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.

He taught them
where to carve
the dead parts
so the rest could live,
to find its flow
and tap its sap.

With every mistake
the mentor took each
student by the hand
on a short walk
to the middle
of the forest

where it slopped
into pools
thick with inky water,
where the mist
often got trapped
between light and dark.

He mixed water and mud
and pressed it into their chest,
took a sharp branch
and gently scratched
his secret words into them,
until it became a tattoo.

He then gave each a bag of seeds
and a canteen of pool water,
guided them back to their errant tree,
chanted for them to mix both
into the thirsty soil until
it no longer screamed for inspiration.

The students repeated this every day,
watching the grass bloom infinite variations,
discovering their tongues speak
at first his and then their secret words
until they knew all of them,
even those yet to be spoken.

Gone in the labyrinth
of dense words
is the thin golden clew
that is the salvation out
for the gathering of lost poets.
The thread doesn’t exit
to the center,
to meaning,
just a thick grove of forest
where they meander forever
in the definitions all around them,
each footfall erased in
the revision of those before.

I lose one sock every other washing.
The wisdom of the washer and dryer
says that God is stockpiling the lost one
to be reunited with the other in heaven.
Does that mean those with perfectly
mated, never separated pairs, are
doomed to the spin dry of eternal hell?
But then, it’s Smart of God, not letting me
hop around on one foot in my nakedness.

Socks are greater than love.  
They remind us that things
lost will eventually be found,
show the foolishness of looking
back to see what’s coming.
They are reminders that
rain is the reason clotheslines
have disappeared.

I am a Vitruvian Man
marked out like an anatomy lesson
in black and green dye,
something to align against the mean,
a mold made of sheets and plastic
to aim the mechanical eye
to revolve its rays around.

I can’t move because the machine
requires mathematical silence
to perform its cure, so the nurse
must tug me into place.

I get lost in the hum of the circle,
lonely bagpipes playing a dirge,
maybe Amazing Grace,
maybe Scotland the Brave,
maybe the last graceful notes
of my own dying world,
maybe it’s just noise.

Somewhere there
is a small echo of God
that almost gets lost in the creation
of algorithm and code,
smothered in my general deafness,
the unbelief that He would touch me
at my weakest point
like a biblical character.

The scan stops.
The mold is done.
The nurse lifts me gently up
making sure my feet touch the floor
before letting go.
She smiles and reminds me
that the end is just 25 treatments away.

Exhausted, endured,
my  veins
touch the moon's hope—

this faded celebration
that keeps clinging
to possibilities beyond—

amongst these pallid faces,
silent companions,
the burdened

looking down this
sterile room,
pale walls,

who surrender
to sleep so easily,

unheedful of this
moon child

listening to only
the comforting whisphers
just ahead.

I have no taste for whiskey,
although it seems over the years
I have developed a proclivity for cancer,
for building the nacre into  pearl.  

It’s funny how one can live with death
scooted to the borders, listening to it
rap the door with sub-audible gusts
that only your dog hears and barks at.

The holy trinity, my wife calls it,
three masses on the left, right,
concluding down in a ****** triangle,
a parasite, a dark natural beauty of my years.

The bad genes of my parents play out their divorce
in my body, diabetes and cancer
fighting for the claim to death’s victory,
my only peace being to cut them both out.

The Great Physician puts my cure
in the hands of fallible demigods,
whose inclination is to bury hope in the
condolences of the other well-intentioned masses.

“It’s great that you feel no pain,
Your color looks good today,” they echo
as the pallid tv weatherman I met
in ruddy years on the brown river shuffles by.

The nacre of the cancer ward-
an open shirt skeleton on oxygen,
two old black men  talking loudly
about seasons of diagnosis and mistreatment,

just waiting, waiting, waiting to get better
caws at me as I make my way
to the reception table just bright enough
to not seem an open casket.

My wife fills out three pages asking
for family obituaries while I answer
on a tablet forty questions about death,
five about life, two about insurance.

I wait in quiet sitting in a clinical green chair
Listening  for my name to be called,
thinking not about the culled pearl
but the beautiful oyster thrown way.

I can’t walk into Walmart and not scan for shell casings,
see the bruises on the fruit and think of those who fell,
those now populating its aisles and borders
and calculate if it’s a number worth the killing
when the man in a heavy jacket with a bulge,
ramrod eyes and spine level as a concrete wall
decides to subtract brown and black from white.

