eagles

eagles dream
nightmares
of being me
short sighted
without talons
wingless

of what use am I
unable to soar
or see prey
at a mile

I do not fish
but scratch
with curled fingers
and never find grubs
only these sounds
I obsess over

I don’t know the joy
of fierceness

they wake
wing-stretched
with relief

Morning Shoes

Flying on one wing needs balance.
I swallow the buzz of air music,
the purrs of insects,
the fire in the sun’s long tongue.

Walking is more problematic
as I thud to the ground
and each landing disorients.
I see cats in leaf shadows.

I strain for the music of you
as if my will could burst you
out of darkness but I hear only
night birdsong, a heresy of joy.

I slip into morning shoes
that limn the outer,
button the shirt of reality
but it scratches and is too short.

Door

Alice had it right
with the rabbit hole, I mean.

You walk along one day
and step on a stone

and it turns like one of those
hidden doors in a wall

and you fall into this place
you’ve never imagined.

It’s the suddenness that blinds
like looking into a tiger’s jaws.

It’s hard to get traction riding
the bald tires of yesterday.

Squatters

A random pollution
colonizes me like
a landfill in my body,
dark threads that hang
and twirl in my left eye
like gunshots to vision.

They are here to stay
these squatters of time
the first of the advancing army
of dissolution.

Mortality arrived suddenly
like a postcard bent in the mail
with my name misspelled
as if a mere bit of paper
doesn’t matter.

Colors

Peach juice slides down my throat
with sun sweetness and pit splinters.
I am left with a honeyed rawness
an exhilaration of pain
a song of blossoms.

Joy flows with undertones of longing
with desires fired from the ash
at the bottom of the kiln
in colors I do not understand.

We are partially fired pots
you and I, left unfinished in the day.
You paint me with breath and words.

Solstice

It’s the day of deliverance
when winter’s corpse lies
buried under leaves and
summer arrives clothed
in woven flowers
perfumed with mead.

Yet here, seared
by tropical suns, one walks
into the time of hallucinations
where plants engorged on heat
have 5 foot leaves,
papayas ripen on trees
and oceans breed storms
that eat the land.

It is the season that tastes
of delight and terror,
where feeling the most alive
is the soft fruit hidden under
peels of dead skins.

Blossom

They come dazzled
to drink of her.
She lays open,
branch-bound,
petals spread wide,
her only freedom
to tremble in a breeze.

Hungry tongues
give her no peace
as they rim her,
lap her pollen,
breathe into her.

Urgent feet
trample her flesh
even as the hard
vibrations of wings
bruise her softness.

Wasps come
as fierce lovers
and bees
and the long-fingered
butterflies.

Moths take
the night shift
as she staggers
stem-held dreaming
of the stillness
of morning dew.

Interval

I’m an email
from the universe to itself,
a daily kiss evaporating
in nanoseconds of eternity.

Let’s erupt together
in the flash of the moment
before we vanish
in the planetary tide.

Let’s go singing
of rose petals and of mud
and write love letters
with firefly pens.

a mountain

I’m a love song
for wasps and flying insects,
bent over among herbs
and sweat-heavy at 95 degrees
in the middle of the afternoon.
They land and drink off my skin.
Do they back at the hive
tell stories of a moving mountain
raining salt juices under the sun?


chives, lemongrass, basil, (detail)

Imagined

Toss them like bags of marbles,
these minds that bulge and burn
filled with monsters and grace.

Flee into the moment.
Become gossamer wings,
wordless, without desire.

But always we fall -
imagined meteors,
bits of cosmic detritus in a skin.

The earth turns, crows hunt frogs.
We write poems as divination,
calls to the universe.

Small Birds

The sky is crayon painted
in swaths of dark blue,
in great messy
arm swings of energy.

“Stay inside the lines”
but I never believed them
even when I was five.
They told my mother
I wouldn’t obey.

Then I wrote poems at six,
exhaled them like breaths,
till my words took wings
and became small birds
that I hid in drawers.

They took them away.
Learning to count was important
and keeping my room neat
and being silent in class.


Image: morguefile.com

or maybe

we slide through words,
wiggle between
the wetness of leaves,
feel the moment
like a tongue on our skin,
at times like a cat’s,
scouring, insistent
or maybe as rose petals
leaking scent
the way a day rains joy.

Prey

Tornados pad
across the sky
and I feel like
a prey animal
a mouse perhaps
swallowing the night
in fevered burps
hunkered down in
the cupped lips
of a dirt burrow.

Of the Fringes

I’m hunting radiance
which comes and goes like
the movements of barnacle shells.

I cling to a rock as
poems slough off my skin
and litter the sand.

I lose myself in blossoms,
in white petals hugging
stamens and liquid ovaries.

I sense the ecstasies
of pollen-drunk bodies and
bathe in the scent of warm soil.

I taste this day with a solitary tongue,
with flavors ramped down, no music
but the silence within.

It is tentative, this touch of the fringes,
this animal sniffing of the moment,
unlike the flames we tossed over clouds.

Figs

We make plans.
We map worlds in our heads.
We know nothing.
We are trumped by a fig,
by seeds and flesh and sweet juice.


painting by Sandy Vrooman

Prayers

The voices are many,
competing stations,
a tower of Babel
that fractures attention
and words
until mind falls apart like glass
leaking meanings
in soft unheard moans.

I struggle in quicksand
caught between mud and light
until thoughts are clay
stretched thin
becoming transparent, fragile,
my breaths reborn
as earth-wet prayers.

Drenched

I am seared like bacon
on the notes of birds, tossed
into the pan of the morning.

Clouds attack me with color.
The sun's lips cover me
and I turn into a bee,
pollen hungry, drenched
in hallucinations of flowers.

Thai Dreams

Slowly a dragon takes shape
from a watermelon’s hide.
Butterflies soar
from skies of cucumber.
Roses dance in papaya flesh.
Her small curved knife
births Thai dreams.
My words lurching after poems
and her hands both massage
the willing flesh of the day.