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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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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she delves

she delves and i am bitten

by the frost clinging to the eaves

of all these men who told me 

her place was held fast.

she dives down and down

and i am watching the 

gravity of life suck

her into a purple void.

i am a weak stitch,

unbroidered at once

by the fallacies of

the politicians of faith;

so much so that blood

comes from the eyes and

tears from the throat;

i am a spent coin at last.

what she wants is what she

cannot see without the

abridgment of her prison sentence.

and lately i've played a fool,

conjuring the specters of 

worst-worn scriptures i'd

memorized in youth.

how they told me i am the

first and the last, and she

the second moon in an orbit

of dying stars;

how her vehicle was driven

softly along a gilded path 

and that i was to be her

captor with a small net.

the policy of the unquestioned

elders implied that her 

womb was a place of sacrosanct

harmony with their god,

and that from the dawn of eve,

she was to suffer the depravity

of the unsalted sea and weep

tears of joy for everything not hers.

i delivered her evidence, her

blue truth, in buckets filled

with the oils of distrust and

maleficent good-knowing.

i imparted from my ego the

episodes of reconciliation

one makes when the heavens

of the forgotten are closed up.

i never said no. i don't say no.

i never said can't. i don't say can't

but i idled in my stupor, drinking

in her benevolence like a dog.

and i pissed on her pride the

day i forgot to let her free;

shit on her love the day

i did nothing but sit there and smile;

the smile of the drunken

fool who winks at the prophets

and tells himself he's the 

master of all that he sees.

can you not hear that thunder 

in the ephemeral distance,

that sings with the voice of

the lost and the flutes of Eros?

she loves. she loves from her 

plundered bosom, giving up her

flesh and her latitudes and her

fine, silk, aromatic tempers,

so that i may crouch in an 

un-man's fear, huddle in a boy's

peppered hubris, cower in a

long shadow of selfsame service.

i am all out of hope when

i see her bring the fog home,

and she drifts and drifts and 

clamors for the side of her ship

like that, her fingertips

bleeding from the ridicule

of the ignorant and the 

intelligent, who don't get it.

she is on a journey without

a path, an affront to my 

foolish male sensibilities,

which require a map.

i am shouting!

i am shouting

at the mirror

at my cold, senseless self.

that i missed her

meteor is such blindness; 

that i allowed myself to

labor under the sugar of fools;

that i listened to the drool

of men who required of me

their undivided attentions, but 

divided me from my epic truth.

i'm writing this while drunk

on the music of my youth;

inside tearing to shreds the

patently stupid words of priests.

she delves and i am bitten

by the frost clinging to the eaves

of all those men who told me 

her place was held fast.

she dives down and down

and i am watching the 

gravity of life suck

her into a purple void.

she deserves what she wants,

that's really the thing of it.

and i must keep water in the well

from which i must wash her

new-soiled feet, the feet with

which she walks her thousand miles

away from what she was, and 

toward what she is,

so that she comes back to me,

a better fool for her,

a better fool for love,

a better me

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cigarette and faith

i gave a homeless woman
a cigarette on a street corner
while on a walk yesterday
to say hello to my lover;
it was an idle impulse.

she said i had the most
gorgeous lips, this woman,
whose jamaican nouns were
weighted under the lubrication

of a beer she held in one
hand, the fingers of which
looked liked the thin
horizon of a widowed desert.

she could not light the
cigarette so i offered,
and handed it back and
she said she was saving up

for a trip back home,
which i chose to believe
because i want to use
her in a story some day.

my friends will say i did
this for my ego - the giving
and lighting of a cigarette
to a woman without a home.

and to them i will blush
and smile down the long
tunnel of their knives and
look at my feet.

let us argue, though, for the
sake of it, and say i did do
it for my ego. when i am alone
i don't do well

and can feel the sap of
the tree in my veins and
i become a vagrant dog
at the heels of bitter secrets.

my mineral power goes dim,
you see? - the voltage drains;
the fuses of my inner column
become dry thistle in a gale.

