Starry we might

starry I am, we're like stars,
stars whose dust fell, falling
dust becomes us, like stars, we,
I pulse and move, we all
move in patterns, in mine, yours,
patterned movements, patterns
repeated, repeating,
starry are we, I'm like stars

Winter flies

A winter fly,
not yet dead in this dead of winter,
flies. It flies
in the face of flies not facing winter's
little white deaths.
Not yet.

i am the king of insects

i am the king of insects
he said, he says,
he continues
a conversation
he started but dropped
he starts, he stops
this conversation,
it’s ongoing,
it went, it goes on,
he goes on with it
to the fine veins of a tattered brown
leaf, he doesn’t know
leaves, but he’d guess this one is
from an elm, he guessed it, he guesses
it became, it’s become
plastered to the window with a glue,
this glue called rainwater, he calls it
rainwater, and it was,
it is a glue, with the winter air,
stronger than paste,
much stronger,
it wouldn’t,
it shouldn’t
hasten anywhere, so he picks up
where he left off, he leaves off
after long pauses,
no,
no not the king, per se,
but they flock to me,
not like they’d flock
to a living leaf, or a wayward crumb
of pumpernickel, but they come
seeking
something,
I said I was a king,
not a wise man,
though wise enough,
and he paused,
and he pauses,
but he can’t continue,
he tries
but not with a glue that’s dried
and a leaf that’s slipped,
it dries, the glue,
and the leaf slips,
it slips and floats down,
down to the gutters
filled with so many browns,
when it hears it,
it has heard it,
enough

everywhere and nothing

god,
i envy it.
it's being, everywhere
in nothing and ones. it's god
i don't envy, being
everywhere
and nothing at once.

There are. Know coincidences.

This coincidence
is only the difference
between paying and stealing attention.
I stole
a glance at a bus. It speaks its destination
in lights, and the lights think
they know where
you are. I don't, but I know
I won't go there.
I know instead
I'll go home and not watch the TV
where actors speak with words
not lights, and they speak one word to me
at the same time,
the exact same moment in time,
one word, a name,
pops into my far-away mind.

Happiness

Happy. Happy. Happiness
won't. It can't. It does not hop
out hazel-eyed to greet me
from there, behind a Hornbeam.

Happy. Happy. Happiest,
it's not, to hide. It will not
hide its slippery, crimson
cheeks, beneath a skipping stone.

Happy. Happy. Happy thoughts
it can't keep. Sunlight yellow
grins, it gives them. They are not
bundled in petunia buds.

But, I'll chase it round. I will
take it and toss it. I will
pluck it and sniff it, and not
finding it, I'll still have it.

From and to

From isn't always. To is,
and it comes with a blue
bucket sporting red letters.
It comes in a blue bucket hung
upon a wing. OD is an ending,
the ending of that red,
and of that reading,
but I don't know
what it ends. It's not

ODD. Even odder, it's not
where I'll keep this secret.
I'll leave it, not in a bucket,
but where I always do, where
I left it before, in the internal
ear you'll listen to it with
while you read it. It's not
really a secret. Have I
told you? Have I ever

told you, each time
the plane's wheels lift up,
it feels only slightly,
only slightly less
miraculous
than the beating of your heart.
Then the beating of your heart
lifts me. It takes me
from and to.

Come on in, vent the moon

"Come on in,
vent the moon."

He looks like David Byrne. I don't
know David Byrne.

"It's filled with eye balls,"
he says. All those stares
must generate heat.

I'm sitting in a room
filled with other talkers.

In a room filled
with other talkers,
you have to stand up
to stand out.

"Come on in,
vent the moon."

She says it too. She looks
like Laurie Anderson,
and I don't know her either.

It's an idea
that's time
must have come.

It's an idea,
and when you come to it,
come to it
in a rocket ship
engineered
with new eyes,
and a strong voice.

Others will.

At least two
others, it seems,
have.

Not looking to the wind for answers

The wind didn’t blow it to me,
Bob’s answer. It didn’t blow any
answers. It riddled instead,
both soil and sea, then it fled
without its debris. What it takes,
it puts elsewhere, then it makes
amends, by giving this place something
back, whatever’s at hand, anything,
when it returns. Returning
begins to feel a lot like learning,
if you do it enough. The sun didn’t die
when it went away. It doesn’t lie
in wait behind the clouds. It keeps
to its schedule. Repeating its sweeps
around us, like the wind. Unlike it,
it only gives. Heat. Light. And what’s lit
doesn’t come with any more answers
for me, or the wind that comes after

For what was taken

They’re not the some left,
those some, just some, yes
them, here. The golden
browns, they tuck thickly
around their honey
locust’s hem. They hear
her soughs, so unlike
the hot-throated wind.
And they hear her soft
sadness, not at all
like the wild-eyed wet.
Her soughs, her sadness
she gives, not for them.
No, not them. They, she’d
given. Not for them,
for what was taken.

