Kateri (1)

*"Kateri"
   (for Steve Catlin)

Dear umbrous squat Kateri crawls
  like rain, eyes squirmed,
  scaly comb at her neck

  -to gall one for very holiness!

Wildly galled, indeed for to believe,
  do and eat came (for her)
  rather scurriedly, with no time

  for a true locust love-

 just some waters & beyond
______________

*I hope with this I've righted the terrible wrongs committed against her in Leonard Cohen's Beautiful Losers.

Uma*



*A poem inspired by my reading of one half of Anita Desai's novel Fasting, Feasting.
------------------------

"Uma"
(for Helen Senkiw)

Closed up to the gills
  a girl roils,
               regrettably--

  with empty tray, stands
like a party doll (in pigtails)

     eyes thick,
     collapsible

like every shunted  jasmine                       

  Uma,
like every collapsible ode to
                                   sun-whips
                                      silent tides,

  deep dark Uma,
                      my
                         wounded
                                      water
                                             bird

Running as a kind of lie



"Yes, but it hurts to realize!" (Lawrence Durrell)


A cento of suns (I still find) wouldn't
  nor let alone those

forested paths strung like the foetid
  body of a lie--

Always second or third from me the
  eyes, smile

that ought rather to smooth, to know
  but don't--

In a steady scentless rain, in park
  trails

always feeding second or third from
  that which ought most

and never does, soothe a numb, in-
  consolable me

Always lying eyes & the run

Ode to Narouz*

*A poem inspired by Lawrence Durrell's The Alexandria Quartet. A work remarkable if only for its masterly portrayal of the imagination's true desert heart and, in particular, of the Hosnani brothers in Mountolive.
__________________________


Whip in hand, Narouz speaks and bats
  lie split at his feet:

to a brother's glib oily bitch, a whip! and
  an old desert queen
   -true hearts-

Sand and eye's clutching vision, inter-
  twined, slink like Suras
   -in desert light!-

Linking palms of lovers also split,
  lying dead like bats
   - at his feet-

Remarried



Like every mari complaisant , perhaps
 who's all tweed and gin
   (& no more)

  -soft on sighs-

scraping slowly up the stairs,
  swollen reptilian eye
     of
       the
        new/
         old
          husband

     carrying
        her
         handbags
          to
            the
              top

"Morning prayers" (3): gum arabic

Will Petersen

She's radiant all right, mouth a dangling
  lark and is mine-nuncupatively!-

  until it isn't God! I hope not

For according to me, the petals-i.e. the
   white ones-took the eye and

did it again, and then leaving me with one,
  just might want to fly:-

the love of  one who burns pure as sky
  ( "foreshown & foretold")

Squirrels (1): "If I could write a perfect line" (for Maria)

I'd be in a blaze somewhere or just alone (reading,
                                              too sore to stand, or

 probably too clouded   to see the squirrel that's
   not once, not twice gone for a falling twig,
                                                             already)