"Each time, in the telling"

Some school of cavefish follows a current
Winding through pools not black
But void
Water carrying chalk
Water mingled with roots long lost.
We are those swimmers
Insofar as cavefish have schools.

We are the crooked ten-minute colt
Shivering on darting knees
Treading grass
Treading loess
Falling among the steppe-seeking herd
Somewhere after they’d forgotten the way.

We are the builders of boxes
The binders of books
Erecting a spider web fortress
To cloister the thinking I
In the sober comedy that
it
is tame.

Deluded that other is other
That other might be expelled
We shoo it, shrieking
Sweep it away.
But we were lassooed before words
By a pair of snares
Wound around one another
And repeated a trillion times.

A work in progress, likely to be titled Transit of Vulcan or Syzygy

Whispering clouds follow where I tread
betraying these hermetic tracks
sculpted by raggedy books purchased as a student
as they defeat exhaling valley after parchy hill

Eager summer sun scrambles
after worm that is already mine
this bipedal racing-snail
rising 20 minutes behind the day
lingering at not quite half of 2,175 miles

I never know her name

I am a half-hearted border collie pilgrim
she the hyena ascetic

We wag salutory tails
as duty concatenates words like
~~~snow fed
~~~~~~sandy bottom
~~~~~~~~~rock tripe
~~~~~~yesterday
before she recalls forty cabbage whites
who settled on her bag at Big Meadows
and her tongue knits a slithy yarn on copperheads

Mercury shields my left eye from the sun
casts a shadow on the right side of her face

The holy here at last draws a secret X at our feet:
Wrought with archers' potence
limbs engage as much as resist
strain and stretch
until finally I seize
upon mulberry's most enticing branch

Indian pipe-stems evolve from slight wrists
place pinched fruit
first in their owners' maw
then on my palate

Coarse juice reacts with feral sweat
to render some berserk drug in my brain
that courses to a stone-tool drumbeat
in the periphery of the firelight of my mind

I see polychrome horizons
emerge from the battle of rain against phyllite
to bear annelids who play chess
or backgammon or go with amino acids

A third arm joins mine as Puck
adds her sinewy weight in pursuit of
always more We're
dazed and knotted among wet blades
bough having failed
in the wandering instant of distracted neurons
that disorganized bark, shins, leaves, elbows

She howls out hysterical mulberry pulp
my own laughter preemted by the impact of face against skull
a collision that strips away plaid bandana
which had since some clear old deep
conceiled peach-fuzz backpacker hair

Ropey knees and jabbing palms
climb my scattered frame
as she regains her bearing and her bearings

My inibriated form follows
like a johnboat with 1 oar
to find (we'll call her Urania)
feeding bag to devouring bag

Their combined burden embraces red raptor shoulders
and clutches hornbeam hips

A hundred domesticated pleas sling slack lariats
fail to trip right nanny goat feet
as they mete out
steps
yards
miles
years

Crocus mourns
Grey billows cast white shrouds
Marmot is no seer

Leges motus

my hand casts Newton's spells
careless stone obeys
water submits
five rings fade
smaller
gone

Five pieces of strangers’ lives, or words overheard on an otherwise quiet train

“I’ve been doing a lot of amputations lately.”

“No. The problem is, we’re still not liquid.”

“My therapist was right. God really does hate me.”

“Where are you? No. Where are you?”

“When I’m richer than you, I’ll be giving the gifts.”

