love by the river in springtime is a perilous thing
the sky is bruised
with purpled patches,
gauze of white cotton
cloud strewn unsteadily
across the southern horizon.
many have come
with their beach chairs
and their expensive long lenses
to watch the herons
chase each other round
the naked winter nests
in the farthest branches.
i watch them watching
from the pipe bridge over
pregnant waters, the little islands
sunk beneath the brown and the rushing,
tree roots emerging from the current like
strange seabirds that reach
for the sky. from the squawk
on the other side of the river,
i know the herons aren’t
in the trees. they’ve found higher
ground among the shallows and
play their love games, as we do,
amid the rocks and the shadow.
brief empirical note on rigid body dynamics
The refraction of one-way windows
into remorseless blue-
puddle pasts full
of breaking
glass and sad Sunday
mornings angles
incidentally with the co-
efficient of sweet f(r)iction that
beads sweat on rivergrass
in December sunlight.
(Their shattering is
a thing beyond
the imperfect forces that pull
bodies & universes
together.)
Re-Drawing a Portrait Once Painted on Plywood
A lone housefly myopically crawls
up pale-peeling kitchen walls, entropy
in quotidian microcosms that
screams of a stiletto- hardness
tattooed in both prismic eyes. It
belays the soundful softness
of rounded thighs and arms
of the woman at the table,
the smoke of her solitary
cigarette winding like
lust toward the fluorescence
overhead. There is sex
in this as in everything.
Even death. An unwinding
of flesh into the universe
that birthed it, entropy
again. Or perhaps simply
childhood timelines
tangled with tangential
tomorrows and the
exorcism-autopsy
of memory, a stillframe
of this solitary instant, yellow
and blue, aborted phosphorescent
remembering.
quarter past two
An owl-
eyed moon hangs
low like overripe fruit,
menacing the hot
horizon with her glowy
berth. Sweat
beads on the skin
of rooftops, perspiring
night-dreams of a dirt-nailed
city bent on creating
itself. The river drowses uneasily.
It smells
like jungle, and sex.
There is good mud here, and this
is no time for sleeping indoors.
Wild things
etch their names into wet
downtown cement, pile
old bricks into hillforts
from which they fling love
songs at one another
and think slyly of revolution.
Laughing, we
shake the moondust
out of wind-blown hair
and run to catch
the current,
kiss the river
goodnight.
