Something Turned Quiet

The sun never quite belongs
to itself anyway. Eclipsed, or
with countless reflections, energy
converted to the rapid molecules
of dehydration, heat, photosynthesis
welling up evergreen and deciduous.

While it still blazes on and on,
persisting like any other engine,
I wonder if maybe it could
belong more to the obscurity of night,
when you can see the numberless stars
that make the most of the moon,

shimmering spectral in the lunar
calm of the lake’s garden, wavering
without much of an afterthought.

Astringent, Antiseptic, and Detoxifying

The weather bit warmer than it had been
over a few days back. Moistened with
humidity but spiked on the broad scent
of juniper berries, sketched off from conifers
while blue resinous rain soaks the backdrop.

Not that the bills have or had been paid,
or are no longer due. The mail still arrives
from clockwork stations. Thanks a bunch.
Paper cuts to adorn the landscape
like processioned chisels. Luckily,
some deliveries meant to be made
route over towards new happenstance

once the solvent matter is fully regarded.
An ointment of cleanliness. Not necessarily
sharp, but brisk as cold gin, bold stones
in rivers that pepper into the evergreens,
herbaceous with camphor and fully esteemed.

Framed

At times it would be nice to be a painter.
Today with this dark morning rain.

Start with a wash of complications,
like what’s being dumped from the sky
with a soppy run-off from the side
of an opaque mountain.

An ancient and hidden heft
writhes as a matt of fur
and claw in there. So bring it
to the dry canvas, prepared
stretched, bound taut ready
to knock about an echo
of physical brawn.

....................Then, slowly,
a submission with the corners,
leaking from the furrows of old
earthen brown, drawn out to sprout
in coagulated roils towards the sky
like rivulets spitting up through cellulose.

Seems what should follow would be
some nictating neon green to top
what can become a grove of salt
soaked trees, as each brush stroke
falls with the faults of inspired details.

But not to let the colors drown exhausted.
Better to leave bits crass and fresh instead,
and then back off... scattered brief
with staggered hesitation,

before lifting in, here and there,
some final reflective dashes of yellow.

.......................Almost too much
for flat dimensions of a drywall, a heavy
collapsing melange that can flood
the floor with wood splinters and tar,
the roof collpased in pinholes.

Its the gall of undeluded flow, engrossed
beyond the frames with a bold augment
purged through flexed muscle of emotion,
and when you’re ready to walk on,

is surrounded by white translucence.

Akin

Something like
pastoral fog this morning.

Trees and cars afloat,
polite with backdrop

washed out into plumes.
A carafe of non-essence,

extraordinary as everything
commences and towards

the provisional, along with
the solitude of an eye

quiet within mild dilation,
slumbered breath, thoughts

exerted as whispers
only to retreat to a few

blades of grass weighted
with the cool mire of dew.

Sleep only added to the paralysis,
an anonymous air behind a closed door.
The self is the burden; the allure of non-
existence. But blood always makes a plea
as rivers and mountains do as they do
without an end. And the containment
of mono-singular life can keep being
relearned as illusion. Guarded castles
and fantasies in the no-man’s land
of which the villagers fabricate such
great stories. One could almost die
by them. So the sky now, again, has
the reoccurring appeal.... not for its lack,
for the expanse....rooftops revealed as
mute stones beneath clear-cold water,
atmospheric wind..... Where does
one find one’s self once the front
has died down? Back on the ground
not so much as you, but another place
where more things are made. Meadows
of flowers, shorelines of fish, millennia
forests lined with myriad eyes on watch
both day and night. Places to stand barefoot.
Rather than some other new beginning--
an assimilate of personal projections
that will wear the hands into the grains,
through the currents, onto the petals,
lifting and leaving traces of loss while
all remains existing. A continuant more.

Such as in Late July

Morning has never been sure of itself,
never finally, such as along the way
in sporadic pockets, some voices that speak,
as on a typical day while sun rises back
up behind my shoulder. Though,
I look more at sunsets, and slow.
Every day they dissolve everything
linked to the calamitous. Ultimate
end, ideals applicable only when slightly
misunderstood, as with the in between,
here in presence, and all sorts of breezes
along with the hallways, open windows,
varied pressure systems with turbines of raw energy
I don’t always want directed but inferred
to somehow decide to enjoy about
in daylight with, at most, an illusive adventure
rather than a kingdom. The array of options.
They can inflict much self importance.
Consider when lucky randomly unintended
regular life can show you a toad,
let you revive your stubbed toe,
hold your hand, and then let you go
proceeding outward as always shading
manifolds that make yesterday different from today
while also from the same blank pallet of sun,
something simple enough. This time. A place.
I might agree, there is no road, maybe some
circular traveling and tints of mirage,
clouds keeping the insistent dissolute,
and how pleasant to watch on the ground
from the center of the broad blue circle horizon.

Homesteading on the Hinter

Every structure slow and dulled
for safe keeping, supplants to contain
the largess of surrounding
wild-lands tamed into prairies.
Then temptation to wear a badge,
like after a grand banquet
where you can feed yourself
with perfect matched agreement,
and ignore the descry offered
in the fog on the solitary
walk home, the transience
that’s solved with disappearance,
as when and how it goes
on as brief aspects only.
The rigid does not want this
thought possible. Frightful!
No. Creepy are the hard grips
on revolvers, the sulfuric smoke’s
miasmic veils. Sad instead--
polished dreary iron of a porch
lamp awash in its own limited light
and left alone, currents read fluid
through moist opaqueness
we woefully grasp to understand
simply as ‘good night’. Go ahead
and ponder to imagine that bit more
about what you’re now supposedly
doing, what has become vulnerable
and frail, calm in the fantastic.

Slightly Startled, Started!

What hangs next, with now,
from openness of sky

can dawdle past recollection
of your possible knowing.

But if it augers in the hub
of your calcined skull,

to hiss the falling
fine rain, to complain
beyond limits

and inceptive of buildings,

you can have a gross run-on
with just about anything.

A plaintive distortion gone

awash with surly marbles

sparked hard and miraculous

despite the fewer and lessened
arrival of true miracles each year.

The ingrained redundancies
that are kept tired and smudged,

suddenly meant better, falsely

wanton to your added flare.

Part I (IV, III, II)

And what assortments made by chance dwell with actuality

.....a car red turns around a corner back with sunshine
.....floutist inside new leaves plays welcome back Sam
.....on effete roads beholden to curves laden with asthmatic grids
.....spaced below these that are welcomeed native tourists

and quick signifiers remaining in there as well as simply here, avocado
placed to where it can give the poor chap a bone. What it seems is
starting, avoidance of sleep, time for an enjoinder through verbal gills

operable as breathe underwater, beneath understanding completions
and bleating cosy with obdurate laughing. Its hot molten rock
you know, curls steadfast and rolls about tropics of philharmonic

longitudinal latitudes in spheres, but then smooths out into a sail
towards notions on a new edge of a treasure map. Embedded
off the side in a singular place. Is being. But only an element

augmented by those that want to toy wire with a Destination X,

to explore closer to the fray of what surrounds slipping frigidity.
Also include the pointillism found in the rain of her skyward down,
dropping tones of the broken clouds upon that imagined shore

overlooking the sea from a frail window. A wharf of condolence
first felt in the mutuality of a glass hand singing collapsed anthems,
washed up flotsam. Conjecture, then move inland, towards

both the heart and stone. Just how did we end up in this world
from single cells to primates? Chemistry of open waters,
where presence emerges which is yet another aspect of absolute white

leaving as matter returns in the forms of spring, a vernal marvel

.....chrome on the tailpipe shine as much as the new was
.....turning around the manhole covers below is the water
.....and above is the air or even an airplane towards Chicago
.....blues melding into one blue of the turquoise run of sky

and now we have singular options of choosing, maybe candelabra
because what is placed onto today is not quite the same
as what was had yesterday, possibly more fiddle about the corner

running from the side of a mannequin. They really can come to life
and not just at nighttime. Like with that fateful rib and caught
up with an insouciance, innocent of being entirely understood.

