Baudelaire #3

Baudelaire

First draft composed on February 18, 1999. Second draft January, 2009. 

Today is the kind of day

to think of obscure streets,

steaming and bending into wreckage.

To pull some

breath from beneath

the skin of the city,

a bit of air

that brings us back to grapevines

that once twisted here.

         Look,

there may be a vision

draped over the streetlamp

there, surrounded by

the puckered fog.

                  Listen

to what coils in dust

below the reconstructed.

There may be a memory

hidden beneath the broken

phone booth:

a touch of a soft finger,

a few notes on strings ,

a singing that has never

really stopped.

After the Monthly Senior Women’s Luncheon

Two women chat as they walk from the club hall.

One holding a pan containing a remaining slice of coffee cake,

the other clutching a green scarf around her face as she laughs.

They are recalling something someone had said, something

comical and delightful. They are saying goodbye,

Hope to see you before the next luncheon,

they both think it, say it, and mean it.

The woman with the scarf waves as she reaches her car.

The woman with the slice of cake waits a bit by the curb.

The coming winter light is starched and white. It is 1:30.

Her stomach is just full enough of shrimp salad and the

small crunchy toasts she has forgotten the foreign name for.

A brief wind fiddles with the plastic wrap that covers the cake,

makes a sound like a child stirring from behind a wall
and ceases just as abruptly as it begins. 

Along the Woodpile You See a Trail of Demise (Revision #1)

“In time the curtain edges will grow light.

                              Till then I see what’s really always there.”  - Philip Larkin

Along the woodpile you see a trail of demise,

a few feathers, snuff-colored and thin.

Then, aside your brown boot, the source--

a swallow down, the puffed pulp of its breast

heaving final rhythms.  Standing there, you

wait. For what? Sun begins its December descent,

spills gauzed yellow on the broken leaves below.

In time, the swallow stops, and you go.

Returning to your tiny room, you read the messages always there:

fissures walls conceal the dusted spiral

of a lost snake; the handle of a white teacup just below

the stove—things  gone missing and forgotten carry on in their

diminished states. You weigh them, knowing now

that in the morning you will return to the woodpile

where you will watch again for the slow finishing, 
for the trace that's left behind: 
the leaves below, the signified,
the folded swallow, the sign.

Along the Woodpile You See a Sign of Demise

                             “In time the curtain edges will grow light.

                              Till then I see what’s really always there.”  - Philip Larkin

Along the woodpile you see a sign of demise,

a few feathers, snuff-colored and thin.

Then, aside your brown boot, the source--

a swallow down, the puffed pulp of its breast

heaving final rhythms.  Standing there, you

wait. For what? Sun begins its December descent,

spills gauzed yellow on the broken leaves below.

In time, the swallow stops, and you go.

Returning to your tiny room, you read the messages always there:

fissures walls conceal the dusted spiral

of a lost snake; the handle of a white teacup just below

the stove—things  gone missing and forgotten carry on in their

diminished states. You weigh them, knowing now

that in the morning you will return to the woodpile.

There you will watch again for the slow finishing—

the dirt beginning its ceaseless envelop, 
gathering feather, bone, and wing into its thirsty .
Gone with a trace:
the folded swallow is the sign—the leaves below, the signified. 

Along the Woodpile You Spot a Trail of Demise 
(Version II with alternate ending)


“In time the curtain edges will grow light.

 Till then I see what’s really always there.”  - Philip Larkin

Along the woodpile you spot a trail of demise:

A few feathers, snuff-colored and thin.

Then, aside your brown boot, the source:

a swallow down, the puffed pulp of its breast

heaving final rhythms.  Standing there, you

wait. For what? The sun begins its December decent,

spills gauzed yellow on the broken leaves below.

In time, the swallow stops, and you go.

Returning to your tiny room, you read messages you find there:

fissures in the walls conceal the dusted spiral

of your lost snake; the handle of a white teacup just below

the stove—things  gone missing and forgotten carry on in their

diminished states. You weigh them, knowing now

that in the morning you will return to the woodpile

where you will wait again for the slow finishing—

the dirt beginning its ceaseless envelop, 

gathering feather, bone and wing into its thirsty coil. 

Watching, waiting, you read the cruelest of  human 

knowings from the velvet-trimmed pulpit in your mind: 

the folded swallow is the sign—the leaves below, the signified. 

Margin Notes

You said I ought to edit myself

            I tore my dress: comma-sized/black.

You said to prune my brainy flights

            I chopped my hair until it stood twig-like on my skull

You said I should delete wasteful adjectives

            I smiled brightly as I crossed out your note

You said I best purge the literal

            I swallowed Pound’s bough. Its rotted petals reconstructing

in my throat

Leadville

Also published on Flowers of Sulfur


Leadville

            —circa 1874

Her hurdy-gurdy sound detaches in tangents across the plain.

little missy violet walks from the dance hall foyer.

