Sonnets to Eurydice
by Dennis M. Hammes
SONNETS
TO
EURYDICE
by Dennis M. Hammes
SCRAWLMARK PRESS
Moorhead, Minnesota
The FISHHOOK Group
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Sonnets To Eurydice
Copyright 1970, 1972, 1973 1974, 1975, 1976, 1979,
1980, 1981, 1982, 1984, 1985, 1986,
1987, 1988, 1989, 1990, (C)1991, 1992, 1994
by FISHHOOK and Dennis M. Hammes
All rights reserved.
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may be reproduced to paper by any means including mechanical,
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whether analog or digital, or electronic broadcast,
without prior written permission from the publisher.
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graphics, and attendant files), may be copied for
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Scrawlmark Catalog #SE1.1
ISBN:
LCC Cat. Nr.:
Scrawlmark Publishing
1016 South 3rd Street
Moorhead, Minnesota 56584
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Legei pou `Hrakleitos `oti panta Xwrei kai ouden menei.
-- Plato, Cratylus
Das Wenige verschwindet leicht dem Blicke
Der vorwarts sieht, wie viel noch uebrig bleibt
-- Gottfried Wilhelm von Goethe
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
PREFACE
These are not so much my feelings as the disco-
vering them; not so much them as the discovering
what I liked or dared like, and finally, less even
that than the discovering of the value of liking this
feeling or that, will I, nil I, no matter that I
liked, scorned, feared, etc. it, for all are in the
entire course governed finally by that statement of
Russell's, which has been with me through all I have
written: "I suggest that an emotion which can be
destroyed by a little mathematics is neither very
genuine nor very valuable."
To the extent that genuine, or accurate, feeling
reflects natural law, it can be said that feeling,
process, and their result in the sonnets, had, in
Rilke's words, "stormily imposed themselves." The
storm has lasted nineteen years as seasonally and
variably as the monsoon, the chinook, and the bliz-
zard, and like these is more or less destructive.
But if these have taught me anything, it is that to
love any thing genuinely requires the letting go of
something else -- and that this grief, or relief, has
no effect on the love other than to let it be the
more itself.
The sonnets are thus more a description of
process, in the first person ignorant, than they are
any definition of something the reader may wish to
lean upon. (Many readers have resented this, some
deeply.) It may dangerously be presumed that the
ignorance fights to and succeeds at progression out
of itself to something that it can lean on, something
that is immediately and permanently more valuable;
but as one of the early sonnets already intimates,
this result has probably nothing like the stability
of a car lot with each make and model priced in its
parking place. Rather it is as flying by the seat of
one's pants: it cannot be taught, but it can be
learned. And if these show only that it can be done,
already is learned half of what is needed to fly.
10/23/88
dmh
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
for
Terry
l'envoi
I seal this sneaking ark to you who bid
Me save our beast-bound thoughts their certain term
Through plural flesh and mockeries of form;
The rainbow dam the covenant-doomed flood,
The firmament at devil leaks the brood
Sea surge in the gall gullet of the worm
That mimes our red tide and consumes the storm-
Accumulated crumb our long vein bared,
And Kronos ever gobble his own brat
To make us lonely for the ones we were
When we were older than our songs were worth,
The stumble sounds in seven pairs set forth
To tout faint Eurydice on her tour
And tell her hearing is their Ararat.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
1
Three seasons' span, the iris is a tuber,
Slow in the earth through humus or through gall
To bloom for one brief week, a poet's goober --
But leaves both bronze and rhizome in the fall.
When fifty falls shall handicap our run
And we move slow, though not for any thought,
If we have only bronze for courses won
Then age is all that age has slowly wrought.
To grave a graven earth's a sorry trot,
Coursing a course to end where we began :
Unless we get us all our grandsires got
The iris will have last of any man.
Then let us swell the front while blood is green
Before we must be bronze, and ever lean.
2
As though bees knew the brevity of best,
The fullest lilac is alive with stings;
And though this prime must fall, it ever brings
Broad wonder at how every breath is dressed,
And inspiration at the breath's behest
That joy is highest that must dance to strings :
A cricket has a year to wear its wings,
And still -- and that is why -- they are caressed.
Then lilac has more beauty than a brief
Whose brevity is argued by the deaf
Whose credence is the requisite of creed,
And bees and I don't quibble at the doom
That we must fumble blooms while they are bloom,
For we inherited a quitclaim deed.
3
Such times as memory and I agree
And I can draw you to my windward rail,
Then two or three planes grow to be a sail
Floodlight on blue; the spheroid of the sea
Rolls up its edges to encompass me.
And though I watch, at any evening's mail,
Your chestnut in the chipmunk's sunfired tail,
I'm not bound by the duty we could be
Because of this. Because of this, I lie
Within the thinning armour of my pen,
Erasing absense from the empty sight
With line descriptions of the hungry I;
Unsatisfied, I draw the day, and then
My ears howl with the emptiness of night.
4
The time we played the summer day its dare
With lazy ayes, guitars, and breathless swims,
Orange auras leed the lay of auburn hair
And ripples licked long highlights at your limbs.
These forms of sun and woman lost their mass
In molding memory's amoebic fluff;
Their mettle won't hold half a gram of gas,
But, to hold me, they have steel enough.
Now I play Patience, cheating in the dole
Of worthless tricks to overcall your /quid
Pro quo/, but you will always have control :
Mind's ions will remain the days we did
Until time plays his lone black ace, to trump
The murmur of their most important pump.
5
The sill distills the silent, night-numbed lawn
As light distorts world lived through window glass;
But to my touch, even your pulse must pass
Through every wanwood garden I have grown.
My pinemeal lies thick with the lilacs' spawn,
Muffling footsteps pressed to tended grass
Grown silent to considerable mass;
I turn to your light scent, but you are gone.
How long must I listen to the note
Of time's bum ticker ringing out its guard,
Intoning "Halt-and-Who" in civil rote,
Condemned to be both watch and hurried ward?
Once, once, if I could plod in nodding nap,
Or trade this magnum handgun for a trap!
6
Out of the snow I fell into estate
And all meet bounds ran oozing into spring
To choose for me their own demand and date,
The time to sweat, and shorter time to sing.
Evicted from April without voice or vote,
I roll the crawling of July's blunt heat
So massive I must dream to stay afloat
But only sleep to dream encumbered feet :
Monstrosity of showing too much life
For one man's being to contain its blood,
Leech lilac overflows my flickering knife,
Still growing as I prune its purple flood.
How have the lines I thought to tend so well
Become this prison, this malignant cell?
7
Again, you flow like lilac to my mind
Who slowly grow through what my weather wrought,
Transfiguring common elements out of kind
To bloom a while, and then recede to thought.
Was bloom your mentor, or was lilac taught?
You of yourself outsoar the elbowed crowd,
Embrace the air as life enough, and brought
The first dumb bloom by which I was allowed
To assume the rainbow, caliper a cloud.
Yet if I dream some secret `why' or `how,'
Or measure god, life's size or shape, too proud
To foot the weather, being tomorrow now,
My eager reach jerks on the blankets' girth,
And wakes to roots caught tightly in the earth.
8
Can hardened hands that lately wrestled Rome
Ignore the texture of their lance-loved flesh,
Or wipe their leafgrown green to let sun crush
The lilacs that stood tall beside their gnome,
To be a chestnut filly's living comb,
Then make her main attendant of the brush?
To keep the stable sealed and fencing fresh,
The constant groom must be in constant roam.
Though I might learn to love her easy rein,
The gentle leather of a common course
And favored saddle, she is not a horse
To leave the parlor for the jousting lane,
And though she seat me for my talk of Grails,
I serve the lilac's leafmeal in my nails.
9
Should my scant hay coax her from where her eyes are
The focus of that clover-clouted hill,
Will choke her quick the handy present ties her
To paddocks pricked by seedpod-doddered dill.
She is too blooded for this drying stile,
All pecker-heckled, worn in long retrace
Of heavy lines that strut about her guile
And maim her movement in reciting grace.
If her fact and action streak these frames
And chafe time's harness best when blessed to run,
Then I can't hold her to these meldewed hames;
Her being is in being, not having done,
And take to pasture knowing her a day,
I'll keep her only if she goes her way.
10
The grave's grit growls along my arm's dumb ear
As keys that made their love with your short life
Grow gross, resistant, an enfeebled wife
Whose aspirin speech assaults me to endear
Whatever taste remains to local beer.
Their unoiled obbligato, dancing fife
Caper this once-proud carriage, beersong rife;
Struts struck, they clown in anaesthetic cheer.
Yet limbweight ever slides my midnight palms :
You, through the chalk shriek of my digits' dirks
Skirl keys, a loan glove whose lithe lunar wrong
As Sheba bodied Solomon to Psalms
Still taps the bokken's oak to /soter's/ jerks
Who awed the clod tad of my tongue to song.
11
Sunshine girl, the gold peal of your skin
Blinds me to myself; your ringing voice
Deafens the clock as your quick blood beats thin
The gargoyle past and foils me into choice.
But though I slash the tendrils at my heels
To paint the walls, the rotting baulks remain
To stay bent beams, and so the ceiling reels;
Not disrepair, but nothing to maintain.
No bloom can stay within these windy walls;
If you be lilac, you must hie away
From the Midas of these mildewed halls
Whose only substance is their own decay,
Sure death for any woman who would hold
A termite king, that chews his love to gold.
12
You, basslissom, scissor of limbs-au-lait
Afloat, shoot past the toehold where I lean,
Sand straining, chest against a roiled careen
Of underbridge whitewater like the whey
Of time; curds hurdled, I regain the quay
Of solid dreams, to set a common scene :
A beachside bower where the sunshine sheen
Of flesh wakes fresh desire to have my way.
And then recoil from these remembered weights
And silkshot textures, dreams' quick exhalations;
My morningafter megaton rock church
Slams ambling fingers, yellowed page of hates
Grown green again in nurtured generations :
John Calvin turns in my grave heart's slow lurch.
13
These rocks, the shocks of which curse toes
That clam the sand in search of your gone Grail :
Brief draught of days, brimmed weekend in wet clothes
Or none, substantial as a clam's stormed trail,
These stones protest. Than your curved heave of hip
Less soft, more slick but with the stream's hair ooze,
More skate, that slats dreams into a fat lip --
There is more comfort in dud buddy booze.
(Again, the rocks.) Rammed hard against the whelp
Of water-lilies, jealousy like granite
Grades the flash of flesh that offered help,
Monolithic time, past's mass this planet.
Leave that amoebic love its lumpy slough :
Who hates his blood despises it in you.
14
Once a slick cutlass, dreaming the duel dawn,
My temper was the common tide's disaster;
Now I choke physics before the Roger's drawn,
Afraid that love heave to, take aim and blast her.
My song packed thick in common mustard plaster,
I think to bring in sense with little mimes
Of a fever-shook, self-leeching poetaster
Who sets his sickroom with his blooming rimes.
And all bent ended if I kiss at limes,
The palsied lips stop, cured, locked on their harbor,
That sail by sinking, who won't learn betimes
That Occam is too dull to scrape the Barber.
Sick troubadour, whole mute, the logic rocks :
Who'd cure himself must cure his paradox.
15
How soft, how often have you brushed my thought,
To thrum and weave the webbing of my nerves
Until their whole synaptic net is caught
Up with you! Design, plucked, reels with curves
And I career from when to when, my now
Excused of all crabbed toil, harsh sound and light :
Why snarl the present with the means-and-how
When the knotless future is so right?
But Nissl bodies, being less than lithe,
Exhaust themselves before the web of then
Is one tenth loomed or lost; some hormones writhe
And I become my hunger once again :
Of now, of having been, of yet-to-be,
Bare being is the bobbin of the three.
16
These golden toadstools bullet from the birch
So slowly, yet bowl low those sacred themes
That life looms after death, but never dreams.
Gold-girdled girth, a meal-bogged log's a church
Unstating awe, saw-spared to be the perch
Of preaching fungus; crumbling browns and creams
To palette them again in what it schemes
Well-flavored colors, it becomes its search.
But, slowly though we grow our mushroom sense,
Frost will wreak its muckwork, overnight
Reporridging our elements to stew;
So I stake out this tentative defense
To hound the grave cook's ladle with our might
That you live here as I have lived in you.
17
As you watched lightcaps roll a sea of grain,
A Mourning-Cloak streak by, two chipmunks play,
Oak timbers crash in pressure from the rain,
And Gothic domes eroded by the day,
You, too, have known the clock-struck whim
To make a cloud's quick orange solidify --
Succumbed to hunger's humbling interim
Of time just bare to see a hue and cry.
So, when I taste the speed of all that grows
Brief blooms, the mindprint of an evening when
Your whole attention folded in a rose
Propels the bandaged digit of my pen
Beyond the thin inertia of a mind
That, sworn to nothing, only aids the wind.
18
Twin turbines whistle like a stooping hawk
Over the bobber-hobbled phone lines, glide
To spook bucolic walleyes and elide
Our interim. Flight-whimsied, like an auk
Sham-tumbling imagined sunsets, back I walk
To keen the Wailing Wall my bird-stained pride
Calls pen-and-sword : my tackle hung, I hide
A hook-slung plug in every heronsquawk.
The fabric of flight torn, I try mind's amends
By flying these winsome want-ads of my speech,
But curse the sucker whose mudpudding tries
At bottom hope to soar to lofty ends;
Then to this clouded muddle comes your Beech
Reminding me that even hard steel flies.
19
Quills swilling ink and steel, I learned to fly
By spreading wings without a flap or crew,
But knew your radar's omnipresent eye
Had flailed the scare from air before I flew;
So you, who are my sole substantial mood,
Flight plan these fledgeling hops from stump to perch,
But if the leaves where I have stopped to brood
Show form, it will be said that I'm the birch.
Then even I, whose mudfeet nibs first soared
To solo from your insubtantial shove
A grossbeaked heron, must leave you underscored :
When best in flight, then I am least in love.
And yet my vulture must admit you room :
The Lycoming outsoars the thieving plume.
20
Though you are skyjacked by your will to fly,
Hoist on the talons of a falcon mind
That steers by stars and holds its own helm blind,
You, like your radar, cannot turn to try
Your own crisp Christian or your lisping Bligh
Yourself, but fly to leave yourself behind
And so become whatever you may find
The jury world's reflected in your eye.
Touch down, then, to reflect yourself in me,
Who, like you, like that changeling Irish elf,
Am so chamelion I may not descry
My own persona; there, between us, see
The infinite reflection of yourself
That shatters your mirror's small, one-sided lie.
21
The omni spreads its silent beacon Morse
To home steel pigeons to your radar plot;
A silent desklamp lights my pen its course
Through airways of my known and fancied thought,
To land a page on phage or calculus
Brought out of midnight cloud, inclement weather
Of trying to show that `one' and `one' is `us'
To spark this hearth by striking us together.
But some control assigned us separate rays,
Else frequencies that interfere to hiss
The singing in yourself, though singing sways
The elements allowing me to kiss;
And that my voice won't choke on rivet lugs
Though you fly aircraft -- I, to find the bugs.
22
The trees' tall fingers furl their living lace
Antennas to your pulse of flight's designs
As though the steepled popple sought your trace
Through poured Aurora as I seek these lines.
And you : entowered where the radar's eye
Sees you less often than I see you here
Through empty airways after each goodbye,
What antenna tends your inner ear?
We round one third of earth on evening watch
Collecting passwords from a varied crew,
And though we reach alone, and sort by touch,
My way seems solid : blind, I still hear you.
Whose sibilant foot, what creak of oiled leather,
What night guard holds your interlude together?
23
One letter like rain; my sky intones the south,
Counting days a Lodestar rounds its laps
From you to you, avoiding gravid traps
Such as I set myself in your long drouth :
One outline sentence swells to your full mouth
As I join Berkeley, Leibniz, and such chaps
As castle passes at your lone "perhaps,"
Nor any absolution cure this truth :
Sugar stitched to thymine in thought's socket
Congeals a lone resolve I take for granite
As Armstrong footed man a barren planet :
My intuitions shame the shrieking rocket
But burn out short of dreams that would drygulch us
To leap the inch of my own central sulcus.
24
The bright aurora flash through time, expanding
Gauze from an exotic dancer, but
The "Dance of Seven Veils" finds me outstanding
In my field, less dunce to why than what.
An axe-struck regular I stump, remaining whole
Bound to earth's gravid curve and ancient blame
Until mauve's movement, some blinked jink cajole
Me back that only permafloating game.
Then logged limbs smoke to space, blown broad and loose
From cause to cosmos; transfinite, I see
Bright Baltimore swap sky with Betelgeuse --
Stars in a dancing space containing me --
But words clang at the body's plodding pawn
Whose proof must cavil where the queen be gone.
25
Fishhooked, you leap aloft, "why /me/"s
Atug these lines, trying these bobs we make
Against the other (I would rather wake
Against the other), nib-spooned potpourris;
Nor I escape the adverse noodler's fees,
Long nights to pantrolled knees in a cold lake,
Then hoist on my own /gaffe/ : this scaled hake
Though flying fills you more than poetry.
Duck dare, the gull's foil limb, airoiler arm
Uncurled and copied in aluminum,
Fly higher than clang claimed the more /elat/ --
Irrelevant. This overrules : we warm
On what the rose disclosed. Then come
And turn the sheet while I let out the cat.
26
So you hear wheezing in athsmatic rime
What I behold myself, and yet am not;
From every aging stroke, chalk shrieks of time
And early terrors' senile polyglot.
We might match tempos, log the hearth of now
To bank these hours' calm caulk on graying days
And cavern rooms that howl the wind of how,
Letting age grow with us those things we praise;
But since I can't conjoin minds in the flesh,
I bridge brain fissures, doublecrossing doubt
By walking when I was tall and lilac fresh,
To make that do when I must do without;
And this achronic posture is my choice
Since I must wrench my back to hear your voice.
27
You come as geese that stroke a crystal lake
By massed red oaks adjusted with the breeze
In simple sums whose numbers meld to make
A Monet seascape almost Japanese.
Faint figures solved, each air-oiled plume becomes
From beak to cowlick, flying's master die :
Sheenshatter webs tuck back as each one thumbs
A flick of alulae to lick the sky
And hangs on integrals of wind and wing,
The gaggle haggling flightplans or plain fun
Clean in the air. Windcleaver chins afling
Snow geese are flight, and don't care how it's done.
This go-and-touch drops at the river mouth.
But always flight. And always somewhat south.
28
The howling yesterday tonight is still;
The tomcat rolls his stomach to the fire
That heckles echoes up the chimney spire
And holds night mirrored at the windowsill.
This space, though dawn will ram its random will
Tomorrow through the daydream of desire;
This time to place a pawn, time to inquire
Or scratch one problem with a buzzard quill.
Caught in ephemera that is flight's renown,
The blaze of days, impending frost's gray rape
Of untried sap, the apple standing brown,
-- Accumulate to leave scant time to gape
At painted trees, much less to paint the town.
You, push? Day's squeeze enough.
-- Peel us a grape.
29
Beyond this pane, snow fluffs the marigold,
Nosegays and poison ivy coexist,
Rocks recapitulate their ancient cold,
Or mushrooms prowl the early morning mist.
There's more than glass dividing fire from night
And oak leaves gleely whithered by a world
That pops improbabilities to sight
And men from records they have lately birled.
The moons wink when eclipses split their gravel
And stars confound the cosmos with a joke;
Flesh has a shorter orbit, quick to travel.
Blow up the fire; there's little warmth in smoke.
Then darkness will become arm-pillowed light
That binds our grabbag in the elbow's bight.
30
In that small room the water of your hour
Wraps you from flight's panoramic ease
While high auroras ripple; the taut tease
Of surface tension tents your latent power
To draw fresh breath in some uncustomed flower,
Yet each attempt at gills ends with a wheeze
As dreams drown, while Bernoulli's magic frees
Even the heron from your fishbowl tower.
Caught in the walleye of those gauges' slow,
Finned ignorance of air, whose blind surmise
Sees only water in the cirrus' flow
And mildews the held breath as the wonder dries,
How lonely you must be, I think I know :
The radar drinks the wind, and never cries.
31
The trees blaze brighter; swells even the thistle
As space awaits your coming like the street
Stills everything to color as the whistle
Starts the parade. Joy lingers, though as fleet
As gable-level geese, or sudden blanch
At purple cliffs of cloud, mock terror stacked
In instant fiction of their avalanche,
All theory released by breathless fact.
Neither the birch nor this fantastic dawn
Mean by their glowing, yet one broad belief
Survives beyond the theses they will spawn
To spurn the windrow like a winter leaf :
Let cosmic physics resurrect the day,
It's our conjunction, holds the night away.
32
The wind hoots in the bronchi of the trees
While owls ogle the humilities of wing,
The blackbirds walk, crows crouch; no feathered thing
Dares yet to dawdle in the Beaufort breeze
That dandles at your slipstream, though it please
The numbered mileages to add this fling
To the cawed courses sculling at the spring
That flirt that hemisphere while this one sneeze.
Then let sham tumble accidents of height
That, born to feathers or the sooted quill
Stall when the strange song sting the stranger mouth :
It's more than dare parts careful thought and flight
That parts the spit of weather, though the will
First stutter that would sing its own strong south.
33
Lissom aluminum, though quick to astound
With /tout en l'air/ and reel, compiles a log
Swelled gravid with each leap; some scoured cog
Must scatter /pas de deux/ the both renowned.
Then proud struts prop a low, erratic mound,
All polish swallowed in the gagging fog;
The wing husks echo to the squatting frog
While all these postures but embrace the ground.
Yet here these echo in a living skull,
Their slow feet palaver the quicking pulse
Of thought's lithe ions, feel the flash and gel
Of foundling knowledge come to someone else
Not as the dandy speculates a ball
But as we rub our thighs against a waltz.
34
Gravity bet, my feet plied pedals, sped
Balanced boozejug elbows breeze-akimbo
A-chin the wind where oaks experiment red,
That lane. That lane. A suckerpunch, your limbo.
Tripod steadier one foot, I straddle steel
Less strong than hollow, treads against sunflow,
Backbucking wind, brakelock a slipping wheel.
Roll back. Regain. Perspectives in a row,
Lake, leaves, the same. House, yes. Stratus blind,
Untubed and slapped to skylight, but your trace
Missing some lines, unscened even to mind;
Whole attitudes of you vacate this place.
Alternatives these landscapes, yes : a mole
Nosing for grubs' bloat sweets; a cellarhole.
35
How like the leech of hunger, this; your absence
Sucks the joy from bright beliefs of leaves
And nuthoused squirrels in their return; a sense
Of loss dilutes these colors' catch, bereaves
The longer sleep before the final frost
Congeals bright senses in the dragonfly;
These colors have no benefit nor cost
And are no answer -- no one asked them why.
Yet hunger, occupied with beans, leaves joy
To dwell at autumn through a snowbound season;
Your vacancy leaves nothing to alloy
With time, and empties life from empty reason.
More than these ring, or glass along the bar,
My mind rings with the pluck of your guitar.
36
Your waist at my counter I remember now --
An alien comfort, updraft in routines
Of cutlery, blacked pancakes and brown beans;
A time nontransient, dream-concretion, /frau/
That even the air tries hard to disallow;
A lissom bulk uncharacters these scenes,
And redefines the flyers from the means,
But leaves the reticle without a "pow."
So you in my loose but finite headspace wrong
Unawkward ways whose blunt backyardlight gleam
Is too of stars; and of the living song
You make of time, the pulsing of its theme
Seems not enough to break an apron-thong
To charter at the flightplan of a dream.
37
Now neither Bacchanal of bloom and birds
Nor snow's pragmatic lines relieve the day
Of dribbling clouds and watercolor words;
The lone street lamp reveals diluted, gray
Unspeculating masses; slack limbs splay
As, leaf by leaf, fleet colors leave the stalks
Of stark, black trunks, while kissproof themes go stray
One friend by friend, in short, unfinished talks.
Bombastic promises of equinox
Fade with the lilac's husk, and life lies slight
In twisted seed pods, crisp on concrete blocks.
Yet four split logs can space away the night,
And though my rooms are neither broad nor far,
In their still air may echo who we are.
38
Day rammed by day, as glaciers will crush rocks
With rocks, /Wrm/ time abrades my sense
And barrens it, forbidding sunbound flocks
Touch down to this self-rending stone; so dense,
Your absence seems to weight whole continents.
Against that mass the barrelstove's bubble tries
A soot-choked chimney whose squeezed air relents
To belch gall gases black against my eyes.
These prayerwheel pages whirl, but dream ink dries
To crumple tissue futures you would bless
With breath and movement; though art falsifies
Harsh fact, these won't return your easy dress
Nor let me flash to ashes, turn by turn :
Iced wood cleaves clean, stacks square, and will not burn.
39
Gross winter can be dealt with, brought to gain
In skates and skiboots, brandy and a fire;
Snow kept from walks and driveways, and, in main,
Its mass disposed to place with wood and wire.
The squirrels sleep silent in the maple grove.
Protests of muscle at the axe and saw
Flow out through flannel hassocked at the stove.
There's less of chance in nature, more of law,
And deeper solitude in longer night;
Though days are shorter, they are less pellmell
As scenes resolve themselves in black and white;
If it is cold, it's definite as well.
