Seer of joy but sayer of sorrow,
From numinous lips, the heart burns down,
The convergence of pulse in ash wireframe
Is love, in keeping but not in heaven igniting.

Excise my heart and let it keep as an island
That only beats when the waves come across,
And all the ancient world speaks in me
With light of burning lips and crushed hearts.

When someone dies, the world becomes this
Unreplicated moment of beauty, an essence
Unconfined and filled with no other self
But selves complete, though all heaven may blaze alone.

Mothers come gently to our rooms, the sunset kiss on the forehead,
Woven homilies from their baskets of forgiveness and spools of yarn.

But for the grave, this heart its coiled sunset unspools, so long entwined
In woods and seas that redden now into the soul of all sunsets combined.

Love, given over to stone,
Encoffinated warmth of sun,
Shielded from the prickled infiltrations
Of a many-menaced world.
But here we live too with porous beauty,
Here we kneel with bulwark of shoulders,
Then fall without a twitch to the wind.

A pine forest is the hand,
The soul of the palm fans out in fingers
Like the clayey striations of the sun.
The forest has no sound but the bonebreast
Wandering round of a similar hand,
All but shut now except for the unspoiled nest
Of browning needles and the ancient realmless mound of love.

America is an untended urn,
Not filled with wick of candle,
But with eyelashes burned,
Butterfly kisses of slaves to simmering plows,
As the Whigs, Mugwumps, and Know Nothings
Like Senates, praetors, and praefactors of old,
In new form, snare the grasshopper pulse of populace.

If we could once more lay our heads—like the universe
Rests its child’s soul in the lap of its native mother—
In our Indian maiden’s lap, where she once rolled
Maize flour and the dusted cornsilk of our eyelashes,
She could knead our eyes closed, and the stars would walk
Barefoot with summering spirit through our midnight homes.

Every Autumn, the sky a little more to stone belongs,
The immovable strata of deciduous columnar clouds,
Every leaf that falls, Rome a little more to earth’s heart recalls.

That night, one of the old guard died,
And the rain said nothing,
And the thunder said nothing,
And the clock with its bell chimes
Struck nothing.

Here, love is the far proxy of look
- She is dying a distance -
Yours travels from brook to sky
To the heaven wanderings of death in my blood,
The black smoke-congested veins possessed
By the baffled realms of battlefield
By the horrors of the mundane
From this old mouth, emptied of kisses.

A pig in the grass
Sounds at scratching and bratching,
Scratching and bratching are sounds
Of the world at its last.

Snow brings to earth the ash footsteps of Titans,
Winter in its giant vacancy of bygone strides,
The overthrown birth of frost mother and sky,
~The snow proselytizes all our warm tomorrows~
But the totality of loss lies like a starved lion,
Paws crossed, staring at the cold changeling-world,
As a young white-tailed Springbok ages into distance.

What is Christmas but the collected dead to say one last goodbye,
To speak in their fabulous, untranslatable tongues of old furniture
And the lacquered shine from the lighted tree and pablum of candles,
All that seems childhood’s undersong of pine and catch-full solitude of eyes.
Until the feeling past Christmas of unwrapped sunset and having said goodbye.

Death is a fluttering bird unnested from one mind
To bring its twigs and mud to the next, startled mind,
Where it dwells, Death and its brood, silence.  

Death is the fractured self, once removed from the mothering mind
~In journeyed sadness~
To its own end, fully aware of the whole and of its own disrepair.

Death is a flowering inward,
@— the cleistogamy —@
Like lips to our own souls,
Drinking ourselves to florid nothing.

Snow is but listening silence,
Sent from our dark past,
Inaudible ghosts made visible
In the butterfly net of cold.

Paper lantern prose,
Crematorium of hearts,
Beating quick to ash.

There the floating scholar of green lines read,
There the shading peasant of sun-fields plowed,
There the fleeing empress of coral red gowns,
There the graying knight of frost-broken vows.
A tree is a haunted ruin of bare limbs and rooms.

But thought scurries around like a five-lined skink
With its tail shimmering blue as oil floating on water.

My grandmother had forgotten everything but the ability to be good,
Innate courtliness sitting like a castle upon a moor.
Her world of insensate rains and fogs and heaths,
And still the hearth flickering from her lost eyes.
My grandmother whom I adored, to all the world,
Your goodness will go unnoticed into night,
Just as your eyes stared unknowing
Before the subsuming of tides,
While the world blasted through your bones,
Breath without force of inspiration.

