Before the Tree

When talent breaks its last rewarded string
and grace released its furtive song
all the bells in tandem then will ring
and sandwiches revive us.
Onward, moth of ages!
ordinary plates
relinquish vertiginous portals
for the leaf is not to be
and the dream is on its knee
before the tree.

Here in the garden of undeclared saints
there are limits on the brooks you can withdraw.
As fast as reason eats the valley's sun,
our day is done.
The garden smells of paint.
No windows grow upon the thorny fruit
and shoots of lemon colored uniforms
drape over arbors of lost rumors.
There is no edge to it.
We hear voices when there's no one there.

Head crowned with solitude
seeing far, roots far below
entangled with the huddled distant others,
nourishing the accidental and unseen.
Who knows if your heart is joyous or bitter
or your gaze more intent than rambled
flooded inward or released to be born
of colored air?
We hear only a rhythmic converse
with the teeming wind.

When windows creep upon the failed fedora
and angels black the weary Diaspora
the fantasies collide us.
Inward, sudden thunder's beacon
cavity of mire
unleash the fluted planet
for the best is not to be
the irredentist forest flees
before the tree.

[irredentist: one who advocates the recovery of territory culturally or historically related to one's nation but now subject to a foreign govt. From Italian for "unredeemed".]

Oct/Nov 1998

tasked

your task eludes your grasp
and your return is uncalled for
your failures nip your heels
climb on your back, you think
no one can see them riding
but somehow they do.

easy as the imagination finds
you lose
and the grasp cannot connect
with the tempest in your shoes

this least of all is true
that the renewal is uncalled for
no, the grasp is meant to be
the first reason you try
to complete the evidence of the street

1998

Greetings
Instability is a crushing boor
except on certain Sundays
when the feet of nations walk blindly
in the mire of consequence, why
are we surprised when those supposed
entities, parties, forces, all the choirs
of power persist in doing what they know
we know is destroying them--it's the urchin
revolt writ large, bannered across the sky
o'er the squalling pit of composure.

I send you greetings, earthlings,
pitiable creatures who cannot even see
into the infrared or ultraviolet,
who no longer sense your own planet's
meridians of forces, who are blind at night
and cannot connect your inner worlds
with your perceptions of the outers.
You wonder that I speak English--we
have been monitoring your Star Trek--imagine
our surprise to find many alien languages
whispered in dark barrooms at the edges
of jungles and slums. We are still puzzled
by what you mumble about in churches
and the braying of your electronics hurts
our 33 1/3 ears. Nonetheless
the concubines of conscience inhibit
the pleadings of the grass.

We now return control of your set
game match, your conjunctions and
disturbances, your permutations and
inconveniences, to you,
who did not miss them.
This is what we wanted to know.
We will have no further contact
with your gray minds, your buzzing
fingers, dead skin.
Please arrange for our souvenir parkas,
Renoirs, partitas, late quartets
and ball point pens to be sent
to this address. Didn't you know
that you are a living time capsule
buried in this abandoned neighborhood?
Turn on your TV, and
think about it.

1/30/99

caught

what good is this man
with no mother
and no son
no father, no daughter
no grandchildren
left adrift
by the gods
and goddesses

caught
in an eddy
the old adventurer
working the sails
in a world without wind

will fate arrive
on a silver plate
or a wooden slab
a granite box
a cold blank stare
a flashing nightmare
a long starving fade

or will there yet arise
just wind enough
for one more
voyage--be
ready

5/03

endless

Endless young women in tee shirts with cigarettes
tiny breast and bright face
EYES of quick challenge-YOU:
the world of forms
to her, a representation---
a body, maybe;
endless young challenges in young eyes with tee shirts

thin arms, thin hair
leafed on sunned skin
challenge the BEAST
with a billion tendrils, a
million arms and eyes
and faces
to settle her challenge
in one poor weak man
who functions...

Endless young functions in bright cigarettes
with leafy wives
clinging to the sides of
the world of illusion---
to her, a representation,
a body, maybe
endless young beasts in tiny breasts with
a thousand hairy tendrils
and eyes
and faces.

and if not with
this precision
the form is
as probable---the
many of the endless young girls
will slide from
insolence to certainty
settle perhaps forever holding
fashions of tee shirts
before eyes
and representations
of faces, maybe.

1971

Thunder and Lightning

The collapse of all visions
the air forced out of the storm
like thunder ignored, accommodated,
having long been explained
that the sky does not fall
fall
we've fallen
into this balanced step

uneasy compromise with
paralyzing intuitions
of the eye and bone
the lightning bright flash
gone before there
and then the crash

now we recognize without
seeing, reading the
shorthand of our familiar
landscapes, having lived here
so long. The flash
reminds, reassures, yet still
does not fully
illuminate.
We know everything
so we see nothing.

But the thunder is never quite
music
and the green edge of pain
is still the flesh of the whirling trees


5/1988

The Ancient Plaster Has Wise Cracks


Truth has high ceilings
though reality roils
in the shivering dark.

