Critique

Oh what we would do for a word,

What cruelty, feigned fealty,

What unrelentingly pretentious play

Pretending idiocy, professing to be 

Anything but tendentious for its own sake

To sling the subject to its last predicate,

The next best thing to being right.

Reducto ad absurdum takes everything,

Like the humidity takes Miami,

They call it impeccable logic, the rock

That crushes scissors but can't take

A blank paper sheet, so far is it

From the real, from the way we kill

To avoid going to jail.

There's a bounty, albeit secret, there somewhere,

Must be, as everybody seems 

To know they will be paid

By the amount of blood they draw

In praise of the living, whose smiles are

A call to war, across the centuries

Of smug insouciance to the threat.

The dagger drops as dictated

By the perpetual motion contraption

That's been running since the beginning of time,

To bring forward everything that's beautiful;

The all-encompassing frieze, the Davids 

Pulled from slabs, the spirits freed in wire ...

They call it cheese.

At the Releasing

Your insatiable thirst for knowledge 

Yet you forget you are all of us;

The volumes you can't quite consume 

Came, in the beginning, from you

-- And so much missing!

The Alexandria Library, for instance

The moments of your memory

Pulled away in pullullating sunlight

There are too many clues,

None lead to certainty

But veer instead to corners

Where the dark itself seems an answer 

So profound is the remembrance,

And so remote

Lifetimes feel the strain of this lifetime, 

They peel off from its photos and our eyes

Humming in a frequency

A dexi-quaver away

With the ogre gurus

And the time machines

Cordoning like wardens

What can be known of the past

For it is only past

As our minds conceive it

It's ongoing, for the turn there comes

From the turn here -- 

As the tree that blows to one side now

Extends the growth of all the trees before

And speaks to us always, in a way

That we can't -- must not -- hear

Except with its waving

That's telling us of something

We can make it anything we wish

And how could we ever be wrong?

Complete Unknown: Shoesteps after the Movie

The sea breeze, the singing palms

Say you can be anything

Here there are lights in the mist,

Horns calling from alien ports

The blankness that engulfs

Doesn't own you

The way that people do

When they reduce you to their view

The gulls ask us questions,

The headlights on our faces answer

Identity, we don't like to say, is not a

Compass point, it is the sea.

The Orange of the Poem

Passion is the Erigne of the tone,
     Works out the convalescence squirm
     To find the iridescence you've been given.
She breaks across the wooden realm of Joan
To masquerade as oneness in the furtive zone
     Of incandescent leisure worlds of men
     Who can't defend the messages they send,
The missives from a long-lost home ...

Miseries are for sunny days,
The whole thing is front-loaded,
Filled with disgust, ready to be shoveled
To the wishing pile, never mind the wash
Coming out in the intricate consanguinity
Of deep-seated pathos rung in the squeeze
Between laundromat proverbs and innocent suds.
The maker takes all diligent precautions
To ensure the figures are apt
For interpersonal disaster, transparent interplay.
The gnome of the world finds its own ordainment
In the calyx of long event sunsets,
The moaning cure of darkness and space,
The panoplies of infinite flux borne on a cheese 

Of excess, never mediate, ever-mudded,
Through any modalities necessary,
A route of discontent to fly through at distance
But the orb is a sly way to coagulate tears
In a crystalline salt shaking meter,
As an anchor on the boat, the beat moves
Too fast, the edges go frazzled in continuous churn,
In the pit of incommensurate salvage burn
Squawking for firecrack, the ends of a biscuit,
The age of Ptolemy covered in scars,
Rasputin too all done up in ivy,
Necessitous wormholes from volleys of spars
Under the cool blueing stars
As if, once more, the dollies will squeal
With delight, and make all dim shadings
Aright for the night of long knives and cold truth
And asterisk bluffing, the whole tub an onslaught
Of mud, sparking soap purple if only in air,
The tar is a river that's regnant there, commands
Elusive islands, sweeps them solemnly to the shore,
Blocking corporeal replies when the cloth comes 

To sanitize the sutures and lies, what wise ones 

Lay beside the boils of the tide in aerodynamic 

Slipstream ripped for complacent abjuring 

Of specificity, for it all inures to the sticky
Wet plastic strip that dangles for flies
And car keys, lobotomized trout.

You've been found out, circumscribed,
Ostracized, turned around inside;
What are the demure replies to the noise
That rise? It settles, the poem, wherever its words
Have fallen, what traipse of space mortals
Cannot enter, even with the slickest treads,
For there is only the steel of rails  
In the phosphorus heavens to glide by.
Memory is a funny strategy, Mnemosyne,
To take collapsing space like a hem or the weather
In, to make sense to the senseless, the dim,
The driven mad, the players on the butt-end
Of packs -- all that whispering is too much 

The sauce of waterfalls hinting, as the symbols 

Turn so perfectly into meaning
At an implausibly remote remove.

