The soul has as its sextant the ribs opened wide,
The heart its compass in fluid circuitous diatribe,
When each to zone the geometry of Greek sky  
With its powdery fabulism of centaurs and jars
From Aesop’s wine of words, the untimeliness
Of sundials to Charybdis’s bloom of giant watery eyes.

To know oceans by the dry riverbed of my pulse,
To scale only as high as the sparrow’s tomb of my heart.

Says the soldier to his love,
When he holds her handful of fantasy
That itself recalls holy wine and bread,
The blood seeps into his own hands is all.

Says the soldier to his love when he crawls
To impotence of mud and stone sediments
That augur not a fleshen but a fossil birth,
Like the bone of the once-masticating jaw.

Said the soldier to his love, when he fell face first
Into the nuptials of lily, delphinium, and dark earth,
I only wish to be the petals for your wedding, my love...

From the first, the fluid-filled sacs of stars,
The yolk of yellow lightning and oily rain,
Then the placental storm, birth-giver of roads and oxen loads,
Witch towers made from silk hair and the peasant sucklings of plague,
Whelped there by the milk of the river Arno, by turns pacified or stern.

The Dark Ages is a storm nesting in the sky, built by posthumous stares,
Piece by piece, a raven’s birth from eyes and saliva of roads and rivers.
Of the woman who gave birth, the sway of leaves where once fell hair,
Only her lips hover in the air of warm sun,
Like a fountain in the bare palace courtyard
Suspiring, flowing, extolling…

I remember the hidden chapel bells in her voice,
The little cloister of her abbey looks that opened
To a lovelorn courtyard of cisterns and well works,
The sounding pulleys and ropes from the springs,
I will miss her nothing said to my infinite misgivings.

A vintner of aged leaves in the wine-press of the sun,
Thin-skinned like the lucent grapes from the vine-runs
Of the island trellises and teal-cordoned waves, lowest slung
Fruit-laden bough of sky, Sicily, whose ateliers of rolled cigarettes
And uprolled sleeves like tides tease smoke into studio paints,
The black apple wine of storm made into mouthfuls of pulp rain,
Before the sunrise is gathered again in fishing nets and crab pots,
The coastal towns with their salted roofs of pied clay and pigeons
Along the lava stone streets, and night from the chanteuse of Egypt,
Singing her coral to heron, as when her bird-like barefooted slaves
Left tracks across Old Kingdom wastes, so this dreaming old man
Leaves his wrinkles to these grapes and across the sand-island pillow,
Asleep with his fathers, hay-hauling peasants of wandering darkness.

Mothers come gently to our rooms, the sunset kiss on the forehead,
Woven homilies from their baskets of forgiveness and spools of yarn.

But for the grave, this heart its coiled sunset unspools, so long entwined
In woods and seas that redden now into the soul of all sunsets combined.

Seer of joy but sayer of sorrow,
From numinous lips, the heart burns down,
The convergence of pulse in ash wireframe
Is love, in keeping but not in heaven igniting.

Excise my heart and let it keep as an island
That only beats when the waves come across,
And all the ancient world speaks in me
With light of burning lips and crushed hearts.

When someone dies, the world becomes this
Unreplicated moment of beauty, an essence
Unconfined and filled with no other self
But selves complete, though all heaven may blaze alone.

Because stones do not pray, even in their centuries’ quiet,
Because the vines are long, only for the sake of length,
Not like the drab Orpheus-song that always up-ruins.
Because vestal Autumn is a bride of noon-time rain,
A faithful stream with her white mist of suffibulum,
Beside the path whose footprints are half-notes from the grave.

When I die, I will miss
A woman’s long hair in the wind,
Not a timeless thing, but a thing
Without concern for time,
The way Rome always reminds
Of Greece, and Greece reminds
Of salt air and vines.

Death undoes itself like a woman undoes her dress
With knowing look and shrewd-salt of beguilement
Of supple shoulders and bared back, of life shimmying
Down the legs of the longest dark road of disappearing.

The goddess of the spent moon skulks to her feathery bed of fiery dawn.
Wrens through the uplands wend the fence weft with piecemeal straw.
Lips painted like pomegranate groves, dashed with fructifying sweets.
A kiss is a far-off and warm opening of lips like the sun into forest gleams.

The lit fuse of her lips touching off
A din in the black powdery night:
Illumined and immolated am I.

Death is the dictionary of unknown words,
Written on the pages of the unbound book
Of earth and sea ~~ to no one, its soliloquy.

The farmhand burns the leaves, though the bodies of slaves
Lie at heaven’s impasse in the trees of dying looks, barring them
From peaceful death, the sad emulsified perch of love and heat,
Hung at noon like John Brown untended, bearded of sticky summer,
Heavy-headed swinging noon and the smell of honeysuckle blood,
Fetid day like the coming dirt of graves, the clinging air of disease,
Snake-winding down from the trees with no pleasure of the bitten apple.

