Fall is an empty street in Rome,
Of byways of dry-leaf stone and moth-haunted hours,
Of market stalls with their over-haggled and fingered rinds,
And melons moiled over and palmed and bruised.
The light blows like once-told ripeness from the basket of fruit.

There is in sadness a sense of Fall, of spacious leprosy where crippled thought like the outmoded nymph dies behind each tree, and childlike peeks out to let at least childhood disbelieve in its unhappy end.
     There is in sadness, a branch that holds the once-upons, the happily-evers, and the destined-to-bes, a sweet find for all in grief.  Each stem lends momentum to their pluckings.
          There is in sadness, a young man who cherishes dead leaves.  He lately held waxen happiness and knew this as his permanence.

Morning was sudden-made as an onwardness of hills,
Meant for donning crusade in chainmail glistenings,
The sun visored in misty slats of cold steel,
To glimmer fusty through the godded grove,
A holy sepulchre, earthly-dim to its rafters of oak,
Where the forest-fall of sunlight shed its rosework,
And a red-breasted bird, its song-flight of dappled gleam,
And in the meadow, where colorful whorled the tale of Saladin,
Wayside flowers shook beneath the destriers' cloth caparisons,
A sunny fullness of vales for the crusaders' forest-heartened lungs,
And when this furthering of sights was sunken from,
Still an onwardness of hills to Jaffa like steppingstones.

Books are like the sun’s rays,
Still giving off fingertip warmth,
Though long cut off from the source.

Books are sunlight and Greek silence
Captured in glass firefly jars.

The light from the end of eternity
Comes in through the window glass
Sits on the sill with the red Anthurium
In the stenciled orange Waterford vase
Centuries.down.and.Decades.done.
From the grassy light of the Lyceum.

If the sun were to choose where to die,
It would falter over Pompeii,
And lie like a broken godhead
Or lava poured into the pottery cups of
The open-skied houses.

The immortal is the time before the rain
When we have thoughts of it afterward.  
By then, the mosaic of tongue and its words
Are broken stones swept away
By the shuttling broom of storm.

We live in the sunshine of our broken loves,
Where window curtains flow like pouring water from the aqueducts.

Sunlight is the memory of an old world, and we are just
Watchmakers who labor at the trumpets of time
As if to blow from the mouthpiece and unwind
The second hands and derelict hours of our luminous grief.
So too shines the scintilla of frost that covers the ancient wheat,
Snow falls like the listenings of lovers in the dark, and we are just
Cartographers of snowflakes, mapmakers of frozen eyes,
To zone the parallelogram of her strands of hair across the sky.

These and these and these
Were never ours.

The earth-dark octaves of her singing hair,
Sung-circles of campagna, the citadel,
And campanile bells in the Segestano air.
The pail sits like an expectant kiss on the lip of the well.

When a woman averts her eyes,
I feel the snow has secrets to hide,
Or from the small crook of her arm,
I feel the warmth of buried sunset,
In the charm of a country steeple.

The desert is a hummingbird
With wings of hovering heat.
Weightless idler,
Forever in love with the acanthus leaf
And the nectar of the far Aegean.

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.

A vintner of aged leaves in the wine-press of the sun,
Thin-skinned like the lucent grapes from the vine-runs
Of the island trellises and teal-cordoned waves, lowest slung
Fruit-laden bough of sky, Sicily, whose ateliers of rolled cigarettes
And uprolled sleeves like tides tease smoke into studio paints,
The black apple wine of storm made into mouthfuls of pulp rain,
Before the sunrise is gathered again in fishing nets and crab pots,
The coastal towns with their salted roofs of pied clay and pigeons
Along the lava stone streets, and night from the chanteuse of Egypt,
Singing her coral to heron, as when her bird-like barefooted slaves
Left tracks across Old Kingdom wastes, so this dreaming old man
Leaves his wrinkles to these grapes and across the sand-island pillow,
Asleep with his fathers, hay-hauling peasants of wandering darkness.

Love is a Phoenician breeze,  
Purest abjad of Tyrian purple and royal blue,
Pillow bearer of golden consonance between kings.

