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.

Come home from eagle-throated distance,
The canoe-tip of the crescent moon scuds
Into the silted, mud-bed of heaven.
Her face-dream beside the pine trees
The mollusc of purpled wampum beads shining.  

Bury my hands, ninidji, in the eagle’s nest,
Carry my feeling words to her on wings.
Let her mix roots, berries, clay
and the feather of my hands
To paint her face with my words and these trees.

Or let my hands ripple like flat-fish
Above the silt-bed of her slim stomach,
Held there in radiant scaled warmth.
Lappihanne, the rapid water of our river heart,
Like an arrow that glides from the bow,
My people where the tide ebbs and flows.

To us both, the dark, golden edge of woods whispers, kuwumaras…
And the water arrow will never land,
But carried in my eagle’s hands,
I say kuwumaras, my love, and pierce through all darkness
To the empty path made full with the ripples of all who have passed.
My nika, swan of the woods, let us dive into the dark, golden sea
Of forever in the hills.

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.

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.

America is an untended urn,
Not filled with wick of candle,
But with eyelashes burned,
Butterfly kisses of slaves to simmering plows,
As the Whigs, Mugwumps, and Know Nothings
Like Senates, praetors, and praefactors of old,
In new form, snare the grasshopper pulse of populace.

If we could once more lay our heads—like the universe
Rests its child’s soul in the lap of its native mother—
In our Indian maiden’s lap, where she once rolled
Maize flour and the dusted cornsilk of our eyelashes,
She could knead our eyes closed, and the stars would walk
Barefoot with summering spirit through our midnight homes.

Fall to me, all you streets of Rome,
With your embrowned oils from torched walls and breccia of shadows,
The pizzicato of stairways and afternoon slowly closed
Like the thick, leathery-echo from this book of all roads.

Fallen, smoldering empire of storefronts and back-shop heirlooms,
Your lupine hills unbound with milk of cur in the wind and woods,
To your fallow fields rowed deep by a conquest of oars,
To the deepest silence and soot-muted oneness of Pompeii,
And a sky that is an ancient coin, without worth,
But still rubbed smooth at the edges by overfond lovers.

Alstroemeria, Southern-rooted watcher of the skies,
Angel tongues of Peru, with your ******-blushed annunciation
Or Incan-hued sacrificial fire.
So much like the moon tongues of all rivers in first frost or first harvest.  

Like first love, first death is the truest form,  
And blooms in scorn of all its many-mirrored rivers to come.

A pine forest is the hand,
The soul of the palm fans out in fingers
Like the clayey striations of the sun.
The forest has no sound but the bonebreast
Wandering round of a similar hand,
All but shut now except for the unspoiled nest
Of browning needles and the ancient realmless mound of love.

Blow, Lyceum grasses, blow,
From coiled lips of your wolf-god Apollo
Whose dawn-padded paws to starprints roam
This temple-tribute to thought-illumined roads.  

Blow, Lyceum grasses, blow
Of wave upon wave of your brushings-by,
From staff to sandal-fall to cloak hemline,
For rhapsodes, your song-odyssey to sew.

The Greeks built the sun,
Upon scaffolding~acrobaticon~  
With pear-skinned lightness to glow,
Or like leavened bread from the woodburning stove.

Blow, Lyceum grasses, blow,
The sun lies old on its famine-cracked pillow,
In spittle of gold and yellowed phosphorous,
With the gods past-blown to ruin.

The goddess of the spent moon skulks to her feathery bed of fiery dawn.
Wrens through the uplands wend the fence weft with piecemeal straw.
Lips painted like pomegranate groves, dashed with fructifying sweets.
A kiss is a far-off and warm opening of lips like the sun into forest gleams.

Thrums the bee waggle-dance in a haunt of Indian horsepaths,
Or the shaking leaf one second past the strike of galloping rain
/ Parsimonious lightning, thrifty in its jagged stalks
Against this night of heavy-hearted oaks /
Then the hay-fringed bale of sleep, rolled into a valley of slowed breathing,
Through parting cloud-diabolique, poison-peers the wet toadback of Autumn,
Glowing moon-gristle in the bosky wolf’s beard with its wireframe of teeth.

Autumn is a Greek sea,
A summation of wet leaves,
Gathered wicks of sunset,
A hypocaust of warm water,
That lies beneath our feet,
Incense from the Sea of Crete,
Risen to the airy suggestive.

Autumn is a word in the mind, fallen leaf-like to the mouth,
How like the orange rind, our ancient past is shriveled under pillars.

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.

A sigh is a barebacked rider, soundless along a sandy coast,
A candle tipped with starlight, wheeling in a cosmos of smoke,  
A firefly floating on the ruins of the wind like a winged gyroscope,
A skull in the stomach whose teeth are my own and breathes
With Babel’s thousand tongues telling fragrant untruths.

Here, love is the far proxy of look
- She is dying a distance -
Yours travels from brook to sky
To the heaven wanderings of death in my blood,
The black smoke-congested veins possessed
By the baffled realms of battlefield
By the horrors of the mundane
From this old mouth, emptied of kisses.

They said passing by me that they would put out their eyes,
The clouds did as they died across the battlefield,
As the gauzy horses stanched the wept blood,
As the thorns, gnats, and briers, wound into
A dove’s nest of bayonets and knives,
The clouds died in insurrection,
And the night breathed freely and the stars cleared the mud.

