Dec 7, 2009

The Bell Ringer

I stuck my face through
the hole and knew
without hearing
that I was the victor.

Ovals of applause, mouths
wide with acclaim,
blessed my one good eye,
tempered the bronze

in my ears, its soft thrum
bright and quickened.
Lifted above the rabble,
I floated through

the city until one that loved me
took me down,
made the quietness hard again,
so hard and black it hurt.

How I would ring
the bells for him,
that he might know
this pure and finished silence.

Moses

He saw the finger write in stone,
the tower of fire and whirlwind,
all doubts erased. The crack
and echo of that colossal loss
would bellow in his ear's ache
until he was wrapped behind stone,
left for the promised disinterment.

How would you feel, in the vast
violent face of things once merely
ruminations, in the brutal brunt
of dreams made loudly, brightly real?
You would wear the whitened mop,
would stumble and bear the signs
dizzy from epiphany, consumed,
weathered with such shock and solace.

Behold, he croaked, this adman
back from a sudden unmasking
laden with proscriptions, conferee
entrusted with his ten bold proofs.
Down the mountain he came, affluent
at all pores, bloated with knowledge,
not an ounce of faith left in him.

An Admonishment

May odes, epistles to the hills and fields,
Wordsworthian trifles lauding daffodils,
acquire innocuous irrelevance.
Have done with Keatsian honeyed indolence,
all naive praise of lethargy that limps
in panting languor under Helicon.
Give out, faint reverence of roses, rapt
applause for passive habitants of gardens.
Beauty is everywhere in evidence
and may by any eye be wondered at,
an easy loveliness, substantial grace
that leans amenably and comes to hand;
and yet in blindness Homer sang, whose eyes
were far too keen to tarry on a rose
or any bagatelle in wilderness.
Illustrious legend, cast your towering shade
from the Idaean mount and dignify
myopic poets who in dalliance dote
on dew-drops, deafened by the pipes of peace.

Last Supper

How could they, in His presence, eat a thing
or swill their wine? One thought how, if at all,
he would escape the weight of guilt. The King
of kings spoke gently, quietly cast His eyes
from plate to glass, and He regarded the wall
on which a devastating shadow rose

and took a shape that only He could know.
The revelers went on eating, ignorant
of Death upon the door, and even's glow
that shone red with the holy blood of God;
nor could they hear the angels' keen lament
for men who in that Name would drown in blood.

A Call to Shadows

I summon to me again the sentient ghosts
who've lain in dormant purgatorial sleep:
in Spiritus Mundi (stolen from Yeats again),
storehouse of fey flotsam and jetsam. I knock
at the colossal whorl of a giant's ear
who sleeps as long as a river, shout helloes
in cavernous hollows, in the din of echoes.

O come, they said, some twenty years ago,
and whispered in a gossamer singing: come,
a little kiss of silk on the tender ear.
Seductive shapes danced sinuously, dressed
in diaphanous gold, windswept; Ovidian
lanternslides upon the inner eye -
and now I bid them all return to me,

my loves, my flickering fireflies that gemmed
hours of boyhood's darkness: dark of nights
or dark of days lived in desire or dread.
I summon back. I rummage among shadows,
as one who channels in a circle of stones.
O come, I said. In silent wells of thought,
a drop: the birth of ever-widening rings.

Suburban Sketch

I.

By night, the dogs' kingdom: warning yawps
Stretched across darkness, unapproachable.
Occasionally the clamor of a truck
Passed by, or from the highway wheels
Screamed on tarmac. A place of furnished yards,
Swing-sets, locked sheds, pristine lawns.
Moths bounced by devious blue lanterns,
Struck and thumped like dropped acorns,
Fluttered and died, about every hundred feet
That crackling, seductive glimmer.

All doors were bolted, blinds drawn.
Deltas of shadow thrown by tousled trees
Curled in rain gutters, probed weathervanes
Mounted near the taut guy-wires
Of unwavering antennae. Tiled roofs
Bore the weather on their scalloped
Slopes, secured the sleepers under them.
A child, I sat in the boughs of an old maple
And saw them, in strict order, like soldiers
Ready to uproot themselves and march.


