coruscations of the numinous
come from somewhere
courting the dust of ashes
OK love, take over this wheel
keep near the earth
do right by place
without veering from the path
that way lies hoof prints,
the dark enlarging light
courtyard full of laughter
or kisses where they stray,
the unaccountable ones
with particular intensity
Let caress outweigh blow
How to be here otherwise
She said he ought to see
what he was doing
and how it opened the sky
She was from the beginning
now you understand
wit in the house of the holy
where everything is
where it claims to be
welcoming not seeking
now I have finished
long ago was I beginning
out of zero’s void
(14 July 2011)
copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander
Thursday, July 14, 2011
Wednesday, July 13, 2011
The Interstices
" . . . where coincidence and nonsense merge in a lover, until the sky
would look on you . . . "
Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge
She walks with us to the bar, I and our now dead friend.
"New moon in mist 1980" she writes in her book
Random Possession. We share beer. Who knows where we go?
Tides accompany oceans, agencies of events
converge in the bookstore where the one-eyed master
reads from Memory Gardens like he was writing it
in front of us . . . and here she is, back from Alaska,
happily. I ask if she knows John Haines. O, she sighs,
he’s a great poet . . . The Dutch traders from Amsterdam
entered China and took away jade carvings of gods
said to make things happen should Westerners overstay.
All Dutchmen were not too odd to marry the women
they met where mutual fancy corroborated
the slide and weft of constellations, a weave of waves.
A splay of sky looked down with its hilarious face
to see through clouds passing over the sun, warm lover
immersed in meadow grass with the beloved, loving.
Three are dead now: Jon Gill Bentley, bullet through his brain
in Durango: who would know why? The century changed.
The great poet dies in the cabin made with his hands.
In the lower forty-eight he couldn’t stay away,
returning to Richardson, where falling on the ice,
a friend lifts him up, lets him rest, reads his poetry
aloud until death parts the poet from his filled page,
and how easily he moves from one world to the next.
The summer the master read, who would have known his eye
was lost in childhood, overcoming young a stutter,
teaching me how stuttering with poems I could make
the tic flow through silence into articulation . . .
She marries the sculptor, they make books together, then
live with their daughter in New Mexico, in New York;
love’s intensely gentle legacy . . . Creeley dies then
in Marfa, Texas, he to whom so many were friends.
I thought once you wrote Life and Death you lived forever,
I was that young, and stayed that way as long as I loved
–as now–the young Irish-Danish-Polish gypsy girl
who has stayed with me to survive our fool’s errand.
We loved, we grieved. We left behind a biography
of horizons whose aging waves spill over earth’s fire.
for Leigh Baker Ronco of New Orleans
(13 July 2011)
copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander
would look on you . . . "
Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge
She walks with us to the bar, I and our now dead friend.
"New moon in mist 1980" she writes in her book
Random Possession. We share beer. Who knows where we go?
Tides accompany oceans, agencies of events
converge in the bookstore where the one-eyed master
reads from Memory Gardens like he was writing it
in front of us . . . and here she is, back from Alaska,
happily. I ask if she knows John Haines. O, she sighs,
he’s a great poet . . . The Dutch traders from Amsterdam
entered China and took away jade carvings of gods
said to make things happen should Westerners overstay.
All Dutchmen were not too odd to marry the women
they met where mutual fancy corroborated
the slide and weft of constellations, a weave of waves.
A splay of sky looked down with its hilarious face
to see through clouds passing over the sun, warm lover
immersed in meadow grass with the beloved, loving.
Three are dead now: Jon Gill Bentley, bullet through his brain
in Durango: who would know why? The century changed.
The great poet dies in the cabin made with his hands.
In the lower forty-eight he couldn’t stay away,
returning to Richardson, where falling on the ice,
a friend lifts him up, lets him rest, reads his poetry
aloud until death parts the poet from his filled page,
and how easily he moves from one world to the next.
