A concentric set of circles

I have a thing about the eye,
the watching one.
Let's just leave it at that
unless of course
you want to talk about drawing legs,
the pressure of a pen on paper,
a woman's ass and upper thigh,
a subtle shift of contour.
shouldn't it be simple?
Like drawing an eye
a concentric set of circles.

Waitress travels time

Balancing a tray--
your legs as smooth as ever.
Don’t you see
how time has thinned my hair?
All these places
where my skin is used to creasing?
I apologize for staring.
And yet you bravely come from 1990
to take the syrup from my table.
Why come now,
when all I want is breakfast
and you have lost your name?

Highway

This is the only road through the wilderness.
It doesn't matter where it leads,
just keep traveling.

Enchanted

Life has hollowed me out
hollowed me out
hollowed me out.
Can't you hear its echo?
It flows through me
and flows through me
along the passages it carves.
Leaves nothing.
Only roaring.
Listen--
voices arise incessantly
as if from nowhere
without beauty
or meaning.
Yet, they are an enigma.

Supplication

Saint Ink the Incandescent
won't you take me to your See?

Cast off your purple habit,
drag me into dusk.

Let Sin like root divide
the shadow of your flesh.

Enough of condemnation
I want to see you glow.

When it gets too hot

I swim and swim
until the noise is gone
and then the shore with its mad highway,
until the sun has vanished
and the waxing moon,
and there’s only starlight on the water.

midnight

stars like distant cities
clouds like continents pass
first bright then dark
across the Moon's ghost light

Lost Hour

A vacant beam of sunlight
across a thousand years of dark
illuminates a pictograph,
a lost hour-- high-noon
in some other realm of time.

Lodged in the present--
potsherds,
indentations pressed in clay,
Whose fingerprint?

all-you-can-eat buffet
air-conditioned rooms
the ring-tone will wake you shortly
after 7

An infant cries,
grasps a hollow breast.
A long-dead jack-rabbit needs skinning.
Dust, the color of blood
covers all the empty thresholds.

demarcation

It no longer matters
where the circles are drawn
how large R is
how many digits of Pi
just stop selling me
what I don't need
lifted skirts of your lies

still-yet-shining Sun

the Sun hangs low with wanton light
it warms the flat face of a rock

strange brown flies buzz by
Black-eyed Susan's drying petals

long shadows 
dead Daisy stalks bobbing in the breeze

I saw a woman
my eyes upon her every inch

they still remembered
what she forgot

her fingers on her awkward flesh
they ran along a strap

perhaps she'd worn
a misplaced dress

the Sun atop a rough-hewn ridge
water rippling toward the southern shore

I used to ask to read her work
it's still too cold to swim


the blue vein of her inner arm
a sideways slidden ring

will it be a Wednesday
or a Thursday?

I am grain spilling from a carted sack
wilted bells upon limp leaves

I am not afraid of hornets

white scar of a contrail
clipped fingernail moon

where does the distant pilot drift?

12 attempts at candor

I
Take this highway
you’re on now
it leads to a desert—
a long groove
worn into stone
where you can howl
obscenities at an
unconcerned sky.

II
If only you could escape
you’d take it with you.
This is the joke you play
over and over.
It isn’t funny
anymore.

III
I used to fear
words would leave
that I’d lose them.
Now they overflow
say too much.
I don’t know
how to stop them.

IV
One more
I say
Just one more
not to have
but to give.

V
And it comes to this
you do or you don’t.
You end up walking
the same gray corridor.
 
VI
I used to tell myself
love is enough
the air sufficient
but it all runs out
even time
ink wasted
on a page.

VII
What’s this?
laughter?
Why do I go on
sifting these fields of lies?

VIII
Broken brushes
twisted contours
why have they abandoned me?
Is it me who’s giving up?

IX
Who keeps chasing after me
telling me I can’t?
Whose child am I?
If I told them to leave me alone
wouldn’t I be talking to myself?

X
Bent and water-stained
photograph of a young
woman, soft skin over-
exposed color too strong
cream etched naked into
eighty-yeared cheeks

XI
Why is this the answer
to a sidewalk full of people
who never give a damn?