Craniums carry
candles of pretense
but feet err
in bleeding shouts.

Faith is the dream
before morning
till light becomes invisible
in the panic noon.

Kind universe to trace
our jaunty brush strokes
though the crash of mystery
satirizes the lines.

Time has slender fingers
but clocks measure only
the folly of souls.


Pittsburgh 1996

Menu

He is the bland wolf
see him come,
garish pleas, greedy tongue
into the restaurant.
This is his greeting card adventure.
All around him voices munch
on stony ears.
Look what he devours.
He questions you: why
do you hug your guilt
like a stolen teddy bear,
like your mother?
Eat with me.
Enjoy.

The bland wolf
eating pie
faced with a mistake.
This greeting card adventure
has no bite. The worst is
probable. Evenings here,
voices munch on stony ears.

1/1990

The March

You don't have enough brass here
for a whole band, they told me
urging felonies from my eyes
spurning words that stealth
inflicts, upon the marble
wounds. Freezing
he pleaded with the vanguard
but the mask that washes the night
went on spinning. Ballast
was denied again. No bond
of flash could echo the dyne
as we frayed, bleeding into flames.
I carried the region on my neck.
Our flowing feet made the standard music.

2000

On the Beach

On the beach you see
the beauty of broken things
worls
weathered form

the water runs in
the light runs out
while the small birds
follow

each tide wipes
sand hard and clear
brings new pieces

I finger the big
shell and the dry wood
birds head beak

and say to the sea
take me
take my heart

7-9-97

where to be/impressions of protest

When I talk about the war
I look for the answers
in the faces of young women.

I recount my memories of demonstrations
in blades of grass.

I stared at the yellow bricks
listened to the sounds of the woman showering
and voices in the smoky distance
talking war and antiwar.

I awakened in a field
of clock radios--
Mother of Exiles,
blood must make you kind.

I will hide.

1968

Night people

I figure the first poets
were night people
who entered the world in darkness
their day forever night

and so while others slept
they kept watch
against the rustle and glint
before it exploded
as roaring teeth
and they stayed alert to the
insidious slitherers
threatening sleep-stilled skin.

In their firelicked solitude they had sharp
thoughts.
As the cold early morning drifted in
they dreampt awake
and in the slow explosion of dawn
poems were born.

If they were singers
they had to sing to themselves
as the others slept.
They were hunters
who searched in the dark
for images.

In the light
as the others prepared to hunt
and gather
they were given to warm sunlit sleep.
Later, they would hear stories
of the day.

undated early 90s

Realms of Speed

Urgent as the close wall
odd in the ruined rain
we marched, greeted, sang
loved by clocks
arguing dreams, unfurling.

Hot sand of
burned light,
waves galloping and collapsing
their death shouts
the ragged rhythm of that place

but not these, honk honk.
Adapt, respond, be always
and everywhere
appropriate.

Give us not the drag of passion,
the sodden slowing tears,
the porous mud of rumination,
the obstacle of principle.
Beep beep. This kingdom
is a riot, where every agenda's
a king.

undated 90s

Roots

I put down my graceful roots
in the secretly famished land
where attendants eat my ear
and the sky has holes.

Invisible warning of green sucked
into blank fury
and tumbling blackness forever--
the black-hot eternity of hell

no one will speak well there
or battle back with colored clay,
checked ribbons and tablecloths,
wine with dinner.

In this universe of freely enterprising
explosions and hurtling fire
we are the ridiculous.

6/1986

It's the time

It's the time of
revision.
Yes, it is
at hand.

Your whole life,
what a phrase.
As wide as the earth
for anyone.

No dreams
of destruction destroy
the visions roundly noted.
Fragments of salvation,
literally.

It's the time
of revision, yes
it is at hand


7/1986

The Past

The past is a recessive gene
a hunk of algae in your head
that keeps dirtying up the pool of your life

The past is left-handed

The past has an eating disorder.
It eats disorder.
Several orders of disorder
at one sitting.

The past is the suit you got
without a fitting.

The past is a freight train at night
roaring through your temples.
The church bells of your past are ringing
for you and your various gals
and sundry mornings of reverence for
loveliness and confusion.

The past is a cataract
in the eye of the truth,
an emotional chip
on your front tooth.

The past is a limited toy
the fire engine of accomplishment
that's two inches high and breaks
it's plastic

The past is an iridescent dye
or the way your eye
looks to other people


If the present is names you can't remember
and faces you can't forget
the past is the opposite of that.

The past is a clean sweep
an onion eater
a world beater
a mad platter
on the lazy susan of your soul

The past exists to
give nostalgia
something to think about
to give art the life
of the artist's death
so the present can catch up
to the dubious future

the past is a cat in the hat
of Abraham Lincoln
Hitler's moustache
bleeding into Groucho's

the past masquerades as a series
of clichés
under the costume gleams the dagger!
you laugh, but the blade is sharp.
fortunately, the present
is an anesthetic.

The past is an aphrodisiac
you take the morning after.

1989