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Alfred E Majko
3546 N Paris Av
Chicago, IL 60634
773-625-6269
847-240-8951
amajko@yahoo.com
Cinquecento
Cinquecento
Cinquecento... 1
Cinquecento... 2
Mists of a Dream..... 5
The final quarter of the monthly moon....... 7
Ogygia..... 8
Actaeon... 9
Pantheon of Spring... 10
Ganymede as Lucifer 11
They Hover.............. 12
Red........ 13
A Soul... 14
Sonnet... 15
Chiaroscouro Tree... 16
I want to chuck this all in a hurl........ 17
Our Last Night..... 18
Descent 19
Dream on Polyhymnia.............. 20
Of the Basilisk: Eye to Eye for all Time.............. 21
At the Door.............. 22
Hunter... 23
In the hallway mirror... 24
The Brightness of air..... 25
A Ram Amongst the Briers.... 26
The Father's Death.... 27
Landscape.............. 28
Rains Miserably 29
Sacrifice 30
Empti-day dream of day-glo light.............. 31
Pencil dictate this fainting dream.... 32
I come... 33
Eye of the Beholder 34
High Way 35
Mystery of the whispers.............. 36
Canyon Fall.............. 37
Summer Noon..... 38
Blue-white Black..... 39
In the deep space where is the blank.............. 40
When father kissed me with his craggy lips.............. 41
eyes upon alit with grace..... 42
the distant roar in the pall of noon.............. 43
Weather 44
Fire....... 45
There are shadows in the water-world..... 46
I once thought of.............. 47
If I were my brother.. 48
Adventure 49
The Church Organ Plays While He, Watched, Prays..... 50
The Rain as I Drift Asleep seems Sad to me..... 51
Shale-grey the sky that hangs..... 52
Shadows do not play. 53
At the Ice Rink...... 54
Pep Talk 55
Mists of a Dream
The brilliant reality of any dream
Fades
And disappears upon waking.
I am told a story about
A boy who broke a window one summer.
I am shown a picture of
A boy whose front tooth is gone.
People tell me
These boys were me.
I sit in a yellow wicker chair,
Smelling pine trees,
Warm breezes messing my hair,
Dragonflies buzzing,
The water rippling under the wooden pier.
I stand on a street corner,
Cars jammed together whining and roaring
Up and down the neon street.
People pressing about me,
The smell of their bodies rising like steam.
Did I sit in a yellow wicker chair
And fall asleep,
Dreaming about
Noisy cars rushing through a city night?
Or did I stand on a street corner,
And close my eyes
Daydreaming about
Lazy dragonflies floating through a country day?
A woman says "Goodnight,"
And I go to a room.
Did she stand there and look at me?
Did her lips move and a familiar sound come to me?
Who was she looking at and speaking to?
I walked away from a friend because I forgot his name.
Then I forgot what I wanted to say to him,
Then I forgot him,
Then I forgot that I forgot him.
That little boy who grins toothless out of an old picture
Is not me.
Time has made him not me.
I feel cold, then I feel hot.
Was I cold once?
I see a blue rug, then I look at the white ceiling.
Was there a blue rug?
I hear a mailbox cover slam, then I hear a fly.
What was it I heard?
You cannot put your foot into a river
At the same place twice.
A spider hangs in a dewy web,
Connected to his past and future
By strong strands.
He can move all over his life on any strand.
But if the web breaks,
The spider falls,
Crumpled in a ball,
Falling,
Nothingness surrounding him to his death.
I repeat to myself the story of
A boy who broke a window one summer.
I look at the picture of
A boy whose front tooth is gone.
I think of a yellow wicker chair and green pine trees,
Of noisy cars flashing by.
The strands are breaking,
Nothingness surrounding me to my death.
Falling, falling.
A woman moves her lips, looking through me into the darkness,
As sounds seeming to come from those lips
Rush past me through the darkness,
Rushing air past my ears.
Falling, falling.
The brilliant reality of any waking
Fades
And disappears upon dreaming.
The final quarter of the monthly moon...
The final quarter of the monthly moon
In darkened sky is like a mortal gash
Of some huge monster-god, whose awful wound
Bleeds 'cross his blackened cope in starry splash--
Or like a tear in cape so thinly worn,
Its gauzy fabric lets through pricks of light:
A rent impatient time had rashly torn
To show behind eternity, star-bright.
