There are strings. Nine strings? No, nine of some-wheres,
plus one black when. Back then, they weren't strummed, but they're
vibrating from, or to something. Something flat. Real is flat. Real and
flatter than. The fattest lie is the fastest why I can come up with. I can
tell you: I've lived this sigh before. Not a sigh, so much. As a breath
between, death's hidden in the greens, and life. Life's again. Then's death.

What you should look for isn't . what the screen tells you (it) is(n't) suspicious, Look for . not what's packaged and left . unattended, Look what's right (be)for(e) you, It's the sparrows' shallow hops . down narrow aisles, They stop and go . unafraid and even if unrewarded . (it) do(es)n't stop them, Follow where they go and know what s(cr)een(s) can('t) be trusted.

There but for now. here, The grace of unknowable gods goes. me a mere trace of what they can be, I don't know them or I can't. but I do, Know they're not. too mighty or merciful with their slightest. hands, Those invisible but not invincible hands. they used to grant me life.

The rain bowed, deep, and the sky spoke in strokes of cheap yellow about how its time is short, or shorter. It spoke about how. How's a tall order. It would sort the how out with the clouds who applauded. They're still applauding the rain.

said isn't told. said
isn't telling. i've told
the hours to slow.
i've told
minutes. i've told the moon
to hold
its blue in deeper. what's soon
unheard is saying. i know,
i said.

i find, and i've found the seconds
stay still, and
they move faster as i count them.
i've counted them
slow and fast. i'll slow them down, and settle
in the middle
of them,
slide in right between them.
in their gaps, i was, and
i am, a wish. i can,
and i will, wish me there,
and wish her,
and him, and her again, all of us
wishes. i wished us
as those wishes spelled out in smiles.
we're smiles
meant to wrinkle, and increase
with that wrinkling. we, as wishes creased
the freckled, and the pale, the mahogany
skin on bridges of noses. we are, we'll be
those wishes written
out in sparkling green,
gray, blue, brown, black eyes. i have,
and we have
sparkled. we sparkle being them, whether
those wishes come true, or whether
or not i am and can be,
and they're all now, the seconds, here with me.

this dark-proud night doesn't fall, its partner light
leaves. i did fall, falling into a night
that was hidden. i fell, and i'm falling
toward a too shy infallibility. the failing
light is where sleep loves, but love can't sleep,
not when there's night to break, and light's promise to keep.

When you weaned me from the waning moon,
its milky cusps, winking welcome
moods of starry surrender, I was lost
to my reflection rearranged
roughly on the window's pane.

Don't take flight yet, you said,
first take the light's left hand
and keep it from the misbehaving oak,
its frightening reach.

There are beehive-capped angels
swinging there beneath, and they're angling
to gather moony souls
together in false hope.
Their absent promise is absolute,
and absolution.

*They'll utter their nothings,
utterly sweet, if you let them,
and lull you with their yellow tongues.
Fly away with this light you now hold
and risk the falling.

A dozen starlings
dozing in the evening sun
doesn't dare the season's end.

It dozen-n't, dare it,
these dozing within warm pinks
to dream up spring's spry bend.

I don't like it
repeating myself
I do like it
repeating others' sounds

This hissing fits
the night's shut eyes
it fits, the hiss,  
its missing ears

I won't miss it,
the hiss. Where does the air
slip, when it stops
repeating after me?

The fly on the wall
stalled, its small
head pointed
n
w
o
d
,
not to listen in
but to black glisten in
the reflected light,
the wall's, and then fly

tip-tap
the tippler rain drips
tip-tap
the tippler rain's slick
tip-tap
the rain, tippling, wraps
lit-up
city streets in plastic

When the coin dropped, it drops
with a clang. Clanging's
a kind of language. A kind coin,
it coins me as phrases. Its careful
words are phrased not to spend me.

A winter fly,
not yet dead in this dead of winter,
flies. It flies
in the face of flies not facing winter's
little white deaths.
Not yet.

