Your friends love you but
They’ll never grow into your thistled shoes—
The suffering you show as you lean into the window.
Up against the sun—they feel small, too.
The comportment of waiting is based on people who are kind
and willing to wait.
They don’t understand the fraction of a cat’s life.
This, I thought, is the only dream
I’ll ever have:
Blue purple
Blue red
And the faithful grey binding a short-lived shadow
Of humankind to the green of home.
In an unexpected clearing
I heard the voice of God
The moonlight laid bare
And the silver trees all took a side
To where I was.
The voice said, love is important
To love songs. And so love is important.
I dream present tense.
The past is August— a series of memories
Mt. Fuji from thirty six points of view,
Wheat fields,
The blue and yellow skin I never
Quite saw.
My science class memory of the Universe, it always
Begins in the dark. There are pinholes
Of misleading promise
—but that could be my eyes.
Have you ever seen a dead sunflower? The kernels
At the heart look like mummy teeth—the backwards-
Withered petals no longer canary yellow.
Instead, they curl away from the earth, like a vanquished
Coven of witches looking elsewhere.
But the point is
It—the Universe, I mean, always moves to the light.
Once and always to the dawn’s light
Where the water balls up
Like mercury at the bottom of a thermometer.
Where the leftover animals get reacquainted.
The bronze leaves break up because
They’ve been given no lines.
The bean from which we get chocolate is good.
And milk is good. And the rivrrrun of everything
We get from milk is, too.
It’s good. But silence appeases a
Different set of Gods. No age, no
Gender, no celebration of appetite.
This embarrassment of riches is different from
The rich folks you know.
They hang out in truckstops
And undo the eating of their own souls.
How do we understand what they’re saying
In moments of ecstatic undoing?
Think of it like a volcano erupting:
Some folks will run away,
Other to the source of the explosion
To find the others. But everybody runs
The country must have looked like a person once.
Someone landed and said,
You, you remind me enough of home.
That’s how the globe was formed
And little by little the idea of home learned to travel—
And develop its elusive slang,
Saying to the foot, not where you go.
Saying to the letter, maybe.
I want to see everything, hear everything,
And share it all— how the walls start to smell moldy,
Violet in the drying light.
And no floor could support a living soul
This may only be the beginning;
So, here I am—I want to feel everything.
The clover filling in the blanks
Between the grass,
And the sky tumbling down the wild, clean hill.
The poetry you lose seems wasted
Because you failed to externalize.
For hours maybe even days you continue to feel that
Lost opportunity, as if reaching off an empty pier
To pull aside the fog— a chance to see
And let them see you. But when you pull it back
Not even the miss you missed is there.
You are wanted,
But you want the miss.
So, with the curtain in your hand you ignore the future
As your guts shake the bottom of the sea to life.
One or two trees with roots behind the horizon
Slouching away—gatekeepers to another life, as the
Dead tried to leave, left.
The sun came—unrest went quiet, and
Orange light held court on the grassy shadows.
The first was the Elder, but the
Closest had one foot on the sunny hill
I saw.
Human pearls look like toes,
As they sink into the edge of the curly waves.
We know reverse sign langauge,
We spend a lot of time working on our backs
Torsos and tesserae,
Come by and look where my works begins.
Look: it’s disappearing: a reason
Or reason for pearls.
Keep it.
For a few nights salt lay before the purple sea.
But for the rest of the time
Despite the taste and its
Buoyancy
The one closest seemed farther,
The impossible nearer to me.
Language could learn a lot from you—
Because you meander—
You get lost so easily.
You aren’t good,
You hook and you have good adversaries.
Speak quietly and especially slow to me
How the rose rises from the exit wound
While the earth and heroism
Sleep.
Are you warm enough, now?
Is the poll incendiary or the
Polder smoldering for some
Supernatural reason?
Are you hot because life jolted you hot?
Were these feathers left on the floor to remind me
Of you—you, the Angel,
Me, the disoriented bird?
The greater dream must look impoverished
On the hill,
Beside the cows and rows of corn and
Sheep we count.
Once we fall asleep and the agriculture of sleep
Falls asleep too
There may be a moment—but just one and
It’ll pass quickly—below—
You will grow from a seed to an aching tree
And the sun will set inside of you.
We don’t remember everything.
But when we meet it’s awkward, and there’s a
Lot we pretend to quietly understand—
We go home and dip inside ourselves, trying to
Pry it out, like change from the seat of a recliner,
Or hair from a stopped drain.
There was an eleventh commandment
And it had something to do with the color blue:
Perhaps it was the pailletted aura of the sun and
The possibility that it was
Point A in the whole sky.
Or, more likely it was how we ought to grieve. How
The heavens should fill our eyes all the way,
And how our eyes should blink, too,
And thank the heavens.
This dream is more science fiction
Than the others.
I meet a camel on the road to Damascus. He falls
Apart instantly, and I’m like why!?
Pretty soon the humps start convulsing and it’s dark
Outside. Blood everywhere.
I throw a saddle over his
Shoulder.
It’s gonna end. I’m gonna wake and he’ll be
Ok.
I keep thinking about the glory of love
How it has holes in it.
And as higher functioning organisms we’re
Drawn to those holes.
We are and the light from outside is.
You are born grass-tall.
Where did we leave off, and what were you saying?
I was holding my fingers in a damp bundled cloth, and Yeats—
One of us was destined to pass out from the intensity
Of the afternoon color.
I keep having the same funny dream—
I’m trying to grab a giant pearl
In the ocean but it’s greased and the waves rock against
My will. And I’m just dreaming, anyway.
It becomes a kite. And I wash my hands.
Down from ten I count to zero,
Each blue ribbon tied to the string,
And each spindrift of sunny daylight
And more strings. Even stuck against solid things.
I am no longer looking ahead or behind.
Chop me up into smaller orange parts, saying,
All will finally be revealed.
Take a look as the sun drops his damp bath towel
On the floor of his private field.
