Quick fixes.

We are not unstoppable.

What pours from our leaky faucets

Will contaminate the water of the world.

There are pewter-lined realizations and plumbers'

Quick fixes

But in backing away the system of sewage is clear.

We drain when we fetch what we swear we can hold.

The way we think about things together.

The nearest things are often the fastest,

Heavenliest

--and care-free:

But they're cursed.

It has taken us so long to puzzle out our inborn meaning

Bracelets droop on our girls' wrists, and the music that surrounds us

Is a kind of ebullient junk.

Look past the surging welt of a hill where

One will go and be discovered,

And one girl will set her dream against the malignant stars.

The anniversary landscape.

"That never get up no more place is here"

-Langston Hughes, 'Graveyard'

The wind is full of breath.

As if coaxing water from the sea, or

The broadest tear ducts,

The Earth must sing.

Such green songs are these--

Bereft of patterns.

They remind me

That this shower like so many showers

Must fall,

Flooded with cheers of defeat. Meanwhile.

The wind is full of breath.

Purity.

Please, never forget

Purity--

Not as a law,

But as a blinded promise.

And promise to remain unkept.

And there, upon a song.

When upon the wilderness' stake you encounter a feast

You must eat.

And there, upon a song,

You will discover amid your senses and

Turbines

The need to dance.

But this is not a simple observation. And you were augured

In your own breed of impulse and recognition.

And this land is not the same as it was a moment ago.

Two aspects.

What we've come to know as surplus

Is only the surplus of wisdom--

So little a focus,

So wild an aspect

--alongside another aspect.

The green preparations.

Once the bearing of rain came from a window

And all the world was hungry.

Folks were disturbed that it didn't get more attention--

There was a halt cleft in the program--hard shoulders relaxed, soft.

No courageous acts. Nothing was allowed.

The game stopped.

It was as if the green preparations of sound came to beg at the door

Of a wanton color. Finally--and this is important--

We let ourselves say so,

We didn't know where to look, or how to behave.

Don't let me down.

You know when the wind blew and they lugged their gear

Onto the roof.

They played 'Don't Let Me Down' and the wind blew, even though they knew it was over.

They were told to stop

While businessmen and some alert fans gathered below in the wind.

The work of time will come, and the wind will carry it in and carry it away.

Some were across the rooftops, their speech halted

And their hands nearly idle but for the anticipatory joy that they were catching something as it fell

--the wind, and it was over.

The spire sigh.

History doesn't sigh. It doesn't tally any of the devastated towers;

It relents to the lasting ones, the obstinate obelisks open

To the batterings of hours.

When nobody's awed 'oh' rises, and none await the designer's hand

Love will stop apologizing, and fall back upon the land.

Love haiku.

Small promises are lethal--

The heart floods with them.

Each dizzy yes is a song.

A girl.

Music is homeless, it once belonged to heaven.

And it was crucial enough to the winged inhabitants that

--at first, it was allotted a single golden room

Where they could go and lie down.

Then the founders expanded their brilliant notion and a

Palace rose in the cloud, as you'd expect a volcanic island:

Peering on the senses from the sea,

And the riches of the room swelled with

The sleepy dusk.

Composers, though, they loved that.

Never ones for sun tans or girls

They merely embraced the underlighted origin

The ground zero, like it was a bronze idol,

Or a memory.

The other sugars you know.

The sweet berth is so unlikely to be banked down--

to spare bank civilizations, To spare our towns.

It must flow up and low and

To either side.

And when it goes,

Such a startling light, it aweighs,

Crests--I must, short of knowing just suppose,

In moonly sucrose.

The lyre bird.

Portrait of Ella Mae Morse, singer.

Words have had it unkind,

Taking the better parts of

Centuries to finally get

The standard tongue's bent

And thrive.

Not so for the lyre, a bird, land-bound,

Left here, who was hatched out

Surprisingly as his throat cleared and

Songbook already fit with sound

He corrupts once in his own favor then

Once against.

He knows his own name amid the glossary

Of sounded-out animals, a choir of

Would-have-beens and precipitants of

The echo--the rest of them, they scurry.

To the evolved shoulder--fit as the bird's sharp tongue,

Carry. Your job as opposed to flying is to carry.

The moss ark.

Ed Ruscha - 'Me' (American 1999)

The moss ark was built less out of assistance or purpose

Than it was of substance.

Once, as its own soul dictated, it was carried--

Having been sought and excavated,

Then allotted space in worshipping eyes

Then buried.

See, in fact, how gracefully the observer glances to

Read the carved line on the stone,

Then hurries to look back?

Off map.

I shouldn't go too far aside of my own foot--

But I was humbled to research and disregard, and push--

I did look. Nobody was at the party.

The only one who

Hasn't found her way home

Was with me.

The vigilant lamp.

Laughter is practical. The seam prepares to

Split, but instead it fashions

A zipper.

Watch, now, lover,

Watch how fallow it once was

And how wasn't no longer

Substantially-and neither faithfully, is.

(He is full of dreams to buy your birthday--its candlesful of wishes.)

Empty swimming pool.

Ernie Bushmiller - Sluggo Dreams

The depths lie somewhere between white and an ineffective blue,

Drained, but cluttered--Waiting to be raked up.

Neighbor girls who remember the summer

Tattletale on its leafy edge, faces just--

Wheatswollen.

The room they take up is where I was when I saw myself

Admired.

The surface glare broadens like an I surrender flag for the kids

nightly.