From isn't always. To is,
and it comes with a blue
bucket sporting red letters.
It comes in a blue bucket hung
upon a wing. OD is an ending,
the ending of that red,
and of that reading,
but I don't know
what it ends. It's not

ODD. That's a beginning.
Even odder, it's not
where I'll keep this secret.
I'll leave it, not in a bucket,
but where I always do, where
I left it before, in the internal
ear you'll listen to it with
while you read it. It's not
really a secret. Have I
told you? Have I ever

told you, each time
the plane's wheels lift up,
it feels only slightly,
only slightly less
miraculous
than the beating of your heart.
Then the beating of your heart
lifts me. It takes me
from and to.

This coincidence
is only the difference
between paying and stealing attention.
I stole
a glance at a bus. It speaks its destination
in lights, and the lights think
they know where
you are. I don't, but I know
I won't go there.
I know instead
I'll go home and not watch the TV
where actors speak with words
not lights, and they speak one word to me
at the same time,
the exact same moment in time,
one word, a name,
pops into my far-away mind.

lonesome doesn't move, it clings
to time-tapered tree limbs,
to grey
sidewalks refreshed with a white snow,
and to the blood red brick walls overlooking them,
but not overlooking what went
past, no, not overlooking what passed as a life,
a life that went speeding past them,
with no quiet moments to take a breath
or to sit within them;

the past didn't go
the way she wanted it, the way
we'll see it, not the way
the blood red brick walls wanted to feel it,

but the bricks hold it, with tree limbs,
with walks, and they hold her,
and they offer her, still lonesome,
Hattie, stilled by blood, here to me,

and she comes to me, no, not her,
but the thought of her still blood, and when I take her,
or the thought of her, I take it
away, a little of our lonesomeness, the blood

i am the king of insects,
he said, he says,

he continues
a conversation
he started but dropped

he starts, he stops
this conversation,
it’s ongoing,
it went, it goes on,

he goes on with it
to the fine veins of a tattered brown
leaf, he doesn't know
leaves, but he’d guess this one is
from an elm, he guessed it, he guesses

it became, it’s become
plastered to the window with a glue,
this glue called rainwater, he calls it
rainwater, and it was,
it is a glue, with the winter air,
stronger than paste,

much stronger,
it wouldn't,
it shouldn't
hasten anywhere, so he picks up
where he left off, he leaves off
after long pauses,

no,
no, not the king, per se,
but they flock to me,
not like they'd flock
to a living leaf, or a wayward crumb
of pumpernickel, but they come
seeking
something,

I said I was a king,
not a wise man,
though wise enough,

and he paused,

and he pauses,

but he can't continue,

he tries

but not with a glue that's dried
and a leaf that’s slipped,

it dries, the glue,
and the leaf slips,

it slips and floats down,
down to the gutters
filled with so many browns,
when it hears it,

it has heard it,

enough

And then I'm here,
and when I'm not here too

They walk past me,
and I see it in their faces,
the generations,
and their generations,
when they walk past me,
the worse-off
and the better,
they come too,

And they come,
and they come,
and in their faces
there are shades I can't name,
but every one of them is,
and everyone of them is
beautiful

And in their hearts
there are whispers,
whispers that speak in shapes
I can't measure,
but they whisper
pleasures,
and they whisper of their pains,
and they're not like mine,
and they're not unlike mine either,
and through them all,
they have, and I have
stayed strong,

And they've come here
and their strides have covered,
they do cover,
not distances,
not years,
but those joys and sorrows,

The joys and sorrows of many
yesterdays,
and they came from those many days
and those days flowed out
from many places,
from many places
that are now one, and that one
will go too,
into many,

There will be many
tomorrows,
and into many
tomorrows,
it and they will go,

And when they go there,
they'll go everywhere,

And when they go,
everywhere will be
one place
and nowhere,

And it's from there
they'll bring me back,
and it's to there I'll go
and I'm going there,
and I'm going there
again, with each of them.

And the bay, not purple
but purple
in this light, addresses
all who pass by it
with its uncountable,
jelloing tongues. "You
didn't come here to stay. You
came to put on calcite
layers. To let what's inside
grow, or change,
or become, what you'll become
when you no longer come
here."

Most don't listen, they watch
the wind
make a dead leaf hop.

I've been in this play before.
I've heard
and spoken these lines.

Will I speak them to you?
I will. But first, about this fly.

I'll tell you about it being
my reincarnated friend, Smita.
She's back to swim in my ointment.
She's back
to tell me it's okay to be
careless with what you wish for.