The plants are in rows, ID'ed and white-tagged.
The same sun descends on arboreal weeds,
Jungles where life is alive, and yearning
To let the Mother be, for there are many
Teachings out of her needle, that threads
The impossible to the seen.

Confessions of a Fantasy Addict

You can be anything

     when you are nothing

— Plugging volcanoes up

                        is a bore

When you only exist

                as others.

You can judge 

                        the flaws

Of the less-than-perfect

     perfection,

Make the fallen

                 angels small

Whose rosary beads

                 you handle

Intoning

      some prayer

To get you next to them

                          to feel

When the double play is turned,

     the note that no one expects is bent ...

The accomplishment 

     makes them figures of glass

And you

                 more than them.

The Aging Light

The book of the truth

     never seems to be,

Although it may 

     break the skin

Of what before

     we couldn't say.

We may even

     choose again,

With new brands 

    of whims,

That we recognize ... 

    from somewhere.

There was a book before

     there was truth

We try to find once more; 

     it didn't answer, didn't explain.

It just had a being 

      that changed us.

But the change

      has long since passed

And we've forgotten 

      what it was

And we pick up every book

      to try to recall,

But it's only something new

      that isn't real and isn't true.

We're hardened like

      a piece of stone

Still waiting to be

      thrown.            

Blues

Dionysus the Menace

     rummages through 

                         the wires,

Holding tight to the life force

     that wants to die --

It spills out the sad times

     from the numbness

                         and sanities

Beyond any victories

                         of vanity.

It lays out there for us to feel,

       as though we weren't 

                         permitted,

As though such pain,

               such beauty,

     was not allowed.

We look around as our

               jaws drop

To make sure we don't get 

                          caught.

The primal wail of why-o-me

      has only a thin professional 

                           veneer,

As if the whole facade

               will disappear

In a burning gyre of tears

      insatiable to escape,

Yet also to reach there

               once and for all,

      the place of expression 

Where the accounts 

               are settled

And the truth can 

                            just be said

Without the blinding shadow

Of the distant other instead,

     whose gaslight tortures

                 are innocent in the end.

The wail can't be stopped

      in the infinite need

To be understood, though one

                              never will be,

      only loved, in its way,

Which makes the spirit play 

                              to slay,

The body's strings

      in endless bend and sway

                 to shake and swing

The demons that were never there

                             away,

To be free, they say,

      but that's not what it is at all --

It's loneliness we cannot bear,

      we want to share the emptiness,

                  but it's not there.

Griefspring

Memorials everywhere,

     too many new flowers.

But who are they for?

     The known stick figures,

Stand-ins for convenient

                            diatribes?

Or are there those who died for us

     we never knew before?

In hives underground, battle lines

     of space, the places where codes

Were exchanged, who go unmourned,

     their cause unacknowledged, 

For part of freedom is to feel 

                              unobliged,

As part of service is to give

      without thought of return.

Still, there must be a merge, there must be

                              a balancing,

Something preserved as it is perceived,

      some gratitude accorded,

Even if the gift is for

      a future state;

A soul in need, no longer

                              victorious.

Night Beyond the Doors

It's a dark place

     the wind blows

          a-yay, a-ya-ya-ya-ya-yay,

The stars are placed

     in masonic configurations 

          climbing, climbing away

But there is laughter

    from the vast,

          long-suffering trees

And the eyes in the field

    are pleased

          to see

The things that we

     can never

           comprehend:

The wideness when each

     moment

           has an end.

Intimacy Translated

For more I can't be loved ...

Straw music plays like alms

     across the strip-tease valleys --

If I but knew knew how much

                         they loved me.

The urge to cease

     came through the mountain leaps

As it came in the golden blonde's 

                         arms of sleep;

The urge to live

      beyond each moment

Is the same as to know no moments

                         you are in.

The thought of closeness

      missed

Cannot but bring

                         the distance,

The thing that you regret

      and never lost,

Even in the fall to

                         oneness,

As if oblivion is not enough

                         to prove

It all resolves to nothing's

      sweets of love

Without someone to share it,

                          as a prop,

To find what's locked within oneself,

      the thing that never stopped

And never can

      stop ticking

On the clock that

                         doesn't exist,

Just dreams where we measure

      how far we're separated

And how many connections

                         await

-- We could not handle it otherwise,

      the confusion of the limitless,

The job much bigger than we know,

      to shed the skin of consciousness.

The bird voice that is far away

                         becomes our mystery

Until we speak from the other side

      to ears that can't perceive,

But in that there’s a call to that

       which moves us to our knees,

They call it faith, the open moment,

                         the golden memory,

And all we see is part of it, here,

      the distortion of eyes and ear,

The dirt of commerce that we share,

      what persists, in numinal air,

A call to service,

      to the invisible,

What holds us from a distance

                            in a shell

Still burgeoning and turning 

      in the swell,

To embrace what we barely know

      in the sadness of farewell.

The Tomb with Nothing in It

What do we know about God?

