Poetaster

POETASTER HAS MOVED

2006-12-08T11:34:00.000-08:00

Thanks to all loyal readers, but Poetaster has left for better, more Mac-friendly climes at Typepad. Find me at the link above. Over the coming weeks, I'll be transferring all content, as well as adding new work.

Noli me tangere

2006-10-17T11:53:00.000-07:00

It is the small, light thing in grief
That pushes hardest on the heart:
The telephone, the TV, breakfast.
The hellos and goodbyes that happened
With quotidian comfort now dissappear,
And I shake with sheer awe
At the size of the absence. You will
Not return. There will be no return.

Geomancy

2006-08-29T16:26:00.000-07:00

The light illuminates the page
As I tilt the book toward the light—
A major work, and I am a lover
Of books. The earth tilts away,
And the back of summer is broken.
There is an urgency in the hills,
To gather, to fledge, to finish,
For now. All things will go golden.
Even the air, it seems. For now.
The rain comes, and I find comfort:
The sun is only sun; the rain, rain.

The Gibbous Moon Waxing

2006-07-19T15:17:00.000-07:00

This is an opening. I forget about that.
The wrens arguing in the branches have
Nothing to do with me, but the seeming
Import in their tone is deceiving,
So I pause to read their signs, remain
Ignorant. I've lost meaning,
The elements of my desire:
The ease in the wind of the dragonfly,
Unseen luminous blue of its body,
With purposes all its own.

The Santa Anas

2006-01-05T14:37:00.000-08:00

We left off trying to summit when the Santa Anas
Returned. Watching the sage on the hillsides
Rattle with the dry wind, it seemed some
Signal or sign, and we turned back without
Speaking. Now, I have come for the strangeness
Of the change, the sudden shift in emphasis
That makes the confused maples push out
Exhausted buds--too soon, too soon.
In your empty hands you hold that air,
That heat and shocking lack, bringing it all
Back around to tomorrow, when the wind
Will shift again, away east perhaps, from the ocean,
All ending in entropy, the seneschal of the spirit.

Speaking of the Philosopher

2005-11-11T10:51:00.000-08:00

Avt tace Avt Loqvere merloria silentio [“Be silent unless your speech be better than silence”]
— Salvator Rosa, inscribed on his self portrait

This is Commedia dell’Arte, no doubt: Rosa, in the guise of Brooding
Thought, cocksure thought, the philosopher all’improviso.

Your mistress Muse looks like you, too, Poet, Painter, Trickster.
I always assume you are there, in the landscape somewhere.

When you say Be Silent, at first the mouth tightens, like so.
Words disperse, the thoughts behind them thicken into consideration

Until suddenly (What a joke you play, what silence you propose!)
The viewer knows, nervously avoiding your eyes--

Eyes (Oh, the right one, the one that knows!) of an impresario--
That I'm imagining the outside view, looking at reflections

Of me-as-a-[you decide], talking double to the self and to us,
Philosophizing you.

Pascariello, you; and Soldier you, too.

This is better than silence. The selves, they mask and dance,
They play each other, Capitano, they play you. Glancing

at us only to fool us and seduce us with the rôle,
the dress, that currently catches your interest, ours.

Though the question is amateurish, I must ask,
Where are you? Displeased, droll, looking slightly down

on Naples? The ragged clouds and sepia air you project
are atmosphere for your command, your dramatis persona.

When is speech better than silence? Which silence, the silence
Of the canvas? or my furrowed brow and frowning mouth?

I imagine a play with a frame in the middle: I consider
The quiet to be dangerous and so chatter like a sparrow.

You remain unmoved, but formulate responses in the form
Of different attitudes. I look on, postulate a theory, content

To quote experts, provide allusions. You display props
And change into costumes that say by synecdoche.

It’s all in my imagination, of course. My mind’s eye.
The reader may imagine me before the picture in England,

Infatuated by a handsome face long dead, the love of illusion,
Sublimating for hours while people pause, and then pass.

My thoughts buzz and hum in this public display of affection,
While I stand still as that painted stone. The reader may know,

But silence there. Silence here. We operate in the same circles,
Whoever you are. You say, Imagine me centuries from now,

Staring at you tricked out in my mind, limned
With a darkening sky behind you, frowning at me darkly,

Wondering if centuries from now you would be
Staring at me intensely, cautious, ready to speak.

The October Poem

2005-10-25T08:28:00.000-07:00

A month of waiting, suspended between instants.
What an absurd name for its lengthening nights,
Its overused spookiness and migratory birds.
September passed without leaving a mark on me,
And I am written on by the word. Looking at the last
Gray light resting on the leaves, I feel an absence
Of transmission, what the leaf perceives denied
To me. This is no comfort. I want to be lost
In a beautiful knot of language, in the deep not
Now of the past. But the day, like the month, like now,
Is going and I know that terrible exeunt in its metaphor,
In the light, in the spot of rot on the pomegranate,
Even in this wresting, questing after an end.

