From: The Perfumes of Helicon and #'s of God
by Tom Able:
A City
A city under glass
as Paris from the Louvre
somehow deifies
the air in New york
blue swan on her breast
liquid shadow
fine blunt of blue nipple
that speaks no absence
except her shade
which was "wise beyond years"
and passive as a horse
whose blondness ached
in beauty disdained
as if for comfort
at the sign of that dawn
"whose effort made me see"
"Civilization is memory"
Her arm along the table:
miasma's white cup.
He wanted to be more beautiful
than any woman could ever hope to be
to know the turn in the passage
that is a verb and its reminders
but no matter how hard he tried
he could not pull that virtue
from a single mirror
its brilliance like a tear
on his silver sleeve
and he is what is left
"with his many wrongs"
My Conundrum
Blankness as a sea.
And the man is hungry.
He weeps a millenium
of clouds and paper cups.
His tears a claymation
of a tyrannosaurus
stomping a tiny city
of tiny purple mills.
A population there.
A frantic concierge.
Who listens valiantly and repeats
what it is
Like a man making his way through hell
with a lighter
a dog
a drink
a violent "or else"
Dream
The white is not desire.
Though from it a cube falls
then a trapezoid
then a deep song of refusal
mulling over the whales
and putting the caller on hold.
And so a shapeless thing.
A tiny thought across a strand of wire.
Frisson of beach weather
salaciously waving.
Hi. And hi again.
As dull clods pose against the furtive sand.
poised and posed over an obscurer reference
holding the sea like an idiots reflection
in the lightning-flecks
of an idiot's tear.
Personhood
It was a music of salinity
in which a vacuous stare
moved past him into solitude
and fists of air.
"Belonging to no one"
And there were shades dancing
lewdly
as if their dance were not
a dream
or a caricature of what it was
to be sure.
A scene
and yet a dream
of desire in stasis,
they fell around him
in droves
saying nothing at all.
And what he was came back to him
with derivative face
to reassure the mirror
with his failing grace
Song
Walk with me down to the ocean
and it will be as if summer
has found a darling to resist.
There, in a garden of sunken stones
aqua will come again
as if their had never been a ship
and grief remain a tincture
or violet to dismember
looking away into a sky of disaffected
bliss.
As intention will be a raven of shadows
to amend
while my hands trace a motion
you may forget to miss
The story
Unable to stand without
the narrative
He. they. The discursive air.
Did blind one oaf
and fart into the ducts
"shaping a miserable day into
an impertinent question"
and the little girl
whose house it was
feigned a blondeness that exacted
no reprise.
Where the pure. The immaculate.
The intransigent.
wore socks.
Doodled. Played hangman,
And talked a lot.
Little violets
Little violets are falling
and there they go
falling into the hands of willfull strangers
falling as if to say
I am a tiny sleep
and I do not know how to rescue
the nothing
from its home.
Of false advertising
with preternatural grace
stalling their requiem of coffee and
eclairs
in which the silence muses at the rim
of air
portal in the blood
or lip of care
monument to refineries
and the last pings of lust.
Some Nyquil before Driving
He was a tyrannosaurus
and the rain made him think
in thick drops of cold
a dream without recourse
to faber and faber
or a pastorale of glass
with tiny steel birds
poised to fall
on the fir trees
from the garden wall
as if to leave
a fait accompli
for an anal posterity
his favorite toy a doll
that destroys them all.
From : #'s of God
To see
and falter
as sweeping rain
or needled grass
to prick
a sky
of haute couture
and dissolution
fastened to
a piercing cry
to see and
sigh
as if
to drown
in whitened spray
as in a languid pool
is to ache
again
for word's reply
and think to know
the outside as the inside.
From:# of God
Inside the trivial lives
the undisciplined.
and the light of the sore
on pain of asking
holds baubles of rain
not meant to answer them
and are final
in comparison
to the upstarts
that they sing
the gladness
of their mania
a vitality
out of sync
halo of disaster
for him as for her
the wind of ocean
that is a dream of the pure
From: #'s of God
He sang into the ocean
the sun contained.
A spanking was his father
in a city of dull games
and was funny when he slept
which was a way of getting smaller
of shrinking into the text
like a flea masquerading
as punctuation in a theme.
And he knew it but still his knowing
didn't change.