We are seizured into the unknown

With one syllable, not even a raft,

Tinctures of sandlewood notwithstanding.

The light yields a thousand tomes of dark

Scribbled as a form of control.

The Venetian Phoenix, the Phoenician phalanx

Twirls around a caduceus of death 

Like a walking stick with red eye

Taking, in the guise of enlightenment,

As if we are supposed to know,

Something wrong with us, a sin of error,

When there is no need to accommodate 

The prison with the skies.

It has gone on in the name of learning

A long time -- the antipode

To pull on our reactions. How silence

Never seems to be enough.

Rare earth, shared soil,

The plangencies of taking on a truth

Revealed in shadow frequencies,

The individuation of seems,

A not that turns to is,

As if it's meant to stay

Instead of breaching the code

And carrying away the resonance

Of the true to dead center, where it

Becomes, again, a realized possibility,

Congruent with light, but shaped by

A higher drive, to know, the role of Gods,

Nothing beyond desire. It permeates

The universe as the one true fire.

Holy Saturday

The Jesus and Elvis syndrome

           takes its hearts

With arrows dipped in 

                     acetylene 

To inflame the pilgrims

                             with longing

That they themselves

      can be set aside 

For the iconographies

                     of fashion,

What earned the rites of peace

      in surrender.

The purple robe flung over

      the shoulders of the frame

Constitutes an impermissible pearl

           hung with a name

That ravages the non-believers

                        in themselves,

A black that grows

                        with every motion,

For the song is never right,

           the suit too sourly tight,

The light too obscure for

                       illuminating nights

Left to our own devises 

                       without device.

The agency concocts the sunrise

           in our minds

Each year, day, season,

           for every discrete reason,

Careering as the cosmos

                                locks its gems.

You will not handle them today.

                 Your longing 

Must persist.

The Purposes of Distraction

Primordial encumbrances 

                     shoot the lark;

Can we bleed bloodless?

     Are the stages set

               for cherries

                     or for dark?

     The bold begat the blind,

The two-faced Janus mask

               overhangs like vines.

The mind is not what you think it is,

     It is watching -- no outlet

               for your thoughts, worth

                       only pennies.

The clutter fills like foam

               in a sock cushion.

The stories of your home,

      Compendiums of

               misplaced dust.

You've become, 

               in words and song,

                        a casualty,

      electromagnetic scrape,

The homings on you 

               where you are

      to keep you mired in place

               without recourse,

                          without pity,

The play of the

                 collapsing city

Squeezed

                 of any juice

      despite the café cream

                that brims over

                           as laughter

     bitter and 

                 hot like tears.

They have come now, the fae,

     ears perked, by the rosemary,

Surprised, in the season of bunnies,

     to not be seen,

                 though their toadstools

                             and ponds

     feed birds in every garden.

They are known

                                thus no longer real.

That is the way the teachings go,

     the bump in the night

                  merely disappears.

Unoccupied realms those beams

                  of heaven's light --

You can't decide what vision trick

                                to cure,

     blue or orange on your eyes?

The theories give so few clues what to do.

You could chase down deeper theories

     or go on, as is

                               your wont 

                   to something new.

    There is always 

                   something different 

That is always

      too the same

                               but it will do

For the purposes of distraction 

     amusement never fails

                    to block another moment

                               from the whole

(Like how douchetard is the new mot juste

     or the secret life of spirulina seeds)

-- All are equal

                    to fill the thoughts 

                               with possibilities

That will never pan out except as

                    momentary prayers

                               to nonexistent dreams.

The ones who veered away

      and smile behind a screen

All say to follow them

                                but they leave

                     no breadcrumbs 

                                        behind.

The Poet's Task

The timekeeper of the aeons,

Who brings from heaven words

Imperishable, a flower bloom

Made human, 

He brings thoughts past mind's extent,

Where the heart can't bear to go

And the spirit needs a dare

To hope for.

On the mesas of the pure,

Horn notes like the lord's command,

The place of silence,

Man alone

To contemplate the whole of the human,

As one who only sees, only hears, only knows

The things that can't be seen or heard or known

As if they are the colors of the senses.

The music of the spheres may bend some notes

To fold into the grasp of those frail fingers 

That know what it is to long for

What can't be found.

The tones can, through desire, turn to healing,

Through compassion things not understood gain meaning,

Through music thoughts can soften,

Reveal themselves as feelings

That will carry bravely a name

Through the nettles,

Gently kept from any contact 

With the thorns.

The Consortium on April Poetry Month

“It’s a rat fuck.” – Phillip Levine

The children must never grow old,

    Lest the spurious rest with the dust.

They have lost all their taste for conquest

And are given to squeaks from the nest.

The prism dissolves into monochro-me-ism,

    With rainbows the aura of God.

The poets were too little read,

They fell for the slicks of their brethren:

Their books in the towers, their words on the lips

    Of the pure who pass through the vestibules.

