Warren Falcon Biography

[To read prose essays by Warren Falcon go to falconwarren.blogspot.com]

What the orphan knows about light —

hidden behind a star
the ash sings without self-pity

yet burns no desert

impervious to heat

all kinds, even human,

excepting the heart

its capacities to startle

Truth be told, O presenting grief,

I have been poem-less for months

I blame the Intruder, insisting

the death of poetry

and so much more, like, say -

Everything I kneel to

out of brokenness,

out of elevation,

devotion perhaps in
between

little flames
beyond their wicks,

mystic at last

If I wore a hat
I would remove it

such pure slow gestures

butoh or

ballet

convey

that there is not even wind, that

there is only spirit

beyond flame — words,

what comes after — as before

what staring is for

when in doldrums

then, again,

read much,

find moment's reprise -

slips a phrase from a
sleeve,

an image dreamed,

poetry visual

so

try

and fail

palms up

it does not go unnoticed

**

Charles Winquist here lays it out clearly, darkly, clearly better than I could - ever - though still I'll endeavor - W. Falcon

'We do not mourn that we see through a glass darkly, we now rejoice in the dark loveliness of the glass. (Dominic Crossan,1975: 39) '

To 'rejoice in the dark lovelinss of the glass' is an alteration of values that suggests that we can know the darkness, think in the dark, or think darkly. The concept of epistemology of darkness is an experiment with this suggestion. Paradoxically we are seeking to illumine the possibility for thinking darkly. The heliotropic metaphor central to a familiar understanding must itself arrive at the strange configuration of an illuminating darkness.

Learning to see in the dark is learning to bring darkness to the light, that is, learning to see the light arkly. We are now in the heart of an epistemology of darkness that acknowledges that part of language 'has a completely unfathomable unconsciousness of itself' (Gadamer,1976: 62) . Can the darkness of language work on the transformation of consciousness? We cannot decide in advance of the experience whether it is possible and what it means to move the familiar and habitual world into the context of the imaginal world.

The task at hand is to replicate for seeing the light and familiar world of daily life in the shadow of the imagination. The world that we already know can then be known in the dark. We thereby teach ourselves to see in the dark so that we can live in the middle. This strange exercise is a taking hold of life. It is a valuation of where and who we are. The whole process is a work within a semantics of meaning and is a function of consciousness.

The immediately available paradigm for seeing the light and darkly is the common experience of dreaming. Dreams take daily life into the underworld, and the dream-work is exemplary of downward thinking (cf. Hillman,1975) . In the investigation of what it means to see darkly, it is not the interpretation of dreams but the interpretation of the dream-work that will be the via regia. This work will be hermeneutics of the second order. We are interpreting a process that is itself a process of interpretation. That is, the dream-work is an interpretation of the waking world that blurs the focus of a monocular vision and drowns the clear ring of univocal speech in a cacophony of metaphorical voices. The meaning of the manifest dream content is a psychological enigma, and the meaning of the dream-work is an epistemological enigma. Analysis of dream content and analysis of dream-work are both interpretations of a secondary order, and both of them are distinguishable from the primary interpretation that is identified as the dream-work.

— from The Epistemology of Darkness: Preliminary Reflections by Charles E. Winquist.

*

From Dark Seeing aka Supreme Fiction or Lavish Absence: From The Dusk Of My Ghost House - Adventures Of An Autodactyl - A Vanity Mildly Tourettic

'Like many of his contemporaries, [poet John] Wieners was interested in how unconscious and aleatoric procedures could 'subvert order' and transform the visible world into a dramatic, emotionally saturated symbolic landscape.' - from Making Use of the Pain: the John Wieners Archives - by Andrea Brady [can be read at academia dot edu]

CABLES TO THOMAS MERTON:

I'VE LEFT THIS PEAPATCH MY
CART, AND A DEAD MAN
THE WEAPONS OF OUR WARFARE
BUT WE CAN'T STAND
STARVE, CAN WE?

AND THEN?

NEVER BE ANY MORE LIKE THIS-EVER

REBUILDING THE WALLS
ERE THE LAMP
LAST TIME
MOST EVERY DOG AND CAT
FROM CALCUTTA
FOR HEAVEN

GUARANTEED RESULTS

THE RISE AND FALL
GOING DEEPER WITH
THE WORLD'S BLACKEST
BLIND, BOUND, BEGGING
MISSING GOD'S LAST TRAIN

WE WILL AGAIN STAY IN THE LOVELY

*

CONDUCT YOUR BLOOMING IN THE NOISE AND WHIP OF THE WHIRLWIND.
— Gwendolyn Brooks

for us all —

in unstoried
astonishment

*

Words of an Old Poet to a Young Poet

try not to startle

morning doves
from their patient songs

listen carefully

do not tear the wind

a wild stallion
counts his sins
in mares

*

Glenn Gould In Heaven Does Lament (excerpt)

Roll in the coagulate burden then,
the Piano Grand.
And my little chair -

Little chair, hold me, pray.
Let there be, crouched again
once again, play and play.
Let knees press close to chest near,
pressed knees there do pray.

Let all of me be
Agency become music
in fingers latency,

theirs deserve all waking praise.

Let us rejoice what is in scarlet shed.
Let us praise iron.
Let oxidation within us reign.

*

Let it come down; the light.

Let it come down; the stars.

Let its cold mouth gape; the moon.

Let its angles fall smoothly to its side; the night.

Let its red run down the wall; the darkness

as if my tongue could matter less by day
than my thoughts could mean more by night

spinning

as

galaxies

do in their

unweary

lightyears...

*

Life, Dear Barcelona, is sweet.

One endures long enough to break through thunder,
a taut belly, a smooth place for lips to land.

One may reach a 'Pure Land' which has no logic,
the tedious seasons of long life endured.

Still, one gathers names of each joven**
prince passed beneath loving,
yes, arduous hands.

Again, upon Kingfisher's wings I blow these kisses,
this music, your patient ear awaiting the purist pearl,
for you were once the bequeathed, escaped girl
without fear of oceans, this one between us which
now must be overflown to reach you.

All this just to explain 'Stealing Circus Hours'...when the chapbook is ready, I'm thinking that this should be the title for the collection that actually sums up my life of seven decades plus a few years. So, I just reread several poems, ones I believe are the better of the too many but that are not but are part and parcel of a writer's process, the rusty water comes coughing through the cracked spigot (how'd that happen?) from ancient tenement pipes and with patience comes the pure clear stream that is quaffable, worth the wait though the sink is stained red from the stuttering prelude to clarity, s'why god invented steel wool but, Lord a'mighty, must be a weight for such sheep to carry. And alas the poor shearers! But....

I may add to the selection title in order to give it a place, a setting, a holler, a town to slant a tone of a life that began, truth be told, and has been, a series of 'still births thus

Stealing Circus Hours - Stillborn Falls Poems.

'Stillborn Falls' arrived at the end of a poem written about unrequited and/or rejected love - both Anima and mortuary - a late afternoon sole launderette, the best part of the poem, a late and last arrival, half drunk (a bit more) , counting pocket change for the washers/dryers spinning scene that wrote itself to sum the angry sad poem about drive- by rejection in the last seizure, I mean, STANZA:

'At the laundromat now a woman in nylons stoops.
I drive by with a wave, another town, same storm,
a study in shields and blades wondering about nylon
mysteries, hand washed, bent woman's name turning
over and over again in spin and dry cycles of drink.'

Of course, I'm in straight drag in the poem but the 2 lane main drag in a one horse town in boonies is the real marriage, the run-on sentence, a life sentence, or so it appears, to careen between Veerage and Virage counties, empty bottles in the steerage. But those, the bottles, are rumors only. I, rather, tee-total and when I drive, once every year when out of the Metro, I'm sober as Matthew 7: 23, that's careen enough.

But back to Stillborn, back to thieving via a lone child's eyes, near to but not partaking of 'the fair' though he, fair is he, is well deserved but doesn't know.
What's HIS story? It's all in the last 3 lines. More than enough.

But, hopefully, enduring the vision of evacuated fairgrounds now closed, circus tents folded, packed, loaded on train cars ready for departure into absence, another name for winter, the boy at a night window may one day count backwards from the future to give grander report of how it, how he, went, and where, what filled in, clean changes of underwear all along the way for of laundromats there is great need, adaptations cleansed, folded neat or not, iron hot or not, ready for new veers, more than fate, one can hope, or worse, providence or tao, steering 4 wheeled junk to joy or joy-enough, a man once a boy capable of parking the damned substitute for life having stumbled (but not drunk) into a way to say, 'Hello...', extend a hand, good for counting, yes, but now able to grasp another, make contact, the hint, the thrill at the word 'touch', better, 'embrace' and so on and so on.

A kingdom for such sweetness. Or least make a good swap.

Hope yet.

Regret, plural, yes. And yet I have some keepable (meaning salvageable) poems that, such as they are, do chronicle a life, mine, alone, lonely, but not idle, but saddling up to to a taut life tightrope in, say, more than a half century, a permanent enough high top, me a'wobble up there, a walker trying to entertain, impress, inspire even and, best or better (at least) , to bless distant gawkers pointillist faces in the stands below

as I pretend the miracle of never falling.

That's a theme too. It sustains in the implied failure.

But go up a few lines and read again the hope part, a haiku, I know, but they, the 'ku', are designed to pack a wallop. Let it be gentle. Let it be hard. I try to not bar the heart, mine or some, not all, others - I am human after all - and as Emily counsels, 'the soul selects her own society' and then bars the door.

Imma introvert. I get rashes. Am prone to disappearing without warning.

Rumor has it (that's a favorite word or phrase) that I am an alien. I knew it to be so as a child playing with a flashlight in the front field in the night, family sleeping in the house, me flashing morse code to stars - S O S - SOS - aka 'come get me, bring me home, this was a grotesque mistake, damn fine print of the contract writ in rusty alpha stentorian...whatever! I was framed. I was conned. I'm done in. I'm done born of errant heritage, a rogue mistake, brakes failed and still on the run - o humans

I am your hard mystery, and soft, not so fast for I am fat
and cannot round the bases quick. I am your inherited meek,
a burden to shake into a sliding man furious for home.

But that was then. Better now that I am urban and roof top needs no mowing, me up there 3 am, the sky orange, a stronger star makes my acquaintance as I point out the winking red light of the Manhattan Bridge suggesting that it, star, encounters the wonder and small favors of moments that don't have to mean.

Love to you, Our Lady of (Sparrows) Barcelona, at least three times a day, make a funny face to a child in a window staring down at you. Or on the balcony close but across the way.

You be you as you do and are. I be me, too, as am, but home base always out of reach.

Perhaps I'll make it to Spain. I pray I do. Fond of bulls, Tempranillo and much vaulted (but often too over mentioned by poets, or wannabes) 'duende'.

What did Unomuno say? oh yeah,

'The only way to give finality to the world is to give it consciousness.'

What flashlights are for, batteries in the larder. Windows, too. And rooftop camoflage late nights.

Sky and I have a polite agreement, even a fondness shared, long in the making (that childhood field) . Overhead seems partial to cities. Could just be me projecting again as I do, like Stillborn's transit scarecrow in its Model Zed waving at nylons scrimmed in window glare's Hopper toned drive-by goodbye town, no stop sign, not one there. so 'get the message and just keep going.'

And so I shall. But with a tight throat, and a swollen heart. I'll take both and offer

(this is between you and me, old friend)

my favorite word to just being still around these or any other parts,
and fingers still able to tally what's what in any train yard in sight -

PRAISE.

*

An Outstanding Invitation to the Dispeptic Banquet (A Declaration from 2008)

for two grander 'failures' - my tenures at 1) Cauldron College and the other at 2 Gravesend Institute, which shape my credo enough which I take from a man named Auden:

Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;

With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;

In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.
- W. H. Auden, from Part 3 of 'In Memory of W. B. Yeats'

And in the persistent darker inner weather, mine and world's, tethering, nay, lashed! to Auden's hope, these to ballast:

I pose you you're question:
shall you uncover honey / where maggots are?
- Charles Olson

myself
the intruder, as he was not - Robert Creeley

I am a sin-eater, a transgression taster, a veritable trespasser's tratatoria of degenerate degustation, digester of daimonic dishes and damaged just-desserts. And, yes, I swallow. As a blues song sings it, '...it's a dirty job, baby, but somebody's got-ta do it! '

But I'm not the only sin-eating thug in the people business. When cogitating about what I might want to say regarding transgression an immediate image of one of my heroes rushes to mind as first conjured in Peter Redgrove's account of his therapeutic work and apprenticeship with the late John Layard, Jungian analyst extraordinaire. Redgrove writes:

'Very early on... I was lucky enough to meet a great and widely known analyst, John Layard...a striking man, in his late seventies when I met him. He had snow-white hair that was worn long and flowed over his collar like steam boiling from a pot. His face in repose had a profound listening quality, and he was very tall. In the centre of his forehead, just above the eyebrows, was a small, round, skin-covered hole in the bone, like a third eye-socket. It was a bullet-hole, from when he had once tried to commit suicide, and you could tell if you had managed to interest him because it would beat with a pulse like a drum. When he knew you well, he would take out his denture for comfort, and then you could see that when he was absorbed in what you were saying he would salivate copiously...he told me he was a sin-eater, and that was why his mouth watered. I protested in the name of common sense; he replied, 'We've had enough of that. What we need is uncommon sense.' --pgs xiii-xiv, from the 'Introduction, ' - The Black Goddess and the Sixth Sense, Paladin Books,1989

Upon first reading this striking image of an elderly Jungian psychoanalyst formerly suicidal with a bullet-hole in the middle of his forehead toothlessly salivating proclaiming to be 'a sin-eater' to his client and student, I laughed outloud in gleeful and relieved recognition of someone to whom my inescapable humanity could easily relate, bullet-hole and what led to it, saliva and appetite for sin-eating, all, along with his reframe of sin and transgression -- how devilishly tasty! And how un-New Agey, un-New Thoughty, not at all 'spirituality LITE', un-clinical psychologically, irreligious, irreverent and utterly human with sulpher and brimstone tints and tones, his very crusty humanity not any longer laden or at least less laden with the burden of an impossible moral transcendence. All the while vibrantly humorous and deadly serious, bullet hole attesting to the seriousness Layard took his work, that of his clients. And nevermind the transference and counter-transference! ! Sin-eating is serious business but not without boundary-breaking irreverent-for-the-gods'-sake humor. Humor, latin for 'fluid.' A sense of humor, a sense of fluid fluidity, of flow. Currents. Implication of heights (air currents) and depths (molten earth core magma flow, water currents) .

Step back then! I'm salivating and the flow is heavy. Liver, transgression and consciousness all flowing together. Coughing confluences. Noir-ish nuances. Outright offensiveness. Keep a spit cup nearby. A spit cup, for those saintly and civilized ones who wouldn't deign t0 know, is kept near at hand to spit snuff or tobacco chaw into whilst one partakes of the gravy and the levity of the nicotinic leaf, and sin. Leaves aren't too far from sin. Just ask Adam and Eve, first transgressors who brought consciousness out of divinely legislated unconsciousness by obeying the consciousness bringer, Lucifer, Light-bearer (The Creator Deity forbade eating of the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil) .

All consciousness, then, is transgression.

If you haven't noticed, one can become keenly self-conscious when transgressing. Thus the leaf coverlets on the Primal Progenitors as the first underwear in the Garden of Eden. I recently asked a colleague why Adam and Eve covered their genitals and not their asses since there is so much shame about anality and shit. She answered wisely, 'You don't cover what you can't see.' But I transgress, I mean digress. Back to sin-eating and consciously doing so which is really the parson's proffer, the psychotherapist's prerogative, the healer/counselor's pretense and pressure.

But let me begin at the beginning again with a confession again:

I am a sin-eater. Until only recently I secretly salivated a la Layard yet publicly pretended to be an abstemiously lite though contrary poetaster of the luxurious foie gras of the Seven Deadlies (Seven Deadly sins) , a munching momser at the veritable smorgasbord of cultural culpas and egregious condiments, those musky, putrid, odoriferous offal-awful morsels of eclectic human sin, mine own, others. Foie gras, the liver from which it is made, is an acquired taste for most humans, a rich, bitter, more than slightly turned odor-of-shit flavored organ meat. A friend from South Africa recently told me that lions always eat the liver of a kill first, and fight for it. Male lions have first dibs since the liver appears to be the most tasty of organs out of the plethora of organ choices. It seems Nature makes liver top choice on the menu for beasts. Why should we uber-animals with consciousness be any different?

The liver as we know converts toxins in the body into harmless substances thus it's rich poisonous flavor which is absolutely and dangerously delicious. Prometheus, that forward seeing thief (his name means 'foresight') of Greek mythology, stealer of divine fire and meaty morsels intended for the gods, bringer of forbidden consciousness and therefore of culture to mortals was punished for his transgression by being chained to a rock where an eagle (sometimes a vulture) would eat his liver by day only to grow back at night to be fed upon once again come daylight. Prometheus had the gall to break divine law and appropriate fire and sacrificial meat for humans, a titanic transgression, his being a Titan afterall.

Edward F. Edinger, Jungian analyst writes:

'Prometheus' story gives us profound images of the nature of emerging consciousness. First there is the process of separation, which determines what belongs to the gods and what belong to humankind, the ego gaining increments of meat, or energy, for itself. Then humanity is provided with fire, one could say with light and energy: consciousness and the effective energy of will to carry out conscious intention are created. However, there was a fearful price for this, because the acquisition of consciousness was a crime, as described in the myth, and its consequesnce was to generate in Prometheus an unhealing wound, the wound inflicted by the eagle/vulture by day--during the time of light and consciousness. This particular detail indicates that consciousness itself is the eagle/vulture, the wound producer. Prometheus pays for the consciousness of humanity with his suffering.' (pg.12, The Divine Drama, The Inner Meaning of Greek Mythology, Shambala Press1994) .

Prometheus committed hubris (inflated pride, being like the gods) and though the gods punished hubris they secretly understood it and admired it seeming to repeatedly pull for it by their restrictions, laws, taboos clearly laid out for mortals and the lesser gods thus guaranteeing transgression since laws, boundaries, taboos beg for transgressors. Though punishment is meted out there are rewards to the punished, sophia (wisdom) being the greatest reward in Greek religion. Sophia/wisdom, humanly gained from human sinners, gifted even the gods who eventually evolved/transformed into Greek philosophy and its pursuit, philos = love, sophia = wisdom, the love of wisdom. This sophia is not derived from the gods above but derived from human sin and sufferings within and against the laws/taboos/boundaries set by the gods who themselves did not obey what they imposed upon mortals and the created world. Thus we learn that transgression, going beyond the bounds, crossing over the border, brings or can bring consciousness and wisdom. Suffering punishments for far seeing, seeing ahead, just plain animal curiosity ('what does that apple, that liver, taste like? ') going for the forbidden fire, brings consciousness for transgression equals consciousness eventually.

Transgressors Serve, Ignore-ance, The Mythology of Transgression

Transgressors serve. And are served up by the 'righteous', the wannabe gilded guru-ic gossips, those glib spirit entrancers, those chin-charmers dime a dozen, those Metro-mancers who plant golden, mass produced flags in the 'transformation' business staking their claims of imminent domain in the new gluttony that is now 'Spirituality, Inc.' from lofts to loony toons, the 'enlightenment business' with TV talk show hosts proclaiming the latest best-selling 'Secret and Esoteric Science' designed to gain material stuff and, of greatest value in that racket, projections of 'Power' with money attached. There will be no dirth of these who so easily via magical thinking with no critical thinking whatsoever please the desperate, the greedy, the forsaken ready to 'worship at any shrine impulses toward perfection' (Artur Rimbaud) which are promises for transcendence but most often dissociation and bypass of the problem of the shadow side of existence, of good and evil.

Transgressors bring that disowned shadow and underworld value, that which has been left out of official culture secular and 'spiritual', of families, clans, cults, groups, communities, nations. They are scapegoated but at first usually ignored. John Layard, mentioned above, said that the crime of Oedipus, whose myth our Western culture is built upon, is ignorance-- ignore-ance (pg. xiv) . Every rebel, maverick, criminal, rule breaker represents a lost value or a new value which has been ignored by the collective. They may be punished, they will be punished, but in the end the punished one will become wise or has the potential to become so and, that not happening, some child or two or three or more will be born or will arrive from some other shore having crossed a border legally or illegally and the old collective values shall fall to the new values brought in by the invader transgressors.

Religion, myth, dreams, society historically and currently are full of those mythic transgressors who bring about a new value, a new order, or herald one to come. Jamake Highwater in his book, The Mythology of Transgression, speaks of two kinds of transgressions, theological, which is a breaking of the absolute laws of god, and mythological, which is 'a metaphor suggesting a process similar to metamorphosis: an act that brings about transformation. The line crossed by a mythic transgression is a boundary of consciousness at the same time that it is a boundary of collective mores...such boundaries are called 'reality' (pg.44) , ruled by an ideology or theology or philosophy (all of which are believed to be absolute) . Mythological transgressors are always perceived by the collective as theological transgressors and are always considered threats, criminals, and are punished. Highwater pointedly continues: '...transgression [from the theological eye] is generally understood to mean an action that is morally subversive. A transgression is closely associated with the religious idea of damnation...we reproach them as sinners. And the more 'terrible' the transgression, the more we reproach them. We may ridicule them, disdain them, beat them, imprison them, banish them, or we may even kill them. But the worst of all possible punishments is doubtlessly our attempts to redeem them: to change them from their sinful ways to our blessed ways...Sartre said that 'hell is other people.' In matters of dogma [theological or psychological] he may have been right (pg.42) .'

In sum, the mythological transgressor leaves the known, received and sanctioned 'Walled City' of norms, of the socio-psycho-sanctimonious collective in order to bring about revelation and transformation. The archetypal hero's journey always leads to revelation and transformation. Highwater says 'the crucial turning point of any (hero's) adventure is that moment when a man or woman breaks away from the commonplace world in order to act out a sense of self. It is this decisive act of disjunction from the commonplace, of departure from the known world, that represents the essential act of crossing the line, of breaking the rules and trespassing beyond the familiar world. That trespass represents the hero's willingness to pierce the protective walls of the community. It represents the daring [and Promethean 'gall'] to make a precarious passage beyond the walls by doing that 'one thing' that is forbidden (pg.41) .'

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

THE POEM SAMPLER, THEN. SELECTIONS/SNIPPETS, PIPS, PITHS, POSTULATIONS, PRESTIDIGITATIONS MOST INGLORIOUS YET IMPLORING

'I suppose it is the late, or soon to be, poet's lot to jot one
for daffodils. At least one. This is mine, a last will to verse.' - Juan de los Oscuros

'shall the shadow go forward ten degrees, or go back ten degrees?

It is a light thing for the shadow to go down ten degrees:

nay, but let the shadow return backward ten degrees...

and he brought the shadow ten degrees backward,
by which it had gone down in the sundial of Ahaz'
- Kings 2 20: 9-11 (King James Bible)

What is all this singing bathed in tears born of
tremendous fear and desire? Whose arms would
hold fast and safe embracement against the brace
of all us we fallen stars who do burn brightly out
or, more like me, privately in quarters, counting
days as if each is the last until that dread thing
finally enters, after a life time of daily threats and
close escapes, with hopeful relief?

Hopefully there will be no buyer's remorse for purchase of Death.

''Here, '' I'll try to say 'ponst that day, '
(one must become Shakespearean in such company,
last payment on the installment plan) ,

''Here's breath for you. I tried to use it well.''

July 2021
East Village
New York City

'... Shut the sea to His sad complaints... ' - Ruth Valadares Correa

'... tossed up and down as the locust... ' - Psalms 109: 23 (King James Bible)

This, of a sudden -

woke up w/
teeth hurting,

too much salt in
last night's flung
together meal,

my careless
Sodom hand,

a.m. face
swollen from
two things,

looking back,

and molars that
quit years ago
but forced them
to endure promi-
sing only softness
pliant upon slow
bites and easy slices.

Sufficed for awhile.

Now Oxycontin
dawn droops lids,
dunks face and
what can of my
head in cold water's
trickle spigot the
super's yet to fix
so wet's nixed
months now

but drips'er shock
enough, baptism
enough, and coffee,
then see what day
might bring sprung
from whatever wills
this cyber thing, its
anti-viruses auto-
immune can't tell me
from bugs and I pay
out extra bucks big
but both bugs and
defenses work against
me such are cyber
graces' incautious
in flagrante worms.

*

Past Lives 1970s

Here horseflies feast.

Upon weathered stones are
only creases where once were
names, dates, God's Word,
chiseled by a now unknown
hand, an impression only, one
among many, reduced to no
plot but that of Providence
left to surmise swatting at
Eucharistic flies proving only
flesh and only blood, a flood
of questions eventually
exhaled and exhaling still,
waiting beside a white rock
with wings, ignoring fires,
leaning into changes.

So let all

verb tenses confuse themselves

for seasons

the newly dead are come to ground

These Graceless Things

these graceless things, Autumnals most
now, now all einfalle, footfalls of a life
gathering, guttered, muttering often enough
for a bit of daylight or, sounded tinnily enough,
'distraction fits', more like keeping the bit in
the mouth, letting the mane lead, tack the
tales, it, some of it all, keeps coming back
to me for reprise or mercy or even glad
surprise of at least a line, a phrase, an image,
an effortful stammer that is more than a
glance against the nog, nog, noggin' along

with apologies to Red Robin

'... the poem of a spiritual quest which never defines itself...' - Wallace Fowlie, 'Rimbaud, The Myth of Childhood'

'A single long sentence without cesura forever unintelligible.' - St, John Perse, 'Exil'

'... The trick is to find heaven and ever let it go...'
'... A problem with heaven is that others pay for it. My heaven over yours. Heavens differ and wars are fought over them. How many people spend time supporting another's heaven? Heaven becomes a hot potato one tries to hold and others try to get rid of it. Everyone's angry at everyone else for not supporting the same heaven...The trick is to find heaven and ever let it go.' - Michael Eigen, from The Sensitive Self

_________________________

sorting shattered
ornaments each
Christmas before
the tree is trimmed
the grim task to sort
each broken globe
glinting shards from
the survivors (I AM
ONE) so sad a mystery
to me still remains
how they do break in
darkness stored in
attic high untouched
by light my hand
the supple hold of
green everly - I cannot
toss them (pretty shards
all the more beautiful
because pitiful (I am)
any-old-way away) so
bear them to woods
where the tree is yearly
cut/coif-ed & so scatter
them upon needles brown -
changelings into sparks -
resembling those the
welder makes just out
the door now kneeling
as I have kneeled (once
& do still) chub boy
adrift midriff-ed betaken
by betoken mysteries'
brokenness's safe(r) re-
turn to trees ever green
though hard on toes &
orphaned shards I now

adhere to a bard or two
the goodfew ('Call me,
Goodfew') of words &
what of them of absence
be made though presenting
sleight of palms even
Rodriquez 13 kneeling
before fire/light

Erotic stance w/ pewter
hands the welder removes
his mask reveals a fine
face w/gold teeth unbroken
as ornaments were once
& forever; Bro eats his
sand-the world-wich
blankly staring

past his truck

notice then the
side of it says

DESIGN - FABRICATE - INSTALL

& I think -

the history
of religions is this,
just, only the sign
reads Modern Steel
(NOT Postmodern
as it now should be
to be precise & true
to the age bereft) located
on Stagg Street thrust once
again into Christmas - deer
& such - though Celtic too -
Cernunnos snorts from forests
rough deeply into green mown
fields where sits beside
a full silver stream an
orphaned god abandoned
carved upon stone with
bronze (before steel) but
still (the god is) stone
fearing it is no longer

real yet sentinel to
'an archaic authority' (Kristeva)

I AM ONE, BUT OPPOSED TO MYSELF' (JUNG)

orphanspeak from
orphanmouth tries

Rodriguez 13 sandwich
done kneels again mask
in place again showers
more the steel step
single-pointed flame
so hurtingly bright
reflects back to it-
self but unopposed as
is night sometimes op-
posed by me such stars
sparks upon a steel
black step above I fear
to take that one so
whistle in said dark
a friend to nothing
much but a friend to
sparks such are whist-
les in the lurch the
stretch of mind not
disregarding toes &
a nose for pain

The nail of my toe
is purple beneath
with blood congealed
there/no place to
go though my foot
takes it to & fro
back & forth the
ugly nail an eye
blind scarlet as
the fabric in my
brother's poor
church behind the
empty wood (Beauty)
of Cross the pewter
hands (make too much
of them the mind says)
indicating that 'light
is or can be found
there in 'absentia'

Black tape it began
with black tape it
began & so too ends
the tale of a nail
swollen misshapen
each step a hurting
forward keeping a man
awake Christmas & all
& being or striving
to be a poet I do not
care at all any longer
(a lie) so wrap my
injured toe blood eye
& all in electrician's
tape feels good there
& not to see it screaming
there seeking surcease

& so seeking I
open the thick
tome of a half
century America
blood & steel
misshapen god
so misshapen
citizens with
miscreant tongues
reel but with
feeling snort
paganly into
the green hope
in spite of all
that has gone
before in spite
of Christmas
even once a year
other holy days
gone, too, wild
for gelt 'all melt
& maya' I too
spill into the
the covers the
heavy book &
open it up it
always now
opens to its

(all our)

broken back
the poem there
at the breech

HOWL

as did
I/we all (just
to remind) when
the blue water
broke to nuclear
flame over an
elegant place
as did the now
faceless orna-
ments break
into armaments
& my/our own
wooden burden
for blades dropped
(& falling still)
hard upon as
did/does the mid-
(mad) century drop
fall into this
new one while
Robin Blaser
sing-songs from

the room of the (my)
(our) living the (my)
(our) in-breathing
breathing out -

'The clown of dignity sits in his tree.
The clown of games hangs there, too.
Which is which or where they go -
the point is to make others see -
that two men in a tree is clearly
the same as poetry''- Robin Blaser

'Oh say can you...' (fledging parapl0gic)

CHRISTMAS EVERYDAY'
SHOUT (to the server, Marco Saint) :

'Arctic honey! ...mouthing the root...
garment crow...declining preacher...' (John Ashberry)

Bring me the check! 'because I was flesh'
(Edward Dahlberg) ...'because I have had
to be fetched out of the deep like a fish,
or fell like a white stone from heaven.

'In woods & mountains I roam' (Jung) in
Christmas world that limps a black taped
toe pointing a way fore/aft the heft of 20
bereft centuries so great a fall

DESIGN - FABRICATE - INSTALL

the subject matter
is not new & not
the sorrow old as
the first cave bear-
ing first fire in
human hand the ex-
piring artist torn
from blank sky to
an expectant wall
a herd there a de-
claration - one day
we too will fill the
earth as hooves have
done & capture sun &
be done over over done
& so come to such edge
of ruin masked BUT
(unexpectedly) OPPOSED
(because of thumbs)
TO OURSELVES & THE
PLACE THAT HOLDS US
STILL THAT MATERNAL
NOW ABJECT & STILL

UTTERING STILL

WRITING BEYOND

CAVE & CENTURIES
TO CONFRONT SAID

ABJECTION:

Kristeva: 'Writing
causes the subject
who ventures in it
(abjection) to con-
front an archaic
Authority, on the
nether side of the
Proper Name'

Rodriquez 13

the welding machine
explains nothing to
a black toe joyous
still for the post
delivered by a
feminine hand
Maria Saint of the
blue & the gray

each day become
Christmas

shards

erotic hands
not

withstanding

the pewter man

the absent Cross

can know of Saviors
by our loss the cost
the price of the
ticket the hieratic
gesture the certain
madness a folie
given Its head

Let me then work
my poem (all of
them) around in
furtherance of
what can be said
without such drama
of centuries &
to come Lines end-
ing in Stillness
which is not Death
but Vast from
Which each comes
then returns

(self/myself)

in

to

Image -

Sky -

Expanse -

Singular Branch

& Many -

Plenty Are

Stillnesses

Advances Even

In The Rot The

Dissolve From

Clot Toward What

It Is Or Was &

Always A Proper

Name-Enough For

Me -

STILLNESS

I am taken with
Such at Which
I stare which holds
my gaze with shades
of It & of Itself

that is, is a death
(or like unto it) -
Stillness unbreathed
or in need of It
(Breath) now, having
been only once (Rilke)
who (It seems) be-
comes relents known
form though (It is)
returned or re-
rested to Itself
beyond Christmas

and yet and yet

the kneeling boy

in the evergreen

the shattered orn-

aments gleam the

needles' net a

permanence enough

*

The Empress of Contrails Writes Upon Darkness

the labyrinths
that time creates
vanish.

(only desert
remains.)

the heart,
fountain of desire,
vanishes.

(only desert
remains.) '
— Federico Garcia Lorca

I, on the other hand,

have lain down with

countless thousands.

My tent is worn out.

Stains mark love-cries,

some blood where tongues

are ground down to root

words, utterance hard

pounded, soft tissue

torn letter by letter,

tender verbs opened to

pain, that which is paid

for more than alabaster

embraces and this strangling

of waists

My tent has drained more

of love's body than a mortuary.

Spikenard scented oils taint

fabric folds and flesh. Rote,

worn pillows are daily, sometimes

hourly turned where I half expect

to find teeth or coins hoping

still for one true word for

love without name else it flies,

moths repelled instead by flame,

pillows revealing nothing.

But I turn them still.

