terminus

outside the dark square
diminishing temperature
stiffens the fingers

a lone light bulb pushes
a half-circle of yellow
off a closed door

all attempts-- feeble
a soul slipping through
absolute zero

out the window of Angela's new home in the city

civilization's rectilinear divisions
nature's naked bifurcation
sharp winds blow grey

Capella

she asks if he's ever been afraid
beneath the thought of an infinite night sky
he says no, unless by fear you mean awe

billions of stars just beyond reach
she replies I had to clutch the ground
and he as if you'd fall away from Earth

he tells her of a scintillating star
he can name it but she's already telling him
a whole landscape aflame with light

ash

leave the door open just a crack
and a cold breeze sidles across the floor
our mothers slip into some mumbling dream
their wax-paper skin translucent as time
that lifts generations of leaves

they begin to speak in a language
they used to know before our infancy intervened
as if they never cut their hair
and it fills a whole room
with the volume of a birth-song

maybe their passing is one gusting exhalation
of light and a vacating of voices
which have been in labor
all these long years
of our wasted lives

even we plant our seed
in the mothers of our children
we are re-born in them
we empty ourselves
sometimes hope is a backward looking

a reminiscence of a future
already lived in some broken revolution
spinning through another universe of impossible
the door flies open
shadows with the force of gales

rattle porcelain heirlooms
a stampede from the pastoral linage
a pail of spilled milk
blood of fowl upon a dulled paring knife
the grinding-wheel's coarse edge

a sun-bleached cotton dress
heather in a garden
a wormy radish in earth-darkened fingernails
the sprouting of a green potato skin
sunlight through corn-dust in a crib

the half-warmth of a blue-veined hand
laid against a cheek
red runny nose
a waft of tomato soup
wet washcloth for sweaty locks

song almost in whisper on the long unlit hearth
darkness of solstice held back by sparking log
when tiny cinders glow they speak a truth
one by one they darken to ash

meal at the bar

I have become unfamiliar with the notebook
once a thing of dependance
a crutch or bridge of some sort.
Now I return to it as a pastime
though I still hope for some conversation.
I am at the age where I can only read headlines.
I've forgotten my glasses.
I have come here to eat.
There is only the putting of food in my mouth.
I am hungry.
This is a fact I keep telling myself
far too long to believe it's actually true.
This is a place I know.
I know what to order.
I know where to sit.
Even if the counter is cold
it's familiar.
I like pita and hummus.
That's why I'm here.
Even if I must live beyond hope
I have a full stomach.
Some possibility of conversation is present
but as with all good things
it slowly turns to dust. 

fade

reaching out for      barkless branch
                             weathered grey touch
                                                       dust kiss
                                                                  white ash once moist
whats left               ?
                             ...brown leaves rattling
                                                                                          rattling

hope

eleven dead birds
each a new color
laid out on a table
dark eyes lost to light

a tuft of chickadee
upside-down in a glass
the sparrow's spiny tail
points to some other idea of sky

cowbirds swept into a kitchen corner
(more numerous than fallen leaves)
clogging the sink drains
plugging the toilet

one of each species placed
in a refrigerator
a robin a blue-jay a cardinal
in separate bowls

crows heaped in piles
atop my blankets
each night I'm roused
by muffled thuds

at 3am these birds are still alive
they fly around in song
whitewashing all the furniture

crowbar

have you really come to dismantle all the machinery?
where did you learn to melt steel as if it were lead?
all that I've manufactured through many hard years
see how you've left me in this pool of black oil?
what do I do with these handfuls of bolts?
even if I could consult the lost diagrams
you'd only work your cheap crowbar
deeper into the mechanisms

walking with my son

There's a trail that weaves through a grove of small poplar
that we walk in the evenings as the sun goes down,
when the young bending trunks take on such a color of pink
I can never remember but always dream,
where we sit in summer as green leaves grow
among the rattle of come-and-go breezes,
and find in the fall the color of yellow against a roaring blue
until one day the nakedness of branches--
a landscape becomes part of you.
Why do I speak of this in the present tense?
They're nothing now
just splinters
a swath of bulldozer tracks
beneath electric lines.

Lovers in a re-run with a poet

We were in a Planet of the Apes movie running from a mob.  You were nursing someone's baby.  Keith Taylor was with us, he wore a white lab coat.  We fled up a high hill along a winding road that had been recently asphalted. The hill had been excavated, a huge gully of bare earth cut a dangerous angle down into the city. We came to a solitary structure, a church without a steeple, an abandoned big-box store. Was the baby an orangutang? The mob would soon approach. I knew this. I had already seen the movie. Our plan was to take the stairs up to the balcony. If we could just reach it maybe the mob would be too lazy to follow. Keith placed himself behind a counter and planned to use it as a pulpit from which to shout, "ape has killed ape!" hoping this would provide a distraction. Meanwhile at the far end of the balcony you began to page through some harlequin novels which you'd found on a small end-table. Things were falling apart fast. I needed to find a way to encounter the mole-men who were supposed to save us. They lived beneath the ruins of New York City with the last remaining Intercontinental Ballistic missile. Though they had plastic faces they were supposed to be helpful to humans. The warhead was still armed.

