"UNREQUITED"
©1993 - DV8
01. BAREFOOT FOR A SCORPION
The colour of the sac and stinger of the scorpion
was red, and got its beauty from their poison. Bare
feet ache with the threat, the eyes with praise,
the serum for revulsion. Praise be, then, that
the armoured teardrop searching on the tail
could miss feet, sting sight, and reconcile
death’s stamping panic with a vision of form,
red at the point where chance and love join.
02. FOR HIM
now to lose you
what sense
in what is left
the rocky
riverbed
without water
03. WALKING ALONE
It is night. For hours I have been walking,
wanting to see you, hoping you might
appear suddenly by the side of the road,
on a bridge, or in the arc of headlights
bending towards me. I have continued
beyond any place you might conceivably be.
Sunk into a dark hollow, between trees
and stone, the river goes where it has to go.
In the cold air I construct long conversations:
whatever we wouldn’t say if you were here.
I recite poems, sing songs. I return home and write more.
You are, of course, attending within them,
handsome and calm, near a window
or by a bridge before winter. I fix you
safely, where we might find each other.
But something comes between us, like glass
or water, a distance I cannot avoid.
We meet by accident and fall away.
I come back here, compose some more,
and walk about at night reciting it to you.
Everything I conceive as possible
returns to an ordered page. I wish I were blind.
I wish my fingers would drop off.
What are they doing, writing all this again?
04. THE WAY OF ALL LOSS
Breathing in the thicket of your thin, tossed hair
I would hear our voices like distant seas
break vaguely upon the waking room where
suspended, tentative, ill-at-ease,
we floated above our awkward bed
like tight-lipped angels on the Sistine
ceiling. Listless in the garroted
shelter of your arms,
apologetic for having made apologies,
I winced like a patient being hollowed by disease.
Oh, what coarse insistence there is to lust!
If what I know is just the hoarse
reply of skin becoming brittle crust,
the guilt of love become remorse,
I would have understood before the fragile causes
of your doubt. Driving through the pain,
did you listen for a music in the manic, weeping rain,
and imagined you saw me
in each swaying stalk of wheat, each sighing stone?
We learn by loving that we live alone.
Now I loiter through the winter in dim
museums, startled by what I am,
or ride the subways every afternoon,
my arm drawn to the window, poised like a harpoon.
05. MOONRISE
Moonrise, nothing angular about him
but the effect, pocked cool harlot
whose sheer moves between buildings
toting garbage
flings me out delight.
Can I take less of Autumn than he
clear into winter, can I value the less
fortunate who acts better and better
balances but to be seen?
Belong to me,
two-timer, partner in climbing erosion;
you nowise furnish me the handholds
into the blind loveseat, but repair
to it costing a bit of smile.
We trail
the whole lover under your still veil,
never quite ready to die. Dumb
whore put out the light to cross over,
dump me then to distances and night.
06. JUDGMENT
Oh, why judge him
even though he is a man?
(As Cain was before him)
Which can never fail,
Being bound by no pride
Of Armorial bearings
Bequeathed in tail male.
And though your blood brother
Who dared to do you wrong
In his greed of him
Might plead a like wisdom
The fault to excuse.
For he is just,
He has hanged the vain rogue
By the neck from his noose.
07. THE ESCAPE INTO YOU
So many years of making it, who deserves
that many more, like a reprieve
from war the weekend soldier
furloughs into a medal of dishonour?
It wasn’t enough to be a mountain,
you had to be a river I couldn’t swim.
We had your body to build on.
Even that arranged a little paranoia
like a face you almost once
recognized over a raincoat when
the elements came together, you
swearing, what a gasp to see an old friend.
Any slut could have broken my heart,
the way we lived. The event, for all that,
was so special I never asked, Are you,
or are you not, overcome by my vast
glandular diabolism, huh? Soldiers
leaped; I loved your silent stones.
08. THE SCHOOL OF NIGHT
What did I study in your school of night?
When your mouth’s first unfathomable yes
Opened your body to be my book I read
My answers there and learned the spell aright,
Yet, though I searched and searched, could never guess
What spirits it raised nor where their questions led.
Those others, familiar tenants of your sleep,
The whisperers, the grave somnambulists
Whose eyes turn in to scrutinize their woe,
The giant who broods above the nightmare steep,
That sleeping boy, shuddering, with clenched fists,
A vampire baby suckling at his toe.
