Sunshine No. 4

On the balcony is a building's worth
of aluminum framed marketing posters,
thick black plastic shadow boxes, litho printed
relief presses, signed and numbered horrors
of fading cerise and green interiors, and food photos.

From the two walls in my office
I swap out pictures dozens of times daily,
swinging the flats by their wires
across the floor and back out the door.
One landscape is titled "Sunshine No. 4,"
so I ransacked the bins
for numbers one to three, for five and higher.

My dealing in indecision and similarity
and the genuine in this graphic glut
makes the contra-temps of late 1930's typeface
and early 1990's color separation
look like a deck of reason and intuition.

An abandoned artless reprint of some vague Degas
is less an opinion than a point of view:
I can tell you of sheep in a fold, in silk screen
figuratively far off, and hold that perspective
until a flush of wood duck lights among
the dependent and implicate worlds.

Awakened Falling

This effortless mind retrieves creaky and warped planks under foot,
and hears a scary snap in the ropes slung over Connetquot River.

Wanting to see summer trees on two banks, dipped and dried,
we could step across on the exposed stones,

but we aspire to swindle and loot a beauty preferable to its promise,
where even silvered, weak and wind-worn timbers are venerable;

and if, in flight from whipping bridge to wet gravel,
we entertain regrets, we lunge yet aware into cracking.

Screeched pleas to the far forest must happen often
between the clouded blue sky and everything else,

like so many formless songs sung to scare the Buddha away
from haunting a home we suppose to be there, mid-air.