Bounds

Sinon would have called your love a noble gift;
Those behind the wall would have seconded
And seen the bolt strike left, and still not lift
An eyebrow, because whose left anyway?

I portended ends that have not come yet;
Abandoned home in an all-weather country
For the flattening shade of Constancy
Where, above all men, we worship Aengus.

No. I mispoke. Worship is the wrong word
And Aengus does not fit. Keats' sedge knight
With his boggy shield completes this image,
A silver wanderer in ghostly woods:

His recusant hand skims wasting heathers
And drops likewise into shallow, withered streams
For a fish or woman who is not there--
Though the fish recalls that poet king
(Whose rodded harp-string sinks in growing grass),
Skinny and longing in the poet's grasp.

Sonnet for a Cockateel

From the ad interim stability

Of just being weightless underwater

I glimpsed the undulating form of mother

Come to subtract me from my camaraderie.

Her tideless ebb and flow bore peremptory

Guilt (that look in her eye that my father

Always spotted as something the matter):

My lawyer with no good news from the jury.

I rose my head above the muted purl

And breathed, pulled to the deck by heavy hands

That never could warm me, even when I

Stood wrapped and toweled in her lee. Unfurled

And resonating, the news came to land

And landed softer than the bird had died.

Poem for Reading

Let the binding bend,

Write your name in pen;

Know the thumbprint

And the miscreant

Mark--know the malformed eye,

Let your finger run the spine

And let the line be thumbed.

Thumb it yourself: Don't think

About humidity

Or where the stain came from;

It is not a hieroglyph,

And the bend is an arc of

Nothing. Gaze into it.

Leveling

Levels and layers and layers of levels,

An old ring-around and turn the mind off

The wearing away the war of the day,

A gyric occlusion of this and that,

Sometimes adding on to the confusion

Of the meter--scant poetry on falling

Through cloud and cloud; a feeling of living

In the undertow--sometimes syphoning

Its meaning, sometimes dwelling in it.

Sonnet for Staying Friends

When I think of us as something nascent

Or young and unfounded, or newly wrought,

Or virginal (now that’s a funny thought.

Virginal. Young, eager, maybe frightened?

Attempting to find some new untouched spot

And feigning poise or erotic complacence)

I wonder if the text falsifies ends,

Or if we are new hands on some law book.

Wonderfully new. Hands can be drawn or shook

Whenever. And people can let a new

Line be drawn wherever, in sand or soot;

Though that sounds stupid: imagine us years

From now drawing lines in the ground in some

Sandy patch in the middle of everything.

Villanelle: Watchman's Song

New benedictions by which I was blessed

Grew structures and rules, implicit in time,

And counted on fingers, stressed and unstressed.

No ox on the tongue, no sunlight to rest,

No turn of the pages, no thinking sublime,

Just new benedictions; a baby to bless.

Ship’s smoothest wood mocked Leviathan best,

Her coat-foundered floor (one Mariner’s Ryme)

Uncurled my small fingers, stressed and unstressed.

Ein Zeit—a time—Und Geist: a living test,

A lamb bleating sharp at the shearing time,

A father to father; his latter half blessed.

Now I recall my father’s barrel chest,

Vibrations on ear, and rumble-stacked rhyme;

He counted my fingers, stressed and unstressed.

Arching of fable, a glint from the West,

A thunderous march-to and tug-on-the-line

Renews benedictions by which I was blessed:

A count on the fingers, stressed and unstressed.

Villanelle

A kneeling man keels in the shallowbank,

In the fish pond, where the fish always were.

He elbows in for no one left to thank.

 

Within whose walls and burden due his rank

And memory, to whom should he confer?

A kneeling man keels in the shallowbank.

 

In the house he can wash inside his tank,

And nothing in to watch or even stir,

He elbows in for no one left to thank,

 

Beneath Helen’s breast, where skin was wiped blank,

Or in the marshes where never with her,

A kneeling man keels in the shallowbank

 

His fingertips test the threshold, inside dank

contents of ether, just water to her;

He elbows in for no one left to thank.

 

Thinking of currents against which his lank

Body could curl – or turn, and not stir,

A kneeling man keels in the shallow bank,

And reaches down for no one left to thank.

Connubial Ballad: For a Wife

She wore a pair of danced-upon

navy girl’s shoes and she bounced her

bosom high when she laughed and drank

champagne through her teeth and always

a saint on Sundays and never

spilled food when she ate because she

ate her food so delicately.

She had a dog too and the dog

was tame enough to ride in her

purse and wear clothes that she bought for

it and take little scraps of beef

right from her fingers and knew what

to bite and not to bite and where

to pee and not so that she could

take it with her everywhere and

bounce it in her bosom and give

it kisses and we would watch her

and knew that when we grew up we

would bounce in bosoms like those ones

and eat our food right from fingers

and never bite what we shouldn’t

and never pee where we weren’t

allowed to pee. Not even when

We wanted to. No matter what.

Julia, she, whose mother was a horse or read about and thought that it was true for her too had two mothers, she, Jules, and thought for in loving me to find three, was I or to be or having been that for her in just pretending really was. It was thorough, what I wanted to do to her was thorough, or I mean the planning of it was

and touched beneath her skin stretched down from a point to the bit of baby hair behind the earlobe, tugged taught where the ribs graduate upwards the revealed too-tight thatching of sinew muscle; the sinew grew and flexed when her and my hands grasped and pulled ours clenched together in her hair so long as to fall tickling to my chest, and she balanced upon a columnal arm protruding from the hair on my sternum seeming at times when she screwed on top of me like a fish bent dead on a spear.

and she her mother being third was born from artificial lagoon, her lasso-eyed and new hands to lines pushing aim towards irons, pushing fruitless tack. tack!

that the fish would have been born too as a mother made more sense to her in reading than the horse but then again the fish that was Vardaman’s mother didn’t have the eyes or nobody ever saw him have them so whose mother anyway?

Arrow

 

Tacit history, like nothing I remember,

seems to beguile me

into breathing heavily on her

neck

and ear,

and holding her (me trembling) –  she

the longest arrow, stolen

random from my quiver-ing –  sleepingbag of

baby-cloth –  on

 

string drawn too far

from slack to ease

and I me

trembling and no and

to show my

not-knowing

breathing heavy, heavy

I powerless so

 

to release and watch her

sail – a screaming

siren-wild into the fog

bank. It the fog will clear

around her, she to be

found, no note from

me attached or intended

only strings and bows

snug-tight in baby-cloth

 

or more arrows.