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.

He holds his head high,
Always bays to things that come,
  .  .  .  Sticky gum on shoe.

Driveway of grave stones,
Army of orange poppies—
  .  .  .  Little flags victorious.

Clouds wafting above,
Seabirds sailing in the sky,
  .  .  .  Whitecaps on the bay.

In the eyes' corner,
Dull and deep, drenched
In dream with hair running
Within the longest song of breeze,
Where bones decay and flesh
Evaporates, there and when,
Cleansed in flash, eternal
Flame, is where we met.

By the sea, I saunter and think of her,
The tides slip into wild coves—
Like my own desires under moon.

I search the skies, emptiest horizons,
As the gawking gulls circle in windy
Tempests of confusions.

Shy stars appear as the sun is destroyed
And the sea sprays like a bursting fire—
Plastering rocky crags.

The long night that always, was coming,
Has theived its way from white hope,
A shroud for a sea journey.

A lone osprey shuttles a fish to its nest,
His heart— soaring on high—
While mine submerges at edge of sea.

I remember that day on Mount Tamalpais.
We picnicked under the loving sky
On Bolinas ridge, atop Wicklow hill,
The maiden’s breast.  We found those apple trees,
Who’d gone wild and fell into their world.
A blossom on the way.

I took your picture and you developed into
A sea-horse, or was it a mermaid?  The ridge
Was foaming about you and birds were swimming
Like fish underneath.  We found a tree, an umbrella
Left at the beach.  The coral-grass became our bed
And wine turned into water.

A spiral dance in arms of anemone, it was
All embrace!  That reef was spawning heaven.
At the treasure chest under the sea maiden,
Like children on highland pap, we played
At the beach that day in a castle above the clouds,
Beneath the wave.

~

You've asked me how can I see a future when love, in all
Its numinous beauty, is waning?
I reply, the immortal stars still shine above the veil of clouds.
You say, why are the salmon swimming to their pools of origin
Only to die as they spawn?  Only to die?
I tell you their love is unconditional, like mine.
You ask me did the giant sequoia know it was shelter for the burning grasses
When they walked from the seas?  I reply yes they knew.
You question me about the lofty snow cranes that fly over the Himalayas
And I reply by describing
How the priestly flocks, chanting on their mission, honk—
Announcing the mantle steps to the heavens.
You inquire about the elephantine manatees gracing the shallow banks
And wonder if the sea mermaids remember their lives beyond the latitudes
Of capricorn and cancer?
Or you’ve discovered in the wind a new reasoning as to why
The talons of the paired eagles lock in midair as they court?
You want to understand the nimbus garden, ocean slate, of lake Titicaca
Where resides the Andean sea horse gliding above the clouds?
The whales that circle dance in unison collecting krill?
The noetic display of the birds of paradise, the songs of nameless creatures
Playing in the wilderness like a forgotten melody only lovers lips remember?

I want to tell you that true love knows this, that life in its
Prismatic shimmer is all the myriad colours of infinite existence wrapped
In time to the sublime structure of white and bones.  I must tell you
That the flower is mighty in its opening, the humming bird is a sorcerer
Who needles ambrosia with vortex wings weaving his way to the Gods.

But I am nothing beside your disbelief which has arrived, before
I can even imagine the sweet awakening, like doom, my shell is the iridescent
Hollow of the one eyed Abalone, discarded in the deep fathoms
Of the ocean pressures.

I swim the tides as you do, investigating
The endless tendril seas,
And in my chest, during the night, I woke up empty,
The only thing treasured, a golden face
Trapped inside my dreams.

                                                        ­­­          
                                                             ­­                       — after Neruda
.

Poppies, wild in a quarry,
Orange, brighter than sun,
Thrusting thoroughly gravel,
Bold as soul crossing sticks
Into ****** pagan heydays,
A crop of colours branding
The loose stipend of stones,
One windy trail-flare shock,
A bulwark of stars, so laden
On landed, maiden shores,
The first batillion breaking,
By mighty petal, prim hands
Fiercly alive atop the lifeless,
Gravely low, defeated soot.

Bright moon, perfect, full,
Her *******, unbound in starlight,
Heavens outnumbered.

Ancient bearded ones  .  .  .
Stands of knowledge into sky,
  .  .  .  Snow face of mountains.

Where have all the days gone by?
What once was new, now is made;
Night is falling, close my eyes,

Now, the moments softly cry,
The light has clouds racing away,
Where have all the days gone by?

Fresh and verdant the gentle tighs,
Summers sweetness up in blaze,
Night is falling, close my eyes.

What once was truth now is lie,
After rains shear loss of May,
Where have all the days gone by?

I hear the hush, leaves that die,
I fear what the swan has to say, 
Night is falling, close my eyes.

Awakened to such sad surprise,
Spring was such a fleeting haze,
Where have all the days gone by;
Night is calling, close my eyes.

