my brother, in the prolonged lead-up
to his death, photographed a rose,
a rose my mother planted in a narrow
garden at my parent's house, where
he'd come to live out the remainder
of his days
i would sit with him over nights, to
be a vigilant watchmen of his frail
meanderings, a guard against a sudden
stuttering fall
that morning, the morning of the rose,
we sat together on a bench on a porch,
and he leaned into me to show me his
photograph
"it's...
what giving creature is this
something like a whispered song
mere touch
her meaning is like the texture of the perfect
my mother has escaped love
that love is no mere enthusiasm
savannah
how comes the muse to the latched-upon artist
swing
she wears galaxies of memorabilia
Friday, December 23, 2016
Saturday, December 17, 2016
shidah
destruction,
i see, is how they've mended that
city in the distant blown-up country,
and i think how the sons of abraham
have all made a mess of it and his
daughters are left weeping
i once embraced, with gaiety and without
shame, my brother, who came to live with
us when we both were greater idealists
the muslim and the christian by
the faith of our fathers,
but to hell...
Sunday, December 11, 2016
my passion
i tried to be as cold as the
church wanted me to be when i was
much younger and they said i
must remove the bellows that fired
the passions of the flesh
in me dwelleth no good thing,
they said, and for years i
flogged my inner yearnings
down into a loathsome pulp
and the homosexuals i knew became
stock characters, with their lisps
and flexed wrists and flash and
bright arrogances
and the girls who unfolded into flower
before me at every turn,...
Friday, December 2, 2016
light
a descent of the mind to gloom
is that slow wind-down of a senile clock,
that dull drip in a country sink,
that gray water in a pasture puddle
it tightens the jowls
and draws the heart into the stomach
and aches the legs toward a bed
where relief-in-sleep is a fool's illusion.
winter, it does not consume,
it extinguishes by bloat,
crowding my primal inner space,
suffocating it by a crawling expansion.
observe the fester of a sore,
how it begins...
Sunday, November 27, 2016
motion
when i woke, i went straight to
music and what i heard
set a scene one might picture
if awaiting the rise of a curtain
on some expected play
between actors we know
and whose work we have
a certain anticipation toward
or maybe that was the mood
i was in already when i awoke
and the music was a mere
conspirator? either way
the music felt like a prelude:
a softly moving bass, the strum
of a guitar, the slide of the jazz rake
across the face of the...
Sunday, November 20, 2016
play
someone
asked me once:
why do you play like
this, why
did you not leave it to
children
and remember that you
have a
certain elevated place
now and must
put away the things of
your youth?
and i
could not answer him with
any
honesty except with a shrug
and a
blush of shame and i'm sure
my
silence was the answer he wanted
or
expected
the way
some teachers,...
Friday, November 18, 2016
coins in a Ball jar
coins touched by the hands
of a
thousand now come to rest
in a Ball
jar that sits on the edge of
our kitchen
counter
it was the precarious
position
i found it in – on the
ledge like that -
that got me thinking of the
man whose
face was the first i saw in
this world
something of glass so close
to falling,
so close to tumbling that i
could feel
the descent...
Wednesday, November 16, 2016
let's be friends of a thing in its spirit
let's be friends of a thing in its spirit
in the same way we view a stone
or a single blade of grass
or the sound of wind
how they in themselves
alone and free can be
considered as they are
and are not without injury
to separate them out for a time
in order that we might
enjoy within them a view
of pure simplicity
indeed they are part of something
outside themselves and into
which they belong
to be sure, of course
but have a beauty alone too
that...
Friday, October 28, 2016
sonnet for the bird with the hollow song
i care no more for your enthralling song
your recitals i refuse to attend
those once-beloved lyrics now all but gone
with that performance, i cannot pretend
i am left more cautious since i have heard
your siren sound tempting my ships to harm
how you caroled us with your cloying words
and burned us with the bitters of your charm
now you've flown to feed upon new goodness
to trill your story for another soul
with fresh audience, no need to confess
to...
Saturday, October 22, 2016
three leaves
these last days of autumn
shimmer down to something
close to the moment before
sleep, when the world outside
contracts into darkness and
the ether of dreams comes
drifting
out a dining room window
of our simple maine farmhouse
a red maple stands with half his leaves
still blazing, still clinging
to branch, while two thousand miles
away they eulogize my uncle
who was...
Sunday, October 16, 2016
blur
we were married in a sage masonic
meetinghouse during our descent,
on the stage of that stoic hall, as
part of a late september day dressed
with mist and autumn removals
it was a fine place, yet what is a
place but a context into which
we rain our droplets of time
that we manage to
stir into something like a life
my brother took pictures...
Tuesday, October 4, 2016
cicada bottle summer
the kids just last week presented to me a
trim, stunted bottle unearthed by the rooting snouts of the
piglets in our garden bed out back
where the soil is still a rich virgin black.
i placed the vial on the sill of our kitchen window
above the sink and it still held the earth in it;
so besodded that the light outside labored against
an obscure passage through its thick...
Friday, September 30, 2016
give
i've defaulted on a few loans
lately and the lenders have now closed
their windows to me
for not meeting their terms
perhaps i'm sorry or
just not taken in by the
rate of interest and how it all felt
like an ambush of serpents
i prefer equal terms scribed
within the bright tails of those luminaries
with whom i've shared some
meteoric passing
an exchange of corresponding
light against a contrasting dark
no unparallels
no imbalances in our intensities
you...
