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My published poetry has been collected in Glossolalia: Speaking in Tongues, published in 2009. The book can be purchased on Amazon.com
or directly from Orchard House Press.
Early reviews have been very generous: "An inspiring collection of work for those who find succor in the wildness of words or the
wilderness of the Pacific Northwest. Glossolalia is an invigorating book of unconventional poetry--worthy of note. -- Nicholas Hallum, editor of
Poetry in Place: The Pacific Northwest in Prose and Poems
White men's bodies turn green under the billows of the sea I have been told so; when the young are dragged from the tide their lips have melted into a delicate slash of emerald. Black bodies turn blue in the brine none of the longshoremen here notice, for there are too many dead; in Jamaica or Barbados it is rarer. There, the heavy pictish tinge is obvious -- their friends, dark and strangely indigo, found among the flood of tourist caucasian suicides.
the change is as oblique as the departure of the soul when our flesh takes on the scent of waves, our skin tone melds away. But no one has ever noticed the change of shade; these corpses often float for years. then, sometimes, they return to shore, marry, take up jobs or clean house, have children, laugh and talk. I am walking around still, tasting of ocean, undetected. the dead shall rise. 
dug myself out of the tide spattered coastline, down here, where the oyster shells hinge themselves open and close, open and close. a tingling pulse comes, under the throb of the sea's vast flesh it calls me and I know now it is hard to come into living again after years covered in barnacle waves I took the deep into me melted self into sea yet now, to be born ? advice. (To a writer: remember, some old boats never sail.) 
rough ideas rest old leaves on the dock of a harmless sailing port. They sift into mulch where, sometimes, if fortunate, staggering after dark in the champagne dusk, your trailing fingers leave a seed where mizzen mast grows: sister of basil, or sage, but hard to find the dish to flavor. if sprinkled, the threads are strong, intoxicating. Too confused a taste for some. Don't touch the rough wood dock then; even glances tend to wilt the leaves, somehow. You wouldn't think it would and conversation shivers the curved tendrils of growth to pieces; you might be left with ragged fibers, if you're young. It takes another night like the time your lover stroked you to tumescence on the kitchen table and you had to leave for Sunday School luncheon. Or a morning time of gasp, looking through timbers of a dead dock for lost keys, in a rush, when you have nearly forgotten the mizzen. Then the bowsprit. Almost unnoticeable; if your eyes are empty the spar will never keen the shrill soft sound holding tight in a moment when you may least afford it. But it must be noticed. And the silent keys may not want finding, so why not? I won't tell any signs. Omens maybe. wind might be kissing you. The air could be from Guadeloupe, so sweet it is close to rotten. Do elderly Spanish senóras brew it, feeding the pot with holy water and something ineffable? Or does a small girl wearing a red shift with blue hat, discover its taste on her finger, and wonder where it fell from? sometimes there is not the air. There is nothing; a spoken caress. For a long time, you are Rachel gleaning a long hill clean with broken fingertips. The mind is fleeting, as old love's memoried lips. No one has a better hand than no one here and dust settles through closed rooms, days on days. No one sails any more. It is too hot. The sun beats, a sullen heart and you have forgotten the weight of being pregnant. All this will not hold you back. You will leave the high heels like two dead pipers rigor mortis in the sand, spikes upward, because the sea is washing and stroking a hull, your boat, slim and beautiful, waiting. The virgin wood has rarely any hold on land: its roots were flowers, or had I forgot to sing you that? Over the curve of sail and keel, drifted blossoms paint leftover sunset, gold, blush and azure: a wisk of champagne. The only stipulation is leave then. Catch the childish wind off of El Nino and may the gods bless your yellow heels left behind. birth bed. (for Jill) hand trails out of surf, twitching, grasping, sucking sand down around the trembling flesh, into my hole, gaping wet mouth of a grave, a womb in the sandcastle land. i am safe here, whisper now, through razorback lips coral has formed me made sea-urchin havens down between hipbones a starfish rests contracting in stillness again and again tasting blood in the particled water la mere swallowed me there is nothing in her that is not part of me now... she is a sea anemone writhing with color, about to wrest life from this tide. wording. The slow settling of a house with someone else’s dried bits of Memory still inside. Life eating itself is what they said of my Cancer. It seems my cells found their own lives so much more Interesting