Thursday, June 24, 2010

when sparrow faked eight to cover

There was an eyebrow of cirrus
stroked black above the sun,
black over white morning,
as I stared at garish clouds
and watched the soffets drift
under the steady clairvoyance
of two sage and observant crows.

I could smell the pitch to come,
a pitch that would hide the cones
under a white diguise of freedom:
if I had been halfway smart
instead of dumb all the way
then that downy woodpecker
would not have guessed right then
that I was smug and thus unguarded.

When I watched the flock
from the hemlock boughs
the traffic of wings
was appealing at first,

so ripe and bold and bracing
in late spring when wild beaks
peck fragrant nuts on bleak bark
and the mating flutter begins,

so behind the green facade
to mount eight pleasures
was almost numbing to do:
but in striped joy red ploys
were fadged in cackles
or plotted with a catlick
before the feathers bloomed.

A clam shell luna of night
illuminated her solstice of flutter
but a wet bird never truly flies:

when the new eggs hatched
they were tiger striped with lies
and I was not amused.

There will always be a bird
to fuck with a sparrow's head
if the blue jay is there
to bribe with timely trinkets.

There was only one truth she chirped
amid a burst of later trilling

a trilling never ending.

there was also water too

she handed me a card
but it was not as funny
as she had lead me to expect

I did not use an opener
but it may have been in a dream
where I was suddenly growing older

she wanted to be bedded
I was quite sure of that
for she told me so herself

collecting bling for the Ondines
I was also quite sure
that I was not intended

Saturday, June 19, 2010

what the mocking bird said it's just a little

Some time after that season of keening rain
blanched the bleached slats of blue-gray siding,
the gutter's low scrub bloomed shortly once-
just before the blocked and frosted jalousies
shuttered the lime-streaked porch for life.

Inside the nod of flowers drifted away
drowning out pool filter chlorine whines
behind dapples on dry buttery siding
where once the rain had flowed in sheets
over a withering brown oak's low branches
and vibrant figs coaxed from depleted earth.

A table plated with unfinished eggs gives
a circus of coffee aged evidence of lift
in a place where nothing uplifting is left:
no mouth in the greasy skillet entices ears
with a low sizzle that has long since passed
into a torn curtain obscurring cloudy skies,
ripples form on the pocked aluminium shore
of lidless guardian service with steamy
gradients of starch under the striped rose
hanging a shadow over the newsprint news.

Puckered lilies would rather smooch the moon
than greet the apricot rise of morning stalled
long since a quartered acre of silence arose,
arose for a sun that only after stabs next door
and only after an early breeze shakes uneven rain
from other sun-drenched leaves of maple.

Saturday, June 12, 2010

sang a ballad too

One item filling her arms
when he yawned the door
was the umbrella opened
when she left in afternoon,

an umbra begun in breath and blue
under a dome of breaking spines.

There was no salwar kameez or sari
even in aqua and ivory to meet
when she crossed the lintel,
her pale and ungainly jog
in the journey away from ash.

There was no magic in the candy wrapper
nor three-chord punk in sandstone places
nor copper rounds meant for flipping tails.

His mistake indeed.

The flat husk of a crushed toad
was sad baritone to his eyes:
the candor of found objects
easily embossed in giddy flock.

The pointing yellow markers
painted by an unknown hand
marked out a route in henna
that he already knew quite well,
for the want she imagined in him
was meet for her when peaking,

was only a blossom tip where
floating in a cloudy dome
the blood orange hollow rises.

Saturday, June 5, 2010

a mondo of transcendent sorrow

Rounds of bubbled slag-iron
spread as ersatz cookies
under day's pale crescent
and nimbus frowns at play
to soothe the porcine boy
who only watched while

the moony boy became the moony man
standing on that sown strip of grass
between the same curb and sidewalk
observing the cars chrome blur
nonchalant with pot-bellied grin
year after passing year

the lawn sprinkler's syncopation
only worshiped by happy chance
with the rotation of each breath.

To polish in smile that door
with cut prism facets
and beveled oak galore
and prize a routine portal
into shallow self-reflection:

having been all things
being again one more
was barely a hair's ruffle
tickled by a light breeze
that hinted of rain
only later in the day.