Tulip

We float around like clouds

And the wind lightly touches our hair.

I have a beautiful feeling

When the façades release their birds into space.

The light bends to get a drink

At the stream, puzzled by its own shadow.

The colors of evening have arrived.

I love you more than gray and pink and pale blue.

I wish we were curled up in a flower.

That would be lovely maybe a tulip.

Before the sun comes down

And the words collect like droplets

Of water, I will miss you where you are

And the night will be as the day.

We Are Lucky

To be born on the edge of the same galaxy

And to have collided in the great particle accelerator

To have all our fingers and toes

To have our curves correspond like the sinuous bodies of ocean and earth

To pleasure one another with our five mouths

To be naked in our clothing

To walk hand in hand in the river of humanity

To spit rainbows

To have our teeth fall out so musically

Not to have lost all our feathers

To fuck also in spirit

To join two labyrinths with a single kiss

To eat one another for breakfast

The choices get harder, finer,

This thick into the maze.

The music we make when we come inside

Colors our sighs in the darkness.

We love one another in a big basket.

The white cotton towels have been engineered

To keep us floating in each other’s arms.

Trying Not to Think of You

How can I embrace what has no body?

You have a body and I embrace you

Wrap me in your soul

Consisting of arms, legs, shoulders, and lips

Your torso is smooth as the softest Greek marble

This poem embraces you like a cat with hazel eyes

Its long sultry glances at you signify the eternity of love

The universe is a void for verbs and adjectives

All nouns are illusions

It’s like a foreign movie with subtitles in a foreign tongue

As we walk around and put our mouths where they fit

The sphinx-like bridge in the light of late September

Queens almost looks romantic from this vantage point

Nestled here between steel and stone

Only you and I exist and maybe not even I

Only curves in space like rivers of sex

And while the tattoos flower up your back the dawn comes

So this is what it is to love and be loved by you

Forty is the New Thirty

The same old abandoned walks

Despair would be too dramatic, would call for action

Instead I am shading my eyes from the sun

The dark side of the sun spooling out its disenchantment

I am not the only drunk on the temple steps

The swirls of light around people and special objects

All forms of knowing and perceiving

This road has been hallowed by travelers

The children throw rocks at the embassy

I can write whatever I want

The clock, the wave, the bird, the star

Some very nice things have happened

And some not so very nice things

The Lava Life

I slept through the resurrection

I drank too much Irish whiskey and had to sleep it off

It was raining fire while I slept

I woke up for the war but then went back to sleep

When I asked you to marry me I was asleep

I slept through chemistry, philosophy, and law school

The kidnapping, the hostage crisis, and the release were a good long nap

I never woke up for my divorce

The alarm sounded but I was sleeping

I couldn’t keep my eyes open for the French Revolution

I was asleep when I lost my virginity

Wake me up before you come

I slept through Great Expectations, Little Dorrit, and Oliver Twist

I was late for my own funeral I overslept

While America was working I was enjoying a siesta

I slept through the Olympics

Remembrance of Things Past was written for insomniacs

I was dreaming I slept with you

I was dreaming when I heard you say “I love you”

They had to wake me up

I slept through ancient Greece

The sunlight was so bright and warm I fell asleep

The universe rotated on its axis while I slept

I had to take a nap to wake up

I slept through Paris, Barcelona, and Moscow

When they walked on the moon I was out like a light it was glorious

I was sleepwalking when I performed a triple by-pass
The Berlin Wall came down and there I was asleep

I hibernated in summer too

I’m sorry Your Holiness what were you saying I must’ve dozed off

The Ushers of the Exact Limes

At home in the caves of the sun

A perfect chest of drawers.

Ringed fingers.  The plausible ins-dead

Standing, soap flake galoshes

Essentially gardens, mythologies

Where the other animals read

After the lights go out, after

The war.  We shine up the lily,

The touch of feet silver the linens

And method.  The story of us

Tangerines every sympathy

Pursuance of limits

When parted.  To logic, a fig, flames.

Clouds and letters, blown.

If I could go where no one lives

And stare into oblivion,

It would be exactly as here and in this life.

In the Bird and Flower Business

Although the fraying at the edges

Occasionally flips the game pieces,

Scattering the pattern like tv snow

Through the mosaic of being,

Everyone has an unappointed task.

The bits we gather go back into the fold

Issuing between the visible and the light

On those occasions when the tide

Of darkness ebbs.  The flashlight

Makes them sparkle in unforeseeable

Ways, the flashlight of the mind,

Asleep for so long, then one day lit

Like a torch one is now carrying,

In private splendor, for the new creatures

Suspended in the walls of a raindrop.

The power is not yours to do with

As you wish, any more than sleep,

A pure good, is something to have,

But it will come to you, like love,

And then you will be swimming

Beautifully, the equal of the angels.

Let’s dive in the oxygen till the stillness

Reaches its apogee and we are pure time.

