What the Night Brings

Prepare yourself; shadows
leaking over ridges
in the mountains

lengthen.

Not one but three
hawks circling
the fallen prize-

circling.

Blackness grows in
toothless woods, hurries
towards the sunken valley

eating light.

Just outside the safety
of your house, evening
knows the secrets

of your heart;

prepare yourself, the shadows
bringing home your grief,
a phantom of your sorrow.

Deeply, like Rain

Everywhere, rain following
rain. Everything

in the world
is drinking.

We could be happy if
I could hold you

captive in this
storm. Even I,

am beautiful
when its raining.

Capturing

Cup the hands into a bed to
hold the sick bird, gently place
on colored leaves; the sky
does not appear to notice,
a piece of it is dying.

Roll the hands like periscope,
frame the moon. A hole of light,
a tunnel to the soul emerges,
haunting, lovely. Later, in the evening
stand beneath the cedar trees; listen

to the silence of its shining.

Open up the hands for sleeping;
fingers poised to catch a dream or
shadows moving over linen hills
like waves of sea. Forget the hands,

the heart will tell you, mark
its drum, the beating darkness.
Use the muscle, its hollow rooms
to capture love.

An Ordinary Morning

The less you look
for happiness, the more
you find it. I am not surprised

or puzzled by the darkness.
What leaves no visible sign of
being- the oiled palm print,

the disarray of foliage altered
by a heavy foot, the streak of
daylight bleeding in a summer sky,

the shadow of a passing bird
moments before disappearing
into a wall of fog and cloud-

need not be understood.

Everywhere is sadness, shame
nothing saves us from it. Here,
I close my eyes and quickly see

rays of light, blazing edges burning
outward like an ordinary sun just
rising in an ordinary morning.

To Live in This World

Those circles beneath your eyes
like bruises; lips that rise subtle
as the Mona Lisa smiles-

a disappointed mystery.

Who doesn't love the ringlets
dancing off your neck? What
star's beauty suffers from a lack

of pleasure?

For miracles, alone, I stop to
wonder how the light reflects,
cast back, regressed and shining

on your blessed face.

If sadness sketched is loneliness,
if where you look, my heart must
follow; there is rapture in my body-

there is rapture.

The Guest

Pulled down like root, twisting
secret, I neglect the city's splendour-
sleepy cafes, gleaming streets,
young girls leaning out of
cotton-curtain balconies, watch
the children play below with stolen fruit
or marbles.  Did it rain today? I would not know,
these eyes sunk down inside their coat.

If I were guest, this riverbed would greet me,
now its body barely moving, shuts me out.
The light it needs, the whirling skylarks often feeding
from its tangled banks are missing;
what is missing stays with me.

About Forever

Of heaven: gaping eye,
all silence, light. A sea
of light; white, white

silence. Of darkness:

implausible, distant
distance. Not like
anchored night but wider

as in blindness. Of spaces:

wall of fire, shadowed wood,
floorless room. Floating,
falling, hacking,

bending. About forever:

enormous waiting,
sleeping, waking,
dreaming; no escaping,

no departure.

Blame It on the Wind

Rain or so the sky stained cloud; it was
the wind (your trail) made flowered,
dew grass, butter root and shallow
bowls of soil spring.

I hear the thunder, resonant and rich,
your speaking weighs the blue light
down, travelling to some high point
then burning.

I don't appear to love you only when
I cease to dream; a storm is coming,
heading home relentlessly. Rain or so
the sky stained cloud-

it was the wind.

Back to Hearth

Fashioned like a particular life,
they say, beyond living
the process takes a turn;

and so occasionally, a sense
of stillness within motion brings
a folded surface forward.

What emerges differently than skin,
the bones, the body; then, naturally
the subtle act of forming void? Here,

the spirit splits apart, patterned as
the evening sky; so oil, water, smoke
and dust, morphs itself to light.

We leave some trace, a tremor, fixed
and spiked the body stays, stripped of
dream or violence in its mossy grave.

Wonder-worry

Have you heard the long note
from the distant? Talent
should be like that-

effortless.

Blind-ing, beautiful snake,
father-mask. I, too, am
careful of this world-

unbearably.

