Put the Fingers of Your Left Hand in the Palm of Your Right
The earth touches itself,
a sky touching clouds
as we seek a mirrored heart,
a face inside our face.
We are all either alone in collective silence,
or a congregation of noisy majesty
singing as geese flying north toward spring.
When you go to sleep
place the fingers of your left hand
in the palm of your right.
It is the moonlight touching dreams,
the crocus touching sunlight,
laughter breaking down walls of sorrow,
one heartbeat defining birth.
Put down the appliances and circumstances,
put your body down to earth,
fingers to palm.
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Razor Blade Life on the Mountaintop as Seen from the Lighthouse on the Rocky Shore
You can’t tell who lives there
until the sun goes down
and the occasional full moon
shows shadows on the drawn curtains.
It could be either one man,
or a family.
It really doesn’t matter who is there.
What really matters is the way the light seems,
the way the wolves slip away like pennies,
what tune the machinery hums,
how the galaxies conjure our children’s reveries.
The house is all the houses you have seen
on several forgotten streets,
the windows showing off boring lampshades,
the roofs huddling under the weight of worry.
But you and I are on the shore skipping stones,
and all we can do is guess.
Imagination grows with distance,
dreams grow legs and walk into the mountains,
the houses and the man or the families
become ants beneath the earth,
we stand beneath the light,
turning our backs to the ocean’s rocky shore.
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Christmas Day
I see the bare branches of the locust tree
welcoming the natal,
lifting up as angels’ wings,
triumphant in annunciation.
Beyond the sheet of gray
that claims the sky,
I know the sun is there,
for us, for lovers united,
for the ones alone this day.
The locust tree is a family
of trunks and branches,
of leaves fallen or blown away.
Yet it stands in all the seasons
and especially now whether
on a greeny lawn or in depths of snow
,
eternal as heavenly love.
I am not annoyed
by the lack of snow,
or by the lack of the sun’s fierce fire.
I hold my lover in my arms,
hold her love in my eyes,
hold her life in my heart.
Today is Christmas
and the locust tree
reminds me of the greatest gift.
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The
Bystander
Only watching, he is full of avoidance and delay.
How do the hours and minutes tick?
Asleep in his bed, he passively dreams,
awakes afraid of what he must face.
A day full of wolves,
a funereal night he covers himself with.
All the people, all the activity,
are potholes he must drive around.
His job is a carnival ride
taunted to take,
the only relief is leaving it.
He is fearful of touch, of talking,
only does so to run from death.
He wants the perfection of his body,
the perfection of his family,
the perfection of death if all
his dreams are dust.
Sick of watching, he walks out the door
to go where waters run without effort,
where weather only is, and takes shelter
in all it has. The rain is his rain,
the breeze is his breeze,
and the warmth of the sun is also his.
He realizes he can watch no longer,
must immerse himself in the flood of others,
and becomes an ocean where all the great creatures
pass through him.
The bystander is become a swimmer
in all the currents flowing,
not afraid to drown.
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Ascension
In time’s elongated choreography,
my senses carved all that was known
into recognizable shape.
I was kind to animals,
gave humanity wide berth,
loved a few people well.
Light from the sun,
longing questions from stars,
the grasping great moon of November,
drew answers from my looking.
Trees with spring buds,
snowladen like layers of white linen,
angular and majestic,
gave me growth in a kindness of wisdom.
But no human can know another
without missing them first.
Forget me as you knew me,
remember me as an interpretation of the world.
Remember how I blew out candles in the dark summer night,
the orderliness of my underwear drawer,
how seldom my bathroom was clean.
I walked on solid ground with you,
shared words of breeze and brick;
we became expansive sea.
At the beach-edge,
I ascend into the drowning resurrection,
nonexistence will not contain me,
I will swim in waves of eternal remembrance,
night water weeps the natal song.
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I Want to Write Like Pablo
Neruda
On the beach of sanguinity,
Pablo Neruda drinks the blood of nuns,
becomes a sky of azure clouds,
with rosaries falling from an ochre sun,
penetrating his thoughts like a harpoon
cast into the shark's eye
by the weary fisherman
who wants the sun to be a woman,
luscious fruit of Pacific shores.
