Subiaco

On a hill in western Arkansas

There is a monastic community

Where each gives according to his ability

And receives according to his need

But sadly and in profile

So what if night’s wakeful hand

Unleashes carnivorous clouds

So what if animals rest before sleep

Sometimes the monks ponder

A very real and deep spiritual bond

Between the apple and the knife

The monks inhabit a state of mind

They abandoned cities of troubled swagger

Towns of tepid severity

They are auditors of moonlight

And wear sorrow’s habit of conquest

They cannot see the evident and obvious

Bruised starlight in their eyes

Why should they seek the end of the rope

The monks are unfamiliar with visual stereotypes

Unequipped to wear complacent public faces

They walk this interminable span of gullied land

Their hearts asking no questions

These monks who were born wounded

Six times in behalf of prodigal shadows

Only Because It Pleases the Tongue

Branches reach like sinuous rafters peaceful

At evening when a bird loses all measure

Of these leaves this land that memory

Captive before spoken things the soul

A thread tied to a star the slow passage

Of everything could have been different

Could have been waiting for you like rain

In your wineglass the remorseless flame

Of sound the intractable smoke of silence

A sheet wrapped around a thought now

Let us praise those who pray alone with cold

Stones O how they love that which awaits

Its own defeat how they adore that which

Reconciles its own face with its own scream 

Author Reading

Never the Word Here Only the Sound

To stretch out now among your reading lamps

To feel things no longer the equal of your water

Seventy years north of here or somewhere just

Like that sometime sweet and screaming inside

My chest when you sweep this empty room

Clean of all its feathers when you say adore

My choices and abhor me take the sugary treat
Have the surgery charged with splicing day 

To day you say you're the magician and any

Number of others under a sweeping bridge

A wonder of Victorian engineering you say

All morning aquiver at your call O look dear

I say see the field of syllables blindly dancing

See the curious moments fresh and green 

Author Reading

Motionless Under Our Lids Forever

Congratulations lady for the inconspicuously

Malodorous  flowers of Chinese privet in your hair

It’s time my dear we take our place on a known

Scale of things O it’s time we situate our distances

Within such measures as we are wont to have in this

Great communion of eyes closing as they watch us

We who feel strangely anonymous and empty like
Two sparrows yes the heavy stones at the front door
The cypress planks put down against spring mud

There are no more paddle boats no transatlantic

Futurism no horoscopes nor even brief similitudes 

Yet we go down the levee nonetheless and see

Tugs push barges past Vicksburg it's true

We wait for us from several points of view

After Striking the Startled Air with My Head

What do I care for a memory whose thoughts

Are heat lightning whose convolutions whole

Towns manage to speak at last a word they say

Supposedly satisfied with a flabby-muscled

Squelch like an alcoholic’s fart ah nevertheless

The brain’s only a cord-caught thought quivering

Flowerly the real form of which I won’t tell you

Though yes of course I could surely become quiet

As a shadow exhaling exquisite little sounds one

At a time and all in a row there on a table

Like shots of dark liquor for my forlorn friends

So far away they confound even the summer

Solstice in this envious town where old women sell

Baskets of the best eggs on some stone step

Author Reading

What You See at the Fotografia Buffa Exhibit

The mirrors all hang at different angles

You see a dirty-faced girl drawing on the wall

Beneath painted bookshelves and paperbacks

Scarred by cigarettes you're thinking smokers
Preoccupied by decades of dust you think

States of being matter as parts of the scene

The girl is drawing a man in a short coat

Who came from Morocco and lives now

In an abandoned Chevy atop a hill he says

The radio gets better reception up here

Where he’s listening to a public radio piece

About a photography exhibit at the 1900 Paris

Exposition called contemporary life in America

In one of the mirrors you see your own face

Unseen Currents as if Undone at the Lips

A lone figure under water

Perhaps the photographer’s wife or lover

She is reflecting

A sacramental zone of ritual

This event could be taking place anywhere

She is reflecting

While drifting gracefully downward through water

Bubbles rising from her upturned face

She assumes the posture of Nijinsky leaping

In this very sculpturously composed picture

The woman is concentrating hard with good reason

She is reflecting

Her melodramatic pose

Owes much to expressionistic aesthetics of the 1920s

She's a presence floating in a submerged landscape

Which is no more than a setting

Her personality is not degraded

In the presence of her nakedness

She is full of reflection

A fullness emboldened

By ancestors to whom

Deportment came as second nature

Her countenance is invested with actualities

Too affecting to bear