Under the Bus, In the Garage

Blessed desolation

Crisp as palm fronds in spring,

The cricket sings

In my private box

Away from the abuse

I'm not allowed to admit to --

There is too much at stake

When they fall apart without me --

Must be sheepish only

At the woundsalt daily,

Cannot contradict

That I caused it,

It takes two to dance, after all,

The one who gives love

And the one who hates it

Are equally at fault 

For sharing the space

As if they had no choice.

To have a choice would put me,

In fact, at fault, which is the one

Thing that can't be surmised,

To know how holy and wise

Such torments will make me,

How that was part of the design

That I drew, all smiles, hand in

Glove with these monsters

And their victim cards

Distributed at birth

Like meaningless flowers.

Canyon Road, Santa Fe

The river's edge must be purple in the landscapes,

The gorges must resemble female forms,

What these galleries present looks nothing like 

What it looks like, but what it is, a version of the human,

Wearing spirit on its sleeve. Do these complete

The scene as they would match pueblo decor?

No one knows, viewer or painter, though they know

Somehow they like it, it prompts some chord

That couldn't sound before, an embodiment 

Of flight for what only leaves the ground

In our minds, sacred containers

Always emptying, emptying.

New Mexico Highways

You might not see a car on these roads,

Or a house, for an hour,

But there are always the signs

Warning a school bus stops here,

For it's a long haul

To unify the schools

From Corona to Ramon,

Eunicel to Jal, 

Datil to Old Horse Springs.

It's as if they chose this life,

Chose to live here

But nobody chose to live in Vaughn,

Ohkay Owingeh, Loving.

You have to go 14 miles

Up a dirt road 

In the general vicinity

Of the Earthship Biotecture 

To find someone who chooses

To live there,

In a stationary fleet 

Of school buses,

Shades in the windows,

Stove pipes on the roofs,

One of them calls itself

A General Store, with its wares

Written boldly on the side:

Lighters/T.P., gas cans, ice/ammo,

Petfood, frozen food, bottled water,

Candy/cokes, tobacco paper,

And, standing apart

From even this community 

Is the purple bus of Stan,

His 2 peaks lending library,

"Books" written where "school bus" should be,

Portable chairs for reading in the rear,

There is "science, art, fiction, poetry

And children's" and the door

Is open, the stacks visible

In windows from where children dream.

Here, perhaps, is the last place

You can still find it, information.

Roswell

A saucer on the ceiling spits out tiny bursts of light

In unpredictable increments, as if it's thinking,

Beyond, even, a program, something not able to exist

In this realm

                        where no matter how indomitable

Her will, it's still only human, a program to process

The program that goes "you will die soon."

Down every green road, there are choices of churches,

Compassion allocated at every one of them

Automatically, like a recipe, to the saved.

There is nothing left over, in the equation, apparently,

For the hunted aliens so far from their world,

The hot and fat cows with tags in yellowing fields,

The earth itself pocked with iron mosquitoes 

To extract her blood with a measured plunge.

The God of Love can't overcome such subtleties,

All any algorithm can do is throw reference shade

Of some underlying sense within its noise:

The village of Hope that rose all at once

In the fallout shelter golden age and died together

As if a bomb rusted its tractors and trailers

And cleared Saving Grace Church of the last believers.

They try to make sense of such things at the Chaos Cafe

In Artesia sometimes on especially creepy Fridays

But the program is dialed back eventually

To fishing with bowling pins on the bottomless lake, 

Making children's games the miniature of life itself

On animal-themed sporting fields that overwhelm

Even the endless desolate stretches of useless land, 

And leaving the town as soon as they can 'cos it's hot

And there's nothing to do except drive to the cabins in Cloudcroft,

But they have become the circuits of their place,

With the hats, jeans and weary faces to prove that

They can't rise above the dust where they were born.

They let others in, begrudgingly, as part of some

Human urge for lucre and news of a different world,

They say "look at our fairgrounds, art galleries, our legacy

Of Pecos Bill," but still it stares at us, the green

Universal cartoon of why we came here,

To see their shame -- the aforementioned lights on the ceiling --

In hopes that it can yet never will be explained ...

Their embarrassment is not at the witch-burning monster

Of their nature, or the greed that brought their gold to plunder

Or the other surefire formulas to cadge the tourist dollar,

But whether what they were born to, without their consent,

Actually happened, as it didn't for most visitors 

Who still laugh at the cartoon to hide their own shame

Of not knowing -- such a limited computer -- not knowing!

At the White Sands Amphitheater

I may scream a silence of words:

     The moon-colored dunes!

     The moving desert!

     The living plaster!

But it's the men with their tube eyes

Who try to capture illusory hues

In the gold and blue hours

Like camels leaning under the sun's trajectory --

The task master something other

Than the one on his back.

Sleepy Town Lunch

This building is old enough to remember 

How they played Mescalero music here,

Sophisticated as swing but there was trouble 

And now it's a parish soup kitchen

For vegan hipsters in El Paso,

And the radio song played now is alive

Beyond its helpless singer and whistlers nearby --

Its frequency matches the orbit of the moths

Round the flowers in the window

Where the ceiling fan dances in reflection.

