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.