Observations

The sky
has
two suns in it.

One is the reflection of the other.
One of the suns is
me,
I am that sun.

I speak of godlessness
because I am godless.

No,
I am not godless;
I am god and I am
happy as he.

Happy and
godless
as the lion’s bloody face,
the saguaro that does not
move or shiver,
just stands there
in the night
as the stars
circle
him.

The Octopus

Was an inventor in heaven.
He invented many things,
his own birth
one of them for instance,
crawling and scrawling out
this shape on the wall
in the theater of the sea.

And he invented colors and he invented writing.

Yes, I knew it was you—
only your bulbous brain has enfolded
so completely to imagine this gibberish,
octopus, whose
limbs are the alphabet
camouflaging into nothing.

The Huge Shadows of Hands

It’s a grotesque
and bloody
movement they
dance into the room.

Dressed like old women
in nightgowns
they take turns
reminding us that ghosts
are waiting
in the living room
for us;

all we’ve got to do is
go on in the living room
and talk to the ghosts.

Some New Season

It arrives flaming
on the back of a crocodile

floating dead
down the Ganges.

We all work to pull it through,
pull it happily to the edges of our toes.

It is cooled when it comes up
and the mud, too, is cool.

How has it cooled in that time?
Some aspects have been removed.

The crocodile’s throat is stuffed
with weeds and muck. Her eyes
are still,

and someone set her on fire for us
and sent her down the river.

Yes, that’s what it’s like.

Magic Outside of the Drugstore

There was a man standing underneath a tree.
I don’t know what kind of tree it was. It was
planted in the sidewalk and he was standing there
underneath it, staring at it.

He had a white beard and long white hair that
curled around the backs of his
overgrown ears.

He also had a suitcase
and eyes that seemed to shine like
stones out
from all that water
of hair.

He kept standing there, staring,
so that you knew he was making something happen.

It would just take a while:

Eventually, he would move
closer to that tree
and the tree would move closer to him,
and they would float together
after a number of years and
form one thing, and you’d just see the tree
standing there, or maybe the
white ends of his hair on the
bark, but no one would know
it was a man in there,
the last ends of a man.

The Neighbor

The old man chopped off
the heads of his flowers
and sanded his teeth
as was customary each morning,
then locked his lock twice
before passing me.

He smelled
of ham and homefries.

Once again
he passed back
as I turned around
to retrieve something I’d forgotten.

Perhaps
he’d forgotten something too.

Perhaps we’d
forgotten the same something. Perhaps
this man was my roommate.
Perhaps he had forgotten me.
Perhaps he was my father,
my father beheading marigolds
or tulips or queen anne’s lace
under the windows,
forgetting something
because he is dead
now, and the dead
don’t have memories.

Anyhow, the door came open
for the second time and as I stood there
he actually seemed surprised to have it come open like that,
as he made a little gesture with
his beautiful old face.