Those Aren't Damselflies

The sun reels up a line of flying termites.
A wet abutment of brick admits single-file
fliers into the only club under the sun.
The block of sky allotted this basement
apartment of yard between the hedge
and the stucco froths like champagne.
The sparrows pop in to catch
them like anti-gravity snowflakes,
each wing a uniquely flat splatter of veins,
each gray light-catcher straining to flutter
up faster than hot air buoys ash.
A nuthatch discovers a tasty splotch,
freshly too heavy with their beginning,
she lazily scoops them gulletwards
without wasting swoops and wingovers,
not like the showboat staking out the roses,
shouting come-and-get-it like he's
multiplied the fishes himself.

They keep rising, unaware of their numbers
before or after, the odds of an even
chance of finding the upper limit
of their body's ambition
or of beating the sun
back under the earth.

Both Sides of Night

The long line of light tugs
the eyelid upward.
The bait of emptiness
burns like a barb.
Stars stab as far as they can.
Under the deluge of the celestial,
life seeps out the pores
built into every skin,
the wounds they were created from,
right to the sleepline
and lower, into the down
falling is only a metaphor for.

In a wormhole fit for no ships,
a tunnel dug for the king's
annual escape from time's end,
some prehistoric beetle
rolls up a nebula
into a star.

Involuntary Perpetuity

Persistent green fly
my hand will flick
every time you land

Weathering

Time may measure man,
but the hours are not his metaphor.
The radius of delineations
tick-marked on the turn from one
to twelve does not shape his face.
That self-replicating hash
called a calendar, mesh wide
enough to net men, sieve so
open all the golden days go
out with the muck,
that body serves his work, not him.
The automatic numbers clambering up
their perpetual ribbon of an only-sided
ladder, those rungs rising underfoot
on their never teetering
repetition of higher and
those hand-rails made of hand-cuffs
pulling as straight to the track
as tin ducks on the target wheel,
that flat ruler of the real
cannot curve to the contours
consciousness inherits from
loops of brain, will never
bend itself around the bulging
cyst of a lonely minute, while
seconds refuse to let their fractions
count as voting members,
nor can it hitch a quick
left hook with the runaway
horses of happiness and desperation,
dragging man's clump of leftover
star round his inconstant horizon.

Time is where man lives,
but it is not him.
Once upon one of them,
he also learned to build houses.

We Have No Deluges Today

Proud of such a calm shoreline,
the puddle lets the facets
skate on her watertight face.

There is no emptiness without depth.
So smile.

Onward and Upward

Antiquity rhymes with iniquity.
Which proves progress
sounds like a good idea.