You'll only arrive at this house through
the woods we grew with purpose
Those birches dance
in costumes curled & fringed
Lights wink between the two
still flirting with the handsome oak next door
While below graped canopy
four chairs collect deep shade
emptied now of long-awaited guests
Sensitive ferns beside smooth purple stones
focused on this visitation
Heavy, cool air, fuels the spreading greenness
embedded in every surface, as if footsteps
you might fit your sole into each morning
and trace, still sleepy, a path older than ants.
This I abjure:
rough young magicians with red hair
and freckles and the memories
of them which have dissolved me in tears.
Full fathom five
my father lies and my beloved
and my beloved and
the ones I thought, however briefly
beloved
and of their bones is coral made
and of my heart
is hope squeezed not quite dry.
Even as the leaves cover paths
and grasses parch, there is nothing
but expectation
of the island, the prospect
of the buoys tolling in the sea
the cloudless sky
the spells
for which no longer have I breath,
of the final nothing at all.
"Yonder in Ethiopia are the Antipodes, men that have their feet against our feet." ~ Bartholemus Anglicus
Even the bereft take advantage of a window's uncostly function -
But no transparent choice guarantees an apparent outcome.
Through crust & core, shovels hammer in hopes of riches and great escapes -
Those wounds never heal. When a women's mantle is disturbed - she'll leak her innermost secrets - so don't be too hasty.
Bide your time, taking away slowly spoonfuls of dirt.
If you leave your perceived Siberia in haste just to pop up in Antarctica,
You deserve a penguin's sour upbraiding. To not be kitted for the occasion -
Is to be vestigial, tuxless & fucked.
He drinks because she scolds, he thinks; She thinks she scolds because he drinks; And neither will admit what's true, That he's a sot and she's a shrew.
From Nash's The Old Dog Barks Backwards , published in 1972.
Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide, The, July-August, 2009 by David Masello
When you are far away like this, I replace my time with yours, the one you are occupying. You arise when I do not, take meals before I have an appetite, love, perhaps, someone who is not me. You have led an accelerated life, yet your flight tonight follows the horizon. As you speed westward, you slow. It will be dark when you land. We will both tire as the moon rises. We will sleep together.
Morning, the sun will heat us to the same temperature.
If it could be written in words, all of it - the clearing of the woods down the gorge wouldn't provide enough paper - but there are so many things worth writing:
The woven nest whose tendrils snake the rafters that fat-bottomed bee she bores the beams and rails
Sun and shadow mutate from mid-day dapples to six o'clock streaks and stripes Regularly, the blue-jays terrorize the robins, "Cheer, cheer!" A cardinal, to spite its weaker song fans the braver fire of its plumage against which the robin's pale orange blush is shamed.
Will there be a roast tonight? Will those broken cords be put to use - cut loose into a crackling moonlight sonata while we are still able to hear it and while the woods around are still audience?
Beech twigs at daybreak clears the palate - coffee pulls the shades open Spatters of separating forms evolve in God's country the oddly mittened sassafras, orange & ribboned mushrooms - the companions of coal. Animated wood smoke tests memory's rafters - recalls California or Maine? Suddenly, I am ten, with Betty on a stone beach.
Or that visit with Ben Franklin which yielded little, But called to mind: "If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead and rotten, either write something worth reading or do things worth the writing." I have done so little of either lately, I reflect - I've missed you, my friend, and it's my fault, really.
What becomes of the world emptied of the wild and woolly? The incorrigible flirt of birds - their inexhaustible metallic twitters; What song accompanied Adam's expulsion from that first forest? The retreating and silenced hemlocks, their crushed needles evoke poisons and potions. The dimming of the lanterns, the wetting of the coals... What soft smell will be registered by our human exit?
He died, and I admired the crisp vehemence of a lifetime reduced to half a foot of shelf space. But others came to me saying, we too loved him, let us take you to the place of our love. So they showed me everything, everything-- a cliff of notebooks with every draft and erasure of every poem he published or rejected, thatched already with webs of annotation. I went in further and saw a hill of matchcovers from every bar or restaurant he'd ever entered. Trucks backed up constantly, piled with papers, and awaited by archivists with shovels; forklifts bumped through trough and valley to adjust the spillage. Here odors of rubbery sweat intruded on the pervasive smell of stale paper, no doubt from the mound of his collected sneakers. I clambered up the highest pile and found myself looking across not history but the vistas of a steaming range of garbage reaching to the coast itself. Then I lost my footing! and was carried down on a soft avalanche of letters, paid bills, sexual polaroids, and notes refusing invitations, thanking fans, resisting scholars. In nightmare I slid, no ground to stop me,
until I woke at last where I had napped beside the precious half foot. Beyond that, nothing, nothing at all.
