Eyes

Humanity is a rumor, a vapor play
moving through the lines before the vanishing point.
If occasional red grunts from a stubbed toe
it's nothing I can feel, it's just a memory of pain

yet my shape - my very soul - conforms to the fractured view
like the universe itself is too wounded to move,
or, rather, the blood stands still while everything else flows
in a dizzy spin of motion without form

where even light comes from things broken in the churn,
where every boundary's finally soothed with swirling gray,
a hurricane of thought that grows in folds and rolls away
to form one more electric galaxy of crackling noise.

Aggressors and receptors go off dancing in the flux,
the knife to feel the twinge, the wound to feel the fury
in imagination's clouds of possibility
dissolving into further storms, the clash of thunderbolts

in a vast non-linear sky, where the causes
of what we experience are hidden behind cloud,
where all that will be and was is blurred in raptures of the light
—so much hangs off the empty sheen inside the ink-black iris.

Cult as Symbol

We fall for a face,
the smile that lets us walk,
the frown that makes us stop.
It doesn't matter that the thing is meaningless.
It's either this face, or forever the dark.

Bohdi #2

There isn’t anything that can’t be thrown
into the bonfire of your self-loathing.

Bohdi #1

Be careful what you create
it may end up being real

Nin-me-sar-ra (Adoration of Inanna) - II

This is the second of a four-part translation of the oldest surviving lyric poem in human history. In this segment, the author, Enheduanna, for the first time in recorded history, names herself, as part of her taking on her high priestess role for Inanna, who is portrayed here as an all-powerful, but distinctly feminine God.

Lady, Supreme there, who'd dare take your Earth?
If you frown at the mountains, the green there will die,
The canyons will burst into flames, and blood will flow
Down rivers because of you, that people will not drink.
The soldiers must gather together, to surrender to you,
The elite troops must gather together, to disband for you,
The young men must gather together, to stand before you.
In the taverns of pleasure, a storm brews,
The best men are hunted as captives for you.

You speak for those who can't say "the land is yours,"
And will not declare "in the name of your loving Father."
He has spoken the Word and your footing's restored:
The sheep disappear from their stalls,
And women no longer speak of love with their spouses,
They no longer consort in the depths of the night,
No longer reveal the future inside them.
Wild and impetuous Cow, Great Daughter of Sin,
Queen greater than Heaven, who'd take your province away?

The Great Queen of Queens, born for the Word,
Born of a fate-laden body, you are greater
Than even your mother, a sage over all the lands
Who gives life to all of Earth's people,
I give birth to you with this song!
Goddess of Truth, fit for the Word,
You speak with magnificent force
And unfathomable heart—I'll intone the Word for you!

Enheduanna has entered the rectory for your sake,
To serve, my fate, as ornament.
When I carried the cup, and struck up the song of joy
They set down my meal as if I had never lived there.
I came toward the light, but the light was too bright.
I came to the shadow, it was veiled by the storm.
My sweet mouth became full of venom,
My power to heal turned to dust.

Incantation

The storm passed, now everything's different:
There's nothing outside of the one.
We still talk as if we are separate
But that's only to have us some fun!

The wind will not let you stand in its current,
The sun will not let your darkness take hold,
You must find a way now to know all is perfect,
You must let the spiral unfold.

Equinox

the green
freezes
at a pause
in the wind

nothing should want
more
than what is there

the light
slowly rises
off the soil

America: A Rant

Fuck you, America, for fishing permits and helmet laws, and for not
letting minors carry guns. (No amount of Twinkies or Family Guy
reruns could ever appease the rage I feel toward you for that).

Fuck you, America, that every town is not like Vegas, 'cos you know
that’s how we roll but still withhold it anyway like the pilgrim
fuck you are.

Fuck you, America, for any and all taxes, I do not care how many cave
people you vaporize for no other reason than it’s cool as fuck,
my mind’s made up.

Fuck you, America, that I never see celebrities at the DMV, and for not
giving me that Trophy Wife you promised me, and for not
making me famous even though I know you watch me
every second of every day.

Fuck you, America, for lying to my face that the rest of the world
wouldn’t kill to be like me, the coolest asshat on the planet
because I do not give a fuck at any time and I will do whatever
it takes to make myself happy by any means necessary.

Fuck you, America, for being such a fucking pussy that everybody wants
to crash your party, and for pretending that it wasn’t you who put out that first hit of crack for free.

America, I’m pissed, and I will never rest as long as dishes must be rinsed,
laundry must be folded, and groceries must be taken out of bags.

I cannot be at peace, America, til there’s a Walmart on every corner, and
every food store has Maine lobster at 3 o’clock in the morning,
and there’s a decent sport to watch in February on TV.

I won’t give up, America, until I can hear Tibetan acid jazz whenever I
please, can take care of the national debt on my wii, and watch
porn while I drive my SUV.

I won’t let up, America, until the President admits the moon landings
may be faked, and the Temple of Satan is allowed to home school,
and there’s at long last a Church of Tranny Christ.

I won’t be satisfied, America, until the loftiest mountain peak is accessible
in my jeep, and the most inhospitable desert serves roadside ice
cream treats.

I won’t forgive you, America, until Minnesota blueberry pies are freed
from prison and onto my plate.

I won’t stop hating you, America, until you show some fucking dignity,
and stop listening to everything I say.

I won’t back down until my body's in the ground, and I’m strolling
through the heavens telling God how much I miss those chili dogs
in that stainless steel blue diner that just appeared one day
without my even trying.

The Charity Auction

They laugh and bid a thousand for a certain Bordeaux vintage,
and five K for a single day of golf.
It's noted in the building, who's feeding the poor,
those soup kitchen people who look just like us.

Everybody's happy -- tax breaks for all,
why not get a little something on the side,
to help one live at last like a human being?

Who's to say these paddles
up and down like prairie dogs
don't deliver the secret codes,
the number combinations that unlock the cosmic vault,
what some call "empathy"?

Sunday without Prayers

The mind is fattened for slaughter
to spare it unthinkable predators.
The first fires glow in iron pits.
The grass is turning green once more.

I am as anxious as a deer.
The parameters of the dream
prevent me from seeing what's out there
to fear—vulnerable to sun beams.

The Procrastinators

They're yakking, again, instead of working,
their passions expended in plans to remake
constructions long finished and dead;
they vie to build them larger, greater, faster

while their own project wilts neglected
—to its fate they're indifferent, even though
it hasn't yet met its fatal design flaw,
it's curious lack of care in workmanship.

But they'll grudgingly put their time in,
do the bidding of idiots in charge,
whose ambition is only themselves,
whose world is never their own.

