A Dialogue

Scene:

The Reed College Student Union, wide wooden
Lodge. An angry FLUTIST pipes at a calm breathing
SMOKER.

FLUTIST:

The beams are resonant, the wood absorbs the twittering tune
And multiplies silver tones, sound refractions
Denser than the light that yawns through the windows,
But not as thick as, purer than the air, this choking mulch
Of smoke that fumes your breath, that rots inside
Your lungs -- you treat them like wine sacks! -- a disgrace
For the pungents of poison your veins all carry around to ruined
Brains, conflagrant skulls -- but not for the vim to yourselves,
So much as the harm in the vigorous breath, which by steady pulses, gulps,
I'm trying into music. Can't you see how the aether might dance?
Or are flares all the mind in your ranks? Coruscating laws!

SMOKER:

Twirp, not a twitter, your complaint whines on unrelenting
As your savage twitch. Metal, that flute? Becks of oats,
A rotten rill, guttering air in a stench that bloats the head,
Pounding far more on the ears than ever in our rusting lungs.
Rusted your playing, rustic, the growl of the wolves set to strings,
At best harsh springs, bubbling sulphuric slime, and the crime
Of your cat gutting song only harps on the tune of your blame,
Squawking plaint; so we'd rather smoke hay-stacks
And set the choking walls in bleary-eyed conflagrations
Of sweet tobacco, harsh weed, than tolerate
Your lymphing strain, which strains on
Our peace. Go play in Prexy, a haven for hummers,
Free from our mutterings, mouthfuls of smoke,
Good for your lungs, but better for everyone's ears.

Now look, I may have
Screwed up in all that
Screwing, as you say,
With a knife twist
Turn of the screw or
What have you, wrenching
Deep into the gut until
I drew the spurting blood,
Delicacy of time. So?
A man can take his pleasure,
Whether her blood is still
Dripping from my veiny cock,
Or I've ravaged the race
Of women, like cropping a
Lush fertility. Simply put,
Woman, I tricked you: my seed
Is already deep-burrowed in you, you
Have become apart of me, or I
Likewise, we've grown into
Each other, the same sap of pain
Confluence of our being,
Which was already being, so
Everything I've taken
For me, for us, for all that
Grows into the fatal earth.

When he left, the room
Grew longer in the twilight,
The bookshelves slanted
Like the shadows' slant,
The twitch of the leaves
Patched brightly on the walls,
And a warm breeze
Whispered the lucent remains
Of a sea change into my ear.
Sidereal waves were rising,
The night's flood sucked at my heart,
As if I were a conch shell,
Spit up by the tides, abandoned
To the whims of childish ears.

Suppose that the gown were made of flowers
Grafted with flowers, woven together
Into the skein of a flower, really a blooming symbol
Of bloom. Now suppose you showered it in living,
Wore the petals down, dragged the clustered hem
Through shaggy walk in closets, long, dimmed spaces,
And every night a hundred strange embraces. Gradually the blue,
Embroidered, buried in the dirt, of course comes grey
And black as earth; but the memory of the dress,
-- Is it wilting in the back of your mind, or folded
Into some remembered drawer?
It is probably all a matter of air -- and time.

The Walls

Walls beyond the dawn, silent
In their need for silence, themselves stone
Perched on mortared stone, define a space
Of creeping shadows, echoes
And the voice of echoes, which is the night
Sobbing, a clamorous exclamation of surprise
Spilling across stones, voiceless
Keepers of the night.

Lecture

Is
And is not
Will
And will not be
Form a curious web
Of logic, hanging from a thread
By language, whose dual capacity
Equals reality. You’ll see
That a proposition is true
Or false, that it is,
Or it is not.
When we fix the meaning
Of words, the polarities of doubt
Collapse, and everywhere we gaze
On the immense structure of truth.

Take, for instance,
The logic of material things:
In a moment I press into your open hand
Something, not physical,
But prefigured in physicality, an intellectual
Proposition, at least
In language. This is an example of a showing forth,
Clear seeming, and it shows that everything
Either was, or is, seems or will be. You become the dream
Of your own reality, which is at least a reality of mind,
In the mind, reminding you again of the split
Between you and physicality. Now take the soul:

Imagination is an enemy -- it yields to the confusion
Of is and is not, which is a proposition
Of the will, which wills it so
Or not so, and the farther things fall
From duality, the less they prefigure reality.
Imagined pain is less than pain, but more than pain,
Likewise imagined death is more or less. The moral being

If you consider words there’s only empty seeing.

The First Existential

Crystal isolations, whole solicitations
To a state of supreme being
Where nothing is supreme: think

The vagaries of your own experience
Into a cold conscience, which grasps hold
Of the iron bonds and twists them into an imagination,
Or at least the palpable possibility
Of an imagination, or even then the barest shadow
Of such an imagination, which becomes an instant,
Instantaneous with the moment, of momentary
Significance. You're still locked

In the cave, a cavern more hollow
Than crystal, more crystal, blue shadows, cold fragrance,
Than hollow, but in all events hollowed and hallow,
Which is the space not of imagination, but the preconception,
Before any reception, of reality's womb. Locked in the immensity,

In the enormity, in the monstrosity, which is a monstrous omen
Of birth, a showing forth that conceals, a concealment that hides,
Cringes, and still conceives and deceives
New valances of beauty, there is some stirring,

