Es Tarde, No Sabias

A new rising, charged by the voice of the dawn / singing,
Over whom spires of memory, / sun-tinged breaches, capture /
Pools of light, glinting and bedewing / fresh peaks.
Now is the time for a sprig of parsley, / willow flowers
Blush on the hedges; every corolla / opens in voice,
Because it has spoken, entered into the globe / of wild speech.
Might every song be a mother, / and might I stand here with you, Mother,
Though we are distant, split by the lapping / land, still banks
Of sand, and mountain tides. / When this comes, when I return
To you in the milk-sapped leaves / and among the amber of blooming fruits,
When my solitary flight is enough / – wing-tips over the alps –
Then we will enter the groves, / brimming with acynthus, so far!
I can see them on the other side / of the mirror.

For the Graces

Will you sing also, lacing loves / through the bitter warp of time,
(Time, devourer of beauty, ravenous / for all good things
As a lusty youth) in tunes / whose golden thread is joy? Let
The pleats of your tawny hair fall / in unctuous folds
While you work, as a cloak / for your sinuous breasts? Muse,
Never have I desired to possess you, never / until now
So mightily as a stream, / roaring into rapids, plunges
Down the separation of / a doubled earth, and pours
Across his brother's face / the tendrils of a limpid mist.

Home

We will live in a home without walls, my people, whose windows
Are the open air, rooves of starlight, and, as atrium,
The setting sun; not glorious, rather
Ragged in the winter, no citadel
For summer's heat, and quiet as the roar
Of streaking bolts, though not so cozy
As the daybreak's grass. Wide wandering for our loves
(The Loves, whom every homestead needs); we'll sleep
But little, for sleep breeds ignorance and disgust --
What bodies we'll drag to our hearths, kin!, worn
In the seeds of perpetual time. Now clearly we have all
We need, since these are the cravings of empty life.

Panoply

This silence which is not the lapping air / coming to tides upon its homeland
And back into the sutures of an afternoon / setting by a glum sky, incandescent
But honest – a rest not dissimilar to / the droughts that poppies weave
By a flourishing grave, still and serene – / steals into the holes of the vortex,
First paradigm of present song, leading the ministrels / and the brides of night,
Bedecked of somnolent garm, through jewels / for their mistresses lost
In the staggering blaze of a leaf.

Over the long...

Over the long, under the soft, through
The primal threads a yarn entirely of gold,
Cloying as speech, stitches my love,
Stilted, though tough, worn beautifully
And sadly as a cracked out tomb,
Where pale shades ride by the midnight
Blazes, blowing down from an ocean
On high, turbid mists for a lust misplaced
From eternal rays.

When I Return

I would love you as no other could
If there were something I could bring you,
Agathon, that no one possessed:
Not a rich tapestry that might hang,
In tapered folds, above your bed, brushing
Silk sheets with purple cloth from Tyre
That shines, but a valuable, unique,
End of the Ocean gift that only I could give,
Tempering deserts and the flails of the arctic
Winds, shielding my body from forests' folds
Of ebullient growth and the frothing
Mountains, where I would maybe press worn soles
To ice. Then maybe I could conquer lions,
Then bring the jackals into valleys
With a weave of vine – no other gift
Would buy you away, whether the wine
Of love or secret, beautiful words.

When the Mind is Delightful...

R (10/4/2005)

When the mind is delightful, life takes delight –
A word by the sucer of roses and violet,
Fresh hues flooding through open doors,
To drip from harmonic triplets and fifths
Down the body whose vibrant music is time.

***

When the mind is delightful, life takes delight –
A word by the sucer of roses and violet,
Fresh hues flooding through open doors,
To drip off harmonic triples and fifths
On the vibrant body whose music is time.

While you have the power...

While you have the power to grant
Suits, or send them away,
Banished to the quarters
Of a darker globe,
Where they will rend themselves
In vain, turning empty tales; while you
Sit on a purple seat, and smell
Mollia's spiring cloves as they wing
Through the fragrant air, I,
Oh Wealth-Begotten, beg
Crusts from my lady,
Whatever muck a cruel
Hand is kind enough to throw
At frozen earth.

See...

See, I wanted your air to murmur
Me, what breath? Sweet sound,
Falling through the crescents and stirred
Up in rhapsodic heart.

Who are these moons, whose
Are these moons? They belong
To the void, arms of the erotic night
Embracing, bending to her will:

This dance? Moonshine,
The liquored ebriations
Of a lonely heart, drunk
On lust, that lucent amber,
Peetering into crystal moons.

Introduction

What would I do with you? A tantalizing
Thought, subject of our inquiry: touch
Your thighs where the short hairs cut,
Slowly, or lap your chest with my
Tongue, the way that waves survey
A timid shore? What storms must I rein in
To hold the light-house of your gaze?
But I would be a rage, with lightning
In my eyes, my words a thunder;
The violet flower, wracked
In rough-edged winds, would crumple,
Fall -- when I want to crush
The petals in my palm, and smell
Their deep bouquet. Come to me nearly
Far, just close enough to reach
In the space between our air.
Then I would hold my hand
Out, stretched into its straining tips,
And wait to feel your fingers' clasp.

