House.

The forest
Follows the pralines
Of the fox to the

Gull.

Just before sunrise, outside Carlisle.

When words failed him, he coughed--
But those plegm yellow sounds got the braille

From the lungs so the tongue could be read aloud.

He did what came natural, next:

Shot a white eye into the pond's air, and watched it
Over the stock divot, disappearing in flapping ink--

The indentations rose to places where they

Could recite their iliads in clouds.

(He thought if only his wings would touch the infinite watertips.)

The maple.

There are certain words that spook me to say them.
When I can convince them to come out

They arrive, smarter and tauter than I could imagine.

I say to myself,

ouch, I do not belong here in this old pill-colored palace.

And the heft and the pine in my voice summons the past.

A compliment.

Dance.  I'll remember you differently.

There is no platonic research, no rehearsal. Nor,

Can you come early, nor respond
afterward.

I have the flu,
I'm old

I was never right beside you.

Gloomily, I turn a weak faucet on my feet.
The suspense of my steps thrills me--

But I see them as they are, one as conspicuous
and unclear as the next.

I know which step follows the right after
so long--

And you,
Are so strange to everyone for whom

We dress and wish.

Infancy.

Wise things are coercive--
Blooming in fields lost to sons, bell-casters,

To battles.

The flowers on the blue curve are a sign of a season
Shortening, having colored

Now, already
Dull.

The pink inner thrills on those
studious fingers feast on the
Over-abundant sun.

Such a world of lies--just listening will
Stop your heart.

Last season a fat baby rose from his cradle,
The lava-folds of his tender back to the field,

Unfriendly to the hands that made him laugh.

The subject is the rain.

A fat poet reads,
Playing with the hair in his belly button.

The subject is the rain.

Who among us would follow him down that road?

Think of the mud and
Humiliation.

Think of the agreement in his smile to which none of us could ever be faithful,
Drying off.

It copied an older form--one to which we do adhere, actually.


And these rainy plums are black and sugary.

Narcissus.

Our

Welfare has armied numbers going on.

So quarrels dip boot-high, and fill with smoke, 

and, too, fill with wandering.

But
Civility is cleaner and has reason on its side--
And the grave greens and the algae blues pollute
It. Look at this fleshing ebb, here,

Where the Allegheny slurps under a bridge.

The swimmers
Go unnoticed, returning almost,

The fun progressing in their heads.

Dreaming of home.

Occasionally, you get someone like Glenn Gould--
A human.

But here we are, where memory is stronger
Than art.

Morning observation.

Dawn passes through the heavy curtain;

People are happier than they seem.

Swimming haiku.

The balm of the Moon's
White eye on swimmers below--

They work tomorrow.

The losing party.

Who may I hear singing?

Though the tune gets so incautiously lost in dynamite explosions!

In peppermint; I taste it!

In breezes, in ease.  In thrift.

In curtains forlorn for those who might but haven't parted them.
Listen to the leisurely red crackling and then in laughing,

Re-cackling--

Listing, as the idylls
of vertigo
found in stacking
Things up to
achieve
the hilarity

of toppling.

The air upon them calms me, which is why I find myself
Asking.

A losing party cuts sentiment in final stone--not so much in conveyance as in tone
Neither theirs, nor their own,
While

From the dim lawn and hapless crickets
The rich fingers of a harp are most

Sweetly and hungrily heard chirping.

What I tell you is a secret.

How sincere are the gladdest fingertips!

Most refrain, 

--or never feather,

Or never are.

But pointing at the scribble tails of salamanders in the soil,

Or enlisted by the cupholds of (so much) music

The initiative to look weakens.

Take this glance of darkness:

It stretches past the orange morning

And the humor.

And the gallows of smoke that get produced:

And the purview of that smoke we inhale,

And the purview of secrecy.

The heritage of angels.

So what is it?

Is it the distress of form,
Or the dilution of color?

Is it less than the neat grass knots I tied and hair-parts which
Have gone through great lengths to be
Puzzled for, and looked upon?

I think it's a cloud of yarn.  I think it's an impressive cat--
And not human at all.

I mean, look, there are its teeth, and too, its sharp, peach-lidded eyes.

But what else.

Because something determinate must address our misfortunes with
The future.

OK.

Some of these hornets
Don't sting--prop bees.

They belong to the set
Of Nature.

And when swept up,
With trees and seas,

They'll go away.

Okay?

The birds squandered in flight.

If once a baby then always a baby--

---and to

anyone.

Go up womb.  Go up word.

