Tower of Thrust

                                          Upon your white unblemished thigh
                                          O stained with rocket fire sky
                                          A wound erupts at evening shine
                                          Orange as Christmas clementine.

                                          Patience climbs the tower of thrust.
                                          His foot dislodges flakes of rust
                                          That shimmer to the ground and sigh
                                          “The window of the launch is nigh—

                                          “Open your casements, rain soft fruit
                                          Upon our undeserving suit,
                                          Star fruit, according to the seasons,
                                          Absent motives, absent reasons.”

                                          1/1/2014

End of Dream

At a place where the earth’s eye (the sky) bathes in mirror and conceals its nakedness with pure light from the callow fecklessness of man, an excited four-pound monofilament fishing line connected by an exquisite hook to the most sensitive lower lip of the earth’s rainbow tugs at nerve fibers and sticky, clotted viscera in one’s vital areas, evoking panic and death. Will it jerk an emission from one? At the back of one’s cave an old hunger awakens. A patterned china plate is littered with sickening bones and gristle. One must wake up one simply must wake up. End of dream.

(Last entry of 2013)

Love's Fist

                                        One drop of night’s black ink a rarified
                                        Blue blood smear on dawn’s laboratory slide
                                        As stellar consternation’s scruples mount
                                        Anent earth’s elevated white cell count,
         
                                        The town begins to stir. A distant car
                                        Sneezes to life. Its starting leaves a scar
                                        On the slashed silence. Trash cans sing
                                        As drivers feed them before motoring.

                                        Thunderous birdsong floods the ear and wheezes
                                        As love’s fist grasps a feathered heart and squeezes.
                                        The fist that wrings the poor bird’s soggy heart
                                        And animates its limbs in every part

                                        Massages pistons in the engine’s chest
                                        And quickens matter at the wind’s behest.
                                        Some sodden cars parked street-wise sweat with dew
                                        In the cool morning air’s metallic stew.

                                        8/24/2011

Night Prayer

                                    Tactile sky, a child’s bedroom wall at night.
                                    A blue star like a gas fire pilot light.
                                    Wallpaper frieze, or drooping elm tree clusters?
                                    Night-lacquered saraband of interlaced leaf lusters.

                                    Presentiments of deluge, featured in
                                    The walled sky’s membranous translucent skin;
                                    A bleeding-through of humors, held the while
                                    By nothing but the muscles of a smile;

                                    Ready to burst, an eyeball fat with dew,
                                    The ocular tumescence of a view
                                    Galaxies-wide in compass, in whose girth
                                    And argent perlustrations drowns the earth.

                                    Night vault, in whose ideal rotundity
                                    Thunder awakens, cloud your eyes, as we
                                    Breath on a lens; your deafening vastness this
                                    Will sweeten with the moisture of a kiss.

                                     1/6/2012

On a Company of Female Athletes

                                                  Some women, chastity their sword,
                                                  Under the star of battle seek
                                                  Glory in war, the past restored,
                                                  A breath of things uniquely Greek.

                                                  Nude to the waist, each handsome bust,
                                                  Gives off, amid the scent of flower
                                                  An awesome scent of stadium dust
                                                  Rose oil and sweat and milk gone sour.

                                                  Their loins unclothed, their limbs unfresh,
                                                  Into the shower rooms they fleet
                                                  To rinse their battle-weary flesh
                                                  And stanch the sour smell of defeat.

                                                  (1981?)

The Elm

                                               Harsh wind rifles and harps
                                                           In the fleece and bones of the elm,
                                               Rocks it inside and fillups
                                                           Its leafy ribs with its fingers
                                               Tormenting brilliant storm chords
                                                           Out of its sea-green welter,
                                               Imbuing with blue-flash lightning
                                                           The somber heart in its slumber.

                                               Pellets of fish-eyed water
                                                            Glide off its green pelisse.
                                               Myriad post-storm droplets
                                                            Glitter like broken glass chips
                                               In a hallway of shattered mirrors,
                                                            Ensnared on fishhooks of light.
                                               Everyone shudders to see what
                                                            The storm sees, throned in its tree.

