FIAT LUX --- Ivan Arguelles

FIAT LUX

Ivan Arguëlles

authors-text blog 03

West Hartford CT

© 2014 Ivan Arguëlles

FIAT LUX

                    Amors vai com la belluja

                     que coa’l fuec en la suja,

                     art lo fust e la festuja,

                              --Escoutatz!—

                     e non sap vas qual part fuja

                     cel qui del fuec es gastatz.

                                                        Marcabru

                        I

              INTROIBO

the end which is also the beginning

                 the insectary of the mind

yclept  γνωμων

carried over the shoulder backwards

                    into the river of time

ransacking the jewels of heaven

no longer interested in the mere range of languages

                   and their articulation

sonant clusters like gold and silk interwoven

“by the grace of Ahuramazda all that we did”

to be both deliberately filthy and obscure

            and didn’t we chase the merry over

loam and tide 

the greater ticky bird and the lesser ticky bird 

who announce the dawn of Memory 

if there were a tripartite way of being

from the Giant’s Causeway to Stonehenge

arousing Finn’s hand again the timber trade

plowing with long ships the wide dark mere 

                  ivory tusks cinnabar amber

and by sunset when the water turns to flecks 

of copper and the tramontane blows our fleet

past the pillars of Hercules 

              who then will the wiser be strewn

‘twixt the main and the immense invisible

did darling darker death her twill spell this yarn

and suchness of againwit beside some crystal rill

and sing sweet dust mingled sleeves the origins

fourfold flung midst sleep the heavy 

                         one waking never knows meandering

to some dusky spore on the asia side the ancient

far from the transom’s small light the gimlet bore

shaking headwinds round and round the gore

alphabits chastened scripts scribbled lore

on high beyond any orientation the stars! 

                        little frames of gilt the sky 

a god whilom peers blinded momentarily by Bang!

and in an instant or less than the myriads 

of galaxies cottages garden plots rivulets fortresses

cobbled lanes ruined glass barren stretches of fire

the whole heraclitean thing asunder shivered and shattered

against the loom of language         what? starts a shaggy

maundered with thought to being a whistle 

as the car sheers fog lights with a tremendous metal 

shining and shining can arise from ruin nothing

venereal outpost                  carnicería paraíso 

husbanded headband rainbow terrific clap by Jove

how many windows later must we brook this storm

eventide the summer mourn of can’t remember when 

when islands drifting melancholy once a shepherd dwelt

that was when like a big orange moon her face

it first appeared singing between slats of empire

and the eight thousand spears below and the lowing

of stellar cattle rowing across the hoof-shaped bay

and maddened at the city gate the elephant reared

to get out of that dream to run to the library

to make it Saturday again the peaceful and red brick

layered myth brazen faced with notched swords ablaze

from the rich recently plowed earth Gaia furrowed

her titanic sons wrenched muscle and hip one against

foremost the other Hooting loud the mace and fly

can such between just pages of a book?

what are the mighty against this fraction?

the tethered syllables of old Babirush in clay wedges

fix the heavens with a fierce cobalt incantation

haunted shibboleth empyrean of phonetic symbols

in arterial decay by the roadside clattered chariots

horses broken at the haunch neighing horribly

by meadows of consonant clusters fiery diapason

how can the many times we read the opening lines

the inches of constant fret and delay translating

didn’t you ever think of using the telephone 

would Ajax be on the other end sweating the nightmare

in hexameters of despond and reeling mist walls

cannot say what mother would be precious pearls

sounding against darkened musk room’s end

argent plash the eyelid’s sill a hovering remote

stilled the ever but small liquid trophy glimpsed

and diameters of hours rounding the satellite’s veer

could this be the one and every historical event

smoked in the ear draining pulse of august mill

heat and its terrific reflections mirrored blackly

in the brain’s volatile shuttle cock       a thing!

poems set to a music hermeneutics each note the

caught in mid flight the arrow’s ornate sense of destiny

whizzing into the sump of interpretation 

like the skillfully fingered flute child Krishna plays

loitering by the banks of the sultry Yamuna

so one thing leads to the other dans la grande nuit des mots

and soon we are kissing the front end of the next century

rapid viviparous entities that we are fast dying

Whoosh!                the assault on alphaville

bunch a goddesses come running out mostly naked

one shouts “omicron” another pleads “omega” 

it’s always like that an indecision in cloth

somber megaphone deliberations in one ear

siren swoon in t’other a hank of moist hair a 

alone in the car radio feeling frozen

decades pass and the insect of obsession is still there

eating away at the detritus of 

                   one with the red hair of isolation

cries out her “sigma” rolling abject whorls of 

dust pans recycled for epic             junction 

matter of seconds and the entire cosmos refigures itself

in ultra red time capsules distributed at a local pharmacy

we are there jostling for attention the movie camera

an agent of rushing night streams singing swinging

both fists in the plush area below the left eye

the wee hours a piano a                   avenues flood

emptiness the crooner in dishabille mocks Enkidu

ever the god pawn at the mercy of the temple whore

how many deities put to death last week?

is it to till we hoe with ink the sad spell grieving

anvil sparks flashing a radiance of words forgotten

china shore sinking for miles of longing the intense

did we unhitch the horse and then to the cabildo

to sport junketing moon shrines to deaf stone

while still a fourth one in ochre beige decries “beta”

moving a picture in sepia oval tint the actress

I want her in pink each finger spawning a sigh

in the key of Delta moistened             un hunh

yes can such be crammed into a minimalist suite

mimicking the faux grammars of rhododendron and lilas

can flowers think can inscriptions mate a dueling sun

isn’t it a poem to re write and learn to do it right

margins to the left and put the dactyl next to the spondee

scanning latin derivatives while Dido burns    alas

them goddesses all a mess want’um honeykins dead

                        ruin upon ruin in the square mile of marsh

allotted to moonlight on the run to Uranus

has feet will travel reciting as well as can be recalled

the opening stanzas of the rg veda big mouth O

haven’t we “seen” enough haven’t we quelled

watching the red skins whomp it up on Manhatta

it is a poem re written rebus and hump backed 

soliloquy in american diptych stitching muddy water

a dream I am we are all having in simulcast opticon

links letters to knuckle bone and transposes

head to gravity to make sun shine while it hays

have learned to scribble at best a few by heart

nosegays and magnificent temple wreathes out to dry

knock once for fun twice for the undertaker to fly

I am getting nervous about the hour

“they’re not home yet”               sound of car wheels

on gravel crunching at the dead of night 

spine for lunch asbestos orientation crushed odor of

in the beginning of the end ghosts 

exactly who the brother is and who the others

rapping on sheet glass for another drink

lamba mu and nu in quick succession naked 

in front of a big Japanese lens

this isn’t about “you” any more this isn’t

hunkered down next to the large empty pond

a Buddha type in overalls just waiting for a hit

and the goddesses half tippled with tattooed eyes

they come rushing to him making the air cry

with their lamentations over gamma and delta

“ladies why are your eyes tattooed?”

“by the brookside nude we swam in the millpond

 undressed we died”          heavy with nostalgia

skin dripping a bitter map of mountains dark

why does their summer never come why does

and is it because we don’t have the money nor does

whenever we approach them banshees or maenads

         they flee like wildfire their various hair ablaze

smoke signals from the Hindu Kush languid dappled

on the way to Mohenjo Daro to find the dancing girl

with her tresses tufted in a white ribboned top knot

          drink to her, comrades!   evening is drawing nigh

the deserted fane the stray dogs whining a lost moon

how many mansions later is it according to the Mayans?

how plaintive the oncoming night sky its Pleiades

drawing the water winch across Orion’s Belt

from afar the flower song wafting light years a-coming

it is because we are learning the poem and sleep

dream-stippled bed speech shifting yellow sheets

move over, 

                     it was here the museum was lifted

by levers into the celestial lake and paper fans

inserted into our hands asked to walk the length

of a marble parapet jutting out over the Mojave desert

and far below the threads of motorized roadways alight

toys of the puzzled mind            the Minotaur

casts his crazy shadow over the mirror

athirst for Athenian blood he stamps his cloven feet

from here to Egypt it’s a swallow’s flight

strange engravings in the ether bring to mind the 

yes the goddesses the way they murmured in the well

brief as a slain gazelle their aspirin white breath

could try to talk tapers flickering in the back of the eye

from either side the onslaught of whispered words

of love and its trials and the castle on the mount

blade of maize, do you hear me? 

switch to present, tense

    cigarette in mouth, ache in heart

me-me-memorize all of it from aleph up to zed

birds eye view of the Canadian Rockies

doing a swing shift on Pluto where histing her skirts

Persephone does a fan dance the craze of the cemetery

dallied too long in the month of Furnace

singed her skirts and the knees lit up like carbons

fall in love with that pouting mouth hair all over damp

wanna go to hell,           she’s the traffic girl

on channel 5 not a day older than the day she got it

carmine blur and sound of centaurs rushing sand

how to understand how to explain how to dwell

in the cusp of the Nile day-dreaming sphinx stunned

the organ grinder who works the mind’s shafts

is high again                    Sicilian,

                     by the rustling reeds Theokritos

laments his Bion all of a strange afternoon

eyes the color of furze and tobacco 

sky pivots in them a full turn then disappears

these are the soledades great noons of grass and heat

far from the sea’s reiterated echo of salty manors

when only the cicada’s monotonous obsession

toils the violin of haunting and despair for hours

until from a chinese balcony the widow throws her shadow

into the waving illusion of harvested fields

no one recalls anything,        immense black shawl

floating like a transparent bat three in the afternoon

so it is, friends, the story of my love

and bows and employs the furiously painted puppets

to narrate the insanity of Orlando on the moon

is he the one who was crying by the gate last night

rust and grime pith of the gypsy street walkers

hawking their hidden jewels wounded sparrows

the phthisic breast,

       to discuss the interminable the infinite the endless

and Joe at the head of the table with his condescending

all smirks and quietly aggressive completely sure of 

turning to each of us dust and shadow a question

is literature the prize or immortality

enumerating the platonic virtues the origins 

how the Mayo clinic came to be and the mansion on the Hill

and the many byways between school and playlot

the kids tossing a ball into the galaxies and shouting

the alley coming home backs of houses screen doors

shutting on the immense dark within

what is the distance between what cannot be and

what is here and now what is the green the reverie the

around her temple swart ivy twines

and Lo! for if I am with you today

do not think I will be forever among the flower pickers

those destined to kneel in hot fields choosing

the multicolored variety sun constructed anthology 

these blooms culled are the many hued voices

that make up a lifetime of memory a longing

and browsing in the remains of Old Latin

we find that Ennius remembers being a peacock

Etruscan god of gardens Vertumnus, lead us on! 

what goes dancing primrose wild and lotus calm

making the way to the forge of possibilities

to the new day after life to the tremendous

the ineffable and Joe at the head of the table

defiant somehow but nervous biting his lip

to be photographed in his post-existence glory

like when we was kids hiding behind the apple tree

a shame it all has to end and the pruning shears

rusted in the garage and the big white whet-stone

and the bottles of whiskey hidden behind

the fishing tackle 

                               Vertumnus, lead us on!

                            II

            EL TRONO DE LOS DIOSES

through narrow waterways deep and clear

our small skiff we ply, Jesus, yes we say sweating

still the next afternoon and no further than the still point

the engrossed unfathomable from which we cannot move,

nor does a hand descend from the menacing summer cloud

nor from nowhere the rushing voice of a deity declare,

much the same it was in the last century as shadows 

playing on a stage where meadowlark and thunder sang

we gathered up our forces and for love drank deep the draught,

chill struck the brow, evanescence set in, and night,

the looming, brooded, a single verb we employ to shove

the wounded craft across the still mere into the thick tuft

of grasses greener than bottle glass and imagine, yes, this

not that is where to be is the greater dilemma, under the sky,

rent the bosom of mists and booming hollow the unknown tract

through which we must pass, yellow looming ever nearer

saffron underthoughts pale advances on air, breath! 

do we shiver its extent, or excited start talking as if inspired

calling on the goddess to come forth to show her bare thigh to

if even, set the tooth on edge and smell of meat over done sifting

through the rare ether of imagination until caught in a mud 

with no traces of color we are turned inward to implore, what,

a single blade of russet grass we cling to sharing in the event 

of dying the small streak it sets against the moving heavens,

small shifts in the spectrum, come to the third hour and the sun

still high, has it budged at all, silence all around except for the buzz

of an insect trapped in a web, not where we should be, not,

the ancient stone the untapped source the personification

of a lost emotion, azure hums with the flight of dead angels

whose airplanes have gone lost beyond the radar, we knew

them, we know them no more a sort of panic at the throat

and in the ear a drill perfects a childhood memory of red,

this is not the way to be, this is not the boat we hired, this 

is not not, this, the wine have we drunk it all, the white and

the rosé kept chilled in the small ice bucket, no one recalls where

nor when it was last night and in a dance hall to be sure

we contacted for the first time the houri of love, dark

semblance of a desert bloom storming behind the hair 

a gleaming the lightning of sand, is it any further now weight

mired in this small catastrophe of ochre mud, expect depth

and the formless activity of desire when least anticipated

to arrive waving a brief flag of suspense extreme for its 

broad weave, there, I have never been farther from the personal

pronoun than now, and other things that are strange and 

unpleasant to admit, losing sight of destiny the goal the long

haul toward sunset where we should be mooring at a wharf

called something like fandango or flamenco, not sure which,

and ticking within the intimacy of spanish gold a temporary

voice summons its animal, startled we wake from our siesta

drenched in the myopic heat of this false tropic bole, Amaryllis

the fair whom we share in a single uninterrupted dream

she steps out of the tangle of grasses her ankles filthy with mud

her skirts loose and ready to fall and her hair the undone

continent of Mu, 

this waste place this sump they call El Trono de los Dioses

girls used to come here to draw water

pack animals on the long trek to heaven

arms white as rope fallen asleep beside the stone work

cannot name a more like paradise in fewer words

scant allusion to a mythography of distances

eros was here kindled once bussed on the nape of the neck

and shot like a stray dog at sunset

other languages contend for the honor of poetry

metaphor and its humus of discontent

but the one spoken as rapidly as gunshot by the girls

who used to come to draw water here

to hear them speak lilting sing song broken tagalong

it seemed to the unaccustomed ear Paradise

this place called by some El Trono de los Dioses

bric a brac amorphous rocks set one against the other

red dust flakes off them easily and a shadow

scary for its constantly moving shape

if we could agree on the cut of the cloth

to cover her lap and send her back to the cabildo

or the plane ready to go to Miami

but here all afternoon the whining of cicadas

and the remote drone of diesel engines on hot asphalt

supposed to be a ruined temple or something

things come apart lose texture and color as dust

make a circle in the pulverized part

chant and dance up and down Hooping Hooping

soon out of pure air shaking her inky tresses

the daughter of a god will manifest

and sit herself down on El Trono de los Dioses

waiting to milk the evening kine

the easy part is getting the bark to move again to enter

the bottle green waterway between the immense shadows

of the palm trunks, to read the inscription on the surface

constantly wavering among water fronds and lotus when

the sun cuts its angle abruptly and the characters dissolve,

what can you do, engine of destruction, doubtlessly lost

in the moving earth, the parts that cannot be identified

that cannot have a name a history, born from the lotus Brahma

the four faced like a clock fused to all directions, of destruction,

sun glinting on surface swarming with midges and gnats,

infinitesimal deities of malaria, characters dissolve, swift

air currents carrying messages from the dead, short circuit

of existence the lilting afterlife of a thought, first it’s yellow

then verging on blue green the abyss where myth vanishes,

pushed out toward the center then start going in circles

the whirlpool, mysterious eddies almost see a face below 

the surface, sun begins to decline against the hour when

we do the reading, technically dead the, of destruction, 

barely perceptible the whirring of infinitesimal deities

of malaria, dissolve, reading in unison selections from

the Bhagavata Purana but in this searing light the angle

of the sun, characters dissolving, face beneath the surface,

beckoning between the immense shadows of, moving earth, 

this, reflections in golden liquid shimmering of the sun his

ruddy head slowly going down, realize there is no sure exit

the snaking waterways between gilded crests of shadow and 

lurking other things nameless and dissolving, have not heard

the egret’s cry? did not see various the white plumes descend

like downy rests of sleep  far fallen from heavier the head so,

questions in a different tongue, built the watery fortress a

citadel of wattles and mortar soon to sink like thought,

a man’s no more than that a drowning impulse to move,

forward or back, but in motion hail the great rolling light,

our life, selections from the tenth book of the Bhagavata, 

child Krishna off to herd the ruddy kine, into the ocean

of Being we push off from the marshy tract as evening sends 

its bright signals in the eastern hemisphere of sky near the

edge where the Pharaohs have their chambers, the ruddy kine

lowing in the dark grass, when will they come home

set up the tents, careful to place the papers high,

the girls in pigtails sighing who have lost someone

a song they sing to the end of things,

tie the lantern to the rope, see,

around it gather the fateful moths white winged

buzzing their deadly note, their deadly note,

it is puzzling that we are here, of all places,

removing our boots, unbuttoning our shirts,

unable to really sleep for the fear,

what is out there just beyond the planet’s rim,

El Trono de los Dioses      waste land

like moths to the flame we too, 

suddenly speaking and with strange words

as if by a divinity struck, and exchanging

clothes and rags to the wash house wend

in the mind a poesy a blend of literatures

is it far, do we know where

how to sleep in such distress of thought

come to us dream entities bearing paper swords,

a waste land      a land fill          a

sound of huge trucks removing detritus

the sum of history,          off to an ocean

girls in pigtails seen in relief blue bodices

have lost someone           , sighing

we have been to the sacred mountain

to the fogs that curl around the moat 

and seen the canopy flapping high over

the sea green pond,                the gazebo

and inside it the statue of the Mother of Heaven

in gowns of transparent azure

but, here, sit ye down

here are cushions of argent threads woven

and the head, lay it to rest             remember nothing,

mysterious this passageway this watery conduit to what

other world, ears ringing the distance it takes to maintain

the mountain, landscape painting, waterfalls of memory a

radiance for a minute, a purity of thought emblems reddening

by day’s end winding in and out and through these various canals

flushed with a dying light copper-flecked green baize tinted, overhead

the slow canopy of a late sky sprawls unfurling its alternate

universe of intricate but fading constellations, echoing hours

of remote brass a nostalgia for unwalled cities in the Tuscan past

a forever written backwards in stained apocalyptic mirrors, else

what are these pendants looming in the dusky air these faint 

glimmerings assorted jewels pasted to the waning fabric byzantine 

elephantine ivory chastened enamel worthy of a dowager empress,

yet through these sluggish shoals we push our errant skiff no compass

to guide the chance voyage into the crenellated night distance,

a sobbing a wary moan childhood whispers somehow come back 

to evoke a need for lying down to sleep under the eaves of a forest

hut to dream the black dream of loss beneath leaf piles grown old,

yellow brittle gnarled veins turned to mulch underfoot where 

the phantom treads ancient unyielding husk, was a life here a

driven force a 

or so it seemed, wandering, could you

never felt so     the thing is, 

brilliant flash before my very eyes

the world’s skin trembled ever so slightly,

thunder in the nerve green spreading,

a swill shut the pulse, focus lost

tent flapping darkly in the wind

night after, night    however so tender

the first dew felt underfoot, waiting

longing for the transcendent moment

when the driven rain turns to light

such,             someone else was there

before the small portal,     jade in the ear,

husk of time, the ticking 

               pierces the sound barrier

just outside of              immense, the

how many of us are there in the end,

handful of pronouns, declensions

of substantives according to gender and

number,     we, that is, each to the other,

bound    , and then forgetting who,

and to ask of the deity what, and to

receive, what       , penance on the knees

the canvas flapping wildly now, a sharp

current from mars         , celestial awakening

and to jot down a few lines before,

this is El Trono de los Dioses      , high

barely visible just above the mile of dust

encircling the planet,     storm signals

and aftermath of destruction, 

inches from the next port, sluggish inert the waterway

wending through mazes of reed and lotus mesh, sticking

the oar into the ooze pushing pushing hard on the pole to move,

and what gives way barely yielding the clayey mud thick 

as night on the other side of the moon and switched to darker

where stars barely perceptible and the large hotel abandoned 

on the right where ghosts of Chinese rail workers dwell, there

hard by the lightning shattered palm and the totem beasts

howling and prowling through the years of grass and yes

the wasteland the automobile graveyards the diminished

fraction of the world burnt by its ambition, yearning slow

toward the vast and final inch towards, the

                 III

 LEÇONS DE TÉNÈBRES

                  (a)

not the single nor the plural

but the uncountable near the nexus

of sunset and vine watching the slow

motion of empty cabs drive by in 

funereal procession whose mighty death

whose massive stone with just a nick in it

is being conveyed to the lawn of eternal distance

you might say it’s the lone ranger or a horse

strapped to the desert of dreams barely

but just barely breathing a reminiscence

like a hotel of forty abandoned floors

filled with dust and the portfolio of air

that belongs to no one any more

standing there for the traffic light to change

for the sky to move its rebus of clouds

to the southwest quadrant where Persephone

waits for a cigarette to begin smoking

the lit end sketching a path for a super nova

isn’t it supposed to be by night fall

when the wingèd things begin to stir again

shaping from the vacuum of reality

an evidence of sleep amorphous and pale

and the multiple worlds of light and breath

that constitute for a nano second only 

the universe as we think to know it

before falling again wings singed 

and tufts burnt into the miasma below

and isn’t it at this hour of dusk and aspirin

when the shadows we inhabit start to move

in and out of the map of porous structures

better known as the Fall of Troy

that we commence the journey through

the labyrinth of cocktail love affairs

with its poetry of lipstick and rimmel

etched into the eyes of the walls of heaven

how we flounder in the address and symptom

of something more ancient than this

asking with a bitter accent which is the exit

once we have established a connection

to the cadaverous six-foot doorman

who claims to have known Achilles

before he went down on the south side

in the internecine struggle for turf

it all fades into a present of absinth doors

that elaborate fiction of shuttered windows

memory on trial reduced to embers

& in the dream shrugging off her father’s death

bright and effusive as ever her red mane

flashing like a signal in the dark

she moves gracefully eliminating one

by one the lovers she has summered

over the distance of a lifetime

the pomegranate of her mouth 

the very music that destroys

even the grass she treads

the minute planets

that thrive on dew

us in their midst

                     (b)

afterwards in the spacious and elegant lobby of the Mayo clinic

chasing spirit demons out of recently dead bodies

the enormous brass carillon booming in the winter ear

dizzying reflux

                     isn’t red the dust of

ancient ascension (s)

                    riddled with flame

the opposing shore its mouth

                    averts the very air

it craves  

                    for one I am a thought

sheer crystal ablaze

                    transparency & luster

long rides home to wherever that may be, or is

but doomed however

                    dark the plow

earth underside 

                    billows like a flare

arms white as rope

                    head a shock of hair

who hasn’t seen once

                    the surface of despair

and renewed the consequences in a greek restaurant

hard by the old catholic mortuary off west center street

you mean the nunnery, the sisters of Saint Mary

in their perennial black ground length robes, frightening

or climbed into the pit

                    to wait out the drug

storm of leaves

                   tension of weir and gas

or is it the rabid arabesques  

                   black saliva sutures

wearing the shore away

                   the indefinite article

barking the random

ambulances of eternity bearing the circumstantial corpses

back to the dust mound whence all arises, origins

carved in evening air, mephitic, pharaonic coming and going

through 84,00 rebirths to cross the sea of Being

is it then desire 

                   purgatorial wedding feet    

soldered bridal veins

                  gutted husband wear

ink the size of alabaster 

                  a place neither sun nor moon go

head down in the tarmac

                  angel breathes shattered

dovecote dimension

up the terraced slope climbing twins hand in hand

carving from the snow an incidental paradise

frozen apples the meaning of abracadabra the comic

instantaneous radio fused to a circling search light

coded for something that outdistances memory

when mother can no longer be, and the dog and the ceremony

for a religious assumption and the burning wax tapers

how far to reach 

                     when each blade of grass

is a universe and

                     children in boxing shorts

fisticuffery in the gloaming

                     wary in the lunar mansion

to sleep ho heavy head

                     to pierce the barrier

called the flowers of god

these little imps come roaring through the lobby

knocking down halt lame and healed alike

in the hunt for the magnificent white stag

set loose a hundred years ago and ghosting hills

what fanciful and errant deed 

I am sick to the body and dead cry out

nor do the Hounds eat the goslings 

but with blood red ears leap into the frosty air

clouds like unto the masters of thought thunder

and the whole earth shudders toppling its peaks

what did the dreamer say then, pray tell

what did indeed the uniform with its gold braid

and strutting like a prince eating cake

                        rendered silence aloud

reading from the book of Mormon

                        with wagons still ablaze

crossing the Sioux reserve

                        pricking their steeds

in ten gallon hats

                        whooping to declare war

a tornado a mile wide

                        swept the Zumbro valley

leaving in its wake 

                        nothing standing

waking in a small casket and still dressed in his sky blue

the inch worm and the gallows bird feeding on sweet bread

the way the wind howled around the hotel corner

on the look for a tea house an inn some place for the night

and pointing to the adder shouted “’tis he, milord!”

