Stephen Ellis


Impudence

The crystal, the rock, the stone-
Faced brutality of each purgatorial
Mountain upward climb toward
Some visage of eternity, the Sun,
Moon, Stars, or beneath one's feet
The simple breeding dirt infects
The day, completely surrounding
All we imagine it to be, frozen
In place, through language, it never
Moves, as in Dante, to be in a
Circle in Paradise or Hell is about
The same, because you can never
Leave it, first things being first, for
Love to follow, one has first to leave
A furrow that a plow creates
Into which it can fold, undetected,
As an airborne seed undoing itself,
To the ruin of all theory, the flesh
Of a dog erupting somewhere in France


Revelation

I have a co-dependant relationship
with my own body
(but, wait, I am"
my own body"

and thus, the hopeless
completion

of this single thing
divided

Forbidden Love
for Angel

But it's all forbidden, the fear of edge
Upon edge upon edge of skins, their
Forms and features, all in touch,
Combined and recombined, whose heat
May cause the psyche to lose itself
In indiscriminate illumination, so it is
Thought, not that to be felt is then to be
Believed, but there is at base a belief
That a certain causal something will
Remain, after the hair flies, after the dew
Is drawn up into the morning air, intellect
Gone clear, and senses hung out to dry,
That life causes Death, that to live
Intensely is to bring it on, although we
Know otherwise, via Eros, that no
Straight lines can lead anywhere but
Away from the tangle any of us is,
Caught in the curvature of it all


One Song Orphews Forgot
for, and with, Stephen Heller

The standing frenzy
at the bar
erects a nameless
hell

to have had
its entire length
even unto death, O

that false song
unsung again

you hero, riverless
lake


In Counterpoint Our Nature’s Wit Immures
for Kibbe

Like salt in water, love can hide only 'til one tastes
Its flow, my being plunged thus through this bright
Invisibility, thrown up from sea's whirlpool, from whence
A star is born from nature's depth, onto the freshened tip of
My tongue, articulating your name, a form of illumination,
Moonlight at my lips whispering in the limbs of a growing
Tree, the limber wood of our own bodies, matrix of
Our embrace, toward hope the tree will yield all the wood
Required to build your throne, mine, our common bed
And table, and the unfolding house that will enclose it all
Along with us rooted one to the other, in each other, for
Each other, as the single growing tree through which
We wear our mutual verdure as a crown, thus to know
Love as constant miracle, how a tree does grow from water
And like the language that clothes the distance between us
With marvels of sunlight, moonlight, starlight, and their air
Drapes in the hanging limbs of heaven - hearts, minds and
limbs entwining - two souls each to the flowering of one care

-all poems gathered from his blog, Theater Of Eternal Recurrence