HEART THREAD 323-325

323.

And if it rains we say some other thing

and if the sparrows drown out timid raindrops

there’ll be some peace at last in this cartoon

forgive me my investigations a bee has to live

the drones hum around the hive those artists boy-band poets

I’m just the wrong kind a man I couldn’t find

honey in a honey jar how strange the world is

all contents and containers and a bird going by

knowing no more than less

voices of the cyclists wheeling past

chatting loud as if they’re standing still

the slender miracle of mind we all can hear.

 

324.

I climbed in winter up Glastonbury Tor

stood in the ruins of St. Michael’s Chapel

peered up through the roofless tower to watch

the original star from which we fell

you and I slept together on the Hill of Tara

peaceful in cool summer

right beneath the Stone of Destiny

we live our little times apart

Himalayas blue flowers too

where is there for us to think

but this half-acre hot summer

birdsong almost too many leaves

very green, this place, here.

 

325.

No lingering slumbery rubato flaunted coda

without slowing down it simply stops

Stefano Greco plays Bach’s unfinished fourteenth

he has a theory I guess I never understand

I think silence is the best philosophy

those empty minutes that we long to touch

I fill them here with ambrosia

a sappy word that meant in Greek what does not die

life, that limitless cliché

o love me as much as I love you

you can do it if anybody can

you are the only one who understands.  

END OF HEART THREAD

HEART THREAD 321 & 322

321.

A troll is not a little thing it’s a living stone

a stone that knows how to move

a stone with hands and only the huldra tames him

or so I read in a book I wrote

I found it on my phone faces made of shadows

light itself is made of their soft fur

they’re all around us their breath the thunder

all summer I’ve been translating from the birds

now who will be my dragoman

and guide you cleanly through my cloying text?

it’s done already! you’ve read and understood!

what else is there to tell but the sound of it?

 

322.

All that’s missing is the rain of gold

on Danae’s spread self, the blue flower

clinging to your fingertips the crow calling loud

right overhead to tell me what’s what

the time has come he says kairos

like a glee or a gospel anything you choose

long as it has a tune in it

the watchman on the roof stirs in his sleep

the trees wake up and tremble at that song

you wear your clothes woven from the stars

I know who you are but with all

my talk that’s the one word I won’t say.

HEART THREAD 317 & 319

317.

So what if her skirt is made of flowers

his skin was made of ocean

people grow old with what they hold

all that holding hurts

pain of a violin how can I sing with something in my head

the pale arm that calms me so many nights

all a step away from mania

where does the sound come from you rub on your strings

consider the pain of all I give you

is all forgiving blue light of the other

fills the whole body the way sound fills the ears

only this and nothing else. 

  

319.

The bowl of night beleaguered me

then airless dawn we read about in books

written by frustrated selfish young men

there is always air enough for women

even poor Salome here I can breathe! but night

had other plans and other selfish men

the one who wouldn’t kiss her one who killed for kissing

o it is strange to be a woman in this world

to have made all this then see it turn against you

boy by boy until the mean old men enslave you

I wish I could do something to change or help

but I’m a habit man mechanical like all the rest.

HEART THREAD 315 & 316

315.

I can’t help it if it tells the truth

the weather’s like that, breeze and knees

there is waiting to be done because the world

subways are so old-fashioned

we are children when we go down there

blue light in the Clark Street tunnel

the hardest is to be now at all

broken branches where the deer browsed

I think of winter and of Scamander

the river rising to rebuke us

the gods of everything for everything’s a god

not us though we’re on the other side of that. 

 

316.

In the completion things get in the way

until it occurs to her they are the way

then she leads me to it and you too

the other side of everything and here we are

I have to talk like this I am a voice

only what we say counts not what we do

he said and climbed the rain-drenched slope

into a Chinese dream he never wanted did he

why all those fan-fold books peonies and lexicons

of course he wanted to go there provided it was here

only the voice moved drifting over the hospital gardens

old man weeping on the marble steps.

14 April 2015

I keep waiting for something
to crawl out of my right ear
and spread its wings and flutter
loud around the house crying
this is what you’ve been
listening to all these years
for I am music and a living thing
dangerous and beautiful and
who knows what else I bring?

HEART THREAD 313 & 314

313.

She was in him all the time

Rosa peregrina pressed between the pages

so much talk the morning mower

break into an art beyond commodity

you pilgrim rose that took his hand

led him to color alone and left him there

while she herself stepped up inside him

castle of palaver beauty counts

on one finger the ruby of the setting sun

we live again because we mistake

this art too beyond the financiers

life belongs really only to the poor. 

 

314.

