Let My Words Be Food For Gods

us

There is a glow about you

I have meant to see sometimes

from the corner of my face

looking at you on the sly.

What is it exactly

that you have compressed into a thing so small

as I?

We are well trod and practiced at being uniformly

nothing; and less: an us;

shod like horses; trained to excuses;

steered by the bits of iron in our mouths.

Our biblical truths disgust

and digest us.

Our every nod is a lie; says

"Of course; of course."  Damn our "of courses."

Look at my eye,

its reflection

of You

as big as a huntress moon

still floating by day of a June or July.

I will see you always surrounded

by a summer haze

of blue-white sky

resting atop the backs of horses.

(from Uncollected Poems)

Let My Words Be Food For Gods

Let my words be food for gods.

Let them be for apples in the cracked hands

of succulence after thirst;

for the dripping tongues of dogs

in dreams of labor in the shade

beneath the warbling birds.

Let them bring platter on platter from the brown hands of maids

in suggestion of immortality gained

by the sting and the blood of long slender blades,

followed by feathers and palm fronds fanning

a drowsy eyelid squawking at the sun.

Let them sing where all have trod;

through what laborious fields

and long ordeals

through barbed-wire runs

beyond the tongues of stuttering guns;

let them say

where all have gone, and slipped their chains,

and come up angry out of graves.

And if I

have sometimes sat through sermons unafraid;

amused myself where others knelt and prayed,

ashamed;

and if I have sometimes raged against them all,

fist and elbows to a wall,

insisting upon my own significance;

if I have sometimes lived in basements, small;

and again have towered over cloudy Judgements

many heavens tall:

Let my words be grain for all;

bare images

sprouting from the plains where heads have lain

and cattle call

and grasses grow up straight without a name.

(from Uncollected Poems)

Imagine

Imagine heaven as a state of mind,

and the arrow of time is irrelevant.

Who points here and there

in avoidance of keeping a promise

is an idiot:

The eyes tell their own story.

Lips are vagrant.

The tongue hides

like a turtle's tail.

And the warrior sun circles

round and round

in the dust of its own chariot.

Between you and me

and the rest of the world,

the secret to keeping a moment alive

is to see the kingdom of

possibilities in it.

Leave nothing outside.

Start with Pride.

Stride.

Stride.

Stride.

And always remember:

A sentence begins and ends

with the same period.

(from Uncollected Poems)

And A Cloud Brings Rain

Love is such a puny word

for so much praise.

It hardly leaves my tongue,

my face;

falls like a lugnut in the mud;

and I feel ashamed.

Water on the highway splutters and dumps

buckets until my hair dies hanging

crucified on the hillside

of my divine disgrace.

Every passing motorist is an eyeball witness

gazing long; windshield wipers

hang their tongues like tired dogs;

and love is standing there with folded arms.

How curious,

having thought to save a stranded tourist

standing so dejected in the rain:

and such a pretty little image to a passing sponge

of a brain; but I confess:

I am only so-so mechanically inclined,

and the rain

can be relentless.

(from Uncollected Poems)

Pretending to Be a Fly

Every spider is an artist,

more or less.

It takes a Mind

to spin a web,

with no help from a scientist

And I confess,

it would take a bird

to teach me

how to build a nest.

A beaver,

knowing nothing of its university,

comprehends an architecture

nonetheless.

And I,

a beastly creature

and a delicate thinker,

with pen poised over my own designs,

pretending to be a fly,

must get about my business

with the rest.

Let come what fortune

or what disaster,

it takes some kind of start

to be a master.

(from Uncollected Poems)

Undiminished

Tonight is for fire

and blackened stones.

For the bringing on of stars by campfire light,

and the anger of sparks let go like crazy bees

into the beards of hemlock trees.

A weakening moon will be here soon,

is trying to stand up straight, still

fat with child:

an effulgent light, undiminished,

like a lantern flung in the trees igniting

a slap in the face of night.

Cold chills milling in the air from the lake steeping

deeping into ancient evening

wrap around the arms and breathe out drunken treaties,

and cedar kindling burns the face,

fierce and friendly.

A frenzy of war-thoughts,

mean and stingy, are suddenly

standing up too tall between bundling blankets

of old mens' bones wrapped in mumbling

that meant to speak up loud for peace,

but sit there chewing on strips of beef.

