In a grove of seven oaks
From my run-down cottage
I see, the night clouds saunter
And drift and spinning round,
The break-neck moon, beaming
With joyous abandon, the piercing,
Painted white face of a pagan God.

He shuffles his muffled way through cardboard aisles,
Oblivious, sheltered, speaking in a mumble of tongues,
His piecemeal truths search for all that is meaningless,
Where he carves a gravestone—arguments in the rows.

Without you, my heart,
Sun is bleeding as it falls,
New moon is broken.

Ocean birds scatter—
Sun melting day on horizon,
  .  .  .  Waves in pantomime.

Downy in a bed of cotton clouds—
Faraway under seas of coral and wave,
The maritimes of fair and lonely currents
Cast us away and dropped our weary souls
On a lost strand of some great ocean landing,
Circe appeared, was knowing, to greet us as we
Woke, led us to a citadel island above of the sky,
We dranked of thirst, her fey sweet potions in haste,
Made our way in flight to kiss misadventures escape
And mired in woods fell once again, innocent before
The dawning break of a greenly seeded eternal day,
Blue eyes born, became, in the spotted branches,
Freckled arms and barks of ever reaching hair
Praised in silence and timely mystic wanes
Quivered in peace like a yearling doe
As never leaves were blanketing
And the moon sang with toe,
Our eyes sank lowly, softly,
Only to spark upon tides
Of the glittering pools
With starry eyes
Glowing new
In lovelight
Of dear
Sun.

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.

Born of fire, your body burned under mine.
The slip shod friction kindled in the bliss.
Blue flames flashing and water dowsing time,
Smoke, my wave, moon seas, lighted sands kiss.
Blue and cold my eyes set, seizing treasure,
Your flaming hair a bed, my boat was wrecked.
A sea of glass and all the stars were measured;
Red on white, your skin was cinder flecked.
Flames were raining, **** the waters break;
Two bodies burned that night, fire on the lake.

Painter, poised in passing,
Mad colours, melding with light,
Mind illuminated in the stroke,
Brushes tang, tangle in structures
Of vision, the solitudes of smoke,
Perditions fold on black lines,
Splattered in smithereens
Of grace and white.

I saw you in dream,
We walked together,
Kaleidoscopic,
Like truly it had once been,
The comfort of always you in hand,
The sun's caress, the open skies,
A secret valley, fields beyond
The first breaking,
Dawns perfection,
Then music, newly made
Played on, seeping
A soft étude of warm drops,
Rain so gently dripping,
The whole meadow began to move,
Yellow butterflies and red winged warblers
Wafting round circuitous, ceremonious,
Soothed in simple harmony,
We made our barefoot way,
Toes in the sands,
Passed lofty streams, came upon
Golden gleams, glens, surprised
By lake shores seams and slowly,
Without fortune, gazed
Into the creaking sadness
Of blue
Reflections.
Suddenly, we slid, fell
Amid rolling tears
Filling our eyes,
And my hands reached
Out into nothingness . . .
Demise,
You,
Vapourized.
I awoke into steadfast
Silence and smoke
Of low, deepest night,
Tarnish taste of sloe
Burn and cold blackness,
Hopeless, banished,
Before the running after fall,
Near inklings of those
Only, once known,
Unblemished,
Hues, fading,
Lost,
Colours.

Shipwrecked at sea, wholly lost
In the green pools of her eyes,
Little oceans reflecting cool stars
And shear, lighted murky moons,
Her branching kelps of hair lashed
Me to the blinding poles of never.
More and maddened she dredged
Me adrift with oceans birds flying,
Fish and tear jerky waves of darkling
Deep maelstrom swells and cresting
*******, the casting lines of thighs,
And curled toes, towing me under,
Till I was sweetly drowning, again,
Lost asunder in her flowing bodies
Of holy well, mystic seas and ocean.

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