II.

There was something about the silence
Of closed garages, like faces in sleep,
Something in the way fences explained
What they were keeping in and keeping out
Better by starlight. In packs we wandered,
Hiding cigarette ends, those telling lights,
Behind our palms, observed by owls
Perched in trees like judges, eyes like ingots,
Or down the back roads, under telephone
Poles erratically orbited by bats.

Half-hearted delinquency set us
Standards of conduct, left the world
Safe and at a distance. Our eyes
Meddled at dimly lit curtains, pried
Furtively for a breech, a glimpse of some
Coveted girl in dishabile that never
Was seen, nor even sought in earnest;
But dogs were king, pacing their beats,
Keeping the peace. We pensively returned
To private rooms, Ataris, quilted beds.

Corinna and the Swains

I


She wanders floral pastures, through shadows
that mottle shivering meadows, damp
her sandaled foot and radiant ankles, calves
like ripened peaches, eyes cast downward,
rarely sunward. O Corinna, cry the swains
that pine in perpetual pang of love,
that steep their palms in lust, that of
desire are never purged, that pluck
languorously the strings of lutes
or breathe but faintly into flutes
and make sad music of hard luck.

She moves in ways that scream to the eye
and punish the groin, her swollen skirt
sways with flesh's opulence, slides
in maddening shifts and moves
in clefts, on supple cloves.
Eyes fat with unappeased desire
swell after her, crying, Corinna, Corinna.


II.


On florid hills we lean on elbows, breathe
despairingly, one leg up, one slack.
That ceaseless baaing becomes nearly unheard,
taken so much for granted, like the sound
of one's own breathing. Birds
flit among branches of trees whose names
we would be happy to forget; the good dogs
keep the straggling fluffs in line. We scan
the skies for gods: their meteoric descent
from azure, heels afire, pinions pressed
flat against bodies of supernal sinew,
unnaturally shapen. We, in awe
and unadulterated envy, mourn
our common and unchanging flesh,
our merely expedient organs of generation.

O Corinna, we observe you, we poor Clouts,
we pale insipid-faced personae, we
slack-jawed bucolic bachelors, goat-scented
experts of the Petrarchan sonnet. Step
to us once, stream-wet, charitably bend
in front of us with pendant breast, be wanton,
like Cynthia with her rapt Endymion,
and let our cloying, classic thirst be quenched
before the Olympian ravishers divert you
with startling metamorphoses, strange shapes
of potent and exotic beauty. Stay,
and turn Tradition on its ear, balk Custom:

There are too many poets in the world.

Islands

We stood and wavered on the deck and gazed
half-heartedly into the chopping ocean.
Our girl, she drove through wild water, split
hills of brine, as brazen as a harlot;

No thin black line appeared on the horizon;
no wisp of turf to salve the stinging eyes
of men too long uncontinented,
lurching drunk on salted planks, wave-tossed.

A saturated and demented rabble,
we cup our ears for Sirens. We are lost.

*

The queenly moon lurked in cloud,
patient as the sun descended;
bottles broke, and Bacchus slipped
to steal a puking swab.

Disquised in that pale raiment
he reveled from stem to stern.
The sails bellied,
the ship lurched onward.

Where are the gulls
that shrieked
like banshees to remind us
of lands we left behind us?

*

Some of us leapt into the bitch below us
and welcomed oblivion in her wet embrace;
some of us met the Devil in a knife-edge
below-decks, and expired upon a curse.

*

This prayer we humbly whisper
at the altar of the wheel,

in solemn incantation,
with a tremor of the eyelids,

beneath our ragged banners
before a rising storm,

fingers at the triggers
of our plundered arms:


Sweet Christ, King of sea-walkers,
Tamer of winds, O make the waters smooth,
Wine-maker, Alchemist of Heaven,
Cloud-splitter, Immanuel,
Be with us in the unbroken waves before us,
Be with us in the froth and foam of our wake;

O Conqueror of the ancient ones,
the ghosts of Rome and Athens,
Your heel will abate the will of the Titan,
the maker of storms;
Your heel on the neck of the giant
will temper the wrath
that haunts the dreams of the mermen.


