no pyre

i'm minding the folly
of my own conceit
that burns in my
breast for men whose
art i envy

in life's balance the
gifts of the creators
are pyres set upon
their mountains
and lit for all

burning the corpses
of their creations
to let the ash rain
down upon the heads
of all receivers

in my darkest
i have fallen into
a valley and the
summits rise up to
cast me in their shade

and urged by malcontent
i scale their jagged
slopes to gain the
peaks and douse the
flames that burn me

such is the blindness that
befalls a man who loses the
sight of his own vistas and
comes to rely only on his
feet to move

a man whose jealousy
has embalmed the
spirit of his creator and
wrapped him in the swathe
of self righteousness

and on the last scaled mount,
turning 'round to check my
progress, i see the fires are lit
anew and sending up great
plumes once again

except mine, which stands alone,
unfired and distant, cold and cast
in the clouds of neglect and
wanting the return of its master
to bring the fire back

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one hundred thousand thousand and one

every moment now is past

and therefore marked and

the names for each are etched

onto melodic strands that

you drop into a jar

one hundred thousand

thousand and one marked

moments that make the jar

a perfect measure

of the virtuous time

and pleasant peace

and tidal epic that you

once shared

the jar a wide-mouthed

ewer of crystal that you

place upon the window sill

of your aggrieved mind

and when you reach into

that blessed chamber

you swirl, with a child's

fingers, the dowry within

because a good man gifts

a daughter a certain trove

of one hundred thousand

thousand and one blessings

that no other can read

or attain or approach

or wash away or believe in

or dispel or ruin

what is yours is the memory

fashioned between the two

of you singly and without

the authority of others

and in a day, any day, most

nearly every day, you will

hear the words singing to you

as echoes in a deep wood

you will reach into your glassy 

globe, your crystal keep,

and swirl the subjects with

a child's devoted fervency

and let a word come to

your hand in a magical

fortuity and pull it out

to give it renewed breath

one of a one hundred

thousand thousand and one

wonders will sing in your palm

once again

as if you were back there

in the moment it was born

and he will be there as if

sitting beside you

and you will feel as

if the time has not fleeted,

has not been spent, has not

rolled on, but rather has hesitated

hovering in a small place

just for you in this conceding

luminescence in which God has 

allowed you to once again bask

before replacing the thing,

the gift, back into that

place in your jar

on the sill of your mind

i knew not the man,

or the name of the far-sighted

sprite that you birthed

together, father and daughter

but that is why it is yours alone,

your one of one hundred thousand

thousand and one time-woven

remnants of life's labors together

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jennifer's sonnet

i sit to write a psalm of spring and love
when morning sun has made her light be shone
through frames of glass and cast from up above
this violent view has left me all alone

a crooked thing that bleeds into my room
was once the purest form of all that's true
the sun, a bride, and life her lovely groom
are separate now in time and rent askew

a friend whose sister's breath was taken fast
is witness to the evil of the game
that slants the light and life when giving pass
and takes its toll when filtered through the frame

the pain of death is how it foils the heart
by taking light and breaking her apart

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body in the river

it was the beginning of april
and the local river had glutted her
banks and shouldered away a man
who'd jumped from the bridge.

when i met a lover who
was a poet and who told me
she was put on this earth
only to change people.

she had full lips,
which is all i
cared to know
about at the time.

she believed also in past lives
and claimed that her prima persona
had originated in 19th
century eastern europe.

i told her, when she asked
what moved me, that i mostly
loved the Byrds, Simon and Garfunkel,
and much of the Dead.

so she wrote a poem
for me that claimed
we'd met on a battlefield
of vietnam as medics, lovers.

it called me, the way an open
door at the end of a dark hallway
calls to a child sprung
from the throes of a nightmare

so i leaped

she smoked a lot and had
experimented with drugs while
attending an ivy league
college and she was an impatient lover.

her mouth was too big
for her face, i thought, and
she said she distrusted men who
spent too much time on foreplay.

but we played it out
all the same, met and
engaged, pitched forward
and back fully.

the snow had been
rained down to weak,
fallow patches in various
spots along the road.

every walk alone outside
smelled like overturned
soil and the renewal
of past conversations.

i found myself walking
a lot those days
and not bothering
to wear a coat

because i wanted to
feel the bite of
the spring wind in
my feverish bones.

the kind of jarring waking
up that comes with
the hard resetting
of a runaway furnace.

or like the plunge in
december waters after an
immersion in the purity
burn of hot springs.

i told her i cared about her,
but i didn't really;
i agreed with her that
we should run away,

but told myself: only to a field
in vietnam, or the capital
city of lithuania before its
fall to the imperial russians;

a long-off escape
in a distant separation
with that cold wind
i felt now stinging the eyes;

to some place
just enough out of the
reach of my own
feeble, dying imagination;

to convince myself that she
was as romantic and
as important to me
as she was to herself.

she didn't love me -
i knew that;
she loved how
the smoking bothered me

but that i didn't complain;
that i had not been to europe
like her; that she had a degree,
unlike me;

that she had expansive stories
and an exotic history
and a resume written
at the knee of the literati.

she teased me about
my unimaginative domesticity,
my narrow, provincial reference,
my impairing lack.

and after that brief
fire, when june came,
she was gone in a
bland ceremony.

against our wills, somewhat,
but not really, and for the best;
i walked the banks of the river
afterwards, from the opposite way.

the cold wind was
gone, the blood back
down to a reasonable
temperature.

they found the body of the
man in a downriver town, bloated
and bobbing, run aground among driftwood.
changed.

i can't listen to the
Byrds anymore;
the Doors, the Stones -
without feeling transposed

i heard years later that
she had a husband and children,
lived in some city as a wife
and no longer writes poetry

i do

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