Blue

Perhaps it was
the blue umbrella
amulet carried

on a walk just
as the dew point
was dropping

and temperature
resolutely cooling
after days of rain

from the remnants
of a southern hurricane
churned from the last

of last month’s
summer while the
first leaves turned

yellow beneath
a grey sky above
the beige ground

which led her and
the air to a basement
with oil paints

beads and ribbons
to fashion upon some
open jewelry boxes.

Some Evening Consolations

A brisk wait on the driveway,
Not wanting to go in or out,
Leaning against a door panel
Slightly dinged at inspection,

The avenues call upon the trees,
Towards those few still standing

Both swollen and craggy.

*

Astringent surveys of segments
mad at brown deciduous for not
bothering the beforehand and
without use for an afterward.

Closeness is an always that they grow,
Exposing of what the final consists.

Loneliness only a lack of faith
In the instant that is awareness.

*

Slowly houses blend indistinguishable
And the danger of the umber void
Is the allured peaceful draw
From shades of an earlier verdure,

Always in the whole of insult
And worth a dumb forgetting.

*

Contrasts make for stark presence,
The pale carve of sky a screen
for paper puppets.

Temperature drop pulling up
the outlines of shadows
into a silhouette.

Leaves turn,
Fall long past the knots of
The broken aggrandizements.

*

Nothing deserves the span of time
That provides a color of presence.

A stand in the areas now allowed
Fills about with a completeness.

Garden

The sofa not placed beneath the window,
A chair with a stiff back, the framing
Of the outside acquires an attentiveness
Not demanded, it asked for nothing-

--------a wind at this end of its meeting
--------waves stalks of lemon balm
--------with the same effect as though
--------neither were ever even there

Casualness and is left to the worn
Print of the cushions, a slumbered
Forgetful ochre, and what remains
Catches the air that stays open

For a placement.
A hard span of stone.
Granite pale with its
Own masonry of layers

As actualized into a compact,
The entire scene of combinations
Creased and thru all development
Of the complexities of Summer.

The midwife had waved from the river.
A gated password into activity--

--------a spirit and the holed shoes
--------beyond front door directions
--------paced upon an attentive world
--------from a raft that carries with it

Necessary choice greeting when standing
With the contact, braving physical delirium--

--------small baneful leaves broken
--------open and leak oceans of mint
--------unduly sharp knowing texture
--------as the aging tip is a process

The gratuitous laziness of past sleep
Becomes the graciousness, unbound mulch
For whole bowls full of next year’s fruit,
Prepared from what was decided, tended.

Back to Home

The quest of the poem? A rascal dew
Moistly over a tribe of orchids
A leader never heard the minutes
So now the song flows, as they do,
River brown, or clear if north, stones,
Where you can lose yourself headlong
Thrown equal in a murk as clarity
Which might cool or warmth seduce
Birth and liberate dull distractions
Into a sediment condensing fall

Of frog, lizard, pre mammalian eras
Infused with asteroids and volcanoes
And tropical fronds of tropical ports,
Riding migrant lines in reverence
For the leak of creation, additives
To diamond puddles of blood oranges
Pooled from the sweet milked coconuts,
How was that, fronds of carbon, emergence

With reflections, no preference, agility,
Swirling eddies in torrents of the Yangtze,
Between branches and momentary above
Ledges that require wings, waters with gills,
Open spaces coiled in the gravitas singular,
The constant universal when we first swallow
Mouthfuls of red oxygen, ground’s weight,
Breathing then on in a canister pouring sky
Later adorned with the drift of pink clouds
Of a personal shed as we go beyond ourselves

In the round head with a mouth spitting
Language eggs, the semblance momentary
Like the relief that then collapses on itself
Followed through with saving continuation,
Momentum for inspiration, swollen tributary
Like innumerable cells of sea life, swimming
Inward, on instincts, beneath the jettison
Propelled from steep escalations of waterfalls
Upstream where people have since gathered down

On hands and knees under arcing rainbows
As beautiful as humidity in stanzas, completed
From the broke free droplets cut from the mass
That are, not mine, but our ideas, emotions,
Filled in images spraying forcefully out through
Common sounds of our day’s hieroglyphics,
The same I-Got-It meaning as string theory,
Like explanations for infinity, within fractals,
Exact measurements of time’s endless universes

