Dead Center

Upon reflection, as I dip my pen


Tonight, forth ripple messages in code.


In Now’s black waters burn the stars of Then.

Seen from the embankment, marble men


Sleep upside down, bat-wise, the sleep bestowed


Upon reflection. As I dip my pen

Thinking how others, deeper into Zen,


Blew on immediacy until it glowed,


In Now’s black waters burn the stars of Then.

Or else I’m back at Grandmother’s. I’m ten,


Dust hides my parents’ roadster from the road


Which dips—into reflection, with my pen.

Breath after breath, harsh O’s of oxygen—


Never deciphered, what do they forbode?


In Now’s black waters burn the stars. Ah then

Leap, Memory, supreme equestrienne,


Through hoops of fire, circuits you overload!


Beyond reflection, as I dip my pen


In Now’s black waters, burn the stars of Then.

James Merrill

The Persistence of Feeling

It isn't really memory that persists, is it? If that were all we'd be free, even in remembering. It could be all so very Platonic. The messy part, the tentacles that refuse to let go, the feelings, those persist, and won't be reasoned with. I've tried to explain them to myself and still they are an enigma. Try explaining shadows to someone who's not seen the sun. I don't know if I've seen the sun, really. I've been running in the dark in the midst of some treacherous obstacles. Perhaps if I'd have confined such activities to the foothills of the Cascades, where the worst one can do is run off a cliff...

Hearts Outgive

Harrow and Glimmer,
 Fishhook, Splinter-lodged,
into mind's eye--
Deep indigo eyeflash,
Yonder, outward, unhinged,
 Will hearts outgive redundant ends.

Carnal Apple, Woman Filled, Burning Moon

Carnal apple, Woman filled, burning moon,
dark smell of seaweed, crush of mud and light,
what secret knowledge is clasped between your pillars?
What primal night does Man touch with his senses?
Ay, Love is a journey through waters and stars,
through suffocating air, sharp tempests of grain:
Love is a war of lightning,
and two bodies ruined by a single sweetness.
Kiss by kiss I cover your tiny infinity,
your margins, your rivers, your diminutive villages,
and a genital fire, transformed by delight,
slips through the narrow channels of blood
to precipitate a nocturnal carnation,
to be, and be nothing but light in the dark.

Pablo Neruda

New Mad Light

Light me again
I'm flame-made
Flame devoured
some passions
win out,

so dense they
devour light

despite their
mad mad
improbability

Blackbird

My little blackbird returned
Matchless and only
Singular dark
to my mateless heart

Black Hole

The spell, dreamcast,

for the darkmired

tenant of Saturn's house.

black on black, 

the line is drawn, 

step over, step off

the edge. 

Event horizon

beckons. 

Cloudbusting

“. . . full sexual consciousness and a natural regulation of sexual life mean the end of mystical feelings of any kind, that, in other words, natural sexuality is the deadly enemy of mystical religion. The church, by making the fight over sexuality the center of its dogmas and of its influence over the masses, confirms this concept.”

Wilhelm Reich

Red Abject

The red line,
(try not to see it.)
cuts you in two.
A crack,
a rail,
a tear,
a thread,
a blood scrawl,
with splinter
of bone.
Glister crimson
blister.
Bone jar shaker,
worms in the head.
La Red tangled,
blow fly,
maggot snack,
crimson claw,
flesh snag,
hag catch,
sag and groan.
                                  (You can't
                                  look away.
                                   You can't
                                    want to.)
Fever swamps

mosquito murmurations.

fish snagged in
a nightmare net
of folly's prison,
slime emits,
self-smothers.
Eye hook,
jewel-bright,
ruby ripe.
Try to rip
blue orb
caught.
La red in red.
A big mistake,
realized too late.
Fear is to fear,
and only fear is left.
Sinister turn,
offering burn,
the spell cannot
be
broken.
Glitter, slither,
cold snake.
Smoke, fire,
burn, break.
Tumor excised
with a butter knife,
carefully laid
in dish of white,
was a heart,
now a bite.
A morsel for
a jagged maw,
putrid lump,
carrion to gnaw.

Gone

Go Gentle.
Goodnight.

Pretty Words

I dreamt of spinning blades
the glimmer in your eye
lash to bat
glitter
a cold steal
 thief in the night
what you take isn't always what you get
 and what you get centrifugal

Tainted Love

It Will burn, Alright

33

Rhizome bright. Starlight.

Burn and break. Web snag, 

hammer shatter. Self-kindle.

Sparrow

A sparrow turns in air, shoots skyward,
a black dart on blue, the fulcrum of the
world in that moment before it all swirls
away, shifts direction and lights on
an ephemera anew.

There's a crack in the world at dusk
and at dawn where some creatures enter and
exit. They are the ones you listen for,
lying in the dark, but strain your hearing
as you might, can never be made out.

When the Frost is on the Grass

Not made of the stuff
To Last out A cold season
gone by first frost.

Trapped in Madness, Star-Crossed

                   desire-           addled
                 un-rooted     unrepentant
               Blood-slick, ruby writhing
                  still holding to madness
                    that will be forsaken
                       drowned in Time
                           Disavowed
                               Ebbing
                                 Gone
                                    .

Bless

Fire Burn and Cauldron Bubble

Waxing, new beginnings. Light to burn, burn to break.

Electric

Beauty

I am fair, O mortals! like a dream carved in stone,
And my breast where each one in turn has bruised himself
Is made to inspire in the poet a love
As eternal and silent as matter.
On a throne in the sky, a mysterious sphinx,
I join a heart of snow to the whiteness of swans;
I hate movement for it displaces lines,
And never do I weep and never do I laugh.
Poets, before my grandiose poses,
Which I seem to assume from the proudest statues,
Will consume their lives in austere study;
For I have, to enchant those submissive lovers,
Pure mirrors that make all things more beautiful:
My eyes, my large, wide eyes of eternal brightness!

Charles Baudelaire
— William Aggeler, The Flowers of Evil (Fresno, CA: Academy Library Guild, 1954)

Pink Invocation

Upper Air

High, pale, imperial places of slow cloud
And windless wells of sunlit silence...Sense
Of some aware, half-scornful Permanence
Past which we flow like water that is loud
A moment on the granite. Nothing here
Beats with the pulse that beat in us below;
That was a flame; this is the soul of snow
Immortalized in moveless atmosphere.

Yet we shall brood upon this haunt of wings
When love, like perfume washed away in rain,
Dies on the years. Still we shall come again,
Seeking the clouds as we have sought the sea,
Asking the peace of these immortal things
That will not mix with our mortality.

-Frank Ernest Hill

Taking Many Leaves

What we call the beginning is often the end And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.

The dove descending breaks the air
With flame of incandescent terror
Of which the tongues declare
The one discharge from sin and error.
The only hope, or else despair
Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre —
To be redeemed from fire by fire. (IV)
Who then devised the torment? Love.
Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame
Which human power cannot remove.
We only live, only suspire
Consumed by either fire or fire. (IV)
What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from. (V)
Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,
Every poem an epitaph. And any action
Is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea's throat
Or to an illegible stone: and that is where we start.
We die with the dying:
See, they depart, and we go with them. (V)
We are born with the dead:
See, they return, and bring us with them.
The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree
Are of equal duration. A people without history
Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
Of timeless moments. (V)
So, while the light fails
On a winter's afternoon, in a secluded chapel
History is now and England. (V)
With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time. (V)
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea. (V)
Quick now, here, now, always —
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flames are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one. (V)

T.S. Eliot --- From Little Gidding

Ring of Fire

Blue eyes.

Of the Way We Were