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A Cargo of Green Hearts
~POEMS~

5/10/2014

5/9/2014

 
pay attention as the fire dies low sinks capsizing 
into its crisp whimpered embers and night 
hovers a downside-up invisible angel 
expecting something of you. it is time;
you've been anointed with flame
your plebian excuses all gone scurrying
off or flown. tonight you've wrestled up 
all the stones sinkers you stuffed in your 
pockets for the last year and some 
you've been schlepping around 
so long so precious so familiar
as familiar as would your own bone broken
and protruding through your thigh. 
too many to hurl off into one night
to be held by one night and its pushpins of
stars. god knows with them you could 
build a staircase to Mars or worse
places. god knows you'll die wearing them like 
toy-capsule vending machine trinkets or 
shrunken heads and the weight will 
draw down your sad flesh to the iron-bound
Earth's core. enough with this futility-- 
surrender takes many forms, its least angel 
the major league pitcher whose ballpark busting
throw you aspire to so much. Monet painted
sweetly in the heft of his quickening blindness 
bluesmen carved music from lead-strung
instruments chain-balled to the grave and a
thousand lousy  drunks have been medaled
& made love to for poems less sincere than
this one. even the perfect  airbrushed gods are
half-jackass (they who made us in their own
image out of monkeys). we carry what we carry
until, simply, we no longer carry it or 
no longer are. in the mean time you're allowed--
a jot against the stone-sinewed age of this
cornucopia  earth whose sun will burn and
burn and fail and die too someday--it's about
balancing the fulcrumed weight on the task
of shadow sculpting slick with hands of 
shadow, the careful drawing down and
down sheets of tender light against your
hunchback silhouette until and until and again
and again you see and see against the
dying fires forged and spent: the shape
of your own wings.  




Wings

3/28/2014

 
a flock of owls followed me
out of my childhood
last night almost caught me
with their cruel blunt beaks
and crueler loneliness
came out of  the trees
like sheets of paper torn
from a dismembered diary
burned  me down to the knees 
with their yellowed stare.
words are not enough to describe
how it feels to be driven 
out of shape, into prey
nothing but the battered
heartbeat for company
back hunched from a 40 year
cringe & ahead the empty
house in a dead orchard 
the house I will die alone in
a mattress waits linened
in the broken glass 
of a hundred windows through
which the breeze sweeps
in the soundless wings.

3.24.2014

3/24/2014

 
Wood frogs beneath the floodplain
lie leaf-litter frozen hard as ingots still
and still so tight and hard the silver  
maple buds you could nail one through a plank
while softshell turtles asleep as stones have
paved the river's muddy bed for months
still living? or breathless-dead? you ask
it's all attitude, what you think and how
you think it, a glass filled by half or just half emptied
is this love so sadly stripped away by steely ice and  
clawing wind a sleeping seed or a cold dead stone--
you choose: do nothing
or love this world and all that's living take
that frozen frog that is your heart
and blow on it like an alchemist bent on turning  
hopeless lead to burning gold.


3.18.2014 

3/18/2014

 
I tinder-gather the winter's dark variables
its struggling math and parentheses of
ice. the equations no longer suit me
nothing will satisfy me now but the spare
zero of bare flesh. it's no longer about
letting go the calculus I did not learn
and may never. it's about sudden
erasure, the bone-crack of ice-out  
unexpectedly on the Merrimack
overnight seaward swept; the 
materialization of birds, songs
truce-shattering the wind-walled
and pacified silences; the way a fresh
sword of grass cuts through
all tallying thoughts as a lover's
tongue slides through once-gated lips  
sudden parted. if there is a time to burn
things that make sense, that time has
arrived. if there shall be an altar
to unpredictability, nest that 
holocaust in my heart. make me stop making 
the sense that winter humiliated
from me. let break the slate, let it lie broken 
let shoes be discarded and the busted 
black shards walked barefoot. with the impending 
sun as my witness, I swear and swear again
I am standing on holy ground with all ten
fingers useless.