Almost like the beating of a breath, almost like the breathing
Of a wind, the winding of curves and twists
Into hearty knots. No motion is possible, and the antithesis of motion

Is silence, quiet waiting, but a waiting that prefigures
Action, or an action in the waiting, since the cringing weight
Won't fall, but hangs suspended in the possibility, the elaboration,
Configurations of time refiguring, calculating, planning,
Clever and dolous, doleful, dull in traces
Of smooth silver, granite silver, pomegranate silver

Tracing the reciprocity of the prison, of the season, but most like a lesion
Or a leech, sucking the dry entrails of the great
Beast, reborn and renewing when the day renews, when the moon
Sheds moonshine like a woman emerged from a pool,
Sheds starlight like the beaded drops of sweat
Shooting out over the horizon. There is one image facing you, a face

Who imagines you, and all existence resolves
Into the mysterious glare of a light
And the singular darkness of those bulbous eyes.

If only there were something real, muse, a crystalline valley
Brimming with golden light, all colors, rapidity of hues
Autumn in their beauty, long and lolling waves
Of summer bloom. When lumber falls
(And only here through muchness
Of foaming springs) grey moss gathers
With mushrooms and clover
In gardens of grey antiquity,
Perfected, unsparing of succulent mists.

Instead there is the work:
Accomplish the brown little dregs
Of work, smash yourself in the red-forging
Flames, cook yourself all carmelized
Species, groan and rull
With the waves.

Pleasure I want,
Not rivers boiling over
In slick oil, rimming
The soiled banks. There is nothing,
Muse! in which mortals won't use
Their advantage: interest accumulates
In piling pages, and burns through the gloom.

So I'd rather be dead,
Engulfed in drifting flowers
Than live with livid flames.

In the elaborate elusion of a question,
I lose myself in lustrance, monstrances,
And remonstration. Everything seems real,
But a vague disquiet pervades
It all; the seeing image flickers like crushed
Candy on the edge of a knife, dull is a life
Blade skinning time and wrinkled tears
Off an onion. Things seem to come in pairs: good
And evil, being and death, time
And the absence of time, literature, its opposite, progression.
If only the sweetness of autumn fruit could dribble
On my tongue, I'd make some sense of the mess, the dirty
Piles of laundry, the quick-sand scraping the pavement,
The glass-like prisms and prisons of life. Most of all,
Existence would no longer be a game, but linger on,
The grandest obsession of all -- wings would move
In the scale, and the flicker of a lingering pine-limb would be
The most natural thing in the world.

Every Writer Has an Obsession

Paralyzed by the inconsistency of action
In an imperfect world -- or perhaps in a perfect world,
Silver globe by star-shine, by the moonlight --

But certainly weary, these verses come too easily
Of one thing, and then the contrary, synthesis
In contradiction, mind games, word games,

Finding and refining terms. Fatigue rules the brain,
Roosts on the higher towers, pulls on the steamer,
Runs through the engines, and his long laugh

Echoes across lanes. How can a course
Lead off course, the topic, off-topic, utopic,
Nowhere? Pigeons perched on 'sailed and soiled

Lines, sagging on long distances, drooping
Like lids, like mouths droop, looping
Through a limping tongue, and all my words are dun.

Horace, Carmina 1.5

What bright boy has infused you
In manifold roses and urges you,
With flowing scents, Pyrrha,
Beneath a happy cave? For whom
Do you bind up your tawny hairs

Splendorous simple? Alas,
How often he'll lament your faith,
His changeful fate,
Insolacely wonder at oceans
Wicked with winter winds

Who now harvests you in gold
(Oh credulous youth), who hopes you
Always friendly, always free, unschooled as he is
In the shifty wind. Yes, miserable are those

To whom, untried, you should shine,
-- Can shine. A wall sacred
For votive offerings witnesses
How I once hung my sea-sogged rags
To the ocean's potent god.

For Hemingway

That the hands would fail -- or not the hands,
But memory, that memory could forget
Not a substance, but a substance's
Extrapolation, that life could make
The last interpolation:

Feeble clouds the vision and the tail
Of the storm, an idle dip below the feeling
Sea, the rocketing motion
Of emotion, ever outwards
From the heightening depths
Expanding, recreating, all while immolating
The decayed journey of time, the expanse of a day's,
Or a thousand's, and the speck-like

Shores. All of life is just such a speck, or a shored up
Raft, a craft of which it is pleasure to make,
But which philosophy advises (and revises) is
Like any poison difficult to take.

Lisa came from away, clutching some secret
To her chest, about her like the box
Of carven wood she cradled at all times,
Caressing in a still born grief, always renewing, so her eyes
Were limned with tears, her limbs, her hands were weak
Under the burden, she often doubled over as if a great weight
Pressed her back, wracked in silent, triple pains, which she concealed
As carelessly as she was careful
Of the box.

The box was never open.

