Rain
When
the rain
stops,
hopefully
my
tears
will
too.
As we cross into the street, the dog pulls
against her leash to get to the fledgling
grackle. The bird hops away into the other
lane. We make a wide birth to give it room.
As we cross into the grass at the park,
the growl of an approaching vehicle makes
me turn. I shouldn’t turn, I know. But I do.
I watch the hopping, fluttering baby die.
I am from Kentucky.
My statement is a confession,
a confession made not to a priest
but to all citizens. I seek absolution
for my sin of residence, for being
from the state that every cycle
since 1984 — 1984! what irony! —
delivers to the national stage an actor
who exercises deviousness, lust
for power, and patent contempt
for the Constitution and the purpose
of government to uphold the common good.
Even though I have opposed him
in every election, I cannot help but feel
a burden of geographic guilt.
Dizziness to match a planet’s rotation
Rules with no purpose, just malice
Dust, impatience, and rain
Too many blind eyes, cold shoulders, and bystanders
And
To ignore the seas would let the air consume you
All I was doing was waiting for dinner on a winter’s Sunday.
You walked in the room, we dined together, and you left holding my heart.
Thus, speaking of us is a matter of fortune, even the partings.
Still, we’ve grown old together within these years of absence and silence.
I love you in my way each day, even when I rale at the alone.
We’re proof that some things are important, but others quite ephemeral:
Perfumes become confused with time, while hairstyles and fashions are passing.
The sole fully memorable kiss is the very last time lips met.
A passing woman told me, The perfect breasts are the ones you hold now.
Even the shape of a hand means less than then, no matter how tender.
The thing that sticks with me, even in mid-night, is personal at heart:
I will recall your eyes as they said my name far beyond eternity.
YOUR BROTHER’S BLOOD CRIES OUT.
IT WILL NOT BE HIDDEN.
IT RISES FROM THE EARTH
LIKE LOST PASSION,
FREED FROM THE SERPENT’S MOUTH.
THE MOTHER WEPT FOR BOTH.
THE FATHER IMPLORED HEAVEN
TO SPARE ONE AND MARK HIM.
THE FIRST DEATH, THE FIRST JUDGMENT
MADE A HOME FOR THE DEMON,
MADE A TEMPLE FOR HIM.
GOD STRUCK THE FLESH MARK
TO SHOW IT WAS HIS WORK,
NOT CRAFT OF THE DARKNESS.
HE FASHIONED IT AS LIGHTNING BRIGHT,
AS ONE WITH NO SEPARATE PART.
A CRY IN THE WIND, ONE WORD.
NO MAN MAY DISTURB HIM
WHEN HE SEES THE BRAND THERE.
HIS HAIR AS WHITE AS SNOW.
HE REAPS A HARVEST OF REMORSE.
HIS EYES WITHOUT EXPRESSION,
AS IF BLIND, BUT MUCH THEY KNOW,
TIED TO THE SAVAGE EARTH BY BLOOD.
THE YEARS FALL OFF LIKE SAND.
THE BODY THAT GAVE PRAISE,
BESIDE HIS EQUAL BROTHER,
BETRAYS HIM.
HE WALKS A SILENT LAND,
AS FAR TO THE EAST
AS MEMORY LASTS FROM EDEN.
careening static seas of ceaseless surds,
black seedbeds’ freckled femur’s sultry,
sibilant soughing soothes and succors,
sorts, resorts, and, tittering smooths—∴
like tongueless
Orpheus transposing
radio static in
tactless clacks or
cracking glass
cold dribble of ink’s amorphous membrane
clung against torridly sun-stained chrome
a thought
a pulse
compelled it
forward
fleshing out
a fickle surd’s
attempt at tenuous mimicry
sown through a shadow
combing from crumbling
corners
patchwork ridges shadows sheared
in limberly lumbering
patterns
moonglow
blueberry blue
sprawled lissomely rich
as stockings stretch
to blear these crazing veins and creases
craning manes and shrunken pieces,
jury-rigged rounds of Newman’s Guilty,
The Bonny Swans, and Love and Mercy.
The Judge lies
south of a shipyard’s
blistering clarion cranking
cannery static.
A crinkling steeldrum
cast across splintering heartstrings
strapped and bolted tight
as a snickering rictus
sallowed teeth grit.
Quiet canaries blackened
blot and plot the
Euxine’s swoln and
shoaling bays,
but splattering song
or tempestuous tirades
teasing at age’s nyngkilings
swift as stars elude
an old orrery’s orders,
stammering, bruxist, juggernaut, star-clock;
red banded youth in cacophonous chorus line.
Stars, a rash
among perfect darkness,
perforations puckering seamless paper,
signs and sigils stitched
in quilters’ tried and trusted stencils;
stencils, fashioned
fixed in fractured
tracts of inviolable tracing paper:
ophidian bolts unfolded,
frayed, and flaccidly framing flawless forms,
as though you’d swaddle insufferable sackcloth snugly ’round wan David‘s thighs
(quaint personage scourging scrupled eyes
as umbrous voices bilboes stalk
and doctrines darken deathly still;
as cumbrous choices fillip stocks
and mockeries meekly measure all
sensitive creatures heartfelt frissons
cramp, enfeeble, cripple, riffle, roil,
crack— alight, and slacken).
