I watch my love,
almost a mermaid,
standing in the kiss
of shoreline and ocean,
washing sand from
her glistening form.

In the pause
between tides
I tie a hope line,
strong as
my inglorious life,
to her toe.

She swims through it,
hardly noticing my intent,
only her friends
crowding around,
reflecting her noise.

Shadows pass her face,
gravely drip
down her body
as her rising beauty
drifts away from me
and the setting sun.

Winter  
The rain sheds  precious jewels this winter night,
the oaks untangle their branches in clarity,
musky solidarity, and affirmation of their place,
an unlearned wisdom  of existence  that
allows them to bear the staggered light of
unhurried clouds spreading their endless
laughter to all those fixed below.

Fall
The cold, crisp wind of change kisses
and abandons all the oaks of the field.
They shiver off their acorns knowing
they must be naked for the dark days ahead.
The clouds dark smiles are just beginning
to bear their light for winter’s derision.

Summer
The sunshine dances with the wind
and the oaks of the forest sway
in the merriment of unfiltered days.
They embrace a child’s shadow,
generously mixing it with their own,
bearing a tempered light for those
who breathe beneath their branches.

Spring
Diamonds of rain embellish the thirsty oaks
and they drink it in in tangled unity,
not scornful of the others judgement.
Fickle clouds grudgingly bear the light
until the sun forces them to share
its unending generosity with everything below.

Its leaves fold,curl in
Their grip yields to the cold wind
The elm knows their loss

The tongue
     remembers
all the death
     it has tasted.
It teaches us the
     name and memory
of things.
     The aquae of
the  womb’s ocean
     as it dries in the
first gasp of air.
     The vitae  
coughing out  
     so the lungs
can start its
     invisible cycles
of dying
     and renewing.
The taunt
     of the nose  
denying forever  
     the tongue’s
right to taste
     the light of light,
claiming
     the invisible
for itself,
     the visible
for the eyes
     and the mortal
for the body’s
     flapping corpus.
The sal of flesh
     as it tastes the  
lechum of breast.
     The tongue knows
the Unami of vowels
     before the first words
spoken and heard.
     The sweetness of
the first thought
     before it dries in the
sourness of memory.
     That the first honeyed  
almond greeting is refined  
     from bitter goodbyes.
That leaving home
     tastes like oranges.
That love tastes like chocolate
     and the newborn like rice.
The tongue knows
     from its time with the ocean
that the smell of death
      usurps the silence
of a mother’s caress,
     the waves of all her
sobs and tears
     until the sweet salt
is the last everything
     it only always knew.

If you accept the apple
you must accept the bite,
the lips that bit the flesh,
the legs that climbed the tree,
the eyes that looked and lusted
for what was in between and above
the white cleft rising in the speckled light,
all the crucifixes after and the rising flags since.

On my father’s house
three slaves and six horses
died when the old stable blazed
a  century and a half ago,
and three union and
two confederate soldiers
slayed each other
in a forgotten skirmish
a few years later.
Their skeletons were found
two years after the war
under an uprooted white pine.
The county let the field return to forest,
except for the old stable.

My father, a nonresident,
cut a dirt road through
the upper quarter,
built a cottage house
over the old stable,
a gate house fifty yards leeward
with a pond in back
and a large windowed manor
that cut a wing between
earth and sky
just beyond
at the edge
of the rocky wrack line to the bay.

Until the houses settled in,
the earth screeched its pain
and revealed its ossified sorrows.
After years this plot
finally  accepted his tranquility.  

My father died and was cremated
far away from this adopted place,
He  returned only because
his will demanded
his celebration of life
take place here.

Except for the family,
who undutifully held
onto their allotted share
of his ashes, the attending
mutes, sobers, wailers and criers
faithfully flung
his cremains in the breeze.
They watched, cried,
bemoaned and wailed
as every speck
refused to settle
and blew out to the bay.

No bad guy talks alone
to a Bible in a hotel room
with a gun in his hand.

“If a man commits adultery
with the wife of his neighbor both
the adulterer and the adulteress
shall surely be put to death…”

the good book says or
he thinks in a cold sweat.

That’s how he met Cynthia.
She was fearless.
That’s how she became his whole life.

He’s not humbling himself.
He’s not learning.
He’s not even listening.

It offers him words of love.
“YOU ARE NOT ENOUGH!”

“God loves you
with his whole heart.
He loves you.”

He looks up to the ceiling
and lifts the gun up.
“Can you save me?”

My grief is stillborn, not consoled by the hope
of replacement of another good little boy or girl
with brown paws and a gentle lick,
another Anne or Tom with eyes that cry of heaven
and a bright mind that can write lines of cerulean clarity or calculate pi to the twentieth decimal,
a wife named All  or a husband named Trust,
a mother named Everything who can  feel,
understand the 10, 000 aches of my  soul,
or a father named Generosity who is there
for every birth, graduation and funeral.  
Everything and All that is  trusting
and generous can never be replaced.

My grief is a suicide that can’t be understood
by the generous and trusting,
everything that has come before
and everything that will happen since.
My grief is not yours and yours is not mine.
I can’t share it with you, only bear it.
All we have in common is tears
that fill a cup of pain and enough salt
to line a Margarita glass, the next
bunch of circular steps till the watch stops
and someone opts us for ash or six feet under.
You cant understand anything of my grief
until you have lost your Everything and All.

My grief is space, a dark, long, lonely void,
like a lost astronaut spiraling away from earth.
There is no consolation in the idea
that at least he won’t be suffering for long,
that God won’t give him more than he can bare
and then some. He doesn’t care that he has all space
to feel the slow asphyxiation that comes
with the release of gravity.  His parents will
still be earthbound, feeling the heavy loss,
forever looking up and wondering
why the sky took their joy away.
The world will let them cry just
as I cry for his floating away.

