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.

Duality

His joke lands like a barrel
full of monkeywrenches.
She laughs like a life
preserver wound out of piano wire.

His hand makes a meal
of the string-thin meat
of her knee. She coughs enough
to lose weight.

He's as sharp
as cheese in a mousetrap.
She's as slick
as a worm full of hook.

Two Versions to Vary On

1.
the prop box unfolds new dolls
for the mirror to model on her:

silk as tight to her thigh
as a sword handle or

feathers as open as naked arms,
she can't decide who to wear.

1(b).
like a stone's throwing itself
to prove distance exists

her cross-legged,
wheel-hearted breath

asks emptiness to burn hotter.

Maps Have No Up

Crow calls the four points
each distance echoes the same
long shock of gray

earth-soaked clouds cast
a green pine black
against the sky it strives through

What Might I Learn Tomorrow?

The fly knows
the grip no flutter can spin out of,
the sudden slush of calm
since the pinch,
but the fly knows no spiders.

The bug knows
squash and crunch
but not shoes or sparrows.

The rat knows
the snap, the trap
is just furniture;
the rat knows the twist
in its organs but not
which false-feeding hand to bite.

The dog knows
the groomer's and the vet's office.
The car also goes to the park.

The ape might know
sign language, but that only
helps keep her in a good cage.

Unaired Sequel

On the concrete, pollen pounds itself
to dust, unable to seep in, dreaming
up a sweeping wind as fast as the fall
it flew down from the tree with.

Haiku: Shell

white molt of mantis
body weightless in the wind
a complete fragment

Repetition Isn't Fast Enough

dull as water stuttering in slow motion,
she hauls and dumps the same bucket
down and out of a well as dry
as a skeleton's stab wound

Guide for the Dead, Demoted

Sparrow holds out his own variation,
a quarter notable lament for the job
he lost to Crow, a bird after his own
imagery. It's down to driving
the Veilway's Shuttlebus, standing
room only for the class of crawling
things, spirits as small as his wingspan
deserves to symbolically lift,

Sparrow sings his sadness in chirps,
unhearable mourning hung on a high pitch
he cannot descend from. Big, black Crow
laughs because his giggle gets the somber
treatment. Sparrow browns out of sight.

The Momentum of Perfection

Bricks of broadleaf,
mortar of thorns,

I am hedging,
and the bush

beats a dull sword.
The garden never stops.

Craft Project

Ribbons round a wire,
a spate of blues
from pale, northern morning
to the deep patina of gloaming,
wound into speckles,
strands lapping each other
into sharp diamonds tight
as scales; one vein of violet,
one bare blush,
embarrassed to play the only
cameo of pink,
seventeen satin striplings
bent from their mother spool's
curve to serve a tight helix,
last legs made to dangle
from a knot for a knee
over some fall of hair,
pure color hired out
as highlights;

a circlet, lilacs bound
to crown some momentarily
pretty face, some woman
wearing the fairy
the adornment was meant for,
for the moment,

now a ring made of things,
waiting to be put away,
for a niche in the nothing
where the body it is missing
has lived out her long wait
for a need to believe in her.