Pablo Neruda sifts mournful sand
through the fingers of his hands
like
so many tired bulls,
and he is tired.
Tired of the mountains,
tired of the jungles,
tired of Tierra del Fuego,
tired and offering prayers
to a god who is only found
in marketplaces far from Santiago
where gray dogs bark at dust,
where gray women do not smile at tourists,
where gray houses have no color.
The small village priests are revolutionary moths,
fanning the flames of Anaconda insurrections,
fanning the flames of sin,
fanning the flames of Pablo Neruda's guilt.
The rainbow, barely seen,
is Pablo Neruda's oldest pair of sandals,
wearing down the decrepitude of the Andes
where soulless birds are a cathedral dirge
of unremembered penitents.
Pablo Neruda sees all the infants as hungry worms,
wriggling their rebellion toward the moon.
But the moon is an empty plate,
the infants starve,
die a condor's death,
its wings - their arms -
a panoply of tears
on the beach of no horizon
where the nuns
are once again tears of Catholicism,
where the ochre sun
retreats to a night of peasant's curses,
and in Santiago,
the guards before the presidential palace
watch Pablo Neruda walk,
his sullen pencil
bayoneting their fascist desires,
his teeth flashing in their tortured dreams.
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I
Did It
It wasn't him, it was me.
I went to war, came back
gung-ho frenzied and
crewcut stoic.
I killed the enemy in the desert
and became my own.
I turned hard right,
veered off the pavement
and lost my license plate.
Somewhere,
away from the coasts
where the truth of body counts
is a buzzing fly
you can't swat away,
I stowed my bombs and my hatred,
then bestowed these gifts
on faceless children,
on unknown wives and husbands.
(When your family and your friends
are only ciphers in your conspiracy,
it's not hard to kill people you've never met.)
The family is a shattered crystal,
the children are a thousand specks of light
caught in the glance of the sun,
I am the shattering hand that holds them.
I can't be caught,
I can't be brought to trial,
I'll never be convicted.
I cheat on my taxes,
vote down school budgets,
eviscerate the editors.
It's me, not him at all,
it's me, and I knew it all
along.
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The
Verdict
No matter what the jury says,
someone is always guilty.
The racist in me says all blacks are guilty,
the liberal in me says police are pigs.
In television's three-ring seriousness,
everyone maintains their innocence
while they secretly cash
in their collusive guilt.
We all cheat and batter each other,
it doesn't matter
if you put a suit and tie
on a murderer,
no one will ever really know.
We all bury the truth
by planting evidence;
we stay safe from
being murdered that way
and continue
to kill with neandrathalic suavity.
We wring the tree dry of details,
ignore the root of cause,
and excuse the woodsman and his axe,
cursory tears rake up the
fallen leaves.
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The
Beginning
They found them first in Minnesota.
Like honest politicians, something
was missing.
Some thought it was the water,
the air,
maybe something they ate.
Frogs without legs,
without eyes,
without normalcy.
This was the first sign,
then again, maybe it wasn't.
Maybe it was the Challenger explosion,
maybe it was Charlie Manson,
maybe it was the Garden of Eden.
They thought and postulated,
had a cup of coffee,
turned the page
and put down the magazine.
This is
how it started.
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Time,
the Hero
In the frenzy of clocks,
like the antlered deer
at dusk sniffing
for snow-covered apples,
there is a calmness of ticking
that marks the seasons,
that gathers the days
into collectives of crowded minutes.
The holidays and demonic elections
are weeds in the garden of time,
and time itself becomes
guardian of life,
sentinel of our souls.
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Failure, Death and Necessity
A child with dirty hands,
narcissistic grunge,
and a paycheck.
Indecision of clouds
is a heavyweight,
choking the ropes.
The clock ticks bloodletting
like the gleeful surgeon,
the cardiac rivers gurgle and spit.
Pompous media drivel passes on the
right,
speeds toward the exit ramp,
collapses on the corner.
