Athens 1976-1982
I stopped writing poetry the summer I turned 20. A few months later I embraced the atheism of a natural worldview. For two years I wrote no poems at all, then a woman in my philosophy class recommended D. H. Lawrence, and my interest was rekindled.
Instead of the often fixed meter of my earlier writing, I was eager to explore what I dubbed Lawrence’s “conversational” style, where the focus was on the timing of stressed syllables per line without regard for meter. The first of my new poems was “Preparations.” Most of the poems which followed were written in Athens, Georgia where I attended graduate school at the University of Georgia.
preparations
That day
when spring is come
and birds blow song
when wind is blue
and sun stirs up
thrashing about ’til cold be gone
and buds peek forward
from the womb of the tree
raising their heads like flowers to the air
while black flies buzz black with
the quick lust of the bee
and butterflies
flair
with their certain, butterfly flair
and ants spin hotly
out their caves in the ground
searching new food
and dragonflies wake soft,
wee in the silence of the morn
beyond the winter-death of sound
that day, I’ll prance to you
in the early light
and we’ll make our bed
until it is night.
cockroach
Stay away from me, stay away
you with your living anarchy—
Always the cockroach, you patter across the floor
in galumphing invisible patters
gone now
behind the crude plastic stone
of a wall, up the bathroom corridor
like an saint
bloated and squishy, half-smashed
juice
oozing all out in your wounded gait.
Flinging like a crude
cave-stone over
the hot sink edge, frantic
flinging
of whetstone—in wild
cold-terror of me
terrified stone. Is this you,
fired with fear
in your ice race for the wall? Do you feel
sputtering
consciousness, internal
roachness? Do you fluoresce
loudness?
Do you know your own God?
mechanical
The bare-boned hand fists up, knocks at the fist of my head
with that same pained, grasping knock of a hand that has bled
drop to drop out of it all the giblet-nerved blood thick and red
that was in it to drop, with only the mechanical left:
skulled nerve orders beeping their way down like the dead.
perch to wire
In the stubble field to the shadows of the town
The busy birds are busy from perch to wire,
Clustered lives, clustered like the lives of men,
And men’s machines, bereft of machine fire,
Strewn like dead heat on the field and the cooling sound
Of rest that has come again.… Clustered lives
Bird lives, air swoops to the business end,
To the business end and omega of stubble days
Bird-busy with the business of the town.
moon
I know now, know now, the final swish
that moves my life so slowly—oh so slowly
on its way. Is a swish, a swish of the secret
silver contract made with the moon
by a people I wasn’t even born yet.
But the contract is mine
as much in turn it was theirs.
And I will do my duty—even if it means
following mapless a sky I do not know,
whose stars are strange to me.
But follow I will as I have to
in the trip of life that is hardly a trip
hardly a going anywhere or a getting
to any particular place on time
even if there were maps at every station.
So I trace after the swish
the sweep of the moon; its endless charting
cycleless, lineless, only a turning
from something to something.
sun
Sun is a flight of photons
pelting me in the morning
entering the skin of my body
in photonic penetration.
Gold little embers
enter me by my fingers
by the weak frailty of my arms
cocked before me.
How should I know what the secret of life is
when it is only embers
even the sun’s little embers
come to me by these arms?
student
High up in my carrel, in the stone tree
that sits woodless and rootless on the dust of the earth
if you could see me there stone-faced as I read
stone-round eyes cast on the page
like rocks on a turf
maybe you would know
what strange animal I am, damp grotto mind
shackled like an invalid
quarantined alone
within the castle of consciousness
dim mutation of time
spaceless, spiritless, boneless—enclosed
in my library of petrified stone.
storm
Tonight falling rain
I pricked my hand on the hedge. A bare branch
pricked me
knotted skeleton, dark-reaching
haunt-night excursion
out of the earth-darkness.
—I fling it
off me in despair! Death
death follows me everywhere.
Underground currents
rushing
black swirls cycloning my feet
dark
dark rain beating down
surrounding me
like underworld dawn.
And earth balled up
a tiny bug into its shell
and the damp
rain of the underswell
swells on us
swirls about our feet down
the drains
of earth
sluicing through
slipping down
cowering
down dank
swills
half-alive
dank life
holding out like a sparkler not yet died.
Drain underground.
Underswill.
Black undersparkle of the gutter.
Down
rubble down, washing
down, draining out
into the deep
deep pipes of the earth, into
the hollow
roots
of pre-life and dark.
