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.

“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.

Distant thunder.
Dead wind.
Light, greenish-grey.
Thunderheads rumbling.
Empty street.
Branches swaying.
Then a thunderbolt.
A few big rain drops.
More thunder.
Torrential rain.
Wild wind.
Zero visibility.
Thunder overhead.
Gusting space.
Blowing leaves.
Full motion in the trees.
Vast screen of mist.
Thunder diminishing.
Then louder.
Then diminished.
Rain letting up.
Wind circling back.
A last thunderclap.
Sunbeams breaking.
Rain from the trees.
Enchanted life.

Water penetrates pigment.
The music washes away.
Words sink to the lakebed.
Trees are growing in silt.
Faces appear and change.
Someone dead in a book
Reappears in the rain.
We tremble at a touch.
Leaves tremble at a touch.
Hate doesn’t die; people die.
Flood and fire/ fire and flood.
Our Saviour on a cypress.
Branches shake without wind.
Bird reflections surface.
Sentences spill into water.
The watering can is filled.
Drops engrave stone.
The shipwreck is home.
Fish arrange themselves.
The membrane swims.
Love and suffering are one.
A book opens to ice fields.
A poem is under glass.
Mirrors read their erosion
But dream like the sea.
Without the sun I am silent.
Without the moon I am still.
The manuscript is washed.
The actors are ready.
An audience assembles.
The first lines are silent.
The last are written first.