I WANTED TO TALK INTIMATELY WITH
SOMEONE, ANYONE
I imitated an automobile,
I sounded
Like a horn being pressed--a motor
Failing to start,
The squeak and skid
Of a quickly pushed in brake.
I added a spin, as if he car was out of control.
I was standing by a fountain in shopping
Center hallway.
I had an audience.
I had been in the desert so long I had not spoken
To a person in years.
I spoke the old colloquialism I had learned when
In a monastery.
The audience looked bored.
The people began to leave.
All my audience was soon gone. They might have stayed
If I had not tried to communicate.
They might have stayed if I had kept imitating
An automobile.
I BECAME A PLAYER
The chromatic
scene was like a poppy printed
On a translucent plastic
And backlit by a purple light bulb,
This mist curled conjoined with stage floor dust.
The mimesis was deemed “romance,’
Which meant it was a Hellenistic reenactment
Of an Attic myth, Apollo
Trying to get Daphne to comb her
Wild hair into an occasion for a cordial cocktail.
A nun appeared, a strand
Of blond hair slid from black cover hiding her hair
To segment
A slight indentation on her forehead.
She touched
With her green-painted fingernail
That black silk shirt with a white tie
Of a passer-by.
We knew it was a fragmentation
That was dislocation in a world
We were taught was rational
And intelligently ordered.
The mowers carrying boxes
Packed with the beliefs and values
Of the past sixties’ ungenteel generation.
The mowers talked in high diction
About baroque art and the counter reformation.
It ended with a dance.
The mist had risen and thickened
And no one could see what was happening
On the stage, but a critic pontificating from
Ceiling loud speakers informed us--
It was a dance, a minuet,
Bare feet moving according
To regular traditional metrics
To crush grapes.
LIGHT INSIDE A LUMP OF ROSE QUARTZ
A light, shaped
Like a crooked spiral staircase
With some steps lumps,
Other steps look like
Opinions of the wind,
Ascend or descends
According to the mood
Of the perceiver or faith.
The color of light
Is one of the colors
Of the many-colored peach.
This light is the peach color
Of yellow, a mandarin
Chinese pale yellow. This
Lights is so otherworldly
In spite of its orientalism
If it wrote a gospel
It would Gnostic Christian,
Mything pleromas.
It is the light that
Some perceivers
See inside a lump of quartz,
Rose quartz.
This lump of quartz
Was given me by a girl
Who had gold twists for hair,
But who ran away
From being a nurse
In a nursing home
To wear only
Only a white sheet
Stolen from Sears
To pray all day
Worshiping the sun,
To pray all night
Worshiping the reflected
Sun light of the moon
In an unknown part
Of a rain forest.
I now am painting on canvas
The lump of rose quartz,
Dimming the rose to accent
The inner mobile yellowish light
Which when painted
Will be still and false
To be imagined mobile
By the perceiver.
I am painting on a ground
Gessoed white, and
Sprayed with a Duccio gold
That Duccio used to give
The proper background
For the divine.
