Some Other Poems
Here is a random collection of other poems (including some political poems).
Though Gravity Might Not Admit the Fact
Though gravity may not admit the fact,
The child's first sloppy footsteps are a wonder,
The spirit of the flower's will to be
That bursts the rock it had been buried under.
And how much more the spirit of a man,
Whose manifolds of soul connect to God--
The gesture of his hand, his sight, his thought,
In which a bare transcendence may be shod.
On your birthday, may you raise your hand
And lift the chalice into which was poured
The lighted life your parents newly-brought
To seek on earth the sparks of its reward.
May the causeway from that first event
Illuminate your steps, your hands, your eyes;
And may you daily drink that rare liqueur
That makes the poor man rich, the simple wise.
Darkness and the morning mix at dawn,
And nature, red, spins beauty in her foam;
The grass stem rises from the leopard's tread,
And from the wilderness, man builds his home.
May you build a sturdy home of love
Whose masonry is quarried from your heart,
Where warm companionship will bring, at dusk,
The sparks that had been loosed and strewn apart.
Flowers Blooming on a Slope of Grass-Covered Ground
Flowers blooming on a slope of grass-covered ground;
Trilling in the branches of the sea-green boughs, a bird
Lording its kingdom, flits, is gone, shaking the leaves;
A pale, red bellflower hangs its head where a cricket has whirred.
And I gather the cat-tails, flags high in the marsh.
The milk-weed pods are full with milk, flowers are spiky-violet and pale,
Ducks are suspicious, ambling in the blue sky's white-fired sun,
Raising a foot to scratch a half-arching wing, wiggling a black-barred tail.
I lie, eyes closed, red sunlight flaming,
In the itchy, untended grass; a spider ambles across
My wrist; I start and shake him off, lost
In the grasses, running for refuge across the sun-burnt, shaggy moss.
I gather the cat-tails, a tall, natural bouquet
Of wishes for health, true-standing, green-flowing grace,
Offering the summer day and the bird-raised, sun-nursed grasses
Over the ocean-flowing stream joining hands, reflecting face to face.
WHEEL
This cosmic disk, gyroscope,
My ears are confused, I feel I’m
Falling. Where is this oxcart rolling to, what
Mud, what crushing rock, hot road along the water wheels?
Here is a ladder of words.
I eat them, I climb to their top,
Nothing is holding me up. I have reached the
Invisible hoop, turning giddily upon the
Spoke of a ladder that has
Disappeared. Black hands of star screech,
Green sour ocean swell endlessly extended
Without a center, wheel scent of incense in ice-skied
Field. To the golden prayer
Palace, I bring the wounded red,
Dragging these heavy presences. I wish to
Weep here, weep here where joy is the electric sweetness.
THE EMBARRASSMENT OF SHIMON PERES
Sentimental sanctity
Spreads sweetly through Norway. The Pope
Too is chirping, France flutters her wings, and the
English ambassador is prancing in his cassock.
And you here are dying of
Embarrassment, you have hung your
White heart on the line to dry, you leave frantic
Messages for the secretary general, but
He is dancing with the queen
Of Sweden. I am sorry, but
They have scraped together their dried, unclean blood.
You race to the door in white gloves at the sound of the
Bell. “It must be hell to have
To listen to the bombs, the bursts
Of fire.” “Oh yes,” you say, “it makes my hands shake,
My cups rattle. Really, that is someone else out there!”
I HAVE DECIDED
I have decided to love
My foot. My foot has decided
(Despite its rivalry) to love my other
Foot. My left eye has decided to appreciate
My right ear. This takes study.
This is not mere puppy love!
At one point, my small and large toes were going
To a therapist. They wanted to get along, but
Although they naturally
Loved my fingers (they admired
Them, they praised them freely), they had grown tired
Of each other’s jostling, how each took up so much room
In deep and lightless shoes. What
A revelation they had one
Afternoon–an epiphany! For many
Days, they insisted on sandals, airy and broad-soled.
IT’S NOT A BAD PLANET
It’s not a bad planet, as
Science fiction fantasies go.
There are cars, and electronic sensors, broad
Sunny streets and flashing lights, and electronic wands
At airports. And this loathsome–
How shall I put it?–this worm, this
Offal, this noisome–ugh!–stench, darkness, this fat
Canker is crawling grossly through our kitchens, as we
Listen to the piano, as
We prepare dinner, as we cut
Lemons, outside boys play on the thick, mint grass,
This worm, this stench, comes trundling through, and we keep cutting
Lemons, and the radio
Is playing, and sixteen children
Are dead, and the radio is speaking of
Realism, political compromise, its words hiss
Like Lethe, the computer screen
Shows immaculate white stars, on
The street people walk, talking into slabs of
Plastic, but oh, the worm trailing refuse, the sickness
Of heart, or the freezing sleep
That enfolds your thoughts, and you see
The headline: CIA Chief Sent to Strengthen
Palestinian Security Forces. What a
Planet! Oh, it is simply
Hilarious. You have to laugh.
And what else can you do but peel gnarled carrots
In the bright kitchen? Our orbit passes through the dust
Of this gargantuan worm,
The angels cannot bear it, pure
Souls recoil, this soiled globe wrapped in the hollow
Foul worm. Look, everything is shot through with light, and
In the cosmic structure of
The body that God has made, we
Are the dark bottom of the well, beneath a
Ladder rising into the brilliant, endless brightness.
THE WIND OF GOD
Let us take advantage of
This day to fish for red and for
Pastel souls. Back home, we will sit about the
Table with the family, we will be the human
Unit, we will be the cell
Of civilization. Do you
Remember civilization? Let us set
Aloft dragon kites and eagle kites in the wind of
Our spirit and of God’s mind.
How everything runs together:
The child, the adolescent, the old person
And death. And because today there was no dirty bomb,
We are all these things, we are
The sacred boulder, the mayfly,
The blue air, a point of nothing, an ant, a
Presence in the night of shadows in the wind of God.
TAKE THIS WHISTLE
Take this whistle, and do not
Explain a thing. Play a tune that
Is a house. Speak words that are colors. Hollow
Packing crates are flowing on the Hudson River. Do
Not be one of them. It then
Comes back to this: God sits in the
Center of the bone. Words can be His scarves, His
Iridescent canopy of willows, of night, of
Silence. Have we lived with God
So long that words are squeezing out
Of our pores? So that we hustle to transform
Each “aha!” into a funeral for a mouse, and
Speech is a row of knockwurst
Thoughts? Pause between conceptions; hear
The knee of gratitude; in the boredom of
This blue silence, see your ocean tremble, rise, revolve.
RABBI NACHMAN SAID, “THERE IS NO DESPAIR”
Rabbi Nachman said, “There is no despair,”
And he knew what he was talking about.
The streets billow with fog, and you doubt
That you will ever again see air
Without the shadow, without the sight
That sears the eyes, that lives in your sleep.
And the Palestinians weep
For their martyrs of dynamite.
And the sun is serene, words float
On the breeze, only your hand
Is trembling. The brutalized land
Absorbs our blood in silence. We quote
Great rabbis, we guard our tongue,
Attend lectures that speak of wondrous acts.
We piece together this wreckage of facts
Into a ladder. We make every rung
Mean something: a rung of charity,
A rung of introspection.
We seek perfection
In the wailing chaos, clarity
In the silence of heaven. It seems
We are ruled by the angel of death.
On each sidewalk we feel his hot breath.
It licks at our mind and burns in our dreams.
Rabbi Nachman said that there is no despair.
Do we have any choice but to go
On that path? To say that we know,
And indeed to know that this infinite air
Resolves in a dew, and that light
Can shower the street,
In this realm of bloated deceit
Where we seek the blind comfort of night.
THE TRUE IDEALIST
Everywhere the true idealist declaims,
And his vision flames.
But we shake our heavy heads,
We stagger on the treads
Of an old, bloody path.
The purity of the math
Of trajectory and bomb,
Of cold rage and stone-hard calm,
Where babies’ limbs fly,
A shadow of the perfect sky,
Is not ours.
We shiver beneath the exploding towers
And grapple with ourselves.
Our sight delves
Into our own distress.
Without tenderness,
We tear at one another,
Smother
Each others’ moans
In vehement tones.
Meanwhile,
The style
Of that pure idealist,
That ultimate realist,
Covers a field of snow
With bullet holes; woe
Is his joy; airplanes exploding,
The click of a Kalashnikov loading.
He uses this world: its stolen cars,
Its flying nails and iron bars,
Its buses, bolts and cyanide,
For rapture and pride
Of mauling and hate,
For a holy, beatific fate
Of heaven mixed with gore,
Of war
For the sake
Of murder. Take
It as it is: a fist
Wielded by a true idealist,
A man with shining eyes,
Without weak compromise.
Again, that vision takes its place:
The heel forever grinding someone’s face.
THE HORSES RUSH
Jerusalem is always
Jerusalem. A thumbprint of
Arafat or Avimelech or Phikhol, traced
In soot, presses down on the mountains, pushes us down
Into this gray, common dust.
The angels are singing, the light
Is indomitable, the horses rush
Into the walls of water, the sun is standing still,
The moon grazes the fields of
Dawn. Mansions are carved out of the
Living words. The fire on the altar consumes
You, as it always has. Too bad the angels sing so
Loudly, the light is always
Dazzling. Beneath the feet of this
Heaven, the horseflies are drawing blood. It can’t
Be easy, it must gall, to say these are not two worlds
But one. The scent of incense
Coalesces in the plastic
Air, lucent with the trembling of unseen foot-
Falls. We could hear the heavy flapping of the wings the
Entire afternoon, the
Sabbath, lambent purple (at first),
Sparked upon each dark hill of Samaria, we
Were the milk-suckled hills of Judea, how distant
Now are Ramallah, Jenin,
The black echo of clattering
Voices. The Sabbath Queen is blue, the black hills,
Lions are still pacing the forests of Lebanon.
