Making the Bed (poem)

First, the upper-left (all that was wanting
was love), and the oversized pad is soon snugged
(bounce a quarter on that bastid) smooth, taut

to the bed (you gave me); then (have drugged enough)
the bottom sheet (you gave me, too), spread smooth
to the touch (lingering, your diffident touch):
\
(Yo! and behold [yes, ecce! homini lupus])
this baying blank of our daily bread
(forever wanting what for want of you)

covered now with the two pink blankets
you also gave me (flesh oozed beneath),
and last the patchwork quilt (and the song said,

you get what) which is too small (but was free,
after all)--place the pillows back at the head.
To sleep, now, and perchance (all that was wanting

From the Dead-File (poem)

Dear Jan, as once you husband, but now perennial
lover merely (though on some distant urn
of a more distant yearning, we still bend
to love's learning,

I suppose), I propose to you a new acquaintance.
But first, let me begin to try to express
who it is I am, what I've become.  Pure chance,
you see, has pressed

and shaped the man whom you once knew and loved
so well (though, rest assured, the priapic wand
upon which you once danced, and dallied above,
still stirs to its longings,

now and then) beyond his own knowing self,
though perhaps you would know me just as well--
bah! but enough of that; the thing-in-itself
can always tell

the ultimate lie.  What I really want to say
seems impossible to mouth (though wanting for words
cannot still the urge to paint you some day
silently flourishing

for you and me, and Grace, too) without you
to cling to as it's said.  All that's left me
is the silver stud for my ear, the loud, blue,
Grateful Dead T-

shirt, a black beret, and the squinting picture
of an angry baby.  (Such frail, frail props
to hang a heart upon, this not of course to bitch
about the loss

of so much else.)  I cherish them still, for all
they speak to me in Braille.  Bah! no thimbleful
of wit can recall our one summer's slow thrall,
can it?  Yours, Michael

ps  I would propose to you a new acquaintance, love.

Epithalamium Revisited (poem)

When eye finds limbs impossibly lissome,
The blood beats to a speechless wish:
Sweet bells, this beatitude.

And yet word with word will intermingle,
Most artful twist of the act most sensual:
Sweet bells, this beatitude.


The blood beats to a speechless wish;
It sires some self beyond analysis:
Sweet bells, this beatitude. 

Most artful twist of the act most sensual,
Word turned to a touch far more tangible:
Sweet bells, this beatitude.

It sires some self beyond analysis,
A sweet amalgam, nor hers nor his:
O sweet bells, this beatitude.

Word turned to a touch far more tangible,
Our voices recline, our limbs entangle:
Sweet bells, this beatitude.

A sweet amalgam, nor hers nor his,
Two come to one, connubial bliss:
O sweet bells, this beatitude.

Our voices decline, limbs disentangle;
Heart beats more slowly, eyes would wander:
Sweet bells, this beatitude.

Two come to one?  Connubial bliss?
When eye finds limbs more freshly lissome--
O sweet bells, this beatitude.

Flying Home (poem)

we are riding

riding the black wheels singing

singing the brown cows flying

flying by

"Betty, get that kid

out of the goddamn ashtray.

If I have to stop. . . .

her hands:  pale-white,

slender birds,

gathering the gray dust,

chalking her fingers

we are speeding

speeding black wheels passing

passing black wheels leaving

leaving the high blue sky

 "Jesus Christ--can't you

keep him still?

He's driving me crazy. . . ."

her voice, small and warm:

   "Gerry, he just wants to see."

and I fold up small

in her warm arms

and at last, we are riding

riding up the narrow

steep drive to Pa

a short, fat man guarding his house

and my father grabs him--

"Papa, I've come back."

and their sun-polished stone

faces fuse together

as my father's tear washes

a single track into their golden face

"Baby, don't cry. . . ."

Double Vision (poem)

Near blind in summer's sun, we spar
     to some ancient, oedipal rhythm,
Father and son:  we joust on the hot tar,
     and rain spheres through a mystical rim.

No child of mine this immensity:
     outsized body, outrageous
And fantastic--out of breath, I see
     double, see the child that was.

Comically diminutive, perfectly small, 
     his pliable bones thin as kindling--
One quick snap, then, for the god mortal
     to test the seed once engendered.

"Give me the ball, Dad, I'm open"
     and unthinking I turn from the hoop
And wing the ball to my three-point hope--
     he grows to his height, arches, and shoots.

Those first words spoken, his being
     fleshed in a green, green idyll,
Could he see himself then come finally
     some impotent, fallen idol?
    

Reading by Candlelight (poem)

The power has ebbed from this place
       where I lie up alone,
       and returned home--
and in the sibilant space
       of its absolute absence
       I watch the dance
of Frost's mowing, scything voice:

His silent words slice to the bone
       as I writhe to the bite
       of this flickering light,  
a scurrying thing pressed to the loam
       of the kindred, kindly earth,
       absently hurt
by the whispered sigh, the hushed low

word, absently spoken tonight:
       and where is the power
       of that fruitful hour
when Frost, perchance by candlelight,
       culled fated flowers
       for absent lovers,
sighed his words and first began to write?  

At The Cave (Linzy AS, W. Germany, 1975) (poem)

                 1

Yo, Apple, he got the MDA,
and Beverly, she got them long, long jeans,
and Shelley, she be tiny and mean
in a dark basement club on this military base.

And pale Margaret, she got them crotchless hose
(and sure that be all the better t'expose
lips damp in equipose).

And Rosanna dear, would guzzle her beer
wit' her hubby, Spike, who done brung her here.

The lights be low, the music be hot,
thumpin', thumpin', thumpin' a lot.