Oasis and cloaca,

love birds parched,

now moves caravansary

toward heart's always

winking horizons.

There are many before

the sun rises.

Perhaps my name goes

before me, my press,

Empress of Contrails,

peacocks in tow,

trailing tallies, scores,

arrivals, departures,

ejaculations, rejections,

all faces hands have held,

and yearning beyond possibility

hesitant dawn's mourning doves.

Have I not spoken of tears

subtle parentheses of blame,

brine outlines punctuated,

thinly silked, easily taken

for wing-laced salt maps,

tongue lick sighs grown

weary with enunciating.

Nightly misspoken, the

flagons are tossed down.

Recall how hot winds blow loudly

as do I, billowing the tent. Men

cry, mad for my return yet burns

no desert impervious to heat of

all kinds, even human, excepting

the heart, its capacities to startle,

its dunes in vast stretches beat,

beat for what moonlight can only

suggest to scorpions in silver

shadows, pitying serpents coiled

smug in their ability to shed skin,

unlike the veiled men.

Hide what cannot be unwritten

though this trail of brocaded

skulls in time returns to sand.

One cannot see this hand

waving goodbyes, the other

concealing tint and quill.

Through ages, upon human vellum,

through cycles unending and same,

what heart heat bids, I write best

upon darkness, eyes closed, tent

open to all who may, supplicant,

come wandering in.

**

Boxing Day - December 26, 2023 - A Bit of Life Writing, Of Late

'We are all a scandal.' - James Hillman, archetypal psychologist/author

'Mine, O thou Lord of life, send my roots rain.' - Gerard Manley Hopkins

[This from a blog post 2014 - friend Elaine in mind, an homage, also to Hopkins, and early flail-ures at verse, still Christianary to squid ink my 'true nature' (or so it is rumored there is such(ness) ' amongst the Calvinistas. Earnest, yes. Sincere, to a fault. Naive yet nave beneath the surface persona I had fallen for as me, what was desired by the 'sanctified' who felt no need to hide from themselves (or so I do project - humans being, after all, utterly 'human, all too human' despite scripture verses and demanded faces to present) . I eventually fled from yon John Calvin's holy hill in order to save my life. If not I'd be dead, certain. Better that, I then thought, than to be as the Holy Remoters Top O the Theological Hill Heap Ones - dead certain.

Glad I did, flee. Rumors followed me. Thankfully, rumor-ers die. Out of my control so I bolted for the vale and to eventually unveil enough for and in some somewheres to befriend a someone I had to get to know, a scandalous me but all of me was mine so far as I could find.

But/so, there were still some great moments among the 'Justified' for which I am grateful.]

A brief account of one:

'Awakened to this this morning, Bachianas Brasilieras No.1...I remember the first time I heard Villa Lobos - in college, thanks to Elaine, a library copy and a suspended moment at the dorm window watching fog pour up from a deep Tennessee valley, socked in again, which often happened on Lookout Mountain, weeks of thick late Autumn fog, gray white-out cloud-light leaning into the unlit quarter, philosophy books stacked, Pre-Socratics, Church History, Clement, Polycarp, Gnostics (I realize now that I am one, or a part of me is) , Old Testament wind howling just beyond the pane, the un-modulated whistle of said insistent storm playing the Castle In The Clouds in fierce Sinai song, Bachianas Brasilieras, No.1, conducted by Villa Lobos himself, nothing short of revelation that my too young to be so weary self had no idea existed but upon hearing within pinnacled gale, then, nothing could prevail against my landing oriented-at-last by mostly cellos and fog spinning in the Brazilian folk rhythms I would spend my entire life descending toward, stumbling forward, misstepping after, 'my kingdom for a macaw, ' become a slack-jawed shamanista entranced by dirt, green overhang in forest din, daily feathered by birds all kinds in twining limbs above.

No romance involved with all that now, I am an almost old man more rapidly untangling string by string, out-cello-ed in the end, and yet again, by an innate longing to land, go under, dwell within, peaking out, over strung, finally done with Polycarp and company, at one with my Hopkins book still, sufficed - Terrible Sonnets to accidental Grace - rendered, I yield, I am peeled layer by layer to pomes penny (p) each glottal stops and 'soul, self, come, poor Jackself, ' be advised once more, 'jaded, let be, ' while not forgetting to go with Lobos rhythms, leave 'comfort root room' finally escaping John Calvin's dire and doom...'let joy size At God knows when to God knows what; whose smile's not wrung, see you'...

and raise you One.

*

Here's the VERY album I listened to, Villa Lobos himself conducting the orchestra with an honest baton and not his honest cigar:

https: //archive.org/details/lp_bachianas-brasileiras-nos-2-5-6-9_heitor-villa-lobos-victoria-de-los-angeles

*

The sonnet entire, #47, by Gerard Manley Hopkins:

MY own heart let me have more have pity on; let
Me live to my sad self hereafter kind,
Charitable; not live this tormented mind
With this tormented mind tormenting yet.
I cast for comfort I can no more get
By groping round my comfortless, than blind
Eyes in their dark can day or thirst can find
Thirst 's all-in-all in all a world of wet.

Soul, self; come, poor Jackself, I do advise
You, jaded, let be; call off thoughts awhile
Elsewhere; leave comfort root-room; let joy size
At God knows when to God knows what; whose smile
's not wrung, see you; unforeseen times rather—as skies
Betweenpie mountains—lights a lovely mile.

*

Some early attempts with Hopkins influence strong on me, even though the poem begins and ends with lines by Shelley, another to absorb, the rhythms and such have more Hopkins than any other...

A Grief Earned - An Ode Beginning & Ending With Lines From Shelley

Here, 'on one fountain of a mourning mind'

I have been taken up into grief, the strange
relief of clouds. Soon departed, I shall be
once again returned to disquieted prayer,
the proud monk to his rites rejoined such
are covers for disjointedness.

Adroit is the spoiled self touching only
late that of Other, of Beauty, Adonais
'dead then' when Mr. Shelley, once young,
now always, has clung 'moderne', as much
as, as soon as he can deny, spurn, return
a Vision 'toward the vital air'.

^

He has the advantage of an Eastern detachment.

I, meanwhile, to walls stick, to
sheets, this cup, full, cannot release.

I step, my foot remains to boards,
stuck, must walk inwardly restrained,

halt, try to, misstep, the usual tread
of, with, my heart.

^

With heart will I to Guatemala go,
a Mayan lover do some good, me there,

to active volcanoes, deepest lake there
with creatures strange - axelotls, pink,

delicate,

and one fountain send where I need
to go - there, continually letting

the hollows go, release the tread,
following, and the after-flow;

feeling grief's all,
I follow to where all is fled...

**

Yet another attempt, some Hopkins ghosting in't:

Poem For Caravaggio - Contemplating 'The Conversion Of Saint Paul On The Road To Damascus' At 4 a.m.

In the shorter light, the extended
night of cold and star-bright questions,
may you cast clumsy net forward into
what it all might mean to fretted you,
to me, stretched canvas, though I will
not thrust these words upon your paint
or palette but make offering for your
own work to feed us through the eyes;
perhaps time to remount the horse
and soldier on, or to fall again, gain
Damascus perspective, from one's
back watch vision distort massive
horse into a God receding into necessary
darkness foregoing image,

see what may form in the spreading dirt,

what resurrection there is in the smell of paint.

*

And finally this writ in 2010 while I was saturating in Charles Olson's Maximus Poems, that 8000 pound book, happy to lug it around in order to take 'the risk of beauyy' aka:

'He can take no risk that matters
the risk of beauty most of all'
- Olson, from 'The Kingfisher'

Toward Erasure No Longer Effortful

That one day the book shall be written,
Odysseus come smiling through the door.
That I shall live forevermore free of provision,
be delivered presently into good, rich life
and unto the richer world, my Lover so long
turning turning turning in distance away from,
yet to manage a caress, a kiss which
neither dismisses nor fully embraces.
It is I that am and shall be erased into this
Love which shall then in time be erased
as well in the greater Sun and that Shining,
too, shall be erased. Then we shall all be
scattered, or I shall be only, embrace by
embrace, toward erasure no longer effortful.

I sift draft by draft rough toward world
now slowing in spite of parentheses these
provisional postulations of 'the good life'
to come. Eventually. There is only this
that I am living now. And my hands feel,
even perhaps are, strapped to this wheel
that turns me as turns Beloved Earth,
the Sun, too, each dreaming
near to but apart from each.

My reach is
here on my tongue,
in my fingers here
grasping words from mind.
I am ever behind in this chase,
now am further from

Love,

Space,

than ever
though my heart
is swollen from
wanting It.

Still, world, accept my blessing.

I send this message aloft on kingfisher wings.

**

Exodus-Excursus After Folly - An Aging Poet Addresses One Who Wanders In Mountains Remote [Reprise - response to madness, to choose only one of many ongoing murderous madness wars in mid-October 2023]

'Now I've broken my ties with the world of red dust;
I spend all my time wandering and read all I want.

Who will lend a dipper of water
to save a fish in a carriage rut? '
—Han Shan, Tang Dynasty, China

1

There's a wary Moses in the distance counting pocket
change to give to the ferrier, coins to fit the eyes.
I'm hanging at the back of the crowd. There's manna
enough for pockets. My Red Sea is long parted but old
Pharaoh's got a new army. Each day is a scrape in the tents.
Prayer and fear is sustenance dragged further out by pillars
of fire. A volcano rumored to be God publishes 'Mandates for
a New Junta', led by a well-bred stutterer (prototypical politician,
it seems) . In odd limbo there trail reluctant murmurers.

That Golden Calf Incident was a silly mistake,
an overreaction, but there were agreements made
at the outset, sealed in blood, first born sons threatened
or worse, guaranteed real estate for dairy farmers and
bee keepers, oodles of milk-and-honey futures, money
to be made in hopefully greener pastures. Now it can
be said with certainty, a 'promised land' comes with
big catches - I've exchanged one for another, same
mistake - the barbs are plenty, mostly mistaken people
thinner than scripture loudly staking claims to land
and deity in long meander.

It's a luxury, sure. Some choose to wander. Some don't.
Water is scarce in deserts. Wheels are few but for
chariots of war, not many ruts though there's thirst aplenty,
not the bounty promised before the journey.

A penny for a wet tongue.

I'm of that hung up crowd forced to flee, a victim
of unleavened fate, or is that too Greek a notion?

The question begs asking. Unintended impertinence
must be forgiven. That's the theme, right? the long
march of history, that of redemption in time though
each and every has an opinion. Can't be helped.

Much to explain.

All's a seeming washed in blood.

2

Old friend, I've been reading zen, the death poems,
and Sayings of the Desert Fathers, in many ways
the same. These orient, assist. I can still lift a head
up among stars while swatting flies just to be silly
for what do stars care at all but for real-ing eyes,
they're wanting to be the more perceived, more
than lumps in solidity, but as sublime, as they once
lightyears dreamed, as a boy's fright-years dreamed,
too, despite a hard father's boot-steps on childhood's
stairs just other side the door to send him packing,

Future's shy Desert Father
anonymous on purpose,

beneath the bed,
a wilderness of sorts,

hiding still.

3

Now

I'm flung further into the fray though I sway up 5 flights
of stairs, long in exile, dizzy with the street, the human
beauty and brokenness there, all those flower pots in
windows, on stoops, the blossoming tree brightening
between darker bricks to truly dwell. It is for me, a shy
son, to see in spite of big chunks missing or torn out,
to remake the world as it always is for gods long to
be bread to dwell in our finitude. To them, then, I am
'the Dude', a daffodil in my lapel, gate of heaven and
h*ll open at the end of the block. I skip forward singing,
'La La La, ' poems a'pocket. If questioned at the gate
I'll blame you, meandering still, granting permission
the entrance to boldly storm.

Between St. Marks and the horizon my fingers still work.

Because They Rhyme They Live, Not I

'O Poesy! for thee I grasp my pen
That am not yet a glorious denizen
Of thy wide heaven; yet, to my ardent prayer,
Yield from thy sanctuary some clear air,
Smoothed for intoxication by the breath
Of flowering bays, that I may die a death...'
— John Keats, 'Sleep and Poetry

I suppose it is the late, or soon to be, poet's
lot to jot one for daffodils. At least one.
This is mine, a last will to verse.

But first, I take a pill before dying, I mean, its
meager meal, yellow sun on a jaundiced plate.
'Consumption' is the word I want. I've got that,
and few breaths left and a flat voice to tell it in:

'The daffodils were yellow as the sun.'

So lay down the pen. Ungrasp! I say.
An olden voice pulls at bruised skin.
I grow thin. And gasp. I grow thin as winter air.

I'll not see them rise again from bulbs perennially.
Not me, annulled in this season of the lung
though each breath mimics leaven, assumes
Eternity's aspirations, but...(where was I?) ...
not me, not long for my tongue to sing.

Meanwhile, bright petaled mouths flaunt, gape,
gulp in early spring, whereas, I flop here, leaden,
landed, banked, a carp brought to heel from bluer
lake pulling gills swallowing nothing that can sustain,
or not much. I sympathize, yes, then down another
pill for more air to clutch, breath an almost perennial
memory of last spring when it first edged me in,
clipped my singing short, when seasonal flowers so
easily rhymed but in a minor wheeze for a minor voice.

Fine then. Some one, some other poet write a line
for when I've gone under forfeiting all final drafts.

Those yard yellows spoon dirt to a useless
feeding sun, useless because I'm soon done in.

I'd do the same for you, Mr. Keats, in a soft, bleating tone of voice.

**

'Dear Low' - Upon His Leaving Mountains For Manhattan, circa 1981

for Lowery McClendon

You did it. You left the trout behind.
Sunday the corn was cut down. Apple trees
in the nearby orchard were felled which explains
the screams I heard a week ago, and the droning
of wasps. That hill was exposed this evening at
sunset, reflected pink in the sky. Reminds me of
the women I always saw through your eyes,
their large lips and eyes, the dark thighs particularly,
fields without their corn now shedding a purple
light like Stevens' Hartford, and you there tonight
forsaking the school yard we'd walk beside
stopping to comment on that view of hills
at our favorite wall where 'Nigger's Pandemonium'
stalled on hot nights to break beer bottles for your
poems broken glass, curtains you'd pass in the
dark where your wheels would splay the stars stuck
to tar bubbles on the street when Hart Crane beat
his words against your rhythm running down
to Montford Park.

Be quick about it then, your departure:

I walked through your house.

You left behind that crooked frying pan.
Your steaks will never taste the same again,
and that espresso pot there, too, black stains
stuck inside like little Lamont's words,
'Are we lost yet? ' Just thrown out like
that plaster of paris bone from the kitchen.
No dog would chew on that, some kind of
sentinel to Arborvale Street signaling something
fragile has passed on like Mr. McKnight's
roses given over to winter, Indian summer's
old woman, packed up her warm skins and
vanished like a wife or lovers.

It's like that, you know. No magic but our own
so often like that old white bone's intention to
be art, our poems strung on the page like slip
over chicken wire, words expiring from our
clutching at them -

'You will be beautiful, make meaningful our days.'

What are our names anymore, Low?

The corn is all cut down.
An old scare crow remains.
Apropos. Poetry's worn out image
stretched out on the hill forlorn in the ice,
forgiving no one, especially ourselves,
alien corn of a foundering century.

12/8/2023 — Reprise, Not Elegy Yet - Direction Switch or Twitch, the Dry Assuages

'Above us only sky.' - John Lennon

Sri Sasquatchitananda and Heroic Elypsseus
Their (My) PostModern Wattage Twaddle Woe

Dear Virgil - Dear, Dare, Door, Spore, Spur, Surety, Durance,

Cables, cobbles, even gobble gobble lung wither, so blame
the weather always inner for what ails as arrears are now,
now come to maturity, nothing here to pay back with but
breath, effortful overtime, surrender each, tho, as recompense
hours front row sinner's bench tin placard o'nt, my name
hammered, only room enuff to 'walk the 'Jehovah Plank';

give account,
have already,
and
will again endlessly,

poems offered to the

White Whale aka Western Deity, Veiled
One, or Ones, of Other-Ether Spectral
to compass point geographic confusion,

truth is all deities are local.

Still I'll gamble, no prize to win, or to be won,
won over, overdone - rather than a fork and
knife dull, stick, please, Mercy, either, or both,
in me, moi, savoir sass surprise reprise with
spit, with spatter, for my being yet one of countless
jokes up the ever raveling Beyond Almighty's
sleeve or more lest GdashD be multi-armed

thus requiring constant retailoring

In the beginning the Patch

aka

'Patch As Patch Can...'

And just for fun - 'Patch Squatch'

Despite Post-Christian, Postmodern statistics/spasti=stics re: Patristics,
I qualify, or so think, to paint myself Mystic, or at least more of that than other tows.

Ted Roethke, Jack Caputo, 'Good-Ol' and other aerie Yokels

what provoke/invoke 'of the rose' otherwise pretend-plot,
or skies multipli'e-d, whichever works for whom which
preaches without preaching 'religion without why' since,
at least so it appears from eyes front of head, and surmises
ever-ly from the back o' noggin, that the rose blossoms
without why but just is,

in is-ness,

mplies

purpose not to be punished, or girdled, requiring
a human deity's choking out

'I thirst.'

Another way to say, 'I want (desire) - enter Siddhartha other end of nope) .'

So, I want, gather the finitude-starburst 'of the rose',
of myriad, let its/their diminishment be 'punto', the end of
loose strife's sentence run-on or over or slog which, to be
clear, is abbreviation for 'soul log' as in 'blog' 'vlog' the new
flogs' to come where each blossom gets to give account,
hope for at least a nano-second of witness -

KATZ! shouts Zen

Break Chronic Crepitude's Anthropo-Entropic

yet other names/approximations of/
from lowly human station 'neath starry
crosses display, splendid splay reduced
by thumbs abbreviations only,

who knew? that
an asterisk contains
an aster, a star, or
once was a star for
who even looks up
now, face into hand
into screen's

flattened obscenity

reduced to, as is
our species, brilliant
of wits, yes, but, as
Ernest Becker repeats -
Sir Jonathon Swift

lest we forget's that

'more's the feces cuz

all we, like Caelia the Fair,

''SHITZ'

ENTONCES (w/apologies to Miss Van and G. M. Hopkins) :

I'll not. I'll Tchaikiovsky.
Kvetch, 'Pathetique'. Bleak
on, not priest on knees, yet
plead, wretch, here stretch
arms, at least one, grasp as,
wreckt, wrack on pain, wrench
kindness render, or try, pity,
and so end City of willful man
'is Clod's cruel tred improv
replete - hyssop, vinegar to
lips sponged tourette-ic cry
'I can no more' reduced
down to a man, no further
compression possible, I bear,
endure, will, no choice in the
matter, Crucible's Riddle, dare
cling to rhyme and opposite,
offering two thumbs yet, a
blood-eye, and a dry tongue.

No wonder then,

and now, forgiving OTHER - no blame -

we make stains. We make marks. I'd prefer
mine to be ob-literary (at least that's

the intention fantasy of extention into

dot dot dot

Elyp-seus)

or No Man
to cyclops
bleats - and
ponder-must
upon personal
pond, eye
forward, try
to balance,
skate, hover,
sur-face or,
here's religion

for you aka

'walk~~~~~~~~on~~~~~~~~ water'
rather than 'sink i' the 'drink' (Melville's
e-fusilage) , pretending, me, or perhaps
cloyed to sinking-hope's sift soft soap

'rope-a-Pope'

polyglotal

peripatetic

pueri-poetic,

lets us

pretend,

O Homo Viator **

the miracle

of never

falling

**Marcel Gabriel's description of the human species, its drive as

Homo Viator = ''man on the flyer, man the traveler, man on the way'
('takin' my time but I don't know where. Goodbye to Rosie, queen'a
Corona - it's me n Julio down by the schoolyard' - Paul Simon)

ap

prox

i

mate

lowly

human

station

beneath

+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + starry crosses

display

displace

'The desire for God—that is the root of the trouble I have bought for myself. I have taken God, the name of God, what is happening in the name of God, as my subject matter. With or without religion, with or without what ordinarily passes for theology, the name of God is too important to leave in the hands of the special interest groups. That is why I freely own up here to a certain theological gesture, to a theological desire and a 'desiring theology', as Charles Winquist would have put it, which is undeniably a desire for God, for something astir in the name of God, a desire for something I know not what, for which I pray night and day. I am praying for an event. — John D. Caputo, The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event

M'eye's wide toward time-as-cued, that black hole
monitor other side-o'kaleido-skull in late stage fiddle
idol 'I'm'-pire (a bad play or attempt to conjure personal
'Imp-ire') , plant my flag on water, 'er might, a mite eremitic,
be air but not airtight but have to, must or bust, commit
metaphor, symbol, error, not the dreaded predictable clot
called 'sign' (I get to change my mind because consciousness
does so alla time so's not MY mind but's the nature o' MIND)

so plant, skate, surmount, May's 'King Sway n Swagger' whilst
I stagger-sink fall no longer appalled - not true! not true - but -
jagged by fractures' fractals, stricktured - but - such is being
(a kind of seeming) , a being with the rose or IN-rose 'mind' - it,
rose, blind to its self, its subjectivity, is not, is and is yet, fretting
not what it, not personal, a moi relieved of moi, a me that can
lag behind or cast ahead as seed, rows ahead plowed by two
eyes what's in the head and always devouring need and knowing

it,

need.

Want.

Thirst.

I, yet again.

Fait Amor. Surfeit Armoire.

Most likely something sustainable'll thrust shoots from clods,
odds are one can then return, get to work, harvest slash and
from dirt to plot to mouth to, all our last name, Smoke we are,
or Ash we were in the wind End wins as it wilts where is lispeth
......elispth-is......well......'all manner of things' or 'mannered
things' well wrung, flung (event-u-allie) ......we know the deal
for if, nodding else, proof's in th' pulse, th' sapien plot alchemical,
'all raw to the cooked, 'y'all' 'maw to maw! ' calls Jackdaw,
'monkey's paw, ' to the letting go pitched in from the very
beginning in 'amor fati' sequels sprung shoots to mouth to

dung, and then again.

Ach! doo! There's pooh-etry in't.

Or as Allen Ginsberg sez it - 'poo'r human prose', so

forgive, please, us, all our woes, Mrs. Rose.

Yer gardens I'll tend still pending nothing but it, the gardens
and the rose, remain without why.

So. This's my prelude, my forward, etude itchy allergi-ed eyes
and loud sneezes. Chill air coming into hovel here cuz old
old window frames literally keep gale-breeze-time-velocity
pale; seems there's always a cold wind - Tis a living and a
burn while air is still Free, puff tympani, huff panes, loosing
caulk but, or so, never mind talks or taps, nods as late winter
sun lowers more, more slants side aways through curtained slots.

O, Lad, Holy Mountain once above our
heads' but s'now but blinkered reverie. Remote.

4115 address no more. A gash now

Holy Orders of MANS four sisters,
their black underwear swaying on the
backyard line, silk (the sheen told all) ,
irony to see as they were covered head
to toe, but the wind, more wind here,
knew what's what of Holy Orders and
what blackness, delicate, smooth,
borders the Sacred near cemetery
vast I once literally dulcimered in
between monuments and headstones
strangely at peace there tho would
not want to LIVE there yuk yuk yuk,

Hallelu Y'all thine the glory,
Hallelu Y'all Imma schmuck!

Signing off, Laddie Bux.

Yers (what's left is vaguely choral) ,

Tehude (in dulce jubilo - in sweet rejoicing)

*

Fortune Cookie Autumn 1980
Born: month of the Dragon.
Horoscope: 'Today's the lucky day.'

Luck, you say? O.K. Once. In a small town
on a snowy road, the scenery spinning round.
When it stopped you were pointing toward a good
place - Home. The message: Go back.
You can decide again to begin again
or stay warm there: Wombtown, population: 1.

No Lions Club or local Jaycees.
No chocolate bars and brooms for the blind.

Free room and board. It's kick and dream,
kick and dream and cleanliness more efficient
than a space suit. Talk about luck?

You're here aren't you? Don't say good or bad.
It's no accident the month's the Dragon's.

Chinese or no, the year has a tail long as a river.

Peel the scales behind the ears
you'll still roar for pain o roaring
boy spinning in the world, the
recurring dream of vortices whirling
pink and red, a large mouth with
teeth spitting you intoan even
muddier river. You'd fish it if you
could. More likely you'd dam it
at the source. The occasional
catch ismore likely snag in undertow.

It's undertow that matters.
The real power's there.

Ask the undertow, you'll get answers.
Don't say need. The bottom's filled
with old cars, tin cans, bad seed.
All you'll ever want. Get lucky.

This is the day. The glass on the window's
steamed. Outside's a blur. What's that gone by
spinning with rustling wings, roaring like wind,
glint of mirrors hurling down? You'd swear
there was a splash. Something's pointing,

Go back.

*

The biographical sum as it was, as it were,10/31/2010 - 14 years ago - I now dwell on the Planet Septuagenaria 'stealing circus hours'

Refugee from the American South.
Now loud-but-reverent mouthed in
New York City.

I have been writing poetry since I was a child and
perhaps may have learned a thing or two which, as more than a few teachers
have advised me to do, must be quickly unlearned or forgotten. I was born in
1952 so inherited some sensibilities of a developing world, its spiritless and
spirit-lessening technology. Unlike the technology I am rapidly growing
extinct or very quickly out-dated but not spiritless.

I have given up keeping up with the times and now gather my tired self after
all the chasing chasing chasing after a culture which erases as quickly as it
makes a momentary thing while pitching it as 'the Real Thing.' Mercury as a
god is after all the great dissolver of all forms. Nothing is new but the
perpetual puddle He brings. But still, we can muddle through easily making
idols of self and machinery, and now this digital fidget cyberly out of
Pandora's Modem. Fame? BOSH!

meave the world to the scoundrels!
My hand once wrote.

My heart was here, full,
and it left, fuller still.

'What thou lovest well remains.'
- Ezra Pound, Canto 181
'
Let him not be another's who can be his own.
- Paracelsus

VISUAL BIO. W/Photo - Spare:

Little blur of a photo to the
right of page, apt image -
The 'striving-after' poet,
much younger days, some
months recovering from
food poisoning, once again
exiled to roses, reading
Lorca & Rilke in a park,
Medellin, Colombia,
South America.
01/1979.

Now, 2010, mid-years renewed
zeal, patience, I work at my still
'striving after' poems

['How long, O Lord, how long? ']

raise their feeble colors,
prayer flags in remote
places hung by unknown
hands, more tatters than
prayers, tatters the greater
expressioni n a dry season
for love, for this Here/Now
reading/hearing smitten,
poets, some, proclaim
sacredness of apparently
profane acts which are so
much more, given contexts
of grief, need, need always,
always, for Presence even
when reaching fails its ardor

*

Giving Darkness in Giverny

Monet might have seen,

giving darkness in Giverny,
defiant to last optics inevitably fired out,

nerve light made the more dipped,
smeared on clutched pallet bent to his gaping will

struggling to open eyes the wider see.

Was failing him the light.

Closing-in world reduced to all horizon.

Tints, brushes, memory
frame these final pieces
canvased, inwardly conformed,
recalled light more light than all raw day.

*

Autumnal Math

The ground assumes its portent.
The good of the season remains in what is left behind.
It takes what lays down or is laid down upon it.
You'd think it a kind of king of accountants.
You'd sink down an addition of arithmetics,
heartbeats, breaths, footings found and lost,
all the unintended landings of a life.
You'd think it wouldn't stop.

You'd sink down even wide awake in this season.
Such sinking pretends its endings in countless
geometries of folding life down or over and under
sundering fractions apart, forgetting theorems, all
but the final one. The rest can change or pretend to.

Admit you are no good at numbers.
Admit you can only count to a certain sum,
or down to it. Reverse your life if you want to,
wind it down with a memory. Beef up the end.
Noble or not, you can fake it.

Planning is what counts for indemnity.
You can make it seem to make sense.
You can try a new line on every stranger you meet.
You've only begun to juggle Euclid anew under
white lids painted shut with mortician's abacus.

You know a new counting accounting for fainter
signs, new ground to flick numbers between your teeth.

What's left behind is now wrong.
The good of it is what belongs to the
laying down of lines about what you've
finally done. Recounting your old formulas
gives some lingering warm to nerves on edge.

No hedging now.

The ground assumes its importance.
The season rattles all our leaving
in its cupped hand.

*

The comedy of hollow sounds derives
From truth and not from satire on our lives.
Clog, therefore, purple Jack and crimson Jill.' —Wallace Stevens

10/25/2023 - Reading Philip Whalen in Manhattan

BLACK TILED FLOOR

random COFFEE SHOPPE

ONE YELLOW-GOLD

GINKGO LEAF THERE

Mid - Wither - Season —

HOW FAR YOU HAVE FALLEN

Whalen's

'Uh // Oh
Now You've
DONE IT!

Minestrone
For all sentient beings

get me outta here! Bail me
out of the WORD OCEAN

I wish to God
I never seen your face
Nor heard your lion tongue'

*

Yet a' nother foray into beginnings, stating, restating, no rebates on efforts made but some payoff (what costs?) or bounce tho temporary, when now's a Beguine (river giving ever its current) begins anew....

Dear Goodfew,

'... it's the black pond
And cold, where toward perfumed evening
A sad child on his knees sets sail
A boat as frail as a May butterfly.' - Hart Crane

....many dreams that I literally killed the long haired young me who was so tragically beholdened to POESY (BIG ARCHETYPE) . The beholdeness was not the real problem, it was my innocence and hope that IT would save me, a child's hope, a sad lavender boiz hope for salvation and value. NOT wrong but hindered me from living on 'terror infirma'...so important and hard those dreams were but they were spot on, not the end all of themselves but are, as we are, as dreams indicate, phases we must go through in order to fill the shoes we're meant to fill be they glass slippers, army boots or ballet or olé zapatos, they do wade or waddle...I'd rather swagger staggerlee and have my metric feet find their own beat and take heat or (worse) cold, for the trying...

....sadly, justa surmise beneath diminishing skies (the limits) that positive projections (which are real not false, Freud is wrong) had been withdrawn via vicissitudes and -ectomies all kinds heart broken or too many sins and amends made (as alluswe do parry refusing mostly to carry the weight of accruals (a'cruels - life's knot to crack we nuts blinker forward (Richard Hugo writes 'isn't is funny how the mind looks back? ' in a void of refusals' contusions while all the while all we ever wanted (and granted)

their inexact poses (slanted, leaning) are roses (delicate bruises each eye) aka 'surely he hath his posies' - Ernest Dowson.

Projections (posies) do get withdrawn (or, rather, in my own experience ongoingly, CRASH or POOF, disappear 'had the thought' but can't remember even 'my old flame' or frameworks for proposed happiness (there, the word is said once and once only) for as a great poet hath writ the goal's 'to be crotch happy and dog dreaming.'

And so we learn, burning bridges and changing orthodonture (tis an molarish adventure viz 'Pardon me Roy, is that the cat the chewed yer new shoes? ') that projections change, fail, fall, move away, have affairs and never come back, but we remember, we're ghosted (and one, I insist, can and should make the most of ghosts and ghostings since everything, each and all, are geists, grists, poetry grifts (slants left-handiing, no ransom, demands but only one, 'you will make meaningful all my days' - one more, with Roethke here on this one and mostest, 'Praise to the End' no matter the matter, leaning knots of roses butoh-ing plotting dawns]

*

Jotted, first London journal note August 2016, New York to Heathrow, recalling full moon light slicing cabin darkness through narrow pane plane window mid-Atlantic:

Swallowing the moon whole could mean
madness now or overdue for the supreme
vanity of daring to eye-gulp the whole swiss cheese.

Please gods and moondogs
the effort pays in insubstantial ways,
makes a life, gives focus, employs for life times:

spilt milk

one milk tooth
a throat charm
against seeing
but not the saying.

It troubles me that I can't get it right.
Not the moon but the poem.

*

'... because the soul is a stranger in this world.'

'This blue world. Unattainable - stranger than dying, by what unmerited grace were we allowed to come see it.' — Franz Wright

I just want to say to you, Franz:

such blackness I have traveled through all night, and
because of you I have made my peace with the Atlantic.

And returned, I slept, one hip wounded, a new name to be announced
at a future date bearing a significance of which I can only wonder

derived of a bruise that I have often sung, of swift and terrible deity grasped.
It grabs back, refuses to relent but is bargained with and for, leaving one bent,
limping,

a worshiper forever.

**

With Wallace Stevens on this one, the Atman Project,
the conjure conjectures with very good chinaware, his,
not mine, I only borrow:

The Planet on the Table by Wallace Stevens

Ariel was glad he had written his poems.
They were of a remembered time
Or of something seen that he liked.

Other makings of the sun
Were waste and welter
And the ripe shrub writhed.

His self and the sun were one
And his poems, although makings of his self,
Were no less makings of the sun.

It was not important that they survive.
What mattered was that they should bear
Some lineament or character,

Some affluence, if only half-perceived,
In the poverty of their words,
Of the planet of which they were part.

—'Supreme Fiction' is part of a poem title by Wallace Stevens;
'Lavish Absence' is part of a title of a memoir about Edmond Jabès.

