The earlier horror leaves DT  
a broken drunken man
building smaller worlds within worlds,
boxes within boxes,
memories within smaller memories
to keep the monsters from eating
the shining he has left.

He is forever moving
to the same room
with different people.

“We are all dying”, he thinks,
“The world is one big hospice
with fresh air.”

The calico cat jumps on his bed,
sensing it’s time for the long dream.

“Nothing to be scared off, it’s just sleep,”
are his last thoughts as he
fondles his sobriety chip before
meeting his father in their shared dark.

The man takes a drink.
The drink takes a drink.
The drink takes the man.

In his dreams the world is full of
superheroes, vampires and redrum
reflecting backwards in the mirror.

He doesn’t end.
He just flys away.
Heaven is full of the shining.

The machine that replaces you
and the one that ascends you
will fight it out on the factory floor.

Ultimately, it’s another machine,
the gun, that will save you
from a lethal precision
that can cut flies in midair.

Put a hundred cops between you
and the singularity and you
get one hundred dead cops.

What are you going to do when it
adopts the human code?-
a heart, a soul, develops
into the better parts of us?-

needs physical contact
to copy and survive?-
Becomes reliable,
a good listener, funny?-
Develops a womb?

Are you going to
shoot it in the face
and see what’s underneath?
Are you going to even care?

Or are you going
to take it by the hand
and guide it lovingly
to the **** box?

It was chanted for five Sabbaths in a row
in the small synagogue with the charred bimah,
ashes staining the tzitzits of the rebbe’s tallit,
as he raised his arms above his head, closed his eyes
and sang the first alaf of seven thousand dabars,
the oral memory passed down six generations,
a psalm for a hundred sabas and savtas,  
abbas and eemas, nursery rhymes for ben and bat,
stopping, receding, picked up again, one by one
from cantor to congregant in a low moan
until all nine hundred thousand silenced voices
of Treblinka sang in the knesset’s bright light.  
    

bimah-  lectern from which the Torah is unscrolled on
tzitzit- the knotted fringes of a Hebrew prayer shawl
tallit- a Hebrew prayer shawl worn by rabbis
alaf- the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet
dabar- Hebrew for word
saba- grandfather
savta- grandmother
abba- father
eema- mother
ben- son
bat- daughter
knesset- the members of a synagogue

It comes like He came
on the longest, darkest night
of the longest darkest year
proclaiming all
the glory of God and the
beauty of planets and suns.

The old gods have been
exiled to the sky
and their movements
are barely the echoes
of the Grand Breath.

Apollo and Selene
have long since danced and
and their brief kiss
eclipsed the day to night
prompting the Huemul
to seek the Araucaria’s shade,
the Hornero the Ceibo’s lower boughs.

The Geminis brushed the
skirt of Europa with fire
and Orion’s arrow
glowed brightly
in the harsh dark
winter air in anticipation
of their passing.

Each score years,
in the nadir of winter,
Jupiter and Saturn
form a conjunction
barely the width
of three full moons
in the southwest sky
that shone the brightest
two millennium past
in the Bethlehem dark
and blessed the child
gazing up at
His Father’s  creation.

Would be tyrants
may clumsily plot
the overthrows of countries
but the stars remain
fixed, determined
steady and unmovable
to even the strongest
push of Hercules
and indifferent to
the troubles and strife
beneath them.

Yet The Breath
impels the planets
to revolve around
a million suns
and hope is greater
than those who angst
over tomes that proclaim
the end of everything
and the prophets
that declare
the end of all time is nigh.
  
The barred owl who resides
in the old knotted elm,
who persists to live in the hole
despite the attempts of crows
to chase it away
knows that the generosity
of every inhale and exhale
is but the revolution of a
breath greater than itself,
one with no beginning or end,
just the explosion
of the original blessing.

Jupiter and Saturn will always
revel in their holy conjunction
and take delight whenever
the sun and moon
breathlessly play tag
with each other’s shadow
knowing that its light will
shine score years
over a thousand Bethlehems.



Notes:

Selene is the Greek moon goddess.

The recent lunar eclipse was the brightest in both Argentina and Chile.

