Guilty. I am a chain-breather,
even on trains and planes, funerals and churches,
crowded theaters, even in bed
my furtive breaths inhale
each one delicious, each takes in
the reality of circumstance,
the where and when of all the air
around me, each air special,
different, no need for cinnamon
I tease my wife, but sometimes
sometimes I do need to add
the sugar of her smile.
7.x.22
Race car driver
aimed at the sky.
Show the video again,
the part where the books
are bones and the whole city
turns into a cemetery.
2.
You can see that too, gazing
through a broken window
lo into an old miner’s shack
and there everything is, tu sais?
3.
Mila found the bones of his mother,
somehow taught how to think,
thinking is praying, isn’t it?
Taming the mind, holding
one thought and being held by it,
what do you find to start you?
4.
Magic has no exceptions,
only excuses, words we didn’t
grasp in the first place
now bite us on the wrist,
the fang of forgetting,
come home to the ruins
that stretch out for miles
in the Pompeii of your mind,
the world fresh and new outside.
7 October 2022
Raptacious
as a dream
snatching away
the taste of morning.
an old word
they use it in Kentucky
greedy to grab,
rip off the grey
cloaks of waking.
Words wake us,
dream drags up
back from the what
is this anyhow,
we blunder through images
even when there’s no one there.
7 October 2022
The resilience of architecture
comforts the pilgrim,
no place to lay his head
his own head maybe
but there are places,
houses proliferate, stone
walls stand.
I rub my eyes,
Parthenons and Vaticans
on every street.
And every boulevard
leads to the sky–
every pilgrim knows that.
The delivery van drives around
and finds its fated house.
The pilgrim watches
boxes walk inside,
the truck move on.
Why can’t it be a bus
and him inside? There is
some me everywhere
so why not I?
Itchy grass, autumn moth.
another mile.
5 October 2022
PSALM
for J.N.
The Lord is my shepherd
he sang and the stone listened
bite marks on though leek leaf
pilgrim disguised as a jogger
children skillfully play
a game they don’t understand,
and I would be his sheep
her pet tiger the autumn moon
cover your heads dear friends
harvest soon, too soon to plant.
2.
Next year’s alliums already
sting my eyes, I need
the mead of music, parched
with truth, need the holy
silence only music brings,
stone on your doorstep, door,
threshold, liminal, margin,
pages of the book to be,
Adonai rohi it sounded like,
his young voice suddenly old.
Words age us, did I even know
I wanted to be a sheep, a ram
even mighty with curved horns,
would I eat grass? But what is
this tumult around me, a town,
nation sick with fun at midnight,
who really is the moon?
5 October 2022
At a certain moment
it had been decided in him
that the world was real
in just the way he was,
if he was, aware and feeling
and thinking about everything
and wanting and not wanting
and forever being there.
He wanted to be there forever
so took lessons from the stone,
not just vast arching synclines
or mountains on the horizon
but from pebbles on the path,
did research among the trees,
grasslands of the 40th parallel,
Buzzards Bay and Bosporus but
most of all the sea he could see
from the cloud he also visited,
sleep or waking, one mind for all.
4 October 2022
2.X.22, lune
Classrooms on the moon
where young poets learn
meaningful dreaming
and semiotic touch–
which
parts of their own body
they should listen to
most keenly,
and which
to keep at a respectful
distance, mere ancestry
snoring way inside.
In those pale lunar chambers
they learn that urgent skill:
to speak without assertion,
hum and sing and watch the sky
and let the reader drive.
1 October 2022
1.
I have to cleanse my stables.
Too many hoof prints
in the dust, footprints,
too many names
scrawled on the stalls,
too many names in the index.
2.
One sunrise should do it,
because the sun is always
she is good for forgetting.
One sunrise, one prayer,
one newly-painted white wall,
a wet kiss offered freely
to the passing wind
and then it’s done.
3.
Then the bare building
will be mine again—
‘mine’ means free of my own
history, free of my wants,
wins, failures, ‘mine’ means
just me, alone with what will come.
4.
But the old smells
still linger, stirred up
from the floorboards,
dirt of the yard, by the very
wind I hoped would heal.
And heal it does, but fragrance
takes a long time to go away.
5.
Stallions and mares,
those who galloped,
those who slouched along
dragging a cart full of manure,
Carry me to glory!
I shouted as I rode,
but they who could drag
boulders out of earth
could not drag me out of me.
6.
So the stable stand empty now
and people ask me what
that building is, is it a house,
who lives in it, is it for sale?
Everybody wants to get
out of the city. But not this house
if house it is. This house
is sacred to its absences.
A hot wind for a wonder
or call it warm to be milder.
Slim woman in blue satin
singing on stage and call it time,
sky paling.
2.
A person
is mostly geography
anyway, sail the sea,
climb the massif,
remember the forest
where thought sleeps
and seeks out all
the elsewheres in the world
even before a single touch.
3.
The pale act worked,
a cloud has formed,
lightly, shouldering east.
Remember the signs
we saw in stores, Look
but Don’t Touch. why
did we pay so deep attention
to such light-weight philosophy?
The trees know better in breeze,
it’s morning, at least
wave back at their signally leaves.
4.
I felt this way
in California once
for no good reason,
It must have been
just being west
of where I am
and here doesn’t
fit on a plane.
So somewhere else
makes someone else
and the wind was warm.
5.
Look in a book,
find the old name for now,
and where her altar was
when we were sensible enough
to offer on it marigolds and memories
and pour out on its stone
the sweet wine of forgetfulness.
6.
I keep trying
to keep it from
being a love song,
but keep failing.
Your face when you’re sleeping
on your side, at my side,
turned towards me,
dreaming of an island,
and I see you right then
soon as I open my eyes,
gasping at the sight,
I lie there, a child
waking in the temple,
nothing to know but love.
I am, where you are.
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