White porcelain vase,
Translucent
Crater of the world,
Painted at the Vernal equinox
In Peking blue
From the Temple of Heaven.
The Emperor (old style) rides out
Under a yellow silk umbrella
With fringes of spun gold,
And the People inhale
Lest they shatter the silence
And wake the sleeping revolution which
Tip-toes by on bound feet.
Alone, he stands on
The snow-blanketed terrace,
Bolted with dragon heads,
In the Forbidden City.
Alone he burns a bull calf
In sacrifice.
Alone, he stands in optimum dread
And counts his blessings.
In the Hall of Prayer
His silk slippers are like
Dropped dandelions on ice.
Alone, his yellow umbrella floats
Between red lotus columns,
The celestial cone-shaped vault
Of rose-veined marble.
Alone, he hears the lovers
Whose whispered intimacies
Are magnified a thousand times
By architectural munificence,
Fiancé themselves to the future
Of a country no longer his.
Alone, he crouches feigning
Prayer, the lovers’ endearments
Ringing in his ears,
And knocks his head nine times
On the navel of his kingdom.
The lovers are startled
As the emperor’s decapitated head
Falls with the message.
Galileo’s Moon
A drawing of the moon
By Galileo’s hand,
His trained telescopic iris
A white porcelain sieve
Dipping into the unfurled universe
Weeping stars and trailing planets,
He knows not why we worship
The blank face of span and nebulas
As if it cared or would
Write another destiny for us?
If it could cancel the blankness
Of white rice paper
Cleanse lunacy, honor witchcraft?
Men pour their dreams on its surface
Measure time in its tides and humors
Howl at its waning and waxing
Women take its rhythms
As menstrual flow and birthing
Sing to its metathesis
Spin destiny’s wheel
Which catches in slots
And capricious gum balls
Spill into the blue diamond sky
Set with brilliant carats
Pulsing to the same lunar
White porcelain moon
Captured by Galileo
Not yours nor mine
But his cry of love
In the Ether
tempora mutuntur et nos mutamur in illis;
non sum qualis eram; de die indien
The Moon Drawn By Galileo
Galileo’s pale hand followed
His rapt snow leopard eyes fixed
On the telescopic circle of lunar frost,
His hand waltzed through a thicket of
Meticulous strokes observed magnified
By the glass lens he himself invented,
The miracle of the moon,
Metamorphosing itself into white porcelain,
Shadows, lakes, hills, craters
Valleys, oceans, rocks and stardust
A heavenly topography more
Transpicuous than any dogma of Faith
Earth and moon linked arm and arm
Like celestial sisters dancing on
Christianity’s Seprecure recorded
By genius’ unblinking gaze.
A new sacrament dawned
With each stroke of pastel
An idea becomes translucent as white porcelain
“Hush, don’t think, draw,” he murmurs
To himself, hand poised in rigid observation
Fingers stiff with espionage
Plying a hamlet of thought
Prying truth out of a lie
With his no longer blind iris
He concludes the earth cannot be
The center of the Universe
It sits static in the sun’s orbital embrace
Minuscule in the Milky Way
Sacrosanct in a depthless scintillating sky
Of ungravitational space, black holes
Polestars, super nodes, meteorites and
Stars that die exactly like humankind
Of age, disease and violent collisions
Sweating comet-tails of ashes spawning
Worshippers and weeping dissidents
Who mock the concept of resurrection?
While the silvery opal shines on in perfect
White pumice stone rubbing out
The astronomers undreamed configurations
That bump the globe’s icy core?
His lead-gray hawk’s eye magnified
Deity size, tracing the lonely sphere,
Messenger of lovers who have always
Adored this planet copulating to its tides and vortex’s
Full of the knowledge that the earth
Amongst the galaxies, nebulas, Quarks & Asteroids
Is not and never has been the center of anything
The sun, the moon’s antithesis rules,
Regardless of his recantation to the Inquisition.
And that stars will die eventually
And take the earth with them leaving
Only ashes and dust behind, ice and darkness
And evidence of the mendacity of immortality.
God-like, Galileo sketched on,
Until the moon faded,
Impervious to cold and heat and hearsay
Meticulously capturing metaphysical light
In deft touches of ochre and white
Charcoal and pumice on parchment
He blessed each stroke even as it transformed
A mighty mystery into the secular
Erasing myth and worship, fantasy and deception
Upheld by the retrograde Inquisition’s torture
His great eye tracing the starry messenger of lovers
Through his telescope texting them that despite
His repudiation, the earth rotates on its own axis
Around the sun and moon, around the earth
“Regardless,” he had whispered to himself
The world had never been
The Center of the Universe, love was.
