246 Spiritual poems

When the townspeople gave the teenaged Buddha a glass of wine so delicious he grew to an unthinkable size and froze into a blue statue that shielded the town from a wave that broke upon his back and would have swept away the town if he’d not tasted the wine and afterward the people were overjoyed and said they would do good deeds like carpool their children to school more often and plant lettuce everywhere while the Buddha melted into water and receded into the calm sane sea.

How can it not be about engine, secret blaze behind the wheels? How not about this no-way-to-resist seeing but one side or another since the rails quite insist & iron's so right, always running off its own might. How never about freightage or the outdoor face in the indoor light? A yesteryear's pall over the day at hand? Not about the passings-by of nailed-shut houses & grouse setting sail from a rusty swing? How not me out of uniform, out of a sleeper's berth, bare & barely rising atop smoke & so little air left in the soft underbelly that I may meet—nay, embrace— the hello-goodbye cloud.

i. My body a full echo                I dawdle down to the creek Ask the god of blood for Abundance     continuity My offering      the syrup of pressed beans   & A 7-winged tulip ii. Later the rains swell the creek with coffee            the storm        a beckoned sheet The immortal herself reaping the earth          the tongues cut out of the cows iii. I walk in                       as the wash      attempts its valiant swallow A cafeteria aid             wipes the cotton from the counter Her bald eyes              aurora with       seeds You brought that           didn’t you? iv. My bottom lip a pink venom     My desire a valley with legs       His steady fingers toying the tea            I look up to a straight line and bury it    Can’t downsize what hithers me Every now & then a troubled thirst opens my mouth for a song that does not come I feel it all until a fixed voice decides No      but wait      you’re the water

because I go like the professed sinner repentant to the altar of your baptismal flame I am saved despite your sculptor-love whose whimsy kneads and molds and fires then breaks the free-form of my fasting body to make me whole yet thankful I accept these carnal gifts of you Eros and wear them as I would flawless jewels (how can you know that I have bled the way and back biting the dust to wear your name?) . . . the wound lies not in your infliction but in my expectations . . .

Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright, The bridal of the earth and sky; The dew shall weep thy fall to-night, For thou must die. Sweet rose, whose hue angry and brave Bids the rash gazer wipe his eye; Thy root is ever in its grave, And thou must die. Sweet spring, full of sweet days and roses, A box where sweets compacted lie; My music shows ye have your closes, And all must die. Only a sweet and virtuous soul, Like season'd timber, never gives; But though the whole world turn to coal, Then chiefly lives.

nothing left to worship. The three-tined sun is on a string. A chain to hang you on. A rope to coil when you’re done. Lately, a sharp-winged bird skims the dusk dragging the web-footed dark. Up there down there. Foreground. Background. What you can swing from.

God put his finger on my sacrum and he lifted me, he set me in the center of the universe, the curious desire of my chronically lonely life. It was cold and dark and lonely and I was scared. There were no accessories. I burst into tears over nothing. What would Jimmy Schuyler do? wwjsd ? And as quietly as the sound of Kleenex being pulled from a box, I sneezed. And morning, that goddess, as if she were slightly deaf, barely lifted her head off the horizon before laying back down. And a rose opened her portals and the scent ran up an elephant’s trunk, or tried to. Such a long way for everything to travel! From here I look like a front moving in An icy purple light a poet would say belonged to a perfume stopper belonging to his mother. When it was her nipple. You know, neither in the past or in the future.

How many miles to the border where all the sky there is exists for the soul alone? Where the only breathers breathing are constructed from some new electricity and the flowers are made indestructible, and messages from the dead arrive like calm white birds with a gift? One more night of spiritual ice and we might all become birds, green birds frozen on a black winter branch. There is a drumming in the shadows under leaves: a million eight-eyed spiders on the march. The buckeyes beat themselves half to death against some lit-from-within screen.

This sonnet is your personal amulet To be worn in instance of need Or constantly held in the mind Occurring here and elsewhere at this moment This sonnet is sent without cunning To cull a particular phrase from your lips To enlist another protector In this age of malcontent benefactors Against an ironclad schooner Feudal kingdom Dismemberment by jubilant crowds Strangely indifferent faces Heat and dust besides Suicide implicating others

Angels are unthinkable in hot weather except in some tropical locales, where from time to time, the women catch one in their nets, hang it dry, and fashion it into a lantern that will burn forever on its own inexhaustible oils. But here—shins smocked with heat rash, the supersaturated air. We no longer believe in energies pure enough not to carry heat, nor in connections—the thought of someone somewhere warming the air we breathe that one degree more . . . . In a packed pub during the World Cup final, a bony redhead woman gripped my arm too hard.I could see how a bloke might fancy you. Like a child’s perfect outline in fast-melting snow, her wet handprint on my skin, disappearing. The crowd boiling over, a steam jet:Brrra-zil! And Paris—a heroin addict who put her hypodermic to my throat:Je suis malade. J’ai besoin de medicaments. Grabbing her wrist, I saw her forearm’s tight net sleeve of drying blood. I don’t like to be touched. I stand in this mammoth parking lot, car doors open, letting the air conditioner run for a while before getting in. The heat presses down equally everywhere. It wants to focus itself, to vaporize something instantaneously, efficiently—that shopping cart, maybe, or that half-crushed brown-glass bottle— but can’t quite. Asphalt softens in the sun. Nothing’s detachable. The silvery zigzag line stitching the tarmac to the sky around the edges is no breeze, just a trick of heat. My splayed-out compact car half-sunk in the tar pit of its own shadow— strong-shouldered, straining to lift its vestigial wings.