THE TWO-WAY FIGURE

No one claims to have seen the God
in whose image we are made.
       We too go unseen,
when we go as God.

The sky is fuchsia, and orange
flames hem the black earth.
       Refraction and impedance
betray our whereabouts.

Whose persons do we move with now,
       where we are seen?
Our impression makes our likeness;
we are figures for ourselves.

TRILLIUM

I would not want to live
inside anyone else’s clarity;
we always come to be confused.
“Who am I,” she asks, panicked,

when logic fails to put a face on sense.
Trillium, I think, shocked
by the purple of the sockets
her eyes haunt.

Chaired alongside me, Mother fidgets.
Her father, dead now forty years,
and her brothers, out of touch,
are the men she talks to,

those present more oppressive
than the passed.
“I don’t exist,” she says,
turning from my silence;

who, then, is the other
that gains robustness
the farther back-lit
memory goes to work?

Presently, she laughs, recalls
her childhood neighbor
bowing, reins in hands, astride his horse
in a yard only she has seen.

Now she can reach to pat my leg,
for I’m here still, where dusk
puts a patina of fine light
on clouds I cannot ease.

ORTHOPEDICS

The leg is not what you thought it was.

No longer are you walking

to and fro the reconstructed

memories your mind wanders.

Well-lit corridors are a way

outside time, and their stations

hum with voices from around the world.

On your back, unmoving, day after day,

you begin to take apart

what remains of your person.

Someone else can have the sunglasses

and the wallet.  The watch

needs a timer and a reset key.

On one side of the leg, doctors have pulled

skin together with stitches;

the other side’s fish-like design

is a graft taking hold.

An external fixator extends

from foot to hip and keeps in place

countless fractures.

The tree is a painful fact.

The body has been broken

by its puzzle:  pieces of bone

that float in the sky.

You recall the brilliance of this sky

and that it did not let you fall asleep.

NOT ONE THING

The heart, first to depart,

is soon followed

by the other parts,

falling, as will being,

through the many

sickening distractions.

The stone mouth idles.

The pining lover,

whom you mistook for feeling,

had been heartless

even as a child.

Of what could he repent?

The different days are all

a trial of moods.

Embers may be sifted

from behind the eyes,

winds kindled in the ribs.

Please, may this be so.

May we not break

at the sharp point

or impede

the wheeled vehicle

our sleep has balanced.

Through inevitable

refinement to love,

may we frame fragments

in the generous

number of the house.

DARKNESS HARBORED A FUGITIVE VOICE

Every event has a cause

but the sequence of events is random

and nothing happens for a reason

or by necessity

You might have argued differently

had you believed explanations

for the absence of character

that belied your achievements

Company had eased delirium

Unfamiliar caregivers brought blankets

and pieces of meat to the vigil

they sat as you strengthened

You belonged, after all, elsewhere

It was time to leave your secret place

The hoot owl called to take you back

Sadness tumbled like a river deep within

The shit you had smeared across your face

could have been streaks of painted color

and you wanted to prove fearless

even with your fallen understanding

DEATH IS AN ANIMAL

There is a word

that is an executioner

and a person

who has heard the word

that lost his head

You have seen yourself act

    like an animal

and would regain, if you could,

    the human footing

You are a part of nothing

The parts make sounds

that put their unity

at a distance

GROTTO OF THE GNOSTIC ANGEL

The past comes to an end

reversing itself

as we ourselves restore

the future

contriving for remove

a garden

of ornate resemblance

The past is a country

remembered by immigrants

who pushed through cities

trusting to find a sky

that flattened land for grasses

and for the unadorned to plow

Our heat is heavy with water

Alongside stones we nudge

the reclaimed chinaware and glass

travelled to set up house

(and house again)

