Monster Means “To Reveal”

“The Laughing Demoness” by Hokusai

The horror lies within these smiling eyes
which glimpse a Nothing deeper than despair.
After despair, it comes as a surprise,
a punchline: that there’s really nothing there.
All is well. Go, stroke your baby’s hair,
then twist the whole head off in laughing rage.
No harm is done. A bird flown from its cage.
Play catch with it, then toss it in the sea.
Or else go out and play the holy sage:
Point to the dumb dead face. You see? You see?

Originally published in Literary Matters. 

Submit to you — is that what you advise?
The way ripples do
whenever ill winds arise?

If fields of autumn flowers
can shed their blossoms, shameless,
why can’t I also frolic here —
as fearless, wild and blameless?

I had thought to pluck
the flower of forgetfulness
only to find it
already blossoming in his heart.

Alas, the beauty of the flowers came to naught
as I watched the rain, lost in melancholic thought…

So cruelly severed,
a root-cut reed…
if the river offered,
why not be freed?

Watching wan moonlight flooding tree limbs,
my heart also brims,
overflowing with autumn.

The wildflowers and my love
wilted with the rain
as I idly wondered
where in the past does love remain?

Sad,
the end that awaits me —
to think that before autumn yields
I'll be a pale mist
shrouding these rice fields.

This abandoned mountain shack —
how many nights
has autumn sheltered there?

Am I to spend the night alone
atop this summit,
cold and lost?
Won't you at least lend me
your robes of moss?

Once-colorful flowers faded,
while in my drab cell
life’s impulse also abated
as the long rains fell.

Two things wilt without warning,
bleeding away their colors:
a flower and a man's heart.

Watching the long, dismal rains
inundating the earth,
my heart too is washed out, bleeds off
with the colors of the late spring flowers.

"It's over!"
Your words drizzle like dismal rains,
reducing me to tears
as I wilt with my years.

My body has wilted with late autumn rains;
now even your leaves lie colorless and scattered.

Like flowers wilted by drenching rains,
my beauty has faded in the onslaught of my forlorn years.

How brilliantly
tears rain upon my sleeve
in bright gemlets,
for my despair cannot be withstood,
like a surging flood!

Watching wan moonlight flooding tree limbs,
my heart also brims,
overflowing with autumn.

In this dismal world 
the living decrease
as the dead increase…
Oh, how much longer
must I bear this body of grief?

In eye-opening daylight
much stands revealed,
but when I see myself
reflected in hostile eyes
even dreams become nightmares.
Such wretchedness!

Terrible reality!
You must do as you must, I suppose.
But even protected in dreams from prying eyes,
to watch you still pains me so!

Since my body
was neglected by the one
who had promised faithfully to come,
I now lie here questioning its existence.

As I slept in isolation
my desired beloved appeared to me;
therefore, dreams have become my reality
and consolation.

Did you appear
only because I was lost in love-thoughts
when I nodded off, day-dreaming of you?
(If I had known that you
couldn't possibly be true
I'd have never awakened!)

Though I visit you
continually in my dreams,
the sum of all such ethereal trysts
is still less than one actual, solid glimpse.

I pursue you ceaselessly in my dreams…
yet we've never met; we're not even acquainted!

Yielding to a love
that recognizes no boundaries,
I will approach him by night—
for the world cannot despise
a vagabond dreamer.

These moonless nights,
when no star lights your way to me,
I lie awake, blazing with longing,
my breast an inferno,
while my heart chars within me.

Overwhelmed by desire
in the lily-seed darkness,
tonight I'll turn my robe inside-out.

Sleepless with loneliness,
I find myself longing for the handsome moon.

This unbreakable shackle, love,
chains me to this world of pain.

Fiery coals searing my body
hurt me far less than the sorrow of separation.

This vain life!
My looks and talents faded
like these cherry blossoms left limp
by endless dismal rains
that I now survey, alone.

Since there’s obviously nothing to catch
in this barren bay,
how can he fail to understand—
this fisherman who persists in coming
until he collapses in the sand?

Am I a guide to rural fisherfolk?
What do I care where the anemones dwell?
Why ask me to reveal the inlet,
lead you to some dewy shell?

Compelled by my longing,
I boarded desire’s drifting boat;
where I now float aimlessly,
with wave-drenched sleeves.

Oarless and rudderless,
beyond the help of the fisherfolk,
I’m wearied of crossing and re-crossing the sea...

Flowers blooming but never blossoming,
never ripening to fruits:
the ocean garlanded by whitecaps.

Autumn nights are "long"
only in verse and song:
for we had just begun
to gaze into each other’s eyes
when dawn immolated the skies!

Poems about Moscow
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

5
Above the city Saint Peter once remanded to hell
now rolls the delirious thunder of the bells.

As the thundering high tide eventually reverses,
so, too, the woman who once bore your curses.

To you, O Great Peter, and you, O Great Tsar, I kneel!
And yet the bells above me continually peal.

And while they keep ringing out of the pure blue sky,
Moscow's eminence is something I can't deny ...

though sixteen hundred churches, nearby and afar,
all gaily laugh at the hubris of the Tsars.

8
Moscow, what a vast
uncouth hostel of a home!
In Russia all are homeless
so all to you must come.

A knife stuck in each boot-top,
each back with its shameful brand,
we heard you from far away.
You called us: here we stand.

Because you branded us criminals
for every known kind of ill,
we seek the all-compassionate Saint,
the haloed one who heals.

And there behind that narrow door
where the uncouth rabble pour,
we seek the red-gold radiant heart
of Iver, who loved the poor.

Now, as "Halleluiah" floods
bright fields that blaze to the west,
O sacred Russian soil,
I kneel here to kiss your breast!

I Know The Truth
loose translation by Michael R. Burch

I know the truth—abandon lesser truths!
There's no need for anyone living to struggle!
See? Evening falls, night quickly descends!
So why the useless disputes—generals, poets, lovers?

The wind is calming now; the earth is bathed in dew;
the stars' infernos will soon freeze in the heavens.
And soon we'll sleep together, under the earth,
we who never gave each other a moment's rest above it.

Insomnia
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

2
In my enormous city it is night
as from my house I step beyond the light;
some people think I'm daughter, mistress, wife ...
but I am like the blackest thought of night.

July's wind sweeps a way for me to stray
toward soft music faintly blowing, somewhere.
The wind may blow until bright dawn, new day,
but will my heart in its rib-cage really care?

Black poplars brushing windows filled with light ...
strange leaves in hand ... faint music from distant towers ...
retracing my steps, there's nobody lagging behind ...
This shadow called me? There's nobody here to find.

The lights are like golden beads on invisible threads ...
the taste of dark night in my mouth is a bitter leaf ...
O, free me from shackles of being myself by day!
Friends, please understand: I'm only a dreamlike belief.

The Appointment
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

I will be late for the appointed meeting.
When I arrive, my hair will be gray,
because I abused spring.
And your expectations were much too high!

I shall feel the effects of the bitter mercury for years.
(Ophelia tasted, but didn't spit out, the rue.)
I will trudge across mountains and deserts,
trampling souls and hands without flinching,

living on, as the earth continues
with blood in every thicket and creek.
But always Ophelia's pallid face will peer out
from between the grasses bordering each stream.

She took a swig of passion, only to fill her mouth
with silt. Like a shaft of light on metal,
I set my sights on you, highly. Much too high
in the sky, where I have appointed my dust its burial.

Excerpt From Hamlet’s Diary

Some life-pulse agitates the stars
   Tonight, and breaks their spell,
As memory stirs in beamless eyes
   Or depths move in a well.

Secluded in a nave, one light
   In private tempest throws
Fierce shadow-struggle over walls
   Some secret ghost-wind blows.

And sunken embers, ashen-faced
   Flare suddenly unstirred,
And through the timbered hush, a gulp
   From some lone pond is heard.

Time’s watch lives on, a brooding lull
   Disguising depths aroused;
Sleep, of remembrance is not quit,
    And spirits walk unhoused. 

Mechanism Will Of Course Prevail

Who really knows if what's borne by the born
is confined to known mercies of sense
or if death can be trusted to really provide
a final escape from existence.

Infinities more may lie in store
(to hope not is not to be sure)
and maybe once in, there's no way out
and you're forced to forever endure.

