Stained Glass

Stained Glass

I. Building Snowmen

Drip.
Gravity draws medicinal tears
Drip.
down the plastic tube duct.
Drip.
Prescribed lamentation,
the liquid
already knows he will die.
“So said, so sad.
See how the cancer
works. Takes his beauty.”
There is beauty in the bubbles,
moving upward against the
Drip.
Are these his last breaths
begging
for the intravenous to stop?

Walking in the footsteps
of a frail, frocked man
past granite markers of the
officially dead,
my footsteps only half fill
the crushed snow spaces
his staggered steps leave
from the black limousines
to the rectangular gap
in the Earth.
Fifty shifting feet bring a
percussion rhythm from the
crystal coated ground
drowning out predictable prattle.
Ashes, ashes, we all fall down.

An empty champagne flute
catches the red, blue, green
twinkling reminders that the tree
must be burned.
Clear bubbling liquid transforms
them again.
Red, blue, green.
“The bubbles.”
What?
“The bubbles, they tickle my tongue.”
Her black cocktail dress is
cut too low,
further distracting.
“Have you kissed anyone?”
Why do you ask?
Her tongue tastes like
butterscotch and bubbles.
She says mine tastes like
ash.

Two small children twirl
about in day-old, dirty
snow.
One rolls a ball along
the snowy, red-clay lawn,
grunting as it absorbs to
half her height.
The other mirrors the
movements, but stops
with a smaller sphere.
Then combined with a
third,
the two small children,
one crying for a lost mitten,
press and pack the clay-snow orbs
into a prone snowman.
A screen door crashes
closed
and an unshaven man in boxer shorts
casts a shadow over the
frost golem.
His eyes sweep from
children
to globes.
His laughing is interrupted
by a beer can sip.
“Looks like another drunk
Indian
wandered off the reservation.”

All cities are real,
even those unseen.
Mine stretches from a
winding, polluted river
to a burning mountain top
capped with a gray, granite tower.
And from that perch
the city bleeds from
tinder trees to stagnant stream
like a patchwork quilt
with asphalt stitches,
keeping all anonymously
warm and separately
sleeping, but I lie awake
as the water company
renders the seem
I live on.

II. Crop Planting

Celestial swans raping
middle-aged women
with their heads in ovens
become a parade of romance
as everyone I touch crumbles
into spent firework ash.
There’s a spot on the wallpaper,
just below the cobwebbed corner
meeting the ceiling where
you can find the souls of
all your zombified friends.
That’s where they went,
fleeing their fathers who
made sure his notion of
original sin was deep inside
them, long before angels
should ever know of
sweating,
panting,
grunting,
thrusting,
spasms of sin.

In the bedroom,
between the drawn out sighs,
she exhaled into my
ear
naming the wind inside.
“Gonzago.”
And thus the breeze
was muted on a staged altar,
and there it died.
Purpose to prove the
murder of another,
or an invitation to find
her life?
An execution by elocution
of a woman mad,
in all of its meanings.
Poisonous tongue touching my ear,
transcended human symphony
and I a flute –
hollow and needing
forceful winds
inside to play a tune
that would sooth our ghost’s plea
for vengeance on
that incestuous, that adulterous beast.

Twisted branches grow
seeking something skyward,
something lost
to the rose and rows
of revenants shuffling across
the cracked soil
where the roots have found
sewers and caskets,
rats and corpses,
truth and secrets
all covered in civilized
cityscapes
where no one can find
burglar, banker, father.
We are poor.
Quoth the Raven, “Evermore.”

Oh silly Caesar,
had you only listened
to your soothsayers,
who could read so much
in a gutted, dainty lamb’s
blistered, blackened
entrails.
Oh silly Caesar,
we need you not,
but send us the soothsayers
for there’s a message
missing in the blood of our
lamb, drained by spear
after being hung high with nails.

Death then birth all the same,
one is another just placing blame;
for the purity of the problems
sits waiting on His say.

