36 - For the Bird Who Carries and Lightens

Stone beach a bed

bird spreads pebbles

to ease

the weight from heavy places

in the piled-up day.

Sleeps on rock, too tired

from evening-out

our crushing castles

to fly home.

Feet in the night clutch

at daystones ferried

place to place,

even dreaming.

At sea height

the beached are beautiful.

Jellies light and stars

stud the ocean’s coronet rim;

drowsy eyes the dazzle

washing fin and feather

in the watery ink of

all the hard light-lines

unpainting fade of

land to liquid

at the sun’s egress.

Plume sighs little billows

bird on warm

rocks heard the water

helping him

equal the beach.

It smooths the sea glass

for his soft bones,

sending shell-gifts up

as shields from the deep.

14 - For a Different View

When the sun’s florid hand blots

wrought iron curls in calligraphic shadow

on the net mesh of a window screen,

and its felting of highlit white dust flings out

depthy fields frozen in a snowglobe

moment resisting imperial summer,

time pockets to accommodate this

unseasonable dream:

How I would skate in that

frictionless immunity from

seasons’ melt of perfect surfaces.

6 - For a Friend in Storms

And in the grips of it,
toss out hope in banknotes, blow
crushed paper lists from windows
Go, say to kept things
From the pockets’ hold
your hands
retreat to keep from losing

Loose, cupped folds of linen
slings for broken limbs;
despoiled of trinkets lift
the yoke of grips on things.
Night begins asleep in hammock’s hold.

Don’t fear the emptying of pockets where you kept yourself;
you are the weave and safety of this vacant haven.

3 - For a Friend Alone at Night

At dusk, the warm of you
diffuse into the cool
collects the waternight in
young leaves’ gifted breath—
The jewels of dew.
And you are limb-heavy with
this weight of untaken
exhalations
languishing in
verdant excess,
left to your own keeping.
But water seeps;
drops from tips of fingers
trickling soilwise to subtle roots
the subterranea of ardor fed
are sipped for arborescence.
You are the littlest rain
that’s fallen to me,
field friend.

2 - Fact

Color is the scaffolding

Remains when feeling rots off bones of the seen.

No, Aesthete, the line is not bare — azimuth, arc of peregrine faith, it is still fraught with nautic thrusts

Impelled to plot the promise of frontier, even faint.

But a stilled heart admits the nudity of hues.

Sculpted in bas-relief, palette oils mime the depth of things

No longer rounded out, ballooned like glass filled with desire’s breath.

When does blue cease to be a mood?

When does green slither backwards in its unbirth to stasis?

Find yourself looking to pigments as facts, and then you will know.

For mine, I saw the amber dappling of shine, vestiges pocked in the face of thought,

And trusted this fossil-memory of riches, preserved for a dormant one.