After the pops we watched,
from the window. Rabid
or not, the raccoon flailed
like ribbons on a demo fan,
life pushed out like pulled air
in the driveway. Two more
from the cop to secure an end,
a spectacle, a gathering.
Five cracks in the driveway
to bring the neighbors out
for a killing. The mowers wind down.
We watched in awe the last
few pulses of agony
slow run to the gutter
where the last leaves
unraked on an afternoon,
mingled with road grit
and hunks of can,
were soon washed down
by the firemen
and their hoses.

I told Luke about it by the iced cream.

Some days smell like years
like the dinge of sprung sheetrock
when the rain came in
the cricket loose against the chimney
and the attic floorboards
expand with the frosts
of every winter spent in this house
insulated with cardboard and crates
ransacked from the floorplan
and catalogued renderings

And some days smell like years
like the blistex on your lips
when the rain came in
and we kissed this tired old place ours
and the attic floorboards
velvet pine underfoot
whispered tall rooms in this house
and the stuccoed walls spoke
of a lost craft revived
in your freshly washed hair

I can smell in your eyes
the brine of a ceiling
when once we dreamed
beyond the rafters
and collar ties
beyond the shingles
and the familiar maintenance
of our lives

Saps run before the weathers -
hordes of sugar in the root -
what little stays - thin and capillary,
above ground, contests
the filigreed fingers of water
with denser sweets.

And thus, unleaved and ****,
what to the eye appears barren,
rude to the dog-eyed sun,
summer nests exposed as frail,
stricken to bone in winter,
stands as a man I once knew -
propped by his own root,
wide as shade and none other.

You ain’t no butterfly.
Forget them wings.
Ain’t nothing but worksore,
blister and things.

Ain’t nothing but cane -
we ain’t nothing but cane.
Come out that cocoon, baby,
come stand in the rain.

Come out from the womb.
Come down from the bed.
That Sickleman needs us
in the barrow instead.

At Irving and Sheridan, cabs, buses and cars bled with a scab of gray belch low in the gelid airs.  Above, a draught of light spilled out of the Redline, spilled lanky into the coffee of the night, filigree cream in the eye.  It was then that I saw her, strobed in amber as the train banged itself taut and fleeing.  I watched her decay, velvet down the platform stairs.  I stood gum on the sidewalk before ticked-out commands. Walk. Don't Walk. Walk. Stirring a light thick with the bitters of spent grease, she poured into the street and came toward me, longstriding.  It was then I saw her, tepid and far.  I no longer heard the flickering scrape of the El, nor did I smell the burnt hashbrowns of the New Crystal flickering day-old soup in neon and steam.  I heard only a vague exhausted wind, smelled only the lurid musk of Obsession and rot as she passed beyond the veil of my brim. It was there, at that moment, I walked Hopper for the first time. It was there, at Irving and Sheridan, I became an overcoat and a thin dime.

Cloud came no closer than that,
but I tried.

Emboldened and primate I tried.

Scurried up the elm to bring night closer.
But the limbs got thinner,
thinner there and sapling.

****, the stars are wounds,
and the moon's a gaping.

And what swoons below
is a lark, a laugh and a flaking,

like skin ripped in endeavor,
like skin that is ripped with want,
ripped with gravity, like fingers,
pale with just hanging on
as the growing tip breaks
and falls before magma.

It was something else entirely.
It was not the ripped yellow t-shirt
I pulled from between the boulders
Where the lake met Chicago.
It was not the penny or the wasted
Gull feather. Nor was it the child’s shoe
That no longer flickered as she ran.
It was not the rusted corkscrew that
Faintly read Jackson Hole, Wyoming,
By the gold and chipped cowboy
Tall in the saddle,
Nor the green and brown shards
Of empty glass, nor the used
And smoothed shells of mollusks.
It was not the bits of blottered pages
Whose inks no longer spoke of hands
But water and dissolution.
It was not the lensless knock-off
Rayban’s - severed at the temple. No,
It was something else entirely,
There, hidden in the rocks,
Where the water beats upon us.

Would you betray a maple for its shade -
deny yourself the cool comfort of dim light,
sweet woodruff and fern, ground ivy,
violet in spring? Columbine refuses
full sun. Your languors burn, blister
and peel with each maliced stroke
of a chainsaw.

She was crushed ice,
great for chewing,
bad for teeth.