Drone-strung, her torso waits for its player.

A crib is a disheveled doldrum of human need.                           

little missy violet walks from the dance-hall foyer.

Somewhere beneath her breastbone a series of levers turn.

A crib is a disheveled doldrum. Of human need:

the clanking-pocket gent, fierce gears in woolen trousers.

Somewhere beneath her breastbone a series of levers turn.

Beyond cracked walls, bursts of pewter snow.

The clanking-pocket gent, fierce gears in woolen trousers--

after the dig, the sift, drip of the silvered tongue, there is this:

beyond the cracked walls, bursts of pewter snow,

and her torso, a pliable instrument and white. 

After the dig, the sift, the drip of the silvered tongue, there is this:

A rosined heart pumps coniferous blood.

And her torso, a pliable instrument and white

as powdered wind. Here within branchless town

a rosined heart pumps coniferous blood--

Its hurdy-gurdy sound detaches in tangents across the plain.

January

Outside our window

a yard of ice, onyx, sleek

we drowse in feathers

The Solstice Ends and Spins Out Eternally

"She tasted the snow on her palms:a nothing taste, but full of an unnameable big thing,  full of distance, full of the sky." --Adam Foulds

December, come to me, selfishly

I call you. I ache to be the only one,

the sole walker, gilt beneath the sun.

But I am not. Cannot. The earth has

known more feet than my fragile

mind can conjure. Mine are two
more only. Winter, another winter,
my footprints mark and mark
where it is impossible not to vanish--

as if I were the nothing that is
and is not: the fringe of ice along
the cedar boughs starkly
beautiful and vapid.

Starkfield Night

Blood rises, breathless.

Shadow-wife stirs. Ethan sees

light beneath the door.

Midwinter Tanka

Emily walks a
mile on hardwood, circles
the Franklin stove. March
hangs like a purple hat on
the homestead door: just too far.



February, 2009

Vandyke's Coleridge

What is it about your October-sky
eyes? Your primal mouth:

Lips slightly flanged,

teeth made for sinking into bark,

or lime tree leaves silver-sided in the sun

or tearing through the tender heart of

a girl, a nightmare, a bone-hardening lust.

You sat for the portrait
just long enough to be eternally
caught: the twenty-three years of you against
the spreading mahogany of the backdrop.
The skimmed-cream skin of your brow

stretched across the pulsing ribbons of your brain.
The split-second still-life of your milk-wet mouth.
The vanishing point of your eyes.

The Honeymoon Tour

In Milan, the new bride

emerges from the hotel elevator 

without her groom

(he waiting alone by the bar).

She turns her toes toward him,

makes a move.

She is stopped by the hand of a man

Placed on the small of her back,

pulling her in to his roiling lips.

She cannot focus on the face at this

angle. He is one of the tour, she knows that.

"You are beautiful," he steams, 

surprised by his own voice.

Her eyes find the floor,

a word surfaces in her mind.

The hand is removed.

He shifts away,

returns to his inebriated wife.

Outside, night.

North African prostitutes

haunt the frigid fields.

By morning, 

only stiletto holes

filled with tongues of frost.

Bareness  is the word.

bareness.

                                                          -January, 1999

Girl, Point Reyes National Seashore, 1965

The first time you drove away from

home with the intention of not returning, your route was west.

You were 18, brimful of bile enough to last a rusted lifetime.

There you sat, in an enclosure of steel and rubber, plastic 
and glass, speeding across the rolling gut of the Midwest,

safe at last you thought, you thought

your shadow-thoughts; your facts, your truths--

tendrils that grow and thrive in the shade of underthings. 

Your body a ball of dough, kneaded wrong by a careless baker.

You let the screen door slam on the humid bareness of the hot

House on the road, wheeling past any manner of madmen,

only a steel frame and speed barring you from...

Who is keeping who captive in a Des Moines shed?

Whose hands are where? Whose father locks the door

as he enters the pink bedroom? Who? You 

got yourself as far from before as you could possibly be-- 
Finally, Point Reyes, metallic dawn crosshatching the farthest rim.
You there on the shore of the wilder ocean where the earth 
so easily tilts on its arc, where surfaces shift like primordial 
puzzles, the tide swallows whole with its guttural tongue.

And you thought, that is nature, that is earth, that is normal. 
And this thought was the first to tear at the heart of your mystery.

(last line refs. Hamlet's question to Guildenstern, III.II.365-366)

The Uncertainty of Distance

On the burnt-grass field above the

Flathead,

a woman runs, arms dipping through

the air like oars.

The man she seeks can see her coming--

beside a stack of reeds, he

can hear her howl

but does not yet know the expression

on her face.

