The picture above was taken at the Alm's House
Cemetery at Gettysburg in 2002, and represents
for me, the reason we write at all--so our bones
do not some day lie beneath a stone upon which
nothing can be written except the way we died.
It Waits
In the face of delight,
it is there.
In the soft carpet
under feet, in the high cloud
perfect and unreachable, it reigns in dark edges
and in thunder. Inside of an hour, a minute, in every
ebb and flow, in utterance
and exhalation,
wondering where to go
to find safety from the ballpeen
pigslaughter
second: the crack and mallet of the Almighty,
poised and ready to come down, hung on a spiderweb
of randomness. You may
run, but there is nowhere else
save into it,
so pray the head
is ready for the blow. There is no time
for human foolishness: there's one shot,
.......only this one
...is the last to make it
.........reverenced.
Grackle
Tunneling
under- tunneling
through the hard stuff,
wear a
miner's hat.
By that, I mean
make sure you have a way of seeing you
through, when you
have to go in deep. Reach down
beyond your boots
to find the roots of it.
And be aware
the light at the end
of the tunnel
is probably
just a mica chip embedded
in the cave wall,
and reflected from the little lamp
of your hope.
There are miles
yet, snaking the least, before you find
the very worst. Life doesn't
capsize
overnight-- those things
take time.
I heard this
from a crow. Those birds are
wise.
Inured
It's simply this:
despite the words
that trail as soft as
willows
on my skin,
they are the cloud shapes
changing,
trailing bloody entrails
like the trunks
hung down from funnel clouds
before they take
the house.
Bolt Out Of Blue
Lightning strike
of adrenalin when I
look into sink and unexpectedly,
there's a
shiny millipede,
prehistoric
looking, Pleistocene and frightening.
See how flimsy
are our ties
to anything safe-
and how a bug, a simple bug
can lay waste to what is tidy, what is
known. What tricks then
fate could feed us, skipping stones across
the untouched, serene
surface of a day, when anything
black and horrible can happen
all at once. Steel up
the spine- another one
is coming.
Death's Geometry
Parallel lines
will never
come together, but day by day
out of the corner of my eye,
I'm seeing ghosts
right out
in sunshine. Hiding not
and walking
in the opposite
direction.
I can see them, but when
I turn my head
they're never there,
what in peripheral vision marched
as solidly as posts,
are merely thoughts:
a bit of longing tagged to doubt.
But I've a feeling
if I follow,
someday we'll come
together. Meet
in coldness-
meet
the moon up face
to face.
Another Twenty Four
The days
pass like sighs. And what are
sighs, but
intake of a wish and a catch
of longing. Some more ragged
than the ones before, yet both
are breath,
and breath is open,
empty air, hoping for a raft of laughter
to sail away
a while. Or perhaps a sprig of mint,
a stick of cinnamon sucked
or a kiss to make the lips
less lonely: intake of time
escaping out again, and waiting
for a tidepool come to
play
in.
I sit each night
at the sea wall. On these rocks,
I hear no Sirens singing, except
far off in someone else's
dream of oceans
there be
duets.
I cannot
see them- I am blind
as well as deaf and have no
password,
yet I know
for sure that somewhere,
there are voices.
Wake Up Call In Amityville
Ice cold
anger
up the spine
jumps over the line
from ice
to burning turpentine.
The clock is fixed on 3:15
each time the bad dream wakes him,
just like
"Who is dead in the in the Whitehouse?"
Lincoln said, and always
bullets
answer; a dark recognizance
is what I fear most too: if it will be, be
swiftly- no,
I do not mean it-
.............
Be not
.....
at all.
Too Much
Something happens
like Pearl- the young reporter, butchered
on camera; there's a ragged line of
shrieking
murder. The world goes end over
end,
loamy, rich
and dark between the toes, warm
from the sun, and now and then a sharper piece
shocks the heel
or arch
by way of saying
real, I'm real-- this ground,
this day, this breath and sweat-
these cornucopial feelings all be
borne into another day, where
miracles, and God
somewhere,
is heaving his
great shoulders,
crying too.
Defects
The structure
looks the same:
smooth face, solid
seeming, it's only in wind
you'll see the sway
there is the
webbing
of a thousand threadlike
cracks
the crook
of a bone hook finger
beckoning,
that gives you to know
....
a ghost
has already come
......
for the
tumbledown
..
house.
Random
It's an
ambidextrous god
who gives with one hand,
takes
with the other.
Butterfly
in the right fist
slowly opening,
black widow in the left,
curled up and shiny like an onyx
from an
idol's eye.
The clever legs
are eight: identical
messages from him
on high,
from whom all madness
flows.
Herald
Blip
on the weather
screen, could be
a storm, a sunspot, or a warm mass
of air--radar
is like that.
Emotions, too- you feel
the ghost of a thing, an artifact-
a bat
right out of hell.
It comes as a blip on a map
inside the stomach chamber, choo
chooing on a track made out of memory
and intuition,
fibers of your fears.
You hear the beast before you see it
storming in, big Number Nine
and know that, this time,
it's a Lulu..
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