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.

1.

Edward Estlin Cummings
rode Buffalo Bill’s watersmooth-silver
                                                          stallion
into my high school English class in 1971
and broke onetwothreefourfive lightbulbsjustlikethat
                                                                                   over my head
he was a forceful man
and what i want to know is
how do you like your blueeyed boy
Mister Poet

2.

E. E. Cummings
whistled
the

goat-footed
balloonMan’s        tune
far
and
wee

in Just-
spring
and
      i heard
nothing but
the world as puddle-wonderful

3.

e. e. cummings cut the tops off
his capital letters and i

                                    stayed a little
                                                        person

l(a

le
af
fa
ll

s)
one
l

y

i never signed
                      my name
                                      the same
                                                    again

Lorca leans into the bullring's skybox,
freshly painted red and green
like blood and grass beneath the Iberian sun,
where poetry composts into compositions
fit for a toreador, whose tights hug his thin hips,
tempting the huffing beast to hook his groin.

Spain's family jewels bulge behind the tattered
red cape, the one tool of the trade that can't
**** the bull, only blindly enrage it to charge
for its pride, its race, for the red light of glory,
as royalty wave their embroidered handkerchiefs,
awaiting the bull's ****** ear, still warm and steamy,

after so many twirls around the packed-sand dance floor.
Each step kicks up a black faux pas, first lunge
along the fatalistic journey to mortality: a pale thigh gored,
an artery gushes. Gangrene seeps in, drenched
in brandy, which disinfects only the guzzler's gullet.
No antidote to sepsis, no darning of the tights.

The toreador dies to fight another day, his banderillos
still stuck in the **** of muscularity, his eyes darting
among the crowds for a sign of good fortune, good
hunting, as in the old days of machismo and torture
and blind lust for the blood of brutes who threatened
no one but the cowardly prince on horseback, wobbly

beneath the weight of his armor. His ardor as fabricated
as his divine right to rule over the beasts of the field,
over the beaten-down brows of his subjects, toothlessly
grinning at the hope of dining on sacrifice, something
the truly chosen people could do only on the pain of death.
Lorca mourns the dying fighter with the duende of

flamenco, the wild, passionate cry of suffering, the blackest
black of Spain, the urge to create and destroy, to undress
the poet's soul, as naked as a newborn, as powerful as
a raging bull, charging without thinking, divining the forces
of nature like a hurricane, an earthquake. To shout down
death is to immortalize art, as long as human history endures.

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.

Sleep eludes me like
a jilted lover.
Eyes shut, ears shut,
craving unconsciousness.
Brain waves break
against the waking shore.
Breathing falters, gasps,
Hiccups in a fitful daze.
Tiredness descends like
the evening fog.
Vision doubles, loses focus,
seeks the unity of dark.
I dream the world
in aching color.
The world dreams back,
a screen of void.
Who can project the emptiness
of calm?
Who can protect the solitude
of rest?
Vertigo ***** the marrow
from my soul.
Pain fills the fissure in my head.
I turn to turn in the ocean
of my bed.
I no longer can go under.
In the shallows, I cannot swim.

Sunlight ricochets off the blanco bell tower
of Iglesia de la Asunción, landing as a spectral
ball lodged in the iron-barred windows across
the narrow lane. Light splays its rays onto
an outdoor café, which bustles with excitement
at the arrival of perfect weather for the perfect
pueblo blanco of Spain, a grand fiesta of white.

Priego de Cordoba revels in its inheritance
of white, the picture-perfect, pristine village
elevated above abundant olive groves and
the crackling, undulating earth. Here, you
gaze upon the arid land with the all-seeing eye
of God, never bloodshot, never blurred,
crisp as a hawk's flight to prune its prey.

Approaching the village, giant, arthritic roots
of ancient trees sprawl atop the shallow
soil like crooked claws. Farther ahead,
a 19th-century goatherd leans on his long,
weathered stick, whistling beneath his
beret, as his garrison of goats clatters
down the massive, twisting row of rocks.

Serenity seeps into your bones as you stroll
among the potted flowers, bursting with red
and white into the Barrio de la Villa. My
wanderings reach from door to tiny door,
touching nothing but the spotless white paint
that bathes the tall, stucco walls. I fly above
the strictured street, wide enough for a donkey's

passage, laden with burdens of the quiet life.
Like a condor, my broad wingspan brushes
the facades of these run-on homes, whose close
proximity propels the principle of shared
existence. Now we must live face-to-face,
mano a mano, shadow-boxing the hanging pots
as they lovingly labor to sprout laurels of victory.

