Allegory

An antelope in

mid-leap:

the heart.

 

Come Clarity, Come Black

All day, the men that fails to bring coyotes
out of storm. By marsh-mires, in a dream—

or not in a dream but in a wet, dream
slow reality: soldiers poise, in rows,

heavy-legged as if with hesitance of failure
of what happens—or is about to. Overhead, thunder

and lightning. Do the soldiers find the lightning,
wrapped in yellow, intimidating? By the shore,

waves grow as though they are wet,
blue answers of Babylon’s tower and not just waves,

the harbor rocking like the one abandoned solider
—come clarity, come black.

 

Unfinished

I name them as though they are stars—

Zeus, Pegasus, Orion—I am in love lipsticked onto their forehead

 

in thick, plum letters. Their names

 

are carved into wood: aspen and birch, bark peeled

off to give space to Bill and Molly

 

Forever and this wind, all around,

 

in our shirt, filling, emptying

the space, this heart brown but not red through

 

which an arrow crosses. By the trees,

 

this morning, no raccoons, no peacock

wing to flail as against a ghost

 

force, no ants, only the two teenagers in love,

 

sharing lips, leaning nude

but just-showered against the other, against the trees . . .

 

 

Untitled

It was not like any dream: here no fence or barb-wire
allows for the jumping of the sheep I never counted:

one, two, three sheep, the usual story. Here the cattails
bend, unbend, at this lean hour. It means nothing but

the wind shuffles them, in the heat it is strong. In the
dream, there is a lake I call Lake Como of seaweed—

yes, it’s that much seaweed—and Lake Where Horses
Enters The Sea. One after another, as though sheep

in another dream, in lines they come. I can count them,
easily: one, two, three horses, not the usual story.

If dreams are messages, do I need to clean—what—
body? my hands? I have not murdered, nor betrayed,

nor loosened, from the dying crows, the dying lambs,
their limbs.

 

Salvaging the good lines in bad poems

It was not like any dream: here no fence or barb-wire
allows for the jumping of the sheep I never counted:
one, two, three sheep, the usual story.

¤

I take a step away from the sycamore as if, reluctantly,
with the reluctance of a father leaving his children,
I let a child lie in a crib across the Nile.

¤

If I lay my body upon
yours, if you allow me, if we fill each other
like bees-in-honeycomb, we become a kind of sashay:
a sashay like that of the sea and the horse: here,
the horse that enters, and the sea that keeps it,
moans Enter me, and I’ll assist. The cattails bend,
unbend, at this lean hour. It means nothing but the wind is
strong,

¤

So that each is a feather of
a peacock wing: the bodies laying sprawled
on the Palestina ground.

¤

Here is the abandoned fiddle, here the spinner
from once the women spun wool, together, by dimmet,
by dawn, here is the silence of the rooster without voice

¤

The crows come to smoke at dawn.
Today, in flocks, herons pass
as they would over anything.

¤

Look: the trees are not themselves today: the
boughs / the needles / the cons do not bend
to slap me. Cattails, in lake Como of seaweed:
of rainbowed fish and blue colour
that is not really blue.

 

Look: the trees are not themselves today: the
boughs / the needles / the cons do not bend
to slap me. Cattails, in lake Como of seaweed:
of rainbowed fish and blue colour
that is not really blue. I know that. The lake
looks like that—that blue thistle—because of
the wavelength of the reflecting light. It is not
because of the sky or the Greek Gods who,
in ancient times, drank from chalices and—fed—
cupped, loosened to the earth the white
wine we know, have known, all this time,
as rain and more rain, that water we drink
from taps the way bees drink nectar.
We have known and—have imagined,
have walked these grounds, have plowed,
have raked the fields with hands as if tokens
of holding, not loosing as, through my palm,
the earth retreats, slips clean, like sand,
from what tethers. The slipping away
through my fingers is not intentional,
like the slipping away of the soul isn’t.
The tethered soul was never tethered:
was caught only by the bodies now buried,
meaning nothing but we have put them here
or they are too weak to rise. This is under-
standable. This is not: the soul as the body,
the soul as what tethers it.

