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

Redemption I

Held in bone hand—  a life
unmade, drips from worn joints.

Marred by dark grains
it melts away—
an undulating pool of silver
seeping into sand.

As if caught in flame—
it becomes glass
just for an instant.

All that remains— grit
takes the contour of bones.

splendor

greatly diminished
house of a thousand spoons and few forks
an empty drawer

Algebra I

The sum of their ages is six years less than mine.
I tell them sixteen years for me have passed like two
which is three times less than six.
This story problem—
too senseless to solve.

Your idea of love

Your idea of love—
red giant stars
a globular cluster 
tattooed on my chest with a fork
tines bent into fishhooks
you cast with no art

Your idea of love—
dirty dishes
me on the dining room table
you with pliers
he loves me, he loves me not
my teeth ring as they land in a pot
I hate you, I hate you
not part of the game

Your idea of love—
my toothless mouth
cradled in your arms
shards of glass from our portrait
worked into raw sockets
twisting and turning
if you love me you’d kiss me
that’s a nice boy
your knee in my jaw

Your idea of love—
me naked
in a stained porcelain tub
filled with gasoline
I know how you hate to waste it, dear
your face glowing in match-light
a cigarette hangs from your lips
you know I don’t smoke
the match falls from your fingers
onto the floor
don’t think I’d let you off so easy
that's not my idea of love

in winter darkness

breezes swirl
hollow my voice
lift whispers

across quiet miles
your mouth waits
starving with warmth

always making

dreams into poems
preams into doems
peams into droems
poeams into drems
poems into dreams

Clocks

city planners have devised these—
three great unblinking eyes
ensconced in height

one over knowledge
one over law
one over commerce

they gaze upon our urgencies
pupils pierced by iron shafts

two dark arms quantify subdivide
attempt to master
through mechanical means
that which is inscrutable

once

stumbling upon a hidden entrance
deep in an old abandoned wood
she wandered into a dark labyrinth
more ancient than trees.

running her gentle finger
along rough and dusty walls
turning this way and that
she found her way at last to me.

you do not belong here
my raised voice
how did you get through?

but by then it was too late—
every wall she'd touched had crumbled
light was coming in.

Mishap

As I set out on the path I worried that there might not be any more water in the well.  I never was very careful.  I didn't even see the snake, only heard its rattle. It bit me in the calf, through my jeans. I staggered into the well and fractured my femur.  The poison didn't kill me, but after a day in darkness a bucket struck my head.  Some woman overhead shouted, “Shit!”  There was no water so she left, and no one came back.  A week passed.  I had to eat myself to survive (methodically, first my legs, then my left arm, then my torso— I've carried a jack-knife since I was a young boy.) After I took the last bite I began to float.  How careless I thought, I've forgotten my knife, my keys. It didn't matter.  I had no weight.  I kept rising; out of the well, above the fields, heading to the stars. Earth from space is so beautiful, just a tiny ornament, a memory of a fading blue pinprick.  I'm not quite sure how many years passed before I started to fall again, pulled towards the center of the galaxy; converging in perfect silence with crowding stars, ashes of planets, and blinding light, but I arrived at last standing before a familiar door. It was locked as always.

biding

sun hangs low beyond a field
around the garden a rusted wire fence
dead branches for posts
sunflower stalk black against snow
bent-over head empty of seed

january

the children move among old apple trees
seeking shifts in elevation to sled

trees so many years burdened
trunks split with weight of un-pruned growth

branches now empty of wormy apples
some dead farmer has left for birds

why do you never come to this field?

the children lose themselves in its abandon
time has died

the sky pulls away from itself
wisps of clouds

in the west
a burning glow beyond the weight of gray

in diminishing light
you walk back

down a road
still muddy

applied physics

dull brown metal door
safety glass
cool to the touch
a low hum
reactor
cyclotron
madam curie dead
damned by curses
from shadows etched on walls
wernher von braun kidnapped for his mind
would the british castrate the son of a bitch
and yet we still turn over rocks on the shore
find beneath them pebbles
but sometimes
it is possible
more possible then you think
a child's tooth

Ruins

outside of Cairo
there's an open air restaurant
where there are sphinxes
too many skinny cats beg
cold chicken from your chipped plate