Not to meet a face
that did not seem to have a veil burned to its surface
which was only fog.

Standing up in the boat, the Seeker.
Stood on the landing rock, the Greeter.

In an unsung park where the river no longer drifts
an undistinguished pedestal says, Roger was
here. Now, dogs by day and drugs by dark.

A murder of crows, a short-tempered queue
of cars; this brilliant fence of gingko. This is Providence.

Shirtsleeved afternoons
turn toward leather as the trees
blush, scatter a last

few bright, weary wisps across
the great bruised heart of the South.

The spirit cup drifts
down the pond’s moon-sparked highway.
Far laughter, shadows.

Love or poison? Your turn. Drink
to the star-drenched latitudes!

A few of those rings
that run around the spun earth
cross this southern state.

Is that what the frogs discuss
in the dark beyond the pool

light’s blue-green shimmer
or is it a more ancient
topic that stirs them?

an asteroid they noticed
or the flowers on the moon.

a field of foreclosed flowers
dreams of living rooms
glass ware china ware nowhere

the beautiful struggle here
pray a house is not a home

the middle of october
leaves carry the sun
families furnish rentals

the margins gather for warmth
where the buffalo don’t roam

Pray a house is not
A home. And while you’re at it,
Pray that prayer is

Not a funhouse mirror slid
Between terror and God’s face.

Time to make something
From nothing—garden, star chart,
Beehive, birdhouse, abacus

To add up what remains when
What we thought was wealth is gone.

Season named by what
is no longer, having left
the garden gate just

open enough for the goats
to wander in, to rip out

any trace of green
as if all along they knew
while city trains pass

with men who stare into news
papers meant to understand.

The eyes, splendid in
a bowl of moon, & the tragic
head served on a silver

tray—I understood fate most
as a boy at the Rodin:

each his own marble
bust, light-stricken guards, & open
gallery. Of course!

Parades of Ugolinos,
chewing in bloodsucking silence.

Outside, on blighted branches,
tomatoes’ orange lanterns. Paradise, too, is hell-lit.
Soon now, Day of the Dead—

Heaped platters hauled to the vanished.
Graveside feasting dusted with sugar at midnight.

Take the highway south then.
Whitman’s abattoir fills the nostrils along I-5.
Just past it, blossoming citrus.

The late moon flenses cows to meat and marble.
We drive on at the speed of prayer.

Tonight the dead dance.
Feed the dancers sweets, flowers.
Pray to nourish rain.

Scrape clean graves of our lush debts:
Butts, foil, diapers, tears. We’re done.

Moon lighting up sky
At night, over black mesa.
No buffalo bones.

We’ll all make it home somehow,
When the dance is over. Rain.

And the sky that sends it down
was once, in 1933,
the bowl

for dust the wind reamed clean the
silos with. Its rain, now, spills

a bank, slaps beads against
the flank of an old shed.
Within, wet, a girl

thumbs nu prez xtc ryt?—
send. She hardly hears the wind.

Those years of our hurt
Brokered by the war’s despair
Became flags of art

Waving in November air
The simple songs of the heart

Arise as we start
Over knowing we might dare
Now the grieving part

For those whose lives stood apart
Too long in the bloody cut

And then it happened—a shifting so accumulated

that it tipped—like a ball shivering on the rim

tapped over—into the basket.

And we were cheering, incredulous,

some of us standing up from where we’d been sitting,

standing up in front of our televisions,

some weeping in public, or kissing someone, or

still standing, dumb and smiling,

as what we had asked for walked out on the stage, grave

and graceful—and we looked and looked at the man.

Corrupt unscrupulous treacherous
opprobrious traitorous felonious lawless
ignoble sinister atrocious foul
demonic malignant immoral disgraceful

—Then, at the distance of dawn, glow
A distant lucent hint of glow

Arrogant evil iniquitous odious base
reprehensible wicked villainous vile
pernicious venomous criminal shameful
unforgivable unforgiven never forgiven

—Then a crystalline autumn apple of air
and we breathed breathed again breathed

ahh unh ahh unh ahh
with lets for the braces and
halters for losses

the iron lung hastened the
fastening process

After he goes on about hell, she says
“We in heaven.” No, Leo says—he’s driving—
“We dead or that’s Toledo up ahead.”

No more dead than yesterday, no more
alive, either, just about the same.

You drive all night to get somewhere
you’ve never been only to wind up
nowhere or if you keep going some place

worse, if there is a worse. Or—if Leo
is right—holy Toledo! And we been there.

