Around the Curve of the White-Cheeked Moon

The curvature of bodies.

The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice—and injustice.

The curvature of the earth is imperceptible, but it bends toward sunrise—and sunset.

The curvature of bodies is slippery, elusive, but it bends toward truth—and enigma. Like a cloak. Like a child.

Bodies are cloaked in their own alluring, inviting, beckoning plenitude and curvature. They retreat over the horizon of themselves—the plumpness of a calf, the apple of a cheek—and draw the eye with them into darkness and doom. Into their lady-recesses. Their secrecy. Pretty scary, yes. Pretty scenery though.

The curvature of time. The pregnancy of space. Moon-swallowing. Mind-shattering.
                                             
                                   Around the curve of the white-cheeked moon
                                   The night’s face gouged with her scalloped spoon
                                   She  licks and sips with trembling lips,
                                   Cements and seals her own eclipse.
.
                                   What lies concealed around the curve
                                   Of the white-cheeked moon will shatter nerve
                                   And end the life of mortal man
                                   Emerged from darkness, drowned again.

                                   Around the curve of the white-cheeked moon
                                   Notched by the teeth of her scalloped spoon
                                   Darkness she sips with trembling lips,
                                   Cements and seals her own eclipse.

                                   What lies concealed around the curve
                                   Of the white-cheeked moon will quite unnerve
                                   And spoil the plans of modern man
                                   To supersede his mortal span.

Sooth, a silly song. In my opinion your opinion that this is a silly song is a silly opinion. Cary Grant. Marilyn Monroe. Monkey Business. Hello? Griffith Park Zoo. Snake department.

First light was last light was alright when the circle married the line (from another silly song).        

12/28/2014                                                                

The Waist of Time

                                                      Spendthrift as the day is long,
                                                      I spend my time to write this song.
                                                      I lick each line with longing tongue
                                                      Like a man whose knell is rung,                                      
                                                      Exhausted, wasted, gone to seed—
                                                      Sweet, you fill my deepest need
                                                      To watch you grow, aspire, advance
                                                      Strutting in your underpants.                                          
                                                      Tasty as a drop of dew,                                                  
                                                      You eat me and I eat you.
                                                       Little song, run to your mother
                                                      While we join to make another.
                                                      She is sweet as you are sweet.
                                                      We suckle both at Fancy’s teat.
                                                      What a joyful waste of time
                                                      To embrace the waist of Time.

                                                      12/3/2014

Hunter Gatherer

Hunter coeds. How many jeweled navels shimmer and undulate under flannel and denim, clean crisp college linen and fuzzy sweaters? And what goes on in their heads? Quelques choses étranges, insondables, repoussantes, délicieuses. Five-borough houris from Pakistan, North Africa and the Middle East, some with pelvic tattoos and jewelry no doubt she has designs on me I will lick your tattoos with my eyes become fluent in the colubrine contortions of your abdomen.

                               As though in Cupid’s college she had spent
                               Sweet days a lovely graduate, still unshent.

Ungeschändet. Unspoiled. Still virtuous. Unhandled. Wrapper intact. With the bloom still on. Plummy. Keep your grimy mitts off my unblemished epithets. A girl with loose accommodations.

Human flesh liable to spoilage. Unspoiled youth. Refrigerate to prevent spoilage. Morgue locker. Age. Liver spots. Discoloration. Like darkened banana peel.

The air was full of seditions, discords, Islamic fervor. Boiling out of my blood.

Patterned animal. Tattooed floozy. Pale smoke. Smooth skin. Curved white instep. Sandals.

Saracen moon. Her voice was at sweet tremble in mine ear. He rose like a throbbing star at those voluptuous accents, ethereal, flushed. Divine high piping Pahlavi. He melted into her dream, solution sweet, as the rose blendeth its odor with the violet.  Mid the sapphire heaven’s deep repose. Thank you, Keats. As she dozes before her iPad, hard drive crammed with medical knowledge, criminal justice, political science, Eastern languages, medieval romances, radical declarations, terrorist chicanery, recipes for explosives. Robust youth. Fair maid. Planted at the Hunter College Classics table, kenning Ovid with serious mien.