Like a siege of lightning in the storm.
dark Hotly I feel the evening’s demon creeping at the rear of each resounding step as I walk up the pavement, silently keeping an iron grasp to terrorize my talk The shadows that hide in the dark in the invisible closure, that shake in the wind whirling leaves like a sea between roots they’re fire-flames sucking me in Sucking me in to the dark, the underworld dark of dark inner fingers, hands clutching me, clutching my sides, grasping, squeezing the breath at my sides drowning me down, down, deep in the waters of nothing
sparks
Sun is a thousand sparks
of white life fallen loosely upon us
And who can talk of knowledge
without first having considered the white sun?
beggars
For us the grey moon has turned
full circle, the mountains lie
helpless and green as turtles on their backs
in a last, blood-puddled
final pang of death. Clouds hook
death on the moon, four feet lie
gentle as stone in the shell
—turtle nature had mottled.
Here by the river, this old beat-up log
—bones of a tree—
we sit silent and haunch-eyed
beggars for an alm
from each other. We do not understand
tongue-tied and begging like foreign seas
lonely, impotent seas
beggared and calm.
Night folds over us, moonless
blood all gone in the shrill of death
crescent hung over with clouds
like shades drawn
drawn deep and final. On its face the leering
shame-lit mouths and eyes
that will not let us reason together
or love until
our shame is gone
and we smash this moon of lies.
meeting at north campus
I have come down the shimmering sidewalk
shimmering like a reflecting pool
of one-eyed, witch-globed
lamplights
I have come this long way to see you
out of the nightmare to talk.
Why do you stand face
turned away
bark of your back to me?
Do you think me a ghost shadow
fluttering
darkly on your soul? A chill wind voice
swaying
on your sway?
Look how the walls leap up
in jointless brick monotony! You say
that this white-faced
doorway
you say that it’s not for me?
The pebbled brick of the sidewalk
eat up the starlight
like electric digestion.
Is my body to your soul
the same chemical
demolition?
That is the question.
The yellow, shimmering lights
blinding our sight, their wet glares
fall on the glass of the eye
the shared
cornea
awed by this clash of electric and night.
pause
The rain has taken us over
over the world
Come on like a dark hood over the world
and we are strangers
stranded
in the darkness stranded, and we cannot see
There is nothing to see
Down
downward the rain pinging
and we cannot see
It pings in the pine trees, on the needles unaware
drop on drop burning out
Passing cars, their static in the street
slush unseen
through the down rain
fade into nothing music of sweet
silence, amid the pain
of the tumbling drowning dying of the world
silver
The streets are black and wet silver tonight
the air is cold and heavy
the moon asleep behind clouds.
And the sky is night, with a star or two
and Queenie and I are walking.
We love the bundled clothes and fur we are
the cold moist wind to our eyes.
We love the black road we walk
with silvered pieces of rain
and the clips of our feet on the pavement.
It is the clip of someone alone at night in the street.
Sole Jupiter is out in the sky
where night is free of clouds
a sole star for sole streets
and the careful clips of our walking.
We breathe in the cold, the cold spirit of air
and feel alive and the feel of our bodies.
Alive is the feel of our bodies in the night dark of moon.
Like silver in the streets.
woman
She’ll come in the morning
her shoulder-long locks flowing
in dark and naked whispers on your neck
—and the long-haired sighing of wild abandon!
And you’ll clutch
oh the soft-ghost-hazed, bare-armed body
quick now in rivets to your own, it will weave
tears in lump-stringed ribbons on your face.
In the old morning
you sleep it away and, before you rouse to,
belly on belly and the flesh
weight of her, turn
now in to another avenue
of sleep
another dark alley
of penetration—deep
home
home, and you fade
away into her shoulders and are gone
for yet a while
a while, and then
delicate-tongued she is found
beneath you all bound there in the dark hair waiting,
hidden in the sudden shadow-strings
of her eddying dark-woman locks!
view from the inside
We are fishes in foreign seas
passing our lives in wayward schools
that have no direction, consternation.
Onward we go, we follow the ocean
and some of us die by tricks quite unknown
some grow sick, but none search for home.
all of threes
Three brown-eyed dogs and a woman
came up the grass
in the almost summer, and it was north campus.
And the woman walked gaily with the sun on her back
and the dogs watered every dogwood tree
with their yellow water.
Several people in front of north library
laid lazily back in the shade and giggled.
soul of soles
Flat finny fish alone in the sea
bottom-disguised scuttle our earth
half-blind solea lurk in your mud holes
build your mud cities call yourselves men
ocean-trapped slip eye migrated upward
searching the sea it’s the outside you worship
from above
Three trees inspecting UGA campus
put their noses to their branches and pondered
how short and sassy the peach-puss
rouged faces of these green-eyed lasses
wagging their tails to such smart classes
looked, when seen from an objective height
yesterday
Outside the sea is drawn tonight
tide hangs low,
ocean vapor
scuttles about the housetops
moon peeks through.
