The Rose Lasso

From website gregglory.com

Written by Gregg Glory (Gregg G. Brown)

The Rose Lasso

 

 
By Gregg Glory 
 
Copyright © 1996 

Published by 
BLAST PRESS 

Text File*
Palm Reader*

  


Contents

Nailed Longings
The Phosphorus Stars
Alba
You Have Gone
The Night Winds
Because You Took
Body Complete as a Planet
Simple as Sticks
A Full Cup has Come to Me
The Lunge
You Stood Up
Stone to Stone
Memento Mori
The Bride of Sir Patrick Spens
Spring Has Come
Florida Dawn
This Iris Is
In Our Mutual, Mortal
What Newton
Bushwacked
The Golden Ticket
Elegy
Abide, Abide
Simple As Sticks
Body Complete As A Planet 

 
Tell me who gives us these infamous gifts 
         to make such a promise 
                 and make such a slip 
 
                       --- Tom Verlaine 
 
 
A drunken God has made us, if he made us, 
             marring our fineness  
                    with alcohol-loaded thumbs. 
 
 
 
 
 

Heartless Vienna bestowed on the dead composer all the honors it had refused him during life. "Never had an emperor a funeral to equal it," wrote Therese von Brunsvik. "Thirty thousand people accompanied him to his gravesite." They would have done equally well to listen to his music.

    

Damn the bastards!

     

--- from Beethoven, Composer as Hero

I read what I need in my grand Dyslexicon, if you see what I mean. Watch first the thumb that rubs the words, and syllabus the syllable second.

Nailed Longings

 
            nailed longings 
         never told lovelier 
 
in rainbow airs 
     a touched harp 
        awaits vibrant 
   one dayshaft--- 
 
           virulent loves! 
 
closed eyes 
     shelter opalescence 
---wonderaroused soaks 
       tongues' duotone 
 
          scarred redshifts sear 
          life's emblematic tracts 
 
 
 

The Phosphorus Stars

 
The phosphorous stars at your fingertips flower and pinch me, 
Awaking dark milkyways like hidden veins 
Throughout the sulking valleys of my breast. 
 
"Throw the stars up! Again!" 
 
Our serious laughter catches in the ceiling's maternal plasters, 
Soft as the stars that have ached to arrive there. 
I lie on the dazzled bed as on a silver pond, 
My heart a dry pine tree reaching after the sky. 
 
Fed pure starlight by your fingers 
Anxious and cool as grapes, I shiver against you 
Shaking the slender constellations from your hair 
One star at a time. I swallow the tornado of flame 
That still hides its little blossom of light, unborn. 
 
I escape out of myself, dangerous, I run away with the night, 
Anything, anything to trace the deep absence 
That falls backwards into your eyes like a diver. 
The small, mobile flagellants of your eyelids unlace me, 
Make me plain and open as a burst fig. 
 
Narrow-footed cats dance on the shards 
Of the steep glass-crusted cement wall to view you. 
I hunch in their shoulderblades, and spray with their sex. 
The moon comes out of my mouth, a swollen white tongue 
 
To give you this mysterious poem. 

 
 

Alba

 
Sunset clouds in awakened eyes. Mysterious. 
The day takes on what the night has dropped, 
Everyday, as if it were only natural 
To sink the things of darkness in so much light. 
 
Before me's the luminous landscape of your back, turned 
To its solemn and human warmth, like a sky. 
I leap up to the lightness. 
 
I am trying to draw for you an archaic theater, 
Old stones rolling to an ocean voice, cracked lines, 
But all I have so far are these inapt words. 
The severe doric columns go under your eyelids, heavily. 
 
Outside, March. Its universal brightness invades 
All of my senses as I touch you, seeding brightness; 
The devouring waters rush and whiten, so light, 
Trying to become the wind no one can see. 
 
