1. At the Temple of the Mind - Poems for Albert Pinkham Ryder

2. Almost Fifty (21 Snapshops of my Life)

3. Bannister’s Landscapes

4. Goethe’s Palm

5. At Mosquito Bay (Poems after Aime Cesaire - Puerto Rico) 

At the Temple of the Mind

Green Animals, a topiary where I walk, is across the river

from an Isle of Desolation: no willows, no Temple of Apollo,

just hot fog and burning pages from a poem by Edgar Poe,

a broken epithet, and lone, cracked tombs in the shadow

of three graces who’ve come to say my art is too temporal,

too fleeting or imprecise for the anguish, toil, of everyday life.

The cold is a color that transports me out of a dream of ants,

back to the world of cuckoo clocks, smudged ledgers, where

the only task of language is to talk.  A grotto fountain leaks

into grass, a fragmentary image that can never be forgotten,

just as words, hidden in my pictures, will be etched in stone.

Look! Overhead a star’s on fire as it roams the Milky Way,

as a parade of beasts from Eden meanders down the valley,

a pair of auks another bright taboo against the end of time.

Lord Ullin's Daughter

Blue sky over Scottish islands, where a chill has spread

to every bracken fern and vale– to every fleeting thought

the ferryman ignites as he poles the king from moor

to moor, hoping to find the daughter who’s eloped

with a beautiful madman from the far-off coast of Ulva,

where goats top outcrops of rock from which to peer

into the bottom of the sea. He stares into the sirocco

as whitecaps glaze and batter their dory. She, as if guided

by a star or god, makes sure not to look back at Hades,

as she sees it, for Lord Ullin, who nurtured her

through childhood’s woes, must now be a thing

of the past. The open ocean is her suitor now,

the young sailor with a beard and dreadlocked hair

is part of the rime of the sea and the heaving land

beyond, which is what she’s after. A tide running

out is her heart’s companion. So no matter how

hard they pull their oars, they cannot overtake her,

a child of the hand of snow, who’s passed to a world

where the dead will sleep with open eyes, where

youth is peering into the pock-mocked face of the sun.

Pegasus Departing

The day starts with Ceylon tea, some hard-tack biscuits

and last night’s Saturday Review. Roosevelt is President:

Booker T. Washington has visited the White House,

71 Van Goghs are shown in Paris, Annie Taylor barrels

over Niagara Falls, the Boxer Rebellion, 义和团起义,*

the raids against the Manchu railroads, against feng shui,

put down, and Marconi’s read a transatlantic message

at Signal Hill, Newfoundland, dots of the Morse code

‘S’ blending into static of ocean waves. World darkens

with the new millennium, just as my room goes grey,

probably just clouds obscuring an early December sun.

But the horse descends, born of the blood of Medusa,

plagued by gadflies and a tribe of Amazons, as if from

the holiest of cities in Hindustan where a jinn would go.

I can no longer hear Manhattan outside my window:

in the foreground of the picture plane, I have the bard

dismount to a pedestal of ice, sit in a thoughtful pose,

not unlike Rodin’s, focusing on a word like immensity.

As the horse spreads its wings, alights, I poise the poet

climbing up the icy cavern walls where he’s entombed

until a muse of Dance allows what men are left to walk

up gravel paths to reach the heights of Mount Olympus.

* Pinyin– ‘Righteous and Harmonious Society Uprising’

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