There are situations in which one is cut off from the opportunity to do one's work or enjoy one's life; but what can never be ruled out is the unavoidability of suffering. In accepting this challenge to suffer bravely, life has a meaning up to the last moment, and it retains this meaning literally to the end. — Viktor Frankl

[T]here is no coming to consciousness without pain. — Carl Jung

Should the conflagration climb
Run till all the sages know — William Butler Yeats

Heart-injured in North London, he became
The Latin scholar of his generation. — W. H. Auden

It's urgent,
Imminent,
Fiercely non-communicable.
(Carry a firestorm in your veins.)

Secrets, secrets are no fun
Secrets, secrets hurt someone

The secret, untranslatable, hurts the secret-holder:
Frustration disguises isolation.
Distilled isolation is pain.
Purified pain is meaning.
(Carry a firestorm in your veins.)

Secrets, secrets are no fun?
Secrets, secrets hurt someone?

O, only momently!
Heart-injury transfigured is salvation.
(Carry a firestorm in your veins.)

High school's unwitting, eclectic crowd --
sweethearts, jocks, "gangsters", A.S.B. --
had universes stuffed in it.

You can clearly picture where you'd sit
during lunch, shaded under a tree
near the bike racks; disallowed

and unaware, the future unplowed.
No one expected a baby
(or thirty), marriages, deaths, the flit

to forlorn bitterness: counterfeit
lives. Your peers had much more agency
and promise than they saw, unendowed

with foresight in a teenage crowd.

Lavender parted by blunt wind:
the unkempt morning hair
of a park's running path.
Pale-green grass crawls up everywhere
in tufts like a thousand lost toupées.

In spring
cars, northbound from San Diego,
packed with kids and camping tools
or slimmer businessmen,
get full view of it:
                             a transient glance
between La Jolla and Los Angeles,
a moment of flashing color amid asphalt miles.

I thought for days and could think of nothing
to satisfy the eye and hand and heart,
or satiate the mind, or at least seem
worthy to be willed into decent art.
The past ten years offer little I’d deem
rousing enough to write this first part.
Then imagination just so inclined
the speaker, the scene, what I’d sought to find.

Grasping the pen, I pressed it to the page
and out poured imagination as ink.
I painted a line, then outlined a stage,
and pondered for hours on their supposed link.
It seems excessive thought may shape a cage
in the corner of which ideas sink.
Sometime later the stage had some players
and the line had formed multiple layers.

All vanishes the ensuing day,
forcing thought on what’s soon to expire.
Dramatis personae hardly convey
the message famished minds desire;
Likewise, poetical visions crochet
a meandering, allegorical empire.
The thought-maelstrom bids me “Confess!”:
I’ve reduced life to a logical process.

Seagulls hit the horizon's backboard
off the sands of Pacific Beach.
In my lungs breakers burn out
some forty feet from shore.
They will return.
This jetty'd be a monolith
if this ocean were a sky.
Silt on this deserted
coast scene is encumbered by
bits of driftwood and sun-bleached glass.
The living in this town
are accustomed to the weight. And
tidepools are their hearts:
shallow, mossy, little things
fending for breathe.
This jetty'd be a monolith
if this ocean were a sky.

The white dove has been
symbolic of abstract things.
I ask it to fly
far, put muscle on its wings.
Until recently the dove

atrophied inside
the skull. Now I’ve forced it out,
favoring strong emblems,
images too pure for doubt:
The Ark, the raven, the dove.

The raven flew the globe
but found no carrion worm.
Because of instinct
it was unable to confirm
any paradigm or thought.

Next the dove took flight
and, though it failed at first,
found a concrete
symbol to quench the parched Ark’s thirst:
one lonely olive leaf.

But even olive leaf
allows interpretation.
Each stronger symbol
creates its complication:
the skull, the Ark, leaf and bird.