Only smoke and birds in flight know more.
And you know, it's a potion
Of air.

No healing.  Not in my sky.

Marvel, sunny.

Marvel, sunny.

It is a bicuspid war, and a toes war,
Nothing less.
It is not here, however--not on this particular shore--

Has been declared with pawing paws,
Is in all
A virginity war.

Go between the letters, seas, the phone calls

And the utter lack of yesses.

Run, if you must:  For Shit's sake crawl!
Go to maybe, now, with eyelashes
To fend off the marvelous sunny tresses!

Every restless thing is a vessel, a home--

A fortress to patrol for a
Hat to fall.

The scurrying drops of blood in the wild.

TWINS (n.).  One was shrilly determined, while the other was buoyant--of possibility, and guessed at.  Can you tell which from which?  By the way each roams?  By the kinks specific to the hide, or the trail of scurrying drops of blood in the wild?  By the possibility that one may secretly be the other?

Imagine the wish of arms that surrounds you.

If it was both pathetic and marvelous
You'd dislike it,

You'd be uncertain about it--
Let a foot of snow fall on it,

Humble it,

Without skin.

Your fingers would ply absently in sting and misdials
East of your belly
And simple human truths would--without ceremony,

Gravitate to another.

Sheep drift peacefully across the field, and the yarn

Makes a pattern.

The walk is sacred.

If you came here hunting a dream,
Or a cosmic pale blue dot

You are lost.

The aegis of corruption
And

That of our satisfaction are identical in one stern
Regard:

They humble the sticky tarred stone for Good and Evil
As each travels
--and as each. is humblingly busy.

The spiritual histories.

Peter Paul Rubens- Jupiter and Callisto (Flemish 1611-13)

To grind is, yes, please,  to eat what has humbly fallen,
And ground in the kinks of a grinder.

These goldless histories, Dear Light, are
Spiritual histories.

And this and me and
Gold are not skin--

They are spiritual skin.

And you,
You are not who you were when I saw you.

Yes.

At the wheel,

Turning around,

To say yes.

A recycled effort.

The curse blooms in wild kisses.

Breezes dream from everywhere--

Without courtesy.

Once was an archway, or a wave dismantling the shore,

Singing, insignificantly,

"I have hurt you, my Sister, have I not."

Lake shed.

I have been asleep for so long where

Mosses drench the brush--

Their sopping residues cotton the shade lying

Beneath me as

I am upon them:

Meanwhile,

Or eternally, an orbital task is asked of circles on the lake waters

Just once, and is

Expected and expected

And stalked,

Not so

Much as many times or often,

The surface storms, but when the

Equidistance returns

And the mirror is gradually, confidently

Retroubled.

Poverty is freedom.

What in the riches of our resources

Stays us to the course

Liberates us,

When liberated of our resources.

We are free.

Knitting factory.

Desiderio da Settignano - Young Boy (Italian 1460)

For Oliver Wright.

Everyone has a shell with which to call,

So call! And everyone looks preoccupied.

Upon each sprawling earfall it causes,

the beck is thrust eagerly against

The all--

You were named, and measured lengthwise

In inches--a trout, a record-breaker, a warm stitch--

Apparently it's important,

In the execution of a maiden shawl. It is yours to crave,

Its bay of toys and anxious others from which to cast

A growing shadow

And draw--

From this, little burstling, let

Innocence invariably recede, and your impending

Goodness resolve.

Look up.

When the world opens up to beg

You buy sharp things

And you open them up to beg back.

And what you harness in the incredible fear of others you lay warmly near

The heart of love.

(Look how it barely squeezes by when it moves past what it fought to subdue.)

The fairest leagues.

It takes supreme patience--

Are the fairest leagues

Ready?

Have the random kicks of trunks been devised?

Are swimming thighs and splashing shoals--

Even if dangerous, been apprised?

Could the recreationists possibly be that wise?

Just blushing and just

Blushing

And

Sinking coldly with the purpose of drowning

Out of high school

Only to rise,

The creased gangly few

Nuisance youths who, new, know mermaids

And guessed, and wished, and

Made mesh of their ebb-

Capturing chests--

Them, I mean, those few.

On waking up.

I have exacted from Wonder

Everything I need.

And my living limits are dented

By bullhorns.

The Gods.

My eyes were traditional and young.

In the white glarings of the creek

Between smooth stones the colors of clay and

Blueberries

And bloodshed,

I grasped the coffee of the Earth.

Immobilized by the relationship of ones I

Loved and ones I tolerated,

I met my friends, who are Gods.