[work in progress, yet untitled]

Dervish ink
slices out tiny circles
angles
(some might say serif)
driven to bite like a sharp axe
burried in my chest
by lunatic arms
I drink a broth
of red & white fungus
and wear a shirt
rendered from the hides
of bears or boars
in ecstatic hope
Lacquered hair crowns me
and blue earth-pigment
adorns mine eyes
as I gaze at stars
directed to rise over
menhirs
mourning
morning

A tremendously brief haiku in the English language borrowing elements of Latin grammar and describing a fact of which I am moderately certain

am

Teraphim

I wish it were bee, but it is heron. A tribe of sisters and the odd brother, Apis melifera is infinitely social, raising the collective children, and intimately industrious, dancing out the nectar-dance to show all the way.
Heron, Ardea herodias, on the other hand stands alone, watching the fickle horizon or the heavens reflected in the scrying pools at his feet. He divines the secrets of mudbug ecology and of the hard rain heralds, locks them in the vault behind his eyes. His posture and his beak remind me of ibis (whose orthodox name escapes me); the ibis with his peck, peck mud-dipping beak is the aspect of Thoth, patron of the scribes. Three-times Great, Great resolves to absolve himself of his obfuscated philosophy through industrious scribbling. Can heron’s disciple to the same?

Cross

He takes the same train I do
The same A to B
We ve never acknowledged
Neutral scowling rush hour faces
Now he appears at lunch
Arrives in costume to play in the wrong scene
No less disgruntled
At the quiet indignity of eating a sandwich
Than in riding the rails
Another lost actor strolls by my window
Pink flipflops over white lead chevron stripes
Her proper place is the bagel shop
Twenty two miles away
God is running out of actors
In the sitcom of my life
Ratings must be down

still pond stirs
pebble wrinkles nod-off
inhale

flicker
geometric pegs snap into place
I settle back to sleep

Things scribbled on August 10 from 12:11-12:26

REMEMBER YOUR UMBRELLA, NIMROD.

my Mondrian wall
golden world dances beyond
she took the choice seat

it hides in plain sight
gnarled tree by the coffee shop
leaving life behind

the jackass and the pachyderm are fighting for the crown
six or an even half-dozen
overzealous congressional staffers
wrinkled suits
phones singing Motown to Providence crackers
wasting their brief lives in servitude
liars, salesmen, and big-tent-revivalists
none better than the last
ellipsis

waiting for Godot
Ray rambles schizoid sermons
I seem to be blind

"no more coffee," my watch scolds me. time to go.

Pneumonic

I look at the polished brass frame around the glass door and see an image that reminds me of one of van Gogh's self portraits. A young man, his short beard framing his cheeks, looks back. His blue eyes pierce me, searching for something, but they are fettered by a force deeper than the holes they dig into me. I feel bad for him. I want to give him the answer he's urgently seeking, but he doesn't even know the question. I take a deep breath.
I study the notebook in front of him. Its dusty-blue cover is worn, the helical wire in its spine flattened in a few places. The pages’ edges fan open a little and reveal scuffs of graphite and a few dots of smeared ink. It seems alive, breathing like a horseshoe crab or a spider.
The book’s owner has only looked up from it a few times since he sat down with his coffee. Mostly he has been writing frenetically, first on one page, then another, sometimes flipping three or four pages backward to cross out a single word or add a line of text. Sometimes he just reads one page over and over.
The author furrows his brow and breathes labored breaths, unable to inscribe as quickly as he writes. This is frustrating. Sometimes searching for an elusive word, he fidgets like an animal too long caged. It is as if the act of pushing pen across page is some Herculean effort that weighs as much upon body as mind.
I sit back finally and find that I am equally out of breath.

Gnomonic

Arcs reach from London Heathrow to cities on the other side of the pond. These aren’t lines that you would be aware of if you were to stand (or tread water) where they pass. Some might call these lines “imaginary”, but I would argue (perhaps splitting hairs) that they are “conceptual”. They exist in peoples’ minds and within tools we contrive. These lines are of the same stuff that allowed the Sphere to show A. Square the insides of his neighbors’ houses.