ARE YOU GROWING TIRED?
Are you growing tired of
Ideas? So am I. They float,
A bright fog through which we sense the glow of lamps.
We repeat the ideas to each other as though
They are the lamps. And are you
Weary of inspiration? Of
Being hounded into joy and piety?
We buy these pills and always we need more. Have a drink.
The mountains you have climbed in
Your mind are quite real. The honey-
Comb that someone squashed on your head, dripping on
Your thoughts, and the bees buzzing in your belly, and the
Shafts of light, vertical and
Horizontal, are they pouring
Into you or pouring out? This is no joke,
This craggy boulder beneath the hot Judean sun.
SACRIFICED TO THE GODS
I don’t suppose you’ve ever
Been sacrificed to the gods, or
Floated on a raft when the ruddy sun spilled
Its tint upon the mile-wide Amazon, and when you
Stood, you felt the tenuous
Shakiness of your existence.
Really, you do not know where the sun-baked path
Will lead. In-between the adobe walls, listen for
Foreign voices murmur. How
Does it feel to be slaughtered to
A foreign god? You know how it is, to have
Your heart ripped out, still beating, on a venerated
Altar. It’s not so bad. At
That moment, what you are thinking
Is the most important thing. First of all, see
What you are not thinking of. Why ever think of it?
THE HEAD OF THE YEAR
I think I got a head of myself,
Blue cabbage head, green zucchini ears,
My ears were as usual scraping cellar floors
And my eyes were pickled in fine imported beers
From the Aleutian Islands or Spain or Rome
And my hangdog look spooked the cocktail room,
The threnody of my trembling ears
Muttered through the crepitating gloom.
Oh witch hazel! Oh bairn! Oh strife!
Oh head that wiggles on its string,
Oh wretched flood of soupy plates
And saki in the moonlight of Pi Ling!
Oh here my hand beneath, and here my foot!
Oh here the monument goes toppling over
And I am staring at the Milky Way
Toppling into this moist field of clover,
Toppling down upon my hoary head,
Toppling down and tasting in my mouth
Like the wind that Cortez never knew
For he was waiting for the mailboat from the south.
Hey! Hip hip! Catch that man’s attention, if you please,
He has brought the milk, his horse hooves clop,
And the white of dawn spills in the sky
And here is no path to go or come or stop,
Oh this head of mine droops like lead
And sunflowers are cruising through the dawn
And underneath the mushrooms where the drops
Of nacreous liquor sweeten the lawn,
We have drunk the milk of trees’ desire,
And our bodies floating in the mist
Remind us of the trumpet that awoke us.
We read the letter whose words we’ve often kissed,
And the green and sparkling fountain
Flaming in the plaza soon retires.
All that night we spoke the words of nightjars,
And in the morning the glowing coals of fires
Burning on the beach still warmed our legs,
And the melted wind still flickered gaily,
And our sourmilk souls were gaily swinging
Picking out their tuna luncheons daily,
And the spinning record slowed to stillness,
Till a glowing jiggling ceased its motion,
Till rolling on the endless heads of foam,
Your silhouette embraced the blue-black ocean.
ICE CREAM
I was thinking about my
Soul. And I was thinking about
Ice cream. So how can I travel from my soul
To ice cream? Who is traveling? Why is my soul so
Patient? Look at you all, a
Bunch of blossoms hollow at the
Center, walking on the yellow paint-stroke street.
All these rules and regulations, someone’s got to cut
His hairy shrubs. When you take
Away gravity, gravity
Still remains, but at least we are walking on
A sidewalk made of nothing. The avenue’s a swatch
Of primary colors, and
We are walking our bodies or
Wheeling them in motorized vehicles. So
Without light we are light, empty as a suit of clothes.
A BLACK WELLSPRING
The plum tree tinged the wet wind
And the violet sky. Walking,
Walking, walking, chew on almonds and see the
Sides of buildings orange with the smoke of spirit. Choose
To say, “I made these buildings,
This blue sky collapsing onto
The Museum of the Modern Mind.” God is
In exile in that tree in Central Park. The little
Boat scoots along the water.
Hyacinths are drooping, the sound
Of an axe thumps outside your window. Curl up
Beneath the yellow covers. Dream of weightless sailboats.
The cherries hang from gnarly
Branches like earrings. Here men
Are praying in white. Their black phylacteries
Expand. A black wellspring summons your mind forever.
IF YOU AND I ARE STILL ALIVE
If you and I are still alive
To walk along the stream
Where toxic liquids kill the sedge,
I’ll ask you for your dream,
And we shall forge a plighted bond,
And I shall ask, “Forgive
My silent lips, my eyelids sealed,
For see, we yet do live.”
And high above the city towers,
Bursting orange, round,
A churning fireball explodes,
A wind without a sound.
So gather rosebuds while you may–
Or something of that kind–
As Stinger missiles shoot our way,
And don’t think me unkind,
But let us all the pleasures prove
And drink the purple wine
And breathe the velvet scent of rose
And twisting Columbine.
The snow is on the cherries now,
Awake, awake, with me
And we shall watch the snow drift down
The elemental tree.
THE OXEN TAIL
Here she waves her oxen tail
And she wears a silken veil,
And the night from zero ripples
Into new-created stipples.
Offal from the darkness bursts,
The throat is scratchy, vainly thirsts,
The ears are broken, arms swing wide
Beneath a black, distended tide.
And so we pass the morning foal,
Serene within our cruise control.
Past the pristine, virgin fog,
We in lambent rayon jog.
Attar elixir, heaven’s bloom,
Slipped inside your mother’s womb.
Grasp this black and viscous earth,
Recall your swift bespattered birth.
I AM AS TIRED AS A BAT
I am as tired as a bat
Who is wearing an old straw hat.
I hang about in trees
And fan myself with the breeze
Of my long, curved toes.
I really wonder if anyone knows
About the green fruits
And the long, stringy roots
That seem to have spread out,
And I bury my little brown snout
In the primrose.
I guess that’s the way it goes,
I guess that’s the way the tidal wave
Blows through the old, upended grave,
And the green sky is dewy
And the high school band chants “Louie, Louie.”
The wind is a muttering torch
Spitting sparks on this old porch.
And these books seem so tired,
So mired
In an old brain pan.
They were given a CAT scan
And they meowed.
I was really cowed!
So anyway here I am,
Having tasted the concord jam,
Swaying in the zephyr,
Afraid I’m growing deafer.
The world looks rather brown
When you’re hanging upside down.
Urgh! That wet wind sure does blow,
I wish I knew the answer, though:
How to strain out the rocks
And the scent of old socks.
Sometimes I think it’s hidden
Underneath that old midden.
And I flap my elastic wings
And feel those wet evenings,
And the smell of fruit drives me batty,
And I seek your friendship, laddy,
And the shifty, crazy flight
Of intoxicated bats at night.
THIS FIELD OF STARS
This field of stars
That stretches out to Mars–
Some things are more important than
The vast, impenetrable plan,
Some things, like a drop of dew
And the blue
Varieties of sky.
Why
Be locked in a room
With the great Whom
Of the Universe?
He won’t be averse to your stepping out
Into the spout
Of your pouring,
Roaring dreams.
Why not loosen the seams
Of your prayers?
Invite the mayors
Of important cities,
The wittiest
Men of your acquaintance,
The lachrymose tears of bygone Peytons,
Into your chamber of air,
To the glistening stairs
And coruscating walls
And the tall
Alders.
You get the picture?
Why be a fixture
Within the mind
Of the blind
Piano player
For whom every prayer
Is an attempt at tuning,
Another dusty swooning,
Nothing new?
(Here in this room where hothouse flowers once grew.)
Universal peace
And a kinder, gentler police
Force
Are (of course)
Nothing to sneeze at.
But one feels a buckling of the knees at
The sound of a grouse
And the sight of the west doused
In purple billows
And the black silhouettes of secret willows
Where no social groups mingle.
Don’t you feel a sage tingle
For something as fresh
As the removal of the pressure
Of all the obligations
And the need to abjure vacations,
On everyone’s behalf?
It’s no sin to watch the sapphire
Glint of a shard
Melt the hard
Encasement of the sheathe
Upon which you have so often broken your teeth,
And then wander, as you
Have so often wished to do–
Upon the back roads
Where the toads
Whistle
Amidst the thistles,
As owls,
Undisturbed by farm dog yowls,
Hoot, “Hoo!”–
With the Universe’s One and Only, Distinctive Who.
THE ACCORDION OF TIME
The accordion of time
Might be squeezing your stymied
Senses.
Yet the densest squash
Comes before the gosh-
a tootin’
Adjutant,
Airy, cerulean,
Infinite, boolean
Blare of blue
Trumpet whoops
That signal the snow rimming
The hole of the hymning
Mole. That mole presses forward,
Seeking doorward
Into the soft, black earth:
In Timbuktu, or Perth,
Under a sunny vale
Or on the Adirondack Trail
(Seeking the fleet, elusive game),
Or in a wasteland unnamed
At the edge of the tundra
Lost in a conundrum,
Or crawling beneath the great-eyed loris
In a tunnel within the primeval forest.
