The other sugars you know.

The sweet berth is so unlikely to be banked down--

to spare bank civilizations, To spare our towns.

It must flow up and low and

To either side.

And when it goes,

Such a startling light, it aweighs,

Crests--I must, short of knowing just suppose,

In moonly sucrose.

The lyre bird.

Portrait of Ella Mae Morse, singer.

Words have had it unkind,

Taking the better parts of

Centuries to finally get

The standard tongue's bent

And thrive.

Not so for the lyre, a bird, land-bound,

Left here, who was hatched out

Surprisingly as his throat cleared and

Songbook already fit with sound

He corrupts once in his own favor then

Once against.

He knows his own name amid the glossary

Of sounded-out animals, a choir of

Would-have-beens and precipitants of

The echo--the rest of them, they scurry.

To the evolved shoulder--fit as the bird's sharp tongue,

Carry. Your job as opposed to flying is to carry.

The moss ark.

Ed Ruscha - 'Me' (American 1999)

The moss ark was built less out of assistance or purpose

Than it was of substance.

Once, as its own soul dictated, it was carried--

Having been sought and excavated,

Then allotted space in worshipping eyes

Then buried.

See, in fact, how gracefully the observer glances to

Read the carved line on the stone,

Then hurries to look back?

Off map.

I shouldn't go too far aside of my own foot--

But I was humbled to research and disregard, and push--

I did look. Nobody was at the party.

The only one who

Hasn't found her way home

Was with me.

The vigilant lamp.

Laughter is practical. The seam prepares to

Split, but instead it fashions

A zipper.

Watch, now, lover,

Watch how fallow it once was

And how wasn't no longer

Substantially-and neither faithfully, is.

(He is full of dreams to buy your birthday--its candlesful of wishes.)

Empty swimming pool.

Ernie Bushmiller - Sluggo Dreams

The depths lie somewhere between white and an ineffective blue,

Drained, but cluttered--Waiting to be raked up.

Neighbor girls who remember the summer

Tattletale on its leafy edge, faces just--

Wheatswollen.

The room they take up is where I was when I saw myself

Admired.

The surface glare broadens like an I surrender flag for the kids

nightly.

It's why I love her,

Strewn around these kinks and nicks

And purpling knuckles

Is the memory of the hands with which I

Once prayed.

This parishoner gets spared, and the rocks get treated kindly by the light.

This place on Earth must certainly be Heaven.

The stream-smoothed rocks, one after another glisten--

It's as if they have captured the naive burnishes from Heaven

And amid the cursing flush and grit disbursement they glow.

The moon is beyond reproach.

The beating heart serves behind glass--but don't worry!

The glass is colorless and the message is colorless.

Each thing thrives. Look!

The glare is beyond reproach and the palpitations are as well.

The onlookers gather and their humid awe gathers. We turn the lights out

and the moon is beyond reproach.

Mansion.

So seldom do we grasp the plentitude of what we admire.

We fall over in love and then we are lost in these vaults--

For the cup and the humbling wage.

Love poem.

Wait, it's not that there's new honey!

But I look at the dare of the sun-dried grass

And it's so flush and winding

--and Her!

Is it not new honey stripping me of

what little wisdom I ever had?

I will always beg for you by name.

Andy Goldsworthy (U.K. Recent)

The heart is contrary,

And droops when it is responded to.

Cracked in wisdom it hasn't a policy about lying--

Just a policy for being lied to.

Oh.

Rembrandt van Rijn - Self Portrait, Later in Life (Dutch 1660's)

Oh,

Acreages and old folks' eras parse the rented landscape--

In each throat a maturing voice drones its

Rich and poor story.

But none are quite like the cock-bell song as it arrives in the humidity--

And goes.

The goodnights.

Sometimes it is similar to a balloon--

Each tensile point of its tent is sponsored

By the wild air.

This is also true about the night. Lovers fill them

With wishful "goodnights"; so much goes into each.

Finally one day we'll be forced to rename it;

The stormy "I love you" place will need

Us to call it something.

