Beyond the Lack of Language

Beyond words, says you, beyond
The capacities of words,
The powers of languages,

As if you began with what
Limits words, their boundaries,
What words can manage to do.

Rarely, if ever, do you
Turn their limits inside out
To show where there are words, but

The world, without words, remains
Inadequate without them,
Since only words can express

What the world cries to express—
Not where there are no words, nor
Where words are inadequate,

But where only words will do—
Right words in the right order
Someone snatched away from you.

There are words, words you could sob
To the walls if you knew them,
If you could only recall.

Inside the broken ruins
Of meaning where the words
Pool everything you could use

At the bottom of the pond
Of what only the words know,
Dark, full of meanings you need.

The Haze Concealing

Ah, she has gone to green
Behind her aching eyes —
She has gone to golden haze.
The gremlin hides inside
All kinds of golds, but then,
That’s what gold is, isn’t it?
The haze concealing.

Christmas Shards

Sometimes admiring the paints
More than the paintings leaves you

The strength to witness the world
Without stripping your power

To keep participating
In the way the world witnessed

Handles its worldly business.
This afternoon sprinkles work,

Gently for you to follow
A trail of barbarism,

While the doves and the crows land
In long grey lines like soldiers

In formation, ready
To seize the town, bird army,

Smarts in the crows, discipline
In the doves, hope on the ropes

Peace in the early evening.
Shards are always on their way,

However you predict them in gold,
However well shards grow worn.

Where Ends

Before the ends end,
There is the black tower
Ending, the flowers

In the big city
Extending, ropy
Resilient embrace.

No less focused, filled
With love and safety,
Careful mother care.

Two rats are laughing
In the gutter, not
At the mother’s concern,

But from their joy, her
Secret power to hold her
Own in her protection..

These lines hang off ends
Of tattooed twigs of
Spring cherry blossoms.!

Surrealism, Sort of

You almost hate to surface
For a few weeks from thick clouds—
The simplest language stumbles

Between the arts, no longer
Content to name moth or bird,
Then spot a cat in the grass—

Sophistication matters
Again, and Greek forsaken
For the production of forms

That are error, error raw
Til the next elaborate
Exercise in memory

That may not rescue you
By some hopeful thing you glimpsed
In a corner of the world

Someone’s brittle scholarship,
Someone’s fierce revolution
Someone’s sophistication,

Which now you have to muster
In clever comparison
To keep your poems in the game

Instead of simply writing,
There was a midnight-colored
Dove in the afternoon sun

Doing nothing much tempting
But being the wrong color
For a dark dove in the sun.

Clothes for Twelve People and One Velvet Ant

A jacket for you and for
All your dozen giant friends
For no good reason but fun—

This is not an honest poem,
Not a work of anything,
Slam! Slam!  After flexes so what?

After flexes, then there’s this,
And this is here to show off
What you can do with a light

Touch steering the wheel of life,
Known for a heavy hand at life.
Didn’t you enumerate a dozen,
No number enumerated?

Like the Sound of a Cat

If there are shapes, there should be
Shadows to accompany
Them, then, it feels like, the saints,
And their shapes matching shadows—
The same thing, matching shadows,
The intensity for you,
That a bump must be a cat.