High wire act

See this high wire, this tight rope?
They string it between then and now, grease 
it good, dare you
to step out, shred the net, set up
wind machines, start the lions roaring, spread
shattered glass below, and that's all just
for openers.  Then they tell ya stay home,
you got nuthin' to prove.



Worm's eye view

A world, spinning through clouds
insubstantial as your breath
on a morning in January.
On the world, puddles of cobalt, islands
of emerald, cinnamon, ivory.
On this island, hills, mountains,
forests, plains, meadows.  
At the edge of this meadow, a tree,
American elm, gritting its teeth
against the remorseless stare 
of the beetle, its arms raised
in resignation.  In the crook
of one branch, a nest, a whorl
of grass, earth, twigs, a frightwig.
In this tangle, a bird, its breast
raging, its eye vivid.  In the beak
of the bird, a worm, more resigned
than even the tree.  In the eye
of the worm, a world, spinning
through insubstantial cloud.


 
Armstrong's foot

Blake's fearsome tyger
stuffed and raffled off
on the midway, Jonah's whale
a cartoon pitch
for tuna, the snake
in the garden just a torn strip
of inner tube after all, the moon
when Armstrong's foot left
its mark nothing more
than the green cheese
my grannie always said
it would be, cheese
filled with holes.

 

In love with decay

I stood in line at the Safeway, my basket laden 
with rotting fruit.  There were cherries glutinous 
in their sugared blood, blueberries marbled 
with sepulchral mould, molten strawberries 
laced with slime and fragrant as sulfur, peaches
and plums all softboiled eggs, all puppy belly.  

A woman in a flowered dress and cheeks rosy 
as a newborn's turned away, holding
her nose, but the checkout clerk looked through
me, saw that I was in love with decay, with the rapture
of destruction.  Gently, she placed my purchases
in a paper bag she drew from under the till,
jewels too precious for plastic.  Then I set off
home, drunk with the possibilities of life.

 
 
What was it Eliot said?

The hair in my nostrils grows white.  My penis
stretches, yawns, rolls over into its pillow, desire
courses through me like flickering light
in a storm.  A mosquito bows its head at the well
of my pale blood and hesitates.  My joints 
sing, a cappella, my empty palms ache.  Outside
the window, sparrows congregate at the feeder
like old women on the stoops of Brooklyn
when I was a boy, noisy and vivid in their scarves,
their arms filled with the absence of their
children, lost in the war or to illnesses 
now mercifully extinct.  These birds regard me 
as the women might, with neither contempt 
nor indifference, they know I feed them, asking 
nothing in return, and their gratitude pulses 
in the blue sheen of their throats, but remains 
unspoken.  When I open the door, they explode 
like gravel sprayed from the tires of a speeding car.  
Their song thrums in the absence their shape 
carves into the fragrant air, a reproach,
a warning.