*

Well may You judge us, should we walk again
upon a ground that stays fixed to our heels;
well may You judge, and save a little blessing,
Mighty Jehovah, who wrought the mercy of islands.

Eve in Solitude

Adam is exiled, Eve remains; a fancy



Ennui 


She lowers her hands, long accustomed to joining
in the still posture of humility:
now she forgoes the sacrament of prayer
and dreams her silent mornings out. The songs
of little birds who crowd the Garden,
who make a raucous shivering in the leaves,
give her a tender pleasure, but not peace,
nor solace for her hours of grief
that halt and hesitate, and never pass.


Eve To The Angels 


Ethereal guardians,
I have seen through you,
but have heard the ruffling of wings
on rare occasions when you stretch, settle,


and resume your infinite watch. 

The moon, shedding cool silver,
ascends the darkness,
round or sickle-silhouetted.


What flowers blossom from her breast?
What cold petals drop like diamonds
in what phantasmal gardens
to gild what prisoner's pain?



Ages Hence

In limitless aether angels clash, rend clouds
that fly at fiery heels of seraphim;
obsequious cherubs sing perpetual lauds
and kneel concordant at a radiant Hem;
mammoth gears of ancient engines grind;
spirits divided by opposing passions
conjure tempests: wild empyrean wind
of Thrones, Principalities, Dominations.
Our Lady of the Garden lies unshaken.
Errant tresses spread in beds of fern.
Ages of exile pass, yet she, forsaken,
nervously awaits her love's return.
The chill of grief infinitely lingers
in the patient folding of her fingers.


Epilogue

Awakened at cock-crow, our solitary exile
lies abed and silently rehearses
the posture of Death, which she can never assume:
her fingers folded at her midriff, still
as standing water, and yet warm and tender,
blushing with the bloom of life; her eyes
sealed with volition, not shut down like blinds,
nor penny-weighted. Waiting in the darkness,
Adam, in full flush of innocence,
and naked in the light of memory,
will wait for her forever; but he wakes
no more to mortal seasons, changing weathers,
or crowing cocks heralding sunrise. Dust
is what has come of flesh that dressed his bones,
that struck her fancy, plucked her maidenhead;
dust now committed to the earth, to cycles
of change that never turn in paradise,
where she remains, naive in purity,
in solitude forever sanctified,
in sickness of inviolable health,
where blossoms in profusion burst, and bring
the constant, cloyed calamity of spring.

Nov 10, 2009

You

I thought to find You in that space
just to the left of Tennyson
that made the mist shine in his eyes:
those bellying tears about to break,
that shimmer of things not gazed-upon
alive like whitebait in his gaze,

for that elsewhere is nothing strange,
is no less than the dark in sleep
which needs some sheen to make it thrive:
an abstract moon, or wandering stars
that Yeats wrought in a fiddling song.
You, too, could make the darkness change,

could take the night and make a womb,
could give the emptiness a shape
and fill it with a flood of light.
So I pursued You in that place
but still and wide, where poets watched,
as on some corner in a tomb,

lids roughdried with a wind of years,
for something moving in the void
made vivid in a flash, a bolt
that proved the dark was really nothing
beside the vanity that is ours,
and that gravid absence that is Yours.



And still more blind swiping in the dark... though this was composed recently, mid to late 2000's.

The Poet

"You must do this", they said, and pointed outward,
as if I had some magic in me. "Make it
before the last light fades, see, it sinks downward
faster now." And so I figured, fake it.

They shook their heads and wondered how I did it;
they even said, "It's something, how you do it!"
I took the trifle in my hand and hid it,
looked skyward, shrugged: so that's a sunset? Screw it.