It's why I love her,

Strewn around these kinks and nicks

And purpling knuckles

Is the memory of the hands with which I

Once prayed.

This parishoner gets spared, and the rocks get treated kindly by the light.

This place on Earth must certainly be Heaven.

The stream-smoothed rocks, one after another glisten--

It's as if they have captured the naive burnishes from Heaven

And amid the cursing flush and grit disbursement they glow.

The moon is beyond reproach.

The beating heart serves behind glass--but don't worry!

The glass is colorless and the message is colorless.

Each thing thrives. Look!

The glare is beyond reproach and the palpitations are as well.

The onlookers gather and their humid awe gathers. We turn the lights out

and the moon is beyond reproach.

Mansion.

So seldom do we grasp the plentitude of what we admire.

We fall over in love and then we are lost in these vaults--

For the cup and the humbling wage.

Love poem.

Wait, it's not that there's new honey!

But I look at the dare of the sun-dried grass

And it's so flush and winding

--and Her!

Is it not new honey stripping me of

what little wisdom I ever had?

I will always beg for you by name.

Andy Goldsworthy (U.K. Recent)

The heart is contrary,

And droops when it is responded to.

Cracked in wisdom it hasn't a policy about lying--

Just a policy for being lied to.

Oh.

Rembrandt van Rijn - Self Portrait, Later in Life (Dutch 1660's)

Oh,

Acreages and old folks' eras parse the rented landscape--

In each throat a maturing voice drones its

Rich and poor story.

But none are quite like the cock-bell song as it arrives in the humidity--

And goes.

The goodnights.

Sometimes it is similar to a balloon--

Each tensile point of its tent is sponsored

By the wild air.

This is also true about the night. Lovers fill them

With wishful "goodnights"; so much goes into each.

Finally one day we'll be forced to rename it;

The stormy "I love you" place will need

Us to call it something.

But what?

Your breath bricks up and floods the floor; the architecture

Falls on me. My breath is lost.

I cannot speak and I wouldn't if I could now.

Keys lack wisdom--

Good thing, I lose them too.

This dog is falling asleep beside me.

And my memories, oh what are they?

Just look how the apartment ends and the rest begins.

The crop circle.

We have crossed the wood and path

To find a wild mosaic,

One in our aspiration similar to

The one we'll leave.

Niggerhead.

"Indeed, I can see no reason, but the most deceitful one, for calling the religion of this land Christianity."

-Frederick Douglass

These specific linen alterations

They don't stain less--

If forgiven

The hum of starch mercy can't assuage the havoc of their ceremonial uses.

Applauding the love of every gregarious grasp, clasp untorn,

These which we seek to protect can neither be created

Nor destroyed,

Nor re-cherished in familiar uniform.

Imagine you, young solider, not so much as less of the hem.

So much as more of what is so faithfully and foolishly worn.

Tomorrow these emeralds.

Bo Bartlett - Dreamland (American 1998)

Could it possibly be all the staining love I have seen

Is now before me?

My eyes brim with jeweled tears--

Easily and free--

Each one confiscated from a heart,

Each labeled,

Each as promised restored to the return addressee.

Each, my Love, safe.

Tomorrow these emeralds will grow amid the grasses.

This conveyance of the soul you too shall see.

Their river of time.

The beloved bank-side sleepers

And their river of time--

How nearby are either to

The witless hand

As it endures all it touches?

The speechless variety.

And isn't the quenching speech of the speechless variety

Like the water you find between beached and distant rocks?

And out of necessity do you not marvel--not at the quality, nor at the timbre,

But differently,

At the dearth of the company you receive.

On the Honeycrisp apple.

Sugar, though icily practiced,

Doesn't stand a chance

Against the dissolving search

Seduction makes prior to

Leaving the caramel of pink

For the blue enameled moraines

As they lie patiently, then couch.

Don't let me be mistaken--it suffices

To provide where healing needs its own new swatch.

It endures on a scab, on the pittance of a patch.

The standard.

Space contributes to the sum of the antonym

And to the reticule the tongue's gem--

You found this jade-colored abscess--

So much as to touch it and ascertain the stone's fetch--

Its alien gleam you met and rain use the same language:

This is in the passing favor of most markets

And its' currency is useless.

The company you receive.

And isn't the quenching speech of the speechless

Variety like the water you find between beached

And distant rocks! And out of necessity do you

Not marvel? Not at the quality

Nor at the timbre, but differently,

At the dearth of the company you receive?

"We walk."

Loud song,

It is as much to bend the grasses

As it is a mandate to drown the fortunes

Of the graceless.

Breakfast.

For a man named Troy Davis, about whom seventy-two hours ago I knew nothing.

The casualties were grown in the soil of a single imagination.

Maybe one errs to curse, prefers roses, or so and so

Thinks the harvest of flowers has a brain and knows.

But cup away those weak young hands,

And impart in them what they need:

Let leaves concede their rainy awful deeds;

Let the corpulent colors of petals bloom--

And as roses be polite: let those go on and bleed.

Temper goodness in their hungry fingers and unwitheredness.

In the little--relieve them from the slump of roses, the sins upon their noses.

Clear the formidable stems from the table and roses and all they to us mean:

Prepare a place for silliness to express,

And waffles with blueberries.

The month in unexpected rain.

The rain adjusts us

Falling on the rednecks--the unusualest of intellects

Neither without the fraying work of purpose nor

Dependent on it.