But why try to nudge with possible fates
when those sure ones we all can see
never seem to deter nature's tools from deploying
their brute power to make a life be.

Spring Fever

The current outlook has started me brooding,
asking myself as I writhe in my box
how many long stretches more

should be left to chance, to whatever
common treacheries still lie in store.
Of course,

between decidedly wishful
enlistments of any chore or bore,
there's scenery galore,

just oodles of riveting decoration
to help expel the daily prospect
of sluggish passage through a void

and expand the rescue team of vital
things like this still left to be done.
Right now it's springtime again,

and a week or two ago while pacing
the space between uneasy escapes,
I must've paused to check the view,

a proscenium arch of chartreuse leaves
disclosing an anemic row
of daffodils over across in the park,

all which might've seemed less deja vu
had the politicos ordered a headstone or two
to cap off their visionary landscape art.

In the meantime, the scene's turned green,
and I note the hanging half-wreath is capturing
a bloomless bed's gray edging of cobbles,

so I guess that brand of granite instead
must serve to show how a dream of beauty
can produce so engrossing a land of the dead.

Well, don't expect anything great.
It's just a way of knocking off
another block of time.

Current Attractions Besides Frère André

Living alone in a box before you're dead
can prove a bit of a trial, to wit
how to remove a weight of hours

from early-rise to early-abed
when there's nothing but time ahead,
not even a stint at the treadmill for fun,

hardly a thing but forced absorptions,
self-imposed puzzles or chores,
evasive maneuvers performed to diminish

a sense of infinitesimal progress,
of standing still in a stagnant dimension
stretching to kingdom come.

So happily facing another black morning,
its only stimulant chuggishly trickling
into a stained pyrex pot,

I lugged two bags of recyclables down,
dropped them in their usual spot
beside an ailing tree in the pre-dawn

murk of an amber-lit sidewalk.
And now, hooray, a check to be written
presents itself as another fine way

of slightly budging the clock.
Later I'll probably latch onto other
rare rungs in my climb through the day,

the latest edition of Tass let's say
(as I dub a local free speech organ)
with its monolithic insipid array

of enemy lines to be spied on,
or maybe some noticed urgency,
like recurrent gaps in my liquor stock.

That's about what it's come to
since they banned the entertainment industry,
ran out the only wizards at hitting

the daily jackpot of foreign spare income,
crowned their virtue with a virtual ghosttown,
brought to an utterly derelict end

a nonstop ten-year winning spree
that had showered down riches on everyone.
So now,

with the children safe as can be
in a warm woolly sock of deprivation
where only the rampant fuzz are free,

with pretty much nothing left to see
but strings of tots passing sluggishly
through a sort of spiffed-up cemetery lot,

I'm thinking of starting a free soup kitchen
(for nothing but the company)
as well as an overnight shelter (why not?)

perhaps out of some recrudescent desire
for even a lukewarm body's comfort
as much as to nudge something hot.

Knuckle down to the family life I say,
bow to the dictates of the day,
when things have entirely gone to pot

there's hardly a reason for staying awake
except to join the flock and Baa
or methodically feel inspired to jot

out a ditty, and sing
hurrah.

Ode to an Opportunist

He calls me a broken record,
seems to wish I'd change my tune.

There's no "advantage" in it he says.
"Who else would take a chance on you?"

(I think he means their ratings would plunge
if they ran my latest series

on life's only reason for being.)
It's true enough, I suppose.

My decided lean towards eternal peace
I admit is somewhat at odds

with environmental preservationism.
Advocating taking life off the menu,

every species of it even,
down to the minutest form,

while the rest are all gung-ho
for keeping the kitchen popping out dishes

could conceivably cause some viewer defection.

Meanwhile, his broadcasts keep hitting it big
he keeps telling me—with a faint whiff of relish.

(He must have some Simon Barjona in him—
that fisher of men God chose as his stand-in.)

I should've been net-casting more I guess
talking less to myself when skirting the void.

I know the company's aim is full houses.
A church's success is gauged by its flock-size.

Still, that's a tough bill to fill in my case,
born as I was with zero knack

for religion, or business, or peddling my wares
(I've just never had a salesman's nature)

no dream of a nonstop Broadway run
nor of anything else you could call immortal.

(He tells me his broadcasts might go on and on.
While me, I'm just thinking why does he care.)

How many watch ghost shows I wonder.
(I've also wondered if they're funded by Baptists.)

Should I mix it up with phantasmic scenes?
The supernatural does have its snares.

But brainflash! UFOs could prove hypnotic!
A second! A troupe of divine derrieres!

The hint I'm picking up anyway
is the way to woo crowds is not by wishing

mother earth might someday soon
be mirroring the silvery moon,

be hanging aloft in the night-sky
lustrous as any white porcelain plate—

that it might be wiser, for the company's sake
(and maybe too for my own)

to take a break from outlandish dreams,
come up with more compelling themes,

focus more on audience bias,
play to their weakness, be a bit more resigned

to providing passable reproductions
of whatever entrances a fish's eye.

(I understand it's essential
to keep profits high.)

Am now thinking Married With Children—
a remake?

Or would nature's beauties work just as well
to glue a target-group's gaze?

Whad'd'u think?

Possibly violets, gardens, whatnot
could fasten pupils in as tight a headlock?

But this brings to mind a line
I misread the other night:—

"the breast covered with violets."
Odd what I saw instead was "the beast

covered with violets"—
Perhaps my eye sometimes gets its kicks

by teasing my inner junkie
with the perfect fix.

Old habits and hopes die hard?
Might even cause optical confusions?

Or was it just my cataracts
making things look as they aren't?

But off to the races (The mad hatter crept!
Like Housman I wish I'd forever slept!)

Being wedded to fact has been holding me back.
I need some new angle to get me on track.

For god's sake stay tuned!
I swear I'll try to make you swoon—

maybe a remake of Happy Days?
At any rate you can safely assume

my wish for a lunar earth's been inhumed.
No more stars playing taps for a foodless globe.

You can bet you'll be having a lovely trip!
I'm building a brand new passenger ship!

Whatever it takes to get you on board!
(Only company men can count on a raise.)

But to end with my newfound jocular flair—
you'll be cast out, shunned, jailed or killed

if your view of what's right doesn't line up with theirs.
So beware. Their tolerance has a strict limit.

They'll hogtie you with interdictions.
(though cashcows can temper their taste for restrictions).

They were made to reproduce and gang up.
Mutual torture's their favorite hangup.

All were brought here to be sucked in
by the luscious lures of a treacherous host.

Most are seduced of course. The host's so compelling!
(It knows how to keep appendages swelling,

knows how to hide its omnivorous lust,
so well it's the god in whom you trust!)

Just recall I'm a broken record.
My only point has been to make clear

he's nailed it—
the proof is before you, right under your eyes.

He considers himself quite the whiz,
and this is to prove he is!

(The quintessence of every species of life
is disturbing the peace and promoting strife.)

In Search of Charon

The hour is ripe and yonder lies the way. 
—Virgil 
 
One wary day towards dusk the elevator stopped 
and slid its elegantly grille-worked gate apart 
releasing lean and wispy shadows, strangers all, 
unknown, unnamed, their cloven eyes like vagrant genii 
trammeling in and out the well-appointed hall. 

‘Welcome to my living room,’ an old crone said 
her hair an egg-white whisked under a mourner’s scarf 
with leather slippers quaffing like two emptied flasks 
she let her tears fall on the velvet tasseled chairs 
which lay like sleeping relatives beneath their masks. 

A transient visitor alighted, then another, 
traipsing back and forth, intruding on her lair. 
She shuffled humbly, unperturbed back to the pantry 
arching shoulders dank like butcher’s trodden sawdust 
there to sort her tea-cups into symmetry. 

In and out the strangers went, the elevator 
opening onto the recess of her room 
while village women, silent wallflowers, gathering 
and pausing, filled the air with scent of talcum powder, 
thoughts on hold like wings beating and hovering. 

‘Welcome to my house,’ the voice exclaimed again 
its thinning timbre hostage in its own domain 
resigned and trapped, a hummingbird with no escape. 
The elders whispered, raised their crippled fingers high 
in wonder and in sorrow at this cruel rape. 

‘I have my peace,’ she said with equanimity, 
‘a place that no one knows but me, a secret tunnel 
through this darkened world. They say there is a well 
below, a flowing rivulet, right here inside 
this swinging door, where unmolested spirits dwell.’ 

