Absence and Dreams, Roots and Branches (poem)
(these poems are just drafts, but in some nether-space of feeling they are both complete and incomplete)
Absence and Dreams, Roots and Branches
Here’s a chalice.
I’m in Dixie.
Alchemy
is much scarier
than “alchemists”
say. It doesn’t
ever happen.
Electrical cords
happen.
A screen-saver
comes over
the eyes: clouds
mangy cover the
mountains. They
are so reasonable.
Thieves also
go on vacation,
but they don’t –
they just
don’t — see you
coming. And
giving. I’ve doused
the brochure on the
American anchoress
in a hotel sink.
And the little soaps
won’t wash out… Some
where in a door’s
county a lye
archon is baptized.
Here all buildings that
matter are white.
A brook
solves silently.
The book will
often be written
upside-down,
struckthrough, carried
off by
powerlines. Clear-cut
forests will become
growth and utter pythons
in the wilderness
of math. (A rail +
a rail + dogwood)
At the x-roads unknowing,
I eat my
breakfast: congregation and
dropsy, kneeled to
the bone, shovel-
ready. The persimmons
in the parking
lot scrawl: Bus
your own cups,
then again.