Guilt

That one bird singing in a crooked tree
I paused to listen to as I passed by
was like a bell rung on an empty sea.

From where I stood it wasn't hard to see
its blood-red plumage and its small black eye.
That one bird singing in a crooked tree

seemed desolate as any thing could be
for how it cried out; but that hollow cry
was like a bell rung on an empty sea.

There wasn't anything about but me.
The clouds were graven in the still, gray sky.
That one bird singing in a crooked tree

had only but to move to set me free,
to lean into the desert air and fly;
but, like a bell rung on an empty sea

it cawed its caw. I took the liberty
to cough, then cried; but still it sang. How sly
that one bird singing in a crooked tree,
like deafening bells upon an empty sea.

Bold Type Here

An inch below the headline
we know exactly where we are.
The mirror shows us the same face,
behind us the same cracked door.

We get the picture: black
umbrellas, yellow raincoats.
We've passed the same wet stops,
morning papers playing hats.

Landscapes fill in so quickly
we cannot help not seeing
vitreous squares that mean sky
and pristine hills sliding.

In no time we've got it cold:
the slightest pressure here,
the right and the wrong way,
the long and stupid sleep when it's over.

Passage

The old trestle seemed to go on
for miles. Steve and I crossed it
a few times one summer, his long

legs moving him quicker, his feet
surer than mine. I suspected
the platform, side-stepped cracks

and gingerly avoided sunlit gaps:
it was more than a hundred feet
to the road that ran between

the fields. I looked over, leaning
easily on the guardrail, watched
the birds fly under me.

One day Steve had a better head
start and got too small. I turned
back, knowing I'd never catch up.

A train was coming and I heard
the tall trestle squeal and shake.
Steve's face turned when he felt

the wheels, and I watched him angle
toward the rail. He looked over his
shoulder, saw the engine bearing down:

a black face that laughed through
the air between mountains, trusted
ancient ironwork would give it wings.

That smoking dragon clapped his back
with a scream as it passed; wind
shoved him, but he kept his pace.

When I met him in town he laughed
and had the better of me. He was sure
the trestle would pitch him over,

how it swayed from side to side
and groaned as if its back
would break. I'd never been on it

when a train came and I knew
I wouldn't be, ever. Birds look
stronger and faster flying overhead.

Interruptions

I.

You always seem to know the time and place
when I'm least inclined to listen. Your voice came sheering
with its syllabled static, and now my brain is laced
with dust again, things I'd found and set in line like dolls

for an honest accounting have fallen into a muddle.
I wanted to write of a summer, a once, with rod and reel,
the bridge over the creek, the lure that writhed
and left my fingers tacky, flung with a whizz and kerplunk

into the water. Fat fish wallowed deep, shadows
that moved with weak volition. I wanted one of those
stinkers weighing my line, a bug-eyed chump
with a chic piercing. You can't eat them, they told me.

Fish I can live without; but the bridge
with its quaint arch, its sense of somewhere else,
its buck and tremor under galoshes, remains
in high memory, not the killing, the wide-eyed

deaths drying in pails, the knife scrapes
or the funk of scales, but the scent and gossip
of the water, the queen's-hand-wave
of oak and maple leaves at the end of Augusts,

the green that meant too much to give up,
too much to let go of. I never really liked
fishing, and mostly merely tolerated those times
with friends at some dock or bridge

over water that seemed too scummy to forage in -
red and white and round, the bobbers bobbed
like miniature bell-buoys in the muck,
the silvery film where insects walked like Christs,

legs like hair on a forearm; under the water a worm,
pierced through his dark pink cumberbund,
longed in its simple way for a hole in the ground
where rain is a gift on the roof, and not the world -

but better you should think that I am
on about it sentimentally, so that
you keep your tongue plumb to your palate,
not wishing to disturb me.



II.