Monday, September 26, 2016
your dry field
i'm a thunder advancing
the edges of your field,
crawling in a scold,
rumbling toward that
squalid acre
where you pitched a
flag to stake a claim
with a tongue that
carries the poison
of asps
yours is a field turned to
scrub, bordered now by bramble;
no more dancing daisies, happy gilia:
all of it burned by
the transgressions of your lips
you summoned this heat
that has dried your
range and drained
the waters underfoot
and now
look at you
pouring...
Tuesday, September 13, 2016
we had our forests
we had our forests,
my father and i,
where i witnessed the
sanctity of his gesture
on walks that trimmed
our margin
a hike taken in a place
with precipitating light
and inscribed
with the words of god
what mastery
of yours
did you bring to
that place for me!
my shepherd
in a cathedral of
spruce and pine,
steeplebush and needle
bowing my youth
and making souvenirs
of...
Wednesday, September 7, 2016
my serenity
i.
i became vexed
by your capture
and the menace of
your leveling domains
foaming torrents
coalesced
beneath your brow and
exuded an eliding patience
i in my swagger
pranced in a boast,
delighting with
the purples of hubris but -
soon weighted and cowed
by the sway of
your scowling lectures
and fisted ragings
you wore me to the
thinness of a sighing
wafer and in my...
Tuesday, August 30, 2016
after loving
you're as tempting to me
as a voice in the loitering ear
as a finger within the melding folds
as a release of the theological moan
as a breath of the jubilant tear
as a quiver in the harmonic deepness
as a lure of the rushing smile
as a parting of the governing limbs
as a nuance in the presiding glance
as a kiss on the shading mouth
as a tongue on the greedy flesh
as a...
Monday, August 22, 2016
pray
now comes my father
prostrate in his
own garden
ebullient and free:
he readies his solomon's temple
and God enters in
a slow descent
green goes the tightened
apertures
dilating
the corrugated irises of
the closed mind
and i leave and
arrive
he seeks - my father -
to burrow down into
the valley toward
tranquility
peace is peace
no doing
no meaning
pitch from the canopy
of pine floats down
upon me;
the grace of a
garden with her
black-eyed susans
and...
Tuesday, August 16, 2016
pammy
pammy, so verbally
pale, yet
soaked with the wisdom
of mothers,
saw her boy sent
has life been good to you?
has life been kind?
has God of others
been God to you?
or did all the heavens
burn up
and her angels fled
the day he was flung
in the night
and left crying?
we are stolen
in our time
from embraces
and from calamities
and we leave our loves
and our lovers
longing
we're...
Tuesday, August 9, 2016
pietà by my side
pietà by my side
draw me that
pitying picture
of The Mother
cradling her
spurned son
that has inspired all
those sculptors, poets
and painters
to live, a poem
must die
in the lap of the poet
resurrected by
the source of
smashing love
tear it down tear
it all down and
pietà builds it up
by my side
in loose
lashes of the pen
my partner in
heraldic play
hand to pen to paper
the mother and the poet
sacrifice their children
to brute betrayals
and...
Thursday, August 4, 2016
tally
takes the tally
and makes his mark
the fouling driver
hollers and the
hungry hawk
hums
with a brute lash
he
makes her a prisoner
with a knife
to inner thigh
lie still and yield
mine mine mine
he marks -
mine he marks -
marks his mine
tick tick itck
she unmarks and unmarks
singing
in her head's head
a hymn from
a former glorious
field
wandering
and he makes the
the blade thrum
'cross the
chrysalis flesh
pleating it
bleeding her
of her senses
feeling...
Wednesday, July 27, 2016
my portable moonlight
my portable moonlight
lulling me into loving life -
a seductress with your
impermanent posture
pulls me toward a terrifying
peace
i have not tried
hard enough
i have not cried
long enough
to know the
spoils of good love
you blunt me and
you enmeek the brimming
crowds that soon
yield at the knees;
the sky a sable oyster
and you a cunning pearl
i have no impostor
in my bed at night:
my passion is a
greed for something
hot and brutal
and eclipsing
so...
Friday, July 22, 2016
you
the pursuit of
your leisure is the
oxygen of my love:
your untensing
your fists released
your loins gone back to meekness
and our repose
is not unlike
being drowsy in the
sun of an open window
on a day
meant for labor
yours is a metaphor
found unfurling
in the language
of your limbs: they speak
in rising waves
of a tidal pool
bees tending to their
peonies below the
window
are lovers tending loves
after all
and you tend me
the waning light that
passes...
Monday, July 18, 2016
she takes a lover
and the man kisses his lady,
watches her drive
from their home to
meet her lover,
the swollen sky a'dusk
is the color of plum
and the garden beds emit
green flavors and the scent
of a lulling fertility;
on the ear
the sounds of
calling crickets
and in his chest
the night breathing
opposes his own;
his lungs pressed upon by
an unexplored thought
while something low stirs
and he sees the taillights
of their car
some way down the road
and he wonders...
Sunday, July 3, 2016
nearer you
do you still yet find yourself
on a walk down that near lane
eclipsed by the breathing wood
drawn like we once were
by the worn latch of the cabin door
that led onto aged pine boards
into familiar gray-lit chambers
induced as blood is
into the vessel of life
and do you still yet find yourself
treading among a
breeze of souls
impelled toward
a day's worth of
languid summer business
of late breakfasts
of cool swims
of play-in-pines
we boys were...
