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, saw themselves sad
And the shadow of their lover, then sky, sand sprinkle,
Do they swing their noses downstream or into the air,
Feel the weights that once supported libraries,
Governments, the cool porches of homes where wine
Stains the white floor and red prints diminish with the moon.
Every grain at the river bottom is an olive or an orange.
We might touch eyeball to water, watch for sprouts.
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
Off at the sound of the thresher like any other
Lonely voice with sore soles. He scrabbles up the wet
Rock face and shouts, throatweary and blackbrushed.
“Ha” but it comes out “Kah”
But now he’s holding his ground. He’s turned
On the artist and finds himself fooled yet again,
Erased to the neck, helpless against all these greater powers.
He clings to a poppy stem. Imagines so hard that he
Becomes crow and black and cherry and orange,
Rhino and treelines and poppy bursts bright as sunsets.
inside the eyes an olive turns into a light bulb
marbles sturgeon eggs dropping slowly to the sea floor
white lamps the size of grape seeds drifted by black currents
wheat grains mosquitos with stomachs honeyfilled
words light smears hot as razors grazing the eyeball
the horizon drops and we skate into Orion
inside the eyes where black becomes white
where attractions repulse like sea and land
air and vacuum
the lone crow drifting like a white feather in a black sky
The sun orbits hot
and loves green earth like pansies
the red-tipped brush
What is the difference between sand and water
When both fall through your fingers
One palm wet and one hand dry
One palm slick, the other brittle
When gray light washes down from the mountain
Like one hundred years of repetition
And the water rushes over the world filling
Every gap and crack and basement
The sky remembers what fell from it
The ground looks up from under a glaze
Of surf, reaches, and writes a message
Back, erasing yesterday.
Sumacs say that bears use their claws
to divide what’s in the way, crashing at me
with fear in the center, their raspberry gums
blurred when the color’s wet.
But each movement is many times
moving. And so leaf rows become black
teeth or claws, and bears become bush
as they retreat into some other future.
What they leave is quiet and the memory of blood rush.
They leave the image of their entrance and departure.
What are sumacs but a memory of bear claws.
A friend showed me what Barthes wrote about sight
and continuity, without which we’d all break our noses
on walls and, motionless, imagine pain as grit and red
somewhere ahead:
“. . . space can be constructed only from completed variations,”
Barthes wrote.
And so orange and olive brushed onto water
by wind are instances of purple, blue, and pink
emerging slowly as the clock ticks and we step
closer, step around, step out, making as we ambulate
and see.
Water and wind never stop and olive and orange
will always be also purple, pink, and blue.
Light scatter, the crash and crack of surfaces meeting.
I fall into color and close my eyes.
light, hot, and really windy
New York’s breathing by us
shouting Rhode Island down
listen for those billions of letter sounds
on the shoulders
of dust, sliced into syllables
by leaf edge and needle point.
States speaking over the miles.
millions of words
on the hot wind as we watch
the tree bend and the water ripple
laughing as we watch
Planting but planting what? Lily
Plants itself where ever sun touches
And Butterfly Bush must be cut down
To at least a foot above the earth,
Their purple squirrel-tail blooms
Pointing accusingly to the pines
With their sagging branches weighted
By their meat.
Grass loves growing where I love it least.
In the beds, but, no!, not in the useless
Pasture land over which the bush points
With a sarcasm that smells of grapes round as bumblebees.
The leaves above the potrim yawn blackly
With tongues green and long.
sunlight coming and going at 6:30 PM
when we’re somewhat full on what the table
brought and can still feel the day’s momentum
at our backs and tomorrow’s lists waiting
like the breath of wind in the distance.
You could see them from the sidewalk,
White jellyfish come from somewhere East,
Wind-ripped at the tops like old sailors’ hair in a gale,
Their cotton bottoms bloated with purple turbulence.
Light chains linked them, elegance in white
Disclosing some organic brotherhood,
A fuse of hot and cold, a sharing unshared
By those who have no relevance or strength to match.
We feared they’d snatch and drop us from their
Wells some place from where there’s no coming home.
You could see them bottom to top, their ice-flow
Width and slow imminence, as if some piece of the South Pole
Had cracked away and ascended to some height
Where the gods cough ice-crystals and pick their teeth with trees.
You’d hear the thunder, like the muttered but fierce talk
Of revolution in cantinas.
All the sky collected in one front of air, moving closer
But not moving closer closer
On the sidewalks we’d watch wait
The mulberry branches would turn; they’d
Wave us away as if they knew better, knew
Something of the power of slowness, size.
I remember running toward home as if some invasion
Were at hand, black drops slapping at the tips of my shoes.
Behind gray, green, and lilac you can make
out a moon rising like a gray ball.
The Murrays met the Sanchezes
at the fringe where light becomes
a thing that drops like seeds from the sky.
They touched their palms to grain hair,
parrot beaks, cold ocean spray.
They felt painted, touched back
by something untouching like the moon,
water, ink shed by deep-ocean octopi.
A color is always many colors
just as a place is a collection
of forms, oval, tipped circles
of rain on a pond turned stained glass,
fire in their centers.
At dawn green and yellow
become time. Time
becomes that faint gray
at the pond’s edge at sundown.
Here’s the new computer and just the beginning of a long transition.
Images edited in the Gimp.
