For Poe, On Halloween

The floor boards beat
dull beats,
but they won’t

beat without me
lying
down, not on

them, on the bed,
their beats
beating up

through springs, in through
the walls
beating. Beat,

I’m not afraid.
My heart
beats louder.

Sop-o-rific

The sop of it is terrific.

Look at it soak
up
all that white.

I could tear it, another
piece of this
bread, more white bread
to take up
more white milk.

I could dip it –
this piece, this time
not in milk, but tea
or better yet,
tea and milk –
to slowly watch
the white
darken.

Or gravy,
I’ve never made gravy,
with or without
its little lumps, but I’d like to
dump its brown out
over
a large white plate, and sop.

A milksop is a person
easily frightened.

I don’t frighten
easily.

Sometimes I do
need to bribe myself
to sleep, and stop
these soakings,
when I listen
to the stillness and think
about
the ways I can soak up your voice.

He'll light your way to you before

I sometimes dream in the third person

He did
and she would frolic
along a wooded mountain pass,
among its prickly firs
and down a long basalt road
passing between their two countries
placed incontinently
an ocean apart,
their two unwritten tongues
writing overly-dramatic parts
she doesn’t
and he wouldn’t speak.

Appositely, not in opposition, we're defined

I am
appropriate[ly]... fit.

I was
positioned (at rest)
[to] respect... another.

I can
be it, side-to-side,
front-to-front,
[and] back-to-back...

You’ll see, me
three-dimensionally… related
[to you.]

Bold, her dash

Bold, her dash … dashing
not coldly from … moldy facts
…......................... to unfolding asks

Give praise

There’s a peculiar geometry to where
my days take me; in circles
inscribed in squares, where
I’ll greet the same faces, faces
oval and round, and then some
with more angular features.
Sometimes
they’ll scatter along stray lines,
and sometimes
they’ll challenge me
to remember where
I met them.
Sometimes they don’t, change
or challenge me,
because sometimes
they can’t move
and there is no face to remember.
I met an elm of silver.
It was robed in the indigo
night. Robbed of a limb, I made it
a face there,
with a ring for its smile
and a knot for its eye,
but I couldn’t move it.
I couldn’t turn it,
not its not-eye,
or its not-mouth
up to the marshmallow
light, no matter how hard
I tried. Yet,
the light still fell there,
and it made the elm’s not-mouth
sing, “Give praise,
dear boy, not for what you’ve made,
but for the light
and what it makes,
when it falls
in the fullness of our circles.”

Let's give praise

We, the unjust stewards

Before our children, we came,
this world of generations
no wiser, and to them,
to the children of light,
we said:

“Until you, there was the dark
we made. True,
what we’ve made,
we made for ourselves. Even you.
We made an end
of Man, an end of we men
with the means to make
a righteous mess, and
if we failed, we failed only us,
not you.

“We made deceptions. If we could
have deceived you,
one more generation,
we could have been, we men,
forever, lasting
in our habits, in ours,
nations.

“We were faithful, most
faithful to this, or at least
our faiths filled it,
if too much. What’s just
in the least, how can it be
unjustly too much? If we were,
if we’ve been
faithfully unrighteous,
for Man, or we men and we admit it,
will it comfort you? Will it win
your trust?

“There are true riches,
we have not been
faithful to. To who
should we have
given them? To you?
What do you own? No,
servants serve. We were
masters of earth. Better
to be one and hated,
than as the other
be loved.

"Behold
us, that one, despised
but no other. We cannot
serve but god. God is Man, and
we men..."

Go back

This square of light isn’t
an open door. … It’s tricks played
by playful shadows.

