Masquerade

prologue
i am the one and holy ngumi
ngumi painted bird heard of nations
a last encircling laugh wholly consuming
lord of these dances dance the stations
of the cross this dance is the wind
swallowing sputtering on fire like the bush
spear of the palm of my mind
my frightening howl my hollowing whoosh
impounded as a thief in rankling chains
homesick for Africa sweet forest buffalo
my soul sinks deeper drown me rains
(betrayed of man a goddess incensed her glow)

I
this dance is the dance of life:
whirling speed, twirling dervish
canonized by blood and wind;
and watched from the skies.
sanguine they turn, turn, turn
(the burn of meaning)
and lace themselves with glaciers, march
toward a sacred grove
(pounding of rhythm we fall to the ground)
we are a garden they the gardeners:
cultivate us with your roses, o souls,
and we will whirl to your hundred slaps and blows
until the frost falls from our breath
and garlanded hyenas make a skeletal circle:
invisible like death

II
this dance is the dance of birth:
a scatter of daisies—fermentation
of emerald, the moment of mirrors:
a garish logarithm. birth smells like death
(my birth is the stage, death its ledge)
I stepped on eight knives
to enter this dance; I stepped and I faltered
by each knife, left my foot
and stepped into the world,
a mountain of flesh
(and for my audience the sky)
and I sang, and serpents;
my mother dreamed a dragon fire
and my father was drained of semen;
his legs a jumble, bereft of breath,
tasting umbilicus but marked for death

III
this dance is the dance of knowing:
a knowing like a skeletal crutch: horrible
but ultimate, a shock of paradigm, a blow
of distate at living’s back: but wonderful
to see! to chant! to glow! to wonder no more: to know!
that power usurps its pain. it makes living strange:
thought ever barbs, it pierces consciousness and burns,
recasting in its image the autumn leaf-change
and the winter haunt of morality (white urns)
it is a lion: it roars and snarls, gnashing teeth
and glorious mane, magnificent to behold:
knowing is having truth, and ultimate belief,
its dance a wobbling line, its chanting loud and bold

IV
this dance is the dance of repression:
flames from pianos, played by stretching hands:
a frost-gray wolf
who covers the moon with the moon
and coughs into lungs (frost-gray)
motion is written. icicles break at your throat.
you cacophonize, a frenetic trance
of seizure, a drum of pelicans
(beating broad wings)
over shaking ancestral leaves
(they fear to tremble)
wine-dark the seas
that drown you in frenetic dance
(a seizure)
a jolt, a convulsion, a bonfire
of vain circling rain
(thunder brimming from the clouds)
a charlatan your soul,
a laughing pelican with broad beating wings
(he rests in dim ancestral leaves)
they fear to tremble but don’t know why,
their god made them to breathe and then die

V
this dance is the dance of death:
sunset: a broad beat of wings.
the heart is long with night,
sovereign, a cloud brimming thunder.
once cherried, once a rapture,
now denoued to lightness in a soft burial cloud
(a waltz of tulips)
poseys with chafing petals,
around you in a confiding of blessings:
despair is meaningless,
solitude weariness,
this waltz an answer from the watcher:
death who adjudicates knows your hands, your eyes;
his to stand with arms out-raised. yours to die.

Soneto para la mujer más hermosa

hers is not to be called beautiful, but
to dig in medical books for mystic
knowledge, ancient Hippocratic secrets.
hers is not a vampire but singing blood;
hers a canticle of knowing, cryptic
with obtaining and rebuking regrets
for their hand-wringing or their rash of flesh.
hers a taut oath to a paralyzed god
of self-denying, a hooded skull-like wretch
who wraithes her with pierced hands, an iron rod,
and a manic word: sprechstimme of scripture.
hers is floundering, patient smiling walks
every day, every day; censure
of routine: love eats her like waves at rocks.
Love eats me like a vampire, blood for her
and I know distal alabaster chimes,
her eyes, her eyes, a routine of furor;
I know her rage for me. I know my crimes.
her is mine to protect from blasphemy.
hers a soak in mirrors by painted tears:
I remove my façade of infamy
and rock her, rock her, that hells are her fears:
my hell, the burn of sins unforgiven;
and hers, the flame of lone years in heaven.

Ode for Capitalism

so sit nights, you stinking hobgoblin,
bury your treasure seven miles deep
and laugh, but know days come when you, maudlin,
stand at tombs on Easter and weep,
hunger like wolves fenced from sheep.
you dismember form and damn the saved,
coughing their bones: you scrounge all for dirt,
and bite to make bleed, and laugh, and dig graves;
America averts her gaze.
the vile bodies fester for days.
you who alone give orders, a crown
whispering to a blind king, and you
who while a bulldozer claim sacred ground
to stand, arrest motion. your flu
inflects darker minds, unmoved by truth,
rabid and starving for their riches.
they burn their scruples to join you,
red like power, and crucify false witches;
they torture and they play bastard chess.
America watches. Her eye twitches.

Salome

for Gustave Moreau

Motion is calligraphy, thought barbed wire.
Salome's dance is a hissing razor.
John coughs and chokes. Salome breathes like fire.
Her gruesome prize King Herod's awful chore.
Motion is catastrophe, thought thick salve.
Her skin burns with guilt like pus-filled blisters.
Women hold their babies, cows their white calves.
Light echoes seething on marble. It glisters.
It envelops her. For this she was born:
to stick in his throat, a sentence of mud.
Her motion calligraphy, pages torn.
Hissing viper: when she strikes it draws blood.
The brief pause of guilt. King Herod guffaws.
Salome twirls. Her thoughts are eagle's claws.