                             (c)

into the forest and father chasing shouts “don’t go!”

and sweating in the movie house abandoned

remembering the empty medicine cabinet 

just wanna find perfection at her Lotus Feet

and the distant shouts from outside either children

or a party in distress the prickling heat and dirty waves

on the lake beach the number of fish belly up silver

heart drained of light life empty of meaning

increasing daily and the distant Indiana steel mills

smoking clogging the air streams with poisons

when Diana Ross and the Supremes were riding high

everything a confusion this is Kali Yuga this is

with waters going every which way and no where

but the boat was veering in the wrong direction

the helmsman drunk and twined in white ivy

whose woods are these what inextricable passage

there were no Blessed Isles no Hesperia nor Arcadia

only the monotony of uncounted days learning

linguistic paraphernalia and laws of phonetic decay

looking for the other side of the eternal edge

can count on none can speak for no one

but keep the girl’s name a secret

keep hidden what she said and did and with whom

and hold the lantern away from the doorway

let none seek her for barter or affront

at least for today and the moon’s rushing tide

sleeping in the name the unutterable like fireflies

and the planetary monograph destroy it right now

legend and the hierophant of the Olympians

just a stone’s throw from the hospital 

surrender earthly love of wife child parent

or at the benzene stand which is the entrance to hell

loitering tramps illumined with song to the dawn

escape from the 84,000 rebirths sometimes a goat

go naked eating goop avoiding all mortal contact

sometimes an insect and others a human damned

and above all destroy the wandering remnant

the light above my head the walls ever nearer

how she danced in a red kimono inebriate mad

and let none be the wiser for her who was

and forever the yes in her eyes a darkening

like a spinning top in my brain illusion of her

run into the woods the labyrinthine and cold

memory of the empty medicine cabinet 

the rishis the divine ones the mendicants waiting

one by one the days become wingless and blind

we grow old aging in the slanting faltering light

forgetting which is the name which the body

shadows nothing but shadows

                                                     whispering

                         (d)

does anything make sense any more

tree branches swinging in the wind

how many darknesses must stain the air

how much grass underfoot must be painted

listen to the insects in their archaic worlds

making the rounds among the fallen planets

how summer is this moment of grief unbound

how green this errant must of undue form

hear the muted singing in the leaf

how much its winter pains the silent vein

swirling the mass of remembered thursday hair 

reddened in the crater of the missing mind

this is the hospital of dusky mountain passes

this is the lobby where spent childhoods gather

summoning a season in extinct x-rays

chalking sidewalks with a legend of yellow

where is the valley of the water bearer

where is the dale where chanting the shadow 

multiplying in its chaotic skirts mourned

celestial deaths raining from the clouds

how little is the house become in its lawn

so lessened by the migrant heron’s tune

how fast space reduces the time it takes

to travel from one life to the next

shake the gourd-rattle and darken its tone

speak if you can the flaming distance

what are the shapes of ink when the dream is done

where can anyone go walking at such an autumn pace

you tell me if the face in the mirror is one

or as many as the days it has taken to wake

I am not that one nor the other in its latin

they are writing furiously in the tundra

a long poem about the residue of love

snowflakes turning blue in the absent room

gravel mounting against the aging tide

vedanta of the spotted deer and white roe

so many things to think about and nothing

books to discard because they are not butterflies

an urgency to dispel myths about alcohol

music arranged like sand in the japanese sleeve

to hear it is to become a devotee of satin

a longing to sleep underneath vermillion

remembering if possible the sexual act

the union of fish and star in the desert

or is to misunderstand everything from the start

taking the text and renumbering it 

using a calligraphy of forgotten characters

in long slanting flourishes on the skin

of one who died years ago in san francisco

                       (e)

bells of dead copper resounding before dawn

sleep’s ivory thicket dissolving in black dew

will I know you when the sun shakes its head

over the dappled distant mountains of cathay

switches of russet grass whipping lightly in the air

for a body to draw nigh for blood to rise in welts

what is all but forgotten in this tenuous labyrinth

may well be the mind in its first oriental light

did I tell you to come at the hour of the cricket

did I ever summon you across this bleak distance

to come running through the empty temple

praying to each and every headless deity   AOI

who are rattling the 84,000 spears in the unlit vale

the amassed souls of purgatory hungry for silence

look! in the western quadrants of sky flocks of geese

who spell out the longing for summers of endless grain

had I not looked into the abyss would I have seen the mirror

had I not gone blind would I ever have seen your face

it is the other world you are walking under a great shade

umbrellas elephants staggering with the weight of the sun

it is a far other world you are walking a spirit of shadow

take care not to veer to either side of the highway

where clusters of malignant gods with nets of cancer

lie in wait those half formations of tideless ink baths

what baleful design circling the morning air outshines

setting in relief the horses whose toil doubles by the day

what errant planet what constellation gone dead wrong

marks the minute of our brief and only encounter

did I ever tell you to wear red in that fashion

or to put your hair up like an empress stepping out

the mansion of the moon meant for your dwelling

lies smoking in the nether moor of Etruscan countersigns

and the doorman who announces daily the list of the dying

shifts within the enormous corpus of linguistic decay

oblivious of the rules prescribed by the Sanskrit parrot

and instead pronounces of all names your Name today   AOI

                     IV

             LUNA PARK

                     

it comes as a surprise no it doesn’t on

the lakeside silver the bushes burnished

by the last light ever echoing the mirage

of voices tumbling off the ferris wheel

I am not arguing for the full moon

moving like a mysterious lantern in the sky

opposite the unconstructed city that awaits

the innumerable dead who have gathered

around the fallen oak to pray for the mill stone

no surprise that the sparkle of distant flares

imitates the immense reflections of mountains

can it be that the living never cease to breathe

those innumerable dead whom we have known

not as the disappeared but as the engines

of an insane memory we have of living

of having lived on this silver lakeside

burnished with bushes which are mere outlines

the disparate and calumniating members of

of the dense greenery swarming near Luna Park

that casts songs out like rust into the night

the raucous tutti frutti of eternal adolescence

obdurate fickle licensed to embrace all forms

the rushing swoon of consciousness in white

spreading an even whiter shadow into blank

tossed the hair to one side parading vermillion

her tattered skirt and grazed knees barely

visible moving in and through the shrubbery

coupling with the very absences of ego 

king and subject alike in the nicotine embrace

that alcohol and smoking have destroyed

the piecemeal bric a brac and nonsense 

with a pair of eyes and longing ready to cry

listening for the words of the song to “mean” 

cylindrical syntax of the most archaic thought

bucolic grasses vanishing into a mere darker

than the legend of time 

bucolic grasses vanishing into a mere darker

than the legend of time 

cylindrical syntax of the most archaic thought

impostors the dead because they reappear

in dreams mocking cajoling spitting in their

brandnew store bought clothes creased pants

pomaded hair skirts of flourishing pleats

multicolored hair pieces jissom streaked cheeks

the whole paraphernalia about immortality

riding the roller coaster at Luna Park subdivided

by immense extra planetary trajectories lies

about the history of this and that plunging

necklines waistbands of Siamese rubber golden

temples acrostics with the names of the infernal

did we never return home that night in May?

and insist on non-existing rights to formulate

libraries with volumes of cuneiform imprints

dusty rolls of endless text in neo sumerian latin

diacritics like moonspells and iota glosses removed

from the margins and the never ending poem

heroes strangled in their hexameters and Lo!

queen Dido or someone like her bound and gagged

in the classroom chalk smeared and sobbing

the race to the blackboard to conjugate irregular 

verbs and the missing pronouns of pornography

the skilled letter head that declaims justice

for the black man in Arabia just south of Hyde Park

you may not recognize these enormous poesies

am I to understand the intricate details of sleep

merely by posing as a sand man on the viaduct

that leads from Mount Ida in Crete to the cataracts

of the upper Nile oh how tired the mind becomes

the visceral extrapolation of thought and memory

disjunct issues of time and space on the grassy slope

was this the victory you employed the parallel bars

the succinct invocation to the gods of soil and grit

oh let us please this is not the way the uninformed

the practice of self mutilation of genital immobility

by the shores of Silver Lake littoral transduction

of polyphemic verses ululated at high frequency

and on mars they are painting the water red 

isn’t it queer how we fall apart by the water’s edge

and on venus mercurochrome dunes and silt

dissolve in a flood of italics and infra-red waves

intrinsic details of that why didn’t you call me

night stars falling and cluster bombs in the ears’

windows what a charade it was, joe, 

are we spent with all our planning for hope’s

isoglosses you wouldn’t tell I didn’t ask 

dialing  leaf after leaf trying to get in touch

this battibecco a surfeit of color schemes a wind

with the inner Diana a plague on arrows & stones

a fling’s watch away from christ’s mass the narrow

colder misery we never owned and the old chevvy

blackening in the gravel put-put exhaust fumes

go to my head and see stars at high noon swinging

invisible rotations of the whet stone in the garage

odor of benzene and old whiskey the fishing poles

like markers of an irregular destiny hanging

from the timbered ceiling if gramps ever knew

the evening was crystal clear with the Pleiades’ 

excess fires lighting up the whole eastern hemisphere

I will go flying with you tonight we’ll ride the monorail

all the way to downtown wherever and go shopping

for muskets leather sashes corsets figure-8 shoe laces

the gamut of domestics to bewitch and destroy

multiply the times I disowned you by the moon tide

flying with you tonight to the seven celestial mansions

cushioning with velvet your padded cell Oh One!

I’m not getting older I am old ‘neath the spreading willow

without you I am ceasing to be much easier going

solo driving this dream machine into the tundra

a hundred light years per hour

                      BIGGA BUKKA NO HAKKA

how can I wake behind such reveries looking through

the owl glass into the till where hands forage for romance

in a sub alpine dialect locking ringlets darkly silent

each finger poised to indicate the persona offuscata

marginally taciturn holding the mask upright

but pertaining to the eyes mascara and rimmel drip

-ping! ‘s alarms going off in the pillow already 

how is to sleeve sleep’s off draining drink’s seep

ho-ho heavy head’s lead tantrum pushing dank a

dust bowl framed in gilt spectacle what a sight you

was holding up Orion’s belt in the left hank whilst

reciting in the right angular a dialogue of all sadness

to be even as the road unwinds through autumn mulch

misty listing shorewards in a daft sort of cycle Arthurian

in meter and feet counting long syllables twice

put your ankle shift forward and hold the pulse so’s

I can take a better loose at you moon-weft and all

it’s hard to drink this much tonight I’m already insane

buckled to this beer shaft looking for my advance ticket

to the big tent a show for all reasons white puff 

ancient leggings greaves hasps winches shields a shift

at a time loping through the grazing zone wreck in sight

when who’s do I see but the sound-alike version of

Romeo falling off his ladder with no net below

cabloom! picked up his brains with a scooper 

and divested the shadow of its glowing raiment

don’t that make for a tragical thing all down sided

so happens nightly we were sailing along using

clear water for a mirror when all we could see

was and ever will be the thrift of a thousand million stars

caught in the mesh of aqueous thought I dizzied

at the mere idea of you down below sinking surface

of a countenance no god would take back limp

as the blanket mother poured over us the night we

drunk as two angels off the leash fell up the stairs

arm in arm necking whitely oft as winsome could

how vast was my empire! what year was it 496?

reciting the pandects decoding the effluvia byzantine

aghast at the ruin in the bedroom vomit and maps

spread across the ancient persian rug of Alcibiades

then sat we down and talked ‘til dawn of great poetry

citing  Sappho and Catullus and the hoary lyric tradition

and bucolics and eclogues too and waves came over us

sweeping us into the mass of watery drownings sung

by bards and troubadours alike to this day, amen!

what? that was the fireworks night by Silver Lake

everyone was running to and fro blinded by the spectacular

and the barkers at the gate to Luna Park bustling striped

with faces like plastered rhododendrons didn’t you think

it did not take forever to die it just happened so fast

when you weren’t even looking that way the dusty trail

facing the immemorial Tao the masters playing bamboo flutes

careful never to speak rolling eyes back into the centuries

the beautiful lonesome sound reedy and whispering

in the hills it is in the dun colored distant hills which

we never did reach thinking it once an easy journey

over pack saddle and livery hose and everything jangling

asterisks the hard edge of each paragraph near the south

took your shoes off someone did and left you for dumb

frosted the soles of your feet as you ran unconscious

through the city whose map you had just completed

yellow borders hyphenated trunk lines canals rusty barges

this is what I get for reading too much for comparing

my self to the canonized who “knew” for drinking dark

the already spent allusion to the gates of heaven AOI

forgetting is not so easy soft the pigeons speak shhh

dawn the great aubade I sing, joe     hearest not?

                                 V

                           

                     A U B A D E 

                               “Lanqand li jorn son lonc en mai”

                                                                   Jaufré Rudel

silver lid inside out

-hiscent ouverture            unfurled

                                light!

rolling dark masses heaving westward

from far below the moiling millions

the faceless sleepers in their mattresses

of grit and turmoil groaning dream spent

harsh the lot meted them to play out the day

on some asiatic shore       spear smitten

or to be bidden by some atavistic god

one with squinting eyes and tripe hanging out

to perform some unspoken deed darkening

windows the hasp of a ghost ship

waves pounding loud against the pane

wake!    shrill gull skreeks circling above

flurry of wings grayish mists unwinding

forth then do we unplanned send the mind

amongst the flower beds of antiquity

to choose its destiny      as if there were a choice

a sudden turn in the spare becoming 

of still another life              splash!

when they had departed from the island without Herakles,

bereft on account of his beloved Hylas, with heavy heart

they pushed on through the watery main, intent on pursuing

their cursed destiny, knowing full well which gods had a grudge

and which ones to propitiate, hands locked to the oars and eyes

pinned on the stars above to guide them 

gathered up flowers from the yards

blowing a fine yellow powder    calling out names

long since forgotten           “Hylas!”

each in their sleep a different man

each on waking a distant cousin to none

palms chafed raw from rowing 

                 wind chewed the ropes swung

uselessly and the brine eating their skin

seemed to come alive crawling

                  up as far as the cheek bone

just below the twitching eye pulse

how to regain strength enough to defy

the goddess whose totem bird

                  grey–eyed mottled 

rests mockingly on the prow 

                    how to sprout wings

like the soul to fly against the heat

smoking cigarette after cigarette

dense and damp       faint flares

blowing red in the sultry cabin

telling yarns about days in Mycene

                    wearing gold masks

having a go at the rutting queen

‘morn sparkling like emerald

                wagons hitched up

to pairs of milk white oxen 

skull craving and crazy like fly swarms

for the hour to spread its dazzle into

          sound of the mast cracking

Fortune’s turbulent sprays whipping

the foul and misty atmosphere

                  siren song distance

when would they ever          again

it was summer 1956 when everything seemed to end

when everything seemed to begin in the fine sheets of dew

sprinkled over the folding fields and groves by Mayowood,

like a casket the future hove into view with its horses lathered

sleek and black chomping at the bit, a girl named Sharon Dee Crawly

riding on the back seat of a convertible driving down Broadway

around midnight shouting out your name, your name Ivan,

the wake of things the multiversed unconscious of root leaf

blade and vine spanning the inch of mind where red augments

at the speed of light and the dream of living and dying takes on

the elements of the kaleidoscope and you are and you are not

lying next to her in a darkened room listening to Elvis Presley

hauntingly moan Blue Moon 

then the corn ripened tall in the southern field

and the months too many to be numbered

flew as on the wings of a dragonfly iridescent

and face down as if peering into Hades 

the eventual hero of his own dream spell vomited

wonders of Tenochtitlan just glimpsed! 

there he saw dimension after dimension peel

away like onion skin and the Whole shine forth

neither to the right nor to the left of the Axis

but in the troubling diameter of the Myrmidons

millimeters below the pyramid of the Sun

a black flame shot out 

was it envy ire guilt sloth pride         shine forth

lust avarice overweening hybris        shine forth

in a pink button-down collar shirt and ivy league tie

and in Teotuhuacan both splendid and ruinous

under the black Aztec sun                  

           “tous les matins du monde”

and emerging as if from a shed snake skin

his intelligence that the cosmos encompassed

skimming constellations born and not yet born

with the ease of a                

a black flame shot out      

                                       was it just ego?

millimeters below the pyramid of the Moon

and when the autumn winds began to blow chill

dry husks rattling in the dim yellow air

and the months too few to be remembered

passed as dirty raindrops on a speeding window

the former hero of his other dream face down

lay oblivious of the netherworld under him

the splendid mansions where the Pharaohs go

when they have had enough of the light

“… he was a noble man, prince of Blaia, fell in love 

with the countess of Tripoli, sight unseen, for the good

that he had heard about her from the pilgrims come

from Antioch, and of her wrote many verses with fine

melody and meager words, and for a desire to see her he

joined the crusades and put off to sea, and on the ship 

fell ill, and was brought to Tripoli to an inn, dying, and

when the countess heard of this she came to him, to

his bed taking him in her arms, and he knew it was the 

countess, and momentarily recovered hearing and sense

of smell, and praised God, who had kept him alive long

enough to see her, and so he died in her arms, and with great

honor she had him buried in the house of the Temple,

and on that day she became a nun for grief that she had

of his death.”

what was Enkidu to do?

that was the morning I took off with Joel Pugh

hitchhiking to Fort Snelling and Minnehaha Falls

to study speech organization and linguistic change

once the great unknown explored by père Hennepin

alarm of the chattering jay birch bark canoes sliding

stealthily into limpid waters under watchful father Sunne

pathology of phonetic decay twelve types of aphasia

wheel keep on burning  

                   “si che gran pianto e cruccio fu in Troia“  

was there ever a morning so bright with promise

what magical world sparkled out of the asphalt ribbon

highway 52 Oronoco Pine Island Zumbrota Cannon Falls

on either side old Ojibway legend wove spider webs

that crystallized forever sky’s intricate azure

thumbs out standing defiantly on the road side

humming and whizzing vehicles full of gods tearing past

the occasional deity with heart stopping to pick us up

for a lonesome stretch with hand painted decorations

of green ivy gnome woods fishermen gone daft 

illusory villages of teepee and cobalt drifting lazily

because there is no limit to memory because 

teeter totter clouds brilliant array of enigma and ink

splashing down on the man built urban horizon

highlighted by stockyards state capitol university dorms

Joel nervously self confident already future spent

at my side jiving at the benzedrine driven truckers

who manned the wheel effortlessly asleep in the light

grand pantomime of life! on the city streets high

with the poetry of ecstasy and jubilant sexuality

which way to turn what road to take dreaming

whose big shadow to follow into the numbing wake 

that destroys all who plunge into the galactic mirage

Joel ticking off the minutes left of his stay on earth

grinning like a medicine man who can’t keep a secret

performing the supreme blues number of his adolescence

and talking fast to trees clap-board houses girls all

declaring his red-topped presence to the cosmos

whiplashed to the racing metal that too quickly darkens

coming home that afternoon bathed in a luminescence

that only night can project we start with amaze

as the radio explodes with a wild electric guitar

and a hillbilly guy singing Be-Bop-a-Lula

“che ‘l chiaro giorno fu tornato bruno”

                                     “Those Dawns even now equally

                                        the same of unchanged color,

                                        move on; concealing the black

                                        monster, bright with gleaming

                                        forms, brilliant beaming.”   

                                                     Vedic hymn to Dawn  

forthy ferny foot ‘neath the scapular graze

unpen the ruddy kine flush from dark welkin

hush blank ‘chens histed lissome behind walls

patent glaze an eye a single glassy doth amaze

circling the dance ‘tween reed and flame air

lit up hastening to become more than itself

the gleaming forms equally of mottled hue

unchanged color dash streak the rubescent

orb climbing into the third heaven mercurial

shining of brilliant beaming chased as emerald

or dew designed on the patient and blind leaf

doth then the monster black stir in mind’s lair

removed from sleep the doleful as day puts on

some flashy flair mushrooming clouds hugely

oriental dashed with orange tapioca verdigris

asterisms hunt the belt of tears charging dark

into the first Hour’s topaz greek unhinged doors

through which rush frothing the steel sleek steeds 

hooves clanging on the ionosphere’s metal canopy

like lightning bolts their nostrils breathing flare

fixing from one invisibility to the next the flame

eternal the massy redundancy of time’s events

concealed the black monster starts the daily tour

shifts of red in slattern ranks th’ooze primordial

from which all that live repeatedly awake alas

doze full recriminations of violated dreams aware

on lawns empty out the dumped thought confusion

concocted betimes by the guile of master Negative

and but then do we consider the universe to turn 

high above fused to Dawn’s pearly weft swirling

the immutability of hue and tone the loud freesong

like some infinite violin string descending ever

to where dust has its origins the yellow maze & flux

dense the dusky whorls released by chafing deities

upturned and overruled by the Monster’s negritude

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

there it is, Aubade 

                                 do then glistening go and sing

to the evanescent dews the rites of spring

                           wake then Love, the tender

                VI

CARCEL DE AMOR

                                “voi mi tenete e sempre mi terrete

                                  occhi miei bei, nell’amorosa rete”

                                                          Boccaccio, Filostrato

                 primera parte

the time when Parvati smeared herself

with red sandal-paste    no tengo palabra de nadie

todo se disuelve                mountain peak 

to mountain peak in the flaring mists

painting the air with memory

eons since the last encounter with the Big God

her thighs all a tremble and the left eyelid

quivering as if for a bad omen    ni sé porque

nadie me recuerda                   waterfalls

rushing out of the morning sky    

you know why and litters with yellow the vast unknown

pebbles sparkling like mica ‘neath her feet

and starshine glow in the depth of her eyes

“lemme go, Lover” hoarse shouting

the metaphysical tattoos of the amorous bout

light years ago with ShivJi still raw

                    shivers up and down the spine

into how many dictionaries

                    has she divided her life

ni yo tampoco recuerdo

                         a nadie

flashes of imperial lightning bright green

hailstones rampant floods life gone amok

followed by what is the longest and saddest

               looking but not finding

when she was just a little bitty and skin was

one rosy song softer than

and the grasses underneath hymned the universe of 

her footprints                   well wasn’t that a time

all bells and silver clouds       lágrimas sueltas

corriendo para nadie

                                      clad in her pink finery

cutting a figure between rock and mountain cave

alluring elusive mysterious enigmatic haunting

the wind shaping the vault of her enormous hair

and everywhere the billows and chime rhyming

her name that no one can hear                              

                                                      underchosies

and silk stockings argent sprinkled glittering

for all the morning to wake

                                                looking for a love

labios pintados bermejo

                     cuchicheando en la oreja de nadie

checking for all the diacritics

tossed into the empyrean glimmering asterisks

wasn’t her the Himalayan sweetums the 

whatcha call the dancing fling her shapely

ever in downsized ivory and chemise see through

               pellucid shimmering wavering quivers

a thrill to see “the” her coming and going peekaboo

nightless frump      where was that love

looking for in abstract ashcan paintings

             in sparkle-all tease-me dust rags

like millennial cloud-swarms mounting jewels

of light in the preterit beyond of time 

           the quintessential the acme and apex

worn like the crown of red too far to reach

above her glistening sand-papered brow

         ah her deliquescence her evanescence

her her her what!       ojos sin blanco

percibiendo la nada de nadie

pepper-rican heat served up in a boiling can

Uma half woman half you name it 

all but naked strumping in teeter-totter heels

up the shady residential street the slattern dump

the hoyden primped to kill

                              looking for true love

any love at all in fact her hair peroxide orange

her lips my god the size and flame of them

       that would floor Catullus    basia mille

into perpetuity and the death of all eternity

nights without count the supreme annihilation

of love the one and only

                        jujube voodoo hex in a torn skirt

helium voiced chanting some gaga number

as if she meant It            olvídame no me dejes

                  con nadie

errant Parvati     disheveled tongue loose

barking woof woof like the animal she is

                      inimitable of orgasm the endless

ululating mercilessly longing 

            for hoary old shaggy ShivJi

still doing his dance of destruction

                way on top of the world

 as we know it

               knocking everything to smithereens

splitting the atom for the nth time

         bathing Parvati in her supreme distance

with the billion watt light of Love

         origin and end of the universe          AOI

               segunda parte

“to die of not being able to die”                                  

thus Teresa de Ávila   pierced

to the quick by the marble lance of 

and Hari took as many wives as pleased

love of the formless god who in turn

like a dog ate bread from Namdev’s hand

on all fours a bag of stones on her back

forsaken by the blue-faced god Radha

built in her name a temple and danced

naked the gopis emerged from the water

shouting in piercing voices either Ram or Sita 

in a living room on the upper West Side

Mira Bai considered divinely mad

betrothed to the only man in the universe

sat on the divan patiently assailed 

by anthropologist and linguist alike

arguably centered in Mathura the mandir

beside the sluggish Jamuna the cowherds

companions to the child-god dreamed

did the Christ himself not wash her feet

the Maudlin red-haired gypsy thing

lingering toward evening to hear the lowing

gentle dust clouds melancholy sunset

in the Maghreb where the muezzin drowns

his final prayer eyes rolled back

who has not seen from within the Love

traversed the Ocean of Being and drowned

reanimated a cow brought the river 

from its dry bed turned the temple around

careful not to step on the slightest living

the weaver Kabir who met Namdev

and Goraknath and Guru Nanak

do we not all praise Ahuramazda

does not the element of fire in us all

made vows to be true to One only

slept on stone slabs imitating Lions

sufis dancing wild gyres around the

and great shadows of night encroaching

and the Stone in the midst of nowhere

worshipped deities with skull-garlands

soles of the feet painted colors of heaven

indigo to mercurochrome blanched ivy

in between calls for Jihad the Adoration

bhakti Vedanta with its small white deer

in the annunziata position not being able

to die how can we obtain the highest sphere

crowded into a hot vehicle to cross the frontier

Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe on the dashboard

“Borderline, I’m gonna lose my mind”

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

I cut the hair of my mirror self

counting forward the years remaining

the lessons left to learn in the grammars

the loves left to remember and recount

as are leaves like the accounting of man

budding verdant to be torn wither or fall

inclement seasons music that cannot be heard

a face from the mist emerging and insects

in the faint ear buzzing or whirring

toward the flame drawn into darkness

the eternal insentient plain todos morimos

huérfanos however indistinct a face emerges

the years remaining cutting the mirror self

hair growing verdant budding as years

of men are recounting leaves wither

falling from the branch to be torn crying

a bleeding voice out of grammars

seasons conjugated like irregular verbs

of rain and sleet and hail to be heard

like insects whirring chirring in the faint

grasses too mown drawn to darkness

ear listening to the todos morimos

forward loves remaining in mirror

of selves counting however indistinct

a voice emerging a face complex as

drawn to darkness the insentient plain

lessons left to bud like greening insects

faintly the ear falling as are the branches

of men drawn to a complex face emerging

huérfanos cutting the hair in Borderline

toward the drawing flame emerging faint

an ear left to learn accounting the grammars

left to be heard a music the eternal crying

wither and buzzing fall bleeding leaves

as are the voices of man recounting loves

lost or drawn forward as are remaining

the insects in darkness drawn to grasses

as are mown the hair in the mirror self

emerging faint the face crying indistinct

however complex are drawn flaming

to the bud of seasons raining morimos

of my mirror self is there any other?

like irregular verbs the hails and sleet

mist emerging from a face faintly complex

as are the budding of man the music

of loves the accounting like huérfanos

that cannot be heard falling the insentient

eternal the hair cutting like irregular

verbs drawn to love and todos morimos 

whirring chirring darkness the emerging

however indistinct flame cutting like

“to die of not being able to die”                                  

“Borderline, I’m gonna lose my mind”

                  tercera parte

in the clinic where they treat the wounds of love

Haroun er-Rashid dazed or stoned

looking for the Ka’aba in the middle of Hollywood

prince of Cupids darts him another fling

falls unconscious whirling dervish in Buick 88

racing the pyramids of thought to their source

whirlpools of deep and incendiary Eyes

jazz frictions in the deep middle of the Unknown

his quiver wavers solemnly sounding the down below

never waking from the thunder and spotted grief

a drum on the equator a lyre somewhere in the Gulf

how dreaming swells the tide’s distant rushing

drawing from the moon her deliquescent combs

and sands of voices alarming fill the blowing sleeves

for never again the kiss to touch Her timeless lips

did never then a stone confound the books of algebra

his library tomb a trip through leaves of ink

how drowning fair caliphate the waves return a deer

grazing on the mind’s other side so once long ago

a poem inscribed in the grasses of the Mountain

a lyric sung through the flowing princess hair 

Jesus wasn’t that a swoon the ancient dark 

of extra-planetary night the walking tom-tom sticks

each desert the shadow crosses each reddening vine

the ivy round his temples burns a love supreme

and Legend in her course of days inspires

the rudiment of white that gives sleep its size

enlarging the photo of the One with jasmine scent

and powders of the crescent fane abandoned

beside the chinese path leading inward to the heart

how far from light the crumpled form in its abyss

how remote the sound of the tinfoil breath

circling ever more faintly the Beatrice of youth

reducing the promontory where lovers hang

with deathless wish to increase the inch

while surrendering to the weight their sighs

this is long to tell the bridge that crosses space

the zigzag pronoun employed to fake the brain

uttering with simplicity the complex consonants

the undecoded mantra of the venereal jewel

So breathe deeply fragrances of sandalwood and thyme

become conjoined to the sublime Other 

speeding in your Buick 88 of flame and metal

pay no heed to the sun’s great errors

nor to the lunar rains that fall forty floors

you are become the Elemental undivided 

spore within the rock seed in blowing air

yet you have never met her nor once seen her

who dwells in the paradise of screens and shades

who languishes in sheets of archaic vowels

sleeping the remote drugs of ruined Carthage and Troy

never beheld her in the bath of liquid phosphors

her skin the music of alcoholic troubadours

how can the never been assume her idiomatic shape

resolving labyrinths of instamatic reconditioning

even as the Sultan’s curtains descend silently

and the hushed amphitheater turns to hematite

the audience of volcanic ash no memory retains

and soundless hands applaud the inky spire

the dialogue between When and Now

“I begin to boil using the force of my thumb

to move heaven from its colors, and when night

with its unspoken trees descends taking me from 

the seething waters and the half of me which is

female turns to red coral, then I aspire to the top

the half of me that is corrupted and rust, the male,

I inform light of its incidence and evanescence and

like a rushing wind in the marsh reeds take shape,

while the woman who is in me, the very essence of

me, dissolves becoming liquid the dashing waves

impelled by the moon’s white turbulence, against

rock and tower toppling all substance and matter,

there is nothing left but the void, breathing is difficult

and sleeping in stone the vast unconscious beneath,

what am I then, and I am walking down the street 

furious to have her the half of me that is inaccessibly

woman, the painted hemisphere of a sky that exists

outside of stone, of the void where the unconscious

dwells swarming with insect galaxies red yellow and

indigo beyond the spectra, the her who is all of me

obsessed with her every being in the shimmering

distance of light years of an honorific pronoun

whose use is forbidden, more difficult than ever

to breathe using my index finger to push against

the pharaonic membrane, the her who is insubstantial

and whole the all of me that I cannot have behind

the mirror my mother invented at birth, stone and

dense bottomless nothing, and I go sleeping down

the street insane to have a go at her who has consumed

me with obsession, dancing with her in the gutter

singing with her in the back alley strumming with

her in the land fill, how can we be halves of one another,

each is the irretrievable other unconditionally azure

circling the mystic tree where our wet clothes hang,

she is the other me the Eleusinian baffle in pony tail

and pink wag and doing a threnody to send the chill,

she must be me all the time when I am not there and 

yet I cannot have her until she is all of me, staring dumb

out of a glossy magazine cover some thirty years ago 

when like a tempest her hair captured me caught

me in its peroxide mesh and flung me to the seas

where to this day I seethe reaching boiling point and

beyond , the ineffable red at the origin of things

me her what who that art Thou!”

