The youth of birds...

I sing the youth of birds, white wings
Plunging through the forest,
While the stream pipes silver
And exhales billowing rapids, that,
Like the carnival of clouds
Piercing the white sky
Invokes the springing rye,
Whose tender stubble loves
The wild edge, and dreams
Of the chaotic hedge, a startled growth
That reaches for exploding stars.

I sing the dark moon, who floats
Over the jewel of the night like a precious
Vessel, and accosts in her private dismay,
The battles of nacreous stars, whose honey
Sweetens the eyes of a fragile beauty,
Ready to break in the dawn's hot rays.

Luxuries of Albion, your hot lips,
Your strangling glances, have sea-shattered
Many a sailor wrecked on siren eyes,
Whose call like the guttering forests,
Thin pupils of thunder-struck rage,
Kept the wild song within the rounds
And wreathed the rocks
In a torture for brilliant young men
Who deserved to die.

I will not mourn them, though I am a singer of Albion,
And though Albion's first fruit have I gathered
In a spilling copia of honey-sweet milk,
Teat-nourished and willing, ready to spring
Like the flowers of twilight,
And if the sunlight could spill down my hair
In golden strings, spear-sharp, and I
Were mantled of moon-glowing silver, these acrid cascades
Would nonetheless fall from a harp unwilling
To follow pleasure's lead.

You people who live by the way-side, on the road
Where the east first trenches an occident of spas,
You have a charcoal street and black chimneys, soot-stained,
And you are soiled, and the flame in your pupils is red.
I have seen nothing of nobility in your lotus-cheeked boys
And your girls are as scarlet as roses. You pursue the pretty shadows
Of a setting sun, you run to sweep away a patch of darkness
Like a spot of dirt -- with tea-tinged teeth you yawn and clap
The air. The holy among you profess no faith
That's worthy of your name, the infidels I credit only
For their breaches tumbling down
And rolling into roses: this blooming vegetation
Deserves your veneration. As to saints, I knew of one
Who executed swiftly (twinkling like a distant star)
His martyrdom by bursting in a car.

***

The youth of birds, white wings
Plunging through the forest,
While the stream pipes silver
And exhales billowing rapids, that,
Like the carnival of clouds
Piercing the white sky
Invokes the springing rye,
Whose tender stubble loves
The wild edge, and dreams
Of the chaotic hedge, a startled growth
That reaches for exploding stars.

The Platonist

First beyond the tumult there is one,
This flux of visions and refractions,
Which we call the light:
The light in crystal, which we see
Is genesis for all beauty.
Like for music, like for art
The secret patterns which the heart
Observes, for these it yearns --
And so the Medes made silk,
The Greeks their urns. If you doubt
That beauty finds her shape
Between the accidents of verse
And in the play of paint, reflect
That these are deeper intimations
Of an order in our meditations, and though
As Hesiod would have it, Chaos made
The sky, the earth, the mountains, and the waves,
Still the patterns in the globe, the constellated sum
Is our eternal destiny, the Beautiful, the One.

There is the self, I see, and I resolve
The multiple earth into a floating star
That crests the waves of flux
But still is drowned. When I touch
I know the feeling in myself, but of the feeling
I do not know. You speak
With neoclassical restraint,
Resolve the world in a gem, and all the light
That glitters blinds my eyes;
You leave me in a darkness, and if I think
That I could reach towards what I'm not,
I grasp, like mighty giants at the entrance,
Everything they do not know. Forgive me
If my style is obscure, since I have much to learn.

The one is in the self, the self is one
Who grasps the one and drags it
Into the lucidity of time, just as the rhyme
Connects the feeling sound of double lines;
We see the verse a single whole, that,
Like the soul, connects the varied and the strange --

-- Into a unified harangue. Give me no more verse
That rhymes, but tilted style, slightly; the rhyme
Stilts syntax, certain words and only certain words
Allow the easy flux, the rhyming poem
Becomes a shoddy simulacrum of the truth,
A summersault around the real, a tight-rope walk
Across a line of fluff. My opinions, I know,
Are rude, but if we are to seriously discuss
The Beautiful, this thing you call the One, then let
A dissonance embark your words, and if they ring
At all, then clear, a dulcet sound -- a dialogue, a sprout
That we can nurture, trench, and grow,
Whose plush leaves, like Jack's beanstalk,
Will tend together towards the sky.

The Positivists

Another day in the world, which is why.

Gasping 'til you're hoarse with breath doesn't make it real
Even if you gallop off into the unknown,
That great body of the globe that cannot be possessed.

I was speaking a language formed entirely of gibberish,
I pretended that I did not know its meaning,
So the endings of the sounds in my acquaintance
Became entirely new, and composed secrets
That had never been uttered yet in the mystery of this earth
And would be never again, because the spontaneity
Which made me breathe these ay's twisted into a green yew
Was entirely lost in the passing, and beyond recollection,
Scattered over the globe as it was, over the winds.

Then I cried a tear for loneliness, but it was only passing fleet:
No one understood the silence between words
And no one wanted to. Worse still were those who did,
Or claimed too, and I hear in the echo of their blue lips
The bird call of my own mort tongue, perverted
Into a stillness, a solemn lake, a drug
That is anger to those who partake and suffers
For those who observe. Fortunately there are not many watchers
In this day and age, and we all forget the rage,
The anger in which we began,
With which we end.

I would spit on you all but it would be a sad drop,
Fragile, refractive, glowing like a misty globe,
And almost like a tear.

Father's Day

I am commissioned to write this poem
To celebrate a day like any other day
Which recognizes nonetheless
It is the day from which all others spring.

Here every ordinary day finds fountain
In the deep seed of its past,
That rises like a face and spurts
Into a speaking form. The father

Was always present, there is no moment
Which negates the act, which makes the deed
Less real, for from it every real became;
But this reflection is an affirmation
And reflects, as if the father were the sun
Glinting from a pool.

Am I the pool? Can I negate
The law which is my nature to reflect,
The difference of this day which I deny
Until it slips and blends in with the past,
An accident of every future hope?

The future is my being, and history
The father's looming face.
What is my father but a wrinkled mass
Of what became, a grey intelligence,
A broken vein? But yet
To speak against the father
Will deny the self that speaks, because
The father is the prospect of the self
That looks ahead into the time
That blends the future with the past, and so
The father is the spring of possibility
Before the self that falls, and so that self
Can realize only in the father, only in your 'You'
The 'I'. The father speaks through me
And hence I see, and if I fight the father
I am blind.

But does the backwards bending
Figure of the father twist,
Infect all being? He makes it in,
The mother is to make, and so the mother
Fights against the father,
From which fertile ground
I grow. And all this growth is just
The affirmation, spreading from the roots
Up to the seed, and then the stem
Which flowers in the 'Yes', the will
That feeds the future on the past,
Whose beauty is the 'You' that crowns the 'I'.

And so this day is not like other days
In that commission, through the affirmation,
Firms the 'I' who speaks then as a friend,
And only through this trust can we find love
Which is the beauty of our being.

Something Greek

R1

You will be my boy: otherwise
I've known your blue eyes
Too long that sing like guitars,
Your neck that tunes and strings
Down a floating base to detach
And ripple like a keyed mirage,
Only to swell with a single, secret
Note that stretches out through the sea
Of dreams that swirl around you like
A peninsula by the running tide,
Or a cliff under the flying stars.

O

You will be my boy; otherwise I've known your blue eyes
Too long that sing like guitars, your neck that tunes and strings
To a floating base detached and rippling like a keyed
Mirage, only to sprout once again into a single, secret note
That stretches into the sea of dreams that swirl around you
Like a peninsula into the running tide or a cliff into the flying stars.

Dawn

The buildings, haggard in the moonlight, pocked
As her face, still dark, shudder as a cool air
Floods the horizon; like a galleon
Loosed from her mooring, dawn glides
Through an ocean of still air, pushing out waves
And furrowing the sky. The first tide
Is a flood-light of crimson splendour
Unhinging the grey specters
That leaves them floating like buoys
In its mobile swathes; the sterile
Dialogue of the evening, pierced
By the sullen, reluctant light of an office
Cracking like a tired eye, gives way
To morning's soliloquy, a collation
Of loosely timed bird-calls, mixed with the groans
Of radiant cars, and bound
By the strings of waking thought.

For Research On Time Spent

Lords called the stone cherubs
Who rest in autumn by the boughs,
Bows arched, pointed
In the direction of sunrise
Delicious await the coming dawn

While the fugitive fall of the day recalls
Her transitory dress, the jewels embossed
On red linen that fell
As itinerants fall in prayer,
While the altar of her eyes
Still burned, ephemeral,
Unchanged.

The mists are rising through the arch
Like incense, these bridges that pierce
So many breasts;
The cloak of the twilight descending
Arrests a few transient pigeons
Who peck at the stone and prepare to,
Like so many statues,
Return to their nests.

Woody Solo

I'm terrified of love,
Even though I hear them singing,
Each to each, Tityrus
Or Galatea, the reed that croons
By the hollow beach. "Gorgon"
Rather I whisper, tremolo, a trembling little finger
Perched by my lips, as still as a (silent)
Clay pigeon. If all of the music around me
Were only motion, there's something about the clear
Wings of the subway and their shrill
Beat through dark chasms like so many
Lumps of noisome coal flying through the intestines of this,
My sick city, whose frigid towers peck
At the noxious sky and peal
Out, flower from their basins
As perfectly as the chrome of her lip-stick destined
For vanilla tips. Enough of this beauty:
I hamper for the chaos of things.

Zombies

I awake. There is a face
Pressed up against the glass,
How long it has been perched there
I don't know
Watching.

Her throat
Is torn; pale wires, dry
As brushwood, mat
And crumble on her neck, her eyes
Are blood, she does not breathe.

She wants to get in.

This is the moment
Of waking dreams, when nightmares
Press closer to reality; that word, 'impossible',
Rolls heavy and dull over the world, cracks
Like thunder. She is staring at me,
We are face to face. She is hungry.

On the streets below, ghouls
Stumble over the still cracks of the dawn,
Which catch the sky unawares,
And stain the clouds
The color of her eyes.

My heart is pounding. There are screams.
Her hand presses on the pane, I can see
Every blue vein distinctly through the glass
That still separates us.

Dark clouds roll across the sky, I wink
And say goodbye.

The Untouchable Deed Must Bloom

Sometimes I want to see them
Dance, their delicate bodies
Spin like cocoons, then fall
Like a cone from a pine. Their sharp
Silk edges ravish me and I climb
Into golden peaks that transform
The world's slime.