She found me thirsty and pica,
down in the taps,
bounced and fanged.

And there she was, tall in the glass,
clear in her gaps but clouded
with lime in the hard stuff.

Yea, she yielded to my jaw,
ground her by the mouthful,
but my throat only dried,

dried that only a long pull
could quench it; dried such
that only a melting would do.

But when the water came down...
when the water came down,
she crumbled to a chunk.

And spinning in her way,
spinning in her way of refusing,
I set the glass down, parched.

But that's the way with ice and water -
that's the way,
somewhere north of thirty two,
but somehow south of liquors.

Blind slouched friar on a slow mule
that through ford and thicket sure-hooved
loafs on to a deaf peasant shack whose eyes
crackle afire in a sprectrum unseen to the seeing
and the friar feels the heat in his fingertips
reads the braille of himself in the scars
on the mumbling one's tools, hovel blunted,
dull, splintered hatchets and soft hammers
that never found a brick to stack against the wind.
The blind one in the deaf one finds
one full moment where a bread and a hot sip
of slack water postpones the ever-fording.

Again today a study
proves our immortality.
To run, however long,
reduces the risk of death
by twenty percent
in a sample of two hundred
fifty thousand.

And now they are running.
Running against the certain stone.
Running on the slim trails of hope,
gathering ticks as they brush
the closing blades.

The path gets thinner, old friends,
Narrows to a deer-path.
But the whitetail seeks only water,
forage, such sweet leaves -
never the headlamps, no,
never the headlamps
that creep up the road.

Come, O Love for down the vale,
Where moonlight frocks the lovers’ tale,
Where moonlight mulls the staves of trees
And shreds the fuschia from the leaves.

Come, O Love for down the vale,
Where cleave and stumble long prevail,
And woolen grass reveals the press
Of all that slept there shorn of dress.

Come down the vale for it is known
The miller’s grain was never grown
Here below long-shadowed stone.
Come, O Love, and come alone.

Put down your labor’s winnowed sheaf.
Lay down in heaven’s gentle brief.

Up there, in the brevities
and rifting cloud something
lured my eyes.

For this dog is a blacker black
than a slip moon night, but here,
on this morn, the dim prevails.

And the bending of wet leaves
beneath her paws wager green hope,
but they're brown. I saw them yesterday.

Yesterday, before the rain came winter,
before the now the sea plops
from a rust split gutter onto an ice pick.

But this is what wanders
when a blacker black dog
is hidden in black.

This is what wanders
when wet leaves mute her paws
and I wait, for her.

But up there, in the brevities
and rifting cloud allured,
a dust cut the night briefly.

And briefly, so briefly,
there was a moment assured,
but uncertain as daybreak - I and a dog.

In the gathering steam and sizzle,
innocence borne on the cleft tongues
and snake oiling scales of just and rust,
turn green in the enzymes -
the endtimes just months away
from release and streaming.

My god has it been this long?
Broth turned to black reduction,
caramelized,
forgotten on a back burning coil,
while I sniffed the air for musk
and cardamom,
while I taste the dirt and slick
crushed biscuits in the mat,
and for what?

Steam carries dissolution,
no two ways about it,
flavor is the concentration
of dead upon dead,
scraped up fond of burning things.

This is madness,
conflagration,
cultivated extermination,
but I reel and I swoon
and roll back repulsion
with a carnivore's lust for melting fats,
with a vegan's lust for imitation,
with a child's zest to burn ants
with sunbeams, focused
to a pinprick.

Silent where they fell,
spent ash, dog hair, coffee grounds.
Silent as they were when useful -
for buzz, for warmth, for waking, now
bits of grit to grind down the slippers
and vanished for a pleasure.

Silent where they fell,
old debts dismembered,
chunks of glass that could perhaps
be re-assembled as candy dishes
or ashtrays - maybe porches
where the chew jaw geezers
took summer and low orange light
way back when.

And the sun fell where it falls,
like threadbare throw rugs
and beaters, old dogs
chained to trees,
and the red rust Fords
thumped by the woodpile
and scavenged for parts -
silent playthings for children
racing in the torn sprung seats.

You left hair in the tub,
toothpaste splatter on the mirror,
a wadded towel on the rod,
wet footprints on the floorboards
marking a stumble to the kitchen
where you guzzled milk
from the carton, there with
the door open, cold spilling
out like flumes to your feet -
and I loved it.

