HARVEST

Abating lashing winds and raging

      black misuse

the sun forgives the weeping

      willow.

Flood recedes as

      a disliked rich relation leaves

the Delta

weighed down with gifts

      of fruit and arable soil

the rain will come again.

COÑO (PUSSY SONNET)

–         For Kristy and Kate

             who threw down the gauntlet

                one  Friday evening at the Piccolo Bar.

                                       

                                       

                                       Effective

as phrases à moitié-comprises[1]

poetry to order pushes

nobody’s button.

Too beautiful for this

affected hauteur

provocative and facile

words are impelled by

the gravity between us:

high school French and

phrase-book Spanish

collide and ricochet inadequate.

Thank God

there’s something to be done with

a tongue we all understand ...

---

[1]Fr – “half-understood phrases”.

HAIKU

Caesar falling raised

      the toga over his face.

            None would see his end.

SALOME NEVER REALLY THOUGHT...

Ask me

and for you I’ll burn

the world.

Ask me —

I’ll don the clichés

and outdo Gatsby

for gold-hatted high-

            bouncing love.

                        If you ask

I’ll pull the heavens down

or die trying to lay them

            at your feet —

Desire it and I’d

reach down inside

strangle the poet

dress the corpse as

an accountant.

I’ll be the best friend

the lover or

both; your counsellor

carer; therapist; clown;

your partner; I’ll be

your mirror —

In my

long-gazing appraisals when

you’d know my thoughts —

look — see

yourself reflected then

ask

yourself — who looks back.

Ask

which you you’d be —

ask

what you’d have from me —

and knowing all this

don’t

ask me

to be your heroin.

MONDSCHEIN/MOONLIGHT - For L

It’s easy — watching

languid candle flame

warm the milk-wan

body,

midnight hair cascading,

framing

the face that’s haunted

your dreams —

to tell yourself

God has led you here,

His metaphors and signs

garlanding a poppy chain of

            destiny — that

the

dark eyes searching

your own, so close they

            merge,

will always regard you thus —

that morning will never come,

its cares, its quotidian glare —

and lovers

carved

one from the other

never have to

            part.

BLINK

Lethe laps Ophelia’s body

      washed up at its edge;

hubristic combustion illuminates

      then consumes

the stage. Act after act

projected across the glow

fragmentary nightmare reels:

grainy black and white infused

      vivid scarlet.

Tragic:                                                 Absurd:

everybody’s flawed and dies.        Dialogue from different plays

                                                            collides real-time unnoticed.

                                      Farce:

                                      manners, sex, and bursting bubbles

                                      of meaning.

Alone in this omnicameral theatre

Narcissus ponders Hamlet’s question.

BRONTEAN MECHANICS

—    Pour Ma Jolie Copine.

It’s said a collision

between membranes in a multiverse

          gave birth

amid orgasmic destruction

to all that we can know.

How often did those

universes pass unseen —

a vague unknown

feeling in the nothing before

contact?

Can love be a matter

merely of timing?

Had Heathcliff and Cathy

met in their thirties

could they have saved

everybody the bother?

Could Cathy have lived?

Heathcliff would always have been

lost.

Had his love been

stronger than pride

might he have given her more

than a mansion of memory and

          dust?

Universes loom

from dark matter between realms.

Outside time a flash

could be a moment or eternity;

a new world

beautiful, complete,

known only to its inhabitants

exists for an instant

          forever

blinked out of being

by the sad, cruel logic of reality.

Love exists without time.

Time engenders destruction.

Perfect love destroys perfectly.