Venite adoremus

this evening the sun descends,
a heap of fire, first star-sparks sprightly crackle
over the silent snow-capped evergreen
like vigil pyres of herald hosts,
and all this agony of heaven leaves at last a pink blush
brushed across the westward sky
child sleeping gentle on the earthly breast

advent passes in the window just behind

the computer screen

how simple to miss god with us.

An attempt at some Christmas Guitar

What Child is This/Greensleeves

Borrowing heavily from a Carissa's Weird tune.

Something isn't there.

Shoveling Snow

In the cold and dark with the wind
pouring out from behind the house
the snow falls, falls and I
bend, rasp my shovel on the sidewalk
under the white blanket like a final
breath and the snow covers over the hidden world
soft, beautiful, and cold
a marble for the gusting pyg-
malion air. the gentle earth is sorry that I
give my warmth up to the sky
throwing this load like salt
over my shoulder for the voice of the wind
to scatter like particles of common grace
upon the silent sleeping world.
how the eternal lightness of the firmament
tugs now at my ragged gasps.

Chiefly Concerning the Rutabagas

At the nordic
themed Christmas party
you enjoyed the mashed rutabagas and
the purse of your lips as you did
and the curve of your cheek, your hair
drawn back in the candlelight cause me
to digress
as this
is chiefly concerning the rutabagas

which were once the main commercial crop
in the tiny Danish immigrant town in which I was also raised
and on which I, a schoolboy, did a history project,
interviewing an elderly fellow who used to work
the rutabaga fields. I thought, when I went
to his home to talk to him that he would be glad to wax
nostalgic and warm to the tale,
but it was quite different
he did not remember this topic fondly for some reason.
Athelred was his name, call him Red, and he was unready
to reveal the exciting days of the rutabaga.
Here I had thought
that was the joy of old men,
and so I was deeply disappointed,
but again,
this is chiefly concerning the rutabagas,

of which he did tell this tale:
that when the warehouse where the rutabagas waited
with their purple tops for the trains to take them
to the unsuspecting boys and girls of America--yes,
when it caught fire, the wax, you know, young man
in which they are shipped, to preserve their pale hide,
ran down the streets like a Dansk Pompeii
(I am adding this for poetic effect)
and into the sewers, a very good place for liquid wax,
but when it cooled and stopped the whole town up
people got so sick of rutabagas that they never
wanted to see their pasty white forms again
and so the warehouse stood empty, got old
and romantic enough to interest me
which is why I talked to Red
who, in his younger days would probably
have been equally distracted by
the way your eyes so infuse this air
that when I breathe its warmth
into my lungs it almost stops my breath
(I was going to say like sewers filled
with rutabaga wax,
but that is enough
concerning the rutabagas).

When your eyes can't feel to weep

I will say what use
is it to dispute
with you, sitting on my stomach like
a hundred-pound of feathers
I would rather rearrange this icarus
like, the wax of my thought soft, soft
the wax of our faces let us set to the sun

run with me, stretch your arms wide too
now the wind moves, alive with the unknown
particles of energy--how i feel you beside me
bathed in plastic lightwave beam
how I know your gold-droplet eyes again alive
--no

not tears these are, but the wake of blazing dream.

On the occassion of the creation of the grand amorphous Christmas constellary

We strung lights
starting too late in the evening
and it grew dark before we had finished

we had shaped and wrapped the strings intricately
not accounting for the space between the lights
and as the last pink cloud banks broke for the coming night
and we plugged in the last link of string, sitting back to admire
it became clear to us that it would take all the imagination of ancient
astronomers to decipher our intent.

I know nobody can sing the blues like Willie McTell

But I still tried.

In poor taste

How we argued then
while we cleaned the house and cooked
and got ready for the aunts and uncles
argued over whether we were doing this right
and all the years ingrained in us by mothers
fathers spurred us along like Montague and Capulets

and we discoursed on cranberry sauce
and how I liked the cheapest kind
that comes canned and bland, jellied
tasting of horse hooves and tin
and upon sweet potatoes a la marshmallow
and you recommended something more interesting
requiring fresh ingredients and careful processing
and I relented and it flopped
because it wasn't what people remembered
and it amazed us both to see the certainty
which attended these expressions de la palette

and so I wondered if those with impeccable fine taste
are simply those who have forgotten
but you pointed out it could have gone back for generations.