Seven Love Sonnets

I

once I dreamt of you pleading, eyes plaintive
as dying nuns, cold with innocence, beat
passionate by love (wind against a stiff
sapling). your sparrow-laugh in summer wheat
scalds memory’s skin. we fell off the cliff—
bottom dropping, I think of you, eyes closed,
serrated by lace and the candle-blaze
of sun; lives ago. the circus is toast;
sold elephants tread peanuts while they pace
trumpeting blues in trailer-beds for coast
towns and small zoos. the dream-dance is over.
Rip van Winkle who woke stinking drunk on
the mountain and his deaf dog are both gone.
madmen pick pink flowers by the river.

II

to me, your white eyes seem to gleam with the
brazen sparkle of moon-crushed diamonds,
comets that ride with javelins of dust
past white blinding planets and crystal suns.
oceans that rush ashore on dark beaches
where snarling dogs and giggly children play
endless games and share limp dripping peaches.
a stubbornly mellifluous black bay
to which a storm-cracked thirsty ship has come
with dreams of gristly steaks and honeyed mead.
a jay’s wings beating newly in the dumb
spring air, the first in flight from the strong breed
of a gossiping regal-breasted mother.
waltzing to jazz and shouting, “I love her!”

III

in you everything coalesced like
ice—battered dreams floated sun-ward, ringing
with damp smoke and reeling from love-bronze strikes
of callous lightning—but you laughed stinging
memories to feeble sleep—in you my
sins were naked as rain—they basked spring-clear,
lighted like glass beacons below a sky
grotesque and brazen by bliss—with you here
was jubilance—frothy moon-drowned nights
of singing for eggshell-love, for Helen
who brought fire to mankind in a swan-white
hurricane—in you there was no thirst—when
I call, decimated, you answer in
silent riddles, your heart shrill in the wind.

IV

some fires you cannot put out (deep water
or oceanic breathing): they burn strong
like a boy fishing with his grim father.
my heart aches blood. my eyes linger over long
clouds. you were soul to me, function and act,
structure, dressing, and woodwork. the lights laugh.
I stand embered by your ruins, distract-
ed (ritual and art, staff and distaff):
some buildings were meant to burn to the ground.
this fated conflagration the heavens’
immutable decision. without sound
the burnt heart-strings droop with desire: leavened
is my bread; levelled, my lovely towers;
branded absent, my heart’s need; blank, my hours.

V

imponderable the storm snarls, sand-grey
coyote, wicked whispering secrets,
dark streak on the sink of the sky. stiff hay
burnt by praying lightning, searing white jets—
through glass I watch it stifle and near hell.
damp the grass and damp my mind with sorrow.
worlds may pass unknown—our love cracked—white bell
born from desperate clay, stretched like a bow
to breaking—the calm night ambivalent
and dark, still, and still rain, colder than dark—
you harped by indecision to intent.
laughs of thunder drove you mad with rough stark
echoes. the form of you shivers blinded
in the cold stars. your heart’s need left mine dead.

VI

memory’s dance choreographs itself
with your face 2 am calligraphy
dust like secrets settling your slalomly stealth
your fled love baptized by sweet perfuming
rain on wind-bent pavement midsummer dreams
your arms tremor my air pulsing nervous
your night pierces my calm slicing heart-strings
your name brands my lips hot and furious
what breathless that overtakes a steel day
anchor me eros I am weak a fool
dazzled by mirrors eastward like cathay
your smile rises yellow balloon to cool
the earth my heart hot and furious dense
neutron star blessing god burning incense

VII

with the seasons changes love, butterfly
blooming gray-winged. fall dusts me with dusky
ardor, arboreal but soft, fatal
and persecuted like squawking pigeons.
in you rose summer, yeast-dotted visions
overwhelming thought. shivers like cradles
creaking runes pestered me. long nights, husky
with unknowing, bleared the revolving sky.
I am happy you are gone. this morning
cough of aberration a sentiment,
not a truth—but I do miss your movement,
(smile a trumpet, laugh strings) and your scorning
glare. missing is not wanting, wanting not
loving—I loved you. fall stinks with love’s rot.

Acrostic

Feel warm my arms around your waist and
Undulate divinely, a sweet grand
Caress on the tips of your fingers.
Kiss me and I tingle. Your soft breath.

Your silence. A shade of you lingers
Over, riding the clouds headed west,
Uncertain but full of decision.

Breathing tapers. Your harsh precision
Inters me. But I still blindly hope:
Tomorrow we'll go back to those woods,
Cough in the kicked-up dust and dance close:
Has anything ever been for good?

Villanelle

that god gave his only begotten son
is known in scripture a fevered sweet prayer
his body leaves split palms voice like a gun

dense with meaning his forest he vine-strung
but burning suffering you cannot bear
that god gave his only begotten son

his wick snipped tremoring candle wax flung
of a god drenched in sweat like braided hair
his body leaves of split palms voice a gun

shimmering earth clouds of nausea he hung
nails gnawing gathered moaners unaware
that god gave his only begotten son

arms sawed branches bones eggshell from sun
ragged eyes that implode their final stare
his body falls from palms voice like a gun

twilight is a garden marble icon
of jove thundering righteous unaware
that god gave his only begotten son
body of leaves split his palms voice a gun

Song for Judas

Judas still hangs, neck at prophesied

angles, toes limp with frozen blood, eyes

watching.  He’s seen horrors in castles

that drove him blind with mad agony.

Humanity scares him like a bride:

white-faced under his noose, he descries

hidden tombs with doorways like assholes;

lumps of stone, toe-kissed by ebony

gods; wolfish judges with white teeth who

lash thieves and beggars to crass pillars

and whip them with spiked lizard tails.  To

them Christ would not be worth the silver.