Category Archives: poetry

Salvage

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the wild man, the recluse, the rustic
edgeling, hermit, housebound, hidebound
when magic is so somewhere not here
even when here is not a muddled blunder
like low clouds distant mountains
or the hole in the series where
the lock was, where I was, and all
the other places you never look
the heart a little animal
running and running on the flat when
the next thermonuclear hijack
makes everything an over thing
the loners’ club, how it happens
no place in our underfoot is not
towered down creatures before us
abandoned places, all their giving up
how we survive such vast undoing

 

Beside Inside

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Always there is that one beside you
no matter the gray evening with its
piercing stars or the silent road, an
invitation to abide or go,
it is what’s made for you that’s not you,
the thing past you in looking glasses,
unseen quests and all unspoken poems,
parent of the street’s cacophony
the mess of executed thought, one
with your inside face, mysterious
to you still as collapsing stars or
water bears or even the water
that washes you or fills your cup, as
promising as all forgotten things.

we are running

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we are running
our sky is the bottom
of a boat

approaching the wall
we pull out
our puny weaponry
disclose ourselves

bomb-light
startled trees

see our feet please
we’ll not show
what we see
just a simulacrum
of running
a simulacrum
of seeing
as if you’d fear
the village behind us
blossoming

hello
darling

we have a hacienda
in us invitations
cannot penetrate
a border spiked
our various heads
souvenirs
after images
of our afterlife
a sky-wide moat
as if someone
would

we had ankles once
jewelry, guns
berries
fetch was a word
with a water bucket
all we ever said
was O

we have
chemicals

cropped
and furrowed
into two
now we know
when you don’t
where you go

just look at
all this
room

the things
your hominids
have done
a ruse for hands
or thimbles
the deviant ladder
of our smile
your lesser loves
food one mustn’t eat
so it can’t
be gone

your machines have
memorized you

run

Grrrrr

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In your muggy prehistoric, we roam,
we rage and root up monstrous vegetation.
We converge at roiling waterholes
or in warm seas you call raging. Consider
our volcanoes, our smog, our canopies
and canapés, our lack of ice and
entertainment. Taxis. Cosmetics.
We are always open-mouthed, fussing,
grumpy preludes to grappling and ripping
or just showing off our dentition.
Our flanks commandeer broad air while you
are safely far from underfoot, small,
chittering in rank leaves or underground,
hiding out from your first apocalypse.

 

 

image: http://lhldigital.lindahall.org/cdm/singleitem/collection/human/id/297/rec/12

 

Stick

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something shorter than an arm
but with more mojo and traction
than worry, the ephemerae of
prayer on the sending end
with enough smoke to send up
this thing without words like
fishing—the whole being yearning
till we are nothing but hope

 

Thick

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eisberg 3 mod ward

Thick is how not doing feels, but
paralysis is a tremor at a gate
that turns into a steep incline or cliff
or vast and empty waste. Whatever
it is, it’s the place before place, it’s
where you belong where belonging
has no meaning. It’s where nothing can be
got, where the illusion of having
runs out, where there’s no Virgil
to explain things you can’t see.
It’s the country of all corners though
where two meet there is no one,
there is no face to face. It’s where
the wall you had to lean against—
the one you slid inside to slide
along the edge– is gone.

Private Drive

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Private drive with its dense camellias,
a doorway of golden light that’s always
just a ways on. Dusk, across wet grass to
memory’s dilapidated house,
its rummaging ghosts. And beyond, the
tethered ship, its scintillating rudder
and low rumble. The pilot sings. Suit up.
Distant sirens, somebody down, but you,
you’re off, the city plummets to nothing,
you’re deep inside a sky full of stars.

 

 

 

 

Our Lava Flow

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Our lava flow—red cheap
horror movie blood, intersection
pale gray sea, steam & all sorts of
roiling, steely foreground
outcropping & floating there above,
a sienna demon or angel, so
alike in their unexpected
appearance and erasure, so solid
mid-air, held there by the gimmicky
strings of the mind with its claptrap
room of miracles & ghostly
rigging & its stately passersby,
strings of code for hair & the rough
gloves of beasts hunted to
extinction, like us these hundred
years or so of truly last goodbye.

Mystery Tour

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In dreamy hot regions you may see volcanic
scenery and ghosts of near-naked men whose
mysterious disappearance you can spend
whole days imagining—the aftermath of
their bristling pomp and scintillating armor,
how their skin glistened and how they grinned
killing their captives, all of them, liking it more
than anything even sex and drink and gold.
Their gods’ discreet distance in their own
separate time made it necessary
to torture strangers and murder neighbors,
no kneeling in austere confessionals, and
afterwards feasts and fancy dancing in long halls
of human skulls and artful documentation.
Their few remaining manuscripts are limned
exquisitely on skin, their language, some
speculate, dire and full of prophecies for us,
vast libraries destroyed by the weather
they worked so hard for and never got.
But their monuments and pottery remain
to tell tales of elaborate marital
blood-letting and games designed to execute
people merely passing through and probably
not so unlike the more fortunate you here in
the safely scary dreams of your soft bath.

_________________________
detail from image: Yaxchilan lintel 24 British Museum http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/highlights/highlight_objects/aoa/y/maya_royal_blood-letting.aspx

Funerary

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Somewhere low the traveler in his hat
asks directions, higher up, death on her horse
with her wings and compass, paid mourners
on the upper level in their muu-muus
and brogues, smoke and chat on their break,
real mourners lounge off to the side, drinking,
telling jokes, ladies in the dressing room
with their mystical pets and cosmetics,
your effigy enthroned and looking like
some anyone not you–later on the other side
such weeping the wine can’t assuage now
the procession’s done, guests heading home,
treading on blossoms, their feet trailing ash.