Mountains in Montana
5:45 AM August 11, 2007 - 10:39 PM August 11, 2008
Recording of Mountains of Montana available
on Sean Farragher's Web Site
Mountains in Montana
5:45 AM August 11, 2007
The curves of every hill
change my scale of what
can be realized
I climb to the past
and the rocks beneath
the waves are not lost.
They bend as granite
flows with rivers home.
Carried there by motion
of waterfall ocean wave
my sand grains round
with each deposition.
I was raised on the Palisades
between New York and New Jersey.
Edgewater was my crisp ocean
blurred by the red ozone night
fall when the cold air dried
ice ponds into thin crackling
skin that I wore in that winter.
I expect swollen hills in Montana
but the scale of Mountains drives
my peace into another falling
cliff caught under the heights
where summer blueberries grow
and we hike as children for horizon
will be done. Thy will be done.
My scale in Montana is tainted.
I love it. I feel as if I can say
the word love here and accept it.
2.
Relative space has changed my arms
and legs made them longer and
resumed where strength revives
the long walk into a dark cave
to dream again about ceremony
and the ritual that a Phoenix
sets in its fire and tongues.
We have so many languages now.
I am larger here in the morning
at 0545 AM on August 11. The
heavens are slightly lit in one
high point and dark retains
the middle and the end of eye.
Every gray hill where
wild fires appear distorts
the bones and sinew of
sculpture that rise animate
out of the daily fear transposed
by arms that wave dark
matter lanterns to overlook
the genesis of glaciers, lakes
when frozen quarrels as
winter thawed rocks split
to record crystalline murder
that shifts giving to space
again as story plumes and
myths burn into miniature
portraits collected by spirits
who would clip away wings
from these not too human
beasts fair remnant of whimsical
songs improvised by deep
drugs that nature provided
to slow the rest and keep
us from falling to fast
down open natural sewers.
Within the history of rocks
my mountain cleans
the stink from light to
stretch with dancers
into their public hallucination.
In this way we drive easy
into plans and whispered
maps not spoken until
there is nothing but dark
and no one can change
accidents that open
wounds to heal all stones
and make crystals
into our heavenly sky.
I am realized as sun drives
its shadows away to dry forest.
I assume my whole skin
and beauty swallowed by blue.
6:55 AM August 19, 2007
“Life is a sexually transmitted disease.” -- R. D. Laing
We are alive in the smoke
of red log resumed wild fires.
1.
Am I dead painted sky
and cannot shift out
of its way to prevent
wild fire and ordinary
crime set in umber clouds
made grievous by ordinary
nature in tormented sandy gray?
Here is love photographed fog
story fed back and love made
drives the plated rocks into change.
2.
Rebirth of the Spirit Ado
Mountain Spirit Manitou
born fully formed of
last night of every gender.
This was the history of the universe
from big bang to the next, from
one woman to another. She lives
in the skin of the bear for all time.
Delivered as girl born of woman
Manitou grew into the web of palms
by sky’s revisions. He held her
to her heart and his life twisted
as the dark matter made its way
through the caves to know her
daughter as human beings, desire.
Some also called Manitou's father
desolate specter of every star
who transformed his mouth
to fashion the swallow and kiss
of river drowned estuary and
the private dreams of living
spirits bound with fury
in the danger of lost shadows.
Every step Manitou walked faster.
Thoughts grew fatter as children
made their sacrifice; for that is
the motion of the trickster and every
year, century as forever we sing,
yes, we will love until the light dies.
Sentinel Mountain born from her own
life became mirror of mother and father.
Her children would ride many paths
and many Human Beings, but that
is the nature of families and stars.
Manitou squints as ancient woman
and the next infant renews splendors;
the spirit of the forest calls
bears for wolf claims daughter.
The void spoke – Manitou called
the infant of the infant by name “ Ado"
as she lives a human being and not a
spirit within great salt waters and rivers
with even the slightest pond of fire
eating flowers gone mad on the roots
of broken down spirits with silent names.
It will be as if Genesis repeats.
Mountains born out of ice and lake
rise over cumulus clouds as storm
growing strict strikes lightning
at the high pinecone near old Lake
Glacial Missoula spent now.
August 22, 2007
The Lakota, Teton Dakota, Teton Sioux
I am more Grit than sky
and I war on the beasts
of the earth to wear down
the rocks and millions
of year as tectonics win.
We will collapse and read
that flat scale to linger
when hammer strikes
open rock becomes skin.
2.
I cannot speak clearly
when the weather blasts
difficult. It’s not possessed
like dreams open starry night
for Van Gogh to keep inside
his secret book now released.
It floods mad space with order
made from his resurrection.
3.
Every word of my mountain
dries up too easy. The grass
was dead and at five minutes
before 7 AM on 19 August
the rain does not feed
cliff its proper respect.
Love might inspire calm.
Emotion turns weather red.
Rain could hold wild fire
and melt dead grass into green.
4.
Breathing strikes fewer burdens.
In that rain love breaks from simple wind
pushed low to high and if we resurrect
that morning after our bodies clasp
with erotic charms to drive our limbs
into the ripe face of the vertical cliff.
Lust was born from death as well
as that prerogative that life spurned
to keep death in separate arcades
so the bells would ring and gongs
strike when she felt her heart seize
when that moment ripens rivers
to press her body from the pattern
to drive hard into love again.
5.
Sex cures the perilous
storms from all mountains
with cliffs and nubile limbs.
It threads the smoke into
blue morning glories and
white peonies as fire fades.
Historic Love Poem
August 24, 2007
Her smile curls on the horizon
while her face followed larger
than the moon became caught
with fireflies in August twilight.
I hold to her in magic wand.
My woman rides Montana hills
in blue, gray, tan, black and
brown frenzy. I am willing
sex toy. Tied to our bed we
swirl waves, clouds, tempest;
our eyes craft blush and come.
Please rest. She sleeps
within our ribald flanks
engorged with blond hair
fresh shaken branches
and every green grape
and orange slice crushed
in mouth, ground in stud to tease
the blood to even greater
floods and screams than
waterslide-roller-coaster.
In common light, nothing
less than wild fires shake red
horizon and please when she
races her breasts like white
clouds with rose edges fascinate
while we watch through a prism
our legs pause in stream and
cold water and its hot crust
cook our sex in tangible lust.
2
Steam covers Montana's
mountains in summer too.
Cold will come and snow
compel us to the edge
when hurricane's swirl
covered until bodies quit.
3.
Daydreams march away
as we churn sex to
perfect aspects as history
of rocks as the moan
of dark sex knows only
our secrets that we keep
together bound in a ribbon.
4
Love is born in historic
poems. It's one of many
masks I fondle and bless.
When you are semen to my eggs
Gender is stretched
5
I write historic poems.
Kiss my mouth with
the full sun set soon.
Our children grow
by generations.
The mountains
tremble every night
when the air freeze
and our hand snow
covered make shadows
on the walls as fright
without escape blends
into the historic mountain
fallen down again and again.
6.
In morning breakfast
with children I cook
sausage and eggs
and serve us with
single rose to lips.
5 AM -- August 26, 2007
Twilight & Darkest Mourning
Rocks gather in familiar families:
igneous, sedimentary and
metamorphic and now in new seat
at the petrology table
add Experimental Rocks
recreated from dark matter
and crematorium ashes.
1.
The Mountains are black
as the sky was clear
and invisible colors
appear as pale rainbows
or something more splendid
as light breaks open into
my blue and orange rose garden.
Every flower has a face
and a mind and is yours
as you dust with me
oblivion into plenitude.
Out my window are the foothills
of a mountain that has its own
face burned into my flesh so god
has spoken before and after my
personal epiphany. I am grown
in that stone. I am listed as descendant
I am tortured until I speak louder.
2.
The history of rocks is the lithology of dust.
