I don't trust nobody

             but the land I said

I don't mean

present company

of course

you understand the grasses

hear me too always

present the grasses

confident grasses polite

command to shhhhh

shhh listen

However a light may come

through vaporative

glass pane or dry dermis

of hand winter bent

I follow that light

capacity that I have

cup-sized capture

snap-like seizure I

remember small

is less to forget

less to carry

tiny gears mini-

armature I gun

the spark light

I blink eye blink

at me to look

at me in

light eye

look twice

and I eye

alight

again.

I am this

salivating

mouth without

hands with-

out arms

bent down

shameless

face to plate to

some original

hunger aware

that I'm alone

and I alone am

the one -> pushing

the head

to eat

A far cry. Epistrophy. A refusal.

A nightingale is recorded in a field

where finally we meet to touch and sleep.

A nightingale attests

as bombers buzz and whir

overhead enroute to raid.

We meet undercover of brush and dust.

We meet to revise what we heard.

The year I can’t tell you. The past restages

the future. Palindrome we can’t resolve.

But the coded trill a fever ascending,

a Markov chain, discrete equation,

generative pulse, sweet arrest,

bronchial junction, harmonic jam.

You are the wren scavenging for the husks of beetles.

I am the trout poking through river rocks,

the head of a copperhead slipping past,

the shadow of what you asked for turning to husk.

I am an open parachute, breeze billowing through. 

You are the wren scavenging for the husks of beetles,

Now, I am flotsam poking through river rocks,

the detached head of a copperhead, snagged on rocks.

During recess, I remember, the parachute in my hands,      

an open shadow, breeze billowing through.

When everyone pulled the chute upward to run beneath,

I was flotsam poking through river rocks,

the undulating lead blue shadows.

The parachute, faded indigo, was sweaty in my hands;  

tucked beneath, one might feel whole

when everyone pulled the chute upward to run beneath.

It’s also true that some whitetails never lose their velvet.

Hunters raise their eyebrows calling them atypical,

antlered does, cactus bucks, monsters, shirkers,

ghosts, raggedy-horn freaks, because they lead

long solitary lives, unweathered

by the rutting season, because their antlers

are covered permanently in a skin

that most bucks shed in late summer,

because their velvet horns spike and slope

backwards, never hardening to pure bone,

growing ever more askew. A recent one slayed

at thirty points was described as having

 stickers, kickers, and a whole lot of extra junk

 full of blood, hot to the human touch.

The bluet is a small flower, creamy-throated, that grows in patches in New England lawns. The bluet (French pronunciation) is the shaggy cornflower, growing wild in France. “The Bluet” is a poem I wrote. The Bluet is a painting of Joan Mitchell’s. The thick hard blue runs and holds. All of the, broken-up pieces of sky, hard sky, soft sky. Today I’ll take Joan’s giant vision, running and holding, staring you down with beauty. Though I need reject none. Bluet. “Bloo-ay.”

My abstention from the Park

is for Billy Nichols who went

bird-watching there and, for

his binoculars, got his

head beat in. Streaming blood,

he made it to an avenue

where no cab would pick him up

until one did and at

Roosevelt Hospital he waited

several hours before any

doctor took him in hand. A

year later he was dead. But

I’ll make the park: I carry

more cash than I should and

walk the street at night

without feeling scared unless

someone scary passes.

Wigging in, wigging out:

when I stop to think

the wires in my head

cross: kaboom. How

many trips

by ambulance (five,

count them five),

claustrated, pill addiction,

in and out of mental

hospitals,

the suicidalness (once

I almost made it)

but – I go on?

Tell you all of it?

I can’t. When I think

of that, that at

only fifty-one I,

Jim the Jerk, am

still alive and breathing

deeply, that I think

is a miracle.

She walks all the time in the Heart Ward.

She makes no sound. She is always alone.

If she is looking in the toilet stall and you come in

she leaves. She calls you Dear.

I was thinking of giving her my flowers.

Just now she came over and said,

‘You don’t have to be writing all the time Dear.’

I said, ‘Do you have any flowers?’

She said, ‘No Dear.’

I said, ‘Do you want any flowers?’

She said, ‘No, no flowers, Dear.’

I said, ‘Don’t you want any flowers at all?’

‘No,’ she said, ‘it’s too late for flowers Dear.’

Naked women are being dragged

down the sandstone shelving

on their backs, very slowly.

With ropes tied to each foot separately

so the legs close and spread open

as they are moved.

When they cry out or shout down

at the men sitting in the lifeguard chairs

looking at them through the gun sights,

the sounds, no matter how angry or foul,

curve and billow like a wave: coming

to the men on a soft wind

caressingly, like sirens singing.

The almost transparent white grub moves

slowly along the edge of the frying pan.

The grease makes the only sound, loud

in the empty room. Even the rim is cooking him.

The worm stops. Raises his head slightly.

Lowers it, moving tentatively down the side.

He seems to be moving on his own time,

but he is falling by definition. He moves forward

touching the frying grease with his whole face.