A sudden spasm raked,
raked your shoulders,
your torso, all caught
ecstatic at the mingling
of milk and hot bath blood.

Wearing your robe
like a prizefighter,
pink to the ring
and gearing up for a bout
that never comes -
now that's the stuff
my sweet **** -
that's the stuff of the long fight,
the long familiar,
the mustache I lick from your upper lip.

I was always adept at disappearance.
Just silt and gutterwash slipping off the ridge.
Brown water and runoff, thick chemistries
down to the trout streams, crisp, unmuddied.

Perhaps, though eroded by my passage,
shaped, however briefly by this greedy torrent,
heedless of the lumbers and rounding stone,
I hope for a simple clear to surface.

I am stilled by the rippling eyes of you,
these faces above a drowning.

These each and varied grains of you,
these flakes of skin and hair of you
remain, held close in this current,
oft rabid, oft flat and running,
knowing only one nature -
to keep on - to keep on -
to keep on to the tides.

A shadow fell upon my sheeted crown,
and she whispered, “It is time, my bonny, it is time.”
And when I rose, a linen for cloak,
I stood shoeless on a cobbled road,
squeezed on a Georgian lane,
where tight faces hid behind tight curtains,
dim shadows in gaslight
with green and scurvy eyes.

With her palm light-pressed
at the base of my spine, she urged,
“Walk now, my bonny, it is time.’
And with the first trepid step the street
fell away in a crumble, the facades
shattered as crystal and sharp,
and bunched hills lurched up as strong backs
from a fall, snow dusted, studded
with black pine and all the tangles of wind.

And though I sought to turn and return
to the bed-warmth of my slumber,
there was nothing behind but gray plain,
gray sky, and the gray eye
Of she that bade me “Walk, my bonny,
it is time.” She then melted to a lynx, svelte,
plump-furred for winter and steaming -
she melted to a lynx and gamboled
down into the crease, down into cutting
stone, down below bones that crouch
as hills, where stiff creeks hide their prey.

And I followed, I followed as old women gavelled
out plainsong with brooms among tines.
I followed and trembled as snorts and howls
of unseen brethren called my name.
I followed, and each round pebble -
a chittering mark on my pink soft soles,
as I descended down the fleet-pawed path,
bent with the tortures of shoes,
and the pines lengthened as nails pounded
from below, some swift and urgent
hammerstrikes pinning a hard sky.

Her track led deeper, deeper
than the slanted roofless mill
wheel half crushed in ice and misuse.
Her track led deeper, deeper
than the vagrant hamlet where
no smoke from chimneys plumed.
And as the path narrowed, thorn rich
and squalid, I took to my knees
and palms and stretched before the mouth
of her den - fuming of musk and sulphur.
“It is time, my bonny, it is time.”...

If I
had not leapt upon the weathers,
I would not know the rain,
neither the soil soaking violet rain,
nor the mountain rounding violent rain.

A train upon a scheduled track,
rarely derails. It is calculated thus.

If I
wonder whether leaping forth or falling back
into safer briars leaves fewer scars,
exhilaration would be a foreign land
of laughing fools with burnt hands.

Gain versus loss is the work of accountants,
profiteers and venture capitalists.

If I
had not turned away from her,
turned from evaluations of with or without,
turned from the doubt, the wish, the one last kiss,
my hands would never have found yours,
and blue upon hazel unite in the faint
few seconds, standing on a cliff,
together, above a deep and narrow pool
into which we plunged unthinking.

...Sleep conjured a small dog
with a granite eye, mats and mange,
Three legs and a vagrant tongue
That hung from the left of its snout,
A viscous drool that strung without
Shame, without breaking to the floor.
And I, though broken in a dream,
Shorn of hands,
Less a body than a thought,
Became a dream for a stone-eye dog
Who rolled belly up to offer its scars
And plump tumors.
We were one then.
We were one -
A broken man and a broken dog
For once thus calm in a dream.

What can I say?
I was a bad sunrise,
quick scudded to cloud
and withholding.

Look at it this way,
it was a great day
for pictures,
unshadowed,
no hotspots
to burn away
in a dance.

We were a function
really, a shallow
angle of incidence,
a glancing blow,
mathematic,
not prismatic,
no split beam,
just one garish
morning thing,

and a slow
overcast
trundle
to a setting.

