A Miscellany of Heart-Roads

So what am I getting at? Don’t we all ask ourselves that in the work we’re about? The deep work I mean, in our poems and prayers, in our studies and excavations. Getting to the heart of the matter, to that infernal heartland of the magic South, the half of Ireland beneath the Sidhe, eighteen inches down from the noggin along a descending road of souls into the plush and gush of vitallest gules, a swampy hot island in the center of the chest where my truths are all rooted: knowledge of self, knowledge of God, knowledge of the world. There the starry heavens are writ, margined by all things lost at sea.

Heart-knowledge is knowledge of first things, of the way we were when love flooded through us like a uteral sea. It is knowledge of mythic time, the lineage of gods before kings, of the vast intercoursings of Aphrodite astride tunny Poseidon, of the precise count of Zeus’s sperm, of the names of all his children, the number of of Hera’s enraged tears. There too my personal father and mother, as the latest bum battlefield of the heart, re-enacting Wellington and Shiloh with grand intentions and generations-deep wounds.

If only learning the heart followed a clear procedure: always the roads there are muddy, strange, noctilucent, dangerous (at best turbulent), as if one were tasked to walk a sword bridge over to it. The light provided for this passage is moody and moony, ethereal, cold: clearly Other. No wonder we’ve always loved faery imagery, as Thomas Tickell sings “Kensington Gardens” (18th cent.):

When Albion ruled the land, whose lineage came
From Neptune mingling with a mortal dame,
Their midnight pranks the sprightly fairies play’d
On every hill, and danc’d in every shade.
But, foes to sun-shine, most they took delight
In dells and dales concealed from human sight:
There hew’d their houses in the arching rock;
Or scoop’d the bosom of the blasted oak;
Or heard, o’ershadowed by some shelving hill,
The distant murmurs of the fading rills.
They, rich in pilfer’d spoils, indulg’d their mirth,
And pity’d the huge wretched sons of earth.
Ev’n now, ‘tis said, the hinds o’erhear their strain,
And strive to view their airy forms in vain;
They to their cells at man’s approach repair,
Like the shy leveret, or the mother-hare,
The whilst poor mortals startle at the sound
Of unseen footsteps on the haunted ground.

What are these beasts in our chests, surly yet serene, burning with a certainty for invisible things, durable most in breaking, always just beyond our wills, our courage, our knowledge? How do we receive the wisdom of the heart? Is it a matter of Solomonic instruction, as we read in the Proverbs:

My son, attend to my words; incline thine ear unto my sayings.
Let them not depart from thine eyes; keep them in the midst of thine heart.
For they are life unto those that find them, and health to all their flesh.
Keep thy heart with all diligence; for out of it are the issues of life. (4.20-2 King James Version)

Or is it always something we must find on our own, to know our true feelings, to sound its mysterious depths? For such a task do I turn to personal history, the jawbone and Rosetta stone of the heart’s mystery? In AA they say, “your story is your sobriety;” the tale is whale I here ride. All I have are memories, signs, passions, griefs, and oceans of coagulative ink, thinking down into the heart of that heart, through its heat and its confusions, its mad certainties.


AURA OF THE HEART

Sept. 16

I was born Merovingian,
fixed by a birthmark
over my heart of a red
heart with an arrow through it.
Some tattoo, eh. It faded
when I was three, perhaps
when my own heart
first began to break,
waking to the great
and greater distance
between me and
the objects of desire
I call love, that lucent
moon which hauls
ever higher and further
across its singing mothersea.
Moonlight casts an aura
over night lands; so too
that mark’s memory
lamps the blue realms
of my heart,
a ghostly phosphor
which somehow knows
what I can’t see
like an inward bulb
screwed into ecstasy.
That birthmark’s aura
gives voice to a skull
up from the dirt
or phallus in a boat
floating down a
black tide’s nekyia
bringing the news
to me of that furthest
limit down and away
where You swell
the rooks of hallowed
sound. Did that mark
fade into my chest
or travel down?
There’s a blotch of
brown on my right
anklebone; if that’s
where my royal
numen came to
rest, its surely
just a poor wreck,
the relic shoreline
of a first pure
ecstasy. I live there
now, in the slow
wreakage of my
body’s South, the
happy ruin of
a rune which so
transfixed and
nailed my history
to a woman’s—real,
imagined— smile.
To dowse the depths
in love’s high name
became the aura
of my own -- “son
of love? is my
real name’s Jewish
root, that name
which hides behind
and south of
the name I writ here
by, like the rudder
of the coracle
St. Brendan
sails in search
of one true shore.
That birthmark
lost long ago is
the bluest aura
of my song, staining
every chord in noctal
wash, giving birth to a
faery brood of
singsong ditties
fathered by a
brutal fish & nursed
on mortal titties.
Infernal parable,
mythos of a heart,
ghostly lucence
of a thrall I’ll never
name, housed down
at the bottom of
it all, though each
harrowing goes deep,
wilder, freer too. So
upon my secret altar
I place that
sign of a birth-unions
struck by love: savage
calyx of perfumed
lush thorns, rosebud
closure which has me
forever sworn to
an ending without
real orifice, waters
at first light, the
aura by which I’m
born again here,
a moon over the
first wild sea,
giving heart
to what cannot be.


