At a distance, the bland earth is a photo tinged of emerald green
Selfsame cars blow through. Playing in the margins
Forfeits judgment and your peace to the 10,000 shades of envy.

The usual story is re-penned like some perverse guarantee
We’ll all be disappointed some day, and everyone is at large
From a distance, those scowling portraits done with shades of emerald green

Something we’ve come to need and come to hate, against what men levy
Me and what they weigh the lithe little ghost of the human heart in
It seems strange outside light of rippling 10,000 shades of envy.

But where it is heard the gentle thrush say, “bereave, bereave, bereave,”
I’ll be a small voice in the coppice, singing, “breathe, breathe, still breathing”
At length, some small corners of the bland earth take on that emerald green

Thorns may drain burgundy from your hands, to leave your skin sticky sweet
Impressed in those ugly scabs like how you love yourself like sin,
The thorns just fall off like clothing in 10,000 shades of envy,

We lift pain away then, the happiness of the finally free
Hands lifted away from prayer can worship the single day in
And closely hold earth’s photo tinged of emerald green, then there’s no need
For forfeiture, I’ve my 10,000 shades of a different envy.

Expectation stands in Middlecreek’s waters, it toddles
In curious little hands, in Marylanders only up for the day,
And the snow geese hang like freed shapes of the sky;

This lake comes alive with fluttering wings,
The people around me keep their eyes close to the ground
While a new and weightless thing who walks in fickle grace
Stands in awe from every eye transfixed and terrified
Even the infant child, reborn like of us
Under what little sun 100,000 geese would allow
Through flight, into a world of charcoal.

Something happened in every eye. I don’t know what gods
Revealed themselves to us, or if we walked joy from scorn
But none of us felt human or pain only the swirl of the birds
Dancing inside one another like fire, like passion,
And all the words anyone tried to say were wrong.

Could I say my name anymore and still be right?
Could I call myself so separate when every heart there
Stuck to a single note, and every mouth struck dumb?
Could I speak beauty any longer, or had the geese
Renewed the tongue a fictive beast?
We never were what we thought we were
All but angels afraid of floating there.

For Kara--

I was an idle mind miles out at the wheel, just combustion
On a road.  The borderlands
Lose their sense of place and aim
Just skirting the middle space with no face or claim to
Dauphin, Lebanon, or Lancaster.
I’ve given my love to any of the three
One is in memories and
One is in late, and
One is where I graciously keep moored
The threads of my rebirth.

These signs are riddled in bullet holes, their figures
Come to semblance of entangles, brilliant in brunette
And a gaze, reluctant ever to be caught,
I wouldn’t wish to go back
If she could be remade from bones, copse, and sunlight
Through auric clouds of mayflies.

But, the illusion scatters, and in its lack,
I do find her, much more real than ever
She is what keeps me settled in the several fawning hours
And though weak from sleep she’s the very victory of a single breathe
I start my day believing in, that she’s a spirit,
There’s this life of hers inside the countryside
Like winds who speak in sweetened tones, mild
In mockery and bewilderment, the very grip of control
Has her fingers playing palmistry, pretending magic
Distorting the sad matter of earth, her very being is a song
That to lose or to grieve my lonely way
I, to Mt. Hope, find clear direction back.

Fall in love with Lancaster girls and they can break your heart
They'll have you already like rolling hills and city lights,
And she is the entire scene commingling
Where it ought, that summer aura of hers
Is a blessing just so hard to bear,
For stories are not so wearing on me, they are easier to believe.
I no longer need to pretend
That airplanes are shooting stars
When there’s no need for wishing to a home
Where the heart is anymore; there is the
Hand that leads me everywhere,
Back to the miles of shimmering land
Where one hears always sighs of content
And rests easy in disbelief.

Icy tangs are all the early morning, budding its flower
The young mother born into the sonata of her own being
That seems so foreign to thick sheltered blood,
My adult notch in this Exquisite Rotation.

Humid skies are as spy glasses to the truth
So says the colossus with our sun for an eye;
She steps out of the illusion beautifully blue
Robed in silks of celestial gold;
The skin hangs taught over the most beautiful
Pair of collarbones you’ve ever seen
The pass of your previous life comes in sublime waves
Of crashing aether and all the souls flee with irreclaimable mirth
Before popping in the atmosphere like spit and wishes
And everyday is the day of rest, a pondering
Of avant-gardens where a savior once walked.
He and his church left the path of the geese
For, he hears not, the pass of prayer on their lips.
But, I do not blame them: their mouths are full
With the sky’s drawstrings, reinvigorated from their disuse,
They’ve no time for the good word.
My family of geese fly for the astral bodies’ abode above
Where the casual speak of poets, philosophers can be hears
Talking about their *** lives, talking about themselves
No longer galvanized by their own recreations.

And as I go to place this thing in the place of pain
Warm rushes in the shifting life-force, the green of
Exuberant joy hits our hydrophobic throats
And we exhale, watching it roll back as the geese fly overhead
With no mind or reason why.

Give me another sweetwater afternoon
That tastes of onion grass and birth
And doesn’t care where you take a leak,
Give me the safe and warm provincial air
Coming from the west like a beggar
on a box car,
Give me the humidity that blots out the June-day sun
While we think ***** thoughts
On my couch,
Give me the opportunity to exchange blows with Johnny Rebel up the street
And his grandday’s probably rolling
In his grave,
Give me the hicks I rolled with for laughs before they married too early
So they can ride around on bikes with me
Like we did when the world was ours,
Give me a couple more days in the acrid Juniata
So I can dive in its sloppy green body
With reckless abandon,
Give me fishhooks in my heel
So I can pull them from my nakedness
And get Amish-made whoopee pies after the tears stop,
Give me moss covered roofs and tons of **** in the backyard
And the idle lap of water beneath the trout-boat’s belly
While I tell myself I’m not a redneck to my sunburned chest and my open flannel.

Show me what you can’t tell
From all your eavesdropping nights
The languid-age’s usher is itself
An innocent pusher of wares and waters
Like a dog-eared page, always there but
In the foggy memory of past chapters,
A silent stranger to the binding
Actors in world of 10,000 faces each of sound
And hailing of an old friend, and exits stage left:
I give you Seasons change:
Bitter chills, coming and leaving less, made her sandals
Turn into sneakers, then to boots, all one size larger than before.
I give you Divorce:
They laid prostrate in bed staring earnestly
At an open window on wither side of the room.
I give you Poverty:
The boy ran through the convenience store aisle like
It was the garden of Eden and his mother’s $6.26 in change
Made him hear the voice of God.
I give you I am drunk:
Hey, babe. What are you up to? It’s been like three days since…well
I think I miss you and you are so ****.
I give you I am envied:
All the glitter of pins came through the little slits of her eyes
And that mouth could press its own diamonds.

You’re swimming, okay,
And the Bible suddenly opens up.
Not many people are faced with this,
Except you: you’re an exception.

How do you take it?

Barely, would the sublime horror of communion pass on your lips
Once the ocean take its Leviathan form, and it opens its mouth to speak.
Its oratory becomes very clear in the maelstroms of countless gallons
Rushing blue cannibalizes itself before you; you have no time to think of death
When the salt’s burning your eyes and you’ve finally figured
How useful a gyroscope can be.

Too soon, three darknesses will emerge from the desolate homily
Taught not to discriminate in thought or action: the backs of your eyes
Straining against the buoyancy, the restfulness of not seeing a bottom,
And the path Jonah’s bones took, the disbeliever.

Mostly, you’ll want to congratulate yourself like a legend,
You wonderful *******, when you come in crashing on the waves.