Mount Hood fails to show
clouds swallow peak past snow line
ancient one hides face

I thirst fiercely in the desert;
I spy oases in the sky.
I've come to the edge of Mosaic Canyon.
There's nothing to drink
but the surface of stone.
I try licking the tiny pools
of rain water filling cracks
in the boulders.
But they, too, are illusions
packed tight below the sky.

If I could survive on colors, I would
be sated. Reds, browns and tans.
A subtle gray graces the front
of the stone where I sit.
I must try to **** it dry.
Foolishly, I set out hiking
without my water bottle.
Now I hallucinate streams
and gullies in the sand.
I can't go on; I must go on.

Cirrus clouds swirl around
palm trees. Camels linger
at a bubbling pool, settled
on their knees. Cold water
spills from their gnarled mouths.
They have forgotten nothing
to survive. I have forgotten
everything. Soon I hear
my name being called.
It echoes down the canyon.

I stumble backward, ankles
slanting on the stony path.
All along, I keep my eye
on the sky. The vision never
wavers, only intensifies.
The canyon walls box me in.
I cannot catch my breath.
Behind me, my wife calls
and calls me to safety.
In her hand, a cup of cold water.

Robinson Jeffers’ poetry rings as hard as bone,
his windswept lyrics fed by his dark side.
At Carmel, he built a tower of stone.
Wind, sea and storm fostered his rugged pride.
With nature’s fiery force, his skills he honed.
His message bleak, from which he could not hide,
foretold an elemental strife alone.
He wrangled roan stallions only few could ride.
His long-winged hawks over waves would moan.
He joined their wildness with soul open wide.
His poems made me yearn for his coastal home.
Nothing humanly made could pull back the tide.
His poetics read: Etch your heart in stone.
A Zen he practiced till the day he died.

Robinson Jeffers’ poetry is as hard as bone,
his windswept lyrics fed by his dark side.
At Carmel, he built a tower of stone.
Wind, sea and storm fostered his rugged pride.
With nature’s fiery force, his skills he honed.
His message bleak, from which he could not hide,
foretold an elemental strife alone.
He wrangled roan stallions only few could ride.
His long-winged hawks over waves would moan.
He joined their wildness with soul open wide.
His poems made me yearn for his coastal home.
Nothing humanly made could pull back the tide.
His poetics read: Etch your heart in stone.
A Zen he practiced till the day he died.

1.
If I ever write a poem again, I will forsake my Muse,
that fickle, toying sovereign of my imagination, too often
leaving me empty-handed in my hour of need.
Her well of words runs dry, sinking woefully below
the water table. She makes me drink sand and call
it champagne. I stagger past her in disbelief.

So I will let my senses suckle me, source of lasting
sustenance, my mind expanding in the grip
of clairvoyant sight. Look: Black lines on a bone-white
page stand out in low relief like monochromatic
hieroglyphs with an indecipherable story to tell.
But I seek poetry, not stories, and will discover only
dusty metaphors and sun-baked images beneath
the bone-dry surface of this forsaken temple.

2.
If I ever write a poem again, I will write it backward,
dedicating the ending to my vacant Muse, who will read
the finale as a beginning, if she deigns to read at all.
Does art replenish the hollow heart? Do poems patch
the torn muscle? She says yes, of course, like a two-penny
palm reader, rubbing out lines from my inky hand
that do not fit her preordained paradigm.

A Muse befits the myth-eating Greeks as a source
of soul-craft and finesse, attuned to Orpheus’ lyre.
We have spewed out myth to make way for fact – solid
as stone, empty as an atom, shifting with the great
quantum winds. My Muse wanders aimlessly through
the desert, in search of words, of music, of nourishment
for the penniless poet in his epoch of need. Need means
want means lack means void means loss means anything
but fact. Let us seek succor in the seeds of the senses.
Let us cast the mutating Muse to the vortex of the quantum winds.

The world is a vast library
with seemingly endless time to read.
I know my time is ending, on the brink of the void.
So I stroll the stacks of fiction,
dislodge Dostoevsky's masterpiece,
The Brothers Karamazov, rich in drama,
good vs. evil, and grand, probing ideas.
The book weighs more than my brain.
It weighs on my soul: Who creates
ultimate value in the cosmos, God or man?
Here rises the perfect question to ponder
before gasping into the grave.
I turn the first page and begin.

I walk along Cannon Beach at low tide.
The sea lazily laps my legs.
The tawny sand firmly packed, pockmarked
by seagull prints. On the hunt for food.
Tiny ***** scurry past; orange-pink
starfish cling to black boulders,
plump, distorted sea creatures
inured to the tidal pull.
A lavender-red sky signals twilight.
I head toward Haystack, a towering,
natural icon of coal-black stone.
Ahead the path is strewn
with flotsam and jetsam.
I scan the horizon,
then unhappily turn back.

1.
Framed by a well-worn,
wooden windowsill,
we peer down on Purgatory
from our hotel perch
high above the restless shores
of Lake Como.

