metonymy4u

i am nothing that upon nothing waits
i am the song that sings its end
i am morning.
i am fire and a universe of risk,
concealed event which craves
its instant use and end of instant risk.

i am the arrow and secret of purgation.
i am imagination.

won’t you take a moment of a day
to publish me in your heart someday,
kiss my photograph in some tarnished abode
tenderly walk numerous ways,
and by your art discover, though i lie still and cold,
you did not wish this life untold—

caught, it laughed!

it washed the new with the old.

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What fire burns alone,

what imperturbable joke tells itself in the room
after I’m gone,

chasing behind my shoe-heels,
worn down in city after city,
as if there were somewhere to get to?

Foreign gestures make foreign meanings
and leave us so confused, you forgot:

happenstance always takes its leave
ahead

of all parting.

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Autumn’s lease and summer’s day

have found me in my spot,
here where city winds travel round and round
here where iron’s gate on my heart is wrought,

plant turn by planet turn.

Ten minutes more is all I crave,
ten minutes, and so much more—
an answer of sorts before I go,
something or someone to show me to my grave.

O do not let me go down all alone.

Dear my love, my life, my light and my friend—
could you be the usher of yet another chance, in two
well-paced steps, for one who regrets it all?

Can you rewind the life-tape
on a life near lived out, all-in-all?

And there, and there,
and there again—
seeking an even count on a long gone urn
which carries some faint relief depiction
of a stone’s story told turn
by
turn?

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Do
you know a place
somewhere outside of life where
once, death did and does not walk? Mine
is a different history, told
and re-told in the telling
always with a novel disposition. But

when I a single
day in the life of all goes back to
the stuff of earth and dreams
of dawn before men have conquered the
world won’t

you stop and think? Think: how
may we stand on death? How
is the bridge constructed that does not collapse
under the very weight of its own
construction and how

will you be a breeder of love?

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Concerning the Issue of Property Rights

The daily grey of morning
greets me with a nod and I’m off.
Round the round with a care for myself,
the ways familiar but do not please.
Taken home, examined, they seem foolish in a domestic light.

Worked in time, a human artifact’s words
blend with the night and
I have mixed my labor with the land,
therefore it is mine.

O for the domesticity of lace,
shy windows gazing out the night
framed by reading lamp light,
and the cozy naiveté of a Grecian urn!
Who for a moment would not desire them?

In their life, in their lily lighted life.

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Today I loved you. Tomorrow never came.
We romped in the abundant natural caves of our minds
and there we mined
for diamonds. Each one a fortune.
I thought yours the better.

I made you a ring,
we parted closer than 2 lines on a zebra’s back.
The day came when I heard your voice
scooting around the vaults of a gothic cathedral.

I as only tourist,
wondered about the accuracy of my guide book.

(When I remembered your face—
then it was when I wished for a heaven.
Not before. Not after. Never since.)

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The grass is always greener
where the eye rests. I speak
to your eyes and
I grow. Oh won’t you please
hear another day

for me?

Immortal muse I am deaf
for the decades of astonishment
spent

in your hands.

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Tell me about
eyes I might have met. Yours.

Tell me of them,
and then
sing

a
bit
in the hours before dawn my love—

license another day between us;

begin it now.

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I tempt not what with fate should not be tempted,
thus upon a morning soft and rosy painted
I ran round the city gate with your love
and there met one who seemed a traveler with a face
distracted by lands of many cares, dust of late
driven horrors in itineraries better never
seen, never wholly contemplated.
I thought what can be this mystery clear
what does it wish, where will it wander
in times abroad that we have yet to bear and
in what carpeted dream of nights, oil
lit shores of far off lands—what wishes, what wants,
what caprice, what loves with love presented
shall it hold dear?

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Sister

was a strange new word i learned to say
when i but nine and then some years
felt spurned by those whose cares
suddenly some elsewhere lay.

though quickly i learned life always answers to life
and gives up its secret there,
love uncovered rises to its time
and delights our children fair. then i could not know

what wondrous fare would bring from time to time
treasures to my near ten years already
thinned out in leavings of fall colored trees—
none well marked by a small child me—

that there upon that snow shod afternoon
under a pale winter sun become the day of your birth –
my lamp was relit and the day was shorn
of all its out grown earth.

o dragonfly of time that brought you to me
what strange experience this life;
child hand and nose drip
are what i remember most of mine,

yet you showed me the sacred and the trip
of life in all its splendor, a beauty ship
you sail on now to your own rose flowered family.
and though i see your road of love paved smooth and sure

i know not what lies on time’s other side
the bounds of beyond are closed to me
just as traces of the all past done
misted over by time and tide.

yet dawn hath a new day crowned today, and thus i might
lose sight of all that’s gone
in a dazzling bright entreaty
of all this beauty, all your loves yet still undone.

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