Metropolitan

                            All skied over with blue lip smear
                            Tin-snipped water sheeted the way onward
                            Drowning in its light.

                            Seven lights from seven beacons plumed the cheery shoreline
                            Hoarsed into silence by the nightless cavalcade,
                            The bright-lit pantomime.

                            What if an inky canopy stepped down into this jewel?
                            Would its footprint rouse the waters?
                            Would they slide, jelly-like, into storm sewer horizons
                            And the air quicken and depart
                            And four stakes tied with builder’s string mark plans for a new river
                            Under a blueprint firmament?

                            Almost it seems.
                            Meanwhile steel towers fend the day.
                            Daylight draws loops and cloud-curlicues in the festival air.

                            3/4/2011

How To Speak Dream

                              How to speak dream. I speak dream. What is sleep?
                              A tongue of water that makes seashells seem
                              To speak molluscan language. I speak dream
                              Endowed with speckled bivalves from the deep
                              Embedded in wet sand—not tampons, cheap
                              Medical waste with which our shorelines teem
                              Or flaccid pocket watches limp with steam
                              And hung on trees to sweat, perhaps, or weep—
                              Effluence from some meathole—but the sea
                              Cradles the infant language in its womb
                              And utters it upon the shore at night
                              And swaddles it in blankets white as foam
                              And in my sleep it babbles with delight
                              And cannot speak, and cannot speak, or see.

                              1/16/2014

Melissa’s Flame Red Ear

                                             I see Melissa’s flame red ear
                                             Protrude through amber tresses clear
                                             As water. While around it turns
                                             Murdered ice, it glows and burns.

                                             On the mountain vassal snows
                                             And assets that the winter froze,
                                             Locked in crystal vaults, prepare
                                             The limpid honey of her hair.
     
                                          Like water gelid, pure and chaste
                                             Headlong to her ear it raced
                                             To ignite and to expire
                                             Fuel-oil for a vestal fire.

                                          1/11/2014

Winter Birth

                   “Sages strove In vain to filter off a crystal draught Pure from the lees.”
                                                                                           Cowper (Task, 1784)

                                            Through the thicket, woven tight,
                                            Filters holy winterlight
                                            Cleansing land bereft of worth
                                            At the warming of the earth.

                                            Summer made the pox abound
                                            On the pullulating ground.
                                            Pustule-like, where wildflowers grew,
                                            Sprouted latex condoms, too.

                                            Beyond earth’s gates of greenhouse gas
                                            A pulseless army camps en masse
                                            And counts its prey and holds its place—
                                            The cold of interstellar space.

                                            I see its bright obsidian gaze
                                            Descend through mawkish, thriftless haze
                                            And penetrate, surpassing price,
                                            An iris blue as glacier ice.

                                            O mother of the blue-eyed earth
                                            Grant to man a winter birth
                                            And dress in blankets warm as snow
                                            The heaven's seed that sleeps below.

                                            1/2/2014