That will tie to the corrosion of pink flowers into a land of blood.
If seismic enough, all the commuting traffic will come to a halt
and the pattern of consult stops. A blank array of quiet, translucent

forming specter. And then a peace filling back in over the diagram

and under flowing its own options to demonstrate curlicue
distinctions in coils of rope, their royal ends dipped in red wax.
Which are hardly beginnings or endings but from one molding

bound to another in sculpted moments of liquid zones. Oriented
to only what’s also being devoured. Too quickly, only scant
remains that continue to take their toll as early as 9:00 a.m.

to the remaining observer. Poll bearers for a dour agenda
in changes of rain, sun, warmth or cold. Again it can be said
that this is not like yesterday, barely can be known as today

while finishing a tree’s bloom of nascent greens, the adoration

.....harsh wale of sirens and pull over of cars to side
.....a retaining wall leaking moist as a healthy wood
.....accruable with the bleeding repairs left off of a
.....bike on its side under a quick air of bird chirps

reviving with a tragic placement of something, like comfrey.
A sonorous entanglement. At the tips of your fingers. Hanging
in the field or a garden that sprouts reaction. No one knows

what that might be for you, but it is yours and is espoused
and at the same time ignored. Traceries only. Confiding
only to the sifting shadows colluding impenetrable night

before the sodium chance disappears in the pruning
assimilate of multiplied fracture. Open in a reduction
of the strain which is extensive meddling. Spiral from lung

base that signals to the nerves. Taken with a hands on

walk in field below the brigands’ view of Etesian wind.
Not to ever suggest it isn’t about the purity of texture.
That’s where its most commonly lost, answers wanted

through a platitude of medication to arrive at significance.
Poppycock of the most (un)desirable kind, such as money
and head mongers. How about the spindling importance

of meagering process? Which won’t leave out the sonorous
trumpet of the declarative, grand as the old oak that made
a piano, only that it can be cordially modified to temper

bitter tastes which surround withering isolation, like a
feathering of pliable skin structure upon rings of osteoblast
before any arthritis, the still new hands atop a table

wide spread as bloomed reflections on the apartment’s patio,

.....daily lunch crews as well as workers and shadows
.....still in the wind of honky-tonk radio red beaters
.....core farting from mufflers over slick backed Euro
.....five speeder running over mannered cross-walkers

which brings a brute trampled innocence up on the stage.
Wise up and pay more attention. A god will save you eventually
but not anyway that you would want it to. Holy coriander

and sassafras tea will drape cool as shade over the yard,
where you think finally a rest begins. Thanks, but not until then.
Wound as a degree of bravery with bits of slight knowing

that means next to nothing, outside of a cultivation
to continue. That I refuse to deny, only it would be nice
if completed harm could be kept to the diet of a garter snake.

It won’t though and why we are back to the broken window.

Children in the yard already start to fade into experienced haze
and the sun within the eye. Their feet are wet and they don’t
even know it. A mind tarries itself off towards adventures

of distraction, with haunted ghosts and all the fears running
rampant in the night, born from rigid anxieties of sightly day.
What withers in both the recede and confronting advancements.

Perhaps insomnia isn’t so bad, your face in the ceiling
not unlike your face in a mirror. Step outside and the face
scatters in the unfathomed reflection of countless stars

out of brumation and into a standing dream of somnambulance

.....mail box while passes the brown clothes of a courier
.....there and hovering the red stop sign and stout tulips
.....replacing yellow daffodil pollen coating windshields
.....with someone remembering a frail hello from morning

in the parking lot, the only jewel in the pocket that’s really
nothing but a stone, with what are many stones and sitting
down for no reason making each precious. Beyond naive.

The world possibly never asked more than this. Spice it
with something healthy, maybe even tempered a bit
with what it is not. Regions of slow ruin flow with austerity

in time, damn craggy, windswept on a mountain hermitage.
The garden is the scenery and framed with quick black
brushwork across a menage of rice, straw and bamboo.

Sidewalk cafes in France; doorless observance in China.

Benefactors and alms were the means while also alone
in order to fly skyward. The sifting clouds lose
touch but they won’t constrict even if sliding outward

in the forms of killers. Stare into the roil long enough
and the threat eventually resolves. But again, maybe not
quite the way you first wanted it to. And if that matters

than one wonders what the implication to physics would mean
if both momentum and presence were taken from the equation.
Big Bang in reverse accommodated by pertaining backwards,

absurdly going towards the center into a prance of dense troika

.....rails of gravel friction crack potholes loosely filled
.....with rattle in the wheel wells bouncing hub cap
.....discus for inventive children spun dizzy on plastic
.....yellow sheave about a utility pole’s humming guy-wire

reined by guided projection and injection and it’s the loss of one
of these that unbalances the mystical thread. Rather keep a balance
like with a bed on a southern wind, blowing curtains before and after

cotton rest around the ephemeral loneliness following apotheosis.
How it slopes towards sadness. Not excruciating, we’re stronger
and much too selfish or selfless, like being head-smart for what

is to be the guided core approaching anteriorly, hard on a back wind
down the mountain of being, upon which were placed ragged sights
effaced to new winds and floods, rock slides that are maelstrom

churned while sitting and sipping from a brown coffee cup.

There’s no reason for the fanfares exploding from envelopes
piled and mistaken as common letters. The pledge never asks
itself to exist. Just a pitch of mild conflagrance upon a door-

step to place dog, cat, man, breathing anew, ripening fresh
air of the return-again season. The seeds begin to be filled
in with verdancy, liquidescence, new found elements of Celtic

romance that play along with lifelong thoughtful utterances
intrinsically augmented through what embroiders rare silver
onto a process of footsteps. A point of impact that’s landed

upon the ground pace with slow evocations of laboured beauty

.....myrtle shoots thick growth over tarred railroad ties purple
.....dapple flowers cardboard cup soggy flat and swept
.....and still there a sparkling on a curb from green glass
.....black smudged tire skids drawn long and from sudden

pictorial treatment of an end commingling unfathomed geometric.
So line a few angles. Ponder somewhere between the tip-
top of your head and the red flamenco of your wonderful pelvis.

All of that is classic with an infinite knot of tension. Having to be
lived in, exceeding ourselves and one reason for the verge
brought to a life of stories, expansion of looping lemniscate

sceneries. Like a block of roads, painted backdrop with sun
colors oiled above couples of figurines, flowing the ceramics
universally and iconic as they become while realistic visage

influences by one another, privately back into a brass spittoon.

The menagerie stopped specific. Then back out to field open
our possibilities, keeping alive, multiplicity being the only truth.
That, and singularity from which there’s composition. Monsoon

of philosophers and tablet arraying gallantry, beggars
from mass transitions that impregnate tendencies of cellos.
These dimensional waters filling a white bathtub vibrato

from the surface down into a loveliness of drain. Elements
are out there and a whirlpool when the cork is yanked
for the dark matter in the center of another star’s galaxy

where there’s birthing between, an entering and lifting of a big toe

.....exhaust pipes infant leaves and dot flower petals
.....pink tint in motor oil and fry grease from last year
.....street fair still there upon rubber wheel strollers
.....self powered wheelchair forward with leather hands

towards a bedroom or a bathroom. Again, the fluctuations
that began with A and ended at B, all of those X’s feebly
destined with a grain of sand’s significance. Have a party

and the next day there is either the bird’s call or the cat’s
jump to wake you up. Land the wooden floor, preferably still
warm with last year’s summer so you can inhale

the grain rise through toes resembling snail heads.
Infinity of the gastropod’s conchiolin can be a wild
protective onclave defending through accommodation,

integration, configuration, an assimilate of bright nebula.

And all of that started in the soil. Square inch fecundity
of rain forest exponential to an abandoned quarry.
Though, fill it with water for late night skinny dippers

and some humanity continues to stir, if not based
in science fiction acquired from the scent of used
paperbacks piled with sliver fish. Caught in the rings

of Saturn on a piece of moon is stationed the used book
store with the sickle of an aesthetic found in words, ideas
and fantastic stories, the tabby cat that’s always at home

curling about purveying feet with a purr of consensual yes

.....swaddling paper bags that blow above fallen
.....branches dropped from wind storms patterning
.....fallen cherry tree fuschia petals all more piled
.....beautiful moldering in a place where they should

no longer effuse in juvenilia, that brief scratch of time,
after each tintinnabulates off ends of projected branches
to lay within collages lain to pass onward. Scarcity

that makes us hold onto dreams or return to the table.
Benjamin Franklin discovered his new inventions
when sleep deprived and sitting on an uncomfortable

chair. Inspiration summons you when ignoring what is
followed while you still follow, the entry into the room
which is accepting as it is, despite wether or not it fits

your latest fantasy, a bejeweled lingering apparition, that.

On horseback it gets trailed by a rider and his donkey
to transverse harsh functions of landscape, undergo series
of strokes and gasps however they might hit. Also a yawp

to shake the ground for series of compassionate resolutions
denying nothing. Its a step in both directions that tears
the conflict apart liked hatched seedlings in a dense forest

germinated with natural consonance, limitative burrows in endless
outcomes, the array of choices. We are allowed existence
found in sublimations resulting whenever there’s thought

in this dilemma, feeding in the hidden corners of a restaurant

.....new off of Division Ave. eyed by helmetless biker
.....passing a Honda parked on a hill frozen up to railing
.....and concrete steps alone towards the walkout
.....deck green lunch and backdrop of Mac diesel fumes

that float beyond one and two, as does southern May wind
undergoing clarity of pondering wonder, clear in confabulated
outcomes that make of the heart a semi-tropical sea sponge.

Keep it immersed and it stays heavy in the flow of currents,
dry it out and it flies outward between autumn and winter,
encrusted, cellular membranes, permeating worlds

with perpetual exfoliation of the spring of desire beneath.
No wonder skateboarders joined the return of the robins.
Skinned knees and red breasts. Sunrise in sycamores.

