Sleeper

When you return, come unnoticed,
Steal back silently late at night, and
Let your entrance be mostly unseen,
Without a trumpet voluntary
To mark the moment
And no grand polonaise,
But return like a tired worker
At the end of the midnight shift,
Moving slowly in the darkness,
Quiet, as not to awaken those who slumber
And dream deeply in metered respiration.

When you come back again,
Let your footsteps fall in the hallway, pianissimo,
Your shadow moving through the bedroom doorway
Just a bit ahead of you.
The nocturne of silhouetted movements as you undress
And clothes fall to the floor
With the muffled rustling of a bird taking flight,
The half-step inversion of you
Peeling back the bedspread and sheet
And your weight shifting on the mattress.
___________________________________________________________

Tender

And I saw today with some surprise
How beauty is the cosmic currency,
A universal tender, that will valet park me
Near the main entrance of a higher consciousness,
That swings open doors wide
And buys Sunday brunch at 10:00 a.m.
At outdoor cafés opposite the beach,
Under a Catalina sky of blue silk,
Draped like a canopy over the green sea.

And I have come to know well
That some lessons are best learned slow,
The result of repeated study.
I have worked long like a dullard,
Drilled each detail into memory as an imbecile
And trained my eye on each liquid movement,
Graceful and poised, of bare arm and naked thigh,
How the mere hint of a wiggle in the ass
Is like a wad of cold hard cash.
___________________________________________________________

Trio

I.

Ode To April

And I recalled the opening line
Of Elliott's Wasteland:
"April is the cruelest month"
And I think that somehow the same
Could be said of any month,
May, June, July,
August, September
And not to forget
November and December.

Indeed things green and things yellow
Are growing quite irrepressibly
And soon a hint of color will crawl up
The bare willows and upon the ash and maple
New foliage will sprout, modest at first,
But growing toward green crescendos.

I remember my grandfather
Was a modernist in his old age.
He would slip into spells of incoherence,
Utter words in odd tongues, not of European origin
But more exotic. On summer afternoons,
He would sit in the shade beneath a tree
And rest his back upon its bark and trunk
And sometimes in fragments,
More often in the gibberish of delirium,
Speak to me like Sybil.

I believe that Spring is strong
And April is not fragile but merely subtle.
Sprouts peek most shyly from the earth,
Green shafts against the black soil,
Tendril roots twisting down.
There is no cruelty in
Of modest beginnings
Or in the small starting of things.

He has closed his eyes and
Oh that I could awaken him,
Just grab his arm and say:
"Grandpa, wake up. You walked in the sun too long."
He would open his eyes and look at me,
And mumble something in Arabic
That sounded slightly slurred
And wave his arm for me to go way,
To let him sleep.

The days grow longer and the light
Now streams in the big window
Just after sunrise, and April is the month
Of things sleeping and slow awakenings,
Of fragments that grow
Toward the fullness of meaning.

II.

At Lake St. Clair

Fishing at Lake St. Clair today,
Alone on a long pier,
Just north of the power plant
Where the line of steel smokestacks,
The "Seven Sisters" dominate the sky,
And I always think them
The perfect classical form,
Tall and slender as they are,
Ionic columns left standing upright
Amid the rubble of some ruins

The water-tinted orange
In the first light after sunrise,
Its surface choppy and textured
As if painted on a canvas, pasted on thick
With the short pointed strokes of a palette knife,
And I recalled a fragment from long ago:

"White-caped waves sweep the lake--
My father's dreams"

And me picking out with such care
Painted spoons of speckled green,
And a feathered jig with a chartreuse head.
For you know my grandfather was a modernist,
My father was a neo-romantic, but I,
I am a fisherman.

For the measure of a man I know
Is in pike and pickerel and perch.

III.

Piano Sonata

Things are most pure in their beginnings,
As if time somehow tarnishes
Innocence and stains
The sweetest intentions.
It is the April of things, rather than their August,
That is most lovely,
Tendrils of hope
With roots that grip tenacious and deep,
The watercolor that seeps across
A sketch of charcoal landscape.

In the rain today
I found a faint trace of music,
A fragment of melody
That is the sound of a piano sonata,
Notes that resonated softly
And make me remember
Black and white summers
When I crossed the river on Macarthur Bridge,
The sunlight
On the surface of the water shining brightly,
The waves gleaming
Like schools of chrome minnows.