Tell me a story when I grieve and cry.
For I am a poet and need the comfort of words.
For I need the art that lives and can be passed around.
For I need to know what you don’t know.
For I need to show Everything and All.
For I need to imagine everything you can’t.
For I need the action of your kindness and time.
Grant me your generosity and trust.
Grant me the power of your pardon,
the grace of an honest look,
the sincere utterance of I’m sorry,
for when you lack the words
I know all the generous, trusting, healing ones.

If I shut the border,
no one will shut their window,
hide in their closet,
lock their door.

They would shake the blinds of moths,
bring the dog in from the doghouse,
let the cat feast after the mouse hole
has been plugged with a door wedge.

In the distance
the train whistle blows
dispersing mist and rain.
No one steps off nor boards.

The bird nest is not abandoned.
The hollow of the tree stays hollow.
Nothing has shut down at all.

My pen scribbles a poem
only to watch the black words
return to the reservoir.

I open the dictionary to the word “hope”,
but the page refuses to settle
until I put all the words in them
face down on the writing table.

My stoma grumbles louder than my stomach.
I shut my cancer in the mother-of-pearl.
My wife’s cancer is placed in the
small valise of all our memories.

I can’t shut down the museum.
It already is.
I can’t shut down the cinemas.
They already are.
Only the pharmacies are open.

I shut down my mouth
on my broken jaw
with five missing teeth
only to feel the maw of death.

I shut down the ash of my childhood
into a golden urn of my own design.

I shut down America, I shut down God,
putting them both between the now
empty covers of the dictionary missing hope.

I shut down my passions, my emotions
in the moldy basement of my despair.
My shut down love is chained in the dungeon.

Shut up, shut down,  I repeat  to myself,
until those words lose all definition,
until my lips are sealed in pain and
the only thing left is my total shutdown.

Again, today,
the cowboy will close
his eyes
and listen to the hooves
of wild horses
all around him

knowing that
his well-trained palomino
will take him home
like a lover
who knows
what his lust wants—

knows the way to him,
through the black covers
of that dark room—

even as the returning
creates and then destroys the
greening prairie, the chambray wind.

I listen to his wheeze
and watch the machine ascend
for a full breathe then
fall back down again
and know I must trek
to the mountain once again.

Like my mother, heedless of  
self and for my  sake,  
will he snap twig after        
twig to point my safe return?

She died clutching a small cross,
a loblolly branch,
her bones resting on
Appalachian
soil, open to the sky and
animals delight
like her ancestors.

She was a feather.
He is a boulder.  
I can’t lift him on my back.
He will roll down the mountain.
I can only drag him
and watch the pebbles and dirt
cascade down to their beginnings.
Pull him to last breath.  

I hear a twig snap
and his hand falls to his side.
I release him to the dirt
and the mountain cradles him
as I stumble home.

“I will pick you up after
chemo,” my wife says
the next day, as I watch her  
drive down the mountain
road, listening to
branches snapping in the fog.

My mother wanted me to go away.
I hardly sent her anything.
From behind, we all look alike.

A bicycle splashes
over a puddle
and its aura
reflects down
the streetlights
praying halos
on the umbrellas
of the pedestrians
that pass under.

Down the block
two stop signs
on opposite streets
both signal WALK,
letting the crisscross
of the quotidian begin.

This moment it’s
a blue umbrella
******* around
a red one.

Earlier a chihuahua
in a poncho sniffs
and wants to nip
at the English bulldog
wearing a Mac
in the pouring rain.
(Is it so strange.)

Hours later a woman
in a white dress
and black high heels
will struggle with
the designer handbag
slung on her left shoulder
and the Bergdof’s bag
grasped tight in her right.

The crossing mother
with the black stroller
sings a shushing lullaby,
hardly noticing
the little stumble.

Oh how,
The city releases
its spectacle of life
when it rains.

I treat the future as past,
a bright yellow house I inhabited,
filled with broken furniture
needing repair, replacement, to be
quickly put to the match or just all thrown out.
There is a kitchen with pots and pans
everywhere and much flour dusting everything—
and bread, bread, bread, so so so much bread.  
Maybe I will keep that aqua sofa with
the broken frame and pop-out spring
or that oil portrait of my dead father
with the eye gouge that makes it look that his
ghost is still watching over me.
My mother (God rest her soul) was
my door and she took the door with her.

I wish I could claw out
a space for her in the
partial darkness beyond
but she  refuses
to move from her space in my
soul’s basement in a way I
can not hammer through at all.
Only the heartbeat and
breath we clearly share moves forward.
She was a great dancer
but I could never learn the right steps.
Oh mother, mother dance for me again,
in the distant, distant horizon.

I try on my death suit regularly,
and even after my cancer surgery,
it’s still too long in the arms and legs..

This year I did manage to find a
comfy pair of shoes in a size 9 1/2
that don’t make my toes numb.

in a few years I will come into a
nice inheritance and will be able to
afford a tailor that will get it right.

In Elsinore the poppies grow
Despite the constant selfies show
     That stake their place in yellow high,
      No birds photo bomb their big I
Show not seen by same throngs below.

We are the influencers you know.
We shine, svelte pose, for good ad flow,
     Post for your likes, so we can lie,
        In poppy groves.

Take your quarrel elsewhere you trolls:
You will follow us we all know
     Your phones, held high to your good side.
      Poseurs keeping faith with the lie
That your green screen poppies all grew
          In Elsinore fields.