100 million years have passed after collected
sediments layer to rounder grains and silt.
We freeze time in our indiscretions with
mountains as they push the mass into arms
held open as if the woman caught in her gasp
as she is fucked so the mountain roars.
Sediment, batholiths, igneous intrusions,
the motion of the earth under gravity and
our sun breaking the world into pieces
collected for reconstruction into a table
top of white oak buried in our river
for hundreds of years. It is perfect
as a relic and function of the life made
into an outline so help me that marvelous
road will leap above the hills and fall
down like Humpty Dumpy and children
enthralled will gather with my love
to refresh the earth and we redeemed
gathered in the hall for the diorama.
Night Meditations
August 30, 2007
1.
In day spun gold I write black night into empty vessel
and my desert out-back in the garage, a painting held hostage,
laughs at my strokes that pretend to be nature.
Henri Rousseau the French painter walked
on the hills of Mt. Sentinel in Montana.
In 1950, camera lights flash-bulb great American
spectacle. Picasso cannot gather parts of speech
for Pollack to execute before Jackson murders
woman and tree in alcohol spun opera.
2.
In grain of platinum prints the Rockies spring
into dispassionate chords background to caves
where small bones of cities are simple, even
dull faced in teams of clouds alien to usual sky.
Shy cumulus hang close to the awful ground
raise to the indigo tapestries of silk and earth;
where sweat and breath unfold as flags draped
over the caskets ring through clap of waves
and over the binge of thunder until wolves
run beside the wagons to hunt the best place
to plant teeth into life while racing the half moon.
3.
In the third frame of this folly written first in long hand.
I am alone with "Mad Judy" -- She lived near W. 74th in NYC many years ago. My story speaks as geometry weaves new maps while the topography of Mountains in Montana draws secondary shadows on the backs of my hands where Judy left a scar to show me maps
of the subways from mountains to city and then a rattle
when nothing emerged from the cellars and ancient
roots clustered in the broken cliffs and failed water fall.
4.
Jazz strikes passion close to the edge.
Scat song blessed with melodic conga drums.
Night in the woods has neither contrast
nor dimension. Amber becomes umber.
The invisible strikes houses in the fore hills.
The grease from wild fire smoke mates
with bare brown dry grass when diseased.
Rocks cure everything.
They replace things, ideas
abstractions fixed when
magma deep underground
solidifies as another
signature frozen when
history can not be stopped.
Outside Sentinel Mountain
objects dissolve in the slurry
of car lights on roads
below Glacial Lake Missoula
plain where history that
character in our morality
play rusts surly and lean,
cured by discovery --
new territories in old notebooks
inscribed by perfect crystals
with some prejudice then revolt
5.
Listen to the resonance sung in six parts.
Bach runs keys along the spines of rocks
where we balance not before a fall but
as monument to the magic of levitation.
I dance without feet and arms while
my body glows as path to summit.
6.
Obsidian minerals warmed
by the ass of hot beach sand
drift in geothermal springs
into the ghost of spray
before the surf meets lava.
7.
Woman appears at top-crest where summit
meets tits and breasts hung to the hunter's necks.
Her nipples point to six sided stars collected as seashells.
I once knew mollusks that lived next door where
the organ grinder slept wearing shirts
only the blind could montage as
sludge in the bottom of the lake
where I hit and cut my head open.
I was ten. I lived. I survive dark forest
and dream of the mountain cast where
bear crossed my path riding my elephant
and his musical wings flapping some jazz tune
in 20's Speak Easy. I played the clarinet in the band.
Of course, I lived in the bottom well of that city
where empty ditches call nightmares, black sweats,
wanton fingering and greed drove sex into eruption.
It is always “Noir” where set painted faces to dissolve
and grow our mountains of bones by accretion into polygons
made with isometric halite and silica cleaved with vulva
shaped as Sheela Na Gig on the doors where Dizzy plays.
Breasts were born on of the black hole.
She fed me meat chewed soft. She kissed milk
like blue edges where ripe vulva lives ribbons
of spit collected at the corner of our mouths
with my semen and faultless lubrication.
Mountains need special care to preserve
smooth parts and also protect friction.
8.
It was a party for us when we were twelve.
I loved black then. I walked into night and terrified it.
9.
What is that yonder of them dear Eastern Roman icons?
Can we taste bleak chicken as we hunt the mountain for
secrets folded on into formal letters discarded as carbon
copies in multi-layer sheets like soft, silly gypsum
I can smell sex in the minerals collected
with beryl and limonite, pure lead, perfect tri-axis
with different logical lengths and three angles
between arms, as God rises in reference books.
Triclinic Crystals are called God today on Sentinel
Mountain and I am breathless in the morning cold
that is so welcome to the earth and its broken shell.
10.
There! Hold the still mouse,
bleak fowl with broken bones
separated by wolves into species
as index for short million year bursts..
Evolution does not share light but blows
winds, cries, raises hell in its arbitrary
dance steps one, two, three, and tango
makes four when blind actor dances
at the Waldorf and smells sex as shift
of rock made uncomfortable --
splendid when silica replaced carbon
and father gave daughter and son
musical song to drive madness
into mother. Why are we clichés?
I collect the black imagination. I climb
the mountain without breathing.
I find her again and she shifts her dance
when cliffs tumble down to break apart
my sculpture. I was told that light makes art.
I steal empty black space underground
for my promised land more than prophecy.
Grandmother, you dream you were
a girl in Palestine those nights
in Harlem before 1910 when the Star
was painted Judah by German sausage
makers without hands and testicles.
It is not absurd to believe in destiny.
Believe in how rocks collect our honor
and keep the earth changing like
11-year-old dancers rising
graceful clouds into swart light.
11.
My pure Missoula River dresses with
fish invents Lewis and Clark for every
wild thing needs an inventor with
keys for doors yet to be grown
from the cracks in the gabbros’ hills.
12.
I have only cookies
to give you children.
I have one great idea
to press to your hands.
Knowledge is musically
sweet. Please ride
imagination’s roller coaster
twiddle Dee Twiddle Dum.
13.
Imagine Belafonte singing
"Daylight Home and I wanna go Home"
Yes, pray, on your knees.
Rub the rocks in your fingers
and feel the grit. You are blessed
by the rough and smooth,
invisible and complete.
Night breaks nothing when it hits the stones
and turns them into red embers forever.
I made some lunch today.
I cut the bread. I sprinkled
salt and leaven and found
where I was baked flat in
bricks spread with ceramic
eyes and bloodthirsty speech.
Last Meditation Tonight
I meditate on the black night
Mountain in Montana and I
watch stars resurrected
out of my own lips again.
We breed without promise
and chance makes it good.
The mountain lives when
the human ark dies.
Mad Judy taught the Letters “GOB”
(Summer of 1975 -- Interlude)
There is only Gob, Great Gob with one arm
a missing tooth.
Great GOB lived in the mold
and dead air of New York Subways.
In 1975, I whisper above the screech
of train tracks that GOB breathes
in Montana now; she makes love
folding into my lips one kiss at a time
to feel what the wind knows
as it passes from low to high
pressure along the equator.
Yes, Mountains know secrets
no one else can realize.
It is almost too true to be
an easy thought and I am calm
when I put it to bed in my
arms and feel its soft ass
against the bulge of my pants.
She - Mountain was glorious –
one direct line woven
with quilts of green trees
and lakes that bear-salmon
splat and growl with torn flesh
bearing spine open glistening
as beautiful strokes of crimson-mauve
muscle flap flopping fish against granite stones
where river and bear make plans in pink flesh.
September 1, 2007
“Sexy Rocks” Missoula Tour -- Music by Jefferson Airplane
Fuck with Rocks and Be Reborn
the Bible rewritten Proclaimed.
What may seem absurd and false
with time becomes the law as fame.
I watch earthquakes burn the faults.
