Beloved moves words through me as if I

Beloved moves words through me as if I
Were a soft book; I live and I'm a language
Evolving and reiterating, then
Dissolving in a diffuse decadence.

I'm written in the mind which is the world
Which is my self which is a movement of
A love that is without a language and
Without a bound in its resplendent reading.

To comprehend a fraction of what is
The wealth of her, to taste a nectar where
You are no longer self--no me nor I--

But empty as the air before a music,
Is the true work my verse has its object
And worth the toil of a thousand Suns.

Imagine her legs in movement like a language

Imagine her legs in movement like a language
Of thighs that build a script, subjecting vowels
To this refraction or a rounded mouth,
Or if her gestures whirled into graphemes...

She is this light, an instrument of God
Producing and pronouncing sounds. I say
To her, with her, "Let's make love with nonsense
Because we're sacred and ridiculous!"

The line about her shoulder I had heard
In the ascending santoor melody,
And then the calves above a brown piano

Reverberated. I'm no self within
This endless, infinite, confusing music
That is her graceful, thoughtless utterance.

The way the words were formed by her lips

The way the words were formed by her lips
In loops and rings, the recess holding air
That moves and vibrates up from tree-like lungs
That warm this air about a throbbing heart;

Or was it how the light reflected off
Her in a way that brought the room alive
With movement, choreographed light and dark
That flickered across a dim separation?

Desperately, I moved a breath without
My self to vibrate into her. I knew
She heard me when the contours turned into

The nothing filling out the room, and then
I heard her sigh and toss as if a brief,
Senseless dream completely satisfied her.

When a Buddha went to the river, saw the gulls

When a Buddha went to the river, saw the gulls,
The thick brown water moving quickly down
The spine of this soft continent, he spoke
About a boundless ocean, or the way

The Rishi saw beyond the sky. A sound
They sung about the sides of that mountain
That many heard and cloaked in other names.
Right at the mountain where the rivers end

Or where they start, whatever's north or south
I guess we know from the word map we use,
Whether we know it or not. He heard the clouds

Suppose the gnarled and tangled river oak
Was another Bodhi tree; a lotus curled
Its stem up to the surface and bloomed.

What woefully foreign, irrational science is this

What woefully foreign, irrational science is this?
There wasn't any method followed when
Ibn ʿArabī prophesied a map,
Or Borges sat designing another labyrinth.

Once I wrote a poem where all the parts
Just went together, where it made sense;
Or did I? This to that divided thought
Within a happy nonsense I had sung,

Or did I? I'm bound to repeat myself
In three discovered cycles like the tone
In Pran Nath's nondiscursive coughing warble.

A couple birds formed an hypothesis
In the leisure of a May updraft;
I woke and I wandered about a disorient land.

Some of the older poems make less sense

Some of the older poems make less sense
Than the ones I'm fussing about here and now,
And no matter how I try to clarify
Each of them, I am at a muddled loss.

Let's barge right through another one just like
A fumbling drunk goes through an unlit room
And stubs a toe on the darkened and low
Mahogany inherited coffee table.

Illumined by the nonsense of them all;
Only the Frost poems make any sense,
Or the ones I read in different translations.

Something is lost in all the subterfuge
Of style that classifies a modernism--
I don't know what it is, may never know.

I saw us there. We jumped the crooked fence

I saw us there. We jumped the crooked fence
And ran between the rows of cows until
We found ourselves in waves of painted yellow
Flowers stretching to Lake Salvador.

The cool, flat water stretched like a mirror
Reflecting back at us a painted sky:
The art Nizami once articulated
To punctuate his song of maddened love.

Quickly! Line the ground with handfuls of
The hay that's rolled in bales and let's doze off
Imagining the world asleep with us.

The milky white of sky--or was it thigh?--
Caroused as the dim, satellited earth
Wobbled a bit in its eccentric orbit.