Girl in the rain.

I am a slave to memory:

Bring it forth, all

In the ecstatic fortresses and

Horse-drawn masses,

Anything that is like it.

I will lay my head on its tracks.

Do you remember telling me you thought the rain was invisible

The way it parted at our gentle command?

Favorite song.

Each song has a kind of sweet birth,

As if alerted ahead of its own resonant rush

That your neck bends to

Suit your ear.

Of New Orleans.

Over time the heart develops an irregular valve--

An extra oath.

It hushes its own rifled respirations, warmed slew of slushes,

Bygone and pearline pinked gut punches.

To look now you'd swear you were facing a Polidori

From that crumpled bit

Of New Orleans--

It is after all a physical place--a thing

Inundated with verdant swill--look and smell,

With dreams--

With dreams.

The picture of late March.

Maybe we are leaflets of what fell in love,

Be prepared.

Schedule your meetings and next pints of

Things duly cushioned and frosted.

Be prepared.

Allow for yourself a pause--however arhythmic, however slow,

Say it is likely to be

And go.

However steadfast you would have been before

You need now to be

Go.

Imagine how the auburn sugar of the stalk stands--

It works better melted down:

Go on now.

Chase this apparition of time and the dreariest foment.

The gaze will untrained, pie-eyed and silly

Go.

April.

Let us let go.

Let us with less pride

Acquiesce and borrow:

The sun furnishes with color.

The April wind with

the richest swallows of silver,

And the Earth swells in drunken joy.

The emeralds.

Curiosity begets curiosity:

I wonder about the exquisite things I have

Lost--

How they floated on,

Yellowing then,

I imagine, greening.

Such riches bud across the hands of spring.

Did you name each to each as I did?

Did the marble sky impress you in their

Full and drinking eyes--

As

It did with me?

Perfection.

I could never govern Nature.

In silken lines

And knuckly spines I have in fact

Seen the illusions of perfection

Among the perfect

Imperfection.

Once goes the rust of bleeding leaves.

Next the ecstatic foam of coupling water

In the fresh and open dews.

Once goes the compact of brave light--

Next the cowardice into which all eyes take comfort

And see.

A ruin.

Was it the miracle of your first death?

Have you even sufficient breath

To speak of it with?

Could the sinewy sprawl

And humblest caul on stunned lung

And tensile arm incumb?

The archway descends

In the way of the Sun--

A parabola, a narrative

A ruin.

Was it the miracle of your first death --

That vault, up, then down,

City cranky but asleep, blood already brown--

Tell me,

Did you find those remnant beats your chest

Promised to thrive on

If found?

The body.

What human composure lacks in discipline it makes up for

In the chill of its endurance.

Dream less.

Dream less

If dreams now mean less of me.

Bully your thoughts til they cave

And prize me.

How good are you with wishful things?

Do you command what is good less in a frost,

Knowing thawed it

Will heat

And be needed?

Be safe.

Raise less than usual amid these fraught fixtures--

These forlorn and needy faces--

Raise so little

That the necessity of it might too

Avail so little--

And throw down your shields,

Filed shivs. Such

Lanky giving arms, they will die before

Even once trying to stop holding onto you.

Even now a prism erupts;

This is the hearth of your arms.

Go now.

Be more gentle than necessity commands you to be.

Suspicion.

With less than exactly what does a flame move.

Gauge the summit carefully--

It is pale, and flickers as if threatened.

How you became who you are.

At last there was a droplet on the window-screen,

Seen in its place and followed

A while.

Observers caught on and eventually

Everyone took note, they looked,

One even wrote:

First came the blink of a different moss-colored eye,

Then a different language was spoken.

The crest rose,

The gloss on the magic of blooming fields froze.

Must you always look back this way?

Can there be no alternative to history

Spoken or

Scientifically imposed?

How gravely pink I have seen you mounting

The hill. It might as well be named for you.

The bankruptcies of the ocean.

"I wish I was a fisherman"

-song

If envy we in decadence and crippling fortunes must

Let us crash then upon it, cast loopholed net wide upon the deep.

We could it's true go hungry

Or languish,

Irreversible and ambitious:

We might in marasmus perish, callus, or in cuts of salted sea

Fish and fruitlessly flesh away ...

We might anyhow pull the harvest back into our arms

Letting it disrupt the swollen

Bankruptcies

Of the ocean!

Go ahead,

Cast loopholed net wide--

For the arms--all arms, that fail to span the fingers merest search yet

Fail to suitably seek,

And, if only by withering suspicions,

Fail to find even a wavering perigee glow

Amid hungry

Pangs.

A quieter vocation.

Imagine the rigor that must be mustered,

The starlight available

And clustered

Upon the backs and plans of fieldly yawns

to invest upon it all.

Hold dear close the chirp of the land,

The dizzying sweat that aids the sound

The air that relents on dampened hand.

Fit your fittest notions for peace, but

Relax, let your good defenses relent.

What goes on out there belongs to the mangy sun

And you, clean cut and summer soft are fitted

For a quieter vocation, a safer action.

Slug.

