Released

September’s garden
pardons all –

releases from its
brimming stall

tomatoes, watermelons,
peaches –

ripe and tumbling – bursting
from the vastest reaches:

no less born of star
than you are.

.

Hidden in a Love Poem

The urge to render yearning
for a lover into verse
is followed, soon, by learning
it is prey to one small curse –

that of a reader thinking
it speaks nakedly of you –
not knowing it is drinking
from a far more potent brew.

Whatever love verse conjures,
please don’t wonder if it’s real:
too small! – far larger ardors
in it burn to make you feel.

Beyond a poem’s languor –
blunt, seductive, brave façade –
can lie the hidden anger
of a lusting after God.

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Each Tiny Spat

Enchantment, now,
pre-dawn, as single spatters hit the metal casing
of the air-conditioner – gentle clatter, off and on,

raindrops in the dark –
entirely and quietly regaling
with a strange sweet intimacy:

softly changing tenses from the present, past and future
into something so dimensionally more embracing
that the mystery of its extended moment,

lacing vertically and horizontally
into new continents
of time and space, lets you derive

the soft exhilaration of an accurate perception of this place:
gently passed to you
as if it were a lover’s note.

Lines both long and short in it devote themselves
both lightly and assiduously to a mission
of composure, perfectly at ease with nakedness:

irredeemable exposure.
Each tiny spat
is that.

.

.

.

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Altering the Mix

Shocking glimpse –
quick catch of a particularity –
abetted by an angle of the lens, perhaps –
a something-other-than-expected

which erupts into a deluge
of the recognition
that before this
you had not expected anything.

Slice – oblique – desire? –
lightning shooting through the mire of you –
altering the mix.
It’s not exactly that you’ve never been

in this sweet sudden fix before.
It may be odder that it hasn’t happened more.
(You being a receptive sort.)
The stranger part: it is as if another heart –

invisible – is tracking you, and cracking new
sharp fissures in your shell.
You almost know this
feeling well. Unconscious wish? –

imposing its romantic itch? But there’s
that faint enticing smell –
a little rude, a little like fresh
sweat. As if in payment of a debt.

Or are you making
that up too?
Or is it
making you?

.

On the Eve

Clouds are
thieving,
weaving in

over Manhattan –
stealing bits
of sun

and spitting them
into the gutter –
tethered by

September’s
sibilant inclement
weather –

hissing muggy
through the leaves
as if to mock

whatever grieves.
The city’s
on the eve

of the eleventh.
Nothing rhymes
with that.

.

Some Part of Mind

Some part of mind persists
perennially in a twilight –
psychically equivalent
to the abeyance that obtains

between late afternoon
and early night – an opal hush
of indetermination – buffered
by the velvet crush of gently

holding back: soft tensile
strength sustaining calm –
a proto-Never Never Land
where all remains undone,

not quite imagined – wrapped
and held in almost-colors
which must haunt the nearly
blind: vague blushes, barely pink

and blue and gray and silver,
gold and brown – calibrated
hazily to spread diffusely
over possibility – to keep

the temper down. Some part
of mind exists before and just
beyond each bend, not quite
seed-bed, not quite end.

.

As Soon As It Stops Working

You say: as soon as it stops working,
you’ll stop doing it.
And sometimes, blinking, jerking, accidentally verging on some thin
translucent fringe of liminality, you feel yourself tugged just a touch

too far towards whatever isn’t there –
and wonder why you try
or what you’re trying for
and then, somehow, perhaps to stop you contemplating stopping,

something gloriously rears up –
godlike, tall and glowing, gorgeous, golden, halo-ed
and too flagrantly aroused, alive and here to entertain
the least reality of the abyss

your pale involuntary private mumbling anxious fear suggests –
madness to go on with it and madness to arrest it –
so you take a breath and coalesce
into another strange display –

as your imagination splits kaleidoscopically again to breed
another dimly fathomable day. Gremlins in it
wrestle, burrow, seethe and forage.
Everything takes courage.

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