Frames of Monk

Skin blooms a weather of shower and afternoons
and weeks of Wave Mountain;
little monk walks Junes;
and August roads hot tars detain.
Exotic beating looms with shuttle clacks,
barks adrift and seadrift float flood from rain-
sailor’s warning, monk’s pain,
Glorianna’s skin tracks.
At night the wafting of the wood is balming;
the skin’s weather, the short shout of the palm.

Tanned mind hails on the virgins; that’s age’s envy
and only lust flatters;
Puer’s envoy,
from somewhere the future shatters.
The sea beats the young boy, monk’s young father
to the man, dwelling with divine squatters,
dwelling on the daughters,
mountain breaks up, rather
like the ordinary small man of thinning
soul, locked within the clastic rock of sin.

From stony fields of massy, clacking bones, she sees
him approach the courtyard
through locust trees,
leaping like poem’s laugh-last word,
or before falling, pride in one’s estate,
human backstory, ears that haven’t heard
now perched, like some absurd
pigeon, to click and grate
upon the gates of the institution,
above the hoary and inconstant stew.

Monk’s moon finally comes to the playhouse, condemned,
performing the Soldan
in a cage, hemmed,
rolling with the tyrant’s golden
train, pulled by his wife, ‘til they brain themselves,
Heaven and Earth bleeding on the Satan’s car.
That’s what comes of love’s star
dried of it’s fire by elves.
Arts of banishment, logically pursued,
arrive at poems where no passions stir.

Autumn delivers him from the oppressive swelter
and the freak intentions,
dubious shelter,
and the variant suspensions
of disbelieving; hard to remember
how I could have fallen so very far
short of the under-par.
Let us embrace somber
reappraisal of the situation,
rendered and chewed up in the vasty day.

Mountain mirages in the clear days, the short days,
the leaf will come down husk,
bit with sharp rays,
wood smoke nosing eastwind at dusk.
White cities beckon the road, sweeping wrack
of thunderheads with a gate of moonlight,
the dead month at midnight
when the road rises, back
of time, and the spirit-fates gaze dolefully
on the sleeper dreaming of an asphodel.