than mine. Even as I breathe, as I speak, they turned Away, watching their own patterns grow. Now your mouth moves The riffs and swells echoing, rocks in the current above my Grave, an underwater blur. The lick and plunge of words become A physical act without a touch, something created between us. Your laving coolness covers the sounds of clocks ticking, plants Moving, even my cells growing. The languorous notes waver in light, Leeching cold stinging labials into my ears, forming something Eternal from the raw tongue, palette, epiglottis, the virgin air flowing Warm as blood. You are attempting an exorcism of flesh, a bruising Invocation, a baptism in dialogue, drowning me in harsh fricatives And vowels, a falling to risk, to best anything doctors may give. For it is Dangerous cutting throat into voice, suckling breath; we know nothing Except what has been given us by the past. A life is dissolved in every Sound we utter, and we speak the history of those who forced meaning From animal thought formless and void. We make a river from the past, Mouthing here the sounds of those unremembered, except where the soul Beats. I close my eyes and know their thought in mine, the metastasizing Of one self into other. Together, we taste my undead breath, thrashing my Soul’s blood into a froth of
meaning, covering the tide with a foam of letters, later. (after Robert Bly) I have enjoyed writing, at a desk all day long. later, a friend and I go for a walk to see who can leave the most behind but we sail only under the white blossoms on the trees and a pale moon that lurks in the day sky. gone too far we turn and cut across the wind for home. The Conversation. When that demon had brought me to a place of knowing That I had only the surge and ebb of lust, the hollow need for Others to fill me, those things none escape. ‘The truth,’ she told ‘That you live between absence and loss, and strive to know less.’ Corrugated rainwater steaming on the alligator backs of streets, Leaping statues from mist and moonlight sifting in, comfort And laughter in a dog's face, petals on cold boughs. Twisted Shapes holding memories in concert, loud lies to efface death.’ To see in such a frozen scrim some icy substance, revelations in Whispers of blasphemy left behind in the frost. I surfaced in that Phoenix of a dawn, knowing the glorious throes of daylight, and Slept, taking comfort through a world small enough to hold. We look for such an end in time of great fragility. And in the Crush of soldiers dying I found again such truth: a cake, new Boots, old soap, things merely to hold, not great or less by Knowing, of nothing a sign. Her words echo still, even as the Large movements of my wants are crashing, bludgeoning Unseen, like some dark beast through empty rooms below, Marking the unreal, the shades of things; metaphor and lies, Not touch or taste or even that most fleeting, remembrance. Now I stand away, keeping things apart, keeping the small things, Those mundanities; the shoes and clocks, mops and pails; Undistinguished. I do not need them filled, imbued with Fiction and with prophecy. One must have the grace to step aside, To turn away from fate. Now these make my life distinct: the sound of Snails, the twist of real thread, a taste of basil. An intricate curl In vines becomes exact. A rasping of tires and the fibrous strength Of wood; the movements of a whippoorwill, the turn of key in lock. places. places i have been with my hands that i would not take a body, and places dredged so full in violation or ecstasy that consciousness would break the surface with this curling symmetry of letter i have turned to dive dry, into root-torn ruins plumbed depths of hunger, searched for my own hopeful anger and lost all that my knowledge knows there are limits to such exploration only words enable the craft, and always the boatstream loses way, evaporating when i feel the sharp shallow tinge of edges and mystery; then i am marooned on dusty land, tongue drawn up, a crow's parched wing to the top of my mouth where the teeth tighten. i want more: a feast of syllables to explain these things, the places my hands have gone to, of their own accord. For Orpheus, returning. There's wheat where he's dead walking My grandfather, solid as dust or mist billowing up Over the shimmering grain, lingering heavy As evening over the empty Dakota sand hills He's looking for something: the dead always are Called out by this dream, he drifted to the old farm Over the dropping dusk. He waits, as the field furrows Lengthen into rifts of shadow and dim lustre. Watching him linger in the depths of my sleep, I think The stories were true, that some soul might sink down into ice Singing so that the song, breaking through our chests, out Our mouths, brings to light all the oceans We've swallowed, silted thick and dark For in the dark times there will also be singing A wind of singing that slices out between the stars Carving passages for us to follow after the last noise The last breath, the last story (but one) O, you who