In the Open

The leaf tongues taste sun and rain

And they will speak of it

In the limited ways we can listen:

The light is bright, the water wet,

Life comes from pairs like that ...

Yet what is said reverberates

In the air declared to be barren

Like lashes from a distant whip

That disturbs more for not landing ...

The wind that could be anything

Taunts us with a fury all our own;

What we don't understand we almost know,

Enough at least to think that there is hope.

Shame of the Observer

It's in the nature of everything

     to be discredited 

So that there is no more

     something else.

The one who was never

     anything

Must stand alone, at last,

     responsible 

For believing what was seen

     was real

And the only certainty

     was nothing.

In Mayotte the Earth Rang like a Bell

Moments crystallize

     the high held note,

Makes it feel as if

     the patchwork fits,

But so much is asked 

     of this gift called time,

As if it can't be onion peeled

     past, present and future

Like music into layers

     to savor the experience 

Of watching it go, for time

     is only memory,

Though we don't, strictly speaking,

     remember anything;

Every moment is a blank slate

     we fill with paradise smoke

To eagerly brush the dust away

     and await the grief

Of losing what was never there,

     the keenest kind of loss.

Quatrain for RPB

Words can mean anything you say,

You can shape them to game any play,

But this ocean here brooks no words,

Makes no claims that it is real ---

      the way of worlds.

The Poem's Progress

Brutal Pluto -- the words contort

To catch the inescapable nuance

Of what can't be expressed,

The actual -- however rare

It's just another figure

Placed like a Pythagorean comma,

The only thing we know,

The flaw,

What tells us of the pearl.

Some Oatmeal Cake for the Seely Court

Your victory comes at the expense of 

Everything else. You have won if your world

Immolates round your ankles, no trace left

Of what cultured the pearl, made you feel

Like a slave, because you were dependent.

Can you withstand everything you are not

So that what's left when all has been taken 

Stays on as will while the other you is

Handed back, borrowed, a facsimile,

No longer even your own soul disguised?

To experience so what you already know

As if you have forgotten, that's a special

Kind of learning, as every other thing

Finds it way -- by vaporetto -- to the whole,

Eyes watching from the ghost sateen formstone.

Mute Rooms

You can make a souffle 

As your icon throbs

On the conference call,

Strike a background pose

Of tradewinds in Tahiti

Or the impossible 

Mountains of Hong Kong,

Decide when to talk

As if you are deliberate,

Not flaying like an otter

At the switch.

It's a comfortable 

Way of being,

The world at sane distance,

As the audience, 

Without the wretched

Steal of baseball news

In a too-long conference room

Cramped in the reality

Of your momentary illusion.

How much more

Authenticity

To lie, in virtual 2D,

Be anything you want to be --

And the responses

Exactly the same!

Theme with Variations

Morning conversations about death over coffee,

No stages, just calm as the horizon,

The ticking of the day the only sound.

And afternoon, what you can no longer do

Is the way for you to slow down,

That's what it took, although you still plant seeds

And pull now-overpoweringly resistant weeds.

In the evening you are permanent again,

We share like always secret thoughts

That came from timeless being, the light inside your eye 

Is in my heart, and we are naked, 

The flesh pulled back from the hologram.

Lesson with Garden Tools

When he said to turn the other cheek

He meant there was nothing more to learn

From being slapped.

Ah but there are cushions here,

Moments of warmth, a cool breeze

To contemplate abstractions 

As if they are the things

We make believe are real:

Lawn furniture, blue gardens,

Chicken wire on the jacuzzi.

So it is with Consequence

And Destiny and other fabled gimcracks 

Standing in our way

Like a leaky hose, something to fix 

Or let go of, as the test invites you to choose

What to pay attention to

And what you can leave alone.

The rocks succumb eventually

To our protestations.

There are valves to replace,

Tightenings to accomplish,

People to consult as if they know anything

Of the particular problem you are facing,

Which is always the same:

Why am I here, futzing with levers,

Leveraging ideas, chessboarding people

As deep background research for

The scholar of my higher soul

Whose invisible mortarboard

Waves over the proceedings

Like a shadow.

The weathervane spins, as if to tell me something

I could somehow learn.

A voice flows like a sacrament,

Posing a thought as if it

Was alive.

And, somehow, it becomes so,

Long enough to think I know

What it is, and be disappointed 

It has folded itself back in on me,

How I look with what I already know,

Trying to fit the circumscribed 

Into a tinier scheme

Like compost from a shovel

To a pot that is too small

So that something will grow,

And grow it does,

The obligatory miracle,

Everything around us sways

Nodding to our mind

As it yields its own 

Unaccountable fruit.

The Diaspora that Awaits

Oneness divides -- she can't help it 

But pull away from stasis

Towards that which can be learned

Through absence 

And its ever-shimmering twin

Loss. Such griefs we contrive

To serve some wretched purpose 

Of a higher way to look at things.

The mechanics of transcendence,

A memory of rarefied air

Plucked like private hair

With long, painful tweezers.

