| Contents There Was a Man
Koheleth and John
The Fair
The Spirit of the Wood
Stroke
The Time Traveler
The Boat Maker
The Woman Who Chose Her Own Form
No Customer to Satisfy
The Pyrrho of Martinsburg
Desire
Philo's Justice
His Kingdom
A Motion of Order
Wood Shed
Fine Grains
Serving Suggestions
Following Instructions
First Moment on Such a Bed
The Cellar
THERE WAS A MAN
There was a man who built me into
a castle and I could not
stop to eat dandelions
or smell orange blossoms.
I worked all day on synthetic wholes.
Logic spit at me,
but I jumped away and caught it
in the front of my shirt.
I went to the bathroom to clean it
and saw a man building
a tinker toy tower on which he put
a can of stewed tomatoes.
He said, "You must submit
to everyman's pleading."
He was religious and wore
rosary beads
and a large wooden cross
on which Christ hung
with yellowing scotch tape.
He wore a black coat
and black eyes and gray hair.
He said, "You must submit."
I said, "I am working on a
mathematical system."
KOHELETH AND JOHN
Koheleth
It was light among the drifts
of snow.
I could hear the blowing,
a tedious blowing,
an endless round.
John
When the wind stopped,
the night was clear and cold.
And the stars proclaimed light
in the hard, black sky
barely seen above the mist.
Koheleth
Why did the wind come?
Where did it go?
I wanted to follow it,
but that would have been futile.
Who can grasp the wind?
John
We cannot know why it comes
or where it goes.
It is a dark saying
breathed out by
an inexplicable presense.
Koheleth
We cannot know the meaning
of the things that happen
on the earth.
We can catalog them.
We can describe them.
John
You tire of seeing.
You tire of hearing.
You find the wind
a tedious murmuring,
but does its mystery touch you?
Koheleth
I rise up in the morning.
I lay down at night.
I find peace in the moment,
in loving for a moment,
in working for a moment.
John
All earthly things pass.
All our work and desires pass.
I looked for some permanence,
some word spoken,
some word called out mysteriously.
Koheleth
I have heard men proclaim
their private visions.
I have seen men
massing together to listen,
no visions of their own.
John
I felt an irresistible calling,
a mysterious moving
as my breath quietly
merged with wind, with air,
with dark motions of atmosphere.
Koheleth
Who knows when my
breath began?
Who knows when it
will end?
My breath evaporates in the cold air.
John
A great love wells up in me.
A great wonder fills me.
The wind has become a man.
When he touches me
my body trembles with joy.
Koheleth
Men multiply words.
It is a great burden.
There is no end to them.
How often those words have hardened
into weapons of war.
John
All the words cannot be spoken.
An infinite number cannot contain it.
A few words suffice.
If a man strives to follow,
these words will guide him.
Koheleth
I have sought wisdom.
I want to know what to do.
Laws and precepts have come down to me.
I will follow them.
It is all that I can do.
John
When in solitude and quiet
I listen and watch
a deep wounding afflicts me.
An old self dies.
A great love is growing.
Koheleth
What a burden has
been laid upon man.
The suffering of his days agonize him.
There is madness in his heart while he lives,
and afterwards he goes to join the dead.
John
It is not clear what we
will become.
But we will become like him
because we will see him
as he is.
Koheleth
There is a great gulf between us.
We both stand on the edge of the abyss.
We both look into the void.
I see darkness.
You see light.
John
It is a small step,
to listen for a moment to the calling,
to trust for a moment,
to let go for a moment,
to be caught up to ride on the wind.
THE FAIR
The glittering motion of the
summer fair with rides and
children and bees trying to
drink from their cups.
He was a thundering shadow
on the literal day.
The animals gathered around
him to listen to him preach,
the screeching doe eyed animals
with ears sloped back
with humped backs
like no animal ever had.
Those tourists,
those mutilators,
those buzzing flies,
he swiped a them
on a billowing day,
a sun freckled day,
only marred by the
odd stinking bum.
THE SPIRIT OF THE WOOD
Peter by the garden gate
and Susan by the wall
could see the spirit of the wood
slip in behind the stall.
It looked like the leaves of autumn,
the gold leaves of the fall,
but its eyes were like the winter,
cold blue and practical.
And there was a touch of summer,
of spring around the mouth,
of heat and green fertility,
of breezes from the south.
It made poor Peter shiver.
It made sweet Susan laugh.
It went over to the river
to write its epitaph.
STROKE
When a sudden pulsating of air
made dark eyes flutter
and the pumping of black fluid
burst red in a warm night
I felt a dizzy light strangeness
and my eyes became dry
and I peered through the rising buzz
of a brain caught fire.
I wished to bathe in cool water,
in calm, cool water to float.
I wished to let my body drift,
free, free from all desire.
THE TIME TRAVELER
The time traveler was not very old.
She was a child really,
but already she had become
a vector across the fourth dimension.
She was often told
that like the ring of a tree
she was but a slice slightly random
of a four dimensional region.
She was young, she was bold.
She did not mind to be
but one of many in tandem,
one spirit guide, one of legion.
THE BOAT MAKER
Once on a side channel far from
the main flow of the river
where the clever ones never go
I met the boat maker.
Only few knew that he made boats,
tiny boats of paper,
folded in intricate designs and
let free upon the water.