Trace it like Hebrew or Cajun: is this our dialect

Meager, if unsatisfying and locally abrupt--son to Mother

Other to confused other?

These rare rains are young--they sparkle with buckish cursings

In stride they even the road, the work

The burstlings.

Like an animal.

Need knows only need, and withers.

So to the fortunes of youth goes only want.

How like the poor--

They beg to touch the lamp that wealth neglects.

A generation of dust meets the eager palm--A wisdom--

It is a hunger and it is a thirst.

The substance of the prang.

The speechless variety must be moved;

It does not move itself.

Think of it as the block in the trunk of the prang.

Every so many thousand years it must be pulled from the shelf of its own body,

And along with the others rearranged--

You know, we err and lose the aspect of our humility in

Raw and witless daylight.

The forest.

Endanger the soul with purpose.

These trees and porcelain breezes--

They are heaving and rich with rain.

The shadows awaken new with the sun.

Fight harder.

Local.

The impairment of kisses lies in the nearby wind.

My blame disrupts the jade middle of

You. My palm grows with a nearby heart,

Deputized, I have two pulses to take

And look in on.

Bee line.

IF being was fat and what it suggests then

The air admiring between us

Would not negate our address--

There would be an edible line,

And I would fatten this line

And consume the weight.

Obsese, ill-fed,

I would arrive.

My belly would impair the white hill and mimic the moon;

You would eat it up and in lying next to me

Be happy in local honey--cupping handfuls--

No cops.

I live for you.

The mop at the end of the night is a lot like the curse

Of civility.

Adherent grease lacquers the floor. It's a record.

It's a way of saying,

"I wasn't dishonest; my curse was honest."

My civility you walk upon has left streaks.

And you must at a glance choose and subordinate yourself

To the hour.

September haiku.

Paul Thek - 'Dust' (American 1987)

That yee shall be children of your father which is in heauen; for he maketh his sunne to rise on the eiull and on the good, and sendeth raine on the iust, and on the vniust

-The Gospel of S. Matthew, 1611.

The fragrance of rain

Is a mere dream to the tongue.

Taste, prosperity!

Detailed representation.

Read closely, you'll see no watery ripples for waves written

In the atlases where the oceans build, rebuild and bequeath--

Nor help from an illustrator's presentiment

of brine terrain danger where

The rocks and white phantoms wait down beneath.

Nor, too, is there no helpful key for the dry land located in between,

For the cragged folds of fool's gold

That lie around--

Impatient too

For a fool's trembling gold-dig to chip away at custodially

And exhume.

The passageway.

The itineraries of the young marble like treasure maps with plans. Unedited shoulders,

They tan. And we shed tender leaves: This process

It humbles us.

Find El Dorado once! I'm begging you

With rust that was once furious blood gushing.

With just once.

With the barest once.

Untitled haiku.

To the rainy glass

The residue exceeds the

Treasures of kings.

To the drain grate in the street.

Wassily Kandinsky - 'Decisive Pink' (Russian 1932)

Breeding macabre and ochre and pink leaves seem to be,

And have come to find you

Where they meet.

Are you so lowly discolored since we mated to create you that

You count them

As you eat?

Lights!

An imperilled generation must here have dared and bloomed:

Cursed brood in the simplitude where darkness rouses;

Praised, as well, upon the spark of its flimsy fuse--

Lights!

Managed by the turf of electricity,

Needing to use it--d'you think it might falter or

Otherwise its riches disprove?

D'you think our kindling hands are worthless, or somehow engineered, rude,

Espoused in the gleaming to simply be monstrous

And protrude?

Well, do you?

The finest attention paid.

The riches of wisdom and hearsay are good--if half true,

Shot from vibrant tongues

As, quickly, in speaking, they

Glance at their losses.

Disposable amusements.

Sarah Bernhardt

The contentious merit of a dandelion remains
Protected by debate.

Is it contagious? Does it pollute the lawn?

That's tough to say: It charms the field,

However. It charms the field and that is final and that is so.

Combed in the locks of its sunny hair
Is the stuff that wins lost children

Well before flowers have their chance.

Joy and a small knife wound.

Loudly and to nothing

It springs from the tip of me,
A congestion of ruby leaves and lips and sad rusty suns.

The coolness inches on the glands of the air.

How soon and regularly it visits with its subterfuge of
Blushes!

Creation.

The rumor that surrounds you is like bathwater.

Are you bigger than you seem? Is there a joke
About the others your tongue is
Holding onto?

The walls have a heart. I suspect your knees in the light
Have a heart.

The cleft upon the wild.

This park closed hours ago. And everyone has since

Disappeared behind the curtaining ripples of voting booths.

Even now, aimless and undecided, I imagine the tepid poetry
Of reason. The sensations flee.

An evening purse of birds and blackened greenery slouches--

There!

It is yawning, as it prepares to sleep.

Rat whines, adhering to glue floor.

I wonder if Joseph Mengele, too, awoke in the orange juice sun and wondered if that pocketful of posies in bed
# 4573902

Wasn't really the emissary of love's true heaven.
Sadly, and likely without a feather of regret, he detected in himself

A yes: Yes, courrier.

The discoverers' class.

Relieve the seal on this hermetic room--

It is full of candles and ages of smoke.

Incense returns,

The year, too.

Every orange strike upon the dominant sky is

An impression of our disregard,

As sure as if we filled armored skins and

Pried for the redolences

Of those black wicks which lit our anointed failures...

Beauty is a thing of the past.

