A water lily opens,
an orange hand atop
a murky koi pond.

The flower's pad floats past
like a slim man's buoy.
No one notices.

Beauty is of no value
to the practically minded.
Soon, the orange hand closes.

On the other side of silence,
A lonely, primeval drone.
Wind hisses through the violets.
The dejected spirit moans.
i reach for eternal solace,
But grasp only rough-edged stone.
Here, climbing toward the Highlands,
My sureness of hiking honed.
I cross and rush to Inverness
In search of the ancients' bones.
They bless me with their hieroglyphs
I cannot decode alone.
I wander through the mistiness,
Keep clambering for my home.

He invented space anew,
painting subtle cubes in bright colors
flattened by a wide, gray light.

Critics called him the creator
of the modern age. He did not listen.
Shuttered from the trappings
of artistic success, he eschewed
the Parisian salon scene with its
sophisticated circles of envy and lies.

Fiercely perfectionist, he destroyed
canvases that fell short of his
extreme, exacting standards.
But he would always begin again.
The essence remained; only
the execution had faltered.

His art mesmerized many of
his fellow painters; they saw
the world with new eyes.
Yet he sacrificed the reactions
of others to achieve an impossible
incorruptibility of life and art.
They intertwined like a
double helix of DNA,
companion contradictions
seeking a final synthesis.

A cramped wooden door
in a rough stone wall in Aix-en-Provence
leads to his studio, a humble
hovel where modern art began.
We live there still.

First, know the exits;
stage left, stage right.
The play may be much
longer or shorter than you imagine.
Be prepared to bow out gracefully.

Next, know your lines.
Make them authentic, real.
They reveal your character,
for good or ill. Never deliver
them halfheartedly or dully.

Next, polish your actions.
They keep your audience on its toes.
Act naturally but with modulated emotions.
Melodrama has not been invented.
Lugubriousness is simply in plain bad taste.

Finally, study your author.
Is he smarter than you? Or does he
merely have the creative power you lack?
He moves you according to his whims.
He judges you on each day's performance.

And remember as you rehearse: There are no second acts.

I see him,
dressed in a crisp, new suit,
button-down, baby blue shirt,
red power tie.

His diction is flawless,
his banter witty and warm.
He exudes extreme self-confidence.
He knows his own worth.

Soon he begins to pontificate
on the presidency and politics.
Surprisingly, his remarks are nuanced,
sensitive, caressed with tolerance.

Then he begins to sweat,
his eyes downcast; his body slumps.
What dark, deep secret is he hiding?
What arcane cosmic law has he violated?

In all absurdity, I see him suddenly
as Joseph K. The burghers soon
join me. The verdict is in.
With practiced dexterity, they slit his pale throat.

There is nothing left
when the snows swirl,
the wizened apple falls,
the hills turn tawny
and dry, our love lost
in the undulant
folds of the earth.
We turn together
in search of the
blessing of the cirrus-
shredded sky. Hawks
soar, return to land,
then swoop away again,
carrying our hearts
in their hypodermic
talons, now heavy
with wounded prey.
Shall we step backward
or forward? Shall we
glide silently away,
or run moaning
to the hills? All directions
collapse into one.
All directions point
elsewhere, never here,
never there, never
where we stand,
never where we stare,
yearning for the steely
hawk's return, yearning
for more than this
chilly impasse, for more
than the frisson of
this no way out.

Their baskets tell a story by design.
Jewelry shines with the wealth of turquoise stone.
Navajos see all Nature as a sign
Of creation myths as solid as bone.
We are formed in the world, souls out of time.
We find our place with Spirit’s help alone.
Humility, grace our reason and rhyme.
Our songs of thanks stir Mother Earth to groan
As we gradually turn deaf and blind
To the harvest she has graciously sown.
All kinds deep in one, and one in all kinds.
We must remember the vast riches shown.
All baskets tell a story by design.
In them, lie sacred secrets of our home.

Charcoal, silver, sea-blue clouds muscle up
in clumps of dark impasto, caking the arch
of the spherical nave of the northwestern sky.
Cloaked in clusters of paler blue, the gods

of Olympia push eastward. They buckle under
the weight of this mortal firmament that hems
them in with the force of towering thunderheads.
Perhaps only Titanic heroes can survive the

titillating sizzle of lightning strikes. Naked
filaments of electricity hurl holograms of color:
a tangle of negative ions, radical brush strokes,
and Nietzsche's will-to power. Eradicate and destroy.