Polyurethanized love,
Polyols and isocyanates
And one part dove.

The elucubrations of the lute, pulsing from the finger strums of starlight,
Plum-twilight of the Colosseum like an emperor’s bowl of plucked fruit,
As the night’s ghost-gods are tuned to Castel Sant’Angelo, Hadrian’s tomb,
Who drink the dwindling hours from the wine-stemmed glass of musical moon.

But come the times out of tune, the dwindling of stone is the going blind of Rome:
Rome is built upon millions of eyes closed with the underside of their lids tattooed,
By labyrinthine aqueducts, far-aging roads, and traceries of Nero’s Golden Home.
Then death its sight-sun blooms through; death the architect of Seven Hills renews.

Long ago, the mother died who made the thatchwork basket with her daughter for the fish wrested from the water to the stove,
     Long ago, the sun that loved them both died while the rope-wrought hands of the fisherman grew old,
          Long ago, the lid to the teapot stopped its clink when closed by the hand of the granddaughter who would think of them all and the buried sun when she looked at the stove,
               Long ago, someone like me wrote a poem that no one will read in a sunless room with a cold stove.

Marble made of seagulls’ wings, set in flight,
Their beaks foam and crest and rise for air,
In headwinds and feathered drag, upward lift,
Carve out fluted columns by tunneling vortex,
Beams of bluebirds made from cross-sky stitch,
Parthenon of flying tides and nested Acropolis,
Endless fossilized sigh of Saronic Gulf sea-winds.

The fallen leaves are the shrouds of hoof prints,
The withers of breeze reined to time-kept trysts,
Gentilissimo, Cavalieri di Corredo, Italian knight
Whose path by pure lover’s look is made clean.

We go back, we go back to the sun caught by handfuls,
Like the Medieval snow melts into Grecian stream.

Gentle knight, to your galloping song of Winter:
The sweeping rush of grass and gathering refrain
Of bells surrounds the long sloping meadow of
The muzzle, snorting freedoms of wildflowers past,
Leaving its bosky thunderbrush of tail like distant
Summer storms and the slackening rhythms of rain.

We go back, we go back to the sun caught by handfuls,
Like the Medieval snow melts into Grecian stream.

The volplaning bird plucks from fish-eyed shallows,
A gargoyle perches on an ***** key, ever sustaining,
A woman plays the lute from man’s hollowed rib,
As the priests with sophistry sweep the dust off sin.

We go back, we go back to the sun caught by handfuls,
Like the Medieval snow melts into Grecian stream.
But the clock cannot turn its face from its tears.

The rain-modulated trees and the hoarse leaf
That in themselves tell a love so complete,
Were once the playthings of lovers’ sights
Who passed here once and once and never.
Love the destitution of love.

The mouth is the small compass of the soul,
Without dials, true north, or magnetic force,
The ungaugeable instrument of the voice,
In directionless modulations of undertow,
To circumnavigate under cartographer’s pole
Stars guide our wayfinding-heirlooms of words.

The clouds loosened from the sun
Like a frock from a tidywoman,
Past care with her labors done,
Crumpled rag thrown over a chair,
While a fan blows the loose ends
Of the apron ties like misty fragments,
The clouds loosened from the sun.

To spend the hours compiling skies, indexing unearthly strata,
Mark the dog-eared page of moments with the hesitant thumb,
Waiting to turn each day and find death a bouquet of words,
All to view glowing creases under the closed eyelids of time.

Rome has set on the sun,
Spreads the rays of its streets
And the warmth of its torches.
Caesar commands nightfall come,
To make florid incense and wine
And talk as one full of the moon.

Keep your trees, keep them for your heaven of ashen dusk
And night like the pale-faced deathmask of emperors,
No reason that the commoner to oblivion is hushed,
These old-wise woods and leaves, peopled without us.

Keep Macedonian dust lightly conquered over the breeze,
So that it shoots its tail like the centuries-sole comet,
The scorched earth left by Alexander’s mapmaker eyes,
Swung wide like his Sarissophoroi over Persian might.

Remember the lesser grove of his teacher Aristotle’s tribe,
They have only slipped their sandals off, to bare themselves
Of sound and the concourse of the foot’s impulse,
Caught the lithesome wind, to flow outside our hearing,
And muse as empire of air and loss and forgotten walks.

Keep your trees and the darkening sky through them
That remind me of the passing into the past.
Never is the poem from tongue of ***** or plow.

