Dark sound raven makes,
Chortles top fir tree, haunting—
Druids incantation.

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.

Haiku  ( splendour )

Youth spins out of dream  .  .  .
Children are made as they play,
  .  .  .  In green leaves of grass.



Senryū | Haiku  ( verity )

She walks in beauty  .  .  .
Shines without delusion,
  .  .  .  Certain as starlight.



Haiku  ( choral works )

Sun sings in morning  .  .  .
Music of light starts each day,
  .  .  .  Song birds joining in.



Haiku  ( raiments )

Sun-shower dressed tree,
Rain left bright silver jewels,
  .  .  .  Beads on evergreen.



Haiku  ( showcase )

Wild flowers touring  .  .  .
Fine art pieces we all see,
  .  .  .  Pollen rides with bee.



Haiku  ( changeling )

Echoes from stone walls,
Rain bleeds rocky into being,
  .  .  .  Water drips to wells.



Haiku  ( great blue angel )

With forgotten wings,
Walking on shallow waters,
  .  .  .  So proud stalks heron.



Haiku  ( maddening )

Sun— my nemesis  .  .  .
Even moon is foe with arms,
  .  .  .  Light embraces her.



Senryū | Haiku  ( scrumptious )

Two eyes glazed over  .  .  .
First time naked with my love,
  .  .  .  Icing on our cakes.



Senryū | Haiku  ( rainmakers )

My eyes indifferent  .  .  .
Made hers well as we made love,
  .  .  .  Both crying for more.

Spring will soon appear,
Morning sun lighting snowfalls,
  .  .  . Burning winter tears.

In my garden, feral and overgrown,
I bear with branchings of the apple,
Hunched and grey, laden with fallow
Fruits, the tired, knottted fingers die
Each year, under which are baubles
Of sourness and stray, poorly drawn
Circles of fodder even hungry deer
Will not graze upon.  The elder tree
Slowly casts itself into Bonsai stone.

Down a valley, in the grades of sun,
Lay a stand of madrones in redden
Fire, with deepest eyes of burnished
Green leaves, some immortal Gorgon
So beauteous, in form and branches
Divine, of Olympian flame, held, atop
Heavenly escarpments by the loving
Skies.  I see it for what it is, my love,
Your body and hair, so tawny, so fair,
Though, ever lost to me but in dream,
Are dearly those red branches, a fable,
Your eyes, green as sea, those leaves.

The smile of her eyes  .  .  .
Sun giving birth to sparkle,
  .  .  .  Waves on bright water.

.
The lone stark bugle cry—
Horn of the great mountain elk,
Ripples down cold through morning
Dusted wood as the mushrooming dews
Drop into dearly waded pools under
Fawning toes of forage and cool
Evergreen.

Bull frog in fish pond—
Loud, one day I heard last croak,
Raccoon washing hands.

Rain, softly falls in old deer valley,
All the woodlands swimming underneath
The steaming fog.  What peaceful sound
I hear, softly rings out of the sparkling
Woods and meadows, chimes like a thousand
Sleepy bells announcing the rising sun,
Who sings loudest, after the rains.

After our row  .  .  .
I bought flowers and waited,
  .  .  .  Now they are brittle.

The heron spreads his wings and preys.
His stony stand a beachhead sloughing
The salt sea, a sepulchered wading.

Leaven the broken bred, unshell
The teeming waters, a fisher of mermen
Unlordly low this lying father,
His wings are palms,

His rock a mount, his wings a bay,
And deafness, tears in the outer shores
And exaulted seas the forgiven waves,

Swells the briny blood and kelp.
Vains are streaming to the fisher king,
Lordy he lands the lying father
His wings are psalms.

A tiny flood that arcs the sky
Marks lord in miniature, a King
Fisher flies, His wings are
The waters calmed.

The otters bask and preen, mermen
Jostle in the laddered rays of the sun
They mark their surf, insouciant play,

Wavering the fisher of men, he sways,
Simply they circle in song singing hours,
Dancing as do the murmuring waves,
Their strokes are psalms.

The dark woods circle the clearing.
The marsh birds, safe in their stalks,
Curtains to the yellow,
Cautiously wading.
Wick and wings — wand
Over, under leaves.
Merlin shoots — morning,
Smokes the light
Air.  