Splinters From Exile. Name for a volume of poetry. Vituperation, sparks and splinters, flashing bile: splendida bilis. Splinter XXLVII, dated July 6 etc. etc.: “I carved this splinter out of my flesh while sucking down coffee in the College lounge” etc. A grey old man in a caravansary. Accredited seraglio for those seeking advanced disgrace. Institution of higher leering.

A veritable produce aisle full of plump, perky comestibles, untouched by human hands, blooming around the room in air-conditioned contentment, in the apple orchards of knowledge, releasing their odor to the air vents. Refrigeration to retard spoilage. Scented soaps to retard "soilage." And here and there a few well-preserved (or just plain retarded) old parties, as transparent as soap bubbles, trying to look invisible as they punch the return key on their laptops, staring grimly into cyberspace.

Splinter cells, revolutionary cadres, political assassination.

A brilliant poet and scholar ("What Heidegger wrote on Nietzsche makes everything attempted since—extended efforts at least—without exception, seem like fluff and blatherskite. The field of Nietzsche scholarship/discipleship is strewn with dandelion clocks like Homer’s Contest") a wise and thoughtful teacher, and a man of deep and abiding kindness and quiet modesty, said the author in his fake obituary.

Hunter College. Young women stretching like panthers all over the place.

Orangutans and kudus. The Hunter College zoo.

Things I cleave to. Caterpillar eyebrows. All fur and ripple and electric rustle. The haze, dust and bloom on things. Young women.

Cold indifference. Face painting. Age. These things do me despite. They make ruin of my charms (carmina, little songs). Disappointment all I endeavor ends.

Lost in reflection, I plunge headlong into smooth tabletop, Lake Formica. The floor disappears, the ceiling opens above my head. I am spilled, poured out like water, surrendered to the earth. I flow into intricacies. Mighty in girth, a tall milk-white cloud towers like an ivory and silver god behind the Seagram’s building. I feel the sky printed on my skin, I cleave to it (surface adhesion). I am tattooed with clouds, moutonné.

Go, little songs (carmina). Let me not rub the bloom off you.

7/6/2014

The Republic

                                                                     

Purple cloths, the genuine sea-purple, in the furthest reaches of the sea, islands of sard, carnelian, chalcedony, where the air is temperate, krasis ton horon. Let the sails unfurl, let the hair flow loose. Iron limbs and darkened skin. Reinvention of love in the new Republic.

Unlike the ancient Greeks and Romans we have mobile phone technology and freedom. We can text our hallelujahs through cyberspace. We have big sugared drinks we can suck on and phones we carry around like pacifiers, minds numbed with conversation and brain-freeze, happy children of global consumerism. Who needs freedom? And when the big oaf dies his soul will painstakingly extract its long glistening abdomen from his nostril and fly off into the air on silver wings, to Hades perhaps, like a Homeric hero. When I look at a modern citizen of the Republic all I see is litter, trash, recyclables. Worn-out glitter. Pity, embarrassment, shame, disgust. Please let the Republic be a dream so I can wake up. “The best is to sleep dead-drunk on the beach” said the gun-runner of Harrar, with salt-encrusted skin and sea-sores, nuzzled by seething billows.

With contempt I shrug the Republic from my shoulders, polluted garment, and don a mantle of blue sea air. Brown sand crabs scurry, greet me as liberator. “To every drunken sod who sails with me, I say: Death won’t purchase your soul for a cracked tester.” Surprised shore birds answer, wheeling.

6/2/2014

Logical Necessity

“Logical” necessity is necessity deprived of its essential ingredient: its “sharp pinch” (Shakespeare). Necessity is pinchy. It is the pinch-nosed huswife pinching household pennies. It is a hobgoblin, pictured jabbing a pitchfork in a naked burgermeister’s buttock. Logical necessity is homogenized necessity and therefore ultimately indistinguishable, by dint of sheer indifference, from the other logical “modalities”: possibility, actuality or chance (i.e. luck: nota bene). Logic: the bromide pantomime. Original creation’s colliding stars and suns turned into harmless banners in a guild pageant of organized trade unions—the logical functions. Logic sets itself the problem: how can we acknowledge the pressure of necessity in all its bitterness, reverse its flow and turn its prickly commandments into the effusions of our own arbitrary will? Herd them in the form of electrons around the printed circuits of a silicon chip? How can we subdue necessity to our own sweet ends? Necessity, the dragon, the goddess, unfathomable, wild destiny. Greek Ananké, a dinosaur, lumbering, ankylosaurus, a looming monster bristling with spiked armor plates, primordial but extinct. Ankylose: rigid, unbending, the decrees of fate, the will of Zeus. Rigor, constraint, anguish.

