Jack i

Regard him for his tenacity
And do not say he is this or that kind of a man,
And do not say he does not deserve his dinner,
His car, or Jane's obedience,
His meek but affectionate pooch
Who licks his hand when he comes home...
For this is the thing that Jack dreams:

Elysian grass and champagne, eyes of office girls,
A son who will make it in the world
And raise up his house strong into the next millenium.
He is Joseph, he will spawn a nation.

O it will take us years to forget Jack,
For he lives in every one of us
And we dream his dreams nightly turning the other cheek,
Shifting the weight of our bodies heavy with half-sleep;
The gorgeous panorama of his house and pool and patio
Stretches before the eyes of your Fancy and mine
In the darkness, when we are most alone:
When poetry echoes until it becomes a wild uproar
And not a pleasing music;

O this is the time we love the Jack in us.

A Reprimand

O sentimental, anemic,
writers of bad poems
in a bad time.
we will pay dearly
for the wrong:
for our foul tunes.

Down in Elysium dwell
poets gone lang syne;
but we shall not show our
bald faces there,
our bald souls.
We are attracted to errors
like flies to excrement:
like old women to yarn.
We spin mere dross that no voice
will repeat.

Like children to pleasure,
like profligates to sin.
We eat our nonchalance.
Too easy on the John
we issue it over and over
and over again.

First Shaman's Song

O wind do not pass over me
There is no reason you should pass over me
but rather take me with you
for I long to run hot and wild in the night stars,

O wind do not pass by me.
There is no reason you should pass by me.
but rather take me with you
for I long to bring tumult to the blue waters.

Second Shaman's Song

O moon do not betray me
I pray you do not betray me
For I long to lie hidden
in the black skirts of the cool darkness

O moon do not discover me
I pray you, moon, do not discover me
For the eye of the wild pig
and the tail of the scorpion yearn like hearts on fire

O dawn do not come suddenly
I pray you do not come suddenly
For wrapped in shadows I sit
becalmed and free of the storms of light

O dawn, come with slow steps
with the careful steps of a dancer
(softly) from the east like a girl
in crimson come and lay your delicate kiss to my lips

for only then shall I rise
then, with the dew of your lips
on my brow shall I stand and fend
the onslaught of morning

Sub Urbia

Children race down roads in Suburbia
Hammering little feet on their rubber pedals
Women wearing cotton summer dresses
Bending into heaped laundry-baskets
Sensual lips clasping plastic pins

Men away in the cities, at lonely consoles
In boardroom melancholy, suited and cologned

Boys catch toads by edges of forests
Freckled faces alight, alive w/ young life
Rampant among mushrooms, mouldy timber
Quick feet ransack the thick earth.

Third Shaman's Song

Into the great wilderness
Among the high mountains
Say prayers for the wild things
(Begin the counting)
Into the wilderness
Among the bare mountains
Into the emptiness
Into the desert
Pray in the wide night
Clasp hands and dance
Tarentella, vivace!
Twirl around in wild-joy
Clap hands and begin the singing

Cricket, child of the earth,
Scorpion, gray-dove,
Meet me at the meeting place
(There is no place at all
No place to hide nor rest
From the sun that reigns the heavens)
Mother Earth forgive me
I trample upon your breast
And kick the dust from your sleeves
Forgive me, weary traveller,
A mote upon your spine
Shrug and send me spinning
Headlong into space,

Into the Great Wilderness
Where there are no mountains.

Gothic pieces

i.

Change of seasons
in the wonder garden,
a delicacy of wind
& light.

Jostle of leaves thru which
thin rays entwine
to make a wreath of green
& white.

Ivy clings to walls.
One idles in the shadows,
scratching intellections,
delineations of feelings,
reflections, images:

A maiden from an opening
in the stone
in elegant distress
extends her arms;

her mouth, a cherry-red
oval cut
in alabaster: she
pleads thru history

for her savior, who
is ambling among woodlands;
tall in Faery-land,
stout in armor,
warrior.


ii.

Are there among these ruins,
amid the ivied bases of foundations,
signs or indications of living blood?
of course, the insistent flora thrives.

Moons rise cold, the dawns of even;
crescent-eyed guardians of night.
Blue discs masqued in caravans
of slow-moving clouds and mists

that writhe and weave themselves
thru scant-leaved tops of dead trees.
These old symbols live behind my eyes,
images of autumns chill and dying.

The scent of decadence, odor
of leafmould and crack'd stone.
A gate groans on ancient hinges.
Winged silhouettes eclipse the moon.