I come with my love from the roses
seaweed hung round my belly
to talk to you.
(gift of my buttocks to you)
Last night when sea
was white like a sky
what did I say to you? what words
that kiss of ourselves be reply?
Morning came yesterday
and ran away.
Now the acorns that run
up this hill in the wind
with secret messages you do not tell me
what are they to this world?
Surely nothing important
though they be our friends.
(and friends be sacred)
Ah, let me hold it for you
the wind. Let me
capture it here in my hands
only to blow on you
when you ask
and leave when you will.
Tell me now
is there no better way than this
to make me your man
rather than merely
your lover?
boring sonnet He said, “Life is boring. Everywhere you look holes are being bored like bears in hibernation snoring bore holes round themselves where food is stored.” “Is that all,” she asked, “that bears do in the winter? Is there no love-making brew of passion no sipping of holes within their hole? Is there no splinter sleuth of bears that act in some such fashion?” “No, life is boring,” he said. “Life is boring. You’ll get nothing from your bears but sleep all winter—sleep, and weak-kneed snoring.” “Life is boring then,” spoke she, “and the way you keep your cold-hearted hands from me I swear you’re more boring than your sexless bears.”
a fall (after love)
I came the short way down
unbraked through the tumbling gown
of green catalpa, with the sound
of a hundred falling beans I came unbound
like thunder roaring.
The sleepy snoring
of the quick ground’s whoring
hardness brought me down.
Now I wait
castrate
in sovereign state
Too late.
ritual with the sea
Oh give me
enough that I may be
master of myself, my own
ceremony;
let the sea
come overwash me
with her heaviest salts
touching my deepest wounds, rushing
gingerly.
It is necessary
now.
dusk ride
Pines pass us by
trees of hours gone by
as we take our car ride.
Clouds go rushing
down the sky blushing
hideous pink
as we travel by
and horizon thumbs up
to capture the sun, cup
over it in a blacking wink.
I think
world has blurred
into nightside.
red, red rose
My love is like a red, red rose
A red, red rose is she
All day long beneath the willow boughs
She suavely swings my baby
All the day beneath the swaying boughs
Hours long below the green-leaved tree
She slowly swings my baby.
My love is like a red, red rose
A red, red rose is she
For up she rises when the dusk has come
Up rises she and baby
Up she rises from the thorny rose
Up gets she when it’s evening come
And tosses me my baby.
nakedness Let us cast off the hard-clothen girth of our spun our machine-woven cover and come stepping out— that we may see how a man looks like the dirt earth-brown earth-sandy earth-skinned creature stepping out earth-borne born of the earth.
demarcation
Now we linger at the door
of the temple of God
liquid-brown anguish in our eyes
for we gaze
arms down at the bright blaze
of hinge
fine-crafted and silver
that shuts us in.
or shuts us out
The sparkling, all-virtuous hinge
clasping with strength puritanical
the oak-heavy door
standing at the portal
of the temple of God
with its wrought iron bolt
of eternal demarcation and damnation
that shuts us in.
or out
Better to be a lonely cow
that at least has life
in an open space
and got the mute
whole green world
of grass for its pleasure
than be some pent-up young tiger
shut up in queue on the ark of God.
battlefield
There is an island in my breast, all snowy
with whiteness, frosted in tons of billowy
coldness of pain, and hurt of a cold wind blowing
at the core of me, at the quick.
Life, it is not a trick
played by some childish, freckled God;
we are not princes hidden
in the form of frogs
nor princesses, nor will I succumb
to ignore the pulse that flowers
in my thumb.
I have not come through the battles
of tonight
that I might be thwarted
in my running blood—nor poisoned
by some white
sterile injury that parted
me from the fingers of life—
though you
with your mealy-mouthed touches have done
grave injury
to me, and to the sun
that bleats in my blood with veins of maleness, rushing
like a river of gentleness, flushing
through my deepest-swelling reaches, plucking
the quick of my life
into bud
in its fun.
And I tell you the wounds that ripple
in my blood like cold tadpoles utterly
alien, unknowable
foreigners, spies, cold-eyed
agents, betrayers of me—out to hurt what’s fluttering
most alive in me; all that is hurtable—
they are pus of evil, muttering
lies of death. Ice
to freeze the simpler
straight feeling in my blood, and make it whimper.
potency
I am the wind.
I am less than the wind.
