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.

Four Celsius

Bole-mate of gray rabbits,
red maple root fretter:
under the ground runs Jack o' the Green.
He told me the tips of twigs
and whistled me a steam air
over frozen dark moss.

He danced a single jig of snow
letting go, a treble jig for ice flow.
I huddled and huffed blue belief,
I hunkered yes, shuddered
and shivered please, Jack,
scuttle frost, smuggle me Spring.

People are Most Like Mountains

under construction

KERNING

On a furling bolt of vapor
In light draped on the river ,
we fall in love from elsewhere,
and fit our alabaster shells together.

Now with power over human bodies
we curl away from youth like cooling ferns.

The green hills are farther run,
the leaves more crisply done.
They fly to us, our fingers
interlace under an unending sun.

A Sublunary Picatrix

I am facturing a bird of fortune,
trying to find significance in geese.
They bray meaning to the trees,
and if I am waiting or worried,
thinking about food, listening to children,
I make a mental note,
but the goose-sign so far seems to be encrypted.

Over the Hudson River a white crane
imitates a gull. I mistake the crane
anyway for the cow egret, who, African,
crossed the Fernando de Noronha Plain
to Brazil and bred north, a bird determined.

I should mention how I surprised
a Great Blue Heron at Tiana Bay.
There was an inhuman eye, fully round,
fakily set like that in a blond teddy bear.
Struck clear gold and unthinking, an eye
like a sword-straight beak, like backward knees.

So my folklore follows from
my caprice: when the killdeer screeches
I reverse course; whistle with the thrush
to freely pass him on the street;
gesture minutely to the redtail hawk
so the mice get a head start.

Seeing one crane means there is one crane.
Seeing a heron means I am impossible.

Piety

he eats black
peppercorns
as a rule

promising
a garlic
aspirin

tongue of fire
his body
can abide

SELF PORTRAIT WITH CIPHER

Listening to strings
Maybe not holding too tightly to things,
I’ve watched lots of sweaty bottles slip,
Endlessly, to the tile; hit;
And jump up shattered.

I’ve got fillings loose in eight bowls,
Three or four kinds of oil,
Four or five vinegars
In event of salad.
I’ve got spoon-shaped Minnie Mouse eyes
And plates for hands.

My fingers are clock and calendar,
My bed, a board with two pillows.
The door bangs in my ringing ears
And the cake-tin wind chimes chime.

There’s the stick and staff I spin
While staring at the smoke detector;
Candles and a transistor radio
For emergencies –

I’ve got a slinky
And a Superball for my set of jacks
And a styrofoam cooler
To keep these objects:
My face and head,
A compass and a vacuum.

Three Sisters

Change overcame me in the Cascade Range.
The McKenzie-Bend Highway runs west from Deschutes,
along Three Sisters,
into the Santiam shadow of Three Fingered Jack,
and the glacier lying like a coin in his palm.

I drove all day under the eyes of that family
as they held up the sky,
swerving past a chattered and volcanic shoulder

and phoning in from some
wayside wide spot to ask the way,
likely way late getting to a party,
just to sleep on the floor,
worn, story-filled, travel-famished.

When my sister died
it was like a minaret had fallen,
like one of the pillars that hold up heaven had fallen.

Heaven didn’t fall,
but the slopes and peaks are more delicate,
as though one must walk barefoot across
the great floor of the earth,
under a ceiling that seems at times to tip.

Teardrop Pool on South Sister
fills with spring snowmelt.
When called to pray,
I turn to the center of the world.

Volo Volo

My separation from heaven is false,
vertiginous and beautiful,

even as clouds pass the moon,
moon passes the stars.

Dawn is damn miserable until
the crows begin feeding in the street.

They are here to bow and scrape
their dead for food and normalcy,

as if wished iridescent into life,
into the mist that is melting snow.

I'd forgotten the dragons of winter
that lay drowsing in the ice-laced vales.

This damply sharp morning,
when the birds and I

slow down under the sky,
festival dragons ascend through us.

Finding the Footprints of Harm

One

What anyone may call a good walk waits,
a last bit of measuring I take today.