Root of Njaro

When asked by my seventeen year old daughter
to provide a line for her creative writing class
I tell her to say, I come from banana leaves

which Hemingway used to wipe his great white ass.
Her mother strongly disagrees.  Alright, I say,
just tell them you come from an absence of latitude.

Instead of my sister's for left-overs

I choose a coffee shop on the south side of the street because I like the way the sun illuminates storefronts on the other side. This may not be the primary reason. The primary reason is I want to go somewhere public to write. This might not be the primary reason either.  Maybe the primary reason is to overhear conversation which I can insert at random locations into this narrative and so enliven it. A cup of coffee must figure in somewhere. Somehow it interlaces an image of J__ one night at the bar, though she drank hot chocolate, and I rye beer which the bar does not serve. Or does the coffee, from Ethiopia, take me back beneath an overgrown coffee tree, where coffee nuts on reed mats dry in the sun? Why does it always come down to a vision of small breasts in a mirror? (It's because this vision interjects itself into everything, even if there is no garlic, which to me is as great of a sin as having no tahini.) I use tahini in everything. See how this introduces into the reader's mind a connection between tahini and small breasts? Let's take an erotic leap—picture small breasts smeared with tahini. Note: please do not involve J__ with this connection. I do not intend it. They are not her breasts. She would be offended by this intimation. Perhaps this also offends the reader. This is not about the reader. A haze of cloud has shifted between the buildings across the street and the rays of sunlight that would illuminate the storefronts. Winter is here after all, regardless of how many people came for Thanksgiving dinner, or what size the breast was. The tip of a turkey wing, nearly all crispy skin, was the only meat I allowed myself. I love skin. Take that statement and isolate it. I love skin. See how the meaning changes entirely? Now expand this idea to encompass the whole piece of prose. That's both the trouble with, and the beauty of words. I love the flavor of unadulterated coffee. I am still attempting to ascertain the primary reason for my being here, at this coffee shop I mean. Regarding my reason for existing at all, well... As I drove down here through the early morning forests I concluded that I'm quite useless for most things, but none-the-less, here I am. I've determined I no longer need to justify my own existence, and perhaps this realization might be useful to others. The sun's come out; I'm down to the grounds. See how these statements are loaded with symbolism? I guess I'll come back the next time I'm in town.

'if' and the unreal past

if
the snow would stop snowing
wind stop blowing

oak leaves turned brown

if
the sun did not set
in a crack of horizon

orange of another color

if the tips
of my fingers
weren't freezing

naked cold fingers clicking the camera

if the photos weren't blurry...

but how could they capture
that miraculous light
glowing then fading

winter comes early
oak leaves are stubborn

what's left of love
goes on stinging
deep into this cold night

lamentations for Jesus

yesterday the sunrise
such a color
I keep trying to go back

~~~

all these miles
did I really think
none of them would change me

~~~

how could her hands
those tiny pinkies
begin to move a sea

~~~

desert winds
arise from nowhere
take away the sky

~~~

are the years more numerous
always grinding boulders into pebbles
pebbles into sand

~~~

You've made promises
I have too
but yours aren't mine and mine aren't yours

~~~

many years are as a second
chance given to a fool

~~~

a trail leads into the forest
much overgrown
through intervening years

~~~

how long will it take
to see that life is a borrowing
I'm only a beggar

~~~

the color red should fit into this somewhere
and its dancing on waters
beneath a setting sun

~~~

weariness overtakes me
as it always does
a sudden noise wakes me

~~~

I see the diagram repeats its arcs and equations
as if this is never going to end
and there's no period represented

