Holds Mercury in its cheeks.
And the red leaves of autumn.
All the roads it has traveled
It has marked with the same
Dust and stone.
Holds Jupiter in the somersaults of daisies.
And almost disinterestedly the exuberant the light on its endless shores
When full.
Even in the shadows of
City buildings
Sits infinity.
It just adds up that way.
The universe is mostly
Unwalkable.
The apples are
Vagabond green,
This year
Freight train
Stems.
If we could give
The moon an ocean,
Or glue on it blue wings.
Autumn first appears
In the tuning
Of a stranger’s guitar.
In a galaxy of goldenrod
And a handful of comets.
The color of a stolen coat.
The IQ of an origami
Tesseract.
Obscurity hung by a crag, by its metaphors.
And if the puddles ask, smile.
In this mystery, not even totality
Covers all the bases.
Paradoxes are natural.
The Nine-O-Clock Song like a spilled spool
Of tread along and over desperate for what’s
New of the city streets, along the river
Like a lucky railroad spike you found
As a kid then into the fields of pussy willow
And milkweed and goldenrod
The Song of the Moon Crater is a poem
Written by Walt Whitman the astronaut,
As is The Song of the Snowdrift written by David
“I like sneaking into the drive-in” Thoreau
Just as when we were kids hanging out
On the curb, or just running around, till the dusk up dark ladders
Into night when the streetlights came on
How does one return. Ankles full of the sky. Throat
Clear of clarity.
To ply whatever theories one hopes to shape
And hang them up like coats and call this
Being or consciousness. The pinprick of dreams.
How does one get back to an open heart and
Feet on the ground full of thoughts and inklings.
The metaphysics of a canyon and anything that
Isn’t a canyon. Even the fire hydrant is a vase
Of ideas.
And furthermore, September is the last
Green house, soon enough, the dried-up roller skates
Of what’s left of the flowers.
Full of confusion, the chalk poems
Along the highway shoulder are mine.
In a state of superposition, said the would-be observer,
It’s possibility all the way down.
Have you thought about Jupiter as a tattoo idea?
Or how what is written below takes breath?
The gulping moon over the riverbed,
The tangled ribbon of self.
A chuckle of meandering
On one’s shoulder
Urging one on
Like a cricket
With a couplet
For wings
Along the roads
Even in ditches the goldenrod triumphs.
At night dragonflies
Carry dream cargo.
Without pen and paper
Throughout these lost cities
The grasshopper sings with its legs.
Any day now, they’ll announce
There is other life in the galaxy.
A telescope and daisies and weather reports
And subtitles and because beauty,
And all that you have lost and gained,
You find in everything that part of all of us,
And birds, twigs and space shuttles, trampolines
And bubble wrap, groundwater and dandelion shoots,
And coming home late with the dusk
Still pressed into on your shoulders.
It’s the chatter at the edge of the day,
Tracing its thoughts
Till it forgets its sense in an afternoon field
Lying there, scrimmaging dreams,
And the coneflower on its stalk
Mirrors the void, and the grasshopper
Like a highway with a half-moon
As antenna.
naïve haircuts 