Let the young thoughts have their say,

like thin sticks crackling and burning

where orange embers of old logs lay:

old mens' thoughts are for old men's keeping.

They build on one another like stones making;

but smoke is twisting, and in your eyes:

Go away!

Tonight is for the unafraid;

for looking to shadows cast by leaping flames,

and fingers of pharaohs aimed like arrows

teaching the children to remember

that stars have names;

are distant relations.

And now the night is a crazy horse,

and the headlights of a car with a gruff engine

are throwing the shadows of trees all around

in coming out late from the city

to a campsite reservation.

Tomorrow will be nothing left

but the ash of reason;

 shafts

of mountain sunlight dusting

the very tops of trees without a season.

(from Uncollected Poems)

Rendering to Caesar

My gilded estate

has no porticoes and pillows;

no nameplate

clasped in the claws of lions;

no marble or bronze,

or sprawling lawns;

no sprinklers timed to wake up late.

My estate is but a breadth of golden light

on sudden intake

when I am falling backward into faith

in arms

strong as promise

given

by unblinking eyes

and lips of slate.

My estate is granite.

It is the realm of some god whose gaze

I equate with the rush of a river

and I

am standing half-way in it,

divine in my own right,

wet with fright,

and crossed by the current.

Sovereignty,

after all these hard and trying years,

is just a word:

My estate is senate.

(from Uncollected Poems)

Something Wet as Borneo (a vignette)

      "Historically, the leading edge of thought has always moved around a bit.  A new idea takes hold of inquisitive minds, and suddenly semi-naked natives are mapping the heavens and building pyramids in the middle of a jungle or a desert; hackers of heads are building empires out of brick and bone and blood and mortar; knights and troubadours are gallivanting around the countryside in noble quest of higher order; monks and rabbis at their chemistry are counting bumps on heads, or clumps of angels or elements or lumps and beads and threads of anything that adds up to a quantifiable intelligence. Civilizations come and go like stubborn fads.  The divine right of kings and queens and popes and all robes laureate are basically a fashion show:  they went out with a 'told you so.'  Peasants basically run the show now, or just now figuring out they always did.  Once upon a time, long, long ago, I think we must have lived upon the world as in a dream, and history is the fleshing-out of painted strokes, for we are still world-making, and this morning's episode still has the ancient scent of something wet as Borneo or Mesopotamia; something Chinese even here in Idaho; there are fingerprints on everything:  the dream itself is biting at is fingernails and thinking, thinking...."

(from an unpublished manuscript:  "Genesis:  A Social Vision") 

Open Road and other poems

Open Road

What if God was only a tall, tall man

who gave us a first idea of ourselves

And left the scene with another man

a very long time ago;

Just another George, or another Sam?

Or, heaven knows,

A Judy?

And the only overarching Plan there ever was

came down to you and me:

An open road

and a many-headed journey?

Who am I

at three a.m.

I'd like to know, breathing mist

upon a cold and unreflecting window?

Looking out at nothing.

I am my own religion now;

my own confusion and philosophy.

I live for making poems,

and would hear a heart sing.

Maybe my own, God forbid.

(So selfish of me.)

As far as I can tell,

this is the barest truth of things:

We speculate around the bend

what no one really knows.

And if we cannot make ourselves believe

one or another very important thing,

We pretend,

and put ourselves to bed unnecessarily guilty.

Ah, my boys and girls,

don't you see:

There are only straight and narrow Rules.

Why,

Even the very wind must curl

itself around a tree.

(from Uncollected Poems)

The Chapel

The kindness of the chapel's grin
almost invites a curious traveler in.

The stained-glass eye on verge of tears
says, "Amen, amen," at passers-near

Like passing off a kind hello
that busy people never hear.

A friend to everyone, I hear; and still
a singer of hymns, a prayer of prayers.

A kind old uncle with a hat:
that's the kind of chapel I like looking at.

A sidewalk wide enough for all to talk
and disagree, the way a parson parts his hair.

I like that.

But the organ groans too much of sin
as if it's leaning in the wind.

The paint is cracked and white-washed thin,
but a lived-in house with a welcome mat

Rolled out flat for stomping-in
of every stray cat, tramp, and next-of-kin,

Cannot be all bad now, can it, Jim?
No, not all bad.  Not all bad.

But don't tell that to them.

(from Uncollected Poems)

The Air is Full of Memory

I have been one

to contemplate a thing made

brighter than any sun.

