Sometimes she can just appear
Like a flower
Even in the darkest hour
On the bench watching
The pigs, softly saying
Hello.

What remains in the space of death?
The crinkled mountains so resilient -
The battered shore ever-changing.
“A day full of rain”
“A net full of stars”.
In the distance, through the mist
The lighthouse rises and radiates
Warning of impending danger.
Through my fogged filled eyes
the truth pours out. A fern
begins to form.

Tree limbs on moon beams
Leaps so frightfully to the edge
Of ever existence, only then
Will the shadows finally fear us.

Look at the stars, the space between
The owl and the deeper woods, why
Then would one begin to say
That this day, is far too short?

But a snake in the weeds,
beside the barn, sliding
away down the grassy wood.

In the springtime after death
Like a flower in the blowing snow
I know, I know the way
The world feels – tired and anxious.
And time, like wine grows finer
With age (Can you feel it’s
Booming heartbeat) can
You taste its enticing bitterness?
The long sonorous days
Of dusk and love are near again
And the future tiptoes on the quiet shores
Of that boundless, nebulous sea
Exhausted but auspicious;
Like a shadow in the wind

the poem should melt the mind the
words should be so, lascivious as if to
jump from the lips of stone
and kiss death itself. I know
the sun, have seen it's curse.
I know the moon have cried.
I know nothing of mountains but
the climb. I look at the sky as if
it was the sky. I dream too little
dread too much.

Soon this room will be empty, yes
And another will move in, decorating
Corners I thought once impossible
Only to fill holes, in their loneliness.
Soon, monsoons will imbue mesa
In color, flowers will bloom too
Love can endure, and memories
Like smoke, will drift away.

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

Maybe I will be around to tell them living that
The end is not the end show them my atoms
Flowing on through time backwards towards
The end maybe I will be a river I will be
A river then that flows on through and
Cascades into the endless emptiness of
Beyond time I will be like a bird there
A bird that waits to tell people the
End is not the end I will fly away again
The smallest parts of me somewhere
I will show them with their own existence
The beauty and horror of it all I will
Be like a river then like a bird there too
Singing two songs two songs to them

Down by the river’s
Cold half-moon dance
Creep the thirsty
Shadows of canyon
For a quick sip,
                           Of time
Beneath all those stars
Of January.

Outside of my body the minutes fall like rain
Time sweeps the edges of a great ocean
The heart beats and the blood flows within
Confined and hallow I wait to escape eternity
Beyond which death awaits in a stifling wind

Today the rains fall among the green pines
On the sandy island the seagulls grounded
I look out from this tattered wooden home
Out across the grey water and beyond
You wouldn’t understand my thoughts at such a moment

Too dreadful for words I carry this dead weight
Like a slave I brood this awful feeling
Of isolation a prisoner of existence
I shift my body as if it wasn’t mine
I walk the beach alone amid the summer storm

The rusty wire of time shatters
And a million beads of life and nonlife
Plummet into the unconsciousness of the waves
Like seashells they lay strewn upon the shore
To be smothered by the waves the waves.

I tremble my mind to dream condition
I open up my body my bones and veins
I wait beneath the stars in benediction
The river flows within me and beyond
These lonely eyes turn into golden fire.

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

Like ships in the night
The armada of storms
Sail off across the horizon
Out onto the distant plains;
Booming and anguished.
I walk in the night electric
And feel a certain buzz inside
Cautious and wild, stirring.
The night is hidden from me
by the night, the young leaves ripple
In the empty wind.

Erase it all, the heart
The desert. Even the horizon
For me.  One two the stones
Fall. The mountain. For you
From me. Escape
Eternity. The short trees
Even in the fog of the new rain.
From you, to me. It all makes sense
To build a home, a nest. Goodbye
Flowers, time to disperse your seeds
For you, for me. Though I have travelled
So far, for so long. Stardust
Moon.
You ask how I speak so naturally
Look at where I have lived.
The desolate inspires. phew
. lllllsalin the breakdown bewty

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.

