Moodna Viaduct

It's your unbowed and accurate line I love,
a thing that rarely ever occurs in nature,
the protest of your thrust, your gallant push
across the sky between the passive hills;
the ballsy umph that drops a laughing no
down to the green come-hither of the fields,
as over birds in high defiant black
your hubris stretches and will never break

until the town past the next station stop
has eased its last ghost out, until all towns
that quietly doze around the last wide arc
darken and sleep. Until then, span the world,
despite the earth's pull and the push of storms,
an iron stride across the common ground.

x

Shanty (An Ornament)

Over the 'wine-
dark' sea salt-whelmed
we rode; in white
foam steeped we slept.

Silver the sleek-
backed dolphins leapt
& dipped when loured
the sky's egg, dawn-

cracked. Wind-whipped froth
spat cold, splattered
bulwark & beam-
end, brimmed scuppers.

Adroit all hands
abaft, astern.

Trim-sailed we sought
palm-piked islands
& round-lobed brown
loves: horn-bosomed,
eyes obsidian.

x

The Show that Never Ends

All night he worked. He tapped at blurred edges
carefully until the edges were lines
of perfect circles spinning on their sides.
Weary of balance, and still more tired of feeling
the constant tug from the floor, he would have rested,
but the crowd was hungry and he fed them. Girls
swept up the plates that fell and easily cracked,
unbelievers that, prone to the earth's pull,
wobbled and gave in to the facts of physics.

The big cats leaped about him, through the hoop
he held out, ribboned with a wreath of flame
that started from a spark at his wrist. His head
lay like an infant's in the lion's mouth.
And when he conjured with a thriftshop tophat
he was playing God: he sowed thin air
inside the hat with witching seeds that turned
to silk scarves, bouquets, impossible mouths
that drank up water by the glassful.

The man was something with a deck of cards:
He dealt, flipped cards with cards, shuffled
in ways that shocked and stupefied the eyes
like waterfalls, chain lightning, lunar eclipses.
He didn't need the sudden ace of spades,
the queen of hearts tucked in the sucker's pocket:
His every move was a trick, and when he spoke
he buffed each word soft like a hypnotist
so that they never heard the pulse in his breath,
the bangtail gallop thumping in his ribcage.
Even the sweat on his forehead turned to diamonds,
and garnets dribbled from his palms, click, clack.

x

Lethal Injection

One pinch, and winter drifts toward your heart.
Your eyes are dazzled by the thought and keep
a point transfixed in space - cold and apart,
two fathers watch them shudder into sleep.
Now I will speak, though I cannot forgive:
lifting the iron from my tongue I swear
three syllables that are too vain to live,
that fall out stillborn, withered in mid-air.

You cannot hear me now. You lie so still
my voice returns to me, its breath turned sour.
They lift the sheet and hide your face from view.
Most will forget your name. Two never will,
who'll waken nightly in this terrible hour
joined in the ritual of remembering you.

x

For a Fearful Flyer

A book at the knees is unread.
Carry-ons guarded between the ankles
are minor possessions you are loath
to part with, things that are the dislocated
you which should never soar, never
wantonly slice through so many climates
in such purer air. The book's tattoo
of thumbprints at the author's preface
will go unnoticed by the janitors,
the flight attendants, and the dapper captains
who saunter by like royalty. Walls of glass
contain what is, ostensibly, the genuine
Middle of Nowhere. Jetways offer the only
practical escape, cold connectors of Here
and There. Now from those channels
the newly arrived stream and smile,
pouring landward, religiously grateful.
You envy their relieved aplomb, the dry hands,
the giddy chatter of wet mouths; but soon
this you, this faceless, purgatoried you,
will also grin and mill among the living.

X

Light

The crow's caw yields at last to cock's crow
whose bluster at the wakening of the world
blots out the black bird and its banshee squall.
The dawn's red army on the hills scatters
and crawls; he breaks his baby film on peaks,
his yokeblood trickles down the stony slopes.

But night will never loosen its grip: it holds
the fire-god in contempt, that fat-cheeked idol,
that ruddy Buddha-bellied sky-king rising
to put his sopped thumb under the witch-kettle,
spill entrails and deride the shepherd's book,
forgo the butchered ox, invent the clock.

He has his gold throne on the sky's ceiling,
slays mythic horses in their circuit, throttles
the mad bolt-thrower and the four-faced blowhard.
All mornings mark the death of alchemy,
of trick and ritual; out of star-pricked gloom
they blaze up, killing shades in sudden fire.

m

Arcadia Revisited

Although you're older and a touch myopic,
on coming here you thought to find a clutch
of naiads in a brook with beaded spines
stretched at a sun in slow-fall, rumps pushed up
like Valentine hearts, pulled under foam fringes;
or Silenus, woozy in his canted world, spilling
his tankard, hedged by melon-faced tipplers
whose jaws hang slack in permanent guffaw:
bacchants, bare-assed voluptuaries, cupids,
attending his collapse, air thrumming with a tense
blush of birdsong: the port-red flutter of flutes,
the shrill, cinnamon-sharp chirrups of piccolos.

And then the blare of a horn: a shepherd's flock
galumphing up some sunblazed slope, leaving
a green valley echoing. But the day winds out,
dusk settles in cool silvers. The furtive sun,
once salient as a crown, glints like a drowner's hand
between armadas of cloud that drape the hilltops.
Crocus blooms bow down; in a wizened ilex
one pipit cries. You imagine this world is spent:
waters soiled with the deepening silt of age,
windfall foaming, cracked like a crone's skin.

You kneel at a spring and spot beneath the surface
a face you've seen before, drawn and fish-eyed
from mooning into a well of enchantments too bright,
too cloyed with opulent greens and golds to mean
as much to the father as to the dreaming fry
in his fiery dawn. You see in that searching gaze
the reason for your visit. You thought you came
to sing the brown pools back to clarity,
to make the olives thicken with oil, to hear

the splash of galleons in the salt-laced air
arriving somewhere in the middle distance:
a coast obscured by coppice or chaparral,
just over the bluff. But now you see you came
to greet the eyes that quiver and requite
the soft, dumb love that furrows your brow,
the peace that likes things quiet and hears no feet
in the grass. You lean and taste your life.
Your tongue is steeped in ordinary water.