Just there,

between the molecular cracks

of someone else's oxygen.

You see,

I have already lately fathomed

what these two precious blue

eyes lost in years of graying after

someone else's heaven.

I am almost certain

this must say something charming about me

no one will yet dare to deny

or to confirm:

That where one day's effort

faltered,

you could say I stumbled once

Upon.

And now the Road holds open promise

where my Roman feet have wandered;

turning West

where every New World word is pregnant as an egg

and my tongue is thick with dust

of yellow European yesterdays

and marrow on marrow of tomorrow's African

cinnamon dawns and saffron dusks; it burns

in contemplation of a simple moment's

contribution made Immortal.

It IS.

My body but yearns for a home and a bed.

But sleeping blinks away the poem

...lived.

(from Uncollected Poems)

This Moment Also

In putting wings upon the air
I am convinced and well pleased
with these Creations
of My Mind Also;

That if what lives, lives on
then so, too, the earnest prayer
of This too-dazzling-to-believe-is-real and rare
rosy gem of Time, This
Moment Also.

Even dead
the falling bud of every memory tipped and spilt
is equally red:
it burns itself into the ground
like any seed.
It makes a bed.

I like to look inside and down upon
wherever I have bled and laid one, just to say:
I lived there.
Me!
And there,

There,
I Live On.

(from Uncollected Poems)

Delirious

One by one, the days

like dominoes

lean upon the sweating shoulders of those

still standing;

 clones

almost to a man of them;

a thin brigade of toppled bones

and what is left of a march of dots

against uncertain endings;

comrades

left behind to follow after,

some uncertain line of them ahead;

diary pages blowing in the wind;

and poor planning

is the lame excuse of every man.

How curious,

 the way a shouldered rifle

seems to bend;

the driving design of falling forward;

the dead weight of an only friend.

Ah, but this is not the end,

for we have made ourselves a promise:

Defend, we said, the dreams of fathers

and of prophets.

If I could,

I would drink straight from their faucets.

(from Uncollected Poems)

Accidentally Conscious

Anything Electrical

There is a place in dreams

where men get out at night

and walk as lightning.

Morning comes,

they hover over steering wheels

looking up wide-eyed at Nothing.

They search through static on their radios,

feeling frayed along the edges, frantic

for anything electrical....

(from "Pan!  On being a nature-god with cloven hooves

and a fondness for woodland nymphs.")

Accidentally Conscious...

      "Anyone can mind a stream of thought, collapse it into quantum particles, perceive it as moments of environment, and interact with their own redundancies made tangible in a 24-hour cubicle.  In fact, we are all doing just exactly that.  We are so good at it by now, we run our minds on automatic; we are knocking about in our own rinse cycle. Permanently pressed.  But most of us are so caught up in the Stream, living in circles, it seldom occurs to us to step back a bit to observe ourselves in the act of making conscious what is just a trickle.  We are rather semi-conscious most of the time, more doodlers than actual artists; or accidentally conscious more often than on purpose:  we always surprise and delight ourselves when we get a bright idea thunked out several lifetimes after it was started; or when a fortuitous event unfolds straight out of the blue, after so much time has elapsed we plumb forgot that that was where we threw it.  We tend to think of life as something that 'just happens.'  But nothing sticks until we glue it:  we get exactly what we concentrate on... we just have a short attention span.  And, forgive me for saying it, but we're rather addicted to our points of view....

      "But one who has learned the value of concentration upon an ideal is a pioneer on the only frontier there ever was:  a meaningful moment.  Anything less -- an 'act of God,' a 'random occurrence' -- is a self-defecating affront to logic.  It cleaves a mental kingdom in half to deny one's Source; and then there is only a concentration on habit.  Religion as a club-foot, and amputated science, will never pave the way for we who walk as giants."

(from an unpublished manuscript:  "Genesis:  A Social Vision")

Earth Prime and other poems

The Four Seasons

Said one leaf to another:

"So...

this is autumn."

Said the snowflake to the icicle:

"Dang!"

Said the radish seed to the onion seed

planted in the garden:

"Race you to the top!"

Said the sunflower

to the flowers in the shade:

"Hey."

Said the body to the grave:

"We'll talk about it

in the morning, babe."

(from Uncollected Poems)

Earth Prime

The bullfrog

 makes a space around him

with his bulbous talk.

No one enters through the gate

without a password.

He sits upon his one

Gibraltar of a rock.

