cross contentions, you'd
O'ercome, o'erweening some will say, the Fates;
Which oft us weave as victims to the brood
Of blind humanity's conformity:
Unfettered, and directed not by pelf,
You'd ride, in true superiority -
Wait, here's my glass, I'll need a drink myself!
- Yes, yes they're idle words. What sense to try
To see when all around us is steel and glass
And concrete ribbons stretching to the sky.
Our modern city's crisscrossed scratches - 'las! -
Inspire no art, unlike the curving lines
a snuggling 'bout meand'ring, village streams,
Or medieval burgs' a-spired shrines,
Or Renaissance's medit'ranean beams.
This muzak culture, cat'ring to the pop,
Deflates my erstwhile youth's enthusiasm.
What sells, who likes, there flows my artly slop. -
I'd don my dusty death! I'd cross this chasm!
Then in some downy glade - or heath'ry brake -
On brook - or crackling creek - a sparky runnel -
I'd float on cumulus - what's this? - a lake? -
No brackish fen in darkling glen! - a tunnel
Which is life's marrow lon'ly narrowing:
Of course, the only possible is now!
- What heady things this liquor makes me sing!
But in this world still nature yet can dow.
That smoky dell awashed in hues of Falls,
With cooling mists enwrapping face and arms
Of one who brood'ly ambles through the pall,
Creates a perfect scape from worldly harms;
Or distant view expands the soul full out
T'horizon's line; or pounding waves upon
The shore mark time's eternal beat about
The heart; or rumbling thunder echoes on
around the air in pouting mumblings as
One's fevered mind; thus nature mirrors man:
His fears, his hopes; till nature thinks he has
Within his heart, his brain, his guts. - Then brand
Electrical! The flashing lightning! Crack!
Then birth a cloud its fresh'ning raindrop litter,
In lisping splashes 'gainst earth's dusty back!
The power! For weakened man what could be fitter?
And yet is this just one man's silly thought,
Whose city life breeds idylls of the vale?
I could not camp beneath the stars, too fraught
With urban 'menities to tour the dale.
Why seek I that chaotic world when hums
This churning city's oily engines' clear
Calliphony? The very power dumbs
Those tongues of God to silent, harmless fear!
- Oh, must you go? Then let me get your coat.
Just sneak a look upon the foyer wall:
My painting, an original; yet note,
You must, you've seen a hundred more in malls
Throughout the suburbs. Cad'lac gentry, Ford
Bourgeois have charged their taste for that on cards
Of plastic - pliable they are! Accord'
To it I ply my trade and copy hard
What all the merchant-painters do, as they
In turn mock me. Yet I have tried to paint
Some mystery, philosopy in play
Of light upon the birch there, and in faint
horizon's curve, a-graying to the gray-
white sky, a gold'ning to the golden ground.
That light, that gray, that gold - can you then say
What time it is or season be? That mound
In front so dark with gloom, now does it not
Quite snidely mock the sliv'ry, silv'ry slice
Of birch tree on horizon? None, I wot,
Can form a tree with vibrance so precise
That it, e'en though aquiv'ring line stands firm
and powerful like my turgid knoll; and yet,
Am artist not. I must to freedom squirm
Through pathless woods, o'er chartless seas, but get
No farther than this room. - Despite my lecture
Th'artistic eye is in one's mind: may be
The pineal gland which people do conjecture
The soul's soft seat or man's third place to see -
Just joking, ha! But wouldn't it be dear
To know within us breeds a perfect sight,
A god-like vision without worldy fear?
- I know you're in a rush, so say goodnight!
Drive carefully and watch the signs. It snakes
The mountainside, this road. But, oh, the stars!
Eternal pinprick beacons! Could I take
A voyage 'mongst them! Visions strange, afar!
The amplitude of sounds, kaleidoscope
Of hues, the vast variety of things
I see and hear - and he does, too, old fool!
Avails the dream of nature blessed for us
Alone? What profits gaining thoughts which we
Project upon the world? That bending curve,
The screeching tire, my sweaty hand upon
The wheel - its curving plastic grooves so warm
Within my fingers - this is life, my song!
He said in coming age my heart will be
Dried up, a desert new where once was sea's
Emotions. Let it happen! Life will pass,
Thus balance me: hope fear, joy sadness, calm
And wildest virulence! This road, where I
Experience it all, I'll travel on
In curved trajectory to "dusty death"!
And Dionysian, Appolonian be.
My wand'ring life (must watch the road: it's slick);
So poetry in steel and verse in glass
Will flow as if inspired by gurgling brook
And feath'ry lea - to hell with distant stars
By my car's lights outshined - my life, my poem!
The sun-glorious spring far shoots its healing rays
Amongst bulbous Bacchic buds whose leas
Intoxicate the soul unchained from winter's days.
And free neath open sky, seduced by music's mysteries:
The rush of the vernal moon flitting white upon the tide,
The sweetly mocking laugh of sun-drenched morn,
The storm running fore it flashing-eyed,
And the fruitful footsteps Ceres listens for;
--That rhythm, that beat, what can it be?
Horus stomping off to war with Seth,
With electric-mechanic efficiency,
In yearly vengeance for his father's death!
Is this, our martyrs' march, a gurantee of rich rebirth,
Or recrudescence of rebellion, on this errant earth?
At first he appeared in softest radiance,
Suffused with rosiness, infused with danc-
ing colors like trembling dawn upon the glass
Of the thinnest pellucid lake.
Then seemed a morass
Of inner fire, a fusion of forces that burned
With scorching heat and terrible hate. He churned
Up mocks and sneers and whining complaints, and slighted
The admiring boys and eager men--all fighting
For his love.
He promised a diffusion of humid
Floridity for all our lives in his taunts and his lurid
Temptations to promiscuity: the tropical heat of his touch,
The swamp moistness of his kiss, the pungent aroma, as such,
Of his secret SPELUNCA--whether actually humbled,
Or forever inviolate--all grew to surround us as a jungle.
He became for us a beacon, bold and bright,
Beaming across the plain; and flashing, he would strike
The wistful visions wavering on the horizon's lane--
Himself like a delicate jar of pinkest jade
Enfolding a glorious truth of far reaching beauty--
And heralding the sunny glare where primal nudity
Couldn't hide, where the world's weary end would steam
Away neath that naif adolescent stare--
What dream!--
Still always threatening to burn our skins with his sexy
Possibility--our fantasy--his coquetry--
Yet, how soon our bloated sun dripped west-pink light;
And he, once morning's star, dragged up the night!
Pinheads tapping on the floor -
The great clouds outside, wafting white and billowy behind the scrapers of the sky -
R-ring r-ring -
Squeaky voice leaking thoughts -
The clouds puff out -
Slam the phone down -
Typewriters, copiers, calculators, duplicators, facsimiles, folders, inserters, meters, registers -
That one convoluted cloud, nimbly cornering the taphic slab of steel and glass -
Enfolding thunderbolts in its vastness -
What springs from its forehead fully armed? -
Imagination, as real as it (just as formless) and the building beneath it (just as firm) -
Far darting -
Beauty and truth, truth and beauty -
A call to make -
Tome, drone, bone, phone, moan, known -
Busy -
Do it now, no delays, get it done, finished, over with, accomplished, past, forgotten -
This job -
The cloud is spreading its white fingers across the blue blankness -
Westwardly to the sinking sun -
And eastwardly they march, the city's office keepers, to the night, the weekend -
Oblivion sandwiched between each oblivious week -
R-ring -
One last call (he wants to get done on Friday afternoon what he didn't accomplish all week) -
Lay the receiver gently in its cradle -
The cloud fully dissipated, blankets the blue, lids the sun -
Ragnarok -
Could this be the end? -
Fancy, fatuity, reverie, dreams -
As real, unreal as all the objects around -
I close my drawer, lock my desk -
I file my folders -
I pile the papers -
Neatly -
Fully expecting Monday morn -
Token? -
Dime for transfer? -
"I write these words for Castor, brother thane;
Whose earthly-hellish place I take awhile:
My immortal powers conquer mortal bane
While he rides equine flesh o'er terrene mile.
His flesh my soul in alternation file
To spark the seasons' twisting whirl anew,
To shine as beacons for the sailors' trial
When worldly worries rile life's simmering stew.
But if combined, we skyey twins would rule -
Then fault to remedy, the weak to strong,
Of all our qualities would meld into
A gem of hardy, adamantine song:
Orpheic sleep could sweetly numb our brows,
And in imperial lethargy we'd drowse."
Delicate trembling on the quivering line
Departs as soft, low colors descend
And quiet scintillation desists;
Now violent cacophony,
The uneasy intemperance,
The weird extremities expressed unduly,
Distress our quiet thoughts.
O easy rhythm dancing life does mark for all of us mere mortals--
Where I do turn, there the twinkling lights, there the tapping feet, the
swaying curve of ivory limbs--
Yet there--everywhere--the blood and gorge, fear and hate--
metal on metal and the crashing screech of fierce intemperance--
It's that idiocy of the complete vastness--variety--of the World, the
terrible, violent, unsympathetic, cold, indifferent Universe.
A sweet-scened reverie upon one spring--
It caused a slight splintering of my indolent mind,
The hues dancing wild, the taps flittering free,
Like tiny china pieces showering the ground
In freely falling pindrop glints.
This was a time of soft sleep,
The numbing caress of breathing waves,
Yet turbulent, chaotic, brutally rough,
The continual waft of somnolent insomnia.
And so this sudden splash of dreamy image
When through sea-caverns loud with sound
I came upon an open field of green...
"Du bist mein und ich bin dein..."
These tinny rebecs string me light,
Yon hurdy gurdy turns so low
--Cithern, Psaltery, Dulcimer!
Mother Mary's the only answer:
The ideal of chivalry Mont et Chartres!
The sun,
Forcing its dull, yellow heat
Down upon his head,
Singeing the brown hairs on his neck,
Blasting away all thoughts'
Pressing his reddening shoulders
With a weight of searing heat,
Burns also the grass, the wafting grass
And the black-green leaves of the grove, swaying, whimpering on the wind.
This is summer's day
Dread danks on grey
To bell sky o'er billowed hay
Like turquoise soft with sweet tokay
Like a summer quiet it lifts light,
Like the cooling dawn reddening on the humid night.
No more visions of ghostly tombs of hard, flint stone.
And now, wheeling in their own sweet reveries,
The birds cascade and rush, high and free, each alone.
