It is a dark world behind your door

It's a dark world behind your door
You are the mechanic of a mysterious machine
You are the complete story
You are the most capable
You are the graceful and strong

But even the mountain needs the mist
to sweeten its lips in the morning
And where does it go at night
that the moon does not find it?

So you need me, or my brother
to find you on the edge of time
and carry you to the
softness behind your strength

You have your poems from me

You have your poems from me.
More is not better.
Let us not overstate our case,
or script our future meetings

Please don't find me dull
I have never been here before
I am not familiar even to myself
in this place

How odd I must seem to you.

Amen

Splitting Wood

It's the simple splitting of the wood
The axe prepared, the stick selected
The arc, the mark
the heart of the matter
From one, now two?

How can you love a bird more than an ocean?

How can you love a bird more than an ocean?
The colored flash across the window
The not-sweet song out of sight
The glimpse in the tree, on the edge of the tree

We see each other and you fly
But only a limb away
If I do not pursue
And if I am happy about my own work
I soon see you chipping at the sill

Were I to rush my whole full heart
into the light of day
I am certain I would never see
you again

And what do I know of who you are?
Much easier to love a beautiful bird
if you do not see it too closely

The flitting and flirting and sweet song
they are more of the thing than the thing
in its blood and dust and feathers and eyes
and lips and smile and song and ...

Where are you, my love?
Why do you hide from me?
Here I am closing my heart again.
Here, I am busy about my work.

Here, a poem for you to taste
Good nourishment
Don't be frightened.
See?  I will not ....

I listen

Are you, the jackal from the edge of the night
who darts and tears at my heart as I sleep?
No, the teeth of the beautiful night
are in my own breast
and are my own desires ...
For absent, you dance in darkness
a shadow of nothing, invisible but to my dreams

Ranann

We settle easily in a camp by the river
Our voices crackled and sparked
like the fire, sending up comets of laughter
or dropping into dim and solemn intimacy


What do we do when we cannot sleep together?
How do I show you I love you?
Prevented by the injury to hearts that once
beat in our own breasts, and by sullen


knowing that the desire for that is trust
in tissue paper scenery, here by the fire
where the world is more mysterious, somewhere
in the cauldron of coals at the center of the night.

Broken Sculpture

The sculpting was nearly completed
the paparazzi were coming over the wall
she was breathtaking, composed around
her solemn and sorrowful reverie

The Madonna (no, not Madonna, the Madonna)
quiet and alone and accepting of grief
Helicopters were flying over
rich kids were gawking out the sides

It was you, of course, under the bill
"She who needs no name" ...
Then you smiled.  Impossible!
The sculptor's trowel fell on his foot

The shell of plaster broke away
the woman was alive and here
His work!! Not spoiled.  Exactly
But surely not what we had in mind.

It's over for you, too, you know.
No more simple solitude of a broken heart
No more leaden habit of betrayal or loss
No more eternal corridor of false hope

We saw you alive, and yes, we regret
our confusion and stammering and secret wishes
But we tell you, as the master says
"suffering is dreaming of the death of your child."

You should keep your jewel
the glistening emptiness within your chest
It sees rightly the futility of this chase
and opens another, a holy world

And on awakening, you may carry up your grief,
But I am standing here to say
That you are beautiful and wise
A dream, too? Perhaps.  But not more or less.

Carolyn

In the stream of this life, the turbulent stream
A mote from top to bottom swims
being nothing in himself, and seeing only
that which is brought to his eyes

You are who you are, beautiful, bright,
awake, in this place with me, for a moment,
then gone, and now I swim in the memory
and the fantasy and the illusion and the end.

Yes, the end, of you who did not know
      there was a beginning
Whom I protected from my heart's opening

Is that how we are in this world
Alive only in the fragrance of blossoming?
Can we not also be alive in the coolness of the moonlight
Or in the richness of the soil and roots

Must we dance across the cilia of desire
and carry it as memory until we are engorged
and digested in the routine of pretending memory is fresh
and new and alive is in devotion to faded words?

You who are most worthy, and most desirable
were protected to be alive in this moment,
      and protected by me,
so that in the flow of this molten stream

the one who dives and dies and longs for
that stream to turn at his own prescription
will not carry you in with him
and far away from the here and now

I will know your scent in the moonlight
And I will know your tendrils in the loam
And I will keep the knowing of you
from the bitter breath of blossoming