latch, part ii

the door is nothing,
the latch a make-believer;
fear is a cold ghost

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primul fiu, luna mea

the best thing, really,
is to live in someone else's
hours,

which is often quite easy
for this man to do when
it comes to his children.

i tinker with their
clocks a bit,
play in their minutes

like some threshing
child too bored to
remain inside.

it snowed today here,
son, and the schools
canceled their classes

and i lay inside of
a kind of warm imposture,
thinking about time.

how i've a lover who
lingered along a longitude
of upper hope and lower despair.

how i've a lover who
spoke her truth into the
ears of a denying child.

how i've a lover who
carried me across the threshold
from passion to friendship.

and i am ok with this,
good with where i am at,
primul fiu, luna mea.

but that is my life,
and need not seep into
yours. it shouldn't work that way.

you know very little
of any of that part of
my extant journey,

any more than i truly know
many of the moments that
brought you to your station.

i was not there, except as
a spectator looking through
a long glass made of the

particles of hope and joy,
frank expectation, and
prayerful reverence.

well...i was there, of course,
inside the cells of that
beating soul-heart,

the muscle of your
prairie spirit and
mountainous vigor.

you've done so well,
primul fiu, luna mea,
you've climbed out of

youth with the resolve
of gravity and the
balance of goodness.

you have astounded
and astonished me,
you have migrated.

you have sculpted with
delicate pupils a masterpiece
of impossible marble.

you have drawn a greater
horizon and marked it with
vitality and ferocity.

you have demolished the
tombs of fear and in their place
erected great, airy halls.

but that is past, and all history is sold
to time the way things
are bartered between enemies.

which is to say,
the way of the was
dwells in bad scriptures,

and the way of the
soon-to-be plays in
the ether of hope.

so i am most interested
in where you will be
after tomorrow's tomorrow.

to reside in your every second,
awash. to linger in your
minutes, quieted.

to await your return
with stories about
the hours,

primul fiu, luna mea,
so that i can know
you even better.

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how to make basic homemade love

in a large bowl, dissolve yeast and
1/2 teaspoon sugar in warm water; let
stand until bubbles form on surface.

infinite dreams begin in a
transparent solitude of diffused
light and agile essence, so

begin with your eyes closed
and pray to aphrodite in her
suckling sweet-wander.

whisk together remaining 3
tablespoons sugar, salt, and 3 cups flour.
stir oil into yeast mixture;

she may answer with a sigh
and move the crowns of three
skies upon your head,

that you may entwine and commune
with her and your lover altogether,
and thrice be enchorused.

pour into flour mixture and
beat until smooth. stir in enough remaining
flour, 1/2 cup at a time, to form a soft dough.

you will soon discover the apt ratifying
that comes of heart-fiber and soul-fate when
your lover and you,

foam-covered and now
so engaged, make a natural
peace among the enemies.

turn onto a floured surface; knead
until smooth and
elastic, 8-10 minutes.

the syllables upon your tongues
will engage in something green
and drowsy, as when dreams come,

and the melodies of the moon
will harp, and the hum of the
seas will float you.

place in a greased bowl, turning once to
grease the top. cover and let rise in a
warm place until doubled, about 1-1/2 to 2 hours.

growth comes with the agitation
of your blended existence and
from that an inclination

and desire to say, in a quivering
voice at night, when entwined,
something secret.

punch dough down. turn onto a lightly
floured surface; divide dough in half
shape each into a loaf.

hands on the flesh of hungry
hands, fingers within the
fingers of uninhibited dawn,

legs lapping legs and
lips licking at lips
until the earth trembles.

place in 2 greased 9x5-in. loaf pans.
cover and let rise until
doubled, about 1 to 1-1/2 hours.

time is perforated by time,
and set to the time-keepers
who keep it all hidden,

because we are not ready
for love, ever, and we are
not ready for life.

bake at 375° until golden brown and bread sounds
hollow when tapped or has reached an internal
temperature of 200°, 30-35 minutes.

silence bleeds us out, but
the sounds of love are varied
and primal

and mark us for whatever
destinies she can afford,
lessly dressed and naked by half.

remove from pans to wire racks to cool.

let love sit and rest and
let love be love and linger
in the shadows of our hearts

so that, when it is time,
we break bread - without the burn
of lost loves - but with the lovers who rise.

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inclination

is it what's hidden

or upon the surface

of life where my

eyes are deceived?

all the damaged

collateral lives inside

the vaults of exalted

memory

and that long

whip that strikes

with the wet tongue

lashes the flesh. 

ever at the

ready, i see things

in echoes, dormant

seeds, Gothic light. 

i have put things

in places, or i have

not, but together 

they float in

colonies of

debris within

fine excuses and

apologies. 

what i see is what

i can: ruminanting

fossils of stories

i have penned, 

to the point

of distracting

myself from the 

beauty of my heart. 

what i love 

about nature

is what she can

give: particles

and viscera of

the departed and

downcast, shot through 

with ancient grains of light. 

it's all closer to

twilight with each

day and i have no

answers, 

just the flavor of

the skies above

and the hope of

elevation. 

what is here

is right there;

my eyes need look

no further. 

i won't know any

better anyway. 

so i will let life

incline toward life. 

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cherish

i cherish the leaf

who's fall was of a design

not in her control,

and that she let go,

floating in an aimless twirl,

descending toward,

descending without,

abandoning resistance,

embracing her fate,

coming to full rest

upon a watery bed

joyful in the dance.

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fallen

she the dispossessed,
having dropped from her green perch,
is the way of life.

a long walk alone
finds me mulling her new state
in a chancy world:

a fruit of some tree,
cloying as the grace of eve,
is among new friends.

everything falls here;
faith, love, hope, time, are all braced
for good of the Truth.

i am the apple,
the searching leaf, the pine bough,
the draining waters.

all is returning,
all is hearty abundance,
all is what it is.

