I wade into tidal waves,
my hands full of dandelions

humbled by the sun
choked up over comets
I’ve given up on sunsets

you are a supernova clad only in my bed sheets
I make a wish every time your chest falls

****** lungs full of anxiety
My mouth tastes like an ashtray
filled with the buts of things i forgot to say
washed down by things i wish i hadn't

Still tripping over shoe laces,
I search for poetry in *** holes.
Forgiveness in pillowcases
my eyes have trouble resting these days

So, why aren't we dancing?

Following the rhythm of our mismatched heartbeats
I clumsily waltz through misleading conversations

Some days I think I need nothing
more in life than a spoon.
With a spoon I can eat oatmeal,
or take the medicine doctors prescribe.
I can swat a fly sleeping on the sill
or pound the table to get attention.
I can point accusingly at God
or stab the empty air repeatedly.
Looking into the spoon's mirror,
I can study my small face in its shiny bowl,
or cover one eye to make half the world
disappear. With a spoon
I can dig a tunnel to freedom,
spoonful by spoonful of dirt,
or waste life catching moonlight
and flinging it into the blackest night.

All winter the fire devoured everything --
tear-stained elegies, old letters, diaries, dead flowers.
When April finally arrived,
I opened the woodstove one last time
and shoveled the remains of those long cold nights
into a bucket, ash rising
through shafts of sunlight,
as swirling in bright, angelic eddies.
I shoveled out the charred end of an oak log,
black and pointed like a pencil;
half-burnt pages
sacrificed
in the making of poems;
old, square handmade nails
liberated from weathered planks
split for kindling.
I buried my hands in the bucket,
found the nails, lifted them,
the phoenix of my right hand
shielded with soot and tar,
my left hand shrouded in soft white ash --
nails in both fists like forged lightning.
I smeared black lines on my face,
drew crosses on my chest with the nails,
raised my arms and stomped my feet,
dancing in honor of spring
and rebirth, dancing
in honor of winter and death.
I hauled the heavy bucket to the garden,
spread ashes over the ground,
asked the earth to be good.
I gave the earth everything
that pulled me through the lonely winter --
oak trees, barns, poems.
I picked up my shovel
and turned hard, gray dirt,
the blade splitting winter
from spring.  With *** and rake,
I cultivated soil,
tilling row after row,
the earth now loose and black.
Tearing seed packets with my teeth,
I sowed spinach with my right hand,
planted petunias with my left.
Lifting clumps of dirt,
I crumbled them in my fists,
loving each dark letter that fell from my fingers.
And when I carried my empty bucket to the lake for water,
a few last ashes rose into spring-morning air,
ash drifting over fields
dew-covered
and lightly dusted green.

I, too, would ease my old car to a stop
on the side of some country road
and count the stars or admire a sunset
or sit quietly through an afternoon....

I'd open the door and go walking
like James Wright across a meadow,
where I might touch a pony's ear and
break into blossom; or, like Hayden

Carruth, sustained by the sight
of cows grazing in pastures at night,
I'd stand speechless in the great darkness;
I'd even search on some well-traveled road

like Phil Levine in this week's New Yorker,
the poet driving his car to an orchard
outside the city where, for five dollars,
he fills a basket with ******* apples.

at first when you take off
the world just looks small

a dollhouse, a miniature world
an amusing punchline to an old joke
a fantasy tinged with g-force and sprite in clear cups

but as the sky darkens and the plane lifts higher

the world seems to drown in blackness
an inky clarity of night not confused by clouds
and suddenly it is as if you are at the top on an ocean
looking at a far away ocean floor
crawling with foreign creatures with all of their bones lit up
over coral reefs of light and movement
parking lots like stationary jelly fish and highways like currents
of neon veins pumping lights and cars

all of the world's exoskeleton is illuminated
and it is beautiful and movable  
it is nature's patterns played out in electricity

but the farther out you go
the more the sharpness and geometry of the roads and cities
attack the eye

and the coral reefs turn to computer motherboards
all of man's ingenuity and beauty no longer draping the world
but ordering it

into squares and jagged lines
into distant pixel pinpricks
into maps

until you're not traveling through the world
but over it

Earth my church
I dig within and plant with fervor
kneeling  grasping skin wet smeared
immersed in wondrous mystery

Yet sacrilege there needs to be
crushing bugs with vehemence
between gloved thumb and finger.

before I knew he had.
His flight trailed off into a Utah
sunrise. He left behind a little strand
of thought, and, in a cramped, amber room that saw
long talks of topics that soon thinned grey,
a set of dog-eared books has been put down.
Books that brought nearer to my thought his own,
while somewhere Interstate-5 grates ‘cross the ground.

I sleep there still, although I left for good.
That house to this day asks me where he was.
Their smiles, the little comfort that they could
give, were emptier than their words. Often
I feel the vague pulse of their ragged stares –
torn, threadbare they unravel in the air
to mask their faces: that inner decree
which shades the truth. Where and how’d they ever grow wrong?

He must have, as the plane touched the runway,
felt the dawn’s shudder fracture his young bones,
his thoughts turning to those dog-earing days.
The seemingly endless months full of groans,
as they should have been, being spent alone.
And that set of books, at least it would seem,
ignited the wick on which our passions gleam –
slate-grey regards.

These six years past since they took him away
held minutes like a needle in plied dust.
There’s something in the spring that brings decay
here. The outward beauty of the world just
clouds the mind’s loss within the spinning gust
that all the blooming flowers usher in.
Then the rain comes –
in spitters and spats it spins the spire.
When gone the white-wick’s still on fire.

As the 5’s scratch cracks up the drying earth,
I recall Nietzsche, Guevara, Burgess.
Famed men who’d not anticipated births
inside my brother and I like cypress
trees, evergreen and coniferous we
drop seeds year-round. The setting Utah sun,
barely audible, gasps in the copse.
He’s with me now. What’s done is done.