They taught me most. The scholar held his pen
And watched his blood drip thickly on the page
To form a text in unknown characters
Which, as I scanned them, changed and changed again:
The lines grew bars, the bars a Delphic cage
And I the captive of its magic verse.
But then I woke and naked in your bed
The words made flesh slept, head upon my chest;
The bed rode down the darkness like a stream;
Stars I had never seen danced overhead.
A blind man’s fingers read love’s body best:
Read all of me! you murmured in your dream.
Read me, my darling, translate me to your tongue,
That strange language which you know by heart;
Set my words to your music as they fall;
Soon, soon, my love! The night will not be long;
With dawn the images of sleep depart
And its dark wisdom fades beyond recall.
Here I stand groping about the shores of light
Too dazzled to read that fading palimpsest
Faint as a whisper that archaic hand
Recalls some echo from your school of night
And dead sea scrolls that were my heart attest
how I once visited your holy land.
09. THE TROUBLE
We were together in the room talking
together, quietly, when one
of us hurled a cup against the wall
shattering it there, now the tea
is there. There is
nothing inflammable
as peace, nothing
as far as I can see
but a broad air
filled space
we call the room: here the trouble moves, burning
its way across the grass
figured in the rug, a figure
of our too careful quiet, crisp
and without motion, to a distance
where it is extinguished. We
are still here
in the room
we have not moved from, talking
of the trouble,
hedging
in around it
slowly, with a stubble
of voices, when
the heat of the moon coming
from behind my back catches
me walking
away from it again.
10. WELL WELL
Oh he’ll be to blame for how it ends he says
he knows that
It’s okay if it doesn’t last for always and always I said.
Whereupon he snuggles his head in my shoulder,
secure in
that I love him, he knows that,
and secure in
my loving touch as he touches me,
and that he can leave okay, warm
and intact with love yet another day!
I watch him looking at me –
he in my arms, me in his!
his eyes are intelligent,
they are reserved yet warm:
Oh the strange current through me
that Love is the word for.
“Wednesday night there’s a band playing,”
he say’s he’ll take me.
A sign: goodbye?
Like my lawful husband returning
to his home from his own love
He stopped in.
When he was across the street
we waved at each other: Good Luck.
But it’s never Loves’ question what Love deserves.
And we’re all on it as the earth does turn.
And what I thought was goodbye was months ago.
We keep making it new like the daily sun.
It passes my understanding.
I don’t know anymore what’s going to happen
and when that’s okay it’s really okay.
11. TOWARD CERTAIN DIVORCE
High-beams stabbing the eyes of animals,
the ruts and spilling over shoulders,
upon which wheels occasionally
cry, I am walking on this road
toward you, for you, just walking
without controversy, without a worm
in my stomach, not a thought in my head,
when I stop short at your doorway.
Just to say thanks, write, and stay well,
I arrive to water the trees, upon which
the ‘poet’ has shed his tears for years,
and to burn the remains of his heart.
It is the middle of the winter of the heart,
or is it summer – I am never quite sure.
Anyway, the furnace is practically floating
or the two people have turned it off
because it is only winter in the heart.
Not a thought in my head for winter!,
and here I am and it might as well be winter.
Or is this winter-in-summer, does it matter?
Friendship, which seems so unpromising now,
promised them an envelop of profit,
a Land at Land’s Edge, the world itself
extending to a testament of geography.
And now you want to separate for good,
and if I were better I would stop you,
wouldn’t I?, by singing to spite this hunger,
though you beat the bars of my harpish heart.
And could I propose the self’s satisfaction
if commanded to, and rise, thus, above you,
in alteration of the solitary soul
which poets worth their salt take as their task?
I am afraid I only have the casual prophecy
and not the life of the word, that energy,
within me, though I have sworn to seek it.
Swear to me, that you leave to seek it too.
12. NEVER
Never shall I beg the gods
to force the wind and rain,
nor shall I ever
long for you again.
Never will I find you bright
in the moon-glow of the night.
You are what never was
and what never could be.
For you I would have sailed
across the seas.
I can’t stand this pain.
Never will I love in vain.
Never will I love again.
The spring of my life is no more.