He has faith in the snuffle
Of his unruffled
Nose. Sightless, he lacks
No sight, finds cracks of dawn
Under the worn
Drying pine needles,
Scatters a flock of clueless beadles.
Digging to the goal,
He feels, enrolling
His snout, his claws,
A plausible
Sense of where
The air
Is as blue and as crisp
As the wisp
Of the cloud that strayed
From the blowing escapade
Hurricane wind
That petered out, grinned,
And recalled with nostalgia,
With a twinge of this-worldly neuralgia,
The palace on the mountain
Where the queen and the count, in
Invisible raiment,
Sought to provide the proper payment
With heart and voice,
With roistering mind.
The palms of the count’s hands, blind
As the eyes of the mole,
Were drawn to the longing soul
That seeks the shining heart.
And the Tartan
Bagpipes bleating
(The full chord noting the brief day’s fleeting),
Into silent night descend,
Till the voices of their yearning end.
TIME PRICKLED IN MY BONES
Time prickled
In my bones, tickled
My lonely cave retreat.
It was sweet
To forget, upon this new planet,
Everything but my new vanity.
All the rules here were so parochial,
But I never felt broke. Ellipses
Round the sun swung under me, until
I forgot my ice-milk home, quilted
Whiteness, vague, recalled
Shapes of celestial aldermen.
My doubled eyes flew open.
Here I learned to cope and–
Like the frog hunched in the pond
Whose half-immersed, wandering
Eyes see below a green and misty realm
And, above, the vaulting elms
Clear as the sound of rat-tat-tatting
Woodpeckers–saw this and that! Ingrown
Sleep ceased.
The beast
Of the forest snuffling,
Ruffling
His back hairs
At the foot of the spiral stairs
Lifted his muzzy snout
And let out
A snort, a roar,
And wept like the River Jordan.
And I walked amidst men,
Men of the clouds, at attention,
Ram-rod
Stiff, hosanna-ing God,
And men of the wadis and deltas,
Of the Congo of hell, tussling
Husked boars, men of the silver-skinned
Coast, of the eye-tearing wind.
And all that remained
Was, with these stained
Hands, to be kind,
To mind
My P’s and Q’s,
To recuse
Myself from all conflicted
Interests, and interdicted
Judgements.
I had to budge. Tents
That I had set up
Were assaulted by the wind without let-up,
And the keen
Cold cleanness
Prickles in my skin and nerves,
Swerves, trickles, in a trice,
An icicle rivulet
Down my spine,
And I give you this old wine,
Which burns and warms, inside,
The lazing lion’s pride.
WHETHER YOU ARE ALIVE OR DEAD
Whether you are alive or dead,
You will still have to make your bed,
Pick up after yourself,
Put the books back on the shelf,
Dust the floor,
Feed the poor,
Watch the snow fall
And call to God.
We’ve been prodded,
Poked, yoked,
Choked, and joked about
So long, without a doubt.
But history pours down the spout,
and the same slack-jawed lout
stands straining blankly,
and his hair grows rankly,
and you–stay!
Say what you will,
Here at the window sill
Or wherever you’re prepared to jump.
Like it or lump it,
The snow falls. So
Recall snatches of Edgar Alan Poe,
Something about the eternal crow
And the ravening maelstrom.
Wherever you are from,
Friend, take my hand,
Have some canned
Pineapples.
How one grapples
With the issues of the day!
Weep into multiple tissues, and, say,
Is that a snuff box you’re got there?
Yes, it’s full of air,
Of fire, of earth and rock and wire
And I fished it from the clear stream,
Switching its tail amidst the bream.
Don’t crowd, boys,
This white powder
Will make you sneeze, louder
Than any new-born, puling
Child at the dueling
Within him.
How different life looks
At the edge of the galactic rim.
There, all earth looks like a hymn
Or a herd of elephants
Crashing through the savannah,
Trampling the manna.
And you wander about
In your pajamas, pink
With little figures of llamas
And ovoid panoramas
Of an entire conjecture
Packed within a lugubrious lecture,
As you chow down in the refectories
Upon sandwiches light as heaven.
Eventually, you will get caught
And the good that you bought
Will stick to your bones,
Mr. Jones.
So you may as well
Ring the bell,
Let the swell
Of the sea slap
And rap
Upon your seaworthy skiff,
If
You dare float upon a sea
Of possibility. So hope
Or mope
Upon the beach,
Listen to the seagulls screeching
Over offal.
The buffalo are extinct,
You may be thinking, we’ve been jinxed
And parboiled,
Soiled and rotten.
What on
Earth more can we do?
Man, we can man the lifeboats,
Eat whole grain oats,
Rub angels’ wings
And other invisible things
Into the snow,
Grow an inch a day,
Pray for rain,
Strain our brain
And then
Like a master of Zen
Stand upon a mountain top
Where all has stopped,
Before history began,
Where the blood of the ram ran.
Just one blank slate
And a cornucopia overflowing onto a plate
And the promise
Of an armistice.
Now take this pinch of snuff.
It’s heady stuff.
It clears the wind
And rescinds the dust of millennia.
Many a time, I’ve dipped my nappy
Head into the sappy wind
And wiped my eyes in honey.
One: ease your mind,
Two: find inner peace
Three: may I introduce you to my niece?
Just release the handbrake
On that car.
It’s gotten pretty far
To here.
If you just don’t jeer
At the dusty steering wheel,
The out of shape muffler
And the gruff lurching of the gears
For the past three or four thousand years.
I think you’ll get a smile
As it whips about this island
Beneath the divine eye.
A hurricane is blowing up, and my
Chilblains are acting up.
So come on in for supper:
And stay awake
And make out
Like a bandit.
I’ve got to hand it to you,
There among the mimosa plants:
You sure know how to dance!
THE RANGE OF WHAT WE DO IS SMALL
The range of what we do is small.
It isn’t very broad at all.
We stand upon the soggy bog
And hear the calling of the frog,
The answer of the winking star,
Which isn’t, really, very far,
The shiver of a patch of space
Between two galaxies, a place
Where vacuums spend their sleepy days,
Rarely pricked by gamma rays,
And quasars blink, consult their compass
(Comets think them somewhat pompous),
And then the frog, he belches out
A short miasm, a sonic pout,
It smacks the Scorpion on his snout,
Bounces off the Scales and ergo
Falls into the lap of Virgo.
A man in London feels his nape,
A billow blows upon his cape,
A cloudlet shakes, a drop of rain
Spots his tentative white cane.
And lines surge to the moon, beyond,
Disparate metals form a bond,
Dragons rise from deep despond
And shake the passing vagabond.
We stand upon the deep crevasse,
Watching Frankenstein’s monster pass,
Leaping to a frozen floe
Where polar bears rock to and fro
And clipper vessels seldom go.
And in the city, horses trot
Through Central Park, where stands a knot
Of nature lovers, watching as
A clump of blushing azaleas
Yields a yellow bird, whose trill
Rises to the window sill
Where sweet geraniums turn their petals
And sifted sunshine softly settles
Upon the asphalt, brick and chrome
And bands each westward facing home.
The range of what we do is narrow,
Exceeded by the whirring sparrow,
But if our hands caress the air,
A dance of hand in graceful prayer,
What gentle breezes we may waft
To silo, straw, to barn and loft,
To silver stream, Peru, Bangkok,
To shifting cloud and straining rock,
To jetties, dolphins, cosmic rays
Sheeting through the world with praise
Of neon glows and winter days.
Oh frog, your artless baritone
Has shivered pond and star and throne.
A peep of moon, a windy sky,
A glimpse of angels fleeting by.
IN LOVE WITH CLAMS
In love with clams, he sang the sea
Of imperturbability,
Stood back to honor his own shades
Of forward red and palisades
Where tumbling green sank to the floor
Of lichen rocks and gorse and hoar,
And then a gelid dignity
Froze his eyeballs like the sea
Upon which ducks with pride and pomp
Avoid their brothers from the swamp.
He waited for a crystal vision
And read his notes, to gain precision
About his soulful accoutrements,
And smoothed his gray, expensive pants.
He thought of red, he thought of blue,
He blundered, tapped the old soft-shoe,
He found a beach where egrets flew
And plovers hatched and swallows grew
And red and green and pink and mauve
Eclipsed the sky, embraced and strove,
As starfish on the sands did rove
And hustled to their watery cove
Where mussels clung and limpets dove
And the bell rang true as the red buoy hove
And the blue sky sang like the gray-clad dove
Of the depths below and the chambers above
That dazzle with their blazing love
And the golden room and the silver glove.
He loosed his mind as the skink releases
His tail, skedaddling to his nieces
And endless cousins, viz. Emmet and Mabel,
Who scurry about the breakfast table,
And in the silk sun-curtained air
Feast on meringue and chocolate eclair.
(Brother, can you spare a dime?
No one around can spare the time.)
He lumbered about and blew his nose
As the elephant trumpets with his hose
And the zebras plunge across the plain,
And he laid down a road across his brain
Where the neurons, trampled, didn’t peep
While he drove about in his father’s jeep
And was put to sleep by his murmuring sheep
Whom he had been entrusted to keep.
(“Well thanks a lot and thanks a heap!”
He yelped to his kith in a leaping cheep.)
And the soldiers marched, Hup two! Hup two!
And they thought that marching ought to do,
Marching that tramples dale and ridges
But snaps the cables of sea-girt bridges.
And here men pray like a circle of gold
That spins on its axis and never rows old.
