Poetry

I sketch the patternings of the sea:the iter- and reiterationof event. Similar; not the same. Lulled by dull predictabilityof my own selves’ dreary projections,I’ve confused the sacred with its name. Better scan fractals, rhyme sea with tree,tune into tantric syncopationmy mortal gods, frantic and profane.

In moonlight the landscape was all blue: frit of cobalt, french ultramarine, far off hills of phthalocyanine and that gleam of light on lake water cerulean, shore rocks indigo, fugitive soldiers freezing to death on a Prussian ground, when my beloved turned on me his eyes of blue mercy: lapis lazuli, pupils of gold.

i. Ill …we are all ill, i.e., neurotic… —Sigmund Freud All ill, some very, some not so much or notso evidently—though perhaps for thatall the more ill. Overall I’d say I was ill,but not quite ill all over as there’s stillsome small patch of well, a window sillof the psyche I can look out fromand…

I avoid books about the present or last war, The war has never been. The air Is thinning itself for the breakup of winter. Breadths of breeze requiring sun Slice through any and every complaint To a dark kind of summer. Moon scuffed at its edges, brighter, Narrower, smears its self-improvement mirror- Image of giveaway…

for J.G. I am powerless to change a thing. ButLet me fool you, sweetly, with my penOr better still, my fingers, and if not With my fingers, then my tongue—Wherever you feel yourself turnedTo wood, wherever a joint is thick Pinned into a pleat or crook, trappingYou in twists of pure human pain—Let me in….

Into the mute and blue- green marble mailbox my dust deserves to go though not for that which I’m going. I deserve to go, and not alone, because I did not sing loud enough about this life, this world. Singing poorly is acceptable. Not loud enough is not. There were too many things I saw…

The war that so many would like to forget, and so many othersrefuse to remember. Thank you for the relief, the rest,for leaving only palimpsestand a little rolled orange eraser dust,and not the xxxxx of a stitched-up wound,when you came to do what erasers do.The way you rubbed out, in one wide swath,the memory of…

Plaintive 1 They asked me, “what do you think ofthe smell of money, the smell of a womanand the smell of the sea?” I held firm.Night wavered and people were singing.The smell of the sea I know, I said,but I am not an informer. The smellof a woman is my purposeful businessand you and I…