A SILENT SPRING

Hyacinth, a thrown discus has left you bleeding and oh, The West Wind, he set it off course.

Hyacinth, from your spilled blood I fashion my garden and oh, The West Wind upends you at the source.

Bait me on a silent spring.

The martins move to let me bring you this, the spondee of my hands, a cove about your face: the soft water.

HIDE & SEEK

Thick air in my lungs: my demons work bellows from my shoulder or the shoreline, wherefrom I measure horizons.

Hide and seek:

with gods as my witness, I'll be deeper than the shallows.

I stare at the sun with kaleidoscope-blinking.

I've a short-sighted vision: you're hooked, lined; we're sinking.

A SIMPLE UNDERSTANDING

Ten square chains and a home of pine:

I want a simple understanding

of work, of love, of a child in a cradle, some fiddle before our bones bed for night, and the trunnels offset to brace our anchor beam.

A thousand square chains and your hand in mine:

I want a simple understanding

of fields, of rain, of a horse and bridle, a kettle to steam the cold panes of night, and a well-rehearsed bend toward sleep for tired eyes.

Hearts unchained and your hand in mine:

I give you, darling, a simple understanding of wants, of warmth, of our lives well-cradled, a treadle to move our love day and night, and the purest of springs to cleanse the water downstream.

AUBADE: ISLE LA MOTTE

Attention turned to the pasty moon

Always the same clay face I have seen St Anne in dapple-gray light with palms Out as though nudging us forward When the cold pulsed like a blister

Deep water is a psalm we lean toward

As ancestors certain only of its mystery

Champlain's small waves crumble like gypsum

On the rocks

Where founders stabbed

The earth with bronze crosses and votive Deity We took it all in stride

From stone patriots to Mary with a flickering Wick at her bare feet

She is guarded She was sculpted with a constellation Of blemishes on her forehead

And her eyes and how many others

Made the Mohawks fear that island

***

I remember it now in chiaroscuro

Above the stampede of clouds in winter

I spent an hour on the atlas

Of the tarmac where the final wet

Stains of the season bid me adieu

Here six miles high in degenerate sleep

The prattle the polite turbulence the sense That I'm lifting toward heaven toward something new With a gusty voice with silence Toward a heaven cherub-heavy And its host of floury bodies

Oh let me not rise before the sun

The universe I eat I drift

The universe is roe with globs of stiff butter

We do our best to prick it with airplanes

We wonder what color blood snakes through it We cling to fantasy in dreams for fear Of waking empty

***

There is a home I imagine

Its cobblestone path is crumbly with wear

It is anywhere There is rubble on TV

Phone wires outside are crow-bent and crowbars Pry screeching nails from the shingled roof As from a casket

And doesn't the sun Rise white as cream there

Isn't it a dimple On the delft face of sky

I will go

Again to Isle La Motte and touch my hand Against the storm-licked shrine whose blood Is thicker than Champlain's and mine And whoever is there on the island In her own sad eternity with a worked smile

Protecting nothing any longer

But praying still that we thank Her

CAUGHT DEEP IN THE DYE

The brick is fastened to mortar.

I am attic-bound, witnessing

spring fall. I can't recall

what about your absence

has shocked me to write again.

I have stared for days on end

at squirrels nosing through

skidder-tracks, where needles stormed

from the felled front-yard spruce.

And here, though in bed by ten,

the town wriggles at the first licks

of spring. At Mulberry and Chestnut

my brain presses on

like a trawling motor, the familiar hum

silence can no longer do without.

PRISM

We waited all night long for the sky

to open and sparkle

our fast crown of water ice.

Dear prism, if the sun allows,

I'm awash in your colors.

I'm afire with this vow:

There is nothing I want more

than to break bread with an artist's hands.

And if they be yours,

may earth, air, fire, and water

command the stars to assent, my heart to warm.

STORM & WAKE

Stay on the shore, dear one; the wake could overturn you.

The soft ripple of a dorsal fin

in this cove; the cove the cupped hands

of a god at his shaving mirror;

the sky bent well in an Archaic smile.

Dear one, do you while away hours

in song, like a warbler?

Your tremolo, sweetest tremolo,

brings a storm, brings

shipwrecked sailors to your port.

ANOTHER TIME

Copyright 1967, Tom Rapp/Pearls Before Swine.

SMALL WHITE PETALS

Small white petals in the wind,

and sidewalks mosaicked

with samaras from the maples,

and footprints, and music:

a merganser-spotted pond

on a bleak Sunday.

When you move like first light

through the blinds, I am

at peace. When you move

like first light through the blinds,

you warm me like a memory.

The faithful file into church

in well-pressed white blouses.

They up and leave,

they smile, they share

God in upscale white houses.

PLASTER FROM LATH

There's a ghost in the window with vacant eyes, white in the twilight, corset-pinched and blighted by the downpour.

In the hallway I have seen you

in your white lace. In the hallway

I sit for your soft piano serenade.

While the last one home slams the door,

we separate like plaster from lath.

Angel-winged Canada geese

and I have stayed north this winter.

Dawn breaks like porcelain; with clipped wings, to the soil I am tethered.

In the hallway I have seen you

in your white lace. In the hallway

I sit for your soft piano serenade.

While the last one home slams the door,

we separate like plaster from lath.

Come in, then, have a seat, I have saved some soup for you. Be the tureen empty I will share my eyes with you.

When the last one home slams the door,

don't let's separate like plaster from lath.

IDLE HOURS

Neither silence nor the dark

bend of light through the blinds

can harrow my wide-eyed hours.

As you rest in the young dawn, I resist

the cold landscape

from which these panes were made

to protect us. Wake

and melt away the ice.

Neither birdsong nor the animal bedlam outside in the trees can torture you out of your sleep. As the waves of sheets turn you like beach-glass, the cold landscape's my refrain; and if nothing protects us, ...

HIGHER ALTARS

Sidle away the way I taught you.

And savor mistakes--the salt of the earth, the sweat of desire:

upon what but those ruins

could you erect higher altars?

The door is braced with luggage of divorce:

typical garments of temporal longing.

For the fourth time in a week, the well water froze; gabardine-decked men arrived in the driveway, with Jesus billowing from pamphleted pockets. They spouted the power

to splic fraying hearts, but their passionate rhetoric could not soothe love, could not write those hearts into the scriptures of sleep. So much depends

upon the umbilical tug, the restless

voyage home, the want and eisegesis

of reunion. So much--lost in the furrowed brow, the disapproval, the wheels forced to turn.

FOR THE BIRDS

With all-too-familiar bones you rattled around-- a shattered hip, some slipped gears. Then, just hummingbirds eye-level in a makeshift home, hospital-cozy, with red shag, bedpans, a throat full of stories.

Old age seems a troubled childhood:

the birds we dream of being, we become--caged and lonely.

Death is for the birds.

I sweep the stairs and my eyes of pollen.

I beckon spring to nest here, with its hummingbirds and a makeshift god. May the earth be cozy. The topsoil in my hand is a fistful of memory.

NUNC DIMITTIS

Since it was all to come to this

the graying green

patina of the failing

season

labored breathing

the night tremors

arms

wild and flailing

Go then

now to savor the earth

though it

be so cold

this time of year