Throw my hood up
It's raining outside
And inside
Is a nothingness
Like my bedroom walls
Your words
Echoing
Maddening
Repeating
Defining
I swim toward the shore
But it moves away
So I drift and sway
Amongst the eels and beer cans
I talk to them like they understand
Out of the sky I demand
A satellite picture
Of how your hair might be
The image is good company
In a way they never are
Here and gone
Like a shooting star

The bliss of an open field, in sun drenched Midwest days
left an uneasy tension in the mind of the lonesome
and loathsome

How is it that liberty can be so provincial
or that the porous poverty line can be some kind of osmosis
of these societal bounds

What constitutes freedom, when your mind is a cage
or when every book you read is also bound
and these glassy eyes of tower blocks
blink and shudder until they break and rain down
on a whole class of people,
and the bloodied tides swell through the streets at dawn

Try and pose some grand question to the innocuous universe overhead
Or run and fall on tired tread train tracks, flailing arms and legs, screaming
This Elysium falls over broken skulls and your life is shattered too, screen-door glass shards
Pompous waterfalls of the soul crash on a vacant rock, and you sit crying to imaginary songs
Take walks through empty towns and fantasize about some crumbling bridge
Or even smash vending machines in anger
Or kick at tenement building walls, and hope to God that they fall
Like you did when the spirit left your body
We were too young to understand, the slanging match of the soul
And how the doors that slammed were representative of a larger being
The ever present societal constructs that they were bound
And now even in adulthood we too scream at one another
Wishing we were not them
Praying we were sane
So you wash dishes by the grease fire, moonlight faded curtains
And I sit by the table, grinning some unfathomable grin
Because just yesterday I stood there too and washed in the same manner
Fighting urges to lunge and fall at the humming beast in the corner
Or so and you make eye contact
And but I am lost in trains of thought
Or thoughts of trains
And just then the kids come crying, from the upstairs rooms
In the house that we grew up in
Or perhaps, the house I lived in and you grew up in

The small dogs look at the big dogs;
They observe unwieldy dimensions
And curious imperfections of odor.
Here is the formal male group:
The young men look upon their seniors,
They consider the elderly mind
And observe its inexplicable correlations.

Said Tsin-Tsu:
It is only in small dogs and the young
That we find minute observation

1657

Eden is that old-fashioned House
We dwell in every day
Without suspecting our abode
Until we drive away.

How fair on looking back, the Day
We sauntered from the Door—
Unconscious our returning,
But discover it no more.

Athens

Over the restless stones of the Parthenon
the hurrying footsteps of Athena
pursued by Poseidon down
the narrow ***** streets
past our still-arguing parents
past our still harrowing childhoods
we remember going away from here
quickly carried on the salt breeze
the swelling falling away of seasons
wanting what was never enough
forgetting what was never enough
green we said just give us that
and maybe the blue would be enough
but when they took our mother away
we cowered and when our father
was drowned we stood silent
the green watched and what we
thought was the blue became
a whole millenium a conflagration
finally the boat turned into the harbor
and we went up among the dark trees
we have come back to listen
to what the stones are listening to
we are listening to that


2. Sounion

So we sailed past Sounion
our sails holding and letting go
of the little gusts of light fading
and washing over us
we could feel our weary thoughts
slipping from us now our hearts
holding the darkness close like a mirror
an emptiness we wanted to love
and then Mycenae’s hill’s scant shade of
one tree the hot breath of Perseus
the stillness of shining stones
from wherever the enemy comes
he must scale this height
taste the blood of Agamemnon
on the thyme-rinsed breeze
to what god do we sing now if not
the hidden one known to these hills
in these bodies how many
broken columns will have to be
raised again and in that place
where only thresholds remain
dividing the green grass inside
from the green grass outside
how much labor to become no one
to step right past ourselves and speak
at last out of the merciful
into the pure silence


3. Patmos

The petals of the flowers on her dress
as she stands in the bow of the ferry
rounding the last trace of Samos
make me remember Pythagoras
said music heals their turning
and rippling in the wind now
more intense then quieting
and I can either watch those
petals or these waves and feel
what the night has made of me
a mood like that one house there
on the hillside of the far shore
only an eternity of lapis between us
or I can hold the mountains up ahead
the boat’s slippery progress toward them
the sea sloshing as we cut through it
feel how these islands were formed
from all these pictures all these sounds
so it hardly matters right now
if we ever get to Patmos
if we ever climb the steep hill to the cave
where the terrible words were spoken
or see the view John saw or dream
of spending a winter in that
abandoned windmill there
because right here and now
watching the petals on her dress
it hardly matters much at all

One morning after childhood
the mosquitoes were just gone
and childhood returned and I
could run right outside
without fear of being devoured
by those piranha of the air
it was like the barbarians
and in fact no one was coming
so the sun could stretch out fully
over the cool flesh of the grass
mostly weeds the way flesh
is mostly desire a part of
the will of the world
in which for a few moments
I felt completely secure
ridiculously secure