To S.
Well, whatever your name
If the moon shouts ’I am a liability,’
More power to her, she means business
And you’ll start births in a green
That shirks the ice-cold shades where demise
Gets a warm scent of booze, where you can taste
Persephone’s cider, for only in your eyes
Lives on the green, a strained fever as you strive
Not to fear wild-eyed women whose limbs
Haunt rooms rife with books or flowers fighting
Over moons, mantises, maybe hidden papers-
Mark my words, now, much stronger than them
The scent of her soul will snuff out scents,
Or births, if only her green betrays
A mind crushed like the moon
When late at night she slides by
To an ambivalent blue, demise, or a hideout
Impervious to a breathing light where
Heaps of indifference meet to jilt living stones,
Or dazzle them with the blue of tangled skies,
Of the traces you sow when feeling too craven
To even clear the dark,
Lest it hands you God’s answers,
Maybe the truth of truths, the shadows
Where thou shalt hide your words,
While He lets them haw between raw light, rotten light,
And moonlight gives herself just a bit-
Not bad, as the soul has still to learn the ropes,
How to stand up against skies and fire
Whenever they devise a red mayhem
Jumping from star to star to swamp them,
I know, aren’t they mad at her psychedelic tales-
Alas, old habits always die so hard.
*******
To M.
Hers is the only dance, your earth,
Wasted fields, a green the soul bolts down
When she begets fresh words,
Your thieves of obsessive light-
Your fault, I’m afraid, you ate her up
As a child, and now you wonder,
To keep or discard life lest he grills you,
A sky so great at third degrees-
So try to give them shelter,
Maybe they won’t give out
When inverted swifts fly
To a sacred place,
And a weirdly ethereal moon
Swerves right to books, or souls-
Say, God, but why did you let her
Throw to jails of heaven
The waste fields of your eternity?
Look, she’s in, her loss,
Let not this sizzling sky slake her thirst,
But a rough light, a glint to days
Drab as pewter skies, or mothers
Stale as the bread they ate-
Your hunger is over, loss,
As light is shifting
From soul to silence,
So bet your desire, maybe your prayers,
If starved symbols hide among scraps
Or scramblers on the walls, play hard to get,
But heaven forbid they drop your words
While ravens eat up what stays behind.
*******
To B.
No risk in the reckless blue where flowers preen-
Among trees, loss, unbearable stars,
When you least expect it and only blue
Your life can gather-
If shards of sky and ice
Block you in other harbors, other caves:
And a blue winter goes hiding
To assault and chill a place
Of walls, crippled, elderly-
Those bits of a still life hidden
In angry men, or gardens where you chance
By stunned lizards,
Shadows of women, echoing voices-
All too eager to gun down in your womb
Water, and depression, the blasphemous letters
The sky keeps sending-
They swear, yes, and you, soul, stop sorting them,
No one to forward words, if you are so short
Of blessings, got it, seed?
May was the good cop, June is the baddy,
No last word for you light says again and again-
If only the trees call you you’ll never find
The lost, the silenced, only a meadow that lifts
And surprises you, maybe God-
And maybe, soul, you’ll feed on his grass,
You’ll head for tees, scooters, light-
At changing times, in changing places,
Who knows, even life will call you-
Can it be true?
She’ll heed from trees
When at long last dogs and wrath are done.
