Migration of the Snows and Blues

The silage field empty
of nothing but a honking island
of a thousand snow geese,
I stop for what could be mine.

Overhead hundreds circle,
settle undetectably, safe,
swiftly emptying the sky
of white and grey skeins.

I wait for everyone to land,
walk beauty-hungry and wingless
toward them. Two or three sense
my strange approach and drift.

I step slowly, broad shouldered
with great love and homeless desire
over corn-rich clods to see the island lift.
Today, after you, this is my only power.

Cradling the flock’s racing hearts,
a sparkling surge of countless, prudent v’s
sings one high pitch of blue solidarity
slanted for miles and miles away from me.

2012

On the Upbeat

The water of the sound of and in you
spreads light in salted rivulets

from highlit crown to flashing
clavicle and liquid notch

through—gasp—
your heart’s black springs

past dampened cotton collar lip
where goblet eyes and palms

can only guess the gleam
of gravity’s clandestine lines.

This joy can never fully know.
But O! we clutch and sing,

evaporate and brim
our thinning clothes.

2012

Photosynthesis

However scintillant,
One grows tired
Of suffering.

Trees grow tired
Of the fuss of leaves.

Even in the dead of winter,
We cling to final rattles.

Stark, just drop
What no longer
Gathers light.

Light already gathers us.

2012

Picking Up Sons in a Parking Lot

Misunderstanding
the concept “kennel,”
a boy cries quietly
into tissue for three hours
in a car when he believes
his parents are planning
to sell his dog
before holiday travel.
He won’t tell his mother
who pleads gently
to know the reason for his tears.
She makes guesses.
He shakes his head.
She wonders if he is protecting her
from her own imperfection.
She is sure it is her fault.
The divorce wound,
the one he will hide
the way she has hidden hers
for thirty-five years.
Perhaps he doesn’t tell her
he cries for the dog
because he has already
learned that sometimes,
no matter how he feels,
events, decisions and love
are out of his realm of control
and it is no use discussing them.

2012

Doghouse Bass Blues

Still thrumming spine,
a lone bass string
dark humming one
who plucked and left
a stolen peck
on smiling teeth,

from scroll would span
that fretless neck,
past high bridged
wooden abdomen,
and within hollow
sound holes, ring.

2012

For What We Take

I put you in a floured, plastic bag
and then a flimsy, deep aluminum pan
since eating winged things
and quickly tossing the mess that’s left
is how we Americans give thanks.

2012

The Techno-Optimist’s Love Song

If technology advances
exponentially, and my body,
your body, these oscillating,

electrochemically, aesthetically driven
love machines have self-organized
this complexly—quantum flesh

reaching through each other
virally, evolving memetically,
transcending ideational duality

and the tragedies of biolinearity,
then let us spend a raptured life
together in a year, a month,

three days, a night, a song.
Download your honeyed app,
and, yes, your starkest one,

right here. Spread your thumbs
until my deepest windows shine.
Step in. The beginning is always near.

2012

~with thanks to Jason Silva

The Dangers of Adoring Living Poets

Screw together wobbly word stairs I have not yet climbed.

Marry us like bleeding fingers and fenceless lands.

Sink into the great gut and wait for me, an ear.

Stir my hardened words with long, calloused hands.

Give it to me straight, one rough character at a time.

Misspell yourself upon my belly’s sand.

Douse the torch and dance with me until a sphinx appears.

2012

Existential Risks in a World of Immortals

1
No lines rewriting the story
of your face is a risk I wouldn’t take.

2
How would your story change if your body didn’t?

3
I wouldn’t know the soft way you smile
in the days before you die.

4
Hero, if there were no risk of death,
would the prize mean as much?

5
Enough empty promises!
Eternal Life would finally call Eternal Love’s bluff.

2012

Red Bead

It is never safe to assume
karma is through with you,

that all you have done
and do has been released

like a necklace spilling
beads across a floor.

You gather the beads,
re-string them while you sleep,

always a familiar,
pleasing pattern.

Oh, to sleep! This sleeping
storm that blows games through.

One game, you let it go.
You let it go. One name.

It rolls just within reach,
the red bead.

Again and again,
you have slipped

it in your mouth
between cheek and teeth,

your foray tongue
a muscled dream.

Try to spit it out,
the dead seed.

Wishing is not the same
as living or reprieve.

2012