Too much buzz
not enough be

I want to show
a certain day
of late winter, 1984,
snow on the ground.

The lake was frozen.
No ducks, no geese.
I threw chunks of ice
and listened to them skitter.

I threw them high,
as hard as I could,
for the sheer joy
of useless, unwitnessed doing.

They made parabolas,
missiles failing orbit,
then crashed and shattered,
fragments skating this way and that.

Ice on ice, conserving momentum,
made notes, whale eerie,
no, not so, notes like
no others, plaintive, pale.

The making of the sound was
between ice and ice,
but the air that carried
altered and added.

And what of the ear?
The surprise of hearing,
the isolate encounter,
illustrates something else.

That the unanticipated
simply exists is uncanny.
No logic explains the openness
that freezes us taut, frees us.

I come out
from the forest
where
in the middle
of my journey
I lost my way
onto a plain
so bare
I despair
of the finding
more than ever
I did
of the loss

1981

1.
These thousand oaks that before leaves
Tie ink dark knots against the blue
Of April sky yet can not net
The liquid light, the laughing light.

They root and lift and lean and slant,
Only by stance communicate.
Their branches make horizon words
A maze, a place, asymmetry.

2.
Here now I sit who knows not how.
Here now I see who knows not why.
Hear, now, I say, who knows not when
The liquid light, the laughing light

Will send me back this way again,
For I am light and slight and sleek
And as a fish slips pursed nets,
Slip pursed lips, two lips, to be.

1982

Before Sanders

Before Sanders John Finley, Jr. stood and said,
or should have said, “Through the medium of
the ancient Greeks, myself I adore, object worthy
of such adoration as I can master, which is much,
insofar as I myself am much and yet even more

So stood John Finley. Jr., before Sanders and strode
and went on saying what came to him across
the wine dark medium of the ancient Greeks,
their olive trees and boars and sheep and sails
and I, young, listened early in my sleepy morning

Now, John Finley, Jr,, you are dead, your blood
commingled with the dust, while you have gone
down to dark Hades where alone you loiter in
what is less than half light, less than half honor,
while moths flit through your heartless empty chest

I remember you, John Finley, Jr. who before Sanders
stood and said (or should have said) “I adore myself
through the sleepless medium of ancient Greek”
and I honor you as best I can, for vanity, too, is
a painted glaze upon a vase, a hope and a truth

She is the heroine of her own drama
that is huge because it surrounds her

It has no windows for looking out
and no doors to allow another in

Her own drama is so gripping
it leaves no room for loneliness

Body and mind are both temporary
and a man doesn’t get younger.

Over and over I retrace my steps and try
to color them in, but it’s hard to stay within

Any lines at all- they keep getting away from me
I watch them go, like cargo ships on the blue sea

The sea is soft and soft
The nuanced colored folds
Of twilight's robes spread
High above the bright horizon
That waits to receive
The great ruddy golden sun,
Poised burning at the lip;

He waits, this diplomat
Who walks the white sands
Of this precinct of refuge,
To hear the sizzle as of
Hot metal quenched, to see
The steam rise in clouds,
Perhaps runes of augury;

He needs counsel, would
Prefer something surer,
A sign even of the doom
Of his delicate enterprises,
If only such were reliable;
Impatience and treason he has
Found twined together within;

His body delights him
Only when it takes him
Unawares, his mind delights
Him less than formerly;
Beyond every twist there
Is yet another turn,
No setting lets change rest;

The sun meets the horizon
In silence, there is no
Sizzling, no steam, no shape,
No advice; he is alone
With his thoughts and the cries
Of the water birds, urgent
Accents on awkward beauty;

This planet, they say, is
Like long lost home, a place
That was before musing or memory;
Its inhabitants are a rare
And wild race, sighted only
Once or twice in a decade,
And then but briefly glimpsed;

The breeze is from the sea,
It has the tang of salt
And impossible freedoms in it;
Moist air into moist air,
He speaks to himself
Aloud in actual words,
As if he were another,

As if he could
Yet become another,
As if he could
Step outside himself
And leave himself
And yet walk on,
Leaving behind footprints

Five toed other
Than his imploring own
On this white smooth sand
By this far
Unlistening sea;
There is pain
At the corners of his mouth;

Where lip meets lip,
Something bites,
He can not say
What or why;
All action is become
Agony and contemplation
Also agony;

When he sees the creature
In a grove of palms
Just ahead where the beach
Begins to turn
A white shoulder to sea
And recede
There is first only fear,

Fear without recognition:
The face is flat,
Sallow almost yellow,
It contorts,
Shows itself elastic,
Able to take any shape,
So shapeless;

The arms and legs,
Two of each,
Are red the color
Of rust, elongated,
Composed of vines
Or cables, braided,
Limbs of many strands;

The creature moves
Like a shadow,
But unattached;
It slides and glides
Across the ground,
Coming and going at will,
Meeting no obstacles.

Judgment is instant;
A lifetime of judging
And thinking and judging again
Leaves no room for doubt:
The diplomat can not elude
The creature, if it means
To strangle him, so it will.

The bit is released
From the corners
Of his mouth;
He does not fear,
He no longer has to work
So hard to rein himself in;
His mission is clear.

The creature stands
And waits and looks;
The creature is more
Frightened than he,
Without words or ideas,
More exquisite
And primitive both;

The creature rushes near,
Catches him
Across the shoulders,
Across the neck, so that
He feels the rasp of its arms
On him, gathers terror
From it, but stands still;

Then the creature
Is gone
So utterly gone
That no diplomacy
Or art can evoke
Such loss
Beside the sea

At twilight
On a planet
Both familiar and alien,
The sky fading
Beyond blue towards black,
The diplomat speechless,
Without policy.

