blade

i came across this
blade and strummed
her with a finger and

i watched the dew tumble
to my bare feet waiting
and i thought about
the will of its wanting

and the arch of its back
and the pearl beads
riding on the thin ridge
and of their tumbling down.

it's all about the collapse
into the self and the
phonetics of the helpless
toiling we all make.

how a man once said
that when you die
you return to the memory
you loved most in life

which for me would be -
...

i guess i'm not yet sure
of the edge of that quiet
night or feel its pursuit

others i know have or
are, and i wonder where
they have landed or
where they expect to land

like the beads of dew
shaken suddenly and
violently from their long
highway among highways

by my curious, dumb finger,
how they rode the green blade
like crystal dreams,
then leaped into the air

and came down on
my bare feet waiting,
their coldness a prick
of my sleeping conscience.

i told myself i
better wake up in
case i miss the glass
jewels of this short life

before my blade is
strummed and all my
memories land at the
feet of unyielding stones

my best memory is yet come
but can be seen in the end of a
spyglass and i
won't tell you what
i see, but it

makes me laugh
and weep because
you are there, my beads
of radiant dew,
my loves

Read More

apples, fall

i saw you flower
in the spring of this
particular year, the
nurturer's air rushing
in as if from bellows and
beneath the tree from
which you hung, the
grass beginning its
rise to the goddess

i stayed away from the
tree, and from you, for
various stretches of
time, although you
spied me most days
when i came

to fetch the children,
who were out in the
back field thundering
in their frolic and unable
to hear the call to supper;

or to water and grain the
horses, who stood
in the pasture blinking
and whinnying at
the heat of the sky
and tumult of the birds;

or to dodge the stout
raindrops and electric
flash of lightning
that commuted the
sky into the refuge of
the wild reapers;

or to kiss my lover's
neck, with my hands on
her hips and her head back
and the sounds of
the summer spilling
into the soil if only
for a moment.

you aged slower
than the days moved
forward, but there
you have it - the sun
and moon are rivals
for your soul as much
as for mine

and i came out
one afternoon to
find that you'd
rounded into green
pearls strung
along the branch;

ornaments suspended,
silent as the flame upon
the wick, you in your
clusters clinging to
those slender arms,

hopeful for the day
that you'd find me
with my eyes adoring
your skin and my
voice high in the
chambers of your host.

but i am too wildly
flung to linger
for long, to be a
worthy engagement
for all of you.

some i did pick,
at random, to consider,
to handle, to polish
in the palms, while
most of you looked on.

and the harvest did
come and you braced
for it, virgin brides
awaiting in your green
cathedral, until the
whole affair was past
and you wept to the
ground on the eve of the
harvest.

i found you this morning
while out for a walk in
search of a matchless
offering of frost-dew on the
blade,

and there you all lie on
a matted bed of leaves
and grass, in concert with
a cold autumnal air that
sucked in as if by
bellows.

your stations now fully
transmuted to something
not lowly, but low, coronated
by crystal beads of dew,
your migration completed
violently indeed.

i'd missed it all,
all of it nearly enough
to no longer fully
know you anymore,
which is my consuming
transgression.

but rather than collect
you all in one terminal act
of hubris, to gather you
into unceremonious buckets
and get you off that bitter
bed that will soon succumb
to winter's enduring
concealment, i left
you to be

and stepped away to
rejoin this calamitous
existence that leads me
more away from myself
than toward, knowing that
i cannot be all things
to all good people,
and therefore almost
required by the fates
to leave you
in your spoiling postures

but stll

please

loved no less by me

Read More

the girl who dreamt of the exploding sun

the girl who dreamt of
the exploding sun
regards her moon
in a temper of mutation
and solitude,
singing about
a day or two not
long ago when
love's lifting wing
left her on a
diver's ledge

a wail to the stars
has caused her temporary
blindness, so she
bleeds from her eyes
until the salt in them
returns in a melancholy
flow down onto her
hands, her lap, the floor
and she is finally
ready to tell
me her dream,
which woke her last night

the sun - she explained -
rose high and stayed
fast when she ventured
outside: this cyclopean
orb hanging above the earth,
the size of immortality
and flaming in
its cradle, the sky,
like an accused child;
bristling and arresting
the air and scattering
all of god's shadows

but then, she said, in
that posture, in a
bloated cast, the
sun broke into a
thousands smaller suns
and tore across the
horizons and into the
orbits of all the stars
and held in their visages
the expression of eve on
the day she first loved adam

i am apt to think
she had dreamt the
dream of the resonant
goddess, who comes to
us in our most unarmed
state, tripping among
our gardens of dim light
and through our crops of
bright darkness and who
murmurs above the
husks of our delirious dreams,
'play, play, play!'