VI.
LOVE PERFECTING
2002-2007
Going to Memphis
I
I’m leaving this place,
Quitting this watery catalogue,
Held sweetly on this river by my boat,
Lacquered in black and white and covered with
Designs of swords and cups, wands and pentacles.
My hair trails in the reflected sky while
My men’s oars drag in the pearly wrack.
I weigh a pomegranate on the scale before me,
A bushel of sunflower seeds to the left of me,
A basket of shellfish to the right of me,
A fountain flows in back of me and a palm crowns me;
Nevertheless we do not eat nor drink nor stop for rest.
We are going to Memphis.
I gaze into the saffron mirror of Venus,
The cups to the left of me and the cubes to the right,
The twelve fruited tree shade me and a white pillar crosses me;
The day passes and quivering heat visions
Mingle with the steam of my breath as
I keen to the rhythm of the rowers while
The sun blows on my eyelids,
Where love comes up poppy-red (what joy cultivated) and
My eyes become as u
nseeing as baked amber,
Set in the deadly cross of a gilded past as
We pass forgotten places and they wave to me from the
Shore.
We pass remembered places and they wave to me from the Shore.
We pass dreadful places and they wave to me from the shore.
We pass nameless places and they wave to me from the shore.
My cry carried by herons unfurls across water:
I’m going to Memphis, I won’t be back this way,
I’m going to Memphis, I won’t be back this way,
I’m going to Memphis, I won’t be back this way.
I’m going to Memphis.
II
I’m leaving this place,
Cheeks swollen with puffed breaths of desperate life.
Swaddled in silk sails embroidered delicately by infant hands,
I glide from mistake to mistake,
Raising my colors insolently for everyone to see,
For I am the Signifier;
The way is in me.
My convicts need no compass and my sails no wind,
For this river runs deep and this river runs straight.
This river runs wide and this river runs true.
No steel and concrete dam can alter its course;
No explosions of man-made trivia arrest its current.
I hum to myself softly and pluck on a ram’s head.
My eyes keep to his and not to the shore for I need no sign.
The moon rises behind me,
The path opens in front of me,
The mountains stay to the left of me,
The stream remains to the right of me,
IHVH crowns me and Ankh crosses me with a kiss.
Eclipse comes and the orb of the world dissolves in a pentagram.
Comets kiss stars and neighboring universes fiance hotly,
Watching ellipsoids spin and meteorites wed asteroids,
Colliding like a panicked crowd at the fire exit of space as
We pass old friends and they wave to me from the shore.
We pass worn loves and they wave to me from the shore.
We pass my children and they wave to me from the shore.
We pass my lovers and they wave to me from the shore.
My cry carried by sparrow hawks unfurls across waters:
I’m going to Memphis, I won’t be back this way,
I’m going to Memphis, I won’t be back this way,
I’m going to Memphis, I won’t be back this way,
I’m going to Memphis.
III
I’m leaving this place,
Nostrils exhaling rare incense,
Intoxicating sea gulls into suicide dives against my chest,
I watch luminous crabs make love in the deep.
A felucca, sodden sails big-bellied with sin, hung low from
God knows what heathen voyage makes a figure eight in salute.
I sigh and light my pipe in the modern dawn
And play cards with the Hierophant,
His triple crown reversed, his scepter triply crossed,
And I win which makes him triply cross,
And Anibus sees it from his tower and laughs in his harelip
While I drink the wreath before me and crush the wheel,
Devour the lion to my right and strangle the wolf to my left,
Pick the red rose that crowns me and bloodied become very silly,
Giggling and snickering behind my hand, panting and screaming
Like a wailing wind-played Aeolian harp unstrung,
Battling in my simple-minded way hysteria and cataplexy,
Insanity, scotoma and the Devil,
Mortifying my own flesh and munching icy emeralds
I fish from the side of the boat with my hair
(They melt in my mouth like rock candy);
Exhausted, I turn and slip into the dreamless sleep of beasts and children.
The wings of the Phoenix press against my bankrupt mouth his head
On one breast as we pass the shore of the dead and it heaves sand at us,
We pass the end of the world and it vomits burning pyres,
We pass the other side of truth, and I don’t recognize it,
We pass the wretched of the earth devouring the dogs of the rich.