Why does a curtain of smoke
Phrase this decline
Between me and mine,
A cheapened sign
Of an elegant time?

Truly my boys are golden:
Their flower-pot heads,
Whose petunias
Will creep from the dead
Soil sporting new seed;
The untouchable deed must
Bloom. But a fog fills the room
And muffles the air,
Then settles
And chokes on my hair.

Glass

Convinced of the unbridgeable gap between words and things,
The only chasm that can really yawn, and yet, observing, too
These wild swans, insinuating
Their glass necks, whose arched velocities
Plunge by the broken
Artifacts of the lake, he vowed to construct
(For what Gods, whose blue hair the moon
Light, pin-cushion of stars, whose red locks
The dawn, then curls?)
A boat, a floating tomb, in which he could set
The lost edges, crumbling, like bits of plaster and glass.

Apreggio (adapted from Samain)

A lute's liquor breathes across the soft enclosure,
Stirring up the shadows of a poem – your silence
Drifts across the night; who dreams your floating locks
And hides the moon? The forests, Silvia, Cynthia,
Hold back the beautiful threshold, touched
With purple eyes, and drown the little star
Who cries. Come, while the silver staircase
Falls, to the garden of blooming good-byes,
Where the mourners who dream of the moonlight
Lie.

I must find my own creed...

I must find my own creed, my own way
Over the wastes, the boiling sands. Life
Provides no Virgil, there are no three
Heavenly matrons for whom I'm a source
Of concern – hardly one, though anxious,
Who brought me here and whom I soon
Will lose. I stare at the broad deserts,
The trees braying with thorns: the brambles
Are hungry, they mesh like the horns
Of rampaging bulls, in rage or in love.
There is a wind whose bitter incursions
Threaten to snap and break these lofty arms;
It carries with it the red grains, raw
From the sun, and deposits them again
Like ashes, rain. I will cling to myself
Close, I will hold myself as slightly
As a dried stump, who have not seen rain:
The skies are as purple as blood
And they flow through my veins.

Lector

Lector, familiar of deserts
Where the burning reigns, while you
Were baring skin to naked earth,
I perused Proust, taking each delicate sentence
Between my lips, mouthing
The r's, sighing the ou's, letting the languor
Of limpid l's dribble down my chin and drip
Off my bare chest; in other words I was perfuse
With language, I tongued
His meandering syntax, I gagged on his obtuse
Locutions, long and cool as the shade
Of a beech on a hot summer's day – so keep
My secret meaning, reading never held the key.

(Samain) Antigone

Man, punished by the gods because he found,
And like Jocasta's lord in misery,
Tired of the seething sky, from age to age will bound
And each night ask if he's arrived.

But guiding his baton that wrecks upon the pavement
His daughter flickers by his side, veiled and chaste,
And faithfully accompanies, for pure contrast,
The ancient poverty for which his eyes were lashed.

Through the stone cities and the long districts
They pass; tending a hand, every night,
At the cross-roads the blond eyed virgin asks

For alms: and nothing is more sacred than the eyeless
Ancient king, who approaches us from the deep past,
For whom our hearts still suffer, skip a beat

While she sustains him always, the divine Antigone.

The wind is still tilting in the leaves.

I am not myself, this blue sky
Winks at the edges of the leaves
Wind-blown while the ocean of air
Waves to the purple passages of cars.

Things are rarely what they seem;
I'm least myself when I'm at home –
Not even a narrative cut
From many verbs progresses except
Through the instance, even the insistence,
Of what it is not. I hate lyric, false
And lying composition of the self,
Like so many idle gods.

I see things moving around me: I
Am in flux, but detest revision,
Infinite or definite, as if some moment
Future will compose me, what I say
Is not yet true.

I would like to destroy the self,
Put it through fire, eat it,
Wither these lies. Even language
I long to peel until her deceptive bells
Crack, and peal no more.

Neither moments nor time,
There is no here, there is
No now, and we do not exist.

We need to stop seeing
With sight, which the mind transcribes
Into memory, like so many poems.
There is no difference, I offer
No deference to, but only an eternal
Deferral between poetry and prose,
Since both already say:
When will we stop dividing our speech
Into categories (a real deferral)
And begin to listen, in order to hear
Nothing?

Prose More than Inspired by Henry Rago's "The Knowledge of Light"

In a pool of momentary brightness, minutely interrupted by velocities of rain, I considered amalgamations of leaf and cloud reflecting on the dim splendor of the dusk, whom a light breeze shook like the eddies of the water's slow and flickering stream; these, together, formed a music, a tremulous piping, the shadow of a tone: it was the light singing itself to the luminous stars.

I had heard the deep uttering itself, and seen the sky in congress with the earth, and so I began to write on this eternity of mirrors, each searching for its own reflection in another self, with a trembling hand -- "How an arbor, river-twined, spills into the long, slow shade, only to bloom again, below the pitch, in a glaucous confluence of boughs..." -- thus twisting the fabric of silence until it stretched and curved into a bolt that could crackle under stones and make them sing the heavens' pulse, who were already wobbling on the low sun's bow, a hidden sign for ascendant birds.

Then the sky changed into the circuit of the moon and became a shadow for the sake of other shadows, a darkness looking for and looked upon by the deeper darkness below the single glitter of that pearl. The light, so distant from itself, still became, even for its coming into darkness, a kind of knowledge, coming to itself, so that it shared in what itself could only know, coming on the other in some way, and hence becoming well.

I am still watching them, these dancers cleaved by darkness, dozing in their half-dreamt effervescence, while they glide to either lucence before joining, snapping back together in a flash, as darting wings tilt and flap, drifting slowly apart, only to merge in a single arc, one beating heart.

The year is still wading, awaiting, by the reef, the moment when the current will sweep and carry the seasons into rapid ice, glazing this island, these oceans in a cold remorse of watery light, curved into a spear that will draw the silent night. Still I speak, waiting for the word that contains of itself some language, transparency of the darkness that arches into the sky, covering the naked year with the perfection of these hours that, one by one, collapse, like marbles falling into a rounded glass, a sphere that recedes to a convex sound, that recedes to a twinkling eye, marveling on an unknown sky.

Reason

Time eats me, these compositions
Of minute detail that bite
The way they pass,
And I want to be dark,
And have dark lips,
Sun-streaked and sad;
Soft jade too, but fine
As thin threads
That I might comb with long
Fingers, like a harp...

These obscurities
Are paradisal,
And they still glisten,
If obliquely, why
I whisper.

Crevices

I will string perversities together, like the strumpets
Waiting on the field, all in a line.
Licking each of them I'll touch
An immensity, I'll spread their wrinkled twats,
I'll stretch them with my hands:
How the tongue enters dark spaces, and hears
A drop of blood, how the ears taste whispers;
The fingers see each solitary blade of grass, and hash
The hairy hemp. Oh dripping chin, oh shit-streaked
Body on a body – there is one opening
But many winding paths.

Descarte's Discourse on Method

PREFATORY

If this discourse asks for too much breath, let it be split
Through six, the first of which will treat diversities
Of star-mused eruditions; the second, of the regulations
That confined the author's researched ways; third,
The morals he extracted from his method – followed by
The rationale of God and God in man, upon which
Metaphysics rests; and then to physic inquiries,
The movements of the heart, and various
Complexities, and how man's soul might differ
From the beasts'; and sixth what he believes
Is requisite to fare a longer path, to drag these studies
Further than he thought, and finally (of course)
Why he hath wrought.

FIRST PART

Of all things on this earth, good sense is most equitably
Divided, since each man bethinks himself so well disposed
That even those who pick and whine at every other lack
Desire of this boon no greater share. And they're surely not
Mistaken, so that here we have a witness to the equal
Distribution of good sense, of reason to distinguish
Right and wrong in every man. Therefore if our opinions
Are diverse, we needn't think that common sense is proper
To the few, but simply that the many ponder many paths,
And rarely likewise muse; but it is not enough
To have a mind that's sound, if you should twist it into
Torturous cacophonies – you must apply it well:
The greatest minds conceive the greatest benefactions
And the greatest crimes alike, so those who scoot ahead
With care surpass the labors of the fools who greatly err
Down the wrong path.

Myself, I never thought my intellect was better wrought
Than other men's, I've even more than often hoped
For lightning insights, clear illuminations, distinct
Imagination flooded to the brim
With present memories, in short to see
As others see – I know no other quality
That renders knowledge right – because,
Concerning reason (rather, sense),
As it alone rends mankind from the beasts,
I would believe that it is all entirely in each
Man, and in this trail the regular opinion
Of philosophers who say nothing that is,
Is more or less, except with accidents, and hardly
Among forms and natures from a unique gens.

But I'm not afraid to say I've found a lot of time
Since youth to travel far enough down certain roads
Which led me to concatenations, maxims that I've used
To mold and hold a method, through which it seems
I have the means to penetrate the heights
Of my acquaintance, little by little to raise myself aloft
As far as mediocrity and mortal nature
Will allow. But even now I've harvested such fruits
That though I try, in self-considerations, for a lowly
Self-esteem as over arrogance and pride, and though,
Peeping with a wisdom loving eye at other men's
Performances and varied enterprise, it seems that none
Appears but futile, vain, still, among the occupations
That are man's and purely man's, there is this one
That seems – yes – worthy, good, and I dare believe
It is philosophy, the one I chose.

Of course, I could be wrong, could have, perhaps, mistaken
A little bit of brass and glass for diamonds, gold; I know
How often we are subject to misjudge ourselves
And everything we touch, how much we should mistrust
Our friends' opinions, since they're well disposed
To us. But I will nonetheless be pleased to open up
The passages I've kept in my discourse, and to represent
A painting like my life, so every reader might
Judge, and I can learn, through apprehension of the common
Din, what people think, and thus embark on novel explorations,
Which will supplement and augment those I've used 'til now.

Thus my design is not to here assign a way
Along which you should all conduct your minds,
But just to show how I have followed mine.
Those who don the precepts of a preceptor, a don
Must think themselves much better dressed
Than those they test, and if they miss the slightest mark
Are marked below the rest; but I, intending only
History, or, if you like, to stretch a yarn
In which you'll hear inimitable feats, but also,
Those you might, with better common sense, repeat,
Hope my story be, at very least, just usefully received
By some, but reprehensible to none, and everyone
Will praise what I have frankly done.

