In 100 Poems on
29 August 2008 with no comments
The black bird assembles out of achromatics
where the green tiger meets lumbering blood
bears on a livid road under moon,
that mounted stone, buoyant as hunger.
Whale eyes wink out the stars,
briefly, and the sea floors rise like
things that expel breath and cloud.
What about him, the bear, red as stalemate?
See children miles back following and a man watching
from the light-grazed hill as a woman draws
with berry-red ink just—foul—bright—worlds
on the river’s friable beach the color of bone
writes them all.
The women will meet in the valleys hauling
countries by ropes. Those heavy places
where humans pretend to die.
The drag marks
they make are wide, white, and deep.
The sun remakes itself in windows.
They kissed under trees and shared iPod
buds as water rushed in from the edge
of the world, the birds calling
with the strain of distant trains in the desert
where all that matters is liquid splashing
out of stone
and the tiniest seed tumbles
out of the dark like
the last word of a poem
the last slash of a brush
landing on white dead center.
In 100 Poems on
28 August 2008 with no comments
When they are not presence, out
leaping stone to stone, we miss
their artifacts. A gum wrapper, a cut nail,
bunnies of dust.
An ad means they were there,
thought about going, thought about
returning, worried about dark in the parking lot.
A crumpled sock in a corner
is an old frustration that speaks of weariness,
brake pedals, a whimper over a twisted
ankle, or the fit of a new shoe,
when such things mattered,
like the lives of fish.
Promises. We will go (we went), we will do
(we did), we shall make plans and plans
and make and make
as the river makes its directions,
rushes, bends its grass,
and follow through until the next are made
and there are more socks to be tossed,
more rivers to fill,
more smiles when we enter the room,
and the soap in the tray will once more
drip with promises made and kept.
A trivial note will mean something other.
New, it might have closed, soon
forgotten moments after scribing;
old, it opens onto crickets, a fresh breeze,
that same river the color of frogs;
it remakes a thought, an idea, unassuming,
unknown so that all notes or gum
wrappers hide the thorns of a rose.
Unwashed door knobs are a clock of the years passing.
The songs you once heard bend around the walls.
Our job may be to listen for meaning
before meaning,
to learn today
as the unfolding of a wrinkled scribble
crushed at the bottom of a drawer,
that everything lost waits for its finding,
everything come morning time,
a thing found.
In 100 Poems on
27 August 2008 with no comments
Winter politics–
a drowning man reaching high
for the sun through dashing crows
In 100 Poems on
25 August 2008 with no comments
A cloud of crows
crosses the sun,
so like sagacious nails
dragged on a window screen
with casual passing.
In fits,
Summer rushes
with the sound of wings,
heats us
for the silences of winter
tinted blue and coming hard
on the browning leaves.
People watch them
in the water glass,
a shadow
of crows
makes the sun
matter all the more
when the air turns
quiet, like a heavy door closed
and locked.
The wind bends
a blade and another
and then another bends
at their shoes
with another wind
and they yearn for the return
of the crows
and what can be seen
and smelled
so near the sun.
In 100 Poems on
24 August 2008 with no comments
In fantasy land they eat melodrama
like pudding and have eyes the size
of coffee cups. On a corner, men carve
faces from meat loaf and the citizens
dream of frogs and hunger.
Underground air drifts. It meets the grates
out and divides into fifths and bleeds along
the edges. The smoke’s white and the wind chimes
click to the passing of the planets, instigating
dance and wantonness. Sometimes I long
to tear my heart out.
In the green, people have stopped to watch
honey ants hump a butterfly to a hole as big
as a tire wheel. The wings scatter among
disregarded papers, blueprints of a neighbor’s
home, maps of lands fled from forever.
Spent tickets plug the chain links of a small square
where sweet bones have been ground for fertilizer
and buried with seedlings. Already,
you can hear them speak in short syllabics,
yearn for the edges of plateaus.
They’re soon to bloom into the imaginings of the mad.
In 100 Poems on
24 August 2008 with no comments
a man will pick
bones up by the river bank
and call it fish
benighting
his knowing
to the water with a smile
and tip of a cap
fooled to the last
as the stars
cut the sky into
universe
or butter
see that glass one
shatter into
green, purple, crafty,
that complication of phlox
into which the artifact
has passed,
here’s to dead men
and the bones of fish
In 100 Poems on
22 August 2008 with no comments
I don’t know if it’s
a sun I see through
gaps in the summer
leaves or crows chasing
their tail feathers
or a moon rising
into autumn.
This is how life passes
with a play of shapes
and the mild fingers of the seasons
touching and leaving their
prints on the hillsides
where I watch the sun or the moon
through the summer leaves,
bearing love and color through the years.
In 100 Poems on
21 August 2008 with no comments
The surface of the sea becomes
red feathers on the steady back
and forth of the bear fired by the sun
as he stops on the sand, says,
why stop there?
