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

A Minor Rage Against Forest and Field

Beyond the hollow aspen
the bartender announced his cold visage—

“In the seventh room of the Moon,
I, beside my stubborn shadow,
have managed to escape
the destruction of time!”

All the while his shadow,
whose activities confused the other reflections,
had been throwing down all
the cut-off stems of daisies.

he called it love

year after year
the ocean lingered
far beyond the searing stones

the burden of absent inflorescence

seven unceasing shadows
traveled overgrown passages
commanded by time

they navigated by voices
that echoed from each blind tower
never meaning to put to shore

they all bore leaves
from lands they’d surrendered
never to return