Sleep is part
of the underground—
not taxed. All
these hours, colors,
and people (real and not)
are coming to me for free,
cracking their belts
like whips,
offering me
chests of money.
What code—
what provision
of science—
does this fall under,
this unregulated
carnival of closed eyes?
Is it safe?
Are the funnel cakes
sold here
soaked in trans fats?
I fall asleep at night
on a welcome mat,
in front of the
brick-hard hearth. I
keep warm
by throwing one more
log, one more day
on the fire.
Only because you’re handsome—
that dark black hair of yours,
those slick metallic sides
sweeping down the sidewalk,
stopping to kneel at the neediest feet—
You know where to take me
without even asking—
you know me
better than a cabbie in London
knows his British city. The main street,
the side street. My street, yours.
It seemed a sky
free of commercials,
blue and cloudless.
But he could sense,
swimming in all directions,
waves of banded frequency,
like hungry carp
fighting for food pellets
in a tiny pool
at the Botanical Garden.
With his rifle raised,
Full poem here...
Cracks like these like those
in the earth’s crust. Take
time to heal, never heal
completely. Not wise to build
on but people do it anwyay.
Earthquakes the moments of
raw words and return.
With steps across the field you stride,
despite the calf-deep snow.
What lies on the other side?
I ask but you don’t know.
What field, you say, what snow?
To it you bend and place your plow.
Upon bestowment of this kiss,
a cherry-bearing orchard puts to root.
Not a limb does the lucky sun miss,
nor does water overlook a tender foot.
A woodlet free of serpentine hiss
is your breast, and all its fruit.
Their arms swing like windmills,
friction free, disproving grade school
texts which denounce any theory of
perpetual motion. The surfers cling
to their boards like scholars their books.
If waves were words, surfers would read
the dictionary from cover to back and,
upon arriving at Zurich, would stare
at the azimuth horizon, yet dissatisfied,
pressing the ocean for one more walled
utterance—a salted syllable, a wet grunt,
anything working its way back to shore.
The cumulus clouds hover steady
and low in the evening sky.
They are blue or white. Their choice.
They don’t need to give a reason.
Blue because they want to;
white because they feel like it.
When they’re ready to
roll their own die, they shake
out to sea, join other clouds,
frustrate the surf with rain, and
contemplate the breeze
in another life, as sand.
I
A cloud, glowing purple
with mischief
puts a hand on my shoulder
and nibbles at my ear.
Its menthol breeze
hastens me to cover.
When the rain comes
—pitter patter—
I ask only that
it leave its hailstones
at the door.
II
The storm went off.
The storm has no lights.
He’ll come back on,
by tomorrow.
The lights went off.
The lights went down.
Rain and thunder,
by tomorrow.
III
Aha, I caught you—!
—Caught me at what?
It stopped raining—
—Yes, but it’s still wet.
Describe how this island
became an island; whether
it was once all water or once all rock.
The petrels matter to the ocean.
If they do not fly there is no island—
there is neither coast nor reef.
Under the reef, more rock,
originally hot, now cooled to stone
by the slender hand of God,
reached down from dim Ceres
to leave an invitation
for a séance at Vesta 4.
An invitation we never got.
How could we have?
For, it was buried beneath coral and lamprey,
meant only
for the minor gods of magma and pumice;
for the soft-boned fish,
born in the teeth of the mako,
circling in waters above.
The Germans appealed World War I,
so I was sent to the trenches,
taking my grandfather’s place.
For days I saw no one, except
an enormous storm of a man,
who fought for neither side,
but drove a rusted combine,
collecting back taxes like
golf balls at a driving range.
As his squeaking tractor scoured
the trenches he demanded,
“Back taxes, back taxes!”
If you didn’t duck he took up
your scalp like a head of wheat,
so I dug down, looked after
my tomatoes and corn.
Jets, too, roared overhead, but I guessed that
out in the distance, somewhere
amongst the farmland of old,
large general stores lay empty,
and the highways died silently,
trafficked only by men with guns,
in haphazard uniforms,
beating the pavement,
burning gasoline for their fires at night.
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