Late December.

I imagine the waves have said things to the wind

We'll never know.

Watch the edge for a wisp of a clue,

The question comes first,

Then the asking party,--

Tastebuds.

The wine generously wasted

As anticipated darkly stained them,

In the smoke they kissed

When their acid speaking voices ceased.

In the kisses for which their cleared throats thirsted

The pebbled tart syllables slipped

And

They tasted.

A truffle hunt.

An abbreviation with snout down

Sniffing at the frost

For the profit of its rhapsodic sacrifice--

Or likelier and sillier still,

The aromatic sum it casually lost.

The winter affection.

Purity, it turns out, is harsh,

Dew-lined lips, but blade-enforced.

The edges won't slice so much as ask,

With each pinked line: am I to pass,

Jabbed, and again--

Yes or no, did I pass?

The answer is certainly certain,

Though in certainty beyond grasp.

The very young.

A tiny staggering drunk wishes to be heard:

Dearest ship, ragtops and waves promote the lonesome

Distance.

Can you hear above the loudness of the seadrums?

Is it so loud that the shrift of my company

Grows lost?

Is the memory of me the rhythm of your memory?

The wishing voice begs.

What hewn warmth

Knows such a winter's distance?

And with what capability does it travel,

To the assistance of the

Trembling, awful wish?

Oh, but in memory...

AFTER the war the crumbled wall was well at rest. With time and the expense of memory it said in wasted bricks, "You have fallen, but not so completely."

Dust revealed the blush foreground, the light as it was, then,

Watched with purple eyelids, and

Said now, "You have fallen, but not so completely".

The olive branch.

The dream is a permutation of

A wish--

Even if it's a nightmare:

A bird's dearth vanishes in the clouds;

It hopes, intriguingly, naturally,

As hope encourages

So fruitful and distant, gaining.

Bonfires.

The skin wrinkles and relaxes--

It is cooperative.

The feral eyes see auburn consequences

In the fires

Of the festive.

.

Gold in the light and

Of no good value to the Earth,

The ritual of digging them up is sacred.

Look how the last umber sun floods my hand,

Fingers relaxed inches from where they searched

So long.

Advent.

Spend wisely on the new.

Which breathes because we were smothered,

Which eats because of fire and we fed it

--which labors in a croak of silence

While we sleep and dream heartily of its safety.

In an orchard, nearby.

It speaks in shoots and little peaches,

Having learned the vocation from great hands

In wide-slung reaches.

How does it emblem the young restives of

Nativity?

It decides each by each,

Arid furors and dewy peaces.

Real poverty.

Wind is the prosperity vested in the senses.

As such it ought to be respected.

Most nights when it's cold you

Leave in a sweater, tightened to yourself

From the beggarly weather.

To the familiarest shadow.

The cad said to the same cottage,

"I wish you knew."

There are two of everyone

And of some more.

The spare answer.

Fit armaments pant for the spare answer;

The field and sighs correspond.

They are not ready, their temple of grass and

Gulfs of wishes:

They are not ready.

Scenic burden.

Gerhard Richter Mustang-Staffel (German 1964)

The bird, atilt, expects of the green air

What the ocean brings

To its homely carriage--

A graveyard begged to wait.

Stolen silverware.

So with touching it--rushing, reveals.

So, with so little to keep tame hands still

Theft occurs, dropping the wealth

The tame steals.

The orphaned state.

Behold the disappearance of the Origin.

The consolations cricket-chirping, a new rainy sea

Of umbrellas above the orphaned state it sticks us in.

See the fleeting softness of its cheek aglow--

Fresh and mysterious

From the hips of a ripened rosy volcano.

History has grown shorter,

Telling us about these disappearances

Incomprehensibly, and

In order.

Mirror image.

What begets isn't at all conscientious, often running late

And apt to forget.

Regretting is true, knows only it's one lush

Reflection: regret.

The brief passes.

The light forfends

Its idle collaborators.

What narrows to cross the pass

Escapes with an accuracy

Betrayed by every shadow.

(bit)

In this instance he would go inside himself to the land where he and his sister had grown up, where he, rather, they had already begun to prepare for their children. The invisible generation still waiting to appear, they were to tend all the familiar things.

But inside it was not the kind of place he could look at or walk past--instead it was a blue coil reverberating with a chill tone. This was forgiveness. He might've had a field of hearts to share this choice, all for naught. He spent those moments, that evening, choking on the one he had.

After reading two similar poems.

For Edna St. Vincent Millay

On the one page there is a poem for Jesus Christ. Opposite it a poem for Beethoven. For Christ pathetic love, for Beethoven rapture. It is salvageable--from the disguise of commitment in the former, disappointment.

From the opposite, the latter, an ecstasy owing to bluest sound, and no commitment at all.

Heft.

Speak less and softly.

I have accumulated my inches

By shoving the rest further from me.

The wonder of the canting hour.

Be a list of light like an accountant,

That I might count you.

I am in the shadows showing in an orchard's bars,

Going on where the mechanics of brilliance and humidity stews

Peaches

From their natural weight and sugary

Colors.

Slang.

What we predict

Resists detection.

What copes with what we do predict

Scabs and sores

As if infected by the crack

Of what we accept.

Pronunciation.

We ought to have a strigel in the place of the sword.

Each word would be scraped along the skin

Rather than severing its crooks and all its lovely pits.

The pronunciation would be slick when spoken.

The word would produce sweat.

The word would produce it.

Shit.

The promise of tears

Would not stop me--

The birth of red eyes nor,

The mottle of battered skin.

Is it a chronic condition?

Might I go back to this

Reconciliation?

May I beg on my knees for it?!

Is a moment in the eyes strong enough to grip this bitter wall?

Warmth.

Sometimes our breath fails to exceed the

Constancy of a stone stair--

But rarely, and in poor memory.

Our stair, after all, rivaled the ethereal pitch of

the sun, one time.

You could have said, "I love a cloud"

or

"I love the sun you pretended to ignore."

But you didn't.

You looked--the brim of

Your mistreated guarantee had been overcome.

Someone mentioned stars, and you gave in.

Putrescence.

The only thing to which vanity responds so quickly is accusation.

The fly, alighting, and given the option, prefers flesh.

The rugged interior.

All genuine substance is fated to dissolve

In the bark of discord.

See ahead, the blossom extends

Well between unswayed hands.

What will grow tomorrow knew itself between gray land

And clenched fingers today.

And rejoice.

In the marches of our labor

Lie not us

But our bagged and stowed hearts, set aside.

It is only in the luxury of moment-length pauses

That we regain them, open them,

And rejoice in love.

The ocean, early evening.

Why does the ocean insist on this coal-colored wish?
Why with hands so able, silver multitudes and
Skies stable

Does a bellyful of sharks and shipwrecks insist upon
Using one of those hands

To hold you?

Their feast

(A caprice)

When I finally arrived at their feast

A man erupting in sweat spit, gravy,

A ruby cranberry among pearls of barley.

He muttered about the weight of the world

Discorrespondent as it was with

The gale it had suffered.

I served the teens breakfast eggs and left.

Confession.

The words are flawless--

See them climb all over me.

In a kind of kindness they

Refuse the ruse in my rude misshapenness.

They refute the contoured subsidies I offer them

When I confess.

The light I remember.

You have so much emotional investment in praising people that when you have to pan the same people a few years later, it tears your spirits apart.

-Pauline Kael to Francis Davis, Afterglow: A Last Conversation With Pauline Kael, Da Capo Press 2002

Dimension is ignorant to the light I remember,

And yet

They compete.

The measure of dearest contentment.

The loyalty of a wish demonstrates two basic things:

Its improbability and

The measure of dearest contentment.

You owe nothing to the eyes who see you.

"Extremely close to Lycaeides, in the falx, furca and valve, and considered here retaining an ancestral aspect of that genus."

-from Vladimir Nabokov's notes on lepidoptera, (Paralycaeides n.g., 1945; Nabokov's Butterflies, Beacon 2000. Dedidacted to, among others, Vera. )

You,
You owe nothing to the eyes who see you.

And you are a threat to meaning all the same.

I want the thread of

Silken letters dissolving

In my throat.

I want, in part, less
Than this accommodation

To clearheadedness.

I could say,

"Please belong to my senselessness,

As a mussel to the profanity of pacific

Brine."

With the best of stability I say--

--and again, I say.

The throat of a girl.

Each speech goes back to

The quaver of songs--

To the throat from which a half-sung thing

Stung and in gentlest tuning

Stings.

