ALL POEMS OF WARREN FALCON

Poetry Series
Warren Falcon
- poems -

2
Warren Falcon (04/23/52 - xxxx)
...'a boy thief stealing circus hours.'
To read more prose and poses you may go here:
falconwarren.blogspot.com.
Refugee from the American South.
Now loud-but-reverent mouthed in
New York City.
Regarding my writing...I have been writing poetry since I was a child and
perhaps may have learned a thing or two which, as more than a few teachers
have advised me to do, must be quickly unlearned or forgotten. I was born in
1952 so inherited some sensibilities of a developing world, its spiritless and
spirit-lessening technology. Unlike the technology I am rapidly growing
extinct or very quickly out-dated but not spiritless.
I have given up keeping up with the times and now gather my tired self after
all the chasing chasing chasing after a culture which erases as quickly as it
makes a momentary thing while pitching it as 'the Real Thing.' Mercury as a
god is after all the great dissolver of all forms. Nothing is new but the
perpetual puddle He brings. But still, we can muddle through easily making
idols of self and machinery, and now this digital fidget cyberly out of
Pandora's Modem. Fame? ! BOSH!
Leave the world to the scoundrels!
My hand once wrote.
My heart was here, full,
and it left, fuller still.
'What thou lovest well remains.'
- Ezra Pound, Canto 181
'Let him not be another's who can be his own.
- Paracelsus
VISUAL BIO. Spare:
3
Little blur of a photo to
the right of page, apt image-
The 'striving-after' poet,
Much younger days, some months
Recovering from food poisoning,
Once again exiled to roses,
reading Lorca & Rilke in a park,
Medellin, Colombia, South America.
January 1979.
Photo by D. Simons.
Now,2010, mid-years renewed
zeal, patience, work my
still 'striving after' poems,
-'How long, O Lord, how long? -
raise their feeble colors,
prayer flags in remote
places hung by unknown hands,
more tatters than prayers,
tatters the greater expression
in a dry season for love,
for this Here/Now reading/hearing
smitten poets, some, proclaim
sacredness of apparently
profane acts which are so much more,
given contexts of grief, need,
need always, always, for Presence
even when reaching fails its ardor -
how we all reach.
I bow to those hands full, seeds full,
words full, questions full, that so deeply
stir one to his/her own craft
that sings the heart truer.
POETRY BIO. Childhood - Lamenting - Song of Experience
Might I sing it then?
How many stones he hauled
Not bidden but rough forced
Hand by hand from coagulate soil,
A boy's red wagon rusting
Full of spilled tumble-stones -
Unyielding stars between the rows, silent.
Brooding father with
His hoe to weed or ridge
To row or brow to strike
Made of a boy a mule and plow
At Earth's farthest Edge
Too ill-tilled to nurture
But more to fracture.
4
Land and the boy turned by his
Father's bad blood to waste.
Both boy and corn obedient
To his And Greater Hand grew tall.
He hid there late summers in
Fateful stalks, grew small on
Shadowed afternoons reading of
Exiled, royal Odysseus and scores
More, native born and slave, driven
From homing soil beyond surf, beyond tall
Mountains and fragrances desert-walled.
He waited, a stone for a small boy's hand,
Or a God's, to haul him or throw,
But it was his father's.
I often stare now at my own to know the difference...
POETRY BIO Adolescence - Praising.
Cleaning Fish On Good Friday,1966
Fate, then, heavy in a boy's hand
hoists dead weight to a nail on a tree.
His knife scores firm flesh yielding
beneath freshly limp gills - there is an
instrument made just for this, pincher-pliers
for catfish skin - he grips and tears,
uses his weight down-stripping smoothly
bare to such luscence little ribs of roseate flesh.
Only the overly large head, the ugly face
whiskered within gilded monstrance,
remain pure to form, thin-lipped and
mocking, restrained by depth pressures,
sustained on surface trash, dead things
that sink down it's treasures.
5
Tenderly sing, then, to a nail,
to a boy's blood catechism -
hands, minds, meant to be stained,
mercy's quality unstrained
neither by will nor gill.
Scavenging flocks gladly fill their
gullets inhaling entrails tossed
in supplicant bins.
In unison Gregorian they scream:
There is a nail for me
plain, a chorus of barks** -
splintered lips
punctuated surprise,
glossolalia of rivers
now given weight.
One can only will
praise to 'The End',
and spill, after pliers,
one's silken guts in offering.
**A catfish when brought to shore barks, a rasping, barking discharge of air.
POETRY BI0. Middle Age - Awareness of Mortality Sure
Descending the hill in unplanned rehearsal
for what has become a destined association,
our mutual confession is invisibly drawn.
A ruined one-room church appears,
a cemetery plot weed-hidden behind this
once sentinel house long remote to men and
as present as God, my own presence is bound
to his who stands confounded now as three,
one above grave, one within it, and me
in between, one eye upon him, the other
upon sagging dirt where bones and a
ragged shirt share an unexpected
moment of veils confused in sunlight's
disarray of leaves, wood, of stone and
shadows frozen there, not breathing
6
for us all in unstoried astonishment.
Here horseflies feast.
Upon weathered stones are
only creases where once were
names, dates, even God's Word,
chiseled by a now unknown hand,
an impression only, one among many,
reduced to no plot but that of Providence
left to surmise swatting at Eucharistic
flies proving only flesh and only blood,
a flood of questions eventually exhaled,
and exhaling still, waiting beside
a white rock with wings,
ignoring fires,
leaning into changes.
POETRY BIO. Middle-Age - Acceptance - Forgiveness
Acceptance:
Repose Of Needles
For Sanju,
who says she is
rotting within,
and dampening
And once again,
for my father
If you need to stand or lie
in the shade for awhile then
do so as farmers do, as does
my father who farms his despair
in hot sun then lays beneath
pines in cooler shade to rest,
to dream that activity between
dirt and sky means some lasting
thing in its doing even though
his ruined life cannot make
it right between clouds and
his obsession with weeds.
Between the garden and the
un-tilled woods he rests,
repose of needles and bark,
mid-day sun insisting its
question slowly. Night dawning
he at last in darkness stands
returned from day, a practical
vision of green shoots to come
from blistered hands.
Up hill to the colder house,
he wills himself to life enough,
speaks some words to wife,
arcs widely around silent wary
children and lives to be old.
His loss of memory leaves it
for others to forgive, to live on
in the rich rot of that ongoing
question which nurtures his
memory haltingly, gracefully, on.
7
Astonished, I have arrived at
love for him who hurt me most,
have learned to obey the odor
of decaying things compelling
hands to dirt. Within the dream
of staying, the tendril and the heart,
my aging body takes on my
father's form; I, too, like him,
am a farmer when I note how
it moves in its winding reach,
rooting, rising, giving horizon.
Forgiveness:
Psalm
What can I bring to harvest but these
bruised hands, these cracked stones?
Praise to the fruit tree long untended
beneath mendicant stars.
A boy above, his Radio flyer** lightening full,
Reaches to me now en exilio, the farther flung.
Father, my most difficult, most diffident friend,
My most loving curse,
A strange and fragrant Grace arrives -
Look.
From unexpected fire
comes frail, brief blossoms.
*William Shakespeare
**Radio Flyer is a toy company, famous for it's red wagons.
The company opened in 1917, the year of my father's birth.
PUBLICATIONS:
Small Favors of Mourning. Chapbook. Bartram's Ear Press. 1977
You're Toothless, I'm Beerless. Let's Fall In Love! And Other Unlikely Love
Poems But Sings The Heart True. Chapbook. Published under the nom de
plume, Norman Nightingale. Friendless Phrase Press. 1979.
Bucolic Bouncers At The Belly Dancers Ball (published under the nom de
plume, Norman Nightingale) . Chapbook. Cortical Canticle Press,2006)
The Cathected Poems of Norman Nightingale. Unexpurgated Edition, Norman
Nightingale. Chapbook. Cortical Canticle Press,2008.
A Boy Thief Stealing Circus Hours, New and Selected Poems. Warren Falcon.
Chapbook. Cortical Cantical Press,2010.
8
A Brief Prayer After Viewing Grunewald's 'Isenheim Christ'
.
'Genuine knowing begins when sentimentality no longer bars the way.'
-Eugene Monick
I, too, have swung
on a cross, my own,
but nonetheless everyone's,
too often disowned,
denied,
decried as untrue,
unnecessary, that
there is no Adversary,
only Light,
that overbearing Rightness
which never
leaves room
for me.
I only know
that deep night,
that way beyond sentimentality,
that way over and beyond 'the Path'
into the thicket, the swamp
where the god of gators waits,
submerged, calling to me to
step less lightly upon the world.
Warren Falcon
9
A Totem Of Old Last Night With Us Walked - A Verbal Sculpture
.
In arms we carried It as one
does a child, yet it was
He who carried us both,
bird and man, who cried
openly all along the way for
our presence was solid in
His arms.
He did not care who saw
these shed tears, head down
beneath spring blossoms -
Dogon warrior standing tall
with his staff and carved horn.
Warren Falcon
10
Abandoned Train Station Near Grandmother's Grave
.
for Lida Harris
Then died there the rose beside the house of tin.
The track bore no train for years.
Weeds traveled tendriled and
yellow rooted between trestles.
Broken vessels whistled through
shattered teeth of glass.
Only wind and no rusted train passed.
Though the scene bears dislocation,
though the brain remembers station and motion
of steam engine and iron wheel rotation
the places of old gone passing
bear no malice toward stillness.
All around mute remains remind the
occasional passer of former days;
an old snuff tin crumbled in a reverent hand
longs for the woman grasping then,
holds sweet dust beneath her tongue
as the land must hold her now where is
no whisper but sleep beyond sleep.
Weeds to the eye are sad between rails
but listening to their green and yellow belles
the rightness of their swaying displaces all sorrow.
Their distance is a distance one cannot know
but only borrow in imagination by extension
of miles, their reach is ours then, translated
green and longing, their leaves throng the
evening air, in silent clamor fling down seed
to summer's blundering prayer.
Warren Falcon
11
Alchemical Passes For Father and Son - Turning Thighs to Diamonds - Third
Pass
THIRD PASS
Wild strawberries,
all authority and
accidental grace,
you reveal too much,
dew wet, still sticky
to the touch.
Opening sourness
deserves a frown.
Sweetness slowly
yields surprise for
what always unites -
untended desire
gone to wildness
brought low
beneath branches,
slow embrace of
cradle boughs,
entangled legs
and light.
And shadows shall win the day.
That wild sweetness is a stolen base.
That the tongue is an untended garden.
That there is a burning soft hands can know.
Warren Falcon
12
Are We Lost Yet? A Letter Poem To M. Meursault, Gypsy Cab Author Caught In
A Texas Milky Way
for Bob. M.
Mark the first page of the book with a red marker.
For, in the beginning, the wound is invisible. - Edmund Jabes
And so it was I entered the broken world to trace the visionary company of love. - Hart
Crane
'A man of many false starts...'
- Opening line from the manuscript spoken about below.
Mon Cher Marcel Meursault, homo viator **,
tumbleweed rumor, post-war roamer,
son of Cain, Biblical stain in from desert storms,
Your first sentence launches the tale of an overly educated Texas veteran of the Iraq
war driving his bondoed cab, the 'Great Spackled Bard' as he calls it, here and there in
the edge towns surrounding Mammonopolis doing so because that's where the money
is, compelled to dirt roads and back streets one would never intentionally drive if not
for that cursed need for money forcing a peg-legged hobo's freedom of sorts, shattered
leg below the knee ignominiously left in the sands of the Shahs, to make mutually
agreed upon brief commitments with strangers to destinations ending with a discharge
and a fare-thee-well.
Between nocturnal addicts, the usual after hour customer, arrives the graveyard-shift
nightly migrants to the Waffle House for respite rituals of grease and gravy, the
Medusa-wigged anorexic waitress with echolalia loudly repeating every order to the
sullen cook with his ash-tipped cigarette limp on a pouting lower lip; she repeats
overheard conversations at dirty tables, customers politely pretending not to hear the
gossip, the truth, the large confessions of their little lives pasted Hopper-like to the
diner windows, glaring reflections without error there where the only self-reflecting
going on is the scribbler in the pink booth perversely taking it all in, thinking, feeling,
penning it down in notebooks looking for himself in those echoes with your stolen
shades on, eternally cool in his capacity to tolerate what you call 'the great densities' -
immense absurdities de le quotidian.
Petrochemical company flares just across the highway signal Mammon Cathedral of the
Wasteland's neon-voided promises, Velvet Jesuses and Velvet Elvises, to the folks who
live in and around this mess, a desert kingdom of the far flung, you being one of them
now home from the war, in exile before and after, returning to the beat up but beloved
truck that also tells a story and leaves a stain, black puddles writing the names of
God-'Jake' and his slow breakdown while breaking into those stately mansions of the
godly rich; the hard lessons of earnest 'Private Hodges' trapped in his pattern of
wanting approval and love ill sought from the gold-toothed refugee 'Drill Sergeant
Tomaso' late of Liberia, a wannabee Jehovah with too much power over America's
young game boys shipwrecked onto military shores.
As everyday and make piece these settings and people are you make me love them,
even those monolithic chemical companies, and the justly reactive radio heads, their
13
words blown out of cab windows - you write, 'the wind blows away our words' - to be
heard all the way here in the East Village, New York City, the words discarded or
dragged screaming from a passing cab compelling compassion, curiosity, hinting of a
calm eye in the center of the eternal return of static pitched dispatches to the corner of
Crackhurst and Waffle House and back again. This eye observes, swerves to miss the
Mexican kid chasing the ball into Same Ol' Street ('same as it ever was' - David Byrne)
, notes it with caffeine, amphetamine laced, and traces 'the visionary company of love'-
stubbed cigarettes, sputum maps coughed and spat.
As justly bitter (unlike the bland and tepid Waffle House coffee) as your writer's
voice may sometimes be therein resounds a tremendous kindness sorrowfully heard for
these faces and places. This 'brokehearted' uttering does indeed trace the visionary
company down those righteously straight Texan streets missing a few teeth, unfurling
like remote prayer flags in coldest Himalayas fluttering, flung from gypsy cab windows
wordless hiccups of eventing into the oblivion of the obvious - flutter-flap ancient
technologies of cloth strung holey in bleak majesty, gesticulate, pleading 'Mercy' for all
the species, eventually our own, obliterated by human tracings. In another Buddha's
tongue:
Gate Gate Paragate Parasamgate Bodhi Svaha
GONE, GONE, GONE BEYOND,
COMPLETELY GONE BEYONDENLIGHTENMENT,
HAIL.
Keep going with all this and the other bric a brac pieces. All the opening lines and the
one above were strung years ago when you were just a kid in 'Father Bob And What
The F*ck Land', in all the books (which are never false starts) read and to be
read and written since then and now and to come during the suffering and isolate
hours, forlorn miles in the merciless cab, all jib jab flap and flutter in real voice about
poor human choices which even at their worst are votes for visionary company in those
universes revealed even in glittering Texan and Iraqi sand. It is so brilliantly human to
find the diamond in the sh*t.
And it is damned good you are inspired amidst the debris of progress, a wake-dreamed
jeweler mining away, in-breathed, while sucking those cigarettes and lovers, the
endless hash browns, along Texas highways and byways waiting for another dispatch
to Bumf*ck and Divine.
The psalmist says it right, no matter the blight:
'Let everything that hath breath praise the Lord.'
I await another dispatch prayer for the far flung tracers.
W. Falcon
**homo viator means, man the traveler, man on the way,
the latin name Gabriel Marcel uses to designate the human species
especially modern, now postmodern man.
14
Warren Falcon
15
Ars Poetica Redux
Dying trees fall easily.
Poems, too, as they should.
Dead wood rots from which
One good poem may grow,
The better to hear in the higher
Branches, the creaking lower limbs.
Sequestering lovers late afternoon
Whisper. One is carving the bark,
A crude heart with names within.
Now unread, unspoken but for the overgrown
Path, a bark-less scar now where was the heart,
Without thought, without desire, write only this,
'How arms entwine, how branches break'.
Warren Falcon
16
As Dew On Grass Sleeves No Longer Stiffening In The Wind - Moments From
The Orange World - After Reading Kenneth Patchen
.
for Bruce and Patti
happily singing in their chains by the sea...
'...do not grieve, therefore, those who are lost to you;
they were ever so to themselves...'
- Kenneth Patchen - from 'There Is One Who Watches'
I've lost my way and wait for signs.
Distant signal fires indicate 'wait here'.
No gate ahead. The iron dogs hungrily await
all who approach edges of the orange world.
Best to settle in, grin at stinking Death who is
sinking into the ground winking at me as if to say,
You will soon sink. You will soon sink.
Who do you think you are or were?
Step forward if you dare.
I've observed how furred things give up without much complaint.
They've grabbed often enough and so Death grabs back.
They sigh or call out in their animal way, Son of a b*tch!
but in the end they relent and they sink leaving only their
pink tongues spread out over the dawn as if to say...as if to say...
I blink in the dark looking at edges distant fire.
I wink back at Death who has left only a bony hand
on the ground where He waits just beneath.
How trite He is but it does the job, conveys His trap clearly.
When dawn tongues awake licking dew from my face,
and my fears, I shall raise both my hands, too,
as if to say...as if to say...
And flaunting these two hands to Death's one, and with flesh,
I shall walk away the way I came having done with burning signs
and a night's work of waiting, my presence taunting the dogs,
Death baiting as if He has forgotten one hand upon the dirt.
We have flirted, Death and me. Not the kind of company
I like to keep preferring furred things to winking bones,
Death's head all teeth and no whistle. But I earn my pay.
I walk away, my own tongue licking.
*
I can barely contain myself arriving back at camp.
She waits dreaming shyly in our tent, a Bedouin soul bending
gently over the wells in Her keeping on Gentler Hill.
I shall lick Her face then. I shall not tell Her how
I have survived the night with Death at my feet, the taunting
signals over there at the edges, iron dogs alert.
17
I shall not hurt Her with knowledge of this orange world,
all the dark things within it. I shall not take Her roughly
to me but softly settle beside Her where she breezes as dew
on grass sleeves no longer stiffening against the wind.
I shall bring Her in as a fisherman brings
in his boat softly singing a fisherman's tale,
his throat a song-sore nocturne rocking night waves,
beacons ashore flaring where his Love lies sleeping
awaiting conjectures, his folding, folding into Her
gently suspiring guesses -
'Is my love away at sea, at sea,
dark as wine presses as he will
surely press me?
O drink from the wells I tend -
I earn my pay - and away with
ocean roaming! '
Distant lights demur sure in their beckoning.
Sudden he turns singing boat and heart to shore,
starfish near at hand yearning beyond foam..
Dawn tongues slowly raise up land-sunken houses,
stilled curtains in darkened windows not yet stirring.
Nearing, he shall not shake the dew from his cloak but gather
as much as he can to bathe Her - feet, hands, those parts
Death cannot sink into, but he can. And life will continue on.
As will the other, his lost brother of the inland tent
now gratefully at rest forgetting the ever orange world,
edge fires signaling unseen until dark,
and then the dogs,
and Death's hand,
and then back to work again.
Warren Falcon
18
Autumn Haiku
Even from my front porch
the rusted sewing machine
yearns for golden thread.
Warren Falcon
19
Autumnal Math
The ground assumes its portent.
The good of the season remains in what is left behind.
It takes what lays down or is laid down upon it.
You'd think it a kind of king of accountants.
You'd sink down an addition of arithmetics,
heartbeats, breaths, footings found and lost,
all the unintended landings of a life.
You'd think it wouldn't stop.
You'd sink down even wide awake in this season.
Such sinking pretends its endings in countless
geometries of folding life down or over
and under sundering fractions apart,
forgetting theorems, all but the final one.
The rest can change or pretend to.
Admit you are no good at numbers.
Admit you can only count to a certain sum,
or down to it. Reverse your life if you want to,
wind it down with a memory. Beef up the end.
Noble or not, you can fake it.
Planning is what counts for indemnity.
You can make it seem to make sense.
You can try a new line on every stranger you meet.
You've only begun to juggle Euclid anew under
white lids painted shut with mortician's abacus.
You know a new counting accounting for fainter signs,
new ground to flick numbers between your teeth.
What's left behind is now wrong.
The good of it is what belongs to the
laying down of lines about what you've
finally done. Recounting your old formulas
gives some lingering warm to nerves on edge.
No hedging now.
The ground assumes its importance.
The season rattles all our leaving
in its cupped hand.
Warren Falcon
20
Bare To Such Luscence - A Catfish Mass
.
for John Berryman, his Bones, Confessed
Antiphons:
The original fault
Will not be undone by fire.
The original fault was whether wickedness
Was soluble in art. History says it is,
Jacques Maritain says it is,
Barely.
- John Berryman, from 'Sonnet ix'
Introit then Lauds:
Punctuated surprise,
hosanna of rivers
sounding with
or without gills...
I could not make it there,
that 'pointed conjunction',
nor up to air. I, Catfish,
soft sift bottom mud, give up
on purity, on flitting civilizations
lifted or pressed between
surface and aspirant spaces.
Done with all that, some
have had no choice.
Catfish choices differ
from those of the 'Windhover' Christ,
'dappled, dawn drawn' though they be
(Hopkins implicate flights of resurrection) .
'Stead, Berryman, without art or Maritain,
out leapt his sonnets from sonic
height-bridge to river-fells and missed,
the fool, one last scansion - dirty trick -
'hisself, too, hit, Bones sans pomes,
hard mud, perhaps one foot or his
beard delicately dipped
in paginated river'.
Catfish Homily:
Witless old mud spawn, widest mouth,
no lips to speak of, pulled greedily from
21
black water to shore, there's a bark in
air that old Catfish makes in punctuated
protest at too much light or is it, rather,
ecstasy, final vision gasped dimly seen
in depths, hinted upon surfaces,
Platonic shadow plays portending?
Is it the latter, sparks of praise to what
is finally seen at the end, a life mucked
and mired in obfuscated fundaments?
Eucharist 1965:
Fate, then, heavy in a boy's hand
hoists dead weight to a nail on a tree.
His knife scores firm flesh yielding
beneath freshly limp gills - there is an
instrument made just for this, pincher-pliers
for catfish skin - he grips and tears,
uses his weight down-stripping smoothly
bare to such luscence little ribs of roseate
flesh.
Only the overly large head, the ugly face
whiskered within gilded monstrance,
remain pure to form, thin-lipped and
mocking, restrained by depth pressures,
sustained on surface trash, dead things
that sink down it's treasures.
Tenderly sing, then, to a nail,
to a boy's blood catechism -
hands, minds, are meant
to be stained, mercy's quality
unstrained neither by will nor gill.
Scavenging flocks gladly fill their
gullets inhaling entrails tossed
in supplicant bins.
In unison Gregorian they scream:
There is a nail for me
plain, a chorus of barks** -
splintered lips
punctuated surprise,
glossolalia of rivers
now given weight.
