A Window On the Dark Nights of Summer

The truth is that there are no monsters.
Staring at a window on the dark nights of summer
will yield no terror worse than the reflection
of your frightened eyes in moonlight.

I bar my gates.

I lock my doors.

I do not own a single mirror.

My voice reflects off polished glass
and through the silence, here is the echo
of me sitting in the dark, weeping.

Waking

When did sleeping sooner so to reach the dawn become

this endless musty wakefulness? When did rocketships

become airplanes, when did airplanes

stop being blue and red stars in a child's sky?

When did the grass grow hot beneath my feet

and seep between my lips and burn there?

How the hell do I get home?

The road is no shorter for my asking it

where it will end.

Misty, heat-haze vision

of walking towards the sun.

Supplication

I am wrong to say that I must train my eyes to heaven,
my prayers to stars,
my hands to reaching high until they ache and fall aside;
I search in all directions: God is there.

God, here am I.

American Blues No. 7

One note cracks the pavement and distorts,

grossly distends the meaning of soul

and what it takes to make beautiful noise.

Buzzing in my ear, throbbing in my hands,

burning on my lips; the conviction to kill dogs

when they are foaming at the mouth in a dark barn,
like college students on bail in the Ivy league,

with rubber balls stuffed in their mouths

and blindfolds soldered in place.

I've read their signs and heard their prayers and protests:

burn whiskey, shoot kerosene,
blow smoke off the steaming double-barrelled six-string
and it makes a sound like bells,
like broken bells and howls and wind in trees

that grow between cracks in the lanes on deserted streets

all day, all day, all day, all day, all day.

God, who knew this was what they meant
when they said bend, contract, release, orgasm!
play the fucking blues?

American Blues No. 4

This is the sound of waking from a lifelong fever
to the taste of my own breath,
the scent of windlessness,
the sight of being blind from staring
at the glowing pupil
of a cloudless sky.

On the previous horizon the sea rose up and swallowed the sun.
All the smoke of its death filled the earth, erupted nightfall.
Now the spent sea (a desert) is cold
from the light of the crescent-thin corpse
of the wet sun, dripping stars.

A dog kicks its legs in its sleep and growls in its gleeful throat.
Beside, a man dreams that he is running
from the snake-eyed shadow of his own ambition.

As daylight breaks they sweat themselves awake.
They are not chasing. No more running to escape.

They are lying both in puddles,
brush to one side,
rocks to every other;
bleeding out.

The man with his feet in the land, his heart in his head,
the days in his throat; pulsing wind,
each beat and return like the vertebraic crackling
of old hands trying to squeeze a trigger.

The wind knows just what the hell it is doing
when it blows dust and sand in the face of a dying dog
as it howls for its violent, virulent drunkard.

The Edge of the Peaceful, Roaring Sea

God knows my path through these,
these endless woods and shapes of foxes,
thieving foxes with their tales and eyes aflame,
these shapes of fire and the whispered shout
of a woman's voice that reaches out
to push me far from her.

By the light of fiery tails and by the faith of hope in love,
I spit into the dust and wipe my eyes with grime
to prove to us that I am truly blind.

All my movements cast the most fantastic shadows,
just like this helpless, happy tearstain that you touch and hold and read.
If only you but knew what you were drinking,
you would not be, O! so thirsty. And I-
well, I would still the tap to cut the flowing draught
and fall asleep amidst these lovely foxes, lulled to heartless passion
by the sound insistent of the echo of the love I knew to be.
But you will not, you know, and nor for this will I.

Somewhere through these God-damned woods,
there is a swell of low grass that goes on forever
to the edge of the peaceful, roaring sea that never ends.
On a rise above this hill there is a house
built with the callus
and the blood of Irish hands
to house a green and tender soul
whose heart can heal and gentle bloodless limbs
and fill the whole of eyes that seen too much.

I pray that I will see her face, which I have never known,
and that she'll speak a language that I cannot understand
so that I must fall silent,
watch her lips and hold her hair
and sit with her and listen.

I pray that this will be there, and that someday she'll cry,
for all the crying I have forced away,
when I am old, and tired straighten up at last my hands in joy to grasp
the sea-swelled ropes of my dying form
and face the wind and roar with happy rage and cause my final storm.

American Blues No. 3

It's hard to live as if you have an answer when every cry you cry

you would, if you could bring yourself to call it, rage.

I am the sound of walking across the eye of God

as if I own the place, with the heart of my childhood calling out:

"Look at me, look at me, look at me!"

He doesn't look any different.

My steps raise clouds of ash in traced coordinates

across the wasteland of a luscious yard

as I fall out into the ruins of a perfect home

to live with the ghost of a beautiful woman

and sleep with faucets from upstairs

trickling down through swollen woodwork

to rain on my candled eyes until my vision smokes over.

I turn around, and all the trees have taken off their clothes.

They stand in the empty, naked and stark, like buildings;

the high-risen monuments to a concrete winter.

Tramontana (My Dreams This Afternoon)

On a Catalan hill overlooking the specter of Lydia,
the Nightingale of Port Lligat,
and the silhouette form of the great masturbator,
a man stands old beneath the sky's one stormcloud, breathing deep
the heady aroma of promised lightning bolts.
He has chased the cloud and traced its shadow across to this hill
as it promises to drench him, without unhappiness
or recourse past the limits of the beach.
He stands, he shouts; his hands,
like birds once shot at, fly to touch his face.

He tremors calm through tears through widened eyes,
and hands he lends to tensious gravity.

He is;
still.

From view of him my spirit descends
and thresholds the doorway without door (so just a way)
in a wall of flinching whitewash.
The walls ask, You? Where was the day?
I whisper in a voice like the steps of a candleflame's dance:
"She is nothing, nothing, nothing."

And O, the house,
it groans
into the vibrant folds of dusk.

On a Catalan hill overlooking the specter of Lydia,
the Nightingale of Port Lligat,
a man shrieks into the screaming melody of tramontana;
there is lightning in his belly, and his breath
has fallen on the hill,
beyond the reach of his grasp.

*

In the tramontana, the whitewash will refuse to say what it hears
and in its silence I will lose my words,
just as a candleflame goes out and rapidly ascends its dance
in the manner of intertwining pathways

found in channels of rising smoke.