Falling Away

The source of value is arcing back in on itself
Arrows are disobeying common sense
Returning to bows.

I have only a toe left inside the dance
Of the sleepwalkers
But the irony is in the cast iron nature of life.

As I exit this cage, and leave the gruntings behind
The shell that surrounds me
Grunts more boldly than ever.

Typhoon

Today is for studying the Beaufort Scale
For understanding rescue
In the breeches buoy formed by the
Wonderful curve between the shoulder blades
Of three women at the bookstore

Or to tell a friend that the story began
When Macwhirr tapped the barometer

The foamy swells of time are whipping white
Froth by me and warning flags snapping
In high strung wires as irresistible green seas
Wash across the decks on Cleveland avenue

When she smiled at me I heard

Hatchbolts, even keelbolts
Beginning to give way

Ruins

Have you ruined me for all others?
I do think you have

There is a sheet of plexiglass
On one side, my past
My dreams, my naivete, and you

On another side, my now
My waking moments, and my decay

Your net has captured analogues,
Ancillary loves, places
Sand and sea

Time itself is strung through your funnel

Stone

She held the stone outside that sculptor's dwelling
It was her own and solitary : "Gates of Hell"
The child of her desire for copulation/his rejection thereof
Who is greater, she or he? Rodin is august,

But what of her experience on the outside of his radius?

And in a square chamber Kollwitz helps us
Also become a stone or metal mother wrapped around
That which is most precious to her : who can bear it?
Although it is stone or metal alone.

I'd like to curl on her doorway just like a mistress.

I am the mother of the stillborn child of my love.

Other Poets

At the seashore
Some kids throw stones
Others take their rafts or boogie boards way out
Some collect stones and shells
Some lie in the warm sand near the dunes
Their spirits silhouetted against the sea

In the forest
Some birds warble, others trill, others crow
Little animals scamper around
Bigger ones rustle or stay still
While we come walking through
With the kids ahead
All under the shelter of the trees

The World's End

where earth rivers pour out into the void
thought to be at the edges of a flat planet
are here on the unswept streets

these rivers appear to me, and to no one else
to be sweeping the avenues
to be rushing through the alleys
as wilderness canyons

when they swell and pour
over the edge of time
they freeze in the reaches of space

amidst shreds of yesterday's plastic
and the wind whipping of islamic fabric
the playing of children, the swaying of trees
and the thoughtless drone of traffic

it seems that no one else
hears these waters move

in a tower

a man in a tower
is reading
by the light of a candle
what he is reading

i don't know

i do not know at all

is it a guidebook
to the masonry
or a map to the view
from the window?

i will never know

in the meantime
outside
the sun shines
the seasons change

the storms come and go