Summer.

On both sides of the summer shoot
Aching hands for the
Scolding heat--

Not dissimilar to the trees bookending a sunset

Or the reaching we do when grieving
To the one most grieving.

Watching.

Harshest judgments may come at the
Point of exhaustion.

Ripe celebrity,

You have been so keenly regarded,

Your heartbeat measured,
Your graying head
Held like a baby's

In their narrowed eye,


Come back, see as little of us as
We in turn see.

There is a jagged hedge of your youth in us,
And of us and in us, we are to your avail
Shepherds.

To the old.

Your lake lies undistressed
Just past the leafed-in
Finitude of trees
Where the subject can rest
And finitude need not as we proclaim
It exist.

Overtures to the young.

The moon is always going to
Be a little green.

And the Devil is always going to
Be making enticing
Pacts by its side.

A rich whirr bowls in the air, voices:

Listen.

Sun spots.

A mark on the sun must
Certainly mean
a mark on us.

However that transference works--
By shadow or cajoling

It ought
Regard us as with the same fair
Vulnerabilities.

The closest heart.

The cordonned heart moves and is like
A paper lantern on this river.

A rain disrupts it,
And eyes follow it
Always.

See the trembling glow as it dearly
Wishes to join the water.

Candy rain.

Everybody is impressed with candy
Rain.

It runs from the swelling trees
Like the knowledge we seek is down

Not up.

The rail.

Your hand on the rail,
The inveterate praise of light
The knuckle as it wanders
The omen.

You are an omen.

Evening.

Okay,

Come back and
Make a prosperity of my precarious
Luck.

Aisles of books and aimless sun has--

Would you lie beside me as the moon is
Being born?

The divine.

On a drenched flat where the rain had been
The sun grows delicacies and
The waters recede in teary shadows,

As if chastised, subservient
Marbled by a
Greater.

There were days when swimming I thought we had found a fold in
The law and were suddenly immortal.

Sweaters.

In part of the past
Lie sweaters and
Things I might've bought

For you had we
Time, I money

And the length of the
Measurable manageable.

Had I, we,

More deserving, less
Indebted to ourselves solely.

Ourselves, ourselves.
That we might be different than we are.

The totem.

Imagine if you actually found one,
An artifact,

Caked, but intact.

Say this arrow, errant on impact,

What kind of cost could you dream up?
What kind of coat would you wear to
The unveiling of that?

Would its slightness
Cut away from your take

Would it in shrinking mystery come to extract
Blood

From the expectation generosity and ardor
Packed?

New design.

It is assumed that a new design will soon be
Awake--
That from the hostile break

A more recent will disrupt the hill,

With shake and
Aftershake.

It is impossible.

Growing old such as I do
I tend to notice

How new leaves resemble the last,
And

How the ochre curling script outlives the brightest
Cast.

Dawn on a workday.

I can see the light through
A crack in the curtains. It is not
The only but--

Devices with crab like
Eyes cluster by the console, a waking
Shimmer lights up the spine
Of a book.

--that rain-colored explanation moves,

As if ascending.

Proportions.

A cultivation no more minute than a dime could no better disguise itself in the pocket, and yet the salvageable stuff of us could so soundly be hidden there.

Seduction.

I'm impartial,
But at a certain time the river
Compels me to blush.

I cannot say no to you.

A thaw in the senses.

The subject,
Closer and nearer,
Is so little like the Moon--

How do I even compare them?!

With the one the lips are dark as they reach,
And with the other less so.

With one the shadow falls behind me
And with the other closer, nearer.

Everyday there is a thaw in the senses
And the hands

When the blue parts with a
Specific variety of light.

Wild nothing.

for Jill Cichoski

One bit of the swing chair's space is suddenly displaced by another's.
The cane aches as sweaty bodies sink in the sway

Talking up the marshal bits of love and love

Or smart--

And it smarts.

For once in a generation you walk past the coyote cage
And don't wish to be like that thing.

Rust flower.

New hands don't trust a prowessed thing and
New hands don't know where to go.

Clotting ferns in the distance
And everything you thought a showing
Flower could be

Was.

(Bits and pieces saying aloud, coupling might with what.)

Item.

Good news:

The West has been contained--

The one involving gunfighters

And ours.

A maze.

The verdure forgoes other forms of verdure.

We spent the afternoon
In a toothed hedge
Tunneling for the center--

Tunneling, too, for

A way to the landing.

The sobbing waters

For the great poet, Tu Fu

If I pedal back slowly
The flicker slows
In my favor.