6/29/2014
 

  

NYC

Story of my rise to wealth. (In NYC, the town so NYCE they named it TWYCE.) I moved here at age 42 and hung out my shingle: fatherhood services available to all New York City women. Cream splash in the coffee gene pool. And Brighton Beach devochkas: Masha, how pouty you are. But the fact that I was not “employed” and never had been “employed” apparently prejudiced women against me. So I was no more successful at fatherhood or at any of its preliminaries (the sweet stricture of having sex for example: I would have gladly born that yoke) here than I had been in Omaha. Admittedly, my love of women always took a back seat to my love of laurels. But I was an ardent suitor of both. Single-minded, one might say, in my conviction that both were somehow one. Singularly crushed by the rejection of both. Nescis, temeraria, quem fugias. Per me concordant carmina nervis. (“You know not, rash one, from whom you flee. I am the god who marries words to the lyre”—Ovid.) Poor Stephen. Chrysoi stephanoi estephanomenos. Crowned with rank fumiter and furrow weeds. Melting snow makes me cry sun tears, by Apollo. Shield your eyes, readers, from my words!

And my landlord came to me in a dream and said “O thou afflicted, tossed with tempest and not comforted! Behold, I will lay thy stones with fair colors, and lay thy foundations with sapphires. And I will make thy windows of agates, and thy gates of carbuncles, and all thy borders of pleasant stones. (Call pest exterminator for blowfly infestation.)” And the Rent Regulation Board rolled over and said “Amen.”

Stalking the premises, owning them, I extend both arms down vanishing corridors, don them like the sleeves of a regal mantle. Behold, my kingdom. Princely purlieus. Ducal privileges. Stove, refrigerator and a pot to piss in. Speaking of which.

Fortune peed a puddle of gold coins on my kitchen counter.

Fortune, dear reader, squatting, peed a puddle of gold coins on my kitchen counter. Urine-colored Krugerrands trading $1321.30 per ounce on APMEX. Three hundred and eighty seven of them to be exact. (She has a big bladder I guess, the kinky young darling.) Pirate gold.

Moist palm. Lubricity. Your moisture is a sore decayer of your whoreson dead bodies. Studs and joists: corpse and bones of a tree. Mildew. Rot. Blowflies. Smell of dead rat, unseen good old man.

Dame Fortune the strumpet. Welcome to peeteenagers.com. The number one site for beautiful peeing young teen girls. This site will absolutely satisfy all your needs for peeing young girls.

And behold a wonder: Fortune’s bounty slid over my skin like slippery golden rain, in waves of liquid, splashing warmth. I felt epidermal horripilation and surprise, and an eyelid sprang open in each pore. My skin became all-seeing, golden-eyed. Poetically pockmarked, as it were, with vatic pustules. Visionary.

Like a vista I once saw in Omaha as I topped a pitted concrete road in the suburbs one evening on foot: sheer incline, close to heaven, spoonfuls, medallions of molten gold, a liquid feast, a summer fortune, scattered over the crest of the hill ogling the distant, clear sky with flushed eyes after a hard rain. Plastered wet maple leaves, agate-green, clutched the pavement for dear life with little clawed hands, trying not to fall off the steep road onto which they had been dashed by punishing hailstones. Into the void, into the perilous, picket-fenced deep. Pirate doubloons. How did the houses manage to cling to the pitched escarpment? Wondering if I could step off the summit of the hill into the pale, gilded sky, which shivered, naked, at the end of a sprawling avenue of shade trees, as if the angel of the Bethesda fountain had just emerged from a refreshing summer dip in Central Park lake, divested of all her woolen angel robes heavy with pigeon excrement and sordid human endeavor. Emma Stebbins. Into the radiant, sad cold light of evening. Friend: may the road rise for you. Convalescing from my sick bitch mother. When I lived in Omaha all I did was walk day in, day out and patiently recite myself to myself. I was afraid if I didn't fortify myself with ego vitamins I might vanish with grief.

