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.