brought the dead up singing, You who swept the rivers into flooding sound Lovely lying story, O you, clutching a trembling Dying lyre as the trees fainted down living around. After a scatology of fallen lover's names, you come To where we are adorning and perfuming a city Of corpses for a stinking second-hand grave There are so few who really die any more We pass from numbness to unconsciousness with as Little change as the wink of some forgotten eye. Yet you come, you, a story, a remembered idol Only true Why have you sung, and what passions shall The living depart to listen to you? What tears can Remain in a place of flickering shadow and shade? Unremembered, something told to me in dreams Echoes back with a sound like wings on sand. For I've found you alone, long sunken in silence Brushing your withered lips against the throat Of a harp, loosing these notes to spill out Stories, old as the sea itself, and young, fresh as The boy's body crouched tight in the deer-copse Lodged here against stones and beech saplings, drifting, Brush branches wrapped thick as fingers around him, Too young to know how he moved slow on broken bones Like salmon towards a dry river run, Or why there are not more faces beside him In the dawn, where he waits for the deep still woods to stir Waits among the desolate dead, waits for the singing to rise. There are a few souls dragged crazy across the years The rest have dripped away, water through our fingers Children: the bleak earth's brightest the first to perish the last to drown in time and first to be bound back to life when the notes trickle through the trees Notes that no one hears now But washers of feet and wording children and shuddering fools like you The badlands are creased like old flesh where your ghost wanders, Stealing into the silence where walls hold no paintings anymore No Quetozacaotal to inspire, no Michael gripping Satan's hair. In this time, the revelled whisper of a voice stirs The choke of a swallow catching in the mouth, Leaving a scent on the tips of the blades of our tongues Burning like cinnamon Bitter as the peel of an orange The low quick tones echo across the sky Lips fluttering out a spray of notes Frantic as gusts on the white leaves Of water in the harbor of night. river. white frost an inch thick on our morning dock: two feet above the winter water. deep in mounting fog, one hears the nestling ducks, an echo of reeds in tide, ever rising. sound sinks away with the watery air at dusk. cool fire licks the mist, this silent whispering wick. across seas, many fingers set the death-boats floating down the Yangtze flaming and winking for the souls of my ancestors. after the viewing. Snow touches each house with the blankness of ash Each building isolated in the eddies and the rushing flow that strike and glance here, there, indiscriminate, leaving us behind. We cannot hold a soul long before we must give it away; the weight of it bends us, breaks us. Yet we keep wanting more, even as we give it away, departing before we have arrived. In winter, the trees in this town appear one by one along the silent streets, each branch crowned with frozen air. The oaks and birches have abandoned leaves, and broken out, budded, in a shock of white. Elegy, for Doug Dykstra ( died October 1989, Alaska, age fourteen) Like woken beasts we staggered awkward through the cemetery snow You might have cried, the strain showing in your cheekbones and big eyes, when we prayed over your mother, but then you might have watched the ropes lowering the first coffin and wondered The right side of yours was heavier; I faltered lifting the wooden weight Had you piled gold pirate coins as loot under the lid, or chosen secret stones to hide there, stolen from Matanuska salmon runs? Maybe the good shoes were too tight or the boy scout medals superfluous and you had laid them against the side to wait till you could get out and test the snow with bare feet I think you took a perverse pleasure in the box slipping, one corner on the rope, while we stood there, sweating and pulling, our feet cold in the sludge and frosted loam But all you wanted was to be down, like the time you jumped from the Slackmeyer's Big Pine and broke your little toe, in spite of the ladder You were looking up at the circle of faces, shouting "yes, yes" when the clods of earth were finally tossed to fall wet and dark and wonderful dirt against the snow, covering two white boxes in moist loose earth You love the smell of roots and wild things underneath the ground unfrozen now many months later, and you are cupping the wriggling earthworms and the curious beetles in your hand and hoping they will try to escape (you can catch them then) You're exploring the light cool dirt and whistling the sap into the grass blades and struggling flowers and -- never before done by a boy -- climbing pine trees from the inside Nothing good is quiet in the spring and you are listening to the brambles and stretching out to hold the rustle of thistles that can sting a dog's nose The smell of