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red dust

i.

i love the pockets-full
of red dust
that you are:

a collector's
worth of archaeological
meteor-shower atoms.

that through my fingers
i might sift you
for a thousand years,

feeling the soft-soft
sigh of your breath
on my closed eyes.

ii.

you are of the uncommon
fires found in the
outest backs of the
wilderness of common men.

there, in the distance,
the shape of you is
bisected by the
cross-hairs of branches.

something to puzzle
toward, to be in
search of, to be too
far flung to catch.

that's a father's
prayer, of course; or a poet's,
whose pursuit is of the blood-stone
souls of far-flung words.

iii.

i'm tired of grace
and of words and
of the faith of men
and of time.

but i'm not tired
of you.

because one cannot tire
of watching the way
the moon commands the sea
from across the vastness of dark.

iv.

it is october, and things
have changed, but i
still go for walks and
talk to myself, mostly.

the maple is giving
up again; the ash and
the beech and the elm,
they're spending what they have.

it will be again soon
that i walk and can see
a better view of the moon
at night.

but it will be colder then,
and i will need to make haste
and go chasing my
breath toward the heat of home.

v.

when you look back,
be it toward something.

when you reach,
be it far beyond them at least.

when you take pride,
kiss it on the lips.

when you discover
joy, be it.

when you find that
place, remember how.

vi.

this man, full of
failed words,
and propped toward
pity more than he should,
loves you, pockets-full
of red dust that you are.

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true

with this audience
of bent tree and leafy ground,
love's never dismissed

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frost on the tire

something comes from nothing
and the morning sprites, how
they light upon life with the
aplomb of kings to their thrones.

a child's bike laid on its side,
and within morning's reaches,
recumbent and receiving
her blessings of life-loss.

something comes from something
and the child who left the
bike upon the grass is asleep,
dreaming of something blue or green.

i have left a lot upon
the table, and allowed it to
speak to me from its history
to the point of distraction.

i have seen left things and
have mourned the loss of them,
only to realize later that they
gave to me what they should.

i walked around the bike
to gain a higher perspective,
to change from the lower view,
and perhaps change myself from me,

but came back around to the
lower, to inspect the frost on
the tire, to marvel with opened eyes
at the spectacle of descent.

how the autumn augers in,
strips the colors, makes way
for the princes of winter
and the crawl of demise.

something comes from itself and
the child who let go of the bike will awake
wiser, and will be something of a mystery
in how she looks to these eyes.

frost on the tire
this early in the morning says
to this father, 'Be unto the world
less wicked to oneself.

'love the evolution of the
child and let go the emulsions
that separate you from you.'

frost on the tire
will scatter with the rising sun
the way crickets dance from
my feet when out for a walk,

and the child will gather up
her bicycle and ride it
for a time before snow flies
in from the west with

winter on its hurried heals,
and things will wait 'til spring,
things will wait,
and i will be older

and so will she
but better so, for me.

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leaf and her form

i have no poetry
for the echo of
the real, the form
of it and itself.

what can be love
if not a leaf, but also the shadow
of the leaf that was found
beside herself one day?

this fallen thing
that came to rest
here and placed her essence
nearby, thus leaving her
slightly removed.

that love in her various
natures is the thing sensed
- by smell or touch or sound
or taste or seen by these ruined eyes -

but also the thing above that
and therefore beyond it,
or in this case
beside it.

i was merely walking,
with no aim except not
backwards, when i
came to her this way;

her and her stronger self,
the shaken leaf
left to decay, dropped from
a congregation of

leaves whose cathedral
above me had not yet
released all its spreading
palms.

the perceived next to
the real is how i came
to understand what i
was witness to.

because what i have
come to know is that
both live as attracting
opposites, one the

same as the other,
but the other more
pure and more purely
elevated

so that i could believe
in the truth of the one
by witnessing the
shadow of the other.

which is to say
that i have sensed
love but not confirmed it until
just in this transitory moment.

i have lived among
it everywhere, but
now, only now, have
gained faith of its reality.

something does this for
us, gifting glimpses
of gold in the veins of
life to keep us true.

love is a leaf
gone to earth,
and love is what it is, and
best viewed as what it is without.

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delightful

remove yourselves, friends;
take yourselves out of the hall and
pack up the remnants of the day
in the echoing wake of all those condolences.

bind the bouquets with the bunting
of all your will, pocket them
as you leave through the door
and place them somewhere at home.

discard the starched shirts and the
pleated dresses; hamper the clothes
worn in the mists of sorrow and
elation that flowed in the tears.

remove yourselves forthwith;
and go back out into that world
from which the dearly has departed,
that gray-gray world of quandaries.

vacate the omens and the aspersions
of the lesser souls who've played at your
fears and poked at your eyes like
needles of light.

see the after-gone of her as an entry
that leads you beyond the cold
interior of those lousy moments
that once bound you to despair.

and see her blow you a captivating kiss,
or whisper you a fantastic fairy tale,
or sing you a silly song,
or dance you into a temperate light.

fold up the chairs, friends;
remand yourselves to a better place and
skip the receiving lines of hostile
energies so that you can breathe again.

warm-bathe yourself with your lover,
or eat ice cream with the same spoon,
or fold your arms into their soul,
or read great poems to them.

walk along a slender road with your child,
or spray them with words of great zeal,
or swallow their laughter with great gulps,
or cartwheel yourself through their joy.

jar a fistful of errant pennies for your friend,
or nibble on the inner-ear of their victories,
or penetrate their difficult orbit with a burp,
or share with them your favorite flavored happiness.

for the departed has no quarrel,
has no trespassing demons,
has no malignant nights,
has no vanishing days,

and she endeavors to breathe into you
the air of something as surpassing as the stars,
something as fine as euphoria,
something as peaceful as prayer.

so remove yourselves, friends;
take yourselves out of the hall and
pack up the remnants of the day
in the echoing wake of all those condolences.

