May contain mature subject matter
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1998
Fire.
It crackles and the wood sticks are murdered in it.
They turn and snap, sparks upward streaming.
They are red and quickly vanish but
their burnt dust catches in my nose-hairs.
Like with spring sap, I get high on this smokiness,
which makes my in-breath of air deadly stale.
Into my ears comes a roaring, is it my blood-pulse?
The dense song of my father's last breath,
or the fit-sleep I'm wakened from by my wife's poke. You're snoring.
Pixels white and black nearly hum.
Smooth the naked skin on rocks so rough.
Piece by piece the silent program plies its moves.
For smooth my flesh on flesh which grayly
limns the dirty fabric of the chair
whose wheels squeak so.
In the soft white light of the black pixels,
with the toneless click the next image loads.
For the still splashing of the waves,
on the rock unwet for now,
the water sprays silver arcs of droplets never falling
on his smooth skin.
Aghast at the sudden wet.
At the kitchen table the young male's
screams from the front yard
wash with the morning light over the newsprint,
word by word, as the sun removes the nightshade.
His sister's teasings are the pleading I can't hear
of the new bird-babes in the backyard.
The foreign photos printed on the paper
receive this day's dust particles,
drifting down from the night through the light
from out the sky through the screened window
through which the children's playtime seeps.
Spring-sap of the trees, some of whose branches
ache across the window light with naked, crooked limbs,
others lush the day-green of twittering leaves.
I stretch over the editorial,
searching for the end word to the front word
of the bumpy sentence of up and down letters
in black-type Garamond 10.
She's almost ten, smarter and older, free and cruel, longwinding,
and he is mad and happy in a flash after flash.
There are shadows in the water-world
where the soda's edge seeps across the table.
Also between the sky of stars and the yard's night-gloom
grey cloudlands drift above our eyes.
The stars are too dim and distant, too few by the city's glare.
When I point out the brightest it seems unsure in its twinkling.
For now the mosquitos' arm-pricks
bring little lumps to swell on our arms,
like the morning's neck crick
is birthed by the tangle-feet of the nite-wraps.
Peace is the jolt of grownup conversation,
know-it-all and know nothing.
The dog akimbo launches the jumpy lawn chair
and we laugh. Restless peaceless night.
Hums and shadows and the great wheel overhead unclear
in its counter reflection in the spill below.
Even in sun I see the dark side of things,
piercing pinprick of sunlight beaming off cars,
wash of grey of highway,
flat pale blue sky
like the chemicals chemism that wash my brain,
intra-somatically produced,
the masque of death at the end of trivial--
beauty becomes trite
anguish compression pressing me--
but what is this pain?
then sudden this too fades,
there's a fence around my peril,
bluebells and whitefluffs in green and black
away on both sides of me,
behind only null warmth where the embers cool.
Those silk-hairs bend down coyly
as my breath strolls across
the motley islands of her skin.
An aroma wells about my face
as intimate sighs undulate across
this rhythmic vibrata of her taut flesh.
When my blood thickens and my mucous drains
from my temples,
when the sharpest proximity distends
and our souls overreach and retract,
the shells reclose so that the clammid pall of
our bodies' lumpinesses are one on one.
Then a sigh I hear,
whispers not mine,
and out of syncopation
that wayward respiration.
I once thought of
a white lake as white as the moon on a cloudy nite
where overhead were bishop's birds in rising spears of red
as I felt it must be so
but what was odd was that the sky was black, black behind
these words spread as stars in rigid arcs on the surface of it all
because once before, a while ago,
that blue-white sky loomed voraciously
over water, deeper than the purple of its waves;
would I be imagining then green-entwining weeds
or panfish of soft pewter
just beneath a glassy membrane,
on which the savagery beats its wings?