Once,
there was a sound called breathing,
called idling, called waiting
in your car for a "whatcha doing
next Saturday", for an "I'll call
you tomorrow", for an "I had a good time
tonight", for a paralyzing moment
of fear to end, for that should
I just say goodnight and go to end,
not knowing in the silence of our breathing
that all you wanted was a gentle goodnight kiss
before I darted from your car.

Dormant in dry divots,
in the basins,
what I am, what I will and what I will be
is rained, is whetted,
by what is, what is not and what will not be.

There blooms the green resilient,
the sulphured algae,
hot spurned by weathers -
the must of us.

There plumes communion -
chance and wide endeavor -
flush and fumed -
above the gathered ponds.

I can smell my own pits,
my night sweats,
****** up in my week
unwashed robe.

I am disgusted.

And yet, there,
in the garment bags,
lingered in your suits,
your suits I brought home
from your funeral
in the sands so long far gone,
remains these same
and bitter musks.

And there, in the bags,
the pastes of rose wallpapers,
struggled up but aligned remain.

And there, in the bags,
a spruce topped Goya,
thick hipped as forests
and earth angels remains,
there before a sniff.

And though I sit here
in the acrid smoke and
coffee fumes, wondering
breakfast and baths,
you stand stiff as dry-clean,
tall on the hangers,
held and never squandered
for a tear, there,
thankfully there,
the scent of you remains.

Sing forth the treasons,
the seasons have been sung
long before revolting - D minored
the winter, G majored the spring...
Bah, the seasons never heard
these grovelling breaths,
but ****** them deaf up.

Give lung to the unbreathed
rumors squat below the bridge,
that the tumors unskinned,
revealed pulsing on our red,
white - blue tunneled drums -
these cancers defiling the myth of us.

The fall does not applaud
the clapping of leaves, but
strips us to bone, and the
blown away come to us cardboard,
cornered in the cold sun, unsung,
mocking the radio comforts of disdain.

Our own unmaking, unmasked
and riven with lies - lies and all lies
reinforced with steel and striped beams,
stiff on a pole, snapping as whips
on a cotton bent back - crowed
as every patriot hymn
fades in a grumble.

Such joyful music this treason,
this treason not treason,
this discomfiting strained ensemble
sparing neither breath nor ear
the true screech of anthems -
beat, immobile chords,
chained and ghetto thirds,
cast-off tritones, contrapuntal,
scraped on gut and strung up,
and over the laminate woods of us.

Come to me vagrant, O Death:
starved of bone, starved of lung,
dime-eyed and savage.
Do not come to me gorged and gorgeous,
for it is only when you have known
true hunger, withered to a stalk,
submitted to beggary and stale breads,
you may come to my door, my table.
It will be then, O Death, that pity
becomes you - it will be there
in my clouding eyes you bear witness
to what makes grief a giving - it will be
there in my dry cracked palms held
empty before you, not a partaking of life,
but a share of a hunger assuaged and willing.

Dangling on the burn end of a breath,
is a word -
gaunt, untenable, reliable.

Dangling on the burn end of a breath,
is a syllable -
unto nothing, unspeakable -

until the rattle rains its verdict.

I like burnt coffee,
the black half cup in the ***,
evaporating into syrup,
tongue-rejected but swallowed hot.

I like bent smokes,
cracked at the filter,
pinched and squeezed,
dispersing joyous poisons,
some to the lung demanding:

Each day begin bitter, imperfect,
stiff into addictions of dawn,
into the drawn curtain ways
of waking.

Small,
Still small.
The storm knows
As Nietszche knew,
the botched and bungled
fall. When the one great love
stalled with damp points and punch tires
stuck on the shoulder blinking out
flashers to no one in sight , the rise
behind - just wet exits and no beams bright.

Seasons turn the birds
like pages.
V's in the slipstream,
deny this place as habitat,
when Canadian airs
slump down in the jetstream.
Pelican pouches gone,
black tipped twirling
thermal phrases gone.
Stilt legged herons,
still and balanced on a single bone,
like prophesy, a blue note
scribbled in the margins.
Egrets, orange-beaked
and wading,
slow stepped
and stabbing,
reading slow
the ditch water
for movement,
paddling boats
of the many ducks,
wood, ruddy, mallard and wigeon,
gliding bloom algae scratchings
of summer, gone.
All the fattening
cushlings gone.
Even the Kingbird,
stout-shouldered,
Maltese,
relinquishes its kingdom,
surveyed from the fastening post,
The cunning moves Othello,
on these crisping griddled plains.
Dark-eyed Junco,
black over white,
return the wintering hedge,
to the shrivelled berries,
road grit, given seed
and stubbled white pages.
Great grays and redtails
lurk these simpler plumes
in simpler plumes,
and wait the white plunging.

