Many Musics, Seventh Series *part 3 of 4*

[cenacle]

Continued from here:
http://www.spiritplants.org/forums/the-library/many-musics-seventh-series-*part-2-of-3*/

xli. Dark Patches

We each know the dark patches,
yet still dress apart & walk wordless
astride each other, keep the roughest ache
close, love it like very life, like it will
release us to flights arcing over this how,
this why, a secret crucial bridge
to some other beginning, new knowing,

wild forgetting, a medicine come from stars,
grown within, like a healing fruit,
discovered solely searching inner forests,
this balm grasped in both hands &
with a hungry cry bitten into, how fierce
its pains yet finally, fucking finally,
the way two arisen become one, not

the drinks we took deep of books, their
waters discovered at last poisoned,
no, this knowledge, its cost, but yes!
a name for what gives breath like song
to all, a name! waiting to love you
all our lives, wake fearless, undefeated,
& an hour come to show you my dark
patch, my love, my two loves, my many loves,
reveal me as you know but far more beautiful instead.

******

xlii. Holy! Holy! Holy!

He said our world is made of language,
it's what we know, & nodded. I say let me
soothe your heart & change your mind.
I say I'm dragging my long history & yours
along, yes, & the generations of white oaks, &
the million gnats egging up tomorrow, & the stars
exploding in tonight's blessed skies, & the centuries
of centuries past & many times that to come,
the air too cold for thought & the poisons
subtler than that, world is made of language
he said as though no crazy cock in my or wild cunt
in yours, colors I look through for, old smells
that hunt me, tastes I'm deeply unsure of,
my tongue, my touch, when I've been fatter,
when I've been hurt, sometimes my metaphorical
heart but sometimes worse, those hours empty
of dream & do, but now let me soothe your heart,
let me change your mind, I too would forget
every shift contacts every other shift, & me too,
yes, in my lowliness as you in your certainty,
my times of loathe, yours of grind & cry, are they songs?
Let them, & some more, they could become nocturnes
architected from dreams of ice & sugar, first orgasm,
next orgasm, best orgasm, sing with me! Know less
& less, & sing! Singing grasps it all & language
just the visible exhaust, oh, I pray for you
with your books & podiums & houses easy
to burn in the cosmic sense, but say tonight
may the universe yield you better too.

******

xliii. Song of Ragged Claws

I met you in a dream of desolation
& later knew you better. In the dream
we were young, combatants with big ideas,
singing, ragged figures in the rain, you said
"a game, this universe?" I nodded from atop
my great railroad rock. "Time + play!"

Later you were on cassette tapes, made because
you were cowardly & far from me. Better beers
in Germany than England. Better whores in Thailand.
You'd given my a device in that first dream,
it would attach to your strange cassettes so
I could play & listen. Then began the new songs.

Imagine wordless crooning begins, low as ground,
one quiet thing among many, but rises, yes,
at some point rises & is now for attention,
still wordless, but yes, you were recalling
the dream to me, the one of desolation, yes,
& now there were words I remembered,

"Ragged claws, ragged claws, a mind sliced
away & revealed, ragged claws, ragged claws,
those walls aren't high enough to protect
the world from me, my music is bark
& root, I'll travel by the soil, sup on the starlight.
Ragged claws, a mind sliced & revealed."

They kept coming, these cassettes, one labeled
Vodka Notes, another Labia Dreams. Once blank
& I listened through twice. Less filled each time.
You were confessing it. Minute by conceded minute.
I told noone. I have lain wide-eyed in the sweetest
breathing breasts & said nothing. You were hid in my beats.

The cassette labeled Last Songs came to me,
too fucking easy this, after another of those
dreams. I was him again, the one who finds
the freak beast in the prettiest girls, coaxes,
coaxes, coaxes, holds the mirror high until mirrors
is all there are. Sweat, snap.

I don't drink anymore & I go to my old bar.
I go to my old table to listen, order nothing,
say nothing, go there to listen from
the light of a city in autumn's clean unfurling
into the smoldering poisoned dim, go there
to listen—

I don't know if you'd call them songs, & the cassette
is gone now. Was he in the desert? There was hard wind.
Maybe ocean? His voice sounded wet & far.
There was the squalling of instruments or
electronics, a band? Words emerged that
I knew. Ragged claws. Time + play. Slower.