Golden-green fields of ripened wheat ripple
in the dying sunset, the final line that fierce
Titanic warriors dare not cross. They no
longer belong to the Earth: The mortal-divine

divide that once made them flourish now opens
into an absurdly widening chasm. No landing
place, no welcome space. Redundancy redounds.
So they don their ancient armor and pointed helmets

again, swinging butcher-sharp broadswords
in the sky. Achilles drags his blood-smeared blade
through the clouds around and around Priam’s
blood-rich frame, mocking the way Hector's

ravaged corpse circled mindlessly in the sands
of Troy. Today, such hate-hewed heroics are but
buried shards, fragments battered with blatant
disregard. Now, these violent vistas lie visible

only to the Tiresiases of millennia past. Savagery
has sown the wind, reaped the whirlwind: cyclones
of blind, wild urges cutting up moral character
into bite-sized portions. Rank desolation flees,

sublimated, subjugated to the mind's many-
splendored mansions of poetry. Homer chants
hymns to Troy, to the Hades-bound heroes, experts
in evisceration, in swift evasion, in black-blood death.

The glory of war today rots into nothingness,
sputtering under charcoal clouds pouring rain.
Once Leda waddled behind Zeus like an imprinted
cygnet. No longer. Below the sunset, humans hover

free above their handiwork, suffering from the humid
heat, striving to attain a semblance of household pride.
Their gods-slain ghosts adorn the family crest, as they enlarge
the world's unbelieving chasm with each new shock of wheat.

The lighthouse looms
far off-shore,
its blinding Cyclops eye
circling like a hawk
closing in on weary prey.

The beam blips to
infinity, signaling
wayward ships to slow
their progress through
the choppy sea.

From here, on land,
the house rears up like
a medieval tower, a defense
against dragons menacing
murky depths unknown.

I blink back, trying my best
to reach infinity on my own.
The sea is no substitute. Its
vastness sweeps to a pinnacled
caesura on the Western islands.

Ask Melville whether the spiny
reefs held infinity at bay.
Only for a fleeting moment.
Only until a colossal crash on
the firmament sounded. Paradise lost.

We have no paradise here, save
the spectacular Oregon coast
after sunset, when flat sand lights
up like a neon walkway and
purple streaks paint the sky.

Star fish, in puerile pink, cling
to black boulders. Waves
dive deep. The lighthouse
keeps signaling to no one.
No shred of infinity to be found.

I followed her down the Spanish Steps
her pink dress billowing in the wind
she was Hellenism in motion
the tireless grace of youth

in the plaza I dashed into Keats' house
a mausoleum of dead Romantic poets
and their ever-living verse death masks
decorated the shelves as Byron and Shelley

rose in shadow a lair of brotherhood
rife with premature deaths and ill-lived lives
I peered into Keats' life mask looked up
and in the doorway languid Nike in pink

I handed her a new volume of Keats' odes
she smiled hollowly set the book aside
and searched for wings to flee human contact
missing a head her ancestor guards the Louvre

Like an army from the Great War catapulting
out of trenches to battle blindly with enemy
machine guns and mortar, tourists take fire
on the Great Plaza of Salamanca. We line up
to sip ruby-red Rioja, savor eyelash-thin slices
of jamon, spy on the antlike antics
of the maneuvering crowds, who cross
the square in bunched-up patterns
of inscrutable geometry, of indirection.
They traipse from here to there and
back again on reconnaissance, as castanets
click cacophonously off the concrete plain,
and conversations carry skyward to the sun.

On the walls, bas-relief profiles of Spanish heroes
populate a paneled paean to celebrity, to spirit's might.
St. John of the Cross, Cervantes, even Quixote himself
look down upon us in one-eyed stares of forced patronage,
unwilling participants in the guerrilla tactics of sharing
their World Heritage riches with the disinherited of the world.

Conspicuous by her absence, St. Teresa of Avila
levitates above the maddening mobs to reach
the outskirts of her interior castle, which houses
myriad rooms of virtue that no ordinary mortal can
attain. Her destination: perfection, tilting at
the immense spiritual windmill in the sky. She blesses
me as the waiter carries another tray of wine, endless
libations for the infinite thirst of adventure, discovery,
and the spoils of travel. Winking at Cervantes,
I turn into a temporary resident, unlikely scion of Spain,
and masticate another wafer-thin portion of jamon.
My taste buds dance the flamenco in delight. I sigh.

O how Hemingway loved this sacred soil, his soul
tangled in the bullring, with its ovals of blood and sand.
Newspaper in hand, he stands in the stands to watch
the horses and woo the Spanish black that wraps
around the ring. Mind and spirit settle into the nosebleed
section on concrete benches that radiate heat
in the afternoon. Soon death will follow, not for them,
but for the witless bulls, fierce, innocent victims
of the blood lust of war. Who has nostalgia for this now?
Who kills the monstrous beast within? It rages and rages,
pawing sand, seeing red, seething with hatred
of its tormentor, thinking -- no, feeling -- only "attack."

I have followed the trail of Santiago de Compostela
longingly in my mind, peering over the Pyrenees from
the French plateau that self-abates at the foot of the peaks.
I watch pilgrims scramble through Roland's Breach,
a toothless gap planted in the middle of saw-tooth summits.
Through it shines a light to beatify Iberia. I stand on
the plain, St. James' clam shell firmly in hand,
my walking stick crooked as a branch bearing fruit.
Ahead, only spectacle and absolution await, incense
swinging through the nave like smoke from a failed
mortar round. We stand in waves of penitents, praying
that Santiago still curries favor for the faint at heart.
War is hell, say the toungeless bulls. Listen to them bellow.

