Mare Imbrium

Grandmother Moon hide me in the snowy
blanket of your light, let me see the
secret life of the woman who walks with golden
candles in the night through this the city
of my discontent. Let me see her stories
& her songs, the girl triumphant in
her monologue, the young woman's careful
choice, the maiden taking account of her
truth, not trusting the slick solutions
of the paranormer players like this would-be
Magus.

Good for you.

Mitred corners enclose me, in this frame,
I look and suddenly, she is there, Eleanor
of Aquitane, that tapestry at the Cloisters
fair Annalise under the boughs of the holy oak
Kimberly, smiling that knowing sacred grin
across her desk. "Later you."

My heart is drumming her lyric self
each cycle greater than the last
the notes describe the melody of this life
Grandmother Moon
help me be worthy of Her song.

This piece was written before Kimberly and myself started living together in late 1996. I was deep in the knowledge of the Lady by then. Graves' The White Goddess rested on my bed table. It had suddenly come to me that Kimb and I knew the same sorts of things about the nature of being, the universe itself. We both had adopted the prism of the Lady in how to approach and live our lives. And, I was totally falling in love with her. That pretty blonde woman in the editor's office, who smiled at me when I walked by. Every day I still strive to be worthy of Her song, the Lady's and Kimb's. This is still the most remarkable event of my life: Kimb's love.

in this vision

this woman is white, so very white
her limbs are geometric, tense and predictive
her skeleton is the armature for this fate
her translucent flesh, grey, pink, wet, open
waiting for that certain key, that poem

darling we have to join
hip to hip word to word
we have to serve this universe
in the night you become the
huntress and I become the
great Stag of the forest
the marriage must be made
I hear you in the savage wind
the time has come
the tree is suddenly in flames
all that I have been
turns to your face

An early goddess poem, written in the period between Becky Bradway and Kimberly Britton. I spent several years there, without a lover, reading about the White Lady. I never trolled for women. I didn't go to the bars. I did have an abortive affair with Connie Panichi. I lived inside a dream, really. It's a hard thing, but somehow I knew that the Lady would bring me someone. And that is exactly what happened.

haunting the self

if memory could reduce, or expand the slide show
the multitude of voices turning phrases out in lyric sheets
if the fact of this memory were only more concrete

instead the days are ghosts:
the people I don't see
the women I don't fuck
the children now become adults

what has become of me
hidden with Lindsay's ghost
imagining a unified field theory
in the mist of these memories


Einstein spent the last part of his life attempting to posit a "unified field" theory. He could never get it and no one really ever has been able to say it "all" in the equations that are the language of the theoretical physcist. Lindsay refers to Cousin Vachel, whom all Springfield poets must at least acknowledge if not honor. I honor him, though, having spent entirely too much time in his shoes. He had a hard road to how and it sounds like it might've been even stupider than mine on the subject of the romantic liaison. Enough theory, I need it to be real in some specific fashion.

just

in sun-dampened days the backyard swing
lies placid under a cold fall rain, plastic
seat shiny and clean

blessed be the backyard where
the noises of my time turn the self
outward; where my daughter
and I sing Pete Seeger's Hammer Song;
where the moon illumines the cantata of plants
thick w/fluid and green noise in my memory

I return in sleep to my child
digging in the sandbox; we tell each other
stories, track birds across the sky;
the dog chases squirrels on the wires
overhead, and people rowdy walk down the street
on the other side of the wood fence
where we cannot see

Winter is black and white; these days pass
like water in a fat pipe
no one should ever give this up, or be forced to
true love should be just—remember this
if nothing else


Reflecting the time on Bryn Mawr Street before and just after BB left me. Paige and I spent a lot of time in the backyard. She loved to swing and we would sing song while I pushed her up as high as she wanted to go. Those were perfect times.

Sleeping Beauty Awakened

From the passing bus the brick home
on the boulevard's corner seems asleep
eyes flipped the mini-blinds turned up
... a hundred years pass
the noises of birth & death in a two-step
while sleeping beauty casts off the down
comforter and looks at the arab in her bed

suddenly the cat demands his freedom
the dog sneaks out the back gate
the child, in her room, wads grandma's
unused fabrics around her in role after role

beauty does not wake the arab
she has her own great white to pursue
and it has been one hundred years now
She dons her rob & slips back
into the real world

the Ay-rab is secretly awake
in fact he hasn't slept now, for 100 years.
His kiss did not wake her, but he
would not give up. He listens to the child
speaking rhymes. He feels better.
He remembers the whale's
terrible, glorious attack.
the Ice breaks in his heart
... beauty, beauty, beauty

a hundred years before she climbed aboard the bus
john lennon died and she sent the arab away
the south fifth street thunders across the boulevard
in the sandy soil the great white sleeps
even today

From the manuscript Approaching Candlemas in a Sports Car, Poems on the subject of need in a damaged universe. This poem was written after Becky Bradway left me. She is posited as sleeping beauty here. This refers to her avoiding the subject of her father's abuse for so many years. We lived in a house on the corner of 10th Street and Bryn Mawr in south Springfield. Years before we bought that house (1987) Becky lived on South 9th Street and often took the bus to SSU. It ran up 10th, right past the house and she imagined living in that house. Becky left me in 1993, so she lived there for almost six years. I lived there another six years before moving in 1999.

