Collected Poems

1988

541 The boat that leaves Golgotha is in the Charon of dreams. They must get off and sleep December 21,1987 Hidden underground in a frame      of relics and love. Come on down, come on deep.      The pigeon, the dove, the owl cross over a boulder in the mud.      O carrion, o carrion thy gentle swollen tune      just promise me and promise me the world in total ruin The streets were empty as ice young and old wailing: pleasure never goes too far. Treasures in heaven or hell. The cities fade, the meadows reek      O carrion, o carrion thy gentle swollen sight just promise me, and promise me the world in total light 1988 January 1988 All the stars will be gone, there is enough emptiness in space to absorb all dust of stars, while you and I speak under voice of birth, sleep, mist in the hour of the street. 542 Nobody is loitering, O sensual eyes just see or connect the dreamers and as our generation’s blood spills, the water of night is flooding us. Nobody’s holding anybody’s wrist nobody’s humming nobody’s singing in the hour of the street. Irish Entry February 4, 1988 Looking at the crow on roof now on top the wire wet soaked in January heavy rain, heavy traffic at crossroad soaked with desire in a cottage by an Ireland lake. Three crows together in the thunderous rain, a cat’s wide head, swaying, soaking in rainfall, in a cottage by a lake in Ireland. Two crows, one picking its feet, the other eating something big. One crow in the integration of cries by a lake in Ireland in a cottage in the rain, by a lake, in a loch in a moment locked up, mindless, faceless, bottomed out without motion, speed, or sound in the bottom of the lake of grief and dreams splintered by the rising sun 543 March 7, 1988 Swamps and people live in a lake risen from a volcano An island bolted from fire appears out of the sea like A memory appearing in the shadow of dark yearnings. Who can appear to me? March 17, 1988 Turn the screw, bang the nail, grind the stone, in absolute fragmentation. There’s making a poem there’s poverty— There’s holding in your arms something you love, there’s childhood that comes jumping at you like a bird’s syntactical song on the first Spring morning March 29, 1988 8:27, have a language, that bundles against the cold wind against a hungry trestle vibrating the stormy mind of loneliness nestled in tomorrow’s prisons of substances, visions muddied in substantial poverty. 544 March 31, 1988 When you can choke off the underdevelopment of love the wonder of settlement in the dust and sand the Egypt of loneliness and the kiss of everything, then you’ll believe the spear that burns the heart the volcano in the bowels the poverty in the street where love chokes you back March 31, 1988 A man listens to music next to me, and a woman next to him listens to music, and a woman reads next to her. Two men talk, one a white boy the other a black white bearded man describing the stops along the tracks. Sweet descriptions and voices of holy mankind, holy rites along the route to Troy. But where is the warrior and where is the guide, O Hermes in the drafty Spring moonlight where wind shakes apart tears that soldiers keep to themselves even in the music of the trees that set them free along the holy ring of stars in the destruction of the world 545 March 1988 Happy heart that sows the breeze with seeds & pollen gods freeze to keep motivation for love’s regeneration What I mean is that every particle of life is a reverie a dream where death takes over March 1988 Song birds enter the morning the pre-dawn before the fires you know, when the night                 floats away like vapor on a lake, or like kisses in the woods. Songs that even God didn’t know, or even the gods learned                 from their created. Continuous, threaded, like a            cherry was stuck in the throat March 1988 When I think of all these fuckin’ hours lost in weeping over nothing and of...