December Roses

For Richard

And
there we are

in each others eyes

trapped

ARRIVAL IN FLORIDA

The jet reaches down
                                 into the clouds
                                                        swimming in turbulence.
It escapes to an ordered mosaic
                                               of ballparks, pools and houses
— One expects
                      giants to come out
                                                  and shake their fists
                                                               upward—
One must fall
                    closer...

When one lands
                        the palms tower above
                                                          the Spanish moss

Does nothing but
                         hang over one
                                               from the Cypress tree.
The coral homes are as bright
                                            as the sun
                                                             and one must
Follow street signs
                           to find the one route

To the salacious sands
                                 where one gazes

Through layers of vapor
                                   past urges

To discern and to judge
                                   to enter and own
                                                              the water

Until one merely looks
                                 from behind
                                                    and does not follow.

TOWARD THE GOAL

To look:
To dream of feeling,
Of being with...
But when one touches
With gritty, hindered hands,
One closes one's eyes
And dreams of seeing.

RILKE'S QUESTION

I don't play these games with myself
But to be with you
I must win your hand
and finally lose.
In my silent life, where thoughts of me
are a rumor,
There is a sadness that devours love
Because it cannot find itself
it needs to resolve
Into something else
needs dissolving
Into other
people's problems.

UNREACHABLE

The things that drift to one's mind
And kiss to evade being kissed...
We were lost in our separate worlds,
But veered clear of a middle where we may have disappeared.
I had the word and she had what the word meant.
We weaved around a closeness
We were actually escaping from
And brushing up again against...
The edges of balance...the mortal tender straw...
The inflamer and container of illusion
Dangerous like a funnel together
But going each way alone,
Nosing toward the place where we can leave parts of our soul
Like dew in deposit cans
To be carried away and drunk by nymphs in another room
And finally to grow into a message
Now floating in the waverings of hell-fire eyes
Tickling
Against the whiskers
Of irresistion...
The last outpost of falsity before the final truth.

MAKING THE LONELY TRANSCENDENT

The daffodils have risen and are dancing in their dresses,
The flames of spring ignite, the knots start unconnecting,
The ghosts float and fly, juggling knives
As if they never killed before.
The contents of an envelope after spring unglues the wraps
And terrible thoughts of a steamy world
Where we search for facsimiles while the abnegation swirls.

We are caught limp in the sockets, plugging in our passion,
Playing the odds with our portable prongs.
We file the insoluble in a voluminous canister,
While categorically denying all the sparks that short amidst us,
Miraculous and irreducible. We cannot evade
These entanglements of sticky lips and flesh,
We follow the worn path to heartaches and the treasure the heart protects,
And try to wander free of the fetters of the cruelty
That is our beauty.

I have come face to face with a beauty that kills,
That lingers and singes, where it hurts to look too long
Or too far, for fear that I would understand
Why those the most beautiful are the most alone.
Like all the other megalomaniacs, I never figured out
That it was really me speaking, from the beginning,
And so I am left holding the sagging moon, inconstant
Like a rotting grapefruit, and I wish only to watch her
Play the banjo all day, from scowl to smile, as the sun
Skirts irrelevantly over the burnt grass,
Tailor made for tragedy.

Lollipop-eyed ladies exercise their sadness on a leash each day,
While old business blue and grey men play horseshoes around a sphinx.
No moment of the world will allow me a space in another's glow.
Sometimes it seems God wants all things to grow.

CACKLE

Dubious
The way you lift your garter
Tuned to the classical tone
Of inebriant wind through
Your shocking locks of flame,
Suggestions
That your cloven hoof covers —
A white nun's face
With burgundy swirling around
As random as the wind but more fanatic,
A radiant cardiac concerto
Where every move is choreographed perfection
Downward,
A dance of death
Where the viewer, not the dancer, dies.
And you say:
"Ouija boards are dangerous.
No self-respecting Greek peasant woman
Would let her sons be caught with one."

