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'And all her silken flanks with garlands drest'— But we are coming to the sacrifice. Must those flowers who are not yet gone West? May those flowers who live with death and lice? This must be the floweriest place That earth allows; the queenly face Of the proud mansion borrows grace for grace Spite of those brute guns lowing at the skies. Bold great daisies' golden lights, Bubbling roses' pinks and whites— Such a gay carpet! poppies by the million; Such damask! such vermilion! But if you ask me, mate, the choice of colour Is scarcely right; this red should have been duller.

When thou must home to shades of underground, And there arrived, a new admirèd guest, The beauteous spirits do engirt thee round, White Iope, blithe Helen, and the rest, To hear the stories of thy finished love From that smooth tongue whose music hell can move; Then wilt thou speak of banqueting delights, Of masques and revels which sweet youth did make, Of tourneys and great challenges of knights, And all these triumphs for thy beauty’s sake: When thou hast told these honours done to thee, Then tell, O tell, how thou didst murder me!

Lit with strange carpentry magic — they build time-shares in her head. They carve names deep in wood, erect beams of metal to hold up the invincible defense of a bad history. They mourn what’s subjective. They are shutters closed. Sometimes I imagine such men in flip-flops with fat towels draped over confident shoulders. I imagine they all live in Texas, and find South Padre too hot, and then I imagine them blaming diversity for everything. Here, in the middle of grief, we pout to the rhythm of their sentences. Suns hiss in their dreams. Soon such critics will meet daily for prayers. The Pharisees identify the guilty woman. They are gathering sticks for a witch burning. Curandera lit with the fire of sighs, casts spells, burns sage, sweats in a lodge, her own prayers flaming.

“first there is a word the word is the song ” 1 song gives birth to the song and dance as the dance steps the story speaks 2 the icy mountain water that pierces the deep thirst drums my fire drums my medicine pouch 3 deep within my blood a feather in the sky foam on clear water Tayko-mol! 4 free as the bear and tall as redwoods throb my blood roots when spirits ride high 5 a valley ripe with acorns and yellow poppies everywhere as i stand here dreaming of you 6 jolting my dream an old man struggling with an eel      his coat appears disheveled and empty 7 in a sacred manner i sang and waited a lick of your blood i must take, reverently, deer 8 for you, blue corn baby, my thoughts on a melody of love sail the sky 9 around fire on my head a rattlesnake hisses and slithers then flies up      out of sight fighting in sleep i cry out 10 the snake in my spine is tensing for combat thoughts become forced and tight the air is a sharp knife 11 from under me today the earth was pulled balancing on a sharp mountain ridge i search for a plain 12 Tayko-mol has not left us but lives in the pulse of our words, and waits in the azure for us all

Summer’s sweet theatrum! The boy lunges through The kitchen without comment, slams the door. An Elaborate evening drama. I lug his forlorn weight From floor to bed. Beatific lips and gap- Toothed. Who stayed late to mope and swim, then Breach chimneys of lake like a hooked gar Pressing his wet totality against me. Iridescent Laughter and depraved. Chromatic his constant state. At Ten, childhood took off like a scorched dog. Turned His head to see my hand wave from a window, and I too saw The hand untouching, distant from. What fathering- Fear slaked the impulse to embrace him? Duration! An indefinite continuation of life.I whirled out wings. Going Toward. And Lord Child claimed now, climbing loose.

Some things become such a part of us that we forget them. • I want because of what I wanted, and what I wanted, I wouldn’t want again. • The passing of a soul is light, extremely light, almost silence. • There are pains that have lost their memory and don’t remember why they are painful. • Convince me, but without convictions. Convictions no longer convince me. • We don’t forgive being as we are. • At the last moment, my whole life will last a moment. • Man is a thing children learn. A childish thing. • Don’t speak to me. I want to be with you. • There are those fallen who don’t get up so as not to fall again. • The dream that doesn’t feed on dream vanishes.

But then there comes that moment rare When, for no cause that I can find, The little voices of the air Sound above all the sea and wind. The sea and wind do then obey And sighing, sighing double notes Of double basses, content to play A droning chord for the little throats— The little throats that sing and rise Up into the light with lovely ease And a kind of magical, sweet surprise To hear and know themselves for these— For these little voices: the bee, the fly, The leaf that taps, the pod that breaks, The breeze on the grass-tops bending by, The shrill quick sound that the insect makes.

The town’s trees, roomy with winter, have begun of late to fill with them, a settling that commences with dusk. The widows complain — claim they can smell them, can hear them shuffling in the trees, a wing hitting a branch a sound sharp, they say, as ice cracking. They cannot sleep. And so you form a committee, convening with shotguns to fire every night into the darkling congregation. Every night, the air resounds with that resolve, and every dusk they return with theirs, circle, a lazy familiar vortex around a drain, an old appointment they keep with an inescapable place; this argument no way, Claude says, to be any less afraid.

The world of visual poetry is known for its collaborations, and some visual poets create a large percentage of their works in this way. What is interesting about K.S. Ernst and Sheila E. Murphy's collaborations is how seamless they are, as if created from one intelligence, even though the poets come from different areas of major practice. Ernst is highly attuned to the world of the visual arts, producing works designed for gallery spaces. Murphy is an active textual poet and a more recent participant in visual poetry. In "Vortextique," the vortex before us is literal: a maelstrom of words that suggests the ultimate artificiality of linguistic signs, the ambiguity of speech, and the impossibility of absolutely accurate communication.—Geof Huth More About Visual Poetry >>

They were not traditionalists. They could bear the innovations of plot. They could not wait to landscape the plot. They had plans for a bed of pansies because pansies hardly ever die in a cold snap, because pansies are hardy despite the name. When they shoved the trowel into the soil it was with his hand on the handle and hers                                                                            adding force. They knew there were only nine types of people in the world and they knew which ones would close the deal. They knew the shirkers by sight. They had options. They knew about Required Communication. About how I feel and you feel. When there was a question of who did the dishes and who did the cat box, it was settled in-house and never required an outside contractor. But the pansies got stem spot, leaf rot, and mildew. When they looked at their options it seemed there weren’t really that many after all. They swore to uphold the bonds and the principles and the yelling. They swore to oral sex. They dressed to the nines and they walked the aisle. They stood up and received the standard narration.