But autumn birch lapse barren, leaf from limb
The way doubt plucks the color from a dream.
40
Too like the popcorn, these, uneasing you
In teasing you to art; a twangtune tongue
That wrinkles as it tries to write you young
Slang-tangles with techniques it can't eschew.
(Matches the thinking.) Dump of a decade, two,
Three tens of seasons' pulpwood lies where flung;
Instead of your live joy, I've only sung
Of where the bear has wallowed in the dew.
Now midnight kilowatts among the mildew
Mute the syncopation from your pulse
In untrained themes whose tempos tread you false
And telescope your span to what you will do,
To dream that this confetti be me, who
Still tumbles the kaleidoscope of you.
41
The saw leans silent at the chimney wall
And turns, of its own balance, from the bricks
Whose way it is to bite at teeth, leave nicks
And kidgrin edges, that they squall
Through slabs, eschewing the solid drawl
Of native metal. Though it knows no tricks
Other than to turn its back on bricks,
We two have made some mighty acorns fall.
But I've no quarrel with the logs it's laid.
Nor one with it; it's been a certain school.
We've made the highest woodpile we have made :
So high, to pile at woodpiles is to fool
With what's turned fooling. It's not a want of blade
Unscales this, but the standing of the tool.
42
How can I sing my cabin's peace to you
When wheels' black lipstick smears the runway tar
And duralum lolls limp, a homely gar
Gone fish-flanked in the early moon's bright dew?
When wind distorts the contrails you just drew,
Or enroute turbulence leaves a twisted spar
To make you think you might have walked as far,
No Nowalaimie Downasleep will do --
I only know when I observe dried fronds
End in their earth, or, tired with their art,
Whole fields of tall sunflowers shrug the bonds
Of contract with the sun, to wait the mart
In random attitudes of twisted bronze,
I, too, swell with the gall to pad my part.
43
Stark and storklimbed, grossbeaked, slow to fly,
Unlimber thimbleheaded dimwit; bare
Minimum of bird (beak, bone, and dare);
This heavy heron, tenor torquenecked try
At flights whose birdbrained sentence gangles by
You sparrow pinioned, albatrossed to wear
A lumberlegged apostle of the air;
This deadweight to our /gaudeamus/, I.
The lesson of your rollercoaster course
Shows how you love the gravity of limbs
Astride your aims and airways that you force
With each wing thrust seem disconnected whims
Yet landings are what solo flight endorse
No more than errors master paradigms.
44
More than a pane stands firm between the pith
Of brittle barks and whites or spitting storms,
And more than wonder, wilting in the dorms
From quarters spent sequestered with its kith;
Much more than faith that humbles at a myth
Or makes its mediocrity of norms
Slams nails, details an elevation, warms
The kit and boodle, or the weaponsmith.
If you would spend the chloride of your thought
In wistful, sudden luster for the cheek
That bids the bay with noises it was brought,
Then water what is dry; I need not speak
A single foreign attitude I fought,
And as for this old roof, it doesn't leak.
45
We, bonebeaked bastards of old flesh jerked taut
By new designs of neurons, feel the flare
Of wings with sight that plights us to the rare
And wheel of will that we are what we wrought;
Yet fear is not our sight, but that we sought :
And we are hunted in that what we dare
Is not the kind of feathers that we wear
But that we try the plume to prove the thought.
Feet numb the gillstirred slough. The hunters grow
Succumbed with standing, jealous of the flight
Of every shorthop sparrow and crude crow
Who copies us, yet certain of their right
To steal our distance with the stolen glow
Of fire that answers dark with appetite.
46
Two days of casting purls defend my feet
And interface cold ice from colder thought,
Estranger of the ice-caked ducks I cheat
By trapping bits of summer, yet I squat,
Stumped : this was no country for a camp,
So you were right. And other things are mauve.
The overflowing pipe I dump and tamp
And match the sawdust-constellated stove
To melt the snow that fences at the floor --
Weapon of wind and omnipresent night
That slips a scimitar between the door
And where its frame should be, but isn't, quite.
It could, but for the bowsaw's summer thrum
Be cutting me, not my lineoleum.
47
Naked we came, and naked I would lie
To have your truth beside me, head to head.
What is one lie of friends? And what imply
A lein upon your balance, mine be fed?
If I plead pain of hollow leg and life,
Or that I'm stumped, still fishing in a slough
Of walleyed biclops, principals of strife
Whose only rout's the cheese and wry of you,
Naked we stand to judgment of the fee
Of any summer's stream, cursed but to choose
Our own spring compass, speed, and frequency.
If any claim the course who scorn the clues,
Take wing. Outsoar the lamprey's obscene ruff;
The sucking of the clock is leech enough.
48
The bullrush dried, the ash beartrapped in ice,
The pond's pace slows within a creaking wreath
Of frozen fir, the stark chaff of wild rice.
The kiss of frost reveals the crystal teeth
Behind the hum and mumble of slow motion
Grown these clods, numb, comatose with sleep
That nothing nostrum short of snowsnake lotion :
This chill sleeps one season, but lives deep.
Yet let them lie. My steps' slow splashing shunts
None but transient fowl from these deep swells;
The blunt, cragged countenance that fronts
These numbered hopes, unadmirable cells,
Is too much beak, an epe'e struck in bone.
Let ducks lead ducks. The heron hunts alone.
49
The wavicles through this bright barrel pass
Affected and affecting without blame
Of origin; in this great tiny glass
The cannibal and victim loom the same
Drop from the bucket, bucket from the pond,
Unvoiced and reeling with the heave and hum
Of season, and their voice in me no fond
Division, only telltale atrium.
These troglodytes of sense, whose ways converge
The choice of life to how the charge compel
The shape and slap of what will keep, what purge,
Prove choice be mastered in the stupid cell.
I rack these slides as you rack me, elide
Into vague yesterday -- yet I abide.
50
I am that I am, this nexus, clot
Of probables pertaining to a place
Once nebulous -- I, I am the lone base
That graced a wish to gel to what I got :
The days slip, ticking, but I hear you not.
A cast of letters struts before my face
But I am all that fixes all in space,
And more past effort, all my future lot.
/One replica of self./ To /tete-a-tete/
This trace, your seeing so unlocus me,
Repeating breath, the slug and furnace-grate
Whose slag draws dull disciples to agree
That sight's itself; the fire can dissipate
To spray all space and still not cease to be.
51
The tape slaps off. Uncertain sounds we tried
Without recourse to touch, attempts to point
Similitudes of sight, recede, anoint
A memory too loved, as one who died.
Another death : your image, rigored, dried
Of action -- vanished tempostatic point;
My elsewhere, your familiar; welded joint
Now parallel but self, not view beside.
Translated into ions, you abrade
Against the dottle of my rapid breast
Of time and small success, your accolade
Reduced to golly like a gravied vest
Congeals the party, dilute marinade
Too simmered with my want, too much expressed.
52
The walleye swallows as a hoverharp
Dares airborne scares, but sunspot dragonfly
Cannot, with windnet wings, persuade the carp
To part from slurping to purloin the sky.
Those eyes tip upward only to defy
The happenings whose aptitude they smear
To shapes that snap or else are tippled by
The stupid, drooping countenance of fear.
Each mouth the center of an ecosphere
With eyes akimbo, it is chow eat chow
Is paradise enow : your lissom Lear
Is paradigm those shamans disallow
Whose gag's a ghost that gobbles what does not,
So leave their goblins glad to be forgot.
53
One star strobes southward, proving the slow page
Of calculated sights; a figure wrought
In duralum and dare, bright aerophage
That glides on gas squeezed solid by a thought.
Aluminum-limned fish, the sucker sieves
His swill with gills that succour every breath
Of spirogyra, while their sugar gives
Euglenic genesis in every death:
Parades of pottage cycle out the night
In motions scored and scaled, but /sans/ excuse.
What birthstone did you trade for appetite,
That makes you now so glad to be of use?
Dumb chemicals I cannot love or hate;
In mumbling that I am, I am too late.
54
Why do you tease this hermit hamlet, still
Demanding motives of a riddled smock
For what demands a simple act of will
To make to rush what trickles through the clock?
Canned in aluminum like common bock
You neither age and neither churchkey churls
Nor Benedictine bishopric unfrock.
They beat the clock, who let the day to girls
In lighter boards than leak the stuff that whirls
The bursting aster, hand grenades of grouse,
Squadrons of geese above the Stens of squirrels
And sniping chipmunks all about the house :
September trembles; still, it tweaks my nose.
So let's incense the gods. And lose our clothes.
55
I'll waste no chloride that I cease to care
For stock in common futures, the bright get
Of darling inside dope, mere floral dare;
When act shames object, it is time to bet
The cherished chassis to the churning pot,
Chance losing the dear locus of the self
To future's fickle taste, the quick blood clot
Within a single page or half a shelf.
Fresh naps and heaven are a servant's wage
And faith excuse more chance than any god;
Who will their eyes to see will see and gauge
What floral law allow, and what need prod.
For lilac goals, the enzymes care enough;
They cannot spill, who wallow in the stuff.
56
I parallel the moon, shins counting logs,
A grace of grass against the surplus boot
That whispers self against the bursting frogs,
Exploding wings, and the cajoling hoot,
To touch the core that compasses this trek,
The reference of sense strewn spastic, guy
Against unamiable sway and beck
Of images composed with either eye :
You are the scent of smoke toward which I vault
Through woodland overtreed and denizened
To tell the hearth-stone, cherry in the malt,
Emplaced at outset to preserve the end,
One proof against caprice and charming elf
In being first the hearthstone of yourself.
57
The scherzo dulls before the record's run
But half its rainbow past the diamond head;
I will not fly the wish, shoot flies instead
And jump the grooves of duty and the gun,
But cannot jump the sword, that unbegun
With waiting for your princess to behead
The fondled edge with purpose, A to Zed,
And issue both the virgin and the Hun.
Never the vets, but newsreel soldiers, click-
Frozen in the stride toward semi-glorious,
We hand-in-hand until, the goal before us,
Such anticipation crowds the clock
The jangled beats won't sweeten into chorus
Because our bull will not come to full cock.
58
Some time now into this work-curdling love
Begun almost by chance (though you did not
Bar genuflection) : such a gentle shove
Sent fingers stumbling to their keys, and hot.
Some little time since your smooth polyglot
Of shifting textures tutored at my hand,
Grape-turgid, bursting, eager to besot
That dietary, gnarled appendage (bland
By habit if not choice). Even the sand
Was loth to leave you when you left the beach:
A sharkskinned nibbler took my arm to stand
And left our bodies lying, each to each,
But how blame afterimage after all,
If bodies get the whole world in a ball?
59
Calculating stars, contested time
To fly by that same pressure at the breast
That bids the lips kiss one admitted guest
Than kiss the numbers from their random rime,
I strain to the compression of a prime
That made me a provincial /beau geste/,
And quite, quite mad, but only north northwest
And brought bent purpose your surprise of lime.
A wirehandled plane, day circles earth
To fall where it began a model flight,
Still tethered like a buzzard at a birth
Whose cord's the limit of its appetite.
Resmoke your sextant when you measure worth:
The day may be our length. We are its height.
60
Should that bronze bosom know it's beautiful,
Or that pretender feel that he is king,
Except the one observe me dutiful
And either quiver as I pluck and sing?
All gold is mud until one strike a ring
And every structure but a pile of sand
Until the rebar and the scaffold sting
And recoil make a hooker of the hand,
But what you see is less than was planned,
For grasping at the object shortens reach.
It is the mother proves the child demand,
But it is not the student proves I teach;
Let lawyers wallow in my careful height,
And as for you, be still -- and let me write.
61
The woodpile simmers in the fouriers
Of painted ice their candles have deferred
From pumpkins, grinning failure to amaze
The children years of candy have inured,
But, piled behind the trigger of a word
That crawls like green mold through the mayonnaise
Your absence darkens earlier a third
A world that wobbles from the paraphrase
Our minute hands behead with moulinets
To limp toward winter under standard time,
And life leaks through the chatter of the chaise
That putters pretense of the man that I'm
That had, face up beneath your noonward height
Dispelled Orion's skirmish with the night.
62
Not that our slug will shrink within its husk,
Slip vision as slow playtime slips a boy
While you lapse sleepy, nodding toward your dusk
With less joy than with images of joy;
What sorrows sharpen in our mill and thresh
While age blunts pleasure, age cannot misplace.
Not convolution of the cooling flesh
Denudes more surface to a stinging race
Gashed ashen features to essential rage :
That all that heat must lapse to tepid norm
Is energy of living, not mere age,
A coal-cored tempest, cooling into form.
It is but that whose sense of alamode
Would let a living blowtorch warm a toad.
63
The hawk glare glazed as sleep dissolved esteem
Quit of its sight and postured as the frog;
The low sow grunted, nuzzling a dream
And dog cursed dog and resonance of dog.
Night woke to all its dull accustomedness
To sanction darkness; over all the sky
One shade of shadow settled to redress
The rigorous necessity of eye.
Two things alone are worthy of recall :
The single candle keeping back the glass;
Your face. Two coals described a lazy scrawl
As you became a mountain to my palm,
Nor I make boast of any better thing
Than finding there a song I did not sing.
64
No, no, no, no love?
Why should the knotted worm, the doubled flies,
The drooling mongrel and the bitch be warm;
Why men the gloating ministers despise
Raise arms to make the least of couples norm
Or brag of boys that brag how well they feel
Provided that the thing is vermiform?
How know that sensible warm swell who steal
The swell from rigor with their spastic digs
That long-kept value quail, repeal
The careful heart to shudder flanks of pigs
That prides of pimps serve up our Visigoth?
"Know, know, know, know Love!"
And so I knew -- but never reckoned sloth.
65
With "Sumer cumen in," your throat turned chill
And harsh-scaled in the clutch of viral thaws,
Reminder of the voice of one who still
Remains in thought, but speaks to give me pause.
Then I was choked by acquisition's flaws :
Bright gifts are easier than turbid art,
And pillage simpler, still, the marble straws
The Seven Hills that conquered only part.
Yet I will not pursue a spastic start
But blame the earpiece, microphone, or virus
For grave chill, that takes the private mart
With spoil, when those often loved will wire us;
So I am dumb; and I will not lax dumber
And argue with the plentitude of Sumer.
66
The mailbox stands, a birdbombed sentry, bent
To wait delayed arrivals in the rain
Unmercenised, while hope still mutters, "Lent,"
Though it's July, and never was germane.
Still though the void and airy atoms dance
Poor sustenance, that leaves a hollow shell,
It thus sustains a ringing resonance
Of any voice it does not know so well.
So does my current hunger flesh my strength
By making sentry's sense of that which hides,
Is apprehended, challenged, and at length
Is recognised, and recognised resides,
That I'll make no sot sentry raise a stink
Nor you dilute your vision wasting ink.
67
As humming numbers tumble into racket,
The wind's word furled and gathered weight to cramp
A skirl of lace escaping from her jacket,
A lady bug comes tromping on my lamp.
Such interim conscripted, vapid vamp,
Convex enigma, concentrated weight
Of dome and dare descends from trill to tramp
Assault on lines that less than lilt this late.
Shazam whatever prosecution state,
The orchids of your wings will say their say:
Protrudes between the bonehulled husk this spate
Of flight's own fans, anticipating day,
When yet you'll leap, and yet weight twice abhor
The freedom in that flight weight mock you for.
68
Still slow to smell the smelt and slow to sky,
And slower still to any /savoir faire/,
To any balance nothing but the tare
And deadweight to our /gaudeamus/ : I.
What fist of feathers, combing through the wry
With shag legs trailing and the choler spare,
The paper airplane's turgid luminaire,
Compass the genesis of things that fly?
Yet all the ancient weights of love are truer
Your tumble come to palm or midnight strophe;
The laugh lasts laughter, Eros is more Cupid
When you're in the blue your flight makes bluer.
Flight dared to fletch, I dare to scratch this trophy :
Love being lover, stupid is more stupid.
69
The tetrads quiver spruce and nuance by nuance
Turn formula to dance; these four drawn arms
Coax force to song and resonance to force
The rhetoric of rosin from the forms
Whose trace in time is tune that time will trace
In the loosed substance of forgotten thought
That wakes from wheat and tastes its waking false,
That mind that sing become the mind song write.
And four arms draw this movement face to face,
Astride the concert that the art invite,
The song cohabit flesh, the being course
Whatever life the careful scoring caught,
And turn again to atmospheric fluff
To be redrawn if we were good enough.
70
They hope that it will turn your salt to salt
Who numb your course with numbers; others gnaw
That let resentment let the common law
Lick empty envelopes to name your fault,
And multiplying iamb by penult
To fly confetti in that williwaw
Commands no prejudice and fails to draw
Low views through their recombinant Foucault,
So when the whicker of your engine rolls
About these wind-Octobered walls and spooked
By scribblings of outwintered mice and moles,
Then I who have been candled, belled, and booked,
Am that more certain than these evening coals
That I'll abide your quibble --
Lot's wife looked.
71
Because the pipes leap up, the people thought
They stole their thunder from the mouths of gods
Whether that humbling Brook had thought or not
How notes were wrought from steel, and steel from clods.
These tones were wrung of numbers more than notes.
So, too, the duo stark in white and black
That stands each to the each as promise floats
Imposed of tone past candle, bell, and book,
Compose an interval against the rest
Held silent by their organ, stones, and awe,
Who, having bowed the heads the others blessed,
May draw whatever notes they see to draw,
While excommunicate of common gods,
Two pull these stops against the claims of clods.
72
This infernal thighangle of hope
That sets my pitch apitch; that jollies night
And slights of fear to calliope
The fair to ordinaries, and the right;
That lets me lay the hesitant for might
And giddiness, the wish to love induce
Those layered lauds or lows of faltered flight;
This fools. This fools. Desire is mean excuse
To maul the mooneyed munchings of a moose
With counterpoint beyond its tune, to gall
With want that waits contralto of a goose,
Or carry back their summer in a ball.
Then let the specter of its passing pine
For those who fear their joy.
I shall sing mine.
73
What you have done is done. It is a trick
Of ways of was continued into might
Dis-still the soul, forbid it to alight
In any joy less than the final pick
Of prodded schemes, wail the imagined brick
Gone stray from or forbid the perfect height
Set on a hill to stay the common night.
Nor are you its window's ending wick.
Be then a stately hovel, O my soul :
Love fire and ice, but care to keep the coal.
You are the sum your sorrows seek to rend,
That cry that any brick is not the whole :
Part hearth, part fire, and part the welcomed friend;
A place that is, and does not wait to end.
74
Oh friend of this, our distance into time,
Still friend amid that carnival of fear
That substitutes for goal a length of clime,
Swell in your breath the world, and hold it dear.
Nor in that rush to make another's thrall
Let loose yourself, that joy become the huff
From gate to gate, from ordered start to stall
And strangers' locks. Once won is proof enough.
The apple, or the ridge of yonder range
Are in themselves yourself, or means to be,
Were once the strange, now means to breathe the strange
As morning clover, not the keeper's tea.
If trails should offer carrots or a clue
And you should find them out, by all means, do.
75
Were all my senses stupid as the snail
To give me but the clabber of a thing :
Four tastes, a smear of smell, and whether mail
That bruise or bruise, or sister flesh to sing;
Were any pudding colored by the plum
As much as perfumed, and the thread of such
As I exude behind to wake from dumb
And cry me brother to my bumbling touch
But only this, but this, and there were more
By leaves to springs in ways to stripe my prime
On this bright stem than stem enough to score
All ways upon that venture into rime.
Then in your other love you halve my haste
And in two lips bring twice my prime to taste.
76
The corpse will not lie still. It flows between
The sometime prison of the failing bones,
Dilutes with rain and chemicals; unseen
It tints the wind and undersides of stones.
Becoming leaves of lilac, waves of corn,
It finishes a figure, seeks advance;
And reared in praise, or only to adorn,
It is a dancer, making out a dance.
Glory of movement, death of being still,
The dance or dungeon is the only dole;
Tripped from life to struggle up from swill
That, cursed with stillness, builds another role,
And, dancing, knows each strange, slow dance to be
Its own sweet reason for the dance to be.
77
And how the savage God recedes
Before the microscope and coil,
To hide behind a string of beads
And leave his tribe with holy toil.
The heretic gives sacred oil
To entrails of a strange device
Whose heresy it is to spoil
The proper faith, as well as nice;
Delivers mountains in a trice
And turns the desert into green.
Too little joy, too high a price :
The unseen must remain unseen
Or else the faithful must perspire
To make the heaven they admire.
78
Just like my beard, this memory of you,
Or I'd be shut of both; to say, "begone,"
And stubble the sink with detritus of dawn
Demands time, digging, and a broader view
Than I'm afforded. Anaesthetic, too --
The eager edge, misguided by a yawn
Slices my roughs, and ready blood is drawn
Too forth. And there are better things to do.
Especially as this cutting comes undone
(Ha) overnight. And even overday
The stubble spears my neck like apple rind
Blooded with sunshine. Better this than none,
This manageable brush; and give you stray
To second-growth my thoughts, if we've a mind.
79
Shall I breed lilacs in an empty truce
Or leave the overwhelming bloom for gall
Of glove and scabbard, and the sounding spruce
Nothing but the yelping of the /salle/?
The nectardrunkenness that tastes of things
To spit the pips precisely where they land
Does not leave pollen to the want of wings
Though backyards bear the bark of the Garand.
The difficulty in these paradigms
Buonarotti saw as still as stone,
And gave the god those overbearing limbs
To lift the grape, though tired to the bone
With those who pray that heaven seek to please,
And sit to curse the garden, meat, and cheese.
80
And spring cajole the lilac's colored stuff
To wake from physics to the garden tea,
Why shall it scribble fancy on the cuff,
Denying salt to stupefy the sea?
How often will the often reborn breath
Cooped stupid in the cells come forth but clone
Recruited into cribbing shibboleth,
Pretend in clay what stays already stone
At last to groom its evitable grief?
There is more blood in coleus than these;
More breathing in the bottom of a leaf
Than reeks from this inanimated wheeze
That laboring for invention rears amiss
From every compost of a former kiss.
81
I do not need to look at you to see you,
To see your words to say that I must say;
A prairie and a mountain range away
I need not wear your arms or friends to be you;
The toil and song that answer here to me, you
Know in delight, and know again by day;
Then, seeing that this will, that other may,
You seek to see still others, that might free you.
The water is that running is a brook
And still is ice and scented is the sea,
Or to your quiet running or your book
The water comes, and sometimes comes to be
A lilac, or a thing that thinks to look
That beauty is, but is but you and me.
82
Worms and weeds do not, I think, give thanks.
They suck the ground, but do not taste the dirt,
Or think to thrust the earth between their flanks,
But take no pleasure, never daring hurt.
Their plodding speed blitzes what none contest
But not to ruin or to grandeur; quickly
The loan of last year's labors slowly pressed
From sun stands forth again, not thickly
And not to fruit, but still to stand or crawl
Not very far. Life green by chance and browned
By other chance is given spring to fall
When ground is pulled from weed, or weed from ground.
Then how does lilac answer with such bloom,
Whose pillaged armloads decorate my room?
83
Gather the flakes of bees, the motley earth,
The severed lives of silk and year of girl
That flush our variegated day of her
And we will make a locket against wrath.
Then stone defend the sting of us from us
And steel and the sterile earth bulk from the wreath
All our careful keeping of this past
When blood in passing shook the passing heart.
Let no man see that passing of the sun
From mouth to mouth, and if any learn
What arabesques the dervish dust attain
In his long crawl to dancing, tell him none,
Or what rest have the staggered, gravid soul,
The kiss of rain awake the petiole?
84
The words and wires both dangle, and I lose
What little sentence I proposed these bits
In snarls of colored words and ulnar fits.
Electrons, or our meanings' quick-breathed thews,
They ought to go through PNP's in queues,
But, giggling from nits to light and back to nits,
Estrange Marconi's more sedate "dah-dit"s
For these conversions, stranger than the Jews'.
Shall I make light of such a store of arts
As mind last took and laid, and having care
Leave lay to woo to unity the parts
Of such as squeak of fissiles for their chair?
My lilac love, at least, will never go
Rattling the tins of dons, that moves this slow.
85
The tungsten stutters, and the building shakes
But here's no apparition; if you turned
Against your pillow or your dream of lakes
And midnights when pine sparked while minutes burned
To take my hand and hurry up my stairs,
An empty sheet is all your present now,
Even as mine; those tremors but the airs
Put on by earth that knows forever how
But, shy our purpose, lifts the tops of hills
With a hot heat to see if rocks will dance
In our bones' absence, if the empty fills
Or full pours out. In our most awesome glance
Is the mere hope of certain movement, but
Whatever the world for 'how' we still know 'what.'
86
I should not ever let these pines pitch woo
In hamlets of the shelf, nor specied chase
Bribe off my Cyrano, as yeomen do;
Should sweet my breath to Eddy in your face
Instead of licking at the stamps between :
Your least drawn breath smells corporated labor,
Not mutual, but snuffing at the scene;
A prodigal whose pencil weighs a caber
For Bifrost; heaven made of overfond
Subliteracy with a careful seam;
A cottage curd aged but a bit beyond
That every man's high sentence starts a scream.
Yet will the honeyed monuments incline
That stole my dear, for I will steal their line.