The trees lined up along the roads
that veined out in different directions
sometimes divided sometimes united

The fall air bordered on winter

How many state lines did we cross
as we drove across a wide country
sometimes divided sometimes united

Every state is a state of mind

Every love is a drive
toward a more perfect union

And in Vermont—up a twisting hill
the Barrel Man’s sign: twenty-five-foot
collage of barrels hooked and joined

to make a man. 10 bucks apiece, he says—
Soap can, oilcan, what-have-you can
to fill with salt and sand, dented metal

presiding over ice grip, sleet to snow.
Each wood-slat throne adorned
with rusty shovel, each can a turquoise

charm against the car’s careening!

Sagittal, the geese, like a dismantled dormer,
a gable of hearts. How instinctively they go.

I know the tidal blue mountains
shifting at dawn beneath their passage

over philandering clouds more true to life
than any vow. Though I’m heir to hawthorn,

nandina, holly, puritan barb, reserve & blood—my pounding ribcage follows them,

pulled into air in knell of chthonic joy
only the hidden, then harvested can know.

A cumulus of time drifts
over snow, petals, papers, ash.
We sleep

and spin, synapse as solstice
shortened days, lengthened light.

Clouds and continents
immediacy and history
become one.

The old man’s face wanes, ardent
despite the distance and dark.

Love stays
and that’s American.
Look! Our native beech tree,

short on green this winter,
won’t shed withered leaves.

Scraps cling to boughs,
strawlike but amber in sun
as wind ruffles them.

The crackling you hear
is only deep breathing.

How many poets does it take to change
a lightbulb? Two. One to change
the lightbulb and one to

envy the one that got
to change the lightbulb.

How many poets does it take to change a lightbulb?
Two. One to change the lightbulb
and one to write, “I’m screwed.”

How many poets does it take to change
a country? How many presidents? How much pain?

—& a lightbulb turns
earth. Berkeley lovers in a
Thai café: mint, sweet

basil. Geminid showers
all this week . . . Solstice, almost—

You can take money
out of the empire but you
can’t take the empire—

Look. Enough of these wars. A
rabbit crouches in the moon—

In front of the craft shop,
a small nativity,
mother, baby, sheep
made of blue
and white balloons.

*

Sky

god

girl.

Pick out the one
that doesn’t belong.

Girl God Sky: at the levee’s
edge, she waits, a stick in the dirt.

Towns still stuck at the Gulf’s edge:
Pascagoula, Waveland. Miles

of highway. An empty trench.
Flooded. Now unflooded. Gone.

She lies on mud and leaves,
tries not to disappear.

Rising wild onion sun painting the Illinois prairie.
A wind dances on buffalo eyes—horns, beards, winter fur.
Herd breathes vapor, turns, mists away.

Handful of dung and corn seed slammed into the ground.
With spit, with blood, it grows, as eyes shrink, ribs, body,

Skeletal collapse. It grows, spreading corn wildfire—
Corn running, silk scarf, pumping heart,
Indian body, just bones. Indian opens an eye—

Sprinting trees can’t catch up, sun circles behind,
Kernels pop off. Rockies rise. He leaps up, gone!

Old leaves, deer tracks in the mud around the front porch,
step-chart for a crazy dance. Just past the solstice and out here
at land’s end the song to song is blue jay blustering rivals,

three-note chickadee saying what? _______ __ __. Cuneiform,
I read, was the same physical work as texting, quick

little pushes on clay instead of the iPhone screen. Message to
song,
then to now; the days shifting longer, possibility rising,
this year . . . While far off, in the capital, some idiots are
chased away,

and others invited to the stage. How much to hope?
[portion of line missing—tablet cracked] Birdsong, ascendant
notes.

Maybe you’ve seen how a sea-falcon,
hovering above its own reflection,
will at last strike through it to the silver
life flashing just beneath it, and thus
survive. How there’s a cadence even

to brutality. As it turns out, there were
always choices. Sing, or don’t sing.
Ritual, and the unraveling of it. You
all over again, but bearing the light
for once steadily forward, as if for us both.

The snow is expected. It’s the day before
The day before and snow is expected
Across the lake. The story doesn’t end
Though the year does. The snow resumes.

I liked the present better when it was still
The future, like a kid who wanted a chemistry set
For his birthday, because the flasks and beakers
Were beautiful, full of the warm south.

And there you have it: sun’s bravery, wind’s power
Shaking the powder out of the spruces and pines.