She vanished in the shadows
of a mid-March Sunday’s moon.
When I first heard the news
an orange leapt from its bough.
There were bees in the flowerbed.
Grass shattered under my feet;
the smell of soot and ash
clung lightly to the breeze;
her smile fell
from a Hong Kong orchid
off Market Street.

The news first came
dead-ended and one-way.
Eight years’ reflection on that day
have hoped it was a turn in life:
the harrowing left onto Texas
from Mulberry Drive –
the high-branch’s snap
in the old, ragged pine –
when I was lost
in an Irish poet’s mind.

Hearing her voice, years since passed,
among this phone’s old messages,
I hear myself the day I heard the news –
Christianity’s eternity
became eternally confused.

Her long, black-curtain-hair,
the books piled at her feet,
the way philosophy
rolled off of her physique…

All I hear now when I think of that day
is the frail rattle of

a noose’s sway: pebbles beneath the midnight train.

April 2012

A patch-work roof burns underneath
the sallow-white chill of a mid-winter moon.
Nearby a lake suffocates in ice;
an astronaut has lost his helmet.
Blood rushes to the eyes and tongue
as a ragged derelict loses his balance.
He topples into a dumpster;
the last pear drifts from the tree.
The firemen are enclosed in smoke.
One froze at the door,
the others melt into the haze;
a hand slips below quicksand.

The moon is doing all it can.
The spaceman is floating away.
The *** is asleep.
The roof is having the time of its life
and the pear grows into another pear-tree.

They come down the road coughing
Up beliefs between cigarette drags
And slight hesitations of who they are to others.
Orange-ish yellow unattractively
Embroiders their chests; they've got their protections,
Their unambiguous vests.
From hazy breakfast drudgery
To night's exhausted rapture,
The play the same stage, the same lines, the same players.
But this is living to them:
Shrugging at the future; believing just because;
Knowing the store still provides overpriced cigarettes.
Their feet rattle on tarry asphalt
As their tools swing away. Patterns
Are in their hearts, their caged, tamed hearts,
Stifling what they want to say.
They built the streets I drive on
As I fight with my nothingness
And I remember they must feel this too,
Just as darkly and definitely as the wheel feels the road.

When Brasidas took Amphipolis,
one surrendering citizen etched out
visions of the future,
the reoccurring melody,
on clay in some veranda –

*That throb from the fold to the ripple’s edge;
the flowered bank’s erosion.
The circulating noose and knife;
themes where fools wander.

A mound of nails;
where Iscariot’s shekels
buried thirteen withered stools.

Thumb out, he hitchhikes from Prague
to the south of France, floats
the Marais Poitevin face-up
on a flatboard, sees
the last sunbeam slip behind the Louvre, sings
a song he calls "To California", snores
on one more of his friends' floors,
four euro to his name.

Static of definite extinction, to whom are We allied?
If it is to Your noise, Your scatter and clean-up-later attitude,
then We are separatists.
If to Whatever, We are assuredly conspiring cohorts.
Do You claim to provide what We've needed all along,
but have simply been too short-sighted to know We've needed?
Or do You delineate? Do You define Us by unpacking Us,
thereby reconstructing Us into sections of a whole untarnished tool?
Machinery, if you will?
Take, for instance, television.
Do We need, or even want to watch?
Needlessly We need it. We want it for lack of choice,
or so We think. It is, simply, there.
Easily - and how easily We may never know - one may turn
to the body's offerings, or the plummets and peaks of the mind.
Sport, science, language, art, human, essential, vivid, now -
they are nearer than no one knows; practically graspable.
But Static, You move Us to wish.
You **** Us to think we must consummate Ourselves.
As We said, We are separatists.
Declare some vapid civil war.
Who, then, will provide your nothings?

Geraniums wilt into the bedrock
behind a treehouse the canyon knew.
The lanterns have extinguished.
Crow in the ****** overhead sifts
downward. Below the trundled dune,
poppy after poppy -- hidden in mantling dust --
deafens in its own rustle. Where
is the moon today? Where
does the sky end and wrap
inside its craters?
A caw splits the wind in a palm,
drives it through a lantern's smoke.

