In the park, soft-study of sands and swings,
Where the birds while away the unabridged air
Like rains on green, copper roofs ~ their wings.
So I have touched my rainy fingers on the fountain’s surface,
And tum-tumed at the dumpy belly of a dog,
So I have felt the vendor’s balloons like cantaloupes for freshness,
So I have a pocket-change of smiles for all.
At the fountain’s edge,
Like green-molded quaystones feather-singed
By the touchstrokes of the arcing wings of the sea,
Or like a saucer of warm milk
For the alley-cats to drink the milkiness of sun
And then with their paws,
Plink at overturning the day into porcelain shadows.

Sometimes I want the snow
To fall over me,
Cover me
Somewhere in the woods.
I’d just lie on some fallen twigs;
Listen to them crackle
As I pushed my back into the earth.
Then I’d look up
And watch the white drop,
Let the snow fill up over my body.

I’d feel it sink into me,
Pour into an empty mold.
Cover me
And make me part of the smoothness
Of the white earth.
Then I’d wait,
For the rabbit or deer to leave its tracks
Over my white.

And I wouldn’t care.
Not care that the snow had been
Wrinkled~
Because I’d wrinkle it too
When I got up and left my tracks
On another’s white—
Maybe someone like me,
Who had watched the snow fall.
And maybe they’d stay longer.
But I’d have to go,
Because it’s only
Sometimes I want the snow
To fall over me.

Sunset is a washwoman's stream of rubia dyes
And the crushed scales from the Kermes insect,
While the loosened garments of life slide
Over the ancient liquidity of the hills rolling
As the mountains rolling as the seas rolling
As the clouds rolling as the graves rolling
Like eyes rolling back to sleep.

I am pressed for lullaby,
Not the pillow-clap of thunder or the ether songs of Persephone,
Biding by her asphodels with icen fingers from plum-colored hell.

But press my ear in my mother’s lap of ancient sun,
Of peplos and himation and stola,
And listen to the vines and bunched grapes
And all of heaven sink in its commodiousness.

Press my ear to the sun-fed heart that flows
To the furthest span of the cloth-seas of man and
The solemn songings of the ever-deepening sky.
My mother all along smoothing out the wrinkled sheet of sunlight.

When I was too young to stand against the world,
I ambled its sempiternal floors and overheard clear minds
Blustery through the stark decor of man’s marbled winter.
I was too young to huddle in banners for warmth,
to follow festive the dizzy denizens to their
lightheaded classicisms, their sandal-freedoms upon desolation.
I was left word by regency, word alone.
I was a child at the base of dark thrones.
And too often sneaking looks to steal a seat,
Sneaking seats though no one was to come.

I am a child in a place of dark thrones,
Too restless to settle when no one will come.
Lying just to lie across the worldly floors,
As my clear mind blows the torches to sputter,
And the hallways, one by one,
Are wordless and long-heard.

Here hang the wine-sotted troubadours of sadness and clouds,
~Having played serenas to paramours lipping at the cup of an evening bawd~
Like tethered donkeys now with their packsong of pastorela and alba,
No more musical mensurations of the ****** Mary, Cantigas de Santa Maria,
But slung over the railings of dawn-blotted taverns or courts of renown,
Here hang the wine-sotted troubadours of sadness and clouds,
Like drinking gourds, their stringed citherns dangle from their shoulders,
Leaking the strummed honey-wine of sound like the retchings of the nearby sea.

You who have never known the loveliness of love,
Gather your heads on the torn pillow’s edge of mud,
Under the wood-tar shadows of camphor-aided sleep,  
Where your low-flung groans are starvations of sound,
And the amputated clouds, insinuated with gangrene
And blood-stained woods, are still bound to the shooting
Stars that fell beside you and flung up hissing rays of grass.

Parents of the midnight sky, the stolen stars of your children
Open their broken mouths to the battlefield heart of trespass.
To their soldiers’ eyes, the floor of heaven is uncut grass,
Wet with rain and mold and the unlifted wings of Pegasus,
Whose unearthly hoof to unearthly earth scuffs the clod
Of the lunette for the cannons to divulge the great, stuttering
Coda of everything old, malformed of breath and bone.  

Some grass somewhere will now seem the hair of a sweetheart,
And those dead eyes will aways stare, too fond of love unknown.
So the dead soldier and grass and sky conspire to hold a woman,
So the soldier makes the truce between earth and sky,
Between man and the divine, though the chestnut trees    
In red human tongues, pay their deep-forested encomium to distance,
In misspilled gorgeousness like Apollo surveying his own tomb.

Therein lies the fur, filled with running wind,
Milkweed in the scruff, the scent of wild-wood,
Some mystery-hearted forest where pulse begins.
Therein lies the Centaur, satyr, and god-disguised swan,
Ageless wonders prowled upon by an age-old Parthenon.
You broke your wolf’s tooth through those haunches of lore.

Therein lies the fur, filled with barking dust and dandelion war,
With a spine that stretched back to the she-wolf and city-birth,
The peeled nerve of a howl once tremored your Aurelian lips.
Therein lies the serf, hunter, fairer hand, and lord,
From wattles and daub, the wandering-sands of Saracen, or Crusader’s moor.
You kept the path beside to remind that instinct shines as the holiest earth.

Therein lies the fur, the warm, ungovernable peasant of sleep,
Ever prophetic in your skies by eyeshut-trace of the hunting moon,
Twitching at the day’s thousand faces, all asleep in themselves.
Therein lies the soldier, nurse, chaplain, and fell-prayer,
Mange-like war is the whimpering season with its flea-bitten welts of stars.
You struck blind but true at the throat of gas-hissing war.

Therein lies the fur, outracing the rain and the spout,
Nested with more birds and Autumn song than rain,
Your sleeping ear pooled like cool eaves of the barn.

I sing once more like a boy into your unfolded ear.
Listen always for my ancient, choral voice and your chores of play,
And race earback to the sun in the belly-grass of your free-eyed fields.
Leave your last paw mark, torn on the red clay of my hand.
You are forever wrapped in human touch, ageless and aged,
And if ever the dark in madder darkness encroaches,
Leave black eternity to my faithful eyes.