ars poetica I

possibly, for gertrude stein.



a pantoum on a steamboat calls for bogonias
a lack, too, of them and them.

a knot in my hair, a wind on my side
burnt from the light of a cardinal calling

red in a way you can explain,
a wind burnt.

lethargy is only a way to lift
and call the bud

of a bud out of it's dreary.
it is and isn't.

but an onion has a prowess;
a bone in the silk;

a way to turn lethargy into
where clapping begins.

de, ja, vu, and me

the cardinal can breathe in the scent of succulents
with the tiniest set of lungs, maybe on a four tent

field with a quinacridone rose landslide, to make
pantoums easy enough to turn a poem into a

pomegranate. the light is august, peppermint
tea on the lips of william, who took the last

of the honey. ecinacea is lethargic, the dust of
learning how to close your eyes is everywhere;

only want a map to understand the handstand,
tangerine wine too, it's 92, and i know now

that the lace-fly has a heart tinier than any root.

the hide and go seek of chiaroscuro

your memory is on a maroon road somewhere, at night when i'm up and not up, somewhere there is driving and somewhere someone has light in their eyes, finding a way past trees no one will ever want to know, the chosen ones impregnating the spreading dress of our yards, the chosen we love like long roads. you're everywhere in a long road, in a maroon cup of milk, cold air on my tonsils, thirst, winding around in a circle, in a white dust, seeing you someplace else, and in wintergreen, blue moustache, the bated breath of our newborn, sweet roads, any road long enough to eat a row of clementine wedges, a lacefly in a buttonhole, sticky eyes of a watchman, wondering how wide space isn't only horizontal, thinking how Luther would have liked Montana too, where afternoon's wafer and lamb lay in the divinity of transmogrifying clouds.