The way we appear

So unacceptable,

What we'd never see 

Without some role reversal,

What some may call a mirror.

Whinny of the Gift Horse Mouth

Understanding is what gets in the way,

To know why someone carves their name in your skin

Is a kind of complicity, of being them

To forbear what you know, instead of feeling

What has happened, to you, a world apart.

It's not cruel for the one who would eat out your skull

To deny you, for they know not what they do,

Your wisdom surmises, to catch the void

Of their innocence. But there's something in you

Independent of what they do or don't intend,

Although that becomes impossible to see.

It's as if you planned it exactly this way.

Kindness of the Earth

It's hard to look past the dying limbs now

To see the flowers we just planted.

Another spring can almost suppress 

The horror. This is happening, the movie

Numbly grinding to its grim resolution,

The sad one kind that calls itself beauty,

Our heroically oblivious fight

Against inevitability.

The decisions that should never have to be made

Now must: the ashes, the organs, the children.

The other world won't allow its peace now;

We must wallow in the bitterness of loss

As if to prepare for a reckoning 

Everyone sees coming without an inkling

How life will change, stuck like flies to the present ointment,

Alive to any scene the sky displays 

                              

So not to contemplate the old wounds, how 

Vengeance will be mine at the end of this 

Awful time, and how that will only make 

The grieving worse, the loneliness more acute.

Mountain View

Before you know it

A little sanity gets through

But they have people

Who can language you

With impeccable reason

That freezes your brain

To move you along

Back to the safely insane.

The Lemon Trees

From the Italian of Eugenio Montale

Can you hear me, poets laurel-wreathed
Still move only in leaves
Of plants with little use: boxwood, ligustrum, acanthus.
I, for one, esteem the streets that achieve the weediness 
Of ditches where, from standing pools
Boys fish out a few
Meager and haggard eels:
The gullies follow the embankments 
And fall through strands of reed
To open into orchards, of lemon trees.

Better for the lustrous squall of birds
To be smothered, swallowed in the azure:
More lucidly, then, the whisper is heard
In courteous branches the air barely stirs
And the aura of this odor
That does not know how to peel from the earth
Rains an uneasy sweetness on the heart.
Here our delight in our passions
By some miracle silences the war,
Here falls to us poor our share of the riches
And it is the odor of lemons.

Can you see, when things, in these silences 
Abandon themselves, and seem close 
To betraying their irrevocable secret,
How we expect sometimes 
To discover an oversight of nature, 
The dead point, the weak link,
The thread that, once unwound, puts us finally
In the midst of truth?
We scavenge around with our gaze,
Our mind examines attachment’s separations 
In a perfume that rampages
When the day languishes most.
They are the silences in which you see
In every human shade that breaks away
Some disturbed divinity.

But the illusion is missing, and time takes us back
To noisy cities where the sky only
Shows itself in shards, from above, inside the finials.
The rain wearies the earth, then; winter’s ennui
Crowds the houses,
The light turns stingy – the soul sour.
Then one day from a poorly closed door
Through the trees of a courtyard
We see the yellow of the lemons;
And the ice in our heart melts away,
And the sun’s golden trumpets
Thunder in our chest
Their songs.

-------------------------------------------------------------
I Limoni

Ascoltami, i poeti laureati
si muovono soltanto fra le piante
dai nomi poco usati: bossi ligustri o acanti.
lo, per me, amo le strade che riescono agli erbosi
fossi dove in pozzanghere
mezzo seccate agguantano i ragazzi
qualche sparuta anguilla:
le viuzze che seguono i ciglioni,
discendono tra i ciuffi delle canne
e mettono negli orti, tra gli alberi dei limoni.

Meglio se le gazzarre degli uccelli
si spengono inghiottite dall’azzurro:
più chiaro si ascolta il susurro
dei rami amici nell’aria che quasi non si muove,
e i sensi di quest’odore
che non sa staccarsi da terra
e piove in petto una dolcezza inquieta.
Qui delle divertite passioni
per miracolo tace la guerra,
qui tocca anche a noi poveri la nostra parte di ricchezza
ed è l’odore dei limoni.

Vedi, in questi silenzi in cui le cose
s’abbandonano e sembrano vicine
a tradire il loro ultimo segreto,
talora ci si aspetta
di scoprire uno sbaglio di Natura,
il punto morto del mondo, l’anello che non tiene,
il filo da disbrogliare che finalmente ci metta
nel mezzo di una verità.
Lo sguardo fruga d’intorno,
la mente indaga accorda disunisce
nel profumo che dilaga
quando il giorno piú languisce.
Sono i silenzi in cui si vede
in ogni ombra umana che si allontana
qualche disturbata Divinità.

Ma l’illusione manca e ci riporta il tempo
nelle città rumorose dove l’azzurro si mostra
soltanto a pezzi, in alto, tra le cimase.
La pioggia stanca la terra, di poi; s’affolta
il tedio dell’inverno sulle case,
la luce si fa avara – amara l’anima.
Quando un giorno da un malchiuso portone
tra gli alberi di una corte
ci si mostrano i gialli dei limoni;
e il gelo dei cuore si sfa,
e in petto ci scrosciano
le loro canzoni
le trombe d’oro della solarità.