Circuiting around burning gas conglomerates
That resemble intense pondering over
Double lattes on terraced porches, back tables
In library basement corners, lost gone weekdays
At night in private studies, the bottleneck
And a radio’s hand blown harmonica, before bed,
Sheets where a lover does drift, somewhere
Makes a land that we have imagined can be
Convulsed through heroics or splendid magic
Stored in cavities of lyres, lutes, drums, chant

Compiled language through a philosophy
To turn communication onto its own light,
Random coherencies, spoken, sufficient
With reflexive subject matter as mountains
Tower over villages, shores of sea ports
Wash toes outward, into shadows, visible
As your own heart and mind, lost nowhere
And still, ignoring the pretext, cry along
With the gibbons until adducing a dance

Or submit, memorialize, the effervescent
That knells within the bald exclamations
Of the wild, sirens, a disband of differences
Between night and day, beastly angelic
Instances only, calls and the echoes
Of tolling bells. Cicadas this evening.
Early crickets. Feisty driveway dogs.
Hidden backyard cats. The caterwaul.
The bark. The horn. The vibratory fusion
In a hum through some spoken words.

How many miles of wire fencing
Line the backyards of America
Is a question with an answer within
Its own bent, sodden, cut pull bindings,

Sort of as when its asked if aluminum has
A natural taste. One ignored by children
As they trespass with jelly sandwiches,
And here as well. Plants on both sides,

And some with edible berries, others
Poisonous, handled by those feathered
With hollow bones, which many reel
Suddenly from. Emptiness of reeds

Hold only the content of their own space,
Tamed into bendy straws for grape soda,
Else shaped into flutes blown in unkempt
Thickets casting an umbrage of half truth.

Only single option- trust yourself like flight,
Letting go of yourself by grasping loosely
With what is played so it can pass below,
With your substance, which isn’t frightful,

It’s the mulled umber after all eventual loss,
A procession of primary colors in the actual
Opaque mixing of secondary penumbra, positive
Negation gained entry larger than you were.

Full robins of summer poke up earth worms
After the funneled rain, from clouds with liquid
Geometrics rather than grated squares. Trunks
Of a hundred year old silver maple, and a nest

Above the yards of four different properties
With as many generations of owners, like
Winds that lift pipes through green leaves
That sway in the time of invisible answers.

As You Deem

The choice of feeling you don’t want to participate, instead
Claimed to understand and then the clusters of new mosquitoes
Are found frantic, asunder while they displace the evening light,
And so the packs of sparrows then are also overly riled,
As with the first darkening of a storm and the same as scarce food
During the mid winter, both with urgency, farrago flights
Amidst winds, blunt clouds, and in each is heard something
Through songs you do not hear sung in the early morning
And more like the snarfs carried from a past year’s loan boar,
Possibly on a small island resolute against the pull of tides
With streams as craggy as the live problems of assurance,
The sun and moon replaced with stubs of incised stones.
How it is ruined when polluted with imposed implication.
How it can be viewed when surrounded by unlimited ocean.

Open Rafters

While painting outside one morning
The door to the attic flat white,
Last night’s raindrops
Are blown off the leaves
And evaporate their own notions
Before landing on the ground,
Forgotten, unplaced,
Bright ideas

Sent back into the sky,
Up to the arid clouds
Before laden with the too heavy grey formations,
As more resemblance
With winds that only know
Weight as all is seen in total,
And therefore absent,
Breezes unpossessive,

The same as the lights
Off a reflective moon, or a sun,
A drift orbital flight unknown to itself,
Part of everything, as with matter
That is a communal in a dance

While funny dank shadows
Croak jealousy to be heard,
Those tail ends behind objects,
Hidden bullish coves of secrets,

Also a part of light in the caverns
Of this something that sings itself
From a base of cornored emotion,
Into openings, sprung from the opposite
Of what is prefered, carried to spacious air,
Glinting sparse vapor,

Tuned beyond distinctions as what we can
Only know as temporary scintillate
In the uppermost lofts where a few bats
Maybe spince laughs of sonar
And the dry framework suspends
In the air of our arid heads.

