The Absence of Stone

This is a collection of poems written from about 1980 to 2000.












The Absence of Stone

An artist was given a block of stone
And told:
Carve a depiction
Of the absence of stone.

Everything I say about you
Is a building of bricks
That does not exist.

No wonder Jews pray
At the Western Wall.
Only such stones
Could truly rise
And become nothing.
 
In the Forest

(based on a poem by Rabbi Moshe Wolfson)

I stood beneath the linden tree
Listening to the linnet sing,
The wren, the jay, the raucous crow,
The crescendo of the slow cicada.

The tree stood silent, shrouded in its dream,
In the ease of a stillness that seemed forever.
A breeze caressed a branch.  A sudden gust
Stirred its leaves, rustling like rain.

And then the storm burst down, and spread through the air--
And the forest sang.
Every tree, every bird, every squirrel, every grass -
Whipped by the roistering gale.

Every fieldmouse, every silkvine was a song,
Every hunched rabbit, every soft-eyed fox,
Every particle of forest; all but one, mute and ashamed,
Dismayed, superfluous, alone.

How could I join the song of lightning,
 
The passion of heavy-sailing clouds,
Ashamed that my voice, my frail human voice
Would stain the majesty of tossing trees,

That the turbulent cry of my eddying soul
Would soil the rushing harmony of creeks?
How could I sing with the trees and wind,
The least of men, abashed?

The wind conducted, the forest wildly played,
The hills burst into wide-spread chords,
Raw and sweet.  How could I join them
When my heart was aching, raw and sullied?

Out of my silence, the echo of a voice
Trembled and unfolded from the well of my heart:
"Stand as a man.  Your time has arrived.
The forest awaits your voice.

"Though your hands have disgraced you
And your soul grown coarse as bark,
God desires your voice.
He is praised by your mouth.

"Riding the heavens' majesty,
King above all awesomeness,
 
He listens to the paper-wasp,
To the broken-hearted, to you."

Trees of the forest, sing with me.
My prayer is one chord with you.
God dwells within my empty heart
And gives me joy.

Every tossed bush bearing berries, sing with me,
Every branch lashed by the wind-thrown rain -
From the depth of this scored and earthly forest
Our song is rising beyond the sky.
 
 
The Memory of the Bricks

The sea split.
I saw the dust upon my feet
And the wheels of the chariots thrown high above the sea.
On the other shore, I asked,
"Whose wealth is this that lies upon the shore?"
Moses called, "Take it, it is yours."
But I did not understand.
The kings of Moab and Ammon are discomfited,
And I hear the beating of tambourines.
In this rocky desert, our throats are parched,
But our footsteps never stumble.
The memory of the bricks of slavery
Is sweetened by the beauty
Of the daughter of Israel:
"Beneath the apple trees, I woke you."

 
Some States of the Union

What loaf of bread is floating
Over Texas?
Where are the clothespins of
Alabama?
Why haven't Missouri's pajamas
Returned to their abode?
Oh, the rain on the pine forests
Of southern New Hampshire--
A toad on a mountain path
In Wisconsin told me,
"Do you think you can go anywhere?
Even the boulders of Florida
Are mossy in the cool of day--
You cannot run away--
Please--lie down in the grass in Vermont--
Please--watch the stars as thick as
Aphids on a grass stem in Washington--
Oh!  Oregon she calls to me, calls me!
Across the plains of Nebraska I hear her singing!"
Then I also heard her sing--she said:
"I have not run away!  My trees are quivering,
My streams are raising their waves,
My rivers their mighty currents."
 
I danced.  I danced like a cricket in Connecticut.

 
Sabbath Eve

Souls are floating away
Waving their white fedoras
Beyond Italy,
Beyond Turkey,
Swirling into Israel like white gardenias-
Moshavim like aprons spread on the Negev,
Shabbos twirling like maple seeds,
Night beginning like dark soil
Being washed by sprinklers turning
Like the seven days.

 
Out in the Field the Messiah Is Coming

out in the field the messiah is coming,
imminent in the flat quilt of clouds
tinted brilliant salmon underneath
by the orange, sinking sunlight
creeping into pink sky.
above the rushes and brush, a skidding bat.
out in the field the messiah is imminent,
almost trembling into being.
a muskrat totters across the path and into the brush again,
resolute old man at home.
 
Beneath the Thatch Between Me and Heaven

Beneath the thatch between me and heaven
Water is dripping like honey on my heart,
And I recall you, beyond a wall of stone.
You and all of my heart are entangled in an embrace.
The notes of the piano drip through the air.
I see your face, and your eyes that do not look at me,
And I search for a place for my feet, without earth, without hills,
From my heart that cannot rest in an exile sweeter than honey,
An exile of salt, an exile of rain.
Only I in a white shirt remain, like a lost, abandoned dove,
And Jerusalem and Gilo have forgotten me in their heart.
There is no hope from a rock in the desert,
There is no hope from rain in a tired land,
There is no hope from kisses in a room of fog.
There is no love for the locusts of the land and the hearts of its people.
Shall I speak with the rock?  With an exile like honey
That catches my steps?

 
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.
Loneliness may hide a hand of arteries.
A 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 can hide a celebration, a sculpture, a railroad train, a horse painted eight thousand colors, confused, self-conscious, 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--
Then you shall know that you had always felt a kindred heart-beat beating.

 
 In the Heart of the Highway

In the heart of the highway I am smelling the scrub
I am looking at the large red sky
I am caressing a herb with my nose
I am watching the tall, yellow tree shake its leaves that fall about a woman and two children, flashing onto her yellow sweater, the children lifting their hands.
in the heart of the highway I am watching ducks splash down onto the water,
robins hop amidst the yellow rushes, heads cocked,
drumming woodpeckers, serious at their occupation.
in the heart of the highway I am playing the guitar,
pulling seed barbs out of my beard,
watching the turning birds, black paper cutouts.
in the heart of the highway I find my soul in a red, empty chair
I sit in a decrepit restaurant and order a slab of pitiful fish.
in the heart of the highway I send letters to Jerusalem
I blow a shofar from the depths of the basement.
in the heart of the highway there is a boulder covered with snow
it is a boulder that I have gazed at longingly.
in the heart of the highway there is a little crack and a little flower in the little crack and I bend down to smell the little flower and I am run over by a diesel tractor trailer.
in the heart of the highway a long wind blows through the field.
 
in the heart of the highway there are crumbs on my holy book and I look up and see trees within trees.
in the heart of the highway I am in a phone booth, dynamic and effective.
in the heart of the highway I fling aside science fiction and step out to watch the river of cars
as the universe shakes its veil of silver coins.


 
Love and H2O

I wish love poured like a waterfall through everything--
Love like a silent well.
I used to think that one day I would be smarter than everyone else
But now I know that love is a tidal wave.
If I were the snow I would melt like tears of love.


Love Is Worth Waiting for

Love is worth waiting for.
It is a rose that recreates
The face of creation.
It is the face of the sun that waits

For the dawn, a scythe turning,
A whisper of a rivulet,
The flitter of a wing, a form
That has not yet been set,

Whose meaning still is new.
Love is worth waiting for.
It is the whisper of creation
That lies behind a green and magic door.
 
Slowly, I

Slowly, I
Discover the forest
For myself.

When I danced
In Cote d'Azur,
You were there too.

On the surface of the sea,
Suffuse the spray
With kindness.


Delicious as a Peach

You are as delicious as a peach.
Or is a peach as delicious as you?
Did I forget the peach when I made the blessing?
Did I forget the blessing when I ate the peach?
What exactly was I remembering,
Out in the garden
Under the peach blossoms?
Did I forget to see you,
Or did I forget that I am seeing you?