87
When hands acquire the curl of easy tools
And wonder dulls in mantras of old psalms
Come the voices of the surging schools
Whose rush falls to the upturned ears like alms.
They sing of flying; could they sing of less
Who have had flight? And if they foot the earth
When they let go the wind to walk this press,
Is not their air implicit in their dearth?
A phrase falls from the sky. The words of air;
The noise that when it yawps and whistles, sings;
The magic words. The words that say, "Up There."
And whistle of a background noise of wings.
Then squawk the wind's word : this will lure the goose.
We'll not let flight let out that we're not loose.
88
Shall I derange my fifteen wits for you
And hide in concert what you will not hear
Outright? Or help you to pretend the glue
Lets you pretend no synthesis but fear,
And so arrange contraption in the clear
That music mums the harping of its parts
As scrolls excuse the tenor of the gear
That picks these scales alilt to weight our hearts?
And wish pure implication of your starts,
Nor cant nor quaver, but the dream of rage :
Byzantium grumbles through your partied arts,
Apotheoses head, but sunders parts :
Eternal youth, Atlantic geriphage
No cirsumstance assembles into age.
89
Much have I travelled where the realms were sold
And many fettered homes and gardens seen,
The figures of great men all growing green,
Streaked with the young, their elders merely old.
The timid gather into noise; the bold
In ancient armours with a greater lien
On empty children than the fighting spleen
Knew in their fathers, fiddled with and foaled
In prim, precocious want of being it.
Now stout Cortez goes by ordered plane
To slit those bellies poorly armed again
While mothers pray they are not seeing it!
Oh, for a draught of that most civil sonnet
Whose mother said,
"Come with your shield, or on it!"
90
Being out of season with the tone of youth
And green before accomplishment of age,
Cursing small facts less succulent than truth
Bought by decripitudes, a kind of rage
Takes all and over; like a bumble bee
Banging anthers, I take up the rub
Of morsel against morsel, trying not to be
Stupid at hectares. Here and here's a nub
Of what the honey is; let the sweet sun
Further the rest. Let hornets build them fresh
And out of kilter, and the same old dun;
Somewhere's a hollow structure begging flesh,
Its comb whatever flake by flake will grow,
And built to living, not to leave it show.
91
A sense of ocean rolls across this plain
Even in the choke of August dust :
Here we would breathe water after rain
But for a lunar shrugging of the crust.
And so it is, though rooted by our trust
In sudden April's accident of bloom
Between one season with our minute thrust
From either cruelty of living room,
We'll not lie quiet under that perfume,
Nor rigidly allow the common law
Consumption that tells lovers to resume
The /droit du seigneur/ of the williwaw,
But, waking from another sediment
Weight out the strata that the rest invent.
92
This cat knows meditation. Maybe you
Are what he muses with his eyes half shut
And lazing at his nose (our world's whole hue,
Your ministry of hands); perhaps the mutt
Most recently offensive, or the thought
That there is yet the lingering of mouse
Beside a certain board, and that he ought
Maintain tom-satisfaction in this house.
And ours in him. Perhaps. And now /t'ai ch'i,/
The world expelled to pull each limb in place,
Assume the Nine Short Forms, inspect the /ghi,/
And then to the arrangement of the face.
All grace and power harbour in that ease,
Meticulously fattening on fleas!
93
Soft pad the slitted eyes of hungry thought
Through all the rustling detritus of mind :
But reason, like the waiting cat, has caught
But only what was there for it to find.
To pounce a rustling leaf, may catch the wind
At work within the plumbing of a leaf
Or littering the mouth, the breath amend
All hopes with simple sight, or let belief
Stroll the cathedral of this Fall, no grief
Parade its pennants to a bruised desire.
Comes to the waiting ear the wind's own laugh
And heated hints, the promise and the dare
Delivered with one voice, the chance
To dance the only dance there is to dance.
94
A cup you touched and tippled, I put out,
For what's a cup but lately touched? Not touch.
Not even staple drunk. Indeed, not much.
What touch and sip become, are what's about.
That you will drink again is not to pout,
Becoming more than was, for was is clutch,
And sip that will not take another such
Is thirst, and like the empty cup, is doubt.
Then put it from your pantry with the press
Of else that aged the giddy joy of self
In these disposable containers; do
From silver what we learned to do from glass
And keep the being fuller than the shelf
With what remains : the recipe of you.
95
For god's sake, hold your tone and let me sing!
For should, accusing love, you choose to kill
The thing you choose, with second to the skill,
You've chosen choosing absence of the thing
That would have brought you all it was to bring
But that you willed it execute its will
By burying what lives, and buried fill
The past, not heart nor arm, with ragged ring.
Then let the dead past have its dead, but know
That steel rings steel and parries flesh the arm,
That mind kiss pencil, lip kiss lip as warm
As love kissed love in any age ago :
Or choose another, yet until you prove
Your love with choosing this, none ever love.
96
Not poems, nor the promises of gods
Shall last beyond the intimates of love :
If flies still snuffle fragrances of clods,
Bees busy cosmos, or awed students prove
Identities of stars; if silver crawl
Dendritic like a snowflake through a stone
Or iron like dawn turn blue to write that all
Is still as all, shall love be left alone?
Then do not want an ending, but to do
That straining of a stride and stretch of thought
That every lover that preceded you
Lavished on large world, until had caught
Beyond the love, the being of all one
That is the same since loving was begun.
97
Of all the beings each may choose to hope
Through age on age and skill on skill in time,
Achieving this man's art or woman's scope,
Not one will fill inflated faults of rime;
Nor even ten. And slow though numbers creep
That tell our sentence toward our end of when,
We know not what we'll see before we sleep
Nor how much alter that we'll love again.
And play the puss or stalk it as the cat;
Rehearse the morsel or the alien street,
Ears aching with the suddenness of that
Which is to happen, semitense to greet
The shadow or the shattering of the fur,
Still, still, the step, the wonder, and the purr.
98
The word for sword is foil, and the ring
Of guard on guard, and attitudes of blade
Are hues of war; yet only steel's deep sting
Will ever show particulars of shade.
The word for wing is number, and so light
Balanced with engines, rivets, and the maul;
Is even lighter than the fault of flight
Whose height we stomach at a heavy crawl.
And let us try the word for love, that touch
That cannot tell caresser from carressed :
Past attitude, or war, or math, how much
One ever read of other lovers' best
Or practiced for the dropping of the glove,
Still steals that touch :
the word for love is love.
99
Though now this word, being sung, is being lost
And the bones divided with the land,
Cage filled with clay that snuffed your mantle
Still, lilac will out wit this stupid frost,
Breathing where word has failed and fear has cost
Heaven; and though the lay of bone to gladness
Has its need of something like your dance
To teach it chirp, breed epic in a boast;
And though the mouth forget the voice taste breath
With every taking of the toast and milk,
The arm mum tone whose flesh was twice the word
And eyes wince words to preference for broth,
Yet will word kiss word in the tubered dark
Until the bone course forth. Song will be heard.
100
What is there can love that cannot kill
Part, cut by sabre or the edge of speech
Afraid to wound the hope admit the ill
Or kiss hope while the love drain with the leech?
What draw the union that the green shall grin
And feed an emptiness the heart's own oil
That purpose stagger out the bared chalk's groan
The lengthening and unexampled mile?
Not I shall offer you to fears, nor ask
In tribute to my errors, they be thine :
The callus also, swordsman's utter task
In cutting evils from us, murder mine.
That map made flesh, the bone repeat from dry
Choose me its father choosing you am I.
101
There is too much and not enough of you
Demands the burden of my breathhold hours;
The figure promise half the world I woo,
The other mouth but drool that warm milk sours.
Our pretty groping of your emptiness
Still ciphers us to us with everything
Was hailed with willow while the hand grew less
From telling profits to an idol king
Whose small electors mudpie every art
Whose children cannot tolerate such sight
And ears the rushing of their telltale heart
-- "But they're just ears!" and then my age alight,
For every tale last while the fire stabs
And you but leap to lick your mother's scabs.
102
You who pulled our salt surge to yourself
To lie a beached fish lolled by small sensation
Quickly borne and quicker doffed as chaff,
From seed to sewer but a shower, creation
And the reek of love tossed with the towels,
Ate with your other mouth to spit us out,
Digestion bypassed, tremble at the trowel's
Lewd tuck and kiss yet plain of boredom, pout,
Deny Elias to the grinding guns,
Mew hull and trysail tautened by the storm
While lanyards molder in corroded runs,
Your mutiny outeaten by a worm.
You'll stay no passing object but a wake
Whose trouble swells the course the captain take.
103
How in and out about where there's a garden
Or even an excuse, the daubers go :
Shillelagh shapes, these bumper stickers pardon
The past's tense "flee" with conjugated "flow."
Not since you sipped my lamplight has the wheat
Made twentywitted marrow of the churl
Who breaks his biscuit in the judgment seat
And offers half to vacuum grieved of girl.
Even the toadstool tunnels to the sun
And worms go flying when the robin blabs;
The stone keep nothing from the urge to fun :
One insult -- cornfed Monte Crisco stabs.
Love crawls all animals, rewrites all men
While you play 'possum in your little pen.
104
Momentous thing this dying is; mischance,
Or wilful negligence that brings a man
To vacancies where elders fell from dance,
Bring him again to self : where he began
Is momently the measure of his span.
The web of word, the careful having seen
Turn not so much to dissolution than
To having slipped below a certain mean
Of staying coherent, to a pure serene
Of slumber after daring giddiness; mere spate
Not period. We wake to a strange scene,
And having lost all words and wit. And late.
And death's no door to this saloon, but hinge
That swats the wondering drunk back to his binge.
105
If we had world enough, and time,
It were uncriminal to trace
The each slow minute of your face
And every lineage of our form
Could figure us in want of shame
And end an envy of its course
In every pleasure's lazy vice
And ending be its only crime.
But all we are not ending, such
Are near ahead as always were
And though the being them is sure
The mystery is ever which
In unbecoming them, will sue
The want of us from me and you.
106
Issues from this gruel the simple soul
And reels to being flavors, or the sauce
Of some slight oscillation of the foal,
And now in liquid stillness, now in toss
Becomes the giddy slide of swallow, green
And caterpillar ripple to a moth,
The flit of flight the secret in the broth.
Figure on figure, stance on stance become
The liquid slide of act on act, a grace
In being is compounding its next sum,
This lonely multitude in consort trace
Another rime of names, and as that moves
Identifies itself, and finding loves.
107
It's the /panache/ stands up to dance and still
Or dancing makes itself a haste in those
Who will not stretch beyond their pains to skill
That dress the flesh to dance instead of pose,
But foodstuff to the gratitudes of flesh
That otherwise parade its hopes in raw
Wounds that the appointed boots keep fresh
That appetite might benefit from awe.
But dance love only dance the love refute
The hostage second heart, deny the edge
The yielding parry of an absolute,
To let their pose hello the fondled Judge
Whose god he is, for he will tell them they
May dance on whom they will, and need not pay.
108
Neither grief nor gratitude for grief
Will ever tell beyond the ticking heart
What finally close the playpen of belief
Away with the trod words, the voice come art :
Killing, my dear, is not compulsory,
Nor stabling the pale steed to save the sword
Some days of travel, titillating worry,
Or sifting treason from a common word :
When in the course of human being the steel
Be attitude absolving din come tax,
Long prayers and bingo wear the pious wheel,
And wives and daughters polish up their backs
That men must bleed to do their job at all,
Tie up the sword : the horse will bolt the stall.
109
Two seasons wake in reaching for their term
And one in groping finds itself a treat
Beyond its own control, the dainty form
Twitch-bested, dottle-dented to the meat
By joy's own jolt : exhuberance of arm
Exceeds the reach of reason for the tone
That it would have and hold, and hold from harm,
And holding, pops the ice cream from the cone.
Then season solves finesse, and reaching finds
Muhammed hands made tough by molehills touch
You shorter than desire : the bellguard blinds
The compensated arm its parry binds.
When will your reaching after mountains touch
These harp-strapped hands that love to pick too much?
110
Not since strewn Miletus has time thumb
Tamed soul's quick spider to the working rage;
The shroud shrugged fall, neat Euridie stands dumb
At having climbed the miracle of age
To wake to will an empire from a cage,
Whose cooled cavort the hovel of the part
That cavil height, the civil sea's green sludge
Creep carpets in the valleys' flood, your art
But grope a graveyard in the gibbon heart
That, left to the gamble groom of the dream's dram
Drown, drawn in dabs from whom the old tort blurt
And shrug the stone to toll the long pram tomb.
All strains hurled sloven, yet the rose retort,
The slow tale love to shame the random term.
111
Something there is that does not love to sleep,
That swells the lilac when the color's done;
That hurls the salmon streamward, stirs the sheep,
And sends the glacier rushing to the sun.
And /tout en l'air/ the music and the seed
That skirl the August sky while crickets call
Agree that something is, and has agreed
That there will still be crickets, after all.
And if a thing so small can be so sure
That it will clatter at my hearth, can you
With your superior schooling so demur
From anything a cricket's certain to?
It is but April cruel that you must bet
That you are you, and have not learned it yet.
112
Shall those bleat blessing on the repast past
Whose stone sting seconds the surprise your flower
Touch from the march of molecule to blast
In the red-tubed palm? The worm dream power
That pass beatitudes of stride to cower
If wind's twerp cheep its platitude to plain
And nod the seed slid soak the sacred hour
The crop's crude bigamy beget the crane.
The sail soul silt the brindled salt, refrain
The simple stone from monuments of sight
As lilac drink the dram, the leaves' seive strain
The sham scum its simplicity of light,
That lord laud table whose contempt of stone
Recycle singing from the time-doomed bone.
113
Like lilac, you transform my common quartz
When to the midnight of my knotted fist
Come humming as spring plum swells timid snorts
To kiss my blarney stone to amethyst.
And I will sing, not cry, you take world's wrist
Though tonsure jerk the sheet; the crumpled ball
Of tangled tongues foregathered at the grist
Growls forth from faith to mumble at the wall
Without your with. Though through the song the all
Is less than cosmic, still the lilting map
Makes short the trip the peeping soul must crawl
That it would leave behind the numbing lap,
And if our separation must be long,
It's all that ever stretches out a song.
114
"If we could glue the leaves on trees," he said,
"We'd never have to rake," and I agreed.
And said, he tweaked his pruning shears to speed.
Not having clever proverbs, leaves, instead,
I bowed to where the subject problem spread
Before the bag, and brushed and pushed and kneed
Another year to promises of seed
The cautious crow already upped and fled.
A penny for the guy. And one for those
Whose love is for the lilac of the year,
Before the daily detritus has strawn
Conditions on the carpet of the lawn :
I'll take October, that the shaking shear
The dross of days from everything that grows.
115
Everywhere one sits there are the stones
And every stone the record of some say,
The scratch of some soft thing that wrote its day
With its own nose, and did not burden brains
To learn the lurch of dicing with its bones
To leave what cuneiform they've learned to clay
That stutters softly in the slowing gray
At those who dare the terrors of old runes.
And creak the chalk or rub the verdigris
There is no record of postnatal pout
Until our literacy manage this
Slow waking to identities of doubt;
But split the pen or split the chrysalis,
The same wings beat the air to finding out.
116
Though all our surface stutter into war
And wake climb wake to aggravate their end
Nor any alter any washed ashore,
The lake abide though all the water rend
From every devil wanting dividend :
Let witling nature, jealous of the deep,
Amaze itself with mayflies, to attend
What grasp an hour and gasp itself to sleep
Nor let to any better comfort keep
Whatever will the waning day asail
Than something that some rotting poet peep
Between our yellings of the Beaufort Scale
And all our rush from spring to neap, and yet
I wit our water wot the what it wet.
117
Cold in the earth the love of song lies deaf
But not that clay has stopped the ears from praise;
The blood is more red than the frostbit leaf
Whose halleluia counts a single craze.
I am not crazy at a love or song
For neither name the autumn at a blush;
Leaves' works are short, but that of trees is long,
And slower than the thrushsong is the thrush.
Though thick with earth, the blood grows red that dare
The breath, this lone profession of all bloods,
And deeper breathe the more the breath grow rare,
And soar this heaven held between the floods
Who dare the curse of Pharaohs to exhume
Disordered papers from a dusty room.
118
Like as this tingling bearing tell the forge
And flows of heat and skitter of the stone,
And tell ahead the hurtling engine's surge,
The course converge into this metrophone.
It was your ear that taught the tendon sing
And iron heed iron that nurture at a thought;
That concert clearest at your vanishing
Though what remain is but the shape we sought,
A matter of possession laughs the lost
And might have been can still and still become
In quiet forgings of the dear possessed,
And breathing stars beget more radium :
For all the world's a forge for steel to sing
And life's not pattern but a patterning.
119
A little while, and there were the words.
And the words released the bounded tongue
To drag the brain by lesser roots along,
Far where atoms made no mode to bide.
There in the dark the soul shall never brood
The tongue attest the often-tasted slang
Born and watered of the minor tang,
The long sobs of fall the dying never dared.
Be moderate, you gods, in what you bear
For this brat image of your aching selves
And bastard murmur of the playpen floor :
The stupid meat is what the torture saves
For laws are learned out of the root despair
And love alone because the soul still raves.
120
There is no telling : you will have the poem
Denuded for the tipple of its lips
Like orchids stripped of flowersweat and phloem
To nestle on the clamor of your tips
But well above the cloth. The dancer slips
From slick to slick the whole whose handling puts
No fingerprint, whose slipper never trips
Your primer pattern with a turn that boots
The guts of troth, parading empty suits
To while the music last, and lasts the while.
And after the flowered word, the word for fruits.
The word for admiration. Word for smile.
It will, by god, from Hades, though it trips :
Nor fake my countenance by reading lips!
121
Still and still you bicker of assault,
Who squander stillness that its stealth abrades
Your own unfashioned substance, and its shades
Displace your lesser stuff and storm your fault.
High sentence ringing in an empty vault
Behind the willow, epitaph parades
Its preexcuse for fading out -- and fades,
Its only port proposing that it halt.
And still and still you arrogate that calm
By which the tones of concert still them out
Of random strains assorted by the palm
Is but the silent litany of doubt :
A train of bridal tombstones sworn to qualm
The still and still, and still and still you pout.
122
You all chameleon and dimpled Grail,
You /are/ a chalice of most simpled rim :
Warmed of the lips of commons warmed by him
The hostage love bespeak. The ceased heart hail
That what cannot be sung succumb to Braille,
That willowed Orpheus, the threats of Pym,
And intonations of the Madame Mim
Cannot entice the student stroke to fail :
How supple is the willing novice lip
That kiss the sustenance and kiss the sweet
And kiss as well the place the two lips meet,
That though the Master lover age, and trip,
And stall from station in a single slip,
Still, Grail form novice, and the lover beat!
123
Lilac, you, whose death from frost forebodes
The April prank of yet another death
And knowing still rehearse the early modes
And pentatones that modulate the breath
From shriek to lilac in a season, hold
In your least crotchet the true cruelty
Of giving over to the threat of mold
That power to sing, your awesome fealty.
For everything that sings yet louder sings
Of every tatter in its rise to grace :
And ears must hear : it is the song that flings
The roar of triumph from the tattered face.
Then pay less heed to that I wear that thing :
The victory I sing is that I sing.
124
The chestnut alters shadows and the bats
Stream from the cavern on the moon away;
And there the tick of nothing moved, great cats'
Digestive musks, the rattler's question -- nay,
Those have the ancient rectitude about them;
Those all belong, and still to them their law.
And age alone records it be without them,
Nor bone nor film of ash remain to draw.
It was their winter kept them warm; their play
Filled aching hollows of the skull with time
And the wind's word; and never any day
But word made flesh and raised the flesh to crime.
And glee possess these empty girls and boys
Who then possessed the glee, and who the noise?
125
What caverns have we clambered in our climb
From rotifer to Rotary! Allow,
For cavern-crawling writes more human rime
By days to eons else we took the plow,
That Wilderness were Paradise enow,
We score all progress toward the Loaf and Jug
And still more stately mansions. At the brow
We strain, yet if there is a hug
From any Book of Verses, the least tug
Drops trembling Pluto in a tidy heap,
So. Give the man a totem pole to lug.
Whisper so, to make the woman weep.
And on we tripidate, the brow perspire
To worship random noises from the lyre.
126
For song will out and some where you are singing,
If noncely nowhere but my echoed skull,
The law abides and widely my upbringing
With that sweet day of you. And I am full
From wide to wide with your assured wherever,
Nor do I know, nor even need to know
If you're away, or yesterday, or never,
For that the fallen seed constrains to grow.
The turning of the corner or the clock
Bring you to mind and so will bring to me
But whether to conspire or to mock
Will be what singing make itself to be,
And so the always at my back I hear
That perfect singing want the perfect ear.
127
Comes mewling in the chuckled dark this strange
And bedwhite creature I at last despise
For that it will not listen at its eyes
As robin-quickly reflex made a hinge
So lower down. No. In the dark is dange-
R. Shies as struck from singing's wild surmise,
And clutches in the dance; and for replies
Goes up on lines, and argues like a sponge.
You wore your whiteness like a long white glove,
Full dressed for concert when you were most wife.
Full counterpoint your spice, you wholly clove
And at your touch the virginal got life --
Libretto is ephemeral, not false,
But now I play, while you play someone else.
128
For every course at least four times the sky
Bespeaks us on and smirks our smaller clocks.
More this we fear for those that learn our fox --
Child, student, most especial my --
That often love is more impressed by spry
Adjusting play and nursing paradox
Than by the fitting of the feet to blocks
And way to compass for the hungry I.
That is no country for old men. Its crown
Is thorn to rote-soothed foreheads, and the gall
Of fearing for one's lover since one's death
Forces from the heaven of the brown
The cruelty of green, that makes us all
Spit on the clay, who breathe the ancient breath.
129
So "God is dead," now, are we? That they sleep
Has ever been ingratitude to kids
Unvisited when bedcrumbs cause the peep
That lifts the light in under gummied lids.
No. Once again the several god awakes
Though well-uncoupled from the corpse, ta, ta,
To kindle lighting in the darkened jakes.
Sing "Oh, what Love"?? What necrophilia.
My one unfriendly eye gifts unicorns
On any chimney cherished by a stork;
It were more capital you cuckold Norns
Or prod a brown bear with a haying fork,
Than that you sing the seventh day to hear
And wake to climb the summit of a sphere.
130
We love the coffins, that they came to us
As sundry god assuredly did not,
Uneditored of birth, that omnibus
Baroque complagiarist of comely plot.
But whence the coffins? Hadn't polyglot
Some chapters since Creation to revise
The speaking parts so that the infant snot
Need not evade the vowels, and the eyes
Have props to pose at purpose? Wild surmise
That shamans mummied, drawing out the brains,
Still struts and frets at jackals, and mudpies
Are kept by corners from the spank of rain :
We will our voices to the very stones,
And still graffiti covers up our tones.
131
A curse of poontang on a comely course
The Vatican would fig except the phiz
To stall the student where the action is-
N't, moving Polynesian, speaking Morse,
Collecting men commended by the Bourse,
Demands responses to its pay-scaled Ms. --
Five thousand years of fevered synthesis
Should pall to Peter from the modern vers-
ion?
Paul fell blind with sight; prudent Perseus
Shined up to shield appearances to scalp
The price of foreplay; she the vorpal sword
Need never snack, swamp water well afford
Reflection quite enough for us to whelp
The peeping shibboleth /that/ preppie play us.
132
/Porgi amor/ there was when there was ear
And let him hear, albeit with machination,
Press of a supporting cast! What fear
Makes concert count the house, and estimation
Close the play to property and stage,
To strut and fret in pretty place, and suck
Evening and evening on an empty rage
At yet an empty room? Another Tuck
Will not at bottom solve the ass of brown
For that he must quit aye to quibble not
Or trouble Falstaff with the able crown
And so put out the light to keep the spot;
Nor will the shaken resume resume
Disordered papers in a dusty room.
133
Like dogs dependent on their days for cat
To tell a fight who cannot tell a marking,
And hydrants for the vincible elat
Of what still smells but is no longer barking,
The empty synapse flinches from the light
To solder cytosine to having been
What one dared not, not quite, to be despite
A chatechism warranted to win.
Out of the rootwrecked dark and ancient song
I made you this of you to make of this
A thing that made you less than made so wrong
A thing for kissing what refused the kiss,
But watch a future where I will not be,
In sleeping in the dark, you sleep with me.
134
Why should I wake to will your walk resume
Now summer has relented of /my/ limbs?
"To every thing a time." November dims,
Drives heave with ice, the shivering louts assume
The ferns' long stare at sun, and thymine's groom
Becomes a dream the stolen halberd trims
With half a year of rime the college rims
To measure out tradition with the broom.
Sleep, then, as the sunspots in a fly,
The polka-skirted hollyhock, the slap
Of bass who slop at stars; or wonder why
A sleeping cat could choose to leave a lap
When none will be the toy. But leave me dry,
I leave your leaving when I leave the map.
135
You stood so with your arms so full of bloom
That once or twice your face reflected color :
Sunlight spreading in an empty room
Is for an afternoon the lilacs' dolor.
What there was of attitudes so solar
Grew you to envy of their little day
Whose countenance you lightened into pallor,
A longer Lent inherent in your may.
