Possibly the beginning of something...

These are the sleeping houses of God,
we say it to each other again and again­—we
are always writing the same
poem.

In the sleeping houses of God,
it is impossible to sing together.
The air is too clotted with feathers
and blood;
voices are strangled at great distances,
& we are busy muttering in short cadences
brief prayers and admonitions.

Every day, we undo the threads of the same
cloth, each knot or bead
shuddering to the quiet floor.
It is perfectly still.

Sometimes, not often, small boats
approach us, here
in the sleeping houses of
God. We watch them drift closer toward us,
as toward a small and changeful island
somewhere in the Aegean,
where unpronouncable creatures
stand with waiting hands, streaming hair,
horrible eyes.

They never stray much farther
than the breakers. Their paths always seem
to diverge.
We watch them
with little hope.

It is possible that we have shifted the ground
with our stamping feet. We are always
moving in the same direction.

At evening the waves swell
like a tumor and consume the sky. There is
no sun,
only a blazing and constant light.

It is the country of the sleeping houses
of God. In our berth of tumid water,
we stand with our backs to the shore,
asking one another
the same question:

despite innumerable answers,
we remain under the lampless sky,
repeating.

Praying

On Sunday, I open up the house

to let in the June morning

to ease cobwebs from the empty rooms,

to efface dreams

adhering to the surfaces.

The weather—

of late, inimitable oppression—

has broken, and at last

we have a little serenity.

At noon, the hour of baptism,

the bed is stripped of its clothes—like a woman

praying for her old voluptuousness.

I wash the sheets in cold water

laced with lavendar and mint,

hiding thyme in bunches in the mattress

to conceal the taste of sleep

and mad dreaming.

I make a breakfast of mango slipped

from the flesh, orange water, cheese

& bread sprinkled with oils & thyme,

sweet plums. All day,

I do not speak a word.

One afternoon (or many of them),

I spent hours just sun worshipping.

It was easier than dreaming, you

could come away with a cleaner feeling.

The liquid of sunshine in the veins

was clarity.

Every so often, tempted by the suggestion of being born,

I stand naked in sun,

reminding myself of distant pilgrims who

prayed to the air or sang

their parched hymns to some tranquil god.

I search for him in the dazed clover,

my fingers grazing sound,

the tender in the long grass, all summers

distilled and scattered  through these empty rooms.

I am praying, praying.

Derelict--a poem for summer

DERELICT

I.

I was on 7^th Street;

a troop of boys was riding ahead of me, their backs

blazing in light,

small lit men full of air,

their t-shirts billowing behind them

like their swelling lungs,

as though they would restrain

or guide them—

it is the same thing.

At 4 in the afternoon

the sun could collide at just the angle

with the facade of the derelict building beside us,

half a blown-out wing —just

dissolved:

A blind man in sunlight.

Its bewildering joy in that moment,

as it stood in sun, the carved interior of its lungs

gasping in air

was enough to split the heart.

II.

He came back from his brief sojourn

at the institution

slightly derelict, like a rock tossed and left in the sun.

I could see from here

his crystalline lungs expanding

beautiful and raw in the breaking.

He muttered apologies and confessions

too desolate to fully sound them.

Unbelievably whole in body,

his remaining architecture might have stood as

only a testament to past,

a remnant.

You never think you’re going to witness

the ruin of another human being.

Sunlight and chords fractured

in the crystal prism of his lungs

remind you that he was human.

III.

On my desk, a small piece of sea glass

occupies a corner with the shells

that I stole from a beach in Florida,

one of those summers I trolled sand for a single

jeweled semicircle, edges

raised and grainy with the lapping salt:

The carelessly halved base

of something gathered in glassy waves

slowly disintegrating

among my books and shells.

At times, boys up the street ride past

on their bicycles, or pause to carry

small burdens to each other,

their dialects lost on the June air

as I watch from up the street.

They are remnants of me

looking for shells or grasping listlessly

at walls dissolving

in air and sunlight. I try to gather some

of the crystalline fragments in my hands.

In the afternoon,

salt drifting across the table,

I glean a few discordant shards,

charged with surreptitious and bewildering light.

The Names on the Wall

What is left for us to say to you,

names etched on glass?

names etched on our crudely living hearts?

