Brave Speech Stumbles Toward Morning

Brave speech stumbles toward morning
Midnight’s velvet music echoing in the pillow’d rose night
Moon's stifled arm casts aside her orange billowing sheets
Rocky dusk wears pitched and bleeding wings
rising from the roseate diffusion
Blind dawn stammers forth
Brave speech stumbles forth into the morning dew.

Air, brown and dusty, swallows the jagged edges,
Flickering in grey and white.
I cannot read her signs
She fades into the mist…

The devil’s diamond fingertips
Scrape the parched earth
Which bleeds in furrow, flood and rivulet,
Lowering speckled clouds crumble.

The sky hammers out a thunderous music
Boulders shatter/ the devil rages more…
Mountains fly into dull powder
Evening filters and sips afternoon’s greens and reds then
Races to twilight.

Roaring proudly as a lion,
Tossing the earth on her side like a little toy.

Now we have it---the long awaited apocalypse.

Music for the end of the world
Incessant hammer cracking
Roaring Vulcan armies spark stars in endless circuit,
Earth entire, dipped into a Lake of Fire.

Mankind one in its hopeless song:
“Who can equal the screaming force of the monster
born in the bowels of earth?”

Convulsed, muttering whimpering after the banquet
“We are weak and despicable worms,
whom if Thou deign to merit grace, oh come and save us!”

Christ, call forth your legion of Armies and appear in Glory.
Christ, dear Lamb, Save me now, my heart is crying
The battle is raging…

Brave grey tumblers roll on, the tide recedes and afternoon marches,
Sun with his streaming sword has slashed open the sky,

Water down, healing water purify the streets, flood my soul.
Free me from my ignorance, heal me, take me into your sweet arms, my Savior.

Apocalyptic Ballad No.12

Grief comes at dawn
before first light.

In a dream---
her eyes----
Dark stones in the square before the cathedral.

In the mighty forest
we hear a dull metal roar endlessly rolling
The devil’s diamond fingers scrape the earth
Hammering a thunderous music.
The tallest oaks are falling
Thunder roars
the valley shakes
Fires leap up into the sky
Silver clouds roll on forever
But the streams have lost their way.

So valiantly gleaming
Over the ramparts we watch.
Night’s early prowl
into the valley.
Her wings torn on jagged rocks
Pale evening flees to twilight.

Bitter Water

I cannot sleep
pounding chorus of crickets pulses
blood ringing in my ear.
Night hastens its boney hand
Seizing the light;
Making captive all promises
Of delight.

It does not leave in dreaming.
It buys back these brief contracts from nothingness.
It speaks in voice undead from a whited grave.

Names etched on the stone the hard wind cannot smooth away
An island amidst the chopping waves of broken speech---
Cracked bridge/fractured boat
Bitter water gathers, slinking stream,
Ashes and pale distillation.

All at once one tries to think
Neither wakefulness nor dreaming.
Unrelenting toil
Pounding out our days from dark zero.
All of these things win back our world
No better than yesterday.

Apocalupsis

Man, thy walk, is but a little flight and
Change of scene
You find yourself in the same water again and again.

From surf to surf
Escaping the dusty confines of earth.
None flies so free as the wheeling gull.

Blue sky, this thin envelope,
Gives distant dreams
For your dried sight.
The drink of its crystal vial
For all of its width and heighth---
Is a weak mixture gravity cannot slip.

Were you to escape this terrestrial pull
Where would you alight?
Nothing on the moon is meat for your imagination.
Sleep, a brief forgetting
Of dusk and dawn
Yet the same day rolls on
While you pretend that all is new.

Your purse is terrestrial,
Hammered in delicate coin,
None of your riches could buy back one word.
Your eyes search the flattened horizon,
All on earth is earthy
None can quit its spinning.
Therefore content yourself in pastimes befitting
little children
And still derive great satisfaction in this play.

Admire the black cow in the searing sun
When the Winterland is white
Save for the tawny, dry grasses
Which he must chew upon.

Our Lady of Ice

"The earth reels like a drunkard,
it sways like a hut in the wind;
so heavy upon it is the guilt of its rebellion
that it falls---never to rise again."(Isaiah 24:20)

Tears pour from heaven
clasping stone on crystal grave
littering yellow lawns;
To muffle angels' songs,
to toss blossoms aside.

Lady, how long since the dinosaurs slept
with the howling wind and ice;
how long until all that man has wrought
will counterfeit such great price?

Lord of the Poets

I.
Whose voice squares prime
To fire’s heaping slag
As to every blanched root sunk
In bitter cavern
Every purple blossom on the vine?