Her Name is June

Beside the raspberry patch
one can see her in the yard
laying on a fold-up lounger,
and lets just leave it at that,
without any disclosing which
no one needs to hear, such as the
mishmash of some heartbreak,

just there, in the sun, summer, with
splint reflections off green plastic.

So now you are placed into the
scene as well. Welcome. But I
won’t tell you where, maybe,
at her feet, or hidden behind
the fence, beside her on
your own chair, in a house,
in a neighbor’s house, from a
waiting car out in the street, or
beneath the porch with rabbits.

Location remains in your perception
and depends upon what you want
to get. Well hopefully not that crude.
If so, you’re on your own. Replace
it with relation and the acquired liberty
of being multiple places at once, myriad

as an eye that is a sun (the most obvious)
but also maple seeds twirling down
into the dried out eaves troughs
and the base leg hairs on the stems
of the weeds that peak up to a sky,

as easy as a cloud’s shadow like two
butterflies, with wings of powder--

a Hackberry Emperor

a Meadow Fritillary

–flying into the spindly entangled
thorns so full of prick sharp briar,
tart smudges of blushed sweetness,

and her with those new red leather sandals
and a full glass of sangria floating your lime.

Eos Raining

The morning’s atmosphere of showers
Was what you might find on Neptune,
Or possibly more like Venus-- wait, which
Is the one with swirling storms of warm water?
Oh yeah, only our saline earth that flies on water
And should maybe be named as Eos.

Not just a green rain, an early morning deeply blue rain,
Of an air sponged with dark clouds, azure filaments
Draping over with heavy holes in long
Pattern with the soft fray of vitreous drops,
Collapsing a street into clarities and reflections,

Both a cubist dream and the singularity
of unstrained puddles, slightly muddy
And bottomed out with a quarry’s gravel
Beneath the vestments of random asphalt.
The looking glass too anxious for a self.

The world mirrored in those liquid collections
Until the next raindrop falls like a stone
Only they are always falling so there is fraction
With the hypnotic irregularity of paradox in
The tops of trees and buildings, mercurial
As thoughts when not really thinking about them,

Where its possible to float bushes on top
Of the gray stones ret through colanders,
Yielding an overflow through tires of passing cars
That stretch upon explicit rivulets, those hushed
Glissades of gravity across saturated grounds,
As do south-eastern salamanders glisten wet fire
And the feathers of birds are as polished as fish.

An acquiesce grows as the prior succumbs forward
And the transformations carry our momentum
Into a fictive future, all presence in a dank cove
As one stands outside their washed-out parlors
And feels the viewing, the pulling, that is not a sun
But the disjointed that soaks loss into the curative
Ground to shay the curled blossoms atop irises.

Astronomy in whirlpools, without agreed particulars
In the aura of living things ecstatically temporal,
In a full flight across to the untouched horizon.
The man who took his dog for the morning walk
In the local park got caught unexpectedly, inexplicably,
Soaked through in a t-shirt that was the ocean.

Talk

Its not that the weather finally breaks
The lonely weather does as a roving singular
And does not have an accompanying choice
And even if it did
We would not have access
As we largely don’t
With one another

Only what we might pull up
Or what will float out into our presence
Is what is said and
That changes it
When we stand beside
And do our best to match

The songs of birds or those of blue whales
That dive in depths beyond time’s existence
And somehow communicate a needed effort

Those clouds
As dark as spring’s tumuli
Voiced as the broad fin of a sailfish
That eats pound on pound
Of giant squid loaded with hundreds of gallons of ink
Shooting through
With esophageal muscle
Bound to a bone sprit
Aiming for the barrier
Of a thunder
That will tear royal curtains

Well, maybe not so profound,
But at some level of quantity or loudness
Possibly even not much more
Than a strong mutter
Is what we hope to get across
Whether a pull tab beer can from 1980
Bottomed with black snakes from Alabama
Or a piece of driftwood worn fingerprint smooth
Into cyclical assemblages of identification
And both knowing the lap waves
And the elemental pleasure
Of shaking hands

With the unlimited combinations of molecules
Compounded in oxygen and simple hydrogen
As might a couple
Corralling one another in arms
While strolling
Through a supermarket parking lot
Somewhere amidst torrents of a rainfall
So fully washed the loan banks
Begin to make sense
When the vaulted basements flood
Gratis

And how all the matters may wash back
To the sky
In an undertow
Of an unsteadiness that is also light significance
Resulting from mutual acknowledgment
Not much more than a budding hunch
Fleet and swift
Which is why four footprints
Disavow as empty imprints
For debris that can only cohere
Because they are in mutual proxy
For the next Observers
That want to share in something to say.

