Saturday, August 31, 2013

Fascicle [3]

three

Go then. Sky full, the way was there but not
now when Death has mounted the pyramids,
Cairo devolves to Damascus . . . too late?
the future dying and dead with no blood
visible. Esperanza, Life’s gate: Spain’s,
ours . . . Death’s camps, the bomb, the wars, refugees.

(31 August 2013)

copyright 2013 by Floyce Alexander

Friday, August 30, 2013

Fascicle [2]

two

To talk with God you must love Him but kneel
on both knees. Do it. You need to find words
emerging from the deeps, not from the will..
Sure, you’re beyond earshot if you find God,
and yes, it’s like in Oz, He has no face.
He’s said to raise the dead and leave no trace.

(30 August 2013)

copyright 2013 by Floyce Alexander

Thursday, August 29, 2013

Fascicle

“I think I will go now, the booze is gone,
wherever the heart is, a box canyon
become an abattoir, corrals us all
and there’s no reason to continue gall’s
spleen: I can’t help it but I hate you now.
I think the hour of lead is melting, slow.”

(29 August 2013)

copyright 2013 by Floyce Alexander

Wednesday, August 28, 2013

Don't

  “We live in fear and therefore we do not live.” –Buddha

                    1

By the bo tree storms swell, mix fire with ice.
We don’t know

Weather. When the young took over weather,
Men turned to people.

First rain of napalm, no children ran free
Of scars and grief.

  2

Don’t change your name if you don’t want to die.
Stop.

History starts when you are born, brother
John claimed.

Try to feel time inside you suicide.
Live elsewhere.

Did not John claim he would die for his art,
Stay in L.A.,

Where canyons were filled again with the saved
Who never risk death?

(28 August 2013)

copyright 2013 by Floyce Alexander

Tuesday, August 27, 2013

Improvised Dance Steps to a Faux Ballad

Assignation does not a marriage make.
Nor do your body’s hollows in my bed.

The town–your town–so fifteenth century
Francois Villon succors the dream we share:

In the poet’s fantasy, making love
on the run, leaving the gallows behind.

(27 August 2013)

copyright 2013 by Floyce Alexander

Monday, August 26, 2013

The Lost

In morning, before the day, when quiet prevails,
no cars pass by, the cats asleep, the lady of this large house
sleeps in, for me: I rise and begin this poem of nothing
worth troubling the nerves to feel, stark memory of what I lost
among peregrinations. The sea was as warm as the city,
and I drinking the air, alone, imagined myself happy.

(26 August 2013)

copyright 2013 by Floyce Alexander 




Saturday, August 24, 2013

Cabals

I don’t go now. I heard too many say the same thing,
so many I started mimicking them, turning them away,
inviting me to leave. There were precedents. The Nam
vet, say. He talked about war and the others were all
moved on, to Afghanistan, Iraq, Afghanistan again . . .
Invited to leave, he walked politely off. And I followed.

(24 August 2013)

copyright 2013 by Floyce Alexander

Friday, August 23, 2013

By Memory

He said, You’re just like me at your age–sleep too much, eat too much, drink too much, fuck too much . . . I didn’t tell him until the last, the end of that year, I didn’t come to class because he thought I read well and I knew I stuttered and how could he not hear it? or the rest of those in that room with its fading tan walls, the one where his friend boomed lines from Paradise Lost the same days he introduced me to his friends, Kunitz, Lowell . . . and Auden, from whose Italian villa he had just returned with his bride Beatrice  O’Connell.

(23 August 2013)

copyright 2013 by Floyce Alexander

Thursday, August 22, 2013

Near the Sky

From the meadow to the trough, their tails switching, their deep guttural sounds,
and do they remember her disrobing down there for the man with his camera,
cupping her breasts and kissing her where her legs parted for the full feeling of him
on his knees, her dark olive skin a sheen in the noonday sun, the horses happy . . .
Or so he thought he knew, for how could they be so beautiful, these creatures,
if not happy, at least as happy as a man with a camera whose eyes see the sorrow:

(22 August 2013)


copyright 2013 by Floyce Alexander

Friday, August 16, 2013

Look,

’s hard to believe in yourself when you need to help others believe in themselves.
Body, soul, and the intellect: there’s a song about the first one, but the other two
you don’t know if you can’t hear or see what the head says when the heart finds
lips and fingers. Crow flies that was strutting in the unmanicured grass growing
among islands of dirt. The man said, Mow your grass, and so I swung the scythe
I learned to wield along the edge of water where I was paid to ensure its flowing.

(16 August 2013)

copyright 2013 by Floyce Alexander

Monday, August 12, 2013

Artist in Exile

You are not even gone, same sky in other skies.
With so much left to do, time is a stone
to carve. If cities are buried in you,
there’s no need to fear loss. Thrive in release.

No matter how many expeditions 
end in failure, the test is not triumph.
Home may be everywhere now you are not,
what you saw becomes what you see remain
set in motion, space yielding the present
shifting shape, stopping, beginning again.

The spider, the artist always exiled,
keeps moving as long as there’s work to do,
tracking a way out of and through the void,
no need to be done, each instant open.

(11-12 August 2013)

copyright 2013 by Floyce Alexander

Sunday, August 11, 2013

To the Beauty of Odessa

What does one say when this far off?
The sea might be simple to touch from here.
The water rising behind you could be
all that separates you from the old man
sitting on the bench, who may be feeling
a nostalgia for his youth, having glimpsed
the blue soul in your blue dress. Or you may
be the spirit that brings him back to life,
jarring his sorrow into happiness.
Having nearly reached the sky’s reflection
in the water flaring up out of the stone
fountain, would he translate what he sees deep
in silence, wedding it with memory,
if you spoke to him on your way by?

(11 August 2013)

copyright 2013 by Floyce Alexander

Monday, August 5, 2013

North Shore

Something like a ferret darted between the two bushes bordering the path from the house above to the lake water swirling through the rocks where the gulls came to be fed when he has down there.

That went on as long as the light lasted, then the ferret or whatever it was had left, though the gulls swooped in to spear the breadcrumbs he threw into the air, caught before they found a place on or between the rocks.

They went up a mountain and around it and three hours later he shucked her clothes in the cabin and she balanced her breasts under one arm as he tongued her pussy wet so he could enter her with his gorged cock.

They were there forever, it seemed, though a week passed too fast for either of them. They drove to the casino at the far end of the lake and inside the smoke so thick he coughed and she said, Let’s go. 

At the nearby fort, where the old fort harbored the voyageurs in the past, young people dressed like the originals wandered through to find a tourist interested in conversation and ambled on beside them, sometimes in circles.

They stopped in the town halfway between the casino and their cabin. A tall woman with a smile and comely came out of one door that you could see stairs behind. She entered a café and he remembered her.

He could have been anything he wished to be with her. The tall woman reminded him of her standing and walking and sitting and lying beside him, who was always the singlemost claimant on his heart.

(5 August 2013)

copyright 2013 by Floyce Alexander

Saturday, August 3, 2013

Walking

Unhappy flareup, business at midnight. Where do icecubes go?
Everything appears endless because nothing appears to change.
Shadows shim the light when the moon is full. We go out walking.

I believe we will be here until days end and nights begin.
There’s no being to fear. We have only our own kind, our ghosts.
Walking is living. Our way is circuitous, untrammeled.

(2-3 August 2013)

copyright 2013 by Floyce Alexander