~~~

a single tone
sustained by repetitively drawing
a horsehair bow across a wire

~~~

A long time passes
waiting for

what keeps you alive kills you

her pock-marked face
floats up the stairwell
rising from an empty bus-stop

he's trying to destroy himself
in some far-off place
an anonymous city

lies of bought love
her small breasts
in an afternoon's mirror

a vision like pomegranates
and her neck-- a white crane
in the light of a vacating sun

she takes his un-buttoned shirt
covers her own corpse
and walks down the hall to take a piss

exodus

departing the city
leafless poplars
armless hopes
clutter

theatrics

the whole war seemed no less absurd
than that bare-chested butcher
dripping with cow blood
brandishing his cleaver
like an underpaid
b movie pirate
drunk on
rubisi

clutter

what I wanted to make of my life
just a few smooth pebbles
handful of dry lavender

a single worn limb
from a pine on a hill
where I overlooked everything

the gazelles have run off
two rusted arrows
remain in a corner

dust-covered stones
I stole from Mount Fuji
I should have left them in the sun

the observatory's purpose

professor x points his telescope
beyond impossible clouds

catalogs un-lit parsecs
with the blue glass of his robotic eye

he scans a certain number of familiar ticks
until he has the right-ascension

a few more degrees of declination
to the nebula he calls his lover's grave 

leafless poplars

i point out crows to my son
patches of yellow through gaps

rolls of dark clouds
hurled over high dunes

tell him over and over
look--

a landscape of branches emerges
surrenders its leaves to novemeber

we follow sunlight
it spills from a crevice of sky

a copper burnish
in the heights of oaks

but dusk comes
and light diminishes into leafless poplars

grey on a knoll set apart long ago
because of its color of moonlight

among the pine shadows
like a fair-skinned daughter lost to fever

armless hopes

abandoned on the road to death
because everyone else goes to much more beautiful places
because i just sit and listen to piano music
from someone else's hard times

this is a sad can of beans--
i taste blood on the lid
it takes everything with it
as if beginning to speak
in some instant that never arrives

i kill it with wanting
a whole day of giving others back messages
listening to what the machine does
when nobody's watching

scintillating in an un-submerged eye

Was it Ichabod's head
on its ear in the mud
mouth framing
a half-watered exhortation
to the horseman in the Moon?

saturday night

i roam the familiar avoiding those i should love
like i wandered through alleys in foreign cities
beyond the understanding of others i chose not to visit
in search of cloudy horizons burning with brilliance

i walk the winds of november
a few stubborn leaves still cling to ink branches
alleys that smell of last night's beer
corners reeking of urine

others dine together in restaurants along front street
where with clear plastic sheets they've cast out the weather
replaced it with music from women--
up and coming musicians or someone well known

cup of espresso gone cold in my hand
i find a sheltered moment of sun
it's caught on a wall of old brick without windows
casting a light from some other country

traffic noise pauses
the roar of distant surf
falls around corners of buildings
along paths i'm unable to follow

lingering light dwindles
i am left with the diminishing sound my of own footsteps 
wondering if they bear even a single genuine thing

departing the city

red leaves of maple
trodden into wet sidewalks

by the impatience of others
retired from gathering winds

stray traces of white
settle on concrete and vanish

i start down back streets
emptied of restaurant music

walk them over and over
again and again until

i can't bear what they want
they can't give what i seek

i'm off towards clouds
toppling over western hills

where dark winds devour all
the sun had to give

furled

mast-stays sing
I remember a woman from Amsterdam
though not her name

the six-inch scar across her cheek
the left corner of her mouth
but not her name

her face like sun on calm ocean
the white scar   a thin straight wave
she had taken in   a solitary grace

her soft voice never told of the knife I imagined
only asked if I liked the swimsuit she was buying
she was already dreaming of sailing

and I was already with her
forever
 

found

after many years
alone in the woods
elation
brick
shame
lost rivers
a freeway
murmuration
dusk

after many years

a house missing one wall
crumbles into a banana grove
earth-red among burgeoning growth
the white linens of childhood still on a bed
as if the whole world were only a bedroom closet

alone in the woods

eleven grackles in a quaking aspen in the sun
saw-toothed yellow leaves still cling rattling in the wind
the grackles chatter high above the browning bracken
all things grown from earth now returning to earth
damp with thawed frost the decomposing grass
red berries bountiful on still-green holly

elation

alone in the jack-pines
far behind the hills
a man sits naked in a pond

a woman in black pours water
from a bowl upon his head 
it trickles through his long white beard

ripples radiate across the sky
a fading smear of peach
stars begin to fall

they're not what we suppose
but burning coals of bluish ice
the size of fists

they smolder in the pond
but pierce the ground
like bullets cutting through un-fired clay

crows fly out from smoking holes
kirtland warblers
wrens

on the edges of their wings--
fire

brick

a brick has borne a wall
so long that weight has been forgotten
like I have forgotten
the presence of so many people
who have not noticed
a bricked-in archway

I wonder how many times I have passed
through doorways un-filled with brick
how many I still must pass
and that's the thing--

most don't realize
all the doorways they shall never enter
numbering in the billions
nor do they know
which doorways they entered for the very last time
how could they

shame

I have broken the sacred bone
spilled the bloodied wine

turned the yellowed page
crumbled the fallen word
stained the dark frock

I have pounded on piano keys
and knocked the porcelain Joseph off

lost rivers

a fresh-painted wall
filled with photographs strangers have taken of places unlabeled--

black and white rivers
framed waters arrested behind glass that has cracked 

visions of unknown eras
redeemed from others' garages unpacked from lost boxes discovered in attics abandoned

silent rivers cutting through forests of deciduous trees
leaves returned long ago to soil carried away by currents forgotten

a freeway

divides
  shadowed farmhouse from red setting sun

parts that which was sold--
  hay-fields where house-trailers for migrants now rust
  creek-beds and knolls foraged for mushrooms

it severs
  the oiled dirt road still traveled in dreams
  the sand-blow where a lone tree towered--
  the maple I climbed as a boy
  to name with a jack-knife
  my first true love

murmuration

see how a thousand starlings rise--
a vast amebic cloud
above the building's broken silhouette

how a soldier stoops across a purple sky
to take a pack of cigarettes
from a dead man in the mall

see how a single ember circles darkness
scribes its empty orbit through the black

dusk

down the shoulder of a straight and narrow highway
across fields of bowed and rain-damp grass
the gravel sky hangs heavy
and from a dark and jagged forest
black eyes rooted in shadows watch

the highway leads nowhere you have been
comes from where you can't return
no one else is traveling in this weather
even the light has flown from the wide valley's folds
a brown-watered stream carries it trickling away

too late you ask where you can rest
no answer gives comfort
it's not comfort that you seek