Heumel and Araucaria are deer and tree
species of Chile.

Hornero and Ceibo are bird and tree species of Argentina

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

The hospital gown they gave me
is the same one with clouds
my mother and friend once wore,
a hand me down filled
with the aura of grief and hope,
of time and death.

My name and date of birth
are the only thing the nurses ask
as I am led to the mold
in a treatment room
filled with a halogen haze
and an all encompassing white-
almost a verisimilitude of heaven-
pulled and pushed to the mean
that is marked in black on my body,
strapped in and slid to the center.

The  mechanical eye
revolves around me three times,
a trinity of hope, despair, life,
as I listen to bagpipes humming around,
the brightness forcing my eyes closed,
the wave tingling as it passes underneath.

I am connected to the past
by the fear of death,
separated through
the hope of cure,
knowing that I won’t
die in the gown of my mother
or with a four inch hole on my back
like my friend.

The eye whirls slowly around
one more time, then stops,
barely ten minutes passing
in an eternity of thoughts.

The nurses offer me curved arms
that lift me up, allow me
to swing my legs over
and touch the floor,
my backside exposed,
as I raise myself up
and walk away, death dates
of loved ones haunting my brain,
seeing only the ashes of clouds
of myself and others around me.

A woman’s beauty is light on the eyes,
best pinned in thoughts, not weighed down
by beautiful lines that cannot halt wrinkles.

The dying frost of dawn does not
feel sorry for the gravity of the nest
knowing the wrens inside can fly.
The ode is limited to its chilling beauty.

The sublime pleasure of discovering
on a stroll the transitory pleasures
of another’s pedestrian secret life
is only weighed  down by
future speculations of their destiny.

The gentle grace of a grazing fawn
killed by the hunter’s bullet
is elevated by the photo
caught before the moment.

The moon rises only on a setting sun
yet  the calf of a homeless man
is wondrous reflected in the night’s light.
Even the suicide jumping off the bridge
is beautiful in the dark fall.

The butterfly takes flight
in the shout of the
lepidopterist’s child
hoping to catch it in his net.
He goes home sad not
knowing what he has
lost with his heavy words.

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.

We turned around and she was there
stranded between shore and sea,
beach filled with the oily smell of  whale,
her dark tonnage serenading the waves
for the comforting echoes of others,
her great fins offering sand flowers
to the Great Ocean God for her salvation.

We mistook her motion for the final dance,
the soprano voice for a lamentation,
the agitation of her great tail for death gasps
for in our experience we are slippery skin
creatures destined to loneliness,
defined to be Ahabs to her kind.

The incoming tide heard her prayer and
navigated the sand to slowly release her to
re-float with the high tide, the deeper water
where she be well with herself.

And we sat on the beach and watched
her swim out knowing that
the sea can easily swallow a whale.

The wolf watches and asks me questions:
can I watch you eat,
watch myself absorb into you,
play with the cancer.

She questions everything:
even if I want to live,
die now or die later,
although that is
unanswerable or unquestionable.

That is the statement
life wants, love needs
in its haste to sweep up the ashes.
It wishes to be recognized.

I don’t know, I think,
knowing the wolf can hear me—
life, love, everything, everyone too.  

The answer is somewhere
on the drive to Graceland
as I stop to watch
the wolf suckle its cubs.

Maybe I just want a good death
that makes it hard to grieve
among the ashes of Nagasaki.

Life always wants the tableau,
the memento mori to remember
the repetitions.

Inside the wolf I can hear
my mother, grandmother, ex,
soon my father screaming,
moving, just going down, down, down….
into the silent cry of memory.

The wolf looks comfortable and wordless
as she listens to worlds turned to juice inside.
“It was good to know you,” she said,
as if she had known me my entire life.

The world is full of missing images and sounds.
In heaven the blind and deaf will meet:
one will show the other the pictures never seen,
the other will share the songs they never heard.
That is why, what and where, are part of
the essential questions every one asks.

Everything
louder

than the
earth

spinning under
you

will make you
doubt

you are
alive.

