~~~---~~~

One traffic light blinks up the void of love and pain

all the good people are going home

walking eyes blink across bridges

from hometown to city heights

the whole body of a dream has entered;

blink hard, toward disintegrating days

that milk paint for bronzed spiders

thrown through afternoon, stung awake

one more vacation from the body

as the house windows melt upward,

two maids of the pathway blood drinks up

in the valley, one touched the web

left it springing, one sprung the hatch of the belly,

one swept up the kindling for memory

one shut off the machine and smiled

my bed rocketed, suspended in salts and aether

new highways calling on the screen of a velvet passport

you nimbly entrance, small mouths are crying

in the bicycle-swiped wild grass

(*)(*)(*)()()

Color mount palaces poorhouses
all dance to the crumbling law
the fountain wears a thousand eyeglasses
for your passage to break the pigeons
round the cobblestones
milk on the seams of concrete walks
and white summer dresses laid out
on mud green pools

(*)(*)(*)()()

*)*)*)*)*

If chrome police on tar
and all other arid dying world
turn to ash when you round a bright corner
disc-light rise and accelerate the planet
cemeteries in flower myriad air balloons
jostling the horizon, paint on a blimp across the sun
we touch through the wheels and gears of the shadow

*)*)*)*)*

...><...><...

Ledges on wheels
roll forward the dark thatched mountains
hands beg electricity from rock
deepen the large air further
a bridge from planet to planet
will rise from the place
we hook arms on the pavement
the slow burlesque of trees
in a confusion of seasons

^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^


Eons untouched
you hold a cobalt receiver
I hide in the ocean replica
a plane of light and shadows without sound
and the phone crumbles in my hand
your skirt is on fire but it won't hurt you
so I won't put it out, I'll move Saturn

voices will continue to cross
a shore as if they still had shape and language
the orbits will thin out
a beach will land on our heads
so faint we won't feel it, or notice if other swimmers
are sharing its senseless caress

my towel is under your life
your sunglasses are under my hat
my blade is under your kaleidoscopic rock
I'm not noticing the sun
I hope you're smiling
I hope you're here


^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^

SOME FRUITS

In the skin of an apple
what lives innate
in the burst of a grape
what vines shoot throughout the body
in the heft of a mango
the greed of armies distilled
becalmed by a bite
life in a basket, a gullet full
a planet replanted

----))))))


The damp's worth of fallen galaxies
folded the orchestra society
into a magnetic pile
where we strummed and faded
two violas and a network of branches
with hornets nesting
at the crux of color and heat
your wide eyes watched the landscapers
through parlor glass
the old country ate up on itself
until its pillars were
the cornerstones of pleasure
in our antique delirium
searching caverns for other caverns
big bang larval
weepers and crawlers from the hot rift
coal-walkers who don movie white
walk away from the gap sneezing laughter
light shuffles off to the edges
framing the long descent
a love, a frieze of fan blades in stop motion
or a maggot in carbon


----))))))

///|\\\


When you are an arrival
of light that slackens
on metal structures
when the battlefields hum up gardens
and long towers sprout
fecundate windows high
I need a cigarette to pin me to the earth
I need to be in an automobile
closing my eyes to your perfume
the engine having been given its instructions
the lady servers retreated behind glass walls
the whole landscape open to husk travelers
who hit a boundary of suspended water
come out cowed on the other side, smiling
the circuit that opened the ramps and closets
brought a meal of leaves
we washed it down with black soda
all our histories gone to the current
your transit unmapped
terra birds in a scaffold singing
to the stem of your neck
and the high windows growing.


///|\\\

RUT VILLA

She lands on the passenger seat like a fallen hawk
the boiler in the back of the dreamed room
is soaking the air with whistles
the faceless interview breaks up
between angel and transgressor
the aisles of a traincar we're always looking
past years when the cemetery was a playground
and everything I crushed turned into art.

((((((((((}}}

Here is a house drawn into smoke
by a wet finger
and the error of a saint
by a bloodied tiger, wondering
as only the blood can wonder

Slipshod forestblossom, a chain of dreamed ideas
sprinted past toxic vats and link into sunlight
holding hands watching all the branches break
the families abandon their best to the bottomless
somebody whose eyes I know
will stay home to pet the cat
while the broadcasters bring them the bomb
through a basement screen

Something cleansed will fall out of the wall
we'll pile on with our sexes
then wake up in its form
on the playground the forefathers built
and never tried
needles of a flown planet
the climax in the med-tent outlasts a battle
diamond fingers together on a candelabra
the void is singing your song, a fortress is groaning

((((((((((}}}

****

To destroy the known areas
dark slip into dark, supermatter

****

><><><><><

The cloud-born rock, whose face
feasts on butterfly kites

the secret cleft in every beach
where sand falls into the greater burning

the tenth place in my being
grown for you to inhabit

harbors of debris-licking water
benches where seated forms
fall through sleeping shadows

remain homeless, though they return to mansions
retain heat, though they rift through city time
deep into the arctic

cloud-born bones
finding a pond's orchestra

a faint sidewalk on a sudden plateau
kitchens that won't save caresses for a bedroom
and steam from deep in undiscovered branches
to vaporize the blood and make flight easy

><><><><><

<><><><><><><>

Light's hole-puncher,

when world started shedding its scales
we were deep in its coves
didn't know it had a surface
that the front would flake off
that everything would be a meteorite
that chickadees on the breakfast slab
would spoon seesaw each other plop repeatedly
into gilt-ringed teacups

off-universe, every bridge has suicide doorways
to whisperless air

<><><><><><><>

)))))))))~~~~~~~~~|

Wind that blows through time
time that is its protecter
terror beyond terror and before terror
that can be endured

The meadow wept crosses
swines nicked the dirt for endurance
willows were still filthy from the hurricane
ski-paths of white light
trickling ascended the living hills

Like a hopscotch error
a drumset on fire, a waterfall of footsteps
a backyard venting bivalved life
past the wine basement under the vines
you'll eat only what floats, take only
what I lurk back with like diamonds
from the carved city

||||))))))|||

When departure's song rears out of the deeps
in digital lands or in frail space
leopards leap in cages, light-years in a single second,
the overwhelming succession of populated mountains
me and your camera mouths on the gravel,
knocking against hedges trying to part
the veil of a sand palace in repelling light
garden snakes in the grass, your lap
the hissing of strange new waters
as if I were primitive man, you newscaster medusa,
larynx burned by passage in my ringed hallways
smoke and chemical
only catcalls pierce up, from pond waters
walls in the steam tattooed with world's slogans
the bridge is flipping like a rake
the othershore's creatures to an uproar
of all airport passageway, overlooking totally
love at the pretzel stand, marriage near
the ammo shop, laughing

||||))))))|||

~(~(~(

Over the local river
there's a strand of mutant oxygen
that carries my secret name
all over the earth.

Be with me tonight, Reinaldo Arenas, Walt
Whitman, somebody.  Re-teach me
to speak from.  Only to tear open
the banks, fresh water from fresh water.

The gulls are not from the earth.
The sky is immovable.  The piano hurts,
the ground is too beautiful.  I am headed
for the break, event horizon
between reality and fantasy
like powers from the past
I am going to rend it open.

~(~(~(