Call a thing by its name
and make it so,
a pianola’s sacred scroll
an incantation dreamily leering
Helter Skelter
Stygian oaths
of skulls and bones
cast over a welter
sweetened in dippel’s
or smeared in realgar, woad, flax
left stitched to a star
and cast in a faction’s
stiffly smoldering mold
of impervious iron
chains of them anchored
by wires belayed,
uncoiling, creaking lines
disgruntled Mamet’s
mild metronome
stirs and surges
echoing drunken seamsters,
initiate friends
of a Morai’s union
shaping fates
in flawless, thoughtless,
limberly senseless
lines and leads
a Singer’s pulsing
prong attuned to
tried and tireless
patterns creased
and yellowing— lo!
though pressed
in precious poesy
further, radiant,
throbbing steam
each fringe alights
among endless,
ineffable forms
of ouroboros barred
in staffs and measures
a shepherd had
seized in tremulous frenzy,
Patrick afeard of his sibilant,
sibylline snakes still— lo!
the posers pained
in leaden paint,
those evermore jealous
of Ellison’s struggle
that stirred such
plumply potent poems,
plums a thrawn and
charring star must
pickle thick and gold
as umeboshi;
who’d smear a
stolen photo, rimed
with bluntly splintered
surds and garish oils
to matte a perfidious
pallor guilt had wrung
with a plug of
purported color, light
inditing languid love
‘long thrawn, indelible
fractures; bees encircling
rings of broken branches,
sensible as sodden breezes
pluck at dangling pipes
and bottles braying—
Echoes of Ellison
sleepily sung
in tone-deaf numbness
mumbling maws
eruct in some
saturnine sap like
tactless ants this
bobbing breeze
implores to
fancifully fling through whistling windows—
Glib groomers of
Jack the Bear
bedazzling dander charred
in paled and tailored
mellocreme molten pulses forged;
what torrid ideals
and harrowing hordes
of torches tousling
mindless meat, frail
artery chewn from
blackened flesh
a plate adorned,
a cringe bespoke,
wet wad of cud
what Wagyu cribbed
from glimmering grout
of jet and pearlescent
sediment polished flagstones flaunt;
those crisply viscid teeth
of a pedigree’s grin
impressing properly prominent prints
upon orange, ruffled tule
of a circus attraction
trammeled in tedious two-steps—
Ursula pawing her howler’s claw,
shimmied with whipping tales’ arrangements,
skinning a cordial engagement raw, found
papering yellowing walls in tender dander
singed in dappling smoke
a cringe bespoke
a plate adorned
and crazed in curdled blood
mistook for dirt or stiffening pudding
leaden flakes of paint arraigned as staggering tangrams
gods drawn long among caking dandruff
wielding wild wigs and warpéd mallets
sanded, lathed, and stained, the lacquered,
stitched in sciamachy’s shimmering camiknickers,
a teddy stretched hard and flat as blistering asphalt queens streaked muddling lines through—
to tie a tongue in
languid, lulling lines
wan, peevish limelights lazily
whet and dampen; drupulets,
racemes stars assay, that
laymen’s scrofulous touch
contracts, then, withering
blithering march among
battered pieces sloughed
from forebears’ formless
puzzles flustered, bent,
upended, burnt,
unbroken, still
encased in imp-
ervious prisms
that thoughtles-
sly, far-flung t-
heorists shape-
d from molds
of dreams fr-
om which no
light escapes
and nary so-
me surd’s w-
arm smudge
distorts—
a turtleshell spider attempts to ascend my cuff,
assaying my length against distant trees
each perilous inch by parlous leap;
the baffling suction,
drums coarse seawater snakes across
picking a chittering snare to seize
and release in a leveling peal,
diminished to silence
ruffled in glorious
birdsong heralding dawn
or something brighter
and evermore colorful
moving—
This blizzard’s clearing, azure, crisp:
feel fewer frustrating frissons fizzle.
A dream informed me seasons prior,
All of us will be left here as small and cold as the snow.
(I sleep in the shape of laborious hieroglyphs most nights.)
The dial’s sloughed that dithered ‘twixt shrouded and snow-blind.
The aerial’s sinuous shimmy spirals in wild menageries free
as Athenian birds, as slithering glints a fluid, perfervid thread of sumptuous surds (that tones of throatsong flesh) thrusts heartily, simpering, forward, cresting,
weaving among our sunrise fresher hues here hitherto often merged
in molten, pulsing, unrelenting reds and blue of a glaucous bruise.
even in daylight
we know the moon is there
pale and waxing
or was it waning?. . .
do you think
the stars still sing
so we can hear
their truth
you wait
in the amber dusk
soaking in the light
for me
when i earnestly try
to reach you
running on a loop
it seems impossible
like a collapsing star
i think i see you
but you’re just a shadow
of what’s already gone
a reason to get out
the beacon of hope
your fading skeleton
light years away
listen
can you see it?
Two gas stations
Right beside each other
One dollar store
And one school
A trailer park
And a hundred farms
A few churches
And lots of backroads
A water tower
Spray painted “will you marry me?”
A little small town
That’s my hometown
