Memento Mori

I found the image in the attic,

In the half-light blurred, static,

Like a votive, intensely vatic.

In a shadow box, five white stones

All shaped like finger bones

Arranged in a question mark,

A gesture beckoning a dark

Something beyond conceiving

Into the emptiness of believing.

I took it and nailed it to a wall

Downstairs, only to watch it fall,

Its glass crack, the stones scatter.

I think they no longer matter,

But I’m wrong. I see them still,

Years later. They won’t, and will.

They're like ghosts no ghost can kill.

Opposition

At the point of the intersection

between the theoretical line

and point, there’s a dimension,

not of space, nor of time

(those have been imagined

more thoroughly than I’m

imagined by myself), but of sin.

Not the brand to trouble God,

this sin is words that begin

without being misunderstood

(because the speaker winks!)

and conclude that bad is good.

I think the pine trees think

in theorems, plane geometry;

their sap is magnetic ink,

and the splash of red I see

in rose, cardinal and Mars,

is blood escaped from my body --

as if I had come from a star

to civilize this wilderness.

The beach is the registrar

of every grain of sand. Mass

is energy’s conscience

and confessor. The soul is a gas.

Yet, right angles, in defiance

of the circle’s perfection,

assume the world, and science

escapes reality’s detection.

Violence in Peacetime

How orderly the mowers sound,

blades mincing, round and round,

the tender blades of grass.

I hear the boots of killers pass

beneath my curtained window —

look out to know where they go.

Curse

Can a country be under a curse, 

A few words of malignant verse

Chanted inside a racing hearse?

To hell with superstition!

A man, cults, and institutions

Have turned our nation sour.

The Mind has forgotten the hour

Can grow late

Growing hate,

Like an ocean filling with plastic

Leaving life crippled and spastic.

The curse is proliferating thought

That the future can be bought

And as quickly taken away —

Only the loudest given a say.

Will the worst curse have its day?

The Death of Galileo

Galileo is gone and forgotten.

The earth is again as flat as a coin

Around which the sun is quickly slowing,

Nourishing all that is raw and rotten.

A feather falls faster than a lead ball.

Beelzebub erases your recall.

The bald liar is our new scientist;

There is no proven fact he cannot twist.

Poor Galileo was forced to recant:

Today we have the canting sycophant.

Hence it’s obvious that the earth must cool;

To think differently proves one a fool.

I’ve seen a bald eagle flying backward.

A plague of fat rats invades my front yard.

Haiku, 2/3/26

A walk in deep snow —

Think of nothing but troubles —

Rabbit tracks just stop

LIGHT

A beam of light cutting the skin of space

travels at the speed of time to the beginning,

the end of things, seeing everything between,

without being seen.

Or a single photon released into a sphere

lined with silver, instantaneously covering

all of space, repeating that cold cycle endlessly,

as if someone might see.

It is a discrete miracle, like a man’s soul,

a point on a continuum proliferating one day

to saturate the universe with something better

than gas, heat, matter. 

It is moonlight, the boxes sketched on the floor

at two thirty three in the morning, a lighter 

shade of light. Watch it turn the earth.

It is promiscuous,

infecting its neighbors, or looking to.

It stretches across the sky like an eyelid

and proliferates color like a drug dream.

It splits the prism

into living spectra, dulls the magnifying glass,

blanches the dead leaf, burns the cloud white; 

it is nothing at all—until it strikes something.

Holy Blood

Here is Purgatory too: vines and flowers
Extend from a woman's neck, but her legs wander
Away beneath a shower of black holy blood.
A chemo spirit struts, though she's lost her powers
To console or restore the faith others squander,
Lost all but her rage to escape the coming flood.
Little live hands reach through the clouds yearning to touch
What they can't comprehend, like the Klein-bottle-brained
Devil with the tied shoestring eyes, who knows too much.
He is no god, this clown, though he has often reigned.

DONkey Wrong

The old Donkey, at his prayers,

Ignores his betters, those brayers.

His missal is the alphabet,

Which he hasn’t quite mastered yet.

His teachers wield a paddle of wood

That stings him like gold donkey flies

When he don’t learn his lessons good,

Like mistaking his “Green” for “Ice.”

“Shouldn’t the pupil know more?”

We wonder, “perhaps he’s an Ass?”

His brothers honk a mocking snore

And let a mephitic cloud pass.

The pupil thinks, They will be damned,

But first I need my cranium crammed.

The Truth Well

Both the Truth and the liars are hidden

And will not come forth to speak unbidden

By necessity’s will or convenience,

Unless called for by fakery of sense.

At the bottom of a stinking dry well —

Half way, the easy half, from here to Hell —

Where nakedness — dear Truth — shivers and sighs —

Will Emptiness stitch golden clothes of lies.

He emerges to strut in his glory.

Every sentence he spouts is a story.

The Truth, her bruised body cleansed at least,

Climbs out to the reception of a beast.

They beat and rape her, drag her by her hair,

Throw her back into the well, her dark lair.

The Murderer

 The job is done, the murder weapon stashed;

A beautiful young woman bashed and slashed.

The killer and his partners listen intently,

Moved to inaction by a simple song

A woman sings with soft intensity,

As if her passion could efface a wrong

Perpetrated with mountainous cruelty.

Will speechless bystanders be sufficient

To subdue the heartless secret agent?

The song is over, yet they hesitate.

Three observers, representing the State,

All alike, unblinkingly accuse us

Of the action's unconscionable causes.

There is much more for us to do than wait.

The Reversal of There

I rarely walk beyond that tree

That is home to birds —

And air — too close

To the undermined

Riverbank.

I’ve tried holding

The tree — hands uncertain—

Taking a step —only one —

A test of courage —

A test of foolishness.

Even at flood height 

The water invites —

And seems — at times —

To flow in reverse — back

Up between its banks —

I follow from here.