To Whom It May Concern Again it is coming of age, blown open blossom, turn key operators and survivors, coming up for air twice. Yet forty or fifty are burned alive, forty or fifty are buried, forty or fifty become lost scrambling up the hill to check. When the machines start to stop at zero, replacing the hums with great silence filled and fitted by one huge conversation between nature and her guests: promises and facts, big success stories, all of it gravity gravity gravity.

The Mummeries Not sure where the sound comes from although it is very early to hear such motors and moving. Might be out back, further away like a fighter jet at noon in the parking lot of the group home where disabled adults act like babies. Perhaps that is the answer, yet poems are just formulas.

Tallow Who cares about the Gods anymore in brown fires between us, latent fat quick to learn temperature. A birthing begins and ends in Julian, in the quiet there. Here is where the sadness began, here is the corpse of happiness or at least the memory, a sweet aftertaste of mix-matched wax and bones.

Here is where to keep
a white sky between six and seven.
Here is the place to store
the special parts and quiet pieces.

Crossing

For a week the blood
smear as deer had
dragged herself
on broken legs to a side
of the road and lay there
like a hand swipes
a frozen window.

There she watched the last cars
and shooting stars, took a final hit
off the moon where no Injuns
ever stood either and she promised.


Praiseworthy Appearance

On Friday night
the fox speeds up
to make it -
away from the town
full of light and actions.
The way he smooths on by -
a little train of feet, film
made of fur and tail
in one brilliant line.
Left to right as if
a switch lifted and the chute
opened through which
he aimed and shot.

Not My Share

We slip into the parody
of nations, ball parks in back
streets easy to the strip
tease, all blank tomorrows
between the river Jordan's
shoulder and fake smile
strangled in the birth
canal with umbilical cord.
The stick bugs of Pharaoh
in vast directions of flight
become a pre-emption
of parable in haute
twisting, haute history,
haute foreign policy -
all so haute in a beautiful
dying, a better wicked
and unhinged, stewards
of linearity. A voice
erupts into the norm psychosis,
a blatant not so obvious
flow of pingpong glamour -
a steadfast parade of boredom.

The Way Back

Each day the line opens
into voices complains
a secrecy imagined by hemispheres
between contingencies.
The last time our mountain
rose up between various histories,
a road and nod between
interested parties, the way
the sun held our attention
before dark, this little bit
more it gives is breathtaking.
No one remembers anymore
us there in the shadow,
nobody can recall our faces
relaxed and grown weary
is a place intended
for laughter, for glances.

The Obviate

The problem is, as one might guess
that there are no more questions
to ask, no more fights to pick.
There is so much more waiting
to do and although it is pleasant
to realize that realization
is better late than never or early,
it is still saturated with our agony.
One of the finer features happens
to be the anticipation of astonishment,
the first few flinches to the monumental
throes of horror and gasping,
those of the siblings and left hand
being the hardest to hear and worst
to contemplate now. Should we have
tried harder to dislodge insolence,
forced them to see the difference
between the accidental right
and this pitiable no nonsense certitude?
Would it have mattered at all
to inform them of our own
perserverent sadness caused by
their lukewarm guesses
as they ignored our pleas,
the truth that lurked behind
their gazes? How many sins
sped between handshakes and gum?
Which day might have been the right one?

By The Way

Too late a version came close
to recognizing the path
between the decades, you
there absconding with the three
best arbitrations and seven
time-tested suggestions, leave
if you will to do no harm,
build no excess in the examples
with your short and outrageous sleep.
Starlings tucked into the easterly
props are props themselves
all the way from nest to flit,
a wrestle with national slaves
as sacred thoughts stream and gather.
Posterity wears our clothes backward,
while books struggle to cash-in.
An awareness of you in the layers
concocts a new revelation,
tight old secrets with lop-sided hats
hold up in transit
between ticket fare and gas station,
play rummy with old dolls and dragons
in the corner behind the hat stand.
The yawns knock over whole weeks at a time
while eons shuffle between our dust and ankles.

Dirt to Dirt

In the mean bag of your eyes,
in the tragic dent of your human
ears: the small sounds and lights
scatter ash in similes of sand,
how tiny are the explosions
in such strategies as days!
A pinpoint of diamond light
to find our wedded fingers
wrapped around an army
of enemy and kin,
the entire damned breed.
A production of paintings
truly on the head of a pin
amid cloaks of tar emit
a steady shower of moisture
and dust, a batch of mud
cakes and mystery. Peri-
winkles of time
in the lyrical ethos of myco-
bacterium that rescues
literature one last time
as it floats and flirts
in the four o'clock sun.
Between skin and salvation,
the universe erupts
again and again
on as much as a breath as a gust.

By The Way

Too late a version came close
to recognizing the path
between the decades, you
there absconding with the three
best arbitrations and seven
time-tested suggestions, leave
if you will to do no harm,
build no excess in the examples.
Starlings tucked into the easterly
props are props themselves
all the way from nest to flit,
a wrestle with national slaves
as sacred thoughts stream and gather.
Posterity wears our clothes backward,
while books struggle to cash-in.
An awareness of you in the layers
concocts brand new revelations,
tight old secrets held up in transit
between ticket fare and gas station
play rummy with old dolls and dragons
in the corner behind the hat stand.