Underneath the cedar’s in the green grass
The orange cat spreads her bones a certain way
And every so often lifts her stout head
To see the people coming and going

To her the clouds take on the shape of fish
Swimming lazily in a shallow pond
Her body stalking silently the shore
Never letting her shadow reach the sky

The lull of the afternoon is immense
And the mourning doves gather on wires
Cooing every so often to make sure
The day does not slip away unnoticed

The lighthouse rises above the cedars
Rises above and into the ocean
Stretching its neck in anticipation
For the first hint of a gliding white sail

Now she departs that tangerine flower
Stalking ghost-like paw after silent paw
Strutting instinctively toward the water
Vanishing in the reeds which disclose her

The clouds drape across the waning evening
The sky turns blonde to pink to purple
The light from above shines the horizon
The soul escapes the body once again.

The wind blows my ***
Towards my shins;
Salty breeze you joke!

The third time I opened my eyes I began to cry
Midnight ferry ride silver full moon
Over black waves
A feeling beyond death
Following the blinking red lights
Letting the tears gather slowly

The white gulls diving like stars tumbling
From the cold cloudless night
(A father a mother and a daughter)
Her first boat ride ever
Perhaps the mystery of life exposed
Blonde hair blowing in the salty breeze
Her eyes open as wide as the Atlantic
--And to think in no time
She will be safe asleep in a warm bed
Dreaming of a thousand things to come.

This is all I can do to keep my thoughts straight
Ride midnight ferries to abandoned islands
Grey salty Atlantic silver rimmed islands
Where cars disappear into the frothy abyss
Where the newly paved roads lead to nowhere
But the blusterous sea where all is forgiven
And forgotten.

I make a new circle with my mind
I have been here before but in a dream
I can remember the fluidity of the waves
The sand rolling across the rusty grasses
The seagulls screaming like children
The lull of a salty afternoon sapphire
In the shade of the live oak
Disappearing in the reality of waking
My eyes open slowly to something familiar
But now I am here on the beach, in flesh
Standing before an immense possibility
At the edge of a venerable beginning
With the sun setting over the watery brim
With the breeze rolling through the trees
My feet rested in the sand apathetically
Looking out over Pamlico Sound with wild eyes
Trying quickly to grasp what it is, its meaning
Its mystery before it fades away and slips
Into obscurity forever.

I will one day become an ocean
And those that wish will come before me
And throw their troubles in my vastness
And pray their sorrows to my moons.

--I will soon become an answer
As silent as the evening sun
As changing as the seasons done
And bolder than the question.

It was first a dark blue rattling
As dark as the deep ocean
Then turning brighter brighter
Creating silhouettes of the forest
--The birth of day stretches
In layered colors of silent waves
Now a sort of white pushing up
Like an angry fist piercing the sky
Breaking the shore finally
An orange layer pink to the south
Saturates the horizon and grunts and moans
The weight of a million years
The gravity of love turning and twisting

I’ve had this memory before.

--The bird wakes from the night
Without thought takes flight
Wings outstretched to the west
Upward and over the mountain goes.

--To a peaceful sunrise August 17th 2012--

Take this thought of noon day sun
I give it to you with a flower
Purple like a July rain
In the evening of dusk
Yet this thought is tiresome
As the flower sags to the left
Your bones ache dry and your eyes
Glint in the rays of a gift of July
For you before July is gone
This year and August rushes in
I wish you take it softly so
And place it in your kitchen window
And as this thought and flower
Wither with the dying season
With the decaying thought of summer
I hope you stop to never think of me

Deep within the mountains a valley of green
In summer city of insects and towers of purple and
Yellow with the bees and butterflies preoccupied
With the joy of scent inspecting each door to find
The sweetness of living as the day descending
Sending rays through the spruce like some sort
Of king reaching for his laborers carelessly finding
His mark fallen short as the sunset frozen in
Lines of color spat white with roaming clouds
Yet the river gurgles even in the night and the song bird
Sings into the darkening hours a deafening cry
Hears a call back from some distant neighbor
“Will we survive the reckless night?”
As the howl of the mountain lion echoes granite
Sends a shiver through the ancient spine like
Some sort of expanding as the rooster calls the day
The lion births the night roaming silent paw
Across the nestled needles cracking
Sticks and pretend you are asleep because
Not even one eye on the ceaseless twinkle of
The stars will break your fear, wandering
Lonely as a deer in the midnight meadow
Head transfixed above the gas of space, the twist
Of galaxy and the silence of the forest leave me
Breathless, I hop from star to star like bees
Buzzing from flower to flower myself opening
The doors of sweetness, that unattainable nectar.
--I fall asleep in the meadow and wake to find the
Sun rising above another day and hear the cry of those
Same song birds “We have survived!” in soft sweet notes.