Everyone's mother is dying,
questioning children
about their jewelry,
about the weather.
You know you went to school,
you know when death first knew you,
you know and knowledge doesn't satisfy
your hunger.
Nights wrap themselves around your
days,
and all your imagined comforts
are stray dogs that won't come near
you.
You knock down the hornets' nests,
paint and plaster,
see the doctor,
and pay the bills.
When the neighbors pull up their
gardens
and the sunset is more southerly,
the clarity of dawn is more apparent.
A fully turning circle turns more
fully now,
the slow walking of warm weather
quickens
in the ripening of apples,
all the family ties itself together
like cornstalks in autumn fields.
The equinox takes stock,
calculates the dividend of seasons,
and pays
handsomely to each deserving day.
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Away
How do I measure distance?
I drift in an ocean
of people and things.
They swim, float and sink
and the waves hide time.
If they take away my face,
will anyone know me?
If my arms and legs vanish,
am I just furniture waiting on some curbside?
Everything, everyone I hold close
is dust on the mantle,
the only currency I hold is memory.
Every sound higher than moonlit geese,
becomes fainter, erasing faith in what I see.
Death deals the cards,
I see death crossing the corner.
I want to eat the hand of death
so it will not grab any more.
I want to swallow stars, galaxies,
constellations and become a universe
that knows no distance.
I want to bury all the clocks,
destroy all vestiges of time,
so no one will know of any passages.
I will make a stillness of life
and in that stillness, life will be,
and be.
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Squirrels,
Sailing, and Five Notes
I have no idea of how the mind
works, of how to sail, or why
squirrels leap from branch to branch.
But I do know how to peel a banana
and enjoy an Oreo cookie.
It's these little things that suck up
our attention and make us saints.
If our brains are little forests
and all the thoughts are squirrels,
it is no small wonder our talking
is rain on parched ground.
A wind dies beneath a sobering sun
and we cannot sail until the moon
rises like an old man from an easy chair.
Can we force a wind from thought,
or pray for such? Still, the boat
drifts thoughtlessly on our whispering.
Above all this commotion and conundrum
is the chaotic piano, heaving sounds
at anyone too close to hear. Five notes
slap my face and I burn a melody at the wall.
There it dribbles down, collects itself
into song, only to attack another
unsuspecting fool. Every note takes aim,
seeking rearrangement and now
we know
how the mind works.
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Veterans
War has its children, its
orphans;
all
of us have bleeding wounds.
Each
of us has their own Vietnam,
the secluded teenage bedroom,
the deluded marriage bed,
the half-room where we wait for death
and don't know the nurse's name.
Not just the brave men,
the men of duty, honor and sacrifice,
the children and the women
have hard won their ribbons.
Most of us know no foxholes,
no falling bombs, comrades shot dead
before us.
One day each year, we honor the fallen
and the forgotten.
Who remembers the nameless?
Who will build a wall for us?
I will cry for the children, murdered playing.
I will weep for the women beaten and driven out.
I will mourn for all the nonwhite veterans
eating injustice.
I am a veteran, too.
I have been shot with falsehoods full of salt,
tasted the twisted sea shuffling
poison on its uncaring shore.
We will honor all the veterans,
the abandoned, the abducted,
the amputee who has no voice to cry.
I have died every time you have died,
and I am buried with you.
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You
Know It's Love
If the air's on fire
when you speak her name,
if
her smile shames rainbows,
if together you are unstoppable,
you know it's love.
When your eyes first meet
and all the glaciers melt,
you know it's love.
It's love when you throw away
your self-concerns,
when the world disappears
and
becomes only the two of you,
when Eden is rediscovered.
If
he gives up football Sundays
for country walks,
if she gives up miniseries
for the affection he cannot ask for,
you know it's love.
It's love when wrinkles
and signs of atrophy
are not way stations,
but are seen as beauty
graceful as turning leaves.
When the telegrams of death
no longer can be ignored,
you know it's love
when you open the door
and let your breath
walk behind the one who's gone.
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Overtaken
The sun cuts hills to splendor,
spines of dinosaurs yawning
in the mouth of dusk.
