HMS BOTANY
sailed through the woods,
the squint-eyed captain
measuring leaves,
drawing outlines of them
in a dusty book–
someday I’ll get them all
he breathes, and the first mate
helps the helmsman steer between the trees,
name me! name me!
each one cries, so much work
a life to sail a mile of woods. 7.X.22
Guilty. I am a chain-breather,
even on trains and planes, funerals and churches,
crowded theaters, even in bed
my furtive breaths inhale
each one delicious, each takes in
the reality of circumstance,
the where and when of all the air
around me, each air special,
different, no need for cinnamon
I tease my wife, but sometimes
sometimes I do need to add
the sugar of her smile.
7.x.22
Race car driver
aimed at the sky.
Show the video again,
the part where the books
are bones and the whole city
turns into a cemetery.
2.
You can see that too, gazing
through a broken window
lo into an old miner’s shack
and there everything is, tu sais?
3.
Mila found the bones of his mother,
somehow taught how to think,
thinking is praying, isn’t it?
Taming the mind, holding
one thought and being held by it,
what do you find to start you?
4.
Magic has no exceptions,
only excuses, words we didn’t
grasp in the first place
now bite us on the wrist,
the fang of forgetting,
come home to the ruins
that stretch out for miles
in the Pompeii of your mind,
the world fresh and new outside.
7 October 2022
Raptacious
as a dream
snatching away
the taste of morning.
an old word
they use it in Kentucky
greedy to grab,
rip off the grey
cloaks of waking.
Words wake us,
dream drags up
back from the what
is this anyhow,
we blunder through images
even when there’s no one there.
7 October 2022
The resilience of architecture
comforts the pilgrim,
no place to lay his head
his own head maybe
but there are places,
houses proliferate, stone
walls stand.
I rub my eyes,
Parthenons and Vaticans
on every street.
And every boulevard
leads to the sky–
every pilgrim knows that.
The delivery van drives around
and finds its fated house.
The pilgrim watches
boxes walk inside,
the truck move on.
Why can’t it be a bus
and him inside? There is
some me everywhere
so why not I?
Itchy grass, autumn moth.
another mile.
5 October 2022
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