 
You Who Are Hiding in the Cracks of this Building

You who are hiding in the cracks of this building,
You whose hand emerges from two books on the bookshelf,
You whose face appears upside down in the stairwell,
You who have left footsteps in cake crumbs in the basement,
You whose frantic smile has remained imprinted on this window, looking in,
You whose stump of a hand has remained between the covers of a swiftly-closed book:
Come back in, there are letters that are dancing in your forehead,
Come back in,
Vowels are jumping in the palms of your hands.
If you feel an itch of discomfort,
It is because these spiky musical notations are under your clothing,
Because little crowns are racing up your arm, trying to fit on your head.

I know you are all right.
I saw you fall seven times.
Now, will you please, again, get up?

 
Preliminary Exercises

Raise your head.
Turn an ear to the wind of the world.
The wind is larger than the songs that you have heard before.
The spiritual master has not come to give you a comfortable place to curl up.
The creaking of a cradle rocking in the branches
Is not the song of the prophets.

It starts with an electric buzz in the head,
It starts with an inability to sleep,
With a flea that won't leave your left ear,
With a jittering need to thrust apart the columns of buildings.
Try as you might, you cannot worship idols.

Walk down the street while you dance.
Speak in a pleasant tone of view while you are singing.
Wheel through the supermarket while you stand upon a mountain.
These are preliminary exercises.


 Find the River in Your Dream

You were asleep.  Now you have woken
Into a broader sleep.

Find the river in your dream.
Waterwheels are turning lazily,
A hundred spaced upon the banks,
Feeding the golden fields.

Sail upon the river's broad expanse.
View from its mouth the vastness of the harbor.
Turn the other way, fight your way
To its source, a stream in the unhacked jungle.

 
Mudslides

Are you racing through the mudslides of the world?
Are you watching a shadowy statue at the street corner
Whom you take to be yourself?

There is a fir tree
Whose cones speak to you,
Whose branches beat with the pulse
Of a living world.
When your hands open,
The gates of heaven open.

 
Why Has the Comet Fallen?

Why has the comet fallen into the sea?
Why has the pelican strayed?
Why do the squirrels stand at their posts at midnight,
Watching you skulk between them?
Why do the skunk, the porcupine, the groundhog
Scatter before you like scrabbling leaves?
What is it that they know?
Each is carrying the spark of its own life,
And you
Are carrying someone else's spark
In your coat pocket.
How brazen your songs all sound.

Now take a step
Into the park you call yourself.
See, the November wind is your wind,
The newly-minted sky features a moon upon its pale blue skin
Like a grinning, floury heart.
It does not matter if you never dance
When you are inside your own dance,
When even before you can begin to speak,
Your arms and legs are singing.

 
 When All the Waters Split in Two

After eating so much matzah,
Have we set off in a ship sailing on a sea of soup?
Egg volumes and olive volumes seem to litter the vast interior plains.
After so many cups of wine,
Have we aged until we can see the crown
Of the Ancient King?
After so much story-telling,
Do we see a trace of our own stories?
And then before dawn,
When all the waters that sailors sail upon
In their sleep
Split into two
In the crevice in the midst of our heart,
Something was dislodged,
The buzzing of a fly,
Baal Tzefon crumbled,
Walls of ice collapsed behind us from a dizzying height,
And we stirred in our sleep.
Then we sang,
In the immemorial murmur of the soul,
Then the shore glinted with the ornaments of crushed chariots
And Miriam lifted the tambourine.
 
When You Give a Bouquet to Your Beloved

Count your blessings.  There are forty nine.
The ones that you can’t count aren’t blessings.
They’re a halo.
Are you a scattering of cosmic light
Or a star, a moon, a sun?
Newton merely described the sun.
Wherever he looked, he saw only the sun,
And thus, he saw its flaws.
He saw the flaws burned onto his retina.
We are stars without number
Contained within a number.
When you give a bouquet to your beloved,
You know the number of roses.
But something else is being exchanged.
What is the fiftieth rose?
Who knows?
On that day, we all go home.
It is a good day to listen to horns.
Ruth and Naomi together are bringing a swaddled child,
A cup of blessing,
Wine that goes to your head.

 
There Is a Lion Prowling this Synagogue

We are looking for lions to gather us at last.
Reach down to the ground.
Here is a plant whose deepest roots
Are watered by the rains of heaven.
Look what spices grow.
And see how lions roam these cultivated fields.
You are sitting behind a bench, behind a pew,
As though no one would see you.
What evil scent are you concealing?
As though the most painful thing in the world
Is to be visible.
Come on.
There is a lion prowling this synagogue.
He is looking for you.


 See How Beautifully the Trees Undulate

See how beautifully the trees undulate.
Look out the window onto the world.
There is so much of us, so much of the world,
Contained within the allness of God.
Let us with our looking
Gather together everything that we see.

In Van Gogh’s paintings,
How the light does shine.
And how vivid are the images of God.

We look out from the shadows
Onto the great light.
What shadows they are!
They are the clear-cut details of our lives
Before the light-washed fields.

All the world sleeps with us,
Although the sun is blazing.
From the dark coolness of this room
Comes the quiet of the world,
And its blazing beauty
Shines through our repose.
 
 
Everything Is a Oneness

Everything is a oneness.
Every rock is part of a story of boulders.
We too are part of a story that gazes down on galaxies.
Music is like that.
It flows amidst the pebbles
And we feel it flowing through our veins.
It is a cataract pouring from our heart.
We are pregnant with a new oneness.
The eagle in the sky is recreating itself.
You and I, the eagle, the sun
Are all part of great lesson.
The entire lesson appears in the whorls of one thumbprint,
In the whorls of two thumb prints pressed together.

 
The Sea Called the Night

What a storm wind this one word comes out of,
What a flood of spilled dreams.
We ride a ship of words of Torah
Through the sea called the night,
And at dawn a line of love illuminates the east,
And on the ruddy plain, we see Abraham camping.
Such words of Torah,
Canoes shot through narrow rapids,
Bring us to forget ourselves
Before the Maker of this tremendous valley,
This insouciant globe.
And when our heart turns within us,
How much of a nothing do we become,
And the light of our shame
Illuminates the world.
It is the sun of the tefillin
Upon which the nations gaze in awe.
This is the unbound energy of our song.

 
the tent of changing colors

I do not know why
rainbows do not appear on our faces
silence does not appear as an outcry
silence does not descend bearing words.
if you have wandered through a city of laws
and cannot even keep your neck clean,
then in the green pasture
perhaps your hands will soar.
these are two paths
they are one path
clap your hands together
in their hollow is jerusalem.
in the borderlands, wings fly without birds
elsewhere, sullen  birds stamp about
preaching how to fly.
one day we will meet in the tent
of changing colors
the sun will take the hand of the moon.
say something
that comes from silence.


 The Juxtaposition of Heaven and Earth

If not for the juxtaposition of heaven and earth,
Women might marry men of hideous visage,
Sons might move their fathers’ beds.
As it is,
Strands of wool, cables that hang from heaven,
May grasp the smooth flax of this world--
For sometimes there are no juxtapositions.

Waves of light are particles;
Particles of light read men’s minds,
An angel sits on a beam of light and straddles timelessness.

In the juxtaposition of the leaves against the sky,
The paradox of the world is enmeshed.
In the juxtaposition of feet upon solid ground,
An irreducible mystery exists.

 
The Laws of the Bath

Rabbi Elazar ben Chisma said: The laws of bird sacrifices and the beginnings of the menstrual cycle are the essence of the law; astronomy and mathematics are condiments to wisdom (Pirkei Avot 3:23).

