The Siege
Right-angled
hydrangeas blind
the windowframe
to the bitter
rotten clot
of light
over wrought
iron chairs perched
like insects
beneath
constellations
of coffee stains
while the red
eyed frenzy
of the night fast
implodes
in steam and speed:
beleaguered
soldiers boiling
oil for the castle
walls.
* * * * *
The Bat
Above my head, a lonely bat flew screaming through
the silent sky.
Its wings beat back the rising earth to hold the night aloft.
I try to listen.
It’s true, there is no poet purer than the bat:
into the sky
it shouts each word it knows – just to see the sound.
It never sees
the firefly, the echo of its word for firefly
is all it sees.
It shouts these words at secret highest C’s – free
of vanity.
Satisfied, it disappears into the stars.
I try to listen,
but all I hear is summer slowly dying.
* * * * *
By the Harbor
Concentric rings of limpets grow
across the rocks below the pier,
exposed like salt rank by the sheer
water of the moon-clenched tide.
Wine leavened, we watch
our laughter mingle with the ferment
of vaulted gulls in hotch
above the scent of sunblock.
Crabs scrawl across the brooding
stones and urchins,
softer than a poem
on the margins of a notebook.
* * * * *
Zika
The dark and oily blood of dinosaurs
coagulates in distant desert bores,
suckled by the gnattish maws of rigs.
Pumped into the sky to burn, the warmth
of prehistoric heartbeats melts the ice
to water palm trees. Larva plump like rice
in stagnant swamps. Mosquitoes, long and thin,
shake the air off of their wings in ecstacy.
The siren clout of dino-blood’s temptation
draws them from the tropics. Led astray,
bearing miniscule conquistadors:
protozoans wave their whip-like flags
and pray in chapels made of chitin.
Marooned where prey is bitten
by the insect’s thirsty drills,
history repeats itself.
* * * * *
Journeys
My heart still dreams:
the lingering stench of fire
drifts across the veldt.
In a couple of minutes,
the plane drifts past.
I hate flying:
between destiny and origin,
the journey’s compressed
like an accordian.
So, I ramble down the page,
finding the slow miles,
verb by verb.
* * * * *
In the Morning
The swell of her thigh,
boundless and bare as a sand-dune,
rises along the secluded
trail by the ocean.
I keep my head close
to her chest, to the rhythm
of marching red blood
cells prepared to erupt
as a blush in the cold
that awaits us outside
of each other. I write
her name in iambics without expectation.
I dream with the strength of a barnacle growing
in silent explosions on pilings protruding
from graveyards of marl. Exposed and denuded
by morning, in wait for the moon to remember
to tuck me in tropical seas. I would drown
if the sea were more than a drop in your eyes.