Catenary

Those cherry trees over there know it’s not Spring. 
Marcel tore this quickly.  It is in front of the paper
that the template suggests a shape of
some gentle hour.  The velvet one.  Picking at the grass
in a plush corner of the meadow, looking for sheep
too abstract for words in a painter’s sky.  Fleecy clouds
scraped or
flayed,

with the start-up
commotion of an image coming unhinged.  Lawn chains
studded with stars hang in pendulous sleep.  Who is that masked
man hovering by close, as the swags of vamping music
sink,
gently so
in the art-free zone?  Green moths meanwhile
decamped Garibaldi’s beard.  We kept
to columns of cool, mixing it up,
culminating

in an atmosphere of deft moves on both sides.  An erased
canyon.  Attic moonscapes.  Waning or waxing?

Billboard Crossing

And those freely
architected dreams
we’ve been so
much told about

maybe there is
though

and there’s a case
where it’s OK

They know behind
scenes

billboards read your
body and after
a while comes a
hankering to
be loved

but we’re so
connected
so busy these days

more conically
mended I
remember but I
only looked at
them.

And The Swan

No contrast of feathers and flesh,
but a full phallic thrust of hearts and
violence.  Feel like walking in traffic.  A window seat
napping with the cat, subverting the
line.

Her rose tattoo
the thorn recommends a lighter shade of gray,

beautiful flower reaches like the anemone advances;
long-missed orphan retreats from the edges
in a feathery existence of light and
sea air.  Leaves traces pleasing to look at
of having been there. 

Academy

Had there been trees present
at all those crossroads -- beautiful trees!
and green a parrot green known to us in those parts,
what would any desert god have had to do with us? 

But it is a tenantless sea rolling
ghostly waves which depends on us,
with the odd sight of a few denizens
of the land-speed world advancing upon
those famous salt-flats --

Summed lines of every progress teased-out into animated
ribbons pulling together shape, manner, and movement
clothed in a kind of luminous pearl, if not a watchful one. 

And our bodies like stark keels
frothing-up suds in advance of passing through
it
honeycombed
with exotic dimensions as it were.
Nonplussed once confronted by tiny entities such as these, we
chiefly desire to know them . . . to feel it as if
on our tongues, or within our fingertips!

“O, hold me in your arms a little longer!”
-- Welling-up, if detached from a freshet turning the old mill,
in advance of the spirit, which is breath, making words out of
phonemes clasping same together.

World in the heart of manufactured words and Sun created out of
smudged umber

touched in passing with devotional thumbs,
even as the sea welters away.

“Stay a little longer!”

Ghostly in the mist the factory seen from the edge of sleep
hand to mouth the words -- Even so,
Just the same:  adamantine in the teeth of
an ephemeral world. 

Listen for the conductor’s baton, a gray ribbon in her hair.

Glissandi of a hundred violins at midnight.  

Gertrude's Knee

On the towpath somehow the great diorama
all eyes rest on you
because of it, rest assured, firmly
in its gloried place freely apart from you,
and did not die when you died, and
now all these years hence
a patrician’s cloudless hymn
has collapsed into
some remnants of sample weather. 

Shoring up
while in the careful act of subverting,
brandishes a feather at a grand gallop across

Acrilan swards of ornamental grass murmuring the gentle name
of your tormentor.  Nothing rests after distance,
or satiates withal --
a quiet supper below deck, even as outside it
presses
parti-colored flowers hard to, and
from portals the bridge fretted with St. Elmo’s fire. 
Sallied forth with fresh thyme.  Curdled skies.