To burn with fear in a riot of meanness
Is the sole cold gift of a scalding sun.
The flashing, glinting wheel of steel
Upon a pallid cheek was gently blessed
Who aged while seeking youth, by fragile breaths.
What thin word, emasculate, wild,
Can twine through shadows of my heart,
Or trace the wicked turnings of my mind?
The cloying tunes cascade upon our indiscriminate minds,
And over sun-glared highways speed we past the garish lights;
The searing heat envelopes all our gradually numbing senses:
Our feckless rage, mercurial cheer combine in dull immenseness.
And one now dreams of rushing waters,
Of softened scintillations lapping,
Of coolness creamily enwrapping
Against that rocky thought that falters.
Splash!
And suddenly borne up on a surge of spray
At last
To a land of dreams beyond this worldly fray!
Over the bumbling crowd, eagle eye for a Trojan prince,
Mumbling loud in his regal flight, stonily he squints:
For who should there be but Dandies
Feigning a monopoly of aesthete,
Trying to be so indiscrete
To prove their special status as souls
And not the merest emptiest machines, mimicking common humanity's
Roles.
So pushed upon a column of air,
The insubstantial, invisible bier
Of insects and birds tossed here and there,
Wafting to tempting lights on the shore,
Tapping, click-clack, on a lantern's glass,
Or sizzling in the fire, on the electric bulb so hot,
Ending their quest, their chore,
At last,
As they become little more than the thinnest blot,
He dares his final, soaring pass - a shot!
He plummets silently down toward the indifferent earth -
muddy and brown, turgid and dull -
The air, the wind whistling, hissing against his ears, his burning ears -
The gay lights of the empyrean sphere indistinguishable, untouchable,
blurred.
A low, soft hum as he, without sound, sloughs into the tossing sea.
That one awakens. And we careening towards horizon blend into
The radio's blare: materialism's numbing pitch that mesmerizes.
Literature's lonely escapade
Of word and image:
Describe the red-burning sun or weakly wavering yellow moon -
Let alone an inner joy or confused, exhausted conflict:
When up and round supercedes in alternation the rising and falling flat
and sparse.
That inner joy bobbing on a cool, blue surface -
No, fierce, sharp like any mortal pain,
In sole possession of the sweating mind, inescapable concentration.
An animal's instinct is tough, invisible,
Or like Buridan's ass it, too, with indecision frought?
The dewy sprinkler water gently oozes from each lone gold white red petal.
There -
A blur, kaleidoscope, whizzing and whirling, turning the mind through all
its hues and lights
Round, dashing it to the ground in tiny china slivers, spraying with
tinkling sounds, laying a glinting sparkle suddenly down.
There again -
The narrow, compact view or the shattered wide variety.
This beast, this snarling hound in Potter's lane,
His bloodshot eyes like hellish, reddened coals,
Upon the dusty road keeps me to stay,
While I would hunt the woodland's nimble roe.
O would I were a brutish hero strong,
Then I would grapple with his frothing jaw;
I'd snap it off and swing it 'gainst the throng:
My enemies in life's fierce gee and haw.
Now sets the sun and rises blood-faced moon,
Reflected in his smoldering, smokey eyes;
I'll call her name to help me fight my doom,
To teach me truth to fight this world of lies.
Across her face a blackened shadow falls;
Then night is full, and dog and I are lost.
We fight for Theban kingship;
We two decide the battle of the seven;
We of one loin are;
Yet opposites …
His dark hand touching mine with stinging heat,
Grabbing hold to fling me through the air,
He is by my nightside always watching, watching …
May we die together,
He crying with no words,
I sighing "My brother, my enemy …" ?
No, not like the classic tale,
I'll close my eyes and sleep forever:
He'll reign instead;
The dark old moon will shine no more;
The year will never see the sun come round …
Yet he'll die too, old, wrinkled, gray;
And snow will fall and wind will blow, ignorant of what we played.
I
Wild, thrice-whistled wind,
Thru thickset, twisting trees,
Lays its yoke of seeds,
As a laurel upon my hair,
Blown from the starry north.
II
Splashing, spattering rain,
Gushing from the potent sky,
Floods the pregnant earth
And floats the child in his tub
To the nipple-peaked mountain top.
III
Hear that lonely bark,
Echoing from some hollow yard,
Of Deaths' companion chained,
Perhaps, to an ancient wall,
Guarding the moonbeams there.
IV
A new-spun silver moon,
A scimitar that burns the gorse,
Blood-faced queen I am,
A shield of white repose,
A hissing on the moonless shore.
V
Stretched upon a cross,
High upon a hill,
As the red sun to dust,
Beneath the zenith fell,
I was burned to ashes so I could enter hell.
VI
I am crippled and stumbling;
And she hoots at me,
Offers a spear to my dark-faced twin,
Laughs when he hurls it thru my waning heart,
Cries when I fly to the oaken tree.
Worms ooze from the sloppy earth;
And a brown bird descends
Gliding, flickering it wings,
Gliding on the warming autumn air
Gently skimming the dewy grass.
So thought thinks upon itself,
Coils and recoils, intertwining.
And dull warmth steams about my ears.
My head is heavy, buzzing in a low drone.
The sun is yellow-bright.
The heat rises high.
The air is clear, jeweled with greens and blues; -
My mind drifts far into the whiteness,
For there's a shining star out there.
In the cool clear blueness, blackness,
High above the curved earth,
Far from all humanity,
To a clear, bell tone of a white, far star.
Thus mind eschews the body;
And, Cartesian, we wander,
Round and round upon the mud,
Thinking with our minds of yonder.
Where the clean blade that will cut
Our thoughts from our skins?
Where the even jointure which, broken,
Will solve the jigsaw of mind and matter?
The distant vision,
Of which countless dreaming poets sang,
Spews sentimental mist
Upon my yearning brain:
Still golden-haired and young,
The Maiden smiles,
But with sultry stare,
A luring hiss
From blue eyes and red lips,
Her sharp, white teeth,
White-capped like the nine waves
Crashing on the roaring shore.
When I leap onto that shore,
My other foot's still on the prow;
And the white-hot moon
Pulls at the sea and takes the bow,
The shooting pain almost tearing me in two,
My twisted leg now fit for cothurn-boot.
So she moves among the crowd,
And I the actor play:
But the vision's lost to the hounds,
Who bray, who bray.
And I hear the gathering waters
Which wash the dead elders away.
What did he say?
"When That within the coffin fell,
Fell - and flashed into the Red Sea,
Beneath a hard Arabian moon
And alien stars."
The Sea I roam in mind is Indian, though,
Where had He slept beneath the soothing waves,
The calming sea, our mother's juice -
But he is trampled in the mud at Loos -
Oh, crack, crack, crack that awful rhyme,
That prolongs a short breath,
That quiets a scream,
That numbs any pain,
Mops up his blood.
He is dead, and I have lied.
I caught, this morning, the lone drone
Of buzzing planes, arcing and sweeping
High above where I pump my water:
And how they sounded in the catastrophes of their descending screams,
In the ecstasies of their ascending howls,
Like the end of the Year (for it was November),
Like the weak rattle of the waning god,
Charging yet dying, cheering yet moaning,
Sighing at last, gasping as an unknown ghost.
And how the children took up their toy planes, undiscerning,
Buckled themselves into their parents' cars, unlearning.
- Where the fire brilliantly burning
That can dash gold embers into their blind eyes?
A ring of shadows about my head,
As Winter's sun sinks in the west,
- Like druid stones from ancient time -
Begins to swim within the brine
And, circling, froths till ghostly white,
As I wait for my deathly bride
To lead me with her frosted hand
To the spiral castle on the northern camp,
Whose spinning, twinkling lights afar
Become the beam of one bright star:
A child whose head is banded round
By the silver circle of my trembling crown.
Blunden saw his red so bloody dull,
And Yeats an Incorruptible Rose in wine.
How may I describe the full
Hue of this book of mine:
Like the bright banners of disarmament?
Like the Princess's cloak at her wedding?
Like a woman's loving lips?
Like the blood-scratches on her hips
I make while dull with wine?
Crashing bore!
Ships bow knifes into the imperial shore,
Smashing sea and sand into
Translucent particles of the thinnest glass:
Unhued fragments flying
And turning and twisting
On the waves' flat floor.
No blood to cut upon a heathen face?
No sword to flash?
No oaken lance to hurl
Against a quaking door?
But a mist enfolds the pointed prow
In dark and pungent smells.
And like the mumblings of a sleeping sow
I hear the huge sea swell.
And often, within the darkness
I see the sudden flash
Of drear daylight harking -
Which I fear the more!
Mountain bare
Of wood and steel
Whose fine snow drifts silently upon the ice,
What specks of modern color lie
Embedded in your crevice?
Whose steely pins are thrust into your sides?
Is it with a haughty mind
Or complete indifference
That you cast your tons aside?
One by one those specks blink out blink in
In the free fall of avalanching snow.
You will them not to go?
You hold them fast against your rugged breast?
And what gay wind sweeps the snow in plumes from your aerie crests?
A mirror bright reflects the sky
Beneath a spreading tree.
And where alights the dancing dust,
Sharp glass's line is seen.
The light melts into placid lake;
The tree is black seaweed;
The sky is roof from ocean floor,
Wherein drifts silently
The dust dancing into nothing:
Black, nothing, and free.
With how sad steps, O Moon, you climb the sky,
How silently, and with how blank a face.
Who could stare at you with hope the lie
Is true: a kind queen rules the human race?
You stare upon us, not impure nor chaste,
And cast no sympathy upon our cries;
Indeed, you seem for human horrors braced
To dance with glee ere bloody arrow flies.
And yet, it is not you that's sad but I;
And you don't dance but keen and briskly race
Imperturbably across the sky.
So now it seems so smooth, this unpocked face,
As when you changed a man to moon-struck deer
And loosed the hounds to prey upon his fear.
The silence and the half lights
Pour serenely from the shadowed roof,
In whose hidden beams is trapped the dust of years;
And the thickness of air
Muffles the hum of the world outside,
Its smell recalling all my musty fears.
High in the windows
The burning warmth of God's colors
Dreamily muse upon the sifting thoughts inside,
Where the colonettes'
Thin cage lines
Are like the fillets of ascending prayers.
Look! Sole devotion
Of an angel's clasped hands
Betoken awful inner knowledge,
Next which common man's
Communion pales,
Gasping in the candles' splendid fire.