This well worn pall of sequined sky drapes o'er
The fog entombed earth as tattered shroud;
And through the rip, as through a cut, does pour
Sweet starry blood upon the poor and proud.
This 'cisioned piece of keen-edged brilliancy
Forebodes the fiery sun"s intensity.
Ogygia
The deep,
Its wine-dark and broad back,
The frothing spume it casts far over the jagged rocks--
The snow-white droplets speckle the greens and blues and blacks
That checker it from the shore to the thin blue horizon's line--
Mirrors my mind,
Reflects my hope of far off lands,
Mocks the shallow depths of my soul;
As when, weary head on hand,
Staring across the bumpy waves, the billowy sea,
Watched for the merest hint of ship-sail,
Longed for the slightest whiff of hearth-smoke
(As seen in the distance in the cool evening's walk)
He, sad-eyed;
Then turned, as I
Lonily trudge to the urban cave,
To the cot where I sleep midst the city's snore.
Actaeon
A stag,
Through crashing leaves and snapping twigs,
Which scratch its sweaty skin in lines of deepest red,
Its deer's heart beating faster, faster in its new found fear,
Bounds,
In midair,
Its neck sweetly arched, head turned back, eye askance
(The magic droplets in delicate beads upon its forehead)
At the hounds,
Snarling, yelping:
Those dogs which once gave friendly paw
And loving lick in carefree sport
Before the fire in the hunters' lodge,
Now reaching the stag and mangling its flesh and spraying its blood on the
silent leaves and witless ground--
As the staggering animal falls,
As he catches the glimmer afar,
With a human awareness again,
Of whitened form, of secret beauty.
Pantheon of Spring
The sun-glorious spring far shoots its healing rays
Amongst bulbous Bacchic buds whose leas
Intoxicate the soul unchained from winter's days.
And free neath open sky, seduced by music's mysteries:
The rush of the vernal moon flitting white upon the tide,
The sweetly mocking laugh of sun-drenched morn,
The storm running fore it flashing-eyed,
And the fruitful footsteps Ceres listens for;
--That rhythm, that beat, what can it be?
Horus stomping off to war with Seth,
With electric-mechanic efficiency,
In yearly vengeance for his father's death!
Is this, our martyrs' march, a gurantee of rich rebirth,
Or recrudescence of rebellion, on this errant earth?
Ganymede as Lucifer
At first he appeared in softest radiance,
Suffused with rosiness, infused with danc-
ing colors like trembling dawn upon the glass
Of the thinnest pellucid lake.
Then seemed a morass
Of inner fire, a fusion of forces that burned
With scorching heat and terrible hate. He churned
Up mocks and sneers and whining complaints, and slighted
The admiring boys and eager men--all fighting
For his love.
He promised a diffusion of humid
Floridity for all our lives in his taunts and his lurid
Temptations to promiscuity: the tropical heat of his touch,
The swamp moistness of his kiss, the pungent aroma, as such,
Of his secret SPELUNCA--whether actually humbled,
Or forever inviolate--all grew to surround us as a jungle.
He became for us a beacon, bold and bright,
Beaming across the plain; and flashing, he would strike
The wistful visions wavering on the horizon's lane--
Himself like a delicate jar of pinkest jade
Enfolding a glorious truth of far reaching beauty--
And heralding the sunny glare where primal nudity
Couldn't hide, where the world's weary end would steam
Away neath that naif adolescent stare--
What dream!--
Still always threatening to burn our skins with his sexy
Possibility--our fantasy--his coquetry--
Yet, how soon our bloated sun dripped west-pink light;
And he, once morning's star, dragged up the night!
They Hover
I caught, this morning, the lone drone
Of buzzing planes, arcing and sweeping
High above where I pump my water:
And how they sounded in the catastrophes of their descending screams,
In the ecstasies of their ascending howls,
Like the end of the Year (for it was November),
Like the weak rattle of the waning god,
Charging yet dying, cheering yet moaning,
Sighing at last, gasping as an unknown ghost.
And how the children took up their toy planes, undiscerning,
Buckled themselves into their parents' cars, unlearning.
- Where the fire brilliantly burning
That can dash gold embers into their blind eyes?
Red
Blunden saw his red so bloody dull,
And Yeats an Incorruptible Rose in wine.
How may I describe the full
Hue of this book of mine:
Like the bright banners of disarmament?
Like the Princess's cloak at her wedding?
