Not knowing what wind is
I roll up my sleeves above the elbows.

I hold my arm upward, outstretched,
To have naked skin touched by the unknown, the wind.

I felt my arm transformed into a piano keyboard
Being played by the wind’s invisible fingers.

I listen to the music,
Shut myself inside its closet.

For a small segment of time,
I’m rapturous in our useless, brutal man-made world.

THE SUMMA                                                                                                                              top

 Thomas Aquinas, after refusing many gifts,
Accepted a gift,
The gift--all the caged birds of the city.
Thomas appropriating Aristotle,
Thought cages
Depontentialized the avian telos.
Thomas opened all the cages, freed the birds.

I wonder how Thomas Aquinas felt at the moment
He saw the colors of an European goldfinches wings.
Did he erase his senses,
Respond conceptually,
See the sensuous colors,
The sensuous motions of flight
As dehumanized minds see water as H20,
As dehumanized mathematicians
See reality as dehumanized numbers.
How did Thomas Aquinas
Respond to the sensuous motions of curved wings.

How did he respond to the quivering of yellows and reds.

I’ll never know how Thomas Aquinas responded to freed birds.
Thomas Aquinas,
At this time, the most learned man in Europe,
Probably could not understand
How he responded to the sensuousness of freed birds,
So he wrote his Summa.

RUMINATIONS WITHOUT ROSES                                                                                        top

 Hen eggs spiraled with swirls of pastel colors, concealed
In uncut grasses and tree crouches. It’s another Easter.

On freeway, steel containers, motored, speed
Anonymities, aorist, to lost of memories of alimonies.

A bee, barefooted, gold-girded, disappears into a corolla,
Emerges shod in gold shoes, brain-busy, creating sacred society.

The order of the society we celebrate is not an order
Of love or intelligence, but an order enforced by autistic idiots.

I recall writing an essay on phenomenal ontology
While sipping cognac in the front of the cathedral at Cologne.

On the Cathedral steps, colored by stained-glass reflections,
Shirtless, tattooed American rock singers sung disjunctively.

STRONG WIND                                                                                                                          top

 Her dress, long, loose, the lake wind
Pushes the cloth

Tightly against her body
As she walks by willows.

The dress, a blue faded to the lightest blue,
Cheap cloth.

I was stirred, excited
When I saw the tightness of the shoddy dress.

She spoke a shoddy language;
I blame my mind for listening.

GREEN FROG                                                                                                                             top

 She had red hair, natural vermilion, scarlet-spotted
In accord with au courant punk fashion. Her hair
Dropped, curved, swayed like the movements
Of a white-stocking anorexic, angular Toulouse-Lautrec,
Drugged dancer, dancing at 3 AM among pot smokers.
She, sipping cognac, said,
“Do you know that Descartes
Thought the pineal gland to be the seat of the soul.”
I replied, “ Why don’t we go back to the Borghese gardens
Sat all night with Campari between the large roots
Of umbrellas pines, and when morning comes
Go inside the villa view Bernini’s Davide
Slinging his rock at an unseen giant.”
We had just left an insurance company’s backyard
Vodka-martini party lit by three large kleig lights.
It was at the party where she lost
Her Audubon painting of a pair of summer tanagers.
Now, I was gazing at the skeleton
Of a sand dollar inside plexiglass on a bar table,
Thinking about the inadequacy of all human relationships,
And how this fact is covered up with a language of lies.
I did remember when we left the party,
My excitement in seeing a small green frog
Hop to hide behind a white orchid
That grew on the electric-sprinkled wet wall.

MIRACLES WITHOUT SUPERSTITION                                                                                 top

 The distant hills of brown red rock
Resemble a hermit’s exotic threadbare robe
As he joyfully sings songs about Australian emus.
The garden pool had leopard-spotted stones
That changed their spots
As the wind dressed and undressed.
The frangipani tree by the bricks
Is holding in the curl of a leaf
The words the moon spoke last night.
I wondered how many naturalistic miracles
Happened yesterday that I did not observe.

CONVERSATIONS AMONG SOUVENIRS                                                                           top

 Old, non-instrumental lobster-trap--grayed,
Hairy, loose, broken slats,

A souvenir

That serves as a shelf
For a golden Buddha extending one foot
From the lotus position out towards the world,
Bo trees, rice bowls .