Cannibals.

Each runs wild.

In saying so I have no problem in saying that each is new:

Each is new.

Tear off the coverlet, the lime--it would've kept you from stinking...

Stinks of rain and

Traffic.

Each runs wild,

Less sun,

Less mobility of distinction. The hand

You draped from the exposed side

(in the fashion of the artist you'd been.)

Joyous rotten.

Dew ferments

Before it has a chance to grow its mealy globes.

Grass expedient,

Did you know the knuckles of worship swung from the

Heavens?

Such a kiss.

I was list-- speechless

By the Mother

of a L-- that

was Left in the

Mottle of a

Wreck.

Each digit she had pressed expecting the

Wise likeness

That our l--- could never get.

Wreckage.

No long words,

No one in a dust-colored suit paid to flesh it out.

Beheaded G*ds and books taking place on shipwrecks,

Wait for the cue--

The pink indented lip is responsible for more than the merest of shipwrecks.

Wallet.

"The first thrill of joy to my awakened soul let it come from his glance. And let my return to myself be immediate return to him."

-Rabindranath Tagore, Gitangali, Poem # 47, Scribner Publ., 1941

When I threw my father's wallet in the trash it

looked as useworn and natural

As the tongue of a grumpy tortoise.

I have looked at all the right monuments to perfection

And arrived poorly prepared with

Softest questions.

Sunset, November.

The tympani shudders before the echo of war.

But a sound hand disturbs the mallet.

And a fearful tug prepares to silence it, begging,

"Guide me Luck, for Thunder and the

Burnished cheeks of your G*ds turn

West".

Dumb bird.

a face will

change under

neon

lights

-F.A. Nettelbeck, Bug Death (Alcatraz, 1979)

The origins of dreams are filled with obliterated cans and easily downed game animals

By normal people.

Each glance marbles the skin of what is seen.

When he thought about cremation, particularly cremation hurriedly carried out before the body's cells had fully decomposed, anger stiffened his own living body.

-Kenzaburo Oe, "The Day He Himself Shall Wipe Away my Tears, Teach Us To Outgrow Our Madness, Grove Press 1977)

Each glance marbles the skin of what is seen.
See each feature,
See the shuddering eyelashes.

One could be all to the glance,
Which is a mind made up
Before apprehension.

As if one, traveler and road.

The Sun does arise

And make happy the skies.

The merry bells ring

To welcome the Spring.

The Sky-lark and thrush,

The birds of the bush,

Sing louder around.

To the bells cheerful sound.

While our sports shall be seen

On the Ecchoing Green.

-William Blake, "The Ecchoing Green"; Songs of Innocence And Of Experience; Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul

Whole and breeching wide!

Taste what I salted and give to you:

(Dry off, first.)

Cake crumbs, warm brandy!

The heartbeat and hearth

Of a mismatched custodianship

Between profane things (

whole; wild).

----a hew of mucus blood birthing against the roughest sum of probability.

Bench.

Each bench we share belongs to the

Afternoon we share.

Each sun--just a bit of it known, in fact

Maybe too.

A profanity.

Blue is the color of an empty sky.

Black is the bolt threatening

Too close to your

Soft softest hair.

The iron age.

Each against a corroded wall,

And the fortress distant,

Locked.

How peacefully, fulfilling,

Each would have felt,

Surrounded by the other

A moment sooner,

The rust distressing each less,

And a moment sooner,

less still.

Its beloved dawn.

In the bright and first

Rupture

A silence.

In the grace

Another grace,

Unfortified,

But safe in realized aspect.

In the bright and first

Rupture

An echo, too,

Where sound infatuation clung to the last meager notes

Of its beloved dawn.

Pitch.

I am sleepy from speaking at the same tone for so long.

Must whisper, must shout.

The wealth of intention is

Shipwrecked.

Must whisper, must whisper.

A thanksgiving toast.

May the creatures bred of habit,

And those so wildly of the wilderness

find the glow of the table's wood--

None harmed,

All stray from the welfare common but undestined.

May the buckle of joy snap, and the warm water rush against the bounty.

May it in that improbable bounty rise to meet you in

The fullest of its mercy, and the flushest of its girth.

The town and field.

Beyond this crop of a town lies a field

Resting against a down sun.

Each stalk is bare,

And sings faintly in the sky.

The crows adore it.

A lamp.

A lamp surprising the wilderness!

A living room from your past--

In the middle of nowhere and

Surprising the wilderness!

Imagine the mark we leave when we leave--

The conversations you had with

Your Father about

The simplest song as it grazed

The summer grass

He'd cut.

Brief love poem.

The way the rain disrupts the evening lawn

The way seeing it disrupts it disrupts it so much more--

Disrupts it with human fever

We salvage who we are in the filament-wide

Particles of gulping sight.

Climbing.

A question fetched from the absurdity

Of simplest ambition.

How past reaches of oxygen and travelers' voices

Do we go on?

Transference.

"But even more does the ocean dominate the air."

-Rachel Carson, "The Global Thermostat, Man and the Sea Around Him, (Oxford UP 1951)"

Even the swollenest beast

Rejoices.

It is a challenge to see the wound of daylight from beyond the hill.

The meditating above.

Each walk is comprised of a series

Of graces.

I am met with the silhouettes,

And their cause;

I see the auburn on the ridges of the city early,

And meditating above

Later.

The ravine and the river.

The ravine carries the scars of the river,

Retreating at once into the wild

And into the evening.

In the absence of insight trickles

Your blood river of time

As we knew it.

Demarcation.

The first moment of a day is kept to the jealous heart of the day;

You were asleep, unaware.

A good heart is strong and wise and looks vigilantly on the land

Of the day.

It says mine and disregards the complaints piled at the brittle blue

Door.

Amid drenched roses given, now dry.

Be not discountenanced if the knowing know

We rose from rapture but an hour ago.

-Edna St. Vincent Millay, Sonnet no. XXVIII, Collected Sonnets Perennial 1970

The aching ear bends to silence.

And the eye waters to see more.

How dutifully I bled my senses of their ease,

Their years of water.

My instinct with nominal things is to claim them

As memory.

Manifestations of evil.

I could cup the breath

Breathing inside your lungs.

I could cup your breath,

Aware of demons,

Puzzles,

Foreign languages,

Heard more frequently as we grow wiser with age,

And as yet a mess,

Incomprehensible.

I might be reading you upside down,

But I'm too close to know.

From a beach.

If we could choose what to corrupt knowing

None can go clean our beds would be made differently.

The marvel in memory would be unusual.

Each stitch of our fading picture would cling as one

Differently.

Servitude would be a kind of vacation.

On the left the infinite would light the beach sand,

On the right you would lie--

Your expectations and the hours bereft of all I have done

In the distress of tranquility.

Bare wrists.

Arrogance and need fetch the small things.

Contract.

We sit indoors and talk of the cold outside.

And Every gust that gathers and heaves

Is a threat to the house. But the house has long been tried.

We think of the tree. If it never again has leaves,

We'll know, we say, that this was the night it died.

-Robert Frost, from 'There Are Roughly Zones', The Poetry of Robert Frost (Holt 1969)

Each shingle crooks to the deficit of the builder.

Each window boasts a warp.

The moderate room in which you sew

And sing,

Is at an irregular angle.

The hallway, too, is longer than the keenest foot steps remember.

The new title.

The new epistle

Appears in moveable print

With an unsteady hand readjusting the letters:

First, a clue, then a coy article.

Before long there is a line salivating to

Her rapturously apt title.

The disappearances.

When I was young I worried that the surf was stronger than

anyone could imagine, that their hairs turned white instantly and they were gone.

Ornaments built sturdy for the most distant of stars.

Eyes aloft, over dangerous places

The children follow where Psyche flies

And, in the sweat of their upturned faces,

Slash with a net at the empty skies.

-Rudyard Kipling, Wireless, Kaspar's Song in 'Varda'; Traffics And Discoveries Penguin 1904

Ornaments built sturdy for the most distant of stars

Will collide in time.

Every bout with joy must ferment in its own

Indecision

Where greenest eyes may see and go and learn.

About a woman, recently.

Scope owes less to loss

As to loss its burden significantly diminishes.

What were youthful breasts in sight

Are flecks of light.

How to design a constellation.

None of these classifications is satisfactory by itself. In practice, every library is started from a combination of these modes of classification, whose relative weighting, resistance to change, obsolescence and persistence give every library a unique personality.