I am rewarded to crouch behind a new mask,

A bracingly ugly crutch--

One as much I fooled around and found as

I pieced together and made.

If it lows it must, in monstrous notes

So beautifully track to transpose--

This thing has a rat's unceding heart,

And follows a dog's unerring nose.

The things we must never forget once they have begun.

Resisting is the watchful part of love

That insures certainties.

There is no membership card you get, and beyond casual scrutiny

The unaccredited sunset is simple-mindedly let in:

Here you are...

The gulf you find might just as easily have brayed out in the

Elbows of the real-life lakes, the fingerlings--

A gulf that, as if itself presuming,

Imposes its own full depths purely as an example of

the murky religion of its bathers, its opinions of the sun

Strobe with light--as if charismatic,

Dismissive.

A season begins.

This air we replenish--

It was never in danger.

Moths plump on the dust in our closets.

We were eaten away from, but we were never

In danger.

What words you could find if you searched where

Displaced bits of outer space await.

These bite marks represent the fabric we risked

And in the course of a season folded--

But we were never in danger.

The curse of the smoke and the music.

The climber was formulated in heart and purpose to

Find the mountain;

Color was bred into the sinew to disturb

Love.

Each impression governs its source, and resembles the

Parent glance.

Sometimes when you speak--above the curse of the smoke

And the music,

I feel I should cover my ears. I don't want to disrespect you.

You have spoken. And I am living in the

Wish to lie empty as if you'd never but still could

If you chose to.

The lease on this place.

Old boughs fill custodially with the cost of living;

Get a tattoo so it's clear that

This lot was you.

The occupancy of a bone--were it like an

Apartment is divided in thin wall--

Sinews of growth strewn in pulltabs,

And the wall cracks where the surface

Suffered years of focus and a smile's sag.

So few things truly happen in a vacuum anymore.

So few things truly happen in a vacuum anymore.

The cultures are interconnected--and every spice

Of humankind

Heats their beds when they're gone. They have shared

Damp bath towels--

Too bashful to shower as one.

And they share the tried estimations in their eyes.

Invisible always, visible.

If in creasing it flirts or flatters to enhance

Your beauty then invite it--dignity too.

But, woman in a hat, now,

Does it enhance you?

Written words in public, there, they--aren't you?

Ducks crossing the atmosphere where you work,

Your venerability growing rich with lines--

Invisible always, visible. I only came here

Because you roused my suspicion and I looked--

My question was loud and ceaseless in the quiet of the

Ford's dream--its watery flue.

Wealth.

Put poise ahead of fortune. Even the

Idle bodies draw gazes from eyes too alert to

Rest.

There is a make believe destiny that

Follows lazily the fingers,

Counting.

(Imagine what they could touch.)

Out of the garden.

"I only intended that you need never be content with nothing."

-God to Adam upon the Expulsion. Par Lagerkvist, 'The Eternal Smile', p.65 (trans./ed. Hill & Wang Pub., 1971)

The purpose of a white curtain is to remind the fortunate of

The wind that visits the window.

And to the displaced, there is a cheery friendship in the pleats of

Rain.

The mechanics of breathing and getting used to it have only ever failed me

Once or twice.

Drum beat.

We're not so fortunate that we can claim to have known

The guy who invented marble. Or

The woman who invented an open book in the grass.

She must've been there looking at herself. What a shadow on her feet!

What grass!

Someone--I guess, approached the table with bashful taste

And said, I don't claim to be Ingres, but I spend all my time thinking;

I invented the way I look at a girl in public.

Today is a kneeling crawlspace in the glands of the wood,

With neither cursive nor curious searcher.

And I am not going to lie, I get lost in it.

Today I invented a door to a house

Just to be thought of.

The disasterette.

The lips I remember pickled when she smiled--were too shy

To just bite into a raw onion.

Her teeth were small, and her palate drew from the scud of

Childhood.

I want to impress on you mustard, mother-of-pearl.

The garnishes borne to the fragrant curd of

The curb--

Our blueberries are bulging with noxious wine.

By my apartment.

Before you were beautiful you were informative and you were wise.

The herald of moonlight owed you all its money.

I miss the flutes of columns I've never touched

And the wild you.

The end of summer.

At the sound of gold we rush forth.

Autumn is nearby and our forts

Lie in ruins,

Blushing and smoldering.

The you.

The footsteps of a hurricane fall to Earth.

Her cousins in the rain cry as they too

Fall to Earth.

To succumb to gravity is to be humbled in the most primitive sense. And

Her heart flows across me,

Mass, drums in ceremony, the need for an article when I call out

As we flood--beating.

The carriage of being.

A point in space waits just like any other--exposed.

These ex-wives we can love and call pillows...

Play.

Handicapped with gauze across your eyes,

Or the jinxed air of a rumor,

It's no matter.

The scud met your tender shoulder, and--green though it all was,

It'll always hurt.

Dear girl.

Purpose, what a match you are for delicacy and the turbines of color.

River.

The snow that has fallen on the breast of this river

--long after I've forgotten it,

I'll never know.

The eminent culture.

First I wanted a life in architecture. I saw the wimpy

Bank--in spite of robberies and recession, its

Place and its parking lot stood.

Other ideas built over that one: Law, heart surgery, nameless thing with

A backpack in Europe, eyes wide with detection and

Eyelids for a bit of a rainy hood.

I was aphoristic when it shut down and the weeds began to bloom.

