July 5

Taking things a bit more far, to further
an idea into words you might want
to someday say to yourself
like they were your own abstractions,
like it mattered.

Own up to anything reasonable, able
to, by algebra, prove I'm really the best
at splitting infinities into tidier heaps
of things no one can agree to call
a heap.

Let the words pile, then, let me
help in the sifting sheets made-up
to keep in mites and moisture
among other certain someones; too
tired to mind

much of anything. Hrm. Maybe
we should try to be a bit more
precise in our language,
among other things.

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Lunes- July 4

Hourly, trains squeal
with people.
The freight is silent.

The whistle is long
with rumbling
caked under it, soft

like the glass becomes
under your cheek
as you try to sleep.

Time jerks with the stops
the local
obliges. You wake

less frequently now;
you know where
the long stretches are

across bridges, past
countryside,
through god-lost small towns.

You can't even hear
the whistle
after long enough.

But it wakes others;
it wakes me,
and I imagine

others as well, tied
up in dreams
as best they can be

while still listening
for those sounds
of the world outside

that pass knowingly,
that will pass
soon, soon, soon enough

for us.

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July 3

An odd gnash of knees,
somewhere in movement
reaching past things
and ideas to people
waxen as ever, unmapped
and scattered billion-parted,
hissed out sneezily, a flume
so wet and despondent
like there was so much more to see.

Painted up now for naught,
all allowed and tired, heavy
with hair practiced to the point
of hands frayed by subtle
axe-work, the wood wearing
down hands rough-hewn

and still on the right side--
really the better option.
So the joints bump together
and the comfort seems lost
in tossed toes and strides,
in want of sleep, in need
of words without holes.

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July 2

Hard quiet and train whistles mingle
and chill like breezes on wet bodies
that haven't yet learnt the warming
that comes with near-total submersion.

Chew in your sleep, snort
refuse to sit up for your glass
of water on diamond dust shoes
and talks of cartography,

as you resolve to study more
and ask for a ticket back to something
more than an itinerary, more
than a warping of the surrounding

city-scape you replace, not taking it
into yourself-- but reflecting it
and being consubstantial and closed,
long gone like late trains that still

need to shout, still call to yapping
backfiring cars, topical, tired.

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July 1

Its not that I wanted to steal the baby,
rather its head filled my field of vision
so completely that to reach out and not touch it--
I needed to be careful. The soft spot
is all over. Its eyes are normal-sized,
though that might be a trick of perspective.
Where are its parents? Where is its husband?
Could I save it? Its wandering awfully
close to the little fountains, round the slick
marble rims misted with water
splashing onto itself and up, thinking,
pulsating like an open-headed dog.
I decided to take my chances.

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Crossing Rules

Shambling fleshy siege equipment,

loaded, heady: waddling forward

until it turns to cross the street

and a new, uncertain sway asserts

itself, unsurely, jowls and all,

leaning fresh weight into pockets

of space and pavement black and greased.

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A Rethinking

Resting in the tabernacle,
the curtain sewn back up,
unseen drinks being swilled
in dubious relics,
a stemmed cup for each:

Let no thought of warring
or strife affect you, you

who crowd me daily,
and linger here on a night
where we walk umbrellaed
and over-shadowed through
these tunnels of streetlights

before your turned profile alights
and (with a gorgeously awkward
yank) enters into a restaurant.
You tip-toe around scattered rolls
and baked meats, a singer unharmed

by this now nightly routine.
You sing the passer-bys, you
sing me and fix my head
so as to make cartoonish
my yet unbroken stride.

Like you, all the figures stray
and pause, looking with sure features
at me and the pasts they know
I conjure and slip like an offering
into notebooks and pillows.

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A Pond

The reeds are tangled suns
yellow and stiff, smoldering
set stones in the shore's band
that wraps so tightly the wind's tresses,
which ripple and barrel sometimes
into those grassy orbs
that spread and allow whistling passage,
swaying for a moment into a ready archway
above a figure on the thin bank.

Below street-level, his back
to a bench turned away
as he drinks from the bowl of gusts
and breaths deep, his legs
grown in firm and rooted
between two flaming bushes.

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Sitting in the Mulching Radius

Seated on roots and chips of wood
turned over and handled previously;
a pause
for rapture, for the blanket
of steely undulations of fog
filling softly the space between
fanned branches and eyelashes,

piling up and dusting
written upon white walls
not fully erased, markings smudging
and unbudging in busy confusion
and disparate fragments
that work on my fingers
drizzling timber and dirt.

