Cassini

I painted the walls with my mistakes,
Because when the sun rose it did so in the color of my mistakes.

The ray tore the yard, and the tree bled poison
--while the robin skipped the song.

Spring extended the frost because the line to see the frozen bodies
circled the block.


In the mirror I waited for evening to fall,
For, I don't know, a shadow or a shape,
An itchy rag to wear, a lovely loop,
A swing.

The sun fell and everybody's clothes appeared to match.

But my eyes were undiscovered planets.

The Bay of Edgars

When it gets bad there must be some
Creature sanctuary to which they can punch out and flee.

Whether a cat, or an ape, or a human,

Bothered inside by a problem drawing in all three.

It must have an owner, no matter what.
A master to change the litter, shoo

The western poacher, or indoctrinate
The applebee.

It must do nothing else, necessarily--
Least of all for me:

A blood hose feeds the navy river by sunset
Bankside grass and
Water grass,

A vos souhaits...

Harry Dean Stanton.

When the Earth was young every
Time slot was available.

You could part the waters of a party, asking
Which came first,

The chicken or the egg

Or feeling tired.

It was before the allegory of the cave and
People believed faithfully

What they saw in windows.

A kid's marble dinosaur was propped up
On the ledge of a Shoney's

And either dusk or the doppler steeple traffic
Filled the old inside with
The light of damnable earnest nausea.

And that, and not magic,
Is how we got home at night.

Hosannah.

Within the emptiness of a knot
Lies a view of the ocean.

How many silly, psychological dreams have I tolerated over the years

For a look?

The aviary.

All the rest was made of something less durable--so, naturally, it was all unreliable.

Never pass inspection. Never be
Recommended.

To duck beneath the eaves
Meant to cower from the world, from its
Bucklings of rain, its unlucky droppings, And whatever other lazy debris.

To look up

At all involved the fuss of protection--Sunglasses,
A helmet, a will. Pathetic.

Among the rest, where do we put the birds? Is there a dormant theatre, called. Themselves, where

The unprepresented things can be kept midflight, and
Dried, and managed?

It's tedious to think about, but what quick Scaffold design to erect-- where will they Eat, or mate? After all they must.

All of this, of course, surrounds the Exception.
We have always locked arms in
Emergencies.

We can relax in that unmusical air, and talk about the things we are sure we do Not understand.

Silence.

It clatters with mockery,
And refuses to budge.

Skidding in place, hogging the
Grass in the pit of its hostile

Blue hand.

Not an inch to either side, nor farther
Away will it go.

But draw it closer and it glides on a wave
Of sweetest humidity,

So quickly as to be misremembered,
Greeting you in an unfamiliar tongue.

It's now only a matter of time--we used to
Parse the time we had left in negotiable abstractions--months, full seasons.

Parts of your body fell from heaven
In the form of rain.

The Voeghtly.

The old icon statuary in the Voeghtly
is so worn away, to the point that features--and
for that matter, the corners of the letters
Commemorating them

Are nearly all lost.  Pocks and lichens
In between the important stuff
Have taken over, and

If you get close enough you can follow
A tableau--the past, the near future,
A grist of nudity, sleep, and forgiving mist.

Dust is where dust is
Albeit forceful in lording light and
Thin staffed for the disaster of dying.

One sculpted youngster stands atop an ash-color pedestal,
Lit by what fire he must have seen--

The sun or the neighborhood, after dark,
Til an adherent finally takes him up in his curatorial
Arms,

Saves him.

You will be our King Tut, he says to the boy. And I will make sure you never
Have to remember any of this why you yourself and others are remembered.

So, you want to paint a picture.

It is unfair white in a world of counting.
And so it is a world of unending disagreement. Petty eyes

Study petty fingers, flipping through
Stacks of stuff.

So, you want to be a collector.

Start with a cottage in the woods--
How many trees did it take, and which way
Does it face?

Is it shy to the light?
Or is it devoted to the sleepboat
Moonlake?

It was important to someone, once.

Does it wait in a predicament of beauty,
Half-built?

Now you count it out. The building blocks
And orphaned stumps, the yard made of what is near in flattened lumps.

The bottom line seems to not matter as it is
On its foundation, in its original
Habitat.  But when you carry it on your back

The oldest ounces of nowhere gain weight, and tend to matter.

Voyager.

EMI wouldn't grant permission to
NASA to use "Here Comes the Sun", by
The Beatles. It would have been one in
A variety of sound documents--
HELLO in an array of languages, and Chucky Berry--a
Muslim call to prayer.

The vessel went into space without it.

But the Sky is magnetic. And so what gets
A yes as it rises will always get a yes.
But--and here's the thing, what gets a no
Eventually gets a yes, too. It must rise Longer.

So when permission was denied, the stars Swelled as the sash of the brooding Peacefulness that, yes, is;
And that, no, cannot yet be imagined.

But yes.

The first
Voyager went as far as the hashmark

Where the sun routinely cracks. Not the
Beatles, lifted up, but some forebear, some  

Beating Mozart took-
From his numb, feline
Fingers, to the windows that shook with the

Earth singing.

The red brook

The bach was unsophisticated,
And pretty small.

Listeners came in ignorant of what it meant in translation, knotted shoelaces at the length of simple expression...

They could distinguish the simplicity of their own slang language

From distant counterpoints--But even then they left the currency exchange math to chance. And the disquietude it produced made them visibly uneasy. The water was free.

One, or maybe a few stripped the cone of the dusty fuzz

One of them got too drunk to stand up straight, saying,"Now, let's fill the slate to Heaven--and cook every dish we know for the Sun King."

The moppet.

(The cats must have lived just fine, separately, while I was gone.)

God's Dad didn't hover because he didn't really care.  But once, he said, what is that.  What is that supposed to be??

The son sat hunched on a piece of graph paper, whose adornment was a Twomblyesque starbuck that were it any other occasion, it could be identified like that, and just that.

CHRYSANTHEMUM.

How's that supposed to work?

The son bunched irritably at the shoulders, as if about to rote recite Latin for an ignorant parent who might know he hadn't studied, but all the same couldn't read Ovid for himself.



The flower, he said, finally, Dendranthema, pictured being led into the western world, by way of Russia, disguised as forlorn moppets, their faces hidden,

Sun in their hair--and eventually a new world.

But the dad just grumbled.  When I first saw one I--and have no other reason but this to remember--caught sight at a roadside stop on the turnpike.  I was pretty young.  Everybody else was eating or helping with the oil change on the long vacation drive.  I went to pick it when it vanished.  And with it everything vanished.

We drove across Dauphin County and I could smell the bracing choir of things.  I was carried into a local hospital where my parents were eventually told it was just an unexplainable accident, which even then seemed flimsy to take science out while resolving the greater innocence.

In the room where I woke up a pastor from a nearby church had heard, and left me a tiny potted cactus as a gift.  And a few comic books slouched in the window sill like an old broom.  One, I remember was a Spiderman. While the other followed a superhero who had no face.  But it wasn't really that he had no face.  It was simply that, in his tact, and plied by his ardor, he made it so that no one could remember him.

The dad said, making a grand connection, Do you remember when you we young--almost too young to remember, I'm afraid, and we sat by the window listening to music. I do.  I remember.  Ernest Chausson's garden of lilacs? Moonglow, the son said, with the picture eventually taking shape beneath his hand.  By Artie Shaw.