How little they knew, in that manic time,

How unyielding the trauma of youth.

The curse passed to them, to make the broken world

    Salve-adage-able. There were not enough words

To silence the blind wisdom

Of everything wrong, irremediable,

Except the unconditional, which worked out to be

    One’s experience is authenticity!

The moth one chased age three,

The bender that one’s mother had 

In all its unresolved glory,

    The time one stops for tea – or coffee –

All roads lead to a deeper – sense of me,

What the great ones prescribed, they say, 

In the dog-eared remainders of old dead

    Anthologies beaded by mediocrities 

Who don’ need a 4 am memo to know which way

To butter their bread.

But children’s wisdom correlates with money

    Thrown down the drain;

They will survive this strange attempt on them

To enter-cage or en-train,

What of the stewards who look after them,

    Who once had some words of their own?

They still echo in the gaming rooms

Like a bright mechanical tune

Parlayed for a place at the table

    Where the blandest voices reign and sangwees

Are consumed. That’s all the inmates are able

To tolerate: no talk of feelings, the things that make you angry,

For victory comes to the one left standing

    Who had wagered the fewest shards,

And even the slightest howl from outside

Will bring down the house’s cards. 

All this is known – if nothing else of this dreary 

    Place called poetry today, which sends its rancid shoots

To every paper of record and alternative weekly

Trying to sell the frisson of its exclusion,

To peddle its irrelevance as if it wants to be put down

    And not keep acquiring more wanna-bee’s

To hang on to the would-be coattails 

Of an emperor’s threadbare clothes.

The poems, oh but what about the poems? 

    Soulless and toneless, they live on like ghosts

In an attic only visited by the brave or foolish enough

To know these gimcracks pose no threat,

No PhD theses will be harmed in their renderings

    Of mytho-historic events,

Their seconding with decades-old slang

Of the latest mass mind control lies

As if the work was to disguise

    Their own corr-opted perfume

Will barely register

Above the din of the doomed.

But here we are – what seems the final whimper,

      Death throes gone on so long

The people have gone to eat a hamburger,

Pick flowers, bury their dead

And have not – will not – return.

    That is the way they had planned it;

The Poet, no threat,

Is one to the Republic

As his ancestors bore the mark of Cain

    In seminar rooms and leading dissertations.

Don’t tell me you know my plight,

Who say you care, who hold the light,

For the sun shines on puppets and prophets

    And the muses, like Elvis, have left

The pantheon, to cry among the pigeons

A river of tears, for all we should’ve felt, but didn’t.

Department of Truth, Poetry Division

The cultivars of catastrophe

Are the closest we know, in the real,

To reality.

The notes go all over,

Along the outlines of some inner plain.

The meaning is hidden in a recess of brain

Far away, and charged with a particular way

Of thinking. 

                       The infinities of interpretation

Come from the same central eye 

That will push blind reflexive

Expression aside, like the wind

     Overrides a tumbleweed.

To serve the unknown

                                          In the guise of this town, 

                        This street, these people

Is the same thing as serving the truth,

   That thing only known in refusal,

In the emptiness of the invisible 

    Touched with gold.

How will we know, in multiplicity,

That we’ve lost the way, that wisdom’s dying

For what can’t be shared, but must be?

Each moment has become an eternal finality,

     Words beadstrings of jewelry

Released to be re-leashed again

             In a brittle concatenation

All equal as a soul

                                  In consensual freedom

From having to mean, open to any understanding.

Is that not the way of advance?

    To have each singular, each peculiar particular

                                Accepted

Into the blackness of the whole?

If only we could fight for truth 

    The way we fight to be right.

But the bifurcation is behind us,

     And we are jump cut, no longer recognized

          By ourselves, by the past 

That is happy for the most part to be erased.

          But it will say to me, if asked, 

                In the most forceful way:

“The worst of the worst is the good,

    For you have to look,

                Feel around,

                         Evaluate yourself,

Instead of turning the page with a devil’s cackle,

Feeling quite happy to be free.”

Kleinzahler on Niedecker

The sparrow stays

       In breviary 

Despite the riffle raffle

       To her calls

As though she was an eagle

       Impossibly small.

One would think there would be

       Only a bio

              Left —

Yet she feeds on the green

       Moving calligraphies 

               Of grass

As if they could mean

       Even after

               The saying.

The Dark Porch

     I had to learn the simplest things last:

The intelligent are put where they can’t hurt anyone:

          The cages of academie, 

          The gaslight houses' jackets, 

          The cardboard towns along the street.

     Words may have meaning someday

But for now they are the playground of the damaged

      Given a platform to say:

          "There is no truth

                 Except my lie"

And if it's offensive enough to the holy

            It will be advertised

      In waves of saturation

                  For the cognescenti.

The informed are a bomb that has been defused.

     But history will soon enough be wiped smooth,

As it is periodically, when the deceit gets too thick

     And faith can no more be relied on to fool.

