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.