And Apple be handing us packets of cellophane
and up and up we's noses it goes,
the little white grains of afrodeezick snow--
all sense be lost in that feeling's gain.

Oh, we hot to trot, don't you know,
and Whoa! where be Apple's hands agoin',
but up and up Margaret's inner leg,
and th'other up tiny Shelley's, too--
no need to whine, no need to beg;
them hands, they be welcome here,
ain't nothing fo' us but to giggle, leer,
and settle back in our hot, blue groove.

The lights be low, the music red hot,
thumpin', thumpin', thumpin' a lot.

Now Rosanna and Spike,
wuh-oh, they be thinkin' alike,
and they gonna take it out to the parking lot,
gonna find the bottom of her honey pot,
oo-wee, oo-wee, they gonna dip and dive,
back seat dancin' in a '65

four-door coupe by Mer-say-DEEZ,
bare ass shining to a streetside light.
Oo-wee, oo-wee, that be a sight to see.

The light be high, the music quite low,
and they be thumpin', yeah, tout suite
accelerando.

                   2

Picture this:  a shaped composition
in black and white, one bound in black
though peopled in white--damp Georgia cracker,
black Apple's sure stuttering finger,
Bev and Shel's dark laugh in the back,
pale streetside lovers in coupling position--

and what did these have to do with those?
And how these colors come juxtaposed?

Ignorance Is Bliss (poem)

When I arrived here,
you had already left your wife
behind:  she greeted me
with her perennial question:
"Wanna long neck?"
I took that as friendly
welcome, though not usually
given to poster beer girls--
I left her on the wall, manna
from a generous stranger.

You also left a bumper sticker
affixed to the dysfunctional
closet door:  it read
"I (club) my wife
I (spade) my dog
I (heart) Memphis Tattoo Studio"
I left it there, too.

Aside from those traces,
this room at the Y was empty,
its pastel-lime, cinder-block walls
wrapped around a narrow
single bed, a monastery
refuge for a young male
Christian.  I quickly filled it up,
filled it with the rag-ends
of a nomad's life--a paper sack
full of photos, a file cabinet
full of divorce decrees
and old birthday cards,
a toaster oven
minus the toast, and a wall
full of books, already read,
stacked vertically.
I lead my life simply, and every day
she greets me again,
her long hip cocked:
"Wanna long neck?"

Now I find that you
never left at all:  rather,
you took a rope
(or was it a tie, perhaps,
a sheet or a towel, I wonder)
and slowly choked the life
out of yourself.

These days I find
my haven of solitude
peopled with vague rustlings,
and when your wife greets me
from her place on the wall,
her voice vibrates
bloody and sensual.

Bangor, Maine, 1967 (poem)

That place sometimes seems to me lost
    forever, the Penobscot hopelessly defiled
with these intervening years of its long unwinding,
    its trees thinning about the temples,
        gone, in fact, almost blind
        with this winter's heavy coat
of featureless forgetting, its silent snow.

But even yet there are moments when a shard
    of green memory will poke through, keen
as a scalpel's edge, bright as the frozen sheen
    of a winter morning:  I suddenly see you
        as you were then, a young woman
        lolling under trees in her backyard--
and the Maine spring burgeons for me all anew.

Of course, we are both far from there now.
    Draped with our children, bedizened
with our past husbands, and our ex-wives
    those first days beneath the boughs
        where the little river lies
        seem from another's life--
just old items of clothing donned as an afterthought.

Women in White (poem)

You look so safe there,
standing in the green spring
of your folks' front lawn,
holding my small girl
in your arms--
two women in white,
a study in calculated
innocence.

Now, that small girl speaks to me
in the blond sentence
of her fifth year's wisdom,
out of her blue-eyed joy
with things forbidden.

And what of the aunt,
so stunning in white,
olive arms the compass
of a small girl;s world?
Stunned with a whisper
in white, an obscene
invitation
to some too-studied experience,
she moves to silent song,
her solitary grace unbinding.

In my silence, I wander
again and again
to this moment snapped
out of  time, to a dreamer's
image of two women in white,
their small plot of green.

Awakening (poem)

Through dimly cast shadows,
     figures hushed in darkness
     fight the morning splendor;
amid the rustling of sheets,
     the oiling of limb on limb,
     the droll choir of bumps and squeaks,
laughter, transparent as glass,
     covers thin songs
     of passionate solitude--
in a curtained shaft of light,
     solitary motes blaze
     into stars, and silently
laze on photonic seas.

After Night Goes Down (poem)

                                           (with apologies to Tomas Transtrommer)

The war goes in time, in tune

with lamentations dressed long, black, and slinky.

Its bones are white, its blood, sudden as color TV.

It appears without sign, a plummet from blue.

Man can shelter from whip of winter's sun,

can warmly loaf in the artifice of home.

But the drunk red river reads like a telephone book--

abandoned names froze permanently cold.

No one is promised a seat by the hearth,

though workers still work and farmers reap.

But warriors will be obeying still

the soft sound that brings down sleep.

Agnostic's Complaint:  Ice Storm '94, Memphis, Tennessee

                                   --for Jerome Oliva, age one

These trees weep in silence today:
          the limb-wracked tears' diamond gaze
          creeps slowly, cold; a lustering
    unjeweled crack splits the sinewed braid
          of upturned unitary green,

and somewhere far north, beyond gelid mind's
          finite traverse, a small child
          lies infinitely still in a sterile white
    room, its myriad past voices subtly wound
         with bright fluorescent shards of blight.

About these two, what could poet say?
        Or brother?  Or shaman, or priest?
        Nothing, save that trees have wept today,
    save that the world here has whitened in grief,
        nothing, save for the prayer brief
        that might save this one at least.