Poverty is permanent is to live in a physical world

endlessly interdependent dependent on each puff of breath

each stone you stand on your will contingent on the molecular

even if you think you’re not just mirror neurons

just the habit of acquiring speech

because it doesn’t lead anywhere

it perdures or seems to as long as you do

the world has never abandoned anyone

up to you to leave the world

naked towards the riches of the unconceived

I love you she said despite all this I tell

oiled wrestlers grappling with the moment seems.

HEART THREAD 311 & 312

311.

Accidental purposes of Delta music

on that day women chase men or seem to

they shall handle texts and not be harmed thereby

they shall preach the good news without knowing it

old battleships with concave prows

plow into tropic harbors bring truth home

tapa cloth and Charlie Chan and Maori skin

everything written was written to be forgotten

forgotten deep into you and ripen there

nasturtiums a little peppery in her salad

mud fights in Oregon knishes on Pitkin

if you think these are random think again.

 

312.

Children in the cornfield who are you now

furtive actions in the furrows

who knows what eating really does

two children lying side by side

hieroglyph of the space left between them

every relationship makes its own sign

whole world a museum unknown curator about whom we fantasize

theology philosophy history and baffling pre-dawn dreams

where we are always in a far-off city always trying to get home

so this planet must itself be the distant town

the stewardess won’t let me on the plane

must be the fiery angel she drives me off with an ear of corn.

HEART THREAD 309 & 310

309.

So we’re back with love and not much else

greatest of all seemings unless you fall in it

we’re back with love it springs us forward

into the kindness of our only hope the yellow of the rose

where no one lives and all love rises

to spell the billion stories that we tell

all their theology old comfy car

Packard or a Panhard on its way through the sky

all roads lead to home

that’s all you have to know

a little knowledge and some gasoline

smile brother you’re almost there. 

 

310.

Who threw the switch that made the water come from hydrogen and oxygen

someone had to be the spark

is it you who look at me oddly sometimes

as if surprised to find me there beside you

who could the spark be but the other

we come from ocean but where did it come from

who else is ripening down there now

ready to crawl out as we did and take our place

asking questions of the howling wind

playing their flutes in the desert

and like us always trying to remember

where we came from and why?

HEART THREAD 305 & 306

305.

So little said and so much waking

salt meadow hay best mulch men say

I’ve managed to know nothing but what I can speak

the van is at the door it’s all just weather

sitting here alone with my hibiscus tree

the written evidence tells against my life

my father by the cellar door painting grey

everything waits for us below

an image worthy of your eye

the end of the pagan world was the end of the world

nothing learned nothing lost

I marvel at the emptiness of me. 

 

306.

So it can mean a little or a lot

a billboard on a vacant lot is all my Hollywood

and see behind it how the lovers chance

it would be Ancient Greek if it had a goat

but wisdom does not wear a cloak

the afternoon is longer than the night

or so the bird explained

a language half sound half color

all things intersect in you

all the silken raptures of the couch

rainstorm in the desert

from great pain some red flowers after.

HEART THREAD 303 & 304

303.

They must know their bodies well

since they have nothing else to know

knowing never stops

it’s time to come back from the underworld

just as I am just as I am

backwards always is everything

no age but awareness

give us our animal back

sex is an accident on the road to truth

take off your shoes for this is holy ground

the feeling that your body is

there is no other world than this.

 

304.

A poem is guided meditation

mild propulsion of the written world

when it stops the process it launched sails on

knowing the mind

clear light between the names of things

between the things

so.ma the bright between

the new the fresh the uncontrived

your mind finds by itself

sacred absence in the core of you

all the holiness and shadows pass

maidens and heroes and sunlight on the sea.

THE RADIANT

                                        for Susan Rogers

the ship all the hard-

won inches of her

to be a boat

a boat from someone’s

hands uprisen,

low-gunwaled,

prompt to the water,

swift,

        a wherry

she calls it, one woman

can scull this thing along

I call a ship

 because it leaps

along the river soon,

soon, she hopes, so many

hours hundreded away

to knit this wood together

to be a boat. 

   Her ark

against the dangerous

mainland,

                where we abide

bound by gravity

full of fear about that lucid

luminous water all

round us, all we have left

of the first America,

before we did to the land

whatever she flees from

into the beauty

that is always moving,

that touches everything it passes,

waits now for the slim

vessel that will know it well,

this hand-made animal she weaves.

HEART THREAD 302

302.

