Another Adoration of the Divine

I don't know...

if artists have a moral compass:
when everything is beautiful
good and bad can be so nebulous,
when our faintest gasp of feeling
deeply echoes in the seas,
when the face is only seen
in our constant rearrangements,
when the colors that are missing
are those not yet painted in,
when the lesson's in the working
through the masks and the materials,
the grand unveiling nothing
but a stone that fell to earth.

All I know...

the graffiti in the tunnels
is always darker
—no flowers here—
curses.

James Joyce

Who this gizmo sez my writing style is most like. From the Spanish of Jorge Luis Borges.

In one day of man are all days
of time, descending inconceivable
from the initial one, when a terrible
God prefigured the agonies and days,
to that other, the ubiquitous stream
of terrestrial time, the source of its flow
the Eternal, extinguished in the now,
the future, the past, what is passing is mine.
Between dawn and darkness is the universal
story. Descending to night I can view
at my feet the path of the Hebrew,
Carthage destroyed, Glory and Hell.
Grant me, Lord, the courage and joy
to scale the pinnacle of this day.
Cambridge, 1968

Toward Rain as an Everyday Thing

blue bridges

restless anonymity
in Melrose windows
a glassy mind

pallets - oh my heart! - in piles
behind wire
giant spools of pine
wind thick black cable

the stones are painted brown

one day there'll be rain instead of bagpipes
the only sound
now
a voice in Hindi
trembling like black mud

silos of self-storage
on weed-cloaked hills
hold the stuffing
they used to make in
factories here

black glass
broken
cage covers
ripped
a window hole
dug
in concrete
where once
was glass

rusted warehouse windows
with blue frost panes

the girl in the silver t-shirt sits
alone
on a sofa
under the overpass
that's the busiest highway in the world

black stencils
on the back of a billboard
rust veils
on the base of its pole

an iron window
slanted open
horizontal
like the white florescent tubes
inside the anvil dark
tool n'dye
shop

illegal colors
on the mansions
in Bridgeport

the rain
turns tree bark
green
tree stumps
rust red
makes manhole covers
brim
with waters
makes them shine
muddy power lines
back

A Vision of the Future

As children we play
with money all day

But the mighty Bronx
takes us
on its back

Through snares of trees
snag ragged weeds

We all be Niggahs nah
espalda mojadas
ahora

Self-Portrait

I worship my heroes at the break of day,
Scour the paper for when they're in town,
Defend them in absentia against the common lot,
Connect them with the sublime ones in a compact whole.

I put on myself the colors of my heroes,
Show allegiance to the cause with bumper stickers,
See their pale reflections outside my window,
Dream before their pictures on my computer screen all day.

In a world of people they express things right,
They say, as one man, all a man can say,
They lift themselves, with sweat and vision, to a rarefied plane,
Through natural force never live the compromised life.

Oh, I know that there is darkness behind the drive
But it never comes across, except transformed
—All that they've lived turns back into gold.
They bring, from some other realm, an ineffable feeling.

But it's not what they do but who they are that counts;
They're just like me, these people that aren't real,
I don't know who they are, if they even exist
But I know that they've lived the same life I have.

The gurus and hierophants try to tell me
They are parts of myself, just like people in a dream,
That creating and perceiving are identical twins
That unify as one. But I won't believe,

I bow down to the icons as if to God,
Keep track of all they do, like a mother
Keeps her child's hair and feces in a book.
I imagine them on beaches with their families

Sharing what we share, with society's validation,
The sense that something in our eyes revolves
Around them...but maybe it's not our hopes and fears
They're carrying, we only will them to be.

There are no dreams of mine they haven't captured—
Maybe it's not their dreams, but they themselves.
Maybe it's not them, but some strange mirror,
Better to have something, than nothing, there.

Prayer of Thanks with Songbirds

The sun reveals the poems
that magic black night leaves:
a granary of knowing
where all is as it seems,

no larger than the current trails
inside the whispering trees,
no smaller than the vast machines
that churn out ways to see

if not for the whirring
of the solitary
turning like an owl's head
all around

to the orchestra in the leaves,
all music save the tiny sight
of finch and chickadee
flying between boughs quickly.

