She opened the door of night

She opened the door of night
And became unhinged.
Hanging upon a turning knob,
Lifting high as her children's kite
Had lifted love and then was lost.

Wheels sing with the sky,
Constellations not composed of stars
But of a billion hollowed moments.
Every thought as unconnnected
As a heart's diagram exploded.

Walking in a spiraled ring
On suspended sands in Alabama,
Her faith the duration of a flower.
In the drystone riverbeds of Babylon,
She unsieves sediments of the hour.

She made her bed at last inside
The shadows blanket thinking:
There'll be time enough tomorrow.
As the lunatic moon undid
Her countenance of sorrow.

The Mourning Rituals

The morning rituals:
Water set to boil,
The coffee measured out in spoonfuls,
Paper filters folded in half -
Because we ran out of the right ones.
It satisfies me to improvise,
To make do with less;
I wonder if there's less than this,
Less than this, I whisper
Quietly to myself.

Cat is out back
Lounging in a square of sunlight.
I open the window and meow,
Startling cat awake -
Go out to fill its bowl
As cat meows and hisses at me.
No one ever taught you how
To show proper gratitude,
I say to myself.
Then meow and hiss back

The water is boiling.
I remove it from the base
Letting it cool down some
So as not to make the coffee bitter.
Then pour it over the cone,
Adjusting my flow in
To equal the flow out.
A perfect slurry,
I say out loud to no one
And then I also add a meow.

I stir in a spoonful of sugar,
Then a spoonful of cream,
Watching the Milky Way
Spin in endless night,
Endlessly fascinated.
Never tiring of this part of my life,
Marveling like a child
At the simple daily events.
I am a child,
I think out loud.

It pleases me to bang
My spoon rhythmically around
The mug's interior listening
For the distant bell from the Monastery
And the ancient bell of the ox.
Then I hear her say, Jesus!
From the other room.
You're gonna miss this ringing
One day after I'm gone,
I say out loud.

This world is no longer home for me

This world is no longer home for me:
There's a fishing boat up in a tree,
The inverted cross of its anchor hangs
Loose as the tongue of a bell exhausted.

The neighbor's house cut in half
Exposing the unmade bed and blue sheet,
An easy chair facing a shattered TV,
A black boot standing on the stair.

The Laughing Horse gutted clean:
What remains behind is empty frame.
And once surrounded by a home,
A solitary door half opening.

Down on Tarpon street,
Beside the piles of blank debris,
The boatless fisherman drink for free:
Siren's tears from broken glass.

A hermit crab from a souvenir shop
Tumbles in a tide now amniotic,
His new home the empty shell
Of a washed up piece of plastic.

Born of Sun

Born of Sun,
Out flesh of woman,
He stands,
Sword hanging his hand
Like a curse.

Sea incarnadine,
Attacked abject rage,
Blood surf,
Wounds opening words
Between waves.

The son set
Himself against father.
Eternity paused,
Blood letting loose lost
Amidst slaughter.

Ever mutable
Memory of death,
Full fathoms mine,
Words echoing lie
Under last breaths.

Born on waves
Icarus descended,
She rides,
Pulsing tides
In vulnerable ended.

As Albert Ayler Stood

To live for the love of God.
To stand as a reflection from God.

As Albert Ayler stood
When the music moved
Through him.
As Chang Tzu's butcher slipped
His blade effortlessly inside
The spaces in between
The bones of breath.
Dancing with the ox,
Raised up on hind legs,
To Summertime.

Summetime...
In the easy evening light
Upon the killing floor
Until the sweet beast shuddered,
Let go a low moan
Sounding sigh
Unwinding
Its last breath.
As if it grasped
Its own sweet death,
Falling apart,
Being entirely separated,
A harmonic graced note
Suspended, then faded
Into blood and bone and flesh
And air.

Could George Gershwin
Have ever imagined Albert Ayler?

On Easter Sunday
In Eliot's crowded Cathedral,
The Sisters of Maculate Mercy,
Stand before the congregation,
Black veils breathing
Over faces ruined by elation,
Singing,
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

In our less than critical evasions,
We think of the voice of the Rilkean angel,
A terrible beauty uncontainable,
Reverberating in a cul de sac,
Trapped in the apse
Of this terminal musical cathedral,
Notes now not so much as fading
As collapsing inward
Under the pressure of inadequacy
Into the absolute silence of the crypt.

There is the haunting question:
When is even music inadequate
To the task of surrounding
Human experience with meaning?

Here at John Coltrane's funeral,
Thought rings with the unimaginable:
The human being is not inevitable.
Ayler's accidental notes inscribing
The sigil of our unwelcome presence
Upon the pain turned threshold
Where being itself becomes unbearable.