Whose utterance is gate
to pattern and process---
both emblem and archetype
of Three Worlds:
Angelic, material and divine?

Cluttered tongues
Speak of matter’s supremacy
in unbreakable laws of energy.
He wields confounding phrases,
so steeped in beauty, as to render the perfect cup of understanding;
Each word a mountain or an ant,
Poplar leaf clattering
Or slab of striate shale potent with heat.

Whose eloquence bespeaks eons
And strides generations
Of literary brilliance
In parable and formulae;
As reactive in nuclear and atomic power
As the perky flight of the bumblebee?

The Lord of the Poets
greets the quick who serve him
with giant ears like elephant palms
Shimmering lines
Wave the breeze
Of Creation’s dew
In a thousand-armed tentacled embrace---
Understanding more than a little of Nature’s scripts.

For to feel is in some sense to know.



II.
When I am exasperate, dangling at the limit of speech
Not knowing how to articulate this pink stone---
He gives forth new words
And shows
This brick pounded, fire heaved,
razor-sharp to touch treasure
to my astounded eye.

Elemental speech
Awakens sense.
Uplifts heart,
magnifies soul.
Can joy be so contained?

A hand dips a stream
By the side of the rail where chunks of coal throw off.

The double green valley grasps
the setting torch of sun
Reflecting a peach light
On dusty porch windows
Melting this
day,
And all of my liquid, Summer days into one---
One very good Carousel day.

How long the poet will sing I cannot tell.
Or how he goes on singing even now---
For who can describe
words scratched into sand while accusers flee?
(“Where are your accusers now?”)
Who can tell me how long the stellar light falls to flicker in the freckled surf?
Or measure length and meaning of alphabets stretched to the sun?



III.
Lord of Poetry,
First Lord,
Word and tamer of the Seas,
Word spoken (over elemental water and void).
Eternal word;
Lily of the Field,
Bread and water of life.

You give power to become
Sons of God
And mighty Sons of Thunder.
You dissolve the Deceiver’s desert logic
In three breaths.

Poetic Lord
You command pounding thunder
In language full with authority,

Before this all other discourse is powder and branch set to fire.

Bottled Bells

Death goes swiftly
black wings flapping,
bottled bells jangling,
Smoky voice intoning:

“You are late in waking
the battle is raging,
the sun is setting.”

Life had its moment---
The muskrat
sucking the green watercress
at the frozen stream’s edge;
Boys skate at ice hockey
Atop the crystal lake---
Grey vision of the scarlet bird
Who echoes your name
In a dream.

Bottled bells clacking and clanging
Fingers tapping.

Greater nature is at rest
Circles cease to turn
Death comes near
You can hear a hollow voice echoing your name

And all at once you can see her!
If you weren’t so late in waking.

Whisper, Whisper

I see lines being drawn on a distant horizon
Leaden with crush
what is drawing nearer lingers
as the Pied Piper dances.

"Whisper, whisper little child
night deafens your speech.
Ah, draw back,
Draw firm the blinds,…unsnap the shade."

When I was a child
I saw wisps of ancient smoke
Coiling around the censer
streaming into fires of no regret.

Tuning in on WFBG---
Walking down the streets of Hollidaysburg
In all kinds of windy weather.

I found signs in elm, crystal and salamander.
Read portent of uneasy season
on puffs of cloud and puffs of smoke
And knew love in forests, fields and laughing in the meadow.
But never held on to anything so strongly
That I could not feel so many dreams lay behind…
No, I never knew so many dreams.

The sun has not changed but my eyes sees weary signs on the grey dusk tracks.

Who prowls this wilderness
Whose dream envisions a black and stormy cloud?
Whose ears cheer to the distant roar of drums?
Who calls the tune to hasten His return?

You who covet the power in the sky---
The Spring of Spring escapes you
trampled innocence
litters the ballfield

You envision the Glory of hard Battle
Interview with application
And receive promotion at work!

God does not solicit shame
while you preach tall sermons
And frighten timid souls
Turning His Holy Word
To your own hierarchical and political ends.

Ambitious artists make beauty walk prostitute.
And speak of pearly glamour in the fashion world…
And pearly skies
painted by God.
since He is everywhere all at once.
Not for someone else,
Not elsewhere,
Not from or in some other time

"Whisper, whisper little child of the world I once knew
night passes
words
Have flown
There is nothing left to say
My tongue has rusted and my teeth break on each word.
The day breaks
Draw back the curtains, my little one,
Draw back the shade."

Final Poet

The final poet
Is a rocky pier
Who gurgles exclamations---
Bits of things
snatched back and judged by the growling surf.