I am stuck between Sweatro and Gingerman,
stuck out by the dumpsters, ****, and toothed butts,
scrubbing concrete for roaches, hands stung
out with brown shards of Michelob bottles
between shots and lines.

I am stuck in the batlamp, stuck in the felt,
stacked like quarters by the rail, waiting my turn
at the game, my turn at the trough,
hailing drinks like cabs, two fingered,
absolute and limed.

There was a girl there once,
square-shouldered, brass-railed
and flickering. There was an eye
to an eye, a mocked dissection - yes,
a cutting - a splendid humbled nothing.

Yes, those nights bled fast,
slumped down to Campeche,
burrowed into beans and red rice.
Yes, before the fogs wore off,
before the graystones went gray,
before the foilman don't like that,
out there in the dumpsters,
where I found a roach,
scarred my lip, spread glass,
spread lies and conjured a time
high in the **** of discard,
high in a nothing called mine.

Nothing broke east today.
Night simply collapsed,
feral and bloomed
with hard ******,
dollar-a-rack billiards,
two-buck-chuck chardonnay
curling my tongue
like the tillerman's fist
that coffees, highbeams
and bitter jaw breakers
can never wash clean.

I'm not thinking grim,
but those beams only grant
fifty yards of reckoning
into the blob of night,
that gaping maw with gumdrop teeth
and ditch green eyes.

Many tongues blithering
explode like cattails,
like plug cubans,
chewed and cancerous,
like doghair teasing my uvula,
like that five second,
twenty foot,
across-the-bar romance
with the square-shoulder girl
spending no time my way,
long drawn out and vagrant.

Your coffee's getting cold, my love.
Bella curls into your knees
twitching.
What are you dreaming, my love?

Copperheads tangle in withering steam,
and I'm fifteen again,
fifteen minutes late again,
hoping the first words
on your lips are a
good morning kiss.

Black Aggie presides on the Druid Ridge,
taking children to her lap
that they may convene with bent-feathered
birds felled in her shadow.

And there on the Druid Ridge,
in the red eye of night she foots the grounds,
drags each from their slumbers,
calls forth to discuss the marrow.

Oft scorned and feared by black grasses
burned in her passing, stained by vandals
unfeigned hatred of grief, Aggie
remains for to harrow.

Cold, still, tormenting the Pikesville shroud
such that none could rest in the lime
of her stone-eye, such that none would test
the hand to reach into the pits of their loss,
to find each one a pulp for the barrow.

Burnt in the steam of crab,
there was no in your eyes.
There was no on your fingers,
peeling the apron,
splitting the shell,
scraping the devil,
digging the claw for meat.

I found someone came like a mallet,
but it was you walked away,
bored in youth,
bored in the shell of love,
met on a crab lunch hesitant,
in an inland cafe,
where they only steam female
not thrown back to sea for spawning.

But what else could I say?
If honest is the plate of love,
then I served you well.
But what came hot,
like a platter of crab,
was quickly indulged,
and all that remained is the no:
the no in your eyes,
the no on your fingers,
the no on your lips.
the no that always lingers.

In this winter called Leviathan,
gorged be the meddles of men
lurched there, rustbound in ice
and enzyme.

And all that arcs over, whether
the crust limbed trees, or the white
tresses of sleet pinged on our heads,
mocks like a maul.

Roused and thus cursed by the makers
of beasts and things craving anvils
and the nails of undoing, undoing,
undoing us all.

And though it was said "Thou breakest
the heads of Leviathan in pieces..."
it is the heads of all men that break,
it is the wilderness fed.

Just a forelimb on the road,
careless as a twig,
but no plunder for crows,
no worthy feast for a scavenge,
just hoof, hide and bone.

And that’s how they left her,
a narrow remain, somehow
shorn and distant thrown
as if her full and russet frame
had been lifted, held aloft
and in sacrifice taken up,
into some sanctified bounding
where car and deer ne’er met.

