veronica

masks

the image is of
love
huge, hard
as a thick stream
of milk
pouring
like niagra falls
over a threadbare will
love comes
torrentially.


there was   the  red
   and   the  black
veronica
i reached into   that  core of     dark
and said   your  name.

zinc metaphor

masks:

if the sky that we look upon
should crumble and fall
and the mountains tumble to the sea

the image is of
the fact that
i once loved
you.

i won't be afraid, no, i won't shed a tear
just as long as you stand by me

that
just once
to have loved

to just once
have tumbled
into that ocean
of juice
from its cliff
of pearl

broken
swollen
on its
taut tide

to have
masked
desire
with your
name

darling, darling, darling
stand by me.

i wept in a dream

masks

the image is that
i wept in a dream, lover,
that you were there and not there.

but the truth is,
i mourned you while awake. 
i mourned that i had never loved you.

that mask was made
of mother-of-pearl.  it changed
in every light until one was bright enough

to heat it
to a shattering point.

a maskless clarity.
i looked at the shards
that filled my hands
and said your name.

milton

the image is
that which will have to pass
for the thing itself.

because i have nothing of yours
but an old shirt,

and there never was anything
ours.

your existence
so far outside of me
you might as well
have been a star
lover

only your shadow

only your shadow
brushing the ground
i pressed my mouth into.


there is blood flooding the stairs of the tower.  the tower is myself, citadel.  the tower is a prison.  the tower is my body.  lips and eyes, hands and hair, the tower is built of longing, the tower is built of the resistance to change, the tower breathes in and out and its language breathes with it, slow strides of breath, breath to feed the fire. 

the mask is
that this makes
some sort
of difference.

quietus

the mask is
that the image is.

i fend off the moment
in which to let you go
you and your shirt,
your shadow, its taste,
your smile,
your voice,
and that feeling
that sunlight
meant something
when i was near you.

lover, i search your coin
out
amidst the eternal cushions
of the couch.

meditations of the beast

the glass shattered
down to the very bed of it,

the lintel of the window,
jagged with light,

and i turned and saw you there
veronica

but it was a dream

you were a pass of cloth

you were an image

you made only an impression.


masks:
looking back on what i've lost,
i wrap my arms in white linen--i am
marked with mourning,
marked dawn's,
something
as easily marked
as white linen

something so
shattered
shattered
to its very frame...

something
ready to build
in the empty lintel
left by your name.

11. fingers of the bird

new monster

time they say
is like
sand

each moment
an implied
equidistance
from the rest,
each with

its own
heart
burrowed inside

the thousand things
felt in
each
are all
available
at all
points

also those
imagined

space is lodged
inside
that heart
also

like a
pinecone
ready to
spill its
seed
at frost,
waiting to
decompress

the image is of
a dawn a lighter shade
of gray
and the earth too
a lighter gray
and
me giving thanks
for everything
for everything
i remember

the stutter collected
inside my tongue

raucous freshness

grace--
i live in grace.
it feels like tears
tears on a face.

tears of joy
or tears of pain
the feeling goes round
and round again.

and as it rounds
itself anew
the moment like
a centrifuge

spinning away
the imperfect

just
water
salt
against
the flesh

i give thanks
for this
deep
pause--

so much
larger
than its
cause

dearest

there is no such thing
as a beast with no burden.

this feeling that remains
like sand in the mouth of the oyster
of having cheated everything
to get near to you,
beloved, best-loved,
the one i loved,

defying everything
but words and actions--
with you in every way
but those of fact and fiction.

i dwelled within you secretly
and only because you had
so much to give me,
beloved, best-loved,
the richness of your hair,
the smell of you, the heavy softness.

you were like a phoenix
bursting on the horizon
limitlessly far away
and yet i came close enough
to brush the skin of your hands
with my fingers and call it
an accident

and your ankles
the music you listened to
just scraps
the smell of the knowledge
of things that surrounded you

it was more
than wanting
beloved

i had
an oblique harvest
of you--a harvest
of the things near you

(gathered the dust
of your star

on hands and knees
gathering dust

you formed
inside me
a precious jewel)

i saw the blue of your veins
like rivers
i felt the skin of your voice
on the air.