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Galoshes

A puddle splayed across the path
a school of cigarettes
cowering in a flooded sidestep
printed in the mud spackled
over grass and snow, congealing
at this point the valley clutches
trunks that taper up
into delicate-fanned tree shapes
static and arterial
in the grey-blue bosom of a sky
close and teary-bright.

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Drive and First Conversation

Main street lined with beaming
dandelions of metal + glass.
Lights green-rusted and blistering
we pop them one at a time
into our mouths
roughly as we pass them.

You reach out and pluck
a brittle crystal bulb
from which the light oozes
over our fingers and eyes,
glowing and sated.

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Wonder

Road up turns, shrugs
and off its shoulder rises
this path of improvised steps
left-roots and rock slab-right
towards some clearing
rounded by trees
like cupped hands
cradling a removed city view.

We lie on a concrete square
here, incongruously planned
and left, as it strains no more
hoisting steel and water;
one foot of a local colossus
still guarding, still supporting

two backs
the horizon's insomnia
of stars and gaps
in the leaves.

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Will Restlessly Wander

A drunken shade, autumn traipses
down the paper'd hallway
ripping red sheets as he goes
the color floundering from the walls
a resonance beyond
that offered by stiff nostalgia
of familiar picket fences.

He stumbles on;
the floor turns golden
and sets.

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Unseasonal

Event with ponderous steps:
the field, unspoiled and rigid
under snow just beginning
to slink warmly into the ground.

The mud then grasps at passing soles
dipped and blessed
in burnt-brown water
trails. Wary and remembering

the soft pleated grass
this sun used to cue.

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Alms

At the threshold here
of grey waste of rocky maws
joined, open to our stirrings
on the land made arable
to the touch, profuse

in golden bulls of dawn
their stark high horns
their formed flank billowing
each leg a pillar of smoke.

And their flesh cries out
its wails our offering
that silence denied
wrapped and not charring

but melting
as do the sounds in heat
dangling over this taut room;
I, your supplicant.

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Work and Ironworks

Stutter over familiar formations,
cast like New Orleans balconies,
stifled by heat and dust and the hammers
I wield as I gut it; the space is molded-
over, the drywall brittle. There is a sense
of digging, of excavation, though
so much will be thrown out. Books
and trophies, unidentifiable wads
of paper free (in an odd,
unsettling fashion) from attachment,
from feeling and comfort.

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Fabbricabile

Whisper of a blue scarf, leading smoothly
a slight jacket of red, Irish-brown
hair alight the figure minding her step,
not minding me; laden and zipped up
unnaturally, the fastener taut under my chin,
minding myself and the stop-string
and my hair draped over it.

Automatic and hand-me-down laments
mingle with thoughts about poetry
and smoke and readings, work and the bus
concise and absorbing.

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Chutes and Luges

Muted, oddly, and cultured,
brought in and together
with glancing perceptions,
distant and parallel, crowded
and in want of breath:

thinking good thoughts, quiet,
and hands and a skip
away through snow, curved
so we slip away, arms
thoughts and all.

And you stop speaking,
writing books and hearing me,
though I am silent, removed
as can be the eye, as it is forgotten
as quickly as it was dreamed.

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Body Forgets

Lay, rest, bury yourself
in warmth, and be kindly
against the woods.

Stinging fingertips on errands,
dodging and handling, hurting
and cold; almost warm.

Open jacket, colored and huge,
dancing past, sustained
in the absence of others,

responsive to touch, any
touch that means rightly;
it soon seems light + troublesome.

Sitting wholly cold and sleeping
and growing colder with dreams
a long ways away.

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Summoning Scenes

Plausible, most likely
made up, its definitely
a different game, further
down, seems younger,
from a good distance
I never was, nighttime-
lots of people-things
(they unfold differently,
more strangely) subsumed
by the places come to feed
on the dark gloom'd island
as memory warrants
and their temper holds.

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A Race

He came right on up
to the counter, two dollars
a gun, shoot it into
the clowns mouth there
to fill up the balloon
______the balloon will fill
until __the balloon pops
and we have a
______winner!
___________number nine,
you get a large
prize -- choose from the sea
horse the starfish
or the hedgehog, yes,
_________two smaller ones
for your little lady friend, two
otters for you and your lucky lady.

