-E-

The moon, in her odd
dance through the clouds, mocks
the abandoned skiff,
snaps its mooring line as if
she might take it fishing.

-A-

Boat-tailed grackles

confuse the                                           telephone line.
                    catenary                   of a
                                     sweep

Their calls, the rusty twanging of a taut wire.

-D-

He speculates about her evening doings
as he takes notice of the stone plectra
she steals from the early bright of shore.

-G-

Due to
Her conceit, the
Spider’s only music
Is the ping of warp as she weaves
Her weft.

-B-

Oscillating strings
        spiral
 the apple
     into the warp
                 of space and time.

Did you not see who plucked them?

-E’-

My heartstrings stand still—
vibrate as you pass.

insides
      milky, some on
 into night
          wise, catching of pine moons above dawn
            for there, cups hold the permanence 
of curbstones       a lone wolf here
   goes a long way towards tipped understanding
      (lilies and river runs
   mist on a pumpkin, blind suns)
          what each leaves guilds the next place
our own rabbit speak or table to put our elbows on
      the room's end is where our cold hearts 
            hand imagination the answer 

what we are comes of chance collisions,
encounters with flotsam—offal and plums

floating in a flood of language     we choose
what remains—the fantastic: your coat a sail

on the icy pond, you whooping and flying
on your skates as if caught in a griffin’s claws

the everyday: gossiping as we hang our wet jeans
on the line when we can’t afford the dryer

mornings are a salvo of  love promises,
afternoons we come undone, spiraling apart

in our bubble chamber, evenings we calm
ourselves doing mathematics on the fingers

of clocks       each day’s unspoken words
become our fluttered history, orbiting us

like the gold planets of an orrery (though much
less neatly as if gravity threatens to let go)

in night’s hallucinations we find ourselves
lassoed, one to the other

Winter’s white cremation—from its quietus
shoots arrow-tipped croci. She greets this bed
of nails sprung from the ashes of the elements,
from anger and lust
                     with a rush of pirouettes,
a dervish, her girdle of dead man’s hands
rising towards the heavens. Her unaffected thigh,
her sun-darts lance the heart of the white child
watching. Immortal,
                  primordial, the blackest moon
garbs her body, a black swallowing the pigments
of day—the boy grows on the whip of her fabric.

~

streets blue-black with spilled rain,
he eyes the copper head tilted back
     against a twenty-foot leg

  which climbs the store-front into antique
violet lace     / a lingerie advert lost on him /
   he's captured instead by the little crooked canine
                   exposed in a smile

in his mind, he nibbles her lip,
         licks that topsy-turvy tooth

until he is distracted by the dark sprite
boarding the bus       the curve of her calf
     invites him, conscious
a beckoning

                  wait, that girl there!

    he itches to squeeze her
like the political sandwich boards she's wearing
               as she scratches her nose
and examines the sky        burns off the clouds
with her intensity, loosens knots
     of trenchcoats all around

where underneath, the fair ones
       call for summer

~

Play Shiva to Shakti—face your fears
in the multi-faceted dew of her bracelet.

Watch Kali in her white dance, light ascribed
to the unbridling, the parliament of woman,
   
a male undoing. Dance her dance in wholeness
and wine. Recognize, in her face, all the knowing

of a goddess—the goddess-all-knowing.

~

        his key, their lock
through this doorway      on hot moonlight
she stretches, her thighs scarcely in check
  as she says hello in a stage-whisper

left-handed darkness, moonglade
  on the river between her shoulder-blades
down where, her down        her skin
     the skin, the rising to and fro     deep, her
       breathing mingles back
and back she comes in his gaze

hips and breasts disarranged
  head and nape askew, the theatre
she’s surrounded in plays
   his desire, a blueish shadow
        riding, illuminated, sliding

incendiary this moonlight, fingers ignite
    the rhythm on frosted fur
he takes his first
        warm taste, slips his tongue inside

   what perfume is undone!
on his tongue come the others
  snaggletooth, hot dark sprite
springing from between sandwich-board
         sheets

these faces the window loves, the window
      pouring night heat
over her advances      she of a breeze
climbing up to stand over him, one foot
on his thigh, the other on his breast
  climbing down to

            ride light, full

      with weight

     riding astride, equestrienne
a necklace of skulls bounces off her arm
her rose breath rains secrets       he

            is undone

if all were kept at the point of questions:

silver smelts slipping between legs,
spring waters rushing upriver

        momentum tosses her
   into whitewater and nets—
she reddens her lips with bites
   to warm them against ripplets
       palavering for her boots

flower and wood apple blow
through the ship’s furnace, spin her
past sunflowers         galaxies
cut from black marble

