And surpassing in their touch.
What masterpieces they wrought,
Images that leapt through time,
Engulfed in the perfect night
Of millennia and cold,
Skeletal stillness, pending,
Closer than the walls around.
How did they reckon future,
Indeed immortality?
The primal forms they imaged
Yet proceed from some beyond.
They remain, undivided
From the dead and present hand.
A Sloven
A sloven entered the parade,
Was out of step and wanted aid
To fashion well a bold charade.
“I am the Emperor Norton.”
His cry was heard by everyone,
From Candlestick to Tiburon.
None questioned his high majesty
Nor did gainsay his sovereignty.
His subjects set his spirit free.
The sloven tarried and held sway
Until at last he passed away
And into legend by the Bay.
Far in the Flaxen Fields
In the mute morning
The reaper walked to the west,
Shifting from time to time
The shimmering scythe
That swung like a pendulum
From the ascending sun.
At Midday he had got
Far in the flaxen fields.
Striding then in the tapered shade
He seemed to cleave the day
Downward from the blind meridian.
And in the soft sight of a bear,
He merged with the wall of woods
And the green pale of genesis.
The New River Northward
The river runs steadily northward,
Clear and intricate with shade.
On the near bank stands a great tree,
The branches white and stark just now,
Not yet greening into spring.
Ten years ago I placed an offering
In the narrow fork of the tree,
And I said a rude, immediate prayer.
Now the softest echoes of the words
Run slowly northward, year after year,
And the river flows beneath facets
Of green and gray light northward.
From the River House I see the tree,
And I am moved to regard it with respect.
It stands in the presence of my mind,
After all, aging as I age, involving me
In the keeping of the river and the land.
The river runs northward through time,
And we stay, the tree and I, marking
The passage of drift and dreams.
The Snow Mare
In my dream, a blue mare loping,
Pewter on a porcelain field, away.
There are bursts of soft commotion
Where her hooves drive in the drifts,
And as dusk ebbs on the plane of night,
She shears the web of winter,
And on the far, blind side
She is no more. I behold nothing,
Wherein the mare dissolves in memory,
Beyond the burden of being.
Blood Memory
Palo Duro Canyon
Forever are those days within my reach,
The days of devastation, each by each.
My ghosts recount them in their broken speech.
Meadows of Brit
Are we to live
In precincts of the sun?
Are we to give
Allegiance to the One,
The Lord of light
Who ranges on the sky,
And in the night
Lies low and does not die.
Are we to burn
In waves of solar seas?
Then let us learn
To be and to believe.
Broken Drum’s Coup Song
You would do well to turn and run.
I am descended from the sun.
Announce me then and have it done.
Say to your chiefs I am the one.
Beware my father’s burning breath;
It is an omen of your death.
I am descended from the sun.
Say to your chiefs I am the one.
Now to Believe
Now to believe that we shall be
Careless again in Brittany,
And married in a chapel there,
And on to sleep in County Clare.
We kissed in rings of standing stones
And breakfasted on tea and scones.
Musicians played for our delight,
And Druids chanted in the night.
In those high moments were we come
To all that we could dream, then some.
And in dimensions of the spheres
We have invested precious years.
The Cave Children
These are the animal’s envoys,
The feral girls and bestial boys
Who cull a language from mere noise.
The Bloom of Appearances
Around a nucleus of reality
There is the vacancy of clouds.
Nearly opaque the massive forms,
But they are vagrant and beyond.
There is no substance, only show,
A blooming of appearances.
Rain falls in the troughs of oceans,
And light, as through a prism,
Imposes arcs of color
On the unreality of clouds.
One sees them, and they sail
In sterile, steady winds. And there,
In the vague dimension of illusion,
They cast empty shadows on the earth.
Perfect, More or Less
Nothing is perfect, so you said,
And yet I’ve measured you in bed.
I know perfection when it comes.
I know your parts, indeed your sums.
More nearly perfect you are not
For more and nearly miss the spot.