Whatever is must be storytold. Planted in thrice-ploughed fallow and come to harvest.

A mortgage, a marriage and a car in the driveway.

All squirting out of her little fire nozzle, her honeybunch, her goddessportal. She turned on the girlhydrant and anointed me with goddessnectar. Here’s looking up you, kid.

Spun me silly. Spinning of yarns. Spinning of planets. A great spinning is taking place, I've always felt, winding everything up.

Reverse metamorphosis. Girl in yard. Tree in yard. Girl from tree. Tree from girl. Ovid. Divo.

Fortune. In the city that never sleeps.

Fortune. She's a very kinky girl.  But sweet too, the cozy little slut. Tumble-haired beauty. Hot-cheeked, with the delicate morning scent of wine, urine and apples. Like the ancient Camenae (muses). We satyrs should know!

Not scary loco like my mother. My mother, the goddess of Clinical Depression. Not hers, but everybody else's. Everybody around her. Like some kind of terrifying head nurse in life's psychiatric ward. Deranged policeman of the psyche. She emanated clinical depression like mustard gas while somehow remaining immune to it herself. Her healthy young metabolism excreted it from her skin like a poisonous cloud. Psychiatric wards erected and filled themselves up spontaneously with suffering in her vicinity. My father almost died. Kathleen Marie Brady. The Typhoid Mary of middle-class dementia.

June night filled with sweet linden-and-locust scents, fireflies and insect fairy moans. Whiskered nightjars, dusk’s whirring bull-roarers, purring, square-eyed beauties the color of charred wood, unscrew their lids, let out spook, charm, like captured junebugs. Thelkteria: charm, spell, enchantment. Zone of stars. The girdle of Aphrodite. The enchantment of Aphrodite’s diaphanous knickers.

(What is “dusk”? No one can say for sure but it has a voice, impossible to localize: the plaintive whisper of a nightjar, like the mew of a kitten hungry for milk—a sound you cannot localize but can nevertheless feel on all your exposed flesh as if it issued from a cardboard toiletpaper tube. The brush of nightwings against the skin. It flies on dislocated shoulders like a crippled spider. Its spindly bent wings are marked with white moon-squadron insignia. It manages astonishing feats of spatial agility in aerial love-dance with its prey, small winged insects. I call it by its European name “nightjar” because at dusk, when you unscrew the lid, something magic comes out. Night itself issues from the nightjar. Isn’t beauty always jarring, queen of smoke and darkness?)

Wild celery and rue at the garden borders. Two wreathes of celery crowned Xenophon son of Thessalos at the Isthmian games in 464 B.C. Wedding parsley. Funeral parsley. Oak leaf clusters. Coronets of ivy. The laurel, the bay crown. Herbs of grace. Memorial herbs. My father’s oak leaf clusters. Where are mine? They withered on the branch. Doused with a mother’s sweet herbicide. Milk of her murderous breasts. Nursed in smiling secrecy on the fountains of an immemorial hate. Hatred for my father. Hatred for his son. Pah! I spit the milky venom from my mouth. From my withered antlers sprout Jove’s own green, not even Diana can turn my hunting dogs from their scented prey.

Tomorrow again. On the hunt. After I have showered and gargled and sung my morning battle song. My prayer to Zeus, the Allfather.

Thus ends the story of Pluto’s gold and my rise to wealth.

6/29/2014

The New Lyre

Look up at the sky, her shimmering skirts. You probably see power lines. But all I see are fists, squeezing electricity from the air, shattering the lyre. The great blue lyre we call the sky. The great blue ribbed cathedral ceiling stretched over our heads like music. Transformers transform transformation into uniformity. But Apollo’s forked swallow tail will sever the city’s nerves, enforcing a new music. And the only catgut in the new lyre will be feral cats in the throes of love, howling their guts out.

