The you I never got to know,
Who doesn't exist,
The shimmering you composed of glances and a few soft words -
the rest but expectation -
The unsustainable you who melted with the March snows
As we walked by the river when knowing you
Meant forgetting her:
Where has she gone,
This you who never was
And whom I suddenly remember?

****************************************************************************************

The Composer

He would not long abide in any key -
A single phrase sufficed to show its sham.
From unrelieved monotony he’d flee
In endless, vain pursuit of promised lands.

He learned to love the movement, not the goal,
The thrill of modulation, the blurred sight
Of passing places, vistas that the soul
Glimpsed fleetingly, remembering with delight.

He named music meaninglessness enjoyed,
Desire traced toward imagined bliss,
Devised by one arisen from the void
And destined to return to nothingness.

**************************************************************************************************
I am gloriously lost
(The loster the better)
And more so each year.
My ignorance blossoms
And my questions spread like wildfire
Devouring the sureties of youth.
I am afflicted, in the wilderness of the world,
With curiosity, and all that I see
I would learn to love.
Most happily am I lost:
I welcome the wild wind, the onrushing tide
That sweeps me beyond familiar shores.
Leave certainties for the dead
And bliss for the non-existent:
Number me among the fortunate,
The living, the lost.

********************************************************************************************************

It's just before daybreak I enter those cities of dream
Whose charmed, curving avenues our feet seem to know,
Where the children again are playing,
And where the scent of crushed almonds
Becomes a nostalgic melody tormenting my heart
And dissolving as I awaken
In the Land of Disenchantment.

*****************************************************************************************


For a moment, as the sun returned
And warmed the old stone wall overrun with blackberries,
And the finch's immemorial song gilded  the afternoon,
We seemed to remember the reason we're here -
How we came to this world, and who we truly are.
Then came clouds of oblivion
And poetry, our hope.

*********************************
This is how you build a  luminous cavern:
You begin with nothing
And imagine a little space
That grows
As you put things into it
Until it becomes the world.

******************************************************

The music that we sense can never sound,
The images we'd shape can never be;
Knowing beforehand this futility,
We yet persist in littering the world with poems -
So many crumbling castles scattering dust
That dances in the sun and, settling, forms
Haphazard patterns, lovely, unforeseen,
So that, abandoning what we intend
Makes failure a beginning, not an end.


********************************************************

Who am I?
From the mirror opaque eyes resist my gaze.
A hundred habits govern my goings;
A thousand dancing thoughts surround me -
Why do I elude myself?
Long ago in darkness I lay dreaming,choosing,
naming myself and you and world;
Now it's true, or difficult to believe
These eyes are nowhere's  guardians,
Reluctant portals to nothingness.

************************************************************

Of late the waking world's become a dream,
Soft interlude between bewitching nights
Of scented music in an unknown key
That eases poetry's futility.
What are these places, rising from behind
Dissolving mists and disentangling vines
That long ago, about me, newborn, wove
Forgetfulness in a tumult of signs? -
That feed upon this veritable earth
While indicating elsewhere, meaning more?
Perhaps, if I could live a thousand years
And see all hopeless, myriad things which are,
I'd learn to love as beauty disappears
And stride with ease into the beckoning stars.

**************************************************************


Were I a troubadour or a trouvere
And loved a woman inaccessible
Through rank or circumstance I'd utilize
My subtlest skill to praise her rarest gifts,
Finding in the frustration of my doom
An opportunity for poems to bloom.

But as a modern man in a free world
I stare across an existential void
At some unknowable Other I would love,
Confounded by a language I mistrust,
And prisoner to my subjectivity;
And so resolve to form in this abyss
An emblem of impossibility
Made possible through love's deep mystery:
A poem by which to banish nothingness.

***************************************************


Words come too late for us and for the world;
The winds of memory die on life's still sea.
We live and row unknowing with sails furled,
Adrift 'twixt origin and destiny.

****************************************************


When the ships appear,
When the long-fluted, dream-crusted ships
Fall from the milky stars
And settle again in our midst,
What shall I say then? -
How explain that,
On your account,
I cannot leave?


******************************************************


Your greatest fear is groundless!
Though you may pass through myriad worlds
(Chance-tossed or doomed by wages of old sins)
You needn't fear oblivion: those cold moons
But form the stage on which life's drama plays -

Your fear is groundless!
Though you bear no memory
Of your countless transmigrations
You shall awaken as a bird,
A stone, a warrior or a maiden;
And live always,
Surrounded by children
Or in the study of your solitude,
Yes, you shall always live -
To the weary rhythm of repetitive tasks
Or in the midst of Carthaginian splendor -

And yet, Noble Traveler,
Among the hundred houses,
Sparkling vistas, oceans, suns,
Behind the many masks (that know
Those other faces as their dreams)
You'll be forever homeless, without name -
Fear not oblivion, then, but know instead
This is the price of immortality:
The ennui of endless wandering,
The terror and despair of one who seeks
In vain for his face
In the mirrors of infinite mornings.