Like a woman's loving lips?
Like the blood-scratches on her hips
I make while dull with wine?
A Soul
A mirror bright reflects the sky
Beneath a spreading tree.
And where alights the dancing dust,
Sharp glass's line is seen.
The light melts into placid lake;
The tree is black seaweed;
The sky is roof from ocean floor,
Wherein drifts silently
The dust dancing into nothing:
Black, nothing, and free.
Sonnet
O dark-eyed girl of fierce pungency,
- You lie naked like a feral savage;
You trouble sylvan fire with potent ravage -
Now hide bare bulb's hot lunacy!
I'll taste the lurid liquor of your pocket,
Savor the spices slapping as pain pricks
- Your very beauty vibrant like flame flicks -
As the hot light burns high socket!
...
Perseus dug Andromeda a pool;
In triumph rode the dusky beast,
Whose skin he'd tow, whose blade became an ivory tool.
Upriverwards rushing, an eager groom,
I, too, will break the dike and drain the pond,
Soon stagnant marsh, a swamp o'er which you'll brood.
Chiaroscouro Tree
Against bell sky
It rings clear on the summer air
Midday Angelus, an efflorescence of brilliancy
Shimmering pride of its surface, silvery
This emerald green of the benighted isle
Almost yellow, quick-darting to the eyes -
Where the shadows fall
Dark patchwork of obscure fears
Forest green of the vengeful huntress
Black in its innermost, convoluted depths
To the swaying skeleton of twig, the unmoved branch, down
To the firm, brown
Earth.
I want to chuck this all in a hurl...
I want to chuck this all in a hurl -
Do some awful violence to the blank otherness.
Full of vim, would present to the world my I.
But what punishment can it deserve?
Only what is for me.
And what penalty need this one?
The parti-colored spontaneity,
The free will in its spinning whirl -
Stretching o'er the cosmos,
Weighing like a glad god upon all things.
Oh yes, I know "where is thy sting"!
Damn it all, but I can only live like you!
Unlike, I watch the phantasm, phantasmagoria,
Like the proverbial luckless wretch, frosty-breathed,
Staring at the happy eaters inside:
The wide glare of the lights, yellow and white,
And the warmth seeping slowly through the panes,
On a winter's night.
Our Last Night
Gentle
A breeze
Blows winding shafts sweet tufts of your hair
Black
Night with the stars
And in your eyes the blackest stars
Skin
White mounds soft O my head my lips
My hand o'erreaching
Our tears
Your sad yet beautiful denial
My forlorn loneliness
Our clothes
tangled O my hands a-clutching your hands
Hard and soft on me
Our bed
The grass the wet green-black
The night sky a-dawning above
Come
to me with me
Our bodies writhing pumping in our love fierce love
O rhythm O beat
My heart your heart
Our heavy breathings
Soft hush hot our breaths hot hush hush
My sweet my one
My own for now my one true love
Glorious Eos comes
Tripping now with light
Light on our dark love
Come O come
Light the day our way is done
It's over and lost
O love
O pain
Loss is my one true love
Descent
The sky is dun, a softened tone,
Upon a day whose password is a groan,
Within a tumbling bus whose metals moan...
Silent riders with their bones quite cracked,
Demon driver who betrays a laugh,
As on a tossing boat whose doomed are trapped...
Do wait to be drowned in this sea?...
Or burned in punishing fire we?...
Lulled and waked, alternately?...
Where in truth the fire of love,
Where still the ocean's deep?
Just a hue of grayness like a dove's
Hovering passionless above the deep,
Humming wings that bring monotonous sleep.
Dream on Polyhymnia
As one lone pipe o'erwhelms with plaintive call
And with its circles weaves an Orphic lull -
The unvoiced notes, the silent majesty
On which it grooves a dancing filigree -
So round the mind like ribs about the heart
And with titanic pain, without, apart,
It presses thoughts like blood with manic gleam,
Demonic edging to a panic dream.
O priest, forgotten by mechanic time,
Nor rough beast waked by your olden lyre,
Can still anoint us men with blood-red wine,
With lance's point fix star of golden fire?
Bemused, inspired, in ecstasy, succumbed?
Can art exalt a mind with sweetness numbed?
Of the Basilisk: Eye to Eye for all Time
Andante plectrum chords, in measured walk
About a court whose garden smells unfold
Like secondary notes that beat the air:
What plaint they keep in folded hands unsung,
And where the maiden tor to which they'd string
Their thorns' red rose of cambered sound?
