i learned early on to put back the garnet ring
try and keep the table clean
beta tested bedroom mirror
hiding a broken wing
theres always other garnet elsewhere
books to pile upon the bed
finally finding some space and quiet
to hear me
the incessant gnawing sun shroud
scuttling creature of shipwrecks
bottomfeeder
and the light bolting through the water
and the wide and quiet
and
all the time these lovesongs have been to myself
but spoken to other
because i could not speak to myself
i had been betrayed.
there on the edge of the great quiet
smelling of pine resin cut hay and loam
a shadow plays in puddles of shade
and i know her name.

Quid Pro Quo #2
(barbers adagio for strings)

crawl through into the skin the smell of your heart what love tastes like.

a dense wall of mind trying to catch a glimpse of itself in a telescope.

the night has been full of faraway stars thin dreaming

everything is what i would ask for

A Meeting

She steps into the dark swamp
where the long wait ends.

The secret slippery package
drops to the weeds.

She leans her long neck and tongues it
between breaths slack with exhaustion

and after a while it rises and becomes a creature
like her, but much smaller.

So now there are two. And they walk together
like a dream under the trees.

In early June, at the edge of a field
thick with pink and yellow flowers

I meet them.
I can only stare.

She is the most beautiful woman
I have ever seen.

Her child leaps among the flowers,
the blue of the sky falls over me

like silk, the flowers burn, and I want
to live my life all over again, to begin again,

to be utterly
wild. 

 

-Mary Oliver

page one half.  what i do.  trying to find a brian eno song and theyre all too ethereal when i want to roll around in the smell of you.  hungry.  famished.  this feeling.  the planet shifts and so in me a shift.  something deep and true and traveling between the dark and the light.  i open the books.  i open to energy.  the high tide lifts my boat.

 i have no oars.  i have a picnic hamper and hope in my heart.  things coming to a crisis:  danger and opportunity.  the cone of light tight down on my fused skull like a drill the light makes everything okay.
the first wish in the wishing cup.

i cock my head to the song inside, i catch rags of it when the wind is right.  i take my cocktail and try to write it down.  this shift.  certain as noon.  and a broken clocks right twice a day.

hes a grail knight.  and that knight chooses to put the grail before him.

i dont want believe any of the rest of it all.

another man id be happy to get snowed in with

the damned ache.