Koi

2005-09-29T10:15:00.000-07:00

Confluence here, and I am made to entertain
The irony of fishes, in their glowing skin,
to drown in air, submurged to thrive.
Who will hope for me when hope is opened,
flayed--the end of it the sum of works
and days? Such silence, such a sense of above
and below, of an opposite limit in the mirror
above, seen with eyes engineered not to see.
The world is cold and I cannot swim in water;
I swim in air, an element, media, the stuff
of my voice. I seek to speak, to shine
in diamond skin. Flesh is cold in the wonder
of the pond, the slow lovely sliding hours.

Without Attachment

2005-08-11T10:57:00.000-07:00

Bee shadows fall on the curtain in the afternoon,
Moving through the shadows of the sumac blooms.
Excellent desire: the sun, the source, the shadow we cast.
Holding out my hand, late in the day, sun low,
Darkness falls across my eyes, foreshadower.
I move, and it is gone, darkness prefiguring light.
Actions like these, natural to me, may seem odd
Or strange to you--empty, or full of vanity.
But bee shadows on the curtain are more lovely
Than the bees themselves, darkness in transit,
Leaving behind a trail of memory by my own hand.

No. 15 (Bright Yellow and Red)

2005-07-27T11:05:00.000-07:00

"For dissimulation is an exacting art."
--Rothko

This is why we value our indifference:
Because it is too brief for us to bear,
The piercing truth of our infinitude.
It is a glory we are unable to sustain, a high
Failing note on an oboe, any ray that shines
From any star, children's laughter, or early
Morning peace. What instances of grief
We will ultimately know--this is the source.
We weep at the grace of Siva's dance,
Destroyer, creator, the intellect without awareness.
Allow me this much, this moment, here,
In the text, and I will reach into your dreams
To find the human, elemental and severe.

The Mouse in the Photograph

2005-06-24T17:35:00.000-07:00

It should be as easy as blinking,
Remembering what you don't percieve:
The movement in the photograph,
The dream in which you drown,
Enlightenment in the stone Buddah.
Eyes remember unbidden. Cones
And rods recall the shade you picked
For the bedroom was the same
As your favorite toy. I know this song
From somewhere. Open to me now,
World of absence, what I apprehend unaware.

What it says doesn't matter;
The sound of chairs sliding back
From the table, scraping resistance.
It's best to leave, after all; but linger
Here and finish your thought, delay
Decision. Bring me over to your
Point of view, what I would say
If I were you. It's hard to decide
When decisions are already made.

Recollection occurs. Ah, God,
It was so sweet for no reason,
Reaching for my coffee you were
Washing white dishes in the sink
And it is late Spring. But something
Is missing, missing. Something
Is gone from the moment
And what that is I can't recall.

Jacarandas at Dusk

2005-06-03T10:25:00.000-07:00

There are certain destructions that can't be
Denied. I'll never know the texture of my own
Voice. It's always uncertain what I'll remember,
So I must take care to be here as it happens.
If I call, and you answer (swear you will),
We will be in conversation for all our lives.
I call you now, reader, call and wait on
The diminishment of the word, like the purple
Of the jacaranda when the evening comes on,
Silent and shading into absence, or the robin's
Warble in the near-dark, about to be consumed.

The Apotheosis of Psyche

2005-05-16T09:26:00.000-07:00

Time opens the willow wand, perhaps. Perhaps
It does not. The sky is veiled with tattered silk,
Like Monk dreaming at the piano in halting silent
Beats, opening the bar in sheerer rhythms than
I can see. I was wondering, what is aware of me?
Then, as soon as I don't care, it becomes mine.
Finished in a way, always a fragment, me partial to it.

Gap in the Text

2005-04-08T14:35:00.000-07:00

What does a crow do all day? This one’s
Chasing a moth through the grass, as
If he had nothing better to pursue,
No pressing appointments with crow
Friends. There’s a nondescript brown
Sparrow watching him from the shrub,
Tiny glinting eyes and head cocked,
Considering. What to do with the time?
I’m standing alone, waiting to know
What the sparrow thinks of the crow,
Of the passing hours; I believe that both,
All, one day, will turn and speak to me.

No, that’s not it. It’s the overarching joy
In seeing the glassy black feathers against
The infinite variation of green in the grass,
The hop in pursuit of the cabbage moth’s
Erratic pathway through the air. It flits
To the tock of a crow voice: flutter, rest,
Flutter, rest—hop. And the plainest
Of plain birds watching him, too. Like Keats,
I take part in his existence. I shatter
And reform, piece together the moment:
Crow-play and solumn sparrow, this is not
Our world. Ah, however brief, I felt it there--
The narrow circumference of my body
Fell away. I could not think, only see.

