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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swing

she wears galaxies of memorabilia
upon the dangerous hip; adorned
as if awakened at night in order
to hover through the day.

the psychic factions of her limbs
can and will call forth a sort of
sheer fabric of passion and i am
obliged toward such ornaments,

with which i find the causal
bruises of her strengthened agency:
she swings in a hair-knotting wind
of forced attention, for example.

or escapes upon the sway of
life-sized wings that are cambered
by the velocity of blasts that toss

her body back and away.

i have urges in sleep that become
perhaps the bone in a dangerous

mouth, how they are strange clots in 

the blood stream of my otherwise quiet.

i have no control of it. (meaning, the
motion of her.) or rather, the gravity
of the swing's prayer-like pendulum-pull,
its significant finality of cause.

the effect is stupendous and scary
at once: the blank forwardness of
her travel; the tonguing way it laps
at the ridge of my weakening field.

so my position becomes a thing

of uneven sky beneath a watery

earth and i am left primitive in

my new approach to her want.

i say i need, but really it is all

a pure swaggering thrum of

unspent investment in time

caught upon a canopy of fright.

this here is rare oxygenated

lightning. it is fresh departure.

it is irrigated conscience. it is

misspent sweat of the thighs.

it is a beautiful destination

toward which my arms betray

my eyes, my legs betray my

mouth, my heart betrays god.

a full-hearted rain on the roof

cannot compare to the malice

of a swing when occupied by

a soul searching for rebellion.

dear god have i tried. how i

have governed my impulses

in one fashion for years, to

see it all spin out to fortune.

the attempt must be swallowed

and regurgitated so that the 

soul can eat nourishment from

a bowl of oblivious nectar...

i come back always-ever to

a place of standing to aping

shame and the royalty that

comes with no crown.

heaven is searched in these

moments as i negotiate the

swing: to pray to find the

apex, to pray to find my grasp.

when in truth i have no

leverage against something

so violently shoved and so

dutifully kept as a soul

wanting to escape from me;

unache for me;

break from me;

in the name of love.

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knowing

i'm done with the
vibrant glow of the
bulb in the night

and how i relied
upon it to speak
to me when
clamoring to safety.

the dark did not
change my trajectory
inasmuch as the light
stole from me my compass.

and the fear i felt at
times was never vanquished
by anything more than
when i closed my eyes.

i don't reach out in the dark
anymore, but rather plunge
forth into it, eyes shuttered,
with knowing in my heart.

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