Blind to the beauty of the world,
he tenderly takes her hand
and brushes a kiss across it,
then blushes at his boldness.

Whatever she cherishes, he pounces
on to rationalize away into the ether.
It is Mars vs. Venus of the spirit.
But when blindness drives him
further inward, Venus invariably wins:

Her love cannot abide the boor,
the bore, the shamefully bold.

The book opens into infinite space,
myriad folios flutter --
parallel universes we inhabit
one person at a time.

Pages read forward and backward,
upward and downward --
no directions reliable,
no compass or rule.

Imagination stretches its
elasticized muscle --
to encompass any object:
Doric pillars on the sea.

The sea swallows itself,
book spines cover dry land --
tread on them lightly to
choose a way forward,

to reach a conclusion,
existential noir --
whodunits lead to a map
of the stars, pulsing

in invisible night ink.

One hand in a field of diamonds,
the other slopping pigs.
You are neither star nor earth,
as Rilke would have it. You are
always in medias res, always
on the way, thrown into the world
toward some dark horizon.

Never settled, never open,
never easy, never found.
Truth eludes you like a fugitive.
Your will evades everything
but pride. You run toward sunrise,
a being-unto-death. Now hisses
In a still small voice: then.
Here means elsewhere, there
means nowhere.

Turn back into the void. It taunts
you, tightens its grip on your gut,
spews smoke in your face.
You eat despair, regurgitate fear.
Where Titans swagger, you scurry
toward safety. You keep searching,
one hand in a field of sapphires,
the other trailing God.

Two glaciers that once kneaded the neck
of this tiny tourist town have bled
into the mountain -- now twin rivulets of ice
ambling aimlessly up the rocky, grey *****.
Robbed of its tourist prize, the town shrinks
like snow in the scalding sun.
I have not come for the snow nor the ice,
but for the warm-blooded Alpine splendor,
which cannot recede from this isolated valley.
The ghosts of glaciers haunt my path up the hills
into the belly of these bulky peaks, cemented to the earth
like pillars of stone sculpting themselves.
Tourists must settle for such shrunken beauty,
still as intoxicating as new wine.

Place your hands on your ankle
and squeeze tightly -- like
a tourniquet -- until your foot
expands, withers or explodes
from the pounds of pressure
damming your lower body’s
blood flow.

You can neither walk nor crawl --
your hands otherwise occupied --
so you must sit, half-cross-legged,
listless like a Beckett character,
supporting the burden of existence
-- its pain and tedium, its inexorable
cosmic absurdity.

Without budging, you survey
your surroundings -- a stage
unattended, only the foot lights
lit. You see your future waiting
In the wings among the heavy
velvet curtains drooping
with dust.

You sense an escape: You can
tumble toward your goal, bruising
your brow and back, but covering
distance like Quasimodo alighting
on his bells. You will collide with your
path forward: exchange your tourniquet
for a cross.

A troop of goats trot triple-time down a valley road,
a machinery of bells threshing the mountain air.
Little breaks the silence of the rural dukedom where
we reside. What does, gains immediate notice.

It is the happening of the moment passing through
to another place to pasture, the *******
Of the seasons. Though meadows burst with Kelly green,
and no trees have dropped their leaves, it is
autumn’s inaugural, where clouds hug the earth, mountains
curry themselves, goats scurry to new homes.

We, too, have shifted homes for a respite from the mundane.
The new now advertises surprise: This will not
appear elsewhere, will not last long enough to forget
where we came. With time, we follow the goatherd’s
abrupt call and hope to be rewarded with a golden bell.

The wrathful snap of rifle shots ricocheted
off the vast, seeping stone walls.
Cable cars descended to the valley floor
with a high-pitched hum that ripped
the curtain of quiet in two: no silence in Lauterbrunnen.

Bullets knew nothing of where they lodged.
Cable cars intruded on the space of Europe’s
tallest waterfall, whose spidery flow
continued unabated, oblivious to the human
connection below. The falls knew that Paradise
does not exist in any given, worldly place.

The Amazon River basin brutally burns;
glaciers vanish from greenhouse gases; the ocean
self-elevates: sea level a lost fantasy of the past.
Still, harmony hums louder than the knitted ropes
of steel squealing under unrelenting friction.

Silence has no purchase here; it is dead time, unproductive,
waiting to be filled. I fill it with my rambling
thoughts, held captive by the valley’s massive U-shape.
Maybe it is enough just to think and stroll,
the acrid smell of gunpowder in your nose, your
thoughts echoing like ancient hymns within your skull.