Daybreak

A person can’t really be certain
When it was they found themselves awake
Beneath or amidst the convolutions you just know it
As recognition of what all is always being lost

In the yellow shrub of the bloomed forsythia
A robin sings in the thin wax of morning
The stretched clear awareness bands around
A self and the passing clouds then recalled

There as happened to be something
Between the sudden rings of the alarm clock
A final edge of a knife as clear as the shape of air
Of absence with a presence because the end is missing

Holes left from the night sky out of sight
In an eye aware that it is an unseen sphere
Not calculating but aligned with apparent dimensions
And in daylight a sun that too is an endlessness

The windows which know the clean cold of old frost
From when hunger was learned to be lived with
A stone being better in the garden rather than on a plate
The breakfast also is there as good as it disappears

And after even before both feet touch the ground
We fatefully begin our additions and changes to the day
With an access the steps taken become completely ours
Lost in the grass or home that will someday not be there.

Poem

Because, I’ll admit it, I have a need,
To pull this back upon itself, the whole thing,
Through a series of words, the entire house and yard,
The growing up and into thick shades of grass

Hand sown with seeds that might fall
As anything would from a tree, a cloud, her lips
With a soaking rain that brings red bricks
Into the fluid expressions of a single face

Found on a stone of three million years
And the short lived me beyond myself
Without keeping or losing anything because
The handful was dropped anyway as it is

Only open air in the palm and passing emotion
As solid as the ground and clear as the winds
Where a person can then stand forgetting thoughts
As they are everyone else’s for the matter, only acorns,

Each is a single seed coated in exterior leather
As they hang, fall and lay in the landscape
Which includes orbiting satellites, a moon,
A steady interior with a slow, quiet rotation.

Some April

On what is known as Good Friday
a snowstorm rolled into town, encasing
the major freeways and I did not mind,

extra compiled minutes to drive in the car
listening to Sibelius over a cusp, orchestrated
drama one might think larger than astronomy.

In summer months, the tradeoff in downed windows,
earfuls of folly wind, bass stringed currents
or six gambles that concede vibration, simple, while
waving to agreeable strollers that befriend Electra.

Here, maybe, is where you might expect the poem
to say something like how on Easter Sunday
all that unexpected snow began to melt and the
beneficent shoots of the daffodils were revealed.

And this could close there, a segue
into the allusion of change. Spring.
Whether that happened doesn’t matter,
because it will garner back to a foot.
If you still think it should, I guess
it would be as a nice completion,

but the best pieces of love come
from broken seamless inherencies.

Outside always will be such things
as transitional sedentary objects
which are untied contents, the neighbors

gardening bric-a-brac, maybe composed
before the return of the robins, maybe not,
the birdhouse perched ready for a lost wheel
that will crawl with morning glories, or doves,
over stone Buddhas, dancing frogs, warm greens,
the cat or dog receiving the sought for attention,

which makes me think this is a better way to end,
which is not, thank god, really an ending anymore
than trickles of life resemble warped gang planks
outstretched above the limitless sky-blue oceans.

Intentions

Unplaced relations don’t adhere
and can make the reflection in the mirror
only a matte wall behind
where you thought you stood.

Where ghosts are the fear
in the night, in daytime
it’s airtight pools of water

until diving head first
carrying your own oxygen
once strength has tied
to your fledgling limbs.

Earthy evolution-
mucky and conglomerate-
has not allowed
a sole living thing
to be a floating lens,

an algid surface of a planet
with orbiting curios
of moons and icy rings.

Instead we can look down
and see our socks off,
wiggles of toes,
then at night, out in the yard,

a halo of stars around
a raised hand made of boreal fires.

