In 100 Poems on
22 July 2008 with no comments
I just cut grass
trimmed
scuffled a bedfull of weeds
how wet everything is
the white roots
the chocolate soil
where worms twist at the sun
and the ground bees have laid
their children
for the year to come
the swarms are now
the best
first of spring
My knees are brown
the sun puddles
on the green
and my hands shake
with minds of their own
and I wonder
about bulbs, seashores, the dryness
of the lunar
light on the walls
of the house
at midnight
the sun warms my hand
with a yellow touch
the dark green grass
a bed for us
my hand
the yellow print
the green grass
reaching
for the bush leaves
there a rabbit
with a whole eye
smoke under the clouds
good days for rain
at night
In 100 Poems on
21 July 2008 with no comments
Like the man who thought
every phone might be ringing
for him in Calvino’s
traveler,
I think that the colors
of the world are all
meant for (or trapped in) me.
Rose and carmine and indigo
detonating deep inside. How oil
insinuates into engines, so
lisianthus lubricates the rounds
behind my purpling eyes,
the curves at the joints
when I bend,
stirs the blood that drips
when I crush red
in my hands and scream
with joy the tint
of my tongue.
I am the one you see
asleep in your beds
at sunrise, in the evening,
picking through the amethyst,
lime, and red primrose
and when you shout
for the law I laugh,
leap into the yard
next door, and the dogs,
they bark me on as the day
rolls and the colors
oil and frisk in my veins,
swirl in my fingernails
and the lightning strikes
as I run, mouth contorted
with the embrochure
of sweet, sting, and leaf,
freezing me
white in the field.
In 100 Poems on
20 July 2008 with no comments
He should have told her that light is his symbol.
He should have told her what stones say.
He should have told her he’d carry her books, pack, charms.
He should have told her his real name in the park where the trees grow like statues.
He should have told her how he feared what was underneath.
He should have told her his favorite flower, flavor, fondnesses.
He should have told her how he’d played on the monkey bars.
(He did but he couldn’t say whether she’d heard or understood)
He should have told her why that hurt had dried in the shape of a fish.
He should have told her to add salt to boiling water.
He should have given her a list of jokes, things to bring home from far away.
He should have given her paintings about patience.
He should have assembled the sky out of the zest of black suns.
He should have given her things to refuse, like flowers, chicken farms.
He should have given her attention in crowded rooms.
He should have given her roses, fawns, a kiss in the rain.
He should have given her blood, a knife to strike with, because that’s how wounds are healed.
He should have given her spells.
He should have brightened her mood and her windows.
He should have brightened the cave where waters echo, drip.
He should have lengthened the day, the night, the hours in between.
He should have loosened, tightened, taken off, stuck, adumbrated.
He should have stood by, stood long, even as she went back for something lost.
He should have followed when she strode in the shadows of mountains.
He should have followed her down the hill.
He should have followed her into pools of blood.
He should have counted her footsteps, her breaths when he couldn’t sleep.
He could have could have could have could have
Caught her on the last day of the world.
They could have gone down into the city together.
Where the lights crash the sky.
In 100 Poems on
20 July 2008 with no comments
In a dream I saw umber birds inking
like knife slices out of a rolling lowland.
I hurried to them, approaching on the back
of a seed that had raised me from the valley floor
on a cool wind, an idea, a country emerging
with sails from its cities, engine gears creaking.
But when I reached the place, they had winged
away leaving shadows on a russet ground
that said, “Soon we will return. Or write us.
And remember–at least as long as signals last.”
And last. At least as long as a shadow can stay
in one place. They’re like tiger prints in the blue
snow. See how deep the holes go. And go. Alas,
they never did return. Rather, the wind let me down
on a shore where the grass was silver gray
and spread off above the water to the ankles
of mountains like an impossible number of heron legs.
I waded, made way through the fields. The air
turned thin above the verticals where light
touches the world first, and woke up cold,
sore, high above the writing on a stone under
a green tree striking a pose against storms coming.
In 100 Poems on
18 July 2008 with no comments
He did not lose his son.
