Depression’s preciously bounteous baffles
buttering golden orts in gormless, greige, and cumbrous dust—
which once had obsessed with what scuffed scryer’s eyes
seared censer’s brittle breath of embittering wisdom
boiled tough as sulking, rain-slouched suede, or
supplely stationed yolks
this garbled water’s
woe-ribbed maundering muddles
gray and impassibly marble-hard—
Paled poets’ glims old Homer’d honed
to shape amongst insightful shadows
traces sweetened, banquets limned
delectably long in haunting timbres
callow tongues still stickily stir in
(though often balled ‘long blunted tangs
cold, fetidly flickering bulbs benight:
bemuse, bedraggle, baffle, balk, and break);
Paled poets’ eyne Apollo’d milked
once combing broken glebe-land gaits
for glibly tickling eclogues lost
or thrilling still some saucy swineherds’
sun-singed, brusquely roughened cheeks
to the dimpled ribs of raw ribaldry reeling;
Eggs young, slumping Sartre cracked
and folded cold and quietly, slouched
in age’s mirthless aegis wanned,
to chunky, noisome, sourly
sallowing, understated,
overwrought, obtusely
disabusing, dinged
and lye-flecked,
pithy, and dry
meringue
an imp unversed in bakers’ tastes
once muddled and mashed of boiled egg—
and there the veil descended stiff
as a months-old bowl of instant grits.
These pie-faced farmers Fife had tickled
like Thalia sneered at Ulysses McGill,
bent picking impertinent, prickly clots
as Shaw once shewed and sleaved his plots,
sardonically smirking plots undug ,
airs brazen flues unearthed and sucked
incensed to char and channel strokes
some smiles sack whilst wiles choke;
what chambered organ’s fickle flues
recoil in, roiling, runnied, and ready
to; should such knots untickled clumse,
malinger, shrilly cinch, or worse,
be mackled with thoughtless flogging self-
effacing, cloaked and clogged
in swoln, deboned, and sorely sunken
meringue; implode amidst tasteless pangs
repressed and obsessively plucked along mangled cat gut—
Blue and white
seemed every seaside,
porcelain-frail,
what ages crazed and cracked
in honouring a measured aegis aching,
pressures prescient storms unfurl;
wet banners overblown, blown over or
burdened worse than burdened knew;
shred sashes clewed, expected to belly;
wry winds, gaunt palfreys plucked,
could carry or tarry, calm, enliven,
crash and crush— careened amongst blushing blossoms,
here:
another quaint, colorful teacup preens,
its bodice flued and ivied in silvery filigrain fey,
and licked upon its tawny breast
fresh-envermeiled flowers spring,
pristine as toddling teeth,
from swarthy fens frail slaking slurping thins,
bright bulbs deliciously sprawling
idle sip by quickening gulps engulfing,
argent arbors bridging ribs as
porters promise sterling portals rare,
shanghaiing hatches hitched
to rarest blossoms flukes must feed through
—lo!
a plate estranged by a delicate seaside,
ever more than scenes mere orts obscure:
small shores slight azure inklings lick
as inchworms mincing, trembling
backs that but blue glints of sunshine smother,
aligned in a lissomely scintillant sweetness
fanned to impishly shimmy in shifting light,
bright freckles fording fjords unfolding freckles forged
and filled with thrilled and chittering ripples
ondines dredge in blithely azure tresses,
tickling indigo’d tadpoles pink,
some shreds they’d shed or shaven slipshod,
snipped with cerulean tarpon’s gills,
their worming tresses churn and trellis in
tall and tacit tors a swooning Ravel unraveled
whimsied once to scale and freckle his sinuous staffs with—
tors and fjords unstitched from riffling Rayleigh’s haze,
flown drooping in seamless tones and timbres
creatures, frail and ephemeral, rare as peak-plucked air,
lathed shorter than any bur or inchworm,
lithe as a chiseling erhu’s dandled bow,
these maypoled ribbons pitch!
These smoldering, smoking, smirking tors
splayed cream obscures and scores ‘cross coffee’s
skin; or a pollen-flecked firmament,
vast, unfastened, and vascular threads
of such tremulous spirit
stamens, bees, and dryads spool;
each sip’s swift scenic shift,
bold, flickering moods a painted players’ wrists
alight or languor, clangour, soothe, reprise
in plangent yarns unleashed ‘long grains
the pines once webbed within glistening floorboards;
hymns no trenchant clique had yet suspended
from some feared and sapping sentiment
sharp as a popgun shot out from under
a yawn-mackled bell jar: one must choose,
among what children charm and chew,
amid what wasps weave papery nests of; know
each moment, every golden ort
one runnied glass abandons, squeezes
sternly or nervously gutward, freezes
lithe and alive in timbres crisp
this pulsing ice alights, aligns, enlivens,
gay and graven, gilt, illumined
petals lilting lurid red and frenzied fuschias
throbbing fierce as fires quicken; represses,
aberrantly, lashes lost ‘long scratchy lenses,
hairs some somber swallow uncoils and glues
like a cramped and sobering tickle,
a staggering frisson of peas misplaced
or micturition’s fricative trickle,
pulses’ tenuous pinions clipped,
bright curd unseized left limply sluicing laceward;
braving a bell jar’s brambling gauntlet viscous voices thorn.
This bread, drawn Rilke’s children greyed
upon which greige and cumbrous dust
(some wights would weigh as souls eschewed
wan wights ensnared in gnashing yokes),
is sparingly spread ‘round rictal thews
to crib at crippling mold and must
it know all life lives ‘long a stage’s
pliable lines and ephemeral lights,
and pits we coarse composers tune
with any key we, wandering clumsed,
enthused, arraigned, or
whimsically simpering; steal
upon but stock-strewn streets, dark
trailheads ponderous peaks proposed;
what paths dull hatchets chewed, eschewed,
refused, reputed, repeatedly raped,
repaired, or spared that nobody
more than most any one drubs,
depresses, shunts, shuts out, or
allows to illumine and, warbling,
lead?
