Voluminous Presence (8+10)

VOLUMINOUS PRESENCE (10 + 8)

The rain beats the world into voluminous presence
a garbage bag's chime & dangle
palette of a littered stoop
obscurely but certainly
churning out the window
hey Joe — where to?
grim brine
the half life of cancer
Mary Lincoln's vicarious lobotomy
early enticements to stay dead

Instead I dreamed we had a baby
early warning metastatized
like a thing swallowed
into a Lima Ohio jail
beckoned through the bars to
Uncle Art
insisting we
are born free
A gutshot
into natural reality

Where prison everywhere plays its part
it had your eyes and my tremulous heart
twitching green leaf
or Rudaki's bright teeth
liquid and suddenly gone
gripless digging in the garden
ending up on display
like the day
of marriage-mirth of your mother's son
you burned your breasts you stood so long

To the full flush of an alley rose
gingerly
invented for you in memory
the organ of the departed swells
over your blue swimsuit and the sand
drifts here on the backyard's creaking balcony
the leaves hang like laundry the wind bodies
the nine winds stationary
as a cup of coffee
on a dead man's library desk

Catalogues of comprehensive complacencies
like endlessly tiling desires run out
I guess at the tiring house
there are rats in the roof and immense
stone tigers on the pediments
If they could move or even meow
or help you dress
to clothe the emptiness
of everything blue because one thing gone
Now the pin you sleep on

wavers, breaks without harm or worry
beneath your still unblemished face
variegated flowers, strewn pentimento
rain fragrantly, blatantly
warming the mint sheets
breeding huckleberries and barefoot backwoods
balladeers
to fill your ears
with adopted songs, old & then
& only of an imagined innocence

i.e. "The moon shone murderously ..."
Afternoon lamp on
God & His monsters groaned in the church
an act or worse
an abstract pattern
as the bells rung
"you will be considered pirates and killed
... in the rushes of the windless moon"
Ed Dorn sang of matrimony
and our genetic lunacy

is conquered as a planet forbidden
who turns upon the self
in collapse like society
our bed fell
impaled on a board
I was evil and dumb
the whole time I knew her
she kept her gun wrapped in paper
turn away from the edge &
toward the horizon