the holding of light

you know the pool in love canal,
my now girlfriend, the one that loves
Jesus, the one that might be the one
says over the phone, i am not on the phone
but answer, yes i know it-
yes i know
it holds deep blue benzine and
bubbles of pure noon
each a container of sun, and I know
that it has recorded
my youth, silent
as a spring of hard iron
water constant as limestone
time runs to it
like my fathers love, a combination
of duty and anger,
the quiet maleness of doing
the manifesting disfigured intention
a rage of convention, defines civilization
digging holes and filling them in
finding purpose in the action -alone
the auto drive to work
the cage a woman becomes,
after she calms the sea, gray with
anger so deep
it is white
and she
provides earnest flying lessons
to those birds of desire
the ego like a window on fire with
mornings to come, and a finality
in the mourning of moving,
hands and dwellings
first one home then two- 4 houses
split parceled out like seconds swept
clean by a hand counting the
minutes we
dwell in becoming whole
recordable truths, a pool dug
in dirty soil, soiled dirt
its is a simple list of the
sacrilege, my parents
grocery list become confused
in the milk and eggs of everyday, as
we would shoehorn church in to the yawn of
Sunday morning, my spirit longing for
the tragic, the blood i knew was true
now though i know the water
is cold, and the chlorine is
strong as white stones, and the only
poisons swimming in the deep end
is the past that threatens to stop me
and pull me down past the embers of midday
fracturing time and propriety
where i and he and this 91st street pool become
one thing, and just the memory
is whispered, like a gust, a God
through the leaves of an aspen tree.

buried in the calendar

For me alone
God tugged a dark text
from the lemon light page sour with
morning sun, a ghost called to
dance in the melody of memory,
copper flavored as a mollusk, and
grown even, heavily biologic with
rage to haunt the steal
blade ego me, sideways through the
blank street of my marigold and mercury
sunrise machine,
Riding the clocks fastest hand
gravity’s thought astounds as
suddenly as a goldfish, curling faith
to cream, and weaving in the
willow trees that limn each
separate memory, in blue & pebble gray
along each orange scale burns the
difference, pronounced as night &
day
a wobble of axis, the word made into
rock, clay, dust and abandoned where
the glued stones shine by the
slices of light that accumulate into
a life long railroad, traveling east-west
a fixture of spirit, silver as a
gun delivers to me daily
new lead, dull madness inscribed
in my mind
forever two lines, running alone
together, a darkness of wood and stone
between us too, a million rails burning
sun untouched for a life, but for
the antler of shade where deer
crisp through September apples
I ache at all this gleaming gold
pressed up against a window pane
my mind winding
hair into sweaters and scraps of sweaters
into quilts, a feminine finger points
me north, a signal of that cold
freedom, courting the moon in winter
night, snow & space colliding in my eyes
a colorless world, metal lie
and before me now grows hands of
blue sky after its slumber, drunk and abandoned
love keeps me quarreling, pull at the wheel of
life, pouring out glass after glass, of this
electric thing, from some thing that seems
to be a great decanter of late December.

toes in the depth of cold shadow

you know the pool in love canal,
my now girlfriend, the one that loves
Jesus, the one that might be the one
says over the phone, i am not on the phone
but answer, yes i know it-
yes i know
it holds deep blue benzine and
bubbles of pure noon
each a container of sun, and I know
that it has recorded
my youth, silent
as a spring of hard iron
water constant as limestone
time runs to it
like my fathers love, a combination
of duty and anger,
the quiet maleness of doing
the manifesting disfigured intention
a rage of convention, defines civilization
digging holes and filling them in
finding purpose in the action -alone
the auto drive to work
the cage a woman becomes,
after she calms the sea, gray with
anger so deep
it is white
and she
provides earnest flying lessons
to those birds of desire
the ego like a window on fire with
mornings to come, and a finality
in the mourning of moving,
hands and dwellings
first one home then two- 4 houses
split parceled out like seconds swept
clean by a hand counting the
minutes we
dwell in becoming whole
recordable truths, a pool dug
in dirty soil, soiled dirt
its is a simple list of the
sacrilege, my parents
grocery list become confused
in the milk and eggs of everyday, as
we would shoehorn church in to the yawn of
Sunday morning, my spirit longing for
the tragic, the blood i knew was true
now though i know the water
is cold, and the chlorine is
strong as white stones, and the only
poisons swimming in the deep end
is the past that threatens to stop me
and pull me down past the embers of midday
fracturing time and propriety
where i and he and this 91st street pool become
one thing, and just the memory
is whispered, like a gust, a God
through the leaves of an aspen tree.

there, growers in lean times.

pale with grief
I ride the sun in to
the flat black rooftops of the
abandoned and boarded
hold outs, the
solider skeletons of
the immaculate desert- downtown
the last daisy flying
up in solitary wind
my widening eyes
empty burning a
crescent moon in the blue
lung sky I exhale a
pattern of street lights
solemn and begging, bums, food almost
never,
wanters- but mostly cash, a story a
lie- if not one cigarette, two
a quarter,
some how 33 cents seems to be a scam,
too
the unbelievable made true
by urgency, panic, desperation glue
to hold their brass words up against the
shredded sun, telling it to children too
softy though
because it is so quiet now
in my city
that
the mice wail, and gather
under its purple hour
to call her home,
Midnight, Midnight, And she comes like a wife.

granted for you in stone & out

where sand is gravity
a baltimore
oriole
reminds me in number
that it is the birds, that limn each
line of poetry
further away- husking the
silk, and refining the poor,
out
of their mouths gold is dropping, and the
secret bubble is (a cupboard that is wrinkled blued
as a gun, and draining)
busting in side of the
wind, the last carriage of meaning
rests on each (remember the shopping cart of
books and the distant man...pointing at the rain)
wave (the riddle)a sort of killing, a fin
descending, the trophy of life,
an elaborate thing to say, (in gesture and gray)
I rest
when the
clock strikes ten
and cement
the dour corners
down, and
look, I see the end the end that is not
coming, what (posit, each number thoughtfully,
and empty to the night, the
other name for red, so cool)
gratitude we will
have- everyone (green and through----->)(yellow)
looking back, remembering the
possibility of extinction.

the haunch of venison is hung high; our place of honor and thigh

this evening is the last
i will know, i have been extinct before,
and am i old now,
as the trees, as the moon
a violent clown sleeping and now
the question rings, like a dark telephone,
what is it now that i know, can i sense this thing-less thing,
shape a word around it and call it nothing- i know and
do not know, the moon, violent and laughed at,
drunk now and sleeping has been what i call
my heart, it twists on the river stationary, waiting
for some celestial fall
to bring a peaceful rise and maybe tomorrow it will occupy
the same sky as the sun, and lose its glow.

Mirror, ink and rabbit glue.

i feel like death is near, not
the calm coin, Chinese
and a century worn out
in my hand ,
the
mind
that holds,
I know it as it
prowls
the handle
of my kitchen knife
the carrot a wrist, the killer
outside
garrote
with
in
twisting my heart tight
to breaking- fatal as love
rigid as a glass,
vibrating an unseen train traveling
with man and strange man
after stranger, like daffodils
a green that aspires for nothing but
hope strange men, and man hope
that
the bar car opens, before, the
trip brings them all through the silhouette
of the last town
before the diesel locomotive eventually
disappears in to some
weedy plain
or minor hill.