I should have broken my back by now
with my lupine spine,
feet screaming as if in a wolf trap.
My outrage prowls the low valley
searching the arid land for water
to slack the thirst,
the howl inside.
Once there was real silence
but no answer.
Now, rage is my lone truth.
The lamb has been eaten.
Nothing stays in my broken jaw.
What is caught just slips away.
The times are always lean
for those who howl alone.

Outside of town a man died
naked beneath a nice tree.

Some said  he was old
and that the tree was an elm.
Some said he was young
and that it was an oak.
Others, that he was a child
and that it was a magnolia.

The only thing they agreed on:
that he was naked, dead, under a tree
and they felt sorry for him.

So, the Widow Smith secretly
dressed him in her husband’s best shirt
because she was still mourning
the loss of Tom’s chest.

Mr. Aglet, who owned the shoe store,
privately donated the old Nike’s
Timmy abandoned when he went to Harvard
because Aglet missed Timmy putting them on.

Haberdasher Scye donated his swankiest cufflinks-
the one’s left behind when a newlywed customer
learned that his wife was in labor—
because Scye hated the look of an unadorned shirt.

He then gave his favorite top hat
for no man should be buried with bad hair,
his finest knee-high dress socks
because that’s what funeral’s demand.

He than gifted his finest silk tie,
a nice leather belt of the man’s waist size,
and just to finish the look

a properly somber black jacket and pants.

Optometrist Eyear noticing the man
was squinting rather oddly
crafted a fine pair of designer spectacles
that fitted perfectly on the dead man’s nose.

Everyone in town felt good about their gifts
and the funeral was well-attended.
It wasn’t until he was deep under
did they notice that they forgot the underwear.

They found them, the next day,
the one thing that knew him best,
hanging high in the branches of the tree.

The trick is to love life,
even when you have
no stomach for it-

even when your life
crumbles to burnt paper
in your hands-

your throat choking in its ashes,
embers turned tearing diamonds,
weighing you down in grief’s obesity.

“How can a body withstand this?”
you will ask, cradling your face
in your palms- your ordinary face

now, no dark smile, no deep black eyes,
just your ”yes, yes, ” uttering in
the rebirthing dawn “I will love you, again.”

Brother, I await you outside the window
amongst the night traffic zoom and scent of pine,

story sitting on the throat’s knife edge,
the truth unable to roll out from blood fear.

Mother, I feel your harsh breath outside my soul.
Father, your praise is hidden in the hot stones.

Brother, the moon slices you,
tripling fear across the unforgettable,

a memory haunting a thousand of my nights.
How can I love the ghosts of those beings I hate

or hate the shadows of things I truly love in light?
Brother, I know what I can only imagine.

In the night, I know your hand is there, all in mine.
I imagine the cold breath of stones.

To ride the subway clutching half dead roses
in a paper bag is to know that shadows
have weight, light has gravity and geometry
exists in algorithms of pain, that  sadness
is  a reflection of the loneliness of space and time.

Even the sisters under the MTA map,
one cradled in uneasy sleep
in the cleft of the other’s shoulder,
the woke one staring mournfully ahead
as the cab lights alternate between
jaundice station hues and tunnel blacks,
are aware that they are moving grave stones.

The lovers awkwardly  kissing in the next seat,
her eyes slightly open not meeting his gaze,
their heads tilted so far their faces misalign,
exist in the uncertain promise of intimate connection.

A woman stealthily smoking nooses of ash
steps on, cradling  a crying cup of coffee,
while an old man with a cane holding a
rattling tin of coins blindly exits to the platform.

At the top of the exit, the nearest brownstone
has a family gathering to take a clan photo,
their impatient gazes exposing the micro spaces
between their existence and their own lonely thoughts.

When I roam the real forest
grumpy apple trees spit their spoiled rotten children on
my shoulders knowing I will collect them
and mash their cores into cider.

Their leaves refuse to form shadows nor shade me, letting
the sun scorch my monk’s crown deep cardinal red.

The weeping willows shed snickers not tears.

The oaks refuse their goodness  
and discernment, all their wisdom.

Around me the trees stir in their leaves
and call out “***** coming!”

Yet, I shade the thing I love
even as they shout out, “Go away, away.
Go home. Go home now.”

Still, my little Pomchi girl knowing forest from the trees
bows down to ***, bends backwards to ****
in full glory of all the angry, angry leaves.  

Note:
The Mary Oliver poem mimicked here can be read at:

https://www.brainpickings.org/2019/09/23/amanda-palmer-mary-oliver-when-i-am-among-the-trees/

What is the land
but dust
but mountains
but forrest
but mud
but lost sorrow

What is sorrow
but torn soul
but wounded skin
but a trail of tears.

This day
the Chickasaw
Choctaw
Creek
Seminole
Cherokee

wipe the
white mans dirt
off their right foot
with their left foot

wipe the buffalo’s blood
off their right hand
with their left hand

walk ******
bare right foot
to wounded left foot  
on the dust
of their ancestors
their sacred hills

walk away from
The Great Spirit
to the not greater
white man’s God
slow sad right foot
to slower left foot.