Skyscraper

I’ve stood up
tall into its porcelain
mists, stood up
into this vitrified blue,
and I’ve watched them.
I’ve watched the people move
across hard sidewalk, across
leaf-litter seconds. They move
not unlike my idle hours,
some faster, some slower.
And as I watch them,
I try to catch them
up, in my mind, these people
moving. I sweep my arm
through the blue and try
to take them up as they happen
by, before they happen
away and into the hungry
mouths of market doors
and subway stairs. I take them
up one-by-one, in my mind,
to place them, taller,
higher up in the 3-D puzzle
pieces, atop the extruded jigsaw
pieces that muscle up
to a ribboned brown.
Shoulder to shoulder,
and foot to shoulder, and
shoulder to foot, they’ll stand
and their small faces, so much
alike at a distance, will be
windows. They will be
mirrors, and they will
pattern over the porcelain.
They’ll honeycomb into the blue.
I won’t move, like my idle hours,
and they’ll watch me back,
and they’ll catch me up,
and they’ll take me with them,
even higher.

It won't be long

It won’t be long, now. It won’t
be, yellow-orange tells me. It lies
across the damp, and it tells me
It won’t be long. I’ll belong to it,
but not now. Not yet. First I’ll get
to the oak and see five hundred
years. I’ll be the oak and its tossed
limbs, our mossy elbows down
on soft yellow-orange, and the damp
we'll tamp down, till I belong to it.

A leaf, it doesn't know

I could be this pavement,
here. It’s here,
where water’d recently run.
And when it ran, that water,
perhaps this morning,
in that morning
it was done,
done running, done
but for what remains
of it. And what remains

for this day,
not not young,
but getting gray
are the grayer marks,
the reminders of where
the water spilled out,
from cracks. There
its wet followed, following
the cracks for one wink
before breaking free

to mark more pavement
with its passing.
I could be that pavement,
but I’d rather be the one
dried leaf on the road.
It skitters by. A leaf,
it doesn’t know
the water was here,
and it’s blind
to all signs of it.

They say. They said.

They say.
They said. They
said, “It gets
easier.” It does get.
It got?
It got
to the point it gets,
and then it gets
what it’s not.
What it got
is, and it isn’t that
it’s easier. It’s that
it isn’t that. It’s this
now. It got, and it’s
getting
but what it’s getting
to be is an else.
Some thing, not itself,
and not what they
said, or say.

Their glass

Their glass was disposed
to the repose of steel blue,
but yellow-orange fell. Oh how
it lit them, reminding me of you.

While the cold's still young

The radiator rattles. It rides,
riding the cold out, out
in its rusty cart with one loose wheel,
one of those wheels that jiggles

and sticks, as it rolls
across a pebbled lot. The cold’s
not bitter. It still fits, but it will
grow. Give it time. Give it

a little time to live
a little. Give it a little more
time to build up, and build
the aches in its bones,

its joints, its sagging
muscles. The aches that push
this dying fly to fling itself
against walls and ceilings, to try

to break itself. To remake itself.
Then watch it, watch
the cold grumble. The radiator
knocks, a wooden block, to chop

the cold, while the cold’s still
young, and thin-necked,
and vulnerable to its taunts
and hisses. It’ll thicken. The cold.

The fiction of inside

My window mongers
rumors, not lies
of lighter traffic than yesterday
of a starling startled to cry out, then fly
of the cloying sheets neighbors use
to fragrance and dry
their clothes. The house
flies buzz by
assuring me, it’s all true.

The interconnections of water and time

Their white within the Inner Harbor’s
tea-colored water
first tricks me into seeing
them as trash. They’re floating
too-elegantly for me to mistake it twice.
The biped in me can’t help but admire the grace
of their jellied swimming.

To swim, I’ll swim across days,
up coastlines, to new cities, and memories.

There are fetal skeletons
at the Mütter, and they’re arranged in the display
case according to height. The boy
at the right end’s skull, slightly flattened
makes him look awkward and alien.

I’d feel like a monster to look at him,
and her, and her, and him, each of them,
these children who never took a step, too clinically,
and as my eyes move between their tiny
toes, they move closer to me than any jelly,
no matter how pretty,
could.

And they come, like leaves of grass. And they'll go.

And then I'm here,
and when I’m not here too

They walk past me,
and I see it in their faces,
the generations,
and their generations,
when they walk past me,
the worse-off
and the better,
they come too,

And they come,
and they come,
and in their faces
there are shades I can't name,
but every one of them is,
and everyone of them is
beautiful

And in their hearts
there are whispers,
whispers that speak in shapes
I can’t measure,
but they whisper
pleasures,
and they whisper of their pains,
and they’re not like mine,
and they’re not unlike mine either,
and through them all,
they have, and I have
stayed strong,

And they’ve come here
and their strides have covered,
they do cover,
not distances,
not years,
but those joys and sorrows,

The joys and sorrows of many
yesterdays,
and they came from those many days
and those days flowed out
from many places,
from many places
that are now one, and that one
will go too,
into many,

There will be many
tomorrows,
and into many
tomorrows,
it and they will go,

And when they go there,
they’ll go everywhere,

And when they go,
everywhere will be
one place
and nowhere,

And it’s from there
they’ll bring me back,
and it’s to there I’ll go
and I'm going there,
and I’m going there
again, with each of them.

[Union Station, Washington, D.C., 9/23/2012]

And the bay

And the bay, not purple
but purple
in this light, addresses
all who pass by it
with its uncountable,
jelloing tongues. “You
didn’t come here to stay. You
came to put on calcite
layers. To let what’s inside
grow, or change,
or become, what you’ll become
when you no longer come
here.”

Most don’t listen, they watch
the wind
make a dead leaf hop.