I am a tree. I am greater.
I am an ant with strong ant arms.
I am a weak flower, a little violet, with no arms at all, no power.
Yet I am greater, much greater than these.
I am the pansy and I stop the wind and I collect the rain and I shelter the ant when he asks me for shelter.
I am the dark pansy, alive, living with power.
Which I carry under the banner of potency.
In the name of flowerhood.
With dark-petaled eyes.
And bright soft faces.
I am the pansy and I do all this. And nothing can undo me.
From my pansyhood.
Nothing can undo me.
Yet anything—everything—undoes me.
Slightest being of power tramples me down.
Merest whim renders me broken.
Plucks my connection to my roots, to my ground.
Smashes me so I no longer hold forth in my dark pride into the sky.
Tumbles me from my sky.
Any being of power can do this. (Angry wind not excluded.)
I am a weakling, a nothing in power, flexed against these others.
These beings of power.
I have potency, my personal delicate potency, and that is all.
That is the end of it.
It is my darkness.
darkness
Darkness, it is beautiful. The dark.
It is my lips sucking at what I know not.
It is my fingers gone into dark places, like a ship of explorers.
It is me forgotten in my desire to explore.
Yet I am the vessel that does the exploring.
It is my toes when they meet ground, power flexed against power.
It is my knees conscious, like springs, of their final connection to the ground.
Ground is not-me.
Sky is not-me.
But my potency declares itself against the sky, against the ground.
Where I am is not-sky.
It is not-ground.
It is a mystery.
I am darkness. I move like a ship among the unknown.
I myself am the unknown.
The unknown darkness.
I shall lap over you, another unknown darkness.
I shall splash over you in darkness and un-know you.
In the dark rain of dark life, we shall be.
partiality
There are too many people
this late in the century
for us to slither off the hooks of our incandescent personalities.
There are so many of us
we choke on the air
poisoned
drunken, stoned light-headed on the mist of this ever-same white air.
That's us, all right.
partness
Why should I be a whole?
Even wholeness is sickening
A hand ought to go away from the body
beautifully
and linger like a being all its own
a knife poised high on the musty air
suddenly slicing home to earth, to my body
violently
me
Let me be partial, parts
like a bee and a violet
are parts
Let the wind split, when
menacingly
I jump before it, I challenge it
Manifesto (of sorts)
I
I have made a discovery.
A startling thing.
I have stumbled upon myself.
I have discovered: I have no worth beyond this body I name myself.
A body, it is hardly much.
Yet it is so, it is so.
I have discovered a marvel. It is so.
My body is myself.
Myself.
It is so, though.
I’m no great thinker. My mind is no great thing.
I play chess, I play ping-pong: both but little better than average.
I cook a little food.
I am a student—again, little better than average.
Which isn’t much to claim.
And, once claimed, amounts to nothing.
Nothing.
Certainly it can’t justify me.
Isn’t sufficient to explain or account or pay for my existence.
I exist, and nothing I can do will pay for the cost of it.
What I do, all that I am able to do, in the end
lies worthless to pay for my existence.
I write—yet I can’t find the magic words
I hate the words I do find.
Words despised in the blood for not being quite good enough.
Not magical enough.
I want—I want to pay for myself.
Unable.
Unable.
I am a tangled bundle of old debts.
I shall never, never pay them off.
It’s beyond me.
Well then, I will just be, and know I am nothing.
This dream I have, I will hold onto it, even if it is a fire that burns me.
I will be burned, that’s all.
What choice have I—what else?
To live in the darkness that is death?
To not live?
Or just to be, in the darkness of life.
II
To live I must hold a little candle.
Yet the very candle is me myself, individual, inviolate.
Beyond me, yet myself.
The little flame flickers. I am sick.
Flame bursts forward in flashiness, strong and proud. I am healthy.
Beautifully healthy.
A stupefaction comes up, like a dark air: flame ebbs low, I’m sick again.
It dies to a small hard incandescence.
And I know, with a painful intuitive knowledge, I want fuel for my life.
Some other flame, proud, bright, to bring me to.
If but a small lingering ember—if even that.
But something, something to touch me, and I it—as if touch
were some unknown softness, and gentle, so gentle.
A harsh touch puts us both out.
III
Life flames like a candle that burns detained, or not detained.
And it longs for fuel, for friendly conjunction, a cross-flame.
My blood longs to fuel the pure yellow flame of another.
To make its show, for all it is worth.
If it be not much, then I’m sorry, I apologize: it be not much.
I can’t change what I be.
Let me burn out, let me die.
Or take what little I am and flame me bright for my one short burst of glory.
