Dusk

oh the Sun

it's shining, it's burning
blistering away the day

the tree branches swaying
in the gales off the bay

flocks of swallows
dotting the yellow sky

as if Summer still had some sway

as if already
the light wasn't bleeding away

hulks of the maples
a growing shadow in the west

a streak of brilliant white
so luminescent

thrust at such a perilous angle
into the shoulders of the trees

a jet barely visible
nearly lost in the heights


its engine heating
compressing the air

using the atmosphere
against itself

to climb westward
so to appear

as if it's falling

into the ghost of the Sun

how wonderful to know
that light seeks after light

the peach edge
of a gray cloud

already eclipsing
that bright contrail

branches still buffeted
sway

the north winds
roaring hollow and bodiless

tearing, tearing
the world away from the day

Overtime

That's the thing. I should be developing GetHTML("CensusKey") but I'm sketching contour lines instead. I'm trying to get the edges right, an oval of a face, remembering a glance, trying to remember the corners of a smile. I'm not being analytical at all. The code keeps crashing, I keep running down rabbit trails, the outline of her hair, that knee length skirt, the band-aid on her toe. Why do I keep cutting and pasting the same variable, as if it's iterative? Its getting dark outside, the rain's incessant, so much code to write, so much.

This can't be true

She was born on the Autumnal Equinox. They remembered this was so even if, perhaps, there was some meager chance she wasn't. She would come and go so often on that day when Day and Night stood arms crossed saying, "We're the same you and I. You go one way and I the other."

Says Day, "This is your time. I know it as much as you, but do not think that I am less than you."

Says Night, "This I know so well, having watched you live these past few months; and you, you're no more than me."

You go your way; I go mine. That is how it is. Can't we go together? There's no particular reason, even if there is a purpose.

Last year a milkweed seed drifted through the open windows of my car. I'd pulled off in some sun-bleached country field; was just awakening from a nap. So quietly it drifted by, so delicately floating on nothing but the air. As it passed I knew it carried me away somewhere, and there you were, your hair so soft and cool against my sunburned cheek.

Ten Thousand Birds of an Unspecified Species

ten thousand birds
darken the sky
fill it with riotous noise
night has darkened day
clouds appear in the west
consume the stars
they still shine
the windows are open
i stand on the porch
watch them fly
fly out the door
rise to the sky
i am pinned to this Earth
mouth agape
watching them
watching them 
skyward fly

Return

Once there was a day when the forests were pure when the sun shone from an ever blue sky. Some days I still find it. Many years ago, a hundred million years ago it seemed, a white moon without blemish shone. Do not be afraid to return, to linger. Pause. Do not be afraid to seek it out.  For many days you will not find it no matter how hard you try, but please for me, for you, for all of us, do try. Don't surrender.  There are many ways we must surrender and when we do we know we must, but don't listen to this, my telling you what to do. The winds are pure, the sky is blue, the sun shall ever shine. That place in the forest waits for you, keeps waiting for you.

hope of summer, spent

acrid smelling shotgun shell
spinning through the air
smoke
and taste of smoke

regret

an empty plastic casing

pleasure so temporary
pulling the trigger

young boy
pointing the barrel
inches away from tiny white chest
a chickadee
the rest of his life
tasting the spatter of bird shit
mingled with gun smoke

young man
taking an eight point
nearly two hundred pounds

vertebrae shattering
turning
to face the sound
echoing off distant hills
still running 
on its side in the swamp

gray

gray clouds

a cold cold rain

Flight

Tonight as I kept repeating the melody stuck in my head, pounding it into the worn keys of a tired old piano, I went back to the time when I traveled for days by bus across the wastelands of central Tanzania. I was fleeing myself, putting kilometers between me and the places that had become too painful for me to stay any longer, where I was living out the lies I was telling myself. I was distancing myself from the whores and the old bartenders I surrounded myself with, who played along for profit, complicit for their own pitiful reasons, who would have rolled me over had I died to pick my pockets for the few useless Shillingi I lived off. I was escaping those of my own devices which I believed had already killed me, and had yet to come to gestation. I occupied my mind those days with fears of various forms of infectious disease that depended on such activities for their procreation. I had already known that I was going to run. I had the bus ticket and my bags in my room ready at the Y. It was on that last night of my envisioned destruction when the bartender had already stiffed me, and I let him just to see how far he would actually go, when J____ had finally given up her manipulations and suggested that I take the sixteen year old who was new. S____ had already thrown the beer bottle outside against the wall, and her friend speaking of love, trying to negotiate a settlement had given up too. She had in her hand a paperback of Gulliver’s Travels, which was fitting, for it seemed by that time they all had already tied various threads of their own contriving across my torso and limbs, and were clinging to them in attempts to pin me to some firm unmoving ground. The deal was made. I was to pay their ways into Jimmy Conners, and they would swing by the Y to drop me off so I could come later. All of us had come to separate independent realizations about how this would provide various opportunities of escape for any of us. Maybe no one understood but me that all of them would be enacted without exception so that early the next morning, head heavy and stomach rotting with too much beer I was sitting in the midst of villagers on a bus, sunlight searing through my eye sockets into the back of my skull, leaving in the dust that desperate city to waken without me.