So inexplicable
the codes and the notes,
how they connect
every tree in the world

Montale in New Canaan

"né più mi occorrono
Le coincidenze, le prenotazioni,
le trappole, gli scorni di chi crede
che la realtà sia quella che si vede."- Eugenio Montale, Xenia II

You dissolve like sugar in the lemon juice, til
you are just that gift of surf, the catch
in an oriole's song, the footfall that is almost
inaudible...
Signs without lives of their own,
never love, because never absence
(though they possess us as any lover,
dole out all we know with the perversity of the divine).
You rush through the vistas
of mountains and streams for the glimpses
in the golden air of the unfamiliar
remembered, but there's only a painful
reminder, that the lover, the great invisible,
is you, just as it's painful to remember
that other people are also angels, equally ghosts.

The fireflies rise, in an emerald evening,
dim enough to hold all our dreams
but too bright to offer salvation.
Then schrapnel thunder, that makes audible stars.

Summer Afternoon

"Air without stripes" - Barbara Guest

Pools blue as hydrangeas,
rocks sick with white
inflamed in light's desire
that twinkles as the wind soothes by,
for the sun demands a mirror
in the thinnest of skins and leaves,
even the flower-bloated bees
that come out from honeysuckle
hidden in the vine battalion depths
to ignite the air with the hue of their cry
stew in their own juices
yearning to cool, leaning to nests
as if nature was one long, lascivious bed
for sleep that swims in visions.

All that can live
is alive now
this large day.
Summer must be
as leisurely as streams,
as generous as crystal
to hold it all inside.

Desire for Switzerland

I thought that tree was my friend
yesterday - it had that color I liked,
the deep green remembered from long ago -
today there is only the gray of the whole.

There was a time I was one with that tree.
I picked it out from all the others in the woods.
I decided to like it, and, finding it mine,
felt divided from the others I shunned.

Now comes the time when such judgment is gone,
when things once so clear seem unknown,
when I must let each tree release to one breath
and not retch at my own emptiness.

But how can I move to the unity to be
when I can't feel its central beat?
How can it be that I traipse this new world
where all that is revolves around nothing?

Two by Du Fu

Unworthy translations of the Master

Goose Alone

goose alone eats not
flies and calls misses flock
none remember it
in cloud vein chase lost
looks as if it sees
thinks that it can hear
mindless ducks answer
mixed up totally

Autumn Meditations (5)

Gods island palace - south side
catch dew through gold stem - high sky
west side - jade lake - falls - queen mom
east comes - mist - purple - fills pass
tail of cloud peacock - lifts gate
sun surrounds dragon scale face
cold river shocked - year's so late
how long to watch blue chains play

The Fence

This magnificent prison,
how gorgeous its window on the world
(nothing but a dark mirror),
how invisible our captors
(how immense their fears).

What a thing it is, isn't it?
The art of corralling the human spirit!

Our thoughts are all of our freedom
as we follow the yellow lines
proud that it's obedience we are choosing.
How attentive we are to the convolved logic,
how we cling to repeated phrases, manufactured facts,
how rules so malleable seem so unbending to us.

We worship slaves who dress like Cleopatra
and speak like Cicero.
We take our orders from predators
on the other side of the argument
against murder, child molestation, rape...
They do their best work there,
while we contend among ourselves
in smaller debates.

Go to the fence, it's barely noticeable,
see what's there to throw you off the scent:
the media, the brainwashed neighbors, the camera eye.

Granted, some will be sacrificed,
they caused [insert disaster here] to further their plans,
and they leave only pastel shades of opinion
for us to wear like clothes.
But the truth
is not something you can name,
it's more like a feeling
that flows from fact to irreconcilable fact
without regard to the form or the motive.

Life just is, there is no real
argument from those who oppose it.

They are as hidden, and can hold us, just as much
as the non-material power to which we surrender in prayer,
that does not answer, but whose silence
only helps us.

Connecticut Morning

The sun always chides me to grow up,
become impeccable, for once.
But the fog this morning arrives dying,
never quite articulating what it is
except to cover the trees
and obscure the bay.

Clarity is another game,
a way of hiding the heart
from its all-knowing largeness
—it hurts as it hurts,
all pain is locked inside it, all joy.
The buildings only disappear.

How I want them to feel, and to think,
these faces of stone, how,
when I let that desire go
the light in the window
recognizes me.
The sun beams descend as blessings.

The white sun turns my head down.
Dark reflections play nearby.
Ah, the endless pose of forced humility.
Nothing ever hurts me but myself:
reading disapproval in the darkness,
feeling vulnerable in the light.

The fog has lifted from the river
as if it was never here.
The voices come back, crying for love.
My choice is to give what I can.
Let all creatures stay where they are.
To move them, I must first kneel down.