Celestial constellations outline
the thrust of personal
recognition that begins

with the scopic placement
of a self in tenor,
which includes the smudges

of solar flares
and that something
on past the reach
of darkening Charon,

beyond anywhere,
anyone can feel or see anything.

Open Bracket Descriptions at Lunchtime

While drinking coffee and clear water
at a table in the back of the restaurant,
a black van, slightly broken with rust,
parked along the curb out front with an
engine running and the worn down bumpers
lined in a taut contrast of white sunlight.
For whomever it may have been waiting,
all the diners, a second or two, at least, lost
their view of the amphitheater across the street
and consigned to the sidewalk that stretches
unilaterally forward or backward, as do the
water and sewer pipes filled with ingressions.

A flock of perched sparrows are their own shadows
On the power lines when blanched clouds are the sky.

“This dark coffee, and this glass of water,”
I said to myself while gazing into reflections
of my defining plate, where I was dumb sized
into the place setting, until a fly caught
a greater attention and took me to a corner
of debris, crumbled tissue, temporal dreck,
and then flew up to the moltings of dust
that were hung from the panels of the air vent,
where the air, with its molecules of shed skin,
slightly warmed and scented with skillet grease,
swept into an absence beyond ceiling tiles,
above sandwiches made of sesame seed bread.

On roofs rain collects in puddles, snow into drifts,
And mutely reflect the dispossessions of the sky.

With coffee grounds at the bottom of the cups
the waitress had read fortunes while a
half-hour philosopher contemplated fulfillment.
After the meals were served and eaten, they both
hesitated to further into the afternoon, to instead
wait in their gone hopes for a Frisian stallion
to ring the bells of the back door, previously broken
into the null and ready to ride through a double
parquet forest of blooming dogwood and surrounded
by the absence no longer needing to be charted,
maybe upon flanks of hair like a controlled ink,
or a soaked nib flowing the definitions of petals.

Fallen leaves are invisible as the winds when
Entered into a sole moving mass of dense water.

I finally got up myself and left the newspaper
with the articles folded upon their own pages.
A chess game remained in stalemate and its players
went behind their strategies, only leaving fingerprints
upon a full dispenser of napkins ready for dirty hands
that suspended the shadows of early Hitchcock.
Someone next to me had slumped into an escape with
halved eyelids in the first or third quarters, wearing an
iron pressed shirt but unshaven, a starched collar
but scuffed shoes and sunglasses in the front pocket.
A radio broadcast told of a hijacked taxi cab tearing
through parking gates, culprit’s description in contrast.

A compass of shadows lengthens as day continues to fall
forward until they point everywhere in the open night.

Dream Intrusion

There was a quiet something, maybe it was,
sometimes called a dream, last night that of a
slow processional lulled beside the entire ocean,

a continual apparition of thousands of multitudes
with round faces and endless sun rays of horizons,
floating unharried amidst the ubiquitous shoreline,

and myself when getting up in the morning,
with bare feet on a floor that feels like a basement,

prefers the tangible weight with its own material
as a dream also but with dimensions of awareness:

the hefted descriptions of a blue jay ascending
into its own small, black opening in the sky
becomes an actual wing of flight;

the constant fictive shapes of the dunes and hills
with stories told through ground rivulets is
an acquiescence without negation;

colors hued in the chiaroscuro of emotions
contain the mixed blends of experience,
inclusive of that light’s spatial genesis;

as a guiding vision they weren’t going anywhere
and circumstances are largely the directions
more true than the follies of distinction;

besides that, the sleeping dream is an inconscient
display of images made from the oblong and
unformed lapses of psychic gewgaw.

Enough of the explanations. Awake in reality is perfectly
fine and capable of adorning concrete with landscapes,
we’ve done it for years, and should be reason enough
to enjoy dressing, drinking down a cup of coffee,

and with a half-an-eye on what they call the hour-to-hour
face forward and go through the front door, home in tote.