They'll let the arguments go,
let them be settled
by the future,
where all disputes are resolved.

...And the Survey Says

For its 100th Anniversary, the Poetry Society of America sent out a questionnaire to 300 contemporary American poets on what it means to be an American poet. All of these unknown to me poets said roughly the same thing: America is a ruthless machine of erasure through homogenization of the authenticities of gender, race and sexual preference, and its poets from Leslie Marmon Silko on have used the polyvocal utterances of the other to bravely challenge that hegemony, with poems that wear jeans, buy each other beer and often have sex.

Yours truly was not included in this survey, but because I believe in democracy and the American way I thought I’d post my responses here.

In what ways might you consider yourself an American poet?

In that I’m alarmingly ignorant of the rest of the world, specifically the range and history of world poetries, and in that I’ve never let that slow me down in any way.

Do you believe there is anything specifically American about American poetry past and present?

I can’t speak for the past - I wasn’t there – but present-day America is unique among countries in having let the Rothschild banking interests who control the foundations, universities, media, corporations and political system destroy poetry along with whatever residual force it once had in larger society by luring poets into academia as a condition of publication/recognition/money.

Is there American poetry in the sense that there is said to be American painting or American film?

American poetry is like American bobsledding, a convenient label for tribal frenzies of exclusion.

What role do historical and geographical factors play in American poetry and in your work specifically?

This is a fancy way of asking if the fact I am alive and not dead plays a role in my poetry. I don't honestly have an answer. All I know is that when I write about, say, 14th century China, it can only be for me about 21st century America.

What other aspects of your life (for instance: gender, sexual preference, class, ethnicity, religious beliefs) relate to your sense of being a poet in America?

Part of being a poet is not necessarily knowing what my gender, sexual preference, class, ethnicity, religious beliefs, etc. actually are, but I see I am in a minority of one on that score, which may be why I wasn’t included in this inclusive survey.

Is there something formally distinctive about American poetry?

American poetry has been, from Whitman on, stubbornly free verse, at least relative to the rest of the world. This has been a great strength, in my opinion, and helped spread the influence of American poetry throughout the world, even England. Apparently this is a great insight, for it appears most of the respondents on the survey thought the only form distinctively American was to drop “y’all’s” or “yins” into poems.

What significance does popular culture possess in your sense of American poetry?

Writing poetry is the way I cope with popular culture, in that it helps me to ignore it long enough for it to go away.

When you consider your own "tradition," do you think of American poets, non-American poets?

My own “tradition” is a country of poets, from all over, living and dead. This is in contrast to the country I actually live in, which is by and large poetry free.

Which historic poets do you consider most responsible for generating distinctly American poetics?

Distinctly American poetics? You just won’t quit with this vapor, will you? I suppose there’s a certain joie de vivre, a bilderstürmerei, a full of beans gormlessness in American poetry that comes from a combination of corn, Protestant triumphalism, wholesale extermination of the native populations, lack of moats (ie “rugged individualism”), amber waves of grain, African-American "blue" scales, tolerance born of shallow roots, cultural standards determined by the lowest common denominator, an unquenchable thirst for blood, a total inability to see that there is an unquenchable thirst for blood, and good old Yankee ingenuity. The embodiment of all of this, of course, is Poe. Aren’t you pleased with yourself, now?

What are your predictions for American poetry in the next century?

It will continue to not be read except by other poets, usually with that particular jaundiced perspective of the aggrieved.

Nin-me-sar-ra (Adoration of Inanna)

This is the first recorded lyric poem in human history, written about 2350 BC by the first recorded (named) author, Enheduanna, a Sumerian high priestess. Although this poem was copied as a popular sacred text for 500 years, throughout the Babylonian era, it was only discovered in 1927, with the painstaking task of translation from Sumerian clay tablets only beginning in the last 50 years. The current scholarly translations still contain numerous ambiguities, contradictions, obscure references, hidden nuance, and the inevitable loss of semantic purity as experts puzzle over complex grammars and well-hidden religious beliefs. Rather than wade into that debate, I've created from the existing sources (Hallo and van Dijk (1968), James Pritchard (1975), Annette Zgoll (1997), Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature) a more poetic translation, since I've found this poem to have more than historical interest.

Here's part one of four parts, to be posted each Friday over the next month. The first section is an affirmation of Goddess Inanna's power and purpose, as well as the poet's role as embodiment of the Goddess in words -- at times, almost a consort, in terms that are striking to modern sensibilities.

Lady of the Word, a raging light rising,
Spirit of earth, in iridescent robes, beloved of An and Uraš,
Mistress of heaven, protected with jewels,
Loved by the life-giving crown, that fits this high priestess
Who holds in her hand the seven holy powers.
My Queen! You are the guardian of the Word.
You have lifted the chalice, you have held it in your hand.
You have gathered the liquid divine, placed it next to your breast.

Like a dragon you spit venom on the land.

When you thundered like Iskur, no green life withstood you,
Who brought down the deluge on those who opposed you.
Sultana Ianna, uniter of Heaven and Earth,
Who rains divine fire on the land,
Who's been chosen by An to command the Word,
The Lady who rides on the snake
Who, endowed with the power of fate, speaks the Word.
The great rites are yours - who can fathom them?

Destroyer of unaligned soil, you unleashed the storm.
Beloved of Enlil, you weighed terror on the land.
You stand at the service of An's commands,
My Queen! At your battle cry, all foreign lands bow.
Humanity in awe is silent before you, the terrible glare and storm
As they bring you their anguished clamor
- For you, they must walk the path of lamentation.
For you, all arms are gone before the battle.

My Queen! With your strength, a tooth can break flint!
You possess us as you come a storm possessive,
And as a storm percusses so you howl.
With Iskur do you thunder,
Spread exhaustion with your roaring winds
While your own feet have yet to tire.
Humanity strikes a song of lament on the lyre.

My Queen! The great gods, Annana, before you
Fluttered like terrified bats to the tops of ruined mounds.
They cannot withstand your devastating gaze.
They dare not face the terror in your brow.
Who can cool your furious heart?
A heart that is too violent for soothing.
O Lady, are you viscerally sated?
Is your heart now really filled with joy?
Great Daughter of Sin, your rage does not cool!

Why Artists Don't Care if They're Wrong

As random as commercials they change,
the faces on the monitor
flashing on the building guard's black suit
—a litany of scofflaws, framed for wanting.
What are the crimes, I ask, inside their books?
They almost seem near-normal,
they seem, at times, to smile,
I wonder what deprivation
drove them to the brink this time?

A million tales in the naked city,
we all, not worshiped, push to some line—
and fall back as the will goes deaf and blind.