I cant walk a crowded mall parking lot without scanning
for gapped car windows with no panting dogs inside,
searching for bump  stock impressions in the cloth and foam
venting the velocity of aggression in the unfolding humidity,
the rust in the panels mating with the rust in the soul,
the numbers adding to his perfect algorithm of annihilation
unaware that color is an impossible illogical subtraction.

The Aurora of the Dark Knight Rises stains every movie I see
adjusting my seating calculations towards the nearest exit,
making the ten dollar hustle two seats away a quaint fear
compared to the ****** page manifesto of nearby hands
restless for assault when the cool dark light hits every eye.
I’m safe, cuddled in the low numbers of  the matinee.
For now, I’m not worth the killing.

The Sumatran orangutan, gardening her spot  
comfortable in the canopy and lush tree top,
nursing her young month-old,
fell fiery below, seventy-four holes
in her when the shooting stopped.

Four air gun pellets pierced her left eye,
two her right, leaving her darkly blind,
a howling Homer, Milton in orange pain,
bereaved, childless, now a wild-less refrain
scratching the earth for any hopeful frame..

Her collar broken, lacerations from sharp objects
on her upright arm and leg, one left finger a socket.
Her fiery camouflage that hid her in the canopy light
is singed in the clearing flame, her skin turned night    
just another victim of human slight.

She will suckle her ghost child five years until mature
for the pain she has there is no real animal cure.
Use to solitude she is now truly truly alone,
even as the human rescuers reset her broken bones.
For in the war between good and bad man she is the lure.

Spared the ignominy of being a rich Clint Eastwood’s pet,
she will live out her life in sanctuary and uneasy stress
away from those who fear a Planet of Apes,
a refugee of the Air Gun War with her own tamed space,
PTSD, therapy, rehabilitation and very high tree state.

Before audaciously
flying
in the strangled gleaming
of the last glory
of extinct clouds
rising
I asked my soul
what is the purpose
of having
the last thought
of mankind
or any
dreams
Oh Jinn
give back
the last of me
stolen and not yours

The Jinn replied
they blessed you
don’t you remember
or dreamed that you remember
it was that memory
of some things
and everything
that started your world
and ended this
and theirs
It started
and finished
just the way
you wished

I come to the creek path near my house, the one my wife doesn’t like me to walk alone, for fear I might fall.

I see mountain bikes riding through, a leashed  triplets of dogs of Goldilock sizes their caregiver behind, struggling to contain their strides.

My husky-chi barks at them, underneath a low growl  in the back of  his throat threatens to come out.  

He pulls me to the path. I pull him back.  

The evening concert of cicadas and toads in the overgrown retention pond between is just starting its clicks and croaks.  


Hours  later, on my beast’s last brief walk of the night, while most life is asleep and the path is still dangerous, I hear their deafening crescendo.

The creek is a gray smear cutting through the golden moon, the canopies of the night.  


Only the streetlights, the head lamps of a car turning the corner, show me the way home— but I think, know, only want the path.

A chill rolls in, so to the first drops of  predicted rain, of  the morning  fog and mist to come.

I unleash my dog and he vanishes into the path.  I hear the splash of water, the snap of twigs and crunch of leaves that lets me know he had crossed to the other side.  

There’s a small squeal, two long beats, and with it, the concert stops, then restarts in a softer refrain.  

My  beast proudly returns, dropping a field mouse at my feet.  I am disgusted, but being gracious, I pat my dog’s brindle head, tell him he’s a good boy. This is his nature and I am helpless to restrain it.

I stuff the creature into a dog waste bag, think of walking to the path, just to where the concrete and forest separate, and pitching it as far as I can, but then realize my dog would just retrieve it again.          

My dog snuggles against my leg. I put the mouse in my pocket, pet my dog’s heaving stomach.  

The path calls him- calls me. I clip the leash to his harness, prepare for him to tug me onto the path.  

Instead, he spins around without a snarl,  and starts to follow the scent trail of home, pulling until the leash tells him that I want to say.

I sit down at the end of the concrete path, my dog obeying my motion, but facing home. My fingers create a lazy trail in the muddy earth.  

When it’s deep enough for a small grave, I drop the mouse in, covering the hole over quickly before my dog notices the rejected offering— the present I can not keep or even explain to my waiting wife.  

A sadness wells in me- not for the mouse but for steps I will never take- the knowledge that I will fall and never get back home- the knowledge that I will not know the wild path forward, just the hard, white one behind.

