From Snow Formations
Threads
The danger is not what you know
but what you think you know.
Someone famous said that or a fairy
fed it to me in a dream. Either way
the grenade I saw yesterday
on television might have been an artichoke.
And soft green words
might be a figment of your imagination.
Take that couple over there, in the half-light
of an evening tree.
Couldn't the man be mistaken? Couldn't her whispers
in his ear be the trickery of breezes and summer cottons?
Isn't it possible that the elm is really a flimsy
umbrella--
worse, the rainsoaked photo of a flimsy umbrella
coming apart in threads?
Chaos enters the brain swimmingly. Mere humans,
we realign ourselves, posturing.
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Symposium
We handed them God on a silver platter.
Do you know it took Him only one day to annihilate
the past? Which, of course, allowed them
to start over again.
In a flash,
He gave them light and a place to gather:
Pool halls and greasy shacks.
The world sugared white.
We took up the slack.
Served up their heart's desire: Export A
and an excuse to get up in the morning.
Vinegar on fries. Cameras to seize the day:
Dogs coveting cigarette butts,
An Elder's rotten keyboard of teeth.
We gave them mercantile lust
and the cunning
to turn 4,000 savage years
into art.
See that sky up there? That was us, too.
We gave them television,
liberalism, tampons, Pampers,
Pop tarts, tooth paste, acne, tartrazine.
Did I mention Sugar-pops? Xanthan gum,
Hubba Bubba, Boy George,
Ringo, Paul, John, and Love, all they needed.
With protection (which, of course, they still won't use).
The rest just came: Woodstock, Hollywood, the World
Wide Web.
The nerve of them saying we stole their land.
Such a small thing.
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Artifacts
Assorted broken dolls
by a grave site,
armless, nude,
eyes obliterated
by centuries of ice.
One might confound them
with those running
wounded
from their men:
Eskimo wives
in southern dress,
bandaged
in the stubborn moss
of June.
Don't.
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Inukshuk
That brown speck on the tundra
that thing like lint
on a white dress,
that's me.
Move a little closer.
Seems I've been here since the Vikings,
since way before you.
For years, I've watched the herds
come and go. The river.
I can certainly tell you a little something
about bearing up, stalwart. Resilient.
Unaffected by the rose moss
springing in a breeze,
the teardrop
clouds.
Let me tell you about the stone
will. How, even through the
poignant light of softer days
I go on, standing.
Visibly intact. Touch me,
and I fall apart.
****************************************
Still, Life
From the graveyard everything looks good.
Shrouded, now, in white,
crystallized, I see that.
I also see carbonized snow
as a good thing.
Pardon my cynicism, my failure to acknowledge this
sooner. I'll get to the point.
How many of us ever take time to enjoy
the Earth's exquisite intricacies? Victorian lace.
Spider-webs. The organza wing
of a common fly.
Who, among us, actually hears
bracelets in the chilly wind? A rattlesnake
coiling through light?
Put it this way.
Next time you claim to be bored,
visualize brownish-blackish grim nothingness
and then feed on the world,
one breath at a time. Imagine the tang
of unusual spices on your tongue;
red dust falling
lightly
from a powdered stamen.
Loosen the flower, drink some wine,
make your solemn declaration
singingly--
I can't even imagine not being here.
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From Satie's Sad Piano
Prologue
The New Millennium
The bishops feared a dip on Wall Street,
flashfloods, tornadoes, snow squalling
in tongues, the chickens awry,
–-a white, interstellar madness.
They predicted the harvest in tatters,
provisions under the staircase
stupefied into dust.
The prescient would hear it coming:
a week early, demons in the glassware,
heirloom dinner plates shifting
imperceptibly,
a chink in the rattling air.
They feared 40 days & 40 nights
of blighted, non-believers
spitting up blood, bile, the Seven Deadly Sins
of the rainbow
bruised & shaken, the last conscious radio
issuing prayers for the End.
But midnight came & went, dragging its long face,
& spring arrived, as always: seeded
with light.
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By whose leaden will did I fall
into fall’s most alluring musk?
Who deranged the senses
such that I nosed beyond the knowable
road, the tactile
alligator bark of trees?
Who sent me gibbering into my
simple, primitive brain?
Father, I know not that I have sinned,
merely this:
I would as soon travel blind
as inhabit earth’s pedestrian corridors.
Lured by the cinnabar waltz
of leaf on leaf,
gold sniffing out rust.
Delusional.
Love thrown, whimsically,
my way.
****************************************
Summer hums with improvised gaiety.
In a parallel hemisphere.
Birdsong in ascending scale. Dawn gladdened
with mangrove, eucalyptus. Jubilant
over-the-moon kids promising
all the wrong things to each other.
So rapt, so absorbed in their own rhythm,
they’re unaware of the storm
making overtures on the horizon.
Because living hasn’t yet tapered off into
Satie’s sad piano.
Yes, the rest of the world seems to know
a thing or two about love’s bitter edge,
the dirge that wells up, unannounced,
to drown the Orphean blue. But who will say?
Having been there themselves. Having known
what it means to drag among the baritones,
but before that, what it really is to fly.
****************************************
The city awoke, refurbished. Yesterday’s euphony
of rain easing into birdsong.
After the long night, quiet restoration.
But whatever happened to those lovers
singing the raspberry blush of dawn?
I ask not out of anger or spite,
but out of genuine sorrow.
Sometimes, second thoughts
bear no resemblance
to second thoughts:
their failure to accommodate
the fluctuating light.
A rosebush beneath the window.
The last warbling stars,
bending away.
