Poetry Archive
Tuesday, July 22, 2014
Sunday, January 12, 2014
If Then
SETTING: OPTICALLY PURE GLASS ABOUT 3.5 X 10-4 INCHES OR 9 MICRONS IN DIAMETER, CAPABLE OF TRANSMISSION OF INFRARED LIGHT (WAVELENGTH = 850 TO 1,300 NM)
SCENE
(Voice): Do you?
(Other Voice): Maybe we should...
(Voice): Okay that was better next time...
(Other Voice): Yet it is now more perfect than perfection.
(Voice): Still one and one makes; if you ever feel then that it is you know I don't feel...
(Other Voice): Me too!
(Voice): If then...
(Other Voice): If then, if then if then! If then! If then! (ululates)
(Voice): If then trains are running, if then outhouses can be made from flower petals?
(Other Voice): Somewhere a little closer in? Bubble wrap and, and who wants to die alone?
(Voice): A dog in Spain, I was only in that serpentine canyon once. In Utah. Serpentine. And a reciprocating saw.
(Other Voice): See how the arrows fall over there? And the slings right here.
(Voice): Another one like you, another one who was prehensile.
(Other Voice): Squatting or making mortgage out of potatoes?
(Voice): Lace, cherry cake, dishes if necessary.
(Other Voice): Yet neither with intention nor having the proper pulleys, the trains in Amsterdam.
(Voice): I see. So tired. Would you be offended if..
(Other Voice): I said what is these fruits anyway? (sighs)
(Voice): So, where then?
(Other Voice): Right, where then?
(Voice): Too bad.
(Other Voice): Pleased ta meet-cha!
(Voice): Good luck!
(Other Voice): With all of that.
Friday, January 10, 2014
Wednesday, August 14, 2013
Oncorhynchus Mykiss
crack swell rot
cave chip split
decay recede
bleed grind
my opinion is that,
and I don’t know
if anyone else
has figured
this out,
there are reasons why
and more than that
they don’t listen
to reason they
listen to
outside forces
please good
a bloody business
this scraping
see here:
rot decay
periodontal
recession
cavity
apocalypse
the unhearing
with yellow teeth
trout swallowed
by trout
geese clubbed
with putters
take a
bag of flosses
and a crawdad
pinching a trout fry
in a cold pool
with you
the gravel behind
the dam
the molars rolling
toward
your lips
your mouth
is full of
bloody
trout
Tuesday, August 6, 2013
Those Days in the Middle of the Week
Click on the first picture, then scroll to read:
Those days in the middle of the week, when everyone else is working.
I sit out at the plaza, in the café, by the ridgetop table, and do what I do.
The lifelong adolescence in its way. The barking at the commerce of time.
A staff put out against the current of everything.
Constructing semaphore messages always anxious
they’re invisible.
It is not the baby being pushed across the plaza, the immigrant washing the
café dishes, the growing of squash with water from a drying well.
It’s not anything other than the echo of metaphors
bouncing down the well
reaching cool silence
inaudible.
Yet the repetition of anything builds a mooring eventually,
whether it bothers the tide or not to
abide by the new sinuity
glide the new riffle
make way for
its mass.
Ambition is a sham against the tide.
One that makes its space
by taking it from
the plaza quiet
with the force
of will.
Were my arm a scythe, I would reap my own head
that the fountains keep flowing
in the plaza bath or the
drip irrigation lines unbothered
by distortion
distortion distortion.
The baby rolls past the dry fountain
the brown skin shuffles coffee cups
the squash dies when the water
is diverted
to our cash crops.
Tuesday, July 23, 2013
Friday, May 10, 2013
Hedge Nettle Tea
I went down to Green Ridge to watch a friend’s house
while he went east to bury his father’s ashes.
Four walls, a roof, no fuss.
A riot of garden all around,
succulents and olive trees,
basil and pine.
I was reading a lot of geology, a lot of weather,
trying to get the story of it just right.
How the Pacific High was throwing wind
our way and the wind made fog
and the tectonic plates
made mountains that
blocked the fog and grew redwood trees.
I love even the sounds
of these big movements.
Subduction and Coreolis, lithic and morphic and upwelling and deposition.
And then I go out to pick nettles and realize that
all of my life I have been wrong
about which is the stinging and which is the hedge nettle.
Names for everyday plants,
long committed to memory, wrongly so.
I don’t know anything.
I make a tea of the hedge nettle anyway. Lemony smelling
and all kinds of green. To have mistaken which of
the nettles give a sting,
to have not noticed even that.
Such a thing.
Vultures circle below the garden,
riding the rising heat.
I watch them through the steam of the tea.
I think they are vultures.
In fact, I insist.
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