So since I was speechless, I have suckled letters, and, assured
Their darkened tracks could lead me to a clarity secured
By these black bars, a vantage with a view to utile life,
Conceived a boundless hope to read. But soon
As I'd achieved my studies' course, upon whose head
One climbs into the doctored ranks, my fickle passions
Changed. Hampered by new doubts, my thought
Began to stray, my only progress, that I knew
How little that I knew. But I was in the best of Europe's
Schools, and as I thought, if there were savant men on earth
They would be here. I'd learned all the others learned, and,
Discontent with what my teachers taught, had even rushed
Through every book that dealt with things occult
And rare which fell between my hands. I knew
How my companions judged me, professors both
And peers, and none had deemed me second class,
Even if it wasn't mine to someday take a chair
And teach. And such a vital age, more fertile in the intellect
Than ever yet! And so I felt at liberty to judge my times:
Nothing on this earth seemed worthy of my hopes.

Toothpaste

Three Revisions

1.

Forms are what I call
This system of profligate shades
And shapes, this geometry
Of architectures, variegated
And various, whose collisions
Invoking and provoking sound,
Echo and re-echo in the corridors
Of my precipitate memory,
Where the architecture of these forms
Is already their horizon, already the Form
That shapes them like tooth-paste
Is shaped, tunneling through the caverns
Of an aluminum volume.

2.

Forms I call them, these architectures
Profligate of shapes and their horizons,
Whose hue and cries re-echo
Through the corridors of the mind,
An oblique plane, a patterning of linens
Tinsel-strewn through the apt recesses
Formed and falling off; their mute application
Returns me to my being,
The place where I was born.

3.

Forms, or so I call them, these profligate
Horizons, architectures rich
With the stirrings of thought, volutions whose echos
And cries, calls and appellations redound
Through the caverns of my memory,
Resinate already with the shapes
Of an idea whose tunneling structures
Have wrought what these aluminum volumes squeeze.

A Dialogue

There is a river of large volume, whose rushing currents
Wash the dry banks and push their swollen silt
Into a sea that granulates these forces
And drives them back again shoreward.
I was sitting by the bank, on the hump
Of a rough stone, apt with moss, bending
My eyes to the point where horizon
Meets the circuit of the ocean, trailing
Ligate swirls and zags of ruby sand
Into the amethyst and diamond gold
Of a surf stirred by the pattering sun,
While a sonorous breeze, heavy with the fruit
Of tides, the sand-swell, the lamprey's gait,
Strode into the recesses of my mouth
And freshened my tongue, when I noticed
A pale wanderer, a scrap of dusty rags,
A deflated knob of sagging skin,
Struggling up the dunes ragged with sea-weed
And torn by a lucence of shells.

Who was the man? His nose
Thrust out ahead of him,
As if a hook, jagged with the brittle
Barbs of time, had been cast
From that convexity of cruel brine,
And now extended past
The line of sunken prints that
Fell across his gait as silently
As curvaceous reciprocities
Of rose petals melting through the clarity
Of an amber glass, into the air.

His eyes reflected tessellings of cloud
Smattered like cream puffs in a cup
Of wispy tea for which his head
Served as the ladle and the kettle
Simultaneously, a bitter brew
Of sassafrastic sweet,
The kind that leaves a meat
On the edge of the tasteful tongue,
Between the teeth. His lips
Were all the wretched world, only moist
Where a word could struggle to speak.

***

We speak, I said, with words,
Words are a conduit of information.
Not so, spake the seer:
For how can information carry,
Sag and spread through the aimless air?
Is knowledge like a trickle, does wisdom
Filter from the denser to the merely dense
Container? Instruction is an accident,
A spill? If you drop these vessels
Will they shatter, will the gourd
Smash into fruitless cords,
Water-lorn and empty? Reform
The clay that you shaped
With your tongue, "inform":

Is not informing information? How-so?
My lazy eye, distracted, was attracted
To a bee, a fuzz of golden amber
Gathering the tinctures of the sun
And flinging them,
With languorous limbs
That buzzed and hummed,
Onto its carapace, a ragged drum
For transport.

A Love Poem

This is meant to be pastiche,
A motley collection of borrowed imaginings,
Set together in unschooled lines; the aims
(Since every collocation commences with the muse)
Are to write as clearly as possible, and to speak the truth.

You may be wondering who I am. Have you seen
A bare brunette, skinny, yawning eyes,
Asleep in the pit or picking his nose?
He was hunched over a long book, his attention
Split: one thought lingered over cool Greek assonance,
Homeric rhythms; another marshaled fingers
Through flaking hair, a pock-marked face; but a lazy eye
Had reservations, a special thought for your zebra scalp,
Your gaunt face, body almost a child’s, hoping to hear
A surprising bellow, a skater’s voice, chill tones.

But I always see you, slumped on a step, or smoking
Over a cold, stone bench, chatting with a hip girl,
A shag-haired friend. I ventured a word, once,
An ill-timed whisper. You were sitting at a computer,
Piecing together an essay on Faust.
I don’t remember what I said, only the feeling of regret
When you dismissed me; but secretly I was pleased.

I’m always pleased to fall short of beauty:
It’s absolute beauty that I crave, the extravagant blaze
That burns me, or, to borrow a phrase,
The candle engulfed in a double-edged flame,
A fiery finger jammed through the wax
Devouring it from both sides. The guys I see

Are useless, worthless, but I endow them
With an infinite worth, my imagination works them
Into glistening pewter, shined steel, all the delights
Of the perfect word. I may be ugly, but I aspire
To live in a glossed cage, a crystal palace
That gives an angry arc to the dawn, a sudden embellishment
Or augmentation that scatters the spectrum
Into fracturing geometries of sound.

I’m getting carried away; my olive-skinned muse
Is slippery as oil, my object always sliding out
From greasy hands. What was my whisper?
Beautiful boys, your own beauty I was hoping
To skeletonize in mere words. I am in danger of losing
Both my intellect and the exterior structures
That intellect craves – that is to say, myself.

I think too much; my thought diminishes me,
It has made me sickly and pale, I brood like a corpse,
I am razor thin. Dissection has turned me
Into a skilled dissembler, knowing every word
Can be replaced, in any case, with something
Just as appropriate, if not more-so. What do I want?
What plan is imminent in this scalpel sharpness,
When even the words are impassive and cold?
To freeze moments, to recapture, in someone else’s frame,
The body and real presence of my past?

I remember a frozen lake, music and snow;
The feel of gliding, pushing always
From the left, all the seduction of freedom in motion,
Until, through the stupor of my blind thoughts,
A speed, a rush that lifted me into the air,
My dad’s descending swoop, large hands
Lifting a small boy abruptly into the sky,
And the burgeoning eaglet soared.

I miss those other days,
Curled between mother and father,
The double progenitive force,
In an impossibly wide bed, working
Back into my seeds, the stark enclosure of beginnings
In a universe too large. When I hold a boy
My body longs for this –
To become the surface of another seed,
Container of ethereal secrets.

I have transformed love into a great secret,
A delicate, jeweled box that remains always clasped,
A precious cachet of emeralds and diamonds,
Staining my imagination alternately green
Or entirely blue, while I whine, howl, slobber, and cry
At the lid, gilded, at the hour-glass keyhole,
Whose secret is simple and vast as time.

So you are staring into an uneven blaze of traveling photons,
That somehow, perhaps even through chaos and reticence,
Have assembled themselves into this presentation of words,
A language of incorrigible loops and neat circles
That represents what I would never say,

Especially not if the pressure of my gawky body
Were to impress what I imagine is a smooth, pale chest
And two slight iridescences, projecting
From milky skin like little knobs that I could turn
(Ludicrous) to bury myself in your heart:

For even then I would not bite your ear-lobe, and sob
This nothing strain into your skull, the intricate knots
Of your brain. I would be too shy, the rituals of sex
Would weigh me down, even as what weight I have
Pushed you into the foam, impaled you on a pillow
Of close-stitched thread. So why do I write?

What is the significance of this rambling verse,
Impassive and way-less minutiae, gravitating
To the center of a confession which doubtless
Is not even true, since I betray
My own thoughts, the real weave of myself
In these translations?

When I began, I admit it was formless,
I followed my thoughts, I chased them
Like half-remembered dreams – or night-mares,
And I was pursued: spider-webs, ivy tendrils,
Snares snapped at my progress, all my negotiations
Of the fameless landscape dripped across sleepy eyes
Like a gauze of a tear-stained vision, while my hands
Grasped at the dissonance, pursuing these figments,
These frightening pigmies. Of course I knew

That I was going to write a great poem,
And I was going to write about love, and your form
Which was rapidly swelling from cupidinous bud
Into bitter fruit, a crab-apple, a little lump in my heart
That throbbed whenever I saw you, yet would not allow itself
Extension into fantasies, the imagined lover who raps on the door
Twice, then enters, scrapes off his clothes, lies in my arms
Like a passing bliss, like headlights
That illuminate a ghostly room just as quickly
To disappear, to rejoin the night, to become nothing more
Than a dim palpitation of crickets, the slight soprano
Of screeching wheels, a night-wanderer or the shrill bass
Of his broken bottle, and gruff laughter – this would be my theme.

I would write about all my lovers, or rather
Every beloved who for a time had captured my brain
Like an engine roaring in a muddy rut; I would relive
The dull sense of expectation, the impatience,
The sheer frustration of it all, but this time
It would be set it out in verse – verse which is never eternal,
But maintains the appearance of changeless stability because,
Even if Poland was twice not Poland, yet a Slavic Shakespeare
Remained to weather the tyrants, the parade of enlightened despots
And Holocaust victims, these people with their angry, pale faces
Clambering en masse for a bit of blood-stained earth; yes, through it all,
Some poor, hopelessly idiosyncratic Shakespeare,
Refitted to a harsh, stranger’s tongue remained
In that ram-shackled hobble of a library
To inspire Czeslaw Milosz, whom I’ll admit I’ve never read.
But it was there – it survived like a faint ember,
Ready to ignite it all again, ready to devour
Miles of frozen tundra and impoverished crops, the shtetls
Pogrom weary, licking their wounded limbs like flies
Resting on a bit of old dung;
In this hope I decided to record my loves.