Tower, spring.

How safe the bell must be to ring.

Each cloud is near enough to capture that

Song.

The setting sun leaves a place,

And the moon is there. And it

Leaves a place.

Shower.

There are disciplined times

When I have nothing.

I draw your face in the steam

And press my tongue against the

Idea of where

maybe, et cetera.

Inamorata.

Life can be found in the smelting pots.

It glows in union and stimulates what it must endure. Slag.

How pitiful.

Salt.

There is a far lesser kind of wisdom dividing people--

Deeper and abandoning people and misused.

Some must forever be encouraged,

And some never.

A grain of salt is a measure of learning,

Worth no less than its

Weight in salt.

Holy color.

Tim McFarlane (recent Philadelphia)

If we follow subtle odors we will reach

Subtle rewards.

First, you could say, we will have holy color.

Holy shapes--

Teenages,

Cleft away from adult time as if meaningless

To the future.

The thrifty life.

Jean Auguste-Dominique Ingres The Head of a Girl (French 1813)

The thrifty life you have was never dreamt of in ignorance.

We all knew--you, and I, and of course they knew.

But pick away at your shoes, at the veil below them--at the blossomings of

Me and others here, seeing you.

There is only one thing dividing you from the apple.

Seance.

Every once in a while it's like a ouija board--

I have the layout in my head.

There's the table.

wonder and I want to speak up.

The chandelier rocks when the girls from the past speak--it is

As though a baby had been born and was to be cared for,

And was the spirituality of

A delicate prank. The Song goes:

"I wonder..."

In the waves.

Nobody can say, "I must," before the waves.

You are free.

This translucent ocean before you is free,

Its decisions and color,

Its frenzies of prehistory

Are free.

Your genetics and memory steep in vaults of black tea.

Tour tongue has tasted to be there,

Your arms have swam to stay afloat.

Such a reward, saline and crippling.

Inamorata.

My children, who are a part of the sun, mine embers to be yours.

Acutely known

--or unknown,

The fluted heart is felted in damp green fur--

The cat gets around.

Isn't it remarkable what slender ledges welcome this little thing,

Asking,

"What next, Dear Animal, when my hands fall to my mossy sides?"

And what is like the things one does when finally free?

They're bundled in the Earth,

So coercive when called upon.

Sleeper.

Chemicals meant to cure sick people have been

Detected, mixed in the blood of dancers--

What there in desperation seeps between the waterproofing

Cup of fingers

Clings to the gentle sleeper

In marbles of lazy sweat.

Each divoted inch of skin is a burden to the touch.

Pittsburgh.

Leave it to the ingenuity of complete strangers,

Gravely eliminating the past.

They drive while their stranger passengers throw

Tapestries from the blue windows,

Insisting, "More beautiful!"

On all they derange to pass and

All they cover...

The archways.

As do the eyes wander far,

So too does the blue breeze upon which ferries the soul.

Every archway is, however far,

Full of wishes and conditions--

Out among the gales with mottos,

Saying, "you have come here on thin things,

I could shoot them down."

Virtue.

Into the stealth crass of this heartbreak

You must go.

While you are there you must

STEAL

From the others. And when the pall asks you to regret it

USE the crass regret you stole.

What you've cobbled, creature, will recite your name...

A peripheral blur.

Distress comes and goes with

The feeling up

Up--

And foxes running by.

What the expression became.

The future backed away from us,

Wrinkling saying so, stooping

To fit the aches--

Saying, "Louder."

The ears' hammers became paperweights

While the dead pets became memorabilia of

Mid generation confusion, as each side sought

A common language to

Argue in.

The soul was common, and like a body it was

Blemished with a shadow.

"I wish you would speak up"

Became

"I wish it was your fortune at my bare feet as had never been once before."--

And

"You needn't say anything. old wall. I understand."

The luxuries.

For JW, who once rode a horse into an electric fence.

I have finally made myself happy,

Watching a bird land

On a wooden lamp.

There's a writing desk with some papers feathered across the top,

Beside

Which--and beneath its shadow,

Lies a sleeping brown dog.

I have achieved my own variable record--and the riches in

The window are all wan and hungry to me.

I need never ache to join the half-blind path of the others,

Nor to be young like before.

The invisible.

For Robert Serra.

If you trace the bird out of the tree

Its hesitation will go undetected at first.

It limps from the solids then tumbles up-

Ward.

Once a mystery is true it places the non-believers first in line.

But non-believers--it took work and money and

Belief

To accommodate you.

You have tried to worry. But seriously, don't!

