Marmalade Sonnet

Don’t give me tongues of men and angels
pretty one,
but kindnesses to damnify this zero-hour.
My eyes are pale from staring at the sun
and platitudes of Babel’s leaning tower.
No prophecies I seek, nor bleak vignette,
but stretching in the puff of quiet moor;
the summits steeped in peak and pirouette,
blush suffused with burning flesh, not war.
Feed beetling crowds of shilly-shally sentences
to birds and other herds of pleasant beasts.
Put out rapscalian pipings of repentences,
leave mulling over mournings to the priests.
Put on the coffee, spread the marmalade,
let us find amusement in charades.

Parakeet

I saw him once in a horses nest
moiling over lime wedges,
his slices precise
as papercuts.
How his fingers
gingerly couched
my glass retreat,
carefully made
my change.

His eyes were hands
and arms were thighs.
I saw him horizontal. I
imagined him leaning
against
my kitchen counter,
our breakfast
well eaten.

Spine to cortex
he slid in
and up
then down again,
if warmth were caged,
my hips were Parakeets.

I measured
the arc of my breast
with his palm between
the rounds.
I knew
his draping robe askew,
his father’s face;
the everything
we didn’t share.

Kingfisher

Two Mergansers “gruk”: informing.
Softened undertones of plucky
odors rising; shoreline warming.
Spring and rivers find their mucky
way along. I will be gone
south when Kingfishers, patrolling,
split the air in half at dawn.
Flying arrow-straight, controlling
glide above wild waterways.
Thrilling speed while fishing, does he
feel a joy in flight? My days
watching him have passed. Because he
can, he flies so fast.

Caterpillar

Where inauspicious words can be atoned,
in gardens of sensations known to flesh,
beyond unopened blossoms of unknown
greens with sounds of many wings and breasts
in flight. There, you exist for me in thought,
what soft-bodied thing has found the night
in me this way? This chrysalis is not
aware that she can fly, for lack of sight.
Still seeing legs of caterpillar days,
I count on falls to help me float away.

Hems of Bombazine

within the hems of bombazine
I found my legs desire there
his too below, his flaxen hair
and gauntlet eyes so charred and rare

We shared a dance between the glare
and fastened there, found downy quills
grown fast in goose flesh, stippled twill,
our samba swayed, the twilight spilled

and when my thoughts were rototilled,
preserved, embalmed and counter weighed
and all the change was counted, payed;
the bank was balanced, love betrayed

.

Have

Often, in angles
when the day is low
they come,
through gates of pampas foliage.
Knives of moon-atlatyls
thrown in zebra hides
and tatted knots
against the garden box.
I suppose you, there
my pride’s companion;
before me like a poem.

Conversed in silence,
our responses brush.
The bending wind
annunciates tall grasses
in a rush.

Shadows settle up,
becoming
somber victims of the dark
and whisper
things to me about
what it is we never found,
but somehow, still have lost.

On the Crooked Fork

Beneath a cedar canopy,
the Maidenhair fern part
a slightly humid shade into wedges.
The Trillium, like vagabonds
with snowy petaled heads
are edges where waxy hearts
of wild ginger spread.
Blossomed Shooting Stars
twist in shapes of amethyst,
ignite at will against
a galaxy of chlorophyll,

on the Crooked Fork.
We saw the prehistoric headed
Sculpins where currents tremble,
lulled in turquoise-clean,
were poised above the Lima-bean
shaped pebbles.
We resembled a wishbone,
watching prone and stretching,
cupped hands magnified, submerged,
side by side, on the verge
of catching
the shy creature and

we panned for gold and thought
we found a fleck, then made up names
for other fish, juggled speculations,
talked of filing claims,
struggled, smiling through a tiff.
We stayed until the evening breeze
spilled out freely in the trees
banking off their bark.
Suddenly, a thrush in bursting keys
sang chiaroscuro’s last trapeze
and rang the Crooked Fork.

The Fire Escape

Bob was unusually tall with a face that was a cross between bat and a sparsely shaven man. He had small round eyes that rocked back and forth steadily in their sockets, keeping time with his frame that swayed rhythmically as he spoke. He cast an odd contour in a pair of boot-cut Wranglers that seemed a couple of sizes too small and his thin legs split away from a rear end that bubbled out aggressively. He wore a faded pearl-snapped western shirt tucked in with difficulty and a pair of beat up logger’s cork boots that accented the deficiency in the length of his jeans. He always had a ‘Warm Springs’ baseball cap on, turned backwards that appeared to be spitting out his straight tobacco-brown hair.

It was hard not to stare at Candy’s cotton-soft face nestled in the damaged bleached waves of her curls. She applied a blusher very liberally to her overripe cheeks that might have been called ‘candy apple evening’. She brushed an abundant indigo mascara around her melancholy eyes. They always looked to be on the outskirts of tears and seemed to be paddling above her uneven lips that never quite covered teeth that pushed against them so violently that they gave her a childlike lisp.

They were the couple who shared the uppermost rooms in an older brick building remanisant of a flophouse. It was let out by the week in the ‘historic’ section of the inland Northwestern town I had ended up in most recently. I met them both one evening, shortly after I arrived and ventured away from my no-frills rental which included a twin bed and hot plate, to get some air. I was perched on the cast- iron fire escape landing across from their door and was looking through the maze of tangled power lines into the tavern backdoors and alleyways below. Candy told me how they had met each other while staying in the State hospital. “I was there because sometimes I get sooo depressed and Bob was there because something real bad happened to him.” That was all that was said about their pasts and Bob proudly mentioned that Candy liked to give him hot baths late at night.

I began to explore the town and noticed an older man dressed in a black suit, clutching a bible. Everyday he would be pacing below a free standing, ornate four faced clock on Main Street. He would step away from the curb, almost into on- coming traffic, waving his arms in swooping gestures as though he were leading an orchestra. He chanted in a sing-song voice that ascended from baritone to high crescendo. “Hellfire and damnation to the sinner and the heathen!” He was in the same location most afternoons with his passionate brimstone messages. Drivers swerved and pedestrians ignored and avoided the ‘precher’ or some would laugh, elbowing one another while they made a wide parabola shaped detour around him.

It was always amazing to me when I would enter the ‘hotel’ foyer where I was staying after a night out. A clock repair shop was located on the ground floor below the rooms and it seemed as though chimes, bells and birds were always assaulting the hour. I also began to notice an odd noise filtering through my door, sometimes after midnight. It seemed to be the singular, unintelligible pathetic cry of a man’s voice followed by eerie masculine grumblings and ending in imploring desperate mumbles. They seemed to emanate from the room across the hall.

Late one afternoon when I was having a cigarette on the fire escape, I questioned Bob and Candy about the noises I heard at night. “I know who that is, he used to stay at Warm Springs too!” Bob blurted out a bit too loudly, then seemed embarrassed and was quiet. “Oh, that’s the preacher talking to himself” Candy said softly. “You mean the one I see on Main Street?” I asked. There was a longer than average silence. Candy was looking down and didn’t raise her head and when she answered me, it was in a low and reverent tone. “Yes, he lives downstairs and its sooo sad, so very sad.” She paused again, then continued haltingly with heartbroken inflections. “When he was younger, he used to drink… he ran over his own little boy in the driveway.” When she finally looked up at me, her blue-fringed eyes were magnified and moist.