BIRTHMARK

2004


All metre and mystery
touch on the Lord at last.
The tide thunders ashore
in praise of the High King.

-- from “A Defense of Poetry,”
Giolla Brighde Mac Con Midhe (13th cent.)
transl. from the Gaelic by
Thomas Kinsella

For some—it is horsemen; for others—it is infantry;
For some others—it is ships which are, on this black earth,
Visibly constant in their beauty. But for me,
It is that which you desire.

—Sappho, Fr. 16, transl. D. W. Myatt

I was born to such
hapless outre & riven
song out in love’s
blue tide: The
gods scarred
or scored me at
birth with the
unlikely mark
of a red heart
with an arrow through
it & affixed high
over my right nipple:
I was a humming
baby who took later
delight in the sight
of pretty girls walking
by our front window:
Sang long & loud
to Big Toe my
toad in her yellow pail
out at Cape Cod where
we once vacationed:
Fell desperately in
love with the girl down
the street who swam
topless for me in a
bright blue wading pool
(we were 3): So when
at 4 years old
I sat on Jacksonville
Beach with my mother
& heard her voice inside
the surf I was already
old in that song, a
veteran sailor of
the rise and crash
of blue seem: The
birthmark faded around
then, it sunk into my
heart to conch a chapel
of that beach of
song and love and
you: Ever since
it bid me sing
for good and ill
these useless raptures
of sigh and swill:
No more of that
history this morning,
there’s work to do:
My wife and I up
now at 4 a.m., I to
work where the pile
is high, my wife on
to Wal-Mart to get
shopping done
so she can get home
& to work on her
fabrics, that
embroidery inside
her which must
come forth: Incessant
this desire to repeat
and name all the
waves which carved
a sound inside my
ear, or woke more
ancient tidals of
womb and gene
and heraldic
minstrelsy, like
an old song’s next harp:
This life is one
wave’s rise and crash
and ebb so wild to
reach you at last as
ever, pregnant
in every wave
you’ve bid Cupid
ride since time first
poured the seas: I’ve
long given up caring
how the world accounts
and dismounts this
blue tongue from your
salt throat: And if I
err, I err now wildly
enough to appease
the errant itch: I’m
not much different
from woman who saw
the likeness of the
Virgin Mary in a
grilled cheese sandwich
she had just taken
a bite out of, preserving
the morsel for ten
years (waiting for
the death of her
parents, she said)
& then selling it
the other day on E-bay
for $28,000 to an
online casino:
Same gal, different
grill: There’s lucre
aplenty to blow
in fustive coin, spume
and spew enough
of burning narhwal seed
to horn every ocean
womb: Enough sweet-
sounding syllables
to wash on every shore
that lies ahead where you
once walked and gazed
imploring emptiness
to send your lover
at last: That’s my gig,
my under-employ, while
the real life goes on
and down and through:
A happy life, I’d add,
composed of joys
which carry a high
and dear price:
This salt blue intone
is like bone-ribbing
for that big-finned life,
a cathedral keel
of wavelike bones with
all the world between us
and every song on loan
from the missal buried
far down there in
the cold dark sea
where you and I
sing in each other,
spinning the great
wheel over and over,
praying we’ll get lucky at last:


THE BIRTHMARK

2000

Both ends burning:
head and cock
sizzling down
to the unexplainably
dark heart from
whence all hungers
are denied.
Ghost birthmark
heart with
an arrow through
it. Son of Eros,
lordly fire filtering
hither and yon
with his untutored
clutch of arrows,
looking for love
in all the wrong places.
How many beds
does it take to find
the name?
Rooms I have entered
heedless of the
hour or of my
sour condition
in search of the
the edge of fire.
Flying off again
before drowsy
rains: appetites
sated but not whet.
Puer in the guise
of Eros flying over
each encounter
never touching
earth or bed
long enough to
recognize a face.
Because love is
a torture, the heart
forged in fires
greater than passion.
A geologic, transforming
boy to man in each
bloody kept transition.
Returning to the same
house again and
again finding room
after room
and when they
seem to end
remaining to praise
the same room.
Releasing the goddess
from the woman
not to love
imperfection but
rather to praise
what is perfectly
here, her blue gray
eyes rising from
one voluptuously
offered hug. Understand-
ing boundaries as
walls of a heart
which permit old
blood to grow new.
Adult eros a fable
we love to tell
amid the order
of our lives - Praying
o not shoot thy
sweet and terrible
arrows this way
again.
I’ve plenty.


HEART PIERCED BY ARROW

2000


Heart pierced by arrow:
a signet of assault
by Eros. Love’s rebirth
on a shaft of white fire
when she says
O Yes
and I write O Boy.
All I ever wanted
to know in that
swift pierce
from half to half
of a heart.
My birth tattoo,
my epitaph.
God singing while
he warms his hands
on my pyre.

NOT LOVE BUT ART

1995

Not love but art:
rare dazzle of
the highland hour;
seducer combing
his black hair
on the sagging
porches of the heart.

He who obeys
by violating love;
Arrow barbed
in glowing iron
falling gorgeous
to the sea.

Gilding the
echoes
of love's
futile shout.

Solitary boat
rocking on a
black lacquer tide.


NOT ART BUT LOVE

1995

Not art
but love:
she who walks
so naked
outside
cathedrals
Whose smile
defeats
their shadow

Hot blossom
so indolent
and svelte
curving the dreams
of island boys

Her eyes
so deep in blue
to make
God weak
in the knees

Most herself
when this
glass womb
shatters


THE HEART IS
NOT A DIGITAL FACT

December 1994

The heart is not
a digital fact.
It is not locked in
a choice between
solitude and romance.
No.
I would awaken
to what wilds there
are between those
cities of sorrow
and swoon.

If only
I could quit
this godforsaken chase.


ART HEART

2006

The heart has no place
in the market -- ask
any of its players
from salt-seller to
grifter to brass tycoon.
I wonder too if the heart
should veer right of
poetry so to avoid
all confusion of verbal
swoon with the real
songs of love, the
ten thousand simple
ditties which compose
a couple’s fateful life.
The heart of art
is pure usury,
gold on one side of
the glittery wave
and Arctic blue on
its other, never meant
for beds or the
tender garden of
days. The art of
the heart ships to
shores far down
from the heart
of the art, where
it’s always full moon
and the waves
crash like milked
silver, harrowing and
blue and incessantly
brutal and deep
and divine. I swim
with the nixies
and wake with my wife,
secure in this
narrowed conceit
of two vaults meant
to fill far from the other
yet mutually misered
by one sambaltique
sea. Coinage and vantage
mean less in its slopes
than heels and mizzen,
spars cast far below.
However I say it is wrong
though the distinction
is true. Whalers in
crow’s nests would
agree: cask your oil
safe below; keep
an eye trained equally
on flukes and home
shores; and always
remember where you’re
standing, and on what,
somewhere between
God and the vast
plunging sea. Thus
I keep my heart
in its soul cage
beating sure down the page.


HEART INSIDE SONG

2000

from “A Breviary of Guitars”


