You ease and tease us through the years
With a Moses beard and a Sistine Chapel scene of God.
All say we know better and keel over dead.
Flat as a board with little knots and boles in concentric circles,
Like pond ripples or crater dimples that
Spread from the source like a Big Bang.

That we know better and talk to such a one of our trances and
Automatic writing staring at the sun and
Hoping it is my navel.
My prize honey pot on the glory trail of blind, shaved Bhikkhus with
Robes and bowls and a set move we all know about
Of concentration and asking.

A humble wafer to dissolve on the tongue
Like the ticket price for a hit of acid and the trip,
Only a ferry ride by the car bumpers parked
Door to door, ear to ear, side to side,
We sway with the music as water lifts a boat.
We turn at the turnstiles with our price of graham crackers and honey –
Demeter’s gift, Diana’s prize of the grasses saved from burning.

The thin asking at the door from the rail tracks and the far shore,
Just this side of asking.
And we ask anyway of one another,
Red, bulbous, money in the bank.
Touch my thing, my heart of gold you know,
The treasure house of being in the family with jewels.

She sewed the incision just so, with delicate fingers and a sure hand.
Cardiac surgery, prostatectomy, a simple opening of the mind
As if possibility were a new color never seen before.
How do we make sense of the truly other, the strange, the novel,
The appearance of the ten manifold as one.
Don’t ask, never tell
Such is the invention and storage of relics,
Things inside you, obtuse and hard to swallow,
But if it grows from the inside, it is always there.

You little god. My big God of vacuity and absence.
Better to have a thing you can touch
Than a thing that is not real, vague, made of fancy,
Harvested from texts of grass, papyrus,
Anthracite black as sin, dark as the omnibus that hustles
From Orion, after the Bull to the Pleiades.

“Star crossed lovers” at the Ponte Vecchio,
The balcony of our lives looking out at each other’s eyes,
But inside, the river turns a silent knot,
The has been catches up with now, still homeless,
Pregnant with meaning, sheltering sheep on her wooly skin,
Laying hoops around the manger door,
In hopes of catching something, a muon or a sign
From the Hadron Collider that
As we ask after the real lover in the yarn,
As we turn the soil,
As we settle for reparations,
True liberty is not a quarter of the catch phrase but
The whole dollar, silver,
Bought, sold, bundled as bad debt and
Borrowed again as our woeful sin and your mute twin
At the door or window, coming in.

Somehow not genuine, not deep enough,
You tell me lies. I bury my eyes for
Fear is a burning, burning bush,
A bible of tell all and memory,
Sacred, still unified until we crack the page.
Open as to ourselves with Dr. Freud and Mr. Rilke and Vienna
And the old ways before murder ruined everyone.

In Paris, we thought people would let you be, but
The sorrowful Russians seem to follow everywhere,
Leading us with sad lead,
Or is it fleece of gold in their eyes and on a long rhythm and
Meter in a tongue I will never understand.
No need to track blood in the snow.
It has all gone cold, your Mediterranean meditation on
The sound of sand and falling walls, your antiquity and
Your India of stolen stories and plaintive wives,
Your asking is too selfish and shallow.

Grow roots as the Great tree and leaf out
Bodhi flower on the high cliff.
The passage was for someone who died almost inadvertently.
Came this way believing and as the waterfall on the rocks,
The mist in crashing surf, the light on water,
The eye of the beholder, gone.
Reminisce no more.
We have London, things to do.

Smelt, Herring, Newfoundlanders and Laps,
The Labradors and Pointers, nose to ground,
Still as sky beyond eagle.
Not the angle of language like last year’s breakfast,
A snow holiday for dead Russians by the train.
For the guns and crosses etched in prison walls,
The fetch of the unthinkable,
Bound in turban, as the mind in lotus,
The family in bloom settles in to the task of
Remembering true selves as a
Guide from which the grave is a mere twitch of
Spilled dirt or a mudslide or drops of a fountain
Going green with algae.

Every poet is a Jew. I am one of you.
Every tavern, every nail, every water board and the feeding trough,
The tropes and memes and single bulb swinging from the ceiling.
Who sealed us in?
Whose hand is water torture, whose
Lotus is the blown open belly,
The film reel and more real.
Out damn train,
Out sunk boat,
Tram of the old city in frozen slush,
Out grey, out blue, you Navies, you air force
Enlisting the meek,
You neck of lover and leg of lamb,
Under cover like a root cellar, a bomb shelter.

Who took a pass on the civil war and
Laid bleeding sibling on weeping mother.
Who gathered all of Italy for the show,
The knowing gesture, the rise and rise again,
Of an army, capable but misled.
Samovar on the burner, Uncle.

I fear being lost in antiquities knowing nothing,
Following a faded quaint advice I invented from
The porous soul of imagining as if all souls
Surpassed death even as we sing their muddy passing and
Mirror the limitations in a dull brooding, all my own.
As the TV would have it for all to believe,
For the scrolls and traditions to gather the
Fears of destitution and the abject trajectory of
Having anything and anything to say
In the vowels of silence.
The fatted calf is bleeding fast.
The cup of salvation is spilled on a stone calendar.
The clock is a rock and on Mars, it sits a million years.

In water as in my woman’s soul,
Down heady one,
Lay down little babe of shipwrecked dawn,
Down lisping,
Down rupture,
Down salvo and puncture.

How much humbled the beauty of the self
Even in love’s eye
Redeemed as flower to stone,
Match to grass, true sailor, cabal number, lone lover,
Perfect dervish, wailing
Entry to crack,
Patient hand to set,
Forehead lit by fever,
Grace grateful to finish and yet ending
On to again find us heart on the extreme,
Tempting another sumptuous one from
None to nowhere to now.