Invite the fox, the beaver, the possum,
The hyacinth girl and the apple blossom
And the saint and the cat and the tapping hornet
Where the worshipers gather and the gold-globed cornet
Is playing outside where a grass blade sways
In the temperate wind, where the trunk of praise
Of the sycamore tree and the laymen’s lays
Of oriole chirp and reveille
Awaken a susurrus reverie.
First he saw peaches, then he saw fire,
Then he perceived the long-delayed wire,
Hunched up his shoulders and raised his head higher
As visions cruised in from the stars to the byre
While phosphorescent waves trailed from the hull
And flashed in the flourish and swirl of his scull,
And no thoughts were left to carefully mull,
But were pecked at and swallowed by rooster and gull.
There are words and words, and some are not words
But colors and shadows and screens and gay birds
And blue, and trumpets, and awe, and sha!
The snow-shuttered visage of Shangri-La.
He peeled an apple and put down his bags; and
Examined his hands and the lay of the land.
I VISITED THE VILLAGE GREEN
I visited the village green
Where crystal visions can be seen
By you, or me, or any of us
Alighting from the crystal bus,
Whose chandelier glimmers as
The bus lets out a gust of gas.
And I recall, or think, or see,
A facet, individually,
A glass in which there can be seen
A town, a mill, a village green.
And I recall, or think I do,
The shape of sunlight in the dew,
The curve of air, the crescent shapes
Of time that on our shoulders drapes.
And I let in, with cool eclat,
The rearing horse, the black sheep’s “baa,”
Speeding on a web of neurons,
Thirty billion bright Lake Hurons,
Intra-spatial universe
Where holographic souls disperse
Purses quick as mercury
That flash their small infinity.
Ideas quickly oxidize.
Left on the shelf, they prove no prize.
Electrons whirling in the air
Are no respecters of them there.
Quantum shampoo in your hair
Will whisk your head most anywhere.
The worshipers will pray again,
Vague feelings will be flowing then,
The thoughts of upright, sturdy men.
But sometimes I just have a yen
To free the ocelot from his pen
To streak along the quiet pews,
Nuzzle elders, eat their shoes,
On the podium, wail the blues,
Declare and blare galactic news,
And if the beadle demands his dues,
Bare its teeth, leave pawprint clues.
We’ve entered into dusty climes
Repeated songs ten thousand times.
At forty-two or fifty-three,
We’re dead as doornails, you and me,
Spinning like the hour hand,
Traversing this too-tired land,
Traveling to a tired heaven
Whose sour dough turns slowly leaven,
Bringing children after us,
Who’ll also spin without a fuss
And disappear in the maw
Of vast, majestic sacred law
Or ride the breakers of old lore
That breaks upon a gritty shore,
As sermons we have heard before
Sedate us to our very core.
Dust filters slowly to the floor
And dulls the veins of raw, red ore.
On a higher frequency
Where nothing’s what it’s thought to be,
Where lead is gold and slaves are free,
And whispers exponentially
Expand and leap the garden gate
As in your breast they resonate,
The village green, now opalescent,
The chugging bus, turned iridescent,
The river, where the leaping plaice
Describe a curve in mystic space,
Where footsteps never leave a trace
Of where they led the merry chase,
We disembark and in the park
Wait until the sky turns dark
And feel the breathing, furtive, hot,
Of the panting ocelot,
And let the vision of our eyes
See oceans sink and mountains rise.
And where we go, our trembling hand
Awakens tremors on the land.
THE RAIN STRODE DOWN
The rain strode down and washed my soul
Into a morning cereal bowl.
Day bleached my bones with vivid light,
My soul went squirreling into night
Drenched by the fountains of the moon,
And felt its petals quicken, soon
To bloom upon the broad estate
Of silence, wind, a breathless wait.
THERE SWIMS UP FROM THE DEPTH OF TIME
There swims up from the depth of time
A fish of frightful mien
Whose fangs are spiked grotesqueries,
Whose scales are pale cool sheen,
With blood red eyes and savage teeth
And horrid, bone white grin.
What terror stole up from that black,
What gruesome flank and fin,
There in the brrr and lanky cold,
Where giant squids glide past,
Trailing glory: sucking arms
Of ruin and rack and blast,
Staring with dead saucer eyes,
Wraiths flowing through the cave
Of nameless floating entities
Whose image will deprave?
And jellyfish like dreadful angels
Silently do rise,
Pulsing like a silent clock
Whose passage scarifies.
Oh thank the sun that shines upon
The blue and glinting sea,
The salt wet air and rocking boat,
This kind tranquility.
But grow acquainted with the deep,
The cold and breathless deep
Where angels dream and serpents stir
And rub against your sleep.
The glinting sun, the bobbing hull,
The gunwale glistening,
The far off clanging of the buoys
For those yet listening
Upon those slight, precarious isles,
Rough seagulls land and preen,
Then rise into the lucid air.
Their wings are damascene,
Their hearts beat fast, they rise and wheel
As grandly as the sea:
A gentle circle silver blue
A boundless wizadry.
Approach the coast of noisy men
Where commerce clubs with war,
And broken spars and drowned calves heads
Are cast upon the shore.
The cobble path, the wall lined lane,
A gate of fleur de lys,
A fountain where azaleas bloom,
A smooth trunked alder tree,
A voice as silver as the leaves,
Subtle in the air,
Whose little shivers stir the green
Of herbs and maidenhair.
Earth and water, fire and air
Collect within your soul,
A four fold song, a human voice,
A ringing golden bowl.
HAVE YOU EVER TRIED
Have you ever tried to wrestle with the sea?
Show up at midnight in February or March.
The wet sand that was beaten back glistens in the moonlight
And the pier stanchions glisten too.
The voice of the world changes, never-ending
And your own voice flies with the wet wind
And the foam sizzles up the long table of the beach
Trying, again, to swallow you.
As distant as the white and red lights
Is the space that has opened up
Between your arms, in the chamber of your torso,
In the singing void that sizzles behind your words.
You have emptied out the coal furnace of your heart
And the blue-black sky that sizzles with stars
Is cold and silent And the emptiness that you craved
And the white roar of the waves
Is as sweet as the lonely distance
Between you and the blazing bridge
Where the movements of your hands
Have created an avatar of invisible sinuous shape
That speaks its mind without your mind,
And the curve of the jumbled jetty rocks
Is a crescent moon where the phosphorescent water
Is struggling to reach you,
And a white lucent pearl
As silent as heaven
Forms in the sky
Like the earring on Vermeer’s foreign girl,
A tearless tear-shaped pearl
That articulates the silence of ecstasy
And the endless, ever-shifting roar
Of the heavy, wet black waves.
AS YOU STAND STILL, GRAPPLE
As you stand still, grapple
With the one to whom you’re speaking. Apple
Blossoms are starting to wilt on the gnarly
Branches. And old geezers are revving their Harley-
Davidsons. And cool young dudes are exploring
This fresh new world with words. And in Boring,
Maryland, the fire department is having a pot luck dinner.
I can’t wait to be the loser or the winner!
But tool around until you find a copse
With spider webs and sticky, grainy, pine tree syrup drops
(There’s no more forest left–try a golf course or museum--
You can pay for access to each tree per diem)
And grapple with the force of love and savor
Apple cherry honey berry flavor.
A Train
Illness may hide a smile
So radiant that death itself, illumined, sings from the well of its ancient mouth.
A block of starry sky may hide a laugh, a Spanish guitar hanging on the southern wall.
The heart of joy may hide the well of loneliness,
The well of loneliness may hide a shattered skeleton, a Pleistocene warrior, an Andalusian monk, his cowl golden as a bowl of oranges.
New Jersey may hide a study hall where a thousand men sing of the wheat fields of Nebraska, above whose russet plie black birds, pods of dark intent, sweep vivaciously across a pale, then pink, then cobalt sky.
Loneliness may hide a hand of arteries.
A French film may hide a prayer in the alfalfa field, where the mist hovers into the wavering darkness and transient screams of unknown creatures burst from the scrub.
A school may hide a celebration, a sculpture, a railroad train, a horse painted eight thousand colors, confused, selfconscious, grand.
And when concentric circles draw in mystic flight
A ring of naked colors fading into light,
There shall be left a stone, a wind, a cloud--
Amidst the shattered unity within the crowd
A word, a chromosome, a trampled love-lies-bleeding--
The realization one had always felt a kindred heart-beat beating.
HOLY AS A PLOT OF LAND
Holy as a plot of land,
The Torah embraces you.
The Sinai is another world
Where spirit reigns without water.
Water the hills with your feet--
The color of the fruit is the color of eyes,
The color of hands.
The houses in Babylon disintegrate
And only the sound of Torah remains.
But here each brick is holiness.
In Jerusalem I have no dreams,
Only white stones.
THE MESSIAH
Black hats dance like wicks
Of extinguished candles.
The Messiah has come! He is here to wake us!
Respected leaders rush from their homes.
They stand beggared in the turmoil of the street.
Messiah, are you forty years old?
Have you worn a jacket thrown across your shoulders?
The time has not come for unqualified love!
We must rebuild from the ashes,
And publish Torah journals.
The wind uproots all streets and bookstores.
The huddled mourners vaguely shuffle,
Including, in the rear,
Mrs. Gittie Feldman, whom we wish to acknowledge for her yeoman service in typing our latest biograhy of a gadol.
Mrs. Feldman is thinking of her kollel husband and her
beautiful children.
Suddenly, to her horror, she is blown off her feet,
Flying in the Messiah's wind.