The only love I have known is the bird that lives in my ear,
In the wind and cloud tunnel of long ago, with a hot salve
Of sunshine poured into the singing hole, the warm honey
Of wives’ tales, the remedy of home against the world,
Though the song has since flown.

Nothing can be said from the lip of the sun,
To array with full redress the wind-flayed waters
Of the river-run and the naked broomrape of Spring,
Absolve naiads of their blued minstrelsy in venous scream,
Or pour a yellow songbird from the gold-rimmed cup of war.
Nothing is said in the liver-spotted ground of rain-ghosted gardens,
Where love’s monument is a blot of dried flowers and grayed thorns.

What is Christmas but the collected dead to say one last goodbye,
To speak in their fabulous, untranslatable tongues of old furniture
And the lacquered shine from the lighted tree and pablum of candles,
All that seems childhood’s undersong of pine and catch-full solitude of eyes.
Until the feeling past Christmas of unwrapped sunset and having said goodbye.

Her dark hair falls like the lowered trumpets,
Soundless as the eyelid-close of Accursed Gates,
Past the city’s outer walls and alley-clotted throes,
Some shield-hearted soldier sent to his earthen fold,
Her blood-rimmed sky-lids of night foretell the phantom peace
Of Autumn like a head sinking down with the fell-purpled leaf of war.

***
Love, you once guided the black looms of Autumn,
Olive-skinned druid, you are a dark everything,
And a toss of your hair flings to dust all of Rome.

America is an untended urn,
Not filled with wick of candle,
But with eyelashes burned,
Butterfly kisses of slaves to simmering plows,
As the Whigs, Mugwumps, and Know Nothings
Like Senates, praetors, and praefactors of old,
In new form, snare the grasshopper pulse of populace.

If we could once more lay our heads—like the universe
Rests its child’s soul in the lap of its native mother—
In our Indian maiden’s lap, where she once rolled
Maize flour and the dusted cornsilk of our eyelashes,
She could knead our eyes closed, and the stars would walk
Barefoot with summering spirit through our midnight homes.

Love is a left-mouse click, a flashing prompt,
For the cursor cross of a Crusade that never was,
And the knight who is broken on the scroll wheel,
And the lady in waiting who backspaces from the real.

Corded muscles of the neck ferry the voice of sky,
Charon of words adrift in a salivary dislocated sine,
A fracture of breath, the stenciled rowing of a sigh.
Psychopomps of moonlight, past-throated vultures,  
Carrion of clouds even if stripped clean in vulpicide,
Even if our scorched and coining tongues tip at stars.

Love, given over to stone,
Encoffinated warmth of sun,
Shielded from the prickled infiltrations
Of a many-menaced world.
But here we live too with porous beauty,
Here we kneel with bulwark of shoulders,
Then fall without a twitch to the wind.

Someone must go off to death, little ones.
Though grandfathers hold back the darkened thrall,
The half-flit coven of breezes and icy vine that sprawls,
Until the black worms away at them and they grab hold
Of the language of death like a locket over their hearts.

Someone must go off to death, little ones.
In spite of the keepsake of hoarders, fathered by fathers old.
Death’s single-worded world speaks; the chain of old men folds,
Kingdom’s pawns, their broken tongues lie bleeding with sun,
The black fluency slips through, then childhood falls as one.

Someone must go off to death, little ones.
There is one who played with us in sunlight
Who sits between the ancient legs and watches us
Like a friend from a window who is too sick to play.  
Old men, soon to your rest, and I will let death
Carve its name on my shoulders while my spirit frays.

Trace my love in the half-shell curve of a woman’s back,
Like the naked wetland of Egypt, ibis-nest of the Nile delta.
Lovely woman, throw your arm back like a tethered cord,
To this sledge-mason for your pyramids, this falcon-doting ward
Of your gold capstones, all-seeing eyes over the west-bank shore.

Love, our days of polished limestone are wind-scoured,
Left like a pile of petrified fruit from figs and bottle gourds.
Love, always forget, now the sand has filtered into my pores
And cascades into the empty shell of my quarried heart.

Garden of Gethsemane, under your Mount of Olives,
The green-pitted translucence of night, where Christ,
Seer-in-knowing, writhes at the split seed of fission,
Break of night into the morning blossoms of Hiroshima’s ash,
Of mercurochrome and zinc oxides and the red snow of skin,
And his resurrection, forever once-again, in atomic flash,
The smells of honeysuckle and hay of manger,
And his breath of molten potash.

What is to say beyond the poplars,
But the dry mouth of her death,
Like the hoarded provision of an echo,
Somewhere far off in my being,
Where darkening moves up the stone step,
Each footprint like her powdered breath,
Her shuddering voice channeled through my throat,
Shattered like frozen buds blown to the faceless snow.