when the Sun is out shining go turn your face to its light this is what I tell myself the sun will shine when it does and when it doesn’t maybe rain let it come when the moon is out shining wake stand beneath it whatever the hour of night let it tell you things that you’ve forgotten let its light paint familiar landscape strange summer fades there’ll be others or this may be the last no matter take the time wander a field find an unknown wilderness alone when vegetables in your garden ripen pick them the green beans die from rust let them go wake to leaden clouds of fall the day’s sudden coolness let cold brush against your lips winds redden your checks stars still shine progress in their mechanical way i suppose other things are like this too i showed up at the wrong funeral confronted by loss of someone i didn’t know i have to live within myself who else has the patience? each year my litany grows longer so many more reasons i will let things be if i am different so what i haven’t the words get beneath my skin September winds blow strong the quality of this day battled out in the sky above i’ve spent a whole succession of months chasing the light of the Sun there is never a day i seek the shadow of clouds

Words

I am not sure anymore if my writing is only a footpath through the forest where I've traveled, or if it's a way revealing itself into the depths of an as-of-yet-undiscovered wilderness. Maybe it's both or neither, just water flowing where it will, where this present landscape affords it passage. Perhaps it is only pooling in some concavity where the myriad forms of pond life thrive.

solitude

i went to the desert
it was like a sea

(you need a boat
to travel the sea)

walked for miles

had no sextant
lost my way

in the middle of nowhere
sat a Coupe de Ville

'58 or 9
a rusted husk

sky through bullet holes
hollows for headlights

no steering wheel
doors gone

i got in
sat on a stone

turned to
Father Anthony

“you got the keys?”
but he was gone

in the back seat
Athanasius

shouting
“drive you fool, drive.”

Autumn

In the dream a friend was telling me how in 1948 her grandmother was born on the Vernal Equinox, but September was near. "We've turned the corner. Summer's gone," She said. We stood in shadow beside an unfamiliar gas station. An old woman drove up in a rusty blue car. It skidded to a stop. The woman had crazy eyes. She came to me and buried my face in her chest, and when I looked up I saw she was a classmate from many years ago. She didn't look so old. I could see her nipples swelling behind the fabric of her cotton dress, and when I awoke I was a boy again sleeping in my old bed, trying to pull up the old wool blanket I used to use when I got cold.

bordering on cliche'

Inside the room
a painted cloud

music of
a violin

the flowers already
starting to fade

scent of incense
always masking

some odor
of death

Outside the window
clouds are real

so is
the sky

earlier
I walked

among the cut-up branches
of a beech

September
knocking at the door

I myself
am crawling out the window

dancing over
a distant hill

the grass so green
this summer

my body
in many ways denied

always telling me
it's there

telling
and telling

until at last
I have to listen

sunlight through
the window

so wonderful
this time of year

faith

inside a small adobe Church
air thick
smell of incense

a candle for Jesus
flickers in the darkness

outside
above the desert
the brilliance of clouds
whiteness of clouds
moves
across a stoic sky

in the distance
far from the empty Church
there's a skeleton
of a prehistoric fish
pressed into a layer
deep inside a stone

that darkness is no different

the coast

the days are long

cards thrown
one at a time
at a wall of gray cement
they land face down or up
an Ace
a Queen of Clubs not Hearts

is a Jack a Knave?

boats rock
on distant waves
not blue waves
gray green

1 + 1 equals something too far gone to see
the cards don't tell a thing

at the corner of the future
is the past
she knocks me flat
cards fall out of my pockets