I watch visages turn,
until I see the one
that makes me stop in horror
- a terrifying face -
a suit, a tie, a killer smile,
a twinkle in the eye.
I recognize that tragic mask,
the one that I call mine.

Meeting without Coffee

The Louisiana sank -
laid low by icebergs
or German torpedoes -
the sea turtles flew
on chartreuse wing
past mountains upside down
like the narcissistic fiction
of a bar chart
in the laser light
on the smoke-talk CEO
hosanna'ed and seconded
by the C Suite yes men
while they wheel
the oysters Rockefeller in

The Gnosis of Entropy

Following the thread from Henry Vaughan to Philip K. Dick

There once was light that showed the face of God
We turned to bars of gold in holding cells;
Was once a throne for Lords of higher light
We turned into a toilet's useful shell.

We reproduced all forms in our own image
So we could worship icons of desire
'Til we ourselves became another object,
The living spirit plastered within wire.

The logos thus became a dying thing,
Ideas only formed to turn to stone,
We taught ourselves by grieving we'd atone,
We laid down for the treasures death would bring,

And so all things have come to have an owner
And God's now found in worthless things thrown out.

Canon Fodder

Times are hard for the immortals.
Young lovers no longer try to impress them.
Girls not only snap their gum, but cast cold eyes
on their nether regions.
Boys not only yawn, but don't even take pride anymore
in pretending they know what's going on.
They all come, young and old, equipped with gotchas,
the you shoulda done this'es,
you didn't do that's,
the how could you do this to humanity and me brickbats.
Of course the immortal is innocent as charged,
he might as well be Pegasus in the clouds,
it's just the indignity of having it forced on them--
he thinks he's all that, they snobbishly say,
or he thinks he's better than me, or
I bet, even though he's dead, he puts his pants on
one leg at a time - and by the way only a moron would claim
that his shit don't stink better than mine.

Times are hard for the immortals.
All their thunderbolts hit lightning rods.
No one notices anymore all the people they turned into gold.
At least their rebellious spawn knew, if not what they said
or the way that they said it, at least that there was a certain
weight to them that meant they must be destroyed.
Now the mere fact they are still alive - albeit dead -
is enough to warrant a drive by (and need I point out
today's machine guns are not near as nice as they used to be
when the pen was mightier than the cut and paste).

Times are hard for the immortals.
The demands on their time never end.
Between having to reach consensus
among diverse participants
to being a guest of honor at wakes,
there's very little time to be dead,
to let the sunlight filter through
the rarefied air they've left behind
as a reminder to those who don't look
that every person ever born has changed the world.

Writing

The birds chirp like typists in the trees—
my day condenses to this: a fatal word—
the one thing they are lacking—
a gift they cannot understand—
the clouds move by too quickly for a thought
to get caught—I am the first idea
set to pounce—I blur in every thing—
there's only now the ink—to fix the strange—
that hollow jug reverberating without meaning—
it takes me hostage just the same—
the cry of something moving—
bereft of all but feeling—
the breath inside this cry—
is all I've left of life

Moonset Plaint

The past, a mortal snip
of hibiscus as big as the universe
rolls back like coal from endless foam
-- nothingness makes a noise
of wet stones crackling.
We fall to the voiceless,
the unexploited land
that fills the space with secrets
never to be known
-- that's why they call them secrets.

A hanging hand
that soon becomes a cloud.

Absentia Animi

From the Swedish of Gunnar Ekelöf

In autumn
In autumn when we say farewell
In autumn when the gates are all open
to meaningless pastures
where unreal fungus rots
and water-filled ruts run on the path
to nothing, and a snail on the path
a torn moth on the path
to nothing, as is a rose past its bloom
the tiniest and ugliest. And a daddy long-legs
stupid fragile-
legged bastard, drunk in the lamplight of the evening
and the lamp itself like languishing light
whistling over the sea, the thinking polar sea
of long waves
silent rustling scum
in a series divided by the series
from nothing through nothing to nothing
Set opposite composite abrasax abraxas match
(like the sound of a sewing machine)
And spiders spin their nets through nights of silence
and crickets rasp
Senseless.
Unreal. Meaningless.
In autumn
the rustle of my poem
words at its service and there is
Dust fallen over them, dust or dew
til the wind swirls up and affixes them (down)
(and) elsewhere
The sharers shall seek the meaning of all things
understood long ago
that meaning rustles with rustling
which in itself is something quite unlike
wet rubber boots traipsing leaves
distracted footsteps through the park’s carpet
of leaves, endearingly adhering
to wet rubber boots, forgetful step
You wander off, forget yourself
Don’t hurry
Hold a while
Wait
In autumn
In autumn when all the gates
then it happens in the last late slanting sun
after a day’s rain
with long pauses hesitating
as if caught
a leftover crow sings at the peak of a tree
for nothing, for the sake of his throat. You see
his treetop stands against heaven’s bleached bank
next to a solitary cloud. And the cloud floats
like other clouds but also like leftovers, off season
with its Being flown elsewhere long ago
and of itself (its song) is already something
other than

Eternal peace
Senseless. Unreal.
Meaningless. I
sit singing here
in heaven in a cloud
I wish nothing more
I will myself a far, far way
I am far away (among the echoes of the evening)
I’m here
Sets opposites abrasax
You as well as I

O far far away
swimming in the bright sky
over a treetop a cloud
in blissful ignorance!
O deep inside me
Reflected in the black surface pearly eyes
of happy half awareness
an image of a cloud!
It isn’t what is there
It is that something other
It is within what is
but not it that it is
There is something else
O far far away
in what is distant
there is something close!
O deep inside me
in what is close
there is something distant
something distantly close
in what is this side of the distance
something neither nor
in what is either or
neither cloud nor image
neither image nor image
neither cloud nor cloud
neither neither nor nor
but anything else!
The only thing that is
is something imagined!
The only thing that is
in that which is
is something else!
The only thing that is
in that which is
is what in this
is something else!
(Oh soul’s lullaby
song of something else!)

O
non sens
non sentiens non
dissentiens
indesinenter
terque quaterque
pluries
vox
vel abracadabra

Abraxas abrasax
Sets opposites composites that becometh sets again
Senseless
Unreal. Meaningless.
And spiders spin their nets through nights of silence
and crickets rasp

In autumn

Ambition Makes One Gray

Ambition makes one gray.
Colors lose their hold
in driving rain
—the blur fixes
a soothing touch
where edges are cut off.

Eccentric

Ambition dies with summer's final heat
As oak boughs fall like laurel, lose their caps
On orange needle down by unkempt stones--
A graveyard from the war outside of town.