I narrow to the lane's end, where lies buried the
barrio's secret map to the alleyways of Paradise.
I spy an aged senora sweeping with a stumpy
straw broom to gather up the beaming bits
of white and sprinkle them into the faded folds
of her patterned apron. She stares at me, just
another incorrigible source of refuse, bearing

the crudely unwrapped gift of a devotee of beauty,
breathing in the barrio's florid scent of security,
blanco a blanco, endless white on white. I turn,
incapable of tracing my steps, of tripping right
or left, traipsing to the fringe of the barrio,
where streaming waters wash away all colors
save the nakedness of white. Neptune towers

over the concrete pools of Fuente del Rey,
a king's ransom of swirling waves that imprint
the reflecting cradles of sky, wrapped in cotton-
thin clouds shredding the afternoon into white,
rose-tinted white. An unfinished canvas of
monochromatic color fields blends into
the blinding white. I cool my feet in bubbling

ponds, peering out at the outlying jungle of
bushes, dwarf trees and twisted vines. I need
rest, the rejuvenating powers of Neptune's trident
hanging above my head, ready to knight me as
the Quixote of Cordoba's rippling region. He
splashes me into intimidating fountains of
life, of light streaming its tranquil rays into

basins of sheer delight. Here, I lay my burden
down, dip my feet into the cool, white flow of
Epsom baths sans the salt. Renewed, I use
my flatfoot tools of travel to trigger my trek,
my pilgrimage into the white belly of Spain.
Still in the barrio, I ogle the outdoor café, then
take the first step to tread all sin underground.

Unamuno wrings his hands, frets over
the Tragic Sense of Life in which we
all die inevitably, inexorably, unwillingly.
And death is simply non-being to him,
and non-being looks a lot like pure
nothingness, which means we can't
even think "non-being" or "death"
when we're dead. It's all one, big,
fat zero. Add it to or subtract it from
itself, and it's still nada, the sum
of all fears. O the woe of being human.

I read him as a teenager in love with
philosophy, and thought him the most
profound thinker Europe had conjured up
in the 20th century. Continental philosophy
was the only philosophy for me, heavily
Germanic. Even Sartre was a closet
Heideggerian, teething on Sein und Zeit.
But Unamuno leapt over the Teutonic depths,
plunged into Dante's circle of death, scratched
out a mirror image of the human face. I took
it and ran, Kierkegaard stuffed in my back pocket.

Philosophy is eros is love is an incomplete connection.
Reality rises like a daffodil in the green grass
of spring. Wordsworth pens an ode; the rest of us
stare and blindly think we know what we see. But
the eye doesn't conceive, it doesn't relieve anything
save a surface tension. The eye can't speak, can't say
that the daffodil is real. Nobody sees reality in the
flesh. Nothing meshes with sensation but sensation.
That's the Latin way, the Mediterranean way, says
Jose Ortega y Gasset, another Spanish wizard of
wisdom, wishing for intellectual love, dancing at Delphi.

Philosophia. You can't see it, you can say it, but it's
all yearning, no release, no peace until the mind
settles on the bottom of the stream, feeds on
jetsam, maybe flotsam, then thinks "Being" and
gushes *******. This is Plato's territory, a long way
from Spain. But there's geometry in the bullring. There's
life and death and nada and sol y sombra in the stands.
Ideas don quixotic cloaks. Cervantes turns them into
literature, the Ur-story of Spain and its millions of minions.
The common man squirms for comedy. Tragic senses
squire hard work, and if life is so short, why not eat, dream

and be merry? Unamuno deserves his fate. Thinking
about death still adds up to nothing. Thought dies, too;
it's not accustomed to rue the end of infinity. It has no
affinity with hard limits. It rises, stays aloof, looks down
on the world, which has only one side visible, and pronounces
it good for nothing. But can't the thinker take a joke?
Incompletion competes with vast yearning like the tortoise
with the hare. No one gains on the other: Zeno's Paradox.
We might still ride Mediterranean Vespas, but the Greeks
kick-started this thing into motion. There's no reason

without Socrates, and he pronounced death a no-fear zone.
Unamuno forgot his Crito, Phaedo and Apology. Irony adds
up to something, not nothing. There's no surface irony here,
folks. This is Mycenean, not Mediterranean, Athenian not
Salamancian. Spain thinks it thinks new thoughts, taking
the bull by the ****** ear that's left behind the horn. No mas.
Only philosophy thinks itself, eternally. It never dies, man, even
if the cosmos explodes to a pinhead, then vanishes like
a magic trick. What's tragic about necessity, certainty? They
rave on in that dark night of the soul. Nada means nada,
but "means" isn't nada. It's todo on the human topos.

