The luxuries.

For JW, who once rode a horse into an electric fence.

I have finally made myself happy,

Watching a bird land

On a wooden lamp.

There's a writing desk with some papers feathered across the top,

Beside

Which--and beneath its shadow,

Lies a sleeping brown dog.

I have achieved my own variable record--and the riches in

The window are all wan and hungry to me.

I need never ache to join the half-blind path of the others,

Nor to be young like before.

The invisible.

For Robert Serra.

If you trace the bird out of the tree

Its hesitation will go undetected at first.

It limps from the solids then tumbles up-

Ward.

Once a mystery is true it places the non-believers first in line.

But non-believers--it took work and money and

Belief

To accommodate you.

You have tried to worry. But seriously, don't!

There where magic gets into you

The buoyant clawling flickers,

Forward.

To each governance flies a tell to the mystery it evokes...

The 1950's.

People who once lived

Here

Staggered everywhere they went. They staggered on

Their way to privilege, and they staggered on their way to abuse it.

They staggered to be drunk for the light,

Inventing mementos like iced tea, and the notion of afternoon--

All diversionary tactics.

And maybe once in a while still and alone one said to another:

"My love must be a kind of blind love."

Very important.

Death, make a match for me.

I mistook the wallpaperer

For the architect.

And I mistook the pig

For the guest.

Stay with me while I watch you.

Less startled than I,

Still, given over to

The staff of surrenders.

I am their white flags, all their white flags.

Stay with me while I bulk in the wind and watch

You.

Central Pennsylvania.

I wish this lamp worked through the storm!

There is a boastfulness, half explored--as if sleep was an excuse!

Where do I go when I fall asleep?

And what girl did I miss, surveying the fence-posts

Across which sheep casually roam?

If I have to fall to Earth, I'd like to fall here.

When a girl wakes up you can feel it.

Her toes lift up off the sheets--

They are lighter than the snow.

Haiku for two.

See! Both landscapes owe

A little to the eyes--Blue

Among one, the boat.

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.