Poems

Stone words hard to wield, smooth as the moon washed of night, shape me into a weapon no man can see except with the eyes of his bones. Words tight as skin in a fleshless space, worn thin in a cage of a promise, design fast the leap into the air no man can follow, [...]

Naked leaves sifted nightly, gathered, fondled, and stored in long sheets of black fire, nailed firm to stars, free of feelings' clatter, freed most of all from the earth whose fingertips touched fire, arms steeped in the sickness of its craving: the earth's love is persistence; rust; time spread over wide pastures; weeds perpetuate the [...]

Look inside the face traced with the world's moist stone into the mirror of every kindness gentle bones and a hundred glories could neither imitate nor efface; see the white mingle with gold, the gold with dusty tracings, the foundation become weathered red, and the stone remain, alone, a salvaged monument to the faith shared [...]

See how the black flock of quietly fallen birds stares, swallowing air, at the air staring down. Their minds become wings, their startled dreams of the sky insidiously sawed down to its very blueness-- the black flock falling, without a sound, into the soundless blades of grass: the alloy of the hundred-eyed earth and the [...]

He dreams his way up to being, quietly, with unhurried breath, as though breath were a blossomed staircase leading to a perfect sky where kind-eyed gods themselves with slow, sinuous movements, ancient skin and immaculate hands would greet him kindly: "Friend!" As though the net to catch human souls were masterfully spun of poetry, and [...]

To see faces of men, remote and deep, remote as in a listener singing without words, singing and seeing the processions of thousands waiting for the picture to drift and sing organize into prismatic perceptions the unkempt indifference of their wish. To see the wish grow ripe in the images darkly golden, darkly painted as [...]

I have too clear a mind for dreaming, she said as she ordered her thoughts away from the distances they were meant to approach and surround with incantations of thought, with benedictions that carried cloudiness into the world of too much logic and fact-- to make the most prodigiously dancing statement, to make the most [...]

The left hand of darkness is light walking backward. The absolute is the runaway smell of an ancient rain. The mouth we kiss is not the mouth we stake our fate on. Look: the throb of light is the cool breeze of years to be. The shore of detachment is away from the sleeping seaweed. [...]

The shape of a whisper? What else do these bones promise? Lying in wait of some body's love, stretching thin arms, twitching thin nose, witholding kisses with a halting hum, why, they are growing instant shadows! They are developing twisty leaves! Here, in the ground beyond the world, they are dancing a rat dance, they [...]