Her soul would fly up among my wishes.
As a fly she can't fly anywhere
but around me, so she flies to where
I stand and stays in my hand.

I take her
back to that stage where we began.
With no mouth to speak her lines
she still gives them to me. I would say:

"She never understood.
I only ever wanted to love her."

within the seconds of this,
my second time.

But Smita has me say only
"Love," instead.

I'm the old man who can't tell time any more
what lies ahead.  Any way he tells it,
what he'll tell it is always
how he's become more or less himself,
less the more.  He sits
a broken dish
down, and watches the hours run off
the end of his spoon.  It's the same way,
the exact same way
his medicine slops, when he tries to
stop his palsied hand from pouring it.  Oh, how
he'd like to run
off or away or on and on about it
after learning the moon doesn't turn
blue waiting for her cow.  She turns her face for you
not to see her giggle
at the thought of how a cow might plummet.

This moment
right here (and this one
right after it) is (or it was,
and they are, or were)
big-belly, ready-to-drop-
everything, and
run-the-red-lights
pregnant.

No, not with any oh-
so very vaguely named
possibility (you know,
or don't know, the one),
but with a very real
if possibly uncatchable
beauty – all the impossibly
cerulean lizards, lavender
jays and cobalt butterflies
we never chase.

It's (they're) giving
birth (or gave it) again,
not to anything
we'll possibly notice,
but to all of this (impossible
to name) loveliness –
one plucked chartreuse leaf
fluttering down to the chocolate
ground where it will stay,
whether or not (looking
forward or back) we bother
to see it.

See that tree
looking angry with broad
and black arms
low and at the ready
to barge in?
It's there, but put out your
cigarette
and don't think about it.
What I tell

you not to, you know you'll
do, so think
instead of the black-white
woodpeckers
who hang at bird feeders
upside down
and who sound like squeak toys.
Now don't think
about them, how they might

scar happy
trees with arms raised to blue
and a sense
of distance. While your heel
scuffs the ****
out on the walk, you won't
be thinking
about the angry tree
before you.

I've read the news, and it's red
with painted lip prints, and the stain
of stranger thumbprints. They're not
mine. Neither of them. They belong,
lip and thumb, paint and stranger,
singularly to those others who don't
read or write such things. They may
bleed, them, but the blood isn't red,
or crimson, or cardinal, or scarlet.
Pick a shade of red, and it isn't that,
at least not until it's too, too late
to stanch. The bully's standard is to take
it all, all of it except the fall crisp that led
into this strangely warmer winter. I took it,
and I saved it in my bones to prepare,
but the cold didn't come. Not like we
were used to. I'm told the bully wears
what he takes with a dashing style. See it,
that royal blue that outfits him? The flowing
robes? The gold. I've been robbed. We have
been. Not of things, but of a view. A view
with no room for us in its downside-up
very periscope-unlike perspective.
There's no upside to the up-down
and just around the corner trips
I take. To the grocer. To the bar. To
the five and dime. It's fattened up
to a dollar. And the slimming newsprint
costs more than what I get
without the paper. I don't
get it, not the print, not the paper, not
the red lip prints, not the thumbprints
left by strangers, not the news
I've read and I'm reading.

It’s not an absence
this 2am darkness—
half-dark and half-lit
by its unnatural glows—
grabs hold of,
firmly pulling it—
this thing not
an absence— growling
from the dead
black inside a stray
dog’s too-mouthy head;

not just it, but the voices—
untroubled and present
if not too
many, tucked into
a more deeply darkened night.
It takes them, not to
gobble them
up, but to throw them
off cobble, cement and stone
to open places, voices
won’t normally come.

The beauty of it is
none of this,
and all of its
beauty, not the triumphant blue
of a jay’s bluest coup
unsettling the mature greens
and their younger leaves
to topple one cardinal’s redness
and its calm,
not it or the uplifting, baleful grays
that follow to chase
it and us, with the dense, clear drops
pristine brown soils savor,
no, not one moment of it
or the us who share in it,
will last, can last
any longer or matter more
than that instant
my no longer innocent eyes steal
a glimpse of your smile.

