Tuesday, October 2, 2012

A Strange Place

When will the pretty thoughts return?

Empty,
Aimlessly content.
Being here, now is easy
like biking down a gentle hill
amid pastures and potato plots
Accelerating, but not too much,
Rolling.

Torment comes and goes
An old friend with whom
I pick up where we left off
whose shape changes with the years
but whose heart is always the same and
whose cold calloused hands clasp my face
as that mouth reaches for my ears
with its urgent whisperings
of the time we've lost but perhaps
it's best that I go alone sometimes
but I'm so dear and bright:
beloved!

Peace is a strange place
I only find by stumbling
among the birches and berry bushes
tripping inside myself
on glacial boulders face-up in the sun
leaping the fissures and ravines
of earth's trickling tap,
my worn in ways of going
toward the end, or the beginning.

Wednesday, May 16, 2012

The Well

Pinhole to the sky -
Dry spaces lit by fire suddenly struck
by fits of weeping into me:
I shall hold it all.
My stomach ever-expanding
bloated, gaunt
For want of things non-existent,
Since ice ages ever the same
Heaving and sighing of seasons.

Be not awakened to these plummeting
Cavernous depths all streaked with algae,
But return to me with desires those
Pieces of earth-core etched with lost grandeur
And your longing will dissolve with centuries
Into iron. 

Tuesday, March 27, 2012

Boston

A city of ghosts.
Now, for me
Hovering just out of reach
I paid them in grief
Wept and wore ashes
the allotted days, but
They do not rest.

Lie in peace!
For you have found the
Promised Land
the citrus blooming
quaking dust-hills of
All that cannot survive here.
That land is your land,
and this is not mine,
As it takes your shape.

Who could have guessed
Your spiritual strength -
the way your soul could
Span an entire continent

I came here
but for the magnificent un-reason
you awakened in me.
Those three years of long madness
Grateful when you granted me
Ground to stand on.

All around, desire of my heart,
Your orchids bloom
a dark sweet taste melts on my tongue
and music clusters away silence

More than a year, now,
Since you
Breathed this air
Why do you refuse admittance
to forgetfulness?

Once, I feared to be alone but here,
in the company of specters
I envy the flowers
Content to return to the
Dust to which they are already rooted.

Tuesday, January 24, 2012

A Wish

My desire to know you unbounded,
I seek
a dwelling where I know the
Ground before the air
to curl my hands, Dearest,
around the broken
Places in your line of vision and
The Hunter in me tracking
rippled waters, tracing
your scent still warm along my ribcage.

I am not the healer, the Savior
Merely the muddy acceptance
of a shallow grave in the
field of wildflowers:
decaying matter, lifeblood
of possibility.