Now the echoing step
Of one who enters
Leads my mind to what I have become:
What I feared,
Who prayed long ago
Devoting life so that His will be done:
A mere herdling
In the world's fierce bustle,
Cast upon this rock awhile,
Like those I see
Also musing on noon's hour
Here and there among the wooden pews.
Splashes experience's wave
Upon the brittle rock of the self,
Where we defy the juggernaut state,
The ghost-white images of others' masks,
And our own deep, empty darknesses.
A crisp and chilly night I walked and knew
That cold knifed keenly into Polish breasts,
Whose corpses lay unkissed by dawn's bright crests,
So far away in that land's sudden slew.
When snowflakes circled round I came to know
A ring of steel around a worker camp:
Each fearful, hearing that the jackboot tramp
Was crunching loudly on the gun-packed snow.
Who could resist that cold which numbed all sense,
Which marched to inner chains a mind once free:
The body scarred by armored State immense
And hounded like some game from tree to tree,
And panting in the frost - like sweet incense -
- The soul's last free word, "Solidarity"?
A candle out of darkness lit white
Races its mirrored reflection of light
Across a gilded pillar, whose glass
Is ice to a hand that burns in fire:
Golden, flaccid, leaden pyre!
This is the morning of my love
The grave squeaking of the dawn
Bleak monster of the distant past
The just barely breaking yearning
Shooting fast upon the fields
Reddening pink to whitening gold
The fallow gasp long gone
Of night's fertile moaning.
Yes, the sand in the wind rubs the blandishments
Of anxious quests to burning blankness;
But does there not loom smoke's scents,
Writhing like snakes from the tomb,
A tawny voluptuousness?
O dark-eyed girl of fierce pungency,
- You lie naked like a feral savage;
You trouble sylvan fire with potent ravage -
Now hide bare bulb's hot lunacy!
I'll taste the lurid liquor of your pocket,
Savor the spices slapping as pain pricks
- Your very beauty vibrant like flame flicks -
As the hot light burns high socket!
...
Perseus dug Andromeda a pool;
In triumph rode the dusky beast,
Whose skin he'd tow, whose blade became an ivory tool.
Upriverwards rushing, an eager groom,
I, too, will break the dike and drain the pond,
Soon stagnant marsh, a swamp o'er which you'll brood.
A time of calm and rest
Marches in upon the shore,
Upon the sand we roam in heat.
There the town's excitement lies,
Flat like a drunken post-carouse,
Trampled under naked feet.
Some wait defiant as stones,
Unconvinced to social ease,
Doubtful like some barbarous braves.
But I bide the water's dazzling light,
Am stunned to blue indifference
By the pounding of the thunderous waves.
Lo! the paradox of this tide
Which dulls with heat as it divides,
The reprieve of this timely pause
Which soothes us, secures us to endure its laws!
Tragic youth,
Breathe the slime cliche
Of sentimentality!
It's unsmart;
Businesswomen and sportsmen
Decry it:
But that vain penalty
Will be yours as you wish it:
Charm us with your old goat song!
Rise up, mountain bright,
Burn luxuriously in the night,
Cloud the mind with incense sweet.
There, upon the flat plain of thought,
Fat and gray, like the land's dreadnought,
Overwhelm with your dull power.
Like the icy floes to water grinding,
Like the cold air into cheek knifing,
Spew like flames our passive waves,
Gasping on your sun-red rock.
She's a coiled spring waiting for the plunge,
Her smooth hips moist with spice,
Her tuned lips hoar like ice,
Vibrant for his tenuous lunge.
He stretches thin above her, fully grown,
Breathing her pungent scent,
Drinking her breasts' ferment,
That in her hair he wipe his liquid moan.
I
In straight lines flares the sun,
Each fiery beam awash in lies.
Mists cut aglare.
So clouds they dun
and, acrid, burn my eyes,
Like the spokes of the wheel of which we ware.
II
Sometimes it'll rush upon me
That null the light is here,
While the wind spins and hums,
The brightness streaks about me,
Yet void of hope, dull with fear.
III
Now burning black the bars,
Clanging solidly down,
Safe behind them my face,
Silent, thick with stripes, strict with frown.
The thin tangent of aestheticism -
A gentle flick of one's epee,
Glinting in the sun's hard light,
A star-child to father's yellow smile.
Rock-red is the blood and stone-gray is the flesh
Awasted through mere anarchy.
Why not a retreat,
A rising through a tower?
Ivory is my mind, it suns my inner world,
Beams mainly o'er the flat, sad plains of the lost past.
A foil to Olympus, a whispering foil!
Leaves deathly green
Stifling a riot of yellow
And a band of red
Like a South Sea's cape
Burning to powder a meadow.
Ring of fire revolving
In upward spirals aflame
Chariot and wheels a-burning
Red-streaking high to the Wain.
Each stage, a corpus-shell is molted
A new, anointed robe is donned
There! clean, white
The dead, burdening body transfixed by light
Transfigured bright
And o'erbeaming a windless, waveless, rockless sea.
Like the one clock of occasionalism
You spring beside me heart to my heart beating.
Two machines set up before time
To meet here now in perfect parallelism.
Or is it that one follows a half-tick behind?
Umber clouds of fog a-roll,
Ominous hints of thunder blows,
In the twisting, twining folds within
An amber shape whose ashes glow -
An ember shape whose next breath is a flash!
The twain, entwined together with their boyish limbs -
They taste the hot breath of each other,
Gyrating their smooth, ivory hips.
Each a Hyacinth, a Hylas, a Ganymede -
No thought now of the future plain,
O'er which one hovers brightly on his lonely sphere,
With the other strapped by convention to the family tree -
He, watching the star with lonely regret,
Yet with a sense of inevitability;
The other, a burning indifference to the present,
With no memory of the past,
Just a beautiful burst above the darkened mass.
Words, significant beyond a mere
Expressive breath? Power to plumb the base
Depths of reluctance or mount the giddy heights
Of unrestrained desire? Or a middling norm?
To square your unmixed beauty, for that, dear,
I scratch these jagged lines in eager haste;
My strokes overreach themselves in hurried flights;
And yet, I can't illuminate your form!
Some round with light a flatly painted mien,
And steel may shape a stone or whittle wood;
And yet can ever they encapture sound,
snare the bird-wings of your body's swish,
The insect murmur of your warm caress,
Tune the wildness of your voice serene?
Against bell sky
It rings clear on the summer air
Midday Angelus, an efflorescence of brilliancy
Shimmering pride of its surface, silvery
This emerald green of the benighted isle
Almost yellow, quick-darting to the eyes -
Where the shadows fall
Dark patchwork of obscure fears
Forest green of the vengeful huntress
Black in its innermost, convoluted depths
To the swaying skeleton of twig, the unmoved branch, down
To the firm, brown
Earth.
I want to chuck this all in a hurl -
Do some awful violence to the blank otherness.
Full of vim, would present to the world my I.
But what punishment can it deserve?
Only what is for me.
And what penalty need this one?
The parti-colored spontaneity,
The free will in its spinning whirl -
Stretching o'er the cosmos,
Weighing like a glad god upon all things.
Oh yes, I know "where is thy sting"!
Damn it all, but I can only live like you!
Unlike, I watch the phantasm, phantasmagoria,
Like the proverbial luckless wretch, frosty-breathed,
Staring at the happy eaters inside:
The wide glare of the lights, yellow and white,
And the warmth seeping slowly through the panes,
On a winter's night.
Turning
Awry upon the flat pane of glass,
The clean washed mugs are spinned,
The parti-colored light upon the drunken flickers.
Surely you can hear outside
Machine gun stomping,
Juggernaut of Man:
Parade of industry, conventionality?
Upon my Word there'll be no flood,
For there's the sign upon the sky:
Cry in time, then, to the marching feet -
Immanuel!
On that, our night's last dialogue of silence,
"While I was gazing in the lovely eyes
Wherewith Love made a noose to capture me,"
I should have caught your dove-white hands in mine,
Have warmed in cradling hands those shivering wings,
Forbidden them the freedom then to fly.
Oh, uselessness of hope that binds delight:
Just to strain to snatch up you from you as
"Me from myself thy cruel eye" hadst taken.
I could not stretch my own wings any further
But hovered, ghostly, o'er those yawning caverns.
Where were "as black as Hell, as dark as night."
You had "led me, a slave, to liberty,"
Which bond I champed at that too final plunge.
Could I have trapped you in my lightning lunge?
There, I think, was the brightest irony:
To have plumbed those daunting depths when everything
"Hid in my heart" lay "open to thine eyes."
"Why of eyes' falsehood" hadst "thou forged hooks
Whereto the judgment of my heart" was tied?
Why this infatuation like the others?
Was there some flashing gleam that I descried?
But I gyred, tethered to those plummeting deeps,
"Commanded by the motion of thine eyes."
A silent Dante sung your Beatrice eyes,
A forlorn Will descried your midnight eyes;
Outside, a headlight shined behind your head,
A gibbous nimb for your Diana face:
Your trenchant eyes were deepest in that light,
Their binding beauty blackest for the white.
Her eyes, the beauties of the night.
Her face, a glowing of the white
Flame inside. And when she walks
It is with a languorous glide.
Her voice, like water lapping cool
Upon the salty beaten rocks,
Mocks my wave-tossed mind and seems
To drown it in a darkening pool.
I cast my hopes upon her lips.
From which come words so cruel, so sweet;
There I earn my justice meet,
Result of our fingertip duel.
Her ears untuned to my voice,
Her head averted from my smile,
Proud but shy she plays with me,
As with a toy, as if a trial.
Words spill too easily from one
So wordy, passive, lone as me,
Seeming just another lie,
Another sex-sly crudity.
So how can she believe the truth?
A flattery? A compliment?
Care? Desire? In love? In chase?
- understand, how, my haste, my ruth?
Reject if weak, reject if strong,
To be this way or that I fear;
Whisper "Sweet" or mutter "cruel":
Either way, I'm a fool, I'm wrong.
Her strength, my clumsy weariness,
Each other fare a complement:
Yes, but then upon my face
To sense the fleeting breeze of hair!
Sombre,
a pain, muted flat by sharp degrees,
Dun, my sky without its moon,
My stars crepuscular,
Suffering sad a-twinkling.
Rhythm of my heart,
Who can not hear you,
This sigh, this moan,
Washed-out in weak pastels?
Oh, the Wheel wends:
I hear its distant whine of steel
And see its spokes sun-bright!