Renga, renga on the screen where has all the music gone?
State Line potato chips, wish I had a few in hand

Down in the Lehigh Valley at the bottom of the bottomless
ditch
Lived alone in a cabin attending the railway switch

Went down to St. James Infirmary, saw my baby there
Bees and butterflies pickin out her eyes
On the streets of New Orleans

You know I’m a crawlin kingsnake baby and I rules my den

Women loving each other, they don’t think about no man
They ain’t playing it secret no more. These women playing a
wide open hand

But actually nothing’s—nothing’s—gone, and nothing’s new
About this new slim chip of time we’ve just now crossed the
border of,
Adding one atomic second to the flowering

Open-handed clock—feel it?—we’ve not been here
Before we think but the price of gas is down again and the sale

Of guzzlers up—oh brother—land
Is not our land—I pull the last leeks up from under
Frost and point the round white-haired root-ends straight up

To the invisible day moon, full moon—clenched hand—
torch—give me
Your whom? your whom?—

Are we not what we invited in?

“We’re not them,”
the man at Verizon
Help Desk says.

“OK,” I say, “who is ‘them’?”
“There is no ‘them,’ ” he says.

Epiphany. A sign
outside Prince Realty:
Need Help? Inquire Within.

All the dry stiff Christmas trees
tip to trunk along the curb.

The same sad spark inhales itself
all the way to its beginning.
Man wants to be happy,

cannot help wanting to be
happy, Pascal sighs, blithely.

I’m trying to be. We all are.
Spinach is, cucumbers extremely so.
It’s winter, again,

Oh hum, the river freezes at night.
Ah, the pretty kids, skating!

rivers freeze in the east, but in California the sun-baked homes
yawn with open windows and the skating is done with rubber
wheels

it’s winter still, but we’re not on the same terrain, or under the
same
blessed eye, or lacking of spinach and other green things

you curse, we laugh, but then fires explode and consume with
winds
that possibly tickled your nose one day—somehow none of us
are immune

disasters are our lot, sun-blistered face or frozen smile—it’s
more about
whatever wholeness we hang on to when nature and our
natures break

and what language of that memory can elevate us to try again
we’ve been here before, and we have to save the world every
time

Magma, negative ions, heady politics
Continental Divide’s a way to crack your heart
One eye on the Pacific, other gazes east

Up there in Washington, D.C., where they run your life from
It’s celestial now, 44th Prez gorgeous as a gazelle, & smart too
hooray

May he not be a warring one, close torture & all its
accoutrements
Ancient bristlescones awaken in beauty of astonishment
January crisp inauguration eve has a dream

Gay civil rights still waiting in the wings show’s on
Citizens (all together now) reach out to the Middle East

What’s the big idea? And then again
what idea was so big it couldn’t come through
the little door. It waited outside for us,

throwing pebbles at the window.
Finally it gave up and went away.

Now at least we’re out on the hillside
We can see it flashing up ahead, in the alder brakes.
Will we ever catch up to say how sorry we are?

Believer and nonbeliever, each on the hillside,
each wondering if the other is right.

Five, six—and righteous,
the child in green in Gaza
stands in her wrecked home,

grubby, indignant. Her hands
point; she explains what was done

bombed, burned. It smells like
gas. We had to throw our clothes
away! The earrings my

father gave me! No martyr,
resistant. The burnt cradle . . .

Oud, ney, riqq, kanun
artillery in moonlight
music in Gaza.

From the cold echo chamber
a siren’s long melody.

Neon-tinted snow
parking lot slash dressing room
dobro, pedal steel

Fingering the fretted neck
G, F sharp, B, C sharp, A.

If there is a God,
Please may He or She
Assist our new President

Guide him to Peace and Service
Help calm the Military

Grant prosperity to every
Last human on
Broad-breasted Earth

The semi-bliss of Nat’l Health
And a Sharing of the Wealth

“No Images” would be perfect
for this renga snow,
chill in the cut.

Air rocks
Oppenheimer clouds.

Swear to God, word,
if Doña Maria loses
her botanica—

Vapor, flakes,
crystal, kaboom . . .

Whoa! Hold on there, Partner! Time for you
To speak up. This here Renga’s a verbal democracy—
Bambara, Hopi, Español. I hanker to hear

Your voice cross lines like sunrise from Denver
To Kansas City, chasing the groundhog home to spring.

Mother of All Tongues, whoop-ti-do!
English, Nuyoriqueño, Frisian, lingual whoosharooni,
Carny barker barks—slippy slang, Wu-Tang Clan,

Tlingit, Maori, Mayan. Poems are made of words.
Pass it on. You talkin’ to me? Do tell! I’m all ears.

The “flow of the wind,”
“wind elegance,” “wind madness”:
renga’s mother stock.