I am drowned in joy,
floating a mystery of stars.
For almost fifty years gravity
has impaled me upon the earth,
and my mind runs with mercurial feet
to seek the horizon's other side.
Money almost becomes important
until I see a sunny sky.
Today the blue, tonight the moon
and no clouds intervening,
the hours are snails,
the axis is not noticed.
Every muscle is complacent,
each breath irretrievable,
an eye blinks noncommittal.
Does the railroad drudge on?
Does the highway drudge on?
Each traveler sees the way
go onward, disappears into it.
The gravity of space is tenuous indeed,
we need not know
what holds the stars together,
to see is to see
and perhaps that is enough.
The horizon's other side is
a hairy wolf, the sun a reasoned bride,
and I will float the mystery of stars
to see.
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Before
Existence
Anarchy, chaos, void,
the three graces of nonexistence.
Before there was before,
prior to everything existing,
even before nothing,
there was - what?
Silence requires a vacuum,
space requires limits
time requires measurement.
There was what is
before it was defined,
before the birth of its language.
It was white, it was black
it was large, it was small
it meant nothing
it meant everything.
No one saw it,
everyone has seen it.
The past never existed,
a fairy tale!
The future cannot be known,
imagination is the death of fear.
Order, logic, truth
are guardians of existence,
we are trampled by experience,
we see and know,
we see and know.
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Radiant
Heat
How cold is heaven?
Without a sun or burning star
what happens to all the runnings?
Things pressed together making movement
are creative in their expressions,
they create measurable energy.
All our motions are frictions,
bouncing molecules ad nauseum.
Ever notice when you pet a cat
in the dark that it gives off lightening?
And lightening itself ascends.
Where is all this radiant heat?
Its transience is discernable,
it leaves a memory, a shadow on summer lawns,
a thirst and hunger on drawn afternoons.
In tempestuous beds, lovers know
this heat, but cannot hold it for any length.
Only in thought does heat exist,
not in ovens, in any machine,
in any material thing is heat held.
No one knows its secret world,
the world of rising and falling,
of its eternal
shining.
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Come
Back to the Breath
The planes appeared,
the towers fell,
we watched in disbelief,
we wept in anger,
came back to the breath.
Now we seek
revenge or justice,
either will do,
we come back to the breath.
The enemy is close by
and far away,
he sleeps and we do not,
we come back to the breath.
We are more than any one person,
we and they are hydra,
speak many languages,
wear many faces:
hatred, selfishness,
wastefulness, blind rage
and self-absorption,
and again,
we come back to the breath.
In the media's unblinking eye,
we still see the horror
and the waving flags.
Regimes posture,
come out swinging from their corners.
We come back to the breath.
Across the protecting oceans,
selfrighteousness preens,
courage takes stealth.
Victory will come with great cost,
great sacrifice.
We come back to the breath.
The television will not broadcast this,
the flags will either wave or drape,
quiet determination will decide.
We come back to the breath.
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Why
Is the Universe Smiling?
On a flat plane, or perhaps a slightly curved plane,
we walk through cornflake morning darkness,
gather teddy bear flowers along giddy paths,
and die a slipping through one
of those immense things that suck in
all existence, eating ice cream cones
from the bottom up, as it were.
Things burning, shining,
triangles and parallelograms of youth,
are bathtub battleships,
and everything is large, so large,
a hat covering your head, all the way to your neck.
You want to believe your importance,
a giraffe that eats the topmost leaves,
but the noiseless silence, the crashing of light,
the ripping and the building of subatomic structures,
the birds in their nests hatching,
make you the same in the straight
line of your thinking.
Even the beginning holds you in its cry,
no ending can be thought of,
no grayness, no blackness, no concrete shoe
in the river of forgetting.
All and all is all, nothing you can see
is what you see and that is why
the universe is smiling.
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Picnic On
Mars
Sometime
when our bodies are regenerated
from their
cryogenic state,
we’ll
pack our basket with Saturnian wine,
the finest
cheese from Mercury,
and in a
nanosecond find ourselves on Mars.
