HEART THREAD 123 & 124

123.

Wanted to do this hard-edged island in the city

could be Manhattan could be Berthillon

makers of fine wax masks to mood your seeming

this little language lobster in your trap

broken cage left empty on the sands

void your prisms soon o white man

a voice comes through the stovepipe listen

charcoal hisses at you beneath the ribeye listen

the blackbird explains it in the hedge

your fingernail on the mirror watches

we need more footnotes and fewer wheels

broken plaster statue still Mother of God.

 

124.

O light no different from the night before

as plain as the beginning of all things

simple as hydrogen a one-piece light

the longest day on the smallest island sounds like life

terror in every sense rises from identity

pulchritudo voluptas fortitude

and give all things to everyone you meet

discard your enemies like old clothes etc.

teach a morality machinery aspires

to be one with you without myself

there will always be oligarchs be one or leave it alone

there is a broken branch a bird can sing on still. 

 

HEART THREAD 121 & 122

121.

The mystery of when this must be said

lungful of particulars maiden voyage each thought in your hair

over the frozen lake a childhood spell a letter read

a breath from their mouths condenses on St. Peter’s dome

we break our vows by silence wet tongue of the beast

Anglican hollyhocks rise by the stone Buddha

I can’t remember to dissemble this self no I

I spend my day interrogating ocean

my nights parsing my interrogations

drink soup with me breadcrumbs on the snow

a bird will follow them to the open book

always contradict the weather the Cross is contradiction.

                                   

122.

Long day to celebrate the light

knows what’s coming a colonnade in hemisphere

to catch a solar system in your back yard

southern somehow arrogance to kiss the wind

I fought against me all my life and lost

nearby on the longest day a sheet of light

we saw it slice down into the forest glade

pagans these days more pious than Christians

the earth asks more of us than Bible does

stand up and be shadow wield the axe of light

horns of a bull wit of the woman pluck

flowers out of nowhere and braid them in your hair.

BY THE LITTLE STREAM WE CALL THE KEEKENHANNA

1.

Measurable the music

forensic afternoon manuscript

who murdered the morning

alter your A’, scriptor,

get ready to wedge them down

into the welcoming silent matter

that brain below the brain

sympathy is union with the dead

peachpits germinate next spring

in a tune like this

nothing gets lost neither

sorcerer nor saltimbanque

a child chided before supper

wants to go home but is home

woe woe a foundling feeling

can you get over it?

personality defects hypnosis heals

to be in your hands though

drink from earth’s hollows

you replicate by anatomy

a child and an encyclopedia

2.

incurious pharmacy of oil

sandalwood I learned to sew

lions roamed that city when

medical issues glamorous therapist

cool fingers on the swamp of my brow

healing is happenstance alone

crystals by the Keekenhanna

cure the wound by waterfall

into the stone the illness falls

water tells more than the land knows how

exercise the spirit that glossy colt

be quicker in it,  be mercury

no one will be there when I look

opened this door a thousand times

fumble the light switch temple maiden

you need a shave she plainchanted

olives red crush beneath our feet

the inward moment springs on us

one more lion to ride home

you speak their language with your knees

that was the hegemonic greeting

kissed her shadow so she spoke

the words for once don’t count

but I will tell thee them

what counted was her breath

upon my temporal-parietals

what she said was Mind this matter

3.

imagine we had done this long ago

gotten to the quick of questions

and touched the silent matter then

not waited all those years of who are you

but plunged all wet through the crazy gate

wise houses waiting to teach us a story

far away to our very selves

think of the children in the quince trees

all chattering in Welsh we’d be

and no one to gainsay our games

Principessa Salome you slew

my image quenched it in your own

kissed my dead lips till they spoke

and everything was language once again

no more damned music

I am afraid of being about things

want only always to be from them

from them all the way to thee

your ear your easy rapture

and all the children waiting to be fed

hasn’t the sunshine said enough?