Walk dragging their
dead still right foot
to still left foot
far away from the sun
of their monumental land

to this country
of bullets and blood
marching, running
blue right foot
towards gray left foot
in a frenzy to *****
bronze monuments
to all their dead

And when they cry it’s
the prayer of the white man
buried in Indian pain

May the wind
that is blowing
now and always
the dust of our memory
blow beyond your
fear of us
and all different
colored spirits

May the wind
turn from you
and only return
until you love not
the scars you
put on our backs

May you open your
eyes to unbuilt land
and see finally
The Great Spirit
calling every one
to share the
sacred hills
even the dust
with all that
have always walked
right foot to left foot

In the hospital room
the doc watches Death come,
last breath a quiet sigh
surrounding the crash of stats.
He has visited Death’s country  
and left with its blue bruise stamp
on his wrist and heart,  
very thoughts.
No goodbyes.  No regrets. None.
Just schemes to betray it
when it tries to betray him
wrapped in a hospital sheet.
He save what Death stole.
He pull life out by the heels.
He rebirth it again,
give it years.
Death’s revenge took his mom first.
His dad made it two grave stones.
Today his pockets were all full
of Death’s black-blue pebbles.
The plague was blooming,
the pollinators were keen.
The world was a Kaddish,
torn cloaks and moans.
He saw blood through the sheets:
the new nature was just
now beginning its Spring bloom.

Super Nova

I destroy the gold house
inside my soul—

the nova of light on
gold archway, gold mantle,
gold walls.  The last bits of

real places that once shined.
l thought, forever

in the aura of sun-
shine on once
gold rooftop, gold windows,

gold doors. Look in,
search and see, find: black gold

steeped in the dark
burned down to ash of
gold wood, gold grass

the once gold streets, gold hills
all around my dead sun.


This dead sun will never rise, rise
and shine its light
to my gold soul.

On the white dry limbs of the sycamore, disrobing
bark etiolated in spring flash, three doves roost.  

“Peace,” they coo to the desire of my heart
to calm the violent world so like
the Lord’s small ship in the tempest ere
the rebuke of wind, sea, the faithless in their fear.

I will be kind.  Spread soothing balm
over the skin once pierced by thorns and
the white scars opened in bath water, on sheets-
the unknowns, red under the sycamores.

The ark doves cast the waters, one roosts the cross,
becoming a miracle if watched too closely
until fluttering wings burst it beyond symbols.
The world exists neither parched nor flooded, only
benefiting when sun and rain fall in good time.

The message flies everywhere further than what
I gave, circling calm and slow in every breeze.
I watch the three doves return to the
hallow ease that prods them to make their nest
on the white dry limbs of the sycamore.

“Don’t make me bury you,” the elder
spoke to the younger
over the phone,
knowing that his child
had inherited all his demons.

“I will support you
if you want to do rehab,”
he whispered,
that old Harry Chapin Song,
Cat’s in the Cradle,
about fathers and sons
circling in his head;

his son’s new one,
Harlem River Blues,
kicking it off the loop:

Lord, I'm goin' uptown
to the Harlem River to drown 
***** water gonna cover me over  
And I'm not gonna make a sound …”

“I won’t,”  the son
promised his father.
A click and a dial tone
was the final statement.

That night
Justin Townes,
named after
Townes van Zandt,
the folk oracle
that was his dad’s mentor,
died alone
in a Nashville apartment.
A mixture of  
******* laced with fentanyl
was found in his blood.
He was just 38.

When a child dies
the father no longer a dad,
no longer
the parent of Justin Townes,
or just J.T.,
his first little boy,
adopts his own identity back,
rears it fondly in memory,
burying the child’s legacy
until the erosion of time
files him down
to his birth name,
just plain old Steve-
Stephen Fain Earle
from Fort Monroe, Virginia.

When Townes died
he did a tribute album.
When his old demons returned
he released a tribute album.
When grief surrounded him
and the whiskey bottled beckoned
Steve mined J.T.’s  catalog
for a ten song tribute session
that can be done with that rock sneer
they both shared.  

The only thing that mattered
was that it be released
on the day of what would
have been J.T.’s 39th birthday.

He would concentrate on
the songs whenever he wondered
why he stayed clean and J.T.  couldn’t.
Why did he survive and J. T. succumb?

Steve didn’t hate the fact
that J.T.’s songs
were better than his,
his guitar fingerpicking
was more mind blowing,
that musically J.T. could play
Mance Lipscomb blues
in a way Steve was never  
able to figure out,
not even that J.T.
had a way better voice.

He was always reminding J.T.
how proud he was of him,
how much he loved him.

No, Steve hated that it wasn’t
enough to save him,
that he was the stronger man.
that they both shared the same disease.

Steve sang, his craggy voice
the perfect underscore
for the dark themes
in J.T.’s ballads:
a drowning death
(Tell my mama I love her,
Tell my father I tried.
Give my money
to my baby to spend);
the phantom-limb ache
for a former lover
(Even though I know you’re gone
I don’t have to be alone now.
You’re here with me every night
When I turn out the lights.)

It was therapy not catharsis.
Steve always sang
because he needed to.

J.T. was the opposite—
dressing in retro style,
reveling in the notoriety
of his intimidating talent
that was always trying to
eclipse his more famous parent.

Steve wanted this to be a memorial
between father and son.  
No guest singers, especially
those ******* enablers
that helped **** him
with their nonintervention.

He never included J.T.’s songs
about absent fathers
and single mothers.
He knew only J.T.
could rightfully sing those.

Steve was expecting it to be
a horror show emotionally.
He felt sad, but not disappointed
when it was just business as usual.

When it came time to perform
John Henry Was a Steel Drivin’ Man
he deliberately emulated
J.T.’s fingerpicking.

He felt jealous that his son
was able to write
the John Henry song
he always failed at.

When it came time to record
the album’s last song,
Last Words,
the only song
written by Steve,
and like the
more sentimental
Harry Chapin one,
a heartbreaking synopsis
of a father’s journey,
from cradling his newborn son
to speaking to him for the last time,
the pain returned and
their shared disease
pulled inside him.