-Georges Perec, "2.1, Ways of Arranging Books" Penser/Classer, Editions Galilee 1974

In heaven your elbows will fall tighter,

Rougher to the last edge of me.

To each, since I'm already there,

Propose,

Beg you now,

Fall as falling was asked lastly and

By scraps from scraps of you.

Configure, dear wishes,

As if sailors' spoils, and their raw delivery, counted on

The count of inches.

New arrangement.

Once was the coast now

Its marsh trembles

Awash to drums of

Hula algae

And orange fishes

In languid nibbling crushes.

See to it; once was the coast

Awash to drums, and

Owed debts to swimmers' chokes across freedom

And their pounding fleshes.

In a mullion of light, ever boasting.

In a mullion of light,

Ever boasting,

Moves a waltz

Undistressed by age or

Vagrancy to caress--

In a mullion of light,

Ever boasting

Gleams the picture

Of an earnest story,

Its crumbleworn voice--

In a mullion of light

Ever boasting.

Might less pride come and dim the glare?

Might harsher proof upon the silent coat

Change their song--

Even a note?

Prayer.

My G*d, I'm tired.

I do not say it vainly.

Every bit of wisdom I ever had is clenched in

The wringing hands

You gave me.

With leaves lying about.

Need provokes substance

With leaves lying about.

A broken code.

In a heart lies a loss

And inside a loss

Blooms another loss.

Direct fall, I can carry you to the next place.

A vulgarity.

Help me understand why my love bucks, and is an estranged bit of action,

Why the warm stable horseradish doesn't appeal to me.

Help.

Cold air.

Every time I speak I speak to the wisdom I once abandoned.

Every time I come back to the bald air and spindly earth

It is with that clarion:

Go be humble, distrust the cold air visiting those waters

No longer urgent, never once more.

At home with heartbroken winds.

A credible silence goes to where it's going

In rags of moonlight--

In a black skein.

This spares us the nausea of judging what could not,

Emboldened by deficit of insight,

Match the thrill of our urges.

Heartbroken winds, you are home.

Heartbroken silence, you are still going,

But you too are home.

Infancy

Mystery harbors in a sense of completeness.

The viewer must recapture his breath,

Picture himself before the fact

To be where, once--

To regain that infant serenity of

Watching a thing in motion

On the verge of sleep.

The series of our youth.

Once every last birch has been childishly counted
We will live between them,
And the rustling of snow that accompanies them.

So much like a piano one wants to be in expression,
So direct and punched in the force of sound.

I hear you.

November (III).

An open window frames the last of the geese.
Instantly the window loses its purpose

Or instantly embraces the hue of the
Cloud's scull, distant beyond the trail.

November (II).

When I was young the weather was always cold

And cheery.

The irrational in me expected a specific kind of fruit

From it.

The suspension of disbelief.

What harm befalls the world knows

Cause.

Somebody said so, and in saying so

Sides with us.

It is in that image and in less than no other that

We fashion a face upon our shields, breath

Cast on the skittish dawn.

The bilge of the swell.

The only way to stay safely aground is to watch

The waves for disturbances.

Rhythms flush whitely over

Cobalt barrels and dead fishes. What is lost is lost.

Keep your eyes open,

dirty feathers fill the low sky.

Mists curse in the applauding thunders:

The envoy supports the bilge of the swell.

Bread.

I am waiting for these words to be filled,

like opened slices of bread.

They are blank, and such as they are nearly inedible.

Once they were warmed by the bodies of those who loved them.

In their grasp

They tore, but only so as to

Embolden them against the

Threat of incompleteness.

The roots of evil.

My arms are open--if only

The teetering mention of you would fall.

I would resist all other urges.

In an orchard, nearby.

The leaves lift the wind.

And a skipping aspect of the radiance

Flies in the bare wood.

November.

A pale droplet falls, then another, raw on

The autumn field;

The moon has taken the place of a

milk sun.

Everyone is home.

I am resting my hands on the table

After today.

Piles have moved across the lot,

Now everyone is home.

The late sun relaxes in a copper bowl.

I count the ways.

In those streets of light are

Each and every hello to a gray dress washing the rugs, and body;

If light has a memory then everyone

Is warmed for comfort

Doomed and

Light has a memory.

Is there any guiding mystery?

I've been left wondering in the way of a clock

At times

With half a moon showing

And a girl readying indulgent lines

Beneath it,

Is there any guiding mystery?

Could I help my parents by selling my hands for

Their stowed yield?

Is this cobweb refrain written on the others as

A sign of age,

Or are they saying thank you

In the tack of their bales?

Clear and blue.

If there is a heaven and

If the tender sky can in its

Weakness

Hold the deserving few

Then where must they stand so we know?

The audience of saints who resisted the

Wretchedness we share--

Was the encumbrance less than it is today?

Were women kept in chests

To honor the purity of the eyes!?

(Jesus, don't answer that.)

Such as it is.

A weight so forceful in the hands,

In a minute it will sink,

And everything I've tied to it

Will be drenched and

Will storm centuries of the deepest

Steel wealth.

Remember me,

Remember her,

Remember what we called centuries and

The Gods named

Embarrassment,

Polished--we did polish it.

Of warmest rain.

This dream is no ordinary dream.

When I reach out to touch you

I crawl to the pitch of warmest rain,

The familiar crown from the street lamp,

A storm grate overcome with swill

And music to fill all memory.

The ruse.

Language is wrecklessly close to nothing at all.

Its replacement with more careful inspection,

Love,

Divulges itself with grand spills to disorient

The speakers, hearers

Translators. Love:

Running from the chin

Cracking the teeth,

Melting the tongue as it jerks on the weight of

Peeking adventure.

Is

Unstoppable,

Or who would?

You get it?

Your home.

Give up a morning and root

For the seeds you've sewn.

Skewered by pillared shadows

And limited in the means of

being found

Those physical doses will doubtless have been

Strewn about you.

Fortune is a meticulous thing

You learn with stubbornly stubbed fingers.

Some of those mottled pockets in the ground

Are yours, with

Fresh shoots,

With your neglected likeness.

Of the hands.

You can learn from a town what you can learn

From the rock beneath it.

There in the infant features of a tilted glass catching the light

Blazes the infinitude that left the rock beneath it.

Stolen from each blade

And each color

Is a voice of choking

Order--

Disoriented by its direction--

As one to another it as a word--

Briefly animated as blazed the infinitude

That left the rock beneath it.

The river rises.

Carriers now familiar with the bridge
Cross again even as the rains leap the guardrails;

The river is confident, it grows up.
And on the dry cobbled grade below a
Scholar sleeps off a handful of strewn days.

The end of a conflict.

Now in the decadence of grass
The archway is split in half, each

Side vanishing in a shriveled
Cavalcade.

Who looked and read the epigram so
Chapped and lichen-pocked?

Could either have known that
The revenue of the sun lies
In movement--

That stone slows the foot?

Vital limitations.

Haste more than time
Mothers each new day.

How many thousand years
Of daylight and work
Must pass across our skin to learn

The vital limitations of the species--


We have no choice but to go on mercilessly.

The miracle.

And when they see it this one time
They will call it by its one name

As if that was the only word that was ever written down

The only word summoned when a woman kisses.

In a storm.

A wooden pin holds the mast in its place
Against the hail of adversity.

In the meeting of winds a storm makes details.
These waves are illuminated with silver nicks

And steam.

The boat itself will fold and reemerge
Sink, then rise.

Each dreamer copes thusly with a task so lowly as
Being borrowed by the ocean;

Each dreamer will sink, then rise.

Today.

A perfect breath of air is waiting,
And the land,

Perfect,

Will wait with its kindness.

The virgin.

Each pear grows til the moment it is picked.
Ripest rains pursue its froth-colored sugar,

And the Earth, patient, waits with
An upturned palm.

Voices till in the branches as
The young wobble and

Dream of their next climb, fall, fall again.

In violation of what, it's natural to wonder?
Encouraged, but
By what?

Engendered to bloom and rescue the
Hardest senses
Til the wrists ache from reaching and
Dreams assume that milky
Green.

In violation of what is this thing, exactly,
As the young play above with their understanding?

Here I am below them.

Don't stray.

Don't stray;

The broadest course of thunder
Cannot be mapped.

In the veins of it, however,
Is a flare of starlight.

Nothing escapes;

Don't stray, it has traveled
To shine in your room.

Passing by beauty.

The truth in my hands is a
Clumsy truth, but

It doesn't wither.

And when I wish for the prosperity of the fields I've passed through
I get little help.

