If the sun was dipped in ice for a moment,
It would not burn, but sing of the difference of self,
The disparate extreme, the broken yelp of a solar flare,
Muted by the soothing sojourn of iced light in layers.

Cover love in ice and it burns,
Voluptuous in its piercings,
In shocking bloom through the universe.

Death has pluck, you know, the like to sever love,
Then to show unannounced after the ruckus,
Even after so many no-shows at the theatre or club.
Death, indeed, is a tough sport, I am told,
Who plays cricket or some the sort,
Though no one really knows or asks,
“Wicket” does seem a word of choice.
But, for certain, a devil’s ouija hand
Of bridge whist, as sure as lives off
Pall Mall or Regent, as pipes a walk
In the London fog, here and there.
Yes, indeed, I would call him a chum
If he wasn’t such a cad.

Time has turned her back on me,
So I feel the rough shoulder blades of sin,
So I no longer conjugate with her reflective eyes,
But see the incommunicable universe, as cosmos
Of ribs and unshining lungs, wet and clay-like,
With fingerprints where I pressed in.

Time has a ravaged back and the organs drop
Like sodden fruit, gone unpicked.
Time is that woman looking back,
With her hair witchery of forever turning.
I see the future lovers on her crystal path,
Translucent workings of her single-sided glass.

Love has passed me by like a stream at a miller’s side
Who has store of grains and grinds and little else.
A bird is the mill wheel that spills out
Small buckets of splashing trills in these woods
~Whose heart is the great spiral tragedy of a tree
that lessens itself by load of leaves~
Love has passed me by like a road for the dusted hoof
Of a pack horse whose rider is a daze of coin-pursed eyes,
And a saddle of dry distance for fortune’s miles.

Love, how you pass me again and again,
In your madness for grain of coin and its too many roles.
Sometimes the giver is more gift than the rose.

She is the typesetter’s “e”

The once-rounded uncial script,
Unbroken like the solemn vow of a monk,
His whisper, a shepherd of words under the cowl,
Murmurations of the Holy Mother to the lambswool shroud of candlelight.

His candle-flock of dreams to some hill of penitent towers, war-cowed
And broken open like faith-unfended helmets, littering the ground,
With their unspeaking tassels in babbling pagan sound of wind,
That hill too, once-rounded bare under the glittering apostles of twilight.

In the abbeywork of air, calligraphy was a cipher of souls,
He unwrested demons from an inkwell of sunsets, smothered them in blotting paper,
Freed the incarnate whole to the book of hours, nib-pointed in quills and illuminated in gold,
Line by line, in Carolingian winding sheets, he returned the misshapen to the fold,
To the carpet page of home and the warm ligatures of their waiting women.
So the shutters of the heavenly house could blow light in slanted rays to a wilderness in storm.

But he never tamed the aero-elongated, descender of Troy in a “t,”
He never knew the unholiness of the underscore or fonts as ******,
Or the world unwilling to know itself in serif robes of ancient lore.
His life was a simple rounded-out syllable of one man,
Left in the muddied, unintelligible text of faith and war.

She is the typesetter’s “e” and now belongs to any hand.

Loneliness is a sketchwork of pen and ink of iron gall,
Brushed over in brown wash of wood soot from oak,
Disguised then under tempera of golden-ratio of yolk,
Flared over with fiery oils to the smoke-blurred brink, sfumato,
Or pigment of the fresco, a shade of off-life, languid as watercolor,
Or from the too-fondly-felt impasto knife.

But bares its bones in the light-dark cleft of Caravaggio,
With diminutions of death and the storm’s dark imbroglio,
And sunlight as flesh made into soul,
The skin stretched whole around the world.

Each sky is just a sketch
Of loneliness, left unsigned,
By every hand.

Death is a fluttering bird unnested from one mind
To bring its twigs and mud to the next, startled mind,
Where it dwells, Death and its brood, silence.  

Death is the fractured self, once removed from the mothering mind
~In journeyed sadness~
To its own end, fully aware of the whole and of its own disrepair.