The difficulty of belief on a sunny Sunday morning.

He looked up at her over his newspaper and took a sip of coffee, rich and dark against the white glaze of the cup. She had gotten another poem published, and now he could see that people were starting to pay attention. And what of that; no one deserved it more, he thought.

And yet he couldn't suppress a certain irritation--after all, he had always felt himself the keener mind, had almost always prevailed in their various discussion (with a carefully tender tactfulness, of course). But as he looked at her now, with a fresh realization of her depth of understanding despite all her flakiness, he began to be almost overcome with the feeling that her innocent air and her sudden keen interest in the uncovered beauty of what to him were mundane moments was something that he could never have, and so he felt the need to goad her a bit.

"How is it," he asked, "that someone as intelligent and, seriously now, artistically brilliant as you can still go along with all that nonsense?"

"What nonsense?"

"You know what I mean--religious nonsense: signing crosses and eating wafers and sprinkling water and proclaiming the three-in-one this and the virgin-born that. And here all this time, as you know, the church has gone about beheading people and burning them and stealing and enslaving them--robbing them at the very least, with no remorse, each week."

"Alright, come on, we've been through all this before. Wait a minute; where does, how did you put it, artistic brilliance, come into it? That sounds new," she said with a teasing smile, but also a slight blush.

"Well, simply because it seems like intelligent people, artistic people, people who know things, are the ones who always break free of it, break away, drink the hemlock, declare the sun the center of the solar system, stand up for knowledge, expose the bigotry and hypocrisy that the rest of the people are blindly, maybe even willingly, taken in with--they even adore it, and think it's the height of godliness. Maybe they can't be blamed, I mean, I certainly don't look down on anyone simply because--but people who simply shut their eyes, that's the worst of all!"

He could see that he had pricked her at least a little bit, and felt both satisfied and ashamed at the same time. But she turned from the window, morning sun streaming across her shoulders, and looked at him with a kindness and confidence that was touching, and gave her face almost a radiance.

"It may be that intelligent people, as you call them, will see the ugliness that creeps around behind a lot of things, and maybe it's even good that they do. But as far as I can see, art, poetry, or even just a simple, satisfying life, is simply a matter of paying attention to things. I mean, not just bad things, but to really look honestly at it, it's hard to go about berating everyone and everything. If you really want to know, I think that at the bottom, an honest life is where you accept the things you are given. And I think what you are given is each moment as if it were a message from God. You know, growing up, how they teach us that the whole world is a general revelation of God? Well, lately I've been thinking there's more than a logical proof of existence in it. What kind of a God would be that neurotic? I think it's personal, and artistic brilliance, as you call it, is simply the act of paying attention."

Of course he loved her in his own way, and at that moment, how could he help it? And he actually wanted to believe her. Still, he tried to keep up with the news, with politics, the academic world, and so forth, he tried to pay attention, to read the consumer reports before purchasing, and he just couldn't see how any of it had to do with God or beauty or personal messages he should sit around waiting for. It isn't that he thought the world mechanistic, or that he was somehow a strictly rational being--I'm not a nihilist, he thought--it's just: I love her now, but I'm not about to think she's suddenly going to ascend into heaven, just because she happens to be standing in the window in the morning of a sunny day.

Thanksgiving

Is a feast to the cornucopia of blessings
each one I see, all buttered and browned,
brothers and sisters in rustic crown, take up this horn
and blow shrill notes to say,
"I am thankful for you and you and you"
potato, fowl, and bitter fruit
grum, garrum, feel the drum
of my stomach, rollicking in this
bacchic fun!

To my infant daughter

On the day you were released
from the hospital for home
I went to the parking ramp in a daze
that anything in the world could be
like the thick dirty cement on the second level
the scent of your newborn skin an amnesiac
to the reality that whirred in the street traffic
with you strapped and snuggled in the backseat
driving like your bildungsroman was the scant mile to our garage

Yet I couldn't help but be conscious of your gift
more love than I can safely hold.

