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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

Midway 2

As from the flares of farflung stars escapes
fire's light as blonde as ingots so time trips
and with its finger furrows the maid that sleeps
where silver spittle pools and the cheek drips,
and so on: prattle of ghosts in sackcloth keening
where poison trickles on the inner ear
and tarns are glassed with ice and terns wheel where
all rosebuds die, where talk is stripped of meaning,
a wintered world beloved of nihilists
jammed full of nothings where our hopes betray us,
abandoned to the eating dusts of chaos
where black suns stall like clouds in standing easts
and flies roost in the trees and starve for a lack
of dying, quick as the hands of a stopped clock.


Sep 1 2008

Midway 1

While past the roof tops' cones and pyramids
stars swam like shallots in the cosmic soup
bright Anthony Midway opened up his shades
and pushed his eye against a telescope
and staring deeply at the hams of God
who squatted somewhere in Orion's belt
and diddled in the Magellanic cloud
grew tired of ogling at the starry vault
and shut his eye and capped the magic lens
and lay back quietly dreaming in his bed
where universes spiralled in his head
and missed the blackness that he saw there once
before those patterns flashing in the dark
turned exclamation point and question mark.



feb 08

Radcliffe Melancholic

i.

With knee upraised and pen prepared he labors
to invest with bone and sinew his haunting phantoms:
an architect of order wrung from chaos,
fisher of Spiritus Mundi; a seeker of talismans
and tenderer of trinkets to basilisks. The dust
has crept upon all things and patinated
the objects of the visible world, and in this dross
the finger of Radcliffe trails, describing patterns
of supple flesh saved from infirmity
by active and regenerative desire,
rejuvinating and preserving lust.

A genuine satyr, unappeased and pining
perpetually, he observes, insatiable
and permanently unsated, his secreted eye
swollen with wonted visions, unbreakable lens
in torment trained on divers titillations,
voyeur and victim of venial predilections;
and yet, not this alone. Albeit fleshed
and robed in beauty his beloved spirits
loiter in chambers sewn with silver threads
of flute and violin, and there is laughter.

The girls are tender and the songs are sweet:
pristene calves rest on the arms of chairs,
bottoms recumbent, spread in warm divans;
and books lie open, occasionally thumbed.
By such is Radcliffe haunted, rendering him
vain and indiscernable. Soft smoke curls
from candles scented of jasmine and lavender,
enfolding and confounding him. His perfumed
doxies idle or wander aimlessly, their tread
dollops with sound virtually undecibled
the cavernous hollows of his skull. He sits
transfixed, his quill and tablet in neglect,
and surreptitiously attends each thresh
of softened thigh and the sublime constriction
of flesh in action: the flexing of broad haunches
flushed in sanguine absence of maidenhead.

But prudence guides him and a civil demeanor,
nor is he wont to proffer the leering invasion
of public eyes in public. He undertakes
no silver tongued seduction, is taciturn
and, in affected nonchalance, retiring; but burning,
he stagnates. Time, with her infinite skein,
unwinds his days and still the abyss yawns, white
and blinding in its emptiness, a palette
that mocks with nothing, not even the errant swirls
and loops that indicate a moving hand,
transparent cubes etched in the inviting margins,
or faces scribbled, or breasts in silhouette.
Nothing. Abhorrent absolute: sheer absence.

Infatuate of an ideal without fixity (because
lacking substance but not entirely divested
of identity), he lives behind his eyes, beholds
Arcadian sub-realms: green Elysiums
his wonted habitat and cherished demesne.
Lulled by coos of Keatsian nightingales
his hand is numb and indolently rests,
debilitated in rapture, oppressed to stasis.

Inebriate of luxurious Aprils, the interminable
burgeoning of undecaying Mays,
this Adam of his own eternal Spring
in self-imposed abandonment, invokes
wet-wristed muses who elude him, coy
as naiads sheened by brooks. Is this aesthetic
or merely self-defeating? it may be asked
and yet the answer is of a certainty
the latter, and the rub is there. We have heard
of gardens run to riot, whether forsaken
or never adequately tended: Swinburne tells of one
hard by a sea that will be our treasure trove.


ii.