There will
be meadows, streams, bright fluffy clouds
now
ensconced there in ethereal pebbles.
Once again,
we’ll find ourselves naked,
unaware and
happy,
young,
receptive, and responsive.
On a
blanket of petals,
we’ll
play a symphony for 88
with one
finger,
paint a
museum with an eyeblink,
not need to
read, not need to think.
There will
be no intrusions,
no religion
or politics,
no media
entrapping.
We’ll
dally for an eternity of infinite eternities,
eat and
drink and never tire,
taste all
the galaxies,
be full and
never filled.
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Encounter
at Ground Zero
Beer swallowed, cigarettes thrown
across a table,
thoughts scattered among french fries, a girl
staring
at me with one eye. A tourist in the realm of
a
philosopher king, prying words from teeth
clamped shut in
self-defense. My mind surrendering
to common
inquiries, his presence a redwood shadow.
His hands scattered
like pennies on a southside sidewalk.
The girl stared with one
eye, left her friend,
our places empty. Off to the
low road,
driving through hard rains of reality.
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Come
Eden, Slowly
There
are days that are continuous,
independent
of yesterday,
free from tomorrow.
These are the days
spanning creation
and permanence.
Adam and the
homeless man,
Eve and the soccer mom,
Cain and Abel
are rival football captains.
All knowledge is unknown,
a
tree unplanted, ethereal as windbreath.
Here is the minute of
building,
here is the hour of planning,
here is the
century of tears,
we will not live anywhere but now.
Motion
is change and time
is the measurement of change,
we
eat every turning corner.
Celestial bodies sing silently
shouting
their orders unheard by the barbers
and the
fishmongers,
we hear the white dreams
of our children
calling from our blood,
we see the hands outstretching from
the sky
that reach for ours,
and we tremble for the
safety of our own arms.
The apple waits hidden.
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We
Will Wait
i can't see above
the fog-covered
ceiling.
the house that i will
someday build
collapses,
laughs at inequities.
she waits in closets
and
hangs my coat next to
used pants. i wait impatiently
for
ironing boards to spread
themselves across muddied shadows.
my
boots need cleaning.
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Interim
The
ink
spilled from the quill,
the light from a thousand windows,
all
seemed quiet compared to the
state of my unsettled nightmind.
The bed invites the tired
to take refuge from the day
and
prepare for the next
interrupted by incoherent dreams.
The cricket's harmony
is
testimony to the noisy work
of unseen hands and feet
creating
another day to be cast
into our midst.
The darkness
surrounds me,
but I am near the light,
the quill--the
windows
are not there now--there
is no light.
The
thoughts turn off
the curtain descends--
the last act
is played.
No applause as the audienceday
exits.
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How
a Family
Relates to Death
I remember the months they waited
for
his death, like grim timekeepers.
I loved that old man--he
read me comics
when I was seven. My own death
doesn't
bother me now.
I have no wish to live beyond
my
time--a parking meter, an unexpected
ticket. Marking
time until the
inevitable, I can't stop myself
from
screaming at that nagging calendar,
can't stop loving
sunrises, like so many
prison postponements of high voltage
and
small tablets. Why do I think
of that old man so
often?
My life seems shorter than a broken shoestring.
I'll
wait for the grey express,
luggage in hand,
ticket
under my tongue,
the traffic of my eyes
moving toward
a final destination.
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The
Little Man Who Thought He Was God
He comes in to eat
and observe the people.
He sits in the corner and chants,
"I
come to this country in 1956",
because every civilized person
needs
toilet paper. He probably lives
on the north side,
lives part-time
in the back row of the church.
He is
omniscient, but puts only
30 cents in the box.
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Make
Me Laugh
If
I threw bricks through your mind's window,
would you chase me
down the crying street?
If your face bleeds, needing to be
touched,
will you call my name and grab my sleeve?
I
will come back, tell you fresh jokes
and give you crisp toast
on Sunday mornings.
I can make you laugh, but can you
embrace
my sadness, spray my unpainted world
with the colors of a
winter sunset?
I will I could tell you of the visions
I
have held so tightly, that have been
filed under
"miscellaneous".
