Jan 1, 2016 | Uncategorized
It’s five years since she saw
a mountain lion walk in our backyard
and the next day we saw his paw-prints
big as dishes following a slender deer.
Hard December then, mild one now,
a little sheet of ice that just won’t melt,
salt, and step careful. No beast left,
we have to make do with music,
that subtlest of all animals, fangs
in harmony. Lydian mode, footsteps
start on F above middle C, then
see what happens. The Greeks
thought this luxurious, naughty,
Asian attitudes, tigers, drunken gods.
Sep 1, 2015 | Uncategorized
Can’t help it. Just hear different from you.
I’m always listening for the heart and the god,
the lust for splendor and the splendor of lust.
Even when you tell me that’s just dull passagework
while, say, Schubert is fumbling for his next idea,
I hear the thighs and belly of the stumbling man,
a boy really, half-drunk, shouldering towards
the ever-elusive Friend, the one he wants to worship
and go to God with and touch. The Friend is
always hidden in the music, ahead of where
I ever am. That’s why I guess I’m bored
by music that knows what it’s doing,
where it’s going. Professional, tafelmusik,
the academy of inoffensive technique, skeletons
dressed up in costumes from the opera house,
the one that always burned down yesterday.
Jul 30, 2015 | Uncategorized
The last Freemason died today
carried with him
into the Familiar Strangeness of afterlife
the secrets of unsatisfiable yearning
pothos, from which
his architecture grew.
From absence alone
he made deep song.
Jul 24, 2015 | Uncategorized
A bridge to nowhere!
Stagerite, explain myself
in thy book I looked in vain
and so they closed my eyes on me
now I must write
what I would read
and all the stories start again
and never end.
Jul 22, 2015 | Uncategorized
Be arbitrary. Be anybody.
The world of capital
forgives every choice
just keep choosing.
Only the hermit is villainous,
probably verminous,
disagreeable, old.
All the wrong things. He
of all men is not arbitrary.
He has chosen nothing
and nothing has accepted him
as her bride.
They live together
anywhere far away.
Sometimes I have dared to climb
the easier rock slopes of their abstruseness,
could even hear them talking from far off,
a man saying nothing with all his heart.
Jul 22, 2015 | Uncategorized
twice I was a Christian
no matter what they said
I loved him because he is a door
he said, because he knew himself
better than I knew me,
when knowing is the same as being
Enlightenment is not about light
it’s about ment, the mind
behind light and anything else
Jul 21, 2015 | Uncategorized
Last days. I feel you love
we are only still beginning,
Eden in the rearview mirror
closer than it appears.
We are beginning.
Every archaeologist knows we just woke up.
There seems a pressure in the air
that silences the ears.
Crickets or tinnitus who can tell,
we are newborn always,
immaturity is my sword and shield,
Jul 20, 2015 | Uncategorized
Lady, did you see my fugue?
It ran this way,
it said it was finished and I believed it,
it took advantage of my credulity
and ran away, this way,
its nature to flee and mine to follow,
did you, Lady, hear my fugue?
It favors underbrush deep ravines,
hilltops, ruins, crowded streets,
it knows more names than it can touch,
it tries to wrap you in its changes
Jul 19, 2015 | Uncategorized
For there is anger in the human world
and hymn tunes don’t help
need a bolder potion,
ah, I have made a mousetrap for the moon,
now I am him but who cares,
a new slant on every story
but nobody cares,
that leaves me free
for alternate alchemies galore
next year I’ll catch the sun
and pin her to the door —
why not, it’s the house that speaks, not me
Jul 17, 2015 | Uncategorized
Escape the consequences. Born big
or born small, it is your genius
building you out and out and out
from the thought you are. I, Paul,
a citizen of Rome,
tell you this, do not conform
to the system, but renew instead
your first mind.
The mind that makes you
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