So now I have sent it to you, a preliminary sketch,
These mottled pages glistening with the sap and dew
Of my excrescence. I imagine your eyes
(I’ve never even seen you closely enough
To ascertain a color – if brown,
Then the soil of my form; or are they milky blue,
The snot-green sea? A composite,
A mixture of porn and pent observations,
Agonies in a stolen glance later reassembled, scratched
With a thick, dark chalk – imprecise lines
Blurring into shadows, a dull frame, a black height)
I imagine your eyes will scan now, puzzled.
Is this a stranger, some half-forgotten friend,
A drunken acquaintance? A lover lost,
A prank, some idle sport? A poet
Or composer of occasional verse, an obsessively
Criminal mind? The clock and the calendar
Have their private reasons for dismay: the other day

A girl was raped. A waddler, albine hair, tattooed
Skull and dragons, eyes obscure, emerged
From an unsuspecting car and seized her
To sate something growing inside him, ugly, pale
As his scalp, nourished of moonlight, pruned
With each divination, inconspicuous cruisings
Round Eliot Circle, under a frowning sky.
Did he especially worship one lithe beauty,
A celery stalk, bursting blond, with attractive eyes?
Or was his harvest for grapes that, squeezed,
Ferment into the punishments of wine? Perhaps,
Like a dawdler at a fruit-stand, he tucked an apple
Under his coat and ran, only to discover, on the street,
That it was pulp, pounded meat, but he in his hunger
Ate her, dropped the sullen core like a sack
Of sapless sticks, and now he drifts by the cold
Risings of the sun, and the heart-breaking moon.

Perhaps you think I am going to rape you,
That the bulk of my body, so familiar to me,
Every inch explored and melancholy,
Aims at the target of your flesh with a singular intent,
That my eyes are a binocular extension, cutting
Through the rays of space into the between
Of your drapes, of your lanced shadow,
So that my wicked, clutching fingers, cramped
On the device, might feed into a gyro-scoping brain
The peeling layers of your dress, until only the skin,
Shaved of all accoutrement, revealed in its true form,
Sang a helpless song; and you think that I am an impatient
Connoisseur of this music that dangles between the sinking
Sunlight and the oblique perorations of your body, unmarred
And aloft in the speckling hues of dust; well,

Beauty could not accuse me of ignorance, and I keep
A heady cult of music like a flask about me; I yearn
For the strong drink of intoxication that is vouchsafed
Not to the profane, but only the man of delicate fingers
Who plays over each stop with the consummate skill
Of an eloper, never interloping, but he is always held
Close to the eternal heart of things and glimpses
Their half-secrets veiled in the fortunate cache of the stars;

Nevertheless, it is my ambition never to violate,
To handle each manifestation with the care
Of a Ming vase. Yes, I would like to turn it over
In my hands: who doesn’t want a chance to trace
The margins of pale China like ridges
On a whirling dragon’s back – the dragon
Who is the river, and the river that is the dragon?
But the taming delicacies of music forbid
The incestuous turmoil of hearts, these cascades
Of air mingling with rapids and rapid despair
Bursting over the prairies like a thunder
To sweep them away in a cloud of dust.
I could never use you, my lust is quicksilver
Art that I can never touch, the messenger
Of podiums and promenades behind the velvet rope.

So I end where I began: what have I been able to say
About love in an hour, a week, these twelve days’
Labour? Or what can I say to you? Surely I will awaken
From this verse like a strange dream, vexed,
A half revealed mirage of mixed imaginations,
A sculpture quarter-formed in the bleeding rock,
Whose eyes are not yet and forever tears
Rough with the ash and sweltering decay
Of the desert, whose lips are puckered brittle
With the song of a lost land fading
To an echo of tuneless sand.

Oh, if there were a name I could call here twice
A magic word that would reveal all this talk of love
Redounded finally and wholly on myself, that my song
In double apostrophe closed into a formless globe,
A protean myth whose every change revealed the truth
More truly and more strange – but love is a journey
Outside of the self, love is the soul in shackles
Revealed, love is the fleeting leaf turned gold
In an autumn of peerless shadows. If my sail now fattens
In the ripe wind, if my keel flattens out towards the horizon
And I float across unknown seas,
Then let these words be a prologue, the seers’ guidance,
Prophecy of another realm beyond verse, beyond self,
Boundless, infinite, and eternal, a latitude of pure aesthesis
Unrealized, undreamt, forgotten, and misremembered,
At which I will aim my catch, unbaited and alone.

Novel (Rimbaud)

I

You can't be serious at seventeen.
One pretty night, to hell with beer and limeade,
The bustling cafés' by the bursting glitz!
You'll walk the promenade under linden trees.

The lindens smell fine on these fine June nights!
The air is so perfectly gentle that you close your eyes;
The wind, sagging with noise (the city's not far),
Contains vineyard perfumes and sentiments of beer.

II

Just then you see an entirely tiny rag
Of somber blue, framed by a little branch,
Irked by an evil star, which merges
With gentle currents, small, completely white.

A June night! Seventeen! You're a little giddy,
There's a champagne sap clambering into your brain...
And rambling; on your lips you feel a kiss
That quivers there like a bug...

III

An insane heart Crusoes across novels
– Until, in the clarity of pale reverberations,
A damsel passes with her petite, charming airs,
Beneath the terrifying shadow of her father's false collar...

And, since she thinks you're tremendously naive,
She keeps her bootlets at a gallop all the while,
But twists herself around, alert, a sudden move...
– And cavatinas die upon your lips...

IV

You're in love. Leased out 'til August.
You're in love. – Your sonnets make Her laugh.
Your friends all leave, you're in bad taste.
– Then the beloved, one night, has deigned to correspond...!

– This night...you return to the exploding cafés,
You demand your beers and your limeades...
– You can't be serious at seventeen
When there are green lindens by the promenade.

Sacrifice

I would like to make sacrifices – sleep, nourishment, happiness – if those sacrifices meant a brush with greatness. What miseries would I not endure if I knew they would guarantee a fine style, something worthwhile? Worthwhile is the key – because time splits into smaller infinities, wasted – because every day can be quantified, and I feel that with all the rushing sand, my life is ebbing away. So I would gladly give this time, which is wasted and useless, for some eternal quality beyond time, a timelessness saturate of time, something I could hold in my hands and keep. This is useless.

Suppose that I did write my great work, my chef-d'oeuvre, where even the paper is vellum thick, and the ink is stainless gold, and the sounds are like charming music, and the meanings are like magic – with the power to move mountains, turn back streams, draw the moon and blot the skies with an inky blackness – even so, what will become of me? What will become of it?

These sounds will decay as soon as they are heard, even the most precious ink is wasted, the paper will be worm-eaten dust, and in a thousand years, little will be left of me. My corpse will be ashes, my flesh corrupt, my bones rotten and brittle, barely preserved; further, the civilization in which I lived will be decayed and rubble strewn – already new homes are sprouting up like weeds, already children are born with their hungry eyes – nature is like a giant fungal growth, springing constantly from itself, always giving way to the new, and the old are eaten and utterly dispersed, so that even if the totality is the same, nothing is recognizable, all is constant flux. At best perhaps we are like coral – but I do not want my dead words to accumulate like so many monstrous skeletons. I will never be alive again.

So perhaps this is a ritual of redemption – these words that stream unceasingly, possibly even to vexation, time evaporating, so many half-remembered sentences from other books contributing to the awkward mass such that it itself appears already like the accretions of meaningless coral, the spectacular waste of centuries; perhaps this is a ritual of redemption in which I slaughter time, and myself, and finally my breath, so that my spirit will rise to the gods, who I think do not hear our prayers, as some sweet incense, before its dispersal in the winds, before it becomes mixed with everything else in the earth. This I know: it pleases me. I would sacrifice on the altar of my own ambition if it would bring me peace.

Proust

I wish I were Marcel Proust:
Paris, the gilded architecture of so many memories,
Intimations of immortality sparkling through the glitz,
The champagne that makes the room amber,
Elaborate silk gowns and ties,
Waxed mustaches and wily suits, laughter.

And then to go home to a room of slanting moon-light,
A cold bed propped by a draft,
The almost palpable faces of adjunct buildings,
Sentinels with yawning eyes who would tirelessly watch
While I re-inscribed the world's inverse reflections

As if onto one of those snow globes,
The kind you turn and shake
And there is a stillness,
Sparkling flakes strewing a field of embedded forms
With their soft, mechanical music.

Glossalia

From the lyric poets I have taken love,
The fear of death, and boredom; in heroic verse
I witnessed metered struggle, the fates of men
And states; tragedy taught me that our life
Breaks hearts; from didactic I learned how to fix them:
This is what I know, the subtle art
Of imitations, the Alexandrian flare
For speaking tongues. But what I do not know,
What I have not learned or found
Is myself hidden behind the masks,
And sometimes I wonder whether
Behind the fabric of poetry
I'm saying anything at all --
If, when I take off the accouterments
Of assonance, rhythm, rhetoric and rhyme,
To name just a few, there is anything left,
Anything that I've grasped beforehand
Or brought to be on this page. Ex nihilo, nihil fit:
Perhaps my doubts are making me deeper,
But I feel like I'm becoming void.

Third Wheel

I am your shadow, chill on the grass,
A wordless echo who won't understand,
The perspiration that sticks to your cheeks
And reeks. What you want,
I won't let you have; I will stay with you
Like a foreign tongue, I will cover you like a tomb.
If you struggle, I am dumb -- already a corpse, already
An unflinching doll. Can you see my face?
There are strange tears dripping like glue,
Pursed lips guarding an unspeakable wish,
An expensive word.

Towards a New Lyric

Is it possible to speak without betraying myself,
Or worse yet brooding on a midnight
That will never come? Poetry, I am now convinced
Should be a clear and pleasant stream,
Easy on the heart and lungs, compact,
Because the cup of dilute measure
Pollutes the brain, while a shot of eau-de-vie
Quenches every thirst and leaves the vision
Lucid and the heart dissolved from pain.

Port Morning (Samain)

The sun, by degrees emerging from fog,
Gilds the old tower and height of the masts;
And, casting her net through the darkened waves,
Makes the sea sparkle with argent mesh.

Here surge, touched by a far-off ray,
The porticoes of marbled architecture;
The wind, spiced, makes reverent adventure
In the limpid clear and fine of the morn'.

On the arsenals palpitate standards deployed;
And the petite children, whom petty games joy
Recall to the current the rings of old oaks,

While a stately vessel, blushed azure and purple,
Bounding and light in the sonorous spray,
Transports himself, with rippling sails, into the day.

All humor perished from my exhaled blood (Verville)

All humor perished from my exhaled blood
Leaves me parched, while the spirit in my heart
Extinguished of an excess spleen, in my distress
Forces on me melancholy's (oh!) extreme effects.

Ha! Almost all around me, raging in fury,
Perished, broken, 'rept, weighed down with time,
I have care, I have spite, I have horror and fear –
Of your eyes, of my bad, of death, of life.