4.

the fewer words that answer far

legible at close quarters chapped skin

imponderable yesses and no wonder

questions seem to be part of the sky

his business with Gaea and all the green

and scarlet things are answers to

whom was happy as a drug can make

a friend a beach  a nightingale

uncaged in Switzerland, yes you

ride my pony far as please

different faiths for different miracles

blue light deep in my mother’s diamond

first time I saw it, look for it always

sick eyes among the lilies from Peru

stanchions hold foot traffic back

one league southeast the raven croaked

a town grows from a raven’s wing

a town is a bird’s shadow solid grown

I walked until I found a field

and there you were guised as shadow

guised as ten thousand stalks of corn.

HEART THREAD 119 & 120

 

119.

I lag behind the utmost grammar

the truck squeals out when it backs up

lost without prepositions if no angels were

the operators do not believe in their machines

a Vatican of leaks inside your cellphone

but you don’t believe me when I call

because calling is its own thing, calling is God

and you always think I have some other motive

I have no motive I am motive I am mind

so make room for me in the caravan

across the Sahel because I am also salt

a word in your mother’s mouth you hear in dream.

 

120.

Seminivores all over beaks and tiny talons

when you see a bird in flight in truth it’s flying through you

the hollow places in your close-packed chest his fly-zone

so hurried and so gone by,  a clifftop romance

the pale-eyed ghost sits on the inspector’s lap

left alone the little dog howls harrow harrow

moon phase sundial water from the rock

endless embassies of birds at sunset crisis

they go so fast no one knows where no boasting

and if the mind be separate from the brain how wise they are

and we too with our fidgets of the flesh

inferring trajectories that lead beyond the real.  

HEART THREAD 115-118

115.

The priest slept through my confession

so my words went straight to sky

the little sky inside the heart I feel you here

the sentimental sinner cried the ferry left

the harbor suffused with nightingales from somewhere else

stop being continuous already the truth is made of broken glass

rose petals we nibbled from the rocks

quotations from Montaigne a clamshell cracked

a cardinal singing from what is that an apple tree

the day left-handed the ragged sky Guantanamo

clouds can only tell so much but more than we

there is a cruelty in America we must delete. 

 

116.

Try against the cruel cry we have rights but no right

what sunrise does to morning glass you do to me

the sentimental agents spoil our feed

all that nostoc dripping from the night

listen to the cupboard the dishes tell the story too

the star-sperm settling slowly while you sleep

and the cup left in the sink to soak the herb stains out

each thing knows some part of the situation

the battered hulk this boat you call the truth

leaking its way from Portugal full of opera singers

priestesses on hilltop canoodling with the dawn

this vessel trembling in my civil hands.

117.

This is the dawn of ceremony the clement word

when all men and women open their mouths and say

the truth that only they can know each one a part of 

we need them all we need them all to speak

until every man and woman is a prophet we know nothing

leave piety learn prophecy say what you don’t know

each one has words enough to know what he doesn’t know

they don’t all have to love you they just have to speak

language will not really work till everyone has spoken

then we’ll really learn what language means

the secret god hid from herself when no one created the world

back before even this argument our life began. 

 

118.

The hear of the message is proportionate to the anatomy of the angel

or are there no numbers up there

or nothing but numbers in heaven

pause for breath even those who are not breathing

she walks down the street and everybody understands

that’s what a sky is for to trap the light and spread it

so we can breathe, the wolf can prowl

the square perfect pixels make everything unreal

unreal as it really is dream about me

in the long Pacific nights and I will change

I will be whatever you intend I will dig

gold plates out of your hill and give them to you.  

HEART THREAD Parts 113 & 114

113.

I'll know the question when the answer speaks

if you say so darling I only hear the organ

green and white the monks’ church at St. Gall

remarkable country for being left alone

whoever told you there are alternatives

remember pennies not made of copper

remember the wolf in the driveway

mockingbird on the drainpipe

I have tried to deal with everything

give every weather its place in history

for I was Waterloo and Austerlitz

Prince Andrei dreaming by his horse’s hoof. 

 

114.

Your money or your life enough of meaning

I crossed the polished lobby to the elevators

no one I knew could live in such a place

and so I rose through bronze doors to family problems

my own estate the sky above Manhattan

and I owned Brooklyn too and east beyond

but not out west over the river Jersey and America

the sky belongs to me I say and on it

I take my stand no one else can judge or smite me

though sometimes someone else will touch my hand

and then the sky bears witness to my purity

purity of meaning everything in this single touch.