No plundered armload led me lose my say,
But such a silence voice itself were numb
Lest it be clipped to clamor your bouquet
And show you voiced by singing cosmos dumb,
As those who study silence with a noise
Will ever echo empty girls and boys.
136
Long on the loon green dark of booming ice
Not thick enough to bear the trembling flesh
Hudora steels rush, throwing out a sash
Of where I've almost been, where almost cris-
Is, far from navesides waiting under rice
For their own hope to kiss the steel or crash
The party, but who have no wish to splash
Or tender stretch marks as our gambit's price.
It is the worth of daring, daring worth,
And dark has no dominion over it :
As stroke by stroke the stripe extract the fear
From ignorance, the shape of earth stand forth
And strop the straining to a perfect fit :
Who has the steel to stride it, he will hear.
137
Three years you sat and picked at your guitar
The way you picked your plate when you were three,
Refusing bits of mushroom. My. How far
You've come, babe, since I had to snip the tree
That stopped my singing to the former thee
That nakedness outstripped an age of rime,
That old enough and unlike it had made
Up your mind what not to look at. Time
Was actual and act a curse : sublime
Construction of a thing that would rejoice
Because it had had joy was only mime
And more unique the child deny joy voice.
But then you gave the failed guitar to me
And so you had to hear and I to see.
138
Now how this drafty garret of my soul
Creaks in crosswinds, sways to ruckus trains,
Accommodates the mice. Unchosen hole
From all whose holes there gibber all the brains
From maggot beyond gibbon, if I grant
That those are brains and that the vector's up;
But up it is, or curse myself to pant
And pummel no more purpose than a pup.
And let the pup his sham tongue twang the bone
Its mockery of meat, my blood gone dust
That can't bite back, it is as good as stone
For what I've mind, and unlike stone knows lust
That cannot quitclaim anyhow, or cuss
This ambling gamble, as it houses us.
139
Like rose from the stone's guts squeezed,
these human arts.
Agony, no : particular of process,
And like all process wanting all its parts
Each with its tempo. Tolerance of dross is
Small, but filtering lets total losses
Overrule the rapture with result.
Still looking only up at awesome crosses,
The pious alm becomes a formal cult
Before the stubborn child become adult
To propagate his cribsprung williwaw.
Then all swill willow else your voice insult
His army of adulterated law,
Our pied apostasy leave you alone
To cull you from the captivating stone.
140
"Combustion slides in cylinders of steel" --
No. White temper in a gnatsfart time
Slams fifty four ton carriage into wheel
And every wheel a half inch into lime;
And as they breast to purpose from the past
Their clothing wrap who fathered this event
As children press their terror of the blast,
The body hammered by its own intent.
You know nothing who've not set the bolts
In August dust or brushed the lazy snow
From boots and sighting glasses while the dolts
Slept through the morning papers' claim to know
Of "ground gained" and "democracy achieved,"
These designated victors, those bereaved.
141
As praise is water, sipping at the stones
Washed clean by constant centuries of praise
Above the treelines, ignorant of bones,
Of detritus, of dung, of ordered ways
Of coming down from mountains bound by rocks
That bound it so the last time it came down
From climbing after breaking of the locks
That bound it so to course, to dung, to down :
So would I praise, so would I wash my drouth
To sing of you, to sing you to your fears,
A mountain seepage to my blistered mouth
In whose reflection all the mountain hears,
But that the water turn the course it greet
To gather most where I have pressed my feet.
142
There is no music but the reach of arms
For enemy or friend or for what reach
For friend or arm, for music and for speech :
There is no music in the best of dreams.
And dreams are all that gurgle in the prams
And sprawl at angle on the tingled beach
With skin acream and tauter than the peach
Your borrowed noises fleshing out their proms.
What loves has aged, but age is terrible
When sweetened dreams of age that had no labor
But the dream itself parade past spring
To songs and acres less than arable
That grew some anyway : more than the sabre
Human voices wake them when they sing.
143
That sack of sea you wear : suspended dirt
So quick to temper, timid in the end
And crabby toward the wrong it would offend;
You wear your beauty like a riding quirt,
Throw vitriol no farther than your shirt,
Unable to involve what cannot mend
With any vulture as a final friend,
Because you keep no spite, but only hurt.
A pride in puissance or the gladsome gland
Is one kind sin; the other, want of pride
In ancient judgment, and that it command
Who will ignore it, not because they bid,
But that their sin condemned them to a stand
That cannot overcall the spade we did.
144
The strawn sun spalls into the yellowed rooms
And cleverly you yodel cockadoodle,
Rubbing the Lazarus the flesh assumes
With chrisoms to remove the spoor of boodle
Sunk to in the dark. And thus remiss,
Your kit replace your kiss, a daily droodle
Condescending in antithesis.
But sleep will not adept, nor custom stall
With its accumulating ambergris
The sweet that roll the world into the bawl
The reawakened is and law arraigns
Who paint their maggot with a social scrawl,
And no song salvage for the Jacks and Janes
Their ministries have mummied to the brains.
145
The lockup rattles on the forty-five
So badly mere prediction missed the mark,
And so no cartridge kissed the steel alive
And all the bull continues in the dark.
The force that through the blued steel drives the shell
Slams my green thumb; that whispers back from pines
Despoils my ear; and I am not to tell
How on the squirrel's cones the kitty dines;
But one love dead, I cannot congress those
Whose many motions property the spent
While hating language, that the tongue disclose
The flavor hidden by the argument,
So I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
To go and tell her what she thinks she knows.
146
Better to hide away what would have been
With the broad spade and let them have violets.
What quiet reading would survive the din
When children essay into triolets,
Anyway? Fold this, and let the sword rust
For you have claimed my figure with the sword
To threaten with my sword, abandoned lust
For terror leaned in papers on a board.
So would it lie but she would rather sleep
Along a callus worried by the song
Of steel that whirls to separate the sheep
By their whole hundreds into right and wrong,
And at the cling of iron proceeds to do
What you in any masque were coward to.
147
Though wrapped on air, my wrist still aims epees,
Thumb hackled back, aimed even in the dark
At something only it asserts to mark;
Calligrapher in steel, still tries a phrase
But has to target some used book displays :
The lovely feelings that the training hark
Expend all effort snickering the snark
With nothing but a lilac to amaze.
One walked so loudly some blind singer saw
Troy sparked, the ashes rise, the heroes fall --
But smash the plaster of Paris, your alto law
Dispels the curse of swelling with her gall,
For you'll not have the household common raw
So some Iphegenia keeps her doll.
148
Your to my gopher-tousled beans' bed stride
Flash photographs the what we would betime,
But faster than your thigh to thigh elide
My breath hangs up with trying to drop the dime
Before my prophet takes sweat slave, the quirk
Implicit, that it be before my crime
Against your fishing laws untimely jerk
The line away from what I'd lay fileted,
And I'll blame love, for it is lovers' perk
Allows applause before the lines are played
So long as there's no vote to swell the clout
By running trump before the ruff is laid,
And they can dream, and they can do without
Who'll venture but three days to gig a trout.
149
There is still wonder in an early chant;
And what though my guitar have lost a string
That make to play a strain? To this I cling
For every tatter in its mortal want
As far it wean me from the primer slant.
And what, years add such water to the thing
That no child practice at this parrying
For that it's insufficiently /avant/?
These shapes,
though all the arms of Thrace between us,
Or we've no arms, perhaps no will, to do,
Were still high model while the ages grew :
All arms their age denied, one plaster Venus
Beckons still to whom do not abhor
To wear arms that a man has worn before.
150
Your liquid song gone running through the soil
Of cauliflowered plots, your glad bouquet
Betrays by grace of its essential toil
That in the end the earth cannot dismay
That lot who leak into it anyway
As first excuse and last resort from harm,
Nor any elegance your time portray
Convert the church the instant quarks can charm.
"When elements to elements conform
And dust is as it should be," it will sing,
But here is that short season of a storm
That stirred the planet Ocean into spring
Whose millions rouse up long enough to peep
Resentment, set the thumb, and back to sleep.
151
How far between the stars! Nothing enough
To fall right off here; where that heavy law
Cannot remind freesailing that you saw
The end of ocean. Moon foots too much fluff
For what wish want : the troughed thought luff
Against what be, that Odysseus draw
Glands' admiration, every ship shall yaw,
For none may tack, save you afford a puff.
How far between the stars. Yet they will be,
And none will ever show the start mistook
A thousand strokes before the course began
Nor all the sweat that fathomed you and me,
And you, too, puff at oars, and with this book
At last have language without the man.
152
You are as in the park the peonies
That bear the winter sleeping under hay
Burst up from stubble in a randy splay
To bare their heads against the southern breeze
Betimes abandoned and betimes to tease
The waiting fumble, bothering the day
With randy shapes in naked ricochet
As gaily and as conscious of the bees.
And Thomas, Teddy, George and Abe revolve
The aliening stars, that lose themselves
Until the very Dipper shall dissolve
From dumping April in the petalled lake,
You will sway forth from under crowns of leaves
And men weep song with wanting you to wake.
153
Would that you, who referee these games
Were half as sempiternal as the fun,
The grammar, or the figures with Greek names!
Damn /all/ this noise of resurrection!
For if we cannot sing, we still can bitch,
And find those tones displeasing to the Hun.
If life is little but a series glitch
And death prefer the lot of them at once,
The only figure that the shroud can stitch
Is making an improvement on the dunce.
Then if I spend a lifetime from that trend,
At last I go -- for the experience --
How shall I sing the steel that sing an end
Until I have left something to append?
154
The earth rolls over as the rooster howls
And Sunday levels lovers, wives, and tarts
In commonwealth. Ablution leaves the towels
Accumulate the humble scum of arts
That rose again from that despair of Sartre's;
Mascara tremble and the comb tresspass,
God reassembles from his eval parts,
In tentative revival from morass.
And when the sermon, holding up the mass,
Proclaims a solemn high communion,
Hosannah raises palms before an ass
And absolution's lemming juices run,
The congregation lowly crawl the floor
Amewl for all the loves they were before.
155
Why have I sailed this homolytic law,
Whose waves assemble into molecules
That, molecules to foodstuff, food to maw,
The maw beget our being, and being fools?
And all that your Penelope unplight
Be learning but a hunger run amok,
And whether for the favor or the fight,
I need not tell in time to beat the clock
Of world revolution. Let it spite
Me thrice before the squeaking weathercock,
I reelect myself another term
And term alone will overcall the mock:
Wherever homostyle repeat the germ
Ulysses slips the lotos of the worm.
156
How without you have these notes been wrung,
That we arrange, eliminate or scrawl;
But it is not a dressing of a doll
My face and every sense retrace the song
Of every breath that sang, the /sturm und drang/
That words replay, nor words decay and gall :
Not only may I only here have all,
But every part where every part belong.
But then we want the perfect mood to vote
Enough we strike a song without the singer
Not to have to flee the fouled note,
Allowing raptures build on every ringer,
And this invention force the flesh keep pace
With every wrinkle in an ageless face.
157
Why do I know surprise that your avant
But step from stipulate to state and spit
For love or lucre only that it want?
Always the mouse will vote to have his teat
Between the tooth and talon under pressure,
Universe be largess of the flit
Of time that slave eternity, and, yeh, sure,
Wisdom be a sermon on Marantz,
Procession solve a sisyphus with Escher,
And litany baptize the fer-de-lance.
Let none awaken long enough to die,
For all we know is that those only dance
Who help the camel through the needle's eye
Nor suck the public spit your taste ally.
158
What foods these morsels be that fuel your flight
Around the bouncing carbon carousel
With wantonness of will, but appetite
Rehearses at you not the half so well
As when you let these elements yourself.
And even though each eager breath compel
One thousand bits of Ghibelline and Guelph
To make one voice that whisper in the ear,
And every trip that slip this river Alph
Be novel as a bubble's always sphere
And lone kaleidoscope or any kiss,
The waking love the knight but not the gear.
Then revel at the wake in solving this
That all that wake must love antithesis.
159
Too many ghosts whose only breath is mine
Have taken up my time to tell them off,
Which gave them so much plasm and design
That when I told them, all they did was scoff.
But now the salt and lemon grief of you
Have drawn the damp of the baptismal trough
To leave a more tenacious residue
Still not enough to rear your derriere;
Had lips that power, then I would wear them through.
That power is yours to wake or to impair,
And yet your sleep is half the bellyache
The shudder in the head engenders there;
It's as inspired nor half as mad as Blake
To halve my breath and keep you half awake.
160
The cornstalks cross their arms and chatter fall
Replacing crickets with the cricket's ghost,
But though your sense of debt shut up the /salle/
These Mason jars have tripled what I grossed.
If I could can the instant of the sword
To titillate the fear or taste the boast,
Such simple fare would never close Fort Ord:
The infant hand still flouts the velvet glove,
That what it got the scaffold will afford
Once more asneer at being hung above
The diligent, and shysters haul the crap
That every tyrant is composted of;
So oaks drop into scabbards, and the scrap
Still warms the swordsman for another slap.
161
As Mozart giggles through the infant noise
And sends an ancient crotchet to derange
What prose proposes, your scent redeploys
The sense the random roses would estrange.
For you the hydra homostyle exudes
These spirited half spirits in exchange,
That lick the finger pointing at the foods,
Uplift the leg to will the world a judge,
Run from the noises that defend their broods,
And think no better thing than learn a grudge.
And will my while to fashion your undress
To fish your flesh or tell your fouls or fudge
And figure at the rapier, why address
What will not learn how not to leave a mess?
162
Bury my voice and burn these pages, do
Unto all others all you think they dare
Because they dare to seem the same as you;
That bladder cauliflowers all the care
That ever kissed the sentry to Bataan,
Since it is not the smooch that starts the fair
Nor every schoolgirl gets beneath the swan.
So if the dream is all the get of that,
I'll get from you the quicker to the yawn
Within whose death you bury nothing flat,
For if my blood dilute with every dew
For I must clue the plum your photostat,
What is your profit if I plumb the clue
To so forget we wake again as you?
163
Since Charles had his hair done /a la/ Pym,
There issues from the press the simple chap
To bawl that he has seen as though the glim
Were cleverness beyond the mortal slap,
And classes vote diplomas, tout /belles-lettres/
The sucking of a soggy gingersnap.
But none who sing Planck's Consonant forget
The class of courses that of course confound
The world behind an issue bayonet :
For some there was the belling of the hound;
For most, the cat. So bet upon the fox
When common bays for boys are better found
Than speech beyond the binding of the box
They sleep at length in to perfume the phlox.
164
The air sags, clogged with gnats and natty news
Breeding deadlocks out of a live land.
Since Gettysburg is now so many years
Your owners say you are the way you planned.
A tired transistor fails; the picture blears.
Your pickets charge you are a chattel ware
But words are gray waves at the candied ears
Whose bravery is such they almost dare
Hieronymus' Garden of Delight:
Some things can leave no seeds but fancy swear
In men who have their love, but you are rite
Adonis finds too uniform to choose
Without a purgatory's hope of spite,
Nor will you end the set between the yews.
165
The belly that I tickle children kick
And speckle with the slap of scars; the clog
Of that fell fall at shoulder wears the fog
Of piebald spatters, and the spastic Shick
That shaves the dancing wax does at the nick
Of your brief candle, for an infant smog
Surrounds the lessons of the synagogue
With democrazy's rocking credo schtick.
A fire that nothing but itself can vet
By burning out, out of control or civil,
May be a beacon or a cigarette,
A book or candle in the winter hovel,
Perhaps to feed, and then or not regret,
Or be in aid of only with a shovel.
166
Why when I pick at those sweet songs of clout
Does sense retreat from sedatives of sound
And every soup-and-amble afternoon
Demand a twelvemonth that our sense be found?
If every word obliterate the moon,
A god cannot forget but only dance
The perfect figure to a perfect tune,
But perfect figure is a circumstance
That danced your scents until your sighing sylph
Became the wind with but a backward glance.
And that become a bloom that swayed at Alph,
Your apple hit my head and knocked me out,
Left my howl animal to name itself
And wake me to the calculus of doubt.
167
Like every Hydra replicate the mouth
Embracing water 'til it learn the teat,
So do the head's phones listen at the birth
Of word from darkness, stuttered dit by dit,
And in and out their little rooms we go
To taste them for their more or less askanse,
Their storeroom smells, or shadows' foal Io,
But always for another step to dance.
Red rivers rush in ears, fool Herakleitos
With sediments that map this mewling Morse,
A swirl of spit for which the god benight us
That we have waked to question at our source.
So it is good to have someone to curse.
What molecules will listen to a verse?
168
Here in the night the whirling colloseum
Swells with the return of your sad sauce;
But every Pencil Pod Black Wax museum
Is still as stringless of our ancient loss
As of appreciation of the solar stream
For none have needed learn redo the dross
Assembles into waking, waking dreams,
And clutches dreaming tighter than its booze
To hold about it when the midnight gleams
With sudden edges through the nodding yews.
We pay for birth with seeing twice released
Or resurrecting each small thing we choose,
Keeping the edge to keep the least the least,
And fitting sherds of being to our beast.
169
One night will fall the day will not refresh,
Fleshing no reflex, skin to blinding skin,
Nor stir our needles to its groovy spin
Though we will spin from here to Bangladesh.
And we not map the molecules we mesh
And leave to whirl another into kin,
The mushroom suck the salad of our sin
And swell to slip its skin around our flesh.
There is a tongue that loves that it receive
The thousand atoms every breath retreive
That Billy put the english on in ruth
For what arrives although he has to leave,
As swords resume their scabbards while the tooth
Is doomed to front the empty mouth from youth.
170
Two beecell eyeballs made of knotted laws
Concenter the remotely buzzing blot,
Push shoulder hairs to depropulse the gauze
That beat's bite lessen on the side that's caught,
The hunted be the hunt, the old husk drop,
And life that thinks it thinks chew what does not.
That thinking float as high as Ribbentrop
On boys permitted passage that they cheer
The safety of a blade without a strop,
The magic and the blade will reappear
In calibers the infant still denies
As knotted laws jerk short the wild career
And still the body swing in line with eyes
No matter that the brain has eaten, flies.
171
The shrinking woodpile, growing pile of wash,
The pablum paid with what we pinched for Glocks
To rolls of coppers in the ammo box
(To be accused of frightening the frosh) --
One of these midnights we'll revert to squash,
So drop the dropout with his paradox
That spanks the brat and never minds the Spocks:
Step off the stoop, and never mind the slosh.
Our lash is told, but never the offense,
And Chronos chews at Zeus no matter Zeus
Won't thrill the infant tongue with pious juice;
No memory of class will recompense
The memory of purpose, nor arrive at sense,
And swords know more of peace than any truce.
172
When sword-laid reflex dawdles into pains
Or rain invades the ligaments to bleach
Those prints once fast to sunlight and to speech
With wandering air suffused by lilac stains,
Nor all that ache nor any loss restrains
The wish to try new arms, that faster teach
A twitch become a leaping Koumeniche
The elders mummied, drawing out the brains,
Then you I hear, and hear my heart confess
To something I must translate, it be shriven
Of that that you would never quite possess,
No matter with what slow abandon given;
And hear the thankless crime my words must bless:
More now than us, my heart and I are riven.
173
How longer can I go on singing you
What few enough conceived beneath the swan?
Black crickets try the walls, attempt the goo
Injected to refuse that frigid Don,
And slip from sight, eschewing all disguise
To woo the tumbled crumbs our paragon
Now reassembled dares not to despise
In certitude that traded in the /salle/
On friends with the attention spans of flies.
The keeps agape, the courts decay and spall
While droves of piglets prophesy on thatch,
And should our clutter ever set, like Paul,
Your room full of the raging of our match,
What will have gathered for the flame to catch?
174
The swedesaw crowns the window, turning brown
As we swap colors that we used to sport;
Now chainsaws ride my wagon, and a frown
My face: why should the useful teeth grow short
And ours but long? Let god obey Aquinas,
Physics Holmes; Isaiah's baby court
Allow him nothing but a blanket, Linus
Holds the swagman to the billabong
And Lucy well content to come up minus.
A Pearl by any name rides the Mekong
Whoever plows and who must lie beneath,
And everything wears out except a song:
I will not paint a pastoral on teeth
That still tell trees
what swords they are to sheath.
175
How much the dark of what you fear to see
Stripes manners on your want, until a god
Grows in the place that wants your referee
To mollify a masque with a facade
That truth must taste of its benevolence
And diffidence become a promenade
That rushes breath to take its leave of sense.
I, too, can honor what does not exist,
Giving it room 'til /lebensraum/ invents
/Hitoridka/ of a pessimist,
As even you: and should you part that dower
To cozen the miswhimpered Royalist,
I leave the world I woo an antic power
That cannot cut the gardener with the flower.
176
Always your steps succumb to random rubble
Of Plutonic love, the flight to Zeus
Surtaxed by cowardice to cough up double
For the triple dog of pre-excuse.
It isn't willow, but its pious use
Is as effective as another chip
For wanting pencil cedar; burning spruce
Writes not enough to rate a paper clip.
Then all flight cancelled, you account a gyp
That none will sing another song to you
Nor fly as high despite a longer trip,
So, tired of wanting what your law eschew,
You gather rags of empire for a toff
To have my head, who cannot get it off.
177
Three diodes light, the screen declares a print,
And dots of pigment stutter out a rage
That's each itself, although the carriage sprint
Their bit parts on the fourth wall of a page.
If there is something does not love a wall,
It tumbles one so seldom that an age
Must have a major poet woe the fall
From Jericho's to keeping out a tree,
For let the dots assemble in a scrawl
That sings of their assembling you and me
They must dissemble, else they will compare.
Ah, happy wall, allows the blind to see!
Forever shall we love and love be fair
Provided none shall cut a window there!
178
What can I argue that I have not sung
(If gripe can sing outside the honkytonk)
When that demand I lead keep music hung
Beneath the frog? It needs no Captain Fonck
To riddle my doghouse days, despite the myth:
I am outflown when any heron honk
That double carrick-bend he's creatured with,
For let their term but wish them unbegun
Or suck the willow for its senseless pith,
They prey on life forever but have none
Who sleep their sun away while they embrace
The earth their fathers left, their own earth shun,
And will not see themselves fail to retrace
The song that essayed to reflect your face.
179
The thumbnails of the beans vote always down
Before they're up to thumbs, or down to earth
To press the point; always, your tiny frown
But strains the waiting soil halfway to birth.
Well, thumbnails need a strain before the lyre
Subject the gods their necessary mirth,
And strained it is. You who could inspire
With your least blush to turn our thumbs on Troy,
Berlin and Carthage, /samurai/ to fryer,
Are half again to turning soil to soy,
When all would turn for you if only you'd'a'
Tried not to compel your daring boy
Be /half fast/ -- the moon can turn to Gouda
Before /that/ finger point as far as Buddha.
180
So moot to sing of you to you, but worse
To hold touch silent else its song defray
The being who recoils from its ricochet;
The sipping whine require a universe
To write the bad time out, the good rehearse,
Still predication tricks me day by day
To taste our twain like wine, and so belay
A vintage sunspot cycles would reverse.
Nor will one coward die of this critique;
The grape still breeds the worm, and so do I.
And sloth allow their breeding to the meek
And even what is squeezed from rock will dry,
Still words stroke even silicon to speak,
And someone touch the sand that prove you lie.
181
The moving finger points, and having done
Moves on to further planets, or to scratch
The lichen from the structure of a stone
Or dandruff from the nature of an itch.
It does not care your student thinks to watch
And so to blame the finger for your sight;
It's less in love with touching than with touch,
And less in love with touch than with the light
That makes touch of a parsec in your night.
What it would have would not be something had
Nor make of having such a rare delight
It had to cry a former Galahad
Nor so besot with that telepathy
It turned from having touch, to paw at me.
182
To any who'd appoint a child to place,
Your Furies mewl submission, will not cross
The pusillanimous who pule your loss,
And you stay hid among what you should grace.
The tape slips by the pickup heads; a trace
Repeats the tunes we threw against the joss
And overcalls the monument you moss,
For this had none beyond our ears' embrace.
But tape pops splash the same transmission hash
That stunted the old concert, and the frost,
Compounded of a common tracery,
Compiles from every minute worry trash
A glacial weight behind my pentecost
Where our new measures of that joy should be.
183
To drink new water from an unnamed stream
Is daring worthy of becoming chief,
Considering the thermofluid thief
Has circumstance so set that the best dream
Can get no farther than a chocolate creme,
An oaf half bred, a jug of wine, and grief
That cowers at an uncontested brief
While dissertations tongue the curdled theme.
If men who walked the moon propose the dole
The way Attila kept his horsemen high
By making partial what they hated whole,
And partial students strain to make the troll
Voice long to make the river maidens cry,
Should I sing else than you and me and why?
184
The touch and treachery that saved the few
Congeal into religion, while the faith
Descends upon the lesser /billets-doux/
Like pigeons on a public bronze; the wraith
The willow wooed grows a tumescent shrew
In whose pout sonnets rival the Marantz,
But neither pay the boatman, run him through,
Nor raise his cassock with a /fer-de-lance/.
Not you are small. Your ceilings are so low
My least rehearsal leaves a sabre scratch,
And through those little windows only grow
That yellowed weed that any mushroom match.