I was young and stupidly Jeffersonian. I was standing in the room.

On occasion the gulf of serenity has adapted its coast to fear.

Whispers.

There are people I've come to know strictly by their whispers.

They starve--their sayings, when they speak, begging for a squeak

Of a rhyme, the mint of rhythm,

The time that buddies up to washed-

Out time.

I know the surfeit of their graves;

I know what the graves they build will look like.

The pattern of chaos.

Everything real is incorrigible. Just cast a glance

Out and see what a mayhem becomes the light!

I don't mean to defend the bully,

But I grew a green wood and decent rhubarb in his shadow.

I balked at discovery. When I saw I pretended he was

A rose due for us all.

A breach of practicality and effort.

Poverty is a state like no other; it has a way of drawing itself into focus when slack inches in the eye or heart. It isn't as simple as so I go without money, or so I go without food this morning. This state is so I go without comfort to adorn the senses, and with threads of peace and none to spare. The most humbling and humiliating conflict is uncertainty: Who's to blame? Who, too, might breach practicality and effort to refresh the field?

Foolish.

The scull is hopeless: It hews at the jade hills of seawater, is

Kissed by the white girls of light--as indifferent

To the oarsman's wishes as it is

To the calculations of his sculpted path.

Each might sing with her voice. Each, like a faint, cleaned-out shell--

Like a beach-foisted whale might, after her sublime fact,

Be joked about.

The bottle on the shore.

The sea is built on jerked-around

Risks and pulsations.

I hope what you love has come ashore

And that your threats to go without have

Turned orange with natural humility.

The cobblestone road.

Lush urgency carries us on the path,

Giving us occasion to pity those whom we encounter in our light,

Then pass.

But in truth, it is neither haste that has brought us this far, nor sluggish

-ness on the others' parts. Relinquish to Nothing:

This road is--

How do I say this!?

--sometimes shorter and sometimes longer. These cobblestones have

Had occasion to glow with fire and be unquenchable.

Regardless of those dear and foreign passers-by the walk is sacred.

On youth observed in summer, age 35.

Below the breeze of envy notwithstanding,

This livid season blooms in the custody of our senses.

Away from the greazy scorch of our work the young greet the Earth

With marvelous insults.

A mist pleases the imagination with its feathery shade and days

Shoot leaves between

Their dreaming fingers--

Inches above the dirt. We have always relied on the grace of youth,

While those sleepwalking hands spring open to clench a

Tuft of their sun.

July.

Each sense tells the soul its purpose. The tongue tastes

Everything. And the eye sees everything.

What land have we not fallen down upon?

What energy has not already forced itself inside

And blinded us?

The policy of blood.

Take this ordinary heart, for instance.

It is unattractive and beats with uncanny precision.

It navigates in between thin weeds, and hovers in me

On the toughest soil.

Nothing can grow.

So secretly is a moving thing brought to life, learning lessons

As it dies.

The heart and the weeds: tough, tough.

The silences.

The difficulty in loss tends to lie less in the silences of a voice as it does in the energetic reliance we foster for the breath that brought our hearts to life.

A lie.

Invention spills from the lips of a singer.

Each crease is like a cipher.

The first, and the next and the rest--

Neatly creases.

To believe in any one is to love the purse of everything.

The origin of a ballad.

Loyal ears were cupped that way biologically--they foundered to hear it--

A whirr grew out of a bellowing.

The cause was pitifully faint, said by

Wings no less brittle than they were certain.

It was a song owing to the marbling sky,

Or if more discernible it might've proven, conversely,

The sky owed itself to it.

I must encourage us.

What a sound you leave--it's almost nothing,

like congruent dashes in rainy mud

Or pawed ink--kissing wet paper,

Running from the volume language.

What a sound you--You, pull from your slop

Your sleeve.

The land, indeed, is better hid--

Graffitied. The rain is a common excuse for

It's charming slashes--

And your tongue--reticent as it is,

commands shivering asses.

Hectic schedule.

Busily,

As if writing poems about being alive--

The launchers have waited, their hands stained with

The strawberries of dragging ropes, blistered and dry.

With might and no minute to spare they line the

Wood

And let go.

July poem.

The superb, peeled orange is
Part of a team of

Things

Similar to the Sun.

Provenance.

Dirt is specific,

And lies gaily distinguished from waste.

Piles, bleachcrippled piles

of the former lack the purpose of planning.

The crescent light ought choose one,

But Which?

The practice of warmth.

Give this clumsy arm credit.

As it extends beyond the common grasp

A new energy is born:

Such hands like this arm are like worn and other hands--

Their credits fumble and divulge their worth.

The practice of waiting.

What a specifically human headache it is for each to look past the savage

Leaves,

When the savage leaves are still speaking.

Stop for one voice. Now wait for the next.

With as much of the senses it is a hardening practice, with it too

It is a formulation of the soul.

June is so early, now.

Just before drowsiness sets in, and

Each guest is like every

Other guest, they go furtive, and rest.

Paths go as they have always gone,

And to the others less familiar and nefarious

paths curtly crest--

To the right fork their pinked wishes--

To the left their wittled, if unrecognized best.

The colors in needy eyes.

In the bough and without adjustment, innocence rows. It shares a tree with

A mysterious breeze. It grows accustomed to change.

The heart might as well be the colors in needy eyes--

The eyes, half-accustomed, bewildered by their share

Row. They row.

Teeth marks.

The color of the first impression

Differs widely from the one that lasts.