full fresh underground is rich, like that old mine shaft we found at Keewatin or the dug-out with the log ceiling where you slept alone all summer while we were inside the house You'd walk in covered with dew and pine needles in the morning And I still expect you to come in and tell your sister "look what I found while I was buried!" and hold up yellow knucklebones all on a string with an old watch still ticking, your treasure, like gold unearthed in a wood box as the pirate lights dim out. praying with one eye open. (after Mark Strand) through dark windows, the clouds move like one thinks a bird might, old ghost caught by light, scattered feathers fractured snow. on this morning, Pentecost, tremors of brass burst the air yet my eyes are closed, I am still as the Christ who sleeps on crosses everywhere, that dead thing now and ever. yet does some flame still lip this shore, rousing all the mingled mass of tongues and what wind unscented by decay licks through this space? what fires flit still over us sleeping and waking enthralled by a divine demon unto grace? fall away. i. I lose myself every autumn and it takes me all the long months between, scrambling and scraping in the crusted frost and drifted misplaced leaves to try and regain some of what was left behind in that headlong rush towards height and danger, endurance, oblivion and our last desired movement before winter. there is a moment, in awful fire, when all the sensitive points on our nerves are seared away, and pain ceases. moments, dim seconds to the rush of death. and in that compressed time, there is the greater rush of desire. even in that last fatal moment, beyond all sense there is the wanting to do forever what we had last hoped to do on earth. burned to death, young men fall and rise and step, and fall again. losing all of what they had, shard by burning shard until the only life that remains is that wind of desire. ii. more than a little of me is lost each winter and less returns every spring autumn is my time, for I come into it saited, complete, everything that was the year stuffed into my maw, my eyes full and open, knowing I have in me something strong enough to be killed. in the fall, I come with some part of me to die. it is reassuring knowing that the season and I will fight this battle, and that I will always lose not really knowing who I may be, or what strength has passed from my self in the bed of winter, until it is all over, and I can remember that last violent spasm of some birthing angel wrenching my hip with a curse. iii. the still-born months pass out and I can begin to gather those scattered pieces that were a self, again. it takes time, this gathering of the burst fragments, flung wide, like mortar shells that don't want to be found. I hate seeing the hills grow green and more green through the warming days, the cruel Aprils, the growing March. the fecundity of it all is choking while I am still putting shards together, unable or unwilling to place my own roots, thinking there must be something more inside this half-made absent form, something lost in the mist of the fall before, hidden in the crevices of vanished glaciers and cool water that has suddenly been eaten by roots and must be dug out, exhumed like bones that grow into a graveyard oak tree. It is a hard struggling, this wrestle for something that is always over the extra edge in a place I can't really know but in shadows and dreams. finally, I am satisfied with the dream of who I am, with the self I have pieced from that which was killed and broken, comfortable with this new stranger I must grow to love. He becomes familar, this solidifying ghost, a person who was not, and is no longer cleansed away by any penetrating snows. iv. in such comfort, the days lengthen and give me time to find. solstices have come and gone, so that I can feel the knowledge of my phoenix-self wax and grow. but the sounds change, so that I begin to fear the beauties of fire and ice. it becomes harder to hold strands together, harder to weave the figure I want across the long loom of hours. in these slow dusks, the knowledge plunges into me that the dun light of this season means my self soon will shiver to a moon's faint sliver and shatter endlessly in consuming flame, like the stars that spread bright, hard and hidden as crystal, ungraspable, across a late autumn sky, in the first days of winter. time. I shall lick out the corners of you savor the residue you leave behind listen with my eyes closed in the half-light for the rustle and scrape of your passing and open them to find hours, days, centuries sucked out by you, insatiable, to the marrow you're a scent traced with fingers in the night dust squeezed tight, and thrust into this hot flesh, until we are swimming out into something untouchable time, sweet will your way, brought gasping up by a God who filled the empty vastness with the movement of your breath: the lazy long moments, and the shortest years the quick flitting milli-seconds, and the oldest split gazes into eyes I'd