One can only will
praise to 'The End',
22
and spill, post-pliers,
one's silken guts in offering.
**A catfish when brought to shore barks, a rasping, barking discharge of air.
**************************
[The poet's brief commentary about 'Bare To Such Luscence - A Catfish Mass':
Thought one might be informed of my inner dispositions, theologically and 'Other-wise',
by this piece in progress...it refers to John Berryman, one of my poetic masters who,
brilliant, alcoholic, tried Grace and tried out Grace - Grace never tires though we do
and sometimes expire seeking for it - took a leap off a boozy bridge, a true 'whiskey
priest' to Poesy and That which he praised and bruised to purple if not completed
purpose...the Catfish is referent to my southern roots and the Fundamentalist 'perch'
(stance and fish!) which can n'ere be rooted out of me no matter the
plier-pinchers...
Also, poem refers to Gerard Manley Hopkins, his poem, 'The Windhover' which is one of
his most praised...a phrase, 'dappled dawn drawn Falcon', of course inflates me,
Falcon, to the elegant and predator Christ he sings hymns to, 'Windhover
-Wingedhunger' for souls if not for bodies which Lord Death takes good care of.
...I've learned to be brutal in editing my poems but, alas, not my sins and both
deserve further 'edits' now and to come...thus the universe will spill my guts in the end
from slimy rooftop perches of enthroned roof dwellers.
In spite of guilt I still praise...]
Warren Falcon
23
Basho's Ghost - Even Signs Wave
.
for Nimal
Older Age
Road gets narrower
eyesight dims,
even signs wave
Basho's ghost
guides with ink,
HERE NOT HERE
Can't ever cross
Rainbow Bridge
Beneath it, though,
a billet of mist
Warren Falcon
24
Because They Rhyme They Live, Not I
'O Poesy! for thee I grasp my pen
That am not yet a glorious denizen
Of thy wide heaven; yet, to my ardent prayer,
Yield from thy sanctuary some clear air,
Smoothed for intoxication by the breath
Of flowering bays, that I may die a death...'
- John Keats, 'Sleep and Poetry
I suppose it is the late, or soon to be, poet's lot to jot one
for daffodils. At least one. This is mine, a last will to verse.
But first, I take a pill before dying, I mean,
its meager meal, yellow sun on a jaundiced plate.
'Consumption' is the word I want. I've got that,
and few breaths left and a flat voice to tell it in.
'The daffodils were yellow as the sun.'
So lay down thy pen. Ungrasp! I say.
An olden voice pulls at bruised skin.
I grow thin. And gasp. I grow thin as winter air.
I'll not see them rise again from bulbs perennially.
Not me, annulled in this season of the lung
though each breath mimics leaven, assumes
Eternity's aspirations, but...(where was I?) ...
not me, not long for my tongue to sing.
Meanwhile, bright petaled mouths flaunt, gape,
gulp in early spring, whereas, I flop here, leaden,
landed, banked, a carp brought to heel from bluer
lake pulling gills swallowing nothing that can sustain,
or not much. I sympathize, yes, then down another
pill for more air to clutch, breath an almost perennial
memory of last spring when it first edged me in,
clipped my singing short, when seasonal flowers so
easily rhymed but in a minor wheeze for a minor voice.
Fine then. Some one, some other poet write a
line for when I've gone under forfeiting all final drafts.
Those yard yellows spoon dirt to a useless
feeding sun, useless because I'm soon done in.
I'd do the same for you, Mr. Keats, in a soft, bleating tone of voice.
Warren Falcon
25
Bessie Smith - Powder Dancing On 3rd Street, Chattanooga (circa 1971)
.
Already the river begins its sweat.
April to September I'll be on the porch
Come sunsets listening to cars in the
Dark and you, remembering the flour
On the floor** and me and Willie in
Stocking feet dancing till dawn,
An old man down the street come
To drink on my porch sometime.
You were singing one night
While we drank and he just
Had to dance and pulled me,
Reluctant, skinny ass kid
All over the floor that night.
But my feet did dance.
And the flour stayed down
The whole summer long.
*****************************
[**In the Jim Crow South
in juke joints for blacks
sometimes powder or
wheat flour would be strewn
on dance floors and couples
would dance silkenly gliding
barefoot or in socks..
To read more about this read
my account of it on poemhunters
titled, 'Now Heart - Some of
What I Remember When I Listen']
Warren Falcon
26
Beyond Blossoms, For James Wright
.
Old teacher,
consigned
to poems now -
another way
beyond blossoms
of which you
often spoke.
If you were here now I, too, would
speak of horses encountered on a
hill in the south of France, Monthaut,
its ruined church without knees,
sun low over foothills of the Pyrenees -
From shadowed trees downhill
at least 20 of them run to me.
I feel them before they fiercely
appear, hooves tearing dirt
and grass in their ecstatic
ascent of the steep arriving
like excited birds, haunches
quivering, damp from late-summer heat.
Their soft noses push at my hands,
their vulnerable breasts press
hard against barbed wire.
They offer themselves to me,
their long necks extended,
massive heads dipping shyly,
not without some blood -
I think of you now as I did then,
remembering our bellowing lungs
in rich shared air, odors entwined
of earth, of mane, those of sweet
grasses and the binding brier
where they stamped, trembling.
Not poetry here,
Old Master;
just reporting,
how it all breaks open
blindly between doldrums,
dark hammock refusing
to be swayed on a bad day.
Something is here you already
know but if there is forgetting on
the other side of the fence
27
I remind you now.
My hands caress
echoing equine graces.
In their eyes I can see
in that way of all breezes, finally,
where you went.
********************************
Here is Wright's poem, 'A Blessing':
Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,
Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.
And the eyes of those two Indian ponies
Darken with kindness.
They have come gladly out of the willows
To welcome my friend and me.
We step over the barbed wire into the pasture
Where they have been grazing all day, alone.
They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness
That we have come.
They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other.
There is no loneliness like theirs.
At home once more, they begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness.
I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,
For she has walked over to me
And nuzzled my left hand.
She is black and white,
Her mane falls wild on her forehead,
And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear
That is delicate as the skin over a girl's wrist.
Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.
Warren Falcon
28
Cleaning Fish On Good Friday,1963
.
Fate, then, heavy in a boy's hand
hoists dead weight to a nail on a tree.
His knife scores firm flesh yielding
beneath freshly limp gills - there is an
instrument made just for this, pincher-pliers
for catfish skin - he grips and tears,
uses his weight down-stripping smoothly
bare to such luscence little ribs of roseate
flesh.
Only the overly large head, the ugly face
whiskered within gilded monstrance,
remain pure to form, thin-lipped and
mocking, restrained by depth pressures,
sustained on surface trash, dead things
that sink down it's treasures.
Tenderly sing, then, to a nail,
to a boy's blood catechism -
hands, minds, are meant
to be stained, mercy's quality
unstrained neither by will nor gill.
Scavenging flocks gladly fill their
gullets inhaling entrails tossed
in supplicant bins.
In unison Gregorian they scream:
There is a nail for me
plain, a chorus of barks** -
splintered lips
punctuated surprise,
glossolalia of rivers
now given weight.
One can only will
praise to 'The End',
and spill, post-pliers,
one's silken guts in offering.
**A catfish when brought to shore barks, a rasping, barking discharge of air.
Warren Falcon
29
Cracked Song For Dirty Boots
.
for Nimal Dunuhinga
This tree which grew, and grows still,
by a child's bedroom window,
this house, this window, gone to
developer's bulldozer work.
Now in crater of what once was home
memory and red dirt stand radiant,
starred, late-afternoon.
Stark shadows' black frieze
an astonished stooped man
with time's small piss-boy of damp,
bunk-bed mattress fears stand
broken-backed upon years, gaze
from edges glazed into bark, vines
maps-of-escape, iron shadows impress
long into wet-pit clay, shards of sun on
window glass stick in throat's
cracked song for dirty boots.
Warren Falcon
30
David To Jonathan, A Lost Psalm Recovered, Recent Translation, circa 1978
'And it came to pass...that the soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David, and
Jonathan loved him as his own soul...Then Jonathan and David made a covenant,
because he loved him as his own soul. And Jonathan stripped himself of the robe that
was upon him, and gave it to David, and his garments, even to his sword, and to his
bow, and to his girdle.'
- 1 Samuel 18: 1 - 4 King James Bible
The Lost Psalm
Abjuring flesh of necessity,
this, my peace, is false.
To speak of love or sex
this ancient tonguing
betrays some fault
disdaining the human world -
which occurred first,
the birthing or the wounding?
Jonathan of my dark joy,
my love boy,
the music woos, ah,
me, swells me up.
It is my sleek, bleak hour
remembering Bathsheba's girth.
Yes, there is some mirth in remembering her,
those skirts and veils like a cadence of sweet cakes
and guilt,
but knowing your ungirt, perspiring embrace
so near to the Lord's tent,
oh, it makes the sin sweeter
for sweet is the intent
to only love
for now it is
the building up,
the uplifting,
the enfolding,
the engulfing in flame,
Abednego's dancing
unconsumed in a hardness of
flesh in the hardness of belief,
no relief of vision's ken within himself
or fire but in arms and legs thrashing
out creeds to live by.
Warren Falcon
31
'Dear Low' - Upon His Leaving Mountains For Manhattan, circa 1981
For Lowery McClendon
You did it. You left the trout behind.
Sunday the corn was cut down. Apple trees
in the nearby orchard were felled which explains
the screams I heard a week ago, and the droning'
of wasps. That hill was exposed this evening at
sunset, reflected pink in the sky. Reminds me of
the women I always saw through your eyes,
their large lips and eyes, the dark thighs particularly,
fields without their corn now shedding a purple
light like Stevens' Hartford, and you there tonight
forsaking the school yard we'd walk beside
stopping to comment on that view of hills
at our favorite wall where 'Nigger's Pandemonium'
stalled on hot nights to break beer bottles for your
poems broken glass, curtains you'd pass in the
dark where your wheels would splay the stars stuck
to tar bubbles on the street when Hart Crane beat
his words against your rhythm running down
to Montford Park.
Be quick about it then, your departure:
I walked through your house.
You left behind that crooked frying pan.
Your steaks will never taste the same again,
and that espresso pot there, too, black stains
stuck inside like little Lamont's words,
'Are we lost yet? ' Just thrown out like that
plaster of paris bone from the kitchen.
No dog would chew on that, some kind of
sentinel to Arborvale Street signaling something
fragile has passed on like Mr. McKnight's
roses given over to winter, Indian summer
an old squaw, packed up her warm skins
and vanished like a wife or lovers.
It's like that, you know. No magic but our
own so often like that old white bone's intention
to be art, our poems strung on the page like
slip over chicken wire, words expiring from
our clutching at them -
'You will be beautiful, make meaningful our days.'
What are our names anymore, Low?
The corn is all cut down.
An old scare crow remains.
Apropos. Poetry's worn out image
stretched out on the hill forlorn in the ice,
32
forgiving no one, especially ourselves,
alien corn of a foundering century.
Warren Falcon
33
Delusion Of One
Born: month of the Dragon.
Horoscope: 'Today's the lucky day.'
Luck, you say? O.K. Once. In a small town
on a snowy road, the scenery spinning round.
When it stopped you were pointing toward a good
place - Home. The message: Go back.
You can decide again to begin again
or stay warm there: Wombtown, population: 1.
No Lions Club or local Jaycees.
No chocolate bars and brooms for the blind.
Free room and board. It's kick and dream,
kick and dream and cleanliness more efficient
than a space suit. Talk about luck?
You're here aren't you? Don't say good or bad.
It's no accident the month's the Dragon's.
Chinese or no, the year has a tail long as a river.
Peel the scales behind the ears
you'll still roar for pain o roaring boy
spinning in the world, the recurring dream
of vortices whirling pink and red, a large
mouth with teeth spitting you into
an even muddier river. You'd fish it
if you could. More likely you'd dam it
at the source. The occasional catch is
more likely snag in undertow.
It's undertow that matters.
The real power's there.
Ask the undertow, you'll get answers.
Don't say need. The bottom's filled
with old cars, tin cans, bad seed.
All you'll ever want. Get lucky.
This is the day. The glass on the window's
steamed. Outside's a blur. What's that gone by
spinning with rustling wings, roaring like wind,
glint of mirrors hurling down? You'd swear
there was a splash. Something's pointing,
Go back.
Warren Falcon
34
Dinah Washington, All Alone On The Street Of Regret (circa 1977)
.
It was sunrise, October.
Karen had just done herself in.
I suffered it through with
William Blake and gin.
Over the fence across the street
Children ran to class and Blake,
Too, chased those kids fast through
Leaves in the chill school yard.
I thought - the ground's already hard over
You, Karen. To Charon, then, and keep
Yourself warm. My arms no longer can.
You left no note in the dawn.
Out of lime and song at 7 a.m.
I dress, spin down the steps like then
In this morning now thin with Spring.
There's green over you now.
I can't help but see a thin mildew
Form around your fingers in the dark.
Blake's down playing in the park.
I'll play some Dinah when I get back in.
Now, Heart, don't you
Start that singing again.
Warren Falcon
35
Erotic Lullaby For Bedding, After Roethke
Belly belly the hard boiled egg.
I map out of a dream.
Love a long necked boy.
Dance lips! Leaves of legion.
Jelly, yard dog! Leap to June.
Suckle me, honey,
long necked, boney onion.
Why cry when peeled?
Count the rings of a tree,
the circles of a breath.
The nose is a love.
Press me, press me.
Iron me soft.
A breath leans,
nape of jeans falling.
Wedge me, wedge me.
Be an ax.
Clap me, trunk of calcium,
bone of need.
Sing, throat, puller of weeds,
secret coronations.
I day your arbor.
You arbor my seed,
belly belly
egg of sway.
Falter me,
long necked, naked boy.
Lather I'd rather thee.
All egg is joy.
Warren Falcon
36
For All The Words Dished Up - Two For Emily Dickinson
1
For all the words dished up,
A plate without meat. Maybe, bone.
No love fattened you,
never used your flesh.
Green as grass you stayed.
Dauntless, no narrow fellow passed.
2
This talk of death, dear Emily,
I know it intimately - plain talk
describes it best, as you know,
this Mystery grotesque -
concreteness like tombs hard in
the eye or that slant of light
obscured by a fly.
OK. It's done now. And ever will be,
for all the words in green
afternoons cannot evade mortality -
and soul no more than that butterfly be,
I laugh to call it Eternity that waits
beneath this plank, that other room
where a coach kindly stopped,
dropped you, yellow wing, still and
dark, now daunted and alone.
Warren Falcon
37
'For the Sake of a Single Verse' - Words of Rainer Maria Rilke
.
Ah! but verses amount to so little when one writes them young.
One ought to wait and gather sense and sweetness a whole life long,
and a long life if possible, and then, quite at the end, one might perhaps
be able to write ten lines that were good. For verses are not, as people imagine, simply
feelings (those one has early enough) , - they are experiences. For the sake of a single
verse, one must see cities, men
and things, one must know the animals, one must feel how the birds fly
and know the gesture with which the little flowers open in the morning.
One must be able to think back to roads in unknown regions, to
unexpected meetings and to partings one had long seen coming;
to days of childhood that are still unexplained, to parents whom one
had to hurt when they brought one some joy and one did not grasp it
(it was a joy for someone else) : to childhood illnesses that so
strangely begin with such a number of profound and grave transformations, to days in
rooms withdrawn and quiet and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to
nights of travel that rushed along on high and flew with all the stars-and it is not yet
enough if one may think of all this. One must have memories of many nights of love,
none of which was like the others, of the screams of women in labor, and of light,
white, sleeping women in childbed, closing again. But one must also have been beside
the dying, must have sat beside the dead in a room with the open window and the fitful
noises.
And still it is not yet enough to have memories. One must be able to
forget them when they are many and one must have the great patience
to wait until they come again. For it is not yet the memories themselves.
Not till they have turned to blood within us, to glance and gesture,
nameless and no longer to be distinguished from ourselves-not till
then can it happen that in a most rare hour the first word of a verse
arises in their midst and goes forth from them.
- Rainer Maria Rilke, from The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. Translated by M.D
Herter Norton. W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.,26.
Warren Falcon
38
Found Poem After News From One Roaming Alaskan Wilderness
.
for Andy
far flung from
Black Mountain,
Charles Olson
in mind, quoth -
'I come back to the geography of it...
An American is a complex of occasions,
themselves a geometry
of spatial nature.' - from 'Maximus to Gloucester, Letter 27'
*
You lost
again,
poor boy,
in way out
places.
Better there
than lost
in familiar
here/now
such is NYC,
East 10th
street soothed,
sore -
red wine,
air conditioned
poems
Writing (is)
bitterness
mixed,
prayer,
such is
personal
geography.
Stunned
how life can
somehow go
but one can
either resist
or flow
with it
feeling
Deity
39
(is)
the
Greater Current
ripping all
cloying maps,
clawing hand
from roots
on the bank
worn by
Greater Intention.
One relents
may like
Jonah lie
spent,
still defiant
under
withered
gourd vines
such are
poem-shades.
Still,
the dreaded
Nineveh volks
repenteth.
Not I.
No 'shed I'
but
El Shaddai.**
Effective, what?
Indeed, more
God's work
than my
half-hearted
attempt to
convert rivers,
alter courses,
egos,
when
mine own
is still
40
wrenched
in Sacred Grip.
All's well
that ends
swell or is
swollen
with a
modicum
of sensation.
Can't wait
to hear of
travels
Klondike
&
more
tis boon
to read of
just here.
Ah to be
anywhere
but here
but intent
is to bear
this where
enduring why,
still celebrating
breath,
sky,
sidewalk
generously
allowing
my weight.
**Hebrew for 'God of the mountain', & 'God Almighty'.
The root word 'shadad' (ש ד ד ;) means 'to overpower'
or 'to destroy'. This would give Shaddai the meaning
of 'destroyer', representing one of the aspects of God
Warren Falcon
41
Four Snortets, A Parody With Fondness For Thomas Stearns Eliot
.
'Now we come to discover that the moments of agony...are likewise permanent with
such permanence as time has...Or even a very good dinner, but the sudden
illumination-We had the experience but missed the meaning.' - from 'The Dry Salvages'
by T.S. Eliot
1
Burnt Snortin'
Mister, or Sir, rather, Thomas Sterns Eliot left his evening door,
late middle age, having lived into the postmodern new millennium,
having again reiterated his propounded new diet whereupon,
wandering on a deserted shore near mumbling twilight one might
meet a most inarticulate soft peach or unutterable yet edible Christ,
or a close match, a little kidding, upon which we may, if we dare,
reiterative quartet playing plaintive though palliatively, dine four
squarely in Piccadilly sempiternal before getting sodden after
sundown, preferably on Friday, which is a good time to do it, to eat
and drink again, remembering that it is end of the week, out of the tube
finally unethered, trousers unrolled at last, the mission to get plastered,
doing lines in the stalls, toilet seat become an altar of dissolution.
But, despite numbness of lips and tongue, of nasal passages,
do not hope that trousers shall roll up again till Monday, and do
not call it fixity. And do not call it fistula for that is to come but not
quite yet.
And who cares? or let us forget. Teach us, O Mannered One,
to care and not to care having lost muscle plasticity which a
good pair of dark socks can cover what was once pliant and
supple, now a gruesome obscenity. Have I overstated?
Shall I overstate again? Shall I? No? not now? how all things
crumble, even a souffle caves from expectation and thus we
wait with dope, we wait without hope for hope would be hope
for another line, and yet another, and we are reduced to shouting
repeatedly shouting, Muther f*cker! Muther f*cker, overwrought,
in the stall, temperatures and ovens not withstanding.
So listen, I said to myself stalling for time for the coke to take
effect, wondering why the hell I mentioned a souffle, to kick
in wait without prematurely crashing, for the night, O Friday,
is still young though I am not so young,
I grow old
I grow old
I unfold a
hundred pound
note roll it
tightly tightly
42
greedy for
lines and
more time
more time
for laughter
remembered
in the bloody
garden now
grown with
weeds
BOLLOCKS
2
Wasted Coker
so I said to my soul, yes yes yes wait without eating the dish eaten
last week which gave me the infernal trots, now giving me something
else to think about, f*ck that old Edenic garden, wait without faith that
the waiter will return the dish sent back merely because one can,
because one (note how I go to the third person but f*ck that) , ONE
ONE ONE is really angry at the boss and one is in the stalls not for
coke but for yet another freshly chewed double anus demanding attention.
And all things are stalled for in the stall all is bloody and ONE,
erhebung with motion too too much, squatting, endlessly squatting
wiping squatting wiping ad infinitum of bum unto bumbling attempts
so I said in the stall,
wait, wait dumbly, tongue lagging,
for the dope to kick in, forget the late
arrival at office, f*ck Mondays! the usual scene,
one can recover here by porcelain cool
white o white as
the lines are white
which, too, porcelain, is waiting to be cleaned,
and all things shall be cleaned, but only after
midnight for I shall have left by then having forsaken
all hope and the sink where I have discreetly washed
my skivvies in order to go home again, return
uncomfortable, without support, to throw them in the
turning dryer to dry again for I do not hope to return
again until next week to probably reenact the same
scene again, (bringing another pair of skivvies with
just in case) , the patient server, harassed, must add
and re-add my check again and again because I am
still
43
very
VERY
pissed at the boss, at the chittering fetuses mocking, always
mocking, in the shrubbery near the well-used apothecary and
I shall go home foregoing mulberries, for I am too blitzed, having
forgotten the rejected dish, the wish for justice, for mum's steak
and kidney pie, and I have remembered all too late. Alas.
So let us go home then, which is a kind of personal Golgotha,
for which the rent is beyond my means but let us go and
make our supper remembering to take the gonorrhea pill.
No, let us purchase our meal though on a budget, and forget
even all this trivia. Let us forget all that, too, looking in,
deja vu, the bathroom mirror from the stall
(have I left or do I remain?)
Recall then that I can leave the comb unhandled
until Monday morning. It shall not cruelly beckon
again from the toilet, or it can be justifiably ignored,
to comb what is left of what is left to fall, or grow,
but that's a laugh. Come Monday, and only then,
we must find the diminishing part again, searching
ever searching,
scalp and England
all one, or soon shall
be One
scanty scanty
scanty
3
The Drying Assuages
And all is vanity amongst these my ruins.
And Sweeney, whoever he may be,
tidies up neurotically, gin on his breath
for he is bored unto death but awaits
daily the post for possible liberty
which he once took with a wealthy
widow who mistook him for someone
else. The scar forever reminds of
dumb lusts, and dumber luck, for loot,
never dreaming she was a black belt.