Murmurs curiosity evoked, scattered through the room like filaments
Of algae through a lake when the sun, effulgent
In the early glare of dawn, scatters the tatters of lichen that from twilight
Keep the sky in curtains, battered darkness, and likewise overpours
The minstrel moon. Some guessed
It was a music box, the figure of a ballerina
Carved in ivory kept to curve and sway in life-like grace, others tested
Letters, perfumed notes, the keepsakes of a lover
Lost at sea; but at least one woman suspected,
Old, and worn away like cliffs by time
In passing waves, collections of a life yet
Set in disarray, fragments of memories, photographs, candy
Wrappers, everything that might evoke the endless loss
Of emptiness. Miles heard these scattered conversations
While he tended guests; there was an especially hollow
Space where a grand log fire blazed
At every hour. Couches carefully arranged, end tables
And Ming vases, delicate tulips aided the guests
With a distressed, luxurious comfort, and often reclining on leather
They worried away the weather, rumors, providence
And pardons, and sips of yellow tea
Strained through yellowed teeth.
When Miles came to fill the stoved abyss
With freshening fire, smoking like a pyre
Of pinewood scent, he assented to ascend the surge,
The busy, wired rumors, humming from one end
Of the idle room to idyll galleries, on, so to speak,
The further shores; the tide of conversation
Crested in crescendo. Mrs. Foss, an eastern lady

Who'd amassed a western fortune, stayed a perpetual rent
On the second floor – a room of lush carpets,
Persian, peacock feathers, couches of feather down
And portraits of staid matrons, respectable, household appliances,
Faithful, reliable, as set as the cocker spaniel
Setting on her rug. A once society's matron, a woman of much power
And great pearls, long fingers curling to delicate
Nacreous edges, deep sunk eyes, her eyebrows
Ledges by the ledgers of her face, friendly, wasted by and
Wasting time, she made a practice
Of his guests, she met them, learned their stories, squeezed them
Dry like lemons of their juice,
Then let them loose. Not all, of course, fell under her familiar spell:
Honeymooners nervous to quell
The whirlpool of passion avoided her the way a vintner shuns
The shriveled grape; men of letters (and there was
The amiable, occasional Ph.D., on holiday
To study) hated gossip, avid only
Of long dead passions, famed conspiracy in well established
Books, and burning looks
In dictionaries, stationary holidays; and these,
Who talked of persimmons and parsimony, laws, symbolic
Larcenies, the aged mum avoided in the harmony
Of mutual and contrary persuasion. There was no occasion
For such tensions in her life, she liked predictable
Tears and tears, chamomile
And soggy pears. It was she whom Miles held
In peculiar confidence, and she appraised young Lisa
When she came, before she went.

Not that Miles was all about money.
The walls of the lodge were argent,
Argent, and flecked with gold
Mosaics of gemstone tiles, frescoes
In all their lush extravagance,
Paintings of precious metals
On stone, marble
The floors, reflected in ceilings, the whole hotel
An elaborate tomb
By the purring sea.
Miles was an artist of comfort, the inn
His masterpiece. Outside the front,

In bas relief, above the arches and the architrave,
The frieze, in frozen splendor
Matron of the island, mother
Of flowers. Her face was fat and thick
And rich, her eyes were glazed
With goodness, her complexion
Pale from chiseled cheek to marbled gaze,
A Parian nymph in palisade, watcher
Of the crashing shores, but only by the spectral vision
Of a floating ghost, an apparition
In the loneliness of flowers, a quiet circle of daisies,
Gold, her glowing hair, grave as the lakeside scene

Below: the queen, the mother of flowers, bold
In jade and retinue, strewing the seeds
Of anthoi by willows, flora to lichen
The dripping shores. Quite glum, or serious, serene
All touched their foreheads,
The faintest suggestion of hills
In lead, the somber tones
Moved only by a grace, a freedom from bone in the act
Of scattering flowers:
Jasmine was garnet,
The lily was ivory, the wild amaranth
An emerald amethyst; so perfect in cut, shape, and form
That it lightened the storm of nymphs, not mourn
-ful dryads in procession, weeping for Adonis' dearth,
But naiads in digression, pale among the sparkling bursts
Of flowers, springing everywhere flowers
In great abundance, regenerate hope.

Horace, Carmina 1.4

The winter in its sharpness is dissolved, of spring
And of Favonus through a gentle change. Drag
Machines parched keels, and neither does the plowman 'joice
In fire, the cattle in stalls;
The fields grow not albine with floury frosts.
Now the Cytherean, rising of moon, now Venus
Leads on the dance: the Nymphs with joined hands, the decorous
Graces tread alternate foot on the earth,
While Vulcan, with all his gravity, burns
On the gaze of his Cyclops'
Workshops. Now we should garland sheared skulls
With green myrtle or flora, which the freed earth
Provides. Also, it's right to immolate in shady groves
For Faunus, whether the young goat asks
Or limp lamb requests.

Pallid Death beats with an unconcerned foot
At the taverns of paupers and towers of kings. Happy Sestius:
The brief summit of life forbids one undertake
A longer hope, for presently night presses you, and shades --
Forlorn Proserpine host; where soon you wander
Will partake of the kingdoms of wine
With the dice, or will you lust after Lycidus, tender,
For whom now the youths grow all hot,
And after the Virgins will warm?

I think that we do judge poetry, and writing in general, by the ideas that it expresses and the clarity with which they are developed. Good writing is persuasive: it makes an argument and convinces, or tries to convince, its reader. Good poetry is doubly persuasive, because it forces us to take it in its own terms. Because persuasion is the key characteristic of good writing, all writing, and specifically all poetry, should be open to discussion outside of the context in which it would be read. Some have called this type of analysis "reading against the grain", but it is simply critical thinking, thinking of the type even readers of newspapers or magazines engage in when they write angry letters to the editor. Once you send a piece of writing into the world, it participates immediately in the game of critical revision and reconfiguration; it evokes a response, it is filed away, it is compartmentalized and defined in the reader's mind. But writing is like any remark in a conversation or argument: it intends, it signifies some movement of the mind or the soul intended to throw the reader, like driftwood under a wave. Only, you, the writer, have the ability to retract it, rewrite it, and submit it again, if you discover it has not the desired effect. Perhaps the writing process is a continual wrestling with and wresting of meaning from the reader, or a kind of battle between reader, writer, and poem. The best poems revise their readers even as they are being revised, and that is why they are so powerful and enduring. A classic is that which is infinitely subverted and yet, in the process, subverts. In any event, the development and substantiation of ideas is just as much the provenance of good writing as a certain felicity of form.

