Val

I liked Val because he
didn’t say anything. He just
asked me what I wanted done
and I’d respond in whatever fashion
I could muster; a little bit here, shorter
here etc. And then he’d go to work.
First, he’d fold my collar down
and wrap a length of gauze at my throat. Then
he’d pick up his shears and tap them a few
times against the comb.
Val worked fast, even around the ears. I knew
he wouldn’t cut me. He was a pro.
He had a few strange pictures of sickly
adolescents on his stand. One of a woman
I presumed to be his wife. A
cell phone. Cash tips. A magazine clipping
featuring the shop. I liked Val
because he didn’t say anything. Except, when
he was all done, he’d back away and lift his hands
and say: Now you are new again.

Following It

I go to the door, check the lock again.
Poke through the mail.
The city is quiet out there. It sleeps
under blankets of conflict and doubt.
Observe a faint rectangle of light
on the kitchen tile, follow it to its source.
End up this time at the window
watching the half-eaten moon.

The not knowing
of what’s coming is very present;
what can possibly be generated
out of this still air, this block of salt.
What areas can be encircled; what inventions
are even possible.

Dry Wood

Can it either open or close, or both? Does it have hands?
Can it be both large and small, like childhood?
I held it in my mouth like an acorn; the sameness of both sizes.
Hands on a gray rock, a fly, one strip of grass.
Can its waves cross the desk and touch me?
My father glued them in place.
In doing that, he opened it, and he closed it.
His hands occurred and then they died, while
the ocean indifferently watched.
Back to etiquette.
Bow to the forehead of time, seagull, swinging
through the snow like a block on a rope.
The beach turned and regarded its people.
They were invisible and sat cross-legged like monks.
Drank glasses of milk big as Stonehenge.
Why does the brain consent to something so outlandish?
It reiterates nonsense like facts, it kisses doom on the prick.
The forest on the outskirts stands steady as a priest.
Clues in the rainbows of skulls, the prism interred.

Animals

A colossal bird came down
to be
the feeder of the whale. Each
moment passing, some bit of him
breaking off.
Coming loose from my
loose descriptions.
Drawers of silver
spoons and knives.
The bloody composition of
the sun
cooking its own head.
Forbearance. With balloons
tugging at our wrists
like dead tethered
planets
haunting earth…

we
all have plans
to die.

Not just make it there
but
actually do it.

Celebrate with a small
gathering of wilted relatives,
plum pits, music and
the firing of a
pop gun.

Serves you right.

There must have been something
all this time
as life
coagulated at the joints.

As evil men walked through knee-high evil
with pickaxes on their shoulders, and
sunk them into
newly
finished graves, calling out for
their mothers.

Near and far. In a
flatland called Medea. Her name
stitched
on maps. Sirens all night.
And the deep, macabre woof
of a dog

I’ve never seen. He brings
something to me in my sleep. Is it

the bone of my aunt Marnie?
Is it the bone she lost
when
she tumbled off
her bicycle?

The spotted moon limps through
the rotted door.

Entangled and newborn out of the hair of the universe.

That aimless glow-eyed animal
that prowls

the courtyard.

Now It's Nothing

A window.
A Japanese Kimono closed against its
skin--white as apple flesh.
Nothing like a surgeon’s poison.
Nothing like a block of ice; like a salt-lick; like an undertaker’s dream.
Two nothings on top of one nothing.
I am nothing…
Now that’s a nocturnal idea. That idea has no teeth. That idea
is as complicated as a tarantula, with eight eyes
and as many legs, hairy as a dog.
That faint aroma of your mother’s perfume is very real
even though you’re six or seven states away. That’s nothing.
Nothing fleeing nothing.
Losing in a battle of zero.
A murderer’s eye with you in it, like the bloody seed of a tomato.
Your deceased cat come back to life, you swear it.
Your father’s urn crawling out of its grave.

These are characters who cry and we are addicted to their pain.
Their pain is a synonym for our own.

I am quiet as an ocean tonight.

Our brains consent to our deaths,

which is proof that they are indifferent to us.

Voices In The Blue Hills

This is the place for translation.

For making rubbings of
things into other things, other forms.

Where the skull gets translated
as leaf and log, where lists of my gentry
are unraveled
and dispersed like seedpods. Where gravestones

sprout like hens of the forest.

All around me is the unbrushed
hair of years. Bunched, yellowed. This, too,

gets translated

into words and bodies
as I lunch in the abandoned stone house.

Why have I brought these terrible
apples here

to eat alone?

It is with this question that I continue
with my work. Push the softened

blue hills at their rest
to mold with
future’s unloving blueprints.