The door of my home is opened and through it
The summer day is fading on the walls those dusty
Wooden planks soaked in rays for moments and through it
I step forward and into and around the corners as if I were
The sun on the horizon gleaming bursts of rays in those
Sullen corners through the dusty wooden slats.

Take seat and watch the completion of day finite resting thinking
Of a summer day spent among the hills of granite and pine
And all the dreams of day complete and spent jumping creek
And taking rest beneath green aspen or discovering
Caves or basking in the sun on granite spires.

Now exhausted in an enlightened thought
Sitting in my home resting with the sun fading into pale colors
On the walls thinking very carefully as the colors grow paler
A pale blue to grey now like frozen lines of shadows
The strangest colors of summer, dusk summer dusk.

“To which poet would find joy
In writing about joys and for why?
If summer is season it should
Be second thought to fall.”

Look at me! I rise from the reading
Of Robert Frost and write the words
Of the earth like a volcano and beside
My brain the springtime flowers
Growing in the sunlight of thought
--There has to be a river somewhere
Said the mountain but it was gravity
Or even larger that said something
In this dark deep midnight hour.

There’s a dead deer in the corn field
Where the hunter has gutted out
A hole to reach the inside
The womb of death
The void of once was
And a fawn walks aimlessly in the woods.

So let October evaporate into November
So bring the truck around the old fence
And pick up that dead deer
So cut two slits behind the knees
And pull upward, upward, upward on the rope
Toward heaven and shave the skin
For winter gloves and cut the meat
For a bursting belly and now all that
Hangs is a disembodied silhouette
From a hundred year old pine tree
So cut the legs, slit the skin
The muscles and the joints
Take a saw and saw away into the marrow
And let the truth fall to the ground again
Hear its loud thump as the dead dies away
And call out the cats from the cement basement
Let them linger in the pugnacious blood
See the blood congeal on their white fur.

So let the hunter be happy with triumph
See him grin in the fading light of evening
So let the poet withdraw into the nature of death
See how gloomy he looks there in the purple dusk.

Imagine being a hollow tree
On a damp morning in
November in Minnesota along Lake Superior
When lonesome is the
Only thought on your mind
When the clouds do not lift
For days and the wind
Is perilous from the north
And the white and black of your
Rotting trunk is the only disparity
To the orange and brown ground
Where the mushrooms, they even they
Are dead.

That is the way I felt walking up
The gravel path at dusk with two friends
Such a dusky hazy muffled
Moment when the only light was
A blue black that seemed to last
Eternity and our breathe from our
Mouths were drowsy ghosts in the air around us
And the cold hit our ashen cheeks
And stung red the luminous blood
Gathered in our eyes and
I thought of her how I would never
See her green eyes again looking out through
Up on the hill looking out through
The forest and over the lake which
Could not be seen as a lake anymore
Just a profound purple translucent hole
And out over into that last bit of day
That bitter blue black which
Hung so hallow on the horizon
The saddest light endlessly
The saddest light endlessly
“We are almost half way there”
Said ***** and I nearly died right there
Nearly crawled on my knees into the forest
And as I gazed behind me into that black emptiness
I saw something run across the path into the forest
Something run away from the fear of loss
From the feeling of hurt and pain
It might have been a deer or a wolf
It never looked back it never turned around
And then it disappeared into the woods forever
And the only thing I could do was turn my shoulder
The only thing I could do was continue on.

A colorful glimmer of Christmas lights
In a dark room in December hid my grandfather
From the life he had proudly gathered.
Silence was taken as a relief from the rotting flesh
And smell of decay
Which had sank into every depth of the home.
My grandmother’s troubled eyes searched the
Room for useless words to fill the winter night.
Outside the heavens were covered by clouds
“How are you doing?” My mother spoke nervously
To him multiple times and in the faded dark he repeated each
“I’m trying the best I can.”
The cancer had slowly taken away his strength and
The wrist loosened around the faded arm chair which he gently sank into
The mutation made its way into a tumor over time
On his left cheek and his bottom lip hung motionless
In the flickering light of the candle.
Even with the form of dying
A shade of life could be seen in his eye
And some words echoed from the deepest parts
“You look older with your beard” he said
With a grin that showed us all that his time was near.
I left my grandfather with a bend of my body
“I love you” and a handshake that led to a hug.
His final beat was felt on a Monday afternoon
And the winter distance separated us.
I came home for the funeral and all the
Women cried and the men stood quiet.
The priest took a request from my grandfather
And told a story…
I was three years old and my grandfather raised
Me above his head with force
Quickly rising and sinking me into the air
I flung between his arms
On the strongest throw I flew above his head and into the sky
And proceeded down through his slipping fingers
His perpetual eyes looked down on my falling body
“Andy hang on!” he said, knowing I was perfectly safe
I must have been climbing back up with fear because
In that moment with my innocent eyes full of life
I gazed up toward my grandfather
“Grandpa, I’m trying the best I can!”

