LIBRARY LION

There are those who say

His heart was big
as a library lion's.

Look.
It held back nothing -

There is inventory, boxes
of good.

And what I say is:

This heart
meant everything
to his liver
and his lungs
and all his
other parts
especially
his tongues

Which were several,
yet he was

Mum
on all matters
of this heart, and yes,

It was difficult for him,
the plain language,

putting the word to love.

SOUL BUNDLE

With the Sunday Times this time came
the out-sized insert explains the archeology
of the soul, the binding of new bodies to old souls
something Jesuits tried with the Iroquois back when

and after they'd claimed mastery of the ipsimma verba of their own liturgical
language such that they would boldly tell the Indian they had made Latin
simpler.

Which was another lie.

And since I'm as yet unaware of evidence of the Oneidan altar boy,
an Ondogan Catechism, or a Mohawk talking
-stick that has some tender-heart's first
confession.,

I shake-out the Times bag
again after having done it once, already studied the insert,

and I'm positing a soul bundle ensnared in the bag,
compromised such by the route-man's packaging that

history, later, would never notice the damage done or the flop
-cakes calling themselves neighborly or righteous who intersect

our soul-laden lives lived nearby  -  the seven or eight of these
unattached

running into and over us
in the ordinary course of our Sunday morning 
through no fault of their own because they had never caught up with Corn Spirit or Earth

Mother or whatever...

...who ought to have untangled, unbundled the souls
off my drive-way, passed them on...

FRAGMENT

In her room, by the body's
clock, she wakes, rises

as the dead might rise,
bewildered,

calling out.


On glassy legs, she shimmers.

     Imagine feet unbound, bloodless.

     Imagine hands browned with old leaves
     who won't sweep off.

Listen as she calls out to him whose gone.

See her roam the winter closet, lost
among his coats, listen...

voices come
frail as china,

rooms grow thin, birds

come stealing in

pick at shard
and shell.

HE GAVE DIRECTION FASTER IF SHE COULD FOLLOW THEM

He looked the other direction.

    ...she checked the directions, the velocities of the winds

He couldn't follow the directions of his thought:

    The spatial relation between them
and the course along which he point
or move...

And this:

    Under the direction of the King something
have a tendency to develop how something
have to be done...

All this, a function of faster
if she could follow them

    - and management, or guidance or steer
toward incoming derived forms...

Nevertheless, together, they proposed a newer direction

    ...which was not a formal statement to do something,
but more like him, when alone, him have no direction in him life...

CHRIST

I am trying to get rid of my homeless
jesus talking

small g genocide which he said we'd forgotten
when he says if

thousands of drought tolerant
shoppers

were made to thirst, as in,   I thirst  

less would need to be said.   We had a laugh.


Maybe take a way the pain
medication...would that help?

-  Had I been out to see the wild
flowers?

-  Could I name my grandchildren, hurriedly, in their birth order?

-  In what context
did I put him?


I, of course, had my own questions:

    -  where do we let you shit
    -  why do your eyes follow us in our cars
    -  in the snow, we are not monochomatic,
                                                are you?

            
             What gifts we are missing, were they given
             what life we've spent was it driven

             if there is no witness
             is there a sound

             ...should we listen

                                          What say the voices?

BIRD YEARS

In man years, he's sixty-seven,
a wingspan of seventry-three inches;

voice: usually silent; pale feet.

More public support is needed
to save him for a little while longer.

He is willing to relocate
to the Vermilion Cliffs
above the Grand Canyon,
where he might expand
his wingspan
mimicking
the California Condor
chicks he'll nest with
if they'll have him.

He enjoys the mountains
and surrounding open
sparsely covered brush
country where he can
easily detect and
approach
carrion.

He is almost extinct
and more public support is needed
to save him, at last.

INDEMNIFY ME

Even if put down by death
prematurely, any one of us blameless
to the undertaker, it's still shameless
how we've held our selves up
under the protection of Job's
even-handedness

despite somewhere in some bibles, it's
been muddled and
translates...his breasts are full of milk
and his bones are moistened
with marrow... or ...

his bowels are full of fat
and the marrow of his
bones is moistened...

is a pail of milk,
a wheelbarrow with
sheep skull hood ornament,
and there needn't be dust

distinguishing us, finally,

but, how, one may wonder, how may disparate selves
lie under, share stuff, even-
things out
amongst their own bone shards

at last, never again having to
help God say what he meant to say,

maybe

keep some death away which has them dying
in bitterness of soul...

whether good life, bad life

THE DEATH OF MRS. ALFIERI

A neighbor far from the fall
thought she saw a doll tossed

from the top step
but it was not

anyone but mum's old chum
reaching for the morning
news

RAPID EYE MOVEMENT

I don't know   what they are...

      But they are not them    the dreams

                 I flew in

THIS IS WORK FOR THE THERAPIST:

Unkinking the kinked; splitting
two into one; whiting out
mistakes made in pairs

while one sits quietly   bites
the lip white while
the other  spits

unused anger white
at the corners
of the mouth.

And while the lather cakes,
his bride makes work
of lives recoiling

like cut barbed wire...

    ...the man of the house
    on fire eats his wife and children
    without listening to her dying...

to make light
of darkness
in their 50 minute hour...