By the time it was on tape
he knew it was the only
song he had written in his life
where every single word
in it was true.  

Last thing I said
was ‘I love you.’
Your last words to me
were ‘I love you too.’


https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FXgtD3jfikk&feature=youtu.be

(In homage to William Carlos William)

Outside was my red bicycle
leaning against the wall
next to a red wheelbarrow
on which nothing depended on.

I was the kind of child who
was always daydreaming  
himself to victory and today
I would win the Tour de France.

So the plan was to practice
beyond my own wobbling peddling,
like the unbalanced red wheelbarrow
my father pushed among the chickens.

I felt the heat, the flame of potential speed
where so much could happen
and depended on my straight control
in a world zooming by in flame

until the wind was red wings,
only my own red thoughts ablaze
in the warp and the things I hated
of the world were no longer in myself.

until I flew over the handlebars
hitting my forehead on a
sky blue Cadillac door handle,
the scar following me to the future.

Now I nick the tiny flames of memory,
as I push the red wheelbarrow
up the hill as if my life depended on it,
even as it always wobbles down to the chickens.

Remember the sky even though
it won’t remember you.

Know the constellations tales
even as they know not yours.

Remember the moon’s pull
despite its denying your shadow.

Remember the sun, the dawn even
as its novas your sight,
singes your memories
in forgetfulness, grief and time.

Remember the sunset,
that yields to night
that hardly embraces you.

Remember not your birth,
the maternal pains,
the gasps to your first breath,
the silent cursing of your first form.

Remember not your life’s mistakes,
your mother’s and hers.

Disperse them in the wind,
awaiting angels to hurl
them into the sun.

Remember not
your father’s indifference,
the times he chose
not to be a part of your life.

Remember the earth in all its colors
even as  it entombs everything.
that skins it.

Remember every plant, animal eaten;
the fallen tree that is your house frame
and every book you have read-

for their death and your life
is the child of every poem written
and consumed in the soul.

Remember the howl of the wind
in its indifference,
the universe’s deafness
that seems not to listen
or know you.

Remember that language,
your scream is the retort
to the universe’s grudge.

Shout “I remember”
even as it whispers
“I remember you not.”

The eye feels the light,
the lens knows the truth:

The children silent
under a blue tarp
amongst the rubble—

their little backpacks
still on their backs
offering the hope they
still might stand up

then, the beat—
and the realization
that will never happen.

You want
to look away
yet you can’t.

You must
look closer.

You must
look for longer.

Again and again you
must be the essential,
indisputable witness

to things no human
being wishes to see—

The line of strollers
left at Przemyśl station by
fleeing mothers carrying
their infants in their arms,

a less brutal
more hopeful image
connecting in solidarity

mothers divided  
by geography
and circumstance.

And yet, there
is the uncovered
mother and child

who died face up
in the square amidst
the brightest sun,

the ****** pregnant
mother being evacuated
on a stretcher

who stop you
in first gaze
and mid-breath,

who demand
you to act, demand
you to respond,

when you see the mass
graves of Mariupol

and know you can
only think of
those of Babi Yar.

For some God comes in silence
and for others it’s a saxophone solo.

He’s the confession a lonely parish priest
has waited all day to see and hear

after lattice hours of watching
smoke blow down
like Cain’s rejected offering.

Every soul has two Popes,
both living in God
but are not of it.

One preserves the past,
the other walks hope’s path.

they took the body out
but the blood/bloodstain
stayed there.

the investigation begins.
that’s the police’s job.

but after the death
the cleaner cleans.

he cleans up blood,
pieces of bone,
skin,
maggots, flies
everything that
a corpse/body
leaves behind.
the smell
of decomposition/death  
will be gone
by the time
he finishes his work.

he has a very close
relationship to blood.
it’s something
that he respects.
he always tries
to keep in mind
that these remains
left on the floor,
this blood/bloodstain
belonged to someone.

what were they like
doesn’t interest him.
who were they
he’ll never really know.
he just owes them respect.

(every time he leaves
the atmosphere changes.
it changes
because nothing
reminds
them anymore
that there,
in that place,
someone
lost their life.

things will change
and the way they see
these objects
is sure to change as well.

of course they
still have that loss,
that pain,
but the way
they are
going to face it
is different.

his work is done
and theirs begins.)

he has a recurring dream
about his work.
he is driving at night.
the street is dark.
there are people
but he can’t see their faces.
he doesn’t know if
they are saying
hello
or
goodbye.

it is something
he would like to know
but he doesn’t have
enough time.
he thinks
that these
shadows/silhouettes
could be people
who have died.

at the end of his dream
he’s in the sea.
he’s trying
to get
to the surface,
but never
gets there.

it’s a cold,
dark
place.
he tries to move.
he tries to struggle.

suddenly,
he wakes up.
instead of being uneasy
he feels happy.
all around
is the shadows
of tombstones
leaving so many stains
on the grass
so much work
for him to do.

The greatest where’s Waldo paintings to be
have him the tiniest spot at the very top
in a population of near clones.

After searching everywhere he will be
the last thing you’ll  find,
the last thing you’ll see.

Your life will have meaning again
after generations of
searching and playing the game.
                 —————
In every Picasso there is
a copulating couple
waiting to be discovered.

In Guernica, you won’t find them
above the third eye
of the bull

or between
the neighing horse
and the illuminated light bulb.
                   —————
In Hitchcock’s Rear Window
the gaze to find that one point
where meaning and ****** collide

leads inevitably to the next obsession,
not solved until the end of Vertigo
where the same blonde in the same style

in the same fog and confusion of The Birds
is  saved from the ****** of crows
by the man she didn’t pull from the ledge.
                     —————
Freud always makes a background appearance
because Salvador Dali never got paid
for any of the watches he melted.