Like red leaves,
after tree had fallen.

I dream houses.
I dream small rooms
behind small doors
in which small wardrobes
lead nowhere but trappings
of our mangled time -  
of yours and mine.

I dream chimney fires,
tongues between walls
and curtains hung like tar.
We were never long
in the vapors, strangers yes,
but a lope of gray shoulder
and a turning was you, I am sure,
everturning and blue.

I find you in the floorboards,
scuttled in dust and debt,
heaped for a match,
for a flicker,
but nothing is scorched in this.
Rather what crushes here,
the burdens of rooves on cinder,
the cracking of small rooms,
small scores
never carved from a plan,
compress what should be at rest.

I cry “Wake”, each morning,
I cry “wake” to find you,
tragic in the sheets,
bound before the fan ,
mumbling something to someone,
flexing your hand. Yes, I see you,
tangled, but dreaming I think,
twitched of some else tomorrow,
stitched to your own land pink.

How many schisms
does it take to change a light bulb,
that gray irritant in the shade,
that fray behind diffused glass,
incandescent once, but burned,
but burned out?

Twist the *****, **** you,
dare you take the **** thing out
and pop it on the floor,
such joyous crack, this glass ever thin,
this wire-mocked glow, exploded
as air seeks to neutralize the vacuums,
seeks to restore among the vacuous,
these lumens built to fade.

Winds don't speak my name,
just carry on,
foraging stone for beaches,
combing grass for a song
like a rasp on a bowsaw,
like a drop in a bucket,
galvanized and rusty.

Winds don't speak my name
and if I went to school tomorrow,
I'd be the the fool with the apple,
conjuring bribes of better grades
and gradients carved in sandstone
ledges.

Hedges don't smell the wind -
they turn noses -
let the stank come in.

Days of wine and roses
were nothing more than days of wine
and headaches, presupposing
that a functioning drunk
was less a drunk
and therefore unimposing.

So the winds don't speak my name,
but rather split and run,
as I stick my nose
in all that flows,
in all that liquid business.

Otto rode filthy down the slumpline onto Cowpers - past Bleaker's Brick, Mole Rat Slim's and Dave’s Sour Onion , on down to quayside all hooked and hungry. Flyer said Gracey Mae Beam was hoarding the stage at eleven, hitting the planks of Varlot’s Velvet Rope with no back-up - no thunder drum brass or strung out string section to stifle the hoots and howls of them mongrel boys scrapping over leavin’s. He knew the drill. Gracey would lead with “Heaven” then lilt dissonant into “Hell and Lula”, spin down into “Luna”, swing out riffs of “Hypnosis” and barrel into “Gun Metal Blue” and run “A Lass To Mara.” Yes, he knew the drill cuz the set was theirs, arranged in a one bedroom walk-up shotgun with a Wurlitzer and bad plumbing. ****, has it been that long? But Otto knew, felt it in a rib, it was coded on the leaflet - Gracey was playing Varlot’s - the first haunt - going it alone this time, no Wurlitzer, no Otto, just a dim lit backdoor black-smudged around the ****. He’d wait for her there, three smokes left and rationing. Three smokes left and hoping for a glint-eye nod.

Espaliered vines hang like convicts,
strung out in the vineyards as portent
to passers by.

But the tasting rooms are open with cheeses,
retribution and grim justice -
verdicts of wine.

I see them, the tasters, the gawkers,
giddy on the road for sips of vengeance
and sublimation.

I see them, glued to the glass,
glued to the crushing of grapes,
calling it justified.

What can I beg of tomorrow
that hasn't already been denied?
Am I a cup in hand, an avoided eye?

If I yearned for a lung not shallowed
with tar, would you grant it?
I thought not, I've asked before.

If I fought for one black minute
to toss the shovels aside,
to use my hands to dig,
to sift my own grave for riches,
would you give it?
I thought not, I've asked before.

And if I spit in your face,
take all the days unnumbered unto myself
and squander, would you take it?
I thought not, I've done it before.

I'll meet you in the morning,
yes, we'll face each other again.
But I'll want nothing this time,
I'll beg nothing but hard weathers
and grime. For that is all
you are want to give.

Settling accounts in cuneiform
is the work of Sumerians,
ten sacks of wheat in autumn
for two goats today.