Friend, you have come to the labyrinth

Earth     Air    Fire     Water

whirlpools of deep and incendiary Eyes

                   VII

        TROBAR CLUS

                          “Quant l’aura doussa s’amarzis”

                                                              Cercamon

                          a)

                 “the trips’s not over yet!!!”

        hungry ghosts writing from down under

a message years in the taking       

           and the leaf falls from the bough

some days so bad you can never have it back

           the wind lays the grass down low

you wake from the siesta knowing it’s over   

            a dream all it ever was a painted

air passing over a nothing earth a 

            shake it out of the photo if you can

dismount it hide it behind the unread books

             a summer like that smoke inside the glass   

the sheer impalpability of it ashes in no time flat

             I ain’t coming home no more I ain’t

possessed by immaterial reflections of mind

              bent over the water the pliant willow

distance of hills dun colored dusky

              where myth keeps its kings of yore

remoteness of the door can never forgot that        

               purgatory of the unlit basement

or sunny afternoons when you undressed

               the shadow and its poignant shoe

and in the sky thought to see your uncle’s

               phantom fighter plane streak by

it was what was beside you lying there

              it was that brother lying there

husk of breathing just like you your half

              intuit everything that was to be

how is it we are dead already in that wan light

              what purpose do we serve wending

aimlessly through soldiers’ field a cold whisper

              to write a poem about some eyes

or draw night from the corner house the pines

              did no one ever come back from it

and in the alley way fling gravel stones

              against tin cans and echo the unknown

now that he is gone I am more than ever he

              I mirror his eyes his nose his lips

 I grow into the ravel of untended thoughts

              the mass of nerves the undigested brow          

or waiting on the curbstone for the dog

              to come running with the paper 

is that me around the bend in faded t-shirt

              the canvas of life yet to be consumed

a friday night symposium of beer and cigarettes

              songs that riddle words that never mean

a joe a bro’ a postcard from the nether world    

               who can answer the unbidden phone

who can order from the restaurant of the Greeks

               the lofty order that brought Achilles down

or is that my brother round the bend in faded

               what is skin that it cannot be peeled

or hair unkempt and the drunk on the stairs

               what is the small verse lhude sing cucu

which exactly is the window that spares night

               and of the myriads of stars blazing

which is the one where we linger our summer

               intent on a single blade of grass

a half-heard word an insect sounding its viol

               the bicycle leaning against the fence

irruption of red from the solar flares

               that blind us and we lose our selves

walking into the library of darkness to look for

               the volume of the alternate dimension

pictures we share in the multiple hour

                of nothing but sand and emptiness

alone the two of us in the children’s corner

                fantasizing a medieval warp

black lozenges of time and space pyramids!

                is this the access to grief

is this the shutter that precludes light

                or we are climbing Plummer Hill

searching for the cave of abandonment

                sure that the music we hear comes

from the brooks and dragonflies of loss

                 when the faerie realm was bright

but longing the ancient wound the bitter knowing

                 us embrace the unfolding

 map of lawns in the act of invention talking

                 to one another in the attic heat

pretense of flight and the angelic hosts

                 legend of becoming so much other

than the ones in the small and fading photos

                 to paint a sea upon the bedroom wall

a water so immense neither of us could perfectly drown

                 glyphs of rain and impending stone

cold premonitions falling asleep one last time

               “the trips’s not over yet!!!”

                      b)

grains of sand running down

         blades of grass now finite in number

the causeway to the heavens less steady than before

         the hollyhocks priceless in color now a fading

memory wind-bent beside the white washed garage

                   within tents of fantastically braided upholstery

upwards of tens of millions of cities clamorous and ruined

           and the 16,100 brides of Krishna married in a day

do we wend eastwards in caravanserais ten thousand leagues

            passing the furiously rent dreams of the surrealists

who walk cosmically sleeping in the enormous eiderdown

               which are the mansions of thunder and silence

how impossible a single childhood split in half

        sitting on freshly painted folding chairs the length of ink

and we speak to the artists who have gone divinely mad

         and we talk to them of the fables of number and order

the rank divisions of countless dead still moving among us

          of dictators in phalanxes of quill and lapis lazuli

spitting into the face of the Daimon who invented them

           and we converse with them about the infinite afternoon

in the atelier of Gog and Magog spinning whirligigs of Love

          absence of all but the last 13 billion years of time

and when someone calls our names do we really know which

               is the Name and which the shadow of the name

it is heat and the profusion of sky bursting with ether

           balloons of incorporeal stigma and hues and tones

like rivers racing backwards into the dust of things

             if they present us with books and poems and science

if they award us with the gifts we cannot understand

           and we shake their invisible hands and congratulate them

for having visited us in all this summer of intense yellow

            do they tell us to go back westwards to the limbs

to the subterfuge of grass and waving corn below painted awnings

                  or do they only tell us to just sit a while longer

for the cool of the evening with asterisks and grammars of light

                can we ever be ourselves again in that dappled hour

watching the lizard immobile in its eternity of two minutes

               listening intently for the song of the leaf turning brown

shall we once more amble lazily south of the great highway

             to the water with its sands of immensity and longing

casting shadows among the foliage of historical anomalies

               being uncertain who it is chattering in the shifting branches

and we speak to the artists who have gone divinely mad

             for it is to ourselves we address these innumerable topics

counting down the decline of the west with its european mind

              our fingers search for clues in the unmown grasses

lawns of sudden night spring up where we wander half and half

                the improbable hotels of the heavens light up in a blaze

both terrible and instantaneous and just as suddenly disappear

                somewhere in the galaxies of cuneiform and devanagari

that go gravitating centrifugally out of our heads into the unknown

             a blaze like never before this moment when both ourselves

and not ourselves we revel in the pointillistic blindness of the pharaohs

             dipping our feet into the passing stream with its minute civilizations

of midge and eel and dragonfly we become with them Unconscious

                do we somehow return home to our beds below the tattooed sea

does mother put a hand upon our fevered brows and sing a chant

              is it nirvana we have been to and back in a matter of instants

is it to create to make grow the person from within to blossom

                darkly in the insane refulgence we so deeply intuit

becoming one another in the swarming Transformative Vision  

                is it as we fall finally sick to remember just once

hollyhocks like fragile heads bent against a whitewashed garage

                                       c)

who will surrender first the wounded text

radiating a thunder of afternoons without appeal

hail and grass in ruins the immense omen of eternity

shadows working themselves across absent lawns 

and among them a messenger breathless who asks

            which of you two is Maheshvara?

are we not both the divine introspection of matter

the fleeting coruscations of stellar drift caught

in the play of a forgotten birthday party

to celebrate the spectacular and annual Routine

which is the reminiscence of the moment in Oblivion 

when submerged in the amniotic tide we signaled

to one another with the language of unborn fingers

a poetry of insane recognitions and speculations

mutilated ciphers and dendra of time unannounced

our birthright the moment we hit the light of day

winters away from the awakened mind of understanding

there is nothing beside the wattle hut

and even less beneath the shattered palm

whose fan is waving hard by the rock

what shoe is missing in the plundered mulch

what is ancient lorn fragmented apart

what is thickened by smoke and dusk 

inches from the place we first met

miles from the home we never had

a suchness of waves enormous and sweet

hunkered down over a diminishing pearl

can ever the blind so hardly see

dumb flashing thunderheads aloft 

where’s to go what’s to think and why

summer’s one day left and greening

somber shades didn’t they shift

memory’s crystalline remains ablaze

who was it among the two of us

waiting on the curb for the maps

unfolding in their own true sky

to first name the roadside accident

head back on the blissful grass

watching keen eyed for heaven’s epic

writ big by changing clouds to espy

drowsy drifting like fleeting insects

I have immemorial longing to rest beside

you on the sleepy banks of the Zumbro

and though the tip of my penis is burning 

to lie wherever your ashes are strewn

nothing else makes sense nor the songs

of the troubadours in that old blue book

nor the loom of language nor the house

mysteriously poised on the edge of time

where we thought the riddles of distance

or the simple efforts of the pharaohs to die

took place in an elaborate silence of honeycombs 

where like detectives we looked for clues 

to lie beside you of a stifling afternoon 

on our stomachs on the baked cement

beside the swimming pool’s drowning

voices the sun taking us in its red vortex

to never move again in this siesta

filled with the humming of ancient stars

and the cyclical road trips of galaxies

immuring us in the hour of dead heat

next to your corpse hands folded flowers

eyes rose water lapels sandalwood incense

taking your breath for mine deeply

the endlessness of a rhyme in trobar clus

                       VIII

          DARK MATTER

when will planet earth collide with its nemesis

when the Achaeans quit drawing water from the well

and the oracle ceases chewing the bitter laurel leaf

it isn’t because we found carbonized on a tractor

some distance from town a pair of incinerated angels

nor that on our return from the moon that night in may

singing countless rounds of the hymn to Demeter

that we suddenly forgot precisely who we were

descending through miles of sleep into a sandy cove

spears in hand immediately alert to the death at large

some immense shadow beast lying in wait on the rock

beside the roaring instance of darkening waves

nor seared by the hallucinations of Saint Adolf II

“Ynaventura! Great empress of Bengala of the 28 celestial lights!”

supreme and elegant grace of spiritism and et cetera

are we by any means transported from the doggerel of fear

but by laying sacrifices to the One or the Other goddess

who has benignly brought us home from the hospital

and swaddled us in the raiment of long gone heroes

then by some hap do we begin to experience the light

withdrawn from the mean quarters of high school

and ragged with the excitement of new found grammars

heights we then perceive talking rapidly to mirrors

to the glass objects placed in our hands in place of weapons 

what a depth opens up what profound ecstasies

do we ken the errors of the sun the multiple circuits

round and about the ninth heaven and the thirteen deity

descending by rope of fire and stone to other childhoods

to the mass of unformed myth waiting to be remembered

and I am not with but am YOU brother in the Descent

pyramids inverted by sheer excess of shadow exult!

stowaways of illusion and contour we watch art unfold

unyielding precipices of the most massive delusion

we mark the quotations of the Vishnu avatars unholy

in the reconsidered round dance of trembling adulteresses

all adoration and devotion in their dovecote of madness

earrings upside down necklaces around the ankles

great pearls of white sweat lapsed on to their fevered faces

they are Ours for the taking clasped to the recondite 

and hugely red mysteriously chanting in an archaic Aztec

foot-stomping with eagle feathers in their hands Loud 

how is it this is only happening in the ninth grade 

and we are just come back from the Mysteries of Delos

necking with girlfriends on Lee Ann Meyer’s porch

lit up by the universe of fireflies and lunar moths

octaves of a celestial music and as many decades later

the swooning night sky comes to take one of us away

purplish cloud formations like sculpted arhats

dust bowls swirling in fiery dislocations of thought

to be counted among those who read the Decline

and seriously considered Gauguin or Matisse to be

seers of the present condition that of fevered mitochondria

the push and pull of progress leaping steel high vaults

into the integers of systems too rapid to be assimilated

can the sky be ever so forlorn ever so sideways tilting

in its levered yellows and crenellated disparate arches

how did we come to know this abyss of monopolistic terror

byways obsessed by crows and the leaf-eating caterpillar

we amble outwards from the archipelago of heat

observing in their infinite transience the souls of metal

and are caught unawares by the Instant of eternity

the singular minute when the finger goes lost in grass

and evening comes rushing in with its vials of ether

to prepare the house with its multiple beds and hearths

the multifaceted association of hair and Beauty

is slipped between the dream’s paper-thin layers 

so that waking with new fingers and a digest of green

we can turn the monograph of air page by page

and read star script in large hues of hematite and rust

where it clearly says DIVINE CHAOS burning loam

terrestrial labyrinth the adolescence you have earned

blurring all words into the One in libraries of light

turned inwards your animus and anima take flight

terrific the threnody that lays Achilles to rest

and the tears of the Muses pour like flames into glass

everywhere the tale is the same and of a great disorder

confounding ritual and mask in a forest of lies

each takes the other by the waist and bends downwards

into the lair where Persephone mourns the seasons

perpetual blossoming of thorn-apple and dogwood

and when they bestow the Eglantine on us for the Poem

we have been constantly writing and destroying

we can but strut the stage blindly with a mantic fusion

that conjoins ether to the heraclitean flame of origins

alcohol in abundance and the root that blackens love

vessels of impermanence the human kind lists longing

for shores ever more remote beyond reach lost in mists

to hear the cries of the drowning in the bile-green deep

you ask how does each thing name its own confusion 

what is the dark matter of Transformation being born

signaling from mountain peaks to the Goddess who reviles

and everything starts and ends at the self same nexus

dizzying interpolations of syntax and putrefactions 

it all happens repeatedly in the ninth grade corridor

and we are just come back from monuments of Teotihuacan

necking with girlfriends on Lee Ann Meyer’s porch

trading ingots of turquoise and silver for the necklaces

to be worn around the ankles in the famous round dance

reconsidered at midnight in the State Hospital edge of town

mushrooms growing in reddish circles being devoured

by maenads who have deserted their husbands for true Love

this is the discourse of Pure Reason the Rights of Man

and the girl with pool dark eyes who speaks flamenco Spanish

in our dreams resonates with the absolute madness

of a musician of the Hermetic transducing collars of Egyptian

into the metamorphic rantings of the purely Dionsyian

because we have been there before and seen by day the Stars

being drunk obsessed infatuated in love dying to die 

you bit my nose because I could not wake from intoxication

and there was vomit all over the maps and crystals shattered

it was Beethoven walking on the moon with his brickbat

or Michelangelo thundering out sonnets of angry smoke

in the Vatican of the Underground stained grottos & catacombs

ghosted by the Flea whose immense tragedy mocks ink

it has ever been thus the drugstore with its suspended clock

four-faced beneath which brahmins and mendicants gather

unsure that night will ever come and Rosy dawn again

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

portents migrations of reddening constellations the Brain!

in a back room with indecision planning for the next One

worlds both miniscule and too immense to measure 

flares of Bengal nights and women of impossible nomenclature

wearing designs of heavens in the tangled masses of their hair

bright red the first one to step forth from the orchestra

froth on her bitten lips bracelets serpentine and luxurious

carpets wall hangings waters channeled through rooms

where gopis gather garlands to award the Groom

it is prehistoric the Noise and ceremony of countless gods

small swarming deities creating separate numbers for themselves

blinding profusion of color incense smoking the dusk

azure the perfect hue of what comes from behind hidden

dark matter reading braille the onslaught Robespierre

obscure passages deserted fanes in the middle of nowhere

for no one and transgressions in powder and silk 

languid hours of an afternoon becoming godlike 

crescent moons gilded like the horns of the Cow

being led through the parade ground for sacrifice

appearing in the evening of the grand ball far far away

exchange of spit kisses tooth to tooth guessing it is Shiva!

countless the eons of orgasm and dysfunction in the tannery

who is who in the Medina when the portico shuts

and the muezzin ascending the stairwell suddenly forgets

these are the hours that should not be counted the ennui

and tedium of lovemaking confused limbs and fever

licking the remains of sex in the Etruscan mirror

who said there’s no life like this one? abomination

how far the rills the banks the ridges and haughty cliffs

of planet earth how distantly beautiful to gaze a mist

the fogs and tremblings shouldn’t we never do this

again and again the lacquered insouciance dallying

in the next eternity as if it were the present one

shifts in space amassing cloud nebulae for the show

tonight as on no other and fondling the precious things

and revealing a cool smooth thigh and embracing

one after another the desert princesses their mouths

like opened pomegranates dripping the immortal

how so much like the end of time this eventuality

sitting in the basement a nameless girl on the knee

vomiting over page after page of her magazine 

glossy photos of a life spent in ambition’s boudoir

narcissus and nemesis both shadowy looming 

from doom to dust patiently awaiting the Moment

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

dark matter darker still the 

we have come around to the stopping point

going crazy writing this poem as promised

a vision from the memorabilia of Saint Adolf II

enumerating the endless series of cities built one

upon the other in a fuming clepsydra of sky

knowing full well the finish is not an accomplishment

but the tideswell of waves furiously intent on erasing

everything we have over thought or inscribed

undertow of nausea and expectation

blanched subterfuges in a backward script

unable to be deciphered swept away 

not knowing whether that is you or I on the other shore

waving something diminished in the small air

what I tried to tell you but missed the opportunity

lingering among the bark and futhark runes

attempting to read in the monoliths of ether

the past of the future in the ninth grade

always night oncoming with its silent chariot

its impressive horses of immaculate dust

its ceaseless redundancies of dark matter

swirling in terrific conflagrations

the dreams within the only dream

little by little the           (

a leaf

torn

                       a voice)

               

                          IX

               SCHEHERAZADE

spellbound the tale told twice as many times as ever

carpets unfolding magma celluloid editions in heaven

obfuscations penetrations machinations all a story

to weave and to be rewoven on memory’s dark loom

the unspeakable to fend off the night mute histories

galactic tapestries spinning enormous silences of time

without beginning or end summation of misspent alphabets

everywhere the tale is the same and of a great disorder

then why I am here why this deathly undressing of skin

the participles of void and renewal cancelled and Loud

relics of cuneiform memorization like sands scattered dry

over the what used to be and never was a city out of time

days sojourned in imagined fields palaces of corrupt stone

lime beds soldered planets linked to a fevered poet’s mind

such joinings syllable and syntax words running backwards

to retell the dreaming sleeper’s once upon a jot and tittle

forwards prelude the oncoming august storms and thread 

a noose through the privy space where thinking’s narrow 

and spread sheets cool of mint and fresco on the month

when everything is supposed to start again rains and grass

swarms of gods divided among themselves the chirring insect

horde bright sounding the multiple versions of the instamatic

how it was and when the clouds gathered and which was the rock

and which the stone standing on the which god was first to yell

springing forth from the imaginary brow the multiplied species 

us the human form and wandering in desert and labyrinth to find

nothing rings the distance to possess and when it was the woman

in me the suspended amulet the breasts to bare the chiding spite

brought by the hair to the citadel a promise sworn to keep and

princess alert to phone and form a voice a clarion in the dawn

opaque succession of chapters warring knife and buckler the shield

the hasp the sudden entry of navigable things athwart the seething stream

will you come home then will you not recognize the in me what was 

and yours is only a simple chill a bed beside the unknown lane a bier

here lay the weary thing and rise no more while I this tell you spray 

tolling brassy the invisible heights how you fell why you cried where

oceans among us yes and the great crescent moon my Eyes foretell and

asteroids of predication the syllabary of miscomprehension the herself

implicit codes silent vowels the Goddess redefined and enters all shining

white is nothing compared to her shadow the witness of all origins the tongue

to spell and tell and narrate yes the rising waters the broken bridges fords

places where none dare to tread the blind well beside the fallen consonants

and what’s more when He came into the quarter and raised his menacing quote

shivering in the dusk a stable horses restless the incontinent and mysterious

how each gave the other warning looks a note in crypto script mirrors

with no backside and wasn’t there a great crying and hair pulling and spit

and if you ask me I won’t scribble a menace nor pen feathered notes a musk

a music a treble chord everything in the air intangible a scrutiny to moon

fixing where possible the fluid thought a sensation that I am going to faint

placing metered feet in the margins a whistle a thing caught in the throat

to pronounce anything correctly I choke just recalling how angry it was

echo to know exactly what it was the first time all hot and the apron undone

my god what legs what a spindle of a story to rewind how the labored hour

spent its total minutes and the chasm and the abyss and the arroyo blanched

the first star of day the last star of night I wing them in prosaic portraits

careful to shift the meaning in each so as not to resemble too much the Other

then the orders of red like vermilion cinnamon carmine or hues of orange

limes are good to suck and divine the thrust was first meant to tongue mmm

so when he starts talking all notches and wedges the ideolect is so strange

powders and perfume can you see me looking like that all you know yellow

rumors of tribes coming down from the hills spears and boomerangs

shouting animals in human hides using forked sticks to make the earth mean

something else you should be aware the henna on the soles of my feet

the organ grinder whose monkey eats weeks he painted them he loved them

Lotus-Feet he called me and swimming in his eyes I learned to write the Bible

why they call me every so often to revive water-of-life the primary rose the

deluge of course the never ending so don’t get too close when I’m doing this

when I’m sewing my fingers to the grass and listen loud to the shut door

lateral supports keep me sleeping while the color blank my favorite floods

the lattice and vine and ichor begins to ooze from the pores of my divinity

another thing this is a stretch of the limit a drawer within a drawer untelling

yakkity yak sleepy boredom the countless anecdotes about sperm and time

until zzz his head falls ho ho heavy and lids of steel tighten sleep’s screws

around the tiny disorder of hieroglyphs he has for a brain the filthy sod

why wouldn’t you open another bottle why not the next cigarette a smoke

fools them every time winsome standing knee high to the corner in a mini

arabesques sweet mutilations of sound cooing in the reverend ears a shhh

tossing and turning to the radio he cannot hear to the magnificat the slide

I won’t go into it anymore not so deep as that the well springs the files

colors iridescent sublime not ashamed to admit I knew them all the brash

so I’m in this predicament this wrap around story hour nodding off the 

brown widow’s weeds the vulgate the acrimony and ammonia the sandy

parched terrain the mirages the oil digs sheiks in pantomime sheets

shrieking silently you know the balloons of speech that just evaporate

and loves to hear over and over the one about Agamemnon how he got it

turkish baths and the gold crown rolling into pools of  pure absinthe

or about Helen and the sphinx near the cataracts of the Nile and the dream

basilisks spitting fire in the burning strand she was no one’s anymore

the enigma the variations of the mystery the oracle in the bottle the flies

everything spinning in my head festering scabs on one’s knees begging for

I’m his little alpha biddle his remixed concrete his store-front wife

I’m the wharf he leaps from the wig in his ear the constant harp of all

when I think of it and that’s always and the renaissance Eye-talians

come up to my memoirs all patent leather and stiletto and hair curly cue

then emboldened my tale to tell swells wide a big sweeping operatic

and the air I fling aside is the passacaglia and chaconne of pure insanity

all panting in my lap and sleep walking his embroidered imaginings

me the quim and pestle of his gawking day mares all a sweat and leather

no wonder it comes back for more the god in the amber glass commands

eventide to roll back its fuss and marchers in the snow pack the windows

what breath that is and halos of sunset lordly passages in the fairy woods

messages scrawled on bark kisses and hugs from Zeus the greek paramour

how many times I do it all and rhyme schemes and puppetry engines knock

about baby’s dead in the pudding the queen’s in a fitful ire dark is Here

so it rolls night after rocking night reading heightened literary ornaments

from the lies of Herodotus to the Prema-Sagara under the stellar awning 

shape of ink sable bordered paragraphs utterances from the vedas huge

compound word formations jungle clusters of inimitable clicks and tweets

who’s up there in my tree whose monkey is climbing up my stairs whose

himalayan ex machina jibbering hobson jobson is that discourse anyway 

put the ‘postrophe in the parenthesis roll your R’s jack the knife 

I’m all spine for you Sweetums I’m a shiver in the dusk a panting slur

It’s all I can do to stop spitting wrapping the snake around my thing

going whumpa whumpa whenever Betelgeuse falls into sight what a mar 

suchness of other times I recount breathing in sweetly oleander jasmine

petals fragrant exhumed pinkly shameless unaging whoever I seem to be

girlfriend busty hoyden wench of shahs lusting rutting prinking spanking

all tolled the night’s never over reel tides circle round again the wash and flow

ginger plant taj mahal cool for the templed brow mirrored worlds a whirl

gigging jazz fueled into latest hours can I even the score betting journalese

hagiographies lender lease laws of the saints in question the fundament 

the loam and truss of planet earth the burning squills the parched and hell

shall I never this night end this hour rolling back the stone to find the pit

and shouting’s all around the chamber sword and taint flux sweating words

chanting chanting the invented sigh give the once over to raja what’s his name

the blue finned devil champing at the bit all bone and saw buzzing through 

chastened never and folds the map up and silver lake’s small oval size

pour molten gold down’s throat and quick write the prescription 

all’s a dying in the bosom my hasp has no quick the quivering aimlessness

these plots only thicken and search lights my eyes scour the burdened lore

how will it end this tale of Maya’s come on Baby let the good time’s roll

is it all about me little alpha bit switching the Muse’s twitch the demon

hindsight gives me no qualms I’d nivver again do it like forefront first

giving him the chub of my fist and driving the quill deep into the trauma

penning one mendacity after another drilling it up all frothy and bejeweled

words you know that come from nowhere universes of inky night the Stars!

rehearsing the devil’s funeral endgame of chess hunters mocking Old Tyger

drinking of the witcup and rounding rills on the moon’s argent instrument

how they take it and drub it to death wanting all the same a fame old tyme

virtue’s disregard disrobing pleat by pleat the simple frock I seem to wear

were it not for the skin of the song I’ve outdone Frozen in the back seat

motor still running below zero’s to know what I drink talking outta my head

and there’s so much more I wanna tell you so much more I wanna say

but look Dawn’s put on her rub and it’s time for me to smoke my helium

yes and it’s sad we’re all in this yarn driveling spools around the teaser

and me jawing and jamming away scat singing who’s listening to this

nonsense voodoo argot pidgin talk anyway how many were the victims

and why were they nameless the difference between a just and unjust act

resonates like glass on the distant hill a seesaw light hemming its way 

or I am lost spook talking this nightly shanty where hovel bare I lay

waiting for the exegesis this has been a royal rant I’ve had my toss

the mighty had their flay the small in their ecumene of dust and lice

a sort for want of crime I’d love to spoor a little more but echo’s fade

my joe’s gone ashes my memory’s bitter silt this woe for all is done

                                   FIAT LUX!