the girl who dreamt
of the exploding sun
is an heir to a pale heart
and a desolate amber moon,
a girl who must ever
be on guard for
the breaking tide
upon a spent shore,
and whose own love
is drowned in
the oaths of riddles

i would tell her this,
then, about her
thousand small suns:
smile up to them
in their fine orbits;
gather their rays
in porcelain palms;
sip them from the cups
of green blades of grass;
leap up and
pluck at them as you would
pluck at the strings of
an alabaster harp

for you know not
when they will
wind down their own
days, pass on from your
threshold and become cold
comets colliding with each other
until they've turned into the
dust of ages,
never to radiate down
upon you again

that is the nature of your
lovers' hearts, then

always

my friend

Read More

my witness moon

my tempest purity,
my witness moon,
you've devoured me
and my pale armor;

plundering me,
my pastoral monarch,
my wild testimony,
rending my sea.

outside my window, on
this day, the harvest
epoch continues with
plaited rains,

lashing the barn
and drenching the
fields while i roam my
hallways to your chime.

flecked with joy
and crowned with
cascades of laughs,
you came

into my arms from
your vigilant mother,
whose seam was torn
and who was recast
anew.

you had no howl in
you, you never really have,
my astral sun,
my quick night.

i see you down a long,
pathless suspension,
your invasion of me complete
at the dawning of  a winter.

your meaning in my life
written with blood ciphers
and locked in a dark room
built with the bones of
my ancestors.

i'm not ever meant
to know why you entered
my dreams with all
your seraph sighs.

there, as in an echoing
chamber, you are the
plucking strings of a guitar
and lilt of a whispering peasant.

you were conceived on
a day such as this: at the
height of the harvest foist,
with her wet tremble,

when my howling passion
overtook your mother's
quietude and plunged her
into the familiar fire.

i will ever be an annotation
to your days, my vibrant
leaf, my avid voyager.

i will be the scent of the brume
of an extinguished candle;
the primal wildflower
perfume on your fingertips.

my memory lately leaks
from my timid fibers and
drains into the soles
of permanent wounds.

but,

my feet will fall
in the rattling hall
among a thousand and one
malnourished guests

before i know why you
were sent to me,

my lovely increase,
my armed medium,
my witness moon.

Read More

to the girl sitting alone at the wedding last night

i.

to the girl sitting alone
at the wedding last night with
your gloomy lover:

i saw you twice
for hours as you
looked at the idling
table cloth adorned
with the ornaments of convention
and he didn't ever talk to you

you wore a dress that you
picked out for hours and
you made your hair a
canvas to Eros
and he didn't ever stroke your arm

you watched the bride
escort her groom across
a universe of polished barn
boards while you bit your lip
and he didn't ever whisper in your ear

you were ambushed
again weren't you?
by some bitter circumcision
of his irony; how he sat
with his back to you,
regarding his knuckles

your makeup was
ill-made while you dreamt
into your mirror how this was
the night he would finally plant stars
in your pouch, penetrate your
heart with a ferocious lightning
bolt

you've wasted hours wishing
him into your ripening loins;
hours of sleep enchanted by a
shimmering phantom only to wake
dry to the kiss of the wind

yours is a fugitive story
carried on the tongues of all
the inaugurated women who
ladled their dreams into buckets
of mud

only to see their coins
converted into stones
and skipped out to sea by
men made of ash and silt

i've wondered for ages
why some fields go to
harvest and some to seed;
their flowers felled and
best days sent down unspent

i would tell you
that you need nothing
but to jump into the
wheeling expanse
alone

that you flutter those
slender fingers across the
petals of collapsing daisies
alone

that you captain your
vessel, stand naked on the
prow, breathless,
alone

that you prick your
dreams with the point
of a pen in order to bleed
the air from the line
alone

that you pray for the
arrival of the triumphal
flood within you and not
the captive famine of another
alone

i suspect that you
won't, but instead will
sit at the reception with
your hands in your lap
looking across that long
way down while he
broods

ii.

there was a girl
in high school who
ached for love to the
point of distraction

she was not unattractive,
as i recall, but her
constant vigil at the door
of desperation ruined her face

how much she clawed at
possession! to be absorbed
by the skin of a boy!

i observed this in my cold
corner, alone, watched her
check her reflection in the
mirror of the windows when
a boy entered the room

she did no checking
when i said hello but
she did laugh at my jokes
and i soon became
her confidant

telling me how ____
kissed her at the football
game but has a girlfriend
(so be discreet)

how she let ____
change the oil in her mom's
car sunday afternoon
because (that's the sort
of thing i won't ever need
to know how to do, not with
a good man)

how she let ____
put his hands in certain places
even though they really just met
but don't worry it won't go further
(her mom got pregnant at 15
with her, don't forget!)