thought I'd seen a thousand times I can't find the verge of your skin, sensuous and smooth one hour carrying the seed of another, birthing ever you take away even as you give, circling your wings I have seen you in the lights going off in houses at twilight, the metronome ticking, slowly the world decaying a little with each stroke look at you, sharpening the point of a moment shards of mortality littering the space in- discriminate, loving all, the only way you can yet there is the violence in the way you set angels dancing through a single cool second, whirling it around till it spins and flames. taking you, I shall lick out the crevices find the angles of grace you've hidden wash them all away, and leave you begging to return that something you found whole on the sixth day, and never let go of, beautiful liar, young time. signs & abominations. (a liturgy for the Goddess of Change) the knowledge first, this never fails when the teeth grow rot and the head numb with the cloudy forms of diseases named for English old men themselves who grew sick and died, victims in that most palpable of plagues the calcification of arteries and cognition, the slow and infesting accumulation of age itself yes, some things do not alter in time: not the lilting cry of the passenger pigeon, long-flighted, passing always along the new-broke borders of the sign of change, of irrevocation the constellations do not wane, those distant shapes that began all by tearing apart and lunge still outwards at a desperate speed vast, unthinking into a sea of darkness, silence. and thought itself, ideas and the symbols we place on things: these bear no touch of night, decay and age there is no dissonance in the crucifixion on a killer's breast, brides wearing white the day the labor breaks their water; fingers boiling, burning off as freedom's capsules fall, love for children on a statesman's brow none of this can alter while we watch on, flickers in the dimming fire. sacrament If I am to fall in love With the world, despite time Despite each holocaust, despite Every child who starves with a plea In their eyes, despite every Faltering pulse, despite every Unanswered prayer I must love each moment I’m denied love, each slow turn In which I draw nearer to death If I am to fall in love with the world I must be willing to love Every spot and tear in the fabric Every wind that shakes my door For the world would not be whole Without my love, and without These agonies, without the knots And rips that take the breath from my lungs I must love what gives me strength What makes me less than whole For only then am I part of this world This stained and spotted sacrifice Bloody, and tattered and full of glory I must learn to love What gives me weight in the stream Of this life I know I move sometimes for joy and sometimes for terror, yet If I am to fall in love With the world, it must be In spite of my fear Or because of it: With all my fear held out In my hands, like my soul At the moment of a kiss Dragged out from the places I have hidden it, where it is Small and unnamable If I am to fall in love with the world I must be willing to name it To name every particle of being Every second of existence, every grain That I trod upon, every tree that touches My life, name them all like a fountain Allowing each name to spill over Into the water of time, leaving a scent Something ineffable, sweet, that Rushes away before I can hold it And I must be willing to fall Thus, my own self Into the water to my old house: a home in april (for Vic Bobb) "it shall be you," whisper when the smallest sprouts show there is no death in my frozen earth "it shall be you." not forgotten are the blue noses of the carpenters, how they scouted at my greenness -- planting roots in the cruel month building haphazard on my memory tracking mire with boots, bricks cracked, boards warped, wiring shriveled and rusting like old lilac bulbs. "it shall be you:" what may be won from a hard season? where the freeways run you home. (from a story for C & T) She woke in Los Angeles to the sunlight and the airy sound of the birds in the trees below them. Years later, she would remember this. On foggy mornings, she and he were floating from the light and the city, the sounds of the birds in the jacaranda trees carrying them away. The skyline and the trees emerged, distinct and unreal, shapes in a dream, and she returned to bed and trailed her fingers along his back until he awoke. She did not always recall the love-making, even after their first child was conceived from such a time, but she remembered always the birds. At a tourist antique shop on Sunset Strip she bought postcards: 1950s pictures of early skyscrapers etched like stencils above an earthbound town. She would have been lost in that place where swimmers poised demurely, startled against the backdrop of a brand-new, elegant Santa Monica Pier. At night, she linked their small intimacies to the taste of sea-salt, and the lights that spread out at dusk, phosphorous on an endless concrete