These notions (some say 'oceans' preferring perhaps) together (weather made of depths' currents disturbing everly the air all round) evoke (a little sleep mounded smoke heap 'hear creep, wretch, wrestle with' that which ever ghost's) the ground too, nothing exempted no matter adornment and aggiomamento past century as well as this new one we're collectively/globally 'grand mal-ing' within wrung out (plaintive complaint leap-song 'Now I'm free, free falling' - Tom Petty) yet again (fingers and frets knit nets 'neural obdurato') meeting the challenge (forced fated or not upon riveted necks from which chords wood) or for that their 'dis-s' might amend, appease, if knees dare insist lowering, to atone, if remedy is too slow, or late, weighted heads bowed (in obdural oblad-AH oblations) , waiting's 'the only way to go' (foregoing hopsotch houchie Koochie coo coo ca choo) in eventual voiditude n titty (or her or him or rhoid pleading pity upon all annoying factoids) though common, they do no longer, if ever, serve in now (composting) Millenia (halitose carbon, diminishing further bones)) swerve out of assumed orbit of the same (now clockwise, muddled clouds calculate in math abstractions (meth) to accommodate what's utterly 'new i' th' wind' proposing a new name for deity aka Apo-strophé) with dastardly advanced technology presuming ITS WILL ALMIGHTY (rather, shot put to ill uses) which may soon render (comatose) the planet to (stone or cinder) Absence (unlavish) .

The question, indeed, is 'how do we stand (refusing all brandishments) within these (hell) realms now? '

The other's (whose fool's accounting?) ,
'How to meaningfully respond? '(foregoing)
new dance-craze-mit-song,

'Ever bodice doing a brand noo dance now
(chum on bae bae lu-lu loco-motion) so y'all
all 'do da Downward Facing Dogie' (rivaling
jive moves without hips or, rather, (torn den-
drons, dislocated (the search is on as to where)
whilst t'other dance is denounced as

'Tortoise Rolls Offa Log'.

But 'I'll swan' as is said down Appalachia mountain way,
'Well I'll sway' or try, shall, pray, parley, if there's deity,
ID, or IT, or Them-uns, into our obdurate corner of shapeless
universe that we duel-dua-denim-doo wa diddy diddy
dumbrained mys-torectomies occupy 'plums on our thumbs'
insisting what good critters are us soon to be frittered foistibly
fried upon our own dumbward thumbs (muted blear wax
proven NOT to be the etiology) soon to be 'apparitions', if
even that, thots gone wrong or, again, might could be 'just
the onto-weather but, as my ancient mamaw, a black bear
missing a paw, snuff in her maw'd say,

'Gather ye nosebleeds while ye may.'

She'd add for emphasis and song,

'Hey nonny nonny Calendula and Honey'

descanting (whilst not discounting
or dismounting dogies) -

''ere's one lone cowboy-or-girl,
Poca-hauntus-or-other, 'Now my
life is not the same / My whole
world has been deranged / cow-
boys to girls bang bang shoot
em up baby / I remember' Intruders'
boyhood's extruding thots -

endings total (visions of) burning
deserts 'westward hoes remembering
commensurate fences while playing
lone rounds of putt-puttNO MULLIGANS,
yes, YE forks in the road, scum to that

scat singing now dat scats
gotcher tongues polyglottally

Wooly bully shepherd watches
night flocks on edges for bogies

Whoopee ti yi yo, git along lil dogies
It's your misfortune's none of my own

Whoopee ti yi yo, git along lildogies
forever a'roaming will be your new home'

'da doo roam roam roam da doo roam roam'

aka

'so many, so many I had not known that death
(He's no fun at all) had undone so many'
therefore so thusly:

s'no crowning matter
(or hatter) now
now mores the
bother when
(preludeto further
adieu some-
where below) -

'when the
red red robin comes
a'bob bob bobbin' along'

so sing song's, this one,
to end or livelong ding
dong daze being with
(or at least affirm though deadly) inform or so it appears to be inevitably post-toasties massive pronoia-tron BOOM shrooms 'clastic-incinerate therefore thrustly itinerate (to yet again re-iterate) obvi-osis, whereupon which Nobel maestro scries surmise sums 'the last ding dong of doom' (Time's a loom threadborne or bare) if there's indeed a where there before something or after nothing we will see or not see though Edington Sir hath sed 'something we know not what is doing we know not what' so

addendums I without dry eyes -

'BUT IT is doing something.' Thusly this, to end or begin on a heartful noble note, skewed hope-a-dope (Who wove or actually weaves this rope?) Jack Kennedy sez it is we homo scrapiens, crappulous, Maya-opic (who pull the knot tighter from both ends and this is the way the churl rock up ends) :

'I believe that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of man's puny, inexhaustible, voice still talking! ...not simply because man alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because man has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion, sacrifice and endurance.' —William Faulkner

.... on the other hand ('time will tell'- silly willy Go-dot de-o doe)

A hint perhaps, something practical:

'Graceless things grow lovely with good uses.' —John Tarrant

'The rose is without why; it blossoms because it blossoms;
It cares not for itself, asks not if it's seen.' — Angelus Silesius

Overture

or Ordure

does an orchard make from stone (peach) ,
tomatoes reborn stray between rows and roses
wilding in heaped woods yard-once'd,

plankt-ruins' old stead close beside a wagon trail
barely road/not road, avails centuries shovel-preserved,
rough-used,

of blood rock, mud mortar,

réfused, aviled, a red seamed

redundancy over worked -

bruised,

hoof, foot,

wheel splay

where rose

thoughts' flowers

not stray—

remains a

feminine

pause,

a braid of
purple shade,

rough pines,
and poplar,

one fruit tree still daring.

**

'The rose is without why; it blossoms because it
blossoms;
It cares not for itself, asks not if it is seen.' —Angelus Silesius

Murmurs of swallows in Gers, France,
Of a Christmas in river floods, sky responding

murmur - (A) to make the sound 'mu mu' (old Greek)
or 'mumu', to murmur with closed lips, to mutter,
moan... (B) to drink with closed lips, to suck in...
-Liddell and Scott, Greek-Engish Lexicon,1897 ed

(all praise) and what marvelous

vapor is life restive (as are days)

in thousand undulate congregations

no need for falconer after all

when Chaos a'daze of a Sunday

evening seems to know something

so falls into

purple fields

(O Low, remember
Hartford's 'purple light')

edged by sheer snow peaks where

sheep surefeet know no fear of

heights and there do dung and

play fearless or at least pretend

not to fall in their waking dream

which is the thing -

concavity curves

in a dead hatchling's

sparkless eye reflecting

dead eggs' perfect

forms soft brooded

upon as one might

brood one in hand

pondering which is

the better off the

flown lone one or

the ongoing nest

knot which can also

denote an egg -

hatched or not or

clotted everyly or

otherwise - is all

surmise who knows

what is the thing

joy's winged

malingerers

rise in sudden

annunciate thunder

As one elderly old bird once said

my being newly fledged/ flung,

me at her knobby wither-knees

admiring her mustache and tooth,

told me she to observe and note

1 or 3 do re mi's or more like the,

or to better the, feathered choirs

so try at least to sing

Chirp Caw Crow or Cackle,
break for Grackles, their cousins
black, cross-eyeds seers blear
in all day's array never blink they
say and say and say tho mystery

stays

which is a thing

or so hints I Ching 31 (from cafe au soul dot com)

Line 1: Influenced in the big toe = a goal without movement

Line 2: Influenced in the calves, misfortune = better to wait.

Line 3: Influenced in the thigh, humiliation = do not seek low hanging fruit

Line 4: Wishes come true, perseverance brings good fortune = companions recognize your dream

Line 5: Influenced in the back = no remorse

Line 6: Influence in the jaws, cheeks and tongue = superficial talk

'To activate the power of Te, do not negate the mind, but do not allow it to keep you its prisoner. Being natural and spontaneously yourself, you are always wooing experience because it will always reflect the condition of your inner world...

Lieh Tzu was trained by Lao Shang: " For three years, my mind did not reflect upon right or wrong and my lips did not speak of gain or loss. During this time, my master bestowed only one glance upon me. After five years, a change took place, and my mind did reflect on right and wrong; my lips spoke of gain and loss. For the first time, my master relaxed his countenance and smiled. After seven years, I let my mind reflect on whatever it would, but it no longer occupied itself with right or wrong. I let my lips utter whatsoever they pleased, but they no longer spoke of gain or loss. Then, at last, my master invited me to sit on the mat beside him. After nine years, my mind gave free reign to its reflections; my mouth gave free reign to its speech. Of right, wrong, gain or loss, I had no knowledge. Internal and external were blended in unity. I was wholly unaware of what my body was resting upon. I was born this way, like leaves falling from a tree and playing on the wind. In fact, I knew not whether the wind was riding on me, or whether I was riding on the wind."

**

Slim Noir's Memoir - An Entry Recalling Volkswagen Days

Despite my utter loathing for mechanic work, all thumbs and my mind with the mystics, my dad insisted on teaching me (and bros) car mechanics (pre-computer run engines) , those heavy old engines, etc. and so I did learn to do some basics and to identify when an engine needed expert attention.

In Mexico and Central and South America where I have spent some years traveling, by thumb first journeys so saw the back seats of many a vw, truck, random hybrids, most folks, men, boys, know how to work on machinery all kinds. And I've seen marvelous were-vehicles comprised of parts of different types, Franken-cars, buses, tractors, even train cars (school bus tops, railroad bottoms) , on the rails, on the roads, trails, in the fields.

Alas, the 'bochos' or bugs aren't as evident as they used to be in Mex. City, the city rumbling loudly with thousands of them with all that traffic...there are new VWs that are quiet....the new bug ain't the old bug and I LOVE the old bug/bocho despite the quart of oil needed every 20 miles or so, the blown gaskets, the noise and smelling like petrol when you got out of the car (the engine in the rear wafting fumes into the passenger 'cabin' (cramped, knees to noses, elbows to elbowses) ....and the VW Vans, of course! ! chariot of the hippie gods and I had one of those too with 20 other bodies (living ones, 'eyes alive, minds still glowing' - Grace Slick) crammed-in granny dresses-bonnets to bell bottoms and praying we could get into 2nd gear without stripping all 3 of 'em to make it up a long steep hill, even a struggle on flat roads betimes with bodies outside at the back pushing along to get up enough momentum for the long road and more roads ahead. Great fun. Music blaring. Freak flags flying!

Paul Simon's song, my highway song, one of several, when I remember those years, certainly captures youth angst/atmosphere in the smoggy air then:

https: //www.youtube.com/watch? v=CgsAmUbrCnA

Glad I did learn to work on a car but can't anymore as they are totally other entities now, not named aafter animals or bugs anymore but, rather, futuristic cyber whirrers, warrior oriented, or boo koo MONAY MONAY bling bling things macho-ing or sachaying, boring, ongoing silence no rumbles or vibes at all when at a red light or idling (but they don't IDLE just as we pomo (post moderns) are trained not to do!) ....

I wrote a poem about all the cars and names for cars in the 50's 60's that bore animal species names, insects, and such...there was even a Snipe! ! car...Poem attempted to be about children conceived backseats in cars named for the animal/insect crossed with human dna....kinda like James Dickey's remarkable poem, The Sheep Child, only these my poems children were part Mustang and human, Impala/human, etc.

Great idea for a poem...the poem itself not so great but it was a good moment to have at it....still a good mythic theme to try in a poem...once I drove a Fiat Spider in college for a spell...not mine but that of a friend who liked to be driven and I loved driving that car! but not during that tornado at 3 am on the interstate near Chicago in October 1973! ! !

Now I'm hankering to drive a vehicle (don't do that much at all since I live in NYC and am driven around if need be) ....but during covid upstate I could drive my friend's truck in the mounts there and first time I did so, alone, by myself at last, I literally wept for joy....I didn't realize how much agency I have lost living in NYC, always at the behest and mercy of NYC's conditions. Owning a car here means being owned by the car AND the city, alternate side of the street parking everyday but Sunday, garages are only for the very wealthy (monthly rent almost as much as apartment rent!) ....I'd tell my inner child once on the road upstate, 'Let's get lost! ' and at some point, first driving a car in years, I heard Little me ask,

'Are we lost yet? ! '

Hell yeah! AT LAST!

*

Now: To the poems again assemblage or podge or porridge pour-age autobiographical or whimsy mumsy more o groves laden bidden of/by many part-selves in contention for prominence

Tone setters at the
outset setting stage,
walking the plank:

Descend —and of the curveship lend a myth to god - Hart Crane

On Coney Island boardwalk
benched blondes free from restraining rides
keen on in staggered rhyme forgetting they
once were German swans, grim and pale.

Posing as cranes, nothing lent, they
lament still a dead poet's name.

On this manic strand the franks* are speechless in
the hand relenting to degrees of gray mustard smeared
as is the wind also gray beside the ruined amusements.

Thrill rides plummet stick children hard and down
while fresh girls defy gravity while they can curving
in cues between sand and tracks. Impatient, they
blot their brightened lips, stain tissues thin between
World Wars. They cry out a dead poet's name. - N. Nightingale

If that's too mythical a tone
consider those who conform and know something's wrong
and need a zany few who won't obey.' - Richard Hugo

'Toot Toot Lovers! Bag of bones coming through! ' - Richard Hugo

'... to begin with a swelled head and end with swelled feet...' - Ezra Pound

'Mark the first page of the book with a red marker.
For, in the beginning, the wound is invisible.' - Edmund Jabes

'We happen to live at a moment that is going to get worse before it gets better. The world went inside the internet and became the world...a poem may not conform to your worldview, your tastes, or what you think a poem can be. I often hear students get exasperated if a poem stretches the bounds of what they think poetry includes.'
- Sean Singer

'I don't believe in the other world
...But I don't believe in this one either
unless it's pierced by light.' Anna Kamienska:

'There is another world, but it is inside this one.' - Paul Celan

'There isn't any one correct way to write poetry. Poetry is a word like love: an endless confusion of different things all warped into one word because no vocabulary of discrimination exists.' - Jack Gilbert

'The ant's a centaur in his dragon world.
Pull down thy vanity' - Ezra Pound, from Pisan Canto LXXXI

*

'The cry is part. My solitaria
Are the meditations of a central mind.'

'One feels the life of that which gives life as it is.

'I am aware of being in the elegy season.'
—a few bracketed [black birds] from Wallace Stevens

Epimetheus Looks Back - Upon Gazing at a Photo of Sixty Year Old Me from My Now Being Sevety One

'Grief-muscles.' - Charles Darwin

A decade ago, now a stacked deck of decades, seven plus one card more, was in the Adirondacks, wood stove flue over my left shoulder, the valleys of the deepening labial folds, dark ink blotting the corners of my mouth, 'goin' south', or, rather 'west' 'where the fence commences', me gazing 'at the moon till I lose my senses'. But never the ever-present raver's edge, er, I mean razor's edge. Was/were my zennish days more or less or not at all, my NOW AND ZEN SOME days, my zen teacher a proponent of Wrecking Ball Zen which explains the glazed right eye and the intense left, bereft of self or no-self as the zen language games go, brilliantly so, sweetens obscurity, blurs meanings edges through which one can fall into hopeful (bad, bad, no hope no hope screams sensei) satori, or better, 'what not'.

From the journal then, rather, yearnal, again rather, urinal - aka pissed zen, patience wearing thin, hair too, gale blowing from peaks into valley, the comb over undone, T. S. Eliot's gin breathed growling in the noggin',

'I grow old. I grow old. I shall wear the bottoms my trousers rolled'.

Zen made/makes one, me, somewhat preponderant, or it's just inherently irreverent me, or, is it just me, if so then
'
me who? ' - cue zen yodeler in my head, warbling

'YODEL LAY HE WHOOOOOOO? ? ? ? '

(((((echoes, re-verbs))))) off Three Sisters Mounts looming over my right shoulder just out the plate-glass door., the Sisters, not my shoulder (nadda yogini) .

*

ENTRY - Day 13:

Sensei tells me: It's undertow that matters.

I am stumped.

One adjusts. Continually.
The persona is adaptation
appearing to be solid but sleep reveals the neutrality
of the animal.

Dreams tell us otherwise
when we remember them as it takes an ego to witness,
to remember.

They reveal that we are
caught up into something so much greater than
flush and stir.

It's a wonder we make do
as much as we do and still
call ourselves by name, a
species of animal,

homo sapiens.

I regret self pity.
I'd reject it if I could but it adheres,
last resort of old coots born honestly
into it no matter the copious Mercurochrome baths,
the smelling salts obviating the needed nipple.

The stippled trout I nightly catch,
pink insides turned out by blue
blade kept beneath the pillow
baits me with the riddle
again and again -

Something about a stand of trees,
a man carving some bark,
what breath is for.

Today the Market reports a run on Mercurochrome.

Birth goes on.

I am for rebirth.

A dirth of days makes me suddenly Hindu
foregoing gurus and bindu point.

I've made my own here,
one foot well into 'Cracked and Crank',
the drunk tank a memory
worn out.

Doubt is my companion.

Love, too.

No remorse here.

Buys me time, aftershave, and
loads of underwear for the trickles ahead.

Thank the gods for all that.

Oh. And one last good cigar.

Post Script:
I'm switching to
Groucho Marx Zen viz:
'You sed th' woid,
you got the VOID! ! '

Indubitably.

*

ENTRY - DAY 66 - Let's us see how long this lasts:

Nothing to lose, this rag of selves.
With what glory remains of hungry pockets
I skip forward singing, La La La, a willful
don, a lord of nothing-much, poems a'pocket

*

On the other hand, George Steiner, in his book Real Presences, as a post-modernist surprises with these words at the outset:

Where God clings to our culture, to our routines of discourse, He is a phantom of grammar, a fossil embedded in the childhood of rational speech. So Nietzsche (and many after him) .

This essay argues the reverse.

It proposes that any coherent understanding of what language is and how language performs, that any coherent account of the capacity of human speech to communicate meaning and feeling is, in the final analysis, underwritten by the assumption of God's presence.

*

Proofs weary the truth. - George Braques

My words here are not intended, nor are they able, to exclude what Word-oriented, revealed religions of 'the Book' have brought to us and advanced, but now, next 2000 years, the creative struggle will be to conjoin meaningfully polygamous images of psyche into compressions (es-pressions, as in espresso) and ex-pressions (pressed out) by and with word and Word which have tendencies toward monotheism, one true meaning only, which results therefore, can't be avoided, into a heavy-handedness in terms of a perceived/derived one and only Absolute. Ironically, the Arabs discovery of always heavy Zero - which, to me, is the only Absolute of merit - gave birth to a multiplicity, diverse, perverse, all the more irascible yet embraceable, maddeningly erasable, while growing arms beyond counting, the better to carry the unforgiving densities.

Count them (or try) we must; for congenital compulsions such are calcifications - spirit, soul, life in the body - are gripped in the teeth of the world; beatific, we perceive ourselves to be in the image of deity. Still, we can believe we are 'safe' within these calcified 'absolutes' - o here is the 'burning bush' - or we can risk the profligate ramble which is consciousness, a fire still burning, an intuition in each image that there is more here than meets the eye or thigh or deities as imaged. We all look, or try, beneath the skin of things - under what is presented, or within it - for that half-guessed/hinted at and/or 'felt sense' that there is MORE beyond the barred nerve, more and 'other-than' the shock of a chrome bumper-bent world careening, aware that within all is here-a-Presence, all images and words assuming that Presence - the Arabs gift of the non-alloyed Zero unmeasured by mass, a better name for god depending on thermal history's twisting vector or ghostly mirage, if any are to be had - the base in spite of or within the Metallic Matrix of the blacksmith heart hammering verdigris, chambers, ventricles, into shape, Newton's grave conjugations, living time solidified, hardened, stiffening Presence into dilute renderings of base metal, and chaste Frida Kahlo, her canvases chasing plutonium wire unaware, bears the blunt end of Presence at the end of the Aeon of the Fishes still barely beyond Bronze Age's just sharpened edges fluted, pre-Christian Mexico preferring obsidian ones hacked, chipped, scraped upon hard flint. Frida, volcano born, turns into conjugal vessel, Quetzal plume conjoined to Serpent skin rebirthing extensions of crash, a returning God, boat and horse delivered from the red beard of the bloated sea confronting yet one more deity requiring blood.

Viewing Kahlo's paintings which she came to embody, and they her, even those images and words sought which seek expression upon human tongue in human eye, still seek to deny or decry that Presence, Dark Night in broad day, all appearance, a drift beyond meaning, only a swaying bus careening yet again, repeating collision of the Virgin's hymen, amniotic Host forever a Lover divided yet again, Crepuscular Christi, all this in Kahlo, revered now, cultic, for she is Woman Christ multipli-imaged Suffering One with breasts, concealed antlered uterus wincing at anviled annunciations verified only in wavering beliefs such are weeping statues and surreal apparitions strung out on coniunctio, Gethsemani Girl seen, no longer concealed at all or hidden in plain sight, Christ-o-form agony, isolate, angry, raging, bereft human confusion, 'despised and rejected', the meanness within ourselves destined to see our deities through to the end though beyond capacity to smell necrosis, to see the exit wounds of soul coagulating disguised as skin, muscle, sinew.

And religion.

But it is we who are seen and thus the imperative mercy and compassion, o endlessly, endlessly, for existence as it is and the miracle of that Shining Stranger encountered on all our Emmaus road all the more Real-ing. Lest the bread be broken by that Stranger our eyes cannot see, cannot taste the Thou in existence extending Himself, or Herself as Kahlo-Christ, into our reaching hands and mouths to 'take, eat all of it'. We take when we can see it what is offered by that Shining Stranger who returns us to that 'Thou dimension', all our suffering then contained, held, though never satisfactorily explained so easily reduced to formulaic glibness as so much theology past and presently have done and do still to this day.

The Shining Stranger knows a rod rammed in - o touch his hands and feet, his bleeding side, his weeping womb - and knows Miraculous Dimensions within the apparently real, discovers that very self to be a Miraculous Dimension, an experience, not a Word, nor an image, for both words and images do stumble punch drunk on the once-was-New Wine and Word, those paper scraps unnoticed, unseen, unread, unheeded, or if heeded are only Its, objects devoid of meaning, and not Thous, just one more hapless 'drunk singing in a midnight choir' (Leonard Cohen) .

Emmaus is the road I walk. I pray still. A kind of swoon.

I do not balk at strangers encountered there, shining or not.

When words are put to 'Thou' purposes as the Shining Stranger did at the camp's cook-fire on the Emmaus road then at some point, when bread is broken eyes are opened, a whole loaf now rent into edible pieces rendering wholeness mouth by mouth, once teased ears suddenly recognize sense in sounding voice, that Meaning Itself is before them, feeding, teaching, reaching to touch our own wounded hands and feet, the bleeding sides. All is changed and yet we are returned to life again as it is, but having heard, now seen and tasted ever 'Christ-haunted' for such Grace lingers in aftertaste-yet-a-foretaste,0 Gloria, to say the least, even this lingering grace is a feast, a proffered shining hand remaindering our own shine dim in comparison but loved all the more by 'the Face', It's 'angels' shining. Angels of the Face do not erase us but substantiate our being here all the more.

Christ the Bread, also the Confounding Stone upon which all our glibness breaks. This breaking tells. We are not unloved by that, that Rod and Presence Who knows and partakes of what Kahlo's images, as did her life as lived, portray. No blame. Only awareness of the stain which is existence, exquisite as the burial cloths of the One Rammed to a tree, suffering Divine Paternity, Kahlo arriving on the threshold of the bus which has just, yet again, circulatio, stopped at her stop to carry her forward into Legend

to come to terms
with what happens
repeatedly

18 years of age
piercing metal violates

turns into something
utterly astonished

livid

burns to vapor

still each canvas
backward falls

cruel alchemical
vas splinters
unrelenting nerves

encased steel-plated Virgin
takes a cyclops for a lover

- from my essay at blog spot. com. You may google 'warren'swords' at the blog spot address

*

Old now
haiku easier
on the breadth

Road gets narrower
eyesight dims,
even signs wave

Basho's ghost
guides with ink,

HERE NOT HERE

Can't ever cross
Rainbow Bridge

Beneath it, though,
a billet of mist

*

A river is a process through time, and the river stages are its momentary parts.
—Willard Van Orman Quine

Me, just to be clear at another outset, to set it out, to lay out or in what follows, is to follow, rather, I follow IT, lay it out as IT and how it plays and wants to say, perhaps its stay - which now all below as they go-and-go, are excerpts, patches from poem after poem, a long roam, a life time roaming of them toward rumored HOME, more the homing devices, words, than settling, planting one flag for everything, impossible to do as things, even words do fray down to string and filament fly loosened eventually strand by strand (as do I, me) in fate-wind, and thus the pastiche ensues, unwinds/unravels on purpose not to my own end but to poetry's ends (plural) in creating, destroying, reconfiguring worlds of possibilities plural. And from below bellow scraps filched from whole poems that doubt their legs capacities to stand on their own aka poet Robert Duncan's declaration that

'language, words, make meaning, I don't...'

So what's below is no rural romp or tread and though most readers dread having to participate in the reading of such, having to use their heads and more, better, use their ears without fear of noise or nonsense, then let the lazy forego their efforts here and head off to church or collective shrine or club or circle and so 'knit one pearl two', don the harder shoes that force a straight unyielding path to (or so it is thought and hoped) chaste and bidden conformity to believed-to-be 'received revealed' paths of doggerel and sentimentality.

Or, alas, early 20th century exiled American poet's proclamation propounding to 'make it new' all the while living in classical Europe, is now, early 21st century, 'the old soft shoe' bougie boogie of those new penners currently blowing in the wind, the Bestseller genies sprung like Athena from Zeus's noggin fully formed Jack n Jill Horners patenting both thumbs and plums having believed that they are progenitors of both. But I'll be plumbed, forego the curd topping the pie but stick, rather, a nether in an eye to scrie or effort something wanting to show itself though shy or disguised to throw readers off petrified 'tried and true'. 'Ask not for whom the 'tell bolls, it bolls prithee'' (which is a fun thing to say 'slythy-ly') .

If the reader is a free bleeder and curious about the flow and where it goes or takes one then have some fun and fuddle, let red matter puddle in the mind, the ears, at least one, the better ear the bad one cuz then one must squint an eye try to hear, must effort to ken what's to be be heard that matters in the dim dumb hum haw hem 'to wit, to woo, to whom to what will 'draw flies or better' if it can (or can it) or draw curiosity that begins and ends in further quests such are questions behest that one at least not tarry too long but scurry or surrey forth in whatever meter one finds is adequate to the moment.

There is no certainty here, capital C, so run away to yer barnacled BIG BOOKS HOLY WRIT yer RECEIVED THINKs. A tinker's damn from me to thee. With humor, old and newer meanings both, risk laughter at what Allen Ginsberg calls 'shapely thought' and of course 'unthought' that can open to mystery though the masses are horribly afraid of all that! There's plentyuh old mystery to be had easily and so cheap (tho stale) at The Dollar Store with or without a steeple or shrine or other tell-tale once was symbol now reduced (and on sale) or only a sign, the spark that was once in the totem fled or dead matter tho nostalgia goes far enough for most.
or only a sign, the spark that was once in the totem fled or dead matter tho nostalgia goes far enough for most.

Still, wonder can shew even in an image of Jesus (choose holy man or woman or symbol) apparition-ing on burnt toast.Now THAT I'll take seriously for I could never worship a deity or sacrality that has no sense of humor, one what can still fun us with rumored visitations in the juub juubs and baubles, from Babel to Babble (how many denominations are daily born, each claiming sole authority?) , veritable spawn of further holy wars.

There is some rhyme here below too, some poems, though rhyme's now long verboten in mod school of poesy forgetting that it, poesy, still 'surely hath its posies' aka Ernest Dowson with whom him too I am and 'have been faithful to thee, O Cynara! ' fiddle dee fiddle dim dumb. He died of debauch. But I am the more abstemious preferring profligate torrents of words and what surds may jell even if but for a moment or just plain even if.

As a boy my daily chore was to dump food scraps and other trash-could-rot into large mulch piles to use for father's gardens. And to dig in the dark dense layers for fat worms with which to fish. From this early boyhood chore, the fishing too - a worm on a hook fathomed into unseen depths for a hopeful forkful revelation of fin and flash cornmeal battered, a vocation long emerged into verges with disregard, and dys-regards, effort taken with reading oracular shards glyphs for meaning or leanings toward such that one could take for meaning even if arrived at by other than expected, received and baptized means.

So abandon all hope ye who enter here. Best to veer away unless willing to risk some secure rumored footholds of logic, meter, measure, rhyme, sanity. I'm with old Ezra's humbled fife and thrum 'is repentant, haggard, niggardly self in ripe and rife old age, beyond chastened, crumpled yet and yes but for a tongue and pen still at and in't, the wiser for 'is sins n schisms:

What thou lovest well remains,
the rest is dross
What thou lov'st well shall not be reft from thee
What thou lov'st well is thy true heritage
Whose world, or mine or theirs
or is it of none?
First came the seen, then thus the palpable
Elysium, though it were in the halls of hell,
What thou lovest well is thy true heritage
What thou lov'st well shall not be reft from thee

The ant's a centaur in his dragon world.
Pull down thy vanity, it is not man
Made courage, or made order, or made grace,
Pull down thy vanity, I say pull down.
Learn of the green world what can be thy place
In scaled invention or true artistry,
Pull down thy vanity,
Paquin pull down!
The green casque has outdone your elegance.

'Master thyself, then others shall thee beare';
Pull down thy vanity
Thou art a beaten dog beneath the hail,
A swollen magpie in a fitful sun,
Half black half white
Nor knowst'ou wing from tail
Pull down thy vanity
How mean thy hates
Fostered in falsity,
Pull down thy vanity,
Rathe to destroy, niggard in charity,
Pull down thy vanity,
I say pull down.

But to have done instead of not doing
this is not vanity
To have, with decency, knocked
That a Blunt should open
To have gathered from the air a live tradition
or from a fine old eye the unconquered flame
This is not vanity.
Here error is all in the not done,
all in the diffidence that faltered... '

- March 25,2023

*

Overture (or is it Curvature as is the horn of a bull curved?) from The Cornada Poems - note, cornada means 'gored' in Spanish, a bullfight term)

tell me now
glass-handled knives

I'm not clear where we started

between the rain
whose throat is blue
like a wild fern is clear

I am sad when I see you

your letters arrive fat
swollen with human form

they fly out from my palms

look around you

*

Discovery of the always
heavy Zero - only Absolute
of merit

births multiplicity
arms grown beyond counting

the better to carry
unforgiving densities

Gifts from Arabia
the non-alloyed Zero
unmeasured by mass

better Names for God:

thermal history

twisting vector

ghostly mirage

prima materia

in spite of or within
Metallic Matrices
blacksmith heart
hammers verdigris
chambered ventricles

reshaping Newton's
grave conjugations

more Names:

base metal

hardened presence

timed solidity

dilute rendering

Great Seamstress of Space,

sew, please,

with fingers of dew

these graceless things, Autumnals most
now, now all einfalle*, footfalls of a life
gathering, guttered, muttering often enough
for a bit of daylight or, sounded tinnily enough,
'distraction fits', more like keeping the bit in
the mouth, letting the mane lead, tack the
tales, it, some of it all, keeps coming back
to me for reprise or mercy or even glad
surprise of at least a line, a phrase, an image,
an effortful stammer that is more than a
glance against the nog, nog, noggin' along

with apologies to Red Robbin

*

An idiot squared,
the schoolchild slowly
counts thick fingers.

Starts over and over
confusing thumbs for radiance.

He leaps beyond sums burning
through a window framing numberless
blue scansions turning over
wing by wing.

Rolling velocity
mindlessly over,
no sums required,
round is easy.

Vertical extension
beyond thumbs,

everything.

*

Aperture:

I cannot understand why my arm is not a lilac tree. - Leonard Cohen, Beautiful Losers

September Keroua-ku

sunset
early
delights
for early
night too

so BOO! goes big moon

Dear reader, if you haven't read Cohen's first novel, Beautiful Losers,
hasten to it! I read it in college and each page turned turned my Wheel; I thought,

'Wherever it is he lives inside is where I want to live'

and thus began my perpetual 'striving-after'.

Thus, all my poetry efforts can be called

'The Striving-After Poems'.

Soon I shall be only 'striven'.

'Not a head stands out
A finger rises
Then it is the voice that one knows
A signal a brief note

A man leaves
Up above a cloud that passes by
No one goes in

And the night keeps its secret' - Pierre Reverdy

*

And I was desolate and sick of an old passion - Ernest Dowson

It's got to do with America,
my love of music, my grotesque loneliness... - Henry Miller

Are not all summer nights born late in America

fading when morning glories fog draped at dawn

breech fairgrounds an entire continent long?

Pine perimeters encircle veiled hermetic tents.

Suspended rides now frighten.

Briefly carnies are relieved of their ugliness.

Cotton candy gins spin dry confections to cold crystal.

Sugared metals stick/stop, their precocious tongues

tuned too early for erasure's mistaken harlequin moments

turning the page, turning the ruby, the color at least, in the glass.

How can this reddening world not be loved inspite all glimpes
aheadforward to the last page, the back cover closing within
a clover there pressed, the paler lad/man upon the prancer,
its mane long flowing spotlight glow in overflow, the moment
movement illuminates, now, at last, until the circle's swept at
last, the flung pennies gathered.

