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.

Half the friends I had, where long, long dead

I have not forgotten time,
when the hands of the clock drag me under,
pulling me down to shopping carts and 55 gallon drums
looking up at a broken yoke sun, I know
the iron gate of time, so go and float
down the river w/ old friends, count the bodies
that wash up on the red shale banks and wait for
the currents to bend in to back eddies, an
endless circling of dawn's joy like new born minutes
you count the cloudless sky a blessing
still you move down the folded water
toward the lake, toward the sea, with the
intuition of salt, as a sleepy mind begins
wondering how you got so far out, now
that the mile marker is in sight, it is a
bleak suggestion that to return, the swim will be a fight
find some thing, find it because it is lost and the carp will
eat it and grow monstrous w/ scales made of copper
and eyes of fire that see the globe of time descending
(the thing lost to every one on this river)
and when you come to the rocky beach at last,
the fish that had the golden ball will be only
bones buried in sand.

Mornings wet in the sun

I want to know the
the mystery of asphalt
the decayed ghosts of buildings in my city
i am baptized daily in
the mist of the Falls
but sin envy at every
corner, all the Japanese
and Koreans seeing my
streets and water
for the first time through
windows of buses dispatched
from Toronto, I know they are
happy to smile in front
of the rainbow, a snapshot
freezing the linear madness
of time slipping away from us all
but they do not know the secret
migration of the unhappy
and broken away to Atlanta
or some where Maryland, leaving
an emptiness that strides each
heart beat, we are a casino wager here
bad choices with money and yet hope
keeps the city thriving
with motion, a man
pushing a shopping cart
filled with empties, a woman
begging cigarettes and change
we need something to fill
the pot holes where our hearts where
and we find it and we do it
finally with or with out
the world that comes
to see water fall
167 feet to the rocks below, as
our lives rise and sink like the water
thought turbines lighting
cities and people else where not knowing
what the light switch means as
it goes on and finally off.