My cry haunts me in the mute eyes of black eagles:
I’m going to Memphis, I won’t be back this way,
I’m going to Memphis, I won’t be back this way,
I’m going to Memphis, I won’t be back this way,
I’m going to Memphis.
IV
I’ve left this place,
Become as liquid and as salty as the water that carries me,
Descending the depths like a sea-diver umbilical-ly attached
To a past I never loved. I see the beginning of the end,
And enter into it with joy,
Plunge into a tunnel, so wide, so long, so deep that
All conversation stops and everyone becomes very serious,
Sucking the rancid breath of black life until
Our pupils focusing not on any light.
A silver temple rises up like lightning whistling in the dark,
Holy metal veiled in lily-roots snorting downwards,
Making caverns for petulant ghosts,
Reflections etched in black and white on its sinuous surface,
Sculpted like lava cooled by the brine of sea winds,
Smooth as a phallus worn by a million hands,
Warm and heavy metal more luxurious than lust,
Raised on a courtyard laid in Byzantine love-amulets,
A boulevard of unleavened and unrepentant and un-baptized souls
Oscillating in the nacreous light that is neither sun nor moon,
Standing in a Time which is neither day nor night,
In a climate which is neither summer nor winter,
In a sky only burnt-out stars could invent: the negative of light
On a plain as level and as flat as fate.
My criminals lift their oars in salute, oozing molten semen from
the Dead Sea (Sweat from the sons of father-less ghosts),
The keys slide like maggots down the hollow sleeve of the Angel,
God crosses me, illuminating my left side,
Blinding the Sphinx on my right side and hallowing Zero,
Crowning me in blinking, glowing ectoblastic neon forever.
I rise to greet this musical cathedral, arching as if to greet a lover,
Nipples hard and heart bursting whispering:
Memphis I’m arrived.
For I am the Signifier.
The way is in me.
And Now is the time.
Come With Me
Come
With
Me
Into my deep dry bower
Filled with saffron, musk, and Gulheina,
And I will
Raise you up and lead you on. I will sing you A Song
In a clear low voice, A voice of Africa and India,
A Voice of the Arapaho Indians,
A voice of Scotland and Wales.
Come
With
Me
Into my garden
Draped with Spanish moss, honeysuckle, and
wisteria,
And I will
Raise you up and lead you on,
And I will tell you A Tale In a whisper,
A tale of Africa and India,
A tale of the Arapaho Indians,
A tale of Scotland and Wales.
Come
With
Me
Into my reflecting pool
Filled with iris, silvered fish, and sapphire pebbles,
And I will
Raise you up and lead you on.
I will dance you
A Dance
Slowly,
A dance of Africa and
India,
A dance of the Arapaho Indians,
A dance of
Scotland and Wales.
Come
With
Me
Into my orchard
Filled with peach, cherry, and blue raisins,
And I will
Raise you up and lead you on.
I will play you
The Calf Skin
Softly,
The gourd of Africa and the
Sitar of India,
The flute of the Arapaho Indians,
And the bagpipes of
Scotland and Wales.
Come
Tremble in my arms;
You will be a bay leaf shaken,
And I will
Raise you up and lead you on,
I will take you in and let you out,
I will leave you come and make you go,
I will let you down and bring you up,
I will follow you and then go back,
I will quit you and then catch up,
You will arrive and you will depart,
You will begin and you will end,
You will fall down, and
I will pick you up and turn you
Round
And
Lead
You
Home.
Bathers
Bathers
In a new and unpolluted sea,
Fresh from vision,
You and I,
New,
Emerging,
Clinking like metal,
Shiny on the sand,
As wave-washed copper pennies
Anchored by beach lizards,
Weighted in shrouds of
Smooth rose pebbles,
Attached to
Slow-rolling flying kites
Separated by a
Gritty breeze
That winds down
The space
Between us,
As irrefutable as the Great Chinese Wall…
Evaporating sea tears
On you,
Sea tears that dry
Leaving small white
Circles of brine
Not like my tears
That remain
Forever
Undried
As I walk back into that
New and unpolluted sea
Fresh from vision.
You and I,
Old,
Converging
In the ooze of
Radiolarian skeletons
On the bottom
Of the Arabian Sea.
If I Long for that Oasis
If I long
For that oasis I call home,
That white disk edged in
Cold bursting neon,
Remember this: My last refuge is you, my love,
Primed for the onrush of my curious
And dense body
That invades your privacy
Like the echo of the pulses of
Crow wings
One second after flight
Everytime a Knot Is Undone, a God Is Released Page 11