Wait. They are broken down and fired
when they split from relief of strain.
The heart opens as waterfalls collide
with furious stars. Lovely chance
commits the silicate mind to change.
My Mountain groans. Plates peel.
Air stops. Sulfur burns. Open pit
turns rivers off and on surprised.
I know all my magicians. Who wins today?
How can I predict the roll of landscape by relief
when surprise drives spikes into soil where cities grieved?
I am trapped. Love’s hands dear mother earth molests
my thighs with necessary habits to give will to game.
Endings are never finished. Patience holds process
in accord with every wonderful cloud made cobalt blue
as morning stretched in rosy sky with warm gray clouds
as struggle for tempest explodes when timpani
improvised the dénouement of great pines bare
against brown earth exposed as firebreak.
Cities have short mind. Faults slip open
only from their own constant foil raised to
fall again as we pray to appease abuse.
Inside basalt well, my child conceived in darkness
waits for thrust and parry in air stretched from lips.
Applause cannot be measured by its storm.
Weather welcome hunt as trees displaced
settle back, and rude lascivious sculptures slip
off the palisades to rain thunder upon heads.
The mountain is live! Believe it.
It will fuck with our heads and
bring new light to our disbelief.
Rocks live in their silicate glory.
Rub them against your skin,
feel the heat in your hands.
Make love with them as surprise
lifts you dying to rebirth as split
open madness carries you into
that beautiful art only landscape
in its perpetual change revives.
Fuck my darlings. Heat limbs.
Make thy orgasm so well to live.
September 19, 2007
Love Carves Rocks into Time.
Our rounded hearts want wet plane
where plain hills and furrows arrange
what can only become gullies
for rivers to flood when nature rains
through my fingers over the ledge.
The waterfall drops no names.
She rides the crown and waits
for vermilion twilight to halt
and force winter Queen again
in partial day of lovers engaged.
There are always transitions.
Rocks do not fall in one surge.
She quits and semen
left inside leaks down inside
of legs in pleasant discomfort
after feldspar and granite melt
and children conceived drink
the wealth of magma as blue
milk puddles between breasts.
2.
I hold her in my mouth.
Nothing else matters but
feral words struck at coil
of tempest drugged into
mature fingers finding
origin of species as home.
I climbed between legs opened
and crossed. I suffered revised
maps when land responded
to wit and captured
in quim -- held together --
while she paints. I outline
with tongue, pink pen
those parts in glorious
upheaval over and over
again inexorable waves
beat at the backs of legs.
Mountain rises there.
Great bridges close.
Neither trapped
nor free we wrinkle
in ripe earth for relief.
Every seed, fat and green
with stems ready to breed
falls down human coil
into helix bound desire
as wild revolt of spring
drives summer new and
fall bends prayer on knees --
wet as one drifted cloud
held together in gravity
when tides refuse to
hold love apart no more.
September 27, 2007
Mountain as Collective Noun
"Science is facts; just as houses are made of stones, so is science made of facts; but a pile of stones are not a house and a collection of facts is not necessarily science." -- Henri Poincare (1854 - 1912)
My mountains are collections of space, compact as time,
undone by a drizzle of blood or war or the kindness
of life as the art of redemption.
Is life a collection of gracious happenstance bred
from accidents that are veiled by holy prudes who
would cover up fortune to craft the body feared?
Mountains suffer no panic. I stare at this hump
in the night that touches clouds today,
and brown, gray, green pines whirl as a dream did
the other night when I had sex while she moaned
and the river between us blew into our mouths
for us to absorb as we spun from pinnacle to
base and felt that heavy rock dragged into life
by the subtle passing of immutable grit to birth.
2.
Rocks wear small adornments set on them
by unnatural ghosts to keep from weathering
and into that invisible, subtle death
that things suffer to happen in ecstasy
when rocks explode fired by the random
sparks of moods in murder
as the fragments, shards cut in crust.
The land has its own rules for skin and rawhide.
Human Beings flutter as they dissolve in fire
and that solar plasma overcomes us tomorrow
when we are collected like atoms without electrons
for some dark process we can only guess will strike
In the fall, we rut in the garden on our knees sexually
pressed to breast or stiff parts and ribald wait winter steam. I kiss her in the lines of color that every maple makes obvious bursting in yellow and sometimes pale orange to red verbs and things without fixed boundary or creative disease. Nature cannot lie; love is fondled and saved in
memory and will not keep facts directly to write
as testament to what turn out under the foot mat
crushed by feet and liquidated by snow with melted
salt poisoned with that quick lime we scatter
over graveyards when history quits or speaks
too loudly after the last speech was faked.
3.
Do you know the names for all the minerals
we collected when the crystals reformed
became more complex, even twinned
they spun within each other giving birth
to garnet and silicate gems less valuable
they say than hard diamonds and flash
when person was left as remnant to perish?
Do you know how I love this mountain
and she who became it, as I woo her
with ever aged charm I can satisfy.
I hold us in a bouquet of dirty flowers, not
as something without beauty, but the colors
of our skin and the smock we wash carefully,
in reverence glows and sparkles in ways
we cannot collect for the rigor of fact fails.
October 1, 2007
"When I was from Cupid's passions free,
my Muse was mute and wrote no elegy."
-- Ovid (43 BC - 17 AD), Amores
My response to Ovid:
I swim between the greens.
Stem and root cut my days.
Elegies are more rage than
an end of lust my mountain will
bear another passion from that deep
sand gathered in childhood pails.
I fling it at the waves and they
curl me in their foam to stay
my life until the elegy slips out
the back and forgets that grief
insinuated in the walls of Cain.
2.
Birds skitter with solemn circumstance while
bears of sun cross where mountain bowed
by decline of arms and hurried white snow.
October will freeze to thaw the icy granite
until atoms cleave with unpredictable planes.
Summer has old names and dried leaves
fall as if they are sails Odysseus flew
to fuck Penelope in the dark to suck
paint and glue one last time before
salt dissolves into ordinary fury.
3.
Clouds do not disappear to satisfy even
the pressure of the air that creates them
from the water and breath of soldiers
and philosophers drugged with laudanum
We gather too when night is umber;
We unfairly bend her neck to reveal
red sacred stones to hold Rockies'
flora and descend into unbalanced
tempest whole. Lightning cuts center.
We are struck and blanched without pause.
Forever, we chase where sulfur's rocks stamp
mottled waves and sky as painted flat to
open where the fake and real are one
while new older hands whittle slowly
for erosion what mother's time grew.
4.
The discontinuity of rocks and fossil leave
the undressed ground alone to print its rough
plane and be wrinkled again an old star child
with nothing but sand and ocean and names
for things recalled that Williams plotted
in Paterson as map that future death
but soon his mountain came as all water
falls descend with human beings as
sparrows for flight. Birds mimic Grace;
Slick plays microphone letting it
come in her eyes for rocks descend
from Everest's face. We are safe on
mountain plane. Animal's prowl
but we are them. Murder cannot happen
where snow and grass covers Mastodon
that has gone to seed. Historical meat
and plant eating dinosaurs roam
parking lots at NCAA football games.
5.
Inside my hands insects swarm
and lichens play the hump
of Sentinel's mountain mouth.
In my lap ladies grab thighs
and arms to plant wild flowers
as a spray of some distant sky
spent long ago arrives as rocket
red glare and out of tune trumpets
in that fan fare: mountains do not die
but warble o'er the black hole grate
where time falls down and forgets its race.
October 4, 2007
The Mountain Speaks
after finding a book by
Shakespeare remaindered
as rubbish with semen left
from picnics in her bush.
It was all.
I was all.
My breasts bend to milk
the pasture of its flavors.
I am inside your skeleton.
I am dream. You said it.
I counted strangers hunting
in my mouth. Do not cut the mother.
No hunting here. I am serious.
I will hurl you into delirium.
