What it feels like

1. You are standing in the ocean, thinking of robin songs and midnight rain
Your feet remain exactly 12 centimeters below the water
and in the glassy surface fluctuations
you bob up and down
like a derailed sowing machine
The gulls call and you slowly rotate


2. You are a layer cake, with mayonnaise substituted for icing
contradictory flavors held together in space and time
Spoiled, you are resigned to eat alone

3. You are a cat, charming a bird through a pane of glass
The awkward clucks you make do not find their target
But reflect back to the boy standing behind you

I wrote a poem to my dear love
I baked it into a pie
It sat upon a cooling rock
then floated into the sky

the king of fools

said to me:
I am a Prarie Chicken, a Whooping Crane
a boy with a bat, kicking the snow

The morning and night call out my name
and I unroll wildly into new topographies
I fold into the space between grains of sand
and stalk clouds hung high over saturday afternoons

I ride the winds, I fall on rains
I grow with the grass,
laugh at babies,
clap for thunder,

I have forgotten my own name
and ask you for a cigarette
I have spent all my money
on a sunrise
and burned my shoes
to celebrate heat and light

My body is all dusty bones
and rattling leaves
a wagon wheel and
a plaster floor

Where I go
you cannot follow
but I have been wrong
before

The Temple

Tonight we embrace phantoms.
The ghosts of passenger pigeons
sing 60-cycle noise over our homes
Ancient plants combust in praise
unrolling waves of carbon to the sky
The lakes and rivers and wells
have graciously receded from our path

The ancient hills are wet mud
pouring through our fingers
The forests are a flame
searing our palms
The touch of every living thing
is matted wool and pieces of silver

What a shameful honor
to be priests of a temple in ruins
At its crumbling walls
we cannot imagine
Things we will never know
Something beautiful was broken
and we are haunted

For Dean Moriarty, For Neal Cassiday

In the pavement there is a ghost
mountain to valley
coast to coast

A love that passes around the world
face to face
girl to girl

A shiny car moans into the night
dusk to dawn
light to light

A shaking vision across the West
place to place
Never to rest

Edward Abbey

In the Arizona twilight
There is a flame dancing within a flame
That is turning your billboards
fastly into carbon

See; a sioux war party
descends from the clouds.
They have come to claim
The cities and the machines

Children everywhere listen
to the hum of empty mansions
They carry it over pavement
and write it on their hands

You; Your bullets cannot pass
The ghosts who are dancing
Your cups cannot hold
The medicine in the hills

there is no cigarette,
no gas can, no lincoln continental
There is not even night
or an obsidian blade
There is no unseen hand
but your own