Plum tree flowers!
Someone shouts “cherry blossoms!”
The whole is the false.
Beyond a thousand gates
a thousand gates of rain.
Who will hear our goodbyes?
A thousand gates:
turning back
not giving up.
Mount Fuji:
in such a clear sky
such a clearer grandeur.
Retired sumo:
his immense sadness
crushes me.
Cranbrook Science Museum
Sun moon and earth in its orbit of pain.
Vast togetherness of alien clusters–
But for the laws of motion, love.
But for love, the laws of motion.
Listen, ancestors speak through us,
Counterbalance to perpetual motion.
Words rasp against breath
Like being’s transparent barrier.
Sunrise to sunrise the ball machine,
Eternally recurring consecration
To perpetual space and inertia,
Building its demolition museum.
Human energy engenders, smashes,
Exists in the antimatter of traffic.
Funeral processions proceed
Through interminable pageants.
If we understood perpetual motion,
We’d hate with less hate, less war–
Dream with more dreams, fulfilled–
The ball machine in perpetual motion.
Off I 97 north through Ohio,
A farmhouse was like a doll house on fire.
A family looked on, frozen where they stood,
As though they’d been arranged
By the hand of a child playing with fate.
As traffic slowed, time accelerated.
The conflagration grew life-size.
Firefighters fought back an inferno
And even the light of the fields
Was aflame with radiant treetops.
As traffic slowed, time accelerated.
The red glow on doll faces, a pink sunset,
It all became rekindled memory
Cast beyond farmhouse flames,
Forever fused, the fire’s reflection
In the window of my dad’s car
Burns on and on, as we drive north
Through fire into flammable snow.
I see many feathers on the road
But not all come with messages
From sky roads, tree paths,
Cloud highways
And mountain turnarounds.
This one nests in my thoughts,
This one swings in my mind
Like the trees,
This one is a black arrowhead,
A ceremonial blade,
Just picking it up I am elevated,
Ennobled by an older spirit
Attune to wind and space
And the landscape falling away
From worry, from time.
with so much light shadows are bright
the color of sound roots in neutral ground
white goods or the mist of wolves
mourners dance in a voodoo trance
the end of truth the death of youth
wealthy preachers modest teachers
streetcar named desire flood and fire
a gulf storm wet and warm
a green wine followed by a black vine
like swaying palms the dripping calm
like the blues flesh of the bruise
like the rain crisscrossed the train
who’s got trouble all the trouble
over the river the deep river
canopies drying horses flying
cannabis smoke like incense and hope
love and peace lies and police
musty rooms floating tombs
a lizard call wakes a shadow doll
“The light night wind singing against my eyes.”
Philip Larkin
My old neighborhood is unchanged.
Strange it has changed so much.
Miscellanies out for trash and pick up.
Single bed bedframes, tv antenna,
toothless rakes, birdfeeder and pole
pulled from its earthly flight path–
kid’s picnic table, boxed paperbacks,
cockeyed picture frames– work shed
shelves of nails, washers and screws
and other reparations to affix change
by eliminating the hardware to do it
it gets done all the same in time.
I pedal slower by homes I know
numbed by accelerated sameness
and the void of the sun’s fire
with wheels in my ideal trees.
The one direction out is closed.
That’s where I will have to go,
slip through a gap, over a crack,
having never returned/ never left.