THOUGHTS WHILE WALKING OUT THE DOOR

The crazed assassin
Expending his last straw of reason
Empties the shells of his despair
On the foyer, the same urge to kill
Falls from us too, the same unburdening.
You have no right to refuse anything
But your whole life is one tribute to refusal,
Refusing to cross the bridge
To another, whose demands are not to be
Debated and sequestered and denied, are not even demands
But only questions, opportunities...
How long does it take you to back down, or fire?
You felt like you were the one who got trap-doored
By another person's mode of reason.
Like a rubber eraser with a bullet tip, you wobble
But you are numb,
Not clawing at distances.

WAITING FOR THE RETURN OF A YOUTH

She waits on the hillside for him
To return from captivity,
From misunderstanding.
He had stolen what he gave to her;
She had stolen so much more.

Would he,
Who remembered all the insults they had taken from him,
Remember her
Who listened him into coherence?

She played with the necklace that he called pretty
Strung with the keepsakes of what they had together
— It was only worth itself —
But was the whole of the world she knew,
And so much less than the world she was enduring.

The astonishing woman can manufacture happiness, she thought,
All it takes is to make him free for laughter and dreaming.
She will write volumes on her own,
While knowing what he feels but cannot say.
Her eyes are locks that would open to be locked again.
If he returned, would he meet her expectations
Or could he meet, as a stranger, her stare?

There is so much nothing they must talk around,
So much to do that is not worth doing
Until its done.
She had given so much unanswered.
He had asked too much before he finally left.

Look at her, counting her fingers,
Trying to know what he thinks,
While any guess is hopeless,
And he was all too eager to tell her
When she loved him.
He may not need her again,
Although she seemed to fit completely inside him,
And she held him there.

And then he came, and he was gone.

THE GREEN HOUSE ON CATHEDRAL STREET

The man without a heart stares
At the frames and pedestals he'd requested,
A catalogue of might-have-beens
Where love was not nestled in among other things,
Not part of a package deal.
It made him a slave to bitterness;
Imagining women in the gallery of studs,
Always trying to give in, never able to,
In search of the perfect love, the selfless heart.
These kindling connections
Are enough to light the sidewalks home
But not enough to doom you
To a life apart and alone,
Enough to light the mirrors of your faith
To see in fragile glimpses just how softly
You must touch others lives.

TWELFTH HOUSE BLUES

It's not the madness, it's the loneliness it brings that makes you sad,
And isn't everybody, who is caged like an animal
And misunderstood like a zookeeper?
I've touched your mind's garment,
I've worn your masked face,
I've followed you to bed
And you've inhabited my dreams.
I want to enter that final song of union
But I spin variations of my closeness,
Tombstones of my longing.
The symphony ends on a field with flowers
Where the audience has been outdistanced,
So quiet, I am finally free
To know the flowers as you,
Intertwining with whatever is underneath,
Growing without need of a trace of my being
Or yours, after, out of the war,
The peace has been spoken.

WHO'LL ANSWER FOR THE WORLD?

Never mind what the surf looks like;
Why do we try to describe it,
What everyone can recognize
But no one comprehends?

(Just walk along the muddy shoals,
the effervescing froth drawing in
lace curtains
in a sibilant crashing).

Trying to catch it,
To remember,
Our feet sink into the loam,
Our tread upsets the perfect rolling curve
Of wave...
But such tensions are
Quickly brushed away.

This sea on one side,
The gulls — who look on us only as a source of food —
On the other, and, in between, us
Speaking, acting, believing to be noticed,
Remembered.

SYMMETRIES (WARM EYES)

Down every sight path, a distance, a blur,
At the animate edge, yet another eye
Between which, the silence of a landscape,
The tension of a gaze.
I have been admired, I have been oppressed,
I have been, at best, guessed at;
My cry becomes a crow's caw,
Another noise in the neutralized wilds
That, if we have any say in the matter,
Will not wake us from our sleep.
Still, through our teak and cedar walls we hear
Sound enough to just incite our anger
To send us lashing against ourselves.
The lonely crow, already flown away
Now under an eye that did not want it
But in wanting, got it
Too late.