Speaking, ceasing, speaking. The light goes on inspiring 
Tragic antlers in their brown clashes. I look, 
Again, at you, lying there heavily as a good watermelon, 
Trying my waters, leaping, leaping, loving you. 
 
 

You Have Gone

 
You have gone, you have gone 
And left only your shadow tarrying. 
It is in all the penumbras of my kisses. 
The scalloped darks of your locks 
Drag after the feet of children running in leaves. 
 
The undersides of leaves cling to your memory. 
Light undoes itself to touch you, remember you, 
Your wildness like a reverse fire, searing lightlessness, 
Whole continents of shadow and dark parlance. 
 
This talk between darknesses has entered me, 
Entered me and blossomed, so now within me I have 
The solemn spaces between the stars, 
Your face under the rose shadow of tresses. 
 
Your shadows, formless as freedom, numberlessly large. 
The birds, no matter how high, cannot rise away from them 
And I do not want to, wildly electric, escaping my fingers 
Like sea-foam turned suddenly to wine. 
 
 
 

The Night Winds

 
The night winds, so big, grow small when you sigh, 
So full is your breath of their sowing, 
Even the sea's necklace of rocks cannot measure you 
In your camisole, although they measure the sea. 
 
A vastness resides in your glances 
As if all the earth swung in one dew-bead. 
Your body has the lustrous strength of a horse 
Thundering on the midnight headlands. 
 
I look near you, around you, searching for edges, 
Sides, spaces, but you are edgeless and endless, 
The sweet air that lets me hymn praises within her. 
Your foundations are final beneath and above me. 
 
I am flung into you like a golden rope 
And never feel myself falling. You are the mast 
Oceans dissolve to arrive at. My island, female 
As the deep scents of the jacaranda 
 
Each night holds open to kiss you. 
 
 
 

Because You Took

 
Because you took me to bed, I love you. 
Because your sex wraps around me 
And my body falls out of myself 
Like a flower, I love you. 
 
Wisdom doubles itself like a germ, 
Adding body to body. Your eye 
Adds itself to my eye, and we go on seeing. 
New things, new newness. 
 
Cicadas, windfall, our braiding bodies 
Tender, joyful, awake in each other,  
Simple as forgetting. 
A slow-crawl cross, holy and mossy. 
 
Hesitant as a craving bee I explore you completely, 
Exhausting the tassels of sunlight, 
Removing valuable essences even by the powdery moon. 
And its lonely magnet unites us, crests us. 
 
Stale and silly, 
I return to the gorgeous orchard of your arms. 
Your arms tensile and lively as if managing a sailboat. 
The heavy sail red, full of bloods, wombs. 
 
But agile anyway in the universe that blows it 
Before your face, in the front of the dawn 
Your hair whipping! 
 
 
 

Body Complete as a Planet

 
Body, body complete as a planet, our whole world 
And no soul anywhere? Death, death complete 
As a trainwreck, and no salvation from skeletons? 
 
I stagger after your kisses that stagger away. 
A million miles of purgatory and no heaven to end it. 
Collapsed loneliness, a black velvet hole. 
 
When our hands touch like torches, all night, 
What floss of wire in our heads signals there's Deity? 
The spellchecker in my brother admits His existence. 
 
So why are all the gnats awake on my skin, 
This volcanic island chain of doubts surrounding me? 
Am I the only atheist to ever fall in love? 
 
Without death, I would be content to kiss you hereafter. 
Without death, your generation would be as water, 
Mere water, water from water, a wetness, nothing else. 
 
 

Simple as Sticks

 
Simple as sticks, we ignite. An algebra of skin 
Commences with us; our aureoles vent longing. 
The wind tears through our formulas and associations 
Smearing the clean inks of our thought. 
We kiss like two erasers removing errors. 
 
Blue parabolas disappear when you wash your eyeliner off. 
Vectored cones triumph and crush me in your thighs 
Full of the tragic strength birth requires. 
You throw off your garlands. My heart incinerates them. 
 