go home to your lover,
your children,
your friends,
yourself

and be delightful

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come: happiness to her

come: laughter
          and warmth
          and peace
          and serenity
             depth
          and calm
          (to hug)

come: family
          and kids
          and god
          and work
             son
          and church
          and melanie
          and babies
          and freedom
          (for coffee)

come: kids
          and canoeing
          and water
          and laughter
             paul
          and solitude
          and success
          and accomplishment
          and (good) sleep
          (unto mom)

come: memories
          and family
          and friends
          and music
             relief
          and sunshine
          and ocean
          and health
          and silence
          (with travel)

come: contentment
          and gratitude
          and pleasure
          and joy
             nature
          and love
          and community
          and awareness
          and wellness
          (near connection)

come: warm
          and soft
          and pink
          and fuzzy
             furry
          and bright
          and outside
          and breeze
          and leaves
          (within sunlight)

come: smiles
          and laughter
          and cookies
          and snow
             oceans
          and christmas lights
          and babies
          and kindness
          and halloween
          (beyond thunderstorms)

come: ukulele
          and fields
          and quiet
          and flowers
             freedom
          and stillness
          and comfort
          and warm
          and empowered
          (beneath sunshine)

come: daughter
          and nature
          and ocean
          and art
             sunshine
          and music
          and lexapro
          and poetry
          and blankets
          (toward driving)

come: love
          and sunny
          and candles
          and cozy
             laughter
          and coffee
          and free
          and bloom
          and flow
          (throughout stories)

come: family
          and chocolate
          and love (euphemistically used)
          and broadway
             puppies
          and creativity/creation
          and coffee
          (among girlfriends)

come: flowers
          and hunting
          and kayaking
          and fishing
          and gardening
             theater
          and friends
          and family
          and my kids
          (upon the outdoors)

come: family
          and love
          and nature
          and health
             food
          and water
          and adventure
          and discovery
          and knowledge
          (nearest acceptance)

come: laughter
          and comfort
          and love
          and warmth
             family
          and friends
          and passion
          and floating
          and hugs
          and burst
          (around safety)

come: love
           and family
           and friends
           and forehead kisses
              ocean
           and art
           and adventures
           and comfortable silences
           and summer skies
           (along trust)

come: love
           and laughter 
           and belonging
           and peace
              the smell of a wood burning
           and the color yellow
           and children
           and butterflies
           and thunderstorms

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still thinking

she said:
     colorful, adventurous!
and:
     abandoned, forgotten!
and:
     waiting....

then she went quiet as clouds
before:

     still thinking...

i would play with my toys
the same manner in which thunder
storms played with the fears of
dogs.

nothing escaped my
incessant desire to see what
could be turned out when in;
i come with litanies of apologies.

the things purchased by
my parents i laved in mud-
water and tossed against
trees.

as if what was new was something
of a suspect promise and needed to be
put to a mythic test at the hands of
a Pagan, rock-throwing Jentil like me.

they came polished and packaged,
pure as the soul of a newborn;
tidy, and there is a waiting lie in something
so pasteurized.

she said:
     colorful, adventurous!
and:
     abandoned, forgotten!
and:
     waiting....

then she went quiet as clouds
before:

     still thinking...

we had a flea market a mile
from my grandparent's home
and Pappy would take us
young cousins on saturdays.

he made a promise that
he kept: something under a buck
and it's yours, so we
picked over long, weathered

picnic tables that were
daisy-chained together down the
length of the side of the road
by the old shoe factory.

other people's shit
Pappy would growl,
but he always came away with
something.

and so did we: malfunctioning
jack knives or chipped
Budweiser shot glasses
or a dented Boy Scout canteen.

i once came away with
a tin toy that had been handled
so much by some past child
that the paint was ghostly

and the figure of it so
abused that it was difficult
to tell what the toy had been
in its virgin state.

i took it home and
placed it on my bureau
and no one was allowed to
touch it; i ached for its broken story.

it had been played out,
its story caught in the
fingerprints of age and time,
it sang a truth.

i have a lover who sits in
a coverlet of longing,
thinking back upon whatever
it was, now that it is now was.

she thinks:
     colorful, adventurous!
and:
     abandoned, forgotten!
and:
     waiting....

then she goes quiet as clouds
before:

     still thinking...

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light through a window

his smile was a type of
camera, and we talked about
the girls in the halls,
and we had scarlet

conversations about how
glazed everyone else was
and how they were the dead

straw of life and how Karen
Carpenter knew how to
make us feel exalted.

we stole books from the
book fair and he became ripe
with guilt and burned them

in a small pile behind his
house to hide the evidence,
i kept mine of course.

parts of our youth were
sulfuric, and we sat in the
pews and passed notes

about going to camp,
would my folks mind?
we can swim at night.

we did not swim at night,
though, because he feared
we'd get caught.

he was studious to the point
of a quivering leaf; i
failed what i hated

and walked the halls
among our peers as
if a sword blade of dusty light.

the triumph was in the
pilgrimage of stars in
our separate infirmities;

how we were of a certain
small tribe of people who
wander against latitudes.

i suspected that his
indifference to the passions
of love was a deep,

meticulously hidden
mask of thieves, and
that what he craved

he could not speak of,
not in our age of dissecting
interrogations.

his truth was a spasm,
really, it was a wrinkle
of sheets and he slept unkindly.

he asked me if i liked
being a father, and i said
yes of course.

he asked me if i liked
being married, and i said
yes of course.

his drowsy questions
were inclined to
disentangle his myths,

i believe; to remove those
walls briefly and peer
though an open window.

i believe he loved me,
but i can't be certain, but
i was never certain with him,

the one who walked the long
way through rows of
suspended shadows and

was never one to share out
the tenderness in the deepest
parts of his tissues.

i should have told him that
i loved him, if only to assure
him that what i valued

was that he was real to me,
that i was not as pleated as
i seemed to be at times.

i took a picture of a window
recently, through which the
last light of the day

yawned, and made the
interiors seem like hope
was not without shadow,

that life was not without
delicate betrayals, that
love was not a feeling.

dreaming souls have it
worst, all leaping urges
left alone to die.

his last escape came
in the night, when no
one could see him.

which is the way he
liked it: obscure
and unassuming.

there is no significance
in things not said between
people, to be honest.

what is spoken is there,
and everything else is a
closed window.

i tell myself that,
but really, it's not
the least bit true.