It is raining and I hear my grandfather's footsteps
On each wooden step as he walks up the front porch,
I hear him stop to cough and then continue.
Memory is a fragmentary thing.
And I cannot simply decide
And struggle a great deal
And muse endlessly upon the troubling question:
Is it the April within us that God loves?
Or is the April within us God's love itself?
___________________________________________________________

Confession Of A Pedophile Priest

"Forgive me Father for I have sinned"
And broken the sanctity of holy vows
With a single kiss
Of a sleeping hermaphrodite.
Oh, I have traced with my mouth
The pink crescent shade on one perfect cheek.
I brushed my lips across radiating warmth
And inhaled the strangely sweet scent of sin,
A mere trace of odor,
A slight smell of ripeness
Like the last fruits of late summer.

"Well, Aqua Velva my genitalia"
My voice is the song of the castrati.
The Jubilate Domino of my tongue
That touches and shapes each word
And mingles with the moistness of each new note.
Within the dimness of dark boundaries
And in the of fogginess of faded demarcations
I am hopeless to help myself
Or fight off the gnawing temptations
That grow so irresistibly
Into the fullness of compulsion.

"The sin of Sodom"
In the quiet of the sacristy
And in the twilight of the corridor
That leads to a bedroom
I suffer the burning flagellation
Of angel feather kisses,
In a litany of misguided desires
That is the limpness of a eunuch's lust
And can never be satisfied
By the most solemn benediction
Of yet another young boy's body.
___________________________________________________________

Building

It sometimes feels as if each word is a brick
And the space between each line, a layer of mortar,
That will dry slowly and harden with time,
For it is the simple rules of symmetry that apply
And a certain one up the other construction
That brings to lines a lightness and geometric grace
And to angles the sharp contrast of light and shadow
That is the secret of the pediment and pilaster
And the articulated magic of the cornice.

It is the one line written by Theodore Dreiser
"Who shall interpret the language of stones?"
That somehow endeared me to the man.
And I recall it often and whisper the question,
Sometimes half silent, Often out loud,
As I stand facing each new façade or run my hand
Against the cool smoothness of granite and
The sandy roughness of hewn limestone.

It is with shape and form, the building blocks
Of structure, that I speak to you now,
With plumb lines and yard long levels,
With rock cut and laid with precision,
With pigment mixed with plaster,
And with stone that is somehow budding
New foliage, flowering and beginning to bloom
And to grow to span the distance from earth to heaven.
___________________________________________________________

Cloud Boulevard

In Pennsylvania coal country,
Near the Pocono's,
Where far horizons rise to the sky,
I know that today the town of Hazelton
Is oddly still in the sunlight
Like a cat sitting on the window sill,
And Cloud Boulevard stretches greenly lush
With long lawns that lay before tall wood frame homes,
And it seems to me
That time advances with a lazy reluctance
On afternoons such as this in mid-May.

I have come to walk on Cloud Boulevard
And to remember my life here as a stranger,
A life lived
At what now seems a great distance away
From this coolness in the air
That I now breathe so deeply, and I stroll
Slowly to the East so that the late afternoon sun
Casts my long shadow on the sidewalk
And I pass down this street like a ghost,
Not so much as darkness, but rather,
More as an absence of light.
___________________________________________________________

Words On The Road

On the road leading from town today,
My thoughts ranging on a rural landscape
Of barns in varying degrees of dereliction
And lean slightly to one side
Next to the perfect vertical of solos,
Some with domes and others without,
Against a background green of newly planted fields,
I thought of her, quite suddenly she came to mind,
Just the way she always does, with no more foreshadowing
Than a sunlit afternoon in late May,
And just barely, I heard the words, so silent,
They teetered on the threshold
Of audible perception,
And echoed in that nether region
That is not quite reality, where one would call it
Perhaps an aural hallucination,
A momentary confusion of the senses,
An illusion of a fleeting nature
That makes the wind seem to
Whisper, or the breeze
That would bend the tree limbs to
Mimic human speech and say
To me in a single breath,
No, more a hoarse exhale:
"Quo Vadis?"
And remember the introspections and
Revelations that occur to a sole traveler
Upon a lonely stretch of road,
That makes even the most determined and resolute
Slow their pace or perhaps fully stop
And reflect on their destination and
Question for a moment their mission.