INCAST


jackalhood fires in my bones
I hear stories of the girl who lived on drainwater
how one day we'll unfold each
other's encrusted valley wings
with a ropeswing into the sea
blue seagull white sky
our masks of salt
skirted in burlap and bellowing

toward the bars of rippled sand
she'll lead a light net
I'll follow with a spear on my back
to the music of lunar waves
lapping against an island of airplane seats
brine on the body and brine of the body
torching a bluefish with severed eyes
my desk on the shoreland
with an old tarp roof

jackalhood ignites in my blood
but I hold it back with my skin smiling
the fanning of her webbed hands
keeps my mammal's guardian
wide awake I protect the reptile
locks of her spun hair
touch the ghost of our doorway
bloodblack eyes that light up
the mansions of a lost race
where spines turn deep to gold
and ancient jazz is playing

OPENDOME

it's a fluttering away that I can't follow
runs its close machinery inside the glass of every window
we call it the world and it won't wait outside
we follow it next to the river
carrying bundles of moss-furred sticks
where the water opens up and the chemicals of light
drift down onto our forearms
to peel back our naked cloaks

)))))))))))))

light snapping on and off
in the the empty capitals
the dancing of human numerals
is grounded in salt
and the huge season turns over

we wither into it like squatters with reptile skin
move trains aside with gusts of breath and then
become abruptly powerless

during the birthdays of saints
and the activities of captured horses
time goes through at exactly the same pace
very few notice anything at all

we go in our cloth coats
under and over bridges
cursing the songs in the air
and knocking them down

-_-_-_-_-_-_-

to the land of forward cars
with false licorice you leaning forward
in a subway yakking
how many are dying how many
skinny and hysterical pinning their hopes
and sinews to the sled blade ribs
of a long dead whale playing ping

pong in their clam sweat sleep
somebody wake up in the tubes of hallway
knock me out real cerebral
take away my vacuum cleaner
find me in the passage vapor from a mop
somebody else's suicide
fling my ammonia hair
deep into the toweled paper
of a sacred closet
talk to me machinery
make me a wire worming basket

===============

a broken rhino I
stop between traffic lights
lost as a time bomb
go between huge slabs of grave
aching with celestials
tugged forward by innocent ears
lost in history

the big footprints fill
with a shining salad of cockroaches
moon dragging space
through their shells
light taxed and misting
I lumber looking
on painted runways

^^^^^^^^^
Lamb's ear, sweet skunk,
I won't be haunting your garden's doorstep anymore
or tearing the moss from your stones
or slug-tonguing my way
into the seams between dirty concrete

there's no edge left to the shovels
the cranes and lifts are gone
the sky is further away than ever before
no worker will be singing with metal or wood
my strut has departed the sway
of your bedded flowers

the sun is close and mute to the coming moon
an oak's length of barbed wire
is the earth's last cathedral wall

we're mating in the past,
the mines in mountain walls
river that away

^^^^^^^^^

starved on a pinnacle
deep in the air's history
light comes soothingly
of phantom tonnage

flaws in birch open raw lips
to the movement of weather
there's nothing happening in many barns
the small farms stilled on a Sunday

hanging naked in a willow
two lovers are stems and leaves
absenting themselves
from the traffic of the world

wide mouths fell open at the arrival of sound
young flower of water

--------------
these walls come out of the eyes
out of beauty so that you will know their threats
shadow stamping on last embers
in a hallucinated field
paths on each side going
down to the projected river