His teeth, now wooden, remind him to
be mindful of the good against all wants,
44
and so he sits, wise, chaste, chiseled
in the ruins reading Beckett, but that is
another story written in the stars Centauric
qua qua qua
sisk boom ba
'tween Fuquaad
& Apothecary
near the corner
time forgot
but o not I
when the clot
broke and people
screamed no
help at all as I
stood pale,
pale, paler still
leaning upon
a tailor's wall
he, too, no
help at all
threatening
to call the cops
It closes me in
again to recall
qua qua Fuquaad
amongst the forgotten roses
where one is hungover in the supposes
he began with, that he can never finish
like this, pissed, which goes on,
which goes on, 'I can't go on.
But I must because I am losing hair and so'
dot dot dot into eternity
and so we must wear a hat but let us not go then,
you and I, patiently into all that now for come the
proper time
now then here then,
remembering the chaffing bloody garters
we will pack our Preparations H, grateful always,
no longer walking funnily sideways in the garden,
in the wandering streets, the half retreating steps,
without itch or burn, the tissue roll turned slowly
with pleasure not to double, or even triple, ply.
We cleanse what cannot be seen but only reckoned
with, and sniffed, pull at our chains and buckles,
then pick our pace doubly up for we are late yet
again for work for one because we think too too
45
much and get caught up in cadences but
never mind for reality is
the boss will chew us out another one thus the suppositories
forgetting the time but not the talcum, trailing little
clouds, each hurried step a flurried reminder of
divinity glimpsed, if sought at all
4
Little Skidmarks
O the stall, stall, stall, we all go into the stall
Nevermind, just follow the trail of yesterday's shoe,
talcum and dust mingle taciturn
undoing intention to haste
powdery traces unhidden guidance
the prayed for thunderstorm never come to wash
tell-tale treads reveal some rash is spread,
scaling crud of gory glory and more stains to wash
but what of shame? Do we not hope to turn it to other
than no more to blame? Thus we gait without soap,
panicked, for what is to come, to scrub, to un-stain,
but soon, the boss is pacing. But what is to be gained
in running knowing already what waits ahead?
Another annus. Another anus.
Nothing more.
Hidden children in the mulberries
chittering, heard but unseen.
Note to self:
Must take Thorazine before bedtime.
Goddamn wankers! !
But let us leave them for another dosage,
for another week's prelude sans qualudes,
the sullen departure to work again combing
the faces in the crowd pitching, another aphasia
I prefer to call an 'occluded interlude', yet
another distracted fit caught in a sun ray upon
seeing that the poorly stitched seam hastily done
between the shower and the tepid tea,
between the sorting through the dirty laundry,
46
the deepening ennui for something to wear,
o do not hope to wear it again and again evergreen
(whatever, BTW, 'ennui' is, but it is fun to say and
in this aesthetic some other language needs to be
gratuitously writ to make the poetic voice more valid
if Americans attempt to art, 'writ' is a good word, too,
let me then write it repeatedly: writ writ writ, to wit)
begins yet again, o Ariadne, obsessive compulsive
to the end,
Thorazine Thorazine Thorazine
must must must remember to wit!
...to unravel that which is still, to look on the
bright side, yet another beginning, the public,
pathetic, peripatetic tugging of shirts and blouses
over the widening rip in the thinning trouser's seat,
pant legs remembering to be gay scrolling ever upward.
And yet we still call these knobs 'ankles', forgoing gaity.
Nothing to be read here, now, in Merry Old,
but old age, varicose. the blank stare dreaming
comatose, of repressed rage, still pissed at the boss,
shamed of ankles, the chittering twats in mulberry bush
near home, following, following
No wonder these
little snots at me laugh.
Them I'll clobber
here then now then
Shall we turn the page again?
Shall we? Shall we turn over yet
another leaf? Shall we repeat it all
again forgetting the unraveling stitch?
The itch and the burn?
The Itch and the burn returning,
for one bought the store brand and not the original.
Now it hurts to sit or stand. Shall I say it again,
under fetid breath, dentures stained?
Yes. Yes!
Sit or stand.
Sit or stand!
Now goddamn it,
bloody move on!
I shall say it again because I can.
But later. But let us remember
47
indulgently
now then, here then
hidden laughter behind
hands pointing at loose stitches,
boxers gray.
Forgot to do laundry.
Another note to self.
Another task.
Do the wash.
Most important.
Still, it is a good Friday so, sighing,
at last forgetting all Mondays past
and to come
not withstanding, for it hurts either
way to sit or stand, the late pay check,
piss poor pittance, mind, is cashed
probably on bloody Monday but
never mind. Let us presently pour
our penurious libations
Chianti Chianti
Chianti.
Warren Falcon
48
From The Train Window Haiku
View upon entering Philly
receding steeples
the hairline of God
Warren Falcon
49
Giving Darkness In Giverny
.
Monet might have seen,
giving darkness in Giverny,
defiant to the last optics fired out inevitably,
nerve light made the more dipped,
smeared on clutched pallet bent to his gaping will
struggling to 'ope' eyes,
wider see.
Was failing him the light.
Closing-in world reduced to all horizon.
Tints, brushes, memory
frames these final pieces
canvased, inwardly conformed,
recalled light more light than all raw day.
.
Warren Falcon
50
Haiku D'estat - Staten Island Ferry Wake,1984
This Sunday of ice cream cones
the locals cruise for a dime.
Pigeons here or there peck pretzels
thrown down. New in town
I read these indifferent faces,
news from Sunday frowns.
Last night's drinks were on you and
old friends. Felt like I had skin again
when a certain rub made wonder but
sleeping it off on your floor I woke up
screaming, dreaming death with a bloody nose.
If you wore nylons I could kiss you. I'm confused,
infused vagrant blood refuses no stops, lust cops
wait in dark glasses near darker doors to bust.
I've managed before. Two black coffees
and the shakes, bad. I pack enough clean
clothes for a sidewalk or two. Now I
find myself here in this somewhere floating
toward some shore altogether too familiar
(the dream again) while families squeal,
their cameras pointed at Lady Liberty, licking
noisily their cones, an altogether painful thing
to watch and remembering you naked, too.
I've paid my quarter to get to the other side
even if I get there blue.
Were we talking about rabbit punches
last night, the blank, blond faces
of Stockholm? Which drinks were free?
The dream tells me little except I was (am)
scared and hate this body I'm in.
I'd lose it all but for this one voice here.
Funny, the thought of revival when one touches
another skin. Some god I've believed in but
rarely put to test. I'm going home to rest.
See you tomorrow. Phone me first.
Sudden moment when the ferry horn blasts:
Someone, some kid, is
crying now. Dropped his
cone into the cold, cold sea.
Warren Falcon
51
Hard Days On In At The Rehab For Drunken Poets, An Opera Of Sorts, circa
1981
They can't all be like these, I guess.
The days are good, though, when they are.
The formula is simple really -
We take our ragged bones out of rented rooms for long walks.
You point out between bricks the rainbows in windows, the dirt
now become your dirt, your genius for transformations.
I ram my own by now trite and hackneyed points
home over and over, but it works on days like these.
Reprise. Then cold beer in the dying light of
a gray bar. The stage is set. Laughter over the
wear on those other faces as we shudder behind
our own, the usual exchange of wind.
Full darkness mutes the swarm and it begins.
Curtain up.
Back inside our rooms, last castrati on the radio.
Enter winter under the door crack.
This becomes an event,
the retelling in high C;
'...I guess it's just as well we speak
this way in America and call it poetry.'
See. I'm ramming it again.
Cold breaks my concentration.
It's moving up my legs like hemlock.
Poetry should do the same.
OK. I'll get serious. A brief libretto: :
Today sweet Molly with the black eye
and the cut on her breast cried then
decided to return home to Bud who
beats her when she's drunk. I tried to
talk her out of going but she was going
and she went. Scherzo here. Interlude.
Johnny didn't come home but drank a beer
after court, walked down Highway 25 to see
his little girl, called to say he was sorry for
being late. 'You can't come back, Johnny.
You been drinking again.' Coloratura. And gravel.
Joe vomited honey and banana in bed, a real mess.
I caught most of it in a trash can held up to his head.
He roared when he wretched.
'I've vomited more years than I've lived them' he said, shaking.
'I'm a damned drunk and I'll die a damned drunk.'
52
Warren Falcon
53
Harlem Palimpsest - What Is Seen And Overheard At Six A.M., West 142nd
Street, August 1984
.
for Wonsook Kim
Palimpsest =
1: writing material (as a parchment or tablet) used one or more times after earlier
writing has been erased
2: something having usually diverse layers or aspects apparent beneath the surface
Latin palimpsestus, from Greek palimpsē stos scraped again,
from palin + psē n to rub, scrape; akin to Sanskrit psā ti, babhasti
he chews
'Oye! Garcia Lorca who chews still
Harlem's the better for your shade
once and still there'
Old women
lean out windows
swaying between
backyard buildings
old clothes lines,
gray string
thin
thin
'What's will when
the window slams shut?
Just old cake thrown on the street
Purple flower boxes
woman's hands
folding letters
sweet soap smells
54
on top steps
wet shoes full of wind
Overheard:
'Just catching a cool breeze is all.
Street don't belong to me...'
'She may be crazy but she's polite.
She puts her hand over her mouth
when she coughs...'
'Don't be flattered a
breeze blows in your window
Run! Run like hell'
Shouts overhead:
Keep offa my clean floor
Lay outta my porcelain sink
Ya hear me? !
That mirror's not gonna change your face
What is read:
'After so very many years, it's pointless to
look back on it.
Give this looking back a rest!
55
A clear breeze the world over
-what limit could it have? '
- Setcho, zen master & poet
What is written in response:
In ice streaks upward
here's breath for you
even this ink on paper
this flesh on mind
this writing on air
Why try be happy/sad?
don't affect it
disinfect your mind
play possum
Who's somebody's darlin'?
Jus' time and
gism taken on flesh
dead soon enough
so pace yourself
You've run backward too long
Don't want it
as does the
dirty river
reflecting
without
56
acknowledgment
Warren Falcon
57
History Of A Place, A Bombast, A Psalm In Voices Several
'What thou lovest well remains.'
- Ezra Pound, Canto 181
'Let him not be another's who can be his own.
- Paracelsus
1
'All this our South stinks peace.' - Ezra Pound
In exile, by whose hand unsure - mine, or those hammers of
The ill-starred fathers. Unsure yet on fire I fled their dredged,
God-flooded cotton plains, those self-appointed lords over
They who were deemed lesser dirt or worse. Those who did
Not sing self-praising songs belonged to lordly minds in Hell
So there to I fled and still make a bed there more content to
Be among the bastards for whom the Bard* pleads,
'Gods! stand up for! ' Ay. If the gods will not, and they do, I stand
Up and bray, a fool certain, but in the neighing take deity's cause
Upon Myself - Justice, Beauty, Mercurial Love's Sublimity
Though my heel be wounded by Adamic paternity.
2
Of late an old apple tree cracked,
Twice lightening struck. Dying, insistent
Urges, blooms anew tender shoots
Out of season. One resplendent limb reaches,
Just waking pink on tips, from all
The tangled rest for which I, too, reach,
Grasp and reclaim my own patch, my
Own history though scarred, attached
To hurting words, fists, and cornfields forever
Alien, though bittersweet when recalled -
A boy there, hard staring into distance, his wagon full of stones.
3
Might I sing it then?
How many stones he hauled
58
Not bidden but rough forced
Hand by hand from coagulate soil,
A boy's red wagon rusting
Full of spilled tumble-stones -
Unyielding stars between the rows, silent?
Brooding father with
His hoe to weed or ridge
To row or brow to strike,
Made of a boy a mule and plow
At Earth's farthest Edge
Too ill-tilled to nurture
But more to fracture.
Land and the boy turned by his
Father's bad blood to waste.
Both boy and corn obedient to
His And Greater Hand grew tall.
He hid there late summers in
Fateful stalks, grew small on
Shadowed afternoons reading of
Exiled, royal Odysseus and scores
More, native born and slave, driven
From homing soil beyond surf, beyond tall
Mountains and fragrances desert-walled.
He waited, a stone for a small boy's hand,
Or a God's, to haul him or throw,
59
But was his father's.
I often stare at my own now to know the difference...
4
The apple tree at his garden's stop I often climbed
Repledging myself to 'Anywhere but here'.
Beneath open sky a wind-swayed tree top cradles
Views of further hills reaching at land's edge,
Lake and barricading woods muted.
Soothed then, envisioning my nascent journey out
And away, I discover the most difficult to be that both
Land and father, a part of me still, require of me
a psalm.
5
Psalm
What can I bring to harvest but these
bruised hands, these cracked stones?
Praise to the fruit tree long untended
beneath mendicant stars.
A boy above, his Radio flyer** lightening full,
Reaches to me now en exilio, the farther flung.
Father, my most difficult, most diffident friend,
My most loving curse,
A strange and fragrant Grace arrives -
Look.
From unexpected fire
comes frail, brief blossoms.
*William Shakespeare
**Radio Flyer is a toy company, famous for it's red wagons.
The company opened in 1917, the year of my father's birth.
Warren Falcon
60
Hog Which, Something, Is A Beginning - For Tom Gone Awandering,
Somewhat Shakespherical
.
1
Haven't heard of, from you.
Are you OK or mighty fine?
Perhaps in love merely which
is why one escapes mortal time,
friends, especially such as I?
No matter the matter.
Wondering how, where.
And how fare you, farther flung.
Or me, the further sending these
unasked, unsought. Few to send
to who might care or at least be
bothered yet not required just
a basket to catch my froth enough
at this stage.
Sired upon barren rock and thus
know stones for suckle, I am more like
that one, not to inflate, in Jesus's
parable, the man who sows seed
upon stone. Some roots may come
of the flinging but come high wind or
burning heat, well, one gathers what
can, what's left, sees if something
be woven from strands perhaps
become the better farmer
61
more patient the more resigned
by far for attempts and fated
reaping life's sown rock.
But I ain't complaining.
Gonna, rather, go hog wild,
burst open, try make sense
of messes/mezzes,
pinky raised effetely to offend.
2
One can arrive at such a place
where one is no longer 'scaped
all this - those who consent -
who becomes arrives but willing
participant in inexorable awake
which as yet does not totality ken,
always the upended flames are
rushing, vortices assumed progress
an assumption only a wish but
sweetness, but tenderness for
some few beloved
things may steer,
may guide some,
stir us, even me,
oink oink,
forward, ahead.
62
One cannot be
sweet toward all
except in mind
alone.
Alone,
the hog loves
lowly,
loves slowly,
but it loves
thing by
thing which,
something,
is a beginning.
I am for something.
Warren Falcon
63
How It Was I Came To Be What I Am
[from early poems,1970's, youthful attempts at voice]
For 'Spider' Bottas
They would argue over tides
Who bade me come into the world.
One said, Six o'clock.
The other, No, twelve.
I was born at the thirteenth hour
All the while mother arguing,
This is not the time but a little spell,
While father argued it was death,
You are dying and your child, too,
Is dying. You have been poisoned.
It was full moon and high tide,
The hour of birth.
All arguments yielded to the tide's.
The moon lit up the stadium
Of their gripes while I was
Born amidst their sweeps at
Each other, the nurse neglecting
To wipe me free of blood and salt
Being drawn into their strife.
He was born at day, one said.
No, at night, and he is a she,
Said the other. The nurse,
Speaking truthfully, said,
Cleaning me at last, No,
You are both right. The child
Is he and she, a hermaphrodite
Born of two days labor, its head
Out of the womb the duration.
Ruination! father cried.
Fame, mother sighed.
Both right, the nurse agreed,
Of these fables are made.
Then father tossed me into the sea.
The nurse saved me who later
Became my lover, hiding my
Sexes with a four leaf clover.
Warren Falcon
64
I, Twitter, Stutteringly Remember In Cyber Chases
.
for Ocean V.
a reprise from
Stillborn Falls.
Are not all summer nights
born late in America,
remaining forever late,
fading only when morning glories
breech fairgrounds entire continents long,
fog draped at dawn?
Veiled pine perimeters
encircle hermetic tents.
The suspended rides now frighten.
Momentarily the carnies are
relieved of their ugliness.
Cotton candy gins spin
confections dry to cold crystal.
Sugared metals stop,
their precocious tongues tuned
too early for erasure.
I, Twitter, stutteringly remember
in cyber chases, late night,
sitting at computer scrabbling
after old grievances such are
lovers, cheaters, jilts, and those
rare 'got-lucky' graces, unexpected
65
shudders and shoulders where
I broke open, finally laid, laid waste for
future flatterers and failures of heart.
Such is the psycho-logic of love
or some adulterated semblance
of the word reduced to shards,
to these absurd digital traces sniffing
my fingers for remnant tints.
Can't sleep. Dive in. Recapture what
could never last, trite and true, or that
which I early squandered toward futurity.
Recall, sickened, the candy at every fair,
hand fulls gorged, glutted, belly sore and
wanting more, drowned in the push-shove
of fevered bodies intent on the fast rides
where one loses stomach for the ordinary.
Dizzy, I grab my ankles, confess instead,
I've puked my guts from excess, spun sugar
and cartwheels, mechanical distractions
ghosting up Stillborn nights holding their
breath well past bedtime.
At the window counting railroad cars is
a boy thief stealing circus hours.
Warren Falcon
66
In Excelsis Deo - A Surrealist Carol For Madrigal Choir To Be Sung While
Bathing
.
Hair of soap and head of tears
rinse mine eyes of Christmas stars
O bells, the bells sear me
Wash my hair of splendid fears
water me hot and redly rare
O trumps, the trumpets blear me
Scars heal me up to here
scald me pinkly if you dare
O gay, the gay sleds slay me
Is that flesh floating on the surface me
who swims or sinks fraternally?
I know a strange me
with soap for eyes
and suds for see
Eternally yours,
He.
Warren Falcon
67
In Excelsis Deo - A Surrealist Carol For Madrigal Choir To Be Sung While
Bathing 2
.
Later revision
Hair of soap
and head of tears
Rinse mine eyes
of Christmas stars
O Bells, the Bells sear me.
Rinse mine eyes
of Christmas stars
Water me hot
and redly rare
O Fey, the Fey stars blear me.
Water me hot
and redly rare
Scald me pinkly
if you dare
O Gay, the Gay sleds slay me.
Is that flesh
floating on the
surface me who
swims or sinks
fraternally?
I know a strange me
with soap for eyes
and suds to see
Eternally yours,
He.
Warren Falcon
68
Journey Haiku
For the blind woman
on the train every
journey is inner
Warren Falcon
69
Leave Taking, After Matsuo Basho, Circa 1978
'There is a blessed fidelity in things.
Graceless things grow lovely with good uses.' - John Tarrant
Expecting more rain.
Not yet light though 6 a.m.-
night still over the barn.
From the porch, high wind.
The moon, a corner of it,
rides comfortably in clouds.
Clouds moving over mountains,
their night work -
some rain in the buckets.
Bestowing order,
things feel their boundaries,
robes of autumn rain.
Back to bed,
just-dawning.
Noises in these old walls -
mice search for food or string,
bird stretching its wings.
Soon these things I must leave -
wood smoke, frayed rope coil,
finger prints on faded walls' wrong color.
Last flights -
on the sill
scattered wings,
musky corners'
gently waving webs.
A fertile shelter.
Many nights I have wrestled here.
Some mornings have
broken into me like thunder.
I have shed skin after skin.
These I leave behind.
Some warmth they may
70
provide for the mice,
rags for the moths to eat.
Warren Falcon
71
Loose Train Haikai Or Similar - New York To Philly - A Train Journal
.
Nearing Princeton Station
What a wonderful world
this New Jersey is!
Blue train engines!
Withering cornfields
Just turning Autumn leaves
WHOOSH!
The opposing train
Old graves by a lake
Old woman passing in aisle
Fleeting sign outside explains -
'Fair.'
For the blind woman
on the train every
journey is inner
Blind woman touches my shoulder,
moves just one seat ahead, feels her
winter coat collar, metal ring pinned
to its shoulder. Smiles when she touches it,
dark rings of her eyes light up momentarily.
What universes are in the heads all around me!
While reading about zen master Ummon,
famous for his one word responses to pupils
questions about the nature of zen, I happen
to look up, see young, clean-cut preppie reading
Wall Street Journal, large bold print says,
YESBUTTERS DON'T JUST KILL IDEAS.
Congruence of Ummon and General Motors
ad strikes me. I see in mind's eye, so real,
Ummon enters train car, walks up to preppie,
taps shoulder, thunders in ear,
YES BUT! !
I chuckle smugly, enlightened, pleased, translating =
72
'kill ideas to get to the 'thing itself 'or 'no thing'.
Suddenly Ummon turns, smacks me a good one with
his KATZ stick, BAM! And he is correct, of course,
to slam me. Arrogance along the way, no matter how
apparently fitting my zenny smartness, deserves a hard
KATZ!
I humbly return to my book
just write what I see from
the train window:
State Prison
off the square
in the darkest cells
those forms bursting forth
Prison Window
a jelly jar, water poured
man hands arranging
a little green vine
View upon entering Philly
Receding steeples
the hairline of God
City garden by tracks
Even a scarecrow
Plastic milk jug for a head!
Just passing over a bridge -
railing beside a stream
thin student knows his Nietzsche -
'He who can grasp me, let him grasp me.
However, I am not your crutch.'
- from 'Thus Spake Zarathustra', Friedrich Nietzsche
Warren Falcon
73
LOVERS JUMP TO DEATH FROM BURNING BUILDING
From late night collapse of limes
rum lovers leap to death in each others arms.
Upon the sill they lean resigned,
dead calm revolving in a yellow light.
Neither fright nor anger nor drunken joy
calls them to this moment but habit.
Each morning settles something and so
they resolve half asleep in the window to
disturb the air. With thickened tongues
they obediently fall bidden by fire
hidden in all alarms.
Warren Falcon
74
Man Watching Hawk
for Jim Hodge, of the Cherokee born
Of all the High Land 'wunderkind'
you are the Ironic Chironic, turning pain
to grace, stones to bread, putting
Mercurial Crazy Head to work:
'Extract gold from the shit, '
Alchemy's Goal, Pearl Beyond Price.
Write up the High Land, capture frozen
scenes of wonder-child wild minds'
youthful grieving, mad for leaving
inner and outer gods on road sides,
thumbs worn from warning winds cars can make.
So here's a theme for you:
Man Watching Hawk.
What is stalked beneath emboldened blue,
silver half-moon tangled in winter limbs,
no distance at all is the illusion?
Domestic cat a living shadow
stark on fresh snow,
your own tracks you don't know at all.
Don't look back.
Look in.
Grandmother's blood
can read what your eyes
can only see. She's inside.
She slides over vision's surface
brings to your hand a worn thumb,
something from the other side
'hiding in plain sight':
Moon. Hawk. Tree. Sky.
Winter's tangled limbs are clear.
One must stand still, hold breath
to trap a truing vision.
Burst of wings.
Life startles up again.
Undone.
75
Never the same.
Warren Falcon
76
Marcabre Dance For A Dead Mouse, After Robert Burns and Theodore Roethke
.
