Diana, Discovered

You're lovely and amazing--in your face
is light unlike the heavens' famous glow,
and in your eyes as in infinite space
sparkle such stars as only angels know;

Your body is a playground of the sense
whose secret spaces offer such delights
as grottoes of the Goddess, under dense
green veils where satyrs dance on summer nights;

And I, an Actaeon, drawn by the sounds
of pipes, the sensuous music of your sigh
creep through the bush and, crouched among my hounds,
steal there the naked glory of your thigh--

When years have passed and all my hunts have ceased,
your beauty still will turn me to a beast.

Read More......

Eclogue, of Sorts

Open me up and let what's outside in;
I can contain it. For today I feel
the bound'ry breaking down between what's real
and what's imagined. Yesterday my skin
fit tight; straight-jacketed, all bound and tied
like some madman enclosed by padded walls
I crouched in fear. But now that prison falls
away, and all the things I've left untried
cry out for doing. Let me gather wind
and leaf, grow florid, flowery, immense
with all Nature in my circumference--
abridge perimeters, abolish end.

Today's a day for limitless expanse,
unproven possibility, and dance.

Read More......

Workadaydream

Since there's no help, come, let us pay the rent
and bury busy noses in our bills;
sign every check till all the money's spent,
forestall a month or so these mortal ills.

Let neither art nor poetry intrude
to draw attention off important stuff;
there's gas to buy, and medicines, and food,
for which these wages scarcely seem enough.

Now, when all the weeks and days and hours
that make a life are lived but to be sold,
each youthful dream a seed that never flowers,
and possible paths barred by gates of gold--

you might yet turn your pockets out, and find
ahead the roads you thought you'd left behind.

Read More......

Pocket Garden

Try this: before you go inside to sit
in air-conditioned quiet, pull one leaf
and stick it in your pocket, like a thief.
Tell no one. Make a mystery of it.

In meetings, secretly caress the veins,
trace sawtooth edges, chlorophyllic flesh,
and surreptitiously inhale the fresh
green scent from fingertips: black earth, new rains.

It's easy to get trapped in what is not
a part of us; separate from the world
outside, and silence what's in us that sings
of sunshine-heated rocks, and fingers curled
around moist leaves. Let's learn what we've forgot:
there have to be connections between things.

Read More......

A Djarum Black, After Quite Some Time

The worst thing for you: static crack and hiss,
the orange-white blossom of a magic flame
to ring the rod in ash. It's just the same
as years ago, before it came to this.

Destruction tastes of licorice and clove,
familiar sweetness sitting on my lips
not quite forgotten. Inhalation slips
through sandalwood and memory. I strove

once to eradicate affected vice,
be clean in lung and mind, to mute the buzz
of nerves vibrating with expensive smoke.
But silence played like some forgotten joke,
and now, inspired, I guess I'll pay the price
for getting back to being who I was.

Read More......