In that house Paige had a trunk full of fabric pieces that Connie Bradway had bought and never got around to using. Paige made them into innumerable costumes. Lots of fun there. I'm the arab here and yes it is meant to speak to Captain A-hab and the great white whale that signified the ambition of ego and death. I did love Becky, but by then she had awakened and there was no love for me in this picture. I accepted that, because one has to accept that you can't make someone love you. Either they do, or they don't. I have come to believe that Becky never really loved me, or maybe anyone. But I know that Kimberly Britton loves me as no one has ever loved me. And conversely, I love her in a way I have never loved before. Love reciprocated is far greater than a mere sum. It is a thing that grows, a song becoming light, the breath of the Lady in the sail of this existence. There I go, mixing my metaphors again.

Subterranean Consideration

Seeking regularity
my companions, noteworthy
in the right decade
have come now to the
subterranean considerations:
I measure out my shit
eyes peeled for telltale bleeding
awaiting the potato up the ass
of an enlarged prostate.
Can we handle this stuff?
That's what the wife wants to know.
Can we control the multiplication
of our fears while we eat
the forty-something bran muffin,
the thick fibers of our anima
confined to counting out the week
in terms of Our Bowels which aren't
in heaven, just yet.

Doesn't anyone understand
just how funny this is?

Written after my first colonscopy and at the beginning of the recognition that aging would bring me down. And it will, it will. Certainly mortality is real and certain. But I try to approach it with a good attitude. After all, we are only here because the Lady has allowed it. The fact that we also have free will tells us everything we need to know about the nature of the Divine. We are of the divine and invited to share in this divinity. All we have to do is be honest with ourself. Reall, that's all. Heh.

To Rosie

you never blamed me
recognising my weakness as normal, human
with your bridge gone now
I guess I won't see those people anymore.
So much loss, so many of us
slipping further apart.
The air on south grand is a faint perfume
in my memory. I lived there, an irony
in 1981 ... those perfumed cigarettes
mixed with Ricardo's cannabis.
You would never fold your cards,
even when it made sense.

The Universe is too damn random.
My fourteen year old son told me that.


This poem was written after Rosie Richmond died at the end of February, 1994. Rosie lived for many years in the building at 117 South Grand where Pat and I lived in 1980-81. She moved in long after I had moved out and ended up living with Bradway. Rosie and Ric Amezquita used to come over and play poker with us at the long dining room table that Pat had acquired. These games usually featured Ross Hulvey and sometimes I think JW, and various other diverse denizens of that scene. They alway featured vast quantities of marijuana. Ric liked to believe he could handle it better than anyone else and so felt it was an advantage to him. He lost consistently. One time my son, Joel, won seven hands in a row and got Ricardo riled up. Perhaps because Joel was like 10-11 at the time. Joel's quote about the randomness of the universe is from the trip to New York city he made in 1985, to see me and Becky when Becky was in the grad school at Columbia. He turned fifteen in August that summer, right after he was with us in Manhattan.

Rosie smoked these awful clove cigarettes (I think they are from India) and they smelled plenty. And they were strong. She had quite a sense of personal style that girl. I miss her plenty, as do many other people. As predicted in the poem I had little to do with the feminist cabal after that. BB had left the Coalition. I would occasionally see Polly Poskin. I noticed on tv recently that Polly is the president of my old neighborhood association in Springfield, Harvard Park. I was the secretary for the group for many years, mostly because I had a computer and a laser printer.

In 1987 when J. decided to make people decide whether they were my friend or not over what happened in 1979, Rosie absolutely remained my friend and often came over to Becky and mine's house on Bryn Mawr. And while she lived and ran Brainchild we would occasionally have shared readings. I published several of her stories in the Writer's Bar-B-Q. She was quite the funny writer. I still have a manuscript of Duffy Jo, her comic western novel, and also Fifth Position, her roman a clef of life in Springfield in the 1980s. A wise and funny piece. Rosie and I didn't always see eye to eye, but I loved her anyway. When you love someone that way you forgive their weaknesses and their mistakes. That is how you can tell who your real friends are.