Dip your finger again and draw my loves,
my children, my futures,
my shadow in a lamp,
horses playing on confetti, cats
ambulating into orange rabbits
among fruit pickings. Stop not.
Draw swift as tigers striking
the sun green with their lime-colored calls.
They remind me of something I found
under a stone big as a grave:
a smiling jaw, eyes that smelled
of coriander and peach
and an echo that moved
the sand to glass.
In 100 Poems on
20 August 2008 with no comments
When out of mangos come parsley,
cilantro, coral and craft,
we know everything is some time seed.
Ants march in line
from a dark washout in the sky
and the frog elopes with her mate
to a dark corner of the village.
It reminds me of the rich taste
of laughing with fruit half chewed
in the mouth, nakedness in the wilds,
ducks appearing
from a place on the water
where sword lights cluster
and break and become pink
under the dermis of vegetables.
The ducks make circles there,
collect their gems and fly.
With us at the edge,
pointing, reaching,
glad for undertow, glad for air.
In 100 Poems on
19 August 2008 with no comments
In Chihuahua I saw a dog with yellow ribs
and a face like a broken shovel.
South, I saw her again, in an alley
where children buried stones. I told my friend
the dog’s following, daily, like an unfilled
hole. He said it’s not the same dog just some
everywhere dog with yellow ribs and a howl
like dandelions crowding the wild foot hills
under rain and hail and microbursts that tear
the trees into shadow. I said, it’s the same dog
following and nothing he said will change
me because I can’t admit that those sounds
marking the hills might be armies, storms,
the stripes of a tiger on the hull of a dog.
In 100 Poems on
19 August 2008 with no comments
We will grow hard too
like those ruins birds use
to stand and watch the sand creep
yearly
close the sky out
use the stones to write
gifts in deeps where sounds
and colors huddle like seeds,
molecules, feather flocks,
then burst like a thousand
joys or paint strokes
from the ruins
daily
In 100 Poems on
17 August 2008 with no comments
In the river glass he sees war go by
in colors flat as paint chips, the moon
hanging dry and eyeball white
between two black branch cracks
so serene as to call up memories
of bodies hanging at the walls by bullet holes.
After come faces that smile then glower
at the stars, roll away and call deep
to the sleeping stones. Bone chips,
then, turning with the steady current
like compass needles. Igneous cities, human
elbows treated with scrapes nudging
the twinking light into the shapes of sea green fish.
Obsession like ribbons of yesterday
when he beat his head against a wall
come with the sound of distant booms
that shake the falling leaves in their cups of silver air.
Such lavish depth in the quiet glass, such acidity
in the glitter, bright with organic sludge.
He senses a drift in the continents, some offset
to the geometry of galaxies and their modest tug
on the blood behind his eyes and the water
where a finger’s traced a multitude of lives
ascending on the canvass. He raises a hand,
salutes the vines, and descends to his eyes into the cold.
In 100 Poems on
16 August 2008 with no comments
I saw a child struck by a car one day
in the face, a small plastic toy on the beach:
the child and the car.
Borders broke that day
and war persists
for little more than fictions, futures, old
neglects on the river shores where poems
once played between pink and blue stone,
laboring like fish in the mouths of alligators
or shielding their faces from sprays
of metal breaking from the clouds.
Where two people meet, two ghosts
with quarks in their pockets and sand
cutting their gums, albatross hushing
under the opal clouds. They dash
for shelter
at cliffs where rooks eye the mustard
smoke like nomads, their croaks
echoing high and long and wide as the sky.
We’ve all carved figures in cracked
bone, loosed hot red monsters into the beds
of little ones who wonder into what
dark room their parents have passed.
We should be that more often, that small
eruption of heart beat
in the eye when we learn
they’ll never come home,
knowing from then on what
the rook meant under the sky,
under the sea.
In 100 Poems on
15 August 2008 with no comments
I lived in a small hole for a week.
When I came forth a brown bird
gave me a seed and clung to my finger
with nails like kitten claws.
That day I saw every autumn leaf
on the taper of an oak.
In 100 Poems on
14 August 2008 with no comments
One day I saw hosts of sparrows drop
from a purple sky, went with that story,
down alleys where cats lined
cans for children to knock down
late nights when the summer months
burned and the light turned the mountain
into a long orange storm.
Walk the sidewalks when the city’s quiet.
Chili and bread drift from the screened windows
that smell of rust. A cat laughs and falls
into the dark and the wind makes mulberries
and elms speak the hollow friction
of distance, cars busy at midnight on the highway,
trains clanging in the downtown yards.
It’s hard to see the stars through the steam
that rises from the hot floors and the Spanish
on the porches sounds like singing.
Over the roof tops the children watch the sky
turn purple and the sparrows drop like rain.