No dreams will fall out of my lips.
I will not heal and what you create
will be worthless. Do not test me
I will not be dismissed.
You cannot believe me weak.
I can restore my self. You can't.
I saw savior.
She was moon
opened as fire.
She played my arms.
I rumbled while I cried
springs of water leaked
blood as my enemy divided
what cannot be known.
She filled me with salt
and white bark and elm.
When the hooligans came
I had no protection.
Shakespeare said. I read
my one book late in life.
It was left as litter on clouds
fornicating with sweet nitrogen
raised above the temple I
could not commit to that music.
It blasted the deep rock and
took my spirit away, until now.
I will not fear being alone.
It is easier to sing silent psalm
than lie in a procession
where royalty are crowned.
I loved first Elizabeth Regina
daughter of the mountain
and the future King.
Yes, there was a child.
Drake left him where
the arms and sex cross.
This is my song.
Draw from it salvation
and reprieve. Shakespeare
lived in my voice
when I learned to
mimic your language.
October Interlude
Variation on Shakespeare's Richard II
It is lie what he said as preamble
to this person poem I leave
cut in caves beyond all eyes.
I am not John of Gaunt.
I am not King. I did not believe
it could be possessed as thing. My
discovery sank into another
realm where I bereft of usual stars
could not measure my space to
uncover where black wet rocks and cold
will ring fire to restore the skyline.
I am throne without any pleasure or
accidents that threaten sun. I will not
wink at King. I am not Richard Second.
I will not opportune to brag on my relief.
I ran down hills until my belly flat with
small stones and brief heart I am neither
country nor abstraction drained from slender
ideals and perilous rejection. For many ages
I shed skin, became flat, erupted and disused.
I disregard senses until the profit
in cutting my heart for coin too small
to matter in this false paradise of profit.
Mars and all the other gods were faked.
2.
This mountain has only eyes and lips
and womb. It has cock extended from
the other side where nature boils.
I am only famous in my destruction
or in the habits of my resurrection
when I gather sand, soil and light
into my pulse again with glee
my child anointed by ancients
storms where no one but mountains
can breathe stop and start at once.
This mountain set in motions today
as every day and every moment it
will never cease in human time to
glow as sentinel for future rain
and by my oath I will not be stopped
by any human force including Kings or Queens.
October 10, 2007
Morning Glory
You Mountain! Every cloud dresses
you as raw steel of storm to wane
while autumn's chill suddenly
expects barren snow soon.
You, woman, you are so beautiful
this morning in that golden
ash-rust-gasp of surprise.
Your veils cover what
cannot be seen when
granite hearts split.
It is sworn love
for the first time
when every cloud
addressed strength
of storm will fade-- then
autumn's chill, suddenly,
expects the snow soon
as your palms open,
hair flying wide in silhouette
your legs bridge further
to bring all lands inside
where next 100 million years
will display new dinosaurs
with aluminum wings.
Yes, Mountain love,
please growl. Your fever snarls
as bears do and wolves
stalk for godly kill.
October 15, 2007
(Letters Written While Asleep)
Yesterday, I painted my mountain
with thin blue and crimson watercolors
strained from copper shells
with malachite blooms. I cut every
violet flower edged with green and
rose until the forest was full again
and beasts roamed in thin chains
to bind arms, but not to stop our
fingers from rousing north to south
across trivial lakes to interrupt fluxion
in weal where every erotic string
unties lips, bends petals when
morning glories collapse, contract
as that muscular dance to twist surprise
and to meld with awe sex as good act.
We are euphoric in alarm, and not only
for pleasure, we do not quit the woods
or dry to quickly the plain, but we live
outside too long and we drown
too fast, but then we adapt to
breathe through clay and rake
pleasure in that gift we redeem.
Fulfillment, my mountain connects,
speaks again, for a second time, while
stems and valleys, caves and narrows,
right bridges and build natural
steps from ice and snow to slip
dreary off the ice into that never
permanent Jersey Palisade marked
safe again with inconstant maps
drawn in diluted blood and ochre ink
to shadow foliage more than camouflage intent.
I never understood until I crossed
the last line, became flesh with gold
dust in my spin as time displaced. I revived
and felt my mountain drink her lips
to open my cup and feed from that
hay set out to help the cattle at least
survive with their memory broken
and their sense of right and wrong
restored by the blinking of an eye
and of course forgetting what is made
out of screams and sighs written down
as the beasts that music with its triple
harmony drives the live back home
to keep my mountain whole while
the our geography changes dream
by dream when order refused
breaks eyes, spine and lips as
we hammer one piece of rock
from one part of cliff without
regard to how it holds together.
2.
Today, I pray to mountain when our
pain copies human or bestial steps.
This is no lonely birth, she stamps
as the hollows in the hills collapse
and dust driven upward stretches
sparrows in flight over full land.
3.
Dear Mountain --- time has not clicked.
We are not liable to watch idols
swim up stream out of Lewis’s Mouth
to fall down without Clark
predisposition to reaction.
My Mountain Love Movie blares.
Great Hosannas! Free from dysphasia
we wait our epic return to grace.
How do you linger and pause
and not be uncomfortable for
that middling change to march
victorious from some vault
never known always promised.
for tens of millions of years
to upend your source, refurbish
rivers when the clime does
not warble ye or and I am
now used until the back
of the book and horror
stays same in the tunnel.
We say it is miracle what that
empty mountain, spatial light
has fallen out of sight,
to be marked as love neither
alive nor proven broken.
We march round mountain
singing our childhood songs
and my mountain, lovely woman
so patient while I keep the flowers
arranged to reflect our perfect play.
October 27, 2007
“Winter Becomes Her”
Yea, that mountain as my spine fuse
to hump where horizon's outline
drew down when the universe beguiled
banged we settled in plank of nature's oak
where equations rolled the page.
Winter Mountain:
Winter curls ideals under layers of refreshment.
You archer stir that ardor. I know I smelled blossoms
as honey dried on animal tracks and the ground
of your vulva open in grand pink clouds as book
of light and time left us alone with the first day of Terra.
When you came without Adam, as he was a metaphor
of some undistinguished experiment, your thick
comfortable, sensuous hair woven, long dark curls,
four strands thick strikes danger from lies counted
on three hands and not two. “You are a cheat,” I say.
After all, how you can calibrate one unknown against
a disputed sample. You knew arousal. Why do you
walk away when you so want my acceptable dreams?
When you ask, “how can I appreciate human beasts?”
You do not answer. You leave too quickly forget to disappear.
When you return with fake lightning to illuminate
what are charcole shadows twisted without geometry.
I was not afraid until you reshaped my body
took liberties with our identical eyes, and when
you crushed my speech, refused to let me write
what had always been true: I refused the wake or wave.
I drugged you with erosion not demure red cranberry flowers.
You will not outlive pearls or granite no matter
what oath you substitute for my lovely disabled illogical reason.
All Saints Day
Self: October 31/November 1, 2007
My Mountain you resisted faith and found private
rivers, as your blood curdled down into your deep shell
where lava rumbled with perfect gases sucked back
until tyrannical kisses demanded serial explosions.
Keep faith darling Mountain Sentinel. We did not hunt glory.
We prepared the forest for greater numbers
living a full life, and there would be variable equality, of course.
I search the fields of an electron
microscope to feed imaginary fires for TNP and
other healthy expletives. I know ADP will
transform, releasing heat to become ATP;
mitochondrion satisfied will walk not stalk
from their hind legs (they are actually
included in cells) to shape breath from
what is pure spirit and never been actual.
At the door of the cave the Grizzly pushes
two rocks closer, half inside the portal. He
staggers as I did when I was drunk on an old
stage pretending to be in control of nothing.
Yes, you move on top as enter, exit, close --
thick, full noise stretched beyond any orifice.
