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You tree complete me
And you hibiscus affirm
My existence the way
Color confirms and
perfumes
This crucified day makes
plain
What is light is confusing
I feel your pain I’m
standing
In the sunshine of it
My feet are catching fire
My heart is starting to
glow
I could be mistaken for
spring
Or carried out a corpse
I could be the horse you’re
riding
On the beach at Sol y Mar
O my soul
A tri-tone of Fritillaries
Running up and down the
scale
A soundless visible music
in orange
Flutterings with a vine
thrown in
There’s almost something
Mozartian
In their allegros and andantes
How they can expand on a
simple
Series of intervals
indenting
The air pursuing one
another
Like listening to a spiritual
music
In a mathematical world
Always adding and
subtracting
But here multiplying and
dividing
Here the wings reach
planets
And the green vine
trembles
And something new is
created
If all chairs are musical
And all tables are laid
Let me lie on your table
Body and blood
Let me be violin-capable
In your Sunday morning
band
Or the one who stands
In awe in the back pew
At your beautiful voice
Its body and blood
Lifting above the table
Singing a new song
You just wrote down
Dictated by angels
Offered to clowns
A close distance one god
Must keep from another
But the sky is no metaphor
For the revelation of the
body
As a flower or a tower
tumbled
Into a withering ruin
Some desire for
destruction burns
Through the cathedral of
the brain
The decision a god must
die
Written into the
still-standing stones
And that god is you and
you and me
Saturn’s outrageous
children
Compelled by our body’s
Insistence on taking the
risk
Of leaping across the
abyss of what
All along was filling it
with thought
Among the treasures found
at Troy
A tear catcher such as
David says
The Lord uses to save our
tears
So the dead not be mourned
A little glass bottle
where the tears
Were stored and left with the
dead
To prove the love for
their greatness
Transformed into the
residue
Of a perfume later
analysis shows
It will all be alright in
the end
The rain of tears will
evaporate
By morning so the ground
Gives off the sweet scent
of dying
Flowers mixed with
mercurial light
To keep Venus from crying
That young man who fled
naked
Into the night leaving his
clothes
In their grasping hands
Must have been a great
runner
Crying and choking through
The newly-seeded fields
the miles
Back to his mother’s house
Where she was waiting
sleepless
Already knowing the words
He couldn’t speak when he
arrived
Silently they let his
sisters sleep
What preparations could
they make
Realizing it was all over
now
Already the rooster was
crowing
As he burst into tears
again
Sometimes I stand back
amazed
At myself to let you get
Behind my eyes and find
Your fondness looking back
The body is such a hall of
mirrors
As hell must be finding
only oneself
Repeated and repeated but
you
Have smashed all the
images
Just to watch in the
smashing how
Into fragments and petals
The body unravels
Or else why come all the
way
Into a body yours or mine
If not to make it a purer
thing
Wholly holy wholly hole
Has become my mantra
Has become my call
I sing it to school buses
going by
And throw it up over the
green mountain
We call south and they
call north
Which today because it’s
Promiscuous spring
anointing
Our feet with refuse and
flowers
Because today you died
And were finally able
To get a good night’s
sleep
Wholly leaving a gaping
hole
Gone from here to
everywhere
Walking some dusty road
Wholly holy wholly hole
We are having such an
in-standing life
Now that we’ve reached the
periphery
Of the woods the only
question being
If when we enter we will
find
The ravenous wolf again
To be stared down or not
Or if stumbling into that
clearing
Where we still sit
speechless
Waiting for ourselves to
catch up
Strangely there are the
same elves
And sylphs as in the first
stories
Waiting to carry us away
Or maybe not so strangely
given
The facts remain the same
Happily ever after the end
Do you want the world
As much as the world wants
you
Or is it like in love one
needs
To love a little more
When one doesn’t want to
The perversity of love
The suffering restores
When love loves last
itself
Is almost universal
One wants to get it down
To a few cogent essentials
On a single page
But the world is a manic
lover
Who won’t let you dance
alone
Throwing your arms around
As if in ecstasy or rage
When it embraces all the
light it can
The final black super-hole
of the cosmos
Will implode back into God
If you think of the
flowering now
The mille-fleur of
galaxies we see
It will be the last seed
saved
The seed that lies years
In the spring ground so
ready
To be remembered again
Even now in our brief
bodies
The still black hole of
the soul
Swallows the everyday sun
And a whole new army of
stars
Will have to be needed
To pull us stem-like
Up out of the ground
Can you think of a
dishonest sky
Or a single untruthful