The weavers of the plains are tireless workers
poor but honest, always trusting the generosity
of an unlocked door to let in a husband working
nights at the print and design shop, finishing that
last small sign full of eclairs glazed with the most deliciously  appealing serif  font for the new
French bakery off of main and twenty-third

or the plumber who heard about that
slow running toilet on the second floor
who leaves the bill neatly near the vanity
knowing the check will come with
the Wednesday amble and update chat

or the mechanic who can be trusted with the
keys and a blank check  on the front seat
of that old blue Ford that is leaking green.

The weaver mother with seven children,
threads pieces for their school newspaper,
spins fine clear aqua yarn showing other kids
how to swim, substitute teaches so that she
can bind their minds into a chalkboard panel
of good knowledge, even drives the school bus
if that is what the thread requires to be strong.

The weaver farmer sees the Nebraska soil
is thready, dry, hard to till,   harder
to water, that crops can’t be harvested
without the abundant help of others.

In it they see a tapestry,
the people it’s colors
everything needing a tight loom
for it to work, survive and thrive  
and bind forever together.


So, they are intentionally local knowing
machine yarn eventually unravels,
that good thread can’t be found online,
and that the best panels in the tapestry
are the ones that come from common life.

The poet makes his gun out of any old thing:
sticks of words,  bird song, the swish of trees,
the pitter patter of the growing city around him,

The poet’s gun is never just a gun.
His poems are never just words.

Today, the poet’s gun is a rose—
thorns of wounding,  
warnings to admire its scent and beauty
from a respectful distance.

He fired it in the air knowing
that a gun that is a gun
is a little brook of death,
but since his gun was a rose,
it was dangerous and beautiful.

His verse exploded
blooming petals
shedding its crimson
like dew on the water.

It felt like rain.
It felt like pulsing veins.  
It felt like life being knocked over.
It felt like love bursting through.

The gun was a rose
and the gun was not death.
Out of anything he made it.
Tomorrow, it would be water.

The pond was a quarry first,
a blast furnace to the colonies
where trains ran across its field.
“Iron Ore Bed” map points called it.
It was left to the rain when it dried up.

When his parents bought the land
twenty- five years before he was born,
the field was overgrown and the pond
was weedy and inaccessible.

Over the next few decades,
they cleared the area all around it,
diverted a nearby brook
to flow through it.  
It became the center of their life.

It was sixty feet deep with water
that was clear and warm.
It teamed with small trout, pickerel
and bass, shoals of gentleness that
passed by him and his cousins as they swam.  

Great blue herons, snowy egrets
would feast their briefly before
their Souh American migration,
always mindful of the need
for even quick hellos and goodbyes.

In his presence they would dip their wings
and then rise majestically over the pond
above the beech, birch and ash,
vanishing from his sight, beyond the horizon.

And then, always the rain would come,
the pond shimmering in the downpour
washing the pond mud and silt
from his arms and legs, the last
streaks of it from his hair.  

Afraid he would be struck by lightning,
he retreated to the screened in porch,
with everyone, out of the rain, playing
Monopoly in the coming firefly night.

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.

The port rests on my high right chest, a pink crater,
a  cleanly folded linen shroud kissed with tears
wheeled from operating room to recovery  
by melting folds of scrub blues with iodoform scents.

The fragrance of me is creased into a tucked blanket,
monitors on my legs and arm caressing rhythmic,
sounds dissolving into the hum left in a plastic wind-
wafting hints of my odorless crenulated alchemical cure.

My wife holds the origami of my old self in a
blue zip lock hospital bag that opens with a
singe of nitrate, the final aroma of good cooked food
settling on a rack then vanishing into a memory portal.

I smell no future,  just the staleness of hope and fear
as I uncrease myself into my clothes and stand unfolded
at the exit, in the threshold of a shadowless sunlight
whose sleeves I sniff for the blossoming plum tree.

If lucky I will die in a room
of non-hospital green, on plump pillows,
good linens, with good family and good friends,
the ghosts of loves, the odorama
of nitrate seas, forests or mountains on
walls.
Room where well-cast dreams lived and died.

Will my death be the end of a long love,
mystery, tragedy or comedy,
flashback to life or final nightmare?

Will your face be the  last frame or just
the quieter, dustier bed
out there in the sun— the rain?

