Ode to a Beautiful Nude

With a chaste heart
With pure eyes
I celebrate your beauty
Holding the leash of blood
So that it might leap out and trace your outline
Where you lie down in my Ode
As in a land of forests or in surf
In aromatic loam, or in sea music

Beautiful nude
Equally beautiful your feet
Arched by primeval tap of wind or sound
Your ears, small shells
Of the splendid American sea
Your breasts of level plentitude
Fulfilled by living light
Your flying eyelids of wheat
Revealing or enclosing
The two deep countries of your eyes

The line your shoulders have divided into pale regions
Loses itself and blends into the compact halves of an apple
Continues separating your beauty down into two columns of
Burnished gold
Fine alabaster
To sink into the two grapes of your feet
Where your twin symmetrical tree burns again and rises
Flowering fire
Open chandelier
A swelling fruit
Over the pact of sea and earth

From what materials
Agate?
Quartz?
Wheat?
Did your body come together?
Swelling like baking bread to signal silvered hills
The cleavage of one petal
Sweet fruits of a deep velvet
Until alone remained
Astonished
The fine and firm feminine form

It is not only light that falls over the world spreading inside your body
Yet suffocate itself
So much is clarity
Taking its leave of you
As if you were on fire within

The moon lives in the lining of your skin

-Pablo Neruda

Love After Love

The time will come, when with elation,

you will greet yourself arriving

at your own door, in your own mirror,

and each will smile at the other's welcome

and say, sit here. Eat.

You will love again the stranger who was your self.

Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart

to itself, to the stranger who has loved you.

all your life, whom you have ignored

for another, who knows you by heart.

Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,

peel your own image from the mirror.

Sit. Feast on your life.

-Dereck Walcott

Letter To The Woman Who Stopped Writing Me Back

I wanted you to be the first to know - Harper & Row
has agreed to publish my collected letters to you.

The tentative title is Exorcist in the Gym of Futility.

Unfortunately I never mailed the best one,
which certainly was one of a kind.

A mutual friend told me that when I quit drinking,

I surrendered my identity in your eyes.

Now I'm just like everybody else, and it's so funny,

the way monogamy is funny, the way
someone falling down in the street is funny.

I entered a revolving door and emerged
as a human being. When you think of me
is my face electronically blurred?

I remember your collarbone, forming the tiniest
satellite dish in the universe, your smile
as the place where parallel lines inevitably crossed.

Now dinosaurs freeze to death on your shoulder.

I remember your eyes: fifty attack dogs on a single leash,
how I once held the soft audience of your hand.

I've been ignored by prettier women than you,
but none who carried the heavy pitchers of silence
so far, without spilling a drop.

- Jeffrey McDaniel

old notebooks

3/9/11

Ashes

...And they always turn back into
    humans   lest we forget.
humming
looking at the moon  
glow
as dust gathers 'round
your shoes.
We melancholy madness,
weak and powerless,
haunted by memories,
and leaven things.
Crying to our mothers',
they too forget,
we are all still human things.

11/3/09

-Skinner Blues-

Calm as a cobra on a cold day/
I feel no pain as I shed old skin/
I feel no pain at all/
she makes me taller/
up against the wind/
I feel no pain,
as I settle in.
I carry her/
like a first violin/
I'm calm as a cobra on a cold day/
In the shade/
In the shade/
not scared of the shadow/
or the hint of rain.

Many memories of May

She spoke softly as we talked of magic.
I remembered how much I missed my mother. May is full of remembrance.
How I wished the shuffle of her feet still moved across the earth.
Now I have my own steps, moving with the music, joy, and sorrow that life gives me.

When I fall asleep the ghosts visit me.
I sat in a graveyard last spring,
enchanted by this one grave marker...
it was made of wood and the grass was encroaching,
and trying to make it disappear.
The wet grass stained,
I caught my breath.
The next time I sat in a cemetery was to bury her.
I said words, no one else did.
All I have is the earth of the town named "Ash Tree",
and the memory of shuffling feet.

Roses on Sunday

She said I was "difficult".
Am I ?
Yes. She said.
I thought a moment.
Okay, I'm difficult. But I'm not...
"Yes", she said.

Coarse

With rough tongue
the wound was met
And salt mixed with saliva
iron of blood
and she pushed
further.