When he speaks there are
no stars, eclipsed cold house,
a budding cactus thriving

in the desert.

In the course of life, we hear
many lullabies. While there is
still a history of darkness,

damage,

our ears will not adjust
to light. In dreams, his tongue
becomes a field of posies

resting.

Sap

The trees have ears again, today
I am telling them about imagination.

The slender sprout at the foot
of his great oak mother listens

carefully as he should; he'll be
wider than a redwood cedar

before another crazy human
tries to have a conversation

with a twig. He asks me about
the definition of a dream, if

it's like the ghost of wind moving
through leaves without being caught

or shine of beetles poking through
soil when the moonlight reflects

off their jet black backs like
dark, wet jewels, then disappear.

These are tree dreams, I assure him.
Human dreams are more like sap

that drips down from a wound
in your bark or like winter when

you're hair falls out, you close
your eyes for awhile and remember

summer until summer
comes back. We talked

until the moon woke up;
the moon did not approve.

Midwest Observations

Innocence is a canning jar
filled with fireflies

that are released
in the morning.

If goats eat garlic weed
their milk is soured;

feed them sweet
grain.

When salt is applied,
skinned frog legs

twitch.

A horse is like underwear.
It should be worn by

the same person.

The world is not flat;
neither is the Midwest

entirely.

Never tease a bull
or a brother who is taller

than you are.

Respect nature, admire
its beauty, but never refuse

to eat it for dinner.

The Whooshing Sound (draft)

I try to conceive what
makes the whooshing sound

in metres of music, words as
they escape boundaries of book
to fly from page to mind,

the hush of flowers
opening, undamaged
every morning on the sill,

the spider's nail strumming
through her velvet threads,
the victim's breath she steals.

Everything has a pitch, even
nothing-ness. Capsules of shell,
the enormous rooms of night,

unseen tunnels of wind,
the dark, deep, wells of sea -

its vacant echoing.

As The World Turned

5:30 a.m., the traffic man said they found a body
on the shoulder of the 605. Car lights wound back up
through the canyon pass like an angry boa constrictor
whose skin was on fire.

The CEO of a toy manufacturer committed
suicide last night; his company painted toys
with toxic levels of lead. A pediatric neurologist
described ensuing loss of appetite, tremors, coma

while holding up figurines of mickey mouse and barbie.

I rolled over to watch the dog's chest rise and fall
at the end of the bed, his neck hair glowing in the t.v's shine
like an alien strobe from a friendly ufo that had settled on
a crude and violent planet. We found the remote

and turned the world off.

Moth at My Door

Knocks twice. The first,
to announce arrival,

the second, to listen
for an answer.

Passage involves
waiting in the shadows

until the light inside
comes looking;

you cannot
drag it out

with weeping
or the knowledge

of your years-

the sweetest child
has died in darkness

thinking how
to bend its ear.

And so we try

a language
like a question,

body like
a secret wing,

a fire built
by lovers

who rush
into the flame.

When You Wake Up

She liked colour. Maybe because she knew
colour was life and the absence of it could only be
the other. Like the word vacancy; if filled,
it disappears.

She often thought of miracles. As if
she could conjure one up simply by overcoming
a tragic moment with a deep sense of bliss. Later,
she realized, this act in itself, was the miracle.

Sometimes at night, she would hold out her hands
in the moonlight so her skin would glow like lantern paper
and little grey moths would crawl across her fingers
until the wind whisked them away.

No one knew her, really. She liked it that way.
Like a dream you can't recall when you wake up
or a feeling that makes you smile
but you don't remember why.

Untouched Shore

On a boat that is not a boat, we travel.
From the bow of its rattling bones,
the evening star, that great shining oak
in the land of sky, points to untouched shores.

Heavy webs of star, a mournful trap
of darker holes, hinges man's thoughts
to universe like tiny specks of fly.
It is the sea we hear when we are dying

or its winded breath, the physical divinity
of blueness, the stretching tendons
of fluttering wings whose feathers rise
like thunderheads in swirling weaves.

The gulls sweep down,
not from loneliness, but greed
to touch the thing that we desire most-
such fearsome beauty.

