To try and change the name of God to something more personal, equivocal and alive
Is to the distance and duration, as to the referent and the question.
The body of thought itself resides, anticipates antipathies and from the middle,
Is corn starch, base to the acid, calm to an ecstasy uncalled
To end and beginning only by surmise on the facticity of our being here.

Two legged, stretched digits, cranial capacity,
What name would you like?
Isthmus between waters, woman and man, tautological one.
Submerged reverie, dance card of millionaire stars, airless chamber, perfect pitch?
Classical and daring, caught up, denied, affirmed in the list of lists.

The destitute’ s paradise on thought patrol with the mice and fuzz of denizens and
Dilettantes digesting the sea green and mauzy way,
The tiger flies on the tight path or the leotard cling on the hip In flight of the acrobat,
The toss and turn and tumescence, burning the town and
Down around her ankles, the mite bites and mosquito, mescalito
Itch of the tall grass and the waving ladies of the boulevard with parasols and
Flimsy, made up face as the looks in books
For an answer of Thom Thumb and the old name renounced,
The new moniker rejuvenated,
Graceful structure, just as in the architect’s plans.
Jove, juvenal, enteral,
Gas first, solids later.
Bath house parable of the terrible that came to stay.
That won’t go away-
The new name claiming the true name,
The offshoot now a trunk all of its own.

Grass fire, ant hill, goose and leopard.
The path, the trail, the road.
The spiral infinity you named your holy city and
People have come with the spoils.
Embroiled in boils, the skin a patch work of crops, dusted and dry.
See our pot boil over on the side of the road,
The hanger spilling the water, dousing the fire
In steam and hiss of ruined food.
We can pick up and choose.

I forgot my uncertainty that at the moment of the prize,
Comes back to haunt.
Comes like the dead end,
The poet’s corner covered over,
The rice from the wedding in the bellies, so tiny,
Of songbirds so light, lifting the very air with their wing flash
Of feathers soft as pillows and here again,
I lay sleeping.

Down around the maroon sump of standing water spilled
In the valley, carbon with no exit but to build up a lake
From nothing, reflecting everything
As passive as the sky.
The red eye of the sitting day,
Sitting in for supper,
Lying down for bed in the down.

Prescient is the pelican,
Long span of wing gliding over the water.
Effortless it seems in flights,
Defying, complimenting all stances, tastes, procurement and plans.

It is enough for what is.
Sufficient in the wake of one whose arrival still gleans,
Still means that what was will be as it is
With our thoughts abstracted on the future.
Our toes wriggling in the fertile muds, sediments and floods.

The dumb luck and the seized opportunity of the chicken’s strangled neck,
All tendons and feathers and dead hand of gravity’s punk marauder.
We all fall to earth, her circle of compass and duration
As most all can be in a sphere pulling inward and turning.
Give up your money, plates for the charity auction, chairs for duck, duck, goose,
Run little number, run as the mind speculates on the nature of the dice tumbling,
The beakers overflowing again with our fortunes in the sand.
More and more in hand for the sand sleeps the woman and the man and
The dream time, eleven and twelve, the stars in constellation, bricked and braced.

Exhumation, culmination - five to one and diamond rife with point blank certainty and
Therein lies the feeling, pulled over the eye lid,
Cretin terrors and plume of dragon, dinosaur flair.
Teeth, omega, Suma epsilon, gravitas marries cupidity, idolatry,
Scene of collision, meld of metal and water, meter and pro-noun
Blowing out the candle of zero at dark birth minus 30.

Come on Catullus, your lip lover, the wind has the residue of your ashes in her lungs
All these years never having coughed you up in the spume of mud
To shape god like your once narrow but golden shoulders.
Call her by name in the sails, in the clear harbor,
In the sparkling brook of lady names and overtures.

Come closer little bird and hold me all a twitter
As Leda in the grasp of her swan.
How and how long we try our getaways from the rapture of your capture,
Gazing always with an eye to the horizon, fore and aft.
With all of the people below your balcony like pompous Mussolini gesticulating,
Scaring the birds from the tall grass like a snake.

