véronic

years ago she was the nurse
from médecins du monde
who held the x-ray of my broken arm
against a home-made tray of light
i dreamt of her again
last night

this evening
the sunset turns red
the moon is just a shard of white
i walk around the block
and walk around the block
there is no way of knowing

window

the vision burns
within me and through me
pooling at my feet
the floor made window into the world
a glass through which i see the ironworks
deep thrumming of great engines
grinding bone to ash
the garments of a woman
laid out on a bed beside a wavering furnace
they smell of talc
the stockings have been worn
the odor is not unpleasant
the scent of a woman
weeping naked by the blond bed
her hair is gone
she is bald and shaven and shivering
her ribs beneath her tiny breasts
her eyes the insides of skies
vacuous
she raps her fingers on her skull
empty echoes of an oil drum
a thought drops from her mind
it might sound like a tear
but several come dripping
the faucet run dry
her bare body emptied
beautiful in all its pure lack
and so become perfect
because you can starve her
and still not hollow her out
she is filled with visions of white cities
adobe of some other realm
the place she weeps in begins to diminish
whether it’s moving away from me
or i’m moving away from it
i can’t tell
sometimes the apparent is true
it shrinks to nothing
my window through the world closes up
there’s a knock at the door
she has become lovely
wrapped in the robe
of all her own hair 

october as ontological preface

incessant
the weight of broken things
the way incandescence hangs
on all the dusty shelves

earlier
a fire of small sticks
sunlight beyond the southern trees—
it lay upon the upper branches of an oak

a tendril of smoke weaved sinuously
among the yellowing leaves
the sky bluer than it had ever been
echoing with silence

I leaned into the fire’s heat
it stayed October’s cold
I sat by the fire and dozed
propped up by a grey branch

the evening was fading
but in a sudden gust of light
I understood
what it meant to be an exile many years

left alone to stir one’s dimming coals—
dozing is preferable
to chasing one’s ambitions around
in the wakened life

oh that turning and fluttering
if you take what you’ve been given—
everything
and open it to wind

returning alone

i find myself standing at the foot of the driveway
the dark house
a dog barks a few doors down
and beyond that
traffic noise from the highway
i peer into the night
at bands of clouds occulting stars
many still shine
so many points of luminance
among all the places i’ve ever known
here is where i’ve come to be

head caught in a machine

there was once a poet
who got his head caught
in a machine
it was a very bad machine
but better than his brain
flowering ensued
but not the kind that you might think
the internet of things
began to come to life
and suddenly
the refrigerator started to sing
an automated car
sought out a precarious peak
the municipal water spouts
began to leak
people were confused
they went outside
and there they found
strange things
forgotten things--
dandelions and collard greens

destitute woman

that you were a wren
or swallow or bluebird
inhabiting some uninhabited space

that men might make a home for you
fashioned from discarded boards
of some abandoned barn

that you were two or five
of Jesus’ sparrows
alighting on a bough of locust leaves

that wings would be your grace and
lift you from the thorny branch
or save you from the mangling

understand—

a photograph can’t
nor memory

seagulls cannot speak to it
nor the chattering of children

red of geraniums
already beginning

petal by petal
to flit away

Fallow

From zero, infinity.
From two, sometimes twelve children.
The harvest yields a hundredfold.

Each night
I return to lay again
amidst the desolation,

but then the sun comes out
and all green things
begin to flourish once more.

Yes,
I have decided
I will let the milkweed grow.

longing

deep in a forest you part the underbrush
find morning sunlight glimmering off a pond

in the shallows whitetail stoop to drink
their hides so bronze you take them for naiads

but don’t we always lose ourselves in some wilderness
alone and in peril of being remade into an echo

an imperfect acquiescence

burgeoning leaves
obscure this evening’s soft light
gold upon far pines
let the cool winds set you free
abandon your white gown to breeze

tropic of cancer

remember that desolate beach
inhabited by strange crustaceans
washed away by surging foam
only to come sidling back
those red armored creations of claws
and stalks of eyes
enacting their curious uprisings
in claims over the meager remains
of more complex forms of life
their odd intrigues
beneath meandering boughs of a great tree
that one wide limb where we would lay
weary from swimming
sharing our last mango
tossing its skin into the fray
that glistening fisherman
scattering every crawling creature away
his fish of many colors speared
which in that night’s dark downpour
we roasted over fire
waves in the distance
breaking and hissing
upon that shore of crabs

failing chaung tzu

nothing left undone
the myriad creatures transform
desire raises its head and raises its head

press it down he says
press it down
with the weight of the uncarved block

but freedom from desire
ceasing to desire
even crows and the kites will feast

jigsaw at the library

the sky undone
it’s always the sky
and maybe that’s what i’m here for

it requires right seeing
to finish the sky of another
but it’s nothing to me

some pieces of mine are missing
i keep placing them into others’ puzzles
when they turn their gaze away

a co-worker's observation

she told him she’d seen it
his wife binding him tight
in strips of funeral cloth

his body cocooned
his caterpillared head
she said she saw his wife

squeezing his mandibles to her breast
her milk when he drank it
diminished him

when he was small enough
she stuffed him in her purse
and walked away

re-addressing a chinese pianist

these hands of mine crawl keys—
two hairless tarantulas
caught in the beaks of her frenzied flamingos
how fine
her powdered neck
her lilac sash and purple dress
she is now a woman
and i a boy with sweaty palms
she places her fingers on top of mine
like this you ignorant child
her breath is hot against my ear
we are flying again
high above
the broken chord

a chinese pianist

in purple gown and lilac sash
she flits her fingers over keys
and stoops her head and teeters
everything is birds and feathers
the way she lifts her wrists and elbows
the necks of two flamingos
the room wells with etudes
the bench has toppled
her feet lift from the floor
she flies away
and takes me with her
far beyond
this broken day