We pass from dark to the morning and we undress
shivering when fundamental layers lift in draft upward
where our sun leaves our fingertips.
I do quit this space. You have
warned me well. I know I cannot create delusion
from the actual atoms and other parts yet to
be known in the encyclopedia of interested names.
While I dream torpid sex, long poles, dark owls and crows, --
while I sleep, you promise, danger-mountain .yes,
while I hibernate, as you profess my choices,
you will privilege my tongue as perfect knowledge.
What else can a Mountain teach Human Beings
while brother Bears sleep for eternity?
Yes, I am great bear and I loved on mountain humps
my miracles include all beasts and human beings.
The Art of Murder – November 1, 2007
Halloween has the sweetest smile
corrected for color balance to allow
all the teeth to pause as harmonic silky green
snarl before murder inherited mortal relief.
I did not murder my mother. I did not kill her mind.
The Lord with her deft wind faked her story and babble is cruel.
1.
My mountain, you promise bloody skies
to celebrate that South Bronx ghetto
where my mother and grandparents
watched this blue eyed girl slip
out of the trenches of WWI.
Today, cracks in the hollows of the sidewalk
stumble along side horses no longer present
and old oil burning cars that smoke away life.
You stumble Dear Mountain and we
write notes no one can decipher. Ironic
logic without substance drips in the waste.
After all, we did plan to celebrate anniversary
as birth or death, and my mother, like Ezra
Pound died in the pit of All Saints Day, in gusts
of wind strung thin between small clouds.
I watched the wind pick them up and we were afraid.
Every day after that we fled quickly down greeny
death of the Amazon paradise enraged.
Why are we so easily scared?
Why do we fake witness and passion
to mumble how we're not unique?
The clock and the wind drove us to step
lively into the train and we fell to the subway
tracks crushed into pulp ready for paint.
How dare we pretend my mountain
to love anyone given that loss of life
for nothing but waste and surprise?
We are shocked. So what? How much
longer must we scream to let Halloween die?
2.
I am not the usual mountain today
Do not trust me. I will cut you open easily
as I need one day to prove that mercy lives.
Once a year, every year, my mountain
celebrates death. It makes murder heroic. It
cuts off heads and blows the background clear:
no false hope. Nothing can be pitied. It all
ends in a fall from the cliff, when your foot
misses that one space that keeps you alive.
I have no pity for my victims. They are
simply another stone rounded at edge with
brilliant blue eyes, sandy skin and that wet
open sore of a cunt, or that dirty dick shaken
awake. They all piss in my mouth for lunch.
I don’t mind. Water is a necessary evil. I want
that wash where rivers are made so bloody
they cannot separate skin from soil,
air from the rattle of isotope steam blasting
through the garden wilting the rose.
Without my personal, applied evil how would
I measure goodness? I am selfish but my
life measures millions of yours, and I can
do what I choose without any restraint.
No one can stop the movements
of my arms as the warning cannot be read.
If everyone blinded by a thousand suns
suddenly forgets that they are mortal
and I am not, power doesn’t shift well
in the background without forcing another
soul to its committed peace, which death
living as irony, runs down her nipples
to the bones between her ribs, and takes
her heart as one would cut the wings of a fly
making its escape fail and life terror.
3.
She was warm in my mouth
when I sucked her nipples. I cut one.
I cut her ears. I blinded her with an awl.
I made him cut where she talks, so silence
ran down between her pubic
hearts to settle in the cup of her vestibule.
I whispered. You are not menstruating.
The blood leaks from her heart. Your eyes
cannot see where they are slit, and your
dying like an old scream lingers in my chart.
I was meant to be murdered by
the Manitou on my hip. She kissed
where sleep had no tail, no eyes, --
when she moved to fuck me hard
she slit our sides and balloons of guts
dragged to the edge of the trail steamed.
There, that fetid mass, cut from jewels
from scraps of words you stole murder
while lovers and fiends shifted the vent
to let offal shift tectonic plates in upheaval.
Yes, I understand. I, Holiday, lived one day only.
You owned the rest, but we keep each
other honest as the blind created wholes
where the bare ocean suddenly steams.
Halloween is that instant when terror
wins, -- No, at best, mountains
look away from Human Beings
to follow their ribs as rivers
and lakes break apart again.
November 11, 2007
"The first question I ask myself
when something doesn't seem
to be beautiful is why I think
it's not beautiful. And very shortly
you discover that there is no reason."
John Cage (1912 - 1992)
My Mountain press down to my coil.
What is the origin of matter?
Everyday your answer is different.
Choose one fact please to simplify
the texture of beach-tested waves
stirred in multiple tempos to the echoes
of sand sounded out of prediction?
Mountain, set eyes in blind rock –-
stay at rest my igneous intrusion
threaded at center with silicon
stars stolen from twinned quartz.
We set jewels faithless and invisible
without dogs to whistle out noise.
Bells announce your cause
as you hid without permission
in the bower of cave painting
while boys and girls faked guilt
you're taught when you make love
to your mother without remorse.
My mountain I walked the circles
of your crest today. I sought love
from surrounding hills and horizon.
What happened this morning?
I followed you east to west
where rose stained snow
without steam cleansed vast
mineral wealth from well oiled
gutters of defiant streets.
I did not believe you stood still.
There was no panic; no one noticed
you break crystalline bonds to score
with other determined mountains.
I am amused that we do not speak
truthfully, or is this a passing phase
for the next day crown after the next
royal masque cannot be planned.
You refused to tell me answers.
Perhaps I don't want confusion.
I gratefully welcomed truth. Mountain,
you are beautiful. Nothing I say
can add to polished granite flooded
to undercut continents and to marry
cloud with land as one line dances
between one disguise and another.
Mountain, you add verbs
to death and life. When
you resist calm you capture
not only breath but substance;
you record change not as a diary
but as emeralds set in gold
like blinded birds followed
home in spring.
There is only illusion my darling --
No answers if you consider
the origin of matter and things?
November 22, 2007
"I want freedom for the full
expression of my personality."
-- Mahatma Gandhi
Winter came today. It spelled
beautiful cold and love covered my
mountain with more than golden
shadows dressed from November.
The flowers Sherry called horizon
slipped with rods and rocks in place
while in distant greens decorated
while lost floral caves spirits prayed
for various thrills, revivals and ecstasy.
In soft speech we listened to time
as grand opera with vivid fury.
We close broken cycles and run
races between what and when
where and how long can we exist
without some subtle belief
thrown as weeds by birds on
meadows covered with ice that
glows insistent in the morning
when reds, blue and greens
are darkest and then the sun
appears with faith and nothing
else to promise daylight again
and nothing else appears when
that great flower Sherry simply
moved one step away and returns
so fast I cannot lift my self from
the passion as undercurrent
to when we will be new again.
2.
If you consider radiance as space
with blooms that penetrate ice
there is no limit to personality.
Every voice exists as a marriage
where tranquil past and present
run down broken hills with one
child raised simply as will,
thy will be done, and another
as love, where I am faith follows
the million blossoms of godliness
transposed as flutes and organ
riding up her leg again, finding
what was once upon a time
is now wild cleft again, and
resting split open in leaps
of speaking words I remember
as belief cleans waste with
ardent strokes complete with
will, as almost and dream
becomes backdoor to Nirvana
and Heaven and Hell our softer
cities lost in the isthmus
jackstep down dead free roads
out of breath while we clap
and sing one song after
another praying for honest
speech and perfect pleasure.
3.
The hump of my belly is full with
snowmen faces and snowballs that
delight throws against the sky.
We fly away on the arch of the snow
directed out of space, of course.
We make love in caves, drive slight
wind away, and we plagiarize faith
with a ditty and sonnet about
that rascal belief and its cousins.
Trust walks as love with
pearls and rings and after
all lost memory reclaimed
we find our hands returned
to where they were born;
nothing else matters
when you find love; light
and my mountain flare
with fault and its spells.