The little one stands at the gate and drops a car
onto my side, followed by a stuffed turtle,
so I have to get up and toss the things back over,
thereby initiating the Game. I begin to wonder

why I never wrote prolifically as a bachelor,
when the only distractions were the occasional
knuckles on the door, or the irritating whistle
of the telephone. Those things could be ignored.

One could maintain a decent train of thought.
One could even pack it in and go fishing.
a knife dissects a chunk of ham: smells and sounds
that contest the smoke of my cigarette,

the pacifying click of fingerpads
and keys. I had to trawl for a spoon among
floating soap film and bread crust: my new
pond and pined-for island, a fresh stink.  

May 27, 2009

Lorca

Poet, you summoned the moon out in verses
and set her high over the hills of Spain
to loom god-like, a blue face without eyes
adrift in the darkness.

But you went the way of the dust many seasons
before the moon of a man's heart rises, before
the boughs of the soul's autumn shudder with leaves
morena-hued and slender.

So this is a fool's lament, because your lines
slid like the moon through clouds between my hands.
I thumbed a borrowed book by lamplight, shifted,
drowsy and heavy-lidded,

from your Spanish to its literal translation,
my wife at my shoulder, a petite Mexican blossom
scented like neatly-folded linen, her gaze alive
with the flashing killifish

of television, my son in the back room cooing
at the slowly-rotating mobile. O what grief
can I feel for you now, amigo de la luna,
who yesterday was a stranger?

An Imposition

His hands upon the folded coverlet
 embrace in poise beyond his years. The darkness,
 settling on his tender eyes, begins
 to take familiar shapes. On wall and ceiling
 sliding headlights are a swift reprieve.

Beyond the glass that keeps the weather out
 branches frisk in starlight, leaves whisper: Child,
 remember, He is watching. Therefore may
 your little hands not now unbind their stillness,
 your fingers not fare forth to bring defilement.

Be gladly blinded in beneficent darkness,
 and if you dream, may it be a dream of angels:
 one beneath you and the other above you,
 watching, waiting. Child, the toms are crying,
 for they are mad with murder and the moon.

Lie still, and when you wonder, do not wander,
 but lie in wait, for One is coming soon
 who made such things as murder and the moon.

For One Who Would Rather Not Hear It

Among arches and neglected gates
 cherubs, in immaculate balance,
 stand round-bellied, white stone flaked.
 Birds, in pedestaled basins
 where new rainwater pools,
 preen, tented in bougainvillea
 bowed with dense red clusters.
 Come through your crowded garden
 with soft-scuffed sandal-fall,
 your broad-brimmed hat attired
 with a single dandelion;
 and in such mean regalia
 with only the bees for fanfare,
 two cardinals suddenly flourish,
 and thresh your favorite praise.

Lanternslides

When Snow White enters the forest there are dangers
 more complex than poisoned apples: shadows
 draw around her, and trees, suddenly incarnate,
 paw with branches like arthritic fingers.
 Her arms held out for balance, she describes
 frenetic gestures of panic, treads
 the rising waters of blindness; distended eyes
 pan for the moon's curved wink of silver.
 This scene frightened my mother as a child,
 despite the straight beam stabbing overhead
 alive with dust, and in those fifties, smoke.

A few years later my mother gave
 three more innocents to the world: pulled forth
 from darkness like hooked fish, to gulp cold air
 and wail against a sudden brilliance. Now
 we are accustomed to surprises, to invasions
 of light, the prying and obnoxious beam
 an usher sweeps to sunder anxious couplings.
 Our lives are marked by farings into darkness,
 by ventures into uncertain twilights. Be it
 womb or cave, the cinema proffers both
 the light's solace and the dark's discomfort.

Forbidden Fruit

We searched in windfall, derelict and young,
 for flawless apples: most had gone to mold
 and made a brown and sticky pulp among
 trefoil and honeysuckle. We were told
 never to eat crab-apples, to resist
 their succulent green skin and sour meat:
 "they'll make you sick," our mothers would insist,
 but feasting in defiance made them sweet.

