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.

A Vision of Soundless Bells

Tomorrow I walked away with a limp

from what was near today,

in search of what is true always.

In the company of towering cedars and cypresses,

across the surface of rivers to the sea;

past and over watery forms

and the rushing of monstrous shadows,

I walked, and slowly.

An unknowable vision cut my sight,

like lightning as it strikes the point of a blade:

a grove of silence or whispers; whispers not to hide the words,
but to necessitate attentiveness.

In the center of the ocean; a glade

like a ripple caused by a falling leaf in a fawn's eye.

In the middle of the glen,

the iris of the ocean,

I saw a golden tree take root in dark soil,

white flowers hidden in the petals of its leaves.

Beneath these untouched flowers, hanging in the breathless wind:

silver pears, like soundless bells.

Tomorrow I walked away from what was near today,

toward this, and it has held my sight.

Matthew 9:13

God is here and you are not. Who am I to love?

Hulls are breaking the surface of the water, but the sea remains.
Waves roll and rear into the sky and groan with weight
and call upon the land with white hands,
but the sea and the land are green and breathing and immutable.

You have taken my clothes, have left me cold and undone
with all the ends of my seams hanging over the edge of the past, unraveling.
God has given me his blood, the light of the Sun, and my spirit
to outlast what you have touched.

What am I to say for you?

I am lying in the low, soft pastures of the high valleys of the old sea,
and the night is warming, and I am at the breast of my Lover.

You are running hard somewhere,
exhausting yourself in a spirit of cunning
and victorious malice,
to leave me.

Leave me, then. I am Here.

The Lakeshore Trees

The lake shoreline is waiting for the day
to break its bones upon

the roaring mane of golden dawn, the roaring mane entangled on

the dreams of every dreamer in the night before,

now gone, gone, now gone.

The lakeshore trees are standing till the water breaks the sky

and floods the firmament of swimming eyes and draws

the thoughts of fishes' heads above, aloft, and high,

where they will gasp that it is dry,

where they will drown upon the altar of the sky;

where they will see the lakeshore trees give up their foothold in the green,

will watch them tumble, murmur, slide into the watery blue sky

where they will lie, observed by fish,

till all of the ripples

have died, died, have died.

Atop the bottom of the lakebed you will find me catching wry

as fishes dart amongst the branches, crying, burbling in their cry:

"Help us, watch us, we are flying,

we are drowning,

these are trees in which we die!

These trees are dreams, and we are moving

in the sky, the sky, the sky!"

Breath Submerged in Water

I walked through dreams of nature,

feeling with my hands what I could not see.

I walked through the channel of my eyes as the gates stilled the springs,

and I floated in the limitless expanse of a sea of my dreaming.

I walked through dreams until I found that they are both
the well-spring and receptacle of reality,

and nature is the image of God

reflected off the placid surface of truth in Dream.

I am drowning off my hindrances behind the gates

whence flow the waters of dreams;

I am submerged in this ocean

without bottom or shore or surface or end,
and as I float, suspended

in limitless waters of light and of shadow,

I am breathing.

*

I am breathing.

Discovery of Childhood for Strings

There are strings in the corners of every room,

and if I pull them when I am not looking, the world shrinks lower

and removes its grandeur from its aspect

and my tendencies towards living as if I were small,

as if I were looking for a key and not a doorway,

as if I were not trying to love for loving's sake,

to hold for holding on,

to know before what is to be known

is found by the wind and is gone,

fall and disintegrate

like the tail of a rhapsody

for cold and silver strings.

The top of the mountain becomes, I do not know,

but something other than the groaning task it is today.

The women of the world have hope and look at me again,

and marvel at the smallness of my hands that grasp the strings and pull.

Only ever were discoveries of man like melting snow,

freezing, disillusioning, and covering dreams in hiding as they go.

When did I think that this should be, when all the world,

in all its rooms, wears corners on its strings?

I pull and pull, and pulling find the world that we should know.

I discovered childhood, and that was years ago.