SWEET VEIN (watching the comet in March, maple sugaring season)        (from Be That Empty; first published in Chelsea Magazine) Breathe in the trail of its light, ice river vaporizing from light years afar and melted from the spilling dipper . . . Now taste this:  a water bathed with the sweetness rising, released, the sweet abundance of stars instilling dark with its white sugar grains . . . Boiling, boiling, all night the smoke billowing milkily, clouding the cold bellows of snow, the breathing below freezing after a day's bright thaw . . . Dark, darker, the syrup darkening under midnight's departing moon:  the comet moonlighting, the sap—moonshine . . . Come dip your long-handled cup across the eastern branch of sky into this steam, into this stream of liquid dust sailing through the open vein:  a splendid suspension to sip at lips dark and wet, to raise up, drink in, swallow: TO THE BONE        (from Be That Empty; first published in Green Mountains Review) One against the other across the fleetingly infinite field: that dry crackling of pallid corn stalks clacking comes close to it. behind them mountains range like steppes between the tiers of fog they coddle. it's autumn coming close again and you need to compare this one to autumns past, recall the other sputters of color too good to last. something you need to say, something you come close to: wind in its limitless visits-- especially in fall when it cleans the overblown trees-- wind in possession of you says it best. but you go on anyway, trying to pen the breeze: this fall phenomenon different from summer's in its macabre celebration of the lifeless, in its forever rewritten memory of what comes next. sorrel leaves swirling in a whirlwind mimic your own compulsive repetition, its own circle of yearning so close to a kind of comfort.  quickening conversations of geese flocking south chill through your thin skin: behind it a choir of silence undefined rows you closer to what you'll never forget, what you almost remember this time. closer to its name. the heart overtaken. the bare staves waving at boughs' ends, the musical red wings: something they almost say, more like a sense hunched in darkness, an ache, a suspicion: every time, closer to it, closer. hear  hard light on the hillside flatten the visible scale into two dimensions, and you're in love with the flatted third:  the way it breaks you down, over and over, to mean you are alive. the way you rub it in the wound that you never come close to wanting to close-- as if you could scrub away the whirling of everything else and come down like snow to the center, the eye, so close to the purity of knowing inside this present pain, that searing white place without wind or words. MORNING GLORY        (from Elemental) And then,      to find a way     outward, to believe           in opening. After the long      quick climb, viney reach,     offshoot, curtain green,           to be a defiant hand,      offer translucent     umbrellas           unspun against the light. After the sharp      nipple of bud that pushes     out hard and           carefully wrapped, petulant,      and thick     with peaking life,           to find the other way, to turn      outward against the turn,     the same way a skirt           unwinds after the twirl: This is already the end, the dance ended,      only one moment more, the moment     of applause; this last           incidental motion, mere encore. To open is less a believing than no      or yes,     is more a giving up of one will           to another, the same as the spiral of pinecone      that lifts its     skirts to let fall           the seeds, the same as the hailstone      designed by the flick of wind’s wrist     unwinding           through insistent air. Leaf curl, fern furl, curve of lock or twist      of fate.     So much planning           and intent, so much spent, such a      time becoming,     so much of and beautiful this           briefest blue. VARIATION 16: ACTOR        (from Interval: Poems Based upon Bach's Goldberg Variations & the Predicament of Embodiment) So.  Call me obtuse, it isn’t what you think.  My angle on method?  It’s not some avoidance tactic softshoe get-me-out-of-me shuffle, ta-ta I’m off to transcend.  No, it’s a hallelujah chorus raising the rafters in the theatre of souls that passes as my skull.  Wait up, MacDuff, attention must be paid.  That’s why I do it--to let each make a scene center-stage, because personality, you know, is death-defying, that’s right, it’s all an act in the wings, and I am as many I’s as Zeus gave Argus and honey, I strut them like a peacock, in top form.  Call me a dodo, I am not extinct when like a bird I fly the coop of earthly bounds, equity transmigration, toasting a born again role. I take a fresh soul home with each new script, and honey, I can go home again. And again and again.  What you see is not who I am:  In my one singular sensational shape I don and slough a slew of disparate selves. Think it’s distraction I’m after, anything but humble little me?  Don’t you just wish you could live once in this be-costumed bod, and die night after night, and die, and die, and die, and still--wonders--be this attractive?  Call me vain.  Shameless.  I’m saving face- lifts by means of masks.  An I for an I?  Sleight of hand?  Out of body experience?  Honey, it’s all here in my vita. Call me a condiment, in solid standing, fluid when handled and poured.  Over- soul, when called I come:  It’s sexy but not sexual, lovely but hardly love, escapade, yes, but never escape.  All entrancing and never having to bow out.  So call me any time.  Any one.