We packed them in brown bags and ducked like thieves
 across the field, into the harboring wood
 to share our bounty under sibilant leaves.
 No one got sick. We never understood
 the warning. But from time to time we'd squirm,
 our celebration spoiled by a worm.

Odysseus to His Son

Forget about what you've heard, boy, all of it.
 Throw it in the fire there, it's nothing.
 Let me say something. There is nothing worse
 than stewing in the guts of a ship, hounded
 by memories of a face, by dreams of eyes
 you doubt still take the trouble to weep for you.

Forget about war. There is little virtue in it.
 You'll piss yourself and look for a hole to hide in.
 A sword is heavy; blood is sticky. It stinks.

The truth is I was lost most of the time,
 knocked here and there like a doll, sliding by Death
 like a slug he would rather not soil his hands with.
 Learn a trade, and find yourself a girl
 who'll look beyond what's common in you, who'll see
 what may be worth weaving something pretty for.

Running

Struck, he bolts like
far thunder,
the heart
of the ground hammers.

Flicker of white tail;
leaves,
like parted curtains,
spring shut.

He carries an arrow
deep into wilderness,
feathers bloom
from his side.

He's found at twilight
over a deadfall,
wide-eyed,
ready to leap.

Apr 9, 2009

See-saw

Someone wrote of the
last priest, the last king,
a bloody mess.

Now where are those scorned men
pelted as mad
by horses of instruction?

In the dust under the swing
their glasses break,
those fat-lipped tygers of wrath.

All things come round again.
They wipe their eyes,
they stand up.

Mar 31, 2009

Midway 5

The glass was a smeary mosaic of squiggles, signs
of invention and accident, the willed finger
and bead-trail, volitional or determined lines
criss-crossing a palimpsest. Older he stood longer
until the face that ogled him from the mist
was nearly unrecognizeable, a white-bristled
mistrusted uncle, and thoughts of romance fizzled.
At times like those reality was best,
the close four walls, a skull divested of visions
of Celias and Lucastas and Corinnas,
rain-stippled breasts, inviolate vaginas;
but still the hand, slave to the body's passions,
described outrageous curves in watery scratch
that nothing in the shape of words could catch.

3/09

Mar 5, 2009

Midway 4

There was always a figure that leered over his head
and down his writing arm, and he like St. Matthew
struck crooked with fear and boylike, and it said
put this in but the lines were rank with mildew,
so he thought of flowers with their obnoxious odors,
the slough of nature and the fishy stink
of recognitions in the silted waters,
eyes that gazed off sidelong toward the brink
of nothing, past the gray of the portrait's edge
where God and His angels hid among the ghosts
of the merely dead; but still the empty page
boomed louder than the attic, the keening gusts
against the windows: bland electric field
where feeble invention quit and vision failed.

3/5/09

Feb 5, 2009

Unspeakable 1.

The best poems stop in the throat. What comes
of the living or the dead: that windy babble
of birds and spring, is honey on spoiled thumbs,
a sweet-slick dummy. For an unspeakable
ache behind the eyes, which sounds slaughter
and symbols hobble, but rises for attention,
thrives its moment in a world of water,
and dies with a dribble too silly to mention.


2/3/09

Jan 27, 2009

Dark Dark Dark

Now loose the terror of Leviathan,
Immortal Cetus, of the quiet deeps,
And make superfluous the merman's fin
That innocently gambols in the brine.
Beyond the palisades, the spanning lights
Arrayed on stones to hail the pilot's brow,
Lies but the Night's irresolute enigma,
The quandary's palaver, the conceits
Of convoluted quatrains. Query cliffs
To learn the black arithmetic of angles,
The verities of heights; comport and truce
With fallen angels for the salve of peace.
For who would masticate the fruit and make
His trespass from the permancence of Spring
To swagger in mortality, to steep
His blood in danger and experience,
Must coven with such avatars, be privy
To ministrations of dark kith and kindred.
Bellow and bray that blond and tender maids
Be taken to the dragon's tooth, be stripped
And cuffed upon the tree made two by fire,
The forked and brittle altar, that their breasts,
Pink-crested teardrops, may bring down the beast
To burn and consummate; speak out that lambs
Be slit and bled, that innocence be drowned,
That all the new be bright in immolation.
Now mage and seer conspire, and Daphne curls
In fear among her leaves, Apollo's bow
Extends for seasoned meat, Olympian yard
Ensanguined with the spoils of sacrifice!
I stand and summon under druid stones.