From the first, the fluid-filled sacs of stars,
The yolk of yellow lightning and oily rain,
Then the placental storm, birth-giver of roads and oxen loads,
Witch towers made from silk hair and the peasant sucklings of plague,
Whelped there by the milk of the river Arno, by turns pacified or stern.

The Dark Ages is a storm nesting in the sky, built by posthumous stares,
Piece by piece, a raven’s birth from eyes and saliva of roads and rivers.
Of the woman who gave birth, the sway of leaves where once fell hair,
Only her lips hover in the air of warm sun,
Like a fountain in the bare palace courtyard
Suspiring, flowing, extolling…

Love has become less and less than the loneliness that abides,
Shaped by death after death into morphological surmise,
A sense of evolution without atavistic ties,
(Like her lips forever disjoined from mine).

In the park, soft-study of sands and swings,
Where the birds while away the unabridged air
Like rains on green, copper roofs ~ their wings.
So I have touched my rainy fingers on the fountain’s surface,
And tum-tumed at the dumpy belly of a dog,
So I have felt the vendor’s balloons like cantaloupes for freshness,
So I have a pocket-change of smiles for all.
At the fountain’s edge,
Like green-molded quaystones feather-singed
By the touchstrokes of the arcing wings of the sea,
Or like a saucer of warm milk
For the alley-cats to drink the milkiness of sun
And then with their paws,
Plink at overturning the day into porcelain shadows.

Give to sorrow, watchfulness.
Give to happiness, no eyes, but its blind externals.
Give to me, the blind thoughts that can see through humankind.

Greece burned its sins in the days of Rome,
City of wrinkled roads like the crushed pillow
From a sleeping lover who left long ago.  
The sea tends to its wool-gathering of sands.

They said passing by me that they would put out their eyes,
The clouds did as they died across the battlefield,
As the gauzy horses stanched the wept blood,
As the thorns, gnats, and briers, wound into
A dove’s nest of bayonets and knives,
The clouds died in insurrection,
And the night breathed freely and the stars cleared the mud.

Says the soldier to his love,
When he holds her handful of fantasy
That itself recalls holy wine and bread,
The blood seeps into his own hands is all.

Says the soldier to his love when he crawls
To impotence of mud and stone sediments
That augur not a fleshen but a fossil birth,
Like the bone of the once-masticating jaw.

Said the soldier to his love, when he fell face first
Into the nuptials of lily, delphinium, and dark earth,
I only wish to be the petals for your wedding, my love...

Methuselah, old profligate wastrel of evergreen time,
In giant generational strides, close the striking distance,
Take my face in its failed vision and drink out the eyes,
One fang at my cheekbone, the tendril of silver music
Shown through, pull out its roots and the topsoil of skin,
Blow from your cadaverous lips to the beadhole of ear,
And whisper about the hours of my hummingbird life.
Here you sing alone with weak-winded isotopes of your half-lives.

Keep your trees, keep them for your heaven of ashen dusk
And night like the pale-faced deathmask of emperors,
No reason that the commoner to oblivion is hushed,
These old-wise woods and leaves, peopled without us.

Keep Macedonian dust lightly conquered over the breeze,
So that it shoots its tail like the centuries-sole comet,
The scorched earth left by Alexander’s mapmaker eyes,
Swung wide like his Sarissophoroi over Persian might.

Remember the lesser grove of his teacher Aristotle’s tribe,
They have only slipped their sandals off, to bare themselves
Of sound and the concourse of the foot’s impulse,
Caught the lithesome wind, to flow outside our hearing,
And muse as empire of air and loss and forgotten walks.

Keep your trees and the darkening sky through them
That remind me of the passing into the past.
Never is the poem from tongue of ***** or plow.

The only love I have known is the bird that lives in my ear,
In the wind and cloud tunnel of long ago, with a hot salve
Of sunshine poured into the singing hole, the warm honey
Of wives’ tales, the remedy of home against the world,
Though the song has since flown.

Love, if it were told how little truth you hold,
How diadems and stars are less than twinkling souls,
How anyone can fill your mercurial fancy in the fold,
How you lie before God and you lie with man,
Love, books are less old than your falsehoods,
Or the rood and the rose.

Because stones do not pray, even in their centuries’ quiet,
Because the vines are long, only for the sake of length,
Not like the drab Orpheus-song that always up-ruins.
Because vestal Autumn is a bride of noon-time rain,
A faithful stream with her white mist of suffibulum,
Beside the path whose footprints are half-notes from the grave.