2.9.2014 Truth

2/9/2014

 
if it is true
that all is an illusion
and even matter is a waltz
of tiny fires, waves of light
then why can’t it be
true that the dragonfly stitches
tight the lips of the dead
so they will not speak
secrets of that other world
woven of stars that the
living must not know of
and the loons who we
think fly south led by bits
of magnetite sunk
in their whistling skulls  
really sail on endlessly
passing from galaxy to galaxy
lamenting in their lonely way
the extinction of mysteries
while beneath the waves
the starfish armed like hands
bind this world for us
keep it from flying apart
in a grip tighter than gravity,
more tenacious than love
and somewhere in a jungle
which is always somewhere
other than we can be, the tiger
striped in sunrise, wind
and black night abrades
a path through the trees
the sparks of its passage  
making it possible
for us to dream.


 

2.7.2014

2/7/2014

 
     in my life without a lover
throughout my house
kisses move like blind hummingbirds
windows rattle and complain
my hands linger on vases
the necks of wine bottles, doorless doorways
I inhabit my furniture despairingly
the way an animal inhabits a zoo
and cry over small things
dead moths, broken yolks, sad clouds.
     outside, the world goes on 
and on painting itself tangerines
while I dissolve in my shower
raise myself from the endless floors
and wait for night, sweet night
to climb into my bed out of pity.


1.31.2014

1/31/2014

 
20 below. stop and the cold
presses Her lips to your 
fingertips, draws out
a little bit of your soul
with her teeth. She's been
doing this your whole
life you realize but here
among the winds and their long zeros
the hoodooed trees
and rime ice stacked like daggers
you feel Her at your ear
and there are no
lies, no trying on your eulogy
for fun, no shiteating thumbs
up for a camera, it's just
you and Her and everything
that still matters about your life
this world something sweet
on your tongue all of the pending kisses
waiting for you in another
more reasonable place
a green blade of grass, a duck
slapping wings on open water
lovemaking, the soft miracle of a bed and roof
the walls of your skin your house & 
this safe nation you are fortunate
to live in, strange how everything
becomes possible, beautiful
even rubbish, mediocrity
in this harrowing down
between Being Here and Not Being Here
ice-glaze on your goggles
breath freezing shut your eyelids
the col broomed of its snow 
by the artistic wind
summit glinting like Olympus, too frigid
to relieve yourself let alone dance--
the question is not
if you will  return to earth
(for you likely will, you have
not come to this world
without the necessary talismans,
the requisite respect), but rather
how far down the mountain 
you will carry the truth.




1.25.2014

1/27/2014

 
the storm drops
its star-petaled
art, each one landing
like the foot of a cat
or the fingertip of
an angel anointing
a sick child. they touch
down with geologic patience
lock their miniature hands
slowly wall us off from
this fair earth, erase
all the rough edges
of things. they are the 
curtains of summer's
last song, death's
sound-sapping
lullaby.

1.22.2014 Empty Hands

1/22/2014

 
strange now
to think I have lived
half a year in the
broom swept desert of my 
own bed have raised myself like a
solitary tulip daily have
cooked alone, ate 
from the countertop
breathed into the scoured
horizons of midnight and winter
twining myself around this bear of
nothing touching nothing inhabiting
nothing restless in this space
between skin and bone marrow. 

strange how it has become me
has draped me in its slow
arctic amnesia, has kissed me
long and indeliberately the kiss
that slows the pulse
sets one dreaming soon
forgotten dreams
of spring's green shadows.


1.15.2013 Wednesday night

1/15/2014

 
Sleep now.
Rest your face on
Night's faceless
sea. Take off the day's briars
shed the strangling
tie, the straightjacket
of scars and blows.
Be faceless, bodiless
let Night unravel you
with Her slow unraveling
fingers. The entire day
and everything in it
exists only to prepare you
for Her embrace.

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