The prosperity of the fields I've passed through moves as it
Always moves
--with such indifference.

Gunshots.

Echo least what distresses the ear.

And echo most what you spoke when I mistook
Speaking

For danger with all
My senses.

A Miracles tune on the walk home last night.

To each walk a tune.

And to a tune a girl
Singing--

To a leaden path this way
Glazed in icy moonlight,

Pause if you can once in a while

As in pausing we
Discovered the walk.

Coarse fibers combed from the weft of our walk
And walk so to demonstrate that here and not there,
Lies coupled grace with toppling

And the walk is sacred.

Coal.

To the lonesome miners who found the coal
Below,

Look at the sun and what you gave.
Your commodity is learning to speak
In a threadbare economy.

Mutiny begins in the dark.

All skin rests
When you ask it to
Just look.


Mutiny begins in the dark, Truest.

Mockery.

Silver feathers move to each side
In midair

As mockeries
Develop sincerity.

The birds keep flying;
Our jokes--

Even our jokes, hissy
Scar references, and unhumbleable usage,

Redeem us.

How?

No, truly, how?

Moves from fiction.

Can you tell from the rabbits in the distance
And the cotton wind that holds the sun

That none of this is real?

Is there amid the wealth of memory
Ample evidence

That what has gone before
Moves from fiction

And none is real?

Do you not see why I've chosen a simulacrum
As the tender birch
And tender thigh

Lie elsewhere?

The gentle road.

The air is cool when they go;

One and another part ways.
One final touch of their skin
Forces a laugh--

No one quotes Burns, or Shakespeare.

The gentle road falls below
Always such the gentle road
Where they part

When they go.

A distressed imagination.

A distressed imagination can sad to say
Be contained
With water and cover.

Before it burns its way
Completely through it can be corralled

And kept if you're careful
From the yield

Of fruit, educational tempest and

Shield.

When majority finally succumbs to base and
Last least majority

Let the swollen fingers be like fingers and grasp.
Let the tongue suck to unblock and--

Learily,
Loosen the hold.

Our conversation.

A language written is not so different
From the kind that is spoken,
Determining the fates of
Entire evenings

Crumbling decades of sayings
And humble buildings.

Accents you hear, swell and prevail
As you might expect
Flowers, to see, to smell,

Above a dinner table.

The first impact , you hear,
Says YES
As if the word is dry and hayish.

The second says YES
As if a moisture has managed to reform it
Back to a touch,

A beaded
And leafy

And lowly caress.

Cicero.

Number everything.
Then,
Make way.
Imbalance has an insistent way of keeping
A tab open

And a party going.

(Hellacious sterns of us grab for the door.)

A warm night in advance of autumn.

The ball of the moon has
Skipped few rooftops tonight.

It must be this city,
This neighborhood

In which certain darknesses
And their angles dictate;

It is not to say we are not awake who see it
There.

There is an outdoor cat in the earliest leaves,
And we grieve for the past.

Summer.

On both sides of the summer shoot
Aching hands for the
Scolding heat--

Not dissimilar to the trees bookending a sunset

Or the reaching we do when grieving
To the one most grieving.

Watching.

Harshest judgments may come at the
Point of exhaustion.

Ripe celebrity,

You have been so keenly regarded,

Your heartbeat measured,
Your graying head
Held like a baby's

In their narrowed eye,


Come back, see as little of us as
We in turn see.

There is a jagged hedge of your youth in us,
And of us and in us, we are to your avail
Shepherds.

To the old.

Your lake lies undistressed
Just past the leafed-in
Finitude of trees
Where the subject can rest
And finitude need not as we proclaim
It exist.

Overtures to the young.

The moon is always going to
Be a little green.

And the Devil is always going to
Be making enticing
Pacts by its side.

A rich whirr bowls in the air, voices:

Listen.

Sun spots.

A mark on the sun must
Certainly mean
a mark on us.

However that transference works--
By shadow or cajoling

It ought
Regard us as with the same fair
Vulnerabilities.

The closest heart.

The cordonned heart moves and is like
A paper lantern on this river.

A rain disrupts it,
And eyes follow it
Always.

See the trembling glow as it dearly
Wishes to join the water.

Candy rain.

Everybody is impressed with candy
Rain.

It runs from the swelling trees
Like the knowledge we seek is down

Not up.

The rail.

Your hand on the rail,
The inveterate praise of light
The knuckle as it wanders
The omen.

You are an omen.

Evening.

Okay,

Come back and
Make a prosperity of my precarious
Luck.

Aisles of books and aimless sun has--

Would you lie beside me as the moon is
Being born?

The divine.

On a drenched flat where the rain had been
The sun grows delicacies and
The waters recede in teary shadows,

As if chastised, subservient
Marbled by a
Greater.

There were days when swimming I thought we had found a fold in
The law and were suddenly immortal.

Sweaters.

In part of the past
Lie sweaters and
Things I might've bought

For you had we
Time, I money

And the length of the
Measurable manageable.

Had I, we,

More deserving, less
Indebted to ourselves solely.

Ourselves, ourselves.
That we might be different than we are.

The totem.

Imagine if you actually found one,
An artifact,

Caked, but intact.

Say this arrow, errant on impact,

What kind of cost could you dream up?
What kind of coat would you wear to
The unveiling of that?

Would its slightness
Cut away from your take

Would it in shrinking mystery come to extract
Blood

From the expectation generosity and ardor
Packed?

New design.

It is assumed that a new design will soon be
Awake--
That from the hostile break

A more recent will disrupt the hill,

With shake and
Aftershake.

It is impossible.

Growing old such as I do
I tend to notice

How new leaves resemble the last,
And

How the ochre curling script outlives the brightest
Cast.

Dawn on a workday.

I can see the light through
A crack in the curtains. It is not
The only but--

Devices with crab like
Eyes cluster by the console, a waking
Shimmer lights up the spine
Of a book.

--that rain-colored explanation moves,

As if ascending.

Proportions.

A cultivation no more minute than a dime could no better disguise itself in the pocket, and yet the salvageable stuff of us could so soundly be hidden there.

Seduction.

I'm impartial,
But at a certain time the river
Compels me to blush.

I cannot say no to you.

A thaw in the senses.

The subject,
Closer and nearer,
Is so little like the Moon--

How do I even compare them?!

With the one the lips are dark as they reach,
And with the other less so.

With one the shadow falls behind me
And with the other closer, nearer.

Everyday there is a thaw in the senses
And the hands

When the blue parts with a
Specific variety of light.

Wild nothing.

for Jill Cichoski

One bit of the swing chair's space is suddenly displaced by another's.
The cane aches as sweaty bodies sink in the sway

Talking up the marshal bits of love and love

Or smart--

And it smarts.

For once in a generation you walk past the coyote cage
And don't wish to be like that thing.

Rust flower.

New hands don't trust a prowessed thing and
New hands don't know where to go.

Clotting ferns in the distance
And everything you thought a showing
Flower could be

Was.

(Bits and pieces saying aloud, coupling might with what.)

Item.

Good news:

The West has been contained--

The one involving gunfighters

And ours.

A maze.

The verdure forgoes other forms of verdure.

We spent the afternoon
In a toothed hedge
Tunneling for the center--

Tunneling, too, for

A way to the landing.

The sobbing waters

For the great poet, Tu Fu

If I pedal back slowly
The flicker slows
In my favor.

I am a boy in
Shallow water.
It is in the berth

Of sufficiency that

I gather his Sun--

--light and warmth.

Poverty.

for SB

A half-smile enlivens the distance
As clouds collect
There.

In the promise of energy things move
And retreat from
Expectation.

What's more

That which was always loved is always loved,
Threads bare though they may be--

Staples buckled,
Hands short

Though they may be.

Errare humanum est.

To not persist in the mistake but
To bloom--I wonder,
Could we possibly be trusted with such
Crucial errors and
Tender shoulders?

The old provisional curtain.

The old provisional curtain is, as if vestigial to a bad dream, taking a while to fall; but we--luckily, discovered the inundation of light and fact instantly. There is wild foresight in hope.

Corruption.

It is a verifiable fact that the provision of
Arms

And what lies in heavenly arms

Wrests from tranquility

For reasons both hostile

And time-tried.

(My baby is gone.)

The crane.

The froth and fronds of the sun flood
All things. But

The tendrils of the crane are obstinate--
They remain.

Give in to flighty beauty, gluttonous crawlers--
What is taken leaves no trace
And what of the dearth
Will in greedy part be erased.

