We meet each thing unraveled
from the unanimous pressings
as if events could be singular,
unconnected from the contacts,
only weighted by the looping links of eidetic queue.
Conversations have been too much talk today:
A boy you once lived with talking
About beer and Oldsmobiles;
My brother about boyhood tadpoles
In a drought era creek bed;
My neighbor, the painter,
About brass rungs on a golden ladder in Jacobs dream.
Everything has been an answer to no question.
No one really learns to talk again
After everything they have lived.
On the last day of Pompeii
Were the discussions between artists and models
about the act, the transcendence or
the decorative balustrade of ascension?
Even with heaven on fire and choking on ash
Who would prepare to leave paradise
Or dream of beauty forsaking art.
In the beginning was the line,
A thing of no beginnings or end,
Ellipsed into bending orbits of nostalgic infinity,
Rainbow, pregnant, volcanic hills
hiding paradigms of planes
where a fool could pin the gravity of self.
Sometimes I never slept. Your body was
A place in my flames denying the light.
The side of your shape curved against
Moonlight filling the weave of curtains.
A tongue touched with no answer
where there was question.
No word ever tasted the same
As your mouth upon my eyes.
I worked everything in black and white,
Dissected circles with angles
of some chiaroscuro arithmetic, a geometric logic
of triangles between you fingers
divisions of color in your irises , gibberish
of form & content, rhythm & rhyme
the two shadows of one hand ,
the fine grip of your hand on my shoulder
as I bent over my work
the day you went away.
Since the mystery of that night
When you wrestled astraddle my stomach,
your sex against my navel and the moment’s pause
as your eyes gestured into me;
You have grown there like a ghostly coxswain
racing the shell of my life through rabid arts, rapids of desire.
I was never severed from the twisted umbilical of that,
Became an addicted Sisyphus continually
Sweeping ash-filled ruins for some fresco or monument,
Some sign that Paradise did exist.
How many mythologies I have derived from our time!
What heroes we have become.
Is there a knowledge that the object of art
Is neither question or answer
But the prayer we make by it?
I am only earth – dust and ash.
Mold me with your tears,
Sink your roots deep
And sucking into my heart,
Make your slow noise in my stones,
Take me up into you
That I may live again and silent.