Still the chicken coop
At the end of childhood still
The first snow fall soft as
Still the endless summer
Your emerald eyes, far out
At sea. And time. Leaves us
On the vine withered/broken;
Still your kisses in those misses
Out into the air off into the forest.

Blurs of new growth needles in
Green patches on the horizon
In the afternoon I looked at
Cerisa the god of uncertainty and she
Smiled gold fears at me and later it was
A sunset expressed in fractions no
Complete notion of day or night
And night was compressed light
As Eric the god of thought held his
Chin up to the moon
And me the god of loneliness could not get over
How simple how simple the clouds were
In the midnight shadow could not get over how
How beautifully silver they were

Uninspiringly a soft black snake slips across the path
Flicks its pink forked tongue in the damp Florida air
And disappears into the myriad of green ferns
As if you to say “Your existence is inconsequential”
And perhaps footsteps in the mud is all the hammock
Will remember of us (like memories of the dead).

So the zebra long-wing floats on an embankment of breeze
Stops to rest on an orchid high atop an oak tree
Covered in a vague blanket of whiskery purple plants
Hanging over the reflection of a speechless sinkhole
The gaping mouth of death where an alligator basks lazily
Stirring centuries in the silver swirl of his tail
Echoes outward from the beginning of time.

And your eyes begin to open widely
(Before now you have just been sleepwalking)
To the soft reflection of white wispy clouds
To the unbounded blue black of time, the sky
To the slow bend of emerald palms in the breeze
To the white flutter of egret wings rising up and over
Disappearing into the opacity of the jungle.

So the afternoon wanes in overwhelming branches
Colors blending delicately into mountains of azure
Lilac, plum, auburn, cherry, salmon
Whispering to you “Hold on to this moment”
Reverberating in the smooth glaze of reflections
(The first colors you have ever truly seen)
Dripping from the dusky tropical Florida sky
Melting into the expanding darkness of the night.

First I inhaled the sky
And then I
Closed my eyes
Adjusted my spine
And started
Gathering pine nuts
Beside the cinder
Cone. Then I hid in
The shade and
Read Whitman’s pages of
Unknowing beauty
Standing and sitting and
Crying then.
Walked back as if hollow
More like floating
And there he was following

Behind me I could only smile
Looking back
Fingers full of sap eyes
Like volcanoes.

It was the whisky
eventually drove the eye
Wall to destruction.

Blue lilacs they remind me of
My mother’s blouse that time
I fell asleep between her arms on
That brown corduroy couch she
Kept next to the window open
Outside the humid forest was
Dark green down the ravine
Where a memory of river swept
My dreams were half pressed against
Her breast and the edge of some
Thunder heads billowing thinking
Back upon it now those forms
Opened up with so much force
With so much rain mother
She ran so quickly to the window
Laughing.

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.

Hold up your wooden cross to me
In the desert dear when you are crossing
The valley in moonlight you are killing me
And here there is no water for the blood
To move in so, just go, it seeps into the soil
As quiet as a dying star listen I can hear the
Insects that never were born the ones
That could not find the golden petals,
I watch, as you move on in moonlight
Between mesas and disappear again and again.

August is the bird’s nest a
Broom that falls in the spider’s web when
The toad’s wet toes are the **** yo
                    Questions but but black
holes

Make it a chiseled red line, with grey
With as many feelings as flowers
Opened petals to the rain. Take
A bough of juniper and brush
The soft skin of the sky.  The smoke
Of memories is stained. The arroyo is
Full of clay, sunken feet fill the
Mind. Thunder on the horizon
Shatters the rainbow into silence
Each color divides into dusk.
Underneath the red mesa
I peer into the purple twilight
Which is a closing eye. The
Stars open up like a field of
Evening primroses. The sound of
Frogs, from some hidden pond,
Echo in my dreams on the wetness of
Edges as I slip in and out of sleep.

