Ensconced

For a moment I sat beside a small wood stove
which had stood many months unfired in the shade of a room
whose only light came square framed in turquoise
from seven Black Eyed Susans rocking on long stems visited by bees.

That moment still hung in first light of the next morning
easing like an otter into cold waters where the Sun rose and set
without passage of time between the far shores of coming and going
lingering still while the Moon and its reflection in calm water shone

two brilliant blind eyes over an echo of a loon calling out from dead quiet
Even now, left with words I can never possess
words caught in the hollow of a mouth that can claim no hope of speech
having lived beyond speech for days in the simple labor of moving

from one place to another not to arrive but to continually emerge
from forest to field to ridge where I came upon a crow calling
a weighty shadow inhabiting a high roost—
an aspen beyond age clinging to stone.

Long after the Sun was carried
beyond the west ridge and hidden in cool shadows,
and the Black Eyed Susans have curled,
and the sweetness of pollen taken

into hives, hidden in capsules, and sealed in wax,
time has ensconced that moment in the labyrinth of past
where it has ceased and been refashioned into an indelible photograph
my eyes still claim as mine.

Paved

Maybe the young poets, like a growing list of dirt roads, are being paved over. Asphalt is easy, doesn't muddy your feet with innumerable words, but I am writing about myself again. That's why I order the wrong things to eat. It is non-sensical to sit at a bar so early in the evening while the Sun still shines. No one expects a middle-aged blue shirt to ask for hummus. It is my own fault for not ascribing the order a number, maybe the 8th in the Fibonacci sequence or the 5th because it's not cliche', but since all the young poets have been paved over, so what? None of these fit the formula nor factor into the equation that seems to want a series for input. Am even I being paved over by something as impersonal as mathematics?  The real question is do I want to finish my beer? I suppose there is no answer to this unless I want to give it one, which leads to a related question what answer will I give? One from a vast forest of unusual trees laden with all manner of strange fruit. Some of it is surely poisonous. Some will outright kill me, some will make me vomit, still more may only make me wish I was dead. Here I am with all this black skinned fruit that's oozing milky white pus. I'm tired of it. I've got a whole dirt basement full of this fruit. I've stacked up bushel baskets of it on the second-floor stairs. Maybe It's time to vacate, stand in the field with my head over my shoulder and watch timbers writhe in flames. Is there any difference between a growing mass of black fruit and a billowing tower of dark smoke? It's the feta cheese that's going to kill me tonight.

ghost

abandoned face
an empty wheel
don't tell me this shit

sunglasses
an old photograph
obviously blonde
cash

it's so much easier
depending on no-one

that's the fucking truth

Invitation

I cooked a strange ratatouille with tahini and curry and ate it with quinoa. Now I stand alone in a cool breeze beneath asterisms I’d invented in youth. I'm hoping for a perseid or two. Can I blame those who misunderstand me? It's unimportant. Won't you taste what I have made, and stand with me awhile? We can watch falling stars set the fields ablaze.

Surrendering the un-named

The last clear vase taken down
from a white sill and emptied
overflowing into a dark urn,
that lone sweet hour poured out—
the hoof print of a young doe,
three leaf-shaped pendants
fashioned from mother of pearl,
once the past, present, and future
all now seeping into earth.

don't want a coffee

It's 3:07 under a slate colored sky. I'm wasting my time in this bookstore. Pine needles still cling to my jeans. Out on the dunes I sat in half-lotus and fell asleep. Was it a wren that woke me? What do tourists do on cold July days? Why do they walk their dogs to a bookstore that only sells romance novels? Who would want to work as a barista in the back of a dime store? There used to be a bowling alley across the street when I had friends here. Once while camping in Montana I had a conversation with a Vietnam vet. We sat on the shore of Lake McDonald in the Rockies.  He lit up a joint and blamed all my problems with women on a restricted gene pool.

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