belascollage

her legs in the grip of lace --
black vines of lace winding up from the asphalt,
liquid roots welling in her combat shoes.

licorice gum spicing her talk.
charcoal dusting knees & fingertips.
& smoke. cloud rising from her shoulderline.

hair a floe of lava
bleeding heat through the fog.

ashes like pepper
wandering the winter air,
false snow spotting her lips.

& she flaming. a fresh-lit matchstick
yellow from the sulphur, gold spark
taunting a colorless moon

before falling on the sidewalk.
& the lamp-post reflecting the flame.

Parkbench

before you pass beneath the lamplight

mark the moon's violet edges
bleeding into the clouds,

suffusing your used smoke with wisps of blue,
lighting my teeth not with longing
but with a faint plea:

forget me, but come again to this bench
where our thighs have splintered,
our tongues have split,

and our hands spread starlight
though the cabernet dark

striking like winecups & smashed in the instant

Olivet

Tree rock, root rock, blackstone bed 
where we slept, watchers
breaking lookout

While olives, bats, dark stars
hung quiet in the trees, blind
but waking into moontide

Silver the backbone ridge
of stumps, of naked tubers
& we lay beneath this spine

Above, a boulder, a skull
shone white like a goat's belly
tender side up

There too a knotted heap
of body, knees and forehead
a crop of stones

Cold as rubble on Olivet's peak
& not willing to rest, he planted
bloodflowers on the hill

Which at the first sunstroke
we woke smelling: salt, licorice, iron --
bouquet in a deadly cup

When Our Organ of Wonder Has Failed

When our organ of wonder has failed
and we our own physicians have cut it free,
washed it, packed it clean on ice,
we awaken to a rallying heartbeat
half-cheerful amid bland breakfast and flowers.
We will leave the gurney soon,
travel through hallways, elevators, turnstiles
back to our old affairs.
Anesthesia is merciful -- we cannot see again
what secret metallurgy we have done
to forge a tougher organ, indifference,
from castoff love.
But when from age our anomie cracks
and we return searching to the lab,
there we will find our grail --
a freezer bucket labeled "wonder"
stashed between the tarry hearts.

Janus Poem, or That Truth Has Never Left Us

A door spins on granite dais, gateway
     from nothing to nothing,
          the plenary gate

made from lodestone -- what passes its field
     the aperture attracts,
          assumes.

All the maps mark this hinge
     as start and end, the summation
          of navigators' work:

for here the compass points to itself
     in a spaceless labyrinth,
          the door a mystery and a trap

blind and exitless.
     Thus we swivel through
          to the void elusive,
       
illusive, and invisible
     that, though empty, fills us.
          And as with time
         
we have our lives inside it,
     though for all our charting
            we have fallen into both --

duration and the living-gate,
     an absent place
          turning cloaked in the universe.




 
     What flies around the gate
           is the wind elusive,
illusive, and invisible --
     we cannot keep hold of it,
          but it carries us through
and, as with truth,
we have our lives inside it.

Cricket for Cricket's Sake

In the case of a cricket
keeping house in my coffeepot
I am impatient. Its chirping is a language
so inflected with sameness
that its legs, tireless, sing day-long arias
in the same tone.
My own tongue is variable,
and my own, and I do not speak it
to insects. Why then such insistence
on its own terms, cricket for cricket's sake?

Janus Poem

discord inky tarantula gate

Portrait of the Young Buddha

Siddhartha leaves the baths
ashine with jasmine oil
and jewels, seeking Yasodhara

as she asked. His feet,
like silk, are tender
and he walks tenderly.

Opening the lotus vines,
curtains to her rooms,
the prince offers his wife

a chilled mango.
She thinks his hands
well-shaped, golden,

finer than the fruit.  
With twin-lotus palms
she cups his forehead,

orchard of bliss,
to kiss away an eyelash
fallen dead on his cheek.

He blushes. Her lie uncaught,
he remains unawakened
and she has him yet.

Armature

How an arm lives, brown arm
ending in a hand
(pencil extending the fingers)

how the ligatures of this arm, its binding
tissue and gristle
amble along the bone

how the arm's lines blend
barrel shape with tensility
(hard pencil so foreign)

how a limb, by bend and stretch,
plows into all dimensions
grasping, grasping.

