Pulling All the Sky Over Me

In the Oven

I suspect,
yes, suspect is a good word,
as I push the dates around on the calendar,
eye-balling them, daring them to differ with me.
A staring match with a calendar is a loosing proposition;
may as well bite my lip now and declare defeat.
I let my finger slide down the page in surrender.
I can feed myself a line of bullshit
but time, and its passage, could care less how I feel.

It’s a hunch;
like those furtive notes passed with boxes, requesting check marks:
Do you ask because you know or do you know because you ask?
Sure as rain and spring yield bud and seed,
some things are true before you know them
and will be true no matter when you know them.
But some things, like a pie, aren’t really pie until they’re done.
Before that its all parts of a whole, pieces juxtaposed but not united;
not yet imbued with the suchness of themselves.

I can page forward through the calendar,
but I wont find any answers there, just more indifferent time.
A day is just a placeholder for something bigger,
even if it’s the day I’m on right now.

I can make pie after pie,
but I cannot resurrect fresh cherries from the cooked whole.
Its not that I’m cooked or uncooked,
its that I may be cooking.

---

in point of fact, i am not.
i waited to post this until i knew for sure.

Idle
the distant but grinding crash of a wave on a beach

the skurl and scar of chisel against wood

beginnings are so easy:
you take the edge between both hands,
you hope that by the time you come to the end,
that you got your line straight.

examine these ragged ends,
these loose fibers and filaments:
they form an alien landscape
hills and valleys; a distant horizon.

consider:
is that not, more or less, half?
and gently, so gently, i pull again.

a second's sound bite of a rocket launching from canaveral

the deep churning of ancient engines through water

destruction and hope -
half, fourth, eighth, sixteenth.
sooner or later i'll have confetti.
what will i celebrate?
each moment, each action is shorter than the last.

a thirty-second and now the whole is smaller than the palm of my hand.
what once was larger than my own head,
at sixty-fourths is too thick to go all at once.

rending is not always such an exact business.
i guess that these are more or less rectangles -
along the line of best fit all things may be made more exact.

i have destroyed a page,
i may yet destroy the world.

---

hey look, new poetry.
this, and all the ones for October that follow, are parts of pages i resurrected recently.
stuff i scribbled but found no use for.
i'm putting it up in the hopes of reigniting a spark.

Untitled 3
If i had a gun,
with sixty silver wishes,
i would spend them all on this.
the certainty would deafen the world.

we would all know that secret.

---

this, and all the ones for October that follow, are parts of pages i resurrected recently.
stuff i scribbled but found no use for.
i'm putting it up in the hopes of reigniting a spark.

Fording
my toes part the grass
the dew and grit
and the cool slickness
the tickling of bending blades against my arches and ankels
the steady thrum of cicadas and crickets

pervasive

noise against my ear drums, drowning,
my ears ring with the rush of the blood in my veins,
the pounding rythm of my stride,
the overarching crash and rasp
of lung and heart.

i reach the stream.
i feel the pull and suck of mud,
thick and oozing between my toes,
and i step into the water and feel my feet go numb with cold
the water acting like a cool silver sock.

i wade in further, up to my knees
and splash through to the other side.
transgressing.

down by the river where its warm and green
down by the cool cool river
i would have been a pair of ragged claws;
i would have been slender legs slung deep in mud;
i would have been a slick and leathery pipe organ.

in the joy and noise and tumult of a summer night

---

this, and all the ones for October that follow, are parts of pages i resurrected recently.
stuff i scribbled but found no use for.
i'm putting it up in the hopes of reigniting a spark.

Bone Digger
deep down
beneath the leaves and soil
through clay and rock
a muted kaleidoscope made of browns and grays and blacks

deep down
you know
beyond the roots
beyond where up means air
all things are pressure and time

grind against me

bury these moments in layers
calcify

you, with your pick and shovel
i'll fight you tooth and nail

---

this, and all the ones for October that follow, are parts of pages i resurrected recently.
stuff i scribbled but found no use for.
i'm putting it up in the hopes of reigniting a spark.

Drowning
Not much fits at the bottom of a glass.
A world full of portholes.
It's like only ever seeing yourself from the waist up in a mirror,
reflections are all smooth and blurry lying bastards,
but then you go and find a full length mirror
so there's nothing to hide behind.
I couldn’t identify who that was if I had all night and pile of flashcards.

Light gets sharp, brightness cuts and shatters.
Squint.
Peering into a mug
the world is a vibrating haze of pilsner and lager.
Through the glass you could say everything you always wanted to say
Being here is like forgetting to breathe.
You ask yourself how hard can it be, I almost never think about it
Should be easy to forget the things you never think about
Like the rest of the soft-edged person frowning into the mirror;
the rest of the person not enveloped in currents of stout and pale.
It’s the portions you never let yourself think about
Always there – they are the hardest thing to forget.

Tidal Breath

I look through slots -
chubby, overexposed rectangles of green and yellow
lead up to angles of blue matted with white.
Increase the saturation - small spots flash and sparkle
and back in the grayscale dimness I ponder:

What if our ceilings were floors?
What if you had to actively climb into rooms?
Would the passing of our lives hold more meaning
if our light came from below, not above?

I spend fifths of a minute, indefinitely, just tracing
the dry rot of mini-blinds and household mold -
those sporangia look like trees to me;
deep within the canyons of these cracks.

