Sound is a torchlight passed
Along the eardrum to quiver in silhouettes,
Shadow puppets of the mind.  

Stars are the torchlit soundways to the divine,
With flickerings too far to be heard
Or too much shadow-disturbed to know as sign.

The fallen leaves are the shrouds of hoof prints,
The withers of breeze reined to time-kept trysts,
Gentilissimo, Cavalieri di Corredo, Italian knight
Whose path by pure lover’s look is made clean.

We go back, we go back to the sun caught by handfuls,
Like the Medieval snow melts into Grecian stream.

Gentle knight, to your galloping song of Winter:
The sweeping rush of grass and gathering refrain
Of bells surrounds the long sloping meadow of
The muzzle, snorting freedoms of wildflowers past,
Leaving its bosky thunderbrush of tail like distant
Summer storms and the slackening rhythms of rain.

We go back, we go back to the sun caught by handfuls,
Like the Medieval snow melts into Grecian stream.

The volplaning bird plucks from fish-eyed shallows,
A gargoyle perches on an ***** key, ever sustaining,
A woman plays the lute from man’s hollowed rib,
As the priests with sophistry sweep the dust off sin.

We go back, we go back to the sun caught by handfuls,
Like the Medieval snow melts into Grecian stream.
But the clock cannot turn its face from its tears.

The shanties of the shore are the tide’s wives in clay,  
The uxorious sea fawns at the blushed lips of the beach,
A serenade from the sung-exhalations of all living things,
Though eternity is the stillness of silence repeating.

The farmhand burns the leaves, though the bodies of slaves
Lie at heaven’s impasse in the trees of dying looks, barring them
From peaceful death, the sad emulsified perch of love and heat,
Hung at noon like John Brown untended, bearded of sticky summer,
Heavy-headed swinging noon and the smell of honeysuckle blood,
Fetid day like the coming dirt of graves, the clinging air of disease,
Snake-winding down from the trees with no pleasure of the bitten apple.

Sometimes I want the snow
To fall over me,
Cover me
Somewhere in the woods.
I’d just lie on some fallen twigs;
Listen to them crackle
As I pushed my back into the earth.
Then I’d look up
And watch the white drop,
Let the snow fill up over my body.

I’d feel it sink into me,
Pour into an empty mold.
Cover me
And make me part of the smoothness
Of the white earth.
Then I’d wait,
For the rabbit or deer to leave its tracks
Over my white.

And I wouldn’t care.
Not care that the snow had been
Wrinkled~
Because I’d wrinkle it too
When I got up and left my tracks
On another’s white—
Maybe someone like me,
Who had watched the snow fall.
And maybe they’d stay longer.
But I’d have to go,
Because it’s only
Sometimes I want the snow
To fall over me.

The rain-modulated trees and the hoarse leaf
That in themselves tell a love so complete,
Were once the playthings of lovers’ sights
Who passed here once and once and never.
Love the destitution of love.

We have made too much of love,
Something it will never be,
Without touch or place or rosary bead,
Beyond ourselves and the human race,
But no nearer to infinity,
Without cause or prompting by war or peace,
Simply quelled within its own embrace,
The wax seal on our lips for its unity and defeat.

Long ago, the mother died who made the thatchwork basket with her daughter for the fish wrested from the water to the stove,
     Long ago, the sun that loved them both died while the rope-wrought hands of the fisherman grew old,
          Long ago, the lid to the teapot stopped its clink when closed by the hand of the granddaughter who would think of them all and the buried sun when she looked at the stove,
               Long ago, someone like me wrote a poem that no one will read in a sunless room with a cold stove.

The clouds loosened from the sun
Like a frock from a tidywoman,
Past care with her labors done,
Crumpled rag thrown over a chair,
While a fan blows the loose ends
Of the apron ties like misty fragments,
The clouds loosened from the sun.

To spend the hours compiling skies, indexing unearthly strata,
Mark the dog-eared page of moments with the hesitant thumb,
Waiting to turn each day and find death a bouquet of words,
All to view glowing creases under the closed eyelids of time.