Farewell

The wharf quails a shaggy fist
At the sea's salt-searing whips,
Which tear at the shores,
Lick and lave the leewardings,
As seashells fill up with blood,
And the cormorants' cry
Pierces the leaden air,
Cleaves a line and bites it deep
So the edges burr--
Engrave this knowledge--
The heart's flesh shines like copper,
And song is torn by sea's hands,
Thrown into scaly spittle on the waves,
But still discerned in discrete golden drops.

Never Break That West Wind

The sky went unrecognized all that morning
And through the afternoon
It was not until evening, the glorious gloaming
That began to slip in under the door,
And to gradually fill the room,
Cyclopean stars opening their eyes
One by one took their places on the loveseat
But I would not open my eyes
I would not look upon that sky
It's intrusion was a profanity to me
And so I let out a long, pleading, yet luxuriant fart
Like the wandering violin line that opens Beethoven's Op. 131,
Solid and lasting, like the art in museums,
And the stars sat politely, pretending not to hear it.

Sestina

The saw's plucking teeth
Bite into a juicy red-
Wood, with tufts of fur
Clinging to it's weave
And hearts like sharp feathers
Slicing a stiff salt wind

Around my fingers I wind
The slick floss, between my teeth
Tiepolo clouds painted with feathers
And behind my molar a sudden spark of red
Before dawn I weave
Moss with your fur

A delicious mink's fur
Which round your waist winds
Near your neck it weaves
With a gentian between it's teeth
Violet and red
As a cardinal's dropped feather

At the notch of the arrow, the feather
Makes fly the fur
And snow blooms red
Button's stuck--we can't rewind
So we take the tape in our teeth
And shiny black weave

In time to drums, dancers weave
Arms bathed in keys of feather
Necklaces rattle of badger teeth
Bordered with fur
Spatterings of woodwind
The bansuri spewing red

Still sunk in the red
Unpicking last night's weaving
Into a sphere the yarn winds
Oars feathered
The walls must be furred
Prepared for the comb's teeth

At the stitch of the tooth, an underglow of red
Fistfuls of fur into a shawl woven
And a heart pierced with feathers, left flapping in the wind.

Salt Song

Turning and turning in the radiance
Of cormorants' screams,
Driftwood flesh is bathed,
Salt stings my lips.
I dream of the resonance of the rivers of your hair,
And I stand on the strand
And speak your name to myself,
Before the wind can wrest it from me.
I press wood into my skin
And my eyes make salt
But it is not enough.
Your waters erase my footsteps.
Your kelp shines a net round my liver.
I crave the scrape of your faded fingers.

Speech's Intaglio

No, let me speak--I've sifted the lights from your hair,
Spread your rye with the stars' jelly,
Shucked the ghosts that seal your eyes' wax
And cast the husks upon the cirrus--
Still that marl-eyed rag-toothed ermine
Quick as a sub-pleural fire-stream runs
Roiling through the burrows of my body,
And when your voice comes to me over the sea
As the copper of morning is bitten
By sunlight's nitric acid,
Wings of your breath
Bevel the edges of the air,
Grating flakes of padparadscha
Which glint upon the fires of your froth.

Aubade

We smeared our faces with dirt as it began to grow dark.
Reaching a great plain overgrown with broken herms,
Between which spread beautiful rataplanning raspberries,
We pierced our bastions and our apses full.
We sat down upon the storm and began to observe--
I saw a large sandwich of bread and chicken,
She said that she felt a large glass of milk between her fingers;
I felt a bed grow by my side, and there was another beside her.
When we awoke the cornets were high in the heavens,
The knit wood was beautiful in the summer morning,
And the finches were weaving the branches.
Our beds were of the finest flax stitched with leaves and moss.
At first we were filled with wonder.
'But I am still dreaming,' said Lisa.

Tectonics

From a thousand miles under the ground I tread
You come rolling towards me, you
Who have been approaching for millennia,
You at last sense your birth is near, only a few decades away--
You, eyeless, whose feminine features
Resemble those of the young Mozart,
Though of basalt carved;
My feet feel you walk beneath me--
Sometimes our soles are nearly touching.
When your birthday dawns
You will at last arise to greet me
And eye to eye, brow to brow,
Mouth to mouth, thigh to thigh,
I will dissolve in your igneous.

Absence

Bald crows totter along the Sun's surfaces,
Thoughts darkly annotated, inside their night they hear
The rumble of our vibrations, storm-bright,
Stepping from Colchis over the black sea.
Winding streets of embodied eyes
Towers of sign pointing to words,
A cloud of dog-like force
Blasts like a wave into my weariness.
I sit in the shape of where you once breathed,
In the hole you carved in the air.
With golden gamelans you dropped blood upon the magnolias--
Read the hieroglyphics of the hen's scratching--
Under your eyelids I unburden light,
Hold pieces of brightness and bathe them in oil.