After, the awe returns with less shock.
A father lives in a quiet unannounced moment.
At his celebration of life
service all the children wear black leather.
They refuse to die, be strangers,
vow to know their names, remember their world.
The sound of traffic on the way back home leads them
to a smelly bar open this cold night.
The sirens fade pass for the party inside.
The balcony holds and holds.
Whatever war there is
it will not arrive this night.
They will likely never forget
all this dancing through vintage songs,
dancing again and again.
—And there it is. There it is—
Everything they’ve given up
to stay here and find more.

(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.

Her mother’s tale of the red string
foretold that Miko and Makoto
would be together,
tied little finger to little finger
by a taut invisible  blood line.
What she didn’t tell her
was that the line would fray,
break, need to be
retied over and over.

In their wedding photos
Makoto would stand stiff,
sincere in his white suit,
chrysanthemum in lapel,
hands by his sides,
close to her but
never really touching.
Miko in her red-white kimono
was almost a shrine
with butterfly ribbons,
a sigh more than a smile
adorning her face.

She imagined years
of ritual devotion
turning the gown gray,
the white high heels into
black sensible pumps.
Her gaze would eventually
never match Makoto,
it would rest on her feet,
turn inward until
she saw only herself
alone on the shore.

Makoto would spend
long hours in his cubicle,
drawing house after house
for others to live and work in.
At home the drawings would
fall into an exhausted heap
on the living room sofa
forming a charcoal pillow
for his weary head.  

Miko would put away
the uneaten food,
separating half  
into a bento box for
Makoto’s next day’s lunch,
the other half reserved cold
for her own silent noon meals.
She would dry her hands
on the old never worn
yellow girl’s onesie cleverly
repurposed to a dish rag.

Her mind drifted back to the time
they visited the Snow Monkeys of
Jigokudani bathing in their hot spring.
She would watch a mother macaque
and infant slipping their fingers
in and out of each other forming
rose strings in the slow rippling splash
until the last echo almost touched her womb.
She listlessly gazed at her feet as she
listened to Makato denounce
the silly animal antics she delighted in,
how he snarled out without regret
“Akachan wa noroidesu”
(Babies are a curse.)
Nevertheless he gladly purchased
the commemorative photo of them,
taken at the park’s entrance,
of them posing stiffly because
it echoed their wedding one.

On the bullet train back to Tokyo
she felt sick and rushed to the toilet.
There, Miko knew the yellow secret  
bought at Akachan  Honpo the
day before and hiding in her purse
would become a dish rag.
In the hygienic blue flushing water.
her hope turned to grief
and her grief became a silent wail
that emptied out, a crimson string.

Seated in her assigned chair
she glared at Makoto
staring out the train window
searching the darkening horizon.
He never turned his face to her.
He didn’t even know she was next to him.
Miko stared at the walls, stifling a sigh.

Inside her the red string
shriveled, then broke.
Her sky rearranged
to a desert. Her precious
water evaporated.

She awoke to Makoto,
saying not a word,
entering and shuffling
to the sofa.  

The gas stove hissed.
The yellow dish rag
laid close to the flame.
Another uneaten meal
existed unwanted on
the dining room table.

Miko, this one time,
never bothered to
awaken Makoto.
She walked to the
balcony searching
hard for but neither
finding sky nor horizon—
only houses,
some which Makoto drew,
surrounded her.
She put little finger
to little finger together
then pulled them apart.
Looking down,
Miko knew she
was destined to fall.

It has been five years
since I visited you
my old  Sea Grape friend,
standing proud and
wizened in the front yard,
unbothered by all
the construction behind.  

Everything is smaller
and crowded than
I once lived it,
except for you—  
still the right size
for a wild girl to climb,
providing enough shade
for a shy and pensive boy
to shelter under and  
think lyric thoughts
or listen to the Dolphins
playing their first football
on a scratchy transistor radio.

I was always the net
under your boughs
lest that restive girl  
should fall after proudly
reaching your canopy,
seeing the open sky
the soft sunlight
kissing her face forever
urging a higher climb.  

She never did stumble,
not even once, just
shaking green hard grapes
loose onto my head
like Newton’s apples,
creating ideas for
stories to explore and write.  

She is still a Sea Grape climber
and I a shade tree dweller,
she ever conquering canopies
and I seeking safe shadows
to read under, plot and scribble.

Your life has spanned
close to a century,
although I have known
you near sixty of those.