Food for everyone.

A bay for young ships,
That is what we need

From Nature--

A bay,
Cut one in the tenderest place:

Soft landings, food for everyone.

The heart and the cradle of light.

The distinction between the heart and the
Cradle of light
Is negligible,

Concerning at worst a fraction of a generation--

Like picking the rose in time from
The soil.

Like picking the rose from time, from
The spoils

Of spoils.

Food.

Know that,
Sonorous,
Mystery begets deafened mystery.

Cleft of incident's color we turned as ever to a book;
In this instance the recipe came to us by way of Barbara Kafka...

Bricks for young adults.

What a ring
In the richness that is everywhere.

Have you noticed the superiority of this hour,

How without a Mozart or a Melville

We quench sunsets and in our rifest privacies

rebuild them?

Purse.

What a word,
The purse.

Disturbed from it repositorial
Endowment,

Uncorrected
And flush.

Like lips--
Like lips!

To pursue to purse you.

My imagination is a dust ridden empty bag
But I purse at the sound of you,

Drenched by the succumbing music you impart,

The cloud lifts.

Of romance.

No policy in romance--

I want everything to be free
To be romance, to be my romance

As I am greedy.

Yank and see my feathers falling softly in space

Nude,

Touched by you.

Destroy power.

for the band, Crass.

Lies detail everything;
It's a shame we can't trust them.

What you gather is real, What you embrace,

Real,

Spelled out in a speech so
Reckless and calloused with
Carbunkles,

That to caress it is to accept its aboriginal
Rasp.


Since saying it is insufficient and telling it is
Merely fitting,

And since loving is a kind of disturbance

Since lies impart wine-like honey to words
Since lies pout with imprecise rigor
And the rasp grows from our familiarest corners

It will take a wild poison to corrupt
The corruption while you,
Garrulous and dirty,
Destroy power.

Maxfield Parrish.

As often as you are who you are
Remember how my faith blossomed
In the intrigue of your mark--

How I couldn't help it

How you lured me with the magnetism
Of an outstretched arm.

Dearest, I panted.

Evening.

Pieces of the palace
Fall upon us.

The dust is golden.

How wholly I have drunk of this careless
Wine

You brought from the leafen interior.

And how memory stirs in retribution.

Of cool bolts once intimate with contended space.

--gave.

A partiality.

The eponym of letters
Must not be confused with that which we use

For colors.

There for a duty to the Absolute goes the distinct strand

Of bruisy curses,

Blushing suggestions and a din of

Ochry suppressions.

It is reasonable to wonder,
"What's the difference? If each is so brilliant
And so eagerly infinite?"

There is in the former, too, a duty to earthly flowers--
Substantial in that it is how we know it.

But for the eagerness of the latter
It is a partiality,
Bereft of sex and wild complement.

To each.

To each a modesty in the countenance of rain.

Looking in you will see the aspect of a heat by which plants
Grow. And you will see

The tears of humankind falling.

To each the bravery of the verdure,
Throbbing in the leaves.

It must this resonance to each know discontent.

It must, after all, it must!

Cherry wine.

Cherry wine loses its effervescence when
You learn

What goes into it.

A honey river, a stone tomb--I cannot believe it,

The error in all cherries as they
Ruin curseless grace.

Oh,
--and curseless grace.

Basic sacrifice.

The misspending of one is as good as the misspending of another.
See this copper pile by the bed. Someone lost it,

And we upon sleeping discovered it.

Water.

Alive on the lips of our
Servants

And awake to our de
-mented

Possibility.

It hushes to be squeezed,
Quenches to be thought
Of.

What if what you dreamt of flowed so steadily
as to corrupt us and leave
concern negligible in

Shepherdship.

Sunset, here.

Sorrel grows along the shed line--

When the fence fell a ghost grew too.

And lemons, rising on sisterly limbs, climb.

Disorder.

The body is reckless as a fur coat
--and yet it wears one!

The body is snide as it apologizes for a
Blood transaction made

On the common side.

The body flips hides
And it derides the nails that bite into the bidden
Skin,

What a world lives between yes and oh alright...

Seating.

Spite made you request me and

Spite,
Let's face it, put you next to me.

In her hair.

Whole lives do not end in the middle, nor
Do they abruptly begin there.

Look at the simple one in her hair

Where waving fibers have one after another
Slipped out of the cord, away.

Burrs dig their teeth in, matted eyes prey,

Fraying the braided ends, with a messiness on
The lips that among half lives is coarse and sublime--

Is sublime.

Ingres.

There are certain paintings by the artist, Ingres, at which we must not be allowed to look. Draft and pass a law. We have in the course of the wannest propriety been incentivized: Dear girl you are pure violet sugar.

And and.

Clumsy as it is
We find the greatest grace
In error.

Whole pages have been ripped free,
And the remains give up

Typos.


See here, the conjunction

And its duplicate.

"The walk stood green against the gloss leaf-filtered light and and"

Movie-going.

It must be said between rented breaths:

Everything must hide in the observant soul

And fight in the frigid dark.

Order.

Without the merest of sophistication
The feral

Grasp our civility,

Its hostile interior.

The detail.

Let us not forget this
Symphony of thorns,

Nor this gust from our
Brethren.

Against all worldly hope we must with
Umbrellas no better than moths' wings

Progress.

The mysteries.

Who threw pennies from our car
To the distant creek below?

It might've been me so
Don't despair.

The dryness afterward in which we, partly
Nude,

Discover ourselves
Is itself an investigation.

Sic transit gloria mundi.

For Mark

What amount remains and what--
Did you count,
Was taken?

If everything aching stirs at once the days
And ultimate months
Will fortify

The land past this sentence with
Footprints

We imparted as we, wed to our wisdom or
fated schedule, left.

My love.

The bloom owes bluevein fungus and
An explanation
To you.

And the bloom fruits blued
In wicked spits
Upon the tomb and wadded

Word
For you.

The oboes of the lake.

First take into account
The oboes of the lake glistening,

It is as though, newcomer,
Looking was--momentous as it is, listening.

Remains.

Bold spokes once knew and colored the shoulders of
Humankind.

That is how we'll be discovered--

Not with dried bones or pyramid
Tombs. No,

Each symphonic reach will
Alight and teach

Those heavyclad kin of those
overly practical abodes

About the rewards lying in shadows, and
Journeys acted out amid
The peal of the sun.

The blues.

Where do you live
Under your guise of skin?

Where when the nightly patrol holds intruders and
Noise away

Does your residence leave light and stay?

And of that lantern
Kept on for the night,

Is guidance as susceptible--
Gargoyline and vigilant,

As the effect of the sad song,
The blue strafe of your binge?

The garden.

We achieve the hill of
The garden in tipping thrusts and

Adventures,

Invested with the neutralest of time, and an
Understanding--

Whichever its bent,

That we define ourselves between cobblings of
Awe

And excuses.

Exhilaration.

Bide in my haggardest
Direction

As I have found sophistication
In everything from the crumbly wall
To your base
Momentum.

Lying awake.

How much milk must
Have made its way past


And how much of
The aroma.

I was asleep when the religious
Gave of their tenderest
Nerves and diffidences.

I anticipated the
Casualties and melodies shared
Between stars

And shy of bending I made all the appropriate

Jokes.

Primitive.

The Earth is now awake and resolute
In the possibility of errors.

Just look:

The poet cleaves in the hide of his own words
With mislaid commas
And periods.

It is an imitation of the natural order--
Now awake,

Of the muddy pass he passed
Rich in chipped shale and schist
And hardened carcasses preserved prone

And adrift,

Of lost hours and memories of sunburnt classrooms
Owing more to the glow
Than to
The onus of the intellect as it grows.

Be satisfied if adrift:

Move now barefooted through the Earth,
Embedded as a comma yourself,

And enliven the blood in your dizzy veins.

Red lines.

Make way for the future.

In the places where ponds were

Sit fables.

Secrecies.

Beyond the hill in a recess between lawns
See some of what has been abandoned.

The dull stalks surrounding it can no longer
Preserve such listless secrecies.

The wind is beginning to move
Through conversations.

Beyond this marble--pristine
Or in ruin,

Invents love from dust.

See how beyond this it pokes free with olives
And the surest temperature.

Real love.

Who knew the mistreated were all
Acquainted?

Mostly because who knew the clever hiding places
Of bruises
And bruisers' clever excuses?

If it is a language then share it,
And if it is not then

Bodies,

Dispose of it!

A toast.