Then with a tug she wrung open the dumbwaiter 
and primed herself atop its ledge with resolution 
borne of antiquated faith. ‘My lover calls, 
I hear his name. It’s Charon waiting patiently 
within his scow to steer me safely from these walls.’ 

In and out the strangers roamed. ‘This time is mine,’ 
the woman said. ‘I will you all to disappear.’ 
Like burnt-out fireflies her demons were extinguished 
her buzzing head she bowed and poked inside the vent— 
Her eyes within the midden pit themselves distinguished. 

And on she rowed with Charon sternly at the helm, 
gilt coin the ransom to her new unbounded realm. 

A Strange Sun

The ships sailed up the river’s mouth,
Against a steely, clear-eyed gale,
Far from the vineyard of the south,
The olive grove and terraced vale.
So different from their native lands
Appeared, unto each legionnaire,
The green hills wrapped in silver bands.
And somehow, so much colder there
The wind felt on each sun-tanned face,
Though there was but a narrow sea
Between them and their launching place,
Somehow, the sun shone differently.
Above the steady naval din –
The creaking boards, the splashing oars – 
A silence slowly settled in,
Above the shouts and groans and roars,
As all along the misty banks
A tangled rabble watched them pass –
The wizened willows in their ranks,
The water-flags, the reedy grass,
The broad-leaved poplars, slim and high,
The loosestrife’s vivid, bloodstained rods,
The oaks with arms raised to the sky – 
Through eyes of strange and hostile gods.

Going Home to Campania

I come back to my cool and quiet road,
Testudo shielded by umbrella pines,
Where pavement cracked and garbage overflowed
To fade beyond in bright converging lines.
I come back as a stranger, long since grown,
Back to a land I knew when I was small,
Whose image often to my mind is shown,
Appearing in my daydreams most of all.
My arbored road leads home in memory:
To chilly autumns filled with smoke and haze,
And muddy rains far-flung across the sea
From Africa. To blue celestial days
Of snowless winter and his early nights,
When music rises up from far away
To cobbled streets alive with golden lights,
And fireworks throw embers in the bay.
To pale-eyed springtime in her bridal gown,
Progressing through the sleeping fields with grace.
She stops at summer’s altar and bows down,
As fruit and foliage take flower’s place.
And through the seasons wheeling on and on,
The giant bones of empires remain
Immaculate – though flesh be picked and gone –
In temples of the holy and profane,
In cities built by half-forgotten kings
High in the hills two thousand years ago,
In aqueducts, and many older things
So deeply buried I will never know.
I found this land as when I left it last,
The sea and mountains and the fields between,
And thought that I could drive into the past,
By turning down my road festooned in green.
Here are the potholes gaping one by one,
The iron gates, the walls adorned with vines.
But now my road lies burning in the sun
Between two rows of stumps that once were pines.

Virgo 

Too late, too late, the summertime has gone.
Alone, I wander in the bleakening
That creeps across the fields before the dawn
And beg my heart to not feel anything.
The leaves come down in rusting drifts of gold,
Set free by winds flown south on silver wings.
Alone, I wait for winter to unfold,
Regretful in the chill September brings.
What right have I to mourn the summer’s end,
When willfully I squandered his estate,
Assuming more than my own dividend,
Misprizing him until it was too late?
The bowl is broken and the cord undone,
And I must learn to live without the sun.

Aquarius

A black cross in my memory,
Upon a tangled silver chain,
Against his skin of ivory,
Glows fire-branded to my brain.
I wonder what it means to him.
A superstition, luck-charm, or
A beacon when his faith is dim,
To lead him through the narrow door?
An icon wrought of ebony:
I pictured it when last I prayed,
Confronted with a sanctity 
Above my reach, above my grade.
And on the night I saw him last,
Above his heart it caught the light.
I bowed then, with my eyes downcast,
Beneath his gaze of lazurite.

She Moved Upon the Waters

Unbroken, empty, dull, at first no word.
Then shattered light upon the sea bestirred,
And gilded stones on swathes of silver strewn
That dance as if entranced to silent tunes.
Where now the canvas blank? Dye upon dye!
And she whom ancient fires sanctify
In but a glance has conjured Gods entire:
The void transmuted, quickened by desire,
Where rivers bent in trembling worship trace
The slow-drawn scripture of her hips and waist.

Palimpsest
 
How misunderstood, a language
succumbs to the elements.
You may shout your truth,
throw a tantrum in the slyest way.
They still won’t notice a single word
you’ve said, as if you’ve died only
to the world you still perceive.
 
Slam through walls (now you can),
flicker a light for a grieving relative—
one who barely noticed you
while you were alive,
as if you’d already drifted
to another plane.
 
They’ll pen you a letter in cursive
about times gone by.
Contrition literature, one of the steps.
You’re still looking down
from the high-beamed ceiling,
waving incessantly to prove you’re there.
 
But the air is thick;
all they hear is swoosh and static.
You realize now your hands are gone,
as are you to the flesh’s nagging pull.
 
Skinny-dip into your own utopia—
horses and rainbows by a tranquil lake.
Sound is null, but for the seraphim’s choir.
Words are irrelevant. You’re understood.

Looking for Reasons
 
Rain falls softer on a woman's skin,
tracing her contours on the way down.
 
This New York designer dress, unworn—
smoke-soaked, twice passed along,
 
an older sister's hand-me-down.
I hand-wash the dress, rinsing out smoke.
 
Being smaller has its perks.
So does arriving last.
 
The nest, now empty, sifts new rain—
which meanders, drunk
 
into cobwebbed corners
no one has touched.
 
Perhaps tomorrow, an event
grand enough to reach for the dress,
 
sequins intact, carefully pressed—
a theater, maybe… or warm, doting rain.

Somewhere beyond this vast universe 
of glittering things 
that are unworthy of our worship, 
there lives a girl, a woman, 
whose skin speaks to me 
of wheat and gold and dark honey; 
and there she is, there I see her, 
in the soft fire of her red dress. 

Somewhere beyond this barren age 
in which machines 
have rid the world of melody, 
there lives a girl, a woman, 
whose hands still summon 
the old acoustics of the trees and rivers; 
and there she is, there she waits for me, 
in the sensual embers of her red dress. 

Somewhere beyond the unreal songs 
of a plastic planet, 
full of knowledge but bereft of feeling, 
there lives a girl, a woman, 
whose hips are tuned to the dark 
rhythms of some primeval drum; 
and there she is, there I see her, 
in the coiling flame of her red dress. 

Somewhere beyond the shrine 
where the veil of the goddess 
was rent by the racing hearse of progress, 
there lives a girl, a woman, 
whose lips invigorate authentic beings 
whose songs are their own lives; 
and there she is, there she waits for me, 
in the smouldering embers of her red dress. 

The Lecher’s Lament

For all night long I dreamed of you:
I woke and prayed against my will,
Then slept to dream of you again.

                       — Christina Rossetti

The first night that I dreamed of you,
I took a flight to Palestine
where I talked with Arabs and with Jews,

yet dared look no man in the eye.
I walked right past my embassy
(I felt no love, I felt no pride)

then past the rest of Tel Aviv.
And all throughout the consulate halls,
men abetted war when they cried, “Peace!”

My feet approached the Wailing Wall—
my hand outstretched, my head bowed low,
my lips invoking Babel’s fall.

I saw no mosques with golden domes,
no soaring spires, no synagogues,
nor even Herod’s porticos…

For I was touching you, and not
the sacred wall. You beckoned me,
and by your rivered Babylon,

there I laid down. Your waters I
called home, your lips I called my Zion;
I shook with newfound ecstasy

when liquid myrrh began to run.
The next night that I dreamed of you,
I clutched the cup and drained the Blood.

Archangels thundered at the pews;
the air was thick with heavy scents
of myrrh and frankincense diffused.

Comfort me with ginseng—with sacraments
of a youthful wine-flushed god,
naked and beautiful, chanting a lecher’s lament.

I come to you with bloodied hands
and muddied feet…past hallowed grounds
of burning brush to a faith-forsaken land.



Originally published in Merion West

He was gone 
Not lost 
Nor a rambling fool. 

But set as a boat to the crag. 
Absent his shadow hung 
Whilst time rounded in its diurnal way 

It could ne’er evade nor amend his passing  
Which left, us orphans, 
Consumed and unspooled.