O America!
I wander through your golden-red fields.
Vines with still-green grapes snake toward the sun.
Just how fecund you are!

Kick-started beauty lays me low.
Prairies burn with the fire of desire.
Judge me fickle in my allegiance to you.
How little I sense of your natural glory.

Great basalt stones border the ocean.
Vapors of cirrus clouds streak the sky.
Down the beach-packed path I stroll.
Every starfish clings to life at low tide.

Untold riches remain stubbornly unseen.
Great waves of brine bathe the shore.
Xanadu basks underwater.
Atlantis skims the floor of the sea.

Beyond every seagull, a screeching cry fades.
Mountains suddenly beckon inland: a sea of stone.
Setting my sights eastward, I take the plunge.
The slopes and peaks call to me; meadows blossom.

Here, on my way, I exult in your massive splendor.
Who can ever be sated by your majesty?
Nature mesmerizes. I renew my pledge to you.

The streets of Rome swirl with ***** water.
My clothes drenched, my shoes soiled
By this unholy baptism of nature’s fury.
The Watchmaker sleeps.
The heavens fail to answer, protect.
Behind us, the Colosseum circles broken time
In fragments: blood, sand and stone.
Sacrificed to the elements, we resist
Our fate, resist defeat.
Blue skies hide their faces
Behind *****, distorted mirrors.
Nothing to see here. Only
Rain falls like tears. Only
Tears fall like rain.
Dry land does not exist
Except elsewhere. Dystopia.
Here, curbside, umbrellas sagging,
Italy drowns.

Fog shrouds the dark hills.
Gray sky, gray autostrada.
Rome shines ancient light.

Yes, I am late for the wedding ;
my car was hit
at the fifth intersection south
of the church. I apologize for
the intractable circumstances
of life.

But time has no meaning
for true lovers. There is only
the Eternal Now,
the Eternal "I do".
We have wrapped
ourselves in its
glittering blue.

Already,
we have said our vows
in private
sotto voce.
Already we are One.

Once, in the moment, struck still and silent,
Shadows creep along the hills toward dusk.
Crows blacken the sky; the leader pilots
The followers toward the clouds, fine as dust.
The moon sports a halo of mist, piled up
To sweep across the star-splayed night, which must
Uphold our dream of a world less strident,
A world where truth is beauty, beauty truth.
Prescient as he was, Keats saw violence
As nature’s faulty mechanism: rust.
If not in poems, then in his own demise.
There’s no glory in death, ****** upon us.
But in the moment, scared, still and silent,
A darkened beauty slithers toward dusk.

Poetry hunkers down behind
the freshly finished facade
of language; each link to the lexicon
lovingly chiseled into the smooth,
grey stone. Here, precision reigns over all.

Vainly held in place for the length
of a reading, the facade glides
toward a shimmering white dot
on the horizon.The perfect poem, perhaps?
Here, perspective precipitates all.

Like quicksand, a marshy morass
of words ***** at the poet's feet
as he strains to match
the facade's pace, stride for muddy stride.
If he succeeds, pride will power all.

Poetry is breath, inadequately lodged
in the poet's ever-shrinking body.
Reading wrests the silent syntax,
inhales form through its viscera, exhales
metaphor and rhyme. Like becomes like, becomes all.

Critics aside, the poem thrives as a living organism;
it breathes itself far beyond the face of the facade;
it swirls into the stratosphere, flying
straight toward the cosmos' breathless edge.
Here, the getting of wisdom is all.

Deceit is the deceiver
who tarnishes our golden words
with the blood of angels.

It is a diamond blood, hard enough
to etch a tattoo on the iron in our soul.
A mendacious message
that even poets cannot read
without swooning.

Deceit deceives itself,
stalks us like wounded prey,
until we lie down,
dead weight, to read no more.

We cannot see what follows us to
the chambers of the underground.
Does deception supplant sanctity of mind?
Who harvests the center of the soul?

Deceit deceives deceit.
Meaning we have lost all meaning
except for poems written
in angels' blood.

1.
A perfect cube, this precious steel cage,
with its endless accouterments
of nourishment and bedding,
exercise and entertainment.

No pain, no suffering,
no indignities, no boredom.

The blessings of technology,
salvation of science.
Nothing left to be desired:
The cure of comfort eliminating all need.

2.
His blood pink eyes fixed gazing on eternity,
the tiny gray human once more begins the day.

He rises in silence, no pretense of rationality,
no meaningless disdain for the task set before him.

Pawing and praying for his effective release,
he gnaws incessantly at the cold steel around him,
yearning in anguish for the conditions of true struggle;
willing, affirming the inevitability of defeat.