O march! O dance! O joyous harmony!
O yearnings crashing on the rocks of fate!
To court in my mind the umber of her embrace,
the soft smell of her amber flesh,
To savor in my hopes her dank taste,
in my dreams to hold her lankness...
Now pause, with upraised stick, you Arlecchino,
To threaten, ne'er to hit, this Pedrolino.
At the Door
Blank door, unappealingly scaled
To slam your block against my free range,
Here's the paint with which your mean face
Will take a hue of cool obscurity!
In that pool I will mention
The word I had studied for my love.
Night will overtake all sense,
Reason forsake the heart,
To leave me drowned in its unbitter dew.
There memory would soothe my sight
And weave my unctuous dreams -
As if a marish lie
Would blot the past's mistake!
But I eliminate that hope,
fatuous, unfulfilling, untrue;
Closed tight, ineluctably,
On this threshold of the now I wait,
For the steely grin of the one sublimity!
Hunter
Is it true that a Hunter
Fiercely chases with infinite speed
Hurrying and demanding
A hue, a call, a blast on horn,
To me, ah, me
Light as air
Flashing quick like lightning
O Orion eternal with bow bent
The ever far-darting arrow
With infinite speed shooting past the stars
Like the fading of some evening as the sun unlights
Then the mad dare rush of morning fast o'er the city's heights.
In the hallway mirror
In the hallway mirror
Our faces reflect the generations past,
And, as ripples in a pool smooth the surface concentrically,
The hues of shades of a hundred ghosts ago
Start to limn a finer, rarer graving of our race.
Is this the face, freed from this frame,
Whose living envelope the wind will chafe,
Or will it sense only that the treetops have shaken in the breeze?
The Brightness of air...
The Brightness of air
Holds delicately the shallow shadows
Of deep black, straight rivers.
Next, the exhalations of white-gray cloudpuffs,
Or wheeled machines
Winding along ground lumps on concrete,
Or this airplane droning,
Bring haze into the air.
And those clouds herd their own jagged blue shadows
On the quartered fields below,
On white chalked-marked O's
And little pillbox houses with roofs of red and brown.
So, the gaseous vapors filter
Varied levels of ground shadow
And the haze and puff-clouds,
Topped by strato-clouds,
Blend mysteriously up through light to deepening blue sky.
External roar of engines,
Inner hiss of cabin air,
And the scratch I feel of pencil across notepaper -
A Ram Amongst the Briers
The diesel drones, an airplane roars,
Those cicadas saw me with wings' screams
And the bleating gulls encircle.
Sleepy-time for a drugged Lord
Nodding, ears a-buzz, in heat's humid
Comforter of the August afternoon.
From out this distant sky a bird
Warbles unseen, from the far east or west,
Noting its presence to none of its own.
Some incongruence of lush and worn,
Some quiet craziness askew in unstraight lines,
Some stench, some floridity, freshly spoiled.
Quite quickly, there's a stillness,
A rest, of silent counting,
That cushions the two cacophonies -
Plunge of life and death's eternity,
The hills, ravines, smoothed to flat
Monotony. Once remembered
Sweet, sour pain - truest, fullest identity.
The Father's Death
Your death, our father, son, benumbed in trance
He swooned, unnimble, as it passed across;
Been out to pasture - death, with frantic dance,
Invited me, alive, this filial loss.
His clothes unwound from son to son by chance;
My ma, unwounded, bares a wifely cross.
Pillows about the head sunk down -
Warm, wet bedclothes are the gown -
One boy fritters deaths of seed
Imagines that neon lighted tomb
The glucose drips, Onan's breed,
Out of the eternal infernal womb.
From heart of regular irregularities
to sores, those sisters, these fraternal frailties.
Landscape
Bowl of blue to gray descending,
Furry ridge of trees in shadows,
Not a pinpoint of a terror-place
But spread wide beneath invisible stars.
Worlds joined not at war,
Water-colored in gray and blue and paling white,
Only radio towers in red and white
Like ladders for storming the town of god.
A tunneled road slashed through the trees,
Brown and black of branch o'erarching,
Suddenly wide are fields of tan
Grasses patted by a giant's hand.
Precious droplets enfold the air,
A nucleus of dust for each hollow sphere.
