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dapt-poems

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The horse I loved foundered and had to be
put down. The middle rhyme in an envelope
quatrain was not imprisoned if it was right.
In cold air a nipple horripilates
and rises, the sun comes up and up and up,
a star that bakes the eggs
in a Boy Scout license plate birdhouse.
God was in music and music was God.
A drill sergeant seized me by my dog tag
chain and threatened to beat me
to a pile of bloody guts for the peace sign
I’d chiseled in the first of my two tags,
the one he said they’d leave in my mouth
before they zipped the body bag closed.
Yet one more thing I’d come to know.
In my loving
dying heart
a twilight is coming,
a last ray, gently reproaching.
And over the evening forest
the bronze moon climbs to its place.
Why has the music stopped?
Why is there such silence?
The clock-cricket singing,
that’s the fever rustling.
The dry stove hissing,
that’s the fire in red silk.
The teeth of mice milling
the thin supports of life,
that’s the swallow my daughter
who unmoored my boat.
Rain-mumble on the roof—
that’s the fire in black silk.
But even at the bottom of the sea
the bird-cherry will hear ‘good-bye’.
For death is innocent,
and the heart,
all through the nightingale-fever,
however it turns, is still warm.
Let us praise the twilight of freedom, brothers,
the great year of twilight!
A thick forest of nets has been let down
into the seething waters of night.
O sun, judge, people, desolate
are the years into which you are rising!
Let us praise the momentous burden
that the people’s leader assumes, in tears.
Let us praise the twilight burden of power,
its weight too great to be borne.
Time, whoever has a heart
will hear your ship going down.
We have roped swallows together
into legions.
Now we can’t see the sun.
Everywhere nature twitters as it moves.
In the deepening twilight the earth swims into the nets
and the sun can’t be seen.
But what can we lose if we try one
groaning, wide, ungainly sweep of the rudder?
The earth swims. Courage,
brothers, as the cleft sea falls back from our plow.
Even as we freeze in Lethe we’ll remember
the ten heavens the earth cost us.
Let me be in your service
like the others
mumbling predictions,
mouth dry with jealousy.
Parched tongue
thirsting, not even for the word—
for me the dry air is empty
again without you.
I’m not jealous any more
but I want you.
I carry myself like a victim
to the hangman.
I will not call you
either joy or love.
All my own blood is gone.
Something strange paces there now.
Another moment