Burn me, die me out.
Ah, to be burned out! Burned unto death.
It would be enough.
Or else to burn out, like a flame bereft.
Fate is fate and must be so. Let it be so.
If the moon crosses me, the moon crosses me.
Then let the moon cross me.
I can’t escape the past, which is my body.
Nor undo the myriad deaths that have frozen like ice to become the past.
Frozen, they are incorporated into my body.
And so my body wears the masks of many childhood deaths.
And my death is that I cannot talk, I cannot make communication
from my male being to the female.
That death has gotten upon me.
It is a matter of grace—moon’s grace—and grace isn’t there for me.
The moon denies me it.
I wear the denial like a death-mask.
IV
I tell you it isn’t my choice.
I tell you I have no choice.
Once, once, moon gave her sanction to me; perhaps twice she gave it so.
First time I betrayed myself, my own self, in three ways.
One was ignorance and one was fear.
The third was uncertainty.
Second time I betrayed again, and was betrayed.
My crime was knowledge, and lack of fear.
I ought to have feared.
Third was uncertainty.
The grace has not been given again.
And I must admit, the second time, it was hardly given full-blooded.
It was only a partial grace.
V
The matter of love has defeated me.
I stand here, totally defeated in love.
And unable to love, perhaps.
And unable to come whole-hearted, as to a loved one.
And unable to trust the whole-hearted coming of another.
My brain wants some sort of surety given.
My brain wants an exchange of gifts, first.
Draw out a document.
Draw out a legal document!
Let us get this in writing.
So you see I am defeated in love: it’s gotten the best of me.
A little while, and I cannot trust to love.
A little while, and I cannot trust the love of anybody.
Would you that I should trust you?
Then tell me so—tell me so quickly, don’t wait!
Tell me before my flame has lapsed to a mere weak ember from its wounds.
You must come quickly or my wounds may scar.
Scarred, it will be the permanent death-mark of love on my body.
If these seem the words of a scream—I wish it were a gentle scream.
A loud one scares you away.
Yet I would to the gods I could be heard.
Is anyone out there going to come in?
Knock on this door—will you?
VI
Look at my leg here: it is nothing.
A bunch of tangled, denied feelings. Nothing.
It has no direction in which to orient its life.
No recipient for its surge of life.
No being to surge to.
My being is directionless—has only a dream.
A dream: but the memory of a longing wanted.
I’ve a longing wanted—wanted by me—but still a memory, nothing surer.
I want that my longing be unclothed, be turned to naught, be made nothing.
Let it be made nothing.
I want my dream to be surpassed, as one runner surpasses another.
Dream ceases to exist.
An experience different from the experience of longing
has come by, has trampled over it.
On over it.
Oh that my dream should disappear into dust.
From ashes to ashes and dust to dust.
Would that you or you or you should become a trampler.
One who tramples longings to dust.
Come to me with your runner’s arching feet!
Shall I run with you?
Shall I make to the wind with you?
Shall my fingers eat meal with your fingers?
Shall our feet follow as shadow does shadow?
Shall we know the mutual dark?
Shall we share this day—our one-directional day?
Shall we weave our sunlight together?
You and I, shall we do all these?
Or shall we retreat to our corners, little corners, and do nothing?
VII
Myself, I am willing to give up.
I am willing to say, to you, to myself, to anyone, enough of this striving.
I am all strived out.
I have been rubbed again and over again with so much strife, I am quite sore.
My deepest emotional self is sore.
So that it doesn’t know what is a friendly touch anymore.
Every touch hurts.
Oh, don’t touch me. It shall only mean pain.
Oh, don’t touch me! for I am wounded there, wounded vitally.
There’s an island in my breast, a great wound in my body.
It is chafed white.
The very vessels my deep blood flows in, have been skinned white.
So my blood is afraid and full of sick.
I am full of sick.
Oh stay away from me—for I fear I shall give you my sickness.
Oh come touch me—come touch me!—or I feel nothing, nothing
can heal me of my sickness!
Oh come and touch me and heal me.
Oh let me be healed!
VIII
It shall not be easy.
It won’t be the easiest thing you have done.
The sickness won’t leave me willingly.
You must have some faith.
Unless you have faith in me, all is lost.
Lest you have faith in the weak yet lingering health that is within me.
There is health—a small struggling flame—within.
Can you find it?
Can you flame it?
And I know the trust I shall have to place in you.
Yet I am willing.
I will be wonderful.
My blood will be filled with the sanctity of wonder—utterly.
It will be so.
Can you put trust in that?
It will be so, then.
