“In Tandem”

“In Tandem, a Moth Descends”

In tandem, a moth descends and finds his pains cease
As food, the pleasure of spiders, the seed of birds;
At the requisite journey’s end no sound is heard,
No warnings, no hoary cautions of the wise will please
The pilgrim. Light and only light attracts
The mindless wandering epitome of ease,
A draw to what he cannot use nor does he feed.
The light’s the thing, or so it seems, the simplest act
Of being there, the trek from nothing to the summit’s
All, the goalie’s goal, the arrow’s truest home―to hit the mark:
The point of his desire’s only art
And comfort in this world, its nemesis, the ignition of the wick.
Embracing moments here trumps triumph, care and fate
Never quite soon enough, pas seul,  ever far too late.

Bahá’ís throughout the world gather today within the First Day of the Month of Sharaf [Honour]

“Sonnet In Honour of the Feast of Sharaf”

Not that what is in my soul is pure, nor are my eyes
In proper shielded, buttressed against what should not be seen;
No, my thoughts are not so secluded from my dreams;
These, the ears, are not immune from bablings of bathos on the sly.
My hands are placed firmly where they should not be
Nor to my taste my food as it should be. All
That modesty and honour require are no more; nor is the call
Of truth without duplicity the centre of my heart’s sincerity.
These infectious imperfections gain erection every day before my face
As each hour with yet another hour blasphemes with  uniform joy in their gray
Glories with ceremony in a plethora of follies strewn
throughout my hours’ providential tally of remaining rainy days.
I am never far from falling short of all my own metaphors, the similes and grace
Of He who created me and the cynosure of they who didn’t…yet I continue on
That He remains the Melody of Virtue and I am become the lyric of its song.

“Demonstrative, Some Adjective”

“Demonstrative, EgregiousAdjective”

Demonstrative, egregious adjectives salute me on the street.

The guile of my hours, perhaps the ëgo you say gains admittance to my ear

And raises spectres in the gathering heavens of a year

Of clouds and storms and noxious winters on all fronts. Anxious fleets

Of bankrupt publicans working seas of mitigating spreadsheets―

“Procrastination,” someone mentions, “just keep talking,”―old debates

Clabber easily where genocide of currencies are sanctioned, openly, discrete

Parleys in council. Morganatic masses melt to puddles in polar streets

While doctors cry from pulpits, “Foul! No matter what our fate!”

And we will all drown as before when emerging from an ancient Celtic gaze,

Roman rhetoric melding to Norman lists of deficits put to page

Point for point as goals bound the glory of tax evasion in the late

Night, the nauseating prattle of the screen. No safe haven in the latter days

Of cold correction in a Saxon market, fickle futures that simply will not go away.

 What age will grant sanctuary for untoward savings in the dust―

The ague of decadence and contemplation―more

Or less beside the need of solemnities on the shore

A satisfaction over mere achievement. What must

Be evokes no small modicum of stress here beside the ocean’s egress,

Harbours of contraband uninhabited but for the wayward, wayfarers

Of reticence and perhaps the odd refusal. The late HMS Mayflower

Of course had other thoughts than merely founding a nation, excess,

In turn of the mother continent, northern raiders―the Rus redux―landed,

And the race is on.  But surely goodness knows

The fate of retrogression. Certain the last leopard in the snow

Finds his promontory, and where he rests there must be prey.  Banded

Antelopes will ascede, not the great cats, and yet <i>before the cock thrice</i>

The tribe denies the Holy Ghost while yet another names his price.

Geologic leavings from the rift, an ancient strife, lucid memories gone fallow,

The signs of consequence greater than implication, simple modernities.

So little thought to what survives beyond a portion of a lifetime; eternities

Whispered in the last winter’s winds while earthly crops are all but shallow.

The ears accosted, the ear’s former inspiration deafened by stentorian rhetoric,

Redoubled in the light of the masses in the press and redundancy, the suns

That rise and fall with chutzpha and maddening regularity reaching such sums

And gaseous rumours as permeate the ephemeral and lightly esoteric.

But do we see the latest apparition in the dawning skies

Today and revel in its flight,

No greater vision possible, no finer god, his résum  in lights.

And while accepting fresher delays from yesterday’s demise

All are cognizant of what illumines, that rains will come no matter how we strive,

And in the end the only consolation for the living is the fact that we’re alive.