From down here, it feels
there's nothing
there, but when you're in it
up there, lit
bright blue or a shadowed navy,
the air lets you feel it,
and how it could let you
go, if it didn't love you

so. It will let you pick through
its pockets. They're yours.
All of its is in you,
and it's yours. You're its too,
when you're up there, or down here.
You'll forget this, but not the way
you forget which shirt you wore
after sitting too long in the dark. No,

you'l forget it the way you've forgotten
how gorgeous a stand of trees can be until
you've seen them again from above, them
down here standing in their grassy, mossy,
rolling places. And it's then, you'll forget
you were just telling yourself
how useless and tedious though true
this life can be. Not when you're in it.

They are. What are we becoming?
It's rote, I know. It's rote.
It all bares my repeating. He wrote,

though not to me,
"The first prerequisite of defiling
a corpse is a corpse."
And I thought, Of course.
We've become
experts in their making. And his point,

the point I didn't think
needed making, not at this point,
again, yes, again,
yet again,
is how many we're making.
We're making them

without a second thought
or guess.
With an ease and a quickness,

and we're finding them,
once made,
hard to be rid of, hard
not to accept
as ours, except
when we've become them.

Wherever you start, there's a beginning,
it said,
beginning to lure me into its crystalline
blue, dotted
not by dots but by blurs of a deeper blue.
You knew
all along, as long as you could, it couldn't, you
couldn't, keep you
in the where there where you were. It did, not long,
but long
enough to learn. I followed it then, not wanting
to stop. Long,
it stopped and turned and smiled back at me, us,
a grin
tall at both ends. It wouldn't end till mine was just
beginning.

My religion says,
all this lively life is
precious,
not just the human kind.

It says,
there are no heavenly ups or hellish downs,
there's is,
and it's all around us.

It says,
there's not one way for love to love,
unless
it's without even this condition.

It says,
all we know is
so much less
than what we can imagine,

and it imagines
a universe of expanding beauty,
one or many
in a one that's universally beautiful

and never wasted,
not the tiniest bit of it,
even as we slip
away then back into it.

I’ve read the news, and its red
with painted lip prints, and the stain
of stranger thumb prints. They’re not
mine. Neither of them. They belong,
lip and thumb, paint and stranger,
singularly to those others who don’t

read or write such things. They may
bleed them, but the blood isn’t red,
or crimson, or cardinal, or scarlet.
Pick a shade of red, and it isn’t that,
at least not until it’s too, too late
to stanch. The bully’s standard is to take

it all, all of it except the fall crisp that led
into this strangely warmer winter. I took it,
and I saved it in my bones to prepare,
but the cold didn’t come. Not like we
were used to. I’m told the bully wears
what he takes with a dashing style. See it,

that royal blue that outfits him? The flowing
robes? The gold. I’ve been robbed. We have
been. Not of things, but of a view. A view
with no room for us in its downside-up
very periscope-unlike perspective.
There’s no upside to the up-down

and just around the corner trips
I take. To the grocer. To the bar. To
the five and dime. It’s fattened up
to a dollar. And the slimming newsprint
costs more than what I get
without the print. I don’t

get it, not the print, not the paper, not
the red lip prints, not the thumbprints
left by strangers, not the news
I’ve read and I’m reading.

We’re on the cusp,

a pin-***** gleam on the lip of a cup,
and we’re running. Over

and over, we’ve held it.

We’ve raised it up,
this golden
cup filled with the sacrifice
of time, time and time again,
until its weight gets too much,
or our arms too fat to hold it. Much longer,

and longer than that, the shadows go,
and they’ll continue to grow now. Our fancy cup’s
at the tipping, with its time spilling out
twenty-four hours
a day into the forest of roots

loosing their grip on the slime-drenched
soil. Little Juramaia once played here,
and Gaia hasn’t forgotten her. Could she

forget us, or the trees? She can’t

feel the **** frost for the trees,
or us, when it’s gone,
and the trees have gone tipsy
at the thought. That,

and this lengthening light.

