The Phoenix

This golden vessel weighs creakingly

upon the crux of the ancient wooden structure,

soft and damp and feeble.

This tall sepulcher glows a little from its mouth,

this ancient wooden structure prone

behind its dead tree scraggle-roots and thorns.

This golden vessel rests in the midst and shines through all,

this little precious empty thing, long longing to be filled brim-high.

It turns the water of the eyes to wine so lovers can be drunk on loneliness;

it widens and is large enough to bathe in,

if you know the words to say:

Oh God.

God has not forsaken the vessel of his making;

that which no one values gathers dust unhindered.

This golden vessel weighs creakingly

upon the crux of the ancient wooden structure;

this heart leans heavily upon

the dry beams of a love once new.

Make of a love a crucible,

and the vessel will emerge from flames

bearing its ever-truer form and face.

Oh God, this ancient wooden structure!

Who could have imagined

such heat from an old flame?

*

The truer form is stirring in the glowing ash:

an indistinct, beauteous shape

like a bird with new, clean wings.

Hallelujah in the Dark (Bright Spots)

Hallelujah in the dark, hallelujah as it sings from every flicker of every naked bulb.

Hallelujah for the 60 watts of clarity, hallelujah for the endless chiaroscuro.

Hallelujah in the highest, which my head bumps into

if I do not stoop too low.

Bright spots danced down from my eyes, across my fingers,

and they wet the dry, black powder of the shadows,

the shadows that traced swinging words.

God, write more with this torrential bursting forth,

God, drown some uncertainties in the rippling hardwood!

God, let the planks grow some new leaves;

so old, so dry, do they even remember?

God, let them twine through my nostrils,

let them encircle my wrists and cradle my neck,

and let them flower lotus blooms between my legs,

naked in the dark, revealed.

Take me back to the beginning,

give me back to me, to You, to Om;

oh hallelujah, save our souls!

The planks rend and the soul blossoms.

I Saw My Heart in a Pawn Shop

I saw my heart in a pawn shop and bought it back.

A bell-sound washed across the clerk, said: Free, no charge.

I cradled my repository close and wept him:

Damn you, liar! Damn you, liar!

They moved the chairs at the cafe. There is a long table there now.

How little it takes to slay an old thought, a memory!

Such gold would melt between cold hands.

I wonder sometimes who gets letters now,

whether you've run out of ribbon yet

on someone else

(oh God, God, God.)

I passed your old flame in the hall

and shared a glance:

you too, me too?

We burned low.

I don't know if your letters smell like you anymore.

I cannot find them.

*

I'm sure they do.

*

The clerk said, A beautiful girl

who smelled like letters

walked into the shop the day before you.

He said she looked sadly around

and walked out.

Remembrance Asleep (Echo, Echo, Echo)

"I can't tell you the pace or direction
taken by the guiding traveler beneath my breast,
and what would you say if I could?"

I might have tried to follow the beat,
played double-time, caught up to it somehow.
I may have proved less wanting than I'm proven now,
thinking back in preference to waking up.

We Sang Our Songs (What I Will Be When I Grow Up)

I'm so afraid that everyone I love will die
and I will be left alone in a too-small box,
knocking on the lid with my nose
in a silent place with no good smells.

I don't know why I live so timid, never intimate,
claiming instead to be encircled
by enormous tall oblong protruding pastel faces

of animals leering sexually and wondering

half to themselves, aloud,

what I will be when I grow up.

I know how to sing! I know how to play! I know how to write!
I know how to walk around without my head in some damn cloudbanks,
looking down the wet slope of a murdered bridge.

Stop telling me I don't!

I'm not from where you're from!
Where I came from, we sang our songs
because we knew them by heart, not by rote.
Stoppit, damn stupid condemnation evil notion, confusing the two!

I won't listen to you. Goodbye!

Dream of Living Color

There was a slow harvest
that year, and slow
trysts, like long drops of ice,
reminiscent of all the color,
the variation of love.

"It's too monotonous to love,"
you said once, "the harvest
lacks Autumn color."
If only hands ran as slow
as hearts--look, the ice
you melted, it all drops.

I've searched for the sea built of those drops,
I've searched for a vessel, planks of honest love,
but fiery hearts must burn; a good harvest,
like intentions, cannot bear to ice.
Better to die spitefully than slow;
better to spark high than drain color

at the thought of waiting, to color
the smooth ground with wrinkling drops
and watch the earth bloom slow,
like a memory of love,
yielding to the mind a harvest
when, to the eyes, there was ground and ice.

Inevitably, invariably: the ice
blows in to color
my perceptions, still my hands at harvest,
make me watch as Time drops
my accusations of love
against my heart. Dying is slow,

just as waking is slow
when the corners of the dream ice
over and the tunnel closes. Love
must be the last color
seen when all else drops.
If so, let death harvest.

When death comes, how slow! Its harvest
will be edge-ice, the husk that drops
the spirit wakened to love, asleep to dream of living color.

She Clouds Wanting

She clouds wanting

This damn torrent

No light today

One day

everything

will be new

One day

I will

you
and you

won't

Weep

You

I

.