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A Table Outside

Slintered shards of varnish
on the table where the snow once lay
catching light unreflected
in the dull spot they pooled,
where the melt sat, debris
pieced out of the wet thaw,
a gleaming record of city lights
baked into timber come morning,
its lightness exposed to wind
until the rain, and a dampening,
until spring, and a refinishing.

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Cramped and Tired

Strangeness and a lack of open
space, breathed and passed
with no real mingling, telling yawns
and maybe rest your head here tonight-
glances blind and interruptions
just a little too much, silencing
in that manner, turning out wrong
and changing with some effects
some relations and more disconnect,
more shared air and nowhere.

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This Particular Thing

Some forced speeches, histories
impressively wrought starry
and lit well. Everywhere aware
and unresponding, feigning
welcome and recognition;
it is troubling, still, even.
Dragging on like stale sounds,
recalled in an empty place.

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Leaving Kalypso

Temptations soft-falling and light
dusting skin saltily, washed off
and out by rough swells without;

too vast for an action, this craft
is tossed with me astride,
notionless and in full view

of a body in lack of life and oaths
silencing, but softer now and cold
and the wide sea is all exhausted.

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A Delay Toward Mortality

Limbo and 'waste'
barren stasis
of want;
daily crying,
some love, there
immovable, is very
love.

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Heart-wasting Reports

Warmed down, salted and bare
supplicating and buried in weariness.

Seated in ashes and retaken
by force of fable yawped

all the overwhelming, put forth
in a body's place; given

from unfeeding weary shades
for a drink of assuagement.

Even the silent unmoved
retold still, knotting and full.

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Outside

Thoughts, upward,
dangling,
and ____snow.

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Study of Flesh and Milk

Isle free from symbols, from artifice
and that second coating of things
over beings engaged and open
singularly and monstrously,
as monsters by lack
of depth and pity for talking.

___________To the God
and His rams, a functional talking
of shared existence, peer
to both as self and other, cared for
and caretaker and restful, static
and contented with such ease
wrought in solipsistic irony
barring artifice and communion,
repellent to the dancers and poets
and singers of mortal actions;
they moved away and gave witness
and conveyance to storied beings,
a hero fallen to marauder and blight
robbing of simple sights, now saved
as the whole of the passed and dead
is given, remorseful and silent, unfit
for man, a single tale, stable and uncouth.

Blinding nobody as the weight has,
the vast expanse that precludes homestead
and atones for the death of a hypoculture.

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Thus Rose the Erose Things

Cool shadows of wind, crumbling
the shore in tandem with sea,
accepting of the offering given
of earth, just earth and artifice
convenient enough to be
left and misconsidered, tallied
and longed for vaguely, though
some remains; enough to stand
and lay by, with sandy feet
incognizant of their unreality,
acting as such with each other
imagined breath and shaping
into words too maladroit
to grasp and hold and be
held._________Once a Day
this process is lit and seen
without remembrance, even
now.

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Sarsen Toughts

Holding on to abstracts
of comfort, of solace
smudged by despond rightly,
though that is unthought
yet written and erased of meaning
substantial.

Pagan places the mind wanders
like sea, like gods
in thought and fullness
and cohesion; this is
right enough now, this
being and coherence open,
sighing and tired.

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Whimpered Inflorescence

I see the light went out,
whistled breath, awash in
bombarded by Crowd.

Arms folded and holding coats
like sunflowers
with too-heavy hands
in frosted ground
flaunting sensible longing
for proper timing
so maybe he died.

Smile happy, sense of others,
and bleed like streetlights
that dream of daytime.

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Renovations

A God and a language of ends,
coins on the butcher's block
by the doorway; beset by new tympana
of wall paint, beige and singing, right,
framing the old job and hollow.

Unfinished but suggestive of contrast:
the lighter and the darker shying still
more away from grey black etc-
walk lightly and dry, the bounds
will not stay put.

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Disclosures

Being light-contingent and image'd about,
sitting stolidly in vague abandon
as piecemeal wonders fragment reason and such,
caught up in tumult capricious and lasting,
lasting and aware and squinting at meaning
thus made clearer.

Swinging somehow in a haphazard rhythm,
caught in his thoughty possessions.
Posed slight, subsumed by the open
and flattened.

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