Lamentations (A Haunting)

  When I put on my gown
to shed my grief in linen
that softest hands once smoothed
and folded, in this wide
    and desolate bed
  I fly from eiderdown

  to rows of hills that lie
under the vault of stars
among the scent of flowers
that blossomed far away,
    where few find rest,
  and few go willingly.

  She waits, my slender love.
I dare to stroke a cheek
as bloodless as old lace,
proffer a touch she fends
    and steal a kiss
  she now is chary of.

  Beneath her tattered dress
a fluttering has stopped:
a still bird with still wings;
and yet she moves and breathes,
    and static tears
  shine on her tintless face.

  Why am I taken with
the hands that smell of earth,
the absence in the breast?
When far winds in her voice
    moan, when I hear
  the winter in her breath?

It is Twice Blest

Now like the moon among a crowd of stars
or a naiad from water set upon by lilies
I'll have you rise from sleep, for the night adores
the flowering of all brighter presences,
imagines flames from any subtle spark
that burns in deepest cold. Should you awake
and light a cigarette at the foot of the bed,
let Fancy fashion how the wisps of smoke
might wind like ribbons around your lovely head.

Give me but leave to wonder, in my night,
how you pass yours. I will not have your hands
folded like unblown roses, out of light,
but in full flower, bewildering as wands;
and in the darkness should you think how sweet
is love and pity my cracked and foolish heart,
then, far from you, feeling a little peace,
it may well come to mend and gentlier beat
while I tell myself you are not merciless.

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.

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.

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.