Glint

A sensate change:
from arguing the point
to savoring the observation:

a curiosity which mistrusts
alleged intent – cares for scent;
phenomena regale, avail:

they strike you like the random
plunk of raindrops in a pail:
you catch a glint of passage,

zap of electricity in air, queer
hint of a geometry which
only starts at sphere.

.

While We’re At It

Slice it
membrane-thin,
this golden bluish
glowing blob of day:

array it on a tray
and serve it
with a silver prick
and ruby-cut-glass

bowl of dip.
Cream of lassitude
might do the trick:
you pick.

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Art Nouveau After-Life

This readiness – summoning its unchecked course –
expenditure of force – its sensitive irruptive energy – delicate –
attenuated – gently throbbing into chaos, vagrant sinuosity of line –
a vine that pulses with a fine determination to press out, unfurl

into a bloom – though not quite yet, not in this room, not in your hands,
not yet this year, not yet: this readiness demands a bursting queer
attention – it’s only just begun to set: although the moment holds exactly
everything it needs to reach its bold apotheosis, the closest you

can get, right now, right here, is to experience a sweet vertiginous
expansion: not to wait, there is no waiting, but to be the bated breath
that knows the purer air it needs to breathe is as inevitable as the death
to which it knows it must, as well, concede – and that the panoply

is swinging round and full of an impending groundlessness which will
absorb all linearity and demonstrate its power by making possible
that flower – which, with a fresh remembrance, and beyond all
gravity and din, you’ll know you’ve always been.

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Szechuan Pepper Layer Cake

Days fly by like confetti:
here’s another one already.

Pathetic and forgetful thief,
the human mind is gluttonous

and wasteful: opts for the relief
of overkill in lieu of tasteful:

favors anarchistic battle
and seditious prattle –

nothing for it but to creep
to sleep and let the psyche

somnolently quake – until,
that is, again, it has to wake

and slaver over yet another
Szechuan pepper layer cake.

.

Mostly Elegantly

The day was full of towered
clouds – cumulus accumulating
cumulus – more proud than
angry: save for two or three
small snits of spitting rain,

these atmospheric empresses
appeared content to primp
and plump themselves, parade,
and snub each other just enough
to pique each other’s volume up:

Edwardian and prim, but brimming
with a pressured volupté
that made one more than guess
another day, they will transgress
to far more rabid densities

and roar and pour: today they
managed mostly elegantly to ignore
each other: superior mothers-in-law –
resentful new-wed wives: they
carried on their ostentatiously

remote and separate lives,
almost decorously wondering
(well this side of thundering) how
it was fathomable they could
occupy the self-same sky.

.

Inimitably Wet

How gratifying summer rain is!
Spatter-zaps the metal casing
of the air conditioner
like a translucent anarchistic
gremlin army bent on turning

everything into itself – spits like
a nervous gambler on a dicey bet –
inimitably wet – paints the atmosphere
a scary-movie yellow-gray.
I think I’d like it every day.

I thank the sky for its complicity –
indifferent though it be. I am
a funny creature now: I don’t
appear to want much company:
at least, whoever I would see

must be so welcome to the core of me
I’d never think to blink before
inevitably sitting down together.
But blink I do, today, in this
inclement weather – my eyes feel

sympathy with summer rain:
a comfortable pain: a lubricating tear;
the humid air begets a tiny
sense of nearly pleasurable threat:
a bit of sweat. Inimitably wet.

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When I Read Keats

“…And in the midst of this wide quietness
A rosy sanctuary will I dress
With the wreath’d trellis of a working brain,
With buds, and bells, and stars without a name,…”

lines 58-61, Ode to Psyche, 1819


When I read Keats I want to cut the cake
and pass it round to everyone: insist that all of its
fat buttercream and crumb be licked and chewed –
consumed until each rumble in each stomach has been
fed – not silenced: resolutely led to some sweet new
low resonant experience of the replete: so we might
then resume the enterprise of living in the world

as if it were complete. When I read Keats I want
to layer all noetic dolor with poetic color: tell the intellect
to recollect its instincts: to think sweat precisely
when it used to think philosophy. When I read Keats
I want to follow every hunch: I want the world
to fight me back: alert me to the liveness of a punch.
When I read Keats I want the taste of blood to marry

with the flood of every yearning dream of love:
a sweetness with a tang: a neatness in my cadences
and rhymes which tightens to intolerable brightness:
bangs against and blasts away all time. When I read
Keats I learn that beauty is as close as we can get
to death; provides us with the best inducement
we can know to want to take another breath.

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