Summer 1986:
Music brought me
from a sparkling
beach just outside
the womb to
another distant
strange beach which
felt more like a
tomb: Throughout
the transit in
the many stances
I presumed
holding a
guitar I
never doubted
the notes which rose
in me & called me
from beyond:
Never doubted
the heart inside
the song though my
performance was
always flawed
& errant &
suspect: There was
a riff I created
or which came
unbidden to
me which I wove
into one of the
only true
Innocent Theives
songs: four chords
descending through
each other—
Cmaj7 (pause)
Amaj7 (pause)
Gsus7 (pause)
Em7-9 (pause &
pause) & then
back to some
perky pop
confection Shawn
desired, D-F-C,
C-G-D etc:
Over and through
the chords I wove
a melodic line
bending &
reaching notes that
cried from inside
the chords, nothing
complicated, all
of it pure
alloyed beach:
If you could
distill the
fevers &
longings from the
heart of one late
20th century
end of the
rock n roll show
get a job boy,
it was all in
those chords, that
solo: To Rilke
such music was
language where
all language
ends and standing vertically
on the motion
of human hearts
(“To Music,” transl.
Mitchell): Surely
what I was most
about beyond the
thrash and smash
of my wounded
life was like
stamping the grapes
for the wine
which uncasks:
Transformation
of feelings into
audible
landscape: Notes
of longing
wonder laughter
grief ascending
like gauzy
mermaids of
the air from the
graves of love:
Of them but not
ever she who
waits forever out
of reach clasp &
quench: The deepest
space in us,
which, rising
above us, forces
its way out,
—holy departure:
When the innermost
point in us stands
outside as the
most practiced
distance as the
other side of the
air: Pure, boundless,
no longer
habitable: That
storm cloud rising
above James’
memorial bench
on Sunday,
lifting up toward
the inexpressible
welcome in the
chorus of Cheap
Trick’s “I Will Be
The Flame”: A
totality of wings
& hooves which
has always driven
me beyond what
I know & what
I can do & how
I love: I was at
my very best
as a guitar
player in Innocent
Thieves, reaching
and turning more
notes than ever
& crafting them
back into the
world: I don’t
know if my
darker deeper
ever more wretched
nights destroyed that
promise or coaled
it in whiskey
fevers that only
bade the notes burn
brighter: Both
perhaps: For pure
song cannot live
long in this world
& one right riff
burns oceans
to sand:


GHOST HEART

1999

from “A Breviary of Guitars”

Winter 1984:
A song for this
season though
it wasn’t
recorded til
years later
is Bad English’s
“Ghost in
Your Heart” —
John Waite watching
a lost love from
some high
shamanic perch
as she goes
on without him,
& with some
other: And though
Waite is far far
away that
absence is
a resonance in
the heart which
remembers still
old fires: “Are
you crying in
your sleep tonight”
he sings: When
you’re lying with
him / Do you turn
out the light /
Are you hiding
in your dreams
tonight / In your
world / I will be /
The ghost in
your heart / In
your heart:
She ain’t missing
him oh year:
For years I
wanted to believe
that Dana could
not forget me
now matter how
hard she tried,
that every
future love, ever
other bed would
seem transparent
& false laid
next to the
deeper fuller
love she had
walked away from:
A virile power’s
in that song,
cocksure despite
defeat & oh
how I felt the
edge of that
song years after
Dana was long
dead & buried
in my heart:
Ah but in that
song I heard
again my thrall,
my eros a
black gold which
grew within as
I festered &
fell refusing
to let go: Salting
the wound with booze
booze & more
booze: It did’t
help either that
we kept in touch
on Dana’s terms,
dear friends
without a prayer
of sex: She’d
call me at work
& I would sit
and listen &
listen &
listen, offer
an encouraging
word here & a
joke there:
Listen to how
hard it was for
her to go it
alone and
all the bills
she now had
without me to
help: Listen
to her tirades
against assholes
at work & how
she was gonna
get outta there
for sure: She
didn’t care a
whit to listen
back about how
badly I was living
turning on the
spit of our split:
No: I was the
Ear into which
she poured her
talk: That was
what love of
mine she wanted &
I just sat there
reeling her words
in, stuffing it
down, hoping I
guess that she
would fall in love
again with my love,
this passive open
receive: But
she just talked
on and on
until she flowed
away: After
she hung up
I’d pace the
stockroom in
a terrible rage,
punching cartons,
all of that
fury pointed
at myself,
the asshole,
fool, wimp,
no wonder she
stopped wanting
to fuck you:
Ghost in whose
heart indeed:
that song a
saddle quern
of ferocious
irony because
eros is just
a personal
delirium, fooling
us into thinking
our desire
matters at all
to the Other:
How frightening
it would be
to see what the
Beloved truly
thought about
me: Like looking
into the heart
of an alien: What
makes the song
still so utterly
true is that we’re
all fooled by
our loves: We all
think we matter
to the one who
walked away, that
the love which
wounded us so
is guilt without
reprieve as long
as we deem:
Ha ha ha
ha ha: Dana was
on to her new
loves a month
after crying
her farewells to
me: She
hardly looked
back chasing her
own desires:
Instead of a
ghost, just a
regret when there
was one moment
to think about
it: Eros
feathers our
love with a
godlike soar
when to the
Beloved it’s just
the next wake
to oar: These
lessons were
truly new in the
winter of ‘84
because I had
never before
known any
duration in
loving: Never
given away so much
for an other:
Never encountered
the dire
consequences
of dispossession:
And so for a
long season
I skittered
about like a
crab on a dark
ocean floor
howling my
grief and
grabbing at
whatever release I
bumped into
as I spun:
My kind of love
nearly kills me
— Here’s an
epitaph: “Peg
In My Heart”
or maybe “Both
Legs In Your
Dark” or maybe
“Cashed In
That Vault
of Love:”
Go figure:


POEMS WITHOUT HEART

2000

Poems without heart:
These are the ratty
rooms I now shack in.
And you thought it
was Art over Heart.
Well, Art without Heart
is a waste of ink and page,
a tuneless fart
which no amount
of bitching here
can avert or assuage.


COR DUPLEX
(“Double" or "Duplicitous Heart”)

There is a cor duplex
in this warp of a weave,
a double-hearted shout
whose bright shadings
reveal and conceal
with an obstinate fist.

The Church saw
this long ago,
declaring the heart
both seat of salvation
and perilolus siege,
a foundation stone
cracked three
times before first light.

A diabolic sanctus
houses bride and demon
lover, Michael
the hammer
of God
and Lucifer
the doubting scourge.
Each beckons
to the world
through one
sulphuric portal.

So when I say
“I love you
with all my heart”
you must understand
the danger there.
It means my
rises come with
my falls. I speak
openly to you
and lie through
my teeth.
You get it all.
This morning
is all fumes and mist.
A full moon aches
high above, its
brilliance
blackening the sky.
While you sleep,
there is
a lion with his
feet planted wide
opening wide to roar.
This duplex
heart paces
by its sea,
shouting names
at silver black waves
eternally here
and gone. Someone
show me how to
live wholeheartedly
without ripping
some world in two.


HIGHWAY HEART

2001

The heart is a two lane
highway at rush hour,
burning two directions
at once, arriving as
it departs, descending
as it blooms ...

Even heaven has its height.
Love is defined by
a barbwire fence
we can never cross.
It exiles every embrace.
I would stay with you
forever, but there’s always
another broken chalice
in the next day, another
door smelling of
swilled jasmine and moon.
The heart’s circulation
keeps me on the road
praying to meet you at last
as I wave farewell.

Hopeless O dolor
of sweet encounter,
bone brow melting only
to jut again by morning,
wings moulting into stone.
The gods who washed away
left this salt on our faces
and it can’t be cried clean.
Purge the arrows
and the song flies away.
Radios at night all
fall silent, the moon
is trapped in the sea
which lies flat as glass.

No: It must go on,
prodigal rhythmus
of a torched homeland,
its arterial traffic
hurling ever westward
while the royal vein
carries back the
exhausted desire.
Celebrate it! Or die.


HEARTLAND

2001

...when we choose
the way by which our only life
is lived, we choose and do not know
what we have chosen, for this
is the heart’s choice, not the mind’s;
to be true to the heart’s one choice
is the long labor of the mind.

-- Wendell Berry

We’re talking the infernal
South here, kingdom
by the burning sea.
Heart-roads meander
and invert, blossoming
in the bed of a Nereid
one night, only to
snarl the knickers
of a sea-witch the next.
And always in the air
that sweet fiddling, so
maddeningly near yet gone ...

It’s hell when the mind
tries to make sense
of the heart, no,
moralize its mess, no,
marries a debutante
from some safe
northern ‘burb.
You can try to rid the rouse,
spend a month in detox,
sweep the seaweed under
twelve steps, put some
order in your house:

But still she comes for you
in your brightest hour,
her wet hair clicking
with crabs, singing a
o thing of darkness,
you are my lover,
my child, my bath of red gold ...

Bone minstrel, harp truly
of what’s forever yours:
a spinning boat
on moon-washed brine,
a compass upended
toward the heart’s sour star,
another poem shipwrecked
where it loved, swirling
down this green-black page.



OCEAN HEART

2001


Ah brig, good night,
to crew and you:
the ocean's heart too smooth, too blue
to break for you.