roses

give   thanks
for the  sickness   of it
(the words   like
uneven piston)

the  scrap
of  mirror-glass
in   my  pocket

its fresh
points

i can  clutch  at
and feel  razed  there
feel   kept

in the moment
feel
if nothing else

miraculous

inability
to  free   myself

in  compulsive
blank

compulsive
blankness

resonance

parts that have been
writhing
under the ground
shoot green stems
flowers
comet-red with heat
burst open across the skin
petals rippling open
like an expanding flame

the texture of a scream
undulant like fire
across earth-pressed hills

i will take these blossoms
and make such a thing of them

a skin
like nuit's
an arc
deep as the sky
flowers like stars
burning
pricked
out
straight
from the heart

i will do such things
i know not yet what they are

earth and sky,
recover me
recover me

earth and sky,
recover me

(slack-jawed
with freshness
lips red
with force
the shattered
celestial fire
of the bloom)

ich grolle nicht

i have almost nothing.
not time, not anything, practically.
i have nothing but love.

love, and pain.

love, and hope.


and also the inside voices.


not even a poem.
just a collection of sentences.


and the inside
the inside voices.

(and love.)

watch the collection
drift through my fingers.

hey down a down
the inside voices

veronica

one changes so much when there is so much to change. 
these objects around me, the visually there, the touched--
things are nothing more than actions

slow enough in time
to be identified
as singular

the singularities
are so small
so small

bound a thousand years out from here and now,
up into brilliant white fire-marked space
and that dust becomes a face
and that dust becomes a face

cosmic and forceless
infinitely fine
your name a breath
your name a breath
in you all things reside

zinc metaphor

rhododendrons are bright pink flowers
they are the cups of the morning.

rhododendrons are salmon pink and white
against a deep green leaf.

an unpleasantly fuzzy stem complements
the rhododendron, the cup of the morning.

even the dead leaves don't lose color.
they turn a caramel brown.


the zinc metaphor
spreads
over everything

i wept in a dream

the delineation of an arc,
circus tent-like, of desire
for form, for shape,
for less things--for all-widening--

a singularity in the pole of the world.

i have done such things
i know not yet what they are.

actions trail behind womblike causes,
leaving white waxen tails like comets
when i closed my eyelids i saw them
burning there still,

spinning in depths
deeper than space.

control--infection--
the mechanics of a dream
i have done such things
i have done such things.

milton

the stomate of the rose
nodding against the stem
like a hand
against a wrist
twitching there

when i woke from a dream
i saw so little

the birds wandered the skies
the flowers barely budded out

quietus

croesus of the golden horn
and page blossom from the silver book
the sound of sand scraped against itself
the crunch of a thin layer of sand imploding
and page blossom from the silver book

i have done such things
i have done such things
sweetheart do i know you anymore?
what have i done?  do you know?

descent into ownership
the black and red grip of mastery
the press of lips and the grind of hips
i broke shallow against a lintel
i swept the pieces with my mind

with the mind that spilled from my head
with that page of blossom from the silver book

meditations of the beast

song

air air hold her hair
hold it there for me to stare
let me look at it in love
look at it from far above
look at it from near below
look at it from high and low

every love becomes my own
from the east to western zone
broken in the morning time
broken at the evening's line
hand in hand with golden youth
foraging the edge of truth

i will seek you everywhere
air air that held her hair

12. the great good use

new monster

nude and vibrant silence

silence

spread round like sour milk's hot press

(locked, all doors locked down)

silence no longer the absence but rather apotheosis of sound, silence a feeling, lappable, a discretion of tastes, a fever

silence the gathering and the prophecy

(i will do such things, such things, such open-sound things)

(i cling to
your shirt as if
to the petals
the stamen
clings
fearful of
bareness)

raucous freshness

and too, hands, eyes, words and names of things from out the concrete heart, each like lace, with holes in a pattern

(i stood on your porch and i smoked a cigarette.  the sky was night.  and it smelled like the lawn.  a man in a jacket.  there you were.  and you remarked on a choice.  above night circled.  the eyes of my face circled in, falconlike.  you you you

later a woman gave me a deck of tarot cards.

i was dizzy with you.  and it was cigarettes near the lawn.  a choice you made.  later my heart beat with it.  you you you you you)

my veronica, you stood apart, hanged in constellation like the lover of a god.

