Easy Chair
Brushing up against a body of water,
Her hand moves gently through the cool.
Though we stayed awhile,
We couldn’t keep each other dry
Following a silk road to a minute of joy.
In increments we arrived
At phase two of the covenant.
Elliptical machines, frank hopes
And the gradual rust of apartheid.
Languid, it’s a done deal.
The Soft Touch of a Controlled Mass
Her lips ostracize.
To her credit, I myself am
The quality of roses in bulk—
Manipulated by a hand-held device
Notched at the nexus of clutch
And gear.
Though never lacking in appeal,
The shuttle bus brings fewer
Devotees from base camp as the days go by.
The collected pilgrims huddled slightly.
Around them cotton clouds became
And became.
Nobody chose to retire there,
Which is why smoke from the plateau
Never meets the sky—is nobody’s son.
Death of a Quiet Place
The suburban north, clutching exhaustion,
Dies in silence.
Whereas together we met on the hillside once.
A helicopter, then another helicopter.
Spineless in the streets, the stars are like
Every avatar we ever barbecued. Indelible
Streaks of charcoal and resin.
Shock is a lifeline to a message
We’ve been trying to read.
Sky-Lighting the Steel Industry
It looked to us
An ambition to be garrisoned. Moses
Unspined, points to our glistening inroad.
Our stems required time to rise, joining pleated
Lemons of life’s pit.
Worry, forked evenly, reminds Bristol in the dark
Virginia gratitude.
A mattering ordinance called for agents
Never to enforce. Rosy lots of mineolas trimmed in unison.
Shimmering, lost in our newly-wedded toxicology,
We are starry ranges on the brim,
Delphinus braced in the expectation of agony. . .
But our man on the inside, roused by chorales
Ejected from the depths of a mineshaft,
Skips theology altogether.
He, our forthright paginated invention,
Suits up against a backdrop
Of candy canes and narcissism.
“Soon the moon will rise. If that interests
You, do so.”
Desecrated, our integers live on, held in pairs of
Hands cupped against their will.
Soon the moon will rise again, if that interests you.
But for fratricide, the implastic art, you needn’t recommend us.
Heavily, she galloped past me where I lay
And I counted the grains of a stone.
A tree hovers, disguised in facts
Designed to rock with ease.
On the well of sod, the vines are
Being pulled down
And cogitated: antecedents on the bluff.
GW
An unspecified “the orpheum” froze
on a
leaf’s descent, whirling like a
Japanese paper flower which
ne’er a rogue, disparaging instant
knew in the order of its neat folds.
The quickening attitude, a miscellaneous lark
on a
branch. Lines on a great
sphere yield to matrimonies
drawn to the extant voice of
a hibakusha.
Unauthorized Vehicles Will Be Towed at Owner’s Expense
I
The wayward stare across a distance marked by a star.
The border’s a language jacked on a southerly wind,
A platform of sterile compartments.
Long shadows remain, objects of the harbor, moored to the rise.
In time, the tide will drive us back, splintered beams carried
Down the leverage pile, but for now we collate folio’s of borrowed time.
Part trick, the morning adhered to the domesticating verve of the manufacture,
In the desperate heart of which organic fixtures hang beside.
A Sybil’s song shall provoke a fragrance that completes the species,
A welcome erasure of our manipulative bank book stare.
Through the shared space I sat discouraged,
Stealing glimpses of a child to be, a reoccurrence
Of elliptical kindness sutured to the bottom of a municipal reservoir.
Fruits gutted to reveal the pasty light within,
Rhymes wrapped around her ceramic
Cob begin to spar—the pollenating thorax begins to warm.
Unformed tasks called back to them,
A steady shade under the massive elm.
We would staff the houses of the young with the rags of worship.
Then, brushed with juvenilia, tugboats in kettles of steam tend the rows.
II
Suspicion is a place of renewed ruin.
Stick a catheter in it.
Circus tents of blue and gold,
Some iron-clad world made coldly flesh.
If the past will collapse under the population’s weight,
Do new chairlifts mean that we are the next?
From open windows came the drone of mowing.
Softly, physical love burns a magenta hole in the sky’s coat pocket.
Regions used to give themselves a people for the natives to become.
We warm the tanks of methyl bromide and the sun is whom.
Most deployments are dialed up and shortly forgotten—we
Collapse into time’s elapse. This wisdom is now called television,
And stands for love, a lucent blue is waiting out there,
Visible from all streets after dark. And this alone became the new
Normalcy, discharged to grow the mountains green yet taken in
By the past, a layered composition scattered across our geological earth.
Then a zero comes back, accompanied by irrational numbers.
Life on a drop, cured with a salty lisp.
Hickory nuts fall from the eaves, the children
Guard themselves with a clinical stare.
III
The astronomer’s daughter pours her latest challenge into a
Ring of dixie cups, a careful flip guards the day’s events.
A closed door behind a saturnine moon,
Nobody drinks, though all are pleased.
Attendant to the honeysuckle, he hovers above,
Pursues a purple said to arouse. But groom’s an angry brass,
Pivoting to throw his game of catch and release.
In time, they sell us preoccupation and horny walks waist-deep
In the games of a cold planet. Time creeps along in a feathered headdress.
Whispers of a digital sunrise; we, finally, a blemish that stripes the bloodline.
The glasswork in your hands, a tropical fish,
Smoking, turns. Hips point the way to the redemption center,
Sewing machines in a line without direction.
The local industry is sailboats and penny candy, but everyone reads the internet.
They divine a Doric ancestry steeped in material examples:
More to do with luck and wherever luck is sold.
Corporeal hieroglyphs notwithstanding, the woven-tied sects,
Nick-named “yellowjackets”, puff on trade secrets.
Have we no choice but to move along, look upon goldfinches, and cook a batch?
“Nobody teaches you how to hibernate, rules are rules.”
Enough Green Soul
The avarice
That confronts
What in us aspires
To be kept tidy—ants
And pin grass each undulating
Down to the corpuscle.
A hardened pound of
“Forget about this”
Choked with figures
Dislocates itself from a grid.
Now cornflowers
Fill the depression as fast
As it expands.
Even so, we imagine fans blowing air
Across the beginning.
The New Embrace
Perhaps her lament is jovial
When spun around to face her.
Perhaps Ellen is a beautiful thought,
Like a mild, rose-scented mutiny
Wafted under the mass.
They are different now,
Different from how they once were.
Body language is
The cleavage that sequestered them,
Differently localized, decorated from afar,
Not as it once was.
Nineteen Ninety-Seven
We used theologies
Of forgetting death.
But, as whistle sounds,
The unsteady eyes
Of lady luck began
To draw the harm:
She met me at the steeple’s base
And I braced for the supernova
And she smiled and reclined.