From this distance, an untearable cloth

of sweet grass and dust,

a laugh and a wail are equally plausible.

In this moment, he braces himself,

his brain scans the possibilities:

she is running, there is that sound from her.

Where is the child? There is no smoke from the house,

no rider tearing down the horizon.

He stands, breathing in chunks of air,

his back straight and taut,

one hand clutching the thinnest of reeds.

From Lesbos, Alexandria, Earth

Also published on Flowers of Sulfur

In despair and sunless

summer heat

think on dry

dark places

In Egypt, infinite

Sapphics hidden

below concrete and clay:

words written in a

language you would not know

by a woman who drank

from cups of wind

 
            Above all spits

the very sun

that shone on her shoulders

that parches your throat

that does not reach

those fragments of verse

that even now

are singing into the

ribcage of the earth

Summer End

Remains of the

broken blue coffee mug have

been swept from the kitchen floor

sink has been scoured and dried

Mail sorted and stacked

bills paid and stamped

outside the kitchen window

the yard is clear of branches

jagged piles tied with white string

you sit at the small round table

looking out at perennials

for a moment your mind

approaches a cemetery gate

sweeps the vines and enters

you think a thought that exists there:

you have made a mistake of your life

you have chosen to stay in when it rains

you have not brought an armful of phlox to a friend

and another October approaches

quickly a new noise enters the kitchen

a drip drop drop from the sink

water escaping the pipe

you rise from the table

there is something to be done

Moran Junction

The comfort

of crossroads

is in the choice

they lay for you:

The prospect

of weighing

four directions

instead of

only two.

If back

is tucked

in shadow,

if forward

is getting old,

right

or left

may come to

be your

endless-summer

road.

Meadowsweet

"You should know

that when you swagger among us

I hear two voices speaking,

one your spirit, one

the acts of your hands." -Louise Gluck

Cream in the damp meadow,

our heads unruly but shine

like china plates after washing

I see you walk with absent purpose;

your large thunder-calves crush

our sweetness out.

Will you flatten me before

you pull my long curve

from the darkness of below?

Or will you detach me first,

smell me intact, maybe even

offer me a glass of water

to float in, unhinged,

until you lose interest

and leave me to dry?

Possession leads you, seeds

your mind with an awful desire.

To want, to own, to grasp, to pull.

You will rip me, but I will

have an afterlife.

Mark this: the earth is beclouded

in the confusion of taken children,

the missing, the torn,

the growing procession of the gone

who were lead away from sodden meadows.

Like them, I will haunt in shadowed spaces.

Like them, I will remind you:

If you breathe my scent too deep,

I will enter your dark tunnels

where I'll uncurl and sow inside you.

In the June light you had been hoping for

(late evening amber skirting across hardwood),

you walk toward the western window and watch

the yard animals gather and skid along the green.

The infant in your arms, exhausted from its journey,

hums out sighs, primal, thin.

A pulse, the web of veins in your marble-breasts.

Milk comes in a fever, a flush of human knowing,

the body-knowing your brain did not anticipate.

You wanted a warm-weather baby.

You wanted her first days to be filled

with the scent sweet grass and honeysuckle.

You did not know that all she would seek is you.

Peonies Again

The many-fisted bliss of the peony rows about to birth,

their heads crowned with waves of fuchsia, reminds you of the exposed

interior of the Big-eyed tuna you once saw flayed before you.

The rippled of purple meat descending like stalagmites; the thickly laid stucco of the inside.

This is what lay hidden for how ever long that Big-eyed reigned underwater--

the curtains of sliced fat, expanding beneath cold, blue scales.

You are brought back to the peonies by the pull of your child's hand.

You stand there, holding her up to the almost blooms,

the every second emerging globes of blush.

Your palm against the skin of her torso,

the feel of her ribcage like a small wicker basket lined with leaves.

You are reminded of her beginning place and yours,

those concealed rooms of flesh, now bloodless.

Happening Now

In the yard a squirrel, stormcloud haunches flared,

scours for  rainbow sprinkles scattered by the

dimpled hand of the boy, now sleeping

in the room with the window that faces the yard.

The squirrel has an itch, or a need to be met, winds up

its hind paw like a pinwheel and scratches its fatted back.

There are enough many-colored flecks

 in the grass to allow for a moment's relief.

16 feet above, the boy, head turned to the window,

curls his toe around a rung on his crib (he is still in a crib

even though he is agile enough to climb out of it.

There is time still. The comfort of the cage has yet to subside.)

A thin track of saliva burns its way down his chin.

It will have dried by the time the shades are lifted.

