the six-fingered

that black instant arrives
falling like dead snow
amidst strange ghostly leaves

her white arouses
a kind of flowering
within the blinding solstice

yes the six-fingered’s here
cupping vast landscapes of time
she’s howling drink drink

and you cannot refuse her

your real mother

your real mother
crawls through spirals of ink
can’t you see her white teeth rising
sprouting above the absurd illusion
she sucks from the world
each spinning moment
she does as water does
she places her fingers on the reading page
five shadows slip through
the dead white sun dots the afternoon
crawls over people’s heads
the imaginary snow is a kind of solstice
while somewhere else
in this same black universe
your only brother—the six fingered—arrives
says—
no one remembers
their mother’s pain
then he departs
and you place a green stone
with his name on it over his head
somewhere there’s an ocean you must cross
but you don’t know what to call it
and you don’t want to go

oracle

to envision Lorca’s real pain
consult Lorca
visit him in his black dream
his golden summer of death
laden with sensuous honey
the monstrous columbarium
echoing with siguiriyas

Anne

filled with her world’s black imagination
preserves the afternoon’s illusion
as the truth inside her rains
and the universe slips away
oh how whitely stained
her fingers dream

Dear Bartender—

While you were gone, we encountered various strangers who appeared, then dropped off speeches along the closed visage, next to the skull where all the labor of abandoned days blindly sat. At first voices reflected on far sureties, but then things deteriorated, flopping and rusted. Some entered through doorways, others escaped through broken out windows, square-framed and sobbing. The dawn was infectious, but I’m sure you understand how that indelible mouth we call the Sun can only travel so far without making an absolute ass of itself.

a kind of warmth

that old woodstove where absence fit
where opportunities entered
in the end becoming sixteen searing refusals
various attempts at sky shone through
spilling cinders out onto the earthen floor
they looked like burnt out stars

what we traveled of blind time

that familiar easing of white light
the hand’s destruction
the owl’s call
echoing across the shadows
consuming the far ridge

in still turquoise calm
we parted
we said
we finally understood

the stems
arriving at their absences of petals
the otters on the other shore—
vague sinuous shapes
dark and minute