Story

"Lisa, come to the window. How long
Will you stare into the vague ocean
Of time spreading thick through your mirror?
Haven't you heard that I loved you, don't
You know you are beloved? Lisa, the waves
Are waxing with the moon, and a tumult's
Beauty-strewn across the beach. Dolphins
Glimmer in the moonlight, candles flicker,
Sputter, gush, all of this the rush
Of love. Come to the window, Lisa."

Like thin shavings of time, the paper,
Shredded, scattered in the wind.
The dock became fragments, the ocean,
Fragments; the sun an incoherent blaze
Of all that's incomplete.
Still the distant glimmer of a net
Spread under the current
And the splashing dip of a hook
Or a diver (the matter is uncertain)
Broke the quiet of inchoate waves.

The mother of flowers strew
Slight beads of color
Across the beach, and the turrets of sand
Were everywhere rising where urchins
Settled their hands. The women
Would continue, like washed-up
Oysters, to cook on their towels,
The brawny men wrestle
With foam. At least, at last
One thing was resolved, or rather
Dissolved, dispersed
Through every corner of the dream.

Returns

It's sad to come back, because everything changes.
Look at the sky –- the sky is like a river,
And the clouds are rusted sediment, sentiments
Changing. Similar faces, the clouds -–
It's sad to see them change
And stay the same. It reminds me of time,
Watching them, and I'm not even here
To see them. A ring of fog becomes a whale,
Whales migrate into dolphins, dolphins pass
Into slivers of glass, sun-stained, sea-stained,
The crimson color of leaves in grass. Figments or landscapes:
Autumn canyons, sandwich shops
In the winter, S.U.V.'s –-
All of these must change. Maybe it's hard to see
At first, like flakes of rust, crumbs and dust, or a fresh layer
Of lusty leaves, but the landscape changes
Only to become more like itself; only
We are different, we must change.

Dreams

I have been wrong. Swimming 'lusions,
A gathering cloud of waters gone to seed
In lilies, growing carnations, flower-beds
And riverbeds; dreams. Deeds
By the walking Milwaukee, cities by rivers,
Towns by rivers, waterfalls rushing over vines
Trembling, thatching the woods. A butterfly
Was jasmine, a haphazard collection
Of pearls and diamonds, her pinned up hair
Brown luxury, black demons of fragrance.

Heat and the river-swain. The river was swinging,
The milk-cows were singing, the river-swain
Pealed and the clarion call of unfolding fire,
Yellow irises opened sensational light.
Swan-song mixed with the cricket song,
Breeze laughed. These idylls
Farther of storms, father of storms
Brewing up fresh flowers, long waves
Of sweeping grass in the breeze, close breeze sing
Swimming river. Loose me from my bonds,
Great spirit, lose me and let fly a little,
Fly through the twilight of peace.

From Alencia Lysander:

There are no poets anymore, no philosophers;
Words have lost their meaning. Don't worry,
Do what I do and steep yourself in pleasure:
I fucked a fat strumpet last night, a nun, her wimple
Cast on a crumpled jock, a pair of dirty socks --
She had lily-white, fat thighs which she lifted
High into the air, while my penis fumbled
Here and there (I missed her juicy hole
As often as I came, fat as she was,
Across her virgin berth).
Afterwards she took a bath. I kept staring
At those ivory thighs,
The way she raised a swollen foot
Out of the water, sudded soapy toes. I was
Erect again, I dived into her
Intimate girth, she screamed,
And it was fun. It rained the day I met her; the gargoyles
Were sobbing on the street, the water was dripping
Down grotesque eyes, trickling from gaping noses
Curled into sneers not a mother could love.
What sculptor carved such ugliness, hoping for what
Salvation? In the church, they pray, the salt-smelling incense
Rises. Tears, tears, everything is tears,
The whole world is crying -- the fuckers. All they want
(And this I know) is to fuck and be fucked, 'cause I've done them all
-- And triple six times. Oh Lord, please fuck me. Oh Lord,
Shove the firmament up of my ass, split me Lord,
Split me in sin. Bah, the whole lot of them isn't worth
A spit: man's fallen, man's prostrate,
Man's up to his knees in fucking mud.

Horace, Carmina 1.2

Now the Father has set sufficient snow
And horrid hail on earth, and overturning temples,
Sacred, with his bloody hand, has terrified
Our city,

Terrified our people; return not, grievous
Century, sad Pyrrhus' monstrosities,
When Proteus drove his whole flock
To see mountains,

And in the highest elms, place worthy
Of doves, the race of fish drank,
And on the rising waters the trembling
Does swam.

For we have seen the yellow Tiber, waves
Angrily resisting 'Truscan shores,
Do violence to the monuments of kings
And Vesta's temples

When he hurled himself for Ilia,
Excessively avenger, and that drifting river,
Wifely in turn, o'erflowed the leftmost bank,
And Jove did not approve.