MAPPING

To call
The moonlight onto the floor
But only if as silky as the curtains,
So call them too.
To pull
Out of the stainless fog
A pink tree.
There's a danger
In moving closer,
In finding what you'd thought were stars
Are floodlights to keep bug and burglar away —
But there's nothing memory can't fix
After we've fixed on it.
Cars slide down an unlit hill
With beams that allow us to see
Even at this distance,
Even from our frosty spyglass
We get a tingle watching
The bug-eyed Jaguar sloping down,
As we imagine ourselves as birds
Or, rather, ourselves, diving with the birds
Into pools that ripple as we drop.
We've stolen the sound of the birds
And made music out of it,
And now we hear music when we hear the birds;
We'll close the window before acknowledging
That it's not.
We close the shade to repeat the lesson.
We keep it closed to master it.

How much can you see
Over the ocean at night.
You hear your ears ring with your blood music.
Your eyes strain against the black.
You chase down every glimmer, every crack.
You could sit there for hours
Reforming the rocks whose dark mystery excites you,
But the sun may come to burn it off and overtake
What you've held.
You can't bear the sun
Yet.

ANOTHER

Something you said
Won't take effect
Until we hear it
But what do we hear?
Your words are just a clamor;
We are the key.
You cannot know what you said,
You only know what I said,
Or Einstein,
Who heard what the stars said,
And...spoke,
We heard what he said
And we gaze at the stars
And say "Einstein."
And what do we mean?
We mean to be heard
(As the stars surely do as well)
So we audible the meaningful
To a context we can't share.
We hear
And the spoken crumbles
Like clumps in our fingers
That reduce to grains in our hands
We squeeze
Our life into
And throw.
The act of catching
Disembodies
But is the sole way
Of moving on.

ARE WE THE ? OR THE !

Finding a firmament
In the flux;
Staking a ground
In the dust;
Striving to see a key
Out of clues left before us like puzzle pieces
That resolve only as certain as you please.
Desire builds a voyage
From the spires to the skies;
Desire talks, awaiting its listener
And the beat fades
And desire wanes
Away, and those who stay listening
Are doing nothing but speaking.

VARIATIONS ON A PHRASE BY STEVENS

"Music is feeling then, not sound."
It resides in our hands as we clasp it around,
Squeeze it out.
With our hands we receive the keys on the other end
Of the gentle glissando (for example).

There are missed notes
That nobody hears
But that play on without correction
In the teacherless rooms between our eardrums
Beating the sound, giving it form
And keeping it in like some secret that's good
Only if kept to oneself.
And in the whistles and taps that rise with the wind
The music's overtaken.

FUND RAISING TIME AT THE LISTENING POST

Our ears
Would not protect us from
The prairie,
From an average beast in the tone-deaf
Pre-dawn black.
It could be coming from any direction
And cannot feel the sanction of your words.

POSSESSED OF MY SENSES

Taken into the condition
Of silence
I see
I am nothing
When free from the things I must chase,
And the things that follow behind
To snatch what I've stolen
Without my knowing.
What the mind has is
Consolation for the nothing holding it.
I need to draw my name in the sand
But neither the sand, name nor stick are me
Nor are they those I wish to reach
Through the medium they've assumed
To be them
For whom, I am nothing but feeling.

RETURN

Tamed
By blame, your cacophony makes me a harmony,
As you can see, happy.
I'm a simple enough equation:
Enough for them, enough of that.
I combine in snatches, in smatterings
I do not know but am told I am composed of.
I'm told I am remote, well,
That's not a judgement any more
Than you calling me a pig;
What matters is relation.
At the farthest reaches of understanding,
Past the yes,
One has nothing to show; lacking belief, lacking a soul,
One can only murmur a silent "I know" and turn a head,
Because, at the point where distance is overcome,
Distance begins, the cards are on the table
But one can't compare the hands.
They are different brands, in different realms.