Your lips came in the front door
on a cold winter day in Cleveland

all by themselves, but not lonely
because each one had the other

and began to speak, telling me
how it was in the room, how I was,

and there was no reason for me
to try to answer back, because

your ears were somewhere else
out in the cold that winter day

which didn’t mean I wasn’t moved
by what your lips said, how red

they were, your lips, how much they
seemed to promise and remember

I wanted to kiss your red lips
but there was no way to kiss

your lips without the rest of you
to hold them in place this cold day

In a city of South China
I’m waiting to be executed
for the crime of “Lao Bi”.

I have no idea what “Lao Bi”
is or what I may have done
but I know that I will die

It is morning and my mother
is brought back from the dead
to say “Goodbye” to me

She is led down the corridor
to my cell looking puzzled
and awkward, as she did in life

She reaches out and touches
my forearm, lightly, and then
pulls away as if that’s enough

I say that we’re only allowed
one touch - she shakes her head
and mumbles, “Couldn’t be.”

“It is,” I say, sadly, as one
of the jailors nods his head,
and then she is gone again

And it is time and I stand up
in my cell and then, quite without
any warning or even intention,

I turn into a yellow butterfly
and feel my wings and fly out
through the bars and then wake

You held me
in the open palm
of your hand
so that I
could stand up
straight and see
my shadow fall across
your life line
which ran on underneath
like a river
connected always
in itself with itself

and you did not
close your fingers
to crush me
or claim ownership
so that when I was brave
I could walk around
and explore,
even get to the edge
of the precipice
and look down
from your hand
at the actual earth

where my feet
are planted today
as I get older and older,
my memory of you
renewed over and over
with each day’s changes
so that you seem
utterly a marvel,
my own colossus
whose palm was soft
with the fertile soil
of unspoken hope

1.
Mid-morning in Manhattan, she reaches
For the apple and pulls it from the bin.

Her hair is fine the color of corn silk,
Her own skin as smooth as unblemished fruit,

She means to turn to pay and go,
But, instead, comes in that huge instant

Aware that she holds the apple
As if she were herself an apple tree.

Roots shooting she feels from her feet
And senses stiffening in her trunk.

An unutterable motion of leaves
Brings her an intuition of breeze.

In this small grocery store, Kim's,
Nothing now is as it was before.

The particular apple in her hand is
As sad and precious as an orphaned child,

Her own, lost, since she is now,
Herself other than she was.

Walls and floor, everything
That was the grocery store

Where she found the apple that she holds,
Dissolves into running dapple.

Motion prints on her breasts
In alphabets of shade and light

She dare not decipher
The patterns that forbid her rest.

She finds a rhythm that melts
Her into the wind, so only

The apple is substantial,
Moving as of its own accord.

She has passed beyond a bound
She never knew was there.

2.
The apple is a planet, herself
Its adoring atmosphere.

It spins and glides and twists
And turns and she is part

Of what she seeks, without hope
Ever of finding finished despair.

How can she say what it is
That happens to her when she

Is no longer herself or what
She thought she might become?

She makes the rain and caresses
The seas, lifting from them

A thousand thousand thousand
Momentary shapes of mist,

A calligraphy of vapors
Indifferent to its own elegance.

She is diffuse and flows
Within herself, swirling and whirling,

Describing in loops and eddies,
A dance which is not opinion.

As her weather develops, she surrounds
The apple with a climate, something

Of itself, yet not only such, something
Of her, yet not only hers, something

That has its own seeking and reaching
And groping beyond what it is now.

A climate becomes a way of life,
A way of life becomes a succession

Of beauties and tragedies, a blur of joys
And fear and blindness in ecstasy,

A series of stories absently remembered,
Marred and marred again in the telling.

The apple, the core of this atmosphere,
Goes on, rotating about its umbilicus,

Where a stem as dark as ink made a dimple
Which records original attachment.

A thought congeals somewhere in the clouds
She has arranged along fruit's equator.

It is not her thought, nor thought
Of any thinking subject, just mist

Which has taken a mystifying twist
Towards the making of meanings.

"Can the apple go back to Eden,
Find the very place upon the very tree

From which long ago, whether because
Of serpent's guile, Eve's innocence,

Or Adam's acquiescence, it was ripped
One lazy afternoon before hope?

Can stem be grafted back to branch,
Fruit find its place among the leaves,

Planet find absolution and abdicate
Its own horrendous history, herself

Establish some end to schemes of reparation,
Which have carried her beyond good and evil

To see coils of serpentine implication,
In acts of universally sanctioned love?"

3.
She wakes in terror in her own bed,
Her body naked beside a stranger's body,

She feels, stranger to her self, she might be
Anywhere on a lush summer's night, wondering

Why again she has taken too much to drink
And what her pleasure has wrought on her.

The stranger snores and she feels towards him
Unaccountable tenderness she would never allow

In regard of herself, for if she hates,
She hates only inwards, into an abyss

Of her own making, a place so deep, she
Imagines what she deposits there safe.

She sighs and tries to remember:
What was it she found and where?

What was the smoothness in her palm?
How did she dissolve into air?

What was that sense of herself as text,
Light and shade printing on her chest?

What is the current significance
Of her two breasts, here, beneath the sheet

Rising and falling with each breath,
Like hills on an elastic planet?

She wants to cry, not from despair
But from relentless trying to reconcile

What is here and what is there, what was
And what would never be, although it

Might have been, had only some other
Set of images from another dream

Achieved a sovereignty over the facts
Of air, inhaled, exhaled, lost beyond repair.