What god will a people of ruination call
To lord their ills? By what prayers
Will the sacred Virgins plead to a Vesta
Less than hearing songs?

To whom will Jupiter give the part of expiating
Sin? Still come, we pray you,
Your gleaming shoulders bathed in cloud,
Augur Apollo;

Or if you wish, laughing Erycina,
Around whom fly Iocus and Cupid,
Come; but if you look on a neglected race,
Your grandsons, sire

Come -- alas too sated with drawn out games --
Whom clamor and bright helmets joy
And the angry gaze of the Marsyan militia
Turned on a bloody host;

Or if in form guised you imitate a youth,
Already on earth, winged progeny of Maia,
Deigning to be called Caesar's
Avenger,

Return only late to the skies, and long
And shining stay among Quirinus'
People, lest offended by our sins
A precipitous breeze

Should lift you; rather here love to be called
Father, princeps, and your triumphs, great;
Nor let the Medes vengeless ride,
In your reign, Caesar.

Horace, Carmina 1.1

Maecenas renowned for his kingly progenitors
O shield both and gloried sweetness of mine:

There are those whom it delights Olympic dust
To gather from a chariot, whom the pillar
Shunned by their wheels and the worthy palm
Raise up to terrestrial deities; this man,

If the fickle Quiritian crowd approve to raise him
In triple honors, rejoices; that, if he has put away
In his store, his very own, something
Gathered from Libyan crops; him glorying

To split fathers' earth with a plow you won't at all move
By Attalid treaties to split seas of Myrtus
With Venus' own trunk, a trembling sailor!

The merchant, fearing Africs' debate
With Icarian waves, praises leisure,
The lands of his city; but later he binds
Broken rafts, impatient of suffering want.

There is one who spurns not a cup of old Massic,
Nor hates to take hours from business, now
Stretching limbs 'neath green arbutus,
Now toward the calm source of waters holy.

Troops please many, and the tuba's blare
Mixed with the curved horn, war that is hateful
For mothers. Beneath a cold Jove

The hunter stays, unmindful of his tender wife,
Whether the faithful whelps see a stag
Or a Marsian boar breaks the rounded snares.

As for me, the rewards of doctoral ivy
Mix my brow with heightened gods,
Myself the cool grove of the nymphs
And the chorus tripping with Satyrs
Keeps from the crowd -- that is if Euterpe
Won't hold off her flutes and Polyhymnia, Lesbic,
Flees not at the touch of my beard.

So if you will graft with me vatic lyres,
I will broach the stars with my sublime crown.

Horace Carmina 1.3

So may the potent deesse of Cyprus,
The brothers of Helen, lucent sidereals,
And of winds the father keep you
(With all else but Iapyx set aside)
Boat, who, entrusted to yourself,
Owe Virgil to the Attic shores:
Return unharmed I pray
And keep the other half of me.

Him oak and triple bronze
Had round his heart, who fragile to savage
Seas entrusted a raft
First; nor feared he precipitous Africanus
Raging 'gainst Aquilo,
Nor the gloomy Hyades nor the rabies of Notus,
(Than whom not an arbiter of Hadriatic's
Greater) who lifts and breaks the waves at will;
That which of death is advancement feared
He who with parched eyes swimming monstrantes,
Who saw and the turbid seas,
Ill-famed Acrocraunian cliffs?
Vainly did godhead rend
Prudently from unfriendly ocean
Our earth, if still impious
Rafts run across rifts not to be touched.
Audacious to suffer all
The humanely begotten rush, on account of forbidden sin:
Audacious genus of Iapetus
Fire by fraudulous tricks instilled in the clans;
After fire from heavenly home
Was robbed, emaciation and novelties fevrous
Fell all together to earth,
And far off, formerly tardy need
Quickened the progress of death;
Burst upon Acheron Hercules' labor,
Nothing for mortals is steep:
Earth's ceiling itself we in foolishness seek, nor
Through ours do we suffer (our sins)
His fulminations, wrathful, Jove to put away.

An Invitation

There will be tea, she said, and scones,
(And smiled demurely) come alone.
Will there be musicians too? A few.
No physicians, no large guests, just
The rest, nibbling on their scones
And sipping tea, alone. Spell out
Loneliness with a music, an exotic brew, the key
To all these tables and your tepid tea. Keep
The windows shut against the cold
Inside your bones, and scold the scones
In sluggish tea; dream about bees
Hanging from drapes or close the shades
And leave the plastic birds under
The potted trees. Stir in honey
Or sugar-cubes (with added grace)
If you like. Look out the shaded windows and laugh,
This is the life. Guests will come
And guests will go, and shut the door with a low
Goodbye. Try to take it slow, old
As you are; rest your feet on the hassock,
Fold your limbs, and grin. These are all my thoughts:
I like you a lot, and I hope you win, but the leaves
Are very thin this time of year; be of good cheer.

