A Sly Bunch

Instincts may appear to be at war –

wearied by a permanent

condition of ambivalence: the chore

of keeping whole the firmament

while tugging at cross-purposes’

opposed effects, to hover

over all your nervous surfaces

to quiet them enough to cover

up their enmity: to pull the punch

to make it seem like you’re in balance.

But instincts are a sly bunch:

hiding wonderfully availing talents

for pretense: bombing through

as if they’re warriors advancing

toward another doomed snafu

when really they are dancing –

and having

much more

fun than

you.

.

Kindred Audacities

The dominions –

the lingual genus –

a poem dares pursue!

Like opinions

about his penis

a man won't share with you.

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Language Lesson

I keep asking nobody:

what made me?

At last two angels come,

I guess to aid me.

But one speaks only

Finnish and the other

one Hungarian.

I don’t believe they mean

to be contrarian. But who’s

in charge of sending

messengers like these?

C’mon now. Jeez.

But neither leaves.

One slyly smiles at me

and waves. And then,

somehow their inexpression

saves. Suddenly I see

the darkest curvatures

of night; that they

retain a seed of light –

about to dawn, to beckon

anything that whirls –

abounds – disturbs.

Few nouns –

innumerable verbs.

But in what language?

Those angels knew.

And now I do.

How had I missed it?

Love’s the grammar

I’ve resisted.

I’m to learn it after all.

I’m already in its thrall.

.

Facts of Love

Love has more
to do with what attracts
than with the facts.







.







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Existence Offends Propriety

You tell me I don’t ever finish a tale.

That I go and I stop and am slow

as a snail. Some people must flail

to prevail – others achieve the ephemeral it

by espying a calm place to sit – and indeed

then proceed there serenely to sit.

You resort to a snit. You ask

aren’t there infinite ways in the Cosmos to fit?

But fit into what? What are we fitting by sitting

or throwing a fit? Why do we yearn for an it?

What is there out there or in here to fit? Words

are the girders, drills, rivets and bits that beatify,

gratify, ratify leptons into a wine spritzer which

fritzes in Waterford glasses that clink

from the rims of which we then suppose

we can drink, so we drink. When do we get

to the brink? We now know the answer to that,

we think. Brink is a word. Words are a brink. Edges

and contrasts and shadows and battles skedaddle

into a great sink with a drain that attains an abyss

wherein that becomes this, wherein fitting is it,

we can sit in a snit, we can flail

and prevail and at last

I can finish a tale.

Existence offends propriety.

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What They Want to Ask is This

When two mythic figures meet

who’ve never met before, whose

tales they’ve not been told, about

which they’ve not heard a single

rumor of abased defeat or triumph

over foes, they don’t care. Neither

wants to bore the other with details

of those. But there are questions

they would dare to pose: the toughest

any figure in a myth can undergo.

What they want to ask is this:

Do you exist? How do you know?

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Emily Dickinson, Alan Watts: Be Wary What the Artist Spots

I love this Watts quote and utterly align with it. But I did wonder, didn't I, what Emily might have thought. I wondered, first, if she too might align with it - so elusive and encompassing is her own "I." But then I thought - well, what comes out in the following two-stanza quatrains which, with reprehensible presumption, I've just now written  as prologue to what might have been her response to him: "What Mystery Pervades a Well!"

Emily Dickinson breathed upon
this cosmic edge as well,
though one is never sure if she
saw heaven there, or hell.

She wrote, howe'er unwittingly,
this verse for Alan Watts
to caution him not to be sure
he sees all that he spots.

(to wit:

What mystery pervades a well!
That water lives so far –
A neighbor from another world
Residing in a jar

Whose limit none has ever seen,
But just his lid of glass –
Like looking every time you please
In an abyss's face!

The grass does not appear afraid,
I often wonder he
Can stand so close and look so bold
At what is awe to me.

Related somehow they may be,
The sedge stands near the sea –
Where he is floorless
And does no timidity betray

But nature is a stranger yet:
The ones that cite her most
Have never passed her haunted house,
Nor simplified her ghost.

To pity those that know her not
Is helped by the regret
That those who know her, know her less
The nearer her they get.

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