The arcs’ intended purpose was to estimate the course of aircraft, connecting Europe to the Americas. Business people, scholars, and tourists would conduct across these lines trade, ideas, and single-servings of culture.
These lines were just hijacked. Of course, nobody destroyed an airplane. No one died. Instead, malice of intent has again derailed innocuous plans.
Today on the ride home from work, people looked over their shoulders. I watched two strangers watch a third prod a McDonald’s bag with the tip of his umbrella. One rider, half joking noted that Friday would be 8/11 and that the Madrid and Mumbai bombings had both occurred on the 11th. They way she wrung her fingers as she laughed at this observation belied her cynical calm.
I was reminded of the invisible cord that reaches across minds and oceans and seems to tie our hands and tether us to something moving in an alarming direction. I recalled that connection is like change or difference; there is a tendency to either deify or vilify it.
As the train whined to a halt at the end of the line I stood up and headed home just like I do everyday, one point intersected by so many lines.

Mnemonic

Friday afternoon saw me returning to the office from a conference in Dupont Circle. This was before the wind and the rain that washed-away the oppressive heat. The humidity gave the avenues between the hotel and the metro a claustrophobic character and veiled the sky in a diffusive sand-colored glow. As the escalator took me over that rollercoaster angle at the top, a place other than the one right in front of me came into view. Lamp posts became impossibly green trees; brownstones, temples. The algae-covered concrete tube that conveys riders from the brightly-lit circle above to the dim underworld of trains and tunnels below was a cenote. It was, in fact, a particular cenote I had stood above a month before.
The cenotes are, in the most profane geological sense, the result of the action of moving water on the soluble limestone landscape of the Yucatan Peninsula. Ultimately, the water will leave behind an orotund shaft that reaches down to the groundwater level and far beyond. Convoluted networks of underground channels link one cenote to another, and some of these networks even open into the ocean. I've read that some cenotes, miles inland, contain water that tastes of sea salt.
The cenote I recalled at the station, the one within Chichen Itza, is a primitive thing indeed. A circular chasm two hundred feet across, you’d fall six stories from its rim before you got wet. Birds dive into it, but not as far as the opaque green water, while lizards hunt its vertical walls. It is one of those places where the fortress wall that separates the here and now from a harsh old metaphysics fades into a beaded curtain just out of reach. On the one side are sad domesticated men wearing brown knee-socks with sneakers and carrying camera bags, and on the other side, watching, is that primal thing that made building pyramids and cutting a person's still-beating heart from their chest a good idea.
That gaping maw descends not only into the intimate places of the Earth but well past the thin shell of my mind into an unlit vault within. I can only infer what resides there, the thinking layer of words and analysis buffered from it by the ascetic layer of dreams, and impressions, and memories half-remembered.
I thought about posting one of the pictures my wife or I took of the cenote, but that seems totally antithetical to what it is. Even writing about it is not quite right, the thing being described so far removed from the rational part of oneself that arranges letters into words. To understand the cenote I peered into, recall that evacuated state that you may have only experienced a few times, surrounding rage, lust, victory or defeat, or profound loss.
Places like this one connect the visitor to ideas and experiences that are otherwise outside the network of modern consciousness. The computer on the table in the coffee shop or on the desk in the office deny the observer important pieces of the experience.
Once connected by one’s own experience, these memories become entwined into the network in one’s head. From there, they flow unseen beneath the surface into otherwise inane activities, like walking to the train station.

A metabiography for Dave

He’s what you might call
a nonstandard kind
of person Once when
I had to return
a book to Hornbake
Library Trombley

he says to me I
wanna stay out here
Finish my coffee
he adds with a nod

When I got back to
where he was sitting
someone was putting
change into his cup

November Niner Seven Fower Delta Lima

bide
engines zoom
lift

Coffee at 7th & Indiana, facing east

river of faces
none like each other, nor mine
they are family

in tiny cloisters
shutting out the world around
words, voices, nothing

intentions are clear
he stumbles over thick words
she secretly hopes

always in a rush
sublime life passes her by
was it all worth it?

Patois seduction
I eaves-drop: whispers, glances
I wish I spoke French