The moon drops behind a stone field.
The dark listens.
Pearl is the cricket and the banded street—
where disturbed grass quickens.
Night dews thresh cribbed springs.
A mild organ has started up.
And I, I think of the mild good times:
erased in department stores,
sitting besides a blank figure, starving
under a painting of longshoremen. Some
hold memory playing cards while others don’t.
Our words spoil the sprinkled weeds,
high and curling in the corded night.
Meanwhile, you slumber in the moon,
or whatever’s left of it, filibustering
among the spread wings of lazy stars.
What was our job? Oh, right.
Clean the dreaming warehouse.
Arrest ambition, score the aptitude
of others, figuring destiny out of women.
One lingers alone in the bottle-shaped alcove
Another stacks arms and caulliflower boxes
on rafters with leisure photographs.
And still
timidity comes from months to twenty-four years
one day. Or so the adage goes.
As in a Carpathian tableaux of sisters,
of light shed within a concealed storm,
but the message is to embrace the blossoming obstacle.
So I wait here, examining merits, fiddling with a sublime corsage
when not skulking, nor noticing the irrigation of old bicycles.
Like any talk, the mood must be around the message
to properly convey itself: a sentience of airy praise.
There is reserve for the sun now. Be still.
The thick wind will jerk free form the ward of our talk.
Look at what happens without much walking.
It’s extraordinary. It is extraordinary.
MAY 2008