Rains Miserably
rains miserably
mystery sleek mystery
white brights red lights
arc from the gray wet high-
way
to the sky
a blank gray cloud
blinder than the deepest night
into the cloud I'd drive
miniscule
pinprick of light white
and soft sudden slaps
as the water sweeps the wind-
shield
so intermittently wipers
pass across this glass of mine
glass of delicate refracted light
and the black woods
looming on the left
hovering then slashing
onrushing swallow
sweep up all of me
Sacrifice
A metal knife rips thin
Where my chest is a face of no eyes,
The wound of which formed so
Of which my body's broth steams
Mouths a sibilant "oh,"
Remembrance of wounded lips
Pressed softly onto folded hands,
Whose father glances each hanging tress
Billowing down a bowing head.
Empti-day dream of day-glo light
Empti-day dream of day-glo light
sleeps in a hole of empti-night
a wide deep cave of
hard-to-swallow ice
pain o'plenty neath drifting snow
by sleep's mere-drug a-froze
oral fetal-suck
refuse offal
creeps hoar-frost on the mirror-world
breath-mist from the sigh
Pencil dictate this fainting dream
Pencil dictate this fainting dream
there are demons on my lids
on the edges where lash knits skin to sky
they pine on the edges of my eyes
where a web curves fibrous glass
my male energy pierces those young eyes
weak with hungry lethargy
so comes the lightflash at my peri-stalk
of undesired drive to remorseless release
all I retain is the hard knuckle
of a demi-urge in my bowel
shrinking from skeletons of trees
that lurch out to cut me
bony limbs of winter-spring
as the half-life of pharmacy wilts in my stream
I come
I come
greensward through a notch of shade
cow-eyed prey on a black path
in a clearing upon a statue without a face
tit-god of the empty clearing
from on high
from terrible stones of clouds
of shades of gray
in that odd light of the eastern sky
precious droppings hang like glass
beads of glass
in a fan blown across my face
and all I want is to submit
like the black boughs of trees
green with leaves
and spiny grass shoots
shot through with the wetness of everything
Eye of the Beholder
Sentimental beauty
frailty
in a ceramic cell of secrecy
treasured innocence
graved by my eye that
limns the slope of shoulders
and those limbs of slimness
It's a gray skin that shines black
against the back of the adult-store photo
or again in bursts of color
even the crux of the nude body
seems shadowed
And I imagine
skin of milky white
pores across which my breath
blows hairs already soft down
bent over
And again I return
retract from that vulnerability
disengorged
from that rapture gorged on that
capture
High Way
Away from burnt awnings of faded cloth
no longer red fringed and frayed
high by sleek orange cones
back of trucks flatbeds and containers
on a thick road
on a thin line red on the map
where grey numbers sit on confusing places
some places there are horses
some hippies
dusty companions abandoned carts empty lots
A creature
trapped in a stately forest
where the trees squeak memories
of native ghosts on their American journeys
I pass through the mountains' pressure changes
humbled under the sky high in white
where the blue film thins at ground
balls lightening over a white desert floor
before a city of colored beams of light
and when the sun breaks through
I squint at the airplane
that floats carelessly down
that's the dusky radio time
when the signal fades and I haven't spun the knob
and everywhere a road torn up repaired anew.
Mystery of the whispers
Mystery of the whispers
of the mass of leaves
mystery of the dark
where the houses stand black
mystery of perspective
flat by the dark night blue
when the children tease
their pettiness is serene
and I wait for it all to end
and begin anew
clatter of words
martyrdom of sounds
mystery of the flash-heat
when the sun burns
mystery of my daughter's
"is this like a dream?"