Active songs in the fully leaved trees from hollow throats.

Preservation in the rolling hills with a very nice niche
melding drone of long tones as log rhythm feedback,
the quirky endings to cawking squeals of animals

at play in the distance of next month. While still here though
with the interpenetrating changes. What was thought of
quickly returns to a house pet pleading for more attention,

a nose filled with pollen (the grains deflating to preserve
spermatic moisture until landing on their destination).
Damn how the nose does flow, eyes water. A head as flower?

Sensual body blossom, emotional color beneath cerebra root

.....“Post no Bills” stenciled broke yellow on new blue paint
.....copper column patina above the moisture of dog urine
.....tissue kleenex thin after rain now a patter of shoed feet
.....over repellent concrete sustaining volume of mesh voices

with each as a bagatelle. Concerns could be taken to a mechanic
with a book of coupons when your laces are untied. Unstrung,
yet somehow fed up. Not the tired adage of being more patient.

Accentuate rather into blatant unexpected directions, for volume
that ties the formation of new artwork in the hospital’s court
yard. Test and response time shows new life in what was near

fatal, a gownless Arcadia from the wooden planks of Arne Quinze,
a forest of survival while as rounded as Rousseau and craggy
as Herzog in all that is ‘erotical’. That makes me think of a ride

on a bike that is its own parade, flushed with terriers of flowers.

What about done up? That’s even worth a nap after, to bring
a let down. Grass driveles moist promise and retains nothing
more than what it created and lost. That is all that is kept.

A sense of what sometimes might visit late at night, after
waking suddenly from a dream you didn’t want to end
in prophecy. Days always begin with an unconscious slope

of increments, where next you’re walking for designated relief
around the next corner in an ornate fountain newly turned on
to first sparking water, enumerated blue with inlaid crystal

while dark clouds in the horizon rumble the walls of the kiosk

.....construction protective fencing stacked vinyl windows
.....new condos fined for code violations like parking meters
.....with extended cranes front end loaders tabulated ladder
.....atop a Chevy exhuming cigarette and a head light

polymorphs the anthologized histrionic into new amendments,
like hysterical lilac ambrosia that originates from sea floor abyss,
painted now with names like Caspian, Baltic, Labrador and Black.

Such massive conditions atop the surface. The fuck bubble
from dark heavens. Asynchronous wonder projecting thorny threat
that smoothly accommodates transmogrification. Tuneful sequence,

so why still the concern of a resultant? What can never be gained
anyway, liberated as you are from tyrannies of the definite.
It was a long curse, as anyone knows, and the bacillary horns

hurt last September. But now you ride bare-back on the leviathan

irradiating new logic of discordant bravery. Arias in the health
of crude panaceas bombarded with conception, over thought,
thrown and done towards a grown hackle of blistering contentment

that’s an idea that is now lit like a morning star and more freakish
forever brought down to earth. Everywhere something is
the stuff of creation. All burning with a most insidious freedom

within the belly of the goring verdant basilisk. The power
that has shot from the ground, broken open the crisp air
with a birthing melange of condoning spectrum. This hosts

your continuation for what is being grown in the bower

.....off center behind a wood fence atop crumbling brick
.....ivy melting lime towards sidewalk spotted chewing
.....gum sticky stains groove treaded with sole tires
.....under traffic signs below phone wires sopped with birds

above our heads. At the first break of even earlier sun rise
their brazen timidity shot from the silver maples and azaleas.
Foliage engrossed lazy southern breeze sough. And you already

began to rise. Not quite necessary numerous asides
and birthright sits like a cup of green tea beside a cracked
window. Too much sudden action and reversals in the pane.

And going? An uncontrolled endearment sways the outset
of the first flirting glance, perhaps giving away too much.
Not so, not so. “Let it control us”, as Henry Miller says,

retouched while we find ourselves, empathetic recognition.

Regardless, it always carries a presence, just different
as the gravity and a brass lamp, empyrean with a weight
of scapegrace wedged out with a smile, quick smidgeon

with tips of laughter despite the absence of any petals.
New seedlings in the garden went to water imbibition,
to lag phase, then radicle emergence into heartier stuff.

A heartier green thick skinned and readily absorptive waits
after the rainy season.The truer stuff with new rings of bark
after the courtship. A readily stiffened vertical aqueduct

twisting turgor pressure for a bountiful crop of pistachios.

Turnground Ave.

A brief opening for sunshine,

and the cresting icy water overflow
along the torn sides of the road
aglitter with an overtly aggressed

racket; torn droplets; rubble gravel.

How some considerations can hedge
out enthusiasm, like when advertised
with the mile markers and spotlights.

May worn dreams always be broken.

What isn’t calculated in a warmup
laden with the tear away of eroding
presence. Go ahead, call a construction

crew with orange fluorescent triangles.

But, you, should pass on brunch with the
project manager. His intone will place too
many accusing questions and inquiries

into past and future residences. Annoying.

Might it instead with assembly reflecting
titillation, seen of, newness that exists,
gone within the absence, that is entirety of,

just passing road and more brushing momentum,

pushing and pulling what’s never more
than the headlong infinity of changes eating
away as the dangerous triggers of spring,

a spine ground down in the dirt and found

after the thaw of winter, uprooted by
some flowers that come forward within
the few minutes of colorful concordance.

Inhabitant

An abandoned grey building actively
encased along with the colorless sky

and both lined with the gutters flat
blue hung from old rust, felt of red rain,

just as tenants housed years ago spoke
their whispers in the course tracking

of the framework, with the wind
in the trees, occasional like what

arose maybe once out from a piano
in a corner by a window, in summer

without an ending while ever in site,
the end when everything is happening

after a plant is left by someone
on the first step of the broken landing

against the distrait of the bent rail,
possibly with a small dyed blossom

during the after of another season
while a stray tabby cat eats from life

after being under the back deck
for so long too and Christopher--

he holds one of the kittens and now
has to live elsewhere, in a woods

that can’t be seen and beyond
the city with chains on its doors,

where the wash hangs on the line
and waves outward to the horizon.

Why all the hangups?

Its as though we can open to them, all our small disasters
that can be made available for some sparks that remind

us of the sullen marigold. First though, an air that’s dark.
Then a concentricity. Augering deep into integrative,

is what rises back up a tablature across a presently
vague surface. While still, the wells of the shadows.

But an elusive thread, it can flint across the above
sun, plaintive and yellow, to bring a something together

as light slipping fluidity over off the soluble whorls
of the bouquet. Then welcome the miscue of mercury.

Enter learned tragedy. A stage that was set for red
opera with players that fall between the curtains.

Looking Backwards

The day keeps adding its own
preferences and absent of intentions,
as there is time and now stuck to it,
the debris that makes my feet tire
from what was beforehand. With that,
a part of me. I splice it in variance

with some dry saliva noted in my skull
to tell a story that is outlined
with the molding of dirt. Footprints
carry us back, further to what began
from a rock of importance, now
allayed into a smear of resonance
about the path that is always

swift in the light of cosmic joinery,
maybe in some ribbons of strata
around Saturn with hefty bands
that are also rivulet in sands
leaving only trace words revolving
in the palm below the fingers

while the rest is swept back into
gravity encased as field and sea.

Notes No. 4

The sun has been diffused
with the muslin transparence
of the low lying clouds

into this preferable glow
of the unaccountable,
that is its own simplicity.

Not short as a life but as
existence that is hard wired
with nonpersistent clarity,

as being like when seated
in a chair at a wooden table
with the dark birds at hand.

What recognizes opportunity,
to add to what may arrive
with the subtract of a past

placed into a ravel garment,
fed from an emptying pail
laid down to walk up again.

That, more or less, is
the scene, the continuance
alight within irresolution.

4:00 PM, A Day In December

Afternoon under a diluted sun,
of clumped banks, lowered clouds,
a remnant bird nest smattered
unstable. A period tatters between
the ongoing fresh sentences written
as barren branches held by the sky.

Meander then with the shades of gray,
the tinged over surface of faint light,
the way things remain actual by space
unheld. Such is also the method of
invisible wind carrying on as oblique
pressure facilitating the fluid avarice

of ruthless change. What was once
true, requires to be deluded, and
an instep comes with imagination,
where your liver of pity is kneaded
between the vice grip of warm hands.
If adequately paced-- what can reach

the ends of miscalculated horizons.
You know a destination is achieved
when rupture exceeds the low quake
of the sonic, sending it all directionless
with divided equality, where humorous
solutions weigh busy in other places.

Colorless

Sifting through the air on the sides of midnight
the first snow fall for the season is falling
with pieces of the world that no longer belong
to itself returning back to the foreground
in what is the full night’s effusion of stars
and planets in the countless persistence of dark
as being shaped by these white flecks of nothing
that radiate visibly upon the unseen ground
and accumulate without anything else not also
included within the capture of their own light.