I played it again, like I always did,
but it sounded different, it was melting
the player you'd given me, melting it in
my hands but I kept listening as the goo
rotated in my hands & onto the table.
Not desert. Not ocean. Meteors. Leaving.

And I'll just ask you now & plain,
have you discovered & lost your best friend
in a dream? I'll tell you this much:
it wasn't until that morning that
I finally came off that railroad rock
& conceded the world, walked out that
barroom door, cassette player bile on
my fingers, into common day.

******

xliv. That Sensual Music

"How can we get to know each other?"
"By abolishing frontiers between states."
—Tarkovsky's Nostalghia, 1983.

There is no higher & there is no ground
we kiss. Across the abyss. And you are
mine once more. I wake. And, no,
you're not. Your ruining kiss, your eyes of
sky above me, among the stars, that's how
this was, cars passed your window,
endless traffic, I watched you breathing
& dreaming. Your skin in simple yellow
street lights. I was moaning.

There were three of you that first day, just
pretty girls splashing their faces in the fountain
of that square. Bold & young, you sat on my bench
& asked me whose letter I sat reading. You among
the three watched my eyes, followed them not to
your blouse or legs, or the others, but to the
fountain. You came back later, alone, knew I would
be there still, knew the letter wasn't from a lover,
as I'd said. Love sniffs for good soil that way.

A new dream. A bigger dream. No longer
a dream at all. Forgetting what I was
in becoming what you wished. That first
night we shared your white blanket
with the touch of elephant tooth yellow,
I did no more than hold you, like who
I would be would do, I discovered him in
your eyes among the stars, biting & laughing.
Discovered I liked your moan, you out of breath.

No other. No other. Your breath. Your moans.
Your sigh. Your kiss. I'd sit by that fountain
where we met & your words would slip
in seeds & leaves from the sky & I would
let them scatter round me, cover the bench
where you & the others had sat looking at my
letter & considering my face. They said later I looked
lost but you didn't think so. You knew
I lived on that bench not in your bed.

"Remember everything but lightly"
you told me near the end, you'd brought
the other two around, ready to share
me as I was leaving, taste him,
taste this, this is how it was, this is
what he was to me, it's not down there,
you won't find it doing that or touching,
or showing him what, here, smell
this white blanket, it's in the yellow threads.

There is no higher & there is no ground,
drink the fountain spray before we kiss.
Across the abyss you can see what I've seen
all along, the nothing of cum sprayed
in your friends' faces. Drink the spray,
& you are mine once more. Now, eventually,
you see me as I was that day, & always
been, your eyes closing, you see me
underneath, now smiling, your lips
moist with spray, your ruining kiss,
yes, receiving back & back into you,
back & back, no higher, no ground,
kiss, across the abyss & I am yours once more.

******

xlv. Iconic Square

It was years ago yet I wonder if they
do it even now. Say what you will, someone
did dose the fountain waters of Iconic Square
with LSD. Lightly, like brushing the drums
of many minds, not pounding them awake.

I watched. Many many days I watched
as people dipped dry hands or dusty feet
into those waters. Those pretty girls splashing
their faces & laughing. Old folks tossing up
pennies & smiling into the spray.

I watched the years of watching turn
toward wanting again. Old gleams. Old furies.
Return of violence, return of tenderness.
A medicine come not from stars, nor from dreams,
but within, where there is no higher & there is no ground.

But more. Iconic Square's in a major city,
I won't say where, & surrounded by government
offices & corporate headquarters. That spray
touched important cheeks, drip dropped from
the hands of diplomats, into treaties & disputes,
what abiding fears blooding tomorrow's canvas.

And I wondered. Sitting on a bench, shadowed
by an oak tree, watching, dosed high on
the sunshine & the smiles & the sweating musicians
who played better & weirder through the afternoon,
music the rags a poor man will wear proudly,
music is heartache at rest, playing less & less
for coins & bills, more & more for sky-smacking bliss,
fuck I wondered. A light dose if it touched
your skin casually. Enough to change a mind,
soothe a heart, jar a sure hate? Breaches in
the web, if you believe in webs & who does—

No, it wasn't me. I wasn't so brave, or connected
to the powers over the pipes. I found out by
accident on the day would have been my last.
I drank there while going. A bridge in my mind,
a note in a plastic bag in my pocket. Drank there
on whim, twice because a tug in my heart
still saw a chance the rest didn't. Wavering thing.