Jagged edged plastics,
charred branches
broken shells,
an orange sponge
rhythmically slapped into hollows of rocks.

At a stone’s throw in the grip of a tossing wave
A salty tongue licks clean the rusted limbs
Of a shipwreck,
Whose emaciate wrist
clutches down into final grip
naming man’s last thing---

It is the word of the final poet.

The poet startles green life
And crablike---
sideway scurries
From its meaty feast.

The pier calls the step
Beyond comfort and things wrought by man
Beyond descriptive language
And concern for clarification,
Into final words
minerals smashed clean in the mist.

On salty air
he soars
Without concern
For what is left behind
She weeps over broken things
And promises and trusts;
There are no pillars to lean upon
Something in the wine
Rends her mind.
Betraying what is dear.
Silly chalice!
Foolish thirst!

“I cannot bridge every fall of water
and so face a full night of silence
from my tower.
Fickle constellations---
Fickle companions!”

Terrible beauty seizes his mind.
The rocky pier draws a line into the sea
And cradles the jagged pieces
Tossed by crushing surf.
The day has laid down its treasure.

She drifts away on memory,
On long drawn sketches and voices.
The horizon recedes before her confidences,
Scraps of paper litter the tawny field;
poems stripped bare in wild winds and
Sunny bright mornings

This poem, too, is a line drawn between what is tossed up in verbal game
And the crackling of all that is left behind.

A Hymn to Broken Idols

Prologue
When you were young, shiny and new
Clamoring to be seen
picked up/
Take home/thrown to use
Faces smeared with incandescent light
Bulging shelves outstretched and eager
In a bargain parade.

Working, coiling, grinding days
construct the world that surrounds,
To enrich in labor,
To be tossed aside
Depleting novelty…
Discounted, resold, secondhanded, thrifted, gleaned, shopped.

Use emptied you/emptied you into utility.

Silly magic words escape you
While the world through you was enriched
Fading in newness
Fading in use,
Until finally abandoned
Long-enduring permanent legacy to the land
Though temporally ceased.

You see my tattered shelves and rusting sides---
Would you love me enough to keep me in fit repair?
Could you love me enough to keep me in my youth?

The proudest tools this nation ever built
Charged fresh hills to bring power and energy
To drive the motors West.

I am rusted and resting,
Finger my scraping lips.
The melting point of silver flame kisses my aluminum arm
At the hands of rebels who philosophize against technology.

Take a look at my feet (see where they pierced me!)---
Rubber scraped black paws
Spun on jagged roads of coal.

See my family tossed loose!
Taking strength in what remains,

When we were shiny, young and full of new beer
In plastics of blue and green---
Now our exposed bodies in the rainstorm
Senescent…obsolescent.
Left us to decay in a fractured sanctuary
On the altar of broken idols.
Melted can kneels before the cracked saints
Where little wrens dart to and fro
Singing hymns to subjunctive hypotheticals…
Sculpted flame fading into soil.
Oh, come again!
Come again!

Jealousy for new things:
Slippery cemeteries
Forlorn parks
Decades tossed to the wind.
The immobility of bronze toys, heaping games
And fortunes won and lost.

Nature speaks in a hush to these half-consumed fragments:“On the day you arrived I offered my best gift to the Holy House.
You came with proud men
Who abandoned you at my gate.
I will reclaim you
For my appetite knows no sate!
I possess an endless hunger for slagheaps
And towers long in decay.
Evermore you return to my dusty hand and soil.

Your days in the sun were magnificent in star-studded regalia!
Glimmering and shiny in colorful pageant
Reflecting an hour upon life’s stage.

What have you lost?
What lies forgotten?
Your style is void for it is hammered into every new thing
To dart to the fore
Perchance to recycle,
Or lie snug in my deciduous breast.
Now the slumber begins.
You are my feast!

Then to the other side,
To break through the veil
Some will pierce, others fly,
Some, invalid, will crawl,
Some, consumed in the fire, will wake
Others, mangled corpses with the crows’ pecks,
Will rise and return to elemental void, dissolute,
Stripped bare to the invisible.

Metaphors---
Pale forms!
Geometric orphans
Whose mother dreams fortified dreams
Of your earthly sojourn I intone,
Of thee I sing!

The fallen white torch ash
Uncoils the hour’s passing;
Green leaves in bud
Or in full fisted waving,
Indicate time of year.
Rusting metals measures decades,
Traces of things thrown down
Whose useful hours upon life’s stage
Were bartered in brief joys
And momentary contacts
Then cast into secure oblivion.

