Monsoon Season

The rain is melting the windshield. No wipers.
Streetlights become sparklers, and I become you.

Thirty-Eight Lights

Night. It's the Fifth of July,
but I see fireworks. Barricade light blinks the street orange.
Flashbulbs everywhere like toy lightning.
A police car. The beacon pirouettes,
but no siren. No sound.

Thirty-eight lights live and die each second,
and no one else seems to notice. Oh,
and the pharmacy next door is on fire.

Complex

I can still see you on a white tour bus, nibbling potato chips
and theologizing; your captive audience
sometimes escaping to that shoebox of a bathroom
as Massachusetts blurred by beside us.

But as I pass you in a bakery, offering hello,
you are perturbed. Your eyes head for safety,
and the man in your memory frantically scours
files and microfiche for a clue to this strange stranger.

You have forgotten my face and name,
but I forgive you. It simply squares you in the packing box of humanity;
among a sheepish and oblivious crew, captained
by Oedipus, who forgot even his own mother's face,

making love to her in blissful ignorance;
whole worlds swirling unnoticed about the bed.
He was not blind yet, but he was a man.

lifting waits

I hold still; lifted up
by a pulley. This is not flying,
and there is no breeze. Still, I
wait. I will never know how
to fix a carburetor or raise beans by a pond,
but still snow will fall this January,
and I will take a weighty number
and exotify the wall stucco from an orange chair.

Holy Week

I
Bred in a red birth.
Behind your eyes, our bread's worth.

II
You last, I backlash,
lashing your back with black ash.

III
In black the red dies.
Stillness, and last, the dead rise.

reflection and object

a blackbird careening into
a mirror. a mirror
becoming me, becoming
a blackbird, and lifting
me up to nature.

a blackbird
on an oak branch,
mirror shards for leaves.
The blackbird leaves.

cathedral

there is a horn and a sanctus bell
and an orange and an oak tree
down by the river

oh brothers, let's go down
and shed our sandals like leaves

mud and murk in our toes
vines' branches winding skyward
in warm breath of sunlight

we will whisper prayers and poetry
and discover a dove nest with fledglings

Mesopotamia

cutting up old newspapers
to papier-mâché today's headlines

toenail clipping for a moon
and broken cookie on a plate

Stand on a mountaintop and twirl slowly; your eyes' satiety spiraling with you in an explosive double helix. It is odd enough to be a speck of dust in space and time, but to think: there is nothing meaningless. All ripples into the sublime. This is the most beautiful food chain: a thousand thousand small things nourishing the Kingdom, and I am one.

resurrection

I see sea shells. I ogle them
and smell Easter lilies
to my right and left.

This, too, is a resurrection. I flow
and my costumes ebb. Existence
ends without fanfare, leaving only
a sigh of satiety and an embrace
of sunlight. We were the sun once,

burning away cloud after cloud;
life in our breath and a river of
completeness.

bildungsroman

Like a petal on the wind the toy plane
flew east. I stood centrally, a sentry,
watching the moon pull the sky
in an alluring ebb, and I knew that the
days of my life until now were over. I
cried and smiled and went home
to look at old yearbook photos by the light
of a new candle.

One Evening

Thinking became walking
as my pulse slowed. My body
traced some cartographer’s line.

Walking became gliding,
a moving sidewalk of charcoal asphalt
and me, too slow to blur into colors,

floating with a mythical dignity
to the foot of Jacob’s stair
where living became climbing.

First Words

My little brother cried, “Boo jay!”
as the winged watercolor flew past the window.

But these were not the first words,
for, approximately thirty-three years prior,
my father, then an infant, through the tinted glass
of the dilapidated family Ford,
spotted a bus with his oversized eyes
and bumbled “Saa bus, saa bus!”

These were not the first words, either, however,
for his father had spoken before him, and his father before him,

and suddenly the Ford is in reverse,
speeding back through history
to that historic fur-draped first forebear of ours
who grunted a disgruntled grunt
which translates to “Me hungry!”

But then again, who is to say
that the ape to the left of him on the evolutionary chart
didn’t deserve the honor
for his vocal, though not quite verbal utterings?

Backing up even more, maybe it was the first land-dweller.
He was, after all, the first to speak through air—
it was so much clearer than his previous gurgly aquatic chats.

And we drive back further still
to that immortalized paramecium, whose wiry flagellum
first made a microscopic ripple in the primordial soup.

Then the Ford breaks down, as it often does,
but we still listen in the rearview mirror
to the voices which preceded mortality;
the songs of blacknesses
and the luminous speech of silver angels
praising…what?…something
just out of earshot.

a little vinegar

flashbacks I play on a green guitar
the music drips
and I recall

how your face
used to scrunch
when we would almostkiss
and we never did

it’s too much
the world is all bass
and no violins

but I—

I…

funny…
I always was
never the same—
differing and offbeat

you were all too normal.

and always an airplane but never flying

flying

f l y i n g …

our silence was a movie
or an affectation
or an unclear wall
that ribbons outward

always from you-to-me

a seesaw stuck
one way,
never returning.

a seashell
that, upon your ear,
sounds only
half the sea.

fracturing

again

a heartbone or two,
but

iwillplayfasternowandforgetaboutit.

something finite

a red couple on a brown bench
in park greenery. she whispers

into his mind and a mockingbird
does that for which it got its name.

the girl twirls a fiery poppy
which is all she is, the boy buzzes

a blade of crabgrass
which is all he is, the mockingbird

swims through the skywater.