*******************************************************



What good is it, this dream of yours
That death is to the past a door
Through which we find old love anew
And suffer again what we'd undo?

This time - each time! - I comprehend
That what I'd keep the world will rend;
What good, eternally to live
In ignorance and die in sin?

*******************************************************


May friends desert you and may lovers leave;
May your ambitions languish and you dreams
Of permanence dissolve - such vanity!

As beauty fades may you become despised,
Near-sighted, melancholy.  May your life
Take on the bitter taste of lemon rinds:

Then is it barely possible you'll say
In dying you feel grateful, not betrayed,
For simply having had the chance to play.


********************************************************


Like a little child on the first day of school
You will go with hesitation,
At the appointed time,
Into the room.

Like a child you will go reluctantly,
Glancing backward, dragging both your feet,
Not because you wish to go
But because you must.

And no one will pity you,
Not those dim faces outside the window
Waving with false smiles,
Nor the strange clods of dirt
Already settling into place all about you.

But one thin shaft of light
Shall slip into the cracks of the heavy walls
And nestle on your cheek, upon your shoulder
(And whisper immemorially in your ear:
All is well; I am with you!).


*********************************************************


I float above the days and years
And look on what I've left behind:
The beggar's bony hands outstretched,
A woman sobbing in the night,
And the fallen bird by the roadside.

Humbled beyond all vanity,
No longer desiring to be,
I find myself prepared at last
To live again and mend the past.

************************************************


The shy child you befriended
With your russet-freckled smile,
your strawberry hair,
Who tapped on your window, lightly,
And brought you chestnuts,
The boy who tossed a ball with you
In that park in the afternoon
of a thousand robins -
He is here still - here! -
Beyond the reach of time,
Love's prisoner.

***********************************************
Die Seele ist ein Archipel
Wo ganzen geheime Stimmen singen
Auf tausend duftenden Inseln
In esoterischer Harmonie
Umgeben von goldenem Meer.

The soul's an archipelago
Where sing the sundry, secret selves
Upon a thousand fragrant isles
In esoteric harmony
Surrounded by an amber sea.


*************************************************


I come upon a precipice and pause
To wonder what dark truth awaits below.
A place that I'd forgot and now recall?
A new existence where I am a bird?
The countries of my dreams become substantial?
This one, same life, eternally replayed?
I come upon a precipice and pause
To wonder what dark truth awaits below.

**********************************************************


Unnameable object of desire,
Unreachable city dissolving in gloom,
Faces without souls,
Hands grasping emptiness;
Who will deliver us from these shadows
Into the Land of the Living?

***********************************************


We walk beside our several selves
In parallel existences,
Some blessed, some burdened with travail,
But each of them palpably real -

And doomed: each story ends with a demise
From which we waken under different skies,
Enchanted, anguished, curious, by turns,
Immortal like the gods and blind as worms.


****************************************************


The color of the sea, before a storm,
O'erhung with clouds: for this I have no words;
Nor standing on exotic isle forlorn
Can I repeat the music of its birds;
Nor name th'especial quality of her charms,
But know it, blind and speechless in her arms.



***************************************************************************************************


THE PATIENT IN ROOM 206

                            ONE



Gather!  Gather about me, my wits!


Gather and disperse!



"I will pick irises for you" quoth she
(Or did her mindless phone correct her text?)


In Khabul fifteen are dead, another fifteen injured.



Once there was a shy boy and a girl with
Freckles and strawberry hair.
They tossed a ball in the park

(Now he is hefted on high in majesty -
Now he swings in mid-air, captive king,
And jests as he jousts with the dark-bearded barber)




It was summer in the park: they tossed a ball,
Never speaking.  Now:
"I will gather dandelions for you
As I find them here."  And
Fifteen minutes can save you fifteen percent.


The blade of his nemesis poised
As he swings in the air, captive in a cloud

The cloud-king, soon to be clod

And cloven from this earth, that girl, these flowers:

Who knocks?
Who knocks and enters unannounced?
The children ungrown again, ungrown at last!


When you were young you girded yourself
And walked wither you would;
When you are old another shall bind you.

Bind me, dark eyes!


Find me in the dandelions
Or the iris -
To love (I risk) is not to know
But to wonder
And to wander among imponderable sunsets
Rose and mauve.
Enter!  Enter the children into the Garden
Of Yesteryear, and into the house on the sloping hill.
Beyond, in the golden glade,
Wanders in solitude Tzhing.


Many names have I but faceless I remain.
My love is a beautiful stranger
Whose fond familiar form masks
A mystery of sunsets.
Who knocks?
From up here I can look down on the park
(They cannot see me for I am looking at the past)
There is dew on the light-green leaf-buds
And on the clods of dirt undrying.
Hark the song, the thin-whistling gliss
Of the lazy bird of distant summer
(Some are short and summer long, the saying goes
Of trains and horns of unicorns) -
Drink!