On the Genesis of "God"

Thanks all. Inspiration is often inconsequential, or more like the tail end of the meteor than the force that drives it (even if the meteor is only the glint of a tinselled light and despite Aristotle); I wanted to write a response to another poem, a poem that claimed, "Now that I'm older, I know God and Love, and they are simple." That "know" infuriated me. I'm an atheist by trade, a mystic by disposition, and a skeptic by heart; it was an offensive statement, in a Socratic sense. "Well tell the rest of us, since in your wisdom your mind has penetrated very difficult matters, what God is, my friend." So the first attempt escaped notice (it was letheia, and not the truth) -- a morbid poem about the world rotting along with the body (and neither the presence of soul). After I had finished, I showed it to my mom -- her lip curled, the doorbell rang. Two young women, oohs and ahhs when our dog escaped through the slip in the door. "We're here with the Church of Jesus Christ" (and Latter Day Saints...I don't remember). We believe in Satan, go away. Chastisement, guilt. My mom ran after them and apologized for what her son said. "Oh," they replied, "He just said you were Jewish". A synonym or Christian charity? Turn the other cheek. So I wrote this poem by way of apology to the God and the religion I don't believe in, the religion whose Bible I actually tossed into a fire (after carefully perusing it, of course, and approving very much -- might as well burn Moby Dick) in the presence of friends, impenitent and lonely in the all (which is really a kind of nothing exuberant). And there you go.

The Microwave

There was nothing the microwave couldn't do:
Watered oats hardened, imperceptible,
Into oatmeals, rocky, mountainous
Glaciers of cream cheese, callous
In the deserts of the freezer, by dessert,
Melted into dunes; sometimes water,
Stirred by the ineffable, would swoon a teabag
Into whirlpools of sailing wrath, and the gentle herbs
Scattered through the liquid boiling
Like Zephyrus scatters dust of snow. Always

The microwave was inscrutable, cold -- a removable
Heap of metal, spinning plate,
The doomed electron's disco tail. The window
Was the screen of screams, eyeboils and fancy craniums
Cancerous with a swelling god, tantrums, insanities
Beyond the the monotone whirr of the voice, sirenic
Fancies. In the universe of the microwave
It is always high tide, and these tsunamis wreck their own
Devestations of change, making what never was
The impossible is.

God

If I beat against the glass with a bony fist
I'm sorry; the nothing that men call all
Was a motionless mass of corruption
Eternally changing, not something written in books,

So when the storm came down in glassy sheets,
I was all bone, and I struck the ground and screamed
At the stags taking cover, a snowy-blur
In the darkness and streaking light:

The nothing huddled like a heap in the corner
Of a dusty attic, and the deep, hungry flames
Waiting to consume prefigure my own astonishment

At the cracking, crystal sky,
And the need for a consuming warmth
That only the cold fragrance answers.

A chill like chunks of ice
Clotting the current, water
Clinging to water
(If water could feel it)
For dread;

Wind wrestles with wind in the trees --
Air plunged into the seat of the heart
And escaped with a gasp --
Rotten boughs rasp.

The graves of small creatures
Where the worms feast:
Little clumps of dirt
So the land looks like
Someone planted it
Recently; the pain grew,
Inching its way
Under the skin,
Which broke into mounds.

What is growing?
What has come to root,
Red as a boiling beet?

The chalky cliff is watching plains
Which are nothing more than a plane
Of barren earth, plain of all but dust
Tarrying in the wind: the trachea was such a desert.

Old oaks ruin to earth;
Fish skip like stones across the beach,
Barbed with a hunger of steel;
Vultures pick out a livid string
Of satisfying flesh;
Mushrooms and moss clog the beating
Pores of the forest eager to grow.

Van Gogh

Exhaustion since the last golden dab
Inked out, leaving a stained and splattered
Pallet, dried out edges of hard pastels
Blurring together to adumbrate a chaos

Much like the mess on the easel: half-formed
Trees, monsters of gardens, roads that seem
To delineate sky, what might be earth
Or ocean; the boundaries are the canvass'

Edge; sometimes it seems to spill over, so incomplete
Is the street, a red woman's hair, the glint
Of a rearview mirror, the barely perceptible
Objects closer than they appear

At first. There are always beaches, escapes
Where the waves roar away and return and pink-skin
Coagulates, stretches out over the sand-bars
And cooks; but for me, that is not enough:

I am trying to perfect the imperfectable
Sky, to capture the glare of the sun
In a permanent gaze, to freeze the whole earth
In a delicate, ice-cream cold glaze.

The unenchanted, shivering through a ripe teapot, containing
All the dirt roads that ever panted up a cat-arched
Hill, by the flowers, community plots, the Sunday mercury
Twilight and track, apartments and rack
Of the street, sweet call of produce at summer,
Fleeting leaf dripping autumn with life, the peering windows
That bite their plastered doors, tennis rackets, stores,
And the winding silence stretching out the sore way
Of the sparrows flitting through the parks; an alabaster
Patience or patient looks out through the deep
To cupping hills of sky: in the distance, cold towers, great
plaster people stacked on molting floors, car-doors
Slammed and screeching off, hissing lots.