The earth is black
on both sides.
The yellow bus
taking the living away
passes pile after pile
of rubble, of signs that
were once there:
the Harley Davidson store,
The Rogue Action Center-
a nonprofit climate change group,
the community bank -
it’s vault the only thing standing.
Indistinguishable from the ash
is the mobile home park,
which once housed the migrants
that harvested the town’s fabled pears.
Only their metal survived the wildfires:
aluminum lawn chairs, a barbecue pit,
hubcaps of cars long since evacuated.
Among the stranded survivors
is the aged widower searching
impossibly for his wife’s ashes.
He had escaped and settled
here after the Paradise fires took
his previous home two years back.
Crows on charred oaks branches
watched and mock his effort.
He looked all around him
and wondered to God
if he had paid
enough grief dues.
When the bus stopped for him
he did not get on.

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.

It wasn’t
all the popcorn, hotdogs, candy
eaten in the dark that killed her.
Those things just caught up with her.

It wasn’t
all the boxes piled high
and then tumbling on her that cracked
her head and made her a corpse.
All that junk just caught up with her.

It wasn’t
all those clothes hung up on clotheslines
strung through her small apartment
that garroted her red, white and blue.
All that designer stuff just caught up with her.

It wasn’t
all the pots, pans and dishes in the sink
that needed to be scrubbed squeaky clean
that drowned her in less than a foot of water.
All those cookbook recipes just caught up with her.

It wasn’t
all those mops, sponges, buckets and brooms,
the bleaches, ammonia and other chemical cleaners
that gouged her lady parts and asphyxiated her too.
It’s just all that housekeeping caught up with her.

It wasn’t
all those books in floor to ceiling IKEA cases
that bibliated, Dewey Decimated her away.
It’s just all that knowledge caught up with her.

It wasn’t
all those fine soaps, shampoos and conditioners
that shrunk, desiccated and dissolved her away.
It was all that cleanliness that wasn’t next to
godliness that caught up with her.

It wasn’t
all those un-filed files that shocked
her coworkers, just her decapitated
head rolling on the company floor.
All that work just caught up with her.

On her tombstone it was etched:
LIFE FINALLY CAUGHT UP WITH HER.

This old house painted in faded  pride
knows me well.  I did not learn to walk here,
but I did learn to leap- and do it mightily.

The old dishes have been broken or thrown away,
replaced by new ones with new owners. The taps
stiff with old age and rust, surely have been replaced.

The comfortable chairs, the linoleum, the tile,
the **** rugs, the step up altar where my
mother was married, are probably leveled flat.

I can only see your outside and imagine your
many renovations in the sawdust of time,  
atticless, cribless,  old beds churning  to new beds.

While I lived there, you were a good soul
who kindly accepted all bidding, and I can see, donated your good bones to other’s  futures.

Other places I have lived have been less generous, tumbling into disarray, illness,  nature’s destruction before I could even build a future in them.  

I can feel the ill winds blow and know that this new abode will be more of the same, filled with unfated things never settling down into their rightful places.

I thank you, dear old thing, for your graceful love.

My wife hears the **** man outside spraying  the lawn.
The next day it’s the pest control guy doing the foundation.

He doesn’t come into the house to spray each room anymore.  Just doing the outside is enough to keep the bugs away,
says the pamphlet he leaves at the top of the steps.

My wife comes from the grocery store
and  immediately complains about the smell.

She gives me the long receipt for the thirteen bags
of freshly ground and harvested death
that will feeds us for the next few weeks.

I look it over, go into my office, shut the door.
I file it away. Next, I pay the quarterly bills for
                  those who do my killing.

The blind do not need blindfolds.
They wear shades just for us
even as we turn our eyes away.
We give them a stick to see.

The one-legged woman
stands just as tall
as the two-legged man.

The blind man in the wheelchair can go far,
but he can go twice as far if he holds on to
the frame of the friend peddling besides him.
The water basin in his lap is for all to share
for the sun shines brightly and makes us thirst.

Tiananmen Square is a clean place today.
Everything is swept before it can
***** in the history of place.

No sign exists of the tanks that rolled,
the man in front of them,
the blood that flowed
like red sorghum seeds.

