Rule of Three

Thermopylae: A Eulogy (2011)

I saw the delicate arrangement of sweatlets trickle dewy and bright from wrists to collarbone
         as the barbell hovered above Him like recent rain.
Like a lamb He lay on the bench,
         softly supine under the flickering pale.
God gave Him gravity, vanity and perspiration, and little else, it seemed.
But here with His back on the cracked red vinyl He mixed His bitter gifts
         like Cy Twombly mixed primer and plaster with trash and fever.
They both served Greek phantoms and I think they both chuckled when they looked at their hands.

He was a kind of barber and subcutaneous fat fell to the floor without rustling.
He sculpted by accumulation and He painted by taking away.
He was a bloodless butcher, a body poet and a capitalist stranded on an island.

Where was He? In his skin.
When was He? I remember Him.
What was He? This, and nothing else.
For His name was stitched into His gymbag and there it stayed, unspoken.
Stated simply, He kept no pictures in His wallet, only a faded membership card which was who He was.

When the dumbbells danced in His hands He stared at the orange EXIT sign,
         at the gap between the E and the X that made a squat house.
He fixed on it like a sailor on a star and moved with fullness and precision.
Like Euclid He described an arc full of triangles.

On Saturday morning He would run from Marathon to Athens with His headphones on.
He listened to Christmas tunes by Vince Guaraldi, and midnight jazz that never resolved.
He carried His Walkman fondly and never dropped it as He switched cds in the middle of a jog.
He kept them stacked by the treadmill and they rattled as He ran.

He studied the rippling tendons of other patrons the way Aristotle might study an argument.
He seemed to favor structure over sheer bulk,
         continuous flow from finger to shoulder,
         from jaw downspine to hips to toe,
         bodies in balance and persuasive harmony.
He silently scoffed the swollen tyrannosaur with groping grip,
         the five-second Hercules,
         the skeleton sprinter,
         and all the wanton brutes like hairy balloons
         without discipline or inspiration.
Their bodies were careless and mute beside their betters:
         Galenus' Greeks,
         the staunch Venetians of Mercurialis,
         tribal warriors and folktale heroes,
         men that made gods in their image.
But he never said these things,
         He held everything but the barbell close to His chest.

Everything He did, He did to Himself
         and He left everything else exactly as He found it.
Even with all the running and pushing and curling,
         He was really like a plant:
         His only motion was growth.
Every day, rougher roots, leaner leaves and a stiffer stem.
A flowerless plant that thrived on gravity, vanity and perspiration.

On the day Twombly died He was listless and dull.
Straightly He strode to the bench and loaded three hundred fifty American pounds.
The old bar wrapped in His white knuckles ascended seven times,
         then came crashing down, crushing His sternum.
His chest caved in, sucking the bar into Himself, right below His shoulders.
As He bled out with His back on the cracked red vinyl,
         the artist finally refined Himself out of existence.

Eight days later I followed His name to His grave and left a bunch of flowers cast in white plaster.
Once I had asked Him what He believed in.
His laconic reply: "I am willing to entertain absolutely anything."

These Things Are the Things That I Think About When I Think About Thinking (2011)

If there's one thing that I hate-- and there's a lot of things that I hate, I'm a hateful person-- but more than anything I hate... thinking. I think about trains and lakes, I think about women, I think about bruises, I think about where I am and my shoes, I think about the pattern in the carpet, bed bugs and coffee and cardiac arrest, I think about memories, about the things I wish I could forget, the things I wish I could remember, and I think about how neat it would be if I could barter with my unconscious, buy up all the nice memories, the practical memories, sell all the threadbare filthy memories at a garage sale, and I think about women and trains and bridges, and I think about my skin, my stomach, my justice, like I don't know what to do with them, like it's not in my control, and I think about strings and excuses and I think about what I am, I think about my face and my name and I think about the people thinking about me, when they think about my face, and they think about my name and they think about my thoughts, and I think about the things I say, I think about good days and bad days on good days and bad days, but the thinking makes good days bad days so I try not to think on good days, but that makes me think about not thinking on good days and then I'm thinking about thinking and how much I hate thinking and I think about hate and I think about skin and I think about women and then I think oh god, what am I? and I don't know how to answer that because the way that I think has a lot to do with coffee and food and the phases of the moon and I think I'm going to be sick when I think about how I think about things and I try to think about the last five thoughts I had and I try to think about what I thought about yesterday and I try to think about how I thought about it yesterday and the theories and themes and things I think are so alien every second until my thinking evolves back into the way I was thinking before and it's like a network of memories wakes up when I'm back in the way I was when I thought them and the rest go to sleep so the thinking starts to breed its own kind of thinking until I find myself thinking about trains when I'm nowhere near trains and I never thought I'd be the sort of person who thinks about trains and I think, what's wrong with me? and I think, it's the thinking that's wrong with me and if I didn't think so much I wouldn't think myself into bad situations where I think all across the city at night and I think at three in the morning and I think by the shore and on the platform and across the bridge and at the edges of lots of things and you'd think I could just train myself to think happy thoughts; well on a good day that's fine in theory but the rest of the days its all I can do to think about the things in front of me and then I don't mind the bed bugs and carpets and headaches and hunger because that ties me down but only until a woman walks by and my thoughts wander back to bruises and bridges and god, I wonder, god I don't think it's supposed to be like this and I remember I didn't always think like this and I think someday I'll be better and I think someday I'll learn to love thinking again and I'll learn to think loving again and sleep in peace again and walk with peace again and think of peace again and until then I think I should stay away from trains.

