the intricate work of live

oak trees in sunlight, one

hard-edged shade after another,

Wednesday morning—it’s

Miles again, this time

in Texas, the Gulf clouds

for Garin and Shadla

I dreamed I saw

Ray Brown last night,

the fingers of his right

it is two a.m. mewling

son cribbed next to mama

three older brothers

Well, here it is, the Oscar race has started

and there isn’t a single movie

I’m dying to see.

For years now, we’ve been crisscrossing

this same largesse of valley.

It has provided for us, plenty. You’ve been

my homoerotic sidekick, Bryan.

Excuse me. Ryan. There. You see?

There was a better couch

in his convertible couch. He revealed it

the day a fly kept flying into my face.

It was trying to commit suicide, he explained.

The better couch had a better couch

The moon gets a glass of milk

before sleep. A PBJ

for the woods I own according to the state

but not the Navajo. When these offerings

are gone in the morning, ants

Lovers who say “you are everything to me”
aren’t thinking puss electroshock you are
caravan puss electroshock deaf dog
contrail the orange November leaves
of pear trees instant butterscotch

The Archaeology of Archangels

This is the first in a series of stanzas that

Ordinarily would be sleeping if we (the

Archangels) hadn’t woken up in swimsuits.

I bent coins with my teeth, and they broke. That’s what currency can’t reconcile, green stacks and time, its escapements, the gleaming plates, the missing letter. A bicycle comes down from the attic in time but in time for what? Love spun in the mouth?

You are sprung from the angle of inner event

and rise through the hydraulics of ventricles

like a birdcall in a storm drain

Ahead of the vegetable cart a horse drops

a hoof on paving stones, the clop equivalent

to a gunshot and a hooker

in Prospect Heights in the guise

of a Civil War widow has a heart attack.

In the equinoctial bargain

between dark and light late

in the day she pauses

and, sitting on him,

listens to the storm

“The news from everywhere’s a gone bad deal

And the Priestess of the Dreams says

It ain’t kabuki Babe, they’re losing it for real…”

Here in Finland they say Yatkuu Yatkuu

Keep on Truckin’

Yatkuu Yatkuu whatcha gonna do…

The news from everywhere is weird to bad

Yatkuu Yatkuu whatcha gonna do…

Light hesitates to fix, to position itself

between night’s huge twin mammaries

spewing their milk across our universe

and crusts and ridges of our desert roads.

The sodium streetlights down the avenue

Were vague globes where the dark turned orange,

And the orange dark. The avenue deserted,

The buildings all abandoned, or soon to be,

I drove, I can’t remember where, or when,

“I suffer from vertigo”

— Vincent Van Gogh, 1888

I recognize the look: neck tucked and still,

shoulders hunched, back rounded into a shell,

and the eyes held level as the world swirls

I came across a house inside out.

I walked through all the walls of the rooms.

In bed, I found a black-bearded man

with jasper eyes, his neck in a noose.