                                                                                               12/21/2013

Reyna

                                             Her moist incisement trickles venom
                                             Onto soiled designer denim
                                             While her breasts enlarge and taughten
                                             Under nipple-darkened cotton
                                             And her panther ass tattoo
                                             Bulges lewdly into view
                                             Where her fashion-shrunken pants
                                             Betray its murderous advance.

                                             Her killing ground: a concrete floor
                                             Lined with shops. Intent on more
                                             She prowls. Eight thousand miles below
                                             Lies a swamp of indigo
                                             Stars. Encased in warm cement
                                             Her feet take root. An increment
                                             Of planetary influence
                                             Blooms in her flesh like God’s incense.

                                             11/30/2013

Love's Supremacy

                                     Two wizened sluts with cum-slubbered faces
                                     Crumb seven last lovedrops with spearing tongues
                                     On pacified islands of body hair
                                     As Venus scorches the field of Mars
                                     With the iron hoops of her chariot wheels
                                     To celebrate Love’s supremacy.

                                     June 2012

Two Poems

                                                                Aubade

                                                O sky on whose soft bed of air

                                                an eagle feather fluoresces

                                                porched above adventure

                                                on ledges of knife’s thickness

                                                above stained-with-strawberry satin

                                                on the mouth-of-the-earth’s pillow.

                                                Day breaks the heart of the body

                                                of dawn’s lung liquefying,

                                                coughing its song of decay

                                                in blossoming putrefaction:

                                                delicate flecks of pearl,

                                                puddle of pink-green feathers.

                                                Earth, death, beauty:

                                                A Madagascar bird snake’s

                                                coughed from its throat of azure

                                                serpent-vomited rainbow

                                                nightmare iridescence,

                                                dust on the horizon

                                                like beads of colored phlegm;

                                                earth’s lung lined with moulting

                                                feathers steeped in dying

                                                apricot-compote syrup;

                                                larks’ lungs poached in wine sauce;

                                                the spectacular, tubercular

                                                stained-pillow dawn.  

                                                August 2013                           

                                                           The City 

                                Soles sucked by sobbing cement, I sauntered

                                  Killed by gravity’s amorous hug. I wandered

                                  City sidewalks dead with feet imprisoned

                                  In unobstructed freedom’s dense derision.

                                This ossified bone of civilized contention 

                                  Spacious enough to hide creation’s stench in,

                                  This architectural sepulcher dedicated

                              To housing mankind’s criminally medicated,

                                  Can only, having passed enlightenment’s due date,

                                  Fart exhaust fumes, and in a taxi’s queue wait.  

                                  October 2013

                                    

The Dragon Orchard

                                                               I

Peach-poised, weightless, on a hard chair. Pleached, shaded, concealing glowing fruit. Pencil skirt. Uniform blouse. Notepad mortar-boarded on her pointy knee, sucking a pencil lead. Sharp: ready to take down every word. My amanuensis. Ready. Begin:

                                                 The Dragon Orchard

Blue flash of rock in the deep, the dragon-writhing, mist-shrouded bowels of the earth, granite-sinewed contortions of stone, petrified fearscape wreathed with fire.

O twisty dragons! (The nine sons of the Dragon King, and at least one from the Shahnameh. Ten dragons I counted.)

Far beneath the Manhattan schist, the Inwood marble, the Fordham gneiss. Somewhere under Washington Heights.

Like a snarling nest of cockroach mothers fat with tear-drop eggcases hanging off the ends of their long elegant abdomens, behind the wire shelves in a fetid storage locker on 151th Street, under canisters of mayonnaise, towers of deli pickles and styrofoam trays.

Intellectual dragons, coils of knotted flesh, their watered-silk integuments the color of blued steel, shooting livid fire and casting off flakes of light, ripples of noiseless energy.

Sheets of blue flame sloughing from their carved gemstone backs, their eel-smooth bodies like dandruff into the void, like autumn leaves from an orchard of dragons under my bed.

                                                 "The nine sons of the Dragon King...."

                                          "....and at least one from the Shahnameh."

                                                 (Click on pictures to view full size.)