Hard Wind, Bad Blanket (2011)
[companion piece to Waiting Calls the Macabre Macaw]

For the wistful drifting dogs who hung their muzzles in the sky; and
Of the mellow molten snoring lightly lovely measured sigh; and
If the dumbly tumbling bumbling in the valley lastly lie; why
Then yet still perhaps a smile wryly while they diamond die. But

How, if so the signs astounding flicker in the portent sky, should
Be be so much vaguely weakly strangely til that diamond die, if
Such be such as right and fine towards a measured heaven cry? But
Why the crooked underwhelm? But why the hungry spasmodi?

That the mellow molten snorer lightly love a mesmer sigh, and
That the dogs adrift a-howling lick the trickles from their eyes, and
That the bumbling mumbling bumpkins catch themselves and rub their thighs be
All in all my merest beg of-- beg of you, you thumb divine!

Has is what the sleepy landlord wears who rubs his sleepy eye; and
Snatch is how the magpies swamped in glitter weakly alibi; and
Hold is some vain inkling of the stubborn never diamond die; but
Reach is all the humble bumpkin with his lips a-whisper sigh.

Does this valley ever in the lofty lulling lastly lie?
Ought-- is ought an even question in the final measured sigh?
If we-- can we-- may we-- dream we bake this muddled picture pie?
What if all the molten drippy lovely nonsense run awry?

I'm sorry, wistful drifting dogs who hang your muzzles in the sky;
Adieu, you mellow molten snorers lightly loving measured sighs;
For all my dumbly tumbling bumbling all about this nasty lie,
I've none a word, a flash, a smell to show for smiling diamond die.

Entreaty to a Harsh Mistress (2011)

I thought upon the murky glower of the moon behind her clouds.
I sought-- an apology? No, I conceded her remotion.
I was born too late, and by my body I had lied.
And besides, the stars between us made an ocean,
A populous and unforgiving ocean,
And for all my mermish grace, I could not swim.

But if she would only pass down by a pallid beam
A map of her tortuous displeasures,
And if that map might bear a legend
To decode the awful mess of subtle human signs,
Then maybe, by enlightened hindward witness
Of those tender delicacies I had wrenched awry,
I could come to know my sins
Like Job knew God at last.

Like a child or a pagan I prayed to that rounded moon
To show some merciful knowledge on her face.
In cloudy-headed desperation I even dared think
The moon began to move in answer to my lunatic appeal...
But then she, like a mystery, sank fitfully into the sea.

...While a stranger found An answer to which he just Could not relate; shame... (2011)

Fine and milky frail,
The snowflakes fell like dandruff
and died on the ground.

Jacob bit his tongue
Trying vainly to endure
The bite of the wind.

He peered down the track
And the lateness of the train
Appeared blackly back.

Ten bundled persons
Quivered in the pallid glow
Of the starless light.

He missed his fleece gloves.
Curled up in fists, his fingers
Huddled in his palms.

(A long scarf, two hats,
Three pairs of gloves, some headphones;
he missed his missing things.)

Alarmingly huge,
A solitary snowflake
Fell upon his thumb.

Jacob rubbed his eyes.
What snowflake ever flaunted
Such sinuous curves?

He held it up close.
A map of an uncharted
Woman glistened there.

He blinked. She melted.
He rubbed his hands. The train came,
Iron and growling.

