The Emperor’s Tapestry

He tasted no languages on his tongue,
              just sand.
                              He had a certain amount of hopelessness

hanging over his eyes
              like a tapestry of white roses.
                              He slept, and dreaming created

cities of echoing clay.
              He listened well, he didn’t ask questions,
                              he beheaded his teachers.

He had a few desperate books he was reading,
              a few wine-stained poems—
                              the swan’s icy fluting could rise

in his window like the sun.
              He knew when new birds stirred the pond
                              to live, to eat,

or merely ignite the water and fly on.

From: The Wine-Dark House
Blue Light Press, 2009.

Life Documented
 
but not the life lived. Near exhaustion, but 
what have I done? On a whim I take a shovel 
to the yard and dig. Neighbors splay their blinds to watch me. 
What is down there? I find coins and a bunch of bones. 
I find an old telephone and an iron and a hit pipe some 
teenager must have chucked in a panic. I find old blue 
and brown medicine bottles, a cameo ring of a girl 
with a garland in her hair. There are large rusted needles 
and nails and hinges from cabinets. 
There are porcelain knobs and shards of crockery. 
There is the barrel and cylinder of an old pistol-- 
knife blades and tarnished silver spoons. 
I dig until the moonlight fails me and I can see nothing 
forever. Then I sit down on the edge
of what I am and let the wind sing in my mouth.

Notebook

The thin blue lines
upon which the words
perch—each letter
a bird on a power line.
Feed them. Spread
the sunflower  and cracked
corn and millet upon
the ground. Watch
each letter be called
to you by hunger.
Hear their undisciplined
singing.
Be lost, and if you
drop bread crumbs
as you fall into the
darkness of the tall trees,
watch them be consumed
by such scarlet measures
and intervals of blue.

From: The Wine-Dark House
Blue Light Press, 2009.