“I Was Informed”

“I Was Informed”

I was informed we’d arrived at Sometime Station
Some late grey hour, but was I convinced?
Shadows’ shallows hid pertinent details tight behind the lids and since
I was not awake there was no stirring; no? then perhaps a little indigestion.
I somehow missed what seemed so clearly plain
To the passengers but nothing rhymed with what was printed
On the programme. The brochure gave me hints
And vague suggestions listing attributes and mundane
Tips on what the locals do and how one clothes
The outer skin and where to cast the eyes,
But when I briefly set the door ajar and opened windows
  A judicious crack, I found nothing there resembled tips and innuendoes
That the guidebook said were there, nor what I’d seen in skies
Above my dreams and hopes, nothing close to inspiration:
Pilgrims best travel light and in their flight they forfeit anticipation.

“It Has Come To This”

It has come to this
That
Nothing
Desired
Has
Been mine

 

A minute
Before
It mattered not at all
Within my heart
And thus declined
To flattery
And
Nothing more.

“So Great a Silence”

“So Great the Veins of Silence”

So great the veins of silence on the streets in this year’s dying
Days; a fresh upon fresh blanket of winter’s dews shrouding
Trees and sidewalks, weighting rooftops, goading gables. Clouding
Clotted skies both day and night show no respite. Incense of Abraxas plowing
Down liturgical calendars, disguised, the last uncertain week of this last
Uncertain year; there’ll be no other.  The funeral’s banquet’s not yet finished,
But come now impertinence in  wedding caterers as the neo-looming skittish
Markets address themselves to not so certain promises profit, and as the past
May be the mirror of the future, Hamlet’s wondering
At his own wonder in the thought so universally voiced,
“Can we really stand another year with the same old invoice?”
That it should come to this! Denial’s simple rites, the blundering,
Sundering ties to all that virtue knows in favour of what is known, flaunted
ignorance of both at once even to the gates of Pergamos and Ephesus:
Have John’s missives not arrived?
Are there no prisons, and still no workhouses?

 

“The Ends”

“The Ends”

The ends, pedestrian beginnings clearly seen, a bloated past, andmiles
Expressed in days as chapters’ peopled souls I never meant to meet
And whom I”ll surely will forget. These months must end as presently they greet
Me as this last one has, and even now coming advent  swells in all my trials
And comforts in these last days of the year. Destinies in time are worn: surely,
Material brick and straw of yet another era’s eulogy, some stillborn edifice
To be erected howsoever in the coming hours’ awakened, duly braced
To house the maidenhead of still greater powers and acolades. So purely
These and those before provide a common pageant as prologue
To my latter verses, carefully revised, well advised, and those
That in the worlds to come will never end nor nor will they close.
I engage them all with me today, their homeliness and fragrances, simple songs
Hemmed in soft refrains. Their flavours form the coronets of current themes,
Embroidered borders of what it is I seem to be and what cannot be seen.

“As If the Hearth Cannot Speak”

As if the hearth cannot speak, defects say

“Respond! Reflect! This is no place for leisure in the night

While sitting idly by.” These flames are moot, gemütlichkeit

Gleaned from static to kinetic glories to the breaking day

As columns dancing, sparks and embers choreographed,

Calibrated in the orchestra pit, the overture

Neutred, ascending, with no hope of reward. Smoky  demons cure

The leaves and roots in vain and while the seer laughs

She claps her hands and adagios appear as if by magic.

Here beside you in these hours, I regret

The reason why I’m here; I’ll not forget

The progress of the evening’s tragic

Loss, and opt instead to awaken dying embers to prolong

What cannot be eternal as when the iamb eyes expansion

It has its reward and value only in the cage of scansion.

 She speaks behind an upraised fan.

Jaundiced eyes betray no secrets

In the vestibule; she regrets

Nothing in the innuendo as she scans

The lower horizon of the arc, a greeting to the lessers,

Or, perhaps, her equals who simply don’t exist;

She does not see me in the crowd; the list

Too great.  Her dancecard is full as she is confessor

To the many yet no more than in a glance,

Some single word sufficing all but me. I have no questions,

No statement; I own no definitions, no vested suggestions,

Nothing in the abstract, no “others in the cast.”

I cannot linger long in this fine passage blessed

Beyond a reticence to take so little yet

so much more than even she has guessed.

