Haiku: Moon

The autumn moon glides

on its blade of light - leaving

no scratch on the night.

The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass), by Marcel Duchamp

 

Red lines pressed upon the large glass—

a clear field where small acts take place.

Her gaze lost in three tissues of cloud,

her waist in stays closing off the air,

she’s mad and will not greet her suitors.

Beyond the street—dust collecting in homes’

new windows, grit loosening from shingles.

She watches children teach birds to kneel.

Her priest instructs:  In prayer you whistle

because god grows old and only birds

can make a sound to pierce his tired ear.

Oaken wainscoting, parquet floors, the house

beneath a coat of white paint; white curtains

adorn the flat shoulders of the window seat,

where she sat as a child, her back to the street,

and memorized the rattle’s conversation.

The pad of flesh between her lips dances:

Tell us, Old Town, the color of your buildings,

like sawdust of the ancient windbreak blighted,

shown no pity by the time, taken at the fullness

of its usefulness, and what will bring it back?

Show us trees descending staircases.

Explain the wind.  Don’t show us what it blows.

One man will know the whiteness of her body.

It will cost money to fill her with his fluid.

Shirking his vigil duty, a drunk male

slips from his tin coat and runs away—

his scream knocks a cloud out of the sky.

The other eight, glazed by window sweat,

spin in place, fool with spoons, sip

from hot cups the taste of her nipples.

Beneath the floor hard earth holds back

the odor that aspires to ghosthood and hopes

one day to mount the basement steps.

Note: The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass),

by Marcel Duchamp, is installed at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Rondeau for Ruth

He knew euphoria the day they met.

He’s often felt so between then and now.

Was it the shy smile or searching brown eyes

Or how her eyelashes would lower and rise,

Like glinting perfection taking a bow?

How could any-day simple chance allow

Strangers meeting to result in a vow

And forty years devoid of pain or lies?

He knew euphoria the day they met.

His eye is protected by her eyebrow.

Their two hearts beat with a whisper and wow,

Not felt, but heard, always in sweet surprise.

No thought between them arrives in disguise.

They will never fail to remember how

They knew euphoria the day they met.

Sestina: The Lake Michigan Shore

I stand knee deep in high waves

And wait for the darkening sky

To loose what it’s long held back,

A cataract of warm rain,

Like a proliferation of clear ideas

A mind no longer contained.

I read a book with no ideas,

A tangle of clouds in empty sky.

I couldn’t read it front to back

Or back to front. All it contained

Was words, single drops of rain

Or particles that were also waves.

The smallest moth is contained

In a cluster of dusty ideas

Within the vastness of the sky.

It clings to rotten wood, its back

As camouflaged as water in waves.

It is not moved by the fiercest rain.

The lake is high after endless rain,

An excess of lightning finally contained. 

The sun sweetly burns my back

Until it slips into a rift in the sky.

I find relief diving — the waves

Drown me with persistent ideas.

The sun slowly escapes the sky

Into the horizon, earth-shadow-contained.

Still air can’t raise a single wave

Or loose even one drop of rain.

All I see is the cessation of ideas.

For the night there’s no turning back.

I’ve known myself to talk to sky,

To write incessantly in rain,

And all I’ve said eschews ideas.

On my last day here I turned back

From the lake with waves

Of farewell, memory contained.

At home, the sky is bereft of ideas,

As the garden is of rain. It’s good to be back,

The lake contained but for dreaming waves.

Miro’s “The Farm”

 

Revenged in sleep, yes, a good omen:

volcano, eggplant, hawk feather

conditioning a moment of pure certainty,

instead of remorse. Birdsong dissolves

the hard black shell of their dream.

She breathes deeply, counts the number

of all those living and gives thanks.

Her skin moves over bone like sad music,

a lamentation of slow recognition.

She thinks, The next is tree across a gorge,

a trick of the eye, a drunk’s progress,

the balanced walk soon elbows and knees,

the hopeful ephemerality of creeping

going lower, the rigid belly at rest

on the gnarled limb tapering to a twig—

pointing finger arrested in emphasis.

Fear zero, the unimaginable destiny.

She twists her body like a swimmer turning

backstroke into butterfly, affirming

things still work beneath the bedclothes.

She stretches to call the nurses: sun

a push button set in pale blue sky;

water can, milk pail, red tile, hedgerow;

plowed and seeded earth pocked by rain;

rafters, stepladder, goat bleat, cockcrow;

the fox’s daily raiding of the hen house;

the baby’s naked footprints in dried mud;

snail, calendar, chain link fence;

stones everywhere, endless hard work;

how her back bent beneath wet laundry,

milk, hay, dung, branches, children;

how it arched aching when her sun-fired

husband’s body pierced her in the shade.

The holy triangle: husband, children, self,

grown geometrically into a power of itself.

She remembers the fruit silk and sap smell

of the tree that grew in the center of the yard,

its branches arms with a hundred umbrellas.

In autumn, its shapeless, colorless body

stood like Death attempting resurrection.

The Scream

 

I

Such a twilight
has no history,
nor would this nobody
rigid in the clutch
of his own two hands
in front of a sky
no longer his sky.
Two men walking away 
are too nonchalant
to have seen his face
and stopped; therefore,
it must have looked 
different than now.
Did he see fear
in their faces
or the fear
they saw in his?
The bridge rail
and the black river
connect all three
like testimony
and conspire
to convince them.

II

A red dusk
is sunlit pollution,
so it is not sick
churning colors
and nauseous chaos
of sand and sky
writhing in the same
two dimensions
that move,
because these
are all too real.
Not like that mouth,
that woeful oval.
As the vanishing point
is absent
from the painting,
from that mouth
no word flies,
nor any sound at all.

The Angler (Paul Klee), Sonnet #625

Two worlds, water and air, wishing

And being, each unknown to each.

There’s no secret to fine fishing.

A boat is as good as a beach.

(The river is like a long book

Whose beginning sentence recedes.)

Please, allow no barb on the hook.

You’ll find trout hiding in the reeds,

Or flimmering in rapids, still

Above a bed of sand and stone.

Angling is no matter of skill.

It is for the fish alone

To consider and to chose.

Once hooked it’s yours to land or lose.