There beside the chains of them,
on the way to work, you can turn and say,
‘hey how do you like that here and there’
in a pay filled day with the rote tasks
where small complaints of a luck filled survival

become the optic sensations of electrical endings and
the dream life fulfilled is when sitting on your sofa

in the evening within waves of windows and spheres
with the rustling birds and bugs chirping in the hedge,
where you can swing into last night’s neutered crystal

vision on a tire swing, tied to an ancient tree, barbaric as Tarzan,
and grab the most naked and blasphemous figment of them all.

Some Corners of Water

Lining the streets are trees encased with ice,
first grown from dark pinwheels but now halted
in the freezer of the season. Momentarily.
But heirs with stiffened eyes seize it as concrete
and turn to make some use of the frozen river,

“Not just dammed up, we want it set brick,
like the mud around the construction sites
of the renovated factories, where you could
drive a fleet of trucks across the top of it,
to secure an industrial crane in the air.”

The foreman’s grandmother crashed through in 1938-
breathed small bubbles through the muculent debris-
siphoned oil from the lost eggs of summer’s catfish-
was swept away downstream into the countryside-
and kept alive into the second days of May.

Her sons never made it past the city gates to
believe her, even when they heard her story in
the booming ecstasies of distant thunderstorms.
Quaking on top of the metal frames of their beds
they busily braided suspension cables for stoplights.

The runt of the litter became a janitor and late
at night, up in the top floor office, he listens
to ghosts in girders, watches mathematical lattices
of skyways, snowflakes, envisions another season
unfurling in the spacious fronds of mysterious ferns.

Bolted above a steaming sewer grate on 2nd and Main
stands a statute of the father, bloodless and crusted
within a dehydrated age. When snow makes a fedora,
ice as the starry buttons from a tailor, and then melts,
his bronze amalgamates into the pitch of her moisture.

Their Tableless Kitchen

They bow with wingless backs filling with arthritis
Over porcelain plates laid on the floor.
A once weekly favorite, beets that bled into
sweet pickles and porcine hocks shucked
of the hooves that had sunk into the flux of April.

Out of a sleeve, and a blouse pocket,
Long ago fell a marked card, a lucky coin,
And so there was the uselessness of open secrets.

Maybe the doorbell will ring and possibly might
Stand a live vintage technicolor salesman
carrying a tallow briefcase grained in ruddy
auburn and pouching curbside contents.

And once there was a round maple table
Under which legs hid dances still drunk on
midnight’s syrup. Soaring above mulled berries
Were mouths with the tastes of surprise breakfasts.

Boy Needing a Dream of a Tomato

Pale menace across the bedroom walls-
a shot beam of the intruder’s flashlight
upon the childhood face of paste.

Creaking cabinets in the cracked night-
one a.m. fears of future white cleavers
hidden in the bitten winds of winter.

Intractable layers of haggard shadows-
a frosted clamp edge and heavy iron traps
to snap from the rack of collapsed shelves.

Hours away from any sleep tonight,
covers he then casts over his head
thinking the scrape dark is for a pall.

Will he drown in his own moist breath?
The day that happens his ghost will yell,
“When the muricate grabs, grab back!”

Holding on through the fathomed depth
waits that other warm sun of summer,
pillowed lava and submarine volcanoes.

And Of All

And from what is known as a flash freeze the
ground of the landscape had been encased
with barren lots of passage of crusted flat ice

And padlocks that had froze with the matched
cut keys dropped bent in winds too strong to
settle snow other than in the stone filled air

And to drift against laid doors that remain shut
with the outdoors left as it is met with two feet
taking to walk because its closed back there

And there are shagged chasms of bark of solid
stunned trees that were never born but always
have grown and been hewed by sun and cold

And even though rubber soled prints trace back
to your want but around and in also snow finally
now falling upon ground from the bare sky of

All objects and as light and endless as a road
as long as a horizon that was there the days
this crumpled mass of earth was sat in its gyre.

There, and Beside

After sex under soft and sanguine linens, one
lazily stays in a dream sleep and the other dresses
and steps quiet to the living room, secretly,
and stops and listens and watches because of
a wanted grasp towards how undecided snow
falls always into its place of silent belonging.

