Anne

filled with her world’s black imagination
preserves the afternoon’s illusion
as the truth inside her rains
and the universe slips away
oh how whitely stained
her fingers dream

Dear Bartender—

While you were gone, we encountered various strangers who appeared, then dropped off speeches along the closed visage, next to the skull where all the labor of abandoned days blindly sat. At first voices reflected on far sureties, but then things deteriorated, flopping and rusted. Some entered through doorways, others escaped through broken out windows, square-framed and sobbing. The dawn was infectious, but I’m sure you understand how that indelible mouth we call the Sun can only travel so far without making an absolute ass of itself.

a kind of warmth

that old woodstove where absence fit
where opportunities entered
in the end becoming sixteen searing refusals
various attempts at sky shone through
spilling cinders out onto the earthen floor
they looked like burnt out stars

what we traveled of blind time

that familiar easing of white light
the hand’s destruction
the owl’s call
echoing across the shadows
consuming the far ridge

in still turquoise calm
we parted
we said
we finally understood

the stems
arriving at their absences of petals
the otters on the other shore—
vague sinuous shapes
dark and minute

A Minor Rage Against Forest and Field

Beyond the hollow aspen
the bartender announced his cold visage—

“In the seventh room of the Moon,
I, beside my stubborn shadow,
have managed to escape
the destruction of time!”

All the while his shadow,
whose activities confused the other reflections,
had been throwing down all
the cut-off stems of daisies.

he called it love

year after year
the ocean lingered
far beyond the searing stones

the burden of absent inflorescence

seven unceasing shadows
traveled overgrown passages
commanded by time

they navigated by voices
that echoed from each blind tower
never meaning to put to shore

they all bore leaves
from lands they’d surrendered
never to return

Yule

recall those painful doors
that searing Noel
rising from overripe fish
flopping through narrow streets

we had no baskets

the solstice days
bleeding one into another

the cold touch of fallen whores
wrapped in white sheets
they could have been angels

each of us bearing
our many disguises

Hosanna
Hosanna in the highest

manipulations

among easy-fitting threads
beer bottles tied between
outtakes of envisioned realizations—

love
sunlit limbs
rolling eyes

dead now

escaping
the narrowly shattered wastelands
pinned between walls

yes
a delicate destruction

that city

that year i spent lingering
till the cool breezes of mornings
speaking of the various opportunities
and various exceptions in that city—

you could always find villagers
grinding against the firm night
enacting paperback stories
in other languages
tied up in bundles

take for instance
the stranger versions of Gulliver's Travels
or procreation for that matter
bartenders stuffed into beer bottles

to escape that city
you had to file the forms
you had to pay in kilometers
negotiate what seemed to be
a heavy settlement

a few soiled bills and worn-down coins
a ratty backpack

the bus ticket was yours

wastelands opportunities

whores with their theories
of kilometers and disease
played and provided

when stiffed
they distanced themselves
from negotiated hands

they rolled me over
for no more reason
than an unmoving beer

wastelands opportunities
depended on bus tickets
ground into pockets

hands travelling across eye sockets
empty beer bottles

the bartenders escaping
that complicit city of love and procreation
with their old devices of dead wars