Haiku of one.

A hostile witness

Learns his echo, captively.

Kept, he speaks it once.

Amber.

Can't you see the cave is dark where the search enters

And where the bodies go?

People hearing the response are the echo.

Philip Guston (American recent)

People responding are the echo

And

People hearing the response are the echo.

One part of civilization rises with the brim of love.

And

One is always catering.

Like songs.

If you doubt it, then

Rise away. The tiny calligraphies reach left to right.

The green birch in the sideways

Flux of snow

Is as real as any fairy tale--any handwritten note,

Or hummable song.

A road in the fair.

A road in the fair

Takes time to sink into

The traveler--

Into the muscle

Into the thrush of the glands.

Imagine the tranquility of the lane in

This thrushed land.

The footsteps prevail,

Outnumbered by the brawling Earth,

The Conodoguinet Creek.

I'm not gonna find it as you left it--

In incomplete February jade crystals from the grass contours

Crackling out.

Even the words will pass on by.

And when they're remembered the tongue will say

The current's name

With a nod to the origin--but all the same,

Differently.

This hole of an hour.

Attendez-vous!

The night is falling. And all that goes with it is falling.

One has to wonder in this hole of an hour

If all the things we've lost would have been

Lost,

Had we once looked up,

And measured this canopy

And its starry risks.

Standing in line.

The ocean has the semblance of a single file line.

One at a time.

To feel commitment means you are dove-soft--

That there is a raft waiting-- that

Maybe you might get back to where you were.

And even bad order is order.

Did you ever get your breath back?

I forgot to set the alarm.

No one knew because we lived after the echo had gone. I forgot to set the alarm.

People tend to fall in love with ideas, before people. They fall in love before they know what they're doing. One foot is in the light and soon enough the next. And soon enough it's all in the light.

If you speak too softly I'll never change.

O.

The O of a frost is not the center;

It is not where, if intruded upon,

The enclosive enemy would wish

To enter.

It is the oceanic constellation beyond

The cold Earthly wood,

--a piece of you would just as soon swim as watch,

Idealized by the inward traveling goer,

Branching out in oath and walk,

And decidedly through the shaded way

Of could.

Winter party.

Red footprints follow the damp walkway on--

Each memory of the moon is

An itinerary.

The back garden is boughed with Christmas lights,

And Pepsi fizz rises in the booze and

Plastic cups.

I was here when this was still being developed--before music.

The cleft pass.

I know that beyond the fence the stately grass rises, feral, and

Everything with it is feral.

Here in my lawn is the grand cornerstone I plow around.

Some time back it was the key to a wall. But it all

Fell back into the sea of things.

It was drowned in things.

To one side of where it vanished a pulmonescent

Bay of worry stands still.

To the opposite side of it

A way is there.

You must always remember you are a captive heart.

Winter glare.

I have gone to the window to broaden the light.

It's there.

As often in the rain I've hurried to it seal off--

It's there there, unfastened, as well.

So too--it's there-- is the ice-stiff month. So too the waiting.

With each precursor a thing ages and stales.

The rock upon adventure.

What I love might as well have been shaped after you:

A particle of Nature: Adventurous enough to disrupt the rock

While the rest sang out.

Fools.

Henri Matisse - 'Madras Rouge' (French 1907)

Nothing is happening while

The yoke wrests.

It is, let there be no doubt, a world of shoulders;

Some are light, while some sink.

We stop to celebrate,

Our brakes weak and wet.

Where the color of the wood is lost.

The traveler is bound for an unexpected brink,

Where the color of the wood is lost,

And the sun is sunk.

He will not cross the snow.

He will not kiss the woman;

Here, unwarned,

He must wait and resist his own

Silent voice--

The rumble where black lines go.

"The hushing lawns."

The book of our bones can be read

In the thinnest of moonlight.

Its grass is black and dampened, and

Printed in bold letters even a child could read.

But there are no children here today.

