Foolish.

The scull is hopeless: It hews at the jade hills of seawater, is

Kissed by the white girls of light--as indifferent

To the oarsman's wishes as it is

To the calculations of his sculpted path.

Each might sing with her voice. Each, like a faint, cleaned-out shell--

Like a beach-foisted whale might, after her sublime fact,

Be joked about.

The bottle on the shore.

The sea is built on jerked-around

Risks and pulsations.

I hope what you love has come ashore

And that your threats to go without have

Turned orange with natural humility.

The cobblestone road.

Lush urgency carries us on the path,

Giving us occasion to pity those whom we encounter in our light,

Then pass.

But in truth, it is neither haste that has brought us this far, nor sluggish

-ness on the others' parts. Relinquish to Nothing:

This road is--

How do I say this!?

--sometimes shorter and sometimes longer. These cobblestones have

Had occasion to glow with fire and be unquenchable.

Regardless of those dear and foreign passers-by the walk is sacred.

On youth observed in summer, age 35.

Below the breeze of envy notwithstanding,

This livid season blooms in the custody of our senses.

Away from the greazy scorch of our work the young greet the Earth

With marvelous insults.

A mist pleases the imagination with its feathery shade and days

Shoot leaves between

Their dreaming fingers--

Inches above the dirt. We have always relied on the grace of youth,

While those sleepwalking hands spring open to clench a

Tuft of their sun.

July.

Each sense tells the soul its purpose. The tongue tastes

Everything. And the eye sees everything.

What land have we not fallen down upon?

What energy has not already forced itself inside

And blinded us?

The policy of blood.

Take this ordinary heart, for instance.

It is unattractive and beats with uncanny precision.

It navigates in between thin weeds, and hovers in me

On the toughest soil.

Nothing can grow.

So secretly is a moving thing brought to life, learning lessons

As it dies.

The heart and the weeds: tough, tough.

The silences.

The difficulty in loss tends to lie less in the silences of a voice as it does in the energetic reliance we foster for the breath that brought our hearts to life.

A lie.

Invention spills from the lips of a singer.

Each crease is like a cipher.

The first, and the next and the rest--

Neatly creases.

To believe in any one is to love the purse of everything.

The origin of a ballad.

Loyal ears were cupped that way biologically--they foundered to hear it--

A whirr grew out of a bellowing.

The cause was pitifully faint, said by

Wings no less brittle than they were certain.

It was a song owing to the marbling sky,

Or if more discernible it might've proven, conversely,

The sky owed itself to it.

I must encourage us.

What a sound you leave--it's almost nothing,

like congruent dashes in rainy mud

Or pawed ink--kissing wet paper,

Running from the volume language.

What a sound you--You, pull from your slop

Your sleeve.

The land, indeed, is better hid--

Graffitied. The rain is a common excuse for

It's charming slashes--

And your tongue--reticent as it is,

commands shivering asses.

Hectic schedule.

Busily,

As if writing poems about being alive--

The launchers have waited, their hands stained with

The strawberries of dragging ropes, blistered and dry.

With might and no minute to spare they line the

Wood

And let go.

July poem.

The superb, peeled orange is
Part of a team of

Things

Similar to the Sun.

Provenance.

Dirt is specific,

And lies gaily distinguished from waste.

Piles, bleachcrippled piles

of the former lack the purpose of planning.

The crescent light ought choose one,

But Which?