So climb it like a mountain in Dante's Purgatorio. Fret
no more, amigo. You are on the top of the world; it's a tricky
move to the summit. Ascend on the wings of meaning,
then see what you think, not think what you see. That's something.
And Socrates proclaimed it enough. Hey, Plato made him say so.

Your searching eyes
scour out the blank pages
of my being and shower
them with kisses of kindness,
tendrils of tenderness,
the grand miracle of mercy.

Love leaves an invisible
imprint on my imagination;
care-filled caresses of sweetness
and affection fill my fickle heart.

We stand as one beneath
the grand waterfalls of heaven.
We stand as one because I know
I owe my life to you.

But you say, My life
is your life. And I weep
hot tears of humility as
I search my wayward ways
for your searching eyes.

Gaudi hedges his bets
Against the future.
More than one hundred thirty-five years
Of building the infinite
La Sagrada Familia.
A stone mason’s nightmare.
An architect’s dream,
Painted by de Chirico.
Faith and nature intertwine.
Brown earth smears the facades.
Nativity and passion morph
Into angular designs.
A lizard, a leaf, a cross, a dove.
Bejeweled pillars bend and rise.
Crowned towers reach and climb
Spiral staircases to the heavens.
Chapels pray for silence.
Tourists pray for photo-ops.
All views turn inward.
There is much work to be done.

I walk a labyrinth alone,
shuffling my steps
to follow the intricate inwardness
of the path, skeleton of the divine circle,
maze of the praying soul.

It is a pilgrim's progress
toward the center, where the last line
abruptly ends, indifferent to whether
your prayers have been answered.
The journey curtails, moving around
and around, the finish found
before the beginning begins.

This decorated circle of communion
subdivides into monastic cells,
the walls permeable to the Spirit,
impervious to doubt. The circle pivots
on its axis, perfectly aligned
with itself, perfectly identical
to itself. No cycles to bring change.
No mutation of form. Only
the mystifying distance of pi.

The labyrinth looms like a celestial
formation encircling heaven and Earth.
Dante walks it, with Beatrice by his side.
A circle of new love, new life.
Every next step encircles the entire journey,
enlivening the heart. Agape outruns
Eros in a race of heavenly calm.
All prayers divinely divisible by pi.

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.

Beauty affords no comfort
when you lie miles
away from the nearest castello,
where the owner serves
50-course dinners
for 50 euros apiece.
He hums Puccini
as he dishes the ravioli,
recommends strong red wine
from an earthy clay pitcher.

The white tablecloth drapes
my lap. I dare not stain it.
He is missing a button,
hits a high note, leaves
and returns.

Filled to unconsciousness,
we down the fiery limoncello.
Good for the digestion.
Good for scouring the esophagus.
Beside us a former
Olympic swimmer stabs
her potatoes.
Her children stare down
with distorted faces, inured
to the feast,
imagining a beast
to torment.
Their potatoes grow cold.

A Puccini aria plays in my head.
Lucca, his hometown, looms
on the star-spewed horizon.
Even beauty is no match
for la dolce vita.

Supersensible residue of sound
      reverberating within
the waves & waves & waves of consciousness

reflective laughter flashing
          in the depths of eyes

upon the precipice's edge
          the Absolute folds in on itself

I hurriedly push past myself,
watching my body from above,
feinting with consciousness,
fainting into the Spanish black.

Velazquez's Las Meninas
jack-hammers a tunnel
of ek-stasis, pulling me into
the painter's dark studio,

weighed down by overwhelming
curtains, curtailing the senses'
sense of majesty and control.
This is not trompe l'oeil. This is

tricking the soul into the artifice
of the palette, of paint on board,
of black that illumines perfect
placement: the spectator on the floor.

Stendhal's sensitivity is no virtue
or vice. It suckles the sublime,
sated on illusion, art for art's sake,
delivering a blow to the solar plexus.

I gasp as my body trembles at tremors
of terror, annunciations of angels
bearing paintbrushes as paltry wings.
Their back feathers stained a Spanish black.

Painting owns no one, owes no one
comfort or joy or pedantic instruction.
The cherubs in the foreground radiate
innocence, wonder, humanity's blank heart.

At my feet, my body wriggles skyward,
wrenches for a transplant. Paint on it
Velazquez's black moustache, then part
the velvet curtains. I will rise to new life.

