24

Most stay testing            the gray
         balloon brains of their
                                     enemies
                I swell
                                It is Sunday, a cat
erupts on the nightstand and wine
                     moves into the socks

            I spent the afternoon ogling
            mugshots at the precinct

                so many torn
                                            out eyes
We rented an American
                                            movie about dudes
                                        blowing other dudes
        apart

                Outside a quick quivering bird took
                refuge in a length of pipe
                                                 Being a thing, it bursts
                                        into events
        The poor own the clouds
                     and we love them for it

Sleeping Praise for a Landscape of Peril

We no longer desire to loathe the gnosis
of radio, our children
wrecked to a stabbing finger, or

that is what we feared.

There were so many jaunty
strangnesses

clamoring to punctuate the architecture.
There was a hill.  That hill said things

only a very tiny man might

hear.  There was no lack
to the freakish declarations
suffusing the real.

Strangenesses and no
lack, a chemist
burning love for strangers.

You, my stranger, are luminous.
You clothe

the streets with an onslaught
of hush.  Does the universe dream

through us?  Does the wind
require applause?  Does this horse wish
the stable had a skylight?

Yes yes yes.

A Sonnet to Eclipse Frankenstein

Was that your hand with a hole
like an echo?  I have no
electrical storm.  But when I avert

my eyes I am
no longer a poet.  So, yes, I
have a big, hot, electric

storm.  A cloven lilac storm.  A storm
to bury unfit songs.  There is a metaphor
ringing in the storm song.  There

is a metaphor that cannot be
explained.  There are frozen volcanoes
at the South Pole.  Can

you explain them?  I place my eyes
like a rhyme in your palms.  Hold on.

BEGINNING AMID
Ending with a line from Anselm Hollo

Beginning amid
A series of thrusts
unknowingly
This little self, a wet knot
tying the landscape
into radii
We wake again amid
the complications
of joy, pray
without our sense of it
to stay radical

enough

to embrace the breadth of what
we will not know
so as to move
a temporary instrument
the world wakes

through

Daily banal miracle
wailing amid
horses or disconcerting
the chaos into form
A coarse world only
complete with its murderers
intact
Art no more free
or lacking
in complicity than physics
knees and elbows
obscenely even in repose

It is beautiful
strange
to watch the film bubble
and flame amid
these old odd frames
The body collectors
asleep finally
as the trees wreathed
in sour rot
loose themselves and return
to light, to let
sonic awkwardness
punch breath-holes in thought