Spark

Your brown eyes are like the night with the day piercing through

Your lashes are like the dark feathers of a radiant bird

Your lungs are more beautiful than wings

And your tongue speaks an alphabet more colorful than music

And whatever the spring is it is because of you

And whatever the night has always meant it is you

And whatever limits there are to solitude is you

And whatever dreams there are to dream I know is you

I was barely breathing like a brown paper bird in a pocket of cement

Then you erupted like a tropical island in the desert of the sea

Now the ink fills me and exits me at the edge of my fingertips

Now the axis of my imagination turns around the stillness of your feet

It is like finding an arrow that has fallen from the sky

It smolders there so I pick it up and throw it back into its element

And watch it burn as it picks up speed and descends to earth

As it was in the beginning so it passes even now from me to you

Le Chéile

The tiles on the ceiling need to be swept
and the garden descended.  As the clutter grows
here and there like rocks on the moon
the people looking up find the space to be
a ten-sided box with ten-sided boxes
in the corners.  And so on.  Something to count
on if we could ever find them in the mass

Rabbit ears keep us focused on the clover
and the discarded cabbage keeps combusting
like meteors or bottle rockets in the dirt
where the animals gather to chat and barter

The gospel of the ant precludes a dance
songs can't clean the bathhouse of the forest
clicking and clucking at the nubile geese
lounging in the water at the root of sound

L'Enfer à deux

It is a little known fact that Satan is a herring.

He is red, isn’t he.

All of Canada and parts of the Midwest are going to hell, he says.

I ought to warn them.  But I so want to see the look on their faces!

On my last visit the palace was rather crowded with Spaniards.

They wanted to get a good look at the famous people.

They pushed right to the front of the line.

I slipped out the back when roll-call began.

There is still plenty of good real estate in hell.

If heaven is not an orgy of justice, then why go?

Let’s stay here, order a pizza, and neck all night.

You can be Jane Eyre and I will be the mad shut-in.

Chess with the Man of the Field

Market day in Cheltenham

The shadows of the Schloss

Your favorite song

Comes from your hand

And the glint of glass

As you raise the phone

How do these moments compare

To the dirt road behind the school

That somehow comes unbidden

Or is the memory the thought

The understanding of the scene

Now it is just the strategy I’ll use

In a field of squares

Traced by strings

Dropped from above

Then we’ll stand around

Like mechanics

Told to “Irish up” a Volvo

国王的游戏  The game of kings
没有国王    Without kings

在棋盘隧道  The board tunnels

无情的规则  Ruthless rules

Each piece is made of the past

But is the same true of the rules

We’ll maneuver tin cans and gravel

Inside drain pipes

And the wisps of smoke

That surround the vendors

Will time our moves

An often respite

Of reckless endeavor

And the ceremonial now

New Plateau

We are scattered by the wind, like a whisper, till other winds come for us. One feels them blowing in stillness. North is south and east is also south. The ringlets of the sea fizzle like fake foam in the mouth. I forget the color of her eyes. But not the rough music of her hands and feet. Neap tide sends me back into the house where we sleep in the stairs. It is too close in here. Up in the basement we have the privacy of children. We dimly perceive that the world of adults is a game they have forgotten we are playing. But the play is at its most intense when it is they who are forgotten. The way a painter captures a white muslin skirt that eclipses the persons in the portrait. There it was, all along, a window, sweeter than water, her wet scent. Future days are a calendar of white cliffs, as the sky is smeared by the galloping winds. The past is a blizzard in the face. Other forces are called for. It is the pleasure of perceiving angels walking home from work, that and their musical speech, which brings me on this new plateau where the city’s trees go up in the flames of an early spring. Thus my unhappiness rests incomplete.

Cliffhanger

Today, there is the walk to the rock.

A plan to take tender digital pictures of saxifrage.

We could go together,

But like the seagulls flying in the rain overhead,

The weather is different

When more than one finger clicks the shutter.

Ink, says the merchant perched high on the cliff,

Is more vast than the sky, and he strides off

As we watch from below,

Trying to remember where we left the tripod.

And there it is, spread down the face

In a mascara of moisture and mold.

The brief instant when darkness

Is understood and worn like belief

Reflected outside us in the sheer wall.

Our two fingers making contact

On the small button, jostling,

And then the agonizing picoseconds

As the light spreads its ichor

And the rock changes plane.

Do Not Go Mental Into That Good Night

Do not go mental into that good night,

Old people should burn and crave a dose of Bengay;

Rage, rage against the flying of a kite.

Though wise guys in the pen mope day and night

Because they have no fork and no wife they

Do not go mental into that good night.

Ballet men at last wave good-bye crying how tight

Their pantyhose when they pranced like a green fay!

Rage, rage against the flying of a catamite.

Real men who caught the flu and died in flight,

And learn, too late, the Dow-Jones doubled today,

Do not go blubber into that good night.

Grave Republicans, near death, who stand and fight

Blind mice gazing at ICBMs pointed this way,

Rage, rage against the spying of a Trotskyite.



And you, my Captain, there on the sad height,

Curse, but pay me first, before the devil take you away.

Do not go gentle into that food fight.

Rage, rage against the flying of egg white.

The Absolute

Where is the space of the mind?

Does it exist when others are not looking?

Does it have more than two sides?

What if Botticelli’s Venus lived next door?

What if you actually loved Marie Antoinette?

What if Adonis had rather be dead?

I am not sure about these things.

A question has many faces and names.

It often gets trapped in a semiotic loop.

It is a secret even to you.

It does not really concern us,

Only our being.  It is whatever we are

And more.  It is everything there is

And nothing else.  It persists without us

Except maybe for the indentation we left

In the grass.  I just wanted to leave a note.

A lemon in a stainless steel bowl

Does not cease to be whatever it is

When a mind stops thinking of it.

How softly can I say it so you will hear it?

You are a secret even to me.

Annie

On the Texas coast

Between Mobile and Galveston there is

A great garden filled with roses

And there inside it stands a villa

It is a great rose

A woman is often strolling

In the garden alone

And when I pass on the road planted with lime trees

Our eyes meet

The woman is Mennonite

Her rosebush has no buds and her clothes no buttons

My jacket is missing two of its own

The lady and I observe almost the same rite

Annie

Sur la côte du Texas

Entre Mobile et Galveston il y a

Un grand jardin tout plein de roses

Il contient aussi une villa

Qui est une grande rose

Une femme se promène souvent

Dans le jardin toute seule

Et quand je passe sur la route bordée de tilleuls

Nous nous regardons

Comme cette femme est mennonite

Ses rosiers et ses vêtements n’ont pas de boutons

Il en manque deux à mon veston

La dame et moi suivons presque le même rite

Apollinaire