White the Life as One (2011)

When I was born my bed was splattered red.
Through the window roared a dusk-rich orange
and in my mother's eyes it glistened yellow.
My father's eyes, I think, were misty green,
though in this, my only picture, they seem blue
under a dull blue sky with clouds of crumbling violet.

White creases crackle through the fading violet
where this photograph has folded in my fingers, and the red
of his scarf and his ruddy smile against the blue
is barely discernible, merely muddy orange,
and only in my mind are his eyes still green,
his heavy hands warm, his laughter soft and yellow.

If it stayed in my wallet, the photo would not be so yellowed,
but so many of our days fall like bundles of violets
at his buried feet, piercing the gray and the green;
the Mother Machine breaks down, her lights flashing red;
and as the sun sets in its familiar orange
hue, we fondle the photo, feeling, for lack of a better word, "blue".

* * *

At the ceremony my first wife wore a gown of dazzling blue,
and I, in my lapel, a rose of creamy yellow
that Mother had plucked from her garden that orange
morning. I remember colors. I remember the violet
vestments of the minister. And I remember our son all wet and red,
and I cried when I saw that his eyes were grandfather green.

In early spring, when everything is weakly green,
and my son plays in the young grass, I dream of her dancing blue.
We lost her, too. Late March, her hair so red,
the night so hot, everything so wrong, her yellow
face wasting on the pillow; with one last violet
smile, she was gone. The dawn glowed orange.

And I noticed how my son's sobbing face shared that orange
in the waking light, but his eyes still glinted green,
and I pulled out the picture, thumbed the violet
clouds, stared into my father's eyes of fainting blue
and realized they'd always been blue. My memory had yellowed.
I wondered if my son would forget his mother's head of red.

So I painted it roaring red with dashes of orange,
her dancing on a warm yellow day in the green springtime
with her dazzling blue dress, throwing violets;
I painted her into a canvas, where I knew she'd never fade.

Hark! the Hard-Eyed Hour! (2011)

Holidays in the halogen sun,
Flowcharts, artless white on white,
Grey the days and grim the nights,
Staples in our brains. *snap*

Make like work when Argus comes,
Stitch his eyes in close content.
Hack that hand that hand relent!
What? No flounders. Flounders... *snap*

When were we unborn and free?
Infant I were ripped from caul and
Birthday bloody pinned to wall;
Well, blow your cage of candles! *snap*

Today is day the manger breaks!
Sweep the smash-computered floor,
Paint your name on faceless doors:
"Hark! the Hard-Eyed Hour!" *snap*

Fear me what, what nothing won?
Heaven everywhere is light;
Help me lay the dynamite--
Mace to face to power! *bang*

timbre timbre O somber glamor (2011)

Christmas is
not green nor red but
illustrations in old books
                   on old shelves
of the musky orange glow
of iron lamps and
                   candles
blue shadows faintly brushed
upon imagined snow
raw lines around smooth cheeks
(and the lamps like motes in his
                             laughing eyes)
also the sovereign gold of the
ribbons around brash
   ful presents so
                   round
   ly purple sparkling
that preen and posture
under the whisk--(ered tree)

and the blizzarded girl with her matches
,like love's the burning boy,
it's the manbetweenbridgeandsky
         (and maybe the angel)
         ((but often not))
and the carols carried on the heavy flakes of air,
"Who saved us all from Satan's" and so forth
and you remember Charlie Brown?
O it's the jazzy tannenbaum
                   and the treble
                             cascade over
                                       the ice rink
                                                 that goes
                                                           ba
                                                            di
                                                             da
                                                              di
                                                               da
                                                                da
                                                                   ba
                                                                    di
                                                                     da
                                                                      di
                                                                       da
                                                                        da
                                                                           ba
                                                                            di
                                                                             da
                                                                              di                                                    ba ..
                                                                               da                                        ba ..
                                                                                da          dum-          ba ..
                                                                                  dum          dum ..

Chicago, Chase Tower Lobby, 6:30pm

"The voluptuousness of looking" and I knew exactly what he meant when the pane threw the lights from inside upon the grid of faraway windows and the electrical bulb-specked trees and the 'behind me' lay over the 'before me' like the ridges of a charcoal rub.

Here were all the Great Interests intersecting at odd angles.

The black overcoats of the half-articulate silhouettes footstepping behind me made their motions perfectly transparent; their faces hovered above the light-carved spaces that flitted across the pane and revealed glimpses of the interior cells of the glistening office tower across the way.

