Muted, oddly, and cultured,
brought in and together
with glancing perceptions,
distant and parallel, crowded
and in want of breath:
thinking good thoughts, quiet,
and hands and a skip
away through snow, curved
so we slip away, arms
thoughts and all.
And you stop speaking,
writing books and hearing me,
though I am silent, removed
as can be the eye, as it is forgotten
as quickly as it was dreamed.
Lay, rest, bury yourself
in warmth, and be kindly
against the woods.
Stinging fingertips on errands,
dodging and handling, hurting
and cold; almost warm.
Open jacket, colored and huge,
dancing past, sustained
in the absence of others,
responsive to touch, any
touch that means rightly;
it soon seems light + troublesome.
Sitting wholly cold and sleeping
and growing colder with dreams
a long ways away.
Plausible, most likely
made up, its definitely
a different game, further
down, seems younger,
from a good distance
I never was, nighttime-
lots of people-things
(they unfold differently,
more strangely) subsumed
by the places come to feed
on the dark gloom'd island
as memory warrants
and their temper holds.
He came right on up
to the counter, two dollars
a gun, shoot it into
the clowns mouth there
to fill up the balloon
______the balloon will fill
until __the balloon pops
and we have a
______winner!
___________number nine,
you get a large
prize -- choose from the sea
horse the starfish
or the hedgehog, yes,
_________two smaller ones
for your little lady friend, two
otters for you and your lucky lady.
Slintered shards of varnish
on the table where the snow once lay
catching light unreflected
in the dull spot they pooled,
where the melt sat, debris
pieced out of the wet thaw,
a gleaming record of city lights
baked into timber come morning,
its lightness exposed to wind
until the rain, and a dampening,
until spring, and a refinishing.
Strangeness and a lack of open
space, breathed and passed
with no real mingling, telling yawns
and maybe rest your head here tonight-
glances blind and interruptions
just a little too much, silencing
in that manner, turning out wrong
and changing with some effects
some relations and more disconnect,
more shared air and nowhere.
Some forced speeches, histories
impressively wrought starry
and lit well. Everywhere aware
and unresponding, feigning
welcome and recognition;
it is troubling, still, even.
Dragging on like stale sounds,
recalled in an empty place.
Temptations soft-falling and light
dusting skin saltily, washed off
and out by rough swells without;
too vast for an action, this craft
is tossed with me astride,
notionless and in full view
of a body in lack of life and oaths
silencing, but softer now and cold
and the wide sea is all exhausted.
Limbo and 'waste'
barren stasis
of want;
daily crying,
some love, there
immovable, is very
love.
Warmed down, salted and bare
supplicating and buried in weariness.
Seated in ashes and retaken
by force of fable yawped
all the overwhelming, put forth
in a body's place; given
from unfeeding weary shades
for a drink of assuagement.
Even the silent unmoved
retold still, knotting and full.
Isle free from symbols, from artifice
and that second coating of things
over beings engaged and open
singularly and monstrously,
as monsters by lack
of depth and pity for talking.
___________To the God
and His rams, a functional talking
of shared existence, peer
to both as self and other, cared for
and caretaker and restful, static
and contented with such ease
wrought in solipsistic irony
barring artifice and communion,
repellent to the dancers and poets
and singers of mortal actions;
they moved away and gave witness
and conveyance to storied beings,
a hero fallen to marauder and blight
robbing of simple sights, now saved
as the whole of the passed and dead
is given, remorseful and silent, unfit
for man, a single tale, stable and uncouth.
Blinding nobody as the weight has,
the vast expanse that precludes homestead
and atones for the death of a hypoculture.
Cool shadows of wind, crumbling
the shore in tandem with sea,
accepting of the offering given
of earth, just earth and artifice
convenient enough to be
left and misconsidered, tallied
and longed for vaguely, though
some remains; enough to stand
and lay by, with sandy feet
incognizant of their unreality,
acting as such with each other
imagined breath and shaping
into words too maladroit
to grasp and hold and be
held._________Once a Day
this process is lit and seen
without remembrance, even
now.
Holding on to abstracts
of comfort, of solace
smudged by despond rightly,
though that is unthought
yet written and erased of meaning
substantial.
Pagan places the mind wanders
like sea, like gods
in thought and fullness
and cohesion; this is
right enough now, this
being and coherence open,
sighing and tired.
I see the light went out,
whistled breath, awash in
bombarded by Crowd.
Arms folded and holding coats
like sunflowers
with too-heavy hands
in frosted ground
flaunting sensible longing
for proper timing
so maybe he died.
Smile happy, sense of others,
and bleed like streetlights
that dream of daytime.
A God and a language of ends,
coins on the butcher's block
by the doorway; beset by new tympana
of wall paint, beige and singing, right,
framing the old job and hollow.
Unfinished but suggestive of contrast:
the lighter and the darker shying still
more away from grey black etc-
walk lightly and dry, the bounds
will not stay put.
