Ordering the Edges

link to Website update:

198

Approval creaks the great wide way
Please it not to be the path we follow
The kike prophet of Kilkenny binds
Us dark and green and covers us in thunder
Discovering eyes for grooving
Reaching for a stayathome god
Who doesn’t care for
Certainty nor need an honest show.
Stumbling through the freeman’s street
We pass
The pussy-eaters
The daylight pissers
The blooming pain of pale life
Twisted in interested prayer.
O Jehovah hasty greeker your
Silhouette will give me pleasure
Will you please to disappear?

The Moon Has A Thousand Arms

link to website update

193

The art of murmur is a theory
Repeat the name for a blind moon,
One with odd lead for a heart
And a thousand arms attempting to forget.
See the brilliant darkness at noon,
The black face, holy corona
A sun of no sun, cold, lost in the storm of experience
Who owns hope?
Our lady of quantity on the hill
Of revelation, looking out for nearby seekers
All of whom will fall
As they draw nearer to what might have been.

Light in Autumn

Link to website update: October 26, 2009

190

With these clever sketches you
Come around you speak
To virtue with only a glance
Of a reminded tongue
Uttered words from a grand, headless poet.
You bring with you the loneliest correspondence
Written in a hand recalling the promise of virtue
The wild land shines through you
Your face is that of a hatless angel,
Thanks to a finger, a relic wrapped in paper
torn from stolen books
taken while the librarian experiments
with a rumor of sleep.

191

In heaven’s air there
Is no question of a shadow.
The unforgiven are killed after
Privately pleading over a name for light.
This discreet act is followed by the scattering
Of their empty bodies, strewn like fallen leaves in autumn sun.
They have no thoughts, these narrow wives
Hiding in the noise of possibility
they embalm their voices in stolen sweetness
then go to live among the trees.
I thought I heard Achilles say
That he believed in other birds
And guilty gods
And other questions such as these.

Goya Holds His Breath

Link to website update October 21, 2009

184

A wish is a shadow song of light
Like the air in France, gone then waxing
Twinkling, rarified till the future makes it smaller, less defined.
Unlovely space eternity,
Best escape to an overheard past
Where one can let the heart go to the head
Where the world is a movement: a plunge into noise
A dangerous lovesong you could not buy
In the afterlife.
A mother’s wrath makes rings of revolutions on
An improbable world.

187

Are you there, flowing over the spent poet?
Hungry for the murder of moments you
Paid your way across the useless water no
Lent life lived but sinned in flight from voices and ghosts.
Intending immortality we marry instead and
in the bed we find ourselves are borrowed and
Submerged molecules of logic,
Prayed over but everchanging
Impatient form is the debt of living
The child of servants to the family of the waiting
Steady born vowel in the corner of drinking
Waiting to be covered by the waves of the prying.

Dancers In Hats

Link to website update October 17, 2009

181-

Goodbye, land of giants
So long ye Laestrygonians,
Something I am looking for
Was found in the pocket of another
She, busy in afternoon,
Reads the hasty hand
In the quiet gate
Moment of walking
Moment of longing
Quick heart of paper
Safe heart of stone.
Goodbye, Land of giants.

182

Scylla and Charybdis

The tickled solemn shadows
Noiseless, priceless a weeping laugh low
Mystic, even shining not great but beautiful
It finds its way all ears and dreams a face: a girl
Who buys you a drink and seems to give you a minute.
But larger thought now sees sorrows paradise- she is off to
Darkgreener places all ears and grief,
Ready to pull another sucker through the gale.

183

Hamlet magician you are born so ordinary that
The Buddha would be embarrassed except he
Remains long enough to read a telegram, a poem
About a holy beard-Magician schoolboy.
The remains of light reveal a hint
Of the next shadowless world- speculations of beautiful sacrifice.
Doubtless, formless, the glimpsers of fire were probably right:
Aristotle was once a schoolboy, too.