10:15 ; Expecting

My wife in bed, wound in her cloth cocoon,
sleeps on her side, as her book has recommended:
the book I gave her for her twentieth birthday,
the first she's had now that her childhood's ended.

I like to wake before her on lazy mornings
and turn to face her, holding my next breath in,
to quietly admire the way her lashes rest
like delicate fans on her morena skin.

A flower of Mexico, rose of Nayarit;
so small, a miracle of four-foot-seven;
and now she's wakened, beautiful and brown,
frowning, fourty-five minutes before eleven.

Word to my Wife

Turn and destroy this silence. Solid as iron
it stands between us, but need not divide us.
Strike it with your soft shifting, like a tempest
or goddess; knock it down; though now you lie calm

in its shadow, it should not daunt you, my love, my wife.
O shatter the frail foundations of this wall
I've built between us; come, send the splinters flying.
A breath will do it, enough breath for a word.

Because this burden lies heavy. I write recumbent
an hour after midnight, having again imposed
upon myself a sentence of separation,
a useless absence, apart from you, my treasure.

You lie in a web of quietness, deftly weaved
of tendrils tense with anger, and might be sleeping.
Let this construction fail, my tactless building; come,
kill my designs with an exhalation, a sigh's thunder.

September

September is ambivalent
& tries to be summer and winter
at once but ends with a certain
dullness that is not Autumn.

I cannot read the seasons' changes
by the dressings and undressings
of trees in the sensuous woods of New York
from whose deciduous lap I came

with eyes sapphire-blue at birth
which then betrayed me and left
me brown-eyed and ordinary.
Lacking a physical appeal

I bowed thru adolescence
over the leaves of books
that turned my eyes myopic.
Now in the sweltering desert

of Mohave I renew the old passion.
Beset by a gnawing hunger
for the sweetmeat of poetry:
the taste of her blood and sinew.

May October be fair,
her skies beneficent with rain;
the insistent sun tempered
but a pleasant presence still.


1989

For Jared

My beautiful
blue-eyed
banshee
breaks the

tranquil time &
tensely truncates
the conjugal meeting:
corrupts

the legal coupling; O
bright white face you
smile like sunrise
& rock w/ pride

without moving
your hair awry & deftly
clumsy (unbearably!)
beautiful boy

Suburbia ii

A woman ascends a staircase
laundry laden
sweat breaks
on her forehead

A child stirs in a crib:
a wakening cry
that pierces stillness
like a factory whistle

beloved havoc wrought
on the calm of morning;
honey of disturbance
on the sheen of silence.

Blessings

We incline ourselves again toward the new-year:
two summers now before the double zeroes
boggle our machines: programmers live in fear
of the new millenium, but the Christian narrows

his eyes and glares at the clouds for a vision
of stallion-mounted Christ, eager for a rift
to suddenly appear and widen, the incision
by flaming swords of angels, the promised gift.

Sedentary, I regard my son
whose pictures dress my office walls, my wife,
whose wine-dark eyes defy comparison,
charmed and calmed in the magic of my life.



1998 (Thank You, GOD)

James was Wright

My infant son shrieks, then is suddenly placid,
and sleeps against the supple body of my wife.
I finally understand how I have wasted
The previous thirty-two years of my life.

Suburbia Cantos

1.

Open windows.
Birdsong mingles soft
sounds of birth
strained thru shields
of fragrance;
struck bells of spoons;

silence of dormant
crumbs lost gold
ingots
of morning.

Exhaust:
gray webs
in golden
sun's revolt

cast away darkness,
all-thumbed evils
of night his coolness
kingdom to moths'
fanatic powder flight.

Felt ecstasy of
burning;
kiss of the fire god.
O sweet blue
dance in death's raiment.


2.

We do not have
questions for the
far away mountains,
playing I am the
sun king
behold the glory of my
coronet.
I am golden.

We leave our wives
at home
for they will have fabric
full of shape
& the strange wonder
of softness,

prize trinkets &
labor at allurement.

We do not know
of such things;
we drive steel thru
labyrinths
unaware of dimension;

wet sheaths await us
for the evening ritual.


3.

What are you,
white magic?
Have you bones among
sweet cream?

When will you fly
O bird?
Or stay for the
palm's nest?
The solace of the mouth?

I will hold you
against the
insult of
Oblivion.

Nourish me,
wife,
mother of
life.


4.

She keeps the
cave neat for
the comfort of
the blind worm,
to whom Money is
the rain calling
to ground.

She stands, she moves;
her wrists are touched
w/ water.

If you look into her
eyes you will walk threadbare
among stars;

if you kiss
her mouth
you will be a
fool w/ a crown of rain.




late 1980s (imitating Jim Morrison)