I'd known the place I'd be going for a long time,
good to be able to arc over this hour to where
you will end & some other beginning, a bridge
not too big or trafficked but it was high, so high,
oh so high, look at the sky high oh so high—

The river below forgotten I looked straight up
& kept looking, crawled off the bridge into
a hidden grassy area, tugged there by my heart,
& kept looking up, twisted around to see better,
this is what I'd wanted so long, to look up
from this place. Become a mind as common
where all are welcome. Heartache at rest.

When had I stopped looking up? What day,
which hour? Whose word had made me
look down & never quite so up again, was
it hers, yours, my cum still on your lips,
saying you loved me & goodbye, still nude
with me on the floor, still taut for fucking?
"I'm not fucking her, you fucking dreamed her!"

Was it him, you, that letter you wrote far
from me, coward, about your disease &
your decision? Your cassette labeled
Last Songs that I listened to the night
you passed from me & the last of our hungry
hours arguing if God's best final proof
is music, oak trees, or fine young ass?

There were other reasons & many excuses
& every last one fell unnoticed from me
as I watched the sky into its inexplicable
dusk, into its crying passion told each night as
stars, I passed through seeing up & was up,
became up, finally up, swinging high, oh so
high from the strands above the stars
that dangle them down so low———

Dirty, broken, remade, smiling, I swung
until the dawn, finding myself where
I'd ended & begun in a new way, unexpected,
fine, & I knew enough to trace a path
back to that fountain, those few splashes
of sweet drink, & I returned to marvel.

I didn't leave for a long time, though rarely
drank again. When hunger got me &
my cup was empty. When it got cold &
I chose not to tent with the huddled rest.
When my dreams obscurely advised & my heart
lightly tugged & then tugged a little more.

When I left it felt tragic. A car wreck
full of burning bodies large & small.
The delighted king when barriers to
his blood lust fall, when his word & fist
sum to first & only beautiful truth.

I left & am now far gone to that fountain
in Iconic Square. I dream on it still,
on weak nights, & wonder who opened
the taps, how did they find the way to
let the elixir in? How? Why the light dose?
Did anyone figure it out like me?
Does it go on? Are the grim men on TV,
at podiums, doubting a little? Are tall buildings
governed by secretly grinning goofs?

There are only two tomes.
One tells the sky.
One sings the earth.

Are there fewer fists in the world
tonight? Does it still try to save us all?

******

xlvi. Red Scarf

Pierre-August Renoir, "Dance at Bougival," oil on canvas, 1883.

Tis the red scarf brings you to this café ,
it belongs neither to the dancer nor her mate,
tis the red scarf made the rest alight,
for tonight would have passed on another,
tis the red scarf you can thank, for the staying
hunger of cheek to cheek, hand upon hand,
dark blue, labial pink, trees, drinkers, this wide world.

******

xlvii. Nomads

Claude Monet, "Grainstack (Sunset)," oil on canvas, 1891.

Nomads live behind those grainstacks,
the kind that dance at dusk, who kidnap
scrawny gypsy girls & raise them up
for sleek dancing wives. With their wives
& pipes & strings, their tents & hand-made
rock knives, they live behind those grainstacks,
the weeks & months before first snowfall,
sing hungry songs of jiving asses & dangling stars,
pluck toe-less sprites from deep cattle dung
to squeeze & fire their dreaming brew,
rest lidless atop those grainstacks & laugh
at the cosmos' descent in sparkles & stones,
disappear with the snows, leaving only
the tokens of the scarves of the gypsy girls
mature enough by new year to wed & bed.

******

xlviii. Shorelessness

"What's missing in this canvas," he said,
  "is not the shore nor the sky, as some say,
nor an appreciative human bias to keep
matters of nature subordinate to men,
nay, what's missing here is the crippling flaw
of seeing in time" &, when challenged
to elaborate this ambiguous philosophy,
he propped his elbows on the hoary, twisted
frame, pulled his legs up in a diver's crouch,
& completed a splashless fall within.

******

xlix. That Book

Washington Allston, "Moonlight, 1819," oil on canvas, 1819.

It was as he'd read to me a year before,
in the book we'd had to burn, mail its ashes
to the horseman now before us in the great moonlight.
The boat was pulled ashore, its sail drooping
in readiness. We'd brought the child as agreed.
He might come one day too. I chanced one look
around, this was a beautiful place with its far
mountains & closer woods. Yet I didn't love it,
didn't love anywhere, or myself, or my close companion.
We were bound now to places where want & hunger
& the need to dress for a lover that he may,
pleased, undress you again, none of these existed,
& my only doubt was twined of the boy's damp hand
releasing mine, & the inhuman figure dashing from our boat.