We aren’t, necessarily, up. Beat not

beaten, we feast, and we will be. Come,
tell me, what information can’t be held in

our fatty acids? Immodestly, we’ve had both
the morsel modified and not. Its tiny bits mix
in us and with us, so it can inform us

forward with a digestibly new identity. We have
eaten more than this too, and it’s all in us,
with the knowledge of a world less well-preserved.
Less is on ice, but there’s more for us to taste,

and it’s the more and we’re the more. We
know of it, what it is that can’t get inside of us
if we don’t eat it. Let it, get inside, it won’t
eat at us. It won’t, it can’t shake us from

the unusual way we’ve wobbled through
a closely-measured firmament cold-packed
with these immeasurable clues. We’re no less

permanent there than this half-shell is here. Fixed
by a thin glaze, it awaits one sun, or the tide’s finding

its stomach again for mollusk, fine sand and pebbles.

The difference isn’t. Askew,
it’s a greasy stain.
To be hidden
and scrubbed clean, they bid me.
I’m staying.
The same, it’s true,
I’ve had the same complaints.
Here or there, they’re buzzing
by me like flies. It’s plain
but comfortable up in this attic’s stew.
The flies are actually staying
below. They won’t go
near me, if there’s no
prize for not sinning, not even
originally. Time’s sly.
Like the flies, It won’t go by
me, not when my having it’s been
done. Long ago. A fly can’t sin
not even unoriginally, and I can’t
tell the difference. Not now. I can’t.

Sometimes-things, they aren’t
drawn clearly enough. Sometimes-things aren’t
meant to stand out. Black sits on black,
then it moves around to white. Come lie back
down with me here, I’ll tell you about them.
They’re most times things, but sometimes I see them
and they feel much closer to something living.
It’s not that they speak or move, it’s something
in the way they lie so still but are still shaking
within. Are you shaking now too? No it’s not shaking,
it’s a hum. A string continues to play its song,
much later than, long after, we’ve stopped listening. Long
after we’ve stopped. Can they be, when I know they’re not?
I can’t see them seeing me or being, and they’re not
like me. They’re more and they’re not, but it’s just then,
when they are just things to me. It’s then--
are you still listening-- sometimes
I know I disappoint myself by thinking it. Sometimes
I know they mean to have more meaning than I can find
in them. In the blank somewhere spaces where I lag behind
them, sometimes I crave to catch up. The wind can
make such a pretty knocking sound if the tree’s hands
will play along. No don’t get up. I’m almost done.
I’m trying to tell you I want to be that someone
who’s willing to live sometimes like them, and when
not, not frightened of some place where I’ll lie down by them.

If I could still hold your hand in
my eye, I’d turn it over there
and I’d pull it into mine, my hand
and my eye, and I’d use it, no them,
your hand and mine, our two

pointing fingers pointing out like
two small sticks parting from the same
broken branch. We could scratch-
write together our word, one word,
maybe two words, before the fickle white,

and your hand, and mine slip away
again, a foot, a yard and then
a mile falling between and on
us to break that branch’s end.
Our word, or our words, might stay

behind to look out on two new children,
a boy and a girl, well-bundled in blue
and red cottons, by mothers, against
the cold. They might, this boy and girl,
in one afternoon, assemble, then tear

down an icy fort, a fort made of more white.
It, our word, or them, our words, might
stay and pretend other words are
coming, other words to keep it or them
company when the boy and girl go

back to warm suppers. Words
we could write, or could have
written, of the ways we’d live
and love and share in each other’s
tomorrows, and of the way we’d hold

the suns-to-be, the suns of those
tomorrows, up against one light,
the brightness of this white and the one

or two words we’d left in it. There’s no
sun today, there’s just this white, and it
shines instead before it parts with
our two hands, our two sticks, our one
broken branch. I’ll hold them all in

my eye.

Egg

[This is my hatching
thought, which you cannot
see.]

2. Larva

The moon shines,
a pretty pill.
It couldn’t fill me with more.
It couldn’t
spill its light more
brightly or cover me more
tenderly. My chalky
smile smiles back at her more
sweetly for the pain-killing.
It’s magic.

3. Pupa

La lune brille,
une pilule assez.
Il ne pouvait pas me remplir de plus.
Il ne pouvait pas
répandre sa lumière plus
vives ou me couvrir plus
tendrement. Mon calcaires
sourire sourires de retour à son plus
doucement pour la douleur-massacre.
C'est magique.

4. Imago**

The moon shines,
a pretty pill.
He could not fill me with more.
He could not
spread its light over-
bright, or cover me more
tenderly. My limestone
smile smiles back at its,
gently. To the pain-killing,
it's magical.