Our twin souls will be folded and intricate,

Braided like sisters of darkness and light.

A Very Small Exit

The junkies in the system sleep somehow

Through the revolution leaking from the edges,

One of many small exits.

And spirit is

I have a key to the earth

I water seeds in you, a secret algorithm of love

I am filling up a notebook

A spirit composed of clouds and verbs.

I am in a bad mood.

The horizon is holding by a thread.

I have lost track of the days and the nights

Sleeping overtime, clasping still the straws of hope

To be free, freely entangled in the junk

Nobody seems to mind I put

In this column of integers.  Why,

Should they?  I understand many things

And this is not one of them.

You must have rocks in your head.

Everything is tainted till the forgetting comes

Another set of integers

Then nature leaps out at you.

Le Cheile 6-21

The tides and bodies of boats

Move both ways, into and out of sight

Like a sinuous line between the visible

And the light and the scrutable

A boundary that doesn’t block but bend

All stems to the sun. Dunes curve and writhe

Along the coast til the chaparel reclaims

The dirt from blast and draught

A constant redrawing of wind and shore

An endless line of mad surveyors

Eyeing and chewing and scratching

With lewd stares into the air

Something you can sink your molars into

At last, a blank expression, no, a bank one

Passed through with all of the currencies

Exchanging saliva, despite the prohibition.

We signed for a copy of the resurrection

So now we are the captain.

We call capitalism by its name

And then the shrieking starts

Someone broke a fingernail

Or an iron law and circulation increases

Heading round the cape where markets rip

Stumble and spill into bigger piles of assets

For some the terrible necessity of being underneath

The gameboard of the sea juggling

Its risks like gulls down the line,

Amigo amici, the opening Italian

And the end game a slurry of howling apes

Somehow the vortex looks best in plastic

Pants, in the spirit of dropping,

Called out, collapsing, Pierrot on a string

Vexed at the stasis of his garment

Who are we to check your pockets

Without your coy permission?

James County

Forgive me water

slows the mind

In the days before

The flames engulfed

Only watching

The river was

A prospective lapse

Or a project

From a lounge chair

There are no signs

when entering

or one sign

that reads x-ing

a neglected culvert

and a few machines

used to stack things

I have made a bed
Inside a tube
Small glass tubes
A piece of wine
As fat bodies flow
Down the river
Mumbling

I am always behind
The light unless
It is night or

The smoke fits

The atmosphere

Some places are flat

Others as common

As valleys

Frankly water

I wish you

were as clear as gin

I get my news like a

Human thing

Soaked in a chair

The future in nowhere

Samething again

We is reserved

For the things

That would destroy us

Tiger Lily What's Your Name

An old bumper sticker for a comic presidential ticket

Milk under the bridge

The foreign news was also world news

The news from some other world

Live in the bag of discourse

Shuffling between observations decks

We view London from inside a gumdrop

And before it cloys

A midget grinds out an epithalamium

I licked the stamps myself

Then we floated up the same river

The absence of porcupines in the dining car

Dismayed the shoe-gazers

We were down on the floor when my egg timer pinged
A kitten had lost her phoneme

Of Being Alive

Not many who can stand it ever return

To tell the rest of us to buck up

And quit being such a bunch of pussies

Whatever may come.  Is it wicked

To gaze at cattails in bloom

In that lascivious profusion down the road?

Don’t answer that.  Tell me you love me

But this time try to mean it.

The pyramids and the Alps

Will duke it out to woo you back.

The soda pop in the fridge is stale

Someone ate all the cookies

The house elf is not going to do the dishes

What more can we accomplish?

Some strangeness in the morning

And early afternoon

Lying around the house.

To Walt Whitman

I look at my neighbor’s genitals

Have a drink

I love my neighbor

This poem is not on my schedule

I am stating it for the record

Bliss is not ignorance

The stars and stripes

We are now a corporation

Brick by brick the great wall

This poem is going somewhere

I don’t know where

If you like you can give me a prize

I accept don’t tread on me

Where is a policeman when I need one?

This poem is not a fictional person

I only live here

The water bowl is not mine

Do dirty secret wars give you pleasure?

Appeal to heaven

Write me a check I’ll call you

I am running out of sentences

I stop for food and drink

There is no standing here move along

This poem trudges along looking for a song

My utterance needs elbow room

We have plenty of rooms

One line at a time

In whatever order you wish

Dessert salad aperitif

I feel a fizzy sensation

One hour on a Saturday night

Clouds of copper

The sky rises like a turquoise sea

I am gold on the couch

The dog snores in his house

My neighbor

Something in the sunset for everyone

A swallow strays like a comma

I wrote this poem

I had rather it be you

The Weeping

The moonlight is more beautiful than silk

Flowing over the ramparts

When I pull the curtains back.

Moving to the rhythms of a soft

Parade, the women emerge disrobed

From their doorways as I weep

Locked in a room with no chair.