We used to watch the lanterns wane
before calling it a night.

We used to put bees in jars
before pulling our blankets up.

We used to sing old gospel songs
before getting out of bed.

I feel older than an ancient discipline,
I swear I was like this before I was born,
I'm trying to discredit my happiness,
but I'm as aimless as ever...

The whole condo is full of Doritos.
It smells like a dentist's office, only
without any pretense of dentistry.
All assumptions aside, I plug my nose.
Crunching under my feet, the cheese meadows
spread the carpet's sprawl. Who'd live in this place?
I compose myself, set my briefcase
down, crunch through the living room. Who knows?

  This is ******* gross. Out of these condos
  this one's the very worst. A baby's cry
  emanates through this urban pigsty.
  I peer into a room and...baby toes? --
  baby toes! -- peeking from mounds of crushed cheese!
  *Why do these crack heads keep having babies?

for Kenneth LaRosh*

"All are clear, I alone am clouded." -- Lao Tzu

Those definite days, when I still fooled
Myself into unnatural mind-states,
When I knew myself, but tricked
Others obliviously--
Those days be ******.
Now, my thoughts racked
With an equivocal polarity,
My heart uncertain to its very core,
I walk,
Reborn in ignorance,
Clouded, yet not unclear.

Control: the only thing he seemed to care for –
and why did sonatas disturb him so?

He liked people who would never say "No",
found production an important pursuit,

felt generosity somewhat of a chore,
and didn't give change to the destitute.

Do my children love me? never crossed his mind,
which made sense because he'd always bought their affection.

Dismissing depression and dejection,
he found comfort in ruining another's day

(they'd take advantage of him if he was kind!);
"In the end," he'd say, "they didn't win, did they?"

Through cold New England January's air
I saw him (Frost) squint,
                                          iconic
from across the East Portico,
                                                 culturally symbolic
on a platform above me (I was twenty-eight).

Years later I knew the paper
he held hard to read,
his hotel's old typewriter
running low on ink
                                 the night before.
The illegible poem a preface

to the one Kennedy requested -
the one he'd read years before (ca. 1942)
in the Virginia Quarterly Review,
                                                        e­yes watering.

Frost stood there, faltering
in the new-fallen snow's reflective light,
half-blinded,
and I was twenty-eight as I thought,
"Kennedy:
                  cultured man,
                                           sycophant, or...?"

Their bars are bars there.
It’s just that the taps
have all run dry.
Behind a wall
computers clank, buzz,
dilapidate.

Behind thickened glass
clerical workers
patter like hail
on shingled roofs.
Beyond walls and glass,
sallow-white leaks.

I sit rough somewhere.
Cold, unfeeling stone
everywhere.
A payphone stares
jeeringly at me.
I curl up tight.

Mother and father
surely spite me now.
Brother won’t know,
no, he won’t know.
Others never will.
Don’t comfort me.

I’m in pajamas.
I’m grasping at straws.
I’m falling fast.
I’d like to know
how much is the bail.
“Sixty-thousand.”

My fingers are pressed
on a copier
like those old, dear
library books.
Copied and copied.
Next I’ll be shelved.

battered screws stripped bare by
a hundred thousand terrible twists
from an unsteady, inexperienced,
or overly excited hand
nearly rattling out of their proper positions,
hanging rather loosely
to the last threads of their holes.
fan them as they dangle,
fandangle!
but a blue gust from beneath
the anonymous and unidentifiable bursts
the shriveled scraps of low-grade steel
from their brittle perches
and
then one,
two,
threefourfivesixseventyeightmillion
clatterings invade all audibility,
heightening --- accentuating --- underscoring
each miniscule soundwave
                                                until there is not much more than
white noise, crack-
ling like a ruddy transitor radio
i probably never had
but only equate it to for lack of
another more proper, perhaps more appropriate,
even more...profound (?) word, or, whatever;
hardware indignationum!
what abuses we dish these inanimates created by us for us!, and, yes,
i follow all syncretic trends to
their phenomenal (and fusional)
morphological ends. if i didn't, how could
i know the neutered from the neuterer?
attend to the screws;
the debased, bemused, once-bedazzled little bits strewn on the floor and
frazzled. go on,
get 'em up, up
off the ground.