If I Should Fall From Grace

Link to Website Update: October 14, 2009

175

Who says the devil is safer ?
A drunk confessor
in black and white?
washed in tears, he has his good points, too.
An ancient light, not so much useful as indebted to the
Day it shines on, to the space it takes on,
To the hidden woman with juggling fingers
Who won’t say whether she was visited in the night
By travelling seraphim
Who were really goyim
Who only left a dry signature
On the swift air, and say, “we were never here.”

Ladies of Spain

Link to Website update: October 12, 2009

174

Ladies of Spain
Draining Bladders
Climbing ladders
Investing in lovers
Plowed and now plowing
Immortal and naked
Goddamn goddesses
Sadder, overdue but arriving
Who wants to go home, anyhow?
Drinking electricity
A morning of mourning
Proper curves become trouble
The blood of an engine
Long ago stalled by the wayside
By god and mind
By lipless secret designed.

Always Live Near the Sea

link to website update: October 10, 2009

172

Knowing the Archduke of fire as I do,
We have little chance of two thousand Junes
Instead we expect mouths of garbage
And seas of sin where
Harmless sky and old fish mix
With an odd, Sewage-like effect.
This is how we know we are by the ocean.
Eating what we catch we copy the fashion
Of cheapest raw hermits
Before the smell drives us out
And we go looking for air.

Auto Da Fe

Link to website update October 7, 2009

166

The air of Jaffa gone
The spicy breath of life now wasted
Are we here in better years?
World of voices
Whispers trickling
Assailant perfume mouth of wealth
with an arm of needles
The skin gives in
And craves the flesh of polished animals
When kissing finally turns to eating.

167

Here are the rocks
That we choked on
Those swallowed with broken teeth
Gravy-less yet eaten with three hands
Look at this saintly king!
Little left over the bone
Torn limb gathered then strewn beneath the blade
Splashed fingers wing un-bitten across the Boyne
All this chewed faith
I hate dirty eaters.

A City Full of Clouds

Link to website update: October 5, 2009

163

The world is always forgetting
How to end, life continues while it
Gets distracted by the miracle of
An octopus, a cow, by sitting
Next to the water at sunset by
Wind and dreams and the newly beaten out
Now now now.
The surgeon’s rifle and bicycle travel
Mad, unafraid, retired into some
Watery surprise really a
coincidence of seeing the arm
from the grave
the shadow of the eye
and of things yet to come.

Confabulation

Link to website update October 3, 2009:

160

A moment of trouble gives me the happy finger
A wasted station’s lost voice cracking the word
And the word is to know that
The streets are full of water and lost chances
Horses with wheels and unfixed luck
The monkeys that run the place must
Be eating their own belts
A mob of trees cheers the spilling
Of apples, like the aftermath of a quiet bomb,
Like guts decorating the cobbles
The young know the valley
In it they lost everything; money and a way to tell tales
Prepare to receive their thoughts.

162

a cityful of clouds
heaped on a brother’s brother
a meeting passing notice
an hour that never dies
houses full of bricks and onions
piled against the night
the sin that never washes away
the stain of nature every second dying
every second being born
the coincidences and revealed meanings
the reverend breeze the empty, hopeless sky
the cold sandy sun
a hand in the window across a sleepless valley
the ghosts of great men
born in the blood of the lamb
things I’ve seen in the middle of the night.

Now They've Lost Themselves Instead

Link to Website Update: October 1, 2009

157

Suffering old bad the skull utters an oath
And the oath is a sickness a sign of days
Suddenly opening the eyes of the world
With a stick and a string
An old man passes for all
The answers hard and broken
The warning taken and
The river rising, watching, watching
Out he goes like the morning garbage
Out he goes to the curb
The word of time divides by two
The work of the day overtaken and unfolded
The lark is shaken and dangled
Finally heavy and blown from the bay
Surprised by the sunlight and the
Lunatic timepiece
Won’t you go after him?
Follow him down and explain.

158

Tell me the meaning
Of wishes in ages
Tell me the meaning
Of a knife in the water
Tell me who made
all the bareheaded partners
And the small unbidden children
Recovered from ages left in the earth.
Tell me the meaning of drinking and poetry
Tell me the meaning of loose lost feathers
Tell me the meaning of time and stillness.
Tell me who made this place called earth.