your long-coat blows tattered in the wind
pockets worn through long ago

abandoned robots in the basement

AR.1
a voice activated R2D2 no longer responds
it used to carry cans of coca cola
I reattached its leg with a six-inch decking screw
accidentally pierced the circuit board
a kind of electronic crucifixion
its corroded batteries leak white powdery acid

AR.2
replaced by a later model with humanoid hands
a Robosapien face down on the floor
the programmers gave it only one word--
Rosebud
it spoke when powered down
the death scene in Citizen Kane
that mysterious last word 
name of the sled he had as a boy
before his mother sent him away
pet name for the clitoris of Marion Davies 

Sunday at the Cafe'

Sitting at your little table in the haze of the Sun
quiet breezes stirring the first yellow leaves

You coaxed me from my dull somnambulation
and nudged all else away-- the spiny creatures
mumbling soldiers, all the lazy moths clinging to my shoulders

A sprig of ivy tangled in a smooth strand of your hair

I played with you like a riddle
your language like a puzzle
holding each word as I turned it in circles

Until ink-made letters perturbed with my prolonged goodbye
leapt from that edgy crossword at the far side of the table
and menaced me as I fled down the street

displaced

Thin and pliable, they've been blown across fields from where the wind is unrelenting
   they have nothing to say, they've forgotten how to speak and if they could: atrocity--
where does one begin? They have slowly turned porous, nearly all have vanished
   relocating to invisible houses in countries of quiet meadows on worlds we've yet to discover
no matter how many radio signals we beam at them from Arecibo they're not coming back.
  They've traveled intentionally by indirect paths so convoluted they can't retrace them
even if threatened or tortured, even for their children; they are identical in this way.

Ensconced

For a moment I sat beside a small wood stove
which had stood many months unfired in the shade of a room
whose only light came square framed in turquoise
from seven Black Eyed Susans rocking on long stems visited by bees.

That moment still hung in first light of the next morning
easing like an otter into cold waters where the Sun rose and set
without passage of time between the far shores of coming and going
lingering still while the Moon and its reflection in calm water shone

two brilliant blind eyes over an echo of a loon calling out from dead quiet
Even now, left with words I can never possess
words caught in the hollow of a mouth that can claim no hope of speech
having lived beyond speech for days in the simple labor of moving

from one place to another not to arrive but to continually emerge
from forest to field to ridge where I came upon a crow calling
a weighty shadow inhabiting a high roost—
an aspen beyond age clinging to stone.

Long after the Sun was carried
beyond the west ridge and hidden in cool shadows,
and the Black Eyed Susans have curled,
and the sweetness of pollen taken

into hives, hidden in capsules, and sealed in wax,
time has ensconced that moment in the labyrinth of past
where it has ceased and been refashioned into an indelible photograph
my eyes still claim as mine.

Paved

Maybe the young poets, like a growing list of dirt roads, are being paved over. Asphalt is easy, doesn't muddy your feet with innumerable words, but I am writing about myself again. That's why I order the wrong things to eat. It is non-sensical to sit at a bar so early in the evening while the Sun still shines. No one expects a middle-aged blue shirt to ask for hummus. It is my own fault for not ascribing the order a number, maybe the 8th in the Fibonacci sequence or the 5th because it's not cliche', but since all the young poets have been paved over, so what? None of these fit the formula nor factor into the equation that seems to want a series for input. Am even I being paved over by something as impersonal as mathematics?  The real question is do I want to finish my beer? I suppose there is no answer to this unless I want to give it one, which leads to a related question what answer will I give? One from a vast forest of unusual trees laden with all manner of strange fruit. Some of it is surely poisonous. Some will outright kill me, some will make me vomit, still more may only make me wish I was dead. Here I am with all this black skinned fruit that's oozing milky white pus. I'm tired of it. I've got a whole dirt basement full of this fruit. I've stacked up bushel baskets of it on the second-floor stairs. Maybe It's time to vacate, stand in the field with my head over my shoulder and watch timbers writhe in flames. Is there any difference between a growing mass of black fruit and a billowing tower of dark smoke? It's the feta cheese that's going to kill me tonight.

ghost

abandoned face
an empty wheel
don't tell me this shit

sunglasses
an old photograph
obviously blonde
cash

it's so much easier
depending on no-one

that's the fucking truth

Invitation

I cooked a strange ratatouille with tahini and curry and ate it with quinoa. Now I stand alone in a cool breeze beneath asterisms I’d invented in youth. I'm hoping for a perseid or two. Can I blame those who misunderstand me? It's unimportant. Won't you taste what I have made, and stand with me awhile? We can watch falling stars set the fields ablaze.

Surrendering the un-named

The last clear vase taken down
from a white sill and emptied
overflowing into a dark urn,
that lone sweet hour poured out—
the hoof print of a young doe,
three leaf-shaped pendants
fashioned from mother of pearl,
once the past, present, and future
all now seeping into earth.

don't want a coffee

It's 3:07 under a slate colored sky. I'm wasting my time in this bookstore. Pine needles still cling to my jeans. Out on the dunes I sat in half-lotus and fell asleep. Was it a wren that woke me? What do tourists do on cold July days? Why do they walk their dogs to a bookstore that only sells romance novels? Who would want to work as a barista in the back of a dime store? There used to be a bowling alley across the street when I had friends here. Once while camping in Montana I had a conversation with a Vietnam vet. We sat on the shore of Lake McDonald in the Rockies.  He lit up a joint and blamed all my problems with women on a restricted gene pool.

A concentric set of circles

I have a thing about the eye,
the watching one.
Let's just leave it at that
unless of course
you want to talk about drawing legs,
the pressure of a pen on paper,
a woman's ass and upper thigh,
a subtle shift of contour.
shouldn't it be simple?
Like drawing an eye
a concentric set of circles.

Waitress travels time

Balancing a tray--
your legs as smooth as ever.
Don’t you see
how time has thinned my hair?
All these places
where my skin is used to creasing?
I apologize for staring.
And yet you bravely come from 1990
to take the syrup from my table.
Why come now,
when all I want is breakfast
and you have lost your name?

Highway

This is the only road through the wilderness.
It doesn't matter where it leads,
just keep traveling.

Enchanted

Life has hollowed me out
hollowed me out
hollowed me out.
Can't you hear its echo?
It flows through me
and flows through me
along the passages it carves.
Leaves nothing.
Only roaring.
Listen--
voices arise incessantly
as if from nowhere
without beauty
or meaning.
Yet, they are an enigma.

Supplication

Saint Ink the Incandescent
won't you take me to your See?

Cast off your purple habit,
drag me into dusk.

Let Sin like root divide
the shadow of your flesh.

Enough of condemnation
I want to see you glow.

When it gets too hot

I swim and swim
until the noise is gone
and then the shore with its mad highway,
