My dance, my bad, my deep.
I gave a sorrow opening,
loosed it on
the gap within.

Ornery. Tantrum,
layabout and cry.
Going to victim this whole long day.
Grow me kudzu, funeral bouquet

for neverending grief show. Still, got
rocker hips, roller hips, jazz
in groin and hips:,
joy ends up somewhere

when pushed from head and heart.
End up one sad grinder.  End up bad
with bad sinking in deep but still
one way to set it off and hold it back,

so then to music while still in the hole:
give my bad, my deep a resistance.
Rhythm’s a big mole digging in 
under the roots.  Charged up winner

rubbling the dark village.  Earth body
a quake cracking on the light.  When
I, frightened, shake, I still gotta dance
my dance, my bad, my deep.  My gotta happen.

The archangel
held a blazing sword
edge up.

Adam strolled along it
as he sketched Eve’s hair
from memory,

as he sketched the craze of blood
he recalled seeing
on Abel’s skin.

Walked that edge
every day for hours
never looking away

from charcoal and page.
Walked that edge
while placing his feet surely

between flames, courting burns
and severance but never closing
the deal.  Over his shoulder

I could see the outline
of the Garden.  He never
turned his head toward

or away from it.  All he could see,
apparently, was Eve’s hair and Abel’s
death.  Never a thought

for Eden, never a single line
laid down for Cain, not a glimpse
in any picture he made of the archangel,

the fire, the blade,
his pivot when he reached the end
and began to walk back.

Here was the first artist, raised
from loss and grief, enjoying the luxury
of selective memory.

As for the second artist?  I stood there wondering,
watching my father walking and mourning,
then turned and began to walk

east, back home to exile.
On the way, I made this.
This. I made this

and that’s how I came to art:
I had acted, I had suffered,
yet something still needed to be said.

Been a while since
I posted notice with
a small but bright flyer:

“Henceforth let it be known
that this S. O. B.
surrenders any compulsion
to seek and attract love.
From now on, if it finds him,
he’ll accept it
and if it doesn’t
he’ll be cool with that,
even
if it’s right there,
within reach.”

Pasted up that notice,
sat back,
waited.  

Still waiting today — 
more desperately but
as still as stone;

though the old flyers
are wind ripped, rain blotted,
and not much visible,

I am a man of my lonely,
ill-advised words and compulsion
is too easily misread from outside

to move at all upon any tug
I might feel from anyone,
any tug at all.
 
 
 

Snow at midnight;
before dawn,
blurred, bright half-moon.

No sound but wind as the light grows.
No marsh hawk, no gull or tern in sight.
No boats out there, nothing
between here, Coatue, and Pomoco Head. 

I call the bent, sugared grasses on the bluff
“the bent, sugared grasses on the bluff.”

Twenty five years ago,
I might have referred to cocaine 
in describing them.

If I’d been here in colonial days,
I might have spoken of a gentleman’s wig.

What we see doesn’t change
as much as how we describe it does.

What we see doesn’t change 
as much as how we see…

so: alone before dawn watching snow
and sea..

solitude or loneliness?
In the presence of something,
or its absence?  

That small dent
in the end of my nose?
An homage to a pock-marking
illness in childhood and to
the good aim of my neighbor
with a rock as he took the scab
clean away with one throw.
Left me with the divot scar
and my first inkling
that it might be,
at some point,
considered ugly.

But not to me,
not then at least; I wore
that perfect circle
as a proud badge of
surviving a scrape —
and later on,
when my neighbor died,
dragged by a mundane car
down a mundane street?
It was his only memorial,
the only mark he left on earth
in his eight short years here.
I honor the scar —
no ugliness in it, relic of
one violent moment
of art and skill.

When they have
no set name for us
they call us “beings,”
a simple designation
that what we are
is what we do
and what we do
is be. 

Depending on
where they see us and how
we are being, we might
instead become
“angels” or “demons.”
They don’t see
that we’re the same “beings”
named, renamed, named…

We don’t have much to say
about the choices they make
when they call us up.  
We show up.
We are.  They decide
what it means.

Don’t blame us for that —
that’s up to them.
A being is just what is,

and the naming of it
is how their past
alters their present
as it tries to own their future.
 

in retrospect
becoming a stone
was a mistake

but we learn from mistakes
so in closing let me say
I respect the lesson

next time
I will become water if 
I need patience 

or dynamite
if instead I need
to open up and move 

When first in love
we gladly live
a lot more carefully
than we do
when we are not. 

Make it last forever — drive slowly,
eat slowly, sleep
more delicately,
unsprawled,
not kicking covers or
the beloved or
the beloved’s
annoying cat.

When it comes to sex, though,
we do a lot of edge walking.
a bunch of monkey wrestling,
a heap of knot licking.  

But of course:
sex when first in love
is wild, the wild way
of spitting at death, wild
as not acknowledging
the ultimate way
these things can come to an end.

Careful, careful,
some folks say.

And we are,
just not while danger
is still rock hard
and blue
hot.

White feathers of ash;
slight heap in the hearth
stirs, settles, then stirs again.
We walk up to look at them:
no clues there as to how long ago
the burners disappeared; bricks
are cold, ash subtle and soft and
empty of meaning to our eyes.

We don’t know anything
about this abandoned house,
or about any of the masses of them
we’ve seen boarded up and left behind
during our endless travels
through this once great land.

Like thousands of nomads
in the last one hundred thousand
nomadic years, we’ve enough curiosity
to wonder at the silent graves
of the fires of those who went before us,

enough to determine
if the hearth and chimney
are sound enough
to build our new fire
on the undead ashes
of their last one,

not enough
to want to learn
why they’re gone.