her mother was oily and
indifferent, blowing smoke
and barking orders from her
car whenever she had to pick up
my friend from school

her father lived in another
town - or another state - either
way he was really only
geography to her at that point

whenever i made her laugh
her poverty became a refugee
and i saw the real armies of
her cloudy battlefield withdraw

but then ____ would
come by and she would
stop laughing to check her
reflection and tell me he's
the kind of guy that will make
sure she doesn't live as alone
as her mother some day

she did not solicit from me
a kiss; ask me to change the oil
in her mother's car on a sunday;
allow me to touch her in places.
i was a brushstroke on a black
canvas

i believe i loved her
or would have, but out of
some overladen pity or
misplaced esteem

i dreamt about her laughing
teeth and the toffee smell of her
hair and how i could just mount
a rescue one of these days

but never did and
instead remained a witness
to her expenditure of time
flitting from flower to flower
and watched how she allowed herself
to be caught under bell jars
over and over

i ran into her at a store recently
and noticed her pearl was gone; her
fragrance evaporated, how her
hands and soul were as dislocated as
her mother's

i learned that she suffocated
eventually under the weight of
a collapsed marriage to a man
who was sulfuric and who had
moved to another town,
or another state, either way -

she'd bought her first car
and found an apartment
and her kids visited when they
needed money or a babysitter

how she takes her car to the
local garage to have the oil
changed because she doesn't
mind the man there who
flirts with her

i would know him,
his name is ____, we went
to school, remember? and
he's talking about moving
in

not now, she insisted:
she's too tired to need

then she laughed at her
own joke and we said our
good-to-see-you's
and then she departed
into her new glorious exile

iii.

my daughters, stay beneath the shading trees
that hide you from the mouths of captive minds
resist the urge to dive upon their seas
or set your sails to points of distant finds

deny a quarter to the ones whose want
would have you tossed upon their ashen sands
and make of you a shallow, idle haunt
stripped down to bleeding eyes and feeble hands

crave not a love, let love be love alone
have not your truth be leaked beneath your soul
stay not inside the mind that's not your own
let not another's dream become your toll

my daughters, toss your souls upon the air
and watch convention's shackles all laid bare

Read More

father fury

my son, with his drooly
speech, and his
excitable howling
and his fumbling dexterity
and his shoes on the
wrong feet and his open
fly and his picked-over
sores and his near-egregious,
gargantuan, gaping smile
and his stewing adolescence
and his incapacity for
meaningful discourse

was not dislodged by the snickers
of the boys this morning when
he'd launched his boisterous hello
at them and waved his fearless wave
toward them and dribbled his subterranean
basketball dribbling in their presence

as much as i was

i seethed
beneath the skin of my bones
at them as they pointed and
laughed; i wanted to pull
their souls through their
fingernails and strip them
naked before their petty
peers who preened in the
hallways of their school
and erected statues to these
new gods by their silences

i have gotten angry with
him many times; i have yelled
at my son, and i carry that
guilt one mile for every word
spilled from my guts and onto
his plate; i am sorry, and i have
no grave for my sins beyond
what my own arms will drag me
into, so i pray alone with dirt
in my mouth

in truth, i balance upon a wing
of smoke with my heels bleeding
and my eyes sewn shut, if
only to make do with these
tools i've been given

i was once a boy who
wept in the darkness
of my bedroom after
school so that my mother
knew nothing of the
trolls who haunted the
shadows of my days

i believed then that i
called down upon my
own head the lightning
bolts of those who held
dominion over me and
those like me, who
were voiceless

but today

i abide no fool who
scoffs at a soul that shades
to one side or the other
of a movable line: differences
are ghosts drawn in the salt of
the air and melt with the
tears of the mothers

so what have you that i have not,
and what have you not that
i have dreamt for my sons?

a firmer soil on which to stand?

please.

you have nothing but
your grandfathers' impotence
and coiling hell to look
forward to

so i sat beside these boys
and i whispered into the
pores of their waxed eyes:

i will make you piss
yourselves and drain
you of your fathers' wills
if you
point your finger

one

more

time

Read More

they raised a marble statue for you here

they raised a marble statue for you here
the oldest member of a stony choir
who sing a mourn about your lives afire
and how each breath was forged by angst and fear

in wonderment i walk among your heads
and ponder on this day with all its good
the lives you led and if you ever would
unlive your fates to slip these earthen beds

this marker is a lie to all your youth
a life's best spent when life is lived in truth

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all the lovers are miles away

all the lovers are miles away

and a fence post in the pasture

is too aged to keep her

barbed wire well hung

all the lovers are miles away

and the gate handles are too

entangled to release them from

their holding loops

all the lovers are miles away

and the horse and her two

companion minis graze upon

browning autumn grasses 

all the lovers are miles away

and the lame dog limps

about the yard and lies in the sun

and gnaws a phantom sore

all the lovers are miles away

and a zephyr caresses the

pasture grass as one would trace 

a hand across one's hot scalp

she had surgery 

recently on her foot

to right a 

prevailing wrong

the doctor had

been vague about

why it hurt so

much for her to walk

 neglected soreness

that began as a middling,

almost trifling, foolish

annoyance had calcified,

he told her,

into an unforgiving  growth,

a riotous spur

the size of fate

she said what hurt

the most was the

bandage that kept the

dressing around the incision

how it tightly

taunted her in her

immobile state, no longer 

able to regulate her day

i watch as she

unspools the swathe

from her treated foot

blackened and blued as it is

the wound a puckered

ridge two inches long;