Hello to Sack (After Herrick)

sweet blood on my tongue,

raised by Tuscan wind and sun

ruby jewel in liquid state

seep into my fragile pate

wind around each pulsing nerve

dismantle thick this laid reserve

shyness fades with every swallow

flush and warm abandon follow

Source, 1866

From a dusty shaft, Courbet emerges,

fingers pearl and sticky.

Around his head, a crown of flesh,

spectral-memory of his start,

his first bloody breath.

Paintbrush poised to lead him back

through opening thicket, tangled black.

He will image the Origin,

enchevêtrés noir.

Missing Kathleen

Gone these three years, her

eyes still wet with Irish tears,

her skin yet damp with mist.

See her there, at the kitchen table?

The kettle sighs like a windblown branch.

The curtains lift in an unfelt breeze.

A shadow ascends in droplets.

Her chair is empty.

The folly of March rain...

Waiting

Pound's bough- bare, black with mist, scrapes against my window.

The Pillars of the Earth

The sun, edging over

normal monastic life,

hinges chissled out.

The sky growing preciously 

bright in the east

like gilded scenes

embroiderd by the hands

of a once pious woman.

The prior's bed is wide and stiff.

Eurykleia Knows

With water-torn palm she holds

the foot of the man who came so far,

the foot that walked the sands of Ilium,

was nipped by the blue dusk of fin,

stood on the leather carpet of the underworld.

Now in her hand, the cupped hand of the ruddy slave.

Her eyes move from toe to calf, sinew and stretch,

skin like cypress bark in the torchlight.

She feels a twitch, his heel flexes,

her gaze reaches his thigh, an oar of a limb.

There she sees the rippled pink, the opal sheet

of wrinkle, the plunged in mosaic of pain:

the scar.

His eyes meet hers, knowing.

His lips purse, pucker, hush now.

Beneath the seaweed beard are

the soft cheeks she once stroked,

the rounded, seeking mouth.

Somewhere in her chest, ghost-milk stirs.

She will feed this secret.

The Tide of Battle Turns (2)

Opal-armed women of Ilium,

reach far and far into narrow-necked

jars, fingers feathering rounded base.

Water there, ice-break cold--Aegean's aphotic

depths drummed in womb of fired earth.

Lithe fingertips drip Poseidon's wealth

on lips of men broken as the ramparts.

Youngest warriors watch sky disappear

as marble-armed women of Ilium

lean toward their puckered mouths.

Maids of glistening white,

sea-swell breasts leaking down.

Midwinter Tanka #3

Like a frozen field,

this mood extends--endangers

those who deign to trek

toward the center slope where dark

thoughts skid, slide, and sometimes, thrive.

Snake River Rondeau

July, 2005

This moving skin on twisted spine

Of sunken rock, thick clays of time,

Recites the prose of melted snow—

its Ripple-rhythms swirl and flow

Into this metered line.

Wind meets water to combine

Lifting sage and columbine

Eddies spill them as they go

Along this moving skin

Poetry cannot define

The ancient grace and aquiline

Formations of the dark below.

In depths the breathing do not know,

Forever on ghost shadows wind

Beneath this moving skin.

Midwinter Tanka #2

Favorite teacup

broken, afternoon creaks on.

Wide-armed chair fits her.

Doze now, dark. Below the stove

hiding blades, china undone.

Midwinter Tanka #1 (revison)

revision #2

Emily sees frost

on the window. Midwinter,

Franklin stove sighs. March

hangs like a purple hat on

the Homestead door: just too far.

-------------------------------------

Emily walks a

mile on hardwood, circles

the Franklin stove. March

hangs like a purple hat on

the homestead door: just too far.

Old, old notebook poems #2

Divertissement 

February 16, 2000

At the National Assembly,

the clown preformed exequies

for the man who had been

Sinner, King, Escape Artist.

Not just a farce, an electorate tragedy.

We do this:

We fatten in lean years,

play leapfrog at high tide,

calculate the refuse in the refugium

and applaud, applaud the act all the while.

Old, old notebook poems #1

Baudelaire

February 18, 1999

Today is the kind of day

to think of obscure streets,

steaming and bending into wreckage.

To try and pull some

breath from beneath

the skin of the city,

a bit of air that tastes new

and brings us back to grapevines

that once twisted here.

There may be a ghost

draped over the streetlamp

there, surrounded by

the puckered fog.

We have had wounds.

We have sought refuge

in the destroyed.

There may be a memory

hidden beneath the broken

phone booth:

a touch of a soft finger,

a few notes on strings ,

a singing that has never

really stopped.

Two-Minute January Haiku #2

Cinder, black fingers,

ashes line the grate. Stranger,

Coleridge fortold you.

blog title

The title for my blog comes from one of my very favorite poems, "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison" by Coleridge, just in case anyone was wondering. But I doubt anyone is wondering since I have not (and probably won't) let anyone know about this blog.