Like breaths in a temper, or sheep to sleep, I’ve counted
steps from the click of the house door, down the slate stairs.

My time passes in how used the toys are:
The yellow plastic trike with the push handle

is freshly discarded, outgrown. When the children are young,
one day has twenty smiles, or thirty.

And when their suits stretched, too small, we said they were
eighteen months, because they had no years.

It seemed forever before their feet held them.

I can not tell how long
I have tried remembering when the small things changed.

Yesterday, you fell only twice. You said, “God!”
You said, “no, no, no,” and I am still surprised.

You said, “I am too young to feel this old!
What did I do in my last life that left me like this?”

And I have no idea what is going on, I have used
up all of my schooling, and now put my imagination into

stamina. We are outside the city limits, and I am lost.


Two

There is self-examination, interrogatory
contradiction in harming to stop harm.
Sera, re-breaks, traction, chemotherapy, torture.

And you would spread open your own breastbone
Looking for a warm heart that is completely unknowable,
(the adversary is alive in God’s stead.)

Slink with the alien abductor, (to know what they know.)
Fly on the Sabbath night (to see! to see!)
Find yourself in the gray bridal gown, stalking a misunderstood prisoner.

There is no charm, there grows no bane for the unnamed harmer.
The witch and the werewolf are called out of their night’s sleep
to fight for the crops, and the side of right, in Jesus’ army.

Just so, chronic pain is a molester during rest.
A woman may take canis lupus as a totem into her hands,
even as grip gives way in neurological deterioration:

The terror is living by choice.
Forcing a twisted limb into your chest should look like
transcendent reclusion, but it is merely how angels are modeled into statues.


Three

Rain continues to fall and I am
ashamed of my naiveté.

Let me give you the dead of winter:
ice sadly parts for the cold rain,
that later impishly freezes and grips.

Attend the blackbirds,
we can ignore them no longer.

See the wing print they leave
Sweeping into the garden--
angels of death without season.

Pitiless as the morning star, blackbirds
are the only living thing in the stiff January skies.

Eating the old seeds, huddled under gusts,
They bark at dawn, skim low and
dawdle in the road.

The rain stops.
The blackbirds go on.


Coda

About things we make together:
children, opinions, a peaceful view
of falling birches beyond the patio door;

More often, I am agreeing with the dog.
When you are away, he waits by the door,
and howls his reprimand when you come home.

Come home. Even if it is to retrieve
a thing forgotten --
When you go, return.

ACCLIMATIZED

You have been after that banana for days,
had junky food up to your eyes,
had some bad water in seventy-five,
dysentery, too.

They start so green, the plantain,
so spider-rich and rigid, they are
dismissible in the contusing dawn
of straw, black, blue, goose and salmon
berries.

So at noon, soup.

Later comes thunder in the snow storm,
you step out of the kitchen,
down the stairs, into the garden, to see.
But the sound is gone, the night holds all
that is gone: somewhere in the snow
lie lavender and rose.

Back in the kitchen, rooting through
the cabinets, for flour and baking soda, salt
all pouring white into the bowls,
you can only peel and mash the banana now.
For bread, and a warm oven.

to Business

From the time I recognized
the road to Taso-chi,
I realized I had nothing to do
with birth and death.
-The Song of Enlightenment


These desk descriptions, I say,
I will read on the train,
Everyone I see is reading this morning --

a marketing report, the mix of newspapers.
Across from me a bald man is translating
the Italian sheets across his briefcase
with a red mechanical pencil.

Surprised, I read the upside down headings,
“Caso di incestes,” and “Fornicazione,”
while he stares into the dance of grammar and tense.
I can watch his translation pass across his face
Into the pencil notes, the margins of his work.

Whispering a curse, he digs into the dictionary
And checks me with a guilty glance.
This is no business for me.
I will read on the train --

here is a silk sleeve
with a simple spade leaf imprint design,
rose on rose.
here is a train trestle
grey against the rising Wednesday smoke
and the working sun.