a pleated range of pink

flesh tied with black x's

have you heard from ---

no

have you spoken with ---

no. they're all gone

we talk as she

lets the gauze fall

to the floor and wiggles 

color into her toes

all the lovers are miles away

but the bandage is still

warm and i roll it into

a clumsy ball

and help her undress

and ease her into the tub

and watch her hips

and her thighs

and the way the water

rises up around her

arms and her breasts

and consumes her navel

and she dangles her lame

foot over the edge

and i palm her hot bandage

and watch her 

all the lovers are miles away

and my serene girl,

blood on her foot, is right here

and says bend down and kiss me

Read More

what have i

what have i
but the dim lights of you
lovers lost behind a bleak
window,

through which i must
hurl myself headlong
if i am to gain you back
after all these days,

shattering a barrier
erected when
our intercourse
was poorly spent?

all the estranged eyes
of all the lovers i engaged
with and released are
scowling through the film,

straining against it,
hurting for
the day when we are
congregating once again,

and embracing once
again and exchanging
once again and precise
once again.

what have i
but a bowed head
and a tear full of palms
reaching out for

you through the panes, hoping
that the breast that aches for
you will not drain itself too
much, too soon.

have your faces changed?
have your once-receiving
souls stitched themselves
up into oblivion?

am i to reach you
only to find your eyes
barren and your arms cold
as god and your lungs drowned?

what have i
in my unhappy womb
unliving in fervent acts
of crushing reservation

and the wearing of
a blanket woven by masking
blinds and secured with plastic
ties of self-loathing?

i'm certain you're there,
waiting, and i gain comfort
in that knowing, in that
expectation.

with the embers of your
leaking light i can see
through such a destroying
barrier that there is hope.

what have i
no less than a hammer,
wielded by the air
of your lungs

when you showed me you
loved me and i breathed
it in with my hungry
devotions?

i am sorry that
i have flung you so far;
that i let love lapse;

that i terrified myself
out of the goodness of
your eternity and

let go stale
the bread of you
passions!

on this path i am regaining
the clarity of my
former focus, releasing the
old foe out to pasture,

chasing fears from the
corners of my mortal
encampment that i might pierce
the wall now in this new fever.

what have i
left to do but to
press through?

what have i
lost that i can
find once more?

but everything

Read More

no latch

he wants to be in your company
in the corner away from the dance floor
because he does not dance,
that's not his scene

it's difficult for him
to bridge, to admit to the
emotions across the abyss
of all those years of programming

he'd rather his hand on your knee, perhaps,
or around your back,
so long as he can feel your pulse
against the heat of his searching

and i've closed the latch
on you, i suppose, if you want
to consider it truthfully and
can face the facts

that his desire is not so far
from my experience, that my
exclusions are as darkening as
his hopeful inclusions are lightening

lately i'm in love with the
idea of him, how his hunger
is your iris-opening, and the
spreading is in full gorgeous view

i'm guilty of so much latch-letting
in my life, of harboring my lovers
in a lightless labor, huddling them
in the shadow of my ego

expecting them to bloom in
the dark with just my spoiled
breath the heat they needed to
find their true flower

but i'm discovering the
folly of this, of seeing
the man in the corner wanting
and seeing that his is a real passion

that he sees in you what i know
in you; that there is no lechery in
a full-fired falling into the arms
of those who would fully fly

with you, and be carried by
you or carry you, so that in
either way you are not left
in a cold dark place by anyone

i am guilty of driving the latch
home after closing the door,
and peering into the narrow slats
upon my proud capture

but i am sure now that love
is best laid open, freed of the
pull of tides and yaw
of billowing conceit

that we love best when
spread to it and receiving
it unbound, believing and
coming back home

no latch

Read More

intellectus sonet

you've approached her through that age-old passage
sure her inducement rises with your hand

engorged by the hubris of your passion
then foiled by that which you don't understand:

mouth the opening of her intellect

breathe heat on the aperture of her mind

erect a statue to her introspect

then have intercourse with all that you find

she'll then hear the beat of your native drum
invite her to discourse and she will come

Read More

my baby, she got toes

my baby, she got toes
sunk so deep in that morning
grass that she says, daddy,
i can't walk.

and i say no, i can't
pick you up, you need
to walk honey, it's just
from the dew

my baby, she got hair
blond as the sun, and it
shine in july the way the heavens
weep down on the forgiven

and i say, i love you,
and she look at the
tree with the horse
swing and she laughs

my baby, she got eyes
that consume the anxious,
fired multitude of all those
raging lovers

and adorns them with the
taffeta of her innocent
kissing lips and kindly
cooing breaths

my baby, she got a
hold on life as firm
as oak and she won't
let go for nothing

and she grasps my hand
as we walk toward home
and she whines about how
the world is too cold

my baby, she cry in her
sleep and it sound like
the release of black birds
from a consuming wood

and her momma, she wake
and stroke her head and she
whisper, home home
home baby home

                                                                                                                    i read a story in a magazine
                                                                                                                    that said a momma saved
                                                                                                                    a beach ball that was blown
                                                                                                                    up by her teen son hours