-- Emily Dickinson (LI)

After 20 years adrift in modern paradise
the heart grows burnished, like sea glass,
of its malt obliquities. I remember
my first summer down here walking Cocoa Beach
after drinking all night, my jeans rolled,
the morning a sweet diaspon of swelling joy,
my head singing that old Bob Marley tune
is this love is this love is this love that I’m feelin
to tiny Atlantic rollers which broke and scattered
all the sunlight just before my feet. How I hoped
for some Venus to sashay butt-naked off
those waves and fuck my emptiness
with porno-cum-motherly abandon.
Ah me. I drove as always home empty-handed,
my need for love conched inside that brilliant beach.
The years were not without their tide of vestals,
boozy and half-spread devotees of things
I way too partially represented. Our bodies
clanged like clabbers of a weary fog bell,
our hearts nacreous with bitters which would appall
any god, much more twenty-somethings
reaching for the golden ring inside the other’s thighs.
I tried, they tried, we all tried to make a go
of something which had small Michelangelo.
Then came the wives, who joined hands with me
in houses built on time, earnest sorors who sought
to reconcile their history with mine. Both wives
attacked the task with a feral openness I fell far
short of matching. We never made it together
much to any beach, what with daily tasks so far inland,
removed from those yeasty beams of ocean light,
our earnest labors wearying us from every sou
of drippy fun. No wonder I dreamed
of nipply naiads scampering red-rumped
in the surf just out of reach, their beach towels
dropping like moot fig leaves in the scree
— Nor any surprise that I plunged from
those briared ridges into sweet, descending,
horrific billows. I’ve just begun to right
those rumpy arrears. What’s next?
I’ll not go forward without reaching for
the hand I know, surf or no, toward
the best or worst years of love. Sadly
she may not reach back. We’ve new waters to face,
beached, if you will, where there are the
most difficult of surf conditions, full of riptides
and dark harbors: Yet face it together we must,
paradise or no, or never know which hands
the white heat rinsed in those white sands.


KNOW YOUR HEART

2001

You asked me to know my heart
at last, for once and all,
and either marry or divorce you.
Fair enough. Yet I thought I
decided that for good
six months now, and have
been living to the hilt of that love,
leaching out all unvowed dross
— changed well, corking up the
bottle, paying my debts,
making a daily amends to you.
But a confession of a mistake
in blithely cracking the door
to an old love widened into
a brutal, cold wind
in which you doubted all I’d done
as cover for a truth I won’t
or can’t accept. Know yourself!
You pleaded, desperate not to
set yourself up once again
for some later, even harder plunge
into the brine. And so, I’ve had to wonder
if I love as I live, whether all
I do is imposed from above
upon a rude dissent below.
How can I decide what
seems so equally true?
For two days now I’ve felt
physically mauled, whipped by an
old, older brother, my every
good impulse questioned to
the very stone ground. Awful.
Last night I dreamed
of an elaborate library
of childhood books and
huge leather volumes which
was ruled over by a huge moon
and two fighting bulls and
warmed with a creamy, puppy brood.
And dreamed then of an awful
sea-threatened gorge
between halves of a world
—my father’s, or my own?
I struggled almost vainly to
cross over, cresting the
last ridge to find all becalmed
but divided by an impossibly
wide river. Must I always love
by halves, yoking one to some
other will? Is that the best
I can offer you, and can that
ever be enough? Must I lose
all we have made together
in its hard fought dream of
some paradise, simply because
by rights I’m only and always
halved? The truth will set
you free, but it first
will make you miserable,
I’ve heard it said. How true.
This morning I wonder what
truth must kill to rid
at last the ill too much happiness
has depended upon.
Lord, walk with me down
this frightening aisle
of blood and brine
which divides the good man
from the honest one.
Grant me eyes and ears
which are fearless, open, and free.


HEART-SHAPED MIND

2002

A heart-shaped mind
is not the same as
a ship-shape gut
or (sorry boys)
a divinely curving
butt: There’s no jello
mold on earth
that can succor to
the rim this kissy
cortical waddle
lathed in heaven’s
fruit (halved strawbs,
benignly crescent
orange, sliced Kiwi
squealing limegreen horns):
I would trade Ahab’s
Dick for just one hour
with you in that gelid glade,
peeled and complicit
and congealing
on a prelapsarian
lettuce leaf:

A heart-shaped mind
takes two to tango:
chamber to chamber,
cheek to cheek,
we waltz up the Congo
sans paddle, sans creek.
Only a heart-shaped brow
knows even what to prow.