Bernini’s sculptures float
Over fountains like
A ship’s mast set in stone,
Straining to stray off-course.
I follow the muscular, hysterical
Flow of the Four Rivers.
Lethe bubbles underground.
Step lightly.
Chubby-faced children spew
Showers between their cheeks.
Nothing is quiet in Piazza Navona,
Spreading to the seven hills
Like a blanket of bedlam.
Heaving waves of tourists
Speak to themselves in tongues.
Whose gift to Roma is this?
The Four Winds? The spigots spilling
Holy water onto the hordes
Of heedless souls?
Neptune stares down on
My dampened bald spot.
I will Photoshop it out
If he snaps my picture.
Or some other petite, American tourist
Will, craning her head
Like a dolphin
Flopping on Neptune’s trident.
Navona is a nova of marble
And foam.
Specters live here.
They shout here, they circle.
Bernini’s spawn.

I sit weary is the grey, shadowed corner of a monk's cell.
My ragamuffin clothes fit me well.
When I read, the neurons in my brain fire out of control.
They erupt through my conical hair: helmet for space patrol.

My body language belies my intellectual yearnings.
Literature invigorates me: I blast off without earnings.
Ideas, images prove their own reward;
rockets, like Quixote's windmills, form a vast horde

Of cosmic challengers, who meet me face to face.
There is no lonelier place to land than outer space.
All this, of course, comes from a tattered book.
Stop reading, and I can take a long look

At my isolated setting, scattered but safe.
I feel the innocence of Earth's first waif,
who leads me on through page after page.
I am a stranger still to the atomic age.

Cavernous shadows and clouds encase
the uneven edges of my dream, a dark,
disparate dungeon of beclouded jewels.

No splendor gleams through the pinpoint
gaps. No radiance revels in the penetrating
rays that steadily stalk my internal darkness.

In the deepest center of my dream, I swoon,
wounded by love, which is the light, which
is the Living Flame of Love that sears away

all signs of soot and smudge and stain, all
distorting ripples in the window of the soul,
all disruptive detritus of the dream, its dreaded

diffidence at the prospect of illumination,
of receiving all that it is capable of receiving,
of riding the photons and waves of light

into vast fields of grandeur and affirmation,
of transformation, spilling over with power,
being and virtue, lost in labyrinthine rays

that curve and whirl and roll and plummet and bend
round the center that centers itself outside the circle
of my dream, now flooded with light, an elliptical path

that turns back on itself, leaking through crevices,
slicing up clouds, brimming with the brightest
white, a radiant white aglow with beams of white,

engulfing the bejeweled white that penetrates the center
of the soul, lanced by legions of white, lanced by flaming love,
now penetrated and pinned to the light, until I become the light.

Circles of rope, white, grey and bilious, squeeze around
Wetterhorn Mountain’s chest, leaving only its angled
forehead in sight. Like the tail of St. George’s fiery dragon,
the clouds sink into stone, ******* down their grip
until nothing is left breathing, until nothing is left. Stone
emits a feeble cry of fear and trembling. The dragon’s
tail squeezes tighter, intent on suffocation -- severe oxygen
deprivation above timberline.

Rain is the Sancho Panza to the mountain’s Quixote;
the circles of Dante’s Hell mirror the clouds’
constant clinging below the pointed, harpoon peak.
You can climb this mountain as in Purgatory, but its path
is polished to a slippery ***** from the clouds’
constant rains: such a dubious, deadly affair. Only St. Georges
persevere here; only the holy ones manage not to stumble
on the bulky, slick rocks.

Rain is not a baptism, but an ablution.
Rain threatens the clarity of the day. Rain threatens
the clinging of the day to the present. Always, such rain will pass.
Puddles in post holes, precarious ascent to the cloudless light.
Rain clears the path in hindsight but nurtures the future to come
quickly, like cacti with brief, brilliant blossoms.
Let the thorns be your payment for grasping the blooms.

History deceives us with many fictions.
We mistake fantasies as if they’re real.
Such illusions create stringent frictions,
Giving past emotions their strongest seal.
Our heritage deserves valediction,
But narrative art asserts its appeal.
Myth, story, fable and archaic diction
Overwhelm concrete facts; their essence steal.
I long for the past without reflection
Of ancestral interference or zeal.
But there is no version without mixture
Of deceptions and meanings we can feel.
Past accounts remain shrouded in factions,
Whose rifts of fabrication will not heal.

The company owned
the village.
Residents slaved in the textile factory,
Huddled in Communitat, a social,
industrial haven for the soul.
They shared a workplace,
Housing, amenities made
by modernista architects.
All that was missing was
A church.

Gaudi stepped in
in 1898 and conceived his
elaborate construction.
Perennially distracted,
he finished only the crypt.
A keystone project that
synthesized politics, nature
and faith.
Abandoned, in flagrante, in 1914.

The portico forms a forest of
leaning columns.
Convex vaults shoot from
polygonal arches.
Symbols, monograms,
mosaic iconography
adorn the rugged façade.

The Trinity dwells within
the treasures of the crypt.
A dove perches without.
Alpha and Omega,
beginning and end of
a grand, operatic idea.