there are naked rooms in my
soul, i suppose, that accept
only trespassers and those from
my past who've been maligned

by the exercise of my ego,
so i let them remain there
to scratch at the walls and
piss on the floor.

when i am alone i pester
the fruit on the branch;
i foil good commerce with
the old suffering of the pale;

i hide behind the smallest
stones, licking away the salt
and whispering to the void
some inane song about loss.

i am weakest when i don't
have in my glass jar the
presence of some other
extremity, as if i am an

unsingular being whose
engine is fueled by the
self-blood of others and the
wayward wind of their eyes.

earth's rumor has it that i am
sick with hope-trembled shades;
that i am at odds with the
contentment of the loved;

that i am in bitter contact with
my less primal and that all i
give is what i am assured will
be taken with both hands.

there is a malignant insistance
that i find who i am in the mouths
of my betters; that i'd rather stay
on the hip of the green-blue coast

than swim out; that i am a threat
to the fabric of my own truth
for the sake of keeping the
balance within my humid air.

so it is my ego, to be sure. the
imperially dressed; the secretary
to my wanton stomach; the vague
harbor master; the immersed scar.

but anyway...

the jamaican woman, who held
her beer can as if it were the crown
of the blessed angel, who could not
look me in the eye for more than a second,

said she loved me as i walked on,
motionless in my steps toward
what i believed were the grand
institutions of happiness and joy

- down a cold sidewalk,
thinking

what of it, my ego...

i am here, my friends are not

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aperture

my brother said,
he said:
- about the cleavages of
religion and its crowns-of-thorn
swagger and its impoverishing hues -

'i believe in god
but not God; it's
nobody's business
what i believe in'

there was always a red
gem in his mouth when
he talked about the
protrusions of faith,

how they herniated and
metastasized into the
hardened stones of
shaded, casting-down silences.

how the spokespeople
of that particular brand
of BOGO magic were
the salt of the deadened

and cast men like
him from the gardens
of their own skin and
banished real Truth.

'i mean...i believe in a
lot of things,' he would
go on, spooning out to
me his new-old poverty.

'the Celts. the Pagans. the
Native Americans. the
Christians...' he would trail
off, thinking of others to
moisten his argument.

i would listen while he
waved his hands
and sipped his beer and dragged
his cigarette across our secrets.

we grew up in the same
yellow seafoam of
hymns and overspreading
glories-be and throbbing prayers.

and while i had found ounces
of wonder and joy in
the bedrock of our
family's church -

had found a ripe
wind among the souls
there with people who'd
burned their acres for a
view to answers -

he had grown calloused
early, his feet pricked
by coals and his hands
tied together by foreign tongues.

his version of those days
were calcified by an endless
voyage outward in search
of the master of his confusions

so that, later in life,
he came to feel god-not-God
in what he could smell
and taste; what he could
breathe in with his own eyes.

it was no surprise to me
then that the pale pebbles
of long-away ancestors, who'd
frolicked under the stars and

sang to the wind, found their
way into the pockets of
his soul and within the underthings
of his fragrant dreams.

he was fore-bent that way from
birth; always had a dark
grandeur in the manner in which
he stole the galleries of hurt faces.

his mantel was firm in
its place from conception;
his mark was that of a
man of inexhaustible refuge.

'fuck.
if i want to read the bible,
i will read the bible. if I
want to go outside naked and
dance and shout at the moon, i will.'

he had what i wanted:
a singular delirium of endless
flowers unkept in a striated glass
vase on a sill;

a bald wink at the fires of
hell and a thirst for a glacial
voice that boomed and
cleaved the contemptuous.

he had muscular glory in all
the things i was taught were white avenues to damnation: hammer-pride, sexual fury, profane histories.

i wanted for his open mouth,
his believing star, his volume,
his soft-cold-rain humor,
his aperture opened to the pages
of his own scriptures.

he said,
my brother said to me:
'have a beer'
and i blushed no thanks

'suit yourself'
he smirked and lit
another cigarette and told
me here as in other times later,

'you're just afraid.'