The laws of the bath, those lingering rivers,
Those melting snowbanks, those sibilant rivulets,
Those pools reflecting brilliant paradise
And moonlight tumbling on trembling wetness,
Laws of blurred tracings like lentils or beads,
Of rust stains, white washes, color of soil,
Rotations of weeks like slow water wheels
Are more exalted than the morning star,
Than the cap of heaven, the black canopy
Studded by constellations ceaselessly circling,
And the roll of seasons, the endless cycle,
The majestic tides of time and fields,
Of mountains crumbling, of winds careening,
Of the shifting of clouds in the cornices of sky,
The sphere of the zodiac spun by God’s hand,
The slow progression of spring to summer,
Then stinging wind, sharp as a scorpion
And snowy fields of the forever archer,
The dead lying buried, mothers bearing children,
 
These twins of creation that yearn for completion--
Their source is the blood on the brash hands of David,
Who returned from the war-field, the desert-dry wadi,
To return wife to husband, bring winter to spring,
To remove the rough brambles from the labyrinth rosebush
And fall at the phoenix flame of the altar.

 
In the Shimmer of Air

In the shimmer of air
Before the evergreen trees,
The roar of a distant sea
Splits your heart
Like midnight.
And the arms of a child
Shine whiter than the moon.

 
The Grass Sang So Loudly


The grass sang so loudly,
How could I hear my book?

My heart sang so loudly,
How could I hear the world?

There is a tablet on top of a mountain.
It is frightening to step over the threshold.
The entrance swings shut,
Your heart beats.
You are in a cluster, a profusion of bushes,
Peach-colored flowers, vivid hummingbirds.
Suddenly, you rush, frame past frame
Of broadening gardens, exhilarated.
This is beyond anything you imagined
When you dove into the forest of Jerusalem.

 
Those Creatures Who Were Hard as Bone

Those creatures who
Were hard as bone
Now lend the world
A softened tone.

Those creatures who
Drew down the night
Now bring the world
Renewed delight.

Those creatures who
In silence came
Now radiate
Words’ inner flame.

Those creatures who
Awoke distress
Now bring a doubled
Thankfulness.
 
 
Embarrassed Before Men

Embarrassed before men, you
Fell, a tumbling blur upon the
Gap-toothed rocks--blood-blinded, porcupine-curled; un-
Til your eyes saw only red and only, then, stone white.

Grow blameless in the sight of
God, and from the desert climb the
Dry, bush-stumbling slopes; on the white-burned boule-
Vard, feel your shame-heavy heart become a wisp of light.

 
First Fruits

In this basket, place the fruits
That swelled from nothingness, that hung
In silence, apple planets in leaf-green skies.
God talks to us through clay and journeys; lift this basket,

Express this truth: stone alone
Is a miracle, the quiver
In nothing, the gruel of star-clouds, the rules; these
Float in nothingness, no mind can see around their globe.

And yet upon this hill you
Stand, you speak, wind blows yellow leaves,
And in this world the voice of unknowable
Wonder walks, and, from barren rocks, grace flows.  These olives

In your basket, fat figs seed-
Bursting, require eyes that are not
Dust, eyes that know: that the ground of being can’t
Be seen: this joy, from somehow sky, from wind: this first fruit.

 
You Are Standing Here Today   

You are standing here today.
Where you are, then, stand.  Where you stand
Joy, rejoice in God, ecstasy, you are clothed
In robes of freedom, a cloak of charity, take joy.

You are standing here today
To cross into the covenant,
Not only you, everyone, for even those
Who do not stand with us today will swear this vow, will

Blossom like the land, will blaze
Charity and praise.  Do not be
Silent, do not be still, says Jerusalem,
Shine, charity, blaze like a jewel-bright torch, redemption.

Before us, heaven and earth
Testify: choose good. Emperors will see your glory,
The mouth of God will name you, beautiful crown,
Diadem in the hand of your king, Desired One.

 
Reflections on a Glossy Catalogue

Those bands of gods, goddesses,
Of labyrinths, candle-burning
Pagans, drum-beats, meditative priestesses,
Nature-green equality, coastline explorations,

Wrestling visions, video-
Moon ceremonies, still always
Empty, seeking the vision of the falling
Shadow, no more this wrestling, limb-strewn world, collapsing.

Yet baroque, rococo swirls
Of law, of heaven, soul color
Architecture, elaborate as arteries
Acquired in pain and never sleeping, this flesh-wrought life,

This holiness, this cup we
Do not recognize, these banished
Rituals, these heavy rules--these burdens sing,
These heavy shoes, these history-hunched black living bones.

 
Colors

You see no colors any more,
No flashes from a distant shore,
Your eyes are parched like grass.
And though you march to righteous war,
Repeating vows your fathers swore,
No wonders come to pass.

The scarlet flags on foreign grass,
The blaring flash of beaten brass,
The iridescent door,
The bright, reflecting looking glass,
The rainbows glowing, piled en masse...
At home, your heart saw more.
 
Why is all My Money in a Foreign Bank?

Why is all my money in a foreign bank?
When I count my cash,
A heavy sleep falls over me,
It turns to sand and slips between my fingers.

What good does the sun do to me
If it is the light from yesterday?

It is hard to stop eating chocolate
Once you have developed a taste for it.
The most precious delicacies can be passed beneath your nose,
And you merely sniff:
"But does it smell like chocolate?"

Inside the treasurehouse, the treasure is heavy and ponderous.
Everywhere I see a key.
I have fallen in love with keys.
Or have I merely seen as a key
Everything that I have fallen in love with?

There can be no better friend than a teacher.
But what demands he starts to make!
At first, gather the treasure directly about you.
 
There is nothing more after that.

You who are the eye of the universe,
Before whom we appear to ourselves,
I don't know which is your silence and which is your speech.

We dance in a circle, holding a Torah scroll.
Then we give it to someone else, and we are dancing with nothing.
What are we dancing with then?

 
Why We Dance in a Circle

When there is nothing to say,
Is it because of emptiness,
Or...what?
Ennui is a garden of rotting onions.
Tomatoes are nice: love-apples.
And then there are cucumbers, cool and patient.

Oh, just walk along this rutted old road.
Be patient.
Watch the flapping tongues of your crumpled old boots.

In prayer,
We are not supposed to raise our eyes.
How is it that looking downwards,
We see to the heavens?

In the midst of activities,
The heart knows her purpose.
But the bottom of the heart is raging.
In the midst of thought,
The mind knows its clarity.
But the bottom of the mind is frightened.
 
A Couple of Thoughts

It isn't that I don't speak to you--
But that when I was speaking to you,
I was not speaking to you.

I have been beating my breast fruitlessly.
It isn’t that I didn’t mean it.
I was merely trying to locate my heart.
 
When I Behold this Full-mouthed, Squat-heeled World

When I behold this full-mouthed, squat-heeled world,
These dulled exteriors, blunt and running blind,
These squalid, bleary scraps of hopes down-hurled,
These muddy blurs of weary souls, resigned
To dreary, balky frets, I low and bend
My heavy eyes to gaze upon the ruck
Of baffled roads that reach a garbled end
Where gleaming serpents writhe amidst the muck.
But when I raise my eyes to rough-scraped scarp
That clings against a wind that burns like lime,
Blazing with a cyan fire so sharp
It shrivels up the hands that claw at time,
     I feel this rough-whorled bulk of me spin round,
     And then I hear your azure voice resound.
 
In Memoriam

Where words conclude, this clotted clay remains,
These thuds of earth that more than any speech
Remind us of your slip to sad domains,
A fearful peace that none of us can reach.
Is there no more than tattered realms of pain,
Than accidents whose sudden incidence
Shatters into crazy porcelain
The silent peace we seek with reverence?
You are no youth, for spirits have no age
And now you gaze beyond this cramped facade,
But no pacific saint or counseling sage
Can say why “Levites shall be brought to God.”
We still recall your joy three weeks ago,
Although we knead that joy with mortal woe.
 