We came to the wild beach
To picnic,
But the waves
Were breaking and rushing in,
The wind was gusty
And cold,
Was moaning a faint
Dirge.

In soft and plain
Footfalls,
Over the slide of sands
We made our way
Into the covering
Dunes.

The dull pressing sky,
The white gloved waves,
And sharp grasses,
The call of scything gulls,
All things were grey
And hovering
Dark and faded that day, but not as much
As the few, ordinary, words we spoke,
To each other
We cried,
To each other
When our tears dusted the sands,
We were saying
Goodbye.

.
This wee Scottish imp fell from the skies,
One mythic creature, telling only truths,
Fresh from a fabled land called Utopia—
Once gave a lecture to a room full of old,
Future splatterers of the status quo, dim
Poms and drones from a garrison called:
Oxford.  God save the dream!  Help us all . . .

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

.
The frost, sets in and leaves of red have fallen.
And a cold sun beads on the stiffening ground,
Nimbus clouds, snows of down, now wafted in,
Tagging sun become louder, as ripples on pond
Are waging white with grey, dabbing the tableau,
That nature is painting with a pair of wild swans.

Hurricane has come,
Climate change deniers hide,
In great storming eye.

Tea and cup, ready,
Birds in garden weaving dream,
Kettle wakes, calling.

Will I ever know—
As insects walk on water,
Bliss, stillness on pond?

A hundred crows from all corners,
Flew into view, and whirled about,
As if the cracked earth set quaking,
As if the sky was tiding, sloe black,
What ominous undulations accrued,
What murderous tribulations due?
The very sound they made was tear,
Was tirade and all those black flecks;
Dark sparkles of sun, shadows of fear.

What is music?  The heart rendered?  What life
Is to a dream?  The eyes object in rapture?
What is the soul's shell, but a half note hollow
Contained with music?  Art is cold—
Echo, mute repetition, poor traits for nine
Dead muses of memory, a fiction after
The fact, nor can there be a shelf for credence
Without cadence.  And though the painter's eyes
Remember rainbows colour, his hands forget
All, save black and white.  Though the sculptor sees
The vein of nudes within the sparkled rock
That stone, still, looks back with grieving half-
Heartedness.
                         The chambered heart is beating,
The droning gales are sighing, but like the one bird
Who flies three ways— before and after song,
My middling wings pronounce two kingdoms part
Music.  The felt fingers of rain consort with well-
Tempered earthly quays and everywhere there is
There is the bright organic instrument—
And actuality is sidled with dead metaphors.
Music is but purest feeling given air to,
The mind soothed, the spirit seduced and a quell
For ache of heart, music is pure making—
Existence itself, another plain, a well dressed
Traveler, a border with life—
Body and spirit, who hand in hand and each
With each, are bound as wings are paired;
One flyer soaring.

The sea gulls— who fly in wanton
To the horizon, are a spirits
calling, are sea songs falling
To my mind they falter— as I
Have known such cozen to the sun
That falls each day nor do I see
It rising.  My world is weighted,
Under, pass the lining of the quick,
By the mounted cloud which hangs silver
Over the plated night. The owl,
Whose eyes of Janus tails, when wanes
The lids, tied to crescent holey
Whelm of malevolent moon,

Praise over me, with wooly wings,
Is silent as shadow.  I may strut or run
But they do come as the shadows will
With cahooting sun, and the blotting
Bald faced moon, chiaroscuro—
The days feign and heaven pales under
The wake of the luna sea.

       In darkest daylight
I shamble toward the flat horizon
Where the seabirds fly, till their ends,
I take two-faced my faulty comfort
As I see them, falter, falling, yet never
Do they touch the gloaming ground.

I Hear All The Outlawed World

                        I

I hear all the outlawed world in harmony,
The marshling stalks the green and gaunt
Destroyers who heed not sparkling deserts
Charged to the gill, nor candles pitching down
Like doom.  I note the scale of fossils
In cloud covered peaks, record
The seemly count of bodies by square root
And irrational number, I am witness
Bound to bounty to all who blaze in gray
And shallow grooves seeding their ends
In strikes on the ripe and smoldering fields.

                        II

I see all the outlawed world in harmony,
Barking wood bracing by the bud,
Where runs of blue, bury in vain
Down slash of mountain forest, cascading
Into august, rising after the fall,
As do kind-killers blasting from shells
To die as snails creeping under flower,
Who saw the past wasting away
In filed futures, slipping by blades in neck
Of wood, sightless as gallows of trees
Try ****** each time they make their leaves.


                        III

I know all the outlawed world in harmony,
By seamless song of stuttering gulls,
As in conches, waves of providence,
Cell from the center, beating musseled shoals,
Where wailing ghosts and wing-tips point
Printed nails to the silent capes,
And bumble hairs comb round the broken yokes
Stirring streams of babble baited
By flowering psalms, engaging arms to prey
On tales told by the rood and drown
In eyes turning like sands on the sea.