Demons serenade until
the decayed walls
tremble with old sins
written down too quickly
for the flaw to be recalled
as perfection rides too
easy down the river
away from Carousel
and the blue and red
balloons left behind.
November 26, 2007
On Deism
Speak to miracles, mountain:
the natural world is one field
in the ramble of my faith.
The righteous blood of cold
resides where my mountain
blocks the wind and spins
snow away from Missoula city.
On Sentinel Mountain
when winter is harsh
sky withers gray as clouds
penetrate solid rock when
brown becomes white then
gray in tarnished glow we
absorb faith before peneplane
dissolves facts with mystery.
My intricate universe cannot
be understood by drawing lines
between numbers or tracking
the creases in my hands.
2.
We address the snow in parting.
Winter browns our hands with
the natural blood of perfect thought.
My mountain, save us some green
in the silver glitter of sun in fields
when spring warms wild flowers
makes them violent but yellow
then draws paint from minerals
bleached by erosion of winter.
My mountain is larger than pastoral.
The bible is maps. Rivers and rocks
divide the actual mind from intent.
In revelation I hear Bach's
"Jesu Joy of Man's Desiring.*"
3.
Within planets and nebula
relief rises above my horizon
where the earth had no end
and no beginning as matter,
visible and dark, lifts god alive
from tantric prayers driven
with every breath to become
more than eternity or one
tragic myth left to dry
in mud carved with sticks,
stones and fingers by
absent sun, moon and stars.
*Johann Sebastian Bach, "Jesu Joy of Man's
Desiring" from Cantata No. 147
February 3, 2008
I speak to Mountains
every day and contained
I am led to places where
peace runs through streets
searching for life divided
by the square root of minus one
or any number divided by zero.
Herein my verse mocks my obscured wits
and I travel to know impossible that earlier
life when I grabbed my wings to revive
after death on Don River when in 1923
my lives created once upon a time
another chance to rehearse daily
meal when the universe began.
My woman you were my life
when I died wearing Lenin
revolution and my red collar.
2.
My new mountain begins
with quiet magical sermons
and then step backs
to watch the sun set
on handsome mountain
covered with roses and snow.
I hallucinate for rainbows
where gold can not be found.
Here one day in my State of Grace
on mountaintop we meet again
after eighty five years of snow
storms bred from Ukraine
to my Montana Mountain.
Every daylight-evening divides
red from green, and what happened
from what never did -- and snow
spilled in avalanche to open
spectacle while time in paradox
wins the slanted chess board.
3.
Today, I, my life grew accidents.
Can poker predict fate?
Will fortune as opposite whim
amend daylight wagging
back and forth between
known and unknown
invisible rivers in Ukraine
while the Don River floods
the Hudson or Danube
basin even as Mississippi
swings jazz above flood gates;
human beings dangle from
edge of manufactured stars
4.
My mountain dreams
where Noah sat alone
contemplating one day
at a time like any good 12
step fiend withdrawing drugs
and alcohol but never sex
from bare, aging face:
Why is it difficult to know
my last day of life in 1923?
Impossible will be programmed
when calculus stumbles wildly
with out the signs of the cross
or sine and cosine. The tangent
of miracles will calculate Pi
without computer fables,
myths and deconstructed
fairy tales such as an
impossible estimate of
how many times I will return
again for another day constructed
by chance for that marvelous evil --
my glorious terra in revolt.
I calculate my lives with
history and mountains and now
you stumble into my maze
and we predict another fold
in another dimension as boring
time simply will not follow
rules and behave as layers
of silt appear where
the ice melted Sunday
Fresh snow has not
swept down Olympus
to carry dazzle into black.
Keats and Blake hurry
fists and pens in gray
ink too watered down.
We keep peace and in
clouds my mountain
and the Ukraine began.
It is a glorious 1924
and I never knew it
before our first Sunday.
Valentines Day 2-14-08
Today only tide
and gravity run
from river fall to rise
as simple maps live
love in dark streets
to show-life when
mask and lips, when
lollypops sucked
until eyes change
this twilight my
vivid storm woman
who belts thunder
with motion that
great dancers break
open as sexual shift
from child to woman
borne empty to full.
At that dance, red
heels and lip color
string sophisticated
beads tying heart
to another by nipples
of tide with pebbles
that sting to open life
and make the semen
run across the ovum
as the mist descends
and child rise up again
out of the black matter
descent of human things.
My mountain will witness all
love falling down and clapping
with swallow wings in tune.
2.
Seasons wrestle
limbs while twigs
string to trestle
to green fortress
and we wheel
with hunting birds
placed for adoration
become shrill as lark
finding its last home
and season spilled
as dye in an ocean.
3.
The first season returns
after the last cycle drove
light away from mountain
ridge over the soft fields
down sloped into gullies
where soldiers walked
with any limp or duty.
We, new, are loved when
walls break in fusillade of rose-gray
clouds spent to a morning crash
February snow and cold
rain erase marks on skin
where kisses made love
uncovers maps set to draw
happiness after duplicate
signs are set down
to sing hurrah over again
when the clocks starts
after mud fouled straw
buried time with gold
transmuted to pleasure
"and love conquers all."
Different Seasons in Distant Spring
1973
Spring is the rebellion of the crocus
wrestling with the ground.
The forsythia and the child sweat
and the earth banged a drum.
Then the rain comes.
And we watch the white
below the green,
then the brown crust,
the black below the sea
2008
The Mountain
has simple words
this season. She
melts the snow;
kindling snaps;
bird's feed:
Umber drawn green.
Nightmares stir wings.
.
February 24. 2008
"And my hair is long"
my mountain spoke
in famous tongues
with undeniable truth.
She barks with ardent voice
and considers the history
of rocks and minerals
reaped from the blast
of atoms heated to plasma.
That first bang was louder
than all the suns reduced
at once and it returns life
not to graves but uterus.
2.
My Mountain participates in wind
while wild rain cracks vertical cliff
ground to body as we expand
and contract with obedient service
to amend those fixed unknowns
when random sparks collect
to gather entrails and read fortune
and fame with morning glory
seeds, lady bugs and fluorescent
dragon flies dragged to shore and
plucked to stop the light at once.
3.
My mountain
sheds its skin
every season.
There is no mountain
when hair is short
and sight too frail
and we are illusion
lovely spectacle more
ancient than nebula
of big bangs and pause
recorded in the ledger
and finally posted when
space collapsed again
for that trillionth part in
all the ocean of things.
4.
"I swing my hair open
and I cover the heavens
until my name spoken
becomes the greeting
that starts it all again,"
mountain said rushing
down the gullies
into streams of icy water
melted until snow dries
brown to grass into
summer dust.
5.
Frozen rocks stir
into light leap
above roadways
that orbit the land.
I swing white hair
long now back
and forth as test
of gravity. For 40
million years sand
collected in disparate
pools of obsidian and
quartz, mica and
tourmaline spears.
6.
Planets on some higher beach
shout out names to record
ancient quakes for previous
maps of mountains at grace.
No one knew they happened.
Only the mountain can talk.
Silence has no cradle.
Rock are not deaf but answer
only when the earth fragile
and diseased calls out its rage
with a parade of sparks while bleak
empty matter gathered as cruel
joke declaimed with apparent curse.
March 16, 2008
"And thus I clothe my naked villainy
With old odd ends, stol'n forth of holy writ;
And seem a saint, when most I play the devil."
William Shakespeare
I will not break rocks
and speak false and I
begin with vigor,” she said,
and her bloom reached
its furthest point to spread
petals to crumple for weakened
love reached second to last
step beyond infinite life where
honesty pimps its own tragedy.
Landscapes roll exact from mountain
wit h no one to catch the infants’
storms where silica and iron oxide
painted hot breath into limonite
as god lost her holy fight with
green and lemon flowers handled
by the midwife of crystalline law
its unveiled vigor opened with
rush of lava and pressure split
within folds that will be genesis
for another hundred million years.