The summer the master read, who would have known his eye
was lost in childhood, overcoming young a stutter,
teaching me how stuttering with poems I could make
the tic flow through silence into articulation . . .
She marries the sculptor, they make books together, then
live with their daughter in New Mexico, in New York;
love’s intensely gentle legacy . . . Creeley dies then
in Marfa, Texas, he to whom so many were friends.
I thought once you wrote Life and Death you lived forever,
I was that young, and stayed that way as long as I loved
–as now–the young Irish-Danish-Polish gypsy girl
who has stayed with me to survive our fool’s errand.
We loved, we grieved. We left behind a biography
of horizons whose aging waves spill over earth’s fire.
for Leigh Baker Ronco of New Orleans
(13 July 2011)
copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander
Tuesday, July 12, 2011
What the Dead Say
1
I am nowhere now
remember me
2
already on my way back
3
Why?
4
Because I came from the earth?
5
Because every thing alive
except stones
must die, and only stones know
their fate,
because the bubble that begins life
surfaces and divides
how we all begin, I have heard
tell
6
I go into fire
where no water pours
forth, and air
is left at the door
7
Now I know where
nowhere starts
(12 July 2011)
copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander
I am nowhere now
remember me
2
already on my way back
3
Why?
4
Because I came from the earth?
5
Because every thing alive
except stones
must die, and only stones know
their fate,
because the bubble that begins life
surfaces and divides
how we all begin, I have heard
tell
6
I go into fire
where no water pours
forth, and air
is left at the door
7
Now I know where
nowhere starts
(12 July 2011)
copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander
Monday, July 11, 2011
In Memory of Late Friends
Beginning with the word instauration
I can barely remember what I’ve lost
nor, remembering, does the way clear
to restore to something what nothing is.
If stones from the quarry need shaping
here are tools, though they be only words.
There were ideal words like disciple
that imposed humility’s false faces
in paint that can't touch the only face;
discipline to reveal what was confined
in oils or ink, taking the bluff off
the inexhaustible, where what seems is.
There's no lack of need to ignore what’s
coming, its tangled simplicities. Rain
for instance. Snow fences for the year’s
end. Love, weather impervious to fire
or ice. Doing what the rest of me wants:
to follow its lead. Not mind, necessarily.
A house in ruin leaves little room
where there are no eyes in its windows,
no knobs to turn to open locked doors.
You are gone: the reason is not ample,
nor does it assuage. You bury the road
both ways. Now teach me nothing's lesson.
And I learn only words, yet they stanch
the flow, although nowhere do I fail
to keep crumbling into phases of change
flesh cannot defy. Because garlands
camouflage scars, what art would anneal
its wound if waiting were all there is?
(11 July 2011)
copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander
I can barely remember what I’ve lost
nor, remembering, does the way clear
to restore to something what nothing is.
If stones from the quarry need shaping
here are tools, though they be only words.
There were ideal words like disciple
that imposed humility’s false faces
in paint that can't touch the only face;
discipline to reveal what was confined
in oils or ink, taking the bluff off
the inexhaustible, where what seems is.
There's no lack of need to ignore what’s
coming, its tangled simplicities. Rain
for instance. Snow fences for the year’s
end. Love, weather impervious to fire
or ice. Doing what the rest of me wants:
to follow its lead. Not mind, necessarily.
A house in ruin leaves little room
where there are no eyes in its windows,
no knobs to turn to open locked doors.
You are gone: the reason is not ample,
nor does it assuage. You bury the road
both ways. Now teach me nothing's lesson.
And I learn only words, yet they stanch
the flow, although nowhere do I fail
to keep crumbling into phases of change
flesh cannot defy. Because garlands
camouflage scars, what art would anneal
its wound if waiting were all there is?
(11 July 2011)
copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander
Sunday, July 10, 2011
Sun
I woke and did what I do with her and she with me.
I have known so few women. They were each one my love.
She knew far more men, she never confused sex with love.
Sun shivering the lake like one body another.
