in eyes’ weightless prison,
seeing—
in lake’s dark lens,
exposed—
falling up pits of the sky.
iv
To tear that sky down the middle
will be more than the mind can bear
Brittle, it will break.
v
Our frantic remains
will continue the species,
in ignorance and light.
vi
Swimming, as we did,
they’ll never give a damn,
till just about this time
tomorrow night.
vii
. . . When ice before shards
is too right.
viii
And the light!
ix
The light...
x
Such
is
the
kingdom
of
ice
of
ice
such
is
the
LOVER’S VALEDICTION:
FORBIDDING DAY’S SACRAMENT
Phlox of the liberal phoenix,
breasting towers to day,
extensive
spirit ahead—
repetitious Ananias,
forever forswearing azimuths at noon—
sinking song
in centuries of idiom overflows thy habit,
as flocked thoroughfares spend sloped shadow.
Where gnash thy left,
despairing doors,
as cosmos-meeting crusts
cover a baked vacancy,
I say,
out this emptied one,
“Absence is not eaten”.
FUTURE, BE NOT IMPATIENT
Someday, perhaps, but not this day
Sometime; but then, not now.
Man is a monument-making mammal.
Never ask me how.
SOMEWHERE A PIECE OF COLOED LIGHT
It is such a relative thing
that I am loathe to explain
this brightness as being of the sort
once attributed to the breath of a goddess
dozing just over the horizon. However,
it is also a shame to talk
of ionization and light refraction
(even if they do sort of rhyme)
when something is pleasant to look at.
These terms smack of the magical,
of the incomprehensible—
while it does seem much more likely
that somewhere a billboard-scale Princess
sleeps within a circle of flame,
dreaming kleig light coronas,
breathing plumes of neon mist. This,
somewhere beneath an almost but not-quite
familiar sky; and that she is waiting
to be awakened by the kiss
of a handsome and tireless Prince
about twenty feet tall
in his handsome and Hollywood armor.
Nice thought.
SOUTHERN CROSS
(ELEGY, HART CRANE)
My Nameless Woman of the South,
and the Spring that I accomplished you . . .
All ways one phosphor furrow, Orizaba—
All skeleton streaks one streetlamped street . . .
But always one Spring, so South,
and all shored ways one deep drawn day,
coralling under oranged climes’ chloral bays,
spent and spelled at skulled heavens,
slappings of your tidal sands.
And always my ears will throb as stoppered bottles asea
as the one bunched pearl soul of prior suns dips by askance
when the rude rood raises your wake through night
then bends it down to a dawn
between the sob of the sea,
under the sail of the sun,
and sighed-out hissing sounds of spectered stars.
THE DE-SYNONYMIZATION OF WINTER
I. Pure.
II. Decadent
III. Iceage
Who bells out green mornings
told the summer season to stop
yawning, strode again and overtoned
his bell to more green.
(For this rang the Second Baptist,
Frazer, and Halloween,
with Christmas-conquering irony?)
Autumn Apollo
golden and brown
crackle the bowlength
you bend.
Would were you
so flexible, my lord:
They borrowed your unerring
arrows and brought your sister
to the child-board
among tamed animals.
A revealed pudding of mud
mars the making
of morning snow biscuits
in the maiden eye
and the afternoon runs in the streets
after one inspired advocate
but is walked on to a broken crust
the color a charcoal-powdered anything
(yet strangely, the goat
thigh-bone burning smell
records in smoke script itself
on skies the peculiar shade
a bleeding handful spilt).
FLIGHT
Hilted of flame,
our frail phylactic blade
slits black
beneath Polestar’s
pinprick comment,
foredging burrs
of mitigated hell,
spilling light without illumination.
Strands of song,
to share its stinging flight,
are shucked and pared
to fit an idiot theme.
Here, through outlocked chaos,
climbed of migrant logic,
the forms of black notation
blackly dice a flame.
WHAT IS LEFT WHEN THE SOUL IS SOLD
The sting of the startled porpoise,
welting mulatto the bay’s gray belly,
brackish entrails of ocean,
wrapping the mammary reef,
nor all minnow-dried decidua,
festooned of salt excrescence,
shall barter from heaven back
that heaved corpse—
indemnifying eagles
in peristaltic angle—
by felling fleet the flagstaff wing
on folds of stomach slough.