The punch-line always ready to pounce.
And the Pretty and Sweet and Lovely
Are now the over-painted terrors,
The wandering ghostly errors,
Singing Fuck Fuck Fuck on Easter Sunday,
Profanity now a prayer.

There is meaning.
There is meaning.
But it is a music we can barely endure,
A music we can hardly hear,
The bone's prayer -
God's ghost shuddering
Through Albert Ayler.


***

Sources and antecedent:
http://www.laughingbone.com/thelaughingbone/word/prose/a-beautiful-lie-but-beautiful-nonetheless

The Gemini

For my sister. 



When I was a child,
My mother would take
My sister and I
Out in a boat,
Where we would float
Across the sky.

Those technicolor blue
Texas evenings,
Listening to cicadas sigh
In pulsing waves,
Shivering the world
Star bright.

She took us to the Gemini,
Lit green coils for the night,
Twining us in smoke
As we lay upon a blanket
Waiting for the light.

That distant music
From across the lake,
A sunken song of revery.
And my father's voice -
The man with no name
Speaking straight to me.

Going home
She'd hide us in the trunk
With her wedding dress and tailored history.
She'd never forget us -
She said - forging
Our sorrow in that tragedy.

We could hear her
Wondering where we were,
Calling our names as she jangled her keys.
Laughter gave us away -
She was always surprised to find us still there,
Adamant in her memory.

You once thought death would save you

You once thought death would save you
As a thousand prayers reconcile into one
And the rattling breaths of the old man
Shake in the bed of the child unborn.

Her dresses stand still in the closet
And her presence hangs still in perfume.
The dog's bed is unmade in the corner
And the cat will not enter the room.

Come walk with me down to the garden
Where she watered the bones of our love,
Where the silence of her unsaying
Was traced in the dead leaves' dust.

Her hair is like the moss in the river,
A red ribbon in the red robin's nest.
Where is the life you have lost in the living?
Where is the love you have lost in her death?

The Lighter

I’m reading the words of a dead writer,
Soft her voice sings new in my head.
Between the pages I find a lighter
To show the pathway to the dead.

How comes the light from this device?
She just hands me a piece of gold
For passage through this world of lies,
To warm my mind when it is cold.

With this, I wander through worlds of night,
Over mountain peak and ocean wave,
I’m lost and found in desert’s bright
And time for got is not for gave.

And the writer’s device to light the dead
Was stolen by her whose words I read.


See: https://dreamsofawakingman.blogspot.com/2018/04/the-odd-tool-to-operate-on-dead.html

Under a darkening sun

the miller makes a promise
his daughter in the balance
paper under stone as the great wheel
thunders round again
crushing seed down into dust

lilly pads and lotus
great watery fields of green
with blood laced white petals unfolding
under the immaculate unconcern of the sun

she dreams on the edge between
half above half submerged half remembering
orbs of eyes radiant with indolent avarice
in the large mouthed features of the fish
figuring eights beneath the drawn down faces
of the choiring frogs leaping
in lazy coils from pad to pad
the adversary waiting just beneath

the mill pond contains her history
the spring babelling out from under fallen leaves
she sits interpreting whispered prophecy
about the mounding and the making of the dam
the fool's desire to arrest the riverring
to capture and contain the night sky's twire
in the stillness of the world's darkening
bones planted high up there
as in the deep down of things
seeds of future reckoning informing
the pulsing chirp of cricket’s wings
as the day and night are evening

the water wheel turns
the waterfall is falling
and as stone rolls over stone
she overhears again the oath
spoken all too easily
with too many words
each new one further
diminishing
the vow he made to her

now the adversary stands before the door
the miller holding her bright spun hair
as if this golden offering could buy more
time but the adversary smiling says there
is no more time as the great wheel ceases
its constant rolling turning
to thundering quiet

her soft hair comes undone
under a violent hand



See: https://dreamsofawakingman.blogspot.com/2018/04/under-darkening-sun.html

The Tiger's Tail

I

How with this brokenness is the dream sustained?
How does this story go?
These memories that with I alone remain,
Tired out, sleepless, old.

Sheer plodding along through plowed down verse,
Soiled, abused and overtold,
Meat falls from my bones with a curse
Only seeming, never shown.


II

I found my way into the Tiger’s den
As he was dreaming of the Rose,
Clasped my fingers around his tail,
A symmetry in repose.

And what could I do but transcribe old themes?
God’s starbright skull still full of seeds,
The flesh, the bone, the Tiger’s Dreams,
The cut, the cry, and the wound that bleeds.

And the Fool that stole the bone,
And the shell that cracked the sea,
In this abysmal dark I am not alone
The dreaming god is here with me.


III


The tail twitches in my hand,
The rough beast come round at last
To face me where I stand
Tied securely to this mast.

I’ll not let go again
As I have done so many times before.
I’ve honed my mind with discipline
To endure the Tiger’s roar.