Ice Wine
-- a sonnet for Beverly on Valentine's Day Feb 14/02
I thought it wouldn't be an easy go
To realign ourselves three decades late
With habits hardened to resist the flow
Of others we'd no more accommodate.
It seems unseemly these our "golden years"
To spend in happy self-indulgency,
Whatever debt we claim as our arrears,
Whatever prospects we can yet foresee.
So much for conscience, generation past.
So much for posture and propriety.
Come tap our vintage cask - the best at last -
Drink passion deep. Enjoy immoderately
This harvest hoarded through the years of strife,
This frost-formed sweetness from the vines of life.
Conference Daydream
Leggo my libido!
Don't you know
I'm in conference
With a preponderence
Of questions,
Suggestions ...
And thought
Is what ought
To be so
Not the flow
Of juices
The uses
Of appendages
Distendages
Sighs
Thighs
Insertions
Exertions
Reinsertions
And the hot jet
Of beget ...
So g'way and quit sucking my psyche
Machu Picchu
When Ollantaytambo on the Cusco highway fell
To Spanish smallpox, steel and cavalry,
The Inca went away into the jungle and let die
All knowledge of their citadel.
Two thousand metres up, vine-covered granite held
Their secret fast, four hundred years,
Above the winding Urubamba and the smoke
Of inquisition, industry and war.
So, when I left your sacred valleys, unexplained,
And you drew up the jungle cloak, a shroud
Around the mysteries we’d found,
Only the solstice sunrise found us gone,
Lighting the wondering wings of condors wheeling there
In the awful, empty skies
Above the crawling stream
Of the everywhichway world.
Returning now, we find our passage barred
And must relinquish, as an entry fee,
The dusty baggage of the intervening years,
Or butcher on time’s altar, all we held
As necessary for a safe life sanely lived;
For ghosts that cry for resurrection here
Will have us naked now, or hurl us down,
Unsanctified within this sacred place.
Let us let go decorum’s flimsy gown,
The blood-rimmed garment of convention’s god;
And, absent all pretense, with open eyes,
Accept annihilation’s consequence, where love
Transfigures pride and glistening tears
Wash daylight down the green and granite face
Of Machu Picchu, testifying still
To service, sacrifice and adamantine will.
Rosebuds
“Sunlight kisses roses,” poets say,
and no one thinks too long on it;
image cute, complete and unremarkable,
as roses are in mid-July,
as summer sunlit afternoons.
But were the roses to respond:
blush redder,
moisten,
open out,
pulse up
to kiss again the warm tongue
of their sun’s desire
twist hungry in the bed
and softly moan delight
why there’s an image worth imagining,
worth glancing ‘round to see
if anyone has caught us swallowing
your soft, delicious petals
glistening sweet
upon the taste buds of our mind.
Re-minders
We couldn’t see the way; we had no map;
The future wasn’t stylish when we met,
And insubstantial time so softly wrapped
Us that we nothing knew of fate – and yet
Some prescience or intention, if you will,
Kept us a hand’s grasp only out of reach
Along the whole way heedless up the path
Of busy, separate, mindful lives. We each
Kept just a sideways glance or so away
Until the summit breaks – too close, too soon –
And clutching tight, we deeply breathe each day
Our separate thoughts, insistent to attune --
Let go, let be, let only this engage
Our hearts in total certainty:
That love will hold us always in its rage –
In darkness, fog, or new dawn’s clarity.