What water will baptize a bloom from loam
That got no farther than resenting Rome?
185
What kind of people make a man to choose
To crawl through his own blood to leave them by?
The fox that gnaws its leg off to refuse
The trap of better living has no sly
Compared with this. And medals genuflect
The deaths of men the medals would deny,
Oh, who are we, indeed, to resurrect
The grateful dead; what recently recruit
Subject them to our upstart retrospect?
And die in turn, who eat immortal fruit,
Let sleep forbid what waking might induce,
For taste first wakes what taste to mortal suit
Ill fit, and none can sleep to that excuse
Who wring their changes out of beetle juice.
186
O You of every heart that you repeat
Whose every face runs with the same sea salt
And sin, original and incomplete,
That blames my sight for recognising fault,
"You flickered but a while across our sky,
A poorly thought and poorer apprehended
Spartan dreaming of a butterfly,
That, just it was appreciated, ended"?
Let the lumpy movements of these lines
Love unrequited, languish and wane dim
Before the beauty you would be resigns
To ornament the plainsong of /that/ hymn,
Or rests in public figures, green and warm,
Where even pigeon drops acquire form.
187
How often have the atoms reared your face
From pause to prelude, squall to sophomore,
Start to semblance, start to not a trace,
And adding but a quaver to the core?
The stick on tour, retired, or to score,
The student concert close, the horns a heap,
And crashing notes again escape the bore
Until the willow call them out of sleep.
You the harp stopped, sent the willow deep
To put your score in charcoal on the wall
That naked apes your once concerto keep
An infant notion, hidden in a scrawl,
Dissembled into juvenile discord
Who taught them sing, that willow but record!
188
Let bock lock glottis up against your crime
I sing no more and not for nothing had
Nor of your being wasted or for time
Beat in the bush, brash bash of insects: glad
Alloted you the monkey's purpose all
Our two-backed buckaroo, the purse ensure
The rider fail although the saddle gall.
Though you rein stingy, that the fencing cure
All ape of Jane while your tight clock deny
The shostakowiched heart its turn at Strauss,
One charged a pauper's coffin to reply
Your vote's eviction "/dass ist nun ein Schmaus,/"
And measures charged to think not of you small
Are filled with thinking not of you at all.
189
More than your quiet ear across my chow
Or your Jane stride across my commonplace,
How you so swelled to fill that awe-shaped lace
And then my wide-eyed palm unmake me now,
Who slide toward the December of our vow,
KVOX, your voice without a trace
Gone -- How can I admit my sworn embrace
That your adulthood leaped I to allow
Me lucky out of my encamped swamp sleep
To swat mosquitos with the student sword;
What place now sees you? Whose glad fingers keep
-- While mine keep callus that cannot accord
Adultery -- you... You! These years no peep
And Thrace before me in a smorgasbord.
190
Not you fed me while all that smorgasbord
They boiled from coal my chemistry applied
For lace and rainbow, dye or what it dyed;
My nights, my you, my yellow carbons hoard,
Unfocusing what form the fibers stored
From ribbon used too much to well confide
Your finer stuff, and you have not replied
A single song; the price of stamps has soared.
Already I have numbered this so high
The child at the employment office glares,
Asserts that, like my typing speed, I lie.
You are not good reference: affairs
Leave jealous those not had, and when they die
At last we come awake to all those stares.
191
Your trepidation that I ever sought
To study or record our public tryst;
An accusation that I think I'm Christ :
You from the first knew -- and if not or ought,
You paid not even for the paper bought.
The crime, we share (if they can say we heist
What we created wholly out of /geist/);
The guilt, too, then -- but what is it they /caught/??
Out of coffee, on the outs with you,
Afoot and out at elbows, out of spit,
Not even in the /Kensington Review/ --
Out, /OUT/, damned spot! -- until I benefit,
The worst you can accuse is "stupid." Do --
But not from you did I expect /this/ stuff.
192
Me /you/ accuse that I did not compose
Our constellations, but accused, and then,
Me strapped still to the polygraph and pen,
Reverse the charges, jolt me to my toes.
Me /they/ accuse that I too much suppose
For their enquiring minds: the what, the when,
How often, whether we will sin /again/
And give them a release before our clothes.
This triangle has me up the sharp end.
(The /form/ cannot bear "me" five times as well;
I'd abdicate to the first dividend
From any party -- you can never tell
How much truth money /can/ buy these days: send
Cash, in small bills, care of Astrophel.)
193
You could, if you'd a mind, flatly refuse
Until I starve, then fifty years' estate,
Then end to end those girls their bath makes late :
Your vegetable could outpinch the Jews.
But with a stellar view, all space accrues,
And mathematics (not /I/ passed the plate;
You came, I saw). The concord is so great
(Black, Red all over, White), the whole Field fuse,
And eats its tail, and everything beside,
And just as you and I, expresses it
As monkeys Hamlet, he his worried bride,
And all the rest, the onus of the skit.
And so, my Dear, you've nowhen left to hide:
The Devil swallow, God must take a break.
194
What sad fraud guilt you would impose on us
To make yourself acceptable to sin
I do not know, nor you how to begin;
One step toward self, and mammon raise a fuss,
Accusing us elitist, you a huss-
y, whoring time from What might tink Whose tin
They raised a deity and voted in
For having not an erg of /animus/.
But it is that sweet step that taunts my thirst,
The same as that some dozen since our ape
That its own mediocrity had cursed,
Who cursed in turn the path toward their escape
And all who trod it since the very first
Whose sin was said to have a woman's shape.
195
The collins that I pointed to colleens
Is rock once more to ring our simple ooze
In nightly orbit, sporting that great bruise
And getting even, tumbling our scenes
With tidal slops, tectonics, and the means
To tell the cat what lovers will not use,
A wisdom slowly come inured to booze,
All lottery, and twenty-year-late teens.
But let it smack of more than hydrostatics,
So that the thing allow its integral
Predate the treasures of the better Attics,
It soon becomes a patent chericol,
A prop for academic chairs, fanatics,
And all who'd rather leave the climb to crawl.
196
Too young for Ares and too old for Zeus,
Askanse at strokes you seldom understood,
You sat across my fire, assuming truce
And ten nights that your ancient offer would
As solid and exalted as the Doric.
Sang I then anyway, for that much good
From word come into flesh, although your choric
Promise of a world to weight my knee
Is complicated by the sophomoric.
Sing I now also, else you threaten me
To sit across my fire reciting woe
And postpubescent magnanimity,
And that in middle life the list will grow,
Excusing you with things no man may know.
197
A great cloud hove to eddies that its mass
Tried interpose between two hemi-skies
That pressed ten spheroids in a single pass,
And what did not ignite gave rise to guys.
Nine Troys have burned, and you will still snub Wotan
For boys who'd strip us down to customise
Your ailments with the spoils they got by votin'
(Needing not to burn a single book
To sound half cavalier, half North Dakotan),
For when the moon turns, you achieve the look.
And yet, they do not take us unawares,
For you demand the right size pole and hook,
And make cool cats who would go spitting hairs
About these sonnets, first to show you theirs.
198
My age like ocean sedimenting chalk
That spares the hands by insulating speech
-- If speech be but intention in a croak
Or speech for that it pass a certain species.
Not you at fault; the age is out of jaunt,
And I appointed to repeat a spark
Of aimless rectitude, who sit and joint
Your fashions out of bones that will not speak
Nor give my adam what you'd have him taste :
His pentecost. And all his naming cheek
So wholly sound, supporting cast is lost
And all the world's upstaged : my welcome crack,
You tried a pact I cannot fill, while I
Try you with rapture that you will not try.
199
Abashed by your own daring, you sneak in
Without hello drop coat : your white lace blinds :
O Somewhere you Have left your things : What finds
Me here : us : /We!/ : so ready to Begin (!)
Our /dos a dos/. You smirk as we were Sin
And cleverness itself to slip Who Minds,
And though this offer up to lesser kinds
You know that I will honor once again,
And you Advance. The accurate each stitch
Appoints each wonder that the white enfold
And brags so every I must wonder which
Nor where nor whether we begin our bold;
And I would do you more than scratch our itch,
But we have made no clothing for the cold.
200
A face that boys will bang their heads for, smile
Not quite enought for banging heads, though plastic
Will armor the concussion for a while
And all their training leaves them only spastic;
An ass that Herakleitos would have found
Running with the rest toward what the river
Has at every mouth, that common ground
Diluted into ocean, wanting liver
To separate what lives from what is waste --
May all that lives enjoy you for the slime
You will assemble toward a certain taste
For all we have of you, and you of time,
And hope that it won't take you quite so long
Because you took a notion from a song.
201
Blame the art. Blame art itself. Blame me
Only for my memory, the art
Of making strings of beads with ATP
And RNA, and things that come apart
Mere weeks since our Manhattan turned to beads.
But never blame a thing so vague as "heart,"
For stones have none, and no /post-facto/ bleeds.
Four thousand years since Troy fell into ash
And Helen prodded to who held her deeds,
Snivelling, perhaps, but likely brash
And pragmatist for what would take her nude
From this as from his bed, the flesh still splash
Like Icarus on rock. Your interlude
Dent what it will from stone, the beads don't brood.
202
I even see you in what you took out,
And in this space you leave to occupy,
There is but wood, and wax, and only I.
Damn your totalitarian rag. Now doubt
Attempts at midnight its ear-hissing rout,
And there's no bit of dirt for me to spy
As worse than me, beneath the whole damned sky --
Only my fear, as better than a pout.
Well -- Hades will have fun, and you with it :
How sweet it is, to be so scrubbed by you,
And think of all the wiping there's to do! :
Old Dante's brats, millenia of sin,
And all can make a sizzle of your spit
Before that generosity begin.
203
A dozen keystrokes on a board I took
So long ago my hands have shaped their age
To share a parkbench with that empty book --
The access chirps, the disk begins a rage,
I lose another friend. The smock in place,
Good DR DOS catscans the broken page
That stood in stead of almost every SASE
I might have had but you had underbid.
While youth returns on U.P.S. and MACE,
Hand reabhors the pencil (never did
Befriend the callus thing), and that /dinghao/
Device draws you immediate, amid
The stone this autogeriphage allow
Remember us millenia from now.
204
Your apparition to my taste, belief :
Bright frog ahip the stipple of the swamp,
A moment's leopard, landing couple-thump
To settle thighs and whiteness, pumping brief
Whose leaps collapse the dandelion, tough
To such geometry so gone, then, damp,
Our couple copped, you slip the scape, decamp
From white to spots, to spot, at last, your laugh.
But so my snake, a moment yellow lines
Precise as highways through the larger trees,
The tiger-blink, the halt, the black designs
Displacing things, the two-faced tongue that sees
And having tasted shadows leopard signs
As that it stalks : an absence, a reprise.
205
The loneliness of bluer than the sky
Or chrysocolla, blue enough to burn,
That rises to the pressure of the bone
Or vagrant apparatus of the eye
But cannot be, beyond where I betry
Its shapes and schisms, estimate the pain
To bring to birth or say goodbye again
Will have its out, and never question why.
Then what that your pure of hue behind my I
Show stain of fear or grittiness of skin
When work be done, so that the work be done?
And what, now tools away, the work reply
That you who changed to please me changed me twice
And all I need to do is bear the price?
206
To turn beans into girl is no great trick --
Weed claw and water serve to make a mess
Of Campbell's finest, succulent and thick --
But turning girl to beans is even less.
When swords are turned to plowshares, hogs to ham,
And louts to rule, no murder should surprise her
Whose lions lie to suckle at her lamb,
And all that work revert to fertiliser.
Because I told equations in my /salles/
You told them all that I, myself, would do it,
So as to whether this is Fergus Falls
Or hell, or Thrace, I am descended to it.
The latch clicks, and I hear them lock one through,
And fear to look for that it might be you.
207
Let any child assemble to resent
What pop the lolly from the habit mouth
That seldom wiped itself nor practiced Lent,
And mercenaries mutter under Thoth.
Let any two repudiate their troth,
The covenant at heart shrinks from the crime
Against their promise to withstand the drouth,
And they become their want before their time.
And let a third presume upon the rhyme
Of one and one, that nurtures only two,
And two again become an empty mime,
So I will raise a ruckus over you
No more than London halted tea to face
What some have called the tantrum of a race.
208
All all and all who rave the lilac's doom,
Dream dram of color sleeping in a root
To scent a ditch or decorate a room,
Ascending last a little bit of soot,
An afternoon caress, a summer laugh,
All out of a dead land : what does it foot
Who turn the garden only for its chaff
That spike absolve? The mouth abandon ruth
For jealousy that tears the nest to half-
Spit something rotten in the mouth of youth
To equalise the taste. They get no rain
Who spend their lives to suck a hollow tooth :
All all and all a snake that garden's train
Who make a poisoned music of their pain.
209
What madness was it that possessed the first
Cro-Magnonite to draw his little mark
Beyond the fires where the cave is dark
To tell what keeps the darkness, of his thirst?
And what was that Lascaunian reimbursed
Who first aligned the bones along an arc
And struck to imitate the meadowlark
A music later men have but rehearsed?
And let the bone revert, the painting spall
In sudden desert or in glacial frost,
Again comes heart the dark cannot enthrall,
But what our profit if our art has lost
The dreaming, eager eye, but most of all,
Your heart's quick tune upon my pentecost?
210
And now you leave my bed into the storm
Nor pause the porch, but rush the evening rain,
Eleven-dollar lace to sport your form
Back to your acre on the yellow plain.
And now my sickness crawls around my pain
With equal hope of purposes outworn,
Addressing me as you and me again,
A son upon my lap, a unicorn.
And now the music lapse, your love forsworn,
Our once concerto but a harlequin
Who swats a keyboard that you be reborn
Nor spurn this playing for your mannequin
Along with all the other gentry who
Remember Mozart, not Casadesus.
211
The river stains into the brown-boned rocks
A mote at once, collecting into rills
From what was just a sheen among the flocks
That licked at boulders for the sip that fills.
The grains first down the glass do not stain time
So much as stain the thought with like a doubt
That, when in age, but narrows at the climb
And leaves but little and more quickly out.
Then let us say, when sand has finally sung
My Dr. Jekyll to formaldehyde
And not another note commits the lung,
That, dumb of deltas, it was still our pride
To send among the figured billabong
Where we commit no voice, the figured song.
212
We two were wild in wonder, picking plums
One yellow day beyond the shotgun traps,
And careless of the ivy, thornpecked thumbs,
Our wonder put two feathers in our caps.
Along a weed, all purple and chartreuse
A brilliant yellow spider netted flies
With silk, and canned them up with beetle juice
As though tomorrow were but for the wise.
You washed the plums, and boiled them into jam,
And put them to the pantry with my beans
And closed the door and took it on the lam
Who knew our way, but wondered at the means,
And if such wonders marvel at our day,
What then did /you/ decide to throw away?
213
I saw, upon the grounds where I was sent,
A short white birch, as if by Joan Miro.
And if it didn't plan where it would blow,
It thickly was aware of where it went :
The trunk for four whole feet was sharply bent
As it had tried the ground, and then the flow
Returned, as though it would again hello
The April sky beyond one awful Lent.
If we miscast the cave we grope at now
(Set by a death to have to make this run),
And lose our grip to blindness, then allow
That our false turns admit to be redone
As Lenten want surrenders to the plow
Or one small tree surrendered to the sun.
214
New roofing echoes from the neighbor's lot
To pause the Monarch's southward paradigm
While I must hammer at the summer rot,
Wrapped in the rungs, imagining the trim.
Though none choose winter for a mate, I think
Our spring tried twice : the roof peeled down to swim
While sleet pursued the yelling bobolink,
And wind redealt the calendar to show
All but the dishes flashing out of sync.
Our March returned, an antic, bored Pierrot
Whose colors were defeated in the fight
By bones of lilac for the drifting snow
Without a scent for those who trawl the trite
Or flashy to make freezing suckers bite.
215
What you would have us be was all your grief,
And tattles at your eyes when you will speak
Of love and loving, who is lord, who fief,
And who may say him open, who must sneak.
For all your talk will leave my logic weak,
Your very look so bolsters my resolve
To have you chest to chest and cheek to cheek
No matter whom the price, nor what involve.
This hope a curse, a sin no one absolve,
You will care not, but read the points awry
And while the way the argument evolve
Well past what love, not yet to what make cry
-- What followed more, you murdered with a kiss
So never learned my vile antithesis.
216
"Thou wast begot; to get you is thy duty,"
And we find us three hundred years ago
The same emotion harp the selfsame beauty
And that same fear the rest may never know,
For if you leave no seed that you may grow
From out your ashes like that common tern
Whose fallen husk is all the fishes know
Of flight like yours, it's all they ever learn.
Your flesh gone fishing, yet your Fire will burn
Beatitudes of air, and leave your mark
To find wherever when you will return,
That all our loving in the peopled dark
Can shame me not, and this is not a blush :
Your sun so burns my face we must be hush.
217
The lawn mower chuckles to a choking stop
Outside a brand-new house some hundred old,
And though this tank-trap traded in a 'trop
On merely years of weeds, they stop it, cold.
Here, too, have gophers had their way with dogs
As well as with the yard they finally sold
Your erstwhile lautanist. Ground hogs
Your days enough, excusing you abstain
From shooting these or bringing in the logs,
Yet for the dicker, I do not complain
That trades this work to discontinue rite,
For here I am, and there you will remain,
Though I am sorry your insistent night
Will not arouse to song, nor thrill of flight.
218
To sleep the one more time that ends this time;
To go to bed to wake again a baby,
Forgetting all but that there's life to climb
And attitudes of tone to sound out maybe;
To dream of life, or live a dream, who knows
What attitudes the dervish dust attain
Without attaining them, or who compose
The foundling life without a hint of pain?
The form leaps forth despite the stone be marbled,
And Dionys loves the grape with lively tongue :
It does not matter that the twelve were garbled,
And song but warble from the newly young,
I'll let the chemicals my mother got
Assemble into song, as you did not.
219
Now you, who learned the secret name of God
And turned the chancel for the taste of it
Go back to living for that other clod
Who quit the college at but half of wit :
Not his, the knowledge of the sacrament
Or how the bread's constituent of spit
Or how the man divides the Firmament
The God set up to be that great divide.
We wonder where the worth of wisdom went
When that first Babelled halfwit first
cracked snide
But get no rest from Babel or the half
Who go to church and leave their brains outside;
Who winnow at the wheat to keep the chaff
And stuff the moneybox to build the calf.
220
The snow lies long across the walk tonight
And all the wind blows round about the house
For when you left, you left this place in spite;
For all this singing, you called me a louse.
But once again, you bend it out of shape :
You should be hard to find here as a mouse.
And once again, your figure will not drape
And follow out the course the gods have planned
For me to hope and you to merely ape :
You tend to turn and walk across the sand
To that dark cavern all will come in time
For that I will not take your little hand
And tell the dark conductor with a dime
But only sing, to tell our tale in rime.
221
Step, live and longing, past that tunnel mouth
That leads into that cavern of the heart,
And meet our world of rain and sometime drouth
Whose kiss is sometimes whole and often part,
But whose bright path is ever toward itself
And ever toward a comely counterpart
Of what your lady was without an elf
Or demon, god, or other ancient crutch.
Leave, too, that fad salvation of the self
That leaves the searching soul with nothing much
But one long understimulated bray
That looks aloft to heaven, and to clutch
At all that piety that goes its way
To wish to wake to always yesterday.
222
The music titters from the speaker grille
As Mozart laughs the keyboard once again;
We wonder : whose the fingers, whose the will?
That presses at the keyboard past the pain
Of chalkened joints and party-poopers' noise
To bring this lone sonata through the rain
Beside the honk KFGO deploys.
Is it still Mozart with his mind in gear
That plays the decades as his private toys
And tickles levers for the tune we hear?
The needle stutters from the final track :
We've had our Mozart for another year,
And, all the discipline our fingers lack,
Amadeus Mozart will be back.
223
The clock barks loudly on the office wall :
December crawls by with the speed of birds.
I play my keyboard and await your call
While these electrons try the shapes of words.
My mind still functions in a simple fashion
Burned by you and what your nightshirt girds
And my response to all your fourfold passion.
Such memories attach to what came next :
We came to deal in subterfuge and caution
That left me quite impatient, you perplexed
By what I thought to teach you of the way
The substance of the heart turns into text
And sleeps in books, so often put away
To turn to substance on another day.
224
I went a way I did not know myself
To bring you to the light of what you are;
I turned out every book upon my shelf
And held my sextant to an unknown star
To try to keep the way before you safe.
Now for this work I hear your har-de-har
As though your progress fronted you to SHAEF
Or dean of any college that you chose :
For all that progress, still you are a waif
And cutting off your face to spite your nose.
While others run as far as you can hit them,
In these you live, in these you strike a pose
For all you scratch your head and do not get them :
For all you castigate, I still have writ them.
225
To lose and gain, and lose and gain again :
Thus do we wake to what we have to learn;
Shrill as alarms or as the birds begin
We see the lesson and begin to burn
For all we learned, and left along the way,
And permanence the way of flesh can't earn.
And yet the flesh can hold the clock at bay
With salves and unguents and the training camp,
But even these don't make it go away
So I remember in the morning damp
How out of the night you came to me in lust
And write your story down beneath my lamp
Before your comely features come to dust
And you to reason as I know you must.
226
In little time, the seas shall yield their dead,
And deeps give forth their burdens to the wheat,
And that be ground into the table bread.
In these you'll live again -- though not so sweet
Until the wheat become the living flesh
And sing, and dance, and show the living heat
Acraze with being in the vessels' mesh
What lately languished in the ocean's hire.
But you complain, and think the song too fresh,
And add your pirouette to that old gyre
Whose story is the story of a witch
In dead of winter, and without a fire.
The thermostat goes on without a hitch,
And, pen in hand, I sit again to bitch.
227
This music, broadcast all across the land,
Has reached my living room from leagues away,
So far in space and time from living hand
The living ear does not perceive the clay
That came to life to trouble at the keys
Or trouble with a horse that would but neigh
(The children will have nothing but their ease!).
What shall we say to that bald circumstance
That pitches us to sleep, and there to tease
The waking wonder with a knowing glance?
What odds the clay will ever turn to Ming?
What odds your plaintive tune will learn to dance?
The rain will not fall up, nor pigs take wing
But Herodotus' horse may learn to sing!
228
You, love, who tried to tug me back below
To worship at that shrine to all that dies
Have still to smell the lilac, yet to know
That all that dies returns, and so despise
This way of flesh that seems to go to earth.
You only know a coin for what it buys,
Not what it finds or what its counting's worth,
So never has sweet Mozart surged your veins
And pratfall's all you ever know of mirth.
Come out, come out, and leave behind your pains,
Your petty fears, your monologue by Joyce,
And live with all your being and your brains
Before I tire of your complaining voice,
And turn around, and take you back by choice.
229
You in your pain bark wise at all the world
Because your spirit went the way to Hell
And never quite came back. Instead, you hurled
Bare imprecations at the sight and smell
Of everything that's born and, aging, dies,
Whose study would have helped to make you well;
But all you did was let them dam your eyes.
So all your days are pretty, never full,
And you will grow up pretty, never wise
Though that's alone what is so beautiful
For it alone has learned somehow to be.
Now you must cease at pulling your own wool,
For if you always fail to learn to see,
A sighted one may take your place by me.
230
The gifts are spread around the tree and you
Are scattered somewhere far away tonight
For Santa's coming down our little flue
And angels hover round about with light.
What a story could such angels tell
If only "human" being did not blight
Their wondrous song! Instead we have this hell
Of striving for a Heaven we can't reach
Where every steeple sounds the weekly knell
Of our vain hoping -- just as if the peach
Should bloom tonight. You need to learn to love
What slow-wrought lilac has again to teach :
Don't break your neck to look so far above --
It's here, and we are "in the midst thereof."
231
The gutter stutters with the crack of ice
And all the furnace parts jump up to play
A tune of warming in the winter's vice
That hopes you further on your faltering way.
The world above has winters, for a start,
And interviews, and feebleness of clay,
And many friendships willing to depart.
Too,it has warmth when winds would move the ground,
But none for those whose fears would walk apart
From all that they hold dear, and, leaving, found
Their way beset by what they're thinking of;
So you should stop this plaintive runaround,
For there are women in the world above
Who know of living, and enough of love.
232
Your heavens had had the earth, and turned it wrong :
The plum's long argument in sunlight found
Her explanation spiked on cooling ground;
The swallow fled your elm, whose limbs were strong
With stellar ice, for austral billabong;
The chipmunk chewed the seed, and left a mound
Of pinecone flakes, and your whole garden browned.
Then into that /pastiche/ I strode my song.
But you would have me more than god, a nerd
To keep the autumn at eternal bay
So that your love would never know a word
For dying, and your love, eternal May.
Now all you feared has come, a little sting,
And you do little but to curse the spring.
233
Whenever you would worry for the night,
Remember the time our neighbor's house woke up
And spent its life to turn itself to light
(A race that never has a runner-up
But only winners, never-rans, and stars)
Chasing its tail like a big orange pup
And, mixing sparks and fireflies and Mars,
Sent off its light to wander down the hall
Beyond my desk, with all its q's and r's,
And through the door so as to strike the wall
And pattern it with trees where we had laid
(They being barren in the recent fall)
Then leap the bed, and, though it had no blade,
To wake you up, and wake you up afraid.