What will happen to her chulent?
Though Gravity Might Not Admit the Fact
Though gravity may not admit the fact,
The child's first sloppy footsteps are a wonder,
The spirit of the flower's will to be
That bursts the rock it had been buried under.
And how much more the spirit of a man,
Whose manifolds of soul connect to God--
The gesture of his hand, his sight, his thought,
In which a bare transcendence may be shod.
On your birthday, may you raise your hand
And lift the chalice into which was poured
The lighted life your parents newly-brought
To seek on earth the sparks of its reward.
May the causeway from that first event
Illuminate your steps, your hands, your eyes;
And may you daily drink that rare liqueur
That makes the poor man rich, the simple wise.
Darkness and the morning mix at dawn,
And nature, red, spins beauty in her foam;
The grass stem rises from the leopard's tread,
And from the wilderness, man builds his home.
May you build a sturdy home of love
Whose masonry is quarried from your heart,
Where warm companionship will bring, at dusk,
The sparks that had been loosed and strewn apart.
Flowers Blooming on a Slope of Grass-Covered Ground
Flowers blooming on a slope of grass-covered ground;
Trilling in the branches of the sea-green boughs, a bird
Lording its kingdom, flits, is gone, shaking the leaves;
A pale, red bellflower hangs its head where a cricket has whirred.
And I gather the cat-tails, flags high in the marsh.
The milk-weed pods are full with milk, flowers are spiky-violet and pale,
Ducks are suspicious, ambling in the blue sky's white-fired sun,
Raising a foot to scratch a half-arching wing, wiggling a black-barred tail.
I lie, eyes closed, red sunlight flaming,
In the itchy, untended grass; a spider ambles across
My wrist; I start and shake him off, lost
In the grasses, running for refuge across the sun-burnt, shaggy moss.
I gather the cat-tails, a tall, natural bouquet
Of wishes for health, true-standing, green-flowing grace,
Offering the summer day and the bird-raised, sun-nursed grasses
Over the ocean-flowing stream joining hands, reflecting face to face.
WHEEL
This cosmic disk, gyroscope,
My ears are confused, I feel I’m
Falling. Where is this oxcart rolling to, what
Mud, what crushing rock, hot road along the water wheels?
Here is a ladder of words.
I eat them, I climb to their top,
Nothing is holding me up. I have reached the
Invisible hoop, turning giddily upon the
Spoke of a ladder that has
Disappeared. Black hands of star screech,
Green sour ocean swell endlessly extended
Without a center, wheel scent of incense in ice-skied
Field. To the golden prayer
Palace, I bring the wounded red,
Dragging these heavy presences. I wish to
Weep here, weep here where joy is the electric sweetness.
THE EMBARRASSMENT OF SHIMON PERES
Sentimental sanctity
Spreads sweetly through Norway. The Pope
Too is chirping, France flutters her wings, and the
English ambassador is prancing in his cassock.
And you here are dying of
Embarrassment, you have hung your
White heart on the line to dry, you leave frantic
Messages for the secretary general, but
He is dancing with the queen
Of Sweden. I am sorry, but
They have scraped together their dried, unclean blood.
You race to the door in white gloves at the sound of the
Bell. “It must be hell to have
To listen to the bombs, the bursts
Of fire.” “Oh yes,” you say, “it makes my hands shake,
My cups rattle. Really, that is someone else out there!”
I HAVE DECIDED
I have decided to love
My foot. My foot has decided
(Despite its rivalry) to love my other
Foot. My left eye has decided to appreciate
My right ear. This takes study.
This is not mere puppy love!
At one point, my small and large toes were going
To a therapist. They wanted to get along, but
Although they naturally
Loved my fingers (they admired
Them, they praised them freely), they had grown tired
Of each other’s jostling, how each took up so much room
In deep and lightless shoes. What
A revelation they had one
Afternoon–an epiphany! For many
Days, they insisted on sandals, airy and broad-soled.
IT’S NOT A BAD PLANET
It’s not a bad planet, as
Science fiction fantasies go.
There are cars, and electronic sensors, broad
Sunny streets and flashing lights, and electronic wands
At airports. And this loathsome–
How shall I put it?–this worm, this
Offal, this noisome–ugh!–stench, darkness, this fat
Canker is crawling grossly through our kitchens, as we
Listen to the piano, as
We prepare dinner, as we cut
Lemons, outside boys play on the thick, mint grass,
This worm, this stench, comes trundling through, and we keep cutting
Lemons, and the radio
Is playing, and sixteen children
Are dead, and the radio is speaking of
Realism, political compromise, its words hiss
Like Lethe, the computer screen
Shows immaculate white stars, on
The street people walk, talking into slabs of
Plastic, but oh, the worm trailing refuse, the sickness
Of heart, or the freezing sleep
That enfolds your thoughts, and you see
The headline: CIA Chief Sent to Strengthen
Palestinian Security Forces. What a
Planet! Oh, it is simply
Hilarious. You have to laugh.
And what else can you do but peel gnarled carrots
In the bright kitchen? Our orbit passes through the dust
Of this gargantuan worm,
The angels cannot bear it, pure
Souls recoil, this soiled globe wrapped in the hollow
Foul worm. Look, everything is shot through with light, and
In the cosmic structure of
The body that God has made, we
Are the dark bottom of the well, beneath a
Ladder rising into the brilliant, endless brightness.
THE WIND OF GOD
Let us take advantage of
This day to fish for red and for
Pastel souls. Back home, we will sit about the
Table with the family, we will be the human
Unit, we will be the cell
Of civilization. Do you
Remember civilization? Let us set
Aloft dragon kites and eagle kites in the wind of
Our spirit and of God’s mind.
How everything runs together:
The child, the adolescent, the old person
And death. And because today there was no dirty bomb,
We are all these things, we are
The sacred boulder, the mayfly,
The blue air, a point of nothing, an ant, a
Presence in the night of shadows in the wind of God.
TAKE THIS WHISTLE
Take this whistle, and do not
Explain a thing. Play a tune that
Is a house. Speak words that are colors. Hollow
Packing crates are flowing on the Hudson River. Do
Not be one of them. It then
Comes back to this: God sits in the
Center of the bone. Words can be His scarves, His
Iridescent canopy of willows, of night, of
Silence. Have we lived with God
So long that words are squeezing out
Of our pores? So that we hustle to transform
Each “aha!” into a funeral for a mouse, and
Speech is a row of knockwurst
Thoughts? Pause between conceptions; hear
The knee of gratitude; in the boredom of
This blue silence, see your ocean tremble, rise, revolve.
RABBI NACHMAN SAID, “THERE IS NO DESPAIR”
Rabbi Nachman said, “There is no despair,”
And he knew what he was talking about.
The streets billow with fog, and you doubt
That you will ever again see air
Without the shadow, without the sight
That sears the eyes, that lives in your sleep.
And the Palestinians weep
For their martyrs of dynamite.
And the sun is serene, words float
On the breeze, only your hand
Is trembling. The brutalized land
Absorbs our blood in silence. We quote
Great rabbis, we guard our tongue,
Attend lectures that speak of wondrous acts.
We piece together this wreckage of facts
Into a ladder. We make every rung
Mean something: a rung of charity,
A rung of introspection.
We seek perfection
In the wailing chaos, clarity
In the silence of heaven. It seems
We are ruled by the angel of death.
On each sidewalk we feel his hot breath.
It licks at our mind and burns in our dreams.
Rabbi Nachman said that there is no despair.
Do we have any choice but to go
On that path? To say that we know,
And indeed to know that this infinite air
Resolves in a dew, and that light
Can shower the street,
In this realm of bloated deceit
Where we seek the blind comfort of night.
THE TRUE IDEALIST
Everywhere the true idealist declaims,
And his vision flames.
But we shake our heavy heads,
We stagger on the treads
Of an old, bloody path.
The purity of the math
Of trajectory and bomb,
Of cold rage and stone-hard calm,
Where babies’ limbs fly,
A shadow of the perfect sky,
Is not ours.
We shiver beneath the exploding towers
And grapple with ourselves.
Our sight delves
Into our own distress.
Without tenderness,
We tear at one another,
Smother
Each others’ moans
In vehement tones.
Meanwhile,
The style
Of that pure idealist,
That ultimate realist,
Covers a field of snow
With bullet holes; woe
Is his joy; airplanes exploding,
The click of a Kalashnikov loading.
He uses this world: its stolen cars,
Its flying nails and iron bars,
Its buses, bolts and cyanide,
For rapture and pride
Of mauling and hate,
For a holy, beatific fate
Of heaven mixed with gore,
Of war
For the sake
Of murder. Take
It as it is: a fist
Wielded by a true idealist,
A man with shining eyes,
Without weak compromise.
Again, that vision takes its place:
The heel forever grinding someone’s face.
THE HORSES RUSH
Jerusalem is always
Jerusalem. A thumbprint of
Arafat or Avimelech or Phikhol, traced
In soot, presses down on the mountains, pushes us down
Into this gray, common dust.
The angels are singing, the light
Is indomitable, the horses rush
Into the walls of water, the sun is standing still,
The moon grazes the fields of
Dawn. Mansions are carved out of the
Living words. The fire on the altar consumes
You, as it always has. Too bad the angels sing so
Loudly, the light is always
Dazzling. Beneath the feet of this
Heaven, the horseflies are drawing blood. It can’t
Be easy, it must gall, to say these are not two worlds
But one. The scent of incense
Coalesces in the plastic
Air, lucent with the trembling of unseen foot-
Falls. We could hear the heavy flapping of the wings the
Entire afternoon, the
Sabbath, lambent purple (at first),
Sparked upon each dark hill of Samaria, we
Were the milk-suckled hills of Judea, how distant
Now are Ramallah, Jenin,
The black echo of clattering
Voices. The Sabbath Queen is blue, the black hills,
Lions are still pacing the forests of Lebanon.