XII
How have all these words not
sounded even a single note?
What am I trying to play?

her life

late one evening she called me to say--

she would not allow him to take it from her
if anyone was going to take anything
it had to be her

her uncle's 38-special

she told of how the bluing had worn off
how she never unloaded the hollow points
how its annular edge of steel tasted of artesian waters

I know what hollow points do
she did not call to say goodbye

when we were younger 
we found a cavern beneath a field

coming up I caught her
she would have fallen forty feet

lost in grasses
she gave herself to me

dusk pinpricked with fireflies
warmth still lingering on rocks
I made her promise

that's why she called

asking
wanting
begging it back

western sky all bloody with light

anti-gravity

levitating through backyards in the suburbs i was taken aback by all the lights and fences, so returned to the house where you rent me a second floor room.  i kept banging into the wall.  as i attempted to hover over the roof i saw you in your nightgown illuminated by the tv's dull light. you were looking out the picture window.  i hoped you wouldn't, but you saw me and said, i didn't know you had powers too. looking into your eyes i remembered your son was a suicide. in the bright morning yellow we stood in the nave of a church without pews and turned up our palms.  a few old men encircled us.  the power made me tingle but we couldn't make them float. they were just too heavy.  one of them shouted phonies and swatted the air at goddammed mumbo-jumbo. we went into a backroom beneath the bell tower and sat at a barrel where the pastor had set out a plate of doritos.  a trail of orange crumbs ran across the floor and up the wall into a dusty trapdoor on the ceiling where a hole had been chewed.

LXXV*

Is it always 1 am?

Have your clocks stopped
trusting you?

What good is all this reading
after your glasses have gone to sleep?

Did you forget
to bring out the best wine last?

Isn’t even darkness light?


* after Paulo Neruda's The Book of Questions

vaulting

in half-light of moon through honey locusts
white petals given to summer gusts

they say ride rider ride, claim this promise of freedom
others exhort the darkness is an oblivion

this universe is vast and infinitesimal
your gallop born by cold wet stones

the moon lies down and hoof-beats sleep
you barter hope for a single blown petal

lineage

and what will the outcome of all this be?
days rising and falling
one after the other

your father's ancestors
sent out with spears to hurl
into the black unknown

how many came back?
shall you not also go?

it had to be a cephalopod

O for octopus
for my octogenarian mother
the octagonal lies I tell myself
about how the sky is really the sky
and not just a mass of diminishing air

Mathematics

attempted proof—
if this then that
it leads to a card
an image of a brown rabbit
a white card with a pastel blue border
passed down from a generation that still writes

this doesn’t fit into the constructed equation

some people require mechanical valves
an old man in a nursing home
where I played as a boy
his leg gone above the knee
a pencil stub

I’d wheel grandmother into a sunny room
she’d tell mother
how the ceiling writhed with rats

which variables do I assign?

red digits of an alarm clock
night full of numbers for inputs
sine wave at the bottom of a curtain—
a vine of gold thread repeats in a pattern
bifurcates three times
ends in three leaves

each spring mother went to the woods
picked a lady slipper
set it on a table in a glass vase that never broke
she’d done this since childhood
before wild orchids were endangered—
a place she only speaks of now

we hunted for salamanders under logs
if lady slippers are x and salamanders y
if you plotted them against t
they’d approach the same value

sometimes M seems to be zero

she sent a card—
gold foil Sun with round cheeks
crescent moon surrounded by stars
never stop believing
the trick to drawing salamanders is to alternate legs
give the tail a slight sinusoidal curve

unsolvable symbols
unrelenting theory of chaos
if only the answer was one

come to the cinnabar caves

come by starlight
by whispered word
don’t believe the lies

darkness of night
has long been thought a paradox

travel south
to the side of a mountain
where morning sun enters

follow windblown seeds
let the wicked be a ransom

ask the scarlet peacock
that struts there every evening

its tales are endless
whole kingdoms

you’ll find no doors
at the cinnabar caves

even tyrants rest
only their deeds to wake them

an abandoned city

dark of night
disembarking from a train

the only taxi
a Fiat from 1968
rattles down a cratered road

the hotel--
grand dream
of a butchered architect

a lone diner
eats the last plate of liver and chips
by kerosene lantern

a silver knife echoes
upon a porcelain plate

great wooden beams
reveal themselves in sputters of light
they lift the ceiling into shadow

~~~

in the quiet of a room
the clanking of the worn-out train returns

upon a stiff linen pillow
lies the jostling of travel

before sleep
while still digesting liver
a bright evening sun appears
half-remembered

small fish caught up in a net
hung upon a wall

a small round table

flakes of mahi-mahi in garlic butter
color of honey running down a fork

flavor of a long ago kiss-- the first
washed down with beer