III. On Holiday

Along a New York interstate,
wildflowers and weeds
struggle imperfectly
in failed imitation of
a prelapsarian garden
that sways with a breeze
born from the wings
of a fly that flew off
an unidentified corpse in
some Chicago alleyway.
Slowly a snake slithers
between the wavering weeds,
sensing the blessed warmth
of the blacktop highway.
A pleasurable hiss as it
suns on the flat artery,
and an inaudible thump
as a truck drives over it
en route to Schenectady.

Wilting like cut roses
in high summer heat,
without water I fear
I should die.
Dust and brown grasses
filling each eye,
with rusted mountains
rising like monstrous
apparitions to the west
where my path lies.
But by divine grace
or foolish placement,
a shelter looms closer
with each step toward
dehydration.
A sign promises
food and laundry
inside the holy
screen door beneath
a colossal paper mache
cattle skull, with its
long horns
pointing toward the sky.
Alone at the counter
stands a weathered-face
Apache, with cloudy,
blind eyes.
“Sit, please sit.
Eat from our kitchen,
and drink clear liquor
because there’s no water –
our wells have run
dry.”
I thank him and smile,
then curse the weather,
telling him
this heat is horrendous,
this month is hellacious.
From his throat
a stern cry.
“Name one month
the cruelest, and the
next shall be worse.
The past is painless.
It’s future that hurts.”
I should be
humble and silent?
Is that a message,
Indian?
His laugh flows through
my bones.
“That’s funny,
people mistake me
for a snowman.”

She’s a receptionist
a customer service representative
a poetically correct beautician,
most appropriately,
a temporary distraction.
“Why do you want to see
the goddamn mountains?
Let’s vacation by the sea.”
If only the human throat
could voice the agony.
No, there’s too much water.
Angels dream of drowning.
We cannot go under,
we shall never be
together
by the sea.
In a moment,
westward moving
focused or free.

IV. Under a Harvest Moon

In the foothills,
my guardian angel,
some very old man
with rotten wings.
I cursed him and kicked him,
spat on him and fought
for allowing me
to have become
me.

Where is this King
that must be saved to save us?
Camelot deficient
ended with gunfire,
whether it was one
or a Holy Trinity.
The logical heir,
more Icarus than Mordred,
crashed and died in
the sea. Consider the son
of our Arthur
transfigured again,
was once taller and more
handsome than you.

V. The Freezing Point

The perma-gray skies have returned.
The cool, crisp air is a promise of snowfall,
but the dying and the damned have
no time to stop by snowy woods
to bitch and whine about nothing.
Every moment nothing fills nothing
as her void encompasses his void
and the governments search for
mathematical formulas to tax nothing.

No city is real,
especially those unseen.
It is better to have been
than to believe one has been
through false sense experience
of TV.
I’d look on my city,
but now it’s the river
that’s burning
and the trees that are
choked with dis ease.
Something is misfiring.
Mind is slipping.
The gray, granite tower
is falling on top of me.

On high, formed on top of
boulder upon boulder upon
stacked, sharply risen
edges of tectonic plates
crashed together
when Earth was young
rests a chapel of ice.
The door will not release,
but a crevice below it
opens to cathedral caverns
where through a ceiling
the chalice can be seen
sitting in isolation.
With spikes and pitons,
I perilously ascend
begin chipping and beating
my way into the cup’s cavity.
Ice cracks and splinters
from my stainless-steel axe
and when it heaves–
everything is upside
down and backwards.
Inside mind the
camera obscura has
failed to interpret.
Through broken
perception,
I have fractured
the floor
and now am falling, Father,
further, faster.
Then, in a red clay
valley
my body shatters.

Doctor, is it terminal?
All the King’s horses
“What a mess you’ve made.”
Doctor, where are we?
and all the King’s men
“You’re fractured, you’re fractured,
you’re splintered and sundered.”
Can you heal?
All the King’s horses
“Know thyself.”
Can you save?
and all the King’s men
“You looked within and found abstraction!
No ideas, but in things.”
I reached up and up,
and too late, found the
path led not west,
but inside.
All the King’s horses
“Knowledge comes
from sense experience
from the concrete.
You found abstract,
now where are you at?”

These fragments I have polished,
and edged with lead,
now serve as a window into
Chapel Perilous.
And now, I fear,
I am a handful of dust,
blowing away.