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.