Ha! If in your hearts you have some idea
Of the desires you have etched upon my own
Have pity on one dead who hopes (and for your sakes) to die.

Or in order to rend my death an even better time,
Vow sighs that in my am'rous pains
I draw that thing which makes me languish still.

Mirrors

If I had an axe I would cut until blood, precious blood,
These drippings like rubies of ravenous intensity,
Soaked the slaughtered earth. Craven would I watch,
Saliva dripping and slipping into reveries, until the clocks
Changed gold and breeze of freshness blew:

Fresh breath, why is the world soiled and bothered
With their vexations – why do they eat, why do they breathe?
I need a perch on the golden boat, a prow away from the muck,
A respite of boiling oil from grief. Because I am changed,
I am mixed! This cupid boy hath mixed me, this boy,
This variance of a mingling progeny, dance of the craving earth,
Glutton of time and youthful dreams I watch.

Why can't my body be yours? Is it because the lens of the mind
Settles deeply upon me, because I telescope and spy
Through a veined glass? This vanity of the winds and scribbled speech,
Of salt-pools limpid in forever won't keep me. If I could have your body...

But is it given to touch an immensity? No, it is not given –
Rather taken, erept, forsaken. Why will I tremble in agony,
Wishing for an adze, an ax, to end other people's (and I mean my own)
Misery? Forsaken is the mind, and stained and wilting glass.

Propertius Elegies 1.1

Cynthia first seized a woeful with her eyes,
Me not 'fore touched of any lust.
Then fell my lights of constant pride,
And love pressed head with straddling buck,
Until he taught disgust for chastened girls,
The proveless! life without a plan,
And lacked me rage not through fulfilling years,
All more I felt beheld of adverse gods.

Milanion by fleeing never (Tullus) pains
Confounded Yasid's bestial harsh,
For now in lecher wand'ring Parthen caves,
He met and saw the hirsute beasts;
Then even struck was (splend'rous) by the wound
Of a Hylen ram and wounded did he groan
Through Arcan caves. So he could lord
The velocitous girl: only in love do prayers
And benefactions move. As for me

Late love no urges arts, nor 'members
Noted as before to trek the ways.
But you, to whom deception of deducted moons
And labor to sacers pray in magic hearths,
Behold, come now, convert our dominatrix' mind,
And make it so the more she pales upon my kiss!
Then will I believe that you can stars
And Cytaeanous streams deduce with songs.

But you cry lapsed but late, my friends,
Seek now help for no sanish heart:
Rather the beast we'll suffer, bestial fires
If only for the liberty that loves in rage to speak.
Bear through extreme gens and bear through streams,
Where nothing of a femme can know my way:
But stay – for you whom gods have nodded
Easy breath – situate and ever in bewatched lovings
Safe; in me our Venus drives these venal nights,
And nonce a time is vane kept back amore.
This (I beg you) evil shun: each one's care
Will loiter him, nor will it change a place
For 'customed love. Which if any will advert
His tardy ears from monitations, 'las
Will such a grief bring back my words.

A Marceline Desbordes Valmore (Albert Samain)

Love, whose other name on earth is grief,
Made thine breast a flowing source;
Thy voice was sad, thy (charming) soul,
For from thee sympathy divine a sister keeps.

Inebriation or despair, impassionate slash languor,
Thou spouted cries of gold amid the gale,
Which verses burned upon thine lover's lips,
Took rhythm from thy beating heart.

The Just today, becoming to our voice,
Calls, with palm in hand, upon thy bust,
In order to proclaim thy glory to a Flem' old sun.

But better tender bronze to tender charms:
Perhaps it will suffice – some night – simply
For belovèd negligence to come, and throw

This tuft of flowers trembling with larmes.

La Toison d'or (Albert Samain)

Black in the blue night, vogue Argo, double-timed.
The lords, from dusk evocative of home
Are sadly lain, asleep. Jason upright
Lone patrols, pursues a vane, intrepid dream.

The Lyre of fired (flashing) pegs, and fulgent is the gloom;
An infinite silence trembles! ...And Eson's son
'Pon 'rizons saturate' amasses pride, and flares
Aloft the Colchis' rose;

But! While he lushes ruminant by prow,
Below Medea, fiery of a carnal lawn
Feels flesh resolved in Asia's tepid wind ...

And now, 'der black eye of the quivering Dragon,
Destiny, preparative of antique frenesies,
Mixes with the golden fleece a sombre smell of blood.

Three Haikus

Glass beads falling on
A bedrock carriage bubbling
With the fresh spring's tide.

The plunk of a stone
Splashes spray and ripples the
Cistern of cool walls.

Somewhere a rainbow
Shimmers on the red face of a
Sand-dollar like a mirage.

Someone had better be prepared for rage

I saw a child, a half-bald little Chinese boy stumbling through the library with both hands in his mouth and perturbed eyes absorbing everything and I thought of the newness and hunger of his youth; he was a little copy of his father -- he was going to be his father. I wanted to smash him against the display case where someone has set up a series of stupid post-modern pieces illustrating an even more senseless poem. The dignity of poetry and poetry workshops, having a "thesis" for your poem, saying "something", I want to vomit all over their pretentious little round-table (round because everyone's equal, of course). Shouldn't we destroy meaning along with our children? Isn't this stupid little Chinese boy the seed of all our problems? Aren't we growing into the same wars, anxieties, and heartbreaks? Oh, the poet moans, humanity is a tragedy! Oh! But we can do something about it. We can grab sledge-hammers and smatter all the streets with the blood of our children -- that would serve everyone right who ever winced comfortably at those made for TV compassion buffets. Then we could grow old, suffer, and die. But no more youth.

Cuff-links floating in a drop of milk, dilating with the sponge
Of a giant space, gnawed fingers, ten, half-crowd a little throat,
As he would eat himself -- the jaundiced boy, sanguine,
Whose father sits, serene, and gluts himself on treasures
From my education's hoard of crumpled words. This whelp
Awes at an alien cavern of conjoint bricks and titan shelves,
Cases carefully sating N. Calloway's art, vane prints
To illustrate some cardboard-scribble senseless, expressing,
Just that. What the poet wrote his workshop mulled,
Carefully -- due credit to the artist, to his rituals, meticulous
Symbols, genius jagged ends, all very peculiar wings (oh so dear),
A little bird prepared to chirp some edgy tune for the people,
Really spiritual people, to understand. Save me, the illiterate
Chink leans at his father's knees, whose sledge hand
Absently caresses a few ragged weeds, rubs his dull scalp.

Relatavism

Relativism lies besieged on every side: what recourse is appropriate
When doctrinaire philosophers (and theologians) assault
Her feeble frame? 'Truth', they say, 'is everlasting,
'Herent in the flux of bodies and the shifts of time. Either
Through tests assiduous and gatherings of much, we can uncover
Under aggregate equations all future combinations, or 'dress
A sturdy law: "All apples course unto the earth, the sunlight by its girth
Warps space and time, all favor-less, unlucky lives decline" –
By thus confining matters to the bounds of truth, we prove
Able legislators, and every beast on earth, all fowls,
The clouds, the blinding sun, air infinite that blasts
The planet's face, will cater to our laws, all caper
At our whim.' 'God's whim', the theologian replies,
'For Mankind lives in revelation of the truth, and reads
In heaven's book the pacts on which to found a life, which,
In accordance with a deity's word, grows strong, but in divisions
Of an unpurged sin, wrecks in itself and falters, trusting
Overmuch to feeble strength.'

How can we reply? Is there a narrow channel
Gracious to life's end, along which thought and action
Ought to wend? And can the tides of truth's vast ocean
Erode a wicked earth? Am I subordinate
To hegemonic laws, and leading into dark horizons,
Margins obscure with the twinkle, slight,
Of unknown stars? Is truth this great reunion
That awaits us, 'gulfs us in our sleep, and clears
Like dawn's accumulations from a sun-drenched eye?
Is there a sisterhood of stars, a winged conspiracy
Past the ether, holding the world to an upright fame?
Regardless I reply that here, on earth, we do the best
We can, consider every argument with sharpened wit
And often, as a blade grows dull in repetitious use,
But shines when burnished to an obtuse grit,
Test ourselves with every strange assertion, use our thoughts
In all preposterous 'climes, until we reach that height
Where we observe first glimmer of impassive light.

Our relatives are wisdom, honed maxims to the changeful shapes
Of observation, molding and evolving as conditions
Ask: it is polite, and life is our reward, lest,
Clinging to presumptions, idle images of God,
Unbending in the ceaseless squalls, torrents of an age
Unschooled in virtues, bent on our destruction,
Like the oak we snap 'neath beating storms.

Letter April 22nd

I thought I’d write a letter, by way of introduction,
To thank you for your greetings, interest, and convey my pleasure
At a sympathetic mind (though as for your body, well, we’ll see in time).

Hannibal once fell on Rome, they say, with thrice a dozen elephants:
This is something like the weight of duties, papers, books
That I have presently incurred. Weekends I work libraries
(Where I am writing presently) and clean the puke, blood,
And beer from off the SU’s walls and floors. When I’m not stacking
I read volumes – Das Kapital des Kulturs (not by Marx,
Of newer and more English fame, in fact a canon whose sole aim:
The recent Culture Wars), Virgil’s Georgica, the Preludes,
Several idle compilations, butter-flying fancies, meditations
On The End (I’ll only give a hint, a German author who laments
A vile and Germanic war – not Aristotle, nor
Some fancy Stoic art, Chryssipus, Alexander, or one of those
Precocious modern upstarts who sing of accidents or incidentals
– I prefer philosophy, like my breakfasts, continental).
I write poetry, too, the fruits of which I serve before you
Gen’rously, and whether they be fresh or rotten
I supply abundantly; Horace of old, and I think Dante too
Composed their epistles in bold measure (ancients had the leisure
To take careful count of words), and so it feels appropriate
To scratch out thoughts adorned at least (though they be in all else
Scattered nothing, dense, obtuse) in golden rhymes. For dithyrambs
I have a lyre or winsome silver flute with which I play
My praise in Echo’s halls. Occasionally, as tempers fall,
I while away an hour with a friend, or dip and bend
Beneath a disco’s lights. There I yearn for bodies
Slim and crowned in double sunsets narrowing to muddy,
Drunken cogitations. I dream of orgies, or betimes
A hand or arm, a frame to which my lithely form might bind
As round an oak the ivy raps, rewraps, thence to drink the sap
Of flowing love. But these thoughts succeed
As swiftly as a cloud, some sun-pierced cirrus of an azure day
Departs the sky. Now you have something,
A too deranged and formal aspect of my thought; I bid you well,
And leave you with this half-formed, broken thing I’ve wrought.

