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
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
(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.
(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
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.
My bird in the
hand,
My bright dollar,
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
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
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
Close with you, on
the sofa
(tight) breathing
in unison
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.
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.
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
dark girl I’ve seen her
here before
(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.