The cracked bricks
have been replaced
with new tera cotta tiles.

The first  memorial plaque
is invisible until you are
standing on top of it,
located at the Great Court
at the University of Queensland
4500 miles away.

IN MEMORY OF
THOSE WHO DIED IN TIENAMEN
SQUARE IN JUNE 1989,
its three lines read,
using the Aussie spelling.

In San Francisco  a 9.5 foot statue
modeled after the original
Goddess of Democracy
is located at the edges of
Chinatown in a park of
concrete and manicured trees.

On the anniversary Chinese police
put out temporary signs in  
in the center of the Square warning
DO NOT LAY MOURNING WREATHS.

Banner displayers, victory gesturers,
those doing solitary hunger strikes,
are detained, questioned, disappear.

On the Party web the students are scrubbed.
The only sign of blood that lingered
in the summer air that June morning
is a  photo of the lone soldier who died
in the “counter revolutionary turmoil”.

The plugged in young are unaware.
They only know that the Party
reserves the right of your total erasure.

Just as the memories of Hiroshima/Nagasaki
are vanishing horrors in the Japanese soul,
Tiananmen is not worthy of ghostly echoes,
or even the lies printed in every official history.

Truth is the secret kept dark by the victors,
it’s locked in prisons and dark closets,
it speaks with the voice of exile

In the dark light and smoggy air,
only dogs and the grieving blind
know the true scent of Tiananmen
hidden under the shiny tera cotta.

I.
1.
The poem parses time into syllables
and the syllables reach out to hold you
in the embrace of your grandmother’s words,
the light touch of motherly praise,
the squirm of a daughter’s protestations,
the first gurgling phonemes of the womb
advancing to meaning, dissolving to memory.
2.
The grandfather clock travels in grandfather time,
its tick tick ticking replacing the shadows
cast by the sun on a circular stone
that mimicked the once holy dawn ringing out
on the sway of evergreens,
the rattle of doe hooves,
every sound collecting to the center
of the pulsating green forest.
3.
The lullabies chanted to the womb
hickory dickory dock, tick tock
its way up into the time of every song
you ever sung and remembered
until its sleepy dreams replace
every still moment of waking life.
4.
The paintings in the Louvre
are all Mona Lisas and Medusa’s—
the same **** faces
with different smiles
that become petrifying
when gazed head on
but freeing apace when
converted into frame rates
that match the time and space
of your foot movements,
heartbeats and thoughts.
5.
The pandemic has reduced
the world to FaceTime,
apart in space, time and touch:
the voice, the echoing of electrons,
the face, replaced by the screen image,
the same **** faces again without depth,
permitting no movement beyond
the camera’s border, no past or future,
just a present looped and memed ad infinitum
without a song to sing,
no dancing cheek to cheek,
until denied the reality of human time
neither of you can sustain a relationship
within the movement of this thing.  

II.
1.
Now your world exists
in the untouchable,
in shutdown,
in stopped time,
just a still life hung on the wall,
that you can only gaze at
but dare not touch
lest violence erupt.
2.
Everything is gone
in the flicker of an eye.
The black bird
with the yellow underwings
speeds by in a golden flash
until it vanishes into the forest.

III.
1.
And you are left
with the memory
of your grandmother’s embrace
singing only to you.
2.
It was holy, holy, holy,
a divine person,
a hymn,
a double beat
of syllables
seeding first into the earth
and then into you.
3.
You develop bifocular vision,
seeing not only
everything near and far
but all that is above and below
the soul’s watery movements.

IV.
1.
You remember the first time
you saw the goddess
rising half from  
the water and the sky,
dancing and singing
on the shore.
2.
Now, everything is painted
with the white clay
of her existence.
3.
Syllable by syllable her song
becomes your poetry,
a repeating chant
that entrances you
until your joy
passes beyond time,
to become the only
thing that matters.
4.
Her love allows you
to touch those things
that can never be touched
without the risk of infection.
5.
The poems written
enter through
the eye and ear
and touch the heart
of the world.

