Moon Scribe

IMAGO DOMINUS

1978

She stands at the bedroom door,
half in, half out,
shadow cupping breast and belly,
a half moon smile on her face,
fine mist hanging in the air
between us, darkest night behind,
and water coursing everywhere,
crystal blue and deep and silent.


THIS SCHOLAR'S LIFE

Feb. 6, 2006

This scholar’s life is simple:
to replicate that sudden dimple
which appeared, like a sun
up from its first seas, when she
smiled at me standing there
naked in a doorway with an
oh-too-infinite night
ensouling through at the level
of her knees. Amazing
that so much work without ceasing
could be prompted by
that facial creasing, but as
it flung my heart-gates wide
to receive a springtime roar
in elemental pounding roar
I’m still falling down in foam
of a sensualist’s fundamental
bliss. Her smile, her eyes hung
in the room long after she
soon was gone, leaving me
to build this life’s work
which somehow altars and
furrows and ferries that
dimple through a Vatican
of blisses great and and oh-
so dry and small. Book after book
I’ve filled with similitudes of thrall
infinitely various yet numbingly
the same, a scheherezededean drone,
fresh water every time hauled
brut and startling from the
same old Rome flowing
far underground. No matter how
much ink I hurl she’s gone,
and no matter how short I come
of that sound she made
receiving me that one night
that dimple yet remains, cresting
an evanescent pagan smile
at the shore of all my seas.
Desire’s loss is the feral
metronome I tock, pounding
wavish lines upon white sands
I dreamed us on after one
tossed night of love. My task
is to explicate the bluest depths
of that deliria which shouts
in exult bliss, harrowing all
the skulls I mass and shelve
in love’s strange library.
Each day I dare a song
to replicate an internal quote
which framed a smile’s float
across a late-night room
from I to Thou and back,
diving fin-backed metaphors
to deeper tongues of
her salt bell pealing Yes
through every bed in God’s
blue hell. The lover is a
a scholar of all who fills
his pages with a song
tossed down abjuring waves,
writing in high majescule
a dimple’s finials,
high-fiving, like bedposts,
a rock-n-rolling bed.
And for all the salt I
spread back here between
these pounding lines,
like lime it fails to
stay the ghosts, as souls
like fish escape the devil’s
tines to fan deeper abyss:
the closer I recall
the less she is at all.
The more I write
the less she dimples
that door’s remiss; some
day I will have poured
her in full measure on the page,
a singular lost pleasure
writ from marge to lees
so large and wild as
to volume the eighth
wonder of the world,
a new sea’s crash and thunder
where she once smiled at me,
drowning me in her at last.



OAK MOON

2000

Oak moon
cleft in dark
now barrowed
in the sea,
pale fire of
noctilucent bone,
my knees are
wavelets capped
with your foam
knocking on the
scarred and
barnacled haunches
of an old sea mare.
A mane of ant moss
blowing on this
changeling breeze
leads me here
into this oak heart
unfolding to a beach.
A conch gleams
wet and pink
and pale pure blue
here where the moon
is always full.
Pick it up,
close your eyes,
and listen:
I’ll be waiting
patient as forever’s tide.



O LAND'S END OF MY LONGING

2001


Sweet soft gently swinging angel,
Bottom of a cup that never empties,
God’s smile at the end of my continental longing,
Round road I travelled from harbor and home
into wild exultation and then here,
I can hardly find the words you evoke in merely passing.
You’re a pale orchard of doves in the late moon,
a melon bursting ripe for harvest, sweet with
the nectar I am all too greedy for;
You are curved as my heart, or balls, a white
reach my hands cannot touch but must or perish.
I set sail from my life when I saw you
glistening with oil and and sweat, fired by the
sun into the color of honey and tequila,
uplifted in a long curve from altar to abandon,
two half-suns parted oh so slightly by a thin thong-line
into which my every rock longing raced with
more than a herd of stallions’ fury.
Sleepy continent’s end at the dawn of my day,
ledge of flesh I would nestle my hips into if I could, or would,
let me press against you with my own dark lands
and drowse forever til the waking light
amazes me all over again and I surrender once more
to the dream of a prayer of a song of a fire
sashaying away into the forests of sweet deadly night.


THE ICEBERG

2000

This dark room
is brushed the
faintest blue
by a full moon
low in the west,
revealing
only what’s
outermost.
Like the delicate
ridges and trills
of ice floating
silent and serene
down a blackened
sea, lucent petals
of what hauls so
massively below
in a dream of
death, or you.


