Herein, some poems I wrote during various times in my life, pretty much as they went down, unedited. A few of them even got published in the likes of Prism International and Room of One's Own, but my book-length manuscript (Nonsongs and Neopsalms) didn't fly because my style was all over the map. As are these, but I'd still like to share them. For the sake of flow, I won't break these up with my customary images. This ran so long I had to divide it in two parts.
What Happens in September
all the acorns of my brain rioting
out of a little hole in the top of a tree
I can hear them rumbling
(like Frost’s apples) from long away –
Squirrels whiz in a double helix
around the black tree/each
tail-frisk
bright as a fizzing synapse
The smell of English walnuts
and an old old box made of dusky wood
just opened after fifty years in
the attic
Chestnuts on the ground like the
eyes of fractious horses
that gallop through
a seethe of
surf
I am six, scuffy-kneed, collecting
chestnuts to string or sell on the street
or Sixty, dimmed but simmering still,
hair gone to milkweed,
skin with the smell of dried apricots
and used aprons/still on the
wheel of Four, the wheeling and
reeling,
rocketing year.
Bite the plum
Naked is as naked
does: as clear as
Your eyes are,
your clothing is
that much
/clearer,
dearer still the scent
all man,
of you,/inestimable.
I should never
Take you out of that box,
Never sample those
dark
/chocolates,
too
for / dear you are,
the Arabian horse
of my childhood
(standing still only to be
petted).
Notice me! I am more
than a
Brain on a stick, but
an (all-breathing
(Non-fiction /woman. To break
this cellophane
(that heatshrinks your
legend),
would it be a rupture,
an insertion, an
arrogance of the ovaries,
Or a sweet inevitable,
angel driven (deep)
my / into
the moist cake of your heart
as
You are / removed as
You are / removed as
an engraving of a dybbuk,
I can stroke your image
only, Never get your
smell/or feel your hair
Never grab it –
up in
Let it dry/to a soft
Black wrinkled fruit –
The juice that never
had a chance to
run down my
chin
will gleam in those
glacial blue
eyes:
Will spark on your
skin –
Spring-loaded
April’s where I live,
the place my heart opens
rose-burgeoning, shinyleaf-new
a smell of bursting peonies,
bumble-dizzy bees bumping
butter-and-eggs
swollen buds thrusting
in the lovesick air.
Leaden, laden, leavened, lavendered, loaded,
one big quivering nose, a moist surprise
hatched out in the nest of my body
April Pegasus-leaps
in my pulse,
sun-shot Pan-piped
heady, relentlessly
tender,
recklessly
sweet.
Three haiku
I. Gift
Snow, just one slow flake, settles
subtle as a breath
Lighting on
my tongue.
II. Trail
Beside the still railroad tracks,
A hot sun. Song of
Cicadas.
We ride.
III. Back road
The way unspools, retreating
from a back window:
Unreeling
vision.
bridges (a Vancouver haiku)
latecity nightsky –
spill of black/Silk skirt:dancing
spritesparks/arcs of pearls
Fall
The antique
smell of
autumn
it charges me it
startles my nose:
leaves all turned
foxy,
shuddering into a
crumble of old
iron at my feet
in a great sustained
hallelujah of praise /ancient trees are
praying up: their frail arms
worshipping wide
(some are
redheaded, some
blonde, a few
undecided, as if they
might make a change
at any time) The wind
shifts around like a
salesman,
yellow of denture
full of rude/surprising charm
The antique smell of
autumn it changes me it
(startles my nose. then all at once
an old old woman grundles
by/do I know her?
She is me do I fear her? A study in
black/clad with
a scent
the
lush whiff of
life-in-death
Violin
Falling into amber,
a buzzing blur of
honey and blonde,
strings as veins, a coursing, rush of taut
bliss, stretched across a
hollow core
of yearning: Heart-bulb
lush
will vibrate as / hips of wood
shine like patient still eyes
and ochre sounds tease, tug
at hunger, reach, reach.
Fingers and strings kiss and
come apart, kiss and come apart,
The frail box eems in a subtle
pullulation, shy as a girl, lush as a
wild and
/ whiff of mink:/ all in a stillness
the bow sighs, sighs like a deep
diver, soughing the life in
this creature of tree, this female
fleshed of the organs of nature –
and all nature, all in a murmur
of intimate pain,
hewn
draws from this/heart of nothing
(this wood-held dusk, this
stirred scent of stored petals
this great warm handful of love)
a shining: a chiming, a brining,
a pool of dark wine
spilled from the lustre of flowing eyes,
a seeing, a speaking, this songswept
woman of wood.
shiatsu
playing down the roots of my spine
like fleshly xylophone: each vertebra
oceanic
humming with dim / secrets
ever
Every snake I have / handled
entwisted along the cord. I am
awake now,
chorded by blunt fingers
strummed in the blood
which courses deep vermilion
in the sub-tectonic plates of my pelvis
The gut-song heaving upward
like a straining lifter, triumphant –
Selah, she is new! (set loose
pure
in a slippery arcing dolphin of / prana)
splashed
in amniotic
baptism:
Behold, her crown.