The Moon illuminates

all round

a whole platoon of monstrous

shapes,

pays them all in gold

doubloons,

but no one ever finds him out.

No shape was ever made

that matches, pound for pound,

his one hypnotic thought.

He sits

upon the whole world

as an Egg

that incubates

but never hatches.

Mosquitoes seek to take

the truth out with their long syringes;

but people nowadays 

stay barricaded indoors

when black-clad crickets try to lure them out

into the portal

where the bullfrog's serenade

initiates the startled

trippers in the dark into the hole

of sound

where the world was started.

(from Uncollected Poems)

A Nation of Foragers

I feel the coming on

of a glorious temper.

I see the Capitol dome in flames.

The Monopoly board is two boards now

and sailing across the Thames.

Paris is a shit hole

and nurse to a plague.

It's a new world now.

Sweep away

The dead horse piles:

the marriage vows, the marriage miles.

We were very good

as liars.

Now we are caught with our pants

down.

A twist of the knife

and the Senate is dead.

And no one will take your money now.

(from Uncollected Poems)

A Strange Attractive Power

It is the cocktail hour.

Too late

for sneaking up the chimney, bounding

out of the bubbly, over the alley,

over the rooftops

of the human

race.

I am not one for saying grace.

I am not one for saying much of anything.

But I will Stand My Place.

I will hammer four stout nails

into the corners of my face.

I will call everyone Bob, and shake

each hand like an ape, and nod

at everyone and everything

to keep myself awake.

I will stay calm.

I will prop an elbow on the mantle,

and stand as if I wore a pistol.

I will allot myself one glass

and sip it all night long,

and no one will be the wiser.

I will say I am a poet

when they ask.

(They always do.)

My eyes will drive home, one by one,

a volley of wooden stakes.

I will be a lone white

poodle.

I will grow smaller

as the evening wears on,

until I disappear

out on the balcony,

where stars, I hear, are strewn for the take

like shimmering diamonds on blue velvet,

and thoughts achieve a strange attractive power;

where higher noon is upside down;

and the Moon...

the Moon is a silver dollar.

(from Uncollected Poems)

Electrum

A flower is a pretty thing,

a fine and dandy weed; why,

there is not anything more dazzling to the eye

(within the range of a devic being)

for a devious being to be.

But I,

being a right stout fellow

and a walker over these,

I prefer the bee

and all things too electrical to a mind

to merely standing in a crooked line.

Things that sit well with their own image

tend to agitate me just a little.

I have a mind for black

and a fist for yellow.

I would have the sound of these 

so loud I could not think

without it causing trouble.

I would have swarms of these, and double!

Triple!

Air so thick with thieves

the very molecules would be honey!

Why, I would live and breathe in Nature's

amniotic tummy!

Breasts are disappointing

when you're down to just a nipple.

Love is disappointing

were it that simple.

Me, I would eat bugs

and sell my belly for a hive.

Damn all grand things, and big

beautiful lies.

I think I will not believe anything

that does not crawl in me alive!

(from Uncollected Poems)

Sunbather

I will go out into the garden

and fill a bowl of bright green peas;

and fondle every ripe tomato

till I ought to be embarrassed.

I'll walk right through the sprinkler

on my way to check the carrots;

thump each chest of melon

to see which ones are honest.

I'll check for lice in every

little green-haired head of lettuce;

and walk the ditch a mile or more

to clean the grates, and learn the frogs

back into water (they'll be walking upright

any day now

at the rate they're getting smarter).

And should I chance to startle

that bright green snake of late,

sunbather,

why, I'll strip down to my honest socks

and lay right down beside her.

(from Uncollected Poems)

Fame

The rooster crowing

seems to say

I have no feathers

of my own

for showing.

As if the Sun and he alone

were made for glory.

I pause a moment,

listen,

but I am not swayed.

He tells the same old story:

of light that curls itself into a ball,

rises early,

circles 'round the world

in no particular hurry,

nestles in the Great Nest of the West

with an exceptional flurry!

Just another kind of rooster, really:

masculine, tobacco-chawing;

spitting shadows at the ground;

jawing.

Like the strutting Sun at noon,

he seems to wait for my applause.

But at the moment

I am feeding half a dozen little chicks;

I think

they mean to follow me around

the long duck pond.

Anyway,

I have a mind for making up

its own Resolve.

It takes a long time growing.

(from Uncollected Poems)