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.

Thirty-Six

In the emptied lesson hall there is only him –

a tidy, birth-dayed pedant and postulator, a supposer of facts –

and the desks: six by rank and six by file;

thirty-six

counted desks. In the room of his own,

such arrangements are made,

and the devision of formulae yields a crop –

the same crop — with every harvest.

 

Patched elbows bear a dilemmas weight and middle-age upon the window sill

and the breeze outside pushes physics through bare branches.

 

In the clear-aired country there is nothing

and there is everything; Population residing beneath thin

crusts, Desolations;

still-life backgrounds beyond a green and freshly tousled fore;

details stranded in myopias that sink and

drown in drawn-out distance. Where the

rain drops,

so too grows the grass.

He arrives at an uneasy conclusion, and the oft-exerted forces of

his faculties are bust; the world will turn, simply because

it does.

 

He has tanned and fashioned finely a bridle, and it does not fit;

he has lit and followed matches aimlessly into wilderness.

 

It was blunt trauma, the unruly shock of it all,

and so, the postulator posed.

An evacuation from brute wilderness? No. A hiding of the head? No.

A faithless leap then, from sill to street, from rank-filed hall to

broken feet?

Seconds clucked loudly from the clock.

Seconds;

minutes;

Gone.

 

In the hollow street below, the faint mocking

of a Sisyphus.

A Brief Digression

It’s been a long time

since the first sproutlings from the germ of my blood,

here contained in the hollow cables within limbs

or in thin capillary nets,

huddled around fires,

the lights of their hearths little more than

brief digressions from the night.

 

From electric-lighted outposts in that same shade

of dark, I whittle hours away toward

the crowning of a day at the other end of it all.

On this frontier, it occurs

that each lit patch on the inked-paper sky

is a cavern unto itself; an etched recess

in the flank of greater things.

 

For a fleet instant I see myself reflected

in the play of yellow light on glass: a wrung image reduced to

brief dances on the window-pane;

 

A near-nothing.

Your Faulty Harp

I have always been your furnished harp,

sounding all your flat notes sharp,

and I have always been a witless pet,

begging for what scraps I get.

I have always held the standard steady,

and made the uhlan corporal dread me

when it was I alone who did not flag;

I alone who held the rank.

I have trudged through brush and scrub,

laid for you my coat in mud,

and I have stood where shadows stand

in the perfect pose of a womans man.

But I have lately come aware

of a gradual dimming of that flair.

 

I’ll shortly lose the tune I sing

to the damping of these old harp strings,

and I’ll put down your moneyed purse,

well aware of what it’s worth.

The lance will couch and break our line,

and there I’ll die for the first time

on a field of faces I well-know,

who fell in files on the snow,

and I will wander from the shadowed wild

with the white blood of a child,

into step and out from posture,

out from stead and into pasture.

I have always been your faulty harp;

sounding gently, sounding sharp.

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.