When She Comes with Her Eyes of Rain

On an afternoon when my inner eye trembles

Like a slapped roach everyone else goes

On well versed in understanding this

Melancholy here with detours and wrong

Turnings O the one I love does not listen to me

Here with the seasons with the years here where

A bird weaves a thread of silence and I pause

On a dirt road humming with bees here where

My boyhood dog yelps at their insidiosity

Where I enter a house long since gone down

Where I find myself in an all but forgotten room

Here I surrender my dream and drag myself

Through a mirror to a fated place

Where I have not yet met the one I love

Stop Dancing in My Last Dream

Where I climb a hill in a dark garden

And see a light there

That neither of us will obscure

Where maybe I hear a Spanish guitar

And see your feet kick up paisley breezes

As you dance some kind of tango

Where you’ve never been so

Pervasively happy so suddenly there

Before my brow my confused eyes

Where a storm breaks over us

And blame falls like rain

As we turn to leave

Where you say O isn’t it enough to smile

When we part isn’t it

How we become a legend my dear

Where you say haven’t we

Held that light up

Long enough

What the Poets Say

They say see the sleeping moons

Bubble from the sleeping mouths

They say the tears and poison

O raveled land of raveled faces

See the birds the sea!

They say the words but then
When we don’t quite believe them
They read the words

They say here’s our chance

Fragment—here’s a smile

Heard vaguely in the gray silence

They say see our gray faces

Move among the days

Known without an echo

They say see in our faces

The slightly stupid virtues of our verses

They say leave us

The smoke of dark voices

Our footsteps in the monk-hooded precinct

They say we've lost all belief

They say we come asunder all a-shiver

Like the nervous chandelier in a shaky kingdom

Shim shimmy sham sham

Tinky tinky tinkle tink

To Chance upon a Name Made Pure and New

One happens to hear a name

Quiver briefly in the air before one's face—not

Quite an echo certainly not a cough

An inconvenient sob is what one thinks

It hardly matters in the thin procession of names

Strolling leisurely in translucent gowns—now

Dancing anonymously through hungry rooms

One’s entire mind might as well stare in stunned

Amazement at an endless file of zeros—one

Breathless O after another floating from a void

One’s entire mind might behold a truth

That never surrenders except in its winding path

And anonymous return to the void