for four poets, among many others, who have
profoundly influenced my worldview, selfview, and voice:
Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer, Robin Blaser, and Grandfather Walt Whitman
Where is that Spirit which living blamelessly
Yet dared to kiss the smitten mouth of his own century?
- Oscar Wilde, from 'Humanitad'
Love, when you biting tear the ear of my hearing,
bear me then upon a steel altar by hammers tongued.
Knotted muscle, nerved cord, by heart and heat
implore, defy no sky nor pliant dirt deny but cloy
hand in hand, require only dissolution of the Old
Masters tyranny by Numbers insistent upon reduction,
odd waters trail calcinations-calculations-bodies
born of even water into mists, continuously reft
from Given, riven from Dream, such freed from
virtual into literal placenta and spleen-
striven history reshaped redeems a value once
consigned to Hell-realms confining dark thoughts
to matter.
But only one
just finger,
dark, traces
delicate
a lace
conforms
forehead tip
to nose
then wet
lips
rose-swollen
with happy
use cries
and
barriers
break,
surge in
to new
terrain.
Does not it all bear
the familiar arc, say,
of just-dawn color,
mauve-play at the liminal
curve where sky beseeches
bounded space to give
its shapelessness a
Cause, a nape conformed
convex from Orbis what
has been scored by breath
pressed upon it?
Who then falsely may decree
any matted clot, spark-charged,
blood engorged, may not body-charge
ahead and into 'other' merge so
must be flung
expurged behind neglected
Moon or plunged through the
bruised ring of abjected Space?
Hear me now
Thrice trace
an outline
Give form to
now dust me (I am)
awakening surprise
Here me how
there
and there
and yet
there again,
after hammers,
caressed
aureoles and
hosannas
outward turn
***
This poem has not been translated into any other language yet.
I would like to translate this poem