Other poems

Ode

Go dream berivered countrysides
idyll in hayfields lovers know
the charm of analytics indoor thoughts
unnatured persons’ spirits concentrate
the room’s reversion of the limitless
life thickening in walls we grace
with dignity of artificial light

Journal d’un poëte
tête-à-tête	inscribed on intervening surface each line lies short of traversal
conceit	content unfulfillment endangers the source of sublimation
dispiritment	failed figures drain the memory art conjures life replenish
sortie	passing bodies pluralize the senses disarticulate the leap of faith
poesis	from the daylight source of language draws memory’s thread in nightlong knots

White noise
	Let me describe the page it is flat and white on it stand printed letters the words hard to discern something about description whiteness rather obscurity

The infinite

See infinity in the eyes of another
hiding nothing from nothing
but obscurely work toward simplicity
learning through unreason
the less and less
no other desire
but the page be all
its absent center visible not legible

in dull imagination weighted with its secret
the key turns thickly
sticks

yet cycles rebegin and memory
the old rejuvenates
so constant a sign
makes nothing of absence
the nightgray reddens
with leaves and song
in double incandescence
a flower in the hand
ascends

Pilgrimage
i
	The sight unspoken sounds within an unheard air smelling of secrets and unfilled childhood absences as at the last unveiling of the limits of abstraction while breathless martyrs at the wall await the fertilizing wind our spectral traces interweave on stones faced by eternity
ii
	Such instant wisdom as confers a wafer’s dissolution fails to conceive the infinite in eyeless interdiction could sunlit air and time effect a salutary junction or blood-brain barrier define an absence of relation still our discrepancies repose in the world’s ruined omphalos A wordless negative conveys two figures to the eye’s misprision as limning in a missing third deferred by their desire’s unvision all of a moment there is skin and stone analogies indifferent to their depths Tantalus’ garden beckoned with such fruit
iii
	The pen by counterpoint suggests itself dissolved within its dark transfusions black serpents twisting Edenward encoil us in their rapturous inductions the narrative’s insuring I timedrawn projection of sheer self in modesty’s dark circle caught sensing too late the inward flow expires eddies of form on form wash at the margin we inexpressible visit unpunished the center

Orphanage

Corpse on a stone table
chilled to latency
prime object of my
dread curiosity

Cadaver at the altar
bride of entropy
my last kiss bestow
anew virginity

Those who daily race
with faceless doubles prefer
a landscape to a mirror
Those who know trees not forests
hold city light a sunburst
whose common effect ignores
the repulsion of its components

The landscape is a lie
the city light a vision
in an Acadian treetop
a little girl at twilight
descried in shadows of the moon
the spires of urban splendor

Ballade

Fragments make no marriages
nor stolen kisses permanence
coherence in disparity
too brief for contradiction

thinness of the timeline
through too many senses
twistings of the linear
to threadbare densities

in the wastes of unfame
one contrives a center
amphoras from potsherds
mold a phoenix’ ashes

for you no words enough
nor silence but a murmur
patiently decomposing
banality to difference

forever and together
sharing each other’s absence
invented reciprocity
superior to illusion

we float above the abyss
too featherweight to fall
at some point all softens

omnivorous mortality
devours us unseasoned

Opacity settles in the pores
creeping unfamiliarity
seizes the vine
could we return

greenwrapped in branches
tree-borne arms to face
youth’s chimera at the doorstep of age

Epitaph

Faithful to the difference
reversibly subverted
that once attenuated
rivalries of sameness

fastidiously fled
from messy mediation
lying now in limbo’s
monstrous middle state

too long uncontracted
marriage of dream and action
association ended
by drifting not divorce

miraculated martyr
of the fleshly icon
misreader of woman’s
secondary signs

absence of detectable
heart or brain activity
faint galvanic twitching
at attracting bodies

victim of anonymous
congenital disorder
daily anticipating
carnal resurrection