when language
wearing its formal dress,
well-spoken
at its station in high society,
disobeys the laws of exposition,
Love may creep
like a fiend
into the camphor-scented rooms
of finely-crafted sentences,
strangle the sleeping baby
and fill its bag
with moon and stars.
The foolish nightspirit,
the minutes wild fellows that scatter
us to our rooms,
the tender blissful chatter
when sleep breaks, and night's dream calls
with the dull patter
of soldiers through the halls.
Come to tell us nothing, nothing
shall ever shall matter,
shall ever come softly
as the moments that scatter
us to our rooms.
Through this old door
I have passed before.
Dark make new lore,
then morning comes the downpour ---
Words decide my fate.
The old poet cannot wake,
though the poet make
the morning light break.
Come pale light, glorious light
come old poet to your fate,
make the morning light break.
The crowds walk under the stars tonight.
Yet none are touched by starlight,
The star-bright cities of night
risen in the yards of old houses
have crumbled in the faces.
Walk not under the stars.
The night has come at last.
Those untouched by starlight
walk under the stars tonight,
know all before have walked
under the stars have passed.
words are evening's ghosts ---
they draw their analogies,
whisk through
the empty possibilities
which insanely fish
out of us
the one obscure joy.
considering
their hold on us,
spinning in an eye
their bobbins ---
how little creatures
are born at dusk
and slip quietly
around the world,
hunt the palest thoughts
down, catch
the great impulse
that so devilishly
draws its bow
and fells
us like the baby deer.
When he passed
the houses shrunk down low,
fallen down the little words
in a darkened sentence ---
he made the houses chir like insects.
Fireflies useful for resurrection,
though knew a book of poems
only acquired true favor
after an author was potted.
Then white allusions
came to bite and flash.
His pen at dusk yammered
like a lamb with its head
caught in a barbed-wire fence.
Poetry was a bowl of calf's brains,
rotten cod stuffed with stones,
beside a basket of berries.
Words came sudden
and unobtrusive quivered
and burst, cutting through
the day's stiff corpse
and when would the eyes cold bloom,
half burst of Heaven's stupor
and the dull patter
come thudding up
and swallow the holy terror,
the strange tenderness
that words wore like old tunics for centuries.
Old poems fingered their privates.
The words of a verse all bald-headed monks
sitting around a table in the monastery,
the best hidden in the hierarchy
of a holy bag of bones
barking at the Queen's carriage.