Election Year
A jet of mere phantom
Is a brook, as the land around
Turns rocky and hollow.
Those airplane sounds
Are the drowning of bicyclists.
Leaping, a bridesmaid leaps.
You asked for my autobiography.
Imagine the greeny clicking sound
Of hummingbirds in a dry wood,
And there you’d have it. Other birds
Pour over the walls now.
I’d never suspected: every day,
Although the nation is done for,
I find new flowers.
The Wisdoms
It was now late; Goethe gave me his dear hand, and I departed.
-Johann Peter Eckermann
What happened? I was one
Gladly suffered the believing I am I.
A cut tree weeps a stream of ants from its wounds.
Not two feet away, sage and verbena thrive
In a cascade of blue differences
Over the lizards and dirt.
La di da. To matter to me,
Time was, a man or woman had to love me.
That was America.
That was a chief concern.
What happened is my eyes have no color.
I love the way a flower steps away
From a dead tree.
Broken glass is alive too,
In the colors. In them, I was a republic.
Zion
Suddenly copper roses glow on the deadwood.
I am these because I see them and also see
Abolition, the white smock on a girl
Eating an apple, looking down into
The valley, a small train steaming there.
I go to the uplands to join death,
And death welcomes me, shows me a trailhead,
Foot-tracks overfilled with standing water.
Man has never owned another man here.
Aglow in the shade hang apples free for the taking.
I’m saying that death is a little girl. The apple
There in her hand is God Almighty where the skin
Breaks to her teeth and spills my freedom all over
Sunlight turning deadwood coppery rose.
Landscape: Coronado
Wrecked and painted
Like the part of a shell
A boy finds
And then somehow
The boy lives
A good life in the shell,
A house so close to the rocks
Was Heaven’s adventure.
And we find the hotel a few blocks farther down.
In every room, the televisions are set to one station;
The same movie,Some Like It Hot, plays over and over again
Because it was made here.
And even earlier,
Baum found his image of Oz here.
An American tree transplanted from Germany (baum) via Kansas,
This is Oz? Was.
Over here a palm tree filled with broken kites.
Over there the ruins of a pelican my boy finds,
Heaven’s adventure.
Overhead, bombers
Because the Alhambra is at war with Marilyn and the Wizard.
Revenge is served cold. Heaven,
Sick of hotels and architecture and Islam,
Slides beneath the sea.
In my boy’s arms, the pelican
Droops like an unwieldy flower
Because death is that way,
And how do you put it down
Once you’ve lifted it?
The ocean is God’s holiday from God.
Arcady Again
Beside the house a path
Green leaves as low
As my eyes and a low
Gate into the rainy yard
Opens and even the little
Grass is very wide
God help the man who breathes
With nothing leading him
Here or someplace like it
Inside him which he opens
Wide enough to walk through
And walks through
Surprised to find deer and turtles
Living so near his house
My Mojave
Sha-
Dow,
As of
A meteor
At mid-
Day: it goes
From there.
A perfect circle falls
Onto white imperfections.
(Consider the black road,
How it seems white the entire
Length of a sunshine day.)
Or I could say
Shadows and mirage
Compensate the world,
Completing its changes
With no change.
In the morning after a storm,
We used brooms. Out front,
There was broken glass to collect.
In the backyard, the sand
Was covered with transparent wings.
The insects could not use them in the wind
And so abandoned them. Why
Hadn’t the wings scattered? Why
Did they lie so stilly where they’d dropped?
It can only be the wind passed through them.
Jealous lover,
Your desire
Passes the same way.
And jealous earth,
There is a shadow you cannot keep
To yourself alone.
At midday,
My soul wants only to go
The black road which is the white road.
I’m not needed
Like wings in a storm,
And God is the storm.