We are tirelessly living between your twin lights,

insisting on your memory,

insisting on our modal chant

“Remember,

Never forget.”

You speak in names,

“We are the dead,”

repeating name by name,

your dread, calm memoriam.

Again, and again,

a rhythm for America,

a drumming rhythm to our silence,

the meter of our renewable grief,

beneath these beacons and your shining pools.

                                                            In Memoriam

                                                                           9/11

Ocean City, July 2011

Strangers in the water

It was that time of day, when the sun was rushing slow beams

through the spokes of the Ferris wheel, when the sudden calm

of day struck the boards and the gulls seemed to flutter

from the release like ash tossed to the winds—it was then,

when the sea turned to a white boulevard, to mirror

the broad walk of the board beside the strand,

that we were startled by the bright, mercurial beauty

of the dolphins, streaming as they did just out of our reach.

In bewildered concourse, arrested at the cries sent up and down

from the Ferris wheel’s slow progress to the lights of the pier,

we listed to the beach side, devoured the teasing glint of the dolphins

in the waters of our late exodus. The Ferris wheel may have stopped

its spinning—we didn’t noticed. All that was remarkable

was the bright suggestion of alien movement in the white

glass water, familiar creatures unreal again in their now

incredible proximity. For a few moments, it is us—and them.

For a few unclear moments, we utter only unintelligible noise,

undistinguishable from the cacophony of hungry gulls,

unlovely beside the joyous, white silence of the strangers in the water.

It needs work, but it's gotta breathe!

PRAYER

On Sunday, I open up the house

to let in the June morning

to ease cobwebs from the empty rooms,

to efface dreams

adhering to surfaces.

The weather—

inimitable oppression—

 has broken, and at last

we have a little serenity.

At noon, the time for baptism,

I strip the bed of its clothes—like a woman

praying for her old voluptuousness.

I wash the sheets in cold water,

laced with lavendar and mint,

hiding thyme in the corners of the mattress

to conceal the heavy taste of sleep,

and mad dreaming.

I make a breakfast of mango slipped

from the flesh, orange water, cheese

& bread sprinkled with oils and thyme,

sweet plums. All day,

I do not speak a word.

One afternoon, oh it was many of them,

I spent hours just sun worshipping.

It was easier than dreaming, you

could come away with a cleaner feeling.

The liquid feeling of sunshine in the veins

was clarity.

Every so often, teased by the suggestion of being born,

I stand naked in sun,

reminding myself of distant travelers who

prayed to the air or sang

parched hymns to a tranquil god.

I search for him in the dazed clover,

my fingers grazing sound,

the tender in the long grass, all summers

distilled and scattered  through these empty rooms.

I am praying, praying.

Old women repeat themselves

I repeat things
like an old woman

muttering to myself the phrases
of worn hours, shuffling shoes
in the dry stone

On Tuesdays
I take a train into the city

where I might not be heard
above drawn cacophany

sighing streets over
& over again

Old women sit next to me
on the train--women
who have never been mothers

She repeats me.
She repeats her phrases

to the street sighing
her perfection / an imitable mirror
brown mirrors that would be my own ghosts

They tell stories to one another
Of course

They don't know the way the streets
fill themselves / fill me
On Tuesdays I take a train into the city--

It doesn't matter why

so that small ceramic birds
might not light sharply / briefly

on my hands
I wear gray gloves
to touch smooth surfaces---

brown mirrors
They would rub away spots of discontent

infinitesimal impertinence
to light so sharply on my hands
my hands like brown mirrors

my hands are sighing streets
my hands repeat one another

phrase to phrase / Old women
sitting next to me
on the train

she repeats me / She has never been a mother
She hangs brown mirrors on her skin

warming them to her almond touch
repeating her phrases in sweet
assiduous songs

to the birds
and the brown mirrors

I am not listening / to her sighing
or her sedulous birds //

Something old, something new...

The Silent Poet in the Room

Maybe I
am the silent poet
in the room
though no poets
should be silent. They might not

know how to look at me
or what can be done
with a degree
in poetry.
So I am sitting down

and watching them move
about the room,
quite content
to watch their mouths,
the silent poet in the room.

They don’t know
that I might see the room
as blank pages,
prepositions
laid out with the forks on the table.

