**********

The clutching fields

Shelves of tall square houses
rear up on slants like little
San Franciscos, I am kissing
someone away, chickadees tear
daintily into the birches. A blackness
has crept into their skin
of the news' ashes.

Events have fallen away
dreams are dry as torched tobacco
elbows hit diner counters and tables
with a sound of dying blood;
I found my phoenix here
with a lime in her claw
the sugared virgin of her drink
oils flashing from the rails
of a long train.

We discovered
that we could make the junkyards
shiver and reproduce
the many eyes in many kinds of leather.
Bills are no longer paid
by lashes of gold and silver
and money floats, as your dress drapes
there is no tense to put this time in.

Over the April sidewalks
comes your daughter future
with a fogged rain of cymbals
bent in fortune cookie shapes
from heavy metal attics thick in font
where one crept onto the window's mustache
and ate his electricity like a delicacy
to be considered
heavens are one pillar rolling rain

Neighborhoods explode into plastic
chutes where intimacies unimagined
go secretly away, in disorganized murder
we walk through it for coffee cake
laugh deep as ancients on the wired banks
of halflife rivers.