The dead merely survive. It is the living
Who cast their lives against the bird shriek skies.
They only want another one because
They let the one they had get taken back.

It's not for us who turn the brown to dust
To see the harmony of life, to know
Where nurtured perfect things go when released
Like prisoners of the sun must always be.

We're left each other, to grovel for might,
Join hands, forever wrong, against the sky.
But there's a truce of freedom so few use--
The truth is in the wobble not the true.

The Scent of Death in the Trees

The yellowed straw
hats of summer's end,
the faded parasols

as meaning flies
like cranes south-
ward once more

The windows of the tenements
are holes where
fans once were

the rooms are
empty, a kind of
breathing

there is another
clock beyond
our terror

The Lynch Wedding

They rented Fenway Pahk for the wedding pahty,
and the Isabelle Stewut Gahdner room, along with
private Duck boat too-uhs of the Commons and the Chahles,
three helicopters flew them back to Mahblehead Neck
and fyuhwuhks like Southie's nevah seen.
His daughter married a fucking count, they cheered
and cracked open a bottle of Lafitte-Rothschild champagne;
the last time they saw this vintage was in the old days
in Chahlestown, before tenements became brownstones,
when there were 12 kids or more to an apahtmunt.
They found it in a case pilched from the old Navy yahd,
where all the bahs were, one night after the loopers
flew the cahs along the trolley tracks
down the Bunker Hill Monument, middle finger to the world,
to the Friday night cah burning (the only money
in those days was the weekly bet they made
on who could steal the wickedest cah from Jamaica Plain.
They ahgued and drank and voted and spat, sending the rest
to a burning rubber hell they called "Montego Bay"
and crammed 20 of them micks into the winnah cah
to go hammah'd in a loop around the neighbahhood
-the cops had bigger fish to fry). They drank that bottle
when the liquor ran dry. It tasted great with Fresca.

While Waiting for the Shower to Warm

Lying together in the morning light
outside of law, outside of time
while the sky dome listens to our silence—
in our horned and warted bodies
there's not a trace of a line between us

Noir et Ivoire

"East Coast sports fans are mean-spirited because there is no possibility of sex there." - Robert Arnquist

I'm numb to the sound of jewelry,
numb to the look of gloss,
numb to the feel of eyes on skin,
numb to the scent of skin fresh washed.

The world, in me, is changing,
the naked is no longer cruel
to young men and old ladies.
The girls at long last can be fools.

Death of the Goddess: A Reading of Louise Bogan’s “Medusa”

“The ringing of a church bell to announce a death is called a death knell. The type of death knell sometimes depended on the person who had died; for example in the counties of Kent and Surrey in England it was customary to ring three times three strokes for a man and three times two for a woman.” – from Wikipedia entry on Church Bells

“Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter,” said Keats to a Grecian Urn, and few poets have demonstrated that dictum better than Louise Bogan (1897-1970). Perhaps her most famous poem, “Medusa,” published in 1923, is a veritable lucid dream in verse, one of the richest and most inscrutable in the modern canon. What gives Bogan her special haunted quality as a poet is the way she slices the meanings of words so precisely and into so many rich symbolic configurations that they might be word puzzles, anagrams, except that she has also taken great care to let all the emotions from the poetic state of grace float freely in the air. This haunting multi-valence, here and elsewhere, has left most commentators stumped, having to resort to freely writing in events from Bogan’s supposed life story to fill in the ellipses, looking at this poem as demonstrative of a “paralysis of the will” (Ellen Bryant Voigt), “entanglement with the maternal” (Suzanne Clark), or a confrontation of “her own demonic aspect” (Paula Bennett), among other manifestations of a decidedly feminine perspective.

This reading hopefully grounds that sense within a much longer and richer tradition.

First the poem itself:

Medusa
I had come to the house, in a cave of trees,
Facing a sheer sky.
Everything moved, -- a bell hung ready to strike,
Sun and reflection wheeled by.

When the bare eyes were before me
And the hissing hair,
Held up at a window, seen through a door.
The stiff bald eyes, the serpents on the forehead
Formed in the air.

This is a dead scene forever now.
Nothing will ever stir.
The end will never brighten it more than this,
Nor the rain blur.

The water will always fall, and will not fall,
And the tipped bell make no sound.
The grass will always be growing for hay
Deep on the ground.

And I shall stand here like a shadow
Under the great balanced day,
My eyes on the yellow dust, that was lifting in the wind,
And does not drift away.

The conventional read on this poem is that the narrator chanced a view at some horrific but elided trauma, represented by the Medusa from Greek myth, and was turned to metaphoric stone. As a result, she is left paralyzed and silent, like a church bell frozen in mid-peal, but aware of how the world goes on without her. This explanation, poignant as it is, has never fully explained the startling choice of words and imagery, for example the first stanza before the Medusa appears, nor has it provided any context for why it appeared, or what it meant to the narrator. Without taking away from the effect of that interpretation, I'd like to expand the reading to get at some of these questions, by expanding our conception of the Medusa myth.

Medusa, from the Greek, means “sovereign female wisdom,” and represents a Mycenaean variant, imported via Crete from Libya, of the Mother Serpent God who created the world, and with it the secrets of birth, immortality (the snake was thought to shed its skin endlessly), the cycles of time, healing, prophecy, sexuality and the thresholds between worlds. She was regionally known as Ianna in Sumer, Ishtar in Babylon, Au Zit/Set/Hathor (or Isis in the Greek translation) in Egypt, Ashtoreh in Byblos, Astarte in Phoenicia, Ashereh in Canaan, and Athena in Greece, among many other manifestations. As Robert Graves summarizes it in The Greek Myths “the whole of Neolithic Europe, Near and Middle-East, to judge from the surviving artifacts and myths, had a remarkably homogeneous system of religious ideas based on the many-titled Mother Goddess,” all of whom were associated with serpents, which were usually represented in spirals signifying the movement of the heavens. The challenge the modern world has in understanding Greek or other classic myths is that they derive from the matrilineal Goddess religions but were later intentionally corrupted in the transition from the agricultural to the bronze and iron ages by attempts to impose patrilineal political structures. Thus the Goddess worship at the center of ancient myths had to be attacked and destroyed, usually by changing the myth itself to make male gods the creative force and the female gods stripped of their power. The myth of Medusa is a particularly striking example of this, turning from an oracle of the sacred mysteries (the mask of Medusa was originally erected in stone on caves and gateways at sacred sites dedicated to the Goddess and used to guard and protect women in their secret knowledge of the Divine Feminine) to the hideous head of snakes that petrifies men into stone who was beheaded by Perseus on the advice of a furious and jealous Athena.* The trouble is that most modern readers are only familiar with the perverted version, just as their knowledge of serpents is circumscribed by the Adam and Eve creation story in the Bible, which was a similar, deliberate attempt by the Levites to distort the Goddess religions’ own symbols (serpents, trees) from symbols of immortality and creation to those of death and original sin in order to suppress the Goddess religion and claim power for patriarchal alternatives.