SPARROW FALL II

I can’t seem to put my talon on it:
The deep, darkroom depressions,
whiskey-soaked breakups,
all seem to be part of an ascent.

Mosquitos could drain me for hours
and I would stand up and walk the blood
back into my legs. Maybe it was cold,
maybe summer, and the road dogs chased.

They will tell you I was morose in those
aeries, that I flitted fitfully in puddles:
Stories we can agree on, like we were walking
in a graveyard, or we were at the shore.

When I came crashing out of that heaven,
there were no clouds left, shredded stars
lit my aura, the world was in other peoples’ eyes.

I am no longer a gargoyle, and that
is what is startling. Not alone
in the low cielo. Where I fell there was
a book to read, a chair, and my stars,
grace.

Monstrum after Prometheus

Where were you when the blacksmith struck?
Smuggling across the Great Smokies,
or the Sudan, with the cows so sad and dry.
Well, everyone took your story for their own,
Nestle, and Kennedy, and choristers
from Coptic novels:
The Titan asked the God for favor,
and was punished for defiance.

That we were shackled, not by our actions,
but by our enzymatic presence:
I shoveled the snow, my neighbor held
the screen door open, fed my dog,
and I watched the kids –
that was the twist. Living in the same building,
we pulled each other into a gut-wrenching future.

We know you lied, having now the tools to tell.
With the quantum well lasers in our toys,
And the world wide walkie-talkie in our hands,
The end repeats again:
Tail feathers light on the gargantuan sea.

Flight and the Wine Dark Sea

“Gravity is our future.”
- Michael Douglas

The picture you have seen is set in marble on a parapet. We are in profile,
etched in motion, my arms outstretched, his flailing.
It looks, for all the ages, like I have pushed him over the edge.

I work in stone and wax; reed and thatch; I mound moss and help the herms rise.
There is no trick with twine escapes my eyes, my fingers figure knots,
plot the plait of tangles in the finest hair. I am a crafter.
And as if that were a crime, the gods keep me as a pet.
I can not create. I build or form, mold and make, but I am not free.

There are no gods that live by pattern long.
There is Protocol, the god of social norms,
whose minions are timing, polity, spelling and grammar.
There is Sanitation, the god of the anti-bacterial whose song is the squeak.
They are invisible and difficult to relay to a child.
How big a bite is too big? Are your hands really clean?

Or explain how Harmonics uses Wagner:
let the slow tripping of the pizzicato bring you to a glen’s edge where sun beams
among prickly leaves sawing in the breeze too easily. How can a brass horn
sustain and abate a major chord to trick me into thinking I have laid down my head?

A god can grind psychically to a halt
and command the Minotaur to tell us there is no escape,
not in the way we watched our giddy children held by spinning in place.
Nor is there captivity, as the boundless bell of the sky rings fiercely down,
and one is pinned.

Listen to me son - Daedelus pushes, over and over. He is precipitous or possessive,
panicked or simply potent. Some say that on another tower he killed the partridge Perdix.
The boy always falls to earth, taught by a goddess to fly, or caught by men like Bruegal.

Find me in these divine constructs, unable to stop solving mazes and puzzles,
in the webs and strings I weave into ravenous wings, prepared for you to leave.

lasing eye iris
was found running in the lane
ruddy rose robe rent
from the barbed wire. couldn't you
see tears from your most high horse?

horse hair pocket liner:
the souls of these cat-killed mice
must be made to repent.

for Epimetheus

To a God, what’s potential is most alive.
Re-forming, re-writing scripture,
the possible and the probable writhing
dragon and tiger in the high temples.
That valley of ten-thousand things is alive,
real and so dissolute.

When the treeline finally collapses,
and your idylls expire,
the last thing out of Pandora's pithos
will be the first thing entering a dead man's heart.

Just Hope’s gesture casts the world
in flecks of vermilion on the landscape.
Rodin leads out a bronze burgher’s chin
and in dim and sooty lamp light
we find "The Potato Eaters."

But you remember:
Sheltered in a copse of slowing heartbeats,
after the acrid escape of every ill into existence,
a stunned and foolish girl leaned in to look.