But what?

Your breath bricks up and floods the floor; the architecture

Falls on me. My breath is lost.

I cannot speak and I wouldn't if I could now.

Keys lack wisdom--

Good thing, I lose them too.

This dog is falling asleep beside me.

And my memories, oh what are they?

Just look how the apartment ends and the rest begins.

The crop circle.

We have crossed the wood and path

To find a wild mosaic,

One in our aspiration similar to

The one we'll leave.

Niggerhead.

"Indeed, I can see no reason, but the most deceitful one, for calling the religion of this land Christianity."

-Frederick Douglass

These specific linen alterations

They don't stain less--

If forgiven

The hum of starch mercy can't assuage the havoc of their ceremonial uses.

Applauding the love of every gregarious grasp, clasp untorn,

These which we seek to protect can neither be created

Nor destroyed,

Nor re-cherished in familiar uniform.

Imagine you, young solider, not so much as less of the hem.

So much as more of what is so faithfully and foolishly worn.

Tomorrow these emeralds.

Bo Bartlett - Dreamland (American 1998)

Could it possibly be all the staining love I have seen

Is now before me?

My eyes brim with jeweled tears--

Easily and free--

Each one confiscated from a heart,

Each labeled,

Each as promised restored to the return addressee.

Each, my Love, safe.

Tomorrow these emeralds will grow amid the grasses.

This conveyance of the soul you too shall see.

Their river of time.

The beloved bank-side sleepers

And their river of time--

How nearby are either to

The witless hand

As it endures all it touches?

The speechless variety.

And isn't the quenching speech of the speechless variety

Like the water you find between beached and distant rocks?

And out of necessity do you not marvel--not at the quality, nor at the timbre,

But differently,

At the dearth of the company you receive.

On the Honeycrisp apple.

Sugar, though icily practiced,

Doesn't stand a chance

Against the dissolving search

Seduction makes prior to

Leaving the caramel of pink

For the blue enameled moraines

As they lie patiently, then couch.

Don't let me be mistaken--it suffices

To provide where healing needs its own new swatch.

It endures on a scab, on the pittance of a patch.

The standard.

Space contributes to the sum of the antonym

And to the reticule the tongue's gem--

You found this jade-colored abscess--

So much as to touch it and ascertain the stone's fetch--

Its alien gleam you met and rain use the same language:

This is in the passing favor of most markets

And its' currency is useless.

The company you receive.

And isn't the quenching speech of the speechless

Variety like the water you find between beached

And distant rocks! And out of necessity do you

Not marvel? Not at the quality

Nor at the timbre, but differently,

At the dearth of the company you receive?

"We walk."

Loud song,

It is as much to bend the grasses

As it is a mandate to drown the fortunes

Of the graceless.

Breakfast.

For a man named Troy Davis, about whom seventy-two hours ago I knew nothing.

The casualties were grown in the soil of a single imagination.

Maybe one errs to curse, prefers roses, or so and so

Thinks the harvest of flowers has a brain and knows.

But cup away those weak young hands,

And impart in them what they need:

Let leaves concede their rainy awful deeds;

Let the corpulent colors of petals bloom--

And as roses be polite: let those go on and bleed.

Temper goodness in their hungry fingers and unwitheredness.

In the little--relieve them from the slump of roses, the sins upon their noses.

Clear the formidable stems from the table and roses and all they to us mean:

Prepare a place for silliness to express,

And waffles with blueberries.

The month in unexpected rain.

The rain adjusts us

Falling on the rednecks--the unusualest of intellects

Neither without the fraying work of purpose nor

Dependent on it.

Trace it like Hebrew or Cajun: is this our dialect

Meager, if unsatisfying and locally abrupt--son to Mother

Other to confused other?

These rare rains are young--they sparkle with buckish cursings

In stride they even the road, the work

The burstlings.

Like an animal.

Need knows only need, and withers.

So to the fortunes of youth goes only want.