The cognac conversation was about how to save the polar bear
From oil drilling and global warming.
No talker loved polar bears, but loved his assertions.

I thought of my clandestine cabin in crepuscular Norway,
A lone, old boat gripping the arm of a lighthouse light.
All souvenirs were hidden in the rafters, no conversations.

THE SACRED MOMENT                                                                                                           top

 Out of the outré
Appears the sun-silvered water-covered ouzel
Whose dips shadow a rock
That is the base that begins
A stairway to a storm of shadows.

These moments, unstructured
By predetermined meaning,
When the flower and stone are paratactic.

At the time, I become conscious of a Venetian train station,
Blonde eyelashes,
Pale blue eyes,
A red hat.

The paint I put on my canvas
Sitting on the easel speaks Glossolalia.

RITUAL TO EXORCISE MY ALIENATING IDENTITY
SO I CAN CREATE A GIRL FROM THE FOAM ON GULF SHORELINE                        top

Foam on gulf shore
Bubble
Left by waves
Alone on brown sand
Quivering in the wind
Bubble
About to be born
With shoulders
With arms

I also am alone
But my mind
Is filled with a crowd
That speaks a language
I must unlearn
I must amputate my mind
This burden
Grafted by strangers
On my blood
I must become uninhabited
To inhabit
Her body of water

Foam
Momentary wind-shaped water
Possible sea born girl
Coral colored hair
Body of illumination
Misnamed Aphrodite
Venus
Undine
Inana
Girl, whose name is beyond all names

I gaze at your curves
Among broken sea weed
Among the gold berries of the seas’ fires
Among the broken fishing lines of drunks
The lead that never wanted to leave the mountain
The tossed away bottles

There is a finger smeared bottle
That hates its contents
The artificial flavoring
Colored to please the lovers of lies
But this bottle knows without the false contents
There would be ostracism and the absence of doorknobs
This bottle is my life

Foam I ask you
To change from water into a girl
Grab me with your hands
Throw me against the rocks
Let me become fragments

There is another bottle
Barnacled covered
Slime surrounded
And filled
Inside with a dark mysterious small crab
With fierce claws
This bottle sun lit sun bleached
Invisible
This is the bottle I want to be

My past
Foam
Has been a card game
Played by people who scribbled in chalk
Their names on every sidewalk

Foam
Possible wind shaped girl
I confront you
You not yet born
To write us

The geometry of your body
My loneliness
The wind makes you irregular
My birth
It is the same wind that can take you back into the waves
To oblivion

Your eyes change color
Blue green hazel
My rapture
Never let your eyes stay one color
I try to explain my desires
To the numbers on house
And find myself bitter

I once sought
The rainbows on your sides
On your waist
On your hips
On your breasts
Buried among the shells of the dead
The whelks with holes
The conchs with collapsed sides
I dug into the graves
You were not there
You were elsewhere
Not buried among bleached bones

The colors flicker
Over the water your future skin
These colors constantly
Changed by the wind
The wind always blows

Bubble of rainbows
On brown sand
You the magnifying glass
Through whom
The earth is magnified and seen
But if I touch you
Rub my fingers
Over your curves your future flesh
You explode
Disappear into drops
Under my fingers a void
Empty sand
I’m afraid
I reach with the shadow of my hand

I am the poet who specializes
In loving things
Snails spiders mud pelicans pine cones
Bark feathers fur the armadillo’s hide
The green tree frog’s eyes
No one
No one
Could love you as deeply as I do
But I know so well
The wind always blows
I know the trap
That is life
This prison without walls
Bars or a locked door
I hear this cage of words
I create when I speak
Other than the language of the poem
And build my own prison
I cannot understand
Why I live by the lies others spoke into me
Why I repeat these lies
In my life away from you
Foam
Away from you and the poem
All I know is
The wind always blows
This wind
Doesn’t know I exist
Or you can exist
Foam

I now speak words
Silent words I never
Spoke before
Words that are beyond
My hearing
I speak the contents
Of my inner self
Without hearing

I say
I say aloud
I cannot destroy what little I have
This moment of Foam
By trying to have more
The whole earth and its hair
Why do you
Foam
Hesitate in the corridors
Of wind

I will remain alone
With you
Foam
On this shoreline
Listen to the wind
Will stay
As long
As the wind
Will allow me to stay
Allow you Foam to stay
And write us into a poem

ALONE ON A SHORELINE                                                                                                       top