Scream of schist and red jewels
ruby split horizon as mitosis
struck other germ to split by two --
“there is no other truth possible,”
she said again. She spoke attention
and caressed the seabird beach.
She connects to every part
of light drained from tempest
she accepted as her rigor
draw the view of mountain
and its longer lives are sculpture
drawn for theaters of the Play.
3.
Mountains fold out of flower buds
and every streak on their wet skin
paints another mountain ridge
where I step forward to spring.
There is no false birth.
Children run from seeds
to shining sea. Waves
feed gravity and its plan.
“Something grand,” she said
will challenge the birth
of leaves where conch shells
strum their change of state
while ribbons of mountains
fold into cradles as birth
opens the cervix and dilated
we are spun with mother
earth companion in the park
when the green flower spoke
my childhood name when
my grandfather held my
shoulder to steady my hand
breaking into the loam with
wild seeds borrowed from
some unknown meadow.
We set our hands in loam
and I could see what none
before knew as the lies
of truth break open god.
“I will be taught all atoms,”
Tom and Mountain spoke
at last, and my greeny
mouth opens to breathe
every journey known.
In the beginning no
one can speak lies.
Faith or its fact
has not created
its death cold shell.
March 17, 2008
Poem for Pubic Pears by Farragher
*gig is Irish word for female vulva fruit
Come fuck my brain and I inspire
as Hera did Zeus longing to live
beyond mountains and plains.
Lewis and Clark appeared when
I walked the same river basin
unaware of my presence in woods.
No temporal disorder will unseat us.
The plate tectonics of love astutely
arranged in the phonics of vowels
for this bramble has only solar winds
which we name the sex of Lakes
and Rivers where direction
and magnitude set weapons
lost never won until morning
when slim gods fight fat dogs
fired up with Eggs Benedict
and roasted spits with blaspheme:
"I love all GODS."
Here in my palm she cuddles
damn, and the sunset stalls,
the tempest feared drives
ferocious BMWS with golden
eyes to corral where slaughtered
in war they expire as breath
stained highway for unhappiness
drum sexual longing in old age
when there's no reason to fight
when blasts of money feather
down over Grand Canyon
into soup of cherries now rich
after press coverage and fake
magic "brand" it special when
image replaced with wax fruit
and the bust of Marilyn Monroe
molested in repeated headlines
mould on fruit bowls in commode.
Nature answer few questions
on the screen behind us
a silhouette of tongue in cleft,
or fingers in the web of stars
ripens to make sun even
the big bang irrelevant
as the earth set up to be center
of the universe, which in one
sense it is: We live only on
this oblate sphere. What other
center can matter when all
life now tastes like rotten
fruit served in Green Zone
by dangerous oil men
and Tsars like Catherine
who fucked worlds to register
her title to golden chariots.
Sunday, June 8, 2008
All snow has melted and I say "I love you" and it is a Mantra.
The green shows where the eyes connect to the edges of space. What is space? What does the big bang fulfill? Does it shift with the plates of the earth like a sinister road without depth?
We stay in one place and move nothing. We freeze not as cold but by the whispers of inaction. We pause and drive without fun into the leap forward that has consequence and no conclusion.
After does not exist at the speed of light.
The neutrino in any of its flavors has mass and therefore a clock.
Where and how did fabricate words to shift the mountain closer to the emerald now high choking the flood on the Sentinel mountain, and this grain will sunburn with normal drought of summer; my memory says lift up,
expose after by now, by present,
by the ache of the millisecond before silent big bang
when 'What was God' became 'What is God'
when unknown formulae and theory rest
on that ignorance which is grace carried in the lips
to your lover arranged as the mass of time without
that union that gives to some life argument
for past and present; there's no surety of future
tense drawn out of the pails of sewage
leaking from the bilge of the ship long past sailed.
I am bliss. I am recall of pleasure resting on my fingertips. The rock moves under the pressure of ice. The trees set down in rows of seeds and spores dry on the red rock where the sun rows through madness and completes the map of what happened when chance that permutation of dice glows in the dark when parachutes descend from space to accompany melody
drawn out of the seed hidden in uncut rock.
Sunday, July 3, 2008
The whole life of man is but a point of time; let us enjoy it.
Plutarch (46 AD - 120 AD)
A single day is enough to make us a little larger.
Paul Klee (1879 - 1940)
The life of the rock
begins before steps up
mountains of praise
or after decline of reputation.
Hard news becomes fine
sand without bondage.
Today's anniversary
began with jewel's wife
before he was born again
as million year rocks and
tired suns glide up in space
to time an infinitesimal
July 3, 1977
Marriage began in the southern
summer of Greenwood where South
Carolina days led us away to small
homes and temporary mailbox rusted
frozen as music stalled on phonograph.
We would not live there too long.
Marriage is that horn that blows
without screams or with dissonance,
terror and anxiety dragged
out of the human so
help me I failed too easy I say.
May 12, 1978
Ian born today in Anderson
where the low rise of dead
willow a stump on the lawn
to make the lawn mower hop
and skip but I never grew
more beautiful flowers that
summer. Greens married reds
married soil married moving
on again with anxiety asleep.
I never taught better in schools
the poem revived as breath
grew in thunder storms that
keep beauty as marks of change
on the daily horizon bled new
by the leap to Beaufort
and the marshland flowers
of half tropical paradise.
October 20, 1981
Kathleen born. Her art
words will settle with
new children in Lake
Missoula prehistoric
River drawn with Lewis
and Clark myths and
steps of explorers
staggering up the cliff
easily as light reflected
off the silver moon and
black blue Nighttime
Mountain of my names.
My first daughter Daria
born in 1975 climbed in
my arms while mother
retrieved diaper bag and
and I held step daughter
before mother and we
spent ten years beside
the other lines of words
we drew with detailed
life marked down as pain
and pleasure ridden
in marriage's rooms.
With horizon painted
in eyes, Daria as she
knows color and
will grow seeds in 2008
to mix new fertile flower beds
with gray and blue trim
besides marigolds and
saw dust zinnia dreams
so rich every flower and
three children in 1988
climb the old Greek garden
house on Myrtle and 3rd
just before the nasty
school no one liked.
July 3, 1988
Marriage over.
No, not divorce, but final
words and love spent
children keep garden
house and I run down
the street become Ad
man for chemical fairs.
Every poet lives every
day as one image breaks
to another when waves
short or tall crumble
and as slumber takes
over all the lost nights
and unexplained days.
My children are the
great gift and I buy
them with time and
listening to my heart
I now resume words
and stand by dreams
that have intricate gold
braids drawn to choke
the present from past
as life recovers its every
day celebration of schemes
painted and baked with
kiln until stone and stone
are luster against heaven
broken in place of time
when all becomes zero
again and no one counts
life or how we are born.
July 3, 2008
The mountain is calm
and light brown rusted
near green flowers cut
into bare rocks while
the California smoke
from forest fires burns
anniversary to make
what is not pure at least
clean to soften throats
and feed minds natural foods.
Grandson Delaware
born last month cries
and nurses, sleeps and
raised alert with strong hands
while mother types application
for school aid and read email
that is an echo of our altered
state of mind since 1958.
Fifty years from today
it they year 2058, Delaware
who will call me pappy
created outside of river
driven to sediment
scattered gravity on Pacific
beach where it starts
roller coasters again
riding down the gorge
chasing the stage coast
with guns shouting as
wheels spin away from
death just fast enough
to escape abstract flares
that I can predict now
from reading the palms
of suns in prism of stars.
It is actual and not virtual
that I can predict nothing
now. Who can show life
where only minerals leached
subside in the bubbling springs.
I predict nothing now.