It's a black hole of knowledge

     For those too naive

          To believe,

Who stay within the life of the mind

     In the crypt of the truth,

           Waiting

     For someone to find them

                      But they never really do.

Wind Improvisations

Hot summer wind,

Palms stand in lonely opposition.

             A band comes in,

Merengue, as from the sea,

             Then sirens.

Some invisible anxiety 

Pervades the day

              From somewhere.

Everyone itches to move

              But none want to blow away.

The birds veer from their trajectories.

             The palms succumb finally,

Their blades run like centipedes, 

             Play furioso, 

Swaying to wave it away.

It's a place in between, 

               A place of balancing.

The squall gets all of the drape,

               It falls gently on a string.

Bonfires have already begun on the beach.

The palms turn golden, then red,

              Still holding to a tether.

Contentment is like death,

              But when you move

What moves with you?

The View from Newport

Latinate mansions alone on a hill

Compete for a view: I raise your palms and

Call your pencil pines, and light an eternal

Torch at night because I can! Their cars run

On envy not on love, and from the vast

Desolate porticos, black windows hold

Savage children who can't tie their own shoes

And moan all day long.

                                            Something stays here

That doesn't distribute downstream,

Some vacancy of heroism

In the stone figurines, some terror

Of importance on the tennis courts

Where no one can play, some inescapable 

Irony, in this homage to uselessness,

Created from the dead end of the useful,

Use, 

         That thing offered for their approval,

Those so destitute they can only slake

An inconceivable pain by winning every game,

An abstract construction, unlike the lives

That turn with their wheel, too painful for them 

To bear, except as the place they never

Want to enter: human in the abstract,

When there are real cards and real dice

And secret techniques for cheating the unfeeling

Vaults.

              Yet the jungle feels nothing 

When the tiger strikes. For the one you know,

That everyone knows, isn't known, there is too

Much shame. Thus the face could be anyone,

Anyone could stake the claim.

                                                         But it's not

For everyone, to reduce the light of life

To a thumb and a button, for the brave ones 

Know that value is a void, what falls to them

A nullity to savor.

Vigil

No chance for grace

     With pets in the yard

That slip through every crevasse

     At any turned gaze.

They eat flowers too,

     But not calla lilies,

Turned into the ladies

     Who grew them.

Metaphora

As the palms whirr, a dog's bark

     Moves back and forth

           From meaning

                                       into music

           Unable to reconcile

                         its opposite.

In truth, it is those

     In the next yard

            Who give completion,

         Who give canceling out.

Ballad of the Ladies from Bygone Times

From the French of François Villon

[Version 1]

Tell me where, in what place,
Is Flora, pleasing Roman,
Alcibiades or Thaïs,
Who was her kissing cousin;
Echo, who set noise to buzzin’
Over river and waterway
With a beauty more than human?
Where are the snows of yesterday!

Where is the learned Héloïse,
For whom Abelard let go of
The mundane world for Saint-Denis?
He became a eunuch for love.
Where’s she who ordered Buridan
— Queen Marguerite of Burgundy —
To be sewn in a sack in the Seine?
Where are the snows of yesterday!

Queen Blanche, white as fleur-de-lis
Who sang just like a siren;
Bertrada, Beatrice, Aélis,
And Erembourge who ruled the Maine
And Joan of Arc, Maid of Lorraine,
Martyred in Rouen at the stake;
Oh sovereign virgin, where are they?
Where are the snows of yesterday! 

Prince, for a week, can you restrain
Yourself from asking, “where are they?”
Lest I repeat this sad refrain:
Where are the snows of yesterday!

-----------------------------------------------------

[Version 2]

Tell me where, in what place,
Are the temple prostitutes,
Envoys for the human race,
Who only remain in statues;
Who turned our clamor to music,
Made conscious the waterways,
Brought beauty more than human?
Where are the snows of yesterday!

Where are the scholastic nuns
So learnéd they said nothing,
For whom men became monks,
Turned to eunuchs out of love;
Where are their justly punished
By the righteousness in eyes
That defines the holy way?
Where are the snows of yesterday!

Where are the crowns behind the throne
Whose song and voice was known,
If not directly heard, except as love’s
Compassion when all hope is gone;
And mothers, who we first thought of,
Oh sovereign virgin, where now are they,
Who showed us how to die for love?
Where are the snows of yesterday! 

Sir, it is too late a time
To ask the question, “where are they?”
Except as I repeat this rhyme:
Where are the snows of yesterday!

----------------------------------------------------

Ballade des dames du temps jadis

Dictes moy où, n'en quel pays,
Est Flora, la belle Romaine ;
Archipiada, ne Thaïs,
Qui fut sa cousine germaine;
Echo, parlant quand bruyt on maine
Dessus rivière ou sus estan,
Qui beauté eut trop plus qu'humaine?
Mais où sont les neiges d'antan!