The goddess of the spent moon skulks to her feathery bed of fiery dawn.
Wrens through the uplands wend the fence weft with piecemeal straw.
Lips painted like pomegranate groves, dashed with fructifying sweets.
A kiss is a far-off and warm opening of lips like the sun into forest gleams.

Rome has set on the sun,
Spreads the rays of its streets
And the warmth of its torches.
Caesar commands nightfall come,
To make florid incense and wine
And talk as one full of the moon.

Death is such a thing
As dark cherries
Plucked to bobble from the basket heap,
And so then slighted from offhand,
Be the underling to the massy arbor sweep,
Be the stilled ponderance of solitudes.

She kept bed-side by me all along,
Her prayer like a flower behind my ear,
Asleep, I think I hear the petals fall.

Polyurethanized love,
Polyols and isocyanates
And one part dove.

Love is not a maturation of voices to the more sublime,
But sotto voce, an undertow of groping intonations,
The sod of soil hearts cast across the reaping sea.

What is to say beyond the poplars,
But the dry mouth of her death,
Like the hoarded provision of an echo,
Somewhere far off in my being,
Where darkening moves up the stone step,
Each footprint like her powdered breath,
Her shuddering voice channeled through my throat,
Shattered like frozen buds blown to the faceless snow.

The elucubrations of the lute, pulsing from the finger strums of starlight,
Plum-twilight of the Colosseum like an emperor’s bowl of plucked fruit,
As the night’s ghost-gods are tuned to Castel Sant’Angelo, Hadrian’s tomb,
Who drink the dwindling hours from the wine-stemmed glass of musical moon.

But come the times out of tune, the dwindling of stone is the going blind of Rome:
Rome is built upon millions of eyes closed with the underside of their lids tattooed,
By labyrinthine aqueducts, far-aging roads, and traceries of Nero’s Golden Home.
Then death its sight-sun blooms through; death the architect of Seven Hills renews.

Death has one gleaming eye transfixed to the comings of fathers,
The second one to mothers is bound.
Make no suture or stitch to its blood-seeing.
Death, when you took the first mother,
The last son your undoing avows.

Marble made of seagulls’ wings, set in flight,
Their beaks foam and crest and rise for air,
In headwinds and feathered drag, upward lift,
Carve out fluted columns by tunneling vortex,
Beams of bluebirds made from cross-sky stitch,
Parthenon of flying tides and nested Acropolis,
Endless fossilized sigh of Saronic Gulf sea-winds.

Death undoes itself like a woman undoes her dress
With knowing look and shrewd-salt of beguilement
Of supple shoulders and bared back, of life shimmying
Down the legs of the longest dark road of disappearing.

Do you have eyes, old man, as airy as the sky?  
Do the trees grow through your eyes, old man?  
Do the starry leaves of your mind grow old with you?

Death is the dictionary of unknown words,
Written on the pages of the unbound book
Of earth and sea ~~ to no one, its soliloquy.

The mouth is the small compass of the soul,
Without dials, true north, or magnetic force,
The ungaugeable instrument of the voice,
In directionless modulations of undertow,
To circumnavigate under cartographer’s pole
Stars guide our wayfinding-heirlooms of words.

Dehiscence of war,
The spent shell is the split gourd.
Dry fruit of dry years.

I remember the hidden chapel bells in her voice,
The little cloister of her abbey looks that opened
To a lovelorn courtyard of cisterns and well works,
The sounding pulleys and ropes from the springs,
I will miss her nothing said to my infinite misgivings.

The lit fuse of her lips touching off
A din in the black powdery night:
Illumined and immolated am I.

Love, what have you become?
In broomsticks and cupboards and pantries,
On the dust-covered stairs,
In the breathless rush of faucet water,
On the crumpled lampshade at night,
Love is the summation of an individual’s life alone,
Somehow still expressed by two across the bridge of language failing.

The finger upon whose weight
Depends the pluck of the string,
Does pull back the folds of a drape
Of sunwashed loneliness in afternoon.
Windows drift through you, without home,
Without glass, or any warmth from looking through.
Life in its squared sequence does amass, ecumenical,
Until death its finger does pass in its final pluck
As the touch of the thundering universe.

Pure sorrow is too beautiful for this world.
Pure sadness is too human for us to feel anymore.
But grief is still a snow-covered tongue whose melting chokes and overcomes.

Paraselene,
She kisses like the mock moon.
Her lies have beauty.