An Instance of Asymmetry

2005-03-17T12:42:00.000-08:00

Sitting in my living hand, a hummingbird
Found on the doorstep, as if in offering;
The stillness there a palpable thing,
A kind of object. My hand trembles
With a strange grief for all stillness,
But I insist the name written speaks
Of the thing itself: The fine green
Feathers luminous still, the needle beak
Slightly open, separated from itself;
A dreaming thing, the weight of nothing,
Of air and the fierce fire of living.
I whisper over it, hummingbird,
To beat back the death there, to beat
The wings again, the word so fast
Passing through the air you cannot see it.

Lynchpin

2005-03-04T13:17:00.000-08:00

The open shaft of light in the living room
Made us wait for an answer in the stalled
Silence of the conversation, a sense of some
Convergence or cooperative action.
We turned to you, the host, expecting
A statement or act. But wherever we gather,
Nothing holds us together. I mean that
In the affirmative—we can depend upon it.

St. Augustine Reads to Himself

2005-02-28T09:40:00.000-08:00

The voice you hear is not your own, renowned,
Or sounded. It is an echo announced
In no pronounced tones, old--ancient--and lonely.
Really, such beauty should be empty
Of meaning; instead, it is an aggregate and agile,
Breathing. Blow in it and it ignites in I's
And innuendoes, implied. Pull it into place--
But it resists and snaps like science,
Fast to reason, imagined but lacking an image,
All synecdoche and no bones, no whom,
All an ode, all libation, the small song
In praise of silently reading singing.

Preface

2005-02-23T15:24:00.000-08:00

When you enter the foyer of the story,
There must be walls--even Calder
Had a celing or a floor. I tell
You now: I began in this place,
Ended in that. There is irritation
In particulars, in the dust.
Look at me now; I'm talking
To you like an equal--the miracle
Of nothing strange going on,
Of writing, or the story in
Transition, on the way to another story.

Forcing the Amaryllis

2005-02-11T09:28:00.000-08:00

With its texture like skin (veins, even
The heft of flesh in the stalk), I wait a year
For its appearance. Something ancient
In the ear, the ode or elegy, some song
Calls it out. They say we have receptors
In our joints that sense the earth,
But we don’t hear them when they call.
Can we summon them, I wonder, make
The dendrites sing? What syncronicity
That would be, if I could reach into
The body, and command it to bloom.

2005-02-09T09:20:00.000-08:00

Looking Up

2005-02-06T22:06:00.000-08:00

The branches overarching, black, holding
Silence in the space between the leaves.
Exhuberent in the low notes of thunder,
I demand you open your heart to me,
But I will not answer me, except in pleas.
It is an empty sort of rain that falls on wet
Ground, making foolish puddles without
Purpose. Looking down on the steel sky
Reflected there—me there, too—I believe
Again in the richness of excess. I believe
Each time, again. I am Billie Holiday;
I am broken. But the rain falls anyway.

Off White on Ivory

2005-01-21T20:26:00.000-08:00

The smell of vanilla is an excellent thing,
The plain basement where we meet,
Something we can all agree upon, and start
Again. If anything troubles me about the way
Clouds always approach at sunset (sneaking),
Or the constant loss, always, of everything—
Even the cheapest cheap candle seems Eastern
And hot, the fruit of an orchid, excrutiating
And desirous. Or I can go to the spice
Cabinet in my kitchen, unscrew the top,
And find there something plain, and superb.

The Crow at the Intersection

2005-01-13T22:49:00.000-08:00

It was the opening of his beak, silent in the car,
But the whole body of the crow was cawing.
A word only for crows, our sound for theirs,
But the whole body makes it, crouched,
Fluffed, forward leaning, into the air, to say
Who knows what to some other crow. I roll
Down the window in time to hear the answer
In the distance, some message passing there,
worth great effort. The car behind me honks,
And suddenly his head tilts down, listening.
As I roll beneath him, I hear his wild refrain,
Complex beyond my understanding: Caw.

The World Given to the Reader in Silence

2005-01-07T17:59:00.000-08:00

Proof against despair: All the lovely instants,
tesserae forming the image of your time.
Set them with deliberate care, the whole in mind.

When you cross each threshold--the car door
opens, the move from room to room, the shush
of automatic glass at the grocery store--
you are a god, a Janus-self. Look, here
in the vestibule, there are mirrors: You
in infinite repetition, you turned on each
you, a Duchamp you. The illusion of passage
compels us all into the next day, after all:

I see you there, see your mosaic mind.