Workers bowed in
worship, thanked God
for their jobs,
Gaudi for his art.
No one sits there now.
An empty sprawl of the spirit.
Only ghosts settle in
organic-shaped pews.

1.

You descend through night's black skies
an elongated bullet suffused with blue light
from your window the cityscape lumbers awake
like a crab side-stepping fires of flotsam

Your soft shell flashes with pinpricks of stars
plucked from your earth-bound parapets
no one says "castle" or "torches" anymore
yet how you long for the glow of the past

Generators churn energy to seal you
to brothers in arms guarding the runway
your ears pop as you widen your mouth
and swallow the moon hanging by a string

2.

How you love this desert blanketed in sand
how you wrap it around your troubles and sigh
how it obscures the mist of your crab nebula
how love outlasts the sky like a fresco

Reach across the aisle to your sister in chains
plumb the depths of her quiet revery she knows
what light obscures she knows the cost of darkness
tell her night slakes every thirst in the romance of light

The crab sleeps half-buried in sand it stirs only
to shift positions even sleep cannot ease its pain
you know now that this flight remains in shadow
O how light loves the drama of our checkerboard lives

I saunter through the silent square alone.
The cobblestones gleam from the misty moon.
Midnight, or so I think; the time’s unknown.
A trip to Bruges, where flower boxes bloom,
And canals spout beauty to make you groan
In awe of how the Lowlands can swoon
Under simple charms: an enlightened tone.
In the moonlight, St. Bartholomew’s looms,
A ship for lost souls; its deck made of stone.
Frans Hals, the portrait painter, will sail soon
To the studio where his art was honed.
Haarlem has a legacy, hid at noon;
Only in the dark have its treasures shone.
As dawn nears, the great reversal comes soon.

(After Louis Glück, winner of
the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature)

I rise into the faithful, virtuous
night, misty and mysterious,
illumined by the spying moon.
White shadows point the way.

I am the light beneath the
expansive canopy of stars,
tiny and malleable, trekking
through my limn-like work.

A peak, a pinnacle, a red
plateau. These haunt me,
captivate me. I am the lost
pilgrim, perched on the edge

of expectation, serenaded
by the dark music of loss.
I am open, shapeless, ever
wondering at the capacious

sky. What shall I gain or lose,
bound for permanent separation,
all so my soul may not be
distracted as I limn the light?

The monks pressed wine for the Pope in Avignon.
The Vatican drank fizzy water.
We tasted hand-squeezed orange juice
and eclairs for our petit-dejeuner.
Breakfast at Mas Vieux was a spiritual affair.
Transubstantiation of goat cheese and bread.
Here, the spirit thrives on mortar and stone.
Ancient walls as thick as oaks.
No town lies in sight: the isolation of prayer.
Old Farm grows a bumper crop of transient souls.
They crunch the gravel, find a body called home.

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.

1.
Pink carnations bloom
in stenciled flower boxes,
looking down on Bruges'
grand canal. Locals say they
live in the Venice of the north.

Tourists speed by on guided
boat trips, rigid, peering straight
ahead. The carnations sigh:
They could die from such
indifference. The boat leaves

a white, frothy wake, which
whisks away all the passengers'
woes until the next hour of
ennui sets in, restless for
distraction. I see no need

for speed as I wander the cobbled
lanes laid from the 13th century
to the present age, signs of Bruges'
vast prosperity and pride as the
exquisite lace capital of the world.

Luxurious wares for a luxurious price,
more valuable than the goods
the city once traded as the bustling,
commercial hub of northwestern Europe.
Sundries bought and sold at bargain rates.

I have not come here for
commerce, but for Bruges' late
medieval beauty, for its religious
miracles, for the marvelous making
magic of Belgian lace. All legendary,

all fine, all the subject of tall
tales, of tattling to history about
what can be found and what
can be lost. All draped in gold leaf,
expertly pressed into regal crowns.

2.
After a hurried and forced
lunch break, I scamper to the
Basilica of the Holy Blood
in search of a glimpse of the vial
of, well, said blood with its cloth

that Joseph of Arimathea used to wipe the
blood from the body of Christ. Preserved
for centuries, the vial and cloth made their way
to Bruges from the Holy Land during one
of the unholy wars of the cruel Crusaders.

I have to push my way through throngs
of the faithful to reach the room with the
relic that has mesmerized travelers for
centuries after centuries since the Crucifixion.
Like so many vessels of the supernatural,

the vial disappoints. How can one verify
the holy, the sacred, the miraculous?
The divine element eludes us, remains
hidden, designed to try our faith, to test it,
to measure it against the rule of genuine

devotion. Satisfied that my presuppositions
have proven sound, I squeeze back onto
the streets of the main square and head past
the edge of town toward the windmills and ****,
holding back the sea and its myriad mysteries.

