Pretend

Pretend the words don’t have enemies.
May they be beyond

as eyes are, as hills.
This thought consoles me today,

this lie. Let us say the words
into the whipping winds

of the place we live, and wait.
Pretend the words are not somebody

else’s leash. That you are not.

Stopping an Argument Going Nowhere

As a boy, I stood in drowned sneakers

and held up to the sun a crayfish

between my thumb and forefinger,

just plucked from the creek,

its pincers gyrating and pinching air,

trying to reach back far enough

to scissor skin and win release

from pain by pain. Win release

from pain by pain. Even in the dark places

under stones in creeks, whatever stones,

whatever other kingdoms, this immutable

is known. The dark imbricated plates

of her body were soft bronze. She knew me

enough. She’d treat any animal the same

and be blameless, not dwell as we do

after we use our natural defenses

to return to where we can breathe.

I’d call a friend over to see tiny dark eggs

she strummed under her body’s shields,

then drop her for the pleasure of seeing

that tiny splash, the dark zing backwards

into her watermind. She’d flex her entire body

and her big scoop tail would shoot water

through water as she flew to the safe

underplace. Each language, its dark, protective stones.

I am not a boy. I no longer lift

the roofs of stones from creatures.

Let dwell, let dwell.

Time is water and we must breathe under it.

Each in the darkness it calls home.

It

It is never finished.
I wake and walk barefoot
to the backyard,
past the spider universe
of the abandoned nook garden,
branches of everything-all-at-once
strangling or loving, who knows;
should I have said roses
in a poem, pedigree, pedigree
I have no use for.
Something wilder than roses
grows there and through me,
the birds getting excited
at my approach, summer
through us, they flee
in terror but will circle back
as soon as I’m gone,

as soon as I’m gone.

Thank You For Talking to Me

I say to the rain.
I say to the ingredients of a person
which just erupted in a random conversation
they insisted I taste.

I say to the past,
then lock the door behind it.
I say to the crows
in the cemetery

that act like cashiers,
pretending to make conversation,
but not really.
I say to sleep's

white noise pretending
to be a person pretending
to be me.
Then I nap

and dream of the world
before conversations existed.
How like a glass paperweight
everything was!

dark watery things

she said something to him
and then she watched
headlights cross the ceiling
like spirits disconnected from bodies
they only pretend to inhabit
most days, most nights

not seeing headlights
he said
many more things
so could not see
the souls on the ceiling
as they lay in bed
looking up
still he did not see
he had not guessed
she had said
a final thing

and so when he thought
she slept
she had congress with spirits
on their bedroom ceiling
from the street
who told her how lovely
it would be to live
without a soul
in her body
for just one year

mark the calendar
lest you forget

the things whisked

she found this religion
of just walking
just what she needed
thank you, ceiling
she told the light
and was soon gone

taking a knife and a pillow

Monday

You said yesterday was the first day
of autumn everything. It was not. Today is.
Am I a breeze in your mind
as you are in mine? This window glass
through which I watch you is ancient,
possibly as old as Lincoln's forehead,
making wavy gravy of the landscape.
I wanted to send you some old art
along with its resident silverfish. Autumn
prepares to mount its exhibitions. You know
that usually means sex. Art workers
are usually oversexed and on ghosts.
Ghosts cannot harm us. (I would that
they could.) Today, I asked autumn what
she thinks of you, and it was all under her breath,
like a Ouija board. Just push the planchette
so we can get this over, get into bed.

Sunday

Each person is a cup of ghosts.
Each person like a spoon in a warmth
you can stir and drink close to sleep.
A white square in the museum is useful.
A black square in the museum is useful.
You mostly stir the way birds do
around the museum. You listen to the grass
move through walls, without seeing.
You say the word Sunday to hear
the shape it takes. Someone blows glass
far away, thinking as of a child
who will be your first reflection?

Dark Veined

Dark little pond
sky rains into you
the night is
sneaking into you
manmade pond
between the interstates
you twinkle
with parking lot lights
of dusted motels
one side
of the highway talks
after a stroke
each room
with a faulty light
twinkles
each television
and each gust
between the sliding glass
the body’s
interstate stares
into you

In Rain

sparrows in rain
I watch and watch
the word for you
as much as you

an arrow in your name
how strangely true
and when you fly
without a bow

you launch yourself
at nothing frivolous
I watch and watch
as much as you

Wound

up earlier than wings


how to tell the hours


you don’t care for numbers


blue whispers






what is just


is without hope


blue whispers form


grass listens first






my cat rubs her face


on death’s craggy face


it’s papier-mache


the skull in the window






the sounds of birds


before birds appear


do you seem a transcription


to yourself?






what is just


it’s papier-mache


blue whispers over a skull


now wings arrive






without hope’s burden


blue is more itself


do the birds seem a transcription


to themselves?

83

Eighty-three days
outside spring, she picks up

the bag of birdseed
larger than her back.

She’s defected
from the human thing,

family, friends, neighbors,
class reunion in the Milky Way.

She has so many children,
colors, speed, terrors.

Come close, she whispers
in her backyard. They do.

We don’t need to know
each other to create

meaning, to feel love.
The sounds in cold branches

where they perch and wait
feel more like her name

to her, than the one
the kindred strangers call.

