songbird

a luminous moon once obstructed
baffled in layers of dull branches
depleted over cold distances that mute, outside
the prison yard of my thoughts

then as sudden as the utter surprise in fall light
all solace of dawn instantly dashed
a wondrous fountain, a musical magic
blinding song cascading to ear
and then again gone

tumbling from just above me in the trees
music of the first rain on leaves
lone and diamond throated call to fondness
distilled clearer than watery drops
a dulcet cleansing dirge, beyond love
a melody so reshaping from within
that in its absence

in that yawning echo of silence, whole departure
a very denial of her autumnal hymn

summoned in me a fierce refraction inward
harboring no motive to its beauty
yet without pity, an acidity to human paper
corroding with its spreading fingers out
from one vital glorious burst
and into a gnawing agony of loss
at bare a desperate clinging to senses

as faded morning passed
a deepening grief overtook the every mundane
draping its leaden sadness and suffocating
in its quiet, in being over
passed beyond my flesh's reach

as though writing in my clay: death comes smartly
quick-smothering
annihilating love and possibility
before lights dim into the unfathomable
and we at last know ourselves

view for meditation

Black Dream For Ra

I. Magic

Kiss her absinthe lips
between sips
slackened twilight love
mingling with a breath bound tight
a tense dove invitingly nested
under black corsets.

In love, their boozy blend
carries on vapors
into the half-mooned night.

Travels waft her north
into dazzling light flung forth,
for now goodbye.

But with a kiss
gone as bliss, as before
a lithe liquored gesture
she loots our nascent magic
plucks it by the core
our virtue tucked
with Tarrot and spices
spells and devices
cloaked inside
an unnoticeable windy flap.

Tails gesticulate
behind her engined broom
and stormily she sweeps out
our abandoned narrow room.

Northern lights beckoning their reach
at her noble witching heart --
we see her alight
gently purring in final flight
girded by Gothic kitchen art.


II. Labrinth

Evermore
her absence leaves us
shrinking silences
new coins upon our eyes.

We alone must fitfully decode
a billion notes
recounting all imagined votes
thrusting tardy operas
arhythmically at the in-between.

Together
making and smashing fragile heavenly bowings
while praying and stabbing and gloating
into the forgiving guts of robotic earth harmonicas.

We are made illusory loose
sharpened up on scraped-together California Green
fortified on love and juice and one more machine.

Keys on strings turn stunning atoms
aloose the air, ones and zeros everywhere
exalting out of idle things in truth played --
never twice
dedicated to emptied bottles and the obscene
in vain our quest to draw intact
her oceanic spell through haughty sieves.


III. Somlulence.

Return beneath your vanquished eyes
to inward harmony
of desolate places once beheld and blurred together
returning by stranger movement to be relived
calm and inducing, instinctive as her gaze
one last surrendering up
a returning of her ritual sequence
maternal as the sea.

Our one transpiring melody
from deep within that wholesome cage
invents a music flying of its sweet rage
untiring, unbewitched and aflutter from within
transient, unstoppably unchained
of rhythm and of whim.

To meet it in each guise
her music creates
each time a wreckage of the selves
head restuffed with shredded scores
thrown to error and wrested virtuosity
retooled for the forgetting
donation or redemption of each second breath
a massive music swells undenied
yet this one ripe with unsubstantiated death.


IV. Redemption

Ra's lips alone know
inklings of whence the music goes.

He radiates it and names it.

His million hands play millions of drums.

At his fashioning
our lost playing stands majestic and recorded
in deep buried hallways --

''A menos flores! A menos cantos!"

Our monument
a static parade, heiroglyphic history
fearing and sober and ornate
purposed sacred carvings as left to Time
pure of form and large as the Beginning
ordained as granite songs in perpetuity.

Thy name writ large in its infinite forms.

rainwater void

black shine
abreast the wind, droning
her wrapped blue bead to perfect shape
goddess blood mother egg

her spell of 10,000 shadows
ever superceding, a new moment
everpresent yet bearing no face
all words pass again outside
before stilled lake storms

branches are whispering together
enacting a frantic elaborate beauty
slip among them, tossed and gusted
worshipping random play

watch diamond moonlit gardens
dance to the avalanching deaths of petals
their empty chants
distilled of a rainwater void

name of the wind

Darkness comes battering, upon you
flung open in your every chasm
torn naked, shattering nightlong calamities
torrents of emptiness, undertow so strong
you pulled your head above water
with each word.

At dawn, at last,
something to sustain
a share of the turbulence
your shell, nourished in its first solidity
keeping yourself safe, keeping yourself
apart.

You are now agape
shockingly aware you cling to the dead
lift nothing to the power of open light
but fear and mud.

In a landscape brutally cleansed
a serene strangness flows through you
like your flooded home, all doors thrown open
unable to contain this bursting forth, this want
for being whole again.

don't go back to sleep

the breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you
don't go back to sleep
you must ask for what you really want
don't go back to sleep
people are going back and forth across the windowsill
where the two worlds touch
the door is round and open.
don't go back to sleep.

-- Rumi

some party

"In heaven all the interesting people are missing."

-- Friedrich Nietzsche

Deeds

It's not good,
the doing of the deed
that, once it's done,
you regret,
whose result you reap crying,
your face in tears.

It's good,
the doing of the deed,
that, once it's done,
you don't regret,
whose result you reap gratified,
happy at heart.

-Dhammapada, 5, translated by Thanissaro Bhikkhu.

Snowdrops

Do you know what I was, how I lived? you know
what despair is? then
winter should have meaning for you.

I did not expect to survive.
earth suppressing me. I didn't expect
to waken again, to feel in damp earth my body
able to respond again, remembering
after so long how to open again
in the cold light of earliest spring--

afraid yes, but among you again
crying yes risk joy

in the raw wind of the new world.


-- Louise Gluck