HEART THREAD Parts 111 & 112

111.

If the loves you dream of dream you back

shadows haunt the stuccoed ceiling like small birds

and there are real birds too on plaster leaves

baroque resemblances of passing time

your whole body safe in my arms

vertebral rosary that haunts the hands

don’t say prayers be them

you be the god that answers them

everything is for being and willing to be

and be for the sake of another, the other

not much more left of the story than that

so now at last the story can begin. 

 

112.

Pieces of fear in the room the child sleeps

wanderlust of nighttime things

can you swear that chest of drawers is where it was

sleep is the great healer of the Irish

a physician who makes no guarantees

sleep lets the world around you change

thing by thing like children on their way to school

aftermath their heads are full of fish

your uncle cleaning flounder in the kitchen sink

what color blood did you think fish had

red is always a surprise a wound of tenderness

where the nice bear lumbers out of the trees and hugs you tight.  

HEART THREAD Parts 109 & 110

109.

There’s a taboo against learning history

tabu, to know yestreen spoils your afternoon

everything forgets, pleasure is always now

back then is all the pain and dark and work and wolf

sunbathers wait for their Renoir, the wind

drives them indoors, Lincoln dies in fever

Romulus Augustulus leaves Rome to die in peace

this is the empire — the sea’s been telling us that forever

forever, no god and no czar, no meaning,

no bible, nobody home, sleep in sun on grass

I forget more than you’ll ever remember

that’s why in sleep I am the same as you.

110.

Ask the sea put on a coat and tie

wear a battered panama

we come close to the pylon where chariots turn

fling into the home stretch at last

fat chance to be Rome without the Romans

live in marble grandly with a purple mind

the Jews taught us angels and never forget

the root of ‘angel’ is the root of ‘king’

an angel is a message on its way somewhere

no angel turns away unheard

but no one knows what language they hear in

or if all our jabber is their arcane philosophy.  

HEART THREAD Parts 107 & 108

107.

From the arrow that flyeth by day on the south wind

protect the cradle of the infant thought the blue trees

reach down to us to stifle unbelief

throw your fishing rods away your lariats

because everything but what you see is real

deep in the truth of the unthought

Lila the uncontrived with whom we play

night more than day and the wind knows it all

broken clouds your mother on the phone in every wind

islands change their flags like underwear

we belong to nothing but the sea from which we come

religion is an ailment of the mainland only. 

 

108.

Hydrangea Himalayan flower favorite blue

has blossomed early in Tara’s gentle hand

I saw her tossing them on the hillside south of Sonada

and here by the sea in Betty’s other garden

a few blue already the many on their way

always like that, profit and followers, udambara path

assigning meanings to each thing I go ahead

listening to what I stumble through leave the self out

have no favorite flower no mountains no name at all

the names are all asleep in you

that’s why you love us best

the colors you chose to smash over the world.

HEART THREAD Parts 105 & 106

105.

Hammer heavy but I can judge the sound of competence

and he’s not it, a father trying to fly kite for kid

but there’s no sky, Chinese dragons slice

one another’s guide lines up La Salle above the river

yea Lady the same river the two-faced blue-eyed water

writing is a way of doing nothing but keeping time from passing

or lets time pass but makes it leave behind it

shadows on the little world people hold in their hands

stare gently out the window thirty years

Pound’s kulchur stares back in we live paideuma

the wolf has turned himself into the door

he lit the fragrant peony in the Western mind. 

 

106.

How can I be at peace who knew no war

the Brothers Grimm are my grandees

their angry soldier only in exile find the blue light

I follow the bright lumen to the cave mouth of my sin

there is a first place to wander from

in Adriatic mist and summer storm

pale Rilke fiercest thinker of his day

adding the one force Nietzsche missed, the sentiment of love

and to do no more than tell the truth

invented poetry along the way

this new organ in our flesh of meaning things

a word like children screaming in the rain.

HEART THREAD Parts 102 & 103

102.