The darkened form-

Maternal low lullaby

Abstruse
-Unobtrusive. 

O’ slight sliver -
O’ sallow framed figure -

Where memory laughs
Tears and rain casting me out.

Urchin urged-
 Pall wracked -

Cleaving high for her tresses and the healing summer rain.

Fruits of folly wasted lathe
Once unsurpassed at Esthwaite and then Hawkshead
My recompense assured yet, vanity did rim 
My path in its slippery silvery thread.

And led me to a causeway
Prettied by sedge and curious idle elms.
Where me head lowered dim from sham-reveries. 

The gay dancing rollicksome fringe 
Lacing and binding me in its trance-  
Till the mirth o’ the moon~ swooning weltering waves
Lulled me back.

Railing me in cattails and the soft marsh’d breeze
Drubbing in its cooing eaves
To be- and listen at the moor and caves 
Where silence delineates 

And I, its scribe, waft and shift
Away from this feeble tribe.
Away from the woo of a dissolute life.
To the swan song, the unheralded gong.

O’ solitude!
O’ little bay of the pen
Wrap me in this quietude unperturbed

Whilst light washes way this mizzling play
Leaving me chaste and free.
To the banks of her. 
The one who speaks without words into my open ear.

First wrangler, Second wrangler
Or to lead the quiet life among the dunes 
Immersed in solitude where the mind awakens in sputters 
Then emulsifies into that ever-liquefied state 
Ecstasy~ the welling being fastens to itself 
Once more unfettered rousing to the intermittent chirp. 
Crickets in the bog. 
Transients hidden frost bitten 
Wanderers adrift in the morning fog.

A thin blade of ice per chance
To set upon bittersweet Sizar walking this vagabond dance. 
‘Twas it thru briars leaves o’ Dante, Tasso?
O’er a Chatterton phase amongst tombstones? 

Where wraiths and mists danced
Wyle thru brine vagaries of chance.
I knelt upon the cool pane
Unencumbered thu me head ached for the crashing strain.

These two old, too knobby kneed poles
Spun as twisting orbs about verdant rime crystalized ferns.
O’ boy, o’ lantern dipped in yr youth trimmed dais
Tilt yr gaze to me in the swift chill’t glass.

O’er the banks, o’ snowy planes
Powered fine in threads.
Cravats and wigs primped in pomade
Whilst the breeches ride up against bone bridled ankles.

O’ boy of the song!
O’ boy of olden days!
I see yr eye lilt and flicker in thy shade.

Like little spaces on a fret
The bow curves back
The arrow dispatched.
What of the seeds set to sail
Tiny plantlets
Lives of the felled.
In the play for the derailment 
Stage of the Republic Establishment
What is done, is done the swell will subside ~The ship abides;
Midst roars unleashed 
Angst mashed
Lion’s teeth
Clamping on bones rank primogeniture blue boned.
Nobles oblige ensconced within withered immortality
Whereso’er circlets crafted in cunning gilt encircle throats 
From conception, the denouement~ 
To the craven crushing finality.
The mob seeking liberation through brutality.
Do they bow in abeyance or adjourn; 
To the newly enfranchised
Where finally the lands circumscribed 
Out of hands and blood rends the lies of hereditary lines?

Like Prometheus I didst spy 
Embers neath thumb and forefinger lighting the member.
Tongues in exiled exultations 
Longing to be shrived and assailed.
Demon and seraph set gainst silhouettes most profane. 

The knotted rood which eftsoons remains.
Reminder for he who must be assuaged with penance.
Yet in our childhood hours,
His mantle crimson showered,
Lined with pledges ne’er to be paid.

Didst, I stand like he upon the heath
A godly arrogance replete?
Dost, I preach not a babe wet and placid at yr knee
But with a fevered eye choosing to divine
The landscape Fantastique!

Her soft hand didst not invite nor pat a lap
Weaving tales for kinchin
Nor doling out buttons as guineas
Twixt fire and abomination.

I was tossed, wayfarer in a plain and broken skiff
Unremembered, oarless, adrift.
From love or chaunts hauntings whispered lullabies
Thru hoary gossamere laced curtains shiftless and sublime. 

Aye an otiose babe lapsed thru time.

Tremors shook me, night consumed me
Under the sweat and tear torn sheets.
In the e’en blank opaque rage 
Hideous distortions arrayed
Muzzy fears ne’er to be allayed.

Yea didst they o’er take me
Making me their crazed slave.
Incoherent cherub 
At once slack jawed addled 
And hopelessly depraved.

In that ambient hour,
Where the line ‘tis no more, 
Visions howl searing lips. 

Black crusted omens cursing me; 
Nostalgic hobos, their eerie 
Apocalyptic strange shrieking
Heard rattling e’en draymen’s ears.
‘Tis this a phantom’s delusive cry

Neath cambric threads dressing life, bed
The truth doth oft reside.

Banisters, barricades
Up thru round hinges hung in twirls.
More than limbs from birches, 
Alders without leaves.
Each flight rising higher thru the air
Till it tops to a kirk’s lofty spire.
Where angels billow and reveal
Blowing chaunts thru club fisted trumpets.

Brass shimmering horns
Saluting and signifying God’s anthem.
Lilting hymns for those feeble kneed and unwell
That these stately plinths twist and bend 
O’er and o’er without end.
Leaves me in a mollified place
Where heaven is the answer,
Yet I find no gate.

To Otter I flew o’er a bit of cheese.
Fists and voices caterwauling crying, 
Whilst with my chubby stub I walloped back
Stealing to take what ‘tis mine; Center stage.

Hither didst I go, by the river’s bend,
Heaving and sighing till I ne’er couldst stand.
To that fine fellow my watery grave
Otter whose limbs extended as a prayer.

Yea, the town’s bell and crier upended all.
The haunts, churchyards and crags whistling, calling
In shrill, shivering long wondering rills.

O’ solitary child where can ye be?
Sleep in the meadow, lowing as cattle;
O’ calfling separated from the tribe;
Hidden in thrushes by the nightly storm.

Fierce cavalcade wracking, chewing up hours.
I lay still as a babe, lonely rancher.
Cradled in his arms, a slackened farthing
There safe from the ghastly moans in me ears.

To the father, whose cheeks were wet from dew.
And to the mother whose ecstasies grew.
Returned I, to the bustling throng near death.
That oft sought songstress, oft loved marshy muse.

Who sings lowing; that- cattle weighed dirge.
That they were sad on my parting, ‘tis so.
Yet the memory that would sustain them
Whilst the slick dewy plot o’ earth remained.

Rent and there steeped in soft velvety peat.
Meant for the heavenly crowned to imbue.
There Michael, the archangel of their choir
He, who wouldst regale them when they expired.

Am I that minstrel, or odd darkling crow- 
Who knows which way that warm mistral may go.

Do my slight ills plague thee?
A cough sudden chill.

Does my frame, splintered wobbling being, disturb you?
The viewer wondering, when will the fright be too much.

The snuff, the draught of laudanum, rare and fine;
That the sickroom becomes sublime.

Aria Ligi is an award-winning neo-classical poet and longtime equal-rights advocate whose work merges historical depth with lyrical fire. Her verse has appeared in journals, anthologies, and across international publications. The Romantic Series is her magnum opus—a modern poetic odyssey that reclaims the classical voice in service of contemporary truth. She served as the Senior Poetry Editor for New Poetry Magazine (2013-2015) Poetry Editor for October Hill from 2018 to 2020, and from 2019-2020, the Arts Director at SHE THE MAGAZINE. She is the author of Blood, Bone, and Stone, Temple of Love, Poems for Marie Antoinette, the Pushcart-nominated Hammer of God, which received numerous accolades on Goodreads and Amazon, and volume one of the Romantic Series Hymn to Equity, poems for William Wordsworth, 2025, published through 0-0-8 Studios. Explore her work at arialigi.com.

After the Floods

Relentless programming of blood sacrifices consumes
the halcyon days of summer. Autumn gold hides
behind blind transom windows and hoary doors.
 
Transient bitterness settles in the dark, squishy roots
of inducement. Turning lazily in the river waters,
swollen wooden shapes hint at their former integrity.
 
Colliding fronts squash floating stars, giving
no inducement to those who would stay.