Today's horoscope

We feel what we feel in our own time.
We make our parts from these...
We make our moves under the stars from these...
We navigate the chambers with our ghosts.
We grow at our own pace.

We aren't looking for that hardened muscle.
We reassemble the lost parts of ourselves along the path.

We are looking for that love, without strings attached.
One that challenges us to grow. ..With ourselves.

Returned Postage. Wrong address.

I.

My night-watch

Peering into the dark,

over the walls,

watching the steel gray fog settle into the valley.

The tones of our voices start to fall low,

into indecipherable murmurs

of what we once meant them to be. Heavy. Hallow. Sacred in nature.

Held onto like that pulse we can't control. Woven into the cloth of desire.

Off in the distance is the River Styx. The boatman slowly rows downstream.

The steam of our breaths and steady, beat, steady, moans, drum,

keeping us in the land of the living. They … the They... Sheltered from the heavy, sheltered from the cold.

Her Santa Muerte nature is holding too tight to the shadow.

And They stand on these banks in limbo. Too rigid to let go of their coins.

It was the coins she pulled. But it was really the cups.

If They embrace all the shadow, we have no room for light.

I want that light.

The Southern Gothic, relying on the harm of strangers, hitting the swinging light bulb,

suspended

from the falling ceiling,

it crumbles, as the bed hits the wall, as the fist hits the wall.

Fade into the unhappy ending.

I want feel good.

Good that my heart can heal.

Good so I can fall in love with myself in every pour,

and then seep into an another like a wound filling.

Good with all my being.

Good so that I can heal.

Good does. Good does not ... hit the wall.

Stuck in a room of walls.

But the want to swing a sledge hammer at the stucco does not harbor the stagnate shadow self.

Hammer reveals the cinder blocks that have taken over my space. My healing.

My fucking god. Get me out of this room.

I want to let that light in.

It comes over the valley. It shows us the way.

Sparkling on the dew of the fields. Away it sails again.

She is healed.

II.

Sobriety

Sour-punch

suck

satisfied

sulk

sound-off

succubus

sanctuary

sure

said she

sorrow

satisfied

smug

sorry.

Ash

She swept through the land
as a volcano disrupts
a sleeping village.

How calm and quaint we were,
with our tiny boats on the calm sea,
gazing through      murky waters,
shimmering lights of the silver fishes.

And one day she spoke,
clouds blocked out our sun,
and the mighty Kali Ma
brought on a storm
and ripped through our hut made of sticks.

When the ash blew away,
        and the tide waters cleared,
that, that the sulfur had claimed,
gave life to a new flower.
And it stood erect against the wind.
              It stood alone on the bank,
taller than anything that ever came.

And she sang to the sea,
She sang of the day,
that the mountain gave way,
and the storm that blew,
and the volcano that changed, all
that she knew.

Salted

My heart was not a place to rest your weary head.
My arms do not wish to bear the burden of your regrets.
Go ahead and continue walking past,
This being is not the place for you to regain your breath.

Mushrooms growing on dead cherry

When all the usual things don't work
It's time to do unusual things.

Cryptic Concretions

Today the light is soft with the snow blanket. The sounds are muffled, caught in the chambers of ice that cover our sidewalks and dirty streets. We are wrapped in fleece and taking an extra cup of coffee and time to relax. I picked up my drawing pencil to capture the allusive Jackalope.

My work meeting was canceled. I'm listening to music. Last night some wild creature looked into my bedroom window at me. He was cold. On the front porch there are footprints from a bird trailing over the smoking chair. My housemate stood in the doorway and we exchanged pleasantries as I put out an overdue piece of post. December is unwinding our tethers to this year. This very tough year. I write and consult the tarot. I've been struck dumb with the prospect of new relations. The Chariot, The Stars, Strength, 3 of Cups, warn, wax, wane. Cryptic concretions.

It is a reminder that life springs from the decay.

Winter is the time where we restock our energies.

The sprig that swells and reemerges in the melt.

For now the snow gives me brief pause so that I might feel, create . . . .

Undo the needless wisdom that is bound to mistakes.

I'm happy this solstice turn has left me suspended in balance.   

Fall

Most people think that life begins in the spring, but it starts in autumn. As decay gives life to the forest floor, as the spores feed, new life grows and we only recognize the flowers, but we neglect the growth, we forget the beginnings... the sacrifices. Life springs from death. New beginnings start will the fall.