the big top rodeo
of the latest passions
the mayhem override
the circular circus
solemn locations
stations of the cross
or just this plank road
what hope in locomotion
what grace in standing still
Still
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Category Archives: poetry
Patrol
Like that time somebody sort of noticed
you existed—first love, then violation.
More assiduous patrols are needed–
someone to ride who knows how to rope rhyme
and corral caesurae, someone to mount up
and stay out there weeks at a time or
until the fence runs out, utterly runs out.
Squalls, major thunderstorms, hail in addition
to the usual zephyrs and plain ol’ sunshine.
Just a manly someone in full armor,
someone who salutes you when he returns
and knows everything an order entails
though no mention of means or motives
occurs in four hundred years of
relentlessly well-ornamented text.
Someone also to wear gloves, to have a
stable of gloves for all occasions
occasioning choice. Choose, choose, choose.
Just geometry anyhow in the end.
Solitaire
what is hidden compels
this somber endeavor
life its randomness
the grind of it and chaos
the things you miss count
only once and losses
don’t incur despair, still
the universe blossoms
your options shrink
a sudden obsession:
emollients and adornments
the things you can’t remember
that you could have said
this outpost where your mind
makes a world
Discover
In the beginning there was a
small door,
but escape was
less attractive then
than forests full of
undiscovered species
like yourself, you thought.
So many things
you did not think,
things you did not hear–
monkeys for example
not so unlike you
screamed alarm
from tree to tree–
you thought such dangers
did not apply to you,
lounging on beaches
where the sea
drags pebbles out and in
and out, your mind
entangled with
the flow of things.
Back at your campsite
a god disguised
as some random someone
passing through
prepared a dish you tasted
only once
and now forever
long to taste again.
Why were you so busy dodging luck?
It took such work
to find the wrong places
and love the wrong men,
the ones you crowded,
the ones who crowded you,
the one you found
to leave you
to your solitude,
the one you found to leave.
Free of all encumbrance,
now you know
nothing burdens
like the want of love.
________________________
image: The History of Four-footed Beasts and Serpents (1658)http://publicdomainreview.org
Turn
our disengagement, our disapproval
of the proceedings, just not caring more
about the artifact or the scary
presence of the morph, or the untoward
requisition of articles of proof,
our reluctance, our fading steamy thread
of love, our forbearance, our petit fours
our migraine, popliteal vein, our rain
and portal nightmare, our more than passing
acquaintance with gravity and all its
grave stuff, the notes we wrote pertaining to
the stock, and yes the demon in the woods,
the afterlife of celestial motion
our little spinning turn on earth
With
Where were we when we were with
No matter how long, not ready
Was it what the drift has done
Or the drum of the conundrum
To love?
How it will come to you
How it will come to you, this joy
that rides in on pain and breathes
your inspiration. The one who
dwelled beside stands at the gate
waiting for another shining passerby.
In the tree, a conspiration of birds
abides this green nature. You had
forgotten how performance
isolates. But in this only moment
now, such surfeit, such grace.
Bad for Good
By the time our opportunity arrived,
our good name had been made bad for good–
they rolled the spite and wordage out and
rolled in it too like dogs in muck. Oh yes
we dreamed of crowbars and poisoned soup,
slippery factory floors, electrical
mishaps. Meanwhile rain crackled like shifting
ice, thunder like some implosion of what
we felt in that suddenly flat landscape,
nothing in sight but weather. We hastened
to relocate our spoiled selves, jettisoned
our personal effects, and now we stand
stout in the rigging of our rebirth.
Pony
Flung out of orbit
at last we thought we’d live
like supernumeraries
as we pleased.
The gods that left us here
liked mirrored worlds and ice,
not the human world of
fires and tents and trees.
All that loud singing.
The galaxy they
wheeled away on
had vapor in it and
a voice that left behind
the muffled slap
our weary leather makes
as we go round the around,
the rag a little bully with a
whip made of our life when
no one was looking
the care-to-see.
But we do still love
the sound of water
waving in a metal pan,
our day’s allotment,
and the memory
of the sun we had.
Unmown grass.
Boundless sand.
______________________________
altered image; original image: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Little_horse_on_wheels_%28Ancient_greek_child%27s_Toy%29.jpg
Crypt
For us not now philosophers’ distress
so elegant and rectified,
a cri de coeur in fortified undress,
missing all the loss we find
as our former selves pass by,
thick with others’ thoughts and words.
Still, to say a true thing that will belie
our dark surmise that in this world
meaning is not in doing or what’s done–
wind shuddering the trees,
some turbulence, and then it’s gone.
Behind the shelf
Behind the shelf the occupied heart sleeps
in its little jar–you cannot put your hand
on it, so it occurs to you that you
are haunting yourself. Nonetheless, there is
sweetness somewhere, consciousness like some
confection churned from the labor of
what’s left. It’s pain that’s the true little death.
The things you believed were not the things you
believed in, just your basic crenellation
and arrow slits, light shooting in whenever
you are not shooting out. We could not hear
the tree falling, we heard its aftermath,
like some errant tornado backing up
to fill the spaces it left behind or
you there moving at some spooky distance
from yourself and all your darling tendrils.
This big space I had for you, coterminous
alas with the outer wall where the
patrols are napping or whoring or
conspiring with wolves and beavers, who
suffer as we do upon losing a mate.
Wondering the opposite of looking–
how we could set so much of us aside
only to find it waiting in the lapse.
Even When
The boat sits on a bar of light
brighter than the eye can bear
a bright hole in the world when
you surface, another shadow
on the water from that other
world below with its eternal sway
where your creatures are always
hunting, even when you sail away.
Accidental Antenna 