O little mouse, why dost thou cry
While merry stars laugh in the sky? - Sarojini Naidu
Wee brisket.
Gray fodder.
Thou art today tossed down
fat with grain.
Teeth sing to poison,
paws dance behind walls
taunting cat's tongue and
my impatient demand
'gainst thy nightly
gnaw gnaw
gnawing
Now brace for leaves.
Tossed from back porch to woods
Thy ballet's done, bitter fey.
Sun's up, swan song,
The cat play thee for a meal!
Wheel the poison again!
Swell fellow's passed on!
Reel, poison, reel!
Warren Falcon
77
Mimimus Creaks Oar
I pose you you're question:
shall you uncover honey / where maggots are?
- Charles Olson
1
I, Minimus, tongue in cheek, creak oar, row out too
into the Homeric sea, not old Greek singer, long of breath,
but as Winslow, local seer, his paints, straw hat consigned
to mistook heroics, pure accident, not to check radio
maritime, ask captain if row boat worthy of even an
American sea, projected too, to go a-row row rowing,
claw oar into wave tips' whitecaps safe perimeters,
smell of earth nasal-yet to keep oriented to dirt.
Have, instead, reaped I redundant whirlwind
play America the Fool again, naively trusting my,
and country's, destiny are one, always good in spite
of Melville's long eloquent discantus supra librum -
above the book - more truing than any, to spoil it,
the projected pluribus unum thing, for Mayflower
folks tripping lightly between the hawthorns,
their imported gardens' irritant tomahawks
'can only turn out swell, ' thought they like waves
gathering in sea full of themselves individually
Destined, they then and do think, to break just for,
O America, thee.
And now come poets each century heavier than
before, heavier than the other few, this new one, too,
only bards, a real few, to bar, board up the big gaps,
O great light gaping torn, oft thee sung,
slung over shoulder, hauled, the burden,
o the load
it is now become.
Warren Falcon
78
Mimimus Explains The Pluribus Unum Thing
And now come poets each century heavier than
before, heavier than the other few, this new one, too,
only bards, a real few, to bar, board up the big gaps,
O great light gaping torn, oft thee sung,
slung over shoulder, hauled, the burden,
o the load
it is now become.
Warren Falcon
79
Mimimus Lectures Himself - Pluribus Not Unus, Culpas Minor - Upon American
Bards
.
I pose you you're question:
shall you uncover honey / where maggots are?
- Charles Olson
1
O great light inward,
which cannot (what can)
be said of America obsessed with manners
no matter the carnage stretched to dry
in a land where, Vonnegut clear here,
'love may fail but politeness shall prevail.'
Blind, yes. As yet can't, perhaps refused,
reconcile the projected landscape, the leaking vessel,
landlocked, of State, Vespucius Vestibulis, Topeka grasping
still, scratching at collective far flung coastal doors
for the 'in between' is no place to be.
All things gray there, politely,
plus visionaries, artists, hog-tied,
flee though are, ironically, there born.
And have not been gripped, me,
'cept by proxy, as were these
'just' poets - justified - trying to true
variant visions into One, no matter
imprecision of facts, imposed muddles they be,
O Topeka ongoingly o're and o're, ore of meanings
which are all spelt 'MESSIAH' - always this begins
and ends such messes entire.
Still we call it a country.
2
Reading two still continentally
shifting greats, Olson, Pound,
of late full of their breath,
'Of thee I sing' America's over-long exhalation
in Whitman's overlong beard and o're shadowing.
Rest of us in their vacuum
remain, wander, poems
strapped to faces like respirators,
every out breath labored,
ponderous, poised, has their
80
stench but is a good one what
keeps on giving though ship be
foundered from the start
(see ahead to Odysseus
cyclopean trickstering) .
These,
others,
seek for -
all mining after,
pining amongst
the pinons,
insisting on -
O absolution,
that 'it is only that
the light, o great light,
of the land projected,
was in our eyes and we
could only see our way
to slash, kill toward said projected.'
Blindly now,
still, we seek looking back, vision,
darker inhabitants
diseased off,
killed, or shipped
on good Christian ships,
borders now paced of 'good citizens'
hungry for even more darker blood,
'enough' not a democratic word,
but 'more' (to Boesky asked
how much is enough? He, 'A little more') .
O blinding light.
Odysseus to Polyphemus
the real issue here, entitled marauder,
the unspoken, disavowing thief.
Every shipwrecked citizen located in
Odysseus's answer he to Polyphemus,
one-eyed, mono-visioned shepherd
mourning his lost ones
(lost to Kingly entitled hand) ,
safe-keeper,
none too bright
but constant,
faith-keeping,
Odysseus-blinded,
81
who calls out,
Who are you who unsights me,
scatters my sheep?
Odysseus, wily -
cleverness, not faith,
is rewarded, the valued
in this projected land -
calls back,
not afflicted of conscience,
'I am No Man! '
This the dilemma of all these
our projected land's inhabitants,
Citizens No Man, willfully ignorant
(the greatest sin) or wide-eyed
pretending. Odysseus
in sheep skin more the predator,
'No One' lobbing rocks,
pretending to shepherd.
Let's name it true, Empire.
3
Monet might have seen,
giving darkness in Giverny,
defiant to the last optics fired out inevitably,
nerve light made the more dipped, smeared
on clutched pallet bent to his gaping will.
Some yawping yank,
all sneeze and no hanky,
yelling, 'shut yer mouth ope'd, no manners, '
Claude struggling to 'ope' eyes,
wider see.
Was failing him the light.
Closing-in world reduced to all horizon.
Tints, brushes, memory
frames these final pieces
canvased, inwardly conformed,
recalled light more light than all raw day.
82
4
On the other hand I have only tried
to survive, swollen small, myself,
find ways to be in it at all, appalled
hero shrunk to size, compensation
for grandness, a player 'pon an acre
of God on yon Calvin's hill, ol' John
yawning counts his sins a school
boy his sums, insistent dirt
(because it's there) persistent
cleaning his nails;
but tilled I Bible,
King James,
preferred work that,
sounds therein
instilled instead
a-poem-ing then
off at last from
roller holy hill,
a love affair oracular, called,
the Word out-wrung, wrenched,
I always the winch and never the Bride.
Again poetic little feet tracing circles, little breaths that may make a one
entire
once expired.
5
I, Minimus, tongue in cheek, creak oar, row out too
into the Homeric sea, not old Greek singer, long of breath,
but as Winslow, local seer, his paints, straw hat consigned
to mistook heroics, pure accident, not to check radio
maritime, ask captain if row boat worthy of even an
American sea, projected too, can go a-row row rowing,
claw oar into wave tips' whitecaps safe perimeters,
smell of earth nasal-yet to keep oriented to dirt.
Have, instead, reaped I redundant whirlwind
play America the Fool again, naively trusting my,
and country's, destiny are one, always good in spite
of Melville's long eloquent 'discantus supra librum' -
above the book - more truing than any, to spoil it,
83
the projected 'pluribus unum' thing, for Mayflower
folks tripping lightly between the hawthorns,
their imported gardens and God, irritant tomahawks
'can only turn out swell, ' thought they like waves
gathering in sea full of themselves individually,
Destined, they then and do think, to break just for,
O America, thee.
And now come poets each century heavier than
before, heavier than the other few, this new one, too,
only bards, a real few, to bar, board up the big gaps,
O great light gaping torn off, oft thee sung,
slung over shoulder, hauled, the burden,
o the load
it is now become.
Warren Falcon
84
Minimalist Death Cyphers, A Meditation In Nine Rounds
..
for Mooky,
not even two hearts
could contain your
great spirit
1
Blue cornflowers
lean forward
Reach again
One hand
What cannot be seen
in spaces between
matters
Sky has no memory
2
Lean forward
One hand
in spaces between
Sky has no memory
3
Reach again
What cannot be seen
85
matters
4
One hand
in spaces between
Sky has no memory
5
What cannot be seen
matters
Blue Cornflowers
reach again
6
In spaces between
Sky has no memory
Lean forward
One hand
7
Sky has no memory
lean forward
One hand
in spaces between
86
8
Matters
Blue cornflowers
Reach again
What cannot be seen
9
Blue cornflowers
Reach again
What cannot be seen
matters
Warren Falcon
87
Minimus Stuck - Fragment Abramic
.
To be continually caught as the ram,
redundant among thorns,
horns at branches push,
blood ignored,
flow, more,
to come,
itself,
or other,
kindred bodies
entangled, who
waits a commanding authority,
sacrifice with thorns,
horns, first born.
I am caught up in the matter.
.
Warren Falcon
88
Nicht-Gesicht/Not Face by Rainer Maria Rilke
From the German, translated by Priscilla Washburn Shaw:
Face, my face: whose are you; for what things are you face? How can you be face for
such insides, whose something is beginning continually rolled together with dissolving?
Has the forest a face? Does not the mountain basalt stand facelessly there? Does the
sea not raise itself without face, up from the ocean-floor; is not the sky reflected
within, without forehead, without mouth, without chin?
Do not animals come to us sometimes as if they were pleading: take my face. Their
face is too heavy for them and because of it they hold their tiny little soul too far into
life. And we, animals of the soul, confused by everything in us, not yet ready for
nothing; we grazing souls: do we not implore the Allotter by night to grant us the
not-face which belongs with our darkness-
Warren Falcon
89
No Difference In Memory - After Reading Li-Young Lee
.
I am flying.
I am falling.
No difference in memory,
the smell of rose oil in your hair
my body can find even in the dark;
its scent upon me when I awaken
is the cup alone I drink.
I shall go on drinking when
you leave before dawn
departing to another life
I cannot live but only steal
from mysterious bankers
who lend but never give.
I am not free of this cup.
I have stolen it to remember
milk and a scent of rose
entangled in black hair.
Put me on any cross then,
one of two thieves beside any
good Christ and I'll be with Him
in any paradise above or below.
When He says, I thirst,
if I can reach with nailed hands,
I will gently touch it to his bruised lips
and say, Take. Drink. Drink it all.
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I return this cup to you.
Warren Falcon
91
Nocturne
[from early poems,1970's, youthful attempts at voice]
Fogs of summer
Through the green
Stalks Will shake
Take sweetness
From the corn and
With their tassels
Make an infant's
Rattle soft like milk.
Fields under moonlight
Will silent be like silk
And my comfort brown.
Sounds sleepers make
Shall not be heard by me
Or anyone.
Warren Falcon
92
'Now, Heart' - Some Of What I Remember When I Listen
A river is a process through time, and the river stages are its momentary parts.
—Willard Van Orman Quine
From early poems,1970s, youthful indiscretions/attempts to vocally/poetically arrive
at/derive a worthwhile writer's voice. Some explication might serve or enhance these
under serving, undeserving though 'striving-after' poems hidden in old journals
understandably unpublished but now so with apologies which are these expiatory
explanations. Recently rediscovering these early arrivals, derivative yet aspiring I
recognized and reembraced an enduring self maturing, arriving into late middle age:
Obsessed newly by jazz, mad about the many miraculous lady singers, entranced all
too easily as youth are wont to be by sorrows and sexual infatuations which feel,
emphasis on 'feel', like love, here are two of many 'songs' as tributes and life markers
to jazz singers who provided soundtrack and felt expression to my angst and easily
inflated/deflated sense of self, of beloved others, and of that new territory,
independent life away from parental home and childhood community discovering,
blundering into the fray of separate hearts and minds, irresponsible genitals and
insouciant jouissance ('juiciness', in French) , discovering then and again and again
that like Walt Whitman I 'contain worlds' and many disparate selves poorly formed,
most of them collective projections and expectations of who or what I wanted to be,
what others wanted and expected me to be, resulting in much confusion, tumult and
multitudes of momentary throw-away selves. Thus singers like Bessie Smith and Dinah
Washington became anchors, warm contexts and containers, for my daily
fragmentation and re-formation.
I lived on 3rd street in downtown Chattanooga, a refugee from zealous, politically
conservative white evangelicals and the vestigial yet still viral Southern Confederacy.
Just a block or two from where Bessie Smith was born, I used to watch from my
upstairs porch the steep hilly street's comings and goings with a glimpse of the
Tennessee River between tenements across the street, its persistent rich aroma heavy
in the air. I imagined Bessie Smith as a little girl playing up and down the street like
the kids I saw then - once, two of them gleefully chasing a frighteningly large and
confused looking rat.
William—he insisted on 'Willie'—an old man down the street who knew Bessie as a little
girl, used to come up to my porch after one day hearing Bessie from my phonograph
singing blues onto the always busy but attentive street. One of the first and permanent
things I learned from my porch is that a city street has keen, observant eyes, acute
ears, omnivorously seeing/hearing everything, indifferently, perhaps, but nothing
escapes it, a roving, all-knowing urban Eye of God.
Extremely green and eager as green always is though stutteringly, and without
apology, I enjoyed Willie's many stories and back pocket bottles of Old Mr. Boston
Apricot Brandy, both of which—story and spirits/spirited story —dissolved or appeared
to, age, racial, cultural, and sociological differences, along with those
catalysts/cata-lusts, the forever alchemical Bessie and other jazz singers, Billie! Dinah!
Ella! Sassy! Lil Ester Phillips! Nina Simone! to name only a few of the sensuous solutio
chanteuses resolving sexual confoundaries by Miss-ambiguating sins' plethera with
loose lilt and will- o-the-lisp whisper tongues.
One night Willie, much 'in the pocket'—an expression for being well onto tipsy which
I've never heard from anyone but him—wanted to dance to a Bessie tune playing,
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'Back Water Blues', him recalling nights as a young man in rural Tennessee where he'd
worked hard days in oppressive vegetable fields then hit the after hours juke joints for
'colored, twas segregation days, ' he explained, where he would go to drink, dance
then dive/delve, as it were, into the sensual mysteries of moist skin, hot breath,
mutually open mouths with their commodious moans and mumbles, venial hands,
always vital parts, private hearts mutually pounding ancient known rhythms, odors and
tastes of gin and those slender, forbidden, now greedily stolen bites in those all too
short nights with their damned intrusive dawns.
'Dawnus interuptus, ' I quipped, us both slapping knees, passing the narrative bottle
fore and aft hefting moments re-grasped between us, offerings to the equally narrative
river, the all-knowing hungry street.
Jumping to his feet, Willie described 'powder dancin'' (pronounced marvelously,
'powdah') which I had never heard of. Talcum powder would be copiously scattered
onto the dance floor where couples in stocking or bare feet would ecstatically dance,
gliding and sliding sweetly scented, muskily bent toward later glides and slides in the
slippery joy of momentary allure and amour on dimmed porches or surrounding woods
often enough and gratis upon delicate slabs of moonlight gratuitously dewy providing
cushion for Passion's out and in, honoring and dignifying deities of skin wanting more
making more skin, headlong Nature's frictional algo-rhythms indelibly scored in
every/each his/her yawing yen.
Willie shouted, 'YOU GOT ANY TALC POWDER? ! '
...The jazz us trembled...
'NO! ' I bellowed, curious.
'YOU GOT ANY FLOUR? ! '
Even more curious, 'YEAH! ! '
'GO GIT IT! QUICK! ! '
He grinned an Old Mr. Boston juke-joint night-memories quaff-again grin.
Martha White, a brand of flour sold down South, has never been put to better use.
Willie threw handfuls of 'Martha' over the tenement-planked living room floor as I half
protested at the mess it (and me and Willie) was and would become. Completely
gripped by his present-in-the-past brandy trance, a much younger man now, he
suddenly grabbed me, brandied and tranced, too, my long hair flying, and danced me
all over the floor the night through with swigs of Old But Now Spry 'n' Sprightly Mr.
Boston with pauses to change record albums on the phonograph, 'catching up our
breaths, ' he panted.
Next morning (more likely early afternoon) , Willie long gone, I awakened sprawled on
the penitent porch—a cool concrete floor my sinner's bench—sweaty and thick as pan
gravy, mosquito bitten, marinaded in Tennessee night mists. I staggered into the living
room onto the ghostly floor powdery white, 'stroked' with two attached, or close to,
sets of foot prints, heel slides and smears, a kind of 'Jackson Pollock meets Tibetan
sand painting 'yazzed' yantra'**' with cigarette ashes flicked into the flickering
94
impermanent mix. I've not powder danced since when we drank discovering oral
history's joys, opened eager ears and fraternal arms forgetting fears of race and
religion, age and expressed/ espressed Desire's multilingual disseminations.
I know that wheat is anciently sacred but now even more so for flour, the sight and
feel of it, its unbaked smell, turns me again toward a Chattanooga 3rd street, its
compass river swelling like bread nearby bearing witness still for one cannot say too
much about rivers—their irreverence of edges scored, spilling themselves, proclaiming
natural gods deeper than memory yet dependent upon it for traced they must be in
every human activity, no matter the breech, for something there is to teach even deity
though it may be wrong to do so, or hearsay to say it or sing, but the song is there for
those whose ears are broken onto bottoms from which cry urgencies of Being and
between, dutiful banks barely containing the straining Word.
**From Tibetan Buddhism. Visual meditation devices,
Yantras function as revelatory conduits of cosmic truths.
1. To Bessie Smith,3rd Street Chattanooga (circa 1971)
Already the river begins its sweat.
April to September I'll be on the porch
Come sunsets listening to cars in the
Dark and you, remembering the flour
On the floor and me and Willie in
Stocking feet dancing till dawn,
An old man down the street come
To drink on my porch sometime.
You were singing one night
While we drank and he just
Had to dance and pulled me,
Reluctant, skinny ass kid
All over the floor that night.
But my feet did dance.
And the flour stayed down
The whole summer long.
Now, Karen E. and Dinah Washington are still too painful 'o' dirges to give but only the
skinniest details about. Karen, skinny, too, like this account where the devil is, indeed,
in the details; Karen, young, vibrant, brilliant, German literature Thomas Mann scholar,
once a patient in a mental hospital I worked the night shift at, committed suicide. We
both loved the divine divas of jazz, Dinah Washington in particular.
I used to read William Blake out loud, the voices of the school children on the
playground out our window and in the nearby park so loud that I had to shout out his
'Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience' to be heard. Karen would almost always
cry when she heard me quote/shout now by heart, mistakes and all, holding her sad
face in my hands, 'And we are put on earth a little space, That we may learn to bear
the beams of love And these black bodies and this sunburnt face Is but a cloud, and
like a shady grove, For when our souls have learn'd the heat to bear, The cloud will
vanish, we shall hear His voice, Saying, 'Come out from the grove, my love and care
95
And round my golden tent like lambs rejoice'...'
By then gin had replaced Old Mr. Boston, and thin Karen had replaced some earnest
yet fleeting others for in youth there are ne'er too many, from Willie nights to other
momentary eternities of lovers. We lived Blake's songs, and Dinah's. Karen died them.
The gods and Thomas Mann love her. I still do. Die of them, that is. And love her, do.
2
Dinah Washington, All Alone On The Street Of Regret (circa 1977)
It was sunrise, October.
Karen had just done herself in.
I suffered it through with
William Blake and gin.
Over the fence across the street
Children ran to class and Blake,
Too, chased those kids fast through
Leaves in the chill school yard.
I thought - the ground's already hard over
You, Karen. To Charon, then, and keep
Yourself warm. My arms no longer can.
You left no note in the dawn.
Out of lime and song at 7 a.m.
I dress, spin down the steps like then
In this morning now thin with Spring.
There's green over you now.
I cannot help but see a thin mildew
Form around your fingers in the dark.
Blake's still down playing in the park.
I'll play some Dinah when I get back in.
Now, Heart, don't you
Start that singing again.
Warren Falcon
96
October Night of Divas On East Tenth, New York City
.
for Brandon
A night of divas,
I guess,
stretched out
in the dark on sofa,
look out window
city lights
some fly one
frame to another
dark space square
between what is seen
and then seen again
scratching belly, head, think -
Whatever became of Majestic,
his suicidal crocuses?
In answer, strange, diva sings,
When did I marry Lonely?
can't recall but fell kid-hard
backyard empty clothesline
silk slip, one pin down, dips
shyly in brick shadows,
pornographic breezes.
I sing to my knees now...
Beyond Manhattan Bridge
sudden heat lightening
a good night with cool rain
old vinyl Nyro**
needle scratches
done with song
<<<<<>>>>
**Laura Nyro, October 18,1947 – April 8,1997
Singer/songwriter in the 1960's until her untimely
97
death by cancer. Copy and paste this link to
listen to the song I was listening to which inspired
the above poem:
http: //www.youtube.com/watch? v=Q2PeqqNi9bA
Warren Falcon
98
Of Ancient Mastodon, Sleepy Bee & Young Men Who Leap Too Soon From
Bridges - Nightingale Confesses Into Straighter Teeth
.
Pueri aeterna, sex casus suos
The boys, six falling ones
Tyler Clementi
Raymond Chase
Asher Brown
Billy Lucas
Seth Walsh
Justin Aaberg
Sub olivae pacem, Priest orientation omnes adoremus
Under the olive trees, peace
May you all adore this orientation
******
'Ignacio goes up the tiers
with all his death on his shoulders.
He sought for the dawn
but the dawn was no more.
He seeks for his confident profile
and the dream bewilders him
He sought for his beautiful body
and encountered his opened blood
Do not ask me to see it! '
- Federico Garcia Lorca*
1
My Dear Valdosta,
Even the pigeons on my stoop are silent now.
One mourning dove coos tenderly for these who have taken their own lives publicly on
our behalf, for untold scores gone before them with broken hearts enraged, no more to
engage the unpersuaded world which, one of them, one of the public ones, in spite of
murmuring wharves, in spite of amorous dark alleys bitter in the pitch in the hateful
American Twentieth Century, Hart Crane, wrote before his leap from the ship beside
the phallic curve where Cuba meets the lisping sea, took his tongue away which sang
to us of chill dawns breaking upon bridges whose spans still freely splinter light
returning hungover from night wharves' grottoes and denim grasps, World Wars'
industrial embraces crushing every man and now another one abandons his fingers and
fiddling, o scattering light, takes flight from ledges to edge close to an embrace no
longer forbidden -
99
'And so it was I entered the broken world to trace the visionary company of love...'
I am at the 'Way of Peace Bistro', not your favorite place I remember - unkind to
queens and Miss Things - but the server Alberto whose cousins are the famous Wolf
Boys in Jalisco, Mexico, hirsute himself, gives me free double espressos for very large
tips, of course, and it is not as populated here on Saturdays with the braying brunch
crowds, their hammers for pinkies poised...besides, Alberto just yesterday came out to
me in my confessional booth here at the perpetually wobbly table in the far corner at
the cracked window rocking with Hart's un-confessed bones wrapped in soothing silt
which he now dreams to be his silken pall. Life is indeed strange above the veiled
bottom. I do receive confessions here p.r.n. ('as needed', in medical jargon) and at
my other, now, confessional spots, the usual cafes I weekly haunt for journaling,
studying, writing, chasing down dreams, waves, receding horizons...why, I wonder, is
each window where I sit cracked?