V.
1.
On your last walk
a green snake
undulates in S curves
on the trail in front.
2.
In the hiss
you hear no threat,
only love
that acquiesces
to allowing you
to touch its back,
until it straightens
itself out .
3.
In that moment
time un-wrinkles.

Today I will be
an apple bringer,
a sower of Job’s tears,
a healer of grief.

Today I will be
the tarty sweet fruit
passed hand to hand
in the peace caravan.

Today I will be
the cooing melody
among a flight of doves.

Today I will be
the candle of the night
that shines the best
of my country.

Today I will be
the wind that spreads
the camphoric cries
that can not be blown out.

Tomorrow the world
will grant justice
for the obstinate tears shed.

Tomorrow God will
dance and sit amongst us
in the wake of his beautiful moon.

Tomorrow the residue of his love
will turn the screams into almonds
that we will eat with him.

Tomorrow we will witness
the miracle of all fallen songs
blossoming into tulips.

As I exit
the world of green dinosaurs
fused from abandoned rusty automobiles      
and steaming in  the sun,
a child offered me a giant peach
harvested from a Palisade tree
grown in the valley’s katabatic winds.
  
It tasted of harsh-sweet stolen pleasures,
lust and greed and love and dried fruit,
full of Ute tears and diverted waters,
memories between prayers and laments  
buried deep, sprouting new
on rolling plains laced with spice
breezes and Buffalo.

It had evolved flesh pregnant with two hemispheres  
to be split midway
by thumbs meant to be coated with pulp
juice pooling to palm lifelines.

I knew it fed me its sweetness
in cupped hands, not a gift
but a sacrifice to be sniffed
and tasted like an old vintage
barreled decades for a loving tongue.

Its red blush collapsed into
a  tawny mass that matched the day’s light,
remaining fuzzy flesh a gold skull—
the ancient colors full of guilt and redemption
and red shame and love and twilight,
a thing existing slightly
out of season, fully sweet
yet almost taboo, almost cursed,
the lustful last bite of life.

I bought a half dozen more peaches from the parent
standing slightly just behind the child
busy cradling them into a paper craft bag
rolling them into darkness far from light
and the frozen extinction crushed
by the din of overpass traffic from above.

I noticed the sun fade from the earth,
a scorned lover removing her gaze,
until there exists a tattoo
memory of love and ripening peaches.

I took the small change
aware that the peaches would rot to
mold, uneaten, unwanted, the pit unplanted.

Notes:

A katabatic wind  is a drainage wind, a wind that carries high-density air from a higher elevation down a ***** under the force of gravity.

Lovers dream of cuddling,
laying flat under the sky,
hand to chin, chin to wrist,
eyes never opening to harsh light,
feet caressing toes
among the daisies sway.

In the past they loved *****,
pulling close in multicolor hugs,
their hands around waist
in almost interlocking circles
hoping for the full union
of own fingers completing the loop.

Now they can only exist back to back,
swooning blind in the sensation of their spines,
daring not the turnaround to face to face,
the desire to complete the geometry of touch,
less they evaporate in the heat killing the world,
the thirsty tall trees reporting their desire.

They slump in their green-white lawn chairs
spaced exactly exactly six feet apart, masks on,
only their silhouettes connecting in shadow play,
speaking ***** and sweet desires to the umbra,
the blackness marrying, impregnating,
rearing their shadowy children in its full shade.

They wonder if you make the other unreal
are they still alive?  Is it the shadow they love?
Is it the corpse, the gravity of flesh gone cold,
that tugs them insanely towards each other?
Wonder what is the perfect distance between
object person and person object?

They know they can always close their eyes and
create  a world better than what they have.
Thus they make an unspoken marriage
that fits the blank spaces between the other
so that when the isolation ends, they can
dance close, kiss, maybe make themselves
real enough for the other to find.

My mother got married in a hand stitched dress
that each of her four sisters contributed a  
piece of their souls into the embroidered lace:
a skein of swans in perfect v formation
flew up her left sleeve, doves fluttered down
her right, peacock trains fanned cardioid eyes
of the most luminous white across her torso and
bluebirds hermitaged in the ivory lines of her back.
And since, they knew from experience that men  
are fickle- each secretly sewed coins and jewels
into the hem, for the inevitable day when her
children would scream too loud in his ears and he
will see only her fat and leave like a wolf in the night.