Love is a Phoenician trader over deepest-sounded seas,
Far-blown nomad that still wants for the thunder of golden drums
And the rain that comes in rounded vowels of water.

Because love has no tribe but is the purest nomad.

Corded muscles of the neck ferry the voice of sky,
Charon of words adrift in a salivary dislocated sine,
A fracture of breath, the stenciled rowing of a sigh.
Psychopomps of moonlight, past-throated vultures,  
Carrion of clouds even if stripped clean in vulpicide,
Even if our scorched and coining tongues tip at stars.

The soul has as its sextant the ribs opened wide,
The heart its compass in fluid circuitous diatribe,
When each to zone the geometry of Greek sky  
With its powdery fabulism of centaurs and jars
From Aesop’s wine of words, the untimeliness
Of sundials to Charybdis’s bloom of giant watery eyes.

To know oceans by the dry riverbed of my pulse,
To scale only as high as the sparrow’s tomb of my heart.

Love not the empress curve of your cheek,
The many-storied, empty ziggurat of belief,
The man-handled, baked brick built so high,
Your grotty thighs are pasted with all your lovers,
Your lacquered heart is glazed by luminous grief,
Head-bearer of broken vases as your crown,
Filled with dry dust from liquid stars.

Moon of Pythagorus, such proofless arithmetic derived,
No sigmoidal curves or cold calculus of the divine,
But pale barbarian, war-bringer of straight lines,
Your sea drifts commandeered like lit ash-spears in line,
Or the thrashing of wind-whipped rags of horses’ manes.
Moon of Pythagorus, the phantasms of your campfires
Of waiting armies flicker like fireflies along the stream.

Burn me, Moon, with your fire-tongued spears,
Your haunt of horses, unbridled and reared,
Burn an eye through my heart like the oculus of the Pantheon,
So I can see my pulse beat against the ash of naked footsteps
Of those who make false shrine to me.

You too will die,
Bird with the little eye
That sits outside in the green holly;
We say our goodbyes,
You with your nodding head
And me with my sighs.

Like the frog of batrachian notes in the inkwell of swamp,
And the bee waggling hieroglyphs to the papyrus of hive,
Like the flight of birds in the palm of radiating skyline,
And the sad might of the world to the caged dog’s eye.

All is gone, all my kingdoms, all my sons,
All of valor, all of disenchanted love, but for eyes
That see the world of nothing, slow in its demise.

Maybe the darkest things are the truest things,
Death, the redoubtable lover of all, the atom bomb
Burns beneath cherry blossoms of closed eyelids,
A magnolia grove of forever fasting lips of the dead,
Pompeii and Hiroshima, twin lovers of rupture,
Graves of the wind now, keepers of nothing and all.

Garden of Gethsemane, under your Mount of Olives,
The green-pitted translucence of night, where Christ,
Seer-in-knowing, writhes at the split seed of fission,
Break of night into the morning blossoms of Hiroshima’s ash,
Of mercurochrome and zinc oxides and the red snow of skin,
And his resurrection, forever once-again, in atomic flash,
The smells of honeysuckle and hay of manger,
And his breath of molten potash.

Winter is a cucumber, all ice and evergreen,
A frogskin in formaldehyde,
Cross-sectioned for slides.
What veiny depth from circle flakes is seen.

Trace my love in the half-shell curve of a woman’s back,
Like the naked wetland of Egypt, ibis-nest of the Nile delta.
Lovely woman, throw your arm back like a tethered cord,
To this sledge-mason for your pyramids, this falcon-doting ward
Of your gold capstones, all-seeing eyes over the west-bank shore.

Love, our days of polished limestone are wind-scoured,
Left like a pile of petrified fruit from figs and bottle gourds.
Love, always forget, now the sand has filtered into my pores
And cascades into the empty shell of my quarried heart.

The sky will never hold more
Than all the paths of soldiers’ unreturning,
Laid out the length of undone goodbyes.  
Their eyes that sleep on the wind,
Palace of last breath,
And the rain that falls, expectant of windows,
And those left within to live without eyes.