Bogan’s poem and its strange emotional hold makes much more sense if read from the light of the Goddess-centered meanings.

The opening lines are as strange and beautiful as any in the English language:

“I had come to the house, in a cave of trees, / Facing a sheer sky.”

The vowels lap over each other like waves in a forward advance of sibilants as the stately meter begins and abruptly stops. We’re left to pause and ponder the many paradoxes of this line: is this house earthly or heavenly? How could an underground cave be a sky-reaching tree? And what of that word used to describe the sky, sheer, connoting both intimate transparency and lofty inaccessibility? It begins to make sense when one realizes that caves were the place of worship in the Goddess religions, much as the church is the house of Christian worship. That is why all the leading male gods and avatars of the first patriarchal age (Apollo, Adonis, Herakles, Hermes/Thoth, Horus, Mithras and Jesus, among many others) were born and resurrected from the dead in caves. The earliest known art, often depicting serpents, also comes from caves, not only because it represents the womb, but the earth humans came from. Trees, similarly, have a rich symbolic connotation, of the sycamore fig tree of life, whose fruit was the blood of the goddess, promising life even after death.**

“Everything moved.” The poem, coiled to a stop, soon lurches forward again, into the flowing dynamics of the natural order but, immediately, “-a bell hung ready to strike.” No sooner does the motion start than more stasis, the church bell that calls the faithful to worship is still and expectant, cast in terms of execution (hung) and violence (strike). The key here, as I’ve discussed in other contexts, is that, of all the many Christian symbols, the bell is the only one that was not appropriated from pagan religions.*** Whatever its import, the bell changes everything: “Sun and reflection wheeled by” implying that now, instead of everything moving, including the narrator, only the sun moves, it has been separated out (into, say, a Sun God?) and her reflections are subject to its light.

This sense of dislocation is matched in the subsequent stanza by the syntax fragmenting into verb-less description. Medusa is introduced, but not by name: “when the bare eyes were before me / And the hissing hair.” The word choice of “bare” (rhyming with hair and, later, air) is particularly significant. Naked, undisguised, without ornament. Interesting ways to describe a mask. Bare also connotes “without illusion,” the revelation of the truth beyond the maya or veil. That is precisely what the oracular Goddesses like Gaia at Delphi purported to offer, with their snakes as constant companions. The eyes and hair are “held up at a window,” implying that it is the severed head of Medusa displayed for all to see, but it is “seen through a door,” as through a portal to secret knowledge. The contrast is highly dissonant, and informs the next, equally motionless sentence, where the eyes are further qualified as being “stiff bald eyes,” highly masculine adjectives that are inapt descriptors of the so-called windows of the soul unless, of course, they are dead. “The serpents on the forehead” –the Eye of Wisdom of the collective Mother Goddess, later made masculine as the Eye of Horus, a snake emerging from the forehead/third eye to transmit wisdom – “Formed in the air.” The emphasis is on formed, which breaks the meter, and creates a strong rhyme with fore- and door. Here we are placed in as dislocated a space as the narrator. Did the serpents form the eyes? Were they both simultaneously formed? Were they already formed or form as she looked? Were they substantial or conjured from thin air? The sense of this unsettling, chimerical sentence is that the narrator feels the depth of the resonance, but is left with only an untrustworthy image.

So ends the “past” portion of the poem, or “Maiden” section in Goddess terms. It was an initiation aborted at the start, a quality of insight and belief confounded. The “present” or “Mother” section begins with the next stanza, but it is a motherhood that is simultaneously denied and elongated. “This is a dead scene forever now.” As with a dead child, the loss eventually supplants the past presence. “Nothing will ever stir,” a nice double entendre implying that the mysteries behind the mask continue to go on beyond our knowledge. “The end will never brighten it more than this” – the third irregular phrasing in a row – “nor the rain blur.” The suggestion here is of the contrast between the admitted reality and the actual reality – it is both timeless and dead, immanent and non-existent, like the Schrödinger's cat experiment, in which the cat is both alive and dead − both possibilities exist until you open the box and investigate.

That sense takes on even greater force in the next stanza. “The water will always fall” – paying off the rain of the previous line – “and will not fall.” We see two separate states or polarities, fertile and desert, male and female realities for want of better terms, which are mutually exclusive. “And the tipped bell make no sound.” The sense is of a pregnant female(s) – shaped like a bell – stopped, made voiceless. “The grass will always be growing for hay / Deep in the ground.” The agricultural prerequisite for Goddess worship – a harvest – continues, but its essence has been literally and figuratively buried.

Finally, we move into the “future” or “Crone” section of the journey: “And I shall stand here like a shadow / Under the great balanced day.” This is heartbreaking poignancy – the “I” knows she must return to what looks like the balance of nature, but must learn as a crone to recognize that because the balance of polarities has been suppressed, she can only be the impossible: a shadow.

The poem ends with even more starkness: “My eyes on the yellow dust, that was lifting in the wind, / And does not drift away.” Spirit, conveyed in its symbolic color of yellow, synecdoche of spring and sunrise, becomes a dust barred from lifting, so it floats aimless, a spoil of potentiality, a throbbing rhyme. It’s the minimalism of it that makes this poem powerful – the collective wound of the subjection of women turned into ethereal stuff.

I’ll let Bogan, from another myth-inspired poem, “Cassandra,” have the final word:

I am the chosen no hand saves:
The shrieking heaven lifted over men,
Not the dumb earth, wherein they set their graves.

* The whole sordid history of the degeneration of this myth through patriarchal power structures is detailed at the Perseus database, Tufts’ authoritative Greek myths site.
** A great resource for the history and rites of the Goddess religions - and their subsequent suppression - is Merlin Stone’s book When God Was A Woman.
*** The bell of the Goddess cults was the sistrum, an ankh-shaped, tambourine-like rattle with four bells tuned to represent the four elements. As it was shaken, serpent energies – akin to kundalini – ascended up the spine to open up the third eye to the white light of enlightenment, the inner sun. Athena, according to Aristotle and Pindar, invented the flute trying to simulate the hissing sound it made, but had to abandon playing it because it distorted the look of her face.