Each spring miracle  .  .  .
Trees blessed by caterpillars gifts,
  .  .  .  Holey hands of leaves.

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.

The morning world in mist dissolves and under,
Towed to heaven, we, a plod below the death
Of clouds, sing mute, where they trumpet-glide
Flashing into peace.  Three-toed slabs, parched
Of orange, web the stars over the wine
Dark seas and chalk the churn and twining earth
Into gloaming.  In rapt stillness they,
Are import and income, parables,
Echoes of the innocent song sung to a spire,
Gilded hutches, to those who heap on brightness
Swans are brighter even more with blackest
Eyes, they pierce the silent shroud all starry.
I wish that we were like two swans my love,
Neck of nape, embracing without touch.

I came to a courtyard of my own making,
To a cottage by the sea at the worlds edge.
I furnished it with my left over life, complete,
Barren and colorless and I wrote the newest
Book of psalms out of tinder and flame, a tome
Of grey and useless poems, unheard of songs
And reams of flesh.  There in the lightest dark,
By the Druid stone that was placed just for me,
I planted a creeping yew tree.  And the moon
Sang in celebration and silence like a fallen
Priest.  
                    Under the covering hazel trees,
That sprung to life after the longest winter,
Which taught me to forget my name, I now
Struggle with light and my body, warring, torn
Is fading slow, like the always arriving, down
Turning solstice, the climates of the mind,
Where it is digging the never ending shallow
Hole only the spreading eternal yew, that I
Planted, will ever know and only the Lazarus
Moon shall ever rise above.

I came to a courtyard of my own making,
Was it dream that led me there or my eyes?

You were my gift,
Soft, sweetness, little one,
Eyes of moon and ocean
Hills of creation, of shadow
And bread.  In your nakedness
I fled the earth and bathed
In starlight and dust at the end
Of the forever of the sky.  
In that silence,
Of exploding cosmos and vapour,
I fell, feeling in your smiles the suns
Decay, I felt light beyond
Its barrier, and was decimated
In the gravity of the neutron
Blue of floating eyes in separation.
Your faraway orbs were lost
To me in the frozen dark energy
Of shunted light and the cold
Vacuum of space.
It was my birthday
And you were set on leaving.
It was my birthday
When I nearly died.

Flies in the haze morning sputter and splay.
Water drops from leaves rolling with the blown
Blades. The windy whoo of the owls fade,
Blue buried eyes cradled in the hollow
Trees, the swamps seeker is quietly rustled,
Wings of panoply, spangle-speckle the wind,
Over the flames of autumn, talons thistle,
Crown the dominion of the fall, fade in
Sporting meadows colour, till the dive,
Balm of field, marsh, all ignites. Lever pale
Winds finger through the leaves gravely
And rake as you raid, shoulders that burning vale,
Casualties of insect, the lemming song sings
Mouse and vole flash, dark, sparkles the clearing.

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.

.
In whisper— shadow sings a song.
My call is joined within the hollows,
Only tiny dimpled crests of the sea,
My voice is for rains, round familiar
As patch into tune of old shattering
Light.  I search for love, sloe in slips
Thru ******* eyes, outcast beyond
And ghostly move into monumental
Futilities of unbearing, leery in flesh
Undeciphered.  Make me one lattice
To bind the wind and mark shallows
Mine as I trudge into black, blue sun.
This song— I sing is for lost keeping,
Hear my hush as it breaks for darks—
And I shall love in box, buried, forgot,
Kept at one sight so grave, remaining
As smudge onto stone burnt in a dial
Etched by firing rays of timeless star,
Hear my song— whispers of shadow.

We came to the wild beach
To picnic,
But the waves
Were breaking and rushing in,
The wind was gusty
And cold,
Was moaning a faint
Dirge.

In soft and plain
Footfalls,
Over the slide of sands
We made our way
Into the covering
Dunes.

The dull pressing sky,
The white gloved waves,
And sharp grasses,
The call of scything gulls,
All things were grey
And hovering
Dark and faded that day, but not as much
As the few, ordinary, words we spoke,
To each other
We cried,
To each other
When our tears dusted the sands,
We were saying
Goodbye.

Founded in one fatal mission,
Where joy is merest rumour
And the two toned colours
Of dun flower are drowning
In sepia, where separation
Is touch, folded and kept
Like a lock of shocking red
Hair, fine grains in my eyes
Are stoning pebbles of grey.
Soft is the day and wandering,
Birds always sing, beaming
As they fly, rushing away,
I am stilted sound, hushed
In a vale shadow of whisper,
Flood lights of leaving ways,
Curtains to my moulded stage
And all the airs of outdoors
Mute, closed.