~~~~*

Mole-tick and tick-mole
have wandered out into the rushing light
maybe more'll follow 'em through the brass fence
enskirting the capitol, from eggs locked in place
to the beak that hovers just above the forehead
in dissemblage, in error, they trip
painfully as ballerinas, the world
winces opens a whole wall with
the rip sweep of a curtain

Tick-mole and mole-tick
have been watching numerous trucks go cautiously past
are the sex inside the credit union
move the hours around to unschedule all appointments
lie to themselves about the effects of weather
grip each other's sorrow in cracked laundromats
are going down to the river to bathe in their solitudes together
your beautiful arms are the ancient newspaper
where they go to die

~~~~*

)(())()(())(


That duck's chest and my left palm
ground into the tar's face
are thinking of a beauty that does not conspire
and our laundry money falls into a blood chute

tits over the porch rails make us wonder
how much better we are at thinking
in unison when we're not lost and
wounded--but remember having been

as the pantheistic bleach is funneled wet
into large cloth sphincters
the market's bread is now the duck's
and neither need teeth to digest

the national silver on my hand's web
the tar is not eating my essence
I have none--but I am breathing its


)(())()(())(

(((~~~


Inside the radio cabinet, or inside
the many now on earth who plot and plan
dispatched into our existence with a little music
replenishing our kind for a gone empire
made to vibrate by the attraction, the innocent

>>>>>>~|)))

Voices scattered are not salt or seed
so light goes drifting elsewhere
brings you out of the drywall
your lips an underwater hammer
your roots bathing in fire-murk
a bridge from sky to sky
our home: undercurrents of shifting universe

Disembodied, for the foliage on the outskirts
reach high for browse, sent a new body into the nets
wedged its neck in the fork
its heart in the way of progress
outbound eyes scattering sunlight forward
had reflected it back
how, the ring people
are also mysterious dark spokes