We have played catch with the universe, reversed time. 
Snapped the physicists' pencils, broken the old rules through. 
You walk across the room from your mysterious center. 
Or have I floated up from drowning to your face? 
 
I look at the world the way a stockbroker looks at the paper; 
 
In you, consuming ecstasies. 
In you, all drugs, all hybiscus' furiously blossom. 
In you... my words find shallow resting, like dust, 
As if restless doves still circulated the atmosphere. 
 
I measure all things by your measurelessness. 
 
The stars, remote and faithless, shirr from your glance 
In lonely sidelong birth, shivering in immensity 
To have their long light, to have any light at all 
Outside of your body. 
 
Beside them, I, too, am shivering. 
 
 
 

A Full Cup has Come to Me

 
A full cup has come to me, I cannot empty it. 
In your unsteady hands you ferry it, half a globe 
Full of suns that had run up to you mad as puppies. 
Full of liquid geraniums melted at your touch. 
 
I drink and drink, but I cannot get drunk enough. 
My head reels. My feet tango on the ceiling. 
You have been looking at me a long time already. 
Already, between your strong legs, a spring has darkened. 
 
Lying with you, I am light as a moon-man, 
My silver umbilical moves like a rumor through the stars. 
Tau Ceti seems so close, just over our shoulders. 
What will our children remember about us? 
 
Chance pulled us together with its rose lasso 
But who had held its long comet's tail? 
Your eyes are a mischievous dower, your tears 
Soak my chest and leave no stain. I wipe not one away. 
 
Who is the guilty one when passion is strong enough to bruise, 
Too weak to blink? Am I too afraid of losing sight of you, 
The miraculous ghettos that hold souls in your hair, 
The tinted resonance of your shadow, where it has fallen? 
 
 
 
 
 

The Lunge

 
Prodigal of laughter, stoned on your own 
Adoring, lady, you come bearing white wrists 
And white palms. Ensanguined chafes 
Marr no innocence of your heart's marketplace 
 
Where a thousand eyeing roads have stumbled 
And one has come. Chartless, mapless, and alone 
I pursued the drunken lily of your brow. 
Forethought at the masthead would have me dread thy death 
 
But I came with the starlight, seeking exit 
When it dies, extinguishing with the universe. 
Oh do not tell me of her face's radiance! 
I have felt the radiant proof, and have confessed. 
 
Her face has traced its cameo in my breast. 
Spied waterspout beyond the breakpoint of my bones, 
Glorious and golden, your daffodil surmise 
Flatters my chaste hand in the obsequious sunrise. 
 
 
 

You Stood Up

 
You stood up, and the world rose with you! 
Astounding globe, charter of misty distances, held love! 
 
From you, all things emitted their eternal energy. 
From you, the sensual regale of lifted light, diamonds! 
 
From you, spears of daybreak arose, laughing lioness! 
Night abandoned melancholy, ropes of dew lifted with you. 
 
Dark-headed iris of a thousand days, 
When love comes before us we abandon everything. 
 
Old harbingers, old hates, past truths, deficiencies and victories; 
Miscarried words scrawled on a discarded cast. 
 
The hour of getting here and getting here has arrived. 
The clock has mounted up to your eyes with minutehand prayers. 
 
Glissades and everglades tick also in your eyes. 
Now the door of spring rushes open. 
 
Winter's broom sweeps out its ashes and its tears. 
Now it is the hour without shadow come again, 
 
And the sun collects us. Us together in our nearness! 
Guitars boom in the garden, struck thunder, sound-blossoms. 
 
In your chest, high and light, orchestras promenade 
Through galleries of just showing up. Like tulips. 
 
Down your unleashed arms, rivers arrive at honey seas. 
The mock turtle goes on in his heavy rounds, baying boisterously. 
 
My heart has eaten up the days of us together, 
Salty and strong in its thumb-made dish of red clay.  
 
