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

Tower of Thrust

                                          Upon your white unblemished thigh
                                          O stained with rocket fire sky
                                          A wound erupts at evening shine
                                          Orange as Christmas clementine.

                                          Patience climbs the tower of thrust.
                                          His foot dislodges flakes of rust
                                          That shimmer to the ground and sigh
                                          “The window of the launch is nigh—

                                          “Open your casements, rain soft fruit
                                          Upon our undeserving suit,
                                          Star fruit, according to the seasons,
                                          Absent motives, absent reasons.”

                                          1/1/2014

End of Dream

At a place where the earth’s eye (the sky) bathes in mirror and conceals its nakedness with pure light from the callow fecklessness of man, an excited four-pound monofilament fishing line connected by an exquisite hook to the most sensitive lower lip of the earth’s rainbow tugs at nerve fibers and sticky, clotted viscera in one’s vital areas, evoking panic and death. Will it jerk an emission from one? At the back of one’s cave an old hunger awakens. A patterned china plate is littered with sickening bones and gristle. One must wake up one simply must wake up. End of dream.

(Last entry of 2013)

Love's Fist

                                        One drop of night’s black ink a rarified
                                        Blue blood smear on dawn’s laboratory slide
                                        As stellar consternation’s scruples mount
                                        Anent earth’s elevated white cell count,
         
                                        The town begins to stir. A distant car
                                        Sneezes to life. Its starting leaves a scar
                                        On the slashed silence. Trash cans sing
                                        As drivers feed them before motoring.

                                        Thunderous birdsong floods the ear and wheezes
                                        As love’s fist grasps a feathered heart and squeezes.
                                        The fist that wrings the poor bird’s soggy heart
                                        And animates its limbs in every part

                                        Massages pistons in the engine’s chest
                                        And quickens matter at the wind’s behest.
                                        Some sodden cars parked street-wise sweat with dew
                                        In the cool morning air’s metallic stew.

                                        8/24/2011