fish bowl poetry II.

The scare-crow is strung up,
sullen in the bled field.
He is bruise-packed; soaked and seed-shedding
in the wet, tangerine night.

The rain runs down fence posts,
and collects in the road.  The dog
sleeps on the covered porch;
somewhere, the cat listens.

The grass around the driveway
has grayed and bends low,
The tractor like a tin drum.

A torn, disintegrating tarp
in the rafters of the barn
moves in the wind.

The children have left
little things:
buttons, a thimble, bread crust, rust pennies
in the scare-crow's pocket,
the keeper wordless
of the un-bound earth.

fish bowl poetry I.

Cupid prayed!
          -ugly and round like a trampled peach-
that love would come his way.
          After so many affairs started-or ended-by his arrows
Cupid had created a confrontational love-world, little islands
          of doubt and playfulness.
Cupid hoped, bursting from the window into his new life,
          that owning himself would be sweet and selfish.

s p l i n t e r i n g t h i n k i n g

why do I feel dead; or a hundred

people at once,

a hundred stories

and a hundred feelings.

did I already live?

A hundred years ago,

with white hairs like thoughts silvering

and thinning and burying themselves beneath

a heaving and sheltering earth.

welcome, autumn.

binded black-tied
into friday night
I gallop in streetlights
like the cooled sun
sunk into the folds
of my coat and seeping
skin deep
until I am night-warmed.

VI.

I do not want certain things:

I do not want the sharp shapes of sick, of dying, diagnose me.

I do not want leaving, and being left be at the center of me.

I do not want all the bitternesses, the second guesses, the stone

            of experience without post-script consuming me.

I do not want to want calm without clarity,

            the city beneath the soft salve and slavish haze.

I want to lay in a whole chapter, a word-hoard of sense.

I want a sifting, a picking and choosing of sound or soundlessness.

I want my sameness, I want some sweet alienation-

            enough to make moonscapes out of leftover moon rocks.

I want a language that ripens in my lifetime and hums in my family’s throat.

I want to see everything, over again, first, last, and future.

I want all the suicides of a day, the syncopation of thinking, 
                      the fullness of arriving.

V.

Our ship
           slides warm and wasted
into the sea.
           Now, a new hovel built
by mud scratchings and the whip cold
           keeps us here, howling;
kept and waiting tongueless
           in the tangle-land.

IV.

By the pool,

With the meat of cherries

And chlorine in my mouth,

Skin sun-plastered

And young, impatient

My fortune of memory

And fable future

Suspending me

Still, safe,

the anxiety of new.