4.
She stretches and sleep prevails once more
So that, leaving the grocery store,

With the apple, now gold, nestled in her palm,
She takes, nude and beautiful, the other turn

And enters the Garden from the West
Beneath the red sword of a setting sun.

In the east, seven silver moons
Are rising in a scimitar shape

Above a horizon darkening velvet:
All is changed, all is rearranged.

The breezes whisper through the congregation
Of trees, as if they had all found tongues

Intelligible, in which to speak the truths
That have been so long exiled at the margins

Where thought and feeling go to ice and emptiness.
They speak rhythmically a dance of meanings

That she feels along the surface of her skin.
Now she knows what light and dapple

From that other wood that other day
Had tried to say in their stammering way.

She knows because she feels it in herself
And as herself, without pretense or argument.

Her feet find wings as, still holding
The heavy apple in her palm, she commingles

With the breezes, sinuous within their
Sinuosities, soothed in their smoothnesses.

She has an intuition of curves' cunning that goes
Beyond anything she has known of caresses,

"Love's a riddle," she thinks, "that resolves
Itself within itself, vanishes into thin air..."

As she thinks this, her thought evaporates,
And she finds herself before the only frozen tree,

Bewitched gold, in a singing swaying grove,
As lithe and gently green as spring's spirit.

She lifts herself, becoming a winged serpent,
From the ground and rises to the level

Of that single golden branch on which
The slightest wound only betrays a gap

From where, so long ago, a single apple
Was torn, casually, for just a taste.

She hisses, extends her tongue, dissolves
The golden matter of the branch, so that

It drips and, as it drips, she brings
The golden apple near, but this is all she knows

For, suddenly, no longer woman or serpent,
She finds herself fixed in place, neither apple

Nor branch of a tree, but the connection
That makes the two one again, a stem

That feels twilight breezes tug and sways and does
Not miss, this cycle done, the company of man.

5.
She wakes from this her second sleep
And finds the actual Adam is gone, an impression

In the bed the only sign that he was ever
There beside her, ever flesh and blood

Like herself, as she now seems to be,
Thinking, "I must go to the grocery store

And get necessities, bread and milk
And also some kind of fruit, perhaps an apple."

Her head aches and though she knows
She can not be forever young, forever free

To choose temptation where she finds it,
She does not know how she knows, or why

She feels sure the sigh that escapes now
From her chest is not only her own but,

Like the breeze whispering into hot close
Morning before rain, part of what it opposes.

An angel came to earth
and changed every book
in the Library
suddenly beyond recognition

Only in the margin
of Kafka's Metamorphosis
he left a fingerprint,
a dimple of dawn

Each piece
of a puzzle
can think itself
a continent
until it fits

Silence
can be
either an iceberg
or a pretty nice burg

What is the poet's gift
but that of experience
he makes a summary,

captioning night

with the eccentric
glow of a mob
of bewildered fireflies?

I was not
of those
to whom
life comes easily.

Yet,
despite disappointments,
it lapped
richly
over me.

I was still
and obdurate
as stone
and so
became worn.

Paris
May, 1984

It is when I’m writing my old good friend RR
about my current state, about how I still see
my father sitting with his chin in his hands
at the dining room table the morning he turned
sixty as I have just done...and remember asking
him what he was doing and his answer, “I’m
staring at the prison bars” ( the melancholy
he refused to allow into the music of his voice
present then for the very first time so he was
in that instant transfigured as another person
for me)... it’s when I’m writing this to RR

that it occurs to me that my poor head is
a nature preserve, a wildlife refuge, for so many
who are extinct in the outside world, my parents,
uncles, aunts, grandparents, friends, lovers,
teachers, antagonists, great-aunts, great-uncles,
first cousins now, patients, those I’ve known in France,
Tanzania, Brazil, darkest Ohio, California...
I take pleasure in this new way of thinking about
my own head, my mind that works so hard, making
preposterously little headway, if any, because
I’m always lost even finding first names for now

2006

At forty, a man's body
knows the secret inside

that death is coming
and others will play

sweet, lingering games
in the shade of the oaks.

Others will repeat the form
of the dance when his feet

are no more, flesh and blood
and bones to dust decomposed.

Everything is loss. So plays
the music of this first day

of May, mocking presence
with certainty of coming

absence, as if each white bell
ranged along the green rope stem

of each slight lily of the valley
were become huge, metal, all tolling

together an immense requiem,
one he hears and will not hear.

The lilies of the valley
are the ones right there

under the pin oak that is just
now leafing oblivious out.

1986

Ice, fire and emptiness,
the beaten blank of night

What drowned star beacons
in the bottom well of me?

1984

The practical bourgeois (me)
stammers inwardly as he goes
about his vital daily work.
He knows this aimless world
is falling to pieces
all about his ears.
Or is it betwen his ears?

The suit he wears, pin-striped,
echoes the melody of bars.
If the caged bird can sing,
the cagey bird has a harder time
with syncope, the way life's rhythms
hesitate, flutter and then fly
without wings or rhyme or reason why.

He will not represent or sell
a product in which he can not
counterfeit complete confidence.
If his word is his bondage,
only in ellipsis can he go free.
He skates on thin non sequiturs
and pities those who eat rice,

Because his shadow goes with his feet,
making an ever more intricate dance,
season upon season, repeat upon repeat,
unacknowledged deceit on unacknowledged deceit
he knows what he will not know,
traces unwittingly an Other, Beloved
outcast of himself whom he dare not embrace.

1983

1984

As swallows swoop
through fog's white
infiltrating fingers,
goldfinches fly
quick catenaries
between rocks and sea.

