The words.

Skepticism is free to roam and multiply in the blood

And eyes of our beloved onlookers who see yet

Miss

The destructive promise we've made to beauty.

The words.

Be the sum of finding and

I will give

You the humble adequacy

Of a treasure.

The words.

"Machines for living are one thing, habitations of the spirit another, and so I wandered one day by accident into one of the rooms off the main concourse."

-Meryle Secrest, from 'Modigliani'.

Grand peace, then go double it, goes into the traffic of the words we'll choose.

Spirituality is nothing more than the common and unreliable

Concussion the listener suffers hearing another voice

Arrange familiar words--

You have the catching cuss of a pendulum when you call out.

And your lungs fill each time

With songs.

Wherever.

Abandon me upon the stage of the open sky--

For either the security or your release

--or the ease of peace.

But keep in bluest trust my shadow--

The eave of which leans to

Cool your hand.

The rarest part of the heart's profit finds its source in the wrists

--the Mesopotamia of you, where there the origin of sense memory still flows.

The story in your trash.

"Iesus saith vnto them, "Did ye neuer reade the Scriptures, the stone which the builders reiected, the same is become the head of the corner? This is the Lords doing, and it is marueilous in our eyes."" -The Gospel of S. Matthew, XLII-XXI

Leisure rests on the lap of work,

And all the Persian rugs and things you have

Have a story.

Dream with your lungs and heart next time you dream.

Dream with the places your polder and mother peat

Need you least--so that there with purpose you will be.

Dream, as later, awake,

You can accommodate the rhythmic homilies,

And strew your namesake on the belly of the world.

St. Matthew will know your name, your secrecies

The indelible stitch of your scrap of a hem--

His pen bleeding, his aim

Accursed,

If bountifully replete.

The cropped hip.

Trim away the sure corner, then hide the cropped hip.

The former is an abomination; the latter is merely a crime.

Lonely wind.

Smoke thin enough to bypass the feathers of a fan

Finds a stop in each diaphanous glance.

Each star seeks a buttonhole in which it might wink,

And so rare is the mercy of space that it will wait ages.

Smoke thin, but only so thin for the fan--

Such are the prejudices of the lonely and their choir of mismatched songs.

Perfume of rain failing.

Creatures of the intellect,

To some you will seem idiotic, while to

Others you will be unduly bright--it depends.

Those of you who have foraged will

be graven in the dearth of the intellect--

Your searches will happen during storms

And force of thought will quiet you.

But there are others, and there are more of you.

You will be graven in the springtime of your things,

Your searches will happen during storms--

Force and perfume of rain failing.

Mid April.

Spring is before-stocked in the surplus of frosts--

Its grass is cold, its windows minnowing with breath--

There is not dear enough regret in the contemporaneity

Of summer

To address the swimming distribution of the depth,

The painful joy into which

We will plunge

To alleviate

Its green and swinging sledge.

The trout.

We tend to rely on the most dreaded miracles, the ones that make us feel special--like fish when they're caught.

Vulnerability.

Isn't it obvious, especially

In these derelictions of rain,

Warped through the weft--

How we must run and

In running abandon the

The thread of our cautions.

The mild warmth.

The eyes glance immobile,

Though the glare speeds

Its pink and undelegated mile.

As he approaches the light

Swarms visit the charring birth--

Shape vanishes in hungriest white.

If to count you could know

Count all the windows

In his dreary room, so

As the bent shoulder

Of the younger burns

There is due reverence--

If not envy, in the elder.

Mild warmth falls--and pardon my abrupt sidetrack,

Convinced upon the sweep of the verdant span.

It thrives, though the animal is always held back.

It suffers its each counted track.

The flourish

For Settignano

The depths of your desserts, if cared for will never turn.

A smile, thinning youth, may it never corrupt your face

--each leaf dear to the boy's fair cheek.

The age of miracles.

"I wondered how long could this thing last/ But the age of miracles hadn't passed"

Ira Gershwin, 'A Foggy Day'

If I was away from home these swamps and karat swales

Would seem sweet.

I'd fall to the smallest shallows, kissing them--these bowels,

These furious fanning rainy folds.

Gold for gold--

Inspired, if not informed by the abnormalities of wisdom

I would fall--and meet.

Here my eyes may go on, greenly on, rove--then rove.

See the whispers of sand so rarely sold,

Head from salt-scraped hand it's easily known

The same--in sum, is as easily borrowed.

The copies of affection.

The copies of nature lie in nature. The copies

Of affection have yet to be discovered.

How beautifully you look back.