Meat Love

I can feel you glowering there through my eyes,
Red man of meat, puppet-sinews pulled taut,
I stamp my foot, shiny steak slapping the linoleum--
If you'd just shift slightly to one side,
I could see who it is standing behind you--
You see through me; but you, Adamah, are opaque.
The work of sunrise, launching it's slicing rays
Under heaven's sixth rib,
Mimicking my grandmother hacking away
In the Christmas kitchen;
The moon-kestrels cry,
The star-geese flock--
They touch the earth like a dolphin's leap,
Then sink in the glow of your body's underworld.

Haiku

Cicadas still now
Moon, catlike, curls on lake's rug
Red-rimmed eyes open.

Vita Nuova II

Curled up upon the honeyed crags
As a grouse approaching in the predawn stillness
Bringing purple fruits in alligator luggage,
Turning the shining windmills round and round,
The laughlight of heaven's glance, just so, fellow wanderers,
In May, the volcano-sprouts blossom through the ashes,
And my father, in his pajamas, stands over the earth's book
Turning his blinking eyes to read the puddle which inverts the air:
A god, sunk in ashes, reassembles himself,
A lost ship becomes the sea
Hercules becomes stars and Samson stones
So the grey-spotted land will writhe with ferns,
Will become a purling lake
Become a lake of midday red.

Vita Nuova

Night endures all day in these glistening nets,
Caught beneath the crushing weight of light--
Half-hued barnacle brethren
Drifting in and out of view
In red darkness over the unborn,
The impenetrable, curled-up unborn child
Whose entrails coyly slither into position.
***
Flies so precariously procreate
Balanced on the blank air
Paperthin wings glistening
Like evanescent covenants
(Light's sleight-of-hand)
Riding the pregnant emptiness
Over the thorns.

Dogs of Love and War

Beautiful bronze-bodied dog,
I hear your splayed paws slap above me,
Scrape through the hard red clay,
Your nails painted red by the sultry soil,
Your red tongue aching for flesh,
Your red heart quavering obscenely--
I smell upon you her scent,
Feral and as well-known to me as my own
And which others have smelled with their fat nostrils dilated
Filled up with rank knowledge
The knowledge of other bodies upon that body
The knowledge of tongues upon that tongue
The knowledge of the panting of that dog who has unearthed her
And who comes for me.

Morning Music

The nameless grebe sighs
And mildly wakes the shutters--
The Dream feels cool air on it's face
And expands like a bladder,
As the populace starkly observes
The ritual movements of young girls
And Wisdom, that toothless wolf,
Drinking Spring's delight, holding the cup
Delicately with both feathered hands--
The Sun rues the irretrievable shadows
And the swollen streams burn
Screaming with fullness--
O Jakob!
The Angel is stirring.

Red

Teeth and fur:
Fur for a coat to cover discovered flesh,
as flesh hides and atones for the glistening red machinery
Of liver, kidneys, heart, lungs like wings,
The sight of which is death--
Teeth for to bite.

The child clasps her leg, red with fear
Faces intrusive
Eyes knocking at the gate
Laughter of shining teeth
His face pressed into her thigh,
Red as Chopin's D Minor Prelude,
Allegro appassionato
And he bites.

After Holderlin

Spectral birds sustain
Feeble tones
Far too long
In this orchestra--
Plumb orioles
Ruffled for
royal comedie
A yellow
fog-wanderer
plants his feet
beside mine.

Monster Movie

She dipped her hands into the boiling lead of his heart
--The sound of a moon-mad coyote--
And they came out disfigured, molded to one another,
Encased in a glowing shell which quickly hardened
And grew dark again; the burning smell was inescapable
And clotted in their nostrils. Her tears scored his cheeks with acid intaglio.
Bare and small, she was a small red seed,
Earth-driven and bird-shy, roe of rhododendron,
And he enjoyed her ridged smoothness between his incisors;
The satisfying, subdued snip as she broke in half; then he
Used his fingernails to dislodge bits of her that had become stuck in his molars,
Rolling, for a few moments, these final fragments
Between tongue and teeth, like a jaguar playing with a peccary,
Before consigning them to his endless esophagus;
And when he awoke his body was covered in scales.

Digger

There was earth inside, so she dug
Furiously under the starlight,
Throwing earth behind her
In arcs up to heaven's vault,
Her fingers caked with Life,
She heard all the words,
She heard the words not uttered,
And she dug until she was out of hearing;
Stridently she whistled the song of Sophia,
And refused to speak--excavation was all her lexicon.
Which direction do you face, digger?
After you've dug through the night
And wearily break through at last,
Will you discover sunrise or magma?

Diminished Seventh

That morning we woke to soft blue light of dogbreath
And your eyes, dark with sleep,
Closed again in a long rowing motion
Like a mountain shuffling through a saraband...
But the clanging of guitars in the woods kept me awake,
And in our garden, frost had burnished the copper leaves
A sugary-powdery death-dusting
From a long-fingered transparent hand,
Against my ear I felt the chill scrape of
Autumn's lips chapped black with the dry air--
And in their boxes I could hear them thumping,
The children of the sun locked in gladness,
And I touched you and woke you
So we decided to dismantle the piano.

