.
A leaf, delicate and torn,
Wafts in the caul of autumn
Like a whisper in a blooming
Crowd and only the smoking
Sun knows the ***** of dreams.
Where in the whirled is wisdom,
As a breath so fairly as the fallen
Wakes without wake nor wonder?
Where in the fork of fawn, innocent
Fold, the gentle does, of the burning
Forest, is silence mute?  Where is a light,
In that hold, what rising colour is buried in
The frozen gleam of the golden and forgotten
Seam and swoon of sweet ephemeral summer?

( Song )*

She took the flower that she loved,
Planted him in the burning sun,
A desert formed around and the morning dew,
Were tears the flower cried,
It nearly died.

She took the flower that she loved,
Brought him near, into her house,
Her house was cold and dry, with no light to see,
The flower could not leave,
It nearly died.

She took the flower that she loved,
Found the place where he belonged,
Without walls, in shade of sunshine, where flowers bloom,
In peace they bear no pain,
And rarely die.

.
I have known the stifling silence of all—
The world's cruel turning, the teasing dawn,
Breaking with fainting days, blinking out
Their dashing hopes, so much for rugs,

Pulled out.  I will not miss the slipping shade
That buried my name in Pharos fallow tomb,
Nor will I lament the times passing, raging,
Spectacle, the fallen masque of my fame.

I shall welcome the majesty of the ******
Loam, the honour of being the daisies mantle
The goodly fortune to sleep under the golden
Stars who birthed my dream of grace and light.

.
It would not stop, the drop dripping
Faulty well and I was cornered in
Your eyes, when your love came down.
The gentle rain was a deceiving
Flood.  The softness in your voice
Was dim light bent, on my banishment.

I began to notice the kind indifference,
The doldrum swale, when your love
Came down, was like you were employed
Only— half trying to get along
With me.  My own dulcet music
Crashed in two, she wails a shamed—

Diaphany and darkness from the corner
Room began to grow, when your love
Came down.  The light that moved so dear,
Became a precious ration, it was
A black starvation and I began
To die from tasteless food, sad music,

Fading sun, no expectations—
And laughter meant for others.  I bled
For years on open wounds and I—
Could hear the wind that rails at ones tomb,
When your love came down.

.
He follows a win, shoddy as tin,
What a week, one sorry victory
And tales to be strewn, too thin
His climbing hill, a pyrrhic story.

.
On that western isle, bathed in gold-
Drenching sun, my only, giddy love,
Weaved a daisy chain and crowned
Herself, above the clouds and purple-
Violet seas, her grace, topping yellow-
Sparkled weeds, to flower, marching
In fealty, round her red, reign of crown,
Soon, after new mornings impromptu
Coronation, misty, bluer, eyes felt slow
Distant dread, the subtle, burning fate,
The inevitable nights of overthrowing
And fade of love's noble, corona light.

Were I shaper of dream, I would build
A grand labyrinthian castle of granite
Stone to contain that day—  I would
Conjure a moat, impervious to shifting
Time, the mute corruption of sorrows
Waking.

.
I was with the ocean last night and your body
Was its vessel, overflowing.  Words were frail,
Drops indwelling about the shapeless sky,
Water reaching for its own height and breath,
Like touch, were as desperate letters exchanged,
Endlessly read, until like loamy vellums, they
Disappeared in our hands.  Inklings of tide-
Pool and driftwood.

                               My blood was a river that ran
Its course.  Members feeding your deltas and birds
Breeding where the water-russet sheds on pampas
And inverness.  Eyes like wing through ever—
Green, empties the fossil shell.  Fire, brimming
Mountaintops that were, for countless millennia,
Sleeping.  Did I mention that the earth moved?
No?  Her displacement was involuntary.

Then came the waterfalls, lifting throughout
Time.  The scent, searching for its identity,
The wave, calling to its own name— Ocean,
O— cean.  And flowers, opening like galaxies
In the after-light.  A universe of face and hand
With hunger for salt-rain and then the cloud
Burst-blue and spilt and spun more redolent,
Deities, in joyous creation.

I breathe, in your ocean, like a child unborn.

.
In the mercy caul of night,
Where time is frail as memory,
In the technicolor film of ocean salt,
With eyes of yearn and mute wonders,
There, I saw you once more.

