Low hills bear
the weight of red
mansions
prayer gates & flags
support the opposed gardens—
shrubbery sun-shaped
gravel neat-raked
furrows and whorls
fly the paths
I have become stolid
heat-soaked & worn
I am old & welcome back
every/day/dreams
Birds and fog this morning, birds and fog,
and the slow skelter of weekend traffic
pulling from their hotel rooms
like loosened teeth. We jumble on the road
together, connect by radio waves to slow
guitar. The days of the DJ are behind us.
Even the newscasters perform ad runs now,
and it’s okay.
The traffic pools around Buc-ees.
I was supposed to be awed
by this wall of beef jerky.
Best known as the country’s first
civilian grain of sand inside an oyster,
the new reporter looks for ghost stories
Out of the bottle, sure bet,
simple loss of oxygen works for him,
complex only rotates on radio waves
Scandal is somewhere out on the edge of a tape
pickpockets a society of recordings,
chitchats along changed terrain like a bad girl
Tomorrow is yet another fine example
of what can be done about nothing.
News is history, baked shallow in the sun
Find me a scholar who visits princes,
a curious specialist of deep sea change
grown in spider caves emerging whole
A beautiful tool, an honest stringer,
strong cord with loops at both ends,
who sends me to drift in the expensive ocean
You were the villain, the plot point. I bad
mouthed you, Rotten Papa. You were flammable
fuel in my tank. A maggot writhing
in my Red Delicious. Like a lawyer
I kept a folding file of your deficiencies. In a small
country hospital you slipped into a coma, your head
tilted down & to the left, mouth
half open. I touched
your hand. Out of my astonished silence
came, thank you for my life.
I learn from maggots. They drop out
out of an apple, burrow
into soil for a winter, then grow
tiny wings and fly away.
thrown together into a hat shaken over head
pulled out one by one rearranged on the cork board with a rainbow of push pins
staying close to the texture of things making a deal
with Ill to be only mere companions coming
with more of our humanness showing the present is a fact
and unlimited remove our misplaced limitations for the future and the past lift
the visor on your suit of armor
see people for what they mostly are kind
ordinary just like you
petered out by the ceaseless waves around the edges.
Your wife is going to die.
And I saw no screaming children,
no playsets, no coffees in Palermo,
nor wind chimes that signal hello
in the doctor’s youngish face.
It was a terse slap goodbye
with which he kicked me into the streets
where I wanted to die with her.
The wind blows across her pinhole eyes, dry from scratching.
Morphine nails fix her swelling joints and senses.
They are an arresting brake. Her breathing is hoarse and taut.
My hands press damp towels to her cracked, hot lips and brow.
She says, “You know you’re beautiful when you don’t notice, or try?”
I flipped the gazette to the news of a comet coming to Earth.
The crash had been prophesied for years.
Heavenly boomerangs slay demons in the bush of ghosts.
I want to die with her.
I want to die with her now.
Mr. Takahashi was a retired groundskeeper and he loved to grow orchids. He had spent his whole working life at the hotel working in the greenhouse and driving around on the little isuzu three wheel buggy-car-truck thing making sure the plants had flowers on them.
I needed a lift,
as I stood lackluster in the midst of rows of lavender
there arose a sun so spectacular,
it superimposed itself upon a cliff
and I felt the warmth repose as I saw the shift,
of two puffy clouds floating away in an adrift
