standing by a bed

quiet, then
dog bark
Fort avenue is empty
all its
ghosts- powder at noon,
the bright after rain is
glowing again
wild in this absence,
some thing is
waiting
to collect
around each lost
soul, palmed
vapor, endless sugar, coffee cups
it is here that one
can be
rising and defeated,
known by copper
collapsed,
the
near concrete, speaks
as
house
after house is
wreaked in slices
time for this sort
lunch, breaks loosely
& today
we have chosen to raise
a
whole
union of spirits
to ritualize the
simplest snow, turn a heard
raindrop
crystalline and tear
at this thinnest vale, noon.

what the heart knows in a hole

this stone my heart
has been stopped
it has been dead
before- loam lengthened in
the long hours
bleached white, before
the awkward moon
time like bone growth-
proves painful & surprising
all along the river
has pruned the night
of its being and
this world
knows nothing else-
but the echo of coins
falling from hands
fortunes gone and all
its shallow documentation
for the marriage
of the living and the dead
dealt with in parlors neat
as loves woven nest,
yet the dead want
their song of ash,
their compact of dust
to ring the mind
and balsa fear, it
is pure mission of
the generations to
float this catastrophe
through each human
estuary until it
joins the silent chorus,
the evocation of being and not,
the soul shifts its ragging
disposition and nears
recuperation to eventual
disappearing in to
the wage of every day.

home coming kept here

pain organizes with
in me, and
template's my body-
i read it to know
how to rebuild
my scattered mind-
delicate and careless
as milk weed,
i am open
to any wind, and
scatter fruitless seed
over water
finding fish bones
& seaweed,
regrouped, tightened
by singe, by
evenings bonfire
heat, my skin
bristles, fresh in
the morning snow
gray echos
church bells
the landscape I've
come to know-
yet it has yellowed
become orange green
purple, the
world once colorless
has opened up
and rain is silver,
coins, valuable as bones
that speak in
syllables made of soil
words i long know.

what has to be done lee

respond, said ruby-
leaving us as
she died in the door way
loving the
cafeteria, the passionate
jello
translucent,
rhythmed by
the ribboned train of florescent
lighting
knowing something of pudding ,
she
had all her yesterdays and one
more
tomorrow lined up
right
there
like
storm clouds,
like
sage, at
the foot of
prayer ------------------------>
as if the robins egg blue : sky
echoed the last
scrumptious notion of food
where
the whalebone children
where born
running-
music in their heads weaving
evenly
the sharp knowledge that
came to harm them
into
knotted
copper rugs
given
subtle instruction,
spoken
a mothers tongue-
rolls, holds
shores full of
delicate
urchins
rocks hold lichen
for
bears breath fills with
fog horns and sponge
cacophony
ghosts
where the far away
tube holds the melody
how lost can we
be
hoping
for
final
quiet the
dawn holds
us at its pre-being
where: me, she , and i have
grown
our oldest
in the tissue light,
under sea green night
a dream blunt
in morning sky.

potters meat field gone

never in the ditch, the ribbon
reveils the mouth and
it
is empty,
i wanted more time, where
is it the
street
the linear path-
the want moderator
the trail wants to talk
now and it does not
it stays near things-
at the beginning of
doors, blue jays echo, the
forest as a jail
the family fails and revolves
again
the pipe is passed the
teenage basement
is replaced by the
clan by
the warfare anodyne the
killed mode of being
these streets
these streets
know what is real it is stones
under foot it is the rubble
ruined in
the wall of church in
the tin hub cap in the peddler pushing
the wound, the steel removed
the god of the street, of the road, of
this multiplicity is gone
the blade rips
the blue sky tears
the language flurries down inches
squalls out
on the vacant lake as
the fisher men die at home
warm in loves permanent bed,...

sweet belly one

grafted on the first
light
this heaviness does
not stop, does not lighten,
the simple violence of this
physical undoing parades down
my skull all day
like rain in the
sunniest hour
mouse traps popping-
death clicking through
the
night, through the day
the birth rate
runs rampant, hunters are
mad with liquor
trying to stay up right
shooting
coffee Irish whiskey, jack lights
they fire my brain through
its fish bowl
to mouth its broad emptiness
with in it
the swarm of blood,
issues
rivers to the lake
to the canons
better served by the holiest murder:
a fish cut- the feeble fed,
the derelict sun
mooning on and on loving like a cat
lapping milk, as the I creatures
drag on our apatites for days
and long days.