The summer of my soul is behind a closed door.
And now, the winter of my mind –
Leaves ice freezing my heart.
But I’m praying for this ice to melt.
For this ice to be gone.
I can’t bear this sorrow
I wish I’d never been born.
So you have flown like a bird –
from my hand
turning the light out
within my heart.
And I know you are gone.
So never shall I will the gods
to force the wind and rain.
And I know that
Never shall I see you again.
13. SELF HATRED
Disdaining to attract
I use equal control
Not to put off a soul
Guiding toward the exact
Point where someone snaps
The lure of my self-abuse,
Runs with the line; perhaps
Slow as I reel, breaks loose.
Next time, so as to not
Escape the chance to lose
I catch again, I fuse
Glamour with failings, plot
Now for his admiration
Or scorn, entitling me
To open excoriation
And, later still, to rue
Dealings with that kind ever
Whose attitude I appear
To have created. Clear
That a moral man would never
Have let this pass, unless
he despised me. I would
(but see him cringe!) confess
I never was much good,
Am not, shall never be.
I need his hate? In time
I may. Did he, from the crime
Of love, detachedly
Once speak, I wound myself
As test, alone remain
To console, and hate myself
Too wholly to end the pain?
It hardly matters, does it?
Leave him that image of
Myself hungry to love
Or whatever that bastard will posit
If he has not forgotten.
Of course. In time, I know
Myself thoroughly rotten
For hating myself so.
14. THE PAIN
The pain of days gone by
Lost forevermore
Like love washed up on
A distant, desolate shore
It is never to be regained
Gone from this world
This horrid existence
My heart bleeds
It aches with the pain
That of which I am drowning
The non-swimmer in the sea of life
The blood drips thickly
On the stainless steel
Wretched crimson drops
Dripping, flowing
Racing down the blade
Like so many ignominious wrongs
Pathetic, pleading droplets
Mere tears of the dying soul
Crying out, screaming,
Begging, wanting
Waiting for and
Demanding justice
There is so much
Yet no remorse
The devil
Whatever you may think it is
Rears its infernal head up high
Basking in the agony that I suffer
The wrongs of misplaced love
That of those who just give in too easily
PAIN!
It feels good
As it rips through
My now damned soul
Hurling it towards
And into the void
Eternity, Infinity
(I am not talking Obsession,
This is no Calvin Klein advert)
The deepest, darkest blackness
Has overflowed its bounds
I have been swallowed whole
Leaving no trace of my sentence
Of who or what or why
Or whence I came of where I went
I no longer exist
The blood runs freely
From my open wrists
Filling the bathtub
Reddening the clear
Crystal waters
Salty tears drip
From my blind, blackened eyes
I did not wish to die
Not this way at least
But the pain left no further choice
There is no other way for release
From this form of pain
This pitiless, nameless,
Cantankerous pain
I can not, shall not
Abide this abomination
Delicious torture of the soul
And the blood spills out
In rivers of remorse
What have I done
To deserve this fate
What did I do
That was so fucking wrong
Oh, my pious deities
Why hast thou forsaken me
I wanted to leave peacefully
In my sleep
But this pain is a cancer
And in my merciless
Thoughtless
Insane plead for release
I have brought it upon those
I loved most
Please by the names of all the gods
Give me the courage
I need the strength, the wisdom
The escape, the freedom
Let me be relieved
The pain be gone
Let me die before
I am sober enough to stop myself
But it is much too late
And the rivers of death
Are bottomless
In this agony
This grief so violent
In my bathtub so deep
I really wish I had the guts
To open these bulging
Blue veins
Myself
15. FELO DE SE
I want to die
Life is no more
Nothing to look forward to
My spirit no longer soars
I thought I had everything
Under control
Obviously I was wrong
Now I’ve lost my soul
I am all alone
Left in my solitude
Did I not show you –
Enough gratitude
I just need the courage
To do it myself
I blame no one
Except myself
Someone kill me now
I don’t have the guts
To pick up the razor
And make those cuts
Where can I run to
Where can I hide
How do I flee
From this hurt deep inside
Maybe life will get better
Since it couldn’t get worse
But who am I fooling
Life is a joke
Love is a farce
Now it is over
It was in the cards
Let me die
16. UNTITLED
If I were out of love
and sequence I would turn
the end of love – its death –
knife-like against myself
to cut off my distinction and
join the teeming trillions,
the great majority,
the dead.