An evening fear
--The stubborn tear--
The death of day has opened way.

The sun is low, the shadows long
The horizon sky a light blue purple
The frozen trees now naked free
Cling to every last ray.

Little tiny black dots to me
They climb and fight up to my knees
But every time I toss down my hand
And flick their tiny bodies away;
But evermore they continue to pest
And me to them the same I guess.

Has springtime’s child shed its youthful skin?
Have you not seen it there beside the shore?
Where the water rises from the soul within
And sunshine’s gracious warmth from it explores
This summer warmth seems crude to my belief
Like weary trees naked in falls retreat
Have you not felt ascending winter’s relief?
Have you been tricked in nature’s deceit?
Summer rays fall hard in burning succession
From a silent springtime never embraced
Where graceful winds carry away questions
Of a seasoned feeling never replaced
Youthful days have passed through this ancient land
Spring lay twisted in summer’s open hand.

These waves, brought to life in full color
Against the brim of a tropical sunset
Over the weary Gulf of Mexico
Washed white and silver foamed upon this shore
These waves; complete movement upon the ocean, devout servants
Endlessly caressing the pale, sparkled sandy shore
Endlessly ebbing and flowing through time, space
Through all of deep day and all of long night
Between the setting sun orange and blue
Between that of land and that of mysterious ocean
Between that of water and sky, now darkening sky
Always there caressing
A fine line overlapping, again and again
Riding the spine of earthly force
Crashing against this fateful shore
Gaining strength, losing strength
Gaining strength, losing strength
A constant force upon the land, twisting
Twisting and punishing the pale sandy beach
Twisting rocks and driftwood into new life
Rocks and coral grinded into red dust over millions of waves
Driftwood brown, turned into dirt and black soil
Life molded into liquid, life turned into permanence
A reminder of this strange reality, gravitation
That of which expires, that of which grows
Working on this exact beach, at this exact moment
Grinding and pushing, bringing reason to things
Bringing new to life, destroying old to life
Exposing ancient shells to the sunlight
Woven by a certain pressure, creating detail
Beauty in detail, made by the constant waves
Of which they shall one day destroy
And this very land, one day they shall destroy.
These waves, moving in, in blue and gold before the sunset
Stretched out across all of the land on earth
They have not ceased, they will not, they are relentless
They are innovation in each, beauty of this earth
This universe!
Waves moving in and out, for eternity perhaps
These waves, beautiful forms
Have me mocking the very air I breathe
Have me mocking the very thought of life and death.
(To the waves that crash on Jewel Key)

When the biscuit root raised
Its head to the unbashful sky
With white purpled eyes
And asked why. It was only
Then that spring, nothing but the
Sun and wind.

This, the last night of September
Moon over mesa in cool light no
Crickets left to serenate the
Stars.

Ruins on ruins on ruins
The past is but a sigh
If I could give up anything though
It would not be goodbye.

Ruins on ruins on ruins
What music drives you mad?
If it wasn’t for the loneliness
I wouldn’t be so sad.

Ruin of sunset ruin of
Moon night, last fragment
Of September in the air
Light as a feather and
Crisp as snow.

We gain immortality through death
Like snow through splintered sunlight

It’s as big as this farm field
The universe, after harvest
Tufts of emptiness covered
In first snow. Only the breeze
Of the cold afternoon
To rattle any **** that
was still left near the barb wire
Fence. All the trees were naked by
November. I went further. Supernova.
Where once a glacier slid. Now
Cows ramble on the hillside in
The unfolding evening. In and out of
Light, the clouds are coming back.
The deep ravine is hungry for snow.
Dusk is a ruddy purple and above
The geese are flying south.
Near a frozen pond I watched
The night come on. A constellation of
Branches. A nebula of memory.
And I was young and
And the moon was old. And
Love can only stretch so far
Before it shatters or recoils.
I took the cow path back home
Underneath the snowy stars and past
The woodpile through the gate.

Dorothy is out in the garden again
Pulling the weeds out from the ground
Weaving between the green corn stalks
Like a spider spinning a web.

The brown adobe house rests quietly
In the shadow of the turquoise mountain
Which gathers the onion shaped clouds
With its immense emerald hands.