The Bowl
 
How strong must a bowl be
that contains the love, the hurt,
into which I drop my shame,
where my wings fold over my children’s hearts
and carry forgiveness for the lie.
One day it broke, we glued the pieces
back together again. But the bowl
stays empty. So empty.

Undone
 
Unsung melodies whisper
falsehoods. Unspoken words
sow discord among unkept memories.
Unhealed wounds become cauldrons of hate.
Unloved pain deceives those it would bring comfort.

Wistful Pantoum
 
I am held together by a string of memories
and the marvel of my pacemaker.
Stories help me to outlast the silence.
I need to learn to listen to myself.
 
The marvel of my pacemaker
kicks my heart into gear when it is stuck
as I learn to listen to myself.
Not all the answers are welcome.
 
My heart, kicked into gear when it is stuck,
I ask myself about the next few years.
Not all the answers are welcome.
Will there be pain?
 
I ask myself about the next few years—
so many of the best have left.
I am held together by a string of memories.
These stories help me to outlast the silence.

Russet Rags
 
Russet rags
torn at the leaf
obscure the clear waters
where Ophelia
opens pale eyes
behind green veils.
 
While received knowledge
is exposed to the time winds
accepted truth
is swallowed by the maelstrom
between Scylla and Charybdis.
Hubris, like a swollen blowfish,
floats in darkness.
 
I watch in silence and wait
for zero point
while listening
for the last time
to Bach’s fugue.

The Last Days
 
The sun is out.
Again.
Another endless day.
 
The air is thick with heat like molasses.
Even at night the stones and concrete
are giving off feverish heat like pizza ovens.
Breathing hurts the throat and there is no relief.
Over the Pacific, the doldrums have swallowed
the winds, and for weeks we have had no power;
at night we feel our way like blind mice,
touching hot metal girders, hot walls,
hot stoves, hot glass, burning our hands
while groping for some sense of where.
 
In another suffocating morning
I slowly drag myself to the end of my world
in search of relief.
Water.
I see it rising as steam on its journey to reach
the heavenly alchemist who frees
the water’s molecules.
I open my heavy arms
and ask to be taken.

You Can’t Go Home Again
 
The storm took exception to our apple tree.
Split it right in half. The heavy fruit bruised and muddied,
some apples split open. The raw, wet wood
bleeding sap. The white plastic chairs
stopped in their flight by the vines who were holding hands.
The vines know there is strength in knitting together
and bending with the wind.
Our old walnut tree torpedoed the yellow sand
of the front yard with its still green missiles,
while the honeysuckle, like the vines,
resisted; the eucalyptus lost a heavy branch
that broke many of the tiles on the roof of the porch.
We left the car at the entrance
to our dirt path along the little river
that had shrunk into itself.
After the elemental onslaught, all our friends
were back in business, chatting, growing, the little river
gurgling, everyone licking their wounds, accepting.
 
The dirt path is now an asphalted drive,
the river reduced to a smelly trickle,
the blackberries hacked away,
we can’t see vines or apple trees.
A huge pool where our small one had been,
most of the grass covered in cement,
the exuberant roses somehow
turned into tomatoes and beans.
No eucalyptus, no honeysuckle, no walnut tree,
the pines must have been a nuisance,
losing their needles with such abandon,
and then there are always the pinecones.

Almost no wind, a gentle early evening sun
finds no purchase. And the ghosts
of what had been whisper: Walk away.

Winter Garden: A Hymn to the World Financial Center

Let the gleaming curtain wall, unadorned
By ornament of dryad leaf or twig,
Tower in silence above the cold concrete.
Let glistening fountains of smooth, tempered glass

And the frantic, confused bleating of horns
And bells be mute this morning, as the soft
Music of derelicts and the milklorn sobs
Of dry, discarded children pipe around
This winter garden, where the goddesses
Of clearlit prosperity, bright nymphs,
Hydriads, and hamadryads, strike the pure
Marble with feet shod in forgetfulness.

These stones, hard in unyielding purity,
Will not be sprinkled with a bullock’s blood
Nor blackened with the curling smoke and sweet
Fat of a blazing hecatomb. I’ve seen
Tassled corn and drunken vines. I’ve winced
At the sharp needles of morning sunlight,
And squinted at the cratered eyes and proud
Cheekbones of hunger that knows neither name
Nor home.
Surrounded by steel, embraced by vast
Horizons of stone, concrete and vaulted glass,
I breathe conditioned air, and bow my head
To this metallic strength that yields no honeycomb,
That gives up no steady hum of foraging bees.

Beneath these long, priapic palms thin crowds
Pass in murmuring reveries redolent
Of soft, aeolian fragrances sweet to the god
Of the living crystal, far from the roar
Of the green sea and the sinuous paintbrush
Of windswept islands of anemone.

Invisible hyenas, thick with rapined hope,
Prowl among rippling peels of soft
Anguish and gurgling growls of xylophonic ribs.
Symphonies of kwashiorkor reverberate
Through lightwashed groves of programmed harmony,
And painted graces dance among gaunt fauns
Who ride the scything wake of a scorpion’s tail.

A wand of juniper describes its arc
Across the iris of a restless eye,
And soporific anodynes of Colchis
Soothe the keepers of the horde. But who
Will venture forth to resurrect the moist,
Placental glistenings of yesterday,
Winedark, omphalic slumbers in the bell
Of a trumpet’s trill, the fertile harbinger
Of desolation, and the flaming sword
At morning’s gate?
Spare, huddled children scratch
Bright stone, heave, gasp, and suffocate in a cold
Reflex of unrelenting reptilian will.
A splendid ulcer of solar fire hangs high
Above this living sliver of suffering,
This unmeasured moment of hopelessness
Scarcely winnowed through the majesty
And slake of Eratosthenes’ sieve.

Straw virgins, folded in the gilt and filth
Of a hard driven hoard, desiccate
In the parching scales of the fire breather’s thighs.
O seeds of Babylon! O calloused crusts of stone,
Swollen with the sharp salt of mothers’ tears
And cast, like inanimate detritus, upon
The frozen maelstroms of a dry Sargasso!

The murmuring dirges of sick, famished days,
Crazed rat breath nights, bereft of family
And home, are tallied somewhere in the march
Of porkbelly milliseconds and sweet
Titanium lullabies of milkless machines
And perforated genealogies
 Of accumulated waste. The dragon nods,
The curves are plotted. Inevitabilities,
Such as Spring, puberty, and the Dow Jones
Unfold their blighted petals in the lens
Of this unsullied oracle.

The Witch of Stromboli, invisible
Among her puppet ornaments, delights
In appetite, revels in a cold light
On the slopes of probability,
And cackles at their dithyramb of death.

Lunch hour is almost over. Blank drones
Return in human waves to their chosen cells,
And the others, the nameless others, the chaff –
Poenitentiam agite – dissipate
Into final, irretrievable anonymity.

Let the gleaming curtain wall, unadorned
By ornament of dryad leaf or twig,
Tower in silence above the cold concrete.
Let glistening fountains of smooth, tempered glass
And the frantic, confused bleating of horns
And bells be mute, but mindful, as the soft
Music of derelicts and the milklorn sobs
Of dry, discarded children pipe around
This winter garden, where the goddesses
Of clear lit prosperity, bright nymphs,
Hydriads, and hamadryads, strike the pure
Marble with feet shod in forgetfulness.

Johnson’s Mesa

On Johnson’s Mesa I’ve watched the irises bloom
and fade. Right now they’re dust under a mat
of blinding snow. The road is closed. The ground
is frozen. Bleak tufts of brown vegetation
and broken pods protrude from winter’s pallor.

Each year that passes I am less, and this
is the same: the birth, the death, the sleep and the slow
awakening. Only the eye which lights
the scene must flicker at the coming darkness.

In the late afternoon the snow is crisp
under my feet and blue against my eye.
Silence of circling birds, voiceless footfalls
of snowwhite sacrificial rabbits and sleek,
unblemished predators: a tuft of snow
quivers, a weighted bough trembles, the air,
silver before the violet twilight, erupts
in sprays of disintegrating snowflakes.

I am alone. Inside myself, outside
this circle of blossoms, seedfalls, births, deaths.
Outside the roil of personal history
the world remains, a harsh and savage place
which I no longer try to understand.

