This morning,
the owls spoke Vietnamese.

I am not speaking metaphorically,
I'm telling you categorically,

The owls spoke - Vietnamese.

The air was a'crisp,
crickets and toads hushed
for this foreign refrain - repeated
coded over the course of a ****,
over the breathy hum
of fans drying grain.

As far as what was divulged,
well, that is mine alone.
I just thought you should know,
I'm a long way from grown.

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.

The AAA guide says Jesse and Frank James
jumped Devil's Gulch on horseback to outrun
the Northfield posse. A must see locale.

Though that story has largely been debunked,
Splitrock done built an small tourist industry
around the myth.

Gordy sits all summer long in a cabin
with no A/C, black flies on the screens
like dog hair on a furnace filter.

Gordy sits all summer long in a cabin
with a couple Coleman coolers filled
with all the best brands of soda,

Hawkin' the t-shirts and postcards
he didn't sell last year or the year before,
but that's ole' fly-swattin' Gordy.

He keeps a list of the origins of tourists,
that's all his talk down at the Sports Cabin,
where he sits all winter long.

Between sips and drips of foam above his lip,
he'll say "Norway, Pennsylvania, Mississippi,
Japan, Iceland, Kansas..."

He might ask you if you're gonna eat that.
The pizza got cold anyway - so why not.
Plus he knows what Gloria did yesterday.

He gave a '57 Chrysler to his 10 year old granddaughter,
but she lost it after the divorce.
Her dad signed the title and left the state.

I guess that's about the state of things around here,
disappointed tourists, skunked out beer,
cold pizza, the little girl who lost her
dad and her car on the very same day.

The pin is broken,
And the wheel has slipped from the rod.
The mechanics of our passage
Are broken now,
And all our worldly ventures
Have spilled out onto the ground:
Her red backed Bible,
Your cast-iron pans,
The lens we used to burn down ants.
All there in the muck:
My bad corduroy pants.
Jerseys of just so much
Victory - and victories
Counted large though
Lying there in the brown ruts
Of just so much passing,
Garbled there in the treacle.

And yet we stand here,
Mute to repair with dumb hands,
Mute to the simple truth
That our eyes must now,
As they always have,
Wander vagrant away
From what is now untreasured,
What is now unburdened garbage,
Beside the still spilled cart,
Beside the wheel that dragged us here,
Beside the sheared-off pin
That left us here
On a muddy track
That will never lead home.

everything paused when you waved goodbye
just going to work

every possible tragedy occurred
on the empty sofa cushion
on the arm of the chair
where one of your hairs
waved and cast the slimmest grim shadow

bella on her bed
pudding-eyed and half asleep
chewed a clump of dirt
from her forepaw
and flit tongued
it to the floor

the coffee un-poured itself from the cup
and I was ****** eastward
in your absence
yanked down the foothills of appalachia
slurred across the bay bridge
smeared like butter on the pancake peninsula
past the flash and clunking plinko machines
past the skeeball thunder and flickering schemes
and a summer week's worth
of crab thrashers and spent grease
stuck in my sinuses
past all the great juggling spectacles
of joy to find myself
ankle deep in some other ocean
breakers hammering to buckle me knees
as you turned right at the top of the street
for another sweaty shift
in the back kitchen
of someone else's dream.

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.

Was thinking of you as I ******
the chardonnay out, black exile
to sewage. Was thinking of you
and those trusts - thrice drawn
out of me - breath ******
in perverse resuscitation -
collapsed a lung
and shudders my gut
in the steam of it. And then,

Soft-bodied and filament,
a spider reared up,
pin-legged,
from behind the tank,
and topped the unset clock,
flashing twelve and twelve
and twelve again.

And with my one hand free
I plucked it up, loose-pinched
between my thumb and index,
held it up before the mirror,
before the medicine cabinet mirror
and the lights, buzzing rifts,
bad as daybreak and drought.

And thus, this spider and you,
dropped upon the waters,
yellowed and foamed, spun
quickly down the trap,
a larger purge to a purging.

To give us naught but bleak display,
To say, to say,
Love has never tethered moon
That way,
That heather never blooms but brays
To drop the stars in sage and grays.

And in this flash hewn verdance sent,
Aghast the sea in violet vent,
Abhors the ******-singed regret,
This skirmish lost though never met.

