A cozy silence
closes,
knitting knuckles around a low room
of woods stone plaster tables
a tavern.
Shifting figures tense
as though aware a weir-

skulking gloom.
Fires gasp
and spatter night gem;
somewhere a rasp
of merriment leaves on the
last ferry, fast.

A greater quiet rides a gargantuan camel
of static nearer, patching
its quilt of many breathy epiphanies lost...

A lacuna—
that rain shadow
—falls like a porcelain mask,
cuts us into tangent vectors,
directions.

-

A cozy silence
closes worn fingers about a room.
Shifting figures tense
as though aware some skulking gloom.
Fires gasp
and toss dark shards about;
Somewhere the rasp
of merriment slinks away, chagrined.
A great quiet slips nearer;
It is the sound of many voices lost.
Of a sudden the silence falls like an axe
And cuts laughter free of its masters.

fa;;,
I was
noticing
the
sound

twigs departing severa;
                                          ;eaves
in
human
                      form

swam a ground

the first sign of darkness?
- -slips by- -

  didn't see it

- -and then another- -

  who can say for sure?

- -again!- -

  divinity calms my trunk of ribs,

  still there,

  clenched

- -it darkens- -

  in my

- -growing ever dimmer- -

  fingernails

- -as the night takes hold
 of

The desert we tread,

Our feet of lead. . .

The desert we tread. . .

What lies ahead?

Where is our tear?

Have we no fear?

Where is our tear?

So often near.

We drift a long day

Toward desert's display—

We drift on the day—

Our hopes not frayed.

Oh mistaken night,

We must take fright!

Oh mistaken night,

Illusion so bright!

The desert we tread,

All hope hence fled;

The desert we tread,

Until we got dead.

violet breezes;

dew drops chime

in the sprinkling sunshine:

what melody teases?

with jubilant caress,

languid scents stir,

while leaves whisper

about the watercress

birds in flowery flight

salute the copper sky,

with a swooping cry;

then verdantly alight

in sultry sadness

marches the day—

with golden spray—

towards its death

a black h
O
le pulls the universe,
trying,

stretching its arms,
crying to eat the wh
O
le;

like a tree
it has shape:
its arms are branches,

its gr
O
ping hands are leaves,

everything it has ever eaten
O
ver time

has found the trunk—

its (ca ta clys mic) es
O
phagus,

^past^the^teeth^
O
f^its^event^
h
O
   riz
O
n and
  t
    h
  e
c
    h
  e
   w
i         ng
      s
   w
i
 rl
i         ng
O
 rb
i
  t   s
O
  f
i
  t   s
m
O
ut
    h,
     the belly is
      a gr eater
       m( . )nd
        th I an
         m^ne
          :  a
            .
          s p
           O
          t ! :
        w    h
    ere        its
          a^e
           *r*
    <>O<>O<>
        ><ts><
> <       ?       > <
            :n
            Ow f
            Olding s
            O that all wh
            Oles are
            One
            1
            .

The voidclipper took us over a soul
ocean of sepalescent suns,

spiky nebulation tangling us, our
shields cream in coffee.

~

A

single 

bird flew down the

hale summer mouth of the

luminous

waves.

We were that bird.

The planet was uninhabitable.

I have a new invention: massless shit.

Anyone want to help me market it? I’m thinking chimpanzees flinging wet shit. I’m thinking chimpanzees flinging dry shit. I’m thinking the difference water makes. Gravity? Don’t waste it.

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

Dampening your window sill
dragging in a large spider
by its thorn-dewy shins,
you yowl heatedly.

The sheltering accomplice weaves a breakfast trap
from one end of your kitchen to the other.

The morning news comes through
a timepiece on your wrist;
a caterpillar has used your blanket
in the night
and is hanging with it in your closet,
changing.
"Time keeps on slipping into the future,"
said the wound-up news.

Your teeth are brushed

and neatly parted.
"Let my spirit carry me,"
prayed the spider when you cut its web down
with a pair of pruning shears.

And then it ate you:
it sucked your blood through column wounds in your back,
siphoning the digested burger of your heart.

The sucking couldn't stop, and the spider scarcely thought.

"Time keeps on slipping into the future,"
said the wounded timepiece on your wrist.

By lunch the caterpillar had welded to a false sun
wearing your best disco vinyls
and a tie
and a Christmas hat with antlers and hanging bells.

