ghazal

This is the end of love the last star in the final sky’s crushed and scabbed rhythms
The nightingale’s claw tears the rose-lip to a night-stabbing rain’s chanted rhythms.

It will sing through its’ flesh’s surcease till only the spread-eagled voice remains
And song breaks apart free at last of the wilderness of the throats’ coiled rhythms.

No pieties for separation can hope to assuage this shame’s spent and infertile soil
What was fervent once is now only the serrate reverberation of unrequited rhythms.

The nightingale springs out of infinity’s manuscript to decree its calligraphic truth
The rose of beauty slouches petals plucked as if to a dervish’s maddened rhythms.

There they lie arranged at last the nightingale’s beak and claw the rose’s nether-lip
To another world’s eye this patterned ruin is but a dance of hologrammed rhythms.

founder of the lineage a great magic iron bird


you see the bird laid 5 eggs & from each

5 ancients. generations later our master


(& then many other masters a self-distinguishing lineage)


as abbot he studied again-again the oldly forgot native religion


he changed the practice he took a wife. one day


his master said you are equal to my actualization go deeper still

go to nepal, where 1101 yogis still practice in the opened valley

(a fabulism of monkish giggle midst the veil on veil of mist)



all these teachers & their foreheads. after labor

through the ranks he returned ripe


transmitten with the sated karma, mining bodies


within bodies, sibi's dove within the lacquered flesh


root and router bodies- yet-


all this true enlightenment so few students.


he said i am nobody i just do my best make

your mind soft soap nothing sticks a spider in a cake

consider afflictions slowly. him asleep was clear light within.



for nine generations whispered shames

of extinguishement. (failed & dazzled by his failing). but


at the end a refined text-egg & another iron bird


a chanted unrhymed repetition a new order in baked souls

the cargo boat, ceylon, mozambique, the ocean's prisons.time's conch outstares,

involves




once again the featureless filament of the wooden minute


clock hands unheave the lair


(these stranded sailors laugh for the strangest reasons)


at the third floor window he leans on the balcony


hermetic becomes his rage. he only whistles never speaks.






a librarian in a city that does not exist. catalogues doze.




the pruned heart's oppressiveness premonitions no reconstitution only there is the




'mangled bicycle, the lizard's cold & crisscrossed belly'

riviera in the mind

the villas close as it turns warm.

the air is dry but is cool in the evening

and the water, amethyst


a tiny beach covered in seaweed four-feet thick


this is where she wanted to be

but could never return to / even / in memory

soul- flickering, white smoke, fragrance

or tremulous transparent sphere etc


(no, too ethereal, - too blunt an image).


imagine instead a plant within, hardy yet


to grow it needs the sunlight of your laughter


and equally: the water of your tears.

the last man on earth raised his hand and held out a flower.


he gazed up at the skyscrapers uninhabited for so long. then at the sky.


it was the millennial anniversary of the dying of the sun.


the stars came closer.


they said they were tired of having to be still so long.


they told him it would be a relief when he too left.

she felt the blood run
in the boar's head

sitting on the mud floor.
the others in the classroom
on chairs: the taga teacher
droning

she imagined: a blood-red blow
a final vivid death-rattle-reality

the severed head rolled away


she covered the bloodied hair with hay & burnt it.

organs in a soup. her head and palms cold.

The Holloway Series In Poetry - A.B. Spellman

another berkeley sunset

a flower by any other name...-


but, under-lit


by a setting sun


suspended in transparence


(not a color, not a detail, barely a glaze)


bitumen in lavender


the shape and lucency of urchins in flight


(the sky an upturned pot


holding a film of deep underwater)



-facing up diving downward


balancing in a reverie of patterned form.


in a minute the set sun will snap the image


and fold memory within
the eye's upturned palm-

itsn't only the painter

who lives on his fingertips

his heart a madder root



and swims from one descended image-mountain to another

scripts in water

imperceptum. inapparence. presence-



does not

apply it's self or optimize


is not persuasive


is equal to contradiction


lies undefended



plays with all cards open all eyes shut


lies likely unestablished.






an ocean opens in memory,


the brain a single thorn
weaving blood

the rain like a release of arrows

the earth like a bloodstained mace

smeared with grass and marrow.

the deer sacrificial. the hunter allegorical.

of constellations chasing constellations.

a tortoise the still soul of a churning ocean.

lectio difficilior.

the warrior shines in his wound

the single bullet revealing an opened red

the rod in his mouth a sun destroying the universe.