Où est la très sage Heloïs,
Pour qui fut chastré et puis moyne
Pierre Esbaillart à Sainct-Denys?
Pour son amour eut cest essoyne.
Semblablement, où est la royne
Qui commanda que Buridan
Fust jetté en ung sac en Seine?
Mais où sont les neiges d'antan!

La royne Blanche comme ung lys,
Qui chantoit à voix de sereine;
Berthe au grand pied, Bietris, Allys;
Harembourges qui tint le Mayne,
Et Jehanne, la bonne Lorraine,
Qu'Anglois bruslerent à Rouen;
Où sont-ilz, Vierge souveraine ?
Mais où sont les neiges d'antan!

Prince, n'enquerez de sepmaine
Où elles sont, ne de cest an,
Qu'à ce refrain ne vous remaine:
Mais où sont les neiges d'antan!

#5

From the Latin of Catullus 

Let us live, let us love, precious Lesbia,

Though those old severe men will make us a coin 

That’s rumored to be worth a copper penny!

The suns may pass away and rise up again;

For us, once the light of fugitive day fades

We will sleep through a night that will never end.

Kiss me a hundred times, kiss me a thousand, 

Then another hundred, another thousand,

Then, after many hundreds, many thousands,

When there are a million kisses we’ve contrived,

Then let us scatter them, and not understand,

Else the wicked may arrest us with their eyes,

And none will know how many kisses we tried.

------------------------------------------------------------------

Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus,

rumoresque senum severiorum

omnes unius aestimemus assis!

soles occidere et redire possunt;

nobis, cum semel occidit brevis lux,

nox est perpetua una dormienda.

da mi basia mille, deinde centum,

dein mille altera, dein secunda centum,

deinde usque altera mille, deinde centum;

dein, cum milia multa fecerimus,

conturbabimus illa, ne sciamus,

aut ne quis malus invidere possit,

cum tantum sciat esse basiorum.

Emmylou Sings "Michaelangelo" Live

I can only lead you

To what you may not ever feel,

The unexplainable pathos of the real

Peeled from its shell, delivered cold

Enough she won't go over

The threshold.

                            There is one moment tho

When he gathered up her tears in an old

                            bandanna 

That she could no longer hold a pro's

                                               distance

And lets how she was truly known

      and never realized it

Go out, in her abandoned hope

                                  of love and home,

While the gifts recalled are all around, 

Still glittering like landmines

For the strangers there, like me,

                   saved from the time

When heaven fell to earth

        as the ground gave way.

Stevens Park

Perfect trail, perfect day,

Mustard fields, lilac trees,

Oaks shadow the streams,

Yet it's moments, only,

Of escape from our being.

The dream of the blue Dane

Can't bear this brilliant scene —

The day becomes, itself, elusive.

Santa Barbara

Maybe here, in Santa Barbara,

Where air is clear, views are far,

Can we finally talk, in a garden bar

Or bistro, of things that matter,

As the eucalyptus sways

And the white walls hold the day.

But it is here, in Santa Barbara,

With all her memories, her scars,

Where winds are soothing, sights unmarred,

Our words stay pretty, hearts on guard,

As if to sea was the only way

And there was nothing else to say.

Yet she is kind, this Santa Barbara,

Monterey pines against the stars,

Her smoky docks, bright bobbing spars

That make the grieving not so very hard.

There's only room in the café 

For beauty, new blooms in soft array.

A Lost Girl

Let us tell the truth at last, the past is dead;
    Sunrise is ahead, soon the doves will pine;
    We’ve run out of artful lines, out of wine;
You never let me say what must be said:
I loved you from the time our eyes connected,
    Yet you kept your lashes safe behind a line
    Part fear, part retribution, nothing mine,
Although I wore the fur of blame instead.

How easy you denied your right to be
   Divinity embodied, nature’s way
That you seemed meant to be, Beatrice
   To me, the rise and the fall of the day,
The poetry made out of violent sea,
   An ideal created from love as much as clay.

The Lilac Age

Pursuing her was like wooing the moon:

     No matter how close, still the same distance.

     The place where she fled was an empty entrance.

My light became her, and she said, "Too soon."

Yet she hung on each soft word, every tune,

     As if such praise made all the difference,

     Though her eyes just pitied my persistence,

Resistant, as usual, to my charms immune.

Yet I think of that now as the lilac age,

     When words couldn't worm their way in between,

When grievances desire would soon assuage,

     And a bangle could shake the slate clean,

For feeling was all that was real at that stage,

     The field at the end of the street always green.

The Inescapable Iron

So she’s a ruin, do you not have Rome

    In your local wisdom crypt, her touchstones?

    We’ve lost the aroma, of scholastic tones

From acrid halls where, all of them wrong, the tomes 

Hang down like gyves on open catacombs,

   Words of compulsion etched in powdered bones;

   She sooner returns to dust before atones.

