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.