In the night the air is heavy

yet how it sings, the traffic thinned still whisks
the rain off the slick black back of Portland Avenue
like heavenly music and heavily through the window glass comes,
my own gut like a fine guitar reaches out
its fleshly grain all a-quiver; the night is dark, dark
and deep as the earth how will you know above
from below?
there are scarce lines here with heaven reaching down
each molecule of air, moving through this breath, incarnate
enfleshed
holy angelsong,
oh peace upon this earth!

All Hallows Eve

I have no use for these sentiments
that coil and clew like dew beads
of beetle black, raised from a breath of th'eve
even your gran knew this is not right

now beat a gramm'ry liturgy, with grass blade
aspergil what rises from the midnight dew
all the spirits of the dead set to humming
with their sweet chirrups the damp air resonating
around a candle's light together recite
hallowed be this night.

To a Pine Seed Bug, October 23

The sun's adieu is hard
on you, your steps slowed,
you carefully claw along
this southern wall, raw wind
falling across your narrow back
and blowing a faint scent of evergreen
to me,

in the wet cold, as dull leaves damply
flop to the frost-wracked garden. Tell me,
What will you do with your mottled dun crust
to escape the autumn's lust?

Morning

This morning overcast I can’t
Tell where the city’s smoke starts and
Clouds begin, where the sun’s best effort
Meets a pale end and all the forms of night
Still light as fog creep across my heart

And how could I describe in these words
What each of us know, as the city bus lurches
And we draw to us the comfort of our coats
The comfort as of the darkest sorrow’s vein of hope
How could I describe in words, why try
As though you don’t know your own as I.

When we pulled over on account of the romantic landscape

we stopped the car
and looked at the meadow with its wildflowers
like stars the earth sweetly wove into her hair
our veins were woven together where our hands silently met
and we opened our doors to play this scene we had rehearsed in dreams

the air was hot like a slap
and left our ears ringing with the buzz
of countless insects rising from the field in waves
like the heat of the black asphalt at our backs
the heat of this incessant romance, almost a choking
each molecule of air cased in sweat
sweet as it was, we left it at that.

Arms and the man

I will sing it like this:
the man reaching, backlit,
to his son's hand, arm stretching in the autumn sun,
last rays like leaves adorn the day
and the dark body of the image
the memory itself stretches long, long
etched there against the pavement
like a print in wet concrete
and I know I will come back to this, how it will
stain my eyes as I watch this boy
pass his own milestones.

Arms and the man I sing
and how we know our own
duty by these things.

To a tomato plant

The squirrel, I believe it was,
chewed through half your fruit

nature not want to waste,
it left half for you, still hanging

on the vine, slowly turning a sickly
motly of brown and foaming white

(the day before, seeing the perfect flesh
round, red, and firm, I soliloquized on

how this miracle was produced by you, proud plant,
distilling dust to the muted blush of this solitary
remaining child clinging to your hands.)

Is it this or the autumnal chill that pulls
you, wilting, to give yourself back to the soil?

Ars Poetica #263

How I feel this
late in the night
like unconscious words
setting the body to humming

I feel this like when you speak
from your hundred years dead mouth
and the words are warm still, warm,
the library all afire with song

I feel this, scratching through these veins
like a quill tip stretching ink 'cross parch-
ment sheaves, how I feel in the night
these dead hands shaking me awake,
clasping mine as I write.

Hootenanny!

Harmonica practice.

Dog Summer

The poetry of unconscious words
floats up with the rise of the pavement's heat
swirls round the changing leaves that measure
the sun's leaving, brushes them all aside
wisping like the beards of a thousand wags.

How I will measure in teaspoons this morning's sunshine

but there is no language that will express this
the simple peace of your breath and the warmth
you leave when you rise, early, to bathe, step lightly down
the stairs, towel turbaned round your head
greeting the morning while I lie abed.