And where upon a furrowed leaf,
The miner enters as a thief,
To take the blood but not belief,
Was not the time to span a grief?

But given naught but bleak display,
That tethered moon has gone astray,
And pulls not tide but skin away,
To slink beyond a son and pray.

A smattering chatter
revealed the prophet
to be a fool - a beggar -
a panderer to fear -
for bread, mercy or
perhaps, if luck
ensued - loose coin,
too much a pittance
for counting.

And upon the city,
the Lord of Wraths,
expunged of fatherly
duties, crushed
upon his children,
the light that was
Beginning.

Acrid wheezings then
and fuming,
ascended the ramps
to heaven
and cast the demon out.

God willing, I'll find my own way
down to the rust caverns, down to the dust
and seared calcite, stressed and cleaved,
God willing.

And God willing I will make a trance
of us, a Pan of us, all musics, impromptus
and guile. God willing.

And God willing we will take the rain
in our teeth, shatter on the brink of us,
barrel into the wall of us and bleed laughing.
God willing.

And God willing we will cast the first fist
at the faceless faiths, bent as clay,
that engender the hates of hedons
and lusts that only skins abide.
God willing.

For there is no god, God willing,
that will seek to stem the strides of us,
loose in the hills and running,
loose in the hills and ripping
our flesh in the brambles,
cloven and jagged.

No longer the measure mechanic,
the setting lever and loosening coil.
The need for fingers, precise,
laying thin metals, tweezed gears
and spring engineered
in the knowledge of frictions, is gone
and towered hands are still.

What once was built entropic,
cuffed about the wrists of us,
this clutch wheel of grace and holding
ring, this yoke and winding stem -
mere baubles to the collector.

For now the hours are true decay,
half-lived and radiant,
taut with the drip of what is
and what must be known.
And that bent clockman,
hunched and relic,
stern in his craft, compelling
WIND WIND WIND,
fashions jewelry for peddlers,
but not I.

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.”...

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.

Back on the long stone jetty
a time when the smacks came in
splitting the tide with a daily haul -
marlin flags, yellow-fin flags,
shark flags and all on the riggers.

In come the seiners, longliners,
and skipjacks. The crabbers,
the Merry May, Mama's Revenge,
Rock Bottom Sally, all going
bayside with their wares and
worn bows.

Each in it's cutting and bobbing
joy, blows a horn for the jumping
jut-finger kids  - the day done
on the shore when the waves came a' roiling.

The jiggers in for the market docks
and a couple a bucks for the gap-toothed
waterman gathering legs on the rocks.

Two for a steak a' tuna
Five for a pound a' nurse
Blue Marlin not for sale, my boy,
it's for the record books.

Three rib bones flush from the culvert pipe
after hunks of pelvis beside the tracks -
the tracks with no arms but rumble
rumble strips and red bell ticks.

Clang go the bones
where no grass grows

Bang go the trains
and the pink prairie rose

Rattles with the rush
in the same stiff pose

as ribs and hunks of pelvis whiten
and wash no further than the small
and shallow depression cleaved
by spilt rain through a culvert pipe.

The first time I saw you cry,
even the flies got wet,
worms scrambled like Israelites
before chariots and damp chaos.

I never knew your aunt,
but maybe this was your first
touch of dying.

You told me she gave you Chex
on the brittle days, cookies
on the soft lazy days,

Spoke Danish and laughed
because the horses knew the ways
and all the sisters were named for flowers.

The rocks tumble into the glade,
and all the flowers wither,
even the flies get pummeled,
and the nightcrawlers
drag the mapleseed down.

Monsanto now Bayer's verdict
drifts over the fields
marked as no spray zones
for the hardest of yields

These varied sustained with sweat
soils needn't a yellow crop duster
to spread sour poisons
on our fruits or our clustering

perhaps vain cabbages
to stifle the single ****
that reaches to sunlight
among mono-cropped seed

I welcome your minute manipulations
how your simple glance causes me to rise
from my oak chair and ruminations
to fill your cup that has no more than a drop
of cold black coffee.

Grateful for your routine manipulations
of a mind muddied by past resentments,
the always blue dreams that defy explanation,
forcing my hand to stroke your lounging legs
on the way to the kitchen.

Blessed by these familiar manipulations
for it is not you that provokes a willing servitude
it is that space where our nearing breaths conspire
to spin motes of dust and sloughed off skin
displaced by a kiss and a hot cup of coffee.