The hyacinth and the dahlia
Blossom
In one anothers' shadow.

"Don't be frightened if I cry
and my shoulders shudder," she
breathes. The lavender of the sky
droops above a dim-winter's sea,
and just as the words are out
I graze her cheek like a blade of grass
drops its dew. "I'd be a true lout --",
her fingers of orange topaz --
gleamed in moonlight -- stop my lips short.
"Don't." Teardrops roll slowly down
in a display apt for an old court
show; such a sadness in her tone.

You went to him because you’d never been
loved the way you deserved.
You’re neglected
time and time again. Childhood was stolen
somewhere between “It’s a girl!” and heaven.
I know you think you try.
You’re dejected.
In the shade of the damp one a.m. din
his tongue opens you like children do
Christmas gifts.

You went to him because you’d never had
so much attention from older guys.
So much attention, stained with the dyes
of lust. Is it that the ******* grains
staggered your mother’s ability to
care for you?
You hide beneath an eating disorder.
All the shame spills out
when you’ve got a finger deep in the esophagus’ veins.

You went to him because you’d never seen
a truly sweet smile.
Not that his gleans
away the pain inside you, but that
you’ve never really felt real sweetness.
Every time, when you seem to bat
your lashes,
I know you’re fighting back thick tears;
it’s not an exhibition of sexiness.

You went to him because you’d surely been
afraid of my honest feelings for you.
I’m sorry if the honest love I’d offered was scary,
but I’m not akin
to casual flings. That love was so true,
and ran so **** deep,
I’m sure I’d almost have drowned,
if your deceit hadn’t pushed that bright-blue
river so deep underground.

for Oscar Wilde

If only love came easy.
Once exposed to its removal, its terror, the heart grows queasy.
How hard it can be
To know loving's unlovely
Side: The caught breath once the curtain falls,
Deadened sanctity when recent calls
Turn against self-esteem.
"Was it just a dream?";
"Was it a rue,
Temporary?"; "Was it true?"
Questions amount to nothing.
Answers only seem like bluffing.
I want to love you,
But I know the drill: Two,
Then one. One's pain *is expectation,
One's guilt is association.
"Life is short—let them care";
I wait...I dream...I stare...

On the Embarcadero, winds carry clubbers' words
to me: sound of a satyr's desperation:

maybe she'll look at me.
Maybe even with pleasure and not repulsion:

the silent plea of devil-may-cry men ---
all blood and lusts, more beasts than heart.

Some swing blunt cutlasses that never cleave,
sip hypnotic wine from offering hands, unknown beneath a coverlet.
Others dance into the lacuna of their lives:

decade(s) of searching, yearning,
yoked like juments, under the mortal whip:

sad boys in need of love;
                                    infatuation;
          ­                                        amity;
                  ­                                      acquaintance;
             ­                                                              lust;
                                                           ­                   pleasure;
                                    ­                                                      a look:
                                                                                                      anything.

I can’t believe it’s ten dollars,
ten dollars for a rose.
I could drive thirty minutes
for a cheaper rose.
Thirty minutes south –
then it’s not a cheaper rose.

An old man and his wife
three houses up the road
grow big, bright white roses.
At night I’ll take one,
just one white rose.
They’ll never know.

I’ll give it to a woman,
and she’ll never know.
She only sees the rose.
She sees the rose and knows
I spent ten dollars on a rose.
It’s enough for me to wonder:

does money, effort, or the rose
curve her lips up,
lift up her cheeks,
hug and kiss me?
Perhaps a mixture of the three?
In reality it can only be

the rose.
I spent neither money nor effort.
There’s only the rose.
“I love you” for a rose.
A stolen, half-assed rose,
stolen from the old.