Conditional

If logic
is a frail cloth,

necessity woven with unknowing,

half thread, half holes,
stitches and air,

then thought is tracing spindles, tracking

bones of lace
fanning patterned over the mind.

The Damp Coming (revised)

The dewdrop, glassy, rests
on the forehead of a marigold,
sweat of the garden
awaiting a far-off rainstorm.
A hummingbird flees.
Beneath grasses and the goldenbell,
ferns and japonica,
the soil postures with desire
for nourishment,
the flowers drowned.
The flagging moon-faced petals
of a lone magnolia
grow limp on their stems
glorying in the tree grounded,
the thunderhead reflected in the dew,
and the damp coming.

Jepthah's Daughter

I am not the daughter sent up the mountain
to mourn. But, like her, I ascend it –
hill of black pines — to weep,
to litter my cries at the trees’ shadowfeet
that creep toward the summit.
What we search for in the high places
is the same, though millennia
separate our long climb:
it is for the death watch that we come,
to pray in the shade of a laurel bush
that our fears do not hold us.
While sunset flames onto the cliffside
I see how her life burned there
on a brilliant altar, and how my dying
will come to this pinnacle too –
where the promise of an end
meets the end itself, like peak meets sky.

Smoking Joke

I try to tell it plain:
the day is clear,
my fingertips smell of matches,
and my castoff cigarette
burns like pain on the patio.
Some things,
different smolders,
are incommensurate;
suns and eyes and ache
have nothing to do
with tobacco’s glow and savor,
nor can fire
speak to inner terror.
But the day is clear,
vision is a kind of burning,
and what is there
but to see all at once?

Truth Spoken

Truth spoken
is an absolute explosion,
the spark of a tongue
striking the palate ridge,
dipping back with a howl
toward the throat’s depth
and searing the teeth
before the shock blasts out
to radiate death
then fade like breathing.

Showbill

Blessed be God who changes the creatures
our God who also is changeful

who appears to us in what costumes s/he likes
fetus or bush or plainclothes traveler

whose face crawls with amusing monsters
winged bears and insect angels

who transfigures our bodies
salt from nostalgia pride into worms

whose taste for the picaresque
attaches itself to each ass jaw in scripture

& whose showbill does not come off
like that of any comedy we know.

Book Club Discussion

Describe her narrative style:
fruit flavors.
Acid like lime pulp
on the rim of a gin glass,
sicksweet like a too-soft mango
smashing velvet into the teeth,
plastic and coy
like the sheen of false grapes.

Bird Sonnet, for G.

You balanced me like a peacock feather
on your hand, hollow stem rising from the palm
tall and unsteady. In the whistle of each fall,
glitter and sable and gold-green,
I heard the flashing music
with which you strung me through,
wove of me a wing
so you could fly that curved garden, her hair,
spears of black grass with sorrowful roots.
But I knew myself a cloak of tenderness
made from the flighty songs
our tongues spun together at night,
those sad looms,
and I warmed you until arrowlike you shot off.

Workshop

As the wake of a storm is untender,
so his raw hands at their work:
fingers like whirlwinds
tucking fury into the wood,
sandpaper palms
spewing floods of dust,
and the calm illusion
of the knuckles always still.

To B.A.

Bless our fallow abdomens
O patron saint of ache
for they are wanting

In this channel of abandon
we have lain long
clad in silence

Desolation our blight
we are prodigals
but deathless

Set alight our bellies
so they gleam like flags
at your passing

We will bellow in chorus
when you descend
your glory our wounds

Cascades

I.
What, like mornings,
recurs but will fade?
A wasp’s

white sting
on the bareback deer
coming awake.

II.
Can a silken fish
outstrip in beauty
the lotus?

Both are flaps of flesh,
dead cushions,
mediators

between lightfalls
and those limpid floods,
air and water.

III.
Does the stripling-tied
chrysalis
drink treesap in secret?

No, not like salamanders
swill dampness,
nor vines the sun,

but like a loonsong
pulls vacant cries
from the forest.

IV.
What of the lake
so abyssal?
It lives,

a cascading depth
that trembles
full but desolate.

