http://www.123soho.com/member/mead/
Curtained
Paintings,
The gold robes which veil approach
Of both image & viewer
Framed by life's protective shrine of
Durable frailty waiting to meet
Each other's story like
A train whistle on wind,
The steam, the chuff & clank
Bearing cinema messages, voyages
As fate, where engines are
Needle eyes & tracks part
The landscape same as hands
Pulling back these beckoning
Cloth rivers, these travelogues
Behind drapes
Hours Of
Mouths,
Their pleasures stretching,
Navigable, into eternal spools,
Into lifetimes of telephone lines
Where kisses are taxis
In cinematic synapses lighting
Faces, angelic with experience
Traveling, translucent through
Eyes of wonder,
Through fingers of innocence
Learning intimacy is
Always
Here
Here where
Senses sing clear
After the agony
Obsess Somewhere
Else. Meaning:
Different, on something less than the threat
Of tasting another on your lover's tongue,
Your lover's skin------
To suspect & discredit that, to disbelieve,
Be told: "not what you think" even while
Seeing shards of another's anatomy fragmenting
Into him to lobotomize your system in the fun
House mirror of feelings fumbling like angels
Windblown, back…
Backwards angel, your wings patterned with
The glance of brown eyed Bette D., lips in a sneer
Of cultivated smoke, the miasmic wisps
Where those eyes haunt, even at the A&P,
Muzak fun as Mingus, & you can drift with
The shopping carts, a celestial trumpet
Breaking the chain over the linoleum &
Through the freezer section, through the baked
Goods, a Coltrane opus lifting you on up
Past blues, past jazz, past betrayal's lying
Gullet
You swallowed & swallowed, an angel too
Oblivious to the Bette D. that filled your mirror
'til you exhaled & laughed
The Shades of Night
These are,
This plum, this thalo,
Smooth as a cold bowling ball,
This jade like a coast ridden in
On ink stallions.
Now here is grey blanching to chalk
White, unsmudgeable, the dust of it,
Gauze fringe meeting rhinestone thighs….
Androgynous, that greater breadth,
With ruby, with amber lids painted on
The harem's eyes. They flicker & blink
With a fiery wetness. They drift steep
As tigers in a jungle of glass. Pane by pane,
The stained levels, the translucent
Rush up,
Take breath
As if knowing torment unconscious.
To me, you do this, passing evergreen
Branches in a tangle of stars & bat-winged
Crickets down ribbons of highways…
I center on the motion as if for the stillness
Of mercy, of tenderness, & get them occasionally
Where the night's shifts are Salome's,
Fast fast asleep
Doors As
Arches, the good curve of this wood,
The mahogany pine mix, cherry-gold
Where, golden, the sun comes
As an autumnal coat of stained glass,
These leaves glimpsed in their angelhood
Through this threshold that is open,
This gateway of elevation
Certain as the sky
Hands reach for
As if searching to find, turn some very big
Invisible knob, & ascension is easy then,
Ascension is everything,
The curve of the bow
Spirit shoots for
Bricks, Light
Warm yourself here.
Press hands to orange, topaz, rust red…
Blood is booming to the bloom of this
Light, these squares mortar seals
The roughness of in dust & in
Crumbling, the promise of fire,
A place to touch clay, pigment,
The cold itself thermal & shaped
Maybe for a window,
The sky clouding its blue puffs
Against such space for squirrel play &
The flight of birds…
Each flock passes to emptiness &
The stones stand, the rectangles
Resume order, the grace of this radiance
Your head rests against, huddled
In the frozen, each eye being flame
Itself, closed, compressed, soul-yellow
Stirring…
How you move us
There against the bricks
Where you do not stir at all