We are becoming old. What was it like to be young?
Who will remember? It is enough to have survived
to remember, how could there be any greater gift?
The lake feels like a river tonight, I remember
saying, and she placed my hand between her legs, said, There’s
where it flows. In that first year together, we made love
to make a child. It did not happen. She went elsewhere,
to be with other men, any one of whom she thought
would let her forget, I do not know how to say it
otherwise. She believed my body made her fallow.
Fucking is joy and also she lets me love this life,
of all the others the one who cares for my worn soul,
who once learned all she needed to know with male strangers
and after that came back to become my odalisque.
You should be so lucky, the mirror likes to reply:
She is her own houri. We occupy a country
whose laws I refuse to learn, where I know I will die.
If she was not the first she will be my last lover.
There is no need so great as mine for her olive skin.
Her words hover in her hive like laughter and honey.
She was desire itself caught in a tangle of men.
She chose each one. A man here, a man there, and nowhere
but on my boat did she find the life to come back to
and when I cut the moorings we floated out to sea.
And here we live on dry land next to a lake of fish
in our fifty-first year to heaven, reeling them in,
cleaning out the heart’s dead parts and preparing the sand
for a feast. It could be Mexico or Hawaii,
I in one place, she in the other. If you took her,
she took you; wherever the sun was we would be there,
don’t ask me how. It’s not in the cards or in the stars.
(10 July 2011)
copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander
I have known so few women. They were each one my love.
She knew far more men, she never confused sex with love.
Sun shivering the lake like one body another.
We are becoming old. What was it like to be young?
Who will remember? It is enough to have survived
to remember, how could there be any greater gift?
The lake feels like a river tonight, I remember
saying, and she placed my hand between her legs, said, There’s
where it flows. In that first year together, we made love
to make a child. It did not happen. She went elsewhere,
to be with other men, any one of whom she thought
would let her forget, I do not know how to say it
otherwise. She believed my body made her fallow.
Fucking is joy and also she lets me love this life,
of all the others the one who cares for my worn soul,
who once learned all she needed to know with male strangers
and after that came back to become my odalisque.
You should be so lucky, the mirror likes to reply:
She is her own houri. We occupy a country
whose laws I refuse to learn, where I know I will die.
If she was not the first she will be my last lover.
There is no need so great as mine for her olive skin.
Her words hover in her hive like laughter and honey.
She was desire itself caught in a tangle of men.
She chose each one. A man here, a man there, and nowhere
but on my boat did she find the life to come back to
and when I cut the moorings we floated out to sea.
And here we live on dry land next to a lake of fish
in our fifty-first year to heaven, reeling them in,
cleaning out the heart’s dead parts and preparing the sand
for a feast. It could be Mexico or Hawaii,
I in one place, she in the other. If you took her,
she took you; wherever the sun was we would be there,
don’t ask me how. It’s not in the cards or in the stars.
(10 July 2011)
copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander
Saturday, July 9, 2011
adios, adieu:
Let me fantasize I am my own man.
What would I say of imagination
or its Blakean enemy,
memory?
Though I cannot be Carlos walking off,
nor Paolo or Susanna at bay,
for whom none of this may matter,
I’m far from home.
What will I tell the Secret of Secrets
I left in my stead
when time comes
as close as now . . .
Adios, amigo, amiga . . .
Adieu, ami, amie . . .
(9 July 2011: Juba o-yei!)
copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander
What would I say of imagination
or its Blakean enemy,
memory?
Though I cannot be Carlos walking off,
nor Paolo or Susanna at bay,
for whom none of this may matter,
I’m far from home.
What will I tell the Secret of Secrets
I left in my stead
when time comes
as close as now . . .
Adios, amigo, amiga . . .
Adieu, ami, amie . . .
(9 July 2011: Juba o-yei!)
copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander
Friday, July 8, 2011
Country of Snow and Ice
When snow falls and the cold begins
that will go from September to April
with hazardous gait, the ground shifts
with ease scrambling for traction under foot.