There, across the divisions of property lots, all
built from the understood vagueness of desire,
roads to be actually named with the body’s
‘arms’ and ‘legs’, lean torsos of yards
where squirrels float on weightless tails and
shake out the sighing ends of green walnuts
onto the mappings of the city planner; a domesticity

also with forks and knives that occasionally loiter
with steam and saliva, skins of baked potatoes,
sometimes called as imputations on plates that
are later filtered for tomorrow with water made
cold clear in fluoride and chlorine solutions,
then hand dried, cotton blended towels, physical
limitations, every evening broadcast on the news.

Its in this the lover stands inside these constructions,
sheltered from indefinite winds that run madly
along the edges of property lines, where
handfuls of winter brush roost beneath sight and
above the frozen white surface, emptied seed
pods hang in half cracked and dried effusions.

Husks, shells, drained without an understood meaning.

The other lover awakens, takes the empty hand,
and says, “hold on, night’s loss is coming, and is
where we should stay fiercely beside one another.”

This Week In Blues

On Sunday afternoons again writing words as,
the limbs of the trees remain without ocher,
is what begins it. A pronunciation to variegate
the silence from this austerity with lines of poetry.

Arrive Monday, on with carrying of granite
from the open lake shore, after scrubbed of
phosphorescent algae, sacked into mortar
to block the melt of mud and burning wood.

On Tuesday, a drive spurred into requiem
clouds dense with snow on the west interstate,
in a car plastered with road salt carrying
an expectative bundle aching tight with twine.

Wednesday I’m directed east back home,
where the drama of a storm has passed and
now all that is left, a sky since removed
and a seat emptied of what was never there.

So come Thursday, no, it’s the worst when
the end of the week cadence faces the front
of a wall painted with pallid paste, where
stands a man with a litany of private reasons.

Friday, I dream of a small dwelling that sits
in a radial landscape emptied of the enmities
to fog, but only minutes from a town that loses
itself in the thick complications of nonsense.

And on Saturday’s stop bath on the couch,
solution of beer and blues, Lightnin’ Hopkins,
developed images in a shoe box of snapshots,
the latent colored emulsions, the fade of dyes.

Sides of House Glass

As during a warm up in January,
when nothingness of the snow melts
down into the cold silica of soil, but

sky remains clad with hollow spaces
between the spokes of an aluminum
wheel that falls off and on its axle,

both the eye and the stomach still
scratch along the scarcity of what
the world never has beyond itself.

See myself wear a ridiculous red coat

Out in the garage and instead of gloves,
A tightly laced pair of boots, as though
I was meant to be off somewhere on

A direction with an armload of tools.

The bisection of daytime house windows
can be funny, with that, depending upon
the side a person might stand. A quartz

Reflection of an opaque gravity upon
carried stones or that bucket of bolts
on the concrete-- hands riddled with callus,

Or plain refraction of clarity, transparent
and silent, through to a world untouchable
and complete when asked from ourselves.

A Midnight Protestantism

With the black of night making a
mirror of the back window as
weighted as a pipe organ clogged
with the matted inevitable soot
of past centuries, I type and
the public radio station,
volume low, plays choral pieces
which no person, nor composer
can stop and listen to enter into,
because there is no final entering
with a confirmation declaring a
‘look, I am finally here; look at how
the magnificence shines‘,
because it is only the unfolding
of elliptical cynosures panning
through blank molecular spaces
of the notes and words of cyclic
music where there is blown open
the closed hidden openness and
stopping to do anything won’t
bring it to anywhere other than as
it is being here, alive, as with you
and I breathing, speaking, reading
in and out with the multi nothingness
on both sides of the outside and inside
which, in our best, will be sufficiently
enough until resting in the unknown.

Cut Short

The living of youth is shortly buoyant, afloat
as a passenger in the front seat with the kick
of legs dangling inches above the car floor
and a face of few sights swimming out
the tempered glass window in layered pools of strata,
serous skies, and also, the more immediate tops
of utility poles which wired the arid voltage
for the barber’s sheers during an after-school haircut.