Midnight last,
you and I attended
a pair of skunks
on monlit promenade,
soft, scentless,
self assured, regal

Here, where land and sea
and air and light
hold coastly commerce
we are ghostly sauce
for beauty's meat
which yet we taste

1990

Thaw comes in mid-December.¬ The river runs full,
a sheet of glass at twilight, smooth flowing, gold glowing...
Behind the naked trees, the sun begins
to go down on the horizon...the trees as if touched
on the sky by the twitch of a subtle draftsman's pencil
that knew to suggest rather than to say...the sun, ruddy,
growing larger, that seems a Cyclops' eye.¬ This "I"
that sees the sun, coins it in the sky as well as sees,
is polymorphous, perverse, apt to sire its own terror
even here in these woods that emerge brown and moist
and gentled from beneath the snow blanket.¬ The white dog
goes before me like my own ghost, now seen, now unseen...

I go to the woods to be apart, not simply away,
but in tatters and phrases, in elliptic accidents
of attention, eyes, ears, nose, skin loose from the yoke
of purpose.¬ I go to the woods to be a part,
part of the wind, the light, the sway of the trees,
the deft shyness of the occasional rabbit, the liquid
discretion of the river, mirroring, mirroring.
It seems the white dog who summons me with her insistence,
the tension in her flesh the house can not contain,
but when we emerge I am face-to-face with my self-deception:
the house can not contain me either, however meekly
I sit and stare into the fire's fading embers.

We walk curves in the woods, guided like a boomerang,
now beside the river, where a duck and a green winged drake
bob, paddle on orange webbed feet,
now ranging away through a stand of pines, through a scrubby place,
up a face of rock and down the other side to enter
where the great trees grow that groan on icy nights
in the wind...there is a cardinal, like a dart of blood...
the dog flushes a small animal, seems to catch it...
there are two voices growling behind a rock, the dog emerges
shaking her head...an indistinct brown shape
scurries off...I laugh...the dog forgets her disappointment.
We come back from the woods, like musicians from a trio.

1979

How like a wounded stag
whose blood stains dark his coat
as he flees through familiar forest
and yet can not shake the hurt
which holds close his heart,
does Bernhard his blackboard attend,
scribbling the ancient hieroglyphics
in pirouettes of chalk on slate
before the cold eyes of fiends
which shoot constant arrows of distaste.

How like a wounded stag
whose strength nears final ebb
does Bernhard bed himself down
as night comes on to seek in sleep
some new glow of the flickering coals
that are his life, his loyalty to things sublime,
things obscure: glades green to his eyes alone,
the spirals that falling leaves describe in autumn wind,
mere history, what others hoped and missed.

How like a wounded stag
does Bernhard lack insight to discern
what thrill his hunters get
from seeking his demise,
what delight his death could promise,
what they could want of these woods
that he, living, might be inclined to deny.
He summons up their faces, the one whose hair
is the color of sand, the one whose eyes seem always moist,
the one whose lips are pink and full as berries.

How like a wounded stag
who finds no comfort in the dark
does Bernhard dread the new day,
although he knows nothing precise of it,
only that his scholars will come,
each laggard limb eloquent of dismay,
to launch at him their taunts:
"What is the use of this?" and "This, above all, I do not like"
and "You can not mean to insist..." and "This is cruel"
and "What manner of fool would waste his life on this?"

How like a wounded stag
grown weary of his antlers' weight
which once was his fiercest pride and joy,
does Bernhard note numbness in his neck,
which must support his head
and all that time and diligence have crammed within.
The hatred of boys who will become men
and do the works of men
is sensual like the lust of hunters
who track blood on snow for sport.

How like a wounded stag
who can not plan
and moves in arcs that start to close
to find a final spot,
does Bernhard long for release
not just from boys' minds but from their eyes,
If knowledge brings sorrow,
how advocate joy of higher woe
to those attached to what's below?
As Beast, Bernhard dies to instruct.

Skyscrapers, huge and dumb as parents, dwarf us
as we walk down Lexington in the rain.
Citicorp's beveled white head glows orange
as it disappears into a low cloud bank.

I imagine liftoff, bright flames billowing
down the avenues, these towers airborne,
leaving ashen earth behind as they seek orbit.
Manhattan projects beyond itself, irrevocably.

1982

Canyons Of The Night

In the canyons
of the night,
there's no roof
over your head,
no proof
beneath your feet.

Only rock walls
by your side,
and, far below,
the music
of running water.

You'd best be
stubborn
as a mule.

c. 1993

The living and the dead
are one flesh, not two;
time, the seamstress

A rock
apprehended from within
is emptiness
shot through
with quaverings
that can never know
their own sum.

if stone could speak,
it would pronounce mystic names
in tongues of flame,
burning our ears to ash

we should be grateful
to the stones for their silence,
because it makes a place
for our small voices.

I lower my expectations
like a bucket into mystery

Before eight o’clock in the morning
in deep winter I was getting ready

to sprinkle raisins on my cereal -
they were wizened, almost human

One became under my eyes an old
and wrinkled miniature of the Buddha

I looked in wonder as each resolved
into a separate dried old wise man

Might my dead father be among them?
I searched until I saw a faint plume

of smoke rising up from one, line
so close to vanishing I doubted it

I took that Buddha in my fingers
and, sure enough, it was warmer

than any of the others, so warm
it hurt my tender fingertips

I dropped it on the mound of brown
eleven grain flakes, then followed

it with more Buddhas from the box,
then poured milk into the bowl,

and heard the faintest hiss as
my father’s pipe was extinguished.

