swirl one knit brow

The blueberries in the saucepan

said yes but the bowl's metal flip

rising said spew char into blains

and the tragic arrival of ointment.

Everything takes you back

to some recurring dream

that is a constant deja vu:

couched in the louvred porch

symmetrically opposed at pairs

in red corduroy and ocher throws,

spirits gathered to haunt in silence

wondering what you're doing here.

The carpet stairs are worn there

and no repairs are scheduled,

the green clang of the dumpster

is a lifted chapter already uncus

in the window behind your ear.

How did that pine tree go

so unnoticed so lonely so long?

Intonations for a spell of virga

in a season already pluvian

go unanswered in the swirl,

the flirtation of the hanging squirrel

has coaxed the lettuce to seed

and the maple from Japan

is dying from ants under bark

and antic slapstick collisions

from the trampling of hounds.

A green and yellow garden glove

flattened with navy wristband

half in shadow and half in dust

awaits fingers of light to spread.

In the cry of the catbirds

I am summoned as a god

but nowhere else I turn:

it would be of no value to you

but it has great value to me

because of milky magic

in a molecular rumba

invisible to the naked eye.

Wondering if I should prune two branches,

I want gold finches and I want them now.

and ye shall lie in the bosom of Abraham

The wheel tuned out dry clay carved

and red splattered at the weedy edge

of a rumpy drive come to a tuning end

when the dream stop potting screeched.

I saw that with my own two eyes.

I did not see the giant that soaring dream

crushed in the oily distance that saw these

phone pole legs kicked and pine pitched

and still all possible sawn is listening still,

tarred to the dawn birds at the bare apron

of stubby grass gnarled at the car park edge,

an abandoned bottle label obscurely turned

into sinister maps that are deciphered black-

now all pain and all joy eternally gold in me.

An eight cylinder dose of splatter

just over heaven's yellow lines

heaves salvation when it matters

becoming then just memory of want

then just a memory of memory of want

that happens at the end of memory

when the neutral bits that mattered then

then are rinsed in pink and swiped away.

The sphincter of a smoke ring collapses itself

into a candle of Rome that whispers the night

in a rainbow gouache behind gray lids,

a lone maple barking its perhaps lesson

brazen unaccosted by chimes of leaves.

The surfaces of a Toynbee tile

wear away to reveal its cut scroll

left handed jeweled facets coal black

finger crude cuts of dancing hands

that cymbal between the tropics only,

places in the chiming rhyme of solar night

with the ritual pomp of a secular madman

at the year's worst time and all that matters

just implied by the glare of dust on goggles.

Collecting offerings discarded or often lost

by others to deliver to a streamside chorus,

a chorus barely worshiped enough to weep

yet feared enough to arrive obsessed

in the fiction of a continuous cycling mind,

the most common of these being things

that have fallen in transit and things

that have been washed through the gutter

by a twilight rain that rose up skulking

and auburn strands caught in mirrors

and storm drains clogged with leaves-

twelve cents worth of grimy temptation,

two pennies and a dime trumpet

a halt to running washed to source

by the iron grid of unlucky rushes.

Though it often seems that way at first

the miss of silver that plinked the rubbish

bounced off from there is your pleasure

in the gathering of fetish for water idols-

plastic bus stops are barren of breath,

but with candy wrapped and flat air blues

ragged pine tree shapes easily pass

through the extra ripe of lemon bitter.

The girl with the mandibular grill has gone

to ground leaving an endless roll of box cars

to rattle frame a dry and dusty boredom-

the convenience store is hardly eponymous

though it might seem quickly enough at first-

when you have to come right out and say it,

it probably isn't true.

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

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.

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.

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.