Black skies behind them shyly lay absolute and still.

My knees wobbled back and forth in my stern leather chair.

In my ears my music melded with the murmurous clatter of expensive soles; Dvořák and Giorgios in a giant granite chamber.

I do not understand why the flags waved and wove at half-mast (which they did rarely; the wind was remarkably mild); perhaps someone had blundered?

Below the buildings, below the light-encrusted trees and the mindful motions and a few blue shrubs (sinister blue like sophisticated military maps), the granite dove down into a steep courtyard plaza, like a sleek quarry.

Green or dull gold dimly glowed the windows ringing the pit (or rather squaring it), about nine feet tall, the kind that frame you hat-to-toe, though no one walked down their exposed corridors.

And in that pit, in the middle of it, sat a bold-eyed fountain whose ripples goldly shimmered like television static.

Not too dramatically, not quite ecstatically, exuberantly dignified, the water waved to passersby.

But their passing waned in passing time; a creeping decrescendo crept into the intermittent clatter; the fitful flags grew still.

Drowsily, the business district drifted off to sleep.

Behind the stolid lights, the night-black night remained absolute and still.

Genius Loci:
Tribute to Terribly Happy (by Erling Jepsen),
"Punishment" (by Seamus Heaney),
and swamps in general. (2011)

We always solve our mysteries in the end.
It's a small small town and the ladies are always watching,
So there's only one place to hide things here:
That's the big bog surrounding town.
Lost cows float up from time to time,
Bloated and pale muddy green,
But so do murder weapons,
Stolen cars,
Bodies of inconvenient men
And pretty missing girls
And suicides.
So nothing stays hidden forever,
That's the point.
Your children or grandchildren will know
That someone did what you did,
Though they won't know you did it,
And it won't matter who did it,
Not to anybody alive.
So people also throw time capsules in the bog
And confessions
And coins
And wishes.
It all comes back.
It comforts them to know
That long after their names
And dates
Have been
Erased
The bodies and baubles remain
In the collective unconscious,
Coated in scum
And soaked in slime.

And She Cried Out (2011)

Saw an ad today:

CHICKEN
IN  A PIE
IS GOOD

I want you
to know.

         Young American Plays With Waka (2012)
sorry, Ron

         Were I the strong, sultry sun
         I'd lay my love like
         A hot lariat across
         Your gold-tanned, leathery hide

         The wind winds tightly
         Round the mountain like a spool.
         As the clouds, unraveling,
         Lose their fine delicacies
         The unwoven sky becomes
         A thread drawn unbearably taut;
         Time winding backwards

         The stars wink in shame
         As the bold, denuded moon
         Lets fall her coy sash

         In the lapping, leaping springs,
         In the nightengale's
         Ticklish trills and peeps,
         In the patter of soft rains,
         I am haunted by
         The tintinnabulation
         Of your faraway laughter

         Wrapped in a fine confusion
         I am snow and white blossoms;
         Could this heart at last
         Be awash with negative
         Capability,
         The stuff that resolves poets
         Into nightengales
         Like a dew from melted flesh?

         Like a hard gale in the night
         You batter my windowpanes
         Slip under my door
         And strangle me with kisses

         Caught in your tortuous web
         Of arms, legs, murmurs,
         A hopelessly happy fly
         Lies fixed against you.
         I confess! What fly am I
         Who scorn the fight and
         With susurrus submission
         Fall gasping, limp and conquered

The Archaeology of Survival (2012)

The surviving mind will wake to a warm breakfast
with a limp bliss in the chest like
the sound of an old woman softly speaking.
That uncracked egg so dearly cradled
will at last dissolve in a liquid attitude.
These placid mirages rippling in the road:
postcards from the surviving mind.


In the beginning I was careening around the bend
on a night dark as coffee and you
a pink face stitched on a pillow
a flashlight radio in the passenger seat
Neal Cassady in one hand Virginia Slim in the other
were a fountain of jazz
you were a silver thread wound around every minute
of every century
and I could count you
oh yes
with a jar of marbles, of sand
I was the boy with his teeth deep in the dog
the rain stung but I licked it all up
--
Silence hung his head out the window
while we shouted ourselves hoarse
and murmured each other dry
Every word was a dream
and all my dreams were memories
ground up and stuffed in sausage
that tasted funny and felt like venial sin
But you were a ravenous dream-eater
swallowing whatever came out of my mouth
like a baby bird
so on and on we on and on
while the road and on grew solid under our years.