I never pick them up

the sea is not too far from here
I can taste the salt

is there a boat out there for me?
a gray boat
on gray waves

the clouds
curtains covering sky
steel curtains
cold rivets
raining down

what rot

i smell
can taste it
lick it
but hell i can't shake it
a sling on my arm
two weeks
one hundred
degree temperature
one hundred
percent humidity
two tee shirts
two god damned
tee shirts
worn too too thin
ocean warm
waves waves waves
i'm drowsy
beached
on a sand bar
raised up
low tide
not far from shore
away from the din
the traffic
humanity's mass
the whole fucking city
i sleep like seaweed
cut-up on shore
smell like dead fish
seaweed that died and fermented
in one hundred degree air
(i don't care)
the whole year
rotted
the long afternoon
of that great lie
pitting
prostitute against whore
(nobody won)
beer bottle shattered
bus through the desert
the sea beating beating
against the hard sand
rising and falling
smelling like a corpse
three days dead
fermenting
one hundred degree air
swollen
the pig that i am
while from up in the sky
falling
a cow
trailing its entrails
singing so sweetly
an old lullaby

water a mirror

i
or
you
lost
words
unfurled
rope let go
boat wind-cast
upon wide ocean
into vastness so full

of emptiness there
is no map of the
open sea waters
go on forever
like sky goes
on forever
all men go
to graves
or part
words
lost
you
or
i

passed over

what I didn't say bled like a river for days long after flies long after the blood had dried and the flies dead long after the odor the stink required a shirt held over your nose and mouth what I didn't say lingered there in the silence the solemn silence deafening the silence I had to break with the things I had to say that coming out of my body tore flesh shattered bones like a high pitch shatters glass saying what I didn't say to drive the crows away crows that tear at flesh and go for the eyes there were no eyes there was no flesh there were no words what I didn't say no longer was what I did say no longer was I no longer was there was only what was itself existing because it always had remembering itself what it was it threw me away because I didn't matter it didn't matter if I didn't say if not through me it would find another.

Sound

You wake up near evening
a single stone in your hand

misshapen
imperfect
just the right thing

not random nor meaningless
cool to the touch

made of a wisdom
that you can not grasp

like an echo of nothing
of nothing
of nothing-

How I managed to survive

The damned balloon was made to order, but the stupid asshole who made it let it go too soon. I had to make my own out of bubble gum wrapper, paper towels, toilet paper, and plastic grocery bags. I tied them together with dental floss, stuck them together with pine pitch (did I ever tell you how much exactly I hate, absolutely hate, I mean HATE pine pitch?) Why'd that bastard let it go? No matter, I made my own. Did I tell you that I happened to use the elastic from my underwear? of course I didn't, that would be stupid... but... I mean... oh never mind. I was actually able to launch it. There was a formula for making lighter than air gas in a popular science book I read from the 20's, One of the ingredients was iron shavings. I started grinding up my car before realizing that there is very little iron in cars these days. I ended up using the kitchen sink instead, proverbial I know, but I was desperate. I had to get the hell out. Time's up? OK, long story short I did get out. The balloon happened to hold. Of course there was a small mishap with fire. What? Yes I understand. Perhaps some other time when we have a little longer to talk.

out of pen, out of mind

good morning night elusive. The sweetness on my lips from wine doesn't run too deep. The stillness, pens louder than traffic, the window sky airplane buzzing by awhile ago, the spokes my bent wheel whining, counting time, days, hours, minutes knowing that they would run never doing what you would hope, and that's the funny thing there is no time that ever isn't slipping this way or that, tomorrow yesterday both robbing now, knifing it in the kidney or the back, leaving it laying in the alley leaking seconds and minutes, the bike wheel spinning on its side, and I wonder when I race my bike if I'm not still, and only speeding up the Earth, and if I can ride east fast enough will I ever find a yesterday I'd even like, don't get me wrong, I'm not into repeating (a pause) I'm not into receding into past or into walls that seem no more to be, I'd rather run or race not against anybody but me because just once I might be able to escape myself or me or whatever the hell I am or not. To see beyond the present why would I want that, I don't, the future nor the past, you just let me be now here away from that which should be or might be or can't be. Let time fall off the planet, let me do away with skin, with flesh, with shoes that wear too fast, yes speed if there were no time speed would die, the wind wouldn't blow, my teeth wouldn't chew, doesn't garlic burn? raw garlic good for the heart, and keeping people away, let me breathe on you and leave your flower putrid, let it cease to be, that you might come out, empty yourself and me the (no not a vapor)