In such a place he wanders. Down and away the surf
slides forever and folds her silver raiment.
Even among his flowers he smells her salt
and hears the faint falsetto of gulls in azure.
His head Icarian, he aspires to Heaven, and yet
in flesh his heels find purchase in soft loam.
White cherubs fluting water, feathers chipped,
flaunt wings and exhibit their immaculate balance,
dimpled and rigid until the final trump.

The muck of windfall, wet brown mulch of leaves,
and festering, foaming-over fruit. A ceiling
of branches arched above and intermingling
keeps the place in shade, in somber darkness.
In a given hour we will find our subject here,
apart from the barren house whose turrets and gables
add shadow to shadow, and which, like an ancient vessel,
cracks like gunfire. In those dusty chambers
Radcliffe dreams, at nightfall; but such dreams
will have no witness: let him be chary of them.
We only want such dreams as would be songs,
such as would cheer Silenus steeped in his tankard,
the bacchanalian visions, the dreams he summons
before his inward eye, wrought with volition.

The clutter of roses, the patter of water, the dank
smell of stone, and somewhere, like the face of a girl
behind a veil, the sun in ambiguous effulgence floats,
her brilliance paled by cumuli. She has become
the maiden in waiting, retires in billowy cloud,
her curcuit negligible. In the sea's mirror at twilight
she gives the birds their splendor. But the pallor of one
in hue no darker than his fractured fountains,
complected whiter than such stone, remains.

The darkness suits him. In his somnolent farings
he cleaves to shadow, with feline coyness elusive
of light that violates his canopy. The night
is kindred, being conjuror and creator,
father of fables, of fanciful things and fey.
Dian, chaser of tine and talon, be with him,
our wandering child, be guide and guardian
among his ruins. Upon your silver breast
he suckles, a lecherous infant, of that cold pablum
nourished, and to it interminably addicted.

A benediction to his windy casements,
anoint his barren house, glow on his spires,
and wink at his revolving weathercocks.
Perched in his gutters, be his paramour,
impaled upon his posts, his courtezan;
and creeping slowly to his coverlet
attend him, blue equestrienne. For these
are his darkest hours, before the oblivious
false death of sleep, a time of deliberate defilement,
debased and solipsistic venery. Then Dian,
who art not, slip away and give redress
by your absence. Go and hunt in fields celestial.



iii.

His night is not our night, nor his day our day.
In body he exists in one, in mind
the other. His daydream is, in perpetuity,
one solitary and refulgent noon,
Sol fixed in apogee, and his Huntress hidden,
occluded by Olympic summits. He hearkens
to Philomelas in his reveries
and ravens in his waking hours. The flowers
of Arcady he ponders in abstraction
and cloying roses in concrete. His garden
is chaos apprehended, his girls, attired
in fictive flesh, are clearly comprehended. Once
he lived as any other earthly child
before the blessing of the rose turned curse,
before the fountains proved of supple figure.

He stepped from boyhood into song. Sabrinas
rose, stippled with water; Corinnas sidled,
skirted in voluptuous verse; Lucastas
pined in sainted constancy. He plighted
troth to his kindred, scribbled epithalamiums,
and swore his oath: our poor bucolic bachelors
will find sweet consummation, will be attended
by leaning maids upon goat-trodden hills
as fitting compensation for a sonnet.

The wind caws; stars are quenched like tapers; night
covers our subject in its heavy raiment.
He rises, in the cottony web of dreams
woven like a chrysalis. All is shaken
in the buffeting wind, the pushed and tousled
trees rattle and scratch at teary glass, banshees
bellow in pandemonium. In shadow
he slips between the rusted gates and wanders
misted by rainfall, through the crooked stones,
padding in loam, tented in bougainvillea. The world
would liefer not abide such men, is fain
to harbor a domestic medium. Withal,
he was his bane, his dreams anathema,
his constructs cancerous. Now Dian, veiled
in the liquescent even, is no assailant
nor venial accomplice. Soon she slips
unreckoned under the battered ocean. Dawn
spills timorously on the waking world and finds
him still as statuary, sodden by rain.
The earth is dewed in birdsong, gemmed by matins,
the garden crisped with mornfrost. Necklaced flowers
melt like weeping nuns at novena, their petals
rosaries baptized by infatuate tears.

