Trouble Deaf Heaven
Is there a sound? There is a forest.
What is the world? The word is wilderness.
What is the answer? The answer is the world.
What is the beginning? A beginning is happiness.
What is the end? No one lives there now.
What is a beginning? The beginning is light.
What makes happiness? Nothing.
What makes an ending? What does not.
What is her skin? Her skin is composed of strange clothing and clouds of butterflies,
of events and odors, of the rose fingers of dawn, transparent suns of full
trouble with spain
I got in the shower
and burned my balls
last Wednesday.
met this painter called Spain,
no, he was a cartoonist,
well, I met him at a party
and everybody got mad at me
because I didn’ t know who he was
or what he did.
True Love
Off rows of windshields
in the Amtrak lot
rain in sudden
clumps like jacks. Parked cars
with people in them
awaiting people they imagine
hurtling through suburbs
of silver woods
awaiting them. True
love needs interference,
a certain blizzard distance,
for the words to worm through.
Remember Iowa?
August storms that would self-spark
as if our fights could trip
the finest wire beneath the sidewalk.
And the sunlight, harder after.
Turkey Buzzards
They've been so long above it all,
those two petals
so steeped in style they seem to stall
in the kettle
simmering over the town dump
or, better still,
the neon-flashed, X-rated rump
of fresh roadkill
courtesy of the interstate
that Eisenhower
would overtake in the home straight
by one horsepower,
the kettle where it all boils down
to the thick scent
of death, a scent of such renown
it's given vent
Turkey Fallen Dead from Tree
Startled from snow-day slumber by a neighbor’ s mutt,
it banged its buzzard’ s head then couldn’ t solve
the problem of the white pine’ s limbs
with wings nearly too broad for a planned descent.
Somewhere an awkward angel knows
whether it was dead before it hit the ground.
Any sinner could tell it was dead after —
eyes unseen beneath bare and wrinkled lids,
feet drawn up almost as high as hands.
I loved to watch thistle and millet
disappear beneath it in the yard.
As snow covers feathers that will still be
Twelfth Song of Thunder [Navajo Tradition]
The voice that beautifies the land!
The voice above,
The voice of thunder
Within the dark cloud
Again and again it sounds,
The voice that beautifies the land.
The voice that beautifies the land!
The voice below,
The voice of the grasshopper
Among the plants
Again and again it sounds,
The voice that beautifies the land.
Twenty Five Haiku
❖
A hundred red fire ants scouring, scouring the white peony
❖
Fallen plum blossoms return to the branch, you sleep, then
harden again
❖
Cuttlefish in my palm stiffens with rigor mortis, boy toys can't
love
❖
Neighbor's barn: grass mat, crickets, Blue Boy, trowel handle,
dress soaked in mud
❖
Iron-headed mace; double-studded halberd slice into emptiness
❖
Twenty-third
And at the picnic table under the ancient elms,
one of my parents turned to me and said:
“We hope you end up here,”
where the shade relieves the light, where we sit
in some beneficence — and I felt the shape of the finite
after my ether life: the ratio, in all dappling,
of dark to bright; and yet how brief my stay would be
under the trees, because the voice I’ d heard
could not cradle me, could no longer keep me
in greenery; and I would have to say good-bye
again, make my way across the white
Twinkle, twinkle little star
Twinkle, twinkle little star,
How I wonder what you are.
Up above the world so high,
Like a diamond in the sky.
Twinkle, twinkle little star,
How I wonder what you are.
Twinkle, twinkle little star,
How I wonder what you are.
Up above the world so high,
Like a diamond in the sky.
Twinkle, twinkle little star,
How I wonder what you are.