And Our Lady of Scrap Paper
Playing the guitar for the dappled pigeons.
The 5 cent poems the clerk at the laundry sells
When not making up her own postage stamps
To give away to whales.
A wind lost before speaking or the metaphysics of standing on one leg
Choreographing a weathervane.
Clouds think in hieroglyphics and pull calligraphy
Out or their bellybuttons. So go
The yesterdays of the future.
The last of the morning fog on the pane.
The full-spooled
Moon for a handkerchief. A sweater with feral seams.
A bicycle that is in love with the sea.
Boxcar sounds in the distance.
A feeling of general unease
Beautiful as ditch flowers and
Make believe tattoos.
The feeling of turning a corner
That never goes away.
And there is nothing else to
Eat, only the flowers born from volcanoes.
A forest took
Shape around your heart and set it adrift in the cloud-work,
Shored along by time and all that chance
And fate and even where beauty lacks order, it fumbles gold.
Now that the orchard is migrating towards the moon.
By whatever pieces necessary we will puzzle.
For sidewalk tramps baptized in the changing of the leaves,
Hurled to other dimensions by the rustle of the seasons, and
For what poetry could be, words adjacent to meaning squished together by music,
And the lemonade of time travel.
A summer
Song sans sense, in electric red,
On air guitar.
And the blue afternoon
For pocket change, a terse notebook
Jotted down in a shirt pocket
To keep poems.
But whatever it is, even the typography
Of space travel,
And if you can, do not
Hold it at arm’s length.
June is airy and incomplete and true and I
Will be getting up before dawn to walk
Along the railroad lines and find any hidden
Imaginary doors or graffiti haiku or a summiting cloud formation
Like a labyrinth of words in the sky.
You took to the railroad lines like a fiddler to a roof.
And the hours out walking, an aficionado of being
For the wind and for the horizon and for the fields.
You took home the sweat of summer,
And into the night, the dimpled ribbon of the moon
Unravels along an airy topography. You are enlivened
By the malady of wing and antenna as the butterfly
Tops the ironweed. Like the evening dusk piled on the blue sky,
And above that, the night without any currency
Of its own giving away everything.
We should begin with
The moon, have your cat draw
The circle and its glow and its marred
Demeanor. Why don’t we stop
For some tea and enrich ourselves
On the rain-smell of the coming storm?
When the cat has finished,
And the moon is just right, and over the rooftops,
We will draw up evacuation plans
But they will all be forgeries
Splendidly like puddles or these
Journal entries. Truth be told,
The cosmos is a drum roll not unlike the smell
Of lilac,
The cosmos is also a strummed guitar the color
Of a lonesome whistle.
We should finish our evening by returning to
The moon, where we left it, have your car draw
It being swallowed by our sun
Now a red giant.
Even if, and this is
Stretching it, besides,
Where are wild
Flowers, some as tall
As parking meters?
Sunlight, lost
In the blinds, even so,
Just as well,
The moon is famished,
Fathom-weary,
Just look, the moon says,
I am dust and stone.
You don’t say? As for me,
A quantum and wry sandwich,
A myopia prescribed in glasses.
Zany with the zeal
Of an amateur poet.
A not so elaborate plan
Of minor chords
And marijuana joints,
Backyard afternoon
Of lawn chair versing,
Sun tea and with binoculars
Now at night
Counting the craters
On the moon.
I know this
Too well, the tally
Smarts, still beautifully
Bites.
naïve haircuts 