3.
The windmills whisper, "Holland," while the
****, stoic and stolid, remains mute. Sails
whoosh above me, ready to fly from the
Earth, ready to slice the wind into pieces
before it swoops past the city tower and onto

the square. The breeze bears a message that
I can barely decipher. Written in code, it declares
something about the efficacy of the Holy
Blood as a salvific force to bring peace
to the true believer, as open as the windmills

to the wooing of the Spirit. My antennae rise up,
although nothing more seems said. That is
not possible. So I hike the **** of the ****
toward the gray, billowing clouds that herald
their own message of rain, of storm, of baptism.

Such struggles sting more severely than
ennui: Conflicts lack resolution. Resolve leans
on the arms of faith. Arms carry the weight
of the world. The world whimpers in a
whirlwind stirred up by muscular clouds

of doom. These dark thoughts hound me
as I make my way back to the cobbled
streets and the security of the familiar city.
Soon I stumble onto a paint-peeling
open door boldly illuminated by a long

rectangle of light that washes over a group
of older women, their bobbins and
thread and rapid-fire fingers flashing
in a blur across their velvet pillows,
creating magic with skill and aplomb:

the confidence of hard-earned experience.
There are no presuppositions against such art.
Lace making resounds with the spirit of
blessed endurance, with a sanctity of
purpose, a sanity of mind that only

the vial of Holy Blood provides for those
who believe, who see the divine in the failures
of the mundane, who worship a vulnerable deity.
"Only a suffering God can help," Bonhoeffer proclaimed.
The carnations grimly nod, hang their heads and sigh.

The flesh must be subdued,
for it cuckolds the mind
with its gargantuan girth.
To resist it we need
clear reason,
not dark desire; myriad ideas,
not the anarchic imagination.

The weight of finitude
bears down upon us like
a vertical vise. We spread eagle,
arms outstretched, raised in
a straining V to stop
the mechanical pressure
from crushing us.

We will not die from this ploy.
But the weightless will no longer
fight back. The struggle, eternally
repeated, exhausts both flesh
and mind. Ideas still carry
the heft of conviction; yet
they barely move the needle
on the scale.

2.
Movement springs up like
a desert miracle or mirage.
Powerful leg muscles find
nowhere to turn but endless
rock and sand. The sky
offers no help: as empty as
the listless day. Clouds
pull apart like puffs of
moistened cotton;
they cannot mend the
empty self, for they themselves
need mending.

The flesh plays a shell game
with lust and love. Divine the
winner, then slap away any
sleight of hand that might
lead you astray.

3.
I wander the arid byways
of New Mexico; one road
leads straight to the tomb of
D. H. Lawrence. He took
more than his pound
of flesh; his blood
pumps an irrigating flow
into English literature. Flesh
turned to word in his mind.
And like a phoenix, it sprouted
wings and soared breathlessly
into the stratosphere,
far above the dusty canyons
and the dry arroyo of desire.

evening falls heavily
like footsteps in the sand
gliding with the weight
absorbed in the formless

moonlight reflects
in the dull moving water
through the saw-toothed-edged grasses
all images refract

he takes a step, stumbles
in the darkness, falls heavily
the white sand wrings his ankle
the silent burning in his hands

the pale moon has robbed him
his cries abnegated
he dies
a rivulet of clearer water
trickling creases to the open sea

The wind lifts the moon above the darkened wheat.
I touch the water
and think of nothing.

The cold night beckons
to the slow, bending shadows.
Between the trees
a feather falls.

The leaves divide my breathing
toward the long, ashen poplars.

There now.
Listen.

The clear movement’s gone.

1.

Dust devils swirl on the desert floor.
Saguaro cacti raise their arms
in praise or an invisible stick-up.
No gunman looms on the horizon.

My father drives us home
from California to Kansas
in a brown '61 Chevy station wagon.
His goal: to get there as soon as possible.

My brother and I bake in the back seat.
The air-conditioning freezes over.
We roll down the windows to a stifling
wall of heat. Soon, we will cross

Death Valley, already 111 degrees
at mid-morning. I squirm and worry
that we do not have enough
gas to make it. We are the only car

on the road. Emptiness breeds around us.
My imagination peoples the void
with phantoms, characters from comic books
and drugstore Westerns. Ghosts hover over

my memory now; they hold the key
to my travels. I must invoke them again.
I hear the rumble of the American Southwest:
canyons and buttes, mountains and hoodoos.

2.

On the outskirts of the Grand Canyon,
my father searches in vain for a place to stay.
All motels teem with the smell of curry --
for him, the stench of war in Calcutta,
anathema to a young Army Seabee
stationed leagues and leagues from home.

The neon light flashing VACANCY over
the whitewashed, A-frame office
might as well say NO. We do not stop.
We sleep in the car, the four of us
restive and uncomfortable, awakened
at last by sunrise over the North Rim.

A sage-scented day has begun
under a yellow-lavender sky.
There are still miles and miles to go,
as Frost put it. But something changed
in the night. Barreling down the barren blacktop
we have already gotten there, absence our new home.