Letter to Home

I'm exhausted. I try to keep myself alive; nights, at home
By stocking sandwiches, and showering, and climbing into bed,
Then waking to a buzzing phone, the rush, the busses' drone, days
Enclosed in class-rooms or the fat, grim biblous sanctum.
My only pleasures are composing verse, and reading
Wordsworth, the swelling of whose lines, especially his Preludes
And liberal meditations, is like a clearing flood, pouring from a spacious urn,
That in the torrent of its grace, purifies my hands, freshens my face,
And seeps into a much besiegèd mind. For Greek I am assigned
Thrice doubled pages on the Odyssey, but I (and more than Wordsworth)
Hath exceeded the charge, so that the stack accumulates
And now I burden empty words on something like twice eight --
Nor can I drop the load, as long as an even virgin cranny of the text
Feels unexposed. In Latin I slog through Afric wars, and view
Jugurtha, hot child of the sun, who rich with gold implores
Rome's general ruin; Sallust's style limpid makes one to forget
The tribulations he describes, or yet ascribes, and interrupting from the clear
Is here or there a well placed jibe. I think I'll write on his biographies
Of notorious personalities, descending by degrees, from virtue, to licentious,
Then beset on every side or (worse and minor) merely rude. But as these idle rhymes
Cheer an indulgent whim, already the moon sinks, already angry Tithonus spurned
And his willing consort dawn in concert plot to bring another day, and haste
Another looming deadline, with his chains cruel, his barbs that strain
Already anxious brow, and his long shadow, stretching more
Than morning's dials or of aging noon. So as this letter wings to you
'Cross thousand miles carried on a limping thought, bethink yourself
To good replies -- economies, the business of our house; the weather,
School, and pleasantries; and, of course, our residence in Taos --
Even paltry things, the state of our dog's tail, just anything to lift my cares,
And by delay bring slight refrain to a perilous grief. Good night.

A Heap

Passing loose meadows that were just beginning to to be turned from spring glaciers, I came upon a heap of old manure, a rotting specimen of compost giving its foul scent to the breeze. It made me retch, I felt that all my senses were on fire at this spectacle of failure; I tried to console myself that from this heap came the strength of a new nature, but nonetheless was overwhelmed in tides of revulsion and fear.

Passing loose meadows just beginning to be turned
In the glaciers of spring, fields gaping in their hollows
For a hungry seed, ravenous and craving, consummate sign
Of a spring strength throbbing in the soil, waiting to overthrow
A blanket of glassy pearl to replace abundant winter's veil,
In all, calling and begging under the playful rays to be sown,

I saw an old smoke-stack of manure, discharging wretched scent
So vigorous and strange, repast of a thousand retching loins
Hitherto buried, hidden in the frosts. By what providence, what divinity
Gathered it together, unless foul things seek like, and misery
Is politic? This was the testament of ancient battles, creation
Consuming its own limbs, resuming its very waste,
Reproducing for this vile heap's mere sake. A whiff

Put my head to flames, flooded my eyes, upturned my spirit's beat;
My legs became a trembling, the citadel of my corpse threat'ed to tumble
O'er a worm-worn sole. It was the reverse of an ecstasy, epiphany of Hades,
Th' infernal stream run round in a fettering thrice triple knot, lymph'ic lump,
Node where all things crawling feast and vie for such meager sap.

Philosophic I began, "But nothing comes from nothing; all things fail and rot
Only to be recompiled, not themselves, but, like this compost, the seeds
Of their own renewal. Life is an exchange of infinite capital,
Perpetual in distribution, complex refining of the whole;
These monuments of time are features of a single face, whose appearance
Might elicit calm; let beatific solitude compose you then, for such is the expression
Of nature's peace." I spoke idly, for then a wicked breeze stirred up the heap

Into a new life. The mass groaned like a displeased stomach, and,
In present copulations, split. A tide of maggots and greedy ants
Shuddered above the revelation of its wide trunk, teeming
Through the idle earth, and settled like an echo of the thing
On either side. A black stench feinted through the air,
And I grew sick, and turned my neck, and hurled.

Fragment

This bulk wrecks through the gloomy lanes
On a night held airy of furrows, lapped
In shores whose occasional, calming ripple
Explains the double dimmed light of the moon,
Sapping the eastern rise of her summit
In glistering crowns through tides obscure,
Vaguish and wand'ring, shadowy listener
To the late night's not yet news. This behemoth
Rumbles into port and docks, wraiths
Fasten her with knots and cables, clasp escapes
In a self-tripling prison of rope. Like an eagled cage
She squats over the shore, and menaces
Long bars, the leaning slant of tap'ring poles,
With precisely looming prow. Insects creep
Across the clipper's wings, bearing loads of encased mass
On their stooping backs...

A Lament for Literature, Lately Slain, With Subsequent Ode to Her Saviour, Brian Vick

Literature was sick! Byron, despair,
All ye wilted laurels droop
In Wordsworth's hair,
Whitman's freedom is confined
And sage-like Milton lately rhymed
In an upstart Asian scholar's lair

Where he, or, more justly, she
Dissects them with torturous cries
And consigns them with their race to die,
Last of their self-willed, magnificent creed
From up whom sprang -- and with them dies --
That upstart poetry.

What maladies, muse, invest a blanching face,
What nightmares hold your craven gaze,
Have rose imps mocked and torn your fair,
Lithe frame? O mourn, all ye rustics, for she
Hath lately lost her frail and sickly fame!

But wait, comes a hero from the West,
Delicate, sensible isles far,
Of pen-sharp hand and subtle mind
To venge our maiden's fall, all while
He guts the oriental prince
Of her extravagant affair,
And clears the air
Of lit'rature's singed flesh.

Hail, Vickers, noble Brian, who abides
The lofty peaks, and gazes down the ignorant tides
Of rotten leaks, that threaten to consume,
With ravenous flair, our damsel in distress,
Penelope fair. Yes, string the bow, vicious Vick,
And shoot the suitors numerable down,
These hordes that hoard and feed
Their wretched frames in ignorant sleep.
Once literature is saved

Oh the bells, the harmonies we'll play –
That one man, glorious man, lacking all pretense
Bent only to the highest aim, the greater good,
Married text to common sense
While all her scholars lately wrecked
Furnish forth a double wake.

An Ode

Is there anything more wroth
Or wickeder than Wordsworth?
What we have here is the English language splayed
And fopped about hundreds of pages fulfilled
With his vain illusions, less eloquent than prose --
And little more at that -- But the rhymes!
-- But the babbling brooks -- those quiet nooks!
And in an age of such moment, that man
Could content himself of trees and beaks
And those grass-hoppers that grate on
Through the whole, wide container of the earth,
A kind of peace...

Spirit of the evening
And quiet strolls before car, bus, train,
Leisured contemplator, conversation
Of life, nature's purple royalty, inventor of a verse
Splendid as Appalachian cataracts, but calm,
And the eddies of lakes, and the slight whorls
Of a skiff's prow dipping into the brine:

I'll forgive you, Wordsworth, voluminous,
Brimming, if, when so many poets entice
With their heavy liquored draught
Of wine's honeyed sweetness,
You bring the dilution of good, pure springs
To our ravening banquet.

Images

My head is lazy, I have a lazy eye,
My brain and fingers steep
In a dreamless doze, a tepid slumber,
Crawling sleep through which
A tickling image creeps:

A harbor of digammic voices,
Spreading in a furrowed wave;

A mountain abruptly capped
To form a piddling peak, where trees
Stab and seek the ink-stained sky;

A vault of pages inscribed
Of her vermillion hand,
And signifying some deep
Secret, exclusive and obscure;

An article of high adventure, neatly pressed,
An undergarment or
The silken simulacrum of
A female breast;

Tattered, black paper cuttings laced
Into a helix of sundry lines, and finally the swell

Of budding limes. So the dancer arcs and tumbles
Like the northern lights, a fog of precipitate clime,
Unreal, evasive skein, fine shroud of a middling night.

De Rerum

There is no capable destruction of literature:
Literature is what was always produced,
This orchestra of language, unconducted
But conducive of every thought, grammar of saying
Replicating itself, whispering, chanting, braying:
Who we always were and what we will become.

No, literature cannot be destroyed, language becomes us
Too deeply; it is only a matter of fragmentation,
Collections, acquisition and numerous borrowings:
Language itself turns into a pronoun, and we return to it
From our fiery meditations and mathematical precisions,
From eighteen, fifty, a hundred beads to the heap, sorites,
Inductor of numberless words, ink blotched into obscure tides.

Can I transfigure the world in these figures? -- I'm in a new place;
A place grown steel, a place of iron and predicates,
Technical, lofty, and maximate of craft -- this machinery,
These words, the ineffable ghost and her utter speech.

Portrait of a Lady

A wayward string of pearls:
Proof, however brief,
Of her infamous soliloquy
Which she delivered to the breeze,
Before she tore at her empty beads
And jumped, leaving those orbs to please
Whoever saw them in the trees.

The House

What is this sadness that lurks, that lurks
And lurches along the cold stone
Steps and climbs into the vestibule
Of cracked ceramics and flaking
Paint? It is the house abandoned
Of fluttering moths and parchments, drifting,
Habitual to creeping mice and chirping clocks,
In sifting shingles shifting northerly winds
While evening clatters on the streets
And the moondish rings the clinking
Knives of stars -- and the clouds, they gather
In a thick soup and pour down pea-sized
Clumps of snow until, like table scraps,
The earth is covered in a molting mass;
And on the hill a stippled church-bell chimes
The midnight's vesper, but the dusty desks
And chairs are moldy, heedless, and the night
Folds silent wings across the wings
Of her silent charge. Rest, sleepy house,
With your broken eyes, moss-stubbled mouth,
Age-ridden, gang-stricken cheeks: sleep
Through the restive gales and winter's drought,
In the emptiness of an unfulfilled number,
Forgotten words. -- These ruins bring to mind
Long plains of desert gloom, an undiscovered country
Prodigally vast, invested beyond memory, that,
Lacking only interest, sits patiently and waits.

The Muse Demands Her Service -- in a Tinseled Bowel

Oh the hours! -- I can take no more of literature...

So you have come, so you have finally come.
Good. Come here, Aeolus, keep the stallions, look,
His mane is whipping frail, and the incessant north
Incurs the oaks' destruction, timber
Is gathering in the clouds; between the voyage of the moon
And Aurora golden dawn will be weary,
If you don't rein him in.