into a studded concrete shrine

wherein we recognize

our person reassembled

The two who have conspired

to hold each other off

yield there as one,

oafish, unable to stand upright

without a hand to help

Wings, no less unlikely,

catch the eye, averted

from the guardian’s

remote and placid gaze

above the whirlwind

of our parents

driven back through youth

returned to the old country

changed into grandparents

We are left with trowels 

wheelbarrows and truckloads of stone

to revive the grotto

with forms of promise

fulfilled and then abandoned

and hues of restlessness

inimical to settlement

The angel stays implacable,

as if a figurehead at sea

LIT BY THE SKY

Light crackled

ringing form

huddled beside form

as dancers

might appear tonight

with movement

to uncoil heat

The sky was always cold

before the accident

a slip of ice

off ice ignited

and the slivered fall

brought blaze

to a water landing

where fire floated

the circumference

between birth

and wolflike

memories of time

behind the birth

The forms had stretched

awakening with necks

and shoulders

voices that crescendoed

into wind aroused

to carry skin across

the circle’s flaming moat

for us who wander

shivering and hungry

through outmost dark’s

crystalline enactment

We dress in the fresh wraps

call for our memory

and feel heaviness

collapse upon the chest

as our stumbling aligns

with the indistinct contour

of a dance at far remove

and just now ready

to get going

TWO HEARTS

I saw two hearts as birds.

The first, a silver fledgling

in the landscape’s one tree

polished the sky

when it took wing,

and in its place,

a brilliant sun

declined to nest.

Years ran down feelings,

as if the brooding

had not hatched.

The light came on

one night in the kitchen’s dark

when I opened the refrigerator,

which was empty,

except for the frozen bird

that seemed centuries old

sitting there on a platter.

As I reached in

to pick it up,

the bird’s skin turned translucent

and I could see the heart

inside was pumping.

My hands went right in the bird

and I took up the heart,

which was good-sized,

lifting it out

with both hands.

I am holding the heart

in my hands

and it is spilling blood

onto the floor.

The tenderness I feel

mixes with yearning.

I think the red color

of the blood is flattering,

and I don’t want to get

myself in trouble,

taking back

what belongs to me. 

LOCK-DOWN

   “Escape did not promise anything worthwhile.”

                                                    - Chekhov

The rickety door opens out

from a dark room

onto a screened porch,

as far as oneself will go

(resigned to nonviolence)

to make his sense, halted

at sight of the uncut meadow

past low sweeping pine boughs

birds prepare

in the faltering light

for lock-down.

The bent figure of an aged woman

he had once seen buried

continues her ceaseless rooting.

FROM HERE TO THERE

Go through the wall
when you get back

home a dust pours
onto the receiving hands

your soul becomes substantial
oscillating with the mud

face you wear dry
in the fanned air

between dignity and indignity
you can now inhabit

a long countryside under
construction, ribbed passage, consciousness

of hell as well,
of darkened light

THE COMPLETE PRESENCE

The complete presence

of almost nothing

- the person vanished -

fulfills memory, embodies

name with face,

voice, and gesture.

Unawares, others trust -

only I am

watching this familiar

relatedness turn duplicitous,

the man seeming

equal to no

more of distance

than umbilical measure,

is, will be,

gone - uncoupled - finessing

recall from indistinct

imaginings.   His silence

breaks the trance

of speech, will

cracks, forcing acts

to hope on

incoherence for movement

toward vital, joyous

enterprise.  The car

pulls out, heads

for the horizon's

necessity of lines,

scraping past perspective's

diminishment, clouds flattening 

feeling, lowering storm,

an entranceway, where

has he closed

the door?  Skittish

at indifference?   Bowed?

The beyond boomerangs,

and the here

come back to

returns life from

what he had

thought to put

behind.  Others.  Estrangement.

