There were efforts to sling a steeple around a cloud,
to enclose a smoke ring in a palm,
bring a mountain to a riverbed. They failed.

Something of a Pythagorean charm is retained
for garbing oneself in white,
the precision of mathematics
performing beautifully the rites.
To refrain from bean-eating.

One who has held their hands
beating the air
for a long time
gains a kind of theorem for dignity,
despite having no solution to show.

Wrinkles reveal this was not the beginning but
a palimpsest, set over another work so old
the efforts must continue as the equation foretold.

You have worn your skin
and never asked where it would end.

In rooms made larger by the Old Masters,
your spine also has learned to bend.

The stalk resides inside of you, the joist
fanning through you with the suppleness
of a willow bough.

Don't you know?
The last ink of the day is written with a green pen.

Late summer a lofty pause. At work I am absent from myself; from any conviction. The vegetation has reached to its fullest and covers the vision. Memory free of concern. As in the work of nighttime to morning, so memory of other seasons is dimmed. We wish to retreat at length and recline to watch the season's sunset. Not yet the descent into the urgent. A moment sent to you so silent, it is punctuated with the song of cicadas, chyrp of crickets, so nourishing for you have only to lift your eyes to see.

The legs are two folded petals
tucked supplely under the weight of your torso.

The arms are a cloak thrown over the thighs;
hands are the frayed ends, fingers the wands.

The head nods at the end of its stalk
from day to day, toppled;
often forgetting it is attached.

Shooting up through you sits "The idea."
It balances over top the body and head like an egg.

The heart is gunfire,
semi-automatic.
Your hidden heart stands above the rest,
gnarled and crimsoning the strands.

It has grown into all parts of you,
and all your parts have inscribed into it
the memory of percussion.

canoe
by the oyster bay
in a mountain blue

let the hand through
the gray,
canoe

where a seal or two
blinks and strays
in a mountain blue,

swirling water into new
wine-coloured shades.
canoe,

stretch the light you
saw had stayed
in a mountain blue.

what is this body you drew
like a bolt from the clay?
canoe
in a mountain blue.

Metabolism consumes the wood, tree, mountain, *****.
Breath is the smoke of their togetherness.

Where can I rest myself?
Surrounded by the slow, wooden eaters of time.

Heated cedar smells sweeter than bread.

Our hearth devours the cold of separation.
Built around it are the grey boards of house.

The tree knits into the earth to hold a mountain in place.
A leaf rises from the petrified core.

So many to occupy the bald, everlasting *****,
I think I'll pause to press one into a book.

The slipped knot of now into will be
is such a gentle strand,

the braid undoes itself from yesterday
as easily as a garment's clasp,
as easily as abseiling liana.

Can I hold soft
the line?

To not look back
but keep the mountain's imprint
emboldened in the eye

To unknow
the difference from ascent and descent.

O day, o cloud: what do you know
that hasn't been pressed through my palms?

The incident of a hundred fireflies
like tiny ships
on their way, haphazardly,
to nobody's home
while lightning flickers lightly
in the teeming, inhabitable air.

As if ornithology was the Esperanto of poets
wishing to construct a phoneme or pheromone
to extoll the details rather than build the case.

Spinning from my orbit as you, wondering
in sparse moments cleared by rain
do birds perch along the Grand Elysee in Zaatari?

And humans, uprooted, children too knowing blood:
what mode of classification, what terms to agree on
face-to-face down those dusty avenues?

You remembered June when this morning's sun
was there with the care of a father's hand
etching each leaf into filigree--
or with the unsequestered heart of a crazed lover
with his impossible love letters and artifacts
of century's old over-ripened fruits
that even as they hung precariously from the oaks
dazzled and made space for the stark blue.

A change from last night.
The constellate, dispersing fog
that brought the sense
of an overwhelming descent to a seabed,
the submersion a baffling return to a night
from childhood, enclosed at all ends
and unknowable. A shut book.

2.

Warmth lingers on skin even after
a few minutes of exposure, a caress.
Then, step outdoors and the wind,
whose listlessness and beauty
picks up your step and hurries you on
with characteristic mercilessness
through the cold.

While you were sleeping and roaming and reading
it has crept into the uninhabited crevices,
under doors, fuseboxes, the shades of streetlights
to mold like frost.

3.

Cold is a life-form,
growing and budding in the absence of green.

And it is at this time of year we strangle
the neck of uncertainty.

The sun peeks. The cold air climbs
out of the bottoms and hollows of things.

When it reaches an excitement, as now,
her absence reveals herself:
there is nowhere you can touch her body.

