No phoenix, my love

The house -- our house -- is a smoking ruin
Electricity's out -- no lights left, save for some random embers
I wait for dawn to go in and see what remains, what's lost, what's salvageable.
The TV - toast.
The couch is bare springs and a skeleton of blackened beechwood.
All the food in the fridge - baked.
That's ok. I can live with that loss.  
You reflect on what's really important.
What is?  What is it?
To the bedroom. Where is my wedding ring?
The dresser is a charcoal cube
An ancient altar after the annual ritual
The precious things we placed on top -- consumed
The incense of that cedar and burnished cherry
rose -- to whose nose?  What god found this sacrifice acceptable?
Fine.
What else?
I turn and survey the remains of the nuptial pyre
The scene of the sacred ceremony
Nothing lingers but a shadow
A smudge of grey, the bed ash mocks the entwined occupants 
What love lay there?
Down, down, into dust, blacked out and bedashed
No phoenix, my love
But eternally darkened cold and still. 

(Apr. 3, 2014)

My father, on leaving his home for the last time

As the orderlies wordlessly wrangled me out of my ramshackle rambler
With a rattly bang of the aluminum storm door
and a rump-bump-bump down the steps of the stoop
My deleriogenic dread of my final stop
was momentarily displaced by a fear of sliding off the stretcher
like a silenced sailor being committed to the sleepy deep.

(Feb. 27, 2016)

Longing

What painful pleasure there is
in embracing you from afar

O detestable Love
That brings to me absence
and fills me with emptiness

And satisfies my heart with longing

(May 8, 2001)

dry ice

day grows sere 
eon grows serer still

dawn draws near
eschaton draws nearer still

The Man in the Moon

That silly silent moon slowly ascends, a buttery balloon 
Its bright mellow gleam splinters my watery eyes 
Its beam like a spider-spun silvery string 
Chaining my soul to its glimmering golden bowl.
The moon is mine 
mine alone, as long as I linger in its thrall 
it breathes its clay-cold life into me alone 
and all the wide world evaporates into blind oblivion.
I am knighted, crowned, exalted, sanctified
Purified in its frosty furnace-font.
Thus emblazoned I reign over a world of one
me and my benighted moon —
La luna sordomuda mia
— that pale-haloed harbinger of monotone doom.

Exile

Behold the willows watered by thy wandering soul —
Yes, the very willows whereupon I have hung my heavy heart.
Lo, how they weep!
Oh, how wondrously wise. 

This moment

This hour, we forgot all the world outside these walls
This minute, we lost all the layers of artifice and "civilization"
This moment, we rediscovered the primeval cosmic human deep within us
Ephemeral eternity
Infinite
Point
Of
Exclamation
Singularity
Space and time curving in upon itself
The confounding mysteries of creation
Made as plain as the pupils of your eyes

(Feb 27, 2016)