Buddhas with milk and cereal I ate
as the sun turned cold ground red

Then I woke before eight o’clock
in deep winter, ruddy son rising

From "Lessons From Dreaming" 2001

I lie down and float
on a bed of cicada song

A dark bird is singing
at the edge of emptiness.

A light bird is singing
at the edge of emptiness.

I'm looking for a third word
at the edge of emptiness.

The light of this early morning
comes in the window on a slant

and makes a blank sheet of paper
on the bare wood of the step

I cross on my way to waking.
I reach for a pen that's only air.

How will I write today and what
will be left when it's gone away?

I am
in shapes of light
framed in shadows,
pages in my mind,
a book that's never
done reading

1996

Escaped from sleep,
the night slips away
in whispers while I sit
and listen, like a gambler
at a roulette wheel,
hypnotized by the spin,
having forgotten the bet.

1995

I took my own life
in my own two hands
and walked down the path
from house to river
where I uncupped them.

1996

I work thousands of miles away from where I am,
down the slippery staircase of centuries,
flying in the face of the future, revolving backwards
to where the pinhole of mind at once admits and emits light,
a photo finish that begins a trance with its own exit.

I have a poverty
I can bank on

a field no plough can till
a place no words can fill

I want a mind
of my own

I want a heart
of my own

so I can give
myself away

for free
for freedom

I want a liver
of my own

to remain
uneaten

I want to speak
against freezing shame

in tongues
of flame

1996

This elm that was in spring
both vase and flowers,

is in November, bare,
a thing alone of ink and air.

A hue
pale and pink
as a tongue
lingers
on the western
horizon.

How did
we learn to speak?

specificity of twisted metal,
shattered slabs of concrete,
what once were floors, now
become the weight of death
in a huge savage funeral pyre
still smoking months after
with the flesh of thousands

those two tall slim volumes
reaching up to touch the sky
were destroyed from the sky,
stricken out of powder blue sky,
so they collapsed like books
unable to hold worlds, words
which fragmented to letters

which shattered to shards
so sharp that even thinking
of them cuts, drawing blood
from our foreheads, so we
bleed without understanding,
just the same way we breed,
birth being death’s beginning

thousands died and could
receive no decent burial,
smoked as the heap smoked,
sometimes sent its stench
out to sea, sometimes north
into the city, news more
elemental than a newspaper

A poet lost his mind
still he persevered in writing poems

When his mind returned
he did not notice it

A man as gray as ash,
I walk green breezy woods

Fallen trunks speak to me
of what they were and when

“Once we were green and huge,
we caught sun in our nets

Once we stood and we swayed,
we defied wind and storm

Our now was forever,
deep our roots delved dark earth

We slept through the winters
untroubled by the snow

We woke up in the spring
with rage to make life new

And all that we were, sir,
is best forgotten now

And all that we were, sir
is past ripe to rotting”

I lose a flake of ash
here and there but walk on

by dark rushing river
that holds water and time

The breezes that touch me
are both caress and claw.

Cardinal’s bright in bush,
talisman of flame.

I loose myself in speech
I lose myself in song

Ash once was wood of dreams,
now burnt by becoming

To be lighter and less,
ready for wingless flight

This summer took so long
coming, swiftly is gone

as the trout keep rainbows
in the river’s deep holes.

A man as gray as ash
I walk green breezy woods

Beware that you see me
long after I am gone

What the exiled man never says
because he is a rational man,
a man of moderation, someone whose
manners are civilized, even suave,

is that there are moments
when he doesn’t believe
in the catastrophe that destroyed
his native city, where he was young,

the place where he was a child,
where he discovered the world
and found it good as it found him good,
the place where he first loved...

It is whole, alive and well,
as in a smiling trance, he walks
along the avenue to the square,
enjoys a young woman’s beauty

It strikes even him as absurd
that he doesn’t believe, because
he was there, because he saw the fire
and tasted the ash, saw dead bodies

lying on their backs, like mice
that had encountered small misfortunes,
(there was one very tall man who
appeared to be doing the backstroke,

but was frozen in mid-stroke),
because he had seen his own house
destroyed by a bomb and burning,
because he had escaped by accident

scrambling across the border
in a misty morning to be born
as another person into a new life
and most absurd of all is that

he can remember and also not
believe at the same time, so that ease
and unease make an uncanny blend,
so that he feels at home and not there.

No point ever in saying anything
about this, even just after sex,
because if you didn’t know it,
then you couldn’t know it, shouldn’t

So where he was most intimate
with himself he was most alone
and when his little daughter would ask
what he was thinking – “Nothing”.

Leila has a new baby
whom she calls “my ancient baby

because the instant she was born
she had always been”

not just before she was born
but before Leila herself was born

before Leila’s mother and father were born,
before before before before

“a dew drop of eternity
for now is always

and this labor took me
somewhere else from which I doubt

I’ll ever be able to come back.
Can a bee return from honey?”

“See her sleeping, brother, waiting
for a name to rain down on her.”

In the vast ornate antechamber of dream
I unbutton my self and remove it

I try carefully to fold it but it refuses
to hold a pleat and becomes a small cloud

A hint of breeze comes to float it off
leaving me more naked than naked

The faculty of loneliness has deserted me
I shatter suddenly to be a flock of birds

Compound entity flying through night
to light in the branches of an inky oak

We are the leaves of burgeoning spring
and attach by slender stems to the wood

Nothing lingers of the birds we were
Nothing lingers of the words I was

Waking is the most peculiar passage
I come back from not having been

I have to learn myself all over again,
finger each button as a perfect stranger

I am more reclusive than I ever
dreamed that I could be – far more

I hide in the burrow of poetry
not because I don’t love the sun

but because shadows terrify me
especially my own which seems an abyss

into which I could fall without ever
coming to the end of my falling

it’s a limited life, hiding here in this
so shallow excavation of earth, poetry,

but it’s the best I have been able to do
I’m aware, too, that trees and tall buildings,

houses, other people, even birds in the sky
and ships far out on the bounding main

are quite at ease with their shadows
and don’t know what I call my abyss

I come up on cloudy days before rain
which sends me back into my burrow

I’m afraid I compose my best songs
without light or shadow, when I’m snug

Should I travel, displace myself from here to there,
when I am traveling each and every instant ,
scaling peaks in the mountains of time, losing
myself over and over and then returning
to someone who is someone else as well as myself?