                                                                II

Wandering in the dragon orchard I met a girl. The visual essence of her flowering, fourteen year-old never-exfoliated, derm-abraded, spa-pampered skin seeped into my eyes and drenched my optic nerves, flooding my olfactory circuits and spilling over into my loins. Now, close to the flesh of things, I smell colors, or more precisely feel them, cupped in my hand like a breast or—in the case of many colors—like a middle manager’s abused, misshapen, leather-encased fifty year-old sweaty malodorous feet. Colors engendered in marketing surveys, developed by research teams and debated across conference tables, then manufactured in laboratories and chemical plants where the living, speaking surface of things (not colors—there are no colors in nature) is transformed into crematorium smoke to goose up our sunsets. Mortuary showroom colors. Hunter green. Harvest gold. The new black at nature’s funeral. The toxic skin color of waiting room furniture. The jaundiced, garish hue of twelve-packs of drumsticks in the supermarket poultry aisle, mummified in plastic.

The feet of my darling are watchful, timid and dusty, like small animals.

The Poet’s Angiogram

The poet’s angiogram would reveal me with its fluoroscopic dyes as a branching bloodcloud dilated in space around a pumping organ. Ready to fall into the sky at any moment through a tear in the pavement of reality. Though a tear in the skin of the model on the magazine cover. (The “tear” at the corner of her eye is based on inadmissible wordplay, a thoughtless homonym.) A roving purple mist of anxiety and longing.

(Language should wallpaper our world, not harbor bedbugs of infinity under its curling edges.)

Expelled from my mother's womb into the shark tank of reality, I am already "blood in the water."

O air whose waters I purple
Luminous clear ink dream dark with gravity’s
Invisible shark.

As when, on a first date, you plump yourself down on a corner of your apartment balcony to smoke a cigarette, showing off the expensive view to your new playmate, and the railing gives way sending you plummeting seventeen stories to your death on the street below, hitting a construction scaffolding on the way down. (Oops, I fell out of my life. I tripped on the sky.) Successive freeze-thaw cycles over the course of seasons have turned the concrete to oatmeal around the rusting anchor bolts. What are the innocent zigzags in winter’s temperature graph but the teeth of the invisible shark? Gravity is not a “physical constant” but a creeping hesitation, a conspiracy of opportunities, a web or tissue of increments, of dark—albeit slow—designs as candid and transparent as air, hidden in broad daylight—or as the “clear ink” (have you ever seen the ocean at night?) gravity conceals itself with while creating its masterpiece, dipping its pen in the inexhaustible well of luminous, inexplicable last moments.

Three Sonnets

                           I

My idle prospects are an open wold
Where, in the sun, the dews of morning burn
Naked and pale, in fields of ripe lucerne,
Fragrant lucerne, azure and smoking gold
(Incense more pleasing if the truth be told              
To the gods’ nostrils than the soot’s return
As acid rain—tribute the heavens spurn
As sickly—to this miserable pinfold).
Industrious youth! The high gods laugh to scorn
Your picked fruits pilfered in the hopeful morn.
You are the abundance.  Your soft flesh, O youth,
Divesting to the noontide’s amorous tooth
Its shroud of mortal snow will stain the sky
With gold and turquoise filaments, burn and die.

9/13/2011


                               II


(Faust, Zweiter Teil, Fünfter Akt, v. 11581-11586)

Though my intended task is still undone,
My stone-pale blood reduced and untoward
My backward youth could wish its maiden sword
Were fleshed with deeds and sated with the sun.
To wrest by force of art from the million-
Marvelled fortress of language the bright hoard
Of silver words, by dragon-avarice stored
Against all strength, is hardship scarce begun.
But all that I in animal fury durst
In one proud heartbeat meeting strength with strength
Is animal fury scorned and wasted breath
Until time like a ruptured artery burst
And saturate the sky throughout its length
With poetry, hypoxia and death.