His son lost him, embellishing
a face at other doors and windows,
other elaborations shaped
like moons or buttons watching
him pass through sun, rain,
and evening mist, a gray hand
reaching from a door, like a wish.
And:
The stone had an idea about phases
How one can go from green
To gray against yesterday’s
And tomorrow’s sky. In between,
We are, he said. Then we’re not,
As the leaf, with a drop of the river
On its stem, turned under a limb
Slowly and passed into days to come.
In 100 Poems on
17 July 2008 with no comments
A man had an encounter with a stone.
He told the stone a story.
But the stone wasn’t a fan of riddles.
So he broke the man’s foot.
Then he broke the man’s head.
Then he buried the man in a garden.
It’s a good story, the stone said.
About gardening, the man said.
In 100 Poems on
16 July 2008 with no comments
We are made of light aspiring
outward like the edge of night and day
whose interstice is not the line but a circle
you can carry and swing in your hand.
Let the bear pass through.
Like the death of things,
the crow will disassemble into plurals
and pass mostly quiet through the grass.
and
He still remembers the moment
his son was born. How a moon
hot as the sun came out of her
on a bed with the sheets kicked off,
strong slick fingers out-held.
See the green reeds chase the rushing
crow. See him raise the child
to the light, where the moon rides.
In 100 Poems on
15 July 2008 with no comments
She gathered all her new friends on the porch
and served them lemonade in the chilled glasses
with little lemon prints behind the water beads.
The branches nearby clicked in the wind.
The women laughed like men remembering
the way they used to live before their children
took them over and made them different, longer
at night, tuned to the randomness of human breathing.
They shared breaks, compared the meaning of names.
They faded in the dark. Moved to wine served in flutes
with stems like the long notes of an oboe. Someone
mentioned how olive vines could slowly consume the sun.
Another asked is the world real beyond this porch.
Soon they wondered if their hostess would ever return.
In 100 Poems on
14 July 2008 with no comments
Yesterday on the dunes he felt
hollow, dark. He drew up
the hand of an old love.
Her fingers were long and brown.
He could make songs with them
in the warm light off the lake.
He used her fingers to sing, call
for rain next day on the dunes.
In 100 Poems on
13 July 2008 with no comments
In the course of getting
ahead of himself, he parted
a screen of brittle grass and saw
a blue pool with a whale’s
eye moving across its middle.
The whale reminded him of a boy,
how he could see birds and bears
in the water stains on the walls.
In 100 Poems on
12 July 2008 with no comments
It will be a Saturday when all the soldiers
drop their guns and knives and wave
the battlefields away, leaving them
to the croaks of birds and creaky leather
and the somewhat confused spirits of the dead
who hear the moon scream at their backs
and the anger of those with nothing better
to do than skin with their thumbnails
the images of men and women in magazines
and dusty books where bad ideas
accumulate like spores on old wallpaper.
The soldiers walk away with all the war
poems ever written and to be written
etched on little stones in their stomachs.
Sunday the leaders land in their ships
to bring reason and their religions here
and to bawl out the generals for making
this chaos of cattle prints in the sand.
Soon the air moves and the sand scratches
their glasses and grits the corners of their eyes.
They drink cool water and check their schedules
and ask the whereabouts of their children.
Monday will hear uncertain sounds in the spaces
between the sprinkle drops as the leaders wonder
at the strange shadows they make in the drying dust
when the clouds break and they thumb through their scripts
in search of phrasings older maybe than Sanskrit
or puppetry or grave digging. That one in a black suit
carves an arc with the tip of a shoe.
Another wipes his pink neck and says he could
eat a hot dog or a puffin or an octopus.
On Tuesday one of them remembers the day of enticement.
He remembers falling on the ice.
He remembers how his mother smiled and danced
through a crack in the door late at night
when he should have been sleeping.
Another wants to run to a boat and fish.
A woman tosses a wand into the circle.
In comes a fish fin, a bottle cap, a tarnished spoon.
A man plucks out his eye and eats it like an egg.
A woman says that’s a pretty good trick.
