The Stone

From my balcony

each letter in the word "complexity"

drops like fine china

and in its pieces

is a new undiscovered landscape.

In book stores

under the cover of night

tiny men ready their tiny erasers

but come to find

when they open up those dictionaries

the word already dissolving.

From the tops of mountains

it lingers only briefly.

On the river swollen with spring

the word has never existed.

In other places it has turned

simply chocolate.

And in the front of houses

the word has been replaced by single stone

that only a few can lift, even fewer can carry

and only two can love.

Dancing at Five

I

Your kiss is the taste

of a broken heart

and sleeping beside you

your thick blood

pools in the wine

cellars of your legs

in the dreaming

of your bitter mouth

II

I do not want life to be bread

but a long trail of wooden bars

in the afternoon of spring

after a shower where the wood

smells fresh and wet

the people are new and the slow

twilight is indefinable like oil.

III

The husk of the butterfly

stayed watching us and gradually

the moist loneliness wounded you.

IV

My love, I cannot write anything beautiful

about the sea. Since you are not in it.

And no roof, or birth, or moon rises,

no fruit turns pink, because you have

not tasted it.

V

It is the skin around the eyes

the sleepy hinge to the eternal

rubbed soft with the premonition

of music and soaking peaches

that scents the rain,

that flours at the touch of pestle.

Poem of Beginnings

This is the first line of this poem

It had greater intension than this line

but really never lives up to it

Very few live up to their intentions

And this poem is already drying up

That is why this poem is going to begin again

here and be written on fine Chinese paper

to enhance its imagery of someone

who has found it crinkled and stuffed

into a hole in the attic. But that is not

better than the imagination of someone

who wonders about how it got there

being written by a robed monk

and stuffed into the shirt sleeve of his lover

as he was sailing to America

fleeing a revolution in the red hot night sky

and sailing across the expanse of a dark green ocean

This is where the poem is lost

and then hidden for no one ever to see

in a hole of a dry hot attic

until someone like you finds it

and begins to read and

seeing the stars in a clear blue night

thinks that this is a good place to start.

Jobless

She said, "We have no home."

So I said, "Let's go."

And we left to go our separate ways.

Things were getting darker

because night was coming on

or lingering in its darkness

started to come out in the open.

I was getting tired

because it was getting late,

because I had walked most of the way

and still had no home.

As I passed, the prairie was mispelled

like lagoonal or lacunal.

I crossed half the country and

stopped in a town

that looked similarly like my home town

only that it was twenty years later

and there were hints of revitalization projects

scattered willy-nilly throughout

I was already sort of feeling settled

so I settled down

in a home that looked similarly like my own

only it was lighter and had a new roof.

I spent my days reading the paper and going online

Watched my mother die

When I finally got an interview

for a job I prepared all night but still

did not know what to expect

I decided I would act like Ghandi

but the job was for people who

hit the ground running

and the world didn't need another

leader, you know, we

all want to be leaders.

So, I wondered why I believed

in Ghandi, so, I bought a gun.

And bought another

because the first one I didn't

want to use.

There were a few televisions

like in the old days

in the window

of a electronic shop.

There were several

people clearing their throats

so I walked in.

A lot of things were happening

If only I had some money

I could be happening

right along side of them

but I sort of felt good

even though I wasn't being

included. I took out my gun

the one that I wasn't going to use

and raised it in the air

like in the old days

or in my remembrance

of the old days on TV

where the cowboys

in their exuberance

would raise up their guns

and shoot up the place

all in good fun.

Today they consider this a crime.

But I was thinking of Ghandi

and how he didn't mean that

much to me anymore.

I was thinking that they

were going to call me.

To tell me that I had gotten the job.

That we were going our separate ways

our separate ways

leading us home.

Stop When We Do

Here vapor

may your faded

dungarees

suffer

as I have done

in my amputations

roll up the absent

pantaloon

and feel

for the sun-cloud

river basin

in the dark morning

ghost color.

Knowing now

how mud clothed

and fleeting the rain

the snow and clear days

have turned the discs

of the apple

fall into the light

like the first

conscious streak

of Chinese yellow.

Through which

I have made

my many visitations.

Boat in the Rain

Like the estuaries of sleep

yawning to the warm moon

that breaks the

seal of confession's wax

like the shining, the praise

the deep, the mutual transpiring

the lolling water veins

the hyacinth's leash

like being sought for pain

like the sand of subtle Junes

like flame

like a sea of dunes

an afternoon

like the arms that know no wings

the losing track, the consolings

the whisperings of love soon

and the blue tangents resume

the bays brown

like a wet gown

the threads of names

like the comings and goings

the looking through the frames

a boat in the rain.

The Pond

So what now

And for quite a long time

So what now

I was listening to music

being held up by the air

and then thinking farther out

where there might have been an end

to the place where forms share

And still I could not change or send

not even a ripple

that would not eventually flare

And I grew tired and simple

from taking life out of the world

and its mysterious unrepeated

loss

until my own face

scattered out into the trees

and lifted out up into the mountain

And then I turned

as if there was somewhere I had to go

and walked away from the reflection.