Yes; or The Chagall Bride
(i)
i pray myself
Awake: the smudge and
drudge of day
bleared by the bliss
of existence
a leaping fish of Be/the singing
blood that cries
I am
(ii)
(i insist on you
the way I insist on
Yes:
an E. M. Forster yes
close beside the
everlasting “why”
(like man
and wife
why answers
Yes in an endless
“I do”
Poem on my fortieth (for my secondborn)
and bliss flicked
through, too, (quick)
like the flip of an
eyelid,
/just
when did it pass over,
an infant surging to
burstingly woman?
a / beautiful
when lost it I, gone
these/
days, these days, when
violet
did the / plum become a
dead-
(small/sweet)
driedthing
She went by, my dayspring my
firehorse of a girl, life fiercing in
glace-blue
her/ eyes:
fleetingly this Astarte,
too/danced, Fred Astaired/ toddle
turned to whirl as (slowly
my age
pulled ripe skin down
like the rind of old
fruit).
Love fresh and juiceful
when?/
passed into a darker
hymn, quiescence.
The juice of jigs, all
hard
that/ sex, gone by
too. Ova will
soon
dry/to peach pits
dessicated as hair.
mainspring/
(She, my spring, my/
offspring, spurts still
with
that warm
juice,/sucked hard out
howling
of my / heart)
Guitar (for Keith)
How could I tell the way, tender as a lute,
his voice plays me,
especially over the wires, in the place
Without faces, a coiled, blue
Secrecy? Sound strums off
the tips of my fingers.
Some chords are stiff,
Almost hard; slick and shining,
stretched in iridescence
over my ringing ears.
My smile bars the strings.
The warm seal
Breaks; the peal
(spreading like a fugue
inside my chest) makes an
Easy, reaching harmony.
There are worlds beneath the words,
This overarching pattern, high
as a cat’s back; caught by the spreading
Nest of my hair.
Bird in the hand
My bird in the
hand,
My bright dollar,
blonde head
Hard as a dime,
there in your
trench coat streaming
with spring, wet
as new robins
or
Downy as stamens,
all
I would suck up/the
merry contempt in
your sleigh-bell
eyes,
Pepper my salt
with the wit of your
wounds,
Dive into the
iced-over pool
of your
voluptuous
disdain.
Unbegun
I sense a tightly curled potential in an
alternate self/I have never met: is it me or
thee?
What do you call the sound before the wind blows?
(and)
How many wolves precisely hide behind
the icebound pre-flood of your
unmelted eyes? How would they bound,
unbound? How does a glacier
feel when it groans and cracks like a
cannon, all its
sluicy sperm released?
How to judge the fertility of what has
not yet happened,
an approaching train rocketing backwards
into the sucked-back pre-time of imagination?
Would you smell like shredded wheat,
like gunfire, like an impending
surprise? Would I be able to touch
you, at least with my mind,
or would all my juices, sunparched, bleached with shock,
frizzle away to the nothing in which it all began?
blue popsicle (for J. G.)
I live in your throat, curled
with a cat
sleeping in sounds
that drift daily/supple man-
music
What flavor? I cannot
fathom/Yet shaking my head at you
(underwater) with surprise.
Joyborne, my heart smiles
(chiming) in sleepytime
tune – is it
magic yet?/Dark out
now, I palm the
chocolate
of your voice. Dandle me: cat
in a basket
breathing our lonely, our smilenest in larksilent
candlesmoke -
pomegranate wine
I sip at
your smile;
fire light
dances on your teeth
on a hearthrug oh; comfort.
Close with you, on the sofa
(tight) breathing
in unison
Succulent
rubies. Heavy
with spice; promise
(of bursting kernels
shared on a back step
I’d stain my shirt)
Tryptich
I. Lover
What is the song of you?
Electric; blue
A spurt of brimstone in the dark.
I snatched your eyes
from the fire,
They lit the coals
of my desire
You’re
sharks,
you’ve turned my being
to steam and sparks.
I. Tin man
He walks through
robot days,
listening to the echo in his chest.
Quicksilver tears
spill from his liquid eyebeams
to fuse his jaws in place
And then one night it rains.
Waiting
for the tender mercy of an oilcan,
he holds his rusted axe aloft
Frozen in mid-chop.
I. Skater’s Waltz
We slice in new ice
Keen figures with bright, honed blades
carve in the virgin white
Harsh cuts that cannot be erased.
I let you go. I trust you
to move gently on my twinkling plane,
You loose my hand
to let me spin across your space.
We slice in new ice
Keen figures that cannot be erased.
I would say
I would say that you are springtime,
That lambs
could not be lovelier: laughing bells
Of eyes bright with seeing,
the shining, shone of you.
I would say that you are a
Renaissance painting
of a beautiful woman:
So restored
that the paint gleams; its sheen
Fresh from the brush; its wetness
smelling new.
I would say that you are living
Water: I see tiny
perfect selves, suspended
upside-down in the silver
Merriment of your eyes.
If true, then I would say that you are
Not my brother; but some other; some
me not yet thought of; next year’s
Reflection
cast lightly (God’s amusement)
over waters
rendered still.
Gina
sweet shy
dark girl I’ve seen her
here before
she always wore the best clothes
(silvery things/bangles
feathered skirts
necklace made
from the teeth of a wolf)
now I see Gina in the ward
kitchen. Still beautiful
big-eyed
part Cree her hair tied back
she shows me the tracings of
partly-healed gashes
sewn back together in
a gridwork
hands/
on her arms, wrists.
She must be twenty or so
No one comes to visit
Once she had a boyfriend
but he got sick too
I dreamed of a petting zoo
with live men in it
all naked in their splendor
some
fuzzy, some smooth
all smelling good
of dark leather/gull feather
spanish heather
eating their golden chest hair
like shredded wheat
and leaving whenever we feel like it
could we name them? No,
that would be getting involved.
But we’d remember their
sad eyes at noon
(feeding time – go feed the bulls)
some luscious sea-blue, some rich as
melted chocolate.
