Heavens

Sweet smell of phlox drifting across the lawn —
an early warning of the end of summer.
August is fading fast, and by September
the little purple flowers will all be gone.

Season, project, and vacation done.
One more year in everybody’ s life.
Add a notch to the old hunting knife
Time keeps testing with a horny thumb.

Over the summer months hung an unspoken
aura of urgency. In late July
galactic pulsings filled the midnight sky
like silent screaming, so that, strangely woken,

inside my head

Inside my head a common room,
a common place, a common tune,
a common wealth, a common doom

inside my head. I close my eyes.
The horses run. Vast are the skies,
and blue my passing thoughts’ surprise

inside my head. What is this space
here found to be, what is this place
if only me? Inside my head, whose face?

the tools

1

Gently disintegrate me
Said nothing at all.

Is there still time to say
Said I myself lying
In a bower of bramble
Into which I have fallen.

Look through my eyes up
At blue with not anything
We could have ever arranged
Slowly taking place.

Above the spires of the fox
Gloves and above the bracken
Tops with their young heads
Recognising the wind,
The armies of the empty
Blue press me further
Into Zennor Hill.

“Each ray of sunshine is seven minutes old,”
Serge told me in New York one December night.

“So when I look at the sky, I see the past?”
“Yes, Yes,"he said. “especially on a clear day.”

On January 19, 1987,
as I very early in the morning
drove my sister to Tucson International,

suddenly on Alvernon and 22nd Street
the sliding doors of the fog were opened,

This high up, the face
eroding; the red cedar slopes
over. An accident chooses a stranger.
Each rain unplugs roots
which thin out like a hand.
Above the river, heat
lightning flicks silently
and the sound holds, coiled in air.
Some nights you are here
dangling a Valpolicella bottle,
staring down at the flat water
that slides by with its mouth full of starlight.
It is always quiet

Reckless and white as a flashlight beam cast
into some dark corner, the moon
insists on the deeper blackness

surrounding it. Perhaps it wishes
to be a woman or a window,
cushioning everything, full of itself

for the moment, yet frightened, like any egotist.
But still the stars patiently insist
on their presence, pinholes to nothingness.

When else would I walk on such a night in the world?

Put an ear to the light at fall
of dark and you will hear
nothing. This pale luminescence
that drifts in upon them
makes a blue bole of their caves,
a scare of their scything
tails. They tell
in the bubbling dark of images
that come in upon them
when light spreads like an oil slick
and sea fans
that once were their refuge
turn away.
Now there is no dark
dark enough for their silver tails,
scatter of color
(like coins massively
piling in the lap of a miser)

Mauve mist-shadow cloaks the sky’ s
River-blurred, inchoate border.
Dawn’ s old story; and light tries —
Not the last time — to devise
Lasting order;

From first principles assigns
Laws to frame day’ s jurisdiction;
Drawing contours, shapes, and lines
From the nebula, it shines,
Strange as fiction.

Don't be misled:
that sea-song you hear
when the shell's at your ear?
It's all in your head.

That primordial tide —
the slurp and salt-slosh
of the brain's briny wash —
is on the inside.

Truth be told, the whole place,
everything that the eye
can take in, to the sky
and beyond into space,

lives inside of your skull.
When you set your sad head
down on Procrustes' bed,
you lay down the whole

I love all sights of earth and skies,
From flowers that glow to stars that shine;
The comet and the penny show,
All curious things, above, below,
Hold each in turn my wandering eyes:
I claim the Christian Pagan’ s line,
Humani nihil, — even so, —
And is not human life divine?