The sweet spot that I’ve come to know
Is more than nearly perfect, oh!
Dear Cousin Em
She is one of those who
Still write letters. She informs
Each stroke of the pen
With love. “Dear cousin Em.”
There are four pages in all,
A number she deems proper.
She tells of the coming of spring,
The neighbor’s yard sale, etc.
And in a postscript, in another hand,
The death of her dog Hendrix.
She sends by and large the same letter
To eight other people. It is an all-day
Occupation, taken seriously,
Taken to heart.
Une Artiste
She fixed my heart in a collage
And signed me off, Coeur et courage!
Red Square
On a mid-winter evening
The brisk changing of the guard,
The long queue at Lenin’s tomb,
The glory of St. Basil’s,
Now and then a limousine
Speeding into the Kremlin,
Above all, the swirling snow
In the reflection of lights
Like a speckled northern moon,
These images I would send
“With love, and wish you were here.”
Arctic Sketchpad
A young fox scampers
At the near wall of a pine wood,
Just full of himself.
A raven comes at dusk to play
Hide and seek.
She rides on runners
Into the sheer, glistening wind.
The dogs are joyful,
The sky blushes above snow fields,
And she laughs.
The mountain appears,
Silver and pink in the dawn.
The tracks of a lynx
Are drawn straight on the blue slope,
A long slant.
The Telling
We will be gone,
But we will have seen
Eternity in the sunrise
And the image of God
In clouds on the mountain.
On the breast of the earth
We will be told of again
In the story of Creation.
In a quiet and seemly way
We will take our places
And be true to the telling.
TG
You brought the essence of a former age
Intact and skillfully upon our stage.
Elizabethans would have honored you
And stirred your passion in their verbal stew.
Then mindful of the present, you brought home
The din of biker bars where vagrants roam,
The blare of bugles in the jazzy night,
Young men dying in the dying light.
And in the workings of your poet’s mind,
You struck a balance of delicate kind.
You strove to bring intelligence to bear
Upon inheritance, true, rich, and rare.
The Kiowa No-Face Doll
Kiowa Boarding School, Anadarko
They see how you hold your doll
With love and desperation.
Are they to imagine expression
On the bare, impenetrable mask?
There is nothing to reflect
The face of a child, glad or sad,
Who see upon this sere surface
Anonymity only, a random
Fetish of precise uniformity.
For those who brought you here,
You are the image of your doll.
For those who relegated you
To military sameness, you bear
The visage of a faceless race.
For Bernard Pomerance, in Memory of John Merrick
I am Merrick. Here is my card.
I am with the mutations cross the road.
—THE ELEPHANT MAN
In words you have distilled him into pain
Whose every moment, where his head has lain,
Was grave and sinister and full of strain,
A struggle merely to exist in vain.
Summer Song
sweetgrass
a braid burning
smoke
cupped in the hand
drawn
to the heart
beyond
summer turns
simmering
gathering on the curls
of rivers and the lees
of hummocks
horses
appear on the skyline
there is no prairie sky
without them
they fasten rain to the earth
autumn stands close by
where the grasses are burned
at evening
thunder rolls in the gullies
red earth becomes pipestone
the scent of weather,
like sweetgrass, brings the good of dreams
and thanksgiving
a summer song
A Sighting
A blue butterfly alighted
On a green leaf beside my hand.
Four times it fluttered away
And returned. That is all.
A Silence Like Frost
A silence like frost hovers here.
I look for the promise of being,
But only the bare presence of death appears.
I think of who I am and do not know.
The God in whom I scarcely believe
Is smug with me, tendering forgiveness,
But as much as I, he is culpable.
Here in these words is no silence broken,
But silence lays a rime upon them,
And, burdened with cold, they die away.
On the wall across from my window
A scarlet leaf spins slowly down,
Touching here and there those that cling
To the dark tangle of their waning life.
It catches the bare edges of light
And rocks into the drift and scatter below.
The Soprano
Untimely was this diva’s death.