So then:

To the magnificence of all this grubby ardor
And the quibbling for even more when

--all complaints lying soft at the foot of the moon,

We know we have saved nothing
But have plenty in our worn socks

And we are fine.

To that we are despite our conservative bent
Romantics stirred by like-minded provocations--
If not always by similar tastes.

And to the Greenness in living things pitched

Wild into being and at their most;

It is a rasp on our being, and
If we are not derelict, misspending that then

We are misspending it all.

Iniquity.

Nothing good matters in the blinkering when good
Is not honored.

Take a second to check yourself
Your light, your calculation
So firm Christ himself

Would've tossed you from the temple stair.

The entirety.

Belonging
As it ricochets
Off the well walls,
As it falls--
Fulfillingly bereft
As all imparts to all is:
All

Caws.

Might harbor and the governance of wishes
Bear up this clause.

Why it was written, finally.

"Love is grand."

It's the sort of thing you feel you ought to whisper,
As if any secret you kept was kept
Or was,

In eventually passing it along,

Worth keeping.

Warm air.

A language any more perfect or perfectly spoken would not need our bandying participants. Unconsecrated space awaits.

It will eventually be uttered new and dumb.

There are two basic languages:

The one in which a fortune is written
And the other, in which it will

Eventually be uttered new and dumb.

Blessed are all who belong to someone's version of
The brawling entanglement,

Silent though they may remain.

Agnus Dei.

There but cast to the superbest
Vault

Sinks the term of our work
And our submission.

There wherein verdant wildernesses
Scoring us
We formatively crawled
Against harsher exposures

Against the sum of all
Unclothed

Violence.

There, with you whom I share the chain,
Did we blossom like ruby

Vessels.

The mirror.

Breaching the surest armor
The sun is lucky again.

Past blood and bandage,
Past back stories that brought
Warm parties to that breach:

Where sunlight goes,
A mirror shines;

White wounds trickle across the bodies of
The old.

And the sunlight goes.

Bring.

Gustav Klimt from The Beethoven Frieze (Austrian 1902)

Each time you use the word
Bring

I look for something to bring to you.

My hands humble,

Looking for anything copper you might like.

The hero.

People see the way you take care
Of me.

Certain things will never change.

The props this time are the same as the
Last time.

A lamp to see, a gun to shoot,

An unscathed can,

The mark upon which it was to
Be shot

By the hero.

At this moment.

See the way they break apart the sky
With their wings;

Joy amid neglect
Is a kind of heroism.

Youth.

The prodigious aspect to
Our being is

Humiliation.

Make room, wisdom has a wild magnetism riveting a way
To us.

The hill.

Constantine P. Cavafy, Come Back, 1912, Greek.

Come back often and take hold of me,
sensation that I love, come back and take hold of me --
when the body's memory revives
and an old longing again passes through the blood,
when lips and skin remember
and hands feel as though they touch again.

Come back often, take hold of me in the night
when lips and skin remember...

---

The hill is replete--rich in fact,
With two features.

There is the slope--it descends,

And there is the crown. It adheres to the unknown.

Shape.

Duty to knowing is--in spite of its vulgarity and frame, duty to innocence.

S.

Words repeat because they are irresistible.

There are bounties and boundings,

Perimeters and wishes.

Last count most of all

Are the kisses.

This is because of the crack and hiss in it, the word:

Spoken, to say nothing of its meaning, it

Echoes--a stone thrown, skipping in a cave.

On one wall it cracks, then misses,

Cracks then misses.

Silence enuses and the stone, or its absence

Hisses.

This, I suspect, is why kisses the word and kisses the

Kisses repeats

and all end in esses.

Perimeter fence.

An ink wilderness passes the perimeter fence
To the farthest points of the west. It

Roils and rolls.

To the east there is an ocean of
Beat up stars.

Each kiss is a wish and each kiss is a wish.

Each wish must
If wished for--wobbling first,

Then learn to stand.


Each ocean needs someone to look at it a while.


Every echo that leaves you
All but bereaved to be cleaved from you

Needs a place to land.

Each kiss is a wish and each kiss is a wish.

Mislabeled item.

Andy Warhol-Soup Can (American 1968)

The dirt of this stuff is exposed as such:

How the bounty bounds
And profits the weak at that
Unbelievable break when
Their weakness appeared strong,

When all that we grated ourselves down for so long
Was gone

Was actually--eyes open, gone--

They do not, convenient to them and the interest of their throng,
Notice the mislabeling of things--

The natural wrong.

The tilt in a catastrophic touch.

for my very good friend, Ashley Allen.

even the obscurest struggle is flatly obvious, but in it, and in spite of its aspect and tone, there is grand fulfillment to be had. We are in the world as children to blissfully forget its rugged aspect and tone; we are finally adults to appreciate it.

You.

Peace has a whistle.

In the reedy contagion of after

This

It and all it kisses

Bristles.

Stand perfectly still
As my lips develop a song--

A visual.

Defining the word without using the word.

Robert Irwin (American recent)

The best of this impassive cadre of
Words

Is 'flash'.

Accept that some things
Lie more vast
And expensive--

Prohibitive in the curious
Wash that made of

Canyons fresh

Walls

And of rash, human encounters

Momentarily blinding

Forestalls.

See how, at this moment

We run from harm--

Even in the abstract this arm of meaning,
This flailing lash,

So brutal, is yet so self-dependent:

You can't even define the flash
Without using the word--

Months and months.

Many misfortunes
Owe to

A toughness in the joints.

As they age a worldiness of the body blossoms.

To become firm those angles, they ache

And say,

You must say goodbye to the dexterity of
So many summers.

April, II

Inhabitant love lives here. To oversimplify it, it is
Like magic.

Before magic can be magic

It must by the parameters of
Its own religious coherence

Seem impossible.

April.

See the management of the soul:

You know, the tender magnificence
Will astonish you considerably less
Than the inevitability that
You will lose sight of it.

'I Wonder'

I wonder if it isn't a raucousness in the ensuing
Kids

That makes what they find in love
Silly,

And in desperation
Color?

Distance prevailing.

The world is impressive--doesn't it impress you?

Doesn't it impress you

There?

The legion of corners.

The problem you will
Find in faith

Lies in the legion of
Corners.

It or more accurately they
Await

The persuasive swagger
Or pristinest bell

Of a girl's gaiting air

To round just one
And make of the truest map

A tacky web.

Daylight.

The sun met the oldest bars in prison
In a canting fashion,

Spoke and

Said:

I choose you.

Clearing.

This particular area is clouded over on the map.

Years ago, back
In fact

When your people first arrived
It was hacked clear,

But never graphed.

The moseying sunlight was in place,
A yellow willowy arm shuffling newborn

Shadows in the fronds
And fresh disposes.

No, nothing portended an end of
Times or crop failures, or

Any thing of the like to that trodding generation's grace.
All the same, some impetus thrived

So with almanacs, recipes and their own host of
Pregnancies in carriage they disassembled and

In disassembling disarchived the entire space.

Cast to the side were all but
Your black barkarole, the trampled corridor

And other roses.

On a Cole Porter song.

The song rhyme must be

Written like a sturdy murder

mystery, beginning with

a surprise,

then moving

In reverse

Through

the rest of it

As needed.

Waterlimos.

This is how the night will play out:

No waterlimos, no gulls to descend
On peanut bags, no bag boater's shout.

No reason to shout.

The vine won't wither when you
Decide a kiss goes afoul
Of me.

The grape won't taste of poison
The gland won't spout.

What nature, my tongue
And these lines

Should profit
Content to go elsewhere,

Diverge, disambiguate, reroute

Will decelerate.


As if by suggestion of numbers
A pudgy zero will think, then mouth

Maybe there:

Navigate a tipping bow by it, then
Lose it in the heaving salts, eye
craning, wisdom and its bounding amount,

Hereabouts.

Blue moon.

Jesus Christ,
I wonder if you left me out for grotesque reasons.

The story is ambiguous: Were you married when we,
Met and therefore unavailable to

Me?

I only ask because it's doo wop night and
I'm lonely.

Sharks in windows.

Down to nothing now,

Did you see what scrubbing
Left me?

Sharks in windows and
All the things they say

Lie scrubbed and saved and said.

It's still only one one

But I imagined myself,
Presumptuously, ahead.

A short-lived custom.

Each is
A reflection of his light.

Each is spelled
As is his name, spelled out:

Purposefully, plainly--in curves aloud.

Look how each bird writes:

It is uncommon to trust the sky with anything so
Fleeting. Look,

It bounds.