Tuscany from the Train

Graffitto is the new Renaissance 

     in Firenze --

Its words are on the buildings,

     in the way,

The balloon extrusions of names 

     unfamiliar today 

That may as well be Da Vinci,

     Boccaccio, Dante

Or some more contemporary celebrity,

     a Renato Zero, say,

We are apprenticed to in worship.

     The word though 

Hasn't hit the Ponte Vecchio

     with colors

That won't stop crying

     for attention

To the most hermetic

     anonymity.

Yes there are hints of the real life

     engraved in gold, stone,

But the ancient rules were given

      to very few

To walk outside the dome

      of beauty's prison.

Through an Old Venetian Mirror, the Better Not to See Oneself

History has been destroyed, but Venice

Lets us dream, as if we know the buried world

Still rising, albeit slowly, from the sea.

You know these people walking here too well,

These strange buildings are beyond familiar,

Your steps have an occult purpose of their own,

But Venice feels nothing, that's what it gives us

With its foliated flames, lead iron windows fine as lace, 

Coats of arms in marble imposing on the air —

The scars of brick, though, the peeling shutters.

Art palpates in this Byzantine glass

That projects everywhere its lack of

Specificity. The streets will lead away

In seeming circles, as the wind moves the shutters

Open and closed, but only for effect —

That the drapery folds enter into God

A kaleidoscopic facet of the

Moment set in crystal, enough to forestall

The pain that is seeing someone else

In the blue clear light, with all that can't be done

With mere sight. The Nobles are the ghosts

Who've devoured souls as you would eat bruschetta.

They are not wrong to say the choice was theirs

And that this overhang is part of the elegance

One might even call sublime. The objects call,

Exquisites of leather, marionettes

And masks, canoli and glass, an artisan 

Crafts a guitar as an axeman plays one.

This place is full of such consolations

For the money curse, the best from the locations

They've trade scavenged, in some time and place where

Reality was far more mutable

And marble could be curved like optic glass.

None of the calle's can lead away,

Shopping bags jostling, from your choice of

Obligation; they are runs to freedom

That end at the Grand Canal, as all dreams

In Venice do, the hailing of Charon

And his cab to take one back to the underworld.

Above Pontone, Where the Tourists Disappeared

Ravello in the clouds,

As Goat Island rose before it

                  in a nest of smoke

And the blue cloud assault

         on rising pink

                  from Rooster Island

That held the sky so quiet

      but was too fragile to stay.

Milk Mountain and the Teeth of God

Surround the pearl of the Mediterranean,

                    the mermaid lands,

Nativity towns built into the sides

                    of the mountains,

A rock Madonna holding flowers

       then the De Chirico town

Where one boy chases a pigeon

                    with a magic wand

And another kicks a ball down cobblestone.

Goats in Scala

        across the fjord from Ravello,

Two unchanging villages

        in harmonious dispute,

To make the wind blow

Melodically down the coast,

     where sun lights on

                    the money white

Eyes that long to look past all despair.

The buildings as straight as the cliffs

Tick their antique stains away

In quiet contemplation 

            above deafening ears.

The last gray wisp of mist

     goes above the highest arch

Of the Carmelite mission

     where they contemplate in silence

              the silent, endless sea,

The world below much less than a theory,

      more than a dream.

From black clouds the white towns

                                    open up

      to the sun's seductions.

These breakers, like the history, 

                      can't ascend here --

What takes place above

      exists in abstentia.

The Gods still light the lamps of eyes

Every day around this time

With a kind of awe

      befitting sheer cliff faces

When Helios brings them to life.

The lemons on the ledges

              take on a holy sheen

      of an even icier divinity.

The mist imbues the higher rocks,

The further coast, as sunlight

Brings the present place to something

Almost real, like a mythical painting 

       what is seen,

And, because it is seen, trusted.

But the crags in black and cloud in gray

       remind us of the mercies

We rely on to put footsteps on the ground,

       even as the clots above

                  seem to peel away the sky

To travel with the clouds

                  to a far-off place

That doesn't lack essential mystery.

How quickly do the rocks turn black,

                    the trees go dark,

      the birds veer eerily,

How wide the sky

      that allows no entrance --

Clouds with no mercy

As we bless all we see.

The Volcano

Venus cracked

     as the marbled hills shook

And her temple came down

With the legendary brothels —

The woman, how she knew

                       to disappoint.

But trade was booming, 

                      roses grew,

     a beauty almost superhuman

Every house had surrounded

                                      itself in.

How could they be blamed for

Forsaking her harsh patronage,

     her lush but scanty pleasures?

Why rebuild her temple?

Rome didn't even know where they were!

It was the perfect cure 

      to not remain

                              invisible.

Still, her furore knew 

                                 no end,

Bodies flash-fried and asphyxiated

      to better be preserved

In the kindnesses of ash.

We know these volunteers

For not having had the choice

       to be the final demograph 

Of the past, as one-trick palazzoville pony;

Every stone-fired pizza oven 

                    bears their brand.