The holy we’ve known, her decadent foam,

Still scars the hillside rubble-strewn tableau, 

    Succeeded all-too-well in her mission; 

Earth waits for us at a higher plateau

    While we watch her spin from recognition. 

Can we 'ere forget what we couldn’t know,

    The bodies charred with our erudition?  

Spring’s Opening Move

Palm Canyon, Anza Borrego

The purr of desert lavender –
This spring will feature purple
In the permanence of blue.

The earth spits out its umbers,
As life that’s still,
And life that moves:

The rocks roll with the tongue
Of the wash, as water
Rushes them to sound,

Datura, desert daffodil,
Each one is a city, with a center
Deep inside a quarry of light

That pulses parts of stars
Like humans walk with minerals
Within their blood.

Tiny buds of grass are no more relevant
Than the thinned and brittle limbs
That seem forever gone

But like the iridescent stones
Are only resting
In the whole

With its circuits of flight, like the wind,
Spiraling around each contained
And uncontainable thing:

The thorns in intricate webs,
The twin flame brittle bushes,
The perfect circles where the chia has spread.

The patterns tend to be unique,
For beauty’s sake, perfection’s need,
But they are patterns nonetheless,

Like those lavender bees  
That traffic the freeways
Between exit blooms

And the angles of escape
From each shadow nest
Across crisp, inhospitable sand.

The grass buds are so large
Next to the ants,
As the outcroppings ahead are

Impossible for me to comprehend
Despite their blood-red stains
And knife-blade tips.

You’d think I’d recognize them,
As you’d think the thin red blossoms
On what appear to be dead sticks

Wouldn’t take me aback,
But there you have it,
Even the familiar is strange,

The way that change
Reveals itself
Like a play

In my own attention span
As in the movement
Of rocks and kingdoms.

So much has changed,
But nothing seems different
In the face of this year’s flowers.

The water has come to loosen
The mica shine and divination bricks
I must find knowing in.

The dirt itself is glazed
With universal light,
As I will localize

The non-local intelligence
Beyond my grasp
Or at least my grasping.

The lavender waves
To break the stillness,
The rock pile and its nerves

Are deep in thought,
Bees humming
A drone accompaniment,

Then the crackle back and forth
Of birds, sensing out the depths
That always ripple.

They escape from tree to tree
To demonstrate some freedom
To me, that feels like

A letting go
Of everything
I see and stupidly become:

The ironwood in the sun,
The potential front-yard stone,
Red as the leaves

Of the high plain ocotillo
In bloom, that a few
Drops of water have turned green …

Oh emptiness,
The promised land
That’s in between.

Song of the Slabbies

Welcome ...

     Keep Away

Found spoons put on carousels,

     Bicycle rims to crown weather vanes,

            Dreamcatchers woven in jungle gyms

Are all ways of saying "I matter."

     They all want to be seen

            Yet be invisible

When they fly their smiley flag

     Or pontificate beyond the fence

           Inscribed with 100 Gulf War Vet grievances,

1000 PRIVATE identities parading:

     The Fallout Shelter Ecozone,

          The "off-the-grid" hook-up for RVs.

There are no rules ...

     You must stay inside your car

They are clowns dancing 

     In the sand

          With hands out,

Yet another way to spin

     The homeless embankment

           As a realized dream.

A BBC documentary was made here once

     Of these implacable East Jesus folks,

          Their perpetual transience

Is part of history now (they announce),

     Something (one would think) only

           The sneaker tree could escape.

Mask Up or Fuck Off ...

     The Last Free Place

There's no water, electricity,

     The po-lice drag the streets

             Yet every winter thousands more 

Arrive from the shores of the fishbone sand

     And war-zoned beachfront property 

             Of an American dream 

That lies well beyond Bombay Beach,

     Looking for this, as something.

             There's a library here

Where you can read and drink, and forget

     You are a normie, by being reminded

             That is all you'll ever be. 

Borrego Winter

Trees with green ice,

Low grey veils 

Shoulder the white

Mountain highlands.

Coyote red

Above the valley,

Brush like antlers 

In the sand.

But there’s a blue moon

Jacuzzi pool,

Stars large enough 

To believe.

The ceramic sun 

That's on the wall

The only reminder

One needs.

Unity

From the Spanish of César Vallejo

On this one night, my clock, next to the altar
Darkened in the temple, balks, as black spreads,
Like a flip of an apple revolver
Whose trigger below cannot locate the lead.

The moon, white coin, motionless, shows us tears,
And it is an eye that aims ... I am led

To how the great Mystery is coined, here,

As a hostile and ovoid idea, in red.

Ah, the hand that limits, that threatens us

Behind every door, and that calibrates

All the clocks — hand it over, shadow, pass!

On the grey spider of your frame it starts,
Another great Hand made of light bears the weight

Of a bullet in the blue shape of a heart.

----------------------------------------------------------------

UNIDAD (1918)

En esta noche mi reloj jadea

junto a la sien oscurecida, como

manzana de revólver que voltea

bajo el gatillo sin hallar el plomo.

