Ethics

Will my difficulty
In fabricating silence be worth
Your reminiscing my silent outline
Somedaze
When we are too old
To do anything about
It?

Desire

If I have what I want,
What more could I want
To have of you?

Desire designs itself
To please its own self.
This Faustus knew.

We eye one another
Spontaneously
Fashioning lust.

If we have eachother--
A basic engine
Desires we must

--We lose that perfection.
Who wants an emerald
Returned to dust?

No Lightbulb on the Porch

There is much to learn in a cigarette lighter,
African rhythm, Belgian chocolate and bramble-brier.
This rhyming makes no sense to me
But I'll smoke another if it's free.

This branching, and my friends all gone away
And two cigarettes remain but not to stay.
This rhyming certes puzzles me
But I'll smoke one more as sure as certainly.

These leaves are falling from the tree,
Falling, flailing sure as certainly,
They're gathering by the undead flowers
If only for one cert--uncertain hours.

This rhyming lacks integrity,
I know I'm sure, as sure as sure can be
This cigarette's done, done with burning brighter,
It leaves behind a shock--shocken lighter.

Virginia isn't Wyoming

These wooden planks smell
Like my grandmother's cabin did
In the valley where a
Glacier carved the Teton Valley
Eons ago.

The smell is like sap
Still runs down the
Cheap unvarnished boards
On a slow sloping way
To quiet snow.

Virginia isn't Wyoming though.
Grandmother isn't up
Long before I am, halfway
Done with her crossword
And preparing pancakes
And eggs and frozen sausage
And whatever other fancies
I replied when she cooed,

"What else would you like?"

She didn't call me honey,
She was the sweet one.
Nothing puzzling about her but
The crosswords she unraveled every
Fresh morning.

Grandma is gone now.
Her cabin is not her cabin anymore,
My nippy stuffed nose only
Confuses states sometimes.
It doesn't take long to remember
Virginia isn't Wyoming,
Virginia isn't when Wyoming was.

I was afraid if I set out

I was afraid if I set out
I should ne'er return,
That my fluid heart so shook about
For quicksand trophies would ever yearn.

Who would love me in the lonely fen?
The bluebird, the fox, the wild horse?
These woodlings have it all to them
To scavenge, where Nature left no course.

Byron etched his mark in ancient stone,
Matisse left a chapel by the sea,
Could these modern entageweorc
Outlast a mortal misery?

I shall seek moderation in the shade,
Beside sunlight, that falls between the glade.

I Follow Science

This is an hypothesis I found,
Pinched it off the ground,
(maybe 'twas one's discard)
And I've been testing it.

Don't think less of me
That this philosophy
Runs contrary
To your creature comforts,
It irked me too
Like my first Roquefort,
But it's growing on me.

It might pan,
Or I might leave it on new ground.

Professor

He got to he age when he wanted to lecture,
A silver-scalped half-moon monk among the prefecture
Of Eliot, Frost, Stevens, and Bishop.
And he stood at the lectern
And sought to elicit
Their metaphor, their pedagogy,
Maggie and May,
Milly and Molly.

Professor, I'll listen,
I promise to vigil
If you'll so reward me
At year's end epistle,

(But I know that there's something,
Wisdom or other, to tie me to them,
These legends, your brothers.)