Just Enough Light to Live in the Eye, Thank You

Then too when yesterday arrives

And I look especially shitty in the mirror

Shaving and mad at my performance

In last night’s nightmare recently ended

Saying to my face why didn't you

Pocket those magic emeralds 

You Goddamned fool and I keep

Trying to remember something then

When afternoon later appears

Swaying loosely in the dining room

Like an alcoholic Christmas tree

That’s when I recall I dreamed you

Wielding the violent violin of desire

And playing the holy fuck out of it

Dancing with Wind-Broken Birds

As if exactly the only way all this

Inexorably somehow moves us

Somehow tumbles us like torn leaves

Skittering into wet winter drifts

O tree-eager night play windy chords

For us wear out your lousy instruments

You don’t know you don’t know what

Music should do for such lovers as we

Who palmed church pennies

We who wheedled from God’s hand

Three sacred days alone together

We who care nothing for fragrant spring

A flagrant landscape gaudy with lust

A bawdy horizon fallen into itself and lost

We Who Speak with Inflections of Desire

And so many of us forget ourselves

We forget at any given time nearly

All our beliefs remain hidden waiting

To become explicit in our judgments 

In our assents in our avowals that

Something should be such and such  

So many of us forget that it is we

Who are the great forgetters that

We mastered lucidly this art and thus
Banished ourselves to vast and strange

Domains these frontiers of illimitable pity

Where yellow cities rise in yellow deserts

Where we see horror in white sunsets and

Moonless dawns light our tepid dreams

Moments When Eternity Seems Clear

You think about the inherent qualities of a feeling
That there’s something like it to have certain kinds 
Of mental states you think for example that there's 
This thing it is like to see in the Mauritshuis the blue 
Headband of Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring  
Or that there’s this other thing it’s like to listen 
For the first time to Jacques Brel sing “Les Bourgeois” 
On an old four-song record you found at Goodwill 
You think about the properties in virtue of which 
These things are true of some states of mind yet not
Of others and you see how each is very different 
Like racing bulls and sailing on the Rhine

You know there’s no comparison no way to say

Why you sometimes moan like nobody’s business

As If We Could Live in a Lightning Flash Innumerable Years

Cherishing those reflections you walk along all

Sparrowy as if you don’t give a good goddamn 

Humming unimaginable sentiments as usual there

Beneath great grieving towers of a yellow city

O I know you love to read by candlelight I know

Drizzling rain a blind river and martyred trees I have

All these words and I ride like a dark horseman 

Upon your soul-shade here under wet leaves I

Imagine how tranquil gazing you shut a window

Put out a light precise as an old engraving good 

God let’s just be here beside a fountain let’s ignore

Your seething city my river let's be lost in some 
Geography where flowers get up especially early

Where cars honk and foghorns moan and we do too

Already a Ladder toward You

And isn’t it ordinary the way these hearts

Drip like lazy faucets at the center of creation

We used to be the bellybutton of the universe

We who sat at rest on dusk-yellow roads dust

Drifting aimlessly with what love the wind had

A quest pumping the titanium stomach of God

Wind making us do things making us always run

Through false doors toward we knew not what

Like good children and bad people with no belief

No sorrow being serene machines chugging up

Steep hills and coming down silent valleys like slow

Snow O isn’t it so so ordinary the way this empty

Sky stops dying long enough to remind us of our

Past our love reaches under cool stones our love

Offers us today as the apotheosis of tomorrow

Poem

This morning in Vicksburg a fine drizzle
Makes me wonder if it's raining in Berlin

Guess what else?

A troop of twentieth-century French poetry
Parades down Washington Street

Some poems wave banners the color of intention
Others are winking
For no apparent reason

They march by Highway 61 Coffeehouse
Beneath the Attic Gallery

Your sister Samantha struts before them
Thrusting a bandmaster's baton

She leads them down to the levee wall
Where they pose at the city murals
For snap-chat photos

An Artaud poem argues with a one by Breton
About the political purpose of surrealism and
Where to get the best tamales in Vicksburg

Hooray for the Apollinaire poem
Waving its blood-stained head-bandage
And hollering at the river—

Mes amis, son anniversaire aujourd'hui!

The whole silly city celebrates

These French poems will carouse downtown tonight
They'll get drunk and end up all of them
Snoring ‘til morning in the city jail

Of course I'll pay their bail
Only because it's your birthday, Miranda

Not from Nothing

From this hill village on the Mississippi

I watch Louisiana always over there just

Across the muddy river where shoreline

Cottonwoods give way to cotton fields

And that’s how I think of you—as a place

I can see from over here in Nixburg over here

In Nothingtown where I can’t touch you

And sometimes I remember how you say

Hey babe long time no whatever it is we do

You say we never we never knew you say

Listen dude you should know you can't

Travel through the time you travel in when

You time travel—and it’s not from nothing

If it’s all the same O all the same to you 

When Breath Goes Home and Sleeps

These fat clouds hang low

O watch out!

They fall on you

They fall onto the deck of your boat

Where I left my last chance

You spitting molten candlewax on my stomach

You singing French ditties outlined by throwing knives

You flossing your white teeth with a long hair

You plucked from a pony’s tail

How fortunate the 21st century quietly winnows

The surface of your mind

Only your keen ear

Especially this day so serenely marshmallowy

Only your ear hears the sad shore

Slip whimpering under water  

Should I now that a sound travels farther than time

Offer an open hand to prove I do not tremble?

Should I say I understand the boredom of leaves

Shifting briefly with the sibilance of a voice?

The water’s just as disturbed as it ever was

Your up-from-under look   

Your naked foot rippling the water of silence

The odor of divinity

Becomes you