It will be so.
autumn
Now the wind-breath rustles
and I wonder
to what sort of rest the brown leaves go
that scatter on the fields like broken
atoms
shriveled up
and old
fallen bits of nothing in the snow.
dreaming
If women
once would begin to chatter intuitively the way squirrels chatter
if men
could only be dumb and silent and egoless as old magnolias
and as gentle
—why,
sexuality
might even be possible again
love
might return to human hands, it's honest home.
willow love
If I hold to the soft light
and you to the sad
what makes it such a wrong ‘right’
that we should be glad?
While wind meets the poor willow
and the branches sway
why ought we be still—oh,
and crouch away?
If you be unsure
and I full of an old wait
fearful before love’s lure,
why hesitate?
We cannot make the sun
sing a white moon-song
nor make two become one
nor live for long.
And if flies be for a day
and robins but a season
why ought we betray
such unreason?
Let the stars then be stars
in their eternity
while we be what we are
and save serenity.
minnistress is dead
It has come after all
even the moon is a widow.
Minnistress is dead and tears are dried in my eyes
they will not move,
she will never more move.
Moon I believed in you, believed in the night
you ruled with your face. You fell
eager-breathed on roaming Minnistress
whose cat-mystery
wore the moon-dark crown.
Tonight you are pain-faced, little better than I,
with her dying have you died?
Old mistress and old guardian
are you alone?
Are you widowed? Moonly
woman gone from you, have you lost
all vital part to stone?
I stand in the street, in disgrace.
Bereft of all will. I wait
for the last moment, when I have to know
of the unwilling darkness crashing upon the night, and of
the withdrawal of the moon, and of her black eyes
that prick my blood with despair
to chase me inside.
And know what I must know too well
that the woman in the moon is gone
is become hard-eyed widow
stone-bitter with lies and illusions.
Unwilling I am thrown
like the churning tides of an ocean into confusion.
leaf
A brown leaf scraped at the window pane
just when I
had thought I had lost enough to cry.
Like a finger pointing it
signaled
over
to a spot on the ground full of the sun-spanked clover
I had been sitting in earlier
that very same day
hunting & hunting for a four-leafed one
I might save.
But never found. And the brush
of pain
overwhelmed whatever hope
entered my brain.
Until
some brown leaf screamed at my window
just when I
had given up on the lie.
seven riddles
I
I am one who is tall, and stands upright
and though I do not eat well
it does not matter, for I am one to be tall and thin.
For this I am famous throughout the whole world:
though a million be in line, I’m the one who’ll be first.
II
I grow, yet have no feeling
and where I spurt ahead, I get mowed down.
It doesn’t bother me a mite.
Noticed but seldom used
I hardly know my purpose
yet often I’m painted red.
I must wear this false face
though I have neither eyes nor nose
nor mouth nor ears to hear by.
I am just me, hard and thin
pure growth—without sensation. By this I expose
banalities of paint and trim.
III
Though my skin may be yellow, my soul is black.
In its very blackness lies my value
(though truth is I am more skin than soul).
Fated with a stiff body I sit on a soft butt
and if I make a mistake I can always change it.
Born to non-violence, I endure much violence.
Though I face the blade often I only grow sharper
oftentimes cut, I never bleed.
Tall in first youth, I lose height in old age:
butt worn with use, I am tossed away.
IV
What I make is the sound
of a certain animal
famous for the way he feeds me
at his own relief.
V
What kind of songbird am I, anyway?
I, who have never sat in a tree
or pecked at the bark of a pine.
I, who have never nested in forest
or flown with the wind, smelling the excitement
of a flock of birds on wing.
—Why dream? I couldn’t fly anyway.
I am a captive of man.
Man
who granted me a voice
only to deny me a song of my own.
Who bids me sing at his pleasure
running me around
until I think I must finally run out of breath.
Until I wish I could die.
Man
he put me in a rut and left me there.
I must be one of Hugo’s miserables.
I am a songbird
but there is no song in my heart.
VI
All life-long I have been lover to fire.
Nothing I like better
than my back straight to the heat
hat off
mouth wide open
staring up, gulping down to the full
your unintended gifts of food.
My genitals lay exposed before you,
you who must handle them freely.
Unclothed, my quivering penis
stands in life-long hard-on.
You pretend you don’t notice—suddenly
down comes your hand. You pull me about
by this like a handle:
you never hesitate.
Sexless you call me
but into my lipped interior insert
your precious fluids.
The meat of your life
these are my nourishment. Digested,
unused, I regurgitate
them up again, to the delight of your hearty appetite.
You call me strange one
almost all head, you say.
