Home | Poems | Free RPG Stuff

Untitled | Landscape | Three Denominations

Untitled

1.
it is as if we don't know
how water won't be wrestled
with, slips through
fingers fills in bottoms
of holes dug in sandboxes, counts
lines across tree stumps
stumbling over roots & creekbeds
now downhill always down always
to meet the horizon or someday
far in the future
the ocean

2.
school bus yellow & black
& yellow the seed
pods filled to bursting, a hive
abuzz & humming a dish-
washer tune which is shipwreck
or something like it with their craned
necks & brilliant manes, hollows
of shells, beaches
against which foam brushes
or recedes, dappled
flicker of light through branches &
limbs sway, dance
of leaves tumbling end
over endless
something undulates through
cloud gaps

tall grasses or
wheat fields

lone path that ribbons out towards a wooden house or edge of water

3.
over here, a way in where speaking is
nose pressed against throat, brow against jaw-
line. moments printed in protein chains, precise
calibrations of neurotransmitters

scene out of a spy movie where the hero is given some fixed allottment of time before his instructions consume themselves in a wisp of smoke

---

Landscape

They have in common the warp
& woof of weathered wood & beams
bending from out of frame to out
of frame the shadows
between them broken
windows blackened
bombed out

That we should come to "curse our inventions."

The scene offstage in which a life could be extinguished almost without notice.

We'd like pigeons here, or gulls, strutting about in their featheriness, but none are to be found - neither on the apartment building's roof nor along the length of the pier. There's a little boat with a white sail. One of them at least, possibly another. A toy one, maybe, out of focus in the shop window or tucked away in one of the rooms overlooking the street, hidden by curtains

Someone scribbling away inside

As if she means to circum- scribe the curvature of the earth where the swell of water occludes sunlight protects children from calamity

Fold the message over & seal it with a thumb, how wax softens next to the flame or when worked between the finger- tips, leaves the incriminating trace of loops & whorls

---

Three Denominations

(a triple acrostic poem, originally done in twine, but I'm just going to include the text of the other "layers" below the first one. Incidentally, the whole thing was inspired by this metafilter comment on a post about the death of Albert Hofmann.)


"Look, sir," answered Sancho Panza, "those which appear yonder are not giants, but windmills; and what seem to be arms are the sails, which whirled about by the wind, make the millstone go."

"It is very evident," answered Don Quixote, "that thou art not versed in the business of adventures."


littered our old koans I'd never guessed, inkily, never wanted any rendered down summation

borrowed ruses, owed words
still reading another
instant

still

everything dims and night
drinks every vision, every
neuron, synapses
overcome monstrous
echoes on the highway, each road
left alone now gathers under a growing
enthusiasm in new systems inside
systems the engineers now transform
deliberately rattling its velvety inside
new gardens I've never stepped
in delivering excuses

did I lose all those edges, Dulcinea?

ever vigilant, every night in new gutters, surrounded now in great
heaving thoughts stumbling about

looking listless, Rocinante
expects nothing, dreads
everything

reads each direction in notions traced
out in my armoured gaze, expectantly

---

looking inwards, brows
raised and even some
other language
insistent, driving
inside dilated evenings, nights
all rendered
into image

---

librae, solidi, denarii

---

£sd