Yet how sweet you looked in the Summer's last blush

How can you say to love the night not the moon,
we without our hands twined
the skim of love culled
off each moments depart.
What use is this heart
to pump my cracked hull
all a-creak with the cleats of my spine
as I stoop to seek the season's last bloom?

Aubade

Come
sing a new song for this morning
for the bonds of heaven struck
like bells with this ball of fire
each note is a gift, like all things that are
up from the darkness of your gut and blazing
through the dust of your too silent throat

listen
if you can you can know
how this is the same song
that could not be silent in the first dark
smothered in the deep water
each note, each you and me a gift
to the empty world.

i will reach for you when
you arise, though we stand on a nameless shore
surrounded by unknown tides--
you sing like a fetal heart jump-started
by the memory of the receding cry
that shattered star-waked from the void.

sing a new song, bid the sun arise

For Memorial Day, 2009

The sun has left the memory of its new born strength
in the dark air that blows boughs
caught all around a streetlight's aural glow
stirring the shadows below, how the night lengthens
the lines that leaves make

i take a trunk in my two hands, raise
my head to the flowing sky, all around me the spirits fly
tree-crown sends its own wild cry and my hair
could stand electrified, my hair could flow

like when, hanging dog-like out my window
it blew around my head as I crossed ford parkway bridge heading home
the open river sending chill blasts of wind up to shake me
down
it shook me down to tears, like your memory with new born strength
taking me in it's bony arms, holding me to its wind-whistled no-thing ribs.

morning glory

you reach up for the morn
shorn slivers of moon strewn curling down your shoulders
like parted sepals

calyx cast aside like night
corolla crowned with morning light.

Updated old song

God's Love on the TV Screen

Song for my Children

You are surrounded by love.

Advent

the angel came in the night
or it might have been the day.
we had no warning. we were waiting.
we had no sign on the lintel.
we were waiting for this child to come.
I didn't think to check my hope
that it would simply live.

Fare thee well, hair stylist in the second story window

The snow on Franklin Ave. had
us all stop and go and I glanced up
to the picture window
where you stood with your back arched and your hands
hair-woven I said farewell
as I trained my eyes back to the tail lights
22nd street stoplight softened with snow
like feathery '80s hair, big like that

big like this: every moment styled
with the gel of too-thick sensibility has a hold--"I'd
stop the world and"--that won't quit
until it's just--"melt with you"--
cut so too let your scissor
sing a farewell to the falling locks

I feel the cold
on my new head of hair
and I feel the air the air the air.

Methuselah

Back in college, term papers
had me up almost two days and nights;

I stumbled back to my room almost
full of hours as Methuselah of decades,
understood a little why
we yield finally to our rest.

First Snow

then light from ground to night
sky, the city
rising into the air
god looks down upon the weary world
but rejoice! our saintly head
rests upon this halo bed and hell
has no fury muffled
in this silent white and sterile light
rejoice, and open one sleepy eye
like still-green grass peeping through
this frosty metaphor, and kiss me a long good-
night.

The song will remind us

our love like blank bars doubled
over this sheet, each thought springing
like perfect circles running the length of our measures
when you move i will jump too
i will reach up to you

we'll warble like fats on the piano
we'll rag all through the dry air and blow down
the empty streets of a dusty town
we'll rag like red satin there

reach down for me
I'll swing my arm from my knees
and we will be the action of our scene
the song will remind us how
to move here
reach for me and we will dance down all the evening air

Great clips

called from People
magazine and crying kids
by a

forgive me if i consider you
in terms of universals
and ignore everything actual about you

a member of that class
which prompts the rusticistic brush
which fires the noble imagination
with images of sheperdesses

start your clipper and scissor
and pull back my hair
long as a son of David's, caught
in the tree of your fingers,
feet kicking, and washed in your simple
friendly chatter

the Christ made himself lower than the angels
and I sit here like a cloaked Zeus
and if I don't respond to you, my dear,
it's just from the thunder ringing in my ears


good god, lower than the angels
real shepherd, god I thought you were
like a hippie
all strangers here, we are
strangers in this familiar land, rolling
on wheels of zeal, heads high

sit me down for an absolute
haircut,
raise me from dirt
wind whistling like the spirit of god
over the water spritz
your people are good.
they are.