The woodland birds,
High and low,
Flick and feed,
Soon will turn,
To fallen
Seeds.

(Song)

Remember when, proud walks in bonny glens,
I took her hand, we did pretend
And she became, princess of daisy chains,
O how those days still refrain.

When spring appears, wee birds sing their love songs,
Of the winds, in her hair.

We made a bed in the pine needles fine,
Misty rains fell and tasted of wine
And the sun made its way cross the skies,
Little moons welling in our eyes.

When spring appears, wee birds sing their love songs,
Of the winds, in her hair.

[ Bridge ]

Summer bled into autumn so red
And the seasons sweet, they all fled,

Now winter comes and the valley is run
And the wee singing birds have all gone.

I walk alone down the mountain sides,
To the sea of dreams, close in my eyes,
For she once was a true love of mine,
The north wind blows, out of time.

*Seasons sweet in bonny glens.

Evergreen tree,
Burning red bushels
Of bark, branches open,
Cloud robed against, beyond
The mighty blue mountains,
Sage colour, rages of green,
Teems immortal as the sun,
Where great eagles landing
To nest in the towering
Chapel of a giant body
Adorn, what was always
Regal, everlasting, true,
Spiraling to the citadels
Of the swirling heavens
And even your crown,
A thrusting spire.

Grizzled-brown sound of tuba walking,
            In the way of circles you wobble step, inverse,
                        As does a broken waltz, bearly graceful.

You sniff your way a crush alpine meadows
            And making sense for you are lowly berries,
                        Rude as any intruder might be in the foothills

Of the Gods.  'More wine for the great Polyphemus,'
            Say the drunk brambles, brighty doomed sailors
                        All a wash by behemothing jaws which hang

Them over.  Yet Ursa, if in minor you must play
            By the cosmos' stilted view, great major, it is they
                        Who glare more distant, as if you really cared.

I waited for her  .  .  .
With all the years of my youth,
Heart still locked outside.

Sometimes the body is contagion
To the soul.  Stars in their mission fall
To seed the fertile flesh, ignite
Blue waters of sulfureous hearts,
And so the flash is set to cancel
In the flood.  

Sometimes the lip of soul onto seal
Will not hold, before he first knocked
And let flesh enter, thorny pegs
Pricked nerve and pierced bone on his climb
To the rose, yea, some stars odd as
Meteors crash.

In the swan-sea, song-sangy-frame of crib,
Rough hewn words bent mold to scrape, like
Blasted coral, stood half-submerged
Amid sea and sky, for between the leaves,
Behind the eye, there are little stars
Shining like existence.

In a circle world he fashioned green
Blazons about the darkling day,
Fostered by celestial navigation,
Wrote a language for music, on a map of love
And charted the force of green in a wind-
Rose of discovery.

Sometimes the soul is not contained, it
Bursts in silent sound like well water
From the source.  And of men in streets
He saw the pennies in their grumble
Eyes, and of love and its course he rubbed,
Tickling dim stars.

It was his thirty ninth year in that fall
To heaven when the steeping cell,
Refused to push in its tide.  Homeless
And free on scaffold of bone the middling
Man retracted from sun to sink
With the moon, turn-tiding-toward sea
Like a changeling.

And as ever, nor often, unwavering eyes
Sprout through shifting grains.  And as he spoke
Quite rimless, Dylan Thomas was petrified
In undying light, and solid set within a rill
Of reef sparkling in concert betwixt gas
And sea, so becoming in purple sleeves,
This constellation of mute singers all,
Dried five-fingered-fish, bright embryos
Returned to the shell, they burn between the leaves,
Beset the grounded skies and show sprite flashes
In the dark where He has left his imprints, burning
Above and plastered below.  The first rock stars!