                                                                                                                    before he was killed in
                                                                                                                    a car accident and she told
                                                                                                                    the reporter, "it's all i got.
                                                                                                                    his air. it has his life in there"

my baby, she sing to me
in the back seat to the
radio and i don't
know no other nectar

that sounds sweeter
and i don't know no
better to just shut up
and listen to her

my baby, she got toes
growing clover up in
between them that make her
cry for my arms

so i pick her up
and her arm wraps
'round my neck and
together we sail home

i see the future in the
sky full of dying stars
and i feel the cleansing
of the light in that old dark

i don't care about nothing
in certain moments when
my baby wipes her grassy
feet on my shirt and giggles

Read More

shed

there is a spirit of her
in the things she wears
when she disrobes and
disarms after a long day

and she leaves a pile of
clothes in the bedroom
and with them she leaves a pile
of echoes in the
small heap of pants and
blouse, socks and bra

and she loosens her
life and unlatches her
clasp on a certain reality
outside these walls; her
release of a cold day
is the emission of
her essence particles

in the atmosphere of this
place i find her everywhere:

the favored pillow that crowds the
headboard;

the aborted sandal beneath the couch;

the worn hair tie hung on the knob
of the pantry door;

the fragile handrail that creaks with
the weight of the years;

the rim of the cup left to wait on the counter;

the heavy bracelet, adorned and
dimmed in the darkness of a shadow;

the blanket she pills in the night while she sleeps

i revel in her presence
in every moment shared
together as lovers

but feel her absence the
way i sense the waves of the sea,
how they rock the soul
when i can
hear them on the air
miles distant from me

all of these things
and every one of them
not witnessed thus far
emit a spectral ode
heard in the bones
of those future comers

who traverse the
streams of the dreamers
and are in tune
with the vibrations
made by the heartstrings
of former lovers

i believe in ghosts in
that simple way: they
haunt from the discarded
molecules of their flesh
when once they walked
and felled clothes
and touched doors
and breathed into linens

these small bits of souls
shed as easily as my
lover shed her clothes
enter their dormancy
and wait for a future
listener who will
catch them in an
unsuspecting moment

they haunt not from
a pouty rage, but as
a way to reconnect with
that of the living;

they want nothing more
than to be fleshed
again and making
love or leaving rooms
or crying into palms
or applying make up

my lover's left garments
i scoop up and pour
into a washing machine that
will spin out the dirt of
a day, but her mark
is already made

in a future,
they will smell her and
feel the heat of her and
taste the salt of her and
picture the curve of her hips
and hear her breathing at night

the way i love
to know her
she will haunt
them

Read More

the lily, for good

i recognized the face
of the girl who passed
away recently and to
whom friends were
writing messages of love
and loss across the sterile
wires

we went to high school
together, i'm sure of it,
yet we never spoke and
today the idea of that
leaves me in an echo
chamber with my own
clanging sorrows

i sit and ponder
the face of a woman,
once fully-fleshed and
smiling, who smiles now
no more

whose flesh is forever
seized and withering
but whose soul has been
released to the eternal ether
of the breath of the Goddess
to be re-breathed some day

what changed for her?
- i wondered this -
what transpired that she
be taken now and not later?
what thin variance came
to alter her path?

outside our living room
window stands a congregation
of gilded lilies, weighted
down by a spritz of raindrops
that fell the night before

i imagine the droplets
as souls sent on a call from a
god made caustic for having to
release his children to their
deaths in the name of sacrifice

and they all fell
freely in that darkness,
millions of them across
my small universe

and came to rest
on blades, petals and paths;
steal, rock, and the wool
of the animals in our
pasture

no prescription given,
no forthright agenda
but to descend in earnest
to us here and make whatever
change was open to their
impact

each of them
willing participants
in a ritual of
enlightened
love-offering

their cause known
to no one, no thing,
no beast, not even
to each other

i believe that
my lover, my most
sacred familiar,
is opening

the warmth of
a newly discovered sun
perhaps or the nutrients of
a freshly tilled
earth are pushing
her to flower
anew

without my hand
so much this time
and i stay awake
in reverie of her
new growth
but fearful of my
own waning
influence

i observed the
petals of a particular
lily in our garden
whose flesh was now
dotted with these
felled jewels

and my eye caught
one single droplet
clinging to the lip
of the lily's petal
and i stayed it with
the shutter of my
camera

i've since returned
to my writing and
wonder now what
would become of that
single crystal bead
whose passage began
in the dark with a single
mission and ended in that
precarious hang

will it have fallen
to the grass below
and nurtured something
there, leaving the
lily to her other
agents? and will that
reduce her chances
of flower? will it ruin her?