We do not sleep in the same bed, or love
what is not God (though I thirst and hunger
for the flesh of a sweet woman's body,
preferring hers, as always, and why not?)
The legs have gone, the knees are next,
I could be a sumo wrestler
in his youth not yet a mountain of flesh,
my heart devoted to beating its drum.
I love my wife and she loves me.
I am under the knife one summer, she
the next, my knee, her toe. We were once wild,
she the city girl, I the country boy.
She traveled west, we met. I wound up east.
She went south. I stayed. If I were to go
that was the time, or so I thought.
I could not foresee following, but did
finally. She loved temperate climates.
I could never travel south far enough
to not want her that side of the border.
One winter, her mother sat her baby
outside, naked. The neighbors called the cops.
She knows why now. Her mother’s mother was
Danish. No wonder she hates the August
heat here, in her New Scandinavia . . .
Her mother wanted her steel to the touch.
Her mother wanted her to have a man
with money, her father hoped for moxie,
a man who might make life a work of art.
I served an apprenticeship. We set out
to make this wilderness our work of art.
What form does it take? When will I see it?
I love the smell of summer in the air.
Soon the doctor’s mask will send me a sleep
to forget the pain, though I can take it
and have: how else keep two teeth in the mouth
as anchor for the thirty false to chew . . .
She's become my legs, yet her bright mind quails
to be used. Near seventy she returns
to be with children she was once one of,
adolescent with wild hair up her ass,
she likes to laugh along with saying so,
she can’t stay away long without sorrow
on her nerves. Priests came to the house: they said,
Seduce me to know God . . . She preferred boys.
I learn to sing arias on my own
sending the lode of my voice
through open windows of our only house,
and at mass she plays piano, I sing,
parishioners hush, ladies love my voice,
the young want to grow old but keep young souls.
I see them and imagine them naked,
I am a devil in disguise.
(8 July 2011)
copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander
that will go from September to April
with hazardous gait, the ground shifts
with ease scrambling for traction under foot.
We do not sleep in the same bed, or love
what is not God (though I thirst and hunger
for the flesh of a sweet woman's body,
preferring hers, as always, and why not?)
The legs have gone, the knees are next,
I could be a sumo wrestler
in his youth not yet a mountain of flesh,
my heart devoted to beating its drum.
I love my wife and she loves me.
I am under the knife one summer, she
the next, my knee, her toe. We were once wild,
she the city girl, I the country boy.
She traveled west, we met. I wound up east.
She went south. I stayed. If I were to go
that was the time, or so I thought.
I could not foresee following, but did
finally. She loved temperate climates.
I could never travel south far enough
to not want her that side of the border.
One winter, her mother sat her baby
outside, naked. The neighbors called the cops.
She knows why now. Her mother’s mother was
Danish. No wonder she hates the August
heat here, in her New Scandinavia . . .
Her mother wanted her steel to the touch.
Her mother wanted her to have a man
with money, her father hoped for moxie,
a man who might make life a work of art.
I served an apprenticeship. We set out
to make this wilderness our work of art.
What form does it take? When will I see it?
I love the smell of summer in the air.
Soon the doctor’s mask will send me a sleep
to forget the pain, though I can take it
and have: how else keep two teeth in the mouth
as anchor for the thirty false to chew . . .
She's become my legs, yet her bright mind quails
to be used. Near seventy she returns
to be with children she was once one of,
adolescent with wild hair up her ass,
she likes to laugh along with saying so,
she can’t stay away long without sorrow
on her nerves. Priests came to the house: they said,
Seduce me to know God . . . She preferred boys.
I learn to sing arias on my own
sending the lode of my voice
through open windows of our only house,
and at mass she plays piano, I sing,
parishioners hush, ladies love my voice,
the young want to grow old but keep young souls.
I see them and imagine them naked,
I am a devil in disguise.
(8 July 2011)
copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander
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