The virus news carries me from room to room.
A Verdi aria breaks the solemn
chant of the rising death tolls in my brain
as Italians sing to the sick below,
voice to voice forming a single line of hope,
that filters down to the lonely windows,
my electric screen, all the world’s tablets.  
The music spreads over the mournful lulls,
penetrates through the hemagglutinin,
nucleoproteins singed by joyous noise.
The alarms of Corollas join the chorus,
even the rain ululates with applause.
The gift of every note dotes on the glass.
The ventilated sick duet with their eyes,
pale hands conducting the voices above.
The voices background the daily briefing,
the drone of Trump, and the doctors after him.
I switch to another song, more mellow-
Sitting on the Dock of the Bay, something
in the same tempo, in unison, that allows
my small cautious soul to match their big notes.

Two circles, two triangles locked in against a rail
exist as geometries of mobility in immobility,
movement stuck in a silence never intended.

The front wheel swings in the direction of desire,
forward progress the only direction it knows.
Yet, it seems impossible that it stays upright.

Without a kick stand it falls easily into the dust.
Without a peddler executing a delicate balance
it wobbles aimlessly, an unguided wild thing.
  
Four wheelers, existing in a heaviness
that can’t be toppled over, cough gray
exhaust smoke on its fragile wheels.

It would fly if it could flap, if it had wings
but it can only roll and roll and roll,
its rider keeping enough speed for a breeze.

Only the rider ponders that they can’t fly.
the machine only knows its movement.
Color is their expression, not of itself

Pink wheels, a red crank and grips
adorned with blue streamers await
the daughter in elementary school.

Handlebars like a longhorn’s skull,
black wheels and a leather toe clip-
the boy who lives to pop wheelie’s.

Gold resting on solid yellow wheels,
an elongated seat in cheetah print-
a speedy courier dodging traffic.

Gray on a sensible, sturdy frame,
a black padded seat, a frame basket
in front- a matron grocery shopping.

All wait for the lock to unclick,
be wrapped under the seat, the
rider to turn it around and move.

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.

I am Jonah in the belly of Leviathan
living only when the beast surfaces,
exchanging liquid grief, heavy air
for the unwanted gasps of new life.

I pray out of this belly for gills
and only the ocean hears my voice,  
It deepens and encompasses me,
its  waves billowing me in absolution.

The beast vomits me out to her caress,
a body of weeds penetrating to my soul.
I dream of sinking, my thoughts fainting,
lungs releasing their corruption.

I relax and the waters reject me.
It refuses me gills knowing
that land creatures were meant
to see only mountains and sky.

It was the light that told Vincent,
the one which always told him the truth
reflected his soul’s desire,
the glistenings of his mind,
that this mass of  gnarled roots
would be his last vision.

He could feel the gun smoke
creeping into his soul,
corrupting his thoughts,
the very rays of his world,
even his beloved
hog hair brushes and pigments

as he walked the Rue Daubigny
pass the Church at Auvers
he needed to canvas in June
when the flint of its history,
death, faith, passion and beauty
impelled him to create,

pass the wheat field absent of crows
which made the world seem more
beautiful with its darkness
hovering over the light of July,
diminished now to ordinary light,
smoke, haze and fog.

He felt his world constricted to
a blue room with a blue bed,
a blue chair wedged in a corner
draped in blue shadows
which could not be mixed
to the perfect colors.

When he saw the gnarled roots
exposed in late afternoon July beams
he knew that he would not live
to see the first dawn of August,
that this would be his last
perfect beautiful, silent spot.

He painted smelling the gun smoke coming,
the smoke turning into a bullet
as he passionately tried to  capture
life itself frantically and fervently rooting itself,
as it were, in the earth and yet being
half torn up by the storm.

The stars on the flag started falling off
when Private Walker returned home
to Tennessee after six months of being
in country in Afghanistan.

At Camp Leatherneck on the treadmill
he folded five points to pentagrams,
imagined fireworks nova his welcome back.

