The Definitions

Monostich: a long sentence

Sternum: a little chest

Heart: upside down

Location of the unconscious:

Empty window seat

Horizon: gone at night

Thought: given

Prison: a perversion

—

Our earth can’t live without holy rites.

You can see this from the sky.

Lots of hills to climb up and down.

A straight ravine between.

Snow figures engraved in stones.

Show streaks of sun gone but

The white rocks shrink and grow

Grave at sunset.

Turn to the right

And you will fall to the left.

One figure wears a beard

Down to his chest

But Eros hates coverings.

And prefers to be caught naked

With his bow and arrow.

Embellishes

But clears the way for pathos.

—

From above I covet a mountain beneath my feet.

Shrines made of dung and branches,

With berries for eyes and burlap hung with holly.

They were curled in shadows on roads

Leading to every stop we made from the Trig

To Top Withens to Liverpool.

The white and purple mountains.

Stood over the Brontës and clusters

Of black thistles’ script.

I remember a church (a cave supported

By old bicycle parts to keep it up)

Was bound by a broken bell and a box

Containing snapshots and trinkets.

“We will get through this!”

—

Why mercy?

Having mercy on someone is easier than forgiving them.

That one there?

A man limited by logic, he imprisoned the people whose thinking was infinite.

And her, the serious one?

Stars without light hold the others up.

I lost you for a moment.

Mid-sentence is darker so you can’t decipher it.

Look up.

Oyster, shell pink, sky inside. Our prison.

What would you tell the judge?

The difference between a man who shoots others and then himself and one who shoots others and runs away.

You will tell her that decisions are only guesses.

“Resentment is a weak form of suicide.”

That’s why suicide is hard to choose even when you’re dying.

“I wish they would shoot themselves before they shot the others.”

—

We’ve evolved (arrived) just in time for the obsolete.

The center that runs along the sides of the tarmac

Is a camp without a name.

A holding station.

A glass of narcotics, a warm blanket, steam for suffocation,

For each passenger of any class.

“Did you know a rendition is an interpretation, an

explanation of something not clear?”

“It’s also persecution and surrender,

Translation and the handing over

Of prisoners to countries

Where detention is.”

Pass through customs in silence.

The red strings of radiation

Will only burn your bed-skins.

Do not joke or rhyme with bomb.

“If you have a passport, bless it.”

—

Now the wing is whitening, its patches quiver

on the steel and fragment into petals that are either living or not.

In grade one I watched the lights of cars passing on the bedroom wall

for surely they were messages flying at the speed of light.

And aren’t they still?

In the sky there are few signs of progress.

Tongues wag and sailors pull their beards.

Some have pictures of naked women, some have boys.

It’s fractal, a science student whispers to nobody special.

—

There is a wonderful kidnapped hunted raped and betrayed girl

In fairy tales. She has a name, but the vowels and subjects

Around can’t be switched to fit.

She wants to escape but letters won’t let her.

She never thinks about darkness or dying because they’re natural

And don’t require thought.

She carries her darkness everywhere.

What is not natural

Is being here an utter stranger.

And flight being no metaphor.

—

What if the outcome of an act burst into color.

All that fruit skin dimpled from the touch of branches.

The oranges falling when the creatures below were hungry.

Each wink of an eyelid presaged a long look at a winter

That would come eons later.

What if you stood when I entered.

What if you think of time as a long and everlasting plain,

You can pass across it any which way you turn.

And walk around the pond with your father again.

—

I had a garden of my own

For twenty-one years.

Seven trees times three

Planted for the first children.

Oh its land was a meadow

And our little house, a grape arbor

And a Wampanoag

Grave in a grove of elms.

Then a tree like an elephant

Bucked in a storm.

And its trunk broke into

A wrinkled little stump.

Roots don’t give up.

And stones only breathe once a year.

Many people passed through.

We could have watered more

Or flowered a path

For the visitors. After all

Love meant life and its shadow.

Children played and grew.

I too grew old for no reason.

Love stood at a distance.

One day the snow will camouflage

The huddling April buds

Before a cherry-picker

Damns all but one, the littlest.

—

At least I know when the wild geese

Fly from Sepiessa.

They herd the future

As it approaches the bench.

Night ... the playground

At Town Hall is creaking

And tribal members

Now numbered

In the twos are too early for sun-up.

We almost sit together

But our feet of shadows

Show failed land deals.

Steps lowered and slimy

On a slip into the lagoon.

Ghoulish are the ghosts

Of time past: ancestors

With our same names.

—

Pensées sauvages: wild pansies, like violets, have the shape of thoughts, savage thoughts, colored thoughts, sprung from a stem.

Purple and yellow. Five petals.

Once Cupid shot an arrow dipped in the ink of a pansy into the eyelid of a sleeping child.

From then on the child saw cirrus colors at dawn, dawn

being where iridescence grows flowers.