Wednesday a man crosses the circle and slashes
at a woman’s jaw and the blood that comes
makes everyone crazy for finger painting
and they remember the beauty of open wounds
which is the same feeling in all the languages
of the world. After some time only five remain,
three men and two woman who watch each other
from the perimeter like alligators.
On Thursday a man chips blood from his tongue
and clears his throat and dons the robes of an orator.
He deplores the image of heathens, supporting his concoctions
with words that look like stinkhorn, and then jade stones
and pigeon livers scattered among the flakes
of the moon, and he reads their shapes
as proof of the truth of his positions.
A woman says that’s a pretty good trick.
On Friday they see mammoths crossing the white dunes.
Black birds appear on foot out of the shadows.
The rivers pour slowly into the sea.
One claims his mother’s face in a stone.
Another says he’ll drink his own tears.
Journalists are repeatedly typing one word.
On Saturday the soldiers return to find the five
with their jaws gnawing on ankles and wrists,
as if attempting escape or crude leeching.
Look at them, the soldiers say.
How have we got along without them?
How will we ever learn to paint wonders again?
In 100 Poems on
11 July 2008 with no comments
Often if you watch the birds
you’ll see them bearing olives
and maybe a grape tomato
to their chicks who don’t quite
understand the story of circles.
The shape of their lives through the air
and time is like sleeping in a cabin
where the villages are remote. Bears watch
the lights go out one by one from their caves.
One moves among the small houses.
He presses a dark weight against a door.
He suspends two moons in his eyes then sleeps.
The children put their palms
to the small window above the porch
and close their eyes and imagine
the circles birds made during the day
believing that, come morning,
they’ll climb a high tree, let go, and fly.
In 100 Poems on
10 July 2008 with 1 comment
When his mother died he saw
frogs on the window sill
The smell of old love followed him
through the hallway to a bright door
where a girl stood behind the screen
with day lilies bursting from her hands
His father was with the doctor
asking questions about the speed of light
Years later he passed a cardboard box
filled to the top with snow, the mouth
of a boot sticking out like the hole
of a cannon on a ship emerging
from the cold mists of the north
or someone shouting for the children
to come in for the night who dash like birds
through the gardens in midsummer
His father still calls and in a quiet voice
asks after the light and all that space
it leaves behind on its journey
to the empty edge of sound and touch
In 100 Poems on
9 July 2008 with no comments
one day he imagines
a million silver fish
assembling a pond
as the day burns
a single star
into its surface
permanently now
he gets down
reaches
soon his finger
attracts the dry heat
on the water
then a fish weaves
dark to startling dark
like something
that had once slipped
out of his hands
and he stops
(he’d hoped to draw it out,
bear it home, use it’s heat
to wipe away
the darks that settle
into corners, cracks,
under tables,
behind the eyes)
the star remains, clings
untouched, unmoved
an eye watching
permanently now
as he rises
one day he imagined
a million fish assembling
the water
a single star
a motive
what he missed
and misses
is some discolor
on the water
some shadow
of his own
something more
than sun
to carry home
in his hands
In 100 Poems on
8 July 2008 with no comments
Out of dreams now a woman steps into a dawn
where blue shapes cut the sky into outlines
of leaf and branch, yesterday’s whispers
marbling the shadows where they’ll
dry, bake, and disperse with the sunrise.
She had shed names over the years. They fell
away from her like notes spoken into deep places
where echoes return stranger than their
origins, dripping with the liquids of alien
languages, licked by distant tongues.
Her father’s disassembled first, lost letter
by letter and sound by sound through the weave
of pages, or slipping through the grills of storm
drains in streets she found empty and dry
with promises bundled into tumbleweeds
wandering the intersections and crowding
at the feet of buildings where taggers have joined
themselves to the bricks in black and red
and orange, naming otherness with empty
calligraphy and charms shaped like knives.
Out of dreams now she feels the pull
of the sky in the cool light, the gravity
of names, the potency of heat in the west.
She raises a finger and writes (to test) a name
and then another, writing on a canvass shapes
never before spun by human finger or spoken
with human tongue. She caught a spot of the sudden
sun and a few strings of wind to mix the light with,
and the names matured into rings, petals, song,
two new galaxies turning in the air above the world.