Poem 11

I think upon your lovely set of teeth
No two exactly alike (like snowflakes, but more resolute)
So useful to man; for precise mastication,
And the playful nibbles of your mouth's coy nictitation,
The downy hairs blinking along your superior lip.
Should these ivory dice be misplaced
Broken or buried,
They will always recover their value to me--
The teeth of ghosts glisten like dried honey,
They stick together as they shut upon nothingness,
Biting beyond desire's crumpled limits,
But a ghost can still lap up milk
With it's rag of tongue, so leave out a bowl.
Some things are in it for the long haul.

Friday's Child

Scribbling with mens' pity,
Spelling with his bowels,
A boy with flowers for fingers--
Airlifted to Heaven,
Heart shaped like a chapbook
Which he keeps in a wood box
Stowed under God's lovely arm.

At night our names are erased,
Only the owls know them--
He is one those who doesn't know
He cannot still the air by closing his eyes
Or make the streets stand motionless.
And the loves he's learned
Lie planted under the blooms.

A Memory From A Forest Of My Youth

The lindens were embraced by millions
Of tiny lime-green worms, each fitted
With a stunning vermilion splotch for a head,
Wriggling so delightfully
And re-coloring the bark
Making the tree seem to tremble
With throbbing life,
Like a face holding back a sob--
When they reached the top the worms simply let go--
Dropping like rain upon the ground-leaves
Like a gentle rain in slow triple-time
Like the gentle patter of a gentle rain upon my notebook
And the jay traded his tawdry racket
For a smooth clarinet of gold resin.

Routine

I rise, alarmed, before the sun,
Give my gastrointestinal tract something to do,
Perform my dental ablutions,
Work, daydream,
Amuse my digestive system,
Resist mind-devouring sleep,
Return home from my journeyings,
Offer up hecatombs to my stomach,
Assist my child in her sleeping,
Fall upon my pillow and observe a string of words
Then lie in delicious warm darkness
Until Hypnos wraps around my head--
Then suddenly
A blue pagoda.

Feathers

His body covered in feathers, far above
God views the geometry of the world,
Clean and orderly, a ruled grid;
With each step I take toward him,
I feel him make a move toward me,
Like some half-dreamed game of chess with mirrors;
From a thousand miles away he rushes to meet me,
To reunite with his king-stolen child--
Or
Is he simply dropping,
Like a hawk--



I will not know until I feel in my dorsal flesh
The sweet embrace
Of his talons.

Lost in the Woods

Can you name the one who peers through your eyes?
Have you met yourself--man of meat--walking in the garden?
Heard the footsteps of of the man of stone
Whose soles touch your soles?
You are the Sun's child--Ignite!
Or have you forgotten what it means to stand together in the woods?
To burrow through my breast and place a pine cone in my ribcage?
To walk along the rim of the moonlight, where the darkness
Starts to muzzle it's way in, like a stone-skulled mink,
And hear the tongues of the juniper--
Demanding that we add our bodies to it's stew of humus,
To wrap it's toe-roots around our bones until,
Clogged with clay, we begin to sing.
Already, I begin to feel the feathers fill my mouth--

Falls

At Bridal Veil Falls,
The goats ate from your hand,
Tongues raspy and wet,
Muzzles velvety,
Bodies covered
In a fine rainbow mist,
Eyes miles apart.
Their desperate begging could be heard
Above the deafening crash of water,
Until one morning winter
Let slip a massive white cavalcade
And erased it all.
The veil had fallen.

Nocturne

Transparent nighthawks mournfully blink open
First and innermost
As the sun wearily shuts
It's shaggy Cyclopean--
When the Giants' Bread
Is to lost Heaven's rafters,
Whose fiery light glances from
The glistening entrails of ended song,
The first bright anvils of youth;
Crumbs gather into clouds
Centuries in diameter
Massive clouds which fitfully solidify
Into a stillness of lead,
Wingbeats begetting silence.

The Problem With Light

The problem with light
Is that, in bursting down from the heavens,
It alters all it sees--
It creates colors,
exaggerates forms,
hurts your eyes
and braises your skin;
The hapless heliotropes
Are jerked this way and that
From morning to night
And their necks get sore--
But at nighttime, sealed up, they dream,
Seeing with the eyes behind their eyes,
Because darkness is truth.

Outside

She lay in tatters now, her liver in tatters,
Though flocks of birds tried to sew her, reassemble her,
Using bits of string from their defunct autumn-nests,
Weaving in lavender and mint to keep pests out,
Feathers and string which became her body,
Her body whose surfaces
I had so longed to break through,
Tapping along the exterior,
Listening for a hollow place to excavate--
Her body upon which had once been inscribed
That ghostly braille palimpsest
Which I had tried for so much of my life to translate,
Feeling it wispily, with paper fingers,
As she lay beside me in the red moonlight.

Origin

Beyond Jordan toward the sunrising
And all the way down to the plains of the sea
We watched them rolling,
Mobs of spherophile scarabs,
Exoskeletons glittering hard in the light;
Clicktering alchemists transmuting shit into wonder,
Embracing Ezekiel's anguished diet
(Since New Year's, at least),
The forms of eternity straddled between their thighs
As though giving birth to a planet
Only to take it back to the sea of it's forelife--
We sat together, you and I, in our delicious brooding chamber,
My head rested upon your breast I could hear
Your heart like a muffled mariachi.