HomeElegies – Updated Mar 6, 2009
The juice upon the keys
if as the fingers that play the ivory doors were
there on the shore when the dark eyed keys were sent off
if as the lanterns of Japan when the candle is lit may seek the only sky
if as I were to tell you something that would forever leave you mute
if as at the breaking of bread there were no crumbs to be left
if as the astrolys could draw within the tough green buds
the flowers it so carelessly shed
the morning the sun would go back to its harbour
the child would go back to its labia
the shallow breathing if as the metal needles in arms and legs were a
kindness
if as the molecules of its aiming were to seep back from tissues taking
with them
only what is red and leaving the body as colourless if as the limbs had
already moved on
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Where you are
Genesis 28:12 Jacob’s ladder
And he dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the
top of it reached to heaven: and behold the angels of God
ascending and descending on it.
You hear only the leaves when they turn away
The green backs of them disguising the threadbare distance
Disguising it with their thin green bodies that in their thinness
turn you to slumber
What you find there in the autumn is the silver of their leaving
They are the pigeons of the square in their washer-women clothes
The male in his circles the female of his attention
The silver is the lining of their green summer plumage
Then they are gone with the gold of your early eyes
Perhaps they are a market of fly-bitten dates
Perhaps the pigeons know that the green and their silver
Have always been the same but they do not hear
Your anguish that the sleight of hand of summer has you
On its wavelength between the flowers and the heaven
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Ah the industry of waste
As though the animals in their mute dumb offering
As though you were there in your nakedness penis a kind of true
As though morning is the revealer of something better
The blonde beautiful white that took the hour
The flakes of which we hold in awe and do not catch their drift
The day the tide receded and the gulls there now their lifting
As though the hair of my forehead could call itself away
The loon and its laugh that bends the flesh to brokenness and bends it
even more
As if we could by simple show of hands claim forgiveness
The shore the grass the sand that is the work of wasted time
Could we but warm to that and drink the blood of lambs
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Notes toward an aesthetic of death
consider the peat bog the one where sphagnum lays down so purely it
cannot be discerned from its ancestors
it has kept the secret of its memory and the information of its kin from
the ragged tissues of prayer that are touched in the windiest mountains
by hands of Mongol hands of Tibet where the sunflower saffron makes
an eye detach its magnifying glass and offer itself as gift
consider the last piece of cliff where the last few fingers blow ochre
and blew cinder and blue the bitter cherry and the yew
how to know the looking back would be like this: to the ancestor of
sphagnum the time-tested handshake
with peat that is there in its dissolving of flesh you did not expect and
made you slip your pretty ankle in its promise of living forever
(oh and never forgetting)