Notes No. 4

It was partially realized
that leaves could not cover
entirety beneath the sky,

so dissatisfied, the inevitable
descends upward, uncurtained
with only half of the afternoon

when with affable enough
air to refrain from myself,
watching myself, now there

along with this self, upon
a worn thought which can’t
be held beyond what it can.

Not an Edification for Winter Months!

“Wings of greenwood” Only that,
when the world is not so green,

when we rely upon turns of bygone
ochre resplendent with collapsing brown,

the dossier renews itself with dust
from notes held against borrowed light,

deciphered in the thought as feathers
which fly broadly over the tundra.

The multi-sided all white, it swallows
the bird further in flight. An entrance

of a self of another sense, and consumed
in the cloud unsettled with moisture

with full aspects of a thousand eyes,
waiting, blind again, until released

back down upon this countless earth.
Resultant diminishment from selection

but brought on equal with accumulation,
they interpose their woven textures

that wind while our buildings collapse
from precipitation in clogged gutters.

The setting of a place. The coming home
after the obviousness of where to go. Only

then, reliable as a faulty hinge, our broken
forms of a child, “catch me when I fall”.

Courtship In The Taste of You

These events will culminate in a wallop,
either way. But first a phone number spelled
out in sotto voce sequence, whispering
swift urgent letters of numbers arranged
within the narrow aggrandizements,
as all like our selves, reined into

one might say, chimed into, a duet
with some distant space between that
falters in the necessity of a time line.
A gasp for the now here instead, as rain
cascades durative traffic, concentrated
and upon itself, spooling all the insoluble

where can exist appreciation for vast
rehearsals in this wayside. Like storm
chasers, lovers, how both are moved
by the dark in the sky. Without a reason,
beyond a course ruff with black walnuts,
personally entwined in truancies of nature

from what eddies, sways, dances at night
amidst the mixed chatter of calacas.
We can hear their past ongoing voices,
and remove us then to pieces. How hard.
The hard parts left in back cupboards,
dry portions from the previous owners.

So time to go, don’t you think? That’s
what the radio can sing in the morning--
resplendent for a moment while hobnobbing
with the indoor gazanias; later a sigh as
punctilio squanders in the temporal garden
under a lone star, hung tired, burning as

above the toe end of an abandoned peninsula,
solitary as currents of blackwater rivers
amidst company during shiny café dinners
while ghosts in the streets blindly traverse.
Defiantly, the meal disclosed, pleasant, even
while there’s slybooting in the alley shadows

reminding us that mendacious distinctions
ferment these complexities. Like in the wine
I forgot to mention, paired up with cooked
drama in the serving portions. Garnish over
on the left side. Cheers. How about it then.
It’s easy to be skeptical with something

that’s all too easy. This is not, sort of is.
Supposing there and not even understood as
presence grows escargot and additively the coils
spiral the shell. What is mollified is tasted
in a basket for these rewards, laid out clear
enough as momentum goes forward anyway.

Notes No. 3

Whatever might lay in fertile
shade around the comportment-
which loses if the flower blooms,

laughably, but not scrutinized.
Up from recklessness. The moment
after then taken from my hands

curtailing the old man’s regret,
“where angels fear to tread”,
stoked new for somber height.

Not an intent to be initiated by you,
a choice by me, then beyond me, open
within a flight that is no longer mine.

Subscribing it over to fate, to you
like that. Insistence now in what
follows outward; may continue inward.

The grandest striving, a collapse
into the smallest beneath
the spectrographic core of this

universe, where can lie refrain
in swelled reverberative motion
to conclude and surely will continue.

Stark Evening

Cloudless at sundown, taking a sky clear from the gravity

of colors, a wryly cold agape in the comprehensive deepening

blue, broad extent of streets, sidewalks, motionless within

our leveled consolations that run peripheral to encountered hours

we previously prepared with prominence, only later with scant

acknowledgment not even held to ourselves, a pale transference

and left there lying in the open hand that let go to a wind

simply taking now a few more leaves with it to display possibilities

of absence, as full as the empty field that hosts the flights

of house sparrows while foraged over with wood smoke rising

from a gothic bramble elaborated in a fire that benedicts echo

within the stone, of intonate channel, ceremonious, while moon

still wanes to sliver, chimes hairline cracks in the astral signs

of bells, once embedded flowers, later scattered as mere curves

of the former petals beyond any capturing of time, reveling absolute

upon an infinite course, while beseeching our every wonderment.

Atop a Cataract

To stand opaque in a calf deep river
.....level with a sun diffusing in its own sundown
pondering reclaims the ingrained solitude
.....in a brief stance while roiled nature passes
bound up in twisted muscle melange
.....course over bone about volatile organs
held while time surpasses ancestral
.....years that segment unfastened elements
surrounding in a lift-white spindrift cloud
.....errant like constant mist from the tumult
sky that is recondite with a fathomless
.....edge drop of splendid useless water and light
basis that began symbiotic evolution
.....promulgating the entry for more friction
after a spring forth of blue colors
.....absorbed red spectrums into lengthening hues
to an eventual ocean not seen only a scene
.....disquiet while negated by falling bravery
across the overhanging incident of night
.....collected in a plungepool of solidified stones

Call it Fayetteville

...........................While onward westward,
the objects of this world found in a neighborhood
slender from their beginning casts and molding shadows,
while insouciant night backs into the silhouettes
that have spread off the clear air, now bluely darkening.

.....................The street parsed with rectangular
bedroom window lights, projected upon fences brushed
with the remaining minutes and reflect whitewash of day’s
majolica, a mummed glisten of the earlier motions
tempered down, now below some updrafts of lofty stars.

................................The rows of houses, stilled,
have been guarded by impenetrable thickets of customs,
something of a sighing that quietly guides the tone, like
an etching of a lone village chiseled out from a dark forest
and permeated with ambulated secrets in a depicted fog.

.................................And now the scene framed upon drywall,
safely backed into nostalgia for the discrete indiscretions,
declaring even some other with a brilliant seriousness,
above the careful sleepers, within hallways of somnambulists,
faint scraps of light captured to outline histrionic paths.

Colorful Strife

If an attitude finds its way across
on a foam of emotion without reckoning,
so much then some might try to nail
it upon a wall with a flock of daylight,
or crucify, under a citation declaring,

“this is too much”. It is. And so quit.
The double side of the coin awaits
your entry when snapped into a toss,
when elevated nickle excavates
back into the dullness of a mandala,

as proportion isn’t found on the ground,
at least not anymore than it exists in a
planet’s axial spin. And your bearings
from a sexton and compass? Digression
of what cannot ever be fully decided

while you stand in the situations that will
only ever be halfway acknowledged.
But that’s the ticket. A portal allowing
even the heaviest of weights to proceed
with the feathering into their thin duplicates

until each original falls from the remains.
Again, the return of the flittering birds
or the flow of the blood into red curtains,
as we begin to maneuver about within self
declarative authority as well as the drama

of speech. Heightened and locked, they linger
both with the allergens of dusty tomes,
while peeking from the pages the ghostly
multitude of faces, expressions embodied
in print with as much meaning as yourself,

as we tend to find ourselves in there, each
voiced creation in the fluctuating mixtures
of day and night. The yards turn into seas.
Winds churn the paths. Countries without
national flags. Rewards of colorful strife.

Notes No. 2

The pallid shutting of a night rain,
it twists with the cotton threads and
the hard panned wind, as insomnia

up into the new daylight appearance
rising first in only a more useless
cloud bank of down sodden charcoal.

Dust marred in the hand. Continuance
of matters beneath the hidden fresh
open slats of sky. An opaque balm

from the historic and future condensed
with the pause of waiting, the unlined
space of what’s then there between

and where always returned. A bridged quest
or ruffly sketched, sifting into accumulations
of curves that go protectively backward

while also the pulsing pull of the rivers,
within the fleet streams and handled
again with the delicacy of beginning.

Notes No. 1

The new sun is only able
to clear a partial afternoon,
and heard in the lines that

would extend to roughage
of the other planes, as a
sitting in what is falling

again from the trapdoors
which couldn’t have landed
anywhere. Past conclusion,

as a consent barely found
in a place as contrast was, is
in all the creasing of passing

clouds and misstated conjecture
found as a plethora of vision
from the children. The horses

that are configured for
a sky of meadow unsought
and displayed with origami,

over and over as these
that dawdle fidelity. Not
a course of years. A timber

broken from what presently
matters then, like when her
voice became lined with silver.

Slow at Work Today

Hesitant articulations, afternoon, a slow rise
in cascade of the before mentioned lilt
found in this creaky chair. Alternate arm rest.

This is not yet polarity of much of anything.
It is me sitting with some sounds imaginary.

Herds momentarily free of predators.
Flocks without bragging rights to flight.
The mating ends of the meadow are stalled
in the viciousness of dry grass. Uncalled,
on occasion, I can find myself in all
that may be heard in the silent bottom.