The surviving mind
here, as stationary animal
there, as smiling bookshelf
will call love to order
or else swim in the tidal society of love
or else survive love
with the majesty
of a water tower
in an inferno.


There they rose so holy I could cry
the blazing spires of that daunting last April
like the fingers of a storm come
to shake me by the shoulders and shout mercilessly
into a yawning fontanelle
teeming with clumsy pubescent prose
but I was "ready or not"
and you were "here I come"
and we tumbled down Highway 225
past the rotting cinema marquee
of my first celluloid felonies
(there I witnessed the deathlessness of American royalty)
and we rolled out the dread carpet
into the heavy-steeped night
--
The moon was tall
with a voice of cracking eggshells
that fell upon the refineries
gold with godfulness
The lights encrusting them
scintillated like a starry sky torn down
around the earth like a blanket
held close and tight like a mother
with weary arms like a gravedigger
in Dresden while we climbed
their veiny towers unwinding
from the bloody black heart below
I was the first color that came to mind
you were the mind or the guess or the progenitor
but you kept asking questions
as if they'd never been answered before
and I'm sorry my laughter cut you off when
Kerouac said "Charlie Parker looked like Buddha" but I swear
it was just the most earnest thing anyone had ever said.


The surviving mind a jade icon
carved by rain and shame
that guards the temple
at the pinnacle of history.
With a cool, creamy wind washing across the sand
it draws the body back to the fretful balcony
where every dilated vessel
once heaved in the husky spring air.
--
The mind that survives will not be the mind
that tries to conquer the stifling bushel.
The mind that survives will not be the mind
that cries to see its own rent flesh.
The mind that survives will not be the mind
that lies beneath the loam in feigned repose.
The mind that survives will be the mind
that sighs unceasingly like the perennial
exhalations of the earth.


Do you remember the painted desert
where we met? But
One of many drowsy fancies
under my slumberous eyelids.
You were too finely fashioned
not to drape in translucent blue silks
like a classical mannequin
so I stole you from Pygmalion
and we eloped in the salty heat
of invented days.
But the years were lifetimes
as every atom in us died and returned
a stranger many times over.
Like Caesar's last breath
there was a tiny piece of you in everything.
I, in my protean skin,
I, quick and fluid like mercury,
had no use for mirrors
and often my arms grew like swords.
--
Still we tangoed like the net and the fish,
in the angry sway of kinetic dialectic.
It seemed an even animistic dance,
if you were indeed the flaxen mop
and the iron table,
a round red clown nose,
my collection of hats,
a tattered umbrella;
also the tikka masala,
the rhubarb fool
and the dry salad;
and if you were the first morning
of the second decade,
the yellowed poster of Audrey Hepburn
and the long walk west of Logan Square
then by God I was a shaman
shaking my pen like a rainstick,
dancing the frustrated ecstasy
of an Orphic mystery.
And here we are,
Aquitaine Eleanor and Richard the Richard
hand in hand
ascending the hot narrow steps
of this ludicrous cyberpunk refinery,
misbegotten spawn in tow,
come to see the King of Texas
turn black blood into gold.


The surviving mind waits for the welcome of a warm breakfast
with thick smoky sausage and light buttery biscuits
that crumble like an old woman softly sleeping.
That weary egg so dearly cradled
will at last sizzle on the skillet with a satisfied sigh.
These fumy visitations wafting from the tarry oil;
a sermon of the surviving mind
that dauntlessly wages its five hundred year curriculum
to hold a ripe Hanukkah breath in the pickling vat;
to chew the whole thickness of the earth molar by mountain
and spit the splinters and the flakes of the fading shed;
and in the rippling madness of the tattered
tapestries that dangle all around,
to cherish the surviving faith that gathers
fire-fangled feathers from the ground.

Eternal Recurrence: An American Renga (2012)

Hototogisu
Dead by a pane of stained glass--
Good Friday sermon.

The vines winding up the walls
Of the chapel bear no fruit.

My girl sinks her teeth
Deep in a succulent plum--
Deep in a brown worm!

Do you remember the night
We shared berries by the moon?

I sprinkled kisses
Across your delicious face
Like powdered sugar.

Too hot now for picnic love--
We'd languish on sweat-soaked sheets.

Insects! All cruel kinds!
Menagerie of monsters
Biting me mad! Bugs!

But for the lake-shore breezes
I'd die-- but oh, those kind winds!

