THE HOW
Your quality – how was it shaped?
I was glacier before I was prairie,
Your character – how organized?
I was beached before I was tide,
a grave before I was buried.
Your proportion—how was it trained?
I burned long before I was sacrificed.
Your quality—how was it shaped?
I’m the silence that amplifies the noise
and the boiling part of the freeze.
Your beauty—how ornamented?
I’m the mute portion of my voice,
still a prison after I’m freed.
PARADISE UNFOUND
Firework flowers bonfire the ink ocean.
We too ignite as though comety sparks
in the dark spacious nothings between stars.
Attentive, like hero-shades bored with Hell,
astronomer geckos crowd across walls
to observe binary-system motions.
We awake after a morningless sleep
to the birdsong notes of a bamboo flute.
We breakfast on mangoes and passion fruit
from the wooden bowl on the wicker chair
beside the bed. The hardwood floor is bare.
The room is quiet and cool, as are we,
till together goes interminable.
Soon, palmtree shadows begin to revive.
We smile and sound silently our goodbyes.
And then I return to under the sun
to dissipate the burn of my alone
knowing full well it is invincible.
Later, the beach exchanges bikinis
for cruising wear and yellow lights erupt
and eyes and spirits conspire to corrupt
the sanctified romance of the harbor
and adventurers penetrate borders
and discover new springs of poetry
PROPERTIES
I wanted only a life unmortgaged--
how many stories I would furnish!
When I took hold of my time, my mansion,
I didn’t know how still I’d be transient.
CIRROUSSESTINA
Dust is the forgotten heart of my cloud,
a child of the earth orphaned in the sky,
a whisper of thunder before it's loud,
an ambition too humble to be proud,
as innocent as fleece before the dye.
Soot is the forgotten heart of my cloud.
No such elevation should be allowed,
(they say)
and nothing so lowly should get so high,
a whisper of thunder before it's loud.
Cloud-me may be alone or in a crowd,
my composition ordered or awry.
Smoke is the forgotten heart of my cloud.
This shriveled world is covered by a shroud
that shifts and gathers like unanswered Why?,
a whisper of thunder before it's loud.
I wish you too to live your life unbowed
from your time of youth to the time you die.
Sand is the forgotten heart of a cloud,
a whisper of thunder before it's loud.
HIGHWAY 14
I never went to Luxor
though we once drove to Rushmore
We loved the minestrone
we ate in Minnesota
en route to South Dakota.
The skies were paved with zircons
that she said must be diamonds.
And I thought of Ramesses
when we found Orion’s Belt,
though eager for Roosevelt
and Washington and Lincoln,
Crazy Horse and Jefferson
in all their granite glory.
Milky Way spilt through the night
like a Nile through vacant blight.
This Hathor cowboy obsessed
over sphinx and obelisk,
so we detoured off 14
for benben on Silent Guide.
My oracle realized
when we crossed the Bad River
toward the Six Grandfathers
Up South Down West, North, and East
that our stars weren’t carats,
they were our fatal scarabs.