The urbane mirage, posits that only have been.
There is more than this flat sleep.

.................................................I recall once
swimming from a beach shore and after enough
distance, the water fell below its own hush
while air rumbled with the churning sand dunes
behind to pressure the strength of my limbs.

So perhaps the day is Wednesday. Perhaps
summer is flying by and the small village
to the south awaits struggles of the new crickets.

Prague in May? Said to be, the most beautiful
city in the world. Perhaps it will find a way
on a bridge with a continuation ok enough
to form. And maybe not. But the force of something
always winds with coming unrest. Flushed composure,
a new trouble brought over. The migrated torrents
hidden and inlaid from mandates of our old fables.

Now these hung upon the pale sun’s blinding swirl
awash with the postponement of gravid blindness.
Now with the lapsing surfaces for an interior.

Between before and after-- birds in the masonry,
fluttering grain brown feathers and portioning
unstable events across a calm field of water,

and one can surmise the little stories that will be
told with all these occurring minutes, the sowing
of glass and the boredom flickering from fervid
words in the tavern that have a place in presence
both here and beyond a yard named description.

A summons, a funnel past the chapel, where
and when the plots reveal the tickets I refuse
be refunded, as how an unborn antiquity
can’t collect a final cost before the being here.

As the clock shakes hands with the peripatetic,
the phantom allure with a snake's hunger
only brought into an emptiness that sheds
the something that will continue with change.

My elbows wearing a bit further down now
like worn shoe soles. Soon past a point already
and time to get out and head back home,
knowing what I feel like doing tonight.

Spring Water

When I find myself
back someplace where I was
once, those are memories
that arrive within the presence

they always have been.
Not who I am.
What has been experienced.
The stone fountain within

the plaza beginning to make
more sense than the river
for kids to play. Safer,
clean ankles and feet,

as I am there as well
from a bench that is
not fully bolted, wobbles
on a current of what passes.

The Third Leg is in The Mast

.....................................................“The number three is not a
.....................................................natural expression of wholeness…”
.....................................................--C. G. Jung

heeling into sails
with bracket angles
of late lasting sun
the boat untangles
upon the crinkle
water under pale
glass hull unmoored while
directed as planes
the fibers of a
fourth wind according
rhythms shorn threaded
like preen oil feathers
repel sprit water
of sideward drift tense
in momentum pro-
pulsion direct dis-
placement arrival
arrow sort of like
Zeno bouncing pin-
ball shoreline later
ready then dock walk
skippered not wrangled
with two legs upon
the chopped and uneven land

Petal Tongue Stars And Flowers

As I persist with the further additions
and subtractions-- with these

there is meekness and fertile cark
out the sides of worm filled gobs.

Which is possibly fine if to accept
patiently the creeping sun to display

an adornment of scant crepe blossoms.
Grown risks, the morph of the frowzy

putridness and the bloated and sullen
compost live edged with past necrotic

supplements. Available and irrespective,
for a thrown aerobic toss of dimension

halved with unknown purpose into
a cortege of pout marl, a moist seepage

with terra shift assemblies between
beginnings, endings, spacious spools

dripped with humid glint from eons
of star dust, where initial desire was

aggressively accountable within these
not so definitive materials, hybridizing

ceaselessly in unconscious mire. Active
into new realms on whispered tongues

of warnings, elegies, hopes, the promise
of homage thickly pasted, with bristle,

stuck hair of grotto example, for eminent
glissades of the not so hidden force

in the moon’s severed paleness,
it’s concurrent tide-pull upon oceanic

ground flowers opening and shutting
amidst revolving travails risen over

on exigent stalks that bend petal-beams
northward, stabilized to an astronomic

constancy amidst the ongoing tackle of
metabolic relations within their roots.

Breakfast Nook

This morning runs on to assorted
endings at the bottom of clay coffee,
as they do, and clouds not to stay
in always a parting somewhere
between the time I woke up
and here, sounds from the street

now audible, undone tousle
for unremembered Wednesday.
Explanation in going lost details
to surmise vacancy in what is meant
to be intuited today, the conveyer
between conditions and memory.

To be helpless to that end, carried upon
blank effort, worth imposed random
and abstractions with raw lumber
aggraded for birds’ nests only later
absent, abandoned, split slow
seconds, fixtures in current wind.

“How late did you go last night?”
Longer than I anticipated. A holdout
for the brightest colors to stretch
a dulcet inverse of pool accented
with the cold fuel of salamander.
When sun rises, where do they go?

Outside, the purest of hard gems. Makes
that contrast worth it. Of passing sheen
yellow upon the magenta lavender
greens, ellipsoidal way of remaining
center, seeing from a floating caricature
as maybe in a glass-cut vase filled

with cave water upon an eggshell mantle.
Difficulties when limited to ourselves
and to develop a perspective developing
from it. A platform worthy of place,
observatory, not above all the matters
venturing from previously gone habitats

while the tagged resolute implants
are not to survive, instead to see rise
edema of day and diminished night
both corticated with thin conclusions,
backed with a galaxy of cauldron
brim with chance, stirring plurality

to continue only then ever slightly
different, with infinite omniscient
colorful experience that makes me
more than a spectator, admixed
being and foliated lattice with lamina;
brittle absorptions, moons and suns.

How A Poetry Is Still Written In Summer

after the colors of sunrise to a shade too thick for middling grey,
the elixir of illumination only above blackened clouds sanguine
with the over-ripened regard of pothered fruit, too dense for layers
with vacant space and open aired oxygenation, a moldy sponge
saturate with abysms, expectant erosion, where the personal
attunement is something of a murk in bowls of yesterday served
with faded goblets of cranberry juice that quench the penny gnats
aside rain’s arrival, gummous and below the leanness of light,
when you can’t dominate, not even washed out, taken with a sultan
jigger discomfort that is you as a million of infinitudes
opposite to that one starry alpine path of the ascendant-descendant
to do so, the infinite spread of an oily picturesque setting
of ground valleys wrung on separate laughter, untoward emergence
not wholly muffled, contra rapture, still a squatter in the nocturnal
underbrush or tucked sullen in gills of overly brown fungus
gnawed coarse by tongued goats emboldened with bristled hinds
of fogged hillsides the powerful make quaint with rundown cottages,
to sit there, on the porch, all being shade, sour lemonade, and thunder

A Later Spring

Of the hard questions already asked
implicit to the turning of experience,
related answers don‘t appear. Maybe
at best, diversions past sides of rock
silence, and towards nothing about
the isochronal seasons? Song birds
that can sound wonderful louche bundles
of cherry blossoms with the petals falling
to where the fey fragrance decomposes
beneath a weight on the sun, a night rain,
infusing the grist of the soil while we are
moving onward, hesitations far behind.

Past an Unfortunate

There was a cause. There are always causes.
They roam on past earth but stay in our bile
and can drown us with our assumptions.
Would that be the same as dying in a dream?

We spin from the chrysalis not to do so.
Not on wings of color, more from confusion
that pieces availability into a crude form
shined over with delirious pronouncement.

Symmetric flies on dust pollen as its own.
Retouched for any fact, a separation only more
fully cognizable. A lot of good that will do.
If I want something from the corner store, I go

there not walking backwards. Time machines
were invented for the ambitious. It is presence
that obliges a mellifluous glow at the crucial
intersection in a nature, absorbing the plot

upon the conspectus, absent crocus admitting
occasion’s weather to wash out the disgruntled
thoughts of a mind rung unsettled enough. It is
past time. We know how to maintain the isolate

of our station, stretched for completed encounters
not there. Dusk always resounding deep shades,
then back gratuitously with textures of tomorrow,
like the gathering of grass and weeds and losses

that sift in surrounding ephemera, played loose
after yesterday’s throttle completed the scene.
Standing where next I find myself, with only
as much guard as the thickness of dress cloth,

thinning breezes, I’ll soon complain of the cold
to begin to start it all over, littered in a new lot
with clarity of glass from a broken bottle, heard
muffled late last night when tossed into the sky.

Over

A lift can start with words covering a page,
end with the pass of white clouds

filled in below with what were
solemn trumpets of hummingbirds,

these in dreams tastefully mottled
where between are your thoughts

to hand over and not hold conclusive
to all that’s otherwise angled, trying

to rest collections against the fence
before the wreck of a storm. Rest is

in the impetus of a silent nurse, passing
a hand over the ruffed skeptical brow

not yet blent with the touch of a thousand
colors. The tones of their wings dipped

in nectar coruscate this all elsewhere, in
currents that sweep the tables from houses

and leave the lonely sitting with bare laps
open, and so fly from chairs into a morning

of the oncoming night. A faltered traffic,
cool air swallowed down with warm sodium,

the footprints and shoes left for improbable
fathoms daring height with bizarre turns

while pack dogs snout tin cans of garbage
around about the solid done blocks of streets;

that actually is similar to flight, noting what
won’t be placed on your back or, at this point,

not in the railed gut either. Bareness of levity,
crescent sights, crucibles only filled with ghosts

of some future memories of desires echoed
within those small wounds of the home.