tree
Or a road that doesn’t lie
All day I spied
On two anxious sparrows
Species unknown
Feathering their nest
Only one could enter
At a time the little hole
In the soffit so
The other had to wait
Anxiously clutching
Its bundle of treasure
In its beak it looked
A little paranoid
Dancing around
As if it held some secret
Of the world
I started a small book
About death and you
But then I buried it under
Accumulating book-clouds
Through the whole night
Birds flying in circles
Like us struggling
In a maze of dark and
light
Above the city of death
They can’t see it’s just
A little town on the
outskirts
A doorway in the middle of
a street
We all are walking toward
look
Someone’s arranged the
dead birds
In orbits the most
colorful
At the center according to
kind
Hearing the snow crunch
underfoot
It’s easy to feel winter’s
indifference
Or to think that summer is
out to get us
When it’s all a great hoax
Perpetrated by our
impatience
Just scratch the surface
And you can sense the
years
And years of careful preparation
Implied by its
construction
Including the fortuitous
The sick and the lame
All are woven in
All are given a name
Under the compulsion of
days
And the trepidatious
nights
I was thinking ‘rapacious’
The way they eat the
lights
And through the obsessive
afternoons
Even onto the twilight
hush
Of all that happens in a
hurry
Driving off into the
darkness
Into the noise of silence
It seems like static at
first
It feels like abandonment
Like a soft rain just
starting
To flex its limbs
A mockingbird calling to
you
From the middle of your
life
If something happens to
our love
I’ll write it down
completely
So when you come home
You can read it to me
But I’ve dropped my pen
It’s rolled under the
couch
And to tell you the truth
I don’t thing I will ever
reach
It all this of course
Was written down
Much later it shocked me
I remember a little
The irretrievable words
That will have to go
unwritten
And I couldn’t wait
For you to get home
If you hadn’t loved me
We might never have lived
But God loved you more
That you were always
satisfied
With whatever we had
planned
For you God and I
The end of finality
For we three absolutes
At last naked and afraid
There were no beds in
heaven
So we stole one
Where three could lie
Your body the bed
From which we woke
As you and I and God
The little lights are
burnt out
But the sun shines into a
few of them
An old celebration
Her morning dose of love
was enough
To carry her till the next
morning
Or else she was moaning
all day
So he took an axe to the
day
To the very roots of the
day
A vine that would only
grow more days
Some ancestral tangle
That covered the trellis
In a single bound
He tore it all down
The burnt lights of the
leaves
In which the sun did
sparkle
Sooner rather than later
We might have to try
The ultimate solution
We who favor the difficult
And thorny path
To practice our mettle
Might just have to
Gulp down our pride
If love is the point
The only and final
solution
The unfailing bottom-line
If we would have the
evolution
We deserve to undergo
That we exist at all in
the end
The proof love wins
I will say a novena
For your ailing Hoya
If when it thrives
You’ll give me a cutting
I will trade my fond cat
For four more
Of your mornings
I will track down
Your last lover
And give him or her
A thrashing for not
Loving you sufficiently
Yes I’ll have another
coffee
Yes I believe in God
I called him Buster
Of the Downward Gaze
And the first time we sat
down together
We got drunk on the sun
And sat there for a dog’s
age
Staring at one another
Cats come from magic
stories
Dogs from novels or plays
He finally announced
As you can see I’m one of
the former
Thus the gray mourning cloak
And these yellow-green
eyes
After me the invisible
world
Begins for you – I’ve come
To carry you across
Skillfully scribbled-over
text
I struggle to unravel
What yesterday scrawled
But overnight redacted
Black ink on black ink
With the word daring dangling
From sleep still
decipherable
I see what you’re doing
dream
Erasing my footsteps home
Sometime in the night
I must have written down
the code
In a few simple sentences
And then scratched them
out
For a few moments the
secret opened
On all I couldn’t bear to
behold
My poems are my faded
prayer-flags
They turn in the wind like
all I’ve got
Their bones slip away
It’s just this slipping
I pray to encounter
Of one prayer into another
My streaming one
connection
With the Allmindedness
Who must be listening
Eagerly to each prayer
Not for its supplication
Nor hardly for its fear
But that here in the wind
There is still
Someone there
A pricked finger is a budding rose
The rose of Damascus say
On the road to Damascus
Or she fell among nettles
say
Suffering the pricks of
knowledge
And lay there kicking
But the red blood rose
Sat on the fingertip so
quietly
Eternity froze
As if one had seen a god
on the road
For which the rose
Was a mere mnemonic
When all along
It was just a child
Running to her mother
