Obstinance

Like the fine black dust of coal, it

settles on us; saddles us like stone game or

Custer cavaliers between the jawing maw of a rocky vale.

Snap of cold silver in the throat; anxious crackle and snap

of synapses; and our voices dry, coarse as straw.

It is the squaring of wild dogs off across

parchment plains;

Sense’s cession to the right of instinct,

for it is in my nature,

and your nature,

to harm as we are harmed

and, when scoping blows,

to score for the reddest meat.

These Things Fall Together

These things fall together and apart like a gull’s wing pull-or-pushing

on transparent inseams in the air.

How else could they occur?

 

She sharpens tools to shed the blood of an image of him;

he is whip-tongue, infamous, and cool in all cruelty.

These two,

bird and breeze;

shore and sea,

have never had a clash so bitter as their latest,

as Observers say, but then again

they say so every time.

 

Crash and battle; lose-a-parcel, gain-a-plot;

shake resolve with powder, and take the blood with shot;

trade-winds wrestle gaunt-face with the grey-gulls;

the sea consumes the jut and, choking, spits it up;

 

cold malice marks his face for gruesome war;

she shakes to death the shades of him on her floor.

It is blunt silence that divides them and

blunt silence also that requites them.

 

How else could this occur?

They fall apart together,

him and her.

Pyre

On the day you died

I envisioned jewelled and smoke-crowned fires twisting

in the sockets of your eyes. Those same flames

throw light onto my nights

when I would rather they be dark. Those same flames

burn sootblackness on my shoe-soles and reap

the thin grain in my field. Those same flames

I lit to keep you living

refuse to live themselves in that way of fire befitting:

smoke-spur and sputter, gifting fumes unto the dank,

smokesweet and heavy with the memory, but then reduced harmlessly to flickers,

doused,

and then out.

 

On the day you died

I lit a fire inside a memory of you that I cannot contain.

The jewel-spun light spilled outward from your eyes and thereafter

built itself.

Spark requires flint, and fire the spark in which to bend

and catch on tinder, and afterward

requires nothing. After all, there are three things

that one cannot erase:

slow burns, quick deaths,

and long memories.

 

On the day you died

I lit a fire inside of you that requires

nothing from me. On the day I lit your then-damp life,

I lit myself the pyre I now

step

step

step into.

Of Nearing Beauty

Long have I polished versions of myself for a show

in the glass– those ten variations on a theme–

and long have I failed. Yet, for the sake of nearing beauty

I furnish further in the image of her pocket jewelry.

It is a clear essential.

 

On these days of wind, spruce-boughs buck and

shuffle from their anchors, gnarling boldly in blown breath

from a gust that loosed the schooner sail and bolted for the coast.

The rhythm of air against the wiring sprout

cares no more to be steeped in beauty

than does the steady churn of heavy waves on sand;

it is purely incidental.

Dreamer’s Flags

When the clear pools bend and warp with the wind

or are scarved with gasoline;

when hot lights burn the dark out of the night or

cast hard rain into it;

when the ‘lectric troubadours change

key in midst of phrases to exit quietly onto chords and laurels;

when the summer girls lose shine and shape to

winter’s bulky coat the way we thought

they never could;

when the speakers and preachers of languages slur

their studied psalms;

when the brown plain of your eyes ceases

to contain or keep me;

 

When a moon hangs with blatant mockery

in sun-lit skies. It is then

that you can know the grief of disappointment and

the abrupt waking that leaves one wanting

one last lay

across the lap’s legs draped with dreamer’s flags.

Epiphanies

The night that set upon you then was quite unlike the

blackblankets beneath trees,

or beneath the cool side of your house,

or tossed, unraveling, behind you in the noonday sun.

No, there are

grades and degrees of these things. Like good coffee,

good nights come out darker than the rest

while preserving and not

dousing out the starlight that it brings.

 

Yes, on that night I stood off and saw the last thread of umbilical light

severed from your eyes. It dangled

mo-

ment-long on the moonface and, falling,

was clouded; blotted out.

 

It’s been a while in which you’ve gone and I’ve got a feeling

that the one returned today would be naturally same as

having always been away.

But discoveries happen that way, I suppose.

Like the clefting of brittle stone,

or the irrepressible drift of a ship cut from its moorings,

we don’t put them back

for the simple reason that

we can’t.

They Kill You in Ugly Ways

They kill you in such ugly ways

when they take and twist you in the paper or

on television.

Some would rush you out of womb and into life,

rush you through and through and through it.

And what remains?

 

“Rushed to hospital,” where was “pronounced dead.”

 

They kill you in ugly ways with

ugly photos and the ugly details (and these they

pick like nits with the fine-tooth as glossed simians would)

and at the end of the long day,

you die when they tell you and are

buried

on a shrivelled third of the third page

of the papers. At the end of the long day,

 

they kill you in ugly ways.

Far Along, He’s Gone

 

 And the long-dead boy sings

sweet, sad songs

against the choir.

 

I.

 

In the shadow of a café,

he whistled tunelessly like an overblown flute,

catching along the grain of the air;

whistled tunelessly the first few bars of

‘Bring it on Home to Me’

greybeardedly through creased lips.

 

A twist wrenched him stasis-free from

his shadowed spot

and poured him out into the bluedusked street where,

louder then,

he testified in waxing breaths: the sharp wind of winter shifting

snow down sidestreets boldly.

 

And it soothed his soul.

 

II.

 

Tragedy is the quadriplege

of emotive thought: static and un-

moving; you are brought

to it.

 

Tragedy, which pales

blood from the face, draws colour

from the hairs of the face, and calls

quiet unto brazenness,

brings beauty

unto music.

(Ode to) Alp Arslan,

Who ruined the throne of Rome with a pardon

and, in the gooseflesh of their East,

dug his spurs;

 

Who signed his life and name to the letter for a shot–

one shot–

of pride, and pegged it upon the glanced path of

that one thirsty arrow.

There buckling with it in the clear Turkic wind,

his bet was lost unto the steppe

and in paining throes by the Oxus’ bank he cried,

“I’ve been killed

by pride!”

 

A pierced lion who in blood lay drowned;

a cub asleep in the black soil now.

They come down high from the

mountains with the sprung thawstream,

these light days whose air

I thinly breathe.