Three Who Have Eaten at One Table (Pirkei Avot 3:3)

Eat, at this table, the reeking, fen sacrifice
To tree-bole gods with cloven hooves and eyes of ice,
Eat before jade Janus, strangled by white age
And raven rage.

Eat, at this table, and hear the clattering, caustic noise
(While silent women slide with deathly, silent poise)
Of men collapsing drunk, as the mountain-demon dreams
Of lava streams.

We scramble up the slope of shale-slipping shame,
Till even idols offer incense to His name.
 
There Is One Belief for this Man Without Belief

There is one belief for this man without belief
And his sullen burden seeks a desperate relief,
As the stones rain down and the bullets wash the hill,
And the synagogues are burning.

There is one belief for this man without belief:
That he can rule the hangman, the procurer and the thief,
As the stones rain down and the bullets wash the hill,
And the outposts are burning.

And his sullen burden seeks a desperate relief:
The displeasure of the world brings him hungry, heavy grief,
As the stones rain down and the bullets wash the hill,
And the cities are burning.

As the stones rain down and the bullets wash the hill
He is warning of his prowess, while the eager children kill,
And his sullen burden seeks a desperate relief,
And the suburbs are burning.

And the synagogues are burning on the mountain and the plain
And he’s raptured by a vision swift and empty as the rain.
There is one belief for this man without belief,
 
And his sullen burden seeks a desperate belief.

 
Learn to Walk

Learn to walk as you weep.
And if you have sewn tightly your eyes,
If you no longer see
The black cloak of the casket
Planted in the earth that gives dust and stones only,
Then scratch open your moon-crescent eyelids, red with the dusk,
And free the vowels of your cotton mouth, now, and speak,
Breathe freely and speak now, speak truth.
 
In the Drunken Air

In the drunken air,
The shining white of God’s city
Will be stripped of sin, and of that stunning
Madness: blind preachers leading pilgrim
Eyes to ruin.

Now may the beggars banging broken canes
No longer cry bruised praise
To fire-hungry knives that whirr, to wolves
That howl, bite at the moon,
And bury their snouts in offal
That the regnant soldiers crave.

Walk on streets scrubbed eggshell white
To that ragged miracle we seek:
No more stones, no more hearts
Of snarling dogs, no more skill
In killing, but, to our heart’s question,
The freedom song that the white air sings.
 
The Sheaves of Our Land

Who is a master, and who
is a friend? Do we worship our
Hills of bronze?  Do we bow to the sheaves of our
Land?  Do we not wash the dust from our feet, do we not

Trust Abraham?  He who was
Ashes and dust, he was no more
Than a friend.  Did you meet him, do you recall
How he ran to serve you?  Did you realize that he, he

Was your master?  And the hills
Of bronze were your servants, and the
Kings of Sodom were his beggars, he withheld
No gift, did you despise him as he ran to serve you?

Did he show you his thoughts, did
You think, he is no more than I?
In his presence he made you as great as he.
Make of these sheaves good bread, break bread with him now, good friend.
 
Here These Lights

Here
These lights
Shatter the
Clattering, brown,
Round husk, and now you
See the lights of all the
Lonely, empty city, too
Are lights of holiness, they shine.

Everywhere, the gleaming lights are
Singing, everywhere they dance,
Swift dragonflies. Feel them
In your breast, you are
A golden flame,
Slow molten
Single
Flame.
 
The Law and Song

The law and song together flamed,
They swallowed the lights of darkness.
From the inexpressible black
Their light emerged, their light was named

Counsel, joy, it collected words,
Till light was wrapped in the black straps
Of law, until song stitched the stars--
These two friends, these twin-swooping birds.
 
The Singing Cone

If you see in no one fair fates’ sparkling,
And if you do not see
The depth of glass,

If you’ve risen from
The bed of endless dreams, uneasy youth,

And looked into the eyes
Of men who long had stood as towering rocks
And seen them now as mere

Remnants of a flag,
Then cry, then walk among them boldly, blue

Kerchief, blue fir tree, blue ocean of eyes
Drowned in the passion of
Yearning for men

Who are men more than
You, who are visionary spars piercing

Blue sky, where you are a
Moon
 
That sails on the cusp of

A cloud, swaddled in
Dreams, if you only were rocked to your grave.

Sing without stars, bird without sky, without
Dreams, without fields green as
Hands that swaddle

Your head.  Sing without
Men

Who trample your fate, whose
Ice-
Water smoothness melts in

The green sun of smooth-
Sing-

Ing you.  Look, see your hands are forming
This dawn, electric as
Red fire upon

The wounded wing, the
Feet walking upon

 
Sparstone, start singing, man,
For you are the sole man

On the singing val-
Ley, the singing cone.
 
 His Red Mind Ran

His red mind ran
with the taste of schoolyards
with the astonishing wind
with the swaying thought
of the sky.

Was there a green song
whose acid-tart burr
flowed print silk
upon the river of his breaking dreams,
sweet dragonflies blistered
under the honey of sun
music?

This was the tilting tune
whose bright eyes blinked
beneath the clouds,
whose bright-yellow words
filled the rough fiber
of his stuttering heart.
 
There Is No Word

There is no word that, come down to this world,
Will not shine, will not, bright and wise, flame,
Will not, like green woods, spread out scents,
Send shoots, spear leaves to the sky,
Frail green, pale shade of sky.

And these tears of all the globe, of rank, snake-spoiled tree limbs, crushed
By heels on lone mud trails,
These tears grope in the heart, then glow upon the face
Of braids of cloud, proud moon road
Track of flame shifts, quick, then slow as years’ steps.
 
The Information of This Body

Your cave of ice transmutes
and becomes
the Aegean-green highway
and the hidden cornfield
of hay scents
and petal sky.

--The transmigration of feet,
the blossoming of snow footsteps,
the migration of elephants
across a slow plain,
the dried water hole whispering toads,
the branch before an iron-rim horizon,

the information of this body
and the gold of this desire
to eat the invisible air
around the haloed ordinary
and the dog-bark sheen,--

again we will meet
and these glistening images
these pheasant memories
 
bursting from the brown grass,
this explosion of oval sound
will never disappear

and be glad, therefore,
draw in the cape
about this jade globe
and weep
the scarlet river springs
and enter the crevices
and be the many voices
that you watch
and the snake coiling upon the branch
and the green child below.
 
Oh, Let Us Learn

Oh let us learn
the language of the gentiles
and their sciences
and sing with Yiddish eyes
in the sickly sweet jungle,
and fly upon the exhaust
of a heavy-bellied aircraft
releasing its wheels
upon a city of robust idols.
Their color turns to emptiness
and the words of this ancient chant
do not, to your surprise,
bring the final flood.

Oh let us sing the gladness
of this body, let us breathe
the forests that it brought us to,
let us climb upon its hands.
it is the field of souls,
and the heat of the hour
is honeycomb upon our snow palms’
invisible blue sphere.
 
Oh let us sink into the water
of this earth.
our eyes are shining,
we have not seen a holy tree,
a heel whose thunder blazed a heart
that was a god,
oh let this shining casket rise upon the skin
of black jaguar water.
 
To Say Less

To say less, and less, and less,
Until only one word is left:
A home,
A scythe
In the first Spring.
 
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.
 
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.
 
