Many years alone,
Suddenly— old thoughts of her,
  .  .  .  Lone raven in sky.

I was with the ocean last night and your body
Was its vessel, overflowing.  Words were frail,
Drops indwelling about the shapeless sky,
Water reaching for its own height and breath,
Like touch, were as desperate letters exchanged,
Endlessly read, until like loamy vellums, they
Disappeared in our hands.  Inklings of tide-
Pool and driftwood.

                               My blood was a river that ran
Its course.  Members feeding your deltas and birds
Breeding where the water-russet sheds on pampas
And inverness.  Eyes like wing through ever—
Green, empties the fossil shell.  Fire, brimming
Mountaintops that were, for countless millennia,
Sleeping.  Did I mention that the earth moved?
No?  Her displacement was involuntary.

Then came the waterfalls, lifting throughout
Time.  The scent, searching for its identity,
The wave, calling to its own name— Ocean,
O— cean.  And flowers, opening like galaxies
In the after-light.  A universe of face and hand
With hunger for salt-rain and then the cloud
Burst-blue and spilt and spun more redolent,
Deities, in joyous creation.

I breathe, in your ocean, like a child unborn.

When first we met our words with each
Were laced with smile and touch.  Our eyes,
Confessed and broke at the closing café
And fused in joy and salt, opened up
With long, arresting arms at our sides.

You brought me to your toppled room,
I counted a number of worn, weary
Books, various anthologies, travelogues
And philosophers, a few fierce Poets,
Looking on, strategies for study,
All assembled, with great measure,
It was an alternate version of my own
Battle ground library.  Then, I was yours
But you were never mine.

                                           Your stone,
Walled spirit encroached upon me
And I was unset to siege at the base
Of your winding turret and waged
With you a fortnight of five full years
When you rushed forth on your crusades
You left me, flung, far from the holy lands.

Dancing fir trees, pine,
Greener against bluest skies,
Winter wind creeping.

Was there a word,
Plain or shimmering,
Cast of gold and mercy,
In the bathing light of forgiveness,
Tempered with down and feather,
Wrought of worthiness and pride,
The mellow flame of tenderness
And shearing morning sun,
One tabulation of saving flesh,
The tapping root of the knowledge
Tree, the forge of stainless metal
And touch, stone direction,
One healing humour, cardinal
As blood, forceful as the salt
Journey bearing the pines
Of lodestar coordinates,
Spotting the Xanadu ex
Of the lost lovers?

Little lambs gathered on the precipice,
Soft and snowy, peaceful and patching,
Their numbers change in spotting fog,
By the sea a great erne dives, snatching.

I came to a courtyard of my own making,
To a cottage by the sea at the worlds edge.
I furnished it with my left over life, complete,
Barren and colourless and I wrote the newest
Book of psalms out of tinder and flame, a tome
Of grey and useless poems, unheard of songs
And reams of flesh.  There in the lightest dark,
By the Druid stone that was placed just for me,
I planted a creeping yew tree.  And the moon
Sang in celebration and silence like a fallen
Priest.  
                    Under the covering hazel trees,
That sprung to life after the longest winter,
Which taught me to forget my name, I now
Struggle with light and my body, warring, torn
Is fading slow, like the always arriving, down
Turning solstice, the climates of the mind,
Where it is digging the never ending shallow
Hole only the spreading eternal yew, that I
Planted, will ever know and only the Lazarus
Moon shall ever rise above.

I came to a courtyard of my own making,
Was it dream that led me there or my eyes?

The fly makes his way through the house.
Its tongue, like billions before, is tainting  
All it touches.  The fly has wings to spread  
His mess, and though he has innumerable  
Facets to his eyes he cannot see  
The swatter coming.

The house surrounds the fly and is sacred.
As the great blue world beyond is sacred.  
And the fly is spreading fast, flitting here  
And sticking there trampling his own  
Shelter, spreading pollution and excrement  
With a rolling tongue  

That spews and spits upon his own home.  
And though he is happy while he soils  
His house his eyes are two dead worlds  
Barren and still, born to die by the hand  
That flies even higher, so, the fly cannot  
See the swatter coming.

Buzzing, like a burn, through the innocent  
Air he dreams of vast minions rooting  
His world with legion hands.  The house was  
A garden that led him in, he cannot  
Wait for his seed to fester, all's he needs  
Are God’s green plants  

And clean water, some fresh air to conquer.
This house was made for him he would have  
Himself believe.  But when all has dried  
And all is soiled the fly would wish to move  
On, if only he could, trapped as he is  
In the earth and wooden house.

He could taste it all, oblivious to oblivion
In God’s green wooded world— all spinning,  
The sands are running in the sacred home  
That he himself has always defiled,  
As he has never shown any grace;
The swatters hand is His  
Own hand.

I left the house of the tempest brewing,
Spinning like a rod, spun into flame
And came upon the redwood forest,
Eternal, shouting out heavens name.

The sun was indifferent, the creek shuffled
Its lament, the birds fluted their dirge—
I was so small, in the red giants grove,
Yet, felt so beloved, my pain was purged.

And I warmly came to see again—
My eyes, through the needles drove,
What a trifling is ones fleeting mood,
How true, heroic, immortal is my love.

Sometimes the body is contagion
To the soul.  Stars in their mission fall
To seed the fertile flesh, ignite
Blue waters of sulfureous hearts,
And so the flash is set to cancel
In the flood.  

Sometimes the lip of soul onto seal
Will not hold, before he first knocked
And let flesh enter, thorny pegs
Pricked nerve and pierced bone on his climb
To the rose, yea, some stars odd as
Meteors crash.

In the swan-sea, song-sangy-frame of crib,
Rough hewn words bent mold to scrape, like
Blasted coral, stood half-submerged
Amid sea and sky, for between the leaves,
Behind the eye, there are little stars
Shining like existence.

In a circle world he fashioned green
Blazons about the darkling day,
Fostered by celestial navigation,
Wrote a language for music, on a map of love
And charted the force of green in a wind-
Rose of discovery.

Sometimes the soul is not contained, it
Bursts in silent sound like well water
From the source.  And of men in streets
He saw the pennies in their grumble
Eyes, and of love and its course he rubbed,
Tickling dim stars.

It was his thirty ninth year in that fall
To heaven when the steeping cell,
Refused to push in its tide.  Homeless
And free on scaffold of bone the middling
Man retracted from sun to sink
With the moon, turn-tiding-toward sea
Like a changeling.

And as ever, nor often, unwavering eyes
Sprout through shifting grains.  And as he spoke
Quite rimless, Dylan Thomas was petrified
In undying light, and solid set within a rill
Of reef sparkling in concert betwixt gas
And sea, so becoming in purple sleeves,
This constellation of mute singers all,
Dried five-fingered-fish, bright embryos
Returned to the shell, they burn between the leaves,
Beset the grounded skies and show sprite flashes
In the dark where He has left his imprints, burning
Above and plastered below.  The first rock stars!

Schooled in crass vanity,
Pointed scales of pufferfish,
Blowing up themselves.

Sloe black Guinness seeps,
Raven eye conjured in glass—
  .  .  .  Frothy and gorgeous!

.
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.