Being One of the Veronese Della Scala, However Uncertain and Much Distant, I Too Went Down Where the Sea Is Trying to Give Birth to a New Atlantis

 

Los Angeles—oh yes, that living emblem,
America writ large beside the sea,

just as New York City is—
that dented great apple
of knowing and not knowing
much of good and much of evil—

or like Las Vegas,
the den of thieves
and bacchanalias of rushing nights,

where all who enter somehow remain
within that desert Garden of Eden,
its money minted from fever and dreams.

So what then of Los Angeles
and its Orpheums?

Do pagan Hades and Christian Hells
likewise keep their homeless
upon the streets—

within the selfsame pageant, revel, and reveal
of basic human need
and this Divine Comedy?

Surely there, everyone—
everything that, despite itself,
still manages to remain human
to even the slimmest degree—

must be one of those lost, yet brimful angels,

hovering and circling
like the terminal, falling stars
of The Republic,

thirsting after oblivion
while standing on the brink
of bringing back Atlantis—

in defiance of the sidetracked celestial gods,

that Emporium leaving
the Gates of Horn wide open,

so that what is above
and what lies below
may mix and flux
until who is who dissolves—

an Empire of Water,
souls deliquesced and loosed,
each surrendered
to its indiscriminately chosen poison.

Oh yes—where else
would the powers that be
place a hive

for so many angels with broken wings,

whose stumps are growing
blades rinsed in Styx?

Ode to the Supreme Act Of Those Seen and Seeing Blues

Before lotuses open
the fists of their buds
into whiteness toward the sky,

there, down the valley, water
dallies and keeps its calm,

while forget-me-nots already
show off their minute stars,
embossed in the light blues
they share with my own eyes.

And there are so many—
never just one or few—

as if forever yearning
for dream and life in them
to remain as one,

to cover all they could—

or perhaps emblazon and extol
someone’s body
from all its meeting ends—

and do so both
in poetry and in love,

and in that spotless, perfect act,

even amid such swarms of shades,
the very word forget
would lose its meaning.

Yes, It’s True Not All Lovers and Mates Are Musical and Lyrical

 

Strange how gentleness is a leaning-in,
and how the action—its verb and move—
articulates three key vowels out of five:

A, E, I—

before the shock of touch
gets a chance to shape and round the mouth
into the likeness of deep-toned O or U.

And so intimacy’s summoning call
casts its wooing vows

like a brush in its initial stroke—

as if the space in between
needed to be swiped aside, undone,

so that joy and bliss of the soul may live—

with the help of lambda,
which stands—per Socrates—
for a motion gliding softly
more than any other sound.

Algebra with a Heron on the Cuyahoga River

The heron’s blended blue and gray
bespeaks a ruminant silence
as it covers and dyes
the dusk between day and night.

With its glow subdued,
that coat—a little cloud
furled in gray and blue—
alludes just as well

to the silken swells,
the tufts and wisps
of mists that moor
in dells their raveled sails.

And I cannot help but wonder
how adamant the heron is
in staking out its vertical,

and thus aligning it all—

like a painter’s clean and easy,
perfect, and thus otherworldly line,

with an ethereal, waiflike axis
running through both death and life,

since only in that way it knows
it may attain and consummate
the faultless—the arrant,
pure clarity and calm

in which alone the mind
touches the impeccable,

that lets one hear and see
what moves—even in the dark—

and where, down within,
it stirs and heaves,

even if but vaguely,
stillness and its script.

And in that faint
and paltry rift,

then the heron acts—
and brings

the netted charge and catch,
lifting it from its element
on a precise bill—

so that two

are once more one.

Like a Wand That Lifts a Bar to a Swell of Song

 

O sweet invite! Thus a partition is undone
by a welcoming palm and a longing arm,

and so too is the cover that barred the way so much,
the lingering and its dilly-dallying lull—

like that blank page sliding, by the thumb,
between the jacket and the frontispiece,

and the book’s first image-churning lines,
and love’s overture—its initial, unveiling act—

past a merely tentative, borrowed yes,
past the waiver, past the silent wait,

leaving window curtains stunned,
with eyes mended to the deepest shine.

How simply then we could come close—
and in—and across a gracious smile!