That Final Trespass

 

That final trespass:

the undertaker preparing her corpse for viewing.

When I knock at the door he all but screams “don’t come in”.

She is now a commodity of the death industry.

Her taut face will hold the appearance of shutters pulled;

life folded neat as she exited.

Our Death Offering to the Future

 

Everywhere, humans altering the landscape,

not just governmental, but farmers, developers:

ourselves imposing designs on landscapes that

need follow their own evolutions or, as Darwin

might indicate, they become unfit for survival.

And so, the most transitory, those with least

claim to the future, gouging unmercifully through

nature’s processes, which include in their present

their future possibilities, persist in pulling the means

to live from under the feet of their grandchildren.

Beyond Einstein

 

They talk, panoplies of perception;

Picasso-like profusions.

Tourbillions, the stones’ eyes

as would reflect in Van Gogh’s skies

and mouths: plastic, scream-shaped

as Munch would devise.

Their thoughts run together;

disparate landscapes; maps;

fusions of time and space and dreams; 

beyond Einstein.

A Moment in Autumn

 

A maple juggling splinters of sunlight

is a globe of Autumn brilliance.

I’m sitting on a park bench admiring it,

feet paddling in its leaves

when a breath of wind,

a poltergeist, sweeps them along.

Suddenly melancholic

as though a presence passing

changed the mood somehow;

the aging year perhaps.

Woman at a window

 

A woman at a window;

her back to us,

still.

Window in a blank wall,

open

to the sea;

it flows into her:

the bay,

oceans, landmasses,

like air.

She rests,

arms on the window sill.

The Unifying Principle

 An updated version of a poem from 2018 that was inspired by Cagall's weightless lovers.

Love made us lighter than air;

we careered, wheeled and banked

above the town.

Time, gravity, all forces;

we were the unifying principle.

Curved like quarter moons,

fitting into each other precisely,

loving each other beyond norms,

we freed ourselves.

In that love nothing hurts;

in that love all is healing.

What Victory Looks Like In A War Cemetery

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In that moment

 

In that moment their eyes told everything:

the young woman in love,

the older seeing a young suitor hamming it up.

One smiling, the other concealing laughter;

in that one moment, in their eyes,

see how the broken wheel turns.