Quick fixes.

We are not unstoppable.

What pours from our leaky faucets

Will contaminate the water of the world.

There are pewter-lined realizations and plumbers'

Quick fixes

But in backing away the system of sewage is clear.

We drain when we fetch what we swear we can hold.

The way we think about things together.

The nearest things are often the fastest,

Heavenliest

--and care-free:

But they're cursed.

It has taken us so long to puzzle out our inborn meaning

Bracelets droop on our girls' wrists, and the music that surrounds us

Is a kind of ebullient junk.

Look past the surging welt of a hill where

One will go and be discovered,

And one girl will set her dream against the malignant stars.

The anniversary landscape.

"That never get up no more place is here"

-Langston Hughes, 'Graveyard'

The wind is full of breath.

As if coaxing water from the sea, or

The broadest tear ducts,

The Earth must sing.

Such green songs are these--

Bereft of patterns.

They remind me

That this shower like so many showers

Must fall,

Flooded with cheers of defeat. Meanwhile.

The wind is full of breath.

Purity.

Please, never forget

Purity--

Not as a law,

But as a blinded promise.

And promise to remain unkept.

And there, upon a song.

When upon the wilderness' stake you encounter a feast

You must eat.

And there, upon a song,

You will discover amid your senses and

Turbines

The need to dance.

But this is not a simple observation. And you were augured

In your own breed of impulse and recognition.

And this land is not the same as it was a moment ago.

Two aspects.

What we've come to know as surplus

Is only the surplus of wisdom--

So little a focus,

So wild an aspect

--alongside another aspect.

The green preparations.

Once the bearing of rain came from a window

And all the world was hungry.

Folks were disturbed that it didn't get more attention--

There was a halt cleft in the program--hard shoulders relaxed, soft.

No courageous acts. Nothing was allowed.

The game stopped.

It was as if the green preparations of sound came to beg at the door

Of a wanton color. Finally--and this is important--

We let ourselves say so,

We didn't know where to look, or how to behave.

Don't let me down.

You know when the wind blew and they lugged their gear

Onto the roof.

They played 'Don't Let Me Down' and the wind blew, even though they knew it was over.

They were told to stop

While businessmen and some alert fans gathered below in the wind.

The work of time will come, and the wind will carry it in and carry it away.

Some were across the rooftops, their speech halted

And their hands nearly idle but for the anticipatory joy that they were catching something as it fell

--the wind, and it was over.

The spire sigh.

History doesn't sigh. It doesn't tally any of the devastated towers;

It relents to the lasting ones, the obstinate obelisks open

To the batterings of hours.

When nobody's awed 'oh' rises, and none await the designer's hand

Love will stop apologizing, and fall back upon the land.

Love haiku.

Small promises are lethal--

The heart floods with them.

Each dizzy yes is a song.

A girl.

Music is homeless, it once belonged to heaven.

And it was crucial enough to the winged inhabitants that

--at first, it was allotted a single golden room

Where they could go and lie down.

Then the founders expanded their brilliant notion and a

Palace rose in the cloud, as you'd expect a volcanic island:

Peering on the senses from the sea,

And the riches of the room swelled with

The sleepy dusk.

Composers, though, they loved that.

Never ones for sun tans or girls

They merely embraced the underlighted origin

The ground zero, like it was a bronze idol,

Or a memory.

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.