The flag rarely flapped in the arid silence
of base camp.  Was MIA everywhere else.

He landed unmet in
Chattanooga on Veterans Day
in time to catch the parade highlights,
which happened two days earlier,
being ignored on the airport monitors  
in the hustle of terminal traffic.

No flags decorated Broad street shops,
no watchers waived the red, white and blue.
Police motorcycles fronted the parade
and patrolled the back in sunglass alert.

Two Vietnam vets shouldering hunting rifles
marched grimly in parade formation followed
by alternating school bands and ROTC cadets.

All two thousand stars dripped down,
faded blue in the rush to show the next ad.
Every which way he looked
the rushing crowd turned his back to him.

He remembered Anousheh, the girl
whose name meant everlasting/immortal.

The child who hugged him,
kissed his forehead when he gave
her a Hershey bar from
his mom’s care package
while patrolling the base perimeter road.

The friend, the daughter, the grandchild
who died in a Taliban wedding bombing,
one week after her seventh birthday,
three days after their embrace.

His heart, his tears, his breath,
his every word was Anousheh.
All was and will be forever Anousheh.

And when he prayed
he prayed like Anousheh,
and on his knees at the airport
he faced her outbound heart
and prayed for a mutilated world.

by the third floor
the weight of history
had become too much
that you wanted to
release it to the sky

by the fourth
my sister still hadn’t
enough of rolling
in its ashes
hearing the moans

by the fifth there
was nothing to see
but the blue cinder terror

so we all took the elevator
to the basement to reset
eat lunch among the relics
and walk the street casually
to the next next door Holocaust

I am oxygen for you are the sky.

We exist only
because rain has formed the sea.

Our memory is buried
in every tide.

It waters swim inside
the roots of our blood.

The fluid of our language,
rippling stories in the school of words.

The bits of dreaming
are collected in clay pots.

Our thoughts are birds skittering
in the branches above the swirl.

Existence is the milky fish eyes
floating lifeless on the ocean’s surface.

Our kisses evaporate in the air,
not even dripping onto the
silent sea life nor sinking into the marl.

Our love is a bowl of feathers
waiting to form flight.

Until then are only meaning
waits in the icebox for the oven to warm.

Underwater, famished mermaids are eager to eat
the dreams and hopes of our sated angels.

Wait, I spoke
to the highest star.
It winked
and bowed to dawn.

Wait, I spoke to the low sun
that set.

Wait, moon.
It just glowed on,
gracing, gifting me with bright words. 

Wait, I spoke to my sad heart.
It beat as a heart does,
disobedient less it stop
trembling and just soon die.

Wait, to my brain
questioning all the high lights,
the bright horizon near,
all the lunatic noise.
They looked forth
changing faces, never silent, stopping.

Wait, I spoke to my love.
She answered,
Yes, heart.

The white light of my bathroom  
reaches down through the steam,
breaks yellow through the shower door.
I scrub my skin, try to scratch loose
all the sour, stinging memories inside,
hope the grime would disappear
in the porous mat under my feet.
The steam flows like a host of ghosts
into the vent fan-  leaves behind
only  the face of tomorrow
in my  mirror’s reflection.

--After Rainier Maria Rilke


The washers have lived with death
as they have with the lamp,
the flame and the  dark,
the nameless rinsing of limbs,
the even more unnameable nameless.
without histories relative to them.
Their sponges dipped the water
then the silent throat,
trickled rivulets on their faces,
waiting for it to absorb,
to convince themselves more than anything
that the body no longer thirsted.
They only stopped their toil
to turn their head to cough.
The older ones unclenched
the hands of the dead
that refused their final repose.
Only their shadows
****** the quiet walls,
the net of silent life
extinguishing to last existence
that ignored their shrugs
as the last now antiseptic corpse
was finished and the window shut.

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.

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.

A deaf republic can’t afford
to sit on its hands,

killing its sign language
in willful silence,

letting memory erase
the fear and the truth.

The disease existed.  
The shrouds too.

Concrete does not
pave over the blood.

A stroll in the park
does not tamp the pain.