cunning no body removes

to spend one more
word across the page
to mouth over an echo
low to the ground, i
don't know, what is
the alley empty for
at the glowing hour,
what is the heart
empty for at the
hungry crosswalk, under
the significant
traffic light, why
learn one more phrase
why not beg with mute
desperate incantations
stooped over grits
stooped over oatmeal, lentils
over rice & beans
quietly masticating the
soil, in to soul, where
are the stories, the words-
where is the container for
the legumes, the seeds
that stalk up
the mist, and raise
new squash, spent in each
hope, the house of faith,
the body speaking writes
out the menu of the day
the earth made conscious
the bean, the knee, oneiric
& holy.

when the ribbon is cut, then untied

first slate gray light:
this day does not ask
for this
newness
it is
broken
with ice as
rain it
wants
forgiveness
and then
refuses it
long in the
blond morning hours
it is
formed as an
old shape, a stone, a
stream left cold
for
water has
worked its daily
toil there and
is there no more-
it is
the
landscape
that has always
been
it
holds my
heart
in its cool
depressions- it
holds my heart warm
in its
haunted
grieving air-
perpetual it
allows the hours
to fall here and there,
leaf scattered,
residency
of the vacant street-
waiting for breakfast noon
to unfurl
the promise first suspected
the promise in its eventual
renewal.

the joint undoes the thing blue rose

things to do, all
spirits combine in the
rocky hand to make
lists of things, so each
finger will know it is
not alone, working the
fine documentation
of this
being

roads are named,

so
they can be added to
the list that ascends
the grave-
stone, printed granite
against the honed knife-
Time,

rejoice

the
opus of the bent can
the rust melted off the
fender sun, so many
piled in the yard the
cars reach up to heaven
and ache to die again,
this
is
the quandary of the: traveler,

when to rest

when to go-
stop
to
feed
the pigeons,
stop to tie
up
your boat and speak
at the local talent show,
pray, pray, pray, and in
your closet feel the blood
cool in your
vein, what
else

luxuriate in a woman-

action, and evolution, the sweet
growth of
seduction, and then ...
the bones know this
possession from
dusted nothing to key excesses
and the walled
mornings destruction

coming back

to the middle
of the old town,
the traveler
sits or
saddles, talks
the winter
talk in spring, or
the
wolf pack forest, or
talks of the sea
and
only
when
it
rains,

enjoy the fascinations

of
company (?)- oh,
things to do, let the lazy
hand make
lists of
things to do

blue socks ride the ferry to moon.

18 knows the next line to be
said
out loud
the curve of woman bends
the eye to the ground,
so modeled after death, no
fear can ever ever enter,
the seasons want
specific loves,
of
snow fall of leaves-
gardens, tomatoes, beauties,
beaches, and fires
in
the heart of each one
like love but, unmoving
omni temporal
all here, the girl, the woman that
has bent the world to her knee, bends
as well, and leads in the
sectioning of a grapefruit,
in the translucent tangerine,
in the pear moored out
on the
frozen lake,
out by the boulder
dragged by
memories glacier
there
the air
sharp as crystals, in her
nose, and burns her skin blue
she sings, and signs
the birds their new melody, and
lets the roads forget,
lets the graves turn to
dust, and prints leaflets out
to the dead, and the
dead wait
with the dead, and the lions
and the brutal sun
of the friendless, and the forgotten
the golden seal is delivered by her
absence- she goes
to come back, and then follows,
paw pad,
man
and wraith impressions
to
this blue serenity,
and calls it
Niagara, or home, or thee
and enfolds
the compass of
the world, in her eyes gravity
stunning the wilderness silent
with in me.

thirsty ditch 3

coffee longs for the
curl of a sentence, the
laugh
of man made
ivory, of lost days
coffee longs
for
the
celebration,
for
the
blazed out
buildings after,
for teen
aged minds
frozen in the, long
long prose poem-
smoking
the last of the cigarettes,
the last of the scrapes
of
the
illicit blue
caps of seedy
adolescents
the
destroyer comes at
dawn
and even then the
beautiful people
allow nothing
to come -we want that-
we want
bricks of friends gnarled
by the fiber
of work, by the weave of heroes
by the confidence of every
copy
cat
artist and finally
the fingers twitch to know
every tin cup
now plastic
now paper, now
empty,
cool classic and
ultimately disposable.

not a judge of augur

1.

looking at
your letters
i thought
about
you
- traveling
i then thought,
dreams
must be
the map to work,
work is the
dream come true
the golden
axle
that
bends under its
own
weight-

2.

near a
cannery
plush
with
guts, a dance hall
of gills
reigns,
a cat
that
scrapes at the
moon-
the festival door,
waiting
on the bone shoot,
the
ghost leaver...

(2a.)

the
surf
pierced by the
sting
of
new new
night blue and
if a word was
purple
tonight
it would be filled
to
the
plastic edge with
recyclable
cans,
no paper,
pure aluminum,
a
blue so pure it is a sea
a swan a lake that
disappears
as it
perpetuates a basic map
of the land.