Someone had better be prepared for rage.
There would be more than ocean water broken
Before God’s last put out the light was spoken.
“Once by the Pacific” – Robert Frost

As though the stars were edible
or subject to our praise….

Sleek of leaf and vegetable,
we stretched our length and raised

voices almost never heard
among our human counterparts.

They’d tilt their heads to parse our words,
they’d root about our hearts

and, squint-eyed, search our ranks – hart,
and bear, emu, dove – for untoward

sentiment, some ramparts
they must charge and hurdle.

Yet Sky charged down on us and their razed
towns beneath the water-table

swayed, and we, the last of a line, a précis
of the Word, were audible

to ourselves alone – our doubled
bleats, our howls and brays

were tittles on our shoreless tabula
rasa. Keen-eyed sharks and rays

coasted by like seraphim. Hurried
by an angry goad, Leopard

gained on Unicorn as all of Heaven whirred
like fire broken from its hearth.

And we bobbed, a cork above the Hartz
and Pyrenees – the startled wards

of a panicked state, begging pardon
for what we were not sure, a herd

of Eves and Adams, sires of our race,
in broken waters, pissed-on vetch and bales.

Sail on, sail on as though all rage, après
le déluge, weren’t bottomless and oedipal.

first published in The Yale Review

The sifted light of snow across branch and leaf:
west omega, east alpha, north tav, south alef.

I carried on, oblivious to the clues - simply put, a fool.
Idle roomer, breached boarder, one’s a crowd, aloof.

A roman a clef built overnight? I didn’t know to laugh it off.
Or that roads to a rise of are routes to a fall of.

Pilgrim’s progress: the very process designed to baffle,
and I, shuffling in, clinking…. Never over-shout the bailiff.

The horse on our way back champing grass, the dazed foal
beside her. Sowed oats? Settle for a half or do without a loaf.

And on TV, helicopter blades making a blurred, transparent veil
there on the roof. They bowed their heads to its halo, routed but alive.

And once, long weeks – east: tav, west: alef, north: alpha,
south: omega – the hills, not yet (from drought) aleaf.

On Damas St., even pigeons slept in the branches of the ficus and olive.
I didn’t know then, but to speak about time was nearly to speak about love.

first published on Unsplendid

True pros, the cops hedge
their bets and leave a pistol
close to the edge of the corpse clothed
in beds of leaves and pistils
protruding from the copse hedge.

– first published in The Tampa Review