"...What other sound could be like this?

Which other note could trespass on
to where the likes of tears are formed?

What else speaks so well
of wilderness, of loneliness?

Which alternate voice could manifest
this desolate deliverance?

Such trifling themes as life and death
are kept in Curlew's calls..."

Let this be an elegy
While he lies there
You know what I mean
Bury his body
Down by the side
Of a crooked highway
His spirit will soon flag
A Greyhound bus
And someday will ride
Right on out of our lives
Back to the dark tower
Where past power and fame
Will be hung like a black flag
Tattered and limp in his shame.

Some nights
the moon throws its light
like an old man
who can't hold his liquor in
and spits blood in the morning

Someone ought to kick some sense
into me, if they did I'd hum
like the body of a fiddle

I propose we all strip down
and take a swim with my friends
the dragonflies, but no one will listen
to what I have to say when I throw my voice
like an empty bottle deep in the forest

When I think of all the dark
and swift things of my rivers,
I wonder why time the old boot -
legger hides his maps and goes
on traveling the low roads

Alone I can tell you there is so much
beside the point of the thorn of the rose
and why the moon is with me always
whenever i choose to go it alone

I drink from that blue jar of time
and breathe the breath of sweet infants

Believe you me the dead shepherd
we sent up the river in a faraway land
in a time so long ago still holds us
all by the holes in his hands

You can see the dark clouds up ahead,
my cloisters I am always walking through them
with you children of the lost dreams,
and with you fifty-something snow-headed men

We have just collided with our lost sons
on the high road of morning, we are rising
dust like the dirt on our children's graves
saying nothing to our brothers the stones.

Solitude I wear
      like a second skin
my biggest weakness
       my greatest strength
   wading through 
quiet and tired 
    in seclusion
 as dawn draws
    her arms around me 
cold       and damp
    like the sea
           with no oil
for my lamp
       to light my way
through another
      dark    and lonely
November day.

Coldness, I have watched you
in the shadows,
and you have given me mine
from time to time, awake
I slumber down paths
of moss and who knows what all
darkness we can gather
one at a time, but not one soul
can make a bouquet from another
soul, it is too cold to be dreaming
and there is no place for the duelist,
the two of us, lovers of black clothes
and fairly good looking women,
it is almost winter and the wind
is my second, wearing a dark cloak,
breathing in the dead eyes
of my brother, how they shine
and listen to him sing that sad song
will you, while gathering snow
and turning darker than starlight.