Where sweetness comes from.

It is not polite to mention blood at
The dinner table--

Not because it disagrees with our conditions of eating;
But,

In the fixity of our pursuits we
Too

Are the sweetness to a circling venture--

What circles stops at the table
And rests

Unable to speak--

That guffing breath caught up in its throat,
As though who we are could so easily and

Handily be mistaken

For what we taste like, no longer fixed to
Outrun

Says it all.

Distortions.

Is it a song or a memory?

I know a blur is coming for me,
But it is disorienting and blue.

And all things at a natural pace
Look alike,
In motion.

Like the mirrors decorating a haunted
House

Our eyes meet:

We prevail, at once, to ask.

Written under the 33rd street tressel.

Written under the rail bridge just prior
To its crossing the Allegheny
Is a certain expression
Of uncertain direction.

Like 'Do not enter' or 'Host to the angels'
Words reveal the historic
ache of people between places.

Hopes deride, the language sustains,
Direction...

You approach, it's there, a debauched welcome.

Appropriate response.

If it was appropriate for me to dress
In dresses I would.

I prefer cartoons to real life
And pictures to
Conversations.

I like wallpaper
Above nature

And, forthrightly,
Lied when I likened your lease to a movie.

I've never seen one.

Objet.

A picture in wood and steel has
No place to go.

Viewers tense up
And critics turn to softer matters to
penetrate

And pronouce. Though

Back they and the sun
All hustle

When continuity and flesh
Regard the business of what they really are:

The gentlest polish.

Pays.

This is the last place I'd have looked
For intelligence of a basic kind.

There are no brainiacs or miracle
Workers

No one unkind enough to suggest
Not here, though here,

As a way of leaving the exterior virgin

And the interior compounded by

Incest.

The sterling perimeter.

I am willing myself to sleep
With a purpose.

First I want enough space to
Imagine this thing;

Oh, and I'd like to add a few
Ballsy statements,

Things I'm too afraid to say
When I am up.

Most of all I want a place for the
Gaps to matter--

Silver and half-lawless.

Tin.

No dream deserves to survive like the
Ones we wake up and lug.

What a lavish rainbow.

What a lavish rainbow to waste on the
Easily brought to tears--

As if one rainbow or another less
Hard worked for would produce

A din in each heart.

We need them now.

I wonder if it will take long now to untangle.

Distant points clutter with kids shaving
Spears in the dusty nude.

It is frightening.

There is no use calling for help--
It would only curb our defenses, waste rescue time--

Aggravate the--

--we need them now.

I wonder if everything's come to an end.
The other day it was

A disco in ruins on tv.
The girls were unfazed.
One looked right past the reportage into our eyes,
Saying, Ss kay for parties.

Reckless aspect.

Once but not for long
Meetings were held in the basement.

The aggressives launched
Bake sales, took up collections--

The weakers gave,
Bought muffins--

The motion was raised to erect an obelisk
To anarchy, have its lurching shadow divide

The walk to town.

It never happened, people stopped
Showing up--


A hollow toll pealed across the duck pond,
As early rain droplets and bread for the birds
disrupted the purity of evening

And the anticipation of planned disaster.

A life of excess.

The first thing I remember
After a dull arrival
And a little spell of poor digestion

Was the routine commotion of
Educators and other kids' parents
Whittling down the possibilities
Of succession.

Here were evidentiary collections,
In our schoolyard,
Boxcutters and drunken tortured animals.
The faculty from our

Parents' parents' days attended,

One
Died reading aloud: First names, then, gloriously, offenses.

An empty chair.

Our class was raised
against a levee of time and
Melting ice adding up;
The air was anticlimactic.

And being alive stuffy and familiar.

We have been at it for so long,
And though we are opinionated, we wait for
An additional character, yet,
A supplement

To be coaxed from neediness
With surprises.

The other roses.

Right now there are no openings
In the fragrance of corruption.

Be vague enough when picking an alternative,
Landing nearby
So that when the wall buckles and breaches or,
Light blossoms on the surface

Your tack is plotted,
Your cudgel and head
Down.

Unfinished movie.

It is highly discouraged to use the phrase
"I sense a theme", unless sense
Is what you mean.

Be particular by the light and score,
Cite examples of what worked
With the last director before

He took his own life
And the cast decided to ad lib
The rest, and leave indeciph-

-ered

The inclusion of a blurry
Birth sequence.

The completion of a disappearance.

An obituary for Patricia Travers, The New York Times, 3/6/10

It can be said of prevailing airs and lesser
Disturbances that force and grace

Lie in tandem.

One grunts for the grist where
It gives way to skinning light.

The other, because it was asked to do so
Holds the camera,
Explains:

So grievous a bow born to a child's wish.

Desperate sleep.

All the living lions remain hungry
And the only real sleep is desperate sleep.

Sheep, here, remain ignorant to these things,
Which is precisely why their purpose
lies in the explanation of

Adding--or subtracting from
Our tumbling hearth.

Another formulaic mystery.

Starting today I'd like to suggest we discontinue the use of
Cobwebs and butlers-for-hire.

Go ahead then and unplug the inclement weather machines
Sunken like glands along the drive.

Send back the bats and phony atmosphere,
The reasons we came and the clothes

In which we came here--

Pay the servants severance and the doctor standing by
Get rid of these piling up adaptations of
The Moonstone; Get rid of the poison, the ample clue

Feathered in a sigh.

Take this buried knife out of me, and resume calling me
by my real name, I'll go back to dressing as I did.
What we missed dissipates, how we dressed

What is led to, if recursive or imaginary.

Real animal.

Then--as now,

You would have heard it drag its limp along,
Barely ahead of its own shadow

The hobbled pace gave way to
Tumbling, invisibly,

As the music of disappearance disappeared.

If in a book it corresponded to a name, an illustration,
A theory of origin at least we might know

What next. Now it emerges

So stunningly unknown that anything short of
Attack must be irresponsible

Or, in allowing such attacks, irresponsibly patient.

The tempest--pt. 2

Once you awaken the ocean
The difficulty in taming

It or for that matter
Anything

In its grasp
Will be revealed.

But that's the nature of
Our greenest dangers.

We run until it's too dark to see.
Then, meeting the smallest waves,

Descend

And hope that one reckless propulsion
Intuits as does
Another.

This child of Satan.

The hour passed and reproaches
Passed too.

With sunset came forgiveness,
A levity never felt on Earth.

The blue air of dew drew down.

Silverware came to a rest after a lifetime
Of spinning around the room.

Attic doors acquiesced
And all memories

Atop the stair would have to stay there.

Elsewhere one was being born,
One dying,

Since not here.

Sleeveless.

Is it a jacket or an organ
You're turned away and hidden in?

It is, at any rate, ruined
By roving torrent
It is pulled across the wrest:

And it barely covers you.

First I hoped I would capture you naked,
Startled, and folding in.

Are you so certain to lie hidden from me?

My fascination slips out,
Buoyantly.

From the breeches.

Had a better direction been taken
And conditions prevailed
In our favor

Then perhaps this emergency might
Be a celebration.

We have, under the circumstances,
Been blessed

With all the silver of Heaven.
And the tears of Adam...

They too made the journey.

What wreckages of lines do we find drawn
On the distance though.

What I'll miss the most.

Reminders are scattered
All around,

Insentient and therefore incapable
Of change:

One you might see lies in smart
Girls, their eyes pitted with
Bottomless questions.

Another bats between fading buildings,
Their shutters shed, their privacy and
Style...so long.
Eventually we will forget where they are.
They'll just be gone.

A third reminder will be found in the wood itself,
In ash, rinds, and the wind that swifts to know us;
Nothing beyond that--nothing
In storage,

No one lone line of leftover data
Can explain the excess flooding in
Flooding out.

The past.

It was wild and everybody said so at the fire.
Kids left school with leaves of paper
Still falling...the letter grades...falling.

And your father's phone was dangling
From the desk. The voice--

Everybody left that day.

Eventually a rose
Blew in our

Way. Alternatives:

No.

(One of us would have to go back.)

Living outdoors.

History has a hidden chapter--well
Several
Of great foragers and lovers
Living outdoors.

Why we don't discuss it and why
Better biographies
Were never written must better
Be explained.

It is not as though our intellects or best
Our eyes
Failed to note... In a drainage
Ditch

For example

We found bones bleached at chew points,
Rusting golden
Crucifixes, hearts engraved in trees.
Nude land.

But what do you think--
Who was here before we ourselves gorged and
Retreated

From the galing directions?