'And when I saw my devil, there I found him earnest, thorough
deep, somber: it was the spirit of gravity -- through him all things
fall. Not by wrath does one kill, but by laughing. Up, let us kill the
spirit of gravity! ' - Friedrich Nietzsche]

Rehearsals unseen begin anew before searing noon topples
morning toward concluding shadows,

the band practices another
tune but always in the end a stagger, evening's adagio waiting,

the curtain pull-back, the neighing horse and band when the
standing lad/man balances, easily it seems,

glad upon the tighter rope
or the cantering haunch, centering the miracle in the sky-blue

tights that lights the motion-maddend crowd-now-all-one-child
screaming -

Look!

for us he

pretends the miracle of never falling.

*

PRELUDES

I think poetry must
I think it must
Stay open all night
In beautiful cellars. - Thomas Merton

all these, or many, for Elaine B.
for 'Dear Low Mc.' aka Steadfast
and for N. Nightingale, everly Empress of Contrails

Prelude Blue:

Life, dear Barcelona, is sweet.

One endures long enough to break through thunder,
a taut belly, a smooth place for lips to land.
One may reach a 'Pure Land' which has no logic,
the tedious seasons of long life endured.

Still, one gathers names of each joven prince passed
beneath loving, yes, arduous hands.

Again, upon Kingfisher's wings I blow these kisses,
this music, your patient ear awaiting the purist pearl,
for you were once the bequeathed, escaped girl
without fear of oceans, this one between us which
now must be overflown to reach you.

**

This ancient tonguing
betrays some fault
disdaining the human world -

which occurred first,
the birthing or the wounding?

Abjuring flesh of necessity,
this, my peace, is false

but the music woos,
swells me up.

It is my sleek, bleak hour
remembering Bathsheba's girth.
There is some mirth in remembering her,
those skirts and veils like a cadence of sweet cakes
and guilt... and O this,
this midnight stagger,
nothing hurt but trembling
hand shaking to dryness,
the other leaning into willow.

*

After the Japanese - Badly (c.1984 or so)

That the gods have lifted clouds from Fuji
is no wonder. That you have lifted these
sighs from me here on this pallet is wonder -

enough for me to turn beneath you to earth,
to be dirt that you may sow again,
renew tendrils entwining each spring
that you may lay your leaves upon
fading clover, us the shivering autumn,
ours the promised bestowal -

us to be done over in six moons.

To be done over in six moons
boats gently sift waters
wearing thin transparencies -

suns, moons, stars jeweled facets,
and your face leaning beside the bank
fishing smooth stones to suck
for silver. Winter your need in me,
mine to lay crystal against crystal and flesh -

a fine mesh of stars now strains the river.

*

(a few years late - the beginning of the Planet Unrequitia Poems)

I'm wondering

how a moon so large becomes pathetically
entangled in once gentle willows, suddenly
splinters beside a river, explains breaking
glass, cars aflame

If you wore nylons I could kiss you.

I'm confused. Infused vagrant blood
refuses no stops. Lust cops wait in
dark glasses near darker doors to bust.

I've managed before. Two black coffees and the shakes, bad.

Were we talking about rabbit punches last night,
the blank, blond faces of Stockholm?

Which drinks were free?

*

We lay together, two wrecks, Love,
wooden ships conjoined by forces
too great, too objective to blame.

We stretch beside a shoreline,
eels play in the one rib of our
opened selves, our rarer fingers
share at last, gesture horizon
to stars, even Sun/Moon entwine
before and behind centering a
presumably expanding circumference
curving inwardly toward itself
which is an affection, a longing,
a bottom upon which even God can
lay hidden from secret admirers
such are mirrors whose surfaces
are rarely breached.

But there is reach.

Many ways to say the word 'love'

*

'Humanity, is on the way, always moving towards something. At least, we should be. The classic theological concept for this is 'Homo Viator', or Man on the Way [Man the Flier]. For life is a journey, an adventure that we are always a part of. We do not choose to be on the way, it is our existential situation. We are not at home, we are are on the way home....We long to be at home, in a place of comfort, yet we are not.' - Dan Jesse

'.... from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodious vicus of recirculation.... A way a lone a lost a last a loved a long the ' - James Joyce

*

Each night there must be one, out there,
on the deck, supplicating in boozy tongue,
oozing heart-love all over, spurning the way
things go down in the world, cheap spindrift
the cranes know of dipping their bloated beaks
to the waves. And he must dip his head, braying,
with his hands motioning to the night -

Away! Away!

*

The Empress Of Contrails Writes Upon Darkness - Anxiety Of Influence

I, on the other hand,

have lain down with

countless thousands.

My tent is worn out.

Stains mark love-cries,

some blood where tongues

are ground down to root

words, utterance hard

pounded, soft tissue

torn letter by letter,

tender verbs opened to

pain, that which is paid

for more than these

alabaster embraces

and this strangling

of waists.

My tent has drained more

of love's body than a mortuary.

Spikenard scented oils taint

fabric folds and flesh. Rote,

worn pillows are daily, sometimes

hourly turned where I half expect

to find teeth or coins hoping

still for one true word for

love without name else it flies,

moths repelled instead by flame,

pillows revealing nothing.

But I turn them still.

Oasis and cloaca,

love birds parched,

now moves caravansary

toward heart's always

winking horizons.

There are many before

the sun rises.

Perhaps my name goes

before me, my press,

Empress of Contrails,

peacocks in tow,

trailing tallies, scores,

arrivals, departures,

ejaculations, rejections,

all faces hands have held,

and yearning beyond possibility

hesitant dawn's mourning doves.

Recall how hot winds blow loudly

as do I, billowing the tent. Men

cry mad for my return yet burns

no desert impervious to heat of

all kinds, even human, excepting

the heart its capacities to startle,

its dunes in vast stretches beat

on what moonlight can only

suggest to scorpions in silver

shadows, pitying serpents coiled

smug in their ability to shed skin,

unlike the veiled men.

*

The animal we are
reserves just rights
to complain -

empty bellies,
encroached territories,
crotch urgencies,
skin withers,
fur falls -

brittle goes the bone,
so small the gathered human corners,
so great the needed mercies.

*

(all praise) and what marvelous

vapor is life restive (as are days)

in thousand undulate congregations

no need for falconer after all

when Chaos a'daze of a Sunday

evening seems to know something

so falls into

purple fields

*

If there is a back (if I had one)

would I lie
back with yellowed claws pale
scratch a hole the sky crack hide
desire's body there love's poor inevitable
choices decry the

fetish

of normality when all anything anywhere
wants to do is go undercover preen-preen
undergo indigo scream-scream (as lovers,
swollen do as body wanderers do) are want
wantonly to play become all

feathers

one eye looking this way that the other
bent over a fixed in

skyhole

a

search

breath lurch lunge
all the live long rife song

edging the egg
sag the tail end the

whole flight pattern
migration all night

thrusts rumored
whispers traced

at least two million
years plus whiskers

cyphers filaments
tufts cruciform

downy cuni-nundrum

cross-eyed
cross hairs

there aim
up and in
there deep

in the out
drawing

breaths

unraveling
above the
sheets the

bellows echoed
at last out to
sleepy nothing

only butts'

contrails

pile high

in an

ashtray

*

Einfallen - Remaining Light In Duino

NOTE: Einfallen - German - verb meaning come to mind, invade, fall, collapse, come in, aha, insight-ing

[Beginning with two lines from Fifth Duino Elegy by Rainer Maria Rilke which was inspired by Pablo Picasso's painting, Le Saltimbanques - The Acrobats, with which Rilke lived with for some months]

1

'You that fall with the
thud only fruits know, unripe, '
here wait to be shaken.

Here we carry, or ought to (driven so much past
bitter root) , sugar, not for selves but for the gods
to sweeten their too objective palates

(at least they have tongues/mouths,
we know they have teeth)

to open them into our subjectivity which, secret told, is
what they crave, our realist sufferings, such are sweet
to them, makes them, too, more solid - what they seek -

solidity beyond our capacities to reify
but for Imagination which conducts/births them into material
being.

Our extreme suffering compensates for, gravitates their
too refined coldness toward heat.

They, like scattered flour, having no leaven,
dream/desire us-the-leaven; they seek/swell

into what we have, what we bring, we, the most baked,
to be torn into, eaten too for yearning gods' sake.

They come/fall compelled to colors, palettes, ours, upon
worn pallets, these acrobats, as yet enfleshed lovers in
not yet felt world and literal sense, they

do balance, risk, stumble, break, stutter, cry, utter
such further dimension into

desire's bodies, breath, ashes,
importantly, always just arriving

forgetting the arguing seed's
previous vertical discontent.

2

Such skies already known

limb by limb escape

slowly their shaping.

They suspend, extend then

into their felt fall,

hard land into waking.

What uses for tears there

are gathered there from

the eye, pour upon the

cheek from which miscreant

tongues may most drink.

3

Think again upon these things

which go about in darkness and

stumble against begging no pardon

intent still on passage confused

for words or Ibn Arabi's 'Black Light'

no light at all or thing but a gnossis

found, or given.

Gnossis, most striven for, in minutest motes, is.

All this to say, Ready.

Darkness. Expand/extend

further beyond (yet into)

unsaid street corner,

into inarticulate cathedral,

into unutterable mosque,

into wholly other loci

dependent upon uninhabited

blue field, crust, what

passes for, or has, Light,

hues' overtones 'beyond the fiddle.'

4

Now here must stop

in what is remaining light to cook

must bend to the purple cabbage at hand,

the courage of the knife

the helpful drive of hunger,

marvel yet again, it's faceted pattern when

halved, same as the onion, the leek

Such facets in me too reveal when

I dare to be loved in two

*

A New Postmistress Yet Again - After Reading Duino Elegy Five Before Dawn

'...this carpet forlornly lost in the cosmos...' - Rainer Maria Rilke

A new postmistress yet

again a disaster she

seems to be unable

to read to coordinate

for instance yesterday

two arrive for me in

two separate mailboxes

one in my neighbor's

I find one at my

door just now

when going to

the roof to shake

throw rugs

stringy now

rags mostly

doormat too

letter's there

in one old

boot

left

right

doesn't

matter

can't toss

either out

not yet

must remember

their miles

not yet

ready

for a last

winter

a heap

ready or not

I shake

the throws

over St. Marks

dust is blowing

sun's not high

just enough

little cloud

just

somewhere

beyond

between

buildings

morning glory's

already

opened

closed

an

accident

of

placement

its

indigo

*

Fodor Not Fyodor - Night Walk With Images (exerpt)

'...Because we are partial beings who yearn for total states.' - Michael Eigen

Petrograd
(petrol-grade)
how damnable
(are) your clever-
nesses

now Saint Petersburg

not one sister
city

purges between
shrubs and
out of mis-
placed long
necked lilies

breathes
vodka and sex

grim chorused
pigeon-churn

Icon of Our Lady

(O the lilies white)

drapes drips
robed smeared
candle smoke

sags
the
fagged
ghosts'
conjugal wax
in inkless sky

**

Minimus Flees

'I, Minimus, a boy,
withstood the spelling bee.
Lost the word, its spelling,

E-q-u-a-n-i-m-i-t-y.

So tread I to the apple tree
where the dreaded bee hums
night and day, tells me to be gay.

Mute, I fled. Running still, away.'

*

Oh, pretty boy, Can't you show me nothing but surrender? - Patti Smith

The boy stood on the burning deck
Whence all but he had fled - Felicia Dorothea Hemans

So that three-legged dog pants,
knows only that piss-scented
tires owe him a leg up in the world.

At least one.

All opening lines are strung up years ago when you were
that freckle in 'Father Frank's What-The-F*ck-Land', all
the books (never false starts) read and to be read written
since then and now and to come during the insufferable
hours, forlorn miles in the merciless cab all jib jab flap and
flutter real voice about poor human choices which even at
their worst vote for 'visionary company' in those universes
revealed in now glittering Texan and still warring Iraqi sand.

It is so brilliantly human to find the diamond in the sh-t.

And no need for genius which used
to mean something but not any more.

On with the boring
center line endlessly
dividing though broken
on purpose suggesting
a way to veer.

No guide needed here.
Fear is the drive shaft,
and longing turns the wheel.

Damned good you are inspired then
amidst progress's smoking mirror, like
Blake, a wake-dreamed jeweler mining
away in-breathed while sucking those
cigarettes and lovers, the endless hash
browns along Texas highways and byways
waiting for another dispatch to Bumf*ck and Divine.

The psalmist says it right, no matter the blight:

'Let everything that hath breath praise the Lord.'

I await another dispatch prayer for the far flung tracers.

*

Totem for auto nights
in flagrante,

Tempests
not understood,

barely withstood,
massive pagan
quakes there

where sap does
rise born again

long of old half-dreams
boned aromas,

pines adolescent amonias
sticky there

where a tarred groin-boy
aches, patient,

limb to limb,
squints
holding

weight and breath

without complaint

or brakes

Whereas once of the spinning stars
docked, the spillway Galaxy spins out,

or tries,

its star-child every night for a week,
from-front-seat-from-back, breaches

Nova - a star's sudden bright increase
swells, slowly inward turns, burns back

to original hover over some months
then settles half-past-and-beyond

Carolina

before Interstate 85 was ever

of blue and grey, states blue or red,
this morning's metrics convey the
once-were-living too very late to Art,
to Poesy, to stained cemetery angels'
questioning sentinels leaning whitely
into space rendered mere gestures
in the dusk.

They conjure abstract eternity from
years ahead of our deaths as if we
had already passed on.

Just what is it the meek shall inherit, after all?

Such is mythos - the inheritance,
and the transcendence, of dirt —

First hurts hurt us into conscious selves,
thereafter the losses, the embossing scars
we call character—glyphic scratches on
cave walls such are brain pans. Only bones
remain which in their stiff muteness provoke
the volumes we call Myth, Religion, Art, and
History—blunted inscriptions of impermanence,

precise and precipitous prescriptions for
living, we think, free while leaving that
'stained white radiance' eventually stumbling,
foolishly surprised each time, into all our
grave or urn or scatter greeted everly by

'the conquering worm'—

so goes the Funeral March's drum

Tum tum ta-tum

*

'Of these beginnings, gay and green, propose
The suitable amours. Time will write them down.' - Wallace Stevens

That Salt Adheres

(for Karthik)

that salt adheres to the palm
proclaiming only this
that purchase requires both
sweat and the one hidden pearl
of scraped touch

much there is in the hand
bequeathed;
beneath the thigh the grit
burns smooth the groove
where you lay

tapered fingers flame
that these lips may chaff
chafe more the love
from the grain which
skin frames from
cloudless scansions

Kindled limbs
do not go out
do not ash hot
to powder
nor the colder grow
though each is made distinct,
distinguished,

though each
is extended, extinguished in
the other's contradiction
neither brother or lover

but both

of palms
of salt

Preserve.

*

Preamble/Prologue:

Ah! I am so forsaken I will worship at any shrine impulses toward perfection. — Arthur Rimbaud, from The Broken Boat, second poem in

Ipseity, fun to say, moribund to be, means 'the quality of being oneself or itself; the essential element of identity which begs the question of the nature of identity, upon what is such based, existence (LATIN: esse) or essense (Latin: essentiam) . And thusly the hitherto wither hurled wags on...

Chrestomathy, ponderous what, is a librarian's word for 'compendium, ' which is what all this below is, and all the poems listed, many to be justly, clinical term, 'deactivated' (as will I be, deactivated, sooner than later washing my socks, one can hope, pray, wish may come, somewhere else in the multiverse) . These graceless things, Autumnals most now, now all einfalle, footfalls of a life gathering guttered, muttering often enough for a bit of daylight exposure or sounded tinnily enough, 'distraction fits', more like keeping the bit in the mouth, letting the mane lead, tack the tales, it, some of it all, keeps coming back to me for reprise or mercy or even remarkable surprise of at least a line, a phrase, an image, an effortful stammer that is more than a glance against the nog nog noggin along, with apologies to Red Robin.

Seeking a central conceit is tricky but (I've found) tone is conceit-enough such as 'in the dream the dead sister always returns as a bird' - dear bird that she is/was - mordant muse, bit in the beak, always necessitates a rearrangement of this blear hear-bellow below. Well intended, of course. If nothing else it is all praise, as Roethke says, to the end. And as Eliot says, 'in my end is my beginning.' After this, it goes into the sea. But like Eliot in Four Quartets, toward the end, I hope to at least pass close by a 'shining Stranger', one well-acquainted with, with what, witness in the quotidien caesura each breath is, self conscious, begging release into some majestic sense as the, or at least an, order of things.

Regarding tone these quotes immediately below may approach a range-reach re: what some of the overall effects may be from what has a lifetime now come through/from/over/outta me, aspiring too much to grandiosity, certainly too pompous, a bad habit learned early on in the teeth of fundamentalist Chrisitanity, Calvinism, its dour darkness rigor mordant rack upon which a boy's tormented and doesn't yet know it but has learned that one must make a certain music or tone that identifies one as near or intending to be nigh unto to the Immortal One polishing thunder, tuning lightning, lathering Justice and Retribution in Lava from an unending Inner Sinai caldera imprisoned by Its own Purity and Law and somehow, madness but noble in its own way, requires humans, perhaps all of creation, to liberate It from Its own Terrible Nature.

No way one, not this one, me, at least, is going to escape Tone the Terrible and Frighteous thus the scrinch, wench and squeal forthwith and without, in it all's an most serious Appeal - Misericord, Mercy; all that can be offered for real is earnest honest-enough appeal and response to that unflinching Hover, Searing Eye Ball and a contradictory Kindly Light. So I'll bright and bring-fling beauty all kinds, its sounds too, into the Inclement Blue Nothing. It means me into some meaning learning yearning leaning on rumored 'Everlasting Arms'.

Here I'll palsy. Here I'll curtsy, even bow, forehead close to dirt (leaving a little space between for free will, possible delusions thereof) , bargain mine own hurt into the matter of Matter against His Pristine Petrification Barnacle, my adjudicating behests for clemency before the Bench while on that crowded one for sinners, a veritable separate universe to contain the uncountable herds, alluswe absolute beginners flung into this mess gathering and molding intentions toward Perfection all the while knowing its a shell game been round, still going perpetually around, a long long LONG.

So, forsaken, making a case for finitude's tone, headlong I go, and if you dear reader accompany me some I am honored for your presence...bring your shovel though, your flame thrower, and, please, your sense of humor and also what you know to be true, two things, poetry is hard hard work, a hard work miracle (as are all the arts) , and, quoting poet James Dickey, 'Poetry's the greatest goddamned thing in the universe' (apart from ourselves, of course [he writes, laughing behind of his hand]:

The 3 quotes before the Bench:

'Listening to music, then, we are not first in one tone, then in the next, and so forth. We are, rather, always between the tones, on the way from tone to tone; our hearing does not remain with the tone, it reaches through it and beyond it....pure between-ness, pure passing over.' - Wilson Harris, from The Angel At The Gate

Riff on the above: 'Listening to music, then, we are not first in one bone, then in the next, and so forth. We are, rather, always between the bones, on the way from bone to bone; our hearing does not remain with the bone, it reaches through it and beyond it....pure between-ness, pure passing over.'

'Not, I'll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;
Not untwist — slack they may be — these last strands of man
In me ór, most weary, cry I can no more. I can;
Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.' - Gerard Manley Hopkins

*

And yet another PREAMBLE after the above amblings plural (prolly more to come) aimed to set a tone or more than monotones 'threaded-sewn-moaned give a dog a bone'...Here's the stuffing such as swerved:

A dog named Ego, the snowflakes as kisses - Delmore Schwartz

'If there were a middle ground between things and the soul
or if the sky resembled more the sea
I wouldn't have to scold
my heavy daughter.' - John Berryman

'Yes, Paul dear, Homer's wandering in Hell.
We can't afford to hire him.' - Lorine Niedecker

'How can we cleanse ourselves -- what rites? ' - Sophocles, Oedipus the King

''I still can take

the sky -- there lies my path.' - Ovid, Metamorphosis

THE PARADOX:

'The form of spirit as it awakens is adoration.' - Ludwig Wittgenstein

vs

'Finished in lightning, the little chaos raves.' - Muriel Rukeyser

thus the burden search:

'from omnipotence to madness - within this spectrum locate the ambivalent community.' - Lee, Sue-Im

Fusion or union.
Fission or frisson.
Fissure or seizure.
Lesion or leisure.
Message or measure.

*

'...the perfection of the work, including the perfecting of the victim' - Kenneth Burke

...all's a confession when
all's said and done. Confession
to wit, to what, to whom?

So bring me a unicorn,
a rhinoceros horn fan,
a jade spittoon...'s jus'
me n You the Alone.

Many questions,

medieval and otherwise.

Agnes thinks in squares. Or not.

Layered resolutions vague the plot.

Punished flesh leans into ground.

Our roots there ungrieved are ungrieved still.

I remain stuck in King James,
entangled in lyrical tongues,
Revelation's old virgin

A year before he died Saint Thomas Aquinas gave up speaking and writing:

'I can write no more. I have seen things that make my writings straw, all straw.'

other than bliss of barter - mine was
and is yet not a life well lived but most
certainly paid great attention to - too
painted, sketched, searched, reached,
stretched, dropped, slung headlong
downstairs out windows into Polaris
center splinter off chasing one Bear
or Her other, Ursa Major, Ursa Minor

'no matter, '
urges Mind
and Matter

*

I would rewrite the whole thing
withdraw every word without ado

with undue pressure release even
these mountains upon which within

which I turn sleepless in the dark
beneath laurel the rhododendron

pungent in cold spring air wondering
just where this all goes how it all

ends this life where thunder rolls
between this valley where I am heat

lightening teasing presences I will
not name though the old masters

have forever tried and try yet again
on each thinning page in this worn

book the collected songs which have
finally crossed an ocean have made

it over the Eastern hills to some
of us here far far on other shore

*

REPRISE - First Poemhunter biography 2010 - I stand by it still some 14 years later

..'a boy thief stealing circus hours.'

To read more prose and poses you may go here:

falconwarren.blogspot.com.

Refugee from the American South.
Now loud-but-reverent mouthed in
New York City.

Regarding my writing...I have been writing poetry since I was a child and
perhaps may have learned a thing or two which, as more than a few teachers
have advised me to do, must be quickly unlearned or forgotten. I was born in
1952 so inherited some sensibilities of a developing world, its spiritless and
spirit-lessening technology. Unlike the technology I am rapidly growing
extinct or very quickly out-dated but not spiritless.

I have given up keeping up with the times and now gather my tired self after
all the chasing chasing chasing after a culture which erases as quickly as it
makes a momentary thing while pitching it as 'the Real Thing.' Mercury as a
god is after all the great dissolver of all forms. Nothing is new but the
perpetual puddle He brings. But still, we can muddle through easily making
idols of self and machinery, and now this digital fidget cyberly out of
Pandora's Modem. Fame? ! BOSH!

Leave the world to the scoundrels!

My hand once wrote.
My heart was here, full,
and it left, fuller still.

'What thou lovest well remains.'
- Ezra Pound, Canto 181
'
Let him not be another's who can be his own.
- Paracelsus

VISUAL BIO. Spare:

Little blur of a photo to
the right of page, apt image-
The 'striving-after' poet,
Much younger days, some months
Recovering from food poisoning,
Once again exiled to roses,
reading Lorca & Rilke in a park,
Medellin, Colombia, South America.
January 1979.
Photo by D. Simons.

Now,2010, mid-years renewed
zeal, patience, work my
still 'striving after' poems,
-'How long, O Lord, how long? -
raise their feeble colors,
prayer flags in remote
places hung by unknown hands,
more tatters than prayers,
tatters the greater expression
in a dry season for love,
for this Here/Now reading/hearing
smitten poets, some, proclaim
sacredness of apparently
profane acts which are so much more,
given contexts of grief, need,
need always, always, for Presence
even when reaching fails its ardor -
how we all reach.

I bow to those hands full, seeds full,
words full, questions full, that so deeply
stir one to his/her own craft
that sings the heart truer.

END

*

Winter Rite for a Spider - A Quarantine Dirge [excerpt] - March 2020

Spider first days here I spoke to every
morning from the john wondering at its
slow movements for 3 days till 4th its
legs curl tuck tightly beneath its carapace
I blow at it from the cold seat - bunched
draws round my colder ankles it budges
not at all realize it is deceased legs uniformly
creased a beauty to see first time ever've
felt remorse for a bug
....
so perform brief bone chill rites then
slide down the path patch to my ground
floor entrance to hot shower then to
Hopkins' poem - The Windhover the
more meaningful than ever for its

'dappled-dawn-drawn' things or rather
substituted or addendum-ed pray ponder
'threaded-sewn-moaned' things strangely
mourned actual tears born no doubt of

projections upon small cringes majestically
formed objectively perceived from secret
and sightless spaces suspended cocooned
in darkness or once in close woods strung

pearled between limbs and trunks ferns
freakt my face when August-last stumbled
in marsh's humid stagger thickets face first
into a massive web the sudden grand mal

like seizure like slaps scrape-face-eyelids
forehead-pate monstrous poison fears from
not so small a miracle - webber's tales spun
of/from its self from within to without such

rhymed tattle rattle faint
click no ears human to
hear little feet tight-walking
filament filigrees faint but

so very

there

spun

in

thin

air

*

Something About A Rumi Poem - With Jackhammers, Doves, Bach Cantata Number 85, Hungry Ghosts, A Wasted Life - Or Not

Yet another for Low (who turned me on to James Wright in Asheville Vales)

Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom. - James Wright

And yet this aria on this bright sunny day NYC clear while jackhammers and their jackhammerers pound directly beneath my 8 am window.

Patient doves, their blessings dulcet on usual late winter fire escape just other side of window, have fled,

bed's no refuge, 'm mad daunted, unwanted din in the city of men

juxtapose dust hammered up from bookshelves, compliant window ledge's graying clouds of god knows what,

with Bach's praises, with sharp sneezes in B minor, my whining complaints just so much braying 'Hair On A Me String', impotent,

curses abjure to roaring city that never let's me sleep, Polis's absolute rule-unchangeable being

neither blizzard, gale, hail, pandemic nor Jehovah's Witnesses shall prevent absolute Imperatives of Unrelenting Progress

from hammering meek citizens escaped to tarred overpriced roofs, city of Hungry Ghosts calculating taxes wondering

just why there is no more ink in the Voracious Printer.

Reading James Wright poems, collected, cathected, despite the din, comes then radio's magnificent transcendence, Johann

Sebastian Bach, complementarity of apparent-opposites impinged contrasts of radio's morning news:

'sameness bright, dinged,
yellow-suited predictable
helmeted men at war with
pavement 5 floors below
mad to get to gas, rusted
pipes a'leak, perhaps,
mock episode'

my dream's no longer detail-remembered, s'blotted,

only scraps to poke at -

something to do with a Rumi poem,
a turbaned Sufi at the wheel, a beat
VW cab, bright yellow, banged up,

drives me

(denser body jam crammed
back seat behind of the Driver

my window blacked out -
no seeing the Path clearly)

to my long overdue
Reunion/Return with/to

the Friend.

Did I make it?

Nonetheless

ARRIVED

(relinquished?)

STOPS

Curbed -

Ask, 'How much? '

One eye tics,

Beard, dyed orange,

distracts,

'S'just skin in the game. Get out! '

in full Bronx accent.

Ejected duly.

Street corner

rumbles sub rosa.

Just the thing,

jerks an altared grate,

dyslexia nervosa

out of body

anhedonia -2

a'sudden,

sullen bracing,

then blurs into

frames powder-blue.

Beard drives straight up

into endless sky which,

image, is a lie, it does

end, thin to thinner

then no matter,

more's the ether.

Elevating bumper

sticker reads,

almost out of site,

into unannounced

dystances dim

with tail pipes,

with ashes,

miles of them,

endless traffic:

I BRAKE FOR BLOSSOMS

Still, I have lost the drift. -1

-1 A riff on a famous last line of a James Wright poem, it being:

'I have wasted my life.'

-2 anhedonia - the inability to feel pleasure

*

Got Jack In My Pocket (A section of Slim Noir's Memoir, Youthful Excisions 1970's)

In the valley of Saint Elmo I circumambulated, not a stupa in sight but, yes, very much my stupor, the massive Crosses-pocked cemetery where Tennessee Ave and Lookout Mountain Highway jerked apart, severed, rather, perseverated, and/but but/and I had Jack in my pocket to read among the plots, his many providing accompanying rhythm as I winding went.

Just what I needed then.

Kerouac saved what was left of my sanity while plummeting out of fundamentalist Christianity, self-exiled from the dread Presby-tistas of Lookout Mountain 'pon yon Calvin's cringing hill.

There were other writers too but Kerouac loomed and looms (as in weaves) still, vital to my coming down from the unraveling yarn of Reformation Mountain, the red bricked Lowell-like smudge-neckt rejoinder of Chattanooga, human all too human, greasy smog-smear, yes, but was sufficient enough to blink much and stutter stagger eventually away from a riven chapter of my life coming, or so I then thought, to an end, and/but Chat-town, Saint Elmo's clubbed foot edge-bottomed playing footsies with the Inclination to See Seven States (of Mind, Hell, Heaven) from Summit, a still collective tendency of bother-to-Ascension promises of future inherited mansions imperpetuituous tsk tsk, twas and still tis, has to be, part of personal history, self as blister more than enough.

'Hi there Tex, what you say
Step aside partner, it's my day
Bend an ear and listen to my version
(Of a really solid, Tennessee excursion) ' - opening lyrics of Chattanooga Choo Choo

I took comfort tho in knowing Ismael Reed was from Chattanooga, Bessie Smith too, even Glenn Miller's joyous Choo Choo brought some joy pointing me soon enough avast away to Thomas Wolfe's town, Asheville, where the new chapter really began, Wolfe, of course, being young Jack's literary hero, upon whose porch I'd often swing after an almost-midnight bad cup of coffee in hand, SHONEYS BIG BOY excretions all the blander by the free pot-fulls proffered over an almost floating definitely hallucinatory slice of the famed strawberry pie glopped 10 chinlinks below one's own for the tasting; in the other hand a book, Jack's or Wolfe's, to gander just before I'd clock in some blocks away at the psych hospital for all night shifts on the locked unit where I could read most of the night as patients neurochemically slept bludgeoned, it was and now still hoped, into normailty's promised, o ye good citizens, golden oblivion-with-benefits, depending on the state and region, an earnestly rumored extended sanity unfurling without end, BUT

Jack says it all better, could, did, but I bow to him and try, stick a pickle in my eye, wink wink:

For Jack

On with the boring
center line endlessly
dividing though broken
on purpose suggesting
a way to veer.

No guide needed here.

Fear is the drive shaft,

and longing turns the wheel.

*

Late '70's - Insurmountable Mountains (inside but not out)

'And what shall I cry out?
My impotency? My useless rage?
Then why be forgiven when Heaven's Will stays?

Undaunted, there are no cracks in Its ceiling,
only Light from a million suns to harm,

and a rustling of wings in corridors,
and a thousand voice chorus crying out,

No arms! No arms!

I've been to hell
and flaunt it like a gypsy's skirt.

I've been to hell
with a thosand tongues of metal.''

- a journal note poem 1978 - was reading Federico Garcia Lorca in Barnardsville, NC living in a house over 100 years old, no electricity, no running water, not even an outhouse but o there was a front porch with mountain views, a rusted tin roof still able to keep rain rhythm even to buckle melodically in high winds sister cedar old brushed roof nights shush when dark horizon all 'round blushed w/moonshine fires a half moon's full hand flush chest-close demurely rising from now closer hills' counsel to 'beware, even god loves likker stills' at the foot of Mount Mitchell highest mountain east of the Rockies. This just before I not quite zombie flew to South America for 6 months...then back to dropt-out-last-semester (withdrew a few weeks in but then post-South America) returned to college to graduate, a theology degree but no longer so inclined to theology, but to mystery yes, the theo, that which reveals in the very small object, its center. Size doesn't matter when en-theo matters matter. Thus finally concluded 'to Harlem then I came'.

tell me now
glass-handled knives
I'm not clear where we started

- from same journal same year - cryptic cypher poems inspired by minimalist artist Agnes Martin whose canvases some of them one is substantial enough long gazing/sitting with I finally got to meditate upon upon moving to Manhattan...to lend a sense of where my psyche was just before the 'El Dorado' trek in hopes dire to be reckoned with and perhaps reconciled, re-fired enough, here's two more cypher entries from afore mentioned journal:

between the rain
whose throat is blue
like a wild fern is clear

I am sad when I see you

your letters arrive fat
swollen with human form

they fly out from my palms

look around you

'I finally broke into the prison
I found my place in the chain
Even damnation is poisoned with rainbows' - Leonard Cohen

earth: I'll remember you
you were the mother you made pain
I'll grind my thorax against you for the last time - C. K. Williams

VOICE NOT MINE:

You know you''re a dead man already...so what's to lose IF....

VOICE MINE:

Dunno dunno

I blear veer

headlong heavy-

footed too

the mantra's,

What to do?

Out of my league
as creature alone,
I demur to Fire.

Am awaiting further instructions.

Marinating in petrol.

Negotiating
with Combustion Union

even as I
speak or spark,

whichever come
first which will

inexorably of course

come last then

ashes to ashes
and the mourning

a thousand
or more books unread,

not understood.

