Don't stray.

Don't stray;

The broadest course of thunder
Cannot be mapped.

In the veins of it, however,
Is a flare of starlight.

Nothing escapes;

Don't stray, it has traveled
To shine in your room.

Passing by beauty.

The truth in my hands is a
Clumsy truth, but

It doesn't wither.

And when I wish for the prosperity of the fields I've passed through
I get little help.

The prosperity of the fields I've passed through moves as it
Always moves
--with such indifference.

Gunshots.

Echo least what distresses the ear.

And echo most what you spoke when I mistook
Speaking

For danger with all
My senses.

A Miracles tune on the walk home last night.

To each walk a tune.

And to a tune a girl
Singing--

To a leaden path this way
Glazed in icy moonlight,

Pause if you can once in a while

As in pausing we
Discovered the walk.

Coarse fibers combed from the weft of our walk
And walk so to demonstrate that here and not there,
Lies coupled grace with toppling

And the walk is sacred.

Coal.

To the lonesome miners who found the coal
Below,

Look at the sun and what you gave.
Your commodity is learning to speak
In a threadbare economy.

Mutiny begins in the dark.

All skin rests
When you ask it to
Just look.


Mutiny begins in the dark, Truest.

Mockery.

Silver feathers move to each side
In midair

As mockeries
Develop sincerity.

The birds keep flying;
Our jokes--

Even our jokes, hissy
Scar references, and unhumbleable usage,

Redeem us.

How?

No, truly, how?

Moves from fiction.

Can you tell from the rabbits in the distance
And the cotton wind that holds the sun

That none of this is real?

Is there amid the wealth of memory
Ample evidence

That what has gone before
Moves from fiction

And none is real?

Do you not see why I've chosen a simulacrum
As the tender birch
And tender thigh

Lie elsewhere?

The gentle road.

The air is cool when they go;

One and another part ways.
One final touch of their skin
Forces a laugh--

No one quotes Burns, or Shakespeare.

The gentle road falls below
Always such the gentle road
Where they part

When they go.

A distressed imagination.

A distressed imagination can sad to say
Be contained
With water and cover.

Before it burns its way
Completely through it can be corralled

And kept if you're careful
From the yield

Of fruit, educational tempest and

Shield.

When majority finally succumbs to base and
Last least majority

Let the swollen fingers be like fingers and grasp.
Let the tongue suck to unblock and--

Learily,
Loosen the hold.

Our conversation.

A language written is not so different
From the kind that is spoken,
Determining the fates of
Entire evenings

Crumbling decades of sayings
And humble buildings.

Accents you hear, swell and prevail
As you might expect
Flowers, to see, to smell,

Above a dinner table.

The first impact , you hear,
Says YES
As if the word is dry and hayish.

The second says YES
As if a moisture has managed to reform it
Back to a touch,

A beaded
And leafy

And lowly caress.

Cicero.

Number everything.
Then,
Make way.
Imbalance has an insistent way of keeping
A tab open

And a party going.

(Hellacious sterns of us grab for the door.)

A warm night in advance of autumn.

The ball of the moon has
Skipped few rooftops tonight.

It must be this city,
This neighborhood

In which certain darknesses
And their angles dictate;

It is not to say we are not awake who see it
There.

There is an outdoor cat in the earliest leaves,
And we grieve for the past.

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.