This arriving with us and within us does not stop. 
It goes on and on, on and on forever. 
 
Stations of departure, those old crosses, stand 
Worn and gilded. They are empty, abandoned as lice. 
 
Together we come dancing and solemn, two porpoises. 
Our sides are streaked with blue universes of wet light. 
 
Azaleas patch the landscape, color-dots motioning oboes. 
One note the sorry, somehow sour acknowlegdement of our seperate estates. 
 
In you, the first hello and the last hello. Hello! 
In you, strange seagulls x back and forth. 
 
Those who never expected to meet themselves do so. 
Found dogs surprise each other, exchanging rushing tails. 
 
In us, the swallows' songs entangle and beat. 
The last thrill of their virtuous vibrato domes our sky. 
 
In you, dawn cannot come to autumn. Shadows are always deep. 
Hallucinations adopt your stance, but only you convince. 
 
Let me stand upon your porch, a little old and rattled. 
Let me travel like a shipwreck back to your anchorage. 
 
Let me wash in your tender banks like a seal, and roll there. 
Let me sink in you, hold in you, like greenness in grass. 
 
Oh my sunlight, oh my day's-breath! 
Let me transfigure you, like chlorofil, into my own body. 
 
Let me suck sweet sips of air from the cups of your ears. 
Let me drop my heart in your mouth with this tongue. 
 
These words I use rumor your abiding. 
And yet, you do not abide. 
 
You rush through all dawns, all skies, all risings 
With eagle feathers afloat in your hair, 
 
An indian princess bartering for her bridehood. 
A new danube charging her bankheads. 
 
You groom the night away, particle by particle, 
Until day stuns us. 
 
 
 

Stone to Stone

 
Who had love right in world's history, 
Love dowsered from stale books, old mythologies? 
Who of all those mighty lovers once 
Crossed unwatered that great stream? 
Or could tell when they woke, when they dreamed? 
 
A woman lay by me in my bed; 
Golden nights forgot days of lead, 
And all my intricate subtlety was turned 
Away, as if it had never burned 
With reality's cold questioning. 
 
I call her image up that grew intense 
Because so much of loveliness was struck condensed 
Into those visionary, stone-still eyes 
That knew the world must die away, 
That they themselves would never fade. 
 
Beauty like that of a prideful bird, 
Burnt-out memories blazed intense at a word, 
All look upon me at my life's one work 
To sit, grow still, and to never shirk 
This monstrous sublimity I feel. 
 
I walk the long hallway questioning; 
Questioning, I turn from thing to thing 
An arrogant, restless mind 
That I am tied to, kind to kind, 
A stone leashed to a stone. 
 
 
 

Memento Mori

 
Time's outrageous ghosts, griefs and sorrows 
Rob stalwart hearts of their brave-faced tomorrows 
And spasm us laughless toward joys unmet: 
Agile life holds herself before us-- but not forever; 
We gasp to get the least departing glimmer of her. 
So cursed, and crushing, and stiff is grief 
We must lose ourselves if we lose pleasure. 
Our own trying lives chafe from burning coal to dust; 
We grind on to do, not as we would, but as we must. 
A wrecked auto, cancer's dark star, the tumor's bloom, 
Seek us out on our various ledges; 
We wander open-armed and upward-eyed, seeking edges. 
 
 
 

The Bride of Sir Patrick Spens

 
Lip to lip and hand to hand we meet 
Where wet moon drives down to drown,--- 
Eyes blown wide when the lightning strike 
Silks terror to the ground. 
 
Come away, love, court the storm  
Our nights lay wrapped with the worm. 
 
Say this tempest tempts me now 
Who did not love's thought invent, 
Nor I the one shall ever finish it, 
Though it pull at the whirl of my brow. 
 
Come away, love, court the storm  
Our nights lay wrapped with the worm. 
 
Say that lightning the night pulls down 
Crosses like two hearts in love; 
Which rich greatness first had the name 
The other must content to be emblem of? 
 