i think too of the girl
now gone, and wonder
what element might have
collided and clung to her
then fallen away and taken
with it a different fate

and whether had i spoken
to her in a long-ago
past might have favored
her and her own glassy
droplet of life in some way

or if i take a
picture of my lover
i can arrest her
in her frame and
preserve what i think
she is ought to be

and then i'm
reminded:

i must not indulge
fantastic thoughts
about the power of
my own influence
over the cosmic
and the chaotic

the wind blows
and the rain comes
after all, no matter
how i wave my hands

and that i am
not outside of this
but deep within

and the girl is changed
and the lily is
and my lover too

and me

yes. yes of course

Read More

love is curtains toward a view

i'm waiting for my turn
on the stage with
the seashell footlights
shining silhouettes
against a cream-colored
scrim

i'm waiting my spotlight -
how can it be so
not simple?

i sit in a bedroom
with white curtains,
a fan oscillating on
a desk, cooling my fever
while behind me is the
bed in which we
made love last night

i can't make my art today
for the humidity and
the brawling children who
are hateful with the heat

you can go,
she says - go
upstairs, you can
go - write

if i were a play's
hero-character today
i would be the one
who left his dreams
for a lover who
hated the lips of life
and sucked from him
passion

until he found the
love in the light of
a caress in the dim
hallway of a theater
playhouse, his
breath stopped
for the sake of
renewal then

my lover told me
recently she might
take up smoking
as a way to lose weight
and my first impression
was how sexy it would
be to watch her purse her
lips around the end
of a cigarette and take
seductive draws

the way women used to
look to me in the movies
of the 40s when
i feigned sickness in
order to skip school
to watch classic movies
on my grandmother's
cable television

behind the white curtains,
out an old screened
window, across a variable
way, is a barn standing fast:
an empty assertion of age
and history

in the leading man
of a show i would make
them all laugh and cry
and they'd send me telegrams
by the fistfuls
if we're following this
sort of nostalgic current

the barn was painted
last year for the old
man who lives there,
who looks out his
window frequently toward
our house, i wonder if he
feels a pull in the
heart when he watches us
making love, missing
his own life-love lost years
ago

the idea makes
me sad and watching
the curtains float
makes me want to
curl beneath the
sheets behind me
and smell her

sometimes love
is curtains toward a
view we're afraid
to see, waving -
sadly parting,
while a fan manufactures
a breeze that we can't feel

that's not true,
i'm being moody
and infatuated with
pity as i sit here

the curtains are
irrelevant

we'll make love
again tonight
and tomorrow
and in a dream,
afterward, i'll
give my monologue
in the dark to
great applause while
she smokes

Read More

be present

how do i approach the edge
of my everything and leap with the
conviction of a man in search
of a fickle faith?

i am the promises
and the comfort of things
i offer to a select few,
but beyond that i am
mostly deferred by the
dead and living among me

who dog me
as spirits chase the
frenzied man
into corners of
vacated houses

i want that i should
go sightless into that abyss
like a sea captain commands
his ship into the night gale;
his is the power of a
man twice possessed

to leap is to say yes
and to say yes is to bow
to it all; the fear of it
consuming you is what holds
me fast to my line

i know
i know...
tell me though again
with your lips to my ear
and i will leap

faith is a chemical
reaction in the fiber of
the soul, breaking you
down as rain does to
wood left in a pile in a
fallow field

it lulls everything to
earth, founders the erect,
breaks your cells down so
that in time
you are absorbed into a
magnificence made of the
minerals of life

i'm open to it
because i know the
truth of you is in its germ;

because the future
lingers there with you
and just how spectacular
this horizon is when your
arms remain wide to my
reception!

faith is listening to
the flower suckle
the rain

it is tasting the
crimson blood of
the virgin

it is smelling the
air after a storm
has prowled the land

it is touching the
fertile moss hidden in the
hollow of a fallen tree

it is seeing
you when you are
not in front of me

spirit me here
to my right place! and be
present and repeat
in my ear
the story with
your fine faithful
breath

any story

i don't care

Read More

the soul is the master of itself

he frets:

what passion is this that

comes dawning over my horizon

like a prowling feline?

i am unawares

and ill-prepared, my

heart now inflated,

my mind thrown into flux

make it stop!

(but stop it slow)

make it cease!

(but fill me first)

i'd say to him: consider

every new love is an 

exercise in delicate variations

of chaos, its violence truth to the core

he paces in a stir and says

to the muse who brought him

here: i don't know but i'm alive

it's you! it's you! blesséd you!

but i'm torn, have i gone too far?

but maybe not far enough? i've been

struck by this and it's sent me into

undulating fits of joy and fear

i'd suggest to him: you see,

you want to master

the reigns to something

God set wild in The Beginning

you desire to be

transported just deep enough

then halt at the line you've

heeled in the sands of your heart

yet the soul is the master

of itself, boundless, and

it holds what it holds and gives

back to the universe unbound

and it humors none who'd

be its champion, beguiles

those who would attempt

to beguile it with reason

so know that if you leaped

(and you leaped, you leaped)

