Grey ash, dead-branch-dim

d

e

s

c

e

n

d

s

into corpses, exhumed-verse to still worse fate –

apathy.

Words, once ample-ripe, now winter-sparse,

hunt, cock-ear’d, lungs-flatten’d, for somewhere

to land, to inhale.

Dust-grey soundings lay coiled, like the end of a painter’s day,

wrestling out colours, lines, faces –

not bothered anymore with looking beyond what is seen.

Just the clamouring fool’s last-call for the quick and easy.

These

lazy

letters, unfinished sen

Like changing tires on rusted farm trucks mired in tired dirt,

we muck about in quicksand of distraction, disappointment, deadlock,

the oppressive weight of art.

As needful distraction, we gather up the prosaic, pretentious, polemical,

in fits of laughing stems knit to notes, clinging tight to daylight’s end.

Throats worn from croaking long-forgotten songs of drunken men and laughing children.

Why not dare, instead, to probe the unentered caves where live

the furies, the forbidden, the fortuitous?

That prodigious, crowing dark –

where poets learn to see.

I’ve been feeling like a suburban home,

family-bound, dog-eared, cat-haired, dust-bunnied.

The floor sprawls, covered in lines of loosely connected

bits of string and tape, shoes without mates,

things without name or purpose or place,

shoved in too many drawers, beside stray Tupperware lids

unsure where home is.

I’ve been thatching a wayward garden,

long since surrendered her virginity to the fate of

time and neglect. Her gnarled roots now

the bed of fools – those with nothing to do 

but wait for another dry Spring and

long, parching Summer to follow.

I’ve lost the memory of how to cultivate in her

whatever tempts or teases a solitary bud.

I’ve lost my place in the song,

where happy, drooling drunks drop their lines

of sprawling melody, disconnected from time or tune

or taste, but dripping, soaked in the solicitude of friends.

Old lyrics lie waiting for my attention,

faithful old soldiers of forgotten wars,

older still, fought on fields among the family

of tables and tumbling talk, well-practiced lies

in well-memoried songs.

I’ve been acting like a poem in progress –

a toss-about of lost words, tongue-tombs tied

together by accident in a free-falling frenzy.

Outdoor syntax lost in the mall,

painted-on ivory-tower lips for her rent-a-friend parties.

The ironies, playground of op-eds and writers of no

fixed address, wasted in wordless

sentences no one can read.

But the best poems are never really

finished

In the interest of recusing myself

from the intentional acts of living in

salience and satisfaction,

I remove paper clips from bundles

and places of collecting –

days not yet taken,

things taken too often,

conversations unfinished,

gazes left unyielded to awe.

And I forget to wait.

In the interest of restraining myself

from the morbidity of beloved melancholy

I reach across heavens of tear-stained songs

and their owners, too shy to keep singing –

and touch the lips of those like me,

who might never have sung

were it not for those heaven-kissed notes.

And I forget to wait.

In the interest of reinventing myself

I recall to mind the person least reticent

to dance naked before the large window –

unblinking, shameless with wanton wit;

those long-wished for days not yet cast aside.

Not forgotten, merely unremembered.

A bold and chivalrous persona void of

the self-effacement unknown in our youth.

And I forgot to wait.

On the occasion of my fifty-fifth birthday.

____________________

No, I am not as old as

the wilting membrane of earth –

the skin of her secrets, too tightly

breast-held and leaky.

No, I am not as old as last

winter’s back-porch bread crumbs,

now frozen in cracks of concrete

and flaking paint.

No, I am not as old as the clock,

heavy in memory and fingerprints –

evidenced in her calloused hands.

No, I am not as old as the long-

faded colour now framing the painting’s

place – a reminiscence tucked in

a reminiscence. The irony of old beauties.

No, I am not as old as the tales and

fables, born wild and then loosed

in the telling, fermenting into 

many-tongued song.

No, I am not as old as the coughing

farm truck, grizzled metal and clogged

arteries, belching orders under

a hollow back, still unbroken.

No, I am not as old as the cathedral

stone, serenely quiet in the preachy

way of ancient things always new.

I am just old enough to love, and

to start again.