Friends: an evil haze envelopes us, of diabetic fat and greenhouse gases, entombing our future.

Hearken, neighbor, in your peaceful house. Outside, chaos is beginning to sing. Chaos of broken strings, the broken bits and shattered pieces of the lyre. Music is memory. Thanks to memory (and her daughters, the Muses) the dismembered is re-membered. Harmony loves chaos. Join the love hymn. The refuse on the highway side is beginning to sing.

Muses. Daughters of memory. Daughters of creation. Remember something long forgotten and listen to it chuckle, newborn, in its basinet of Yesteryear.

All I have are words, broken remnants of a shattered harmony.

Contact high. Contact music. “Increase” is a passive verb. A boy, I increased: I was increased. Taller by the altitude of a chopine, I fell into the sky. Many summers ago. My parents grieved.

Lovely lyre-tail. Barn swallows conducting avian music with rapid baton-swing wing beats against the low light, chestnut-plumed, of evening. Sky’s breast. Heaven’s vault cloaked in cobalt blue opera mantle. Banker’s barn. Summer job. Eighteen. Sour reek of grass sap staining shirt, pants. Hirundo Rustica.

Backstory. As I write, above my head, in a ceiling fan with a drooping glass belly full of neatly coiled fluorescent intestines, two talcum powder pinecones of white light, gonadal cocoanuts, shower their leprosy in the room.

On the day of my birth I threw my ribcage on over my thoracic organs, buttoned the ribs at the sternum and strode forthright into the light.

Outside, it is morning. The sky is humming. You’ve never seen a sky so blue it hums? “Matter” rhymes with “chatter.” Out of the fenced yards, vistas and avenues of being, something like a baby’s chuckle is rising, the discourse and palaver of universal matter in its infancy.

6/18/2014

Feral Cats

                                             Inhuman howling? Pay no heed to that.
                                             It’s only Cupid torturing a cat.

                                             (Cupid is a knavish lad
                                             Thus to make poor felines mad.)

                                             6/15/2014

Breath of a God

We are all ears—though many of us are plugged with wax. A garden of ears (Nabokov) watered...from where? By what? By something that precipitates out of thin air, as mysterious as rain, and trickles through the auricular canal and the cochlear labyrinth into the center of the clay flowerpot we call the “skull”: the voice of the nonhuman world, what we call “language” or “word” (which speaks with a peculiar freshness in children). Every human being is a voice from the nonhuman world. Human larynx: silk road to the Orient of silence. There are places where a certain gatheredness collects. A gathered strength. A sovereign emptiness. Places that are zatheos, ripe for divine emanations, epiphanies.The human throat is one of these. Something not even close to human has us by the throat. In the struggle to regain mastery of our own throats, only the stupid prevail.

If thou speakest sooth, then of a surety have the gods infatuated thee.

The poor dumb world, its mouth too swollen with human flesh to utter speech, now chokes on its own syllables.

Will gods again visit the ravaged earth?

They seem to require more breathing room than the present real estate situation permits. Breath of a God, blow on the earth, blow all our cities away like cinders, motes of dust.

There are no meanings, no syntactic rules. Grammar is Platonism. The putty of your language facility is still too cold and stiff, it won’t flow into the cracks of the text, so what does it matter if you can “solve” the grammar of one phrase, you miss five more, or better yet there is no grammar in the text for you to “solve” at all, grammar is Platonism, a creation of your own mind, a crutch used by those who still lack language facility. Throw grammar from the train. Nevertheless, every word is a glint of light from something concealed, fish scales, a dolphin’s back. Rare and dainty things. Bird’s milk. Language mantles like wildfire over the surface of the earth, like breath on a crystal orb, coalescing in intricate hoarfrost patterns, then melts away, along with the earth itself. And no one speaks it. It is as if a god breaths it onto our faces.

A thing is nothing but a large level expanse of cold, desolate water. Suddenly it breeches the surface of itself and vents a plume of moist, blood-warmed breath in our face.