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.

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 was moon walking in the desert
Chasing the memory of rain
Down some dried washes, choked
Full of sand and silver. I was
Following the way of water
Tracing sideways into dead
End hills of Bentonite, purple
And grey I was moving in
And out of shadow like a
Fish in deeper eddies, laying
Down silently beneath the
Weeds and waves.

Somewhere now
In the deeper canyons
Of night, hidden in a
Garden of stars, crawls
Out from a deeper woods,
A ghost of a ghost, hunched
On hind limbs and ready
For the pounce.
      All night.
And you, you are
The deer that wanders
Through the aspen doors
Of a meadowed mist,
Beside the dizzying stream.
And what, what will you
Do then, when those trees
Begin to shift, when the stars
Begin to move?

If you would like to write a poem run away
Into the far field of September choked with
Sunflowers full of bees become small become
More or less an endless possibility become
Light become dark, follow the coyote through
The junipers and see the stars. If you would like
To write a poem move to the desert develop
A sadness that can only be moved by a devotion
To the colors of the rain and devour hours
Of afternoons like a mountain gathering
Clouds gather truth. If you would like
To write a poem begin with the end
Draw a circle in the sand of some dead
River and then erase it, slip into October
Unnoticed and as the days become shorter
Become closer, remember what it's like to cry.

It was all a blur
Of birds, a stirring of
Leafs and then
It was over
Like after a storm
Or between tides
A thousand seasons
A thousand embraces
Of one last goodbye;
Suddenly the silence
Of understanding
The calm dread

The only way in is through
In the swamp, full of thick
Muck. The only way out is
Above, the punctured sky
Of stars. My bones become
It’s thoughts, my thoughts
Begin to stir. Muffled wind
Through the naked cypress
Then the moon
Then no more

No love’s a fern that
Cannot grow no
Heart’s a when rain
Is snow alone no
Moon’s a shoe no time’s
Time no time some

No fern's a love that
Cannot grow

The mountain holds a lake
Like a tree remembers it leaves;
The way snow embraces dusk
And dread hangs onto hope.

The nation has no time to sigh,
Even though it should;
All the arching bones decay
As one in unison.

Me, well, dusk has a deeper touch
Than just the outward earth;
Bounded to the infinite
I'd say the weather is but fair.

And I feel like I can finally sleep again
And I thank you for that.

Of all the possible infinities
I melt beneath your stabilities
The stars and more
Like leaves in fall like
Shorter days and sleep
I know the cough of love
Sick and resilient
Your weaker sides
Aspen, juniper cedar.

My eyes, grey blue, have changed
And my vision, deep grey, has
Changed, much like the trees
On the mountainside have changed, much like the way the
Night fades into morning.  And
My mind has changed, has become a well tended garden.
And my tears, well they fall
As soft as the rain tonight, this
First day of October.

Maybe I will listen to Chopin
One day and fall asleep do you
See the far stars on the near road
In early October? They are elk horns.
Dreams of rockets, bugle streams
Melvin at the pool table again
Beyond the eastern boundary
Of the reservation Germans who
Can’t speak English even say
How did we get here? They count
The time with each breath each
Sip then Blake’s lot a burger doesn’t
Sound so bad does it?

If I could make this landscape into a point Of light I would
Like trying to grab the stars so gracefully tiredly they would
Even say again go

Well I noticed the moth in the mirror
Nirvana plays on and on could you
Be two lines to heaven rather be
A spider than a cricket everyone always
Says “hell na you a spider” would have
Been infinity too if it wasn’t for sleep
Keep my neck crooked just in case such
Deer choice to leap through the pines
Green and black and what stars blur
Blur like dreams where the door meets
The wall is the hole I need never said
Moth stains ain’t free they just something
We can’t keep forever.

