Abundance
Watching you work, a pit
expands in my abdomen
the way it must do in a
mother when her spouse
walks out of the hospital
room to take a meeting.
Why don’t we lie down
right here? After the song
we can share worries over
what to put in the saucepan
or connect the silly dots
together for a change.
The Future is a Long Time
brothers assemble
on banks that shimmer
light directly
from ripple to skin
and across onto horse-
hide unabashedly arrayed
under tamarisk shade.
when it’s time for us
we first wade in
until our belt-lines are wet
then enter fully, bound
upriver so that we come
out exactly across among
the horses that are not
a mirage. dangling between
mustang legs
jiggles a climber’s rope
affixed to a bolt in
a shallow cave carved
into golden mud rising
anciently from the riverbed.
in turn we climb
straight up the wobbling
cord until we both balance
panting in the wall’s narrow hollow.
droplets on us slim
down asymptotically.
amid the sun-
spots on the horses below
that look the same size as from
the opposite shore
we see now the dark deep
pool for whose
depths we climbed reaching
this shallow place above.
before the droplets can go
I turn and say If I were to savor
one moment forever over
and over, it would be the diving
down before us
but us up here. he turns and
says Isn’t that exactly what
we will get in the end?
Gus & Raven
would that I could
cross out our names
which are “Gus” and “Raven”
on this concrete wall
and replace them withGus Raven
“You” and “Me”
if that I could
become this village—
so-called unin-
corp
-orated
—I would fix that
to give all these wiggling families
a place to rest (/dance)
such that I transmute
myself into this whole continent
like I’ve been zig-
zagging to do
all this time
(though I have no interest
in becoming time
(except for music
for that I would
do time))
The Run
our friends sleep in tents as
we two weep by the lake
making up for a statewide
drought.
we mean tenderly but we
swallow, gasping out smoke
and crying like two hanged
trout.
we have the nerve to neglect
precaution as if the amber sap
here has lost its taste for
relics.
as if potholes would vanish
in the dark when we close
our eyes to crunch across the
gravel!
but the world stares at us
anyway, has its way with
us, makes us it’s laughing
stock.
you know what the game is:
these trees planted by the
loggers, the lake’s fish also
stocked.
fortunate for us the light
also cast its thin filament
and in that we are finally
caught.
Celui-ci, La Mer
you say you haven’t traversed, you
haven’t the documentation, as a
bluefish crosses beneath us making
its mockery—two days ago the storm
carried me here, me and my knotted
questions, woven tight in the seagrass,
the ones that yanked me back to this plot.
your sweet question about ice cream,
mine about the man floating across
the salted sound: you did not know the
storm carried him and his funeral, too.
you notice early stars—we are far from
anything, you and me—as I notice
the way the ocean has grown over
intervening years. I avoid your eyes for
the evening, not in shame or anger;
begging the heavens for a lighthouse
I focus on this radical bid for shore.
Attempted Bundle
Attempted Bundle
Please Accept
So I Won’t Be Witness
So I Will Be Wire
Let Me Give You
My Garbled Version
it is an honor to care for you on your journey
One Hundred Percent
Of Those Implicated
Perish Just Here
Tumble Just Here
In Dust, Recalling
Songs To The Last
imagist(s) / vers librist(s)
A Copper Pot Full
With Rusted Water
Is All I Can Give You
Is All That Lasts Us
To Make It Through
Our Thirsty Walk
the path takes on many colors
Distill This Down To
Only Necessity But
Make Fair Accounting
Reasoned Reckoning
Don’t You Abandon
The Good Parts
take to horsing around! take to the dance!
Tomorrow’s Child
Begins To Sing In
A Language We Teach
A Language We Lose
It Will Make Up
Words Of Its Own
didn’t we once do just that?
Compass
we busted rainbow siblings
beautify this long death
together in silly games
assembling some cathedral
to host our licking of wounds
are we still starving through a ___ Bowl?
are we still beaten by the ____ Crow?
are we still studying at the Residential ____?
what my sibling what my sibling
will we do will we do
what my sibling will we do with our short
remainder?
let us remind us how drastically
we have underpaid for our meal
Bungalow
awaiting your phonecall
it is 1953 again, where I
stand between rooms,
one for living, the other
that promises your voice.
I howl a laugh reading
then recant—I should
be actively listening.
I can barely complete
a Hail Mary. What
have I become when
the eggs burn, toilet
runs, fridgerator hums,
clothes sit unfolded
by dull pencils, by blank
notebooks, I expect to
hear a radio far away
relaying an old war in
a dead accent, or maybe
you are living again and
I need to hang up hope.
Charm
when my hand walks into
that rip in your blue jeans
I follow it onto a sunlit shore
and watch a wave arise.
Now I am returned to the place of sensation and
wish to become frozen again.
windmill shadows on
the llano estacado –
saguaros spared in
suburban interstices –
rumbling sensations
in this fiery place –
my prayer for freeze
to retake my heart.
State
the whole earth conspires
in a gratitudinous cabal:
the liquor store found closed
when I should be sleeping;
a libidinous entropy when
I would square it all away;
bad times good for business
in my special line of work;
or the realization under
red leaves that I am happy!
Post to New Haven
sweet Dr. Jones (which is un-
surprisingly your real name after
all these years), do you think after
me, these years later on, and in
which of our shared languages
do you remember (occasionally)
that we used to share soup
(diagonally) in the bright hall
where we neither of us really
knew “up” from “blue” much
less what to do about such
maelstroms we stumbled into
from such opposite ends, didn’t
we, Dr. Jones, it’s a shame we
couldn’t agree over teas the way
we might today should we have
run into each other in natural
sunlight now that our legs no
longer work (and commitments
have proven equally shaky),
I suspect we would chuckle
about it but at least let’s let each
other have a little grace, and
find a way to get along apart
Skookum Atlas 