The Voice Under the Flowers

It's not the dying, but the killing, that gets tiring
Lifetime after lifetime, with no taste for my enemy's blood.
Death is the easy road, but once taken permits no other.
My lot is to save my kindness for my brothers who take lives too.

It's always wrong to kill, but I always find new reasons.
The battalions will adapt, like unwelcome flowers, but their role
Is always singular, to deserve their death with a fatal mistake.
At the end of this, I have only cold words to record their names.

Damn them all — they've kept me from love long enough.
The mulch of their bodies grows flowers for lovers to share
But the soldiers who sliced open the belly
So the children of the nation can feast would never dare.

I turn my back, for them I can only feel contempt,
For the cities they build, that all just will crumble,
It's the least they can do, to atone for the soldiers
stupid or gutless enough to get killed.

They've left me to dress in white in their memory,
To flourish cheap medallions in the place of grief.
I can't even mourn myself. Make a public garden
For one who never lived, in hopes that he might.

Don't remember me — there's little for you there:
An old name from your clan, a sense you possess this land...
You will not see yourself in me, until you learn
That God won't throw dice with lives, but people do.

What Passes for Redemption

Now that we've built towers
with windows to the rivers
The tree that grows in gravel
assumes dominion

As if to say "I see you
striving, love your growing
To the light. I'll be your comfort,
you're far more beautiful than you know."

Just as a sole human
strolling through the hemlocks
By a graveyard in the Bronx
assumes immense proportions,

"Once," says he, "there were far
more trees than bones. Once
The forests thought out all the plans.
I imagine we could know just what they saw."

No Response, No Reply

There is no world to know
that's not in me.

But still, there are these trees,
these silent foreign bodies
That seem to hold much more
than I can reach.

I wish to tell them what I know,
I wish to hear —
Not daring think the words
are both the same.

Across the Gulf

Tell me that the Government must leave this to BP.
Tell me they won't dump the clean-up off eventually.
Lie to me.

Tell me that the booms I see are floated fucking correctly.
Tell me the true gallons that are going in the sea.
I'll make reality.

Tell me much less than I fear will fish and pelicans die.
Tell of nature's healing, how the marshlands will survive.
I want so much to believe.


Tell me there aren't any alternatives for energy.
Tell me that the price of oil won't soon go up mysteriously.
Lie to me.

Tell me that it's all my fault for driving an SUV.
Tell me it's inevitable, the cost for our profligacy.
I'll make reality.

Tell me things aren't happening with Biblical scope and urgency.
Tell me the incandescent eye examining all we do is our own only.
I want so much to believe.


Tell me that the corporate parent is capable of feeling.
Tell me they'll ignore this time all profit's psychopathies.
Lie to me.

Tell me that the President doesn't stand in the shadow of an oil
company.
Tell me that the USA is still bigger than BP.
I'll make reality.

Tell me this will galvanize the change the planet needs.
Tell me of the turn of heart where we'll honor living beings.
I want so much to believe.

Trainride

The trees sleep - the leaves murmur,
The grasses read the sun.

Weeds place calls with their seeds.
Vines solve the riddles of the openings.

Reeds absorb raptly the scenery.
Rocks meditate on the world as it is, and as it might be.

The moss listens to the beat in the air.
The higher notes make flower tops quiver.

What goes on inside, despite all this, still hides.
There might as well be nothing but steely eyes.

A Kind of Curse

The resolute stroller
runs ever into resistance
from the birds and the trees and the eyes
—always looking, always absorbing—
something lost on either side:
the self the shells can't provide,
the life the eyes can't ride.

Trevor Arrives

The cat sees what to us is only shadow.
The squeakings in the wall are to him like thunderbolts.
He feels the river flow in air that seems to us invisible.
For him, the moon time glow is lucid with ghosts.

Still, the objects he'd befriended with his scent
In one day disappeared — and he was taken away
To strange after strange place, only to find
At the last one — all his stuff — materialized.

Miraculous, it seems, what we've done here, the work of gods,
How we hurl away his world with just the power of our minds.
The actual cat, meanwhile, love rubs a chair and fans his tail
Before demanding that his food dish go back on top of his rug.