until the sun has vanished
and the waxing moon,
and there’s only starlight on the water.

midnight

stars like distant cities
clouds like continents pass
first bright then dark
across the Moon's ghost light

Lost Hour

A vacant beam of sunlight
across a thousand years of dark
illuminates a pictograph,
a lost hour-- high-noon
in some other realm of time.

Lodged in the present--
potsherds,
indentations pressed in clay,
Whose fingerprint?

all-you-can-eat buffet
air-conditioned rooms
the ring-tone will wake you shortly
after 7

An infant cries,
grasps a hollow breast.
A long-dead jack-rabbit needs skinning.
Dust, the color of blood
covers all the empty thresholds.

demarcation

It no longer matters
where the circles are drawn
how large R is
how many digits of Pi
just stop selling me
what I don't need
lifted skirts of your lies

still-yet-shining Sun

the Sun hangs low with wanton light
it warms the flat face of a rock

strange brown flies buzz by
Black-eyed Susan's drying petals

long shadows 
dead Daisy stalks bobbing in the breeze

I saw a woman
my eyes upon her every inch

they still remembered
what she forgot

her fingers on her awkward flesh
they ran along a strap

perhaps she'd worn
a misplaced dress

the Sun atop a rough-hewn ridge
water rippling toward the southern shore

I used to ask to read her work
it's still too cold to swim


the blue vein of her inner arm
a sideways slidden ring

will it be a Wednesday
or a Thursday?

I am grain spilling from a carted sack
wilted bells upon limp leaves

I am not afraid of hornets

white scar of a contrail
clipped fingernail moon

where does the distant pilot drift?

12 attempts at candor

I
Take this highway
you’re on now
it leads to a desert—
a long groove
worn into stone
where you can howl
obscenities at an
unconcerned sky.

II
If only you could escape
you’d take it with you.
This is the joke you play
over and over.
It isn’t funny
anymore.

III
I used to fear
words would leave
that I’d lose them.
Now they overflow
say too much.
I don’t know
how to stop them.

IV
One more
I say
Just one more
not to have
but to give.

V
And it comes to this
you do or you don’t.
You end up walking
the same gray corridor.
 
VI
I used to tell myself
love is enough
the air sufficient
but it all runs out
even time
ink wasted
on a page.

VII
What’s this?
laughter?
Why do I go on
sifting these fields of lies?

VIII
Broken brushes
twisted contours
why have they abandoned me?
Is it me who’s giving up?

IX
Who keeps chasing after me
telling me I can’t?
Whose child am I?
If I told them to leave me alone
wouldn’t I be talking to myself?

X
Bent and water-stained
photograph of a young
woman, soft skin over-
exposed color too strong
cream etched naked into
eighty-yeared cheeks

XI
Why is this the answer
to a sidewalk full of people
who never give a damn?

XII
How have all these words not
sounded even a single note?
What am I trying to play?

her life

late one evening she called me to say--

she would not allow him to take it from her
if anyone was going to take anything
it had to be her

her uncle's 38-special

she told of how the bluing had worn off
how she never unloaded the hollow points
how its annular edge of steel tasted of artesian waters

I know what hollow points do
she did not call to say goodbye

when we were younger 
we found a cavern beneath a field

coming up I caught her
she would have fallen forty feet

lost in grasses
she gave herself to me

dusk pinpricked with fireflies
warmth still lingering on rocks
I made her promise

that's why she called

asking
wanting
begging it back

western sky all bloody with light

anti-gravity

levitating through backyards in the suburbs i was taken aback by all the lights and fences, so returned to the house where you rent me a second floor room.  i kept banging into the wall.  as i attempted to hover over the roof i saw you in your nightgown illuminated by the tv's dull light. you were looking out the picture window.  i hoped you wouldn't, but you saw me and said, i didn't know you had powers too. looking into your eyes i remembered your son was a suicide. in the bright morning yellow we stood in the nave of a church without pews and turned up our palms.  a few old men encircled us.  the power made me tingle but we couldn't make them float. they were just too heavy.  one of them shouted phonies and swatted the air at goddammed mumbo-jumbo. we went into a backroom beneath the bell tower and sat at a barrel where the pastor had set out a plate of doritos.  a trail of orange crumbs ran across the floor and up the wall into a dusty trapdoor on the ceiling where a hole had been chewed.

LXXV*

Is it always 1 am?

Have your clocks stopped
trusting you?

What good is all this reading
after your glasses have gone to sleep?

Did you forget
to bring out the best wine last?

Isn’t even darkness light?


* after Paulo Neruda's The Book of Questions

vaulting

in half-light of moon through honey locusts
white petals given to summer gusts

they say ride rider ride, claim this promise of freedom
others exhort the darkness is an oblivion

this universe is vast and infinitesimal
your gallop born by cold wet stones

the moon lies down and hoof-beats sleep
you barter hope for a single blown petal

lineage

and what will the outcome of all this be?
days rising and falling
one after the other

your father's ancestors
sent out with spears to hurl
into the black unknown

how many came back?
shall you not also go?

it had to be a cephalopod

O for octopus
for my octogenarian mother
the octagonal lies I tell myself
about how the sky is really the sky
and not just a mass of diminishing air

Mathematics

attempted proof—
if this then that
it leads to a card
an image of a brown rabbit
a white card with a pastel blue border
passed down from a generation that still writes

this doesn’t fit into the constructed equation

some people require mechanical valves
an old man in a nursing home
where I played as a boy
his leg gone above the knee
a pencil stub

I’d wheel grandmother into a sunny room
she’d tell mother
how the ceiling writhed with rats

which variables do I assign?

red digits of an alarm clock
night full of numbers for inputs
sine wave at the bottom of a curtain—
a vine of gold thread repeats in a pattern
bifurcates three times
ends in three leaves

each spring mother went to the woods
picked a lady slipper
set it on a table in a glass vase that never broke
she’d done this since childhood
before wild orchids were endangered—
a place she only speaks of now

we hunted for salamanders under logs
if lady slippers are x and salamanders y
if you plotted them against t
they’d approach the same value

sometimes M seems to be zero

she sent a card—
gold foil Sun with round cheeks
crescent moon surrounded by stars
never stop believing
the trick to drawing salamanders is to alternate legs
give the tail a slight sinusoidal curve

unsolvable symbols
unrelenting theory of chaos
if only the answer was one

come to the cinnabar caves

come by starlight
by whispered word
don’t believe the lies

darkness of night
has long been thought a paradox

travel south
to the side of a mountain
where morning sun enters

follow windblown seeds
let the wicked be a ransom

ask the scarlet peacock
that struts there every evening

its tales are endless
whole kingdoms

you’ll find no doors
at the cinnabar caves

even tyrants rest
only their deeds to wake them

an abandoned city

dark of night
disembarking from a train

the only taxi
a Fiat from 1968
rattles down a cratered road

the hotel--
grand dream
of a butchered architect

a lone diner
eats the last plate of liver and chips
by kerosene lantern

a silver knife echoes
upon a porcelain plate

great wooden beams
reveal themselves in sputters of light
they lift the ceiling into shadow