How like the poor--

They beg to touch the lamp that wealth neglects.

A generation of dust meets the eager palm--A wisdom--

It is a hunger and it is a thirst.

The substance of the prang.

The speechless variety must be moved;

It does not move itself.

Think of it as the block in the trunk of the prang.

Every so many thousand years it must be pulled from the shelf of its own body,

And along with the others rearranged--

You know, we err and lose the aspect of our humility in

Raw and witless daylight.

The forest.

Endanger the soul with purpose.

These trees and porcelain breezes--

They are heaving and rich with rain.

The shadows awaken new with the sun.

Fight harder.

Local.

The impairment of kisses lies in the nearby wind.

My blame disrupts the jade middle of

You. My palm grows with a nearby heart,

Deputized, I have two pulses to take

And look in on.

Bee line.

IF being was fat and what it suggests then

The air admiring between us

Would not negate our address--

There would be an edible line,

And I would fatten this line

And consume the weight.

Obsese, ill-fed,

I would arrive.

My belly would impair the white hill and mimic the moon;

You would eat it up and in lying next to me

Be happy in local honey--cupping handfuls--

No cops.

I live for you.

The mop at the end of the night is a lot like the curse

Of civility.

Adherent grease lacquers the floor. It's a record.

It's a way of saying,

"I wasn't dishonest; my curse was honest."

My civility you walk upon has left streaks.

And you must at a glance choose and subordinate yourself

To the hour.

September haiku.

Paul Thek - 'Dust' (American 1987)

That yee shall be children of your father which is in heauen; for he maketh his sunne to rise on the eiull and on the good, and sendeth raine on the iust, and on the vniust

-The Gospel of S. Matthew, 1611.

The fragrance of rain

Is a mere dream to the tongue.

Taste, prosperity!

Detailed representation.

Read closely, you'll see no watery ripples for waves written

In the atlases where the oceans build, rebuild and bequeath--

Nor help from an illustrator's presentiment

of brine terrain danger where

The rocks and white phantoms wait down beneath.

Nor, too, is there no helpful key for the dry land located in between,

For the cragged folds of fool's gold

That lie around--

Impatient too

For a fool's trembling gold-dig to chip away at custodially

And exhume.

The passageway.

The itineraries of the young marble like treasure maps with plans. Unedited shoulders,

They tan. And we shed tender leaves: This process

It humbles us.

Find El Dorado once! I'm begging you

With rust that was once furious blood gushing.

With just once.

With the barest once.

Untitled haiku.

To the rainy glass

The residue exceeds the

Treasures of kings.

To the drain grate in the street.

Wassily Kandinsky - 'Decisive Pink' (Russian 1932)

Breeding macabre and ochre and pink leaves seem to be,

And have come to find you

Where they meet.

Are you so lowly discolored since we mated to create you that

You count them

As you eat?

Lights!

An imperilled generation must here have dared and bloomed:

Cursed brood in the simplitude where darkness rouses;

Praised, as well, upon the spark of its flimsy fuse--

Lights!

Managed by the turf of electricity,

Needing to use it--d'you think it might falter or

Otherwise its riches disprove?

D'you think our kindling hands are worthless, or somehow engineered, rude,

Espoused in the gleaming to simply be monstrous

And protrude?

Well, do you?

The finest attention paid.

The riches of wisdom and hearsay are good--if half true,

Shot from vibrant tongues

As, quickly, in speaking, they

Glance at their losses.

Disposable amusements.

Sarah Bernhardt

The contentious merit of a dandelion remains
Protected by debate.

Is it contagious? Does it pollute the lawn?

That's tough to say: It charms the field,

However. It charms the field and that is final and that is so.

Combed in the locks of its sunny hair
Is the stuff that wins lost children

Well before flowers have their chance.

Joy and a small knife wound.

Loudly and to nothing

It springs from the tip of me,
A congestion of ruby leaves and lips and sad rusty suns.

The coolness inches on the glands of the air.

How soon and regularly it visits with its subterfuge of
Blushes!