I am the itinerant 'priest' who sits at meager feasts. Suffering 'congregants' (servers,
busboys, cooks, regulars forlorn over their starfish and soup) , when their fellows
are removed to basement or kitchen or groceries, come to me, ask about a dream,
confess to some anguish or other, ask what should be done or undone...I consult
espresso foam, open the nearest book at hand willy nilly to see what advice or wisdom
might be gained from that Eternal Logos sustaining us all here straining after some
meaningful thing to keep us going when Hart and those too recent others obey some
impulse to place at last the final period, reifiying the punctuate though unrepentant
ending of this too too long run-on sentence of hate. One hopes this period holds fast,
that Logos/meaning is somehow, plates of starfish with fork and knife beside, true or
truing at least.
One serves where needed. And when. So come unto me you 'sad young men...All the
news is bad again so Kiss your dreams goodbye.'**
Here at my confessional I can only plead mercy upon the gay boys of late who have
jumped from bridges, hung themselves, cut, sliced, diced their sad and self-abused
compulsive hands, exploded hearts, leaping dears eyes ablaze in thrall of antlers,
trembling flanks strong to fly decrying the violent hunt which always ends with a death,
bequeathing these chopped bits to me and those others like me who remain at table,
plates before, to stare at what is there to be later scattered, sown, those pieces in and
for Love-without-name or, if named, is still a stain upon confused local deities, their
wide-eyed supplicants, but there is no stain upon the promiscuous sea. The compliant
sky is not confused neither is all that is between confused allowing birth and blessing,
passing of all kinds in all manner of motive and motion. But in the human world,
distressing, there will be more boys, more men growing up as from the very beginning
where earliest enmity mythically grew strong before shoes, before hearts were capable
of breaking before turgid theological floods spilled blood of brother by brother turning
witness stones toward silence, echoing lamenting Federico,
'Do not ask me to see it! '
I don't want to see it!
I will not see it!
100
But I, but perhaps we, who remain to plant these petaled parts of these unwitting
scapegoats whose eyes are milk now forever, we must bar sentimentality, must move
toward genuine knowing which comes from the long hard stare beyond Milky Ways at
the way things still inexorably are. Was it Fritz Perls who said, ''Nothing gets better (or
changes for the better) until it is what it is'? But gay folk know what the 'is' is of the
matter...it is the others, too many of them, who don't or won't know, who willingly
refuse to see 'what is' in order to reach beyond the collective 'Nazi/ NOT SEE-solutions'
of hetero-normative culture/religion.
Perhaps even in the deepest fault of the ocean that very visionary company - in league
with stuporous pigeons, a mourning dove, me here who remains not yet remains,
tearful over my espresso looking for signs, finding only an endlessly fracturing rainbow,
remembering, too, the murmuring secrets of wharves and co-mingled breath - that
very visionary company traces all the sunken ones, the jumping ones, those with other
means for departure by their own hands empty now of demands for love.
Here I sit with my arthritic living hands still demanding, remembering full of past and
present griefs the Violin with a cut throat in a youthful suicide note I once wrote years
ago hidden, hiding out, refusing to shout my rage and despair to almighty 'Nothing
But':
Do not hear nothing but the cabin walls,
do not hear nothing but the late summer roses
petal by petal leaping from the still too white trellises,
leaping pinkly, redly, memory to breezes,
overwhelmed by trellises snagged with cut sleeves.***
But not me. Not yet.
I don't want to see it!
I will not see it.
I wrote it all on the mute page, the Violin refusing to sing, in love with Garcia Lorca,
the goring horn of the Bull, the destined cornada, each and all appalling, commanding
me to write during long nights working at the facility where the mentally ill wandered
with me, keys ironically in my hand, the yellowing hallways with even more ironic EXIT
signs brightly RED above the locked doors, silent companions somnolent but for the
jangling joke of keys.
Do not ask me to see it!
I don't want to see it!
I will not see it.
Still, I have now these better days in the Village, broke or near to it, with
eggs and beans, cheap but edible things. An epicurean after all, I do luxuriously head
to the Polish butcher shop nearby to gather meat but not any of the young butchers
want to be gathered (too Catholic) for Poland is 'passing strange' with bad teeth,
fingers stained with nicotine. Or is it rust from cast Iron Curtains, or the Blood of the
101
Acetylene Virgin? ****
...but back to the meat...
I get my meat, cook my greens and things, have good-enough feasts for garlic and the
right spice make grander the demanded abstemiousness of current coin. I purloin my
pleasure during eats in my dirty yet happy apron with recordings of poetry, lectures or
a good aria or two to salt my food with tears, a blubbering fool beside his one low watt
lamp, darkness too too comfortable like a pooch or cat at feet. What is that bleating in
the darker corner? I shall wait for daylight to see what it can be. And if I can I shall
free it from it's trap and in doing so perhaps free me from all this, all this witnessing as
life demands I must, of young ones setting themselves free because they are forced to
do so by collective psychopathology now rendered even more effective and efficient via
technology, via internet, emphasis upon the 'net', where the ills set free from Pandora's
Modem have only begun to be revealed.
But I shall use that 'net' and my still goodly paper and goodly pen to dim whatever ill
tides there are and to come, as they surely will in spite of low wattage. I'll jangle keys
on the night watches reading my mystic books, making my prayers with roamers of
wards and wharves glancing up, considering bridges, edges, silty bottoms. The tides
are here even now. But right now I wish to sing a lullaby in protest to those hurting
departed, even to those coming ills, that I may sing innocence dumbly back to those
who may come ashore again more gently having forgotten enforcing depths insisting
them toward resistant yet resolved embraces...
...So breech then, waves. Feet first. Heads in the brine. I shall keep time on your
wrinkled toes sticking up from the sand, play peek-a-boo. Then while you sleep I shall
harvest gently, place them firmly in that old woman's shoe...'there was an old woman
who lived in a shoe, had so many children she didn't know what to do'.
She may yet have learned what to by now.
I haven't. But for my one strange harvest here below...
2
Somniculosus Apis, Sleepy Bee
Ascendit infra me, He rises beneath me
Deus absconditus placet, The hidden God is pleased
He is busy even as I write this preparing a repast for many paying guests who will
watch him cook sacred chilies of his Mother's garden born, who will hear him sing their
praises...Krishna was over yesterday, nervous and excited about it all. Working out
regularly at the gym he is now very toned, muscular in a good way, not too pumped in
exaggerated lumps, and he is even more radiantly beautiful/handsome than when we
first met beside the cardamom and the ghee in the intoxicating basement of the Indian
102
spice and food shop not easily hidden, such aromas are not to be tucked down like the
shop is beside and below the avenue.
Which flower should I adorn my table with? I ask, approaching shyly beside the spice
bins. I buzz inside, a bee for the nectar.
If you serve, said he, If you serve with cardamom and ghee then flowers three are
best, the jasmine, the oleander, the anthurium. But if choosing only one, he looks at
me, something insistent, responding, in his eyes, I would choose for you the
anthurium.
And so we began our time together, the cooking lessons, the first demur approaches,
the blushing papayas, then the fires, the chilies harvested, curtains drawn. One day
perhaps I to shall fall but in this way:
I shall fling back the curtains
Open the window
Throw cut sleeves for years
gathered, hidden, to the street.
Shouting out names of lovers,
I shall then leap openly into life
land softly upon the Autumn
ginkgo leaves and, golden,
kiss every parked car
on the street leaving
lips like leaves and all
the cut sleeves in love
with all the world and if
not all the world then
all the cars and a fiddle
dee dee for the fall of me
Yesterday I coached him on slowing down as he speaks (his accent is thickly, richly
Tamil) , how to enunciate each syllable. He had several stories to choose from which
he may relate to the guests, all of which he related to me, a sweet one of him as a
little boy waking up at dawn, asking his dear mama for an omelet to eat:
'Sleepy Bee, ' she called to him. 'Go, my Sleepy Bee, to the garden and be sure to
smell the jasmine there, touch softly the spices in trembling rows, fetch then some
chilies of many colors and I will prepare for you a dish as you wish. When the teacher
makes you sleepy by noon reach then your fingers to your face, smell the spices there,
remember the touch of smooth skinned chilies whispering of lingering liaisons to come,
and you will brighten my Sleepy Bee.'
A chili omelet she would make, a side of yogurt to soothe the burn, and milk from the
cow drawn before dawn's first udder swelled against the press of distant hills where
even the Temple soundly sleeps so very full and pleased with itself. Mother, each
morning as he stumbles, rubbing his eyes, into the garden, tells him,
You may shout if you wish to wake
103
the Temple for the cow cannot speak -
Wake up! Awake! Make haste!
Lord Indra comes! Prepare the wicks,
the incense sticks for His Holy Fire!
Hasten! Hurry! Quicken!
There beside Lord Indra's captured fire in the little grate her Bee awakens watching her
slow movements, the slicing of chilies, the removal of seeds, the washing again of
plump hands, the cracking of eggs, beating them with the whisk, spreading ghee upon
the hot flat stone, the enchantment of liquid whites and yokes becoming firm,
becoming food. She turns them in round rhythms as she rhythmically prays.
After eggs and chilies are eaten comes the rose oil poured upon his raven hair
smoothly brushed back to reveal his shining face, his smile. She prepares him for
school with kisses, his uniform freshly cleaned, ironed, smelling, too, of rose-flavored
soap. Then off to school with a lunch, a string of chilies of all colors sewn together,
sewn when he was still in a waking dream.
'The chilies may burn, ' he tells me, speaking slowly, enunciating each syllable,
practicing through smiles, returning to my gaze. 'But not like the touch of my mother's
hand. She is far away but I can feel her burning hands on me now.' He smiles. I
stammer. How can one enunciate such wonder?
Visionary company, Krishna, his mother, and me.
I have been encouraging Krishna (which is a funny thing to say, Krishna being a bold,
blue God) to find a language coach to help him with his accent, to tone it down
while keeping the wonderful music/lilt of it and he's going to do that...he complains of
tilting his head as he talks 'as all Indians do' but I insist he merely speak and let his
head and hands speak, too, in their own way. If he does more public events he will
need to be understood clearly when he speaks while preparing his magnificent dishes
from his country, his rich feasts of stories of the chilies from his mother's garden
entwined by morning glories, the morning cock already at quarrel with the world just
beyond the tin reaching in to take some spices too enticing to refuse...
I always feel as if he is, or will soon be, bored with me and my humble 'ministrations'
but he sweeps into my little 'box-doir' - you recall how tiny my expensive studio on the
5th floor is! - like a Raj, a young prince beaming, brimming full of stories to tell me,
usually some food, spicy hot, he has prepared for me, offered with a grin. Then he
strips instantly down, lays upon the down pallet in easy, unabashed nakedness - it
catches my breath, I do want to see! - checks his Blackberry for the latest cricket
scores while I hurriedly 'hide' my Ganesha, the prominent statue of the god I have in
front of my useless fireplace; this hiding I half understand...but still, naked, he has a
fresh and beautifully made tattoo of Ganesha on his shoulder, he wears a Ganesha
necklace, a Ganesha bracelet, and a Ganesha waist scapular, the image of which is just
below his navel. So why, I ask only myself and Ganesha, never Krishna, why must I
104
hide my large wooden Ganesha statue? But I do hide Him in deference to Krishna's
wishes and meanwhile have intercourse with the god-in-miniature, scraping a necklace
trunk with an ear, a tongue, receive a scapular kiss of the image upon my forehead as
I trace those wonderful hairlines of the male body on my way to other deities.
Ah! give me all the beans in the world in all my poverty! Am I not, too, a Raj of floors
and scented pillows, this beaming god beneath me thrusting utterly to reveal his
secrets, his desires, his pleasures to me who am not a god?
Life, dear Valdosta, over all, is good, yes? I wish it no ill. But, agreeing with the cock, I
will quarrel, even fight, with life when young men still leap too soon from bridges
because I have learned (and relearn it hard lesson by hard lesson at a time)
visionary company insists its tracings in many forms, man to man being but one holy
expression, those sons, burning mother's hands upon them demanding, insisting to life
that each her sons is a rajah, a Sleepy Bee.
So please the intemperate humanity, in the face of patient deities the burning ones are
leaping still and I am ill with grief, with prayer, their dead bodies gone, their now
emptier hands.
And he leaves me.
I return to my poems.
The room is filled with Krishna, aromas of rose oil in his hair, pungent spices in his
sweat and upon his hands and skin, and sex.
I retrieve Lord Ganesha out from his little sanctuary of hiding (it seems I am always
retrieving deities) and we both laugh richly. I remember to sprinkle some cologne
upon Him, to pour out some milk into His votive bowl, to rub His belly, to light another
candle (the other extinguished, panting, while we were busy bees exchanging knees
and sighs, diffusing male spices into bracing air, fingers upon oily chilies thickening in
always morning hunger) .
I light more incense and thank the Lord Ganesha in all his forms, appearing both large
and small, His adornment of Secrets, though one cannot easily hide an Elephant,
man-love and more in such a small infinite universe whose toes I seek to tickle then
gather for a shoe as tides shrink and swell, grow and diminish depending upon the
worshipers, those who will do so in spite of those who would kill delicate or manly
infidels whose worship, forever babies breath, is all the more meaningful.
Be damned the trellises. The petals shall reach, shall extend outward.
The violin's throat cut.
'Do not ask me to see it! '
Then, Ganesha restored to His rightful place; good-natured about being hidden, it is
back to the kitchen, the slicing of the onion, the crushing of the garlic, the pouring of
the wine, the selecting of the greens and washing them of the clinging sand and grit
105
they kindly bring, then to the pot to cook them in, the meat to go with, and begins the
fire, O Indra, more aromas extend into, entwine with what Krishna has left to me and
the god and I am grateful, full of heart, for each time he is here is a miracle. A grace.
Mother India with hot hands gifts me one of Her Raj's who graces me with his presence
evoking praise bestowed from oft bitter lips and tongue made the more bilious by
aging, aching joints, laxer muscles, and yet the encroaching decrepitude is bent and
stretched, the better for the wear from Krishna's 'half nelsons' and yogic
overreaches. More the better for me.
Yet I remain bitter, too, from the senseless loss of young men who could not endure,
no fault of their own, for sure, who leap from bridges, forced to by killing edges broken
open within and by hateful, fearful others forgetting, if ever had, those restorative
burning constancies of a Mother's hands upon them
I have placed your picture, dear Valdosta, upon my altar beside Lorca's portrait, and
Hart Crane's young face, the image of a sweet Christ holding a lamb en perpetua, and
the yellowed newspaper clipping from Spain of the Matador's death, along with photos
of the young men in the past two weeks who have joined Hart becoming ghostly
visionary company. They now remain forever chaste not having lived long enough to be
wasted, emptied of love from loving deeply out into love for more love, endlessly
bleeding out like our Lorca, a corrida of laurel encircling his head no longer
remembering but remembering only one sound, guns exploding outward, extending,
bullets, petals, one by one beyond the wall where he stood stunned, 'how young and
handsome are assassins' faces', he flew backward in the wall graced with his brave
shadow then his blood until he fell. I believe he fell hard for life demands it as does
death which will continue its duende.
Love, as Hart and all hearts love, is still a vision not yet fully, solidly formed in spite of
stones and walls forgetting noble shadows, but there are foolish Krishnas, restoring
Krishna-moments, patient hidden gods though human hearts and bodies remove
themselves from the potter's wheel too early, too broken, too tired, too alone to try to
shape love from Love from the tiny shard, the remnant bone of the ancient mastodon,
the last one, dreaming within each heart of that Love which all Nature yearns for.
I pray for my inherited brood of brothers, and remember to be gay for all the gray
afternoons in this sad but forgiving confessional, while not forgetting mine and the
cock's quarrel with life, in the booth by the cracked window near the corner of 7th and
Second.
I am yours, bleating, sometimes crowing, but almost always bestowing praise. I am
loved, Valdosta, and I love you.
N. Nightingale
******************
*Opening quote is from Lorca's elegy, 'Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías'
** The Ballad of the Sad Young Men
106
Music written by: Tommy WolfLyrics written by: Fran Landesman
(best version sung that I know of is by an aged Mabel Mercer in concert, hard to find it
now) 
Sing a song of sad young men
Glasses full of rye
All the news is bad again so
Kiss your dreams goodbye
All the sad young men
Sitting in the bars
Knowing neon nights
Missing all the stars
All the sad young men
Drifting through the town
Drinking up the night
Trying not to drown
All the sad young men
Singing in the cold
Trying to forget
That they're growing old
All the sad young men
Choking on their youth
Trying to be brave
Running from the truth
Autumn turns the leaves to gold
Slowly dies the heart
Sad young men are growing old
That's the cruelest part
All the sad young men
Seek a certain smile
Someone they can hold
For a little while
Tired little bird,
She does the best she can
Trying to be gay for her
sad young man
While the grimy moon
Blossoms up above
All the sad young men
Play at making love
Misbegotten moon
Shine for sad young men
107
Let your gentle light
Guide them home again
All the sad young men
***In China homosexuality was referred to as 'the cut sleeve'.
Read an excellent account of this in
Passions of the Cut Sleeve, The Male Homosexual Tradition in China.
http: //www.ucpress.edu/book.php? isbn=9780520078697
 ****Surrealistic Sutures For The Acetylene Virgin by Warren Falcon
'I think that poetry should stay awake all night drinking in dark cellars.' - Thomas
Merton
Look to the body for metaphor
Look to blood, use this word
in relation to dreams or flowers
while silver runs in veins which
are usually streets or vines.
Breasts, male and female,
are stars, have to do with
a handful or feet to span them.
Abdomen, then, is a great
Milky Way gathering,
holding, expelling comets,
caroling colons' humming.
Spleens are bones to
pick teeth with, teeth
which are, of course,
sea horses or gravestones
bearing images of the Flagrant
Heart to tame this spot of
gypsum and flint, to charm
where Violin's cut throat
sings itself awake, one
black breast out of its fold
slapping metal seas against
dropping metal shores in
Sidelight's shadow across
this hand writing now,
slap of waves mute in
108
this stillness of knees.
So lend a darkness to gardens,
ancient pattern of a breast,
cloth lightly lifting, black on black.
From Her chest reveal a slenderer throat
that nods when she swallows
and names her peace.
The delicate will not pass away just yet.
Great Seamstress of Space
sew, please,
with fingers of dew.
Warren Falcon
109
Of Li Po Waking The Morning After, circa 1981
'Let me be forever drunk and never come to reason!
Sober men of olden days and sages are forgotten,
And only the great drinkers are famous for all time.' - Li Po
'We share life's joys when sober.
Drunk, each goes a separate way.' - Li Po
Waking up among these frail green things,
by the stream I hear the hornets singing.
I do not fear them but I fear the sting
of light as day creeps into my shade.
I have read of sad and joyful things
under last night's moon and now I weep
for the Immortals fading from light
to light with their pockets of pine bark
and resin to chew, their wine of sorrow
to drink in their, and my, sorrowful season.
I am homesick for the earth as
these old poets knew it,
a thin veil of mountains,
winter birds pecking at suet,
some girls dancing, and a wife,
some young sons to pull the reeds up
fishing and weeping for my exposed
wino bones while I sit, drunk, pronouncing
upon the deeds of state. Pitiable.
Let there be leaving taking and coming to,
drinking and drinking again,
playing fool to the wisdom of the ages,
remarking at those unkind sages
who always smack their lips for war.
Give me again the hilltop cave,
the pilgrim come to call at the door.
Fires I will then light for this age.
Who comes to me in this season for reason
besides the bee and the mite, the winding gourd?
I have sat here in one spot so long
I begin to lose my sight. Look!
The stream is growing a beard in the daylight!
No word can bring back the Immortals but for wino joys.
There is a blight upon our time. I have been faithful to it
tipping my cup. The present is sufficient but I admit
I am ready to go. My time has come.
Leave the world to the scoundrels!
110
[POET'S NOTE: I wrote the above poem in response to Li Po's famous poem, 'Alone
And Drinking Under the Moon'. Here it is, by Li Po:
Amongst the flowers I
am alone with my pot of wine
drinking by myself; then lifting
my cup I asked the moon
to drink with me, its reflection
and mine in the wine cup, just
the three of us; then I sigh
for the moon cannot drink,
and my shadow goes emptily along
with me never saying a word;
with no other friends here, I can
but use these two for company;
in the time of happiness, I
too must be happy with all
around me; I sit and sing
and it is as if the moon
accompanies me; then if I
dance, it is my shadow that
dances along with me; while
still not drunk, I am glad
to make the moon and my shadow
into friends, but then when
I have drunk too much, we
all part; yet these are
friends I can always count on
these who have no emotion
whatsoever; I hope that one day
we three will meet again,
deep in the Milky Way.
Warren Falcon
111
On Our Broken Boat The Harsh Light Will Not Break
.
'Others the same - others who look back on me because I look’d forward to them,
What is it then between us? ...What is the count of the scores or hundreds of years
between us? ' - Walt Whitman
On our broken boat the harsh light will not break.
We see our day clearly as we can.
Tell the night, now it's here to stay, that
once I glanced the sleeping youth, legs against the wall,
felt a pall descend upon us here,
this boat lancing the bay waters darkly.
Some to books then, the priest to his sad, effeminate stare.
I can no longer envy those of the black cloth
so bend and tie the shoe.
We shod our feet against what long loss of motion,
eyes downcast or boldly returning the stare?
Beneath each eye there's some familiar look we refuse.
We map our way to sleep in the palms of shy or frightened hands.
.
Warren Falcon
112
Our Mutual Confession Invisibly Drawn - Pentecostal Church Ruins
Descending the hill in unplanned rehearsal
for what has become a destined association,
our mutual confession is invisibly drawn.
A ruined one-room church appears,
a cemetery plot weed-hidden behind this
once sentinel house long remote to men and
as present as God, my own presence is bound
to his who stands confounded now as three,
one above grave, one within it, and me
in between, one eye upon him, the other
upon sagging dirt where bones and a
ragged shirt share an unexpected
moment of veils confused in sunlight's
disarray of leaves, wood, of stone and
shadows frozen there, not breathing
for us all in un-storied astonishment.
Here horseflies feast.
Upon weathered stones are
only creases where once were
names, dates, even God's Word,
chiseled by a now unknown hand,
an impression only, one among many,
reduced to no plot but that of Providence
left to surmise swatting at Eucharistic
flies proving only flesh and only blood,
a flood of questions eventually exhaled,
and exhaling still, waiting beside
a white rock with wings,
ignoring fires,
leaning into changes.
Warren Falcon
113
Photo From Lost Days At Stillborn Falls
You see them all morning while driving,
broken cars, omens, those towns you drive
through graveyards now. Your one good
tooth a headache, windshield wipers break in
the storm. Road side glass cuts your feet.
You curse your shoes in the back seat,
fumble with blades in the rain.
One good town out of six and that's the one
you leave behind where your shorts hang content
at home on the line, back yard neighbors
speculating over lingerie with black lace.