The Impossible Orgasm of Sense

To Veronica

One can only truly hear
white water rolling
back black rocks
when the eyes are closed.

One can only smell the cedar
in the salt spray
when the sun glare takes away
the sumac and the sea roses.

One can only see the sea
as a fish would, in a world
without sound or fragrance—
the overlapping sheens, and not

what they seem to mean.
Immerse yourself in the cold brine.
The ocean is endless.
It stops at your skin.

The Whale in the Men's Room

Some people are like the sea, they feel and know
it all, but cannot say one word,

For talking just distorts our deep connection.
The tiniest of nods is full of grief.

I see a lady crying to herself, unbridgeable
with um's and ah's—even a glance disturbs the purity.

Minds like stars are so deep inside us
they seem impossibly far away.

Oh the horror if we found out the greatness
That empties out of us in every moment.

The Shadow of Baphomet

The man who speaks of Satan
becomes Satan, in his speaking,
as I become him speaking, with my ear.

You'd think there would be nothing
to this conjuring, except some feeling
and some words, for something missing,
some absence in our wounds

—but real smoke comes from clanging pipes,
the dark spots merge to one, the pistons
on the ever-churning machine can be seen
ripping some psyche, some flesh, to shreds.

The window shutter flaps—
the demons and the law
hold the room in stillness,
but the hinge can always be elbowed free
to blue light and the golden trees.

The Quiet Companion

The train is crying...gliding through the town
as if it's in a cloud.
It's hard to notice, after such a prolonged silence
That still it isn't speaking from its mind.

The train is crying...one thinks of all the tears
one cannot cry
—For all the pain that one has caused and never known,
And how this train must truly be a friend.

The train is crying...as if it is exhaling
from the sky.
The glass receives and shapes the flow the same as you or I.
It is a finer feeling, a bravery in place of mere transcending.

The train is crying...but now
it's so well hidden
That one could almost swear it was the rain.
What lies beneath it? Behind my desperation for the real?

Poem for My Father

The softness of my father's eyes
blessing all we did with light.
How gentle were his hands
that built houses, washed clothes, cooked meals,
and all of it accomplished just for us
so we could know the fruits of endless love.
"It's what I do," he said, as if there were
no dreams of his own he couldn't share.

He kept us all on time
but there was always time, in him, for us,
to hear our endless tales of poop,
to pretend he couldn't hit the pitches we threw,
to read that same book over again
with the same ridiculous French accent
until we stopped laughing at the word magog,
to persist with me for what seemed like years
until I solved that one math problem.

He taught us how to see: the tree rings,
the leaf veins, the colors in the daffodil.
He taught us how to hear: what people needed
in what they said, the hidden trill
inside each person's voice.
He taught us not to be afraid, of horseshoe crabs
or bumblebees. He showed us it was safe to cross
the felled tree laid across the creek.
He taught us how to say prayers to the frogs and to the oaks -
how it's wrong to slap a mosquito.
We learned from him to love all people equally,
how to ask for what we wanted, how to give without a thought,
how to make mistakes and change, how success begins within.

We always knew to brush our teeth, feed the dog, and say "thank you."
We always knew that other kids only wounded when they felt wounds.

But of all I learned, it's me that I remember,
how I caught the biggest fish, and won the sailing race,
and sounded just as witty as the President
at the adult dinner party.
It mattered that I didn't cry when I skinned my knee,
it mattered that the moon was red, and that my bike was stolen from
me.
I didn't have to waste time thinking where my life would someday
lead,
I could be anything I wanted, there was nothing not allowed.

We read Melville and the Fisher King, and he talked of human
weakness.
I asked how far the stars went back, and he told me all the theories,
and how they all were one, and that I'd have to learn the truth
all by myself.

He always loved me as I was, greasy hair and all,
but saw me try to be like him, and gently, gently frowned.

No emergency at home could raise his voice or bring fear
to his eyes - no dying cat, or broken lamp, or stolen groceries.
He never missed a day of work, or baseball game, or concert,
he always helped us pick up trash from the bay,
and went to all my boy scout camps, and told the scariest stories.

I wonder if I've been half as good
in teaching golden lessons to my own
(as if my kids had thought of them themselves);
in answering every question
(in ways they'd understand);
in showing them how saws and ropes (and, sometimes, women)
worked;
in joining in their play as more than guest,
but as teacher, as coach.

The only answer I receive to this is
love is truth, and truth is love,
and these, indeed, have been my memories.
They ring for me much clearer and more real
than what is actual:

the eggshells, the shaming, the wine.