She is the thousand particles
she is the spacing in between:

twirling, gathering and thrusting through the streets,
she calls you to witness her now as she comes
like a first snow.

Regardless of the insignificance
her voice even shudders at the loss,--
though she makes light of it,
the smell of burnt food curls in the air
and will take hours to dissipate.

Men are better cooks, she says.
Studies show they concentrate on one thing:
they won't clean while they cook.
But then, they cannot grasp efficiency.

Her breakfast is ready by mid-afternoon--
and perhaps I could have made it better.
I've made the perfect dish already
and am still lamenting its disappearance.

Sometimes the difference between men and women
by the time we sit down to feast,
we are still lingering over accomplishment
and they've moved on to entertain the next meal.

We are, though we cannot understand it,
endlessly hungry
while they are preparing the dish.

What cloud, dim constellation
you pale moon of deep detachment from the self.

Dark moon undersea, you are unwilling to perform me
So come! It clings untold time before leaving; reduces the fat of life.

Though your gravity blots out possibility, there’s use hanging aloof
an opaque cloud, tempering all things loud, bright, and obtuse--

Now you are sealed with all time, you want kindly to observe
Stillness.

And when all time departs in a vapour,
you cling without occupation,

an array of senses, then often you begin:
sketching and sketching, and sketching.

Perhaps it is because they very simply
loved wild poppies,
or the unexpected press of wind.

Learning early of that airless, evacuated space
of love to come
they kept ready the guestroom,
hemmed the waiting into their very clothes.

That there are these persisting towers
yearning crazily despite Babylon,

rising up from the dish of the dead's affirmation
like a stamen from a spring of pollen.

Past the Polish priest next to me in the cabin
I look out the port hole, thinking about the smoke
crazily suspended below my flight.

On the orange corner of a cloud
smoke's hidden art peaks out,
illuminated.

My eye, made to catch smoke's body,
speeds past the dark rippling ocean
steps out from its recess, asks smoke:

Where are you?
Come form yourself around my exposure.

There will never be a pause now
it is the season of the first song at last
the tremulous heart has found partner
in the world's quivering.

With growth and green fires, birds carry the wind,
shaking out the bronze into a shrillness,
warming and agitating every alcove.

And also from up out of each lost pond
comes the lilted piping of frogs.
There will never be a pause now,

The oldest news has gone through every chamber.
like a road unveiled between mountains,
The sun tightly wraps my seeking to you.

With all the beaming, ingeminate sounds,
with all the shaking green in us,  
there will never be a pause now.

It's all we can do but rent a room.
Old, with a view to the Bay

Ocean turns shore stone into something
finer than air.

It's time that's needed. We want what flees
and forget ourselves. How much the bone

has stretched to shake with laughter. Gone
and come back

crease over crease
marrow combed, tenderly.

Think how relief washed over her when he deplaned,
returned to the coolness of their susceptible world.

Or the sorrow that was deposited like salt in him
when he looked back and she had disappeared.

In these ways we try to recall the unrecorded performances.
Where an emotion held the room in a trance

with the certainty of moonlight through glass.
We do not know where the applause goes.

Hands that work, released,
flutter up like wooden birds to rise, a throng of geese.

The face is a palimpsest. It is not of Greece
or of the Far East.

Its origin is candled by a city
just visible through the window of a rented room.

It's surface is darkest as it shrinks into an endpoint
with no recess but the last fold.

See, I've no way to confirm that which you see,
and you may say the same about my acoustics of memory.

I've already embarked into my curvilinear home, perhaps
hoping to find there a material of permanent memory,
gone to sleep within a Fibonaccian trace.

Always preferring to follow the pink of a surface
till it's impossible to see.
You might not think it a good thing,
but I quietly must disagree.

Begin by touch: smallness is all
For the world is hungry passively,
wanting so bad to oxidize
the interior of us.

Sometimes the low-lying clouds are a call.
You've never heard it before.
It harrows through you like a train
but lingers even while it gathers itself
while it rushes.

Or a voice, so requiring of you to hear it
one minute it runs recklessly, a little boy,
it has no cares,
casting itself among the trees.
Then, stops all of a sudden
intent on play. You watch
as it takes each green into its hands,

as it turns each leaf over and over
until each is a small black bell.

To the wind
you were the same at both ends.

There is no core.
Encumbered in a dream, you sleep in tissue:

this thin, skirted apparatus
palming the rucksack of the mind.

When silent is is smooth and oblong;
it must survive winter, the pelting snows.

Speak and the barrel fills
bubbling, fermented.

It is yourself you are drinking.
You have all the names.

