May 30, 2007

A Gathering of old Phrases

It was not like any dream: here no fence or barb-wire
allows for the jumping of the sheep I never counted:

one, two, three sheep, the usual story. Here the cattails
bend, unbend, at this lean hour. It means nothing but

the wind shuffles them, in the heat it is strong. In the
dream, there is a lake I call Lake Como of seaweed

and Lake Where Horses Enters The Sea. One after another,
as though sheep in another dream, in lines they come.

I can count them, easily: one, two, three horses, not
the usual story. If dreams are messages, do I need to clean

—what—my body? my hands? I have not murdered, nor betrayed,
nor loosened, from the dying crows, the dying lambs, their limbs.

May 28, 2007

The Greek Play / Tragedy

I

What are they called? what do we call them:

Orion. Pegasus. Sagittarius.


What else?

Scutum and Perseus. Procyon.


And the constelation of a charioteer?

Aurigia, Aurigia. O look how she whips
the invisible horse toward battle.


II

What is battle without stars?

What is Achilles without his shield?
his spear? that which he needs?


A man like any man: vulnerable,
fallible, how in time he will die
by my bow.

III

How?

Less like a leave
than like a bird. Not as much a bird as the Spartan
warrior by the banks of our walls. Nor a lamb,
when it lays down. Nor ruin nor rain nor meteor,
nor bird nests under storm.


IV

What is war without blood? What is war if lives
have not been spilled upon, first, our friends,
later: our foes?

Not a cruel one, but a diplomatic one.

V

A diplomatic one.

May 23, 2007

Shell Dream

In my dream, all I remember were
the shells. I remember the shells,
as if that's what was important, and not
what happened. I held them in my hands,
at first, I brought them home, where they splayed into colours
when I painted them.

It was not like any dream: here no fence or barb-wire
allows for the jumping of the sheep I never counted:
one, two, three sheep, the usual story. Here no witch
with acnes and a crooked nose come by the broom
at this hour, to sweep and to carry somewhere else
my body. It was not like that. There was probably
a sycamore tree beneath which

I placed the shells. Here the fruits reeked age and the shells
..................................carried the same colours
like imitators, as when I plucked them up: then, they sounded
..................................like the sea: looked like the beach.
Leaves hold and get held by each other, the sound a chickadee
..................................when I take a step away from
the sycamore as if, reluctantly, with the reluctance
..................................of a father leaving his children.

May 21, 2007

Rambling / Meditation

(Which version?)

Meditation

So we see more partings
than returns. So we are old. So the wrinkles do not make
a workman but a crippling,
a reed; a weed on the lawn. The cattails bend, unbend,
at this lean hour. It means nothing
save the wind swings the world—is strong today. I shuffle
by marsh-mires: here no reed
stand strong to take hold of and lift me, dirty but just-
dry, against the wind, that which beats me. Clouds cross
like ships, fire ammo the sound
of thunder and shape of lightning. My clothes swell
in the wind and in the rain
that shape it into breathings, shapes without shape.
I haven't told of a dream
in which a Greek boy hunched beneath the shelter of trees
(from thunder, from lighting),
but he dripped and shivered like me. The leaves like grapes
pulled up by the stem, in the wind,
by daybreak, as from somewhere a force had come,
the leaves rustled and bowed
like that, as the cattails bend, unbend, at this lean hour.



Meditation



So we see more partings
than returns. So we are old. So the wrinkles do not make
a workman but a crippling,
a reed; a weed on the lawn. So the cattails bend, unbend,
at this lean hour: it means nothing
but the wind is strong today. I shuffle by marsh-
mires: here no reed stand strong
to take hold of and lift me, dirty but just-dry, against
the wind. Clouds cross
like ships, fire ammo the sound of thunder and shape
of lightning, my clothes
whose swelling in the wind and in the rain
is a shapelessness beaten,
hammered into shape. So I haven't told of the dream
where the greek boy hunched
beneath the shelter of trees (from thunder; from lighting),
and all the time the leaves rustled
and bowed; and all the time the cattails bend,
unbend, at this lean hour.

May 20, 2007

The Greek Boy

The Greek Boy

( PG / V (View Discretion Advised))


I. Thunder, and lighting. By dawn, it passes.
Here is the boy by the trees. He's hunching.
He is not a boy, shaking, and not any Greek boy
on his way to the palestina ground, but
the assembler, the the blacksmith's son.
He's is not dry, he is soaked, logs across
his lap, he is shaking, a hogger or not.
It had rained and had thundered.
What if he turned home, and did not shake,
and was not wet, and did not carry his logs?
What if that which he learned to do with his hands,
he misuses: here, the metal, strike it, strike it
twice, harder, hear that twang. What if those
hands are in his pants--what have he done
with them, the once promising and clean hands
of a blacksmith son?