Picasso never forgave Dali
for the bull’s eye he stole
and sliced with a razor.

If they both looked up at the
tiniest spot at the very top they might
have seen and understood everything.



Note:

Freudians have been looking for hidden copulating couples in Picasso for a long time.  
Like Trump’s claim of election fraud none have actually been found or verified.  But his paintings  are deep and big so they have to be there somewhere?  At least, that is how the rumor goes.  

Dali and Picasso did hate each other and their respective work.  The bull’s eye story is just another unproven rumor.  The eye sliced in
Un Chien Andalou was also reported to be a bull’s eye and not a real human eye.

Rear Window, Vertigo and The Birds were filmed. and released in that order.  All three featured blondes and Hitchcock has been rumored to plant Easter  Eggs to the other films in  both Vertigo and The Birds.  Some film scholars treat Vertigo and The Birds as either sequels or prequels of Rear Window.

Soon, all I know will die,
                be buried or burnt
                in the bonfire,
        lost to senses and thought,
                      become un-
                           known.

            I will fall to my knees
             and become a turtle
                carrying my home
                     on my back.

                    If I cry out,
              who will hear me?  
             Who will
                           know
                            me,
                     when everything
                           known
                           is gone?

The only choice
                        is blossoming
                                            in  the terra cotta
                                                   let the bright
                         renderings loom          
                                                a bloom
                                 too heavy
              for the stem.

Your death must mean just enough

not to curse the day you were born,
to stand by the water’s edge

and not want to swim with stones

until the first dark wave takes
me under in a fetal pose,

sinks me down in the last breath,

the clear waters almost your ghost
pushing me back, allowing

me to walk away.

Of course, I will push your toes, even
the missing small one, back into your shoes.

I will cast your coffin that was my


crib on the soft tide telling
you have nothing to be sad about.

If kites are nothing
but a cross on a sail
they can only rise.

Yet, the child running
with all his joy
in the brown field

on a cloudless day will
hold the string taut,
thinking it’s up to him

to keep the kite in the air
and never let its line
cross the path of birds.

Today, he will learn that
earth and sky do cross
and the wind is a shear.

The boy will cry for
the stranded kite
that heaven will adore.

“I am but mad North North west; when the wind is Southerly, I know a hawk, from a hand saw.”
(Hamlet, Act 2, Scene 2)

Only God sees and knows dove from spoon,
can feign the smoothness of heaven,
let the mind see hawk and handsaw
open in the wide shed behind the house,
not the falconer’s falling glove
and the hand severed from the bird’s wings.  

For thoughts are to the manner born
and God knows the risk of our reach.
He feeds both dove and hawk
while the saw is being oiled.  
The cut finger howls His name
and cannot fly or make wings.

Line 7 references:
Hamlet, Act 1, scene 4: "But to my mind, though I am native here / And to the manner born, it is a custom / More honour'd in the breach than the observance."

The Mayas of Colemnar Viejo for the last twilight hours
of early May exist in mature thoughts, statues unable to address
the questions designed to unseat their repose from  
spectators marching  into shadows.  By night they will
know the answers that will secret their lives, grateful for
Ermita de Remedios for the revelation and insight that will
allow them to play until the miracle appears. Their mothers
will bless them, remembering their time when it was their duty
to stay still enough to hear God breathe and acknowledge
the old beehive for pollinating wildflowers for their throne.

The Mayas flower with the secret whispers passed down
from grandmothers to mothers to daughters from before
when Maia echoed to a month, when she was the very flow
of the vegetable world, the monthly blood, Pleiades nights,
the first fingers of cotton lavender, narcissus, spurge,
and hyacinth poking the spring bloom with shy joy, until
adult enough to be a proper escort for  mute child queens.
Her aura surrounds the Mayas, a halo echoing earth, sky
and sun, the unnoticed slow revolve of all repose
only noticed in the dissolve from night to day.

The tapestries are heirlooms: two borrowed from
a photographer’s closet, one unfolded in the attic,
another a dust collector hung to cover a wall crack,
and the last, depicting a  tangle of horsed knights
in a tropical land on a royal leopard and lion hunt,
ancient enough to have kissed the walls of twenty houses
and become familiar with a dozen Last  Suppers.
Every house in Colemnar Viejo blessed with a nina
has a tapestry with a true or mythic history
suitable enough to be a Maya dreamscape.

The Mayas are serenaded by a brass band attired in paunchy black and white
that parades from pose to pose playing canciones praising  their beauty and style.
They wear relics carefully preserved and handed down: white petticoats
and shirts, Manila shawls of celestial yellow, blue heaven, weeping black,
vibrant Spanish carnations, and pure white, eloquently tied in the back.
Clustered around the town’s center the Mayas can see all the others
solemnly carved in silence and slow time, know that the basilica beyond
houses forever the crying ****** and the anguished Christ surrounded
in golden murals and feel the sadness  that in minutes the frozen
can only watch them freely move, dance and play.

The Walnut Street pedestrian bridge hides it sorrows
in bevies of Instagram brides, cheerleaders,
band members wearing their school ts ,
leashed dogs sniffing the edges of Statue of Liberty green wanting to dive after the slowly moving boats on the Tennessee river below, couples holding hands,
wisely staying to the middle away from the joggers jostling through on both sides.

The daylight dilutes the fear of falling with its clarity,
each step is defined with certainty on its planks,
and a cheerful civility keeps everyone safe.