Sheets shook of sand We fold into the wind We are the salt & sun we’ve absorbed But we do not grow
Basics of tasting Palates of blues & citrus candy Burnt into crystalline entries
An arrangement of stones The constellations on my back Weigh little – elliptical allusions The ebb & flow of my confidence. And my confidantes: Weak as our strangest link.
Our laughs and loves Great wines and deep hurts All held in escrow by An institution which draws little interest But which suffers perpetual withdrawals.
I’ve created this little world. What obligations are here to maintain it? To sustain its law & order – To not move on as the world in which I was created finds itself Short on the upkeep by its creator?
What do angels know? They have no memories For they travel at the speed of light Dancing at the tips of its original rays. Its always exactly yesterday When you met them And they smile & wink as if They've known you since birth Because in some sense, They knew you at your birth But even now barely register Your face for the reflection of Their own light in your wrinkling eyes And besides they are already Well into tomorrow - witnessing another newborn While your greying hair and gnarling hands Though tired - even now are too fast & agitated For an angel's full attention. They will know you again The very moment you slow down enough to stop. In that moment - finally able to catch up with you They will pick you up and say your name again.
Your universal truths are long in the tooth well-worn, not fit for chewing on tougher meats it's satisfaction worn down to softer dough & doughnuts and me just a tip of the iceberg to show fathom my form classic, pure chilly magic flowing cool over the desert casting soft & ankle deep a fog for effect - you could file your dental work back into shape or spend thousands on a replacement pair but you'll never outswim this shark with rows & rows of waiting teeth to spare.
Is Morocco spicy? I'd say it is. And could it ever have cowboys? On camels, maybe yes - with names like whispers or shifting sands again - it's quite possible dunes, beaches, grasses, wind, fog, mule deer; this place has room.
A quadrillion
Varying forms of hydrogen or oxygen
A quintillion
Water molecules
A septillion
Snowflakes fall every winter
In North America
You and I are
Asymptotes
The harder I look at You –
The more the differences between us vanish.
If I worry the page
With ‘I love you.’
One million times squared –
Would you read each rendition
And feel my need in each pass of the pen?
Although I lived my life a long time before you came along –
Would you know how much I ache
When you are away?
How I can’t wait for you to return again
So I can watch your eyes and hands
And listen to your lyric voice
Play a story for me?
My friend and lover
No one thing illustrates Forever
But when you’re spooned against me
So many nights over these several years
Our history is a sum greater than the parts
Whose result defines what Forever is:
Losing count
After one.
This aubergine democracy
Of spongelike texture
And disagreeable taste
Noise experts – tut-tutting without wind
Still blowing out candles
Poor traits to pass along
The struggle to survive
Withering intelligence by degrees
By moonlight this fruit seems hardened to the world
But it won’t last the winter
Without the song of the frog & cricket
Pixie – your trick too late realized -
Lost on a familiar road
A fine environment for thinking
Surrounded by the purple night,
Silently, I breathe out.
In the years before I came to live here
There was fool’s gold in plastic cards
Little promise of things to come…
No regard for bombs, hatred,
And a world at war,
Today is an outdoor brightness:
A day of lapis skies
The world
An emerald tablet.
Have I come to my master work –
Each moment spent
A delicate liquid-solid,
Each passing lifetime
Measured by the people
I spend it with?
For now, I am here
At the soul of the world
Challenged to speak
So much less than I listen,
To stay still and tune in to my heart
While my legs and arms are itching to dance.
Rainstorm
A spray of cologne
On the skin
What summer smells like
Afternoon storms
My love for you
Again & again & again
A strip – a tester
Holds the spores
So fine & fragrant
Slipped in a breast pocket
A return ticket
The transport – a nose
We’re back in summer
Cold rain on a hot wind
Our hands & lips
Again & again & again.