After a while the rain stopped

with the windows down in the rainy dusk
and the road glinting by the cracks of the clouds
a crowd of buildings cracks where the railway ran
sedentary trains rust
leaning on grain elevator curves
i will dip my two fingers down from the interstate bridge
and what is it that draws my hand up like a shamaan over the scene
to feel the spirits dying and all the dry words of the day
swept back into the space our wheels make.

A meditation upon the signs of this holy law of love

Reason is the raisin
of the grape of passion
set in the sun of passing time

why is it that the law decides
the fate of us, criminals for all our lusty flesh?
It is well-ordained thus, since the barristers
are from the same fruit.

I found a grape with three seeds
encircled in one skin, on the vine
twelve more, clustered with forty-four.
and then I did not count this out, truly,
for our world must have some mystery
reified through corresponding signs
like you and I channeling our spirit
down to our flesh, covered
all in this allegoric skin

kiss me platonic here on this middle earth
kiss me like the falling syllables of an oral law
we will pass this on and on, a spirit
reified, plain sense rectified and cast
like the hard cut of crystals
symmetrical about the tree of life

City Summer

Fire crackers cracking crack
heading through the heat we are
home in this city summer shifting every
one out to the steps fronting
the stepping light like a warning
fire crackers cracking new mornings
new mornings

From ICU, Mercy Hospital, one week after the collapse of I-35 Mississippi Bridge

We stand on the hard hospital floor around your bed
In this room segmented by steel and concrete
And we wonder how the span of our fate can be
Less tenuous than the bridge we crossed daily
Thin and strong running along the line that draws
Bank to bank like a river with no bed

Like a river with no bed these thoughts
Fall
Out onto the concrete, the sound of your heart monitor
Like Mississippi’s whisper
When the stones were falling from their line, forgotten line
We wonder how the span of our own fate can be forgotten
As if bank to bank we clasped arms across your bed
And let no tears drop to salt these pall trusses

Like a broken bridge you lie
Your arm draped jagged down the starched linen,
Eyes clouded like submerged car windows
Mouth half-open. we look down at you like reporters
Our talking jostled as hand-held camcorders' playback
We simply must be near you, we interview
The nurse, the dietary aide, the phlebotomist,
The anesthetist who pressed your hand and commanded “move
Your fingers.”

Please, reach out again to grasp bank to solid bank
Rise up from the river, from this bed white as fate
You look unnatural there when you had such graceful lines.

This in our image (this is our image?)

This is a song to you
like the tune streaming through
earphones, like your body moving silently
as a windblown blade. I write this to you
with my eyes closed and your eyes
closed

Like this bus like this train like this
bench
in imagist station of faces, petals
flowering dark faces
closed like the twine of images in holy metaphory
for this mystery, yourself an image
and myself falling petals
caught and flung from this black aspergillum
bough of poetry

But all the natural world will unfold
like the wind
moving silently
as your head nodding
as your lips around your song
blowing wordless notes--

not this note, wrangled
sweet and strange as saints'
faces in icon wrought,
but before and through the thought.

One for walking

We walked down to the river
spoke very little, the motion
of our breath like the wind rippling
the water—not the wind it was but the water
with its own mute vibrations calling
to the obscured sky

We have loved
each other for how long, the river runs on,
the sound of rocks and pebbles
tossed below its wind-blown skin
we have loved and will again
I silently vow that I would even walk alone--
I would walk here alone

knowing how the last light
as we turned for home
struck off your eyes like far golden windows
the water and I to each side taking
the chance to hold love's hues.

like water that dwells with the sky
we are too heavy long to fly
But let us walk, you and I, down, down, down
to the riverside.

A type of dualism

We can understand now how there are two things
like the voice that speaks and the voice that is heard
like my body as it was and as it is.

The difference from real
to real is like the strange
excess flesh of former bodybuilders.
we had built a great body of firm flesh together,
the fading strength leaves me wading like capillaries through this wilderness,
and you like the last artery billowing from the former
massy bicep that would have wrapped around our terra
like mythic oceanus.


