LITMIR.BIZ

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love is busy with the trees.

      Arch-mechanic of electrical sky,

      blood-red tree of knowledge, ichnology,

      witch hazel, mid-May. I think of Bob,

      with his “little piece of string & sharp

      stone,” over at Minnie’s Can-Do Club,

      as if the go-go dancer in her cage cares

      who knows injustice’s oblique cape.

Sagittarius Approaching Thirty-Five

      Yes, you’re still a little eccentric

      around the velvet edges of your voice.

      Your martini eyes say you wish you could

      stop Cherokee Creek behind the unpainted house

      you were born in. Boards drop off like slabs

      of digital ice. The mortar of the doorsteps

      cracks with green flames. You’re crouched

      in a corner, crying because your face plays

      the girl who returns summers to watch the yard

      swell with wildflowers. The iron signpost,

      an arm holding the nameplate

      almost corroded away.

Cubism

      Deep-eyed painter through black windows

      Across night

      Mountain rain

      Drips blue

      Cezanne thinking Six triangles of sun

Insinuations

      Around from Kentucky Fried Chicken

      at Liberty Belle, I met someone

      who looked like somebody’s dream.

      We talked about the obsequy

      behind John Berryman’s eyes,

      about how we loved

      reading The Voice in bed

      while sipping Southern Comfort.

      She showed me where some bastard

      kicked his baby out of her.

      We said we didn’t know why

      we loved walking in the rain

      till everything disappeared,

      but knew why Eric Dolphy

      pried the lids off skulls.

Loneliness

      New Mexico peels off

      plum skin.

      A night-blooming cereus

      leans against an adjacent building

      like the town’s drunk.

      Morning swells in my brain

      till my fingers retrace a woman

      on the air. We all use our hands

      for something, against something.

      The Orange Pekoe taste of her

      stays, even after a brown bottle

      wraps my voice in cerecloth.

      Again, I find myself

      watching the old silversmith

      work plains of buffalo

      from his head. I return

      to my rented room,

      put a bullet into the chamber

      & snap the trigger four times.

      The sun’s now on the shoulder

      of an Indian woman walking into

      distance filled with dirt trees.

      I go to the pay phone again

      outside El Triumpho Tamales,

      & Ray Charles cries from a car

      speeding past.

       Dedications & Other Darkhorses

Returning the Borrowed Road

      The hard white land

      calls you back across

      iron months to Missoula,

      overtaken in Colorado’s slow mountains

      among gray cloud horses.

      Lines, muscles, the heart’s

      great naked timbers, swing

      music. You said, Get away

       from the poem. You’re too close.

      Now, I let each stone

      seek its new mouth.

      In Boulder, your first word

      homage, a lifetime of birds

      gone wild with brightness,

      like bundled hayfields.

      That day when you entered

      the room, we mistook you

      for a man who works

      a mile down in the ground.

       —for Richard Hugo

Chair Gallows

      Beating wind with a stick.

      Riding herd on the human spirit.

      It’s how a man slips his head into a noose

      & watches the easy weight of gods pull down

      on his legs. I hope this is just another lie,

      just another typo in a newspaper headline.

      But I know war criminals

      live longer than men lost between railroad tracks

      & crossroad blues, with twelve strings

      two days out of hock.

      I’ve seen in women’s eyes

      men who swallow themselves in mirrors.

       —memory of Phil Ochs

Allegorical Seduction

      I am piled up so high

      in your walk, I

      slide down a chute of years.

      Touch me, mountains

      rise, & the pleasure

      tears us into a song.

      Quicksilver skies, these birds

      over The Four Corners

      down through Gallup & Window Rock

      catch fire in clouds.

      No god tells them

      different. No hand

      disclaims our closing

      distance, as doors open

      under the sea.

       —for Linda G.

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