Sparse farmlands spread out below
scattered popcornish clouds;
a farmer's harrow;
his sun-baked, callous-caked hands;
two or three farmhands idling.

One hundred thousand rectangles:
property lines
from a 737's window.
West Illinois looks legal
from 30,000 feet.

Starlit nights bring a sense of tininess.
The vast soot-stained cloak of the sky,
pierced with so many tiny scintillating
spots of vim opalescent flares, is a heavy
intoxicant. It contains a thing most panache.
A girlish teetotaler beside me says,
"We're like those stars, distantly inflamed,
lost in a void of what we cannot know."

She is most apt in her contrivance.
I wish to be castellated, terraced
with Byzantine buttresses and towers-tops.
I want a portcullis for my portico that is
made mostly out of gold, an inner bailey
where the stars can sleep and the wine may flow.
I want the wine most metaphysical,
the type that flows and churns, perning
inside the inner sanctum of the mind.

A few hours after the first time someone
looks at you sardonically and says
"Grow up," you feel altogether alone.

Suddenly it becomes one of those days
when the adolescent heart's wilderness
begins eroding. Soon, nobody pays

attention -- not even you -- to distress
in the loosened soil: the dissuaded dreams
you've discarded. Your talent grows listless

and struggles, unacknowledged, till it seems
like the person you used to be and not
you presently, or as another deems.

*August 15, 2013

Lemons fall into the grass
In late December.
Seeing them outside my window, I instinctually remember
Sensual spring and how it gives one tunnel-vision,
How it turns each fleeting thought to an unchangeable decision.
*But Time repeatedly brings what seems gargantuan to pass.

I've heard the song birds in the trees,
I've received their grievous melodies,
I've joined them in their ardent song
and now know hatred is not strong.

I've debated many men who think
weakness grows in an intimate link,
and such talk has only strengthened their hate;
unknowingly they fulfill their fate.

It's harder to give a compliment
than hate someone for what you think they've meant;
because of this I've banded with the birds
and sing of love to love's cowards.

Those fish that lie gasping on the strand,
Beyond nets and lost lust for waters far from land,
Are neither Shakespearean nor Romantic, but bland.

I have two scars on my face; neither one's very visible anymore. One I received at age three (late 1992), falling face-first into a dry riverbed on my first camping trip. I landed hard, my forehead colliding with a crescent-shaped rock. I remember my father turning me over, my vision going red, the blood flowing into my scleras and pupils. The rock missed my right eye by millimeters.  When J.K. Rowling published Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone in 1997 my peers began calling me "Harry." Dark-haired, bespectacled, similar scar -- whole package. My comeback: "They should call Harry Potter 'Chris Gorrie', I had the scar first." Not until ten years later, when The Deathly Hallows was released, did I realize Harry was "born" in 1980.

The summer is static. Over
A drying lawn the slur
Of heat descends. Quiet
The garden flowers. This mind's diet?
Shaded hills and solitude.
Slow recession of the crude
Tracings of my origins,
The silhouettes of sins
And murmurs, blurs into
The sophomoric hue
Of my brain. Can I
Extricate myself? This lie,
Though it elude my thought
Into what action I know not,
Seems to legitimate my being
And foretell the fate of my self-fleeing.

Her heart is cracked alabaster hidden in undergrowth.

Nobody notices the epigraph.

Even if someone did, it wouldn't matter much:

the lettering and filigree have entirely faded.