It’s the midsty morning,
all grammar’s run amuck
and the rapture won’t take me.

They’re lining up,
the letters and errant punctuation.

Spray-tagged against walls
they’ll torment the souls
who’ll stay here in god’s mean timing.

I keep putting apostrophe’s
where they don’t belong.

It’s an oblonging of words
and it will always be
my denial.

What’s possessed me?

I could pose esses,
caressing them down to tildes,
til disappointed and unsexed
by a symbolic life on its side,
they'd rise back up to text,
not angry but sure
their standing’s worth fighting for.

That’s nothing but a bad dream.

Line theft has left
this man fantastical
and it’s broken my container
of finger-twitching quotations.

I'm partnered with whispers.
Disquieting their partner, they whisk her
voice unasked through my dial-bound trips.
Daily they gaily needle me with their tip
to need her voice nonetheless.
Nightly I feed them less and less
detail, but they grow and they mock the endless hem-
hawed denials, I've tripped again.

"Check this box. You know,
the four-squared lines around the hollow
of our white space.
Yes, there's no phrase
next to the unchecked box. It doesn't matter.
We're only here to gather
a positive response. We'll fill in the rest
later, and we'll attest
we could see through
your glassy hush, as we saw through
the stone trying not to dwell
on those bits of crushed shells.”

The shells. Those ****** bits
of shells she left minutes
before she left. Shells already
discarded by some small medley
of slimy unnamed things
somehow both alive and living
out in the dead-calm lake. Those shells lost
or more likely tossed
aside but lightly, as delicate dishes
are gently pushed when finished.

"We've heard you tell it.
The green-brown waves rolled to deposit
them on that spit of coarse, cold sand where
your toes slipped from shoes and care
to taste the ridges
of their gently sloped backs and smooth-worn edges.
She took them home then
and using nail polish she painted them
shocking pink faces and round eyes in various hues
of red. Glitter-glued to blue
construction paper they bubbled
her winking verbs, which troubled
you as you re-read
them and deconstructed
her intentions each color-
less visit to the refrigerator door."

I've told it
and much the same, but when I hear it
their words
become less mine than hers.

Blind skies have gleaned
their stories from the strumming of the bored,
but they do change them.
They rearrange them,
their outcomes, slightly,
and, when they retell them,
the words fall back to us lighter,
delightedly so, than they were before.

It's just us.
We've heard.
It's just us, more called,
and they shared this secret:
Those blind skies aren't blind at all.
They only pretend
not to see, as they bend
the wind to help us.

They let us think,
The movement's thanks to me,
when we tell our shortened tales
where the Lord doesn’t deliver us.
We tell them to no-one
and anyone in particular,
by pecking our thumbs with an irregular,
scratched-out beat.

It happens too when they slow us down,
and we punch-in our excuses.
I would have gotten here sooner
in fact, but the tactless crow I followed
took a crooked path.
That's when not-blind skies wink
and they lift our rhythmic letter-breaths
to become the stuff of linty pockets.

Some day, one day,
not a spare hour or minute
but the splittest second before
a glory-less death,
our stories will snow back on us.
We'll hear them
and the words will feel
familiar, though a little more gray.

Then the smallest voice
we've ever heard,
somehow both ours and theirs,
will say, *The gist is got
but the endings are not
quite right. Yet,
I admit they're also righter
than my telling's long-ago was.

Albert Ross was at a loss.

He couldn't gloss
over the dull fact hanging
lifeless like the near-homophone
about his neck.

It's a pretty neck,
this long and slender neck,
with the impeccable lines of its smooth cylinder
broken only by a smallish apple.

Eve would've refused it.

To sea. To sea.
There he'd see
with its wide vistas
the feathery visage of this polar white
visitor riding astride his black cloud.

"Rain, would it please you to rain?
Are you allowed
to open up and drown me?"
Is how he’d phrased it
in his mind, countless times.

The hardest rain would be welcome,
but this constant threat,
this ponderous yet,
this threaded pendant swinging
as fast and steady
as a winged pendulum might,
was not. It tightened,
that knot deep in the pit of his stomach.

He'd done no harm.

Harm wasn't his to do,
or undo. The harm came before,
at the hands of a father,
who gave him such
an ill-spoken name,
and the Father before him.