Entonces, toujours
and yours, mon ami,

mon frere, je finis

off to rhyme with

fire, and sirelings

*ipseity - 'personal identity, individuality, selfhood, ' 1650s, from Latin ipse 'self' + -ity

*

'...Because we are partial beings who yearn for total states.' - Michael Eigen

otherness / interiority
loneliness / self-ignorance
recitation / quietism
salve / balm

*

the blank stare
the cancelled look

does it go
does fire it know

so goes the banter
so goes the way
of what is the going
away or the returning
or the first-arrived

*

when is the done
actually over?

[shrugs]

another turned page

*

a toad does not say what it knows

*

still the valid address

'shall and will' and 'spill my beans'
the very few that are left

bereft? sure I am
cleft? yes

twained? drained mostly - acedia [ah-che-dia = dryness]

the letting
go of even a leg up
in the world because being
as it is known the way we know it

has
no leg by which to balance

or can't like a candled book
or a cancelled look
dance upon a sill,

or chance upon that which may
be withstood to stand

upon though

stand we will
and must and,

flutter-foot, alight,

so many winged
ones addressing

the old and present
wounds -

latencies of disintegration

ancient slopes of containment

gnomic marginalia

apophatic aphasias

inclement hallelujahs
trace the grace-note of reprieve

*

Here I go once more

working over old attempts at poetry, many
laments dedicated to or about, or accusative
of, the two Indian lovers after whom I no longer
pine but, perhaps, oak, or holly

but good memories of what, for me at least,
would be their gleaned love after a lifetime
of nought; but reach, inward-turned, burns
to a bindu point as yet to be seen but it is felt
as familiar bad weather

Call it spurn or better

This adhered old ache breaks open familiar
sorrows neither lent nor borrowed for what
they are worth or were, hurt-worth, a new
category of value though such with booze
or nostrums varied are still hard to swallow

So now they chorus call,
no, they bellow

See?

The wallow is ready
Just took three doses in three different forms

Who knew self pity had as many or more
forms when just one would do

Now cued Cruel City's proud jackhammers break
out just for me, they're in my innermosts too

they stammer so so shake both wall
and floor yet not without some fitful
rejoicing such are their ever

inclement hallelujahs

*

'I...watch the dark fields for a rebirth of faith and wonder.' - Dame Edith Sitwell

Where have they gotten to
these graces clumsy on their feet?

They've fled, easy wings balletic toward ocean or other.
Black, they bob low over white waves, confuse themselves
for sails or Van Goghs or Cezannes, even Twomblys so,
steady, they go away or depending on time of day and
slant of sun they wobble or appear to do so when things
even birds are bent mirage-podge-and-puddle-trajectories
of intent, instincts prevailing, so

woven, they have went,

their patience with the city spent.

They're fled. Gone.

*

'...Shut the sea to His sad complaints...' - Ruth Valadares Correa

Dear Low....to continue, all is not lost despite dys-mordant molars, narcissus\narkosis meanders late of dawn but oriented again by Villa-Lobos song...so, to recover the narrative of dawns:

Awakened to this this morning, Bachianas Brasileiras No.1.

I remember the first time I heard it - in college, thanks to Elaine, a library copy and a suspended moment at the dorm window watching fog pour up from a deep Tennessee valley, socked in again, which often happened on Lookout Mountain, weeks of thick late Autumn fog, gray white-out cloud-light leaning into the un-lit quarter, philosophy books stacked, Pre-Socratics, Church History, Clement, Polycarp, a Gnostic wind bitter, portending our destined bondage, howling just beyond the pane, the un-modulated whistle of said insistent storm playing the Castle In The Clouds in fierce Sinai song, Bachianas Brasileiras conducted by Villa Lobos himself, nothing short of revelation that my too young to be so weary self had no idea existed but upon hearing within pinnacled gale nothing could prevail against my landing oriented-at-last by mostly cellos and fog spinning in Brazilian rhythms I would spend my entire life descending toward, stumbling forward, misstepping, striving after 'my kingdom for a macaw' become a slack-jawed shamanatrix entranced by dirt, green overhang in forest din daily feathered by birds all kinds in twining limbs above.

No romance involved with all that now, I am an almost old man more rapidly untangling string by string, out-cello-ed in the end, and yet again, by an innate longing to land, go under, dwell within, peaking out, over strung, finally done with Polycarp and company, at one with my Hopkins book still, sufficed from Terrible Sonnets to Accidental Grace:

Rendered, I yield.

I am peeled layer by layer to pomes-penny-each
glottal stops of 'soul, self, come, poor Jackself, '
be advised once more, 'jaded, let be' -

while not forgetting to go with Lobos rhythms,
leave 'comfort root room' finally escaping
John Calvin's dire and doom -

'let joy size At God knows when to God knows what;
whose smile's not wrung, see you'

and raise you One.

***

The Drying Assuages

'And all is vanity amongst these my ruins, '

says Sweeney, whoever he may be,
tidies up neurotically, gin on the breath
for he is bored unto death but awaits daily
the post for possible liberty which he took
once on the mooch with a wealthy dowager who
mistook him for someone else. The scar forever
reminds of dumb lusts and dumber luck never
dreaming she was a black belt, his teeth,
now cracked, remind him to 'be mindful of
the good against all wants' so sitz he the
wiser, chaste, a slack-jawed wastrel, piles
cooling upon cool stones, in ruins reading
Sam Beckett but that is another story written
in stars Centauric, to wit

qua qua qua
sisk boom ba
twixt Fucquaad
& Apothecary
near the corner
time forgot

but o not I
not I when
the clot broke

the expectorating
hoi polloi
screaming **1

no help at all

as I stood pale
pale, paler still,
bleeding out from
an undignified
place leaning
upon a tailor's
wall, he too

no help at all

threatening to
call the cops

It closes me in
again to recall

qua qua qua

Fucquaad

amongst the forgotten roses
where one is hungover in the
supposes with which one perpetually
begins, that one can never finish
like this, pissed, which goes on,
which goes on and still on,
'I can't go on but must (adjusting
the truss) because I am losing
my hair and so on and ever on'
dot dot dot into eternity should
one believe in such, but one may
use the idea of such, eternity
- go forward or behind, wince at
the word - living in the blue rind
of sky crumbling onto nether
shore where relentless waves
tease relentless wind disturbing
a lone relentless tern tracing
uremic rims of foam

'tanti tanti non avessi conosciuto
la morte tanta n'avesse disfatta

quando solo uno sarebbe sufficiente'

['so many so many I had not known death had undone so many'
when only this one would do']

shall I call then eternity
a home for shells, a curve
in space? disgrace myself
yet again with belief, any
one, believe that such shores
are a where after all, a place
to shelter, each wave somewhere
by someone or something counted
as is every hair numbered
counted still? they fall as
do waves into crescendos
rainbows should the sun so shine

for what is left
to comb of shore and hair
is a disturbance of
fractions, refractions
the forlorn redactions
of what is perceived,
felt, spilt upon the
depilitating pate

and so I must wear a hat but let us not go then
you and I patiently, into all that but when come
time proper, a hair fall caught in a shaft of sun
light, the endless comb over undone, wind blown
upon the shore, then we shall speak of it sure,
and more

now then here then
remembering too the chaffing bloody garters

fulminante E.P. defunto perennemente denunciando:

With usura hath no man a shithouse of good stone
each block cut smooth and well fitting
that delight might cover their face,

with usura

hath no man a painted paradise on his outhouse wall
harpes et luthes sans benfit d'un laxatif **3

The toilet seat cold, cruel,
the air bitter as Aetna's vapors,
deceptive Empedocles stumbles
into the centuries' murmuring shadows,
a liar who would be an immortal now
immortally a scandal minus
one golden sandal

fulminant E.P. deceased perpetually decrying:

'With usura hath no man a house of good stone
each block cut smooth and well fitting
that delight might cover their face,

with usura

hath no man a painted paradise on his church wall
harps and Luther without benefit of a laxative'

- from Canto LXV by Ezra Pound, slight alteration
of 2 words, 'house' and 'church' & adding the 4 final
words in French]

spumoni spumoni

spumoni

chianti chianti

chanti

*

Empress contrails trail again, refrain, reframe -

Oasis and cloaca,

love birds parched,

now moves caravansary

toward heart's always

winking horizons.

There are many before

the sun rises.

Perhaps my name goes

before me, my press,

Empress of Contrails,

peacocks in tow,

trailing tallies, scores,

arrivals, departures,

ejaculations, rejections,

all faces hands have held,

and yearning beyond possibility

hesitant dawn's mourning doves.

Recall how hot winds blow loudly

as do I, billowing the tent. Men

cry mad for my return yet burns

no desert impervious to heat of

all kinds, even human, excepting

the heart its capacities to startle,

its dunes in vast stretches beat,

beat for what moonlight can only

suggest to scorpions in silver

shadows, pitying serpents coiled

smug in their ability to shed skin,

unlike the veiled men long in tooth

just gazing gazing at miracle mounds'

fresh muscles smooth shy grin

desire's child come to

wildness with and within me.

*

Autobiography from April 5,2020, lest than a month into the coronavirus19 plague - journal note/prose-esque poem or a proem:

'... he would think he was seeing double or imagine himself come upon a scene of weird witchcraft.' - James Conrad, The Secret Sharer

The only face mask I need here in Keene mountains. Supplied by late afternoon sun while I trudge snow melt mud steeps up the drive beauty blinded. Going to explore the barn newly purchased. Not dressed for barn storming but I had not anticipated more than a week up here when we arrived on March 13th so packed light and left my barn-butch clothes forlorn in a pile of MUST WASH UPON RETURN laundry. Hopefully the spiders and barn spirits will allow me entrance dressed as is.

POST barn storming: upon opening the door I am confronted with a mirror and by mine own visage masked by smudge by smear by crud by dead bugs layered by how many years of going unwashed by not much to reflect but by barn stillness by planked sun dialing internals by insect flight by perhaps rodent and by invading birds by bones of which are strewn in tight corrals for perhaps a horse or two.

I have been reading zen much up here, not doing enough sitting but for these walking meditations of sorts, cheating of course, my course of meditation is 'cheating zen' which I believe, and can argue, that there is good scholarly evidence for and such in history of zen, there being no real rules and orthodoxy but the most import zen 'doxy' is orthoproxy, or, practice, but/and there is much recenty read and repeated in text enough about 'polishing mirrors', that and the bright sun obscuring face, not even MY face but just 'face' or parts with one left eye tracing the left hand path I've much in life taken (cuz force and temperament) .

There's teaching everywhere. Some of it a ponderance and other such as shake clothes and sheets and towels and such before use since winter spiders love to idlely spider there (idling spiders, fiddling legs, when do they sleep?) . And having suffered a severe spider bite some years ago, the craterous skin rot rotting in perfect concentricities, spectrum of colored putrifactions, fascinating to watch slowly devour perfectly good skin, pock full of the stench of beauty and enlightenment or opposite but as they say all doors lead or in this case all (or many) pores cede, that's one zen lesson I do not want nor again need.

Some weeks later, spring snow and freeze, old knees resisting zen, prayer too. So, Rekiah's nephew is here renovating old house so the place shakes and vibrates with hammer and saw scrapes of heavy old stuff to be replaced with heavy new stuff so's psoas's sore me below ground floor down in here inhering pine knot plank plotch catch all or most dusts the mouse/rat/chipmunk dung the plaster the fiberglass o let this cup pass Lord of Ghosted critters-occupants-seven snake skins entwine water pipes cool wet I guess for snakes need so evidence speaks dark hiding nooks with food rodents close by old bones and fur fall into shower stall - three days before the pipes broke from - frozen a'toilet I sit and read the castings now an old constipated sage scrieing the fallen oracle bones and fur and spiders too butoh walk leg
by leg
by leg
by leg
by leg
by leg
by leg
by leg
to what purpose there on the plasticine stall floor/wall not sure but am sure that the dead flies of winter go uneaten/unsucked of inner juices and one spider first days here I spoke to every morning from the john me wondering at its slow slow movements for 3 days till 4th its legs are curled/tucked tightly beneath its carapace I blow at it from the cold seat draws round my colder ankles and it budged not at all I realized it was dead and first time ever'vfelt remorse for a bug a spider and once cleaned/flushed pajamas up I gently scoop Spider up with toilet paper so soft double ply-ed solomnly march spider on bier so soft softly into still harder winter snow and darker woods Middle-March flip flops slow going find a rock up near the shed so place paper and spider there with oddest prayer ever in my life but Lord Buddha helps re: 'all sentient beings' etcetera etcetera sera OK - and so perform brief bone chill rites then slide down the path patch to my ground floor entrance

to hot shower to Hopkins poem - The Windhover - more meaningful
than ever for ' dappled dawn drawn' things or rather substituted or
addendum-ed ' threaded sewn moaned' things strangely mourned
actual tears born no doubt of projections 'pon small cringes majestically
formed objectively perceived from secret and sightless spaces suspended/
cocooned in darkness or in woods strung pearled between limbs and
trunks which freak my face when once I stumble August last humid
stagger in thickets face first into massive webs the sudden grand
mal-like seizure-like slaps scrape face eyelids forehead pate of monstrous
poison from not so small miracle makers webbers or as native americans
have it are weavers of stories spun from themselves and thus spider
medicine is storytelling weaving spinning from within to without

'A first unfallen
church it might have been.'
- Nathaniel Mackey

*

Till then will strain to hear the radio soprano*4 from the
bathroom as I ablute, ablate/scrape, arrange face-enough

around the swollen jaw, saline eyelids puffed and sacks,
push the few hairs in place - scratches on a surface now -

and still plead grace from those strays, the love for words,
the envy of their sounds, see if can find a way to continue

after-pursuits of what was born mid-field of a mid-
summer night beneath Carolina stars new groin-sparks,

some phrases suddenly come from other-where
not sure but there so blindly sat writing in the dark
in squint demiurge wrote my first 'serious' poem.

To recall this fresh feels good, radio's good too while
Bidu Sayao*4 sings Villa Lobos*6 aria Bachianas No.5*4,
a dove at window inching me into the day now more
than a toothache and hypertension for which I medicate
waiting for trembling hands to still enough to hold a pen.
I am fond of hands, these, for pleasure, measure and
reach tho aging. That's at least the quotidian wager.

So, Low, no need to respond.
Go be in your cocoon or 'whatever' time.
So let us now praise infamous weather,
high heat, plead

that pleasing

inclement graces

bestow merciful

cold and dark

blessings.

Let's meet up post-doldrums.

Meanwhile 'light a cigar and smoke away the bad world'. (Charles Bukowski)

INTERLUDE

'The simplest kind of proposition, an elementary proposition, asserts a state of affairs.' - Ludwig Wittgenstein

For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry.
For he is the servant of the Living God...
For by stroking of him I have found out electricity.
- from 'Jubilate Agno' by Christopher Smart

Forget Jeoffry.

Consider the Cat Oliver
asleep upon the journal's
leather, old ink and think
enclosed, weighted as
only Cat-weight weighs
in upon all things, pink-eared.
A Poem of Itself possessed,
not half but entire Cat-self,
He's but a winking Dream
only Paws may seize.

He speaks:

Please the dust in
corners, rather I nod.
Let others consider God.
I shall consider Me,
the Better of the two,
Furred Things being Best.

I shall not raise a Tail to human
deity, that brute untamed,
clumsy, no sense of balance.

Rather, the human is My mastery.
I have trained some few of them
well which pleases Me and greatly
them though I shall appear indifferent
as I ever am.

Clever me.

I will the sun up and down,
the daily annunciation of tin
cans, bid humming humans
whose voices are the softer
for My Presence,

O bringest thou me now the tuna.

NOW.

And their laughter I patiently
endure. They think Me silly
but I am Trickster, too, an Arse
on purpose.

I take their picture with Mine.

Eternally.

But not now.

I repose.

Every moment is a pose,
each still gesture appears
insignificant, a supposition.

Consider.

*

I live at the bottom of a hill near a
broken fence beside tracks of steel.

On the other side a stream moves upon itself
not confusing itself as ice for rocks alone.

A memory in the sound of water, a dazzle of
sky, takes a silly surface tone from what runs

beneath, outrunning rocks because it can;
desire that force which drives the sand.

The movement of water too is undeniable,
solid in its course though sand, as does water,

knows nothing of remorse.

At the fence I wait. No train yet
which will be a movement too beside
the wet, and these thoughts here.

That you are tissue essential and fabric
to my own particularity.

I send you a sound wonder, a welcome again
to that place you dwell here within,

Time the only disparity.

Snow on Telford gravestones, tall
houses on cupped hills in squared

parcels back lit with sunset's down-light,
juxtapose a Wyeth isolation and beauty

which is the dutiful image of you, heart
breaking through remembering our first meeting.

The distant gazebo of that small
town wears white lights garlanded

round, and snow. A boy without
gloves reads alone.

He is no fool who takes his time and
place to know.

I rediscover you a gift here still as
I have in good counsel curtsied and coughed

often enough, my own hand to my own groin
to discover a fissure again, again to repeat,

that you are tissue essential still and
fabric to my own particularity upon a hill,

a house, one fence above a stream and rails,
a blinking boy turning wet pages knowing that

you or someone similar, only a few years
ahead, already familiar, dwells inside

compels his reading just before sunset
squinting at words beyond and past the

fence and the stream, the train late,
footprints dark blue in the patient drift.

*

'...Pierrot moon steals slyly in,
His face more white than sin...' - Dame Edith Sitwell

Seeing the moon whole could mean
madness now or overdue for the supreme
vanity of daring to eye-gulp the whole swiss cheese.

Please gods and moondogs
the effort pays in insubstantial ways,

makes a life, lends focus for life times of
spilt milk, one milk tooth at the throat,
a charm against seeing but not the
saying.

It troubles me that I can't get it right.

Not the moon but the poem.

*

from a letter to an old friend who knew me when,
a country lad young in tooth and great in hunger to know:

Karen, you remember me then....I was earnest indeed in the flush and must of youthful vigor to transcend the body which was doing me no spiritual good at all or so i was taught to believe and so I naively bought to my torment and contusions. I did not think that owning as many Bibles or other sacred tomes in the world as i could would much amount me to blusterous spirituality (well, perhaps I secretly hoped but knew too much better 'because I was flesh' utterly mutterly) .

I now own more Carl Jung books than any approach to sacred and profane or wholly other (well, I also own scores of books of poetry gathered and still gathering those so it's Jung and poets mostly on the shelves and in the stacks) ....and there are tomes of comparative religion, must confess to wishing i'd fled to japan as i'd planned post self-exile from holy hill Calvin's morose Lookout Mount to find across the merciful Pacific a bamboo fountain beside a zen temple or master or perpetually flowing sake cup (forget the green tea) and at least sit for awhile beneath cherry or willow and quaff (even if only sniff one vapor of) a bit of inner surcease whilst cultivating boredom which Paul Tillich accurately describes as 'rage spread thin' and of that i was muchly spread ('like a patient upon the table') . As was and still is ol' yellow bones and bitter toothed John Z. Calvin, the stillborn.

For all the books, head bonks, balder- and other- dash gathered between dust jackets - and i revere them all, no resentment of them as they have been constant companions, quiet, present, ready to be opened or at least keep a door ajar or a tenement window in Harlem over 40 years ago open enough to smell the rich grease of Doña Floridita (Our Lady of Perpetual Pork) ever frying cracklin' and cuchi fritos 2 floors down, love my West 142nd Street perch before the ever encroaching white folks moved in and took over, their rage never spread thin but thickly thickly OY -

for all the books and studies to increase me in gnosis (I remain ever halitose, bilious, and verily splenetic) , I have found the entirety of mine efforts of so-called verticality-is-best spirituality brief astutely summed by Matuo Basho from 17th century Edo, Japan:

I would be a monk
but the the dust of the world
upon my shoulders.

*

And perhaps this sum by David Bowie:

Ashes to ashes
Funk to funky

*

'A lifetime of heave and hoe tugging at Heaven's door 'to break through the seductive constellations of human ordering...' - Michael Heller

Now i'm hanging out in old age, confessing my worn pockets, one holding an inclement hallelujah, and the other tracing, or trying, the grace-note of reprieve.

The only honest prayer I can offer to Existenz Itself is

'Here's breath for you.'

SELAH

**

Monet might have seen,

giving darkness in Giverny,
defiant to the last optics fired out inevitably,

nerve light made the more dipped,
smeared on clutched pallet bent to a gaping will

struggling to open eyes,
the wider see.

Was failing him the light.

Closing-in world reduced to all horizon.

Tints, brushes, memory
frame these final pieces
canvased, inwardly conformed,
recalled light more light than all raw day.

***

'Soft moonlight awakens now
The cruel longing that laughs and cries! '*2
- Ruth Valadares Correa

Post Script next day....

Noting the themes, Low, as I read over what's writ ayer, words extending after meaning, or before, aging on all fronts, meaning and hands - hands extend too (should let them speak, explain themselves the conditions of arrivals for the last Punto) , they recall (a revelation - seems hands think on their own independent of an 'I' or 'me') , they reach but years of such surrender hard grasping literally, fade, while the metaphorical hands, the subtle DO grasp though these now crabs what once were hands crawl, fall short to lap or nap nod toward tides moon wash, a heap of scraps up to the swollen ankles.

But all's a prayer in the layers...

...meanwhile Lorca and I
quarrel much about doldrums
and the 'duende'*7, he wins
of course by singing or, better,
plays a few bars on the dusty
upright*8 about your girl the
Moon, ones about bull fights,
the usual gore but always
a surprise for beauties and
children flinging hearts and
unstrung rosaries into the
clotting ring...

.....while trumpets
salut the Matador plots
Severed Ears' Chosen
One, the Bull Bride dreamed
of once in a wedding dress
white, prim in a window
luminous in full moonlight,
intricate veil with horns
protruding, conspicuous,

curving calcium shyly
up-turning a rainbow silvering
above a young man on his
knees in the dust serenading
'su corazón en la manga'

'his heart on his sleeve',

dapper hat bereaved in hand
labored months to buy for
now's pledge to begged Bride,
unmoved, committed only to
portend a blue moment below
the sill, suspended suitor, pale,
dirges scarlet in eucalyptus,

nearby olive grove shadows
after mournful ellipses scattered
songless without their stanzas
'por el fin de crianzas'*9, sad,

sad, the lamentable time of
lactation has come to an end

so begins

los llantos,

the cries -

'agony,
always agony' (Lorca)

*

everything is descending,
even the scholarship of the
ancient adverbs - Richard Tagett

Both
we are
contortionists

thus take our
place with clowns who
know tomatoes thrown
and juggler's bare necked
necessary concentration.

You are the maestro here
whom I trail behind at respectful

distance

murdered by the too ordinary
controllers

So long

So long to image
to suffer on dear
bruised M the
void of course

o bring me
beauty no matter
how terrible

created by His
own opening
which makes
Him forever
Lorca's girl

'a pomegranate
biggish and green

I can't take
her in my arms..

Won't she come back?

Why won't she? '

You, dear, will read
of my heterosexual shadow

a great lover who serenades
Her in the terrible contradiction

of the moon caught
in bare tree limns strophes

just outside Her window
the fool below in rouge

head hung, singing

O hurt

heart's tin can
tied to belt loop behind
of his ragged pants
pants

waits

to be filled with
whatever flows

in the dirty lane
he leans his
love against

*

'When we shift the dream-words around, letting them play other parts of speech, transformation takes place right in our ears. A dream is itself transformational because it transforms its own statements through polyvalence of its images. A dream is always deepening and differentiating itself.... We return to Freud's view that dream is not a message, but is a self-satisfying narcissistic event. Because dream's words are not concepts that refer, no dream can be interpretively translated to other referents. A dream can only be interpretively re-imagined, as one does with a piece of any other poesis.' - James Hillman

*

'And how can I teach him his hands' - Tyana, the city of Apollonius speaking

St. Thomas Aquinas a year before he died gave up speaking and writing:
'I can write no more. I have seen things that make my writings like straw.'

Old Friend, from one desert to another,

let other scholars of absence break
their burden-heads against these mute
stones. The cactus here, perhaps knowing
of your advent by post, has waited all
these years to come into its radiance
with you. Just tonight it blooms once
only in its life, a miracle itself, a startle,
one blossom of rarified hope.

Distant cousin,

you unveil too in Roman darkness there as
we once shared silent prayer in the churchyard,
our knees on hard stones - our God then - our
thin books not yet written.

One simple stone veils you where you rest,
your books, long in the making, shoulder the
burden so faithfully carried without complaint.
A landscape scarred - life's hard impress has
etched you - is now placed, framed, beside
the new flower, sheer and here.

I wonder how you are now that you are prayer itself
on that hill of bones wet with penitent pilgrims tears.

Your photograph travels all these years to
reach me so long without news of you, my
letters unanswered though rumors stray in
from the same old rivals fed on envy inquiring
about you. I never bother to answer them.
The postman, angel at the gate, has firmly
placed in my hands your parcel of plain brown
paper - FROM ROMA - it proclaims in bold
print framed beside the other framed

dear Unexpected Face.

To see you at last, your resigned smile finally,
gladly, admitting surrender - such repose is
an altar where incomprehension finally breaks
into blossom - Emptiness is Presence Divined
in any landscape or ocean. Or mind.

On the back of your photo you ask simply,
briefly, a note scribbled by a weak hand,

How fare's you,
God's mason friend?

*

Epitaphs Beyond the Urn - An Ongoing Series Till It's (He's) Not

'But if it ends / the start is begun' - William Carlos Williams

1
Here scattered is Warren at last soundless.
As when alive, though everywhere now,
he's still yet groundless.

Lived more by his tongue than 'is feet,
he'd now confess,
He just lived it best as could but what for's
still an ancient ongoing guess.

2
Newly dead
I swore you
to a would-be
cloud

bore you on the lowest shoulder

me too too soon to be shroud

you lived silent enough to be
ignored
so passing, yours, calls attention
well deserved

pity or verse?
both in one?

the Worst

3
bidden, it bore

not a grave
but a door

where is no need to knock

its life grokked
it is no longer

there's no mock in
it tho
as it was and now is

all that is not
never
was its business

but its was only to
obey
That which bade

spider
poet
maker

it made

all praise to the Bidder

**

Dear Incomprehension,

Not much going on here.

Rash continues as does moon's
waxing-waning in stages but
lunar condition's returns and
departures upon my ravaged
surface impinges my days and nights.

I guage.

I manage,

skin tides,

write on,

hoping for one more
freeze which may crack more
limbs than rot.

Rime ice is desolation in the plot.

Flower mouth,
stamen tongue,
frozen drift,

large crow over
last year's flower
bed, bemused,

favorite color's
maize without
nuance,

from back
of throat it
sounds,
disturbs.

Root reach,

clot cling.

Old Scratch,

Black wing.

***

a view of distant
bridges busy with light,
motion,

the spanned river,
dark, spins toward
the deeper East;
a Star there was
once a great matter,
one of the better
nights of the world
it is believed.

It is closing hour.

I have broken my back lifting
all these my loves to heaven.

*

Further news/spews July 5,2020 in reign Nazi Potus/Covidity

'I ain't your Clyde and I ain't your Ezra, I'm Bliss...' - Ralph Ellison

Dear face of The Face, Emad dear, from collective ethers I'm trying to come back to life here,

I've been out of it a long while....now lowered or low laid with sciatica pain down right leg stops below knee and buttock small of back nerves shock or ache or both depending on each move which is now and always feels eternal like a dare to the arbitrary force that so seeks to crush us into some gravity and submission no matter pleads or prayers....

Tracking the wary coyote hovering always just below the ledge or at yard meets woods edge, Mumps I call him, some sag or other at his left maw a limp on forward left paw leg twisted suspect car got him survives now forever on edges nothing bold like a regular road crossing or crow flight over meadow or even straight up Marcy's ice scars mountain dares still trying to pass but imperceptible aeons Mumps eyes plead " no mountain" when we make rare eye contact I try to send some friendly thoughts trying what my friend Valeria does, a wounded animal too and now because of wound is a healer she softly chants

come come come come

come come come come

showing both hands flat palms up for frightened animal to see

come come come come

I've seen her charm racoon-chewed dogs mauled cats sick horse motherless runted out kittens into won trust and life-enough

Mumps ain't having any come come come come

linger eats what's left whats offered in the meadow past dark where ravens get to work moon or not peck for the better portions they like bones just like the furred do - you know Mumps is near watching content enough to eat what might be left of leftovers or excavated fare from back of fridge long forgotten all mold blue or green some slimed things even the cats turn their discerning noses to

*

'Maybe I'm trapped. Although I may be in a melodrama, not a tragedy, from yet another dying empire....National identity is like armor. On permanent loan from a museum. It's dull armor that I clink around in. Could I get an operation that would make me oblivious to symbols? Could I be like human Switzerland, always neutral to the partisan demands of birthplce? Get a transnational operation, get placed in a different body politic? ' - Lynne Tillman

Comet Sciatica struck sudden as well as the protracted viral sequester and my solitude pierced by necessary company of women and cats....necessary not cuz chosen but forced and too long with.....you know the deal - monk/hermit r me or us - the pestilence the potus putz the protracted posturing and pontificating social media without remedy facebook twit twitch bitch bitch bitch to no good end or so it seems but evidence to the contrary are needed riots and protests and new fences layered for yon orange yeti bitch in yellow house called the White what was slave built and now the shoe is fit and tilted in favor of those who forced built it and to them shall be the victory

Mugged like Mumps by past accidents fated old memories pitch forked in dreams and waking olding man woulda coulda shoulda unwilling but shouldered which has a should in't and so much grief so much pity too sung marvelously by Ralph Ellison my reading passages from Three Days Before the Shooting and me not black but perhaps inwardly so meaning soul-blackened which - black being equal opportunity archetype no matter civic turn or culture or hue - Ellison sings my woe too but daren't confess that at all or only to a few who may tolerate such now ad judged appropriation but by gods and little fishes o o o " o star spangled shock of mercy" Ginsberg mercy be or be found in the very place of madness and incarceration at times chosen or too often forced to circumstanced retreat

Mumps and me woe-bo-daddys smirched and be-schmirtched behind the birch white strophes vertical so vertical negative spaces between them all dark relief catastrophic tree fall of a vicious winter surely tornadic torn tops and upper halves cracked midriff trunks tossed or hanging perilous to pass under in other trees thicker limbs or geometry and gravity performing circus suspensions waiting for high wind until then we pretend the miracle of never falling such as acrobats
which are all humans ever were/are

to repeat

We

ever were/are

'ghost[s] of an alternative
life...