The wedding feast is readied.
The giant tent firmly staked.
The table overflows with the seven wonders
of the palate. No one should be discontent.

Outside, the breeze stirs the dunes:
a shape-shifting horizon
seemingly too distant to matter.

All things well underway,
the groom stands to deliver
his speech, as the feast inexorably unfurls
in the blazing afternoon.
"Dearly beloved," he says.
"This is the happiest day of my life...."

As he heads back to his bride,
he feels a slight sting on his
heel. One of those pesky flies, no doubt.

Seated, he again turns to his wife with
yet another loving look, then collapses
onto the table, clattering dishes and glasses.

Within an hour, he is dead.
A slight breeze stirs the dunes.
Beneath the table, a fat-tailed scorpion
scurries toward the horizon.

From York, I booked a train seat, then arrived
At Leighton Buzzard, where my good friends came.
We had dinner with whisky; I survived.
Their tidy house, **** and span, looked the same.
In Stratford, we found Shakespeare still alive,
And Anne Hathaway’s Cottage earned its fame.
We reminisced: In the Lake District thrived.
At Wastwater, the wild we could not tame.
In Grasmere, bountiful meals were prescribed.
Wordsworth and Coleridge wrote poems to shame
Those who keep their meager talent alive.
Back to reality in Wing we came,
Renewed bonds from which our friendship derived.
That they ended, only death was to blame.

Roman thunderstorm crashes
around our ears.
The Forum gurgles gamely
under water.
Rain pelts, ricochets off
slippery stones, shrouded ruins.
History drowns before our eyes.
No road back stands passable.
So let us swim through the ages.

She brought me dozens of photographs.
White, shining virgins
on the eve of their weddings.

I kept them for days,
these dull, glossy surfaces;
the faint grease of fingerprints
screened the black-and-white view.

I returned them in September
on the white eve of autumn.
She took them in silence,
a sadness I knew.

"I wanted you to choose one,
for whom you had fallen."

"But I'm past the age of falling,"
I said,
"For love, I only stumble."

We eat heads of grain
as if they were candy.
The mothering earth,
fecund, flush with seasons,
brings forth a bounty
for the husbandman
and squirrel. Worry
wilts beside abundance.

The cloudy sky reflects in the summer pond,
After the long-anticipated rains.
Cattle herd as one; at the water, bond.
They seek moisture, rare on the dusty plains.
A cottonwood gives shade, but no one comes:
Emptiness of the land a stark refrain.
Of the flat horizon, Kansans are fond.
It opens out to an infinite vein
Of loneliness and hope, like a fine frond,
Storing the last baptismal font of change.
Nature terrifies and soothes, justice cons.
It brings as much pleasure as wanton pain.
Still, we pin our longings on Eden’s song,
To hear the Earth’s sirens never again.

roto-tilled clouds:
swirling sooty silver-grays and purples
moving ever-northward
perhaps like geese gliding swiftly atop
the hazy-blue mist
the dew-covered horizon    brown    green
geese gliding home to Canada

Canada
clouds like heavy fibers being pulled apart    slowly
like cotton
like hoary hairs thinning on top
an old man's head

for they are moving northward now
I can sense it
it is not the Earth moving
I am facing west through trees
and these clouds keep moving/thinning to the dark
yellows    pinks    faded

dark clouds soon obscure the pallid glowing harvest moon
this golden grapefruit hanging above the Earth

it is Kansas and it is dusk

this is the meaning of orange autumns:
to stand looking westward beyond the well-worn wooden handles
of some rusting rotting ploughshare
and know that clouds move north swiftly
perhaps to Canada

Twin stallions gallop beside the sea,
their flanks sweating, curved backs
foaming, long, dark manes flying
through the brine, braided into whips.

Riderless, they splay the sand beneath
the tide, charge ahead as if in battle, flash
large white eyes of fiery purpose. Or is it
merely pleasure in taking stock of the sea?

I could sing of Pegasus, the perfect portrait
of their power, perfect myth of their reality,
perfect essence of their being, perfect eternal
Idea, as the hallowed Plato would have put it.

But I know only the Pegasus of my childhood
imagination, channeled through the huge, spotted
horses on my grandfather's ranch, larger than my
little life, all muscle and nerves and jittery to bolt.

I know only the lush leather saddles, hand-tooled,
badged with Baroque designs, smooth to the touch,
gear of Olympians, smelling of alfalfa, the hay stacked
high in barns for the uncertain days of winter.

I have sung the secrets of the sea, like Homer,
with his wine-dark waters that carried the long,
black Greek ships toward Troy. My twin stallions
surge to trample the ancient city's ruins. Ilium no more.

How I yearn to run with them, to speed over
the sands as if they were nothing but solid air,
as if they raised no resistance to racing, as if my
hooves could heave into them like a golden paddock.