Vesuvius holds firm

        against the many schools

Of painters with their clouds

As they wash across its surface

        ever indented, ever firm.

It's become a thing for 

                     obliterating marks

That never seem to take —

        the horror is too strong,

The ending incomplete,

              forever unresolved.

Rome Canto

I'll revise my epic screed

On civilization's inhumanity

While overlooking these cypress trees,

Powersip espresso standing up!

Even the birds here can explain my plea 

With impeccable joie de vivre, 

Though it doesn't matter quite as much 

              When the fields are this perfect.

The towns have let in influence 

     In the few hours the shutters are open

But still they conclude at each sun rise like

Ancient villages always have 

              That people are interesting

And so one must pay attention

                      To what they need.

There are fountains of bloodthirsty nymphs,

          For instance, statues where they're raped,

Temples where Dracos are worshipped,

         And religions concocted from stolen scrolls

In crypts underground, the true halls of truth 

        Not this legal fiction Vatican city,

Boundary set by Mussolini,

                Not really any boundary at all

For everyone here must still gain permission from the Church 

                                        To speak

Under the domes of steeple city,

                               The wolf town,

With its palimpsest of conquest

                     (They call them souvenirs).

The unearthed ancient ruins spring 

                From irrigation ditches.

Pyramid di Chestio is built into the wall 

Where the laser show, Il prisma Pink Floyd

         Presents homage to things celestial.

       

                               Everyone loves a story,

And it's always the same, though protagonists change,

         The one when in Rome, say,

Where a whore shape-shifted to a she-wolf

Before her Venus half-shell re-baked birth as virgin,

And Caesar went from God to someone betrayed 

                  By his 12 bird disciples,

And the vials of blue tears from Afghan lapis lazuli glass 

    Went from Roman funerals to chapel vestibules 

Just like that, as the age snapped like tree-branch fingers,

                  And Rafael who snuck in Nero's summer

Er, temple, to learn the mysteries of Roman painting 

                  Turned Plato into Da Vinci 

In a mural on Hellenic glory for the cardinal's personal chambers,

     And Peter turned himself into the pope

After walking a bit on the water and hanging upside-down 

                           On a foreigner's cross.

"Most religions fail in the first 30 days,"
         God said to Homer Simpson,

Referencing restaurants, something every Italian at least 

                   Would understand,

But the ones that hang their cross out successfully

         Must recapture death itself from immortal zealots,

And no one did death better than the Romans,

         Its hive army masters of every cruel way to kill,

                  Who made sure that every victim stayed dead.

So the pontoon shift was made, from running water to holy spirit,

         Marcus Aurelius replaced with Apostle Paul.

It's commemorated on top of one of the, what, 

                                   13 Egyptian obelisks?

The Romans knew had transcendental mystical power 

          But not a clue, they say, what it was.

Such impeccable story engineering! No one even knows

                          Who the Flavians are!

     Yes eternal renovation does have its sloppy edges:

The Vestal Virgin statues do have their heads lopped off;

     They sent poor Michelangelo back decades later 

              To paint on spec a revised last judgment 

Befitting a chastened, counter-regurgitated Church;

Not every chancel door matches the temple columns;

Only 26 emperors were killed by their wives;

          The few unpillaged bronzes were too mixed a bed 

Of intellectuals and minor generals to lucid dream an imperium;

Still there remained a whiff of what they thought that they'd erased

     If not the Gnostics, Druids, Essenes, at least the Estruscans!

The sun still rises on pagan days and rebranded holytides 

Though year zero is no longer the birth of Rome

          But its son.

Ah, but in the good times all things appear as one,

                                                Even tyrants are benevolent,

       All taken liberties forgotten ...

                         Not so in Fortuna's more unfortunate eras,

When the heart remembers everything,

                         The loss of daily baths, 

The Funeraria that became the GI donut canteen, 

                 And grieves even the rock left of a dome

As a kind-of monument to a somehow-not-forgotten suffering:

                        The flight of hard-earned faith to Avignon, 

When Saracen, Hun and Visigoth marauders 

                Peeled Rome's gold and marble surface away,

Stripped every roadside mausoleum on the Appian Way,

          Where the toll-booth pope did highway business.

The enterprise always continued, under an ever-confusing syndicate

                         As when that criminal Garibaldi

          Laced up the land-fatted fiefdoms for old times;

Or, the neo-realist interregnum 

          Where what was replaced what they wanted it to be 

                                                For a minute, 

Before the money guest arrived like sirocco breath,

Or, when they found themselves locked in their homes at last

           And had to learn to live with less, they found they liked it!

The guilt-free pleasures of a life as pure as the water

                          That gave this place a purpose.

