The flood.

The poor river endures every gauntlet punch when it passes.

Pity the slippery lips trying to talk, brown running over with rain.

Age guides the shrinking vein to shove

Where growth is unlikely--

And to grow.

The aliases of nature.

The grapes like the ones you carry,

Not to prove anything is perfect,

Not for color--

See them go to

Waste.

Next season you will get that perfume in you,

Salivating and picking up the

Omen:

They suffer and their names change.

Holy, holy.

There is wrong in the lead that colors the veins.

And in the air we breath are choking roses

Blossomed.

Take it all in, as infinitely and sumptuous as they seem.

The this.

Isn't the harshness of the mechanical silence

Of my dear

So dissimilar to

The mechanical silence?

Amid the noises.

The prismatic series of less than you

Is less likely to stop a heart than

Say,

A wounded animal amid the noises, the tin delicacy of

A harpsichord,

Or that silliness we birth when

Simulating an animal

In its foment.

On youth observed from middle age.

In the thickest of the wind

Flee the spoils of daylight.

The hours consist of countless hands,

Pulling at every bulging pocket--

They won the corruption

Of true neighbors

When short of season, and young,

They laid in nearby lawns and

Collected,

Shaded from the impeachments of sharing.

The love dream.

Tell me again how you came to be my grandfather.

How if not for a peculiar dream in which you sprang from a fastmoving train,

Only to look back and

Find in intuition, or the poverty of a glimpse

Maple hair flying in the still and arrested minute--

How you could not look away,

How you could not even fall.

--not even continue to jump.

Tell me again, about that part of me in her

At that age.

The thought of swimming again.

For B.

Between the fins and channels

And into the characteristics of sleep--

One casting arm after another

Reaches further and longer

Along,

Embracing a restless, curling horizon

With nod-offs

And soft eyes.

Winter strikes the passing surface--

From the bank, tilting,

The sun sings a relentless song.

The cane.

In a moment's ounce lies the weight of a ruin

And the fortitude of all that flows and follows.

Old to young, hand to head:

The cane bent once with cause.

Detail of the ruins.

For Fred Nettelbeck

A list of books blows in the empty breeze of a Polidori

--for every title a viewer seeking it,

The way a lover seeks an eye within the eye,

Saying, how many will you look for.

Tranquility.

Good servants fail to distinguish where marble ends

And cheap plaster begins,

Dusting.

The cleanliness of a thing lies in the signature of its peace.

The good casualty.

Ply these wounds with fingers and salve; I am a feast of torture and recognition.

At last, Blue chariot near,

Reclaiming, demanding fitfully in fact...

Decide upon this restless limb how you go!

I will watch you as you move til

I am no longer needed.

Nearing pure darkness.

Harassed by promiscuous gods

The Sun bowed

Gracefully,

Leaning low to pray

For the humblest

Of sentient error.

The cornucopia.

Less of your shoulder comes

In the waking.

And so much adheres to your complements

As if each was arms

Clumsily bringing letters.

The river in late winter.

Trees with reflections for roots

Will be remembered by a

Drunk reader--

Longer.

Mobility.

The heed of silence differs from the heed of

Space.

Wishfully gone from the one is the comfort

Spooned out in travel,

And asked for less

With each deserving look.

Engines.

The heel sinks to prey upon its feast

While the eye rises to it;

To the body go the varieties and engines that bind

Such disparate means.