Come all you harps, blow a little tune
For me, since often the wind is accustomed
With shrill voice to announce
The stretchings of winter, and then the chill
Spreads over fields, and the grasses take cover
In fresh piles of wanton snow, which drifts about
Not unlike dust, not unlike tarrying
Mist, most like to breathless
Stirrings of foam in the freezing air. So too in spring
A gentle Zephyr, yet the sun's
Harsh master, tasks him into quick running
And early mornings,
And nor does he burn in his injured pride,
Since the Zephyr whips him gently into gentle shape;
In this form he glides among the soft heavens
So the clouds take delight, the ether
Soothes the blight of winter, and inspires fresh buds
To poke from their long-droughted nests with a splendorous candor;
All forms of animals too are beloved, and poke for themselves
New offspring: the burdened ewe lies down
Delivering twins, the hope of a flock, while the shepherd
Stretches out under pear blossoms and fills the hills
With his resonous chant. In the summer, often
Lightning bolts break into throaty peals of thunder
Too, nor do they ever strike in the same place,
But raging over the fields, now an old oak,
Habitat for the dove's nest and the owl, that stood on the edge
Of the grainful fields, is hit, and the fire spreads,
Ruin of farmers, across the tall crops, and crackles,
And sends up fleshy zithers, and the tree --
Which often, wizened, the plower had considered
Cutting and stripping of stalks, bark, to split
For the fuels of cold winter -- burns itself out
And keeps the parched hot, but in a different way;
And now they stake at a distant hill: the clouds,
Hungry for sunlight, flood the plains
In midnight, and the arching strike branches
And blooms warring spurs of a white haze, purple madness;
The shepherd, hidden in a cave, or tall
In his tree's tutelation (an unsafe horizon)
Watches in wonder, and his far-wandering charges
Quake. In fall there are sibilant leaves, which have not taken care
Only for singing, but change into feral
Pageantry: the aspens are silver, the ashes blush,
And tawny gold glides in the breeze. So,
Harps, now that you've seen
The seasons making their dreadful way through the earth,
Rampaging, plundering, burning, with nothing untouched,
Isn't it all the better for you to strike spider-spun chords,
And to mirror by the resonant pitch of your exhalant bark
All the shifts and turns of winding eternity's change?

Up lazy hands, where have you been wandering
Off to? You should be stained with coiling rainbows or
At least black charcoal's pitch; you should be dripping
With the ruddy gum of blood, dried green,
Festered with pustulating sores.

Perhaps yet there is a time for the blue,
Whether you mean meridian oceans just frothing at the teeth
Of sailors or the stained alabaster sails by the tails
Of Java. Have you drained brown rice and sifted
Fine barley, fingers? Parchment, wrecked and yellow, bleeding
Over with blue ink, the juice-stained leaks
Of crushed chrysanthema and violets? -- For shame! Scat,
Piano long, stop pounding the minors or catching the rills
Of a flute (stop waving in trills). If you haven't touched
Her undergarments yet, if you haven't mixed a sharp nail
With the quail of pleasure or traced a soft little wail
On her ass-puckered lips, then it's time to knead harder
At rock; it's time to stroke metal into silver dynamite,
But everything must become something, hands!

Have you ever observed the way the night
Scatters across the lawn like so many cats, or the exact
Number of wrinkles summer Petunias fold in their jowls
When they mow? Or tell me if the concrete is cracked
Into numerous pebbles beneath her feet, whether the twilight
Really touches quivering lips, either pressed in vulvulating joys
Or climbing the heights that spiral cerebella
In indigo darkness. Of course there are people
Painting these things!

Hands, I want you to dip yourselves in the muck,
Hands, to sell pounds of your mottled flesh
In Arabic or at least at CostCo.; and if there aren't enough sins
To script the strong number of the beast or at least
Long volumes of crystal speech sweating out perfumes of finger oil
About the world -- well then away with you, hands, away.

Life is the accumulation of excrement
In some stinking pit in the earth, fecund
With other people's rot; fertility grabs the lot,
And mushrooms bloom in their first red
Pubescence, fiery little pimples burst
From the muck. Pigs root around in the mud,
Looking for acorns to crunch with their brine-
White teeth; flatulence, grunting, belches a scent
To high heaven; the wind wrinkles its nose
And breaks up the filth, which scatters
Like particles of dust and washes
Over the shores of the clouds. Satyrs appear
And dance up storms, visages portentious
Peer down through the gloom; a cake of fresh mud
Floods across the earth, sating the wretched 'shrooms
Hunger, which we harvest, first catch of our ignorance,
Devouring, discovering: illuminations bloom.

Idyll

By the blue hill
(You know what I mean)
Obscene little trill
Of the nanny-goat
Whose three glass pawns,
(Her kids, the fawns)
Are eating the lawns:

The ribald flute
Goes tra-la-la,
The old blue-beards
Sing hey-diddy-hey.
The stallions neigh

Near the colored brooks
And fix the mares
With lustful looks,
Sipping the length
Of the foaming stream
By the glassy hill,

You know what I mean?
The prawns preen,
(A cold wind blows)
The eagles scream,
(The twilight grows)
Their talons gleam
On the rippling stream.

The sheep go ba-ah
At their filth;
While their fleeces mix
In the silt,
The shepherd waits
By the soggy bilge-

Water, whistling
Ditties, the loon: a golden
Moon and Galatea
Soon to be wed;
The sun goes red

At the stripped hill
And the fishy lake, snakes
Behind the dewy grass,
And trembles with a last
Alas.

