Do nothing and everything will be done,
that's what Mr. Lao Tzu said, who walked
around talking 2,500 years ago and
now his books practically grow on trees
they're so popular and if he were
alive today beautiful women would
rush up to him like waves lapping
at the shores of his wisdom.
That's the way it is, I guess: humbling.
I am in love, hence free to live
by heart, to ad lib as I caress.
A soul is light when full,
heavy when vacuous.
My soul is light. She is not afraid
to dance the agony alone,
for I was born wearing your shirt,
will come from the dead with that shirt on.
Rings possess fingers.
Fingers remember
what the eyes have
blocked. The blindness
in this
case is figurative.
The figure in this
case is
curvaceous.
)
Milled, folded,
soldered.
Inlaid omen.
Mokume gane.
Ifs as hinges.
Ands as pins.
Rings as
reunions.
)
In some remote
pre-dawn eye slit
the horizon largely
the same
the cinquefoils still
chirpy and obliging the ox-eyed
That the dead are real to us
Cannot be denied,
That the living are more real
When they are dead
Terrifies, that the dead can rise
As the living do is possible
Is possible to surmise,
But all the stars cannot come near
All we meet in an eye.
Flee from me, fear, as soot
Flies in a breeze, do not burn
Or settle in my sight,
I’ ve tasted you long enough,
Let me savor
Something otherwise.
Who wakes beside me now
Suits my soul, so I turn to words
Only to say he changes
The King asks, “Tell me, what is the highest meaning of the holiest truths?”
The Seer answers, “Emptiness, without holiness.”
The King is a restless seeker.
The Seer is a ruler and thief.
I am seriously watching how trees are always missing some leaves.
They sweep the air looking for them. Nothing distracts them. Nothing.
Where leaves are missing between the branches, beautiful sun porches,
which disappear when the tree reaches them.
“Who are you?” the King asks.
“It is not like that,” the Seer says.
Dreams brimming over,
childhood stretched out in legs,
this is the moment replayed on winter days
when frost covers the field,
when age steals away wishes.
Glorious sleep that seeps back there
to the glory of our baseball days.
On the rough diamond,
the hand-cut field below the dog lot and barn,
we rehearsed the strict technique
of bunting. I watched from the infield,
the mound, the backstop
as your left hand climbed the bat, your legs
and shoulders squared toward the pitcher.
You could drop it like a seed
down either base line. I admired your style,
but not enough to take my eyes off the bank
that served as our center-field fence.
I’ m sitting at Nathan’ s, reading a biography of Darwin
who, right now, is dissecting a barnacle
“no bigger than a pinhead (and with two penises)”:
he’ ll work like this on barnacles, his wrists supported
by rigged-up blocks of workshop wood, for eight years.
Nathan is reading too, in the worn-down banged-up “daddy chair”:
those philosophical poems of William Bronk’ s. What’ s
most delightful is that Tristan, eleven, and Aidan, ten,
It is not so much that I miss you
as the remembering
which I suppose is a form of missing
except more positive,
like the time of the blackout
when fear was my first response
followed by love of the dark.
You don’ t get everything back.
Is today morning or night? The radio voice says
the composer is changing the place home is.
When they try to put a tube down her throat,
the woman beside me sobs. Nurses probe
a vein as she thrashes, call the Hmong translator.
