I

Love Letter to a Memory

II

Death in a Winter Sky

III

Tenebrae

IV

Another First Date

V

A Random Phonecall

VI

Reflections Upon Rejections

VII

Girl Before A Mirror, 1932

VIII

The Lost City Revisited

III Tenebrae

Through every woman I caress I search for you, not in a look, but in a
pouring of myself into her eyes, not in a kiss, but in a drink of tongue
and lip to fill the empty cistern that is my aimless confusion. Thus in
losing you have I gained every woman. For in each there is that essential
hint of you, somehow. While each love is unique in its failure, so too
is it one and indifferent in its success. And every love I have for every
woman is thus rendered true by my infidelity to you. And every loving
regard followed by the same cracking heat of desperate desire towards
the never-ending feminine sequence, enshrines the permanent monogamy of
our past faith in each other. How can I rip your bosom from my confident
but yearning face, as I still suck the immortal milk of your critical
loyalty? In your perfect beauty, fixed on the edge of my eye like a
beacon drowned by a buoyant noon sun’s ghastly shadow, have I emprisoned
my future with rapturous memory, my glistening eyes tenebrous in the
tentative shelter of my tears.

Undated but before 3/1/90

Love that transcends forgiveness, that transcends time’s lurid melody,
you before the mirror, arms towards your own future, hands lean heavy
on the portal of decay, on the orange grain of reflection’s frame, beg
for the indifferent truth without hope, in confession for no one.

Dearest Lamb of God, slut of humanity, who steals the sins of my own
history, whose mercy lies upon me like the gilt-laden drapery of Byzantine
Shroud, in self-sacrifice to the lip-less voice of prayer, my sweet,
how can I save thee but in the self-indulgence of poetic raiments?

A flaxen leaf of hair, the cool lilac on your stoic profile, jut of chin
and nose defend the small, taut lips of fasting, the stamp of Constantine
on dull bezant, teeter on a self-contradicting pyramid of pearl then
pitch, on the fulcrum neck of the purity of innocence and the purity of
loss, the thick jet outline of your back an awkward bulwark against the
claims of sex, the coarse, coal vertebrae rigid, regular against the
lily flesh, emprison only the abstract possibility of a circle’s light
green gestation, the impertinent potency of ignorance, detached from
curiosity, suspends intent as sheets of a cathedral’s alabaster
windows imbed Ravenna’s pasty light within their amber veins.

Yet behind that girl’s frieze-like gaze burns a jaundice sun of decadent,
life-engendering, sympathetic aphrodisia, the fevered lips and fired
cheek painted with superficial vermilion cosmetic to signal wanton intent,
the facial outline a round curve of no impression, an obsidian eye that
knows itself but sees nothing save perhaps the finitude of satiety, body
now teeming with biomorphic progress, supply and curvy like veins of
volcanic ivy, one lavender arm aloft like a phallic spire from St. Sophia,
the burgeoning breasts firm and full like the balls of a sacrificial bull,
the other arm draped through Mercury’s sheet of time, through the limpid
mercury of the mirror face, relaxed in its liquid transcendence, both
arms a narcissistic engagement towards self-consciousness, the guts of
love now loosened in a distention towards the rolling sensuousity of
birth, an easeful musing on the soft paradigm of lust bursting forth
from the alienated stricture of chastity, yes, you have I chained
mercilessly to my coiled muscles in the crushing monotony of my desperate
perversions, shredding your succulent flesh like a frenzied lion a
gazelle’s gut in the farce of his final kill.

The virgin harrowed in glass, a gasp from death, breasts disengaged
in a Bosphorous blue, the droop of cancer-filled belly, and the face
behind the face the humblest brown death, the dried ejecta of a once
effluvial love, a glowing realgar dot of a hellish eye, the blot of a
forgone vision, dead sockets longing for the life that ponders them, the
mirror a tomb, the ultimate repose for the self containment that sex
unravels us from as surely as your lips paused before bitterly stroking
mine for the last, as absolute as your anxious eyes in their complete
disillusionment broken the course of my enigmatic promise to linger in our
shared mendacity.

Twist and shun this imaged demise before those calm, unblinking eyes,
and turn if only your musings toward me once again, or better, towards
the very-widening expanse of the fertile Thracian plain, its torrential
wars now becalmed by the grazing sheep pregnant with their clumsy progeny,
or best still must I forget as well as I have forsaken, must I be freed
not merely from you but from the regret of you and your reflection upon
the thin, opaline pane.

Monastery of myth, is thine maudlin maneuver as universal as this
particular kiss? While the simple mind finds a rest in the finitudes of
answers (go forward and do and pray to do! The non-symbology of the
pragmatist in action, the cold heat of deliberation manifested in blind
movement) but what is life and love but a guess

Disgust shields the monk as solitude silkens disappointment. In the
stinging aftershave of a fogged mirror, no love, so final possible
of two human conditions, no mythic comfort or distraction. The bland
business man before me must not give way to the maniac myth-maker, but
both must dissolve in the heat of individual obsession elicited by a
particular sensuous catalyst imbued in the fantastic dream of another,
for variation across individuals lends rise to universal illusions that
instill into humanity our only solution: an artifice born from the particulate.

Goodbye, Adieu. May you reach the repose your death demands:

the crane’s heart stops madly in startled ascent through humid frozen
haze . . .