So this hawk,
this red-tailed hawk,
this 'At first I thought it was a little dog?' hawk
was hunkered down in the alley,
was feeding,
was ripping up,
was eating by tearing off little strips

of this pigeon,
from this iridescent rust-blue pigeon's breast,
a blizzard of pigeon plumes falling
on blood-spattered snow because
the pigeon's wings beat
softly, softly, softly, still
making angels.

The Glossary of Rocks and Minerals says that
invisible structures in crystal
explain the qualities:
gravity and hardness,
the fatal habits, why
invincible diamond
will cleave along axes
of symmetry too small
to be seen.
                    But threshold,
where the eye unaided
apprehends transparence,
brilliance, the glide across
visible surface, its
lexicon of flatness,
this world, informs the intention of
the crystallographer, too far out, on the ice.

Look, look, look,
get out of your Jacuzzi for a minute,
swizzle or swallow that Martini's cherry, wonder:
“Where'd you put your housecoat?”
Naked's not too bad on you, still
snow's a-piling, bending boughs in silence, except
you just stand there, a-dripping and a-dropping,
until you're just a tiny trickle
to your people
anymore.

O, the Jacuzzi crowd prefer their sweet martinis,
so they can place the cherries in between
their moistened lips and languorously slip
inside the silkiest pajamas, gripping cherry pits
between their perfect teeth.
& even if a little dribble tickles at their chin
they know someone will lick it off,
like the ones who seem to say:
"I am a mighty river
to my people!"

Looking out
over the lip of his Jacuzzi,
limbs adrift-o in the boil, our a.k.a., Mr. Linguini,
from his fetid broth, will lift
a steaming finger: a sort of signal which,
beyond the bathtub rim can hardly wallow
any further; the gurgling water swallows all,
apocalyptic now,  like Martin Sheen
(though his muddy Mekong would reflect
the dream-sung air-strike), whereas here
only the lingering whiff
of a sweet morsel:
Chilean (still half-eaten) sea bass.

Mais, mon cheri, c’est de vous qu’ils parlent a la tele!
& pray tell sweetie, how can I say more
in French? Encore? Staring in the mirror,
Speckled trout? Artic char?
(Incroyable! les Anglais ne savent pas manger...)
the dream undone, he'd tried to order pizza
& instead now found himself in bed,
or soon to be so, foreign tongue
tastes best confused. Denial?

O he was into it, over his head,
with crocodiles, our Monseigneur,
at last, exposed to darkness
& the fishiness of darkened things, to feed the beasts:
to reach, to squeeze, to raise the hemistichal stream.
Snow sloughed off an over laden bough
& slapped its spot of sunlight:
this would be afternoon would be.
He rose, our Mr. Linguini,
at last took stock of things
just as they are,
just as they were
& surely just
as they shall be.

The crazy boy is clawing at his mom.
Or does he think she is a tree?
Her trunk twisting backward toward the ground,

a crippled mulberry.
Wicked.  Wicked.  Kicking with his rubber boots,
there are no worlds for him to be

in peace. On something like a hidden track
inside his little hell, he squints an eye
and yells, Let go, let go!, and so she does,

a sob, the tear wiped from her cheek, he's run
across the street, a ratty pompom bobs
on his wool toque, two squirrels ***** a crow

into the sky who caws the same three notes
and settles on a yellow sign that hangs
above his head and warns "No Exit", so

I laugh and look down at my feet to see
a worm tormented by a swarm of ants,
it's spring, a car squeals by, I take a step

towards the brink and beg myself to stop:
I know the boy has gone ahead, I know
the stream descends through hollow rock.

To warm up we walked
       to the ravine;
              we could both wear my father’s
old running shoes.

You wanted to talk
       about us and if
              I’d stayed with your mom,
what we’d of done?

We started to run
       into the ravine,
              we jostled and touched,
“I would’ve done this…and been more tenacious,”

— you’d already heard,
       so we horsed
              on the narrowing path
until you disappeared.

I caught you up
       the last twenty steps out
              of the ravine,
you smiled: “Old man,

you’re going down,”
       and we raced the half-mile
              back to the house, where you turned
to watch me return;

how I lost
       with all of my heart,
              so far behind;
I’d thought

I seemed more than I was,
       but you weren’t surprised
              how easy
you’d put me to rest.

(com)Putaré.
Roman in spirit, I reckon:
pure, amputation,
standing, Greek-still,
numb, counting our infinite
orders. Ordaining but mainly
still, metastatic: a system,
a yes and a no.

More relation than thing,
pure burning forge, binary
burnt to instruction constructs a prosthetic,
so here:
clamour and rattle, flutter and struggle
requiem whistler, your Kyrié Eleison!
Strap up the tap shoe: Hop ! Step ! Brush ! Slip Off!
fall crawling, follow the echoing absence,
of world?

O, there are worlds for this:

Charles Simonyi sang in a soft tiny 'C',
reserved for himself, tautologically,
the in and the out of it:
[#defineNEARnear] and
[#defineVOIDvoid]  I
swear it is true
(parenthetically) to itself,
otherwise go
wherever
you get two.

Virtualis.
Rootless, I reckon:
(hu)Man, reflected (my pidgen) in
vir/us, nest fetid (putére)
Stinking like poison, our
pigeon Kingfisher, the bob and the strut,
picks at its nits, an ubiquitous flutter
inside our openings,
pigeon souls digging
deep pigeon holes.
Souls: Log On.
Infect space in between
system and structure. Logged or afloat
in the time-slice,
the churn smoothing bios (for us!),
to be construed:
Basic Input Output System or Breath,
(Soul, to you)
You know the drill,
down to the psukos, I reckon,
some zoon logon, so
pass a word over: Are we on?
We are off!

We the prosopopoetic (figure it out)—
Warm mask on the dead.
Dead? No. New (at long last),
some thing no older
than its own name:
(declare:
[NAME]
"remember this fire"
*the step was always downhill
(PROCLAIM:
“here we are again”
Here we are again
A£¶šÌ & oÊ°ÔìŨÙ;–
again and again
<…ÚYš„¦ú•¥Ûµ¸e=Â:
a mask on a masquerade.

It hit me while running,
staring down at my feet without thinking,
how in much the same way
two overlapped squares, idly sketched,
resolve into a cube, or
a wine goblet will turn into faces,
this well-worn path in the grass
I believed I’d been sharing all of these years,
was only, in fact, the one I had beaten
into the ground by myself.