1. I heard a brave stone’s tale. A lonely way from home it found the sun lighting the edges of stories in fallen leaves. Weary, the stone began the long roll home, assured by the tree’s one hundred lives.
The bird flies through three surfaces: earth, water, and forgetting. But it isn’t only one bird. Thousands, millions, browns, blues, transparencies, rose, quiet, loud, shallow, trustworthy, with eyebrows like wire, eyes like something fermented in a bottle. They yammer in crock pots. Get into the flour and fly off looking like odd hand signals outside […]
You, red bear, come down from the mountain to sit at the rim of a yellow hole in the grass. The bees circle and the children climb out the windows with caution. In the city people make their windows tight against the coming of the day. You write a language that can be read only […]
As she turned the bend she painted an army swarming the limestone cliffside with ropes. Each soldier wore a different color (and face). They made a star pack, a thick cluster of whites and greens, silver armaments taking each a piece of the moon and reflecting it back to her from a million different centuries. […]
Imagine her surprise to find sun slices placed by the sky on the lawn come fresh air when the day before a deep brown city followed room to room like a pestering face, call, star. Pigeons coddled gray shade beneath the bridges at noon. She held limes deep in a bag, small planets in a […]
The man with a river in his head will find himself on a long stretch between Roswell and Carlsbad where scarlet creeper, morning glory, and orange butterfly weed fire the space between the shoe tips and the longest shadows of the light when evening comes to the desert. Night is painted by the sun, the […]
The walker heard whispers under stones He turned one over and found underneath a blue heron assembling the sky But he doesn’t remember because he’s come late to the river out of a canyon where mist obscures the ground and the yellow window lamps He pushes the clouds aside and finds the lightning has painted […]
“On some worlds water splashes up, dashing over the fingers of trees.” That’s what she told me from the river that runs east to west to the entrance where her cave made a small hole in the mountain. “I’ve seen little blue people crowd onto limbs as thick as buses. The sun curls, winks on […]
the sun in spring is on the underside of parsley in the thousand memories of a wasp’s eye who turns glooms deep into the green painting life over peeling paper-sided trees the wasp sweeps a whale’s shadow over the sea floor a gray mark on the moon the green rimpled edge of land from the […]
I still remember how the sand crunched under my shoes when I paused on the top of the mountain with water enough and bird call and stone became a quality of loft. Black, pink birds raced downslope like the quick tips of brushes painting arcs and the wind rushed up from the penciled grid of […]
On one side of the iris is a green tiger passing On the other is a mountain of gray stone with deep cracks where the iris burrows and chokes On the other side of a silver river a green tiger passes The sun burns black deep in the iris And the moon casts its shadow […]
on a scented night long ago the god came down from a hill and found the moon settled on a pond the god got down close and ran a finger through the moon’s middle calling forth the peony from then on, the flower does not know it’s a moon on water and the moon wonders […]
Stuff pooled up by shore at sunset (a fisheye like a grieving maple) where lost people laughing step and otters on their backs gnaw the muscle inside shells. That’s somewhat jolly. A painted duck falls through a rattling tree like a sampling of strange hail. That’s pensive all through. You reach under and strain a […]
Do bears imagine in fruit red, olive, and orange? When they crack the surface of shallow water, Stir the blue and white secrets of the dawn sky Into scatter mirrors, venus like a fired seed crashing Aquarius into blue-hot cinders, mountains blending With minutes-old light, where the memory of two Faces glanced the day behind, […]
In that tangle of poppies you can see an old world toon At war with some enemy unseen in the mist. He grasps a thin green spear and glowers. As if beyond the water of quackers he has always Wandered the world at large, sweating in the high Swaying and uncut grain stalks and dashing […]