La luna blanca, inmóvil, lagrimea,

y es un ojo que apunta… Y siento cómo

se acuña el gran Misterio en una idea

hostil y ovoidea, en un bermejo plomo.

¡Ah, mano que limita, que amenaza

tras de todas las puertas, y que abierta

en todos los relojes, cede y pasa!

Sobre la araña gris de tu armazón,

otra gran Mano hecha de luz sustenta

un plomo en forma azul de corazón.

The Trees

Gravity … enlightenment … immortality …

We’ve received so few secrets 

With our butts to the soil,

Where the nets of neural roots

Command a forest

Taller and more magnanimous than we are.

Most of the time my brain is in the wind;

I watch the leaves dance and make believe 

They could be mine. What I could do.

But even the stumps are kept alive with sugar

For the wisdom they remember;

Where, amid the antidotes, climate shifts

And most harmonious modes of order,

There is not one thought of the need

To forgive.

The Black Trumpet

Who speaks of what lives in the dark?
The senses always fail.
At five o’clock, when the clouds sharpen,
Is there hope?

Today it’s a phone call that goes on and on
About cancer metastasized into bone
And giving up on a daughter
He’d disowned too many times already to total.

Every day is like this, with the same irresolution,
Though my wet sheets are piled this afternoon
Atop my dusty car! Still, I must let it go as usual 
Without mouthing verdict or complaint …

Yet, as always, the possibility of a Zeus-like 
Thunderbolt of consequence rears its theory. 
But I can’t even locate my favorite mug and can't 
Predict what next demand violence will accompany.

Another mountain of clothes will be delivered to our door
So we can trip to the floor at 3 o’clock in the morning.
More things will be stolen, despite the locks, and I will endure
More taunting how unhinged I get at mere borrowing.

All this I know. As that there are daughters folding clothes, 
Preparing meals, hearing the complaints of aching age,
But here, an eggshell cracking brings
The mirrors down to the floors,

And if one chooses to criticize this latest ruination
As a less-than-innocent, more-than-natural expression,
However one felt will no longer seem the same anger
In the face of a brand-new pain. 

Timelines

In 5D, we've got our two suns.

We laugh at the puppet consensus reality

As the slaves do the gladiatorial entertainments

In the arenas and on TV.

In 3D, they stay at the surface.

Third eyes are merely tattoos.

They laugh at vril eyes and prisons on the moon

As the wacky entertainments of their friends.

There's so much laughter between them,

In an echo, a kind of limbo.

Only a few words touch on the shore:

"Conspiracy" ... "the sleeping."

Lake Ramona from Potato Chip Rock

The boulders stretch out on these hills,

Resting momentarily.

They are not their brother's keepers,

But there they are,

In warm enough proximity to know

What the individual can't.

So much time to learn

The simplest things.

These meadows, these trees,

As close as home can be.

The Urge to Turn the Dial

The song bubbles like an egg

Its gnosis

Many are called but few

Are susceptible

Fewer still take anything 

Tangible from it

Some judgement

A door

So their squeaky hinge might

Sing with the dead

Mother's Song

     Of course, hearts disagree,

Who wouldn't, knowing your every gesture

Is of love, perfectly understood

By the sun of others,

     To find you do not know

What love is, at all ... for you are told

Such love does violence to the way they feel,

What they know.

This place where you lay requires permission,

But from whom? The one who understands 

Has no need to speak. On the other hand,

The one whose sole possession is

Unyielding animosity, will whisper 

Absolution, so beautiful it burns.

Memoirs of the Party Child

Divine lack of self-esteem,

The good life,

All comforts laid out free of blame

So you can wallow in self-pity like a king.

It looked so much like everyone was blessed

With your infernal spout, the fault 

Lay too deep within the stars of your bones 

To be lifted in the glass for observance.

It's a hard thing being seen and known,

To bear the habits and the pride

Of some candescent fire

Sparkling from wire to wire,

To be part of what is always something else,

The oneness a taunt when it gets this close,

When the home the most familiar is remote

As your journey went deeper in the spirit world 

And pulled such demons from the brine,

With tongs nearly surgical, that sent entities 

Laughing through the creaking floors

Of boisterous bores and whore-eyed slatterns

Full of too much love and kindness

And impossible desires to be unbounded

In the pickling firmament.

In the morning, the glasses were sticky

With martini stones, novelty sex toys

Hung from the lamps. It was too quiet,

The riotous night, was there anything left

The next day but good feeling for another

Just like it, where the stakes would inch ever higher,

Like the seas on a fathom-bound ship.

What shores it will reach mere mortals never tell,

Just shared jokes where you had to be there

Even if you were. I hear your voice, more an oracle

From distant space than a voice itself, yet

No one else edges in. That's the way of the humble,

To be the loudest in the room, to ask for nothing

When it seems the world itself won't satisfy,

Like the attention I am paying is in gold.