If it said anything it said blue

I walk with you around the ancient hill to water

am all air and leave it to you to be fire

there are people such that being with them all elements complete

that’s why I run out of breath ascending

the air I needed left behind with earth

I make noises as I arise they are words

you hear these sounds as touch

for every singular is plural I am the frantic chorus

heavy hoofed uphill clamber reach the top

your house in the sky I trumpet my residence

you knew right then we’ve always been together.

 

103.

I am no meaner than the mind next door

the swan on the hood of a Packard tells the time

long kinship with owls for crying out loud

a ghost train rushes past the slaves are freed

from one master into the clutches of many

the salary of circumstance please tell me what to do

I want to talk about the moist details

the lug nuts down below the arm-break crank

slowly unpack all the details blue glass seltzer bottle

call it vichy in Dubrow’s early edition of the Times

I don’t think the subway ends here but I’ve never gone beyond

it’s hard to stop being credulous about the real.  

HEART THREAD Parts 100 & 101

100.

All those things let go

one fish could be a hundred of them rule by rhyme

you don’t see the anchors you see the hulls

moth flies out of the fog the sun

easy weather for an alchemist

the brutal heteros all asleep

why do I love music music is always somewhere else

back to London or Lascaux or on to Jupiter

things shouldn’t lead to anything things should always follow

there should be a cute lieutenant leading them

into the cloud castle little darling

you woke up just in time to be me. 

 

101.

This is our hour

the first of the last time

the lion comes out from the hill and claws those Christian garments off

battle at sea between the waves a wave is war

the pull of gravity meets the push of current and there you are

loud surf all night and the lion looking at you

naked as the afternoon shingle beach a cry

a gull and a lion and our time has come at last

seize and be greedy there’s nothing left but praise

and where bestow it this tawny sunrise this mandolin plangent forenoon

all the subjunctives gush over your lap

sea syntax one same as different as the mother.

HEART THREAD Parts Ninety-Eight and Ninety-Nine

98.

A little bit of legal left I call it mist

you call it sun in water vapor spread

honor Brownian movement throw old letters away

don’t let me into your archive

a rat in grammar

in mesh of syntax mother-naked

the one foundation of your house

Szymanowski’s lost novel an alchemy of sound

or sugar candle in the god wind whoosh

Zuk he did it and bade me to                                    L.Z.

less pants more paunch more tune than tenor

the Romans had no word for it or kept it to themselves.

99.

Sea pink was his poem                                  I.H.F.

and a stone so stood                                     J.M.

braving the Pacific calm

Hebridean storm St. Kilda’s poisoned by birds

my week in Scotland original Annandale

no need to tell you circus tales

sex on the floor while Abbot Sturlo watched

a fish in the sky its shadow a cathedral

did you remember to count the waves

they too have a cycle surfcasters ken

home in wee hours with creel asquirm

this is my theory of poetry.

HEART THREAD Parts Ninety-Six and Ninety-Seven

96.

Loud sea last night I hear at dawn

new sun caught in sugar

else all grisaille the fog of morning

have we done dreaming yet or is

that gothic stonework still in place the crowds in Latin

all the discontinuities make also a continuum

as a hand makes everything it touches its own

this bird all birds squeal a blackbird in Ireland

land of tuneful sleep more sheep than men

as every island is the same island except Manhatta

a place where fish were never plentiful

but from the ferries you could see the sleek seals play.

 

97.

To be long as an epic and nothing happen

boy with a lyre the size of an oak tree

hands busier than the wind in its strings

all words and no meaning

sex without babies

the first posthuman rises from my couch

sonless in brightness and every girl his daughter

the Touch Me Not of risen Jesus new explained

because a story binds us to our culture

and a song cuts free

all Coleridge no Wordsworth

the fable peters out in song. 

 

HEART THREAD Parts Ninety-Four and Ninety-Five

94.

This is what happens to music when it starts telling stories

how could it not be that’s why I grew up with

Franz Kline sunrise over East River a girl from Ecuador

I saw the color size of a man’s reach

stories fall out of the light

tells them into new situations:  these are the colors

all the way from red to violet and beyond

I come from Tenth Street just like everybody else

another fin another siècle the boys come marching home

the girls run away through the apple blossoms

nothing changes the sickle sweeps the moon away

the dark mumbles stories to its lone self.

