I tell myself one life
must yield to another:
fly to spider,
spider to bird,
bird to birdshot.

I tell myself one life
must, in the full course
of a day relinquish itself
to another savage dawn,
fall as each unbidden

yesterday fell, bleak
and ungrieved, twisted
on a rack of tomorrows
no more certain than a silk
spooled about a winch.

The project goes on.
A few stout beams arrived yesterday:
two boxes of nails, heavy as milk,
two pallets of mud from a swallow’s beak,
three incised jawbones,
a woodpecker’s red tilting cap and the dentine
edge of a falcon’s wing — all ready —
but for the plan — the plan balled up
some time ago on the eighth day
when the crew, weary of the foreman’s flap
gathered at the edge of darkness and light
and lounged: well-oiled, unjudged and striking
— so very striking.

Pound
Eliot
Yeats — fascists all.
Would you
?
disposed to such selfsame superiority
make of art
such grandiose assessments
of what is right and pure?
Would you,

in your unpeopled landscape,
gold with harvest,  place
the blemished hound,
the doting mistress, the penniless waif,
and the long bent road
that they invisibly stride?

I make shadows with my hands:
some birds, Nixon,
a spider on the wall, a barking dog.
I make shadows
with my hands — momenta,
false tales of you sitting flat
by the harbor, the ease of your legs
dangled beneath a pier. And I make water
in the shadow, some creases on your feet
and you laugh. I made you laugh.
These hands, disrupting sunlight,
know only the loss of you, your neck
and the fictions of some other tide.

she was blackstrap and off the shoulder
flint eye beguiling she was
***** straight and easy in her clan
sacred in a way
head tossed and smirked knowing
the three quick seconds of our love
that lifetime in the glance
would haunt me old as I am
and not without some clear
and certain lust

Pick one.
Step out of the book clean,
any book, whether bible, cookbook
or blue novel append the phrase
“In the beginning” to the mouth of it:
Harissa & Preserved Lemon.
In the beginning step off from there.
In the beginning there was
Harissa & Preserved Lemon.
Go forth into the worlds
reasonable and unforeseen
& flush with the knowledge
of nothing that precedes thee,
flush as nothing precedes thee
& graced that every fowl or beast
or behemoth fish or mite is
beholden to the tongue
that would taste its name
& every breath spools out
a world anew spewed from
the mewling attentions
of short—tenured gods.
We,
short—tenured gods know
nothing of what we make
until the meat is tendered
& the stew of our lives
cools in that blue porcelain
bowl we save for Sundays,
velvet to the throats of those
that would devour us.

I pray for winter. Summer is fat
and beyond repair. It hardly rains —
children on bikes, on swings
bite the wind. Children eat sky
from trampolines, take
clumps of it in their fists

And fall back on their fevers
laughing, yet to learn
the heft of sag. O! Manic youth —
you’ll throw your greasy chain.
Will it be cottonwood or cloud
that litters the yard come Autumn?
Who’s to know.

When I see children, I see cruelty,
decay and brown ache tumbling
from its stem: the rake,
the shovel, the whine and drag,
some lean deer breaking corn
by the grain bins, the short hex
of old cloud on my tongue.

Soon they’ll be shuttered
in winter’s dry heats these children:
cold-sore, chapped, their bikes hung
carcass from hooks in the ceiling —
like those old men that trim hedges, ****,
sip ambers and broth, wait for snow
like those old women that pry
ticks off their backs.