We walked through the rushes green
Of warmth, broke into dreams dawning
Meadows of casting light, where winged
Creatures, colourful as we, lilting in midair
Spiraled, drifting through the gleaming
Thoroughfares of endless Mays, of tingle
And flame, where once before, we found
Ourselves at the misty plateaus reflection
Of star shine and flight, nary silhouetted,
Yet, framed in the snow melted tarns
Of golden, glorious, Olympus.

.
My story ends of sparkle,
Hands, winding me in fable
The dark lines of her lashing eyes
Are burning rings, shear ice,
Covering the lost ponds of spring,
To see her in the ripening fields
Is to know the myriad colours
Of flowers, wild with loneliness,
She is always numbering the days,
Always on parade, hair, with out end,
Tresses trailing the wind.

.
Deep in the shines
Of cobalt blinding suns,
A cold traveler is bound, lost,
With only pointed starry night
As print to slow circumnavigations
Of her ****** heavens, visions scope,
Cardinal points are ever reaching
Towards ancient regions of nether,
Pharohs deltas, negations and delight.
Twin stars searing, burning, burst—
And in the exploding nebulas of iris,
Celestial oceans of aquas rise, cries—
Eternal blue laid of cerulean skies
Outreach and reel, lot vacuums vast
To outer lands, riding stars chariot,
With such spacial years of light,
Only in eyes of her.

.
I came to the pavilion of the big cats
And in the center was a palace ruin,
The walls were stone and feeble mortar,
The great, golden monarch was the lion.

With wisdom eyes, he gazed upon me,
I lowered my head as was my station,
He did not move, nor deign to care,
In His royal chamber I was under thrown.

I thought, you are caught my over lord,
But his stance said, these bars are scepter
And I heard him say with a long lost roar,
'Hear my horn, I am he, the storm of Jericho.'

In the palace of the mighty, indifferent, king
His thundering voice crackled the lambing
Stables and even heaven closed under ceiling
Dome and I was caged when the walls fell away
And the whole, blown world, remade— a zoo.

—for Síneánn*

We drove to a lost, lonely isle,
And where, if only once to find
Ourselves sown again, belonging
Wholly to the keep of faraway strands
That hours tided us in beads and wave,
The nascent sea whispering aloft and birds
Cascading as we flew, to sail under moving
And hoary dunes with stellar eyes of poppies
Wild, such breathtaking strides for we to make
And the sun set dripping and lowly swept ashore
Away to us on breaths of gentle crests breaking,
We spoke sundry nothings, as if to know things
So simple are to be kept wanting nor ever said,
The lonely, dull star of day fell sleepy, dimmed
By sparks, the shimmer to our eyes—

                                                               So clear,
Shall be the hills of the fair isle to us, will always
Remain caste with new lamb and crowned deer,
By thorn and thistle and rimmed with broken shells
Rung on marbled beach, singular, before innocence
And grace, by skip ****** lovers cradled in only sky
To be joined, with the lined hands of long night stars,
Finally reaching in the jeweled glass by the running
Grains polished, a gild castle moat, stained into ocean
Salt, always by the sea of windows glory and joys given
To each, ever to be ****** upon the high tunes eternal,
Beside the stations of grass and drifted heartwoods,
Among wings by the slip of tides, ripped monumental;

Till when we drove away, this time, in a carriage stall
And all the tumbles of sand into eyes crumbled to end,
We drove ourselves back to riven sleep, a stark beyond
The fallen wayfare columns of momentary paths, we cut
Home, trudging through the garden forests and inlet
Bays on serpentine road, always ever to cross—
A bridge of sighs.

( Sonnet )*

Our tryst was sore, more like pain or penance,
What kerfuffles in our unspoken for eyes
And love grew low, by unanswered questions.
How could we laugh, live in such indifference,

Long, unmerciful time, grinding us down
With not even limitless skies for leaven?
Each day was comic-tragedy, no Eden,
Lives flooded about, simple pleasures drowned.

Yet, each day we dreamed with harnessed wings
Bound together in the throngs, restless journey,
A promise was made on some green gentle isle
And we made our golden shifts such shining things,

Running to rays, future dawns never to come,
Shining things falling mute in dry rots of sun.

.
And speaking to the western wind,
In the sped and turning time of the revolving sky
As a top unwinding like a dropped fable;
He dreams of taking leave, unraveling the coil
Upending his foil
Of listless sights as daylight creeps one more tread
And sweet belief breaks down once again:
Days that are ******* like a sad hunt
When the tracker is bent
On tragic orchestrations that only lead to a duel . . .
Undoing, Oh must it be, "Must we fit?"
Let us know and get on with it.