At the hour
stretched long dusk

the blue-gray air

hobnobbed with new
green spotted pollen

opened tree buds

and around the lone
red cardinal,

dark eye in the rain.

Vague half-credence of a coincidence,
working some dream that we place
into another quick phenomena--

just as I looked up, birthed from the side
of a Red Maple and with an omen of shadow
upon the chipped plats of ground,
a Great Blue Heron god flying over.

The temptation is to give it meaning,
as help to grasp what comes after
the air spicing beak,
the long throttle of neck,
the combs of light feathers
from a body stretched outward
with bones unrecessed along
flights of private horizons….

That is the something, while below
are the swift plays of chance that include
the plundering of the holes of ghosts

writhing in this surround that was/is here,
somewhere. Called attention. Which includes
also insignificance, new ruffles of lilies,

from the stamina of a winged migrations
or the quiet muddy lake bottom
depths at the height of hibernation.

Conditions don’t meet up as they were meant,
instead rive and merge within the innate
behaviors, such as how we might form
from the muck brown of our imagination.

Answer from Her Question

“is that where all of the want-
in what is to be canistered?”
A question a few days before
unsiding herself from the specimen,

and now she has stepped
in circulatory. The certain ware
of centuries against flack stones
and passing of blood and gowns.

Defeat, an old story to the stars.
Glints in blue totter of the shore.
What’s held in secret in the dark
undressed as a shadow born

out of the wave, “A portrait
collapses in the choking fog,
but another in the life of the air.
What sinks, flies, or the blind

algae hovers, not definitively,
not unlike plummets and sunlight,
warped resides and brought to wade
bobbing in shallows somewhere

within the brink of an eye's limit.
Yesterday's sailor and a lopsided
globe, too slippery to place atop
merchant rocks from the harbor.

The bilateral horizons along lines
industrial, both cause and effect,
now hundreds of years later. Swarmed
water, grey from sittings of exhaust

mixed with fossil acid. Dry-cleaned
with business beside some body shops.
The aspic coporal claims downward
to itself- my calcite of a half shell."

At the Belmont

Cross-bar insignia, engraved invitation,
attendees requested and willingly bring
with impacted heels hard on the crust
of the grid of traffic and into elevators
with polished mirrors, oak insulating
the static lair between their bodies
and breathing a low pressure beyond
the locked clasps of the briefcase.

The cards played at night
in the banquet room, and it was
a straight flush of clubs
when the decision actualized
while the strapless lady turned her way,
dropping the diamonds from her
velvet purse down the air shaft,
unbreakable, while scattering,
cantering chime of irked hard cut
echos in a formidable architecture.

The trusses and then the diaphragm
to flux a moment for conclusion.
She had walked in ready to betray
in service to her much older love,
carking bets of an unknown
percentage on the felt topped table.

Ongoing consequence, continual ante
from the personality in the variance
of relationships. Colonnaded halls
that resolve in a weary denouement.
The gargoyles above the entrance.
They mouth a cold lakeside carried in
to the bus stop in a grey wind tussling
about the indissoluble, careless
as the grin from the tooth chipped curb.

A child, another pair of darkening eyes,
unable to reach past what has
already been delivered, lost innocence
and the close draw to an end of a day.

In between exists the expanse
and my walk, that does not turn
out any further than the repose
that remains absent.

There is an inevitable slope in everything,
about the light not held by sycamores
along the avenue,
the optic falling without the hesitancy
foliated in the bark,
mottled shapes creased over with mystery.

Assembled pieces of procession
are marked off
in and out the shuttered homes,
sometimes carefully, sometimes not,
the more formal in my daily gaze
when in their Sunday best
to and from a church
capped with its perfected point,
to lay claim in the sky
on the infinite momentum.

At least the anticipation, thankfully,
proven useless to me, the listed forecast
traded for the air, hinted with condolence
in birds that will return
flights, tinting brief colors,

if I follow with a few new fingers
desire over and through space across time
of each wooded and rooftop perch,
embolden with the living contours.

The momentary animate nettle
often a harsh inaccurate balance, so what
of the inability to know which side
weight pulls over for a definite conclusion?

One such morning this acceptance
was started, the necessary resemblance
of being, so falsely in that it was
warm, thaumaturgy hum steam
in her moor of consanguineous
green dew of half spheres on grass
atop the lumpy ground with our grubs.

Enhancement and Script

Cut from the side of an oak barrel
an attitude takes a tiller indoors
and with it, the enhancement

in waves called from what is otherwise
the sewn draw of motion-- such as moon
about earth and earth around the sun,

absent any decision from that micro-
fire of a blue tipped match thrown
beneath the furnace. How hot nerves

through the grates to the fathoms
of the backrooms, as when I can’t wait
for enseeled rain to flood her bath

and collide with what's whispered
for the rising flames of tomorrow.
There, the parts of a life story

drown in the basin of enclosure.
Even before any of the utilities
are touched, your open robe

unwinds in an open permeability
of cloth, not yet displaced from
floors of the forests, for the shelves

titled with phrases in a paperback,
before the black ink is divided
from an ocean bottom gurgled

with myrtle groves of soaked kelp.
The bantam relay on such lines,
engraving a thin script, sure

this is of a total stone with a path
of pieces. Small frictions submerged
in the full volume of the world.

Through

The lawns lay flattened as sallow
straw and the wet setigerous bristle
on the backs of the fling darts
of rabbits, their jagged glides
along the ending night’s fog

lifting from dauntless snow,
weighted down, feculent grime
from thawed winter storms,
repeated in months wrought over
with the slow shed of bark broke
and rubbed off, the omissions
from last year’s autumn.

The brown troves had been nursed
without any assumable refuge,
a tract of forms cut loose
and the fine cracked
pedestrian worn terra cotta
piled onto the back porches,

with containment, as the wheel,
somewhat actual basic
fingered assumptions that have been,
if so happen, through on migrated
triflings of understanding, carried
about on intended copper rivulets
and the over cloaked possible sky.

Platonic

Your shirt this day, silk
paisleys, some grey, thick

blue, fine lined black, plain
background and outside

toned with cloudiness
a white sky and air

that keeps a cold in
this pallet peaceful
eye that ignores stark

red of construction
tractors, angular

cranes and steel beams as
active diagrams

amidst the full blouse,
for this color scheme.

Insistence

As a brusque morning
in a room with sunlight,
distinguishments of the day
while the potted plants bend
moist stalks toward
those sunken endpoints
of the solstice range

to what we set our calendars by,
only disrupted daily with the tiny
additions and negations
dislodging the boondoggled
compendiums,

companions, a person
gone missing, a locked-up
mahogany desk, a sealed envelope,
a curious mailman, stale perfume.

An unknown sedan
stalked silently outside
on the street for days
with tinted windows hiding
motive and content
as if a container of the night,

where new moons around Saturn
and creatures in dark crevices
of the unfiltered ocean
rummage only
partially discovered.

What is always stirring is a motion
declared from what startles,
something

the irrational and rational
equinox in mind would call
it

an apparitional miracle
from nowhwere brought
to this presence, such as
one half of an aeroplane’s propeller
or a full tin of therapeutic beeswax

fallen from the sky or pilfered
from the clay of the earth,
maybe in an open field, for that matter,
shrubbed colors of a parking lot,

the blocks of components made
soundly available in the shadowy
ward you place notice here and there
in the comings and goings so often.

Companionable

While cutting up some onion, for dinner yet
not knowing what to add beside some garlic,
a dynamic slip sliced the side of my finger
like a variant at the edge of a bird’s nest
caught in the bared growls of the cherry tree,
months before it will break out into spring.

There will be the blankets of blossoms
constantly inlaid with the thinnest of florets,
while the lawn will have already been seen
as a ruff mosaic by the corner imp after
winter receded away from the sunken burrows,
as occasion the thirst salved with the thaws.

Discomfiting winds, still, will carry the heartfelt,
unless the object is far enough below the pressure
with the full dorsal mass refusing submission,
though what’s more harshly common is water,
the universal solvent with dyes of encoded ink
and then the arrows spoken through the air of bone.

So much will burn steady through the year
for the stalled warmth beside anthracite coal,
glowing red with the eyes of burning auctions.
So many there are out test driving icy roads
and finding distracted comfort in the muted
acridine warbles of angels inside trombones.

Graying garages and the un-oiled weather vanes.
Its the same bottom of the barrel, darkly lined
under stars seen as immeasurable distances if
bright enough as reflections which herald planets
made spherical from the expansions of gases.
Gravity accoutering the spindrift destinies.

The great catastrophe brings with it a box
built with and amidst its own cruddy materials
as we sort of do know. And perhaps all this is in
the divine octaves of the purgative waiting,
the eighth day falsely past the westward borders
with what is believed as in what we are moving.

