Blue tiger embossed with golden trumpets
a child's legend never spoken by adult lips
Cicada shells, emptied of song, line the limbs of elms
the faint music of dancing among mulberries
Orb-weaver—black and gold; all legs, all body—
its self-portrait webbed between hollyhocks
Planks laid down over mud to keep feet clean
the varnished decking of a three-masted ship
Deep in the night sky, clouds thicken in moonlight
the wind plows the shadows of the cherry trees
Body made of flower petals, she dances in the sun
she dances across the spider's web, she dances home
kundalini movie—strips of image fluttering
through awareness like an orgasm of endless color
chakra-chain of swirling spheres: a rain of petals
submerging Buddha's silence, his smile, the ancient tree
so many voices! so many faces! distort the body,
tie its tubes into moebius knots suffused with blue
birth canal opening in a country room beneath
a staircase of hearts where children play invisible games
unfulfilled dreams, released, bounce like foil balloons
against the ceiling, their dangling strings tangled in shadows
a slap on the soul! subtle eyes open into daylight,
into the shimmering violet shed by a thousand vivid petals
For a young man, who died by his own hand, July 3, 1993, at the time of the great Mississippi flood
The seed planted thirty years ago uproots itself
in an apartment empty of all but objects.
Heavy earth parts before the river's wet insistent flow,
clouds regather, lightning rattles below the stars.
Midnight darkness opens for the telephone voice,
through the ear's reluctant gate sorrow pours.
The hole in the carpet where the body lay,
the hole in the body where another person vanished.
"God brought this flood," a woman says,
"because he doesn't like riverboat gambling"—
as though the deer crushed in the torrent
dealt the bright, condemning cards.
What darkens will grow light again,
what lightens will fade as ever to dark.
The bereaved mother seeks clues in a son's possessions,
aches to hear his voice from a friend's mouth.
The laws of moving fluids guide many waters
into the private spaces of all our lives.
Chemistry, physics, mechanics conspire
to drive a lead slug into our hearts.
Each swift lightning bolt sounds a note
for the song survivors sing in their pain—
"Split the wood and find me," the savior said.
When your heart splits, whose face shines in the grain?
atoms endlessly pour from Democritus's hands
swerving in their flow to avoid vortices of pain
"and if all the words of their sorrow and pain
were written, the world could not hold them"
the tin disk on top of the globe, half black, half white
marked with time zones, has rusted into one place
". . . it's good the world has so many people—there's always
someone to blame, someone to hate, someone to kill"
Marx's beard blazed—fire, light, smoke—now it smolders
in this damp corner ending a century, ending a millennium
Night and Day flash without pause from Earth's ancient turning;
human blood still muddies the dirt of the bottomline
Next poem in the Contraries loop
Women processing elegantly through a wood
woven with lamplight, clothed in shadowy brocade
Patterns of shadow and darker shadow define the spaces
where small mammals nest, hiding their bones from the moon
Soft shoes shaped to shapely feet, tall headdresses
fraught with pearls and precious threads, silks in hidden places
Along the sinuous path, each limb, each twig wears
cloth of light and dark, trembling where breezes pluck the seams
Patiently the needle passes through the surface, leaving
each time a trace of color, lines of light that spell the world
Velvet hems brush the path before and after feet that
dance as they walk through a darkness gravid with dawn
Gino can't be seen in this wood, unless that is his shadow
falling across the path, its darkness lifted by every light step.
Next poem in the Otherness loop
This broken thread cannot stitch together the torn fabric
of my heart—through that rent pour all things, wet and dry, hot and
cold.
The stick of unsullied incense burns down, becoming ash and smoke,
the fallen coils of ash taking the shape of threads snipped from flame.
The moon's roundness in the jagged sky grows less, its powder seas
lie still in the storm of light our sole star inflicts upon them.
The heart's knot will not be undone by a single sword slash,
the Master's jesting riddle not answered with yet another witty quip.
Let all self-pity, all urgency to sustain the glory of "I,"
be ended, return them to the sewing basket among faded snippets.
The threads combine their strengths by winding around each other,
each separate thread losing its length in the expanse of supple cloth.
Gino, what do you know of needlecraft or the strengths of thread?
Your fingers are too blunt to undo the knots tied by your tangled life.
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