The neighbor's air-conditioner rattles
all night; I dream
of crickets

Asleep in the wheat field
ears full
of a brown whispering

Petals stuck
in the lungs
of the withered river corpse

BLANK TESTAMENT

Stars flicker, and the planets are steady.
Or is it the other way around?
You try to remember, staring up
at your own wedge of cold night sky,
crowded with a testament
you couldn’t begin to decipher.

It’s easier for you to imagine
an army of flesh-eating zombies
shambling down the hill-side
off the back deck, than the deer’s
pricked ear, or the quick-sulfured
eye-glimpse of the fox.

You go inside, take a piss, come back
and just like that, the stars are gone.
Out of the black now tumble
glistening lisps of snow,
like the stars had come unstrung
and were swarming down

gasping ashes desperate to tell you
the story that you missed, turning
a blank white as they hit the ground.

CROWDED WORLD

We walked onto the beach, the glowering ache
of hang-over in our eyes. The dark, cold waters,
the seaweed spreading open its palms,
the long stretch of road leading out past marsh grass
to the farthest, wavering point of salt and sunlight
will always remind me of you, how we lost each other
to something we were sure was there, guessing
at its’ breath, like a net that would catch us.
We could have touched like two white, un-named animals.
But the crowded world found us instead.

RETOLD FEVER

I climb the stairs, breaking out in a fever, while above,
a lightening storm splits wide the sky with gashes
and quick incisions. I’m looking, and inside its’ rending
slits of white light, I see motion pictures, many of them,
all told in glimpses and whispers. I see John Wayne
lying on the ground with a blood-spattered groin,
the Indian holding up his severed penis as a totem.
I see Abraham Lincoln watching a view-master presentation
of the moon launch and saying, "There's not a free man
among them" and then wondering, "Is my check in the mail yet?"
I see the the bottom screen crawl fall past, asking of no one,
“I love you...Where are you? I love you...Where are you?"
It’s an emergency. Please respond.

LAST PRAYER

My apartment dark and still; only I make
the floor boards creak. The same wind
which cracks pines in Alabama rattles
my half-shut window. Sparrows shiver
on dawn-lit telephone wires--the first
rain in weeks. I am the bones
and skin of a single waking equation.
Answer me.