One must put one’s ear to a stone
To hear the axis of Jupiter,
Or a volleyball game in Canada.
Or be on holiday to string
Oh so elaborately
Lights around a black hole.
Even if black holes lack
The ability to look up
And acknowledge such a feat.
Bravo to every dandelion! I agree, it’s spring.
And there are holiday lights around black holes!
And so what if dandelions end up like gray haired stars
At night on the city lawn.
Are finished with what they have to say.
All the weight is in death’s hands
Under an asparagus moon
If life being little more than
The color of grilled cheese above the sea
To somehow out last
The traffic lights of giraffes
In our pockets
The unsettled
For a nest
A short line
Followed by a longer line
Add fire over
Water
Take seriously
The lack of meaning
And give it hope
Finally
Distance is in the kitchen
Washing the dishes
You are drying them
I found my coat
Next to the words
For leaving
I thought for good
Here we are
Spilling gravity
Into the graffiti of
Poetry
Giving chance
Its due
After transcendence you end up standing in the dirt like the rest of us
Time is a red scarf picked up by darkness.
Light is the celebration of that vision.
I carry a paper bag of flowers, the petals are blue, yellow, and orange,
Early flowers, the bag is a sandwich bag, it’s dawn,
I put the flowers in a basket and bike home, the sky is blue, orange, and yellow,
My wild face, in momentum, how is the dawn somehow starry after all the stars are put away?
How is it, just for a second, this wild face among the stars, on a bike, with flowers
For the dining room table, to be with books, and pencils, and to have breakfast with,
Encourage me to open the windows, they are the better part of me, for a few days,
In which time, I’ll write what seems to be stream of consciousness poems, better yet,
I’ll put on my canvas shoes and walk till my stomach growls
For the fire and fever of tasteless stars.
The City Limits
A. R. Ammons – 1926-2001
When you consider the radiance, that it does not withhold
itself but pours its abundance without selection into every
nook and cranny not overhung or hidden; when you consider
that birds’ bones make no awful noise against the light but
lie low in the light as in a high testimony; when you consider
the radiance, that it will look into the guiltiest
swervings of the weaving heart and bear itself upon them,
not flinching into disguise or darkening; when you consider
the abundance of such resource as illuminates the glow-blue
bodies and gold-skeined wings of flies swarming the dumped
guts of a natural slaughter or the coil of shit and in no
way winces from its storms of generosity; when you consider
that air or vacuum, snow or shale, squid or wolf, rose or lichen,
each is accepted into as much light as it will take, then
the heart moves roomier, the man stands and looks about, the
leaf does not increase itself above the grass, and the dark
work of the deepest cells is of a tune with May bushes
and fear lit by the breadth of such calmly turns to praise.
Like a broken guitar,
A mini golf course for
A syllogism.
Why are beginnings so important?
Why is a broken guitar a disaster?
Is the grave coming up short.
And though I think all of this is folly
I am glad of its sometimes kindness.
A poem
Is a belly flop
In handwriting
By an angel doing a handstand
While going backward in time
In a simple sweater, a jawline like a lyric, is the ambition of dusk.
Against the aquarium of stars.
A simple ghost, like a pair of bashful feet in the corner.
The high wires of power lines, the moon like a spool with no thread.
Words in a notebook, coil bound, from the drugstore, do angels tattoo humans on their arms?
A jawline like a stampede, an aquarium of ghosts.
The geometry
Of calling off
From work:
Proletarian pillowcases,
The waistline of angels,
The two unequal sides
Of the human heart.
The geometry
Of staying home
From home:
The summer night is bigger than you
If done properly,
Eyes dream in graffiti moons,
Heart breathes griffin stars.
naïve haircuts 