THE DANCERS

This has never happened

that things are the way they are

because they could not turn

The dancers, staged to question,

What could be more real

than the body?, improvise

and individual expressions

become an ensemble’s,

disclosing form through form’s achievement

re-assembling scattered presence

and for the self which is the audience

presenting original emotion

shaped by choice

attention focused every instant

here, where we are, as we are

      *

The dancers

are floored

to start, heaps

that separate

into the limbs

of trunks

tunneling

air, narrowing

proportion

to a wanton

flurry of leaping

motion

triumphant

grace of simple

lines no one

knew were there

      *

You carry your feet

with your breath,

lifting the pounding heart

from its cavity,

and ranging with intent

over a prophetic space

knowledge cannot reach

to put a hand on

      *

There are no lights,

but lit by wrist and fingers

upturned faces

display moon masks

until the shoulders drop

and the arms flare

as elbowing wings

bank into a spiral flight

hips pivot through

FAMILY PORTRAIT

Pop songs, on a radio,

scratched at the darkness

Your parents seemed trustworthy,

but nothing was

Doors were shutting

the house was falling asleep

Chance had left you

to wall and ceiling angles

that converged, like feelings,

foreshortening corners

In a dream you could ask

for the unfamiliar woods

where you prowled trees

that wore scalps

and the dead snapped back,

stinging across the face,

as scurry, dampness,

and torch light

conversed with you,

turned into you,

the warrior

who found his breath

No telling how

frightened or captive

the family would look

in the kitchen, in the morning

THE MIRACLE

We come upon
and go into
being by chance

participating
in an unfolding
of events
that didn’t happen

Fire is the event
my hatred hangs on

*

One thing happens
and then another

I take a breath
before I need to

and rocket out
of the atmosphere

The Milky Way tilts
level with my eyes,
   bracing me

I look back at the sun
and get dizzy

There is nowhere to fall

*

Years fit appearance

Spring mate flashing white

Bald spot bleaching sky

*

We draw feeling
            from the urges
and take it
   to the miracle

HEALING DAY

A white owl with red eyes

lands the sky

in the dense plants

at the tangled leaf

we twist around

the open garden’s edge

pulled to the sounding river

because the back

is a flowing river

rising for us

to meet the light

our darkness has become

     *

The lover, the friend,

and the stranger

each will betray you

the lover for passion,

which is beyond reproach,

the friend for gain,

which will not last,

the stranger for evil,

which has no recompense

With each you must go

willingly, permit all wounds

to bear weight afloat

in any direction,

thread scar toward sinuous

complexion

     *

The brightening light

we wade in

obliterates

agony, powerful

as a mountain,

as its agile lion,

moving past

the owl holds still

until the end,

feathers stitched

to its translucent

healing day skeleton

WHEN THE POEM MOVES ON

The starting point is at the bottom

you get to using words, their tilted

sounds and false show, for support.

Surefooted, laconic, and culpable,

you work past embellishment by girding

image with mendicant emotion,

constructing loss by left to right descent

that altogether disappears

in the inverted sky, an empty bowl

until something happens off the ground.

This is when the poem moves on,

finished with meaning, and there is nothing

     

about it to point at.  The poet goes

back in the articulate house.  Its brick

chimney draws smoke above a gable roof.

THE FISHERMEN

Things that do not arise

conceive and feed

on memories.  An egret

stabs at a fish in the water.

Then what you desire

(and you are always in pursuit)

takes a different shape

and is remembered

for a pleasure, and knowing,

palm trees, an osprey’s nest

spilling over a utility pole,

sunset’s chill.  Fishermen

were spaced along the shore

like chess pieces in an end game.

You brought rod and reel.

Always, the scout of wind

and water’s advance. 

Old life floats upside down

in the tossing swells,

and just beneath the surface,

silver anger glints, like a lure. 