I Died, and as I Did, Recalled

I died, and as I did, recalled
When I, aged 30, swiftly scrawled
Our names on an Italian registry
And had a strong epiphany,

An epiphany that I’d foreseen
When I was only seventeen,
Crossing a country road in July
When a marvellous insect caught my eye,

An insect that I later thought of often,
Even as I was laid in my coffin,
And earlier when I was forty-five
And feeling once more again alive

After twelve years battling a melancholy
That dissipated when it felt the holy
Rays of the influence of meditation,
Which I had begun after my accreditation

That I had sought to be a professor of math--
For I was fascinated by the path
Of oblongs, circles and an infinite line
 Since I had been a boy of nine--

Had been approved. And now
Never again would I watch a cow
Yoked, work slowly across a field
And feel my tensed muscles yield

To the Mediterranean sun,
For the race was over, and had I won?
I didn’t recall, for now I was a boy
Feeling for the very first time, a coy

Embarrassment, one that repeated
When I was twenty-nine and my face heated
When a girl laughed at me, and now our child
Whom we had raised to be somewhat wild,

Who smoked a pipe and sported an earring
Had been driving the car and not watching his steering.
And now I recall all there is to recall,
For spring never ends, nor does ever the fall.
 
The Temperate Zone

It was time that I took my Immelmann turn,
So I pulled back the throttle and let the fuel burn,
And the earth spun beneath in a streak of brown-green,
I shot swiftly to heaven with the smell of gasoline,
Saw the sunlight on water like bright damascene.

It was long past dark when my plane descended,
The pavilions had closed, the recitals had ended,
And scattered by the wind across the camp grounds
Were the scraps of paper of an old hare and hounds,
An owl and a freight train were the only two sounds.

I had found where the mussels, hugging the coast,
Had petered to gray; I’d gone further than most.
The wind reminded me of a long-ago day
When I cared about jewels that drifted away
Like clouds on the shoulders of a mutable day.

In an ice-walled valley, one time (I recall),
Above the coarse gravel, I felt the engine stall.
The wind beat like wings, I fell like a stone,
Then the spark bridged the gap and with a straining drone
I turned the plane back to the temperate zone.
 
A Very Wise Man Sat Wearing a Turban

A very wise man sat wearing a turban.
The season was winter and the setting was urban.
He had preached so long to others, he figured,
As he rubbed his lean fingers together and sniggered,

Some of it must have rubbed off on him.
The lights in his capacious skull grew dim.
I’m not corrupt, he thought, just tired.
When I was twenty-one I was youthful and fired,

But now–sigh!–I just give advice.
At least I don’t have a more felonious vice.
So he closed his eyes and counted his beads–
And reflected upon his income and other needs.

Meanwhile, in a corner of the room, brutally clashing,
A spider and mosquito–one sparring, one thrashing–
Danced. The mosquito writhed and beat its wings
And the spider heartlessly wrapped it in sticky strings,

Till at last the gruesome job was done,
Till the executioner spider had clearly won
And he hovered over his precious prize,
 
Wary of any movement before his carnelian eyes–

When another spider, one of swifter agility,
Sidled forward, and displaying superior ability
Attacked the first spider, who had for so long battled,
But who now fled the field, clearly rattled.

It was unfair! But what is fair?
The mosquito lay dying. But who was aware?
There was no neat moral here for summation,
For here was no hope, no love, no elation,

These elements writhed beyond man’s ken
In a domain never set to paper by pen,
And this was the answer to the wise man’s prayers,
But he was dressed for winter and wrapped in layers.
 
Do Not Cuddle in the Puddles

Do not cuddle in the puddles in the park.
Do not stumble into brambles in the dark.
Do not bite your tongue or slip off the rung,
Or complain about the food or music that has been miscued,
Don’t reject the gray of clouds or the trampling of the crowds
Or the cawing of the crows or the melting of the snows
Or the scratching of the thorn or the blasting of the horn
Or the scratching of the beetle or the sewing of the needle
Or the rustling of the silk or the curdling of the milk
Or the flying through the sky or the dislocated thigh.
Don’t complain about the mist or the snakes that hissed
The path of weeds, the scratch that bleeds,
The sudden glare, the too-bright air,
The sudden cliff, the puzzling glyph,
The spray of wave, the ocean cave,
The skipped beat, the morning street,
The comet somersaulting through the black, vast night,
Slowly tumbling into haloed, white-haired light.
 
Jacob Rolled the Stone

Jacob rolled the stone
Off the well of tears,
Which rose and coursed in his veins
Like a swelling wave.

He gave the gift
Of these heavy waters
To the shepherds who had stood aimless,
Looking towards each other.

With the strength of this water,
He kissed Rachel,
And it flowed like a river
And Rachel wept.

He rolled the stone off his heart
And the veins of the earth swelled
And the dogs of war smelled it
And ran barking along its course.

But for Jacob’s children it was water,
It coruscated in the sunlight,
It glinted in the rivers of Poland
 
In hard, frozen nights.

Frederick Nietzsche could not drink this water,
Nor could Martin Luther,
And the dwellers of the desert
Love the dusk-rusted, ancient dunes.

Roll the stone off the well.
These are your waters,
They are the waters that have flowed
Since the kiss of Jacob and Rachel.
 
A Dusty Man

A dusty man was walking on a dusty road.
Near him the ancient water flowed,
Placid, glinting, smoothly-muscled,
And he glanced at where he once had tussled

With this angel and with that.
But why do it any more? He sat
On a convenient stone and lit a cigar.
He tried to pray, but his thoughts took him far,

Far away to the stock market and his wife
And his attempt to piece together a life.
“Has it ever occurred that someone came
(He thought) and pronouncing an awesome name

Attempted to arouse his whole
True self, to lift his body and soul
Where any respectable soul should be found
In prayer or thought, where souls abound?”

The man gazed out at the distant shore
And saw a boat pass and heard the splash of an oar
And saw the silver sprinkle of water dripping
 
And his hands on his thighs were tentative and slipping.

“And yet (he thought), this man’s soul was not there.
It had gone to the therapist, where, in his chair,
It reflected on life and on fear and hope
And on children and diapers and how marketeers cope,

Till he brought back to his deserted lair
Fear and smallness, and he dragged in despair
And his prayers were filled with the breath of the street
Where deals are cut and small men cheat,

And his bones were filled with the air of finance
And his heels scratched his soul in their frantic dance
And the horizon he had seen ten years before
Now scrunched up and stood outside his small door.”

This dusty man turned into nothing but dust
And he burned with a flame of oxidized rust,
So that a bystander saw only sparks by the river
And the quick-heated air gave a spasmodic shiver.
 
Flame Now

In-
Side, you
Are filled with
Earth, the bees form
A crawling beard and
Robe, you are the barn of
The world, oh, filled with offal,
And stars shine in your black vacuum.

And
Meanwhile
Amalek
In his pious
Humiliation
Ruts for the fetid reek
Of death. A cool firefly will
Rejoice with light; snakes, with venom.

Thus,
Brilliant
Aurora
Or sputtering,
Spitting flame, flame now.
 
You only have this light.
Flame now, or on your black bed
You will look back and see no stars.
 
The Abyss

Seek truth like a pea inside a pod
Or in the street or in your tub,
In the realm where colors have bled
And left a reality where the only sight of life is one grub

And people are walking around as if they’re awake
And it’s strange because in a day or two you’ll be dead too
And everything black and white will look as though it’s colored.
And this is just another brand of something true,

Yet in the greater universe it’s a lie.
So there were the Jews in Egypt. They made a living,
Even the ones who disdained kiddush clubs
And worked hard on themselves to be joyous and forgiving,

The ones who were conformists and the ones who were original,
And what made the miracles terrible was that they caused such fear.
It wasn’t so bad when the Egyptians were scared,
But when that terror came inside and touched you here–

Well, that was a truth that you could put off till later,
A miracle that pushed you off into the abyss
Of who and where you really should be,
 
And it wasn’t just walking around in transcendent bliss

But it threatened everything you had collected.
No wonder those Jews kept going off track,
No wonder they kept going astray and looking for an easier solution,
No wonder they kept twisting their heads and looking back,

They were being led straight to the abyss,
A sea, a desert, starvation, thirst,
Then the great terror at Mt. Sinai,
And then–last, so perhaps worst–

Just living it upon the Promised Land.
And just when we were getting used to snakes and scorpions too!
You know, every time we get comfortable and fix the couch just right
And we’ve figured out how to do everything that we’re supposed to do–!
 