Because stones do not pray, even in their centuries’ quiet,
Because the vines are long, only for the sake of length,
Not like the drab Orpheus-song that always up-ruins.
Because vestal Autumn is a bride of noon-time rain,
A faithful stream with her white mist of suffibulum,
Beside the path whose footprints are half-notes from the grave.

What is to say beyond the poplars,
But the dry mouth of her death,
Like the hoarded provision of an echo,
Somewhere far off in my being,
Where darkening moves up the stone step,
Each footprint like her powdered breath,
Her shuddering voice channeled through my throat,
Shattered like frozen buds blown to the faceless snow.

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.

So falls Greece, so falls Rome,
And in their bone-lipped tombs
Forever those still listening for love.

Her hand is a bookmark in my heart,
So many smoothed pages ago.

A snowflake is when life and death
Touch lips~not to kiss~
But to breathe unheard words
Into each other's hollowed mouths,
Like a dark, unending woodlands.

Every Autumn, the sky a little more to stone belongs,
The immovable strata of deciduous columnar clouds,
Every leaf that falls, Rome a little more to earth’s heart recalls.

Death is such a thing
As dark cherries
Plucked to bobble from the basket heap,
And so then slighted from offhand,
Be the underling to the massy arbor sweep,
Be the stilled ponderance of solitudes.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Dehiscence of war,
The spent shell is the split gourd.
Dry fruit of dry years.

A pig in the grass
Sounds at scratching and bratching,
Scratching and bratching are sounds
Of the world at its last.

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.

Death is to become sunshine,
To break open the self to the world,
In sunwheat gold and peasant hearth,
(The sun is the only empire of peasants)
Every grain of annihilation is still a seed,
And the sunlight carries the sleepless dead,
Their melted voices are warm upon our ears,
The sounds rooted in, but when we do not hear,
No more than the dead worshiping the dead.

Paraselene,
She kisses like the mock moon.
Her lies have beauty.

Death is a flowering inward,
@— the cleistogamy —@
Like lips to our own souls,
Drinking ourselves to florid nothing.

Long ago, the mother died who made the thatchwork basket with her daughter for the fish wrested from the water to the stove,
     Long ago, the sun that loved them both died while the rope-wrought hands of the fisherman grew old,
          Long ago, the lid to the teapot stopped its clink when closed by the hand of the granddaughter who would think of them all and the buried sun when she looked at the stove,
               Long ago, someone like me wrote a poem that no one will read in a sunless room with a cold stove.

Sings a small boy whose hair is tousled by the wind,
As too the folds of his mother’s peplos and the robes of clouds,
When Greece gathers in silence like the stillness for a deposed crown,
And all Athens around, the song of eiresione for firstfruits of Autumn,
Singing boys with the olive branches of colored wool and garlanded gourds,
A fall-bird to wander the Ionic sky, foretelling of new sunrise.
How that joyful ancient voice still haunts the songbird of sunset.

Methuselah, old profligate wastrel of evergreen time,
In giant generational strides, close the striking distance,
Take my face in its failed vision and drink out the eyes,
One fang at my cheekbone, the tendril of silver music
Shown through, pull out its roots and the topsoil of skin,
Blow from your cadaverous lips to the beadhole of ear,
And whisper about the hours of my hummingbird life.
Here you sing alone with weak-winded isotopes of your half-lives.

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.

Give to sorrow, watchfulness.
Give to happiness, no eyes, but its blind externals.
Give to me, the blind thoughts that can see through humankind.

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.

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.

A knife cuts clean the jugular of Greece,
Sun-shattered Autumn spurts in breezes,
Her face falls like crumpled sails of the trireme
~This is the sound of sinking clouds, mammatus~
The slow tottering head sinks into itself,
The arm of once-command lies lengthwise
Next to the sea, as waves erase all her form,
And the drear and maddened moon in its cage of stars.

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.

I failed to love round, but fallen flat,
My head slumps down, over an ancient map,
My eyes roll back, over the mappa mundi verge,
Where waterfalls purl, and the sea serpent-sleep lies curled.

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.

The Trojan dead are whispering
Indecipherable secrets to sodden-eared earth.
The wind has eyes and sees beyond, Titans outremembered.
Ajax and his oft-turned back
Carries again the fallen from the fields:
     The ******-slept clouds, unsuspecting;
     Slumped Achilles of disbelieving-godless eyes,
     Flinging the final spear of his own blood.
     Soldiers all now of the green husk.
Titanic silence engulfs sound,
Except from those who mourn.
The storm is only a storm
As long as the leaves are lost.
Such is the untimely, timeliness of war.

Love beneath the linden tree,
The blue touchpaper of fingers entwined,
And sunsets of ignis fatui,
The lightning wick of lips and the caroming atom,
That once held faces,
All but sear and blast wind and howl of eyes,
All of love adrift.

Pure sorrow is too beautiful for this world.
Pure sadness is too human for us to feel anymore.
But grief is still a snow-covered tongue whose melting chokes and overcomes.

The rain-modulated trees and the hoarse leaf
That in themselves tell a love so complete,
Were once the playthings of lovers’ sights
Who passed here once and once and never.
Love the destitution of love.

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.