Or motherboard, the logic
open-sourced, a free-for-all.

Only disconnect—
if the circle were perfect
it would be a noose—

let me mention the season.
Downpour tips my cup of gold.

The February
moon, its arms around itself,
still sits stalled beneath

points being made about love
and death in the sky above.

The moral is spread
on some month-old snow out back—
a design we like

to think night can make of day,
the summons again delayed.

I pray to be anointed
by a bluesman’s spittle.
His roar began

when the jukebox stopped taking
quarters. He knows my city

in his throat—
Chicago, he growls,
checking my skin for signs of fever.

I burn concrete, El train, the
Alabama I don’t know.

As if you could fight fire with ire
or tame thought with torn
disclosures.

Fear gnaws, money
down drain, spent in vain,
foreclosures

Sure, or just paddle out the back way
behind the No Exit sign, barely clutching your nearly
foregone

enclosures.

the people are ready
to record the confession

how a body is the same
as a rock in red radar

how computers lock
a missile on a target

what it feels like to finger
the key the trigger

the look of lips
saying sorry

Love the tidal pool!
the microscopic wiggle
of the horseshoe crab

Shedding and shedding till
the body triggers Exit Sign!

Shells are cool to shed.
Not so—the Ozone Layer,
kindness, Tlingit, say—

So much talk beyond ourselves.
If our shells could only speak

More of the nothingness.
Oceans without you.
Puddles made of us.

Maybe, the slag ash we drank
Affected our brains—or maybe

We swam too far from knowing
Where the shore meets
The edge of nowhere—maybe.

Oceans of prairies, black mesa and buffalo bones, the great
bruised heart of the South,
or down in the Lehigh Valley at the bottom of the bottomless
ditch,
carny barker barks, a bluesman’s spittle, Ugolinos chewing in
bloodsucking silence, dogs by day and drugs by dark,
Berkeley lovers in a Thai café, praying for prayer, or what night
can make of day,
sparrows churring above rockweed, eelgrass, glasswort in
Orient, as we gaze eastward across the tidal wetlands
and then the sea,

all hurrying forwards, towards who we’ll become, one way
only, one life only: free in time but not from it,
here in the country the living make together, make & unmake
over & over—
Quick, quick, ask heaven of it, of every mortal relation, feeling
that is fleeing,
for what would the heart be without a heaven to set it on?
I can’t help thinking no word will ever be as full of life as this
world, I can’t help thinking of thanks.

“thanks,” replied the hurricane/tornado.

try ’n’ place my crazy song now.
isolated. an image. afterthought to the sequence.

lo, civilization is a joke to me, always helping.
conviction lacking account.

oklahoma is a burst metaphor for formulaic forgetting.

prayer dust on the minds of advanced fixers
standing behind the glass.

the uncomfortable wreckage is at 190-ludicrous-figure
continuing mph.

tantrum heading in the direction of definitions.

Let’s say physicists
know what they’re talking about.
Everywhere’s a cen-

ter—the universe spreads out
from its first tiny birth-spark.

Yet, in Ohio,
along one stagnant farm pond,
a great blue heron

steps from splash to splash, and thus
shortens the distance to you.

A dark mood so absorbs the afternoon
That dry wind flakes the edges of the earth
And despair encapsulates experience.

Mind breaks loose to cut through time and space
Beyond the pounding surf, the dark cloud-banks
Reflected in the craggy ocean’s depth.

The poem that approximates the mind’s path
Probes the multi-layered mysteries, explores
Those crevices that thought has seldom touched,

And ends where it began: so never ends.

Pathogens injected Trojan-horse-style; temple walls crumble
before a small
lexicon, altared and stable, unsullied, too briefly a miracle. Our

neo-tragedy was their crazy carte blanche.
You’d think they’d have read their Homer. But, like

slapping the moron beside the bully, we invade Babylon to
applause, which muted, a-hem, throats cleared for political
posterity.

Soldiers are nothing more than pharmakon charged with the
damned’s duty,
enlisted to oaths that only finally matter when we wish they
didn’t. The

soldier-philosopher turns the gun on himself to salvage some
meaning.
A smirk and crooked smile, Heh heh heh, sure showd em, didn
we, Dead-eye.

Oh well along the coast in greeny April
Forgiveness is the blue sheen
Of lupine on a windy hillside,

The grasses stating their case for
and against “the continent’s violent requiem.”

The year turning as a renga turns
Toward its source, rivery, many-voiced,,
But what source, really, in the turning?

So the hikers who have walked to the cliff’s edge
Unpack their lunches and stare at the Pacific.