SHAPE-SHIFTER

                        who changes ways 

                                       n

                                       e

                                       r

                                       g

                                       i

                                       z

                                       e

                                       d

                                                            by melancholy,

                                                                        ambition’s

                                                half life,

           

                        must hold desire fast                        well past

                                                            amorous tradesmen

                                                       pocketing decent authority

           

         *

            life/might

            make/much

clumsily articulated                        peeves

                                                                        are no end

                                    against is with

         *

            the breath of an animal

                                                imagination    a winter old

opening for light

          *

to recognize as mine                                    ideas so foreign

                        as to seem some other’s

                                    and what assent I gave

            I now retract

SCAFFOLDING

The top of a building steps up

to the bottom of the sky,

lifting its dream bones off the ground.

Clouds patrol the coffin top

and the afternoon sun drops

over the sides, hitting the street

with a wail that gets lost

in the traffic and people.  

Workmen are taking down scaffolding

and untying the blue tarp enclosure

that billows, like sails before a wind dies out.

Onlookers point to the building,

at its reflective glass,

which charges perception, 

picturing pieces of straightforward light

bundled into a fragile sky.

STRAGGLERS

The roughened barrier of skin stops the cold

and the blood continues to drip

through scant sums of flesh, numb thought,

the frozen earth begrudges air.

Use has exhausted the abandoned plains.

We trudge across their sheen

like the remnant of a scattered army

struggling with diminished weight

to forestall embrace by ice.  

The sky runs its factory of heat

at such great remove only a trickle escapes

to warm the garnets set in our chests.

These are the tiny transmitters of feeling

bodies herd to recover.

The breath you can see is a thin blanket

for the seed-bearing sleep of invisible forms.

CACTUS

The desert has kept its promise of peace

made to the son who accepts the havoc

his presence brings to hostile ground:  

wind-scattered rubbish, metal scrap,

rusted and twisted into beguiling shapes,

and the off road vehicle trails

that cross heat-cracked gullies of creosote

and boulders spewed by infrequent storm.

The place he comes to isn’t named

for divine encounters, and he wrestles

not with angels but with less remote

forefathers, who vie with him for the red

flower atop the cactus barrel.

They claim resilient ornament

to justify the pain they bring to others.

The son hears his father pronounce him worthless

knowing that the grandfather listens

and confirms the judgment;

the evidence is all about him, failure

to go it on his own and make with little parts

a semblance of the greater whole

and he within it.  On the night his silenced

mother tossed her mind in

with the screech and howl of dark distances,

she made her final argument

in his defense, entreating

an inscrutable issuance of old flames

and fresh rivals that flapped for her

on the clothesline stretched outside her home,

ghosts from way back in the inoperable brain

who threatened and cajoled, and like the father,

her husband, were most severe when feeling

came before them stammering, and the cold

chill of stars feathered fright, speaking strangely.

THE REAL THING

So much of what we do

could be done differently

and more to our liking.

This makes us angry,

and we argue.  Then one 

has the fortune

to notice feeling,

which is the real thing,

had been growing all the while.

(Color is now deftly handled.)

And sometimes what we feel

as real is not.

Weren’t we excited

by what we thought true

(we flashed with excitement)

and chagrined to discover

new feelings still grew?

(A continent, almost,

had come into view.)

No longer would we like

what once we had liked

(Who finds truth “unchanging”?)

and we puckishly explored

our changing minds.   

(Their spaciousness seemed lush.) 

Really, what was true,

and we agreed,

was always otherwise. 

(We wanted to be honest.)

Circumstances intervened.

We were helpless to act,

made to settle, where we were,

and do what we had done.

THE TOAST

You see blood on the keyhole

at the side entrance to a person

within whom you live

Doubt turns you away

and gives the stigmatized

body time to heal

The gaunt face calls you back

the weighted chest lets you in

the party is going strong

suffering is out in the open

More and more you leave

words for those who can use them

On tiptoe you sneak past

the big room

where you could be elated

and climb the stairs, dropping

your coat with the others

The forehead lifts its balcony

over a spilling lawn

of glasses raised in your honor

Beyond the lit necessity

you see into shadows

of sweating trees

where your restlessness labors

Your hand moves slightly,

returning salute with intention

to make good on escape

WINDOWS

The sky is a rain of ash
and mind a passing traffic.