Let Phnom Penh be, and Angkor Wat and China, too,
and Sydney and Patagonia and Durban, Chennai,
for my journey is here and my garden, mystery,
and this sense of traveling while staying in place,
is not a commodity, no thing for buying and selling

I traveled when I was young, went here and there,
before I discovered this voyage in a single place
that is vast beyond my imagining. I find it hard
to put down in words how I don’t take myself
literally but do take myself gently by the hand.

I am going where I am going and where I’m going
is here and near and far and I am the only ticket
that I need to get aboard and go abroad in my
own environs that I try to paint for my pleasure
and discover they and I slip away both together

I have read thousands of books
of which I have no memory

Yet they exist within me,
fish swimming in their sea

There is knowledge before knowledge
and knowledge after knowledge

There is knowledge without knowing
and knowledge beyond knowledge

So I am quite learned without a way
to declare my learning which is implicit

I can not lecture or teach and I write
fragmentary notes on what I can’t say

Which yet preoccupies me on this day
after the blizzard which left almost

three feet of white snow which will
vanish in a week or two at the most

I keep on reading and writing knowing
full well time in time cancels all..

White snow rolls away to the horizon
as shadows of oaks declare themselves

I have read thousands of books
of which I have no memory

I start to hallucinate not recall
images beneath blizzard of words

A dream slips in the window
as if it were nothing but light

It is restless and also speechless
dressed in fabric of green and blue

It paces about my living room
I see ocean and sky and green hills

A breeze comes up in the house
I notice the dream keeps changing

I try to get near and to enter it
I can’t help walking through it

I am weeping when I come out
both for sorrow and for joy

You have been gone so long
You are a mountain in my mind

I wander your slopes, finding different ways
on different days, in different dreams.

Remembering and forgetting mingle, so
I get to know you better and worse,

as I explore what’s much bigger than I.
These treks change my vision, I see your faults,

deep ravines that hold ancient boulders
and timber swept down in recent storms.

I see what I should have seen when you lived,
but love and need blocked dangerous vision.

I see how weak you were and how much
pain there was in your wanting what you

couldn’t have, I see that envy made you sly.
The mountain is beautiful but not tame –

storms rip down its flanks at all seasons.
I love to spend time on the mountain

knowing I will never know it, knowing
that it will keep changing and changing me,

knowing that it has no summit, no way
to place a period at the end of a sentence

You have been gone so long
You are a mountain in my mind

I don’t think things out
I think things in

What I think in changes me
I’m partly new to myself

The reclusive tempts me
I can’t declare myself

I can’t pass customs
I seem a witless witness

What is in me can’t be traced
What’s in me compounds

I can’t please and can’t plead
No matter what I’d like to do

What I think in lodges in me
Enjoys considerable freedom

I go on listening, knowing all
I have thought in listens as me

Thunder in heavy August late afternoon
puts me in mind of peacocks strutting
before a storm, blue green tails making a dry
rustling sound, anxious at fear’s near edge,
the multiple feather eyes moving perhaps
an inch back and forth and seeing nothing.

My mind can wander because it is of my
body, organ inseparable – these peacocks
were on another continent and long ago
and yet I house this within myself, how
beautiful the peacocks were, how strange
the dry sound before storm, those eyes.

Am I more fully myself being older
or am I not – no way to answer and
perhaps even foolish to ask as the rain
that was heralded comes pouring down
I am reasonably sure the peacocks took
no notice of me as I was taking them in.

After rain comes the scent of mint in
the green soaked garden, luxurious,
and the black eyed susans are blazing,
refreshed, quite the opposite of subdued ,
the peacocks strut in my mind and make
that dry rustling sound as their tails shiver

Memory, the interior decorator,
works in myriad styles, appeals

to all the senses, borrows from
everyone everywhere, or should

it be called stealing, for memory
recognizes no property rights

is no simple keeper of the books
but a capricious potentate with

purposes of its own including
rewriting of the history it tells

over and over again, so I fall
asleep one place and wake another,

whether it be tent, castle, mud hut
or even prison, without my knowing

the charge or having a chance to plead
(who can plead against his memory?}

Memory, the interior decorator,
keeps busy plundering my life

in order to furnish me differently
than I could ever have imagined

Into the white of my beard
I am disappearing, becoming blank

as if my life was a cargo at sea
that once seemed to have value

and to be heading for friendly ports
eager to receive it and unload it,

to send it off into the commerce
of countries that I hardly knew

but time has changed the conditions
of the market, the terms of trade

so that my life has become quiet
and completely beside the point

I whisper to myself and I hear
the sound of myself escaping me

Into the white of my beard
I am disappearing, becoming blank

perhaps this is wisdom, but not
wisdom that can announce anything,

not wisdom that can give counsel
or point to coming catastrophe

Should I report myself, I wonder,
as a missing person, one among

so very many or should I simply
go on going on, becoming only white

the color that reflects all light,
and disguises all colors in its mix?

