Night World
The barbed-wire vines
knot the azaleas
in the DMZ
of the border yard.
Everywhere I find
the sign of signs:
the abandoned wreck
of a cardinal’s nest,
over-mortgaged,
or under water;
the snout divots
of armadillos,
shy, unregistered aliens.
The world’s another
world at night,
where the dream-scatter
of day lunks about,
preparing, preparing
for nothing at all.
The Gentle Soul
A gentle air impelling her keel, so that in the surrounding serenity her three tall tapering masts mildly waved to that languid breeze, as three mild palms on a plain. Moby-Dick, chapter 59
He used his jeans as an ashtray,
spun philosophies on airy nothings,
slept with a prostitute and a thirteen-year-old.
It was the sixties, we liked to say,
long after it was the sixties.
What moved flesh and what spirit,
already languishing in the purity of decay?
The Oakland tidal flats
are now overlooked by ghosts of dot-com
companies that did not survive the crash.
The eighties. The nineties.
The decades fell like promises made to be broken.
