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