HEART

2003

The heart’s a charnel house
where the dead in their salts
turn and groan, their voices
like a weird-light over
moonlit bogs, seal-songs
on their rocks, the chorus
in the greeny light of
the drunk tank at 5 a.m.:
Hard stuff if you would
have all this and not let go.

Or, the heart’s a Chartres
raised by poor hands
toward greater use,
a hall of rose windows
which tell our story
and in the telling catch
the sun & hurl the
glory of myth throughout
hugeness, upon cool walls.

Which heart would you
reveal, traveller:
bourne of restless bones
or a lasting home
for all who follow?



HAPPY HEART

2003


The wheat leans back toward
its own darkness,
And I lean toward mine.
— James Wright

Clear today, bone-bright
and rinsing snowmelt
into the gutters. Slowly
we revert to standard
procedure, the gleaning and
palming of the hours
for whatever they’re worth.
Yesterday 2 dozen naked
women ran through Central
Park and lay down
to spell out Bush
in protest, I guess.
National security at
Code Orange and some
unnamed threat on
the East Coast.
Soon to ready this dog
and pony show for another
day of sales and then
home, aboard some cramped
Delta 737 for the
belligerent joy of Florida
and my home, which has
seen little of is these days,
but does have a wife and
a cat and a warm chair
for first waking
and whatever may be left
to say here.
This winter light bright
yellow and deep blue,
a sort of toothiness with
an appetite for clarity
at all costs and a clench
which bleeds darkness
come end of day.
A posture of letting go what
served well but is now dead.
God help us survive
with a happy heart.


THE HEART DOESN’T KNOW

2002

The heart / never fits
the journey. /Always
one ends / first.
— Jack Gilbert

Poets believe their art
loquates blue shadows
of the errant heart,
but I doubt it. I’ve
hacked my own in two
attempting to speak
fully, and it only brought
me closing-time blues.
The words never
do more than name,
and that’s not enough.
They’re fall chasms
short of the mark.
Orpheus could have
harrowed hell with
just 3 more words
for love but instead
he found ruin. The heart
doesn’t know, it decides.
Each turn has a name,
but that isn’t what makes
them true. Don’t ever
mistake art and heart
again. You don’t get
any more reprieves.
Not at your age,
and not in this world.


HEART LINE

2002


Every work of a writer should be
a first step, but this will be a false step
unless, whether or not he realizes it
at the time, it is also a further step.
... It takes little talent to see clearly
what lies under one’s nose, a good deal
of it to know in which direction
to point it in.

— Auden

Autobiography has
a personal stink to it
which guides this pen
with surety: but what
is that to you? My wife
says dreams not her
own are boring.
In my dream last
night I felt
a savage love for a
hoary cat kept in an
old stockroom all night:
The cat’s need for me or I for it
was a bittersweet sap
thick with all the things
I’ve truly loved and lost.
I uncork it here for your
potage, not that you
may swill my dreams—
a boorish aim—
but rather to share
that dram of authentic
love which outlasts
all other fires.
My own history is
lit with smoky
hells, the smell of
burning fat my personal
reek and musky from
the glut of needs which
served only to cast
me forlorn further on...
Such news is old,
nothing you’d care to
read about in the papers,
small events long tendered
which do not shape
this world as much to shade
and bass its verbs.
In AA they say your story
is your sobriety.
This backwards gaze
is a poor man’s map,
the lie of today
reckoned from yesterday’s.
This verse is printed
in my opened palm,
a heart-line etched deep
and crossed out
where I try and try again
to get it all down
the way it always has been,
the way it was may
yet surprise us all.


SPEAK FROM THE HEART

2002

Only in the heart of
quickest perils; only when
within the eddying
of his angry flukes; only
on the profound unbounded
seas can the fully invested
whale be truly and
livingly found out.

— Melville, Moby Dick

Speak from the heart
if you dare: Heaven’s
abyss has a sure
appetite for these paper boats.
And not about the heart
but in it, seized by
larger hands in
the calm of this
overwarm, suburban day.
In this house which
wakes light to horrid
questions about who
we are and what we
could ever be about.
In a world already
lost in its whirl
toward banal
satisfactions.
Here, where there
is no difference
between these
house timbers and
the ribs of Gaza
dwellings mauled
by Israeli ‘dozers;
nor any beween
the white ashes
of our cat urned
on the mantle
and ten million
cinders swirling
round Ground Zero.
It’s a common,
heart-felt theme, this
commodious yawl
from dawn to dusk:
We voyage through
this life from
heart to rougher heart,
washed on with
only these frail candles
to light the way.
There is a security (if
you are brave enough
to call it that) in
oaring these boats
over a heart we’ll
surely never know,
tide to tide, fling to flow:
the only wisdom
you’ll find here
lies in letting go.



