Apple-Cold
It is that first cold
that brings the apples,
the apple-cold,
the cold that moves the white moon
further, further up the tree,
the cold where the still, clear sky
lifts and stretches out
as if waking and making itself ready
for when the apples
and the moon
and the warm sun are gone,
for when the apples and moon and love are gone.
That cold, that first cold,
I take it like a hard fruit,
refreshing still,
its warning:
crisp, crackling
with a tang and sing of sour combining with the sweet,
that appleness, that apple-cold.
"More clothes, then,"
the apples are reminding:
"No bare feet, even on the carpets.
No tee-shirts."
More, it is saying, for when the trees have been shaken clear
and the real cold, the big mature, father-cold reaches down
and finding no apples left,
stretches out to us
to pluck and eat away
the ripeness where we sit,
more clothes or not.
It is that first cold, loaded with apples,
the gusts and hardness of it,
the taste and bits of it in between my teeth,
it is that first cold that pronounces 'leaving' with apples as its alphabet,
its consonants,
with the point that it is making:
'come the apples, comes the leaving'.
It is that first cold
that says, "Up, up and out, out you go,
out, out you go;
the stems,
the stems are breaking."
Not Understanding
What is a match
without sulfur?
What is fire
without the stink of it?
What is passion without the burning?
What is burning without
panic
anger
conflict
combustion
heat?
What is life in darkness
without sight or sense of yearning,
without sulfur, where nothing ignites and nothing is burning?
Should the lightening never strike?
The forests overwhelm?
The stillness spread its own bell-less din,
till even words,
any of them,
seem too much like a match carelessly struck?
What is a heart
without blood that rises in heat
to the bump and the beat of a sudden face
lit on an oil slick street?
What is blood
without bleeding
without staining that same heart lit street?
What is love
without the stink of it?
What is not understanding
but the fear of it?
If
If you had told me ....
the spring passed,
and the trumpets of rhododendrons sipped the soil beneath their feet.
The wall of summer's heat was built and fell.
Autumn bled,
a slaughterhouse,
its doors thrown open to the wind and iridescent flies.
Winter skinned the sky,
white and hard as marble.
Clocks shattered at the midnight of it all.
But oh, if you had told me ....
the child cried,
drank whiskey,
pulled all the girls' hair in all his dreams,
fell down hairless, himself,
crying and died,
the bullet of desire deep in his heart.
But oh, if ....
If only .... If ....
The mushroom of civilization grew and spread,
as mushrooms do,
was picked and found poisonous,
but did not disappear,
as mushrooms do.
Instead, yes instead, its irruptions stretched out
and preached its ways above all ways,
and men listened as they continued to eat.
But oh, if you had spoken then,
if only then ....
The conception had its seasons,
its hope but not its fruit,
and the heart of it fell down,
desire burning sharp inside.
What is it died that moment, then,
when you didn't speak?
The sea may sweep the ocean bed,
the wind clear the air,
but words are men's only hands,
their only feet.
Why, then, ...?
Why did you never speak?
Why did
you
never speak?