I've aged more than a mountain
Can't you see my canyons?
Running off into the sun
Into the low ****** hills
The etched relief of a million years
Frozen, like autumn sleep
Restless with tension
Of a long winter. Can't you see
My desires, the thousand foot
Drop from sky to stone
Bellied out like a sword
Laid forth to the day,
Can't you see my pride?
This the empty scene
Only a thought, one of a million.

I’m only good when I’m leaving though
I’ve come around here before this time will
Only be pine trees in the rear view mirror
Teeth on hair from mustache must have
Been awhile before I’ll be back again
Only eyes in the sunset purple then
Dusk.

Beneath the intimate moon light
          Beneath the deep black night
Lay quiet and silent the ocean.
          Like a fish net hung
From the docks of eternity - draped
          among the stars.

Wave after wave the deep night tells
         Of fallowed weeds and ancient shells
Beneath the petrified moon -
         Beneath the deep black night
I walk among the strewn, I weep
         Among the wreckage of the dead.

Well first you’d have to lose
Nearly half of your hope to just
Walk on the edge, then I would
Say become as sad as the thought
Of first snow, the dusk that brings
Winter and you may enter just far
Enough to hear the elk in alarm
Trample off as if they are walking on
Glass, then if you are brave and not
Afraid to die or have already died
I would say walk until the only thing
You see laying on your back is the
Soft impression of raven’s wings
On the canvas of this eternity/

I walked out from Eric’s trailer at 10:15 P.M.
I opened the metal door into a world of darkness
And nothing was known
I stepped down onto the crushed limestone that led home
My feet wrapped in soft flesh
With limestone pressing its white edge against my cotton skin
Like the way it rubs the back of the silver swamp sleeping
The night was damp cool and windy
I could smell the tropical cold in the air swelling
It pressed against my face like a soldier
It said to me, “I am to be reckoned”
It was a chill against my spine
I continued walking toward my house as if
Not knowing anything more than myself
A blink and another thought given but
Here I could only hear the sound of the wind
Rustling the branches of the cabbage palm
It was like a snake in my mind
Another gust of wind and I was further
Now all I could think about was the stars
Candles in the distance
Mysterious and deep as the flowered orchids nearby
Cast forever in the forested dark
They were holes into time
Gleaming bursts of something I will never understand

More limestone stretching against my cotton feet
More fears and more anxiety
More beautiful unknown and more gleaming fires
More of life and understanding and love
More of me feeling like a sword
Cast between the bridge of fear and love
Falling like a tear into the ocean of the night.

A few minutes of time spent between Eric’s trailer and my house
February 11th, 2012

Down by the waves where my thoughts go ahead
There goes my brain again, down by the shells
When the tide goes out and all the earth
Holds its breath, again sweeping and sweeping
All night the moon sinks slinks against dawn.

Down by the waves a piano plays; smooth
Wind blows midnight against palms quiet
Almost holding its breath crawling forth
The souls leaps the edge, grabs your hand
Ten thousand lights lay asleep.

I took my time getting here the desert
That is. Crossed the horizon once or twice
Four years of feeling bones, cold and quiet saw
Slipped a fox down the sandstone gone very little
Rain and a few tears. (Just one desert sunset can
change me)

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.

Beginning to Paint

Can I erase on my face, these tears?
Can I use a brush to flush out September?
Raise the moon high above the mesa
Now nothing more than a vermilion mist
Shaded in by the side of my thumb.

Can I draw a green plant in a red ***?
In the morning, when morning creeps
In through the window which looks
Out upon the young day with a long sigh
While I slowly sip my coffee.

Can I sketch a cloud into the empty afternoon
And make it into a memory? Can it be
Raining over the mountains while the wrens
Dart from juniper to juniper like
Conversation smothered?

Can I trace in your face, those cheeks?
Draw your firm lips into a red rose
And your eyes, such an emerald thought
Can I push them in to become black
And stay there?

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

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.

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

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.