In his bed the women are only dreams
Phantoms, iridescent sirens.

  .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .   ­ .

Yes! I am not King Lir, nor could ever be;
Am a child cast out, transfigured, remote
Innocent, prey to the white flaming truth
The growing down, that clothes my name
Inconsequential, sheathed with shame,
Polite, capricious, calamitous;
Empty of all, it is unanimous
Nor even the memory of ripeness
Invisible, a drop in the pool.

I am weary . . .  I am weary . . .
I shall whisper to the newborns when I am old.

Shall I build upon the strand?  Have swordplay with the sea?
I shall tear my hair, mutter to the moon, bury my wounded knees
I have heard the Selkies singing, sailing with the breeze.

I do not think they will give their skin to me.

I have known them gliding beyond the ninth wave.
I still hear them sing so sweetly, weaving sorrows, on my back
Carving the blue waters as the waves are turning black.

We come and go in cycles with the moon, as tidal waves
Seep and seethe, foam and heave, lone captains setting sail,
In folly with a capsize brimming, before our boat has been bailed.

              

                                        ­­­                     ­­                                      — after Eliot
.

.
I sit under the ancient apple tree,
My heart is low, my head in the clouds,
The day is slowly ending, I am sleepy
When visitors arrive, little buds come,
Raining down on me— a cadre
Of red-headed finches.

( Sonnet )*

Under the primrose stars, the lovers
Lie abed, on green, threadbare croft
Of sleeping daisy, clover and moss,
Trails with hushed air, an embroidery
So fine as to stitch blushing heart fall
And wrap the waters full of stillness
In graces, winding, soft, granulating
Time, wings flutter and hum, winsome
Sparks, fire white, flying as little suns
Burst confetti, in sweet encampment,
Of grass and sapling wood, innocents,
Charmed are wholly twining, in moon
Rise a lantern to the winking heavens,
Out of their skins they are climbing.

.
When once I saw creation in your eyes,
My heart a seed, a finger rapt fist of bud,
A box of chaos, daring to be opened,
By a gentle house of reckless child, my heart
In the bracken field of surrender, saw deaths night,
The fertile light of stars in your face, cradled
In your fleshy shower of holy stone, your flame,
Your fire, nestled in your hair, undone.

.
I have come to the temple
Of your body.  I kneel and prey
Like a sinner.  The holy water
Beads low on your forbidden
Tabernacle, sears my touch
In cleansing flame, what I do
And what will be done is all
For unrepentant confessions
And penances.  Let me truly
Learn the sacraments of flesh
Before I bathe in your wicked
Innocence and commit my sin
At being mortal in your nimbus
Chambers, let the mercies rain
After the fall of my fellowing
Creature, for this night is blood
Sabbath, and sacrilege under
A Pagan moon and let the dawn
In the rising sun of mute morning
Be my absolution, our benediction,
Let the moving waters enfold us,
Pure as lambs, as washed babes,
Baptismal.

.
Little one, before the heart was born,
You were there, already, waiting,
Riding on a star that shoots the skies.

Little one, when the night disappeared
You were the warm, gleaming sun,
Made for a journey of days rebirthing.

Little one, now only memories are sad,
In the hollow room, little one lit the stage,
She wrote the page, drew the lost signs
Saying— we are enwrapped, alive, joined
With farthest reaches of light— little one.

.
Lovers reconcile  .  .  .
Making love in yellow fields,
  .  .  .  Joys in mustard seed.

.
My love is kept, and I have nailed
Her face to mine in a box of sleep,
A chamber for lost chances, subtle
Visitations, concrete emanations,
Somnambulistic signs and mercies
Elation, we walk through meadows
Of the mending sun, sweetly chaste,
Ever deep into the wandering shift,
That tearing time and moon allows,
Real as dream, to the lands of night.

.
We trod in steps without spark,
A careful journey one remakes,
With days of dreams' surrender,
O love— is but a promised land.

In our youth precious time reigns
And greetings are met with sorrow,
Maidens and lads, each entertains
Graces above us, Venus and Apollo,                                                          ­            

Gods on high, who told us stories,
Of the cloud nursery, of mountains
Keep and comings of celestial glory,
Not of gentle caress to windy hands,

Of shy indifferences, the trials of lot,
Nor the endless engulf, still desires,
In this land of lost, unmoving gusts,
Go those who shuffle— souls entire.