Now that the proper instruments are arranged
his time of inscription nears.

He reads from the last page, backwards there
to find the beginning.

Whisking away the presumptions of page one
as mere suggestibility;

to read as the author reads is mission.
Why follow the staged footprints?

The book that neatly folds light between fine feathers
keeps out of sight what he wants,

headlong to reverse truth north, find relativity false  
to find the blazing word for "now."

What is this precious stone
placed in the palm's heart, or ear's drum?

From where you stood
a new language has replaced your standing

and it glides and arches about you,
revealing your weight by not striking any where.

You are the leftover space,
the blood rising under the tongue.





Istanbul Metro

First I notice her other face
in the window her mirror reflection
I realize the only one she has ever lived with
and so it is full of heaviness and pull.

I am alone and so I can't but overhear
the two young woman across from me
coolly picking words from the air
and building a shelter of conversation.

and as they are sent hurtling,
delighted with the results
and shaking with laughter,
for the spangled moment
and nothing more,

The dim cabin made only for practicality
and the stale metro wind
add to the lightness,
that all of this will never come again.

Your skin is not a history of seeing
but of being seeing.

So heavy it has grown around the questions
which live in this postulate world as birds.

Inconstant and full of chatter
One season they built a nest in you
near the sea,

diving and disappearing
as the plover does through a wave
to return upon freshly turned earth
a robin.

O lidded One,
what is this heat which would bear sit  
with plain silence on kitchen tables.

After “lo fatal”

When I read you first I was living in Bergen.
Pretending at translation
and going up scree, clutching at conifers
in a painted flaxen sun.

I'd imagined you’d given up on being Modernista
to settle for a quaint shack—
for the hardness of the carved fjord.

Now if you were to arrive in the wild
where I have kept this place
strangely similar by the pine, blue herons,
               Mount Ozzard over the dandelions,

how would you come walking down the road?

Would deer pause to smell your tracks
or the cedar cutter look up as he heard you pass,

or these coal-black snags
which guard the lot’s entrance
          and haven't swayed in so long
groan?

Dichoso el árbol, que es apenas sensitivo.
Happy is the tree, you said. Scarcely sentient.

Ruben Dario: what is the tree
which rushes through this poem?

Moon

Moon-- roughly
the size of a cantaloupe.

Whom eyes have chafed on,
not perceiving any pain.

Moon, but not quite Li Po's:
Many hungry are below you

hung, paused as if thinking
on the paths to your glaciers.

Given a moonless sky
there was once a time
we could hold words in the mind
far as the line of horizon.

The problem with pragmatism
(aside from self-loathing)
is that no one sings of it.

Of spring: it is not that the flowers crouch on
with an aperture already dialled to metabolize
a portion of the sun, and die,--
it is not that all of this unfolds as scripture.

We live in a web of connections.
For Hume, the sun might not rise.
The flowers will come.

The net is finer than the spider or silkworm's.
Curling, it catches and flares here and there,
grazing down the ribcage of this world
and occupying all spaces, tenderly.

It has come from the farthest places
where a star has passed into senescence
and no light remains.

In August the silver maples
flip and wave backsides of their leaves,
chiming and tinkling under its protection.

So much air and light
has looped through the beaks of birds
and pulled them down from flight.

Departure is what the speaker inhabits.
A self turning photograph
pulling away during the taking.
But slightly over-saturated,
full of the green turned gold.

The earth will become bald white again,
faultless and raked by the winds.
For now, the net slackens out
over the borders of woods
and resting in treetops, safe to be viewed.

A hawk drifting,
turns over the topography of the day's catch
in his eye.

Shadows close like open waters.
But the low and unending dilation of cricket song
of this month plays well beyond dusk.

Hear it extending into you
like delicate limbs
to enter the ear.

Her expectant cordiality locked her away from you.
Where she looked
finches blossomed from the aisles.

His cigarette **** errantry froze him before you.
Where he looked
children dispersed like smoke.

Her gloved discernment hid her suppleness
like a moon in passing,
she had only to reveal a wrist.

His improvisation boredom fended off the breeze.
Where he looked
there were no women left on earth.

*

And on all these passersby,
as when one holds steady the barrel of a gun,
I have steadied my gaze.
And it is for you to know that weight.

Lest my tongue be burnt
and all words I loved disowned
as children tossed out
from the mouth that cradled them
to wander foreign countries alone,
I caress from the creases of my fingers

my english,
this full length mirror
a street girl carries crooked
under her arm and breast--
a horizontal slant nuder than flesh
making meaning in flashes.

Where is it going, bumping along?
Jarred and crashing and beaming
like a throwing up or endlessly exacerbated jazz.