OUR WINTERED WAY THROUGH EVENING,
AND BURNING BUSHES ALONG IT
(Where only the evergreens whiten . . .)
Winterflaked ashes heighten
in towers of blizzard.
Silhouettes unseal an outline.
Darkness, like an absence of faces,
pours from the opened home;
it seeps through shattered pine
and flows the fractured maple.
Perhaps it is the essence senescent,
dreamculled of the sleepers,
that soaks upon this road
in weather-born excess.
Or perhaps the great Anti-Life
learns to paint with a vengeance,
to run an icicle down the gargoyle’s eye.
For properly speaking, though
no one can confront himself in toto,
I see your falling sky, gone gods,
as in a smoke filled dream
of ancient statues burning,
soundlessly, down to the ground.
(... and never the everwhite’s green.)
THE MAN WITHOUT A SHADOW
What master were he of brush or of graver, who
drew the shades and the lineaments, which
there would make every subtle wit stare?
—Purgatoria, Canto XII.
“Machine-like, I saw Achilles
Challenge the gods with the inevitable conflict
Of mortal desires that even the son of a god
Did not lay at the feet of those that formed him.
And I saw him lie
Like Balder spread,
With that mortal tree drawing of his fluids
And shivering against the violent sky,
Upgrown from his pierced member
Upon the darkening ground.
And their open faces sounded
While she, the distant Polyxena, sister of Cassandra,
Spoke nothing, but was believed
Of pity and known of fear.
Unbelieving, I saw Osiris
Enter the House of the Dead
On that Great Day when all the days and years
Were numbered and, yet, saw that his name
Was given back to him,
And, too, the lacerate parts
We re-formed and rose again
And strode again.
And great Isis, before those merciless members
Was undone, and unbelieving
Felt the movement of his nightclaimed torse
Those very hands
Had seen to the rending
While she played the great adultress
To a brother god.
Godlike, I saw the great Odysseus,
Wielder of the blinding brand,
Retriever of the goddess-image,
And bender of that bow,
Fall unknowing to the unknown slaughter
Of an unknown son
Of his own limbs that lay with the darkness
Of she that made men what they were
In all but flesh.
Beloved of her, the dark one,
And also beloved of her
That may never know love,
He took to race of arms
With his own, by darkness,
And fell before his dark own
That even she of the aegis could not hold.
I saw the gods walk by
In vain procession long
To the distant doom of the home
Of the eater of gods
That throbbed with the constant thunder
Of clashing teeth, tongue and jaws
That consumed their Burgundy and cakes
While bearing perpetually
Their unwanted sons.
And the gods came by in their trappings
Of yellow, purple and awful red,
And, asking that it might pass from them,
Shuffled their feet near the end
And thought of a thousand undone trivia
That lay behind, and looked furtively aside
For open doors in the labyrinth
That might lead the way away.
But when these could not be found,
Strove to bear themselves like noble men.
And the unwanted sons inherited
The lands of their fathers
When the fathers were no more
Than outlandish names and strange figures
Cast in stone, mud, wood and straw,
While the filmier integument of the earth
Yet held their horrors
Constantly stirring in green chambers.
And the universe is a blue room
Where an ever-singing woman sits
At the heart of a lotus
And plays upon a stringed instrument,
Where all these have passed and passed again,
And never turns her crimson-cowled head,
Save to the subtle nuances
Of her own melody which she
Creates for an unknown lord. “
IN THE DOGGED HOUSE
The heart is a graveyard of crigas,
hid far from the hunter’s eye,
where love wears death like enamel
and dogs crawl in to die . . .
WRIGGLE UNDER GEORGE WASHINGTON BRIDGE
One who saw the striped underbelly
and light dotted fins swim,
like a creature's from depths of the sea,
above the moon,
may have glimpsed the face that is beauty
in its late orbiting moment
of most skinless dexterity.
