2. On Certainty

Gravity crushes dreams.  It is mechanical and heartless.  Are we really going to say that whatever rises must fall?  You tell me where the romance is in that.  Dawn comes early over the Sierra Nevadas this morning.  I am on a return flight from LA and the clouds look gorgeous, they are huge scoops of champagne ice cream with ( Read more... )

And Where Will We Find Something We Can Comfortably Call Love?
(for Randi Nolen)

In words we throw up against unpainted walls
like overhead projections
or in nothing.

In shampoo-colored fog that takes
our breath, but not away,
or in nothing.

Who, after all, can take anything
away?  Away is a word
made of nettles
and twigs, a nest
of crushed wings
in which ( Read more... )

Trains

What goes between and carries us
is nothing like the sun.

It’s cold and clear, like water, or a glass
upon the counter

that you stagger to, and fill, and drain
to quench your thirst at midnight.

I think of you at midnight mostly
when I am asleep,

though sometimes waking, I can feel the pull
of you, across the tracks

where trains go by incessantly
( Read more... )

Snooze Button

Why, round world, do you flatten
your ears at me, cat hissing spit

at my feet? I came to you empty
of impulse and underwear. I assume

I’ll go out the same way. Now when I said,
“All I want is to sleep without hurry,”

I was not rejecting your quicklight at morning,
your slow growing oaks in the distance,

the ( Read more... )

The pure
                tongue
        whistles

braced       and
        ready,

tied to
                a pail;
                    the drunkard

rolls up

his light boots

some lean
    from the crowd

the sugarfield        views

them    ;

Nocturnal Ghazal ( Read more... )

Sonnet 117

All we were going strong last night this time,
the mots were flying & the frozen daiquiris
were downing, supine on the floor lay Lise
listening to Schubert grievous & sublime,
my head was frantic with a following rime:
it was a good evening, an evening to please,
I kissed her in the kitchen-ecstasies-
among so much good we tamped down the crime.

( Read more... )

Pastoral
for William Carlos WilliamsApples, tinder, haystacks. Shovels glazed ( Read more... )

22 ( Read more... )