                                 X

                                     

                           BHAKTI

I will now sing of those 

      whose minds are turned to wanton bees

of kings tossed like chameleons into blind wells

       of those for whom chastity is nothing

who fling themselves unclad into Desire’s embrace

       of girlfriends who have abandoned their senses

running amok in groves of pestilence and ire

        to reach through altered worlds the Lotus Feet

sing I now the mad frenzied dance of those

        who can no longer comb their tousled hair

letting slip gown and bodice to their feet

        drum pounding cymbal slashing dark ether

sweat beaded faces lost all control eyes rolled back

         of brahmans quarreling over cattle

lost to the dharma to be reborn hundredfold

         reddened by ego-fires chattering nonsense

until drowned repeatedly in the Ocean of Being

         they resurface remembering the only One 

 smoking Bang like never before turning green

          of the ones who become adulteresses for a touch

the nipple in the palm a smoldering turned and spun

          nostrils fuming for the divine spirit invisible

the Unformed god the tool chiseler the deviant mocker

          sing then of the ones sculpted from air full blown

wearing brass pendants the weight of mountains

          in the earlobes and bangles up and down the arms

leaping shamelessly in robes of yellow dust 

          or hiding in mango groves ripe as the fruit itself

breasts hanging as if from branches to be plucked

          in love with an idol a statue a print a painting

discovered in a book coloring the courtyard hues of red

          iridescent spirals whorls of cinnamon and pepper

incense so thick the soul drowns wavering across

          ready to plunge into the seething roils of 

and sing I too the betrayed the paramours in white

          inscribing things memorized in dreams

on curling palm-leaf loud humming deaf as ants

          parading insanely up and down bamboo stalks

looking for the honey pot the dipper the ladle

          mouths wide open moist wet dripping with 

juice of the forbidden fruit the sticky denseness

          kissing being kissed unarmed barefaced

sluts shaking their hips in the noontime blaze

          when nothing can be seen and nothing

exists to see mirage in shimmering sheets of light

          a whirl of voices of snatches of song like skin

tattered ripped from the bone dangling in memory

          of those transduced from the original tongue

written and rewritten in the dialects of hill and swamp

          verdant lush passages of the immarginable

descriptions transferred from tobacco plant to ivy

          coinciding with the theosophist’s amalgam

mercury and gold fluted columns of night-air

         something that has never been tranced and

I sing now of those whose passion is betrayal

         fundamentally skewed in favor of the dead

who live intransigent as seers in the second sleep

         who rising from beds of live coals Breathe

and the ones who are sideways come first and

         the upside down and the backwards and the

ululating in pitch high voices the love Supreme

        carving inches of sperm in the sand writhing

spinning darkening even as dawn threatens its ray

         motioning to one another quietly assaulting

the ones who are deaf to reason who demand

         always to be in the front of the abracadabra

the unreal omegas the who and the who are not

          being as one in plasma and cosmetics

adorned superabundant in jewelry dazzling

          because they are incoherent stumbling

vomiting on the divan where the god-form lay

         sing I then who on the roof display their meat

to the sun and pray in a pidgin Sanskrit in whiteness

          to the blank and ovoid to those who open

wantonly their legs to the cloud-gods whose rain

          descends in a torrent of black sulfur  

to impregnate the witless virgins who piss 

          ecstatically on the temple floor like dogs

and are cursed and reviled and are sent shunned

         out the back door for having had commerce

with the Unseen and who employ osiers on their backs

        parading pig-faced in the alley ways 

summoning from their dormers the Citizens

         How much is this madness a pure joy!

torn a hank of hair in the hand the finger excised

       in the soft grass the lips bruised overmuch

no one knows the self the other is lost in time

        much of what I sing is the longing gone

the tremendous aching to recall exactly what

        but a dew drop a pebble shining alone

on the path which was once the Way

       where errant ghosts thin as reeds stray

wearing raiment the color of sand oblivious

        of the pyramid that entombed them once

always searching even after 84,000 deaths

        the suchness of the thrill the opaque 

the Dance in the stifling ballroom summer hour

        hands aloft heads bobbing senselessly

memory a thing of the past nothing solid but

        the intangible glove that fits over the soul

and the music drum shell bamboo reed tin can

        clappers tomtom the variegated turmoil

cacophonous loud super rhythms outside the body

       voudoun mojo mohenjo daro dollar shill

and the ones who are silver coruscating in the sky

       who are shooting stars feet lifted off earth

moving and not moving to the silent commands

       that impel us out of the nerve gut into 

the immense boundlessness of frozen space 

haunted by the name the soft lesions shading off

into syllables barely pronounced the vedic chant

hair locks strewn over pearl beaded brows a sweat

sheets body indivisible from body the levers that

lift to heaven and the great suspended lakes eerie

moonlit surfaces shaking the wimpled wave sheen

illumined inwards the cast whispering divine shift

reds across milky shaking breasts wet and heavy

darkness the name soft skins haunted night scene

shades plied through tresses unkempt barely off

strewn matted against cheeks the fevered blush

like syllables without echo the stressed vowel a

sweet indivisible from body other than lifted by

levers into a heaven of suspended lakes a sheen

reflecting lunar faces wimpled quivering waters

of shaft shivering strewn pearls illumined wave

shifts reddening indivisibly between body’s weight

shading shifting shapes of the name brows wet

and fruit as heavy idioms hill and swamp eerie

voices vedic chant lifted off earth inches from

chains of indivisible nature watering swift a

beds arisen from abandoning husbands spittle

connected tongue to red fevered hush the cheek

scattered locks matted night sweat the syllables

did I pronounce the berlitz manual lunar stress

echo vowels designed to rotate reflecting moon

sounds sandy mounts shoreline decibels later the

haunting name occluded clusters retroflex clicks

consonants black in nature drop beside the well

kings turned to chameleons pitched blindly inner

dancing illuminations ghostly against the wall

diachronic voices jungle dialect voudoun swell

breasts like darkening fruit wet eerie touching

milky space broadening dream woof the loam 

warm earth spices incense dense dusky smokes

echo bluish spell cheeks blushed the hush a wave

illumined rotting underfoot the mulch of time

dancing inches from planet earth hands aloft 

arms stiffened in trance the indivisible body of

hill and swamp a drop beside the blind well kings

turned to chameleons tossed into syllables pitched

sounds shady clusters mango groves soft as breasts

heaving fevered in the flush manual rotating bliss

dense dusky incense sandalwood cinnamon peppers

bright touching excised fingers forbidden the name

a husk softening shadows a lesion a skin a voice

bleeding in the leaf torn and chewed the baleful

in a trance I’m in a 

the mystical union with the Other when I was in love

with obsessed with totally out of my mind for echo vowels

of her the goddess transmuted was I sick and who in

her celluloid transductions skin softened beyond blond 

alliteration it was devotion beyond the senses to what

and seek in books how the why is which suchness of 

blindly tossed into the well like a king-transformed

chameleon dark hooded night was upon me and sound 

by sound uttered the name lisping slightly bruised lips

imagined until one was the Other me was no more

a sylph apparition half clad shimmering before the lens

I could be her! I could be her! drowned in the sea of Being

raveled in silk slips torn lingerie nylon stockings spit

going under with bad lipstick and processed hair all

peroxide and dumb too smoking helium cheroots prinked

out dazzled and daffy on a non-existent sidewalk loony

sweating it out with liters of vile red wine while Bong!

the television reproduces a noon in hell teen angel 

gang bang in triplicate screen goes dubba dubba 

and there is she Mystical you said it Union herself

the other me of myself dashed in browns and ground

to a cinnabar pulp talking all outta my Brazilian head

each is every for the other you all know that  

it’s this rotating device in the middle

you can’t separate it from the head wind

in the book version twins are born to the soul mother

and unable to cope she sets them circling 

around the sun whirring faster and faster

and down below these mechanical beings

these entities born and reborn without a why

to their name dumbfounded all a staring into the ether

azure blue horizon of circling visions look!

night and day body and soul all in One

transmogrified sent chittering into the trees

pretend to live while really dying 

inventing one after another small gods to interpret

it’s love quite simply that sets them going

making big houses burning incense

drawing pictures using their imagination

it’s mother in the end large soft Beautiful

spawning in mysterious waters

going away and coming back every summer

a doll in each hand a way of talking

you just wanna die for Her

                     XI

              ΝΕKUIA

                        “ai! com s’en van tuit mei amic”

                                               Cercamon

   

                    alpha

drinking malt liquor out of brown paper bags

we sat there in the june sun not knowing

what to say to one another conscious only

of the dark dimension that had spread over

like an inexplicable legend the park rotting 

green fetid asphalt garbage spilled city summer

throw wine sops to the three headed dog

or maybe the words were there we just hadn’t

found them being philosophically silent 

ragged edges of time the stifling air sirens

that create a distance between now and forever

or it is somewhere else hills sick with winter

perhaps waiting for the meadowlark’s song

still the two of us not sure of the context

had there been a quarrel a difference of

never mind the peaceful before us spread

its map across imagined arcadian fields

the bounty of thoughts the Ionian spring

utter delusion of being human and

still drinking booze out of brown paper bags 

would ever return this moment’s interstices

memorial greens budding behind the pages

whiter than longing the next minute of time

throw wine sops to the three headed dog

the two of us separated by the unfathomable

yet the whatness the sheer over the beyond

couldn’t get over the mystery of the illness

the sudden randomness of convulsions spit

visiting in the steep unconscious the gods

who illumine and just as baffling take away

the world turning around on its skewer

a double amputee named Hera remembering

her brazen white arms her supple shoulders

standing at stair top weapon in hand dreams

it is still somewhere else and we’re at a wake

or after the funeral a brilliant sun in our dark

suits for mourning the brown paper bag passing

between us in a somber sort of mythology trees

talking at us leaning against a wind hazy blown

faces emerge to recognize rising from earth shafts

in fist fully risen warriors sleeping their tumble

the bad liquor in our mouths we laugh choking

before the illumination hits the big spark red

throw wine sops to the three headed dog

explosive arguing about what came first songs

or the small birds in their chaucerian latin or

imagining the provençal landscape of Vincent Van Gogh

thick yellow slashes of afternoon so blinding

like a deity converted to pure light buzzing almost

electricity in the rampant bushes whose funeral

the name is now just a label in cold alabaster

like the time windows became a mysterious cloud

and the figures behind them sticking tongues out

immense and horrible why we didn’t suspect

because the full term of the intoxication hiss

couldn’t you tell by the way my head fell to

and you kept on talking about Gide and Camus 

and why years later on some sordid park bench

silently understanding ourselves without a vowel

gilded excrescent moments ripped out of time

dehiscent envelopes of grass or hair to recall

a sunday fishing with gramps on a lakeside

in Ojibway country placid fusion of air and indigo

caught two or three sunfish watching them flop

gasping for life then stone dead wet glistening

throw wine sops to the three headed dog

isn’t the illness like that which descended so rapidly

riding fast in the car the horn honking all the

way to Brooklyn Jewish Hospital the fever

unabated millions of nights crystallized in 

a single moment when consciousness flees

forever altered you thought it was like death

and it should be so wet glistening on the back 

seat of the car honking the horn all the way 

from the lake back to the kitchen where

granny would pan fry them for supper before

listening to radio programs like Fred Allen

the evening brown redolent of old tobacco

in his leather rocker gramps dozing in german

or the dandelions he made us pick in the heat

of the most interminable noon ever forcing

bunches of plucked yellow heads in brown

paper bags like the ones we were drinking

from in that ragged unkempt park in 1978

and putting his foot down to crush them

to make way for even more dead yellow heads

the way we felt too after the funeral wilting

the warm liquor in our empty stomachs to

burn even more intensely the illumination

we wanted to feel looking at a horizon empty

of everything but the resilient metal water tower

as if it would collapse in a second before us

like a dream the terraced green slope embarked

to a street so distant it could no more be real

the metropolis of asphalt and rubber spinning

which was your city which was mine in the atlas

throw wine sops to the three headed dog

the funeral the way the face looked waxen for

eternity on its silken cushion don’t look twice

lying there wet and glistening on the back seat

all the way to Brooklyn Jewish the traffic as if

underwater in slow motion hand on the horn

and full grown the warriors in Grecian armor

with spears in their fists tossed clods at one

another starting a quarrel internecine strife

forming leagues of tiny city states and islands

when a man could walk a kingdom in a day

the sun burning down its clepsydra half gone

how does one return from the house of the dead

                           

          “Glorios Dieus, a vos me clam,

                                   car mi toletz aqels qu’ieu am”

                                             

                              beta

and went down one by one into the unlit chamber

a basement reeking of human urine and winter coal

shades among shades we were become not knowing

nor touching not feeling what it was knocking against

bodies without shape as if lifted from trodden earth

someone crying behind the spent furnace thin reedy

whining rust on the tongue dried spit the unshaved jaw

who could know teeth gnashing dreaming gnarled

branches leaves torn for the nature of their voices

appeal to the sibyl a sudden wind stale and dusty 

words blown into full size the oracle of faded ink

mingling souls stunned and dazed looking for shapes

which once belonged to them in ruined tenements

of skin and cancer eaten bone residue of 

here stood who once shone prideful mighty Ajax

a stirring of lice in the ragged mattress devastated
the seer’s eloquence trails off into a wet blur

of indistinct consonants a mirage of phonetic decay

weather stripped vehicles junked and toppled 

into the rising mud and hands the remnants of

knuckle thumbs twisted back reach out to us

do we know anyone any more is there a common bond

what were once men our comrades brothers allies

it isn’t very far from here is it the exit I mean 

the depth charges that implode the soul’s empyrean

fugue of a million petty galaxies behind the eyelid

the place behind the pile of rags a little warmth

scratching in the ear an echo some splinter of sound

was it a song way out in the sandy reaches of nowhere

could hear the single string plucked and some words

found them on the floating island south of Delos

now just masses of incoherence heard on an old radio

listen to the night where it once was star streaked

comes back to us in snatches of light so archaic

it cannot mean a meandering here shuffling in dirt

memory is a flower whitened behind glass 

alone pale evanescent not the glorious morning

when was that who were the ones walking with us

what highway was it northbound and the carriers 

the ants in hordes blindly scurrying to find their god

beside a dried lake bed where as children the heroes

tossed dice in a game that lacks orientation houses

moved as if by chance from one tropic to another

floating gardens smoking volcanoes in the bluish far

one was named Pepito the others who were they 

walking with us of a morning yellow with light

cicadas on either side of the road in dense fields

chirring endlessly before the call to arms to growth

full blown men with shadows hurrying into distance

here now knocking weightless forms like rice bags

sodden dirty the unbidden dark our wanderings 

to no end in black maze five fathoms below

what do names matter applied to these inert heaps

this was one once Achilles beloved of Apollo!

and of Helen the moon-faced what remains

a forked smear in shifting rubble inky miasma

what can ever take us back to the hull to the tall masts

to the waves that bear light from the depths

roseate apparitions in constantly changing liquid

for there is nothing firm nothing that brings back

memory of ivy and fiercely coruscating Mind

                      gamma

laying on the traced ground these 

            steaming plates the city of Dis

                    with trembling and unutterably 

where a few pebbles                strewn

     tracks of ox-carts leveled by rain

did you remember to bring 

                not sure where the entrance is

the place with a sprig of parsley

how fresh it was here the april

               barley cakes small and white

this was the fallen blanket

         this was the waxing and the waning

    at the gate stoned the doormen stare

guessing who can and who can no longer be

      among the numbered missing a blank

storms raging within the inch

   summer when both of us lying there

a brown paper bag passing back and 

   talking about Camus and Gide

delusion of being human 

           the large hand coming from the cloud

and the straps around the head

       and the thunder grievous loud

whose funeral it was and the music    stray

          gravel underfoot the immense

a voice that hardly      from somewhere deep

mind like a tomb       ants flowing east and west

    the time angel hit the ground 100 mph

nowhere left to go   and strewn brains

seeds lying there blackened    a 

    heat in its metal cylinders circling

the star that governs all     

from top to bottom at least 

          one thousand million light years

and still waiting    on the hillside one early

listening to the troubadour song

          Guillaume IX of Poitiers    riding

unsaddled his piebald horse and 

      the two girls what were their names

fatally attractive one blond the other

       like a raven her jet hair glistening

in a trance lips protruding    down

below sound of traffic buzz and hum

           near the famous greek restaurant 

whose back room smoke filled

        and the murmurings and ravings

of fully grown warriors bent over

         green baize pool tables 

is the entrance to Hades        

    one has to put however unsure

     a hand on the brass knob turn twice

counter clockwise and slowly descend

hear the muffled moan     like beasts

blinded cattle on a gang plank 

      in their midst Ulysses his ear holes

pierced by the shrill            sea waves

turned to glass      deathly calm

     noon when the ladies disrobe

becoming as liquid silk

              their firm buttocks rippling

bellies slightly convex      snouts

         like pigs            blazing nostrils

bluish haze in their eyes 

      corn flowers dogwood jasmine

         never see again    

  sky like pumice a yearning 

a cigarette endlessly flaring 

           here place small sesame buns

and recall achingly the voice

    before it disappeared into a hole

beside the cut grass pour a libation

             dark red the fuming wine

sacred to Bacchus who never

         did us good

                 delta

come to terms with the teenage bodhisattva

whose alcoholic death 

was only an echo of the earlier illness

the bout with consciousness the warnings

from far off sri lanka about attachment

everything is an imitation

quotations from an ineffable past

maelstroms of consciousness swirling

small white buds like planets astray

can mean nothing under the bridge

below by the rushing underground water

where the grim boatman waits

his will be sweet wafers russian cakes

semolina and honey sprinkled

 throw wine sops to the three headed dog

                      XII

           KAΣΣANΔΡA

 standing on the high school steps raving

Apollo spat in her mouth and cursed her he did

isn’t red the angry color and which team will win

arms raised voice grown hoarse barking signals

aren’t the stars to come out by four this afternoon

isn’t the ball to be passed secretly to the Russians

the violin in her head with its endless chaconne

insists on the destruction of cosmic order

divinations at the soda fountain about sex with whom

she allies herself with the shadows that climb walls

of their own accord painting yellow the heights

listens intently to the radio in her brain

messages messages from the various chthonic deities

mud splattered bleary eyed filthy from ruination

who code her mutilated and passionate embraces

no one listens 

iterations of the divine spark in lunar berlitz

from the chasms of her lips fables of the bees

detonations of silent clouds in the gymnasium

where the fellows tease her madly tearing her clothes

“come on, Cassie, give us a kiss” permutations

of the most archaic verb known to man Fuck

shouldn’t she get it right just once? 

stands there on the steps at rush hour in mantic dash

of syllables and sputtering the big rant about the Horse

the noon hour climax the hashed vortex behind the shed

giving head to Poseidon of the billowing waves

“you’re basura, Cassie” a wetback whispers biting her ear

she’s a hex she’s a witch she’s the devil in disguise

 when asked “is there life after high school?”

the harlequin in her stolen sequins and embroidery pouted

suspecting full well the dark price of prescience

mind-body formula breaks down in her utterances

Apollo’s spit turns to ashes on her voluble tongue

sees amazing conflagrations shipwrecks mosquito wars

aggravated vision of symbiotic treachery

eyeballs of the gods perforated by sulfuric myths

jilted at the prom a bouquet of bleeding rosebuds

broken promises string of scatological insults

because she wouldn’t go down for Apollo

what’s a girl to do but go nuts stark raving nuts

it’s all in greek the topsy turvy tale of a woe

gone wrong and her dizzy from the noon time reefer

wearing a white top knot in her hair all oracle

buzzing in the insectary of her madness spouts

grief after grief in a tragedy of baths and knives

foreboding illicit births the twins she would never see

yet intransigent on the concrete steps stands there shaking

with the godhead somewhere inside her shouting

“don’t go there tonight! it’s all gonna burn!”

 no one listens

wearing bobby socks and penny loafers a plaid skirt

with a big brass safety pin and a cashmere sweater

bobbing her head up and down to a secret rhythm

the tom-tom drum the triangle and the maze

she knows who the ghouls are in their insect trysts

Troilus and Criseida Palamon Arcite and Emilye

it’s back and forth up and down the stairs

crisp autumn wind in her hair a narcotic fix in her gaze

who wants to date her who wants to get anywhere near

frothing at the mouth marring the big red lipstick

starts talking latin from out of nowhere

“declarat viridique advelat tempora lauro”

chewing the bitter bay leaf absolutely delphic

nostrils flaring a bluish vapor she exhales strongly

stomps her foot breaks out in beads of pearly sweat

talks the talk of death in strict dactylic hexameter

“effusaeque genis lacrimae et vox excidit ore”

such is the strength of her voice the peremptory insanity

that none dare approach not even her brother Paris

contempt abject hysteric syllogisms exhorted a mile a minute

who will drive her car tonight who will light the bonfire

will the home town team really lose as she hallucinates

will the captain be dragged around the stadium a hundred times

headless and bewildered at the sudden visit to Hades

will the goons from the enemy squad rush taking her captive 

it’s just a couple of blocks walk to the public library

where in swoon over a volume called The Loom of Language

she convulses in a fit of sexual delirium 

being transported in a haze to a paleolithic Anatolia 

Apollo god of light and music spat in her mouth

and cursed her stripping her mind of its white raiment

she can be anywhere she can be in the future of eternity

she can be strolling down second street humming madly

the song from Moulin Rouge “where is your heart?”

she can be a love slave Agamemnon’s own little sweetums

or she can be dreadful matted locks red-eyed fuming

at the top of the stairs adolescent breasts exposed grimy

anklets of filth byzantine pendants five stone each in her ears

the marble lions at the gate reduced to rubble by her look

darting venom and hatred like a desert basilisk

liquid shadow of her twin Helenus prophesying galactic collapse

or she can be girlfriend fork-tongued duplicitous cute

dimple cheeked wavering between athletes for the dance

non-committal unreasonable tease with her bouffant hair

and adult stiletto heels parading in her underwear

before the photograph of her favorite warrior Diomedes

ceaselessly casting aspersions on the future of the war

knowing how darkness will take her by the waist doubling her

in a powder of storms where raped and defiled she will exult

riding a swift Achaean skiff back to Mycenae 

to the sleeping fortress with its maze of corridors and stairwells

night in every corner and the silent roaring of the dream

in which Klytemnestra wearing elevator shoes and a french wig

waits for time’s intricate hair trigger to go off

I am the size of ink a spelling traced across incendiary

skies lost this rant obfuscations in the key of delta minor

sketching improbable omegas the end of time’s round dance

pulsing quasar in the left hemisphere where disorganization

takes place the dismounting of the moon crater by crater

whiteness of the abject the misplaced the unwanted I am

circling stairs that go nowhere ascending into the mind’s rump

a travesty of woman obliged to spend my skin on the empty

cosmetics of sand the defiles and wastelands my domain

at last the bottomless well smoke incense and black fumes

sulfuric language that pours out me unwilling as I descend

the precarious temporal ladder into the tannery to color 

what I see the various sessions of red that are distilled 

from the hides of mythical beasts and implore the gods

the five thousand eight hundred of them who torment me

to give me sense to take from my madly prattling tongue

the bristling vocabulary of the etruscan nightmare script

left steaming on the mirrors of Hades and I am this raving

darkened vowels spitting against the wrists of my captors

inverted curses of the god of light and music hallucinations

this intuition of heights and verticality of mental excesses

bordering on the purely insane putting nothing up for sale

other than my own mind stripped of its white raiment

saliva and bile and sour milk and sperm lathered face

that goes on and off like a traffic signal bright red crimson

parting the seas that erupt from the innermost psyche

and green and slowly yellow and dying beside the potter

whose poetry revolves endlessly on his humble wheel

is I am the ink a size more than I can measure a poem

too could be the insane most part of the psyche I am a rant

omegas tumbled out of the cave and set me up on the top

why does no one listen to ink the ineffable the darkness 

where the stairs can go no further up and beyond to circling

seven spheres each the less than the other in suchness of 

perfection I am the gloss and the logos desperately abuzz

for the introspection of silence the muse unbeckoned me a

section of water the outer remove of ice the fiction of smoke

odorless skin a song too bitter to recall a light yes a light

that too falling apart on the stairs with me only me 

a small portion of space defined by the contours of sand

a thought that I am predicting to be a season of fire and

slowly brought around to beds of consciousness adrift a 

folly the slave of love to some purulent dirty old king his ink

his defiled little smut of a thing when I was a princess once

a wavering robed one with a staff and spoke to snakes 

in the dark and learned from them secrets of ink and spelling

to rave against the oncoming and to see and seeing know

it is come to smallness a notch in the air a something that

cannot be defined other than by the running noise it makes

sleeping easier now beside the fallen lions whose stone talking

like a drunk in the oven considers the variations of ink the spill

so many words of the many none that make sense

the part where the poem opens up and 

the dusty path zigzagging from the ruins of Troy

when I remember her in her fluted robes wind caught

hair tangled by the air’s mutinous voices

the poem endangered by its own direction

barefoot on the steep stone steps below heaven

how could it be she that I would fall in love with

moving writing tools and ink wells and parchment

when the poem stops to make a light shine

she did not look my way never not once 

enmeshed in her incantations and ravings

as if conducting a chorus of invisible maenads

me a few steps below looking up in adoration

spit fire glosses of the forbidden and reviled

ten cities built one upon the other absolute rubble now

and I am dreaming about her feet her hips shaking

how old can she be for me the unbidden poet

she can be twelve or fifteen but not eighteen!

mantic oracular crimson mouth moving wordlessly

though worlds of ink that obliterate all poetry

the edifices in her eyes green jasper emerald hell towers

threatening to collapse at any minute to dust

to years of moiling roiling dust universes

or it is the eye-blackening that stains her cheeks

and I am on a grey quadruped going uphill

the afternoon has lost its gongs all is fade and dun

tinsel hangs in the air a muezzin falls asleep

in the middle of the Call so much heat is in the ether

muffled by blankets of time everything becomes indistinct

yet she is there clear outline of skeleton and moss

on the rant against war and helium dirigibles

she has been to Gallipoli and is destroyed by what she saw

the poem weaves in and out of her skirts

the poem diaphanous against her emblazoned skin

tattoos irreverent love lyrics episodes of dying

from the separation of body and soul

gas structures begin to ricochet against Envy

no one listens to her not even I

making the poem circle her bereft shadow

eating the traces of her footprints in the dusky lime

becoming something other than what it intended

the poem the poem the poem

for           KAΣΣANΔΡA

                   XIII

         SORTES VIRGILIANAE

                       (i)

Talia flammato secum dea corde volutans

the goddess turning the cord flaming in her tales

herself spinning the fates under earth the wiles

her heart sectioned willing as darker skies near

will it be capsized the bark adrift roaring among

waves and shoals espy through divine mists a 

score to keep in the now empty Olympian halls

where masks hanging on mossy walls leer envy

to make of her robe its pleated agonies turning

her cords tightens the lyre her buskins the crown

tinsel and sage and aromas of meat offerings rise

from some peninsula down below where wearied

her devotees sweat and mud streaked on knees

approaching night in vain appeal suppliant dense

her dusky form to make herself present a bared calf

her firm blanched arms the tunic off the shoulder

turning her volatile weapon first at the flaming

then plucks the cord volumes of sound a tension

dispels and lets fly the shaft from its bed into

high the almost burning air where the first stars

signal the poem’s imminence the underfoot twigs

snapping the proximity perhaps of the enemy 

                        (ii)

“Heu fuge, nate dea, teque his” ait “eripe flammis”

hey, born of goddess, yourself and these too take

the rest of your stuff from the flames it’s too hot

this morning for this business and be off running

through yon woods a flare can’t you see the holy 

is on fire the voice as it told you will no longer hear

though you have ears too and scrap the words you 

wanted to use as a hostage to the deity of ineffability

rip from the embers what you can of your soul useless

though it be on the journey to the underground house

and Herculaneum is already burnt so you can’t go

that way and subterfuges abound the fugue the torn

the snatches from the ashes whose ghostly faces

you conjure fearing as always to tear the flesh 

in the wrong place and offer up this dead animal

that was once someone’s soul a revisited entity

from some Pythagorean past the parting is cruel

the embers still too hot your fingers scorched again

raving as you do with a filament of music so thin

the air can scarcely bear it and clouds ruddy as kine

threatening noon with a tempest growing fierce

purple as thunder the night-born and then lost

                        (iii)

et lunam in nimbo nox intempesta tenebat

and moon in limbo held by tempestuous night

what was and was not visible in these dank woods

where confused you revolve in a lunar maze unsure

what it was you said or did losing the divine nimbus

the cloud fret of torrents that swept you from the main

and your comrades your shipmates forever in the drink

drowned caught in Poseidon’s azure nets as the oracle

predicted had you not been otherwise and proud stiffly

rejected the news that a goddess was from the moon

descended in the whereabouts of dewy Fiesole of a dawn

you attached little significance to this homecoming and

mourned your late friends their shipwrecked fate 

and those far off days clear and bright in sunny Umbria

where shepherd among shepherds in innocence you kept

to the rocks and familiar river banks tuning your pipe

beneath the oak shadow making a poem of the fair

Amaryllis whom you have never yet seen but whose

dusky presence accompanies you now in this 

deep and intricate wood from which there is no route

unless the goddess repenting shows you her white sign

in the darkening underbrush and you feel keenly desire

                        (iv)