My youthful muse raged in first beauty:
Sweet milk---dirty morning late May
Ruddy, green spears pierce
Chocolate fields in a crisscross grid.

Glutted stream, snaking, coiling through the pasture,
Multicolored calves nuzzling one another
While mother gnaws and tears with broad mouth
At the yellow green grass.
Such newness is all that remains of sacred traces
Invisible to man’s eye.

Sea froth and sea drunk,
The tilting flight of a gull,
Autumn leaves,
First loves,
No stable thing won my heart.

Then came inspiration for the letter---
Human enterprise and woe,
Yearning for justice
And God’s steady Law.

Now I turn to your stranded occupation of pride and futility
Your confession of beauty mingled corruption
Comforts me.

To broken things I turn
And structure fragments to my liking
Walk with me and see great glimmers of things that might have been.

I call forth broken idols and solitary sing your praise.
While a busy world fits ready for battle.
Gathering new and shiny things for merchandise
Plastering slick streets with autos
Shimmering petroleum parade.

Retire to your original home,
Neither resurrected,
Nor damned for torture,
Insensate,
Long enduring
Exempt from place
Defrocked of style without yearning.

Litter and trash cannot endure as you have endured---
Neither garbage, nor junk…
They are soft currency in time’s market
Whose value will neither sculpt into exhibit form,
Nor resurrect.
Whose paradise is uniform landfill,
Monotony of rubbish,
Flitting ephemera
Who flash and fade on beaches,
In parks, along highways with mangled, roadkill corpse.

You are idols of a calm religion
Whose history waits to be written
Whose first hymn I intone.

You are signal and marker
Of time’s indifferent escape;
Abiding strong outside of use!
Mother Time brings forward the world.
Every bright, shiny thing parades
As wondrous and ruddy as newborn flesh!
To meet the sparkle of parental eyes
Greeting these babes with pride
And when time has squarely brought these things to pass,
Swiftly turns with season to abandon these children outdoors
No matter how well designed.

To even newer things!
Ever and anon to newer things!
A toast to new things!!

Left in the wake
Of ever-renewing nature and her blooming seasons
An aging poet sings a sad song.
The works and the hands of man are caught up in the vortex of elemental dissolution.
He constructs wild dreams---
Conjures eternal life
In a plastic cup.

Like Mother Time
He abandons these projects
To linger/
In a second nature/
In fading twilight.

To come to stand still,
To resign,
And surrender
To dust’s slow certainty.

Outlasting your Creator
Neither moving, nor in decay,
While nature cycles endlessly
surviving frivolous onslaughts of decades
In permanent stillbirth
Though the hands of your Maker have withered.

Rabbitland

Words not given to speech.
Nor Summer to Fall;
Sour not given to sweet
And war not given to peace.
On the warm rock snakes coil.

Phrases out of reach,
Sour berries on the thorn
Strifetorn worldweary phrases
And bloodsucking leeches freely swim.

Held close to nature
the poet muse sings in my ear,

Rarely words wait
while vision is filled to the brim!
Resplendent with beaming beauty:
Mountain laurel’s blooming
As cool night descends Cambria County in mid-July.

Beauty seering the earth of my soul—
Of divinity this is the best bunch---
God may be so many more things
But these rocks and ants are enough---
Absorbed in love with each step.

Peace to sweeten the world
Made bitter with war and ‘rumors of war’
Game against global game
Let us refrain to rest in the forest cool…
To hear the woodpecker’s mighty hammer,
Water trickling cool beneath warming rocks,
Sunlight flickering the great pines in orange silken mist
Diamond spears of spectral rainbows.

On a shaded hill a council of trees and moss is set,
Opening the clearing.
Pure peace runs in rabbitland,
The chief rabbit feeds on blackberries at the periphery
Sour berries on the thorn…

War is not given to peace.
Only rock snakes on their crawl.

Jesus Wept

It is reported how Jesus to the centurion’s palsy struck daughter cried: “Little maiden, Arise!”
And learning of Lazarus’s demise---wept.

Tears of purity,
Tears of forgetting,
Rivulets of tears
Waters of hope,
Waters of joy.

Thunder pounds his mighty drum
High upon a meadow
I am swept into a pow-wow circle
Four doors
The sweat lodge’s searing,
Orange and black tigers of fire lashing straps upon my back.
The tattered wing of black night swoops low
The devil’s diamond claw screeches
Scraping up to the hills the stony burrow
Blood fills the furrow
Red and fiery pink beyond my window.

