skip to main |
skip to sidebar
Mostly feign
inclusion
to retain ultimate
control
losing an arm
is rated R for
violence
so now you’re a
one-
armed millionaire
buying back the arm
the good things
are the hardest
to assimilate if
they
arrive at the wrong
address a boulder
falls on your heart
as you leap together
and now one of
you must part
I stand here a watcher
of waves their rhythms
and bottle-green lights
waiting on the shore
being able to predict
and run to meet
the ones worth riding
like the short time
I have to speak to you
the curve of your voice
on this side of the sea
a couple came down
to the waves and entered
up to their shoulders
embracing and then
walked back to their
blanket on the beach
and lay back down
without a word
perfect
a perfect wave
Breaking and
entering
the other world
Sunday morning
no one’s home
the world we
leave behind
still standing
there
or totally replaced
a world without
us but made
by us it is not
ourselves the world
but what is not
finally
us and cannot
not be us
I ask
Whether I am
an innocent man
to be loved or
killed by one
man for another
by another man
or whether it is I
who must be clearer
and clearer with
myself about myself
distinguishing my
innocence only from
my guilt for you
where to decide
is already to
have lost it.
Never tiring of
making
itself up my soul
moves on along its
own
incalculable perspectives
eventually enough
self-
awareness leads to
the soul of the
world
it just makes sense
but who knew
reality
was so obsessive-compulsive
or fantasy so cold
and unforgiving
the clearly sovereign
sun
rises and sets
but it’s the moon
our feeling share
that gets ejected
like a ball thrown back
and forth by two
invisible characters.
Now the trees are
walking out
of the woods to
show us how
to come back from the
dead
as a daily
sufferance
or nightly
occurrence
but who needs hope
when he’s happy
they say
throwing off their
torn-up
loquacious letters
telling
of soft summer
mornings
evenings languid
afternoons
before anyone has
woken
or spoken or broken
before hope is all
in the not having
as the trees insist.
Mostly the Buddha
is sitting
comfortably relaxed
and smiling
while mostly the
Christ
hangs there on his
cross
and just in these
two pictures
lies something
awakening
about their similar
attitudes
toward life and
death at least
from two different
perspectives
how evolution moving
forward
transmutes wisdom into
love
first as a force for
dissolution
of the wall between
the worlds
and then since even
the evil one
knows who wins in
the end
as the restoration
of his smile.
The air is dry
but it all evens
out
despite metal
screams
along mental
streams
upriver from summer
among earnest mists
and long ermined
fogs
far from shore
I found a small
sail-less boat stowed
where your heart
once stood
as tall as oars
against my lips.
When to moonlight
droves of bad
dreams
permit dispersed
black parachutes
to swarm as if
to bury you alive
and all your harm
comes home to you
alone screaming
impatient spider
touch me anywhere
moonlight
transformed
to light of love
like you.
Finger and blue toe
polish or the black
nail clippings
the old eliminated
to allow the new
until the novelty
wears off
I go out to the
garden
to cut my nails
how long before
they
disintegrate or
maybe
go on growing for
a while still hungry
for more touching
more scratching
of you?
If you cut it
it will flower
it will suffer you
if you insult
its roots with
heaving feedings
it will remember
it will volunteer
for suicidal late
night maneuvers
it will smell like
someone who has
all the answers
free to come and go
summer after summer.
Sex is always pornographic
isn’t that the point
but when love
enters
the room for a threesome
a sweetness and strange
tenderness
accompanies
otherwise forced
entries
and bullying maneuvers
maybe we recognize
the
true life-or-death
nature
of our situation if
only
for an instant and
stop
pretending we’re just
genitals and
mouths.
Forty is enough
years
to decide on your
parent's
names and
predilections
perfectly timed or
not
to culminate in you
the danger of too
much
planning is that
you fail
to notice how
little’s needed
the air believes in
you
the sun is struck
by your flair
for honesty despite
insult and conceit
the days still move
tsunami-like
toward you there
on the beach.
Time which is always
movement
toward death needs
a body
a place to rest
some nights
death sleeps around
a lot
I should say Dr.
Death
it occurred to me
one day
out of respect for
the dead
if not for
pretending to be dead
these are matters
of degree
not kind death is
not kind
Dear Dr. Death I am
dying
please come to me
or send
me a sign of your
passing
I long for your end.
People for whom
religion
is not the whole
point of life
some other
somewhere
there’s a place for
us
as students of the
mysteries
of life what is the
central and
centrifugal
weave right now for
you
why is this life so
intense
and so impermanent
crossing the street
how far light can
fall
your body
represents
but the negative of
reversal
who stands for
that?
The order that is
added
to the order
already there
disorders it
temporarily
forgive this
interruption
the stone mutters
to the lake
I was almost killed
by a falling
boulder
bouncing off my
head
when I was twelve
even in the winter
I would climb the
lake and cliffs
sit there till
frozen
receiving my latest
and writing it
down.
Among those things
that have served
their purpose
the poetry is
in the breaking
apart of the words
the washed space
gathering around
as altered reality
or sky ambles down the
page that same device
and rhetoric time
uses to seduce us
some want to live
some want to die
but the wisest fly
like Francis flies
directly into the flames
to honor and feed
the highest ones he
said.
Tennyson’s juicy
apple dropped
one silent autumn
evening
haiku-like plunging
into your childish
brain
but had you wanted
to be stirred or
shaken
he mumbles so much
behind the stables
when did rhythm
begin in Europe
as the forests were
leaving
and was the
necessary excessive-
ness of the
pyramids or
Chartres or Lascaux
just meant to
humble or
amaze us Lo! he goes
look adown you
idiot
but no mention of
winter.
First we have to
understand the lies
a great many of
them
mastered and their
various small town
origins going back
and then today how
everyone’s a
show-off
as my mother would
say
but why does she
speak
in the poem at this
particular juncture
say to yourself
rather
my I is the
preliminary
work of some great
artist unspeakably
greater than I.
Just admit
you wanted to
suck his dick
kick his ass
that seventeenth
summer of Arab
beauty the poor
children after they’ve
seen Paris on TV
so we can get it
over with mostly
these arrondissements
multiplying in our
minds
until what we make
of our bodies
not even a spirit
can penetrate.
Even over the noise
of the war on TV
the air
conditioner blasting
and the dog continually
barking next door
any child or I can catch
the calliope
creeping
down our street
what sweet music
bringing these last
hot days to us here
in Afghanistan Arizona
ice cream on the
beach
even if without an ocean
and the dying in the
street.
Finally today comes
the long-awaited
the prodigal day
the day stripped
bare
by his lovers
the orphan day
the bastard
skinny one
thrown away
by the other days
pushed to the end
of the line the one
you recognize
at once as yours.
From memory
I designed a small
sculpture garden
in the shade
of two fruit trees
an awning and
fountain
farther down
a winged head
in concrete
on a pedestal
drawn from life
not mine but
someone’s
not this one but
the other one
parked outside
the gate
an umbrella where
the dead can sit
and wait.
Once someone fell
in love with me
but I couldn’t
believe it was
so inappropriate
we were for one
another I was
in denial and
pretended not
to see the cruelty
of my refusal
and laughed
loudly and now
thirty years on
I feel that longing
as if it was my own.