                                TWO

From the magic horn, say some


And cure the crimson clouds.


"Steady now, let's gulp it down."
He's rough beneath the smile,
Rough like a banker:
I'm spun about.  I glimpse the glinting blade.
Who pinched? Who pinched my thighs and mocked
My exiled brow?
"Let's go, dammit: open your mouth and swallow!"
What? And forget the warm sun on the side of the house?
And her voice from the window dropping
Pearls of amber into memory's marble basin?
That fatal draught?  Oblivion's herald?  Never!
"The bastard - he bit me!"
(And the one-day sofa sales and the endless texting trivia)


Bring me my sons and my daughters!
(Stay thirsty, my friends.)

                             


                  THREE

The park is empty, evening falls,
The freckled girl has moved away,
A moss-covered ball rolls wind-tossed
Among stones.

But to be a king is to see a new way
(And I saw fear in the barber's eyes)

I take leave!
My sons and my daughters bring to me
Let them play one last time the mingled chime

Let them show me the invisible loom of my deeds
Foolish father, cripple-king: they will not judge harshly
On my dancing day.

Then gather, gather about me, darkening clouds of winter.

Divest me of these paltry bones:

The courts of chaos call.


Take from my quaking hand this scepter


Let go my names upon the wind.

The cold is my secret friend


As I seek my forming face

In a country without boundaries

In a world without words.



******************************************************************************************************

Dream-house
And a dream-woman
Grown children all ungrown
Or grandchildren growing
Light and shadow, evening and morning.
She wanted to weep, she needed to weep in the house,
In the midst of the hours of the day.
Eternity, eternity and time.
In the midst of the house, eternity.
From plenitude, disheveled hours and a profusion of tears.
Come, I said, I have prepared a bed for you.
Beneath these soft blankets let us lie down together and weep.

***************************************************************

Invisible musicians play a gig
Mad scientists and lunatics ordain.
Pink robots, frivolous, enslaved, enact
Their dark designs upon me without shame.
With merriment they tear me limb from limb;
Amidst the happy din I feel no pain.

***************************************************************

Beneath a deep blue sky
We walked together, my son
Along the broad avenue
With the wind in our faces
And the sky preternaturally blue.
Together
Along the smooth white road
We walked with the wind
And talked
Beneath the brilliant sky
Our words in the wind
To the far horizon
Words like music
Ringing in the dome of a sapphire cathedral
While we walked together
In the wind, on the avenue,
My son!

*********************************************************

Last night she reappeared arrayed in light
In the kingdom of my childhood
She who had been borne away
Upon the darkness
In a confusion of mournful horns
Appeared again in youth and health
With her calico cat
The old radio and her linens
Her eyes like windows
Opening out upon the evening
The purple ocean
And, in the distance, golden ruins of some tropical Rome.
Oh, my mother!
In the room of high ceilings
I spoke to her
Curtains fluttering before the balustrade
Told of her goodness, of her courage
And of my love
We wept as only Bible-people weep
Before the bold, chimerical sky.
Then she became a nightingale
That roused me to this strange, diaphanous dawn
Of stars that are the glittering eyes
Of the beloved dead.

**********************************************************

I have wasted my life!
Wasted the days and the years
And murdered the child within me -
The bold adventurer who never lived
To visit foreign shores
To stride in the evenings through streets of lamplit cities
To rest upon a hilltop by a farm;
Murdered the boy with his thousand questions
Each peach-sweet in the garden of his soul
Killed him with stale certainties
And glib assurances - a fool I was!
Who needed to know
What words can’t teach but love could show.
I have wasted the hours and the days
In brooding on the past, the days to come
Never here, never living
Simple as a snail, comfortable as a cat.
It was for you - oh, God forgive me! -
For your sweet sake I killed that boy
And with him all the fairies, frogs and flowers.
I only wished to care, to keep you safe -
A futile hope - and so you fled -
What’s left? A few more useless years,
Then an end to the days and the hours;
Let my epitaph read:
He has wasted his life.

************************************************************

Always the wrong woman
(the ex - , the late - )
Again and always
With the stilt-house wobbling beneath a darkening sky
Always and again the parents
The borrowed-time people
Aged and ageless
Kind and uncouth
Their oblivious, decaying smiles.
None of it right: not the house on its toes
Nor the too-steep slope
Nor the color of her hair
Nor the room, tall-ceilinged, dim-cornered.
And the young ones missing!
But soon, up the slope, before the rain
They come: the young and the hungry with their egg-white eyes
They come, tall and dim.
Always!
The wrong family
But one at a time they approach me
Their ever-darkening arms open
And I embrace them
(I embrace them!)

*****************************************************************************

Back in the house of distant youth
The children gather on the roof.
Within, silent crotales shine
Where once upon a time we’d dine.
Invisible hands commence a tune:
The mallets float across the room.
But where crotales’  gold should be
I find soft disks of zucchini.
Enter ex-wife in a red dress
Alive once more, amazed, distressed.