In my eyes,
the faint light of evening falls.
Soon all will be darkness,
time to envision
tragedy or joy.
No markers lead the way
to my leap of faith.

none of this is new anymore
the writing,
the dreaming,
the happy guilt

how many times have i sat
and listened
to the wet leaves slap
against the cold morning pavement?

how many time have i seen
the trees in wonder
give their smoky shapes
to loneliness,
changing with the seasons?

the seasons keep bringing me
back to the knowing,
time in the moving
moving through time

for many they claim
that this is the triumph:
the nature of return
to the original presence

but who among them
can give force to the anguish,
defy the distance,
there-being,
himself?

surely the answer must be immanent in the asking

it must be the place
that is severed from its project

and not i who am falling
through the horizon of meanings

gushing strong waterfalls
surge to Indian Ocean
Kipling called it greasy-grey
on the horizon: Mozambique

Byron maintained his political zeal,
Perhaps more than his love for poetry.
Revolution his watchword; its appeal
Would never die toward friends, enemies.
He sought a Rousseauian realm of steeled
Freedom more impressive than Childe Harold’s
Debut, which made him an instant sensation, real
Enough to establish his notoriety.
England was satirized, religion repealed.
Scandal attracted as many readers
As aesthetics; his bad boy title sealed.
Affairs fabled, he scorned immortality.
No paradise without politics, he pealed.
Yet he found it all the same in Poesie.

A languid loon
liltingly launches
a dive to the bottom of
a small stone pond
staked by straggly trees.

Near the shallow end
of the water, greenish
bracken forms
a wispy fringe
waving farewell
to the overgrown,
fulsome banks.

The taciturn trees
burst into capillaries
of naked branches,
as the autumn sun bears down
upon them from its
mid-afternoon throne.

The loon breaks
the glassy surface,
and a ring of irregular
circles spreads skyward
toward the luxuriant sun,
overlooking the lyrical,
liquid world below.

I sit on one of the dampened
stones, stoically awaiting
the loon’s arrival air-side.
Its last breath plunged it
into the darkened depths.
Now, another breath must
propel it upward to rejoin
the living.

But there is no movement,
no minions of bubbles
scrambling to the surface.
The supercilious sun
slinks further toward
the flat horizon.
Nothing happens.

The loon is lost, it seems,
listlessly failing
to defy the odds
of survival under water,
content to linger in
the glory of a long,
lonely yet lovely
swan song.

St. Teresa swoons to herself.
The angel’s impish face laughs
At her pain.
Bernini’s operatic sculpture bound
Behind bars.
Perfectionism, restorationism,
OCD.
Outside, a gypsy woman begs
For centimes.
Inside, scaffolding dims Teresa’s glow.
Art sacrificed to the future,
Content to die in darkness.
A monk dozes in his rosary.
Recitation of dreams.
No legend in the sacristy:
Teresa’s book remains
Unread, dull behind glass.
Ecstasy of love: her path toward God.

The orange-pinkish horizon slips
into the silver sea.
We sit side by side
reading.

Soon night slides into place,
infinite in scope.
I take your hand,
squeeze it gently,
as if to say,
"I am still here. I am not lost
in this book, but
am ever present to both
you and its pages."

You squeeze my hand back,
as if to say,
"Yes, I know."

The moon disappears behind clouds.

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.

bright floral bonnet
young lovers nuzzle, silent
Eros' kiss; first blush

Love dies like an assassin's victim: caught
completely unaware, the thud of a bullet to the head,
mouth gaping to pronounce its own name. The heart
pumps its leaking reservoir of warm blue blood; the final
breath gurgles in the chest like a baby nursing.

Love dies because we create it in our own image:
two become one become two again. We see ourselves
darkly in its bright, believing face. We wrap our bodies
around it, lusting for ecstasy, with no room left for
the self, for the other. Like St. George and the dragon, we

unsheath a righteous broadsword to make a surgical
separation of locked *****. We dread what we wish for.
We lose our world in passion, empty-handed when
the end inevitably comes. We crave an eternal love,
but are fit merely for a temporal one. Time is love's assassin.

carry your heart
with love's full bounty
feed everyone you meet

Lying down
at the day’s intermission,
I listen to Puccini arias,
and am transported to Lucca,
his walled hometown,
with its *****-white streets,
its darkened straits,
its massive cathedral under
eternal construction.

Life limps along in
effervescent flux here,
beauty kept dormant,
or sprouting like a tree
from the Torre Guinigi’s
grassy roof.

A one-time amphitheater
sports cloned tourist shops.
Only one
sells Puccini souvenirs.
La Boheme survives
on note cards and
lop-sided bookmarks.

The composer’s legacy turned
into trinkets made in China.
A vast, discounted reserve
of memory, kitsch and fame.
Still, they provide me
a precarious solace.