May 18, 2007

Fruits by Lawn

Fruits by Lawn


When he says Hell, and Fuck you, he does not mean
to fuck them, the man and the mare the man
holds by the martingale. He does not mean it is hell. How he avoids, wishes
himself elsewhere, like a thought when, in dream,
one recalls that memory we try--and have tried, continue--supressing.
What is the moon to the stars? What is the moon to the stars
if both hold the world?
Yes, that means they are hands. No. Fingers, maybe. It means there is a
God out there. No. God in plurals: Gods. It means earth is fruit. It means universe
is lawn. It means God is tree. By now, the wind has taken up. I know that
by the way the leaves dangle. There is a lawn,
and there is a tree. There are fruits.
They fall. Apples, oranges, plums,
all reddening / greening / lilac-ing the lawn.
Strewn, all over, past a ripeness, meaning there is no freshness:
only how they lay sprawled, dead, like stars on sky.
Visible, long after.

May 13, 2007

In Response to Previous Poem

Not the martingale, not the chicken
we bought for the Greek dinner, nor
the sound of any human voice or
feet's sashay by the table, much less
our faces, never only the window porch,
in no apparent way the wind whistling
by the house's corner, so they have
seemed, the crows on our window porch
like any swan where the water is.
It's not as much that nothing is ever
good enough, as I see it, it's more a wish
to move away from what they have:
the boughs / the barn roofs / the sky
where endlessness is. Does that mean
the crows by themselves want to be
tethered? Let's take the roosting crows inside.

The Crows

It was not as much the martingale as it was
the chicken we bought for the Greek diner.
All day the crows came from the trees that bent
toward their lost crowns to see and to peak
as they do. The crows rustled their feathers
(for warmth, for—territory?), seemed to have
come to a kind of resting on the window
porch. I recall the afternoons spent in the barn
in which there were no cows and no sheep,
much less a lamb to slaughter, only hays and
honeycombs stacked in boxes in rows, and outside
any day the five crows that soared and came
to rest upon the barn's grey shingle, their feathers
rustling in that way that means The wind shakes
them, the wind is strong today. The crows
like any man to whom nothing is good enough:
not that, not that, not you.

The Crows that Came to Roost

The crows come to smoke at dawn,
not like any swan but like the swan
by the pond whose wings unfold as to flap

away from the burial of heaps where
the timbers are stained, burried
beneath ashes. The ashes are not really black:

they are blackened like the crows
I imagine at the creation of time were made
soothed by the Greek Gods who also

cupped their liquid to the earth
(as we know as rivers now, as seas)
and moulded the earth to trees /

to mountains as they do with sand
by the beach, the small children.
Was this ever a town to which

the ploughers plowed the fields,
raked the rows by tomato
shrubs, and the woman did their

daily bidding, they who were the
cookers, the spinners of garn
(of wool) for cloths, and the men

the blacksmiths that hammered
to strength the weapons (as in
the stories we know all too well:

swords, shields, a few men, a battle),
the children like tended lambs . . .
Today, in flocks, herons pass as they

would over anything. The village
is ash and smoke, a beaten warrior in a war
that does not end, does not seem to.

Recall, the boars must have left
this place a long time ago; the ravens,
the crows, as to any dying place,

have come to roost. Here is the
abandoned fiddle, here the spinner
from once the women spun wool,

here is the silence of the rooster without voice:

May 11, 2007

Interesting Ending

I just found an interesting line by Cheryl Snell (all copyrights to her):

The moon
wanes, paler than it should have been.


Thinking a little bit about making this end stronger, I came up with a variant, posting up here mostly for my own sake of remember how this could be a possible twist-ending later on if the end seems to be too deliberate:

The moon / wanes, not the pale as it should have been; / paler.
The Horse Enters the Sea, and the Sea Holds it

If my body is your body, I must be inside you.
Enter me. Enter me when you're ready, you say,
the way you enter the sea, I imagine you saying,

if your voice equals your expression / your furrows /
your can-you-read-me's: Enter me, enter me you groan like Leda
in the Greek mythology, like the hunger we keep returning to, even if,

all this time, I have entered you the way the horse enters
the sea: in straight line. If I lay my body upon
yours, if you allow me, if we fill each other

like bees-in-honeycomb, we become a kind of sashay:
a sashay like that of the sea and the horse: here,
the horse that enters, and the sea that keeps it,

moans Enter me and I'll assist. The cattails bend,
unbend, at this lean hour, meaning nothing but the wind is
strong
; the sun a yolk glow that follows the horse's cleansing.