Remaindered

She sat and wound a tress around a knuckle,
looked through a cold, familiar pane,
skin candled to a darker tone. The long
and desolate earth stretched out and out

to where there were no hills; toms slipped
in tarnished snow, and gray melt ran
from gutters, slid from statuettes,
pearled down the tips of saturated leaves,

glimmered on weathercocks. He would not come,
Not now, not ever. Not in this old story.
He gamboled madly on the moors? Not hardly.
When those white Cupids moved, then he would come.

Poem

When I say look
a street will open wide,
gray above and red below,
no sky or level sea,

but peacock plumes of fire:
their flail and dance
in a broken window,
and panic's silver horn.

And when the clamor
you are deaf to stops,
leaving its sting and burn
plumb in the pit of your ear,

lie back in the echo,
in the still fluid of memory,
the beating of a primal pulse
in a wet black house.

Telly

The breadth and depth of the oceans,
the wideness of azure,
confound your tongue,
your notions of Time and measure,
compell your brain to fruitless labor,
the vain conjunction of syllables,
although your neighbors
nod to their function,
give you hello and goodbye,
the raising of shaven faces
among hedgerows, the cordial
phrasing of social graces.

In locked traffic, insolent horns
piping collective impatience
blare to inconsequence;
the griping, the protestations,
are nothing to the sun
rising above such riot,
indifferent and uncompromising.
And the sea is quiet.

Maker

I wanted you to see things as I saw them,
  but led you into fields that blushed with flowers
  which had no names, with birds that had no song
  and sat like stone. You followed close behind
  until the darkness gathered and my back
  was swallowed up in gloom; then you were lost.
I looked for ways to find you, turned around
  and called through shadows with a thousand words
  that vainly flickered out like taper flames,
  come-hithered to the shapes I thought were you
  with that same finger that had pointed out
  the shimmering vistas we would never get to.
I failed you so completely, left you stranded
  at weedy cross-roads, or on broken stairs
  that wound about on strange and blasted hills,
  at gates that rattled but were sealed forever;
  and there you heard the faintest sounds, strained thin
  through wind and distance, or stopped listening

On the Cover of Mary Karr's "Viper Rum"

A viper's mouth, in livid blossom,
weighs a thin stalk with its gape -
yet not a flower, for no sweet scent
expired from that untender chasm

come-hithering with its sticky pink
where boys played rough-house on backroads,
who, freckled in plaid flannel, snapped
green sticks for lesser snakes to drink.

For death, it seemed, breathed out that maw
(that looked like what could push life out
and draw life in), and we'd but squirmed
like hands through sleeves and, walloped, cawed

in ignorance beyond such bloom.
Years later we're sedate and gaze
and what repelled us once, that yawn
that draws us to its fecund loam.

Now even its image stays and calms,
be it rose-petaled or serpent-toothed.
In time all wiser Adams know
that what's come-hithered soon just comes.

Penelope

I make and unmake.
Seedy swains still linger,
drunk in a draughty hall
while my finger-

tips bead with blisters.
Lacking friend and lover,
I tell a manchild of
a misty father.

Come, my slayer,
put these rams to pasture;
geld them mid-gambol;
grind their horns to powder.

Why stay at midsea,
take for wife saltwater?
Gift these bristling louts
your wine and quarter?

I weave and unweave,
the pattern never alter,
lest design stray,
faith falter.

Jan 20, 2009

Midway 3

Having come to the middle of life's way
he decided to give up, to give up writing,
certainly, as all that could be said had been,
having not died young, somewhere in Italy.