No one calls
these Sunday afternoons

It’s a mixture
of peace and desolation

I watch the light
as it keeps changing

I watch clouds
voyaging the sky

I hear the cicadas
frenzied in their singing

The season is getting
ready to shift

Too few monarchs pass
through heading southwest

I sit and ponder, tracking
myself, eluding myself

Unable to stop
doing either one

The days are shorter
as my days are shorter

I can’t say what I
may have learned

Advice irritates me
even when I give it

Green acorns fall,
first leaves float down

In my heart, there’s
soft and shy music

I’ve lost six of the seven freedoms
and can’t remember the name of the freedom
that I still have…it goads me on, robbing
me of any conviction of my shape or place;
it agitates me with each breath, so that
I am neither short nor long of breath but
syncopated as if a jazz played inside me
continually improvising, exploring territory
not on any map, lost as soon as found

I’ve lost six of the seven freedoms
and can’t remember the name of the freedom
that still has me…having lost their names,
I don’t presume to address the six freedoms:
how much the freedom that holds me still
feels like necessity, as if there were a cusp,
or many cusps where the two met and made
points neither freedom nor necessity but the two
joined to make something new, free bound...

As I’ve gotten older, crossing through decades
like Manhattan neighborhoods on a Sunday stroll,
the angst/insight ratio has fallen a good deal -
I see without the same degree of suffering,
the same fuss over suffering, which, after all,
is only as intrinsic to this life as rain,
sunlight, the restlessness of wind, night…

My question now is, “Is this wisdom?” just
this diminution of a ratio that expresses
nothing more than resignation to the effect
that I am first and wish only in second place,
so far back as to be dwindling to a point…
I was once a great connoisseur of wishing,
or so I styled myself internally…in agony

The summer solstice is almost here and then
comes a long lush time as the days begin
to dwindle down to the winter minimum,
that other solstice that’s ruled by darkness
and a wan light from the south… I have made
this trip so many times I have stopped counting
and that decreases angst, too – less history

Nymph of an oak slips from ring to ring,
dances from where the bark meets the air
to the central rings, which are the beginning
after the wild burst from acorn’s inspiration
and hold still the green joy and exuberance

Nymph is a changed nymph in each ring
where she lingers and does not so much
remember as recover, return to this ring’s
seasons, its spring and summer and fall,
winter snow and stillness and deep sleep

So many springs’ waking, so many red
buddings, so many tender new green
leafings out, so many leaves lifted up
to take in what the lordly sun spews out,
so many deep green leaves, sweet acorns

I know that I am retreating from what I was –
the swirl of these days confuses me –
names don’t adhere where I want to place them –
even my very own on me doesn’t quite stick–
it’s as if I had lost the polestar of vanity in my mind
and so saw things both more plainly and bleakly –

I am only a leaf among other leaves
and the machinery that let sun animate me
is worn out beyond hope of repair –
that gold bird, the sun, is heading south
and autumn plays its ancient script out,
a thing of beauty mixed with glory to make

an elegy while I cling to my branch –
yes, this is confusing, that I am next to nothing,
that I do not know when the wind will come
to harvest me, only that it will come –
there is wisdom, I suppose, in my confusion,
in my learning to let go, to let come, to be done

Who can tell what is in the head of a young person?
Who can tell what lies behind soft smooth expressions?

When we are young we are general issue,
wearing the uniform of possibility.

When I was young there were islands of awareness
maybe even an archipelago in the ocean of bafflement

Time goes on and life writes on our faces, turns
them into masks that hint at what may be inside

Everyone is an enigma, but there are questions
of different kinds, framed by hope and despair.

It is not only that we decorate ourselves with illusions
that are dear to us as life itself, our very own lives.

We decorate whomever we see, whomever we think
we want to know; we pin medals on their chests

What is in the head of a young person comes out
as life goes along and recedes even deeper as well

I look at the young and remember, but remember
all wrong, mixing my own elements up

I don’t know what’s in my head, I still sail an ocean
of bafflement, why should I question the young?

I confess when I look at a lily, at a rose, when I
take their scents in, questions form in my mind.

Summer is becoming autumn.

Even before the equinox, the days have cooled
and become bright and breezy…

The ground is littered with acorns.

The squirrels are busy.

I see a bronzed praying mantis.

The first leaves, scouts for the coming armies,
slant down to land on the green of grass.

There is one red as a cardinal.

A new moon climbs up late behind a bank of oaks to the east.

The great blue heron is so still that it seems
a part of the half submerged branch on which it stands.

The monarchs have passed through.

My white beard prophesies snow and springs I will not see.

What has changed through my seasons?

Not so very much – same quality of attention, same quality
of intention, same quality of invention

Yet I’ve been always in flux.

I dance away from myself without malice

I am watching the fire take, listening
to oak kindling snap as first plumes
of white smoke thread their way up
through the logs of sweet cherry wood
that will be substance of this blaze

then come slight orange tongues of flame
that have no words and also no feet
but dance with phantasmagoric verve
without least inkling of what they do –
dead tree is its own funeral pyre

thick braids of smoke shade of cloud
rise to lose themselves in summer sky
and the fire clears, is more orange than
it has been, more fierce, more fixed
on the work of consuming the wood

I feel the heat that I have unleashed
warming my cheek from four paces
I find myself overcome with awe,
not that I have not done this same
incendiary act hundreds of times,

not that I have not felt this awe many
times before, even cherished it as a way
into the mystery of what is ordinary
and extraordinary all at once, how fire
is destructive and creative both

the wood wanders its way to ash,
past the flickering and glowing coals
that seem to have an inner life
as they have inner light and heat,
become coated with elegant gray