She found her voice and lost her breath.
Hey
Hey, all you people come together, you hear?
Not for God’s sake but for your own.
So you don’t all look alike, or dress alike,
Or speak the same language, or have the same religion.
What you do have, all of you, is your human being.
It is the best thing you have or will ever have.
Free in your spirit and noble in your minds.
Your children come into the world with love,
Love for the plants and animals, for each other.
Do not teach them hatred and violence. Give them
The chance to know and cherish the earth,
The ocean, the dawn, the desert and dusk—
The stories of the world, the mysteries of origin.
Come together and weave the strands of peace
Into an everlasting tapestry of human being.
Bitter Creek Song
Will you go to Bitter Creek tonight?
Will you go to Bitter Creek?
Will you wear the white and yellow dress?
Will your blanket be blue, blue, blue?
There will be dancing by the water.
There will be the courting songs.
Oh, be shy with me tonight, be shy.
But, oh, have eyes for me, for me, for me.
Let your heart whisper to me.
I will breathe the sweetness of your skin.
Will you go to Bitter Creek tonight?
Will you go to Bitter Creek?
An Aspect of Condition
We contemplate the urgency
And engine of our fantasy,
The stars vibrating far and wide,
Abiding on the other side
Of time and distance and remorse.
We would have trade with them of course
And be the ones who dance and play
On silk roads of the Milky Way,
Until we splinter on the bone
And murmur this: we are alone.
Two Figures
These figures moving in my rhyme
Who are they? Death and Death’s dog, Time.
Idée Fixe
She harped upon the afterlife
And was therefore a wanting wife.
The here and now were not her wont.
Bemoan her loss; her husband don’t.
R.I.P.
He was a sinner and a saint,
And went both ways without restraint.
His mind was said to be chaotic.
Obscure, untidy, and neurotic.
The Mute Intensity of Love
For Barbara
If only I could tell you what you are
And mean to me, I would as well be done
With speech. My urgent words would carry far
Beyond intent and purpose. Only one
Expression would endure therefore, a sigh
And silence all but inarticulate.
The ancient languages of wind comply
With this communion, this profound estate.
For every syllable the heart disdains,
The mute intensity of love remains.
For a Woman Unadorned
It was as if the moon appeared
On a headland of black, bristling trees
Flooding light upon waters below, and
Like the tides beyond, I was summoned
By the gravity of your flesh as it lay,
A fragile suggestion of blood and bone
And all origins of beauty and lust.
You strummed the silver strings of the sea
And made ancient vibrations of music in me.
But, what the hell, you knew that.
The Gardener
The matron of a modern sect,
Here lies a landscape architect.
She bought the farm and now reposes
Among celestial ferns and roses.
God knows a certain air belies her;
Her life was mould and fertilizer.
The Man Who Lost Himself
There was a man who went far away from the town, looking for salt. On the fourth day of his journey, he suffered great thirst, and he sat in the shade of a huge rock. In answer to his prayer, it began to rain. The rain was gentle at first, and the man’s thirst was quenched. But the rain grew hard, and there was loud thunder and bright lightning. A bolt of lightning struck the man and wrecked great harm upon him. The man was blind, and his body was burned and deformed. Somehow he found his way back home. When the people saw him, they greeted him with pity and ridicule. He was ashamed of his blindness and his deformity. In the night he entered into a holy place and painted stripes on his body and put on a helmet with horns. The next morning he appeared in the plaza and all the people were amazed. “Who are you?” they asked. “I am koshare,” he said. “Formerly I was a blind, crippled man. But I lost myself behind this mask. I am now the being you see before you, none other. I have brought you salt.”
The Artist of Altamira
Another day
The season turned,
The weather burned.
I walked in testaments
Of ancient time.
Another year
The torches blazed,
The bison grazed.
I dwelt in artistry
And paradigm.
Another age,
And darkness rose,
And in repose
My animals remained,
Rude and sublime.
The Modesty of Relics