Marrow

What a cricket-show on the hillside
crooning to Aeolian winds
cataracting down the Susquehanna. 
Slow summer grooves cuss the shade 
stealing Iroquois light 
and flirt with bees percussing.

You stand among the larch grove 
you planted in anno domini
when you invented operatic growth— 
carbon, karst, soil, silt, rain, love— 
oxygen-eyed larches shine straight up 
sky beyond and liquifying.

Ever this was not a space along 

or inside time, so electric in the kiln, 

fierce their eyes you fire 

rib to lung to heart 

enriching marrow in the bones 

truly and subterranean. 

Generations thumbed to being

graceful in your hands, contours 

you curved from land to long-haired 

long-robed saints medieval 

clobbering every demon who dared to say

we are, for all we love, a hoax.

Here, in your chemistry of glazes,

are green-garden colors 

unresurrectable, but shimmering.

Labor was always ever won uneasily

by women or saints, imperfect porcelain of you, 

each porcelain object that might be true.

The Grammar of Paradiso

We couldn’t linger long, for our time was up.

Years were mossy and we fell into a heap 

mucked up with feeling, and feeling scythes 

chop through us. Years were outsize 

on the palate. Hours turned bitter, then tart.

Augustine said: love god and do what you want. 

But talking became a symptom of everything

perilous; words were everywhere, whirlwinding. 
 

It was easy to be roulette about next year 

sunsetting and sunrising, and to disappear 

into endings. No discord, no duress,

no surprises on the jaw, and no unrest.

Not the raw experience of being tender

too soon, or too late, and sensing you were 

onto something. But living doubt to doubt

was exactly what talking was about.
 

It is all finery of endings, we think, reveling 

in grace, uplift, love. We believe revelation

is waiting for us, but grace is never beautiful 

and it demands more than the finale 

of being human: not peace but varieties 

of experience, not clarity but society,

not writing in Latin but shouting in dialect

beatitudes within. Our senses flame up still.

Transhuman

Vivid consolations persuaded me that being

always on the brink of love was not

divine at all. Turning to indifferences 

is the anteroom of the never. If you fix 

your gaze on objects, it never will suffice.

Nothing takes. We work out quantum truths

greater than time on Earth, 

but not how we become diffuse.
 

We operate in swirling moods of the surreal, 

outer-being seeking inner being

to feed our sense that we are real. 

Vanity to vanity, we race from birth to heaven

demented at the gates, holding virtue tight.

Theological folks say it’s for better or for worse; 

designing doings and goings unscripted 

into scripts is the mystery of essere.

 Beatrice says I am obtuse, and time is inside out.

I arrow to divinity before the bow releases me, 

becoming the moon in the beautiful ways 

sequined fish appear as fractals where light pools.

It is so impossible to calculate beginnings 

at the beginning of time disappearing.

Transhuman on this pearl moon, 

I become wavelengths ricocheting. 

From my lapis lazuli Magellan couch, 

I ask myself how it feels, reading trecento ways 

of believing and turning pages into paradise,

increasingly disoriented that knowledge 

never empties, yet I can’t remember beyond Lethe. 

So many stolen years. From the preface 

to the last canticle, one part more, 

another less; suffering is the maw of experience.