ARE YOU GROWING TIRED?
Are you growing tired of
Ideas? So am I. They float,
A bright fog through which we sense the glow of lamps.
We repeat the ideas to each other as though
They are the lamps. And are you
Weary of inspiration? Of
Being hounded into joy and piety?
We buy these pills and always we need more. Have a drink.
The mountains you have climbed in
Your mind are quite real. The honey-
Comb that someone squashed on your head, dripping on
Your thoughts, and the bees buzzing in your belly, and the
Shafts of light, vertical and
Horizontal, are they pouring
Into you or pouring out? This is no joke,
This craggy boulder beneath the hot Judean sun.
SACRIFICED TO THE GODS
I don’t suppose you’ve ever
Been sacrificed to the gods, or
Floated on a raft when the ruddy sun spilled
Its tint upon the mile-wide Amazon, and when you
Stood, you felt the tenuous
Shakiness of your existence.
Really, you do not know where the sun-baked path
Will lead. In-between the adobe walls, listen for
Foreign voices murmur. How
Does it feel to be slaughtered to
A foreign god? You know how it is, to have
Your heart ripped out, still beating, on a venerated
Altar. It’s not so bad. At
That moment, what you are thinking
Is the most important thing. First of all, see
What you are not thinking of. Why ever think of it?
THE HEAD OF THE YEAR
I think I got a head of myself,
Blue cabbage head, green zucchini ears,
My ears were as usual scraping cellar floors
And my eyes were pickled in fine imported beers
From the Aleutian Islands or Spain or Rome
And my hangdog look spooked the cocktail room,
The threnody of my trembling ears
Muttered through the crepitating gloom.
Oh witch hazel! Oh bairn! Oh strife!
Oh head that wiggles on its string,
Oh wretched flood of soupy plates
And saki in the moonlight of Pi Ling!
Oh here my hand beneath, and here my foot!
Oh here the monument goes toppling over
And I am staring at the Milky Way
Toppling into this moist field of clover,
Toppling down upon my hoary head,
Toppling down and tasting in my mouth
Like the wind that Cortez never knew
For he was waiting for the mailboat from the south.
Hey! Hip hip! Catch that man’s attention, if you please,
He has brought the milk, his horse hooves clop,
And the white of dawn spills in the sky
And here is no path to go or come or stop,
Oh this head of mine droops like lead
And sunflowers are cruising through the dawn
And underneath the mushrooms where the drops
Of nacreous liquor sweeten the lawn,
We have drunk the milk of trees’ desire,
And our bodies floating in the mist
Remind us of the trumpet that awoke us.
We read the letter whose words we’ve often kissed,
And the green and sparkling fountain
Flaming in the plaza soon retires.
All that night we spoke the words of nightjars,
And in the morning the glowing coals of fires
Burning on the beach still warmed our legs,
And the melted wind still flickered gaily,
And our sourmilk souls were gaily swinging
Picking out their tuna luncheons daily,
And the spinning record slowed to stillness,
Till a glowing jiggling ceased its motion,
Till rolling on the endless heads of foam,
Your silhouette embraced the blue-black ocean.
ICE CREAM
I was thinking about my
Soul. And I was thinking about
Ice cream. So how can I travel from my soul
To ice cream? Who is traveling? Why is my soul so
Patient? Look at you all, a
Bunch of blossoms hollow at the
Center, walking on the yellow paint-stroke street.
All these rules and regulations, someone’s got to cut
His hairy shrubs. When you take
Away gravity, gravity
Still remains, but at least we are walking on
A sidewalk made of nothing. The avenue’s a swatch
Of primary colors, and
We are walking our bodies or
Wheeling them in motorized vehicles. So
Without light we are light, empty as a suit of clothes.
A BLACK WELLSPRING
The plum tree tinged the wet wind
And the violet sky. Walking,
Walking, walking, chew on almonds and see the
Sides of buildings orange with the smoke of spirit. Choose
To say, “I made these buildings,
This blue sky collapsing onto
The Museum of the Modern Mind.” God is
In exile in that tree in Central Park. The little
Boat scoots along the water.
Hyacinths are drooping, the sound
Of an axe thumps outside your window. Curl up
Beneath the yellow covers. Dream of weightless sailboats.
The cherries hang from gnarly
Branches like earrings. Here men
Are praying in white. Their black phylacteries
Expand. A black wellspring summons your mind forever.
IF YOU AND I ARE STILL ALIVE
If you and I are still alive
To walk along the stream
Where toxic liquids kill the sedge,
I’ll ask you for your dream,
And we shall forge a plighted bond,
And I shall ask, “Forgive
My silent lips, my eyelids sealed,
For see, we yet do live.”
And high above the city towers,
Bursting orange, round,
A churning fireball explodes,
A wind without a sound.
So gather rosebuds while you may–
Or something of that kind–
As Stinger missiles shoot our way,
And don’t think me unkind,
But let us all the pleasures prove
And drink the purple wine
And breathe the velvet scent of rose
And twisting Columbine.
The snow is on the cherries now,
Awake, awake, with me
And we shall watch the snow drift down
The elemental tree.
THE OXEN TAIL
Here she waves her oxen tail
And she wears a silken veil,
And the night from zero ripples
Into new-created stipples.
Offal from the darkness bursts,
The throat is scratchy, vainly thirsts,
The ears are broken, arms swing wide
Beneath a black, distended tide.
And so we pass the morning foal,
Serene within our cruise control.
Past the pristine, virgin fog,
We in lambent rayon jog.
Attar elixir, heaven’s bloom,
Slipped inside your mother’s womb.
Grasp this black and viscous earth,
Recall your swift bespattered birth.
I AM AS TIRED AS A BAT
I am as tired as a bat
Who is wearing an old straw hat.
I hang about in trees
And fan myself with the breeze
Of my long, curved toes.
I really wonder if anyone knows
About the green fruits
And the long, stringy roots
That seem to have spread out,
And I bury my little brown snout
In the primrose.
I guess that’s the way it goes,
I guess that’s the way the tidal wave
Blows through the old, upended grave,
And the green sky is dewy
And the high school band chants “Louie, Louie.”
The wind is a muttering torch
Spitting sparks on this old porch.
And these books seem so tired,
So mired
In an old brain pan.
They were given a CAT scan
And they meowed.
I was really cowed!
So anyway here I am,
Having tasted the concord jam,
Swaying in the zephyr,
Afraid I’m growing deafer.
The world looks rather brown
When you’re hanging upside down.
Urgh! That wet wind sure does blow,
I wish I knew the answer, though:
How to strain out the rocks
And the scent of old socks.
Sometimes I think it’s hidden
Underneath that old midden.
And I flap my elastic wings
And feel those wet evenings,
And the smell of fruit drives me batty,
And I seek your friendship, laddy,
And the shifty, crazy flight
Of intoxicated bats at night.
THIS FIELD OF STARS
This field of stars
That stretches out to Mars–
Some things are more important than
The vast, impenetrable plan,
Some things, like a drop of dew
And the blue
Varieties of sky.
Why
Be locked in a room
With the great Whom
Of the Universe?
He won’t be averse to your stepping out
Into the spout
Of your pouring,
Roaring dreams.
Why not loosen the seams
Of your prayers?
Invite the mayors
Of important cities,
The wittiest
Men of your acquaintance,
The lachrymose tears of bygone Peytons,
Into your chamber of air,
To the glistening stairs
And coruscating walls
And the tall
Alders.
You get the picture?
Why be a fixture
Within the mind
Of the blind
Piano player
For whom every prayer
Is an attempt at tuning,
Another dusty swooning,
Nothing new?
(Here in this room where hothouse flowers once grew.)
Universal peace
And a kinder, gentler police
Force
Are (of course)
Nothing to sneeze at.
But one feels a buckling of the knees at
The sound of a grouse
And the sight of the west doused
In purple billows
And the black silhouettes of secret willows
Where no social groups mingle.
Don’t you feel a sage tingle
For something as fresh
As the removal of the pressure
Of all the obligations
And the need to abjure vacations,
On everyone’s behalf?
It’s no sin to watch the sapphire
Glint of a shard
Melt the hard
Encasement of the sheathe
Upon which you have so often broken your teeth,
And then wander, as you
Have so often wished to do–
Upon the back roads
Where the toads
Whistle
Amidst the thistles,
As owls,
Undisturbed by farm dog yowls,
Hoot, “Hoo!”–
With the Universe’s One and Only, Distinctive Who.
THE ACCORDION OF TIME
The accordion of time
Might be squeezing your stymied
Senses.
Yet the densest squash
Comes before the gosh-
a tootin’
Adjutant,
Airy, cerulean,
Infinite, boolean
Blare of blue
Trumpet whoops
That signal the snow rimming
The hole of the hymning
Mole. That mole presses forward,
Seeking doorward
Into the soft, black earth:
In Timbuktu, or Perth,
Under a sunny vale
Or on the Adirondack Trail
(Seeking the fleet, elusive game),
Or in a wasteland unnamed
At the edge of the tundra
Lost in a conundrum,
Or crawling beneath the great-eyed loris
In a tunnel within the primeval forest.