The first ones they killed were the poets.
They crowned themselves, the sterile
And sexless acorns who fell from the felled
And split the air, writing with bark,
Would have us not desire experience
But describing trees.  To the naked kings
The word is a wonder, a tool to be used
Like any other.  With a forge, they called
An altar, they pitted heaven and made miners
Of the Gods.  In high places they read
Their grounded works, sogged with rain
Water from a red wheelbarrow, they list
And bludgeon us with their hammered similes,
Scribe their poems, they are the painters of one
Colour and high priests of alchemy, turning
Salon into echelon.  When the falcon stoops
They name him hawk.  Standing ****, flat-footed,
In bumpy skin, their honks go unanswered,
For they are no kin to the swan that glides
And sometimes they remember that,

The first ones they killed were the poets,
When the sky is etherized, prose made
Verse and their subjects yawn the great
Slaving maw.  Steeped in stale erudition,
They man-scaped the garden, pulled out
The weeds and by their words, they decreed
That only grass should grow, in strident
Chorus they are ringing in the sheaves.
But their poems are only like poems.
The naked kings are clothed in word only.

In the thirsty kingdom, water spills
Stagnant from the stein and the droplets
Echo, "there's no there  .  .  . there."
Incestuously they christened
Each other, one hundred years of virgins
Making love with a dead word
They know not of— Poet!  Asters
Among the daisies, yet on the fields
Of praise, they shall deflower
Themselves and though they strut
And prance as stallions and mares,
You will know them by their brays.

I, round the brae of Howth in chalky light,
Lamented my lot more spent in sport than play.
There, land appeared disinterested and sight
Was a teary well.  Cold was the shivering day,
And my frame, a ghost of shadow, was erased,
It receded like the fog.  Just then, overhead
I saw brave birds engaged, a raptor traced
A mourning dove’s faltering flight, how it fed
Its own shining sense of purpose, for not
Wanton sport or lordly state do falcons
So hunt, nor did the bird in peril belabour
His reason, rather he tried avoiding those talons.
A question answered itself within my breadth,
Survival resides in a pageantry of death.

She prolongs agony,
Razor lips cut so sweetly—
Can we be just friends?

I shall make a list  .  .  .
Of those who are awesome here,
  .  .  .  Ego told me too!

The dark woods circle the clearing.
The marsh birds, safe in their stalks,
Curtains to the yellow,
Cautiously wading.
Wick and wings — wand 
Over, under leaves.
Merlin shoots — morning,
Smokes the light
Air.  

The woodland birds,
High and low,
Flick and feed,
Soon will turn,
To fallen 
Seeds.

Rain beads on a web—
Oceans of insects drowning,
   .  .  .  Baubles for spider.

Snowy egrets, pure,
Stoic, white statues of grace,
Digging in the muck.

She left in springtime,
White globes of daisies explode—
What is left of me.

I want to know—
What only lips can know,
I want to see—
What only Falcons vision,
When they stoop from the heavens,
I want to preen and lord—
As only Jaguars can, regal,
In the tangles of purple jungle sun,
I will climb these ancient steps
Holy and of forbidden stone,
If only, you would
Surrender,
Love.

( Sonnet )*

And she so blithely calm,
Perfection amongst nature,
So beauteous, so precious,
Dearer than faint rapture.

How, we new men are lost
Without words, without wit,
Unbeknownst of times' cost
Bearing, bereft, without pill,

Woman in all her temptings,
Hair, longing to be shackle,
Eyes, mirroring dire heavens,
Lips, that drowning fish tackle.

How, to be a man without fear
When all womankind is near?

Deep in the chalk of gloaming flame,
The tawn and pale, of moan and loon,
Where under leaves of forest shades,
The crescent rails of the riding moon,
Here is when the quick blood running
Drains with shear seepings and looks,
With eyes agape, small game stunned
Over pines and green hemlock wood,
The ferryman wings and clawing tears,
Whose silent strike and low red raking
Blasts unto an indifferent lane of peers,
This is the house of apparition's name,
A mages fugue, muffled muses reprise;
The **** song which creeps as sun dies.

Windy leaf falling—
No birds break the morning sky,
  .  .  .  Silent note, a dirge.

Little dull birdies  .  .  .
Love own songs by mirror pond,
  .  .  .  Graceful swan sails by.


Hello Poetry  .  .  .
Rube lords with simple vainness,                                                        ­              
Watch him crown himself.


Hello Poetry  .  .  .
Day sullies night, bright vanity
  .  .  .  Rube is a poser.


Hello poetry  .  .  .
Even vain rube's bio drains,
Spews self promotion.