17. VAMP
I fell away towards death
for lack of company and goods:
no business but to flinch.
A man caught me with the hook
his smile wore at its edge
and wound me up with a winch.
Love’s bucket, I was refilled!
So I came back and kissed
and cursed him.
He fixed lunch.
He gave me solid grounds,
the company of laughter
and the water-works.
I
recant!
Should I invest
in fly-by-night concerns
while I have flesh to risk
and a soul to burn,
why did I hang around
his well head and decant
death’s water to my drawer?
18. WHERE THE COMFORT
Oh, where the comfort (I am hugging close) that sleep or death
I want from you? You turn away looking at colours of the moment,
express a natural exuberance I fear. I asked for wholeness. Thus
the parts were hurled back, the wholeness lost.
On the deathbed a figure who passes his life as if not alone
grabs empty air. A disinherited warmth somewhere. Another City
Surely. Now longing where there was rest, regret where once
a life moved outward from its energies. Now the last desire.
So that the different longings for the end can rest.
19. MIDNIGHT ELEGY
I’m standing, clear-headed, strangely clear-headed
The music of love, the poem’s sacred rhythm can no longer pacify
me.
Lord, I must summon all my strength against despair
– Sweetness of the dagger in the heart, up to the hilt
Like remorse. I’m not sure of dying.
And what if that were hell, insomnia – this desert of the poet?
This pain of living, this dying of not dying
The anguish of darkness, this passion for death and light
Like phalena moths at night on the hurricane lamps in the horrible
rot of the virgin forests.
20. QUO MENDAX
What I thought was love
in me, I find a thousand instances
as fear. Of the tree’s shadow
winding around the chair, a distant music
of frozen birds rattling
in the cold.
Where ever I go to claim
my flesh, there are entrances
of spirit. And even its comforts
are hideous uses I strain
to understand.
Though I am a man
who is loud
on the birth
of his ways. Publicly redefining
each change in my soul, as if I had predicted
them,
and profited, biblically, even though
their chanting weight,
erased familiarity
from my face.
A question I think,
an answer; whatever sits
counting the minutes
till I die.
When they say, “It is David
who is dead.” I wonder
who will they mean?
21. EARTH, TAKE ME BACK
I have been dying a long time
In this cool valley-land, this green bowl ringed by hills –
The cup of a giant flower whose petals are
These forests round about, still wet
From the cold November rains.
Night draws on. It is growing dark.
The trees are silent. The hills are dark and silent.
All things fall silent, or look the other way,
When you are dying.
There is a delicate haze over everything.
Soft clouds are floating like water-lily pads
On the dark pool of the sky. Between them
Stars come out…
22. THE OFFERING
Polished and packaged, grotesque,
The fingers tapered
Like those a harpist might have –
What music would it play?
Probably none –
The intricate strictures in the glass
Would indicate otherwise.
An ordinary hand,
One without pain or distinction,
Except that it’s here, except that it’s waiting,
The object of no one’s desire:
For look at the cut – there,
Below the palm, upon the wrist:
A hand that offers itself, a hand to be kindled…
There is no hand for such hands, no pocket.
23. SUNDAY
Among low familiar fields
the stones have their names
Flowers crowd at their sides
small cups thin flags
the neat and hyphened years
and the wind makes its way
toward winter
I have lodged myself in a box
surly and sad
with no one to visit
The gentleman has few to remember
His people he says all passed away
and have their places
but the roses by the plaques
cannot care for themselves
What could anyone ask
beyond this remembrance
What is it to be blessed
when all the gifts of warmth
cower in the face of carvings
Out of marble ruins
impenetrable the hours of afternoon
become his own
The reasoning’s of passage
and the rites of flowers
may falter between his hands
but what remains rises
above the slow sway of fields
and blooms like bells
upon a danger of snow
I have hidden myself in a tree
where the wind bends down
and the bark bleeds secretly into my hands
Words I say
lie down a while in your white graves…
24. HERE LIES…
Here lies a ‘poet’ who would not write
His soul runs screaming through the night,
“Oh give me paper, give me pen,
And I will very soon begin!”
Poor Soul, keep silent. In Death’s clime
There’s no pen, paper, notion – and no Time.
