A toast.

So then:

To the magnificence of all this grubby ardor
And the quibbling for even more when

--all complaints lying soft at the foot of the moon,

We know we have saved nothing
But have plenty in our worn socks

And we are fine.

To that we are despite our conservative bent
Romantics stirred by like-minded provocations--
If not always by similar tastes.

And to the Greenness in living things pitched

Wild into being and at their most;

It is a rasp on our being, and
If we are not derelict, misspending that then

We are misspending it all.

Iniquity.

Nothing good matters in the blinkering when good
Is not honored.

Take a second to check yourself
Your light, your calculation
So firm Christ himself

Would've tossed you from the temple stair.

The entirety.

Belonging
As it ricochets
Off the well walls,
As it falls--
Fulfillingly bereft
As all imparts to all is:
All

Caws.

Might harbor and the governance of wishes
Bear up this clause.

Why it was written, finally.

"Love is grand."

It's the sort of thing you feel you ought to whisper,
As if any secret you kept was kept
Or was,

In eventually passing it along,

Worth keeping.

Warm air.

A language any more perfect or perfectly spoken would not need our bandying participants. Unconsecrated space awaits.

It will eventually be uttered new and dumb.

There are two basic languages:

The one in which a fortune is written
And the other, in which it will

Eventually be uttered new and dumb.

Blessed are all who belong to someone's version of
The brawling entanglement,

Silent though they may remain.

Agnus Dei.

There but cast to the superbest
Vault

Sinks the term of our work
And our submission.

There wherein verdant wildernesses
Scoring us
We formatively crawled
Against harsher exposures

Against the sum of all
Unclothed

Violence.

There, with you whom I share the chain,
Did we blossom like ruby

Vessels.

The mirror.

Breaching the surest armor
The sun is lucky again.

Past blood and bandage,
Past back stories that brought
Warm parties to that breach:

Where sunlight goes,
A mirror shines;

White wounds trickle across the bodies of
The old.

And the sunlight goes.

Bring.

Gustav Klimt from The Beethoven Frieze (Austrian 1902)

Each time you use the word
Bring

I look for something to bring to you.

My hands humble,

Looking for anything copper you might like.

The hero.

People see the way you take care
Of me.

Certain things will never change.

The props this time are the same as the
Last time.

A lamp to see, a gun to shoot,

An unscathed can,

The mark upon which it was to
Be shot

By the hero.

At this moment.

See the way they break apart the sky
With their wings;

Joy amid neglect
Is a kind of heroism.

Youth.

The prodigious aspect to
Our being is

Humiliation.

Make room, wisdom has a wild magnetism riveting a way
To us.

The hill.

Constantine P. Cavafy, Come Back, 1912, Greek.

Come back often and take hold of me,
sensation that I love, come back and take hold of me --
when the body's memory revives
and an old longing again passes through the blood,
when lips and skin remember
and hands feel as though they touch again.

Come back often, take hold of me in the night
when lips and skin remember...

---

The hill is replete--rich in fact,
With two features.

There is the slope--it descends,

And there is the crown. It adheres to the unknown.

Shape.

Duty to knowing is--in spite of its vulgarity and frame, duty to innocence.

S.

Words repeat because they are irresistible.

There are bounties and boundings,

Perimeters and wishes.

Last count most of all

Are the kisses.

This is because of the crack and hiss in it, the word:

Spoken, to say nothing of its meaning, it

Echoes--a stone thrown, skipping in a cave.

On one wall it cracks, then misses,

Cracks then misses.

Silence enuses and the stone, or its absence

Hisses.

This, I suspect, is why kisses the word and kisses the

Kisses repeats

and all end in esses.

Perimeter fence.

An ink wilderness passes the perimeter fence
To the farthest points of the west. It

Roils and rolls.

To the east there is an ocean of
Beat up stars.

Each kiss is a wish and each kiss is a wish.

Each wish must
If wished for--wobbling first,

Then learn to stand.


Each ocean needs someone to look at it a while.


Every echo that leaves you
All but bereaved to be cleaved from you

Needs a place to land.

Each kiss is a wish and each kiss is a wish.

Mislabeled item.

Andy Warhol-Soup Can (American 1968)

The dirt of this stuff is exposed as such:

How the bounty bounds
And profits the weak at that
Unbelievable break when
Their weakness appeared strong,

When all that we grated ourselves down for so long
Was gone

Was actually--eyes open, gone--

They do not, convenient to them and the interest of their throng,
Notice the mislabeling of things--

The natural wrong.

The tilt in a catastrophic touch.

for my very good friend, Ashley Allen.

even the obscurest struggle is flatly obvious, but in it, and in spite of its aspect and tone, there is grand fulfillment to be had. We are in the world as children to blissfully forget its rugged aspect and tone; we are finally adults to appreciate it.

You.

Peace has a whistle.

In the reedy contagion of after

This

It and all it kisses

Bristles.

Stand perfectly still
As my lips develop a song--

A visual.

Defining the word without using the word.

Robert Irwin (American recent)

The best of this impassive cadre of
Words

Is 'flash'.

Accept that some things
Lie more vast
And expensive--

Prohibitive in the curious
Wash that made of

Canyons fresh

Walls

And of rash, human encounters

Momentarily blinding

Forestalls.