Every nation has its thirsty Molochs.
Every town, every street its raging,
knife wielding priesthood.
Oh, let us praise their dynasty of death,
its belching stacks, the sacred wood leafstripped
and trembling with the roar of our machines.
Oh, let us pay our taxes, register
our discontent, and pass unnoticed
into the anonymity of chaos.

The woods have come alive with sounds I can’t see:
beating wings, crackling branches, a brief
thrashing before the warm, new blood grows crisp
and pink on this cool, newly disturbed snow.
A ripped throat pulses, a snapped spine quivers:
talons and beaks ravage the cobalt dusk,
and a tapestry of liquid eyes lights up
the long descent of deep, unjudging darkness.
I am alone, adrift in the deep wood
of destiny. Whatever path I choose,
the terror follows: stones that do not speak,
creatures that kill, creatures that die, mileposts
and blazemarks on the road to Golgotha.

Along the way broken children shake
their stumps and fashionable philanthropists
appraise the hidden value of horror.
Newscasters edit the carnage, array the corpses,
and feed their ratings with death puked from their mikes.

Once I was a child, born in that bright year
when the last Jews emerged from their ovens,
and humanity drank deep of its nature.
The surgeon ripped me from my mother’s womb
and delivered me, full of original sin,
into a world blackened by six million
burned corpses, anaesthetized by the death rattle
of conscience, conviction, and moral boundary.

Childhood was brief. Beasthood is long,
sad, and unforgiving of itself.
We are the beasts, not of the air and fields,
but of the dark places where children tear
the lashes from their eyelids, and tears
can’t cleanse the crypts of unarticulated grief.

But here, where most things are as they should be,
I watch the last crepuscular bruise of twilight
blacken into thick night and nocturnal
predation. The forest, alive with slashing beaks
and raking claws, rejects me, forces me
inside myself, where reflection yields no likeness,
and frozen rivers of sadness give way to numbness.

It’s that kind of night, when the wolf’s breath is on
the wind, and an icy moon hangs over
the silence of wolves in this Pecos Wilderness.
This night, alive with the arboreal
keening of dark, elegiac pines
and swift, swooping sarabands of raptor owls,
neither acknowledges my presence nor accepts
the bitter sacrilege of my intrusion.

Old pains revile the country of the flesh,
and memory, my muse of suffering,
haunts the ruined barrows of my mind.
This is a wasted landscape out of which
I peer into the dark, forested night,
whose canopy of bare branches and black
needles admits an ancient glow of suns
godless and mute in the black silence of space,
in the spiritless void which presses on the lake
of consciousness, the wellspring of entropy.

Once when I was young, I dared, presumed
to give a meaning to suffering. But now,
outside the dark penumbra of kwashiorkor
and marasmus, far from the sour buzz of flies
and the foul liquor of exploding bellies,
I’ve heard some voice crying in the wilderness:
drowned out by the crisp ruffle of banded bills,
the tinkle of coins, the ring of registers,
it speaks to me, but I can’t understand
the tortured meaning of its feral howls
or the absolute zero into which
it screams its futile pleas of agony.

Even out here, in the tall pines, where an owl
sobs her watch song, and the light of the rising moon
pierces this lattice work of shadowed boughs,
even out here I’m torn by those fierce screams,
assaulted by those roving bands of starved
Furies whose stories fibrillate the vacant air
with mad epyllia of meaningless suffering.
The stalking death that haunts my fatted ribs,
the febrile tossings of the boney damned,
the pompous rollcalls in stale, vast cathedrals
of malignant power, and not the least,
the click of credit cards and broken teeth,
the skulls of mutilated promises:
these all assault me, lacerate my brain
with the hot brine of love betrayed, trivialized,
of childhood extirpated from the marrow
of squandered youth, of death and dementia
defiant and triumphant. The apotheosis
of canker, worm, and stinking maggot
festers, erupts from the pustulent wells
and bilious fonts of puking incunabula
and dewey decimalized despair.

Mauve mortuaries of remembrance, pale
in the dim flames of lunatic votives,
accent subtle life-in-death hues: roses
of death for dull, exsanguinated cheeks,
fragrant dollops of sweet wintergreen
for the rotting bellies and pierced worm hoards
of putrefaction’s slow stepping chorus line.

The nameless and the loved, lost dancers in
this rancid processional
of my brain’s dim archaeology-
I cannot escape them or their dance. I know
the step. I feel the beat. Marionette,
I fall in line out here, among hillocks
of windblown snow and whispers of quivering pines.

Night has fallen. Winter is full and cold,
and tomorrow I shall emerge into the sunlight,
descend into the valley of human smiles,
and walk and talk among the living dead.

Illa cantat, nos tacemus: quando ver venit meum?
Quando fiam uti chelidon ut tacere desinam?

 
On the third day of prednisone I stared
Out from the shade of the old portal, over
A wall of potted plants, into transparent
Currents of clear mountain air all stippled
With golden green foliage against an eggshell
Of powder blue. It was a sky I’d seen
A hundred – no – a thousand times, and yet
It was new, fresh, and like no other sky
I’d ever seen. I took it in and wondered
If I might be dying.  An antique word
Came to mind, a special word that called
To me across time: the thing the old ones
Named avaritia, that ultimate
Attachment to this world, the final kiss,
That last hungry embrace before extinction.
What an unusual word: last love so like
First love, so green, suffused with sap and sun,
And all the melancholy of spent love,
Of dangling fruit in old, blighted orchards.
 
It’s May again. The bells of the old church
Are ringing. Sweet woodruff spices my wine.
Violets are wilting, lilies burgeoning,
And brittle rust exfoliates my joints.
An Acheron of soft depression runs
Through my veins and arteries. My mind
Bends and bows, dips and lifts itself
Out of this soft steroid chemistry,
Into a drug induced melancholy
From which the body’s pain withdraws and leaves
Only the soul’s sickness, the one sharp pain
That lingers like some fierce entropic constant
Of self-exstinguishing decrepitude.

But can I name it? A rose by any other
Name still might lacerate or shred the flesh.
This one – though – I think, got away from Adam.
Amid apples and angels, bees and madam,
He overlooked the secret names of madness.
He wrote a bestiary, invented botany,
But somehow passed over psychiatry,
And Death taunted him with beauty, light,
And the basalt umbra of endless night.

Years back, when I was a teenager, I
Knew a lady, but not her name. She used
To stand out on the main library steps
On fortysecond street. Her hair was long
And gray, she was thin, overpowdered, dressed
In a white blouse and black woolen skirt.
Flanked by winos, intelligentsia,
And numberless arrays of Queen’s Gambits,
Dragon Variations, and luncheon passers by
(All overdue for a new brain wrinkle),
She stood there, beautiful, terrible, looked
Into the crowd and asked who wanted to eat her.
Mugitusque boum – she screamed out for a fuck.
No one obliged. Instead they called her names
And went home to strengthened marriages
And children known only by their birthdays.
She was crazy, and after awhile
She would walk into the assembled throng
And disappear into whatever place
Is the elephants’ graveyard for the mad,
An alley or maybe some sunlit mew
Where she might sip drops from dark glass bottles
That hold the lost wits of crazy people.

Two years passed without me seeing her.
It was on an escalator hung
Between Hades and Hell, linking the trains
And the buses at the Port Authority.
I was going up, she down. I felt pain,
The first jolts of intemperate impotence,
And then I saw her sliding down. Blood gushed
From her mouth. The suited, opposing lines
Ascended and descended. Death speckled
Their timetables, and I never saw her again.

Adele was next. She too was quite insane.
Her widowhood was brief joy’s obsequy.
Her children were a bitter threnody.
Among ladyslippers and columbine
She drank cheap port, and slowly lost her mind.
They made a bed for her in Wingdale. Death
Darkened her eyes, and the dark earth took her.
 
