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.

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.