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lifted

do you remember,
she danced in our dreams?
- and how the questions were all
ominous, like first-of-night
touching the landscape?

do you remember,
everything was so badly described?
- and how the shallow valley of
old winds just wouldn't
cease to vex us?

do you remember,
naked flowers under a bruised moon?
- and how acrobatic fate was all we
had to clutch in those moments
of blanking losses?

do you remember,
the obscurity of wanderlust?
- and how her arrival was
like a mad impulse of
mystical stones?

all terrifying thrusts
and shapeless sounds
and un-gemmed words
and primitive dance-songs
became our mediums.

now, splendor in her
kingdom, and serenity in her
legend, and nourishment in her
veins of delight are come to us
like an avalanche of lovers,

burying all those dead
agents once and for all,
and leaving us the beauty
of a girl in a swing who is
none the wiser, but lifted.

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i'm not certain in which room

well -

i'm not certain in which room
He thought you'd ought reside,

since -

square is round as square can be
when all you do is hide

from -

all His hurried days that race
across your pebbled street,

since -

blades of grass ignore the touch
when faced with His retreat

toward -

lightness chalked by blackish coal
that's dug with bitter hands

which -

bleed upon His stretch of time,
congealing where you stand.

//

i'm not certain in which room
He thought you'd ought reside,

so -

do your best, son, do your best,
and let the Fates decide.

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stonecipher

you crack me open and
the split receives your
relentless flow;

you jest - your wit is
wicked - and you release
great waves of silly.

if i were to remake you in some other art form what would you be?
what i have now is poetry, that dance of watery concessions to language.
i would draw you, then, with crayons made of blood-wax, blindfolded;
pin it on a surface, drink it daily, and not sign it.
this stone, molded by heat and pressure, time and violence,
has its ancient faces placed by ancient foes,

you decipher them
with action figures
and bicycle wrenches and

you find no correlative
significance in the way you
use your feet and hands poorly.

your innocence is a pouring
over, a soft-droplet shower
of powder-blue questions.

you ask certain things
multiple times in your
quest to stay afloat,

and i answer them as best as i can, but i'm better with a pen.
for example, i have no idea which Avenger i would be if i could,
or which weapon i would prefer in the event of zombies.
your tongue and your lips are transmitters that wash
a signal over me until all i can hear is the sound of you dreaming,
a perfect pitch that buoys me to points above the compass.

you sweep away the surface
dust and get to the
chiseled truth;

your instruments of that
undoing rest in the palms
of your thirst.

you kneel at the site
with magnificent calm and
approach my stone with care.

your blood on the skinned
flesh has dried and it looks
like spilled Kool-Aid.

my brother once swung me from the feet in cyclonic carousel circles
in our old living room until my head struck the corner of a brick on the mantel.
i blacked out and bled and he brayed with laughter. the blood on my shirt was alluvial.
i sculpt with ink, bearing down on the truth in the rock.
i harden my resolve and whet whatever appetite that growls.
in this way, i am dependent on your graciousness and untied sneakers.

i am a stonecipher
you crack me up good

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she comes to terms

she had no agency,
and she never spoke.
impoverished, wandering, cool-eyed,
intricate fabric of hand-spun hopes.

there was once a riot of beautiful
people on her small stage, a cult
of the tired who danced between
great oaks of the living and the dead.

with bright thoughts on all harbors,
she was one of them to be sure,
but an old wind wound up and
carried her into an uncomfortable home.

she had to make it all out of bones
again, the foundation to the tower bell,
unearthing rocks to remove them,
singing in the darkness of blood.

life is a caste; a glacial, atomic,
tribal dance; a slow water in
the crevices of the fingers for
a woman made of confessions.

so she must endeavor to
wail at those old faces, so that
she might unmask her furious
hurricanes of fate and love.

she comes at this differently
now, deciphering as she goes,
uttering prayers beneath a
breath made of ancient dignity.

to poke through the pains of glass,
to bite down on her lip
and relearn harsh principles
that she can then discard.

everything has been left
half-eaten for her. everything
has been left to wash up
on the shore.

everything is soapy and
feels like it was just not
meant to be, and whatever
generous bounty was someone's else's.

but in this new face,
but in this new graciousness,
but in this new center,
but in this new sacred text,

she comes to terms

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play out

i was on the other side,
i was blind and silent as numbers.

i was an instrument of parachuting clouds,
i was a fugitive and an oath to the moon.

i was sown into the plaited earth,
i was boys running and assailing open fields.

i have sons whose purity heaved

with the wildness of the forest,

and who listened to the great
overtures of the Mother when she sang.

sons are a translation
of some ancient scripture,
written on the expanded sky
that rains down their truth.

i was a matter of fact,

i was vigilant and a fleeing disregard.

i was posed in a museum,

i was disordered and rending the flesh.

i was happiest in the silence of breathing,

i was pen to paper and a fragrance of joy.

i have daughters whose riddles menaced
me with their adoring contradictions,
and who heard from the lips
of oblivion lessons about joy.

daughters are a revolution
against some ancient tribe,
taking up arms with the fury of Athena,
building temples upon the hills of cynics.

i believed in the walking

and the waking of mornings,

of the summers of long grass

and the night sky of august.

i trusted in the wonder

and the wander of the soul,

of the change of autumn

and her tilt toward reclamation.

i was a child, living among

the length of wonderment that

stretched as far as i could see,

and i lived in the moment.

my children lead me

away, in a playful manner,

like the laughter caught

in the petals of flowers.

and i put words to the page,

imagining these things

are clear, to make sense of them,

but i think they'd rather i not

and to just play

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she doesn't like the rain through the window

she doesn't like the rain
through the window,
and a kiss is a prayer.

she doesn't like the reeling
gravity of a destroyed
passion either.

but she loves like a
whirling Eros,
and her hands are growling.