Heroica

2005-01-06T13:08:00.000-08:00

The elegant line of its restraint hangs in the air,
Like touching red velvet, or some other unamed,
Unexpected impossible attained—the loss for words.

It’s good to still see the irridescence on peacock
Feathers, or diamonds dropping from the leaves
When there’s sun after rain—still a luxury to be.

Reaching through the second movement, chasing
The notes in my head, I don’t want to know the design,
Neither the heart nor hand of the maker—I absent

Him from the sound, absent myself, absent you.

The Stack of Books and the Blossom

2004-12-09T09:26:00.000-08:00

In uncertain terms the object addresses me;
The attachment forms in my perception.
Every periphery is a tableau: those books
And that plastic flower could become
Something in the right hands. Solitude
All the same, a lonely exercise in vision.
But when I am perceived—Ah, the difference!
What wild vastness in the dog’s brown eye,
In the sound of his barking, in our translation.
What hundreds of subtle signals we send.
Does he hear the way I breathe? My irises
React to the sound of his voice as he passes
On the leash. I know him. I do not know
His master. These things I understand,
Like him, without cunning or decision:
We want to play together but cannot;
I want to bark back, a borrowed voice.
Instead I nod my head, mumble consolation,
Tugged along by a leash of my own,
In an instant losing a whole world of him.

Oculus

2004-11-19T14:20:00.000-08:00

What we see at the apex of our curving
Ingenuity defies us. Looking through it,
We see beyond it--becoming a collective
Eyeball gazing at God. The school children
That shuffle inside, under the two ceilings
Of stone and sky, sense its philosophy—I
Follow their upward gazing at the celing,
Swimming against the beam of light, to eternity.
I turn inside it out; I see its sheer sexiness:
The offered breast, the desire to caress
The breathless mystery of the Pantheon
That we created with our own hands and minds,
Our own eyes, intellect and spirit, in reflection.

What Happened to David

2004-11-05T15:06:00.000-08:00

It was dust in the mouth, the dust of time.
Careening around the last corner,
Full of God, he felt the greater source
Beat deeply once again within him,
The wretched demarcation between desire
And the withering channels of the spine.
And so deeply did it beat, a basso continuo
In the mind, that he defied it all—time,
God, and wisdom. And so beautiful
Was his defiance that I seek it always,
Even before the singing of my blood
Brings me to his desperate climax.

The Trace of First Sight

2004-11-05T14:31:00.000-08:00

When perception of the sound of the sea
Becomes the sight of the sea, that’s when
you know. The easy associations of quality—
the sush and hiss, the repetition that repeats—
these mean so little until at last we see.
I was wondering about this when I bent
To pick up a rice grain from the kitchen floor
And heard your voice, so familiar that I
Rose, and turned in your direction to reply.
That I heard it was not as troubling
As my own disbelief that I heard it, and not
Knowing what to do with the fact that I did.

The Transit of Venus

2004-06-15T08:37:00.000-07:00

Looking off now, into the burdened light
On the hills, you would never surmise
This brief unplanned passage or crossing.
It is true that the red tailed hawk is hunting
As if nothing is happening, stirring up trouble
With the shadow it casts in the shrubs below.
I need to pay the light bill, and the shining
Of the sun on a teeming planet
Won't change that. But, oh, what a curious
Thing, to be not just alive but aware
Of a cosmic occurrence. Venus in broad day,
Not shining but a shadow like a love interest:
It's not mandatory to find meaning in it.
I don't believe in God, so that shadow
Doesn't fall on me. I am a mere observer.

Observe this. Moaning over the incense
Of disinfectant, some learned gentleman
Dies an omega in a hospital somewhere.
The requisite alpha birth occurs below.
They are separated by concrete and steel
And the shadow that passes over the face
Of the Sun, separated from the infinite
By what they are, and from me by what we
Aren't--a unified people; earthly, aware,
And whole listeners. So there's a lonely
Bitterness in this Venus, this perfect circle
traveling invisible across a fire too bright,
Consulting no charts, charting no course.
But it shows itself to me, and so shows me
My transitory nature in the nature of its transit.

Every life is an ellipsis at any given moment
Until the end, the period of existence.
Allotted to us...There is some flexibility,
Some play. Still...watching the hawk, the hawk still
Hunting, passing like eternity between me
And the Sun, I am to the moment blind.
Here is the story of understanding, that we
See only what we can explain in truths.
This is the mystery of language, the calling
into being of a thing hitherto unknown.
Even now: hitherto, an ancient thing
You perhaps have not heard or spoken
Before, until you see it, here, now. I see
No shadow on the sun, but I know its name,
Feel its terrible indifference to me,
To you, to the hawk, to the very Sun itself.