234
Weep not for twenty years I wrote of you
And you stayed, stumbling, on that ancient path;
For neither was our love beholden to
The other, nor to any aging math.
Go, weep instead for all those dullards who
Fear reading is a sort of mental wrath
And have not had a story since the Pooh,
(Especially not a story such as this)
For they will never have a taste of you.
These songs admit no parthogenesis
But twenty years to study your perfume,
So those who read can never steal your kiss,
And those who will not read cannot consume
The years I spent within your little bloom.
235
The blossoms of the thousand stars are thick
And they are all that blossom in this cold
That freezes spit before the same can stick
And so your lack of weapon makes me bold.
These songs will never starve the little worms
But keep you cozy while your life is told
That goes to fat the jackals and the germs
While you complain you never asked for birth.
You never questioned what your life affirms
By rising as it does out of the earth,
But drag your feet, complain of my critique,
And scorn my singing while you tot my worth.
Anent the "one and only love" you seek,
What have /you/ done to make yourself unique?
236
I love you. There, I've said what you would hear
And will not hear in all I have to say;
For your complaining sought to commandeer
My sabre for yourself, but found that they
Who dare a girlish country ruled by spite
Will find that girls but wish to have their way,
So Venus' slave is Mars' acolyte.
A sugarDada world's the recompense
For all who kept the foe from casual sight
(While sucking things beset the softened fence),
Arms aching with the downside of the sword,
Aware at last of our most passive tense :
That you who follow loll in our accord
To sit above the dead, and say you're bored.
237
The camera hangs upon the office wall
That put your face within this little frame :
A face whose snicker nothing can appall,
That will not take my love, or take the blame
For progress slowed by every misplaced stride
That stopped to tremble, wonder, or exclaim,
And so put off the coming of my bride
Another day, another year, until
Two hundred songs have swelled the front of pride
And brought me but a thirty-dollar bill.
You, like the boy who saw his first giraffe
Have spent your wonder looking for the shill,
Until your course is nothing but a gaffe
And nothing left but one small photograph.
238
The sun crawls up as though the day regrets
Having begun, and would go back to bed
But that mechanics force it on ahead --
We measured nights in careful anisettes,
Now days slouch by in handrolled cigarettes
And we drink beer straight from the can instead.
A certain notion fills my thought with dread
As poems pile up, and so do all our debts :
Against this, when the lonely night compels
Our grace, the final terror mounts, and we
Depart in darkness, as the Bible tells,
To go on back to being entropy
And crawling things the cultured taste repels,
What have you left for your next self to be?
239
How all my atoms busily agree
We are alive, and live to let us dance,
Compete in brilliance with the Medici,
Or turn about in minor circumstance --
And how your atoms glide against to mine --
And how, that you're away, my every slants
Toward every yours (superior design)!
But Oh! how when you left, you took your life
For accidents of choice to recombine,
And so you might as well have used a knife.
Love is a force whose advocate would dare
To strike a course regardless of its strife:
What will you leave behind you that is fair
Where your next self can find it to beswear?
240
A midnight, and I fondle certain facts:
I do still love you, though I do not pine;
You do not love him, but you can relax
Amid his income, as you cannot mine;
The children love whom they are given to,
But I do not love what the worms will dine
And so I make these telling songs to you,
That you will come with me at last in mind,
But still you veer before they can accrue.
Now I have lost the love he redesigned,
But cannot grieve, and cannot even poach
To get you back. Nor can I be resigned
That you've departed in a long, black coach
And don't respond to the direct approach.
241
Did I look at you, you would go away
Back down that long, bleak path into the dark;
Did I ignore you, you would go astray,
And keep another for a chance remark.
So I attend you, and result in this
Sung platitude, an illbegotten quark
That cannot keep, or even wholly kiss
The bursting roundness or the vagrant mind
Your presence sots me and your absence dis'.
Thus I must sing, but keep my sight aligned
Away from you, all glimpse of you forsworn
On this long course the meanest god designed.
To see you or to have you I am torn,
But what I'll have is have you be reborn!
242
For all its pain, the mind will never bleed :
For all you've been, it still will not succumb
To asprin. It is said your leaving freed
My pen, my fancy, or my somewhat dumb
And antisocial way to be with you.
I say you took the bread and left a crumb,
But that is what my mind's accustomed to,
For you were never one to walk beside
When something in your way branched off. The blue
You out of do, not my but chance's bride,
Both somewhat lover, something of a drain
On my poor circumstance -- and somewhat snide.
No pain, no gain, they say : no pain, no brain,
And dearer than all of Thrace is all your pain.
243
We spread love's wishbone, but your legs don't break.
(They never do, despite how much we strain.)
I'd think that that much angle'd cause you pain.
You blow my candle like a piece of cake.
What do you wish for? And what will you take?
You curl your fists into the counterpane --
Though you receive me and do not complain,
Do you want someone else here when you wake?
In all the years I've tugged at you along
This fearsome path the common may not tread
I've never felt that it or I belong
Within your life, or lightly-feathered head:
Our oneness has the taint of being wrong
Beyond the railing of our waterbed.
244
The sky is clamped down like a Mason lid
And all the household objects tell me off;
My ears are yelling like the locust did,
And both the cats demand their daily trough.
The winter throws its sword down at my sill
And I accept its summons with a cough,
For it is six months to the whippoorwill.
Then I must aspirin the coming day
And for the night, rely upon my skill
In memory of when you went away :
No matter how above the ambient
We rose in loving, ours was a bouquet
That burned so brightly there is not a scent
Of where our lilac-headed loving went.
245
I know. You do not see yourself as dead
Because you woke one morning with a cry,
And soiled yourself, demanded to be fed,
And watched your lunch descending from the sky.
And you are not another : you are you
xWithout these faults -- and your own fish to fry.
(You like those songs you are accustomed to.)
Becoming is such effort to the young,
And that includes the aging any who,
Before they have quite tuned, say they have sung :
And so, I make these songs as my last ditch
To have you back, for you to browse among,
For far too soon we learn that we can bitch
Before we learn to tune another pitch.
246
Today, I wrote another dozen-minute
Sonnet with enough of you and pain
As I could find would fit completely in it,
However that discomfort was my gain.
So there it is, a fit within the art,
For you to fondle, or your miff arraign,
Condemn, say sentence, and depart.
And if it be my minutes make you mad,
Then unconvene our meeting, close your heart,
And let these songs recall the times I've had
Enough of you and not enough of hap,
No matter how you came, or thinly clad.
Whatever you say of these, I'll take the rap:
They gnaw my love off out of your sweet trap.
247
The whole sky is aflame around the sun
Like steel about to sputter in the stove;
The power of the blaze is fit to stun
My eyes across the frozen maple grove.
I know that I must walk, but I will cheat :
The lock bites at the key; at last, it turns
And lets me in to find a plastic seat
About to crack, and still so cold it burns.
I put the key in the ignition slot.
It clicks a couple times, and clacks, and then,
As though to say what engineering's not,
Says "ur," and, slowly, "ur," but not again.
So if you think to die when you get old,
Then hell is where you'll go -- and hell is cold.
248
So many are the ways in which we wake
That days expressible in powers of ten
Are needed for our saying "maybe when"
To what we want, but may not ever take.
So many are the ways in which we fake
The things we do not have, that even Zen
Can not say what was left will come again
Of what the mind will have, and what forsake.
I still would have you back, but will you walk
The living thought, or will you rather sleep
The given path, the proper way to balk,
The kind of talk your every mental /bleep/
Has rendered fit for every other Fawkes?
Or will you join me, even if we creep?
249
The snow screams whitely of the freezing sun
And dogs attend it on today's cold course;
There is no chance that spring has jumped the gun
Or that this bloated sun has any force :
As like there is a chance you'll come my way
Without at least some prodding from my song;
For you have gone, and there you wish to stay
With no good sense of where you still belong.
And so I pound the keys to make this noise
While age creeps onwardardardardardard in his pretty pace
And I watch death encroach upon your joys
With no Persephone to plead your case.
As to my love, and why it sings this way,
The DSM III(R)* has much to say.
* DSM III(R): Diagnostic and Statistical Manual
of the American Psychiatric Association,
Third Edition, Revised.
250
Tonight, I heard a Spaniard at guitar
Playing that Andalusian thing you liked;
The sound could almost tell me where you are
Along that path we once so often biked.
You are, of course, astride a different path :
You creep your age, but still you come to grips
With all your final fears, the clock's dark math,
And hardly helped by pentametric quips.
Yet I will write, however it may goad :
That's been my cute intention from the start;
You are so reticent to go your road,
But closer still in matters of the heart,
For you misplace intention for the deed :
Perhaps one day you'll even learn to read.
251
You cannot count on song to make a space
In which to live, to love, or even drink;
Rather your life must look it in the face
That tries to take away your right to think.
And when you've won what else would have your mind
Or have your house, or sell you out, or fink,
/Then/ sing : of any glory you may find;
Be sure to be your own best troubadour
Of every hit that you paid back in kind,
And how you rose to self from being poor;
How from your birth you walked alone so far
And never let the battle turn you dour.
But if you think to cozen /my/ guitar --
Since when are you worth song the way you are?
252
I used to sing your beauty, it is true;
These songs are full of you, and once so dear.
But it is not the song : the change is you
Who first departed to your dark and fear
To clutch and plain of what you leave behind,
While I may never look, but only hear
In your own voice whatever's on your mind.
Then never may I order you a cure,
For you are woman and the modern kind
Who'd have my hair for thinking I was sure
Of any bit of woman or her spawn.
You haven't lost a bit of your allure,
Nor is it that the one of us is gone;
It's rather that you stayed, while I sang on.
253
My memory crawls like a worm through time,
Head to my head and tail when I was born;
Past either point, why, there is nothing I'm
Save I have knotted for the spinning Norn.
Then like the Norn I spin your yarn in verse
That, being lyric, has no thought but me
And will recall but whom the song rehearse :
We all know /Will/, but who is /Wriothesley/?
Then there is nothing in my doing these
That will extend your time, or how you went,
And it is obvious that you don't please
In any wise my body or my bent;
I'll answer, when I'm asked if you belong,
I may be tired of /you/, but not of /song/.
254
Saint Valentine's again, and for my part
I cross the calendar and pass it by,
For I am done with our affair of heart
As you long since, because you chose to die.
Because you lie with him, the world's a chore
That he will put behind you for a place
Where you need make no effort, evermore,
Nor lose yourself again -- in either case:
He is to comfort when you come of age,
For his is all your future and your plan;
It's golden, if it is a golden cage,
But would still hold you if it were rattan.
You say he is all round, who is an arc,
And says they burn, who only strike a spark.
255
We wait too long for you to make reply.
You make me but a restive Minnesotan
Standing in the doorway, saying goodbye
For three more hours of palaver and quotin':
You do not co co co come, who sold yourself to him,
And do not wish to walk, or set to floatin'
On the Styx another time for whim
Or even love: you merely acquiesce
To his claim of eternal paradigm.
This homage leaves you ever less than yes,
And me a nudnik, standing on your porch
And letting out the heat, while you digress:
You will not walk, to take the living torch
To other hands, who find it only scorch.
256
Out of mind, then in again, then out
You flutter by like something out of Kipling,
Remote, exotic, always on the scout,
And on your wings, the camouflage of stippling.
That's why so few can see your wings. They hide
In your so rapid motion through the air
From thought to action, never to collide
With what we lesser mortals find unfair.
But oh! your fair and freedom hurt my heart
For you've recanted what you promised me
To say you were not made to play a part;
And if I hurt my heart and let you free,
You are so fair to monarch, priest, and elf,
I cannot even doom you with yourself.
257
I know I sing a lot of what you must
And what you oughtn't, let alone the manner:
An accident of choice can take to dust
The best of plans, along with any planner,
And I'd not lose you, for you've come along
A fair old way behind my bastard banner.
But now it's time for you to sing a song
That no amount of following has thinned
With notes that any teacher rendered wrong;
I would not have it said you ever sinned
Since I did, and your justice was too mild.
And I would have you moniker the wind
For I would have you in between times wild:
What only follows me is still a child.
258
All those religions bidding for your ears
Had things the same and things that were unique,
And Joseph Campbell could not rest your fears
That practicing them all would take all week,
So you dismissed them all to walk alone,
And came to this, instead of what you seek.
Now nothing is worth doing to the bone
For death has everyone and rot, all things,
Where no man is, not even in his clone.
Now you have not what comfort all faith brings
But your own effort finds the road too steep,
So you but shuffle while you dream of wings.
If all you're going to do of life is weep,
You might as well go back, and there to sleep.
259
Your sleep continues to repudiate
The evidence around you, and you claim
That all a man can do is lie in state
Or else be thrown to worms. And this you blame
For your poor progress on the way to wife
Despite the obstacles you overcame.
The way to loving is the way to life
For both receive the sameness of the same
And do not curse the course or twist the knife
That all men know of death, but do not blame :
Arjuna knew the meaning of My Lai,
But you have stopped your sight, and missed your aim.
Excepting ignorance and your little sky,
There is no reason any have to die.
260
I shall return, again and yet again
As men around me write the songs of love
And men just born learn once more to begin,
But you refuse another step above
Because your thinking saw a little lie :
For you, time's but the endpoints of your life,
Your mandarin a lonely butterfly
Who says you die when you encounter strife.
You have no freedom from the thought of death,
For yours will end the projects that you plan
Because you do not know your /aleph, beth/,
And all the rest whose sound delivers man :
Because your tongue has never left a clone,
When you demur, you will go down alone.
261
Sitting alone and staring at the wall
Will do a better job of finding light
Than your complaining that the less than all
Is all that greets your many-fettered sight.
You have not gone a fall with anything
That you have seen, to find its source and path;
You cannot dicker life's lone bargaining,
For science makes you ill, and scared of math.
There is surcease for your too-timid kind,
For all your plaint and all that it will reap,
To still your spirit and recharge your mind:
Go back to your beginning, there to sleep
The end of guilt, finale of mistakes,
That washes free each junket spirit makes.
262
To go where some have only gone in mind
'S to leave an age behind, that hated truth;
To leave a song, and replicate your kind
'S to leave your age behind, and get back youth.
For youth loves singing, and by this is caught,
For singing carries attitudes and tones
As well as tune that carries out the thought,
So any man who sings his saxophones1
Need never sing alone in space or time
But always has the harmony of friends
To go beside him on his lifelong climb
From birth to being and its dividends.
Why then do you complain our little walk,
Who do not sing, and barely even talk?
1. The sounds of English, of course.
263
The blossoms of a thousand stars were thick
As dewdrops in your zephyr-tickled hair,
The night so clear you could reach out and pick
Most any one, like that blue giant there.
And you held forth on stellar ages, too,
The Hertzsprung-Russell diagram, and quips
From why a star goes supernova. You,
You leaned right down and kissed me on the lips.
Now all your night is filled with plaint to me
How mouths but hunger, bodies are a drag,
This novel trip is only misery,
And this becoming just is not your bag.
It makes me sad, that you refuse to grow,
But sadder still is that you used to know.
264
A February ant crawled on my book
But not, I'm sure, to read; the little guy
Went here and there, as though to have a look
At what I read, perchance to wonder why.
And then he found a crumb, put it to cheek,
And hurried back the way he came. No fly,
He had priorities: the ancient Greek
I read about, that Orpheus had deemed
A trip to Hell for, seemed to him too weak
A thing to scan when any foodstuff gleamed
His wee horizon. So he left, aslant,
And in a little while, his fellows streamed.
And you, who see the path and say you can't,
Are hoisted by this business of an ant.
265
I went out to the planes the other day,
Their thin aluminum still bent to fly,
To grab at air and curl it into sky
And lift ten thousand pounds and your small clay.
The only gone ingredient, your bouquet,
For you made that mistake, and chose to die,
Never again to write upon our why,
Defeated by the effort of dismay.
You always poohed the power of the synapse
To see some little thing and take it through;
Consider these, before you wear your crepes,
That after all the stations they've been to,
The ups and downs, the weatherman's escapes,
They still are poised for flight -- and so are you.
266
The day a green-and-cobweb dragonfly
Sat on a lily by my southern door
All green and orange and reflect-the-sky
I came out with my drawing-pad for more.
But more drew down as less, the colors dead
As all the earthen chemicals they were;
I had no stick with iridescent lead
So settled for black ink as the more sure.
For just the same I've done the same with you,
Eschewing instrumental circumstance
That lines of lead remind a living hue
As carbon black consorts into your dance;
And still I sing, that someday you will find
It reassembles also into mind.
267
The heavy beasts of snowpiles crouch at curbs,
Hairy with dirt and seeming set to spring,
Though real spring will turn them into blurbs
That run into the drains and anything
That leads them to the river in their haste
To get from our community, their fling
At being something being rather aced
In that they are but sculptures of the plow
Given a bit of sun, and are replaced
By creatures who await the sun and how
All life will greet it, even to my jeep.
I thought I'd tell you what I saw, and now
I'll sing no more. Whenever I am deep
You like the music, but are soon asleep.
268
Expressed from aether came the proton gas
That coalesced to stars and stellar ashes:
So compressed explosion came to pass
In heat so hideous that the atom smashes.
And in that unimaginable blow
The atoms once again got elbow room
To sashay round the corner, /dos-a-dos/
Into blue worlds, and thence once more resume
The integrals of life and love and thought
That populate our time and make it good,
And better still with what our thinking wrought,
And better with what wisdom has withstood.
Against all this rebels the little mind
In your sweet flesh, that thinks it all unkind.
269
I saw today a blackbird in a rut
Arriving to iced Spring, with not a doubt:
He bathed in water near to freezing, but
Enjoyed himself immensely, puffing out
And ducking first his head and then his weeds
In muddy water. Cornfield, oats, or cat,
He'll go wherever change of season leads
Until it leads to death, and that is that.
I watched him from behind a pane of glass
That kept the wind upon his side of it,
With one gas furnace tending to my mass,
My shower, water, and a place to sit:
Some time beyond our birth, our wisdom wakes,
And so a man can build the bath he takes.
270
You who would curse the Athos of the arm
(Being made by Athos safe enough to curse)
In tongues incompetent to state his charm
(Your own devoid of thanks, and wanting verse),
Still speak uncluttered by a foreign clang.
You are too juvenile, and growing worse,
For only children take what Daddy brang
Without acknowledgement of any kind,
And learn but nothing of the /sturm/ and /drang/
That most men make without recourse to mind.
So you'll not have my weapons on your shelf,
And in that case, it's certain you will find
That though I'm neither monarch, priest, nor elf,
I can quite likely damn you with yourself.
271
Get well away from me your little lace,
Your comely curves, your comealong cachet,
And most of all the smirk that fronts your face,
For I have work, and you invite my play.
It certainly is not that I oppose
Your all the things that I'm beholden to
Like this and that, precisely two of those:
Your story won't get written if I do.
And you will live again in little lines
Although you don't believe you will, so won't
Bestride the knowledge that your death resigns.
But it will never happen if I don't.
So please don't anger at my toodleoo;
Just come back in about an hour or two.
272
The flesh was tired with the day-to-day,
Scratching at eyes and necking shoulders down,
And praying that the winter go away,
The river rise and suck the snowbanks brown.
And then one day, it happens. Birds appear,
Yelling in choruses of kind and kind
That no one heard at all since late last year:
This is our load of spring, flown in consigned.
Then boys and youths appear upon the streets,
Their walk alive with every Rock 'n' Roll
That booms above their shoulders, and their sweets
Stride right beside, to keep them in control.
We waited for you and you never came,
But anyway, we had a softball game.
273
The sleigh exclaims a truly awesome red
Against fresh snow that blinds timidity;
The prints trot back, are eaten by the sled
About as fast as days by memory:
Each rear print in the fore, as though the foal
Outran himself, like any one of us
Who found his course attainted by a goal
That men in numbers found so glamorous.
But your dear footsteps only stride in place
To print each other, as an one must do
Who has no "forward" in his mental space.
A man must love what he's beholden to,
And you are harnessed to your own demise,
Your premises all blinkered 'round your eyes.
274
I watched a robin listening at worms
The morning after rain had left my lawn
A living sponge: the grass had come to terms
By leaping several inches with the dawn,
But this, he shrugged (a miracle was not
Within his consciousness). He cocked his head
And puffed himself, and strode another spot,
And listened for the thing the worm had said
About the taste of you ("a thousand grooms
For every bride," the saying goes), and you
Not even fully dead, though your grave looms
Large in every future you construe.
If you believe but all the things you've heard,
You'll get no farther than a hungry bird.
275
The trees grow green so suddenly it seems
They've leafed out overnight: the small brown buds
That winter held amid the whites and gleams
Of snow and ice have worried at their cuds
The April through, and now that May is here
Spit forth their foliage in half a week
From fist to leaflet, and their summer cheer
Overspreads the roads, expects to speak
In tongues of evergreen throughout the year.
And we who know the brief of summer's lease
Already lard the pantry, brew the beer.
But there are some who only think of cease
To throw away the year that time has given
By whining it away upon the divan.
276
Who sees with equal eye, as gods might do
A hero perish or a sparrow fall
Could never quibble at the want of you;
And all is equal in the alcohol
That sots the wanting brain, and gives it peace
But kills the voice into a whining drawl;
For some, the end of life is a surcease
Devoutly to be wished, but for the most
The thought of death is as a mind police
That makes its presence with a little boast
That it, not gods, make equal with the small.
You are so ready now to cross that coast
But I am not a god, to see so all,
And quibble greatly at your little fall.
277
So black and yellow on the purple chive --
As black and yellow's black and yellow get --
So beautiful -- and glad to be alive --
A bumblebee goes fumbling for a fit.
And, finding it, she sucks the blossom dry
Of what there was provided for the day
And clasps another for another try,
And takes the lot back home for all her pay.
Nothing she recalls but where home is;
To fumble flowers is her total season;
Nothing else disturbs this dainty Ms.
Until the honeycomb bespeaks her reason.
Unless you leave behind you what you are
You'll resurrect a bee -- but not as far.
278
This photograph is always only once
Upon a time when you had just begun;
It does not grow, but makes you out a dunce
Against the things that I have lately done,
Like writing my three-hundredth sonnet; you
Still smirk with adolescent fervor and
The sight of all the world you're going to,
But have not, done, or even set your hand.
How like the death that you envision now
Is this poor photo, frozen in your face
And adding not a year upon your brow:
Mere attitude -- so nothing to erase.
The real grave, though of the blackest black
Will wipe you clean and bring you ever back.
279
An elm seed blew against my office screen,
Trapped by the wind, and backlit by the sun,
A bright corona, yellower than green,
With umber center where the tree's begun.
They in their millions dune along the street
And every crevice in my fractured walk;
A hint of moisture, and the roots compete
For no more nurture than a bit of chalk.
For all they sprout the sideboards of my truck,
The seed determines if the kind survive:
A drop of water and a little luck,
Two billion years will see the elm alive,
Quite unlike you, for all your gravid taste:
The elm tree leaves enough behind to waste.
280
Three whitetail walked the premise of the park
Around an oxbow of the Northern Red,
And left their footprints to my evening lark
Where I saw them as well as saw ahead.
A young doe, sharp of hoof, touched but a dent
While two old bucks splayed heavy on their prongs
And showed themselves as well as where they went,
Just as a man does his inconstant songs.
Now you have left your footprints on our course
For any man to read, perchance admire,
For they but waver, and they lack all force
Even if they hoped or would aspire:
We read your story in your little ground
And how you always want to turn around.
281
Our sojourn over, I approach the world
With trembling arms, a humming in my head;
The sabre's hiltiltilt has left my right hand curled
About some certain subjects, overbred
With its own justice, but a sense of peace
That is not had by singing at the Hun:
Peace is had when would-be louts must cease
Their loutish acts before they are begun.
Now twenty years of life are almost through:
You did not love the sword, but only song,
So's but one thing you feel that I should do,
And but one place you feel that you belong.
But death forgets, so life must resurrect
Those parts of history we still expect.
282
The tape pops off, that taught me how to play
The inkspots on an old piano score,
Just as the letters in an older book today
Taught me a poem, that sang a little more.
Thus does the song survive, that once had life
Within one lonely mind that faced its death
Not as you chivvy yours, but with a knife
Between its teeth and steaming with its breath.
The mind is but its song, and song is mind,
Else mind is but the sense of daily stinging;
Song dies not, nor recreates its kind
But is itself no matter who be singing.
Your mind or notion last however long
That any breath will breathe their living song.
283
A daddy longlegs raced across my walk,
Just going places that a spider knows:
Unlike the ants, who always stop to talk,
His straight line did not waver in its prose.
To have such purpose is the thing to wish
For fellows whom it hurts to make a path;
Who will not stoop to throw a line and fish,
But have a thought, to lay it with a lath.
The road to being is a crooked thing
With feet put wrong quite oftener than not;
But man must walk before the soul take wing,
And all of us must live with what we got.
Then be an ant, if turn about you must,
As long as you will turn away from dust.
284
A squirrel took a corncob to his tree
And hitched it up into his little nest;
It filled his mouth as far as it could see,
But claws and guts determined all the rest.
You will not do as much as one gray squirrel
On your slow way to surfacing in Thrace
To give the way of life another whirl
Behind another voice, another face.