 

The crows come to smoke at dawn, not like
any swan but like the swan by the pond whose wings unfold as to
flap away from where the timbers are stained,
burried beneath ashes. The ashes are not really black:
they are blackened like the crows I imagine at
the creation of time were made soothed by the Greek
Gods who, also, cupped their liquid to the earth
(as we know as rivers now, as seas) and moulded the earth
to trees / to mountains as they do with sand by
the beach, the small children. Was this ever a town
to which the ploughers plowed the fields, raked
the rows by tomato shrubs, and the woman did their
daily bidding, they who were the cookers, the
spinners of garn (of wool) for cloths, and the men
the blacksmiths that hammered to strength the
weapons (as in the stories we know all too well:
swords, shields, a few men, a battle), the children
like tended lambs . . . Today, in flocks, herons pass
as they would over anything. The village is ash and
smoke, a beaten warrior in a war that does not end,
does not seem to. Recall, the boars must have left
this place a long time ago; the ravens, the crows,
as to any dying place, have come to roost. Here is
the abandoned fiddle, here the spinner from once
the women spun wool, together, by dusk, by dawn,
here is the silence of the rooster without voice:

 

The Greek Tragedy

I

What are they called? what do we call them:

Orion. Pegasus. Sagittarius.

What else?

Scutum and Perseus. Procyon.

And the constelation of a charioteer?

Aurigia, Aurigia. O look how she whips
the invisible horse toward battle.

II

What is battle without stars?

What is Achilles without his shield?
his spear? that which he needs?

A man like any man: vulnerable,
fallible, how in time he will die
by my bow.

III

How?

Less like a leave
than like a bird. Not as much a bird as the Spartan
warrior by the banks of our walls. Nor a lamb,
when it lays down. Nor ruin nor rain nor meteor,
nor bird nests under storm.

IV

What is war without blood? What is war if lives
have not been spilled upon, first, our friends,
later: our foes?

Not a cruel one, but a diplomatic one.

V

A diplomatic one.

 

Wind the Brusher of Wings

It was never as much the martingale
as it was
the chicken we bought for the Greek dinner.

All day the crows came from the trees that bent
toward their lost crowns to see and to peak
as they do. The crows rustled their feathers
(for warmth, for—territory?), seemed to have come

to a kind of resting upon the window porch.
I recall the afternoons spent in the barn
in which there were no cows and no sheep,

much less a lamb to slaughter, only hays and
honeycombs stacked in boxes in rows, and outside

any day the five crows that soared and came
to rest upon the barn’s grey shingle, their feathers
rustling in that way that means The wind shakes
them, the wind is strong today. The crows
like any man to whom nothing is good enough:

not that, not that, not you.

 

Fruits by Lawn

When he says Hell, and Fuck you, he does not mean
…………………………………………….to fuck them, the man and the mare the man
………..holds by the martingale. He does not mean it’s hell. How he avoids, wishes
himself elsewhere, like a thought when, in dream,
………………..he recall that memory he try—and have tried, continue—suppressing.
…… What is the moon to the stars? What is the moon to the stars
……………………if both hold the world?
Yes, that means they are hands. Fingers, maybe. It means there is a God out there.
. God in plural—Gods. It means earth is fruit, universe
is lawn. It means God is tree. By now, the wind has taken up. He know this
……………………………………..by the way the leaves dangle. Behind my house, there is a lawn,
…….and there is a tree. There are fruits.
They fall. Apples, oranges, plums,
……………………………………..all reddening / greening / lilac-ing the lawn.
Strewn, all over, past a ripeness, meaning here, from the fruits no freshness reek:
only how they lay sprawled, dead, like stars on sky.
…………………………………………………………………Visible, long after.