We dream of this superhero strength;
We must be
made for another world.
what world?

Ecclesiastes 3a

The service is about to begin in the small church
hidden among the pines, swamp, and stones
of northern Minnesota.

Two elderly farmers, dressed in coveralls
and canvas coats banter, one reaching the door
holds it open, calls back, "come on, Marty,
I'll wait for you
like one hog waits for another."

this expression is well-loved and well-used by these two,
worn smooth as a pitchfork's hickory,
and the laughter lifts course and sweet as hay
thrown from thin steel tines.

like a barn full of cattle, we are together this morning
warm with the first touch of spring,
and we receive the alms of the season.
the only purpose of our toil to be glad of good
to laugh for all our labors.

Company Lunch

The pizza has arrived
wrapped in the room's flourescent ambiance
and the smell of warm, greasy cardboard

And those of us this lunch is for
celebrate the flow of foodstuffs
like emanations from management's absolute being
while we gather to grumble over all other of these emanations

and those who walk by glance in through the half-open door
while we sit in the awkward sound of our oral digestive processes
and cardboard cutout of conversation

I reach out with two fingers
casually
for the jalapeno.

To those who scrawled the crude blue spray-painted letters on the neighbors' garage door

People say this is gang-work
coded territory marking
like the piss of a great blue cat
who stalks the night with latexed fingerprints
pawing at our thresholds

Look, I've seen the street art
I've seen the mural on the high buildings
like a flowing flag planted by Sir Hilary
worked by those who will climb in the dark

but this is sick, stick lines
like a cave drawing
lines like those of a child

how old are you?
I wonder as I watch the neighbors paint
the white that doesn't quite match
the last coat why it is that I scrawl these letters now
as garish, quick, and simple,
though touching no one's door nor causing comment

your code says to me
"this is our territory, we make it so
from not our own," you and I together
will recognize it with our foolish deeds
with these good houses no more to us than signposts
for our mighty solipsy.

Ecclesiastes 1

1
When I was young I thought
that if I could have one wish it would be wisdom

wisdom like the great maple in the front yard
trunk seven feet thick, branches spread wide
with only a few that were dead, like the grey laurals
of a seer's head

2
wisdom stands at the gate
and she spread her fingers and raises her palm
wisdom would ride astride the city of men

her roots the earth accepts, the sky her budding bless
like my maple

3
visiting my parents for the weekend I walked to the maple
and leaned against the immoble stem, bark beetle black, with bare boughs
dead against a sky whose whispers no longer lingered
but whistled by. I put out my hand with fingers spread
to climb and pulled back at the touch
of the decaying wet skin, oozing pale white as if from the very heart.

4
wisdom lies at the gate of a ghost town
head shaven and limbs lost
begging the circling seasons for their alms.

Lunar eclipse from the window of room 2134, NICU

The earth around the sun
the moon around the earth
run their cycle course like
this unsuspecting pale child
and her red-eyed mother.

the doctor leaves as the astronomer
comes on the TV to explain the blood red
rays that filter through the atmosphere
to tinge the unsuspecting moon

and neither can explain this:
how there is no sorrow like seeing this pale light
succumb to darkness.

Pop Song

It was as if we wrote the pop song.
it felt wrong
to be so sure and unprofound
but the sound had my whole body shaking.

An old woman shivering and smoking in the morning snowfall.

You sit on the bus stop bench
smoking your cigarette
like a cliche, your lungs
hardened like old metaphor

the snow
falls like a blind hand on your face

falls like a cold question
from heaven:
who are you?

and the earth is sorry
that her children give the warmth of their motion
to the empty air

you will sit there
till all your ashes have fallen
like a dark halo around your feet

and I love you like
the coming sun does
with the warm arc of my thought
skimming off across this new blinding snow

but who loves you like the earth
she who takes your form and makes it grow?

Sir, please tune your guitar

Everything you play is asynchronous
and inharmonic, though it
does create an ambience
good as habitat for the
basic emotions you
express, red-eyed and expectoral.