Behemoth slabs of marble
hang in limbo: rough-hewn
bodies awaiting their savior —
the divinely appointed sculptor
to chisel away the sins of their world.

Reflected in the window’s wavy glass,
the ghost of Michelangelo
glides past — an aging slave to beauty —
humming an Italian hymn to Venus
in syncopated rhythms.

He whispers that the stone
comes from Carrara,
carved out of ragged mountainsides,
carried down muddy, makeshift roads,  
crated onto misshapen barges,
then barreled down the Arno River.

Last stop: Firenze.

2.
In his hands, marble beams
as the body of the beloved,
draped in splendor and light,
draped in radiant form — form
of the sculptor, not the sculpture;
of the master, not the slave.

Beneath the rock-rough surface
of his métier, his soul
struggles to emerge from stone,
rising in rapture toward the divine,
rising on wings of beauty,
rising on wings of desire.

In his hands, marble melds into a mirror
of the making mind.
He levitates, an embodied ideal,
rising higher, ever higher,
toward his immortal beloved —
yearning to be made real,
to be made flesh,
the “coarse and savage bark”
of the artist’s first art.

3.
We come late to all
high lofty things,
he wrote.

And so we peer at the pit of Purgatory,
into its dissonant, disturbing discovery
that art cannot save,
that art cannot rightfully claim the artist’s life,
that art cannot breach the infinite reach
of divine love.

What happens is what is real;
but what is real is what we make happen.

The only choice, then: to go down, down, down into stone;
down into the blood-stained marble;
down into the rough-cut corners of regret.
Inconsolable, sculpture crumples into dust.

First, the patina falls away,
then appendages and organs —
everything but the sightless sea-surge
of skin, the seamless sanctuary
of pagan heroes and gods.

4.
The ideal — immensity, enormity, infinity —
ignites in unrequited desire. The heart strains in vain
to bear the weight of stone.

In Purgatory’s pit,
the master stumbles:
art cannot save him.
The body of his beloved crumbles.

Chiseled above his tomb:
Ripeness is all.

Liquid diamonds adorn the sea,
silver sunbursts of brilliance shine
through the waves, living, heaving,
violent jewels of seaweed and paste.

The sky bares its midriff of pale blue
skin, unmarred like a newborn, a marble
dome of sweetness and smoothness,
restless to immerse the nascent dawn in light.

Under the fierce Aegean sun, we saunter
toward Pireas' port, bags packed, supplies
secure, farewells sobbed, to set sail for Spain,
like Odysseus on his makeshift barque.

The journey demands a lifetime of searching
signs, of casting far and wide to escape
the Sirens' enervating songs, anchoring
the helm in darkened caves the size of yurts.

On the hunt for El Greco, the Greek painter
holed up in Toledo, his home away from home,
his haven of elongated, diaphanous figures,
who rise to the clouds, linking heaven and earth.

We owe the Greeks the fat seeds of culture:
philosophy, theater, sculpture for all, democracy
for the fortunate few, women and slaves stuck
in the kitchen pouring libations for ancient sins.

Shades haunt the past, mounting arsenals of guilt
and accusation. The Greek splashes linseed oil on
canvas, erases his debt, dabs an eerie white in the eyes
of threadbare saints, who elevate to everlasting heights.

1.
The dead hover over their graves,
an unsteady flame flickering
wildly like an inferno.

We cannot ***** it out.
Kaleidoscopic shadows splay across the earth:
brilliant oranges, yellows, reds, and a fatal greenish-gray.

The colors inexorably build to a crescendo.
At midnight, a moldering movement begins:
the dance of resuscitation, desiccated and brittle.

I cannot dance, a lesson lost to the absurdities of youth.
Levity does not lead to levitation, anyway;
my feet are stubbornly stuck to the ground.

The dead despise the living, they say,
always chirping and harping on the day’s
annoyances, dullness and anguish.

How soon the deceased forget their own past.
How desperate we are not to lose ours.
How uncanny when we meet, cheek to cheek.

The dead blame us for their failings and unrequited
desires. They long to plunge into Dante’s Inferno,
mumbling, “Absolution.” We mumble back, “All must pass.”

2.
I flounder through Flanders fields,
mourning the great fallen poets of The Great War.

So many sensitive yearnings skewered at the end of a bayonet.
So many bright, vibrant promises shredded by shrapnel.

Machine guns mowing down row upon row of militarily naïve Englishmen. Red-hot bullets rain about their heads,

lodge in their eyes. All for God and country. The soldiers shed
their own colors: brownish gray for the muck, ***** khaki for the clay,

trench green for the woolen uniforms, alabaster white
for the shocked, dying faces. Our mantra: “This, too, must pass.”

But it doesn’t. Generations of the living long to plunge into Dante’s Inferno, mumbling, “Absolution for all.” The dead answer back: “Patience.”

I have dirtied my hands
with the archaeology of faith,
digging deep to unearth commitment,
smoothing soil to hide despair,
heaping stones as cairns of evidence.