(this is a woman
who abandons the sea
for the beach rose after all.)

she says people are good
because they are and
they want to be,

but she doesn't like the rain
through the window,
and a prayer is a kiss.

she finds god wading in the
menace of the purest chaos,
and she still shades toward love.

she thinks too much
about the limbs of all
those fallen branches,

she thinks too much,
but she doesn't like how the
stars are just collapsed promises.

i don't know this
woman as much as
i say i do.

don't be fooled; men
menace good fortune
wherever they find it,

they sing their own praises, thinking
to do so is to fashion for themselves
something of an infinite well.

when in truth, we have no
original waters, only women
do, and it is made from their blood.

we met because it had to
be, and all the fine excuses
of life were scattered.

i should make allowances
for my own blind failings,
i should be easy on myself

and walk backwards for awhile,
to keep my head from looking for
something; to learn to breathe.

but
however
anyway

she is stained glass
in a hungry cathedral
wanting to be dishonest,

but she can't do it;
her womb is too much
of a sacred psalm,

because this is a woman;
and the laughter of her
child holds the real taste of blossoms,

not the words of the poet, or
the vows at the altar, or
the hands of the lover.

people change and
the camber of their hearts
is the shape of real love

that pierces through
the thunder in a
plunging field.

it is unscrupulous
in its designs toward
terrorizing the unfaithful.

it is made to muscle
out the conventions
of the lofty and the proud.

the women i know are not
hungry for you, my friend, but for
an audience with their own destinies.

for example...

this is a woman
who wears sequins
at the funeral of her history,

if only to announce
to the world that the rain through
the window is just another nuisance;

that she is on the verge of
reconnecting to something primal,
something eternally in touch;

that she embarked, she dived
in, she sojourned toward
something you don't understand.

i don't know this
woman as much as
i say i want to.

i try too hard, that's
really the problem,
my want is a toppled pier

that has surrendered to
her breaking waves, her
formidable tide.

but
however
anyway

she doesn't like the rain
through the window,
and her kiss is scriptural.

it is given and not taken,
it is a profuse offering,
profitable to those who understand

that she is equal to the task
of whatever rain that might
come through that window,

and that she needs you not.

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unglassed

i'd like to think they put
them here, in some
half-insouciant effort to be found
by a lover
who takes them,
in a fit of passion,
the way that happily-
ever-after tied things up
nicely for you-know-who.

the world has never worked that
way, really. it's filled
with the dead ends of
guilt and the traffic stops
of never-ending untidy
shame in which so many
of my friends have found
themselves drowning;
this universe has no driver.

but i'd like to think they put
them here, stained with
the imprint of heavy feet,
like a bronze chalk outline,
and that this lover discovers
them and goes about
their kingdom on a horse,
or at the very least a compact car
that they had to buy
second-hand,

with a bad odometer and
a slack tire;
and that they have only coins to
pay for gas and that they have a bad
tooth, and that they forget to call
their ailing mother, and
that they've been reduced by some
for being less-than and
that they're lost in a small-cloud way.

so that when they find
their lover, and slip on these
unglassed sandals with their
toe-prints and smelling like
ripe unreasonable failings,
she appreciates that they
came back anyway, despite the
world's caving-ins, and that she
knew it was for a just cause.

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all the bells that ring

all the bells that ring above the confounding swirl of this meager life are made from the dust of the innocent heart-core of the premiere stars. children, beholden to which life they illumine, - before their great course - are cast in this stock by the hands of some divine intervener force, and then released down onto the unsuspecting dim unbelievers. i have trust in fate who bows her head toward me on this cold planet, and bestows on me a kind of lighted resolve to always see love in frames of virtue that they so easily make when they breathe out Truth. i don't understand much of anything really, except the lovely dreams of my children, who have made a dance of life seem like a whisper. their arms receive me and i harmonize with joy in their offering, and to this father the bells peal through all darkness and call me to dance.

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a remaining snow in a spring wood

a remaining snow in a spring wood
finds me delirious in my
search for something real;
that i might roll into the
day anew, so very long-bereft of the sun.

however, this is not the
melancholia of some departed
faith, but an inward cheer for renewal
of my passion's passion and
a prayer to psychic rebellion.

the transient history that
became engraved into
legend on my pages
is an ink blot the color
of yearning and as vaporous as
the melting heart.

i am not sad, i do
not compel tears, i do not
stand kindled or abreast
of the dark, i do not mourn
the perforated life that i live.

this is me in one
elegant instance,
one pedestrian, drawn moment
looking out-toward as
much as in-toward, and
away from the vertigo.

i've ventured here often,
if not to this particular spot
then certainly to many spring
woods and many melting
islands, and the vision
has always made me feel
something like loss.

to puzzle over the notion
of this type of change: the
monumentally slow
revolution that takes its
time beneath the sun
and cannot be witnessed
in time, but over time,

yet still take you by
surprise and leave you feeling
as though you lost your chance
to mark the moments in
a momentous way.

this type of encounter -
the snow-in-a-spring-wood -
once was a trip into
a world of dark dreams,
of plunging into wells
of the darkest waters.

now, today - and of late -
i am finding that i was
wrong about the meaning
of it.

i have a marked friend
who stands within her own
greening wood, witnessing her
own snowy cay, and wondering
how her promised adventure into
transfiguring love had been deposed;

redacted by the hand of
the one who once was
her infinite dream, her
epoch of planets, her sacred
source.

how it all collapsed is
beyond her farthest
reach, the balance tipped
and all things yawing with
the weight of life's cumbersome
stones.

she stands now in her own orgasm
of nature with this mind frame, unable
to counter-balance, unable to come
to terms, unable to not be subdued.

i would say to her that
although she feels her
entire day-life has spread
itself across the witnesses
of memory, stretched as
thin as the web across the eyes,

this simple patch of presiding
snow tucked in the shade of
trees is not a mark of predestination,
not a symbol of the evil fortune
cast upon her.

it is, rather, something of a
quiet smile from a distant,
serene face whose deliberate
fortune of being there before
her in this moment is a
good thing indeed.

like my own discovered,
primal, impermanent
snow, which once made me
feel as though the things
of life that seem to be the
proverbs of doom,

is in fact a small rebellion
against the enemies of truth;
that decay and the withering
of things is not the death agent
that we've come to fear,

but the impetus of exuberant
change. evolution is the
hallmark of lovers who, in
their collisions, expunge
hate and bring forth life.

i left the woods on a monday
late morning, returning the
next day to find the snow
all but gone, but the earth
into which it had found its
way, was soft as the sound
of peace.