That business -- sorry.
You came by foot? What penalties incurred? Worn shoes,
Ragged feet. Well it's no matter -- look at this chaos,
A weary marksman couldn't shoot the distance to the edge
Of the throbbing skein. Bleeding pierced fingers? Well the warp
Is in the woof; every-thing's changing, it must constantly be
Re-sown. That's why we need you: quite a good stock,
I'll take it down like a rose vintage, encrusted in the age's
Salt, vinegared, though it retains that sparkling thrust
That boils the mind. Smell. Ah yes, there's a good burgundy for you;
Drink: these are the streams. So you can begin work
Immediately? Something new, something new (muses) -- well we have plenty
Of death, something closer to life's core? Ah, a few volumes
Of philosophical wit; no? Doesn't suit
Your taste? Would you like to see language disfigured and refigured,
Moon-changed, vagabond, fugitive of conjurers' tricks and spelling itself
At every turn in a newfound disguise for your indelible surprise?
Hmmph. Love poets: A clime of Phoebus settled in her crown,
And expelled, through jeweled minstrelsies,
In the forlorn flicker of her eyes, or Shed
The deeper darkness of your soul to my light touch,
And let me keep the hidden parts, and munch over these delicates,
This tender bone? Prattlings neither? Well the orbis terrarum is, by no means,
Expunged, and she propels all flowerings and fruits from fatal branches,
Scathing cities in her silken sinuosities, triumphing of towers,
Piercing the aether, fecund in the silence of space. Leave? Don't leave!
Did I speak harshly? Aether, azure, axes, will you not delight in orbs,
The vault, double-arched ceiling of the soil, dirty earth? You can't
Leave! These musings caged, you don't understand how their sparrowed song
Leaves me harrowed and weakling in the evenings, torments me month by month,
Pleading, begging for morsels, many lies, and truth. Lie for me, strum, strumpet,
Sing -- but you can't leave. I'm afraid of the dark, and the long moans,
The mist that settles on the mire for a banshee's cry, forlorn scream
Of a murdering indulgence. Aeolus! Bear him in the western wind, then,
Scatter him like leaves! This furnace cannot be ignored, our rage
(Of which we required volumes) inextinguishable pursues you to the ends
Of earth, yes earth, our earth, however withering spectacular
You might become. The muse requires service, not of one penis
But plenty, for she is vast and engulfing, she is a goddess hungry for our tales.

O Corydon, Corydon, quae te dementia cepit!

I fled to the wilderness' edge,
And peered through deep thickets:
Flowers were blooming the field o'er --
Supple of stem, rich, bending to the newborn kiss
Of a morning breeze. The air was slick with the dew
As a weanling calf, soaked in her mother's tongue.
Milk! The air was thick with milk, porous,
Laetitious of spores. O take me! -- I was old.

The sweet juice of seasons hath retained my flesh,
So light, so young; and then I grew dry.
I hardened like a sapling in the world. Pleasure's havoc!
I remember butterflies, once they clattered to meet
Me, crystalline indigo shining faint sprinkles of sunlight.
Hues! Hues have betrayed me, I am hewn merely.

So I rest in slimy reeds, swamps where wild
Oleander mingles with the thorn. I am of a pedigree
With the exhausted creatures of this earth,
Whom our mother, giddy with fresh enterprise, refuses to sustain –
She turns an aspic nipple, desiccated teat
To the forced weanling, supernumerary, one
By one too much. I thought I could sip honey
Suckle, frolic with the fauns forever, and the fields
Would always bloom into a silver sky.

Still I strew girdles of flowers, still I cover myself
In the chaste mantle of time, but the ages are barren now,
And of the nymphs I am forgotten. To be hidden,
Childless with rage, thirsty for silks and pale shadows
That float through the streets like petals fallen in the early dawn:
The overripe moment, concatenation of wilting things,
Retrograde and spoilt, the whole desert world

But for those flowers! How the lily torments me, the amaranth
Drips, one enchanted nook, a starveling corner bathed in birdsong,
Sole symphony in this rutting, cacophonous earth.
Oh desiccated mass of all colliding, mere calamity, and chaos strain:
I am of a genesis with titans, and, having seen and fallen from the sky,
I riot in this ruin. Pile mountain upon mountain,
Unearth this soil swollen with feckless dirt; my age might be ruined,
But my plans are fecund: to steal heavenly fire, or if I cannot
Divert a stream of nectar in a moonbeam, then surely manic blind
I'll roam heaven and earth, tearing at these emulous garlands for sport,
Despoiling the altars of Bacchus, and spitting with a tongue parched in,
And at, my decadent lusts. I swear, lady of rose-petals and wanton lief,
I'll make more stems to fly, I'll strew the world more
Than a cherry spring. For the furnace of my heart is charred,
And charred, and worn, the pale-smoldering face of our mother earth.

And now for a short interlude (Coffee)

R1

Coffee, how sweet, coffee, now coffee
To trickle in my brain, combobulate
Intimations, dissonant strains, O stealthy aching
Of coffee! -- A word -- dissolute into the long
Ing eve, breathing the beat to dance coffers
Of midnight and everything's same, who stretches dark
With the dripping of coffee. This blackness,
I could find myself in 't, swimming in seas of coffee,
Where each waves repeat their self and everything lathers
Thick coffee, oh echos chocolate, oh jade, ineluctable
Brew harsh vintage of the dawn, sapping tongues,
Wrecking havoc for teeth, coffee staining about
The rimmed eyes in brewing, boil'd soliloquy,
And everything becomes sick sleep, everything strips
Down in torrents of soul, molasses thick,
Lets Lethe syrup our sleep dissolved
Into brimming mustards of steams, spiced,
Seeming evanescence coagulate of matter, rich,
Sublimated in voluptuous temptations, our volucrous,
Oh for a siren song of yourself, and will
In her screaming! Sing: coffee, sing coffee!

O

Coffee, how sweet coffee, now coffee
To trickle my brain, combobulate
Imitations, dissonances, stealthy strain, oh coffee!
A word – trailing into the long, beat the beat,
Dance, and the coffers of midnight
Where every-thing's the same, and stretches dark,
Dark with the dripping of coffee. This blackness,
I could find myself in 't. Swimming in seas of coffee,
Where the waves repeat themselves and everything lathers
Thick coffee, oh echos chocolate, oh most ineluctable brew,
Harsh dawn's vintage, sapping the tongue,
Wrecking havoc on the teeth, coffee staining about
The rimmed eyes in brewing, boil'd soliloquy,
And everything becomes thick and deep,
And everything drips. Drip down in torrents of the soul,
Molasses thick, and let Lethe syrup of our sleep
Dissolve into brimming mustards of spiced steam,
Seeming coagulate evanescent of matter,
Sublimated in our rich uolupting, our uolucrous,
Oh coffee, for a siren in yourself, and willing song
Singing in the screaming sing! Coffee, sing coffee!

Song of Kirke (Part IV)

For nine days we sailed along, grieving in our heart, plunging our oars into the wine dark sea. On the tenth day, when primal Dawn had arched her fingers through the canopy of the sky, we drifted in a mass of fog until the keels of our ships touched the breaking shore. Tincture of rose-mist dispersed through an island's extent, now incandescent and shield-like under day's jealous glare. Desert beach mounted on desert beach, rising into rings of rugged cliff upon which perched, then fell, strands of lichen and moss, silver and glistening with the damp of precipitate streams. Cliff leveled into green mesa, an ocean sown of sun's violet embrace, flowering into blooms of evanescence, traced by and tracing split currents of light -- which seemed to recall to the surrounding clatter of waves echo of their own hum, abuzz in the thickness of a stupor through which glowed, or upon which prevailed, a clarion sharper than the human voice, but more expansive too in lotus luxury.

We beached our ships and left the keels to dry on the prowed and patterned shore. Men clambered inland, seeking out fresh streams for weary limbs, fell goats by the puncture of spears. Others coerced the silicious fire's seeds on appendages dry from the forest, and lit a lusty scorcher for the service. They split carcasses from legs, poured libations, and feasted on entrails of beastly flesh, brought brimming-fat bowls to boils of sputtering grease, and ladled into their bellies concatenations of wine that flowed into dissolutions of strained arms and strewing legs.

But I stood apart, watching, always watching the sea, violent mother of earth, temptress of glittering skiffs, siren of maritime whorls and rip-tides, shore-ward bending, pregnant of rocks, the destiny of hollow barks, rind-some, of surfaces scraping their nothing folds, delivered and delivering in labors, calling harshly under horizons' bloom -- for seagull, missive stork, the razor's ternful moan, for the black and thin, crag-perched, brooding furies and wayward returns, boding the margins of sunset's eye, licentious waves flocking in moon-tide mass.

Poseidon, earth-shaker, how you have harried me! -- over and beyond Ismaros, bending the Cape of Maleia, and past Cythera too, beyond all care of mortal men. Most vengeful of the gods, consort and bride-groom of death, tireless, boiling wrath of storms, sea-squalls and hurricanes alike, your respite was the Cyclop's eye, Kalypso was your pity, who hid me from the earth in numberless, taunting waves, a sea whose floods abated just to make way for my tears, and most unjustly at that. Yes, king of injustice, you who ruminate on rage, wide-wanderer whose gift is the driving of ships past all bounds of civilized thought, great skulker of the deep -- how you have harried me! Oh, how you have harried me! I am weary.

I was weary. The day exhaled numinous stars, sighed out his misery, bewailed pearly radiance of moon, a sharp crescent, cutting tear, most cold and fiery-distant car. Cruel Artemis drove her chariot higher, whipping the steeds without leisure, the stallions of her marbled pleasure – then, when she reached that height of the aether that perches above Atlas' stooped crown, she reigned them in and paused, lengthening midnight's labors, beguiling her flaring consorts all eager to nuzzle Aurora, fearing the lingering caress of the dawn. Her downward gaze was all air and searing wind, cold and the north-breathing gale.

To Come:

Clothes ripple in the wind
Men cold
Meditation on the companions
Awakened by the ghostly song of a maiden

Love

A soul for a soul -- merchant of souls, two
Blending together in a seeming whole,
Differences dissolved, absolved: this passion
Is life's completion, but perfection
Cannot bear itself for long; so from a finished life
Are borne anew and sharper edges, likenesses to be smoothed
Until they fit into the whole, at which juncture
Their conjunction splits apart, breaking and reforming,
Flowing ceaselessly into and out from itself,
Calling in each generation renewed and eternal anguish,
An original destiny manifest in all its instigations, reconfigurations,
In every separate ripple of the whole, and wholly pumping, heart.