There where magic gets into you

The buoyant clawling flickers,

Forward.

To each governance flies a tell to the mystery it evokes...

The 1950's.

People who once lived

Here

Staggered everywhere they went. They staggered on

Their way to privilege, and they staggered on their way to abuse it.

They staggered to be drunk for the light,

Inventing mementos like iced tea, and the notion of afternoon--

All diversionary tactics.

And maybe once in a while still and alone one said to another:

"My love must be a kind of blind love."

Very important.

Death, make a match for me.

I mistook the wallpaperer

For the architect.

And I mistook the pig

For the guest.

Stay with me while I watch you.

Less startled than I,

Still, given over to

The staff of surrenders.

I am their white flags, all their white flags.

Stay with me while I bulk in the wind and watch

You.

Central Pennsylvania.

I wish this lamp worked through the storm!

There is a boastfulness, half explored--as if sleep was an excuse!

Where do I go when I fall asleep?

And what girl did I miss, surveying the fence-posts

Across which sheep casually roam?

If I have to fall to Earth, I'd like to fall here.

When a girl wakes up you can feel it.

Her toes lift up off the sheets--

They are lighter than the snow.

Haiku for two.

See! Both landscapes owe

A little to the eyes--Blue

Among one, the boat.

Haiku of one.

A hostile witness

Learns his echo, captively.

Kept, he speaks it once.

Amber.

Can't you see the cave is dark where the search enters

And where the bodies go?

People hearing the response are the echo.

Philip Guston (American recent)

People responding are the echo

And

People hearing the response are the echo.

One part of civilization rises with the brim of love.

And

One is always catering.

Like songs.

If you doubt it, then

Rise away. The tiny calligraphies reach left to right.

The green birch in the sideways

Flux of snow

Is as real as any fairy tale--any handwritten note,

Or hummable song.

A road in the fair.

A road in the fair

Takes time to sink into

The traveler--

Into the muscle

Into the thrush of the glands.

Imagine the tranquility of the lane in

This thrushed land.

The footsteps prevail,

Outnumbered by the brawling Earth,

The Conodoguinet Creek.

I'm not gonna find it as you left it--

In incomplete February jade crystals from the grass contours

Crackling out.

Even the words will pass on by.

And when they're remembered the tongue will say

The current's name

With a nod to the origin--but all the same,

Differently.

This hole of an hour.

Attendez-vous!

The night is falling. And all that goes with it is falling.

One has to wonder in this hole of an hour

If all the things we've lost would have been

Lost,

Had we once looked up,

And measured this canopy

And its starry risks.

Standing in line.

The ocean has the semblance of a single file line.

One at a time.

To feel commitment means you are dove-soft--

That there is a raft waiting-- that

Maybe you might get back to where you were.

And even bad order is order.

Did you ever get your breath back?

I forgot to set the alarm.

No one knew because we lived after the echo had gone. I forgot to set the alarm.

People tend to fall in love with ideas, before people. They fall in love before they know what they're doing. One foot is in the light and soon enough the next. And soon enough it's all in the light.

If you speak too softly I'll never change.

O.

The O of a frost is not the center;

It is not where, if intruded upon,

The enclosive enemy would wish

To enter.

It is the oceanic constellation beyond

The cold Earthly wood,

--a piece of you would just as soon swim as watch,

Idealized by the inward traveling goer,

Branching out in oath and walk,

And decidedly through the shaded way

Of could.

Winter party.

Red footprints follow the damp walkway on--

Each memory of the moon is

An itinerary.

The back garden is boughed with Christmas lights,

And Pepsi fizz rises in the booze and

Plastic cups.

I was here when this was still being developed--before music.

The cleft pass.

I know that beyond the fence the stately grass rises, feral, and

Everything with it is feral.

Here in my lawn is the grand cornerstone I plow around.

Some time back it was the key to a wall. But it all

Fell back into the sea of things.

It was drowned in things.

To one side of where it vanished a pulmonescent

Bay of worry stands still.

To the opposite side of it

A way is there.

You must always remember you are a captive heart.

Winter glare.

I have gone to the window to broaden the light.

It's there.

As often in the rain I've hurried to it seal off--

It's there there, unfastened, as well.

So too--it's there-- is the ice-stiff month. So too the waiting.

With each precursor a thing ages and stales.

The rock upon adventure.

What I love might as well have been shaped after you:

A particle of Nature: Adventurous enough to disrupt the rock

While the rest sang out.

Fools.

Henri Matisse - 'Madras Rouge' (French 1907)

Nothing is happening while

The yoke wrests.

