Behind the Discount City

Pelucid, limpid, scarified
in tinsel flitch,
a drove of damsel flies
roves the standing ditch

glancing the bamboo grove
backing two dumpsters.
Eye-blinks, illusional
crossroads, they suspend

their wonky compass needles
suggesting that everywhere
is where I’ll find You
true. My retina scarifies,

tries to hold them steady—
their cross-stitched beats, their unholy filigree.

Woods in Snow

Stints of typeface,
serif thickets erased,

low on pages shadowed the punk
blue of a shaved skull.

I’m truant in them, missing
since spring

in phrases androgynous,
anthroposcenic, percussive

as the soft pock
of snow on snow,

the inverted echoings
of claustral owls.

In glimpses medieval, Bruegelian,
nothing’s moving

but the alien quiver
in a crow’s eye, curve

of iris, that arrow-connive,
to suggest I’m alive.

Ferns

I’m low as this contracted patch
of weeds the deer won’t eat, thatch

shingled with wind-blown magnolia leaves,
clenched welter of mulch & ground ivy.

Ragged shawls of vulture shadow
scribble the garden’s fringe of snow,

but nothing’s here, the old dog
who last summer lay inertly rogue,

dozing in arthritic dotage on the lawn
now asleep beneath it. Yet these latent claws

will, out of dread & neglect, uncurl, flense,
and rise above the dross, coiled, tense,

spiraling silver seahorses, wee tricksters,
first thumb-, then hand-sized, anoxic,

prehistoric, they’ll stalk, little bishops
whose croziers once reached the heights—

in ancient swamps—of oaks, maples, sycamores,
as monasteries of the mind unfurl, heartsore.

So Much Limbo This Summer

Like the stone starlings of a sunken pier
these ladders leant along the storm-
stripped wall a year now with no repair
only appear to support this stalled

& wounded house. Does ice
remember water, or, rather, water
ice? To think in any way that suffices
about suspension, neglect, delay: is it for

the sake of words? How else mime
this space inside my head,
pothole unfilled, jailed by forgotten rime
along a doldrum driveway in & out

of nowhere, the magnolias dropping leaves,
the kudzu a line of limp but rampant laundry.