The Rainbow Over the Book Store

The poem I've been writing in my dreams all these years
Has finally disappeared

To be published in a secret anthology
For other eyes and ears

Now I can observe
The way feet lay on escalators.

Peculiar Shade of Gray

The sky is overcast like a mid-life crisis:
All lines seem finite, shabby.

The steel river gathers in scars of black
As it flows past windowless towers.

At the catholic school, a medieval fortress,
Chess piece lions guard every corner.

The wires are strung in canopies along the horizon
Glistening over low-slung block and tin.

In the distance one can see green windows,
The sea like my grandfather's movies.

In the Sacro Facio (Sacred Making) Room

Some dixieland clarinet,
some ode to piano joy,
some celestial monk choir oms,
some car horns -
These are the keys to my meditation,
as I sit with lotus hands
upon a futon.

The tone of God comes
like the wave of the sea,
I can traipse in and out
playing peek-a-boo endlessly
like a fearless boy,
always home.

The Solitudes of August - IX

Sometimes the dream turns into something real:
the silver edges of the heavenly river
re-appear as asphalt cul-de-sac,
the spiral hum of galaxies
become the cry of crickets as they die,
the vap'rous gold of August evenings
dissolves to forests, fattens into blackness.

The pyramid light on the temples of the Gods
who dispense perfection in the robes of men
is only the poems of Mahender Dudani
and the homes to the orphans of Greenwich.

The love of squirrels and power lines and lovers
turns to an emptiness in my center
like a light snorts from a match.

It is then, when this exercise in profusion is finally stilled,
and the first yellow lozenges collect in the grass
that I realize how crowded my loneliness has become,
how pale of a presence reality is,
how there is nothing but dream in this thick air.

It's a place designed for sleeping,
for windows with no blinds
to look on other windows
with the fragrant dust of morning light
the only thing inside.

With Eyes Closed

I can't see, myself, beyond the words
that form like iron filings under magnets
but I feel the eyes inside the room
that saw the same such words, and where they came from
for as long as there've been words, to explain,
and all these eyes, that now my own eyes join in watching
become one eye, in that discernment, the something missing
in the truth is only truth, has only been
a thing, forever waiting, forever watching
with my eyes.

Banal Pastoral

Hail to the Brinkmann grill,
it feels it all,
that particular shade of yellow on a sun dress,
the whistle in the trees as old limbs break,
the slurping of a mother giving baby clothes away.

All of that, they say, goes into the food
with the smoky chardonnay
and the Himalayan crystals.

Blessings waft to the grasses of Eastern Colorado
where the wind and sun blow grace on
green duned herds and desolate flocks.

The trees lean down
like the muzzle of a dog
as the first hickory notes of skunk
hiss from vapor rings of blue.

The children and the skeeters loom
as thrushes sing their vigilance
and soon there is a silence
of golden evening coals.

The flank steaks never say they're done;
there's no such thing as time
except the sense of things escaping.
The forests will be still
until the fire exhausts itself.

The Sixties According to Dante: A Meditation on "Desolation Row"

"You know nothing of my work." -Satan

Rivers of ink have solidified into tar parsing Bob Dylan's inscrutable ultimate (and last to be recorded) track on his 1965 homage to Charley Patton Highway 61 Revisited but, as usual, nothing has really been said. The bulk of the effort seems to be devoted to proving that characters like Dr. Filth and Ophelia are actual people, and that actual people like TS Eliot and Nero are fictional characters. Part of that of course is in the nature of aesthetic experience, which is much like Monty Python's sketch about the funniest joke in the world, in that even a few stitched together words - the smallest hint that things are actually connected - would make the listener die of laughter. So much easier for a critic to say "I like those clever LSBs" (little surrealistic bits) than "I think those LSBs protest too much." It's also understandable in a song that seamlessly tells all but leaves no clues, even amidst the wreckage of a society that hadn't yet been broken up and wistfully sold into carnival parts, that no one is lining up at the door to proclaim it his Après moi, le deluge moment (well, some people, invariably, are - "when I say there's no cannibalism in the British Navy, I mean there is some," per Monty Python in another context).

The best that has been said about this song is that it comes as a surprise. After 10 different ways of disguising disgust behind cool shades and cantankerous barrelhouse piano, slide whistle and soap opera organ, this one kicks the calliope way down – to an almost aristocratic dryness. The song’s strange cornucopia of American jetsam – enough objectively to scare the bejeebus out of any red-blooded American idealist of wealth – Dylan lays out like a suit the night before a funeral, denying us the privilege of his special brand of editorializing (often mistaken as attitude at the expense of word or vocal talent). “Here comes the blind commissioner,” he intones with quivering irritation at the banality of the image, “…one hand is tied to the tight-rope walker, the other is in his pants,” as if that dizzying picture of the nature of corruption was the most painfully obvious resolution to this character being placed without our permission and seemingly Athena-like into our badly knocked-upside heads. One of the few hints of emotion occurs shortly afterward, the genuine compassion for a riot squad that "needs somewhere to go." What to make of the calmness of it all – we’re seeing the very gears roll, greased with cyanide, kerosene, screaming ambulances, heart attack machines and broken doorknobs, crushing hopes and children, none of it displaying any intelligence that it is in control in any way of what's going on, that it knows anything outside of its own circumscription. How easily the townspeople enjoying the traveling circus turn into literary characters, how smoothly those characters turn into the agents of all our sexual, political, religious and economic nightmares, and how logical it seems that this dramatic progression would make the narrator shut his doors on the whole affair. It seems as if normal life enlarged and sped up by massive amounts of drugs has finally become pedestrian again.

The soothing voice is there to suggest there's nothing to stop this endless wheel of numb repetition, because the insight to transcend it is still cruelly denied, because we can’t bring ourselves to step outside our own primitive psychic space to wear others’ less-than-commodious skin. Instead we want to jump inside Dylan’s, who knows this, who needs this, who says, with Western mock-heroic grace “you’re in the wrong place, my friend, you better leave” – his lilt urging us, of course, to do anything but. We have to look, though we be blind, like Homer and Lemon Jefferson, or less than that, for we lack Milton’s “Invisible Rose” except through the medicine-man medium-ship of Skipper Zimmerman, who can only call the youth-stricken faithful to a raging bonfire as a charlatan entertainer, not the Rabbi’s son who had faithfully learned to read the braille of Mississippi cotton fields backwards in the baked potata sun. So, cheated of being the prototypical reluctant messiah, he indifferently mouths the lines for another role, that of true rebel prodigal, the kid with the motorcycle to be envied, with skeleton keys to ward off ignorant furies, selected by secret quorums to serve an historical moment, that one shining instant when Cinderella was a princess and was able to look at the “desert of the real” with a certain longing. “The Good Samaritan … getting ready for the show” is eagerly ponying up to the squalor called home by America’s invisibles, as a tourist of the senses. Here, the romantic pathos of taking actual joy in the pain of others, pain they've already forgotten was once theirs, is toxic desire, the devil mark of the individual.

