Fallen
I have traveled
on a thousand roads
and on one road
I have traveled,
to hear the voices’ calling,
wound like bits of string
and stones and the soul’s desire.
I have watched the birds
and was told
that rain is consequence.
May it fall softly
on the children’s game.
And I have known
the roaring waves
that brought Agamemnon
to weep for the end of glory.
And I have known
a mother’s care
that sweeps a suicide
with aging hands.
I have traveled
on a thousand roads
and on one road
I have traveled,
to hear the voices’ calling,
wound like heaven from exile
and to a soul’s satisfaction
fallen from the wings of desire.
Vengeful Gift
I should have seen this vision:
The silent church of the blood
And the gust of dull, circling variations
Whining in cataclysmic harmony.
Silent lover, beautiful and damned,
Harvesting kindness in red thickets –
Each brush with hungry time reels
Into the honeyed darkness of ecstatic pain.
How to move away from these solemn chants,
From the dark chord rising in your bones
That plummets with a leaping heart
Deep into the waiting earth.
Everything that follows is a bleak caress;
Empty crosses span the hillside, bright with sunlight.
The unknown lover, distant, laughing, withholds
The last embrace, bestows the vengeful gift of life.
(Ex)colere, exercere, studere
Cast in a glimpse,
bronze angles,
cry for us –
what was tempered
from the dust;
we were not,
our eyes were not,
all that did not belong to us.
Gathered, they gathered
the wheat, the moonlight,
the word spoke,
primaevus,
the young, was a drab shawl
and marked the man, Abel’s brother
for what crime he didst commit.
And Hesse, in doubt,
called to an older friend,
and called not.
And was no sermon
and Pilate was not there,
the students
and Pound’s beard,
but a stubble.
And envy spoke not,
silent, Academicus,
and spoke of it all,
and was not of shame.
And I awoke, seeing the birds around me,
burdenless, and the mountain was not,
and was not survival,
and the beholder stared upon the perceived
like a child with his mouth open,
and the birds around me,
turned not their eyes.
And drank, they drank coffee
in the room, furnished with old oak,
and the book, covered with dust,
and on the shelf,
a bust of Caesar,
soggy with whining.
On a Night Like This
On a night like this,
when the stars are alight,
and the moment’s blissful kiss
expands the languor of sight,
and devils sleep
in the surrounding air,
in the folds of the deep,
extinguishing care,
a tiny voice
like a bleeding heart
will remember a choice
that will rend you apart.
Reality warps,
beauty tears at the eyes
like a rotting corpse,
buzzing with flies,
for gone are the days
of the ambivalent sun,
we are walking the blaze,
living it out, one by one.
Elegy
For Osip Mandelstam
Children peer at me
Around the corners of your city,
In fear of wolves,
Sleep in your widening footprints.
There are no orbits
In your flowering streets,
You who let Rome sleep,
Biting the thread of cool voices,
Cherry trees blooming from your eyes.
You who watched hordes
Leave the sun in the street
To be carried away
By someone important;
You who were terrified
of the blinded sky –
Which way did he turn
In the spotted fields,
Hung with weary moisture,
When no masters called out
To his tired heart?
To you I say nothing,
Like a tree hanging over a cliff,
My ancient sorrow not retreating.
The paper eater –
When he comes around
Nobody cares
For the hungry ground.
Glory wasted
but you still have songs
and I have suspicions
that go mad, (and I won’t tell)
because I’m still hungry
and the world is sharp.
I’ve heard applause
there in the hollow word
and I don’t care.
And what does that mean to you?
And I have moments
to paint you with,
broken roads
that I won’t travel
and the grave is beginning to speak.
Every time!
I’ll cut it down for you –
your laughter cuts it then in two.
I’m in need of your song, Osip Mandelstam!,
My ancient sorrow not retreating.
And children laugh and shout
Down the lanes of your city,
dull sounds,
Asleep in your widening footprints.
There are no orbits
In these flowering streets,
You who let Rome sleep,
Biting the thread of cool voices,
Cherry trees blooming in your heart.
Usury’s Kiss
I will leave my life by the heart of the sea
for the shoulders of thieves,
for an extinguishing star,
for my soul’s loose skin.
I will find it again in the soul of wine
for America’s sleep,
for a soldier’s happiness,
for a fugitive justice.
We were scattered here
like magnolia petals,
from a garden of movement
to a prison of stars.
Our rivers have been poisoned
with usury’s kiss.
A discarded rose
lays in the road
like a dead dove,
like an apple in a broken wrist.
We may abandon this place
where chains hang loose
from the mouths of gutted cars,
abandon it to a dream of brown and blue,
but rust will fall
from a butterfly’s wings
and another wasteland
will open in our lives,
for our rivers have been poisoned
with usury’s kiss.
We were scattered here
like abandoned children
on empty trains.
A discarded greeting
lays in the road,
like a dead animal,
like a rusted face
from another wasteland,
for our rivers have been poisoned
with usury’s kiss.
And I will leave my life by the heart of the sea
for a wolfhound’s feast
for a soul’s madness
for a lonely woman
on abandoned train tracks
for a memory that haunts the echo of today.
Rainbows and Lye
Dedicated to the victims of September 11th
Snake dreams dancing
in and out of ears,
spat out in the dawn,
carrying on from the day that hate was born.
Angels are hanging on this blackened day,
suspended in garments of silk
above the gaping tomb;
shadows walk forth down the ancient way
to greet with burning blackness honeyed milk,
in the folds of memory’s womb.
And virtue spreads its poison wings
across the yellow sky –
rainbows and lye,
rainbows and lye,
streaming down from the Sun’s bloodshot eye.
And I’m begging, begging
for roses to die,
I’m praying, praying
to the wallowing sky,
for I am as wretched
as the innocent,
swallowing a bestial cry.
Break the Violin
Time swallows these days like black tar.
I’ll sit in my room
and watch a single leaf fall
but it won’t be worth talking about.
I’m hollowing out.
I could drink the black sun,
one last time, but it’s the same old thing,
out of the wretched river’s debris.
It’s easy to get used to something
and you can stop listening. The wheel starts to turn
and you’ll wake up on some distant shore –
I’ll push thunder from below me, I’ll scream like an eagle.
What happened yesterday was just a trick –
trickling down from a loop,
a pickling frown on the stoop
of a dead man’s tenement.
Maybe they’re rustling documents,
preparing numbers for their judgement day,
but out in the thicket,
someone’s thick and getting rid of it.
The violin, the violin!
Someone will have to break it down the middle.
The Morning
The morning’s pasted on a telephone pole;
Notices for time’s beginning:
Passion drowns in the cardboard sea.
Just another delicacy
Drunk up like the asphalt’s caviar.
Where were we when the sky decayed,
Where devils slept and children played?
What morning is this, bathed in strange light,
Drinking the dregs of the stumbling night?
The rising cacophony of guilty innocence,
The muddled coherence of mangled dissonance –
The piano is eating the dust off the floor,
Angels are prancing outside the corner store.
And the morning’s pasted on a telephone pole;
Notices for time’s end:
Languishing in the anguished light,
Just another forgotten night
Drunk up from an old brass samovar.