The singer who could charm the world
with a humble reed, must indeed
be in love with words,

yet always this english
why is it you hold out in your upturned hand
precisely what you are at once pulling away,
as if no where pleased you to linger
and so you congeal at the table with us
neither shining nor dissipating,
like a dark matter.

I sang for the certainty of mahogany
the solidity of brass:
where you would meld back into lake
be healed to the pond's surface,
permanently affixed to sky
given back to the unopposed silence
where they might remember us in times to come.

every advance in visual representation
comes of a life form outside the hand
stored up in the energy of silent work
to see a new radix of the situation.

where does the willingness come from
to forfeit all the lines for the hidden core
where does the fortitude spring
to hold the heavy iron of no one's history?

there is a stump in the yard withered and cracked
at the bark-- more marble than wood.
look how even the sunlight slants off the cut!
never brought to the roots again.

fall against its smooth gray limbs
deep in the burn of memory,

the grain is a book flipped open
to every page at once, the sun.
drink this sweet filtered rainfall
of a hundred years of struggle.

I.
the warmth of night makes an unusual gallery
a cauldron of leaves spilled on the grid of streets

what stirred once, green in the heart could only be tended
by a woman or a star
atop and apart from all else that came before

no more time is granted for all of yesterday, its ripeness,
its beaming,
to hang more plumply defined than now

where so much distance reddens--is it regret?
converging behind heart's stone
to abode under sleets of snow.


II.
caught briefly in the eye,
these stars and we share intimately
the knowledge that each has expired

is it that a man must take grief in a certain swagger?
or by softness, falling unaffected through the corridor

like a whiteness
or an absence
forgetting

Her shrill call comes carrying more
than this hour we keep.

And we desire a feather
to arrange for each hour,
as those before

but receive only hunger:
carnivore's memory,
an unfillable bucket.

Not to awaken us entirely
we fall into soft beds,
feathers.

See the fact of tomorrow and
tomorrow provided

like the floating "here"
in another's eye, this meal,

the uninterrupted dive.
We do not remember it.

Wolastoq is the former Maliseet name for the Saint John River.*

Overlooking the beautiful river
the wind is making an incredible
din.

And yet there is no offered
palm, just the driving. Direction,
float of  gull.

Holds tight its secret
predilections.

It says go or come.
Follow me
or fight.

Moon hour

Waking up,
the streets are with so empty
it's hard to believe night
could hold the moon so delicately
in its hand, detached,
like a mirror.

The mirror while we sleep
gathers the mountains up
and waters the thirsty dreams
of thistles
blowing in the moon breeze
the moon aloft
yolked to night forever,
neither dejected nor happy
it wanders its light through
its milk on the ground.


Sleepwalk**

Your mother in a sleepwalk began searching in the leftovers
of what lay in her mind for the three things she had misplaced.

A ring of keys or a wooden bowl, an appointment not written down,
a door not closed.

There she is descending the stairs, opening drawers and pulling
back curtains until her father wakes her, asking

"What is it your looking for?" And leads her back to her room,
where the future resumes and she is telling this story to a child.

The walls codify what the white-peaked vista
peeping out over teal seas, allowed to pasture--

somebody's transient, blooming, ranging thoughts.
A heart leaping, often imperceptible, both of the world
and of us,-- we need to pen the loved.

So our wants, they are already turning to concrete.
A path sprouts up from where you plant one foot,
lightly, on the green, ever-reaching growth of plants,

white cities climb outward, a garden of footsteps
from where the hill drank the sea and enjoined
that meeting with a rose, a temple.

Desire must be willing to want its own outcome, death.
We met on the ramparts of the new city of which
whole lives are built up to find. And now?

There are no ladders from top to bottom.
The sun just setting is just the same as a wild poppy,
hanging in the green whose outcrop already is beginning
to disassemble this stronghold back into hill and sea.

Up and down are not for all things what they are for the whole cosmos*
- Aristotle

There are clouds that pass overhead in sleeves of a darkening brocade.
Have you forgotten they are without weight to us or belonging?

If you are looking for an image to possess, you are one of us.
Not to desire, but to drift

above in the arms of those helpless dancers--
that is imagination.

The god of altitude stands outside
of when or where, enamoured by a lifted chin.

Push up with a force equal to your own displacement
and you may become. Push down at your ends

and you sink at once into this day,
it is a pearl at the centre of the earth.

If you are looking for an image to possess  or to
be possessed, you are one of us.

On an uncommonly warm night
swathes of trees stand like armies
camped under the moonlight.