Metaxu

Traffic keeps its speed
when vehicles hold distance:
no need to broach the space.
Likewise, the forces
that bind matter to itself
tether particles across gaps
for volume’s sake,
and lovers who lack touch
do not miss love.

Appeal to the Woman

Woman, whose graven portrait
bears up the plaster walls
of the museum:

woman of bold lines
that cut down into cream-brown paint,
of sable bones that curve
like bent nails
towards the canvas flesh,

woman of erasure
purged by a paint-knife’s strokes
for layers of repetition

when color-tools imprinted your form
in langorous series,

brushes fresh wands
for the medium
bristles slick with scarlet
or titanium white
blades of metal
crowned with rolls of blackness,

woman of the abject eyes
without pupils,
of the vague crook breasts,
she of scratches gaps blotches
and final ambiguity,

in your cloister do not forget
us passersby,
for it is our deaths
that your frame suspends
above the cold marble floor.

Julian, 1969

It was May when you began
to bring the blooming world
into the house.
                You told me
you were bored with your books
about space travel,
that you wanted to watch the bees
shuttle nectar to their hives
instead.
         That was two months before
the moon landing.
                  Your friends
stayed indoors, sat on their feet
in the living room for weeks
waiting for the blast-off
from Cape Canaveral
to broadcast on TV.
                    Why look,
you said, if it wasn’t
close?
      You filled your bookshelves
with backyard treasures
you could hold in your hand:
birds’ eggs, honeycomb,
the exoskeletons of cicadas,
a hummingbird wing
that I admonished you
to throw away.
              I knew
you were very absorbed
when I found a miniature forest
under your bed,
the tips of crepe myrtle branches
upright in sand piles.
                      You even left
a handful of smooth-stemmed roses
on my dresser
(you had picked off the thorns)
and a jar of lightning bugs
for your sister
so that we, too, would know
how to consecrate small things
by looking.
           For your birthday
your grandparents gave you
a pair of binoculars.
                       You ignored them–
thank you, you said, but
your eyes could see close enough
to spot squirrels in the pecan trees
and to catch the crawfish
that scuttled among the waterstones
like the dark center blossom
in Queen Anne’s Lace.
                      On the night
the moonwalkers landed,
you refused to view the gray television
screen.
     You ran out to the hilltop
behind the house
in case their space suits
glowed, and when you saw nothing
you were upset you couldn’t find
those binoculars.
                  In mourning,
you clipped violets from the hillside
and placed them in miniature
bowls of pottery.
                 The petals hovered
so like astronauts
in those terra cotta moons
that you let them float
until they wilted.

Printing Press

We both wore crisp blue shirts
the day you blinked and said
you dreamed of owning
a printing press.
The starched cloth
stood against your skin
like a slab of paper
lying thick on a table,
and this was a sign to me
that your declaration was fate.
When I loved you,
your idle confessions
were solid as black font.
Of course,
you never opened
a printworks, and I never wore
that blouse again –
the one of cerulean linen
with eyelets around the neckline.

Diptych: Specks and Grouse

I.
Switchgrass: long pale streaks
with pink seeds atop.
Beetles dot the stems.
Sage blossoms splotch the grass
like burst plums,
lines of black ants climbing up
towards the color.
II.
A dusty gale
shakes from the prairie
insects and spores and petals
while the speckled grouse
floats down. Moving its feathers
like broad brown leaves,
it pecks for full fallen pods
that flock along the ground.

Dinah, On the Dedication of Jacob's Well

Brothers, you leave me desolate!
You press my love like an olive,
he seeps away like spilled oil
into the desert dust. Dig for me
a well so that I may drink of him,
for Schechem will sustain Israel
despite your slaughter. Go,
open the rock now, brothers!
Strike into the ground’s layers
as you hewed sinew from bone
and bone from pliant flesh.
Give me springs in peace offering
for my sorrow and barrenness,
waters to match my unending flow.

Sea

sea that swims,
drowning sea,
salt wash waves
crowns of the sea.

green white gray
sea colors,
red the life
within the sea,

white sea invisible
at dusk, sky
gray white green
and sun red.

sea inside the sea,
pearl of the sea,
jade sea
sea of sea-grass

salt sea,
sea of windcurrents
above the sea,
sea of the sea.