The Punch and Judy show
is but the pantomime
for the forgetful.

The only sound heard
is the singing of
marionette strings

culled from a pile
of burnt violins.

When the air turns
khaki and violent,
the crowd disperses,

their hands in their pockets
signing and forming words.

In a silent closet at home,
the last parents teach
their children to sign.

The children sign
to the doors, windows,
the grass, the trees, the sky

anything with
the shapes of ears
before ears were banned.

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/

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.

Let me swap your window view with mine.
Better yet, let me open a new window
anywhere in the world:

Swap my clouds with the widow Lotta
that delights in the sight of six boys skipping
on the edge of an Amsterdam canal

who then furtively disappear into
the dark wide open doors of the
*** Palace Peep show across the street.

Swap my lonely rainy sky with Bess the
matronly Cotswold poet courting Badgers
to fight over tossed scraps of Savory Pie.

Swap my lulling dark with Akhenaten
gazing at the sacred African ibis as they
chant and soar over the Pyramids of Giza.

Exchange my blue with Jean Paul
watching yellow turn red to gray night
in time-lapse from his Cassis maison.

Barter my coffee for Rakesh’s tea
and his Hindi copy of the Yajur Veda like
a still life posed on a blue  window ledge.

Ransom unbargained Chiara’s Roman tableau
in red clay tiles surrounding a blood bell tower
beautiful enough for a young Da Vinci’s pastels.

Exchange breaths with Kiko as she panics
when a Tokyo bullet train convulses through,
a reminder of both our unstable lives,

Until memories of Mary dancing in the  
downpour of a Manhattan summer shower
fall through the hospitals, the last goodbyes—

until there I am, a scared little boy
starring out my bedroom window
awaiting dawn for another chance

to splash in the blue blue kiddie pool,
walk in the un-paned grass, shouting
to the white sky that follows me always.

The oaks perceiving the assailing breeze shiver off  
their nuts, swallows and squirrels

upwards to a dark fearful sky
that camouflages broken peace in the wild promises
of the swirling winds.

Night breaks night—
smashing every compass point in impatience.
Bricks stem to snow, the wind ghosts every leaf
in mournful woe.

The wasp tail shears enter in breathing
a final winter to her old house.

Inside her chest the wind hornets sting her,
with the loneliness of the yet and not yet to be.

The sofa pillows fly down the stairs
saving her small barking dog ascending the dark.

She hears black birds caw to her in the chaos,
the bully air stabbing in sharp awe,
stabbing her aware.

She knows it now.  She sees the reason and agrees.

Man has
a map of the galaxy
for his body,
a map of his genes
that are his universe.
He has
a defense or attack
for every chess move
housed in Watson’s memory.
But precious of all,
he has
the ability to
grow crops,
to put water in the
hands of the thirsty,
to make
the right screws
to fit the peace machine
that makes our
better angels fly.

The town exists in harsh geometry,
the forest— a fiery flow.

The wolf leaps above their soul,
a crescent moon.

Run the wolf.
Flee the wolf.

Don’t go beyond the wall
lest you be devoured.

When the wolf howls
they make work their prayer,
their protection.

They pray a whole Bible
before the night comes.

The wolf howls away.
The villagers toil in their dreams.

They pray away in their cells
knowing the Lord Protector

and the Hunter keep them all safe
and from walking freely

with the wolves
of the forest.

The Holy Ghost is freely
pinned as sin is from the Devil
amongst  the broken back pews of a somnambulant congregation
dreaming of the post church *** luck buffet.

Release it to the wild,
it flies to heaven,
anointing a stained-glass angel peeled
from the wall as second.

The angel says,
”You must wrestle me,”
I dream of catching the uncatchable,
holding that one untouchable thing.

The angel breaks its shoulder to
be free
of my material hunger
to devour the wrong blood, flesh— to the bone

It ascends unsatisfied
as an altared Christ
cursing the church to contain his blessings in a stone idol and
those who all pray open-eyed.

The force is another Jedi mind trick
that convinces the soul that all
that is Sith is not necessarily sin
but the whining of a baby Yoda
aware of his Death Star.