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.

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.