you did so with the wonderment

of a man soul-seduced

and while a breathless descent is the

expectation: a short, furious

fall ended by the impact of

colliding stars,

if you listen, open your

eyes, breathe, and feel

the pull from without

and the heat from within

you will realize that

the world leaped from you

in the moment this passion

came to play

you have the lover

now in an airy sway above

the cosmos, so dance

with her

and leave love to its

uncontrollable devices

Read More

little. league

i remember matty
from little league who'd
broken his arm from
elbow to wrist
while going after a
sharp grounder to short,
how he wailed in the
dust of the infield while
we players all looked on

i stood absently in left
field watching the chaos
of running grown ups
and seeing the faces
go white as the boy was
carried off the field
by his father, who let
a cigarette dangle between
his lips, the smoke slipping
soundlessly across his son's
pinched face

a week later the cast
was already covered with
the scrawled names of matty's
favorite teammates and girls
from school and it was the color of
dirt and the left field grass where
he'd been relegated

his father
fired obscenities at the
coach as much as the ump
in that game, don't think
he didn't

'for christ's sake paul,
he can still play,
it's his glove hand,
he can squeeze it -
squeeze the glove, matty! -
why is he out there
in the fucking reeds,
paul?' and later, he told the
plate ump he was
a blind piece of shit

matty had replaced me
in left, so now i was
out of the lineup altogether
and that was okay with
me, i couldn't hit
and the coach never
looked at me without a
scowl

so
i sat the bench and watched
the drinking-buddy
fathers of the team's most
favored kids strain the third base
line chain-link fence and
smoke and bark at their boys and
slap the asses of their wives

later
we marched in the
memorial day parade, the
favored boys in a rowdy boast
in the front led by matty while
i hung back, told the shortest always
carries the team banner alone

the baking heat bore down
on the bills of our caps and on
our necks while a gangling high school
senior played taps and my father
took a picture of me with his
instamatic and waved

after the reading of
Flanders Fields and the
jolting fire of the rifles and the
inaudible prayers by clergy we
ate ice cream from round cups while
matty thumped his cast against the
porch railing of the vfw

'it don't hurt,' he said to
us, swinging the arm down
and letting the cast bounce off
'i could hit you in the
head, Turner, and it would only
hurt you, not me at all,' and the other
boys laughed, their faces
turned to see if i would say
anything: mount a defense

that was the defenseless summer
when matty's boys looked at
me and laughed most days
and i did not tell my own father how
i hated baseball, my father who stood
apart, on the first base side, away from
what he called the smoking drunks.
i sat in the dugout ashamed at myself
too much to look at him

'how come he doesn't play
you?' he once asked and i
shrugged. 'would you like
me to say something?'
no
no
god no

at the vfw
i did not say anything and matty
said 'pff' and dismissed me with the
casted arm and the
boys laughed, goaded by
a bloating sun

i walked the mile and a half
home alone in my Norway
Cardinals baseball jersey so that my father
did not have to wait with my mother
in the heat while i had ice cream

and as i walked i wished
i had a harder face turned toward life,
hard as a smoking drunk or a boy
with the bravura of a fearless bull

i wished i had a broken arm in a cast
and not such a broken head

Read More

i yearn for the unveiling release

i yearn for the unveiling release
of the artist who can open life
with the stroke of
the brush against canvas

she paints with blood,
and each approach is the
forfeit of her virginity
again and again

such an artist longs for
an appreciation of her
existence and must stand
naked before the canvas,
ready to give birth -
a rendering on the weave
of her pale womb

and the pains of it are
tidal, each stroke
a violent lashing
against the quay
built with chaos

i have an image of her
in her flesh holding the
instrument of her art
while i burn in my place

i consume her
while she stands
there, devour her
with hungry teeth
sunk slowly

if i truly risked it i
would press against her,
in her nakedness, and
beg to feel the pulse
of it in the skin

her head tilted, hair pulled up,
neck serene, the flesh
risen to the touch
of each purgative stroke
of the hand

how the hips stay square,
the feet apart, the shoulder
of the working arm tense,
the bicep and forearm
taut, and from heel
to finger tip a shuddering

and all of her everything
transferred at once to the
flat canvas now made round,
made deep, made open
by her deliberate pressure

i would beg to feel that
energy as a hand searches
for the heat of the
sun-bathed stone after
a cold swim

she paints not what
she sees, if she is being
true, but what she feels in
the rhythms of her
surrender: life beneath the life

i am jealous of
such an artist, clothed
as i am and remaining
clothed as long as i
drown in my fear

