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273
In an ivy-sunned and ivy-bricked
Learning longing wishful gray stoned
Bronx castle
I fell in love with a Chinese acrobat.
From nowhere with a raised limb and
A fingertip
Touching green colored light from the wrist--
Does she miss a lake or a yellow crow
Or morning rice and a village path?
Outside, the air, icy,
Has a distant tang.
.
1992

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Feline motion isn't in it.
Nor loose, nor fluid; grace
Is a word.
The cat 's in his body and doesn't know it.
Sensorium and moment in wholeness--
The temporal knife's edge
Become a field fit for a life.
Paw, and talon, inhuman eye
Alien in the self-same place.

269

On the moon, and other places
A handful of thoughts may suffice--
More if needed sleep in the silence
That inhabits them.
.
For in the desert corridor
Memory's sun is lost in the mote
Yet still the day is patterned on the dune.
Things are small
.
But complication yawns in emptiness
With specter limbs out-stretched--
Til I unfurl myself in the silence in the thought
Plucked from near at hand.

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267
Two women on the street corner
Saris fluttering--a pastel breeze.
I light a cigarette and draw
On their red lips, their brown skin,
Their dappled foreheads.
A disinterested observer
My would-be hand,
Caresses a pouting navel,
India-sunned.
.
1982

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260
In the day's cathedral,
Spring's sermon on birth
And the stained glass windowed wings of insects
Stay with no philosophy.
Ethical consultants, strutting
Geese, lawn the analysis.
The almighty praxis
In this symbology of wood
Is stamped from without,
And the priestly red epaulets
Of blackbirds wooded and stained
Flash heedlessly in the signless sun.

259
The packet crushed the
Eleemosynary absinthe
Drained.
.
The text written the
Elegant calculus
Absorbed.
.
Traduced and studied the
Elementary poison
Consumed.

258

257
There is an edge in sensibility
Intermediate to the constellations of the five--
A chiaroscuro of perception
Between knowing and known:
The stars after heaven, beauty before your brow.

256
There are strange flowers in this garden
With no petals to give form to the air,
But a distance that makes a body of a thought,
Raked and coiled.

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253

252
To coin a pattern by nature engraved
Is best learned's art--
Understanding and nodding by's fellows.
Then explication by some on bended knee,
(Or grave disagreement from the shadows)--
And worship from would-believers
Who make a fetish of a phrase to dun those seen below,
Who post-lounge in the coiner's sun.

251

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249
The road taken that day,
A blind alley, was a consummation of the eye:
To see so clearly needed
A weeding of necessity.
Causality's illusions, field lilies, etc.
A raven too called out, a silhouette sound.
Fellow traveler. I, for one, had to sweep the snow,
Had to, before the onset, or the issue, of the illness.
Seeing necessity. A raven in a tree.

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244
We took a walk in the park today
Where the air trembled with nothingness,
Somewhat damp,
And a squirrel held his tale like a boa--
Nothing, to him.
Or was it being? With a fonted sky
Toiled over with words convexed, concaved:
The bulging topology of clouds,
Wisped, perhaps, by prickly italics.
At any rate, our thoughts seemed as fellows,
And no vapor arose about us.

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The encompassing shallow-hearted deity
That was, is not--
Nor space nor time
But the particulate word
Enchanting: the sea of suns
Is measured.
The primer's eluctable equations, monks' cribs,
Are now stranged, flavored, and spun
To the depth and breadth of the matter--
And the maker's extremity, finger extended,
Is uncurtained as a clockwork chaos.

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236
Unblink and it remains,
The glass edges, the antemeridian light,
The four sisters in Sunday's weeds
Called from Wednesday tasks.
Now--bone ache, cow shit, prairie wind so tired of it.
But there's a thing to do and another after,
And I'll not stop. I'll not stop.

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