The sources of pleasure, its causes and reasons, and chiefest of all
Its effects, sing Heliconian maiden -- you who have often stopped by
The cool stream of Hebron with dipping pitcher, and gathered
Delight of pansies and fragrant wild-flowers to make a garland
That will crown the fresh faces of youths in contest, sweat dripping
Down ruddy cheeks, eager each after their straining work
For the sweet rewards of marble-eyed victory -- and pour for me too
A refreshing flagon of the gods' honeyed wine; after all it is only right
Since you have favored many youths before me, even when youth
Was only the spark of delight you engendered in the hearts of men
With brows weighted down by old of age, while frail care
Stood in attendance, and, growing from the pores of their faces, white wisdom
Guided their hands against the scratching pen. Perhaps you will object
On account of my boldness, and ask that I pursue you with tender wooing,
Or perhaps I am not endowed, neither through inward grace nor a great line
Of grave ancestors, with the virtue requisite for my beloved task. My answer
Is this: some seek not for the laurel, nor for the glory
That dies and fades away on men's marbled lips,
But they desire only to know. If it is possible in beautiful verse
To set out the causes of things with all the sweetness of honey,
Then instruct one for whom it is a pleasure to learn --
And consider that this is no mean service that you will perform thereby
For the earth's generations. For often man is paralyzed by wonder,
Or struggles, even in his sleep, hoping that there is some way
To cast his net for gladness; but his traps are all awry,
The golden bird escapes him and flies aloft, past the orb of the sun,
Returning into your pale hand. You set him again in his gleaming cage,
Moon-formed, beaming, and he teaches you his rapturous song.
So if you will open the little door and let him aloft, instruct him to perch
On the branches of alders and sing before the awed throng,
Or if you will set out for me, in golden verse, the ways of building traps,
Whether we are to weave them from pliant osier or entice
With delicacies and rarified morsels (for only the smoothest and choicest
Of first beginnings can delight delight himself) -- then yours is the glory, yours the power
That unlocks the receding depths, most hidden away in the hearts of men;
And consider that it is no small thing, by performing a mean service
For your most devoted servant, to once again gain dwelling among men,
To return to an age rendered gold, when the nightingale sings in the valleys,
And the brooks whisper soft and soothing things, a delight for the ears and the heart.

It is especially difficult because there is nothing to say:
Not that the moon stopped liquor of blood on the sun-
Tied lakes that were bays, and baying, shapes
Of some bereaved and impregnable
Bitch above barren plains;
Not because the wonders of our mediacracy
Grip the air in streamlined talons faster than ruined
Towers collapse; not even because the sky on the march
Shreds the fortified ants, who scraped the aether,
Black clouds spilling like ink on the sand;

Rather because saying is a honey quite apart
From the sweets of knowledge; the oaks that drip nectar
Appear, the lions will rest while the lambs swim on saccharin
Seas died a rare and brilliant blue, rarified 'til it seems
The skies drip in the humid earth's
Concourse, harmony; because the pain of dissolution
Cycles into the potion, unspeakable, and the rocks won't speak;
Because this is the same dull globe of twilight,
Macerated forest of stars; this is the dream
Of the word beyond speech.

Poems on the Soul

I. Ars Poetica

Away with rhyme -- rhyme, the method of the madness
Away with iambics, the clods
Away with paratactic, adjectival glee -- give
Us a poem of nouns, straight up -- of nouns aligned with verbs;
No adverbs, no description,
An only not often qualified phrase, so the poem
Becomes lucid, clairvoyant, naked of artifice, gilding,
To tread on the trembling grapes; this is the brambling entrance
(What poor players are we)
To a poetry of pure philosophy.

II.

Soul, not
Extraordinary toucan in an iron cage,
Rage of life, indisoluble from atoms, you who, scattered
Through time, somehow breathe forth unity of thought
Like letters that spell out a word
Too low for my lips, fundament to heartbeat,
Subtler than vision, toneless melody

In tribulation, diatribe when you
Or I touch the glass ceiling of constelled
Patterns, trying, tracing
Some purpose in a void pierced twice
By the flow of the rising globes, and when they set
Into sleep, reforming
Dreams and the monsters that suck by the tides,
Some perched on the cliffs,
Insatiable of singing, vapors, mists,
So like we:

Begin the jump in infinity, skip the ruckus
Of the players, twice, skud the backdrops,
Lift the curtains and reveal
Frail and fragrant ripple of the stars.

III.

There is no journey, soul, no body
For the beautiful ascension, studded with
Diamonds, sapphires born in the heart
Of flaming rocks, gold-cast, edified with eddying
Silver that spirals into vortexes, vectors,
Fractals of the blackened infinite.

You are my pulse, soul,
Tides of my vision,
The waxings and wanings of my mind.
It will swallow you up.

If we did scoop pitchers into the infinite, my soul
It would neither be relinquished nor replaced;
No fish of silver fins awaits that hook:
It is the place of our return, from whence we came.

IV.

A few words on love, my soul:
You yearn to dip yourself in this lake,
Rendered three corners of sky, and a quarter
Mottled earth, from which it is true lilies bloom
In their first spring delicacy, but also the chicory
With its bitter fibers, and the caltrop, hateful to cattle.

There is plenty of crushed beauty,
The pleasure of a long coffee
And after. I'll even admit that it serves as a kind of return:
Cool waters spread across the body and wash away
The sweat, the dirt; the feverous heat of living
Subsides from the neck, leaks from the brain as when
A colander, sifting hearty meal,
Drains the brine from the carrots,
The softening celery from soup, so limp and hearty
Mush remains; nevertheless,

It is not the flight of birds that encircles that island
Of gloom and retreat: with its swoop of silvery wings
You'll crash into the earth, limbs buried in dirt,
Diaphanous, growing to seed:

There is a lake in the heart of the twilight,
The aspens shield it from the winter,
Clear and placid, crusted with snow, bristling
From the winds' assaults, long, and heavy with age;
And their branches clatter in the stillness, sirens whisper.