"That Human Need and the Order of the World Are at Odds"

I.
Since Isaac and Arjuna,
questions of God
in silence and aloud:
why the knife, the oath,
the battlefield full of corpses,
why lamb’s blood
a wine for God,
why chariots of death
carry the world.

II.
When Lucifer leapt into the wind
like an assassin kite
on a spool of wire,
he performed the way murder
strikes out from calm,
how each paradise
is a changeling of violence,
a specter of terror
that sifts retribution
in its uneasy hands.

Night Lights

One summer during a lightning storm
you told me stories of absence,
how the sirens did not sound
at the waterfront
when you lit firecrackers there,

how your absolute fear
is not that you cannot feel shock,
but that you do.

Your voice then was voltaic
as the white veins
that open thunderclouds,
and its sound washed me
with memories of other nights,

how the dusk’s curtain
would drape itself over the lake
as the stars rode soft currents
like tea candles in paper boats,

how we would paint the lakeshore
with our forlornness
until we lay spent in the grass
like the husks of stars
cooling against vast space.

Once we drank the moon
from our bottle of red wine
while you gestured at the Pleiades,

wondering how shared heat
melts off into nothing,
how the novas of love
make dust from solid figures
glowing in darkness.

It was those seven ripe lights
that revealed to me
why the tenor strains of your speech
set firestorms in the heavens;

this was because you were brother
to night lights,
everlasting suicides that burned
vacancy into your soul
whenever evening came.

Les Demoiselles Opaques

Three women sit for snapshots
on a stone fence.

Feet limp like damp leaves,
hair flowing like whisky,
dark wide mouths
the shutters of speech.

The man with the camera
loves them,
their precise vitals,
the length and song of their limbs,
their silvery flesh.

Fright covers laughter
as the women blink
at each sharp flash.

Who among them knows
the garments of desire,
threadless
and without duration?

Or the way the wind
settles in the creases
of their skins?

Or the chaos of memory,
hollow like shadows
in a black-and-white
photograph?

Nausea (II)

“Das ist deine Welt!
Das heist eine Welt!”
- Goethe’s Faust

The body:
illness and fluids
held by skin.

Lymph, blood, air,
these circulate
only to stop,

the lifeworld appears
to vanish.
So the body.

The fallen say,
I am health,
the corpus of life,

but the despondent
tell their sick knowledge:
I am death,

the process of decay
unraveling itself in events,
excess in downfall.

What a world,
and such a world,
that we should die!

Nausea (I)

It is mid-February.
The redding tree tips
adorn a pale sky,

the sunlight carries
a chill-edged warmth
and I am alone.

I read aloud
in thawing parks
so that my voice

trips through wind.
My lips and eyes
pinch from cold ache;

splashes of pain
stain my forearms,
scalp, eyebrows.

I dislike the buds
of a new year,
its first months.

They are empty frames
that fail to capture
time, fearful time.

To the Working Class God I Have Lost

To my grandmothers
you were the cherry tree,

the clear spring water
they wrung from clothes,

you were woodsmoke,
yellow tobacco

and henfeathers,
beds made, a hymn sung.

Your aroma in their prayers
smelled like onions,

camphor and sweat;
they heard your replies

in flapping leaves,
a honeybee,

the radio’s soliloquy.
You were the love

in their husbands’ hands
and mouths.

You were grief to them also,
a stillborn child

with an unused name,
yet they clung to you

like a cotton dress
wet from rain.

Liquids marked your trail
across my grandmothers’ days:

blackberry juice
coloring young hands,

buttermilk gone sour,
the bright blood of labor.

You stung like papercuts,
axeblade wounds,

ant bites, infidelity.
You soothed like ice

cools a burn.
You, the life of corn

sprouting from red clay,
birthed and killed in season.

Spirit and Flesh

In dreams I travel to Spanish cathedrals,
great unloved ossuaries
with warm air inside, where tourists
flash their cameras like quick prayers
and forget that what is holy
takes time to know. During my visits
I wonder about the saints’ yellow bones
beneath the floor, and whether their God
remembers such decay. The bodies
of schoolchildren admiring the altar
seem so healthy, so unlike the gaunt ivory Jesus
who hangs unmoving above them.
What a crucifix it would make if an artist
wrought Christ as lifelike as me,
his tissues black with blood
like cherry meat, his joints bent
in vaulting arches, the colors of his agony
swept over the windows. Perhaps I am wrong
to imagine the fruit of the spirit like this,
like sweet pulp and childrens’ eyes
painting the church walls with love,
when certainly I house no faith
 in my own bones.
The only light that encircles my head
is not the honey of grace,
but the lightning of grief
that shocks me awake in the morning.
At least the Our Fathers pass
from my sleep into hot groans
 that fill my palms like sacred oil.