Quis tibi tum, Dido, cernenti talia sensus

whilom, Dido, discerning you tally your senses

the makeshift love that tore you from the weeds

and now you foment the flames that will make you

senseless to the world a ball of mist wandering afar

taking with it what you most treasured of the heart

in death all things are equidistant, Dido, whisk

from what you feel thoughts of being again and

with whom you surrendered your senses now that

dark and its subhuman total grips you from feet up

and seizes the spine and works its verses into 

your still yearning brain, Dido, do not your eyes

discern the revoked trust of earth the fierce ague

of shapes that come to enchant with human delusion

what in fact is infernal the passion to become Other

do you not hear the noon heat like a mountain

of maddened cicadas involving you in a voluptuous

blaze, Dido, and sobbing is of no moment undress

the skin of its white innuendos embarking as you

will on the deathless barge where ash and tears

mingle their ancient tale the one of pain and error

whilst above forever the black sun burns its soul

                         (v)

certus iter fluctusque atros aquiline secabat

certainly iterated the flux atrocious the cyclone

deeper dark the throes of elimination light despairs

section by section the river gives up its flow 

winds that cut deep from the south the simoon 

parches life’s fertile vale and a desert becomes

where once stood the city glorious the nimbus crowned

thither we once dallied under porticoes of blue shade

listening to the fountain’s splash in quarters hidden

from common view our love to share in sweet embrace

shuttered from the sun’s immense landscape and

now that memory shimmers like a mirage wafting

in time’s mid day ceremony tender fluted breezes

wrapping the soul in its prolonged ecstasy while

the body drops its ivied perceptions one by one

green unfolding from the panoply of divine gifts

shafts of endlessness in hints of dream that

just as soon disappear to make us ask were we

ever there within the camera’s inverted eye

certain that the next iteration of breath the flow

that issues from boundless light would us unite

instead of shifting us sundered to this sandy sleep

                         (vi)

Multa inter sese vario sermone serebant

much intersection with varied sermon seeded

when cleft from the sun’s great error wandering

our souls pitiful relics mourn the loss of gravity

the main deflected from the eaten shore to loss

and heavy heads recollect what was once a depth

the varied hues the weight of words the grasses

beneath our shadows inflected as if by a music 

too distant to recall and shapes rococo the ginger

slight the tongue’s soft romance now darkened

ever in this cage dimensionless of flighted lives

sore much by what had seemed to be above

there in the light by leaf and water running hard

why didn’t you ever call back to me why leave me

in this closet dank of never more the stone the pith

cannot the ever steep its misty lore again the while

suchness you over slide and dusky throats silence

in glades of afternoons without memory and 

this quiet moment resides interposed you and me

nor quells the sermon with its paragraphs of silence

the interlude we named between our ears conscious life

this braided air that twines breath to another end

                          (vii)

exim Gorgoneis Allecto infecta venenis

at once Allecto the fury infected with the Gorgon’s

poisoned tresses us assails in our passing randomness

nor know to what avail this savage brands our trail

smoking distances canyons of immense the shaded

nowhere to turn the ire inverted to our souls 

and swells the sick rankling to the brain infested

how to see now the rim of stars the azure bowl

dipping into eternity’s far western hemisphere

leaving us wretched mortals cast on shoals bleak

hopeless introspection the cloud wracked brain’s

futile memory of innocence tossed into furious waters

seething the adjectives that toil reddening the pearl

what simmers just below the skin if not anger’s

trenchant coil and in the cane-break sifting rage

ash by ash until boils over the third half of earth

and the whole goes into the fray victim of hybris

overweening and we doff our masks and betray

what was human in us delusion and error love’s

long straying from the center so why can’t you

and find it difficult to allay the three raving Sisters

whose spume and venom pollute the air darkening

                            (viii)

Reddidit una bovum vocem vastoque sub antro

renders a bellowing voice bull-like within the cave

sub lunar madness to find a way out reconfiguring

the vast geometries of the epic that have led us

so far astray drifting like stunned bees in the stifling

perfume stung wardrobe of Circe rooting like pigs

in great error and devastation can almost hear

sea-waves pounding green depths in the fatal ear

or drum tattoos of legend and memory hoarse

in the irreversible grasses of a mythic childhood

spent in lush reverberation of bamboo & oaten reed

dissonances now I don’t want to I’m not the person

I used to be weathering these antiquities of noise

entering caverns and grottos in the search for some

one thing a recollection of or maybe the melody

the registers of tempo beating in the back brain

the dance what is it shadow plays against a cliff

somewhere ever so distant and the tide swells

drawing out the smoke and luster a febrile song

terrible to hear like a wreckage a flotsam a dirge

threnody in black weeds draped revolving crazily

through rock quartz a signal from the beyond of

  

                           (ix)

(quot prius aeretae steterant ad litora prora)

quoted first the aerial stuttering a literal prowess

so finally stood and on the shore prior winds

a vague calumny the gods who smite us unawares

on the sandy bluff high to watch the sinking fleet

fired by dreams then fallen felled by invisible fists

can it be we never sailed to Troy nor burnt the hawsers

watching sleepers the ancient thing assail billowed

waves the length of a tormented hour succumbed

is there time enough to photograph the eclipse?

who brought us to this forlorn and wasted zone

spent stars accent the absent mind like brassy prows

stumbled forth from the dead mango grove to light

shun the bees! afternoon the immense buzzing red

nowhere to turn and safeguard the tender vision   

adjustable angles foreign paths inward and astray

is there an adjective to describe this lateral tilt?

we faint we vomit we need to learn to sit in chairs

already evening spreads its fogs across the heath

lost beyond counting we forget where the knee

roves where the hand tills where the eye retreats

undone the recollection of grass the dew bestrewn

                            (x)

vos etiam, Gemini, Rutulis cecidistis in agris

Twins! you’ve fallen anon into the rutilating fields

you twain in acrid spirits will your selves ever rise again?

but for the circling maze of the seventh heaven you’d

both be sundered forever from the main and to houses

separate return the dazed shadows of a solar error

pick up those bruised photographed others of a childhood

lost in the antipodes far from the asphodel fields

is this trail of white pebbles a sign from the goddess?

easy now sit your weary selves on these folding seats

do look about into the dark hedges start up no more

paper skies painted your favorite blue for a moment 

only then to smoke return the vast unknown empyrean

each of you describe this gyre’s burning revolution

behold the artist’s eye shared by the kaleidoscope

flames a literature of blazing silences the fierce

distinctions of sound and breath until utterly gone

the last traces the futile tracks the white pebbles

Twins! you too rutilating like unseen stars in the far

archaic as the flowers that bear you into summer fields

pomegranate and eglantine the goddess from her hand

scatters black seeds brooding her great blank brow

                           (xi)

dat gemitum rumpitque has imo pectore voces

gives a groan and breaks from the depths these voices

innuendos of dawn to never be the incessant waves

of darkness the chiding of unfriendly gods the enormous

walkabout in death country catching the chill and agony

why didn’t he listen on the day he set forth why didn’t he

gives another groan moaning his hapless fate these voices

torn from leaves and into the dusky unknown circles

feet grown old trying and everywhere smell of mulch 

underfoot the rank undergrowth sacred to Persephone

perspiring in mortal night sweats not a light in sight 

not even a distant flare a city of labyrinthine structure

giving voices from the depths trying to keep breath 

in rhythm to the memories of life up above in the blaze

of noon with its intoxicants and girls but some fatal error

what was it the mocking of the myth the stumbling across

the horizon that defines a man’s life the imprudent reckless

keeps groaning drawing voices from the deep the multiple

with their rush of words in all directions like the bag of Aeolus

scattering winds of loosed syntax into the vortex voices

like bleeding appeals to the deities of mountaintops 

keeps pushing the limit fragmented words of a poem

                           (xii)

multaque per maestum demens effata furorem

mutilated but sadly demented she blurts out her fury

much she has burked this suffering madness nearing

the other end of the world inescapably the maenad 

born of insanity the raging foment of love smitten 

can’t help herself shifting from red into infrared high

on the helium she smokes returning the shadow to its other

desperate and much the sadly demented her fury fated

keeps going in rounds about the mute cyclopean walls 

what intense moments undergoing torment after torment

love letters keep coming back she eats the ink spits

syllables shafts of dead vowels the wounded spite of heart

her face the lacerated mirror of unrequited passion

here here and here the traces of surrender could have 

had it all and can never understand why it had to end

chewing the baleful leaf and ranting from highest window

hers are the embolism and aphasia of an enormous error

to have wanted at what a price the solar embrace

bride of the Light eternal never was to be the demented

take her out to the back lot and abandon her to the dark

on her knees rolling in the sullied grasses weeping

stark enmity of fate rocking in sheets of black water

                        XIV

                   BOLERO

accused of killing mom fandango dancer

shafts of afternoon death like Bengal flares

denies any association with Rose of Castille

everything is suddenly difficult the languages

one has studied a lifetime and horns lock

the vowels darken a shibboleth to understand

the least line of prose let alone the reasons

why the troubadours went a haunting women

in such dark recesses such lonely distances

a sea between them and the blood they kindled

but to be accused of killing mom the fandango

dancer with his stirrups of cordovan leather

his sombrero what a high thing in the Toledo sun

will we never translate correctly what it was

putting the right foot forward to enter the banquet

ancient bodies conjugated like irregular verbs

in a hispanic tumult of gold and resin sunsets

hush when the purple veil falls and the watchman

puts out the lantern these whitewashed walls

I hear a cornet sound its crimson bright note

in the deeps of Roncesvalles bursting Roland’s

betrayed veins and the Saracen hooves pound

a thrill to be mingling sash and satin scimitars

but just how many do you know and how many

can you speak including all the isolated dialects

dyslexia and aphasia to the contrary a mystery

remains embedded in the dry well’s fundament

horse-dung colored hills of the Reconquista!

and the fandango dancer tortured for hours

by the Guardia Civil because his name is Lorca

and the darkness that encroaches comparing

this battle to that of Kurukshetra with Arjuna

full of doubts and working his conscience out

in closets full of rose water and musk and chiding

who will come to dispel suspicions all the while

elaborating the original translation emending

monkish errors typographical misconceptions

going to Barcelona in search of the unreal Omegas

and the medieval copyists in their small cells

night and day misunderstanding as much 

of latin as possible and the little birds in their 

heads fluttering against the dingbat windows

of fettered intelligence can it be we have come

to know so little in a lifetime of devoted learning 

and the viola da gamba plying dark arpeggiaturas

in the next room where the fandango dancer

fainted from a set of rubber truncheons dreams

he is at the blood wedding gitanas in bodices

with colors borrowed from arroyos of sunrise dust

dance a labyrinthine bolero sweating jewelry

and recollections of the medina and the mosques

of some parchment history about the succession

of imams in far off Babirush adorned with cuneiform

elaborations of the myth of the flood and Gilgamesh

we have only skimmed the mysteries of language

placing the circumflex the acute and the grave

over syllables of quantity to sing them aloud

never quite comprehending the meaning of the words

connecting phonetic aberrations to the god of place

our ignorance is staggering despite the ability

to memorize vedic verb forms in the dawn hour

designing floral compositions for the Beloved

when we cannot even discern her face in the Tavern

is man nothing but a shoulder put to the wheel?

and what of the afternoon lessons about rain

the properties of air the etrurian solemnities 

thunder bickering deities two miles from home

and the fandango dancer lapsed into a coma

has visions of muezzins half drunk with love

tumbling out of some repeated oriental tale

gazelles pomegranates elephants talking horses

all brought back to gothic Iberia ca. 700 AD

when the lute and the ruddy fringe of heaven 

shaped arabesques in the long indigo afternoons

childhood in grammars of rudimentary semitic

making way for complex substantives in red

weaving in and out of agglutinative periods

everything becomes ever a more difficult berlitz

irreducible sums of colors like women shimmering

in veils the size of ink disappearing into night

false confessions drawn from the tattered quill

admissions to bouts of obsessive lunar ecstasy 

implosions of mystical hemophilia and madness

nowhere does it say the human is free from error

his is a monkey life a sequence of imitations

shadow plays of absolutely dumb harlequins

pantomiming the judgment of Paris in old Trojan

so much confusion and role-playing and Bang!

the peripheral characters talking debased Prakrit

come rushing at us all knives and misquoted ire

and the Guardia Civil catholic and hirsute

keep at the fandango dancer who killed his mom

bolero snare drum and bass adagio poco a poco

lamenting he ever swore not to touch her and the song

round and round his demented brain frozen as the skin

she wore in the poem about human error and delusion

sun spots great afternoons in the pandemonium grass

fused to invisible ellipses of the fixed stars at noon

how could it ever be otherwise torment and fever

to have what can never be had and the sheer heights

longing for the figure in the photo processed existence

dizzy to saturation and the world of bees in his head

as he takes the plunge from the dactylic hexameter

into a violent whirlpool of spondees and trochees 

successive issues of red and forced ambiguities of love

attempting to revive the twice dead sonata form

as the rhythm slowly picks up monotonous chilling

someone calls out from the screen door behind the alley

where the kids used to play deaf and dead cowboys 

dust swirling in immense motes vision a peripheral

stop in the midst of a divine commotion surrounding

the birth of the Other and how many step back gaping

music sheer abundant and physical like the dense hair

of the goddess who patrols the western hemisphere

massive bluish curls spitfire locks beehive permanent

combs of small ivory earring pendants larger than life

elephants that loop through the small cycles of breath

she is having even as the mountain obtains full measure

how total everything is irreversible hugely azure 

not enough room to seize the moon in its eclipse

rotations of long dead star stuff sparkling dimly evening

chairs brought on dusky lawns to watch the ivy climb

it is another hour now and the big sound of an orchestra

in the late 19^th century mushrooms on the patio

where they are drinking fast and furiously to forget

the forge and the fires and hammers and the anger

what had to happen the instant after the accident

sirens and wrecking crews ambulances of pure speed

mother nowhere in sight the fandango dancer’s alibi

holding a highball martini a girl with a vanishing face

I love her how she uses any language with her tongue

like a loom calculating a syntax of unregistered beauty 

raptures of synecdoche and splendor of the archaic

to actually speak that way and drive and so narcotic

dreaming it is a day in Elysium obsolete with its marble

intricacies of legend so that everyone is immediate 

yet unattached blissed out stoned remote out of touch

drumming from the outer galaxies reaches us now 

us humans dedicated to self destruction and exegesis

how can it be we move so rapidly through this medium

at once liquid and sonant all things dissolving in light

the music abrasive and shameless mounting its stairwell

the audience too coming to a chromatic orgasm bolero

could not get him to confess the fandango dancer

sweet reverie of distances near the Guadalquivir 

of a remote afternoon the boys all prinked out

in their sailor suits and the drum and fife and

wooden horses jumping up and down sister in

a sky blue pinafore hair in thick braids swinging

and the smell of garlic frying and flies buzzing

green-winged tipping their dreams in the dark

where the patio merges with the unconscious

how swift the civil war would come with metal

and disregard and shoot-‘em up everywhere

forbidden to look and silent set up the slate board

with its archaic noun declensions and tio Julio

showing up late with his piano full of Mozart

some said to turn off the radio because the french

and others that a desert storm was on the rise

yellowing the air a thick and the wind stopped

breathing and when we opened our eyes to look

again the house was topsy turvy the Guardia Civil

officers with mustard colored eyes held toys

in their hands barking commands in voices 

that seemed to come from infierno and sister

tresses undone burst into tears and wrapped

the loyalist banner over her face and stuttered

something like a prayer but they picked her up

and sent her to the moon and in the kitchen

it began to rain thick black drops and frogs

leaping all about and the blur of a disease

that spread through all the rooms including

the one where father took his siesta bundled

inside the Sunday newspaper with its colored

cartoon figures and that was when we noticed

that mom was nowhere in sight and the officers

shifting from room to room they said mom had

contracted tuberculosis and was being removed

to a clinic high above the Alhambra in Granada

where the most Catholic Kings summered in a

heat so abrasive and dense and there was nothing

to be done about it but cry and of course when

evening finally showed up in an umbrella and

strange green spectacles talking about the imminence

of sand and the emptiness we felt in our tiny

sailor suits and going near the broken furniture

afraid to touch the pieces lying there inert so

sad and puzzled to put ourselves to bed with

no one to sing or pray with us and the windows

that looked down on us what a mystery

OK delete the part about the archaic and

strumming a guitar in the key of delta 

never will learn the truth about the matter

the distant dusky dense and furious music

as if creeping in through the defiles near

Roncesvalles then abruptly modern and defiant

swaying hypnotically the way the goddess has

scat singing and the mellow tone of the cornet

high above the Pyrenees sketches of spain

Joe in the basement stoned of a stifling august

afternoon and the nicomachean ethics opened

to page zero where it says all about how and just

why to do it keeping human the inert mass

within us the swarming unconscious depths

where just about anything can occur like the poem

and the staccato beat persisting in its course

to a deafening crescendo the climax brassy

and resonant thrilling echoing up to the Stars!

                             XV

                        LA MER

                                  omnia fert aetas

the bristling and grandiose sea

when noon is meridian zero the wealth of heat

nothing moves fixed on the glassy surface

sea is less conscious than sky which it meets

sleeping in profound indigo depths

distance is a myth echoed by Narcissus

and there are caves created by the winds

in the solitary recesses of memory

where the only text is a variety of green

like the ivy twined around the temples of Dionysus

grottos inhabited by naiads dead a thousand millennia

whose hair and voices assume the shape of algae

and in the mirage of travel islands abruptly

arise from nowhere in the watery expanse

sheer rock coruscations glittering in the blinding

light steep and black wet as yesterday’s eternity

waves rush to meet each other and return

to batter remote shores built on horizons of sand

in the monotonous infinity of the afternoon

when only the sun’s massive error seems to shift

ever so slightly toward some wasted Atlantis

a human voice can bear a music of utter longing

the solitude of a voyager lost on the sea of being 

even as the world moves within the zodiacal mansion

even as the world drowns in the illusion of water

a water vaster than the history of time

men strapped to barks of night toss to and fro

from tide to tide hearing only the grand susurration

of the undertow which is the moon’s terrible sway

and even fainter the small cries of those left behind

those in expectation of a homeward turn

brine mists salt-sting wind burnt skins 

dreams woven by the foamy spray languorous

lying naked on beaches that extend like white shells

around the curving tilt of turquoise 

imagining one is home again in the plinth and loom

instead the rush of moaning swells takes the mind

from the body and empties it in the frothy drink

where sinking slowly all its thoughts turn to a verdant dank

“mother! I am coming home, make my bed!”

conch shell sounds eerie shrill summoning

from labyrinthine depths legends of hoary Ulysses

how many times turned his mind wandering storm tossed

thick curtains of fog the brine stung swooned

in palaces lofty and dark of enchantresses and swollen

the enormous sea-sound muffled all clarity and light

his was the embarcadero of a drunken morning

cigarette burns brown rims of a limitless bottle

lowing beast of a hulk dimmed the memory of being a man

shoulder to the plow and traversing the rich loam

dream shifts seeding the archaic world with poppy and asphodel

his dense remove sail spun into a world of golden masks

petty kings jealous and wrathful tossed onto a littoral

scum-green and wild spewing a bitter marine dialect

foaming at the mouth lips cracked and blue

language of hitches and notches and strained hawsers

beneath striated purple thunderhead skies anger

curse of some god to fling him naked to the shoals

a game for pretty girls and treacherous rainbows

intoxicated on the rocks heads up staggering and mysterious

was it the oracle that inveigled him tied by salt ropes

to a splintered mast to listen to the full siren song

maddening his addled brain the more with obsessions

to be one with the Goddess the elusive and violet eyed one

tattooing him with mussels barnacles burning coral

and using him as was her wont crazed underwater

was ever dream more spent in twine of sea grasses

indigo shivered the blistered tongue and roaring

nightmare the color of mercury whipping spume

into the heavens grayish liquids splattered over a canvas

the size of the empyrean and the circling moon

waning divinity eaten by its own wanton tides

maelstrom of the psyche ego-drunk thoughtless

spun round and round the watery vortex

into the deepest gyre of murky darkness

oceanic twin of space voluble churning 

nothing to hold no grip just a sense of falling

falling tumbled out of the planetary orbit

into the primordial amniotic gulf

AOI

was then brought and beached vomiting green-froth

finny bits miniscule bone ribbing salt mange 

Nausicaa her dancing shadow mini-pleated about his head

so many lives compressed into this liquid moment

shifting in and out and through the sandy shoals

an afternoon out of time only the pounding surf

dense vertiginous whitespray eye memory 

walls of angry water rising in massive torrents

sky-colored equal to the solar rotations in strength

taking foam scudded waves across the universe

to where in her circular memory of water Nausicaa

bends picks up the grizzled spouting head in her lap

sings the cooing reverberations tide song so sweet

to wake him into the light again the dry cloud day

where in a drowsy splendor he will revived enjoy

the girl in tension and pull pulse driving moon sounds

and the two will lie forever in sheets of swoon ivy stained

for the life it takes to remember this ever happened

sand and rock and briny foam kisses a rush

darkening membrane of sun setting majesty

when hush of marine breath taints the fainting light

undertow that removes consciousness and

to remember what went before 

taking notes or it is sleeping heavier now

islands lapped by slow circulating seas immemorial

sprits and envy was it the guessed whoosh

sky parting to let out still other skies of dark water

drowning to wake and look around if the room

is everything there where it was as a child

pacing words against a fomenting language of tides

talking ceaselessly sand and salt syllables

jabbering you know to somebody inside the wall

a see saw sound in the ear a whisper susurration

spitting jets of stuff out spoiling the map of thought

or to go great lengths to deny descending 

watching the memorized hand undergo the current

touching indigo the soft and absent mind

if it’s all still the same with age it seems to alter

the lawns and the cataclysm that came after

a citadel high on the sea-cliff abutting the tragic air

bluish clouds come racing down with song

and then pulling the boat to shore the comrades

ropes for faces taut muzzled against the blast

who takes the bride and who jeers taunting

passing the wine skins around drinking deep

like evening with its unmastered dialects

they flounder collapsing drunk on the still hot stones

what a day it was and sleep hard to forget

out far out to the schwerpunkt where the waters

become as immense and nothing as space

can be no other course for the dying mind 

but set out to sea adrift boundless with only

night and the myriads of stars and their babble

and by day scorched tied by a sheet to the pine

as it rocks and sways to the immemorial rhythms

so many thoughts dispersed among tireless waves

bobbing sweeping diminishing then crescendoing

just as the mind has a way of doing and being

the old things let loose come apart rotting

even words for such things falter disappear

reappear as new sounds in the liquid void

becoming senseless as vedic utterances

in the mouths of dead brahmans 

do we ever come back?

do we ever come back to tell what we saw?

and entering that place I saw a great rock submerged

eddying around it the tides and finny things swimming

this was the rock of Distance from which memory derives

its source and clear waters too in springs here and there

crystalline in which bending one could see the gorgeous

face of Narcissus forever bent to drink of his own beauty 

ravished and so many others love drunk who now spend

eternity in these waters pining for the shadow of the other

and a bit further where the wrecks of great ships lay

floundering useless and still agitated I saw mariners such

as Sindabad puzzled and in rags reciting from memory

verses from the Shahnamah yet he was not of a person

with substance nor a shade but something of an element

of sheer transparency wavering in the chiaroscuro of

his lore and not far thence was the rusted and massive gate 

the entrance some say to Hades far from its terrestrial

reckoning a swaying greenish thing affixed to it many

sucking blind creatures which they say are the straying 

last thoughts of men in their delusion and when the gate

swung fully open what lay before me was the vastest

most desolate waste I have ever laid eyes on a veritable

cemetery of the galaxies where lay in pieces the vertebrae of 

constellations and dwarf stars the battered hulks of 

former suns with their planets loosely floating around

them as if recalling the perfect circles of their childhood

and just inside a host of wailing entities some with names

branded to their emaciated brows others mere wisps

like spermatozoa shifting in the tides and foremost stood

stout Odysseus in his hands were both plow and keel and 

intent on sowing furrows with salt he wept bitterly the day 

he met Circe and from her was forced to part for in this place

nowhere could he find her who was surely damned as a beast

and not as the divinity he thought her to be and behind him in

shattered mail and greaves Trojan and Greek alike still arguing

bellowing with hoarse and raucous voices for they no longer had 

spear or sword with which to cut and not far on a small hillock

was Helen the moon cheeked her face still mockingly beautiful her

tresses matted with gore and blood and small fish ate ravenously

her lips that heroes died to kiss and can I tell too of the dark ravine

the labyrinth and the Minotaur made of several alloys all to ruin 

pounding his hooves as if to strike a blaze in this liquid junkyard

and Theseus I recognized for his treachery now a bone ragged

 mendicant and poor Ariadne tangled in webs and destroyed

 in faith as were so many other damsels and adulteresses and 

wives now simpering bitches on all fours pissing ceaselessly

in the mingled eddies and pools where they were left to  splash

 and flounder and I would tell more but night the eternal has

robbed me of better recollection and I too dazed search for breath

to speak for light to live and as one obsessed keep knocking

on the shattered hulls to peer inside if I could learn more

and take back with me this dream this small white thing 

were it not for amnesia consuming my brain and the twelve

types of aphasia the mythical and how I am lost to language

uttering fast and nothing come to rest

toil then those without memory  

pushing out to sea the finely carved pine

to navigate the immense unknown

billows and wind squalls to swerve

and rains of forty days and bitter frosts

that make the surface a marble trap

those dedicated to oblivion and loss

doomed never to fully return home

nostalgia of earthlings forced to sail

and to sail forever the sea of being

bittersweet the tide I love

and hark the keening gulls above

their shree shrill cries of abandon

to never know aright

this was my place

adrift

              adrift 

to the end of time

                             XVI 

                 

              THE HYMN TO KALI

mother of night darkness and crematoria

time and death the unbounded your dance

born of stone you wear garlands of variously

51 or 108 human skulls you have no heart

one of the seven tongues of fire highest reality

devouring everything you remain dark shapeless

essence of your own form you are Great Goddess

the daughter of the mountain the dumb Uma

who scatters everywhere seeds of dissolution

you have no heart and who night times prowls

in the cremation field wearing only white ashes

muttering a thousand fold your mantra with

matted locks he is the one who becomes a great poet

who Tuesday midnight becomes Lord mounted

on the elephant and sets forth into the world

when you become young again lovely smiling

gesturing with your hands you dispel evil

but can mercy be found in a heart of stone

who has cut off the heads of children to wear

as garlands around your throat kicking the breast

of your master pitilessly who can you be, Mother?

if I call out your name do you ever listen?

at the fashion show Heart-of-Stone in tiger skin

and stiletto heel shoes stomps on  

disseminating world destruction with every step

blowing kisses to the dozens of decapitated kids

who remain ever devoted blissfully in love with her 

because she rejects their love they are more ecstatic

and dance wildly                        white ashes 

dispel evil with her smiling hands         Uma

mountain daughter remains dark and shapeless

informing the world with her radiant beauty

tongue lolling out shamelessly scattering seeds

in rapture armed with a sword and noose

violently deep reddish eyes           her roaring

fills all the regions of the sky and devours

the tens of thousands demons she has slain

drunk on the blood of her victims dances

destructive frenzy to destroy the whole universe

in the parking lot turned to a field of corpses

she rages            mmm               stiletto heel shoes

on the chest of her Lord stomping

the more ecstatic            there can be no mercy

without energy matter is dead

Lord Shiva becomes a bawling infant whom she

picks up and breast feeds      how can 

we call her Mother ten arms ten legs dancing

born of stone inebriating darkness she can be

the cosmos of love the everywhere of Night

the end of time the very dissolution of time

her hair unkempt her body now young and firm

astride the Lion she                devours all

wearing garlands of 51 or 108 human skulls

can we call her Mother and blue lotuses

in her hands and a sword and a noose so beautiful

her tongue lolling her violent reddish eyes

fangs!             at the fashion show on parade

wearing tiger pelt lissome and            ashes

Tuesday at midnight prowling the cremation yard

become transformed              a great poet

mounting the elephant Lord of the

I was dead to the world I had no life

all about me lay dissolution a wasteland

dead automobiles telephones umbrellas 

what god-woman could ever transfer me to heaven

what wit-cup save my mind

no   it must have been something else I did

not the flight to the moon not the 

where was I then when love-lost I went astray

wandered the gangetic plain in search of a way

dust I ate and wary of stepping on insects

and naked covered in orange goop

or cowering behind dried tamrisk urinating

reciting mantra tantra hobson jobson

where in the dizzy cosmos was I all those years

several lifetimes wasted in futile avant-garde

posting positions in dada telescope

fame it was lusting after and the fleeting chrome

that girds the head for a moment on stage

LALA what it was all about who knows

did the god-woman once make herself transparent

could I recognize the stone-born one as she walked 

down my hometown street all full with gait

swaying imperiously like the elephant

no    it surely was something else I did

nor did I visit the cremation yard Tuesday midnights

to become transformed        a great poet, hunh?

what good all those years leafing Pali manuscripts

puzzling over scribbled 17^th century Hindi texts

trying to make it “modern” rubbing alcohol

in all the irregular Vedic verb forms

but why go on       I missed it

I didn’t get it         the god-woman 

there she was all the time in illustrated lingerie

prinking in strangle-free hose  

singing! what a lark her “frozen” song

the radio was full of her and the air for keeps

and magazines numberless skipping through 

virtually every page in all colors of the spectrum

LALA what is a god-women doing here and now

transforming and being transformed by electronics

me she doesn’t know for she reviles her devotees

devours them chews them up

spits them out like useless black seeds 

all over the racing cosmos

so long , Baby            great poet, hunh?