Overcoming Darkness

There, above the frozen ruts of mud,
just beyond the leafless heights of aspen,
a thin luminescent smile of Moon
held within the circle of its own ghost,
and right beside it Venus burns
with piercing shards of shattered light. 

Object Lesson

Take some graph paper
and a No. 2 pencil
draw four lines of equal length
two inches each at right angles
and you will have a square
that occupies sixty four grids.
Choose three corners,
at each one draw a line
one and a half inches long
running off in the same direction
at a forty five degree angle.
Connect the ends of each line
with two more lines.
Thus is the illusion of depth obtained
and you can imagine a solid cube,
or a volume containing nothing,
or less than nothing,
merely the idea of nothing,
but as you can see
the idea of nothing
is already more than nothing—
this is just the first paradox of love.

place

i’ve never quite grasped the confines of geography
those rivers and valleys those highways between us
why are these cities we live in not spelled the same way
why do our streets have so many different names
where among all the doors in this world is that one door
the only door open to me   your door
that sole door-frame standing between us
the one adorned with postcards
from all the world’s places

Sometimes it goes like this

One morning you wake
with the word mujer on your tongue.
You go to work like any other day.
You’re pouring coffee
when someone says
he’s a published poet.
The guest speaker
the PhD from Havana
she offers her hand
and damn—
it’s such a fine dress.

all that is holy

it must be a truth
that everything holy here
will come to an end

elimination annihilation obliteration
so many long words
for that blinding white flash

all that is holy must come to pass
these kingdoms of light
built only on blindness

unfurling blooming blossoming
what can we hold
even time will cease

these clods of dirt
wounded and broken
left in our hands

it will all settle to silence
winds will echo
no more

eternity
composed so entirely of nothing
an emptiness we keep hoping to grasp

cut corn

a small pot of corn
to warm your cold blankets
a thin slice of butter
you eat cross legged in bed
each spoonful
every last kernel

it will never be any better than this—
the quieted room
an empty spoon   

unafraid of lightening

you mete out rage
in heights of branches
assailed by wind
a hard rain in your face—
the sun emerges

you sleep in wet grass
against the knotty trunk
stars appear
ascend to zenith
streak back down

like embers
luminescent trails
above the cricket song

letting go

how smooth the ice
across a windless bay
the almost perfect circle
of a silent moon

as if color is sweetness

look how she paints cantaloupe
halved in morning’s long light
as if color is sweetness
worked into the wounds
of her old wooden table

each morning she goes to the market
selects what fruit she can find
and with her worn brushes
she wends her way
well into moonlight 

she understands the sun departs
much in the same manner it arrives
mingling its orange strands
among streaks of shadow
spilled on the floor

and in this light
she takes her last peach
gives it a new color
over and over she does this
slicing cantaloupes peaches pears

until
she sees what she’s searching for
it is the color of mango
held in her first love’s hand  

my dear wasteland

i'm only a smudge on your cheek
a shadow of nagasaki burned into stone
i'm the last hour of winter
made of that same atomic light

you come to understand

you come to understand

the bent latch
the rusted nail
the last lingering edge of glass
in the window pane
looking out on what once was

it has drowned in a pond
where rotted trunks now rise
out of gray tessellations of cracks
inhabited by tiny black beetles

awaiting the orgy of winter
a blue racer basks in dwindling sun
it has fed upon the young of a mouse
that scurries about
puzzled with absence

this is just the way things are

scorn of a jealous muse

you never realized did you
writing so many useless words
stringing your ink across the pages
over and over

until the pen was spent
and the sun went down
and all your teeth fell out
and turned to dust

though a tree now grows
through what you used to be
all the world's birds
are gone forever

where were you
beneath summer's rustling leaves
always wanting
someone else's urging

the real and imagined

Some say a poet lives by his words
but really he dies

the poet is only a man
wed to thoughts of another woman

even after many years
she still inhabits his mind

the real and imagined
have always waged war

he finds himself in some other country
overrun in a barren field

frothing with spittle
surrendered to the white of his bones

he writes his last word upon her
as if she is paper lifted by flame

paper lifted into the hollow of night
into that which is holy

his own body
he abandons to silence

this inscrutable absence

i find a winter moon
tangled in the twisted branches
of the timeless oak

it also holds the wind
outside our kitchen window

tessellated moonlight blue
like shattered glass
upon the midnight snow

obsolescence

is it time
that has bricked in all the windows
or just being

nearly all the old edifices of this city
now closed off to light
this grey haze of december

above the grime of some shadowless alley
a fire-escape rusts
soon it will come to ruin