  the boy on the bank waits
            with her bucket of fish

~


last night, he rattled dream-dice
      with the red snake,
an apparition which steers him now
to the corner of Bowery and Bleeker
   to watch long blonde confidence

con brio, her gestures
      her poetic proclamation of virginity—
with each shouted reason why men
can’t have her, he covets her more

but here—her in the highlights
and him swallowed in blackness below

        from a juice glass clouded
with age, $6 whiskey-and-gingers serve

             to sharpen his thirst


 
~


possessive drums—temples, the curve of a ship, desires
    her hearthstones seed the countryside
as she roams with the deer, illuminates the unknown
    with her curious torch

a palace, a wooded throne, an owl’s song in shadows
her belly is full of apples

                  taste them on her tongue

Why should she give her bounty to the dead?
                                                   ~Wallace Stevens


I sit in this poem in my peignoir—perhaps it is a mist
of green under which I've smuggled in the lambs
or maybe it is a hard red stitched in invisible words.

In this poem I can stay and no one pulls me from
coffee and oranges or questions. I watch boys pile
stone fruit on platters, over-occupied by metaphysical

matters, forgetting siren songs on rocky shores.
I can't be moved from clouds in an inhuman birth
finding their likeness to things lost. Life-sized

puppets—fishermen and witches—wave arms to the birds,
parade along the ocean's edge. I watch and set my alarm
for nightmare minutiae, the mooreeffoc of Dickens

where momentary doors are real and windows
are but mirrors with forged reflections back to ocean
agates and false smells through keyholes.

The most frantic fear of all is the most precise panic—
when you look babies into another's pupils, you find
you aren't there or anywhere, but here all at once.

Here come real stars to fill the upper skies,
And here on earth come emulating flies
                                                   ~Robert Frost

no one dares write poems about fireflies anymore
because fireflies have been well-written
yet their tiny glimmers make the heart glad
and I like to think these little points of light
might shine for you, too
and burn off that throb of solitude
make the ancient emptiness a vestigial

coat of arms        today the lost pups came home
and whimpered ‘round your bed after an unexpected
outing in the thicket, yet you’d not the audacity
to write poems about liquid brown eyes
and unconditional love because that has been done, too,
but we allow that each deep look and love
and undried river smell is not all about dogs

but us and the day—lass, you deserve
licks on the nose and grunts of contentment,
dreams of cowboys with wide-brimmed hats
playing guitar to soften a hard bed of clay—
we might envy the stars and be left with sobs,
we might draw maps of our hoped-for kingdoms
charcoaling out the only roads to cities
of sea roses and oklahoma dust

in every poem, we might howl like babies
yet we hope we are not pretentious, surrounded
as we are by made things that take us away from the heart
of the woods, the hollows we wish for our beds,
newborn things pushing through the detritus
of fallen leaves

this is a dangerous storm, but I’ve the umbrella
and you’ve the pretty house, and we’ll make it
a mere inconvenience—we’ll write our clichés
and turn them into topiaries of chicory blue,
a pavilion of poppies bursting forth in a wave of joy

changes when air closes in, the fog hangs tight
and I forget all beyond the tree-woven  roof over
my steps & porch, the hot wet rosy white radishes
I bite with a strawberry that gives to the touch.
My 9'X9' patch of dirt yields salad after salad
and the longest day just gone.  I am

mosquito bitten knees, those brief stars of fireflies
hanging in the rhody and over the driveway
like these paths belong naught to me
but to the pines, the red patched woodpecker
who woke me with the sweetest alarm.
I leave windows open for the night song,

the phantoms of fiddleheads—angelic the pine tree
sounds of sonnets and some one to write them for.

Poetry is an act of peace. Peace goes into the making
of a poet as flour goes into the making of bread
                                                            ~Pablo Neruda
 
this poem contains no morals to be pinned
on trees—just a string of  a thousand pretty words:

    palimpsest—syzygy
                 —polliwogs—
   —edelweiss—contrabass—gladiolii
               — anemone & so on…

they belong to us and us to them—these words
sprung from the teeth of our ancestors—
may they carve us a new blue marble
should the old not suffice               let us

gather stories from starlight and hearthstones
shake vowels in a bone cup, gather tales
from rice paddies and shopping malls
craft lines to ride on the crest of the knife

as the dead take their place, give them words
to rename our streets and villages
to quell the battles       

in John 21:3 Simon Peter saith unto them, I go a fishing

     for the bombshell of understanding
     for the celebration within us,
     for the recognition of ourselves
             in the prisoner

may the wisdom of words move us to madness
fold poems into origami birds
compose songs from the candle ends
of our conversations—wish for us
on a thousand paper cranes