Should retribution or betrayal
stab the soft clay, the reed
breaks in the fist of the scribe
balancing credits and debits,
destroying the ledger.

In the distance of ages
come lines gaunt in their pointed
leanings, revealing neither the source
nor reasons for their differing orientations.

It is for the scholars to reveal
what lies hidden in these ancient tongues,
much as the poets in the older ways
distant from the reader, unacquainted,
fenced off by industry and protocol
from the immediacy of commerce
speak to everyone or even perhaps
to no-one at all.

It is red brick and steady.
Though the herefords tread the floors these days,
She is steady. And though the window frames
Carry little paint - it was white - and hold
Where they fell, and though
The creek has wandered, no carved,
Deep against the footing stones,
She is steady. Steady as the ma’am
That taught them. Steady as the hand
That scraped the chalks and simple maths,
Steady as the wind scraped eyes,
The chaff chapped hands
Tracing letters onto boards.
Yes, she stands forever
And only the bell is gone.

Out, among gray and cloud-spliced
verities, beige and stubbled hollow stalks,
a doe held her place on the rise.

And I, slippered and robed,
gathered the costs of my comforts -
the papers and pages of heat
from a white and resin box.

She tasted the air of me,
upwind of her, and the twin steams
of her core beat out, split the chill -
pulsed and sinuous.

Her black eyes unmoved,
she stroked the ground once
with a forefoot and her left ear
funneled toward me.

It is winter now and what hides
beyond the rise, before the snows
and thin forage is for her to know,
not I, for I am not that dear.

Live!
Deliver!
Emit no on-time reviled evil.

No devil ere lived on.

Some dim tide strode the beach pelican,
had quarters for eyes, and a gull's sense for scavenge.
I found pearls under the boardwalk,
but they were just butts
and hunks of abalone
caught up in the pushing.

The skeeball racked out addicts
like melamine and spent rubbers,
but we were young then,
not known for drinking.

Safari had fake skin in the flukes,
Zulu shields too tall for a penny,
and some chump carved out Jesus in sand,
but the waves whipped that away.

I got all surf rod crazy
and hooked a dogfish in the belly,
and some **** took my kite,
so that's what's up for fish.

Later on, though, when the acids came on,
and them jimmies were ants,
and that ******* carny wouldn't stop the ride,
and footprints became skulls,
and the sea turned opal,
and the horsecops stayed cool,
and I became dolphin,
and undertow spoke of passage,
and the horseshoe ***** washed up
gray and silent - I learned -
that mussels cling
to jetties not for communion,
but in the hope that the next sap
would take the pounding.

Weathermen are pushing the storm.
Nobody noteworthy died today.
Eight to twelve on the Twins.
Havoc on the plains and cancellations
pending. No travel advised.
The schools flaked out before
the first wind blew, and the office
is gutted parental.
Milks are shoveled in carts,
pricey waters too. Croutons
got hoarded like hardtack,
and only the lettuce remains,
only the lettuce, the leeks,
and a few fibrous cereal grains.

What was it, that chocolate crust
scalded in the *** from yesternight,
leaning, off-burner, with the dangling
spoon, wooden and stained?

Best give it a soak, my love,
that tomorrow we may find
its nature framed tight in stainless,
framed tight in the soap bubbles
that have raced and cling
to the round squat walls.

Perhaps we may find, tomorrow,
among the gray pepper-flecked film,
risen to the surface, a few plump kernels
of our own yellow yesterday.

So smooth and piquant then. Remember?
Our love a puree of roots and bitters,
quick peppered, swift boiled
blobbed up and sulphurous.
Melting the ladle, melting the ***,
smoking the burner, firing
the whole **** kitchen down.

Yes, it still stings my lips,
***** on my uvula, something
never fully swallowed
but scorched on a hard palate,
peeling skin on the blistered roof
of a recollection.

It was tough then, I know,
making soup last for days,
for weeks, for years.
We were young then
and fond of quick eats,
grabbed before a cab
and shoveled whole,
gulped like a snake
teasing eggs -
unhinged and transient.

But savor these broths unclouded, love,
clear to the windmills, blue and Dutch
at the bottom of the bowl.
Draw the spoon, gentle and away,
lift and breathe softly, eyes closed,
and take what remains, what lingers
velvet on the buds and nourishing.