Paul: I could never pass in silence over
His memory. His family had him
Committed to a nuthouse in Delaware,
A place with marmoreal toilet bowls
And whole closets full of scored pills,
Smooth capsules, and sealed vials that would calm
A restless mind or bludgeon a sick soul
Into black, intransigent walking sleep.
Amid flat affects and frail butterflies
Of pseudoparkinsonism, he told
His story to the keepers of clipboards,
And he was not believed. It was so clear:
Magnates of agribusiness had fed
Him subtly poisoned food which had destroyed
The sheaths of his auditory nerves
So that the sounds of daily life became
The roaring messengers of Ragnarok.
They listened, wrote, and gave him stronger drugs.
Like Israel in bondage Paul stood firm,
Bided his time, and finally escaped.
I picked him up in a rented van
And drove him back to New York where the noise
Almost killed him. Years passed. We lost touch,
And then I heard the news: more lockups, small
Control devices planted in his skull.
While trying to remove them from his brain,
He died. The doctors said he’d been insane.
His mom and dad concurred. They buried him
Expeditiously, but left the implants
Deep in his skull, where they still transmit code
To that dead brain which Paul had left behind.

Mark: he was an individualist,
The only man I ever knew to suck
His own cock, a skill acquired at the feet
Of Swami Vishnu Devananda. What
A fete of yogic discipline! So lithe,
So loose that he could almost stick his head
Up his ass! No wonder that he became
A lawyer. His father’d been a prison
Warden. His teenage sister was his bride.
In a dayglow world without distinctions
They reigned over a desert of chaos.
But it was in his death that Mark broke out
Of his prison and rocketed to greatness:
Leo pawed hard on the mountains. Silhouettes

Of native spruce darkened the silver sky.
Seated on a porch in Colorado
He was the chosen one: god’s holy fire
Burst through his breast like a hot, flaming spear.
His lights were dimmed by sheer mists of death,
And a mighty fate slammed his bright eyes shut.
 
My mother and father, shrouded in clouds,
Alone at the uncertain edge of time:
Father looked back, loved life, and kissed the day.
He slipped over the rim and disappeared
Forever. Mother tightened her fists and thrust
Her middle fingers up to life, to death,
To the blue recessional of the stars.
Cursing the errant spirits of the air,
She leaped, raging, into the leaden darkness.
Pursued by insuperable furies, raked
By screeching harpies of the bitter void,
She vilified plough, furrow, field and fruit.
Her angry tears dropped into River Styx,
And the iron Lords of Death barred her entry.
 
Full circle now: O Fortuna! My name
Must be added to this brief catalogue,
The name that is attached to my casket
Of rust and chemicals. Light no candles
For me. Say no prayers. Plant a cardboard
Tree with reynolds wrap foliage above
My bones, a fire retardant laurel stuck
In a field of plastic flowers, all eternal,
Washable, nonbiodegradable:
Monuments more lasting than bronze to mark
This box of bones that used to be a poet.
And what is a poet? What is a man?
Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
A brief outpouring of sound? Peaks and dips
On a sine curve of ever flattening
Amplitude? A universe of spent
Molecules disintegrating in blasts
Of commonplace decay into some void
Or blank stasis or ineluctable
Dust? A quantum of fading light imprisoned
Within the unillumined mystery
Of a black hole? The measure of all things reduced
To smears and stains, jars, slides, and fixing agents?
Avaritia: ave atque vale.
We have become as gods – no, as cicadas
Nearing the end of our season. We know
Good and evil, birth, death, finality.
With distinction we wear the mark of Cain.
In final solitude, withdrawn from scent,
Sight, hearing, we are perfected in death,
Empty vessels, never again to be
Full, forever barren, forever dry.
Avaritia: ave atque vale!

Snowflakes in the Season of Advent: A Reprise

In this frost-bitten Autumn of two thousand
Fifteen a raw wind gnaws at my heart’s shore.
Owls hoot, old tomcats screech, the cold wind whines,
And the black night demands that I break out
Of this bleak oubliette that walls me in,
This spirit breaking dungeon of decay—
Decay, dilapidation, age that grinds
The flesh and vomits out the chewed up soul.

White bones are gathering still whiter snow.
Old fruit is frozen under ice-stippled leaves.
Piñon, desiccated, pockmarks new snow,
And blood-red currants, frozen on the bush,
Are what is left of all last summer’s glory.

And now gray, hungry revenants are bringing
Offerings to the great sarcophagous Aion:
Jew hairs, scabbed little toes, Muslim foreskins,
And gurgling, pink hosannas of low grunts
In rituals of consecrated blood.
Away from bums and sterno sacraments,
Far from sour hecatombs of burning trash,
I’ve walked the ragged shores of the heart’s lake
Until sin crawled out from the acid depths,
And the dark ripples, in sprawling periods,
Washed the sharp sand and smoothed the scattered stone.

As I write on these pages and scratch out
What I have scribbled, snow, gentle and clean,
Fall of large, wet flowers, whitens the air
With such cold beauty as I’ve seldom seen.
In the pale, icy silence, a coyote yips,
Another whines and howls. Was it like this
When old Courtaud, hungry and ravening,
Descended with hot breath into the streets
Of Paris? The wind carries nearby cries-
Is it that wolf’s breath felt by the young poet
As he shook in the fierce wind, his throat raw
From the harsh taste of anguish’s choke-pears?

But I was never young, always worn, old,
A cocklebur of fruitless scattering.
My mouth too tastes like cotton, and the spit
Coagulates against my throat.  Time passes quickly,
Too quickly for this passage near its end.
Seasons have multiplied and passed away
In sprays of falling leaves. Tomorrows, full
Of ripeness and enticing promises
Of vague futurity, taunt the scored heart,
While nullity, stalwart, truest of all,
Does not withdraw its final invitation.

I wonder, as I used to, whether snows
Of years gone by are truly gone, or whether,
Through seepage, capillarity, a steady
Evaporation and drip, they, with all
The bits of time that they have touched, renew
Themselves and what remains of me, until I too
Am sucked up, poured down and titrated, only
To be lost in those waters out of which
Others, not I, will crawl onto dry earth.

Old flowers are dry. Once supple stubs are bent
Among paw prints, snake tracks, and tufts of feathers.
Earthward they lean, skyward they sprawl, dried out
At their season’s end. Snow will cover them,
Ice will break them, and a harsh, chewing wind
Will grind them into boneless dervishes.
Footprints and twigs are buried in the snow,
The ones erased, the others blanketed
With frosty, evanescent chastity.
The boys and girls of yesteryear are in
The ground, on shrouded gurneys, or deep under
Soft- hammered drugs and sterile blades, too stoned to know
Whether they are really living or dying,
Whether the clock is chiming or a code
Is being called. All are drenched in stupor.

Ah, silence, once there was a firmament
That separated clear light from the darkness,
And they and I stood in the silent cold,
Where, in our pure, enduring finitude,
We breathed the breeze, and pissed on the fresh snows
That opened, warmed, under our golden fluid.
Tell me where, in what country, on what wind
Or memory are the snows of other years?
Do they, like the wild wolf, live on the wind,
Or do they, like us, fall and melt away
In vanishment and eyeless transformation?

Dear Love, on these cold nights, when the fine snow
Rests lightly on dark, frozen soil, Sleep tugs
My body, stretched beside you in your round-trip
Through the dark pathways of the Birdless Lands.
Under the starry baldachin  of darkness
Your breasts, wrapped in a pleated quilt, rise up,
Then sink — another trailhead to  Love’s Mountain
And its inviolate snowfields as deep
As Time.

When, in enveloping  deliria
Of dreams, in soft incursions of caressing
Time, on the sinuous shores of our Hearts’ Lake,
I count the ebb and flow of breath and life,
And you stir in a moment of deep breath:
I wonder where you are, in asphodel
Or aconite, or maybe, next to springs
Bubbling up among tall, whispering poplars
At the secret convergence of cessation
And birth.

When Luna, in her frosty sleigh,
Cuts through the frozen sky, and her She-Bear
Pants her breath across the Milky Way,
I stir in twilight sleep and waning Night,
And ponder, in the tremors of my heart,
If we will wake to rose-lipped Dawn’s first kiss,
Or will you take another turn through darkness,
And pass beneath the Lake of Falling Birds?

I—Easter Hymn

If in that Syrian garden, ages slain,
You sleep, and know not you are dead in vain,
Nor even in dreams behold how dark and bright
Ascends in smoke and fire by day and night
The hate you died to quench and could but fan,
Sleep well and see no morning, son of man.

But if, the grave rent and the stone rolled by,
At the right hand of majesty on high
You sit, and sitting so remember yet
Your tears, your agony and bloody sweat,
Your cross and passion and the life you gave,
Bow hither out of heaven and see and save.