Dream

The rotting stars are grommets of fire
that pierce the beveled sky,
projectile stelae of burnished light
hurtling across the slant plane of space,
obscene bites in the firmament that radiate
white electric pain. For space itself
rends its own substance in a brilliant theater,
unfolding and unfurling
the sordid drapes of its passing life.
The way the air wastes is lyrical,
a sweetwater oracle of deadly shine
that slashes the earth with cutting meteors
whose song is like that of stammering fish
dumb from oxygen swill.
The atmosphere is no dam, for the air drops
decaying particles into my breath,
blending with my life
the friction of its flaming demise.
But I feel only the appropriate kiss of goodbye;
I am alight in falling auroras of tenderness
that settle into my sheets
like  rosettes of pale chiffon,
and the heavens’ unmaking
is the crucible of my undoing.

Clefts

I have lain my stripes to cure
on the coffee table, have set them in rows
alongside its wood-grain,

creating a double striation
that both illumines and elides
feeling with real. On the table’s face

I have fashioned a dense terrain
that spans the limits and range of sorrow,
scratches, grooves, and the indeterminate

furrows of existence draping itself over splinters
like semi-shine varnish
stippling a carved board. In such clefts,

the ripples and folds whose smallness overtakes them
(as mine does me), I have hidden what is unalive
with the living rifts I wish to preserve.

Charles Street

you walked drunken
on cheap liquor
mixed with concrete

your heels
licked the street
in combat boots

you swung each arm
like a crowbar
into the cracked air

your stride
stripped buildings
of their imperiousness

Der Zorn Gottes

If I have known wrath, it was
a stiffness in your arm
that ran from collarbone to fingertips

the unease of your light bones
and the colorlessness of the whole room
that night,

the way you clenched your elbow
and pressed the concrete air
heavily beneath your feather-steel form

while I moved with all the thickness of flowing hot stone
or a slogged ancient river
wide enough to carry each sloughed-off word

we have ever said. For those words
were always overshadowed with wrath,
the unfolding in events

of a forbidden knowlege
which in the happening and in the knowing
was both a wisdom and a death

such that the wrath of god
was not a conflagration nor a consummation
but only stark stillness and pain.

The gray death of pipes and lanes
and the grayness of the soft skin above your lip
were intricate, specific, terrible pathways,

the embodied power of small impressions
that turn moments one from another
as we from each other have turned away,

you, with the pallor of a deathly saint,
from all contact with my nausea,
and I from you and from the dense, wrathful walls.

Melancholia I: Low

Seated at the edge of a riverless ravine,
we watch a procession of trains
stream under a vaulting tunnel
with the malaise of tired vandals
admiring destruction.
The shadowy reds of a low-crawling fog
flush trackside pools of brown water
and flood into our breath. Like a sea, cigar-smoke
swims among the tender ankles of trees
recalling a restless harbor
that we know but will never see.
I speak to you like a nude child
spewing founts of verse
into the drains of rail station and canal
while your palm traverses my spine
like the breathless engines
that roll on below us.

Elegy for Natty Boh

About our meal on a Virginia curbside
there was nothing lively. For your weeping veins
had strewn their protean magic along the interstate
for miles, and we, former habitues of your alchemical streets,
found no life in concrete ligaments between
sidewalk and asphalt, between this Virginia and your
Land of Pleasant Living. We clenched our sandwiches
with our rows of teeth to watch
the dregs of your golden fluid seep from curb to drain,
and we recalled today's dawn (the passing of that final
dionysiac night) when you, the sun king,
transfigured your beau corps into monstrous
bevies of dripping, glowing, snarling arteries
that burst at the sunrise. Now our throats
and the long black throats of the highways home
lie awash in your nectar,
which is your body distilled,
and we are more alive than we know.