SOLIDARITY
Some species urban anonymity cannot erase the red beak of
tangles the probably fir with its metonym of thought
Plumes on the ragged bough like plunder
from some half-assed mob too timid
to face the club of insistence on these lines
SMOKE
Where have I gone
That I didn’t also turn
Against the idea of magnitude
Toward the animal instead
Implacable the horse
Bestirs the bonnet,
The bondsman
In his quiet moment
Behind the teller’s window
Opening onto the meadow foxes
Skirt -
Onto the silent
Salt-lit days after the divorce,
Onto apricots
Onto elephants
Days that opened into windows,
Windows that opened
Upon the vistas
You posit behind each syllable,
Each stone
In a creek bed
Circling a larger idea of land,
Wizening grass-like aspirations
Into the ambition
Of utterance,
How scree runnels
Down to timber,
Declaiming silence
By standing,
Each tree defying the sun -
Knock it down -
With my family
With my time alone
The moment I end is happening
It is the eternal
Voice that says “wait”
“Come any closer and you will leave your feet behind”
ALL SOULS
Sunlight cleans things into the ground
birds in bottled words in lines the horizon
wet marks on father’s bib fading daylit thoughts
Icarus fumbling with his keys
a cigarette and a bouquet
Easter services in the graveyard
we’re halfway there father
mother it’s an apple orchard a keyboard of fruit
apple blossoms mother
fricative for your mouth
plosive for the air in your mouth
to gut the canker
of its limpid color
on a pile of rubble I am the weirdo
in a graveyard on holiday
A man in shorts made fifteen years ago
runs before a woman running
in a florescent safety vest passing
a young woman collected
into black pants tapered at the ankles
who is the sum of the pageant in question
at the Easter services
collectively engaged in team-building exercises
in and around the
why is there a gazebo
I like the stone about the size
and shape of a safety deposit box,
the side without stele
so that it is
until I fold up my kit and go
just so
a repository of Robinson Jeffers’ jewels
dwarfing the surveyor’s orange flag
above the pipe between
these particular remains
I keep aluminum, wool, wood,
water, graphite, buttons,
cardboard, string
and glue, and solution of oxymetazoline
hydrochloride to help me
breathe. I am the Pontiac
hatchback of corpses.
Icarus drops the bouquet
and after a minute in counterpoint
the cigarette
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