Blue Lamplight

Into My Arms

Ray LaMontage Performs "For the Summer"

Where I am

"After" by Jeanne Marie Beaumont

All long labors, whether for hunger, for duty, for
Pleasure, or none of the above, one day wrap up.
Put down the itinerant's beaten pouch, pluck no fruit further;
Linger over the melancholy taste of last on the tongue.
Even a switchblade wit can't sever another stem.

Plenty is a relative measure--if less than paradise,
It's more than enough. The prolific orchard will of course
Continue, other soles trod ladders into the heady
Kingdom of weighted boughs, insatiable, you might even say
Incorrigible (as though mumbling in winter sleep), the way they can't
Not keep coming back, grasping, tugging, lifting down those
Globes that swell and blush to be handled so.

from Poetry Daily, October 18, 2003
first published in The Gettysburg Review, vol. 12, no. 3, Autumn 1999

Muse - Madness

walked past my old apartment on West 82nd last night. I could still see

our shadows wrestling answers, escaped gasps from bodies both,

forceful and resistant: the push pull of a master and servant. Interchanging.

How sweet

          I recall - you went down so slow, fibrillating blouse.              

And you ripped my collar down over your mouth and grabbed

       my tongue

  between your lips, slowly tugged my mouth into you. One look.

One look and you were a crumb stuck under my nail. Yes,

in that old apartment, we had drawn each others limits

by going too far once too twice.  I peered into the bay

window and gazed at the brick wall. Our brick wall where you stood

me against deadlines, doorbells, people watching from the street.

Hiked up my skirt and unhooked each button slowly, slowly, the garters

fell. I remember the animal sound that escaped from your throat. Vulnerable,

a living tremble gelatinous

                               sinking into darkness. You never wanted to be saved. You didn't comprehend.

This walk, a familiar perfume smokes into an open window.

You, sitting at your desk in the loft, smiling, head cocked in one hand.

              I know it's been too long,

but I know that expression: you will not sleep tonight                   you sense

my chemistry shape pulsing the hot air

toward the greatest question one could hope to be presented with: Will you turn              

                  your back on the cold, stony predictability of the internet? 

will you climb down the fire escape and stalk me throughout the night, scratching you pale skin on the bricks, crashing into me, stumbling down an alley to wrist lock my thighs against the pathetic staid lives we've lain down for?

Poem by Ted Hughes

http://uniongallery.blogspot.com/2011_04_01_archive.html

Crow's Playmates

Lonely Crow created the gods for playmates--
But the mountain god tore free

And Crow fell back from the wall-face of mountains
By which he was so much lessened.

The river god subtracted the rivers
From his living liquids.

God after god--and each tore from him
Its lodging place and its power.

Crow struggled, limply bedraggled his remnant.
He was his own leftover, the spat out scrag.

He was what his brain could make nothing of.

So the least, least living  object extant
Wandered over his deathless greatness

Lonelier than ever.

Nick Mount on Nabokov's "Lolita"

https://youtu.be/5Lz_f1qjGiA?si=vBSiBwIpGDV1FayP