Transformations

R1

So let me address you muse
In marigold spangles of twilight,
In silver reminiscence of the dawn, memories
If memories be water -- gathering, crying, suckling
In whirlpools of imagination,
In eddies of effulgent prayer, in real
And unrealized creation, syncopated or lapping
In the lines of meditations, red or blue alike -- red
Because the eye is robbed of sleep, red
Because the mind is seduced of its fancies, finally red,
The color of birth, the overcast shadow of death;
And blue to entwine them, bind them, blue to gather them all
Where the purple embankments of shadows lie, horizons
Sprinkling spice of paprika crushed clouds; blue to bud, yes, finally bud,
Into unknown fragrance of peas
-- Because the mixing of things is established and not the same,
-- Because the mixing of things produces qualities unmatched in anything known,
-- Because the mixing of things is a salvation, a tide more pure
Than the tidings it brings. So if we ring bells,
If we sweep the world in a horse's tail,
If we make or finally become electric bolts,
It was really only the rising, really and finally only
The gathering transformation of clouds,
The breaking and streaking of moonlit dawns.

O

So let me address you muse,
In gold spangling of twilight,
In the silver reminiscence of the dawn,
Memories, if memories were water,
Gathering, crying, sucking
In whirlpools of imagination,
In eddies of effulgent prayer,
In realized and unreal creations,
Syncopated or lapping
In the lines of meditations, red or blue alike:
Red, because the eye is robbed of sleep,
Red, because the mind is seduced of fancies,
Red, finally, because it is the color of birth,
It is the overcast shadow of death;
And blue to entwine, blue to gather them all,
Blue to bring the spice of purple horizons,
Blue to bud, yes, finally to bud into unknown fragrances
-- Because the mixing of things is the same and not the same,
-- Because the mixing of things produces qualities unmatched in anything known,
-- Because the mixing of things is a salvation, is a tide more
Than the tidings it brings. So if we ring bells,
If we sweep the world with a horse's tail,
If we make or finally become electric bolts,
It was really only the rising,
It was really and finally only the gathering transformation of clouds,
The breaking and the streaking,
Incandescence of a sunlit moon.

Song of Kirke (Part III)

For nine days we sailed along, grieving in our heart, plunging our oars into the wine dark sea. On the tenth day, when primal Dawn had arched her fingers through the canopy of the sky, we drifted in a mass of fog until the keels of our ships touched the breaking shore. Tincture of rose-mist dispersed through an island's extent, now incandescent and shield-like under day's jealous glare. Desert beach mounted on desert beach, rising into rings of rugged cliff upon which perched, then fell, strands of lichen and moss, silver and glistening with the damp of precipitate streams. Cliff leveled into green mesa, an ocean sown of sun's violet embrace, flowering into blooms of evanescence, traced by and tracing split currents of light -- which seemed to recall to the surrounding clatter of waves echo of their own hum, abuzz in the thickness of a stupor through which glowed, or upon which prevailed, a clarion sharper than the human voice, but more expansive too in lotus luxury.

We beached our ships and left the keels to dry on the prowed and patterned shore. Men clambered inland, seeking out fresh streams for weary limbs, fell goats by the puncture of spears. Others coerced the silicious fire's seeds on appendages dry from the forest, and lit a lusty scorcher for the service. They split carcasses from legs, poured libations, and feasted on entrails of beastly flesh, brought brimming-fat to boils of sputtering grease, and ladled into their bellies concatenations of wine that flowed into dissolutions of strained arms and strewing legs.

But I stood apart, watching, always watching the sea, violent mother of earth, temptress of glittering skiffs, siren of maritime whorls and rip-tides, shore-ward bending, pregnant of rocks, the destiny of hollow barks, rind-some, of surfaces scraping their nothing folds, delivered and delivering in labors, calling harshly under horizons' bloom -- for seagull, missive stork, the razor's ternful moan, for the black and thin, crag-perched, brooding furies and wayward returns, boding the margins of sunset's eye, licentious waves flocking in moon-tide mass.

Science (Composed)

The world was a harmony, God
Fixed in the aether
Mystic reverberations
Of crystal; fall, force
Where all the centers
Meet; the earth, and questions
Like elliptical evasions, the whole
Universe was dancing around
An answer. Glum:

Then they came with their tubes,
Protractors and contractors,
Their pressures and their chambers,
Looking for a measure, with every measure
Lost.

The arc of a risen and falling life became both sign
And co-sign of their verity, the very foundation
Of stable nations, a paradise of 'cumbers,
Light, abundant wild rice.

Some Scribblings on Science

Are we shaped? Are we formed? Are we
Informed? By what? Experience: experior,
To (trials) try.

Knowledge has something to do with it
Too. What? Knowledge of trials.
Trials? Not in their own right,

But the writ, culture as a kind of writing,
Laws. Laws? There are universal,
Theirs are universals: foedera, agreements,

Pacts: gravity, for instance (across all instances)
And death. That the wind fills a final sail,
Or a cup with water,

And streets with cars. But each law
Is particular, and in consistence with itself –
Rules were meant to be broken,

A hand can break the page. Change
Is the best consideration – take the stars:
The world was a harmony, God

Fixed in the aether, mystic reverberations
Of crystal; fall, force where all the centers
Meet: in the earth, and questions

Like elliptical evasions: the whole universe
Was dancing around an answer. A glum answer:
Then they came with their tubes,

Their protractors and contractors,
Pressures and their chambers,
Looking for a measure with every measure

Lost. The arc of a risen and falling life
Came into signs and co-signs of their verity,
Truth was to be the foundation

For stable nations, a paradise of 'cumbers,
Light, and abundant wild rice. It was not new:
It was not old. It was not a gyre

Waiting to turn upon itself – if anything
A tenor, a breath, a bird
Hovering in the air, protracting the up

By fighting down in seeming rest.

The Song of Kirke (Part II)

For nine days we sailed along, grieving in our heart, plunging our oars into the wine dark sea. On the tenth day, when primal Dawn had arched her fingers through the canopy of the sky, we drifted in a mass of fog until the keels of our ships touched the breaking shore. The tincturing rose of the mist dispersed through an island's extent, for us incandescent and shield-like under day's jealous glare. There desert beach mounted on desert beach, rising into rings of rugged cliff upon which perched, then fell, strands of lichen and moss, silver and glistening with the damp of precipitate streams. Cliff leveled into green mesa, an ocean sown of the sun's violet embrace and flowering into blooms of evanescence traced by and tracing split currents of light -- which seemed to recall to the surrounding clatter of waves an echo of their own hum, abuzz in the thickness of a stupor through which glowed, or upon which prevailed, a clarion sharper than the human voice, but more expansive too in its lotus serenity.

We beached our ships and left the keels to dry on the prowed and patterned shore. Men clambered onto the shore, seeking out fresh streams for weary limbs, fell goats by the puncture of spears. Others coerced the silicious fire's seeds on appendages dry from the forest, and lit a lusty scorcher for the service. They split carcasses from legs, poured libations, and feasted on entrails of beastly flesh, brought brimming-fat to boils of sputtering grease, and ladled into their bellies concatenations of wine that flowed into dissolutions of strained arms and strewing legs.

The Song of Kirke (Part 1)

For nine days we sailed along, grieving in our heart, plunging our oars into the wine dark sea. On the tenth day, when primal Dawn had arched her fingers through the canopy of the sky, we drifted in a mass of fog, until the keels of our ships touched the breaking shore. The rose-tinctured mist dispersed through the extent of an island, incandescent and shield-like under the jealous glare of the day. Desert beach surmounted itself, rising into a rugged ring of cliffs, upon which perched or fell strands of lichen and moss, silver and glistening in the damp of precipitate streams. The cliffs leveled into a green mesa, an ocean sown by the sun's violet embrace and flowering into blooms evanescent, traced by and tracing split currents of light which seemed to recall to the surrounding clatter of waves an echo of their own hum abuzz in the thickness of stupor through which glowed or upon which prevailed a clarion sharper than the human voice, but more expansive too in its lotus serenity.

Ens Hic Iam

Placidity: thinking no farther than the moment
And the momentary, and so,
Within these boundaries,
Feeling each thing together
Or distinctly from all other things. Here

Pleasure overlaps with the intolerable, the different,
And the merely good. The consequences of each decision
Ripple across the face of the present, leaving it altered
Though unchanged in regards to the whole,
As when a triangle chimes, but it is still a triangle:
It all reflects the tenor of something smooth, despite
Minute undulations, though these undulations
Are a part of the flickering eyes, which are themselves
The seer and the sea. This immensity
Lies under things, is their foundation and support,
Although it manifests itself by showing forth
Its contrarieties, as if some supervenient quality
Maintained itself quite separately from what it was, as if
The alphabet spelt out a word beyond its means.

So it is something hidden, necessary but denied,
Like the rock that gathers underneath the moss,
Quickening or silent, moving deeper and deeper into itself
Until it changes to a molten mass, until it transforms
Into a protean diversity, solely metamorphoses, and is
The double face of death and being.

I Have Walked Out in Rain

When will the world be clean? Meaning
Ordered and voluble: it isn't enough
For things to be particles -- particles of what? --
I ask. I suppose it's a problem of vectors:
Everything has a direction, but it's all going nowhere.
Nowhere is the only place to be.
And don't answer that pleasure has something to do with it:
If I milk the sweetness of a human conspiracy,
What becomes of the milk? Cache it in pails,
You'll say. Bottle it, vend it at the market,
Sell it in stores. Keep it away for the rainy season.
No, it's all highly improbable: pleasure
Balances against pleasure, but there's not much gain.
Everything still is, and even if I weren't, somehow
It would all be the same. Movement
Implies direction, within the fixed category
Of beings as they are, but overall
Even time is a station-less, unpurged moment.

O ambition! O folle!

Reconsecrate me, Muse,
Douse me under purest water,
Bring birth to a newer breath.

I have dragged this mortal sloth too long,
Too long the muck of this tawdry world
Hath clung me as deep

As a sucking sleep. Don't you have away
Vials of crystal, good flowering wine that's a sip
Of sharp nectar, buds of brew?

These barbaric shadows, lending and increasing
Like a beating wing, and the hum of the night
Scare me. Muse,

In the spring I was always your child,
About late-blooming poppies and incense
Of wafting thyme. All good things

Were violet and twilight.
Now is the world of daylight and harsh
Suns, now is the moment when pure is apart

Of a necessary past. You will escape. Life
Will be nothing more than these shadows. A few notes.
But can I trace nothing of the dance?