It is, let there be no doubt, a world of shoulders;

Some are light, while some sink.

We stop to celebrate,

Our brakes weak and wet.

Where the color of the wood is lost.

The traveler is bound for an unexpected brink,

Where the color of the wood is lost,

And the sun is sunk.

He will not cross the snow.

He will not kiss the woman;

Here, unwarned,

He must wait and resist his own

Silent voice--

The rumble where black lines go.

"The hushing lawns."

The book of our bones can be read

In the thinnest of moonlight.

Its grass is black and dampened, and

Printed in bold letters even a child could read.

But there are no children here today.

Over time the crease of the spine

No longer creates a sound.

Shhh, it all says. The words are quietly singing.

Science fiction.

J. James Audubon - 'Crane' (French American 1832)

Perhaps we were alive when everything happened--

But maybe not.

This dust that settles on all we live to see,

May in fact be the expulsion of another world--

The venom of their snakes, the wind sweet with cold

And coyotes howling.

Rub your fingers together once they've run through it all.

It is a kind of novel

--cursed with a future.

Love songs for the moon.

The shepherds have gone too far into the field.

Their perspiration is flooded with moonlight--

But the flock they share is far away,

Asking one another 'where to next?' and

'What if all our lives we've been riveted to the stars,

eating and falling in love here

Incorrectly?'

Nearby poetry stumbles from a singing boozehound--

His flock was abandoned yesterday,

And the moon, yesterday.

Stand.

Joan Mitchell - 'Blue Territory' (American 1972)

I have heard you carrying on while I slept.

There is a way of expression that comes from an

Old place--some of it is laughing and some of it is

Listening to you.

Such a duty it is to gather up these crooked toys

And busted things.

As if from behind a thick, cold curtain i see the playful edge of the sun.

This play pen, this Parthenon, will rot,

And some of it will stand.

Over delivered flowers.

Seeing, as if smelling, is engaged with belief.

So soon must you rise on this surface of

Plight, as if bred against its purposes and

In favor of your own,

Choosing the blushing grasp you like with neither caring hand

Nor roaming eye.

(What an audacious thing to do: To choose.)

Readership.

Collige virgo rosas

-adage from Latin

It behooves us to last.

The autochthon who prevailed upon us

In books

Tends to a wayfaring herd.

untitled poem.

If they must then children will be falling into the ocean.

I've watched them grow up golden as the light all around them diminishes.

It is similar to a chessboard.

I set it,

I set forth. Here

Is where I lie--

In a dominion where the infantry falls upon the jade surf

In the diminishing light.

untitled

You were born to steal more.

Make room in your slim treasury--

All the dying must remain undone.

And your purlicue will grow fatter

As you grasp

The bit by its egg-colored collar.

Green hours.

There is no honesty in sweetness.

Take afterthought and prior to that, thinking.

Take thinking, take the riches that grow even prior

to growing. Isn't it a world of kids?

Isn't it fast? Doesn't it go by?

It has green hours for parents.

In the throat.

Every time you speak I lie in your throat.

There with the hatching blue eggs--

Permanently springtime--

And the cooling comfort of your

Speech--

I lie there. I wait for you.

Sunlight adheres to me.

Sunlight adheres to me.

My skin buckles in its smallest corners

And closets.

It's static, roaming. I sweat heartbeats.

All this--I know it seems like nothing.

All this for charity.

All this sunlight adheres,

Here where I sit against the tree.

The grand chill.

Winter waits around for the grand chill to begin.

Think--as thinking curries sympathy, of the work you'd do.

You might be untimely and coldly rude,

Flash freezing and stuffing its scuffs and laggard birds

In a belated letter

Or forcing its tears into fluid lakes as they firm.

Or be wild.

Would you let the last orange leaves have their place

In the unexpected mild

Nude?

Would you--since you're a participant, now, wait, too?

The same thing that makes you believe there were dinosaurs

Lets you believe that when this missive comes the cold will come

True.

Something else will happen.

Split the envelope as gloss spills

Across the white sunset seam

Where,

More vicious and important than words

The tongue to seal, actual and flush--

Presses.

This season will--as if in writing, beg of you;

And the grave is not so different from the stars.

Clothing.

Clyfford Still - Untitled (American 1957)

We don't want to think about what we'll do after.

Maybe nothing.

From time to time the past is jerked or pried and,

Occasionally, a good quality yellow

Intrudes or just comes over.

But our houses are crowned in fluctuating

Attics. Light.

What to do, what to do...