6/14/2014

In My Dream

In my dream I had a wife. She was only nine years old. She had been tramping hard through wild country in heavy boots and alpaca vest and held up a hailstone melting in her hand to show me, but the hailstone was also a starfish, and it was melting quickly, and I knew I had to respond quickly with the appropriate word or gesture or. Emissary from sea or sky. The seal of the great king (symbolon para basileos tou megalou). But as a wet wind stroked me with gentle fingers on the side of my neck I stood melting in fear and embarrassment, fear of her impatience, embarrassment at having neglected to get married for so long. How could I have forgot? In the intervening years I had become more than fifty years her senior. Each of your two hands, my little darling, is already like a starfish. And now you hold a real one in your hand, at the beach, to show me. In your star-spangled bathing suit, no less, with the open back and string tie, your salty wet hair glued to your narrow neck in spikes of surprise.

A maid of summery aspect. A summery maid.

Her boots crunched on wet gravel as she climbed the steep driveway towards the rustic house and the dirty white 4X4 pickup truck, bearing messages, destinies, reprieves, royal commands. Her child’s lower body (she seemed to be decreasing in age as she ascended) was clad in the heavy denim of sturdy-legged farm women.

Twenty Lashes In Twelve Point Type

                                      I do not repine, I do not repine
                                      Slander’s scourge or the withering brine,
                                      My back is voluble and proud
                                      With festering wounds, defiant, loud
                                      With green and purple mouths that speak
                                      Heart’s blood and the good red reek.
                                      This body gouged with cunning’s tooth
                                      Shrouds a poet whipped for truth.
                                      The poisonous tones of liars’ tongues
                                      That soil the air and sear my lungs,
                                      Purring smooth as milk, presage
                                      Scarlet slashes on a page,
                                      Much like the dulcet tones obscene
                                      That hemorrhage from your tune machine.
                                      All my music issues fresh
                                      From my agéd, tortured flesh
                                      To scar the mind with fingerprints
                                      Blood red through the second rinse,
                                      For fear and pity’s strangled cry
                                      Stains my soul like smoke the sky

                                      6/4/2014

St. Agnes Eve

Music yearned like a god in pain through every earbud of every handheld device on the train, drilling into bone sockets like the train through sheer granite (Manhattan schist). Flooding the passenger compartment from the wheels below, God’s yearning, forged steel cacophony. A station approaches: trumpeting wheels snarl and chide. Above, at street level, the pulsating throb of the global economy, the universal machine, God’s pain mechanized, earth-shattering. The death-agony of a God enslaved. Universal power source for all our devices: the tortured God. The bleeding finger, the broken lute string. Orpheus dismembered. God’s body parts littering the landscape in the form of silos, wind turbines, office complexes, shopping malls and sewage treatment plants. And when we have carved the last edible morsel from God’s ribs?

Manhattan—one of the islands which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.

The thought makes purple riot in my heart.

Cowardice runs faster than death (Socrates). Gallop on, splintered music. Behold, our immortality. (Darkness at the end of the tunnel.)

5/27/2014

Under the Stars

"Onto the asphalt, rainy-bright, festive shopsigns plastered parti-colored jester patches. Festive jester plasters. For cudgeled clowns. The sidewalks were skinned with iridescent snake.”      
                                                                                                          Night On the Town, 1982


                               Standing under a vomit of stars I wounded
                               The air with my breathing and drank in the stench of carnage—
                               Clear as the liquorous aether distilled by evening—
                               Wafting from battles past in the light of my anguish
                               Tempered with murderous sadness drowned in the knowledge
                               That even the circus of cruelty and severed finger
                               And innocence clothed in a raincoat of pelting missiles,
                               Excrement, filth and flints is a garment in season
                               Now that the only motley is clown-colored cheap suits
                               Made and imported from China for corporate flunkies.
                               Plastered under a gauntlet of stars I saw this.

                               5/15/2014

Intractable Issues

Gods like income disparity, climate change, wage servitude, corporate slavery, overpopulation, degradation and destruction of the earth come to dominate and control every aspect of our lives because—having become disillusioned with gods (from Old Nobodaddy to the Olympian rogue’s gallery)—we thought mortals could do without gods and, quaintly, decided not to “believe” in them anymore. We call these new gods “intractable issues.”

