subtext

An Ongoing Reformation

Like frost throwing fractals
Across a windowpane,
I shape my life,
Without thought:
A random re-gathering
Of my sundry parts.

Cognitive Dissonance

I live in a world of shadows
Hiding within my thoughts, trapped
Perhaps by the cave wall’s proximity.

Sudden influxes of light blind
With their sharp stabs of insight
Sending me deeper into dark’s solace.

Safer to sit here weaving the tatters
Of my misconceptions, a shroud
Of warmth against some other life.

(November 2010)

Lisa listened and wrote back
the minutia of our lives exchanged
like kisses on her frontsep at night
words flowed easily
like rivers meeting up
coming to a confluence
creating a greater force together
in the coupling of our seperate voices

we traded books, and stories, and letters
always letters, mailing and recieving
one every few days, immediately
starting another – – never not
connected by pen on the page
the words written as if whispered
in the dark in bed, rather than miles
and weeks, and cities apart

(November 2010)

my tongue was a fish flopping
for water on the river bank
the hook still caught in its mouth

my words clotted
before they could emerge
from the open wound of my mouth
I choked on them, drowning.

Girls did that to me – –

But I wrote – –

words had seduced me
seduced me into belief
in their power to transform
so much so I believed
their power was mine
a transubstantiation
like water into wine

I wrote to them
to Monette, to Yolanda
long letters and poems about anything
a flash flood of teen obsession
bravado and love

I meant it all,
without any regard for them
the words floundered on the page
without any one to listen
a mouth opening and closing on air

(November 2010)

The stakes pounded down- –
each one selected
by hand, a careful
weighing, a choosing
testing the heft,
the wood’s grain

like muscles stretched
across the tensile
strength of bone.
Each point cut fine,
each sharp enough
to pierce rock’s heart.

Each stout enough
to hold the ropes
taut. The tent’s
canvas stretches
like aged skin or
a membrane protecting.

The tent also protects
from these constellated
beliefs, from the traps
we set for ourselves.
The straining canvas
calms the star’s fury.

The open sky
brings fears scattered
like stars at night:
small troubles
tremble their flames
on the periphery.

The fear, always the fear
weighs down on me – –
not a specific fear
like being eaten by lions
my guts strewn for miles
across wastelands – –

but that too.
Obliteration contends
with deadlines and what
should be said
to the maid:
All creates tension

like the taut canvas
pressuring the tent’s
ridge pole which lifts
against the lines’ pull.
There at the point of
tension, the cusp,

the meniscus,
the waterline
lifting above the glass,
above the edge,
there is life, always
on the edge of collapse.

(1996)

You must listen closely,
or you’ll miss what they say:
The mutterings and mumblings slip
into a slurry of words- – the mad mouthings
of manic depressives, always verging
on comprehensibility
like AM radio late at night-
signals step on signals- languages blend
like the babble of newborns,
all sounds being equal in a mosaic of meaning.

So, you must listen closely
for each grain of earth,
each mote of dust
screams out a significance
when listening to the dead.
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust:
Plato lurks among the shifting shadows;
Blake, a sparrow among the crumbs, twitters
endlessly about angels prowling the streets – –
And they are there:

the angels,
with Blake,
and Plato,
and Buddha,
and Christ,
and the radiant demons
dancing like houri before our eyes,
but we do not see:
the streets are crowded;
their whispers fill the air

with a cacophony of chaos
which belies the calm of our
comfortable complicit complacency.
Like a sly huckster selling cars,
the stars wink at our existence.
The past is present.
The future hides now.
Each star reveals itself
as it was; each star is
no longer where it is.

Multiple visions of time exist simultaneously:
Four years, one hundred, millions;
all encompassed now in your eye.
It is easier to order the space around us,
to assume that all is homogeneous,
to ignore the incongruities that are more
consistent than any superfluous system
we can create from the swirling air.
In contradiction, we can’t escape the speech
of the dead. The words, despite their deathly

silence, trip and clatter from the city walls.
As we move through the vagaries of the day,
like birds through the rainforest’s canopy,
they echo between the pad and clomp
of our feet like hail across a tin roof,
or bones cast from a fortune teller’s hands:
auguries hatched in the flesh of the past,
like maggots, flowering into what we will
become, a predestination careening beyond
any control except spasmodic fluctuation.

What they say, whether we see the mouth
move or only the echo of the echo,
defines more than our personal will;
inside or outside is of no consequence;
the wall still determines where you stand.
The universe expands into itself,
how are we different, who are we to resist?
The meaning changes with each hearing- –
who spoke first, who after,
the repetitions and refrains.

Each voice shades the one before
and the one after, which in turn cuts
another facet across the diamond’s edge.
The light shifts creating new shades
in the shattering prisms of thought.
The more light’s brought to bear
the darker grows the night needed
to define, divine the edge.
To see through to there, ineffable
and ever in flux, we must first,

like the bird between branch tip
and leaf pierce through here, slip through
the words, the tumblers as they click,
slip then drop into place frozen forever.
so through this pit pattering,
this slip stream of speech,
we plait our pattern between the dead,
obliterating regret and desire
in order to attend to the
impossibly mundane now – –

all to protect ourselves against
the sublime profundity,
the traps and warm comforts
embedded in our language:
the trails leading deeper
into an ever evolving wood;
to save ourselves from,
to exist in at least a contrapuntal
harmony with, the horror of thoughts
which dominate through ubiquity.

(March 2006)

from a distance all edges blur
like the adirondacks and the sky
twenty miles across the valley

years pass and the day to day
travails tumble into dust
what was for dinner, who said what

today like yesterday was a day
coffee newspaper errands then home
chains of assumption click closed

are you happy now compared to when
or has acceptance lulled your expectations
into a mere semblance of desire

(May 2006)

The lies we tell each other strand us
to live out what each other perceives;
I am old and afraid of falling
in love, afraid of fooling myself
yet again. Fear, a faithful companion,
hovers about my decisions like air.
I take a familiar breath and sigh;
where in this miasma exists any hope?

Before I can even speak of conciliation,
as if I could trust myself for an answer,
I first must strain out the duplicitous
viewpoints between which I hide myself
since self-serving rationales fall like hail
pummeling my soul with a vacuous unction.

(October 2010)

One always lives
in the ruins

civilization’s cascade
a spring wells up
and flows away

one picks up a fallen stone
examines the intricate
decorations

build something,
anything,
renew anew

(November 2006)

I work in a field
that requires patience
for things to grow.

Today I moved rocks
from the rows to the edges
defining a sacred space.

Yesterday, I turned the earth
folding under new compost
with last year’s dead plants.

Tomorrow, I sow seed
casting hope for the future,
then wait for rain.

(October 2010)

The consequences of possibility,
with their endless openings of doubt,
dance a slow throb about my desires.
Fear, like a flower, unfolds walls of intimacy,
preventing a breach in the otherwise open discourse
of the day to day exchanges of work and home;
where to speak outside of myself is to court oblivion.
In this abstraction of my life I struggle,
through an ever-thickening swamp, for a meaning
to ground myself in. A meaning which is not just another
platitude, some pat cliché to skim along the surface,
safe, yet ignorant of the potential life and love about me.

(October 2010)