The sand that ticked against his knees
the wind that was still small
and getting smaller
as the limbs fell from the trees
at the edge of the woods
as if to say what he could not
in lieu of fine words
From: #'s of God
Do not mistake me
for a seismic fling.
the world is gracious
and the boatmen sing
anal precarious songs
of visitations and
gropes
at the bottom of land
which is the top
of ocean
and has come from overseas
and now that I think of it
St. Paul was a fop
"one dull voice
speaking through a hundred
rival styles"
as we are a scintilla
of that fatuous lace
the gentility of poured cream
on wings of lace
The Wind
The wind arrives.
and the havoc
of its translation.
("He read for perhaps an hour, then attained the stairs.")
To sleep among voices
that seemed a progress of the air
the fires at Troy managed
in a cigarette,
the golden door, the immaculate star
where an angel resides in fine pastels
above
a desk, a lamp, an expanse of paper.
and again the air
abrubt
in its ascension
and the vaguer baffles
of a paling wind
that diminished him in waves
failing all procedures,
where he moaned
then slept
then slept again.
The Sadness of paper
He gave himself away.
it was personal.
But it was more than personal.
It was the discovery
of an ocean.
and the ocean full of tears
each of them
someone elses
a bankers
or a dry cleaners
under a moon of sorrow
beyond the tiny capsules
of his regret.
And he gave himself to them
in a rhetoric of ashes
an aesthetics of their violence
and that was finally
how they were there for him
quietly aligning
the stars with his hymn
In love
In love as in distance
he spoke against the czar
wind came
and a salad
as "the hero is forever a slave
to his deed"
and forever can be killed
and will be killed
leaving at fingertips a fatuous
myth
manipulated daily
by the doilies of his deeds
in which desire is a violet
of emptiness come down
and the half moon is a comma
between the mountain
and the sound
A laugh among friends
and sky will move
the eye's cicades
that live ajar
against the perfidy
of time
blue with waves
that shade disasters
speak well of distance
deny imposture
and blue that is wan
and desultory
sorrell clouds
in chambered blue
where zones of
white and amethyst
play
and teach the tongues
of shades
a truth
Gone
Gone into the river
and it is milk against her wrist
" the consistency of blood"
with finality no end
of causal dissappointments,
the
fragrance of imipramine against a dance of
wrenns
following the soil as it meanders
through the grove
past the shining
of each syllable
until it falls and
is distance
and sings the pure shadow
bringing
resistance home
Her
To be a style
or reminder of the air
or one blue thing
appropriate to her mourning
that shall or must fall
from plumb-daubed sky
into oceans glitter
or porpoises of light
beyond her calling
and she is me and I
her mural
the wattled pall of
pigments from
Nepal
or ashes to be scattered
by the garden wall
as a noun is a sea
or fish to be summoned
its absence a presence
in which the sun
becomes one
"No Man Who has A Good car Needs to be Justified"
(Bumper sticker)
Waves of light in
anthracite sky
and the many dinosaurs
that make a lunch of traffic
though he is not
what he appears to be
ravenous aria
of a deepening frieze
that the children of anal
centuries are us
so grand, so picturesque
in ungrieved air
where cults
have risen
around metal and glass
" for poetry is a chore
if one is not delighted"
though the "winsome nature
of things in general"
did not
could not
distract them
from their work
Infinite Divinity
Love is a wave
or dog of blood.
as pain may give way
to a thought disorder
as an object in space
is in fact refutable
while persimmons
fall at midnight
without apology
or desire.
He apologized for them
anyway
he ran down a long list
of reasons to look away.
Shapeless until informed.
Unrelenting until dressed.
and a tiny cube of lead
fell next to him
on the pillow.
And he saw that
It encased a single tear
making no effort on his behalf.
Sullen, irrelevant,
it hung there like a breath
full of airs
that would survive
the rigors of air
and he wrote of it
and left
and there was nothing
that had cared
Ought we to stand
Ought we to stand
on obsidian stairs
and the night is glass
stung with rose petals
against the sirens who gladly sing
of November
and the pale betrothals
and fabrications of lust
"as words flow obediantly from trope to trope"
toward the characters of a sea
no longer void
"a question unanswerable"
with a word like dust
White Chocolate Mousse
As she lay down,
the wincing thunder.
"And lace to deck her bier"
its shapes an adornment
of her shapelessness
and the radio that is a rune
"of empty days"
a truant her body
still in the glaze
another Helen
like a horse
and what man hiding there
to sink his music
in that fabled sea
blonde the ocean
and white his need
Time
Did you know it was time?
