Apr 12, 2015 | Uncategorized
309.
So we’re back with love and not much
else
greatest of all seemings unless you
fall in it
we’re back with love it springs us
forward
into the kindness of our only hope
the yellow of the rose
where no one lives and all love rises
to spell the billion stories that we
tell
all their theology old comfy car
Packard or a Panhard on its way
through the sky
all roads lead to home
that’s all you have to know
a little knowledge and some gasoline
smile brother you’re almost
there.
310.
Who threw the switch that made the
water come from hydrogen and oxygen
someone had to be the spark
is it you who look at me oddly
sometimes
as if surprised to find me there
beside you
who could the spark be but the other
we come from ocean but where did it
come from
who else is ripening down there now
ready to crawl out as we did and take
our place
asking questions of the howling wind
playing their flutes in the desert
and like us always trying to remember
where we came from and why?
Apr 11, 2015 | Uncategorized
305.
So little said and so much waking
salt meadow hay best mulch men say
I’ve managed to know nothing but what
I can speak
the van is at the door it’s all just
weather
sitting here alone with my hibiscus
tree
the written evidence tells against my
life
my father by the cellar door painting
grey
everything waits for us below
an image worthy of your eye
the end of the pagan world was the
end of the world
nothing learned nothing lost
I marvel at the emptiness of me.
306.
So it can mean a little or a lot
a billboard on a vacant lot is all my
Hollywood
and see behind it how the lovers
chance
it would be Ancient Greek if it had a
goat
but wisdom does not wear a cloak
the afternoon is longer than the
night
or so the bird explained
a language half sound half color
all things intersect in you
all the silken raptures of the couch
rainstorm in the desert
from great pain some red flowers
after.
Apr 10, 2015 | Uncategorized
303.
They must know their bodies well
since they have nothing else to know
knowing never stops
it’s time to come back from the
underworld
just as I am just as I am
backwards always is everything
no age but awareness
give us our animal back
sex is an accident on the road to
truth
take off your shoes for this is holy
ground
the feeling that your body is
there is no other world than this.
304.
A poem is guided meditation
mild propulsion of the written world
when it stops the process it launched
sails on
knowing the mind
clear light between the names of
things
between the things
so.ma the bright between
the new the fresh the uncontrived
your mind finds by itself
sacred absence in the core of you
all the holiness and shadows pass
maidens and heroes and sunlight on
the sea.
Apr 9, 2015 | Uncategorized
for
Susan Rogers
the ship all the hard-
won inches of her
to be a
boat
a boat from someone’s
hands uprisen,
low-gunwaled,
prompt to the water,
swift,
a
wherry
she calls it, one woman
can scull this thing along
I call a ship
because it leaps
along the river soon,
soon, she hopes, so many
hours hundreded away
to knit this wood together
to be a boat.
Her ark
against the dangerous
mainland,
where
we abide
bound by gravity
full of fear about that lucid
luminous water all
round us, all we have left
of the first America,
before we did to the land
whatever she flees from
into the beauty
that is always moving,
that touches everything it passes,
waits now for the slim
vessel that will know it well,
this hand-made animal she weaves.
Apr 8, 2015 | Uncategorized
302.
You want to translate Homer I want to
write him
all new all over again all shining
and no war
no more war and the pale cheeks of
men
pierced by no bronze prong and no
fire
walks up and down the corpse and the
hymn
that grieves for Linos turns into the
Ode to Joy
a cliché has no memory it plugs a
leak
even Homer nods well I can snore as
well
and pour the beauty of Helen and
Diomedes and Kassandra
back into the ordinary dance of day
and we will know each other in that
company
proud abashed a little silly full of
soul.
Apr 7, 2015 | Uncategorized
300.
Something like a breeze through
people green as trees
this is your moment mother
before the flowers come and go
a life of gentlest waiting
like the hibiscus for its bee
a bird will do, anything I can say
you to
and love a little while, the mild
adultery of objects fondled then set
free
there is some moment in the stillest
things
we learned in the sacred tedium of
Sunday Mass
eloquent silences between the words
when the priest stopped mumbling and
held Something in his hands.
301.