To defy the curfew, the bride

Of the city appears in my dreams.

She is dressed in black.

After two days of rain

A powdery blue mist erases the solids.

Eventually the weeping goes away.

We used to Jump off the Porch

Dying of poetry is a mellow death,

It is cunnilingus for the mind

Windfallen to the pavement like a peach

There to deliquesce in the rain and sun.

Now the whole thing has turned a dark burgundy

With a lake of fuchsia at the bottom

We live now in the caves of the sun

Something very old which I do not understand

You walk in the darkness of your head

These are the last words you remember

Some people take the shapes of others

Petunias are not tumors

Imagine something other than language.

In the first stages of becoming a zero

You may experience a sensation of perfectibility.

This is normal.  What is written and what is not

The other infinity the one inside a thought
Fill up the spaces of your speech.

A whole continent of love and fresh towels awaits you.

We are all having a snack on the beach.

The Long Foam

Trees without leaves

Trees in flower

What is contained between

In the bud

Of imminent coexistence

May be a bubble or not

Thoughts escape their container

Seasonally

It is not always a crime

At least not self-inflicted

When a circle breaks

Into another circle

Many in the pond

Would argue old Bashō was

A secret ninja

So deft in composing

In rhythm with the end

Of all things

And seldom ripping throats

Soft, the hand reaches down

Subtle fingers to pluck

The sewing girl’s needle

From the paralyzed frog

Remember when we lay

On the banks of the river

Two holes in our shirt

From the snares we made

Out of reeds when we rubbed

Grass on our faces to see

What we’d look like older

Much later, the tired village opens

Its reflection in dank loam

Bilious pools and shorn casements

A less than stealthy resignation 

Froth issues from the frog’s mouth

Flecked blades of grass tiny petals

Slowly submerged in the foam

As the white bubbles grow

And alter the direction of the light

In each lenticular orb

So that our scene is myriad

Again

Unsightly the ninja never stops for long

When the globose faces gather

To stare at the mortal hands operant

In the bubble of time a circle feracious

The Lake

Are we then never to rest in port a single day,

Driven ever onward to unknown shores,

Till at last we are swept away into eternal night

Never to return?

O lake, another year has galloped to its close

And she meant to see your lovely waves again,

But look, I sit here alone on the same rock

Where you first saw her.

Then, too, you moaned beneath the plunging crags,

Then, too, you slammed against their shattered faces,

And just like this the wind scattered your foam

At her precious feet.

That evening – do you recall?  Drifting in silence

Between water and sky, we could only hear

The rhythms of the rowers striking in unison

Your waves like a drum.

Suddenly, a new accent was heard on the earth,

Stunning the magic echoes of the shore:

The waves quieted, and the voice that I love

Spoke these syllables:

“O time! Interrupt your flight, and you, hours of happiness!

Interrupt your flow:

Permit us to savor the rapid delights of the best days

We will ever know!

Fly, fly for the unhappy multitude here on earth,

They implore you;

The hours you steal will blunt their hungry cares;

Forget the happy few.

It is useless to beg for a few seconds more,

Time eludes our fingers;

I tell the night:  pass more slowly; and already

It no longer lingers.

Let us love, now, now, while we live; it is late,

Hurry, let us enjoy!

We have no haven; time has no destination;

It slips away, we die.”

Jealous time, is it true, the delirious hours of love

That we gulped down like happiness in a bottle,

Do they depart from us at the same velocity

As unhappy days?

But may we not at least preserve their trace?

What! they are gone for good? are they totally lost?

Time gives, time takes away; and nothing is

Ever coming back.

Eternity, nothingness, the past, abyssal depths,

What have you done with the days you have devoured?

Speak:  will you give back to us the sublime joys

You stole like a kiss?

O lake! silent rocks! caverns! dark woods!

You who are spared by time, who are born anew,

Preserve that evening, beautiful nature, keep

Its memory alive!

Preserve it in your stillness and your storm,

Beautiful lake, and in the aspect of your smiling hills;

Let it imbue the black firs and savage peaks

That hang over you;

Let it dwell in the breeze that trembles in passing,

In the echoes from shore to shore repeating,

In the face of the silver orb that lights your water

With its soft pallor;

Let the crying of the wind, the sighing reeds,

The imperceptible perfumes of your embalmed air,

All we may hear, see, and smell, let it all declare:

They were once in love!

Alphonse de Lamartine (1820)

Bunches

The moon shines down on the water

Even after the first time

Playing golf on an island

Small enough to meet you again

If these islands are a system

That can explain the distance

Between as something other

Than the slow geology

That brings us together

And apart so briefly

Shifting the focus of affection

To the drift to furtive glances

Through the telescope

(breakfast in bamboo huts

and tea with raw fish)

Then I will find a way

To send a backwards sign

By smoke by subtext

Or maybe by moon

When you are not watching

And I am not home