RUBY THROAT

            for my sons

A red spot on his face attracts a demon

hummingbird, who appears to kiss
a kind of kiss of death's near miss,
each of my boys hearing
its thrumming

wings beating about
their wounds quick
as their hearts
speed with fright
once

a melanoma's diagnosed;

their twin
bravado sets
like pitch against
their deaths,

and soon, we are

heretics in this.

DOG

He'd never named a dog.

Not a brown-gray brindle
or black-gray brindled
one was the dog
our Brownies
Kodak-ed

for stimulating memory
whenever we see a dog
with boy

       ...it was not,
                             never was his...


My father was twelve, thirteen,
me - forty, maybe forty-five, when first we

threw his rock at the snake he missed
most of his childhood

and we saw to it, sometimes
                  - that day in the desert being one.

       That day we penny-pitched, the other.

COCKSMAN

When I was a carnal
breath, they held me off with garlic.

What I thought I had   I gave it as a priest
might give a blessing.

My religiosity?  -  I thought they'd crave it.

        But any rooster made a better cleric.

OLD MAN ODE

He isn't like the old men
who wonder if

we salt the waters
exumed from wells.

He's good as old ice -

cools tea with his finger,
will tease a finger round an ear
draw circles over the amygdala -
the brain's space for smell of fear,

and, he imagines, his fear of smells.

He isn't wondering why;

    does wonder if it's he
    or is it the dog, once,

was a part of an occasional dying poem.

DARKER

Shadow in the flower heads
and teazle, up the leafy stems
and thistle to the waste land
and hedgerow, hooking

through the brush and broom,
combing into the deep
fern cup and forest
harsh...

This will permit its decay..
the sedge, the brown bog.

She knew the end of, she knew...

GOOD WITH A KNIFE IN HIS DREAMS

What sort of sleep is it
took my breath?

If it's not death
has my lungs,

fingering

our powdery

beginning,

who is it's      coined my eyes...

FERAL CHILD

I found a feral child in the yard
while culling weeds and tending
to a dog's grave.

       I was surprised to see it cuddled
       round the oleander roots
       seeding the soil with its toes.

And I, who put the dog down late;
he who shoots the air gun at the cats,
      who sprays the crab grass

      shoots,

will move the boy, tonight, to
a neighbor's yard, and pinch
his toes into their garden's bed

      before he learns his labor's

           lost on me.

A FATHER SAT ON AN EGG

You will never hear this from your father, but

your father tried hatching your egg,
setting over you day after day,
boggy testicles blanketing
your soft shell,

only the rasp
of his shoeless feet
shifting in the nest
to break the long vigil's
quiet.

All this in hopes of a child
in place of a loss,

which I believe he believed he'd suffered
in either commerce or connectedness -

or some such silly thing as that which still
has him bewildered at his commitment,

hovering as he was over a strange
-ling's egg hoping


this would read

like a father to you.

LAWN

It's not easy to let die
a lawn.

There's so much to go that must go first.

Water must go, and thirst.

And winter will
expect to kill

what you've killed.

     ...and there are disappointments
which attach like burweed

as you tire of the garden and the home.

You must consider these before you let die a lawn.

THE CONTORTIONIST

At the waiting room, in a doctor's office, he
had crossed his buff legs,

the right under thigh atop
the left thunder thigh, and

sitting there with nothing
                                 to do

with his hands, he
tried manipulating his right foot

to behind his left baby calf,
the instep and toes to grip

the baby calf, the tension then, when
applied, would slip

the hip from its socket, but
which hip socket,
he wondered, and

he could accomplish none of this,
though he'd seen it done once

by a contortionist, and now

he had no excuse or reason to be
here

or ever see the beautiful
baby doctor ever again.

ELEPHANT BY ELEPHANT

The police went through every pachyderm pocket, elephant by elephant,
until they were finally convinced it was a giant hoax.

And, thereafter, they quietly apologized to each elephant
so that the fiasco, in their police minds, seemed smaller

than it did to the elephants or their mahouts.

And each elephant, according to their temperament, either
accepted the apology graciously and left the tent, or reacted badly,

and the mahouts were brought in to calm them.


And, now, it is mahout against mahout
in bitter controversy,

while the elephants seem to have forgotten the incident.

FORGET FORGOT FORGOTTEN

Imagine an image of our inexplicable father, one
of only 100 copies of individual ancestral leaf
-like memories left in our memory bank excluding
those of our lost dead, headstones not
bought yet, forget
                              ...forgot...forgotten...

like the broom and dustpan left
on the side-walk after the sweeping
of the leaf-like leaves as you forget
remembering the process to its end,

or the boy, youself, long

since   broomed away.

PRODIGAL DOG

I can't wait for bedtime
and the prodigal dog's telling
of how 3 days lost in Jawbone
and anxious moments
are not the half of it.

Here's hoping she relives the adventure through the horse
tunnel, or having to tunnel through carcass of horse
to escape the reproachful coyotes' circle of death

dance anecdotes I'd like to live through
second-handedly easier than if
that's what she'll be asking of me

if that's what she wants...

BIRD POLICE

the cops were here because of the red
-winged blackbirds.

There was one in the tree after they left,
3 side-by-side patrol cars in their small row

outnumbering by two the one.


My wife thinks they were just chatting
or here about the beating

a wife took without a word.

I think it was about a bird.