For the Silver Leaf

Tonight time withdraws

To the naked lamp’s blind kingdom

You feel the weight of inenarrable events

In an era before spoken things

Where nothing thwarts the wind

And you find the moment

At the exact midpoint of your life

Evening in the Coppered Hills

Your fear of not being

Makes you intimate with stones

And your fear of missing

The slow movement of shadows

Their quiet breathing

Their whispers

Makes you kin to silence

Insects pause at your hunting boots

Nothing’s out of season

How to Love a Poem

Jazz it

but don’t

razz it

Wiz it

but don’t

jizz it

Yearn it

but don’t

learn it

Spare it

but don’t

wear it

Lay it

but don’t

play it

Shout it

but don’t

spout it

Spit it

but don’t

shit it

Spite it
but don't
shite it

Cock it

but don’t

lock it

Chew it

but don’t

spew it

Lust it

but don’t

bust it

Thirst it
but don't
burst it

Lose it

but don’t

booze it

Piss it

but don’t

miss it

Carve it

but don’t

starve it

Lick it

but don’t

stick it

Trash it

but don’t

smash it

Tease it

but don’t

seize it

Grab it

but don’t

bag it

Slap it

but don’t

trap it

Hold it

but don’t

fold it

Own it

but don’t

loan it

Hear it

but don’t

fear it

Slice it

but don’t

ice it

Find it

but don’t

bind it

Fight it

but don’t

bite it

Sex it

but don’t

text it

I Write Your Name

I write your name

On profundities of night

Lost as daybreak

Shrugs its ancient aching shoulders

I write your name on salt streets

As they unfurl and yawn

I write your name

On dawn’s gnawed crosses

When air trembles with a scent of musty laughter

I write your name

On the bicycle spokes of morning

Whirling in search their gleam

Their fugitive sparkles of time

I write your name

On a blurred noise

A tired moan of low reproach

I write your name

On the waking river’s naked fist

And on the barn swallow’s panting wing

I write your name

On the sun’s lusty ascent

And on day sumptuously

Consuming itself

I write your name

On the city’s dirty linen

On the city’s unmade bed

On the city’s tarnished eyeglasses

On the city’s thick indifferent heart

I write your name

Where you are not

In the poor murmur of a poem
In a fluttering of useless feathers

Little Elegant Doubts a Thimbleful of Fluid Might Erase

Let’s not look feasibly

Worn around the edges

Nor predictably clichéd

Let’s be half air like these insubstantial thoughts

Let’s blow for instance

Dry words at each other

Gaseous puffs colliding

In the space between these open mouths

Or elsewhere down

Silent corridors we see

Dimly as at twilight

The true pretense of these archaic faces

Let’s be frozen gods

You so beautifully keen

I so full of latter-wit

Feeling kissy like these fragile statues

Let’s be luminous beasts

To see and to be seen

And we will only speak

The ancient language of these incandescent eyes

Hey Dude

I wanted to say hi

But I guess you’re too busy

Farting onto the mirror

To see if it fogs up

Protip—

It totally does!

Call me back

Bye

There as in the Water of a Mirror

Never again to trust the solitude of rivers

Nor open fields receding from either shore

No more murmurations of starlings that rise

In one many-winged whirl to settle again

With a single instinctive mind on tilled soil

Never again the blank blue sky empty

And cloudless like your last-time eyes

When we stood there discussing spiders

Found in birds’ bellies and the sentence

Where we prepared for whatever might

Happen in the aftermath of introductions

Never again our frost affected thoughts

Turning toward tropical erotic zones
Where we'll meet again in paradise

Problems that Turn into Rain at Night

No it was a cheap picnic

Like taking a short sip of a thick book

For instance reading in Moby Dick

Only the chapter on the whiteness of the whale

And even then skipping whole paragraphs

Just to say you got through it

Yes I unzipped the flowers

Only minutes before you arrived

So you’d see their open hearts

Beating shyly through Persian blinds

As you hesitated at the window

Deciding whether to knock

No I believe vistas out this window

Are parts of speech all tangled up

Not in the memory of a lost map

But in horizons of two-bit proverbs

Misplaced in the dim light let down

Into darkness into quiet water

Yes I really don’t know that I’m inclined

To talk about that any more right now

After all it’s likely snowing somewhere

That Paul Eluard and I once tossed

Love’s dice while arguing the delicate

Problem of the firefly and that bastard

Won the game so I wrote you innumerable

Unsent letters amusing my dorm room

No the skin all dressed up is as you say

A sort of abomination sure that’s true

But what about the simple apple

Fluent in the secret language of color

Whose skin flames minty French green

Duck egg blue chartreuse avocado

Goldenrod sunflower dried blood

Mahogany amber saffron yellow bird shit?

Yes I suppose the tuning fork vibrates

Indefinitely when a thirsty soul cuts

Time in half like a ruby grapefruit

Thick pink juice dripping throatward

Which whenever I see it always makes me

Feel like a small fictional nincompoop

No my otherworldly architectural angel

I dance in a shower of warm music

On the dubious roof you built playing

Four open notes on my resonant mouth harp

Your body an unknown woman in the air

Beside me as we enter your stigmatized

Attic throwing off the rain impatiently

Yes we run away perilously with our life

Wearing each other’s clothes as we kiss

Our open palms goodbye one at a time

All thirty-five of them the way the dead

Play the piano without hands without sound

Cedar Cigar Box

You can insert any memory you like here—

Maybe something you read in a history book

A dry galantine served to obese monks

Doomed for the guillotine three days hence

The proud head of a galloping pony

You saw at a county fair when you were five

The gallant lungs of a mudfish breathing

Hoarsely—anything you can remember

However big or small will fit in here

The size of a loud laugh suddenly

Broken by a lover’s frown

A horse neighing a cat purring

The shape of a fist or a violin

The carnivorous eye of a panting sparrow

You saw in the desert near Mosul
During a combat patrol

Everything that has passed through

The forehead of a lonesome buzzard

Every danceable if not dancing decision

You wish you’d made before the lid fell