The sun can barely contain itself.
The mail man wishes he was me.
The story is Jalise - I was nearby - she dripped in
soaked from rain announcing, 'I need to get
out of these wet clothes and into a dry martini.'
For me? only a towel to dry her and nothing more.
I swear, Jalise, pornographic peekaboo, hide
and seek, I'm drunk again thinking of you,
how I cut my baby teeth on Stillborn glass,
feet bleeding on always wet roads. One mile
out of two I'm thinking of you, how you wouldn't
let me love you, just hold your hips in jeans,
'just friends'. Your black lace is still a pain.
Five men out of six would call you 'b*tch' or worse.
At the laundromat now a woman in nylons stoops.
I drive by with a wave, another town, same storm,
a study in shields and blades wondering about
nylon mysteries, hand washed, bent woman's
name turning over and over again in spin and
dry cycles of drink.
Warren Falcon
114
Poetry As Constellation
.
for Karthik
You hear
'consolation'
as 'constellation'
when I explain
a poem is a
consolation
work that I
am compelled
to as a lover
is to traces
pointing
beyond sighs
and windows
where
Arcturus
stands
poised
wheeling in
night's patient
slow round,
his arrow
strung
forever
ready to
115
swiftly fly
as am I
along the
spatial curve
of your
arching
thighs.
This, too,
taut,
restrained,
breath held
in perpetua's
swollen
lips of
release -
If you
could only
see what
I see in
your eyes
when the
arrow
finally
flies
Warren Falcon
116
Regarding The Apple's History, A Theological Trifle - After Emily Dickinson
'It's good for the breath! '
With this she tempted Adam to death.
Properties of the apple are renowned since
their eating made it a greatly frowned upon thing.
Still, it is not without its lovers.
But for an apple's charm we would live boring lives,
never a fling or two to alarm the pear,
and we all know an apple will never harm
a teacher's pet, its fables to lure
the imagination, that Golden One's
strength to subvert us to the core.
Let's eat the jelly of sin and tell it!
William Tell's a good shot!
Let's split the Apple in the pot
and stew it for Eve's sly.
Even so our breath is sweet.
Tis the tart one of death
from which we'll all die.
Tis also true, though paradise is lost,
something is to be gained with apple sauce.
Warren Falcon
117
Remembered Laughter of the Frail Daughter There Beside the Fields Sweet
Grasses - Impressionist Autumnal Portraits In Miniature
.
[Notes jotted while gazing at Impressionists paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of
Art, New York City, Autumn]
*
Among ginkgoes
cloven leaves fall
whose burnished
berries yellow late
melon sweetness
of Autumn days
Among boxwoods
evergreen for no good phlox
blooded leaves settle upon
golden flax of weeds
seed the chilling ground
receiving soundless
lips of grain enduring ice
and ice again
Amidst the sortilege
coo of pigeons in the
distant spired village.
low of legion cattle turning
toward evening millet
mow of fringing grain chafing
toward winter silos
Blue waters at a distance
blue the tails of otters
blue the eyelids of sleeping beasts
nested beneath the earth
Distant crows sound the
morning field beyond pasture
Dew murmurs names upon
passing grasses
Echoing wood gold where,
below, the stream's gash furthers along
slowly murdering dimensions
of width and depth
118
Remembered gait of young ponies
toward the spring's sweet water
Remembered laughter of the frail daughter there
beside the fields sweet grasses
The daughter, as the water, passes into silence
Remembered laughter beside the old well of the woods
*
Spittle on the chin
stubble upon the cheek
she met her love beside the creek
Turned in her sleep
the calling heat gathered
the steep bank in the wood
then fell
as water will
forgetting the blood's
first stain on the long discarded sheet
A woman now she fled toward love
and fed there
but famished still
died there
stuck in 'King James',
entangled in lyrical tongues,
Revelation's virgin.
119
Warren Falcon
120
Repose Of Needles
For Sanju,
who says she is
rotting within,
and dampening
And once again,
for my father
If you need to stand or lie
in the shade for awhile then
do so as farmers do, as does
my father who farms his despair
in hot sun then lays beneath
pines in cooler shade to rest,
to dream that activity between
dirt and sky means some lasting
thing in its doing even though
his ruined life cannot make
it right between clouds and
his obsession with weeds.
Between the garden and the
untilled woods he rests,
repose of needles and bark,
mid-day sun insisting its
question slowly. Night dawning
he at last in darkness stands
returned from day, a practical
vision of green shoots to come
from blistered hands.
Up hill to the colder house,
he wills himself to life-enough,
speaks some words to wife,
arcs widely around silent wary
children and lives to be old.
His loss of memory leaves it
for others to forgive, to live on
in the rich rot of that ongoing
question which nurtures his
memory haltingly, gracefully, on.
Astonished, I have arrived at
love for him who hurt me most,
have learned to obey the odor
of decaying things compelling
hands to dirt. Within the dream
of staying, the tendril and the heart,
my aging body takes on my
father's form.I, too, like him,
am a farmer when I note how
121
it moves in its winding reach,
rooting, rising, giving horizon.
Warren Falcon
122
Sing To Knees Now
.
backyard empty
clothesline silk slip,
one pin down,
dips shyly in brick shadows,
pornographic breezes.
I sing to my knees now.
when did I marry Lonely?
can't recall but fell kid-hard
When did I marry Lonely?
can't recall but fell kid-hard
beyond Manhattan Bridge
sudden heat lightening
a good night with cool rain
old vinyl Nyro
needle scratches
done with song
**Laura Nyro (October 18,1947 April 8,1997) was an American composer, lyricist,
singer and pianist.
.
Warren Falcon
123
Surrealistic Sutures For The Acetylene Virgin
'I think that poetry should stay
awake all night drinking in dark cellars.' - Thomas Merton
Look to the body for metaphor -
Look to blood, use this word
in relation to dreams or flowers
while silver runs in veins which
are usually streets or vines.
Breasts, male and female,
are stars, have to do with
a handful or feet to span them.
Abdomen, then, is a great
Milky Way gathering,
holding, expelling comets,
caroling colons' humming.
Spleens are bones
to pick teeth with, teeth
which are, of course,
sea horses or gravestones
bearing images of the Flagrant
Heart to tame this spot
of gypsum and flint, to charm
where Violin's cut throat sings
itself awake, one black breast
out of its fold slapping metal seas
against dropping metal shores in
Sidelight's shadow across this
hand writing now, slap of waves
mute in this stillness of knees.
So lend a darkness to gardens,
ancient pattern of a breast,
cloth lightly lifting, black on black.
From Her chest reveal a slenderer throat
that nods when she swallows
and names her peace.
The delicate will not pass away just yet.
Great Seamstress of Space
sew, please,
with fingers of dew.
124
Warren Falcon
125
That We Can Be Broken - A Bird Spirit Speaks Of Beginnings
.
Citizen! What have they done with all the air? - Victor Serge
1
I began
a bird flown down a chimney,
an empty house hidden in a
mountain valley, a night time
fire upon surrounding hills,
a moonshine still's signal flame,
a bootlegger's warning,
a silent spirit conjuring
drip by drip
metal and grain.
No blue fire therein.
Suddenly spun,
some beckoning thing
wings between night's crumbled
brick and rusted tin,
white rock and
a wide sky,
braced by
a
closed
encircling valley.
2
Here
is a Presence
beyond illicit fires
bearing witness to evidence found,
remains of flight, contrived escapes
stopped by panes,
walls striped in ramming panic,
of ritual and a broken neck,
petrified wings displaced.
Now remote is the open space
they once could range.
3
126
Descending the hill in unplanned rehearsal
for what has become a destined association,
our mutual confession is invisibly drawn.
A ruined one-room church appears,
a cemetery plot weed-hidden behind this
once sentinel house long remote to men and
as present as God, my own presence is bound
to his who stands confounded now as three,
one above grave, one within it, and me
in between, one eye upon him, the other
upon sagging dirt where bones and a
ragged shirt share an unexpected
moment of veils confused in sunlight's
disarray of leaves, wood, of stone and
shadows frozen there, not breathing
for us all in un-storied astonishment.
Here horseflies feast.
Upon weathered stones are
only creases where once were
names, dates, even God's Word,
chiseled by a now unknown hand,
an impression only, one among many,
reduced to no plot but that of Providence
left to surmise swatting at Eucharistic
flies proving only flesh and only blood,
a flood of questions eventually exhaled,
and exhaling still, waiting beside
a white rock with wings,
ignoring fires,
leaning into changes.
4
There are uses for wings -
thoughts,
ramming walls,
and panes,
earnest though
contrived escapes.
At first midnight in stillness,
wait.
127
A white rock,
wings,
a still,
ignorant fires,
illicit spirits
lean into changes.
5
In arms
we carried It
as one does
a child
yet it was
He who carried us,
both bird and man,
who cried
openly
on the way
for our presence
solid in his arms,
he who did not care
who saw his tears shed,
head down,
beneath spring blossoms,
living presences
within bestowing
strength,
order
from
stone and remnant wings.
6
How all this will turn.
I do not burn to know.
I only yearn here,
air and more,
of air now air
all the more
in sustained
moments
128
without height.
Something returns
or turns inward
that may be climbed
to rest upon
or fall again to
some chimney
life to be found,
itself a winged burden.
.
Warren Falcon
129
The Abject Ones, Six Falling—Nightingale Confesses Into Straighter Teeth
The term Abjection literally means 'the state of being cast off.' In usage it has
connotations of degradation, baseness and abasement of spirit.
'...descend and of the curveship lend a myth to God.' - from 'To Brooklyn Bridge'
The boys, six falling: Tyler Clementi, Raymond Chase, Asher Brown, Billy Lucas, Seth
Walsh, Justin Aaberg
'What does a man come to with his virility gone? ' - Walt Whitman
'He sought for his beautiful body
and encountered his opened blood
Do not ask me to see it! ' - Federico Garcia Lorca*
My Dearest Valdosta,
Even the pigeons on my stoop are silent now.
One mourning dove coos tenderly for these who have taken their own lives publicly on
our behalf, for untold scores gone before them with broken hearts enraged, no more to
engage the unpersuaded world which, one of them, one of the public ones, in spite of
murmuring wharves, in spite of amorous dark alleys bitter in the pitch in the hateful
American Twentieth Century, Hart Crane, wrote before his leap from the ship beside
the phallic curve where Cuba meets the lisping sea, took his tongue away which sang
to us of chill dawns breaking upon bridges whose spans still freely splinter light
returning hungover from night wharves' grottoes and denim grasps, World Wars'
industrial embraces crushing every man, and now another one abandons his fingers
and fiddling, o scattering light, takes flight from ledges to edge close to an embrace no
longer forbidden—
And so it was I entered the broken world to trace the visionary company of love... -
Hart Crane
I am at the 'Way of Peace Bistro, ' not your favorite place I remember—unkind to
queens and 'Miss Things'—but the server whose cousins are the famous Wolf Boys in
Jalisco, Mexico, hirsute himself, gives me free double espressos for very large tips, of
course, and it is not as populated here on Saturdays with the braying brunch crowds,
their hammers for pinkies poised...besides, the server just yesterday came out to me
in my confessional booth here at the perpetually wobbly table in the far corner at the
cracked window rocking with Hart's un-confessed bones wrapped in soothing silt which
he now dreams to be his silken pall. Life is indeed strange above the veiled bottom. I
do receive confessions here p.r.n. ('as needed, ' in medical jargon) and at my other,
now, confessional spots, the usual cafes I weekly haunt for chasing down dreams,
waves, receding horizons...why, I wonder, is each window where I sit cracked?
I am the itinerant priest who sits at meager feasts. Suffering 'congregants' (servers,
busboys, cooks, regulars forlorn over their starfish and soup) , when their fellows are
removed to basement or kitchen or groceries, come to me, ask about a dream, confess
to some anguish or other, ask what should be done or undone. I consult espresso
foam, open the nearest book willy nilly to see what advice or wisdom might be gained
from that Eternal Logos sustaining us all here straining after some meaningful thing to
130
keep us going when Hart and those too recent others obey some impulse to place at
last the final period, reifiying the punctuate though unrepentant ending of this too too
long run-on sentence of hate. One hopes this period holds fast, that Logos/meaning is
somehow, plates of starfish with fork and knife beside, true or truing, at least.
One serves where needed. And when. So come unto me you 'sad young men...All the
news is bad again so kiss your dreams goodbye.'
Here at my confessional I can only plead mercy upon the gay boys of late who have
jumped from bridges, hung themselves, cut, sliced, diced their sad and abused
compulsive hands, exploded hearts, leaping dears, eyes ablaze in thrall of antlers,
trembling flanks strong to fly decrying the violent hunt which always ends with a death,
bequeathing these chopped bits to me and those others like me who remain at table,
plates before, to stare at what is there to be later scattered, sown, those pieces in and
for Love-without-name or, if named, is still a stain upon confused local deities, their
wide-eyed supplicants, but there is no stain upon the promiscuous sea. The compliant
sky is not confused, neither is all that is between confused, allowing birth and blessing,
passing of all kinds in all manner of motive and motion. But in the human world,
distressing, there will be more boys, more men growing up as from the very beginning
where earliest enmity mythically grew strong before shoes, before hearts were capable
of breaking before turgid theological floods spilled blood of brother by brother turning
witness stones toward silence, echoing lamenting Federico:
Do not ask me to see it! I don't want to see it. I will not see it!
But I, but perhaps we, who remain to plant these petaled parts of these unwitting
scapegoats whose eyes are milk now forever, we must bar sentimentality, must move
toward genuine knowing which comes from the long hard stare beyond Milky Ways at
the way things still inexorably are. Was it Fritz Perls who said, ''Nothing gets better (or
changes for the better) until it is what it is'? But gay folk know what the 'is' is of the
matter...it is the others, too many of them, who don't (or won't) know, who willingly
refuse to see 'what is' in order to reach beyond the collective 'Nazi/NOT SEE-solutions'
of heteronormative culture/religion.
Perhaps even in the deepest fault of the ocean that very visionary company in league
with stuporous pigeons, a mourning dove, me here who remains, not-yet-remains,
tearful over my espresso looking for signs, finding only an endlessly fracturing rainbow,
remembering, too, the murmuring secrets of wharves and co-mingled breath—that
very visionary company traces all the sunken ones, the jumping ones, those with other
means for departure by their own hands empty now of demands for love.
Here I sit with my arthritic living hands still demanding, remembering full of past and
present griefs the Violin with a cut throat in a youthful suicide note I once wrote years
ago, hidden, hiding out, refusing to shout my rage and despair to almighty 'Nothing
But':
Do not hear nothing but the cabin walls,
do not hear nothing but the late summer roses
petal by petal leaping from the still too white trellises,
leaping pinkly, redly, memory to breezes,
overwhelmed by trellises snagged with cut sleeves.
131
But not me. Not yet. I don't want to see it! I will not see it.
I wrote it all on the mute page—the Violin refusing to sing, in love with García Lorca,
the goring horn of the Bull, the destined cornada, each and all appalling, commanding
me to write during long nights working at the facility where the mentally ill wandered
with me, the keys ironically in my hand, in the yellowing hallways with even more
ironic EXIT signs brightly RED above the locked doors, silent companions somnolent
but for the jangling joke of keys.
Still, I have now these better days in the Village, broke or near to it, with eggs and
beans, cheap but edible things. An epicurean after all, I do luxuriously head to the
Polish butcher shop nearby to gather meat but not any of the young butchers want to
be gathered, too Catholic, for Poland is 'passing strange' with bad teeth, fingers stained
with nicotine. Or is it rust from cast-off Iron Curtains, or the Blood of the Acetylene
Virgin?
...but back to the meat...I get my meat, cook my greens, have good-enough feasts for
garlic and the right spice make grander the demanded abstemiousness of current
coinage. I steal my pleasure during eats in my dirty yet happy apron with a good aria
on the radio to salt my food with tears, a blubbering fool beside his one low watt lamp,
darkness too too comfortable like a pooch or cat at feet. What is that bleating in the
darker corner? I shall wait for daylight to see what it can be. And if I can, I shall free it
from its trap and in doing so perhaps free me from all this, all this witnessing as life
demands I must, of young ones setting themselves 'free' because they are forced to do
so by collective psychopathology now rendered even more effective and efficient via
technology, via internet, emphasis upon the 'net, ' where the ills set free from
Pandora's Modem have only begun to be revealed.
But I shall use that 'net' and my still goodly paper and goodly pen to dim whatever ill
tides there are and to come, as they surely will in spite of low wattage. I'll jangle keys
on the night watches, reading my mystic books, making my prayers with roamers of
wards and wharves glancing up considering bridges, edges, silty bottoms. The tides are
here even now. But right now I wish to sing a lullaby in protest to those hurting
departed, even to those coming ills, that I may sing innocence dumbly back to those
who may come ashore again more gently having forgotten enforcing depths insisting
them toward resistant yet resolved embraces...
...So breech then, waves. Feet first. Heads in the brine. I shall keep time on your
wrinkled toes sticking up from the sand, play peek-a-boo. Then while you sleep I shall
harvest gently, place them firmly in that old woman's shoe with 'so many children she
didn't know what to do.'
She may yet have learned what to by now. I haven't.
I remain bitter. Abject, too, from the senseless loss of cast off young men who could
not endure the flame, the rust, no fault of their own, who leap blasted from bridges,
forced by killing human edges, who are broken open within and by hateful, fearful
others forgetting, if ever had, those restorative burning constancies of a Mother's
loving hand upon them.
I have placed their names and images upon my altar beside García Lorca's portrait,
and Hart Crane's young face, an image of a sweet Christ holding a lamb in perpetua,
132
and the yellowed newspaper clipping from Spain of the Matador's death, all who have
joined or will join Hart becoming ghostly visionary company. They now remain forever
chaste not having lived long enough to be wasted, to be emptied loving deeply out into
Love for more, endlessly bleeding out as Lorca, a corrida of laurel encircling his head
no longer remembering but only one sound, guns exploding outward, extending,
bullets, petals, one by one beyond the wall where he stood before the obedient squad
stunned, 'how young and handsome are the assassins' faces.' Obedient to projectiles
and projections he flew backward into the restraining wall, his brave shadow and
blood, then fell, a last poem frozen upon lips but for circling birds, spirits, carrion or
both, arriving after the blood wedding. I believe he fell hard, for life demands it as does
death which will continue its duende.
Reduced to foolish whispers, restoring moments, patient hidden gods, human hearts
and bodies remove themselves from the potter's wheel too early broken, too tired, too
alone to try to shape love from Love from the tiny shard, the remnant bone of the
ancient mastodon, the last one, dreaming within each heart of that Love which all
Nature yearns for.
Inherited brood of brothers wherever you may sway remember to be gay for all the
gray afternoons in this sad but forgiving confessional while not forgetting mine and the
cock's quarrel with life in the booth by the cracked window near the corner of 7th and
Second.
Trembling,
Nightingale
Warren Falcon
133
The Cracked Cup
for Michael Malek 'where'ere he be, his love for 'the Bard' '
Could I but hold within in spite of crack the strength of flavors sending
vapors up for sweet telling orders at once of earth, of loam, of comet;
In my form though cracked could I but mold the world unfurling before
me its viscous flag, whirl it round, a jelling wind in love with sorrow;
Could I but borrow this shape though marred and gather all morrows to me,
their bitter drafts drink down to make merry marrow sink stars to their
knees hissing remiss secrets to us below, entwining gases rehearsing places in black
heaven's burning, star-graced, flashing mystery full,
cracking the Vault above, vanishing soiled to reappear here, apparitions in insubstantial
hands,
this cup, this man, this room, all one and same but claiming separate faces;
Could all this be true I would hasten the Potter to His sharpening art,
take this bell-kissed form and, rift, singing,
depart.
Warren Falcon
134
The Empress of Contrails Writes Upon Darkness - Anxiety of Influence
.
for Anthros Del Mar
I, on the other hand,
have lain down with
countless thousands.
My tent is worn out.
Love cries some blood
where tongues are root-ground,
utterance hard pounded,
soft tissue torn letter by letter,
tender verbs opened to pain,
that which is paid for more
than alabaster embraces
and this strangling of waists.
My tent has drained more
of love's body than a mortuary.
Spikenard scented oils taint
fabric folds and flesh. Rote,
worn pillows are hourly turned
for teeth or coins hoping
to find one true word for
'love without name',
moths repelled instead by flame,
pillows revealing nothing yet.
I turn them still.
135
Have I not spoken of tears
subtle parentheses of blame,
brine outlines punctuated,
thinly silked, easily taken
for wing-laced salt maps,
tongue lick sighs grown
weary with enunciating.
Nightly misspoken, the
flagons are tossed down.
Pleading echoes, the tents
are packed. Forgiving camels,
commas nailed to each hoof,
tread into cool unread darkness,
all that is within it -
a history of wax seals,
once important names,
broken pledges, lies still smooth,
their nuance-scripted smiles crisp,
predictable riffled pages
intent on cool gain upon
desert's shifting floor.
Oasis and cloaca,
love birds parched,
136
now moves caravansary
toward Heart's always
edited horizons.
There are many redactions
before the sun rises.
Perhaps my name goes
before me, my 'press',
the Empress of Contrails -
peacocks, accountants
in tow trailing tallies,
unsettled scores,
arrivals, departures,
ejaculations, rejections,
all faces hands have held
and, yearning beyond possibility,
hesitant dawn's mourning dove.
Men cry, 'Return, ' yet burns
no desert impervious to heat of
all kinds, even human, excepting
the heart, its capacities to startle.
Its dunes in vast stretches beat
for what moonlight cannot
index but only suggest,
breviaries, endless recounting
137
of causes - neglect, curses,
justifications, worst cases all,
just 'tent talk' to scorpions
scribbling in silver shadows,
pitying serpents smug in their ability
to recite every skin they have shed
without regret unlike the men in veils;
their profane winds, lightly perfumed,
do the work of erasure well,
absolving memory.
What lies ahead shuffles in
cursives of sound confusing
the ear, a solitary traveler
compulsive for solar winds,
tumbles it's own way.
No pressure for accuracy
nor to lose plume and ink
hiding what cannot be unwritten
A trail of brocaded skulls in time
returns to sand. One cannot see,
waving its goodbyes, the concealing
tint and quill.
Through ages, upon human vellum,
138
through cycles unending and same,
what heart heat bids, I write perhaps
best upon darkness, eyes closed, tent
opened to all who may, supplicant,
come wandering in.
*
Warren Falcon
139
The Empress of Contrails Writes Upon Darkness - Anxiety of Influence -
Original Version
.
for Anthros Del Mar
I, on the other hand,
have lain down with
countless thousands.
My tent is worn out.
Stains mark love-cries,
some blood where tongues
were ground down to root words,
utterance hard pounded,
soft tissue torn letter by letter,
tender verbs opened to pain,
that which is paid for more
than alabaster embraces
and this strangling of waists
My tent has drained more
of love's body than a mortuary.