~~~

in the quiet of a room
the clanking of the worn-out train returns

upon a stiff linen pillow
lies the jostling of travel

before sleep
while still digesting liver
a bright evening sun appears
half-remembered

small fish caught up in a net
hung upon a wall

a small round table

flakes of mahi-mahi in garlic butter
color of honey running down a fork

flavor of a long ago kiss-- the first
washed down with beer

a prayer

a prayer still clings
upon a strip of linen

tattered by winds that assail
the pure white mountain
where a tree once grew
in cool abandoned air
 
branches remain
without leaves
each copper twig
shaped by lingering sun

oh, those un-crossable years
veiled in endless strands of her hair

no other way

you've buried your meager coin

sand slips through your fingers

a sun without warmth casts its dull light
a cadence of waves beats the shore

this is a black and white photo

of someone else's summer vacation

you've poured out your measuring cup of envy

sold your teeth

one by one

strung on cheap necklaces of self-pity

and now—

will you also discard the bones your mother brought forth?
your ribs because they are a cage?
your skull just a hollow bowl?

who would choose this?

so many mountains of skulls yet to cross
countries of skulls
whole continents of skulls

rising out of cruel unasking seas

all we’re afforded

entrance beneath trees
sun verging on surrender

only the present
where the forest grows

it tolerates
no remembered thing

moss and lichen without roots
the beech have grown for years

likewise our ways
worm trails under bark

come
empty your bowl

bone and branch
whitened by years

which in their sure way
sanctify us too

an otherwise ordinary day

so this skinny chair rubbed up against a fat telephone pole, or was it the other way around? the telephone pole rubbing against the chair entirely the wrong way which in this case was the right way and all those people who still had land-lines overheard everything-- the cardinal sin was public knowledge and we all went to bed with visions of soft fat chairs and hard skinny poles chaffing against an otherwise ordinary day.