SINGING HEART

2004

today I sight this singing heart
below behind and between
as a crannog built by You
for a dark and wild bell’s ringing.
In previous years
I’ve seen otherwise
in a well’s cold drench,
in whale and girl astride
toward every beach
worth dreaming,
guitar and Bible buried
there when their time
had run Your curse,
amid the manowars
and other boats
I built just for such beaching.
Ten thousand poems
I’ve launched from here,
their verbal engines
tooled for salt abandon’s
blue overreaching, a
name for every isle
in the dark archipelago
of ten thousand teachings.
Here to the tide contains
the kiss and curve of
every woman who smiled
and shared with me
the secret of her blue
beseechings, both
bottomless and more,
that samba sambaltique
I found there and lost, one
foot now citizen of
every wave’s collapsing,
each bed’s undinally
pale pure enlacing.
Winds now work the
trees outside, a late
spring front to wash clean
the humid heat of the
past few days, and with
it bring a clearer blue
for our refreshing,
tiding in perhaps
another take on You --
Heron? Psalter?
Mother, Father River?
Some other vantage
on this dark which
does not bear explaining
but requires of me these
three wetmost things:
apt saddle for deranging;
the will to ride heart
all the way to naming;
and the sense of ages --
God’s and Your’s
conjoined in mine --
to let this crannog
fade to waves
so I can go where
blue ends send me,
bereft of any real
sail or bone rudder,
adrift in the next
draught of a room in
a dream, without a way
of ever arriving
or truly knowing.
Ah! but what songs
ahead are glowing!


THE TRIUNE HEART

2006

Three regions delve the dive
to the bottom of the sea --
shelf, slope, abyss.
In the first the world’s great
fisheries abound, like herds
of finned cattle, swarming
oblative as the feelings by
which the human heart
is found. Now comes
a long slow downward slope
that can fall for miles,
drowned ranges of Alps
we can’t see but haunt
the thickening gloom. This
seems like a border of
present names for
the heart, a wild where
no plants grow and
only carnivores dispatch
each other with something
like a pagan hunter-gatherer’s
intent, where sex is always
dangerous and saddles
the black mare of deep-water waves.
Maybe these peaks
and gulfs were cut by rivers
and winds some dry aeon
off the books, a savage
season of the heart
too old and brutal in its
yawp to do much else
than drown in a mercilessly
mothering sea. Finally
there is abyss as old as seas,
where water first fell and
never left, unevolved the
way shores are shaped
by waves and wind,
permafrosted in a permanight
under the weight of three
atmospheres. Its floor has no
known contour -- geologists
guess great lava plains
are laid up by muck and grist
of all fallen things from a
hundred zones above:
bones, shells, masts, men,
booty, shit, poems, loves,
gysms by the tetra
spoored almost forever.
Everything lost and tossed
is the bed abysms form,
a turbid massy marl where
dreams and ages snarl
inchoate in the
shadows of continents
far above, themselves
chthonic reefs.
Where islands form on
crests of volcanoes,
the sea compensates with
a trench that dives
as deep as six miles, so
what ravages highest in
the sea falls deepest
just behind. The deepest
trench lies east of the
Phillipines, another east of
Japan, a third’s south
of Cape Horn. When I imagine
these three terrains
I name the contours of
a heart which I shore
with you and all creation’s God,
a downward dome inversed
from the sky, completely
hidden from dry eyes trained
on surface waves. We shout
from mastheads at the spout
ahead which trumpets
from the depths we hunt
because we fear them,
and fearing secretly desire to
barb our heart’s own darkest
devil fish and stain our chops
with his gore and light our
lamps with the oil burned
drown from heaps of
blubber and suck the
honeycombs of his brain
that too partake of seas.
The heart’s charm is wound
in three steps down the
gloom, a nekyia which propounds
itself even as we pray our
keels sustain blithe crossings
of blue mains. See: I’ve
written shore to shore
to hell, and somehow
ballasted back on
the weird air that I
found -- prescient and
old, ripe as a sperm whale’s
spout, remitting here
what he inhaled so
far and long ago.
And through it I find
the heart’s low contours
enormous, dark, and wild,
productive of the dream,
the song of bliss, the child.