So He Lives

The day Rilke knew where Picasso had secreted
The painting he had finished in 1905
Called ‘The Family of Saltimbiques’,

—and since he had come to feel its urgency—
He made plans to go to the castle where
Ir was domiciled. He wrote, With all its eyes

The animal world beholds the Open.
But how could this be true?
The Open disappeared as soon as you pierced

It’s confidences. The conditions in which
He found himself were dire at best.
He could hardly speak. His throat

Would thicken and his tongue would
Become coarse. The pain would throb
In his throat like a match set aflame.

The Saltimbiques were old and humble.
They had discovered we must dream
The way the animals beg our dreams

To materialize: They don‘t want luminescence;
Further, they don’t want us to know
That to ferry the dead was unreal.

The precisions of poetry can have no age.
What’s written must belong to the earth.
And be alone as a prayer is. So he lives.

Hallelujah

Falcon Falls

Fall you will, but rise you must.

        —James Joyce

The falcons form as a circle, as a gift
Equal to what the gray, gay glasses beckoned to:
The empty stretches of the empty lots, clue
To the damage done by poetry left to drift,

As it scatted in resplendent high spec gloss,
His desk, more moan than groan, was sewn
And gathered into the artifice of eternity—as if a poem
The sun was in, could no longer be a source

For truth. It doesn’t matter, man, the good
Phoebus is the moonlight too, and among
the forms it forms nothing that it couldn’t outgun
Or out-glow where it was. Nothing could.

Untitled

Where We are Made

Most excellent day, please introduce me to
your spouse.  I have for so long been a fan

Of the way she smiles, the way she folds her lips
against your teeth, so like a tiger, so like

The cages and nests those beasts seem
to need for your coarse and often boring litany.

She holds you back sometimes, doesn’t she?
My, how worship works. I have seen it often

In the folds of silk pajamas, the way everything glides
to the ground, the way a child smiles at death:

It should be so far away, the urine and decay,
the odors of others worse off than you.

But he smiles. Why even his teardrops can look like
the medicine to the bright and golden trajectory.

Where we are made

Every Eve

Every Eve was beautiful. She formed
A reflection of a reflection that lots
Of people would think of as a home.
Every Eve knew that love can tie knots
In laughter. She knew that love was like a poem
That must live among the living—and outfox
The dead. She came to settle, she came to roam,
She came to love the lover who allots
Flowers in vases, who forces every Eve
Not to thieve, not to believe, and not to leave.

An Echo, eh?

All echolalias can be real–
a cheese, say, a nice smelly Brie—
the smell repeated endlessly
as to a hungry moon
hunger that must be
repeatable and repeated,
sieved and saved,
until the moon makes it true,
not only  echoed once,
but again by two.

One for the Road

The mystery of rain: it falls alike
on dirt and grass, on concrete and macadam;
it falls until it stops, for the love of Mike,
and it leaves the soil besotted, Madam.

The Garden Butterfly

 

The antenna-edged ants attack first. They attach
a butterfly to a memory deep in our hearts.
They turn to a transparent lie, as they try to match
their skin with ours. That these ants get their smarts
From bells and ringing shells, chords that detach
to ply a misericordia of all the parts
too partisan, is palatial. To patch
the inside of insects while reminding monarchs
that while rhyme may be the porcelain of poetry;
‘to be’ can only be a poet’s mimicry.

The Garden in Winter

All the magnolia trees have lost their elfin
charm. The garden is as rough and silent as their
bare branching arms.  They look like ragamuffin
soldiers fighting upside down, their hair
scouring the earth. Winter can be a muguffin
in a garden (see Alfred Hitchcock).  It can scare
the bejesus out of all the garden trolls—
for while they wait for flowers, it snows.