Come away, love, court the storm  
Our nights lay wrapped with the worm. 
 
All night your hand blazes where it had slept; 
Midnight's undone, and our kisses heap,--- 
For in the spirit we are tried and kept 
And from spirit to spirit leap. 
 
Come away, love, court the storm  
Our nights lay wrapped with the worm. 
 
O Love where's comfort, where's land, where's sea, 
That touches not the nothing of your hand? 
I am all things where all things meet 
In the original of your eye. 
 
Come away, love, court the storm  
Our nights lay wrapped with the worm. 
  
 
 

Spring Has Come

 
Lenten spring has come to town 
With blossoms the birds sing round, 
That all this bliss bringeth; 
Day's-eyes in his dales, 
Notes sweet of nightingales. 
Each fowl his song singeth. 
The thrush-cock threshes "oo." 
Away is all their winter woe 
When woodruff springeth. 
Sweet fowls are singing fairly fair 
And wilt thus all their winter woe 
While the woods ringeth. 
 
The rose arises, wraps her robe; 
The leaves in the light wood 
Wax all out with a will. 
The moon demands her blue, oh; 
The lily is lissome to see, oh, 
The fennel and the chervil. 
Wooing are the wild drakes; 
Mares merge with their mates 
As the stream strikes still. 
Moody songs, some; so do more! 
I know I am one of those 
For love must like me ill. 
 
The moon mandates her light; 
So does the seemly sun so bright 
When brides sing so bravely. 
Dews dunk the dunes; 
Deers with their dears run, 
So hearts within them dream; 
Worms weave under clod; 
Women wax wondrous proud, 
So well the spring suits them. 
If I should want my way with one 
This wondrous weal I will forego 
And with the woods be done. 
 
 

Florida Dawn

 
Tuneless bottles adumbrate the surf 
Tumbled scuffed lines of water, angelus births, 
Mammoth scarab portents... the sea disgorges 
Venus and her tragic afterbirth; 
Blue sand catches trash. 
 
Haphazard in the palmtree's rooted moonlight 
I thunder vortexing flames, half-bright, 
All-solemn, tipped in cymbal carib air 
And shear my acid tears for the slow sky 
To advance by a single wasted page. 
 
A green flash scolds, recharging time; 
A coiled fire breaks 
From the horizon's burning lime. 
 
Claret's stripped indigenous light, 
Byzantine and exact, 
Laps and smashes this island's coral banks 
And Venus' weaving shoulders come, and come, 
Fusing silted light in the surf's recanting drum, 
And I am trapped in light. 
 
So imagination overtakes a death (my death) 
And joy alone keeps pace. 
 
 
 
 
 

This Iris Is

 
An iris' measure 
Is given forever 
Nor ever may be ungiven--- 
So two hearts have striven 
To darkly top their stalk 
With two hours' unwasted talk 
And bluely blossom hereafter 
Impermanent as laughter 
Where sunlight stains  
Their faces champaign 
Above tall unsteady greens 
Tilting slenderly unseen 
Beneath the feather-petals 
That soft as eyelids settle 
Against each other's breadths 
And kiss until their deaths. 
 
 
 

In Our Mutual, Mortal

 
In our mutual, mortal 
done undone, doing undoing 
push me, pull you 
racing to ruin 
past our curfew 
laughing and cordial 
we collapse together 
and make our midnights burn 
with a thousand torching 
touching suns, and when 
the night clock is done 
and old time runs 
into new day begun 
and cool spring is 
into hot summer come 
in picnic weather 
we tongue and fiddle 
together breathless, apart 
no better-- my heart! 
how we sweat to sighing 
on sweet myrtle purple 
and cry "no more,  
we're sore!" and pant 
like raced-out panthers 
at skies and ceilings 
on our wringing backs-- 
but like a turtle 
we turn over 
and swim some more 
with sheets for water. 
 