In the dreams, I dreamed

In the dreams, I dreamed, two fish grew legs –
these two fish he’d caught. Well, he’d caught one
and the one caught the other,
before he’d caught them together, two in one
flopping from his fishing line. Whose line?
I didn’t know him, but he handed me them –
these two fish he’d caught as one, and I pulled the one
out from the mouth of the other. I knew
it was too big to be just one. What kind of fish?
I can’t say. They were two ordinary fish, of the kind
you’d ordinarily see hanging from a fishing line.
They were a silvery white, and their scales
caught the blue of the early morning light
when you turned them. Then I held them
and I didn’t know what to do with them. I thought
I’d release them, but he’d brought them
from a long way off, and no water was nearby.
There was no water here, except for two puddles.
Two puddles formed where two tires gouged
the ground. The water was a chocolate milk brown,
and it shimmered. I put the two fish in this water
and they squirmed to soak it in. Happy,
I thought, or as happy as fish can be
out of proper water. Then around the corner –
the red brick corner of the house that’s here, for it was
here at my childhood home he’d brought them to me –
I saw more puddles, bigger puddles. The fish
and I skipped from one to the other, each of the fish
also getting bigger, until we reached the horizon’s
line. That’s when the two fish grew legs
and walked over the edge, into the ravine
and out of the dreams, I dreamed.

In, securely

“What’s wrong with you,
can’t you
close the gate behind?”
she, now just a muffled voice from behind
mesh wire and tightly shut
glass, loudly snaps at his back. He didn’t turn
back. He kept going, knowing a few well-turned
ounces of black metal wouldn’t keep
this world, more worthwhile than her keeping,
out.

Stabbed through with the sky, he thrives

Unimpressive digitation

Just when I think
the magic's gone … out
of my magical thinking

I over-hear … the flutter of
her voice … drop

...no, no, it hit her hard,
my mother, the divorce...

… And I think
I’ve pulled it … out
of an empty black

How I'd talk to Tarkovsky

Tarkovsky talked
of sculpting time,
of chiseling off the non-essential bits
of it, to make a film.

Andrei talked
of the primacy
of a fixed past in our minds,
of it being more real for us than our slippery presents
of shifting moments.

Science has talked
of a very different present, a present made up
of our experiences
of more recent pasts, pasts also fixed in time.

The green I’ve talked about, the green
of your eyes reaches mine, my eyes
of a puddled brown, within the smallest pieces
of a second, those pieces
of a past so touchably real because it’s still present.

I’ve talked to you
of the first time I touched your palm, how the spark
of electricity from it still races through me, but the shock
of it diminished when we parted.

If he were still alive, I’d talk to Tarkovsky
of making films, to Andrei about films
of your green eyes,
of my thumb probing your palm,
of a broken past, so I could fix it like the present
of those moments when I can see your eyes.

Hybrid

She occupies the sky, and we will the earth

Gibbous moon
give us some news.

Our moment’s
waxing. A few

are waning
blue. We watch you

roll your eye.
We’ll take the clue.

Yeah

The difference
between “yea” and “yeah”

is more than a put-upon “h”
It’s more than
those sounds like “ate” and “at”
It’s the difference

between the beat-up
old blue baseball hat I hate
to wear, and the glistening
varnish on a bat that baits
my child within

Three times

Three times, truly
… the cock … didn’t crow
… … but … the crow did caw
its last into next night.

I won’t deny it to you.

When the world would change, He would whisper

If you let Him,
He’ll whisper His
old world anew

You thought
you knew

He knows
and He’ll tell you

He wants it, to show you
the way
His world can’t work
the way it’s not,
meaning to comfort you

He has
His ungentle voices,
yes, yet
they wouldn’t suit what
He wants for you

They wouldn’t soothe you

Not now,
and He’ll use it,
His other voice,
the voice He slips
slow and deeper
inside of you

His gentler voice,
it slides inside,
uncoils, and it pushes
out the chills shaking you,
these doubts threatening to
shake His world too

You know
you thought,
but His voice is a thought
it thinks for you

He’ll remind you

This is His world
and He’s built it for you

Flipping probability on its head

I’d say heads
or tails, but and is
always a possibility
when universes multiply
my imagination

The story is

The story you tell me

doesn’t arc. It doesn’t
follow. It doesn’t

rise or fall within one sun’s

cycle. It has no
particular place. It skips

to its own peculiar
rhythms. It takes me

to its many places with no
name, or those names
you’ve given them, the secret
names meant for me and no

other. It’s taken me
so many times, and when
it walks me through them,
I can can see their faces,
through your eyes. The faces

both kind and hard on you,
once smooth or lined, but
always there, I can see

through your eyes. Their pale
green glass casts my shadowy
gaze back to a past, I can’t know
except through you. It’s enough

for me, while I have you
to see it through.