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.

Duly noted -
that million dollar baby donation
to United Way
or some other contribution
to whatever charity
the strategists
deemed would
promote the interests
of the body
corporate,
devised as
noblesse oblige,
designed as good
corporate
citizenship,
to veil
the larger sapping
of riches
stripped
from the backs
of workers
hacking out
double shifts
with machetes
and dull knives.

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.

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.

They are not yours, those eyes -
those hazel eyes crusted
with sleep-thrashed release -
and neither the mind behind
thinking of toast on a new day,
soft-buttered and still yet crisp.

And those are not yours, those fingers,
curled smooth-knuckled on the cutlery,
waiting for toast and soft butter -
and neither the wait for the kettle’s
pitched steam or the dry tea bag
hanging beneath the rim -

And neither the milk nor honey - ,
never the milk or honey.

No, these are not our things -
these eyes, these minds, these hands -
breads, butters, tea -
not even the footfall that drags
across the bare wood floor is ours
To break the one true fast.

These are our grandmothers’ things,
and all the grands before them
that soon as sunk into sand, rise
and blink in the grandson eye,
takes the granddaughter hand to spread
butter on toast and boil water for tea.

Fist upon the sun gods.
Seek among the goddess earth.
Chant and clang before icons:
oh please, good fortunes,
new birth and wealth.
Sacrifice a goat - the blood will dry
at the foot of the temple.
The blood will dry
and still no rain.

Scream into the night
for a pittance of hope demanded
and stir a neighbor's peace
a dog's twitch into soup dreams
of portent and panic. Yes,
that, once done, bestows
upon us the riches, the riches
the ancients cached:

Dishes wash smoother when soaked.
A grain in a bowl is not empty.
Basil brings life to bland fare.
The herbs of spring strengthen
once dried and stored for winter,
and the yeast of us rise unto heaven.

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.

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.

Which river to cross -
The shallow brook of faith,
Tepid in the slow run to God, or
That which drains into the oily pits
Of loss, tormented though alive
In sure and certain combustion?

Give me fire and hard current,
Give me love and rounding stone,
Give me rasping scale and snag,
Jagged rapid bends,
And the black swamp moccasin
Bite into my fat ripe shin.
For that is where I’ll meet you.

And what is more sacred
Than knowing true pain,
The poison of it -
The broken limb, the broken heart,
The breaking rind and taking,
Taking that what is broken
And breaking,
Into a broken hand
And tying pain to pain
And thus healing
As long slow scabs
Conceal the wounds.

I will not confess my sins, no,
But burn them in the river to Hell.
I will struggle - with you -
the orange-tongued waters,
Grit-toothed and unburdened,
Dragged a half-mile down,
Until we reach the ashed
And muddied bank and fall
In the gray and muck of living -
Laughing that we tried at all.

I know silence,
I breathe silence,
I am silence.

But when the harsh winds streak
among the ash,
when the leaves are stripped green,
when gaunt tarnished limbs hiss resilience,

I must humbly bow my head,
and whisper,
to the fallen bark and leaves,
lift my petty eyes,
to the bones of trees,
and whimper.

For it is not I
that rises unto time,
it is the coiled fiber,
the heartwood
and sheer elevation
of living into which
I can never reach,
but with clenched teeth
and torn grateful hands,
I climb
upon that
which endures
regardless.

It is 4 a.m.,
and a black dog breaks
crust on old snow - stumbles.
And a full moon looms
to reveal just east
a crackling of limbs felled
by gathered frosts and west
a barn owl arcs silent - a slurry
of cream, hunger and brown
winter **** hovered and plunged
by moon and yellow porchlight.
A black dog stiffens and sniffs -
limbs give no more crack.

I know only this:
It is 4 a.m. - something bled
and something fed
in the moon and yellow porchlight.

Sheathed in a concrete calyx,
a flower, a generation folded in
upon itself, waits the horrors of the sun.

These petals once unfurled, fell upon
by hard rains and scorch care not, I am told,
the grim and arrowed planting, but
brace against the stem of the next blossom,
for none, I am told, hold the wind alone.

But that is not for me to know.
I only know that these seeds forever sown,
do not prove lustrous on the hills,
in the fields, narrow-tilled,
worse yet, in a vase, I am told,
worse yet, in a vase for gazing.

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.

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.