Winds at rest, the sky is flecked with clouds
perambulating like swans, their white disorder
in blithe accord with one who idles, adrift
in derelict ennui, through accrued dementia,
fain for his paramours, their fair and roseate
curves appareled in diaphanous dress. Come
lambs that gambol on green hills, soft fleeced,
where Pan winds his organic horn; white flocked,
make hillocks boil, make all one teeming May,
fecund and prodigal. Come brooding swain,
crack pated nympholept, in rapt concupiscence
ring concords, sonorous hullabaloos of song.

Druid among the stones, among changing leaves,
whispers of Zephyrus, the busy drone
of bees afield, the clamor of birds; come
Apollonian priest, obsequious acolyte
and Pierian avatar; vouchsafe to us
the wonders of Hippocrene and Helicon,
the abluent waters and monuments. He wanders
in perpetuity, in wonderment.

Radcliffe Libidinous

He fashions dozens, but how can one conceive
of such a multitude? A duet or trio
would be a bounty, and far more conscionable.
The eye was broken at each point of the compass,
smothered in yielding curves and cloves, the weight
of redolent bodies tinct with maidenhair
so finely golden; reft of maidenhead,
this gluttonous throng of sodomites would sooner
suffocate the man than leave him sated.

Only in that transcendent world can one
surfeit of such a feast, where faces dimly
smile without identity, red mouths
sickled in soft laughter. These voluptuaries
are paranormal, their concupiscence
classical, a lydian architecture
polished to the pillars of their teeth.

Our timid sensualist in such environs,
supine and tight lipped, naked as a cupidon,
awash in spittle of his concubines,
slides toward sleep. His doxies dissipate
and loom disfigured, a diffuse amalgam.

Oddly enough, his morphean visions lack
prurience altogether, being rather
random labyrinthine mysteries,
replete with treacherous spiral staircases
endlessly descending into darkness,
or pointless pivoting in mazy houses,
panicked opening and closing of doors
in windy rooms with shuttered windows. Dreams

of the conscious kind, made of volitional ego,
is our material here, not slumber's jetsam,
the fast forgotten junk of sleep. He wakes
and lives in purity among cold stones
and loamy garden pathways, under trees
in wonted desolate shadows, kin to flowers
that throng in numb congestion, chafing hands
in pockets barren as a mendicant's,
lost in umbrageous eden, unaccosted
by woman or serpent, unattended by angels.

Sagacious virgin, in reticent abstinence,
bookish and unbecoming, this erudite
fisher of tomes, his fingers black with text,
grows more myopic in morose degrees.
Obscured in self inflicted quarantine,
a creature dieted on intellection,
sequestered spirit, carnate poltergeist,
he looms in silence in his corridors,
a gaunt ensanguined ghost, a visitant
in transient vagrancy whose small migrations
unsettle dust and mist the windowpanes.

And yet our pity would be squandered on one
who never sorrows absolutely, never
remains disconsolate nor ruminates
in anguish long enough to feel its sting,
who slips in fancy out of deprivation
and lives, the master of his empire, vain
and sated anarch of his hollow heaven.

Radcliffe Heroic

Mad to slay the insolent dragon, at hand
the tempered sword, and shod in worn boot leather,
he mounts the redoubtable siege and puts to rout
the fiery beast who founders in base confusion.

The virgin struggles in her cuffs, her tattered dress
imparts a perfect tender little breast.
In soot she shines in desperate sweat, her hands
blistered in manacles but fragile, soft
as errant petals floating on still water.

