Poems

Ground

The boy pondered the spot of ground:

low, soft, and brown.

Slightly sunken from rainwater

(what little had come that season).

The embrace of the earth

wrapped lightly around a single friend.

I’ll join you one day, if what’s said is true, he thought.

A large pine and its children

covered the softened patch of grass,

waving their arms each night in song

(he has witnessed this).

As he sought to ponder, his father walked past,

behind him,

carrying something to the truck.

“Don’t tell your mother. There were tracks;

I think coyotes got the body a couple nights ago.”

Antagony

Lord, they have killed thy prophets,

and digged down thine altars; and I am left alone, and they seek my life.

She talks to her guests of how she buys organic now.

This will help the years of beautiful chemicals

synthetic, which saturate the entire pyramid

and drip down its sides-

paint makes it look pretty.

Hear the rail of fifty thousand machinae shutting down,

clogged with impurities- please make sure nature does its job.

Fifty thousand moving from dwelling to edifice, speaking with the air;

the subway homeless content in conversation with himself.

She talks of how she fears terrorism.

Her home is made up like an old body, full of machines to filter

the air and the water and the food and the surfaces.

The machines become old and are dumped behind Golgotha.

She talks of how she loves the sun and the summertime.

He will emerge from his place in the wild,

where he eats grass from the ground as a beast

She will say, “Come inside and get some fresh air.”

He will say, “What a beautiful television.”

Soon the shroud replaces the virgin garment.

O Death, where is thy sting? When the time comes…

there will be no more summer and no more winter.

Please- legitimize, politicize, build, bandage, drug, dam, and splice;

make sure nature does its job.

According as it is written, God hath given them the spirit of slumber,

eyes that they should not see, and ears that they should not hear; unto this day.

Bloom

Sudden stars tossed on the raiments

of a red evening,

resting in the desert air.

Woman, talk to me;

your words are thunder…

 

Cloudlings vault low

over the belly of a dreaming earth.

 

Remember this:

your hair is flowering grass

bending on a draught moon.

When you leave in the morning,

remember this:

my eyes are hewn rock

baking under streams of sunlight.

Assimilation

I get older, and if I walk after sitting for too long,

my knee sings a funeral song.

I’ve lost weight, because I eat less,

and I am more often a warrior in dreams

than a winged being.

I want to go deeper than the spot where Newton shakes his head in frustration.

I want to travel to the collapse of the wave function,

let my mind dissipate and moonwalk backwards…

I remember how it was cloudy gray yesterday.

I buy water at a gas station, and now am walking south.

The wind cries and howls over the mouth of my bottle-

it might be the echo lamentations of an old spirit who was trapped inside,

or I may have drunk him already.

Art

Hanging on the narrowing wall,

a Sicilian panorama drifts in browns-

vines clamber up an adobe mission;

clay pots in plenty a sign of bounty.

 

A solitary woman in mute blue and red carries one of them

along the foreground.

There’s no one else in the scene,

since the men are inside watching the game.

 

I think if she doesn’t hurry,

the vines will crack the ground beneath her feet,

and ensconce her as well;

earthenware

lifted to God under the bronzing sun for eternity.

Amoureux regardant l’île

Chateau Margaux

1947

slithers down the stem,

from the bowl,

left on the rim

by your lips;

red-satin

below your brown-swirl eyes,

mirroring constellations

above quai de la Tournelle

and the Seine

in silken ebony.

Lights! Spread before us

like so many gems

inside a store we would not

be allowed…

The glow mixes with

steam,

smoke,

coffee vapours,

sprigs of rosemary,

candle wax.

The night so pure,

yet with not enough air for words;

and the silence is broken by a cloud-drop

making your cigarette

hiss in its long filter.

Let us retire to our homes;

for have you kissed someone in the rain?

No?

Nor I.

a–b, or, post hoc ergo propter hoc

Two ordinary humans, set on a sidewalk, will
inevitably stand, and walk simply
of their own accord
to the next relevant business.

The same humans, when
approaching one to the other, falter softly,
precariously, as if on a ridge or trip-wire,
trying to shift about in a strange tap
of strangers bound by a curved ribbon.

And if curved, then on one
parabolic
continuous loop,
not unlike the quantifiable outcomes
of a Mobius strip.

Causality would seem to be
the perpetual function
more of the effect
than the cause.