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to friend

my elegant, pastoral find;
my storied discovery
among the leaves of the
naked:

how truth may thunder
in the temples
when one stumbles
upon your smoothed stone.

the bloodroot of eternity
resides within the
finding of you and
spreads to all corners.

with some, it just comes
as naturally as the
orbit of the moons
around their mothers

and you fall up to
a fine grace together
to make the joining of
two lonesome nobles,

in a quest toward
the inner organs of
faith and kinship that
surpasses mere association.

when it comes -
truly arrives -
there becomes a
vital new luster

to the old star
rebirthed by the
collision of two
dreamy atoms.

how? how can it
be that a voltage,
vast in its
sovereignty,

be so captured
in a fleeting moment,
be so sent and received
in such precision but

with such dizzy
randomness, that all
of the universe would
have to be complicit?

hearts live in a chilled
world most of the
time, occupying
a firmament of ice,

making such a union
a deep, heated,
cosmic rapture of
fidelity to aimlessness.

we harbor subterranean
hopes and wants,
wishing against the wind
that we get what we pray for,

but a conjoining of souls
who've before danced
alone is the beginning
of divine symmetry.

you eat the words they
give you. you lick
the flavors of their
passion from cups.

you thick-and-thin
hold in contempt
the acrobatics of all
the fools you've suffered.

you lie together in
sweet foliage, breathing
in the sky and her
lovers.

you echo in darkness
all their utterances,
all their gestures, all
their looks in the eye.

you kindle, you enmesh,
you enthread, you
finger the top of
their lamentable reef.

you give them out
and prise open their
heads with your
softest teeth.

you forgive the mark
on the skin that
bears the name
of certain enemies.

you have a new
latitude of snow
and wind that sketches
across the gloom.

you banquet together
at a feast of
teeming stars and
hapless demi-moons.

you know what
knowing means
and shed all
expectations of gravity.

the sacred mother-child
comes to mind when
considering such a
trembling, quiet freedom.

how it is to be
at once a passage to
relic love and the
modern face.

to have this in its
wholeness is to
carry the empire on
one's heart-brow

and see oneself afresh.

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i could sleep

i could sleep
inside the homes
of abandoned
goodness

i could fly
outside the rays
of given
apologies

i could wish
without the need
for angry
demonstrations

i could swim
beneath the howl
of laughing
moons

i could plead
toward the face
of selfsame
awareness

i could pray
within the chasm
of all lightness
renewed

i could say
everything on
a straight line
without your care

or write what
comes to me
in the best sense
rebroken

just to ensure
that meaning comes
from the tongue not
the eyes

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the bed

the bed is not
made where
they laid last night,
the covers holding
the passions like
air in the lungs
and i stand there
in a state of staring.

the next morning
came, of course,
the next conversation
over coffee came,
the next movement
around each other came.

i remind myself
of my worst self,
how the fullness of
life evaporates into
sin sometimes.

my lover and her
lover here in
this epic solitude;
i smell their serious
versions.

and i pretend to
not play with
pretense as the
light of the day is
shunned by a
drawn curtain.

or the bags on
the floor hold
within them the
story of another
calling.

or the carpet
upon which their
bare feet have
padded echoes
with secretive sounds.

or the pillows
dance askew and
and say the words
said in the balance
or counter-balances.

or the empty
bottle bans me
from tasting the
salt of lips.

this is a church
in its magnificent
silence and towering
prayers said in the dark.

what is so
unrecognizable
here?
the tangible is
not a metaphor
any more than
the river is when
i stand in it
up to my knees.

it is an
object to action
separation, really;
it is holding
no new hand,
kissing no new
lips, it is swallowing
no new windy word.

it is a bed
in a quiet room
and harbors no ill
will toward light
or dark; holds
no malice toward
head or heart.

i leave less
grieved and walk
among Douglas firs
and bowed birches
that have looked
down upon these
lovers with no more
affection and gratitude
than they do for me.

and in the bed
the covers remain
and the world outside
is moving and the next
morning came, of course,
the next conversation over
coffee came, the next
movement around each
other came.

with me.

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