Thursday, December 20, 2012

Trees, trees


As numbers float down from you,
tree in the sky, evade my arms,
I could grapple with your roots for hours,
like a caustic death thirteen miles high.

And a route is inside of you, self,
you can’t make me laugh –
I fall down, into the ease of communal strife
like a wind-blown tree with safe thoughts.

Tuesday, July 24, 2012

Two Newer Poems



And we look up

These birdsong-chattering stolen occupations
This worldsong hysteria kissed

These frequent observations’ muted shade
of dollars and blues-tinged reassurances
as a typewriter goes fluttering and comes
burgeoning with dyslexic fruit and dropped ink

Speech grows beer and stuttered belches
turning around the tables stifled, and where take you
Under eons of traveling, aloof on the road it brings me out of my          nostrils home

Stretching in the ancient way it turns to show us
we are made of salt and grain and bitter ruin
Salt and grey where the sea washes over it
and we look up changed

Dark confinements you are waiting for to break



Sysiphus 526B4

Time is more precious wished away, sped truculent.
Distraction is more bliss than ergo sum awry,
When wished upon distracted limbs, without ameliorated scalpel,
Taught in class when never wishing stomach sparkled.

For without revenge there is a bed with covers unfurled.
And when morning bleeds the air red with the lovers,
The sum without scratching is another’s – ’out avail.
But no task more like a shattered hull.

Place up north

I had no sense of being carried along
through angled roads and under
beautiful telephone poles

When the people were asking
what were they asking
They would say

You need that shirt to keep warm
and are you trying
to place flowers in my hair

without first asking
if you have a place up north
and would I like to go there

Five sentences in
you used to go to school
you used to ride a bike

and where were the papers flying
when that mistake
was like a harsh town road

neglected and full of bumps
and you had no sense
of being carried along

Friday, July 20, 2012

Inevitabilities


Beauty surrounded us
with disharmony, so that we could bear witness.
We were old enough to know, yet young enough to admit.
We were allowed by ourselves to move freely,
out of the open wind of suffering,
wind of spring that carried in it
all the petals time had taught to be like glass,
and that time had perhaps taught us that we could not bear.

We are impossibilities, inevitable to becoming,
constantly fatalist – and we reach our ends by crossing them,
only afterwards admitting we are learning how to pray.

When you are working


Like a child counting hairs upon his father’s chin
you forget that moment;
the losing of the dirt-specked floor
to the round bell of a clock’s pendulum.

The guard that lays his lower lip upon arriving trains
taps your shoulder, looking you over,
passing into darkness.

My soul staggers; the train rambles on,
the mountain wind chasing it through and its concealed shadow
is as loud as wood
when I knock it with my hands.

Fast


An impression of pleasing
curved mother’s glasses' rim
to weight soon indelectable,
while impressions unfold
from a moving eye,

in a such great wait
never were there
more presence of opulation,
fantastic beyond all centered out
from in, is passion’s light
weightless formless birth.

If we are held by time


If we are held by time,
we are held in humor,
or contempt. The rocks
are emitting a silent amen.

If we are held by time, and most of us are,
in ravishment, when things are fast
and we are moving,
rapture perhaps, or perhaps, who cares?
Today, I will learn things.
Not by diving long
into them, or by feeling them about my ears
like a warm blush on a late, coming autumn, summer evening,
but by feeling their weight
like stones about me,
and their impenetrable substance
that makes my lack of substance obstinate, and grows later
into things we pass by
on most days, when things are fast
and we are moving.

The Dance


A view of my shoelace,
widened and clear like a flaxen sun,
bent in the bridge of cool summer.

I have been here,
the rock is rough.
I hear dancing,
smile of another.

I went in the children’s chatter
to where the air feels warm
and waits in pockets
for the dancers’ push.

There my eye widened
on another journey;
I will follow, join the dance,
these fingerprints are mine.

Your invitation
passes like a shadow
whose wings are wide.

The Vast Sky


       I still cannot cross this vast sky, this vast sky vaster than the sea.  He sees like a bird, shaking its feathers, this internal beast of mine, like the sun in the distance, far out in the distance, like the sun, sinking halfway into the sea. 
       Because I am in motion, and motion a testament to its own beauty, the river is sunlight, beaming nowhere, beaming from itself like a rose.  
       I think, a pigment in the imagination of another man, the beast that is no more, what comes of the imagination in this vast sky, this vast sky vaster than the shore? 

Turtle and Outcast


Nature is a rock that can be entered
through an outcast’s crop of ragweed.
Already he has found the substance to be chilled. 
And in the cup the smoke has turned
30 years, 40 years, 50 years back
to where the tree made its root,
and bird-song has reached across the universe
into the outcast’s ear and through his garden.

