Mending Kit (poem)

                                      --Provincetown, 2001

The package, palm fit, its binding skeins
of thread, its prick of needled light,
tools made neat for an alchemist's sigh:
there is nothing more real than nothing.

And here, ocean birds scream to sing
some call, their call, to the whippet wind,
to the rushing tides:  and nature pins
its drooping hem with this diurnal
darning of her slow ebb and return,
the binding thread, the shoreline's rim.

We walk down the dazzled light
where waters lave this stone's slow turning.

In Green Harmony (poem)

                                                   --for Holly, and Pam, by the bay

                                 1

A latticed, green world and and water-lily light
     were but last year's dazzle of pink
limbs, a mere scarlet of passion afloat,
     awash, adrift and terribly undulant
              to these milk-dowsed eyes;

and Claude Monet watched it all, la nymphea,
     goat-tongued poet, and moon child one.


                                 2

Once, by Marin's redolently blue bay,
     a small boy heard the contentious gulls
skate eggshell skies, saw the distant buoys
     of men at work, felt the ineffable, keen pull,
              the wounded words of waves;

and the air could glimmer, then, as the diamond daze
     of fog dissolved into indeterminate day.


                                 3

And what child was it, upon Fuji's sacred loom,
     squatted beneath kitchen table, sensed in limbs,
such fragile limbs, earth and sky tumble, felt doom
     in  the rising sun, and shook to trees nimbly
             dancing?  Memory's dim room:

in amah's tow, riding the nickeling train where
     green waves of rye breathe still, en plein air.


                                 4

Yes, many decades since, when Monet surely knew
     the joy of this prismed light, saw the willow's
weeping green, a bed of flowers, its sinewed,
     power of scarlet and purple, its prolific yellow,
               the sky and its watery blue--

his blinded eyes now hang upon Chicago's walls,
     none the less for that, remembering it all.


                                  5

And you, poised upon the slopes of Big Sur,
     peering west into the next millennium,
what will you see to remember, what remember
     to see? what vision now innocent
              become your roseate blur,

more accurate than true?   In a green harmony,
     the mind sways easy on a widening sea.      

Excursion (poem)

                       1

Spike wore his suit close to the vest
and straightjacketed his infinite blue yearn.
What could he know
of a vast space beyond ephemeric indigo?
He like to drink his words neat, most best
unheard in the tavern.

Not of course
unplease to cower in comfortable jukebox
blast, not he--
better the swiveled eye, none any worse
for a bimbette surveyed at two o'clock:
O desire, you opening sea.

At last, perhaps the one utter to stoke
up hearth's fire, to place sounding stroke
to purring pulse.
A glamoring touch should whisper fair quietly.
Tranced out of the tumult
babbling, we hear sang multitudinous the light.

Spike squared sails of his wandering piece and cast
off for the shimmering sounds of this open piazza.


                       2

Roiled upon spumes dark and inchoate,
the memoried past, and flotsam of future rue
sticks crosswise in throat
that will warble no stale wedding tune,
can croak, in fact, only
--Is you is, or is you ain't my baby.

Spike would know hisself better, though way too
late for any mirrored, esoteric glancing
to pluck hapless Eros'
shaft from an unstrung bow, too late to dance
naked before the unrelenting blue
eye of some Isis.

--Is you is, or is you ain't my baby.
Blind spiked quest into dark wood dreamed
where anything, nothing
do unhappen everytime, where spumed stream
plunges underground, the plumed spray
babeling, babbling.

The Arcade (poem)

I grew up at the Arcade--
no, not the nickelodeon sort,
though it had its reels as well,
I suppose--no, the one down on Calhoun,
at the corner of South Main.

My memory flickers on, begins to roll,
and I see its modest square face
looking west towards the Mississippi;
it was young then, so recently born
out of the exuberance
of the war to end all wars.

My mother and I shared
one of the luxury suites,
one of the seven with a private bath,
and I would help her make gin
in our four-legged tub.

Old soldiers would buy it
for a dollar a pint and then take
my mother out to dance at a club
on Beale Street and return after
flushed and smiling.
Her legs were pretty then.

Now, I hear they're razing
the old Arcade, its face scarred
and written upon, its windows blinded
with boards, its bones sagging,
as old man river keeps rolling on.
And my memory flickers once,
and winks out.

The Musician (poem)

With clean flute, I would pierce the holy heart,
     the bright notes, a petal-strewn path through God;
     or, with low moan of bass, I'd play a part
     to lull the whining cosmos towards a nod;
yes, to bend green trees to sing new songs,
     I'd play both black and white, those keys in strife,
     to weld in chords the unruly notes in throngs,
     enticing leaf-laden branch as joyous fife.

But how this I say "I" when song begins?
And when lips with ivory and wood first kiss,
     and fingers' tarantella first descends,
     how find myself at the heart of the tryst?

So when love's motion's begun, the quivering bow at play,
     then comes the breathless one, the man without a name.

Synchronicity (poem)

Because it was high noon of the twelfth day

of the twelfth month of my year of years,

and because I, too, heard Aleppo's bells

and saw a haloed face within the sun-paled bay,

and because you looked, our moment nearing,

into widening eyes with wonder--we could not tell

that somewhere in the orchard

an apple fell

unheard.

The Question (poem)

                                          (with apologies
                                         to Charley Simic)

Greasy ropes with baby nooses wind
through summer weeds, through sun-bathed words
oiled and obtuse, their bodies portending
some languor perturbed.

Greasy ropes with baby nooses grasp,
and groaning, glide, slide from the hands
that would fondle and dandle, would work them in brass
a mask, soi-disant.

Greasy ropes with baby nooses coil
in ringlets, so this mirror would moan,
a crown writhing and fit for a lonely gargoyle,
loquacious and stoned.

Greasy ropes with baby nooses trap
a spectral light, and shine it upon an alien
land, where anonymous ghosts tramp
a course to my mate.

On Her Birthday (poem)

(for Holly Miller, April 26th, 1993)


For me, that year came in
wearing the soft white down
of winter's quilt, murmuring
the words of first marriage vows
under the impossibly pale sun
in a Colorado sky.

And it burgeoned, and grew
to life on an elixir
of pink and white chablis,
shared Gaulois, and idleness--
we whiled away those hours
in a narrow bed, listening
to the fermenting fruit
of our homemade wine,
the passage of hours
decadent and sweet.

That next spring, we began
our long pilgrimage down
from our mountain retreat,
and out onto the great American
plain, riding the roulette
of our thumbs north
with three fat suitcases
and the two black kittens
we had conned from the pound.

We named them Brother and Sister
though I couldn't tell them apart
and the four of us rode
a seemingly random vector
back into the Wisconsin winter
of Madison, mecca for malcontents,
anarchists, marijuana imbibers,
and practitioners of free love.

And then came the spring again,
serenaded by Brubeck and Coltrane,
blissed in the haze of a bigfat bone,
sitting ten floors high on a balcony
watching Lake Mendota slowly
unthaw its hard white into blue--
anyone had never a care then.

Soon, too soon it seems now,
I began work for the state IRS,
and she, for the local Blue Cross:
and our long march into summer
sun had begun; the seasons unwound,
month by month, year on year,
till that march led me, solitary,
to the door of your house on Angelus
to celebrate your twenty-second birthday.

And so on this day of celebration,
though for all that, not one
so unlike so many others
yet to come, I would offer the donation
of a green, green memory
of that time when
I was also a keen twenty-two,
bending supplely in the quickening wind
of my springtime heart, blueing
the world with eyes of wonder.