MAN IN THE MOON

2002

Last night I dreamed
of going to an all-night rave
in some huge old stadium.
It was girdered from
an industrial, perhaps
Roman age, all
its colors gone dark with rot,
old choler now heart’s
char. Techno music boomed
in those bitter bowels,
the revenants all lurching
in their seats clutching
bottles like shinbones
of the beast Himself.
An awful, lonely, scalding place
of human perdition. Why
am I here? I wondered, truly
of no heart to return
to such wallows. Nowadays
I hate staying up past 10 p.m.,
and yet in my dream I wandered
like a rube in Hell.
It was like returning to the bars
I used to drink in, trying to
drink better in them: older and wiser,
I thought I could drink at
some remove, and thus do better
than when I kissed the whiskey
bottles. And yet I entered
each of those places I found
them just as when I’d left
them years before, stale,
grossly wasted pulpits
of decline, surrounded
by the slow incessant suckling
of others as they too
worked misery’s tit.
You can’t go back into such
pickle-jars thinking to rebuke
that low spirit from the brain;
the sad truth is, that no cuke
ever returns from the hellish pickle
it got itself into. Yet there I
was, back in the brine,
bumping with the worst of
‘em in the worst pickle-jar
of bars, deep in the deadliest
of a.m.’s, another patch of fur
on the night’s party hyena,
snapping their jaws at the
icy, vodka moon.
I was trying to get out
of there when I woke.
They say that people die
if they fail to stir from dreams
of falling: So when I got
on my knees to pray I gave
thanks to God for another reprieve
from the howling which knows
not time in any measure
I can ever master
and from the deeper washes
of that brine, which sings
ever of the man trapped
in the jail of his moonshine.




MOONWHALE

2005

The tide in which you welcomed me
and spilt my heavens with a sigh
was greater still when it ebbed out,
leaving me upon a beach more wounded
than I knew wounds could go.
The hurt was like that Pacific breech
which delved the moon ages ago
to cross our nights in sky tidals
as love’s cold luminary, singing
whale-like in its coracle of basaltic,
borrowed bone. That wild wounding
woke every pulse of God and verse
that swims so hard in me today
as I sit in my great white writing chair
astride the darkling, well-spouting
whale of that old wound. Loss is
the bittersweetmost fruit
to ripen in love’s orchard, it’s fall
and split of raw red heart revealing
fruit I never dreamed to feel so
sea-widely, so deeply beneath
the merry blue. In those months
after you left me once again
I walked and drove so slowly,
taking in ripe autumn days
& amazed at their perfections,
my grief gilding the hours
with a melancholy booze,
each oak and dog and child
God’s supernumerary coin,
spilled from a purse which
swelled great and greater
every day you walked yet
further away. It was not your
kiss but the abyss it left behind
that hauled this boat from shore
to sail a thousand moony nights
in search of ampler calyx, for
that nippled swoon which could
milked the dregs of that cathedral
room I found beneath the marges
of desire. Its sea-deep ache burns
yet today, incessant as the moon.
A wild chatter of angelic teeth
inside the falling, tidal croon.





LUNULAE

2005


After a dinner of shepherd’s pie
and sweet red cabbage in this shining
home my wife provides
my father and I stepped out
the front door into a warm
a breezy night, the garden darkly
vibrant, half-aglow in a flickering
moonlight as clouds pressed
overhead. We walked a ways
up and down the street, my father
weaving his arm in mine,
praising the moon which burned
almost full & puffing on his pipe.
As usual we talked about the
mystery, the wild ir- and inter-
ruptionings throughout our mortal
lives by the awful visage of a
primal haul both moon and God,
returning us to ancient seas where
we begin and where the last
room of our dream will end.
Such holiness is cold and lunar,
I think, but last night the mystery
was hedged with jasmine and
wisteria pouring sweet wine from
swollen green magnums, gentling our
reveries into a lunulae hung from a fond
homeward glance, Your provenance
and gold cuspate shores hanging round
my beloved’s neck, praising her
sweet breasts and enduring wherever
we inter it next for distant gods
to harrow and hold up to the moon,
horns of gleaming fragrant art
crashing wild through a cape of bloom.


MOON SCRIBE

July 2005

This moment -- 4 a.m., deep summer,
still-full moon burning the black
garden with cold milk -- is sacred
and wild, a saucer for lips
darker than mine to plunge.
My hand in the light of this hour
is online with death and moves
like a Ouija board planjet, each
letter shored another vowel to Her name.
Surely She writes with that moon,
between brilliant ice and cold mortis,
a miniscule of swoon tracing
a dazzle of light on the water like
the zipper She lowers as I fin
harder and longer than ever before,
spouting ink and hosannahs
between thighs of that sigh
which erases you and I into
the deepest sleep of all, pure float
in soft blue. What I know of
the moon is hauled from an old well,
the deep throat of history’s
husbands and sons, lovers and
rogues, priests and scribes
and madmen too, up from
every man’s impenetrable heart.
She waits there, you know,
for each of us batter down that pale door
up in the sky sailing far to the west.
Every virgin yields to a king
and every dream flashes
below then is gone, leaving we
sleepers troubled at first light,
our hearts still paned with the
frost of old moon magic, the
thrill of it all. O heave deep,
wild summer, hot at this hour
as a storm blunders around
in the Atlantic and a few trucks
lumber the highway which drains from
the sky the last of that moon-magic,
ever the last, leaving me here with
sea-boned scriptures, sargassum
and manowars pressed in the pages,
empty shells scattered at the shore
still burning over with that old
moon’s first silky, cyanotic
effervescent wild roar.