Interrupted by Perpetual Anger

The insects have passed insistence
and are verging on malicious.
What are the pupal drosophilae
gleaning in a week that they
chew me?

Summer sun spots compete
with sudden shrieks since
cicadas lost their calendar,
each hot June cloud
strewing thumb-sized carcasses,
thrummed hollow.

And the sleepy bumble bees,
now simply mindful missiles,
fill my calf muscle with a serum
sickening enough to ground me,
buffalo-like and lowing.

Cherries rot on the counter
and the dog collects ticks.
Two locust tree shadows
turn to cool the pool water.
What am I forgetting?

I Saw the Chameleon

From your suit I knew
you had been in rain,
even after days of travel.
The blue plastic vinyl and tweed
weave train seats left an imprint.
Your hair smelled of distinct
Atlantic cities. But that is past.

Now you lay out a change of clothes
for the week to come:
in yellow you will be hungry
and lean eagerly;
the grey and pink will hold
you on your heels for perspective;
then the red plaid and exhaustion.

With flung hat and feet prized
out of shoes, you'll sink
into a deep suite chair, hide there
until the higher shadows wheel off,
the Arizona sun sets and
messages pass you,
indistinguishable from your future.

Mahler nach tod

I am angry with Gustav
when, white as bible leaves,
we step into heaven, we eat,
and I see that was all he had planned.

"The Interpretation of Dreams" is still wet,
every panicked pickling
or bleeding beast of the mind
may be invited to pluck along the vined paths
or net fish with Peter, yet Mahler
trenches a paste-tasting oat meal
to sate the woad-faced young.

Freund Hein steps into the bone-colored
dawn, an E string plies just too taut,
wrong as a soprano shilling
a Schadow feast among saints,
long as furious life.

As it May Have Been for Ruth and Boaz

I walk past the house garden,
hear the songbird change keys.
Knowing you love me, I chuckle.

In your eyes, mine have time
to lose focus in the lawn's fall and rise
into spring green oak and maple.
Knowing you see me, I see perfectly.

Married today, this now becomes always,
and you and I
closer than the family that gave me,
closer than air against my breath.

And this is how I know forests
don't fight for sun, but delight
in each instant of tree become sapling,
life become life, your God my God.

Folk Songs

Huntington Bay is an incorporated village now,
a conglomerate of ballot-casting investors
who have never seen Camden,
never been to Brooklyn.

Where we eat our organ meats and root vegetables.
Some are family farmers, lone carpenters,
middle managers,
left to figure the lost folk dances.

The mechanic and deckhand are ancestors
we find a way to weave together,
draymen are truckers, the children are athletes,
the president - no one knows what the president is.

Staying with local tunes
when we go to a small potluck dinner,
there's a song we sing when your son or your mom
is in the hospital, a reel for the end of winter.
Few of us know a long waltz called "Moving the School."

We ask the children to learn the twisting leaps
needed for Main Street staying alive.
We look for those who aren't too busy
to sing with us "Keeping in Touch
with Those Who are Out of Town."

We'll show whoever else needs it
how to keep fruit fresh for the picnic,
or an old rendition of "Decent cup o' Joe,"
or how to get to the grocery in the snow.
These are the dances we know.

And at holiday parties
we laugh about the jet packs that we don't have,
and how computers are going to take our jobs
as post-bellum shoemakers or hatters.
We laugh as we sing and steer,
dance and wrench, sew, wash, stow and carry on,
each singing what belongs to everyone else.

On Grenades of Our Own Design

One: Them

There is no doubt when someone gets it right
in science like Brautigan or poetry like Koestler;

(and you see what I did there:
I swapped them in the manner
of the stand up comic, for effect,
because I've read the esoterica
that says this is how the brain works,
and I believe it).

These molders of outrage claymation knead
little knobs of words into a fast blurring smear,
solving the algebra of panic and repose
and dying by choice before us.

Two: Us

Even for a bedroom community
there were way too many bedrooms.
We had the crappy broom, we had the good broom,
we had a vacuum and a carpet sweeper
but we couldn't keep up with the hair

slowly woven around the edge of the apartment.

The cat was crying,
so we had to do something.
We moved the cat to a cardboard box,
then we moved the cat and the box closer to the door.
And the alarm clock freaked out anyway,
twice, for each of our mornings.

The cat was dying, and we flew apart like lucky birds.

Years later, one red and white rambling ranch
looks like another in St James' streets
and I couldn't get to that place
if you clipped me, caged and carried me.

Three: Me

I am racing to the traffic light
because I'm a list maker,
and that is what's next.
I might turn right at the red light,
it's my right to turn right at the red light.

I am fleeing chimp-like into meetings,
in tight shoes and itchy wool pants,
carrying rule books and building
a pinched consensus among the wood-like
tables and cooperative folding chairs.

I am in a twisted firing squad.
Some of our heads shoot blanks,
blameless as a new phone.
We're a rain of exploded social beasts
falling back on grenades of our own design.

DRUM RUDIMENTS

During a lecture at
Brookhaven National Laboratory
I heard faint, high-pitched tones
At various times among the audience.
The subject of the lecture was
Mathematics in Bach’s music.

There are watches that can
Constantly correct themselves,
Connected by beacon to an atomic clock:
One time.

My brain divines cycles.
My brain
Is looking for a good time.

At Cornell University’s
National Nanofabrication Facility
There’s a strained quantum well laser
Turning on and off
28 billion times every second.
The intended use is telephone calls,
Promoting a sort of
Quick digi-speak.

“Hello,” you say,
to make your voice clear.
You might say, “I can’t make it,”
Your voice clear.

My brain is looking
For a good time.

I drove across the country
And I was three hours younger.
I stopped
At that third time-zone sign
And measured: it looked, in passing,
Like a one-sixteenth-inch thick
Metal timelessness.

I’m five minutes late for work
Five days a week.
At 2:05, I walk 500 feet
To catch a bus that’s two miles away
At 2:11, ride for about ten minutes
And walk maybe 500 yards from the bus stop.
Late, everyday, regular as…

I can walk about four miles an hour.
Blood flows through my jugular
At about 200 miles an hour,
I was born at six in the morning
And then I got older.

My brain divines cycles:

Trim my moustache;
Clip fingernails;
Wait one-hundred forty-four
Seconds for water to boil
For tea;
I have today off from work.

My brain is looking for a good time.

foolishness haiku

marooned and bedless
after the broken roof room -
fwoomph goes the bed spread

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.