FAUST BEFORE TWELVE
Every bone is trumpet;
night’s counterpane muffles breaking brass:
the rest is silence and not rest;
chaos improvised orchestrations
of minute
dash downbeat
the closings of fiery valve.
THE DOCTRINE OF THE PERFECT LIE
The doctrine of the perfect lie
is a thing I most delight in,
smoother than life,
planed to fit the times,
sandpapered to join with expectation,
polished to suit the discriminating.
But it is not that way, you say?
Of course. The delight lies
in the lie’s
telling: times, hopes, tastes
to fit, with a little disjoint
here and there,
for appearance's fair sake.
Ask any Cretan you meet on the street:
The carpentry is all.
I USED TO THINK IN LINES
THAT WERE IRREGULAR TO THE RIGHT
I used to think in lines that were irregular to the right,
but the straight-ruled dexter margin’s claimed its own.
Too many pages where lines advance like infantry,
too much continuity,
too many harried characters in far too big a rush
to descend the humps, the hills,
to stub their toes on weighted words . . .
Potential energy lurks at the rough line's end.
A kick here, a bump there,
reality topples,
things slide,
The talus of improbability grows.
Prose is clean and smooth and slick,
advancing fully to the right,
building walls like rows of brick,
caging wild metaphors,
sealing their cells dead tight.
What is left
when fancy's eye is trapped
and dragged along to such a place?
The bottom of the page is cruel.
LP ME THEE
Claims of music
shackle souls
or free them.
I’ve never been clear
on the matter.
Shall we dance,
here on the hardwood floor?
Or shall we soar,
wraithlike,
to some Platonic hall
in the sky,
where a ball
of mirrors
reflects geodesic
whatever it is that we are
to the eye
in the air,
to the measures of time,
hiccup of heart,
note in the brain,
the consummate colors
we bare?
We circulate,
the arm descends,
the diamond finger writes.
THE BURNIN
No animal should be as bright as Blake’s Tiger
and I never want to see one.
Forests at night are disturbing enough,
but while mean kids sometimes douse a cat with petrol
and set it alight
for small, cruel laughs at its meteor runs,
its howls,
who has eye, hand or stomach
(let’s just call it “guts”)
enough to try it with Thee?
More than simple cruelty would have to be involved.
An existential temper, most likely.
As in, “No other is responsible for this act.
Free, spontaneous and unpremeditated,
I have decided to set fire
to this sleeping Tiger I have just now noticed
and burn it away to a grin.”
Or perhaps the matte
r lies
in the hands and the eves,
not mortal, but im-.
—A grotesque concept is involved:
There is this being
with immortal hands and eyes.
Shoot it, stab it, gas it—
It dies.
But the eyes accuse,
the fingers twitch,
as if they’d like to twine your heartstrings
and have all the time in the world to do it,
you son of a bitch.
Considering it every which way,
it is the sort of thing a primate
would contemplate.
I can’t see Thee
doing it to me, Tiger.
A cosmic SPCA seems the answer.
It is too late to do much but admonish
after the act has occurred.
Primates with immortal parts bear watching, anyhow.
And I can do without fearful, striped incendiaries
rushing by me in the night,
God knows. Write your Representative.
Preserve symmetry. Save the Tiger.
I, THE CROOKED ROSE’S DREAM,
DUMB-SUNG ANATOMIE
That I am the pain in the matter is the case,
though that I am the case in the pain is the matter;
and that I am the matter in the case is the pain
and the cross—a shade of passed-in substance
screaming for a name under the driven agonies of hours,
as the slashed apart circle of the sun by telephone lines,
not unlike that final grating of hearts, cut from
where wires begin beyond the bounds of seeing,
ends
shelving bright brooks on flows of black snaking parallel.
So still beneath me lies the world in faint and jettison sleep,
as oftener than nights are whirled the rabbits of my feet
through dreaming jungle. While I revolve
under that star-pimpled sky bust, the quick-gouged intaglio moon
seems somehow a thumbprint bruising its breast
concave under tree topped curves jag-collaring throat;
and aches in later membrane of unclothed day make
hot streams from its bleeding navel an unimprovised,
non-sacrificial way of being, while not saying,
some perpetually unmeant missa in dominica resurrectionis,