******

l. Lost Moon

Hermann Dudley Murphy, "Moonlight, Woodstock," oil on canvas, 1905.

Was it guns or 'crackers we heard that night,
o we listened for hours. When the sky
grew bluer despite the night, & roughened up
like hard seas, & there were no stars,
as there were no clouds, just what I say,
the moon, tiny, weak, remained.

The brew of toeless sprites had been strong,
beyond bitter, but its teases, tossings, &
eventual turbulence did not explain. I turned
to my friends & nodded. When the last light
in the village in those far hills went dark,
it was time. No matter the frothing skies,
nor the labial pink lacing the fragile moon.

We would go, torn inside by days of fasting,
tipped hard by the brew, there, the last
went out & what had been solid earth
under our feet defined itself as a laid floor,
unattached to the earth, now rocking,
now rising, o, why did I still wonder
about the gunfire or 'crackers, the lost moon
in its crying waters, what else,
we are moving up, straight up now,
toward the secret see of seas.

******

[cenacle]

*** Many Musics, VII, xli, Dark Patches - We each & all carry that weight . . . a long time . .
*** Many Musics, VII, xlii, Holy! Holy! Holy! - Started with a line from Allen Ginsberg, and launched in, "every shift contacts every other shift," tis nice . . .
*** Many Musics, VII, xliii, Song of Ragged Claws - Started with a line from TS Eliot, mixed in deep dreaming, and produced this narrative that I still like and still resonates with me . . .
*** Many Musics, VII, xliv, That Sensual Music - Started with a line from Yeats, & one from Tarkovsky, and  deep into another narrative, this is where my poetry of recent years has started to take off, dreams, remixing old lines, and driving new stories, across poems, "There is no higher & there is no ground, we kiss. Across the abyss. And you are mine once more." That's me at my best.
*** Many Musics, VII, xlv, Iconic Square - "music is heartache at rest" "become a mind as common where all are welcome" "There are only two tomes. One tells the sky. One sings the earth." This poem is one of my favorite and best. Full of how I think and move in words when I do it at my peak. This and the previous two broke my more limited mold of writing and vision.
*** Many Musics, VII, xlvi, Red Scarf - Another poem on "Dance at Bougival," over so many years of it ...
*** Many Musics, VII, xlvii, Nomads - Love Monet, his beauties lead me to all sorts of new stories . . . just dandy . . .
*** Many Musics, VII, xlviii, Shorelessness - Another Money, and a funny one this time . . .
*** Many Musics, VII, xlix, That Book - This run of poems, from "Red Scarf" on, were from a long wonderful day at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston . . . the strange tales coming left and right . . .
*** Many Musics, VII, l, Lost Moon - and this tale too, makes me want to dip in and elaborate on it more . . .

[cenacle]

*** Many Musics, X, li, Grass - Link: http://tinylink.net/AGO - I was thinking of a prostitute, and what dreams she might have . . .
*** Many Musics, X, lii. God's Girl - http://tinylink.net/Ow3 - Mysterious ending . . .
*** Many Musics, X, liii. Occupy (i) - This was in the early days of the Occupy movement, everything seemed possible then . . .
*** Many Musics, X, liv. 11/14/1981 - it was 30 years ago when this girl raised & broke my heart . . . still a flame within . . .
*** Many Musics, X, lv. PeaceLoveDove - My friend Jim Burke III died on November 30, 1981, and this poem came to me the next night . . . it holds still . . .
*** Many Musics, X, lvi. Tonight in Your Room - I slept in Jim's room the night before his funeral, not long after he died . . .
*** Many Musics, X, lvii. Them Jellies - went to New England Aquarium, and delighted by the jellyfish tank, wonderfully delighted . . .
*** Many Musics, X, lviii. Revelator - another one for Jim, a bit of unwinding in my words and music . . .
*** Many Musics, X, lix. Entangle - yet another one, starting to feel like my pen again . . .
*** Many Musics, X, lx. Leucocyte - trying to get above the water in my mind . . . swim on . . .

[cenacle]

Continued here:
http://www.spiritplants.org/forums/the-library/many-musics-seventh-series-*part-4-of-4*-5768/