The seven deadly elements fight
like nestlings for our worms.
Death is without end
and therefore never as shapely
as my morning eggs.
Don’t misconstrue the ouroboros:
it’s not consuming but giving birth,
having just crawled out of
its own mouth.
I wake every day of the week thinking
it’s enough to follow
the warm curves of the earth
wherever they lead, though I know
it’s nowhere good.
And each day I dress
as if to the funeral of a blackbird
The sun comes out
in the middle of a shower,
too high for a rainbow—
unless you imagine
the bird’s-eye view:
rainbow against the ground
and off to the side,
the radiant field lines
of this magnet, Earth…
Earth tones—a term
no recent migrant from the tropics
would understand,
how a dormant earth
can come in moss-green, bark-gray
and a thousand browns—
umber, ochre, sienna—
and spring still a hollow gurgling
somewhere below.
The bare ground seems
at first an oversight, then
a growing scandal—
all that anonymity stripped away,
the brown earth caught
without its papers,
and the pines like secret agents
sifting every seditious
whisper of the wind.
It doesn’t seem right,
looking at “the old moon
in the arms of the new,”
the dark part glowing
a bleary orange
with earthshine,
that we can still emit
so much radiance.
Wind flower
open book
wheel that shares an axle
with the earth
your wild moods
are mead
to a solitary bee
let’s take all spring
to read the road
Every angel is falling—not like a skydiver
rushing toward reunion
but like a fish leaping above the calm surface of a lake,
entering a new universe of knives & eyelids.
Imagine being born at the height of your powers.
One rainfall & your chalk outline
disappears from the curb.
One hurricane and half the population
of your migratory species
vanishes over the Atlantic.
I don’t believe in angels, but I believe in their falling,
their helplessness against evil.
Nobody is watching over us except
for the blessed satellites, most of which
are in stable orbits.
We point our dishes at the farthest stars,
Thalictrum dioicum
Dioicum: separate houses.
Here the male
& there the female.
Clouds rise from the male plant
& dangle yellow weather.
From the female plant,
ten-fingered hands stretch
in all directions.
Without scent or nectar,
what flying thing will be
their go-between?
There’s only the wind.
But this meadow-rue
has abandoned the meadow,
so it must flower early or
Jade stone,
Engravings,
Predictions.
Prophecies,
Holding only,
Fiction.
Masterpieces,
Based on,
Nightmares.
Soldiers,
Parading,
On corpses.
A city built,
On another's,
Ashes.
Dead used,
i'm only one, inconsequential person.
one in the 7.7 billion on this earth,
one in the 327.16 million in our country,
one in the 40.02 million in our state,
one in the 994,400 in our city,
one in the 82 in your life.
so i guess i really
can't blame you
for putting others first
can i?
To be honest, we looked so pathetic.
A raggedly line of people
Not more than fifteen
Standing, disheveled
By the side of the busy city street
Holding placards
Asking not to cut down trees
As around us dust swirled,
Remains of the huge trees lay
The uprooted roots like
Splayed innards of a roadkill.
We said, ‘look, the trees are our heritage’.
We asked, ‘how dare you cut what you did not plant?’
We cried, ‘how can this cool shade cast a shadow
On your way to progress?’
Cars and bikes honked us to the brim of the ditches
Like a sullen orb of mercury
He sprawls across the chessboard
Shapeless,
Surrendered, to be shaped
As destiny wills him to be.
Earth trembles,
The board shakes;
Sluggish, he slithers
From one square to another.
Wind blasts,
The board shivers;
He slides from PQ2 to PQ4.
Fire spreads,
The board burns;
He waits, untouched,
Watching the curling