The standard size of envelopes

tonight
mergansers trim the moon language
shave misted verbs before the plunge
let us all in line answer-
word for word
love, concrete
an understanding of wire
as the corrupted
symbol of the steel heart
of stone dropped
instantly dropped in to the body
and counted as a soul,
the same view as Maine
or Brooklyn NYC, I know the
deep intrusion of this copper- it is
oxidizing inside of me, water
fire- first green, now dented blue
lunatic azurite, and wolfs at malachite
more fluvial then animal it flows
to the delineated day
framed in heavy arithmetic
until lit by the sun, all
orange in October
and December medium rare
pink and gray the defined
thing hangs there
ice and Spanish moss like
memories
like hair from every limb
waiting like water waits
for a place to go, with
tiny packages of each stone-
earth and moon, to carry
along like its own.

chlorine the migration of chimera

Condensing tanks
vapor their waste waters
to blue electric, a
flame, a ghost moon
a flare burning out under
water, a river passing into
rock in to language
in to the myth that
created man, hard
hearted and broken
in to a thousand living
landmarks, a sky frozen
and shattered in to
the Christmas lights we
long for, looking up through
trees through the dark
fingers of new man-
stars our ever clear
gaze that stares
down the night and
guilds each walker
home, to adventure
or dreams or the gamble
that this last
saunter will be the
final addition to the
puzzle and walking will
become flying and
flying will be floating
on light water,
the bone hand
lifting of the river, where
the ghost moon nightly
sinks and rises.

the furnace language in semaphore December

all the dead come to
visit in this shallow,
strides like river water ripple the
ghastly and the mundane
at this one hour, the
bones that crush,
dust up the out line of
each ghost, filled with girlfriends
high schools,
cars blank and mute with
clouds and clouds of smoke
hash the edible and the insoluble oil
mixes the memory to
quiescent grease the cement
of my soul at this hour
dead, dead and willing to put
a match to every building, every hut i
could later sleep in, to be now warm.

streets are numbered in the body, bones and more

what is the brick in the field, a pile
of red remembrance, a working mans
cinder a rich mans ashes
walk here in the windy chimera, the ginkgo
bough bearing the faces of each that passes
desolation and Buffalo avenue, collide
in the eyes of trout and heron alike
recording our endeavor recording
the finality of the Falls- on and on for ever,
our history working to shrink this haunting
sliver to buildings and photographs,
anything that can be built up, to fall down
and mark the train yard a red that
remembers bleeding.

to the last coffee draining the last man

what else is there to hate
the fried egg, in the pan
slips out of hand, the grandfather
rises
terrible
and human, an eye lost to
cancer, "i shouldn't
have let them take it" as
if we
were God and his denial
mattered-
where is the cocktail hour man
that skilfully
removed each
element of
death from our physical heads
sweet dreams that I have
curled at the end of my finger nails
while
the bloom keeps growing steady
and under the shadows of 5 oclock
on some clock- a drop
in the mortality
rate on this friday afternoon-- coos gentle
on the leisure of
this pale gloom
the green hands of this woman
hop up to scribble
hopeful warnings
about fresh
lenders, of glow and comfort glove;
about letting the unbearable
in, this north country is measured
tough under screw and nail
the wind curls the docks
like soft eye lashes
batting wire minnow traps
to balls of twine
where decoys rest in a duffel
and
rot none in the frozen
gun of this place bird shot
clearing every last heart beat from
the blue of crackling
Canadian sky spheres mouthing prayers
preparing our passage as we go down
to die.

mention to me the dragonfly

asphalt, brays it’s black gray
pea gravel screams, and tar, gleams
pocketing a destroyers sun then, sudden as stars- extinction
the wings find purchases in stillness
death has bought a moment of
equanimity before the soft, earnest feast
before the history of light & furry
can be written- the pale blue & common
flowers bloom palms- and my human mind
sees biplanes & wind mills, wars &
ultra-violent mushroom clouds
smoldering, a sign rising from glass paneled wings
dormant in forever; a proud sparrow
vacant as a Nazi, hopping to the maddest
dictators- heart and mind unraveling a power no greater
than rain, a gentle demolition a shadow cast by the moon
all nothing- only there to remind me of the clay growing up
through my own feet, and my cloistered fire fed by time
hardening each breath, each vein, until my eyes are opaque
and my sight is as rigid as glass- burned pure stone my
heart, rugged porcelain waits for the day it is broken,
by beak or claw or the blizzard feet of the one longed for.

stir ashes with twigs tonight.

introduced early to
discrete disappearances
new water in the corridor
revels no surprises
there blinks the eyes that
are past eyes,
and and a mouth filled with
black straw smolders
in silence
knowing the footsteps that
echo, knowing the breath
that fills the chamber walls,
each moment a brick that
builds the room of life where
dusting capacitors, and
ringing coffee pots fresh
with their electric directives;
glass and silver- connect
each morning to rest
against a wall of dawn where
the reluctant mind reflects
on the cautious mouth
surrounded by chrome and sun
exhaling a calligraphy
that writes out the
pervasive soul- a book
read over and over, in memory of you.