Preposterous.

We may never pass this way again
But
What if...

What if memorization--
And
Not survival skills, dictates?

The gift then lies in the noticing.

See:

Everybody has a crotch at
Every turn of the body--

And each produces sweat,
Each encoded.

Someone loves you.

See, remember, work:

What if the path matted down is
Everything?

Huh?

Like we should alter our devious
Natural plans let alone

Alter our plans to discuss it...

Solubility.

We have two loves,
Neither corruptible:

The shape of it and
The strategy of our professions.

Look at the line going around the block,
Like shopping could

Corrupt, and therefore
Cure us of our...

The mystery of no science.

This is the mystery of no science
Ambulances,
Vacations in memory
And Seances.

Many diners love the taste of surprise,
Which, I admit, is nice.

But for me the fruit, the cadaverous appeal
The spice
Lies in the sense of skin.

It is as though, despite dirty plates
Girls and echoes,
This really happened.

Snow, 5:37 a.m..

The first gentle push of humanity found talent--
Stitch me up a curtain.
Make me a cane out of
Reaching wood.

Destroy the colony of moths eating me
Using sugar to fell their wings,
Using water, any heaviness really, that
Easiness to be--

To be.

Prevent, too, these caprices of magnificence
As what I build does not bleed,
But nor does it collect interest.

Allow for a before that I might
Return to it afterward,
Forgive my moment's pause,
My talent fights--it stutters.

You are awake I know,
And if awake means awake to me and
To me availed which though unlikely
Is ideal, then your talent is awake too,

Needing to correct,
By curtain or volition
A vulgarity not beholden to
Wishes.

The last drawn breath.

Years from now it will remain a marvel
To historians and their retinue
Of onlookers.

The cane that guides history will have
Prickled its way across the surface,
The shadow of the old man in tow
Like a caption will have stuttered.

Such impressive light will, rest assured,
Sustain. And those stories will
caress the dust, kiss
The magnificent difference.

How gasps will surround the relic,
And how restoration
Will seem superfluous to that fumbling
Sight:

-- the unbearable, or bearable..

Love.

The vine is alright,
Knowing enough about survival
In the humidty of the thaw

To thrive.

Even modest observation could tell you it rises at the source
And moves in each direction.

The rhizomic blur it leaves has devastated
Followers.

Now, there are groups who meet
On Tuesdays

To talk about
What next.

And truly--
They quiver and know not what--these denizens and
Desperate addicts unite
And want.


Their numbers of attendance indicate
Your menace
And that unfurling Color.

Honeymoon.

On the bare table was bread and some mackerel,
Oily and sunlit. Behind

The progenitor's portrait you found
A room.

The family, in turn,
Watched though his carved out eyes
How visitors took to things.

I don't mean spies, I mean progeny of the Firmament.

The palace.

The long table reached each end of the room.

I thought the grapes might succumb to the heat and spoil;
I ate nothing.

The curd of appetite stinks,
But in stinking hunger blossoms away
From the senses--

To finitude.


And what they hang on their walls, and what they hang on their walls

And what they hang on their walls.

Blight.

Immobile
Piece of it,

Adorned with V's for
Fives

Annotated,
Written down and
Cared for.

What did you do,
That only people, hiccupping cameras, looking to
Escape
Care for?

Device.

See the hem of evening,

How, in
It
--steadily and fast,
Everything melds,

Consequently slurs.

One can hope that the ripples of the hardened land echo
The ink,

Or that waves interrupt an otherwise safe
Passage.


If not we have surely promised in act
Something that in writing we must have been presumptuous to say
We could justify.

(You know, we don't build Love for a sprightly air,
Nor even for how it will look in seventy years--though we hope.

We build
It
Based on how the moment dictates, and we're only that strong.)

Wide-open spaces.

Likely an engineer could take a look
And control this water.

We should be wearing mitts, goggles,
Sunblock.

Luckily, mules are stupid and don't mind
What we bemoan--and cars
Don't feel a thing.

Grapes.

People were treated to heartburn, grinning,
Dinner was over.

The cat spread like a stain.

Neighborhood boys wrestled til the shutters were jogged
From the nearby window
And bathing moonlight crashed the bloated
Recovery.

Whoever might argue with American Gothic
In hunger

Could not
Lift a finger now.

Fortune cookie.

What parade you march, may it be made of cropped memories, corrosive batterings. What parade you march, might it endure you and never you and the rain it: Dubious flowers and of perfect colors bleeding their fortunate ways across your grasping hands. Those too, in the parade you march.

Column I.

Built in the fashion of a tower--
Perhaps the first ever.

None conceived a touch could exceed the treetops.

Suddenly there was an air of hope,
Confident surges and a creative passion inventive of color--

There came new light in the original shadow,
It too devised by human hands,

Reaching not for the nearest rungs of heaven
But fanning in provident mid-stretch
To curb the Sun.

Thumbprint.

No one is quite sure how
To handle you;

From one unbrokered inheritance to another
My advice is that you remain
Liquid.

And disturb the peace.

Begin as water must,
--or must have.

Drench what is everywhere,
Then worry about us.

Hindsight.

Stay unhealthy and dislocated,
Young people under blankets.
Swim in bad water,
Drink bad water,
Test bad water on your skin.

Stay in bed, but come out of your former
Sleep.

Carry those pails rich and brimming with
Silver light and dancing windows.

When light,
Years from now, you will agree,
Was scarce
You simply fetched it.

The air of sophistication.

A bell boasts the tone it hides in its
barrel body--

The tone negates it;
Nothing we share can be either divided
Or kept.

طوپقپو سرايى

I know this is just a movie
As surely,
As half-awake I dream

Take away my flesh, hide your inheritance.
Deign to estimate the haves.

Keep her in your eyes and the only good jewelry is stolen
Jewelry.

Now I must end the instruction.
This is not a movie:

You will prosecuted.

This circle and no other.

The sweetly explosive rush
Of the ocean
Braced us

For plump clouds cornering,
Clotting.

Perhaps it is that the wary were forewarned. The
Infinite had managed purpose and
Found
Completion.

Clause in midair.

--is an outlawed caustic
--is adapting from what heir?

--i

The devil.

What dry corner of our damp wreck
bereft of cobwebs
Knows us

As opposed to the vacancy
That is our wealth?

The devil.

The devil's first talent lies in merriment,
What's to come will come--

Why portend doom?


His second is sartorial--
His adornments and learned grace.
That the two alarm us with similarity is lost
On the lot.

In representation and a burgundy flourish do we decide

What futures we have.

Frost roof, fire kitchen.

We no longer have the winter flu,

--we eat red hots,
Fan ourselves, see ourselves

In each other.

Meditation.

Small things embrace deliberation.

See the heart, extricated;
The veins, arrested.

Nothing flows.

Be small and enjoy that nothing has
A number.

Swell when the variable fills your
Belly.

Rambunctious.

Most likely
You won't go home happy.

Most likely, too,
You will
Derive you:
Packed,

Fat,

Sentient, for sure,

But fat nonetheless.

See them through the steamed duck gut window, strafed
By aromas and grease
From the shift.

See expectation, poise.

Not for nothing:

See the beginning.

The actor.

I am a tree fallen in a popular road:
Science says the bough grows weary with fussing.

Then again,
Science says there is a bough.

Indecency.

Do you like the moon--
The molten discount thing that I gave you?

Once we were lowly,
Silvered in grease and labor with gaping eyes,
Wanting eyes.

There where your moon marked a rippling
Detente

The causality of light streaked with poetic
Bravado.

Do you see the gift in it?
This time the world did not so much enclose upon the miracle,
The miracle cleaved to the soiled cleft.

The world was like a dog, it obeyed with profound thirst.

Illumination music.

To learn the bagpipes
Can take a veritable lifetime of fumblings.

One must struggle with the knuckles, the valves,
The hips marbling against
form and gravity.

An amorphous thing that sings and can be found lamenting in the staff of air--
Though study defies it it's not so uncommon.

What is--
Pried against definition
--and too, against form and gravity is the
Nervous laughter engendered
By a learning grasp.

To whom is it not the illumination music?

And to the player who struggles
How is he to know success from the clamor of
Worldly noise at hand?

The nightly feed.

Sometimes I fall in love with just the

Beginning

And it's as though I've been contracted to

see it through.

There goes your kid down the slide,

There, the election results--

--he won.

There, a minute clutter from a helicopter team or

Beneficence. Upon further review

Yes,

He was safe.