The cold branches
that will gather snow

when she’s gone,
and the miracles

of dark peeping
things almost children,

bits of sky

their eyes,
are all the love

that’s fraught enough
to call home.

Cherryborg

    


PATIENCE

The patience of a bar of soap
melting in your hands,
that’s as good
as it gets.

The patience of nearly-extinct parrots,
their beaks wired shut,
shoved into shoeboxes
and smuggled north.

Be quiet, be still, survive.

The sense you get
watching the television news
that you’re being kidnapped
each night.

There’s nothing to be done with that.

The sense the merry-go-round
is speeding up, the population’s
exponential increase,
the gunfire and satellites,
drones carrying anthrax soon,

drones singing in your ear

buy this, flee this,
merry christmas,

the president is hiding,
now you hide,

quick, soon anyone
will be able to kill anyone else
anywhere,
with a button press,

even a third grader
will be able to take you out,

anyone with a phone,

the rise
of the Dark Empire

of the forgotten grandmothers

begins.

Period

The night is crisp

if you listen.


The leaves finished

with competition

on the branch


drop,

one by one


into the water


to see what buoyancy is.

Platonic Fridge

You get so wise

talking to the plant

about the grilled cheese sandwich

you are making

in the middle of the night

all about guilt.

Cheese.

You think your thoughts

are mostly stolen

animal products too.

The moon in the window

is also a thief.

All light feels stolen,

if light is property

which seems a sacred idea

about shoplifting

the divine.

The moon in the night

like a yearbook in your mind

quietly assaults you.

You turn the sandwich

as a lover turns

a lover in a drawing

you can’t stop tasting

before you actually taste

yourself forbidding yourself.

Before you are the moon,

its shoddy accounting

and what it did with light

for billions of years

that it can’t explain

or won’t in this court

because it doesn’t even understand

it is a dark body

with accountability

to other darkness.

Ren Hang

The guardian said No
You cannot eat the creator body
It is dead and on the highway
It died of fever
It pullulates in the night sky with stars
You cannot see astral bodies do that swarm
But they do
Right under the highway of your eyes
As the boiling blood of the animal
Cools down at last
Becomes temperature of a morning green leaf
An hour     a soft bending green sword
But waits to flare in another
Rash enough to insert a tongue
Keep your mouth      the torture clear
Or it will turn leathern
As this angel's        the one still punting
With something   a mockery of desire
A disease
And I look at the supine creature
It made me hungry    I locked
My lips      held tiny stars
I cleared the barter up

Atlantic City Postcard

The stars are stranded over the highs.
Someone tied a mylar balloon to a cactus.
It dances like the eighties.
The green is dead,

but the green is not immured.
The bride is alive, skipping.
Animals pee on your skull.
I pee on your skull.

His mother thinks he is still "dang handsome."

In Las Vegas a bit too long.

He asked me what I thought.

All I could say: "piggishly smooth."

"You have a nice chin."

Add

There is too much ego in this painting
Add in bits of straw
broken bits of other things
that radiance has become
dog’s teeth
lost ball
the field where no one walks
windswept and alive, unsecret
but unknown
add wheat that is food
food which be darkness
darkness which is home
home a dream

For the Image-Makers

The stains on a wall
I mean the photographs come to mean so much
The fractions of being
An arm cut off……….but not a head
You understand the distinction
Don’t you, painter of the mind of algae
You green fraction of being you

The fly’s armor
Admittedly soft and ridiculous
Nevertheless is a sort of ecstasy
You can’t hold back
The stains on a wall might actually be edible
If you are a fly

If you are a half-lost photograph

On Photography

I can’t explain why a photo isn’t a plot.

Because it is true and untrue.

Except that it is also a wheel.

It is the wheel of plots. Platelets spinning.

How is an image inside (us) different?

It cannot lie as effectively.

It must cast (mere) starry nets of words.

Here, crumble this clod of dirt:

Inside earth is more earth.

Inside a fist are many more fists, tinier ones.

The children of fists are fists.

The earth can’t be bothered being a fist.

Except that it is also a wheel.

I have deliberately misplaced my syllogism (my soilogism, my solilogism)

the way a man deliberately misplaces his lover

to lose him or her.

I can’t explain why a photo isn’t a plot.

Because it is.

The cast of a photo is illimitable.

You will never list all the players, dramatis personae.

That stark chair is a person.

That pleading window.

That river, surgeless, carrying away a flowering branch.

It is hopelessness I seek in photography.

The hopelessness of understanding.

And the conviction of being.

Cat

A cat listens to strong winds from inside a cave.

It has never known human hands.

The sun is setting outside of any screens.

The animal feels a sort of contentedness.

(The prey has been consumed.)

Sky is a conflagration and knows nothing.

Cat faces conflagration and knows.

(The face is a sort of conflagration.)

This knowing is a way of being.

Inhuman, as humans are inhuman.

Time is permutations and nothing more.

But there must be a matrix.

The cave serves the cat as a sort of second self.

There are extensions of mind, which is place.

No one in Europe has invented a door yet.

This is the closest thing to a door.

I mean this poem, this cipher.