The day's restless breath
Howls and plows and does not move
The cross-legged monk.

Sun, with a little lemon:
Pale comes-- brown. Brown comes-- blonde. Lies?

When the light turns low
And the blaze withdraws, all the
Hues come out to play.

She sets her easel down by
The groaning oak, and she waits.

When autumn's sun sets,
It throws its leaves in the air:
Red, gold rays of leaves.

The season's shades disappear
In the cool moon's phthalo gaze.

November nineteenth;
The whole world ripe and heavy,
All seems fit to fall.

No one witnessed the last leaf
Vanish in the mounting snow.

Axe tight in his hands,
The docile monk does violence
To the helpless cord.

The mute frost stiffens the earth.
We cannot bury our dead.

Leave your bitter chores
At the door. Together we'll
Sip tea by the hearth.

By the drone of crackling pines
We slowly slip into sleep.

Reed raft drifting on
Seas of jumbled memory;
Faces in the waves.

Once in a vision I saw
Dawn and doom in the branches.

She never walks wild
Or lingers long; brief, cryptic,
Pregnant with meaning.

Origami unicorn:
Who put this strange dream in me?

Phantasms fall away
And I am left with a cat
Warm upon my chest.

The omnipresence of fur,
stale fish odor, frayed curtains.

In this filthy shack
I can abide no longer;
Great spaces beckon.

Perhaps this empty doll's house
I've left will amuse the youth.

Aching along on
The narrow, supperless road,
I miss all my toys.

Squirrels and hares congregate
about my grass-pillowed head.

Tap tap tap tapping
With his stick, a blind pilgrim
In tattered sandals.

Winding between two mountains,
I look up: an old stone king.

The mountains' saddle
Feels like the seat of the world
Riding into dusk.

Turning to leave this hated
Terrain, still I shed a tear.

When the road is gone,
Riverbanks lead me across
The tangled miles.

The tall, tall grass calls his name;
"Kaze, Kaze," calls his name.

This great thrashing koi
Like Bishop's unconquered bass
Demands his release.

The purling, popping patter
Carries a lively language.

Two boys drift downstream
On a thick bed of bound reeds
Seeking adventure.

The game is up at the lip
Of the sea; the trial begins.

Tall schooners, sleek sloops,
Galleons and kayaks alike
Speckle the vast plane.

The sky takes a baleful tinge,
And the sea roils and belches.

Ten thousand tons washed
Ashore, the dusty beach ruins
Of burned out vessels.

She haunts the skeleton frames
Crooning for some lost sailor.

I've asked for her hand
But her heart has wandered far
And long lost its way.

Can pining eyes be pried
From the morass of the past?

The wide earth is thick
With stale feelings and glances
At faraway lights.

Moon, you devil, blight the eyes
Of the sleepless vigilant!

Triviality
Had consumed our days until
Mother passed softly.

Spring is no spring in the lap
Of a naked, hollow nest.

Broken bird in hand,
The cross-eyed child submits
A plea to the Dawn.

The shining breath of April
Stirs the feathers of the heart.

Hanging uselessly
The garlanded bough mocks me
Like a dreamcatcher.

I am entangled in the
Baffling bounty of Springtime!

A mess of blossoms
Encrusts the fields, dizzy in
The fumes of rank grass.

How swiftly the flowers flee,
The green gone in a chill gasp.

Still the heavy sky,
Still the snow, still the placid
Days wait for a storm.

How this hard blizzard explodes
Hungrily into my home!

Alas, this hermit’s
Carefully cultivated
Peace lost in the frost.

And so unceasing, creeping
Loneliness nibbles away.

One stubborn leaf hangs
Flapping, cursing in the wind;
To live too, too long.

In those ochreous days they waned
With dignity and clear hearts.

Five men on the porch
Listen to the pine crickets.
Four men on the porch.

How do you fare, a cloud now
Over this rich canopy?

Would you smile if I
Should pluck this crysanthemum
To tuck in your ear?

How sweetly bashful the shade,
How coy in the brilliant noon.

Magnolias teeming
With perilous seeds bound in
Petals white as death.

His hands make a lariat
Around the trembling calf.

On these sweltering days
The madness seeps from a man
Like an evil sweat.

God bless and keep the children.
Every stone is an angel.

Full of bright crystals
Locked in a rough edifice,
The earth is a man.

The sparkling clouds miss us.
When they weep, our rivers swell.