Here is Pantheon  .  .  .
Dabblers, self aggrandizers,
  .  .  .  What a hollow hall.

Shiftless, sifting the air, 
Plunging gyrations, 
Crow speak
Hackle, hacking; 
Speckles the sky.

Saw the air whittle to smoke,
Black mar in the weir of wings
And mankind muddled in the wraith, 
Slowly streams a bread trail
Forth and back;
Black bleeding.

I see your claw tracks, 
Dark-digging-sparkle 
Plain in the muck, 
Needles threading,
A trail of stars.

The moon, beams over the planted fields,
Growing blades shimmer, slicing the night
As fiery comets first seeded the earth,
Beads light, to life-giving grains of rice.

.
Maple over water,
Hunched by wind and rain,
Lithe branches reaching,
Into the complacent garden pool,
You are like a catcher of wisdom,
A sculpture of spirit, so many hands
To reach with you, as you leave,
So many thoughts that sway
As a troubled mind is reaching
With the wind and the rain,
Maple over water.

.
In house made warm letters run,
Bright poems let, in winter sun—
The dreams of day a lively school,
As songbirds gleam at vernal pools,
Apparitions of youth— fly in and go,
A love blew held in wings, undertow,
Little things now steeping with peace,
Cloudy thoughts set aflame, released,
A lost woman revisioned— unknown,
Is conjured, screening real as a poem.

In my garden, feral and overgrown,
I bear with branchings of the apple,
Hunched and grey, laden with fallow
Fruits, the tired, knottted fingers die
Each year, under which are baubles
Of sourness and stray, poorly drawn
Circles of fodder even hungry deer
Will not graze upon.  The elder tree
Slowly casts itself into Bonsai stone.

Down a valley, in the grades of sun,
Lay a stand of madrones in redden
Fire, with deepest eyes of burnished
Green leaves, some immortal Gorgon
So beauteous, in form and branches
Divine, of Olympian flame, held, atop
Heavenly escarpments by the loving
Skies.  I see it for what it is, my love,
Your body and hair, so tawny, so fair,
Though, ever lost to me but in dream,
Are dearly those red branches, a fable,
Your eyes, green as sea, those leaves.

Blooms of hair, shimmers and starlight,
Face of dream, gathers in lighted loom,
Wakes of morn, spotty forest fawn, child
To magi moon, maid of golden orchards,
Of faraway seas, world opened vastness,
Temptress of foreign fruits and the giving
Sun, where blue, blood oranges old, ripen,
The dark vines grape of ancient olive, red
Lamb and wine.

What enchanted lands are you made of?
Where the diving seas of dolphin, sponge
And whirlpool weave, wherein Gods must
Have loved and making you, left this earth
In beauty and peace, burnished with dream.

Under loving branches of tree,

Singing birds bathe in garden,

Butterfly and cat jostle, sleepy,

Flowers bolt into the open sun.

Birds gather on tree,
Innocent as morning sun—
Cat bleats by window.

Pale, vanity' s reign,
Pablum, overtaking sense,
Hello poetry.

Rain, thumping down,
Pressing grey prints,
Ocean, tears the sky,
Drowning with drinks
Of blue eye and salt
Taste, rude earthling
Song, takes too long.
Must I go on walking,
In gurgle paths spray,
Soaked, silted, ******,
Drabs colours running
In days raging of rain?

.
Eyes, orb as exploding stars,
Weighted light of hair rushing,
Held extremities, nimbus limbs,
Eons' spring, singularity crushing.

Wet welling from earth  .  .  .
Deep valleys, hills, sweating *******,
  .  .  .  I plung into her.


We are lost at sea  .  .  .
In moonless night our soft cries,
Curled waves drowning us.


Above her in bed  .  .  .
Little breaths lifting our bodies,
Eyes, fingers, dreaming.


Her green eyes are set,
Jewels from sargasso seas,
My ghost ship is wrecked.


Her long hair tangles  .  .  .
No struggle in rising— then,
  .  .  .  We are rapt in bed.

By scratch and scrim and keys, a poets write,
Parsing the eyes drop, lancing the buried ear,
Under the hewning gaze of hazel trees night,
Streams forded, moon and yew stepping, stare.