And I Think of a Trip That Benjamin Took

And I think of a trip that Benjamin took.
He may have been sly and he may have shook
But nothing could get him off the hook
Of being a human. And his trail and his road
Were clumsy but bright. In his knapsack he’d stowed
A knife and a light. When he came to the pillar
At the center of the world, he had the miller
Grind him some wheat, which he ground into bread
And placed in the street. And the light caught the dust
Raised by the beggars’ heels. And he drank wine red as rust
And for a hundred meals they reclined together, just as free
As any member of the Roman aristocracy,
Because we unbind one bandage and bind another,
Walk the linear path, yet each soul is our brother.
 
Your Shadow Is Hiding Behind the Couch

Your shadow is hiding behind the couch,
As meanwhile you proudly strut and slouch,
And the wall of stones stands before your eyes
And the streets blow dust, and in grand disguise
Souls are jostling in the grocery stores
Buying nuts and harps and tiles for the floors.
And your own personal plum on your personal plate
Is the most interesting plum that I ever ate,
I’ll put out a CD where I’ll definitely state
That the path of that plum, through the orchard and gate,
Through the air and the barn and the stones of the street
Where the dust and the birds and the soldiers meet
Is a saga, a drama, a tale bittersweet–
And I find that each story teller is photogenic,
And each story I hear slightly hallucinogenic,
And the questions we ask so Platonic, Socratic
And my heart starts to shiver, awaiting the ecstatic
Take-off to where? My shoes on the dusty
Stones are still scuffed and my ears are still musty,
And the streets are flowing with all sorts of souls,
Some eating bananas, some wrapped in fur stoles,
Some rattling silver inside empty bowls,
Some digging for coins, some avoiding the holes,
 
Is your story mine? Is my story yours?
There’s a secret engagement behind secret doors
Where a hundred enthusiasts sway and splurge
In a song of delight that sounds like a dirge
And I want to stay and I’ve got the urge
To stand at the corner and watch traffic merge.
It’s real above and it’s real below
But somehow in the middle we rarely know.
Those who have questions preach solutions,
Addled philosophers, former Confucians,
Gurus who now perform sacred ablutions,
And pilgrims who wash off the latest pollutions
And mothers who keen for their sons who don’t marry,
And Chaim with long peyos who once was called Harry,
And bottles of oil and bottles of wine
And ten stars in heaven (ten, not eleven, ten, not nine)
Oh what a ferment, oh what a clamor,
You barely can keep in control of your grammar.
Where fresh fish are sold, who needs a sign?
Where light’s the hor d’oeuvre on which acolytes dine
And the service is slow and the view is divine.
 
If You Have Inherited Nothing

If you have inherited nothing, give it all
To the beggars. With what gall
They ask questions, but they are ready to take any answer you give,
Floating down like snow sown through a sieve.
You know they have already bought your wares,
For none of them dares
Rummage through the empty bins
Of shredded days and grab-bag sins.
They are sitting at the corners of the street
And washing their feet
In the water that was soaked in barley, their hearts are ripped
And their tongues have been dipped
In the ink of darkness. Out of the stalk
Of your green celery heart, a hawk
Fights his way upward. What have you received?
Your packet of letters is wilted and many-leaved.
And the wise men still say today what they said
When you sat in your cave in hope and dread,
Except that this time you are older than they are
And you are the wise man whose tongue is ajar
And you walk on two legs, what a ridiculous sight
To see a man stumble through darkness and light.
 
Cumin

The susurrus of gentle wings was faintly
Murmuring, and I felt saintly
In the immemorial elms. That blasted susurrous
Was bearing us
Along, pell-mell, and those gentle wings
Were making pings
Across my windshield.
My camel kneeled.
Oh sky that fell from heaven, oh
How I slept under the kikayon tree, so
Slowly did I seem to wake, but not, this time (I thought)
A false awakening. This time, I had brought
My electric toothbrush, my electric eyes
(My hair was hennaed with expensive dyes),
My nostrils twitched, my mood was fey,
And all the happy, live-long day
I watched the pregnant banners snap
And droop and bravely strain and flap,
And saints were standing everywhere,
Some with musky, hennaed hair,
By the heavenly gates at the foot of the stair,
And I tried (I swear) not to stare,
I bravely ate my traveler’s gruel
 
Pretending that I spoke the lingo. A jewel
Beyond compare adorned my finger
But, not having been hired as an inspired singer,
I elected to let it sparkle on the table.
Some people, at any rate, preferred watching cable.
Oh susurrus of wings beating gently
And the Diesel fuel smell of my old English Bentley
Beat in gusts of hot, oily scent,
And I was spent
And in the middle of my fervent prayers
I drifted off to sleep, where in repeating layers
I saw the dust, the unfinished walls, the wiring
Where all the would-be saints were tiring.
And, being no more than a stumbling human,
I drowned my rice in earthy cumin,
Which left vague traces of a secret, fragrant,
That wandered in the alleys, scuffling and vagrant.
I checked in on saints and on books, and wearing my pajamas
I watched the unfolding saintly dramas
(And my own job was fixing all the commas)--
 
Pull in Your Belly

Pull in your belly, do all your routines,
Floss your teeth and eat your greens,
Get on line and wait your turn,
Watch the swift horizon burn,
Don’t be lazy, learn to drive,
Keep your hungry flame alive,
Return your books and pay the fine,
Fill out the forms and stand on line,
Shop and get the things you need,
Don’t be distracted by the weed,
The shiftless shifting of the ground,
The moon-tossed howling of the hound.
 
The Tree

I was climbing the tree of oblivion.
There was no one to talk to
And my own mouth
Was a cotton blossom, sprung against my palate.
The tree soared into the foggy regions
Where castles appeared in the sun-flecked mist
And I climbed the tree of oblivion
To the realm of blue-black heaven.
And I climbed the tree of oblivion
And I gazed on a swift river of blood,
And from it I rose
To a cool, ice-blue water
That flowed through the air of my senses
And I climbed the tree of oblivion
So that the orange ball of the sun lay at my feet,
So that orange trapdoors opened in all my limbs
And the dark blue universe streamed down
And the billows of purple clouds
And the billowing curtains of red and gold.
And the tree of oblivion rose.
It rose higher than my head,
It rose higher than myself standing on my shoulders
And myself standing again on those shoulders.
 
The tree of oblivion rose.
The roads were alive with their own movement
Like a harp whose strings hummed with electric current
Of silver, of green and yellow,
And the tree of oblivion rose.
 
I Spied an Elephant in the Room

An elephant stood in the room
While neatly, with a well-kept broom,
The scholar shuffled, bent his back,
And swept out every dustless crack.
And as the elephant gave a shriek,
The scholar gained in his mystique.
And as the elephant smashed the floor,
He shined the doorknob on the door,
And wondered that his audience
Had shrunk, despite his eloquence.
 
I Caught It

I caught a pickle in the road,
I scythed a swath and found a toad,
And when I wore my clowning suit
I soon received your size nine boot.

I took conniptions from the young,
I squeezed grape jelly from my lung
And smiling as I blithely danced,
I found my life was soon enhanced

By dugongs dancing on the shore
Suspenders in the general store,
Cicadas jumping in my tea,
And crabs that scarcely could agree.

I saw your head, I saw your tail,
I read your heart in dots of braille,
I wondered where the wigwam stood,
And treasure buried in the wood.