Over time the crease of the spine

No longer creates a sound.

Shhh, it all says. The words are quietly singing.

Science fiction.

J. James Audubon - 'Crane' (French American 1832)

Perhaps we were alive when everything happened--

But maybe not.

This dust that settles on all we live to see,

May in fact be the expulsion of another world--

The venom of their snakes, the wind sweet with cold

And coyotes howling.

Rub your fingers together once they've run through it all.

It is a kind of novel

--cursed with a future.

Love songs for the moon.

The shepherds have gone too far into the field.

Their perspiration is flooded with moonlight--

But the flock they share is far away,

Asking one another 'where to next?' and

'What if all our lives we've been riveted to the stars,

eating and falling in love here

Incorrectly?'

Nearby poetry stumbles from a singing boozehound--

His flock was abandoned yesterday,

And the moon, yesterday.

Stand.

Joan Mitchell - 'Blue Territory' (American 1972)

I have heard you carrying on while I slept.

There is a way of expression that comes from an

Old place--some of it is laughing and some of it is

Listening to you.

Such a duty it is to gather up these crooked toys

And busted things.

As if from behind a thick, cold curtain i see the playful edge of the sun.

This play pen, this Parthenon, will rot,

And some of it will stand.

Over delivered flowers.

Seeing, as if smelling, is engaged with belief.

So soon must you rise on this surface of

Plight, as if bred against its purposes and

In favor of your own,

Choosing the blushing grasp you like with neither caring hand

Nor roaming eye.

(What an audacious thing to do: To choose.)

Readership.

Collige virgo rosas

-adage from Latin

It behooves us to last.

The autochthon who prevailed upon us

In books

Tends to a wayfaring herd.

untitled poem.

If they must then children will be falling into the ocean.

I've watched them grow up golden as the light all around them diminishes.

It is similar to a chessboard.

I set it,

I set forth. Here

Is where I lie--

In a dominion where the infantry falls upon the jade surf

In the diminishing light.

untitled

You were born to steal more.

Make room in your slim treasury--

All the dying must remain undone.

And your purlicue will grow fatter

As you grasp

The bit by its egg-colored collar.

Green hours.

There is no honesty in sweetness.

Take afterthought and prior to that, thinking.

Take thinking, take the riches that grow even prior

to growing. Isn't it a world of kids?

Isn't it fast? Doesn't it go by?

It has green hours for parents.

In the throat.

Every time you speak I lie in your throat.

There with the hatching blue eggs--

Permanently springtime--

And the cooling comfort of your

Speech--

I lie there. I wait for you.

Sunlight adheres to me.

Sunlight adheres to me.

My skin buckles in its smallest corners

And closets.

It's static, roaming. I sweat heartbeats.

All this--I know it seems like nothing.

All this for charity.

All this sunlight adheres,

Here where I sit against the tree.

The grand chill.

Winter waits around for the grand chill to begin.

Think--as thinking curries sympathy, of the work you'd do.

You might be untimely and coldly rude,

Flash freezing and stuffing its scuffs and laggard birds

In a belated letter

Or forcing its tears into fluid lakes as they firm.

Or be wild.

Would you let the last orange leaves have their place

In the unexpected mild

Nude?

Would you--since you're a participant, now, wait, too?

The same thing that makes you believe there were dinosaurs

Lets you believe that when this missive comes the cold will come

True.

Something else will happen.

Split the envelope as gloss spills

Across the white sunset seam

Where,

More vicious and important than words

The tongue to seal, actual and flush--

Presses.

This season will--as if in writing, beg of you;

And the grave is not so different from the stars.

Clothing.

Clyfford Still - Untitled (American 1957)

We don't want to think about what we'll do after.

Maybe nothing.

From time to time the past is jerked or pried and,

Occasionally, a good quality yellow

Intrudes or just comes over.

But our houses are crowned in fluctuating

Attics. Light.

What to do, what to do...

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.