Upon the bowed shape of the scar it appears, and the color

Is not far behind.

Too far ahead, however, is the bent of age,

And its differentiation of skin; these things fill a sac

In the hostilities of space. They are neither foot

-prints nor statements, though either jealously claims

Followers. Though either admits its personal and savage

Nursery.

In lieu of flowers.

Churn out in pared banquet fruit

That personal ghost language whose stem

Is more of a root,

And whose stammer is more of a brigade stomp,

In lieu of flowers.

Contiguity.

Before the next light reclaims its lion share of the blue plain

A star or so will give shape to

All the things that are naively embraced.

Order.

For my Mother.

If it was ever exactly so--and if so that it appeared so, so

Likely was it then from the ideal to grow in error.

A hex, then, on your eyes--and mine, as if a hex upon the glare

Of a jewel--a hex therefore goes on the wearer.

But couch away a kiss for her, the birds and grasses

of her day who paused--and caused, and mothered it.

Her apron is seen thin, her perfume caught, but faint--

It's essence roams like thought (or memory lost in fragrant deposit.)

Once there came about in Order a familiar kind of neck I know--

One like mine in aspect--if better, and worse-exposed in my guesses.

The milk of the veins lies aglow, the pallor grows young on

The laboring, as the throat a pure secret or so holds close, and

Suppresses.

The words.

Skepticism is free to roam and multiply in the blood

And eyes of our beloved onlookers who see yet

Miss

The destructive promise we've made to beauty.

The words.

Be the sum of finding and

I will give

You the humble adequacy

Of a treasure.

The words.

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

-Meryle Secrest, from 'Modigliani'.

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

Spirituality is nothing more than the common and unreliable

Concussion the listener suffers hearing another voice

Arrange familiar words--

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

And your lungs fill each time

With songs.

Wherever.

Abandon me upon the stage of the open sky--

For either the security or your release

--or the ease of peace.

But keep in bluest trust my shadow--

The eave of which leans to

Cool your hand.

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

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

The story in your trash.

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

Leisure rests on the lap of work,

And all the Persian rugs and things you have

Have a story.

Dream with your lungs and heart next time you dream.

Dream with the places your polder and mother peat

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

Dream, as later, awake,

You can accommodate the rhythmic homilies,

And strew your namesake on the belly of the world.

St. Matthew will know your name, your secrecies

The indelible stitch of your scrap of a hem--

His pen bleeding, his aim

Accursed,

If bountifully replete.

The cropped hip.

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

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

Lonely wind.

Smoke thin enough to bypass the feathers of a fan

Finds a stop in each diaphanous glance.

Each star seeks a buttonhole in which it might wink,

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

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

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

Perfume of rain failing.

Creatures of the intellect,

To some you will seem idiotic, while to

Others you will be unduly bright--it depends.

Those of you who have foraged will

be graven in the dearth of the intellect--

Your searches will happen during storms

And force of thought will quiet you.

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

You will be graven in the springtime of your things,

Your searches will happen during storms--

Force and perfume of rain failing.

Mid April.

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

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

There is not dear enough regret in the contemporaneity

Of summer

To address the swimming distribution of the depth,

The painful joy into which

We will plunge

To alleviate

Its green and swinging sledge.

The trout.

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

Vulnerability.

Isn't it obvious, especially

In these derelictions of rain,

Warped through the weft--

How we must run and

In running abandon the

The thread of our cautions.

The mild warmth.

The eyes glance immobile,

Though the glare speeds

Its pink and undelegated mile.

As he approaches the light

Swarms visit the charring birth--

Shape vanishes in hungriest white.

If to count you could know

Count all the windows

In his dreary room, so

As the bent shoulder

Of the younger burns

There is due reverence--

If not envy, in the elder.

Mild warmth falls--and pardon my abrupt sidetrack,

Convinced upon the sweep of the verdant span.

It thrives, though the animal is always held back.

It suffers its each counted track.

The flourish

For Settignano

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

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

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

The age of miracles.

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

Ira Gershwin, 'A Foggy Day'

If I was away from home these swamps and karat swales

Would seem sweet.

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

These furious fanning rainy folds.

Gold for gold--

Inspired, if not informed by the abnormalities of wisdom

I would fall--and meet.

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

See the whispers of sand so rarely sold,

Head from salt-scraped hand it's easily known

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

The copies of affection.

The copies of nature lie in nature. The copies

Of affection have yet to be discovered.

How beautifully you look back.

Girl in the rain.

I am a slave to memory:

Bring it forth, all

In the ecstatic fortresses and

Horse-drawn masses,

Anything that is like it.

I will lay my head on its tracks.

Do you remember telling me you thought the rain was invisible

The way it parted at our gentle command?

Favorite song.

Each song has a kind of sweet birth,

As if alerted ahead of its own resonant rush

That your neck bends to

Suit your ear.

Of New Orleans.

Over time the heart develops an irregular valve--

An extra oath.

It hushes its own rifled respirations, warmed slew of slushes,

Bygone and pearline pinked gut punches.

To look now you'd swear you were facing a Polidori

From that crumpled bit

Of New Orleans--

It is after all a physical place--a thing

Inundated with verdant swill--look and smell,

With dreams--

With dreams.

The picture of late March.

Maybe we are leaflets of what fell in love,

Be prepared.

Schedule your meetings and next pints of

Things duly cushioned and frosted.

Be prepared.

Allow for yourself a pause--however arhythmic, however slow,

Say it is likely to be

And go.

