5. blank and full

new monster

i called for you
and you didn't come.
it bears
repeating:
i called for you
and you didn't come.

impossible for this to be
a true betrayal,
girl with your red blood mouth
and your hair as dark as a memory.

when we owed each other
nothing

beyond my obsession.
ergo there must be some point stuck

still

deeper than this
and broken off
at the hilt,

lost
to its handle.

raucous freshness

laura turned into a game for petrarch,
a chase through stone monuments
with green moss new-rhizomed on them
every year

every year he came back to her
and said something new on her face...

i feel wild tonight wild and cyclical
thinking of you
vanesa

of how i would think your name and

feel chasms open like windows in me

and light come up from them
from the molten core of me itself
the earth inside not red but like a sun.

and so my purpose
quite plain
vanesa
i do not re-rewrite your name
but live the legacy
you made in me
and write
what does not pass for poetry

dearest

something about the way
the shell works,

the infinity of the shell,
the shell's rest,

lies split
on sand,
and what was within

goes shaking, slithering, dragging
itself
from moment to moment,
from tide to tide.


i looked inside--
forceless and infinite
i found the tide

i dug myself down--
hey down a down
past the shell to the bone
and in this deep night,
dearest, i claim you

vanesa
it was you i loved
vanesa
i name you.

roses

hurting for a framework of words
with which to house
this blank sacrament of feeling

the feeling of suture
of being threaded
together

along lines, irradiate
between white and black

a spectrum as hollow as whole.

the thing is that the white and black are not the same but they exist simultaneously in the same place.  thus i am strung by what may loosely be termed a paradox.  and the whole world seems to thrum along these strings which collect within themselves moment after moment, while i hang back in fear and in love, mourning what time has discarded, uselessly human.  this is not a metaphor, it is a description, and hence a bulletin from the abyss.  but i will drag myself out.  and then time will pay for all it has broken.

resonance

there is no answer in vengeance because vengeance is only the apparition of repetition.

this is why in the morning i would go and prune my climbing roses.
i would fork spade after spade of nutrient-rich ground
back over the roots, a morning ritual.

and then i would wind the cut stems around my wrists
and pretend i was capable of filling death
with something other than life,

like duty, or shame,
or the nutrient-rich corrosion
of an unacknowledged self...

but the roses were props
and the pretense was hollow.

now i philosophize
inside
and the rose grows
a tangle
over the wall of the house.

ich grolle nicht

but if i never deserved to feel love the first time, why would i deserve to do anything like love again?  wasn't the first time stolen, against all odds, against overwhelming evidence?  something filched from time, put into place only
by virtue of
a fugitive
will?


there is a song
casting its thin thread
across Stygian waters:

vanesa, vanesa,
i drank
nothing
from the chalice
of your face.

veronica

half-living here at
the flooding end of time,
a planed and constant fear
at the back of my mouth--

afloat,
clinging
to meaning,
meaning
in memory
as slender
as the
print
of a
foot
on pavement

in my mind, i suck your shadow from the stone. 
i remake your foot from the taste of the ground.
in memory, i spiral down, down, down,
to the rock and to the bone.

zinc metaphor

charon says:

she was not
even
halfway there
monseigneur

she saw
the water-road
unfold
before

her dark eyes
heard
the spent ones'
cries

she jumped
into the waves
and said let me
swim for shore

she had paid in
full
monseigneur
so i did not

stop her
i do not know
if she is still
swimming

i wept in a dream

petrarch chased laura over the woods-road, feet trapping on roots grown into the way, sunlight filtered to green and umber above and the road itself below of old and swollen flagstone, the moss gathering between stone-breaks flowering in flakes of white.  the air in his mouth tasted sweeter than other air.  he heard her laugh as he pushed back curtains of hanging lichens and found himself at the abbey.  she was leaning against the stones of the ruined gate, in red, smiling, her long black hair in a thick knot at the nape of her neck and as he walked up to her she disappeared naturally.

but he knew what to do: dropped to his knees because it had happened this way countless times and licked the pavement where she had stood.  swallowed.  and the sounds of her loveliness came in strands from his throat.  he gathered them and bound them around his wrists.  and he couched back on his heels and imagined satyrs and clerics come to him and mark the moment, bless his devotion as a beautiful process...

but in his mind there was a tree being smothered by its own shadow.  and when he woke with moonlight stretched across his face, he stood and looked out into the hot night and knew

that with or without her he still was dreaming

and the moonlight stretched like a hand over venice.

milton

it was just a dream, the tower built from the thick smoke of offerings. 
because there was nothing to offer and nothing to burn.
the cavern roof rose clean as it had ever been.

now i offer my fear to you o god.
i put it on the altar of this frame of me,
the flesh and bony bits and the neural semaphore.

the flag of flame unrolls--i will live in smoke
but no matter.
to you vanesa who asked nothing

i leave the act of burning.

quietus

my hair looks in the mirror like a thatched roof
when will my hair stop looking like a thatched roof?
lover when you come to me
lover when you come to me.

my eyes are in the mirror like two coals
when will my eyes be less like two coals?
lover when you come to me
lover when you come to me.

my cheek is blank in the mirror like an unlined sheet
when will my cheek not be an unlined sheet?
lover when you come to me
lover when you come to me.

my brow is in the mirror like a coin
when will my brow be spent like a coin?
lover when you come to me
lover when you come to me.

my mouth is in the mirror like a tight-tied bow
when will my mouth be bought and sold?
lover when you come to me
lover when you come to me.

meditations of the beast

blank:
vanesa i have writ your name in every word
and thereby writ nothing--syllables, phonemes
all washing clear against each other like ice
melting in the glass.

a clear pane
through which to see writ your name

full:
vanesa every word
draws toward you
every word is made
your word

a clear pane
through which to see your name