Are we making sons 
or daughters? "None 
of wily neither!" and 
we chorus laughter. 
 
 
 

What Newton

 
    What feeling gives ground to stolen heaven's hours? 
 
Where's the gain in ecstasy, 
This scudless plus we connive from dusts? 
This sinless winning that overtakes the taken 
And in pure mind glows lightsome, 
In intent outshining the divine? 
 
Once the heavenly terror is over 
And nerves and veins relapse from lushness 
To the careless tiredness of a stuffed couch, 
What lays in that drowse miming contemplation, 
Or half-knots its cool eyes to unpuzzle 
The tussling books on the bleary shelf? 
 
What in God's name is the simply human? 
What remains when we've torn down the curtain, 
Sunk troubles and psalms, all gone, into one ocean 
And stand static again among sandgrains 
Amidst the ceaseless wash? 
 
 
 

Bushwacked

 
Vanity in the bough 
Vanity in the briar, 
So saith the preacher 
And prays his prayer. 
 
     God lies knotted in the bower. 
 
Kisses, sweet messes and delight, 
Sings the cold widow who lives by the bay, 
On these my thoughts drink dry the day, 
My hungry body feasts the night. 
 
     God lies knotted in the bower. 
 
Priest and widow one pulpit share 
And body and soul are tight, 
What one rasps to the empty air 
The other laughs in the dark. 
 
     God lies knotted in the bower. 
 
 
 

The Golden Ticket

 
  Little mattered, and much pervaded 
  The antique living room too much sunlight had degraded; 
  A little heartache burned beneath his cassock, 
  And holy daybreak shattered at the blinds. 
 
     If Christ defied his fashions 
     And strode untemplated and rude, 
     If Hitler really killed them all 
     Then how dare I intrude? 
 
My voice imparts and falls, toils and tolls, 
Its happenstances and romances, its passions 
Its trances of a certain evening in a certain loll 
And on into dawn prepares some further wrong 
Inconsequent, yet beckoning, a passionate 
Lark backspread against dispassionate clouds. 
(I have stood upon the Arctic zones and poles 
Of certain yellow unlighted rooms.) 
Among the wasted cigarettes and torn pornography 
I have sifted and resisted so many  
Facts and truths that harshly glare in so many  
Wasted one-time afternoons. 
 
Holding, holding 
Our hands beneath the spider's pall were golden. 
 
The hackneyed painter's ennui endures 
Formulas of snow and absence, building sets; 
Nailed in the aurora's tonic light, and stiff, 
My red shoes stand steadied on a cliff. 
(I sew my fingers backward that sew my shroud.) 
And I have wandered lost and wondered found 
And in a crossed broken shadow drowned; 
(I have lived my life while floating upon the rood.) 
 
Chastized eyes 
Chastized eyes 
Glare no more on inward wars 
Accreted dusts that sharply crept 
Down the pale defiles at midnight, 
Or assembled dust tumbled from untouched dresser drawers 
Spilling golden dirty light over all. 
(I have seen them all, and touched them all 
And thrown them all away already, 
Golden crowns cascading to a wastebin. 
I have touched the molten blots that blot within. 
I have rearranged my clothes upon a hook.) 
Here's some argument's half-misapprehension, 
There, the moronic posture of a gesture 
Gilding the broken indices of fate. 
A look, a moment's condescension 
Gazes back from above a moth-eaten bureau 
To fall upon the blankness of a wall. 
 
And I have longed and I have lounged, 
Taking nights apart to tack the day together, 
And still the terrorist dawn arrives, inflicts 
Green and golden, and obliterates my weathers. 
 
