Poems

We use such simple words to weave
  the tapestry of light
into our language. Red. Yellow.
  Green. Blue. Black. White.
 
But what is blue? Did Homer know
  when sailing on a wine-dark sea?
Why did he paint the sky with bronze
  and layer green with honey?
 
The ancient brain is not the new;
  when, with modern eyes, I view
the ocean and the midday sky
  they look, unquestionably, blue.
 
With other simple words, we paint
  the colors that we feel.
Sadness, joy, fear, hate,
  love: all these signs reveal
 
some inner state. But what is love?
  How can we call that one emotion
longing, ecstasy, respect,
  infatuation, and devotion?
 
I grasp with these imperfect pigments,
  try to catch the palette of
experience — and fail. What tint
  can be, unquestionably, love?
 
My blue is not a simple sine,
  nor is my love Euclidean:
no matter how I flatten it,
  my love’s oblique meridian
 
will not lie on a paper map,
  nor nanometers ever be
Pacific waves, a robin’s egg,
  or what a person meant to me.
 
Just as the different shades of blue
  have secondary colors there,
so love can be tinged green with lust
  or dyed in indigo despair
 
and still be love. Love’s many things,
  and though its boundaries aren’t defined
its subtle thread is intricately
  laced throughout the tender mind,
 
intertwining feelings that,
  at first, might seem quite different
within a tapestry of sense
  that weaves around love’s referent.
 
In that tapestry, love cries
  while flying on blue swallow’s wings;
it flowers pink in fruiting trees
  and runs with umber wild things.
 
You’re in it, too, in faded fields
  of tangled thread, a knotted part
(the untrained work of younger hands)
  whose weft still binds my heart.
 
Our love may not have been for years,
  been made, at best, imperfectly,
even at our hyperbolic
  orbits’ heated perigee,
 
and cast us both on fast and far
  trajectories to where we are:
you, caught in the gravity
  of some bright northern star,
 
and me to where I settled, bound
  with two firm feet on loving ground.
But, sometimes — when I look on high —
  I see your color in the sky.

If you had asked, twelve years ago,
exactly where I’d be today,
         I think
         I’d say
somewhere on the brink
of some discovery,
or writing my second symphony.
    But really? I just didn’t know.
 
    And if, twelve years ago, I’d read
great books, or studied more,
                   or fought
                   to score
that string quartet, or bought
some dancing shoes, or sailed the sea,
well. I don’t know where I would be.
    Maybe I’d be dead.
 
    The truth is, even now I don’t
pretend to know what I’ve become.
         I’ll say,
         in sum,
I’m happy where I am today,
and questions like that don’t bother me.
Or maybe they do bother me.
 
    You too?
         I won’t tell if you won’t.

In the window light
I am reduced
to another patron
drinking
such bitterness,
and readily.

1

On this, the planet of my choosing I am a boy, a man without his inhibitions;
And here, the trees stand unfelled by me;
And here, the angels sing unconducted;
And here, it is a glory unconducted.

The sky, a thicket of wood and light -
The ground, my heavenly body, planet of my choosing,
It draws the leaves to itself.
We bend and flex, cycles out of phase, my feet, her feet beating;

Natural, synthetic, in a consequent pulse most real, resisting much, obeying little.
And with a run I hug the ground, and with a fall;
And with my buried hands.

Dream to me sphere! Break upon my body vastness and desire, curves that defy the far call.

I observe the inwardness, and it is a moist plain
where the stars, my souls, are waiting in the cold;
My planet, my reflection, a graven image its own unshaken commandment.

And I quit it all at once; And it resumes a silent pulse;
And it is I and another body alone.
My warm hands are removed and moving, wandering and wanting unconducted.

2

Loudly and joyously I set forth,
The gift drawn, the truck started, the axe thrust to the stump;
With passing identity and waxing identity I go unto the city.

I was one to dare and break the law of dependence;
Escaping mind, yet I hope you shall be free without me,
Dependence a plague wiped from your flesh.

3

There they lie dead, the silences and inhibition;
Gyrating along lines I knew not of, and vibrating along strings I knew not of;
On echelons undreamed and unremembered do these desires sing.
I wished to wake them and they have awoken, yet it is wakefulness beyond my wakefulness —

They bring to me sensations as a caravan that brims with spices,
My long outfurled and wandering desires that are hands more than these I have grown,
That are feeling far to the others and far from the others;
Unfinished until the wild’s depths are prodded and a wild heart is calmed again.

4

That force which set this sphere in motion, that commands the waves
With one decision I arrest from its high pedestal, a scientist of my making,
That I should know better than any other the nature of my universe, to which I all along have held the key;
That I should render it, that I should unrender it.

My planet, spinning quick upon its axis, fire blazing against a different fire.
When it is extinguished, then should my planet break free of its logic,
And it is my body that shall be loosed to the farthest reaches —

Are they then departed from my will, desire from desire,
An ego flammable, to flare and trace the currents of the air,
Rising fast unto the thicket of fuel above,
Sinking fast across the bodies;

That body fixed against a stilling cold,
The liquid blinking quick to free the image sinking quickly into itself;
And up again, my newborn senses rejoice, unshackled by former desires
Replaced by these, new and stronger set desires.