On the Bluff side dogs will bite the air
in a frenzy that lasts until the second span’s crossing,
attacking scents over a century and two scores old,
when thirteen years apart the noose corpses
of Alfred Blount and Ed Johnson swayed
in rhythm with the Tennessee river.

The last walkers are the frantic and anguished,
calculating the blind spot and time for a late night jump,
one where no will be around to talk them down
and not even the insomniacs looking out from the bluff
will be watching and listening for the splash.

A mid point plaque details its  construction
with brief  acknowledgements to those
who have fallen in its creation. No roadside crosses
memorialize the blood shed into its rust.

Underneath the Tennessee flows,
no one seeing its blackness,
nor the mixing and depositing
of everything that has cried.

I watched in the swirl, the blue fish paddle
steadily away from the boat,
knowing that it had been hooked before,
the wound protruding wormlike from his jaw.

Today would not be his last fight.
He would not be a photo prize.
He wanted not the weight of air,
just the restless, endless flow all around,
the homely tide.

Algae speckled his skin
refracting rainbow fingers
like prayers in the morning
and brown moldy spots on his lateral line
like vespers recited in a dark nave.

Swirls of lilies flowed beneath his belly
revealing his antiquity and mortality.

He danced defiantly along the reef,
shedding embedded sand,
corrupted water weighing him down
the worms wriggling on barbed Js above,
the anemones gesticulating alluringly beneath.

He once was suspended between ocean/heaven
everything green slipping off,
his blue mocked by the lighter sky,
his lungs rejecting its oxygen,
his blood rejecting its gravity
that cut his very being.

He was born with scales,
flexible bones Ill-suited for this rigid world,
born to glisten never knowing.  
more beautiful peony’s,
things more lovely than him
rooted in lands beyond his sight and ken.

His eyes seemed larger than mine
and in a certain graceful way
they had the heavy density of a stain glass panel
trying to contain all beauty in an icon.
They shifted only towards the light.

He stared mouth agape and every scar,
every hook wound fell off, revealed itself,
proof that he will never be any one’s prize.

Like everyone else, he had learned
the wisdom of the wound,
that life was not in victory,
but in surviving, the possibility,
the hope of catch and release.

I started my rusty boat
and in the dart of his rainbow
swimming away, swimming away,
I felt the thanks of his fin and tail,
as I moored in the direction home.c

She knows the winds in the circles of all that’s around her.
The funnel is as twisted as the screaming man on the wall
                 hanging in the serenity of white space,
                          crosses and orbs flying up like
                             zephyr elms.  Her face
                              breaching its anvil.
                           Her little brick house
                             pirouetting behind,
                                until her town,
                               she is totally lost,
                                until it’s her
                       and the circle is her
                 and the flood, the storm.
            She breathes its screech over
      everything it rushes and destroys.
Can we live in the force of one wind for the whole of a life?
Does the sun gaze down and hunger for the grounded light?

It’s easy for them to slip into the ice,
the big crack of nonjudgmental water,
absorbed entirely in the joy of now.

First winter blankets them, then the frost,  
the quiet, until the last of their woolens,
the black and red squares of their scarves,
their blue and pink pompoms trailing down
become the final gender reveal, the last
memory of their life that skates grief circles
in the frozen lake of their parents’ memory.

The water will lift their lost children
back into their parents arms,
the only mercy the lake will grant them.

Some will replace the weight of
their grief with other newborns.
They will watch them put on weight,
watch them weigh them down,
always keeping their new ones
from the cold weight of water.

The rest will dream every night
of the white cloth that covered
their small and silent bodies.
They will leave a light on hoping
their children will open the door
and come home again—

not lost
in the dark water,
come home again,
not lost
in the eternity
of their blue life.

I search Google Sky
and there is a night picture.
Yellow dots top and bottom
in fluttering butterfly waves:
too many to count,
small red and white dots:
20 per square inch,
medium red and blue orbs:
10 per quadrant,
red orbs with devil’s tail:
10 falling down
red, purple, blue orbs with halos:
20 (mainly clustered in the center),
purple orbs with blurry wings, flying up:
5

I search Google Earth
and there is my red brick house
(refresh)
blown down to a u,
a guard rail, metal flashing
in the only green branches
of the sole oak that survived the wind,
(refresh)
the remains of the septic tank
in a crater of weeds
(refresh and expand focus)
a field cleared
(click next)
foundation poured
(scroll down)
frame erected
(scroll down)
roof, shingles attached
(click, open folder: blue prints)
(picture)
construction plan: Oxford
(picture)
Heritage Park Phase I


I google my name.
Six Images of a Costa Rican soccer player:
good looking, but not me,
Linked In Owner Profile
with no pic,
Home/Facebook/Profile (no pic)
(click)
Poet—All Poetry (no pic):
(click)
289 poems, two  books listed-
(The Nacre of Cancer)
(Like No Movie I Have Ever Seen)
259 followers, 11 following,
nice pic but old and I’m fat,
(tap back arrow, scroll down, click more results)
(Not me) Costa Rican soccer player Stats/Profile,
(Not me) Instagram Profile
(Me) Wordpress blog site listing,
(Me and many others)
We found (me)— search public records online
(click)
fill out form,
(click search)
results found:
1 (me), 88 (not me)
(click x, close page, leave browser)

Things not found on Google:
my cancer,
my marriage(s),
my dog(s)

Real me found on Google
2%
real not me found on Google:
98%,
Me never listed:
98%.