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what giving creature is this

what giving creature is this
who came singing down,
who minds this soul and
craves the greenery of love?

that i am affixed to her
spot in the ethos of
unbridled compassion
and driven wants;

that i am awash in
her wake of relevant
fables and broad,
gleaming fantasies;

that i am enshrouded
by her enthusiasms
for joy and for relief
from the afflictions of truth;

that i am stayed
by her delirious
visions of harmony
with all of life.

give me a reason
not to weep in the
zephyr of her passing
through my days.

give me a sense of why
i should not pour every
gifted coin of what she
has of love

into a silken purse
and distribute its contents
to all the mournful
angels in my life,

that they secure from
it a new place in
the cosmos of goodness
and grace, mirth and humanity.

that is what my giving
creature calls down
to me from a place
i once knew.

i meditate on her face.
i sing on her fingers.
i pray on her toes.
i dance on her eyes.

she embraces me and in her grasp
and at once i feel the firmament
of something close to all the good
things i've enjoyed in my years.

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my lover has said that she needs magic

my lover has said that she needs magic

from the supernaturally quiet

calm that comes with a type of kiss,

something like a whispered song.

and from my imperfect consideration,

after diving deeply into its

meaning, i have met with some terms,

thinking:

her meaning is like the texture of the perfect

day in which all the 

benevolence of Mother is received -

this kiss, if enjoined in

simple sweetness, sees two

different things happen at once:

cleaving fear and spiritual elation.

love arises from this and wears a thin veneer;

nearly impossible to breach

without her necessary components,

which have different names 

to different people: kindness, empathy,

release, joy, faith, blindness.

i don't know, exactly.

the point is, my lover cannot 

extract love from something

that does not first explode.

and therefore, in this manner,

she cannot abide a kiss that is absent 

a sacred, mystical communion.

she told me once, after

meeting a suitor for the first

time, that their kiss left her subtracted

from the moment, and

therefore darkly abandoned in that

moment, roughly accumulated.

i just didn't feel it

she explained, and to my

inquisitive brow, she said,

it's hard to explain,

but there was nothing

here,

and she placed a palm on her belly 

with the same look as having been 

assaulted by a boring, generic thought;

almost verging on a type of tear,
the way she looks sometimes
when life has gone slate.

it was - and it is not -
a testimony to the
manner in which he kissed;

she had no degrading revulsion,
no unnecessary private scold
of the man himself,

who was, by her own
admission, wonderfully
polite, attractive, even funny.

when she first meets a lover,
she expects no mistrial of the
event beforehand, harbors no prejudice.

but rather - and i am being painfully,
boorishly, nonspecific here
because i had to puzzle through it

to find her Truth, that i might join
her in the center of the idea
and understand it -

but i believe
she hopes for
something fragmenting,

something that cracks open
her sternum and stirs
the remote calm into a frenzy.

magic, she called it,
and i had to excuse the
limp term in my mind

because it rang like
a muted bell or a
water-submerged idea.

i felt it with you that
first kiss, she confessed,
and i was then floated

instantly, pulled backward
to that moment, the
muscles of my memory coiling,

to a location
caved-in by a million other
encroaching, dusty stones.

i didn't recall magic -
but rather felt the
light-headedness

that comes on the wing
of fueled fear, the same feeling
of falling in a dream,

face down, toward earth
from a fantastic height,
my breath exhumed,

and startle-waking
just as my face
strikes cold consciousness.

from the separation of our
lips, from the second the
skin of them slipped silently apart,

i was upended, my heart
a thundering vessel,
my mind compelled toward

some vanishing light,
some ascending thought,
some untouchable moon.

thereafter i craved nothing
less than to be a new alien
to myself,

to depart from what was
and had been and confront
a better form of me.

my hands tingled,
i do remember that:
they nearly hurt

with a desire to
forever hold in their tips
the ornament of her soul.

oh! oh yes
i agreed with her
then, newly birthed.

magic, i said.

she blushed:

yes...

yes!

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mere touch

what else could you say
         about me? she asked.
how many words exist? said i.

i lament that we live
in a world in which lovers
believe they're not worthy

of the inexhaustible words
of their poets, who always
have something to confess.

it's as though she asked me,
how many different ways
          could you touch me?

the answer to which would
seem foolish to those who've
felt the power of either.

to the poet in love's
apprehension, words are the
fount from which touch flows.

i know a poetess and painter
who shares her works with me
and it's like the touch

of the fingers to the
breastbone, behind which
the heart awaits.

mere touch, mere words
the poet is over-generous
with both to those who

are willing to receive,
and neither need meaning
beyond the import to one's soul.

to verse and to touch
have the same end
to this poet:

to give and to take,
to intercourse with
a lover's delicate charity.

consider the lover
and the reader the same
in this example:

radiating, next to me,
back-bared and
placated, yielding.

i listen to her hair
on the pillow when
she turns every so often,

subtle as the sound of
voices in a distant room,
muted soft secrets.

every moment of her darkness
it is required of me that
i put hands on something

of her, some part,
that i may repeatedly
witness a life teeming.

for me, touch is a guide wire
to deep inlets, a current
of the transitory spark.

it does not last, nor
could it any more than
the wick of a candle.

which is quite all right
for this temporal man,
who needs his native fix.

poetry is in no way different.
it requires the touch of the
word upon the lover's

breastbone, received as deeply
as she allows, feeling whatever
comes and no less.

i cannot control the
affect of verse and touch,
which is important.

i want each received and
swallowed, then forgotten
by morning,

so that each new touch,
each new poem, is blushed
over and makes her dizzy.