Weighted to be drowned in the sea,
Stretched to be nailed in the sky,
The killing crash of the foam,
The blinding black of the void,
Sink, O heart, or rise:
My love sails with wings away from me,
On a limb, on the wind, my K -
Gentle
A breeze
Blows winding shafts sweet tufts of your hair
Black
Night with the stars
And in your eyes the blackest stars
Skin
White mounds soft O my head my lips
My hand o'erreaching
Our tears
Your sad yet beautiful denial
My forlorn loneliness
Our clothes
tangled O my hands a-clutching your hands
Hard and soft on me
Our bed
The grass the wet green-black
The night sky a-dawning above
Come
to me with me
Our bodies writhing pumping in our love fierce love
O rhythm O beat
My heart your heart
Our heavy breathings
Soft hush hot our breaths hot hush hush
My sweet my one
My own for now my one true love
Glorious Eos comes
Tripping now with light
Light on our dark love
Come O come
Light the day our way is done
It's over and lost
O love
O pain
Loss is my one true love
Country Kin,
Cool upon my face your liquid breath:
Who are you?
Crystal face,
Full and creamy like your lolling breasts:
Whence come you?
Kiss me full,
Free my stirring passions moist and fresh:
Why have you?
Love me keen
Bring my saddened soul your flush caress:
What can you?
Shattered on the sharp points of her broken beauty,
This, ah this, is the dream of my ecstasy:
In the wild rush of her cataclysm white,
To be flung to the awful freedom of the air,
Like a fish silver in the sun,
Like a bird pirouetting down,
From the sudden crash of a thin plate, cracked,
The slap in fun on white thighs, smacked,
To a cool, dark underworld,
A sunless, starless, whirling pool.
When tired eyes take a voyage of delight
In a dreamworld of hues and forms,
When the person drops its self-sense
And the mind loses control of time,
Images and symbols drift up swift from the past,
With which the hopes and fears of the now are shy,
And all around the dizzy, drunken universe spins:
This, then, is the panoply for which I yearn each night!
I sink silently, softly through a dusty frame,
A square view, quick-shuttered, of the racing crowd,
Untouched, unheard, unfelt,
So that my love herself walks in a dream,
And I can't, whether soft or loud, make her hear her name!
O, if I could shut my eyes,
In this world would I sleep,
And here, at least, wouldn't dream?
We are separate forever,
And only this salty-teared vision is left of her,
And this yields no escape for which I yearn:
A flash in the day of a rifle's butt,
The blare in the night of the siren's horn!
The sky is dun, a softened tone,
Upon a day whose password is a groan,
Within a tumbling bus whose metals moan...
Silent riders with their bones quite cracked,
Demon driver who betrays a laugh,
As on a tossing boat whose doomed are trapped...
Do wait to be drowned in this sea?...
Or burned in punishing fire we?...
Lulled and waked, alternately?...
Where in truth the fire of love,
Where still the ocean's deep?
Just a hue of grayness like a dove's
Hovering passionless above the deep,
Humming wings that bring monotonous sleep.
Why is a memory frail?
And, then, why again, the image, never truly concrete,
now so beyond fadedness?
All I can see is a flame-whiteness of skin
and her coal-eyes, black.
Sharp, that is the only sense -
a hot ebbing pain -
where even this will soon be lost to me!
No more games of acting-out sadness,
no jokes about the gruesome self-wrought possibility -
what a phony life that was!
From the inner fever of my mind comes a soot,
upon what I once saw clear as a burning ideal,
a mask of grime.
I can nod more freely, be happy to jostle with the crowd,
the true adultness of my life opens before me,
a treeless plain under a temperate sun.
And all about me, in each mirror, I see, like an ignis fatuus,
but broken into fragile flickers,
my toothy grimace.
As one lone pipe o'erwhelms with plaintive call
And with its circles weaves an Orphic lull -
The unvoiced notes, the silent majesty
On which it grooves a dancing filigree -
So round the mind like ribs about the heart
And with titanic pain, without, apart,
It presses thoughts like blood with manic gleam,
Demonic edging to a panic dream.
O priest, forgotten by mechanic time,
Nor rough beast waked by your olden lyre,
Can still anoint us men with blood-red wine,
With lance's point fix star of golden fire?
Bemused, inspired, in ecstasy, succumbed?
Can art exalt a mind with sweetness numbed?
Andante plectrum chords, in measured walk
About a court whose garden smells unfold
Like secondary notes that beat the air:
What plaint they keep in folded hands unsung,
And where the maiden tor to which they'd string
Their thorns' red rose of cambered sound?
O march! O dance! O joyous harmony!
O yearnings crashing on the rocks of fate!
To court in my mind the umber of her embrace,
the soft smell of her amber flesh,
To savor in my hopes her dank taste,
in my dreams to hold her lankness...
Now pause, with upraised stick, you Arlecchino,
To threaten, ne'er to hit, this Pedrolino.
What is it that I wish?
On your tricksome, trembling petals
To float a wavering kiss.
Strings and sirens
Unctuously moan
In the tired night;
And there, wavering bright,
That indiscriminate lure
Of blasted hope...
But from this discordant sea,
A sight of land of yellow dust,
Where roaming winds
Whip up the hair and sting red the face,
Where buried deep in sandy graves
Lie gods of everlasting stone...
In each, kings and queens reign noddingly,
False action or strained vision,
And in each we can walk or sleep,
With gestures of stumbling decadence,
Or dreams of soundless falling.
To fire your heart with my tongue's appeal,
To toll sadly of my love's dull pain,
To dash on the rocks of hope's contempt,
To breathe free on the winds of mellow days,
Forever to laugh to oneself of this foolish dream...
Blank door, unappealingly scaled
To slam your block against my free range,
Here's the paint with which your mean face
Will take a hue of cool obscurity!
In that pool I will mention
The word I had studied for my love.
Night will overtake all sense,
Reason forsake the heart,
To leave me drowned in its unbitter dew.
There memory would soothe my sight
And weave my unctuous dreams -
As if a marish lie
Would blot the past's mistake!
But I eliminate that hope,
fatuous, unfulfilling, untrue;
Closed tight, ineluctably,
On this threshold of the now I wait,
For the steely grin of the one sublimity!
The calm of peace,
The warmth of joy,
Why does it not spin us like a child's toy?
This modest masque,
This interlude,
Why not like a starry flash,
But like the diurnal sweep of noon?
Not tragedy, not revelry,
But a soft, a bright, a cool, sharp
Tower of serenity!
Hear not the breathing of conspiracy in secret places?
Taste not the mellifluous mixture
Weighing down all and about, this sweet syrup?
For what wagon will carry,
Where can we go,
This sibilant honey sickens us so...
And like the tapping of thin-slivered nails
Hear now spoons on caldron sides slapping?
A bubble's sphere is
Crystalline white and burns
A face uplifted calmly
As it lights,
Then dies
In an anguish of constricting torture.
So music
Binds my heavy heart
With wreaths of ever-convoluting rhythms,
Which break in hisses like the low tide sea.
And hope spies
The world through love-darkening pains,
So that her face, so bright,
Is indescribable at night.
O rose-wind wrapped clouds
O'er purple-blue mist morning,
Do you burn from the pain of the fierce fire
Of the stalagmite city rising?
And your steel-sharp waters
That from full folds pour gushing,
Will they dull the grief that comes to us swift
In a pool where we'll dream, drowning?
This sudden chill
Which wends first witchingly,
Then through me
to a final thrill,
Yes, then, what force or beauty or sadness
Can ever with such power
To slay, to spill?
Is it true that a Hunter
Fiercely chases with infinite speed
Hurrying and demanding
A hue, a call, a blast on horn,
To me, ah, me
Light as air
Flashing quick like lightning
O Orion eternal with bow bent
The ever far-darting arrow
With infinite speed shooting past the stars
Like the fading of some evening as the sun unlights
Then the mad dare rush of morning fast o'er the city's heights.
There's a bull-footed god in the park,
A Dionysus of sweet alabaster.
Then over a crackling wireless "U-N-I-C-E-A,"
And lo!
The great bull horns are the rack of a mighty buck,
Which stumbles, groping in the mud with its slender legs,
While, behind, chasing with piggish squeals,
Charge the tracks of a tank over the trench.
New breathing life that grows within,
While she, in the deepest slumber I have known,
Casts her face in a solemn pose,
And I, looking deeply inward at things to come,
Reach my hand to the covers to fuss and dote.
In the hallway mirror
Our faces reflect the generations past,
And, as ripples in a pool smooth the surface concentrically,
The hues of shades of a hundred ghosts ago
Start to limn a finer, rarer graving of our race.
Is this the face, freed from this frame,
Whose living envelope the wind will chafe,
Or will it sense only that the treetops have shaken in the breeze?
Beauty has a heart
which beats within
And where life quickens.
I heard the pulse
And wondered at its consciousness.
How that mechanic verse
Is a preface of an ode to all life's pain and good.
How that measured surge
Swells into the freedom of personhood.
Time then spreads sheets of possibilities
To score, and note, with the polyphony
Of things possible, the crush of limits
And flights of egoism.
Our daughter we've called Katie,
And in those two sounds
What echoes
Is a shout deeply within me
That I be rescued
And the wide fissures of my self be healed.
But she is not here to redeem these failings,
But her life to lead in the fullness we may offer.
If her name is purity and the serene
Whiteness of the night,
There is also an earthly complexity
And the fertile strain of the hunt.
Rush of night of air -
No sweaty skin steams
Only the dull cricket cadence.
Drone of automobiles, and machines in the air,
The stillness.
Where the rush of silence?
The night is my coverlet,
Uncomfortable.
Rush of blood heard in stopped up ear.
My quiet breaths in some kind of rhythm.
The ideal of beauty, the self-centered desire
Of G for Z.
And that pain of an autumn's hurt
Long ago, thinking of the earlier summer,
Past,
Of my fatuous fatuous love for her.
Black is this night
And tomorrow the payment is due -
My fear is that I'll fear -
My anger is that I've reason to be afraid.
An embrace, that touch, I can risk,
Her breath in my breath,
My hands, her hand.
The Brightness of air
Holds delicately the shallow shadows
Of deep black, straight rivers.
Next, the exhalations of white-gray cloudpuffs,
Or wheeled machines
Winding along ground lumps on concrete,
Or this airplane droning,
Bring haze into the air.
