Poetry

These cricket type things that only live twenty-four hours
having been buried half a century beneath ground.

Moon and stars hand lettered in love, rainbows in tandem dipping cheek to cheek
the last tango of torrential light husking the bee season, pollinating the night sky.

And the halos of ice crystals bending the fletcher`s one good eye
the shaking palsy of white dwarfs, the twinkling true sentience, asterisks of unending light.

Bluffing shadows in the riddle of a rogue sun, a painful, last cheerful hour wringing its hands,
the face of the invisible unveiled, the dark lantern illuminating only itself.

And here in the helix of one cell, in the cocktail of Hemlock and honest Athenian wine,
the Greek phlox that grimaces, in the slaughterhouse of rain.

Ancient quarrels, witch-hunted by a menacing glance
banishing the quixotic fables of both poets and gods alike.

Opaque birds, flying through the slat of the kitchen door, telling tales out of school
space and plastic time, death chasing the plume of its chrysalis.

What shackles the phantom limb of utter squalor, the music box of rage
the limitless self-pity of those for whom no act or word is flesh enough to be real.

In the pleated rubble, a ribbon of days, fossils of lunar moss,
washed out in the scrimmage of its own memory, the rusted animal steeled in the grind.

The musk of twilight, in the dusking bazaar, of the labyrinthine Malthusian heart
the scent of turmeric, henna and sage, tossing a coin, wishing upon nothing at all.

And even when I fall into the jagged corners of that uneven tumble
the crimped steel lags on, filled with white fury, scuttles into the unpeeled onionskin night.

Marigolds, marigolds, marigolds, he madly sings
with his lovely knotted hands, night perfumes of the one most perfect thing.

Potting half-blind, with a gnarled palm, the doggerel of a crippling love,
washing his impertinent past, grouting, cleaving the wolven half-sounds.

Painting now those frail laryngeal petals, of indestructible meaning,
the fragrance of fresh marigolds that clasp the sun in the tumbling nubby twilight.

Geraniums, geraniums, geraniums he cries, and the sky goes black
as the black-eyed Susans, black tulips, and Simon with his crooked blacked out teeth.

There where he straightens the nasturtium’s spine, and waves his wand,
above the chain of boulevards in the Capucine, whispering in a Celtic song.

Kneeling by the entrance that low lines the ground, lilting toward the heart
that rounds the gouache of thick watercolour, a triptych of night stars.

Lifting his brush into a tiny fury, the enthusiasm of one more hourglass glance
breaking the earth with the sulk of incandescence, a garden of gratitude and clandestine wrath.

Shingly little tiny stones pollinated from a boulder eighty million years old,
the wild quiet coast, pummeled, and the gaping orange peonies, festering with ants.

Tarting up the mole-hilled lot with impatience, petulant monkey flowers, thyme, clover and lavender
and the Durban white daisies with faded buttons, laced by toothless yellow bones.

In the rough box, a gigantic fuchsia, tied tall with a ribbon of string, named after Nana
the old dog he loved so much, whose wagging tail purses still suddenly in his dreams.

Another he calls Christina, hardy as the whizzing of hummingbirds’ wings
gone now, glib and deathless as the sea wolf gilded inside.

And a third spiraling on a trellis, in memory of Suzie Dow, the niece whom so he loved
loathing the dalliance that blesses her unrequited name.

Captain, oh my captain, as slowly he weeps, the corpulent noise, lacelike in the marrow,
the universe at war with war, in every flower, that goes untried, and undrawn there.

In two hundred million years the Himalayas, will be plains, the sea his rotting teeth
and nothing more or less true than the stars, as far as they are near.

The bloom in the vase, vassal and Lord, even now signing the both of us,
“here there be dragons”, they say in an odd vehicle of tongue.

At the edge of the universe, the sparrow kings pluck the dying light, night of the hungry ghosts
the local fisherman chant ex voto, the unanswered prayers of hope and joy.

The skylark seed bursting into climbing flowers, chasing a godless god
wild tropes in the little lanes, collapsing under the weight of the roses.

Dear, dear, loveable friend, may your masked eyes, catch moonlight
in your frayed palsied hand, that holds the homeless there, smiting the structured glacial sounds.

In the long night of human, the wild chant, in the green hangers of every wild flower
that blossom in the last of us.

A bright moon shrinks, shines on stray cats and lover’s untroubled lips
and nothing speaks.

Healers have the habit
of tending to leprosy
in everyone but themselves.
I don’t want to be found.
I don’t want to be saved.
I don’t want to rile up
old demons and wounds
and burn bridges before
I’ve built them.

I’ve swam deserts and wandered
until my lungs heaved heavy
from breathing heat and converting
lost footpaths into highways
for someone else to find.
I’m sore and spotted
as an uncaged ocelot,
hiding in a sullied canyon,
growling secrets to stones
older than the rings of Saturn,
asking if there are still
pristine things left to discover.

There must be.

Let’s explore the part of you
that finds a cave-in concealed from anyone
without the secret language to enter.
You can whisper open padlocks,
rummage up ruins from lost silver cities,
unearth doors boarded up from storms
long-since passed but warily remembered,
their residual terror tattooed in rust.
Speak it open in whatever way
you imagined conquistadors
before you knew better
and before you knew memory
and before you knew not every heart
ached as deeply as yours.

I can glisten good as any fool,
and I can hold onto things
heavier than you can carry.
And the soft of my mouth will leave you
bitten and unafraid, cat-eyed
and ripping open,
burlap sacks of gold coins
like a ceiling of stars finally allowed to rest
into their next bright night.

I’m not that hard to find.
Even healers need healing
sometimes.

She left me keys to a house
where no one can live.
They’re tearing it down Tuesday
and putting a vape shop in,
but today they razed the lilacs,
shore their heads like enlistees,
a violet bloodbath of petals
dying on the front lines.
Had they known how she sang
to them each morning,
a cathead biscuit tucked into
each pocket for the squirrels,
perhaps they’d understand why
I gulp gasped in the grass
of her lawn— their lawn—
as the flower clusters collapsed
and branches trapped me breathless
in a driveway I no longer knew.

I bought this car to prove I could
and now, as I wait to turn left
a man exits the Quik-Stop,

black sweats sagging, pantlegs
shirred halfway up his narrow calves.
He’s probably my age, maybe even

a one-time middle-school messiah.
He slouches down the sidewalk,
knees hinging like a marionette

as if in time to Grace Slick,
who’s up so loud the ragtop throbs.
He gestures toward traffic with a tall-boy

then folds to the curb. How I envy him.
My tongue swells as the cold slides
down his throat, jaw slackening,

the world easing up a little.
My sister drank the same brand
when her check ran thin.

The last time I saw her
she drove up to the house, window down.
Come on, she said. It hadn’t been long

since I couldn’t say no, veins drawn tight
brain to toes—so I went inside.
I wish she was here. She’d settle down

on the curb beside him, light a cigarette,
put her hand out for his beer.
And he would give it to her,

the joke passing between their eyes—
me still in my lane
mouthing the words to the song,

you better find somebody to love.

Newspaper crumpling, my sister
sops up vinegar from a bowl,
the window squeaking as she scrubs
at its watery promise.

She’s taller than me, even on her knees,
hair back, jaw set as her hand
circles then dips, circles then dips,
stops. Even I can see she’s distracted

from the messy house by sunlight
sliding through glass in long angular plates
as if life is about to bloom.
The ice in our mother’s glass shifts

and my sister’s braid sways,
her slender arm returns
to circling. I have no idea
who I will be without her.