Preferably the dreams
Arriving from the blue sea
To the pentameters of oars
What it means
To have instead of coins
These spirited verses
Ashore the ghosts set fire
To their own ships
To bar the way back
Here they trace the portents
On the incoming tide
And make their final stand
poem
The Invisible Violin
An abstract verse brings out the eyes, said the florist.
How one cradles a thunderstorm is philosophy. As is counting your lover’s footsteps on the untuned floor as the footsteps turn into motes in the afternoon light.
Every dream is a superstition that has a lot to say about you.
Do you hear, as well, the climbing notes in the setting sun? The bird-like departure of psychology into the horizon?
A psychology that has the structure of an invisible violin and an imaginary amulet. That with the changing of the seasons will find its way back to you.
Sunday Afternoon
Fairy tales are true. The birds transform into us, and we transform into birds.
But that’s not completely true. Neither is any of this. True enough mostly works. And the remainder? There’s always a remainder. How true. Even black holes leak radiation.
Complexity long ago outgrew the two-dimensional world. How many dimensions are there really? The solar system is a crop circle of gravity. Unbeknownst to you, your dreams keep a calendar. Wouldn’t you like to know the dates?
What does the cosmos wear? Some sort of driftwood hat? The storms of Jupiter for a buttonhole? All the highways for a fingerprint?
I like to follow along, tag along the railroad on rainy afternoon with waterproof boots and a simple blue jacket. Could this be biography?
It’s also meaningful to just sit and do nothing. And probably wise. I’m writing this in a bathrobe and a few days removed from a shave and wondering if this tooth ache will go away on its own. A garden is lots of work. But I’m glad of it. Meandering is a branch of philosophy. Take is seriously. Eating together is civilization.
Later on, as night sets in, I look out the window. The cold rain is indifferent. Maybe I need a little of this indifference.
Scribbled Lines
Sometimes the sad gallons of the moon
A tattoo of a trash heap
The sleeve of poesy rolled up like an ode
The sky
Was never where it was
The stillness you feel
Is the universe expanding
The measurements needed
For new windows in spring
How the mystery spends its gambols
Is ever after a just-so story
Strange
The strumming reaches the ceiling and out
The open window,
Till far from its guitar, files in with the dusk,
Whose thoughts are gold-red and blue-gold
And gold-pink.
The UFO is a treasure map.
How an angel, in the city,
Sitting on a power line, marks the spot.
Till the cosmos tickles on the tongue
And expands between the ears.
Three Short Poems
SYNTAX
The velocity of connotation
Paraphrased
By time
Mirrors the exuberance
The commotion
Of finitude
Only the living
Possess slang
POEM
Because of waves
Coherence
Because of coherence
Complexity
Because of complexity
Mystery
A PHILOSOPHY
The stars have a
Bright finish
And a loose mayhem of birds
For a heartbeat
Veins and arteries are the riverbeds of consciousness
Rivulets and inlets are the infrastructure of metaphysics
A Poem For Lunch
This should be absurd and it’s not.
Take childhood, for instance.
It’s ramshackle centeredness,
And hostility to interpretation.
Or what of calamity, this simple game
Mastered by no one?
If this ditty sings, biographies of musical chairs.
Unguarded
The cosmos is an open clearing,
On no rampart, unguarded.
The cosmos is willing to be unsure,
Incalculable, even to the heavens.
Like a love note, unfolded, in the glow
Of the house burning.
And who rouses these symbols,
And the impetus to overcome themselves.
As the physicists would say,
Sometimes mass does funny things.
Poem
How often does
Beauty start as an error
That finds its way
Again
In ambition
Of all that wonder.
Beauty is the set list
Of all lost
And gained
In a life, in a day,
After all these years.
Beauty annealed
By the wingspan and the walking shoes
And all that curiosity and cosmos
Templed
In the open fields.
Fable
We lost the moon in the war. No one remembers the name of the war. Kids spray-paint the nicknames of the moon. Only they know its whereabouts. Rivers are an expression of gravity. Spines too.
The paperwork, we burned it. I thought we should save it. But you said we should write it down afterwards how we remember it.
There is so much strangeness to this day. Like asking clouds not to comb their hair into astronauts, it can’t be done. Butterflies drink the same wine as volcanoes.
We met again, years later. To sort out what we remember. It was mostly poetry.
naïve haircuts 