Your electric potential might have reminded angels
to wake you in the morning,

so a fresh moth's perfume has woken you from life this morning,
before lunch buffets, before the grand coin-op waffle iron rings,

by taking your bedclothes in the middle of the night,
and the two of you
follow Rapunzel's lover through the front door
and into the forest.

In the winter of my soul
the cold struck deep

in the deep of cold my soul

loved summer
in the vacuum of a moment

such snow was falling

rays tore a frost
on my only window

The wordless sun without even lips
smiles like a clown's head,
sinking like a balloon,
exhaling and rolling
pink and red
over clouds like hills and
mountains like waves
as
every eye turns to the first,
the blank radiant O

The letter A stands ready. Movement is beyond intention; A is thought.

The first is forward, of hands an apparition. Patience and offering move strength. A:boulder is an eye. A:constellation setting lifts A:boulder in A:basket made of thread.

The sun is breathing out the sea.

Two sails braking hunt are kites. The ships are god's own feet. He skates the sea and clouds his eye in crowding waves.

Gaia shivers with life

and I on her giant face—
.icropsia
m

Mind: a
game between
an
island and every-
thing
else

You try to pull meaning from things,
and it falls
so fluffily
apart into fingerprints.
While painfully scaling the cryogeometries of Mt. Foxglove,
you let your arms spool out as fluff,
and in fingerprinted anger
they let you.

As if around were here, she said; her man

took off, dissolved into the film. Hemmed

frowns shimmered contagious. The birds began

to be remembered, upsetting above

the cutting room, which pitched and spoke dust

eyelashes moved. Outside wings brushed

paints off Allegheny, in crypt the lust

coiled round and wound around a jamb ordeal,

clipboards stuttered, and the reel went silent.

The door was locked into the building,

pulsing star ice clicked in a bird eye. At length

an ET moved to issue a command:

What you have seen remains here forever.

The bird's poisoned by a bit of clover.

That's a lot of heading south,
I said.

The birds were on a telephone wire
downtown at a festival
they had joined,
a gladiator's match an echo.

I wondered if the birds had any friends.

The sound parted.
I watched several hundred black
butterflies take off.

In seconds they had settled—
were settling along the wire
like magnetic soot, tracing it through the back streets drawing
on the late autumn sky
falling in the evening gold leaves.

Again, after hopping lines to see
the creatures went up in a vapor;
I ducked when they flew at my loft,
my heart smoked when the pendulum missed.

Eventually they did leave. They lifted themselves up
like a giant stalker,
hung in one dizzy
bulb,
made an acrobatic revolution,
and tiptoed off like a cannon.

I am a cut. Dirty blood is all my failure. I am bleeding scarves on the wind in the water, luscious red scarves taking my failure from me. The word suddenly is beautiful, a state, an entry granted to the queen. La Noblesse, Her Fairness. Why be afraid? Why be proud, ashamed? There is no shame in a dead end, a quote of nature, an icicle. In the heart, an icicle. Flagstones covered with it. Growing.

In Wrangell-St. Elias:
a 380 nm octave burning
sporocarp hills, a lensing
wet lacquer above.
The black hole at the center of the Milky Way
spun its mass microscope
to catch a zoom photo

and this is how it looked.

There was sometime a creature in the wind
who cried and fretted sweet her voice;
she plucked your green felt cap and,
coat and hair, she in her likeness rearranged you;

she ridiculed the leaves
who died of shame for weeks; once those
villagers drew barrels to their ears, they
lost aim rusting in the sun;

to pry, she'd smooth her vegetation,
folding it in sound,
challenging and boasting
while among the variations in her song
an insect council played; in a morning fog
she dozed from lullabies;

cry how fields were shorn, how
on ground her death frosts thick;
where you kept your humor
she has been a pile of stones

for you, your rest: in
a sky left wider than before
the dust is growing deserts and
its quarreling is funereal.

to possess a will can be made like iron
in the heart of a very old sun
I traveled through rings and haze
looking for a tradewind curling boldly
at some horizon whence blind to me
slipped ophidian beneath my feet
a shade—
the philosopher's boot struck face
with a lonely looking sound
and clear annunciation
rattling the deck of a turning sunship

Not like honey
but honey itself, made
from crushed bees;
not like a dragon but
the dragon,
stung open from rock;
not a quaking but the
terror itself glass—

the wizard calls up from the
rocks in the dragon's gut
a thorny mansion pouring out formaldehyde,
and there he lives, reading pages made of moth wings.