glass

the one gift he was given
he didn’t know how to accept —
such a fragile thing
intricate glass-work
silver inlay
the craftsman skilled

but each time he held it
he’d break it
he didn’t mean to
just couldn’t be careful
couldn’t put it down

so he kept himself from it
couldn’t bear surrendering
its rare wonder
for his pleasure

but it was made to be broken
and its breath set free

thirst

this river within the silken dark
is not dark

it waters my silent mouth
flows across the table
and i drink it up

but it is wide and deep

an unrelenting current washing over me
it erodes all hope of deliverance

i cannot fight it

in it there is no fear
only the unfamiliar awe
of being consumed

until all that i am is taken in
and these endless panting waters

full

Tuba

I woke at 2 AM and poured my heart out, and everything else came with it, even the tears I cried in 4th grade when I'd butchered the tuba and discovered it was, like me, a mass of hollow tubes. Pooling in the bottom of some of them I found foul fluids I presumed to be stagnant spit though some was blood and semen and synovial fluid which I've forgotten the purpose of.  Sometimes in the early morning I am all ears, or rather just one, a fleshy kind of sousaphone that God likes to play when He is drunk which he must be after He thinks of places like North Korea or Rwanda in 94. Sometimes I think He only knows how to play sad songs, or maybe enjoys playing melodies that even He doesn't try to understand. Back in high school a classmate and I locked one of the juniors in a tuba case because after a couple of years we'd had it with the obnoxious motherfucker. That's what God has to do with me too when, for instance, I tell people I want to piss on the late April snow. This morning Jim Harrison had to come along and undo all the latches.

what remains of an inappropriate nursery rhyme

...when the days and nights
all grew dreadfully clear

we knew the war
would continue that year

still the snow it fell
on one and all

on the dead and the dying
and the living and the lost

and there by the hand
of a cold frozen child

just inches away--
a sleeve

of a red and black sweater
on top of the snow

The morning star twinkled
anew in the sky

then silence was broken
with the coming of dawn

a lone robin twittered
one promising note

but then came the thunder of shells
falling all the day long...

Funny Thing

The funny thing is after you’d been gone for all those years you showed up yesterday. We got a hotel room that turned out to be an engine of a huge steam train. All its handles and levers confounded me until I realized we were in my best friend's hotel room and you had come with a homely girl and we were all together. When his wife appeared at the door, you huddled behind me peeking over my shoulder. I stood there like nothing had happened, but I think we were naked. All evening we'd been unable to keep our hands off of each other. Your shirt was unbuttoned and I had my arm between your breasts, against the warmth of your skin. Then I put my armpit between your buttocks, and the inside of my arm against your belly. You ran your hands all over me as I balanced laterally on one arm performing some gymnastic act I am incapable of. In the morning my friend drove up on an antique tractor he’d borrowed to carry your luggage. I felt a little out-done. As we escorted you and your friend to a distant parking lot, a group of tourists stopped and asked me for directions. The place they wanted to visit had too many turns. You were slipping away; I had to run to catch up. When we said goodbye your face eclipsed the whole gray city. Odd I thought— your green eyes, curly bobbed hair, and how I called you Jane who's a brunette. This evening when you showed up so unexpectedly telling me you'd read everything I'd sent you, all I could think was you were taller than I remembered; when we hugged so closely I couldn't help feeling embarrassed for all the places my arms had been. I wondered how I would ever explain this to my wife.

Note to self

Be thankful for the irreversibility of the universe. It shows us which things are precious, and which are not. Without it, what would urge us forward? It teaches us to be careful but not too careful; to enjoy what we have when we have it, and after it is gone to let it go. It scolds us not to abandon the things that are repairable, and to discard those that are not. There is no arguing with it, it can't be convinced. It wants no nick-knacks on its shelves.

promise

this light
fading from the sky

this day
this moment already gone--

let go
you cannot keep it

more will come
the world is merciful that way

blue dye no. 2

last sunday's easter egg
leaking sky on a cheap white napkin
not much, just enough to follow

i'm lost
can you find me
floating in the stain?

that’s me hovering
over the shattered sky
which i have broken

the half-eaten sun—
un-resurrected
not warm enough to feel

empty bowl

Now that winter’s gone
I sit by a slow river
come here every day
a pair of mourning doves coo
how long will I have to wait?

trouble

winds strong or gentle

diminish not the waters
nor wear away sands

neither shall adversity

carve out spirit from a man

desperate sideshows

atop a great rock
we watched smoke
curl off the horizon
a sudden urge—
I leapt a fissure
three feet wide
thirty feet deep
mistook her fear
for desire

up a mountain trail
pool beneath falling water
we leapt boulder to boulder
her bare legs trusting everything
but someone else
you could fall
I dove deep
currents pulled heavy
strength almost gone

rooftop bar
in Morogoro
I pointed out a ledge
if you see me climb out grab me
stars burned bright
the conversation—  noise
I knew he would fail me
that’s why I picked him

crammed into speeding taxi
rumble of gravel
no elevation
dawn’s dwindling stars
hands on my legs
all of them shouting
stop the car
halfway to the roof
my final act foiled