wave. In late afternoon, the rush of cars promised her everything beyond all bounds and she gasped in the blue of summer sky, silted with fine white and gray ash. Slowing once, she glimpsed one house in a circle of porchlight, hanging static among the many for less than a moment, a tricycle caught like a minature. How real it was! how much the lives of the people living there could mean! there was a sinking inside her that had the harsh taste of despair. They still wrestled together then, as if to prove something to each other and she did not know her despair would take a long time to pass. She stood in the morning, under the water, and closed her eyes, thinking she could not get rid of him, and watched cars move past the mouth of a tunnel underwater. Late at night, she heard him stir in the warm space left by her absence on the bed. In darkness, waves of slow rain rushed near her, passed, and returned. At full light the pigeons appeared from apartments blocks away, specks in the eye of the gray dawn, circling in their myriad dozens towards her swooping suddenly above her head in a rush of shadows, out of the deluge. when did you last come here when did you last come here, to the minute battles that reverberate down the days and months the ties that bind to breaking. when last, except in dreams half-waking, holding, hitting in that close embrace. I was hostage in an open field, four around me, no escape no weapons, yet I would die in this similitude place and cried out in my sleep waking my wife, waking all asking when last did you come with me to this tight closed place, a linkage of sorrows? in the heart there are more lies than any truth those we cannot see, undeniable unwilled to know. that place we want in ourselves always caught in a dying light just as we might be almost upon its movement there is scarcely time to step back throbbing, missing, knowing you have cut and been cut struggling as a boxer struggles for consciousness, not thinking of weight or vision, but the simple shades: light, darkness, memory. covenant. there is a mountain that cuts you when you climb it a tearing world to strip our desires to the quick and plant our hearts in open space: it is only here they root and grow. no other ground is watered with such wounds, yet none has such soil and such sky in the vein. your absence hisses in my mouth a stone on the lips. you’ve seeped out of me, an intoxication of memory, bitter as the peel of an orange, sharp as a curl of cinnamon skin, I know it like a poison in the vein it moves through me, this missing of you, a slow shudder something distant and unknowable comes close, underground, where I post no sentries, keep no code-breakers, where I am blind. in the morning you have moved darker through me, and I know all that I can bring into this room is not enough to fill it. this season this season, the poets clutter up the doorways dry, cracked and worn, scuttering and curling. it is an old place I've come to, somewhere expiring out its thick cold air, holding what little it has left in a watercolor blur: vague folds of earth, writhing trees, tendoning these clouds. the end creeps into my building lightly, skipping along the hallway missing every other brick. new year. Rosh Hashanah comes this year on a day of cool wind, a breathtaking portent of winter taking the world, rude lover tossing the sheets away. in autumn the sadness of all things is greatest for now the world was created. the new fruit, shot through with decay: birthed in the same moment, the racing seed and the worm. window. (the dream of my wife I) seeing a small woman, in bride white running strangely across the parking lot then looking back to the room where you were talking and afterwards she was only a moth dragging slowly across the misty window. standing. (the dream of my wife II) when my second wife went mad, she said nothing and I did not know her madness until we had been married for many years and all the accumulated stuff of life had grown up around us like some tendrilous plant entangling the feelings of my self with her silence. I did not want to leave, but eventually I was saying nothing also and the sky is empty in this dream. I stand among pilings of dusty possessions holding up a cloudy dock and my eyes sail far into the sky, leaving me. moving. (the dream of my wife III) when I woke, I was alone. alone: I did not have any wives and I walked quiet through a house of stone and wood and scent and felt my self move within my body and knew the curving of my belly and the touching of my feet. and when a storm came to love me I would turn away from its caresses and feel my self waking slow, a long still dream. long time. (the dream of my wife IV) I have no fourth wife. such a thing would be absurd. I am not mad. and yet, I wonder to have known babies born from human mothers and eyes straining after words and water dripping from a corner. there is a shadow stripping paint from my white wall and there are dust motes lifted by the waiting air. waking in time. Why do you lie?