Read More

her smile is the thing

my mama, she holds the puppy

in one of her black and white histories

and her smile is the thing

a bare-footed gypsy in the 

early years of her epoch,

building up those resistances

i think i might believe that 

that smile is for me-in-waiting, 

because i called for her even then

her youngest child, who

would be heir to her runty,

her lush lips and lank

and i would be picked on for it

during the early school years,

but she loved the hell out of me

the best way she knew how,

with her little body and 

deep well of blood-fever passions

there is everything in that 

picture that needs to be to 

tell her future

the uncomely summer dress,

whose hem is soiled by the

daily drag on the ground,

gives voice to a life in the 

shade of a forced frugality

on a teacher's salary

the toes in the dirt sing to

a future of days treading an

eternal path of stones and ruts

the arms, in a desperate clutch,

cry to a soul made out of the

effusion of a heart's radical charity

but her smile is the thing,

the beacon for so many of

life's migratory love-makers

who will find themselves

on a reckless sea, thrown and

imperiled, raging and raw

her smile will cast out and

in that sweep, capture them and

hold them fast for a better port

i know this as much

as i know those small hands

and tranquil, sufficient lips

my mama, who played

in the dirt with her bare

feet and hands and who

grew up wanting me in

her womb and loving me

in her wondrous way

felt no poverty but that

which was poorly placed

at her feet by others

i have her smile

i have her smile

Read More

lost joy found

i see in you a flicker of the joy

that hides now in the well of this grown man

a flame lit when he was an active boy

a prince of all the fields in which he ran

a certain seed was planted in the rows

within the hallowed virtues of his youth

it is with love and life that something sows

to bring to fruit the wellspring of his truth

and in a time he sees the goodness drowned

by all the labors of the evil kind

who whisper death to joy without a sound

and swallow all the passions of the mind

but now i've found the courage to be brave

and rescue this: a flame from certain grave

Read More

the love of many

i'd wish for you a second lover's lips

to sing the praise of your passion's passion,

for the largess of your engulfing love,

how it spills from founts to

overtake the seas

love is not a bound volume, to be spent

judiciously or loaned with the frugality of

the moneylenders, but a thing refreshed by

the vitality and desire of the giver, who cannot

stem the tide any more than cease her heart

i'd wish for you a third lover's lips

to suckle at the bosom of your

engorged wants and soothe

the oppression of the constricting

vestments of the prepossessed

drowning those who would march in arms

against the native urges and authentic

conscience transfused to us from the

Original Mother, yet suppressed in the name

of a specious piety

and i will remain your first lover,

your primary, lips uttering a prayer

to the Goddess of the Divine Universe,

asking for Her blessings on us on

the eve of this embarkation

to entreat her with a question: how

does one divorce oneself from the

flock of the sedated, and approach

the true divine, the epic universe whose

manifold nature is the model for love?

for there is no sin in the love of many

so long as the lovers partake in a feast of

harmony with their eyes equal to the

same horizon and the sun, at her zenith,

illuminating all

there is a moral chisel against convention,

a subterranean river that cuts through

the hard rock as veins beneath the

surface of the skin, pulsating with the

genuine power of the soul

the heart has more than one chamber,

after all, and a multitude of ways

in which one approaches her and leaves

her, bringing life to her and carrying life from

her, and her strength is in the love of many

i'd wish for you a life of lovers, on a

migration toward the source of light,

gifting what you have in abundance,

to unlock all the gates so that it will

flow openly as it was meant to be

Read More

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

Read More

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

Read More

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

Read More

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

Read More

fall down with the day

fall down with the day

now, fall down the day-

let the fever go.

let it go now

if you were afloat in

an ocean on your

back you'd let it

let you feel it let

go and your arms

would be outstretched

like falling down with the

day. now, let it fall and

get those arms outstretched

and wait for the collision

with the world

we all love the fall-feeling

but not the fall, it has a

sinister meaning that we

know but always forget;

it is unknowing the known

forgetting the unforgotten

when i'm writing i am

falling down the day

down with the day

arms outstretched and the

rush is in the belly and in

the cock

so there is power in

the fall, intelligence in

the descent, of the going

down too fast but sometimes

not fast enough

we must go to it:

go to it, to have the

pleasure tamped,

the pain amplified,

but neither giving quarter

to the other

falling is a skepticism,

like the feeling of being

confronted by a crying friend

and not knowing what to

say

i still feel the tumbledown

for those who tell me

they've sat at the bedside

of a dying sibling, even though

i've sat there with them

so someone says to me,

'she went home to the lord

last night' and

<she had cancer>

is in the white noise of the grief

and i nod and i say

'our thoughts are with you,'

which is a terrible thing to say

and then i am pulled out

of the fall, fully out

fast, and i feel like

throwing up

after my brother, dethroned,

left us all standing around

that dark, shrinking hospice

room i wanted everyone to

just shut the fuck up about it

or at least to say,

'your brother was an asshole

to me in 1979'

or to ask,

'was he still a drunk?'

or to weep,

'i didn't come around because 

i didn't like cancer'

something approaching

honesty; something

approaching a look in

a mirror; something

other than all that public

masturbation

instead to be

falling down with the

day, fallen now -

the day, float-falling

low-flung and arms outstretched

giddy with the fast rush,

the belly pull, the kink

in the groin, in that place of

shade between fear

and knowledge, the

good long slide

listen:

when love comes

it's a fall

when death comes,

it's no ascent, child

when the sun sets,

it's a plunge of the earth

when i make love to you,

it's a driving down

the baby sleeps in the

arms, and she flails from

a primal reflex

then shutter-sobs for a

moment then is at peace

again

fall down with the

day now, fall down the

day. let the fever go

let it go now.

arms

don't forget the arms

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