You know the smell -- oily death and oily hair
It enters as the rust caparisoned gentleman
Rattle branch top hat, dead man's cane
The blazing costume cannot sustain --
the demon's in the details -- death
decomposition, ancient pains
Hair and nails do not grow, but remain
Look! the demon's sad dance, no sweep no sway
A pile of dust, leaves blown away
How is the hoarmouth fed?
With empty cold inevitable. There is dry desire,
quaking lust for viscera, the demon's fall fires
viscera unspooled offal, stone
and guts, piled and steaming finally
in autumns dust
Some Definitions:
desolate
-thoroughly alone
-abandoned
abandon
-to be under control
-give in
-surrender to
relinquish
-to give back from under
-to leave with intensive force
force
-pain's own action it cannot understand
September, Thursday of the Year
At a certain low angle of the sun
the day's genesis of water-striders
glitter with inscrutable drive to eat
to fuck to die. The crawdads too decide
to leave their keeps with shallow scurry blooms
Batteries of clouds charge the horizon
Ancient, how many dragonflies have been?
Shooting over the valley's high anvils
bullrush, thrush, collapse, clap, thunder drives us in
After the funeral, I danced dirty
with with widow of the father who died
in the house-fire. All God's children orphaned
desolate, bereft, clipped and beating
Of all this we make music
The time
is finally here
time to leave
The birds
are
casting off
their moorings
The trees
are casting off
their
leaves
wind
feet
rake plow
I curse
the day
I threw a handful of poems
like dragon's teeth into the
sea
Even there
you reap as you sow
every word its own
demise
I skip
as the stones I throw
And do I wobble
I
dont fly
What are these black wings seeking?
to flutter? to beat
again?
Word to the wise:
when the waves retreat
don't go
looking for the sea
The Moon is weary of all this.
The perpetual motion and perpetual monotony.
The moon feels forever held in tension between the pull of two mighty bodies.
Though if the Moon sits in ts darkness it senses a third, bodyless pull
-- a pull to void.
The Moon certainly entertains this pull,
but it is just suggestion. The Moon finds itself in a situation
it cannot escape without plunging fully
and catastrophically into one of its two seducers or
ripping itself apart.
And what of the two beguiling forces?
Are they as subtle as they feel,
or is the precarious balance between them
the source of the feathery elliptical tugging?
The one is distant but so impossibly radiant.
It makes the Moon feel seen, but is the Moon being seen?
Or is it just reflection? If only the Moon could know it was
its own voluptuous curves, its own time earned scars being illuminated,
rather than just the other's brilliance...
And the other... upon this one the Moon teased effect,
had tickled blue -- with its own small force -- to brown and green.
But what was given back? The close embrace seemed more a projection
of desire. Now? The Moon hangs so tautly
-- madness
Father Song
1 January 1988 Pasadena, CA
On new years day
the cold split of ages
my father walked me out
you'll thank me, he said
on a morning, a nascent day, a dawn
to shake the Champ's shaking hand
to hold
to be held
to behold
to be beheld
to be beholden to
You are your mother's
son you were is this
I am split in your river
I see I in you, rift of mothers name
Child, you see you gone
The Greatest bereft
of fallen roses the bite
of time the sting a flower
float away, will I even
can I have I ever tried
to hold
to be held
to behold
to be beheld
to be beholden to
Like the daughter of the father
who follows him into the ring
I wonder if I echo
the wrong thing
Earth marked soles that coil a simple stretched plane to rolls
to body warmth to dim light to must to just beyond sight
Possession: to own is fuel to anger from which hate is to heat. You know
this being with cracked blackened feet. And
This being, this other one, lies with short toes spread then curled
grabs - kicks down the clean sheet. Where is truth?
This beings with feets too wrapped in bunches folds to see what then?
when these two beings meet, congress, seek truth, stain the sheets
