Ode to Athena

HARK! Hark! the may buds have bloomed
For June’s sweetness two by two
To steer the spring to Summer’s moons
To ope the eyes with golden new care
Hark! Hark! my lady sweet arises
With tiger bites so cherished and glowing
As roses with their sharp cuddling spines
O’ thorns of the night, maiden pink and dear
Hark! Hark! She is my harbinger of Mandarin
All dear Nature’s children she teaches
Art and laughter and good manners
In the sweet melodious air, she is the flower
Of my little life, the petals of my last belonging
Hark! Hark! For love’s sovereign innocence
That can change a life with bells dearly dim
And weddings of culture with a fragrance of spring.

May Dressed in White

Happy birthday May, birth month
I will always bring you poems
You are the stranger in my bed

Of buds, Spring, better days
How I have clamored after you
In sleep-whispering, felt melodies

Drift of faces I can no longer kiss
Happy birthday May, I am getting older
Songs fluttering away, washed in gold-fire

Excluded is my grief, on the thighs
Of women that come and go –
Happy birthday May, I’ve lost dignity

In the mourning-songs of another broken-hearted
Winter, recover me all in white
That I might be again, a Lover of the Beloved

The next woman to love me, will be my Loyalty
I shall name the mountains after her
Peacocks will drown in the melting throne
Of her lap of sensual Queenly thighs.

These Heroics of May

The sun is alive in my belly/
My navel of blowing May
The soft gold of my birth-month
I’ve waited for this

Over fields where I turned/
Your bronze name in my head
Over and over, like buds and springs
Of all the loves I have ever witnessed

The high stars maintain/
The dripping hope of last-songs
Today’s melody, well it’s for Spring
I am fixed in her like a Galaxy

The secret of her fragile skies is this –
That I’ve had a shinning head
For outrageous dreams
As the smallest movements in my mouth

May is for heroic kissing/
For lovers who burn with lucid plundering
To build new lives
Where we have once been cheated
To replace that with fertility.

The New Girl

One month left, before summer
I feel the weeks before Flowers
As an epiphany of dead grandmothers
Lost love, the usual things, that matter –
My life is being swarmed by little necessities
The aches that creep, the particulars
That make the years blur, I know for you
It’s hard imagine such a day will ever come
So lucid with your youthful form
Bursting in on ideas, hitchhiking your way
To maturity, every word you say
Lives desperate in me, for unanswered clues
To the meaning of life, hidden in your smile
I haven’t yet organized your impact upon me
So I let it simmer there, while we study
The unknowable truth of why I crave
The Philip Glass shattering of the insides
Of hope, that I relive destiny in you.

A Last World of Spring

It’s too late to cancel them now
Isn’t it? The birds of spring, sing
Like a mindful entry into the passage
Into summer, May will be coming soon

Reflected in the water of the buds
Fields of division among the twigs
It’s too late to wait up for it now

Isn’t it? The broad gestures of metamorphosis
There are no taboos in Spring
It walks into us from the inside

Sobering with sensuality, green effort
Hazards of the course of threshing floors
Of desire and clarity of impulse

It’s too late to cancel it now
Isn’t it? No more fence-sitting for us
Ambushed by the teeth of flowers

Like a perverse playroom before summer light
I can dwell here a while, to taste
The nearest stars in your liquid eyes.