Nature

Words torn, unseen, unseemly, scene
some far suburb’ s mall lot
Summer’ s theme: this year’ s humid
— to sweat is to know —
pen squeezed too tight yields
ink as blood or pus
so the phrase scraped, removed
offending thine eye: “Outsource Bush”
Against which, insource what? Who
will do it? Most terrible
predicate — high above mountains snow-capped
even in August in-flight motion
picture Eternal Sunshine of the
Spotless Mind infuriates many No
action, no funny, plot too

When we finally flip it over
the fireflies are out. The neighbor boy
has had his stitches in so I can finally admit
I think it is all fantastic: the suck
of the spark plug undone, the stuck blade
bent into the guard, and the sound
of the hammer’ s head reshaping the metal.
In this our suburban Eden we’ ve only

After there were no women, men, and children,

from the somber deeps horseshoe crabs crawled up on somber shores:

Man-of-Wars' blue sails drifted downwind

and blue filaments of some biblical cloak

floated below: the stinging filaments.

The cored of bone and rock-headed came near:

clouds made wandering shadows:

sea and grasses mingled::

There was no hell after all

but a lull before it began over::

flesh lying alone: then mating: a little spray of soul:

and the grace of waves, of stars, and remotest isles.

Although a tide turns in the trees
the moon doesn't turn the leaves,
though chimneys smoke and blue concedes
to bluer home-time dark.

Though restless leaves submerge the park
in yellow shallows, ankle-deep,
and through each tree the moon shows, halved
or quartered or complete,

Osseous, aqueous, cardiac, hepatic —
back from bone the echoes stroke, back
from the halved heart, the lungs
three years of weightlessness have cinched to gills.
From a leather chaise, the astronaut's withered legs
dangle, as back they come, sounds
a beaked percussion hammer startles into shape.
The physician cocks his head and taps — exactly
as a splitter halves his slate, the metamorphic rock
chisel-shocked, then shocked again, halved

How many miles to the border
where all the sky there is
exists for the soul alone?

Where the only breathers
breathing are constructed
from some new electricity
and the flowers are made
indestructible, and messages
from the dead arrive like calm
white birds with a gift?

One more night of spiritual
ice and we might all become
birds, green birds frozen
on a black winter branch.

There is a drumming in the shadows
under leaves: a million eight-eyed
spiders on the march.

A man with binoculars
fixed a shape in the field
and we stopped and saw

the albino buck browsing
in the oats — white dash
on a page of green,

flick of a blade
cutting paint to canvas.
It dipped its head

It was when they determined that I had been born dead
That my life became easier to understand. For a long time,
I wondered why rooms felt colder when I entered them,
Why nothing I said seemed to stick in anyone’ s ear,
Frankly, why I never had any money. I wondered
Why the cities I walked through drifted into cloud
Even as I admired their architecture, as I pointed out
The cornerstones marked “1820,” “1950.” The only songs
I ever loved were filled with scratch, dispatches from
A time when dead ones like me were a dime a dozen.

The shadows have their seasons, too.
The feathery web the budding maples
cast down upon the sullen lawn

bears but a faint relation to
high summer's umbrageous weight
and tunnellike continuum—

black leached from green, deep pools
wherein a globe of gnats revolves
as airy as an astrolabe.

The thinning shade of autumn is
an inherited Oriental,
red worn to pink, nap worn to thread.

Shadows on snow look blue. The skier,
exultant at the summit, sees his poles
elongate toward the valley: thus

In every life there’ s a moment or two
when the self disappears, the cruel wound
takes over, and then again
at times we are filled with sky
or with birds or
simply with the sugary tea on the table
said the old woman

I know what you mean said the tulip
about epiphanies
for instance a cloudless April sky
the approach of a butterfly
but as to the disappearing self
no
I have not yet experienced that