“The Body’s Built for Stretch Marks”

“The Body’s Built for Stretch Marks

The body’s built for stretch marks, peculiars, indictments drawn from lines

Reserved for bruises, random ancient scars received at childhood,

Subtle abuses leading to arrests, differences in the artificer’s sketches, would-be

Blind catastrophe to a child bound for trial. Etchings, wounds, fine

Byzantine rites of passage penetrate the masses gathered in their schools

Of fantasies as testacies: for the ignoble, pastimes; the chosen, noble death

Certain. Pride of station, booty, brazen badges pinned to what is left

Of  that old shirt or those old pants, and in the end, the glass is raised to fools,

And myriad mirrors of Alma Maters. “Yes,” she said, “You’ll lose that baby fat,”

But she was lying as she sliced another quarter pound of butter

For the stir fry, dairies churned to proven grounds for utter

Joy at dinnertime for the calf, an unction for the stomach and hardening heart,

…Vanitas vanitatum omnia vanitas, and then some for the cat.

All is vanity if clutching at the straws of life and luck and liberty to boot

To generate bravado for hopes that render all his finite questions moot.

Catwalks above his life’s pavilions, sidewalks in a decent neighbourhood,

And nursing homes dot the landscape while all declare,

“You know, the Devil made me do it!”

Who denies the processes of thought, the fine idyllic conduits

From “Why not me?” to “All I am is what I should

Be,” whispered while whistling down alleys and paper routes; the avenues

Conjure images and constructs preserved en bas relief in two dimensions,

Melting icecaps in an ocean of invention and intervention at the mention

Of a third. “To whom and what for?” He wonders at the dews,

Fresh-formed deadlines, spinal taps and tallies, and reams of “Things to Do”

And all before the door is closed and locked, keys deposited at the main wicket.

Who’s survived to say that winter’s haze might raise the need to buy a ticket

To some gilded paradise conspicuous on the fridge, or a cruise for two

Along the coasts or toward the navel of the nation

As he remains at home inured of all such thought and aggravation?

So wide the miles to peace and once again some pompous reconciliation

As the Parthenon limps through yet another year

and cancer strikes the very spirit of the Holy Temple Mount;

In the malls of Washington and London the body count

No longer matters to the kids at dinner while the recapitulation

Of the days’ decapitation give reviews on CNN no rapt attention.

“Nolo contendere” say they, the salt of sorrow’s “single spies”

That marshal once again in “battalions”, with no word nor photo from the skies

Above the glass-lined pulpits of the ‘ulamas of cable news centres

or only slightly less innocuous city gutters, the catacombs of dubious mention

All along the Tigris, the Congo, above Solomon’s mines on the African Horn.

They know their losses simmer silently in the chambers of the heart;

They know their worth in sovereignties and ulcerating boils apart

From what is said of foes on Fox or activists on board the unborn

Born again processions that occupy the parks. Landmines litter, braying gospels

of long’s and short’s, the meretricious glitter scribbled hastily

on chits strewn throughout the bar codes in the canyons of every market floor

Just as surely as autumn leaves attest what may be God’s penultimate bounty,

Blatant warnings in blood  atop the sash of every second church door.

“What’s the Ordre of the Day?”

“What’s the Ordre of the Day?”

What’s the ordre of the day? The laundry?

A trip downstairs to gather bagels in the morning’s light,

Across the street for vegetables from lands where armies clash by night?

The pharmacy awaits―its monthly maw is open―yawning,

Leaving me with hymns of thanksgiving for insurance

And of course the curse á tous les professeurs du côté français

Who voted out the dental plan, which means we all must pay.

Oh, well, I can’t complain these days. There is the firm assurance

That retirement is good until I croak, and croaking’s not that far away.

I might have done the deed this year, but something in me holds

That I’ve at least another year in me; silver this year, next year, gold.

There is in living more than simply doing laundry in the list of things today.

So what’s the sweat, and what’s another crate of eggs and milk and bread?

Another spring, another year, and some few miles to go before I’m dead.

“And In the Timing”

“And In the Timing”

And in the timing looking toward the left or right

I am arrested on a cliff, bereft

Of reckoning what is left

In me beyond the trappings of a simple light

And memories catalogued, together bound

In burgundies and beige, and with the odd in olive green,

The velvets of their spines lean this way, seen

Like houses on a narrow Upstate Albany block; I’ve found

It so, conveniently I guess. There is no slight adherence

Here to regimen, no lesser well-warn track to rhyme

With hours or days as I would have them, nothing timed

In what I spy within the closet or the dreadlocks of my clock, but clearance

And permission to proceed through standing weeds my gentle paces

As if bound by who it is I am, and nothing more than what my bulk displaces.