I plied the waters of the Nile,
I never dared to touch the dial,
I wandered, skipped, and scarcely grieved,
 
I felt a rage, and I was peeved,

The tide ran out, the tide drove in,
And merit was exchanged for sin,
And breakers broke, the moon shone bright,
And footsteps showed both black and white

And here again the air did burn
In charcoal hues, the taciturn
Boulders shone with spraying spume
And comets in the sky did bloom.
 
Tell Me What You Think and I Will Snore

Tell me what you think and I will snore.
And then I’ll tell you what I think
And you can shut the door.
And we can watch the water swirling down the drain.
And we can sand the wrinkles in our brain
And let them soak out in the rain.
And we can hear sermons by the score,
As our brain waves creep and slither on the floor,
Or listen to the cicada thrum of the universe,
(The diffuse refuse of the Big Bang, blah, blah, blah)
And watch the night burst, snow-white, from its pupal purse
And in our breathless darkness blink a frog-note “Ah!”
 
The Lion Burns

The lion burns. He grows invisible.
A plume of smoke rises from his head,
He is nothing.

Behind him a lion crouches.
His heart is empty, broken.
Out of the lion comes sweetness.
This lion needs no honey.

Out of this lion comes the light of the face
And abundance
And a golden ecstasy.
And his heart takes up no room and no space,
And means nothing to anyone.
In it a princess hides behind a curtain.

This is the City of the Lion,
And lions pace the street.
 
The Fog Was Green

The fog was green
Or it was the color of charcoal
That rested on the grass
Until the blue chalk of the sky,
And the two frogs croaked,
Together, though not together,
Like the ticking of a clock of thoughts
On a vast and windy sky.
 
Inquire of the Leaf

Inquire of the leaf
What it thinks about the tree
What it thinks about the night,
Of rudeness or civility?

What it thinks about the lake,
What it thinks about the sky,
What it thinks about the lights
Of cars that without thought speed by?

What it thinks about your life,
What it thinks about the sun,
What it thinks about the sap
Or when the summer will be done?

What it thinks about the silence
Secret in the evening air,
Which, beneath the brash car radio,
Conceals a vivid seed of prayer?

What it thinks about the hill,
Darker now and tinged with gloom,
Where forest sounds are creaking, crackling,
 
And where the timeless moments loom

When the world will cease its breath
And a meteor will streak
And scrawl its light across the sky
And trees and earth and rock will speak?
 
Stones

I put a stone in each box,
An opalescent stone, a scarlet stone,
And I planted the boxes in the earth,
And I discovered an eight-foot long bone,

The bone of a giant, who lay
Under the bleached blue sky,
And the long hall of canopied leaves
Stretched into the great by and by,

Where a dog barked brownly,
And meanwhile, butterfly wings
Lay on the dry clay like foreign currency
Strewn there by wild and invisible things,

And in the sun the dragonflies shimmered
On green perches, with shivering wings
And black chevrons, and turned their jewel-steel heads
As though the rest of us were their underlings,

And the snapping turtle lay in the shallow water,
His eye an unwinking ball bearing
And I watched the boxes with stones
 And I was not past caring,

But the corn shoots clutched the earth
With maroon, intent roots,
And little insects landed upon the stalks,
And then the professional chorus of mutes

Tapdanced on the buried boxes,
And I cried out, “Hooray!”
For which I was censoriously hushed,
But the unbending vigor of the day

Beat brightly upon the clustered trees and bushes
That leaned over the thin, shallow brook
Where tiny minnows darted in tandem,
And I wondered if they swam by the book.

And an opalescent beetle caught a ride
On the floating raft of a leaf
And struggled to maintain its composure
Until it reached its miniature reef.
 
The Earth Draped Herself

The earth draped itself in her heavy, green hair.
Scarlet berries winked coyly in the shadow of the leaves,
And the bees dove into the soft, ivory bells
That rose like empty eyes filled with sadness and longing.
And there, caught in a cage like a shoe in a foot, a tomato plant was growing,
A row of green tomatoes, like parishioners in a pew,
And they did so well the only thing they knew,
So that as the bees wove strands of whizzing, wavering flight,
They rejoiced and they grew.
 
The Grass Was Green, the Sky Was Blue

The grass was green, the sky was blue
And all your sainted senses flew
And blew away the rooftops too
As acorns fell and oak trees grew
And leaves were plastered to the flue.

Oh me, oh my–your hat, so tight,
Your cranium so shining bright,
Your eyeballs glinting in the light
Of lunar glow and star-shot night,
Ideas spinning like a kite,

From town to town, from Greece to Rome
Where sunlight spills upon the dome
Where tangled thoughts could use a comb
Oh where you meet the gamin gnome
Who points his gnarly finger home,

You count to one, you count to two,
And then you count back down, and you
Count to me and her. You knew
This from the start, as shiny dew
Sparkled and improved the view.
 
The bumble bee no longer spoke
But danced with vigor, and the smoke
Rises where the goblins stoke
The fire of words in logs of oak,
Which cleanses all the little folk.
 
You Were Speaking, But

You were speaking but
You did not know what you were saying.
An entire town was in your breath
And when you bowed the strings my body
Resonated to tragedy, my eyes
Saw visions
Of van Gogh, perhaps this was the music
Of history
Or of God
Or of the Ladder shaking down its glistening angels.
Perhaps I had remained mute all these years,
Mute with the words of a mystery like a soiled doll
Inside of which a soul had blazed
Once
In its blue glass eyes.

Today I have grown deaf
And I do not hear your music.
Your words no longer carry me
Like clacking train cars to wheat fields.
I have closed down the station.
No one can buy any tickets
For interminable journeys
 
Or crimson carnations
But
Today I saw the black smoke pillar rising on the horizon
And I felt the wooden floor tremble
With the invisible whisper
Of the locomotive.
 
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.
 
This Field of Stars

This field of stars
That stretches out past 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.
 
We Have Nothing to Fear

We have nothing to fear
But beer
And a few hundred million maniacs,
And the stacks
Of books that we stole from the library.
We have nothing to see
But the glacial masses melting from our dulcet form
And dim memories of the freshman with a pipe in the dorm
Who had heard of Sartre. Say,
Twenty years later, his children have only heard of Bart, reggae
Bands and other paraphernalia
Of the twenty-first century bacchanalia.
Fear. It creeps up on you
And leaves you to stew,
And all you can do
Is to pinch your right ear lobe.
That should stop the entire blasted globe!
And it does, surprisingly enough,
And you aren’t afraid of the flowers’ guff
And the traffic that flows like a banded
Python, thick and shiny. Let’s get candid:
Where does it work out,
Where does it get that thick girth?
 
And where do you find your brittle mirth,
Buried away in a cellar
Which some responsible, well-dressed feller
Has the gall
To call
A Celebration Hall?
If not for being oblivious,
Prudent or lascivious,
Intent on a wide-screen tv
Or pursuing some gamin inanity,
How else would we exist,
Fearing that a thousand hooded men will cut our hand off at the wrist?
That’s why today we’ve come out to the park
Where the sunlight lies stark
On the rich thick grass
And sounds of radio and sass
Float across the trees
And scout troop masters sport knobby knees.
And now that you have dealt with the disease
Of fear and failure and money not growing on trees
Can’t we sit down in some empty room
And talk of the creeping crepuscular gloom
And the muscular song and the whizz-bang real zoom
Of a light that expands like an egg in the womb?
When will you slow down and lazily consider
That the prize portrait goes to the highest bidder,
 
And if you talk and you think, ten years from now
You’ll find your brain pickled, inside the hoosegow?
So come out with your hands up, reach for the sky,
And walk, though an angel aims straight for your thigh.
 