I will be wrong. We all
have our patch of time
and every anniversary
blends from the mountain
mud mixed with serious
blood and the jewels we cut
and sparkle from opaque stones.
Sunday, July 13, 2008
" Sentinel Mountain scorched: grass fire erupts,
searing more than 300 acres on mountain"
Wednesday, July 9, 2008 -- Sweet Grass burned
For H.F.
Love made. Ground erupted.
Her voice traveled, sewn inside
my skin before morning deadly sun
swallowed with mixed fruits. Fire
rode lips to speech as every word
projected renewal when inferno
unlocked new doors. It caught us
in surprise as light from embers
sculpted our faces for no mask
can be found in maps of first
steps made by Eros and that
early morning leap out of bed.
She inspired by her hands
opening what cannot happen
unless you believe in ghosts.
2.
Our earth dry and browns even
before emeralds left the grasses
black and final smoke burned eyes.
into mountain revived when
grass blends green again
with impasto paints chiseled into canvas.
3.
My earth loves sensual conflagrations.
No one can watch every rock, twig
and pine cone. We lived high
in the sweet grass while the mountains
trembled in unison as we carefully
opened our lives with a fair book
of treasures that included danger
and loss as glue to link our weather.
to every mineral and geometry.
4.
Life sways and I live my
mountain and its accident,
which was not planned. I am
drawn peaceful in pine tree
stands of ceremonial grass
and scattered rocks and
minerals breaking that steep
plane down the mountain side
while earth melts from random
weather striking the world's
waves as we shift to keep
our history straight at least
one day more before decrease.
Sunday, July 26, 2008
"Every rock has a name
until it is split so small
we call it black dust and
empty of matter and fear
we pause to empty the urn
and no one knows who
lived inside the mountain
with those whittlers and
changelings who ignore
death by counting verbs
and how many times "fuck"
appears in the margins."
Prelude
The first year of the mountain
is almost over. It is time for me
to consider the consequence of
Missoula and I personified
through the diction of geology.
August 11, 2008 comes soon
and the levies are never breached
for my record shows that I have
lived in some way on the bank
of the Missoula River even as
my body drove taxis in New York.
I am not a changeling my secrets
unwrapped after light years of travel.
1.
Settle controversy by cutting off life.
We cannot run away from conflict
and fellow travelers win and lose.
We are bound to the drama as
we are caught in the tides that cover
us with drought or flood and even
the stars refuse to command unity.
2.
Sex is the subject we handle today
as it is bound with both glory and
tired eyes that make tragedy derivative.
3.
How do we know answers when even
the questions are buried and the words
leached from the parchment do not
thrive in place where choice stunned
by hypocrisy rattled by powerful
drunken soldiery out of Dublin
and New York in some time and place
more invisible that the child born in
five years who will someday revise
this poem and change my life from
inside her dimension and mine blank
will grow slower and softer when blink
and strobe of police lights draw walls
more formidable than the Great Wall
if you hold military might as constant.
4.
Bigotry grows on fields near muddy
rivers with too much rain and too little
blood in veins to sustain a proper life.
If we deny reason and explore carnivorous logic
the bones rattling our mantle will not exist forever.
The hardest stone eventually weathers to sand.
5.
Girls and boys gather on the corner to play baseball.
Their bodies grow with every slashing stick with terror.
6. Ki, Sumerian goddess of earth
Life and death follow a much diluted river bed where
Sumerians from Iraq gather with Ki to magnify
failure we use to unravel success bred to expand
like stars and galaxies just before and after big bang
watched the seasons divide again as atoms will.
Consider the embryo inside uterus we caused without
plan and the conflicts, rain, weather and grief
cannot slip away at night to be forgotten without
a tract of dreams to explore graveyards without
body bags unzipped hidden out of sight but ready.
7.
I will live another ten million years even as terra fails
and Mars dries out again. I will survive, as I have become
the infinite spirit of rocks melted, made solid and then sand.
Sunday, August 3, 2008
"Matter cannot be created or destroyed?"
Questions
Interrogative on Being?
If Why occupies space
and Next runs down streets
watching the edges of Fact
become universal mass
how will fire breed from
that contagion to end it all?
How does Mass grow, shiver
and collide with its own shield
as gladiators bang their swords
when orders come out of the blue?
In that decay how does my
mountain grass grow again
after school children playing
with matches set fire to my hair?
Will I grow out of brown
fired soil to rasp fury within
transcendental planes forged
from fingerprints left behind
to mark how spirits commuted
crime into the bias of thunder
drawn on established church doors
as lightning fit to all the flaws
of Eden as it was created then
consumed by human flaw
and the innocent rumble
of the babble we call tectonic plates?
2.
Neither Answer nor Glory
In the aether will I burn?
How can I heal from scars?
Can every question
glow without resistance?
Sunday, August 10, 2008
If I am the mountain I am always questions. There is never just one solution. Time runs at different speeds. Mountain and human leave different debris. How do human beings weather erode? Can the spirit be butchered like cattle? When renewed do I lose that sacred magma that boils without pause until the screams from burns disappear?
Glacial Lake Missoula
Witness
15, 000 years in the past when glaciers descended from what we know is Alaska and Canada one lake half the size of Lake Michigan filled the valleys of western Montana. One day, and there had to be one day, the ice dam broke and the water flowed at 65 miles per hour towards the Pacific Ocean and in two hours the glacial lake emptied and filled at least ten times over the next few thousand years.
We are blessed by the Channel Scab Lands of western Washington State and scars on Mount Sentinel where the level of the lake recorded its presence in parallel lines 1000 feet above the base of the modern city of Missoula, Montana where the breasts of the hills nurse the rocks and clouds as mother.
The Mountains
Always Love Snow
Mother, the road stops.
I cannot count the steps
I have taken. I am bare
rocks and empty vessels
pushed to the end line
left alone to fill and replenish
weather to emerge when
mothers perform at signs
of birth, death and mutation.
Dear Manitou: I am such a lonely
animal more grass and stones than
beasts. My mother you eat at my
skin as I rub those stains where
presence made slight silver stain
to show the revolt of light and dark
in that mysterious case of how do
we know any history or event when
we do not see how it plays as child-fool
dance on horizon wire at night.
No one escapes accident or natural
forces let out to rage in their own
individual conquest of place where
no one can stop the physical force
that undermines the edges of light
just emerging from outside the cold,
demon like prospect of a succubus
who drinks at the blessing of soil
and makes the movie Future when
kind storms strike down what we
fear and made new great alarms
set like gems but invisible in sand
grains that residue of weathered
granite where frost draws cold water
to freeze every artifact as rocks
divides into cells and followers
of rumors spelled limestone, feldspar
and quartz raised in as press release
history of the petrology of sentient silicates.
Our steps open copper
plume to opinion that other
sandstone life called another
human kind pinched and thrown
away by deep ocean waves
to challenge sublime leaks
from cracked pockets cut way
by knives that bleed calm
to disruption and the volcanic
vice of glorious nature embalmed.
That day I discovered the alternate
scheme I carried alien life with in
a shoulder bag on airplane and cuts
from a artist knife ruined expensive suit;
I was despondent and then I felt how
accident has purpose but no one knows
what will begin from the sketched lines
circumstance breeds into mountain DNA
when released to transform easy facts.
Now, at pagan prayer we are supplicants
struck down flat to the marble floor.
We promise to read all torn pages
and reattach chance and influence
bathed in that dying by life, which
is the memory of abuse restored when
no one counts how many stones
create the fault in mountain and valleys.
We are so many open lies undiscovered.
The mountain bares our lonesome complaint
but not without renewed chance and consequence.
End Note:
Last poem in first "Mountains in Montana sequence dragged
out of ash to restore emblems. What I write is completely unknown
as I mark down results and failures with duplicate pens neither
red nor black nor flesh
Book Mountains in Montana
Compiled 12 August 2008
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