= = = = =

All I am is anywhere else.
Mountain crag, no blade
of grass, what do they eat
and the rocks tumble down.
Naked nursemaid flogs a child—
wait, is this religion?

2.
Mars is near the moon tonight,
something red, woke coughing
from an old disease, la vie
humaine. Caterwauling,
is that what I? Images
come to us from asteroids,
they pass and leave us
stuck with what they showed.

3.
Golden pinecone on the Pantheon,
so who is God when you say the word?
Alphabets all over us, yet hard
to pronounce the stone,
the creep of glaciers
past the sleeping bears.
The child starts crying
and the nursemaid stops.

4.
You see, old friend, hold
firmly to what you don’t quite know,
leap towards the unknown
but do it quietly, at home,
in the dark. You can get
anywhere from here.
Sometimes music helps,
the news from Mozart,
listen. Tender moss
you think his name must mean
when you first hear it
but then comes the slow
movement of the ninth concerto
and a whole new century
falls into your hands.
There is no one in the music
ever, only you.

5.
Pay for the privilege
we say, barbers and harlots,
cowboys and clerks.
Everybody is part of the act.
My friends are in Philadelphia now,
for instance, they have their reasons,
rivers, children, universities,
maybe even owls in the park.
A city is naught without owls.

6.
Not trying to be clever,
just trying to walk the boulevard
from the museum to the cathedral
and study the nature of God again,
between what God has made
and what we have made of Him.
If him is the right word
but let it pass for now,
I have so many mistakes to correct
and the trees along the way
are already losing their leaves.

7.
Why are they allowed
to show such things,
crumbling mountain,
starving bear? Don’t we know
that images last forever
and what we see becomes us,
terror tattoo of things seen?
I wake between nowhen
and nowhen else
to write down what they told
my eyes, and sleep showed more,
now I have to wash the images
with words so that you know
but are not hurt by what you know.

8.
I said the nurse had stopped,
I mean the child whimpered
his way back to sleep
through the broken alphabet
which is all we have left
of how the world was made.

4 October 2020