They were we before we were, ancestral,
we

who'd never not be ill at ease. A vocation
for lack he'd have said, she'd have said
longing, a world, were they to speak, be-
tween... What wasn't, they'd have said,
went
away, would come back, first fanatic
church,
what would
be' - Nathaniel Mackey

*

Rekiah's nephew is here renovating old house so the place shakes and vibrates with hammer and saw scrapes of heavy old stuff to be replaced with heavy new stuff so's psoas's sore me below down in here inhering pine knot plank plotch catch all or most dusts the mouse/rat/chipmunk dung the plaster the fiberglass o let this cup pass Lord of Ghosted critters occupants seven snake skins entwine water pipes cool wet I guess for snakes need so evidence speaks dark hiding nooks with food rodents close by old bones and fur fall into shower stall - three days before the pipes broke from - frozen a'toilet I sit and read the castings now an old constipated sage scrieing the fallen oracle bones and fur and spiders too butoh walk leg by leg by leg by leg by leg by leg to what purpose there on the plasticine stall floor/wall not sure but am sure that the dead flies of winter go uneaten/unsucked of inner juices and one spider first days here I spoke to every morning from the john me wondering at its slow slow movements for 3 days till 4th its legs are curled/tucked tightly beneath its carapace I blow at it from the cold seat draws round my colder ankles and it budged not at all I realized it was dead and first time evervfelt remorse for a bug a spider and once cleaned/flushed pajamas up I gently scoop Spider up with toilet paper so soft double ply-ed solomnly march spider on bier so soft softly into still harder winter snow and darker woods Middle-March flip flops slow going find a rock up near the house so place paper and spider there with oddest prayer ever in my life but Lord Buddha helps re: " all sentient beings" etcetera etcetera sera OK and so perform brief bone chill rites then slide down the path patch to my ground floor entrance to hot shower to Hopkins poem - The Windhover - more meaningful than ever for " dappled dawn drawn" things or rather substituted or addendum-ed " threaded sewn moaned" things strangely mourned actual tears born no doubt of projections 'pon small cringes majestically formed objectively perceived from secret and sightless spaces suspended/cocooned in darkness or in woods strung pearled between limbs and trunks which freak my face when once I stumble August last humid stagger in thickets face first into massive webs the sudden grand mal-like seizure-like slaps scrape face eyelids forehead pate of monstrous poison from not so small miracle makers webbers or as native americans have it are weavers of stories spun from themselves and thus spider medicine is storytelling weaving spinning from within to without

'A first unfallen
church it might have been. Let
run its course it would have gone
otherwise, time's ulterior bequest...
This they had a way of imagining,
this
they so wished it to be. Abstract he
at the back of her mind'
- Nathaniel Mackey

*

Won't say when I will return to City. If/When so I will gather up stuff, purchase needed things difficult to find in remote north country then head back up here for first snows! ! ! ! ! ! ! those harsh howling evergreen

wind blows and moans and whistles that shake the house entire woodstove aflame, wood cords stacked ready....stews and moidles on woodstove in cast iron dutch ovens,2 cats sleeping beneath fleece, Rekiah snoring on the couch very very unlady like and Fulani braiding her long woolen hair weaves and timeclocks tea cups her bow to the Western way of cup and saucer tosses her comb down to fluff the fire, stir the cats unbudgable they are counting matchsticks used on the delicate ceramic handmade in oaxaca stove topped for such and dirty spoons

she's continually crooning bending to dropped things checking the humane traps for mice discovering a pill Rekiah's dropped from fistfuls she takes to wake up to sleep to breathe to digest to hold falling inner things - womb used well - innards natural sag advanced old age which -resigned discovery - never ever stops at the the dead edge end but for now warmed from her, Fulani daughter's groom and pick up pill to forstay doom Fulani of milk in the cups to clabber for the anjera to thicken in the heavy skillet blacher than she Ehiope's child she remains up to her usual countless tasks that must must be done and me me I'm the opposite be-booked, coffee-ed, warm enough below on the ground floor by the window side view of icy woods close and straight on view of the rimed path up the hill view plate glass doors and chipmunks about their work jaw-fulls of finds full-shiver and down the snow hole they go to escape thinner red squirrels three da bitches mean as hornets even to each other competing over frozen territory for a seed single dropped from sesame toast a frigid snack had on the deck now and always chase after each other to do battle over said seed republicans all them they are them that the red furred bestids

In spite of squirrels
this Sunday find from
'Greater Lord of Long Life'
in the Chutzu - meaning
Great Master near the
Great Mountain:

'first a yin then a yang
no one knows what to do

for the one who lives apart'

Read this relieved yet
a grimaced redundant
question returns never
having left, heard Old
Son, Charles Olson:

'I pose you you're question:
shall you uncover honey / where maggots are? '

Queries' distant cousins, very,
one from East and 2 millenia
old, the other from West arguing
on behalf of an unmoored continent
of displaced people from un-
moored continent bones of
which could and can no longer
live and let be

To Be Continued

*

'An ‘inner process' stands in need of outward criteria'. In the absence of agreed-upon rules, private language is a game that does not hold the possibility of making a 'transaction, ' 'making sense, ' 'making oneself understood, ' or 'being able to explain.' - Ludwig Wittgenstein

Altar pieces a bit will nill pell mell much like Olympus
I gather

even Sanai once

if the smoke ever clears, the
scrambled competition picks
up renewed-and-vicious-pace
apace

still kicks post haste even into
post po-mo postmodern mantlepiece
here, mine, shards of once was/still is
deity, fingers pointing to the moon,
never to what's behind it which is where
deity true probably
lives-at-least-as-Idea-or-Id,
or better leading to 'don't know' but
makes a funny feeling, even sick,
fearful in the gut for

Something we know not what is doing we know not what 1

and one knows something wholly other
than self, even what is known so familiarly,
such as daily/nightly totems staring one down,

insisting, what?

something beyond eye or thigh
the weight that Forever really is
or we feel it is, the bone feel, that
ever so slow curve calcium makes
down, down, years of it sinking
and then we wonder our own being

rumors of thunder on Distant Mountain,
fire there, we are stutterers pegged
massive revelations, special effects
parting waters walking sticks into serpents
bread rain and on and on and somewhere

we remember we ought to altar so we
relent even if it's the first and last and
only one of the heart but not only that
but the aged body parts once so primary,
the sagging breast, the sinking

balls,

withered skin still the longing there and
everywhere mere parchment now and
how we may then finally wonder about
religions of the Word, what gets written
where, once and often, on stone then
eventually vellum/skin, and bark too in
treed lands

So lands a Shining Stranger perhaps one of many
bends low forever writes with his finger in the dust,
but the word in the end may us an altar make as
hearing fades and the tongue thinks

'it's only water'' and

'can a man control 'is tongue? '

- it's Biblical

the question answers itself

a riddle:

''never, or rarely''

like my mother dying,

''What's this all about?
Whatever. I'm ready to go''

as if she or any of us can really decide
that but will's a holy thing, asserts even
in the face of obstinate Absolute

that Other-Than is also truth and down
to a woman and man

we get to argue,

''I decide''

What Is Between Arcturus And Aldebaran?

a distinct lump of sorrow forms
we are returned to the fragility of birds -

when the dead sister reappears in dreams
she is always a bird

without this succession
or at least modest lineage -

dead, dead as a doornail

intemperate habits -

there is something here of the child
who upon waking thinks he can fly
even though he failed badly the day before

the urge to keep everything secret -

sin of pride, also greed

a stumbling block
impedes the neophyte

disregarding an afterlife
he who would be first will be last
this is peculiar but not remarkable -

night now

snow is falling -

warm slippers
track for a few seconds
a break in the clouds
attended to by stars
by blackness above clouds

blessed night cushions us
enters northwest

eyes owned
don't travel light -

great Deer sees

and past

be

practice

companionship

child

waters

*

The Idea of Pear Tree

a pear tree forgets only itself as
an audacity

limbs recall themselves

appear to reach

one cannot see them
reaching

they may be silent but
we cannot know that toward
later sweetness they yearn
then seed a still dirt around

content to lie down
the idea of 'pear tree'

reduces to all sparks

yet

no illusion of darkness
hastens the pear

but O it tastes

*

As Henry Miller has it, " Always merry and bright" - though blight upon the apple, the skin, the within, makes the fallen fruit sweeter. The wise bees know and tell us so beneath leaves and limbs, thrumming away, legs laden with pollen.

So may our legs wear such as may our hearts and minds as our faces line and our limbs, as does the fruit, will eventually fail and fall but with years of sweetness absorbed below to cushion and bear that falling away.

*

The crocus does
not compare itself
to cow or crow.

Today is the day I go
with the aid of my staff
into shy spring snow.

All things being equal in Tao,
one foot asks, who is high,
the other, who is low?

Listen.

The peacock's
call from the bare willow.

I trudge quietly on.

The emperor's bird signals
diamond glory to the suggested
world, its breath visible to no one but me,

my old eyes strain hard to see the Way of Ways.

It sounds but does not say.

*

Are we lost yet? the young boy asks.

Because I is another, said Rimbaud. - Jacques Maritain, from " Poetry's Dark Night

the sky is never an occasion for doubt but for change to
a night filled with uncountable occasions of light,
companions of light, never alone as is the day's Sun.

What is known in the crowded vision,
in the visionary crowd of witness, is
variable and dependent upon available light.

...see what a thing it
is now already become
since childhood and
the backyard forest
sparkling, every surface
of everything covered
with ice clear, a sheer
skin which seems/seams
to move as I am moved
returned in response to
impertinent snow to let
more new world come
flashing in, and the
one-more-bird, a startle,
a cardinal red against all
the white, white, there
were many, coveys of
them inordinate in all
the snow blind, too much
for a boy to bear, broken
eye-nerves, brittle sticks,
he kicks on his back crying
to make an angel his own
to be relieved of the too
ordered world, would be
the unwanted, unexpected
child of things shattered,
his need for constancy and
same, beauty a necessary
addiction dependent upon
diction's canary eye and ear,
just to introduce another color
between mouse and meaning,
a chorus stunned into sound.

***

'The time is out of joint. O cursed spite

That ever I was born to set it right.' - Shakespeare, Hamlet

upon my chaste
return sunburned
churned by the
Atlantic I will have
discovered a haunting
sound again

an animal
music of the air

the lungs

screams really

gulls falling
by arrows of
blue which

blue

saturate
sky and
sea to
learn the
heart again

to learn the heart again

avoid the narrows
at the island's end
where feet are easily
mistaken for doves

there large currents
beckon/compel them
to descend

*

the subject matter
is not new

& not the sorrow

old as the first cave
bearing first fire
in human hand the
expiring artist torn
from blank sky to
an expectant wall

a herd there
a declaration

one day we too will
fill the earth as
hooves have done
capture sun & be
doneover/overdone
& so come to such
an edge of ruin

*

And I was desolate and sick of an old passion - Ernest Dowson

It's got to do with America,
my love of music, my grotesque loneliness... - Henry Miller

Are not all summer nights born late in America

fading when morning glories fog draped at dawn

breach fairgrounds an entire continent long?

Pine perimeters encircle veiled hermetic tents.

Suspended rides now frighten.

Briefly carnies are relieved of their ugliness.

Cotton candy gins spin dry confections to cold crystal.

Sugared metals stick/stop, their precocious tongues

tuned too early for erasure.

I, Twitter, stutteringly remember in cyber chases

late-night sittings at blue screen scrabbling after

old grievances such are lovers, cheaters, jilts, and

those rare 'got-lucky' graces, unexpected shoulders

and shudders, when I finally broke open laid waste

for future flatterers and failures of heart.

Sniffing my fingers' revenant tents I recall

sickened the candy at every fair, handfuls gorged,

glutted, belly sore and wanting more, drowned

in the push-shove of fevered bodies intent on the

fast rides where one loses stomach for the ordinary.

Dizzy, I grab my ankles, confess instead -

I've puked my guts from excess - spun sugar

failing cart wheels chasing penny mechanical

distractions ghosting up Stillborn* nights

holding their breath well past bedtime.

At a window, counting railroad cars,

a boy thief is stealing circus hours.

*Stillborn Falls is the imaginary town the poet was born in.

*

take lean brown or brawn a love for all the above,
even if once a week, sneak, steal away to primed
nerves, drives, swell up thrust thrive then share
a meal, wine, again to lie abed all Buddha smiles
while resting one's head upon suspiring chest
breath sour/sweet aftertaste afterglow bodies'
glorious pure dumbshow honoring the primacy
animal living with and between the teeth the
swallow to follow the heart in where/what forces

the bite

Uruboros tail-in-mouth, recreating
Herself in hard passages, throat
to anus to birth canal and cave,
galactic center point waiting perhaps
at the other no end, carbon jesters,
angels teeming on Quetzal quill tips,
twinkling fires in the pitch, sometimes
called stars, or ravens, black heralds
of colors yet to brilliantly come.

Still, such timidity ends in engorged blood, meat requirements, rendering vaporous sublimity too thin for fingers, why forks were invented. If modernity, it's forks and faxes, returns anything of value to us stretching into denial which is all our futurity, it is the return of images, official and unofficial, which return us in turn to our official and unofficial selves, limping shod or un-, ens-not-Ens being-not-Being as we are chafed to particular part-selves multiple-imaged as they want or dream to be...

Who are we?

*

I am taken with such
at which I stare
which holds my gaze
with shades of It
& of Itself, that is,
is a death
or like unto it -

Stillness unbreathed

or in need of It
Breath
now having been only
once Rilke
who it seems

becomes relents
known form
though It is
returned
or re-rested

to Itself beyond Christmas

and yet and yet

the kneeling boy
in the evergreen

the shattered orn-
aments ever gleam

the needles' net
a permanence enough

gold-leafed & trumpeting

*

Tryptic Surmises - Ekphrastics for William Hawkins & Caravaggio, Both Painting Horses

1
HORSE - Hawkins

How would he now depict it,

even a corner of it,

paint it,

busy with the making
of it?

belly's too much,
needs thinning, haunches
trimmed too to size, or
not, concise seizure of
eye and paint dependent
upon hands, monumental
concerns aright or at least
perspectives private
suffering amidst, against,

or in the teeth of, daily
concerns taken on as
ultimate-form,

it is

visual commentary, response
imaged, is backyard ruin put
to good uses, kindness extended
in hammer's claw on cast
off wood, it is Crow near the
barred door, and with heart,
with heart meds, provide limit
to dulling descents, may then
find again's Desire, may plunge
further/deeper, deeper still,
into muck magic of shorter
days given in winter, in the longer
nights generously dumped,
portion/proportion control
upon the human,

such occupies, with familiars,
allusive smears, serving now
and ahead who will partake of
the offering, who will be held
healed in their beholding

nuanced in cloud swatch,
in land swath tumbled.

2
HORSE - Caravaggio

from one's back
see the vision -
a massive horse
distorts God
back into image
necessary to the dark to see
what can be spread upon dirt

to see what resurrection
there is in the smell of paint

to find again the desire immense
deeper, still deeper mud magic of
shorter days in winter,
in long nights generously
pouring out stains-allusive
serving now and before
to ancestrally partake of
this offering-place, this altar
steeped, cured in contemplation -

sample of nuanced cloud

strip of land collapsed

3
HORSE - Both Hawkins & Caravaggio

then see how the belly is too much,
must be diluted, a new leg cut to size
a brief seizure of eyes on the swollen
hock

paint depends utterly upon hands,
a'rights a monumental problem or
at least the prospect of suffering

dislocation

oneself
in the middle

against or

teething daily concerns

paint assume ultimate form

*

Love, let us live without

rhyme

the sun go up the sun go

down,

the Sky-Amor-Wheel- Fati

turn and return

with feeling

Let the painter lonely be

alone

pinned to shore with

his paints, his brushes,

his thumb-gauged vision

in relation to ourselves,

and Void, without intended

rhyme trued, true to ourselves.

Nature, too, is true.

May he use the color blue.

Carelessly.

Tubes of it.

We once were that, too -

careless without.

Now wrecks.

Vaulted.

Now become

weather without

foreheads

without

cloudnecks

Vastness

in the making

if such
is made at all

but is aporetic**

euphoric

a condition,

a given

hard thumb

against

a sky of

tubes made

and of

squints made

we are then a

'striving after'

beyond cream-colored

foam/form

churned by storm

Here come the wild birds again

**the adjective " aporetic" , which it defines as " to be at a loss" , " impassable" , and " inclined to doubt, or to raise objections" ; and the noun form " aporia" , which it defines as the " state of the aporetic" and " a perplexity or difficulty" .

*

C. G. Jung, from the Prologue to his autobiography - Memories, Dreams, Reflections:

'Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome.
Its true life is invisible, hidden in the rhizome. The part that appears
above ground lasts only a single summer. Then it withers away- an
ephemeral apparition. When we think of the unending growth and
decay of life and civilizations, we cannot escape the impression of
absolute nullity. Yet I have never lost a sense of something that lives
and endures underneath the eternal flux. What we see is the
blossom, which passes. The rhizome remains.

In the end the only events in my life worth telling are those when the
imperishable world irrupted into this transitory one. That is why I
speak chiefly of inner experiences, amongst which I include my
dreams and visions. These form the prima materia of my scientific
work. They were the fiery magma out of which the stone that had to
be worked was crystallized.

All other memories of travels, people and my surroundings have
paled beside these interior happenings.'

*

What is concealed beneath matters most,
then the ongoing translation for what
continues to measure paces, what may
even be spoils of the living, either way
either or each indicates there is life after all.

Gather, shall we, by a
pacing river, beauteous,
shining in its endurance
singing of endurance, its,
which may arrive strangely
ding-dong, brutal,
utterly satisfied

*

Desire.

The fire in our house of living rages
and we cannot come out of our own accord.
The event of her going is a beckoning
to see the flame leaping so let's creep
toward the Green and be silent
but if we cannot be then let us be as she,
frail and tender, lifting voices up
in the greening shadow

*

[the poem begins with a line by John Berryman ending with the word 'honey']

Childness let's have us honey, flame intended,
names smeared on the glass, an accidental pane
times hands touching it delicate as trespass,
what is allowed lace of vision times want equals
at last a sum equals at last a remorse felt,
a memory - sunk into soft teas - steeping, turns
steaming said window said prints/views obscured
of nothing in particular or special, troubles only,
only of passing birds enamored of their lighter
bones or are they cloud and shadow? merely the
steep sun declining ashen into the Jersey side?

*

O come lover back the floor where we lay a'times
upon boards the cluttered clothes the depositions
times at least three and take me once again one
times infinity into your arms times two leave me
when you/we are done doing times zero a mere cypher
flown sheer up the flue into the blue ash which now
the sky is where there is only one sky a dove flies
into possibility of memory or not times countless
thousands times plus the time it takes for you to
exit shedding skins, shells am a shell, water you?
you decide times infinity into the one drain in-

to ocean reflecting blue sky of ash blew into what
remains of you on the beach bathing soft Junes,
boardwalk organ grinder smiling/sings 'amor fati'
mellifluously on as hairs their bodies follicles
delicate when under the glass espied over-spills
into o endlessly it's seams, it seems, into memory
which is already over-said overheard redundantly a
river and time, this one recalled, the cloud drift
and the river the tides beside the city both sides
is as ancient as it always was and is - in the beginning
was darkness over deep water and a word, any word

really would do form something out of deep, of dark,
of water which shapes only by outer circumstance itself
in this case a word leading up to this contraction of
bellies against each times two, and legs times four,
and lips times myriad ones gone before - of murmurs
O lover of thee I adore - I am unkindly left remembering
once was laughter spent seeking out between bodies' valleys
eternally shifting eluding capture, this, just to reintroduce
some levity for we were many day-ed times merry-merrily
played harming no one not even the mouse unmoved per-
haps, watching perhaps, still, still, from beneath the

god you insisted be excluded from all our nakedness
times one too many breaths exchanged, groped times
many ropes all our wanting the curtained dancer en-
tranced entered into upon a mystery how one could be
so, well, so marvelous and so cruel too as one wills
memory - an edge tears open: Fact: that there was love,
there was love after all I could see it smell it feel
it there dancing round the living room one holds on
to, and upon goodness worn out pulled from below down
and dark and deep such is this so it is the riddle it
is all now become since you departed, love, since you

departed I shall count backward by threes then fours
the door which once embraced you now never lets you
go no matter the black or blue tide of thee O lover,
what slips out ebbs black back into lapis, lapses in-
to what self is uttered/poured scored transparent upon
surfeit surface/faces which are even eyes which now
glaze with love lost beside the flue marked upon the
pane blue the mouse black upon the floor remains is
many, a multitude of petals times three the jasmine
unspurned at last at last/least return soft Junes the
lips of which are sometimes pink of lavender swollen

as if to kiss times three the antinomies a string of
pearls and thee O lover to me back 'splaying shyly
where the curtains sway/stand behind them the curtained
dancer entranced/entered into upon a mystery the organ
grinder smiling/singing 'amor fati' mellifluously on

*

Terrible tender deity
Breath of mud & fire

ambivalent Word
cooled only by bare

Shulamit of figs &
dates in darkness wooed

what may come
of parted lips

hers torn in two splices

the I & the thou & how
one alembic

conjoins or can exiles

How two makes One
the myriad to the Alone

*

The view from here - 10/01/2018:

I was always a guest - of family, of religion, and especially of language
- nothing more, nothing less. - Robin Blaser

What you have as heritage,
Take now as task;
For thus you will make it your own!

Alternate translation:

What from your fathers you received as heir [or air],
Acquire if you would possess it! - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, tr. Walter Kaufmann [NY: Anchor,1990], pp.114-5]

The traveler at a loss: to go or stay...... - Liu Tsung-yuan [773 - 819]

Fearing to become a laughing-stock to the world
I choose a place that is unfrequented by men. - Po Chui [772 -846]

Here we are opening into the 'the religion of psychology' by suggesting that psychology is a variety of religious experience.

Psychology as religion implies imagining all psychological events as effects of Gods in the soul, and all activities to do with soul, such as therapy, to be operations of ritual in relation to these Gods.... It is not a question of religion turning to psychology, no, psychology is simply going home. - James Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology

The same can be said of poetry for as Hllman says of psychology, at least true for me in that poetry, in a very real sense - a Jungian/archetypal sense, is not at all far from or separate from depth psychology. When in my late teens I found myself-as-an absence in my family, culture, and religion, I relied upon poetry to secure a way of language image inherent as foundation in words which could at least presence me in my absence. I had yet to articulate in the Christ-haunted landscape of the South and the rest of the country...but 'which Christ? ' could be asked depending upon just where in the country 'He' showed up that it was/is the culture which absented me, abjected me to remote margins of 'fundamentalist/Calvinist theological grace, or else, ' that 'else' being the fire which is the only recourse when one jumps or is thrown out of the Fundy Hetero-normative 'frying pan.' This is also true of New Age-oriented 'bamboo steamers'.

I had thankfully discovered Jung early on. Not that I comprehended what he had revealed to the culture which could help it discover a new orientation, a new meaning as the old gods die or absent themselves via their worshipers and practitioners, a violent lot these Abrahamic relgionistas so adhered to the Middle Ages and an irreconcilable split of good and evil which still goes unrecognized in the Western god-image. Two paragraphs in my high school psychology book light weight for sure but the deed that needed to be done was done and that was to read two paragraphs on Jung summed impossibly!

Jung's psychological approach, mentioned archetypes as primal patterns, universal motifs which showed up in all of humanity throughout all of history and that each person had recourse to conscious recognition of and relationship with said archetypes. I was immediately sold, mostly just intuition that Jung was my way through the death of God, of my culture, of the South, the rest of the US and the Western world...the monstrosity of the American century overwhelmed me and even a fundamentalist Jesus could not solidly provide me a place, in fact, condemned me to the margins, the ledges, a gargoyle-boy frozen in place forever OUTSIDE the secure grace of those concretions of theology and god image which disallowed all but " the Chosen."

Years later, enough years' distance from high school and Calvinist college and the much needed nervous break-down/spiritual emergency, I came to New York City in search of Jung, a Jungian analyst, poetry and other books, my earlier gleaning with me in boxes, found the analyst and so began the slow, arduous, always fascinating/excoriating journey/free fall into Jungian depth psychology as it pertained to my own absentia from self and culture.

My dreams indeed did convey meaning bit by bit rather, bite by bite providing inner guidance and broader views of not only myself but what was being wrought in the collective psyche in the American century and the World at large. Poetry was even more meaningful and so I continued to read and savor...then one night I dreamed that I had killed a young poet, myself, and threw his body into the middle of the deep and large lake I had grown up beside. I could see the longhair of the young man splayed out medusa-like as he floated slowly, arms and legs splayed out, into the black depths. I awakened greatly disturbed but also knew that the wounded young poet did indeed need to " go" . Without much thought about this inner conscious murder of the masochistic innocent/orphan young man my own writing dried up. I was sad but felt that it had to be. I had begun to trust-enough the dreams and the source from whence they arrive and so got to the daily task of work, Jung study, and eventually, all flavors of psychology on my way to a vocation as a Jungian counselor/therapist.

Poets, their poetry, remained and remain my basic texts for of psyche there is much therein them...and Jung consolidated and grounded my imagination in the mythopoeic realms of conscious and unconscious and so the dead young poet remained dead, the puer aeternus I had been identified with how could I not be as I was indeed a puer, a young man, and could not land enough in the samsara of the world as it is in order to humanly dwell receded into the depth of psyche but, dressed in other drag, fed energy to my studies of psychology and, with great relief, Eastern religion but even in the magnificent psychologies of East I could not dig a hole, pour in concrete and plant an absolute truth flag shouting like an Easternized Martin Luther, " Here I stand or sit lotus in Eastern fields, I can do no other, though glean from them I did and continue to do. Jung gave me greater understanding from a depth psychological perspective of 'religion' and the 'religious function of the psyche' and so ALL religions collective and private are manifestations of psyche and, major point and revolutionay at that, psyche does not shut out any part of itself unlike religions which do indeed shut out, scourge, repress, consign to the unconscious, the netherworld, limbo, purgatory, while projecting that which is shut out upon the shadow, meaning, the 'other' - people, places, activities and things.

Years passed. I finished my first analysis and for awhile tried my new wings, Jungian, mythopoeic, a veritable spiritual antique shop, my psyche comfortably crowded with images, notions, rituals homogenized as only a capitalist consumer of, now, religious offerings could...Jung was my pretext, or so I thought. Good news is that I had found my way back to religion or, at least, a religious attitude which allowed me to excitedly be 'at play in the fields of the Lord.' But even then some part of me could not completely bow as Rimbaud wrote, 'to worship at any shrine, impulses toward perfection.' And I was still seeking to bypass the shadow, the underworld beings/energies which pursued me in dream by which I used my newfound spirituality to bypass and avoid, often enough dragging or trying to said shadow beings and energies into one spiritual camp or other in order to wipe their asses, put spiritual white robes on them, hang wings and haloes upon and over them then send them off to spiritual charm schools to teach them how to convey when they say namaste and other bliss-ninnyized slogans meant to convey being in the spiritual know. Arrogant, what. Sincere, yes. But arrogant.

But, shudder of shudders, Jung counsels 'facing your own soul.' Soul means psyche. Work with the psyche for which one, with rare exceptions, needs a guide inwardly and externally. Pray to be guided to a sin-eater who does not ignore human imperfection nor pretend to piety and god-almightiness. Look for a bullet-hole drumming in intense attention, salivation and uncommon sense. Find someone who, like you perhaps are experiencing now, is' 'beyond the fence', having lost her/his senses in order to gain them anew along with 'uncommon sense.' Abjure commercial promises and platitudes and be wary of trance-mongers selling quick abbreviated journeys to enlightenment with guaranteed prosperity to follow. 'Somewhere over the rainbow' is just that, 'somewhere over the rainbow', for in the end, once again, one returns, or can, with courage and consent to lose one's 'bauble-babbling deities' to Kansas, ordinary and mundane, praising in creaturely astonishment the majesty accessible in ground, in hands, genitals, eyes and skin. Revelations in the spore and more abound. Land here in the physical universe assenting to suffer and bear witness to the spectrum of joys and horrors which create exquisite and ordinary responses for we are indeed creatures of response in a universe which appeals to us as creatures of response to authentically respond. We may curse we WILL! . We may praise we WILL! . We may question we always SHOULD! and more but conscious humanity, all-too-humanness, is enough. More than enough. We really don't need yogis and saints and fainting spiritual Blavatskys afraid of toothy, meaty existence. The spine of an edible leaf screams, too, when we chew. And we leave it fuming behind us in testament to life and death just as odiferously as the once-was-flesh injestions of living energy called food. Contrariness is who we are. We gaze at the star of our personal sky, cry Why? and We Wee Oui amidst the scry and scree of our being here just one being amongst numberless beings in an expanding universe.

Thus I would amend Robin Blaser's opening statement above, true for me as it is, but having arrived at this current response to Existenz and being in and of it, I venture what is alway a venture when logic and chaos are peeled back from appearance:

I was always a GUESS - of family, of religion, and especially of language
- nothing more, nothing less. - Robin Blaser

Still guessing. And so creation/creating continues:

Missive As Preface - Pertaining To His Gargoyle Nature

" It seemed like the gargoyles of Notre Dame Started yelping." - Vladimir Mayakovsky, from " A Cloud In Trousers"

Seeker comes to Confucius's door seeking entrance and enlightenment:

SEEKER: KNOCK KNOCK

CONFUCIUS: WHO'S THERE?

SEEKER: SHOES

CONFUCIUS: SHOES WHO?

SEEKER: WHO'S ASKING?

CONFUCIUS: THE WAY OUT IS THROUGH THE DOOR

But still:

The problem is that many of us [most of us] are metaphorically impaired. - Gay Hendricks

But further still:

That place among the rocks - Is it a cave,
Or a winding path? The edge is what I have. - Theodore Roethke

" I have occasionally described my standpoint to my friends as the " narrow ridge, " writes Marin Buber. " I wanted by this to express that I did not rest on the broad upland of a system that includes a series of sure statements about the absolute, but on a narrow rocky ridge between the gulfs where there is no sureness of expressible knowledge but the certainty of meeting what remains undisclosed.'

" The narrow ridge is the place where I and Thou meet, " he [Buber] added. When I asked him to clarify this symbolism to me, he replied...'If you like, you can think of the narrow ridge as a region within yourself where you cannot be touched. Because there you have found yourself: and so you are not vulnerable." Martin Buber, Between Man and Man, trans. by Ronald Gregor Smith [London: Kegan Paul,1947] p.184.

Meanwhile, bothering my own poems,
le oevre, to death or breath or something
glotally beautiful, strange fruit born of
dirth and craven beleaguerdness

20,000 leagues beneath the Creeley,
Eliot, Crane, Hopkins and blended Beats
which I am told are good for kidneys,
blood and the sum of crows on the
powerline extended between the upper
edge of my window screen and the
Manhattan Bridge's pale blue shyly
hiding its red light in river fog just for me.

" A dog named Ego, the snowflakes as kisses..." - Delmore Schwartz

The formal addresses:

For you, Delmore, perhaps the untouchable region of self remains still undisclosed or perhaps you have like most of us only glimpses of that enclosure, the self-cloister, the oasis which is the centerpoint of self and Self and Universe always/already present, or at least that is the massive presumption of mystics, but it, Universe, self/Self remains most often elusive due to the stormy intervention of the senses and the vicissitudes of life presentations, and YOU have had more than your share of such...thus your need, your insistent enclosure into instuments, objects, images, to sound and pound and lu lu lu lull yourself into that enclosed space which is all space without dimension upon and within which you receive in your open-at-last-ness, in perhaps the rare place and ocassion when your arms uncross from your chest, and you can finally receive what for many or enough are blessings...your being in that vulnerable yet trusting place allows what is there in the narrow ridge place to meet what will be undisclosed where you too may undisclose yourself within that place and are then met by That That Is, Suchness, Thusness, Is-ness, Tathata which is variously translated as " thusness" or " suchness" ... representing the base reality and can be used to terminate the use of words...but amplifies image, vision, which can lead to no image, no vision, but immense yet really real Silence and Extended Field and yet also the Stillpoint of the spinning world:

Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.
My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,
Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?
A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.
The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
And one is One, free in the tearing wind. - Theodore Roethke

You dwell on the narrow ridge as does everyone only most folks are able to ignore and repress that liminal space because dwelling on that ridge is to be nowhere...what Thomas Merton, quoting Chuang Tzu, calls " the Palace of Nowhere" ...

Call it what you will, I think Hell is a better designation and resignation for who has given up the battle and waits in the in between " the heron and the wren, Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den" - " the edge is what I have" ....self as edge, edge as self...Merton called himself and his fellow monks/mystics " marginal men" ....I have called myself that too but now it is " gargoyle" that is the most descriptive name or designation....ledge/edge dweller, not IN the church or Cathedral, forever outside such, but close, on the edge where " once was mystery revealed" in earlier times...always a watcher, an edge/ledge sitter peering out and down into/onto/upon the pedestrian world, the rolling pastoral scene beyond, never able to see the Duomo, the crown of Mystery's edifice, but it is very close behind, that Rotunda which images the Cosmos....gargoyle with Cosmos at his/her back tracks life, the temporal, from above with Mystery's weight distorting his/her visage forever forcing vision forward out and down...a dark most often ugly jewel but a jewel nonetheless in the Cosmic Crown...Gargoyle twists and blurrs and stirs new perception, surgically accurate visions of what most folks sense or feel but never really see or express but for flails, wails, gasps and clasping at promised baubles of church and culture/country. Bumpkins boobing head or cock-long into each other and what is near for fear of missing what they always/already are missing, the Tathata offered but without advertisement despite Enlightenment by Ticketron and Bestseller/Talk TV trivialized versions of the once was sacred but now sanitized, adulterated, microwaved in seconds " spirituality" ...sorry, Gargoyle in me needed a parenthesis to rant. Suffice it to say, to neigh, even bray:

We serve.

Awful vocation. Odious purpose. Mournful ministry. But we serve.

I reserve the right to complain as a human because it hurts, is hell, is no place anyone or being should dwell but dwell there we all do only most refuse the journey, are pleased enough or would rather just live the animal out and into the grave or dust having thrust and shoved and, yes, loved best-as-could-can and then dies into the liminal-being-animal at the end, schluffing the body and all that, for me endlessly schluffing skin cell by skin cell, behind, blind beneath the ridge at last, repast for worms, scattered by storms. At last unseen.

We serve. YOU serve. And perhaps can emerge, one toe in life waters, again. But the legal pad is a cosmos too. A relation. A gesture of placement, and a just right to complain as a solitary finite creature.

We should convene a convention for gargoyles who, it is not even imagined by those below, know of Mystery, Cosmos close at our back, oh silly vocation, a vent and spleen and rave and lean into our undisclosed humanity at last or at least with fellow Otherwise bounders.

Are gargoyles free to abandon, to forsake their vocations, to somehow, perhaps lightning struck on the temple tower, to transform, morph into human shape though still distorted and ugly, or perhaps, if grace be grace, be indeed fare of face and voice then descend to the human world, step upon the concourse, and track the human pace of embodied, ensouled, emotional subjectively shared human life? Now there's a book I'd like to read, a play, a musical, a movie I'd like to witness - when the gargoyle lays his edge burden down and has to discover the smell of the human and other herd below, grief and grovel, love and betrothal, the brothel, the bother of beauty, the awful hell of it within but out of reach for most, but ghosting in human form but this time only with motion and emotion and transcending notions gathered at oceans edge of grief and longing, the need to belong after all but it is all so appalling but one learns to appreciate the edge had, the ledge-upon-dwelled, the dormition of steeples receding into urban distances, said steeples the hairline of god, holds where fellow gargoyles perch, lurk, search 180 degrees chattering each to each, one at every direction north, south, east, west, reporting what is seen from their watch in the lurch below....the bell towers bong and so gargoyles know sound and distance from the din just behind or beneath, context is everything, everything is everywhere, all is the narrow ridge even the alleys, the byways below, the worn path of the woods, on the hill, in the valley, trailing disclosures avoided or come at last and so come to know ourselves at last for a moment as we are,

beasts upon the purchased hill,
serpents of the human din,
Which I is I? A fallen man....
displaced, one is One,

free in the tearing wind...

Will call to see if dinner for two, gargoyle fare but no more pigeons!

