Surprise: On What is Going On Here

Let's make this clear now. I am what Robert Graves would characterize as a poet of the Theme. All my good poems tend to center around the romantic relationships of this turn on the wheel. This is how it is. These poems attempt to describe and catalogue my real relationship to the phenomenol world. I struggle every single day to ascribe some sense of truth to these words, these captured metaphors. It is, I think, remarkably difficult to be truly honest in language and yet live in humility and love. I think that is why most true aesthetes live as hermits and monks. When you farm the territory of the relationship, particularly with sex involved, the ability to see through the forest becomes very tenuous at best.

Yet I believe I am very good at this. Flawed, but still, a greater resource than I would have thought myself as late as forty. Life is an interesting and fluid spell-making journey. I have embarked on it, as have we all, the spirit in mind, but the flesh is the great engine that drives us. I do not see that there is any actual division between these things. This is the hidden wisdom of the mystery religions. This is the act that makes poetry real.

Suddenly, that which was thought mystical becomes the physical act of love. Surprise!

woman as goddess

in this vision
this woman is white, so very white
her limbs are geometric, tense and slack,
her skeleton the armature for this fate
her translucent flesh grey & pink
and she is just wet, just gashed open
waiting for that certain poem, that key

baby, we have to serve this universe
we have to join genital to genital
word to word my tongue becomes your tongue
you become the huntress in the night
who speeds across this february sky

the white girl spread open like the milky way...
I hear you in the savage wind, your song