If A

but who needs love

a shard, a thin heartbeat

turning to blue 

Then B 

it was only birds

a wavering sonnet of

dark notes rise to

crescendo of clouds 

Equals C

yet one bird

red eyed, twisted foot

waits patiently, fish jump

a delicate dance

Florida rocks slowly

on its wooden veranda

palms fanning

the rooms of rain and

doors open to stars

to catch a breeze, peninsula

like a moon's bracelet

wrapped in humid light,

he was always here 

sightless fog leans and listens,

the pillars of darkness

marked with crickets

the essence is restless

pierced with bright shafts of solitary sound

its violins, deep water drums and

banyons like blind spiders

slowly tap the sand, feeling their

way, like us

tree frogs add little thoughts

to a night mad with sound,

the wind building sand castles

shattered into gulls, beams,

shells strewn below the magnetic moon

clutching its southern cross,

a beautiful disorder

like us, like our ghosts moving through

the stars spilled llike pearls and

the clouds a canopy

fanned with watermarks. 

great faces unbend

in pale light, breathing

a stubble of cold pine, frostmarked 

like the past

like the still curve  of dawn

since the last footprint left

vacuumed away

prisms or shadows

nurse neglect, those secret numbers

you kept

splinter a river into the palest thought

a thousand transparencies      

whose small voice answers:

you really didn’t care

so just remind me how sleep,

remind me when to breathe

there is nothing further than you

hoarding light from an invisible source

a point somewhere on the map, to linger

turning like slow water

certain of your destination

away from here

and trees paint a lenghtening

azure circle, hiding the distance

where you cough or laugh

stars remember a line or two

also all the stone verses cast like concrete

a crumbled substance

now trailing nights long arc of planets

 a long way erased

In a dark pond's glass

I saw you again,

an image edgeless, deep

water so far cornered, the

grassworn patch and globe

we swam as

unknowning, tiny fish who struggled

cold currents, the swirling

world textured blue-grey

and formless, the nearly

inaudible

delicate canvas

on our backs

and its fragile finger

painting dark trails with more

than we could have known

fish lost

in the rush and wave

of an era

the emotional spawn of

moments strung with 

scented rushes,

now pulled dry and

everything ordered into

the chaos we have

hung on the wall and

named, still

we hear sometimes

only a wrenching birdsong

away and

time, unaccountable,

has turned its face.

the frozen hollows
love curls, stillborn

shadow or river?
currents splinter … indigo sounds of
birds, their indistinct tones of waking 

yet I was, having owned the leaves
crowning the days, having possessed
the great garland of hours
and all the light 

how little remains here:
a box or two, monochromotic scraps and
a ring grown cold, its
sounds shaken, sieved
voices of stones

yet night, thick with vowels
is still apportioned me
so these remnants I have, and also
some paper words
which peer at the stars
from their anchors of pulp

their thick brows contort in thought,
scribble unimportant things about stars
searching dim, windy glades
hopeless candles
mistaken for science.

‘Something lost', they note
‘Planets erased.’ 

You left words like lanterns
their rustle haunts the wind

restless, and I'm left with
a vast circus of trunks
hollowed by fire
no one else saw 

and all the days, too, something
I still unwillingly possess

many many stars know gravity, the way it 

clings to light, flickers

then is done 

in these prismatic archways, here,

the Grand Escalante came to rest
 
reminisced in its own vast loss, its
subtleties of color, immutable memories

blood and rock

a complex, explosive past

so now the stern cliffs rise, solemn and upright

austere and dark, having learned
the folly of their violent past

all that lava, all those rock bombs
scattered from  spewn upheavals,

now lukewarm

why, they just simply wouldn’t think of it now

eagle canyon,
a dried black dragon barely breathing its

small fist of goldenrods, Indian paintbrush,

how the fragile things have overcome the giants

slumbering loudly under the low clouds,

one frail root at a time

We don’t talk of our divorces, instead speaking

of how, at 12,  I flew across the black ice

of the Lombard lagoon,

sailed on skates made from

the crystalline fire of the stars, more free than

I’ve ever been since

and how he as a boy so badly wanted a stuffed rattlesnake,

opted instead for the cheaper scorpion encased

in plastic, back when

he and his dad traveled these roads and

oh, you just haven’t lived till you’ve gone into

the Salina ladies room,
absolutely no doors, but guarded by

a 16’ Indian out front,

his raised tomahawk crumbled a bit, 
damaged, perhaps, in long gone battles
chopping away at some pesky

peeping Toms

this roadside stop

a small pinpoint of vulgar light,

a tiny circus of silliness surrounded

by the weeping dark,
the vastly inscrutable endlessness
of the Grand Escalante

It is an ineffable eternity

of geometric puzzles

that God has patiently worked out,

His interlocking buttes and cliffs

intricate in streaming color,

covered in tears of sage

battered by fists of coal

ahead, an improbable enterprise

leans wearily, cowboy style, on bars of the
cooling shafts of sun,

a lone beacon to the folly of man in
the form of a self-serve worm stand

and I idly wonder

who inventories the livestock, what sort of

loss prevention they have concocted

And then Tom makes me laugh, saying

“if you’re born in Gunnison,

does that make you a son of a gun?”

behind us there is so much unseen

and even more unsaid, so much that is eternal

slips away into the darkness of Route 16

and soon we see in the headlights

a 1200 year old cliffdweller abode,

crazily perched 15’ above the highway and

guarded by a small chickenwire fence.

Both of us think the same thing, but

we don’t speak of it.

all of its ignomy 
its shining and beating
chaos, sublimnity
all of its reckoning ....

there was a story here
but few to tell and, like us
and our past,
no one lives there any more