Shakti the Power raving reddish eyes her

kicking Baby Shiva       wears the universe

like a ruby embedded in her navel

prancing from black hole to black hole

mistress of dark matter the fling of a

her hair like galaxies of light

certain stories filigree threading through language

taut on a rope suspended between the highest peaks

known to man a rapid succession of skin changes

fires breaking out on the moon

saturn’s rings dissolve in instant mercury

to have and have not the waist supple as wind

the air between lives goes too swiftly 

maelstroms in the third eye 

does not love the children eats them up

wears their skulls variously 51 or 108

garlands swinging above her ponderous breasts

             another thing

is the section between the matted locks filth

degenerative tissue howling at the state hospital

where doctor Johnson in frock and rubber hose

baleful leaf passed around hallucinatory vision

mexican peppers rubbed on the tongue

holy jeezus! to confess to such crimes

reducing the Deccan to a plateau of white ash

leaving in her wake the assassinations of hindu sants

poets enmeshed in the jungle of dravidian syntax

going up and down through the lacunae

in the sundry chronicles of Sri Lanka

blue monky gods atomized by her glare

insensate to all human passions she makes do

with the terrific and ruddy insanity 

of the necrophiliac and the nymphomaniac

how she moves mysteriously through the zone

infinitesimal that separates orgasm and despair

taking in her skirt of a thousand writhing serpents

whole oceans boiling tides steaming brains!

if she opens the jewel box    Beware!

ghoul and fiend poisoned asps spring forth

cunning now youthful with firm body

enticing with her smile of pure abracadabra

induces four-faced Brahma to his knees

all ten directions go up in the holocaust blaze

of a hundred thousand atomic bombs

she’s left standing in her violent Sanskrit miniskirt

hands on hips sticking her great lolling tongue out

it’s time for everyone to die

forget the story about salvation and paradise

she doubles the size of infinity 

Shakti the seething end term of the cosmos

why weren’t we better people

Shakti matter without energy is dead

why did we let the years go by so fast

why was the last so lonesome a night 

and then the small proof of nothing

but the echo of the vortex

to Myth turning reddened shafts of purulent light

can we ever and the massive moment when recognized

for who she is not the dallying young Uma fresh from

the mountain dew strolling down walnut street a century

ago a parasol of human eyelids turning in her hand and that 

flirtatious winsome half-smile inviting king and pauper

alike to kiss her Lotus Feet can we ever but the strident

nightmare dressed in torn tiger pelt ten arms and legs

how many heads and the clotted masses of thick black

hair tossing this way and that dancing on baked drum skins

garlands of human skulls knocking against her breasts

a radio going off somewhere in the galaxy with a music

of clicks and echoes and tattoos and something about 

the human condition the enigmatic only partially learned

the little understood as the ballet of corpses resumes its

movement adagio ma non molto yes at that very moment

when we do Durga puja and the slums of resistance and

acrimony and the seven hundred establishments of hell

open up their awnings and her tongue extends to the depths

licking us in dreams sulfuric and abysmal when we think

to return to childhoods designing perfect cities only to 

want to bomb them out of existence yes at that very moment 

when destruction is the only pleasure remaining and she

astride her lion of the moon painting with bloody hands

the pastorals of Radha and Krishna is it the verb to “be” 

or is it the verb to “fuck” which is the most important and

yes at that very moment and the famous blackness spreads

over the remaining worlds and there is nothing you can do

and she embraces the mountain reducing it to rubble

and the solar mansion opens its bright brassy portals

and voices emerge contradictory and fulminating reciting

great poetry from all the lost languages but indifferent

to universal suffering Kali resplendent and awful in this

moment of horrific awareness makes herself available

to none rejects all suitors lovers husbands paramours and

aggravation and annihilation of the English-speaking planet

like a typhoon full of raging waters she roars devastatingly

through the Temple and renders it null and void no more

godhead or supreme Truth just the enervating mind-end

of the beginning of everything all over again

loosely put and dressed in flimsy rags 

the god-women at the back door begging

despite layers of grime her face stupendously

radiant the all-bright of sheer transcendence

dare we let her in the house across the sacred lintel

no need she walks in all sans souci as if long familiar

with every room floor stairway “this is my house”

she declares in her emphatic beast voice

 “this is the house of Catastrophe” 

this is toxic game a toss of the bones to read

our finality the infinities within Infinity

all blue rushing like a whirlwind from her nostrils

and she stands there throbbing ecstatic

talking snake talk and rubbing white ash

all over her naked body and kicks Baby Shiva 

one last time really lets him have it

BOOM     out go the lights

                     

                    XVII

    (APOCRYPHA/FRAGMENTA)

                                        the aggravated futility

this is the part where seeking a heaven 

     and none is to be found unless in dreams

the scant remembered and aching because

of the half-recalled words oracular

     divine at times always enigmatic

“only the two of us left” and looking

at the stretch of big water as it curves

mysteriously outwards toward a horizon

         tumbling down the sand slope

to lie there together on the beach as if

it were the “old times” half a century gone

and nothing had happened in between

         just the monotonous series of deaths

that mark the relentless passage that

defines this brief season of light and rain

    as life the culmination of error and

painting and if we could see all over again

the buildings darkening in their interior

the palace of Minos where light is spared

    and one moves as if in a shifting hour

where nothing is fixed and voices manifest

secret and wandering declaring the nothing

which is to be had by opening a door

                         lost epics      

the list now illegible of all the gods and

goddesses                 a white hand

       descending from the cloud loom

sprinkled ashes and water

                          the mingling of names

formless disembodied sprites from the mind

         depart      and in secret chambers

the accounting of urns and casks

how much wine how much grain

          and from Egypt the big prowed ships

in their bellies hidden even newer

      deities bearing seals and spears

          it is for this that writing

transforms the air

              that singing and longing

speak ill of no one

     lest it come back on you

and this is the part where we divide

the map collection the lawns the skies

the long avenues of summer where we

waited for the Friend       

who was coming slowly with the book

to spend hours in the reading of it

imagining that we are no longer here

no longer the ones who are reading

to whom has been imparted this shred

of light this miniscule entry to otherness

and find ourselves suddenly darkened

inebriated raving something new 

something just discovered about

the heavens yes the gyrating

mechanics of fire                      the

invisible winches and levers that

transfer us from the body 

                  who can be talking

in the next room?

what voice is unraveling     delphic

                        code shades

the distance to 

whispering in the eaves falling asleep

to be conscious listening  

symbols   allusions   chimerae

to reinvent the sentence to reinvent syntax

suffocating heat               isolation 

thunder in a sky like a blank piece of paper

instead of pausing         for ink

more words a description

of when angel was at the door 

impenetrable night 

                      chirring      leaves

and asked for just a teaspoon’s worth

to make it worthwhile               descending

from the seventh sphere

         regroup thoughts   flight of days

the bad deeds of conscience 

insomnia you could see it in angel’s

famished eyes leagues of sand hovering

above an atmosphere threatening tempests

counting backwards from the gate of heaven

to the still point where number

loses category silent distant

the purely remote of an archaic

unintelligible myth 

call that the              Muse

instead of piecing the missing parts together

and placing the verbs at the end and translating

it as if it were just yesterday you had to go ahead

and create ab ovo the syntax rubbed against silence

signals illusions the head winds of pages rushing

into a vortex of memory what could be darker than

this mythical complex of springs and running waters

and mirror images of one tortured by self doubt and angst

and the running text below which kept adding footnotes

in red ink and the supply of nominals in a totally

cryptic manner leading one nowhere but astray or 

adrift in a panoply of words suggested from the hoard

found underneath where the lists of now defunct gods

ran on and on in a crypto-sumerian dialect confined

now to the hill uplands of Transoxania and the innuendos

about the Ur-hero and his ax and the woman who suborned

him a plague on the lot and looking for references from 

a much later epoch kings with gilded masks queens by

day whores by night the legendary apocalypse that

happened just next door when the fighting began 

after a riot over the abducted Helen and of the many

Helens which was She none to remember exactly who

or why just a snub-nosed little bitch in silk finery

and naughty underchosies and an Egyptian flare for

seduction in abandoned movie lots you know and the

great et cetera that follows this apocryphal reading

going on and on you just couldn’t stop brooding about

the past the historicity of such unclassifiable data worsened

by an inability to stick to grammar rules seamless errors

the time was 1945 downtown Los Angeles the movie was

“Leave her to Heaven” there were fires in the Baldwin Hills

and much was troubling that winter and the long train ride

to ice country frozen rails steel hard skies clouds brim

with catastrophe and blinding the white and nebulous

future hanging clothes out to freeze and listening carefully

to the message of the mourning doves despite the orthography

in the snow and claustrophobia of deathlessness squandered 

youth in the slopes always nostalgia and longing missing

mother absconded who knows to what cemetery to waste

away phthisic in her floor length embroidery and wasn’t

home a house anymore but signals allusions and chimerae

trying to set it all down in some kind of orderly but

how many attempts sketches half-starts unfinished magna

opera can one fit into a life the disappointment countless

words misused other directed poorly understood lilacs

in the longest sleep and just a step away from the tomb

isn’t the text a problem linear Alcatraz

as far as the bay can fling its mists reading

between the bridges a syllogism for matter

darkening is not the worst it can bring

but isolation standing up to the boulders

of criticism while waves salty peaked shake

the limbo of memory up vallejo street and

down green street in search of the omicron

some bitter little antidote from chinatown

spreading between oranges and upside down

failed to read aright the judgments in fever

like windows through which meaning flies

nothing to do but underscore the keening

birds circling above the limitless paragraph

ominous darkening the parallel bars’ stain

apocryphal disjunctions side by side with

girlfriend in her latest cuneiform dimension

emerge shapeless between docks the harbor

within us the listing deity white hands froth

cannot overcome the speech defect prayer

attitude beside the self abject and petty 

falling from the palms secret meanings

elusive as the eleusinian response nights

when the moon is missing heat rings a 

sentiment that all is over the situation 

fleeting images of before dying wisps

of cold hair descending into the arroyo

where whiplash and tongue-job wash

syntagma of fire smaller words snatches

of a greater light a 

emissions     fault lines    apocrypha

“by the grace of Ahuramazda all that we did”

immense distances overcome in a fleeting minute

we are returned to our place of origin

burning hospitals numerals beyond reach

rings of Saturn blackening in the trophies of sleep

do we imitate the stop-watch in our desire to “have”

what was never ours in the first place

waiting on that summer avenue for the Friend

for the book to open up with its prodigious

and illegible prophecies 

the heart is all a monsoon a storm

rains and darkening afternoons of no return

brooding on the missed appointment

on the failed promise on the mistaken letter

on the forgotten illusion the chimerae indwelling

when we cannot give up our egos when we

this blank scroll what is it meant to say

that the islands we were destined to visit

have all gone away that the Myth in its stark outline

is a mirage of desert cities and palaces

it is silk next to the skin

and mouths like ripe fruit forbidden to kiss

and the Moorish tannery where colors open

under a black and archaic sun

it is not for us to remember anything now

the decades which collapse into minutes

thinking to understand what has no meaning

staring at photographs where the faces like glyphs

give no clue as to the identities hidden there

writing daily to recover what is irreversible

the time lapse of horizons of ancient sand

correcting the often truncated sentence to no avail

reinventing syntax or destroying it repeatedly

not making literature but shibboleth

the frequent poem about the redhead

whose music is a total dissonance in the Hour

was it a mistake to check in at the Hotel Europa?

what was the effort to continue “creating”?

writing daily to recover what is irreversible

here here and here we thought to strike “it”!

the sun’s chaotic error kept circling the mines

where the ancients excavated for memory

and yet here we are today impoverished and

ink-stained blotting out unwanted words

uselessly asleep at the driving wheel

careening from misfortune to misfortune

hoping tomorrow they will have a cure

wanting desperately to understand to “get it”

what will the next letter in the alphabet be?

will it stand for “ruin”?

in whose hospice are we languishing today

how can it be that the dead in their checkered suits

keep coming back in the extra month of sleep

offering us their hands to write with

waking to realms of indecipherable stones

markers on the route to bad literature

to philosophical discourses about the nous

when will the books of genesis that Mozart wrote

come to full transduction

it is all around us the relic of the Flood

on the left hand side of the circle

the distance is equal to that of the right hand side

and in between gapes the yawning abyss

which is the bottom of time

whatever turns up in written form

whatever is described in so many words as “life”

whatever given a minus sign is the suchness of truth

why do we keep relegating this very tale

to the midden heap where the apocrypha lie

like so much residue reduced to ashes

sifting through them looking for one word

that makes sense anymore

“I had nothing coherent to say

                       I had no language”

                            XVIII

THE MAHABHARATA RECONSIDERED

                                                     “The heralds, infatuation and illusion,

                                                       sing my praises, bards my limitless faults”

                                                     “—she went without her body”    

                                                                                                  Sur Das

where is my winged chariot, 

                             where are my war wounds?

difficulty compiling choosing refining           versions

which can be definitive?              lotus and trampling elephants

red eyed demons paper-eating flying wildly

and swaying melon breasted gopis in a trance 

          the names of the Lord              OM

recondite in jungles of sperm and sweat

what criteria to adopt     always shifting points of view

mass of molding documents     nothing precise no directives

only memories of conversations          silverfish scurrying

over dog-eared palm leaves   boomerangs    mantras 

who said what to whom buzzing of discordant languages

discarded syntagma lush undergrowth thousands of years

and the brothers still arguing scheming full of envy and spite

                    gambling drinking whoring

and what conversations!     among them a deity prowled

smell of jasmine hibiscus garlands thrown around the neck

some divine plan afoot and the blindness

either by birth or by intention and the cheating

angry seers laying multiple curses and the sun

his effigy and offspring hidden in the dust

churls and high-minded princes with nose-rings and tattoos

among them a god child-like and secretive guile deceit

it depends on which century you think you’re in

which dialect you’re struggling to unravel

fisticuffery     boomerangs     spitfire          

rivers flowing deep and wide from which lotus-born Brahma

the four-faced and goddesses tantalizing and firm have sprung

and you wonder in which epoch the aborigines exist

nose-boned and hunkering behind putrid underbrush

waiting for the kill chattering empty vowels 

or the monkeys divinely inspired in the trees looming

bound for Sri Lanka with dream spells of saliva

and what conversations!       child Arjuna aiming

his infallible arrow at the eye-painted bird target

“snap outta that!” mumbo jumbo voodoo vedic pidgin

drawing large red circles in the dirt

to call down unwilling Indra king of the gods

whose days are spent lazing in powder blue Pontiac ca. 1956 

does me good to write like this reduced to shreds

the poem about ten miles long in one direction

and maybe fifteen miles in the other direction

unnatural disposition of bonzes growing fetid in the noonday blaze

chanting chanting eyelids burnt off blind to the world

and when they’re done talking all outta their heads

and asking for more club soda and gin fizz

and on this side of the barrier reef the kauravas

a hundred strong full of grit and deception

and on the other lined up a mere handful the pauravas

with mother Kunti like a blade shining in the light

whole lotta roaring and jumping up and down 

caterwauling  spear flinging and           boomerangs!

bringing back the heads of some of them and others

lying there in pools of sapphire blood     ah Lord!

supine or erect what does it matter

the radio is loud and wide broadcasting blow by blow

and as far off as sumeria the god Varuna half drowned

reemerges to report with deaf fingers of the dread battle

that awful afternoon in Kurukshetra when Duryodhana

on his knees finally got it for what he’d done to Draupadi

trying to disrobe her that day in the Assembly Hall

shame and fie on the lot of them in their rusted trucks

and waving banners depicting the victory of the color red

what a wind blew that night and in the marsh whimperings

beheading all those sleeping kids        more boomerangs!

great hobson jobson mantras      Krishna’s conch shell 

blowing one intense clear note across the universe

only memories of conversations          

flitting shadowy figures on the large Indonesian screen

each is every one or none is the other so many dialects

profusion of inherent vowels of unaccented syllables

confusion of grammatical gender of retroflex consonants

divagations of apophony twelve kinds of aphasia

linguistic diseases proliferating in the Deccan 

where the sea washes its warm tides against the cliffs

shall we then to old Mumbai and crown the queen of pop?

shrill voices warbling emotions ancient as the moon

“what’s bitter but love’s sweet memory”    SHANTI

and up from the Dravidian thickets NataRaja on his wheel

comes sowing havoc and destruction laying low whole jungles

in an atomic instant and bejeezus all the folk look up

to see the cosmos delivered of its matter

for a million light years which is only a matter of instants

everything revolves evolves comes around again

and shattering to smithereens comes together again

one whole consistent vibrating particle of sound Yes! 

homeopathic remedies to no avail ayurvedic claptrap

opened wounds torn sutures deities moaning on their cruppers

is there a doctor in the House? 

and whose shadow bluish tinctured dripping in the mirror

is that manifesting all ghostly twilight screened

“when he sees me in everything and sees everything in me”

what conversations!  

                      unfolding the mass of moth-eaten documents

unraveling the skein of tales half-truths outright lies

empty as a drum excoriated and left to dry in the sun

the skin of memory withered and desiccated faintly

tattooed by years of interpolations and translations

until the thing hanging from the tree limb 

surrounded by thick clusters of gnats and green winged flies

that thing shaking ever so slightly as if whispering

to the afternoon breezes that thing almost transparent

and weightless that thing is memory itself repository

of a hundred thousand unwritten histories and languages

touch it and it crumbles to dust particles so minute

go back to sleep dear heart wander no more this flat earth

underneath where dreams are spun put the head

and when your eyes are closed decipher then the rock

read aloud the countless fabrications of archaic myth

raveling as you do the punctuations of thought

senseless meanderings in the grammar book of time

Monkey! pray tell what is the cause of grief?

look in the maps of water in the florid designs of air

are there places of pleasure and pain hidden there

are there ascensions to heaven or descents to hell

described in vivid detail in those vast mappings?

looking up from my little bed what do I discern

but the hollowed shells of deities who have abandoned

their definitions to become all ethereal as One 

they have transcended the origins of the body

leaving us to do battle with the shapes of ire and envy

cleaving from the one its firm trunk and from the other

its abundant and beautiful head of hair        AOI
vapors scintillating in the instant of pure dissolution

once names and geographies rich and pornographic

supple identities of paramours and veils and tombs

for whom we die for and inscribe great poems

that involve centuries of longing and seeking for what

Monkey! pray tell what is the cause of sorrow?

writing everything that has ever been experienced

translating it interpreting it misunderstanding it

never comprehending what so impassions the intellect 

why it ever falls short of itself in a yellow mass

do we appeal to the diacritic or summon the circumflex

and put everything in quotation marks or italics

to emphasize what remains enigmatic 

do we hold the mirror to the script to misread it

to make it waver and turn liquid and run through space

does the end of the day bring us to grief 

another twenty four hours spent in vain

biting our knuckles regretting the parried sword

that has brought the enemy down again and again

shadow plays performed incessantly to explain what

                 AOI

how many clouds have passed since we last met

and shall we ever meet again you on that border and

I on the opposite shore hands aloft waving weaving 

intricacies of wind and bloom the flowering of breath

in me you transient and insubstantial fleeting as unseen

air puffed over the heads of dandelions in you me however

wavering weaving transient as ash dispersed over the Himalayas 

we are come to naught to silences beyond silence unmarked

as space in its inception remains unmarked nameless

circles circling the Wheel of birth and death that turning

gives us light and turning returns us to darkness and for all

that we seem to remember conversations in water and air

hands forming constellations of myth and childhood distances

encumbered only by the shadow of one another traversing

the great road that wends over the hill into the vast dry plain 

where imagined cities shimmer for an instant only then revert

to ant heaps pocking the arid terrain of the archaic planet 

clouds shuddering above changing shape ceaselessly becoming

now fire now cold now longing now nothingness of sleep 

seem to remember something else an argument a bickering

over what a coin a girl a wager to learn something else 

to overcome the body and its sources to merge somehow

the other with its other in a labyrinth of mirrors and light

coming and going calling out to the hollows and receiving echoes 

back legends shreds of a tale scraps of a recollection about 

when there was a great fight and either side weeping and 

menacing night starless and perfect to wind its shroud around

the multiplied husks shells exoskeletons dried pods blown

like a dust of migraines in all directions reddening denser

than before when there was the other tale to tell and the seers 

who came down the mountain with the unknown one she

in white raiment who stepped like the moon across the vast

a riddle of otherness to touch a flake a petal of albescent

material such a thing and the brothers you and I in formation

opposites to each other yet knowing which of us would speak 

and which silently would take and the quarrel that would ensue

and heights and depths flowing and surging like an invisible 

water issuing mysteriously out of the oracle’s mouth a silken

thread linking rust to the aching in the heart what else is there

now the countless clouds that have passed since we last saw one

another and the countless more before this will occur again

frightful vision of mendicant gods before them

the enormous red of the warring planet shaking 

like mica or shale in the full sun blaze of noon

brother cutting brother down trajectories of flaming

explosives bursting in the limpid and terse air

cloudless yet thunder roaring sky shattering silence

into its dissonant vowels and blood shed from leaves

consonants in formless clusters choked in the throat

as igneous arrows fly into one eye after another

and the ensuing blindness projects its universality

over the tenebrous and interminable afternoon 

should Monday ever come again will the wash be done

will men in pressed cloth board trains to do business 

there must be better things in our human nature

to obtain than this meat quivering despair and tears

was Kennedy a coward to back down from Cuba

will the end come as a heart shaped mouth yearning

or as a maleficent firecracker the size of our galaxy?

and Markandeya said
came forth the legions of chariots elephants and horses

in array magnificent to behold and not far off the peahen

danced to entice its mate making a drumming sound 

a coterie of gods weary of rolling dice in Kapilavastu

came to peer over the brocaded edge of their cloud-home

and beheld illustrious mortals clash among themselves

making of bright day a furious night thick with missiles

that carpeted the life-giving air and nostril choking dust 

nor were the ladies exempt from the bloodbath but endured

insult rape and ignominious wounds throughout the body

being dragged as chattel into the steaming jungle 

and by twilight a fog of horror hovered over the plain

jackals and birds of prey made feast of human entrails

brains spilled over shields oozing into the clotted earth

everywhere the rent cries and lamentation of mankind

the ruddy blur of sun sank slowly as if in shame in a horizon

no longer visible for the enormity of the crimes committed

that day was as no other in the annals and maimed bards

scarce had voice to find rhyme and meter to fit the catastrophe

“when he sees me in everything and sees everything in me”

                             SHANTI OM

    

                                 XIX

                 CONFESSIO AMANTIS

                                             “I wolde go the middle weie

                                              And wryte a bok between the tweie

                                               Somewhat of lust, somewhat of lore,

                                               That of the lasse or of the more”    

                                                                               John Gower

“Honest, Officer, I only meant to touch her,

         that’s all, please”

my first galactic girlfriend she’s the one

in the scottish plaid pinafore and large gold safety pin

an excellent example of the feminine declension

she was the perpetrator of small sacrileges                                                

risen from the Dictyean realm her face flush pink

the origins of celestial body mechanics a smile

darkly emerging from oblivion’s bleak hotel

to hold her heaven spread its diaphanous down

and what else could matter but the moment 

of the dance when lights out the song ethereal

wafted us to the world before the pyramids

where oceans and planets and jungles merged

not a thought existed only tingling the strand of hair

on the cheek teasing setting the trance in motion

soft perfume striations of ultramarine light a fog

of intentions extinguished the bicameral mind 

apollonian and dionysian fused into an orchestra

of muted horns strings and massive distances

barely aware of movement the feet shifted steppes

feathery puffs of heat the sweat breakout clutching

tightly to the breast the reorientation of existence

mythiform dreams faint tint of ether globes of helium

the gradual disappearance of red becoming blank

the whitest pale imaginable skin melting like snow

drifting into colonies of remote tropical orgasm

to never wake again green somnolence buzzing 

situated at the corner of 1^st avenue and 2nd street SW

Webber & Judd’s drug store & suspended from the entrance

above the sidewalk the four-faced clock like the faces

of Brahma directing the traffic of that busy bus-stop  

in all quarters of the universe one had but to wait

for the moment to ring for the world to recommence

and in the back room colognes and cherry cokes

afternoon date with cashmere sweater and fake pearls

twilight in eyes seagreen plundered by endlessness 

a longing that can never be defined and growing up

finds so much more involved with wind-tossed tresses  

bright lip coloring and scanty in and out see through 

the atomized perfection of a foreign scent and shapes

of pure distance undulating through magazine pages

arrived from far off Krete mysterious of small words

evoking something ineffable and terrible at the same time

wearing nothing more than the imagination of skin

and the wild hair that belongs to the empress Theodora 

in the Annunziata position in some wayward fane

nostrils flaring lids half-shut mouth parted inviting

the god who created her to undress her with a kiss

breathlessly narcotic a library of lush voluptuousness

the secrets of the body yet be recognized and cataloged 

fluted winds bearing aloft the discarded pink lingerie

musk and libidinous alcohol clouding the profundities

of her deathless eyes in which an insane Jerusalem lists

the ungovernable hypothesis of her rampant sexuality

pure myth and delusion of the mortal error in its sun

towers of knowledge turned to dust by her whims

evidence of a carnal world tropical and swarming

in the incarnadine polish of her finger- and toenails

reckless in the way she walks utter snake of deceit

she’s no one you’d ever introduce to the home folks

in shady byways dirty alleys behind the lilac hedges

she ditches her immortal shadow for a fool’s embrace

in the back rows of darkened movie theaters abandoned

she flings herself in the arms of depraved truant Lords

symbolizing her touch with a dozen briar pricked roses

endlessly rutting doll-like in her porcelain perfection

she laughs off worldly wisdom flinging her burnished locks

sticking a tongue out lolling and wagging the biggest tease

pretending to own the alluring resonances of Echo

hers are the hiss the buzz and the shh of impure sounds 

she is Mind in all its chromatic and unending plurality

for she is one troubling multiform thought a noetic city

she is intellect razed to the ground green turpentine

celestial vagabond protean innocence in a seashell

making music of a mercurial syntax all loose ends

nothing that ever begins a shifting red envelope of breath

looping through the interstices of emotional finales

spreading a perpetual haze over just and right thinking  

ultimately the drum dum-dum of a tattooed obsession

writing the syllable of her name over and over in helium

goddess of tautology and infernal boredom sex-play

kinematic incandescence in a ballet of ruptured organs

frenzy of silent consonants to enunciate the ineffable

shoo-shoo diptych cast in abstract oils and acrylics 

splattered cosmically over a canvas of dead neurons

can she never be other than the fixed infatuation of infinity

dappled naked light years of forever coming into being

perpetuum mobile pornographicum doo-wop shhboom!

I confess that I am forever ensnared raptured to death

with her who is whatever you name it blitz & holocaust

the functionless toy-box exploding forever in the brain

to have at her to snatch the goal before it finishes to be

encircled by the moon of her ninety nine diphthongs

to be inside out within her entrails budding madness

planting  symbologies of extra planetary rotations

wearing her cosmetics her jewelry her flaming underclothes

going up and down the heavenly stair with an empty birdcage

knowing I am lost to have her condemned by society 

for reciting ad nauseam love letters I have sent her

all returned unread crossed out crumpled and illegible

why am I confessing this to you Officer I only touched

that soft unnamable spot a couple of times harmless

she flips out when I draw near with my magnifying glass

with my electric scissors with my hot tongs and teeth

why is it am I so obsessed with this amalgam of stardust

and moondrift this lunatic double vision mirror image

of my narcissistic self in the cross hairs of a lost illusion

intangible as all passions are it is not love it is not anything

like love I suffer because I have never been in love with her

only the devouring end-all sensation of a violent itch

purulent nerve bongs going off up and down the spine

I wanna go yadda ta dadda yadda ta dadda inside her

and then as the One we were forever meant to be Wild!

read together in perfect unison the Brahma Sutra sotto voce

being inextricably the suchness of our own singularities

a-swoon in her massive hair dying of her pizza-red lip gloss

shaking with the quatrains that riddle to excess her memory

how can we ever be other than the Other we seem to be

I am a shadow vomiting everything I ever knew about her

it is not love it is not anything like love it is Repulsion

it is the downside of occidental philosophy the master negative

through which one perceives the universe from its conclusion

backwards into the multiple still frames of instamatic red

which is the color she endows to her trillion devotees

and I am the chosen of so many myriads the one to die

first in the stampede out of the Temple of Isis ah Glory!