Your fellow upon the stone ledge, ancient piles throbbing,
thus I know, despite concretion, I am a living being,

Grokus Disclosus King Unflung But Sung and Singing

*

I am the least difficult of men. All I want is boundless love. - Frank O'Hara

Dear Meaningnest

Haven't heard of, from you.

Are you OK or mighty fine?

Or is it me?

No matter the matter.

Wondering how, where.

And how fare you, farther flung.

Or me, the further sending these

unasked, unsought.

Few to send

to who might care or

at least be bothered

yet not required

just a basket to catch

my froth enough

at this stage.

Sired upon rock and thus

know stones for suck, I am

more that one, not to inflate,

in parable, who sows seed

upon rock. Some roots may

come but come high wind

or burning heat, well, one

gathers what can, what's

left, sees if something be

woven from strands

perhaps become the

better farmer more

patient the more resigned

by far for attempts and

fated reaping life's own rock.

But, not complaining.

Gonna, rather,

go hog wild,

burst open,

try make sense

of messes, one

slop pinky raised

effetely to offend.

One can arrive at such a place

where one's no longer 'scaped

all this - those who consent -

who becomes arrives, willing

participant in inexorable

awake which as yet

does not totality ken;

always the flames upend,

rush, such vortices are

assumed progress

an assumption

only a wish but

sweetness,

but tenderness

for some few beloved

things may steer,

may guide some,

stir us, even me,

oink oink

forward, ahead.

One cannot be

sweet toward all

except in mind

alone

Alone

the hog loves

lowly

loves slowly

but it loves

thing by

thing

which

something

is a beginning

I am for something

*

Distant cousin,

we're made more close by
sorrow. Time's a borrowed
longing, reaches us each to
each - or yours to mine, for
nowhere now we are but
within, perhaps, merely a
conceit but, I in you and
you in vague, yes, me, a
guess, a venality, vanity
being a human trait common,
quite. It is still a trace to
be, to convene congenially.

I now confess:

I preach too much,

from high horse be-
sotted try to sing
a'stammer with all of
England's Pilgrim-more
behind beneath me us
who would be poets.

It is tone that can home
or disperse us, skin or
spooks thinner than thin,
reflections on walls or con-
fused for traffic or meteors
periferal. Didactic, pro-
lific, heiractic much. Ig-
noring transparency's bend,

let excursus end.

Pretend or pray such
extends us into more
than infirm materiality

but let it rest or give,
if rest can be given,
riven from wrested
Pleiades retread Maidens.

For now, let's, craven.
Encompassed much verily,

God damn the West, its deity.

Come cauterize come
correct, impress of self,

homo erect us bears
on what's for other fools

now to court, stalk, woo.

To palmer instead Word-
ward, on tinted oars

bend or pleining sails
snail pace skies turn

away day from sun
toward Polaris or

Ursas Major/Minor
two, close each
to each, almost
would reach but
for each a leg in
stellar traps so
endless beeward
they wheel they
limp simple enough
bearing in mind
to suffer redundant
motion, helps to
know as all natural
things do no matter
where placed in
curved Space that
night skies every-
where indeed are

a sad

sad zoo.

They're dead now too,
the Bears,

& most seen stars,
a chorus of ill sorts,

to keep time out of
habit and rhyme as

a kind of home to dwell,

in no where do I

but liminal bring
them with, bearing

in mind, to say with
or without impunity,

Goddamn the West, its deity.

*

Accomodate: A Brief Account Of Friedrich Nietzsche's Final Months

My illness has been my greatest boon: it unblocked me,
it gave me the courage to be myself. - Friedrich Nietzsche

When fame had found him
long gone to madness the
idea of the nation itself

a blue-lensed delicate eye

mimicked the mapmaker's
method of triangulation
using time not place as the
fixed point —

to see something as a whole
one must have two eyes
one of love and one of hate
the sublime and the ridiculous
accommodate

Accomodate —

his body

softening
of the brain

left to lie in darkness
a week at a time
leeches attached
to ears to draw blood
down from his head

silver nitrate, opium
and tannic acid enemas
to draw blood
furthest down

Yet he reasons that the
constant taste of blood
in his mouth turns affliction
into an advantage

has particular appeal
to the shipwrecked —

still he furies at tendencies

toward submission

toward self-enslavement

Still at work even in
madness some final
surmises
strongly felt—

Style is concern
vulnerable to distortion

Being a philosopher of perhaps
he once ended a book with 'Or? ' —;

Being a philosopher of endings
of final reckonings
of certain shipwreck

totally blind
he surmises
weakly upon
propped pillows

his eyebrows
his mustache
outgrowing
their ledgers

his fatal sister declaritively
writes —

'in being found

he lived well who hid well'

*

'the ellipse of a cry
travels from mountain
to mountain.' (Lorca)

One thumb dithers over thinned
carpet here unstringing another
verse, 'vineyard of the curse'*
kind of thing, a secret rebuttal

perhaps,

or is it rewinding Lorca's
last song's hands tied be-
hind of his back, without
blindfold, that one might
hear when a Los Angeles*
vent blows

east or

similar wind

(el viento
es viento)

(the wind
is wind)

West to my near Atlantic
pontin appointed City a
few miles from shore
where heavy cables begin,
descend, extend where
the dead Poet's music
rests content in his poems
continual inebriant supplication -

'strings of the wind' (Lorca)

Dark my window flaunts orange
street light by neon night, by
devotion bound ceding victory
to the Spaniard's brow now a
swarm of bees at grave's edge
mourning every victory because

of the way his ended

the worst for a Legend's bargain,

bones for his songs

*

Have I ever mentioned that Michelangelo practically never took a bath in his life, by the way?

And even wore his boots to bed?

On my honor, it is a well known item in the history of art that Michel-
angelo was not somebody one would particularly wish to sit too close to.
Which on second thought could very well change one's view as to why
all of those Medici kept telling him don't bother to get up, as a matter of fact.

Although come to think of it even William Shakespeare himself was terribly tiny, which is something I did once mention.

I mean so long as one would appear to be getting into this sort of thing.

Well, and for that matter Galileo would never even ever shake another person's hand, once he had discovered germs. - David Markson

*

From the Encampment of HeartStrife - Further Patiche Extentions In Biography

The bells, I say, the bells break down their tower - Hart Crane

take down the walls, invite
the trespass... - William Carlos Williams

Let him not be another's who can be his own.
- Paracelsus

The problem is that many of us [most of us] are metaphorically impaired. - Gay Hendricks

Refugee from the American South.
Now loud-but-reverent-mouthed in
New York City.

Leave the world to the scoundrels!

As I get older, my relationship to ground is problematic. Balance is no longer an assumption that delivers. Is it the room that leans or is it me? My sense of place has never been too pleasantly real or here but for parentheses happy-enough and for these I am indeed thankful, and place has been and still is found more in sound, a very early childhood thing, in what I hear by ear or eye when I read. Totem in this my life is the book and it's associated familiars. And rumors.

And now, older than I have ever been, which is a painfully obvious tautology standing long at the urinal waiting, waiting, a poem may arrive more quickly than other flow, poetry has taken on an urgency which orients me, grieves me, and leaves me somewhat in relation to light though I burn the midnight oil to work a poem from the darkness, and my eyes can no longer focus...but, it's ground work. Gives some heft, makes some meaning.

Still, can't say I have traveled light. Not really. But heart's the better for the journey forced, pockets full of pyrite.

Soon be ground myself though.

It's undertow that matters

Cooler weather helps.

The rosary of a wine glass, sips, tiny cups laid out for asphalt spirits, and garden aromas from wealthy neighbors' rooftops soothe,

remind of early easier grooves in Blue Ridge mounts when the nearest neighbor was a stream, a creek, really, named 'Dismal' but " it tweren't that at all" as folks in those mountains do say. It ran night and day beneath my back porch and sighed much,

mostly for love.

I used to hear crows in this city, large ones, perhaps starlings or grackles, but haven't heard or seen one for at least 6 years now. They use to murder up in long lines on the edge of a university's art department building and slowly walk about, looked as if the water tower was slowly turning round and round. I could watch those 3-D silhouettes in slow motion for hours,

the hours turning too on clawed feet secure on ledges and,
of course, the friendlier air, call it freedom to fall, to be drafted
upward, blackness whirling or feathered hovering, in nature such is allowed.

*

On with the boring center line
endlessly dividing though broken
on purpose suggesting a way to veer.

No guide needed here.
Fear is the drive shaft,
and longing turns the wheel.

*

once of spinning galaxies
docked

the spillway star spins out
or tries for

its child every night for
a week

from front seat

from back

then breaches Nova -

sudden bright increase
swells inward

turns deliberate

burns back to original
hover

some months

then settles half
past

Waldrop's Creek beyond
Roper but near

before I-85 was
ever

*

born again into wicked desires, the slings and arrows,
happier for the narrows needed to keep such as I out
of " blessed sanctioned sanctified" dissociation, thus
I careen/lean spleen-and-all into crash and lickably burn.

Passion's itch must be scratched, it so insists, open palm
or clenched fist or teeth the Fire Lady's left hand reach
to live in the breach.

I was born again again

but this time feet first.

*

'I'm fated to die with compassions
In the crooked streets' - Sergei Yesenin

Dearest Pickle, pickle's the question:

What is a lake without its lovers parked a spawning bed
of red clay frantic love making quick pushed disgarded
remnants of such mark conceptions-or-not porn tossed
half rolled window to be morning gathered waiting for
school bus glad sons resident on the hill compelling
tree-top nights for skin glimpses more light to see what
who might be front seat or back trying to consumate,
glad word, engendering Chevron children, Impala breeds,
Mustangs and Palaminos half human, also spawn of/from
assorted sea creatures, Stingrays, Baracudas, insect
hatch of Spiders, Beetles, some big cats too of Tigers,
Cougars, Wild Cats, once even a regal Cobra night stalking
varied winged ones, Road Runners, Thunderbirds, Sprites,
once even a Snipe, there were many Falcons, favorites
for obvious reasons all enthrall, hair palmed near-blind
boys straining brittle limbs embracing pines, not lovers,

not yet.

*

Totem for auto nights

in flagrante the Tempest

barely understood

barely withstood

massive pagan

quakes where sap

does rise born again

long of old half dreams'

boned aromas pines'

adolescents amonia

sticky there tar-groin-

boys ache impatient

limb to limb parked

holding their weight

squashed complaints

brakes locked

*

I bow to the bruise exquisite,
address the tree newly vernal,
full moon just passed

passing what is seen not
seen between veins of each stillness
leaf waved in suchness,

what acts or yields, what
moment-by-moment brings,
awaits revelation of foliage and
trunks.

I seek what they have
never having had it,
these graceful young
men, masculine, easy,
at home in their skin.
They live now and ahead
at no one but life's behest.
As for me, twice aborted laity,

God damn the West, it's deity.

I bow to the bruise exquisite,
address the tree -

Meaningnest,

this purpled edge of summer
new, barrage of storms ex-
panding, call it Maple, call
it cathected projected me,
these young men Africaine
on benches easy with each
others' heat - maples peek
at their blossoms their purple
bark, they freely piss, return
relieved, shameless. In such
easiness, theirs, their grace
embodied, I feel the itch, the
drive, the hives invisible in
damp air where young men and
trees thrive. What is it there in
them that I cannot have? or seize
in some, even minor, measure?

Goddamn the West, its deity.

As for me awed before purple
leaf and loin, I am a pagan old.
Few were able to touch demure
me, that is, the very few, confused
as I was for a feminine tongue.

Dark's magpie, me. What
say you now if say you could?

*

the handsome welder, masked, sings
into the retina of his dark glass

how entwined with bridges
a bloated form of tangled
arcs/angles shudders

how lips chafe
gently the many
necks curved
of alloy
million-groined

*

In arms
we carried It
as one does
a child

yet it was
He who carried us,
both bird and man,

who cried
openly
on the way

for our presence
solid in his arms,

he who did not care
who saw his tears shed,
head down,
beneath spring blossoms

*

He's gone crow said one poet of another

*

Is that flesh
floating on the
surface me who
swims or sinks
fraternally?

I know a strange me

with soap for eyes
and suds to see

Eternally yours,

He.

*

feral segue to further reaches spit
indelicately dislodge insistent hairs
the brow the lash the body prolific
flesh acres cell by fur cell straight
ones & curl spit spit unfurl a deluge
saliva godiva diving in upon on around
a blackness most purple indelicate
yet damp tender too to touch

unmistakable

as a shade a sheathed blade a
bruise complication both comedic
& deadly where shall then my lover
hide as well my lovers how distract
that other negritude that greedily
feeds & feeds

upon

Love, yes,
backing in

the floor where we
lay our cluttered
clothes deposed

x at least 3

take me
again once

x infinity

into your arms

x 2

and leave me when
you/we are done doing

x 0

a mere cypher flown
sheer up the flue
into the blue ash
which now the sky

is

where

there is
only one
sky

a dove flies
into some
possibility
of memory
or not

x thousands

x the time it

takes for you to exit
shedding skins shells
I am a shell

x infinity into

the one drain in-
to ocean reflecting
blue sky

ash of what remains
of you on the beach
bathing soft Junes

*

'I am sad this morning. Do not reproach me.
I write from a café near the post office.' - Delmore Schwartz

Delmore, confessional, what?

no mother claimed you at the end

no friend either whom you perhaps

lost, neglect overdue come to exact

poetic portion, your itinerant passing,

a ward of city and state, you-not-you

wait for reclamation overdue, an

uncashed check for three weeks

you spent yourself on words,

noble enough pursuit, no rebuke

for your priorities though maternity

or fate maternity IS fate perhaps

did you end in the end no doubt

this massive mother complex could

not, would not, be worked through

via poetry or booze or rooms chosen

in which to scribble and scribe what

was, as you said, heard in your head

or wherever such are heard

ignorant bird on the escape now makes a music at any rate

as was the mourning dove an hour ago

singing on the other side of pane

knows when to tone in tandem to

poem same or similar each one little

inflections familiar to childhood fields

felt not seen, heard not named, as

if improvising those few notes available

to doves for late afternoon sun blocked

by curtains green, green too my room

10 years now forced upon me filled

with poet scrip -

'green how I want you green [Lorca]

not my hands but green across you now [R. Hugo]

When green was the bed
my love and I laid down upon [John Wieners]

these and more pay no rent, if only

pages were money then but so many

dusty pantheoned singers hand

wringers bringers on of harbinger

dawns/dusks decry what rusty

radiators here might also in their

own way suggest as their heated

season nears end, and mine, what

may be known if ever known, of

afterglow surmise when third snows

in fever weeks give surprise for never

guessed Bestowals

*

O stand radiant-starred late afternoon

O stained stark shadows black frieze

astonished stooped man

time's wee piss boy

*

The distant gazebo of that small
town wears white lights garlanded

round, and snow. A boy without
gloves reads alone.

He is no fool who takes his time and
place to know.

*

Only the poet sells his soul to separate it
from the body that he loves. - Tomaz Salamun

LORCA - ‘All that has dark sounds has duende.' And there's no deeper truth than that.'

*

Dearest Incomprehension

I stammer on scraping skin and song,
a geography myself, a landscape severe,
gone in the nose and ears, the eyes
good for shadows only. And some old
beloved words. I'll plead allergies.

I am reading some dead Thomists
these days, Maritain, your friend,
whom I've secretly adored since
covenants were broken, my own
fault, asking again and again how
one can keep covenant with self
much less a God.

Bless my bones if there are blessings
for such. I've taken them for granted
much. They are my formation base.
I've wasted years chasing the world,
the words for things, and why and
how, I never really thought of bones
but old Thomists did and do, even
Calvinist too though they're way too
dry for me.

Maritain frees me, as does his wife,
the gentleness in them both astounds.
Jacques's a tough bird, though, an
intellect staking claim on thought and
what perhaps it ought to do with silly
human will once Divinity has entered
the room -

What knees are for upturned palms can plead.

NOW

sings bones

NOW

their old hymns ongoing theme.

Seems somewhere I read, or did I dream it,
an old heresiarch in the desert retreated to
cultivate a life of prayer in nowhere. After
all the years of abstention and heat, the
bare land inexorable, he could no longer
utter much at all, speechless before severity,
and beauty, how the eternal question of
" why is man" could be summed in his only prayer:

Heres breath for you.

*

Delmore, far-from though you are,

a young very tall lover visits late nights

betimes glad son of sikhs no longer sikhs, or so
they think, who dwell beside Pulaski's draw, it
groans by day and night lifting divided weight heavy
to sky what silently floats under and through; their
dreams, he reports, are haunted, something pursues
them from the old land

You are the new, Bapila, he says, his name
for me which means vessel, keel, boat, container,

Rather, I am slain, apostate,
not by Prophet's horse bone
jaw but one curved as antler
curves, nuzzles a throat entire

As I fade he rises a new
moon sharply dividing dark
from distance, there is no
confusion of which I am
when Billie sings

....I'm a fool to want you....

of empty space full-parted,
staked, says sickle moon,
confuse my bone, his, rather,
equine angle bright, pressing

close to

parchment and stubble,

rest o rest sigh

upon my rubble

feel your swallow

a sudden other bird

each breath a rosary

India's Godson thin
legs entwine, are swans
whose toes are sparrows
he teases whose laughter
deep is demise black as

his eyes

what can hollow a man
to crepuscular sky, asks
sickle moon,

no, not sky but to bone;
no, rather, what is it makes
me more the shallows

but all water still,
makes me shadow
but all the more real,

alive in refrain only?

how assorted birds and the dove constitute Heart's aviary

how Billie's staggers ever wager skin memory at odds with hestition

how this 'music, ' even yours Delmore, 'fathoms the sky'

*

none of my India-tinted prayers
gather as they once did invisibly
into the knotted hair of my Japanese
once-was-in-my-arms-alla-time
lover

two large graceful scorpions
sume-i*-stitch around his pectorals
their carapaces conjoin at the
heart so many pulsing mirrors
repelling away from each

the tails their stingers tremble
ready at his sides I grip tightly
as he impacts my uttermost

then after thought in afterglow
he looks kindly at me

says into the dark inked blue
the stitched cursives of the
scorpions gleaming silver with our sweat -

something about patterns of flight

inked
fingers gracefully form
an airplane gliding gestures
in dim light toward an open
window then

something about night migration

his back turned to me as he
walks toward the front door
clothes in hand, parts of me
trailing after

posed for anything but departure

*

in bed stunned

in sleep beside
the question

in beatitude
in dumbstruck

a most beautiful boy
Beatitude Itself

in Vatican choir
rapture's soprano

sing crystal sing plaintive

virginal to prisoners
holy pure such singing

the tightrope walker astounds
last lover, Algerian, a circus lad
stretches/blooms in spotlight

merges into

rope-into-youth

and man-falling

a falling-man willful

imolation leap
luscient eventual
inevitable pale

impaler

[]_______________ ____Le Funambule____________________[]

[] __________________The Rope Walker__________________[]

such are attempts transcend via ropes and swings and rafters
upon Palomino's back upon which balances urgent youthhood
in tights holding a gay umbrella over his concentrated head, his
bluer than blue eyes fixed upon some other-world-anywhere-but-here,
not hearing the blurred masses crashing against him-the-projected

that they need
and so feed upon
him torso
him balance
him stillness-dance
on the haunch

him unreal unseen
as real so him peel
down tights to
skin moon-white

each gallop each
bounce portends
him rope and him
fall at last into him
past which refuses
memory itself nor
need for recall or
fall especially when
the bereft remainder
the lover pins him
past to now-agonies

tender pinner he
remains reminds
him splintered
one to sing and say

of him splendour
of him acrobat
him ropewalker
him child/man
of tents
and stray
grave but
gay hints
there is more than a year
a moment in Mercy arms
legs breaths twined till twain
and pain doth them part,
lips forever parted mute

too stunned in loss to sound
the repetitive moment of
him legs and him white
arms flashing down

there is no sound then but

him thud

just one

more than

enough

to end

all that

*

- excerpts from 'Dante In The Laundromat - Journeys Further Into Hell'

5
Still, all this grief, the trees just below me
blossom brightly as the sun has burst from
clouds dark, such shine on such fragile things,
new blossoms flung from branches ripped to
street by last night's high howl or was that
me, even this urban crawl space is sheer,
utter, brilliance, beauty...would be blasphemy
not to say it, to give praise as Toni's tumors
grow so large she looks nine months pregnant,
agonized she scratches her body entire, a
new regimen of medicine, toxic sure, now
that will send, most probable alas, her to
death, clawed skin red, gritted teeth working
out her " what did I do? " she asks other day,
" what did I do to deserve this? " I cry too,
stumped through and through, staggered,
mute, holding her, she struggles to breathe,
tumors press, evil evil tumors, press her guts
into her lungs, less space for air, for life, her
entire body and the entire f*cking crawl space
of the planet entire, nothing but grief, grief,

all grief and quandry. Unanswerable quandry

6
There is still always the laundry
preponderant use of trivia

7
still, there, ironically,

innocent they are,

the blossoms are

close, not far

Look.

they smell like semen

'and the world wags on'

8
Grace, I can't, or won't, argue

but can welcome. Meanwhile,

Toni and tumors and the suicide

friend, the falling man who chose

such intimate relations to gravity

and end, gravity's end, such is

not a friend of mine but betimes

I wonder if going on and on de-

spite eternal returns, or so it

appears till our sun goes nova,

blossoms perform for the eyes,

conform trees toward affinities

for seasons, rooted, they are

and remain in place, are places,

without envy of motion, they

even fall or parts of them do

which does not surprise the sky

or dirt, all hurt seems born to

every option, seems to some

how know every plot

*

Fate, then, heavy in a boy's hand,
hoists dead weight to a nail on a tree.
His knife scores firm flesh yielding
beneath freshly limp gills - there is
an instrument made just for this,
pincher-pliers for catfish skin -
he grips and tears, uses his weight
down-stripping smoothly bare to such
luscence little ribs of roseate flesh.

Only the overly large head, the ugly face
whiskered within gilded monstrance,
remain pure to form, thin-lipped and
mocking, restrained by depth pressures,
sustained on surface trash, dead things
that sink down, it's treasures.

*

'Soft moonlight awakens now
The cruel longing that laughs and cries! '
- Ruth Valadares Correa

...upon Lorca's death in Grenada

I'll still root for that fine Bull
by lead quieted, that only one with
carnations green where once were
ears, shots unheard but felt, pivoting

backwards, hooves

sudden beseeching ground

splaying to

sky,

scars,

clouds,

green

green

the cries beneath cedars

Ay! Ay!

With such...
a new day hums near high noon

where I am remaindered to
silence, still an easy sucker
for a song so sing with my
fingers or try but not to worry.

While kids bounce basketballs
in the street below I'll beat my
pensioner's drum remembering
red clock hands on the local spire
tilting God - shirts and skins* -
between Fathom Street and St. Marks.

Hasta,

until the Vision comes,

Nightingale

*

'Mark the first page of the book with a red marker. For,
in the beginning, the wound is invisible.' - Reb Alcé

'There is another world, but it is inside this one.'' - Paul Éluard

'This is withholding art,
evading disclosure, declining
to give itself away.' - Tiffany Bell

'I think poetry must
I think it must
stay open all night
In beautiful cellars' - Thomas Merton

'Do not move
let the wind speak
that is paradise' - Ezra Pound, from his last Canto 120

'I don't believe in the other world
...But I don't believe in this one either
unless it's pierced by light.' - A. Kamienska

*

from Midnight In Dostoyevsky

Is it
feathers'
dawn shoe

through
which
blood
casings

mourn
the Orange
Moon?

Alyosha
the old
animal heat
turns in on
itself

burns
beneath skin

the bone bruise
fuses out
against what
yearning once
meant in
wetlands
between

navel

moon

corona

pubis

The one eyed
painter too
flicks and claps

repeats silently

as he will and is
want

his lips moving
as

does a spider make
a

quieter order
in

a darker corner

no sight needed
only sense and silk

*

'When it rains, you don't ask how many raindrops fell. You

say it rained.

Lots of rain, many semi-colons- the cell will teach you all.

This blue world. Unattainable- stranger than
dying,

by what unmerited grace we were allowed to come see it.'

- from Franz Wright's 'Entries of the Cell'

*

'...Do not spurn any chance to mourn. Mourning is a kind of Return...'

I just want to say to you, Franz, 'Because the soul
is a stranger in this world',

such blackness I have traveled through all night, and

because of
you I have made my peace with the Atlantic.

And returned, I sleep, one hip wounded, a new name to be announced at a future date
bearing a significance of which I can only wonder

derived of a bruise that I have often sung, of swift and terrible deity grasped. It grabs back, refuses to relent but is bargained with and for, leaving one bent, limping, a worshiper forever.

I can wait for the meaning if it ever arrives. My legs hurt too, treading air the ocean long, tired from such distances traveled with strangers all around, so many,

so many, I had not known that desire had undone so many,

I am still cool upon the pallet on the floor in a darkened room, curtains closed
...
upon the ceiling [a shard of light] scores mandalas of earth tones

another Atlantic, its hidden floor, perhaps its ghost

man made above me asking for my blessing, meaning my honoring, it moves to the top shelf, the volumes in ancient Greek, Biblical,

textbooks for learning that tongue college days - brief spark then nothing, the voltage gone, dead as Aramaic and Koine,

remembered light only.

*

And now come poets each century heavier than
before, heavier than the other few, this new one too,
only bards, a real few, to bar, board up the big gaps

O great light gaping, torn off, oft thee sung,
slung over shoulder, hauled, the burden,
o the load
it is now become.

*

Poem For Caravaggio, For Pasolini

- Remains found in Tuscany are likely to be the artist Caravaggio's,
proving that lead poisoning was one cause of his death 400 years ago.

- Pasolini was murdered on 2 November 1975 on the beach at Ostia.
He had been run over several times by his own car.

In the shorter light,

in the extended night of
cold and star-bright questions,
may you cast

clumsy net forward
into what it all might mean
to fretted you,

to me, stretched
canvas, though I will
not thrust these

words upon your
paint or palette but
make offering for

your own work
to feed us through
the eyes;

perhaps time
to remount the horse
and soldier on,

or to fall again,
gain Damascus perspective,
from one's

back watch vision
distort massive
horse

into a God
receding
into

necessary
darkness
foregoing

image,

see what may form in the spreading dirt,

what resurrection there is in the smell of paint.

*

Grafts from various poems into one

Here, on one fountain of a mourning mind,
I have been taken up into grief, the strange
relief of clouds. Soon departed I shall be
once again returned to disquieted prayer,
the proud monk to his rites rejoined
such are covers for disjointedness.

There, almost within reach, the blossoming
tree brightens between darker bricks to truly
dwell. It is for me a shy son of mists to see
in spite of big chunks missing, lost, wasted,
torn out, that the Celestial World is not as
it appears to most, It yearns for much needed
hardness for spirits without shoes still long
to be bread that they may dwell in our finitude.

Dear uncommon friends, Old Strand, and my zen
quill and pen-ners of the East, imbibers of tea
and samsara, cackling cocks and hens in the locked
and guarded shunyata pens of the world -

you all have become wholeness-itself by now.
I am reading reading crowded pushed your many
years behind me hoping I may gather what you
all have found in the dusk where the trail ends
at the highest peak.

Ruffling all your bright feathers your KATZ
chorus clucks/crows up from the black frozen
stream below:

No becoming.

What is there to be found?

Black Rooster, blind,
scratches all dawns.

*

still in this night I am turning
and turning on the hard pallet

these old pages that I have turned
now over 40 years in starry exile

as if my tongue could matter less by day
than my thoughts could mean more by night

these constant companions the good few
who lend voice to all that goes on

inked between and upon ledges high and in
canyoned depths what continues seen or not

such are strayed
ponies bending their heads to

finer blades tender shoots green or in winter
without complaint chew brown tufts brittle

shadowing snow and a pair of boot tracks
veering off and up or down

alone trail into other fields or
upon remote peaks

only song's
a traveler's companion

*

'...the great sins and fires break out of me like the
terrible leaves from the boughs in the violent spring.
I am a walking fire, I am all leaves...' - Edith Sitwell

*

'Childness let's have us honey'1
flame intended, names smeared
upon the glass, an accidental
pane, hands touching delicate
as trespass what is allowed
lace of vision.

1 a line by John Berryman

*

One touches the other which touches me

I am become a massive bird
bent backwards

a wobbling kite of tallow and tin
a bruised three-blade fan

petroleum kisses over
massive cables between coiled

legs, those others, of mortar,
of hot metal glow

the handsome welder, masked, sings
into the retina of his dark glass

how entwined with bridges
a bloated form of tangled
arcs/angles shudders

how lips chafe
gently the many
necks curved
of alloy
million-groined

*

I am uncovered, thin, bared upon thinner
sheets the man-ripped to many images,
torn into, landscaped to former curves.
No longer do I grieve enclosure, touching
only myself, delivered from layers.

What begins to be, earth swell, breaks
root-room open to blood means.

All hurt now stings twilight quaked into being.
Your breath falls upon me now, taut, sinew,
bruising hands, purple insides flare warrior nerves
to unknotting surprise.

Magpie dances.

Lines, veins, strung between Pole Star
and First River Mouth, an embedded ruin uncovers in milk floods.
Touch gently first what has been too long concealed.

Hard touch congeals once was telling mud remolded into
" Not again. Not yet the bleeding Centurion."
Wield roughly then through gates too long shut.

When I cry out, do not mind. Blindly ram. Do not stop.

Magpie, my keeper, is flying.

*

I suffer the happy travails of indigent withers,
a later paramour whose eyes do what thighs
no longer can. Young men stray in the redder
door and, thank god, are easily distracted,
thank god, the erotic slights of hand, thank
god, the scented smoke, the velvet-covered
mirrors drooping unnoticed; they depart the
happier minds touched more than diminishing
crescents of flesh.

*

I have broken my back lifting
all these my loves up to heaven.

I was reaching for god then - not your fault - a lavender
boy early befriended by crows, already resigned to what
was given and what was to come, a softball between the
eyes, your attempt to guide me toward those diamond
thighs which, you often repeated, were everywhere waiting.

I blink still before you, head down, focused on 'Lion's Teeth.' **
I am your hard mystery, and soft, not so fast for I am fat
and cannot round the bases quick. I am your inherited meek,
a burden to shake into a sliding man furious for home.

At four I pluck a wild strawberry you point to.
All authority and accidental grace, revealing much,
still dew wet, sticky to the touch, opening sourness
deserves my frown. You laugh at my dawning smile
for its sweetness slowly yielding, a surprise gift
for what will always unite us, your fear that I will
suffer, too, your fate, untended desire gone to wildness
brought low beneath branches, slow embrace of
cradle-gentle boughs entangling legs and light
between the greater shadows,

and shadows shall win the day.

*

upon my chaste return, sunburned,
churned by the Atlantic, I will have
discovered a haunting sound again,
an animal music of the air, the lungs,
screams really, gulls falling by arrows
of blue which, blue, saturate sky and
sea to learn the heart again

to learn the heart again
avoid the narrows
at the island's end
where feet are easily
mistaken for doves and
large currents beckon
compel them to descend

*

ravenous I clumsily preen
eyebrows mistake an eye for a mouth
a tongue for a*s-lips an armpit for ear
or neck a navel some other pit of

consequence

feral segue to further reaches spit
indelicately dislodge insistent hairs
the brow the lash the body prolific
flesh acres cell by fur cell straight
ones & curl spit spit unfurl a deluge
saliva godiva diving in upon on around
a blackness most indelicate yet damp
tender too to touch

unmistakable

as a shade a sheathed blade a
complication both comedic &
deadly where shall then my lover
hide as well my lovers how distract
that other negritude that greedily
feeds & feeds

upon

If there is a back if I had one would I lie
back with yellowed claws pale scratch a
hole the sky crack hide desire's body there
love's poor inevitable choices decry the

fetish

of normality when all anything anywhere
wants to do is go undercover preen-preen
undergo indigo scream-scream as lovers,
swollen do as body wanderers do are want
wantonly at play all

feathers

one eye looking this way that the other
bent over a fixed in

skyhole

But only one,
just, finger,
dark, traces
delicate
a lace

conforms
forehead
tip
to nose
then
wet lips
rose-swollen
with happy
use cries
and
barriers
break,
surge in
to new
terrain.

Knotted muscle,
nerved cord, by
heart and heat
implore/defy no
sky nor pliant
dirt deny but cloy,
hand in hand require
only dissolution of
the Old Masters'
tyranny by Numbers
insistent upon
reduction, odd
waters trail
calcinations/
calculations-bodies
born of even water
into mists, continuously
reft from Given,
riven from Dream,
such freed from
virtual into literal
placenta and spleen,
striven history reshaped
redeems a value once
consigned to Hell-realms
confining dark thoughts

to matter.

*

With heart will I

to Guatemala go,

there a Mayan lover

do some good,

to active volcanoes,

deepest lake

with creatures strange -

axelotls,

pink,

delicate,

and one fountain send where

I need to go

*

On our broken boat the harsh light will not break.
We see our day clearly as we can.
Tell the night, now it's here to stay, that

once I glanced the sleeping youth, legs against the wall,
felt a pall descend upon us here,
this boat lancing the bay waters darkly.

Some to books then, the priest to his sad, effeminate stare.
I can no longer envy those of the black cloth
so bend and tie the shoe.
We shod our feet against what long loss of motion,
eyes downcast or boldly returning the stare?

Beneath each eye there's some familiar look we refuse.
We map our way to sleep in the palms of shy or frightened hands.