Music without words
charts my tourist mood
of endless angst.
Opera is the grandest art,
some critics claim.
The human condition rendered
thick in symbol and sound.

Happily, I carry
the philosopher’s stone
to decipher the soaring
scores.
They say, passion, foreboding,
no regrets. A fluttering
high C stirs the airwaves.

Ululating sopranos,
searing tenors sigh
heavenward.
The last act over,
the curtain rises on
the dull, restless, repetitive
routines of everyday life.

In the background,
echoes of Tosca, currents
of ruin and rust.
We must embrace our destiny
even on the off-notes.
Opera’s solo signal:
Amor Fati.

Lying down
at the day’s intermission,
I listen to Puccini arias,
and am transported to Lucca,
his walled hometown,
with its *****-white streets,
its darkened straits,
its massive cathedral under
eternal construction.

Life limps along in
effervescent flux here,
beauty kept dormant,
or sprouting like a tree
from the Torre Guinigi’s
grassy roof.

A one-time amphitheater
sports cloned tourist shops.
Only one
sells Puccini souvenirs.
La Boheme survives
on note cards and
lop-sided bookmarks.

The composer’s legacy turned
into trinkets made in China.
A vast, discounted reserve
of memory, kitsch and fame.
Still, they provide me
a precarious solace.

Music without words
charts my tourist mood
of endless angst.
Opera is the grandest art,
some critics claim.
The human condition rendered
thick in symbol and sound.

Happily, I carry
the philosopher’s stone
to decipher the soaring
scores.
They say, passion, foreboding,
no regrets. A fluttering
high C stirs the airwaves.

Ululating sopranos,
searing tenors sigh
heavenward.
The last act over,
the curtain rises on
the dull, restless, repetitive
routines of everyday life.

In the background,
echoes of Tosca, currents
of ruin and rust.
We must embrace our destiny
even on the off-notes.
Opera’s solo signal:
Amor Fati.

Lucretius envisioned the universe
as made of atoms governed by chance,
with a "swerve" reserved in the void to
salvage some semblance of free will.

Breathtakingly, he foresaw the chief
discovery of our age: atomism, which
we harnessed for energy, genomes,
and the horror of Hiroshima.

His brilliance cannot compete
with the mushroom cloud's darkness.
He foresaw the building blocks
of reality; we deconstructed them.

Insight, wisdom and true philosophy
live of one side of the millennia.
On the other, that same wisdom
crumbles into fusion, fission and death.

Good can be used for ill, unwittingly;
ill can rarely, if ever, be used for good.
Lucretius peered into the anatomy
of the universe and beheld the atom.

Science of our age followed his vision
and beheld, unwittingly, the ferocious
power of destruction, all atoms swerving
from their path. Free will would have its day.

We are pushed by
out-of-date clothes,
chased by boldly printed scarves,
shoved by trinkets
and lozenges.

St. Remy’s market bustles
in the morning sun.
Massive crowds craving
bargains. It is
a festival day.
Vendors lace the cake with
eternal candles, turned off
shortly after noon.

We wander through the
giddy ambiance, peer at the
high-priced wares, wary
of being taken for tourists.
Art, cheese and spices
catch our eyes. We
take home paintings,
etchings, nougat.
We nourish the local
economy.

A church hovers on
the brightly colored fringe.
Its steps a convenient
respite from the madding
crowd. I taste
cheeses, meats, candies
and foie gras.

A twinge of conscience:
Innocent geese gorged
on grain.
Farmers work hard to
achieve the right-sized
livers: bloated.
They can their product,
stamped with primitive
labels.
An immoral delicacy
proffered on tasting sticks.

Euros drop like flies
from my wallet, emptying
it. In search of cash,
we discover antique
wine-tastings cups.
Burgundy tinged with
pewter.
Materialism thrives in
every crammed, covered
booth. Bartering for
prices the hard truth
of commerce.

Who knows a value when
you see one?
Who needs another object
to shelve?
Yet we buy, buy, buy, eyes
weak against temptation.
Humble elegance especially
earns a tip.