However steadfast you would have been before

You need now to be

Go.

Imagine how the auburn sugar of the stalk stands--

It works better melted down:

Go on now.

Chase this apparition of time and the dreariest foment.

The gaze will untrained, pie-eyed and silly

Go.

April.

Let us let go.

Let us with less pride

Acquiesce and borrow:

The sun furnishes with color.

The April wind with

the richest swallows of silver,

And the Earth swells in drunken joy.

The emeralds.

Curiosity begets curiosity:

I wonder about the exquisite things I have

Lost--

How they floated on,

Yellowing then,

I imagine, greening.

Such riches bud across the hands of spring.

Did you name each to each as I did?

Did the marble sky impress you in their

Full and drinking eyes--

As

It did with me?

Perfection.

I could never govern Nature.

In silken lines

And knuckly spines I have in fact

Seen the illusions of perfection

Among the perfect

Imperfection.

Once goes the rust of bleeding leaves.

Next the ecstatic foam of coupling water

In the fresh and open dews.

Once goes the compact of brave light--

Next the cowardice into which all eyes take comfort

And see.

A ruin.

Was it the miracle of your first death?

Have you even sufficient breath

To speak of it with?

Could the sinewy sprawl

And humblest caul on stunned lung

And tensile arm incumb?

The archway descends

In the way of the Sun--

A parabola, a narrative

A ruin.

Was it the miracle of your first death --

That vault, up, then down,

City cranky but asleep, blood already brown--

Tell me,

Did you find those remnant beats your chest

Promised to thrive on

If found?

The body.

What human composure lacks in discipline it makes up for

In the chill of its endurance.

Dream less.

Dream less

If dreams now mean less of me.

Bully your thoughts til they cave

And prize me.

How good are you with wishful things?

Do you command what is good less in a frost,

Knowing thawed it

Will heat

And be needed?

Be safe.

Raise less than usual amid these fraught fixtures--

These forlorn and needy faces--

Raise so little

That the necessity of it might too

Avail so little--

And throw down your shields,

Filed shivs. Such

Lanky giving arms, they will die before

Even once trying to stop holding onto you.

Even now a prism erupts;

This is the hearth of your arms.

Go now.

Be more gentle than necessity commands you to be.

Suspicion.

With less than exactly what does a flame move.

Gauge the summit carefully--

It is pale, and flickers as if threatened.

How you became who you are.

At last there was a droplet on the window-screen,

Seen in its place and followed

A while.

Observers caught on and eventually

Everyone took note, they looked,

One even wrote:

First came the blink of a different moss-colored eye,

Then a different language was spoken.

The crest rose,

The gloss on the magic of blooming fields froze.

Must you always look back this way?

Can there be no alternative to history

Spoken or

Scientifically imposed?

How gravely pink I have seen you mounting

The hill. It might as well be named for you.

The bankruptcies of the ocean.

"I wish I was a fisherman"

-song

If envy we in decadence and crippling fortunes must

Let us crash then upon it, cast loopholed net wide upon the deep.

We could it's true go hungry

Or languish,

Irreversible and ambitious:

We might in marasmus perish, callus, or in cuts of salted sea

Fish and fruitlessly flesh away ...

We might anyhow pull the harvest back into our arms

Letting it disrupt the swollen

Bankruptcies

Of the ocean!

Go ahead,

Cast loopholed net wide--

For the arms--all arms, that fail to span the fingers merest search yet

Fail to suitably seek,

And, if only by withering suspicions,

Fail to find even a wavering perigee glow

Amid hungry

Pangs.

A quieter vocation.

Imagine the rigor that must be mustered,

The starlight available

And clustered

Upon the backs and plans of fieldly yawns

to invest upon it all.

Hold dear close the chirp of the land,

The dizzying sweat that aids the sound

The air that relents on dampened hand.

Fit your fittest notions for peace, but

Relax, let your good defenses relent.

What goes on out there belongs to the mangy sun

And you, clean cut and summer soft are fitted

For a quieter vocation, a safer action.

Slug.

Slime and its purview

Aren't as similar as you might imagine--

The trails leech onto the way

And the glistening memory shines

In a bright instant.

But the regard--Is the regard anything like what the exterminating

Footstep leaves?

Guess all the ways you change it--In

Shape, color--distrustful less now,

And regard.

His English.

Weakness at its weakest can only ever be so troublesome.

The protagonist, for example,

Thrives on sympathy read

As if gold thread

Into his English.

The author in his visor, who hides from error,

Still wishes for those leafing fingers to

Touch one shoulder,

Then his next. His grain

Cuts one way and his prayer similar,

Yet another.

The big day.

In the three days leading up

To your opening

Your sculpture aged as you

Rubbed sandpaper on her cheeks

And filled a stone girl's ear

With the embarrassing

Words of the lazy word gods.

Its green season.

Take care.

See the way the light yawns to regard

The polder.

In the magnificence of the one there

Shows a wretchedness upon

The other--

Its tawny green season and bitter

Sweetness.

The flood.

The poor river endures every gauntlet punch when it passes.

Pity the slippery lips trying to talk, brown running over with rain.

Age guides the shrinking vein to shove

Where growth is unlikely--

And to grow.

The aliases of nature.

The grapes like the ones you carry,

Not to prove anything is perfect,

Not for color--

See them go to

Waste.

Next season you will get that perfume in you,

Salivating and picking up the

Omen:

They suffer and their names change.

