You who I don’ t know I don’ t know how to talk to you
— What is it like for you there?
Here... well, wanting solitude; and talk; friendship —
The uses of solitude. To imagine; to hear.
Learning braille. To imagine other solitudes.
But they will not be mine;
to wait, in the quiet; not to scatter the voices —
What are you afraid of?
Our ropes are the roots
of our life. We fish
low in the earth,
the river beneath runs through our veins,
blue and cold in a riverbed.
When the sun comes up,
the moon moves slowly to the left.
I tie the logs and limbs together,
holding them in place.
The ocean beats them
smooth like rock.
Here my sense of time is flat.
I find in a strip of damp sand
footprints and marks of hands,
and torn pieces of flesh.
Night is a beast.
The tide moves, gushing
back and forth.
Listen, Sanoe
Dewy lehua bud
Here I am
Waiting for your voice.
The answer comes
I am satisfied
Softly, sweetheart
You excite my whole being.
My body is waiting
Waiting there in yearning belief
How are we to fulfill
The desire of our thoughts?
Calling to you, my water lily
Budding for the two of us
Here close by is a compliment
The manu comes to deliver.
The Queen is listening
The aroma of the scents comes together
Mixes and rises upward
So similar, so alike.
I go separately
The sweet knees of oxen have pressed a path for me
ghosts with ingots have burned their bare hands
it is the dungaree darkness with China stitched
where the westerly winds
and the traveler’ s checks
the evensong of salesmen
the glistening paraphernalia of twin suitcases
where no one speaks English.
I go separately
It is the wind, the rubber wind
Kind pity chokes my spleen; brave scorn forbids
Those tears to issue which swell my eyelids;
I must not laugh, nor weep sins and be wise;
Can railing, then, cure these worn maladies?
Is not our mistress, fair Religion,
As worthy of all our souls' devotion
As virtue was in the first blinded age?
Are not heaven's joys as valiant to assuage
Lusts, as earth's honour was to them? Alas,
As we do them in means, shall they surpass
Us in the end? and shall thy father's spirit
Meet blind philosophers in heaven, whose merit
Into my backyard’ s six fat squares of concrete rigged with clothesline,
Charlie the Cop swung gunnysacks convulsed with Jersey chickens.
From the open view of other yards, unfolded down the block,
neighbor women watched ours boil tub water; the barechested men,
laying out knives and cleavers, fumbled the animals into daylight,
To make, you first have
to create materials. Re: man, we know
the rib removed. But, before — ?
Forget ash to ash, dust
& c.
Stick a floating rib (i. e. thoracic
11 – 12, y’ know — “Edenic”) in a glass
of water with the promise
it’ ll grow
roots like leek or fur
Every tripod-
toting birder
knows it never
nests on urban
girders. Even
fences set its
scalded-crimson
head askew, its
waddle swinging,
wings akimbo.
Few have got it
on their lists and
fewer still have
caught it singing,
this endangered
North American
candor, cousin
of the done-in
dodo, big-eyed
Big Sur tremor-
tenor — only
ten or twenty
hang glide over
Modoc County,
There is an alley
where you can go,
where you can kiss
someone’ s mouth
until you climb
inside them, force
your way in, push
your cells into their cells
and become one
creature — angelic.
It isn’ t the way
you’ d dream it.
There is piss,
dew-damp moss crawling
across the brick.
Some nights it is so dark
you must enter only
by touch.
Walk by in the light
and it will seem
like nothing.
The scripture
is written by wenches:
4eva, L+ J, I. T. A. L. Y.
Having returned at last and being carefully seated
On the floor — somebody else's floor, as usual —
Far away across that ocean which looked
Through Newport windows years ago — somebody else's livingroom —
Another messed-up weedy garden
Tall floppy improbably red flowers
All the leaves turned over in the rain
Ridged furry scrotum veins