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my mother has escaped love

my mother has escaped love.
which is to say,
she and my father turn
60 years old in june
as a married couple,
so she understands
that love is no mere enthusiasm;

no chased thing,
 no source of youth,
  no misting degrees of want,
   no harbor pursued,
  no turned-up sun,
 no significant fortune,
no public poetry.

we've all blasted it to
pieces, made it sentimental.
it's in the courts of our
poisoned blood; we are all
feverish with its currency
and have mistaken it for something
like fashion or violence.

love is the ancient find
in the ancient ground,
the sacred air in the tombs
of the kings, the particles
in the air above spring fields,
the twilight rays found
in the shortest good-byes.

she dwells in the beloved, my mother,
my inexhaustible water,
who can't spell to save
her own life, and whose
passions flank us all and
who grew up in the best  times
when life was on an oiled hinge.

i liken her to no flower,
 no obscure scent,
  no palpable constellation,
  no ageless dream,
 no prenatal obscurity,
no heavenly relic.

rather, she is let it go
she is may it be
she is what it ought be
she is never do say
she is always breathe
she is kiss ever fully
she is dance with time.

my mother liked to bite,
did i ever tell you that?
at random moments
she would bare her teeth
and sink them into the flesh
of my shoulder or arm
enough for me to know i was hers,

the way the lioness bites
the neck of her unruly cubs,
a playful marking, a
lucid reminder that she
is the empress, the hungry
master of the wild world.

most mothers i know are like
this; and my mother is no less
sweet than delirious angels,
yet a rogue killer of the
joyless secrets shared between
heaven and man; she is my
delicate escort.

she has irreplaceable loyalty, my mother.
she is a reader of spy novels and
taught me the great chambers found in
the written word that led me
to put to page the finery
of inexact thought and heroic fantasy;
she suffered through the private readings
of my hand-written, jerky dream-lands.

she is the beacon,
the lady chancellor,
the high priestess,
the guardian against and
the foil to my enemies;
she is the longest day
and shortest night.

my mother has escaped love,
which is to say she
and i stand on separate soil,
diverged by a thin
and constant bridge of surety.
my reachable pilot,
my dearest source.

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savannah

                      i.
      how comes the muse

friday night and he is struck;
this poet, who ponders an image
that has arrived to rest in his
mind pulsing with mortality and blood.

thinking: how comes the
muse to the latched-upon artist?
that he is vigorously transfixed
by the aesthetic eye of a her?

in this breezy moment in time,
what comes touching-down
from the cosmos
is a spiritual palm,

and an otherwise depth-less thought
goes in one leaping direction
to become held deeply fast to
that desirable corner.

he must, in fact, let
loose upon his page,
does he not? or it becomes
just another obedient lie.

the poet has the luxury of being
so adorned from a fair enough distance,
and therefore urged to supplant idle
imagination with a new figure of Eros.

and that is how it goes: two
diametric skies are collided in escaping
randomness, through which the giver
and the receiver embrace rebellion.

                   ii.
          love, not Eve

is this not the question, then:
in what effective form can
the poet word-sculpt
the truest essence of the muse?

that he must reduce
it to a form at all, to capture
and release that which he feels,
is his first and ultimate failing.

surely the eyes are not that
color, nor the chin as fleeting
in the bones, nor the arms as
subdued and tone-full?

and what of the careful
consideration of another artist,
upon his examination and execution
to the page of the same she?

certainly, with the art held together
side by side, the tepid reader
will decide that she is
not at all the same subject.

so it is wanting that the
measure of a poet's success
be done by falling in love
with the poet himself;

that we are to know
the muse in her tender,
enthusiastic self only through
the complicated will of the writer.

but in what fashion can
we travel such distance,
and with necessary acuity
and informed reflection,

that we can get to a point
in which we do, firstly, know
the man and therefore,
secondly, know the truth of her?

it's all running up great
slopes of uncompromising, naked
dunes for a vista entombed, nevertheless,
by the clouds of longing.

i'm apt to believe, then,
that the artist looks not to
engage us in a game of
mirrored reflection,

but rather in a prayer
for the ascendance of
the muse to a level
of cosmic blessing,

so that what we come
away with is the
reigning answer to the
question of love, not Eve.

                iii.
     what can be done

what can be done of
you? might i approach
your selfness in a manner
beneficial to my whim?

some will certainly
behold you in accordance
with their own buried
schemes and predestinations;

they will take into consideration
what they know of you at the
outset, and lay over, upon
this tribute, a new transparency,

(if they know you at all)
and if not, my words will be
their first entry of you into
a book of old faiths.

so i separate whatever gray
there is and wash from my
scriptures those tendencies of fact
that mar so many relationships.

i know a bit about you,
so that is unhelpful and
no small impediment toward
art if i want to show the truth.

the fearful and the feeble
will prescribe whatever
required secrecy to their tongues
and thus split the joy of it.

the unknowing will travel
a different path and, upon
its end, be stirred by the
spirit of charity and restraint.

neither of which is anything
a polite poet need care
about, so i've put you all
to the back in a grave

so that now i can embrace,
free of the tethers and in a
colder stance and standing alone,
my prayer upon your image.

                    iv.
             savannah

the face is the draw,
moon-shadowed as it
is, one hemisphere obscured
by original secrets.

she is looking at the silent
and retreating dreams
of some such passion she
had in youth.

that she achieved her
station thus far by
the dint of a mystic
turn years before.

like the rest of us, her
songs and her parchments
of affection, written in the moon's
ink, have been folded

and have been put away
into a volume of hymns,
then remanded to an
impossibly high shelf.

she has her visible eye
affixed to some twilight
and keeps her hair behind
the ear, listening.

all women do this:
they hurt and they
dance in dark harbors
of want and desire.

they don't know who to be
when alone or in a party of refutable friends,
so they keep an eye and an ear
ever affixed to a life of sounds.

for a sign, perhaps?
for some portent sound
from the past that will
signal the new beginning?

her shoulder is faced toward
us - her patrons - but not
coldly. it is as bare
as the most memorable proverbs.

the neck, likewise unwed,
is where the strength is,
holding within which the voice
of a woman self-estranged.

