A Gathering of the Tribes

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Please don't be and other poems

please don't be:

i am unsure of this weather if only there were something beautiful before it is gone is there snow on the ground where you are everything is loss but this is just a house of ghosts. don't your scars itch don't you want to be known, don't you ever go looking for bodies in the snow so you can dress them in warm clothes. i am inconsolable, i want to know the beautiful thing even as i lose it. aren't we all dying soon, give me real words tell me what i don't want to hear is that love there buried in the snow?

i would lie down upon the chapel floor in a moonlit hour until the angels summon me up shortly before they flew off into the waking night singing in a confusion of what are you in your being and i’d say i’d like to love someone or someplace or something until i am gone and they’d say well truly that is a ruining thing and there is no longer purgatory, a worse hell or deeper heaven. and ourselves we were held in everlasting light. 

you were the last creature that i have seen that i understand and know, of course i will act as though i were in love with you though indeed i am not.

i have a special care for your entirety. and an impossible need to cry.

where is the light of you

the epochs:

i guess you could say the moon and i have been spending a lot of time together lately. recently, it has come to my attention that all my love has been in vain. i want to thank all my ghosts for being here for me. if you want to reach me i’m on the top floor of an empty building in the middle of nowhere, i also have a cell phone. or you can leave your message with mephistopheles.

and in that midnight i could not sound myself aloud and so i crept from one aching auspice to the other like a bird in a wheat field broke by the flat blue wind and wondering if this is it the plain of familiarity rolls on and on and we in it if i light my candles by the window and no one comes should i still have said those words when the universe cannot hear them the deaf ear of god as cliff face echoing i come down the mountain to sit by the train tracks and lie with my head back and my legs in the fading color of dusk waiting for a rumbling that means i’d better run as i wait i count the stars as one by one, they come out of their hidden corners burning for no one.

the earth is undone as the sky deepens into the real color first chirpings from the trees baby blue stage stream pooling holes of sky through the forest pale ochre yellow murmuring about the trees deer like stolen statues on the green fogged up bus like a ghost ship are there other people on this planet

but the moon is still here and i am looking at you, the most beautiful thing i’ve ever seen.

oblivion is here all the time now and it is very calm.

equinox:

i have been doing fine every night i sit on my building and count the stars, i have this equation see and at the end, comes the end of the world. you and i are two different colors like the sky a few minutes apart in the dawn i’ve never cried as much as i did when i realized you were real. as when the mourning dove fell upon the earth wailing and from its mouth came that hollow orb of sound so i knelt down and pressed the feathered thing against my chest to hear the sound of its beating as i crushed it and i, came apart but still the slow, my heart, the breathing world in its quiet mind of wintertime has broken into me like the sun coaxing out the shadows of the light and so i crept from one heavens to another ducking between clouds my skin scraped against the blossoming, as the moon went away to hide and the spirits were summoned back up into themselves and everything was the vaguest light in me to which i surrendered

ginger:

eyes, flashing gold-ochre green the trotting spell of her small feet on the earth and finally the mountain collapse inside her as in admitting some affection this being a tremendous sound in her chest which is the way we come together in the dark she was lost in the rims of the earth where it was springtime beautiful and unknown the great garden she knew something about how to be in a place of ghosts and how to live in it and how to touch a heart and know that it is real there is no wisdom inside us except for how we come out into a dusky dream of the winter trees you might say she knew the dearest strain of love singing out between the predawn sound she was in the heart of the mind of the universe which was in the old ways this was in the treasure of her presence but no words for a hidden soul as watches over us sweeter than a kind of god, she is always with us.

i wanted to know you when the morning light in which to dream the bodies and erase the rapturous music of the night or to be alone and live and die of it a plummet from the winter trees the leaves in gentle never-ending suicide to take for instance the blind night to find the bodies as must be buried and to be buried alongside sleeping in the drifts, lost and sightless is this all love is? your casual vacancy or the imagined snowfall in the deep of winter when still it is too cold to remove oneself from the heavens, you and the missing moon, me and the moon.

untitled:

we inhabit the lost spaces as men finishing the rafters

make snow fall past the windows

i didn’t say i’d be gone