You peer into my wide mouth,
you dentist searching for cavities
in a toothless hollow.
You inspect my very insides
till I have no secrets. You plumb me,
then you put on my hat; my mouth is closed.
VII
Tell yet none hear
leaves yet none fall
bound yet I know no bounds
Colorful no color ever seen
nourishing no stomach ever fed
held in hand—hand never touches me
fill you up you can never be unfilled
Seen yet not the seeable
felt yet beyond feelable
known yet am only knowable
Sail an invisible sea
behind a wind that cannot be breathed
dreams
If dreams were my fingers
and prayers dances come true,
on jumbled meadows I would linger
sleeping with you.
And life were a true thing,
which it is (but not soon)
I would give up my manhood
to relearn it from you.
If wind be my voice
with a tongue green as leaves,
I’d speak you no noise
harsher than breeze.
And thoughts were an oak tree,
not intellectual—but were dark—
words would curl like black branches,
kisses thicken like bark.
whether
If you take ten things you know
and mix them well together
and dump them to a salad bowl
will it help you find the weather?
Ok, you bring a million things
into your search of weather
or split them to a million bowls
is your salad any better?
And have you found a single cloud
from your verbalizing loud?
Have you seen or touched a sound?
Have you made a raindrop round?
old morning
A man too, balled up in bed, while curtains fly
like wings room-ward—a man too feels the womanly desire
to be hugged, enfolded in care, touched alive.
This man turns, gives himself to the blanket, his touching liar.
romantic
Thought never made a man
be a man
machines it has made on every hand.
Narcissist man.
Thought-machine nabs a woman
woos her by soft
cooing rhythm of the electric
hum of his cogs.
Then thought-woman like a glowworm
Swoons
makeup gone smuck
uncovers hairless legs, straddles machine
and they fuck
By the light of the silvery moon
In Ju—Ju—Ju—June.
gibbous encounter
Sit then, we shall make a nest
and I shall clutch you, my lips impress
two roses on your breasts.
I put them for a test
of this encounter as his guest.
There then, and let me plant
another here, and here beneath your pants
let loose another in the forest: we’ll let him tramp
around for a woodless valley. Let him find the camp
he will make tonight—but first must go out the lamp.
No, no, lie back again—don’t stir.
It’s now too dark and—brrrr!
it’s cold! Don’t act so uncomfortable. We’ll cover
you warmer than the warmest fur
Jesus, nothing could be warmer!
Go ahead then, hesitate.
Let that silly mind of yours step in to legislate
like a dumb slut the kind of love you make.
Go ahead, let it tell you wait
until it’s worked out some godless way to mate.
Why do you huddle on the bed
squeezing double knees to the breasts
like that? Why fold arms around your naked head
throwing such a volley of tears, and nothing said?
We’re not impressed.
Look at me.
Lift up that naked face—don’t you see
you must be sensible. This isn’t fantasy.
And it’s no game. Now will you please
take down those knees?
So cry at me. You think it is sex
I’m after? Think I’m out to flex
my muscle in your female factory? No! Sacred Text
says you’re not the big production, just annex.
Stop fighting me! God is getting vexed.
He created you a woman. He brought
you to me. You saw my holiness. In moon we walked
this night to your apartment, now at the bed you balk.
It tires me, this talk—
now, feel it! my erection’s hard as rock!
No, no, don’t try to slip around
me to the door. Sit down!
You stay there on the ground.
I won’t be made a clown
even if I have to hold you down.
Since you won’t get on the bed
we’ll do it here. I’m fed
up with your resistance! See, you make me whip your head
against the floor, and now the wood is red…
and now you’re still.
God will have his way before you’re dead.
pickings
The Queen’s Lace puts a heavy head
up. I put a light.
The Clover’s frock is red tonight
beneath moon’s parasol.
I’m liable to die.
Even the flowers cannot be erased
from the backstop of time.
Even grace
can’t save the lonely daisy
of Human life that has lost its stem.
The wind can be stopped
by a factory at work.
The life
of every worker can be stopped
when the flower’s plucked.
The flower’s been plucked.
real death
We must give up our souls and gain back our bodies.
That is the true challenge facing us.
We must find the willingness to die.
Thoreau wondered if anyone had ever died before—before John Brown's death.
Only a handful have died since.
The rest weren't living, so they couldn't have died.
Today our challenge is to live, precisely that, finally, we will be able to die.
No more of the death that isn't death—that is only a remove to another district.
smells
There are certain smells
that hang around
no one but girls
I’ve found.
There must also be
a smell for boys
maybe the scent of their pee
or maybe their toys.
