New Year's Eve

It’s five years since she saw

a mountain lion walk in our backyard

and the next day we saw his paw-prints

big as dishes following a slender deer.

Hard December then,  mild one now,

a little sheet of ice that just won’t melt,

salt, and step careful. No beast left,

we have to make do with music,

that subtlest of all animals,  fangs

in harmony.  Lydian mode, footsteps

start on F above middle C, then

see what happens.  The Greeks

thought this luxurious, naughty,

Asian attitudes, tigers, drunken gods.

Outtake from STEPS

Can’t help it. Just hear different from you.
I’m always listening for the heart and the god,
the lust for splendor and the splendor of lust.
Even when you tell me that’s just dull passagework
while, say, Schubert is fumbling for his next idea,
I hear the thighs and belly of the stumbling man,
a boy really, half-drunk, shouldering towards
the ever-elusive Friend, the one he wants to worship
and go to God with and touch.  The Friend is
always hidden in the music, ahead of where
I ever am.  That’s why I guess I’m bored
by music that knows what it’s doing,
where it’s going. Professional, tafelmusik,
the academy of inoffensive technique, skeletons
dressed up in costumes from the opera house,
the one that always burned down yesterday.

K.L.I. 1936-2015

                                           

The last Freemason died today
carried with him
into the Familiar Strangeness of afterlife
the secrets of unsatisfiable yearning
pothos, from which
his architecture grew.
From absence alone
he made deep song.

from CALLS

A bridge to nowhere!
Stagerite, explain myself
in thy book I looked in vain

and so they closed my eyes on me
now I must write
what I would read

and all the stories start again
and never end.

from CALLS

Be arbitrary.  Be anybody.
The world of capital
forgives every choice

just keep choosing.
Only the hermit is villainous,
probably verminous,

disagreeable, old.
All the wrong things.  He
of all men is not arbitrary.

He has chosen nothing
and nothing has accepted him
as her bride.

They live together
anywhere far away.
Sometimes I have dared to climb

the easier rock slopes of their abstruseness,
could even hear them talking from far off,
a man saying nothing with all his heart.

from CALLS

twice I was a Christian
no matter what they said
I loved him because he is a door

he said, because he knew himself
better than I knew me,
when knowing is the same as being

Enlightenment is not about light
it’s about ment, the mind
behind light and anything else

from CALLS

Last days.  I feel you love
we are only still beginning,
Eden in the rearview mirror

closer than it appears.
We are beginning.
Every archaeologist knows we just woke up.

There seems a pressure in the air
that silences the ears.
Crickets or tinnitus who can tell,

we are newborn always,
immaturity is my sword and shield,