Jesus weeps
Tears like soft rain drifting on the Howling Andes Hills
On big skies of the endless Dakota plain rolling on forever,
Amidst the Color dipped butterflies, and sweet smelling bundles of alfalfa.
On the scorched land drier than dry healing rains begin to fall
But the earth cannot say why.

Puddles of mercury rain dazzle and dance
Lake Randall rocks gentle and slow
Like a shimmering jewel
This greedy, fractured nation cannot know why Jesus weeps.
Thunder roars, in the mighty forests oaks cease to grow, valleys shake their fiery fingers to the heavens.
Silver clouds roll on forever into the smokey deeps
Wounded streams have lost their way.

Arise, arise!
You Silver tarnished skies above the Andes hills
Roll over the endless Dakota plain.
Shower the morning rooftops of this world glistening the weeds and grass.
Tears like soft rain hissing.
For the scorched Indian earth
Cradles roots snug deep into the dry of dry:
So many tears Jesus is weeping

Lake Randall is a shimmering jewel in Dakota’s ochre crown: hungry roots reach deeper into the dry of dry .
But even the drowning earth does not know why Jesus weeps.

This poem is a trail of broken treaties,
A fence---
A net on the salty sea of Galilee.

I wander alone on the streets of men, the proud and mighty,
Who render the low high and the high low.
Like Judas’ tarnished silver
And broken kiss
Howling sirens race the streets where
Brown eyed children with laughing eyes dance
Where cripples beg to learn the reasons for Jesus’ weeping.

Waterrealm

Waterrealm
Over the watery marsh I soar
The soppy greens pull
At her velvet shirt
Streams pulse
Pent up in torrents
Unleashed, unbending,
Straps of wind in echoing cries
Her dreaming body is awake.
Tongues lilt lullabies
Flames of blue and orange
Lick and roll into the pitch night.

Tugging at surf’s edge
White seabirds lap at bubbles
the jellygreen slapping jetty
Pulses ruddy and red
Where salt brine ripples
Beneath fernfoil
Slippery fingers of stone
And veils of thin tissue
Silhouettes the flow
Like sheets blown on an early April day.

Raging, unchecked,
Pent up torrents of hurtled pieces
a world flung into gurgling surrender.
As in a dream,
An open door
I see her eyes in a painting
Hung on a fresh wall.
Waking on the new side
To enter the old day
Into a room of viewers
Who catch her stare
In the candle’s flicker flare.

Our Lady of the Sea

I crawled into her circle dance
gasped for breath;
and submitted to fate for a season.
Over and over she rolled me
in her aquafingers:
clutch and counter-clutch,
the rolling logic
of her ever crashing surf.

Ruddy infants
are tossed from their mothers’ breasts
to the turtle-scraping retreat
from the hungry, bubbly surf.

The rattle and roll of her logic
and the ever-crashing seasnap
called me home
to my dwelling by the sea.

Fathers huddle
in the deep forest green beyond
the shower of her salty mist;
their chariots have all been abandoned
and their shoestraps rusted-over.

Their enterprises are dust
in the childrens’ eyes
fine morning crumbs:


Cities beyond reach,
highways collapse.
She sends a tremor
down the coastal spine,
the earth quakes,
valleys collapse
she is death.

I came to dwell with her but for a season;
and so I came to live by the sea.
She sends my days down the surf
like an echo in a conch
that murmurs and decays.

Four Strands

1.In a Summer swelter
Lime green trees
Splinter with diamond light
Against the August breeze.

The sighing moon silhouettes Black roses Beneath your proud street.
Dusted sparrow dips
Her yellow beak Into the fat pool. Soppy, shifting greens lap
At the granite tub.
Trolley cars slink along Beacon Street.

2.Tawny fields of Summer’s grass billow
The sky is big with fate
Heavy clouds roll on
like battered ships of state.

Another day drifts away
With refreshing mists wetting
The asphalt below.
Adjusting dreams---Shredding corporate schemes.

3.Beneath the haloed orange glow and on the forest floor
Near the blue rushing stream
Spins a circle dance:‘la fete Automnale’
Fire in the night.
Words rise like fallen heroes who never falter.
Firemen tearing down the flaming walls
To bring the broken child to healing water.

So many words have fallen then hoisted up again,
But not resuscitated.
They are given place,
Collected and bound,
Standing in rows,
Lining the walls
Of the memorial Library.

4.Poor, pitiful pigeon waits
On the church stoop crumbs,
His battered milky wing conjures
Golden days
Of youth’s effervescent, shimmering.
His light flickers and fades
Late into this day.

Cracked claw clinging to the clay---Linger no more,
Away I must away.

.