I am a boy in
Shallow water.
It is in the berth

Of sufficiency that

I gather his Sun--

--light and warmth.

Poverty.

for SB

A half-smile enlivens the distance
As clouds collect
There.

In the promise of energy things move
And retreat from
Expectation.

What's more

That which was always loved is always loved,
Threads bare though they may be--

Staples buckled,
Hands short

Though they may be.

Errare humanum est.

To not persist in the mistake but
To bloom--I wonder,
Could we possibly be trusted with such
Crucial errors and
Tender shoulders?

The old provisional curtain.

The old provisional curtain is, as if vestigial to a bad dream, taking a while to fall; but we--luckily, discovered the inundation of light and fact instantly. There is wild foresight in hope.

Corruption.

It is a verifiable fact that the provision of
Arms

And what lies in heavenly arms

Wrests from tranquility

For reasons both hostile

And time-tried.

(My baby is gone.)

The crane.

The froth and fronds of the sun flood
All things. But

The tendrils of the crane are obstinate--
They remain.

Give in to flighty beauty, gluttonous crawlers--
What is taken leaves no trace
And what of the dearth
Will in greedy part be erased.

Food for everyone.

A bay for young ships,
That is what we need

From Nature--

A bay,
Cut one in the tenderest place:

Soft landings, food for everyone.

The heart and the cradle of light.

The distinction between the heart and the
Cradle of light
Is negligible,

Concerning at worst a fraction of a generation--

Like picking the rose in time from
The soil.

Like picking the rose from time, from
The spoils

Of spoils.

Food.

Know that,
Sonorous,
Mystery begets deafened mystery.

Cleft of incident's color we turned as ever to a book;
In this instance the recipe came to us by way of Barbara Kafka...

Bricks for young adults.

What a ring
In the richness that is everywhere.

Have you noticed the superiority of this hour,

How without a Mozart or a Melville

We quench sunsets and in our rifest privacies

rebuild them?

Purse.

What a word,
The purse.

Disturbed from it repositorial
Endowment,

Uncorrected
And flush.

Like lips--
Like lips!

To pursue to purse you.

My imagination is a dust ridden empty bag
But I purse at the sound of you,

Drenched by the succumbing music you impart,

The cloud lifts.

Of romance.

No policy in romance--

I want everything to be free
To be romance, to be my romance

As I am greedy.

Yank and see my feathers falling softly in space

Nude,

Touched by you.

Destroy power.

for the band, Crass.

Lies detail everything;
It's a shame we can't trust them.

What you gather is real, What you embrace,

Real,

Spelled out in a speech so
Reckless and calloused with
Carbunkles,

That to caress it is to accept its aboriginal
Rasp.


Since saying it is insufficient and telling it is
Merely fitting,

And since loving is a kind of disturbance

Since lies impart wine-like honey to words
Since lies pout with imprecise rigor
And the rasp grows from our familiarest corners

It will take a wild poison to corrupt
The corruption while you,
Garrulous and dirty,
Destroy power.

Maxfield Parrish.

As often as you are who you are
Remember how my faith blossomed
In the intrigue of your mark--

How I couldn't help it

How you lured me with the magnetism
Of an outstretched arm.

Dearest, I panted.

Evening.

Pieces of the palace
Fall upon us.

The dust is golden.

How wholly I have drunk of this careless
Wine

You brought from the leafen interior.

And how memory stirs in retribution.

Of cool bolts once intimate with contended space.

--gave.

A partiality.

The eponym of letters
Must not be confused with that which we use

For colors.

There for a duty to the Absolute goes the distinct strand

Of bruisy curses,

Blushing suggestions and a din of

Ochry suppressions.

It is reasonable to wonder,
"What's the difference? If each is so brilliant
And so eagerly infinite?"

There is in the former, too, a duty to earthly flowers--
Substantial in that it is how we know it.

But for the eagerness of the latter
It is a partiality,
Bereft of sex and wild complement.

To each.

To each a modesty in the countenance of rain.

Looking in you will see the aspect of a heat by which plants
Grow. And you will see

The tears of humankind falling.

To each the bravery of the verdure,
Throbbing in the leaves.

It must this resonance to each know discontent.

It must, after all, it must!

Cherry wine.

Cherry wine loses its effervescence when
You learn

What goes into it.

A honey river, a stone tomb--I cannot believe it,

The error in all cherries as they
Ruin curseless grace.

Oh,
--and curseless grace.