And Dorothy is laying down now
Beneath the sagging green corn stalks
With one ear planted in the soil
Listening to the distant song.

The song of the earth is thunder
Echoing down through the canyons
And the sky is filled with darkness
As the cool wind begins to cry.

Dorothy is out in the garden again
As the clouds roll down the mountain
Pulling the weeds out from the ground
As quickly as she can.

I’m finally waking up here is my mind--
A scattering of dreams, confusion.
The desert spread out, in soft clouds
I am awake here is my heart, the horizon
The only thing I can understand, now.
Pain is pain, be gone.
The smattering trail of mesquite smoke
The rising star
The thinning sound of thunder;
The sudden certain mountains
In the early morning rain.

All I am is a burning leaf
A sudden flicker, a short glare
Against the window of this existence;
Some sort of ghost, like the winter snow
Melting into a puddle in the far field.
When the gray fog turns into night,
Just at the edge of the forest.
All I am is already gone, no
Breeze left even to take me.

with all this noise
A flower
lover of light
with all these years
only minutes less
brittle, stiff
the wind
myself
a shell scoured
a lover
some
**** left
to grow then die
yet

I hold too much in my head
Similar to how little
the desert recieves rain. Sometimes
I need to go into the mountains
and drink to feel peace.
I drink until I can begin to write
Then the words spurt how like a
Flash flood. I think about the horizon
and the breakdown of poetry
Everything mus
Even the brittle brush and stone
it's almost June, the mesquite
living is pain, it's every
barely languid
suffocatingly benign;
let it end here no go on
like last years flowers
this years doom.
I've been much further since leaving the ocean
the whole of america for me, to devoir
the stars and their stars
andtheirstarsandtheirstars
isn't that joy, begin

The desert is no place for poems,
Poems need rain. I've been smiling lately
walking more. Thinking about the horizon
and it's voluptuous curves. How the sun
Snakes, how the moon breaks how the stars
are born and die.
. I've never stood
In one place long enough like you have
Old mountain, on crooked knees.

Where is the horizon? I hope it’s the breakdown -
Those sweet memories; these sunsets and stars
The unmasked moon, some dead love net
Hanging from the docks at midnight;
Maybe a flower, better yet the moth
Better yet a path, the open wound

in the middle of my life i enjoyed the waves something about diving straight through them which made it great

From a dream Cleopatra gets up and walks away again from beneath the trees in the swamp a thousand ibis fly away again, we think we know the horizon until death we, oh it is snow
The lack of rain, love on the last day
Either running into the pines or just leaving the island, we have that in common at.least

You must appreciate the lack
Of most everything, lean towards
Death with shallow roots or just
Get up and walk away again
Or know the moon's cycle study
Sadness satisfy your bones
What I've learned even
The horizon is both true
And un true we must accept
Color and the lack of too
Accept the risks and be constantly
Pulled away and back pushed
Down like the mountains
Stand up like the flowers
What is else, silence and then
Tears love and love
Even a feather on lava in winter
Even a broken heart on the shore
The desert whispers but never tells
Not like the ocean he is too brave
Not like the praire.or the swamp
The desert is final goodbye
Between the brighter moments and
Death if you believe in such a foolish thing if you all this and less just to
Say how happy how sad i have been
Ask the desert the mountain the forest the swamp the plains it knows the same it the cold the warmth i prefer tears to silence something about salt and soon the lack of just get up
Just get out hours minutes days
The piano plays and then

I will punish my body
Like the mountain
Punishes me i will
Sleep beside the streams
Beneath the stars i will
Know the moon the

out with the ancient ones
beneath the rain
we spread our wings
and remembered the dead
.

This is a dreamscape no
This is a horizon no
There is such a thing as hope but
It dissipates like the rain, this is
Poem a seed in the ground
If you close your eyes you
Can see it's flame

This is the moment near
I leaned over and whispered
In his ear "my dog knows more
About this desert than you"
And even Leopold, oh his bones
Old, poked out from the bed of some
Twisted rock and smiled and cried.

It is like lying beneath burnt ashes
A blister on your memory. Beside
The rocks two eyes open again.

The tired sky is so dry it breaks
And then melts together again
and breaks and melts together again;
at sunset I nearly cry
Soon the clouds will be like that too.

I have been counting down the days until
The earth begins to lean away again
From the sun.

But who has been counting down the
Days until the sun becomes too hot
For the earth to touch?  And what will
The sky have to say then?

The old man beneath the mesquite tree
Whose roots are shallow and wide;
It is him who has such thoughts so close to death.