Things That Make you Go "Hmm"

"Yes" and I waited for the question.
I admit, it does not appear to matter now
what you need to know. There is not enough
time to conceal anything worth concealing.

Luckily, the grass is still soft and green
in the yard and if God had intelligent designs
for today, my barefeet on cool ground, the signals
the bright white color of magnolias send through

my heart cells are proof enough-

the suggestion, I mean, of answering
questions of meaning before they are
conveniently devised. Things that make you go:

hmm.

Into Blur

Another shocking crime.
Similiar victims. Women.
Trampled. We break eggs;
nothing disappears.

It feels like nothing. Like a blur,
like a string of smoke unfurled.
Either way, we curl fetal,
guitar-shaped, guilt-filled.

There is flame, shadow, art,
wound, mouth, body, dark-

remember?

When my questions reach you,
indecipherable, simple,
is it soul that traces shape
or unearthed, long dead words

that perfectly disguise bruised
and upturned prayers- a remedy

for plunder, feast and fear?

When a man falls into a mountain,
soot-colored throat, blind disaster
rushing down, the distant rain
like winter fur wistful, sad, invisible

is brightness swallowed?

Circling

On every forehead, the label warned
"you were meant to be blossom or a halo
of circling doves... naked, except for joy".

Then wind separated sea; the spirit found
its famous groin and fell asleep, haunted.
They built churches. Columns, arches, spaces;

body of stone, glass whose heart trapped light
in the shape of swords pointed up towards oblivion.
In the belfast, doves circle round the vining blossoms.

Winner Of

What is powerful? History, you might say,
or emotions that wound it. Decide upon
the beauty of your poison; I have chosen mine.

Nightly, like a woven pearl, the grain is changed
to sheets of light, the truth is hidden there;
hunted for so long, we wonder what it means.

So many, many. Noble, striving, poisoned, pining,
burdened. Object: lesson. Reward: our waiting.
You've fought for illumination elegantly, now-
everything but the winner.

Gluck's Bee

A guilty woman thinks
too much about thinking
or does she? The bee I meant
to cut from its death-trap
spider web in the lamp
that lit my garden reading;

my convenience to keep it
there just long enough to finish
Gluck's lines: if I wanted only
to hold you, I could hold you
prisoner.

This morning, warm tea,
yellow light, jasmine vines,
forgotten bee, black, poisoned,
shrouded. Now, the poet's words
make little sense to me:

those with the smallest hearts
have the greatest freedom.

Call It: Listen

What a bird must feel with wings torn from spine or more
merciful, never grown hollow bone to bone at all, or heart
drained blood, a stranger to purpose, a sky stripped
darkness, stars plucked out- a man and absent love.

What harms you, calls for you. To the mind of a child
the birthing room is light-filled, the unknown crib
is not a tomb. Your father's hand, the scythe it will become
wraps you like a horse's tongue on newborn foal; names you.

No one cares about your drama now. It is important to exist
because the terrible, damaged can sing without voice, fly without
wing, beat without blood, shine in the star-less darkness
surviving absence. What harms you, calls for you: listen.

The Intricate

We barely have time to touch; the intricate rarely
surviving the distance between long, brambled meadows
and purple-dawned irises opening. In another life,

not the one we are born in, but the one in which we are
simply imagined, the world is radiance, less flickering
memory. Years gone by, the house that we lived in, I still live-

the smoke-smells from chimney, cold specks of star choking
in sky, silver-weed shining in moonlight as I close my eyes,
each burst of thunder marching across wheat fields, a message

that darkness has meaning, mourning a union, uncertainty
moving towards tender acceptance- an un-worldly gift;
we barely have time to touch the intricate, rarely surviving it.

The Book in Which I Found You

You wrote "my souls,
three of them
have not spoken
in years."

Secretly,
they've learned
to live on wine
and beer

and a few
well-memorized
excuses.

I read
your book
about forgetting,
splitting, that life

is burning
inside a space
no bigger than
your skull.

You said,
"a guest in a room,
a fatherless boy,
the wounded luxury

of a corpse
are masterpieces."
Your third voice,
the one that wrote:

"my souls
are yours"
told me where
to find you.