her thoughts are not as morbid
as they might seem; she has
no palpable regrets but rather
lingering confusions,

thoughts full of beautiful invitations
to grand adventures,
both big and small, some
of which she's attended.

thoughts filled with full-breasted
rains of summer and
all the attendant whispers
of tall trees.

her thoughts are as
complicated as stones
on a beach in the manner in which
they make a reachable pattern.

if only she could connect
them at once to get -
in just a fleeting second -
a glimpse of her Call.

she knows it's there!
and puzzles over them
endlessly while on her
surfaces of days attends to life.

the lips remain unspoken
for, remaining purely at
rest and unparted, to suggest
nothing more than serenity.

they've been loosed before,
releasing all manner of
hosts - from songs in the
night to sighs in the storm.

they've pressed upon the brow of the
child and the hands of the lover alike, each
a blesséd gift from someone who feels
symmetry between the cells of life.

what leisure, then, resides in
her best moments? what wild
specters dance upon her
crown when she is alone?

what does she release to
a blue world, and what does
she retain for the right
receiver of love?

the entirety of her, from
what is seen, is the
beginning of swaying
answers to a watery faith.

there is a desperate certainty
in that visible eye, how
it reveals an absolute
skepticism toward something.

just beyond us, behind this poet,
she sees the accumulation
of a thousand reasons,
a hundred-thousand reasons.

and the darkened eye,
the engulfed eye,
is the one we want to
see, to know what

grand dream is left
in waiting and what grand
dream remains dormant, and
what grand dream is unborn.

she is, in this light,
capable of choosing,
it would seem, an old
place to visit -

in this dissecting light
she is present and
half-past and looks to
no one for answers.

but the eye tells us
she's close to it;
she's approaching that
point, and surely she knows.

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struck, then new

i was struck by the girl whose
visage and whose posture and
whose offered smells were
so violent and so severe
that i forgot everything
about how to behave.

(behave! that terrible
and vexing word that
rinsed from my pores
the real dirt of Truth
and left me so much
dead in youth!)

i was at once, in her
presence, sent back to the
nocturnal leaves of autumn,
to the merciless stations of
deep spring, to the sharp
silver patter of summer rains.

true love hides her engines,
submerged as they ought to
be in a fabric woven with
sincerity, enlightenment,
and the ticklish threads of
amber-dried moonlight.

you don't know love if you can 

put a book to it, you can hum it 

in your head,  if you can decipher 

its glyphs as if chiseled in your 

native tongue on stone-behind-glass.

how i tried to forget her!
how i touched my tongues
to the psalms of hidden angels
so that i might be cleansed of
the taste she left in my
newly vented heart.

i would swear, before i'd met
her, that love was the work of
learnéd hands and not some
primitive magic conjured in
the nighttime of man's minor
chambers.

but she had set loose her continent
of native warriors to my front,
over-running my blood; it was
too late for this dumb body,
who discovered one day that
he'd been soul-marked for good.

it was not her soft-focus
kiss, let's be clear; or
the shy weight of her
hand to my nape, or
the crowning breath upon my
cheek when she smiled.

or the exact breast,
or the enfolded vulva,
or the coy buttocks,
or the obedient thigh,
or the eyes the depth
of a thousand rumors.

it is something you are
struck by, as the
felled tree hammers the
floor and reduces all
things to an exclamation,
then a question, then
a parenthetical.

thus far i've only wondered
from my own arm's distance,
from my own deep chapters,
the meaning of the word,
inscribed as it is with the
hot hand of divine fortune.

never again will i attempt

a run at fate like i did

the day she first stood before

me, talking about the

hum of the winds during

the climax of star-showers.

the old obedience that comes

with age is most vulnerable

in these encounters, and

i'm fixed upon the notion 

that they are as rare as gems 

found in the pockets of fools.

i might search for it -

in fact i have - only to be

put out on my ear into

the cold harbor where

all the other derelict ships

founder on their sides.

i've learned that the splendor 

of a melding union is a gift 

offered when all the cosmos

say yes to you and to it and 

oblivion can be glimpsed in a gesture.

and her gesture was ripe with the

aura of something primitive,

profuse in its boundless calling

and governed by the smallest of

particles that collided with one

another into a frenetic climax of tranquility.

to be loved in such a way

is to be boiled down to the 

bones and resurrected anew,

simple cell by simple cell,

until the heart beats outside

the chest and the blood runs bare.

it's not supposed to be comfortable,

this percussive union; it's not supposed

to lay you down into beds of grace. it's

supposed to prickle and burn and delight

in making you feel in every fiber

the epic expulsion of life's beginning.

i see now, years later,

what she did there:

it was all in her grand

narrative to sketch me

into a pageant of life

secured by her gifts,

to be elevated at once and

for all above the clouds of

the mundane and the grieved,

above the debased attitudes

of simple men, to know that 

life should be life with a lush view.

she enrolled me in joy with

her clever hope-song lyric, securing 

in me a vision of the

stealing vistas of what could

possibly emerge if i chose

to cross her elegant transom.

in recent times i've fallen

out of favor with my own

wonder, stumbling on the

roots of negation, collective

fears and bottomless cups.

love is not a thing of the 

wright, who manufactures

from his hand the great

ongoing war between

life and art, who sweats

upon the chisel and brush.

rather, love is an irreplaceable

exuberance of kisses upon

the brow of a man's narrow

horizon - it exists in and is

consumed by the loyal plunge

into life's unanswerable questions.

it is an inimitable transcendence

upward to her self-ness, to her

embracing desires, within

which you gain an offering

of her spectral flesh, so long

as you keep your eyes closed.

i understand nothing about

your own love, your own

shadowy passions, your own

tumult of faded aggression

toward intercourse  

with a him or a her.

i only know that i was

once, years ago now, an ordinary

creature full of the dire

foils of man, and that

when she came upon me

it was with a new breath,

a new countenance,  a new
flavor to the tongue, a new
pressure to the skin, a new
convention of faith, a new
torrent of vitality, a new
fine excuse for being me.

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