Invitation

 

Same idea soothing minds of their fritters and wasteful worry,

a few passionate stems, shoots from the harvested crop rows

of stubble, the mounds, hills, depressions of the land.

 

Holy places of Bedlam released to wander the crisscrossed plains

where highways face wind, giving little and a little more each day.

To finish the job of Howl or to put plaster or asphalt on the flat level

where water spreads.

 

The sandy floods of the Platte long since harnessed and depleted.

Old man with hippy highlights, who places the candle now,

who but us remembers your hungry morning searches.

Friends from the night before have gone.

The boy next door committed suicide.

Who but us is left to say,

left at the level where the last flood left us.

 

Where Whitman and Ginsburg hold tea with Buddha nature and the

dharma speaks to the land like a whistle,

not a dog whistle; a God whistle.

Shaggy men and their bellies just bathed, rubbing up my thigh,

hiding in the flowers of the eye to dig a little deeper

to the one mind’s reflection of the flower.

 

The multifaceted all made manifest everywhere with all times

partaking in the sip of warm tea, the touch of frost on dead leaves,

the lines of poetry left out to sprout in rain.

 

Tenuous is the mind’s time.

Its little grips on corners

and nothing where the road runs out and leaves us.

Barnacle on the tub,

bruise on the arm,

ropes, pulleys, we are thrown, left,

abandoned in the existential extent of the flower now

far diffuse, past her season,

over the membrane of the cell’s knowing,

turning in suspicion, turning to the long silent stretch

be it beach or road or the cool far side of the pillow and

the partner’s hand and the dog.

 

We reach.  We know. 

We absolve whole tracts of history and dissuade the kinks from their notation,

pebble the smooth with disruption to say, “I am” when all know

I have long since gone away.

Truly gone where the far shore and beard of surf

polish each other in the waves,

turning the sand,

catching between our toes,

coming off in the shower like a second skin.

 

Who holds your perfect body?

Who is the mouth of your light,

the spine of your knowing, unfolding bud of ecstasy.

Who the nose and who the face of your familiar,

but me and my kind.

I hold you.  I owe you.

I love your shaggy woman soul

hidden away like a thing in a drawer.

 

I invite you here, where you have always been, to meet me naked,

hungry and aware

in the morning of other mornings,

on the backs of shattered tortoise shells,

broken by trying to uphold the world.

Even Atlas herself as an enormous womb of night,

has not the shoulders for such birth stretching,

such bringing forth of the after birth, the surge, the foam of palaver

on all ponds in all weathers, on every stage that has gone dark an hour,

considering possibilities.

 

Such meetings of fortune and momentum in the mind,

like kindling for the brush fire, show more of dependence and contingency

than pride or achievement.

It is the dark heart we are after

not the tall tower.

 

It is her reasonable allowance, now a flood well past the levee

leaving even Noah high on his mountain stranded with animals.

Beyond giving up or going forward.

So many trains departed.

Neither weakness, tear fall or gesture.

The ballerina knows them all and the tick of the gate

or a broken stick, an oar.

 

Fully dressed now on a patio above the river,

manicured as a party,

the transmission, transgression, heat

as found, lost and found again.

I am weak to your breath but patient

for your inimitable transcription.