A sudden precipitous drop
The yellow bee
Into the phantasmagoria
Of the flowering ditch.
The sun dreams.
The river offers us
A still heart.
Quiet as a winter
Branch
The moon
Just above the powerline.
Graffiti woodpeckers
On the abandoned building.
Streetlight warblers
Buttoned to the smokestack.
Who is this walking holding an imaginary kite?
Wind into fire, water into light,
Breath into dust, words into dream.
Comets are not capable of love
Is shortsighted.
Several times disassemble and put together again
Just to see how this goes.
New moon, dusk, railway lines, the wind
In all manner of mood.
In the fields on the other side of the city fence,
The elm leaves.
You are alone at night at the basketball
Court, that is disused and without netting, no one
Knows you are here, and you have chalk,
Sidewalk chalk, and draw pigeons and crows
And accompany these with sci-fi verses,
Avoiding the puddles or
Intersecting with the graffiti where someone
Spun the rustle of summer
Trees on the black top. You say something like,
The clouds reckon the stars
That reckon the earthworms that reckon
The tides that reckon the swaths of spinning mass
And gaseous twirls of the galaxies.
In accordance with the veers and volleys, splats and soars.
Before you leave,
In black marker, down the pole that supports
The backboard, you write,
The falling rain, like an untuned guitar,
Does not care what we are accustomed to.
It could be said, poetry
At first moves its toes, wiggles
Free of the past, the personal, the tidy,
The explanations that won‘t do.
At times, subsists on alliterative crumbs,
Cosmic airs, nuts and leaves, circular
Stars ringing in the heart.
The lofty ventures of time, verse, and graffiti.
And so very often, a dogged dream that sniffs out
The roads we oblige in our perambulations.
Beauty is
Not knowing
What the mystery
Bargains for.
One should consider the winter rain.
In all its timbre, its habit of doodling
On the windowpane,
The love of a stirred thing.
A spotted moon shakes off a plaited
Reflection,
Throws the sun and earth a headlong look,
And opens the veil.
I found you standing on a chair. The following day, I found
You standing on a table. Your hair unbuttoned,
Except for a few clouds above the curlicues of your thoughts.
Delighted, you built imaginary cities on the horizon.
It was how you closed your eyes
That made the darkness so beautiful.
I found you on the roof branching like a profound fever
Into dreams, into the weather, arabesque in a thrift store cape.
Avidly, in a diving contest with the last of the afternoon.
And how the seasons translate the unsayable.
We go into business selling the open fields to the rain.
And though you can’t see it,
It permeates the end of the year, it feels
In bright collapse, in the turning over
Of an old you, I walk up to the river
As what’s left of the rain foreshortens a reddening
Sky, and with a black marker write verses on a railroad trestle,
Put words to score these gut feelings,
Scrounge up the ghosts of a childhood
Sky, a string theory around your finger for luck,
It’s no small matter, this troubling
Entropy.
A turning over of self,
By season and tract, it can’t be helped,
Like a whack of verse on the head seizing capillary
And shoe size.
And in the margins too, this is forever,
All of it, all of us, the dandelion, the tower,
Silence resting beneath a stone,
Along these roads, onto galaxies of
Coming home, the beautiful trouble of stars.
Of these afternoons, I am
Wildly in love with the wind
And alighted by its hurried
Poems.
The buzzing beliefs of cosmic
Ambling, the beautiful
Preludes of darkness and
Cataclysm, then suddenly
Of atom and charge, spin
And recognition, the endless
Paths and the streetlights
Ever so slightly leaning into
The rain, passingly framed by the sound
Of bicycle tires on the wet
Pavement, and if this concludes
In a diving board sky
Crowned by the harangues
Of cloud and dusk and
The wind in the leaves,
The backyard sermons
Of joint and lawn chair, the
Feral cat staring from what radius
It deems safe, or the smokestack
Of the old dairy now an eyrie
For pigeon and tonight’s moon.
naïve haircuts 