But it was the cats who discovered

Where Caesar was murdered, in the basement

       Of a minor patrician friend,

            And now the "Julius Seagulls" have landed

Where the cats have fled, the top of Tarpeian Rock,

       For there are more dogs than children in Rome

And more restaurants than dogs, 

                        Yet the ancient graves are adorned 

With dolphins,

                         As if for posterity to know

How the miracles of hydraulics were performed

         For tourists whose hotel toilets clog, who pay

Through the voyeur nose to be jerked 

                        Through every potholed stone

                                   None of them the smooth as glass

Strada one, whose slabs were sliced to perfect size

          And lugged by sandaled slaves with logs

Through a still-undiscovered system of ropes and hoists 

          In unattainable time over obscene distances 

To roll the troops to every ravagable port

                                   For the borrowed Gods

The popes obsessed over in their private rooms, 

                         More tycoons than hierophants, they say, 

As if the joker St. Peter won their all-in poker game.

They were so good at making things disappear 

                                  They vanished themselves.

In our plain site excavations 

                                  We tell our own stories,

Dig our own graves on sanguine soil,

          Of corporeal impieties  

                      And inconsequential excess —

 

It's what the ruins now tell us, which is not

                                                 Of the silence

Hadrian worked so hard to obtain,

          The sound of fountains everywhere 

His vast ear ranged, 

                                 When he took his meals 

                     On his peristyle island library

Alone, with obsidian mirrors, 

     Seeking to be able to live at long last 

                                        Like a human being

                     While invisible subterranean slaves

Kept his privacy inside a room with one painting,

     This Emperor Maximus, with maritime theater,

Seven philosophers' cupola and enough undressed

                     Gay sculptures to feed an army, 

Tho the pedestals are broken now like candy cigarettes

          In a villa-state that is now silence total.

 

I can imagine the hushing of horses

          As the vandal hordes broke through,

How they took their orders still

          To silence tongues with death,

Keeping quiet as they gamboled around,

     Saying nothing to stir the waters of the dead.

Five

Poetry has yet to touch

Even these rich-dappled hills;

What need for myths

When the real is so near,

That is to say,

Impossible to see?

Nothing rises from its existence 

To say what it is,

It is only the measuring and comparing

That gives us anything ...

The machinery without its ticking,

A long hum of silence

So that it is known

While staying secret.

Four

Another unyielding spring

-- Sharp flowers 

Barely fill the field.

That's the way it is in paradise,

So little to call one's own.

There's always some kind of regret

In the words we carry

For the things we could never know

That made us hurt someone.

We feel the burn

Instead of understand,

That is not what is here for us,

Only the target that we struck

Shooting arrows in the dark.

They are old, these roads,

Desolate as they are,

These decrepit fortresses,

As unbroken as the horizon is.

There's too much suffering left

To change them.

Poem Three

How can there be words

When God is a thought?

Music's not heard

Across the waters.

The things that stir the blood

Are phantoms only

Of some will to feel

The rest of what we do not know.

It comes in windswept wraps,

Streams invisible as the future

And unresolved as the past,

But a feeling whose center

Takes us to

Some glorious contentment

That we are whole,

Inside it all

As only nothing can be,

As free from meaning

As what cannot exist allows.

And yet we hold

To being,

Find it in the white

Underneath the sun,

The indentations in sand

That make our imagination bend;

It becomes a victory dance

To see what we thought

Would be there

Appear,

No matter how far

From who we are

They seem to be.

We take it as condition 

Of our learning,

As if it doesn't matter

What is real.

The scourge of endlessness,

Being dropped inside

These shaking walls

With nothing to trust

Except our knowing

Such trust exists --

Some other place

Must speak for us

Under the silence

Of the branches

Singing noise.

Poem Two

There is a stone star

Beyond the vapor play,

Some tight-lipped center

When constant change

Is stripped away.

It cannot say,

When the forces move

Away from it,

How they should obey,

For they form the truth

By trying every lie.

They are violate

And what they seek

Would spoil with but

A shadow showing.

And so we absorb

The cellular commands

And never feel

How large our bands

Circumscribe

As raging light is passed

By dumb to dim reliquary,

Never noting 

What is seen

As it goes by,

What we call sharing,

A common absence

That makes the presence real,

The actual mysterious enough

To not be quite revealed,

Which hurls what is

Ahead of what is not,

A goal that is impossible,

Inaccessible enough

For an infinity of tries.

Poem One

The mist exists

Because we want answers

Attached

To the things that are not real

After all

Our suffering

Takes place in a bowl

Of no reply,

Just the music and the dancing,

No inkling why

Except the way the patterns feel

Inside.

Compassion for us is denied,

Whatever gazes are grouped above the dome

Or meek calls we make to a home.

It is something for life

Not for us,

The turning we cause,

The sweetest rewards

Learned sour.

Transitional Burn

I was born into a state of judgment 

But the plants always rise above it

For liberty's not a right, but a choice,

And some rise as high as stars

From this vantage point

Where poetry has never touched the shore.

Rez Dream

I spent Temperance Day in Washington state

Caught in an aboriginal parade.

An outcast in waking life, I'm embraced in dream;

Everyone sees what I don't touch to my lips

And they are changed, dancing and flying around

With a happiness that I've denied myself

In this search for authenticity, for

A me that can't be seen in all the clothes

Hung by the stage, where every role is easy

And every cat's a lion on the lawn.

What's imagined is the only thing that's known 

Before the unimaginable, me.

How, without the cheers, to love the never seen?