He has faith in the snuffle
Of his unruffled
Nose. Sightless, he lacks
No sight, finds cracks of dawn
Under the worn
Drying pine needles,
Scatters a flock of clueless beadles.
Digging to the goal,
He feels, enrolling
His snout, his claws,
A plausible
Sense of where
The air
Is as blue and as crisp
As the wisp
Of the cloud that strayed
From the blowing escapade
Hurricane wind
That petered out, grinned,
And recalled with nostalgia,
With a twinge of this-worldly neuralgia,
The palace on the mountain
Where the queen and the count, in
Invisible raiment,
Sought to provide the proper payment
With heart and voice,
With roistering mind.
The palms of the count’s hands, blind
As the eyes of the mole,
Were drawn to the longing soul
That seeks the shining heart.
And the Tartan
Bagpipes bleating
(The full chord noting the brief day’s fleeting),
Into silent night descend,
Till the voices of their yearning end.
TIME PRICKLED IN MY BONES
Time prickled
In my bones, tickled
My lonely cave retreat.
It was sweet
To forget, upon this new planet,
Everything but my new vanity.
All the rules here were so parochial,
But I never felt broke. Ellipses
Round the sun swung under me, until
I forgot my ice-milk home, quilted
Whiteness, vague, recalled
Shapes of celestial aldermen.
My doubled eyes flew open.
Here I learned to cope and–
Like the frog hunched in the pond
Whose half-immersed, wandering
Eyes see below a green and misty realm
And, above, the vaulting elms
Clear as the sound of rat-tat-tatting
Woodpeckers–saw this and that! Ingrown
Sleep ceased.
The beast
Of the forest snuffling,
Ruffling
His back hairs
At the foot of the spiral stairs
Lifted his muzzy snout
And let out
A snort, a roar,
And wept like the River Jordan.
And I walked amidst men,
Men of the clouds, at attention,
Ram-rod
Stiff, hosanna-ing God,
And men of the wadis and deltas,
Of the Congo of hell, tussling
Husked boars, men of the silver-skinned
Coast, of the eye-tearing wind.
And all that remained
Was, with these stained
Hands, to be kind,
To mind
My P’s and Q’s,
To recuse
Myself from all conflicted
Interests, and interdicted
Judgements.
I had to budge. Tents
That I had set up
Were assaulted by the wind without let-up,
And the keen
Cold cleanness
Prickles in my skin and nerves,
Swerves, trickles, in a trice,
An icicle rivulet
Down my spine,
And I give you this old wine,
Which burns and warms, inside,
The lazing lion’s pride.
WHETHER YOU ARE ALIVE OR DEAD
Whether you are alive or dead,
You will still have to make your bed,
Pick up after yourself,
Put the books back on the shelf,
Dust the floor,
Feed the poor,
Watch the snow fall
And call to God.
We’ve been prodded,
Poked, yoked,
Choked, and joked about
So long, without a doubt.
But history pours down the spout,
and the same slack-jawed lout
stands straining blankly,
and his hair grows rankly,
and you–stay!
Say what you will,
Here at the window sill
Or wherever you’re prepared to jump.
Like it or lump it,
The snow falls. So
Recall snatches of Edgar Alan Poe,
Something about the eternal crow
And the ravening maelstrom.
Wherever you are from,
Friend, take my hand,
Have some canned
Pineapples.
How one grapples
With the issues of the day!
Weep into multiple tissues, and, say,
Is that a snuff box you’re got there?
Yes, it’s full of air,
Of fire, of earth and rock and wire
And I fished it from the clear stream,
Switching its tail amidst the bream.
Don’t crowd, boys,
This white powder
Will make you sneeze, louder
Than any new-born, puling
Child at the dueling
Within him.
How different life looks
At the edge of the galactic rim.
There, all earth looks like a hymn
Or a herd of elephants
Crashing through the savannah,
Trampling the manna.
And you wander about
In your pajamas, pink
With little figures of llamas
And ovoid panoramas
Of an entire conjecture
Packed within a lugubrious lecture,
As you chow down in the refectories
Upon sandwiches light as heaven.
Eventually, you will get caught
And the good that you bought
Will stick to your bones,
Mr. Jones.
So you may as well
Ring the bell,
Let the swell
Of the sea slap
And rap
Upon your seaworthy skiff,
If
You dare float upon a sea
Of possibility. So hope
Or mope
Upon the beach,
Listen to the seagulls screeching
Over offal.
The buffalo are extinct,
You may be thinking, we’ve been jinxed
And parboiled,
Soiled and rotten.
What on
Earth more can we do?
Man, we can man the lifeboats,
Eat whole grain oats,
Rub angels’ wings
And other invisible things
Into the snow,
Grow an inch a day,
Pray for rain,
Strain our brain
And then
Like a master of Zen
Stand upon a mountain top
Where all has stopped,
Before history began,
Where the blood of the ram ran.
Just one blank slate
And a cornucopia overflowing onto a plate
And the promise
Of an armistice.
Now take this pinch of snuff.
It’s heady stuff.
It clears the wind
And rescinds the dust of millennia.
Many a time, I’ve dipped my nappy
Head into the sappy wind
And wiped my eyes in honey.
One: ease your mind,
Two: find inner peace
Three: may I introduce you to my niece?
Just release the handbrake
On that car.
It’s gotten pretty far
To here.
If you just don’t jeer
At the dusty steering wheel,
The out of shape muffler
And the gruff lurching of the gears
For the past three or four thousand years.
I think you’ll get a smile
As it whips about this island
Beneath the divine eye.
A hurricane is blowing up, and my
Chilblains are acting up.
So come on in for supper:
And stay awake
And make out
Like a bandit.
I’ve got to hand it to you,
There among the mimosa plants:
You sure know how to dance!
THE RANGE OF WHAT WE DO IS SMALL
The range of what we do is small.
It isn’t very broad at all.
We stand upon the soggy bog
And hear the calling of the frog,
The answer of the winking star,
Which isn’t, really, very far,
The shiver of a patch of space
Between two galaxies, a place
Where vacuums spend their sleepy days,
Rarely pricked by gamma rays,
And quasars blink, consult their compass
(Comets think them somewhat pompous),
And then the frog, he belches out
A short miasm, a sonic pout,
It smacks the Scorpion on his snout,
Bounces off the Scales and ergo
Falls into the lap of Virgo.
A man in London feels his nape,
A billow blows upon his cape,
A cloudlet shakes, a drop of rain
Spots his tentative white cane.
And lines surge to the moon, beyond,
Disparate metals form a bond,
Dragons rise from deep despond
And shake the passing vagabond.
We stand upon the deep crevasse,
Watching Frankenstein’s monster pass,
Leaping to a frozen floe
Where polar bears rock to and fro
And clipper vessels seldom go.
And in the city, horses trot
Through Central Park, where stands a knot
Of nature lovers, watching as
A clump of blushing azaleas
Yields a yellow bird, whose trill
Rises to the window sill
Where sweet geraniums turn their petals
And sifted sunshine softly settles
Upon the asphalt, brick and chrome
And bands each westward facing home.
The range of what we do is narrow,
Exceeded by the whirring sparrow,
But if our hands caress the air,
A dance of hand in graceful prayer,
What gentle breezes we may waft
To silo, straw, to barn and loft,
To silver stream, Peru, Bangkok,
To shifting cloud and straining rock,
To jetties, dolphins, cosmic rays
Sheeting through the world with praise
Of neon glows and winter days.
Oh frog, your artless baritone
Has shivered pond and star and throne.
A peep of moon, a windy sky,
A glimpse of angels fleeting by.
IN LOVE WITH CLAMS
In love with clams, he sang the sea
Of imperturbability,
Stood back to honor his own shades
Of forward red and palisades
Where tumbling green sank to the floor
Of lichen rocks and gorse and hoar,
And then a gelid dignity
Froze his eyeballs like the sea
Upon which ducks with pride and pomp
Avoid their brothers from the swamp.
He waited for a crystal vision
And read his notes, to gain precision
About his soulful accoutrements,
And smoothed his gray, expensive pants.
He thought of red, he thought of blue,
He blundered, tapped the old soft-shoe,
He found a beach where egrets flew
And plovers hatched and swallows grew
And red and green and pink and mauve
Eclipsed the sky, embraced and strove,
As starfish on the sands did rove
And hustled to their watery cove
Where mussels clung and limpets dove
And the bell rang true as the red buoy hove
And the blue sky sang like the gray-clad dove
Of the depths below and the chambers above
That dazzle with their blazing love
And the golden room and the silver glove.
He loosed his mind as the skink releases
His tail, skedaddling to his nieces
And endless cousins, viz. Emmet and Mabel,
Who scurry about the breakfast table,
And in the silk sun-curtained air
Feast on meringue and chocolate eclair.
(Brother, can you spare a dime?
No one around can spare the time.)
He lumbered about and blew his nose
As the elephant trumpets with his hose
And the zebras plunge across the plain,
And he laid down a road across his brain
Where the neurons, trampled, didn’t peep
While he drove about in his father’s jeep
And was put to sleep by his murmuring sheep
Whom he had been entrusted to keep.
(“Well thanks a lot and thanks a heap!”
He yelped to his kith in a leaping cheep.)
And the soldiers marched, Hup two! Hup two!
And they thought that marching ought to do,
Marching that tramples dale and ridges
But snaps the cables of sea-girt bridges.
And here men pray like a circle of gold
That spins on its axis and never rows old.