Time you made man and woman a better thing,
Dangling them in the dip by their heels twisting,
By their thoughts and hands reaching out to each other,
Or is it you, Achilles they hold for in the empty air of another dictator
Sparing not the rod of his furor. Gathering not the flowers of our lure,
Dangling from the rib of the boat, daring those in the water
To either go deeper or take the bait.

We held out ourselves in offering,
Humble as monks in the morning before grumbling,
Still half asleep with a dream realized how the most high is made most low,
The eternal heaven despised in the moment so desperately certain and
Unable to reflect naught but the self-same infinity
As if certainty and eternity married chance and the demon spawn were all of us
In the bad blowing waves on a three hour cruise, now way off base.

The Goddess fell from her pedestal,
The shop keeper dusted himself off
Before contemplating the picking up of soft idols,
She has seen the move of desire.
He has burned in fire,
Now pure as an ash smudged on a saint’s forehead.
For all to see and all,
Corpulent, penitent, postulate, grave mark on the chosen many,
Floating in the reeds by the shore where the fishes once found refuge and
Now the wetland appears never to be reclaimed.
Like a view of the horizon from prow or heaved in ballast,
The wet lip of travel and the wet loin of lovers and
The embrace of night with day to say in the warm shallows
As you procreate, so sailed once the English and the Irish,
So others left home on the dance of nameless waves
Themselves offering to be called
By the true body of memory,
By the bay, in the day or by the rivulets on the windshield
Tracing the diagrams of obscure referents
In a hand practiced at the hard math of deviation
From the macrame script read right to left and top to bottom
As the leaves once dripped and
Puddle accepted the signature of our devotions
In its rustic baptismal font.
Not a fount but a font.
Not a mount or a river or even a way forward or back,
You leave us nowhere, nameless, never to come again
But always aloft, tentative, timely.

You leave me all choices, no choices,
Loving in a lazy hand between acts
In half thoughts of the revelation’s draw through time.
The stage players and hands see the curtain up and down.
We can all know what is real, what is left of another time
As the future pulls us forward to just open an eye
On the page to judge maturity, certainty, skill, desire, authenticity.

Passing phase, passing phrase
On the intuition of the art
In time to play out our hour,
In retrospect, upon the stage.

Bode forward rapscallion caricature
Of Aves and raptor, claw print of Tyrannosaur,
Dimple in dust as the moon is not a lake but a pock marked crater
Turning in our geosynchronous orbit.
Easy enough to say,
Hard to spoil the sky with snap phrases of judgement.
Carbuncle on a whale,
Surface and diving, air dependent.

Bad teeth and the dentist.
Hold still, mouth open, don’t, can’t say a word.
Hold still.
Shrill call of a diving gull, sand, sun, spray.
We pray all day in everything we do she says.
Lay low, be still, don’t move.
Before the ache sets in on the tired monks on wooden benches.
The ache sets in at the backs of the thighs.
Eyes can never be still, even in sleep.

We call you gentle raven, soft claw of fates,
We call you in bitter and timid hours, sweat dried from latest failures,
Calamity at the door, vanity, still on the shore.
Can you swim?
How far from here, how else, why now, who goes, who stays, who cares?
The question of our age.
Rash and blunt, not even a question but a put down,
Who cares child?

Just another stranger.
“You try too hard.
You get up early but sit around all day. Staying put.
Tempting fate, another day down”.

Grass on her eyes,
Ophelia just below the water line winking in wavelets.
Plover by the river, bugs in the Summer high.
Tack of the sail against the breeze,
Cut as so much line,
The sea closes on the white wake and
Barely a trail of bubbles, now nothing where it went.

Just below the surface where the boil starts in a heating pot,
Bubbles rushing up toward release of pressure, liberation,
Transformation, joining all the air.
Joining as such completeness to disappear in our labors,
At our tables, to disappear.

No fate worse or so gentle as to be married to an aging, senile poet
On a mission to lay at the feet of Panduranga,
Once more in a babble brook of praise,
Snuffing as the waxy wick in a twist of smoke
Joining as the music, the air, the thump of so much death joined,
Such hope misplaced, laid low.
Hold still.