Says the Sun to the Moon

No, your maneuver to clutter me in series of seminars and a final publication
Was never smaller by your middling authority and relentless, western move. 
No match for my dark unheeding. An affront to your convenience, anyway.
I will make my arrows resolve for crying to some overphotographed country
Minus the lap pool and palm shadows. Where you, regularly drunk on the back 
Porch, resume the controls. Your vision leaving behind the paper house, black


Walnut half-acre. Plot raked in uneven waves, they say three moves in the black
Equal one fire. Burn with autumn leaves, the seemingly indifferent publications
I gave you or compost to fill in the holes. The line of scrimmage behind as I back 
Doorways into another. But enough, the big, black footprints of your last move
Dignify the useful life, and a meal well-disposed. Your remove to the country
Past the countryway store serving breakfast, pizza. A radioactive subsoil anyway


For you. Armed with the lofty science, lotus position, and questioning an out anyway
You could. Dressing well for official appearances, you know how to answer in the black
Tone you are addressed. And in some private furor redolent to your nose the country 
Became your reading material, some rusted connivance of a wellspring in publications 
Gathered in the auditor's pose. Abashedly, only the part I did not make myself moved.
Clambered in constant vague expectation, broke into love on overburdened ligaments back


Down the mountain, submitting to a curfew. A tree emptied of its birds, the wind backed

The fell naturalist. My bowels went cold, stealing to a desk for something longed for, anyway
And since then long forgotten. Leaves fanned out, where planes of the picture were free to move
On the neck of this like two infatuated courtiers avoiding all possible run-ins or black 
Asides of the goat, leaning his bulk. You left off the artichokes if to sponsor this publication
The hypnosis induced by all things in their time even when you are a part and parcel of country.


I shed a skin, while a student of Latin in his limping years indulges rank and rind of the country
Rich cheese unpressed for the unthankful town. I may have thought that an abrupt farewell back
To the halfhearted housekeeping you have shown. What grows in front of me was water, publication
With the content publicly known, how to regret a phase of life that throws description any way
I choose. Dissected tableland of the bills, a touch is to fear the varnish as it hardens, blackens   
With age. With dinner and dog waiting the adagio of his return, you darken your door. Pride moves


You, too. So that he is fulfilled and doesn't stray. You were no more than twenty-two when moved
To wear a man's shirt, no less smooth the collar of this man, whose size has tripled in this country.
Could you not withdraw deeper in your meaning to destroy everything with sharper corners? Blackness
In whom one sleeps, not the foundered marriages they were to. A change of name or revert back
Stills the shining morning with unclogged pores with a ghost of the moon. Plant fall bulbs any way,
Let them swell like the bulbs of your eyes. The vision meant nothing to you, and the publication

Lapsed with little unknown. I was no more than twenty-two when moved to publication
When it seemed like a path to choose in this country. I can lose this symptom or revert back to
It when I want, meaning to destroy everything of yours that I still own, until even memory is black.

 



   

Pirarucu in a Pool

A tour of collage, your tail ends in red like a burn.


The log canoe barked backwards for your slaughter, an arrogance repaid
with the hard architecture of the refuge.

To me, you are a work of art.

Fingercuffed

blind contour exercise

Reading and writing in the right proportions of echoes.

Florida in January


The cold of winter is somehow colder here,
the trees bleaker, with their rags of Spanish moss,
the very air clipped and impatient.
You wouldn't realize summer's forest,
so much like New England, grew in a mattress of marsh
until the leaves were down . Beneath the second growth
a low fringe of starved palmettos
lives in short, childlike arcs, their palest greens
worn almost to the color of old dollar bills. 
In rye field and feed lots,
amid the swaying, wheezing cattle
lost to their mute philosophies,
stalk our self-important tourists, the sandhill cranes--
Nature's aristocrats, eye flared with red eye-shadow
(carelessly applied, as if without a mirror),
their jaunty icepick heads eager or greedy,
but their bodies delicately boned, like young ballerinas.
They high-step away in virginal unease.


Nothing repairs the indifference of their veering,
neither the storm casting its tattered cloak
over the sand pines, nor egrets huddled
against the lake's border, folded up like origami paper,
nor the water, sullen, pocked and greasy,
a rusting tintype of our latent democratic vistas,
Like Ovid on the Black Sea, the restless stranger
might feel such cruel beauty monotonous.
But, inshore, a crusty alligator steams,
nosing into reeds to let off passengers
or take on canvas sacks of mail,
as if the weather had never once been tender
or required, like love, a moment of surrender.

Friday, October 9 is her birthday

Art Nouveau Collectables

You will limp forever before whiplashed lines that constantly remind

There is material to be worked, a poem inscribed in a glass body,

Trailing the same color--the same interview of toned chests or flying buttress,

Eel or lily question. Once again, an ignorance of the obstacles or social problems.

A pulled ray of sun breached the blower's furnace. Look how the stem wilts

Band of thorns reflecting back in his blue glass. Too bad none of them are for sale.

Collecting uranium, vaseline glass is a minefield, and laws limit the sale
To measurably safe levels of contaminant--as a crystal atomizer, given to you, reminds

Emits a green glow under black light. Where the winged scroll, the pineapple fan wilts

One of those natural effects in high humidity. The insipid collector shifting his body

To recall the past of his circus, when a know-it-all manner mattered less, a weight problem

Preceded this passion, but the comparison is unwise, sending us back to buttress

The thoughtfully built collapse in us. Each diverse wish for a swan's neck if to buttress

Those watery heads, if to let in the light and be filled by stained glass, yet the fire sale
Of bold, sensuously blown glass will go on, without the decoration, of even the problem

Of you, lacking the vision of Horta's banisters, and no such logic here, we are reminded.
The pipe creates a bubble in the molten glass. Was she ever, was she on paychecks there, in body?

But our homework, long ago, consisted of ten problems, and time, the opponent, was wilting in us,

Otherwise people write her off. Yet a mood is limitless--with a stylus in hand, an age's wilting

Die-back of certain vases bears the impress on a wall, on a whim, where the tendrils buttress

Bel-étage of this sensibility confined to postage stamps, the Tiffany lamps cast-iron bodies

Of a young woman's arabesques, and I am not sure they speak the language anymore, sales

Have slumped among the young. My eyes water in the cigarette smoke, it almost reminds me

I saw a reticent child I was retracing the cameo or the marquetry, and faced with the problem

Of overpreciousness or the hidden germ already bearing antique marks. A problem of love
Was an antagonizing force, as it was modified for later commissions. The rest of us, wilting

Before the rubbish of what we had said, under the grapevine electrolier, it almost reminds.

The wisps of grass enclosing at dusk around us, and together, we had no greater buttress.

But these molds, inevitably, lost their definition, words were no longer for items for sale.

Much of my learning is through apprenticeship, our childish way of punishing our bodies.

Holding our objects for closeness, there is, for instance, the problem of love for sale,

We had no greater buttress but this, visible—right there—the best place to sell glass, it reminds
Of the first workshop, wilting and widening with centrifugal force the vessels of our bodies.