Cabbage in the Laundry

Cabbage in the laundry,
Clothes upon your head,
The moon is running northward
And the sun is flowing red

And the eggs of chance are baking
On the waffles of despair
And the beach of knives is turning
With its tawny, silky hair

And the burn of air force ramjets
Seeks a signal in the sky
And the stairway to the mountain
Carries smells of fresh stir-fry

And the caterpillars singing
By the ocean in their suits
Leave behind a blurry motion
In the prints left by their boots.
 
The Molecules

I ate, like anyone, a peach,
A car, a yacht, a sea,
A star, a tree, a lamp, a stone,
A length of rope that shone
For miles, five luminescent dials,

And the leaves were plastered wetly
On the skein,
So slowly I dissolved my brain
And on the radio raised the gain

And still I stand here and explain
As I erase these bones, this bane,
And at this piddling, modest rate
I soon will, yes, communicate
With the friendly, frisky schools
Of bright, pulsating molecules.

Come meet with me where cilia sweep,
Amoeba dance, paramecia weep
As we work our way through the majestic era
Of the large and crafty rotifera.

 
And sometimes as we frisk and frolic
(Now past the angst, or was it colic?)
We breathe a silent, cosmic shout
And as existence pours blue flame
And everywhere there burns the Name
We find ourselves, without a doubt,
Still sitting here in stunned time-out.
 
The Sound of Your Blood

The sound of your blood
As you wash down the gloom,
And dustwebs that spin
In the shade of the room,

And the sun smearing sunset across the wide bay
And the wolves that howl and the hounds that bay
And the wheels that churn as your eyelids droop
And your mind takes you sailing in a brassy green sloop.
 
The Wood-Dust Crew

You had seen the last of men,
And the last of men
Was primitive,
Tired and uninspired,
With nothing left to take or give
And one-dimensional,
A tree become a silhouette,
Charcoal-shadow and conventional,
A ballerina robbed of her pirouette,
A card-player holding nothing to his chest,
His best
Hardly good enough
(Followed all day by a puff
Adder),
Growing dimmer and madder,
Slimmer and sadder,
Without the glimmer that he had yearned for
Twenty-three years ago
When he had glimpsed the green door
That fluttered to and fro,
Exposing the glint of a garden view
Where elephants pondered and giraffes stalked.
 
Now the cracks were caulked
By the wood-dust crew
And nothing was left
But an apple core
And a scrap of a scroll
While the naked man, bereft,
Heard the toll
Of the bell shiver the sycamore,
Till everything grew dim
In Siam and Baltimore,
And the Pacific Rim
And points north and south,
Where the mouth
Of the ice cavern yawns
And everyone feels stressed
And slightly undressed
In those unearthly dawns.

That’s when you saw the glistening black letters
Standing in the forest,
And you knew that you were in the company
Of your betters.
You bit at your fetters
With no apology
And watched the yellow-gold leaves flutter
Into shapes that no florist
 
Had ever created,
And you heard your lips mutter
In fragrant profusion,
In layered allusion,
Words that were weighted
But flecked like gold leaves,
And you held silver cards
Up your sleeves.

The bodyguards
Had fallen asleep at the foot of the colonnade
And you looked at the shadow
That the great tree made,
And with the shards
Of gold coins flickering in your fingers,
With the bravado
Of innocence,
Where the autumn light lingers,
Where the forest grew dense,
You looked at the pattern
Of leaves and sky
And the words rolling by,
Large and magnificent
Like the rings of Saturn,
And your mind was a firmament
And your heart a great hall
 
And that was all.
 
We Shake Our Chains

We shake our chains beneath the sea
That gently jars our muted bones.

Like molluscs on a sea-struck boulder,
We spurn all but our rock, shaggy with our spiky beard.

We kill the zebras, jackals, bobcats, bears,
The anteaters, porcupines, opossums and mules.

It is no use. The heart beneath the floorboard beats
And our youth are carried off
By the gypsy and his lion.

So listen to the color of the wind.
 
Burn the Flame

Burn the flame in the night-time
Of your mind, where a silent cat flits
Through your thoughts, and the silhouette of the tree
Leans over you and sings.
 
It Snowed Inside My Head Today

It snowed inside my head today
And did it snow in yours?
It snowed inside the yards and fields
And secret garden doors.

It snowed inside the veins and halls
Where paths of rivers flowed,
And on the swaying dock as well
And on the ceaseless road.
 
The Spirit Had Stepped Out for a Quick Hundred Years

The spirit had stepped out for a quick hundred years
But left behind some grinding gears
And a note telling us all the things that are forbidden,
With inviting hints of treasures that are hidden

But that frankly no one seems to have lately found.
So we listen to that soothing, entrancing sound
Of sermonizers who have discovered authoritative answers
As outside, the lawn is littered with gaunt necromancers.

Aleph marks the spot for a transcendental message,
A green dirigible whose golden banners presage
A delightful romp in the fields of moonstone,
In the tunes that ascend like smoke from the bone.

Everyone grasps a fragment of sapphire
And twangs a note on an out-of-tune lyre
And the ghost is sailing in the promising fog
And the ship comes sailing from the unknown bog

And the fruits that hang in the boughs of your mind
Are yellow within a circular rind
 
And they spill like purple, mouth-staining wine
And delight like honey the path of your spine.
 
The Realm of the Polar Bear

The planes fly east and south and west,
To the realm of the polar bear,
Who covers his nose and advances close
As you just see nothing there,

You only see a shadowy snow
That hovers and shimmers and glides,
And you stand and admire the universe then,
And the angelic epiphanies besides,

As a swift-sliding shadow below the ice
Alerts you at the rust-end of day
That below this frozen snow and ice,
Captain Nemo has come this way,

But that’s all right, for the cold leaches out
All awareness of the hum
Of his twentieth century motor, and
His snapping finger and thumb.

And the black sky opens a little door
In the song of the dance of your heart
And it doesn’t matter at a quarter to three
 
If the horse stands before the cart,

If your words are standing before your mind–
That mind, so icily calm!,
That stitches patterns between the stars,
As your breath blows warmth in your palm.
 
For No One Who Lives Nowhere

For no one who lives nowhere,
The sound of the snow
Is a hollow shadow in a white, soft bell.
At the shore, the tide smashes a half-moon
Of coarse boulders.
Salt streams
Run down to the ocean,
Are swallowed and absorbed.
The entire night, the waves sing
To themselves.
Scoop a handful of air
To light candles in the wind.
Nothing is transformed, except for
Everything. Everything is the same and
New. One, two, three, four buds of light
Bloom. And the seagulls know
No more than the mussel shells
And the shore.
Pull the roar of the evening waves
Around you like a quilt
And sleep beneath the burning stars.
 
And So the Sign Aquarius

And so the sign Aquarius
Swims into our ken,
Its winged stars will carry us
Past stolid, stalwart men,

And as a mood Aquarian
Seeps through every heart
(Of Carlos, Yuki, Marion...),
It paints its rainbow art,

It paints the streets, it paints the walls,
The kittens, bushes too,
It tumbles down the waterfalls
And rolls right up to you.

It rolls right up to you and paints
The floor a golden hue,
It paints the air without restraints
A bright cerulean blue,

It paints your thoughts a silver tone
And paints your feelings green,
With a lemon undertone
 
That rarely has been seen,

And tints your visions Indian red,
Your dreams a lilac swirl,
And then the garden in your head
Glints leaves of mother-of-pearl.

And now we’ve ceased this tinctured tour,
Stride forward without fear,
For rainbow pathways at your feet
Shall guide your steps this year.
 
A Pear

I ate a pear whose skin was rough
And watched the kites flit through the sky,
Black arrowheads that in their wings
Contain the stars that signify

An empty jar; a cracked blue bowl;
A tree that stands a thousand years;
A half-closed door; a half-heard tune;
A half-pruned rosebush, cast-down shears.

At night the traffic light, alone
In the warm and glistening street
Casts its dance of shifting light
Upon a dance of unseen feet.

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