See how, at this moment

We run from harm--

Even in the abstract this arm of meaning,
This flailing lash,

So brutal, is yet so self-dependent:

You can't even define the flash
Without using the word--

Months and months.

Many misfortunes
Owe to

A toughness in the joints.

As they age a worldiness of the body blossoms.

To become firm those angles, they ache

And say,

You must say goodbye to the dexterity of
So many summers.

April, II

Inhabitant love lives here. To oversimplify it, it is
Like magic.

Before magic can be magic

It must by the parameters of
Its own religious coherence

Seem impossible.

April.

See the management of the soul:

You know, the tender magnificence
Will astonish you considerably less
Than the inevitability that
You will lose sight of it.

'I Wonder'

I wonder if it isn't a raucousness in the ensuing
Kids

That makes what they find in love
Silly,

And in desperation
Color?

Distance prevailing.

The world is impressive--doesn't it impress you?

Doesn't it impress you

There?

The legion of corners.

The problem you will
Find in faith

Lies in the legion of
Corners.

It or more accurately they
Await

The persuasive swagger
Or pristinest bell

Of a girl's gaiting air

To round just one
And make of the truest map

A tacky web.

Daylight.

The sun met the oldest bars in prison
In a canting fashion,

Spoke and

Said:

I choose you.

Clearing.

This particular area is clouded over on the map.

Years ago, back
In fact

When your people first arrived
It was hacked clear,

But never graphed.

The moseying sunlight was in place,
A yellow willowy arm shuffling newborn

Shadows in the fronds
And fresh disposes.

No, nothing portended an end of
Times or crop failures, or

Any thing of the like to that trodding generation's grace.
All the same, some impetus thrived

So with almanacs, recipes and their own host of
Pregnancies in carriage they disassembled and

In disassembling disarchived the entire space.

Cast to the side were all but
Your black barkarole, the trampled corridor

And other roses.

On a Cole Porter song.

The song rhyme must be

Written like a sturdy murder

mystery, beginning with

a surprise,

then moving

In reverse

Through

the rest of it

As needed.

Waterlimos.

This is how the night will play out:

No waterlimos, no gulls to descend
On peanut bags, no bag boater's shout.

No reason to shout.

The vine won't wither when you
Decide a kiss goes afoul
Of me.

The grape won't taste of poison
The gland won't spout.

What nature, my tongue
And these lines

Should profit
Content to go elsewhere,

Diverge, disambiguate, reroute

Will decelerate.


As if by suggestion of numbers
A pudgy zero will think, then mouth

Maybe there:

Navigate a tipping bow by it, then
Lose it in the heaving salts, eye
craning, wisdom and its bounding amount,

Hereabouts.

Blue moon.

Jesus Christ,
I wonder if you left me out for grotesque reasons.

The story is ambiguous: Were you married when we,
Met and therefore unavailable to

Me?

I only ask because it's doo wop night and
I'm lonely.

Sharks in windows.

Down to nothing now,

Did you see what scrubbing
Left me?

Sharks in windows and
All the things they say

Lie scrubbed and saved and said.

It's still only one one

But I imagined myself,
Presumptuously, ahead.

A short-lived custom.

Each is
A reflection of his light.

Each is spelled
As is his name, spelled out:

Purposefully, plainly--in curves aloud.

Look how each bird writes:

It is uncommon to trust the sky with anything so
Fleeting. Look,

It bounds.

Where sweetness comes from.

It is not polite to mention blood at
The dinner table--

Not because it disagrees with our conditions of eating;
But,

In the fixity of our pursuits we
Too

Are the sweetness to a circling venture--

What circles stops at the table
And rests

Unable to speak--

That guffing breath caught up in its throat,
As though who we are could so easily and

Handily be mistaken

For what we taste like, no longer fixed to
Outrun

Says it all.

Distortions.

Is it a song or a memory?

I know a blur is coming for me,
But it is disorienting and blue.

And all things at a natural pace
Look alike,
In motion.

Like the mirrors decorating a haunted
House

Our eyes meet:

We prevail, at once, to ask.

Written under the 33rd street tressel.

Written under the rail bridge just prior
To its crossing the Allegheny
Is a certain expression
Of uncertain direction.

Like 'Do not enter' or 'Host to the angels'
Words reveal the historic
ache of people between places.

Hopes deride, the language sustains,
Direction...

You approach, it's there, a debauched welcome.

Appropriate response.

If it was appropriate for me to dress
In dresses I would.

I prefer cartoons to real life
And pictures to
Conversations.

I like wallpaper
Above nature

And, forthrightly,
Lied when I likened your lease to a movie.

I've never seen one.

Objet.

A picture in wood and steel has
No place to go.

Viewers tense up
And critics turn to softer matters to
penetrate

And pronouce. Though

Back they and the sun
All hustle

When continuity and flesh
Regard the business of what they really are:

The gentlest polish.

Pays.

This is the last place I'd have looked
For intelligence of a basic kind.

There are no brainiacs or miracle
Workers

No one unkind enough to suggest
Not here, though here,

As a way of leaving the exterior virgin

And the interior compounded by

Incest.