Plucking on the Cord of the Neckline’s Slip

The interval (閒) is a chord,
a chord of the neckline’s slip;
there, by the rivière, turn by turn,
a serpentine flash might seem to sleep.

Or some reedy dragon with a licking flame
on the chest of leavened leaves, with breath
not unlike those buoyant pavilions of old
alighting and leaning on the lustrous lakes,

in the guise of somewhat boozy papillons,
but with manners and a genius for verse
that pluck a glint of shades from breeze.

Isn’t this how they gather our heads
and, once they do — they’d hold
and ponder — this hoard on their lap?

The Quiet Art of Pause and Beat

Like a song in which the soul
dresses herself — nearly
to a line, a point of undress,
in between a beat and a pause,

there is an art that comes about
and holds till it gives new birth
to breath — so that its return
may break off death and change

what otherwise would be lost
or dulled and mute without,
and, in that breath that bears songs,

where deeper love is growing ripe
to round and join a softened mouth,
sound and soul tremble back as one.

Being Speech—How Can Beauty Be Ever in Anyone’s Life Complete?

Under the frame of arms
radiance is being found
for a weave of wading touch.
And now, at last, you know

the taciturn and dormant,
by rising, reaching to a sight,
and so what beauty is
and what she does—

an interval souls hold within,
opened into resonance,
so you see and understand:

what the statues of old hide.
Beauty isn’t if she isn’t this—
a live unbolted speech.

I No Longer Know Who Musically Emulated The Other First—a Clavier or a Femme

How can a white darken the black
and, by its lit-up coat and glaze,
bring it up with its snowy shade?
Don’t both beauty and the soul

flee from all that’s stark and plain,
don’t they too further a taste
that both listens and speaks
in a way that suits proper keys—

hint by hint—where all that is
is their birth, yet nothing ever ends
and everything infers a Heaven’s cue?

On a nuance, defined and as finely vague,
everything on an ivoried clavier depends.
Only thus, from its deepest, silence starts to sing.

Lilies Akin to Doorkeepers Women Wear as Jewels on the Chests

Lilies’ whiteness persists
to the summer’s end —
so now its spiny rays
may attest to the birth of autumn,

already gilding those cedars
rising in the marsh, almost always
overlaid and masked in silence —
so long and ever yet that lightly

lit and slanted by the lilies’ scarcest scent
from the luminous and genteel floral face
and its necked flask holding inside still

and mystically compressed beauty’s
firelight — gems as if randomly spread,
yet when gathered to be loved and read.

Under the Oaks Brushing Their Pines

In their fall, first leaves of autumn,
threading the air with silent chords,
swell with each such drop
a flaming carpet growing thus —

game, then, soon enough, to rustle
and fly off in the wind
from below the feet
as the space around

begins to burst with coruscation,
folios of lightning forks
and the lightest of the roars.

In such crackling intervals,
on such agape sills, we both
meet and find what we never lost.

Equine Helens, Svetlanas, Lenores, Sophias’ Eternal Conundrum: How to Make Once a Chiron out of Any Standard Stud?

The horse gets it —
that is, he gets those few
human idioms and terms
in his ears ever recurrent —

not unlike the generations
in this day and age
when most of what you hear
has been simplified and scripted

so that thinking anywhere yonder
keeps on running out of space or time,
and runaways are really discouraged

in the economy of penny-pinching
harnesses and straps, and I wonder:
will all those many Lenores ever wise?