Here the triple-shadowed unveil their beliefs:
wrangled dusk-bitten demigods walking with-
out shame.
                    Between the voice I feel and the
touch I see, sweetness loses itself in multiplic-
ity. Here the ****** creators
                                                     peddle their big
dreams: failed, half-imagined writers writing
for some fame. Between the ink I taste
                                                                    and
the blank page I peel, beauty spills onto an
unfinished film-reel. Here the salient idealists
distribute their silent pleas:
                                                 faceless, disre-
garded farmers farming hapless grain. Be-
tween
           the thoughts I see and the biases I smell,
innocence sits unwanted in a wishing-well.
Here the greatest artists
                                          present their newest
piece: aged, masterful painters painting to
stay stane. Between
                                   the subtlest colors and
the heart-arresting hues, skill picks up a gui-
tar and sings some southern
                                                  blues.

for Wallace Stevens*

1.
Just as my fingers on these keys
Make data, so the self-same sounds
Of a CEO’s fingers make me a data, too.

Thus it is the spirit that feels,
Here in this cubicle, desiring—through
Excel spreadsheets, email, a deadline—

Itself.

2.
In the pale glow of a Xerox machine
The body stood.
It sought
The hum of Nature,
But, finding only synthetics,
Sighed with demur,
So barren grew its mood.

3.
They wondered why the invisible child wept
In a security without which Death’s adept;
It could not say,
So convinced were they,
Safety was the dream of a Happiness that slept.

Dear Grandma,
Yesterday on Broadway
I thought I saw your face
front and center on the Times ---
it was Margaret Thatcher, she's passed away!

They say she was hatred;
ruined the British manufacturers,
the miners, and the arts;
forgot the Irish freedom fighters,
watched them die from a distance;
they say she failed the English poor,
even fulfilled the Belgrano's fate...

Grandma, I thought of you in your garden,
picking ripened Early Girls ---
you so resemble Mrs. Thatcher;
what will they say of you when you've gone?
No more than brief obituaries
printed in the weekend papers?
Murmurs at the memorial
during your eulogy?

Although you've wronged me once or twice
I can sympathize with your point of view;
I hope someday they'll forgive Mrs. Thatcher,
as I've forgiven you.

The State is stitched into itself, crocheted
by two hooks of its own creation
into a multiform mirage; man obeyed
his design --- he flirts with devastation.
Despite the deathly brinks, he continues on,
blinded by an insatiable desire.
In West California, sprawled on a lawn,
a boy laughs at his power over fire;
cross-legged monks in Sansara's clasp
sit in bare caves while snows rage outside:
they boy's enamored with all he can clasp,
the monks yawn, meditate: endlessly they've died.

I've never seen any rose the same way;
a forgotten Dionysian frenzy changed
that love-symbol into something "deranged",
at least in moralistic terms today.

fissure in the fold
of an aging merigold
reminds me of death's
soul-bewitching breath;
and a once-devastating wild,
torn and ever-reconciled,
falls in a deep sleep just like a - like a child.

Larkin
quoted Forster's
"Only connect..." at an
inept boxing match. Was either
correct?

Beyond the ridge of my window sill
stands a young lemon tree, still
unbroken by the wind. Above fly
sparrows, gophers run below. By
the tree's trunk are ripe, fallen fruit.
The wind slows down, all is mute.

*The more I study the sunflower,
or the lily, or the rose,
the more fully I see their station:
subtle expressions of nature's power:
the unending repose
opposing human consternation.

they told me
                      “poetry is dead”
in hope that when I found it I might leave it in the grave
in hope that a journey might not begin
in hope that I was

and, dying, I found poetry between
where the azalea knots its white crown and drops
between a hole in sunlight and the moon, where
between the living and the dead
a broken vase of its ashes sift

She stared into the glass,
Saw tears that were not there;
A cat hid in the grass,
Glimpsed a bird and snatched at air.

She brooded by the well,
Heard a sound that went unheard;
A fortress shuddered and fell,
In its ruins promise stirred.

She opened her necklace charm,
Kissed a photo no one could see;
Sailors escaped the storm,
But were captured by the sea.

She sang a silent song,
Said what everyone else saw:
A bird that was not wrong,
Caught in an alley cat's jaw.