The beast expires in impotent flames. Our hero
ascends the dormant tail and plunges his blade
again through evil's hide. His stallion stamps
and pulls against its tether, the nostrils steam,
the mouth grinds, its hair a tenebrous gloss.

The old scenarios, rehearsed like ritual,
virtual, on the cusp of experience,
the vital distilled from fancy. No man lives
guided by stars, but gathers sense from abstractions,
perennial percepts rounded into form
and realized, conceptualized in time.

In a certain sense the dragon lives and dies
in splendor, at the hand of prince or pauper,
his massacre no tawdry sacrifice
but symbol of the necessary virtues.

We enter phantasmagoria, manic mozaics
splashed in chaos on the walls of the skull,
or imagine we do, when in the presence of order
so subtle its pristine character appears
as mad disorder. His waking melancholia
is perhaps a deception, his heralded ennui
a mask, his madness a deliberate ruse.

Promethean he hangs, harried by hours
which pass us in innocuous swiftness, days
that crawl like epochs in his mythic mind.
That verse of Blake's, to hold infinity
in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour
may not be merely mystic rigamarole
and could have pertinence here. Sifting old saws
may well disclose more verities than chaff.

Gallant in longcoat, under a veiling hat brim,
walks our derelict protagonist,
or sweeps, a stir among the literati
where women smile behind their hands, a preening
gaggle of powdered forgeries, showcased
accessories of the fawning mock-aesthetic.

He would be thus, but ambulates at sundown
in solitude along a strand where silver
water and light conjoin, his splendorous sea
star chandeliered, loftily scored by gulls.

Radcliffe Resigned

Alone, I stand between two mirrors,
enamored of twin reflections. The eyes behind me
haunt me, and the eyes before me, sunken lights
in atrophy, countenance in rebuke. I sing
with narrow throat, not warbling like a bird,
in senseless gaiety, but with a tongue
that lacks all acumen: cacophonous gutturals
patinate the glass with brief white mist
and wanly die in dull reverberation.

I love not God nor any counting angel,
insidious perpetrators of imposition,
fallacious criminals, cosmic voyeurs.
The wings of fountains are more apt to flight
than fictive seraphic vans, such stone more sweet
than manna from hallucinated heaven.

Certainly one has heard the bard of Erin
promulgate that Arcady is dead,
such I affirm, and asseverate in grief,
though I would wantonly resuscitate
her pastoral splendor and make her evergreen.

To Hell all heavens that live in spite of man,
in spite of nature, all anemic nirvanas
where in cross legged impotence man withers
in docile imbecility. Such vacuous
substitutes for life will not sustain
a grain of what is good in man, nor may
inseminate nor vitalize his blood.

The summer rain is noisy in the gutters,
gathers in cloudy ponds and brims the fountains;
lichen weaves its mucky velvet; the worms
insinuate in gluey holes and surface,
birthed in pink health; fluttering birds sing matins;
gulls like sirens weave their dissonant cries
in shrieking tapestry; the warming stones
are black and shining. Now I hear the brine,
a thin and salty lick on the ear, a solace
and saturating constant. Come, she beckons,
in sibilant consonants, mellifluous vowels
that summon with the curls of surf, such sounds
promising one perfect consummation.

In the Meantime

Any Jill or Linda
bought frozen food, waited in the swish of bar-codes.
Gremlin fingers tickled the whatzis,
the where that couldn't be scratched here.

Sandalwood, vanilla, mozied through the blinds,
radios talked to geraniums. The Focus
ticked, its clean womb rifled of goods,
asleep and happy with itself.

Any Joan or Debra,
slippery in the bathwater, bead-oily,
sagged efficiently. Under a moon
that leaned forward like a drunken C

Patches or Princess yawned
and shook its chain.
Fireflies so
superfluously flickered no one noticed.

The mutter of palaver that meant something
hummed across mahogany, vibrations
with a message. Any Josh or Ashley
would surely unravel

those soft articulations--
but in the meantime
pressed their powered dollies in the guts
and heard the words.