Satan metes out proper punishments for such hubris, to Casanova if not to the skinny girls who have been, after all, unlike Adam, warned. As has been our generous narrator, who knows the one thing we don’t, that it is the fame of Johnny Angel (aka Einstein) and not the disguise (aka Robin Hood) that burns – the falsely won, not the MKUltra iconography – that is the karmic cost. No wonder the street is empty.

The Solitudes of August - VIII

He reads John Cheever stories on the Housatonic
through the long and sultry afternoons,
And listens to the Vienna Philharmonic
in an old gazebo by a lightbulb moon
But he never once escapes himself,
in all his flying through the mists
To the tops of gothic towers
and their unattainable scripts.
It stirs him to see there are such secrets still revealed
but a wearied understanding is too hard.

A small man with a large heart
that glubs among the stratospheres
He finds himself too far away
for vapor trails to show.
The silver dust that falls on Earth
to shine must hollow be.
The howlings one can sometimes see
are not there to be known.

The Solitudes of August - VII

I am the Imposter's biggest fan, so big he followed me
through music camp and graduate school, past two or three
failed marriages, ruined children, dopplegangers to swat away like flies...
and when the voice milks the words "highly paid solicitors,"
the feeling, from as far away as galaxies,
comes tumbling out of my own skull - the flowers are revealed
to have petals with their thorns - the pulse of my own blood warms...

I am but one in 50 million,
like any familiar stranger
- we all have the face of a Hollywood star
to make what we look like into what we are,
to remind us, like the irises on the table,
of something ineffable in one human
who can speak our truth as fiction,
to tame life like chrysanthemums, into a melody
to shop by, of words honed to only imply the violation
in all that the wounded said, to articulate
the dissociation, to burn the kindling from the dead...

Disasters require mourning - the sunflower leans -
we discover in our shame our glory.

The Enemy

My translation of the Baudelaire poem will be read on this week's edition of Words and Music on BBC3 at 22:30 UK time (5:30 PM ET)

My youth was nothing but a black storm
Crossed now and then by brilliant suns.
The thunder and the rain so ravage the shores
Nothing's left of the fruit my garden held once.

I should employ the rake and the plow,
Having reached the autumn of ideas,
To restore this inundated ground
Where the deep grooves of water form tombs in the lees.

And who knows if the new flowers you dreamed
Will find in a soil stripped and cleaned
The mystic nourishment that fortifies?

—O Sorrow—O Sorrow—Time consumes Life,
And the obscure enemy that gnaws at my heart
Uses the blood that I lose to play my part.

The Solitudes of August - VI

I preach prophecy
and only birds can hear me
yet strangers air mail holy books to my door.

The hermetic scatters
like shattered glass
to the surface of the floor.

They call that "understanding"
but it's really hieroglyphics in sand
that learn new meanings.

There is room in things
for universes entire
to expand in exponentials

and form within their dominance
connections
without so much as a touch.

The Solitudes of August - V

I s'pose that I'll come back around
to the movie that watches itself,
my life - hear again the intervals of french horns
descend behind the purple horses
striding down new emerald mounds.

I know that somewhere in the town
plans are being drawn up
by invisible posses
for me.

All I have to give up is time
and a suspension of belief
that there are writers trying
to cry and laugh people into buying it.
I just hope that the players are likable,
or, if they can't be that, credible
or at least have some charisma to spare,
like fragrance in the air when the picture's over.

But I'll never know. There are too many people
in the cast. I can only imagine
their lines. Perhaps with enough imagining
I don't need to walk through the dream,
the film can be as it was once conceived,
before the suits and the editor's spools,

Before there was a need for me
to wear a turquoise ring and be an Indian,
or a ten-gallon hat to be a Cowboy.
(They're always, you see, on the lookout for heroes,
because nothing in human society
offers anything that may be called a victory,
always a reckoning required in time
in the balancing of gift and receipt).

For my part I hope that this story's 'bout being found,
some whale or some grail they almost go mad in finding,
one that was hiding behind the foyer door all this time
with the sepia-toned strangers in uniforms...

Who knows how it ends, when stories have a mind of their own
(as geometries naturally form from the prism of god's eye).
Characters don't always behave like equations
- always some factor invisible - a viewer? - to obscure it.

The Solitudes of August - IV

The world of cicada song - is not the real one,
Of lawn and airplane motors. The chipmunk's fur
Cannot compare with how the girl pulls all the scent out
From her curls.
The regal glow of summer
Resolves to barbecues and swimming pools,
A woman's, not a blue jay's, sharp complaints.

There is no room in stillness
For betrayal apologetics,
For the deals one makes with evil,
For the keening cry of lack
Across the backyards, where life's victims
Proclaim they're never wrong with icy glass.

The whippoorwills may mock this,
But they have different business -
They reserve their conversations for the moon
And centrifugal breezes - not things
That need convincing they exist.

The Solitudes of August - III

The bird that drags its oars across the sky
Is realized in disappearing. Only the invisible
Is wide enough to hold the paradise
Of the mind. Imagination harvests
Out of darkness such lush Augustan figures:
Bodhisattva, Melchizedek, Jesu,
Each avatar unique to its beholder,
A separate sun for each individual soul,
A god for every god, with dominion over the whole,
To fill the hole of mere appearance with the thought
Of existence. The force they call intelligence
Creates the pretense of the real from endless space.

But how could the god of Moose, with its laws
Comprised of Moose, be also the god of Chipmunk?
I spread my god like trail mix on the sisterly floor
At the feet of a murder of meese.
They look at me with skeptic snuffles
As their eyes grow large to mirror my divine.
The world itself has changed from my believing
Although the Moose, it never will.

The Solitudes of August - II

Better my autobiography in late sun through green bottles
Than in words. They infect the mind with definition

While the swirl of blockglass still evades description
As it calls up memories of heaven.

They are not my memories, but something shared
Anonymous within, a library in a box.

The skeletons are kind, they move from room to room
Pretending they're alive, because we are,

No history, like ghosts, just forms to make new faces
Recognized. An innocence of sorts,

The way some talk as if the dead aren't at the table.
They need communication that much.

Love is real from lilacs,
The frogs and crickets hold the syllable in their throats.

The fireflies sizzle uncontainable.
The same is true for us. We form new names, to do without.