The dead cannot pray.
They molder in their graves
Awaiting resurrection,
The force that creates
The soul’s yearning for
Transcendence.
We yearn for happiness,
Satisfaction, comfort, rest.
We yearn for meaning,
Purpose, a cosmic path.
We yearn for self-consciousness,
Preciousness, an open heart.
Death cannot extinguish them.
Our days are strung together
Like letters in the sand.
We see the message only
As it disappears.
Night divides the light
Into fractal pieces.
The firmament flattened by
The weight of stars.
We rise and recline like
Mechanical banks.
Shoot a penny into
The lion’s mouth.
Hear the hunter roar.
Death stalks the living,
Sticks its finger in our
Ribs. It is a holdup,
But we carry no cash.
Remember Ozymandias.
Memory sculpts
Memorials that crumble
In the sea.
Waves lap the pieces.
Epitaphs erode.
Death be not proud,
John Donne proclaimed.
But how can the fallen
Take pride in their downfall?
Extinction awaits around
Every corner.
There is no defense.
Death is a theater with
Its curtain half-drawn.
Below it, you track
The actors’ shuffling feet.
Above it, only oblivion
And empty stage lights.

The dead cannot pray.
They molder in their graves
awaiting resurrection,
the force that creates
the soul’s yearning for
transcendence.

We yearn for happiness,
satisfaction, comfort, rest.
We yearn for meaning,
purpose, a cosmic path.
We yearn for self-consciousness,
preciousness, an open heart.
Death cannot extinguish them.

Our days are strung together
like letters in the sand.
We see the message only
as it disappears.
Night divides the light
into fractal pieces.
The firmament flattened by
the weight of stars.

We rise and recline like
mechanical banks.
Shoot a penny in
the lion’s mouth.
Hear the hunter roar.
Death stalks the living,
sticks its finger in our
ribs: a holdup,
but we carry no cash.

Remember Ozymandias.
Memory sculpts
memorials that crumble
in the sea.
Waves lap the pieces.
Epitaphs erode.

Death be not proud,
John Donne proclaimed.
But how can the fallen
take pride in their downfall?
Extinction awaits around
every corner.
there is no defense.

Death is a theater with
its curtain half-drawn.
Below it, you track
the actors’ shuffling feet.
Above it, only oblivion
and empty stage lights.

Wittgenstein's ladder wavered in the wind,
as he set out to scale the great garden wall
of language. His ladder, hand crafted for many
years in Vienna and Cambridge, came up short.
He could not climb the moss-dappled wall --
his intellectual paramour since
he started building a new metaphysic of the word,
with his Tractatus.

Suddenly, he hit a stalemate. Not able to scoot over
the wall, he washed his hands of trying to analyze the
black hole of predicates, conjugating verbs and slippery
allusions ******* up each particle of proper speech.
He splashed his face in mystic water. then offered
a gnomic pronouncement over his failure. A type of
recipe for missing the mark:

Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent.

A proposition of the limits of language; it turns out we
cannot say everything about everything, after all. So we
must embrace silence in its coarse cloak of humility.
We must stare down our limits.

Jacques Derrida thinks we must write what cannot be
said on the other side of our mystic sputtering.
The written word has an immediate, imperative tone
of authority, he implies, an authority that renders
silence a respectful remnant of our former backward ways.

But silence butts up against the scruffy gray wall
of meaning. And echoes off it precisely as what
has been said. Pointing by writing opens up another
avenue of speech. Writing speech only codifies it
as a once living thing. You must read the written
text then still point to be understood.

As Wittgenstein knew, silence proves less reductive;
writing simply cripples the living word.

The human sacrifices begin at noon. I must hurry to prepare the ruins.

Good: The pyramids retain their purity of line; the hieroglyphs balance out the skulls, more or less. Let us say, oh, two to one.

A Diego Rivera mural stretches from wall to wall of the Mayan ball court. (Are those blues really from nature?)

Heads will roll! I predict.

I need more coffee — any style. Bring me the big, steaming bowls of France that you must slurp two-handedly. Bring me the tiny espresso shots of Italy, bitter and inadequate, always calling for another cup.

Bring me café in an ornamental Mexican jar painted in bright ochres and reds. Set it on a geometrically designed serape with just a hint of purple on the fringe.

I will sop up the last drop of caffeine with my tortilla, while dining room tables multiply like serpents.

I must hurry. The sacrifices begin at noon.

Already, the humidity clings to my skin like a cheap cologne.

How stupid of me not to have worn a white linen suit, huaraches, and a Panama hat  (straw, of course).

In any case, I am the expert. My art criticism begins now.

Rivera’s human figures roll in a wave of revolutionary fervor: too rounded, too cherubic, too pastel. Industry, agriculture, fraternity, socialism. Hand me the hammer. But no bare *******, as in Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People.

A careless oversight. ****** always adds a pleasant focal point to a painting.

Suddenly, bad news breaks. The sacrifices have been called off; the ballplayers  have converted to Communism. Viva la revolución!

                                                 + + +

Frida Kahlo twirls her mustache to match the flair of Salvador Dali’s.

Her heart flutters for the Spanish surrealist, who has bug-eyes only for Gala.