Let’s leave this place, it’s dull,
cries the outcast into the black hole.
And he and the turtle he had known all along
started off for that long forsaken home.

The Gift


Dried corn husks on a summer table,
shown in yellow sunlight
in an echo out of autumn,
the distant pulse of the city throbs,
my headache, longing,
wiling ecstasy of some stranger, pause
to think of it:
Here in my room, the walls laugh.
There in his room,
he laughs at his walls stained with dirt,
and you are filled with some story
about the cause and effect of bodies against each other.

They can soothe that one to sleep
as a whine escapes your lips;
sunlight fading lightly,
sunrise on your empty pockets, stubborn joy;
and as days pass on to weeks span out like names
drifting out of themselves, forever constant in their vagueness
like dreams, that cannot share themselves.

A Letter


Wide, short, narrow,
            closed, long.

You said you were close
to that other dimension.

I need a cave with substance
narrow and obtuse –
the Deerfield flooding
captures thieves, apathetic glances.

Is this really a letter about true stories,
Or is it a letter about misconceptions, treatises, lies?

No, it is a letter about one thing.

I need a sun that delegates the mischief from misfortune,
And is it laughter that will hold it up – well,
they call it a drop in the bucket.
If it’s that glad to swallow it, what is your pride in calling them to roost?

Love Poem #1


The wound in the birdsong from too much love,
The chatter of the thistles, in harmony with the melting of clouds,
And the broken branch, tiptoeing silently
into the womb of the mountain at dusk.


                                               …

It’s cold in here, refrigerator buzzing, only on at times.
It’s in the cool dark, and there, and there, the meadows haze indefinably.

Before the couch was all spread out, we rendered: THIS LIGHT,
it was to sleep beneath the carillon, for me,
and you, a memory you never had.

Why must we shift through sifting and exclusive psalms to get to things that no one wants to see?
Why must we diet on our sacrifice, and turn our heads to smile at those of us who’d be reduced to waste?
When we reduce our worldliness to cause, governing, these bodies appear, wrapped in your sad,
grain-of-salt-wit smile.

And reduction is a travesty.

Sunday, July 15, 2012

First 3 Poems

Fallen

I have traveled
on a thousand roads
and on one road
I have traveled,
to hear the voices’ calling,
wound like bits of string
and stones and the soul’s desire.

I have watched the birds
and I was told
that rain is consequence.
May it fall softly
on the children’s game.
And I have known
the roaring waves
that brought Agammemnon
to weefor the end of glory.
And I have known
a mother’s care
that sweeps a suicide
with aging hands.

I have traveled
on a thousand roads
and on one road
I have traveled,
to hear the voices’ calling,
wound like heaven from exile
and to a soul’s satisfaction
fallen from the wings of desire.



(Ex)colere, exercere, studere

Cast in a glimpse,
bronze angles,
cry for us –
what was tempered
from the dust;
we were not,
our eyes were not,

all that did not belong to us.

Gathered, they gathered
the wheat, the moonlight,
the word spoke,
primaevus,
the young, was a drab shawl
and marked the man, Abel’s brother
for what crime he didst commit.

And Hesse, in doubt,
called to an older friend,
and called not.

And was no sermon
and Pilate was not there,
the students
and Pound’s beard,
but a stubble.

And envy spoke not,
silent, Academicus,
and spoke of it all,
and was not of shame.

And I awoke, seeing the birds around me,
burdenless, and the mountain was not,
and was not survival,
and the beholder stared upon the perceived
like a child with his mouth open,
and the birds around me,
turned not their eyes.

And drank, they drank coffee
in the room, furnished with old oak,
and the book, covered with dust,
and on the shelf,
a bust of Caesar,
soggy with whining.
  

The Bridge

The hum of summer,
arched brow of the transparent bridge,
half-finished to heaven;
I learn again
what I know of knowledge,
leaning against the mystery.

I find it open,
this door to the desert
from the myths.
It’s not the water
smoking in the east,
the sun is not a thing like this,
an idea that drinks itself
from the borders.

Calm like a Moorish song,
I watch an old dance.
The flowers growing up,
the sky with clouds flowing
at a faster pace than I.

The bridge is my road –
two musics, of land and of sky
mount a horse that left me
on my way from the forest.

And I must play
on the strings of night
the sorrow of the land
to clear the air
of a laugh that wounds
a million stars.

The bridge is where a stranger
once stumbled upon himself
in the music of the stranger
and learned again
what he knew of knowledge
on which a mystery now leans.                 

 * “There is no name for us, when the stranger stumbles upon himself in the stranger”
- Mahmoud Darwish