Sorry, I've been hacked by an automated WTF generator

Oh great, I've lost a flat tire,
I can't even start the electric potatoes.
Who opened the doorknobs and let all the carbohydrates out?
Please, turn down the piano it's getting yellow,
can somewhere smell me why the hell is turning at?
A.P. everthought,
I'm feeling alittle timezone.
Maybe? is something on this?

deep the blue

i long to taste a mermaid's songs
siren lips melodious
to wreck upon the ribcage of a shore
be dashed into the cavernous sea
to unfurl my hungry sails

Winter's last

upon March late field
an evening snow lays down blue
all the gravestones gone

Venus de Milo

arms
                        of modest line           
                                                   contour

                        pure


how her hands

                        catch her skirts
                                          
                                                                fingers
                                                                     without blemish

some unintended sorcery

I woke last night
realized it must've been Jim
my co-worker who turned my eye
who was always turning my eye.

I suspected some overnight chaos
rattling objects on my desk
averting its gaze left or right.

In the beginning
I didn't know it was an eye
picked it up in a parking lot
walking to work
milky white quartz
smooth and round.

For a long time
just a stone on my desk.

I colored a black iris
never thought of Jim
working late into the night
all alone
with a stone eye.

at the end of time

in barkless tree
a great nest of silverware
knives interlocked with forks

in uplifted spoons eggs turned stone
against an empty blue
no circling silhouette of mother
strange bones strewn beneath

driving from the beach

still picturing her beige one-piece bathing suit
aching for her smooth wet hair
the sand clinging to her feet
the cool transparent water
where she floated
beyond Summer's afternoon
in blue sky above pines

sharps

the old piano
at Winter's picture window
waiting there for me
it's time to learn the black keys
unravel the vernal chord

words

written on egg shells
heavy words like recompense
glued to a canvas
as I listen to her voice
all the empty years dissolve

Oscillating

This sea I swim in
where I encounter you
it undulates with light and darkness
I am drowning in you
then I am drinking you in
then I am floating and still
I can feel you quivering
against all that I am

Doorway

I don't know why the way in is through a barn door up a ladder to a hayloft empty of hay after our last horse, Nugget, was sold, or why I awoke there that morning alone with a crow fluttering its wings to wake me. Maybe it coveted my eyes, was checking if I was dead, but when it spoke I began to wonder if God had ever used birds as prophets before. Go to the house for breakfast, your mother will tell you what you are missing. She'll tell you that along the three miles of highway you walked last night someone found your wallet, then your license, and then all the other crap. All I remembered was how drunk we were, how tightly she held me when I'd carried her across the outlet to Lake Michigan. The barn, a picturesque red, was traded for fill dirt at the end of that summer.

dinner missed

red sun dies
out a square window
dark wires cross
cracks in the sky

ceramic shingles slope into gutter
a magpie watches over women
washing in the court

they clean black pots
pull off burnt rice
not for magpies but themselves

heat lingers
tin cans rattle rough music
patio nearly empty

magpies land on tables
perch in low branches
say things
I don't want to hear

The Way Back

One summer when we were eight my twin sister and I hiked back in pine hills where the brilliant blue skies whistled above shadows of hemlocks; where the north sides of hills hid June snow. We'd run away, but only she came back. I kept wandering among the shadows and burning heights. Winds lifted me to the top of a pine, it snagged me by my collar. As I fluttered there I saw how clouds were distant isthmuses, peninsulas, endless chains of islands. I struggled free and floated off. I have only recently returned to rummage through rubble foundations, to sift through ashes for my whittling knife, to whisk away dust from my first sketches of trees, to uncover old Dittos of elementary math problems. The ink has faded. All that remains are answers written in pencil I did not erase-- nothing else, and now I'm out of time. My skiff is moored loosely to the top of a pine, the moon is rounding the ridge, eventide has come, my lands are burning with blood of the Sun. The winds and sea are too unpredictable, there are only a few endless stars to guide me.

It wasn't you

It was the nights of lies I lived
waking in strange slums
off cement floors
in hotels under assumed names
taxi rides of promises
dreams that were bullshit
the late morning sun
burning everything
from squinting eyes

arising

out of nothing
returning to nothing
things small  still  empty
like a coffee cup
a heatbeat with no blood
echoing before sound
before the beginning
an end destroyed
created
doesn't rain fall and fall and fall?
a thread unravels
has been unraveling
since before it was wound
in that great machine buried in some lost factory of time
silent gears turning always turning
slow imperceptible motion
CPU burning out bits
its  0 0 0
sometimes 1
0

Redemption II

wings
the mechanics of flight
not prop planes and smoke hearts
but prisoner #1853-M
the bird man of alcatraz
visited by sparrows
teaching himself to save them
doing solitary in leavenworth

beating a thousand times a second
not candy hearts but heat and metabolism
why bludgeoning a man to death is wrong