Will you make me laugh,
will you
hear the water thunder
over the rocks
of my
long-shattered dreams?
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Sarajevo,
1914
He,
not noticing eyes
inflamed with hatred,
sunlight
danced on uplifted sabers
cleansed of heroes' blood.
Revolution's
dream next to the throne,
chaos born of polished boots
trampling
cries for bread and liberty.
A black-winged bird
sped
toward the open carriage,
screamed its hymn of victory,
the
Hapsburg blood drowning Europe,
the chandelier cracked and
darkened.
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The
Shore of My Name
Today,
the dolphins are silent.
Rocks reveal their sadness,
my
feet leave no shadow.
I have seen the sunrise,
wondering
if the sun has
kept its warmth.
This
sandswept place has not defined me;
cliffs behind me where
swallows sleep
in summer.
A shore will always follow
me,
my name in silent sands,
in constant tides.
Today,
the children play,
their games important.
The world
holds their names in clouds.
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Leave
Us In Darkness
I
Worlds collide in fear,
men fight darkness with
silver
pitchforks
while children hide
in
muddy sandboxes.
they scream
"He comes," but the
catastrophic wearer of seven crowns
brings only clouds hiding snow.
mountains slide toward
quiet
seas, amending beaches
with
heavy sands.
II people
stare as garden's harvests
are
gathered between bloodsoaked
hands. the only death is yours,
i have come to help,
my feet
curl into that fetal state.
III
worlds are entreatied and
clouds die, atmospheric conditions
must be right. heavy balloons
skim chimneys, rooftops and
desiccated cities, they
leave
us in darkness,
we live between
empty bricks.
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Not
to Speak So
Kindly
I asked myself about life, other things,
finding
no answers. Could I live in France,
go boating on
the Seine? Could I be an artist?
Possibly--like
weaving smoke.
People I see speak kindly, I will not.
Illusions
hold your hand,
your mind explodes with answers.
Questions
have no place in your mind's recesses.
Do not speak so kindly,
I
live in common worlds, wear suits common in dreams,
think
thoughts common to no one.
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Perception
If
I had wings, like a gull over some shore,
melodies would live
inside me, needing
no one to explore harmonies within me.
I
am what you know is real
only to yourself. If you
could open
your inward eyes
telescoping a barren
shore,
would you see gulls?
See sand oozing between
babies' toes?
You can see and not yet know, not yet feel.
Love--that
great imperceivable--
will shatter your world.
Horses
with white riders
will tell you where the next room is.
They
will not take you--
you must know the way.
On the
street we perceive the last parade.
Notes weave clouds
together,
the last flag has been folded.
Let us leave
now.
Home, my friend?
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Death
of a Flapper
She
sat in speakeasies guzzling gin.
Her pursuer stood with
one
spatgarnished foot on the brass rail.
She was his favorite,
next
to whiskey and fast horses
that paid off well.
She
could outdistance anyone--
Man O' War, the Feds,
a
Model T dealer from Chicago.
He said he'd dance with her,
soak
her insides with cheap talk
and bad booze, take her home.
Stars
imprinted their warning
as much as tied-up dogs would
at
a stranger's approach.
The blade embraced her throat,
she
loved the flood of liquor
drowning her, the night
smoothing
her dress,
escaping to the elevated's shadows.
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Morocco: 1926
American
movie audiences feasted
on cinematic fantasies of bronzed
oases,
the truth being much more hot.
Klieg lamps no
match for sundrenched sand dunes.
When Mohammed's crescent swam
through
mint-mouthed skies,
aromas of date trees and goatsmilk
rushed
to fill the void
inhaled by jeweled clocks in palace chambers
near
Casablanca.
The cruise ship left decadent flappers,
merchants
of apples and American Express agents
on the dock at Tangiers,
carrying
rainbow parrots, cracked urns -
memories of tennis at
Southampton
left behind with silver tea services.
The
movie ends, a swooning lady
in the arms of her sheik,
the
bedouins smoking their hookahs,
the eternal camels sailing
their thoughts
through seas of mirages.