The blue beaker of sky in your hand,
drink it down, savour it,
swish it around until you can sing arias,
swim in the spaces of song,
open the spigot and pour another,
share it with your friends,
wash your face with it,
bathe in a bath of blue,
rinse all the meanness from your hair
until it shines with morning light,
soak your feet and fly,
play in the sprinkler,
immerse yourself everywhere,
laugh in a blue rain,
dive into everyone’s pool!

“The diamond is the cornerstone of the wise, proof against the blows of fate.”
(Anonymous alchemical text, c. 1600)

Is something good to come or something amiss?
I pick the card up from the woodland path
and stand in the shadows of the trees
holding a playing card like a bemused polymath.
Why here, now, out of fifty-one companions,
does this small sign arrive in my hand?
And as I studied the diamonds in their mine
the ground beneath me changed—
paving stones as in an old church,
a choir filling the air with unbroken sound.
I knew then, in that crossing of worlds,
I had stepped onto my cornerstone;
nothing in our strange lives is mere incidence.
I lift my door card, four of diamonds,
and place my bet on the given and the unknown.

An immature Red-Tail Hawk
magnificent in its rawness
lands in my backyard,
from brown to white to cinnamon-red,
fierce as a Harpy Eagle,
between myth and reality,
youth and adulthood,
its exuberance and power
on the precipice of flight,
wingspan casting a shadow
and the earth falling back.

I was lucky to have visited the Bar Mazzara,
in Palermo, Sicily. The year was 1995,
and because I loved Lampedusa
my cousin brought me to the Prince’s favourite bar.
There, I reached through the glass.
I touched an older world, the coffee like a vapour
that woke me to a dream that was real.

The bar closed in 2014, bought by a conglomerate.
Like anything in time, everything must change,
even the Bar Mazzara, the Lair of the Leopard,
at which Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
would sit, write, and sip his espressos,
trying to hold time in a porcelain cup,
even though in literature or in business,
loss alone is the constant clause in any contract.

Put out a hummingbird feeder,
become a gardener of the air.
One day a flower will bloom—
a hummingbird flower
made up of different species,
so alive it must vanish quickly,
though for a moment it hovers,
glimmers—
an iridescent flower of the heavens
piercing disbelief itself.

Too Hot To Handle

“Those are gunshots,” Len said,
pouring me another bourbon.
“How often do you hear them?”
“In New Orleans, every week.”
“How’s your bourbon?”
“Good,” I said.

A bullet pierced the window
and shattered my glass—
like a line of poetry
straight to the heart.

“That’s a good line,” Len said.
We both chuckled.
A few more shots rang out.
We went back to watching
an old Jayne Mansfield film,
Too Hot To Handle.

Assault on Silence

Outside Detroit’s Orchestra Hall
I had a smoke and chatted
with the security guard
when gunfire erupted.

“Those aren’t musical instruments,”
he said. They were getting closer—
like a drive-by staged
on a rolling film set.

We stepped back inside.
The orchestra had fired
round after round
until out of ammunition.

A dead audience,
still in bloody clothes,
stood to applaud
this assault on silence.

This hour, this moment, this now.
This summer day framed by my window,
it is irreflexive, it stands by itself,
a singular instead of dual object
in the fields of green mathematics.
It is the stillness of time rooted in trees,
time at the green tip of its leaves,
an aura around its summer flowers,
and every flying, singing thing.
This now, this moment, this hour,
resemblance now strangely altered,
though nothing has changed.

Two cabbage white butterflies is a mating dance,
three is a rivalry,
four is a friendship or a family,
eight is a dinner in a meadow of clover
and anymore, is a vision,
between you and your god.

I look at my aging skin
and see how bone begins to speak—
like I’m palming black aces.

What have you grasped, hands?
What riches have you wagered
that didn’t sift like sand or water?

You have but one argument for salvation:
you were present; you endured.
Even scattered across space,
the bones of the hand
hold the dust of a star.

For thoughts like these, I live with praise—
for the hands I have held,
for the winds that have sung my face
back into my hands.

Shadows flower through iron lace,
a shadow leaf falls from a balcony
and vanishes in my hand.
Darkness has one wing and light another.

In Louisiana, the wind dies where it falls,
like death’s unanswered questions—
day in, day out,
that same old voodoo follows us about.
But at the exact moment
of that assignation in Dallas,

the bells of St. Louis were ringing,
a tomato vender counted his millions,
and a prostitute on Bourbon Street
felt a light rain absolving her.

And that is why they call life a mystery,
and truth a conspiracy.