the river is a sister of the time of death

carrying away timid warriors to the town

of the king of the dead surrounded by kings

of the dead. the ghosts make wailing sounds.


the hour is the fire taken from the recitation

"as fire is covered by smoke so knowledge is covered with desire" Mbh

the rising son is an especial splendor


cloud and ocean cloud and ocean in lock


a blind man reads the late afternoon light
watches conch shells under water and later
the 16 crescent shaped parts of the moon.


a pilgrimage underwater under moonlight with the night
shining on the rising
moon a crescent on a forehead


the universe roams in all directions with flaming unibrow.

lotus metaphors

lotus charms as that of palms placed together

the red of nail and finger, the shape.

the red flowered lotus is not the dark blue flower.


filaments are lumen which the lotus eye perceives

& the crease of the garment is the interior distress

as one plucked from water, drooping


fragrant, exhalation as of a child's palm-clap


or: a lopped head, or the tip of a tusk, or spear


traveling from one war to another


its sharpness quick growing as lotus in new distant waters.


though the leaf repels, as words made but that do not stick

untaken advice and old remorse.


the night blooming white lotus is a dark complexioned lord

a landlord's end

in the end even the landlord grew intimate


as an old friend he looked at the servant & her children


the lightness, the freshness, o the repressible humanity




seemed as crushed rajnigandha in the dust of this midnight



if he could turn the wheel back-




the ceiling fan's thin-long stem's wide spoke chugs the liquifying heat of summer



(it seems even to hit an odd dizzy buzzed mosquito spilling his blood)



a sad & profound pleasure & meanness & quietness spreads up in him.



he feels after a long time. the present sharp as a shaving nick




all around, a zen udder of consciousness, a deep, cushioned, stained diwan



the drone of the fan is the metronome of his dying




in that stabled emptiness, each labored breath pops



the last flowers of consciousness- they explode his head-artery



his mosquito-blood splotches the haveli walls



is all death parasitic murder?- the children stare into his cataracted eyes



& absorbedly aim their catapult

in reply

FIRST POEM
>
> (from an old manuscript perhaps)
>
> we dislike that you men & w0myn of meane rancke
>
> wear silver buttons at your knees.
>
>
> or that those of greater liberal estate & education
>
> must for no cald blewe reason
>
> tolerate your wearing tiffany horlles & scarfes
>
>
>
> SECOND POEM
>
>
> as fatal thoughts hover
>
> children kiss trees
>
> breath catches an iron lung.
>
>
> faces in imagination's marmalade mist
>
> tapeworm their ways
>
>
> (six months later who would believe?)
>
>
> kisses in relief thread the dawn
>
>
> searching out the needing;
>
>
> flee. do, not talk.
>
>
> THIRD POEM
>
>
>
> tender but not without shape
>
> a single vein in marble virile
> in its solitude even in its
> blockedness, a nerve turfs
> the castle
>
> the sea roils away under
>
> the bay's window
>
>
> fake softness for love.
>
> small but large of gestures & always
> home in a pure raw
>
> mirrored oasis
>
>
> bird-flight
>
>
> skip upons the sea
>
>
> FOURTH POEM
>
>
>
>
> if this tongue's hum were not so
>
> unrelenting
>
>
> who would have the means?
>
>
>
> let the smile remain so
>
>
> metonymizings
>
>
> nothing more
>
>
> not even its
>
> linelike bone between the lips.
>
>
> separately together
> tear by tear
>
>
> feed & flee feed & flee
>
>
> like sad thoughtfulness of quiet
>
> after the excitedmost circus
>
>
> after the folded tent.
>
>
> FIFTH POEM
>
>
>
> the deeper the quiet the
>
> more the tenacity. all sort of things
> happen
> all over
>
>
> dream-poachers:
>
>
> in an iced land of pleasure
> they are most separate
>
> and each, by
>
> tolerating,
>
>
> recriminate
>
>
>

haiti

1. when young she wished to travel far, see skyscrapers

now dead, she'd give her wings as prayer for the surviving


2.a heart stops
just in time

to slip out the rib-cage &

perch

in a stranger's
memory.

ears grow so fine

that they can hear

as debris breaks up all-around

an ant's hapless,

infinite unfinished

rage-full scream-

every man or ant remains virginal to death

public deaths are solitary still

though one can't distinguish

one's numbed hours of pain or loss or rasped breath from another.



as strewn shanties articulate the earth's quake.


3. at night times ever


in an enclosed room,,, mummified as it seems


trapped as all would feel, where prayers are for dustless starlight



make agitations & nuisance & rage. step on the feet of icons.