I watch the fire and know that I am
watching myself, that I can no more
tarry on the way than the wood can,
that I know as little as does the wood,
that where I’m woven, I’m consumed

I am in the prime of my life
because each instant is prime,
not reducible to any factors,
but simply stubbornly itself

I have accumulated age, carry
it now with me and within me
I’ve been through more than I
can say, although I try to speak

This instant of December near
the winter solstice, gray, twilight
coming down early, has a freshness,
even a sparkle, a way that I

am prime with myself within
the vessel that I take for myself –
I hear melodies I can not sing, frame
scene after scene I can not paint

I am with myself as darkness
descends, no stars tonight but
the scent of wood smoke mixed
with the scent of skunk, fading

No instant can pass for another
but each one passes for itself,
and is replaced by yet another,
incommensurable, vast and free

As if with a bit thrust into my mouth,
as if with a bit lodged deep in my mind,
a story takes me wherever it wants,
not rider but horse, not rider but horse

A story dissolves me and resolves me
into what I’m not by an alchemy
that discovers no philosopher’s stone
but finds instead a stoned philosopher

There is no way back, there is no way back,
a story is a chronic infection,
a story is a cosmic infection,
there’s no cure for its ravishing allure

Day after day I’m the story I tell
Myself, bit after bit, silver and gold

1.
I’m having trouble making anything
because where invention once seemed

like piecing my own only head together,
adding new space with novel views,

now invention seems like taking my head
off my neck, exposing its inner workings,

a matter perilous from the outset in which
I’m likely to lose much more than I gain

I’m aware of an inhibition, a hesitation
that prevents me from taking the dive

so I’m left embarrassed with inklings
of what might be, of what might have been

2.
My old ignorance that licensed my daring
has been replaced not precisely by knowledge

but by experience, thousands of flavors
composing and recomposing atmospheres

that have turned me inwards even when
I’m not aware and feel I’m looking out

To make something new when I’m
someone old, I must use myself as

preamble, go into what has been in
order to let it go, refresh itself, put on

a familiar costume that is yet fabulous –
I make myself new and uncanny, too

Zeus said, “I have the worst headache
of my whole life since the beginning.”

Zeus thought, “Hera is a pain, but not
like this that is so near my center.”

He swaddled his head in dense cloud
dimming the sun but got no relief.

Since gods are two –year- olds
writ large, he threw a temper tantrum,

scattering thunderbolts to the horizon
so shepherds feared for their flocks

and those lucky ones who had skins
of wine, drank deep as they worried.

Zeus’ tantrum was of no avail, so he
changed times and donned human guise.

He presented himself at dusk to an ER
in San Antonio, one more droplet

in a brown river of nameless suffering
and told the triage nurse that he had

“the worst headache of my whole life
since the beginning” - she came awake.

Zeus lay in the tube of the MRI listening
to noise with none of thunder’s glory.

When he came out, the resident told him,
“Listen Mr. Z we have to operate.

You have the largest aneurysm anyone
here has ever seen. You’ll die if it bursts.”

Just then the pain became even more
lancinating and a small patch of mist

burst forth from his forehead and grew
and grew and took form even as it grew

to be as large as Zeus himself, but with
gray-green eyes whose depth was wonder.

“Ah,” said Zeus, “Pallas Athena herself.”
“Becoming, great Zeus, is suffering,”

said the wise one, daughter of depths
and foolishness and thunder, too.”

Then they disappeared, Zeus and Athena
in just a single patch of cloud, moonlit.

“How should I document this?” the resident
asked the chief of the ER, old Watkins

who replied, “My back aches, my feet hurt –
just let yourself go and use your imagination."

In longhand in blue ink on white paper
at the Claremont Hotel on vacation in Maine
just outside Acadia National Park, I wrote
down with urgency just a few early lines -

about how nothing lasts forever, nothing
is utterly distinct, how each of us is almost
a second coming of others who once were,
who were themselves almost second comings…

and so forth , turning just slightly aside
to notice that the mind lives in complex space
native to a profusion of infinite regressions,
finding myself now on path of genuine interest…

but somewhere between Southwest Harbor
and Harpswell, Maine, the pad and the lines,
and the beginnings were lost, with nothing
quite distinct of it all left in my mind…

I can say what was lost was nothing
and say at the same time what was lost
may have been everything - I write an
elegy for the indeterminate, coastal fog

I want to dream beyond dreaming,
to be convinced by worlds that exist only
inside me like pearl planets inside oysters of sleep
tethered to the flickering electrical reefs
that invent me both when I’m snoring and when I’m awake

who can dive for these pearl planets, bring oysters
back to the surface for examination, for interrogation,
so that they can be asked to state what they might know
about their circumstances, about my own circumstances,
how we’re all accidental, even if round and smooth?

the border of dream is not waking,
not a line of fence posts and barbed wire
or even wishing with all its exotic barbs,
the border of dream is hard to reach because
dream keeps springing up under all feet, five toed, poetic

nor is there any going back to the beginning,
when I dreamt I had arrived at origin, suddenly
a wild buffalo appeared and I had to run for my life,
humiliated that what I thought was an idyll was
instead something so other and in sleep that was mine

I want to get in my dreams beyond seeking approval,
beyond asking acceptance, even my own, beyond trying
to amount to someone, but just to float and glow like
tiny phosphorescent plankton awaiting the whale’s maw,
but without knowing that they are awaiting…

In my thinking about my dreaming, how it is satisfactory
and unsatisfactory, there is more than a hint of jazz,
of improvisation, of never putting my tongue in the same
stream of mind twice, even when I want to and when I try,
it’s no dream I’m always finding and losing myself, all ways