My Hero, Dave Smith

Matters of Life and Death

     are so insignificant

Compared to Identity,

     the all-seeing, 

            never-being eye.

The watching 

     makes film, cuts sheets,

Forms shards 

     in kaleidoscopic panoply 

             for fantasy

Of being on the earth

     as something whole,

Meaningful, 

     instead of the ball

            that jumps off the glove.

There is everything there,

     in the silence, they say,

Even the blue tongues of sea

     have something to say

            beyond any "I" 

Yet they are silent in all

     the ways that count

To counting folk,

     who know

             no other way

Of honoring, remembering,

     carrying a space

For the thought

     of someone

              else,

Who can seem so close

      to one's core

To feel so far,

      at home

              in another's oblivion.

It's like a gift 

     from someone intact,

Who knows something,

     recognized from 

                somewhere,

It is a person,

     unlike me,

This small 

     archive of

                humanity,

Some near-ideas

     to recite,

Distant feelings to repeat,

     charisma to extol

                 not knowing why,

Only that it makes me who I am,

     which is almost something,

Almost what I never was

      and never could

                  understand.

Landscape

Ah, life! --

         into the dumpster.

They lived too well,

                    these vines,

      for death

            was everywhere,

The barely alive

      and the vicious kind,

          white, with jagged

                           wings,

Too much death, in fact, 

                      to notice

Where the spirit

         has actually left

    the greyed-out branch

            or papery nest.

The absent no longer

         concerns us,

                  it has done

                  the dying

       that is our chief

                        interest

As we tactically strike

           new infestation 

And relocate civilians 

                  to the trees,

Trying to blur the lines

       between what has

  some price to pay

           and what is free.

The Ace of the Year

Raindrops on pansies in full morning sun

As the equinox groans its scale bellows

And new gold overtakes yesterday's grey.

Varieties of yellow arrive now,

Like the sunrise used to be back in the day.

It's hard to know in advance how this healing

Fed to me like grapes all weekend will feel:

A rose will emerge in the future

With a peculiarly new hue

To remind me exactly of what I've been through.

Incident at the Service Exit

The worm moon is punctured 

Like a fetid balloon

And the bad air swoons

Like a passing front,

All that worry

For the health of humanity

Will turn you to stone 

Victim inevitably,

Unable to influence

The smallest gulp of life

-- It must come on its own

Or not at all.

For change is not progress

In the project to be accomplished

But in the growth inside,

What cannot be measured,

The experience that tells us

Success or failure don't matter

And that everyone you see

Is that terrible teacher

You strangely learned everything from.

After "Bosch: S. Antonio" by R. Hugo

The saint sees the irredeemably sad

As happy beyond measure, for soon they

Will get there, whatever water-logged conclusion

That they were victims of themselves only.

The unrelenting hostility is a gift

Known in the breach and not the observance,

For it is not yours to suffer, though you do,

The giving of the fucks. The world can

Degenerate tonight, your life is worth

A pause of peace, perhaps a ruined world

Is a small price, compared to happiness.

Other's messes are yours to clean. Your toilet paper's

Stolen again. Rules are made, it seems, to be broken,

And the natural advice, freely given,

Is to make others feel the pain they've caused,

What's worse than doing nothing, the right thing

Most of the time. For this is heaven,

The floating away, the clear and empty air,

As hell is how you present yourself to others,

In a red vest, black mustache, your reason for being

Debatable, every claim negligible,

Every gesture of respect something to mock.

Thus the saint replays, like a wax 78,

The brilliance of the hate, how it flows into every

Pore of breath, making love a thing of worth,

A diamond drawn from hard, black earth.

Canto 14 on a License Plate by the Getty Center

I saw the pictures: a Dante-esque

                      Approximation,

The 405 swathed in flames,

The trees and buildings

                Aureoled with Hell.

There were accounts of children rescued

From the vast crypts underground

             The Hollywood Hills,

But it was hard to see, 

                   From the visuals,

How that could be, how anything can

Withstand the fury of traditional perdition.

But now there is no trace, not one

Smoke-scarred tree or

            Shadow on the marble,

As if it never happened, 

     Gaia's easy profusion

             A sort of revenge.

But nothing is certifiable as real anymore,

         Not even symbol-rich infernos

         Or reports from those one knows

Of apocalypse's found

          And narrowly averted.

It happened on another timeline,

     Where the old myths were destroyed 

And the things that would disable our will

                 Were lifted away

           Like liens off a baby

And we were left with the impression

                             Of innocence

     We had before it began:

          No alien/human hybrids,

          Porcine DNA, adrenochrome,

          Baby torture, clones,

Just mediocre art from a nasty plutocrat

      In a wheelchair 

                              Bequeathed

To make us slaves go "hm"

           In voyeuristic disgust.

The Weakening Week, On Fleek

Winter doesn't know what to do with itself 

As it stumbles along the dunes

And moves the volleyballs from reaching hands.

The waves, too, seem intent

On disregarding its pleas,

Save a beard of Father Time

Dissolving listlessly.

Every record is a history

That cannot overcome the buds of spring.