Kahlo deigns to paint his portrait, which turns out to be another of her
 self-portraits. So many selves. So many portraits.

This one sports ample ****** hair and a monkey on her shoulder, who leans across to eat the gardenia behind her right ear. Or is it a carnation? Ah, carnations only calcify into clichés. Let us call it a hibiscus, and be done with it.

(Still, are those lurid colors from nature?)

I must hurry. The exhibition will begin at 2 a.m., the hour when all the wine shops close, and the retablos disappear from the churches. No respect for authority after la revolución. Only the self, the self. Always the self.

Kahlo twists her mustache into a braid for her next self-portrait: Liberty Leading the Mexican People. She squeezes into an orthopedic corset, bare-breasted.

I pull out my droopy Dali watch to eye the time. The hands cross at midnight.

I must hurry. Yet Kahlo insists I sit.

She paints my portrait with a spike through my spine, a shattered pelvis, and partial paralysis of the legs. I can no longer walk a straight line.

She thinks I am she, in trousers. The self, the self. Always the self.

My moustache grows heavier than hers, however, and I painstakingly pluck out the unibrow.

But I adore her monkey, with his close-set eyes. He eats a carnation for penance each morning, then primps before the mirror. The self, the self. The primate self.

More bad news: Dali cancels the exhibition. He has been demoralized by the retablos, which radiate beauty in six dimensions: height, breadth, length and the omnipresence of the Holy Trinity.

A genuine milagro: The streets fill with gardenias and hibiscus. The Mayan ballplayers convert to Catholicism.

A white skeleton dances with Kahlo in the moonlight. He wears her leather-and-steel braces.

No matter. I am the art critic, and I declare all Mexican colors indigenous, naturalistic, and caffeinated. Then I turn out the dining room lights.

A starry, starry night. The humidity sinks into the cenote.

Tomorrow, I shall buy a monkey and teach it to paint. All colors from nature, of course.

The first word is the hardest:

Letters combining and colliding
to emerge from the vast,
empty whiteness of the page,
a facsimile, an imitation
of matter taking form.

Some say
form is what really matters:
pre-existent, eternal,
the God-force of creation
dictating ex nihilo
the process of becoming.

And some say
matter is what really counts:
seductive and inert,
a slumbering potentiality
murmuring softly to be
molded and transformed
into an ever-eroding effigy
of the permanence of Being.

But I say
only the Logos calls and answers --
in dialogue and soliloquy --
deep sounding to deep:

A cry is formed in the dark heart of matter,
and a poet is born to utter it,
struggling -- his whole being burning --
to speak the last things of existence
before his voice gives way
and the gift betrays him.

Yes.
The first word is the hardest
because it is the last word,
it is the only word,
coming into the world as a whimper
and passing out of it as a groan.

Like becomes like.
Mind fashions experience into spirit.
Experience absorbs mind, shapes its ethereal body.
We know more than we see, taste or feel.
The invisible encircles the straining atoms
of thought, expands until there is space
to fill with my mind as your mind.

knowledge aims at pride
wisdom seeks humility
mind awakes in light

Dull orange bracken clings to the peat-like soil that seeps
into muddy moors past Devon. A shadowy fog makes
a royal landing on the low-slung ridge, spewing
fists of mist fit for scalers of Lakeland mountains,
balancing on the knife edge of Helvellyn before dawn.

I follow the droppings-dappled sheep trails, veering away
from the road. A ***** white flock nuzzles the close-cropped
scrubland for shoots of greenery, but masticates only humid air.
In the dim light of evening, a dark presence looms on the uneven
horizon: a distinct world fitfully revealed and obscured, liberated from,
then confined to the clinging veil of illusion that clutches the Earth.

This is no pilgrimage into the noirish heart of nature, yet
I detect through the flattened corona of the monarch moon
outlines of a troupe of Shakespearean ghosts tottering my way.
Revealed and obscured, like questions in Hamlet's tragedy,
they would gladly chant as a Greek chorus, if only they had
material voices to be heard. Together, they mime the news

of Elizabethan England: betrayal and intrigue, executions
and ***. The lust for power pours the foundation of the
City of Man -- sin and ambition, deception and pride. I hear
nothing but the constant scuff of my boots against wet stone.
Silence wraps round me like a cloak of quicksand. I must try
to scrape it clean. But with each new blade stroke, no novel
message emerges, no sign points homeward. Emptiness reigns
like a ruthless queen, ****** and shorn, an otherworldly white.