In patterns on your back
Your fingers outsides
Left gaps in sunscreen
With no rhyme or reason –
Just where your reach
Couldn’t achieve complete coverage.
Somehow the sun designed
A dolphin.
***
At the end of a cloud-stretching tether
Dangles a tourist…
White-legged, white knuckled.
***
Those braids, darling –
Vacationary nightmare
Temporary tattoos
Allow the traveler
To cut loose.
The Mexican sun is a crazy star
With an untamed whirling mane
And the maddest, laughing eyes
The most beautiful part of any flower
To my eye, a burning calyx.
Neck-lace
Is an ugly word
Hard and soft in all the wrong places
Chopped loudly from the throats
Of wandering vendors –
They follow, expectant faces
Like boats I tow behind me.
This sun and these words,
Things that bite and sting,
This skin that burns:
An afternoon in all it’s complicity.
We are not terrible enough
To qualify for godhood.
Maybe for minor demons
we could pass...
As we go our bad proliferates:
A willingness to
Drink entire oceans,
Push under entire lands.
Prerequisites to the trade:
Letting in a little good -
Mercy versus a change of mind.
So, divinity evades.
I am in the neck
from my last life
of wide horizons
into my next
it being endless
in its possibilities.
I am in the neck
pressure building
toward an awaited spasm
an excruciating anticipation
of future, of fear
of the letting go.
I am in the neck
much like other
pinches of past
and premonition
I will recall
the width and hours
my mark will be left
my skull reshaped
inside & out - reborn
into my next tenure.
Six o’clock this morning when Death caught up with us and decided the whole world would go untouched but for you my tawny friend
I think Death was a little spiteful since we’d snatched seven hours from yesterday when he arrived where you should have been to find I’d stolen you away
Unbound you lay by my side at home my belly against your back breathing soft, purring low my fingers across your pain
Six o’clock this morning when I heard a small chime ring – I woke in time to watch you steal away again.
I thought you needed my help waiting for my shining moment to don armor, to mount steed, to heroically jump in…
Don’t worry – I’ll let you know when.
I waited a long time to hear you ask your eyes raised to mine a brow in curled question an honest second of bit of hope a word: Help.
Don’t worry – I’ll let you know when.
I’ve worried myself into bitterness: I wouldn’t spit on you now if flame burst from your head and hair. I might even applaud and yes, I would stare – and if ever I could play fiddle, I would, then and there.
New year comes on eight legs and lifts them to test the air and taste the wintermoth - but the moth is a sweet moon dancer... and spider a starving lurker, or worse, a hungry walker.
With dusty fluttering wings in my ears – no, its not the wind it’s the foolery of the short-lived as they make their mark early and quick flying fiercely at the moon or sun at dizzy heights to be crisped and ruined – to land – they come – to ends again – landing softly in outstretched webs.
I wait safe & sound: a personal guarantee to live long. Cocooned in a stringy nest, ravenous.
In tentacles of shade hyphae dark and narrow tunnels underneath the forest floor a fairy ring in mushrooms a web of eyeless parasites supply a mouth or opening at the cavern’s edge a firefly lights a lamp in meadows to mark the dancing of fairy-folk hy·pae·thral under the open sky without roof temple asexual spores interested in or engaging in sexual activity to an abnormal extent blessed with an exquisite gift of touch like squid in the water oidium like the worst writing in the best of ink - come the elemental basics into the sylvan soil they deeply sink - a threadlike part of the vegetative portion of a fungus to touch infrequent visitors with a forever leisurely life and soothing lines of decompose.
If I didn't like you, I'd replace your voice with the ticking of my watch - held romantically close to my ear, covering the meaningless conversation on my right with a metronomic awareness of wasted time in flight - a comodity more romantically precious to me at moments than you are, my dear.
The safest place in the whole wide world for something that you’ve wanted to hide: your mind, floating in its impervious tank, waiting for your secrets, waiting for your truths.
It’s sleekly coiled barriers, it’s rippled shank are proof your mind has a pocket for everything it’s told for safe-keeping, finders, keepers, to have and to hold no burglary to brace against, no need for wires or defense
No thief has ever returned from the burning darkness.
Go and drop every unbearable memory in its well, it waits – lips expectantly rolled, wide, down in the mouth white stones, like teeth, wait for terrible things to happen. Each one stands straight, each one a sentinel, bright and cold.
