The Man and The Dog

I saw a man
and then I heard this dog.

The sounds were coming from somewhere around me,
it was early in the day.

The dog was howling
as if in great pain. It sounded like someone was taking him away
to be beaten or tortured

or killed, and this man lumbered up the hill, dog at his side;
this was the dog to me. This was the man.

But then I saw this dog, whose sounds were coming from
everywhere in the morning,

and, oh, it was not
the dog but the man whose bark I heard, whose howl,
and everything was calm in my mind.

Time swayed together, this dog was old
as was his man, and they went up the hill together,
lumbered up the hill.

The holy
leaves were the ones who howled, and it was this
voice reminded me of that man I knew lumbering up the hill toward

the easy sun, who welcomes
the dog’s
face.

Breakfast With The Lovers of Life

The breakfast becomes everything there is to know,
the smiling egg balanced and
quivering under the minds that are collective,
six of them in all and totaling
any number of years.
There is knowledge in putting food in mouths, lipstick
on lips, dye in hair,
the mustaches and glasses of orange juice are coming through some thick cloud,
they were at the window,
and they talked while they waited.

Some thought of it as waiting
but I saw, they thought waiting was called
laughing, laughing at the small
bird they found in the complex tree, and sitting there
in chairs
it was a miraculous breakfast,
chairs facing one another on a day called themselves.
They had become day, and they had become the complex bird.

Death In Review

The sun
slithers away behind the old house,
and the house isn’t there anymore,
it was gone last year.

Inside
the man sleeps and the
cat crawls over him in a great movement of death
as he is close,
as the house
had somehow found itself here
in this remote locus.

Why is no one else here?
the man thought.

What happened to me?
How will I explain this to my wife, that I
ended up here, in this house
all by myself?

gray

and my mother
called me squaw-boy
and my thoughts drained
like hanged flowers.

she is lost in the horse field
walking with the herd of
cremated beings,
huge in their chains
and their death,

chips in
buckets.

flies gather
round and
cover them.

it is almost gone now
under there.
it is all
just about
gone.

Cold Stew

Cold beef stew
makes the dead sting
more
on a
cold day.

Above,

flags shiver
like flies in web.

The garden is in remission
cancer
lives.

Winter

The beautiful gray bones show up erected in the cabinet
shaped like a house.

I think of the heart
within my own chest and
why is it still beating?

The fallen out hair of your dead relatives cannot help
but pass its way across the floor at odd times
of the night,

starting arguments, passing
out party favors, making sure you
remember them.