Canyon Fall
Seeming to possess that which is that
above a great canyon
not dwarfed by its gap
but somehow nonchalantly
owning it
glimpsed through an ellipse of glass
in the airplane's wall
its third dimension
shattered to a pretty two
but I feel like a speck after all
alone
not part of its majesty
not afraid it is inhuman
without desire
Then cloud drifting downward
suddenly loom large hills
that hold you in
a palm of a hand that
would crush you
ribbons of highway
silence of bug-cars
that flat land with its heat and light
over a final sharp hill ridge twisting
perpendicularly to the line of flight
and suburbia welling up and sweeping away behind
Summer Noon
two-dime flat beneath a pane of glass
penny-pensive at the vanish point
diags' depth simulators
drawn without time as the quartered-coin
where eyes resize as figures cross a back
ground laid out looping infinitely
dollop-dollar
green-blue-black-gray
diorama
Blue-white Black
blue-white green-black and blue again
tumbling shore of green whose
leaves form black shadows
that still stare in the light
the lapping under the piers is an
ostinado neath the whispers
and away
across the rippling water of
nearby tildes and distant dashes of black-blue
a siren howls
a tenor to the birds' trills
black and pewter-black and black again
where the double cord of trees dams the water
black twinned by grayer black along the
mirror glass of black water
above
white stars in the black
their own twins tossed on the lake-glass
like buttons of light or pebbles or gems white
while
nearby an animal splashes against the shore
In the deep space where is the blank
In the deep space where is the blank
a breathing sounds to me close
in this it should be a place of cold
gravity pulls my personhood still
but any light I see
is it near or far I do not know
and panic would burst me apart
about those majesties of amoebas behind my lids
circle beads on spittle threads
from within each a nuclear furnace roars
or a fluttering of the gentlest leaf
fallen from the tree in back
startled by a nudge within the tomb of a bump
shuddering like a shattering like a sudden thrill
When father kissed me with his craggy lips
When father kissed me with his craggy lips
brimmed with the half-stale breath of ancient sleep
I floated above the earth's canyons
whose shadows foretold the deep caves lightless within
could then the sky's rain have filled those caverns
across vast distances where sun and night oppose their rules
his eye beheld male delicacy in a tear
his hand my hair caressed with grace
his member my mother impregnate becoming
became the further reaches of my embrace
eyes upon alit with grace
eyes upon alit with grace
their inner fire within deep smoke
she's a will o'the wisp above the reeds
brooding in her decay
a hand affirm upon a choke
as sprung from the dregs of seeds
still solitary stalk on marsh
her fire by pillar by salt by day
from the lullaby of her father's charms
beyond today tomorrow leads
an elected lover she'll for broke
wonders wandered in her way
the distant roar in the pall of noon
the distant roar in the pall of noon
slash of the heat that stuns
warbles the unknown bird of her youth
in the crinkle of the anxious moment
dank mystery of the wet clouds
of a fog darkly looming over his errant hand
which upon her sunburnt shoulders wants to tramp
it dammed a river to twice as wide
spring snows from white flared blue by orange heat
crossed mechanically by a concrete line
her pools of liquid blue
pursed lips of red wine
the star flash when she laughs
he succumbs unresisting to those and
her soft breathings in the night
on his hand stirs the pencil hairs
Weather
It's enough of a late Saturday
afternoon sun pressed golden
greens and blacks of the ice-still leaves
at the end of the slide on the tar-stained road
over the bridge over the water
blue gray flattened by the heat disc south
in a moment of clipped brilliancy
its pattern measured on the ground
of tumbrels of shadows to the sky
from there booms the storm
black jagged with white
furiously on the flats
the rain-drill on a house of crystal
where moles of hothouse air muse
in reverb like canons of the middle age
Fire
Fire.
It crackles and the wood sticks are murdered in it.
They turn and snap, sparks upward streaming.
They are red and quickly vanish but
their burnt dust catches in my nose-hairs.
Like with spring sap, I get high on this smokiness,
which makes my in-breath of air deadly stale.
Into my ears comes a roaring, is it my blood-pulse?
The dense song of my father's last breath,
or the fit-sleep I'm wakened from by my wife's poke. You're snoring.
There are shadows in the water-world
There are shadows in the water-world
where the soda's edge seeps across the table.
Also between the sky of stars and the yard's night-gloom
grey cloudlands drift above our eyes.
The stars are too dim and distant, too few by the city's glare.
When I point out the brightest it seems unsure in its twinkling.
For now the mosquitos' arm-pricks
bring little lumps to swell on our arms,
like the morning's neck crick
is birthed by the tangle-feet of the nite-wraps.
Peace is the jolt of grownup conversation,
know-it-all and know nothing.
The dog akimbo launches the jumpy lawn chair
and we laugh. Restless peaceless night.
Hums and shadows and the great wheel overhead unclear
in its counter reflection in the spill below.