And those clouds herd their own jagged blue shadows
On the quartered fields below,
On white chalked-marked O's
And little pillbox houses with roofs of red and brown.
So, the gaseous vapors filter
Varied levels of ground shadow
And the haze and puff-clouds,
Topped by strato-clouds,
Blend mysteriously up through light to deepening blue sky.
External roar of engines,
Inner hiss of cabin air,
And the scratch I feel of pencil across notepaper -
The storm crashes outside, I'm tired
Raindrops splutter nervously.
Dots of rain drops
Upon the house sides and window glass
And ripped screens,
While the hot July air is scooped
By fans droning in the dark.
A crash of thunder, a boom!
Will the light that flashes
Sparkle like gems, glint like sharp metal,
Blind my eyes? Flash flames through
My eyes, through my brain.
Water pours, tinkling, splashing, gushing.
The river of my life rushing to the ocean
Of the all-in-void.
Melted ice, molten,
It cuts, burns...
(My tired eyes are swollen shut
Under red lids.)
In the distance, receding and proceding
The rut, a roar, rumble, bark -
Dark twin smites, I submit.
The diesel drones, an airplane roars,
Those cicadas saw me with wings' screams
And the bleating gulls encircle.
Sleepy-time for a drugged Lord
Nodding, ears a-buzz, in heat's humid
Comforter of the August afternoon.
From out this distant sky a bird
Warbles unseen, from the far east or west,
Noting its presence to none of its own.
Some incongruence of lush and worn,
Some quiet craziness askew in unstraight lines,
Some stench, some floridity, freshly spoiled.
Quite quickly, there's a stillness,
A rest, of silent counting,
That cushions the two cacophonies -
Plunge of life and death's eternity,
The hills, ravines, smoothed to flat
Monotony. Once remembered
Sweet, sour pain - truest, fullest identity.
What gets me off is when a savage beat
Throws my lewdness to a mob of lusts.
My sheet, a chiton gluey with my seed,
Philosophy, a disenchanted trust.
The boredom, of that have I been born?
The loneness, for that have I been marred?
My kin's a rabble race which takes the thorn,
Of angel's strain as inward reptile's bar.
As salmon rushes to its end, my spew
Of whiskey dreams unfurls the cycling streets
I cruise, exhausts the humid, flaccid stew
Of cars to kids, who navigate by heat.
White thread, youth's twill, maternal sewing room -
Along my thumb, around my thimble tomb.
Your death, our father, son, benumbed in trance
He swooned, unnimble, as it passed across;
Been out to pasture - death, with frantic dance,
Invited me, alive, this filial loss.
His clothes unwound from son to son by chance;
My ma, unwounded, bares a wifely cross.
Pillows about the head sunk down -
Warm, wet bedclothes are the gown -
One boy fritters deaths of seed
Imagines that neon lighted tomb
The glucose drips, Onan's breed,
Out of the eternal infernal womb.
From heart of regular irregularities
to sores, those sisters, these fraternal frailties.
Dignified to be single
Solitary in its same whole
Cloth, turned within , a body
This homos in his decent
Suit becomes in turn
Voluble volvulus worth
Its weight in grins -
Wrap, wrapping, wrapped.
White lines recede abut the road's edge,
Red lights vanish through night's pit.
A parallax of parallel draws black a tunnel, an empty well,
Verging, not diverging,
Like straws bent in twinship on a whisk,
Wrenched sinister.
When god's face rushes me doubly,
His blind lights consume me doubting.
When monkeys cavort on a lonely rock,
Stupendous variety in every mime,
As humans dance in a crowded room,
Stupendous variety on every mien,
Hidden in the pithecine gests,
Stands the moonish thumb,
Supernal, selenic, simian, snub.
In a cave of a sarcophagus of ages,
Or plainly beneath the blue bowl of sky,
Alone on the white-tossed waters,
Within the majesty of sharp ridges and black ravines,
Where rivers surge and rush alternately,
Where the red sun burns the stones mercilessly,
In the darkest of darknesses blind are the fish.
A tame mist in the morning,
The white, blank flatness,
The monotony of snow,
Kids like pencil scratches on the white back of ice.
A lost yearning,
What's lost?
Some hidden sudden joy of gods in youth,
The raw bloom of demons' rage.
At night, the starfield and priapic Orion sweeping silently.
One night,
Sleepy forced-open eyes,
Tire-rumbled concrete grid,
Toll beyond,
On-rushing me line,
Garrote of urban light.
- A dream,
Someone's old past,
Old me somewhere -
When night pinks to afternoon,
The wash of the west so strange,
Trees that bar the sun,
Wind that charms the head,
Pond-mud on his foot.
Vacillating,
Vaccinated,
Nostalgia of that noon,
For the shade of things to come.
Bug food
Self-created in the slime.
My lowness is lower than my words can go.
Toy of gods
Strummed to manic lust.
The higher I get, the higher we go.
Foul waters
Reflecting bright faces.
I betray their innocence by my urgent dreams.
Purged
Struggle no more.
My children sound silly with their savage screams.
Dance
The saraband
These Spanish-eyed ones.
His tiny hands in hers and hers in mine,
around a central pier of air we step,
And each to other bow,
Momentarily.
This temporary dream of a bug on the water
On the surface of waters on course to the sea
The tension of the surface unrippled and hard
The glass of the hardness like a mirror thin
Accustomed in the holding of its undivided shell
Enfolded within tissues of all a sudden warm
Quickened to life between the raging shores
Whereout inflated on its own fool's air
Wherein creeping like a crab
Alternating desire with retreat
Then cascading and foaming and surging
The water sparkling over the edge ends.
Bowl of blue to gray descending,
Furry ridge of trees in shadows,
Not a pinpoint of a terror-place
But spread wide beneath invisible stars.
Worlds joined not at war,
Water-colored in gray and blue and paling white,
Only radio towers in red and white
Like ladders for storming the town of god.
A tunneled road slashed through the trees,
Brown and black of branch o'erarching,
Suddenly wide are fields of tan
Grasses patted by a giant's hand.
Precious droplets enfold the air,
A nucleus of dust for each hollow sphere.
rains miserably
mystery sleek mystery
white brights red lights
arc from the gray wet high-
way
to the sky
a blank gray cloud
blinder than the deepest night
into the cloud I'd drive
miniscule
pinprick of light white
and soft sudden slaps
as the water sweeps the wind-
shield
so intermittently wipers
pass across this glass of mine
glass of delicate refracted light
and the black woods
looming on the left
hovering then slashing
onrushing swallow
sweep up all of me
sunlight dabbles on the shadows
of brown trees and grass gray-brown
tussled under rusted chain
fences
swept wildly in dusty tufts of tan
where white horse-fences
amble nonchalantly
There was an iceball sunward racing
In that spring's night sky,
Underneath the arc I was told to make
From the North Pole eastward.
Opposite, Orion, settled sleepily west.
And the dog leapt in silence
Never reaching that jeweled belt.
Pins of light towards the summering sun,
Pure white like bones bleached in the heat.
Their gladness was like a quiet bomb.
trembling fear
excitement rages all around
the half-man
the cold touch of finger
raspy death-rattles
hisses
cackles as she scrapes my balls
twining within
smooth flesh of the embrace
moaning limbs
folding the secrets
as he covers my half-moon
A metal knife rips thin
Where my chest is a face of no eyes,
The wound of which formed so
Of which my body's broth steams
Mouths a sibilant "oh,"
Remembrance of wounded lips
Pressed softly onto folded hands,
Whose father glances each hanging tress
Billowing down a bowing head.
A volcano bursts
words of woman's hate
flashing eyes and tears down a girl's face
The philanderer returned
casts himself away
unbound by the filigree net
Then the passion of the embracer
the obsessed-compelled one
bent over his object in pleasure's submission
The embraced-one's passive
marble form accepts all
the madness that he has drawn
Repetition the rite of family gods
inward turning to a cypress
or a laurel returning
Empti-day dream of day-glo light
sleeps in a hole of empti-night
a wide deep cave of
hard-to-swallow ice
pain o'plenty neath drifting snow
by sleep's mere-drug a-froze
oral fetal-suck
refuse offal
creeps hoar-frost on the mirror-world
breath-mist from the sigh
I nervously sleep alone
darknesses mass on our right hands
skin-spots calculated to stone
while left aside glimpsing skeletal-white
unabsorbed by our meta-dark
grins toothy grins reflect
or your familiar lullabies drone
Pencil dictate this fainting dream
there are demons on my lids
on the edges where lash knits skin to sky
they pine on the edges of my eyes
where a web curves fibrous glass
my male energy pierces those young eyes
weak with hungry lethargy
so comes the lightflash at my peri-stalk
of undesired drive to remorseless release
all I retain is the hard knuckle
of a demi-urge in my bowel
shrinking from skeletons of trees
that lurch out to cut me
bony limbs of winter-spring
as the half-life of pharmacy wilts in my stream
I come
greensward through a notch of shade
cow-eyed prey on a black path
in a clearing upon a statue without a face
tit-god of the empty clearing
from on high
from terrible stones of clouds
of shades of gray
in that odd light of the eastern sky
precious droppings hang like glass
beads of glass
in a fan blown across my face
and all I want is to submit
like the black boughs of trees
green with leaves
and spiny grass shoots
shot through with the wetness of everything
Sentimental beauty
frailty
in a ceramic cell of secrecy
treasured innocence
graved by my eye that
limns the slope of shoulders
and those limbs of slimness
It's a gray skin that shines black
against the back of the adult-store photo
or again in bursts of color
even the crux of the nude body
seems shadowed
And I imagine
skin of milky white
pores across which my breath
blows hairs already soft down
bent over
And again I return
retract from that vulnerability
disengorged
from that rapture gorged on that
capture
Away from burnt awnings of faded cloth
no longer red fringed and frayed
high by sleek orange cones
back of trucks flatbeds and containers
on a thick road
on a thin line red on the map
where grey numbers sit on confusing places
some places there are horses
some hippies
dusty companions abandoned carts empty lots
A creature
trapped in a stately forest
where the trees squeak memories
of native ghosts on their American journeys
I pass through the mountains' pressure changes
humbled under the sky high in white
where the blue film thins at ground
balls lightening over a white desert floor
before a city of colored beams of light
and when the sun breaks through
I squint at the airplane
that floats carelessly down
that's the dusky radio time
when the signal fades and I haven't spun the knob
and everywhere a road torn up repaired anew.