Your history, I imagine
had you a transplanted twig
torn from Crandon shores
to become, after the road,
the first magnificent presence
in the middle of East Shore Drive,
the pride of the community
that built a wall to contain,
protect you from Atlantic winds.

You are the survivor
having seen the coco tree
just across the sidewalk
break in a hurricane,
and the banana plant,
which never fruited,
behind the barrier wall,
under the corner eaves,
(where beneath its fronds,
I watched my first desire
shivering cross armed
in a blue maid’s dress, seeking
shelter from the pelting rain)
the succumbing victim
of gnats, flies, mosquitos
and persistent tropical rot.

I saved my first kiss so it
reside under your  embrace,
an awkward peck that
braced her to your trunk,
unleashing an army
of carpenter ants that
trooped through her hair,
the cleft in your middle
a way station for home invasion.

I knew then that you were
a jealous protector of
all the things that loved you,
at least the human ones,
for I never witnessed
gray squirrels scurry
up your speckled trunk,
nor mockingbird nests
resting in tan scar branches,
nor a single heart leaf,
fall sadly to the ground.

The old house behind you,
has kept true to your colors,
beginning green as the sea
and the initial touch of hand to leaf;
five years after college,
a new owner turning it tan
as your weathered bark;
ten years yon, after mom’s funeral,
it like the twilight glow dusting
your every branch and limb;
till thirty years later, I stand here
feeling the squishy snap of your
purple mature fruit under my feet,
the destruction echoed in the  
dusty patina walls looking
like a Pompeian relic.

Now everything is a remodel,
peafowls, peahens, peachicks
with their rainbow eye tails,
iguanas strutting everywhere,
roosting for competing limbs
in mangroves and cypress,
though respecting your old dame
privacy and royal privilege,
while the din of new spaces
being built on still good wood
vibrates out to you my friend.

I scoop some of your purple pulp
into a zip lock plastic bag,
I keep in the car for road trip
vegetable treasures, enough
for a proper souvenir, the rest
reserved for my wife to make
a sweet, tangy Sea Grape jelly,
knowing that this will be
the last time I spend with you
in your earthly eternity.

The shadows of our footprints
follow us everywhere from the court,
the pavement, the dance, the street,
ink stained register of our birth,
and the stumble to grave,
invisible to us unless
in melting snow, bed of dirt.

The powder on the factory floor
leaves the forensics of our existence.

Watch as trees bend
to cover the crime,
wind and lighting conspire
to cover the crime.

The little black dog on a leash
being hastily pulled away
as his hind paws kick up snow
in a frenzy conspiracy to hide the tracks
while other tracks are exposed in
the freshly trampled white
too numerous for even limbs to hide.

The angles of shadow staircases and flues
declare the evidence of their guilt,
their conspiracy with death.

An iron rooster crowing northwest
in the embers of the day
exposes rooftop crosses
and a receding skyline,
caught in the smoky cyclone
that reveals two once tall towers.

Two shadows on the pavement
walk towards each other
one holding onto the long
rail of a stop sign while
the lady on the third floor
arranges three flower pots
on her tenement window sill
in the enclosing concrete footprints
that surround her and every one.

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.

There is a song that will never be
not one of a crooning summer breeze
but of smothered dreams in ***** streets—

Those buried in shrouds of leaves
plucked from maple trees,
couched in green moss or
in lovely silks on soft downy beds

will never know those
who died on a freezing night,
a bottle by their side or
a needle in their arm.—

The lucky who lived and died
their dreams, earned laurel crowns
will never know the nightmare ones
murdered in their sleep just for fun.

Those who dream of seeing heaven,
rising beyond the drop of stars
with a chorus of trailing nightingales
and a full bench of funeral soloists

pay no heed to those *****, ragged ones,
with the infected heart who fell into the
road  pummeled by wheels that just rolled on—
loud music playing over their last silent notes.

In the rose of their blood, these murdered lie,
the violet of the violent passing bye-—
a thousand moonbeams strong filing  their
unmarked resting spot to the manicured tombs.

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.

I fall back into the comfort of our once existence.
every time the  other sibs cry out your absence
in black texts- how they MISS YOU SO MUCH.
And yet, your stories are my memories.
In their writing down I am there with you, so much.
There with you -mom- in that old faded yellow Chevrolet
traveling the black top of highways and backroads-
you in the driver seat until it was my turn-
the white lines coding out our secret message-
GO- LET US KEEP GOING.

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.