But I cannot tell
no matter how I try
what a boy’s smell is.
Guess I’m a boy is why.
last night
Last night when I should have been in bed
Little ol' me climbed out the window instead.
The lawn was dark that I ran across
And the hedge was black, and an albatross
Fluttered up past me as I pushed on through
Scared all the stars and scared me too.
I ran past the plum and the gardenia bush
Near the edge of the street, when I felt a push
From a cat on a broom, who with cackles three
Begin chasing the albatross that was chasing me.
I raced past the stump in the stubble field
Of the vacant lot, when a wheely thing wheeled
In front of me, and on top were five
Ghosts and a goblin and a giant bee hive
With a hundred bees.
And every one of them began chasing me:
A hundred bees with their giant bee hive,
Behind that the goblins and the five
Ghosts and the wheely thing that seemed alive.
Then the cat on the broom, who with cackles three
Chased the albatross that was chasing me.
Faster I ran to the dark old woods
Down a sand path toward the creek when a hood
Dropped right over me—it covered my face
Like black wings above me all over the place.
Behind it two swimming hands with eyes like owls
And a funny machine thing with feet like trowels.
Faster, faster, faster I ran
Past Big Creek, past rocks and sand
While behind me the machine thing followed.
Swimming hands, the black wings, two eyes like owls,
All following it, and right behind:
A hundred bees with their giant bee hive,
Behind that the goblins and the five
Ghosts and the wheely thing that seemed alive.
Then the cat on the broom, who with cackles three
Chased the albatross that was chasing me.
Worst of all, I knew I was lost.
So I grabbed a tree and began to climb
Trying to get away from the things behind.
But the higher I climbed the higher they followed:
The machine, the hands, the wings, the eyes like owls,
All chasing me, and right behind:
A hundred bees with their giant bee hive,
Behind that the goblins and the five
Ghosts, then the wheely thing that seemed alive.
Then the cat on the broom, who with cackles three
Chased the albatross that was chasing me.
When I got to the very topmost bough
I grabbed onto air, and then I fell.
I woke up when I hit my head:
I had been dreaming, and I fell out of bed.
lyrics for a young sky
(spring)
From Capella to Sirius, like an umbrella over Orion
through Menkalinan, Castor, Pollux, and Procyon
the Great Arc runs, watched from behind by the Lion
who shakes his mane, and out tumble Regulus, Gamma Leonis,
Epsilon, then Delta, then tail Denebola for a bonus.
Leo in motion, we see these bright stars that you show us
as you tramp over Hydra’s head, over Alphard,
and drag the Virgin—and Spica—behind you across the yard,
leaving Libra’s scales in disarray in the rear, ajarred.
southern sky
It’s a southern sky that really loves the women
And I would love them too
But I am such a fool
Across the world I go
To teach a vision fingered in the snow
dirty eyes
Public nudity is illegal in the national forest
for the forest has no eyes
but dirty men do
and dirty men run the world, run it dirtily
and when dirty men get naked
it is only to put dirt on someone, usually of the opposite sex.
Public nudity is illegal in the national forest
exactly
as it should be.
As it should be
in this obscene national world.
wealth & poverty
The Tasaday get to go naked
any time they feel like it, which is most of the time
and they are the poorest people in the world.
And I, one of the richest—
no it is illegal.
My body is obscene. Don’t think of it.
illegal wilderness When I was hiking the river trail inside the edge of the Cohutta wilderness my clothes in my arms my nakedness public below me public to the wilderness anyway and public to Nancy who made me rise up in stout freedom as I clumsily hiked along —if other hikers had come around the bend I could have been arrested in the wilderness my wilderness unclothed of God and all.
the Lord's way
Actually, if Christian friends tell the truth
(and I know they would never lie)
God disapproves of nakedness.
Which isn’t surprising, seeing He made it.
troth
Oneness has a fount in the East
wonder flows from the West
but love is born in a place of peace
between a mother’s breasts
juno beach
Rosy-fingered dawn
reclines upon the ocean
a gift of peach offered to the day
pregnant waves are rising
up her cherry legs
the final lust that seals the night away
february’s call
Far-off summer, bright clear summer,
oh when will you come again!
that broken robin may mend her wing
worn, lost hare wind home again
frog be left alone and
snake, like a god
creep once more the earth with his coiling sheen?
enigma
In evening woods I met a snake
swimming ominously in the lake
undulating un-ungulate.
As night grew in I met a flea
hopping off so franticly
that the smallness of him frightened me.
In the dark I met a sound
ten hundred yards long and bound
by silence it knocked down.
© Copyright 1980-2025 by Dwight Lyman