The apartment’s humming hasn’t stopped.
When the windows are left open,

our feelings can get out

and let themselves back in.

We might name the most familiar
but cannot say which ones

others will have stifled.
The view stacks rooftops,

like patio chairs, past brick
facades, and in a close by building

we take innocent movement
for a signaler’s intent.

He passes through rooms with open shades,

retrieving words

that mean for us to touch.

The needs we conceive

seek expression:

responsibilities, like fish,

and happiness,

the simple hydrogen of light.

What we don’t want

gets started as a mattress.

There just isn’t room

for bending back excitement,

or moving apart.  Our skins,

pale from remorse, 

glow, and the dry air

leaves us short of breath.

CYCLOPS

The busy eye, by God intended

as a third for every mother,

a help for safekeeping children,

instead mislaid by chance, alone

upon a wombless monster’s brow,

token of solitary strength,

blind force, loosed from afar, friend, 

we countenance these strikes,

forged drones that target households

whose measured gaze falls short

of clouded heavens

and the wavering horizon’s

unmerciful confinement.

Accident confounds design.

The artist has a vision,

then a child.  No end of love

will finish both aright, no reach

of heart engage detachment.

GLENCOLUMBCILLE

Waves break at the resounding edge

            of sky and ocean’s

                        great expanse

braced for the dark gather of clouds

            pressing from south

                        of where he stands,

 as if at watch, on the treeless bog

           

            The person

                        who is his own ancestor

imagines voyaging

            from the known to the unknown

                        through a storm shroud,

            muscling ascent

                        Rain spattered sounds

come at his loss of sight

            like revelers

up narrow streets, past the house

                        close to the road

            The strange visages

that take momentary shapes

                        are familiar

the way a mirrored gaze

at a wash basin

            will sometimes recognize

                        monstrous parentage

A fall at the cliff

            could end his heroic effort

He could leave

                        the sheep

            grazing hillside,

the white sand beach,

            and the sweet burning peat

            or walk back,

down through the tiny village

                        and past the general store

In the sky, small patches of blue can be seen

                        the storm moves on,

            and a rainbow arches up

                        more rain, and it is gone

A person finds himself

            in both departure

                        and return

The sea is a fallen down ladder

TREED

The man who has climbed a tree

waits in the branches with clouds

for time to come back

and pick up its minutes

The meeting won’t start

    without him

and he’ll keep his distance

through the swarming snow

    *

In a house, looking out

    on the weather

others have confirmed

the plausible

You imagine things

as they truly are,

embarrassing and harsh

You are white linen,

a tattered moon patch

on a black tree limb

FIRST EMOTIONS

She puts birds to sleep

in the trees by night

so her travels

will not be disturbed

To meet promise

at dawn's return

she eludes the hand

You reach

into a child’s dream

for the egg that flies

Inside its shell of color,

she watches, through passion,

to see that it is fruitful

Egg that eats the lilacs

and swallows the wind

before birds have sung

THE STORY OF THE WORLD

The world is wind

            and sounds that fight

                        through wind

            The small thoughts I have about myself

                        make an off-key disturbance

and the industrial

                        hum and clang

of the supermarket

            by the busy road

                        has its everyday pitch

Sometimes, the world quickly changes

You drive out to the country, go for a walk

            by a lake teeming with white-caps

                        Wind has released

            a strength so frenzied

                        that you stumble

as enveloping noise

            puts you out

                        of yourself           

At last, you are alone, faceless

            at the beginning of the story

    You belong to the sky

You squeeze through a clear blue opening

            in a cumulus thickening

                        with voices rushing to be heard

before you are gone, out of sight,

                        circling widely

            when you come at last to a quiet place

Children are playing on the ground below

and you are not among them