Love is a left-mouse click, a flashing prompt,
For the cursor cross of a Crusade that never was,
And the knight who is broken on the scroll wheel,
And the lady in waiting who backspaces from the real.

The horse breathes in the city, the world of unrelenting pistons
And steam from the jingling harness, and the jangling windows
That reflect the bolting sparrows like fire arrows in the coming night,
Viennese darkness is like the smell of the chocolatier mixed with snow,
Sealed in a sachertorte with the alley-crack of the riding whip on coach,
Viennese sunshine is like the baker’s soul, rising on flashing coppers and tins.

The most beautiful poem is written on a shroud,
As if the stars closed their eyelids at seeing the gods die,
But still-gauzy foundlings like cities of dusted sunlight,
Bound so long between the pillars of Athens and Rome,
Disconsolate remnants in after-golds and winding sheets of stone.

The most beautiful poem speaks only to death,
So it may know something of our loss, our bereftness,
And like the turnkey of afternoon to evening
Under the warm-felt pressure of our reminiscing hands,
We too shall pass like long-limbed sunset along the barren grass,
Like so many solitary walks bundled up in Autumn mists,
And eyes filled with someone once there and absences to come.

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.

Nothing can be said from the lip of the sun,
To array with full redress the wind-flayed waters
Of the river-run and the naked broomrape of Spring,
Absolve naiads of their blued minstrelsy in venous scream,
Or pour a yellow songbird from the gold-rimmed cup of war.
Nothing is said in the liver-spotted ground of rain-ghosted gardens,
Where love’s monument is a blot of dried flowers and grayed thorns.

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.

Pleiades seven maidens sigh,
The sweeping, coruscating gown of stars,
In stillness-rapt, the cosmos in collective gasp,
At Atlas, his amalgamated bulk of last breath.

***

We breathe in the gown of ending,
The snake tongues of our synapses
Flicking out the decomposed praeludium
For the saprobic stars to feed off the detritus of night.

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.

Her dark hair falls like the lowered trumpets,
Soundless as the eyelid-close of Accursed Gates,
Past the city’s outer walls and alley-clotted throes,
Some shield-hearted soldier sent to his earthen fold,
Her blood-rimmed sky-lids of night foretell the phantom peace
Of Autumn like a head sinking down with the fell-purpled leaf of war.

***
Love, you once guided the black looms of Autumn,
Olive-skinned druid, you are a dark everything,
And a toss of your hair flings to dust all of Rome.

Death is my own covetous possession,
A hand-me-down with the worn edges
Of a closed, burnished keepsake box.

Death is the memory of a tree-lined walk,
A daguerreotype, a trompe-l'oiel des bois,
Sight itself turned within, but without end,
A forest of unstirring eyelashes, like long uncut grass,

Death is the stillness of pewter leaves,
And sorrow is sadness in love with itself.

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.

The furrier tells the bell by the time of skinning,
Archangels by their clipped wings as they fell,
Statesmen by show of divided hands at plenary ringing,
The wind by quell of truant petals from daffodil.
And even love tells its beginnings and endings,
By lips shorn of lambswool words and yield of bale.
In light or darkness, though our animal souls uprisen,
Still in their wordless and naked measuring dwell.

When I die, I will miss
A woman’s long hair in the wind,
Not a timeless thing, but a thing
Without concern for time,
The way Rome always reminds
Of Greece, and Greece reminds
Of salt air and vines.

These clouds of Italy are grown on vines,
Infidels of skies, fruit bearers of wine-veined
Marble, fertile in spite of its own lifeless tableau,
Here thrives the succulent garden of the alone,
Where turns aside the burnt nape of the plowman,
Voyager of the cool midnight seas of the mind,
Up to this arable vine of sighs from outworn gods,
And hears his heart once more give up its throne.

Death comes close and breathes a little over my lips and smiles at my terror,
No more the night has songs for the snow, has love for the whiteness,
But lets it go to the last hallucinations under the sun.
Grandfather, lift my soul when this boyhood is done,
And think of things to tell me when darkness grows too cold,
I will be in the corner of eternity, writing poems for no one.