time, compresses into itself when I am not looking when I turn away, when I am not aware a shy lover, hiding its pleasures I wake in the small hours that are left alone with traces of what came before the long, loquacious lengths of time hours of evening, gone to me. my head throbs with violence and a beautiful pain, as if it has been cauterized by the angry slumber of revelry and drink. even the turning of my neck to watch her darker breathing beside me brings memory: laughter, lies, pain and a wrenching in my gut the death that always follows, the retribution for splashing so freely through desire and oblivion. the small, thin, wasted hours now moments crowd beside each other like dry sponges. I step out into the black emptiness and think of love and truth and beauty and how we move around each other in a quiet place. how many hours of silence must we have for one moment to fill itself full, and be remembered? the space under the trees where I stood in delight is under pale stars now and the flat swells of shade. it is quiet and what was told there? through time waning paper-thin, my feet move to the kitchen in a whisper. the drink is a hush on the throat. I lie down again and feel my lungs filling slowly with water or with wine, my eyes filling with that second death to come. rite when Dionysus found his lover's body in the woods shattered, bludgeoned, broken the air shivering against its skin lips parted in a long forgotten kiss he planted a vine in the boy's fresh corpse the tendrilous roots embracing spine and heart and spleen, a vine coming of blood and beauty, carrying a little death away in its sweet fruit, the taste with me now rotten aftertaste of pleasure, it shakes through my flesh in the early morning dark. did mortality come to the god then, the first glimpse of ocean in all directions from a rocking boat, a stillness impregnable? trees have faces William Butler Yeats wrote to Maud Gynne she wrote back her dreams waking to a racing moon above the still midnight clouds, she told him thinking of love that he had been would always be the great serpent Cernunnos circling round the world mystery in his womb screaming beauty on his honey tongue as she became part of him at last unspeakable till Freud talked tobacco-stained Viennese sermons no druids on mountaintops here but old Jung, awake, scratching lurid symbols my blood still believes the trees have faces and wine is full of lost demons. beware, the ghost of the collective unconscious stalks about seeking whom it may devour. prosperina elopes. (Demeter’s Daughter is Gone) she glimpsed as the dark broke she heard, out at the end, how the language would burn and cover with frost before the lid went on again thus day crept out on brinks and borders: and that other – the one first cousin to Cerberus – night, left crown and cross behind, eloped for her: of course we wouldn’t stand for it we made dusk dawn too, traitors, manning the traps the fugitives evaded all on foot, no doubt she with the faint asphodel like ash across her hair and he, night carrying a face streaked and stippled as by strange bright tears. yet we knew when first those virgin cheeks tasted sick sorrow the worm would turn, and eventually they’d plea-bargain he would not want day after all, to know of the steaming pits the horror that wait for night to return to his labors, would he? damn the gods – he’s got to come back – (the dead are piling up at Acheron worse than a subway at rush hour) so we placed notices, like eyes pressed full flat on every shoddy window from St. Petersburg to new postmodern hovels (prefab) on the banks of Lethe, saying they'd get LIFE, when we took them. but that was long ago: as far as i know they are still running, he and she splashing over broken boundaries even now. divination. the sign of ending in each grain of flour, each star, each leaf of tea, and in the streaks of blood, the number of bodies lying wet without. the sign of what we had left behind, willingly. the sign of the loss of all things. the sign of a woman crying and laughing and flinging her arms out birds flying in patterns overhead and leaves against a wall, still. the sign of regret and of redemption. touching our days like honey filling an intricate comb, drop by drop by drop. the sign of time, vast brushstroke coming across a watercolor world. the sign of what I have forgotten, unwillingly. the sign, blank, of a place I have never seen and never will see before death. the sign of a rowboat, and a fool. the sign of a storm breaking, hurricane, winds, lashing rain. in the eye of that terror, someone rowing ever onward, untouched by striking lines and sheets of rain, unknowing, safe. the sign of giving. the sign of taking away. the sign of the world disappearing, winking out atom by atom so that the children's blocks in the corner disappear one by one unnoticed until half the ball is gone and then the other half, and then a piece of my leg and part of a lamp, a word from a letter, whole; the last page of a good novel, the middle of a tie, the branch of a tree, and three-quarters of the squirrel still running along the wire, oblivious; a glass of milk and, like snapping dirt off the end of a moving curtain, a third of a flock of milling birds, rising in flight, unchanged by their loss. the sign of a stammering man. the sign of laughter, and candles being lit. the scent of a meal simmering over a slow fire. the sign of a child falling into a father's arms. the sign of beginning. finally. finally there are very windy days when almost every piece of strength is cast in doubt and turned against you but no despair that came first, a weight undeniable squalling child hanging always from your throat out of you sustained by you overwhelming in coercion in between, a few months one knows life forever rain rattles and stutters softer in cadence and you cannot know (should not) that this measure will ever be turned against you. Acknowledgments: Many thanks to the Reader's Edge Bookshop Poetry Readings in Montrose, California, for renewed inspiration. The listenings, readings, and encouragement of Tim Parker, Chris McGrath and Charles McCrone were also invaluable. Thanks also to Jamie O'Halloran, of the ChupaRosa Poets, for her poem "Lullaby," and the Rich epigraph, and to Bruce Beasley for his inspiring example. Author: About the Author: Ned Hayes lived
bilingually, in the Republic of China, for the first ten years of his
life. He has since lived in
Ogallala, Nebraska; Pasadena, California; Spokane, Washington; Wallace, Idaho; Seattle,
Washington and Olympia, Washington. Much of his Chinese is now forgotten.
 This work by Ned Hayes is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
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