two poems for today

Poem 1:

Brahms in the drum of the bedroom,
piano prays to ceiling-beams.
It's just now 11 AM
And you're crying?

Hair clutters more sinks
than you realize. It's OK,
wash the body; thousands of red things
turn on themselves in the dark.

To want to wash clean
in a stoneless river, to want nothing,
not even Brahms, think:
drains would be less your star-dust, skin.

It's OK, it's just now 11 PM.


Poem 2:

The essential thing has been stolen.
A monk crawls into night,
Worships a moon
in secret. He knows
You are missing.

The field awoke
in him a tree, hope-
birds wet, tangled,
out of nest. He forgets
how to bar the door with his whole weight.

nonesense that I'm not afriad of

nonsense that I'm not afraid of

If I were a beetle, I'd be almost invisible, making a home in a corner somewhere, having things for dinner like lint and dust-bunnies.

If I caught course syllables, I'd iron them in summer heat against my beetle back.

And if I carried things on the outside, the inside would turn into a whirl of beetle-tongue.

Sometimes the ticking you hear is me, whistling about God, waiting for crumbs.

In You is my Other Eyelid

Later:

I slip back into solitude like skin of bathwater.

The importance of coming back to the center of things, like a small curling inward, a soft flutter.

Because isn't my heart broken each time I walk out the door each morning? Having left my sleep. The echoes inside a brain as in a cavern.

There is a song I'm listening to: "I forget myself when I'm not with you."

Seems funny. It's the opposite with me. Unless the you is You.

God / I am the center. Synonymous

with myself, having a touch-stone into my ribs.

Rilke seemed to get it.

"Think of the world you carry inside you--be attentive to that which rises up in you...What goes on in your innermost being is worthy of your whole love; you must somehow keep working at it...Only the individual that who is solitary is like a thing placed...

So it is again. A cycle.

I leave and come back, shift. How else would I wander out into the distance, gathering things on the hem, skirting like a wild, and lost man ray?

Jellyfish of the mind, a blue-drift,

as though aimless. But even a clown fish, unanchored to a reef, cannot drift, not really, in that purely aimless way--the tide has its hand in things.

As does the cosmos have its hand on me, though I think I'm wherever a map has been shredded.

God, I would love to break through one of those geological maps, or the cartographer's graft. Just to prove my point.

"For do you not see how everything that happens keeps on being a beginning, and could it not be His beginning, since beginning is in itself so beautiful?"

I look back and think I've had more gathered in my arms than I do now. Perhaps that's not a bad thing--emptying is necessary to take in newer dust-babies / dustlings.

My older ones glisten. Glitter stuck to backs -- it does not fall, the dust from the other world.

The bliss of this moment. Body warm from the bath, books like yellow boxes, lit up,

ready at my side--Just this. Where I am alive,

no matter what point in which cycle I'm in, isn't it still generous?

Even the deepest sadness that keeps me far from realizing joy. Even then, when I'm sunk in a self-deceptive blue, even then.

How that is necessary--to feel, reach out to You.

Do you know I love that in you is my other eyelid, closing? And somewhere, in me, a hive of Yours and yours.

So I ponder the cycles, or accept them and

embrace the body and restless mind, wandering jellyfish that it is.

The bliss.

I will write, will be under white space,

looking up, again.

Dream and a Poem

Dream and a Poem

I had a dream. This was it. And no, I am not writing, just moving through what passes in my mind, without thought.

My dream: in two parts:

1.a god told me in a dream to pull a string from a bundle of sticks...but only when the moon is red and women let down their hair, dancing...then, words will come to you, spinning in on themselves, creating light.

2. the god came back: it said, talk to the voices in your head, they will tell you more of their story. write that down. sleep in the grass after it rains. listen, all the gods have stars inside their bones.

And now, a poem by a wonderful poet, George Santayana


The Power of Art

NOT human art, but living gods alone
Can fashion beauties that by changing live,--
Her buds to spring, his fruits to autumn give,
To earth her fountains in her heart of stone;
But these in their begetting are o'erthrown,
Nor may the sentenced minutes find reprieve;
And summer in the blush of joy must grieve
To shed his flaunting crown of petals blown.
We to our works may not impart our breath,
Nor them with shifting light of life array;
We show but what one happy moment saith;
Yet may our hands immortalize the day
When life was sweet, and save from utter death
The sacred past that should not pass away.

-George Santayana