Spikenard scented oils taint
fabric folds and flesh. Rote,
worn pillows are daily, sometimes
hourly turned where I half expect
to find teeth or coins,
hoping still for one true word for
love without name else it flies,
moths repelled instead by flame,
140
pillows revealing nothing
but I turn them still.
Oasis and cloaca,
love birds parched,
now moves caravansary
toward heart's always
winking horizons.
There are many before
the sun rises.
Perhaps my name goes
before me, my 'press',
Empress of Contrails,
peacocks in tow,
trailing tallies, scores,
arrivals, departures,
ejaculations, rejections,
all faces hands have held,
and yearning beyond possibility
hesitant dawn's mourning doves.
Recall how hot winds blow loudly
as do I, billowing the tent. Men cry
mad for my return yet burns no desert
impervious to heat of all kinds,
even human, excepting the heart,
its capacities to startle,
141
its dunes in vast stretches
beat, beat for what moonlight
can only suggest to scorpions
in silver shadows, pitying serpents
coiled smug in their ability
to shed skin,
unlike veiled men.
Hide what cannot be unwritten
though this trail of brocaded
skulls in time returns to sand.
One cannot see this hand
waving its goodbyes, the other
concealing tint and quill.
I have written upon human
vellum through ages,
through cycles unending
and same. I cannot cease
doing what Heart heat
bids though I also
write upon darkness,
eyes closed,
tent flap opened
to all thirsters
who may,
supplicant,
142
come wandering in.
Warren Falcon
143
The Icarus Of Housewives, Circa 1981
From ashtrays he rises
when birds in backyards
have been fed their seed,
a dove amid the starlings.
In smoke filled stupor we stare.
Icarus climbs our stairs,
waves his muscled arms
in doorways mimicking
the starlings in stocking feet.
He feels his way blindly
down hallways, a whirlwind
of feathers trailing behind.
And one day like any other day,
bedroom windows open,
he is gone into the sun to
make his movements golden,
to steel his flight a monument
of silver in the sky over Cleveland,
over Chicago, the Dakota plains.
And we are still reeling.
Come back.
Come back, Icarus.
Plead our case to the sun
but do not fly too close.
And it is a day like any other day
we lose him to a solar flare.
All our litigation cannot raise him up again,
our curtains closed in protest to the sun.
Warren Falcon
144
The Lesson Book Of Weather - 2 Thigh-ku
*
Beyond Manhattan Bridge
sudden heat lightning
a good night with cool rain
*
Old vinyl Nyro**
needle scratches
done with song
**Laura Nyro, singer
Warren Falcon
145
The Lesson Book Of Weather - Haiku 1
.
Watching the storm pass over
knew the tornado
clouds by heart.
Easy.
Warren Falcon
146
The Lesson Book Of Weather - Haiku 2
.
Just after hard rain
boys play ball in the wet grass -
far away
thunder.
Warren Falcon
147
The Lesson Book Of Weather - Haiku 3
.
From the porch, high wind.
The moon, a corner of it,
rides comfortably in clouds.
Warren Falcon
148
The Lesson Book Of Weather - Haiku 4
.
Clouds moving over mountains,
their night work -
some rain in the buckets.
Warren Falcon
149
The Lesson Book Of Weather - Haiku 5
.
Bestowing order,
things feel their boundaries,
robes of autumn rain.
Warren Falcon
150
The LoRuhamah Poems - Her Death Discordant
for Judy Asher, killed at age 21
These meditations/laments are set in
Appalachian mountains and towns of
North American Southern states, circa mid1960's
[The name, LoRuhamah, means 'not loved']
Hosea 1: 6 - 'And she conceived again, and bare a daughter.
And God said unto him, Call her name LoRuhamah' for I will
no more have mercy on the house of Israel, but will utterly take
them away.'
Part One
1
O rue rue LaRue among the ginkgoes
cloven leaves all fallen whose burnished berries
yellow late melon sweetness of Autumn days
O rue rue LaRue among the boxwoods
evergreen for no good phlox.
Blooded leaves settle upon golden flax of weeds
seeding the chilling ground receiving soundless
lips of grain enduring ice and ice again
O rue rue LaRue amidst the sortilege
Coo of pigeons in the distant spired village
low of legion cattle turning toward evening millet
mow of fringing grain chafing toward winter silos
O rue rue LaRue
Blue waters at a distance
blue the tails of otters
blue the eyelids of sleeping beasts
nested beneath the earth
Distant crows sound the morning field beyond pasture
Dew murmurs names upon passing grasses
Echoing wood gold where below the stream's gash
furthers along slowly murdering dimensions of
width and depth
Remembered gait of young ponies toward
the spring's sweet water
Remembered laughter of the frail daughter there
beside the fields sweet grasses
The daughter, as the water, passes into silence
151
Laughter remembered beside the old well of the woods
2
Unearthing the old dwelling
found old glass bottles
rusted ancient tins of talcum
utensils grimed which once fed mouths
an old comb sadly saving some long
un-caressed and beloved white hair
a rusty chain for what purpose used
then discarded
Overturning old stones
reveals a child's gum machine trinket ring
O the lovely hand of the long grown daughter
remembered in the plastic ring hole full of dirt
caked jewel of childhood, innocent, cool
in this finder's keeping
Rest o daughter
slumber in the dark palm of the grave
We are slave to suffering
but the little ring you lost
or bitterly tossed away
when its small circle's promise
outgrew you
is here
in the sunlight again
in a stranger's hand
standing where the old gate allowed
entrance to the once beautiful yard
Brief the rediscovered
for all of us are soon
gone under the hill
The ring dear lost dead thing
once human and frail will endure
beyond our bones.
It's promise is safe
I wish I knew your name, dear one
O rue rue LaRue...
3
Spittle on the chin
stubble upon the cheek
152
she met her love beside the creek
Turned in her sleep
the calling heat gathered
the steep bank in the wood
then fell
as water will
forgetting the blood's
first stain on the long discarded sheet
A woman now she fled toward love
and fed there but
famished still
died there...
4
...there that little greensward swath of green grass
and leaf and limb and tree in that little crook nook
of vale dark there and sky gimleted on each blade
and leaf hover myriad in air...
Part Two
'Her death discordant...'
'Birds must sing to keep from asphixiating.' - Mircea Eliade
1
Then died there the rose beside the house of tin.
The track bore no train for years.
Weeds traveled tendriled and
yellow rooted between trestles.
Broken vessels whistled through
shattered teeth of glass.
Only wind and no rusted train passed.
Though the scene bears dislocation,
though the brain remembers station and motion
of steam engine and iron wheel rotation
the places of old gone passing
bear no malice toward stillness.
All around mute remains remind the
153
occasional passer of former days;
an old snuff tin crumbled in a reverent hand
longs for the woman grasping then,
holds sweet dust beneath her tongue
as the land must hold her now where is
no whisper but sleep beyond sleep.
Weeds to the eye are sad between rails
but listening to their green and yellow belles
the rightness of their swaying displaces all sorrow.
Their distance is a distance one cannot know
but only borrow in imagination by extension
of miles, their reach is ours then, translated
green and longing, their leaves throng the
evening air, and in silent clamor fling down seed
to endure summer's blundering prayer.
2
Discovering a small print of Degas' painting,
'The Singer In Green', on the day of her death,
sending it to her best friend, saying:
This reminds me of her,
her features, the beauty of implied song,
a sweetness and sadness, head
tilted back in order to lift her voice,
crooked hand above breasts gesturing
in physical song, green light bathing
the mortal scene.
Was this not her,
green with life,
woman in her prime,
taken into the vast green
of the earth during Spring?
She sings still.
In memory we hear the literal voice,
see her gesture, catch her fading laughter.
2
Go out into some silent space
of green world then. Sit. Listen.
Muted voices and motion are greater there
than any little pocket of earth that our
body or grave can hold.
She dies into the world which
is always alive
and Mystery.
154
So the singer has become the green light
which bathes her, her life signaling toward it,
her death become it which is greater music still.
Be sad, as we will, but know
she is now where the Green is -
in woods,
in the world,
in memory in
hearts and minds
we but borrow it while alive and return
to the Green source with our passing.
3
O rue rue LaRue it's here
this space between the gate and the lovely garden
is here everywhere in the ring in the hand in the dirt
within the hole of the ring in the breath flung in
and out the grave house underneath
the dirt's coolth and dank breath
thank the air and pass the leaves
the hand of the digger becomes the tree
becomes the sign upon which all breathing things
shall hang language surpasses itself breaks
upon its own weight like the empty shell of the beetle
little is the frame we live within the tiny world
the walk upon Vast the space it partakes of making
the wave of the wind ripple in the mind and Mind
turns to the dropp of rain the flaked paint of the
barn side the vague window pane opening upon
the eternal scene of stones breathing becoming bread
the living the dead artifacts
155
All
4
That green has grown.
Leaves have darkened
deepening shadow and hue of green
and so, imagining, walking through,
has her death.
I walk through that, too,
wonder how she fares,
silent lady of dirt
having lost at last
the hurting care of the world,
and we, green and growing,
curl above her dark place,
sure sometime of our grave
as sure as we are now of hers.
5
Scattering wind over bending blades,
I grieve still her leaving,
feel its weight as I see scattered ones
on benches in the park, asleep,
one wretched man huddling where
a band of young musicians tune
their instruments for song.
Disparate images entwine -
gone man,
gone band,
and her death discordant -
the living die
the dead somehow live
singing in the sometime green.
As green returns
so she will in silent memory,
in waves of wind
which is only wind.
We will change but not as she
so changed to every possibility of song.
6
It appears to be ended
but as grass shows there is
a forming wisdom and the same,
156
Desire.
The fire in our house of living rages
and we cannot come out of our own accord.
The event of her going is a beckoning
to see the flame leaping so let's creep
toward the Green and be silent
but if we cannot be then let us be as she,
frail and tender, lifting voices up
in the greening shadow
7.
Dear one.
Dear one.
They've mown the hill.
The grass remains.
Modern scythe and sickle
felled the frailer blades but
stained their metals
green with your name.
The sun shines,
burns that hewn spot where I first
learned to love your passing,
where I watched your leaving
grow wild and lovely,
untamed beside the street,
learned to hear the quiet there
where now a cycle is begun.
A new season of your death
is running rampant again to know
the blades of time and men.
8
Among oaks the fallen do not speak.
The dirt upon which they lay is hard.
Hard earth.
Cold earth.
Need us here
spoken for nothing.
We scratch our mouths
across the scar of land,
wait in the black sun,
pray to break apart.
157
A bird with injured wing
sits among the yellow leaves.
It's wild hurt flays the sky.
Warren Falcon
158
The Nyro Poems - Majestic
for His Winking Majesty
1
'Tornado spawn, ' he said,
gesturing to ourselves and
laughing, 'chapter and verse,
'The storm darkens us around.'
We took cover from God under a
broad-leaf, low-lying rhododendron,
hunched over a hand-rolled cigarette
thumbs could touch but not each
other. Shivering every toke, all reaches
curtailed beneath chaste hail.
In mud gulch, percussive rain on
sheltering leaves, we sang Nyro
(I could hit the high notes then) ,
as frightened of each other as we
were of the gale - the sermons
remained between us unspoken
but for thunder.
'Stoned Soul Picnic', 'Timer',
calmed or tired our terror
now Lear-caged in storm sheer,
odors of tobacco, sweat, of loam,
and lust hair-wet, heady.
Biblical fear - nostrils flared,
smells pungent, sweet -
punished flesh leaned into ground.
Our roots were ungrieved,
and are ungrieved still.
Ah, Laura of the soulful trills...
the years have spilled out since
Tennessee mountain torments
reigned where he was once and
only a Monday king after all,
a god of storms, chased downhill
to shaken limbs, prophetic stumps
triumphantly singing to leaves.
Now where are you?
What of your harlequin shoes,
those suicidal crocuses, ?
159
I remain stuck in King James, entangled
in lyrical tongues, Revelation's old virgin.
I stink still of sweat having long forsaken
Jesus, though I'm told I am not 'by Him forsaken'.
I've sworn off cigarettes, a penance long overdue,
hand-rolling old fears, instead, in onion skins brittle.
Remembering thumbs' refrains I am ill now, this
Nyro song here to calm me praying for another storm...
2
backyard empty clothesline
silk slip,
one pin down,
dips shyly in
brick shadows,
pornographic breezes.
I sing to my knees now.
when did I marry Lonely?
can't recall but fell kid-hard
Beyond Manhattan Bridge
sudden heat lightening
a good night with cool rain
old vinyl - Nyro
needle scratches
done with song
**Laura Nyro (October 18,1947 April 8,1997) was an American composer,
lyricist, singer and pianist.
Warren Falcon
160
The Nyro Poems - Majestic, Reprise
.
Recall floods,
florid days/nights.
Planet 'UnRequitia'
does not spin,
only mulls over,
over again,
again relentless
descanting,
'red rover
red rover,
just send...'
Still, now,
remembering
feels right,
riches gained
by memory as
only memory
miracles can make:
Old Razor Burn,
his 'Empty-Moon' bottles,
molotovs thrown skyward
at dusk.
He insisted lab coats be worn
distributed ritually before
silver-painted matchboxes
opened, blessed with his spit -
impatiently explaining
(I always fled falling fire
and glass) -
'Such concussion
upon night sky brings
deeper stars to surface,
the more easily gathered, '
Flash of Fish Star,
Formalhaut, brightest,
belly up for hands to grab,
abhorring steeples.
Swollen Liver, his mad dashes -
we were always fleeing then
161
valley's venial back doors
in the name of Jesus and gin.
All this, more, an Aeon's end
is not easily outrun checking
guns' splintered thumbs at portals
beyond finned stars' shining reversals.
Gladly - Astonished Grace,
(I address) She of the Yellow Rose,
Her stone lantern paper thin -
abounds in now/then pomes,
always in hearts made gentler
by breaks,
their simpler majesties ever within reach.
.
Warren Falcon
162
This Space Between the Gate, the Garden Lovely - Eternal Rounds of
Determined Variations
.
...variations determined of rounds eternal -
lovely garden the gate
the between space
this...
All
this space between the gate and the garden lovely
within the hole of the ring in the breath flung in
the dirt's cool dank breath
the hand of the digger becomes the tree
shall hang
language surpasses itself breaks
upon its own weight like the empty shell of the beetle
little is the frame we live within the tiny world
the wave of the wind ripple in the mind and Mind
the barn side the vague window pane opening upon
the living the dead artifacts
All
All
is here everywhere in the ring in the hand in the dirt
and out the grave house underneath
thanks the air and pass the leaves
becomes the sign upon which all breathing things
upon its own weight like the empty shell of the beetle
walks upon Vast the space it partakes of making
turns to the dropp of rain the flaked paint of the
eternal scene of stones breathing becoming bread
163
All
All
the living the dead artifacts
the barn side the vague window pane opening upon
the wave of the wind ripple in the mind and Mind
little is the frame we live within the tiny world
shall hang language shall surpass itself break
the hand of the digger become the tree
the dirt's cool dank breath
within the hole of the ring in the breath flung in
this space between the gate and the garden lovely
All
All
eternal scene of stones breathing becoming bread
turns to the dropp of rain the flaked paint
walks upon Vast the space it partakes of making
upon its own weight the empty shell of the beetle
becomes the sign upon which all breathing things
thanks the air and pass the leaves
and out the grave house underneath
All
All
this space between the gate and the garden lovely
is here everywhere in the ring in the hand in the dirt
the living the dead artifacts
164
eternal scene of stones breathing becoming bread
eternal rounds of determined variations...
Warren Falcon
165
Three For Cemetery Statues By The Atlantic, Falmouth, Massachusetts 1977
These three
being of stone
or steel...
Figure 1
An old woman, never married,
speaks among the dunes:
I am the older sister, and ugly.
I watch the sea by the wall,
yearn for each tide's return.
I walk the surf in all weather
and spend myself amidst
the sea wrack screaming
with the tern and the dove.
I count my white hairs by the
sea weighing each for love.
...wear your love, my sister.
Carry your breasts white and full
to his hands, the mouth of the sea.
Breathe deeply the salt sea air,
fill them each for his warm mouth to take...
I will taste brine
and fill each old breast
with sand.
I will taste brine
and fill them each,
each, with sand.
They fall deeply
into my ribs in
the windy dunes
soon, soon to be
swallowed by
the fish and the crab.
Figure 2
Looming over a family plot,
A figure of Biblical Cain:
Ground my face in the world's crotch
I'll never do though I wish it.
Closest I'll ever come be the day
166
I lay my thumbs beneath the dirt
and fish for an earthworm's eye.
Soft skin I'll never touch
'cept mine own hard flesh
with thumb-less caress.
What thigh shall ever be mine?
And no man lip touch, ever,
him I've slain,
nor womankind want,
I hate my mother's name.
To fold the soil or sever
muscle with the teeth, spit
seed to the wind or dribble
praises manfully down the cheek,
ah, heady sin! Tears!
The silt of September's enough!
Hard clay of October be bust!
A fist to the day's end,
black blade pierce the heart
if I cannot kiss you, oh Mud,
cannot push my face into
your belly moaning thicklove
of the world,
eating fossil and coal,
drinking ancient tar
and artesian meltif
I cannot have it then
I have not known the Jehovah Man.
I have breathed salt for nothing,
taken all words for fool's
bedding, crushed them
like my brother, flung them
over fences, slain them
all to the last letter,
each a shattered stilt.
Even upon the word of my name
I bring down the stone.
But in vain. Each blow
cannot crush it. No end.
No prayer.
Black night descends.
The dark well screams
Figure 3
A scholar with a book sits
167
just within the cemetery gate:
And so, green statue with
your large hand on your book,
don't look so foolish
with snow on your head.
When did you last come
to sit beside the dogwood
growing a shadow over the dead?
Death is a deed.
Death is a clean sorrow.
It is natural to weep -
Even a waste basket in a cemetery.
Warren Falcon
168
Three Tracing Infinite Musings
.
1
Striven from
white rock
a wider sky
2
Here is a presence
something returning
in spite of melting clocks
3
Beside hewn stones
on rotting plots
an unseen Chiseler
Warren Falcon
169
Toward Erasure No Longer Effortful
.
That one day the book shall be written,
Odysseus come smiling through the door.
That I shall live forevermore free of provision,
be delivered presently into good, rich life
and unto the richer world, my Lover so long
turning turning turning in distance away from,
yet to manage a caress, a smooch which
neither dismisses nor fully embraces.
It is I that am and shall be erased into this
Love which shall then in time be erased
as well in the greater Sun and that Shining,
too, shall be erased. Then we shall all be
scattered, or I shall be only, embrace by
embrace, toward erasure no longer effortful.
I sift draft by draft rough toward world
now slowing in spite of parentheses these
provisional postulations of 'the good life'
to come. Eventually. There is only this
that I am living now. And my hands feel,
even perhaps are, strapped to this wheel
that turns me as turns Beloved Earth,
the Sun, too, each dreaming
near to but apart from each.
My reach is
here on my tongue,
in my fingers here
grasping words from mind.
I am ever behind in this chase,
now am further from Love,
space, than ever
though my heart
is swollen from
wanting It.
Still, world, accept my blessing.
I send this message aloft on kingfisher wings.
Warren Falcon
170
Turning Thighs to Diamonds
Or what man is there among you, of whom if his son
shall ask bread, will he reach him a stone? - Matthew 7: 9
No blame shall stain us now, father.
Mars in you still storms the makeshift diamond.
Each base of cardboard weighted with stone
is still our house; a bat, a ball and mitt, hard rules
of the game, were meant to undo my lust for dark
heaven shunning shining girls.
The heavy ball you hit to me is never caught,
a floppy glove always falls from a hesitant hand.
I was reaching for god then - it's not your fault - a lavender
boy early befriended by crows, already resigned to what was
given and what was to come, a softball between the eyes,
your attempt to guide me toward those diamond thighs of
women which, you often repeated, 'were everywhere waiting.'
I blinked before you, head down, focused on 'Lion's Teeth'**.
I was your hard mystery, and soft, not so fast for I was fat
and could not round the bases quick. I was your inherited
meek, a burden to shake into a sliding man furious for home.
At four I plucked wild strawberries you pointed to,
all authority and accidental grace, revealing much,
still dew wet, sticky to the touch, opening sourness
deserving my frown. You laughed at my dawning smile
for their sweetness slowly yielded, a surprise gift for what
would always unite us, your fear that I would suffer, too,
your fate, untended desire gone to wildness brought
low beneath branches, slow embrace of cradle-gentle boughs
entangling legs and light between the greater shadows,
and shadows shall win the day. In them my yearning
grew yet, remained for that of edges, what is beyond
them, or beneath, for planets arcing and comets rare,
trailing lovers to come but meteors, not the appointed
stars of permanence allowed to some men's hands,
and never to the fallen.
Grounding balls is the only thing to do so I did,
repeatedly. Still, these essential things were caught
for our mostly wasted days of practice,
wild sweetness is a stolen base,
the tongue is an untended garden.
There is a burning that soft hands can know which
shall finally run some headlong for home at the end,
an inherited circle,
a latter-day glad son gathering berries from shadows.
171
**Dandelion
Warren Falcon
172
Turning Thighs to Diamonds - Alchemical Passes For Father and Son
.
Or what man is there among you, of whom if his son
shall ask bread, will he reach him a stone? - Matthew 7: 9
*
No blame shall stain us now, father.
Mars in you still storms the makeshift diamond.
Each base of cardboard weighted with stone is still our house.
A bat, a ball and mitt, hard rules of the game,
the heavy ball you hit to me is never caught.
A floppy glove always falls from a hesitant hand.
**
A lavender boy early
befriended by crows.
A softball between
the eyes guides.
Diamond thighs
everywhere waiting.
***
Before you, head down,
focused on 'Lion's Teeth'**,
I am a hard mystery,
and soft, not so fast for I
am fat and cannot round
the bases quick.
I, your inherited meek,
am a burden to shake,
a sliding man
furious for home.
*****
173
I pluck wild strawberries,
You, all authority and
accidental grace, reveal too much,
dew wet, still sticky to the touch.
Opening sourness deserves a frown.
Sweetness slowly yields
surprise for what always
unites father/son -
untended desire
gone to wildness
brought low
beneath branches,
slow embrace of
cradle-gentle boughs
entangling legs and
light between the
greater shadows.
And shadows shall win the day.
******
Planets arc
and comets rare
trail lovers.
Meteors are
not appointed
permanent stars
allowed to some
men's hands,
and never to the fallen
caught for mostly
wasted days.
*******
That wild sweetness is a stolen base.
That the tongue is an untended garden.
That there is a burning soft hands can know.
174
********
Finally runs something headlong
sliding for home
inheriting circles latter-day.
Glad sons (are)
berries from
shadows gathered.
