sequence
I like you in my leeway where I heat the frost and
watch the inner weather change
I release the sacrament of winter before tapping on
the glass
I stretch my heels to go and walk
I trespass on boundaries I built myself and wither
them above the set point of near boiling
I administer the sentence held open by fate and
virtuosity
I release protagonistic stripes in favor of the warm
wind I claim to have discovered
I locate consonance with undivulged few secrets
scheduled for blossoming
I thread the needle of contiguosity to fortify the
line between I claim not to have maimed
I like you in my leeway where I heat the frost and
watch the inner weather change
I release the sacrament of winter before tapping on
the glass
I stretch my heels to go and walk
I trespass on boundaries I built myself and wither
them above the set point of near boiling
I administer the sentence held open by fate and
virtuosity
I release protagonistic stripes in favor of the warm
wind I claim to have discovered
I locate consonance with undivulged few secrets
scheduled for blossoming
I thread the needle of contiguosity to fortify the
line between I claim not to have maimed
She Makes It Up As She Goes Along
For a moment, beauty takes its inspiration from response.
To become a guru requires work
she would prefer not to perform.
She learns improvisation
not the disciplined repetition toward perfection,
knowing such a yeasty goal demands a vast . . .
She makes it up as she goes along,
the symphony of retake after retake
when the crowd is doing anything but listen.
She rebuilds the scaffolding on her latest theory,
finds accompanying theme-and-variation snippets
to enlarge its heft.
Her credibility is large in her own thinking.
Waves swell toward and back.
She hears herself be music
and she hears herself retract.
A certain kind of afternoon
when quiet comes to have been filled
with fragments of eternity
she learns and then unlearns.
Language Tea
Incipient flowers rest. We rest. The elocution spaces what is underlying
speech. No flavor, tepid. This is morning. Vibrant when the light
persists. Full of lower case, repeating upper sprawl's indigenous
refrain of season, time of day, conjecture. If a tiny cup is shared,
there is a voice. Each voice, thin, repairs itself in line with other
voice, yielding, as a music from the kitchen twains the louvered song.
Patches of care, a weave, the nest made large or small
He Reported
He reported that a flock
Amid the war
I told him that I cannot help
The ritual seeing
Constantly inclusive of
And he reminded that
Some brook toward some sea
Leaves not falling
Hemispheres once blended mean
He spoke of rock
Wall paved around
So there might be quiet
Some of what is felt curves
Something mid-day
Soon substantial corners
Daytime also lapses
To repeat the single instance
Hip Priest
He does accents, lays on urban fast talk, adds footnotes to every morsel
of the speech. His listeners observe him as they fan themselves. He
works harder than most stand-up guys. I listen to his phrases re-insert
themselves into the refrain. He's sitting down and seems propelled into
his theme-and-variation style of linking points. I think he's basically
a one-routine type guy. I look around at people who appear not to have
heard him. They seem relieved at his non-standard brand of holiness.
They like irreverence laced with clear affection for their mutual point
of worship. Twenty minutes of frivolity have gone by. I'm looking at my
watch. I came here hooked already, now I listen to him try to gather me
into the flock to which I already belong.
Scent of incense, candlelight mid-morning, articulation of indebtedness
March
A crocus pokes through where the leaves still are. How closely could you
watch? Do warm far blue eyes gather what is here? The premises we shared
might now be lost or not, so pencil sketch awaits the color open air
tasting of spring. Each new pair of vestments brings about my tender
loam of a maòana stowing vigor weighing what the rigor costs.
Until I learn again, your tenderness still perfectly alive
Missing
She calls, I feel less
Accurate in judgment,
I sense kismet
Lurking where I cannot
See the surplus
Quietly with access
Pulsed around immaculate
Proceedings, what breaks
The deal is ice,
As furnace trims
The coiled, insistent wheat,
A trap in flow contests
The flow lui-meme,
Repeat for me the steeled
Sequential razzmatazz
Before I bounce you out of
My impersonal catastrophe
Orchestrated as commandments
Never are
