From the corner
a grainy light shades a smile.
In the distance, tenement towers,
gray tusks in a monochrome sky.

He looks like a white root
exposed to sooty clouds,
a tendril unearthed
by quarrying shadows.

I cannot now own that boy.
His body appears like a foreign word,
a thin unconne… Read full post »

 

 

 A vixen lies down to pant at midday,
the grass takes her shape,
bends for hours to the heat of her.

Amid a thin rooted earth, frogs
glimmer on clammy pads.
Water, trees, the forestation of fungi;
a loose confederation
of small white moons.

I saw a kingfisher dive into the sun,
a gol… Read full post »

 

 

A blank puts on its pants.
I adjust body-dreams to fit
a creeping reality.

Through a bathroom mirror,
a naked ape looks
dubiously,
at its reflection.

Waiting for coffee,
reading fridge magnets,
I'm surprised at how interesting
the world is
when stamped into rubber decals.

Hard-wired spikes… Read full post »

 

She sleeps with bears and they love her.
They clothe her in the breathing dreams
of their clan.

They give her the strength of sonorous sleep,
a rest that feeds roots, a sense of her earth,
their flames warm visions, other incubation's.

She is not dainty, she's strong,
sturdily planted, too bou… Read full post »

 

 

Beyond the gill
eponymous assemblies
of dew-riddled worms
begin their spiral songs.

Twilight slips
from kneeling cattle.
A yawl of mizzle and stars
rolls above the sawyers
of the sun.

Fungal soft
a prow of light is risen
for the sailing winds.

Here where the mossy earth
is moored
I also scud… Read full post »

 

 

 

If I had a daughter,
I would be the kind of father
who owns a muscle car.
I would never be seen
without my Wrangler jeans.

If I had a little girl
I would carry her round my neck.
People would say:
Hey father, who has a daughter,
those legs around your neck,
are they yours?
No. I woul/… Read full post »

 

  

 The night knows how to fang a wrist.
When grit nips a hot tongue,
the lights of bistros may be eased
beyond their desolate backyards,
nudged forward by huddled smokers,
until a scree of black curb
can be crossed. 
At uncertain times the geese take over,
blue ice skims… Read full post »

 

 

Blue pods rattle on green tides.
Bladderwrack---Mermaid’s Hair
washing ankles.

There are voices in our breath
they roll over the salt of our tongues,
intone words
from the mouth of a sea
that speaks
as spray and brume.

A mottled crab scuppers its sea legs
in fluorescent foam.

Where t… Read full post »

 

 

I have almost forgotten China.
It got too big for my mind.
Holes appeared.
Entire cities fell through.

The forbidden city
is a convoluted red and gold ribbon
I can't untangle.
I took trains, boats and planes,
to places on maps
now unavailable in the West.

Some snapshots still flutter
like… Read full post »

 

 

 

Beethoven smashes one piano after another.
He shears through keyboards,
a peasant scything hay.

The composer's fingers don't grow deaf,
they become deeper, more blunted
into mallets.

His apartment is disorderly,
tools and equipment
are hidden in Dresden figurines,
in elderly Delftw/… Read full post »

 

They are scattered photographically,
most are related to shipwrecked ghosts.
A genetic experiment,
in an abandoned laboratory
named them alphabetically like hurricanes.

Those ferrous accomplices of my blood,
who cheerfully or absentmindedly
initiated one test sequence after another,
had the en… Read full post »

 

What we need now are anxious parents,
but we are old, and that work
has fallen to our children.

What we need are summer nights,
not too cool, not too warm.
Time to decide what to wear to bed,
and when we wear nothing,
we need the eyes of dreaming cats.

What we need now, is for the/… Read full post »

 

The monks walk
beside the river in single file,
five young men, heads newly shaved.
Saffron robes, washed so frequently
that the orange has turned yellow,
the kind of yellow found
under un-shed autumnal leaves.

In Chiang Mai autumn is a real season.
It has chill mornings.
No leaves fall, but t… Read full post »

 

 

Old Spice and wet grass carry years of talk between us.
What I wear and you gather into you,
become a language neither of us know,
but comprehend in mouse-tracks of deduction.

You read grease and engine oil, as if grease and engine oil
were two parts of a book left out… Read full post »

 

A place to be one with whatever One is.  Lovers come here,
and drunk teenagers. 

The water in winter, tumbles into ice sculptures,
opaque lions and antelope caught in glittering abeyance.

Today I see that someone has spray-painted words
on the rock face in large red letters.
I lo…

Read full post »

 

A four-day drunk.
The fourth day is crystal clear.

I am an arctic god.
I slur no being, crack no shells.
I am vodka and ice in a quartz prism.

Day four is a translucent sobriety.
A star-black taxi ride,
the spill of glistening talk,
a nightclub,
thunder-music.
Boozed-up friends
not noticing my ra… Read full post »

 

His body belongs to a poor person.
(The creases accumulated
from years of scrounging between
bone-cleaning winds, ashen lines,
not dirt, only the aging of those who
must grind out and make do.)

I have his right leg.  The teaching surgeon
has already amputated it at the hip.
A note pinned… Read full post »

 

 
A child scratches a spacecraft in the dust.
He does not call it a 'spacecraft'
because it is 1911.  The Colt Firearm Company
has patented the first reliable semi-automatic pistol;
it does not look like any other handgun.
Decades earlier, Karl Drais invents
the meat-chopping machi… Read full post »

 

A neighbors car
backs out of its garage.
Red brake lights
splash on a dark window.

Going to church!
I envision
his plastic dashboard Jesus
nodding eagerly.

For a moment I want to go
where cleanly washed Americans
worship.
I want to sit
surrounded by good people,
swaying to… Read full post »

The stock of the rifle is hand-selected walnut.
I clean it with a soft cloth and occasionally
linseed oil.

I dust her and look at the porcelain lady
twice a week.

I pick up a quartz crystal and sigh
perhaps once a fortnight.

When the black dog returns,
I drive…

Read full post »

 

We dug a small hole laying the shoebox inside.

I knew you were puzzled.
"Will Stinky stay here now Daddy?"

"He will probably nibble his way out
when the moon is as large as a wheel of cheese."

"How will he reach the moon?"

He will fly there on mouse wings"

"Why is he so… Read full post »

 

I walk on all fours like a dog,
sniff crumbling roots,
bury my ears in the earth
beneath a slalom wind.

The moors are mammoths
above a scant earth.
I hug an overhang.
 
Here at the cliff,
the fragile bones of tussocks
pinion broken nails to stones.

Death turns on an ankle here,… Read full post »