Timid atheists, we have assigned the “solution” of these global “problems” to a legendary future, mirror image of a past Golden Age. Meanwhile the new gods—rogues and rascals like their parents—continue to thwart our plans for world domination.

                                         The bat that flits at close of eve
                                         Is from the brain that won't believe.
                                                                    (Auguries of Innocence)

The Blue Canopy

"And yet was she of esteemed lineage, my daughter, and guarded a deposit of the seed of Zeus that had fallen in a golden rain."—Sophocles                                        

                                             The spring, recumbent in the valley,
                                             Has inflamed the lord of heaven,
                                             Wroth and foaming, venting fury
                                             On the sweet pubescent belly  
                                             Of a smiling nine-year old
                                             Schoolgirl belle dame sans merci.                                          
                                             She, the mistress of the fountain—
                                             Tempter of the sky defiler—
                                             Left her limbs in some disorder
                                             As she slept in plaid attire,
                                             Open to the sky and smiling,
                                             Mirror smooth (the sweet dissembler).
                                             Her molten skin was bathed in splendor
                                             (Moutonnée—imbued with beauty,            
                                             Branded with the sky’s own blazon,      
                                             Cloud-tattooed and heaven-complexioned,
                                             Steeped, infused and impregnated
                                             By the God of ageless summers,
                                             Crescent, youthful, swollen, spilling,                                        
                                             Pansied, pied and gilliflowered,
                                             Fetlock-deep in river sedges,
                                             Where the liquid noon reposes
                                             On her gnat-embroidered fringes
                                             And her margins stitched with skimmers—
                                             Gaily carpeted with duckweed—
                                             While the water winds and surges
                                             Through her eely-throated channels—    
                                             Dappled like a painted pony,
                                             Exuberant, enthralled, coquettish).                                          
                                             First, the tarnished mirror darkens
                                             As the storm cloud’s violet pouncet
                                             Pounces on the dirtied water.
                                             Distressed and angry, turbid, swirling,
                                             The river’s back erects its storm quills.
                                             There is a whipping and a foaming
                                             Then the water licks its bruises,
                                             Stills, and smooths its rushy tresses.
                                             Honey of indignation glistens
                                             On the river’s lips, defiant,
                                             Hectic, panting, lightly parted,
                                             Shrouded in a virgin’s pallor,
                                             Burning on the wounded water
                                             Where the woodland smokes and rustles
                                             In the evening’s light and fire.
                                             Her smoldering heart is dark green agate.
                                             Shafts of sunlight burst and splinter.
                                             With a chill and slippery shiver
                                             She shows her sky side, fish-flash silver.      

                                             3/7/2014

Moon In His Teeth

                                  O for a May, a Candy, a Charlotte
                                              (By custom barb-wired and fenced)
                                    An innocent child, a sweet little harlot
                                             To rub my tumescence against.

                                    With legs like shoots and eyes like rain
                                              Gray on a green hillside,
                                    Impatience a little against the grain
                                              And a port-wine stain on her side.

                                    Fitted to still an old man’s grief
                                              And lifelong-festering sore
                                    With softness pliant beyond belief
                                            And the gossamer things she wore.

                                   Sweet pointy nothings emerge into view
                                              Each like a Spring dew drop
                                   When she handstands (“Look what I can do!”)
                                              —Both popping out of her top.

                                  Indeed, you turn nothing inside out,
                                              Sweet little upsidedown
                                  Girl with a circus flair and a shout
                                            From the gob of a fat-faced clown.

                                  His lips are stained with moon-white foam
                                              And he takes the moon in his teeth
                                  Every night with a book at home
                                              And a sore that the gods bequeath.  

                                And ever since, with a sigh and a wince,
                                              He breaks the eel on his knee
                                  And bloody tints from his fingerprints
                                              Disfigure his harmony.

                                  The stars effervesce in the liquid sky
                                              And boil up out of my loins
                                  And dissolve into mists when you are by,
                                              And the sun into golden coins.

                                  2/8/2014

Woman on Phone Drives Jeep into Herd of Cows: Cops (Police say Daisy Cowit was on her cell phone at the time of the accident)

Police arrested a 21-year-old New York woman who allegedly drove into a herd of cows in Orange County, seriously injuring three of them.

