Uncategorized

In my heart the old love
Struggled with the new,
It was ghostly waking
All night through.

Dear things, kind things
That my old love said,
Ranged themselves reproachfully
Round my bed.

In a culvert by the airport
under crumbling slag
wine colored water seeps
to this pool the two does
drink from: each sipping as
the other keeps look out.
The skyline is a blur
of  barcode and microchip.
Even at home we hold
the narrowest purchase.
No arcs of tracer fire.
No caravans of fleeing
families. Only this
suspicion ripples
through our circles of lamp glow
(as you sweep the faint sweat
from your forehead and flip
another page in your novel)

they move in swift on the Swift
Plants in six states & sift
through the faces to separate
the dark from the light

like meat & seat them in
the back of vans packed tight
like the product they pack
& who's to pick up the slack

the black & white can't cut it
so the beef stacks sell single
to feed the pack the flock
who block passages & clog

Things are not
unmoving (or else what

is ing there for?)
The things once-living

fall on the never-living
all the more movingly for the eye

that passes over them.
The wind wells up

to spill a trail
of onces off the nevers,

take opaque from eye
to mind, or near it —

every rocking takes some leaving
to a stonish spirit.

O fluent one, o muscle full of hydrogen,
o stuff of grief, whom the Greeks
accuse of spoiling souls,

whose destiny is downward,
whose reflecting's up — I think
I must have come from you.

Just one more cup.

habit smacks
its dull skull
like a stuck bull
in a brick stall

and my version
of what I know
is like eye surgery
with a backhoe

on grace
so much beyond
my pitiful gray
sponge of a brain

I'd not believe it exists
except for such
doses of felicity
as this.

It is always the same:
she is standing over me

in the forest clearing,
a dab of blood on her cheek

from a rabbit or a deer.
I am aware of nothing

but my mutinous flesh,
and the traps of desire

sent to test it —
her bare arms, bare

shoulders, her loosened hair,
the hard, high breasts,

and under a belt
of knives and fish-lures,

her undressed wound.
Every night the same:

the slashed fetlock,
the buckling under;

I wake in her body
broken, like a gun.

And fleetingly it seemed to him
That in between one eye blink and the next
Time paused, allowing time to be installed
Within that countless interim,
Coiled up, on hold,
A memory predicted and recalled.
Now, that weak muscle flexed,
All that contained him started to unfold

Torn turned and tattered
Bowed burned and battered
I took untensed time by the teeth
And bade it bear me banking
Out over the walled welter
cities and the sea
Through the lightsmocked birdpocked cloudcocked sky
To leave me light on a lilting planetesimal.

You bring a stalk of bamboo
to the flu room.
Hot pink Buddha offers
some bullet-like pills from his plastic
fingers. Oh high above the pecan
tree, my dead grandfather
walks Basil and Maestro, our two
standard poodles. One’ s beard is oily
from the wheel
of brie he’ s stolen from
the kitchen counter.