Telepathic Love
 
Even when you are far away,
you are with me every day;
and at the going down of the light,
you are with me every night.
I hold your heart within,
I hold the diamond sparkle of your grin;
while you hold me too, I guess,
in the depth of your caress;
and though it isn’t easy to believe,
there’s no reason here to grieve;
for, by now, I know what’s real,
I know the truth of what I feel,
when you send me, like a dove,
the warm hug of your telepathic love.

A Triolet in Praise of the Winter-Hardiness of Apples

The last gold flung from the kingly summer sun—
That apple hung upon the lowest bough. 
From all the flame and light of the season spun;
The last gold. Flung from the kingly summer sun, 
The red gold from encroaching dark is won
and set in the year’s bright crown. Last gallant bow. 
The last gold flung. From the kingly summer sun—
That apple hung upon the lowest bough. 

Nebulae

I have walked into the woods near spring
And found a world of tightly woven darkness—
A tangle of twigs like grasping thorns that ring
The black-fanged mouths of thickets grown ‘round the brightness
At Briar Rose’s castle window. A light
Among the leafless upper limbs gleamed;
Pale nebula of petals amidst dark night
Of twisted branches—a silver crown bequeathed. 
Among those blossoms about to fall I knew,
Quite well, to dwell a world unseen—the next 
And next and next spring’s white and green. The new-
Sprung woods of a year we’ve not yet lost or vexed. 

I’ve walked through the woods as petals fell in a breath
Of wind—and could not, would not, believe in death. 

Solitude

He strayed along the edges
Of fields made mirrors by rain.
He paused beside the hedges.
He left behind the lanes

That lead out to the towns,
And sought instead the place
Where sunlight makes a pause 
Upon earths’ wrinkled face—

Filling up the hollows
Carved out by cold, black creeks
Whose birth’s beneath the ground.
Of all the things which speak,

He understood people the least;
Far less than quiet woods,
The wind’s tearing race,
The stars’ quick, dancing moods.

The Parnassians
 
Sons of islands, who in sensuous, tropic
minds— luxuriant, remote, and feral—
mined for words like Madagascan beryl.
Prowling jungle thoughts, they tracked their topic:
human vanity, the lush, entropic
bloom of desperate life, and beauty’s peril,
studied with an eye austere and sterile,
distant, God-like, ruthless, microscopic.
Life, a fever dream of El Dorado,
foredoomed quest for false desiderata,
these conquistadors made it their motto:
Lose thyself in savoring the data.
Make thy art only an obbligato
harmonizing Nature’s cruel sonata.

The Catechism of Hades
 
Engraved upon a promontory in the Aegean
 
        I.
Because all those who love and live for long
will see their loves extinguished, let us view
already dead our loved ones while they live.
Yes, let us laugh, converse, and hold to them
amazed, as if they were but ghosts revived
for just this instant, and thereby defend
against the grief they cause us in the end.
 
        II.
The highest hope: to tire of one’s life,
for only then is one prepared to leave it.
And yet to tire of this spectacle
of senseless splendor, endless, ruthless grace,
is tragic in itself, the young will say,
and all the wise agree. Confronted by
the inescapable, seek no escape,
but bear yourself as one already dead.
Haunting the world, all things are born anew:
witness our dying star, the way it bleeds
into these rediscovered waves, and raise
your mind to praise the cruelty of the gods,
without whom there would be nothing to love,
nothing to spur our terror of the grave.
 
       III.
Because all those who seek the truth of life
will come away with empty heads and hands,
come– let us view the gods themselves as dead.
For that which moves the tides, the moons, and grows
the olive on the branch, child in the womb,
will speak to us no more than corpses can,
unless through the imperfect tongues of man.


Originally published in Mundus Artium Journal

Gethsemane
 
“Not as I will, but as Thou wilt.” – Matthew 26:39
 
If he was who Paul said he was, no mind
has known such agony as he was in:
The God He felt abandoned by was Him—
loss intimately infinite in kind.
The higher consciousness, the greater grasp
of suffering: he bled from human glands
and felt a horror without end—his hands
held emptiness, and God was made to gasp.
But how could such a man to us relate?
how could a man, if he knows he is God,
have fear of death? We sense a certain fraud
in notions that a God can share man’s fate.
Unless of course He’s not what we believe,
and fears Himself, and what He may conceive.

Odalisque
 
She came, I heard, from some bleak, frozen land
beyond the Caucasus. From thence, that hair
like fire flowing, roaring down in curls,
licking those budding fruits upon her chest.
She is not soft like us. Her thighs are like
a mare’s, rippling; her flesh so pale,
we joke she’s like some corpse come back to life.
But then you see how poppies bloom in snow
whenever she is fresh from bedding him,
and how, if she beholds your eyes upon her,
her own will flash like viridescent heavens.
She makes love like a wolf, that’s why he likes her.
 
She never weeps, but rages silently.
She takes his seed as if she’d take his life.
But still, she learns her place. This week, I saw
her slinking from the baths enrobed in steam,
the dew on her wide hips ten thousand diamonds,
redolent of sandalwood and jasmine,
and even I was stirred. I’ve taught her much:
to paint her eyes with kohl—my little white cat—
and how to play his body like an oud
so that it sings, and he forgets himself.
Perhaps, in time, she too will live for pleasure,
forgetting all— as I cannot, nor ever will.

Ode to Hygeia
 
Goddess of life-through-death, no one but you
reveals to us so well the hidden law.
We scrub our bodies raw,
to rid ourselves of—what? Those little lives,
(so lesser lives) that burrow, breed, accrue
across our steppes of flesh. Which breed survives—
us or them—derives
from power only—yours— and to construe
mass death as life’s necessity is your
inherent moral. Which of us is right—
myself, or parasite—
means nothing: life is life, and life is for
perpetuating: no end to this war,
and half our tents are feverish tonight.

Epitaph
 
Time’s transparent flame calcined this vessel,
leaving here a calcium cathedral.
 
As if the clockwork viscera and nerves,
the vast bacterial societies,
the pride and beauty of the flesh and mind,
and all the dreams for which they loved and longed
were but a temporary scaffolding
to fashion forth the final work: these bones.
 
Remains which teach that only form remains.
A church which is the relic it contains.


Originally published in Mundus Artium Journal

Knife
 
It’s only happened once or twice since then.
We climb into their bed, I read them stories—
Graves or Doyle, Macdonald or Le Guin—
I tuck them in like squirming little pupae,
turn off the light, then leave, and read again.
My wife’s home near eleven, kisses me,
then showers and is soon in bed herself.
I sleep alone. She says I snore too much.
 
I stay awake as long as I can bear—
too long. I don’t know why. Except perhaps
that being conscious is more interesting.
Death too is interesting, viewed here, from life.
Sometimes in early morning I will pace,
myself a mirror of my pacing thoughts,
inside this house, a mirror of my skull.
In quiet dark, my mind is most alive.
 
I stroll into the kitchen. On a whim,
unsheathe the fattest knife, and play at psycho:
I brandish it aloft with backhand grip,
study my silhouette— just like the movies.
No one is watching. So, I shamble forth,
amused beneath a false demented grin.
I reach the children’s door. I pause. I’m spooked.
What would she think if she saw me like this?
 
What do I think, observing me like this?
But she won’t wake. I tap the creaking door,
and watch the light slide down on their dear faces,
their mouths agape, heads flopped like little dolls.
These fragile organisms put such trust
in me. How weird that is! I grip the knife,
and tiptoe to their bedside. There, I think
how much my life would change if I just did it.
 
Of course, I don’t. I leave, rerack the knife,
and fall back to the couch, hot with disgust.
But something shimmers darkly in my heart.
What’s wrong with me? I love them. Yes, I love them.
But just to feel how much a moment means,
a choice that I could make—it gives me chills.
That I could turn tomorrow into nightmare…
But no, I won’t. They’ll get the gift of waking.

The First Christmas

’Twas in a land so long ago …
the lambs lay blanketed in snow
and little children everywhere
sat and watched warm embers glow
and dreamed (of what, we do not know).

And THEN—a star appeared on high,
The brightest man had ever seen!
It made the children whisper low
in puzzled awe (what did it mean?).
It made the wooly lambkins cry.

For far away a new-born lay,
warm-blanketed in straw and hay,
a lowly manger for his crib.
The cattle mooed, distraught and low,
to see the child. They did not know

it now was Christmas day!