The Solitudes of August - I

“The world imagines for the beholder” - Wallace Stevens

It was there, the quarry, when I woke:
Intention, the granite holding up the glass facade.
Was it me who dreamed, or an angelic whirr
That made the island purr with endless life?
(Or was it just the neighbor, what possessed him
To ride his mower like a locust in the whiteness of the morning?)

It was there when, like anonymous scribes, we spoke
For hours, of immaculate mirrors and marshmallows,
Recited icy poems to film noir heroines
From the same distorted book of hymns,
But was there...agreement?
Was what came like squealings
From distant pools, through the vapors of afternoon,
Just sentences construing in my brain
Like the thrushing of a train, in one vast chain?

What you say is never enough. I go beyond its barricades,
Make lists that all dissolve, of meanings uncontainable.
Red raspberries now peek through clinging thorns.

The High Ground of July

I'm just a man in the crowd,
One of a million steps on the stairs,
Yet there is no world except my own.

They all are alternative
Versions of myself,
Like rivulets of light in leaden glass

That show me what I look like
In all my phases of the moon,
In all the veils of lifetimes I've assumed.

Together we can see the river and the sky
Exchanging light, the beauties
Of this place as for the first time.

Our talk is like a madness,
Only understood by us,
How easily we sway from side to side.

And yet we wear such deathmasks,
Protections of a grave,
As if each one begins and ends inside.

Let's come out of our solitude,
The trees speak with our voice to birds
With minds of cloud that move as rocks need light.

Let's watch the radiant dust
Of the high ground of July
As the edges merge to one delicious whole.

Before the Deal Closes

If we all didn't think we could handle our high
This modern world Manhattan
Would be one big AA meetin'
Serving cupcakes and dream water.

Maybe at the end of this
We can say the way things go
To some cold forsaken coffee cup
Whose service we'll ignore,

For argument's the lingua franca,
The dead leaf we cats claw,
Because it's hard for us to trust
The truth more than the no.

All our fears are of being real enough,
Of telling respectful enough lies
To those with the power to be right.
We rush so the capricious won't wait,

And squirm on the pins of their whims,
But all they want is for us to read their mind
So they can change it, some captured thought they can
React back to, with red ink and a captious bellow.

The subsidies they come and go, like wheels
Upon the dharma, that float as gifts
To tag with shame or with respect.
And then, at last, the inevitable

Bell is rung on the exchange.
The sharks find meat to seize upon.
The paper goes to press.
The restaurants may once again serve food.

Twin Flame Reunion Redux

How can I write a love song when you're right inside me here?
It's been a long time since I called your name, Vivienne
For the compromise is now accomplished,
The merger of heaven and earth,
All it took was a broken arm, a poem in Latin,
A swarm of women, and love to fill every abyss.

I found you at the thought of death,
At the thought of it uniting us again,
At you there waiting and smiling.
I could, even now, let go in an instant,
Let the candle I am burning here
Turn to one relieved of mourning.

In this memory of our reunion
I create the separation again
And you surround me like a ring,
The kaleidoscope returns,
The glow from somewhere else,
A recollect of a distant time
When my mind was never whole,
My heart was never endless,
When my body didn't melt to every color,
And what I touched didn't turn into the one.

Like those distant times...

In Babylon...
When you grieved behind the temple wall,
A nameless mendicant, the only mourner
For the Goddess who had died.

In Kampuchea..
When we drank pink bisque from ceramic cups
In a hammock while the children laughed
And the jungle emptied except for joy.

In Kyoto...
When we sparred, resisting each other
With sticks and discourse, forever
Went the game, until our skin
Instead of weapons touched,
And we were banished in a flash.

In Ghent...
When we cleaned the massive cathedrals,
St. Theresa in our hearts, no words
From either tongue, but desire always spoken
Beyond the lace hooks and the alchemy books.
I was young and you were superior,
There was not a past or future, only then,
The shape of Latin on lips touched by fingers
Wet with holy waters, the sacrifice was total,
Two brides, two virgin mothers.

In Charlotte...
When we learned how to brush our teeth together,
Wrote down your words in piles of notebooks
That told me everything, but nothing that wasn't love.
I savored every sweetness as your flesh,
You showed me how to find your face in others,
How those things that seem like boundaries
Are overcome by love.

And now...
When I make a gift of all that is to you,
Any flower in my eye at once is yours
And you receive it effortlessly
And give to me the things I see,
Turn them into symbols of your love,
The cardboard world collapses into dust
And the people who are toys betray
With their motions they're machines,
But you fill them up with light just the same,
With a love that doesn't need a sun,
That takes me higher in the jet streams
Beyond the freedom of the clouds.

And now...
We land, again, the iron weight of living
With the ringing in the beam.
I'll let that echo fade,
For it's just a bell that speaks of pain,
Of a small and distant voice that may say
What's to become...

And now...
The eyes, the voice, the mind
My own.

The Hindu Riddle

You win
when all the little things
turn inside your mind into one big thing,
like a solved equation.

Normal Night at Home

It rained like Montana
last evening
Our trash cans flowed the rivers
of our street

I said I felt my pineal gland
was pushing out my skull like jiffy pop
You said you lay there paralyzed
the better part of the day

We rummaged in the basement for some five-year-old
white sage
That burned until the walls
told it to stop

There were sirens and a warning voice
to stay away from the tornadoes
As green clouds dropped like ink
on forests diamond gray

There was nothing more to talk about
except the ego
You had work to, you said, do in the astral
you couldn't stop resisting

I had nothing to show, just some words
that aren't mine -
For I am the red trees and the blue vines, the black
Egyptian eyes

Some crabgrass glistened as lightning
flashed our pictures
Then the thunders roared in judgment
of what we feared we had become

I found myself grimacing - I don't
really want to know me -
There's nothing there to see -
just a ghost image, a thoughtless nod toward freedom

A Picture Seen by Two

What if we could share
as large as we can feel,
if insides didn't quiver
much more than others' eyes?

What if people were a tiny bit
larger than the vistas
that can only bloom to life
inside our hearts?

If only we could know for sure
that others felt as we do,
their hearts on the same short
giddy flight.


The mirror only covers
how we look, not how we feel
—infernos underneath,
where silent lovers of the sun

Give birth inside
to what feels
to be
pure light

and yet it's found
as in a foreign land
to coat with mystery
these mythic leaves.

Sunday in Norwalk

The
Coincidence Theorists
would have us believe

That churches
must give birth
to crosses,

But in the church
with no icon
above the Ford dealership

In the place of
the cross
Reverend Ed

Prays it be Peter
walking on water
instead.