Let me be so overcome with joy, I wag my tail
Let me walk out the door as if it’s the last day
Let me let you walk me, even on a leash
Even if it means you leave me let me walk
East and then west. On the sidewalk let me
*** on this bush of grass let me smell this
Javelina ***, this javeline *** let me
Mark the small path I walk on earth over
And over again let me say oh this this this
That and that that, palm frond let me ***
Here I will walk beneath the new moon
Beneath the stars even if it means you
Abandon me even if it means you die
Let’s sprint across the street lets fly
Past the church, oh a smell oh a scent
Let me smell this blade of grass and be
Happy oh the fence gate oh the door!
Let me lay beside your feet let me be warm
(oh, and the dreams come let me be free
Let me curl up beside you like so)

The wet haired lady
With big thighs out
Of the pool comes
More than tired
To see me in the sun;
Even stone's have a name
Even math has a
Heaven, pure desert
Lonely and lonesome
Dry and free of full of
Form and thought sun
And stars.

On the desert was a horizon;
The hope for rain, scattered
About like stones
Onto the endless plains.

The smile of a sunset
The soft pink embrace
Of evening, held our breath
In, but only for a moment.

Inhaling the moon, I saw
the lesser stars, oh sweet death
As rigid as the moutains
As soft as the sand.

and then there was a desert
A mountain, without name
The begining and then there was
A tree, with no roots
Walking about in the night
Searching for rain
And then there was a dream
And then there was a desert
A new slate a new mind to construct;
Out of dawn's light the stars
Just ashes, just an owl on a cactus

Horizon doesn’t need a name
Not out here, the sun slips
Back again behind those mountains
Why do I always talk of endings?
She said, so petulantly with a
Cold whisper like moths
In the garden. The cactus have not
Had rain out here for months the canyons
Are still red as a beating heart;
Those caves out there they have eyes
And they hardly sleep in the day even
Gravity has a name even those
Cold dreams even the flower death
Has a name the moon is up
And the end is over, again
Horizon doesn’t need a name out
Here, the dawn has burst
Two baby deer in the desert roam free
Even the forgotten have a name
Twenty hundred souls break then
The surface shattered like a window
The desert lies open and free
I just try to climb mountains those near
Mountains but never can I reach the tops
The nerves run out splintered death becomes too real
I slip down endlessly and frustrated

My love, is a desert set on fire
Her hair the golden flames of
Evening, her eyes the purple dusk
That lingers, then fades
And when I touch her skin like that
With my mind the stars
Like bats, flutter from the cave.

We all cling to the past
So tightly, rooted deeply
Into rock, breathing
Lovely moving through
The washes, the mountains
Have eyes too the moon
Looks lonely down upon
The cactus that begin to wake
In the ashes of the twilight
Out from the old stones
They break those chains
Like stars do far away.

We don't have to exist:
That's what nature has told me
With big blue hips unpalmed
Shoulders unfolding flowers
So delicately when it rains;
We only exist because we can
Not too. The desert is filled with
Scars, these mountains go on
Forever.

Sometimes
The
Desert
Sleeps
Just like
I
Smile
The
Moon
Rises
The tide
Higher.
Cold
Blue
Stars
Look
Out
Atyou.
In
Another
Time
In
Another
Place
Your
Face
A flower
In
The
Meadow of
This
Improbable
Heaven

Then the desert
Speaks
To me you
Should not be
Here the old
Mountains
Say, no rain
It's true
As love
As blood.

The aimless spaces
Of the desert
- The sweeping dunes,
Beyond the masked circle
Of an empty moon.

A swamp without
Edges - a white wing
On water –
A moth
That follows the
Unseen flower.

You can open it up
With just your eyes
And smell it -
All the memories of
A summer field -
And feel it’s soft skin
In your fingers melting
Like the rain does
In the evening.

It was relatively nine
When I walked
To the plaza down
The sidewalk past
The bougainvillea that
Bursts out the fence
Like a volcano
To go see the pigs
That tip over
The trash cans
With their sense
Of smell;
And there she was
Like a ghost
On the bench
With sad eyes
Softly saying hello
Through the yellow glow
Of the streetlight
Behind her
And me being
Relatively shy
Loudly waved good bye
And walked back past
The church and
The old school
To emphatically sit
Back gaze back
At the past and
In thought with
Write about it.

The land was more wild, more wild than us
Yet we sang to the moon and we bathed in the rain
With it’s mountains and rivers unfolding to plains
We rode steady and ready ahead of every bend
With the stars up above we could not comprehend
Just the complete emptiness of a forest with no path
A mountain with out name, and the days filled with memories
And the days filled with dreams.