Someone must go off to death, little ones.
Though grandfathers hold back the darkened thrall,
The half-flit coven of breezes and icy vine that sprawls,
Until the black worms away at them and they grab hold
Of the language of death like a locket over their hearts.

Someone must go off to death, little ones.
In spite of the keepsake of hoarders, fathered by fathers old.
Death’s single-worded world speaks; the chain of old men folds,
Kingdom’s pawns, their broken tongues lie bleeding with sun,
The black fluency slips through, then childhood falls as one.

Someone must go off to death, little ones.
There is one who played with us in sunlight
Who sits between the ancient legs and watches us
Like a friend from a window who is too sick to play.  
Old men, soon to your rest, and I will let death
Carve its name on my shoulders while my spirit frays.

The ancient way across this world lies like sunset over black pearls,
The treetops are marble-made that the riffler of wind deforms,
To know all mother tongues from the quarry of rough stones,
To speak everything at once, Bride of Unbecoming,
The moldering walls of lips, the kiss of vacant streets
And the quiet, wet solitude bespoken by back roads,
The whispered origami of the Forum, paper gods in folds,
Smothered in the false pillows of their own repose,
The wolf’s beard dipped in the fresh pant of dewfall,
While lovers have placed on the stones of the Appian Way
Their perfect hearts like votive candles, cupping the flames,
Looking down the swift arrow of loneliness, Sagittarius its same
Heaven-glow and besprinkled guidepost of a starlit Sacred Way.
Mother of Rome, your powdered face has been made ashen by those
Unreturned home, your far-off travels lead only to the graves of sons.
The ancient way across this world lies like sunset over black pearls.

Sing my song of forgetting,
Of lips never wrong, never upsetting,
Sing the wine-infused air along,
From the violin’s grapevine song,
Purely gifted as the altar wine and alms
Of the Santa Maria della Visitazione,
A cadenza from the catgut of stringed waves,
     The vibrato in polyphonic staves across the lagoon,
          Amid the psaltery sway of submerged algae plumes,
               Like the strident tails of the horses of Neptune,
Or the teardrop-surge of the glass chandeliers of Murano,
The same powdered hue of Venetian sky,
As bluebirds fallen into their own drowned tune,  
As absence awash over the sun-scattered tombs of Olympus.

Sing with a felt-tipped tongue,
So my song of forgetting is never undone.

Numerations of
Lips...Tally bead-like...kisses
On the abacus.

Sicily is the golden caesura of history,
Where the human poem is paused to hear
The exalted precipice of its own sigh.

Seer of joy but sayer of sorrow,
From numinous lips, the heart burns down,
The convergence of pulse in ash wireframe
Is love, in keeping but not in heaven igniting.

Excise my heart and let it keep as an island
That only beats when the waves come across,
And all the ancient world speaks in me
With light of burning lips and crushed hearts.

When someone dies, the world becomes this
Unreplicated moment of beauty, an essence
Unconfined and filled with no other self
But selves complete, though all heaven may blaze alone.

Love, given over to stone,
Encoffinated warmth of sun,
Shielded from the prickled infiltrations
Of a many-menaced world.
But here we live too with porous beauty,
Here we kneel with bulwark of shoulders,
Then fall without a twitch to the wind.

The towering candles of the monk’s studious hours
Now guttered to an old head on the pillowing smoke.

The Pied Piper of Hamelin bloated on the lawn
And the rat tails from his eye sockets engorged.

War is the end of all lore,
The bare abdomen of the ****** Mary gutted for her son,
War is a *******’s mouldering arms,
The infidel to love, the mutilator of colors,
War is the broken feast of the heart,
Bones picked clean.

That night, one of the old guard died,
And the rain said nothing,
And the thunder said nothing,
And the clock with its bell chimes
Struck nothing.

Mothers come gently to our rooms, the sunset kiss on the forehead,
Woven homilies from their baskets of forgiveness and spools of yarn.

But for the grave, this heart its coiled sunset unspools, so long entwined
In woods and seas that redden now into the soul of all sunsets combined.