 

95.

Lay so nary hiding in her underpass

heed here such traffic over who in arches dwell

failing Lascaux, we did it for the silence

no air no sound or molecules of meaning

less plausible than spirit kinds

some unregistered messengers of sense

I touch you now despite the faraway

for every skin is weeks away as India

no matter where the boat is going

there is a better way of getting there

takes longer tastes more pleasure on the way

queen of heaven in her mandorla slips into every me.

HEART THREAD Parts Ninety-Two and Ninety-Three

92.

So while the wind away until it’s still

all sea and no container everything belongs to me

let the roof slide off the sky the sleepers show

dare their dreams to stand up half-dressed

to walk outside like decent pagans

forget all the words nibble rosehips and why not

education only gives you bigger hands

after all those meager teachers one real thing taught!

look like you did last night golden ocher

America sky so far away but let me see

mind takes hold the shape of thing but not the thing

excitement of all the pale-eyed deceiving.

 

93.

Finches like apples so there

we can know nothing of his struggle                    E.D. on C.O.

to know the first time what can’t be known

unanswerable question the fall of light

from the top of the hill you see your limitations

places you know and names hold you in

you are a hostage of the street you live on

a seminaried priest of what you see out the window

everything owns us

will there ever be enough of me to go around

thousands of years people have heard the breathing of the sea

it’s time to hear the word it says.  

HEART THREAD Parts Ninety and Ninety-One

90.

There is a certain subtext to humanity

they would never occupy this hill

this boulevard to heaven though I have seen

the shapes of them more luminous than light

sometimes by the Dogana or any sea-touched hand

land they walk even when they’re standing still

the form before form is a gasp in the mind

to see such absolute a shape dissolving matter

once you have seen such things you can’t lose

ghost girls of the Janiculum laugh in the cypress

a tree is left from their investigations

a doorway full of light that natural house. 

 

91.

Venus as the bride of Christ he taught

and every book their wedding gift

forlorn as a block of marble never carved

insatiable as apple trees he offered her

all the comparisons a likeness is a kiss

sudden stranger on a midnight bus

nowhere in Nebraska the one I never

if they don’t live here they don’t live anywhere

to know truth a little is to know the heart

who knows the picture that was never on my wall

I was afraid of images nothing else can wound.

 

HEART THREAD Parts Eighty-Seven and Eighty-Eight

87.

Roar of the mirror whine of the hedge

ask nothing of me, disturb less than one word does

noise left and right unending

no more nuisance really than the fish in the sea

when I sit and look at surf rolling in

as if I were part of something even this

Battle of Actium before me surf creams on shingle

Antony impaled and Cleo’s left breast toxic-nibbled

and all the lovely stories end at once

I spent my whole childhood believing

and childhood never manages to end

the waves her pure right breast, and go weep.

 

88.

And have nothing to do but this

in the comfy prison of reality

no more work to do but make time pass

change the names of all those wicked places

salt marsh no hay a bracelet of Whitby jet

I went there for the sky the wet horizon

timothy grass belonging from black mud

weathered narrow boardwalk over muck

a thousand birds and only there ever alone

and no room left to plant the lettuce

barely room for dancing with Valkyries

high above the north sky where once a city is.  

HEART THREAD Parts Eighty-Five and Eighty-Six

85.

Every page is precious especially the blank

the story here is her round face her round eyes wet

nothing more to say hence ready to begin again

a man is a wheel on a mountain road

I’m talking tantra but to an empty room

xenolith they built the structure on as if to say

earth gives us something like a day

where is nurture in all this where is Bernini

the woman shape that taught us how to pray

boys in the clouds hair comes through the hat

the sun moves secretly from house to house

but no one knows the father.

 

86.

The breeze knows these

legends of the mother-house

her hands pressed firmly on the territory

noises annoy her most

no one’s children clattering in grass

and in the sky they mow the clouds

the mother-house is guilty of the sun

she made it cooked it over pine cones in her cave

till it glowed ardent hell and hydrogen

then she sent it to the sky to measure us

mind us little children and a rock she spat up too

to light our nights from tryst to tryst.