Epic Road Trip #12

With apologies to Jean Shepherd

New York wasn't hoping
for the bigger kids to pick it
when they chose up teams for kickball;
it was doing the picking.

Epic Road Trip #11

We've seen the mighty rivers flow
from one end of the country to the other:
the Gila, Salt, San Juan, Green and Colorado,
the Plattes, Raccoons, Skunk, Sioux and Missouri,
the Mackinaw, Vermillion, Illinois and Mississippi,
the Eel and Wabash, Allegheny and Ohio,
the Monongahela and Youghiogheny, Juniata and Lackawanna,
the Delaware, Schuylkill and Susquehanna.

All of them now seem like prelude
to this blinding torrential rain,
these wild shaking trees,
the Passaic flooding its banks.

We drive from the desert to remind us of the simplest things:
water just forces itself to a sea.

Epic Road Trip #10

With apologies to Mark Twain

There are things one learns driving on the Pennsylvania Turnpike
that can only be learned driving on the Pennsylvania Turnpike.

Epic Road Trip #9

Thistle seeds
fly through the air
without any need to be touched.
The bee swarm veers near
as natural as the breeze,
as smooth as the whirring of the river.
But one look at this Motel in Wheeling
with its slab sides and steel blue doors,
where people have to smoke and drink to survive,
and I realize how humans just resist it all.

Epic Road Trip #8

The place that I was born
could have been my home;
instead of leaving to seek
the solace of the lonely
I could be living their artful lunacy
engineering friendly words
and repairing broken mains
with an accent rounded on the ends
somewhere south of Dayton.

Epic Road Trip #7

Not far from Spoon River
I'm here at Wabash College
where Ezra left a curse
on the folks of Crawfordsville.

Poor upright Indianans
laboring under the vengeful jujitsu
of an occult classicist
with candles to burn.

Epic Road Trip #6

There is still a touch of softness
left in Illinois:
it echoes in the names
La Moille, Du Quoin, Papineau...
Down mad rivers and blue creeks
are deep woods where philosophy flourishes
and love is still a secret.

Epic Road Trip #5

Iowa is a female
whose beauty appears natural, stunning,
but is carefully manufactured—
as if every inch has to have men jump to their deaths.

Epic Road Trip #4

The endless merging of people like rivers
and the corn always falling down the waterfall—
then a break for a walleye with Clamato and bud
at the Depot on Jeffers Street
where one guy talks with a smile
about how every man's thoughts at one point turn to suicide
and two other men converse about
that perfect afternoon spent mixing for Elton John.
You can see the bobbins spin in the Ideal Uniform store
across the street,
and a man come out with a roll of asbestos
from the Nebraska Safety and Fire Equipment building
with the rusted window frames.
They're carefully taking tar off a roof
without leaving a trace of debris.
The North Platte grain elevators are full.

Epic Road Trip #3

for T, a Sun Prairie farm girl with the eyes of a hawk

We drive through Colorado in a May blizzard:
The jaw-dropping gorges are white,
the rivers and pines are diamond encrusted,
the peaks incandescent in white sky.

The pelicans at 10,000 feet fly through realms of frosted light.

All has been purified: the Rifle Baptist Church,
the Parachute Optimists Club, the Silt Chamber of Commerce,
the Glenwood Vapor Caves, the log cabins in the town of No Name,
the A frames on the other side of the abyss,
the Vail golf courses, the falling Breckenridge lakes,
the tin roofs and coal chutes,
the back 40 cedar outhouses in once-black dirt,
the trees growing out from the top of a silo,
the tires laid on tarps that keep the hay dry,
the cow pens with mounds where milking mothers stand.

It's white from Fruita to Frisco, Gypsum to Brush,
as far east as Yuma, Akron and Amherst.
We watch in Ovid some round baled alfalfa
melt into wet golden light.

Epic Road Trip #2

The history of the Earth
is in these red rock cliffs,
the faces, beasts and eyes
dance across the skies with robes and veils
the wars and transformations:
the crowns, stripes and epaulets,
the sacred hieroglyphs exposed,
the fortresses torn into wounds
still wrinkled towers;
the dramas and discoveries:
the pedestals and jowls,
the crevasses of torqued tongues,
the stacked beaks fit to patterns,
the rock weights balanced, about to take wing.
There are secrets, in the drippings,
of the civilizations before humans
but my heart cannot conceive them,
she sees it all as pain -
she can't imagine anything
beyond her own convolutions
in the stone's peaceful tableau.

