The Flood
Proud monument:
this City we’ve created.
A little lee against the cold.
How its aerie flag,
lit up with heart-swelling lights,
ripples hypnotically in the winter heights.
Estranged river,
moved by the same currents
as this flag on high,
how you tolerate your feigned taming
by these brash, befouling mites
unaware they emerged from you.
Stretching out from the greater sea,
rippling with cool unrest, a potential energy
unleashed effortlessly,
you solemnly observe these deepening infractions,
as yet assuaged by how quickly they dissipate.
And brother air, stretching out to void,
suffers the giddy metal insects
congesting his blowing emptiness.
Proud species,
spreading their electric grid over
the course of the earth,
even claiming the sky, the water.
Faces of laughter, faces of mirth,
faces of sorrow, faces of woe,
as they skate around and around blindly—
buoyed in love like angels in stasis,
rapt in hate like uncontrollable wildfire,
each mental landscape a world entire:
the infinite in the particular—
unknowingly forming art
whose patterns reveal
Nature frowns
as it reclaims
these lost, insatiable
vessels.
‘They’ve grown unaccountably
headstrong.
They don’t see I in them
or them in I.
Their blind longing
for the realization of my Mystery
is commendable,
and needfully—
beyond me.
But that which enlarges them
also makes them shackle me,
and forget me, and condemn me.
And so: they’ve had their fun.
Their frissons. . . copulations
and decimations.
The promise deferred.
Inexorably, the deal
A tiny manmade light flickering
in the black emptiness
of space,
a caltrop island,
stretching outwards,
Breath dissolving on a windowpane.
Proud City,
standing on a foundation
of impossible achievement, tears,
and ignorance.
How you passed, for a moment,
through the repeating dream.
∆ Appeared in Wild Poets: ‘best of’ (Seattle)
A Poem Lost
After climaxing for the first time three times in quick succession and learning that lovemaking can really be the sweaty primal holy blessing of trashy romance novels and exalted DH Lawrence poems, and after the fourth, which began as successively and seemed to move in infinite awesome strides beyond measure, in a hypnotic give and take, a pitter and patter of exultation and disbelief, illumination and death
I lay face down in a sheen of sweat in the cool world outside the blanket as she stroked my back in the most delicate sweeping gestures with slight fingers that till this day the thought of makes me tremble
I thought of the last solemn day of my journey across America after college: San Diego: the inexplicable old western town on the city’s edge where Mexican blankets in red yellow and white flare in the sun and the smells of dust, dried wood, tobacco and hot peppers pleasantly commingle, where I held on to my solitude while it pained and lashed out, like the adolescence of man, or the first throes of springtime, and everyone seemed as distant and inexplicable as the gestures of pacing speaking adults to a child, yet holy and dear
I thought of those solitary moments that seemed graceful and simple then, and now in a tunnel of nostalgia acquire an even fonder and more cherished quality: purchasing rolling papers, two bags of tobacco and a corn cob pipe from the infinitely distant and dear sales clerk with the antiquated visor and striped shirt in the oldtime tobacco shop unchanged since the days of DH Lawrence, sitting on the bench in the dust outside in the sun, rolling a cigarette while two Texan businessmen with large belt buckles on the bench beside strike up a conversation about how they, too, in youth rolled cigarettes like these, fine tobacco, and now in their old age have grown to smoking cigars: and Ah! how lonely I was, and how I marveled and exulted in my loneliness, and how one can so enjoy, can suffuse oneself in so much untainted pleasure from the simple act of rolling cigarettes in the sun, or watching a bird and eating an ice cream cone, or walking among the dust of the alleys of the antiquated western shops on the outskirts of San Diego, reading dubious passages from a Charles Bukowski collection, about Hemingway, and DH Lawrence, and thinking, that Bukowski! sometimes he’s full of shit, but you gotta hand it to him, simultaneously watching the red of the women’s scarves flash in the sun
I might have made a poem of this
but her touch was
too much
Jazz Wafts
Jazz wafts
through the darkness
of the lake. . .
past hunched trees
and grass
like clumped rice,
tissue-paper clover,
past glazed sand
and gravel
in the road,
forgotten boulders,
past street lamps
and their pale
amber glow.
On a boulder
sits a bottle.
It asks for nothing,
gives nothing in return.
The blank hum of crickets.
“It so happens I am sick of being a man. . .”
I leave the bottle
and walk on,
into the darkness. . .
∆ Appeared in FIRE: No. 14 (Oxford, UK)
Sara
Sunlight.
Her face was narrow.
The luminescent green sea.
Her elegant neck and slight fingers.
Silver jewelry.
To grow up when it was fashionable to be young.
Mistakes and great happiness conquered the world.
This is the impression twisted.
She smiled and talked and took careful inhalations of another
cigarette.
∆ Appeared in FIRE: No. 14 (Oxford, UK)
The Path
Down the path
still water
the fallen birch
like a charm
encased in black glass
moonlight
soft glow of
hidden cabin
∆ Appeared in FIRE: No. 14 (Oxford, UK)
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