the moon over my shoulder
is already half-lit
i turn my hand palm-up
it fills with starlight
flying squirrels scold
in an ethereal key
i’m sitting beneath their
favorite mother oak
i take a deep breath
of autumn soil fragrance
a whitetail buck grunts
more as if in pain than in lust
there’s a thunder of hooves
then nothing
a dead leaf drops
into my hand
stars stare back
through bare branches
great beasts of foliage
gone to ground
rustle in the night
like restless currency
with nowhere to hide
the trees go dormant
to dream shadow lives
as modern dancers
now that it’s
too cold for snakes
who will caress the air
with lightning tongues
i am not equal
to the stars
much less any junkie’s
point of light
my right index
fingernail has gone missing
i share a common tongue
with lawyers and sociopaths
a small white moth spends
the night in one of my shoes
so i avoid the paper
get my blood bath from the dawn
Never having believed in happiness, it occurs to me, might have had something to do with why i never actively pursued it. If it showed up regardless, well and good, but in general, day-to-day contentment seemed enough. And you know, maybe it is. For far too many around the world, it’s an unattainable dream.
But what about love, Dave?
And you call yourself a poet!
Pleiades
syncopating
crickets
flickering
through skeletal trees
the bat’s back story
sunset
lava
on all screens
swamp tree
parodied by
its reflection
holding it
under
fire trucks
one after another
into the sunset
porcupine
grazing at dark
I was flying in an aircraft of bones
not the pilot not the ball-turret gunner
I was flying in an aircraft as if
in my own bones
my aluminium hide
the captain’s intercom voice
goes all through me and the flight
attendant’s safety instructions
her boredom buzzes against my rivets
like a trapped wasp
but I rise hungry to exceed myself
I dip a wing and turn
out from the lit grids of suburbs
with their unlikely multitude
of shadows which must be trees
and down there somewhere
hissing as
it burns
Fire breaks the hydrocarbon chains in polyester with a thousand fingers at once. We gaze at the flag’s charred outline on the road as if it were a map to some disaster area: a nuclear test site, a strip mine, the tar sands of Alberta.
fake stars
learning what it means
to shine
sunset and evening star
that smell of pine comes
from a bottle
The earth has water older than
the sun, scientists say. I’ll never
see rain the same way again,
or hear it tap on the roof
at 4:00 a.m. and not wonder
what other skies it has fallen from,
what other oceans it once also
returned to as if going home.
Scientists say they’re more certain
than ever that planets
throughout the cosmos harbor this
resident alien. And remembering
how many times the eye
has evolved on Earth alone,
I listen to the drumming
on the roof and imagine
An oak tree toppled
in a high wind 20 years ago
has rotted almost to nothing,
leaving just the twist of roots—
spokes of a rimless wheel,
crippled star.
As if whatever hardness
kept this clutch from holding tight
now won’t let it go.
To be small is to be distant
& vice versa.
The asterisk calls.
It leaves a message.
You turn it all the way up:
it sounds like a small fan.
In some parallel universe
all the stars look like this
& books with too many footnotes
collapse into black holes.
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,