Say there’s a boy that has two dreams,
One concerns business, one fishing in streams;
But which is the more real my friend?

A wolf licked an Eskimo’s blood-covered knife,
Licked it till it cut-up and bled out its life;
But are wolves’ impulses wrong my friend?

I saw a terrible play with a terrible end
And horrid lines no writer could mend;
But do you think I missed the point my friend?

Upon a time a boy loved a girl,
Loved her like a casket locked upon a pearl;
But what is truest love my friend?

Someone opened a door and let a dog in,
Unaware of where most strays have been;
But what is real kindness my friend?

One hundred slaves wept at their fortune,
United, killed the tyrant, and began to run;
But don’t they still work for their livings my friend?

I found a pocket watch in a patch of tall grass,
Hoped selfishly, watched centuries pass;
But weren't we told time heals wounds my friend?

for Robert-François Damiens the Regicide*

1.
"I" once ate pizza. It tasted of smudged sarcasm. "I" scarred my innards with its blazing oils. Now "I" remember it every time "I" nibble a tasty morsel, the pangs of a deadened sacrosanctity robbing my heart of its pulse.

2.
Pepperoni is vital for the one greased with illusion.
Cheese is necessary for the one who knows the word "soul" to be viable.
Tomato sauce is warrant for ritualistic exaltation.
Unleavened bread is the commandant of the fed world.

I have no tongue for whiskey.
In turn, the whisky tasting
was a waste.
I got drunk
unenjoyably.
Maybe whisky's best use is as an
emergency antiseptic.
Someone asked, "How was that one?"
"The physical manifestation of 'NO'."
Walking home,
I fear this will be the taste
I taste while dying.

Can you hear the sound of the indomitable wind?
It breathes in great heaves
through these sun-beaten leaves,
so boisterous it could flow through ears to the mind.
The eucalyptus’ standing in disciplined lines
seem disturbed by it,
and by the sun that’s lit,
illuminating their aging signs.
From some stark desert some miles to the south
bundles of dry wind roll
up, over, and down this grassy knoll
that unknowingly beleaguers the skin of both
infants playing with their blocks on the lawn
and an older patron
visiting from Dayton
who naturally rises some hours before dawn.
The wind can easily uproot and tear the land apart;
it can dishevel
a garden neat and level,
desolating work to which the retiree gives their heart.
The lascivious sound of the southern wind resonates
past the final palm of the mind
where Wallace Stevens’ bird went blind,
lying low in the recesses of cranial plates.
I say that that sound is no sound at all,
just a loosing slip
of the cerebral lip
attached to a thing abstractly beautiful.
But it sings its song all the same.
Perhaps it is physical.
It’s certainly divisible.
It pierces the sky like a transparent flame.

dreams woke me with a violent jolt.
Out the bedroom window
dew hung on its last thread
to every solemn grass blade.

The way the sun spread
and carpeted the green
in a flood of pallid light...
it was enveloping.

Another day rises with me,
another moon fades bleak into the blue,
somewhere by the interstate
another daisy edges into ghostliness.

Copper skies hang heavy
above my gazing face;
it is a fresh morning now, the entire
noisy world has decided to wake.

Ghosts climb into the sun to light it's kindling
once more for old time's sake.

If there should ever come a day
when the heavens should file for bankruptcy
and the stars pack up and walk away,

know you no longer have reason to stay
and watch the waves abandon the sea.
If there should ever come a day

when gravity breaks down, losing it's way,
and molecular bonds begin to disagree,
let the stars pack up and walk away.

If mathematics come undone and run astray,
break the last abacus and then decree:
"If there should come a day and that day is today!"

If and when it comes leave Earth in disarray,
disassemble each and every tree,
tell the stars, "Pack up and walk away."

Call up all the physicists and say,
"Discontinue paying your A.P.S. fee"
if there should ever come a day
when the stars pack up and walk away.