**Dandelion
Warren Falcon
175
Two Alchemical Passes for Father and Son - Turning Thighs to Diamonds
FIRST PASS - The Flying-Away Boy
Or what man is there among you, of whom if his son
shall ask bread, will he reach him a stone? - Matthew 7: 9
No blame shall stain us now, father.
Mars in you still storms the makeshift diamond.
Each base of cardboard weighted with stone
is still our house; a bat, a ball and mitt, hard rules
of the game, were meant to undo my lust for dark
heaven shunning shining girls.
The heavy ball you hit to me is never caught,
a floppy glove always falls from a hesitant hand.
I was reaching for god then - it's not your fault -
a lavender boy early befriended by crows,
already resigned to what was given and what
was to come, a softball between the eyes,
your attempt to guide me toward those
diamond thighs which you often repeated,
'were everywhere waiting.'
I blinked before you, head down, focused on 'Lion's Teeth'**.
I was your hard mystery, and soft, not so fast for I was fat
and could not round the bases quick. I was your inherited
meek, a burden to shake, a sliding man furious for home.
At four I plucked wild strawberries you pointed to,
all authority and accidental grace, revealing much,
still dew wet, sticky to the touch, opening sourness
deserving my frown. You laughed at my dawning smile
for their sweetness slowly yielded, a surprise gift for what
would always unite us, your fear that I would suffer, too,
your fate, untended desire gone to wildness brought
low beneath branches, slow embrace of cradle-gentle boughs
entangling legs and light between the greater shadows,
and shadows shall win the day. In them my yearning
grew yet, remained for that of edges, what is beyond
them, or beneath, for planets arcing and comets rare,
trailing lovers to come but meteors, not the appointed
stars of permanence allowed to some men's hands,
and never to the fallen.
Grounding balls is the only thing to do so I did,
repeatedly. Still, these essential things were caught
for our mostly wasted days of practice,
wild sweetness is a stolen base,
the tongue is an untended garden.
176
There is a burning that soft hands can know
which shall finally run some headlong for
an inherited circle home at the end,
a latter-day glad son gathering berries from shadows.
**Dandelion
SECOND PASS - Glad Son Gathered
Turning Thighs to Diamonds - Alchemical Passes for Father and Son
.
Or what man is there among you, of whom if his son
shall ask bread, will he reach him a stone? - Matthew 7: 9
*
No blame shall stain us now, father.
Mars in you still storms the makeshift diamond.
Each base of cardboard weighted with stone is still our house.
A bat, a ball and mitt, hard rules of the game,
the heavy ball you hit to me is never caught.
A floppy glove always falls from a hesitant hand.
**
A lavender boy early
befriended by crows
A softball between
the eyes guides
Diamond thighs
everywhere waiting
***
177
But before you, head down,
focused on 'Lion's Teeth'**,
I am a hard mystery,
and soft, not so fast for I
am fat and cannot round
the bases quick.
I am your inherited meek,
a burden to shake,
a sliding man
furious for home.
*****
Wild strawberries,
all authority and
accidental grace,
you reveal too much,
dew wet, still sticky
to the touch.
Opening sourness
deserves a frown.
Sweetness slowly
yields surprise for
what always unites -
untended desire
gone to wildness
brought low
beneath branches,
slow embrace of
cradle boughs,
entangled legs
and light.
And shadows shall win the day.
******
Planets arc
and comets rare
trail lovers.
Meteors are
178
not appointed
permanent stars
allowed to some
men's hands,
and never to the fallen
caught for mostly
wasted days.
*******
That wild sweetness is a stolen base.
That the tongue is an untended garden.
That there is a burning soft hands can know.
********
Finally runs something headlong
sliding for homeinheriting
circles latter-day.
Glad sons (are)
berries from
shadows gathered.
**Dandelion
Warren Falcon
179
Upon Kingfisher Wings - Letter 1 From Minimus Cast Out Into Space Praying
Net Or Nest Catches
.
'The kingfishers! who cares for their feathers now? ' - Charles Olson
1
I, Minimus, launch forth regardless.
I have right to dare my feeble casting
forth, and off, of fetters, the jellies of
sin, and sally, well, if not sally, to jostle
the crowd in the bus station to purchase
my escape to spacious...what? Space,
I guess, to dream outside of who I am or
of what I have become and can see inex-
or-ably, ably, I hope, written in stars
or just desserts, just well-dressed guesses
derived from stormy Herald's blurting,
O winking paradisio, distant still,
'To become men and not destroyers of the world'**
I take my Pound with, old cantor,
no longer cantering but for us both
I now swagger, not to stake a grand
claim in turning the race, the species
other than to what it always was, ever
will be, grandiose, verbose, polyglottal
babblers rebutting halitose Death,
how big is the universe,
how we are all so small
sings it well,
'The ant's a centaur in his own dragon world.'
2
I live in presumptions of other life
that I will eventually live or be living
aware that I live presently as if this
being-lived life now is provisional,
that I shall one day be traveling or
well-traveled, living in some other land,
culture, having planted Odysseus's
oar there, fluent in tongue and lovers
of said land or if now said then perhaps
I may sing and say, bring new ships
into the leaner bay loaded with exotica
to otherwise, o land-locked, Reason,
'to begin with a swelled head and end with swelled feet.'
180
3
That one day the book shall be written,
Odysseus come smiling through the door.
That I shall live forevermore free of provisions,
be delivered presently into good, rich life
and unto the richer world, my Lover, so long
turning turning turning in distance away from,
yet I manage a caress, a smooch which
neither dismisses nor fully embraces and
it is I that is and shall be erased into this Love
which shall then in time be erased as well
in the greater Sun and that Shining, too, shall
be erased. Then we shall all be scattered,
or I shall be only, embrace by embrace,
toward erasure no longer effortful.
I soft sift draft by draft rough toward world
now slowing in spite of parentheses these
provisional postulations of 'the good life'
to come. Eventually. There is only this
that I am living now. And my hands feel,
even perhaps are, strapped to this wheel
that turns me as turns Beloved Earth,
the Sun, too, each dreaming
near to but apart from each.
My reach is
here on my tongue,
in my fingers here
grasping words from mind.
I am ever behind in this chase,
now am further from Love,
space, than ever
though my heart
is swollen from
wanting It.
Still, world, accept my blessing.
I send this message aloft on kingfisher wings.
[All quotations in closed quotes are of Ezra Pound]
Warren Falcon
181
Upon reading Naseer Ahmed Nasir's 'Don't Ever Come, O December'
'Deserts unnumbered have expanded in me.' - Naseer Ahmed Nasir'
A slight sigh moves sand
though a complete desert
(odd thought, is a desert ever complete? a moment ever whole?)
may not seem to notice, being fluid as a river yet static as
the Milky Way where your words pray,
'Fill the darkness of stellar distances with light! Make me limitless! .'
Deserts feel limitless, too, each grain a star.
Each-as-One must refer to its Referring Fire.
We must quarrel with December,
enumerate our grievances to angels
of every month,
'Who will knit dreamlike sweaters?
Who will pick snowflakes falling in the soul? '
Oh, to see and experience all or each
from Light's perspective,
particle and wave -
All graves shall then be opened!
Warren Falcon
182
Upon This Wide Water, For Staten Island Ferry, circa 1985, Manhattan
.
'On the ferry-boats the hundreds and hundreds that cross,
returning home, are more curious to me than you suppose,
And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence are
more to me, and more in my meditations, than you might suppose.'
- Walt Whitman, from 'Crossing Brooklyn Ferry'
1
Upon this wide water, Whitman's bay, wandering
outward toward Eastward windings -
Upon this white-starred charted bay we ride
gray with midnight leaning toward the Towers**
distant growing, stalking, yellow and glowing,
mimicing the stars -
Our eyes stare tearing,
seawind pushes lids to slits.
We glimmer. Lights shimmer
ahead and above,
and still we cry -
the wind.
The ferry, furtive, floats the edge of Manhatta.
There's power pushing against the bow,
riptides to the rear, but we go on,
approach sleepily, enamored of gin and
the beds we will make again and again
pulling sheets tighter. This stretching water
safe-keeps the light of eyes and the city there-
Upon the water's wide skirt one will, quiet,
lift up a hand to the spray, sway for love,
and pray for the world -
A dark tern unfurls from the sail
of a starboard yacht, flirts once with
the silhouette extended upon the wave,
then leaves, an under-turning rail or rudder
sinking in the ferrier's wake.
Each night there must be one, out there,
on the deck, supplicating in boozy tongue,
oozing heart-love all over, spurning the way
things go down in the world, cheap spindrift
the cranes know of, dipping their bloated beaks
to the waves. And he must dip his head, braying,
with his hands motioning to the night -
183
Away! Away!
[**World Trade Towers]
Warren Falcon
184
Upon This Wide Water, On Our Broken Boat - Two For Staten Island Ferry,
circa 1985 Manhattan
'On the ferry-boats the hundreds and hundreds that cross,
returning home, are more curious to me than you suppose,
And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence are
more to me, and more in my meditations, than you might suppose.'
- Walt Whitman, from 'Crossing Brooklyn Ferry'
1
Upon this wide water, Whitman's bay, wandering
outward toward Eastward windings -
Upon this white-starred charted bay we ride
gray with midnight leaning toward the Towers**
distant growing, stalking, yellow and glowing,
mimicing the stars -
Our eyes stare tearing,
seawind pushes lids to slits.
We glimmer. Lights shimmer
ahead and above,
and still we cry -
the wind.
The ferry, furtive, floats the edge of Manhatta.
There's power pushing against the bow,
riptides to the rear, but we go on,
approach sleepily, enamored of gin and
the beds we will make again and again
pulling sheets tighter. This stretching water
safe-keeps the light of eyes and the city there-
Upon the water's wide skirt one will, quiet,
lift up a hand to the spray, sway for love,
and pray for the world -
A dark tern unfurls from the sail
of a starboard yacht, flirts once with
the silhouette extended upon the wave,
then leaves, an under-turning rail or rudder
sinking in the ferrier's wake.
Each night there must be one, out there,
on the deck, supplicating in boozy tongue,
oozing heart-love all over, spurning the way
things go down in the world, cheap spindrift
the cranes know of, dipping their bloated beaks
to the waves. And he must dip his head, braying,
with his hands motioning to the night -
185
Away! Away!
[**World Trade Towers]
2
'Others the same - others who look back on me because I look’d forward to them,
What is it then between us? ...What is the count of the scores or hundreds of years
between us? ' - Walt Whitman
On our broken boat the harsh light will not break.
We see our day clearly as we can.
Tell the night, now it's here to stay, that
once I glanced the sleeping youth, legs against the wall,
felt a pall descend upon us here,
this boat lancing the bay waters darkly.
Some to books then, the priest to his sad, effeminate stare.
I can no longer envy those of the black cloth
so bend and tie the shoe.
We shod our feet against what long loss of motion,
eyes downcast or boldly returning the stare?
Beneath each eye there's some familiar look we refuse.
We map our way to sleep in the palms of shy or frightened hands.
Warren Falcon
186
Uses For Wings - Variations From 'We Can Be Broken' & Other Discarded
Poems
.
'It means so much that we can be broken.' - from an early poem,1978
For Tien Ho, departed,
and Michael R.
carving the empty space
of her leaving still
*
Here is a Presence beyond
illicit fires bearing witness
to evidence, remains of flight,
contrived escapes blocked by panes,
walls striped in ramming panic,
of ritual and a broken neck,
petrified wings placed in open
spaces they once could range.
*
I began
a bird flown down a chimney
dying in an empty house,
a hidden mountain valley,
night time fires upon surrounding
hills, moonshine stills signaling
flame warnings, bootleggers' silent
spirits conjuring drip by drip
metal and grain.
*
Here are uses for wings:
something returning,
or turning inward
eventually climbed,
rested upon,
or fallen to some chimney life.
*
Descending the hill in unplanned rehearsal
for what has become a destined association,
our mutual confession is invisibly drawn.
A ruined one-room church appears,
a cemetery plot weed-hidden behind this
187
once sentinel house long remote to men,
as present as God. My own presence is bound
to his who stands confounded now as three,
one above grave, one within it, and me
in between, one eye upon him, the other
upon sagging dirt where bones and a
ragged shirt share an unexpected
moment of veils confused in sunlight's
disarray of leaves, wood, of stone and
shadows frozen there, not breathing
for us all in unstoried astonishment.
Here horseflies feast.
Upon weathered stones
are only creases for once were
names, dates, even God's Word,
chiseled by a now unknown hand,
an impression only, one among many,
reduced to no plot but that of Providence
left to surmise swatting at Eucharistic
flies proving only flesh and only blood,
a flood of questions eventually exhaled,
and exhaling still, waiting beside
a white rock with wings,
ignoring fires,
leaning into changes.
*
Warren Falcon
188
What Bells & Sex Have To Do With Each Other, A Mythic Rendering From
Ancient Texts & Dreams, circa 1981
'The bells, I say, the bells outbreak their towers...
- Hart Crane, from 'The Broken Tower'
For Marianne Annur
...I will tell you of Fatima.
She is the bell,
The tintinabulum,
The veil and the will.
Then take me to her.
You can have the tapestry of streets,
The bowls of tint.
Shade the surface black
And she will emerge
The river,
The bead upon the throat,
The bread swelling,
Lifting up,
The Fertile Crescent...
1
Between the breasts and
Most of the moving parts
While she crossed the threshold
She was quite badly torn
Fatima had clusters
Mounted solidly of bronze
She said it hurt terribly
2
Fatima opened her dark eyes
...If they were with the tide
From top to lip...
She escorted me to an inner room
Where was an intricate carillon music
It is the inevitable accompaniment
She said pointing below
Come in here, my little eye
I did where she remembered, ululating
With plump cushions where it rotates
189
Of the tintinabulum
A change of waist
Iron or steel bars
To the edge of the lip
At the advent
I nibbled salted melon seeds
For this is the Lailet el Henna
3
In the towers are the reproducers
Within the clean bronze
Their walls were stood
Ready to receive her
And later became all
Of the intricate trills
She pushed her way through
The pivot points
A deep lactation
In the most ravishing shades
Simulate the Pleiades
The rich magenta
Running water is much the best
Whether she wept as she then drew out
Watering the date gardens
She stepped over warm spurting blood
You should have heard her cry
'Ya Ali' and her loud hell-hella
4
A sheep was slaughtered
The physical vibrating movements
For anything tinkling
On the palms and the fingernails
At the point of clapper impact
And on the pillow
She drew out
For the rhythmic accompaniment
And then put it while it was hot
Up inside
A folded piece of bread
190
5
What did she vow at the Saint's tomb?
6
The Henna Night was celebrated
Metal was added to the lip
Placenta and puella runs
And full harmony that are familiar to lovers
Before Fatima's face
A knife had been placed
Between the upper and
Lower big sprigs of myrtle
The waist almost became
Through the flattening of the crown
Similarly beautiful
And took out of the outside skin
Alone in thousands of towers
Between legs
A tiny triangle where several seams met
Variations in the walls thickness
When the bride's hands were hennaed
Had very slow pains
Prayers were said while the metal was
Poured into the molds
An opaque black veil over
The bells of Nimrud
This thickening of the lip
Straight and pot like
To the chanting
Gave it rhythm and balance
7
Fatima was propped up on pillows
On her big bed
She had a large round silver box
Heavily embossed
The shape of the bell
The same thickness
A push button that rings arpeggios
Carelessly she pulled out
Before I went into
...Joining in refrains...
Into the modern bell
191
Recast it for tuning again
Thick and ornamented with gold
Paint and Flowers
As it unfolded her pains
Hell-hella
Delicately through the dark and silent
Just as the rope that swings
Scarely noticed
8
Did you have a hard time of it, Fatima?
9
The large brass bedstead
Lighted candles
Their walls were
All primitive forms
Although she put on the veil
A delight to the senses
10
Mohammad came
As fast as the
Vibrating bars that
Generate blows
I kept on my ornaments
I rubbed her abdomen with a knife
Tore in two a flap of bread
Pink gauze curtains
Wheat and salt were scattered
None has been found
Fatima had donned the veil
Iron, steel, gold
Silver, zinc and lead
Which is formed by the squaring
Of the shoulders
Small bells began
Were shortened
Reduced the muscular effort
Needed to swing...
11
And then went in to his bride
192
With mounds of henna paste
All from silver containers
Plus hundreds of single bells and peals
A time indicator
Anything set with precious stones
I put this on his navel
All with small finger loops on top
The idea of the clapper
To fall back into position
To crack
The thickness of the lip
12
A call to worship was lost
When rings were cast around
The hinges and locks
The soles of her feet
A beehive in shape
Close to the vibrating
Enveloped in a black coat
And my dear whispered
It must be completely consumed
Must be in the open
From the top
There bury it face up
With votive rags
Of the Tigris and Euphrates
The opal and the navel
Watched with deep
Or Henna Night
13
The only remedy is to melt it down
Fatima to me as she lifted the heavy lid
A naked sword was laid
Evolved
Came into being
As a warning signal
There would be a loud burst of
The piercing, high pitched
Trilling ululation
Into tiny handle-less cups
193
A deep lactation
Fatima's milk
The gradually inward sloping sides
Fatima to me as she lifted the heavy box
Drink
It is the Henna Night
Drink
It is the parting of veils
She pointed downward,
Disrobing in the darkness,
The lantern light of the street
Rubbing against her
Fatima to me as she lifted the heavy box
...To dip your fingers in seven colors...
Fatima opened her dark eyes
Fatima to me
She lifted it up
The heavy hennaed night ringing
Hell-hella
************************************************************
'Sympathizing with an experiment, we yet need not venerate the result.'
- Marianne Moore, The Complete Prose of Marianne Moore (Penguin,1987) , p.586
[This poem arrived literally out of a shoe box. Experimenting with cut-up poetic
technique as propounded by William Burroughs, in the mid-1970's in my little cabin on
Huckleberry Mountain in the North Carolina mountains I cut up phrases from several
dreams I'd had along with xeroxed (photo copied) essays from an
encyclopedia on the history of bells and bell making, and one on the rituals and
traditions of Henna night in Islamic countries. My choices of essays were random. I just
opened the encyclopedia and these were the essays I opened to. I cut up phrases from
each, added them to the shoe box along with my dream fragments, and thoroughly
194
shaken (not stirred) pulled out phrase by phrase what became this poem.
This was my most successful attempt of many with this technique. What I found was
that, especially when seized up in writer's block, the 'accidental' or chance
juxtaposition of images, phrases, caesuras in content, contexts and voicings along with
disparity of logical connection between topics (bells, metalurgy, Henna rituals for
women, wedding nights, sexual attraction and consumation) sometimes
created not only astonishing images and poetry but re-tuned my own consciousness to
function in this non-linear associative way as a poet and now, importantly, in my
creative work as a psychotherapeutic counselor with others. I recommend this
technique for all poets or aspiring poets for much is to be learned with perhaps the
greatest discovery being that there is another Mind/Hand/Source involved in the craft
of poetry, of all writing, guiding the quotidian course of our lives, paying attention first
and foremost with a willingness to leave known territory while not devaluing that
territory at all. Immediate and tangible foundations are supported by unseen and
assumed greater, deeper, older and stronger ones. From this rich arche-techtonic
structure, hold and mold our lives and our creativity rise.]
Warren Falcon
195
What the Orphan Knows About Light
.
for Anna Kamienska**
'I don't believe in the other world
...But I don't believe in this one either
unless it's pierced by light.' - A. Kamienska
Hidden behind a star
the ash sings without self-pity -
stake your claim in Beauty.
Flame-near dreams
are of Far.
Jab the mausoleum
majesty of State
in the eye.
Here is your key, little one.
Now run quickly home.
**[Some poems of Anna Kamienska:
http: //www.ap.krakow.pl/nkja/literature/polpoet/kamienska.htm]
Warren Falcon
196
Where Dispose Of The Joke Of Bones - Minimalist Cryptics Sometimes
Metaphysical, circa 1981
.
For two:
Agnes Martin, American artist,
minimalist painter extraordinaire
Elaine Bellezza, artist, too,
and traveler,
and early Anima-as-Fate,
and 'eye giver'
'Is that dance slowing in the mind of man
that made him think the universe could hum? ' - Theodore Roethke
1
off the square
in the darkest cell
where darkness is at its deepest -
some sense of home
those forms bursting forth
2
seal us in
ascetic fire -
and the cave become a dissonance
the lament on your face of saffron reddening
3
but the grids never are
little girls jumping rope
challenge circle words,
the self of rings
like a brown back
the empty form goes
extends outward
yet these words do not contain you
197
4
you have an 'element'
the word is ugly too
dearer than a son
cut cut cut out
the heart that lies
walking seems to cover time
the summit is rounded
outline of a foot on a rock
5
you speak in circles
though loving squares
when I cover squares clad in ashes
are all questions then mother of pearl
6
the pilaster speaks
loudly of days
dearer than wealth
the silence on the floor
7
discover the last image
how skim the ocean of brine
you wear on your face
that gray weight
die for more
this is life
8
the plain can do almost
nothing but weep
to turn my eyes away
destroys its power
198
the untamed fire
9
between the rain
whose throat is blue
like a wild fern is clear
I am sad when I see you
10
your letters arrive fat
swollen with human form
they fly out from my palms
look around you
11
mind now
mistaken
dying flowers
not traceable
instead -
believe the sky is not so wide
it reaches forward
(let us pass)
it is a far cry
is pervasive
get rid of everything
only see in me a part
12
tell me now
glass-handled knives
I'm not clear where we started
13
the pagoda and the spire
199
poke the eye
I once understood you as
articulate who couldn't stand
now knowledge is less and less to
me
and a clear mind -
the rose
are squared
white edge
of the world
ugly
sitting in
snow
14
where dispose of the joke of bones
one must feel the forms
bursting in the tranquil shade
the reality of virtual form
sitting in said snow
the beat of a wing we grieve
certain words repeating -
the world 'ugly'
and just is the 'plain'
what becomes of skin
what becomes of a lotus petal
it tears apart
15
believe the streets are blistering
Nature is the wheel
200
settle for less
some sense of home
those forms bursting forth
between the rain
whose throat is blue
like a wild fern is clear
they fly out from my palms
look around you
Warren Falcon
201
Words Of A Dying Farmer
For W.C.F.
Beat the fields in furrows home.
Hoe a row of young shoots of corn.
To be born anew push three fingers
into the ground. Drop, every other step,
three seeds, then five from the hand.
The earth's alive still with tender things.
Please god and sun the sky will not
harry boys home from school,
will not rule them as cruel fathers do,
their boiling fever for work till weary knees bow,
fingernails tearing on rocks lifted from
red rows behind a redder plow.
Now is the time to say I hated the work of fields,
and I am old. No more to fold the earth.
No more to pull stalks from frost
but to lift this last rock and hurry home.
Warren Falcon
202
Words of an Old Poet to a Young Poet
.
try not to startle morning
doves from their patient
gentle songs
listen carefully
do not tear the wind
a wild stallion
counts his sins
in mares
for Seyed Morteza, singer
Warren Falcon