Authorities say Daisy Cowit, of Wawayanda, was using her cell phone when she plowed her Jeep Liberty into the cows on Mountain Road last Monday. Six of the cows were struck, and two farm workers were nearly hit, police said.

Three of the cows had to undergo emergency surgery for their injuries; they survived.

Cowit was charged with reckless endangerment, criminal mischief and reckless driving. She also faces charges of driving while using a cell phone and failure to exercise due care, both traffic infractions.

It wasn't immediately clear if Cowit had a lawyer.

(Nov 5, 2013)

The Moon Erasers

                                                 Black evergreens
                                                 Sentineled in
                                                 The moonwhite night’s
                                                 Bone-cheeked
                                                 Privet-hedged
                                                 Sun-swallowing
                                                 Transparency
                                                 Present arms,
                                                 Stand watch,
                                                 Expunge the light.
                                                 Erasers of the moon—
                                                 Expansive perimeters,
                                                 Silver glimmering
                                                 Shrinking circumferences—
                                                 Close ranks,
                                                 Jostle in quickstep,
                                                 Retract themselves inward,
                                                 Vanish in darkness’s
                                                 Juniper-redolent
                                                 Imperial honor guard.

                                                 8/31/2011

Metropolitan

                            All skied over with blue lip smear
                            Tin-snipped water sheeted the way onward
                            Drowning in its light.

                            Seven lights from seven beacons plumed the cheery shoreline
                            Hoarsed into silence by the nightless cavalcade,
                            The bright-lit pantomime.

                            What if an inky canopy stepped down into this jewel?
                            Would its footprint rouse the waters?
                            Would they slide, jelly-like, into storm sewer horizons
                            And the air quicken and depart
                            And four stakes tied with builder’s string mark plans for a new river
                            Under a blueprint firmament?

                            Almost it seems.
                            Meanwhile steel towers fend the day.
                            Daylight draws loops and cloud-curlicues in the festival air.

                            3/4/2011

How To Speak Dream

                              How to speak dream. I speak dream. What is sleep?
                              A tongue of water that makes seashells seem
                              To speak molluscan language. I speak dream
                              Endowed with speckled bivalves from the deep
                              Embedded in wet sand—not tampons, cheap
                              Medical waste with which our shorelines teem
                              Or flaccid pocket watches limp with steam
                              And hung on trees to sweat, perhaps, or weep—
                              Effluence from some meathole—but the sea
                              Cradles the infant language in its womb
                              And utters it upon the shore at night
                              And swaddles it in blankets white as foam
                              And in my sleep it babbles with delight
                              And cannot speak, and cannot speak, or see.

                              1/16/2014

Melissa’s Flame Red Ear

                                             I see Melissa’s flame red ear
                                             Protrude through amber tresses clear
                                             As water. While around it turns
                                             Murdered ice, it glows and burns.

                                             On the mountain vassal snows
                                             And assets that the winter froze,
                                             Locked in crystal vaults, prepare
                                             The limpid honey of her hair.
     
                                          Like water gelid, pure and chaste
                                             Headlong to her ear it raced
                                             To ignite and to expire
                                             Fuel-oil for a vestal fire.

                                          1/11/2014

Winter Birth

                   “Sages strove In vain to filter off a crystal draught Pure from the lees.”
                                                                                           Cowper (Task, 1784)

                                            Through the thicket, woven tight,
                                            Filters holy winterlight
                                            Cleansing land bereft of worth
                                            At the warming of the earth.

                                            Summer made the pox abound
                                            On the pullulating ground.
                                            Pustule-like, where wildflowers grew,
                                            Sprouted latex condoms, too.

                                            Beyond earth’s gates of greenhouse gas
                                            A pulseless army camps en masse
                                            And counts its prey and holds its place—
                                            The cold of interstellar space.

                                            I see its bright obsidian gaze
                                            Descend through mawkish, thriftless haze
                                            And penetrate, surpassing price,
                                            An iris blue as glacier ice.

                                            O mother of the blue-eyed earth
                                            Grant to man a winter birth
                                            And dress in blankets warm as snow
                                            The heaven's seed that sleeps below.

                                            1/2/2014