Slime and its purview

Aren't as similar as you might imagine--

The trails leech onto the way

And the glistening memory shines

In a bright instant.

But the regard--Is the regard anything like what the exterminating

Footstep leaves?

Guess all the ways you change it--In

Shape, color--distrustful less now,

And regard.

His English.

Weakness at its weakest can only ever be so troublesome.

The protagonist, for example,

Thrives on sympathy read

As if gold thread

Into his English.

The author in his visor, who hides from error,

Still wishes for those leafing fingers to

Touch one shoulder,

Then his next. His grain

Cuts one way and his prayer similar,

Yet another.

The big day.

In the three days leading up

To your opening

Your sculpture aged as you

Rubbed sandpaper on her cheeks

And filled a stone girl's ear

With the embarrassing

Words of the lazy word gods.

Its green season.

Take care.

See the way the light yawns to regard

The polder.

In the magnificence of the one there

Shows a wretchedness upon

The other--

Its tawny green season and bitter

Sweetness.

The flood.

The poor river endures every gauntlet punch when it passes.

Pity the slippery lips trying to talk, brown running over with rain.

Age guides the shrinking vein to shove

Where growth is unlikely--

And to grow.

The aliases of nature.

The grapes like the ones you carry,

Not to prove anything is perfect,

Not for color--

See them go to

Waste.

Next season you will get that perfume in you,

Salivating and picking up the

Omen:

They suffer and their names change.

Holy, holy.

There is wrong in the lead that colors the veins.

And in the air we breath are choking roses

Blossomed.

Take it all in, as infinitely and sumptuous as they seem.

The this.

Isn't the harshness of the mechanical silence

Of my dear

So dissimilar to

The mechanical silence?

Amid the noises.

The prismatic series of less than you

Is less likely to stop a heart than

Say,

A wounded animal amid the noises, the tin delicacy of

A harpsichord,

Or that silliness we birth when

Simulating an animal

In its foment.

On youth observed from middle age.

In the thickest of the wind

Flee the spoils of daylight.

The hours consist of countless hands,

Pulling at every bulging pocket--

They won the corruption

Of true neighbors

When short of season, and young,

They laid in nearby lawns and

Collected,

Shaded from the impeachments of sharing.

The love dream.

Tell me again how you came to be my grandfather.

How if not for a peculiar dream in which you sprang from a fastmoving train,

Only to look back and

Find in intuition, or the poverty of a glimpse

Maple hair flying in the still and arrested minute--

How you could not look away,

How you could not even fall.

--not even continue to jump.

Tell me again, about that part of me in her

At that age.

The thought of swimming again.

For B.

Between the fins and channels

And into the characteristics of sleep--

One casting arm after another

Reaches further and longer

Along,

Embracing a restless, curling horizon

With nod-offs

And soft eyes.

Winter strikes the passing surface--

From the bank, tilting,

The sun sings a relentless song.

The cane.

In a moment's ounce lies the weight of a ruin

And the fortitude of all that flows and follows.

Old to young, hand to head:

The cane bent once with cause.

Detail of the ruins.

For Fred Nettelbeck

A list of books blows in the empty breeze of a Polidori

--for every title a viewer seeking it,

The way a lover seeks an eye within the eye,

Saying, how many will you look for.

Tranquility.

Good servants fail to distinguish where marble ends

And cheap plaster begins,

Dusting.

The cleanliness of a thing lies in the signature of its peace.

The good casualty.

Ply these wounds with fingers and salve; I am a feast of torture and recognition.

At last, Blue chariot near,

Reclaiming, demanding fitfully in fact...

Decide upon this restless limb how you go!

I will watch you as you move til

I am no longer needed.

Nearing pure darkness.

Harassed by promiscuous gods

The Sun bowed

Gracefully,

Leaning low to pray

For the humblest

Of sentient error.

The cornucopia.

Less of your shoulder comes

In the waking.

And so much adheres to your complements

As if each was arms

Clumsily bringing letters.

The river in late winter.

Trees with reflections for roots

Will be remembered by a

Drunk reader--

Longer.

Mobility.

The heed of silence differs from the heed of

Space.

Wishfully gone from the one is the comfort

Spooned out in travel,

And asked for less

With each deserving look.

Engines.

The heel sinks to prey upon its feast

While the eye rises to it;

To the body go the varieties and engines that bind

Such disparate means.

On the land.

Love is earthly and fast,

And it breaks each morning.

Look first to the traffic beyond the field.

How many stars must have gone dim

Waiting the last

Scant hours for the custodianship

of Light's harp?

And how much of its unseen collision--

Its dust,

Has seeded the field.

The courtship of good words.

Bold classmen's tempests who have collapsed in

White grief on the ocean

And the staring distance that so like a dog

Eats without content or pause,

All things have your hungers known,

Never passing one another,

Yet the growling in their imperiled senses

Gathers you all dearly, with not if,

But just how, down, do we go now.

Bad dream.

An assiduous storm comes on,

In hissing bequeathes its dawn.

The wolf wind of its hymn,

Now dim, begins.

In the furze of its earliest

Disturbance

Goes a black bullwhip

Of its whispering grin.