O Africa

Link to website update

215

Come dark
Define your houses
Place peace on
Plumes of smoke
Shifting altars wandering
In the eye of the night
Cease being wide in
The places where you now rest
Softly ascend and create awe
Easily you now fly
Last night I dreamt of you,
In your chair, so frail and old
Your crooked hip and sightless eye
Last night I flew.

If I Had Possession Over Judgement Day

link to website update: http://miketracy.net/Sketchbook2009/November/November_2009.html

213

On nature’s drunken lips
Oh most beautiful bird
I forget if you fly south for winter
Not in certainty if I shall see you again
A smell of china and wood and drought
Thirty years’ of wanting,… why?
The Awful wearing of paper Jesus-masks
A laugh a murmur chanting waving now first grace
Amongst the passing legs
Homer in the stairwell
Is what you wrote for real?
My earth-mouth, art, rots away
As I create nature daily
This is how I know myself
This is how I remain.

If I Venture In the Slipstream

Link to website update:

210

This Prospero willing to be a happy exile
Winds up in a gravedigger’s pocket
Acting on a world that falls forward
toward some lewd end while
The son of Judas fills my coat with ghosts.
Tonight we will meet ourselves
And wait for you in tender bewilderment
At a place where the wives of giants gather
To celebrate the daylight.
There is justice in motion. We
Glorify the music of silence.

For Brownie
1993-2009

Geology of a Broken Heart

link to website update:

207

A coat of honor the coat of glory
Hidden among summer years
Written name- super man
Last lay dying
Like sound and gone fire walked
Between the slumberers looking
For signatures looking for skies
On the willingness of the wooed but then stealing heaven.
To be at once satisfied yet bent against the centuries hearing
The sound of dying stars,
Finding a returning light
Dear to the horizon.

You Bring Your Rain Everywhere You Go

Link to website update:

201

King forgetter, a gentleman slave
Find your thoughts in antique angels
Left in second-hand shops
Urge the capitalists of night to invest in bones
Believe the best lands are yet to come
Raise up the sage of the dead earth
For another season, rich in arms and the dying
Depart your bed, leave your secondbest,
Your wife, sister and daughter to the company of pretenders
Walk out among some famous smiles
Lay your will to rest in kind tribute to peace
Pray for the name you wish you had

Correspondence With Jack Rivers

link to website update

202

Lovely jaws monylender’s flesh
History jeers at us who have hope
Home we go from Roman lands
From events proving the meaning of mere words
The lifted hands also carry life
High on the palm, where borrowers riot
Fullbellied, trying to test this season
A theory of famine
Inspired with enthusiasm
Searches for lost armadas
In the sea of the Bermudas or
The philosophy of history where
Life is deep and wide and made in Germany.

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.