The walls codify what the white-peaked vista
peeping out over teal seas, allowed to pasture--

somebody's transient, blooming, ranging thoughts.
A heart leaping, often imperceptible, both of the world
and of us,-- we need to pen the loved.

So our wants, they are already turning to concrete.
A path sprouts up from where you plant one foot,
lightly, on the green, ever-reaching growth of plants,

white cities climb outward, a garden of footsteps
from where the hill drank the sea and enjoined
that meeting with a rose, a temple.

Desire must be willing to want its own outcome, death.
We met on the ramparts of the new city of which
whole lives are built up to find. And now?

There are no ladders from top to bottom.
The sun just setting is just the same as a wild poppy,
hanging in the green whose outcrop already is beginning
to disassemble this stronghold back into hill and sea.

What is this precious stone
placed in the palm's heart, or ear's drum?

From where you stood
a new language has replaced your standing

and it glides and arches about you,
revealing your weight by not striking any where.

You are the leftover space,
the blood rising under the tongue.





Istanbul Metro

First I notice her other face
in the window her mirror reflection
I realize the only one she has ever lived with
and so it is full of heaviness and pull.

I am alone and so I can't but overhear
the two young woman across from me
coolly picking words from the air
and building a shelter of conversation.

and as they are sent hurtling,
delighted with the results
and shaking with laughter,
for the spangled moment
and nothing more,

The dim cabin made only for practicality
and the stale metro wind
add to the lightness,
that all of this will never come again.

In night's steady, undisturbed work
you are the first break.
Now as you begin to feel the dew,
see the snow now about you
through the plane, the vastness
which not even the birds have yet filled,
it sees you.

You have both fasted,
but it has feasted.

Eating your absence to become a little green,
this springiness, this welcoming of the not yet arrived
before the landslide of day
with its crevices made by
small decision, a road you took yesterday
that made you nut.

But now there there is no hardness to find.
You see it sailing towards you, half-formed
across the white, this lime in a snowstorm,
gleaming.

Eat and you will be as other men
scattering dust away from paths.

Follow it and you will always be looking back
as you climb behind it, uncertain,
you will disappear into daybreak.

When the snows have come again
to sheath every fine bough,

I am without the word for when
it begins the next day to drop lightly
as if released from a bow.

When I climb a hill to where the sun hasn't set
and children careen down it
and drop into the sea of the valley below,

I do not know what I should do.
Run back down the bank?
No, there is a long walk ahead
to think about what children know.

When I have reached as far as I want to go
and see the mountain across me glow,
impassive and shining with the last light of day,

I know there is no announcement to be had
for why one must suffer to see fine things.

Past the Polish priest next to me in the cabin
I look out the port hole, thinking about the smoke
crazily suspended below my flight.

On the orange corner of a cloud
smoke's hidden art peaks out,
illuminated.

My eye, made to catch smoke's body,
speeds past the dark rippling ocean
steps out from its recess, asks smoke:

Where are you?
Come form yourself around my exposure.

Metabolism consumes the wood, tree, mountain, *****.
Breath is the smoke of their togetherness.

Where can I rest myself?
Surrounded by the slow, wooden eaters of time.

Heated cedar smells sweeter than bread.

Our hearth devours the cold of separation.
Built around it are the grey boards of house.

The tree knits into the earth to hold a mountain in place.
A leaf rises from the petrified core.

So many to occupy the bald, everlasting *****,
I think I'll pause to press one into a book.

Wolastoq is the former Maliseet name for the Saint John River.*

Overlooking the beautiful river
the wind is making an incredible
din.

And yet there is no offered
palm, just the driving. Direction,
float of  gull.

Holds tight its secret
predilections.

It says go or come.
Follow me
or fight.