79. OM, mutt, Ummo

(from London Landmarks by Marjorie C Bales)

"When we rest, our eyes stay open;
we are always off to war

--Ferron

"sometimes a person posed in a garden. the portrait peers back.
in others the flowers are cut, placed in a vase, this movement empty."

witness to my rare, ham-fisted charity:
one more deeply rooted in precarity

this antelucan caravan
at last warms me
with harrowing elan

after i put aside
all sense of myself as sharp:
the things i fangled, rathe or ripe,
a breeze or hard;
after i takeaway the heap
of word & deed
& dreamlife under the tarp,
what indeed am i save "blind
& stupefied heart"?

a lover of kimchee.
twelve-tone music & art
that tingles the back of the throat...
of vistas rare, Led Zep on harp;
subfusc, taupe.
then once untied, these winds will seep
t'ward ev'ry road
on earth, winging, freed:
no longer by my stance confined

to localized particularity.

"I sometimes feel the urge to say that all poetry is for the ghosts, as much as it is for the living."