I am with her and she is with me in Webber & Judd’s drugstore

the four faces of Brahma are witness to our celebration

we share one table one chair one glass one plate one straw

unidimensional in our complete otherness no one sees us

what we are is the ripple in the glass the heat in the ice

the cigarette left burning on the edge of time the smoke

which can never return and she that draws the invisible

through the vast emptiness we leave after our love-making

it is one day past the Monday of 1956 and there is nothing

drool synergy magma insane buzz of moths around the lamp

I confess to shadowing her on the porches of Attica and on to

the Ionian shores where Thales sat and opined about the then

known Kosmos star stuff ether fire water air substances and

earth hidden behind a panoply of rusted weapons leftovers

from the Trojan debacle I sniffed her out of the tamarisk and

stalked her night day in and out of music venues used car lots

hotel basements hospital cafeterias trick shops and finally

cornered her behind a shut down 5 & 10 store outside of

Damascus and if I touched her there Officer if I lay a single

finger on her I swear to Venus it was just that the slightest

graze of the fingertip I didn’t mean to make her howl I didn’t

want her to go on all fours barking like a diseased Maenad 

I wanted her to be all soft like cushions or lush carpets contours 

and undulations perfumes of night musk of oriental decay

not this effervescent post puberty madness rabid and making

like a dog on a fire hydrant and I confess only to watching

her dissolute and dissolving in the thousand degree heat 

of her disorientation No I didn’t lay a hand on her and 

it was never anything like love that made me do it No it

was aggravated and forlorn an absence of  humanity a 

detachment from error Yes more like resigning the self

to the high noon sun shedding the layers of ego and desire

distant from any shade lidless blind to the mind’s purulent

wound from which the multiple worlds of illusion and history

trickle down the skin No it was never love never only the obsession

to read and write and destroy what has been written and blank

Yes to be blank omniscient dead senseless to oncoming light

to breath uninformed shapeless drifting drifting drifting

next door to Webber & Judd’s was the bookstore 

of Lucy wilder gateway to the universe of so-called

literature modern library editions of Chaucer Dante

Rabelais Gibbon Joyce and Faulkner and around 

the corner on the same block was the imposing yellow

granite Plummer Building of the Mayo Clinic with

its impressive lobby dark any time of year and busy

with practitioners of Aesculapius and the multitude

of sick from all quarters of the universe and across

the street was the 14 floor Kahler Hotel and beneath

linking those two structures and other hospitals as well

a mysterious marble tunnel haven in winter for lovers

to get out of the cold and play kissing games and that

was just what we did enraptured and innocent then

bewildered but certain that this was the force of Love

the commanding force of the galaxy the secret kindling

of the fire that makes music 

pulled back the quiver and let fly the shaft

directly to the heart it flew and made target

in front of the county courthouse was a civil war cannon

and down the gentle slope across the street up a bit

was the grand sandstone public library with its large

reading room and great windows all about that let in

the sun whilst one studied at one of the tables surrounded

by multiple volumes bound in green or red leather of 

encyclopedias and dictionaries and numerous books

of reference covering all fields of learning 

distracted by the presence of one another looking up

too frequently from the pages of the latin grammar

her face like a valentine or so it struck his fancy to be

how brief seemed the afternoons when yearning was afoot

what mysteries were invoked by the merest touch of

skin against skin and both went back to where shelves

and shelves of books hid their bodies from view and

thence lip met lip and kissing profound to take away

the very breath dizzying between titles such as The Loom

of Language or Modern Psychology and thereupon

recovered for a minute or two but then went back 

and delved in the Secret 

never again was the labyrinth so intricate

they called it “going steady” the first intensities

that drained the senses and caused the blood to flare

mooning idiotically over the proverbial soda

never for an instant wanting to be out of touch

with the inane the insane provoked to acts of

legend held sway and echo and her Muse

and the riot of small deities who prick and itch

thus do I confess to have been a victim

and from that time Officer have been lured

by the sirens’ song and gone out of the mind

seeking to touch what can never be possessed

                                         

                                “For every man his oghne wone

                                  After the lust of his assay

                                   The vice or vertu chese may”

                              XX  

                  THE MIASMA

Κλυταιμνήστρα

has forever flown the ancient mess a forlorn

adjective subject to blank periods of excess

the thickened plot the cloud smitten ovarian 

flight in what subjunctive mood stress howls

wildly like hair in arrears mirrored in pools

checkered a life spent fuming outside the gate

flimsy cloth tattered the demon panting his

own out to flatter her into criminal postures

heading a cast of Argive minions too flunked

to shape any kind of future in the alloy mines

or simply putting the accent on her mind wows

the audience stunted by evenings of despair

pouring their wine into caskets and greaves

once the proud gear of dust mired warriors

now he comes back the king ruddy with gore

with his little Cassie off the ship up the hilly

path gravel strewn and white by moonlight

to the palace what a greeting tables packed

with sweet meats viands custards flaring pies

goblets of heady booze ichor thick like black

ink downed and then to the bath half plowed

no wits left to be seized as the gods would have

it by fate’s dotty little hand ax gripped and 

there you have it blood outing it like water

through a sieve so goes his soul the damned

(variation 1)

the short the eager and the feather cracker
bats flying thick as gnats at the wall
stories like doors feathered for safeway
while most tales flake mica densely
other trials flue fake gemstones dank
sublorned the idiot paces heaving stones
the ball the beaver and the future creaker
flats crying flayed morosely dumb steel
widgets humped by bathing flails ahoy
seasweeps gill ferns cresting violently
til noon drunks chipping at the moon
distill yet another history full of feats
featured in the animated version for krill
thunk dumping shafts of red twill crap out
crepe papered the sill's battered window
weeps her lust hubby downed by bumstead
mortar skulls the bull as hunk and an ether
breath foils the failed screwstump driver
unless breasts torn from flames smoke
rerun endless looping carnivorous domes
et dit dot wadda ladda merde moo shoo

(variation 2)

Sweetums, come home!

don’t leave me in the dumps to wail and moan

uncle Aegisthus done paint me up with war-black

saying bitter times gonna come coiled and frilled

like a flapper doo-wop shunting the hose up

my legs a finery of nylon seamless as the sun’s rupture

and dreaming all moon-beamy smarmed afternoons

on end drinking this swill poison and hit my veins

all hard to the spine up I go erect as a queen

you just say the word and I’ll do the old Goat song

tragedy from the start palaces like labyrinth

night dark even at noon thick curtained and sealed

like a jailhouse in Albuquerque so’s not to let

the light in that reveals sinners us all 

hymn-spouting with the dead organ grinder

and his little Monkey scarlet nosed bobbing

up and down the Attic escalator

or so says Aeschylus in his crupper

cupped to the brim by acid and taped lies

dulcet tones never scored

(variation 3)

pale I am the wan blanched frail the little

lunar thing spent whiter than sacrificial stones

lying all scattered hair loosed to the winds

who’ll ever say that’s me the flitting image 

willow thin in the reflecting glass who’ll

ever say they knew me in the grass and dark

of a night far off in Sparta daughter of the swan

Leda flirted and betrayed by the big Man-god

ah that was the other life sore times a gone

born and sacked and dragged over the waves

fit for a night of anger in the cellars of the heart

just so tired of the play strutting and ranting

on this paper stage tie a sheet around him while

he’s in the tub and stab the life out of him nasty

cocker that he was bringing that Trojan vamp

all outta her mind too the rave and say what’s

that song upstairs is that the Erinyes practising

their chorus for the final act when I paler yet

(variation 4)

what a romp the both of ‘em according to Homer

calls it the miasma the gore haunted night curse

o’ the Atreids mummers decked out in death’s

worsted flannels and fired up for a slaying song

moon light sonata pig trotters bladder wart 

eye brightener you name it called into play 

the broth simmering in the brain a plot to ploy

fumous discord fidgeting little deities pulling

hair by hair out of the rattling heads mown

like flowers of grief all over Persephone’s lawn

crimson eddied the fateful stream running through

it the floss and scrum she’d a pulled it out had

the chance to give a life away and the winds

that didn’t move the boats and poor little Iphie

boy that made her cry and angry man was she 

ever waiting for him to come home one night

top of the stairs with an arsenal to bleed an army

the oaf swilled to the chops dumber than a rock

he plunges into the vat and gets it just like that

all numb the curtains thicken and plead

(variation 5)

c’est triste la gloire fanée les mémoires anéanties

pourquoi suivre ce chemin de rochers et pluie

there’s no room left in my heart just a waste

of nettles and sky blown heather colorless fade

night swarm of silent furies down-sweeping 

into the mind’s bleak atrium where diddle Iphie

used to play suppliant roaming hades now 

an orphan blasted by the storm’s aggressive mutiny

all them sailors and captains buckling swords up 

for the kill on some vast cliff land a hundred years

from here just ‘cuz Menelaus took it in his gut

to claim Helen for his the smarmy bastard

and I’m just a floor of empty rooms unlit and 

windows where my body dries wasting for a day

when sunless the tragedy will have its gloat 

gravel minded with cities of sand and grit

to fall towers bastions harems crenellated walls

the whole smithereened to bits tooth and nail

cups of bile I ooze and pour the bitch her due

that maven Cassie torn in her windy threnody

Ἀγαμέμνων

very steadfast with a little bit of soda his filament

a tear drop thinks tragicity a mere epitome of doubt

greekly sparking his antecedent is dense in upper land

hasn’t the matter some hand in the myth of echo or

later seemed to crust a valuable entity shipping out

and what quarrel with Thetis’s son stole Briseis and

plunked her in his tent fuming the rageful sod so big

and haughty spear demon caused even greater ruin

a whole era masked in his gold persona not deeming

others in his way driving his car forty horse down the

plank and Boom back to sea watching behind the Burn

while back home brewing something maleficent dark

wayward souls barking hoarsely in the reedy fens

can ancient books reverse his unforetold fortune nay

home rent night sick the fool in his trust cups his soul

strained by envy’s tridented ghoul and haply up stairs

to the bath climbs the churlish dog his end undivided

growling wrapped in crimson soaked sheets his corpse

(variation 1)

Oh bury me not on the lone prairie dumped it 

were it not for the kids Orestes and Elektra vengeance

would not a written book be the players in their cothurns

and chitons like well draped linen haberdashers chittering

in an attic dialect about the main article while the splash

muffled in the bath receives little or no attention the epic

development writ in blood on now desiccated parchment

oh what the hell ivy girt verse in running trochaics 

tongue lashed diphthongs and a rumor of envy amok

death’s ruddy firmament with its massive cancer growths

like dendra issuing from the miasma and hybris of it all

the messengers themselves caked in offal and pus 

riding bony nags across the brimstone paths 

talking with their rudderless mouths about the Ruin

flashpoints of little consequence the bitter alimony

due to the still living in their silken rippling skins

(variation 2)

Mein junges Leben hat ein End schwerpunkt

all knives and smiles the cloaca gang comes at me 

in dreams surfeit of obbligato and stress always

violence in the least word a fixation on the girls

took what I could when I could in the field and the

sea roaring echoless las muchas muertes colloidal

collateral conjunctive you name it the spawn of hell

furious and atrabilious of a generous dawn the rosy

fingered bitch scrofulous scorbutic ant heap 

of the human mind labyrinthine uterine trench

delicacies to the contrary what did the playwright

know and how many acts and scenes to spill blood

and mop the floor and dust the mantel piece and 

sell the books and who’s making all those speeches

flowery ornate and greek especially greek why

the way they stumble over the deck chairs arms

raised high and appeal to a chorus of katydids

for the final runrun reversal of fortune AOI

(variation 3)

Akagamunaš from the fair uplands where heather

blooms purple and hyacinth vies with narcissus

thither too am I known strongest of Mycenean

kings and golden mask and ornate curled beard

you know me by these marks and off to Troyland

I wended with my bro’ cuckold Menelaus fought

there we did ten best years of our lives and cursed

the priest I did and claimed Achilles’ girl as my prize

damn the lot of them blffstxxx! watching sea’s angry

roiling waves bile-green eat the beach of its beauty

and Cassandra too earn for my keep mad thing that

she was standing atop the stairs doing the future rant

beware them Greeks and their foul smelling restaurants

well wouldn’t she get it in the end her tongue still lolling

toppling down the stairway all threnody and hums

ain’t nothing I can do to push back the black curtain

to keep out the hive of insects anxious to have at my eyes

to on my knees beseech Klytie to hold off her wrath

it’s all miasma the dessert of the gods blffstxxx!

(variation 4)

whiplash grammar viaduct to the seven heavens of legend

lore strum strum strumming the ancient lyre for a verse

or two Oh tell me Muse-y all about him Master Bigger

king of Mycene the lion-gated how many his gilded masks

how far he’d go warring fiercely haughty arrogant bastard

sniffing in the offal for an image of his own ruination

out there among those damned by hybris head-down in mire

the polis on his back like an empty attic wind blown dusty

him just heaving his guts out in the tub mercilessly done in

by his floss-haired honey of so many years now a serpent

hissing directives in his deaf ear and celebrating a mass

piqued to hate by some uninformed eye in the wall

that he did this and that on such and such a time who knows

exactly where and the cliffs roared the secret to the skies

and some goddess always on the hunt to off some guy

took it to heart and had herself dreamed into the chamber

histing her hussy little skirts and Pow! so he gets it 

all for a bit of catharsis that makes the audience feel “good”

and they pass around the worn play bill and act shocked grieved

miffed and it’s winter outside and the snow has begun falling

really hard in mile high drifts burying the land of plenty

(variation 5)

hasn’t many years to go before and language strung out

on its variable loom how to catch with any precision this

epic sense now all but lost in cloud works suchness and

viability singing high the notes and drumming palms out

beneath the heat of day heights of drowsy silver splendor

making love on the sandy spit embracing the unfathomable

waters of now longing has its distance and an algebra of azure

tilting deep into the delta functionless as chrome in light

to regard  air where it is most narrow where the heavens

seem to barely weigh and suddenly the attack dazzling

crimson splashes over the canvas of pure abstraction why

is this falling why is the mouth filled with liquid salt so very

fuzzy in the scheme of irregular verbs and shame faced 

the one who is most familiar is the stranger Herself she

who sparkles in the fission of destiny like no other resembling

the at once new attitude of the recent dead in their insignia

of marine astrology and isn’t that even the extra inch one

had never surrendered unless to suspicions of nostalgia

when echo is the slightest reverberation in glass the tin-tin

of an all but forgotten childhood in the mountains of vertigo

Ἐρῑνύες

furious as debacle in mirror-spin they come rushing

through the tiny funnel at the bottom of Olympus

chthonic and infernal goddesses three wailing shreee!

one for the number it takes night to complete 

two for the excess of time after eternity has ended

three for the hour after death which is forever

they dance the wild moonlight avenging human error

mostly words committed the wrong direction sounds

hissing sibilant in the unholy eve promises unkept

syzygy buzzing dreams rent in two and doubled over

sheets sopped with the draining sweat of madness

is it ever pure are there dewfalls of utter innocence

does grass at first understand then by mid morn fail

to comprehend the lesson of unerring light that storms

the eye crazing the demonic urge to overcome the good

ululating souls in despair hanging from invisible limbs

vowels of distracted impurity bleeding from the leaf

black is all they see black black black black black 

and when the next day comes which is never and 

if a new light signals on the anatolian hill 

and if a new light                                        shreee!

(variation 1)

Alecto the unnamable beware!

smothered in kisses greets Sweetums at the door

shuts the windows that open on the periphery

turns on the gas and lights the match

and all the books in the house turn to cinders

and the puddle on the floor hisses and steams

and the stairs give way to the Stygian portal

what did I tell you?

it’s all your fault                 you didn’t listen

(variation 2)

Megaera grudging you your existence

stomps on the marble base of your lies

shatters your omniscience with a single flit!

groveling at the hem of her peplos you whine

begging for one more chance and her furious wings

whip up a cyclone around your senseless head

not even Athena with her kind grey eyes

can come to your ransom, Joe

you’ve forfeited everything 

it’s not a bible it’s not a mayan inscription

it’s not archeological evidence it’s not the fourth dimension

it’s not anything at all not even the long ride home

Sunday evenings when you didn’t know where you were

(variation 3)

Tisiphone vengeful destruction

there is no aftermath no other worldly reckoning

only the destroyed cities of man

the cadillac the chevrolet the pontiac and the mercedes-benz

still smoldering in their great metallic graveyard

gone the famous purple haze

gone the peace prize and the poet laureate

nothing but shibboleth and doggerel and maniacs

carrying portable nation states underarm

ready to blow up at the least suggestion

and the alphabet and the dewey decimal system

and the library of congress cataloging rules

all turned to nonsense in the enormous waste yard

where incinerators burn 24 hours a day

ridding the world of its pockmarked histories

in a fuming disregard for manners and science

blot out the names Κλυταιμνήστρα and Ἀγαμέμνων

erase the stock exchange and the diplomatic portfolio

let Ὀρέστης have his day!

“Oυκ ειμι Ὀρέστης!

                                        XXI

                THE TRANSFORMATIVE VISION

                                            “… for the essence of the transformative vision

                                      is that the sufferings of history themselves constitute

                                      the process of transformation”

                                                                           Josė Argüelles

under Indra’s white parasol you worded

whatever it was you meant to say in dream speech

              countless times wrestling with your demons

cut glass unfaithful girlfriends bad acid trips

drunken driving above all 

          suspended in your last year of college “pot bust”

or staggering home shoeless after a jazz night

    in the unconscious 

            how could I make out your face screwed

oddly into the black wall of time evanescent 

                      it was mine as well impossible to divine

the truth of the hour the numberless minutes

from the time we were born

      until that afternoon on a San Francisco street corner

                      ave atque vale

                the hollyhocks and painted stones 

that lined the driveway      the folding chairs where we sat

waiting        the gravel and the plum tree in flower

and on the other side the weeping willow’s mystery

          who would be the first 

               dead from the start in our Mexican shirts

to proceed into that endless tunnel

                  sending back nothing not even an echo

illuminated windows where history occurred

                  the successive empires of sand and glass

tabulations in Linear B or mayan hieroglyph

                where the one is greater than the ten

and all the grass in the world will not your finger hide

assumptions about the larger sky where cloud states

                transform willy nilly all afternoon

come evening the tin can cries in the hidden alley way

          voices smaller still huddle within the leaf

something sick between the covers a trembling lapse

        envisions one dimension after another

proceeding to the nth infinity of post-modern time

         let me hold you shaking ever so minutely

eyes turned inside out and nowhere to find the sun

          that was the time of the long-bow and

the huntress keen Diana the goddess her aim

for sure was at you glorious stag in your summer

       brimming to release number from the mortal count

and the afternoon was never long enough its song

          like a gorgeous red thread leading out

through the empty palace on to the meadow

       which the planets magnify with light by day

was the song we would always and ever remember

         the pyramids the silver plane the jungle wet with rain

we both agreed that history has come to an end

man had exhausted his ability to perfect himself

         beside the polished machines of τεχνη

lay in small muddy pools the rudiments of his soul

            bits of sparkling mica and cheap rhinestones 

this the poem we will write together both in this world

               and from the other this the shattered epic

fragments of paean myth and hymn floral games lyric

         a word here a phrase there the archaic deconstructed

whole echelons of unremembered verse 

                          see! circling like great birds of memory

in the adumbrating heavens of Thoth the mercurial spirits

                 like troubadours who translate in all tongues

longings the immense trajectories of galactic yearning

        to wake and perhaps never to wake again

beside the Other in some cryptic depth labyrinthine

         the shadowy form of the enormous Unfulfilled

dizzy from such heights drowsy splendor imagining

ports of a meridian greatness teeming with gods

          and warehouses with the merchandise of beauty

maps unfolding over lawns of chthonic mystery

           showing us where to go in sleep and how

to revive the recollection of the Underworld journey

        encounters with beings masked and unmasked

capable of narrating endlessly the epos of the soul

          in its struggles to free itself from the mind’s 

purgatorial prison house however enticing

           and there we were in the midst of shadows

playing for keeps with a grammar of narrowing air 

            flowers fields trees and rivers commanded

by hosts of bees and other winged sprites

          to breathe! azure indigo and pure blue

suddenly you inherited a Toltec stone and became

         your own idol and marched in processions

of brightly painted fans and quetzal feathers

vaticinations no one but you could understand!

      let me hold you shaking ever so minutely

in the center of town bustling below the four-faced clock

    we shone oracular and strange perceiving

 in all directions an exciting destiny was approaching

         women shining with lustrous waters

whose wild and white bodies were ready to embrace

holy mendicants prattling riddles about the end of time

           or with warnings about the next invention

deities to ordinary beings invisible to us

           like vast opened doors of language and thought

how could we sleep the eight hours of night

       how could we sit in on lessons of geography

and history knowing them to be hallucinatory junkyards 

          were we not the mayan twins Hunahpu and Xbalanque

the vedic Ashvins or the Dioscuri Castor and Pollux     

      abiding in golden chariots symbolizing sunrise and sunset

trees hills birds everything even the underworld

         was growing bigger and farther from us 

and we were in a swirling reddening and wild

          every minute was a myth a diagram to puzzle

and then to destroy repeatedly in our amaze

    when would we go to the ant hill when would we

hunt and when would we be returned to the jungle

         I remember waking one hot summer morning

the pool with its jasmine fragrance and the sky

scudding clouds calling us remotely

         we walked unconscious from the ant heap

and went into the waters and for seven years swam

        and tired of the waters we lay on the sands and dried

another seven years and adolescents big eyed and curious

we became either one or nothing in school with maps

          compasses feathers great black boards

upon which were written the rules of all languages

          you had a dizzy spell a nose bleed your eyes rolled back

      let me hold you shaking ever so minutely

I cradled your head afraid of the oncoming darkness

       if someone called us it was the avatar behind the door

what were we to do which was the book to learn

              there was music fife and drum and viol a voice

singing in a swooning rush we understood it

            

in the next life the one that follows the residence 

in the House of Darkness             in the life that follows

the long afternoons in the running grass

or in the life that suddenly commences in glass

                rippling through large shadows

in the sky formations that occur in the eye

    of the Nymph Echo                wherever there is talk

of what happened before                 listen!

          in the veins of the cyclopean walls

voices multiple discordant                    

          that is the lesson of history

                   there is an edge to sound and beyond that

how many times did we walk to the library

        chattering like howler monkeys 

              running our fingers along the rim of time

watching the four seasons revolve in half a minute

before our very eyes    white pink green yellow    

                 and invisible cascades falling on marble

splashing liquid orients in the small air

                              walk to the library 

the lesson of history and memorized

              orationes of Cicero gesta of Caesar

and between the pages you entered the 4^th dimension

      and wrote back after the millennium how you missed me

we took x-rays of our favorite city

         we would never be lost without it

if we fell asleep during the reading

              the teacher’s mesmerizing sibilance 

it was among the hedges in the back yard where we woke 

still hearing her sybilline verses urging us 

             and the rusty sound of a lawnmower

going over and over like a mantra in the ear

           winged insects and the distinct whisper of heat

what a summer that was and the stars!

 “The corresponding development of Mercator’s projection system

(1541), in which terrestrial geography is plotted into squares, aided

in the transformation of nature from a wilderness into an intellectual

field-pattern, and finally into real estate.”

                 One Death and Seven Death defeated

Xibalba destroyed in the instant your nose stopped bleeding

           in a flash everything happens synapses synergy wave lengths

the great wall the bottomless cistern and the jackals’ dumping yard

           it’s graduation day 1956 pomp and circumstance and

Howling Wolf is singing Smoke Stack Lightning and the material

world is a thing of the past green reveries of a gone 

         looking at the Mississippi valley from the observation deck

of the Burlington Zephyr      this was where La Salle and Father

Hennepin first heard the chattering jay and the Manitou

from his post in the topmost pines wrapping a robe of many snows

                              and five sheets to the wind and feeling immense

the train’s insistent wheels clackety clackety clack 

 trees hills birds everything even the underworld

         was growing bigger and farther from us 

five ten fifteen years hence in the clip of a nail 

    enormous distances yawned open and the you and the me

who we had become talking journeys through colleges

aspirin wards insane crematoria the soul unsewn

        writing book after book on the back of postage stamps 

eating the remains of the small air 

         making the universe narrow a back room for ghosts

and still in our little sailor suits abracadabra on calle Tula

     side street of watery Tenochtitlan counting dust immersions

vacant mansions of the desecrated Aztec moons

         twenty and five years more hence exhausted

staring over the edge of a flower filled barge in Xochimilco

         hesitancies       a largo of sad European music

buffalo spirits tattooed to the vanishing cliffs

                 the long afternoon winding down

traces of the dead teenage Boddhisattva warrior

         in the spiritually dead metal of Colorado

or it is even more remote as far back as 14 billion years

in Saint Mary’s hospital on 2^nd street SW 

         or it is orange blossom sunset color 

pasted like sandalwood over the back yard

     of 11870 Lucille Street      you know where

or it is the many volumes of Toynbee’s Study of History

    or it is nothing more than a footprint in the flowerbed

a conjecture of nightmare 

                                                where does everything go

ashes 

                     a rain of ashes

                                                     an arpeggio

“He pretends to have designed and drawn everything on divine

orders in his travels across the world.”

