Feline

The soft pads

             after a pause

Poise fat folds of fur
             before me.

When we look at each other,
we encounter a question of
            need.

   When we touch,

             the blood purrs.

Für Elise

Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds

This fragrance, my memory, is
     not due to perfume.
It falls across the bridge of
    time within deep blood
lines, unsterbliche Geliebte.

Laced like ancient threads 
    silk, incensed and
rich with the storied scents
    of honied skin, and
the breath draws me on
     a journey beyond
this pale clasp of flesh to
    love's narcotic
atmosphere where she
    conspires delight

And I, the soul's addict, must
    compose myself.

The speech and song of p'i-p'a

Finger dancer and tightrope walker,
My string-ringer, you
Make the music fly.
Eyes close and open to the
World of your puppetry,
Where there is a soul
landscapper.
Core cut into pieces of
Familiar matter.

Find me, then,
near the Hsun-yang River
Listening to water drink off
the T'ang moon.
Shards of that feast
remain in my ear after all
the light has passed.

The silvered shafts of p'i-p'a
fold time into song
In no man's tongue.
While it lasts, the flesh in us
shivers codes of desire.
Nothing much to look at; a blur
To our eyes, but in the mind,
Vibrations peal off the
the cave walls.

Consorting in the darkness like
Bats that do not see each other
But hear their comely shapes.

Long nails pick into the
Silence and extract
Such a rush of vowels
That they become
One, subaureal fact, born
To shake the truth in your face.
Sweet, sad and seductive,
The feelings stretch humanity
In its skin and make us
Up, over and more than we were.

Such is the power of the p'i-p'a
To prove a poet's ear.

Beaver Lay

I

I cannot hear the music any more.
The river's song spilled out beneath
My hungry art, fills up the waters
In wide, flat arena with her echoes.

Plumbing the depth of this basin;
warming dreams of the lodge and my lost
spring, I push the pond further down stream
altering last year's alteration

alone. The beaver's curse
to bite off more than he can chew
makes the cut less than
kind but more bark than before.

II

The tastes of aspen and birch empty
of their savor now tease my tongue with
scented memories, submerged music
inaudible to land ears, unheard of airs.

that imbue every hair every morsel
of my chiseled island manger every
cutting and stump in the beaver realm
with the craft of musky play.

In the pond I listen for the soft roll
of her heart to beat on me again
but the water is heavy with what she is not
and I cannot sound alone.

III

In search of the soft wood again, hungry
and cold in the creek, here is Ahmik
to incise the bust of his belov'd
from pole to pole across the wide canal

There is art, poor beast, in the simplest
breast that carries pain against the flow.
There is in sculpted wood still refief
to take a measure in a lover's cameo

The echo sings alone: Kennst du das Land?
Alluvial haunt of the river rat. Sand,
rich with the chips and crumbs of time,
home again to happy, thoughtless protozoa.

IV

Little wonder teeming in the stream
Do you know it? The womb of earth
The foetal echo of its younger heart
resounding in the surface tension.

But I cannot hear it for Long
Time. My sharp ears are cropt;
the music squeezed out of its hole
and the cry of my song crippled.

Still my hands are busy on the keys
now robbed of their rich voices
Yet kept scratching at the night
at what they would say if it could be heard.

CODA
Lay me down on thy soft breast
onanistic night walker. Sweet
Nothing on a curtain of pain en-
Gendered by a brief elision.

Thou, who took the beaver, skinned him
Inside out, and cured his worthless hide.
In dying be no more bitter of life.

Subject: No reply?

In the silence of light
    there is too much to see
In the absence of her
   the rain pours away but
Does not wash.

Islands of sandalwood and
   ferns wrap me in the night
deep within the wet forested
   truth that will not be
answered alone.

Laters

Branch of the willow and the broken lights
of stars on a clear night return with reflection.

The day does not go by, but the day does not
go by. Only the night passes her smile back
to me.

                      1-18

Plectrum

She walked in water with me
up to her ankles. And
she played the watery
strings of sunlight
in silence.

All night the string
she touched off
still shakes me
for its pleasure.

Ka Maka

In the wink of her eye I know I am not forgotten,
Not lost or dispelled.

I am holding on to her light, word to word,
Hoku 'amo 'amo.

Against the heavy darkness of day, her wink
pierces dreams denied

And pulls me inside the warm, wet lustre
with a single, pure spasm:

Sweet nocturnal feeding.

Seine

Are we still afloat or on our way
to the bottom of the light?

Bouyed by a power not our own
just an inch from ... absolute zero.

The sea is calm now and I can read
runes in the lines she's skewed.

To me the sea means only up and down;
To her it is an endless left and right.

Yet, I can still stretch out to her
in the surface tension

Let me Color You

The sweetest murasaki on a thick brush
that drips your color into the night
and into the eyes of desire

This is what I will use to mark
my character on the pure silence
of your skin.

In the lamplight you will make out
the true meaning of my word,
one stroke at a time.

Envoi

Go my poems into the dragon's heart.
Burrow deep into the fiery hearth wall.
Spread the tendrils of an unquenched
heat through her chambered vault, and there
grow in the furnace that tempers steel.

She was hot before;
now she'll burn the soul itself away.

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