He, ages before him,
deigned to make us this world
where a bird’s no more
than a bird or any man
with the want of a soul.

This is it,
your "He was,
was he not?"
collection of lazy
reflections.
You'll project it on
those fuzzy
"Or now was he?"
recollections
and reject them in favor
of a rock solid
first impression.
He was, after all,
with those strange,
even dangerous
inflections
and his oddly arranged
affections,
just a guy
you kind of knew.

Oh great Ophiuchus,
you stand there mighty above us,
all nights, collapsed in the collapsible
container sky. We do
look up to you, Ophiuchus,
as other-worldly worries nestle us
into our nested doll
worlds. Though Ophiuchus, we must
ask again, what it is you can give us
while your sculpted arms keep
a coiling beast at bay? Go on,
let go. Let go of it, Ophiuchus.
Your strong hands can point us
back, just when our need walks forward,
to a stone-laid patio where broad browns
empty into vast blues,
and our wise Hypatia sits
nose in books. Woe it is, Ophiuchus,
she’s so oblivious,
to those shouts of a smallish mob,
their small minds squeezed by greedy Christian lands.
They pad to her on paws
well-provided with ostraca
claws, and next morning the mourner jackdaw
will refuse to withdraw
its usual caw from a flawed
maw that couldn’t warn her, the time’s off. It’s now
it seems, Ophiuchus,
the day’s come, though the daw’s left us,
when clay heads will fall at golden feet. But
Ophiuchus, do please
tell us, can we focus? After
these many centuries, Ophiuchus,
can we learn to focus,
and on our own keep the constant
nips of the present-preened serpents at bay?

I was there, but I wasn't
where snowy wisps skitter
across the beige-brown sand,
and skim-milk rolls
stand frozen, no longer
struggling to reach the shore.

Gulls wheel high and fall back.

I couldn’t hear them calling,
"Here's the beauty
when life stops, and then goes."

I’ve known
several women with the same simple name,
but this morning she’s the one who came
to mind.
I whispered it softly –
her name – just once
(I wouldn’t repeat it),
and you didn’t –
you couldn’t – know
the same name held clinging
*****-blond curls,
the interrupted curve of a bitten lip,
the upturned twitch of a switched-on nose,
a sparking flame at the center of midnight eyes.
Did I make it all up,
what I saw
when I whispered
this same name...
what I saw
when I whispered it,
your name,
just once?

My myth-maker’s made
a sunny place-setting
and he sets it politely there
where I sit not wearing boots.

With black squawks he came
from out-there not smitten,
and he tells me tall riddles of let
blood’s sleepy seeping home.

“You’ll notice many
cut-cross paths can get you there
to the next where, if you know
what’s not here you’re not getting.

“It’s there, where and when
you’ll come in, approximately,
to uncover hurt never.
Ever met cures before.”

He stays there beside
and with unwary wings pushes
twice-worn boots where my feet
were yet, unprepared to go.

Would that four and twenty were all
red-wing blackbirds rejected by the sky.

For each one wonderment’s pie-pleasant fall
down open pockets full of why,
ten thousand unsavory more tumble
I’d prefer my thumbs fumbling missed.

Can you hear it? Louder than a stomach’s rumble,
here comes some-when-else, timely this
time where-ing unaccustomed particulars’ shine.

Buzz with me there, Honey,
although I’ve got no hive in mind.

The end of days may be sunny.

Let’s not hide, but heal what’s broken
and bask in the deep void’s coquettish gaze,
mutating us one short step toward then
with its white wash of cosmic rays.

If this hallmark of a romantic gift
I give
is a bit fumbled,
and its professions of heartfelt wishes
feel
slack in their graham-*******-box repackaging;
If the candy-coated wrapper’s fit
is left
misfitting around its dented-in red corners,
and the lippiness of its stick
has come
unstuck at each crushed-down end;
If the pink bow
stands unbowed
and frowns as unpretty as any crime-scene picture,
while it raises
a frayed end with the victim’s gone-through motion
entreating
death for its last tug free;
It could be
my feeling heart’s once-bold youth
isn't
entirely found in it,
or it could be
the entirety
bound in it,
my heart,
couldn’t find its way out.