                                     XXII

                              JUGGERNAUT              

                                             “In Pukār, our town,

                                               A whirling bee can’t tell a woman’s eyes

                                               From a pair of blue flowers

                                               Opening in the moon’s reflection in the water”      

                                                                  Cilappatikāram

everything falls apart

what the mind is capable of 

                and what the mind utterly fails at understanding

are the same 

crushed by the rolling wheels of time  

maze of flowers fragrances bees aiming for the heart

secreto de amor compelled by hundreds of deities

onslaught of stellar whirlpools at midday

richly caparisoned elephants swaying on the royal road

horse drawn chariots without number under yellow canopies

somewhere in their midst king of the gods Indra

dead drunk lurching under the gemmed white parasol

on either side dimensions of apsaras seductive and sweating

blaring conch shells ankle bells clashing cymbals drumming tabla

for a hundred years this noon hour stretches in a riot

of cosmetics kohl henna lip gloss rouge lacquered nails

sandalwood paste smeared thick over bared melon breasts

tintinnation of the high pitched flute and OM chanting

by the thousand bards who line the monarchic thoroughfare

crowds dense with devotion and incense wafting black clouds

into the intense heated air that none can breathe

palm frond fans waved by copper skinned slave girls bought in Chennai

do nothing to quicken the stifling meridian atmosphere 

nobody is anybody in this throng everybody is absent

the crush of human forms wild with witless ecstasy

moves as a tsunami wave across the city in its rectangular math

umbrellas made from the eyelids of rakshasas steam

beneath them courtesans and the hundreds of royal wives wilt

as flowers that can no longer hold their heads in a hot house

an odor of immense and lush decay pervades the festival

a labyrinth of colors saffron yellow mauve violet rose swells

like a mirage produced by the billowing tides of incandescence

blowing out of the doorways of the magnificent palaces

each in form and content like mountains of sugared candy

sultry eyes the pupils baked with desire peer through

the honey scented haze in search of the perfect lover Krishna

the ear fills with the deafening roar of an unseen orchestra

cinema love songs blare out of the cornices of hotels

it is an orient of spectacular and cosmic proportions

heaving buttresses and arches of polished stone into the sky

from which perch richly decked jewel crowned monkey gods 

whose deft paws scatter red powders into the four quarters

of a heaven that seems to be painted like a massive paper

with threatening sulfur streaked thunder clouds rippling

just above the heads of drugged divine kings parading slowly

on their heavy draped mounts everything moving at lizard’s pace

across a sun burnt paving stone in all directions dimensionless

no end to this infinite procession punctuated by the cries of peacocks

dancing in mid afternoon drizzle and the rich aroma of earth

lifting through groves of yellowish-white champa flowers into the ether

nobody has recall of the morning dew stained and flush pink

when the wheel was set into motion by mendicant Brahmans

reciting all four Vedas and the eighteen Puranas in mellifluous tones

when great dust balls arose from stables where the steeds finely

bedighted were readied for the concert of the altars

fuming with holy fires and banners smoking into the horizons

and the enormous pearly sea conch with its roseate ear

set forth the summons resounding as far as Mount Kailas 

where dormant Uma still deep in a sultry perfumed sleep

barely stirred lifting a heavily serpent-braceleted arm

who was there to recount how the cars of the Sun glistened

moving out from night’s ancient mansions into the empyrean

which is the shadowless house of the Unformed One

no one can recall how the day sped from its dark eternity 

through the wakening among red lotus buds and the clamor

of distant oceans echoed in the nymph’s earlets like salt murmur

cascading through the gilded fingers of the Merciful Goddess

and how mushrooming from invisible abodes the crowds

speaking the twenty eight Prakrits of the subcontinent

painted daubed bejeweled and scented with musk and sandal

no one distinguishable from the other dazed in a rain of yellow pollen

hypnotized by the world’s myriad gaudy cinematic allures

among them girls scarcely adolescent hiding in themselves death

wrapped in costly silks and wearing their hair in towering pagoda shapes

on their hips blue lotus blossoms emit intoxicating fragrance

exulting in the enormous reference of smothering heat

who doesn’t swoon at one time or other in the lush tropical syntax

from mid morning when the rush began and the array of ministers

of eunuchs dancers and mimes everyone as if a figure from a mural

on the walls of the Ajanta caves hardly aware of the person

or the passage of time embalmed as it were in great hives

honeycombs of intricate waxen chambers in which gamblers

some with dice others with dominos displayed on great carpets

cheat and swindle one another sweating in costly raiment

and the constant murmur of those paid to enchant and entice

filling the head with tales of colorful nonsense and pornographies

becoming drowsy with alcoholic drinks or sweet opium Bang

a dream a kinetic depiction a deception of being born and living

running before eyes half shut in illusory slumber the acts

of individual existence mummers dressed as humans performing

the various duties and businesses which involve the time of life

money passes hands in great sums women suddenly appear

marvelous and cunning barely clad bodices falling from the breast

rubies ensconced in deep navels nipples heightened to excitement

theft of mind enormous whisperings in endless corridors

being led through the inner sanctum of palaces the size of suburbs

where in the world is the outside where is the unfinished procession

smell of horse manure elephant dung rotting fish undone beds

stained yellow with sex play sashes drawn over wall-length windows

and the drone and hum of bees unraveling girdles and bow-strings

darkening hush passing from consciousness into trance state

flower petals falling inertly from withered victory garlands 

memory now dim of daylight and the throbbing of drum and cymbal

specters of demons flying through the air in a dash to overtake

child brides living goddesses from the Himalayas and rape them

in cloud houses where anvils work to create menacing thunderstorms

no one is possessed of right thinking only error and human delusion

triumph of painted symbols of loud and roaring music of heat

and the broad way now quakes and cracks from the weight

elephants sway drunkenly out of line horses start on rear legs

bells ring dissonantly shrieks of women obsessed with obscenities

what is the cause of being why is the air so narrow and grief

swarms of poets and panegyrists who imitate and paraphrase

the polished epics of yore hem the deity in with their rant and babble

cacophonous ramblings and descriptions of the heretofore 

what should remain ineffable and sublime defiled by wanton words

no one realizes the twilight of existence is upon them 

cages of crickets swing back and forth inside covered wagons 

parrots on the loose mock the two-legged entity with his own tongue

bright plumaged indigo moss-green ruby crested cockatoos

circle above the terrific din covered by rugs of powdery mire

to discern an identity in this miasma to pretend to individuality

on and on the procession continues into defiles shadowed by cliffs

which reach into the heavens and the astrologers with their charts

make predictions of celestial catastrophes that govern a man’s fate

an inebriate laughter spreads contagiously through the throngs

and the girls in whom death dwells slide lasciviously flower bedecked

into the arms of the unsuspecting exchanging long wet kisses

biting the supple throat releasing mephitic discharges deep and sweet

how great is the clangor at its acme which is at the same time its nadir

jesters and buffoons run lithely seeming to be everywhere at once

embracing the women-folk in the round dance the ras-lila of Vrindaban

for a moment everyone feels divine in the awesome presence

of something someone greater than themselves the Unformed One

ears ring with a chancery of harp and lute sounds eyes blissfully close

it seems the ocean is at their very feet prepared to drown them

in the rushing waters of Being for this is the day that never ends

                                                           this is the day that never ends

                                                                                          moonbeams

                                                                     watery azure reflections   

                                                                infinite lulling ripples

                                                             photograph of light

                                                          darkness the indwelling

                                                       secreto de amor

     

the nature of the dream

in the temple of the white elephant

in the temple of the unborn sun                                                 

who is wearing the mask who kneels

before the deity of the swarming bees

who speechless makes appeal to the burning air

to the ghats of purifying baths

that is I in a faint becoming pale and absent

losing memory of any language 

being tossed a shadow wavering on a liquid surface

illusory image of a thought

the utter nothingness of childhood

in what life did I commit this error

in what transitory state did I imagine

and then to come to possess this consciousness

in whose house am I sleeping

do you enter the chamber of silences

drawing the curtains of whisperings

and beside me lie drawing from my breath

the red thread that leads to death

and mouth to mouth confess who you are

the other the blank manifestation

the devotion to the Nameless

wet petals your locks

darken on your white brow

your fingers tighten the chords

of the stringed instrument the first

and third notes strike perfection

together we descend 

inside and out the same being

there is a drizzle of pollen

a lone bird purple plumed cries out

eerie phantoms across the water

echo some indistinct words

fragrance of the yellowish-white champa                                                      

in the temple of the young white god

in the temple of the meridian deity

JAGANNATH

I dreamed we went to the great city Maturai 

in the middle of the night its broad paved ways

teeming with coopers goldsmiths iron mongers

and mendicants who come from up country

seeking refuge in the sanctuary of the Tathagata

separated from each other we became other

ghouls inveigled us into distinct labyrinths

I was taken by the golden goddess who feeds

on the newly dead in the crematoria

and you gone forever 

                                                         “I didn’t know she was a goddess,

                                                          Had I known, I wouldn’t have gone there.”

                                    XXIII

                     THE AMBIGUITIES

                                             “Now may the dawns, the daughters of sky,

                                               shining afar, make a path for man”

                                                                                              Rg Veda

is it from Tiresias we get this news

the who have drowned

the who have survived the passage

the recent dead the unaccounted for 

                 writing this page as if it were the last day

how to go on from here deploring the Taliban

and the paragraph in small print where it says

our immortality be forever denied

what did we think when we arrived in Kabul

walking up and down something called Chicken Street

nothing but rundown shops and sheets of yellowish dust

had Alexander the Great been here before us?

planned to visit Bamian the place of shining light

with its great Buddha statue now blasted to bits 

the itinerary was changed 

sick on a houseboat in lofty Srinagar

at no time in our lives can we ever be sure of anything

the climb up the Himalayas to Leh Ladakh

in a bus held together by rubber bands

breath taking views and sublime Thikse Gompa

and what follows this life if not the unheard Sound

landed in Amritsar holy city of the Sikhs 

felt like an oven air so thick a knife could cut it

the golden temple shimmering in its history

when everything becomes distance and dissolves

                  in a drizzle of yellow pollen                   

beware not to step on the slightest living thing

moving in and out of a hallucinatory traffic

of elephants and ox carts on the way to Agra

vomiting in the fetid bushes outside the Taj Mahal

Shah Jahan washing his sins away 

a picture postcard of the remains of his love

and in the footnotes information about the soul

its whereabouts and a reckoning of its antecedents

but what is to come of it remains unknown

                  had I written sulfuric flames 

instead of yellow pollen

            would the poem be different

and if I declare “I am not Orestes!”

             would the Furies be placated

would there be innuendos undetected

would the past as we remember it be altered

and if I step perchance on an ant heap

to which hell and for how long would I be sent

rather it is four in the morning everywhere

dawn’s prehistoric streaks daub the eastern sky

who wakes us is the turbaned bus driver 

in whose eyes an eternity of shale persists

opaque as a pagoda inscribed in darkness

our destination in the world’s highest mountains

where we will be suffering our karma

is just eight hairpin curves away 

ambiguities that persist a lifetime

why wasn’t the turn to the right taken

why didn’t you choose the one with the red hair

instead of the brunette with freckles

why couldn’t you make up your mind as to which

language to speak with clarity when summoned to court

because the rest of your life you’d be hankering 

after the redhead the she-devil in command of breath

why couldn’t you decide to play the large stringed instrument

why did you linger behind when the rest rushed

with enthusiasm to worship the deity of light

and yet you did settle for the poem about everything

because you could not decide what to leave out

Taliban deplorable Bamian blasted to Buddha obscure

statue bits four in the turbaned eastern driver sky dawn’s

vomiting in shining Mahal fetid hairpin curves paragraph

suffering denied in Kabul immortality small print karma

rubber bands walking itinerary rundown sheets of yellowish 

shops something Srinagar changed houseboat elephant

pollen sulfuric drizzle sick bushes Taj innuendos ant heap

shale lofty pagoda have drowned who have unaccounted

for survived where it says called a visit to anything sure

of a knife so thick dust before Alexander the lives distance

dissolves sublime views like an oven could cut shimmering

temple Great remains its history slightest thing ox Sikhs

living itinerary postcard forever arrived morning light

when the worshipful deity was nowhere to be found 

and day’s waning luster a fade orange pale on marble

twilit passageways into literatures as yet unframed

you were reading sleeping as you dreamed once more

the brother-dream threatened at his isolated desk

ambiguously positioned between metal and paper

what was the weight that gravitated darkly downwards

holding a grammar of silence and looked up and a voice

not recognizable speaking in parables prophetically

denouncing as ever the political delusion will it be

a catastrophe without warning a new system of numbers

flights of flame using only the eyes to direct syntax

between unfiltered spaces when suddenly in thick braids

the red-head who devours men’s breath and heard

a hissing like steam coming out of the envelope held

in her white hand stands erect shadowless before you

ambivalent as to which twin to address which one to 

unravel in a pool of inky liquid undefined words

of a thesaurus dissolved and wrapping a garland of

immense pearls becomes spuriously naked shivering

her great green Kali eyes hypnotic and profound 

begins her serpent tirade using a language of red coral

undoing grain husks that litter the narrowing air

noon spent the syllables become more and more vague

unintelligible sput-sput-sputtering spitting glottal

stops saliva drenched consonant clusters enormous

diphthongs borrowed from vedic times begins to dance

hopping on one leg at first then with both shoving pubis

out inviting the swarms of flying insect deities with its

musky damp odor that fills the room and finally yes

gives the envelope still hissing steam to the brother 

in question the one who invented his own book of genesis

who rising from his desk now arms dripping sweat

papers sticking to the skin involves the other self with

a gesture unique and sublime but ambiguous as to intent

is it the darkness of the unknown hemisphere or the fever

diagnosed as “mother” which is meant by this hyper correction

time slides into an ellipse orbiting his skull which is also

the other brother’s the one talking dialect in rippling glass

a tombstone away from the childhood once shared 

the apparently fragmentary nature of this composition

the apparently fragmentary nature of this composition

who have drowned, the

who have survived the passage, the 

Tiresias a woman for seven years 

has seen these things has suffered for it

and we are both here and not here sacking volumes

for a single reference to verify the light

that summons us through the windows of thought

                       writing this page as if it were the last day

who was a woman for seven long years

a prostitute who understood the language of birds

for striking a pair of mating serpents

the following summer in Morocco

the unmitigated unforgiving darkness 

Tangier Rabat Meknes Casablanca 

infestations of flies garbage piled knee deep curbside

sheer whiteness of the endless noon heat

sluggish ceiling fans named Dido

blind alleys of the medinas and above all

stench of the brightly splattered tanneries

do we have to live through all this again

forlorn beach at Casablanca and the dead aquarium

malformed children begging at the crossways

was that the summer Nixon resigned?

while the king lies in state in a gilded coffin

and above the seamless sky goes on forever

relentlessly azure terse somber 

strong death wish afternoons like this

waking up to the haunting cry of the muezzin

invisible counterpart of the circling gull

concrete barrenness of the airports in the simoon

suffocating poison wind deep yellow dust and sand

to whom do we submit on our knees brows to the ground

just what did Tiresias say to Ulysses?

there are these conflicting versions

is Dante’s the correct one and how will we know

like a super nova it all collapses in an instant

we were never there we were never here

kingdom abandoned by the gods malformed kids

peering through the slats of eternity

ambiguous planets cycling out of orbit 

myths of Atlantis shipwrecks and madness

incomplete maps of the universe 

compass of a fading imagination

ambiguities wherever one turns

indefinable colors 

sleep

one never comes to terms with it

what follows and what is forgotten and the mind 

turning on its own bent axis shifting through purgatories

of sand and red powders looking for the perfect image

to anchor itself to come to rest for a brief moment

when light and the lozenges of a soothing otherness

nothing to no avail keeps moving restless between

two opposing poles to act or to accept and let it be

shifting across topographies of exacerbating heat and

cold by turns mountainous or rolling fetid plains

a savanna or a jungle cries of unknown animals night

splendid beneath the sky of another planet not ours

how did we get here who summoned us what was the intent

to continue traveling sleepless nights in abandoned airdromes 

looking for ticket stubs lost credit cards useless wilting

bouquets or bars at four in the morning lights blinking

rasping cigarette cough talking talking talking to some

Buddha be-alike with great advice about the next

life the one that’s supposed to fulfill enlightenment

writing telephone numbers on the back of match books

looking forlornly out the window at airplanes taxiing

a light drizzle loneliness and the absolute emptiness

of a misunderstood moment which is all moments gathered

in the palm of a mendicant’s hand at the doorway 

wondering if this jacket too tight is really yours shoving

through anxious impatient queues to board still another

aircraft bound for the next existence on the Tunisian coast

where Dido burnt herself and trying to recall exactly

the lines in Virgil but at this hour and in this rush of

dirt and curses memory becomes a sieve a dribbling 

mesh of half-words phrases out of context broken reeds

snatches of melody and lipstick and you cannot recall anything

with the sort of exactitude required for self defense when

you appear mysteriously hailed into a court beneath a

sluggish colonial ceiling fan and dreaming indeed yes this

is a circumstance you hadn’t counted on and peering through

eyelids burnt by too much alcohol and cigarette smoke 

pushed and shoved by others who like you are in the same

state of mind which is to say total confusion and ambiguity

the no this can’t be your body and search all the pockets

graffiti of the brain tissue paper for a tongue gagging on what

is anything ever transmogrified is what we read in the papers 

ever substantiated by the cuneiform original are we headed

straight for one of the bolge of Dante’s inferno not knowing

for what sins and which is the pronoun to employ now addressing

your superiors or others in command and the clouds fill 

the many empty windows and the aircraft lunges & lurches

through powerful wind currents and you think Jesus this is it

But it never is and in a sweat you transfer from this dream

sequence to the next not bothering to see who the passenger

sharing this ride with you is and what you personify and

why you are wearing this mask is open to interpretation

a quetzal bird calls out in the dark of night abject you lower

your head amidst a storm of parasols descending from seventh

heaven to the first levels of the mortal realm powdery mirage

through which cities of antiquity seem to stagger weighted

by the erroneous engines of history the sound of distance itself

crumbling like a ruined tower you can no longer ask yourself

why you are ambling in this rubble of the archaic and the nub

of eternity in the guise of a blasted tree trunk stands in your way

cannot decide which fork of the road to take undecided as ever

if only if only what                     a hotel room with a disheveled

bed and a dirty lavabo         streaks of mud

trying to recall how you got in here without a key 

where are your shoes?

a date with a call girl named Tiresias 

talk of Apollo’s shafts and the fear

dare you sleep in “her” arms?

how many are the recent dead

the consumptives

          those wholly devoured by cancer

bone and brain 

terrifying excess of mortality

you walk gingerly lest you step on the slightest being

hence deserving the naraka of the Jains

in the back room of Webber & Judd’s drug store

sharing a cherry coke and a grilled cheese sandwich

with the call girl of choice the lights dimmed

the windows smoked as by desire

both of you conscious of the ambiguity

of sex roles during intercourse

yet neither of you fully aware 

that you have exchanged identities forever

listening to the small rain patter on the palm leaves

in far off Sri Lanka

the apparently fragmentary nature of this composition

the apparently fragmentary nature of this composition

                                     XXIV

                           DE PROFUNDIS

                                                Nemo sine crimine vivit

the end which is also the beginning   

              come full circle        

“by the grace of Ahuramazda all that we did”

suborned by some nameless deity     

to eat dirt or is it the music

that makes us larger than ourselves

what are the greater entities? 

          what are the depths?

                   what is the Fierce?

in all that we do a lyric madness impels

both absent and present the mind to a further remove

for hours counting , lotus petals dropping , one by one ,

into the fathomless pond , criminally insane deviant ,

perverse darkest bottom , maelstrom of the sea of being ,

howling , storm tossed , indigent , at a loss for words

this is not my domain these are not my Greeks!

fueled by litigious thoughts , rankled feelings , dis

possessed , constantly harassed by , againbite of inwit 

 , moving among the moveless , unformed beings ,

larvae , phantoms , succubi , the incessantly unborn ,

amphibian ancestors of human delusion , prowling ,

snake slips tied around the waist , the Oracle

pronouncing , syllables of unwonted darkness ,

incomprehensible , oonga-boonga , sulfuric wastes ,

in the underground , blasts of miasmic air , pollution , 

adore the goddess in the tiger skin tunic and red eye

she is the Veda beyond the Vedas! Redhead at AMOEBA!

morass of earthly confusion , bedeviled by stinging sprites

that whelm , the conscience with misbegotten deeds ,

shifting from bog to marsh , unillumined  ,the native soul ,

haunted by the tom-tom , of the hourglass drum ,

that heralds , wanton thievery and highway robbery ,

cinnamon and ginger on the tongue , robes of heat ,

around the pounding temples , makes its weary way ,

from birth to rebirth in this , nether gloom , hash ,

shots fired in the unending , night , sacrificial flares,

maidens , tied to stags with enormous antlers , and

decorated with totem skins , and bridal pendants of teeth ,

that dangle to the belly  , white , with soothing ointments

never certain what is,  passing before the exhausted eye ,

to hail a car in this , confounded traffic and , pestilence ,

to remove the self , from the barrage of signals and , red

projectiles , hungry for some , unidentifiable meat a , sugar cake

, the synapses fail to deliver , messages of right thinking ,

laying the body down beside , the centuries’ old banyan tree ,

from which hang , brooding , the , relics of a republic

make no music unless it is the circling of the Spheres!

insane , predestination , fogbound circuits ,  illusory hiatus

, the mind , desperate and impatient , is , a solitary confinement ,

inability to fathom such, depths, and to resurge , employing

whatever , means , broken chassis , arroyos where , tires

still spinning , chariot of the gods , upended , to rebirth , again

the wheel set into , motion , perpetual , turning , burning , 

ultra violet rays ,  gyres that require no language , a thunderstorm ,

what if it lasted , and the afternoon of a life , time , supposing

latest signs , a sky replete with beaches , devastated by desire ,

on the edge , where , everything is sprung , grasses , infancy ,

fingers lost , wooden wagons deserted , sidewalks of culver city ,

small red balls , painted toys in the eye , flight through horizons ,

of smoke , hills of , nostalgia , dead movie actors , riding saw horses ,

how did you get your hair , to look like that, in Pacific Palisades , a ,

swiftly impending sentence, using a pole , the boatman , pushed ,

through the sluggish , waters , listless cargo of recent , dead , all

colors cancelled , is there a special tone , do you spray it , red?

joined a cult , numerous and tiny gods , climbing on Uma’s shoulders ,

RAGAZZA , strutting down the main , drag , moon on each hip , 

bag of unmentionables dangling , strong odor of sex , as if an island ,

cut off , drained of all impulses , left there inert , legs wide , apart ,

seeping darkish stain , evening in all its , sad glows , a dog’s lonesome

whine , doors open and slam , shut , no one in sight , a firefly , solitary ,

hovers over planet , Venus , just above the house , Uma awake but , 

lifeless , trees , cows , verdant meadows , all in a medieval dialect ,

there! up up and away , inside the body , lunar ruins , like white ash ,

four to five tablespoons , let linger for a year , or so , never meant 

to touch , HER , will be harsh , painting the backside with henna , 

mandalas , chakras up the spine , baby Krishna , kohl around his eyes ,

you will from this , point , on , the natural soul moving , between spheres ,

chanting , the way north americans do , we are left saddened , by

circumstances , hair stood on end , chilling , manual evisceration , 

in front of the public, library , lifelike Radha puppet , GOVINDA!

at the end of the special assembly everyone is dismissed sent home

to question nothing walk out of the car move over into the parapet

sit down at the outdoor café smoke a girl who is passing by just now

frequently do things not conscious of fondling the self in public wanting

the woman on the big wall-size poster facing the screen where animated

versions of Rama and Sita are running like crazy through an ovarian 

jungle making hissing and sibilant sounds alternately as in the epic

translation by Valmiki whose name means ant-hill if you are up to a 

cruise in my buick 88 he asks the girl he is smoking who is a pulp and

gracefully demurs the question to a later date maybe in the next hemisphere

when the moon pasted against a large white thigh evocative of high school

love letters sent without a return address but always haunting the song 

as if from DE PROFUNDIS mentions that the girl was just thirteen and

visited by a holy ghost while at matins blanched her eyes turned back 

into the cathedral of her brain and started speaking pidgin to the cassocked

brethren just back from dewfall how can that mean anything being evicted

from heaven the avatar using disjunctive vowels stuttering into his pipe

never would have guessed to inhabit this body in particular or to save 

souls fiction really leaning against the smoke column and she engenders

a sort of hate between them and causally getting up and putting her cinders

out in his eyes calls him Romeo you creep crosses the street despite rush 

hour traffic swiftly speeding heated metal animals all but grazing her

in the nick of time she arrives at the library to look up in the big pictionary

the meaning of the world “bolgia” puts it in her purse applying a heavy

swath of pizza flavored lipstick and nonchalant as any goddess in a sewer

makes her way through the wall drilling into the set of dreams labeled

”for eyes only” and meanwhile the guy is left behind in arrears stomping

out her butts in the corner drug store waiting for the cue that begins

literary discourse it’s only a remedial joke between defrocked academicians

and frustrated linguists a puzzle to make poetry of the ruins of language

moving ever shifting through red spectra into the eerie galactic outback 

where if nothing else longing and its fluted echoes drift infinitely until

                                         SILENCIO!

             

kept walking until we got to November

stopped to rest on the old court house lawn

next to the rusted civil war cannon 

to have a smoke passed around the Lucky Strikes

took a deep puff inhaling into the lungs

how brilliant that instant the sun shone

glinting off the various metal receptacles and glasses

no one could have guessed which of us was already dead

left the cellophane wrappers on the grass

rolled over on the back to take it all in

the enormity of space reduced to this inch

a crucible of fire between the fingers 

trying to remember the poem from this morning

as the nicotine snaked its way through the brain

laughter from some other planet 

maybe a block away below the neon sign

advertising women’s hosiery and lingerie

the poem from this morning snaked its 

between the lingerie and the prosthetic limb

poised against the shop window about 

a planet away just down the street a brain

which of us was already dead you know

next to the rusted civil war wrappers a cannon

between the neon letters of the poem 

this morning already a galaxy away the girls

tittering in their neon lingerie and hosiery

how brilliant the instant sun in an inch

between the fingers smoking to laughter

heard as if from a poem just blocks away

downtown where the course in literature begins

on the steps of the store where they advertise

neon lingerie for the girls tittering in wrappers

tossed carelessly on the autumn grass 

where November walked as far as the old court

a house away from the street where hosiery

tittering the girls in their scotch plaid

and big brass safety pins read the poem about

trying to remember taking the nicotine into deep

the lungs burning smoke going out through the nostrils

thin blue curling columns evanescent

in the instant the sun on its back taking it all 

in the guys chewing blades of grass a dream

You are the highest Letter the unheard Sound!

when the walk as far as November and loud

the civil war cannon makes its echo neon

against the blocks away a planet tittering

girls taking the nicotine deep into their lingerie

where literature begins advertising wrappers

tossed carelessly on the smoking steps 

where laughter now so evanescent as a dim

instant the sun its big brass safety pin

next to the rusted court house the old lawn

remember trying the poem just hours before

chalk dust fingers writing names in the air

across the street from the house where the guy

the first one who got shot accidently died

though it seemed unreal Lucky Strikes passed

around the store where a prosthetic limb

in neon advertises the window deep into the lungs

which of us is already a poem trying 

to remember was it in this life it happened

from the depths too many books so many cries

from the depths forever learning what cannot be taught

from the depths errant shadows yearning for form

from the depths red lotus blue lotus twining air

from the depths which is ending never having begun

from the depths too many books even more cries

from the depths anguish of never leaving the room

from the depths the steps that lead up to nowhere

from the depths the mystical union unpronounced

from the depths the the the the the the the AOI

from the depths the crystal boat on black waters

from the depths rivers of flowers running from the eyes

from the depths the hand of disaccord tied backwards

from the depths the word for mother applied to grass

from the depths the Fierce the glottal stop the anomie

from the depths waking within the rippling glass of echo

from the depths sounding the third and fifth notes of despair

from the depths not understanding what is meant by heaven

from the depths to walk with fire to the edge of time

from the depths leaning over the great Precipice of eternity

from the depths to remain ever dizzy from the first love 

from the depths becoming and never being the mask 

from the depths too many books and a thousand and one cries

from the depths sudden loss of memory and number

from the depths looking up and seeing nothing but red stars

from the depths making one’s way through a soundless music

from the depths from the depths from the depths from the depths

smoking the first cigarette

tasting the first kiss

wet & dark

adore the goddess in the tiger skin tunic and red eye

she is the Veda beyond the Vedas! Redhead at AMOEBA!

          EPILOGUE : FIAT LUX!

lesser than yesterday and the news 

for why do we live in this wise on this wretched planet

cannot they see we are not as they thought

waiting listless on this border by the banks of this slough

each counting the fingers by which we number the days

and dwelling in such constant sorrow for the time that was

a greening spell for a few bright years of light

suchness of the novelty of breath and warmth

hauling our dream boats out of the murk

onto the grassy knolls to map and build a city

as it were the golden plat of imagination and accident

that was when 

that was when if only we could recall with clarity what it was

when the tree grew crookedly out of the sidewalk

and thunder manifested in the midst of day

noons of a different splendor gathering in shade

to decide this that and the other

about who would get the greater share and who the lesser

and the arguing and cursing 

wasn’t that what happened in life

forgetting the origins forgetting the why of being here

never rightly understanding the because of fire

or the passing from branch to branch the illumination

mind that is the bright ornament of the species

literature has nothing to do with it 

will this breath not also fail will not these words

uttered sleepwalking through the labyrinth

do they not lose their meaning and sound

as we embark on the passage across the dark water

or is it the way they set the knives on the table

or the nasturtiums and gardenias in wreathes

placed around the necks of the statues of deities

is it to place Śiva higher than Indra who clipped 

the wings of the mountains

being oblivious of the hotel from whence they came

and diving into medias res created heroes who manned boats

and suffered the storms of fortune far from sweet sleep

and the goddess who hunted them down

how they sheared the shrubbery at eventide

reclining on vast lawns of ether to gaze at the star works

passing in celebration of nothing overhead

or being transformed by burning shafts into beasts

dimly lit by a human consciousness

so many worlds and divagations and ellipses

and books to read and pages to burn

sacrifice a black ram to the sun

place a small ivory bed in the temple of Hera

FIAT LUX!