Every-so-often a light comes on – it’s a brief success in the history of illumination, but its brilliance is unscalable and when a light comes on every-so-often everything that is Past is burned.
• • •
The sweet chastity of the flowerless fades when exposed to constant bloom as birds cavort in seedy baths as pistils & stamens let bees impale – fungi set their spores asail, wide-eyed, the unflowering sisterhood observes in shocked silence.
But the expressions on their sweet faces and the gleam in their eyes sparkles like a pure Christmas morning as initiates presented Nature’s sexy violence.
• • •
Nervously, she looks offstage and asks, “How am I doing for time?”
Immense globe heedless curve catches the eye as it rests on the backs of sleeping cats a ball borne by the swimming circus seal clouds a pandering iguanadon drops its spin with squeals now the screen of a gypsy’s spangled curtain perfumed with smoke the migration of every lost tribe fixed to follow the wild globe unbreak the broken.
Under the coming promise of velvet night Reality lets cautiously loose As sunset's frail wings Neatly clasp to the ocean's, firm In union, perfection, collaboration As if any old sunset would do.
Rival evenings, lost from memory If either eye saw more beauty Pale now, paler still Holding soft hand to strong At sunset's iridescent cue Every star lets its dance begin Under the looming curfew of dawn Stand beside me, dance with me, too.
History finds safety in the color of a mirror - maintaining every image, every passing scene in silver. As compared to the originals, it’s near-match perfection avoids detection. But there’s a mocking turn and a pervasive ripple in each offering, each reflection. When pushed into a corner, so defensive it becomes! It repeats itself as far as the eye can section, a possible infinity in each direction.
So, I am just a grain of sand
washing away at the feet of space
and time
and softened and fading more with
each turn of the tide -
Is that it?
You push your foot down
and my little sketches,
and my secret language become as
shadowed
as the seas on the moon -
There’s a big, empty glass -
it’s not half-full -
I said it is a big, empty glass -
and you have to put the big rocks in
first or they will never, ever fit when
all the smaller debris starts to fall in
place -
It was only supposed to be a
dissertation on time management
but it led to deeper, more disturbing
thoughts of life management -
where life equals crisis and satisfying
moments,
Where I equal the sand that slips in
between those first-come, first-served
rocks that pushed their way into the
big, empty glass...
But, it is important to remember
that sand was once one of these big
rocks that takes the space up now
and in time
(managed or unmanaged)
the rocks will come to know this
humbleness
as their newfound tiny-ness has them
sink and tumble
between their former peers
and settle on the bottom of the glass
to keep me company.
Meantime, in the sand,
inside your footprints
unimaginably smaller things
make their way
inside my little sketches
and learn my secret language.
The first one fell without remorse a hint of smile on its facet it was never alone even on impact its undirected course the only felony incurred: the stealing of the autumn lawn and the untintended ankle sprained at indelicate landfall askew, but only the first one knew the exhilaration, the acceleration. If one will do it the others will too, that for all the friends who jump off bridges because the other friend, too, knew- it takes an eon to reach the ground... as if each tiny hand to another’s hand was sewn, then blown from that high cloudy precipice to precipitate. The first one fell and the million followers, too small white crystal lemmings so close, their bodies on the autumn lawn- not a peak was left, just white and on they lay so close together as if each tiny hand to another’s hand was sewn.
I will die of many things long before I’d die of loneliness. I will die one million times before solitude will be the infection, that raging sore- I have reached out and perhaps over-defined nevermind- It is the foil to unaccompaniment: this soul never feels alone, without music to support the principal voice. Will death diminish this impact or effectiveness? I would die before I’d see this so- and never know nevermind, let it go. Sometimes high- I see over all these things and into the pure heart of the matter- so that when low and the crowd of things grows thick and fatter, keep at the top of memory the finer oils, the lighter things afloat. Easy to find, familiar haunts- Will I be born a million times and still find these concomitants?
When the finger snapped off- it was clearly too cold- we should know better than to walk into the wind- but - its the only way to hear it sing. Walking away from anything is safe, but silent. There's no song in retreat, not even a hum. So, with fingers tingling we lay them on the panel of the wind and mightily play its keys- 'til the finger snaps, again.