Passion of the odors
lullabies of the winds
the sweet riot
where green spreads for ivoryrose
apple buds bound by silver snakes
by the sleeveless arm of her fertile flesh
by the thin fingers of his reflexive touch.
Mystery of the whispers
of the mass of leaves
mystery of the dark
where the houses stand black
mystery of perspective
flat by the dark night blue
when the children tease
their pettiness is serene
and I wait for it all to end
and begin anew
clatter of words
martyrdom of sounds
mystery of the flash-heat
when the sun burns
mystery of my daughter's
"is this like a dream?"
Seeming to possess that which is that
above a great canyon
not dwarfed by its gap
but somehow nonchalantly
owning it
glimpsed through an ellipse of glass
in the airplane's wall
its third dimension
shattered to a pretty two
but I feel like a speck after all
alone
not part of its majesty
not afraid it is inhuman
without desire
Then cloud drifting downward
suddenly loom large hills
that hold you in
a palm of a hand that
would crush you
ribbons of highway
silence of bug-cars
that flat land with its heat and light
over a final sharp hill ridge twisting
perpendicularly to the line of flight
and suburbia welling up and sweeping away behind
awake arise
through this curtain thin membrane
to wondrous drug of breath
where sound is a rush
and the sun is a thrill
when its noon's high could seem pale
to shadows of gray-blue morn
dripping willows of yellow-green
and useless snowdrift fences left
from that time of
look ahead and look behind
and when the heated air of heavy afternoon lifts
for the humid lush of evening
with kids' calls, cars, and all that soft cacophony
the rhythm will be sleepy
it will not block the blade
two-dime flat beneath a pane of glass
penny-pensive at the vanish point
diags' depth simulators
drawn without time as the quartered-coin
where eyes resize as figures cross a back
ground laid out looping infinitely
dollop-dollar
green-blue-black-gray
diorama
blue-white green-black and blue again
tumbling shore of green whose
leaves form black shadows
that still stare in the light
the lapping under the piers is an
ostinado neath the whispers
and away
across the rippling water of
nearby tildes and distant dashes of black-blue
a siren howls
a tenor to the birds' trills
black and pewter-black and black again
where the double cord of trees dams the water
black twinned by grayer black along the
mirror glass of black water
above
white stars in the black
their own twins tossed on the lake-glass
like buttons of light or pebbles or gems white
while
nearby an animal splashes against the shore
Rid me of the lank noon
of the night without stars
of the morning that breaks so complacently
the hum of driven automobiles
the lock'n'load of office machines
swept into a sleep of remorselessness
I'd drift without dreaming
Sun dog aft of western ring
all its yellow stain in our eyes
blue ways green miles highway signs
cursive recursive rocket beat
amidst the concrete structure with rumble drum rumble
this simple motor speed is our rush
the keen steel city flies
up from the wet Missouri sticks
and she of the fall smiles
while I drive the sun
from the heights where the heat has bleached them
In the deep space where is the blank
a breathing sounds to me close
in this it should be a place of cold
gravity pulls my personhood still
but any light I see
is it near or far I do not know
and panic would burst me apart
about those majesties of amoebas behind my lids
circle beads on spittle threads
from within each a nuclear furnace roars
or a fluttering of the gentlest leaf
fallen from the tree in back
startled by a nudge within the tomb of a bump
shuddering like a shattering like a sudden thrill
Ringman quartered in a daisy circle
of colors and loudnesses
while swinging overhead slender and white
he arcs gracefully
and clutches the bar on each downfall
sandman paintman
thousand clowns
parti-colored in purple-blue red-flamed in orange
adored with yellow-straw locks poking out from their sloppy caps
while amazed we gasp as his whiteness
arcs beautifully up there
When father kissed me with his craggy lips
brimmed with the half-stale breath of ancient sleep
I floated above the earth's canyons
whose shadows foretold the deep caves lightless within
could then the sky's rain have filled those caverns
across vast distances where sun and night oppose their rules
his eye beheld male delicacy in a tear
his hand my hair caressed with grace
his member my mother impregnate becoming
became the further reaches of my embrace
shimmering beauty that electrifies
dangerous fillip of those amorous eyes
quintessential bounty of the surpassing sea
silly lies and lonely half-truths of
all the sensible choices that he rues
of the waste of the loneliness of the holy
mass of his ejections incomplete
his sorry state impels him to everlasting lust
of anger madness blood and sport
the furtive run the lope the unanticipated
sheer glee of his human hate
There was a play in the motions
some game of passing by
winning was in the moods
the pretty pose he affected
in the rush of wind about his ears
there was a silence of speeches
the figures who loomed around him
dimmed darkened diminished
so that an eccentric thrill enveloped him
Water of December
unfrosted her
liquid lullaby of her loveliness
and the charm of her self-reflectiveness
disarmed all around her
sprinting on her sea of legs
evolved the light of the mirror
held before her
she-monster of the maternal
dope-friend paternal
the agency knows
wearing chains of silver in the news
pride in his battered badges
I wear his bruise
The pale sky rises
translucent without waves
where he of the August noon gags
on its flat December
lie of the brown lawn
pressed airwards
lake of his blinkless eye
wind whistle
in the looming dusk
when the lamp of his young sun's a memory
Sacrifice of youth
rack of lamb
embraced by your ropes
I bend my neck
encircled delicately
with your cord my chain
my apple your jewel
will your knife slash inside me
will your towel snuff my breath from me
from the crime scene photos
cashed for the prize
there with the flash
I'll always shine
a part from the shadows
where I'll call for you
inside the darkness
trembling cold for you
over the lines of lush green
lines of brown men rush
an attack on our feeble town
about us our neighbors
faces without eyes
hands without bread
out of the mouth a scream
as my son gasps with the cuts
hands fluttering round his head
a grunting man atop me
spits his pleasing water
a bloodline of new family
from the silence a cicada
drones endlessly
drains the day of light
lidless I of the reptile
sleeplessness of the lizard
death tranceof the stone devil
eyes upon alit with grace
their inner fire within deep smoke
she's a will o'the wisp above the reeds
brooding in her decay
a hand affirm upon a choke
as sprung from the dregs of seeds
still solitary stalk on marsh
her fire by pillar by salt by day
from the lullaby of her father's charms
beyond today tomorrow leads
an elected lover she'll for broke
wonders wandered in her way
Our pilgrimage to the stars
over our heads like a wheel
while neath us the earth teems
rots and refreshes endlessly
there that house of ours
where mirrors oppose
reflecting each to each
a ghost's image of yesterday
but here the lawn is flat
green is its expanse and empty
love I gaze in your eyes
where I seek the blue sky
where the black pools
and you and I hug each other's aching
watch our next step is a leap
lil lee arches backward on the mattress
morphing electric dreams
while maury unjars the oily creams
of his domestic charms
for bent with the hand's fingers
within the twisted sheet rolls
that also fill their faces' holes
is the warmth of the truth and the triteness
the distant roar in the pall of noon
slash of the heat that stuns
warbles the unknown bird of her youth
in the crinkle of the anxious moment
dank mystery of the wet clouds
of a fog darkly looming over his errant hand
which upon her sunburnt shoulders wants to tramp
it dammed a river to twice as wide
spring snows from white flared blue by orange heat
crossed mechanically by a concrete line
her pools of liquid blue
pursed lips of red wine
the star flash when she laughs
he succumbs unresisting to those and
her soft breathings in the night
on his hand stirs the pencil hairs
this room's window bowls against the blackness of the night
where streams of shooting stars stripe the darkness
as his eyes' pupils' deep black pools
refract the whites of friendship's smiles
sharp like the teeth whose edges slice the silence into bits of anger
from the mouths of those he likes to clowns
His greatest madness was lost love
The self made invalid by lost love
the impossible boredom from lost love
unreachable edge towards lost love
airless void out of lost love
his sun of sun's black lost love
heats his petulant fury with lost love
so that as a babe he spits lost love
It's enough of a late Saturday
afternoon sun pressed golden
greens and blacks of the ice-still leaves
at the end of the slide on the tar-stained road
over the bridge over the water
blue gray flattened by the heat disc south
in a moment of clipped brilliancy
its pattern measured on the ground
of tumbrels of shadows to the sky
from there booms the storm
black jagged with white
furiously on the flats
the rain-drill on a house of crystal
where moles of hothouse air muse
in reverb like canons of the middle age
Eyes
her eyes and his blank face
of her sisterhood and his lies
her inner fire lusts
and he fades as the sun splashes across the waves
young boy and older sister
trace the ever-arcing curves away from each others' lives
she of the sharpest facial beauty
the skin of her arms warm with glacial fury
his man-handled rope of wine
the luscious slip of her white snow
is her paramour's evisceration
while he just out of his humbling bee dream
solves a puzzled head with coolness
from the sleep of her afterglow
Healing and slaying
coupled organs
breed my special joy without reflection
slashing of throats
becomes heavenly decapitation
a mixture of mythos insubstantial
as I over the one's body
breaking its living pulse
I'm ever turned inward from out
part of the mob of killing men
straying into a village of souls
claim our evil lord a bug
If he saw the wind it would be shadowed
fan of Japan
arcing round
against the puff of clouds
against the grey blue sky
balloon of dots
wingspread blots
as if they're drunk on the air
bedazzled by the glare
when the fierce sun strikes the
land's things motley
with their colors and the
all-over black
till the lover with a face blocks all
Corn's grey sentinels stand along a tear's trail
wherein the shadows gleam expecting
harvests of hopes' burials
so that the graves limn stone histories
of the white men
burning suns of days after days
vanishing nights upon nights of the stars' wheels
across the prairie to the Great father's seed-water
we were drunk around the people's story-fire
dancing of our puny glory
we are rivers dry blood congealed
for our Father's breakfast
The green glass cries when the sun
strikes it in the late noon
squares of glass which are trapped in steel
upreaching from the place of gray
where midst of ribbons of roads
cars for nightfall dash
Lazy hands float sky whence
in the gray of the wet evening
their ice fingers shriveled in the collapse of their fathers' branches
all the black road aswirl with their walking zombie dance
of the Fall of the year
Fire.
It crackles and the wood sticks are murdered in it.
They turn and snap, sparks upward streaming.
They are red and quickly vanish but
their burnt dust catches in my nose-hairs.
Like with spring sap, I get high on this smokiness,
which makes my in-breath of air deadly stale.
Into my ears comes a roaring, is it my blood-pulse?
The dense song of my father's last breath,
or the fit-sleep I'm wakened from by my wife's poke. You're snoring.