But God is more personal than sex
when the outside and the inside are
the same
a horse you never heard of comes
rushing from the mountains
the comfort of enough against the ecstasy
of more
o horse you cry I will not ride today
but he thinks otherwise and there you
are aloft
the two of you above the hills beast
and human
who knows which is which a fable no
one ever tells
vanishing in blue distances song
fading
nobody knows nobody knows I hear the
dearest voice
laughing at the effort I put into
doing nothing
a snowstorm of images around a
freezing child.
Apr 6, 2015 | Uncategorized
296.
Religion is to dance as prison to the
Constitution
the underside the got-it-wrong the
social trap the money
when all the great ones said go to
yourself in the empty place
quiet room or vacant tree
sit there silent till you know
know enough at least to help and how
and know that we all need you
yes I need you to be, tree behind you
now
you walk around the world
hinting how to take the pain away
we make for each other and ourselves
now put that in your organ and play
on.
297.
I am not the only one who I am
the others need me too
the lighthouse turns out to be the
moon
raspberry bushes replete with thorn
make me doubt the sweet real things
flesh and its discontents, pink
tongues
on suburban buses o I have lived too
much
too little time and bring it all to
you
that word again the queen of
implications
sparrow hawks and midnight hens
you taught me all the names of birds
I’ve had to do my forgetting all
alone.
Apr 5, 2015 | Uncategorized
294.
Old pens old friends the given always
gets
hand it to me we say and hand it
surely is
weather of a distant city breath of
your mouth
transhuman rhapsody suck on your
finger now
o you everything you beast of a
million leaves
make me listen to your touch
also spoke sorrow after joy to mingle
red sky at evening leave your
grieving
all you lost is safe in Amitabha’s
glowing land
it is good to console better to
unmind the sorrow
who are you to lose to feel to grieve
answer me that you Trinity scholar
and rejoice.
295.
I’m translating back into my mother
tongue
what I heard in the high mountains
what I learned under the hill
earth gods and mind lords and me in
between
a haggard buffoon with a bottle of
ink
o sail me to your island ever after
pillow me with stillness till the
fever eases
then I’ll take hold of autumn skies
and bring them onward with a sheen of
rain
to cool the counsel of an angry world
gets hotter by the day as if all
scriptures
give us one mandate to conquer and to
kill.
Apr 3, 2015 | Uncategorized
292.
That was good kyning they’ll never say of me
I lost Caesar on the way to France
a slim-hipped nation on a crowded bus
Europe is always on the march I want
to sit still
buying a dictionary brought me closer
to girls
I was so young I believed in what I
read in what I said
even if I didn’t believe a word of
what it said
I was a boy with a penknife looking
for the bark of a tree
to carve my name in and find out who
I was
the trees were quick in those days
and I was slow
so I remembered music Mahler mostly
and pretended it was you talking to
just me.
293.
So much for me, life begins when you
forget
and live by feeling through the world
of will
that angry place of plastic and
aluminum
commonest elements made hard and not
to eat
so feeling is your blade young man
keep silence till you get to say it
spoken silence is the richest meat
and nourishes the clarity inside
all those layers of you till I get to
me
and always always the other way round
Leipzig the fugue trapped in the
organ
I opened the creaking door and let it
out.
Apr 2, 2015 | Uncategorized
289.
Nothing is likely to end
the rose of Sharon is just now blossoming
should I hand over to it this work of
saying
she is easier to read but harder to
understand
all touch dissolves in color
color crystalizes into sound
a sound you mistake for a word
rain on marble steps slippery as
poetry
but it isn’t raining it isn’t
anywhere
the word you think you heard unlocks
your memory
everything you remember escapes and
runs away
leaving you free alone with your own
meaning.
291.
Successiveness dissolves in klang
all the notes played at once of what
will be a song
use the simplest word for it
a word though now sick with
commercial implication
song as commodity is the root of war
copyright is blasphemy
all of these words are yours to begin
with
I just got in the way on their way to you
shall we end at the Milvian Bridge
where they began to confuse Christ
with Caesar
o throw that denarius away his face
is in the sky
no his face is your face when you
wake up.
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