Weary, I have accomplished this much:
Adding water, the dirt turns malleable.
I squeeze a body out of black clay,
delicately sculpt life into it,
then write my name in the residue.
Mud covers all but the letter "A".

1.
You speak the word
that will hold back
death, muffled along
the forest path.
I seek a clearing
to hear clearly
what was said.
I seek an opening
to liberate
meaning. Nothing
shows itself, save
the flittering of birds.

2.
The poem is not yours to keep,
nor the others, who so eagerly read.

It belongs to the earth,
fated for the forest floor,

sifted through mounds
of leaves, yellow and brown,

buried by a hiker's boot,
unwilling to be found.

3.
Poetry fortifies the bond
between spirit and breath.
Each verse an exhale.

Poems dwell in the dank forest,
silent, thick and dark.
Our hut hovers high in the sky.

In the sky, exhales dissipate.
The word thins, death thrives.
Poetry fortifies the final whimper.

1.
Memory blankets the past
in a neon green meadow
dappled with gray bits of matter.
They ooze and coalesce into a brain
brimming with unconscious narratives:
glottal globs clogging the gaps
of personal history. Tales of sound
and fury signifying nothing but the living self.

2.
The Transcendental Ego reigns over all,
smoothing the way for a unity of experience,
smoothing the way for a universe of sense.
I stroll alone through the empty patches
of meadow, waiting for Wordsworth's
daffodils to bloom. Waiting for poetry
to usurp the role of narrative, metaphor
crowned as the foundation of knowledge.

3.
The past besieges the present like Time''s
Trojan Horse, teeming with shadows. At their edges,
light lines the darkness. To try to remember now,
the tabula is a noirish rasa, staring back
through dull, heavy-lidded eyes. We see as we are seen.
Memory dances before a mirror, an image so close
to our touch, yet so far out of reach. Starved for imagery,
we strain toward the black. Only connect. Only connect.

Your heart shatters
like a plate of china
smashed against
a grungy tile floor.

Pieces scatter like spiders,
impossible to retrieve,
impossible to rebuild,
impossible to contemplate.

Your heart is bruised, bleeding
drops of unrequited love.
The viscera of your body
tighten like a noose. You could slide

your head into it, if you choose,
but what would be the use? Love flees
like deer bounding in a forest.
You are too broken to give chase.

Yet the heart yearns
for completeness;
it is the foundation
of all desire.

Like a baby's cry
in the night, the heart wails,
begging to be heard. Echoes
permeate the dampened air.

So listen: You must breed
a new heart, with new desires,
tightening it together with
a titanium plate. This wound

will not be opened again,
though it aches and aches
in your jaded memory.
Let poetry be your guide; its love

is eternal; it seeks the ideal;
it comforts the sorrowful;
it inspires the helpless mind.
It raises you above the broken pieces

of existence. You have the choice:
Live or die, wallow in remorse,
or claw your way out of your battered shell.
You can decide now: Let poetry be your new heart.

It will not bleed.

We trundle down the wooden steps
behind the weathered farmhouse,
headed toward the orchard
planted in yellow grass.

Only one tree still bears fruit,
the others desiccated from unwilling
neglect, the bequeathal of old age,
the dark turning of nature's cycle.

Looking back at the westward window,
I see nothing but its vacant stare,
seeking the setting sun to reflect
its waning light.

You stumble past the lonely apple
hanging precariously above the ground.
When it falls, your legacy of husbandry
will be complete.

I glance into the dull glaze of your
ancient eyes, seeking a light to reflect
my image, hidden neatly in
the folds of your wrinkled face.

I am the only fruit left hanging
from your long, English lineage.
I ****** the wizened apple
and lay it lovingly in the grass.

It will wither with the winter winds.
Next to the sun's slanting beam,
I feel the frisson of autumn's chill.

Dusk settles on the fields.
I stare at your stooping frame,
my arm hooked precariously
through the tree's crooked branch.

1.
Stone castles float high above the moat,
rising in the empty sky.

Colonnades of clouds pummel the shoreline,
but plunder only Time.

The silver lake reflects the face of God.
Forsake its lifeline,
trace its outline in darkness,
then dive, dive, dive
to retrieve your destiny.

The horizon sleeps at the end of the road.
Light turns, but withholds its blessing.

2.
Pilgrims clamber over slick, thick cobblestones,
combing the ruins of history.
They slip, slide and slither back,
only to lose their way.

A baby-faced mountain bends low
to brush a raindrop off a rose.
The rose reddens, the mountain shudders,
and love blooms —

even as older peaks,
streaked in early snow,
grind their teeth in envy.

Obey your nature.

3.
A crown of fog settles on the silent village.
Wet cobblestones snake back upon themselves,
pooling castles on the ground.

The road plummets to the shoreline; the horizon weeps for no one.

Light turns. Time tires. And infinity seeps into the soul.
Bruised pilgrims withhold their blessing.

Beneath the love-struck mountain,
a lonely traveler gropes homeward.

Patches of empty sky carry scents of welcome:
There, unbidden, tranquility awaits.

*— Chaulin, Switzerland