dearest

light of love
lingering, glancing like sun off the water
scatter of luminescence
the palm of the hand
hitting the water

the water is permeable
wide with toothless mouths
a thousand floating wrists
a thousand limp hands

i will factor this in, dearest, in gratitude.
you put the light in my hands and
when i smack the water it's for you

for you my love loved one with
eyes like sunfire

for you my loved one for the one i love

roses

we were on the front porch and BLOOD the night was warm and the scent of the grass FLESH

i set my teeth against memory.  memory is BLOOD nothing but a FLESH

veronica how i want you.  it's childish to BLOOD
childish to FLESH

foolish to crave in words childish to BLOOD FLESH AND BLOOD

flesh, bone, and blood
hey down a down
flesh, bone and blood
hey down a down

resonance

kettle full of thorn diary chapter and verse:

the sweat on your hands like a sun disc
like a sun disc the rose in the fire
the rose in the fire like a deer in the wire
like a deer in the wire the femur the spire

the femur the spire like the house of the moon
who came to there came there too soon oh too soon
who came to there came there too soon oh too soon
mourn mother the moon mourn the shatter of beams
mourn those split unborn stars as if they were anything

ich grolle nicht

sway
of
sound

sound
straight through

still behind every cell i look for you
look for you behind every shadow of beating vein
within each fountain of the eye, within each whitecap teeth

i pound of sound

my love my love my love
it is a kettledrum
my love my love
it is a sleeve,
a hide hiding mountables
the soft sinkable things
the soft vulnerabilities

kettledrummed i resound
reresound  beating beating out the tender vein
thick-knuckle down the fountain
the giant envelope of lovesong
a wave so deep i could curl up in
and ride  filled, annihilate,
gone

.  .  .

veronica

i was cloth
woven
to catch
your face.

did you see
in me
that shape?

nothing else perhaps
no mirror

could give you

what i could any clearer.
all blinding

white, all gold,
all flowers
teeth-grit with

opening fold,
all spring
pushed out
as if it were summer

not
seasons' betrayal
but
to find
an owner.


i shudder
for a limit
and find
white only

and gold
all-flowering--
a god

that lonely would have
me heal, that

gives nothing away.

zinc metaphor

it was a layer of zinc i acquired
willfuly
caked deep
down into the skin
until
i was a different me.

as if in every cell
this my sick white fought
with your fairy coin.

so that when i creamed
sound
it glinted lamp-gold--
that is,
a glittering expulsion.

posessed:
your
fist.

reposessed:
my dirt
is
zinc caked nail-thick,
zinc in the vein,

poison, yes,
poison.
sweet poison.

i wept in a dream

drop, tears, down deep
through the caverns of my sleep

to the river underground
deep and dark past any sound

where the water ceaseless flows
without break, but undertow

dragging down to leave your trace
featureless at its deepest place


somewhere i'd tried to escape.  had tried many times.  my hands
shuddering, unable to hold
anything.
but it was a harvest, and i will tell you why:
at the bottom of the river, a door was available.
i had been waiting for a door forever.

it was a train that took me away from here
and a train will bring me home.

milton

heartbeat a face
image from out the waves,
veronica
looks at me still
i imagine,
a star
in the sky, shining
like sun on the water

a million miles away.

i don't need to remember
what i can't forget, a feeling
lodged
so deep below
the surface
it turned the whole breadth of the fountain
to gold, to one gilt object,
as water piled upon water,
sweet blood washing the vein, red
with the breath
i drank
of your face.

so far away
it was a dream:
the chalice,
the tower through which
the blood trails
like a white sleeve,
the point
that pinions
everything

worked free
the door to the tower
opening
onto something
less imaginary.

it was a train that took me away from here
and a train will bring me home.

quietus

i was a magician, a master-weaver.
snakelike, the rhythm to you and i
that i wove again and again.

no escape from the outcome,
as any gambler knows,
but for one shaking minute,
shaking like the leaf of a deadened aspen,
the sequence itself can change,

for one cheated ray of light
the sequence itself can change

like jenga.

patient in pale state
my hide in tatters
(it does not matter)
i wait   for my breath
to   rebound
what i never
had, what
i   always   had never had.

meditations of the beast

variance, the jacquard rose,
against red another lesser red,
next to yellow another yellow.
each color holding its other
still, too still, as if
against the line of time itself.

groundless, as if  colors only,
regardless of form,   without
any  abstraction, that
nexus  into which    this
damage  was
pressed   i break
all ways when the night  has  come
and the land   is dark
and  the moon    is  the only  light we'll see
no   i won't be   afraid
no i   won't   shed  a tear
just as long   as you
stand
by
me