And reflected under the mercurial light
are paths of plum blossoms
opening the dark in drops of white.

Allowed to range freely, one's sight
sways with the trees and leaps,
absorbed into the depth of night.

Below beams a cadre of yellow lights:
from the rooms we have gone into
away from the wide open afterlife.

When the leafy mass of vegetation has filled in
All the corners of the northern world's frame

And we are hemmed into its cool fragrance
To which we thought no more could be added,
This evening adds itself to the completed sum.

And caught in the updraft,
We let time reveal its material;
And I am glad to let the mote of dust float across the warmth of the long shadows
And linger there in the afterglow.

I'm with you in the old red mortar and brick,
the city our childhood played out in.

No one can touch
or bear the humility of the quiet things here.

That which was silenced decades ago
shred itself.

Downtown, you find self is not a container or apparatus
but a sunlight.  

And sometimes also a shadow. A crowd. Watch
how they fold down the granite stairs. Ripple in the wind.

They both unwind like a line from the fish reel
and stand still as a streetlight,

a name not spoken.

I take the fat bottle of wine from the shelf,
the smooth of its label and its dimpled punt
in both my hands as if to weigh it
before palming its slender neck knee-high.

It's placed in a crisp paper bag for me
and then it's swinging against my step,
snug from the stained-white roads,
in quickening tread my grip forgets its hold.

Already my eye gleams its opening
before a swift and satisfying emptying.
Blood pouring bottle dismissed
cork whereabouts, unknown.

In night's steady, undisturbed work
you are the first break.
Now as you begin to feel the dew,
see the snow now about you
through the plane, the vastness
which not even the birds have yet filled,
it sees you.

You have both fasted,
but it has feasted.

Eating your absence to become a little green,
this springiness, this welcoming of the not yet arrived
before the landslide of day
with its crevices made by
small decision, a road you took yesterday
that made you nut.

But now there there is no hardness to find.
You see it sailing towards you, half-formed
across the white, this lime in a snowstorm,
gleaming.

Eat and you will be as other men
scattering dust away from paths.

Follow it and you will always be looking back
as you climb behind it, uncertain,
you will disappear into daybreak.

The sudden accumulation of windy days. The hardening off of pondering in and over landscape. The chirrups of crickets carrying last songs outside the bedroom window. The evacuation of moisture and then the foilage coinciding with the bursting air; the downed leaves incidentally.

When the snows have come again
to sheath every fine bough,

I am without the word for when
it begins the next day to drop lightly
as if released from a bow.

When I climb a hill to where the sun hasn't set
and children careen down it
and drop into the sea of the valley below,

I do not know what I should do.
Run back down the bank?
No, there is a long walk ahead
to think about what children know.

When I have reached as far as I want to go
and see the mountain across me glow,
impassive and shining with the last light of day,

I know there is no announcement to be had
for why one must suffer to see fine things.

A man follows after his daughter with a video recorder. There is a shadow
lengthening from where she walks. He does the speaking for both of them
while she grows higher and higher in response. She used to stay behind him--

afraid of doors and strangers. Now she walks ahead. And he is delighted.
This name he has kept for an undisclosed star has gone beyond his
grasp, calling for re-naming. He does not understand. Though he has given up
all his old photo albums to purchase this image of her, it will be years

before she will turn from her hunger to inquire about the man. She cannot stop
running. For every picture he gives to her, she will race ahead a hundred feet.

Now that the proper instruments are arranged
his time of inscription nears.

He reads from the last page, backwards there
to find the beginning.

Whisking away the presumptions of page one
as mere suggestibility;

to read as the author reads is mission.
Why follow the staged footprints?

The book that neatly folds light between fine feathers
keeps out of sight what he wants,

headlong to reverse truth north, find relativity false  
to find the blazing word for "now."

A man must walk with a certain swagger when alone,
Falling sharply through all the corridors of the world,
Unaffected, thinking of the women who may receive him.

This, the Fall and the tangle: the acuteness of past days brought to their brittle end.

No more time is granted for all your half remembered mornings' dreams then before the heart's ready sacrifice, heel bone's tread.

Lady: what there is to say should have already
chosen a way between us. Pick your words?
They are the flowers the earth holds ripened upon
gentle palms. Know this and make your bouquet.

This song is called  sun of June. Or,
the self-invention of wildflowers.

Or, the sweetened fragrance of the outdoors
before the damp scent of dusk descends.

With the painted gold flitting through the woods
and wild lilies in all the right spots

silver blades of marsh grass stand up tall
"I will never desert you."

Desertion inevitably wears earthtones, like a thin smile,
this recollected song.