To calm the sphere through which the train still barrels on at reckless speed, this Space continues to insist on her arrival, as gossamer vapor to swaddle Time.
ayah
yet here
Category: poetry
celestial bodies
uncertain orbit
Given enough practice, a body
will adapt to almost anything.
What follows adaptation are
impressions filtered through
tether by which body learns
to disconnect.
Notice the intensity & velocity
of spin, point being to propel
other bodies into orbit around
that central heat.
The quiet was brief
&
when done, she thought:
Here come lamentations,
returning.
a reading
on a Sunday afternoon
versions
of vegetal being
I still know nothing
but consider the heart
as flower, as door;
flower as carrier
from earth to sky;
each stem a work
in translation,
rooted in an original
story, evolving, the
heart of which,
branching into
constant revision,
continues to echo:
this is how,
becoming.
astral missives
between elsewhere
Where to, next? but the boatman will not tell.
Only leap, he says, between the boats
as we sail in the space between channels,
coursing code of signals woven in these waters,
currents of carpet filigreed with figures
of vegetal dream, scented with musk
of mane and canine teeth, tail and tender
breath of newborn skin; down of butterfly
catching red of griffin’s eye, shouting call back!
against flicker of torches painting membrane
of cave wall; trembling hand over womb,
magnetic storm lunges us into the slipstream
of tongues after Babel’s last breath and look
another shouts, look! We are arriving! now.
regard
and the measure of art
Anything made in this space can neither reflect or embody the life it leans into, but may at best assemble images as instruments with voices of the dead, their players. Unknown concerts happen all the time, keeping time with each tree falling unheard in the distant forest. Now in the shaded alleyway, now at the bus stop, in the basement, the interior of an economy car in a strip mall parking lot. Is it that we cannot help ourselves, making what would call them out? It seems more likely that we would be paved easily enough by asphalt, by overwork, hunger, stress––and forget. I suspect it is the dead who can’t help themselves, reaching back to touch what lives the way we might have touched old photographs in another time, when there seemed more of it. To recollect by offering back the longing notes of these images, their edges sharpened to cut whatever they touch, to make it stranger, as a reminder: you do not know what this is. You do not know what you are.
reading
signs in a year of strange weather
Eventually a road sign may tell you,
here is where it ends. You watch for it,
a reason for the spin to stop––driving
without destination just to get out
the freeze in the cooler packed before
dawn.
Bare back beneath shower spray,
tender beneath hands a bare hope
suffusing talk of what will
come when the numbers
hit, when one day
waiting––a future makes sense
like renovation blueprints
in home restoration shows
following mouse droppings
and mildew to magnificent views
––of the lake, the trampoline,
the long yard, the car, fire pit.
Circle us. No more staring
at the map
like it will explain how
to go from wet wood to flame
hot enough to roast wedding pig.
No more extra shots
of gas station caffeine, extra sweet
––first hit of a story where it all works
out in the end.
No more pretending interest
in craps table logic of six and eight;
fish and bait, how bass come
for worms if you grow them;
no more growing worms in yards
as food for fish approaching feasts
here where the next meal
is so much closer now
to the last.
what waits in waste
notes on progress
What intent
will steal the word
in service of machine?
What essence, baptized by iron
fist, can never reach itself?
Only destruction, and its tools
once animated with vital force
by mechanized congregations
have ways of running out
of hand.
For consolation, only
conquest of accomplishment
in perpetual precarity, seeking
perpetual next.
Here, before
Response, waiting
Speak to me from inside words
of the verse born to bloom before
it dies. I want to hear the fullness
of that nothing.
From the Book of Survival
To hold the gaze
When they came for the silence of our sacred
hiding weapons behind badges, the guards
by way of greeting, shouted Speed! planting flags
in the flesh of our flesh
When I passed, I saw where you had waited
beneath those windows, hunted bodies, and our light
along those points of fracture where it shattered
before cracks from our seeming solids in the dark
went –––where everywhere we look
there we are in pieces––
Palms behind us, trembling–––shadows across carpet
past our feet and the racket of the voices absorbing
those parties of projections, leaking to and from.
And after the cries stopped, we held our gaze.
***
Adapted from Flight Songs (2024, Finishing Line Press)