You want to translate Homer I want to write him

all new all over again all shining and no war

no more war and the pale cheeks of men

pierced by no bronze prong and no fire

walks up and down the corpse and the hymn

that grieves for Linos turns into the Ode to Joy

a cliché has no memory it plugs a leak

even Homer nods well I can snore as well

and pour the beauty of Helen and Diomedes and Kassandra

back into the ordinary dance of day

and we will know each other in that company

proud abashed a little silly full of soul.  

HEART THREAD 300 & 301

300.

Something like a breeze through people green as trees

this is your moment mother

before the flowers come and go

a life of gentlest waiting

like the hibiscus for its bee

a bird will do, anything I can say you to

and love a little while, the mild

adultery of objects fondled then set free

there is some moment in the stillest things

we learned in the sacred tedium of Sunday Mass

eloquent silences between the words

when the priest stopped mumbling and held Something in his hands. 

301.

But God is more personal than sex

when the outside and the inside are the same

a horse you never heard of comes rushing from the mountains

the comfort of enough against the ecstasy of more

o horse you cry I will not ride today

but he thinks otherwise and there you are aloft

the two of you above the hills beast and human

who knows which is which a fable no one ever tells

vanishing in blue distances song fading

nobody knows nobody knows I hear the dearest voice

laughing at the effort I put into doing nothing

a snowstorm of images around a freezing child.

HEART THREAD 296 & 297

296.

Religion is to dance as prison to the Constitution

the underside the got-it-wrong the social trap the money

when all the great ones said go to yourself in the empty place

quiet room or vacant tree

sit there silent till you know

know enough at least to help and how

and know that we all need you

yes I need you to be, tree behind you now

you walk around the world

hinting how to take the pain away

we make for each other and ourselves

now put that in your organ and play on.

 

297.

I am not the only one who I am

the others need me too

the lighthouse turns out to be the moon

raspberry bushes replete with thorn

make me doubt the sweet real things

flesh and its discontents, pink tongues

on suburban buses o I have lived too much

too little time and bring it all to you

that word again the queen of implications

sparrow hawks and midnight hens

you taught me all the names of birds

I’ve had to do my forgetting all alone.

HEART THREAD 294 & 295

294.

Old pens old friends the given always gets

hand it to me we say and hand it surely is

weather of a distant city breath of your mouth

transhuman rhapsody suck on your finger now

o you everything you beast of a million leaves

make me listen to your touch

also spoke sorrow after joy to mingle

red sky at evening leave your grieving

all you lost is safe in Amitabha’s glowing land

it is good to console better to unmind the sorrow

who are you to lose to feel to grieve

answer me that you Trinity scholar and rejoice.

 

295.

I’m translating back into my mother tongue

what I heard in the high mountains

what I learned under the hill

earth gods and mind lords and me in between

a haggard buffoon with a bottle of ink

o sail me to your island ever after

pillow me with stillness till the fever eases

then I’ll take hold of autumn skies

and bring them onward with a sheen of rain

to cool the counsel of an angry world

gets hotter by the day as if all scriptures

give us one mandate to conquer and to kill.

HEART THREAD 292 & 293

292.

That was good kyning they’ll never say of me

I lost Caesar on the way to France

a slim-hipped nation on a crowded bus

Europe is always on the march I want to sit still

buying a dictionary brought me closer to girls

I was so young I believed in what I read in what I said

even if I didn’t believe a word of what it said

I was a boy with a penknife looking for the bark of a tree

to carve my name in and find out who I was

the trees were quick in those days and I was slow

so I remembered music Mahler mostly

and pretended it was you talking to just me.

 

293.

So much for me, life begins when you forget

and live by feeling through the world of will

that angry place of plastic and aluminum

commonest elements made hard and not to eat

so feeling is your blade young man

keep silence till you get to say it

spoken silence is the richest meat

and nourishes the clarity inside

all those layers of you till I get to me

and always always the other way round

Leipzig the fugue trapped in the organ

I opened the creaking door and let it out.  

HEART THREAD 289 & 291

289.

Nothing is likely to end

the rose of Sharon is just now blossoming

should I hand over to it this work of saying

she is easier to read but harder to understand

all touch dissolves in color

color crystalizes into sound

a sound you mistake for a word

rain on marble steps slippery as poetry

but it isn’t raining it isn’t anywhere

the word you think you heard unlocks your memory

everything you remember escapes and runs away

leaving you free alone with your own meaning.

  

291.

Successiveness dissolves in klang

all the notes played at once of what will be a song

use the simplest word for it

a word though now sick with commercial implication

song as commodity is the root of war

copyright is blasphemy

all of these words are yours to begin with

I just got in the way on their way to you

shall we end at the Milvian Bridge

where they began to confuse Christ with Caesar

o throw that denarius away his face is in the sky

no his face is your face when you wake up.