“How heavy the fish!”
Cry the fishers’ straining lines.
Does the sea complain?

They long for a home where the
Deer and the antelope play.

When the shot rings out
And a thousand hooves scamper
We hold tight our breaths.

Even the servants join us
To feast upon this great beast.

Her chapped, ruddy hands
Folded meekly in her lap:
Dishwasher woman.

Traces of pine-scented soap
Linger on her laced fingers.

To love a poor girl
Despite catalpa’s twang is
To have a rich heart.

What could have been in his mind?
Who might have been on his mind?

My lord wastes away
With a strange name on his lips:
“Oh, darling Rosebud...”

We raced down the daunting hill
In those early, happy days.

In the eyes of boys
Like tigers, the day is full:
Treasure everywhere.

This sky, with its fine diamonds,
A jeweler's velvet midnight.

Its black skin opens
With a raw, tender moon like
A gash in its chest.

Pain seeps out, leaving only
A cold, lucid indifference.

Night and I draw still
As dew trembles in the air:
Anticipation!

There it lands on petals, twigs;
There it lands on lips, hips, thighs.

The blossoming dawn
Rises to greet them.
They wince, and they laugh.

Love is a long, long day and
The sun never moves til it sets.

What week in what world
Is filled up with sweet minutes?
No time for poets.

We make our grand mosaics
With the shards of precious things.

When these grave-robbers
Pry up weather-beaten bones,
They turn the soil.

What a rich harvest they yield,
Our restlessly scheming minds.

The poet's conceit:
To call God a cicada,
To live in God's skin.

These trappings itch-- oh, pity.
The air is stale-- oh, pity.

The implacable
Imperial lyricist
Cooks sugary moons.

This is why children still laugh:
The saint, the courageous clown.

When the warm spring comes
The folk awake from dank dreams
And play in the park.

Small against the spreading sky
A bird made whole in the dawn.

The Handsome River (2012)

digging up tubers from the lurid earth
with careful hands brushing the clung loam
and gently reburying a pink writhing worm
murmuring perhaps a small chthonic lullaby
then laying the pale meaty stalks
like bricks in the basket
side by slender side
silent and still

careful hands tucking a stray sprig of nut-brown hair back
under the faint blue bandana wrapped around her head
to keep the nut-brown hair away from her
busy eyes
her vacant gray cloudy bleary busy eyes
gently attending to a pink writhing worm

gathering up her basketful of tubers
and a wide squat crate of mean little tomatoes
and a tin of blackberries
and her spade and savage taloned trowel
and retiring to the tremulous shed
to bathe the lean crop in the gray basin
beside the pitted cutting-board

* * *

It was an easy adjustment once the crying had ceased.

The peace was massive
like an overcast frontier
and fixed as the stars
or the salt in the sea.

Without books or voices
things ceased to carry names
every pepper and mouse was a sign unto itself
and ontology faded into obscurity.

The air was clean the way space is clean
clean as an empty cupboard
and mealy grass began to overtake the blasted fields
while feathery seeds of ruderal swarmed on the wind like flies.

In the quiet light of dawn
the worms gingerly poked up
their blind round heads
among the dewy blades.

* * *

naked roots rinsed upon the rocks
and a toad floating with its fat legs
in the frothy air
bushels of swampy millet seeping and slopping
along the coursing ecstatically violent---
ten million oozing tons of puffing millet
drooling down the iron river
and a dribbling camera
lapped by little testimonies
of seared skin and lolling tongues
and bubbling eyes
vacant bleary wasted eyes
a sofa married to mildew
sporting a single wicked spring winding
and winding up and sharp and slim and winding
a damp little bit of flannel dangling at the tip
like meat on a meat hook
nocuous spheres of ants bobbing in the dull water
bursting against rocks flinging
nightmares of dispossessed chelicerae
flickering down the iron river
a cake of depleted cores
a ravaged failsafe
twenty-four cascading switches akimbo
wheels treads limbs organic
chambered fire darlings huddled in their
surface-to-air cocoons
wings damp with profane oils
an electric nest sizzling
the shadow of an absent mother
rippling down the iron river
green strands of the last great album
filtering through the torrid air
an upended bottle of No. 7
a plastic bin of old mix tapes
carefully labeled by thin red pen
that runs in the surging flood
a cabinetful of spices
and dried garden herbs
spilled to soggy ruin
a chipped and stained action figure
with a tiny plastic grenade in his
tiny plastic hand
and a toy mare with a broken comb
tangled in her dirty mane