O fol de rol de rolly o 
My bloodless feet are skirled in skeins of snow 
 
Daybreak snaps the blinds. Bored, it leaves 
Out through exhausted windows where I have thrown 
How many tired glances into airs unknown? 
And they are tired, emptied by seeing, 
Glancing netherwhere, seeing, recoiling, 
Seeing the thousand toiling hours of neglect 
The glazed eyes of weary aspect, 
Hollow yet disdainful, and rolled upon a bulb 
Or blindly churched in the long, squared 
Eternity of a ratty book that blazes 
Trashed Byzantiums in footnotes obscure; 
Or restless finds itself still climbing 
To some even more forgotten shelf 
While a quaint, antiquarian transcendence 
Cool and numb 
Floods moldy light upon the moldy carpeting. 
 
And still the snow inquires 
And still the day expires 
Answerless, if my foot shall daedalus the fresh. 
(I have killed and I have died for less.) 
 
---No, no I haven't been. Is it near here? 
What's it like? Is it extraordinary?  
 
                 Oh, its full 
Of quiet shades, thoughtful darknesses. 
 
---My, there's no end to things in the heart. 
Is there now? Now is there? 
 
No, no truly; 
There is never any end to things. 
 
And the squeeze of nights, the evenings 
Where so many eden days have sank entranced, 
Collapsed so charmingly about an aborted heart 
In so many unheated ochre rooms alone! 
Oh I have seen and mourned the fabled light 
Disastered in a rucksack crease of dirty pants. 
And yet, how shall I begin, and how beget? 
I have looked through ochre eyes and hollow rooms 
Undeceived, and yet, and yet.... 
 
I am scarred and I am mastered in the garden, 
Near the wisteria, iced by the moonlight's 
Porcelain glances. How many years and days 
Has it been, how many, since first, in moonlight, 
We traded sudden glances? 
Roses had maddened us, and we were glad. 
Here, balancing the wisteria on a fingerend 
Pointing past my agile nose to oblivion, 
Cold leaves rustle in the ruined fountain; 
Water's memory in the concrete bowl 
Scratching over the water's ancient course. 
A thousand points of light conflict 
In a thousand parted dooryards; 
Conflict, flicker, and then resolve 
Focused into a single momentary glow. 
 
(My eyes and I contain 
A thousand portions of a thousand parted souls.) 
 
O fol de rol de rolly o 
My bloodless feet are skirled in skeins of snow 
 
 
 

Elegy

 
The crayon-crammed sun, dear, 
Roaring and soundless, fountains 
A crooked rivering stalk to the grave 
For it is summer and never 
Among the milkweed floods of grass 
Will everyday angels flame again 
Dawn wise and luminous as thread 
Out of the martian mysterious dark, 
So tall was the flying sunshine  
Spied in your crinkled eyes. 
 
The milky sun hung up the sour day 
With daylong hands played the harp grasses  
That plucked our praise-soaked ears 
There on the floor of light 
For it was summer and ever 
Our milk-licked unmanageable bones 
Pounded joy and adoring down 
The auroraed roughs of our breaths 
Till silk-dripping souls announced 
Heaven commences at our fingertips. 
 
Oh it was dawn and noon, and night 
Dropped his forgotten trunk of darks 
Among the staggered stars as I came, 
The sun's brother, halogened as haloes 
Shining my wary wishes in the air 
For it was summer come and never 
In the pearly rivers of the grass, 
Will I silk my grabbing eyes again 
On the welcome-at-once loving 
Of your eiderdown sighing skin. 
 
Now ambergris and matchless 
The mirage-trod moon emerges like a tear 
Over a mourning soul simple as sleep. 
And because summer is overthrown 
And night has leapt up like a cat 
Under the harp-tongued tree of cells 
My vegetable hand now grows 
Mannerly and large to grief: 
O Time has denied me nothing 
Of his licorice whips and nickels 
Nor eboned one nightfall or fastness 
Shut on your ghost-wasted alien eyes. 
 
