“A Summer’s Aimless Thought” or “Don’t Ask Why I Wrote This!”

And so the lesser heat descends upon us once,
But, come again?…and now the skin is damp
For no good reason, nothing more than clams
Must feel through all their night’s eternity, abandoned
In watermarked enclosure, rarely asking where
Their homes are logged–no! nor even more from life
Than what is strained for food. If found, the knife
Will end it all. From accidental currents traffic cares,
From aimless waves and tides and what seals may accrue,
Seadogs innocently involved and driven by their own
Insensitivity to feelings and not so much in interest as they comb
The seabeds looking for what mindless kelp must do–
For supper–Yes! We dine tonight: the sacrifice of clams and oysters,
And budget-minded shrimp, and the choir?–crabs conveniently cloistered.

“I Am Not”

I am not, but I am in the guise of a god;
My fellows are not, but they dwell in Olympus
Every fourth year and have for millennia compassed
This and other greater lesser boiling mountains in the sod,
These solid clots, the sovereign bloods of this blue planet; this, the present odd
Man out ubiquitous, conspicuous with singles, doubles, trebles, celestial hubris
That out from what it is comes naturally a holy trust
And incubus of men and angels, yet another sleeping Ichabod
In all of us, and never far from genii; patience waiting in the knowing;
Yes, ingenuous, untried, ever tied to what becomes the untoward
And thus must ford the stream, venture through the chorus
And the warning, niggling dark and overbearing mighty forests
Of the childhood, the first in Sodom and last deep cut in Gomorrah, glowing
Still, yet knowing whence we came,
we don’t look back, you see, but always forward.

“Within the Second”

“Within the Second”

Within the second, tension
Greeting and suspension
Sought by no one’s intervention
Never seen when the incision
First was made; immediately regretted,
The fisherman must pay out nets in
By miles in order to withdraw from what is set in
Stone for life and wife and children and the silence of posterity. Sunsets
Measured by exigency’s precision and jealous alacrity in moments
Of lucidity crown flights that condescend to incidents and stories
Never dreamed by this finest man or that great fish by land or sea
But in and with slightest motion’s predetermined goals, histories
Of continents and oceans satisfy Calliope
and there within their stations, torments
Boast of sacrifice for crowds where cowards
in the chorus crucify their tragic characters and epic plots
swell as sweat from depths within the pores of poets
finding every gilded ancient fear a kind of test
that does not rest but resonates as never-ending glory.