Woman lifts a verb
to her lips, tasting subjunctive
—would that she
could read
the adverbs perfectly lining the window.

It’s all so very nice
but where
did you put the questions
that might spark some interest?
Woman: Did you ever hear
of a man painting wings
on the sky?

Older Woman: Where
did you husband go
after he died?

Mother: Was it quiet
inside just before
you broke your heart?

Questions loaded
with complex clauses,
and I,
the silent poet in the room,
am churning them
for roots and verbs
to hang like charms
on my skin.

But then—
maybe it’s enough
for them
to let the dusk roll
into mere colors
and not observe the poet
in the room.

Still in progress & needing development. Thoughts?

i. he, loose and aloft, in the desert
        He was something loose        at the edges he was
all untied and open                    at his perimeters his

waving borders so loose         in the wind fitting

that he would look so flyaway           so somewhere
absent from here                           where you saw him

            These are the branches        that came out
of his mouth his voice                        bloomed with trees

dogwood and mistletoe              tumbled from his
vocal strings                         minute wires clung to trembling

green vibrato                      but he spoke through nets
of leaves often             his voice caught in the foliage

           Where did you come from          dark-eyed waif?
Wanderer where                                 did you ask the sun

for directions with                                his hands clasped he's
holding moon under his tongue            --tree man

so inexorable                               in his carcas why did he
loose his ivory tongue                     on the hills?

The crows crawled up then                      they dug
their hooked wings                            into the earth hard nails

that scratched on limestone                  toward him
black smothering rings                           spun slow ascent

but he was in the desert                   the implacable
desert and the open                           --which was like

a door--was more                     the frame of his
wilderness than                             the scrawling emptiness

so through the door          he stepped leaving

the crows to ground                 facing wilderness

and howling wind              all the sun ever said was that

he could climb             his own vines to find a resting

place that all the world               was simply a door

to the next moment                the next spoke of the wheel

he had never felt               so loose even the wind

was slow behind him                 the crows laughing

at themselves when he            walked through desert doors

keeping the moon               under his tongue so as not

to disturb the air             or perhaps keep the door open

propping it with                 the green branches swaying

from his throat                      he was sprouting

there on the desert’s          side of the open door

all doors are open                spaces that his moon-dyed

tongue might move                      through seeking

the path to sun                      the path to sand

rock limestone                         crawling beneath his feet

roots solidly wound                    into cracks

ii. The moon from under his tongue

I am sheltered in the under universe

of my hands

here all beginnings

are my roots all circles

ending in each other

I have harnessed the hills

in my veins I have caught

the nets of air in my heartstrings

I am both

the intertwining voices of male/

female even here

in the implacable desert

the broad unmarkable desert

my water runs deeper

and I open doors

like pearls that run on water

cleaving tenuous valleys

where trees grow where

deep drinking trees find water

deep drinking from my upturned hands

in half the shape of a wheel

in half the shape of a moon of water

each circumference fit

to the other each wheel

in a wheel moon

in a moon

under my upturned universe

gleaming under my upturned sky

& reflected in the sure disk

that I shed on the hills

even the impossible desert

that I might grow there a tree

to reach its branches up

& mingle with the facing sky

this is the song of the upturned universe the song of the bear

crow and serpent writhing in the grass

making shadows in the sand beneath my feet

under my moon tongue leashed

under my moon tongue

gathered in my moon and water hands

can you dance with me under the water sun ride

the hills with me unleashed

take my riven hands the ones with which I loosed the moon

loosed myself on the broken hills

to dance with bear and crow and serpent

here in the light of the crossed and silver moon

I wrote on the sky with my blood

and found poetry in the steeping stars

I bled poetry

from my heart I drew it

from my blood my seeping blood

my seeping poetry blood on the walk

on the walls

I wrote language on the stars

twisting them into sounds or messages

on the blue canvas sky

the sky of the

iii. wide implacable god

she brings water out of the upturned hills.

They are like bowls that she fashions in clay,

that she draws from her skin

stretched over her aching, spinning bones.

She is aching with song,

with the poetry of her blood;

she spills it

to mark her place in the ground.

She is flourishing there.

The crows are living in her branches—

she, the wide implacable god

of the desert.

Her abundant arms are livid

with thriving voices, white

as though they might burst

with the electricity of her singing.