Pixels white and black nearly hum.
Smooth the naked skin on rocks so rough.
Piece by piece the silent program plies its moves.
For smooth my flesh on flesh which grayly
limns the dirty fabric of the chair
whose wheels squeak so.
In the soft white light of the black pixels,
with the toneless click the next image loads.
For the still splashing of the waves,
on the rock unwet for now,
the water sprays silver arcs of droplets never falling
on his smooth skin.
Aghast at the sudden wet.
The looks show that I've lost it,
my explanations bumble as the spring-heat
over rotting daffodils.
A rasping snore breaks wind intermittently.
They all look like their foreheads will hit the table.
Merciless and bored, I too want to fall asleep.
Traffic noise from the streams of cars below
push up against the pane of glass boxing
the air of the room in here.
No birds float in the dead blue,
the road-ribbons, the traffic, intertwine, over and over,
to the limit of the land with the sky beyond.
At the kitchen table the young male's
screams from the front yard
wash with the morning light over the newsprint,
word by word, as the sun removes the nightshade.
His sister's teasings are the pleading I can't hear
of the new bird-babes in the backyard.
The foreign photos printed on the paper
receive this day's dust particles,
drifting down from the night through the light
from out the sky through the screened window
through which the children's playtime seeps.
Spring-sap of the trees, some of whose branches
ache across the window light with naked, crooked limbs,
others lush the day-green of twittering leaves.
I stretch over the editorial,
searching for the end word to the front word
of the bumpy sentence of up and down letters
in black-type Garamond 10.
She's almost ten, smarter and older, free and cruel, longwinding,
and he is mad and happy in a flash after flash.
There are shadows in the water-world
where the soda's edge seeps across the table.
Also between the sky of stars and the yard's night-gloom
grey cloudlands drift above our eyes.
The stars are too dim and distant, too few by the city's glare.
When I point out the brightest it seems unsure in its twinkling.
For now the mosquitos' arm-pricks
bring little lumps to swell on our arms,
like the morning's neck crick
is birthed by the tangle-feet of the nite-wraps.
Peace is the jolt of grownup conversation,
know-it-all and know nothing.
The dog akimbo launches the jumpy lawn chair
and we laugh. Restless peaceless night.
Hums and shadows and the great wheel overhead unclear
in its counter reflection in the spill below.
There the conic shades where the walls meet,
where the corner line props the ceiling
behind our palpable bodies
lumped around the floating, motionless table.
Hear our breaths urgent,
the drone of our speech irritant,
from out of our massive bodies
pooled around the floating table.
We colored balloons before the flat canvas beyond,
where the light and the shade demarcate each other's bound,
as we cower on the motionless table.
Even in sun I see the dark side of things,
piercing pinprick of sunlight beaming off cars,
wash of grey of highway,
flat pale blue sky
like the chemicals chemism that wash my brain,
intra-somatically produced,
the masque of death at the end of trivial--
beauty becomes trite
anguish compression pressing me--
but what is this pain?
then sudden this too fades,
there's a fence around my peril,
bluebells and whitefluffs in green and black
away on both sides of me,
behind only null warmth where the embers cool.
Those silk-hairs bend down coyly
as my breath strolls across
the motley islands of her skin.
An aroma wells about my face
as intimate sighs undulate across
this rhythmic vibrata of her taut flesh.
When my blood thickens and my mucous drains
from my temples,
when the sharpest proximity distends
and our souls overreach and retract,
the shells reclose so that the clammid pall of
our bodies' lumpinesses are one on one.
Then a sigh I hear,
whispers not mine,
and out of syncopation
that wayward respiration.
I once thought of
a white lake as white as the moon on a cloudy nite
where overhead were bishop's birds in rising spears of red
as I felt it must be so
but what was odd was that the sky was black, black behind
these words spread as stars in rigid arcs on the surface of it all
because once before, a while ago,
that blue-white sky loomed voraciously
over water, deeper than the purple of its waves;
would I be imagining then green-entwining weeds
or panfish of soft pewter
just beneath a glassy membrane,
on which the savagery beats its wings?
So gray are the billous clouds
hanging, no drooping as if a shroud
adumbrated the earthenware of small works,
whence the passacaglia's theme repeated
drops gray cadenzas of its obvious beat.
If there's a striation in the sky
and the music plies and separates,
if filaments' withered leaves avoid,
as the slicing time denotes,
then coverlets suppress all this green
and this cloudy comforter sur-sumes our ball.
Where the lush ferns bristle
in the wafting day-steam,
The dreamt of,
When the gray sky-bowl nestles
the black-white of the all-froze,
concave steamed convex
as clarity exudes the red-blue fruit of poison-berries,
This dream,
When the slush secretes over eyes
and the road's foot-sounds be distant muffled.
If I were my brother
and my father's skin hung loose about me,
if he could see his son's supple flesh
or the skin-line marking pale from burnt.
If my twin hovered airily
and smote me in anger
and I could wash
and the lake-rocks broke enkinetic
befriend my thousand pores and wear me like a coat
and the air my aromas
and the water my seed.
If I could turn in and in and in
and I and my brother rush into the free
of the sky of my head,
If I could pass over the beauty and the wanting,
and penetrate my inner self with
my own scythe and strew at last.
Down a deep well
then out to the garden
where all wildness swoons
From aromatic species
knifed across the flat sky
curved inward on the inner eye
Semblances of hue
for the knot
of every dripping leaf
For the riot of the cacaphony
All the flat world underlines the gray mass
where gauzy billows of white smoke traverse.
This weight presses on the surfaces of glass
making opaque the starry universe beyond.
But the still air is cool and distinctly wraps in silence
the ambient sounds that sneak through
of flying creatures and mechanic rovers.
Their headlights attempt an illumination
of the separate beauties of an inner life.
Pins are
sprinkled
on my cheek
so they dry
in the mid-air that
traps the light
from my blindness
as the white
mass
I urge
goes blue
then gray.
In my ear
the blade-scrapes
are muffled,
the tapping
of the ice-drips
forget the loom
of the evening's
heavy fall.
In such exertion,
my heart
murmurs
and my sweat exudes,
while the zipper
that I finger
bodes my disgarbment.
Snap-twigs and thorn-spikes slap against me
as I ramble the tumbled creek-edge
in search of a play-lost shoe.
There a half-mile rising
my son and daughter huddle as color-specks
against the hill's green.
Their shared topic is what?
A silly obsession that after-years
will call silent reflection?
Red-wings among flit-weeds
each-to-each bring screech-calls
and over our heads summer clouds be calmed
in the late noon sky.
Why has the west-sun flattened our
dimensions into primal colors
whose brilliancy nears overwhelming?
My son jumps up and when he dashes into the dark green creek-cover
what swells in me suddenly is this loss-pain.
Line by line wiggle-words weave
Scanned images float to the backs of the eyes
Vocalized mummery
slush-slides thru the ears.
The needlepoint fonts sewn on acid and acid-free
Pages of white or off-white
Bound in cardboard or laminated
Tossed from book to book in sloppy piles.
Piles of words piles of books
Here on the wobbly sidetable
There on the thin carpet of the bedroom
--Impatient with the waiting
In a conveyance that might give a jiggle
Under the mood-blanket the legs ache to dance.
Pure son of an awful virgin
Who with careful eyes caress
The crushed velvet of his headshape
Whose aches unmuscle along his limbs.
While the turgid mass congeals in flow
And serpents writhe in dismal urge
That pierced heart within lip-wound void
Blows breath of innocent capitulation.
The host muzzled in a still piety
Raised once across the plain of penitents
Of whom one makes inward journey
That this day turn dream and sun to moon
Sickle-west to crown the sky,
Cloud to hide that watcher's lust.
Frost-breath blood-dread below exhaling
Into a greyness in the short distance
Which begins to form
A nimbus barely permitting
This soup, and immersed in it
Cube-lines lapping the surface
Of clay-lumps dully protruding,
--To congeal in eye-waters
--As hard frozen husks
--Spread out from a central pupil
While like a god dangling down
To scoop empiric remnants
From the existent scum
Rain-black cloud-bank above impaling.
Foam of fury, rushed madness,
When that hulk-block is the path,
Spun velocity is the passage,
And head-dashed collision weaves forgotten pain?
Behind cloud-strips in a sky bereft
Of moorings to where the morn-sun seethes
Atomic pinpoints must encapse this moment
As delicate crossings of a lace-net.
Then silence implied in a distant motor-roar,
While subsonic swoosh of cars beside,
So clear in the blue-cirrus sky,
Of an orange blimp whose rocking yaw
Not mechanically gleams pins of sunlight
Glancing now on its tip-turns.
Tonite I seek to box my opponent in
With the day-joy that plays a melody
On the base line of black sadness.
But quickly like a shadow in a day-mirror
It trails along its black cape and
Drops fierce bulletins of dreary news.
All its droplets on the upper sides of
All the ceilings crackling afire as twigs'
Tiny vein-straws in their murmurous turning.
As a dropped plate on the kitchen floor
That earlier in the day pinged echoes
About the still of my watching --
This is the crying shame of naked incandescence
Which is the beauty held by no one save its lover.
Shale-grey the sky that hangs
Stare-black the passers eyes:
Uncolored frieze of marbled fauns
Memphis faces turned aside
Whose liquid metal eyes reflect the sky's
Quiet tumultuous rolls,
All spaced on sunlight's color negative
Rouge and verdant on azure.
Would a lascivious twist undo the knot
Of giant mass releasing
Bees' hums in crescendos,
And this fury will bury
With loud noise
And shout aside the old for new story.
Shadows do not play
But flat lay along the street
Or bar their way obliquely across a path
Like blades black but not the blackest,
Not the sharpest, and yet this play
Is beauty where the thinnest line
Reflecting pole by pole
Points away from the light
That smarts the eyes or seems soft
Along the edges
like lashes on the eye.
Where a bright glass is sharp:
Along each side is drawn a curtain
Whose lace-edge is a net for the light--
By the blade of black edge it seems less bright.
Ahead, a daughter sweeps on skates while I
a slim sword or a flame following near,
The icy oval rounding,
The strict barrier of wood avoiding,
Ice slits scraped in counter-rhythm
To the rock mix playing loud,
Ice-curves white against gray
Like our fingernails' cuticles,
So when we fall, our splayed fingers
Reflect our roundings and we laugh;
Then she arises and my shadow presence
Realigns with her
On mere darkened ice (for lights are low)
And in such gray expanse.
