Laid Bare

Macrocosm:
mud.
Microcosm:
quantum-tiny rivulets.

Large and dense:
or small with a propensity for what appears
irrationality
which seems to the imagining

and hopeful eye
to be a chum
of wanton fun.
But one

cannot deduce from wishes
what is is.
One can’t deduce from anything
too much.

I thought today I might make sense
of touch –
that backed-up tensions
might ejaculate,

be overcome.
But all I see is mud,
not rivulets.
And nothing

is the chum
of wanton fun.
Poems lay bare
all you dare

and almost all you don’t.
I asked this one
to help me out:
it won’t.




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Importuning the Dusk

Gathering’s what must be done! –
amass illuminations –
the ones aimed, slanted, at oneself –
pale brightened perturbations

needed to revive the mind –
remind it it is flesh –
exact from it a recompense –
humility: address

its yearnings not with promises –
but, faintly, with a view
of all imagination’s schemes
and all they misconstrue –

to let their arrant play of sense –
nonsense – become the thing –
and not care overmuch about
the meanings they don’t bring –

and not care overmuch
about repute – identity –
but flit, instead, into a nest –
invite a wren to tea –

and kiss a pterodactyl –
then boil it, and shove –
and say to hell with poetry! –
and God! – and death! – and love!

One tries again to prise the light
out – quickly – unaware –
distract it, tangled, in a trope –
too late! No longer there.



.

Rune

I want the nineteenth century today –
to whirl the globe of time back, say,
one-hundred-thirty years – 1879’s soft,
careful and precise locutions – a fantasy
and sway to which my mind gives play
when winter light is like it is right now: before
it makes another shy diffusely glowing bow

into the evening – Emily Dickinson , 48,
and Henry James at 35, arrive – appositely
at my desk for ghostly tea, but each quite
quickly takes an interest in the other – not
in me: Henry’s gray and Emily’s dark sherry
eyes inspect their captive prey and prize –
dispassionate, direct – as if they each

were insect specimens; I want to waft
my deftest sweetest clauses for them
into meaning – elegant and filigreed,
but simple as the simplest human breath –
I want the bliss of thinking I might get their
blessing – but they’re too bewildered by
each other to address another being – dusk

slowly swallows both – and I’m back here
one-hundred-thirty years beyond the hush
of their improbable encounter and existence.
Cell phone shocks the air: a friend calls:
have to meet him soon. I trudge into the cold
Manhattan evening: half-moon – whispered
utterance – etched, peculiar as a rune.




.

Everything I Write is an Ode to the Limbic System

What you really
want lies always
in the realm

of scent.
What you love
has everything to do

with flesh –
both fresh,
and spent.

You have a sense
of this
of which

you cannot give
full measure.
Buried treasure.



.

3:33

Shadows of tree branches on the window
cut the glaring sun-white brightness at 3:33:
like ghosts of some archaic neural network –
separated from some vaporous extinction –
etchily not there except as patterns in the air –

nothing is as beautiful as winter light.
I sit here once again dumbfounded, and yet
powerfully determined to find speech. I won’t
accept what I am told is obvious – that
capturing the whole, in words, is out of reach –

because it patently keeps proving that it isn’t.
The delirious experience of seeing, hearing,
feeling all the confluence in ambience
is absolute: it’s happening right now.
Break the thing down, head-on: say it! How?

.

Basta! I Am Not The Same These Days

More than merely alchemizing calcium to pearl,
a sea change prods another being, far beyond so many limits
in which its recipient felt furled – or even knew were there:
preliminary focus might be rocky ocean floor beneath
the water, but its repercussive resonances alter air.

Some odd insistent funny loving yet dispassionate incursion
of a sense inside has sent me on a ride that seemed
at first one merely taken in the mind: a metaphoric egg
had cracked conceptually: what spilled out was seamlessness.
And now dichotomies have evanesced, divisions are illusory,

the body is the soul – the word made flesh – darkness
is the same as brightness: night is day – and my own symphony
of skin and limb and muscle, bone and certain very
precious other sweet appurtenances now appear to have
their own experience of blood-hot life – which they each push me

to express: and sometimes with a knife; to wit: the slicing
of a dozen broccoli florets which then my fingers toss into
a sauté pan – short span of blazing heat in olive oil and garlic –
and then gently steam before I season them with salt and hot red
pepper flakes (my cooking muscles do not doubt what

they have also done to Brussels sprouts): tossed in squiggly
pasta. Basta! I am not the same these days, and neither is what
flames upon my stove and roves into my maw. I shall embody
an inimitably brand new year: undoing fear of isolation
and replacing it with awe. Sautéed broccoli is its law.




.

My Animal Body

My animal body
has purposes
it makes sure
it achieves.

I used to think
I worked around
its powerful proclivities –
but now I see

imagining that I am
different from
this breathing, straining,
sweating, pumping,

humping, hairy
hungry thing
is fallacy. There is no “it”
and may, at least

as I had once
assumed abstractly,
not exactly
be a “me.”



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