Saturday, January 28, 2012

When we have scoured all our doubts away,
What will remain but a hymn of praise?

Sunday, January 22, 2012

XXVI

Perfect as lentils soaking, each round pebble
Bathed where the water laps, drifts against the current gently.

There juniper exudes a pungent meady scent, and the wood birds are wiser
Than their cultivated brothers. Warbler and thrush have darkly glinting eyes,
And are never startled.
They know these trees, this stream, like their own voices.

And in this heavy bearded wood there are more loamy secrets,
Where spiky pine blankets the condescending lumps of fallen trees.
There a blunderer may find himself in dreams of a peculiar kind,
When light and desire conspire to draw him deeper
Into the forest's pleroma,
And except he is a fool, he will not know it.

There moves the forest's guardian, all draped.
He is the earthy and the intoxicating spirit of this place.
In shape he frustrates any illustration, complete is he,
And any portrait makes his parts absurdity, for he is beauty.

Any eye that sees him finds its deepest fear and dearest joy,
The wanderer is rested in his soul, the hunter rankled,
The lover spoiled of any cheapening love.
Here, in this fecund stillness
Is the utter soul of worlds.




Sunday, January 15, 2012

Dido's Lament

When I am laid, am laid in earth...

Visions throng the morning's birth,
Dreams clasp my hand before I rise from rest


...No trouble, no trouble in thy breast.

Consoled me Love, and then caressed
Me Truth, more gentle than the truth is wont to be


Remember me, remember me...

I loved his shadow, verily -
There is no bitterness


...But, ah!

I loved a shadow, verily.




Credits: Italics, "Dido and Aeneas" by Henry Purcell.
J.R.R. Tolkien.
Jesus.

Tuesday, January 10, 2012

The Yard In Winter

Face down to resuscitate the earth. Breathe the frost away, smell the fertile spring awakening under warm breath. The milky bitter grass. The scalpy smell of roots, the death. The life,
And the sweet content of the ground beneath, heaving like a chest in sleep, and me upon it.
Resting, a child on its mother's breast. The heartbeat of the world beneath my cheek. And gleaming
In the skies, there is my father, and through his eyes there winks the spark of stories. There connect and intersect the paths of slaves to freedom.
Follow me north.
Did I know each nest? And now I kiss your neck, your fingers, you who whisper, Shall we say love us more? Or love us less? Which shall pain you more? I sigh into your dry and smoky skin. Your sleeves are fringed with lichen. And I am leaving you already...
For the same sky under different branches.

And I said You never change. But change the way we understand. To know You.

Friday, January 6, 2012

Never, The End

They say Comedies end with weddings.
But what do weddings end with?

I've been aching ever since the tale began,
For this? Disappointment in the union I awaited.

Stir my heart again, and - defy me! - make me see
The end for which I bleed.

Thursday, January 5, 2012

Classy

I glanced over my book to where you sat. You were snapping gum, perky and assured, and everything I judged "classy."
When they called your name you slipped off your chair like a movie star. Slid a polished hand through your perfect silky hair. You glided past me, heels clicking and smelling like France and tic tacs.

Sunday, January 1, 2012

In Wintertime

He was an artist.
And that was why he fell in love with
you;
he thought that you would age
like wine.

He is a poet.
And that is why he loves you
still;
He knows that you can pierce his heart
in wintertime.

Hunt

Lisping on the edge of words unspoken,
And shifting from one tender foot to the other.
In the darkness, I suck condensing air with a shallow gasp.
I am hiding because I want to be found.

If I plunge my hands into the softness of your stomach, will I find you real?
Are you only a silhouette on the damp grass, testing sounds and fighting tears?