THE IMPORTANCE OF WORD ASSOCIATION
Being is the tiger,
an unseen appearance before it swallows you whole.
Seeming is the spider
that builds the mansion where Maya hides the tiger.
And you curl into your spider’s blanket and say,
“Yes, there may be other situations. But this one is mine.”
These are words of the white sheep that graze on your tongue, issuing from the edge of your lips to baffle my art.
Belief conceals recognition. Orthodox clichés are sweeter than exotic heresies.
I need a poet to speak your freedom.
“Poetry!” you say. “That factory of idols! Valueless words strung together like cultured pearls. A compromise between the universe and imagination, windy sounds tangled in winter branches. A sheetless bed in a purple room with no light or exit.”
A poem can come from a prophet or a priest or a professor or a philosopher or a physician or a beautician. But only a true poem can feel the sun on your face as the snow commandos parachute in behind enemy lines. A real poem contains stone syllables standing against a rain-striped horizon.
Let me be your pattern. I’ve pawned my pasts, demolished the wall that blocked truth-bearing winds.
To deny my tongue is to strangle your throat.
Together we can be worlds upon a wider world.
Our bronze countenances can besiege the Maya fortress, storm its magic damsel resident therein.
We won’t eliminate or lift any veil completely. But we can add invisibility.
“Perception, memory – can’t they be real? Who could confuse a long naked body with an artifice of the mind?”
Anyone.
Everyone.
We live in rust on chrome.
“But, that tiger?”
Being is the all-at-once-ness of everything.
The world is not all thieves and wolves. Providers and puppies inhabit too.
Judges and lawyers may be the masters of bar and brothel, and a poem’s sentence may condemn. But also it may acquit.
Death is always the same distance away and life as near as we arrange.
Yes, our voyage ends with a wake, but not just the wake behind the boat.
It’s now call-and-response time. Your fate depends on your answer.
I say Quiver.
Do you say, “Tremble”?
Or, “Arrow”?
MÖBIUS STRIP
Swans echo the clouds
that echo those swans.
Moon recycles faces, recycles face
I am Today years old, as always
but which we am I today?
es, recy
This river remembers its geese,
wanders woods in their search.
cles fa
BRIDE OF COPPER
homonyms that mean the same
or, your gray is not my grey
they have divergent offspring
bronze if copper mates with zinc
brass if copper mates with tin
bird as vulture, bird as dove
a painter’s silver, or smudge
the flat wilderness of dusk
an opaque landscape of mist
the nothingness of a coin
dime-like or silver florin
hides the man within the war
in a Southern uniform
in a museum’s armor
ENLIGHTENMENT
Aging, we mislearn the universe from birth.
But if then all our illusions we lose —
Can we be sure that lives improve?
IN AN ON-ONE (self-portrait, unfinished for now)
Sophiadome aflame,
Halfunplundered yet.
The Moon is trapped in our crimson net
(like a Frisbee in a cage)
(aluminum pan in macrame)
dark iris riveted to bloodshot eye.
No. Wait.
This is altogether too depressing a prospect. Let the picture compose elsewhere.
Bloated fingers like floodwaters upon the plain.
Unberibboned wrists, not tigered yet by failure.
Arms loose and empty, tethered to boney shoulders
and a lonely bed.
Nope. No improvement from that angle either.
Silver is the ego-greed that turns glass into a looking glass; and mercury, that poison, makes us mistake temperament for actual temperature; while the iron lasts us through the large littleness of our long lives.
Such is the brittle wisdom, these are the elements of our same old sad story:
“The Naked One in the Vacant Lot”
…
