and some days, Pentheus, like the
rest of us, is torn to souvenirs
by his mother and her maenads
as just a few words will poison
park and pond so you forgo the
many strings that tie you to the
rest and restless and still tug in
the struggle against the sun, and
no I can’t really see either but
a few more steps and we’ll rest for today
you see sometimes we have to go
on like this and suffer another prelude
one day molten gold or the certainty
of a chrysalis under a leaf
Tag: gold
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but something already gone glitters
so this soft pen now tries to lift
from the dream of a fish who is
determined to explore the dry
and those waves now gentle reach and
just here set a small movement in
motion that may more or less
resolve into something like melody
though even today as the winds
wild what survives seems sufficient
miracle to keep these sails tight
for a moment while I try to
gather a few parcels of silence
they say it’s worth more than gold
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I decided I would give up
writing the musical about
Charles Guiteau and the prose-poem book,
Twice as Nice as Mice on Ice. Who
knows what’s best and what’s a mistakenearly every bit of gold I’ve
chased has curled to a brown leaf in
my little claw but I’ll give those
old groans some sound and rough shapes andpadding for their feet as they find a place
and sing them to sleep if they let me and
maybe after years of shufflingwe’ll have a little machine that
sweetly encircles it all
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always starting new epics but never
finishing and the work somehow better
for it. The bastardbut how do you talk to that hateful child?
He turns every knife into praise and gold
for his flaking skinnot enough is made of his resolve to
deny the diagnosis at every
opportunity.They say that those under the southern stars
rarely fish but rely on the viscous
writhing things wrestled from clouds.
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those anthologized ones could sing
a line like beaten gold and decree
the world this way or that for time
present and time to come but now
we face exile if we fail to laugh
at those who reach deep into earth
and instead must waste so much
pixelated paper for no
more than a productive cough
our hands are too weak for oars our
feet too tired to climb the hill
and report on the clean air so
we ask the wrong question now that
the mountains have lost their last green
spirits but we have no one
no priest to pronounce the signs singing
from the steaming liver—but no—let’s not
soil this by dressing up in a song long gone
one day the animals that remain may
gather to snort and stamp a sweeter
melody in air free from our cardboard
other animals 