Looking back, I search for Coleridge strolling atop the Quantock Hills.
He has coaxed the Wordsworths there, convincing them to barter
isolation for inspiration. Poetry speaks to William, demanding
a new voice, a new style that joins the bright heart of nature to the brooding spirit of man, that lifts the lowly moments of the mundane
into the celestial heights of the Poet's magisterial meditations on Being.

All this once would have sufficed for me, but the stale, soaked smell
of sheep reminds me that I remain alone. Night falls and the moors
glisten from the constant damp. No one comes to England for its weather or cuisine. No one comes for solace or comfort or love. History,
      literature,
haute couture, base passions: Such is the recipe for a signal
      significance,
for a British extravagance of soul. It abides in the blackened bowels of Exmoor, launched from fallow footpaths and sodden goat trails,
skillfully trammeled by ghosts who juggle in silence the lavish jewels
of Elizabeth's crown, sparkling in the saturating mists before dawn.

Mmmmmmoon Lion roars.
The moon swerves in its orbit.
His voice reaches to the heavens,
avoiding omnivorous black holes.

He contemplates his philosophy
of life: poems written with
incorrigible vitality and verve.
He purrs the "m's" in his name.

Auden said that poetry makes
nothing happen. But Lion invokes
humor and thought, the rigor of form.
He holds deep respect for his readers.

They crave to do him justice in the
wake of an endangering diagnosis.
Poetry elevates the body, tunes in
to its hidden rhythms, sings its source.

As in Oz, the lion needs courage
to face the injustices of existence.
He silver-wraps his moments, gone
all too quickly. He instinctively roars

a new way to create poetry, one
that embraces the celestial,
disdains the body's betrayal.
He will win in the end:

His lion spirit soars.

Mmmmmmoon Lion roars.
The moon swerves in its orbit.
His voice reaches to the heavens,
avoiding omnivorous black holes.

He contemplates his philosophy
of life: poems written with
incorrigible vitality and verve.
He purrs the "m's" in his name.

Auden said that poetry makes
nothing happen. But Lion invokes
humor and thought, the rigor of form.
He holds deep respect for his readers.

They crave to do him justice in the
wake of an endangering diagnosis.
Poetry elevates the body, tunes in
to its hidden rhythms, sings its source.

As in Oz, the lion needs courage
to face the injustices of existence.
He silver-wraps his moments, gone
all too quickly. He instinctively roars

a new way to create poetry, one
that embraces the celestial,
disdains the body's betrayal.
He will win in the end:

His lion spirit soars.

Darkness devours the gibbous moon.
Its final sliver shivers in the freezing void.
Pockets of pock-marked light spill out of dusty craters.
Prints from space-age boots deface iconic astronaut signatures.

Colonies of phantoms have settled on the surface.
They sacrifice stars in elaborate rituals of absolution,
then aimlessly amble in circles around the circumference.
They squeeze water from recalcitrant rocks.

In darkness they decline to speak to one another.
Mutely, they await the daily rebirth of solar flares.
The moon generates nothing on its own. Cosmic
passivity mimics social order. A fiery Logos descends.

Do not succumb to restlessness.
Another journey will not drain the ocean
or clean the sky.
Another mountain will not reveal
the rooftop of the world.

You have your own mountain within.
It pierces the sky, buoys on the sea.
Climb it in solitude, in inwardness.
Rest in exertion.

You will find adventure, joy --
a pilgrimage to heaven's gates.

Climb, and you will find the face of God.

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

Being in the world,
there is a lesion

a murmur of the heart
I have fixed deep
within myself

a slight, distant shadow
a thin silhouette
that seeps
through my fingers
with each passing second.

I must try to **** it dry.

I have risked
everything
to accept it

yet it does not let itself
be drawn out.

I cling to it,
irreplaceable,
unnameable.

I would
annihilate it
in a moment.

The minutes crawl indifferently.
I grasp them in desperation.

I cannot
hold them back.

The silent murmur is not
prolonged.

I feel it pass
without beginning.

All is going to end.
I know it.

Still, I wait.

Nothing happens.

She is my Muse
but never floats a poem
daily I hearken
daily I drown

Abandoned, she waits
for her lover's return
across the empty room.
Banks of fear bunch up
behind her furrowed brow.

Loneliness does not dole out such
punishments. Solitude re-creates
reparations for the self, fashions
an unyielding glue that will fuse
together all her shattered pieces.

Inwardly she knows he is not
coming back. The static portrait
a mournful reminder that love
is as fleeting as the wind; it
blows where it will; it razes

what stands in its way. Her heart
is not ready for such defeat. So she
grabs hold of a hope rising behind the
painted walls. He will not return, no.
Still she stares through space, alone