Fourteen ants sat down at the table. After a few minutes, one said: "Where's dinner?"

I was walking home from scuba practice yesterday when I ran into a bear. At least, he looked like a bear. "Where the hell are you going in that suit?" he asked.

"Where the hell are all the sharks?" I asked back.

(against) blue winter sleep
the sky blankets frosty eyes
the chapped face of the earth
grins in its age
still
the stars come down to play
in the wrinkles of a mountain lake

Sitting by the pond I thought of you,

a line inside my book of learning turned into a daydream;

the color of the universe

was babbling through the water in the sky and tossed the water down

below the ducks

and you the color of it you

the color I once felt are

resurrected in the understudied clouds.

Understudied by ducks, aliens called mallards!

You peer, ancient and warm and wise

and marvelous as a canary-toasted marshmallow violin

bowed by rain
            .       .
    .                   .
                .
~~~~~i~~~~m~~j~
from a dinosaur oasis.

Scooby Doo learned to read at the age of birth,

his mother having liked to flop soundlessly and listen

by the door of Feynman's Pasadena lecture hall

where physics hyperfluxed most days of the week.
The Great Dane learned from her mental notes

given as licks
a grasp of information geometry enough

to extract the most likely positions of his feet

when he first stood.

Most dogs would call it a night

after proposing a theory of quantum gravity

which was shot down

for sounding gimmicky on the same line of voice synthesizer

Stephen Hawking had jammed on.

Scooby Doo was briefly a rock star,

creating several rabid hits

which in the interim both supported his suddenly large family

(cared for in a tranquil Transylvanian castle by Mrs. Doo,
who composed all his best riffs)

and spawned a new species,

the Scoobydooicus fanaticus,

which horded much like a

puffy timbery technicolor cloud of locusts.

In a split particle of analysis

the purebred intellect saw that the real work

was in running fast. If you grew up in the late 20th century,

you may've thought bubbles of tomb earth

only a convention. They are in Doo's favorite pastime

his dismantled body on its way to Pluto, a dwarf skipping stone

owned by the eponymous legend,

for a chew on bone caviar and a shot of oaky cigar breeze.

Thence might as well galumph he under time dilation to the next scene after

skedaddling holograms of him and Shaggy.

For that matter, it's hard to say

how old he is now when you meet him:

not only has he charted every cell in his body

and scattered his yowls like a pack of cards on the spacetime continuum,

but he is surely a hound of all ages,

smiling, frowning mild con-

sternation, vocalizing, or shivering,

depending on an observer's personal history...

Because this takes quite an effort to do at once, he

revs his time camera days or years after a fact—

having earmarked the occasion—

and dips into history for tracing an

angle, another take. In the future, watching himself on TV,

very old now by choice, at least for an afternoon,

he looks in the pocketed surface of a glass century.

A girl caught my eye,

while I wasn't looking

drew its outline with her pupil.

She wrapt

me in her wavy curls

as a mother loves a child as
if I were lithium and she were fluorine

so I knew she knew I was hers.

She walked away

and passed again, I

holding her thought,

my world nothing else;

imaging innocence herself

she walked away

outside and put her back against me

through the window where

I sat

she sat.

A wink, the brush of eyelids sleeping,

her form against me in a silhouette of ours.

She felt so beautiful.

Time carried her again

inside

my eyes

in her eyes

her mouth moving untangling soundless

"what?"

apeiron

awake
grow a moment

less is more

marsmatician
the boundless is holy water

standing next to a drop of it

Burke Lake

well after sunset
and gloomy
climbs inside a sky's

lantern of spirits

after our dizzy merrygoround
a mist on
a horizon

resounding snowy
lore of drifts and
ultraviolet maps
isrealite the snowman
breaks

apeir- on
pira- mon
aleth- eia

less is more marsmatician you're boundless as holy water

awake

grow the moment

less is more, marsmatician,

the boundless is holy water

(standing next to a drop of it

and looking across its belly)

resounding snowy daughters--

this means lore, israelite

now the moment

breaks