frozen moat,
a conversation with a stone.
Each year a column, slowly tilting.
“God is the only architect,”
sd. Gaudi. “I merely copy.”
He became a studious imitator
of the tree, the river, the wind.
Light builds everything,
strings of light
torn from sheer blocks,
streamers inviting you
to reconnect them;
the tails of comets,
the rocket’s smoky trail
mixed among vaporous clouds,
mist off a boiling pot,
the searching vine’s restless rivulets.
Gaudi was killed by a streetcar,
seditiously moored to its tracks,
unable to pass through him,
or follow his immense light.
Buildings are made of music,
rising with purpose,
filling the air’s geometry with forms.
Cities should be built
from the worship
of nothing in particular,
and filled with the feelings
of its people, the only mortar
that can reinforce the beams.
From this I make my life a bell
and hurl its chime
across the expanse,
and a gong of years develops,
buttressed by nothing.
The spool of that life
is filled with temporary commotions,
knowing that a human being
in love with mystery
is never finished
THE EXILE
This is my last letter. The first one
disappointed in a love triangle has
lost the game. Some things upon
which I’ve aimed were undoubtedly
innocent; but that is for others to decide.
I’ve tried to rope the world in countless
ways and have done the best I can,
with tangled prayers and no reprieve.
The danger in the Beast is its seasons.
The morning star enlightened Buddha
and his first words formed a poem
out of the desperate ardors,
adders made of words, blind as a boxer,
striking out at every sound.
How do we discriminate?
The map is linear, but poetry is
circular and continuous,
untangling as it tells.
THE BOOKMOBILE
for Kay Ryan
Here comes that tinny bookmobile
and the children whinny and giggle,
their mouths in the shape of a comb,
a gaggle who open books and find
an ice cream cone is waiting, in icy
repose, just resting there in the gutter,
and when the children butterlick the
cone down flat their tongues turn
black and swell so big that they won’t
fit back and poems form on them.
RETAIL
I will make my art in the margin, I said,
while everyone scurries to look busy,
hoping to impress the Boss,
whose business is failing,
and now must lay his employees off.
I don’t move a muscle,
hamstrung by commission,
and naturally gifted with gab.
I’m used to leaving a big impression
and saying little, my position
secure, having outlasted my peers
who swam back to the university
to spawn their books, whose years
are filled with glib rejoinders
to colleagues about tenure and
pension plans, summers at Yaddo
and Vermont, the right density of manure
for their organic gardens. Fearless,
I will build a church of good-byes,
poems that work their retail magic
even on holidays, that wink when
they should wallow, and kneel for no man.
PUTTING
for John Groover
It’s