5/4/2012


                           III

The wind is fair, and tides of sunlit foam
Engage, immesh, retreat and flash again
In liquid foray, like embattled men.
This pulse of spray, this dance of tides, this dome
Of sweet and sea bright air, I call my home;
An exiled slave, till fortune, fate or pen
Secure release, and once more rapt, I ken
My salt and crystal sea, my spirit’s Rome.
The rape of Aphrodite: a child’s flesh
Polluted by excited sea foam. Dragon
Semen milked from the all-inseminating
Seahorses yoked to Oceanus’ wagon
Coating her calves and ankles with the fresh
Spittle roused by the wrath of the God’s mating.

3/16/2012

Hudson River, George Washington Bridge

Unravelled from its rain spool, the mist-spun
River a smeared jewel in the noonday sun
Under a feast of aether. Fair clouds pass
Locked enthralled in their high tower of glass

Like parsley flowers strewn on a hillside’s crest;
Spars or ribs in Jupiter’s mighty chest;
Florentine tresses plaited with wildflowers;
Worlds on a dial of planetary hours

Enamelled with celestial animals—
Flora and fauna that a light wind mauls.
Crushed like unwrinkled water I fall too
Prostrate under this avalanche of blue.

Thus the hours of day dream on the water,
Night-scales and day-scales of the ocean’s daughter
And as time creeps toward his lightless deep
Under her steel-gray dragon mantle sleep.



2/5/2012

The Sphenoid

A sonnet written upon looking at the illustration of a skull in a medical dictionary.


Concealed by muscle, powder, bone and hair
In duplex from the corners of her eyes
The twin lobes of her shapely sphenoid flare
Like wing-tips of a bird of paradise.

The cranium, bound with words: a veil of skin
Obscures its features, like a lady’s fan
Stretched on a frame that—blue, translucent, thin—
Is moist and flaky, like a sticky flan.

Suffused and dripping with the sauce of blood
That irrigates the temple of the flesh
It will endure until the purple flood
Subsides, the sutures of the bone unmesh

And the bare urn lies vanquished—jumbled sherds
Abandoned by the weak cement of words.



1982-1986?

All Points Bulletin

Felicia Foster. Eyes: green.
Hair: russet (when last seen
In a fashion magazine).

Limbs: graceful. Skin: creamy.
Lips: soft. Figure: dreamy.
(She makes your glasses steamy.)

Be on the lookout. Likes books.
Glances more lethal than a crook’s
Heater. Notorious in looks.



1982-86?

Happy Slaves

Every Bulkan farmer glaives
Fieldcorn with a toothsome scythe
In the land of happy slaves
Where the cutlery is blithe.

Oily shingles, pungent lights,
Walls piled high with well-fed bricks—
Institutional delights—
Winsome axes full of nicks.

Here, like stillborn eggs of thought,
Warm glass bulbs containing small
Writhing embryos of hot
Wormlight sprout from post and wall.

I salute you, happy slaves!
Every evening, one by one,
Mother earth expertly shaves
Bleeding slabs from Father sun.



Written 1982-86? (sometime in the early 1980's)

The Beryl Sea

The beryl sea, a tube of molten glass
Rolled like sheet music.
Like tumblers of a lock, sea-foam hammers
Dip and soar, paw the air.
Watch the mincing surf glide on piano wire feet.
A key turns in a sun-scoured cylinder,
A secret drawer opens on bubbling sand
And the sea swallows its glossy tongue.

Grendel

I was still reeling from Sandy’s punch when the Sandy Hook left hook shook. Like the Double Monster in the famous Beowulf saga: Grendel-and-his-Mother. (Ancient sagas are the only true histories and they seem to be coming true true lately with alarming frequency–like Noah’s Fludde in “Moonrise Kingdom.”) The “ Grendel-and-his-Mother” monster attacked a school and ate 20 children and 6 adults. It swallowed them in the tips of close to a thousand rounds of hollow point military ammunition (expensive little suckers but luckily he was a rich kid and could afford the “best”) purchased by the doting mother for her son “to bring him out of his shell” (out of his Grendel-cave in the dark basement where he dithered with computers). When it comes time for every young man to make his impression on the world isn't it his mother who supplies the ammunition?

The AR-15 assault rifle: America’s technical solution to the problem of the “other.”