I know this man beside me forever,
His gangly presence I got hold of once
So that his loins into days of childhood
Got twisted around my wifely fingers.
I'm the shell he cast out of a plowed row,
The tiny ice-slit whitewashed on the ice,
Which is like a grey concave cuticle
That grows expressed by one of my fingers.
Digital, distal passing familiar ways,
The outstreched arms of his peace signal,
Plunged to any fathom,
She salient in her charms,
He to any else than me,
What youth attracts detracts from me.
Coiled inwardly - to spring - at the ready -
a breath is held - tight, tight in its shallows
like a fist clenched - stomachward.
An inner calm - coolly repressing, waiting -
deeply permitting - exhalation is a release.
Flush-swirl of the toilet - vomitorium.
For a touch so soft on the cold steel fixture -
cheek pressed up on the plastic veneer, when I kiss the door -
in a middle ear the engine's roar.
There is my fear.
Cylinders of light paid by green,
Bills whose terms have been discounted,
In this cube-space our meeting holds,
Where the bright bigness
Bears fruit of essence,
Red urgencies as the net emerges,
Not the whispers that I hear,
Our keyboard fingers hack and back
The hearing-notes,
Our pens scratch curves
Heard sliding on the tiny desktop polygons
On the pre-printed page,
Jutlands of ink, inlets of white.
Stretched out legs on a fatuous carpet
Across the lobby a love-seat of blue-worn fabric
Next a gold-colored can for the wasted tissue.
Strike-note forte and piano trills
And the cadences of a march.
Agony of perplexity, struggle of choices.
What figures for the ground are intercepted
Tremendous in their breathings
With hooded fast escapes.
Incessant repetitions only cascading
Sweet themes of praise just releasing
Paid for dearly in fees laid down
Flat on a green felt table.
Dark presence of the sharpest eyes
Whose attendance weighs in heavy discomfort
Who traps the self in static orbit
Observes compulsion with amorality.
No voice exudes from the dark mass,
No cautions, no heartiness, no whispered hushes,
The silence itself repeats
Like a loud moan from a painted scream.
Its furnace heat is like
The winter's sun against the cheek
So no the head would turn
To see the blinding black.
Lightless heat won't close the lidless eyes
To all the voiceless urgings of the night.
A brash syllable escapes from hushed phrases
Entwining minarets of personality.
Misled the child reads its name
From the list of contestants posted.
Every toddler needs so much
Be fed and entertained
Every disarray madde right
Of stockings and barettes.
The center of the world I
make obeisance to.
Dusky afternoon,
Gray-cloud sky without a star,
Distant line of twig-topped trees,
Houses of brown and yellow in a vale -
This tarnished memory of a golden day.
Heavy syrup of the coming spring
While winter's last sharpness slicing
Tiny cuts on the reddened cheek
Which in a snap of monochromes:
Burnished silver out of pewter gray.
Down to the shore where the water is
Where traffic slides by on silent wheels
The concrete edge of the road is hard
And all night leaks long into day.
I drove with a purpose without regret
Moment by moment condensing
And parked beside a meter in a park by the lake
To catch this edge and water perplexing.
This night’s moistness over the road
Is like a jelly seeping slowly down,
Or the tongue slid across the teeth
With saliva and breath intermixed.
So parked and watching pinpoint sky,
I slip into sleep as the engine cools.
I make a slice of time
And there sits personality.
While you, like rain-taps on a mask,
Crawl down distractedly.
Both the shy-smart and the glad-hand,
Recalled from dank memory,
Stand before the gathered hosts.
Thus we exhale our spirit-selves
In column-clouds
To empty ghosts arraigned afield.
Down to a place in the street I pass
Full of worry with all concerns a-row
I tumble forward at the wheel.
A maniac who would shoot fast
Determined to get as good as give.
Strapped sacrificially or,
Helmsman bound to mast.
Mimic lines splay from out
Of a mass of collusion.
Rose-red blanches to pink
Of a soft circulation.
The meaning of a word is unrealized,
But continues a force the rhythm discerned.
In a murky scene
Two medics shade the mound
And cut the skin cleanly with knife.
What was once afloat
Is now beaten to ground
Attached by the red tube to life.
What is the purposelessness of it?
What furious fever encoils the brow?
What lone figure is there to guess at anything?
What hope from a sleeper who needs his peace?
Beaten and heated iron to steel is forged.
Somnolent exasperations sweeten the mid night.
Vigils are kept by a single self.
Aimless awandering ahidden meaning.
Culled together gathering dust
Liquidly subsumes the must
Sweet sick smell in the heat of the night.
Lobes adamantine fierce in the light
Radiate the blur of the longest dream;
The questions are uttered in a quiet scream.
Lip-limned with saintly nimbus
Body caressed with an errant hand
Two naked eyes aglint,
A mouth of salty spit.
Like a train in a nimble line
Sinuous suggestion beaten to time
Slakes the fury of the iron track
Buries its meaning intact.
This once I capture this time
When the brisk air is murky autumn
And I am left without green shoots alive.
So aches caress my body
As my stilled walk looks like I stumble
And thus unbent the meter of my rhyme.
Somnolence enwraps me
Thru a sleep of reconciling
The whirr of thick fluttering
Comes the blank breath of sudden stopping
- A start arising
But crude existence covers over
Black flies buzz the trash heap
And monks’ hoods blacken against the night’s sky.
End of desiring, end of manic seeking,
End of awakening and resurrection,
End of lost places and empty spaces.
This motion comes into visibility,
This aural piercing overwhelms,
This oral emptiness speaks nothing.
A wood from out emerges sensitivity
Sunlight squints the eyes -
The gold-blue horizon is limitless.
Then night and wheel of stars,
City-lites and roaring,
Sleep soaking, dreams altering.
Punishment of hope, charity of pain,
Faith in torturous pleading.
Unreality the refuge of loss.
Believe the line that marks,
The line that subliminates.
Into a nether-world numinescent,
A hinter-world below the gray,
Beyond become becalmed.
“Out of the depths I cry out.”
This desperation of my desire
Mirrors the depth of my loneliness
And from the rush of madness of ultimate love
Comes the brink of utter loathing.
The centered power of virility
Liquidates into just nothing, nothing.
For a thought for human intimacy
Is not the act of other-pleasuring.
So the splash of our togetherness
Recedes from the blank wall where
The stone house does stand.
In this, then, is all we hope for
But washing away into a night
Of forgetfulness and love passes on.
Jewel
Absorbing the organic frailties
And beckoning other Magi seeking
Respite from the churning never-ending cycle.
Bubbles
Upon a boiling surface here and there
Evanescent whose deaths are unremarkable.
Each
Violent pain passes as it enslaves and saves
With no intermediation of a Saviour who cares.
Night and a soft breathing
Is her human essence absorbing mine
And my forgetfulness is the cost.
Morning becomes a mixture of solitudes
When she turns a glinting knife-edge
Toward the bread and fruit.
Alone on the high way of altered consciousness
- it’s the pain of reconciling myself
To the earthen humus all around.
Evening when a lone star beams westernly
She pours the coffee and its slurps drown
Images of daydream labor.
Night then and her anxious temples relax,
Her fragile hairline blurs into the darkening mass,
Her fingers cup my fever and the air is still.
Overadumbrate the clouds
While the mechanized horde at the gates,
At black noom the city weathersthe storm
Of blasts of glory in pinpricks.
From the other world, seen, wave-crests split
Rising the next one sanctifies
Falling this ocean solidifies -
Last syllable’s awesome await.
In the shadows of faces in unmasked leaves
Of the trees whose limbs branch in the noon sun
And where wind breathes over thye green-black forms
So that oak-ridge and elm-ridge rise and swoon -
Over and under the pierce of light interpenetrates
The overabundance of the multifarious, the innumerable
Of all on the surface of the mirror of the flat dimension,
Looking-glass of a child of a god indifferent and bored -
Don’t know that I can forget
Knowledge of my banal regrets
Deciduous leaves will spring back
Trivial surface boils on the deepest stack -
Fear and boredom and all the loss
Wet-rain dry-snow slaps and bites
That is the only hope which is it is
And there the tall blank untried walls -
One terribly yet common courtesy webs
A silent talky movie between two
The drama never resolves still we
Will pass into a great dark sea -
Very intricate yet quite hard,
Delicacy of intervention yet solid nothing
Really.
This end of a built crudescence
This end of breath
Which I take as the over-abundance of triggered desire -
Desire what sense of this need.
Passing softly amongst the biers
Of old dead princes and priests
Who claimed everlasting peace at the end -
But this middle way we’re bound bound
Into a lover-rush of insatiable lust
Lust;
When can I silently sigh?
Urge or demi-urge compress particulate sand
Into an hourglass of this moment.
Every now completes without me.
All my will is cybernetic by a cipher.
My walk slides into a run but for what do I hurry?
Tomorrow-day’s funeral will this night’s wake bury.
From dry words on a yellow page
Or a glimpse of ephemeral smoothness
Or the drrop-thought unwinding of wake to sleep,
A rush excites a rage.
To the influential wine I praise
All its trickling warmth
How the fever maddens me and its rush
Dissipates into cold sweat.
Dry or sweet aromatic piney
Semablance of my inner fluid beginning.
Anguished what is throw
Sterilized what is lost.
Crazed unknowing pleasure in the pain
Where my skinned head raps against the wall
Shorn of feminine tresses and bare
Beneath a bulb of incandescent light.
Cuts across the surface of my skin
My back reddened with your bites
Each mouth of bleeding oozes cream of red
Each slap, each hit, seeming to demean.
Your eye unblinking, your one-eyed stare
Ropes twisted till they’re not too tight
I think about where I’ve been
Read the handwriting, be forever tame.
Reach out to where there is no warmth
From where the beathing does not disturb
Gross grunts out of the darkness
But none.
The lie untrue of soft allure
Recumbant upon a bed,
But cold, clammy, spiritless.
Out of a clay lump a voice
In silence clamps down
An acclaim of struggle.
A dance cavorts across a scene
Whose linked chain unwinds along,
Merry paper-dolls whose child’s song
Swims into a dreamless nap.
It it freeze, then the cold snap
Of silent breath
Suddenly kills
The go-round weary broil.
Within tumultuous storm rewinds
Clouds of smoke about an empty eye
Gathering and looming nigh a balding hill
Whose dry packed dirt waits for rain.