Invite the fox, the beaver, the possum,
The hyacinth girl and the apple blossom
And the saint and the cat and the tapping hornet
Where the worshipers gather and the gold-globed cornet
Is playing outside where a grass blade sways
In the temperate wind, where the trunk of praise
Of the sycamore tree and the laymen’s lays
Of oriole chirp and reveille
Awaken a susurrus reverie.
First he saw peaches, then he saw fire,
Then he perceived the long-delayed wire,
Hunched up his shoulders and raised his head higher
As visions cruised in from the stars to the byre
While phosphorescent waves trailed from the hull
And flashed in the flourish and swirl of his scull,
And no thoughts were left to carefully mull,
But were pecked at and swallowed by rooster and gull.
There are words and words, and some are not words
But colors and shadows and screens and gay birds
And blue, and trumpets, and awe, and sha!
The snow-shuttered visage of Shangri-La.
He peeled an apple and put down his bags; and
Examined his hands and the lay of the land.
I VISITED THE VILLAGE GREEN
I visited the village green
Where crystal visions can be seen
By you, or me, or any of us
Alighting from the crystal bus,
Whose chandelier glimmers as
The bus lets out a gust of gas.
And I recall, or think, or see,
A facet, individually,
A glass in which there can be seen
A town, a mill, a village green.
And I recall, or think I do,
The shape of sunlight in the dew,
The curve of air, the crescent shapes
Of time that on our shoulders drapes.
And I let in, with cool eclat,
The rearing horse, the black sheep’s “baa,”
Speeding on a web of neurons,
Thirty billion bright Lake Hurons,
Intra-spatial universe
Where holographic souls disperse
Purses quick as mercury
That flash their small infinity.
Ideas quickly oxidize.
Left on the shelf, they prove no prize.
Electrons whirling in the air
Are no respecters of them there.
Quantum shampoo in your hair
Will whisk your head most anywhere.
The worshipers will pray again,
Vague feelings will be flowing then,
The thoughts of upright, sturdy men.
But sometimes I just have a yen
To free the ocelot from his pen
To streak along the quiet pews,
Nuzzle elders, eat their shoes,
On the podium, wail the blues,
Declare and blare galactic news,
And if the beadle demands his dues,
Bare its teeth, leave pawprint clues.
We’ve entered into dusty climes
Repeated songs ten thousand times.
At forty-two or fifty-three,
We’re dead as doornails, you and me,
Spinning like the hour hand,
Traversing this too-tired land,
Traveling to a tired heaven
Whose sour dough turns slowly leaven,
Bringing children after us,
Who’ll also spin without a fuss
And disappear in the maw
Of vast, majestic sacred law
Or ride the breakers of old lore
That breaks upon a gritty shore,
As sermons we have heard before
Sedate us to our very core.
Dust filters slowly to the floor
And dulls the veins of raw, red ore.
On a higher frequency
Where nothing’s what it’s thought to be,
Where lead is gold and slaves are free,
And whispers exponentially
Expand and leap the garden gate
As in your breast they resonate,
The village green, now opalescent,
The chugging bus, turned iridescent,
The river, where the leaping plaice
Describe a curve in mystic space,
Where footsteps never leave a trace
Of where they led the merry chase,
We disembark and in the park
Wait until the sky turns dark
And feel the breathing, furtive, hot,
Of the panting ocelot,
And let the vision of our eyes
See oceans sink and mountains rise.
And where we go, our trembling hand
Awakens tremors on the land.
THE RAIN STRODE DOWN
The rain strode down and washed my soul
Into a morning cereal bowl.
Day bleached my bones with vivid light,
My soul went squirreling into night
Drenched by the fountains of the moon,
And felt its petals quicken, soon
To bloom upon the broad estate
Of silence, wind, a breathless wait.
THERE SWIMS UP FROM THE DEPTH OF TIME
There swims up from the depth of time
A fish of frightful mien
Whose fangs are spiked grotesqueries,
Whose scales are pale cool sheen,
With blood red eyes and savage teeth
And horrid, bone white grin.
What terror stole up from that black,
What gruesome flank and fin,
There in the brrr and lanky cold,
Where giant squids glide past,
Trailing glory: sucking arms
Of ruin and rack and blast,
Staring with dead saucer eyes,
Wraiths flowing through the cave
Of nameless floating entities
Whose image will deprave?
And jellyfish like dreadful angels
Silently do rise,
Pulsing like a silent clock
Whose passage scarifies.
Oh thank the sun that shines upon
The blue and glinting sea,
The salt wet air and rocking boat,
This kind tranquility.
But grow acquainted with the deep,
The cold and breathless deep
Where angels dream and serpents stir
And rub against your sleep.
The glinting sun, the bobbing hull,
The gunwale glistening,
The far off clanging of the buoys
For those yet listening
Upon those slight, precarious isles,
Rough seagulls land and preen,
Then rise into the lucid air.
Their wings are damascene,
Their hearts beat fast, they rise and wheel
As grandly as the sea:
A gentle circle silver blue
A boundless wizadry.
Approach the coast of noisy men
Where commerce clubs with war,
And broken spars and drowned calves heads
Are cast upon the shore.
The cobble path, the wall lined lane,
A gate of fleur de lys,
A fountain where azaleas bloom,
A smooth trunked alder tree,
A voice as silver as the leaves,
Subtle in the air,
Whose little shivers stir the green
Of herbs and maidenhair.
Earth and water, fire and air
Collect within your soul,
A four fold song, a human voice,
A ringing golden bowl.
HAVE YOU EVER TRIED
Have you ever tried to wrestle with the sea?
Show up at midnight in February or March.
The wet sand that was beaten back glistens in the moonlight
And the pier stanchions glisten too.
The voice of the world changes, never-ending
And your own voice flies with the wet wind
And the foam sizzles up the long table of the beach
Trying, again, to swallow you.
As distant as the white and red lights
Is the space that has opened up
Between your arms, in the chamber of your torso,
In the singing void that sizzles behind your words.
You have emptied out the coal furnace of your heart
And the blue-black sky that sizzles with stars
Is cold and silent And the emptiness that you craved
And the white roar of the waves
Is as sweet as the lonely distance
Between you and the blazing bridge
Where the movements of your hands
Have created an avatar of invisible sinuous shape
That speaks its mind without your mind,
And the curve of the jumbled jetty rocks
Is a crescent moon where the phosphorescent water
Is struggling to reach you,
And a white lucent pearl
As silent as heaven
Forms in the sky
Like the earring on Vermeer’s foreign girl,
A tearless tear-shaped pearl
That articulates the silence of ecstasy
And the endless, ever-shifting roar
Of the heavy, wet black waves.
AS YOU STAND STILL, GRAPPLE
As you stand still, grapple
With the one to whom you’re speaking. Apple
Blossoms are starting to wilt on the gnarly
Branches. And old geezers are revving their Harley-
Davidsons. And cool young dudes are exploring
This fresh new world with words. And in Boring,
Maryland, the fire department is having a pot luck dinner.
I can’t wait to be the loser or the winner!
But tool around until you find a copse
With spider webs and sticky, grainy, pine tree syrup drops
(There’s no more forest left–try a golf course or museum--
You can pay for access to each tree per diem)
And grapple with the force of love and savor
Apple cherry honey berry flavor.
A Train
Illness may hide a smile
So radiant that death itself, illumined, sings from the well of its ancient mouth.
A block of starry sky may hide a laugh, a Spanish guitar hanging on the southern wall.
The heart of joy may hide the well of loneliness,
The well of loneliness may hide a shattered skeleton, a Pleistocene warrior, an Andalusian monk, his cowl golden as a bowl of oranges.
New Jersey may hide a study hall where a thousand men sing of the wheat fields of Nebraska, above whose russet plie black birds, pods of dark intent, sweep vivaciously across a pale, then pink, then cobalt sky.
Loneliness may hide a hand of arteries.
A French film may hide a prayer in the alfalfa field, where the mist hovers into the wavering darkness and transient screams of unknown creatures burst from the scrub.
A school may hide a celebration, a sculpture, a railroad train, a horse painted eight thousand colors, confused, selfconscious, grand.
And when concentric circles draw in mystic flight
A ring of naked colors fading into light,
There shall be left a stone, a wind, a cloud--
Amidst the shattered unity within the crowd
A word, a chromosome, a trampled love-lies-bleeding--
The realization one had always felt a kindred heart-beat beating.
HOLY AS A PLOT OF LAND
Holy as a plot of land,
The Torah embraces you.
The Sinai is another world
Where spirit reigns without water.
Water the hills with your feet--
The color of the fruit is the color of eyes,
The color of hands.
The houses in Babylon disintegrate
And only the sound of Torah remains.
But here each brick is holiness.
In Jerusalem I have no dreams,
Only white stones.
THE MESSIAH
Black hats dance like wicks
Of extinguished candles.
The Messiah has come! He is here to wake us!
Respected leaders rush from their homes.
They stand beggared in the turmoil of the street.
Messiah, are you forty years old?
Have you worn a jacket thrown across your shoulders?
The time has not come for unqualified love!
We must rebuild from the ashes,
And publish Torah journals.
The wind uproots all streets and bookstores.
The huddled mourners vaguely shuffle,
Including, in the rear,
Mrs. Gittie Feldman, whom we wish to acknowledge for her yeoman service in typing our latest biograhy of a gadol.
Mrs. Feldman is thinking of her kollel husband and her
beautiful children.
Suddenly, to her horror, she is blown off her feet,
Flying in the Messiah's wind.
What will happen to her chulent?