Harlem in a Clear Red Light

As the day thins, people have turned into images.
They've leapt into the aethers
Like sparks off of the grid,
Like stars that leap like pity
Across these roiling faces
To outline constellations.

The buildings have stopped pretending
That they are of three dimensions.
They are but tones of sunlight
Like the dust in open air.
Everything's invisible
Except what lives in mirrors.

The trees they move too fast now,
Too fast to even see.
The mind moves through the planet
In their leaves.
The majesties of form
Quiver emptily.

How terrified to think this isn't real,
That we can just create it with our eyes,
These perfect harbors and desolate trash
Equally. How pleasing that the world can never see us
Except in shining windows
Of a late, late afternoon.

Morning with Phantoms

The other side is knocking.
There are no words
But I feel the need for purity in my own.

The dead can defend themselves,
It's the living who hold onto hope
That they can re-write another mind
With thoughts of their own.

The viscera resumes its endless adaptation.
The Bronx fills up again with Jewish ghosts
Paletted on stone, in hieroglyph graffiti
That stands alone, each one, even still.

The other side is knocking
But there is not a sound.
I feel the shift of frequencies like a voice.

I must go on, touching without holding on,
Knowing only what is not to be known,
Seeing in what is shown how edges are just beginnings.

In a Silent House

The wind speaks its mind, the walls can't agree
But something is conveyed, in things that pass.
A ghost rocks the chair, a laughter we must bear in the air

How the effects we have caused were no hitch at all
To the ways pieces fall into place.
It's just how the classroom is arranged.

In flesh we can't see those precise symmetries,
They seem like our own sad mistakes, chaos, waste
But the bell rings the lessons, home to the past.

And the path is always freedom, to the order of things.
It glistens but does not change, for all our rearrangements.
The center moves no less than the one inside of us.

It's a shifting of sorts, the dream of a door,
A tremble in the sheer window dressings
Like the trembling at the far end of the void.

What knowledge can come with these consolations?
A twin that goes silent, filling our shadows,
A sound out of nowhere, owning our hearts.

Momentarily Between Worlds

By a corrugated town, the Mexican witch doctor
rascals up the foam that's drawn from smoke:

"In the North magnetic cities
where the brainwaves make things move
one must stay always frenetic
to maneuver round the rooms of brick
dismantled and resumed - where skeletons
have turned to history books
and then to Peruvian menus.

"How much better to imagine owls
in the layers of the sunset
with calm tones when the spring moon shivers
say it's just the way things are.

"The skateboard princes roll the tar
by mangy vine and stoop-stones of dragons and lions;
so quick do things turn stale there,
how easily dilapidated,
how soon the children try to sound like birds.

"Here the evening sun is unadorned
and virgin truth surrounds us like a song,
and we can stare and stare and never get
one hemi-quaver closer. The fire melts
the keening mind, til the wind speaks in our voice...

"Not like those blue horizons
where sailheads bob like trees
shuddering while minds like crows
behind them strive to stay hidden.
The secret there's in knowing
the who, what, where and when,
and remembering that all such facts
resolve to contradiction.

"Here, all mysteries must stay, we can't retain
even an ink stain of this moment
and we wouldn't think to argue
with the birds or with the stars.
The valley floor can only be
imagined...

"No pivot point
for freedom's painful upward roar."

Quan Yin on the Beach

The nose desires this scent,
the eye devours this horizon,
the ear attends to chimes
that voice the air.

So the senses express
their true, undying natures
in a unifying phrase
that feeds on all that is
and therefore feeds it back,

And on all that is false,
for there's nothing to apprehend
but the whirr of right and wrong,
and nothing to be gained
by recognition
but separation's spark.

The only thing to hear
in the breathing of the waves
is the pause that comes between
that some call silence.

June 2, 2010

Falling off the Mountain R.I.P.

The colors in the sand your breath has now dispersed
:: that way the dead remember living


We talked with nothing but quiet
:: centuries passed but did not stop


Look! I improvised the moon
:: still the ocean sighs for what is missing

Small Resistances in the Stream

Young suits and old suits
read the paper like a holy scroll
as graffiti wild as trees flies by
making mockeries of museums.

The blackberry boxes make promises:
new clarities of knowledge,
to be part of something larger.
We can chatter back our thoughts.

The lawyers in their bowties
spilling beer upon their briefs
turn quiet as they see in darkened glass
a ghost image of a breast.

The only person talking is a 50-something woman
about how numb this world's become.
It's the age now of the crone,
plain truth is revelation.

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.