Suddenly,
the high tide and low tide compresses a sigh;
I shut the blinds.

with acknowledgements to Stephenson's Cryptonomicon

What Keeps Me Up At Night

The soft pressure of your hands in my hands.
My pulse quickens as if I am running as fast as I can towards the horizon.
My thoughts flash to the shoots of bulbs pushing through soil,
Vines climbing up against the sky,
Bright green buds emerging from the bough.
You seem a long way off, my heart is pounding.
The entire world seems bright and sharp.
I wonder if my pupils are pinpricks in a sea of hazel and gray.
And I lean towards you, for I am certain no words could bridge this distance.
My hands within your hands,
As if my every ridge and whorl is interlacing with your every arch and curl.
Your hands are warm and i feel a steady pulse push back at me from your wrists.
As I focus the edges crumple grey and foggy.
My teeth seem to be vibrating in their sockets,
I have had three cups of coffee and nineteen cigarettes.
I have had half a bottle of Benzedrine.
I have been strapped to the nose of a V-1 rocket.
I lean towards you, my lungs might burst from the exertion.
Your hands in my hands,
And closer now, still closer,
the flecks of gold in your green irises are stones among the lilies in this country,
your pupils are the clear stratosphere of a chill October night,
the light around us casts alien constellations against those impenetrable concavities.

Your mouth is smooth like fresh fallen leaves,
I am interred in the wet warm reality of tongue and teeth.
Your lips crinkle as lush grass under my feet as I come running back
And I feel as though I have been swallowed whole into the vastness of space.

"where are you going? where do you go? are you looking for answers to questions under the stars?" --Dave Matthews

The man in black fled across the desert and the gunslinger followed. --Stephen King

I Am My Own Map
I never held my breath.
My faith was strong, like stepping
out into sunlight.
And I always just knew.
So, when I see the endless blue sky, cloudless stretching
over rolling waving rustling wheat fields
the wind of my memory moaning to itself
about the end of summer - the crisp moment of fall -
I know that each breath is my own
an unconscious exhale reaching into oblivion.
And I know when it is time to go.
You are my laughingweeping ache
- my perfect acceptance of truth -
my moment when my sight is as clear and cloudless as the sky above me
and when i wish now
when i inhale and squint out into the world
it is to ask not what road i have taken
but, where do these woods go and how far are those mountains?

Along the river bank,
against the Gothic backdrop of church spires and great stone bridges
the artists and the farmers sell their wares.

I stroll amid the clusters of well-dressed locals and tourists:
past women with small woven baskets filled with the makings of dinner,
past young lovers who walk with locked hands,
their heads bent in the private susurrous of gossip shared,
past the jumble of workers seeking sustenance and spectacle.

The early summer day is cool with tiny whispering breezes
pulling scents of cool water, distant oceans, new mown hay -
and the sun seems like an easy and welcome friend playing between the leaves of Poplar trees
glinting off of the steady pace of the river.

I will know it when I see it, I think
as I drink in the heady smell of new bread from a stall I pass by,
the market and the river seem to stretch far into the horizon.

The near palpable flavor of fresh fish rises from another stall
and I pause to admire the rainbow of the scales, the crisp whiteness of the ice,
and the affable patter of the stall owner selling to the crowd.
His jokes about the one that got away are tried but still manage to elicit laughter -
he is glad to be here today, his world is right and true.

I smile, he has teased it from my face like a earnest suitor, and continue walking.
I feel out of time, a star amid planets;
set apart and yet immersed, I am a whole grain lost in the pounded flour.
The people around me could be speaking a hundred different languages,
I feel I would hear only the sine-wave rise and fall of humanity,
their sounds curl around me, I am a stone in the river and they pass me by.

At a soap-maker's stall
jasmine and gardenia hang and flow in the air like kites.
I scent one then the other and more beyond that,
like a flock of birds, I pick one scent out and it is replaced by yet another.

I have felt myself slowly pausing, have felt my legs -my feet-
seem to grow reticent to move on. To root where I stand,
to pull me to the side a tangle of tendrils and vines.
The grass, the patchy cobblestones, the trilling fountains tucked in small garden alcoves
hidden shady patches occupied by benches stone and wood - open and inviting.

Full - all the market is the whole world and I am present to all of it -
known and knowing.
Rich with the time and tempo,
this moment is a storehouse filling with seven times seven years of grain.

I find a stall selling new plums
they shine darkly, their gradations of color
evoking ancient kings and sunsets, death by violent hands and the bleeding force of new life.
I choose the first one my hand lands on.
Paying, I feel as though i have traded a small burden for a great joy.

I continue on, palming the plum from hand to hand. Rolling.
I feel it polish and snag beneath the skin of my thumbs.
My shoes scuff the soft ground beneath me, the ground is going to swallow me one day
and the dust rises languidly as I pass along this path.

my first bite is gentle.
I hear the rip of skin, feel the tear of flesh against my teeth -
the tart tang condensing into smooth swelling sweetness.
The sun shines, I hear a guitar softly tuning up ahead.

---

I am now only one week behind. this poem-story is based off of the chosen theme:

"And he was rich-- yes, richer than a king--"
from Richard Cory by Edwin Arlington Robinson

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