A Petal and Some Petals

At this night there is something
that should be unwrapped
with what could not only sleep.
Beside what-- Me? You? The moon

in the yard can drip a sea
of phosphoresce extending
the blue of what
just prior was the dour
evening, mirrored on cobalt snow
an hour or two ago. Which,
that’s fine too, has to do with love,

but now the lowest of light’s refraction
and the swonk feeling done,
tumbled into violet and scant things
all like the dangerous clarities
founded in mathematical theorems.

They will share the atmosphere together.

The nimble ice thin dancers.
The surest of fatuous butchers.
To succumb to truncated figuring blades
slice through air numinous
creative destruction

and the only dotted dullard-
if the throat of tomorrow’s afternoon
is ironed with contracted insensitivity,
padlocked and molded
and kept unable to cough
an ensemble hemorrhaging
with rude pains of merismopedia,

here in this tangle of tight strings
of stereo parquet. Horse feed.
This, this, multiplicative grit
where the sun’s rosin of algae
has boisterous finales,
that don’t lie to themselves
about what’s always uncompleted,
in opposite seasons. Never satisfied.

The thrilling Rimsky-Korsakov
played over the oil on whetstones,
the Mexican’s and Lithuanians.

They are all parts of pieces
of an assembled apparatus
contained along with
the rest of the world,
with sudden reptile colors

feathering birds of paradise
beside the eras marked
by their incomprehensibilities
of centigrade zero.

Encircled

Imagine the comforts of an impenetrable dream.
The definitions of ‘dream’ as the blue hamper
for awesome plausibility. Is tempting.

It starts out from snow, as what soon follows
November, as not having you here, somewhere
gone over and past a span across longitudes

of northern regions in a pared sky above
the entangled coppice- its whirring yearn
that submerged in rotations of hard currents

in the Indian Ocean. Gravity of polar opposites.
The evening stars are now magnified reflections
with diaphonic vibrations mixed with auburn

tempera in a painting on the wall of the backroom,
a poem, a scene, that is a memory of an afternoon
of your place. The blind of what has past

beyond our selves. The collapse of geometry
that hid in the lush swells of the summer,
the quiet solemn moss of the house

with spore capsules that sauntered in the stalks.
So how loudly we tend to make the irremovable
adjunct tied to the swifts of tomorrow,

only known from what it has previously done
as it once touched us. You. All bareness skewed
with an oracle protected by a rib, to ascribe

to a conic forever parallel with what has been
assembled in the vaulted containments. Remain
alarmed with ice in the sun of the night. Together.

Knowing what belongs inside of impossible answers.

Saturday Matinee

Difficult to make what of the lone walker
down on a side street, over there, ducking
away from the traffic, just past the library.

Hopefully not just a piece of meat for the
mechanical larvae exhausting in a crawl
from the smokestacks, but probably is.

For contrast, maybe he’ll first make it to a field,
or a tidy park that's planted with flowers in open
summer, really, any place dangerously dense

with the diffused creation of comprehensiveness,
dynamic proportions that will return everything
back to the living cell renewal and the science

fiction monstrosity no larger than a television.
Still never safe mind you. But exciting? Fools
for that drama even if at all points but alone,

as it was, as equal to everything else, as carbon
and only one of the elements in the neighborhood,
named after a thick creek swelling and drying

with the regurgitation of the passing presence. Its
there, in this, that are stored experiences we build
power generators, though the stockpile never more

an ungraspable slight of the sum of infinite division
along the parallel blade on the stainless steel knife,
from which thrills are shadowed upon the walls,

ending as quick as after the joke told, punch line
finished, and back to the eqipose. And so we're home,
in hand with another book or a video store rental.

The Loss

Someone is getting excited about watching
the loss tonight, which perhaps is the lesson
about it. When that arrives not as migration,
or paired molecules, what is more to be expected
than tangents, is the many there are there will

always be in that one with nothing to compromise.
Those with a weathered handle on this fact might
find an apt comparison with the petting of a dog,
with the rag of her wet hair still cold from the outside.
Oceanic tide of the sentience in their black snouts,

disembodied curiosity towards what lays under
the stones, the something of the inevitable that goes
beneath the hurdle in receipt of odes after unaccountable
infiltrates. So the counter side of the sun and moon
mirroring solemn mass beyond gravity’s persuasion.

Verticle Thoughts for Sasha and Andre

Sometimes what is left is a dead branch
jutting out a canopy of leaves, which, in the
bettered minds, is understood as caressed blue.

And is fine and all, but what of grey winter?
Or palm tree fronds? As you may have expected,
just when an answer arrives, an abutting exception

collapse, as might fall coconuts or icicles.
Children are right to climb in oaken summer
because when they reach the sulk of adulthood

heights are for faces with feathered loss,
flown with the fleet meetings of yesterday,
not meant to be understood as belonging.

So the accouterments of our home mortgages,
which, I would recommend, should not be
without, somewhere amidst all of that polish,

a spiral staircase. Grotesquely imaginary
or banefully real, painted an absorbing black
and the steps silently padded for your own

breath, scared heartbeat, how both effect your
vision when wound up by a helix not unlike
the contusion of the landscape, now being

viewed from where you wanted your climb to
sponge together clarity from what rises in a haze,
like the cleared living room gone past the flume.

It’s a view that sees no further than the ground
and only less of it is there in the smokey dew
whisked after the addition of a bitter starch.

Pool

Shadows composed of dry oil and
black dust, leaving their tracings past
my destinations in graphite patterns,
propounded significantly eventful;
in the board vigil at high noon.
And the loss of those particled fibers
that acquiesce in the sift of air.

...If one could find the mind for a significance,
the matter could be sparkled as glacier rain
hidden beneath the snow from the arctic sun
and aflow to one of the seven myth filled oceans.

Then label me with a hat, ‘an explorer’.

That could be as exciting as any
of the dreams sauntering past midnight.

Although perhaps this is something more
from the morning and slips too clear for mirth;
the catalyst of frustration further back
than yesterday and long since
accommodating to house arrest.

Not to say the painting of the symphony
still can't find a design from Black Spleenwort.
Though, the trees certainly are not shotgun
barrels. The pervasive does have a way
of threatening with the completion of aspects
where the radial unknown colludes behind
the momentary lambent. The flit played

upon scales so exquisitely, we are taught
to the nuances of what we find
in the range of our vision, and trust
the whole of susceptibility, including
the minor signifier of a maleficence
on the border of the unvivid,
marked by falling hesitation...

A cairn was made from impacts of silence,
after so quickly, his landscape permanently,
unalterably censured and condemned.
The route well traveled cratered
with the steepest unmeasurable depth, entirely
stagnate. The shuttering of the rocks on it's shore
signify the strength of all the abiding years.

In the Midst

In the midst of a demanding
book I pulled up from its
attention and out the
window was the snow that
doesn’t ask for mental rest any-
more than it has any use for
hundreds of flakes of ideas of
the snow as what is about
its distance is proximity un-
sought monotone accumulating
with the other couple few
patrons this day or two from
Christmas in their own personal
silent ways driven in uncorrected
pastures as a wind through one
open window and out through
the other picking and leaving
during some other greener
version with this December that
shows that it is respite which
is the only one thing un-
imaginable with what the
material here comprehends and
can reveal equanimity through
the glass when clear for
about as long as the breath is
stranded before the delivery
truck continues with exhalation
fogging into our entire world
cloudy and when cold enough
with a newly falling snow.

Spa in the Winter

With the cold crunch anchoring
beneath tires and footsteps,
leaving imprinted arrangements
of ice stands and snow braids,

the rubber tread marks
raise our set concerns
over the loss of fluidity,
making it understandable

why chlorine vapors are pooled
yearning confluence in the yards.
To melt the sliding snow,

while the simple river only
a few blocks over
umbers all year unfrozen
damson brown
under overhung branches.

Consider, with every breath
another instigated
blaze of thorn apple hills
blossoming with dying fruit.

And even before
the immediate afterward
you want the warmth
to remain in thermal

contusion cycling
as a bath back through
upon yourself.

Goal of self sufficient desire,
so hurriedly supplanted,
circa 1977, through
a purchase of halogen hair
afloat about bromine lips

where distant bridges engulfed
in meaty fog, specious smoke
from fields once scattered
with dandelions eaten by horses
and up until the aluminum
siding dissipated.

Remembrance
of once there was a flower bed
planted shallow beside
the concrete foundation

and the sauntering hose
dribbled meekly down
to the hard ground
of shapeless clay,
adjacently packed below
the soft hairy roots.

The basement lasts longest.

Cool, dusty webs,
steady ground
temperature consistent
with the annually recalled
climate even though isolated
changes.

Reliable as an attic,
that open air
in the ground where
the finished story tends to lie.

