What is music?  The heart rendered?  What life
Is to a dream?  The eyes object in rapture?
What is the soul's shell, but a half note hollow
Contained with music?  Art is cold—
Echo, mute repetition, poor traits for nine
Dead muses of memory, a fiction after
The fact, nor can there be a shelf for credence
Without cadence.  And though the painter's eyes
Remember rainbows colour, his hands forget
All, save black and white.  Though the sculptor sees
The vein of nudes within the sparkled rock
That stone, still, looks back with grieving half-
Heartedness.
                         The chambered heart is beating,
The droning gales are sighing, but like the one bird
Who flies three ways— before and after song,
My middling wings pronounce two kingdoms part
Music.  The felt fingers of rain consort with well-
Tempered earthly quays and everywhere there is
There is the bright organic instrument—
And actuality is sidled with dead metaphors.
Music is but purest feeling given air to,
The mind soothed, the spirit seduced and a quell
For ache of heart, music is pure making—
Existence itself, another plain, a well dressed
Traveler, a border with life—
Body and spirit, who hand in hand and each
With each, are bound as wings are paired;
One flyer soaring.

Striped wings scythe, sailing across
The late summer sky, wraithing kites
Wrangle with nimbus streams streak,
Banded birds knowing of deaths trace,
One can see such sound which circles
Make, def cries low by an insects wake.

Four crows, black on cloud,
Dark, sordid wings parry and ******—
Murdering white skies.

.
Deeper than the heart—
Of a burning yellow star,
Stranger than the quarks
Between galaxies afar—
So fatal is my love for her.

He walks in stolid darknesses
At days zenith, hears whispers
In the dew dusted fens, lights
Leaves into sun candle flames,
Drew a lake sword by maidens
Hand, alchemic shaper of water,
Air, old fires and earth, bending
Cold elements of moly and lode
Rushing forth, in extra emotions.

In my garden, feral and overgrown,
I bear with branchings of the apple,
Hunched and grey, laden with fallow
Fruits, the tired, knottted fingers die
Each year, under which are baubles
Of sourness and stray, poorly drawn
Circles of fodder even hungry deer
Will not graze upon.  The elder tree
Slowly casts itself into Bonsai stone.

Down a valley, in the grades of sun,
Lay a stand of madrones in redden
Fire, with deepest eyes of burnished
Green leaves, some immortal Gorgon
So beauteous, in form and branches
Divine, of Olympian flame, held, atop
Heavenly escarpments by the loving
Skies.  I see it for what it is, my love,
Your body and hair, so tawny, so fair,
Though, ever lost to me but in dream,
Are dearly those red branches, a fable,
Your eyes, green as sea, those leaves.

In my darkest hour, by the rage of sun,
I met her in a shower of April days,
Riding to the moon in twined études,
The dry chrysalis of winter shells
Gave way to lightness, glaze,
The rain in our eyes, amaze,
Her voice as it fluted, broke,
Like feathers from a wandering bird,
Were my wings of iridescence and joy
And we were blind when we were born,
We were blind as bells of floating grace,
Lived forever by such a new shore,
Such ends of buzzing time,
As May flies.

Today, a poem should be palatable, cute
As a Kiwi fruit,

Dumb
As a horse battalion's scudding run,

Strident as out of tune horns
Of basement bands where the gloss has grown—

A poem should be bloodless
As the slight of words.

A poem should be film of ocean brine
As the reel unwinds,

Cleaving as the gear greases
Spoke by spoke the light smearing breeze,

Blowing, to the temple outhouse
Exalting all the ****** functions—

A poem should be not true:
Equal too.

For all the history of vanity
An empty room and a bass relief

For lust
The keening masses and no light above the stream

A poem should not be
But mean.

Deep in the chalk of gloaming flame,
The tawn and pale, of moan and loon,
Where under leaves of forest shades,
The crescent rails of the riding moon,
Here is when the quick blood running
Drains with shear seepings and looks,
With eyes agape, small game stunned
Over pines and green hemlock wood,
The ferryman wings and clawing tears,
Whose silent strike and low red raking
Blasts unto an indifferent lane of peers,
This is the house of apparition's name,
A mages fugue, muffled muses reprise;
The **** song which creeps as sun dies.

A hundred crows from all corners,
Flew into view, and whirled about,
As if the cracked earth set quaking,
As if the sky was tiding, sloe black,
What ominous undulations accrued,
What murderous tribulations due?
The very sound they made was tear,
Was tirade and all those black flecks;
Dark sparkles of sun, shadows of fear.

The heron spreads his wings and preys.
His stony stand a beachhead sloughing
The salt sea, a sepulchered wading.

Leaven the broken bred, unshell
The teeming waters, a fisher of mermen
Unlordly low this lying father,
His wings are palms,

His rock a mount, his wings a bay,
And deafness, tears in the outer shores
And exaulted seas the forgiven waves,

Swells the briny blood and kelp.
Vains are streaming to the fisher king,
Lordy he lands the lying father
His wings are psalms.

A tiny flood that arcs the sky
Marks lord in miniature, a King
Fisher flies, His wings are
The waters calmed.

The otters bask and preen, mermen
Jostle in the laddered rays of the sun
They mark their surf, insouciant play,

Wavering the fisher of men, he sways,
Simply they circle in song singing hours,
Dancing as do the murmuring waves,
Their strokes are psalms.

"I shall welcome the majesty of the ******
Loam, the honour of being the daisies mantle
The goodly fortune to sleep under the golden
Stars who birthed my dream of grace and light.

World, ply my ship and sail it to the seas
Of love, poem and song, I was unworthy
Shaper and so, whereby cold fates decree—
Lay one, whose name is traced in vapour."

I saw a hunter by a country road,
In tandem with me he sailed as I drove.

His hoody-head set monkish to the soil
Conjured up music so soundful, sacred,
And I unmoving over a tired flesh—
Coloured vehicle felt naked and dead

For he so saintly robed and dressed to ****
In the colours of the sky prayed with wings,
My harrier, his eyes cleansed purity and gold
While mine unsightly piebald pale and blue.

But want of food dovetailed two craving
Creatures, yet, over fed I felt rusty
Below his steely hunger and what saving
Grace God might offer either mice or men.