The Lovers

Look at those cranes in their wide arc!

The clouds they have with them
were with them when first they flew
from one life to another.

At the same height and same speed
they seem entrained entirely side-by-side,
as so shared of gorgeous sky,
both crane and cloud through which so briefly fly.

That neither one of them be lagged behind,
but see wind as nothing but their swaying,
which in touching both, cradling the other,
each-to-each now feels as they lie in flight together.

May thus the wind abduct them to the void.
So long as they remain alive, together as themselves,
that long there’s nothing that can touch them,
that long they can be chased from any place
where rainfall threatens or where shots ring out.

Beneath the varied discs of sun and moon
they will fly on, fallen wholly in thrall to one another.
Where to, you two? “Nowhere.”
Away from whom? “From all.”

You ask, how long they’ve been together? Briefly.
And when is it that they’ll part? Soon.
Lovers thus suppose that love supports them.

Of the Drowned Girl

 

1

When she drowned, and swam down

From the streams into the great rivers,

The opal sky shone wondrously

As if it had to calm the corpse.

2

Wrack and algae clung to her

So that she slowly became much heavier.

Coolly the fish swam around her leg,

Plants and animals burdening even her last journey.

3

And the sky in the evening became dark smoke

And at night held the light in balance with the stars.

But in the morning it grew lighter so that

There would still be morning and evening for her.

4

When her pale body had decayed in the water

It happened (very slowly) that God gradually forgot her,

First her face, then her hands, and right at the end, her hair.

Then she became carrion in rivers of much carrion.

--Bertolt Brecht

Musandam

O, glowing soul of Oman (updated)
your gameless hand reminds me
of a tattered Tilton prayer-cloth.
Why are you at war with entropy?


Don't you know the blood of angels
flows out into the Strait of Hormuz?
Do you really think the gauge
of ring (that pierces Gaia's nipple)
makes the slightest bit of difference?

Alex Tried to Drink New Amsterdam

Alex tried to drink New Amsterdam but
the streets were paved with broken glass,
but the buildings were made of sea-foam,
hyacinth and peacock feathers.

But shy and bleeding, she inquired about me
among those streets but had to learn to speak rudimentary peacock.

Seeming liquid green nepenthe,
nouns and broken glass constrained her.
But mostly verbs were not a problem
because there is but one in peacock
(and it can’t be conjugated).

Said verb is transitive but said,
by simply, keeping, surprisingly, quiet.

I Dreamed I Was St. Boniface

 Rising inward, my prosthetic dream

bled out onto your snow-covered bed.

Pink with iron and welcome limestone, met

in karsts of prescient somnolence.

(red and white at their very best)

That which dreamed itself your bedsheet

they would say a Saxon field.

Your naked feet, embedded, pink upon the snow, yet

drawing up into your mouth.

(a liturgy of ancient wisdom songs)

 Bloodless blood and Brahmsless Brahms,

"In whose honor, sacramental chef?"

Pale white bones in oaken chapels, set

about the silk and garnet implements.

(for those who would so eat their God)

Thunder, splayed among an amaryllis,
paused, unspoken, in a shrinking sky.
As I cut the Donar Oak you bade me, "Let
them be as though their See shall free them.
(We can sing the verses of the night)"

atypical eros

Two rounds

with Saturn, a classic cut

above my eye.

Red, green-yellow, blackish blue wound,

glimmering in hemo-luminosity.

Why is it all so bloodybeautiful?

Standing before

the fake-stone Buddha, white

in meta-silence.

Graciously receiving all the birdshit it deserves,

silently minding, as Vaihinger feared,

another case of "Bird Fancier's Lung".

Atypical Eros

with cross reactivity to yolk sac,

and getting sicker

by the moment (of naming things),

things that stand naked inside me,

naked in infinite love.

Fuck flattery

and bend to the swain of Gomorrah,

whose Byronic youth

would to you, tonight, so rend and cloy

the sacristy of Salome

with whitely silent truth.

Zeno's Paradox (The Down)

I did lose my common view
             amidst the closeness of your down.
Slight and fine as faerie breath,
             between swadhistan and nabhi.

Not that cherished tuft tomentum,
             crowning crest of lotus-lips,
But that softness, in above-ness,
             diaphanous, in sparse array.

Though truly rapt to breathe so near
             your oodhious aigrette canopy,
And coax your sacred delta's dew,
             unconstrained, I'd sip the dew in full ecstatic reverence.
But at this site of downy wisp,
             a kiss would seem most true.

I think no thoughts, though think they me
             a raging serous centrifuge.
My kiss: A heedless, formless equus,
             lame as Ovid's lorem ipsum.

Rapt, and doubtless, (unrequited),
             half the distance could I fly.
Half again and half again in hubric contrapedal love,
             unconstrained, I knew my math was un-Pythagorean.
My common view cannot recur, like Oodh, you've cancelled lesser fragrance.
             Once a condor, now forsaken only by the code of doves.