25. IS THAT WHAT I AM?
New ghost is that what I am
Standing on stairs of water
No longer surprised
Hope and grief are still my wings
Why I cannot fly
What failure still keeps me
Among you the unfinished
The wheels go on praying
You are not hearing something different
We beat our wings
Why are you there
I did not think I had anything else to give
The wheels say it after me
There are feathers in the ice
I lay the cold across my soul
Today the sun is farther than you think
And at the windows in the knives
You are watching
26. THE HYDRA
No no the dead have no brothers
The Hydra calls me but I am used to it
It calls me Everybody
But I know my name and do not answer
And you the dead
You know your names as I do not
But at moments you have just finished speaking
The snow stirs in its wrappings
Every season comes from a new place
Like your voice with its resemblances
A long time ago the lightning was practicing
Something I thought was easy
I was young and the dead were in other
Ages
As the grass has its own language
Now I forget where the difference falls
One thing about the living sometimes a piece of you
Can stop dying for a moment
But we the dead
Once we go into those names we never
Hesitate
We go on
27. ILLUMINATION
Darkness dissembles; the lights recede
At random; bright
Pinpoints appear; valves hiss and unwind –
Isolate, far away, like breath
Escaping, the rush of blood
Dwindles to different chambers…
Meanwhile, the rinsings go on
And on, like an ocean,
Spilling into flesh, rubbing
Their foamy edges into the grain.
Now there is no removal,
For these are the waters that burn,
The acids that scald;
These are the flames you have asked for.
28. APOCALYPSE
In what water has the wing been dipped
that drips its melancholy over earth’s forehead?
In what darkness has our tree lost its way,
the one where the dove has slept for so long?
Don’t ask the night. Nor the sky either.
The night is a bridge, its handrail is made of dead
questions.
The sky is a vault arched of all dead tears.
The night’s sickness is the glare of a wakeful eye.
The sky’s sickness is called stars.
What my own is called I don’t know.
But there is an aching in the universe
which only one not loved can know.
There is a tomb for our open hearts.
There is a grave where fallen souls are asleep
when their ache has burned out forever.
I am a fallen soul myself.
I fell wrong. I fell to the earth.
I am part of earth’s pain.
All own something that must be loved.
All wish to be loved for what they don’t own.
The grass for its stature, for its softness the stone.
The night for the sake of its dawn, the day for
its darkening.
For its flight the pheasant demands love
and the albatross for the way it walks.
The nightingale wishes to be loved for its body’s
beauty.
Why I want to be loved I don’t want to know.
But trembling we pull each other out of our quiver.
Trembling we shoot each other off from the
same bow.
Only the burning walls shine our flying arrows.
We fly to the land where all things grow downward.
There I sail delicately your white boat
out on a sea that is not.
It is full of hot stones.
It has a storm that loves strong sails.
Warning to sailors: Lookout for the drifting mine.
Warning to lovers: Your bow-wave has a brim of fire.
Soon we’re sailing under the water in our burning boat.
Deeper we rise with burning sails
where our stone now lies forever buried.
Exulting it crushes our frail keel.
Burning we hurl ourselves into annihilations’ arms.
The fire cools us with its bird-wings.
Only once one finds,
the precious stone one owns with a beloved.
But you must not get cold,
for the sake of that one time.
Let us dress each other in the ashes of burned walls.
Let us sink upward toward the bottomless surface.
Soon autumn puts its big axes
to the trunk on which our longing grows.
Soon the sea scatters all lovers’ flotillas.
We drift shivering toward naked islands.
The sea’s islands wait
for him who survives his love.
There is a shore one must walk alone.
There is a freedom, too great for all.
Our first freedom is named solitude.
The name of the greatest solitude is Death.
There all bridges run together.
There all the islands float together.
There’s a reading room full of life’s thick books.
There the axes sleep the last sleep.
There is the star which no heaven stings.
There is the only always clear, always quiet sea
which has never longed into waves.
From the clarity of tears its clarity is borrowed,
from their sadness who have loved alone.
But you mustn’t weep,
for the sake of the clear sea.
First in the greatest solitude
may we finally meet.
* All poems composed in a depressed, drunken, drug-hazed stupor during late autumn/early winter of 1992-3.
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