I once thought of
I once thought of
a white lake as white as the moon on a cloudy nite
where overhead were bishop's birds in rising spears of red
as I felt it must be so
but what was odd was that the sky was black, black behind
these words spread as stars in rigid arcs on the surface of it all
because once before, a while ago,
that blue-white sky loomed voraciously
over water, deeper than the purple of its waves;
would I be imagining then green-entwining weeds
or panfish of soft pewter
just beneath a glassy membrane,
on which the savagery beats its wings?
If I were my brother
If I were my brother
and my father's skin hung loose about me,
if he could see his son's supple flesh
or the skin-line marking pale from burnt.
If my twin hovered airily
and smote me in anger
and I could wash
and the lake-rocks broke enkinetic
befriend my thousand pores and wear me like a coat
and the air my aromas
and the water my seed.
If I could turn in and in and in
and I and my brother rush into the free
of the sky of my head,
If I could pass over the beauty and the wanting,
and penetrate my inner self with
my own scythe and strew at last.
Adventure
Snap-twigs and thorn-spikes slap against me
as I ramble the tumbled creek-edge
in search of a play-lost shoe.
There a half-mile rising
my son and daughter huddle as color-specks
against the hill's green.
Their shared topic is what?
A silly obsession that after-years
will call silent reflection?
Red-wings among flit-weeds
each-to-each bring screech-calls
and over our heads summer clouds be calmed
in the late noon sky.
Why has the west-sun flattened our
dimensions into primal colors
whose brilliancy nears overwhelming?
My son jumps up and when he dashes into the dark green creek-cover
what swells in me suddenly is this loss-pain.
The Church Organ Plays While He, Watched, Prays
Pure son of an awful virgin
Who with careful eyes caress
The crushed velvet of his headshape
Whose aches unmuscle along his limbs.
While the turgid mass congeals in flow
And serpents writhe in dismal urge
That pierced heart within lip-wound void
Blows breath of innocent capitulation.
The host muzzled in a still piety
Raised once across the plain of penitents
Of whom one makes inward journey
That this day turn dream and sun to moon
Sickle-west to crown the sky,
Cloud to hide that watcher's lust.
The Rain as I Drift Asleep seems Sad to me
Tonite I seek to box my opponent in
With the day-joy that plays a melody
On the base line of black sadness.
But quickly like a shadow in a day-mirror
It trails along its black cape and
Drops fierce bulletins of dreary news.
All its droplets on the upper sides of
All the ceilings crackling afire as twigs'
Tiny vein-straws in their murmurous turning.
As a dropped plate on the kitchen floor
That earlier in the day pinged echoes
About the still of my watching --
This is the crying shame of naked incandescence
Which is the beauty held by no one save its lover.
Shale-grey the sky that hangs
Shale-grey the sky that hangs
Stare-black the passers eyes:
Uncolored frieze of marbled fauns
Memphis faces turned aside
Whose liquid metal eyes reflect the sky's
Quiet tumultuous rolls,
All spaced on sunlight's color negative
Rouge and verdant on azure.
Would a lascivious twist undo the knot
Of giant mass releasing
Bees' hums in crescendos,
And this fury will bury
With loud noise
And shout aside the old for new story.
Shadows do not play
Shadows do not play
But flat lay along the street
Or bar their way obliquely across a path
Like blades black but not the blackest,
Not the sharpest, and yet this play
Is beauty where the thinnest line
Reflecting pole by pole
Points away from the light
That smarts the eyes or seems soft
Along the edges
like lashes on the eye.
Where a bright glass is sharp:
Along each side is drawn a curtain
Whose lace-edge is a net for the light--
By the blade of black edge it seems less bright.
At the Ice Rink
Ahead, a daughter sweeps on skates while I
a slim sword or a flame following near,
The icy oval rounding,
The strict barrier of wood avoiding,
Ice slits scraped in counter-rhythm
To the rock mix playing loud,
Ice-curves white against gray
Like our fingernails' cuticles,
So when we fall, our splayed fingers
Reflect our roundings and we laugh;
Then she arises and my shadow presence
Realigns with her
On mere darkened ice (for lights are low)
And in such gray expanse.
Pep Talk
Cylinders of light paid by green,
Bills whose terms have been discounted,
In this cube-space our meeting holds,
Where the bright bigness
Bears fruit of essence,
Red urgencies as the net emerges,
Not the whispers that I hear,
Our keyboard fingers hack and back
The hearing-notes,
Our pens scratch curves
Heard sliding on the tiny desktop polygons
On the pre-printed page,
Jutlands of ink, inlets of white.
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