Pulled by the spoken tide of the clock 
At midnight moonless rest I writhe 
Resplendent in my bent vest of ribs 
And hear both tomb and rumor tumbled dumb 
By the mild handmaidens of your sighs 
For it is summer gone and hollow 
And sorrow's gone down with the moon 
And though I tongue earth's dust floods 
For all those romancing eyes gone under 
Fate's timeline is still the grass on fire 
Burning where the wood was wild. 
 
And the crumpled sun, broken, bears 
Funeral tears in the brain 
That wombwise and graveward crawl 
Down the fiery alcoholic face 
For it was never summer or was it 
Under my coal-thumbed universal eyes; 
And only the bigsouled sourceless moon 
Drowned and void in the jailhouse dark 
Remains and grieves derailed sighs 
Over night-locked trees tall as grasses. 
 
Do not grieve, brave, with whys 
Or hemorrhage one ear with a sigh; 
No heavenhelp salves such ashes.   
O Let instead the dear uncandled dead  
Cry mercy up to my eyes. 
 
 
 

Abide, Abide

(Originally titled: HOW LONG SILENT?)
 
When first I put my dreams against the tide 
And against all the world's whorl, 
Woman's word and world's spray and all 
Did first my dreams deride. 
O How long since my first dream had cried 
'Abide, abide!' 
 
When next I tided life's bitter wreck 
And fingered the fathering ashes for mirth 
As if the cursed grave alone saved worth 
Along all the drear shore's long dreck, 
Even then my quiet dream sighed 
'Abide, abide!' 
 
Thirty years' work and little profit, 
So greedy is the white spray's strain 
Rowmen must beat the oar and never ask for rest; 
And when my burning arms unlock, 
From their dry white sockets drop, 
They surrender under a sigh: 
 
O How long's silence since 
My first, flung dream had cried 
'Abide, abide!' 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
recharging time 
 
 
lightning 
 
as a good watermelon 
 
 
I measure all things 
 
 
And with the woods be done. 
 
 
 

Simple As Sticks

 
Simple as sticks, we ignite. An algebra of skin 
Commences with us; our aureoles vent longing. 
The wind tears through our formulas and associations 
Smearing the clean inks of our thought. 
We kiss like two erasers removing errors. 
 
 

Body Complete As A Planet

 
Body, body complete as a planet, our whole world 
And no soul anywhere? Death, death complete 
As a trainwreck, and no salvation from skeletons? 
 
 
 
Thirty years' work and little profit, 
So greedy is the white spray's strain 
Rowmen must beat the oar and never ask for rest; 
And when my burning arms unlock, 
From their dry white sockets drop, 
They surrender under a sigh: 
 
 
 
 
 

 
SUNDAY NIGHT @ THE BRIGHTON 
 
 
                       The Noble Hat 
                       +++++++++++++ 
 
 
       ePHEMERAL oDE TO bLISS ! ! 
 
Consider Destination 
The ending to theis is THIS. 
 
           The flayed skin of Akkadians draped 
   on stone walls-- 
                        the texture of orchid petals 
                        and wet silk 
           It drips like semen 
                     deposited in orifices 
     unknown, spawned         from regions eternally damned 
             bottled water that cannot quench thirst 
             mottled tongues     & 
             bleeding gums 
 
Chanker, oh fabulous chanker! 
Hail the soreness  
Of your puss-filled geodesic dome! 
(It ain't mine, baby.... It ain't mine.) 
 
        The gesticulation of once-thought 
     ABORTED ABERRATIONS 
Time to die, as we were  
                         BORN TO DO. 
 
---Yet, every day I wake up, 
                  I thank God 
        ---That I'm not Jack!!! 
                               The blackness 
                   of Death overcomes 
           even the orchid's sweet nectar as it drips 
   Quietly and Relentlessly in the burning heat 
of night---into the pool of succulent bliss.... 
 
 
               E          n           d 
               ........................ 
  
                  O Ode to Bliss 
                     next time 
                     keep your 
                     eyes open 
                      when we 
                       Kiss. 
 

End

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