SOMETHING'S HAPPENING

Occupatience

One of you is an architect
building mansion for the blind
with monorails and velvet stairs
and embossed murals designed
to be touched.

One of you is a surgeon
with fingers quick as knives.
With metal hearts, human spare parts,
in the theater you save lives
with your touch.

One of you is a financier
moving money young and old.
With fine silk suits and leather boots
you can turn people to gold
with your touch.

Now me, I'm just a postman
who's delivering the news.
I skip up narrow streets
and winding avenues.
Into the ear of any passerby
who cares to stop and listen
I'll give the mail
and tell the tail
of how I'm always missin'
your lovely touch.

The Origin of War

The day we killed the only dragon still alive
(purple blood pooling around our boots)
everyone cheered and high-fived,
took turns trying on his scaly wings for size.

Then the celebration died
down and we let out a sigh.
The knights began to glance
around, a feisty glint in their eyes.

Consecration

I chase you up the maple tree
in our backyard, scrambling
over twisted limbs.
I lose you in leaves
catching only glimpses of pink toes,
following squeals and giggles
as they tumble down through branches.

Near the top
I wrap my legs around a thick arm
of the maple tree and scoot like a gymnast
towards the trunk.
You peak your head out of the owl hole,
grey bark caught in your curly hair.
I scream, as there are bugs on your arm,
but you just laugh and brush them off.

We sit on the end a branch,
feet hanging in the air
like drawstrings off a faded attic
hatch-door. Below the monk walks through
the scratch grass by the river,
blessing almost everything he sees.
Dressed in pure white under a brown
coat, he bends one knee to touch his antlers
to the stones, to the grass, to the bank
of the river.
Holy stones, holy grass, holy river bank.

You try to see it as it happens
but the holy
jumps too fast from his bone-crown
to the thing itself.
All I can see is the monk
dipping his face down
to the river, as if he were
simply drinking it in.

Dawn

Not just brighter.

The sun shines through my window
through the air
through the soft hairs on my arm
and draws itself on my skin.

Red around the edges
or maybe yellow
it won't stay.
Just visits til we mimic
it with fluorescent or filament
decay

Not just lighter.

I've never felt a warmth so gentle.
Even the finest sweater knit from the wool
of sheep raised on a diet of the skin of summer peaches
and captured bits of cloud,
who sleeps in a nest of cotton balls
and has never heard of mutton
feels like an iron maiden oven
next to the rays of day.

Brilliant beyond elucidation
enhanced by morning hallucination
Faster than life, but patient
enough to travel all this way
instead of circling around itself
like some self-centered star.

illumination
illumination
illumination

my favorite type of radiation

to see what I could sea

The mackerel cuts out early
from its silver ribbon school,
to swim swiftly and surely
towards a coastal tidal pool.

Floating in the shallows
above the starfish and the clam,
she stares (eyes as wide as owl's)
for the horizon of the land.

Somewhere on that shore, I'm sure
a child sits unaware
that the sea, so wise, so pure,
mirrors her probing glare.

I also sit digging my toes
into the sand of my soul's beach.
I wonder what secrets it knows
and watch waves I'll never reach.