The vehicles are spinning now,

There's no hope we will learn,

By which we mean remember.

Triptych

I.

The house of spoons

In the Vegas of memories

Calls the faithful to sleep through megaphones

II.

The litter's intelligence

Confuses the sextants

Of the human sphere

III.

So sweet to read the news

In a sunny chair near pink blossoms and green birds --

Once we didn't know it was the enemy

At Sun Vegan

As we launched

Our spring roll 

Spectacle

We were reminded 

Of Heavenly 

Teacher Confucius

Warning us 

About the passive 

Aggressive arc

Of history.

Echoes of an Old Canto

All roads lead to Saskatoon –
                   A warm, clear day,
As the air raid sirens blast at noon
     Like they do on every Friday,
Stirring up the dust of some residual fear
                                   Of the Ruskies
But it hardly rates a note in the drum
     Parrot corps
Rolling the foggy bottom line
                          Lies of war,
Even invoking, in cracker Graham's
      Public murder plot
The Owl Minerva Rule
     To tell dark truths at sunset
When history is safe
                                    To say
– And all the naked shorting
Calls to mind the Lehman weekend
                        Like suicides
                                  In the brain stem
And the Fed façade disappears again
    From rearing its mythic head.

It’s the March Mutually Assured Destruction
        Dance
                    To the boundaryless:
Is money gold or potash, whole cloth
        Spun into cotton candy?
“The transmutation of metals” --
                       The transmutation of souls.
New systems unfold while the gulls forage
                      In the old-world ways
When lack was poetic, the thoughts of others faint.

The whips of seaweed turn in concentric circles.
Kelp knobs deposited
         could draw a cardinal’s curtains.
Haircuts lie in piles of golden insect wings.

Let the masses have their madness.
No longer any point to filling in their blanks
Though it is so sad to know and to know
                     So few have any clue about
Who tells them what to do
    And why they do it --

         New, more brutal technologies

To tell the same mendacious stories:
For the slaves commit the atrocities
    So royalty doesn't have to.

The world disrobes its facial cloth
    And unfurls the flag on cue
Of an imaginary country
That is everything people believe it to be:
                         Violated in the way
                 They refuse to see
    Occurred to them
And since it is imaginary
There is catharsis in their sympathy 
Which turns inevitably to suffering
As reality is turned more desperately
From the door.
                           But in reality no one cares,
No one really wants to know.
                 They are wise that way
Not to feign,  junk sick with fake news,

      To make out the minor
                                Geopolitico arcana
For the sake of harmony with a neighbor
Petrified and estranged though they may be
    At the drum beat drawing blood
As the hypodermic needle did too, too recently.

They say your money’s frozen.
    They feel you are a threat
         Because you don't obey,
But that’s just the cover story, your opinion
Does not matter; it’s the money,
It’s not yours, it never was …

And what if that is, too, part of the Plan,
However duplicitous, for freedom,
            A thing that is so remote
Everyone would go Mad as March
To think that what they had
                      Was called that.
Such wisdom of the dark has to be
                      Unveiled slowly:
Corn shortages, the price of oil in gold,
    The final letting go of things, 
Where the troubles began.

Song: Vampyres (1987)

Loose wings

Flutter and fly off

Vampires

The life of every party

Within

The corners of dark marble bars

There is no one

Waiting just for you ...

Downtown 

There aren't any secrets

To keep

But everybody's hiding

Riding

The underground train to the sky

Scraping insects 

Out of their eyes ...

When the night

Left its magic behind

He was just 

Waiting for his cue

To leave you

Fumbling for some harvest moon

And your mirror

Is the only clue

Song: The Hen (1986)

I've given you nothing 

     and look at the thanks I get.

I know I'm in trouble 

     but the thought hasn't hit you yet.

I've had it with your boxes 

     and your diet soap.

I take the broken glass you offer

     and I shatter it with hope.

Please rescue me til I'm smothered,

Nurse me til I'm sick again.

I don't need your lawyer's arms around me,

I need to hear the hen.

Though I walk out in the morning

I still feel brand new ...

Bifurcated Shells at Low, Low Tide

A dozen seagulls fly away from me

Yet I doubt I have the power

To make others comply --

On the mountaintops where one can see

There's no point in intervening,

Even if there was a way --

But to watch without these feelings

Is to know you don't know love,

How even hatred is a form it takes.

Twos-day Hues

The wind in Adelanto brings the flags

To life. Flags are all that is left of the old

Polarities -- there is something in what

They represent that cannot be denatured

Any more, even if the flags cease to

Exist, even as they fly across a

Million roofs, unnoticed by the media

Eye that says what is and is not true

To ever fewer non-material views.

Peace is upon us. Only the center

Can hold. The cloth that moves from side to side

Can no longer inhabit the gap

Between the world as a movie and

The movie as a world. There is only

Divine indifference left for those who drew

Arms against you, in a pique of what is

Unknowable now, the opening for

Explanations gone a long time ago.

There are only the wounds we have that are left,

The reasons for them suddenly vanished,

The long, slow road of letting light come in

When the white window through the clouds opens.