It Won't Be Long

They shake their eyes at me and flaunt their thirst

Their dreams risen like shrouds of dust in their dry hearts.

Sunlight embroidered these forgettable birds these open-

Mouthed sparrows hungry for what in this vast desert?

Herds of them too parched to fly schools of them swimming

Air-ward and inviolately panting all casting on this immense 

Parquet floor such questions as I have never known to ask.

As if in the solitary act of seeing I see double behold two 

Possibilities like slightly unlike twins parallel worlds

Reflected back to me such a contrary source
And I hear empty women laugh and say:  Ya-ya-ya-ya-ya
Whatever that means.

Such apocalyptic sensualism in my poems in my inverted

Persona all to discover what part of myself in a sense

Is a poet—the recognition of which will be delayed maybe ten

Centuries as was the case with Moses Maimonides my

Teacher my friend.

O hello Ole Moses!  How’s it going?

Who can say where exactly the inner and the outer world

Meet like estranged lovers wordless but with ecstatic gestures?

O this profound crisis of values all fallen along with ancient 

Columns into a liquefied foundation of corrupt culture What?

When I was fifteen I set off on a continual search for impossible

Totality in a quiet at times monotonous music that evaporates

That vanishes into the haunted country I created all by myself.

It occurs to me by the way in the face of a discredited culture

That the sky unfurls a kind of subversive doubt.  O I know I have

Become a measly Life-ist who stands firmly against Life!

I take nothing at face value or seriously ya-ya-ya-ya-ya or

What she said. The Poem will resemble me

For no less rambunctious an art of total negation can survive 

More than a few hours beyond the womb.

Someone laughs and says:

Hell y’all that don’t take no goddam abortion to do.

Ya-ya-ya-ya-ya she says.

No matter how long I sing and sing and sing the poem dies

Not three hours beyond vulgar understanding—

For the destructiveness must ultimately include myself

I who have been excommunicated from poetry I 

On whom the sun bestows a stunning lyrical intention.

In the intransigency of the blood the intimacy of etymologies 

Tangled in the semantical love-knot

I stare blankly at the empty city.

Where does poetry reside?

Everywhere infused with a fire of ironic humor poems

Hop around like popcorn in a deep but insufficient skillet

An urgency of process in my love to which I say the absurd

Is the finest and most basic form of metaphysical existence.

At this point I turn to Heraclitus and the pre-socratics.

I want to hear less logically definitive verbs 

Spilling from morning.  I want to hear at once 

A lyrical summoning of the natural correspondence.

Meantime I shall meditate on poetic process

Itself a vigilant hermeticism but a consciously reduced 

Range of imagery shimmering still every temptation toward

Abstraction O in the short nature of poems tightly sprung.

When the sparrows call me Federico Garcia Lorca will come!