poem #685

At the world’s end; A paper house, set on fire
Its majesty wrenched free from the earth
Its spires burned free of their berth
Old men of fairy tales, Screaming from each window
"Save us from each other, Save us from ourselves"
Watching, the house ascends
Into ashes and embers
Into ashes and fireflies

ingress

watched the wheel not moving
bored to selfish anger
i was not a child. this was yesterday.
i rubbed my earlobes, imagined pulse
seconds before and after the pump-action gun in my chest
blows the face off yet another lover
my body holds the light
that seems so visible to others;
risible in my thoughts, so easily spurred,
so commonly spurned

i know the line of her, that string of words
they depend on her for life and happy they are
because she never lets them down
as they leave those lips, more are cloned
to make their way
to where they've been before,
a vast estate inside her skull
the sheer'd energy foaming on her tongue
isn't she lovely, this Venus of the commonplace
is she not unique like everyone else

more tomorrow. and

green tower terrace (on the balcony, with apologies to du fu)

no wind in the trees
a woman walking down the path below

a squirrel scampers
from branch to branch

here is the home
of yet another man

some layers of his life
displayed in heaps and piles

thoughts, ghost memories
beginning in the bedroom

leading through the sliding door
to the pair of chairs outside

and all these conversations
making a haunting aria

their meaning only now
starting to rise and fall

just like the lovely boys
who dwell above

just like the mother and child
who live below

where is the powder and charge
of their doings

all there is, all told
a bicycle unused, an unlit chimenea

sadness overwhelms my senses
i have to close my eyes

to lay on my side
to dream of other days

all of us in this place
restless and never certain

anything but certain
aware of all too much

imago

the small image of the world
embossed in leather
resides rightly behind glass
hiding its secret geometry,
coursing latitudes and longitudes,
majestic oceans, its deep sea basins
full of salty tears and glowing after-life;

great ranges of mountains
enshrouded by cloud banks and cold still air
middens for a slumbering geology
lush valleys bisected by pulsing rivers
bounded always by deserts and tundra,
by horizons of blue and white,
by desolation, by oblivion

an invisible hand controls her,
pinioned between two fat fingers,
rotating inexorably,
suspended above his terrible visage,
gaping maw of the Creator,
perhaps he will swallow her like a grape

sketchbook no.314

interior landscapes

blue and violet cypresses
expressed in chalk
those rolling hills
embossed on soft cream paper

wind and sun a faded wash
black rolling india river-ink
an horizon line of muddled lead
behind a stand of yew

white golden grass forced of
fen and rush in sap-green hues
a still-water pond raw umber banks
mercurial in dampened brush;

a view toward as well as from
each recess filled with harmony
only her humid breath bears softened
the dissent of form and spirit