* * *

a red-tongued steak knife
wielding a buttery melody
a round chocolate box
and, lasciviously suckling of the sweet funny dew,
the magnanimous, the baronic, the consequential, the rare
the handsome iron river

* * *

wiping the broad knife across her apron
and sliding it back
tenderly
into the ripe skin
wiping the juice and the seeds away
as they squirt across her hand

she finally lays the tomato slices
and the cucumber slices
across the dense little bun of bread
and spreads an oily clove of baked garlic
she raises the fork to her lips
and she can almost taste


Ballad of the Closed Hotel (2012)

Man O Man is
won to thee or live
at least; that's fine
but what is mine to me?
My mind, and every door of a grand hotel.

Monty is not lost to me
but M-O-N-Y is not enough to rub together
and a tawny distance falls across the ragged windows
of the gold hotel. The bibles in the nightstands are mine,
but the fine pashmina neglected
upon the knob of the bureau belongs
to no one only.

123 is almost vacant.
Sylvester stole the pestilent spring and when
the gestures of her small hands infiltrate his skin,
finally the briny maid Saint Molica will lay
a pall across his chest
and gaze into the doom:
“Slyvester, Sterling Sylvester
my faintly faun,
wax bright in the womb and dream
and kiss me for your mother's sake.
You were a babe when you waddled away.”
It was August in the a.m.
His aching mother wore an oriental shawl.

Monty lost his ring
behind the bureau
but Man has come to mean
what the Politic means Man to mean
so when the green finger beckons
the ring defects to the corporate knuckle
and Man has Won
what Monty Lost.
Love is the elliptical orbit
of a stone in a sling;
(Political) Love is a planet on a string;
the point is the eternal return
to the prime banker.
Gratitude is a green finger.
Sylvester was a mean looter.
Sylvester belongs to the bible now
and Monty's ring is strung on a cosmic string.
The bibles and the pallid breasts of the briny mare
belong to me.

Molica never mentioned when
she bare Sylvester, where
or by whom, how she found him
swelling in her manger
amongst the sweets and greens
of the hysterical deity,
the mystery of his plump skin
and the pale glow of his small hands;
told me nothing of these things.
She is dutious, a daughter
of de Paul and Thomas
and her son is dead and she
departs tomorrow.
If only the dust would do likewise.
This House is Fallen without her,
Monty or no Monty.
Besides, he's hardly got two M's to rub together.

What's mine are the doors, the windows
and nothing within.
The tenants need me,
beyond the aching walls
lie only the tawny wastes
exceeding my mind;
but I cannot buy them.
And when Monty wastes away
I cannot buy his body;
I cannot buy back Sylvester
or repair the ring of comings
unwrought by the rage of goings;
and when the dust has eaten
the words from the pages of
the bibles in the bureaus
and every John Jacob
Mary Mark and Malachi
has slipped into the distance
on a silver ship,
then what is won
when naught is live to me
but the secret of the trinket
behind the bureau
and I am too feeble to grasp it?


all will be well (2013)

"And what time that man was fallen into sorrow and pain... our Lord Father would prepare Himself no other place, but would sit upon the earth abiding mankind, which is mingled with earth..." Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, Chapter 51

if I could bending down reach your body in the garden grass
I would not with my fingers pry up your crumpled color
and cuddle dirt around your stem
I would not tend with a trowel or a spade
or call anything mine or imagine
the green world is a garden

I would not collapse or squat but kneel
and my hands on my knees and my knees sinking in the dirt
I would feel them moisten
not to notice but just feel while watching you
breathing a little on the ground
and we would not be kneeling or lying in any garden
on any grounds of any estate
and we would be the way it was
and wait for rain

If I could then bend even further
and snap my body falling on the sodden grass beside you
I would see your eyes across the level distance
and I would not look at them or look into them
or look deep into them
or peer into them or gaze upon them
I would simply see your eyes
between coarse blue shafts of blades
buried in their own shadows

I could not then pretend to kneel I would not
tend to anything and from beneath the blades
I could see the pale patch of sky that you would dim
if you were kneeling above me
waiting laying your hand on my back watching me
breathing beneath you and trying to get up
struggling under your shade

instead I would see that patch of sky
full of light like the rest of the sky
and I would lie crumpled under the grass
my cheek pressed to the earth with you
and be glad you had knelt beside me
for so long while I knelt beside you
and we would be the way it was
and wouldn’t wait