O the line between dreaming and waking
is so fluid and frail. I breathe deeply and feel
the stallions fly over the ranch, up the canyon,
climbing, ever climbing into the atmosphere,

which constrains no thought, no memory,
no deep feeling for flight itself, for rising
over the ocean and its endless tracts of water,
its boundless kingdom of life and death.

How do I go on, here in my loneliness, ornate
saddle at my side, a shoot of hay between
my teeth, champing at the bit to tie myself
to the stallions' tails, to quiver my way

into the shadowed arroyos of dreams, where I
could walk without limping, where I could fly
without falling, where I could shake the brine
from my hair and laugh in the face of Zeus?

The stallions perform pristine pirations,
stealing time from the future, soaring past
days of ice and shivering woes, hay carrying
the bitter taste of sand and seaweed and brine.

I place my saddle on the ground, sit beside it,
and trace the swirls of its swift designs, spinning
me into dreams, into the weak waves that creep
upon the beach, that breach the line of death, only

to return again. Is time a straight arrow fast in flight
or an ever-spiraling circle like the Earth? How can we run
so far only to reach nowhere, only to teach ourselves
to heartlessly crack the whip, as cold as winter’s grip?

1.
We all die daily,
our breath shuddering
from the body,
the body shriveling
into matter, which
languishes, empty
and inert,
envying the
labyrinth of the soul.

What bright spirit
lures us back
into the light, stirs
us to awaken out
of our dark night?
What burden can
we still bear as
ghosts of ourselves,
erstwhile egos
chanting nada,
nada, nada as we
furtively avoid
the mirror of
Narcissus?

2.
We all die open-
eyed, gaping
at the void,
or a vast
field of stars
swirling and
sparkling above
the blackened
upper
atmosphere,
illuminating
the full breadth
of Being:
The Great
I Am of
everything that is.

Beside us, the cosmic
jester and curator
of the world
adds another
plastic frame to
a crudely rendered
self-portrait. Which
self paints the self?
Which self becomes
object and subject
simultaneously,
having its cake
and eating it, too,
but failing to notice
the crumbs
on the floor
and the icing
on its lips?

3.
So many questions
that challenge
the mastery of our
language, that
stretch the boundaries
of our mind like
an inky rubber band
dangerously
near to breaking
from overuse.
No answers
can verify
themselves
to us.
They demand
judgment, an
accounting that
only the dead
can deliver from
the far side of
the grave, beyond
the end of history,
beyond the erasure
of time.

4.
Daily we all die
only to rise again,
our lumpish
flesh electroshocked
into animation,
our soul newly
dependent on poetry
to dial in its
upper frequencies
before they
fade away
into static.
The tuner picks up
an AM station
out of Juarez.
The Mariachi
music reminds
us that this
energy may sputter
and flag like
a somnambulist,
but it never dies.

Fountains fly skyward,
Splattering the boxy hedges,
Impeccably cut,
That line the paths.
Villa d’Este overflows
With sculpted beauty,
Elegant and crumbling.

The infrastructure does not hold.
Static masks bereft of water
Spew blank, dry stares.
Multi-breasted statues
Nourish the grounds
With milk.

Still, we carry on under
Neptune’s ghost.
Gods flourish here.
Inside the villa, Hercules
Performs his 12 feats
Of strength, painted in
Blazing frescoes on
The towering ceiling.
He kills a bear
With his bare hands. Superhuman
power that made him a god.

Another room, more frescoes:
Noah frowns; the 40-day
Flood swirls and surges,
Reeling off course.
He tames the elephants,
Rather than wrestle them
To the ground.

He lay naked and drunk
Before his children in a
Shower of shame.
Facing a lion’s maw
Would have fared better
for him.

Nature unleashes its own
Fountain onto the gardens.
Water spreads everywhere.
Tourists jostle in ponchos.
Lanes empty; the sky darkens.

Irises bloom like Eden:
Deep purple.
Strolling past the hedges,
We are washed clean
By the rain.

The delicate smell of marzipan wafts
through the room, as the nuns push
their specialty candy through an
ancient iron gate. I pass them
a handful of euros in exchange.

Inside the entrance to the cloister,
we move in slanted lines of shadow.
Outside, the sun, blindingly bright,
awakens the day to everything
but quiet and contemplation.

How sweet these primal gestalts
of darkness and light. Secular
and sacred. Prayerful and profane.
You cannot invent such memories;
they simply spill through the maker’s
hands – not like sand, but like clay
begging to be subtly shaped into
a figurine.

First the noses, then the arms break,
like fragments of an antique statue.
The pieces vanish, but you can retrieve
them, hold them spellbound, pull them
from the depths of forgetfulness.
The past does not exist; it’s true,
except in this powerful kind of willfulness
that holds on to brokenness no matter what.

Time moves like thoughts move,
unidentifiable in the body. Time moves
on its own, eternally trapped in the present.
Here, now, is all we can say.

We can resent time, mourn its passing,
but we can never stop it from moving.
The eternal now that moves like cattle
across a field, like clouds across the
lavender sky. Once we aim to taste
the marzipan again, it flees before our eyes.