Death has one gleaming eye transfixed to the comings of fathers,
The second one to mothers is bound.
Make no suture or stitch to its blood-seeing.
Death, when you took the first mother,
The last son your undoing avows.

My grandmother had forgotten everything but the ability to be good,
Innate courtliness sitting like a castle upon a moor.
Her world of insensate rains and fogs and heaths,
And still the hearth flickering from her lost eyes.
My grandmother whom I adored, to all the world,
Your goodness will go unnoticed into night,
Just as your eyes stared unknowing
Before the subsuming of tides,
While the world blasted through your bones,
Breath without force of inspiration.

Here, love is the far proxy of look
- She is dying a distance -
Yours travels from brook to sky
To the heaven wanderings of death in my blood,
The black smoke-congested veins possessed
By the baffled realms of battlefield
By the horrors of the mundane
From this old mouth, emptied of kisses.

She walked out of the watercolor storm of a fresco
Like a cowl-bound form in a light drizzle of rain,
Her mosaic tiles of ancient lovers’ eyes, ceramic-borne,
Just as her hips held the curves of the urn, kiln-fired,
The coiled heat of Greece still stinging through her flesh.

For her, the treetops had been the summoners of storm,
In kind, she poured down the wet grove of her hair, electral,
Pantheress of humid breath and fanged flair of lightning,
Tamed once in the cloudy cage of Pentelic marble of the Parthenon.

But the world piled dust before her, baiting with its groveled roads,
For her black mullings, much-tasted rain, and heaven’s leaves to fall.
If only the Michelango-to-come had carved the clouds of her
For the light to remain, shining its centuries,
Then maybe the thunder would have been left undone.

A pig in the grass
Sounds at scratching and bratching,
Scratching and bratching are sounds
Of the world at its last.

A pine forest is the hand,
The soul of the palm fans out in fingers
Like the clayey striations of the sun.
The forest has no sound but the bonebreast
Wandering round of a similar hand,
All but shut now except for the unspoiled nest
Of browning needles and the ancient realmless mound of love.

The furrier tells the bell by the time of skinning,
Archangels by their clipped wings as they fell,
Statesmen by show of divided hands at plenary ringing,
The wind by quell of truant petals from daffodil.
And even love tells its beginnings and endings,
By lips shorn of lambswool words and yield of bale.
In light or darkness, though our animal souls uprisen,
Still in their wordless and naked measuring dwell.

Love has become less and less than the loneliness that abides,
Shaped by death after death into morphological surmise,
A sense of evolution without atavistic ties,
(Like her lips forever disjoined from mine).

Pleiades seven maidens sigh,
The sweeping, coruscating gown of stars,
In stillness-rapt, the cosmos in collective gasp,
At Atlas, his amalgamated bulk of last breath.

***

We breathe in the gown of ending,
The snake tongues of our synapses
Flicking out the decomposed praeludium
For the saprobic stars to feed off the detritus of night.

Death comes close and breathes a little over my lips and smiles at my terror,
No more the night has songs for the snow, has love for the whiteness,
But lets it go to the last hallucinations under the sun.
Grandfather, lift my soul when this boyhood is done,
And think of things to tell me when darkness grows too cold,
I will be in the corner of eternity, writing poems for no one.

The most beautiful poem is written on a shroud,
As if the stars closed their eyelids at seeing the gods die,
But still-gauzy foundlings like cities of dusted sunlight,
Bound so long between the pillars of Athens and Rome,
Disconsolate remnants in after-golds and winding sheets of stone.

The most beautiful poem speaks only to death,
So it may know something of our loss, our bereftness,
And like the turnkey of afternoon to evening
Under the warm-felt pressure of our reminiscing hands,
We too shall pass like long-limbed sunset along the barren grass,
Like so many solitary walks bundled up in Autumn mists,
And eyes filled with someone once there and absences to come.

We have made too much of love,
Something it will never be,
Without touch or place or rosary bead,
Beyond ourselves and the human race,
But no nearer to infinity,
Without cause or prompting by war or peace,
Simply quelled within its own embrace,
The wax seal on our lips for its unity and defeat.

Moon of Pythagorus, such proofless arithmetic derived,
No sigmoidal curves or cold calculus of the divine,
But pale barbarian, war-bringer of straight lines,
Your sea drifts commandeered like lit ash-spears in line,
Or the thrashing of wind-whipped rags of horses’ manes.
Moon of Pythagorus, the phantasms of your campfires
Of waiting armies flicker like fireflies along the stream.

Burn me, Moon, with your fire-tongued spears,
Your haunt of horses, unbridled and reared,
Burn an eye through my heart like the oculus of the Pantheon,
So I can see my pulse beat against the ash of naked footsteps
Of those who make false shrine to me.