Wafts of dry clippings that fell onto the floor
tiles mopped with wax, that shone with the mirror
reflection and lights in the ceiling, that open zone found
in the indoors, interior of mind, beginning to collect
the pronged endings of growth, the first stabs of experience,

as what the barber’s early ancestor felt years ago
when he was sent out for a survey of the edges of town
and arrived upon clumps of blanketed tufts which had
flanked a white deer, unveiled after winter’s first thaw
with the mists on the cold soil and the clouds of nebula;
and from this he later retold as a story of life’s dander,

explanations to children who’s minds have dreams beginning
to rise and so that memories drop into channels holding
a seeping trickle of groundwater drunk by three brown birds
flying safely above shaved and shorn explorers, hunters,
courageous men grown into age with fitted security ruts, bravely
pacing the borders of the same-old floating distances of the past.

Corrugated Intentions

At the edge of the bar furthest from the waitress,
assembled atop four legged pedestals, two men
sniff each other’s beers. “So far a foot in each
continent, twice even in Africa and Asia. I collect them
like stones in the pocket we never traded as kids.”
Circling smoke and on the TV screen, baseball.
“The Yanks always again in the world series,
but it’s the Padres that are going to win --”
and on they go, coupling gallant tones of foreign
commerce and post-season batting averages, scaled
discussions that weigh and level distance so they
can believe that the wax on their cars can advertise
a wanted degree of a statistical system to China.
With the coming night, they move from the refuge
they took from the remnants of daylight and ride
on manufactured reflections through roads crossing
bridges with jet fuel and pieced together with metal-
halide fixtures, diagrams of glare on door panels, miles
of polished chrome and windshields of oil that direct
traffic through construction cones beneath the dark nothing
of the black that holds the stars we force into constellations,
crowns of those homes backed into tight cul-de-sacs.
Standing momentarily on the concrete of a driveway,
one of the two, now alone, might catch the nocturnal sight
in the unified visage of a raccoon with the full moon, might
pause at the dream of her low path through pine brush.

Hundreds of Miles to the North

Water does not ablate, it is submersion
as smoke around the coal stones of the
shore, on a gravity that is circling in
the depth from the poles to the equator,

tasted in the air flowing through passing
neighborhoods where in some receptive field,
first and last lovers meet beneath dilutions
of clouds that formed a few miles out from

Munising and above the haunted histories of
ship wrecks where sailors are moored in
fatality and wives lost themselves to flotsam
beneath the pink erosion of the hidden sun.

Cries from that first plunge of the bow will
be forever repeated, present with the aqueous
specters of fog and dew amidst branches,
long grasses, broken bottles and rose quartz,

life swallowing life in mouths living in homes
with leaky faucets, holes in asphalt shingles,
ice that tenderly melts cracks in foundations.

A New Home

After waking through hallways

Lit with divested light bulbs

The windows show no passing,

Its a reflection (that is alive)

Back at yourself as mirrors also

Of rooms- walls, floors, ceilings-

And being previously asleep in

Amorphous dreams, nightmares,

A mind can believe the limits of its

Own gateless maze, the blind alleys,

The stalemate of conditions until

The ante meridiem light opens lined

Images of yesterday into forfeits of

Morning and receptions of tomorrow.

Downward, Then Again

Eying Lyon street the tumescent sun
dilated to the West floats there and
beyond in an endless color promenade,

but seeming a moment for us gravity bound,
when atop the empty breadth of the hill
thinking there’s no place to look, but down
to the city of destiny a thousand feet beneath.

For that illusion, fools of momentum
we are, being what we think exists, as found
in my mind, and within yours, as well,

especially in the context of dreams and ironies,
the growing depth from yesterday’s intent back
behind where we came and the personal breathing
skin of experience of then, here, and to there

when all ends up washed in the valley's drain
that basins to a stream and on through a river
that flows skyward to a splendored horizon.

Circumference About 11:00 P.M.

At an intersection with two ordinate cars, maybe
after a game, a drink, or done with hours at work,
the faces of the drivers remain unseen but, possibly
from a pull on a cigarette and a panel’s green display,
a faint flush in each and a slowing as they pass,

a momentary coalescence into phosphorescent
spheres of dimensions with gravities echoing
beyond those motions which slide them onward,

and while elsewhere, through hingeless side doors,
Jimmy and June on a Schwinn ride tandem, vivified
with legs beneath hips dancing through endless dark
streets-- pairs of hands holding tight and looking wide
eyed, trying to grasp the night’s spatter of fireflies.