Dawn Fancy

The sun pursued an old flame
in the garden, blond hands groped
through bushes, cloyed with gold
the flowers, and wings of birds.

This god's fingers splayed
across azure: light deltaed
like vessels in a blue body,
white blood, bright veins.

He touched heads of granite,
feathered and bow-armed,
gilded marble underwater,
shined the odd penny,

struck at last an ancient tree
as if with fire, wakened
a sleeper whose alarm whispered
in shivering laurel.

Eve

She watched the creature push
behind its smaller mate
in a green glade,

the ground seemed hollow
and deep under them, heavy
hooves shook her new bones.

She stretched on rushes later,
stroked the narrow side
and strong arm beside her,

mouth parched and empty.
Asleep, she saw red rind
sheened with rain, cool

and solid in her hand, saw clouds
drag heavily, gray,
eastward.

Faith and Knowledge

In a painting by Caravaggio
an angel floats, giving instruction,
at the shoulder of Saint Matthew.

The man is ancient, the angel a boy
if we judge by appearances;
but the Saint is the child, his knee

bent to the bench, his terror
painted as wonder. Closing the book,
I step out into the dark

where the wind troubles the grass
and the moving air seems
more visited than visiting.

Eventually it dies out, beaten
by a silence that seems obsessed
with itself, like a girl with a comb

leaning in a mirror. Somewhere
a screen-door bangs shut,
a sound that gives what's real

its necessary comfort.
If I turn suddenly, the angel
won't be there.

Storm King

The low railing was broken at certain points,
and there were look-outs every mile or so.
You know the place, you may have seen
sports-cars drawing S's along the bends,
from above or below, on television.

A crackle of static: you shut it on and off,
like the images you might use to tell a story
of a friend's death by shit-luck or suicide
only to find them washed out. So you
try again, because on that same road

your father flew daily between two gates
to nothing on either side (dynamited
mountain on one hand, cliff on the other)
and no space in the rocks hooked
in him its vacuous come-hithering index.

In winter time the waters froze and frilled
the mountain with ice like bangs
on a girl's forehead. I might have said
it was beautiful and left you blind
with a dead word, but now you know.

Esthetics 2

Our symbols are invisible, they hiss
& clunk like tympani, like pipes. A flurry of air
taps patterns in the ear, but that's not this.

I meant to say the flutter, the flatus of f's.
But Fuk, without its foreleg, gallops apace
and wears a smile, no longer a blue-black smudge.

Digital

Ambling by the lakeside, my spawn tell me
Pop we're going down to the water, their wives
are tall and supple in unseemly sungear
I vaguely remember made a scandalous ripple.

I can't recall my fifteen between curtains,
my phiz a beaded lemon of joie de vie
in piss-yellow light, nor can I remember when
I crested the hump of middle-age, went white

and ruffled at the collar, can't see the Shabbat
when I palmed the elder off like a set of keys
and made the other one twice as useful until
He too surrendered to his bubbled Heaven.

You can't look anywhere but they push at your eye,
the northern and the southern, stem and stern,
those comely wrenches in the math-gears, bugs
to ones-and-zeroes. I swallow epiphanies

like pills; but this one's ancient: on and off
is all and always was, the yin and yang
of ball and socket. Anything else is chin-music. I walk
with fantails prancing in the pride of my eye.

Esthetics 1

Heaney tosses chew-toys, sinewy quatrains
cubed like dog-food made to look like flesh.
Creeley talks too much. His verses taste like spit.

Middle America

In the country's saddle, lowered by portly rumps
run filthy freckled kids whom Jesus saves
and paper kites come skittering over the roofs
or spell the names of God in the windy trees
In open spaces, frilled by banks of snow
threaded by fences made with loaves of stone
where casement windows shake with flyblown paint
curled sharp and flaked beneath the spider's silk
in the low-slung middle where the sun is cracked
and smeared in dullest orange across far fields
where barns and silos point to someplace else