Singalong

Death is the ultimate intrusion of nature
Into self, and subtlety is God's art.
Just as parents make children
Their demons make the demons of their children.
One should not marry without a good matrimonial bed,
And one always has time to die,
So play the space around you like a virtuoso.

To Sviatoslav Richter

Put a small piano on a truck and drive out on country roads;
Take time to discover new scenery;
Stop in a pretty place where there is a good church;
Unload the piano and tell the residents;
Give a concert;
Offer flowers to the people who have been so kind as to attend;
Leave again.

Mathematics

There are good and bad things everywhere.
The question of the goodness or badness
Of a thing is a question of ratios.
Pythagoras invented mathematics
And he called it "The New Magic."
Then he leaned back and with his finger
Removed a small piece of tobacco
From his cracked and bleeding lips
That had been left there after the drag
He took from his hand-rolled cigarette.

The Crypt

I sat on a folding chair in the crypt.

The stone columns had been wrapped

In linoleum paneling, and on it were taped

Hundreds of crayon colored drawings

Of horses, firemen, carrot-nosed men,

Suns, Christmas trees, and Coca-Cola

Santa Clauses etched ecstatically

And jaggedly by young exultant fists.

There was a sign that said no smoking,

Another that said no dogs,

And it was strange to know, then,

That once Charlemagne had kneeled there.

Nights and Rivers

Clouded skies are grey in the day,

But turn in cities puffy orange at night.

River water is brown on rainy days

But adopts its robes of color from

The sky come evening and night.

As I stand there watching the waves

As they flow beneath the bridge

I look up into a glade of sky and see

Stars.

Sticking Holes

The slipping seedling of poetry died sometime

A few days ago when I was doing other things.

It wilted and has been replaced by black dots

Somewhere on pages crowded with emptiness,

And clipped dumb phrases, and little pictures

Of houses, stick-people flying, and whatever else comes

Strolling by accident through my vacant mind.

Select Anguish. Enter.

Slowly the sun leaks out its press clippings and

The woman sighs and curses at her laptop

Changing the angle and brushing dust off the screen

Like it was some man she wanted to fuss over

Or like some man she wanted to fuss over was

Saying something through her laptop

And she couldn't fuss over him so she

Just kept fussing.

But I can't stop I'm busy walking back

To where I left from.

Moon Swoon

Locked in the moon swoon,

Fumes fuse blooms and

Quiet avenue tombs

Take the looming cruise

And glue the domes

Of a lingering groom

To the low flowing

Sense of doom

You thought you had left

By comb in your room

Or swept up with the

Crumbs by your broom.

Dumb Poem.

(Pronounced "Doom Poom.")

Of Foreign Lands and Peoples

In huddle now, closed bubble surrounds.

The fire of words clashes at last without

A well-known plan, and bursting, dies,

With strength of love or breakers lacking.

Like the man who swims in the ocean and,

Except for whale-song unintelligible,

Hears only dull full silence

And bubbles, and movement,

But not friend's calls, wind's swells in trees:

Like him I stand in coffee-shops abandoned

Slanting Romances pass tangentially

And lovers, haters, yellers, crooners,

Like water, float past my brain-veiled ears.

Land and language lock, engender flocks

Of feasts of reveries for the first time,

Instead of in created memory,

enflamed in life.

To Clairvoyance

I too am having trouble with this poem-a-day
All these words like ravenous hounds
Teeth jagged-white growl eye-whites leer

Somewhere a New Year's Resolution just died
Like those people the billboards say die of AIDS
Like every fifteen seconds to convince us we should get tested
A few, I think, just died within me
But hopefully somewhere in the world
Someone's breasts just told someone else the time

And yet the time falls back and away and is lost
And all these words convene Sanhedrins
That still and will surge in the deep-sighted future

Long Renaissance Falls

Sing songs, Josquin, and weir

It all, and all suns weirdly lie

In state for your colloquy.

Filiate your songs: the fun

Begins and ends thus-

But never ends-

Elide existence gliding.

Fees destitute of orbs suspiring.

Lithe escutcheon severs

Orphic plenums.

Old dawn, sad friend,

You draw yourself over and over,

And meddle not in the world.

Stupid thing.

Love Poem

We now have planets mapped and written in our minds.

We scan ours wrapped in smitten lines of know-how nations.

We regard their borders' flaps with awe, and think

Only those largest spiring empires expansive.

But Estonia is small and still just a year ago I

Stood in the dawn-wet field, amid rheum and riddle and wrack-

And dry grass. In the distance there were trees-

But such distance! The clement cirque of the sky spoke

Slyly of spaces large enough to contain all the sibilant sighs

Of lactating galaxies sighted lighting nightly skies with their cerements.

And you in your jacket, smiling, in the cold,

Blond tangles languid in fangs of fanning wind-

The grass's lunatic clientele laughed at us in their taffetas,

And the twisted woven spring air, bright, noticed you in the mud,

Fell in love, and thought you better than any empire.

Scooters, Vacation, Fall

Dark paths, beating wings, a thousand gallows

Snake back to - other things - and nightly swallows

Flip and play and, in dusk, the losing fire

Lights landscapes in the west that soon retire.

Obedience is soft in female quails.

They move the executioner's axe layers

Past the daunting dawn on and on again.

What stupid hoops are fit round every lens.

Take rot and leave it there then smell again

Its fervor on another day aligned

To this in futures small and lately climbed

That dwindle as ascending they become

The softest mezzanine of dirts, the softest scents.

And softly yet the past will now descend.

Here flayed thoughts fly south.

Soft tears turned hot lay lost

In the alien clang

Of cavernous vernaculars.

But soft!

A lost thought's toss - caught clay may cause

The mind a loss of heyday.

Hello bitter May!

The bitterns stay.

Sun's slantering ray,

Like gold chopped on every different way.

Hello subnumerary February - r not lost.

Hot off-water-glint spangles

Candles in the dusk-light.

And the sprinkling sparkling

Stars stand stellate,

And every face is gladly glossed,

With play.