Red canyons, red rivers, red tablelands
and now the sky
is a sirocco of smoke,
a red wall of silt brought by gale force winds
obscuring all and dissolving like flash powder,
turning the stone forms into phantoms,
leaving a fiery wake of red road and red dune shoulders.

The raindrops, when they come, seem like blood.

Epic Road Trip #1

Another Sunday evening,
kids nestled towards TVs,
parents sneaking trips to distant lands
before their dreams and commute routines.

Only a few stray gusts of wind
give any indication that for us
the voyage is one way.

The shimmering mountains,
Sajuaros unique as people
in stunning silhouette
against a purple sky.
The harsh yellow flowers,
the tears goodbye.

Flowers Leaning Toward the Candle

Evie Paquette Boyd 1917-2010

She dressed up special for Mother's Day
'cos she heard her husband was on his way
to take her home to her three kids there already.
But six are on the ground here still, her peaches and her prizes;
parenthood is nothing but a string of compromises.

Children almost listen to their mother,
as mothers almost listen to the moon.

She burst with all the glamour and wit of a lost world
preserved in moving pictures whose charms are still unfurled.
She collected her first rooster when West Hills was orange groves
and La Cienega was a dirt road.
She called every bishop by his first name, not his rank.
She supervised her grandkids like a general in a tank.

The willow she planted might remember her,
as there might have been in the end time enough together.

While birds careen and flowers bloom
we pray for rest under the sheet of earth—
we only seem to die because
we need to feel the pangs of birth.

I've been in so many families now, it's a blur;
so many have been called back home, so many re-emerged.
The seeds and ashes swirl, our past and present run,
it's all a rising spiral now, indissolubly one.

Commencement

The sand is patterned now with blooms.
The phallic cactus holds still for pictures
on voluptuous hillsܔjust married
toilet paper on its sides. Quails trill
their plumed heads bobbing. I wave
a snake skin that casts forms across the sky.
It's magick but it's only the wind.

Leaving Gram Behind

Photograph by Dominique Tarlé

There was nothing of yourself you showed us, after all—
the dimmest refraction was all it took
to make my world go away
and that of the rare bird suddenly singing
appear from nowhere—
so little came, but that was all, in the end, that I could take.

For innocence needs no defense
but occasionally it seems we need a whispered hint
that the words of the corrupted are not the whole truth.
But to say a word in return that's not
as inarticulate as the wind
is an equal crime.

The suggestion there's a soul beneath
the Jeshua Tree, fighting, even crying
still shows that shameful glow
of Earth, of sin, of mortality's weight.
Angelic eyes have no mouth
and lizards voice the sacred from the mud.

Some babies never can stop crying,
they never learn to cultivate
the space inside their heads.

777 - #30

30 days in Manhattan in the 777 apartment

Kwabena hands me my phone
and I go out alone
on the red elevator with the Fragonard sky
to a night that brings out the New Jersey.
New York is a bulldog, a Hebrew song.
The cat in the window is gone, but the face
of Emily Dickinson still promotes her garden.

777 - #29

We argue like two red-winged blackbirds.
All conflict returns to the one.
Look, now, at what all our thoughts have become
that crabapple bloom in the pond
still, but it moves forever on.
We can't fault the water for falling.
Two ducks stand as still now as stones.

777 - #28

On the streets of Chelsea a vision

It's for the eye - as long as it's not seen,
the human stone, constructed pine and sunbeam.
It's for the ear - as far as it's attuned
to sounds of love, that weren't attended to.
And so we roam - make every heaven home
and never know how far we've had to come
to reckon our reflection with hello.

777 - #27

A homeless poet chants his silence
at the Greenwich Village carnival
where well-lit diners douse with grease the alcohol
and mini-skirts are hitched within a heel-inch of life.
The heroes are all dead - inside the galleries,
no agit-prop or indie-rock announced on vacant factories.
The revolution will not be visible.