Misogyny

Hide their faces from me, I cannot abide their faces.
But if I must see their faces, paint them dark colors,
And cover the Gorgon’s stained red with a veil:
For she more than any has crushed me like a flower,
She who plucked a live carnation, wild, from the hills,
And so that she might gather to her pug-nose
My sweet scent, pressed me in between five ruby nails,
But let my wilted petals and my pollen fall.

The Green Room (Rimbaud trans.)

For eight days, I'd rent my soles
On rocky roads. I came to Charles-king.
– In the Green Room: requested bread
And butter, loafs of half-cold ham.

Content, I stretched my own hams
Underneath the table, also green:
I mused on the worn out themes
Of the tapestries. – And it was delicious,
When the girl with giant tits
And vivid eyes,

– It's not a kiss that scares her –
The feisty one, brought me buttered
Toast and tepid ham, on a blue plate,

Rosy, white ham redolent of garlic
Cloves – and filled me a tankard brimming
With suds struck gold in the setting sun.

Sensation (Rimbaud, trans.)

By summer's blue nights
I'll tread the paths,
To, wheat-pricked, crush
The tender grass:
Seer, I'll feel its cool
Beneath my feet,
And leave the wind to bathe
My naked skull.

I won't say a word, I'll think
Of nothing:
But infinite love will lift me
Into my soul,
And I'll go far, so far,
Like a bohemian,
Happy as I would be with
A woman.

Hesiod's Invocation

Muses from Pieres, famed for lays,
Hence, incite the God, thine father in hymn:
Through him mortal men are rumored
Or forgotten, spoken or speechless
According to his mighty will. Easily
He strengthens, easily enfeebles
Strength, with facility diminishes
The grand, makes lucid the obscure;
He deftly straightens scholars,
cramps the athlete's foot: Zeus of lofty
Fulminations, whose dwelling is on high.
Heed, by sight and sound, forge custom
Out of justice, Thou I beg; but as for you,
Perses, I might fable you some truth.

Georgics

What makes for fulsome fields, beneath what star to till
The earth, Maecenas, and to join vines with the elms
Befits, what care of oxen, and what cult for holding
Flocks, how much we suffer for our thrifty bees,
Hence will I begin to sing. You, most luminous
Of universal lights, who marshal a year slipping
Under heaven, if, Liber and alma Ceres, through any gift
Of yours the land exchanged the acorn of Chaonia
For fattened ears and Acheloia's cups
With innovative wine -- and you, present numina
Of fields, Fauns, and you too, dance, Dryad girls --
Your services I sing. You also, for whom the primal
Earth shot a whizzing horse when dashed against
That awesome trident, yours, oh Neptune; and initiate
To groves, whose double century of snowy
Bullocks, at Cea, is shearing the prodigious mead;

Lest the emptiness crowd me

Lest the emptiness crowd me and I be eaten, thoroughly eaten,
Engulfed by this hollow globe, gaping belly of caverns
In yawning steel, I will contend with force of arms against vain,
Meaningless air. Whether I say words, sweet one, intending to recall
Your face dipped in my honey like the moon behind his beams,
Her lord the sun's, earth's furnace gleaming through the darkness,
Unvanquished yet, or whether my limbs, throbbing and dancing
Of their own accord, assail the enemy and fill the insatiable absence
In spaces of whose void the crown is senseless sleep, I will be
Indomitable and savage, fight as if the corner were my lot,
Hopeless I, and consigned to a hardness of three points,
Be the gush of time bound to an infinite place.

Alberich

Takes me, really, and bringing me back into the depths,
Calls -- a long, low, resonant hum.
Here are the brine and the waters; hear I Woglinde singing her song:
"Rock, cradles of the deep, and call, wondering waters, who brille
With an unknown heat." This heat, were it I, I were to dissolve
In the extant flux from the wastes of time to their final pier,
Recalling in me the perpetual mystic underlying what is,
Gold-clad herald of the shining star who circulates
Between the vision and the waking dream. But I am not;
Of another race, coursing in my circulation Eden and redemption,
Neither wanted nor received, so the wanderer who watches
For a distant shore. Hear the course of the circulating homes
And the tide of the revolving night, inextricably bound
By the sinking luminaries and yet apart, one foot in the grave
And one by the cusp of the dawn -- because Venus, tutelary deity, holds me
Away, and it is my ever secret provenance to lust, shape of
And shaping the Earth's golden forms.

Apologies

Apologies; I know too little of too much. I speak from an authority
Denied to me by age, a slavish mind, and subtle words. Humility,
Thought akin to nature, working in and through this only world,
I want, should be dissolved, no more than the shade of a light,
But instead a proud blotch, the blush of a hungry blight.

***

Apologies; I know too little of too much. I speak from an authority
Denied to me by age, a slavish mind, and subtle words. Humility,
Thought akin to nature, working in and through this only world,
I want, should be dissolved, no more than the shade of a light,
But instead an idle blotch, the blush of a consuming blight.