*

that salt adheres to the palm
proclaiming only this
that purchase requires both
sweat and the one hidden pearl
of scraped touch

much there is in the hand
bequeathed;
beneath the thigh the grit
burns smooth the groove
where you lay

*

Life, dear Barcelona, is sweet..

One endures long enough to break through thunder,
a taut belly, a smooth place for lips to land.
One may reach a Pure Land which has no logic,
the tedious seasons of a long life endured.
Still, one gathers names of each joven prince
passed beneath loving, yes, arduous hands.

Again, upon Kingfisher's wings I blow these kisses,
this music, your patient ear awaiting the purist pearl,
for you were once the bequeathed, escaped girl
without fear of oceans, this one between us which
now must be overflown to reach you.

- N. Nightingale, Empress of Contrails

*

orphanspeak from
orphanmouth tries

That one day the book shall be written,
Odysseus come smiling through the door.
That I shall live forevermore free of provision,
be delivered presently into good, rich life
and unto the richer world, my Lover so long
turning turning turning in distance away from,
yet to manage a caress, a smooch which
neither dismisses nor fully embraces.

It is I that am and shall be erased into this
Love which shall then in time be erased as
well in the greater Sun, and that Shining
too shall be erased. Then we shall all be
scattered, or I shall be only, embrace by
embrace, toward erasure no longer effortful.

I sift draft by draft rough toward world
now slowing in spite of parentheses these
provisional postulations of 'the good life'
to come. Eventually. There is only this
that I am living now. And my hands feel,
even perhaps are, strapped to this wheel
that turns me as turns Beloved Earth,
the Sun, too, each dreaming
near to but apart from each.

My reach is
here on my tongue,
in my fingers here
grasping words from mind.
I am ever behind in this chase,
now am further from Love,
Space, than ever
though my heart
is swollen from
wanting It.

Still, World, accept my blessing.

I send this message aloft on kingfisher wings

*

'like unto like'
but do not say it
my forbidden simile

one is not immune
to jealous couriers
who would come
between lovers

Rice paper is thin
tender words never
tear through ink

Wild tears fade
sure words to guesses

Distance reconciles
murmurers with desire

Duress strengthens
supple resolve

supple resolve
thickens skin

thickened skin
feels the better
when simple
loves caress

*

Whatever became of Majestic,
his harlequin shoes,
his suicidal crocuses?

When did I marry Lonely?

can't recall

but fell kid-hard

backyard empty clothesline

silk slip one pin down

Dip shyly in brick shadows

pornographic breezes

I sing to knees now

Beyond Manhattan Bridge

sudden heat lightening

a good night with cool rain

old vinyl Nyro

needle scratches

done with song

*

Interlude - Refueling Mid-Air

'Descend and of the curveship lend a myth to God' - Hart Crane

'Take air away and even fire falls' - Richard Hugo

A lone crane squints, its good
eye busy, a study in stillness.
Or is it avian will gone to muck
all feathers and no faith that
matters, stuck, it poses, puts
on a zennish show all butoh
in the shallows.

Its bad eye
skims the narrows,
its curved neck smooth,
feminine, as is

the distant bridge
curved, feminine too,
don't call it grace but
acknowledge the tempation.

Pace yourself.

To South Wind

throw sand,
make demands

though men in
bombers forever take flight

bereaving wind sheer stiil.
Hard evidence is there.

What's to believe in?
Fear's the only thing real,

the only god one
can depend upon, Lift,

some few others assist,
Dare, Weight, and Soft Landing.

Let us mention again
fresh girls on the rides but

let us return also
to the presenting scene,

stare birdblind,

and lend no myth
at all

for there
as here death

is a generic dump
with glutted gulls,

soft waves
lapping all
about lull
and Stop Time

or so says the
yellowed script
in sand,
the hint is there or

spin or drift, some
thing suggested where
breath as darkness is

by design -

streetlights
turn themselves on

hum in low tones
metric,

the boardwalk's
hat trick, sudden

electric brush
strokes each plank
to silver sheen

voiding solidity.

Benched blonds
free now from
restraining rides

keen on in
staggered rhyme
forgetting they once
were German swans
Grimm and pale.

Posing as cranes,
they still forget a
dead poet's name.

*

'Poetry, alas, grows more and more distant. What commonly goes by the name of 'culture' forgets the poem [or distorts it into 'popular' dissemblances]. This is because poetry does not easily suffer the demand for clarity, the passive audience, the simple message. The poem is an intransigent exercise. It is devoid of mediation and hostile to media.'

- Alain Badiou, 'Language, Thought, Poetry'

orphanspeak from
orphanmouth tries

Rodriguez 13
sandwich done
kneels again
& so seeking
the thick tome
of half century
America opens
blood & steel
misshapen god
misshapen citizens
miscreant tongues
snort into green
hope in spite of
all that has gone
before in spite
of Christmas
even once a year
other holy days
gone too, wild
for gelt " all melt
& maya"

I too
spill into
the covers
the heavy
book

open it up
always now
opens to its
all our
broken back

the poem there
at the breech
HOWLs as do
I/we all just
to remind when
the blue water
breaks again
to nuclear
flame over an
elegant place
as the faceless
ornaments do
also break
into armaments
& my/our own
burden for blades
drop fall still
hard upon me/us
as does the mid
mad century drop
fall into this
new one

I hear Blaser
sing-song-ing
from the room
of the living
the in-breathing forced
the out breathing stretched
extending into air & irony

'The clown of dignity sits in his tree.
The clown of games hangs there, too.
Which is which or where they go -
the point is to make others see -
that two men in a tree is clearly
the same as poetry' - Robin Blaser

DESIGN - FABRICATE - INSTALL

*

STRIKE

'Zuke' counsels

Workers everywhere, bricks, straw, verse,

the breast naturally of Woman is bread before
there was bread, the child the loaf swelling in
Her arms to farm & from such frame a world.

Thus Labor. Bread is History.

Child's toil, unspoiled, forms a culture beast,
he crawls forth, makes bread of soil native &
other, a Mother culture all & still, everywhere.

Immigrants Exile -
Labor, Drive Or
Will, And The Lady
Mother, A Malafiction

the subject matter
is not new

& not the sorrow

old as the first cave
bearing first fire
in human hand, the
expiring artist torn
from blank sky to
an expectant wall

a herd there
a declaration

one day we too will
fill the earth as
hooves have done
capture sun & be
done-over/overdone
& so come to such
an edge of ruin

*

Heavy let me pass

lets me pass I
limp up 4 steel
steps push in to
the Way of Peace
take my usual place
settle rattled by
icon image & pewter
vision of what
is not any longer
there the wear of
a half century not
to compare that of
20 centuries past
what can last or
come from all that
so sit me hard down
upon the wood get
to the book at hand
the known & the new
mystery which emerges
from the white plastic
sheath carefully
packed in bubble
wrap which is a
double Christmas
any day

orphanspeak from
orphanmouth tries

sorting shattered
ornaments each
Christmas season
before the tree
is trimmed the
grim task to sort
each broken globe,
glinting shards
from the survivors
I AM ONE so sad a
mystery still remains
how they do break in
darkness stored in
attic high untouched
by light, my hand,
the supple hold of
green limbs everly.

I cannot toss them
away pretty all the
more because pitiful
I AM any-old-way
so take/return them
to the woods where
the tree is yearly
cut/trimmed & so
scatter them upon
the needles' brown
changelings into
sparks resembling
those the welder makes
just out the door now
kneeling as I have knelled
once & do still

a fat boy taken
by mysteries'
brokenness &
safe return to
pines though
hard on supposes
& orphan spheres

I adhere to a bard or
two the good few of words
& what of them of absence
be made though presenting
slight-of-palms even
Rodriquez 13 kneeling
before fire/light

Erotic stance w/
pewter hands the
welder removes his
mask, stands, a
handsome face w/
gold teeth unbroken
as ornaments were
once & forever
broken - eats his
sand-the-world-wich
blankly staring
past his truck I
notice the side
then of it says

DESIGN - FABRICATE - INSTALL

I think: the history
of religions is this
just, only the sign
reads MODERN STEEL
not Postmodern as it
now should to be precise
true to an age bereft
on Stagg Street thrust
once again into Christmas
- deer & such - though
Celtic too - Cernunnos
snorts from forests rough
deeply onto a green where
sits beside a silver stream
an orphaned god abandoned
carved upon stone with bronze
before steel but still
the god is stone fearing
it is no longer
real yet sentinel to
'an archaic authority' - Julia Kristeva

Let me then work
my poem all of
them around in
furtherance of
what can be said
without such drama
of centuries past
& to come

lines ending in Stillness
a suggested Vastness from
which each comes/returns:

Cave - Image - Sky - Expanse - Singular Branch & Many

Plenty Are Stillnesses Advances Even In The Rot The

Dissolve From Clot Toward What It Is Or Was & Always

Proper-Name-Enough-For-Me - STILLNESS

I am taken with such
at which I stare
which holds my gaze
with shades of It
& of Itself, that is,
is a death
or like unto it -

Stillness unbreathed

or in need of It
Breath
now having been only
once Rilke
who it seems

becomes relents
known form
though It is
returned
or re-rested

to Itself beyond Christmas

and yet and yet

the kneeling boy
in the evergreen

the shattered orn-
aments ever gleam

the needles' net
a permanence enough

gold-leafed & trumpeting

*

quiet there where
mud may me dry...do not, O, pass
us by or over

Each time the human mind puts itself to a difficult task, it begins its conquest of new fields and especially of its proper spiritual universe by bringing with all this a certain amount of dis- turbance, of disaster. The human being seems to become disorganized; and sometimes in fact it happens that crises of growth end unhappily. But they are, in any case, crises of growth.

At the time of Gerard de Nerval and of Delacroix, this is what happens: so much had people examined the consciousness of art within themselves, that they ended by touching at last the one consuming thing crouched at the depths; a thing which art does not enclose any more than the world encloses God and which takes us beyond all sense of where we are going. The moment arrives, in the course of the 19th Century, when poetry begins to take consciousness of itself insofar as it is poetry. Then, in a few decades, there is a series of discoveries, setbacks, catastrophes, and revelations, the importance of which, it seems to me, cannot be exaggerated. And that is only the beginning. This contact with self-awareness, this reflexive spirituality was needed in order finally to deliver poetry among us. I think that what has happened for poetry since Baudelaire has an historical importance equal in the domain of art to that of the greatest epochs of revolution and renewal in physics and astronomy in the domain of science.

I suppose that Baudelaire's situation would be described with sufficient accuracy if we should say that he appears to be in continuity with the best in romanticism by the deepening of the consciousness of the art, but that in reality he marks a discontinuity, an enormous transformation, because at the same time it is of the poetry, it is of itself as poetry that poetry achieves awareness in him.

from 'Poetry's Dark Night' by Jacques Maritain

*

'not to be named is to be lost in light' - Blaser

Spicer told me once from
the other side
while I was humming
Edith Piaf about
a rosiness so very
well o're the real

the spice garden
the backyard spread
before the orchard
on our personal
hill reveried

never once climbed
so enamored of the
bees at work
there

their Queen of
the Hill Duncan
and the Apple

named 'Bittersweet'

not to be
disturbed
at all
in this
or any other
May to come

comes Robert
permitted at last

to the meadow
returned

with Spicer here too

enjoined me to leave
only
a guidebook'

'Cryptics For Cripples And Cantors'

'The rest, ' he sneered,
are matters not concerned; broken Maker or
broken meter the world wags on,

not one stone
bitter
in the House
That Metrics
Built.'

**

'How Much Longer Shall I Be Able To Inhabit The Divine'
- via Ted Berrigan via John Ashberry

qua qua qua
sisk boom ba
twixt Fucquaad
& Apothecary
near the corner
time forgot

but o not I
not I when
the clot broke

the expectorating
hoi polloi
screaming

no help at all

as I stood pale
pale, paler still,
bleeding out from
an undignified
place leaning
upon a tailor's
wall, he too

no help at all

threatening to
call the cops

It closes me in
again to recall

qua qua qua

Fucquaad

amongst the forgotten roses
where one is hungover in the
supposes with which one perpetually
begins, that one can never finish
like this, pissed, which goes on,
which goes on and still on,
" I can't go on but must adjusting
the truss because I am losing
my hair and so on and ever on"
dot dot dot into eternity should
one believe in such, but one may
use the idea of such, eternity
-go forward or behind, wince at
the word - living in the blue rind
of sky crumbling onto nether
shore where relentless waves
tease relentless wind disturbing
a lone relentless tern tracing
uremic rims of foam.

Shall I call then eternity
a home for shells, a curve
in space? disgrace myself
yet again with belief, any
one, believe that such shores
are a where after all, a place
to shelter, each wave somewhere
by someone or something counted
as is every hair numbered
counted still? they fall as
do waves into crescendos
rainbows should the sun
so shine for what is left
to comb of shore and hair
is a disturbance of
fractions, refractions
the forlorn redactions
of what is perceived,
felt, spilt upon the
depilitating pate

and so I must wear a hat but let us not go then
you and I patiently into all that but when come
time proper, a hair fall caught in a shaft of sun
light, the endless comb over undone, wind blown
upon the shore, then we shall speak of it sure,
and more

now then here then
remembering too the chaffing bloody garters

*

'Folded and reserved, the modern poem harbors a central silence. This pure silence interrupts the ambient cacophony [that masks our banalities]. The poem injects silence into the texture of language. And, from there, it moves toward an unprecedented affirmation. This silence is an operation. In this sense, the poem says the opposite of what Wittgenstein says about silence. It says: this thing that cannot be spoken of in the language of consensus; I create silence in order to say it. I isolate this speech from the world. And when it is spoken again, it will always be for the first time...This is always why the poem, in its very words, requires an operation of silence.'

- Alain Badiou: Language, Thought, Poetry

...quiet blue interior, Our Lady stands
firm too, graceful, veiled, lightning
strike all around, roars outside nothing
against palpable blue softness, the Host -
firm suchness upon Old World table, flowers
fresh poised in ecstatic trance, golden
mouth Chalice open full of shadow,
hungry mouths to feed

...enter a child a school boy soaked
bare feet uniform darker blue stain run
rain-wind-storm sheltered now the Virgin
place cool upon feet, where is this school
unseen on only road the way to las grutas

...bow before the Host, genuflect small
delicate hands palms white kneel on creaking
wood kneeler kiss fingers holy traces
his prayer

...I have come from afar
from godless City enveloped in
my own importance trapped my own
motions no purpose knees or hands
now come to monstrance find this
muddy miracle with marigolds

...sun breaks through, child walks
tio's house I follow tongueless, a
burro 2 miles mud, flood, to caves,
springs, boy Anselmo out front, little
heels press little pony grey, one
eye brown the other blue, Golondrina,
his name, The Swallow, do not ask why
beneath the bluing sky flush with bird
song in waters red we tread on
me a distance behind

...arrive tearing springs caves erupt
full dark overhang a place for prayer
not for my knees but Anselmo's on black
root kneel holds hard to a limb " don't
fall in" I shout suddenly shaken nothing
within to hold to

All are barefoot there: beasts, boy, self

...returned little chapel blue
an offering for Our Lady - muddy
shoes - receives all things
arms outward extend blessing
blue cool shadows quiet there
where mud may me dry

In chipped vases

altar flowers bright

Done with City

with self

Which goes first?

No matter

The All Blue

chooses

*

What presents?

Venal sins

and mortal, me,

vowing

remember

the water spring,

pure day

forget thinking,

say,

don't try so hard,

hear nearby cedars

scrape, entwine,

they sigh, they

agree

with last this

thought

wishing

as I did,

do still, pray,

they'd always

deciduous be

and not overly evergreen.

*

...that mysticism of the abjection

articulation in underworld the excoriation alienation
unimagined but experienced primitive infantile agonies

such must be inexorably conjured emerging unsought

but fated seizure

caesura
upon gut
soul eye
roll him me
inside out

why/how appease impersonal
deity hiding behind cold bars
doors demanding merger
love to flesh metal iron red?

In answer perhaps in bed stunned into sleep
by the question in beatitude, in dumbstruck,
a most beautiful boy, Beatitude Itself, in Vatican
choir rapture, soprano, sing crystal sing plaintive,

virginal to prisoners, pure and holy, such singing
replunges each criminal kneeling into further
exile into further Glory and me the weeping abyss
returned to skin and nerve endings sheering cell
by cell raw my raw hands long nails bloody, matted
hair on belly, is that smell the smell of animal me
captured, not the Unicorn but the winter lion lying
on sheetless mattress gray yellow, gutted self opened
who would be once again caught in those rafters
whose only crime is to live anxiously for church
bells ringing the here to hereafter.

*

two Hassids young bring candles for
Shabbas only a few hours till inflamed
prayer begins as sun sinks to night

prayer is oil the dead come home to

perhaps even in this cafe they
watch the books gather on the familiar
corner where shopkeepers' decades pass
hurry home before dark with candles
and cares, the wares of religion, the
Book & dream, a distant land made close
by old songs kindled, 'finest ones'
still kindred made the stronger by
fire and voices-one mingled with
Mendelssohn and the later oranges

Ramparts lift by Chambers above
African graves, the slaves of
South Ferry sentinel terminal
near ferries toil as lower Manhattan
lights a menorah towering despite
what is now worshiped there knowing
that home, the one sought even now
more resides in words aflame reciting
the Name, One alone, then of
patriarchs/saints the bearded whole
lot of them who murmur still for all
our want and next year next year shall
be different for we will no longer be
here but in Holy City finally gathered

cabs blur yellow/gypsy
in angular winter light
now dazzle before Spring
when raises dead bulbs to jonquils
potted pretty in windows, on stoops
and, wild, strayed in parks

do not, O, pass us by or over
for all our patient harping

come morrows under willows yet
we shall hang up our loves again

get back to work
honest scrub and
clean beside the avenue
stand recalling willows
never seen

and grieve still an old yet present
eviction in the cities of men

*

'operations of silence' - Alain Badiou

Leave Taking, After Matsuo Basho, Circa 1978

'There is a blessed fidelity in things.
Graceless things grow lovely with good uses' - John Tarrant

Expecting more rain.
Not yet light though 6 a.m.,
night still over the barn.

From the porch, high wind.
The moon, a corner of it,
rides comfortably in clouds.

Clouds moving over mountains,
their night work -
some rain in the buckets.

Bestowing order,
things feel their boundaries,
robes of autumn rain.

Back to bed,
just-dawning.
Noises in these old walls -
mice search for food or string,
bird stretching its wings.

Soon these things I must leave -
wood smoke, frayed rope coil,
finger prints on faded walls' wrong color.

Last flights -

on the sill
scattered wings,

musky corners'
gently waving webs.

A fertile shelter.
Many nights I have wrestled here.
Some mornings have
broken into me like thunder.

I have shed skin after skin.
These I leave behind.
Some warmth they may
provide for the mice,
rags for the moths to eat.

*

I note now from yesterday the grace of
animals that have held me in their long gaze.

Llama looks up from her evening feed of field greens.

Sees me. I wave silly enchanted human making loud
smooch sounds, a call for her to come to me which she
does, walking slowly, blinks through a mist by long
eyelashes purled rising silently while I read my book,
foolishly head down, in the midst of all this gratuitous
beauty springing slow surprise - veiled field, wet,
soft, an unexpected llama looking long at me,
taking me in,

raiment mist at the hem of the darkening woods.

Requisite red barn, old, leans against the ribbon
of ground fog hovering, a wire fence almost invisible,

gray wire in white cloud between me and that cloud
and that great llama attracted I like to think

by my kissing sounds, her ope't eyes
wide and bestowing near me now

suddenly

look down,

the small head always tilting one side to the other,
little mouth a posed curiosity chewing like a child,
the long graceful neck, shagged soft fur thickly flowing,

disappears into tall grass.

I am victim of my own infatuation for all
my lip smacks and cooing and waving of hands,
one more fool for love fooled yet again.

I note here for the record that I have actually lost
the desire to chase, at least outwardly; rather, my
chase is inner as always.

I think that stars are cold in their enviable far
light, unattainable bottles lined up, glinting totems
on altar shelves, pretty behind a dark and mysterious
Bar that is open all night. I need their remote stellar
indifference, their inhuman capacity to be undisturbed
by anything other than gravity, and something-somewhere
light years close-enough going nova. Then are they affected.

For now I remain, rather, a simile then a
metaphor then, really, a black star - energy
trapped, still I must be smart and good-looking
enough in yesterday's Autumn field, and this
memory all aroma and chirp, to attract such
unexpected and unreasoned animal grace.

I read now a yellowed manuscript, an old chase,
an itch returned red, inflamed, my own words
writ 30 years ago sitting on a cold stone wall
by the frozen river, West 142nd Street, hearing
cars and human shouting up the street behind me,
Setcho poems***in my pocket, this my earnest
response to him from icy fingers, my shaking pen

What's will when

the window slams shut?

Just old cake thrown on the street

Why try be happy/sad?

don't affect it

disinfect your mind

play possum

Who's somebody's darlin'?

Setcho, zen master & poet, writes:

After so very many years, it's pointless to

look back on it.

Give this looking back a rest!

A clear breeze the world over

- what limit could it have?

*

Snail Poesis - Conceit One

to variants and …
emendations, …
Let me hear good night. - Lorine Niedecker

Pace,

if pace one

can, your

paces, your

spaces,

hasten slowly

as the snail

traces her

path if path

she is (she

leaves a

palimpsest) ,

or has

time

enough,

and slime

enough,

tons of it,

to sense

or not

where she

is going

going-not,

(no apparent

plot to)

got to get to

with

or without

(sluggishly)

a shell

or,

fancier,

c a r a p a c e

or,

better,

above-whirled

parasol apace

visualize -

she is

a question

mark,

or wears one

if she

wears

where

she is

without

doubt

or question,

and does

not question

her

trail though

questions

gradually

do naturally

arrive -

how

does she,

snail,

breathe?

if shelled, is

she sleeved

or -un to be

less encum-

bered when

being is

weight enough?

She appears to

wait.

But doesn't.

Does not think

'hesitation'

though she

(appears to)

be

comprised

greatly

of

pauses.

*

Loose Train Haiku Or Similar - New York To Philly - A Train Journal

Nearing Princeton Station

What a wonderful world
this New Jersey is!
Blue train engines!

Withering cornfields
Just turning Autumn leaves
WHOOSH!
The opposing train

Old graves by a lake
Old woman passing in aisle
Fleeting sign outside explains -

FAIR

Loose Train Hokku-no-renga

For the blind woman
on the train every
journey is inner

She touches my shoulder,
moves just one seat ahead
feels the winter collar

metal ring pinned
to its shoulder
smiles when she touches it

dark rings of her eyes
light up momentarily

What universes are in the heads all around me

While reading zen master Ummon,
famous for his one word responses
to pupils questions about the nature
of mind, I happen to look up, see young,
clean-cut preppie reading Wall Street
Journal large bold print:

YES-BUT-TERS DON'T JUST KILL IDEAS.

Congruence of Ummon and General Motors
ad strikes me. I see in mind's eye, so real:

Ummon enters train car, walks up to preppie,
taps shoulder, thunders in ear,

YES BUT!

I chuckle, smugly 'stinking of enlightenment, '
pleased, translating, 'kill ideas to get to
the 'thing itself 'or the 'no thing.'

Suddenly Ummon turns, smacks me hard
with his KATZ stick, BAM! And he is correct,
of course, to slam me. Arrogance along the
way, no matter how 'apparently' fitting my
zenny smartness, deserves a hard

KATZ!

I humbly return to my book

just write what is seen from the
train window:

Hokku-no-renga Close To Philly:

State Prison

off the square
in the darkest cells
those forms bursting forth

In Prison Window

a jelly jar, water pours
man hands arranging
a little green vine

View upon entering Philly
Receding steeples
the hairline of God

City garden by tracks
A scarecrow even there
Plastic milk jug for a head!

Passing glimpse over bridge -
railing beside a stream
a thin student reading Nietzsche -

'He who can grasp me,
let him grasp me.
However, I am not your crutch.'
- Friedrich Nietzsche from Thus Spake Zarathustra

*

On the other hand I have only tried
to survive, swollen small, myself,
find ways to be in it at all, appalled
hero shrunk to size, compensation
for grandness, a player 'pon an acre
of God on yon Calvin's hill - ol' John
yawning counts his sins a school
boy his sums, insistent dirt
because it's there persistent
cleaning his nails;

but tilled I Bible,
King James,
preferred work that,
sounds therein
instilled instead
a-poem-ing then

off at last from
roller holy hill,
a love affair oracular, called,

the Word out-wrung, wrenched,
I always the winch and never the Bride.

Again poetic little feet tracing circles, little breaths that may make a one
entire once expired.

*

I, Minimus, tongue in cheek, creak oar, row out too
into the Homeric sea, not old Greek singer, long of breath,
but as Winslow, local seer, his paints, straw hat consigned
to mistook heroics, pure accident, not to check radio
maritime, ask captain if row boat worthy of even an
American sea, projected too, can go a-row row rowing,
claw oar into wave tips' whitecaps safe perimeters,
smell of earth nasal-yet to keep oriented to dirt.
Have, instead, reaped I redundant whirlwind
play America the Fool again, naively trusting my

and country's, destiny are one, always good in spite
of Melville's long eloquent 'discantus supra librum' -
above the book - more truing than any, to spoil it,
the projected 'pluribus unum' thing, for Mayflower
folks tripping lightly between the hawthorns,
their imported gardens and God, irritant tomahawks
'can only turn out swell' thought they like waves
gathering in sea swell full of themselves individually,
Destined, they then and do think, to break just for,
O America, thee.

*

[THEOTIC-EROTIC] Cryptics for Cantors & Cripples

Arriving late to love

the broken tower
mourns its ringing ruin.
Long drought of air
once stilled the clapper.

But one breath, Trembler,
cracks metal.
Muteness falls away.

Frightened doves scatter.

Annunciation of rafters:

Come.

Remember gaiety,
how to sway.

Who pulls the rope
are many.

Silver coin,
fly up from

empty fountain,
renew into wishful hand

a saint's
pocket prayer returning.

Poor in heart, scatter.

Bread, swell upon
leaning monuments.

Flowers
for the dead,
wildly grow
pinching lovers
who kiss

over

open

graves.

Black Rooster,
searching, scratch
all dawns.

*

Long in exile,
dizzy with The Path,
human beauty broken there beside,
in every field shy flowers want all
our windows and stoops to proudly
present themselves upon.

This only now but happy do I discover.

And I am old, my scent upon the wind
down human lanes where even dogs
take pleasure from the air, where
children play and narrow water flows
and petal by petal night and day the
joyous moon swoons in the liquor of
splash upon stones happy to be worn.

There, almost within reach, the blossoming
tree brightens between darker bricks to truly
dwell. It is for me a shy son of mists to see
in spite of big chunks missing, lost, wasted,
torn out, that the Celestial World is not as
it appears to most, It yearns for much needed
hardness for spirits without shoes still long
to be bread that they may dwell in our finitude.
To them then I am a daffodil dandy at a rusty
gate where heaven and hell conjoin. There
where the thinned road ends vague statues
sway out of focus lamenting their redaction
to stone, no river to move them petal by petal,
unable to move at all, for movement is not nothing.

Even pretty Buddhas pretending eternity
cannot move by themselves alone in need
of human feet and arms. In this way then
they become like me for I too will be
borne by men or wind to the grave no
longer able to move on my own.

Nothing to lose, this rag of selves.
With what glory remains of hungry pockets,
I skip forward singing, La La La, a willful
don, a lord of nothing-much, poems a'pocket,
knowing it's all a shell game but I'm clever
having learned something from all the dice
rolled knowing that here and there Heaven
weight matters and that there is more to here
than there. Wised up now I always pack a
change of draws, a piece of broken mirror in
my pocket to gaze within practicing my smiles
to fool the gullible gods who think they are
smiling at themselves.

If stopped and questioned at the Gate to
Yellow Spring, I'll blame you, old Ghost
of too many former selves, a meandering
rumor still muttering the old hymns, who
grants me permission the entrance to boldly storm.

*

more from Midnight In Dostoevsky

'Alyosha, I shall set off from here...loving
with one's inside, with one's stomach...' - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

navel

moon

corona

pubis
...

...
belly laugh

the gut punch
and rabbit

that moment
of consent
entwined
with bridges
rooftops
orange sky
concrete

asphalt
and assholes
a cigarette
each hand a
bottle of gin
a back pocket
search for
quinine the
brine of men

the run-on
trousers limp
the cobbled
street where
a spring
silvers
beneath

navel

moon

corona

pubis
...

...
'If, after your kiss, he goes away
untouched, mocking at you, do not
let that be a stumbling-block to you.
It shows his time has not yet come'

...
much the
Monk who
falls for
One love
every night
from the
belfry smells
of pitch 1st
avenue smells
of singed
hair

a humming
boy hums
pokes bits
of scalp on
the walk
his small
white thumbs
alone touch

the white
lattice kiosk
sells the
Stranger's
face again

Monk Midnight Leaps
While City Sleeps

A Frightful Mess
This Foregoing
Bliss For Want
Of Affection This

Of Spinning Night

navel

moon

corona

pubis
...

'The centripetal force on our planet is still
fearfully strong...I know I shall fall on the
ground and kiss those stones'

(quotation marked passages are from
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky)

*

'Art resembles life, purpose is cousin to need, so bleeds all things together' says the butcher.

I remove from my knotted hair a finely carved pin formed from the bone of a large bird, radiant hair, black falls enfolds overcoming everything around me, covering a small looking glass on the butcher's wall.

I will mourn a little while longer, longing for the dear Sharpener,
his amazing patience, his brilliant smile flashing teeth of metal made,
mirrors, little mirrors, smooth, polished, clear.

I will see myself in that smile no longer.

'Will he return? Ever? ' I ask.

'Do not spurn any chance to mourn. Mourning is a kind of Return, '
says the butcher reaching for his silver cleaver, its handle made of bone.

*

Poetry As Constellation

for Krishna

'...descend,
and of the curveship
lend a myth to God.'
- Hart Crane

You hear

'consolation'

as 'constellation'

when I explain

a poem is a

consolation

work that I

am compelled

to

as a lover

is to traces

pointing

beyond sighs

and windows

where

Arcturus

stands

poised

wheeling

in night's

patient

round,

his arrow

strung

forever

ready to

swiftly fly

as am I

along the

spatial curve

of your

arching

thighs.

This, too,

taut,

restrained,

breath held

between

Perpetua's

swollen

lips of

praise -

If you

could only

see what

I see in

your eyes

when the

arrow

finally

flies

*

Response To Bernadette Mayer's 'First Turn To Me...'

'you appear without notice and with flowers
I fall for it and we become missionaries

we lie together one night, exhausted couplets
and don't make love. does this mean we've had enough? '
- Bernadette Mayer

Failing the Grand Coniunctio
this is the only one we know
the one where we eat dirt
and swallow, are filled and
swell belly up a meal to be
eaten when the Messiah comes

Leviathan is our heavenly bridegroom
presses the banquet table with elbows
manners forsaken in the end
yanks at sallow meat forsaking
the wine which has turned
no First Wedding miracle can
be repeated - no do-overs here
Candles burn on as always, false promises

All the doors are marked EXIT

Still we must try
at the Feast

make small talk

look interested

all the while thinking

This is it?

Angels without knees
aprons spotless starched
as beards of saints
complain of humans
the stains they leave

Overheard
between the fork
and spoon obscenely
crossed
one angel to another:

They call it love
what we are supposed
sublimely to sing of
but frankly all that
pushing and shoving
faces in agony the
cries and curses all
that pulling at flesh
bruised as the moon
this can't be love

We stand without legs
the better for it but
for these we must attend
bent over their plates
greedy to have at each
other again to marriage
beds one last time

And then the singing
begins

an eternity

songs about dirt
about longing to return

how all hurts there
mean something
after all

*

You must leave now,
black mouse of sorrow,
now formally named,
take up in another
residence. Do not
borrow my things,
do not move them
with your tail or tongue
or teeth on the table
top or underneath,
nor in the corner
play hide and seek
where I have once
again dropped the
blue accident of love,
he who has left how
he arrived, brown,
beautiful, smelling of
Indian spice, of rose
oil with herbs,
his long black hair,
his silken pockets
full of childhood
prayer carefully
wrapped for safe-
keeping against
the day of his glad-
marry..

Upon the altar then
do not, I plead, sleep
cradled in the god's arms
nor push my thinning
patience where the votive
candle burns for him whom
you seek to replace with
your delicate whiskers
and all your black fur
with webs upon of the one
spider who dwells behind
the jewel box, his gift
for me, his leaving, here
cling/brush against all
things in this dark place
now but do not let me
see it here where it is
I-not-he who is erased.

Is it your wish, then,
to bless me, black mouse?
to keep me company?

*

from 'And The Daylight Separated The Mad Boy From His Shadow - for Garcia Lorca'

The mad boy
writes feeble colors
for love
the halt the lame the
mute which within
around which intends
bends
distorts in your glass
case
twists takes
traps light to
separate
the mad world
from shadow

Both
we are
contortionists

thus take our
place with clowns who
know tomatoes thrown
and juggler's bare necked
necessary concentration.

You are the maestro here
whom I trail behind at respectful

distance murdered

by the too ordinary
controllers

So long

So long to image
to suffer on dear
bruised M the
void of course