If starting over is the thing you hate
When death would keep you competent and sure,
Consider that your attitude of late
Convinced itself that /nothing/ has allure.
And so you stumble at the thought of life,
And turn around, to take your death to wife.
285
The grass lies windrowed by the side-chute mower
As only mowing back and forth can do;
I only hope that I will come no lower
Than back-and-forthing as I think of you,
For now you leave your life to seek the crib
That all are laid to rest in at the end;
But yours is a beginning, yet you jib
At turning our brief course to dividend.
Still you will have another chance to run
And trudge across another little life
That you will end before it is begun
For that it has a little bit of strife.
And so I wait alone for you to wake
This time or next, what does the difference make?
286
A monarch, orange and black against the blue
Was driven backward by a gentle wind;
His progress so reminded me of you
It made me wonder how /you/ think you sinned,
For only sin can so slow your dear feet
That they seem one, and you a monument
That I impugn to walk along our street
As Giovanni did the dead cement.
The butterfly has only blooms for goal,
His only sin to be that he not try;
But there is much to test your infant soul,
That, seen too soon, will stall you with a sigh.
But it's no matter what the serpent spake:
The next step is the one we all must take.
287
A moth runs circles on my writing pad
Like griddle-heated farts, but faster still,
Reminding me, in his pursuit of glad,
So much of you, and all your little drill.
At first you come, and then you draw away,
And then you stand a while in uffish thought;
You view with much alarm and more dismay,
But do not see the thing the bringer brought.
And so you do not find the way to go
Worth going, though the way is clearly marked;
The much you fear, the little that you know,
Combine to leave your carriage always parked.
What do you hope to leave behind you when
The now you squander turns once more to then?
288
A hornet bangs against a rusty nail
Seeking entrance for her waiting brood,
But if she tells them that she had to fail,
They'll send her out again to find some food.
And so the hornet has more ways than one
To come at last the lifestyle that she wants;
But you will shirk, nor even dare the sun
To find that Fountain fantasized by Ponce.
It lives within the mind of every man
Who leaves his life behind him with a quill,
As well as every member of the clan
Who reads -- or even hears the hornet's shrill
With that same ear that heard it at the start
And, hearing it, but took the song to heart.
289
This willow branch was told to stop my song
By making it impossible to pick,
And so I tried cajoling you along
By singing /a capella/ with a stick.
My whole life scribbled in my little dust
Where I could read the Moving Finger's writ,
And so I sang, while homesteads went to must
And you to Hades in your little snit.
Your long complaint at having to progress
Provides material only for a song
Or half of that; the thing that you transgress
Is but yourself and how you get along.
It's not so much you can't find Camelot
As simply that you read, but didn't wot.
290
Three azures /paso dobled/ at a vine
My neighbor grew to give his fence some class;
They flew about the flowers to combine
Their work with pleasure -- and my little sass.
Whatever's given for a man to see
Should be enjoyed before it goes away,
And given heart, that it may referee
Whatever's given for a man to say.
What you have done besides complain a lot
That you must "die" if you but dare awake,
'Sto so refuse the tittle and the jot
We're left with nothing but the bellyache.
And so you tramp, from cradle to the skull,
Complaining that the world is only dull.
291
A robin hunched his shoulders, so to run
Along the sidewalk by my little house;
He didn't stay and didn't jump the gun,
But when I moved, he scooted like a mouse.
He stopped again, a little way along,
And checked me out, and wondered what to do;
He didn't fly, but wouldn't venture song,
And so reminded me a lot of you.
You haven't learned a single thing I've said,
But will not quit me for another chap;
Your only fear is but to wake up dead
And takes no comfort from a living lap.
So here's the question that your fathers got:
Sing Halleluia, shit, or quit the pot.
292
The crescent moon belies the light of day
Invading it with images of night;
So does your sojourn through the time of May
Admit December as the greater might.
You who have come so far with following
Will take no single step upon your own;
The worth of it is past all arguing:
Your mirror can see nothing but the bone.
An hundred ways there are of coming back,
And all of them devolve to only one:
The mind alone is aphrodisiac
Enough to give itself another run;
And this alone detains you from your life:
A swordsman cowered by a little knife.
293
Some leaves like sparrows, flitting at the lawn,
Already welcome winter in their fall;
It isn't even August, and the dawn
Is just as north as ever with its call.
The berries bend the bushes with their weight
And robin chicks try wing despite the cat,
While those dear felines ever congregate
Our midnights with their chatter and elat.
You like an early leaf anoint the ground
Instead of ringing the eternal tree
That gains in girth by gathering the found
And ever grows more leaves like you and me:
And you will not eke out your little crumb
Because you think you're scared of losing some.
294
The chokevine climbs my TV cable now
Because it cannot find a proper stem;
Its perfect spiral spurns the straining plow
For there are weeds, and this is one of them.
It isn't kept for its commodity,
But anywhere on earth is its demesne:
A symbol of its own democracy,
It grows for growth, and flourishes between.
A bride of want, it doesn't have a groom,
But turns bright red before the waiting fall
For beauty in its age, then comes to bloom
Long after all but asters come to call:
It does not fear the ultimate "amen,"
For it will sow to climb that wire again.
295
A little space above a dark garage
Confines the moon, though it will find its fate;
I stride the alley past a rusty Dodge
And stop in thought, and think that I'm up late.
The moon is waxing toward the quarter now,
And means another month is waning, too;
I stand in uffish thought and wonder how
My little songs can wax my waning you:
For you recede to Hades in the pique
That sees your coffin as your only end,
And let that notion be your one critique
Of all a world that might give dividend.
The moon beams down, and doesn't say a thing
Despite my song, despite my wondering.
296
One night you played your tentative guitar
Athwart my bed, made timid by the thought
That you were wasting effort to make par,
For death would zero all the work you wrought.
You still played well, though bare enough to hear,
Your fingers clever on the brazen frets;
But how your pluck was little more than mere
As though the start already had regrets.
Your way of life is so alike like your song,
Denying concert and behind the beat
When one sweet thought would make your music strong
And that is but to love the what you meet.
You are the only history you've met:
You /have/ returned -- and do not know it yet.
297
If all the things that concert into fire
Are laid within the stove, and one spark struck,
The flame returns. The method is desire
In this man and the next, and not just luck.
It does not matter it were yesterday
Or in another life: behind: beside:
To fire up ashes is to so parlay
The single life that it must subdivide.
Then why do you imagine your own death
As though it ended you and your return,
And make excuses with your every breath,
Forgetfulness makes useless what you learn?
The cat forgets himself, and still the cat
Believes himself the same aristocrat.
298
To hear as Shakespeare, cobbling the chat;
To feel your fingers Mozart on the keys;
To Patrick Henry any bureaucrat;
Or Wilbur Wright the strong Kill Devil breeze:
These are some things that make a man again
Instead of kittens fighting at a whim;
To grow to manhood's only to begin:
We must reiterate the best of them.
Their water labors in our living blood,
But when it's in the meat, it only lives;
It's when it's with the brain, it chews its cud
With ever-living archconservatives
Who did not dance to doom, but left behind
This concert with the universal mind.
299
The cabbage butterfly tries many weeds
Before she finds the cabbage that she begs:
Until its pheromones abet her needs
She has no place to put her precious eggs.
I have one little cabbage by my walk,
A volunteer from two long years ago;
She cannot find it, for it is a balk
Beside the bleeding-heart, and does not grow.
But she will not give up her long research
Of every alley dottle on her way;
She even tries the neighbor's triple birch
In her brief bid to live another day.
And so your mewling fear is given lie
By one small, spotted cabbage butterfly.
300
A tiny moth left life upon my palm,
A streak of silver dust and darker arts:
He circled low and left this final alm
Upon the altar of that book of Sartre's
That says you cannot know until it's done
The value of an action or a type,
And so you and your ever-unbegun
Being is never tattled by its stripe.
You never once have left yourself behind
Where your all-hearing heart might be enjoyed
And grow again into another mind
Except in these, and these you would avoid:
You never count the being you accrue,
And quit the course for that I counted you.
301
Three little swallows, lined along a wall,
Sat, ready to bespeak our long affray,
But stretched them out when mama came to call
With mouthfuls of mosquitos, ooh, callay!
She'd had a lesson from a butterfly,
Hovering one short second with the chow
To stuff a little mouth and fall to fly;
Then here was Dad with Paradise Enow.
What is it in a swallow, loves the air
With all until it's not enough to eat,
But barrel rolls and cartwheels must beswear
The very sky from sunup to retreat?
Three little birds know what they will become,
And stretch their eager selves to get them some.
302
You woke up once from death, and walked the earth
In your fair form, albeit taking years
To tell yourself from your demented birth,
But only love recoups those dear arrears.
It's love, alone, that lets a fella give:
Sad pity only wallows in itself,
Compassion sometimes swallows, that it live,
And jealousy is put upon by pelf.
But loving it is soaking up a thing
Until there's nothing foreign of it left
And after that it live in you and sing
And thus does death pay back its little theft.
It does not matter that you still have breath:
Who will not love, it is the same as death.
303
The dog barks thrice that holds your little heart
Away from world and so away from mine;
A phantom coffin keeps you so apart
You cannot love, or read a valentine.
The world sends hundreds every day to you
From those that slap to those that acquiesce,
But, with your coffin blocking out the view,
You cannot see your forwarding address
And so your world is not of any worth,
For all is lost when you will close your eyes:
The total, blank erasure that is birth
Is not your life, but something to despise;
Yet you would have yourself to redesign
If you but leave yourself a valentine.
304
There is no place to hide within the mind
From things the mind brings forth to habit life,
For mind will have from hiding every kind
That seeks the seeker with a folded knife.
And thus it is what looks like death arrives
Because a friend looks mighty like a corpse,
A side of meat, a thing the parson shrives;
And focus on this rotting object warps,
Like Bosch or Brueghel, all a being thinks
About the subject from inception on,
And so not only death, but living, stinks
Because you do not pass your own baton.
If you'd have life, and not have panic shiv it,
The only parry's that you've got to give it.
305
A gray old lady at the alley's end
Has little left to do but sweep her street;
She dreams the days her boyfriends would attend
And try to sweep her off her little feet.
Arranging sandpiles with a kitchen broom,
Shes turns her dreams to children she began,
And theirs in turn, and what they will resume,
Then strides, bell-bottomed, to her garbage can.
And every other day, she trims her lawn
Need it or not, for only she can say;
She sees, of course, a day when she'll be gone
And only children, lawn, and street will stay
But all the while her dying finds her strong,
Because, my dear, she's passed herself along.
306
A skein of blackbirds streams across the sky,
Six hundred feet from end to end of them;
They feel the fall and do not wonder why,
Nor stop to sing a puling requiem.
They do not seek divine alternative,
Commiserate, or kiss their kind goodbye:
They know that all they have to do to live
Is what their being loves already: fly.
A single course without a radar blip
Is all their thought: a notion to appall,
So if we see but practice for the trip,
They've summer in their heads, though it is fall:
They only occupy themselves with flight
And have no wonder for the ways of night.
307
The Hyades are hanging on my house
Like Christmas in September, though I'm not
For decoration; let the neighbors grouse
Community or Christmas spirit, what
Can ever so improve eternal stars
If we dull people need reminding of
The power and the vision that are ours
If only we would learn what to belove
And give ourselves. Astronomers can tell
The height and composition of them each,
When each appears upon its carousel,
And every name, but never what it preach:
When god created being, he made us
The one who has to earn his animus.
308
You would not give full voice to any song
You ever tried with your timidity;
Your every subject was the dark Mekong
And had in common only treachery.
Your beauty had us fooled into the thought
Some human being hid behind your eyes;
But all your power is a quarter watt
For that is what your reasoning belies:
It is alone your choice that all you hear's
The mouthings of that thrice-cerebral mutt;
But there are more amenable destriers,
And one is Pegasus, one science, but
You cannot hear what anything impart
While loving with an ever-shrinking heart.
309
The fields relax to lightning and a cloud
Flicks like fluorescent lights about to glow;
In one mere lifetime, we are not allowed
To see as many things as are to know
And so I sing you what that I have seen
That you may add it to yourself again
And so take up the disarrayed beguine
You once had with yourself to its amen.
It was not accident I joined your dance
Molesting stomachs with each other 'til
You fell from being in that ambulance,
But now you are averse to pay the bill.
Then let me teach you tango and your life
Will once again take living to your wife.
310
The minnows scatter at my little step
That lately nibbled at my giant toe;
The least of movement, they drop out of Prep
And flit away before they come to know
A single thing besides that water's wet
And anything that wiggles is to chomp;
And that's why man has learned to silhouette
The places in the food chain that they romp.
Thus will a minnow only be a fish
For scooting from what lessons he could learn;
And thus their millions cover any dish
And fill the belly of the stooping tern.
You nibble at the human for your art
While loving with the minnow's little heart.
311
Why not love now to living? For your death
Will only slap you back to life again.
Your mother will begin your /"aleph, beth"/,
And once more you will do the old /zazen/
On class and paper, where you're forced to choose
Among the mob of parents you confront
Who each want you to amble in their shoes
That they may live again, however stunt
Your stride. But they will draw a fellow out
Beyond his years by giving all of theirs
In eight semesters if he does not flout
Their honor, or himself inventing airs.
Of all the airs that waste a man, this one:
That death leaves loving better unbegun.
312
The trees all show that same September green
That were so varied in the early spring,
As though an eagerness to quit the scene
Had lately fallen over everything.
But trees cannot anticipate their doom,
And only answer temperature and sun;
They grow when given, and do not presume
To quibble over when their growing's done.
Each year they add a little to themselves
And so distinguish them from common weeds
Until they turn to houses, chairs, and shelves,
And differences among their scattered seeds.
Thus purpose has delivered them from rot
And stretches man past what the gods allot.
313
The weather's cleared: I will not see the moon,
For it has chased the sun beyond the dawn
To sunset. Shining in the afternoon,
Crescent, faint with sun but never gone,
A simple instrument will bear it out
And show our darling still in health, if thin,
And easting ready for another bout
With poets, lovers, and the gelatin
Of amateur photographers, who prove
She's quite the same as ever in the dark,
As well as that example will behoove
Your billet-doux that it must first embark:
You can set forth to find that you are you,
Or leave you to an instrument or two.
314
The sweat runs like your fingers down my cheeks
And tickles at my fancy for your face:
A countenance I haven't seen in weeks
Because your gods have bid you keep your place.
The only little thing I have of you
On our adventure into growing up
Is your complaints and how they misconstrue
Your song -- and how you fear that triple pup.
All muscle is the same, that's kept in trim,
As well as mind that seeks to know the world;
The being leaves behind its paradigm
That its next self may listen what it skirled:
And when you hear, so soon do you begin
To take less time to be that song again.
315
Because you fear that mutt, you will not hear
The men who sing beneath your little room;
Because of him, a merely-lapsed career
Becomes a burden you will not assume.
This leaves you nothing but your lovely meat
With which to know your several selves, and they
Whom beauty tantalized to try to cheat
But culminate your ignorance today.
Because there is no tenant to your mind
Besides yourself, and that too little grown,
You /will/ be swallowed by what you maligned
And in the meanwhile, live and die alone,
For death and generation both disperse
The ones whom attitude or voice reverse.
316
I scratch my head, hear echoes in my skull
For you have filled it up with all of you
And you have no more substance than the lull
Between two lives both waiting to accrue,
The one, new breath, the next, a ready mind.
One seeking presence and the other, past,
Both hope to grow, but you are all they find,
Still timid at the prospect and aghast
At your hiatus seen from either end
The one all loss, the other leaving man
So little time to grow a dividend,
Because you will not understand the plan:
It wasn't chance that value overbid
When we resumed the best we ever did.
317
The lightning scrawls across the sky tonight
But never goes to ground in all the town;
I try to see, by interrupted light,
My lonely way toward the proper noun.
But should I make myself the aging clown
For one dull woman, beauty that she is,
Who will not even listen to renown
Let alone her own antithesis?
I'm told off to cajole this trepid Ms.
To world and being by Mister Death himself,
Without a tune or any glim of phizz,
And if I win, I cannot keep the pelf.
I need not ask what's in the thing for me,
For love alone would dare this lunacy.
318
The mushrooms bullet from the fog-licked lawn
And open black umbrellas to the mist;
They're all that's left to mourn where you have gone,
And prove as well you never got the gist.
A thing so simple as a life that kissed
You put to scorn for that it would not cure
One simple notion turned psychologist
And cost your life its value and allure.
It took a single logic to insure
You made your condemnation omnibus
By saying death took everything you were,
And proved that you were right by living thus:
You've left your muster but one line of text
And nothing but some toadstools for the next.
319
A hemisphere was dressed for Halloween
But still quite sure he could appreciate
That he was always climbing something green;
Still, each blade only bent beneath his weight
And found him but another place to start
An action far less chosen than innate.
The thing that keeps our climbing set apart
Is choosing every step that we will climb
And that we always choose it with the heart.
You makes your guesses and you pays your dime:
Disgust is all that ever turns you brown,
And love is something more than common mime.
Then see you set some concrete in your noun
Or like the ladybug be set back down.
320
I swing another stride, and there I spy
The moon appearing from behind the trees:
It says not any word but "It is I"
And lights my walk with your antitheses.
Such permanence it states when it is full
It's hard to understand its seeming change,
And, old or new, it utters by its pull
That all of it is there throughout its range.
The tale of earthshine is another thing;
As old as Patrick Spens, as new as now,
It proves the missing moon is in the sling
And only wants the spotlight that it wow.
You'd, too, return if you would but emplace
Some substance in your slowly-changing face.
321
The cold September rain sneaks past my eaves
To dot the panes in desultory fashion;
My pen can't handle what my brain conceives
When weather interferes even with scansion.
But still I try to interfere with you,
For you have been most dear of all to me
Despite the little being you accrue
To entertain both now and memory.
The arts won't suffer, that you bid goodnight,
For laughter and love will always come again,
But all your /joie de vivre/ will spend the night
Dissolving in the cold September rain.
I don't condemn you and I do not curse:
You've done that well enough for both of us.
322
The moon and I were walking down the street,
Though her steps only showed where I was not;
To shake a leg, she used my other feet:
My shadow used the only two I'd got.
It made me think of walking so with you,
Orion with a leg up on the trees,
Our palaver distracted by the view
And trying once more to count the Pleiades.
In those dear days, you'd never numbered death,
While I had balanced it since I was four
And counted life to draw another breath
By knowing somewhat that it summed before.
The moon shines out the shadow that I lack,
But just one thought prevents your coming back.
323
A lone mosquito, desperate for a drink
Got in my face, and so between my hands;
A marvelous small feat of wings and glands
Became a smear of stuff within a blink.
If gods there are, then even gods will wink
At that dear stroke whose meter but remands
The stuff of being to other allemandes:
You, only you, will ever raise a stink
For leaving but a beauty that can blind
But quickly slips the memories of men
As even taste is once more redesigned,
And you are taken up without your ken
Nor let alone consent, while all your mind
But dissipates to molecules again.
324
My loneliness must never haunt these lines
As it embodied me while you were here;
I have you now in thousands of designs.
Each knows you somewhat; all have held you dear:
This mushroom surely knows your brevity
For it was of the first to commandeer
Your little stuff, and so the last to see
Your recent entry into polyglot,
A hermit brought into community.
The little stuff I wit the mushroom wot
Is all its world, so little to appall;
It sees so little, but, then, you saw not:
Alone, I'm friended by a little gall:
You made me lonely when I knew you all.
325
The flies fill up a blackbird in the road,
That otherwise would lie there somewhat flat;
He cannot fly beneath his morbid load,
But when I pass, he flies for all of that.
To be or not to be aristocrat
He never asked until his flight turned false;
At second hand, his aerial elat
Has now become a smorgasbord of sals-
A spread for any public wings that waltz
Through those most private parts this afternoon;
He did not leave a record of his pulse,
So his lone epitaph is, "bring a spoon."
You left no map: we'll have to turn to Zen
For you to soar again in other men.
326
The furnace thumps into a living flame
And half its metal joints begin to talk;
The fan comes on and all the heat takes aim
Right through my skin and clear into the chalk.
You'll find no heat should you prolong your balk
In that vain bid to prove your thesis right
By daring death to let your stuff amok,
And memories your pilot should relight.
But all that being only takes a fright
To meet in you itself becoming back,
And clanging in a loveless blatherskite
For that you let no aphrodisiac,
Nor will you be the first to die of doubt
Because you let your pilot light go out.
327
The engine flags: I haven't mowed in weeks
And have to press to keep a steady pace;
The wheels find wormhills and the mower seeks
A way to ram its handle in my face.
Suddenly that word brings forth your face
Not to forbidden sight, but to mind's eye:
A pattern you would have me quite erase
For that you find the thing, at best, awry.
Disgusted with your brevity, you buy
Nothing at all with which to solder time
Before hello nor stretch it past goodbye
And so you'll never be as old as I'm
And that but yields you even more disgust
As girls who kiss the very aged must.
328
The edges black before the spores are thrown,
These mushrooms stand in bridal white gone sour,
For they can go no farther than they've grown:
To stand and die is all their only flower.
To come to mind is not within their power;
If eaten, they would only make us sick;
They stand aloft for one day and one hour,
Then some few spores repeat the tired /schtick/,
And no mortician beetle gives a click
That even the spores but slosh beneath the cap,
And do not cast beyond the parent stick;
This is where life and death but overlap.
You have refused to be a bride of mind:
See here what happens to your churlish kind.
329
The wind came down from Canada tonight,
Blowing clouds like bright Montana sheep
That charge the moon to interdict delight
And charge the air to interfere with sleep.
Again I lie awake: again you leap
Most naked to my bed, to hang your parts
So near my face, except for those you keep
Effaced from me by all your loving arts:
The only knowledge all your love imparts
Is that you love my hand, but not my sum;
When I would speak, you throw those lovely darts
Exactly where they make me the most dumb,
But I still know what awful want you hide
That makes you quite so quick to leap astride.
330
I cannot see the moon from my back yard:
The city's trees are always in the way;
I can't for lights make out the sky is starred
Let alone view her decollet.
I used to see a million stars at night,
The moon hung over miles of open lake,
Owls and nighthawks taught me of their flight,
And grouse and pheasant taught me how to wake.
Now the streets are overrun with rain
But nothing since you left to hold me here;
But here I am, and here I shall remain
With all the little stuff that I hold dear,
For I must start in time on my own life
Whether I've you or me to take to wife.
331
The spiders throw their webbing in the night
Across the path at just how high my face is,
And they all place it to impede my sight
Knowing insects only fly the spaces.
How marvelous, to have all knowledge born
With all the apparatus that it needs
To get about, tear into or be torn,
To live whatever present intercedes
With not a jot of yesterday to grieve
Nor any notion of tomorrow's sum;
Nothing to know and nothing to believe:
Nothing but the web, and that it thrum:
Nothing of the up-and-coming death
Because no thing of everlasting breath.
332
The water stands between the snow in streams
That undercut the stuff and poke the green
Before the year permitted us our dreams
Of endless rest and final change of scene.
Here is our mouth already, while the trees
Plump out their bloodied buds ahead of date,
As eager for the life that makes you wheeze
As it's to see that you recirculate.
Life! Eager life, in everything but men
Whose little fears and sloth invent them God
To save them from the cycle with amen
And give their backs to his dear promenade.
In case you didn't know, my sulking wife,
You've been recirculating all your life.
333
The water's dear, that pleasures me to rage
By making taut the shapes of fantasy;
The sugar of your skin is all for me
That hurts my blood to leaping in its cage,
And so your form and figure fill my page
For all the world and all of time to see:
All bulges, legs, and face, a potpourri
That, learning dance, became all women's gauge.
Are they to learn that you begot no soul
With all that stuff, that any husband's drudge,
But changing diapers, sewing at a hole,
Now teaching Man, now beating eggs or fudge,
Had more of purpose in a jelly roll
Than all your little thought would but begrudge?
334
The kitten raises one hind foot to scratch,
But puts it down unstarted: not that ear.
I lift a cigarette, but kill the match:
It's not tobacco that I want so near.
Jerks without purpose, moves that misconstrue,
My habits stub against an empty place
That roams the house just as you used to do
But now is only hole, instead of lace.
Those little threads reached out across your skin
Straining to contain your pinkly swell
There, there, and there, but far too thin:
If having was heaven, remembering is hell,
But there is one worse Judgment and Decree:
To be alonlone without this memory.
335
Amid this babble, I still hear your voice
As curves go by in dresses, that were yours,
So well remembered but constrained by choice
To set my waiting hand to other chores.
Your education paramount, I try
To show you what you were, that once again
I'll know your every tickle by and by,
But you slam shut. I take it on the chin.
You gave yourself to money, called it love
And so it was: you love the stuff. I know.
And now, when death's sharp push comes back to shove,
You'll die for that you left nowhere to go.
Still you could save yourself by learning soul,
And leaving /billets-doux/ to make you whole.
336
The moths burst into beauty in the light
And flaunt their colors to the gasping day
But wait to fly them 'til the sun's away
And hide them from each other in the night.
The chance of meeting kindred kind is slight
Until another pattern has its sway
And scented pheromones are given say
To creatures blinded by a candle's sight.
