This Scene is Amphibious

April 2007

A poem is really just a joke without a punchline.

So somewhere in the mountainous districts near Kyoto,
This jet-lagged bluegrass shows up, and sociologists descend
Like a swarm of tweed locusts and notebooks, and first
They speak to the old monk at the top of the mountain,
Who taught Shinto to the Buddha,
Who taught Nirvana to God,
The summary of all monks and all summits,
Who greets them by offering from his fireplace
A hot coal, and bids them deliver to the vendor
Of bamboo hats at the foot of the mountain, who
Once cheated the monk by broad application of maxim,
“Change comes from within.”

The sociologists, who consider arson beneath them,
A matter for anthropologists, press on in an attempt
To dissect the heart of the matter, and discuss with assembled
Musicians, coopers, potters, and the makers of copper wire
(As all the new bands are electric)
The extent of the flourishing scene,
With a digression into authenticity of late Meiji ceramics,
But the scene is amphibious, a loose conglomeration
Of shorebirds, sherpas, and fiddler crabs,
A narrow-winged long division between ribbons
Of rushing sand and sharp fragments of feral pine
Beaten together on a stone ridge with a steel string.

Forgiveness of Sins

May 2007

I did a lot of experimenting with scene-setting this quarter.

I approach with tourniquets of phrase.
This is the last angle of autumn
when the setting sun will cast its
full red light on the cathedral floor
through the stained-glass cape of St. Martin.

I have not been in a church
with even one other
for many years.

Red as a rosary, reading,
in this place that belongs to neither of us,
the air currents, you rise
and prepare to take wing.

In the rafters there is a nest of owls.
Night will bring them down
on the church mice.

This vault is a dry gulf.
Fragile I want starves in the aisle
I love pools around columns
I dreamt of clings to a caesura,
shocked to be spoken, hanging in space.

I believe the architect designed
the wide south doors,
which you fling open, facing the sea
with only this moment in mind:

Flight.

Come back when the moon is bright and the past is deaf,
when autumn’s light is singed into the stone.
Come banging on oak, calling
“Sanctuary! Sanctuary!”

Aubade, Partly Cloudy

November 2006

That was actually my horoscope the day I wrote this. And I’m really proud of it. The parts in italics started out as a song.

Aurora, do you remember the cave in the mountains
Where we played with sapphire marbles in the dust?

53rd Street sunrise, 6:47 AM, and there’s not much use for it here. The world has
Laid on its winter blanket, muttering to itself of mislaid precipitation,
Tightens up and harasses her flocks of crows into action, turns the thermostat
And reads the paper, “set sights on adventure” the horoscope,

When we awoke alone, the first, in narrowing darkness
And all the rays of the sun were braided in your hair.

Brandishes a sharp blade to the horizon, elects the wild geese
Her ambassadors, nods sagely at the iridescent oil in the slanted light of
Forgetfulness, and opens the howling door. The wind is westerly, 14 knots, and
Tinged with dry leaves, weariness, sulfur dioxide. Helicopter beating against the grain

You laughed and a tangle of sparks, tenderly interwoven,
Ignited a fire in the serpentine valley below.

Toward the woods, humming rips through the frostbitten cloud cover, shale,
Scrapes her feet across the wool, cacophony of trucks, and it jumps as she reaches

You sprang from the gates of the moon with the dawn in your arms.

Return

November 2006

Agnostic that I am, I find religious references fascinating. One of a few poems I wrote for my poetry workshop that I didn’t end up using.

Return once to the gypsy highway,
The purple moor, return again

To the blue horizon, the faceless moon
Again, again to the blazing sword

Which turns every way, Jerusalem
In rags, Jerusalem, the house of God

A house of swords, a frame of glass
A gas, expansive, a taut string

God’s own relentless sky embraces
The earth indeterminate erupts

The sun, a rose in mourning
The stars, a house of glass

Return again to the darkly glittering
Morning, electric, rebuilding

The cavern sky, the gypsy moonlight
The faceless moon, the crashing dove

That holds a house of sand upon
Its wings of gypsum rose and gypsy

Moth that floats upon the careless wind
God’s own relentless sky embraces

The house of swords, the frame of glass
Immaculate in waiting fragments, chance

Return, shattering, to the faceless sky,
The gypsy moon, the purple moor
The empty room, the open door

Welcome to the Monkey House

November 2006

Whee! Self-examination – and physics!… there are explanations behind most of the weirder epithets. Oh, and credit where credit is due: Welcome to the Monkey House is a collection of Vonnegut’s short stories, which I highly recommend. “Who Am I This Time?” is a story in that collection.

God bless the reckless instinct that asks “Who am I this time?”
The reckless rose, in restless prose, by any other name–
Oh, any other name! Let fly the mercy of the indistinct parade, the
Eccentric in elegant armor, the haberdasher by night, or the

Dear occupant, this space must be vacated. Please disperse, sincerely,
Who is it this time? Chance stranger to myself some days, lost
In a suitcase, a writer of love songs, a gypsy moth, one who
Worships the dawn, but sleeps through it.

A builder of chance cathedrals, made a sweeper of floors
In industrial corrugated steel-on-concrete. He who stares intently at the
Radio, the washed-out green, the nervous spatter of five AM
Highway drowning in static and rain-swept grays.

And yet explodes the unexpected moment, Who am I this time?
He who wakes to buzzing lip and jangling nerves. Energy,
Electric, inexhaustibly awake – to become, toward becoming, an echo of the
Senseless sky, an agent of an empty room, an incoherent –
Schroedinger’s Self, a barely shrouded storm.

Sumatra

November 2006

So many teensy revisions had to be made to this one. The muse, she is a stubborn wench sometimes.

Two hands that held the sky caught fire,
The moon by string and the sun by wire.
And no one else was watching

But me a lost astronomer,
A hollow tube, the broken earth
And you a crashing dove.

May we all fall in love like the avalanche.
May we all carve our sorrows in the sea.
May we all forget.

Two stars that struck the sea came down,
The molten shards of moonlight drowned,
Like a shattered lily in an open wound,
In exploding sheet-glass water.

You were a blade of snow.
You were a harp of white fire.
You were gone.