They are shoved into the silence,
the one that speeds down the road,
bumps and rattles disguising muffled horrors,
handkerchiefs in mouths, gloved palms
over squeezed lips tight as a kiss.
These are the ones soldiers are told to ignore,
to turn their backs on- civilians, friends,
family- just listen to the chain of command,
follow through on their one and only duty.
There is only them and the next green man
in front, and the next, and the next, next..
forming one long unbroken wall
to stem the disease in front of them.
The doctors and nurses are dead,
and now they must wear the masks,
glove, gowns the hazmat suits,
spray the disinfectant like Agent Orange
on everything that moves, eats, drinks, dreams.
The trucks in back are filled with those
surging to cross the border in front of them.
It could be Canada or Mexico, or just those
wanting to escape the land for the sea,
the ocean, to swim, sail in hopes of
finding their private island to populate.
The rich have bought their own countries,
separated themselves with a technological
continental drift that they do not share.
The middle class have marooned themselves
on the Great Pacific Garbage Patch
fighting for sustenance with gulls, *****, sharks.
Only the poor are left— and them—
the green men who pledged loyalty
to the Constitution and now know
just the orange beast who tore it up
and rendered it to ashes, the Congress
inhabited with lawmakers with
hands over their eyes, fingers in ears,
and palms over their mouths, that
know the knowledge and meals
the beast provides only to them.  
Freedom they know is not free.
it comes with the ****** of those
who disagree, those disloyal to the beast.
The green men are fed on K-rations, MREs.
Their Bibles, Korans, Torahs, all
their sacred knowledge, has been burned
and doused with ****. They know they and
the poor are the **** of this deaf republic.  
The green men hear the screams
in front and inside them.  They remember
when they fought for freedom and liberty,
or at least when it had meaning.  They dream
of the past, when America before the beast
was great again.  Their present eyes see only
themselves and the poor.  Those who sleep
in torn open air tents and live in cages
because the prisons overflow. They
close their eyes and they dream as
the poor surge forward to the border.  
They are too tired to stop them.  Nor do
they want to. They only just want to rest
and wait for the call of the next American Revolution.

Lallo assembles the town in his head
all in shades of green, white and gray—
grass, walks and streets  scarring  stories
on the old sacred hills
of high steel huts
with Bianco Carrara walls and long halls
filled with plains of  baize tables, silver machines
and nightmares of blue cavalry.



Lallo is a Native American Kiowa name meaning “little boy.”

Bianco Carrara is considered, both in Italy and abroad, the Italian marble par excellence. This whiteish-gray stone is extracted from the Apuan Alps in Carrara where there are the most known millenary tradition quarries in the world.

Baize— a coarse, typically green woolen material resembling felt, used for covering billiard and card and gaming tables.

Blue Calvary refers to the color of the uniforms of the  U.S. army soldiers from 1830-1890. Many Indian massacres and force relocations to reservations were carried out by these blue U.S. Army regiments

The fog
covers the bridge
all around.
Above
the day blurs night.
Below
ships prowl slow
and uneasy lines.
Those
driving or walking
through
will remember
the cry
of the sky,
the sobs of
those tiny sirens
below
warning away,
warning away,
those who
come too close
to touching them
in this blindness-
long
after the light
has returned
and
their souls
have safely
reached the
other side.

God,
           do not send the sunshine
           down in thoughtless
           torrents.
Please
            do not obsess on light
            falling on all of your making,
            graciously falling
            everything on earth.
For  we
            are things of the shade,
            and the light falls too
            ******* eyes
Blind
            to all your light.

You were unburied
10 years before I was born,
pulled from the Arie riverbed  
the day Nagasaki burned.
You died like a samurai
in your daughter’s arms,
bowels flowing,
head severed cleanly,
falling to the water
amidst the silence
of dead human trees
with their bark skin turned inside out,
among the screams of the living
realizing that not even water
can stop their burning away.

You were unburied
65 years before I was born,
killed by the big guns
with Conestoga wheels in the
ravine near Wounded Knee Creek.
You died running with your nursing infant
in your arms trying to touch the flag of truce,
your child still suckling long after
the Great Spirits call—  still suckling
as you were piled in the mounds
of mothers with no ghost shirts.
Others children’s children still
Ghost Dance and tell your lore.

You were buried
32 years before I was born,
shot in the back after
you had dug your own grave.
Shot in the back after
you had watched your house
burn in a kerosene blaze.
Shot in the back after
you knew the children
were safe in the swamp.
Shot in the back after
all of Rosewood burned
from the fury of white rage.
Shot in the back
until you were erased
from existence
except in the memory of tears.

What am I meant to do?
It’s summer and the
magnolias are blooming,
the cherry blossoms are ripe,
the black hills spruce
admits its forever mildew stink,
reminding harvesters not to
ever make it a Christmas tree.

I call out not knowing your names,
giving you invisible ones
that will reflect your death and life.

What am I meant to do?
Your unburied ash, spirit,
your buried charred bones
exists in wretched longing,
your names bleed into
the riverbed, the ravine, the clay.
I mourn as I freely travel the spaces
that others had trampled over you.

What am I meant to do?

It appears  just weeks after the last tear,
my mother’s sky blue dress on her life ghost:
same walk, dove shape, soft voice, brown hair cut short-
at least from behind, in the same love light
that moved from donation bin, rack, to her
in the way that the poor are ****** to wear  
the dead’s clothes, hand me downs echoes worn thin
enough to be bleach clouds or ghosts of ghosts,
the seams just barely holding together,
hem taken up from low earth to sky,
the orphan leftovers recut and sewn
to match the little girl holding her hand
tight enough to be a matching heaven,
memory of a bright and special life.