Holy, holy.

There is wrong in the lead that colors the veins.

And in the air we breath are choking roses

Blossomed.

Take it all in, as infinitely and sumptuous as they seem.

The this.

Isn't the harshness of the mechanical silence

Of my dear

So dissimilar to

The mechanical silence?

Amid the noises.

The prismatic series of less than you

Is less likely to stop a heart than

Say,

A wounded animal amid the noises, the tin delicacy of

A harpsichord,

Or that silliness we birth when

Simulating an animal

In its foment.

On youth observed from middle age.

In the thickest of the wind

Flee the spoils of daylight.

The hours consist of countless hands,

Pulling at every bulging pocket--

They won the corruption

Of true neighbors

When short of season, and young,

They laid in nearby lawns and

Collected,

Shaded from the impeachments of sharing.

The love dream.

Tell me again how you came to be my grandfather.

How if not for a peculiar dream in which you sprang from a fastmoving train,

Only to look back and

Find in intuition, or the poverty of a glimpse

Maple hair flying in the still and arrested minute--

How you could not look away,

How you could not even fall.

--not even continue to jump.

Tell me again, about that part of me in her

At that age.

The thought of swimming again.

For B.

Between the fins and channels

And into the characteristics of sleep--

One casting arm after another

Reaches further and longer

Along,

Embracing a restless, curling horizon

With nod-offs

And soft eyes.

Winter strikes the passing surface--

From the bank, tilting,

The sun sings a relentless song.

The cane.

In a moment's ounce lies the weight of a ruin

And the fortitude of all that flows and follows.

Old to young, hand to head:

The cane bent once with cause.

Detail of the ruins.

For Fred Nettelbeck

A list of books blows in the empty breeze of a Polidori

--for every title a viewer seeking it,

The way a lover seeks an eye within the eye,

Saying, how many will you look for.

Tranquility.

Good servants fail to distinguish where marble ends

And cheap plaster begins,

Dusting.

The cleanliness of a thing lies in the signature of its peace.

The good casualty.

Ply these wounds with fingers and salve; I am a feast of torture and recognition.

At last, Blue chariot near,

Reclaiming, demanding fitfully in fact...

Decide upon this restless limb how you go!

I will watch you as you move til

I am no longer needed.

Nearing pure darkness.

Harassed by promiscuous gods

The Sun bowed

Gracefully,

Leaning low to pray

For the humblest

Of sentient error.

The cornucopia.

Less of your shoulder comes

In the waking.

And so much adheres to your complements

As if each was arms

Clumsily bringing letters.

The river in late winter.

Trees with reflections for roots

Will be remembered by a

Drunk reader--

Longer.

Mobility.

The heed of silence differs from the heed of

Space.

Wishfully gone from the one is the comfort

Spooned out in travel,

And asked for less

With each deserving look.

Engines.

The heel sinks to prey upon its feast

While the eye rises to it;

To the body go the varieties and engines that bind

Such disparate means.

On the land.

Love is earthly and fast,

And it breaks each morning.

Look first to the traffic beyond the field.

How many stars must have gone dim

Waiting the last

Scant hours for the custodianship

of Light's harp?

And how much of its unseen collision--

Its dust,

Has seeded the field.

The courtship of good words.

Bold classmen's tempests who have collapsed in

White grief on the ocean

And the staring distance that so like a dog

Eats without content or pause,

All things have your hungers known,

Never passing one another,

Yet the growling in their imperiled senses

Gathers you all dearly, with not if,

But just how, down, do we go now.

Bad dream.

An assiduous storm comes on,

In hissing bequeathes its dawn.

The wolf wind of its hymn,

Now dim, begins.

In the furze of its earliest

Disturbance

Goes a black bullwhip

Of its whispering grin.

Baking bread.

Rote hands grow sore from turning the dough,

The wind has fallen off.

Here and there the expectation of broken bread

Returns.

The restoration of air is a humble enterprise--

It begins with nothing.

Plymouth.

When the girl in the shell said, Decent

She didn't err and say Decency,

See,

There's light upon the ribbon

That caters to the box.

See, Sprung very early free:

Pink and innocent-reminding and useless

As a stick of gum packed with baseball cards:

Discover outwardly.

Pink.

Disquietude--

You can hate the dirty grass,

And no one would reproach you.

But boast and this congress will make the bitterest most of it.

Kiss less of its green, Injure your knees less.

Draw romantic bees less,

Get honey, honey, honey less.

Test humblest carnation distress...

Less.

The chop of nature will cleave your ash-colored skull--A lawn stain,

Pink with memory.

Insomnia.

Erring complicates the way on the road

But none of the beams of light.

Miraculously, a custodial trench of grass will stand at attention

In what was once considered

The dark minutes.

Of panic.

The rest of these tears were lost before they were mine.

Darkness preferred the land and left us

To the lonesome of the sky and no good path.

The wall born of earth and the star lit about

Have collaborated on a dim corridor.

Here sailed the ambitions of other travelers;

Here the course of birds

Unchallenged in their buoyant way.

The narrow.

Isn't the gorge in autumn deeper than ever?

See the bloated whalish shadows passing by.

Is that the bull bow of a ghost there,

With the stricture of the dead's

Symphony?

The shadow of a bird rarely depicted in flight.

The raw gut of the crane seldom seen

Bears wind from the wing

And the thunder of emptiness.

Photographed standing

Its still eye holds an amusing crystal

Of the sterile heavens.