Once he let me come with him in
the cool, early morning.
He watched his small boats float away
and sink without mourning.
I live close by now in the woods
and sometimes he comes with me
to sing in the lonely places
and let the wild words free.
THE WOMAN WHO CHOSE HER
OWN FORM
In that not so future time
of enhanced electronic norm
there was in those bright networked lands
a woman who chose her own form.
He who hid behind a thousand
variations of perfect beauty
looked with fear at one who would choose
her own physical reality.
But fear turned to fascination
and to a shaking of foundations
and to years in her ample presence
free from sensory computations.
NO CUSTOMER TO SATISFY
He sits below the trees in the
warm bright billowing air,
his mind a calm buzz, his body
comfortable in his chair.
And there is time for useless thoughts
and fantasies of why.
The how is still, no need, and no
customer to satisfy.
THE PYRRHO OF MARTINSBURG
I was eighteen years old when I
let my old world die,
the black wagons, the black coats,
beneath an Amish sky.
It was then that I met that sly
footnoter of footnotes
who replaced my proud assertions
with stammering and doubt.
We roamed the rural counties
rootless and alone
and I became a still stranger
in my childhood home.
But now I live at my ease with
linguistic politics
and silently recite the heroic
deeds of the heretics.
DESIRE
When desire comes up beside you
and wraps you in its woolen cape,
you are to it a fruit past due,
split open like the skin of a grape.
Or perhaps it is a thick web
interlacing branches of trees,
and you are patterned from it ebb
and flow like curtains in the breeze.
Or maybe it is a fine gauze
that filters the no from the yes
and is thus the effective cause
of all your pain and happiness.
PHILO'S JUSTICE
Philo hovered ponderously
in the garden path
demanding his form of justice.
I went out by the compost
and up the hill into the brush
and Philo was there.
In my bed from the thick
dampness his whispering voice
settled on me like death.
In the heat of love his
wheezing breath and watery eyes
disturbed my lover's slick skin.
In the cold memories over
years now in my old age
he holds me to my bed like rope.
HIS KINGDOM
The man who would build
a world with words
mixes breath with wind.
His blood mixes with glass
by crystal walls,
windows broken.
He stands close and
whispers so that the ear
buzzes and is deaf.
He looks deep in eyes
and is blinded
by an indifference of trees.
A MOTION OF ORDER
The formal sequences of
captured randomness
are not for me a rose or
any flower.
I try to fill the nights with
the arrays for my
trembling,
stylized grasping for fire.
They would have me juxtapose
or they would have me order
my steps and in the
hollows my sounds.
Or I would have myself fill
it all with a quest for
order in the casting of
feathers and bones.
We have not found the true
way for a striving wind
to form and form
a musical stone.
WOOD SHED
In the wood shed we
were joined by a crafty saying,
a new tale of the ripeness
of things that pass.
We they say were joined
by craft, a new old craft,
a hopeful art, that joined
ever, a strange mixture, us.
We were joined in word only,
in a confusion of word and solidity
or a text of solidities
claiming no words.
From the upturned stone of words
I crawl out and do not
find anything but
a wild weed hovering in still air.
FINE GRAINS
The fines grains of slipping cells
ruined by the singe of my fearful light.
The fine, fine containment of water
in water and light.
There was no starting place.
There was no real tree in the woods.
We waited in the clear space,
a joint motion of doubt.
We never for a moment felt
the spark or the rough
sand paper of our mouths joined.
You were a rattling of stones.
I was a rattle, a thin whistle,
a creaking gasp of bones.
SERVING SUGGESTIONS
Break it open
and fry it up.
Set it out in
a coffee cup.
And when it's cold
turn up the flame.
You're much too old
to take the blame.
High, spry, little man
kept his life in a coffee can.
Ho, throw, grown-up boy
counted his days with a wind-up toy.
But no one could hate
the fine moss that he ate
or the hollowed out tree
where the little ones be.
He finally sliced out
what he had to say
and left the frame
for another day.
One, two, three, four, ...
FOLLOWING INSTRUCTIONS
"Dip down in the pool and drink."
And he drank.
"Look through the shattered windows."
And he looked.
"Make of yourself a raw planet."
And he was raw.
FIRST MOMENT ON SUCH A BED
She was bigger than I thought
standing there by the circle of stones.
She faced north surrounded by the nude.
Steam was rising.
It was cold like knives.
She seemed quite composed,
really at peace with herself,
a true witch, lovely in her large bones.
From where I was I could see
clouds reflected in her eyes
and saw pictures and felt
her like a sponge.
No animals were in that wood
besides snakes asleep.
There was birch and ash
and maple.
There were asters turned
brown with white tufts.
There was brown clover
and green moss.
I would like to list all
that was there,
by square inches.
In a clearing,
in the middle of the clearing,
there was a circle of pines.
The needles were thick and brown.
THE CELLAR
This is no time for such whining.
We really can't have it.
Buck up! Look lively!
No one ever looked at the door.
They didn't know it was there.
In the cellar, oh the earthy smells.
No one could touch the potatoes.
I know where they are,
and the turnips, good God!
There is also a window
into the damp walls
into the earth
for those who can
travel as water
sucked by a million
thin fingers.
Oh to sink into the gravel.
Oh to be sucked up into the sky.
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