May 10, 2007

The Greek Gods

Look: the trees are not themselves
today: the boughs / the needles /
the cons do not bend to slap me.
Cattails, in lake Como of seaweed:
of rainbowed fish and blue colour
that is not really blue. I know that.
The lake looks like that—that blue
thistle—because of the wavelength
of the reflecting light. It is not
because of the sky or the Greek
Gods who, in ancient times, drank
from chalices and—fed—cupped,
loosened to the earth the white
wine we know, have known,
all this time, as rain and more rain,
that water we drink from taps
the way bees drink nectar.
We have known and—have imagined.
How wrong we were.

Sacredom: Death

It was not that I didn't call, aloud,
your name, I did: Jesus, Jesus,
heal this flesh and fix these bones

I groaned: yolk-like, I dragged the 'e's
of 'Jesus' the way the yolk is glued
to the eggshell, has stained my fingers
meringue. My limbs have become torn,
have shifted as if into the yolk, that
position it has before it leaves the eggshell,
askew. A-canter. That way. I laid
down, have been laying down
for a long while, in a pool, less
the abandoned Greek figure than
the barbarian splayed, forgotten
in marsh- mires filled with cattails.
I grasped for my necklace: a
sacred sign my hands clenched
around. And then I knew, and turned
as if a survivor to the sky: a blue
sacredom: On earth no blood was
ever spilled

May 8, 2007

When We Let Go

So that each is a feather of
a peacock wing: the bodies laying sprawled
on the Palestina ground. The limbs.
The bone and flesh, neither fresh
nor dried. Here is the sun that splays
them. Here, each like a bridge,
are my arms, hands palm-turned as if
to baptize or to preach: We love you,
the way God loves you. No word is
needed. Out of defeat and acceptance,
both, I do nothing to save you, not
as a rebel but as a guard that start doing
the right thing. I hold you, and now
I release, let you warm the earth with
your body before you turn cold
and enter the sky the way, once, naked,
you entered /the sea. The cattails
bending, unbending. What was becomes
what is. Nothing really changes, in time.

May 6, 2007

A Lover

Let's make this much
clear:
I have loved you
the way you haven't loved me,
have watered the flowers
the requested number of times,
not with a reluctance but a lover's
willingness, I have plowed these fields,
have watched you laze in the heat-
crippled fields with martini
and grapes, each grape made fresh
and ripe by my hand . . .
have found myself merely this long
accepting. What was there ever in it
for me? If I'd be a bee, you'd be
the flower. No. If I'd be a horse,
you'd be the horseman whipping me
to run faster.

The Body: The Soul

—have walked these grounds, have plowed,
have raked the fields with hands as if tokens
of holding, not loosing as, through my palm,
the earth retreats, slips clean, like sand,
from what tethers. The slipping away
through my fingers is not intentional,
like the slipping away of the soul isn't.
The tethered soul was never tethered
by the body: was caught only. This is
understandable. This is not: the soul
as the body, the soul as what tethers it


/ version 2:

The Body: The Soul

—have walked these grounds, have plowed,
have raked the fields with hands as if tokens
of holding, not loosing as, through my palm,
the earth retreats, slips clean, like sand,
from what tethers. The slipping away
through my fingers is not intentional,
like the slipping away of the soul isn't.
The tethered soul was never tethered:
was caught only by the bodies that,
eventually, laid, not rested, which implies
peace and more peace, beneath earth.
Like sand, the soul slips away from
what this long has caught it. This is
understandable. This is not: the soul
as the body, the soul as what tethers it.

What is Meant by Failure

What is desire? What is failure?
I have long thought of the latter
as what is in our hands and palms:
here are the wrinkles that, like leaves,
do not stop coming, do not seem to,
but seem to be, must be meaning, almost,
failure and more failure. Listen:
here is the song that is not really a song;
here are the trees that, all this time,
have seemed but have not / been dying.
What seems like failure is not failure.
I know that. It's the subtler signs,
not the swan that raped the woman
but the stillness, the palms becoming wrinkled,
the slow, weak blow of a trumpeter
not a trumpeter. So says the heart,
a truth to which the swans come, desire
come, plucking each feathered wing off
the swan's reddening cargo.

May 1, 2007

Alba: Desire

Alba: Desire

I love you, have loved you, the way a horse
loves, all this time. Remember the lake

and the lovers who crossed it with a small boat
and two oars, though the water churned like big biceps?

They should have drown, naturally, but did not: could not,
as we cannot: we will love and meet as if for the first time

each time, each of us like coins buffed to a sheen
by each other's touches: Do you feel that rinsing

of flesh? Like apes we clean each other
with our hands. Your hands enter and clean me,

not like the bees that enter the honeycomb,
but like the horse that enters the sea.

You will be missed.