Returning

This river runs over concrete.
the land never knows where its water is till
the forgiving sea claims its daughter.
until then,
like a creature trapped under ice,
the land feels for it,
a pressure,
a weight of birds and trash
won at dawn or dusk
when sun like a magic trick turns
dark water to mirror, slick and broken
with floating objects.

This river is a city river, breathing death in
regretfully--
still, when it floods the egrets come.
tall, princely things with
awkward legs they keep a secret
until moving, when they extricate each toe by toe
slowly disdaining everything.
and at sunsets the sandpipers come
shadow puppets filling the emptiness
of the concrete slopes, horribly
whole and permanent.
and always the small birds come
and go, taking sewage fibers home
in their beaks to craft a homely nest, and
the fetid algae sinks quietly into itself, and becomes
limp hands.

In My Hands

In my hands napkins become wretched things
Clenched thoughtlessly into balls, worn into shreds
In my hands pens that click
Become disasters, while important papers become ragged;
Gnawed.
Wet glasses sing, and candle wax
always cools in the shape of my slightly burned fingers.
In my restless hands, whole things
Are made part.
In a prison cell I might scrape the iron bars with ever-sharper nails
And when I had made a feasible escape
Sit there dumbly. Worrying
The thin blanket between my hands.
A contiguous rosary.

These hands are lost
being hands.
They were meant to be hummingbirds or other
Winged things.
That could fight air when troubled
(instead of each other.)

And so I write, and the hummingbirds
Settle into silence.

Canada Trees Understand

Black-eyes birches on my mind when
Everyone else on this plane is sleeping
For forty rows they are passed out.
Embarrassing, drunken, wilted; their mouths
Dark chasms
Like my birch's slow doe eyes
The white skin around them peeling, molting.
The deep tissue color showing through
Matching the scab I got from wrestling a friend
In an inflatable obstacle course
Inflatable carnival bright colors sweating cotton candy--
Later, the boy from Connecticut told me he couldn't
Inflatable joust me because he was a pacifist
And I thought, I could be a pacifist
But I couldn't because
When my eyes gleam dark knots
And the white lines sing
Of being in boxes
I reach out a fist, not a branch.
And i punch and hit because my hand will hurt
And since it hurts both
It hurts none.
Something for nothing is magic.
I am itching, I am peeling,
I am broken but still growing.

Growing Pains

It's the manic way I hug pillows to my chest when I
Can't stop laughing.
The dense ache in my legs.
I can't sleep.
No one sleeps.
I close my eyes and let them ache

The Sandman

Left brain right brain bridge of your nose

Here comes the sandman
Left brain right brain you make me insane.

Here comes the sandman

Just past the bridge of your nose there are
Clouded faces swimming in your memories

Walking so softly

Into your spinal cavities pulsating womblike thinking
Not of nothing, floating tree rings static tv screen
Fractured shards of the house plant you dropped, cutting
Your hand on the pieces of the universes you glimpsed in the
Deadlands before sleep.
Sunspots and blurs, your groggy and throbbing thunder, the
Music of your eyes.

I am an egg I am a curled up shark waiting for life in
Its hard and twisted purse
I sense nothing. Only this.

only you when you blacked out and imagined
Birds in a sandstorm.

Creeping along in the tips of his toes

And he sprinkles his sand

With his own little hand

In the eyes of sleeping children

Go to sleep my little one

Go to sleep my dear

Promises

Somehow the edge of land seems more like the edge when you're 100
Feet up on a cliff
Somehow promises seem more breakable
The idea of them fragile and thin. Watching
Elephant seals move on land makes me think of
Teenagers, even their amphibian names
Even their noses as they rear up
Crash into each other and in the moment
Before the collision the way their necks twine is
Religious but they crash and fall into the ocean
And in the splash I can almost feel
The energy it takes to rear up again but they will
Not like a choice but like a chemical flight controller
The one adults never acknowledge when they ask awkward
Unanswerable questions like
But what were you thinking?

The Elephants leave the sea and the seals crawl onto land.
They rest. They molt.
When they rise from the deep they bring it with them in sound
Like the fresh on summer nights with the windows down
A deep and ripping rumble.
In the sea they swim alone but on land they need the solid weight
Of others to dream that they are underwater once again
Hunting for life.
They wake each other but it's only to check that the
social order is unchanged
Only to compare nose lengths
To stretch mouths red open slowing gloamy teeth and make that sound again.
Promises are impossible. This
Is the real edge and all others appear edgy but go on for secret ages.
I promise to be stupid forever.
I promise to never move till fall and only wake you up to yawn
Fearsomely.
I promise to never change the fact that I am changing all the time.

Poem 2

We drank this city down on foot.
Chasing bridges with colder drinks
Brown bread single-file marionetting
Past every window on Lombard St
And if the Palace of Fine Arts has survived the fires
The earthquakes
The tourists
Then maybe it would have fallen if we hadn't
Loped in throats open eyes up everywhere every filigreed surface
Our substitute for redwoods
These things lift us up.
We talk big here words that burst speech bubbles
Generalizations about this our generation
Madcap comedians, scientists, mourners we become in
Five days, each a line on the staff paper, the Richter register
Where the notes fall into patterns
Trace out routes we wear into sidewalks
(page turn)
Treble clef for sunny days. Minor keys for mist.
We'll hear this music in days months years
After it is sung felt eaten lived chewed because
We're light on our feet and
Not even sound catches up
And now we are fighting with river rocks now we
Read serious things and smile for the understanding
Smelling of gasoline, mesquite sweet and skunky.