December

At the beginning gate of winter,
the staggered stalling of snowflakes
heard upon roofs otherwise suctioned up
silent in the aching loss of temperatures,
changes which say forever blue is also
wound with a limpid gray of stolid
water that gasped amidst the last leaves,
a hindering upon the city streets,
even over the nitrogen from dog urine
by the painted yellow canary hydrants.
Freezing drips of ancient autumnal rust

of what is brought from high to choral low
is the holy, wholly the way the snow falls
from an open sky above the clouds.
It bends over the thickly brown brush,
makeshift caves for rabbits that have lived
long enough for a fettered balance with hawks.
They carry on the heart beat rites of blood.
Instinct as prime directive. Harsh motivator
from above with copper claws and beaks
that glean in crystal aquiline sky born views,
under which nosey quivers guide the routes
of dotted imprints that follow through
on the earth, the damp scenting nostrils, of

rhythmic profanities sounding in Morse code.
So as this, a beating flight, a run thumping.
Such as down upon the stored wine bottles
while maybe also with a playing of spoons,
a mouth harp, for, who would guess it,
if should we let it, some parties, dances, lodges,
clubs, ballroom entertainments, everywhere,
and possibly even the six day trial to anew
with a musical saw pulled from the peg
board wall, bending frictions so champagne hot
the horsehair bow smells of ungulates and Sioux.

The long, long trail really doesn’t go much
Of anywhere, white wail as the plains remain
spacious and the woods compact. Its congregated
nature and is in its existence, which is
on through a nowhere towards
a burning mirage of sunset. Hard reality:
each of us, flight or prized fur, will end
in the snowy cold, pasties stiffly pasted,
so we shudder towards nearing
another year’s end. How suddenly fierce
the celebrations, sciatic tracks in all full snow.

Many of the Mysteries

Many of the mysteries start in the evening.
For some examples, we call it contemporary
pinned upon an ample infinity
from any of the stars
while the processes with premonitions explore
spun hours to those planets hidden beyond sight.

Not unlike customs of the country’s centuries when
people knew how to both plant and grow garden
vegetables. Gourds like squash
like the brittle rattles
that attended, brought dark rains and prophecies
before prediction records of scientific almanacs.

So Sunday mornings. Blue morning; scored over
with rituals of blackness, burnt edges of breakfast
and some inked words forming pages
of a good novel
of imagined scenes as the thermal clouds betray
coldness and cease in weight down below the mist.

Playground

The cold absence above chimneys
not unlike a hollowed gloom
brought out to faltering fields

containing nothing beyond
the trees. Empty space in both
that is tattered from what is

broken so also configurations,
wild coherencies, anatomic remnants
without time in pure action

of form, substance synonymous
with past and a future,
opposites, both so equally blind--

only arsenic of shear presence.
Dangerous? When watching a few
kids in play down at the park,

sliding back onto loss fragments
aside the stance parents who
sip from insulated travel mugs,

suctioned pains are for what
is not remembered as familiarity
moves forward to loss.

A pair of worn shoes remains.
Bafflements poorly miscontstrued
as wanting an it to be resolved.

But they are. A couple of new
soles and fresh resonance
of fleeing ground polish

skirting levels of tumid vallies
as what is loved escapes on inward
steps free with sequenced motion.

Compact with Nostalgia

Borrowed words can be used to match
a point on the unreachable constancy
of the horizon, still there is more
involved during an evening
so far deep beyond the frame.

For a long love on the carpet.
Two new baby squirrels in the yard
that spend more time about the grass
than up in the tree. At morning
I had looked up and decided upon

a concentration for the rest of the day
with the influx of a plastic radio,
damn yammering while raking leaves
and then the full choir of mauve rounds
out with the heartbeats of childhood.

Nostalgia won’t be slipping past, it is
carried on within the loam of the earth
after the fade out of re-acquaintance;
a warm hand on the turned back and
loaned touch out from the clearing cold.

At some moment closer to midnight,
the shadows are not any more longer,
or darker, but reveal blind formlessness
carrying on, as complete as diurnal
agendas. From a lamp a still-life moans.

Through this, inevitably, what strives
to be interpreted and will hold out
past us all night. If not in dreams
of sleep, then what it mythologized on
the bed stand, always in privacy.

October 35

The change of the season,
if it wasn’t here what else
to do over there other than
count and clean your tally?
Question hideously precise.

There is a valuable lack in
not getting a good night’s rest,
when you wake more broken
than tired in the OK autumn
absence of unheld morning.

Ample smell of a mephitic skunk
burrowing away from the light
beneath an acidic bed of leaves,
hints at a future not yet sensed.

On the porches by the lawns,
electronic newspapers. I have one
but without effect on my suspicion
of yesterday’s answers as sun
wanes in the labyrinths of both
the seen and the unseen forests.

Once upon a time, ago, a reply
full of a green life lobbing abundant
through the brunt of endurance,
steaming audaciously with
a brawn of attributable might.
So full of vigor I braved
wonder where it does all go.

That is then when all thoughts
do go, enfeebled to the wind,
elegies of tissue paper into
the flamed passings that blaze
extensions for only a few seconds
of color, cincturing brilliantly
red, the quick burnt meaning in
the hollow frames of empty nooks.

When we want it done and complete,
we sit by the fire, warm, cook the oldest
calf and harvest, full and with heat,
a border protected, lurking in a pit.

Stay hungry-- the girded bark textures
stay outward, tympanic slated recompense
from a pursed area set over with a dried
understory of hazel, those ashen trunks,

depthless gray, as a sky gets when
stand three sentries over a crimpled
scene, watching pinched absences,
heavy bindings of density, destiny
in the vale to be heard so much later.

Even If Just A Something

A walk not holding collection,
desultory return home, spatial
on the last of the lukewarm
nights of a falling October,

after hearing of what’s done
through the squall of the world
where there is so much
that goes on beyond us

as does the Beluga whale-
....arctic..opal....polished..pearl
mankind and inept nominees
calculate without a worth,
even if it can swim backwards

those high pitch twitters through open water

and while in a back room, aside
one lamp on the bookshelf
under which is held a book,
maybe lays a stub of pencil,
a half glass of alcohol, muttering

mark upon what’s read to a final
fourth movement at the end
of the hour, day’s unseen stars,
iridescent effusion in darkness

from an obscene roost
in the irked fallacy
of the bulbous
imagination

for something else,
not stated predominance,
for moving in pods of thought
with the common interflow
of submerged feeling.

Glottis After Breakfast

The light slated horizons through the blinds
The fruitful shaded hands of the gingko leaves

they are the something to be seen and said
about dust which neither understand
as remnants, so like yourself,
so attributed to lost pieces
for completed compositions, me too,
supposing the beach with sand castles

and all of the something in a shift,
and our acting, action resolutely ignored,
in kitchens where ceilings expand
beyond assembled lines of tables,
as day ellipses and a crest revolve
we pull off a shelf, down to a stainless
point, so fixed, a reliance acutely done
with all the pain of an inedible
which we decide how far it will go

In a forgotten backyard
Of one who never did say cease,
Broad pin steadied into possible ecstasy
And gaze distant entry of an earthly waltz, slow
Speckled through grills from that old fence
And the cypress boughs’ fragrance
Tuned with the guide of some arm

leading air particles off the farce,
fallen from a thing of architecture
and as quick as that- we’re back,
to where we started, collapsed,
shedding skin with cats and dogs, only
us with handfuls of fetid allergy,
not knowing if the fan or the vacuum
is which and should be turned on high
as a black hole swallowing constellations

neither, both, a black cat with closed eyes,
of green stars, curled atop
a grey wool sweater pulled from
the hope chest made of cedar
and lined inside with mirrors, reflections
when opened upon tangled brush
from branches of verdant summer,
but peacefully thought

Upon down aspects which the native tourists ring
Solemnly passing with the shadow’s full glissade

Economic September, 2008

What had been in the marble lobbies
maybe not exactly rising increases
with historical content, but rather

anxious morning sun’s ghostly soot
of finance from a past Tannery Row
withering return towards managers,

to redraft the construct, steel stature
atop the cant of red bricks, renovate
over upon what are recognized

roads and our- once republic- walls
about which now glass buildings
inhabit leases, these sudden shifts of

industry measures outside the brushed
falter of human lapse, an ambitiousness
to be brave, and waste cached dollars,

the iron fence, core heat and sulfur pits
as full as fire in the blood’s cauldron
fed with wood cords, scraps of planks,

raked from the fears on scorched hills
and the hard cliffs of New Hampshire,
as etched into brass plated ceremonies,

creosote preserved solid oak frames
against oil portraitures of the pioneers
altered in the failed brokerage firms.

That Cathartic Something

It may sound best as you attempt
to melt the snow of relentless February with
the salt of all those woefully bucketing tears,
but, with sight through the kitchen window,
when delusional warmth of the harvest moon
is cut from cold and the unhindered possessions
of children, emotional lies, so carefully
realized, shorten back to the landscape
upon a sauntering mauve edged with silver.