I did not know it was time.
--That the beautiful has become a song
with death its music, come to assist Helicon?
And he is sad when he sees himself
because he is small
though Orpheus still paints her image on a
cup
always preparing a song for the nothing that is why. Windows
"And you were what I loved and you are
gone. Skin. Curve. Lute. Song."
Where
stars begin
though violets are a wrong
and couches shudder, air is brazen
and describes his love for her
and so his dependence
as a fascination with the finches in the
yard
their shouldering at the feeder
and bright aubades.At which point silence
no longer appeases him
and the wounds of desire
fly backwards to the sun
burning there as if somewhere.
"Water.Fire. Silence. Swan.
Her love his name
his pain her wrong."
These Documents
These documents of my demise
to whom shall I send them
to analyze the sun
and the crashing genders of their
munificence.
Love is a problem until there is
love
as pain is a thorn in the
heart of the crowd
and wealth an ad of our disease
dead, so dead,
the great Achilles
whose blood ran brightest
at his heel
He
He was jealous of her beauty
which required no other
and surpassed him in the aviary
of his impassioned plea
as he looked away blandly
hoping somehow it would all turn blue
Which was not the novel he had originally meant
that book had been a silence
in which echo declined the air
and what was left was a silence
untried and untended
"In which the beautiful becomes the ordinary
and the ordinary becomes a wave"
The Rain As Present Poetry
Drowns uneasily
the livid house
and coriander to flavor
them, who speak
without history
and without context
beyond the fluidity
of the air
"Which is very funny.
Very funny indeed"
"It is a quote I like a lot,
full of mischief and impertinence"
and it pounds impulsively
the violin in the stone
where they sing an anal beauty
every fragment a tower
to an homogenized ilk
that fails the silence
and arrests no flock
"The Bearer of that Wand is Hermes"
Sun
that dismembers
the lineaments of day
whose moods distract old men
"from the grief of their play"
I love you
and I want you to know
it is me that loves you
and not some sophist
who can spell his name
because I am he
and my wish is small
a reptile's hymnal of strength and grace
climbing the tower naked
with a tiny t.v.
To finally marry
the air with these heights
and the tangents of silence
that are its metier
A Cone of Silence
Who knows what shadows
the sky decides
"Rhetorically it is a dare
and the proof is in the word
as the word is air"
Like a tiger that forgot
its stripes in the sun
and went home with nothing.
Not violets. Blood.
Jurassic Park
It's fun to be a dinosaur
and to spell"Ideation"
in front of just about everyone
--a tiny brontosaurus, a leaf eater,
though it is unclear at this point
whether I live in water
to support my weight
or live on land and laugh agnostically
through the various chewy leaves
that roar in my belly
creating a millieu of divine borborigmy
and I am that very dinosaur
sleepily waddling from the den
into the rainforest air
with colors streaming
and tangential with commands
while"the gods return in unstable meters"
to feed the hungry and digest the man.
To God
You are tiny
I am tall
a dinosaur
didn't brush its teeth.
Its laughter came
that was wrapped in newspaper.
Smaller than the atomic.
Small. So Small.
The microscopic leaden dinosaur
sang an age of failed reflection
at the threshold
of the goverment's door.
As I thought I was Orpheus
but I was bald.
Sang out loud anyway.
And that was all.
The Last tear
The last tear fell.
It was beautiful.
It was a furnace made of diamonds.
and its shape changed as it fell
into many animals
zebra. egret. manatee. horse.
And it is singing a song
of impunity as it falls
ember of that preciousness
that is a remebrance for the shades
and above them on the hill
the breath of angels
intimate with that ache
which is a parable of desire
beautiful without rank
effortless without number
between water and air
where a sorrow was the fall.
There was a whiteness,
it was not me.
yet it was in me
as if to say
my name and speak
its antiphonies
of light and alabaster
and pure nard
and cherry-petal rain
against amethyst skies
and beaten gold
a drastic bliss
among the traffic
which surges through our suffering
and our conflict
into light and silence and purest rain
the bliss of a landscape
that is cast from bliss.
Away
Do not touch me !
I am small.
Atom of grief
under a microscope's pall
tossing and foaming
to cathect the invisible
with the intelligence
of a flea
that bites down hard
lunching vigorously
on a terrier at the mall
or a man become song
at the follicle's center:
pulse of light or surge of wit
looking back on himself
and laughing at it.