Sky was not enough—
Bird flew into my window,
Broke neck hitting glass.

No rout, they did not let out a cry,
With veins of flame in swelling eye,
No word, could semble nor shutter,
The bumpy flesh tore into the light,

In nimbles of silence, nimby smoke
Smouldered by sidle of spent fires,
The house of future days was open,
Their ***** it hearts eternally closed.

Body of ocean, milk and sky,
We are tangled in the hope of night.
The lips of the milky way, creaming us,
Stains and is **** with a taste keening;
All is creation.  My meteors crash
Into your ruptured Earth.  I flame
Upon your must and moisted furrows
And my toes are locked, rooted in yours.

Body of ocean, milk and sky,
In the deserts of the day you are true
Oasis.  The curves and waft of your sands
Seethe and sodden my barren plains,
Are erasing all my wandering memories
Of an endless sky and now your eyes
Are the only stars I know, and your skin;
A sheet that holds the heavens shimmering.

Body of ocean, milk and sky,
Your ******* are the heaving of grasses
And wind, loft and laden in the rounded
Hills, a hoard of ****** bread, bountiful,
Ripe and strange.  Your hair is an endless
Savannah, your valleys are gold and honeyed
With milk, seared, filled by my penetrating sun.
In passion we play; low on earth and deep in sky.

.
Oak blasts through the sodden earth,
Vine, vainly wraps with pale veins,
Bark of tree, serrated, cuts—
Vine dries up spinning.

.
Lear wanders in stormy open, bares warring elements,
The heavens blister, crackle, night is balmy shroud,
Wretched monarch babbles in sprinkles of wind cold,
Arguments lost by ones own pouring perturbations
And raining sky said 'nothing will come from nothing.'

Howl, howls into blackness treed in lightning splits,
His outcast soul, reels, fleshed, cut to smithereens,
Tang of salt burns on the bluffs and the sea rages,
So entire and ceremonious is Lear's fall meted out,
Air spoke, 'nothing from nothings ever yet was born.'

Sky proclaimed to man child King, here is a reckoning,                                    
Each mad choice was self infliction, now wind flays
And sweet Cordelia lies in her innocent **** grave,
Sky, in thralls of thundering asks, 'what say thee now,
King of highborn follies, even purple heaths are rags,

Yet black and above you and night shades, whine,
Unworthy King, done in by compounded effects,
The might of maelstroms in low butterflies wings,
How now, bare trees, knifing reeds, skeletal flashes,
To rains of night are ever your lanyards my lord,'

Sad Lear so near oblivion fell mute, sky went on,
'Howl and cry mad King your reaper calls beyond,
The icy brisk heavens await to brusque you away,
Your slipshod kingdom was mere and fools' dream,
Howl, til howls abrupt abate, for nothing now comes.'

Sun falls, moon rising  .  .  .
Crows splattering throught day,
  .  .  .  Two pieces of night.

Is all concrete below ephemeral skies,
To think what is now as already made,
Riding lone, the plateaus of a minds eye,
Or is whole of nature purest esplanade?

Face of the fallen  .  .  .
Morning after our parting,
  .  .  .  Full moon in daylight.

One day gone in the long great forest
Of the ancient world, wolves alone
And mighty hungered with true kin
Stalking the tundras of the snow drifts
And all their prey, with cautionary eyes
Moved in heards and flocks swaying
With the sounds of the forest floor
And the spearing grasses.  The wolf
Was his own master, free, unbounded.
A great spirit, brother to the moon.

One dying day, when the bushes burned
They came upon the garbage dumps
Of early man.  Their smoke was laden
With the smell of fresh ****, small skins,
Animals, ended trail, and salted death.
Many wolves circled in fear, their pits,
Only one or a few tasted the left overs
The easy scraps and bones, tailings,
The elder pack would not stoop for.
These few unguarded wolves morphed
And mated with each other, their mane
And fur, soon was tamed, soon became
Mottled and brown no silver remaining.
This was the fall of the wolf, not man
And the moon turned white, when wolf 
Became dog.

Frogs— suddenly dive,
Blocks of flesh crane to the sky,
Heron holds head high.

Today, a poem should be palatable, cute
As a Kiwi fruit,

Dumb
As a horse battalion's scudding run,

Strident as out of tune horns
Of basement bands where the gloss has grown—

A poem should be bloodless
As the slight of words.

A poem should be film of ocean brine
As the reel unwinds,

Cleaving as the gear greases
Spoke by spoke the light smearing breeze,

Blowing, to the temple outhouse
Exalting all the ****** functions—

A poem should be not true:
Equal too.

For all the history of vanity
An empty room and a bass relief

For lust
The keening masses and no light above the stream

A poem should not be
But mean.

Jesuit Pope reigns  .  .  .
Blood red in ignorant cold,
  .  .  .  Cardinal in snows.