The soul's a moth, that sleeps until its spring
And, bursting forth, forgets it ever flew;
It takes an afternoon to build a wing,
An evening to test it, just like you,
Who worry so at burning anything
You keep yourself in total darkness, too.
337
My cats go crazy when the furnace runs,
As though the blast of air were all their bane:
They will not stand to warm their little buns
But run away to check the windowpane.
And there they find that winter took the view
They found so very luscious in the spring,
Just as some winter dallies yet with you
And covers over all your bargaining.
And while you quibble, snow gets in the cracks
And plugs the works your wishes had in sight,
And freezes shut the doors from you to facts:
Your days grow dark while all your hair turns white.
But this takes all, no matter what they feel;
You do not bargain with a life: you steal.
338
My little Mage goes hacking down the Hall
To pick at Rubles and the pluck of War
With Lightning at his fingertips and call,
Still never knowing what he's fighting for.
For I am his commander, not himself:
Those are my eyes beneath his pixeled brows;
He sees but what I will, and all his pelf
Can only find him what the Game allows.
You have the eyes to see a universe
From bosons to Red Limit, moral choice,
But observation felt your infant curse
(Delivered though it was in alto voice),
And you see nothing, for you damned your eyes
To looking at a world that you despise.
339
My Kitty is quite lumpy for a cat:
She swells in all directions with her kits,
And when my other Kitties tell her that,
Her claws come out amid the hissy fits.
She is as female as a being get,
To do, nor think, reacting to the urge
To bite and clobber every day, and yet
All loverly whenever hormones surge.
She sleeps against my pit, just like you once
Did; she, however, makes no game of it:
I am not one of any random stunts,
Nor love untaught, she will not manumit.
Yet this affection will not really do
To stand in place of what I learned with you.
340
The shutter clapped, and all your happy curves
Made artwork of a chemical device;
One look, my lonely heart sits up and swerves:
When you were naughty, it was oh, so nice!
The things you did to me, and did right here,
Were not found in the bible with "Thou Shalt,"
But all the best will do them for a cheer
So sweet the muchness constitutes assault.
You took my heart and tongue, and keep them still
Though all your curves have flatlined, and your mind
Has ceased to make flesh succulent; the will
To have you must make do with what I find:
Like mammoths in the ancient Agassiz,
T T This photograph outlives you, but for me.
341
We joined as planets seem to join at night,
Slowly but certain of an only course,
Two bodies merging to a single light
And going on their ways, to outside force.
You were uncertain of the thing you saw
But so sure universe could never fit
Such different courses to a single Law
You could not tell between the law and writ.
I'd watch you stride my yard across the snow
And turn to the warmth of wood stove, lamp, and pen,
Certain that what you sought you would not know,
And would not keep because of it. And then
I'd sit, my books in place, my pipe alight,
To wait our next conjunction in the night.
342
Nine years you labored to a different writ,
As certain as a cat is of her nest,
This neat, that thought in place: always your best
Without one kitten you could show for it.
Without a purpose for you to acquit,
You wandered from me just to try the rest;
Unfit to know except by how they dressed,
You could not tell your own, and so would spit
At those who gave you succour, held your bounds
Until the edges closed, at least; you learned
Nothing from a scar, the hurt mere grounds
For some retaliation, so you spurned
All that hurts to teach, and that astounds.
But love hurt, too -- and still you have returned.
343
The kitten climbs my leg and sits my lap,
Just cozy, not expecting anything
But to be left alone, the maybe hap
Of Belly Tickle, Rub The Chin, or String
(Except I have no string; I'm busy here
Recounting you to you, so that you'll wake
And so resume your thousand-year career,
But all you do so far is bellyache).
But accidents of lilac teach you hue
Who will not take the palette to your work,
And accidental fair adds up to you
Even if you are a sloppy clerk.
Well, you refuse design but honor hap
So might yet sit my comfortable lap.
344
A grunt of semen to the heaving crotch
And two half-beings grope into a dark
And comfortable existence, there to botch
The choice to be or not, their Cutty Sark
Never quite leaving port, though thrown to sea
With quite a bit of grunting every time.
So what, exactly, fathered you and me
Beyond our launchings to the we that I'm?
It's song, got me beyond the fuddy-duddies
Who thought they owned my soul but had no ear
To hear the voice that rang in their own studies
And turned my little love into career.
Now I sing you, who follow like a mist,
And if I cease, then you do not exist!
345
For if I cease to sing, then you will fade,
As I have made of what I think of us
An one that sees it too, beyond the shade
That falters your halt step, a bag of pus
Where mind and world had met within the skull
To plan a little future for the two
(A future that your coolness would annul),
And turned to pudding all your thoughts of you.
Now, if you do not know what makes a man,
How can you make one, stands against the dark?
And how complete, who quit that you began
Because your race has disallowed the mark?
For, while you only think of when you're gone,
I turn myself to words, and rave right on.
346
When your dishonor finally ruined love
I turned to glories of the lesser sort:
The way you wore your panties, doffed your glove
As prelude to our lovely body sport.
I might as well have had a little snort
And then some more, as sing so much of you;
There's little in these lines but your sweet tort,
Though they have taken decades to accrue.
To take two decades at a /billet-doux/
Is mania of sorts, the kind that sleeps
Until each morning, only to halloo
A memory, and not the day that leaps
To know the value of the living land,
Just as you once did into my hand.
347
The contacts clap, the furnace thumps with flame
And tells me fall has sneaked in by the back;
And that is all that sneaks in since our game
Was called some time ago for all your lack:
Yours was not love but aphrodisiac
Alive within, just like Cro-Magnon man,
To cause your little midnight sneak attack.
But so bright segments of my life began,
And you, you took my love, and then you ran,
For love is a responsibility:
For mine, you thought to be a superman,
Of which your little thought would have you free.
How like a girl, to her own self untrue:
The only thing you had to be was you.
348
Some men in space, a boy who flew above
His origins, apparently for sport,
A footprint on the moon, and John Galt's love:
What were these little fillips to our sort?
The only thing I feared was your retort,
Snappish in its ignorance of fact,
Tradition, or the way to these; your mort
Of all my tries at words and every act
But grabbing at your dear things, fully snacked,
Made hell of every minute I was not
With all of you, our bodies bivouacked
On any chair or bed to make a sot,
For there was nothing but your body to you,
And nothing there for me to do but screw you.
349
I think of all I learned while you stayed blank
With what the State allowed a graduate;
But not the State: you've but your choice to thank
For sucking the Official Version, plate.
For campus still has sciences, of late,
And technical material in the arts,
And those who don't commit a social fate
Can still remake a world from its parts.
I say it without drawing any charts,
For I had taught it twenty years ago,
But you refused to marry our two hearts;
Instead, you married but an OBO.
You probably are happy with your lot,
For you, at least, had wanted what you got.
350
You walked in beauty like my double moons,
All round and white and ready to my hand,
Surprising me on random afternoons
With something poetry had never planned,
And so besotted me in every gland
I almost spent my life to wait your visit.
I thank my training that I had more sand
Than that, if not enough to cheezit.
Now twenty years, I've tried my best to Biz it
Out of mind, but "best" was still in thrall,
And memory is not an evil, is it?
And so you have remained my only doll.
But though you've made it rough to love a wife,
I think it's time to go and get a life.
--* les envois *--
Dear William Shakespeare,
Avon calling? A pax on such a cheek!
One hundred fifty-four of these you grew
From molded paper, smoothing Petrarch's meek
And coddled ruts to raise the humored hue.
The evening stalk among your leaves can show
The tyro troweller bright bouquets of sense
And supple will that charm a bough from snow,
But these two years, the stalks become a fence
That bars my pen while roots wrench at my digs,
Engrave my themes and shake my tale with prattle;
Instead of blooms, I winnow tweaks and twigs,
Ashamed by green thumbs as I thumb your tattle,
And that you kept the piece to take six years
Is all that shakes my will to hurl spears.
l'envoi
Well, I am done, and well I'd hurl plenty,
But I have kept them nine, and taken twenty.
Dear James Shirley,
The lowing sounds in seven pairs set forth
To float a flood of borrowed foreign art
And try new lingo for its very worth
If not to be, at least to act the part.
James, James, what did you help us fellas start
Who hide the private sentence in the scene
By publicly complaining of the heart
When no one dares complain about the spleen?
Not all that time is passed; a bean's a bean;
A man has need, where lilac just has xylem;
A virgin queen is still a virgin queen,
And fetish man still claims this rhymed asylum
Inventing English Lauras on a whim
Who really only want a paradigm.
Dear Phillip Sidney,
With how sad steps, o moon, you stoop yourself
To worm a woman to a little height,
That keep your rapier on the toilet shelf
To trim your toes and not your acolyte!
What subject could not rise, whose master lows
Himself, but keeps his song an eremite
To pedestal a star, himself depose
Until the very posture make him numb?
Who stoop to 'scopes for what the bent disclose
Will straighten to the bends, at last succumb
As something from the ancient deep must swell,
Exploding in exalted vacuum :
If man must stoop to fit his Stella well,
When he must stand will see, his astro fell.
Dear John Berryman,
You saw them plain, those little men whose itch
Would rather be addicted to their hurt
Than learn enough to praise a fancy bitch
Or bury her who cannot raise a skirt.
What can give reason to that lazy pain
Including yours, who had that golden blurt
To sing and tumble? Sing instead the grain
And leave a hiccup for the other stuff,
Nor order memory relent the strain :
Lust has its hour, and it is not enough,
But why, oh, why did you not wish to win?
John, John, if you could not make room in there
To court an angel with the devil's pin,
Why did you bury man? Or else begin?
Dear Loren Eiseley
The snow is to the windows, and my heart
Aches to be out to study all that's dead
And blooms again by striking part to part
To spring's quick beat: the substance in my head
Will one day let me sleep though night has fled
For letting its violas fall from pitch,
Percussion falter from the dance it wed
To lapse again to chaos' spastic bitch:
We call it "death," and dig a little ditch,
As though this end excused your want of start,
And, moved by nothing more than random itch,
Gripe life and death are hard to tell apart,
Ignore the thought rekindled in your tones,
And let your voice be dictated by bones.
Dear Daniel Rossetti,
A sonnet is a hawk, that starts aloft
At some deep, ancient onset of the wing,
Of something savage and of something soft
That beats still in the blood, the air, or anything
That lisps of wind, of clouds like popcorn balls,
And, seeing flight fall short, begins to sing.
Far over fields whereon the vulture stalls
The hawk's on freshets, being whirls and loops
And constant gaze, until the whole world falls
All alien to legs, and things in coops.
At last it spies the what it will espouse
From that wide vantage on the world, and s
t
o
o
p
s
Past spastic sparrows and the grounded grouse,
And bears aloft a limp and lifeless mouse.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Index of First Lines
94 A cup you touched and tippled, I put out,
131 A curse of poontang on a comely course
283 A daddy longlegs raced across my walk,
203 A dozen keystrokes on a board I took
200 A face that boys will bang their heads for, smile
264 A February ant crawled on my book
305 A gray old lady at the alley's end
197 A great cloud hove to eddies that its mass
344 A grunt of semen to the heaving crotch
319 A hemisphere was dressed for Halloween
288 A hornet bangs against a rusty nail
295 A little space above a dark garage
119 A little while, and there were the words.
323 A lone mosquito, desperate for a drink
240 A midnight, and I fondle certain facts:
286 A monarch, orange and black against the blue
287 A moth runs circles on my writing pad
291 A robin hunched his shoulders, so to run
91 A sense of ocean rolls across this plain
306 A skein of blackbirds streams across the sky,
284 A squirrel took a corncob to his tree
300 A tiny moth left life upon my palm,
199 Abashed by your own daring, you sneak in
7 Again, you flow like lilac to my mind
208 All all and all who rave the lilac's doom,
258 All those religions bidding for your ears
176 Always your steps succumb to random rubble
335 Amid this babble, I still hear your voice
279 An elm seed blew against my office screen,
77 And how the savage God recedes
210 And now you leave my bed into the storm
80 And spring cajole the lilac's colored stuff
67 As humming numbers tumble into racket,
161 As Mozart giggles through the infant noise
141 As praise is water, sipping at the st st st st stones
2 As though bees knew the brevity of best,
17 As you watched lightcaps roll a sea of grain,
71 Because the pipes leap up, the people thought
315 Because you fear that mutt, you will not hear
90 Being out of season with the tone of youth
146 Better to hide away what would have been
29 Beyond this pane, snow fluffs the marigold,
201 Blame the art. Blame art itself. Blame me
162 Bury my voice and burn these pages, do
59 Calculating stars, contested time
8 Can hardened hands that lately wrestled Rome
117 Cold in the earth the love of song lies deaf
127 Comes mewling in the chuckled dark this strange
38 Day rammed by day, as glaciers will crush rocks
241 Did I look at you, you would go away
115 Everywhere one sits there are the stones
268 Expressed from aether came the proton gas
25 Fishhooked, you leap aloft, "why me"s
242 For all its pain, the mind will never bleed :
128 For every course at least four times the sky
95 For god's sake, hold your tone and let me sing!
345 For if I cease to sing, then you will fade,
126 For song will out and some where you are singing,
83 Gather the flakes of bees, the motley earth,
271 Get well away from me your little lace,
34 Gravity bet, my feet plied pedals, sped
39 Gross winter can be dealt with, brought to gain
168 Here in the night the whirling colloseum
211 Here on the brown-boned earth
239 How all my atoms busily agree
42 How can I sing my cabin's peace to you
151 How far between the stars! Nothing enough
103 How in and out about where there's a garden
35 How like the leech of hunger, this; your absence
173 How longer can I go on singing you
175 How much the dark of what you fear to see
187 How often have the atoms reared your face
15 How soft, how often have you brushed my thought,
156 How without you have these notes been wrung,
50 I am that I am, this nexus, clot
330 I cannot see the moon from my back yard:
81 I do not need to look at you to see you,
257 I know I sing a lot of what you must
245 I know. You do not see yourself as dead
236 I love you. There, I've said what you would hear
56 I parallel the moon, shins counting logs,
213 I saw, upon the grounds where I was sent,
269 I saw today a blackbird in a rut
316 I scratch my head, hear echoes in my skull
env I seal this sneaking ark to you who bid
202 I see you even in what you took out,
260 I shall return, again and yet again
86 I should not ever let these pines pitch woo
320 I swing another stride, and there I spy
349 I think of all I learned while you stayed blank
252 I used to sing your beauty, it is true;
274 I watched a robin listening at worms
224 I went a way I did not know myself
265 I went out to the planes the other day,
297 If all the things that concert into fire
105 If we had world enough, and time,
226 In little time, the seas shall yield their dead,
30 In that small room the water of your hour
106 Issues from this gruel the simple soul
107 It's the panache stands up to dance and still
55 I'll waste no chloride that I cease to care
78 Just like my beard, this memory of you,
207 Let any child assemble to resent
188 Let shock lock glottis up against your crime
118 Like as this tingling bearing tell the forge
133 Like dogs dependent on their days for cat
167 Like every Hydra replicate the mouth
113 Like lilac, you transform my common quarts
139 Like rose from the stone's guts squeezed, these human arts.
123 Lilac, you, whose death from frost forebodes
33 Lissom aluminum, though quick to astound
136 Long on the loon green dark of early ice
192 Me you accuse that I did not suppose
104 Momentous thing this dying is; mischance,
44 More than a pane stands firm between the pith
189 More than your quiet ear across my chow
89 Much have I travelled where the realms were sold
198 My age like ocean sedimenting chalk
337 My cats go crazy when the furnace runs,
339 My Kitty is quite lumpy for a cat:
338 My little Mage goes hacking down the Hall
324 My loneliness must never haunt these lines
253 My memory crawls like a worm through time,
47 Naked we came, and naked I would lie
108 Neither grief nor gratitude for grief
214 New roofing echoes from the neighbor's lot
342 Nine years you labored to a different writ,
64 No, no, no, no love?
96 Not poems, nor the promises of gods
110 Not since strewn Miletus has time thumb
62 Not that our slug will shrink within its husk,
190 Not you fed me while all that smo/rgasbo/rd
138 Now how this drafty garret of my soul
37 Now neither Bacchanal of bloom and birds
219 Now you, who learned the secret name of God
186 O you of every heart that you repeat
97 Of all the beings each may choose to hope
74 Oh friend of this, our distance into time,
14 Once a slick cutlass, dreaming the duel dawn,
23 One letter like rain; my sky intones the south,
169 One night will fall the day will not refresh,
296 One night you played your tentative guitar
53 One star strobes southward, proving the slow page
281 Our sojourn over, I approach the world
256 Out of mind, then in again, then out
6 Out of the snow I fell into estate
19 Quills swilling ink and steel, I learned to fly
254 Saint Valentine's again, and for my part
79 Shall I breed lilacs in an empty truce
88 Shall I derange my fifteen wits for you
112 Shall those bleat blessing on the repast past
9 Should my scant hay coax her from where her eyes are
60 Should that bronze bosom know it's beautiful,
163 Since Charles had his hair done a la Pym,
261 Sitting alone and staring at the wall
277 So black and yellow on the purple chive --
248 So many are the ways in which we wake
180 So moot to sing of you to you, but worse
26 So you hear wheezing in athsmatic rime
129 So "God is dead," now, are we? That they sleep
93 Soft pad the slitted eyes of hungry thought
293 Some leaves like sparrows, flitting at the lawn,
348 Some men in space, a boy who flew above
58 Some time now into this work-curdling love
111 Something there is that does not love to sleep,
43 Stark and storklimbed, grossbeaked, slow to fly,
221 Step, live and longing, past that tunnel mouth
121 Still and still you bicker of assault,
68 Still slow to smell the smelt and slow to sky,
3 Such times as memory and I agree
11 Sunshine girl, the gold peal of your skin
143 That sack of sea you wear : suspended dirt
164 The air sags, clogged with gnats and natty news
165 The belly that I tickle children kick
263 The blossoms of a thousand stars were thick
235 The blossoms of the thousand stars are thick
24 The bright aurora flash through time, expanding
48 The bullrush dried, the ash beartrapped in ice,
299 The cabbage butterfly tries many weeds
237 The camera hangs upon the office wall
124 The chestnut alters shadows and the bats
294 The chokevine climbs my TV cable now
223 The clock barks loudly on the office wall :
321 The cold September rain sneaks past my eaves
195 The collins that I pointed to colleens
347 The contacts clap, the furnace thumps with flame
160 The cornstalks cross their arms and chatter fall
76 The corpse will not lie still. It flows between
292 The crescent moon belies the light of day
266 The day a green-and-cobweb dragonfly
303 The dog barks thrice that holds your little heart
154 The earth rolls over as the rooster howls
328 The edges black before the spores are thrown,
327 The engine flags: I haven't mowed in weeks
309 The fields relax to lightning and a cloud
272 The flesh was tired with the day-to-day,
325 The flies fill up a blackbird in the road,
326 The furnace thumps into a living flame
230 The gifts are spread around the tree and you
285 The grass lies windrowed by the side-chute mower
10 The grave's grit growls along my arm's dumb ear
231 The gutter stutters with the crack of ice
63 The hawk glare glazed as sleep dissolved esteem
267 The heavy beasts of snowpiles crouch at curbs,
28 The howling yesterday tonight is still;
307 The Hyades are hanging on my house
343 The kitten climbs my leg and sits my lap,
334 The kitten raises one hind foot to scratch,
217 The lawn mower chuckles to a choking stop
317 The lightning scrawls across the sky tonight
145 The lockup rattles on the forty-five
205 The loneliness of bluer than the sky
66 The mailbox stands, a birdbombed sentry, bent
310 The minnows scatter at my little step
322 The moon and I were walking down the street,
336 The moths burst into beauty in the light
181 The moving finger points, and having done
318 The mushrooms bullet from the fog-licked lawn
222 The music titters from the speaker grille
21 The omni spreads its silent beacon Morse
41 The saw leans silent at the chimney wall
57 The scherzo dulls before the record's run
171 The shrinking woodpile, growing pile of wash,
340 The shutter clapped, and all your happy curves
5 The sill distills the silent, night-numbed lawn
244 The sky is clampedpedpedped down like a Mason lid
273 The sleigh exclaims a truly awesome red
220 The snow lies long across the walk tonight
249 The snow screams whitely of the freezing sun
331 The spiders throw their webbing in the night
144 The strawn sun spalls into the yellowed rooms
238 The sun crawls up as though the day regrets
314 The sweat runs like your fingers down my cheeks
174 The swedesaw crowns the window, turning brown
282 The tape pops off, that taught me how to play
51 The tape slaps off. Uncertain sounds we tried
69 The tetrads quiver spruce and nuance by nuance
179 The thumbnails of the beans point always down
4 The time we played the summer day its dare
184 The touch and treachery that saved the few
312 The trees all show that same September green
31 The trees blaze brighter; swells even the thistle
275 The trees grow green so suddenly it seems
22 The trees' tall fingers furl their living lace
85 The tungsten stutters, and the building shakes
52 The walleye swallows as a hoverharp
332 The water stands between the snow in streams
333 The water's dear, that pleasures me to rage
49 The wavicles through this bright barrel pass
313 The weather's cleared: I will not see the moon,
247 The whole sky is aflame around the sun
329 The wind came down from Canada tonight,
32 The wind hoots in the bronchi of the trees
61 The woodpile simmers in the fouriers
98 The word for sword is foil, and the ring
84 The words and wires both dangle, and I lose
142 There is no music but the reach of arms
304 There is no place to hide within the mind
120 There is no telling : you will have the poem
149 There is still wonder in an early chant;
101 There is too much and not enough of you
16 These golden toadstools bullet from the birch
13 These rocks, the shocks of which curse toes
70 They hope that it will turn your salt to salt
92 This cat knows meditation. Maybe you
72 This infernal thighangle of hope
227 This music, broadcast all across the land,
278 This photograph is always only once
289 This willow branch was told to stop my song
116 Though all our surface stutter into war
99 Though now this word, being sung, is being lost
147 Though wrapped on air, my wrist still aims epees,
20 Though you are skyjacked by your will to fly,
290 Three azures paso dobled at a vine
177 Three diodes light, the screen declares a print,
301 Three little swallows, lined along a wall,
1 Three seasons' span, the iris is a tuber,
280 Three whitetail walked the premise of the park
137 Three years you su sat and picked at your guitar
182 To any who'd appoint a child to place
183 To drink new water from an unnamed stream
262 To go where some have only gone in mind
298 To hear as Shakespeare, cobbling the chat;
225 To lose and gain, and lose and gain again :
218 To sleep the one more time that ends this time;
206 To turn beans into girl is no great trick --
246 Today, I wrote another dozen-minute
250 Tonight, I heard a Spaniard at guitar
40 Too like the popcorn, these, uneasing you
159 Too many ghosts whose only breath is mine
196 Too young for Ares and too old for Zeus
18 Twin turbines whistle like a stooping hawk
170 Two beecell eyeballs made of knotted laws
46 Two days of casting purls defend my feet
109 Two seasons wake in want to grapple hope,
45 We, bonebeaked bastards of old flesh jerked taut
341 We joined as planets seem to join at night,
130 We love the coffins, that they came to us
243 We spread love's wishbone, but your legs don't break.
212 We two were wild with wonder, picking plums
255 We wait too long for you to make reply.
234 Weep not for twenty years I wrote of you
75 Were all my senses stupid as the snail
178 What can I argue that I have not sung
125 What caverns have we clambered in our climb
158 What foods these morsels be that fuel your flight
100 What is there can love that cannot kill
185 What kind of people make a man to choose
209 What madness was it that possessed the first
194 What sad fraud guilt you would impose on us
73 What you have done is done. It is a trick
215 What you would have us be was all your grief,
87 When hands acquire the curl of easy tools
172 When sword-laid reflex dawdles into pains
346 When your dishonor finally ruined love
233 Whenever you would worry for the night,
276 Who sees with equal eye, as gods might do
157 Why do I know surprise that your avant
54 Why do you tease this hermit hamlet, still
155 Why have I sailed this homolytic law,
311 Why not love now to living? For your death
134 Why should I wake to will your walk resume
166 Why when I pick at those sweet songs of clout
65 With "Sumer cumen in," your throat turned chill
82 Worms and weeds do not, I think, give thanks.
153 Would that you, who referee these games
12 You, basslissom, scissor of limbs-au-lait
228 You, love, who tried to tug me back below
122 You all chameleon and dimpled Grail,
152 You are as in the park the peonies
251 You cannot count on song to make a space
27 You come as geese that stroke a crystal lake
193 You could, if you'd a mind, flatly refuse
229 You in your pain bark wise at all the world
135 You stood so with your arms so full of bloom
350 You walked in beauty like my double moons,
102 You who pulled our salt surge to yourself
270 You who would curse the Athos of the arm
302 You woke up once from death, and walked the earth
308 You would not give full voice to any song
204 Your apparition to my taste, belief :
232 Your heavens had had the earth, and turned it wrong :
150 Your liquid song gone running through the soil
259 Your sleep continues to repudiate
148 Your to my gopher-tousled beans' bed stride
191 Your trepidation that I ever sought
36 Your waist at my counter I remember now --
132 Porgi amor there was when there was ear
140 "Combustion slides in cylinders of steel" --
114 "If we could glue the leaves on trees," he said,
216 "Thou wast begot; to get you is thy duty,"