1.

Looming  the dark riddle repeated harbor sky

an episode    gradual

but less than

as if scooped from blue    neither

recollected nor answered     as if a laminate

hovers over the dark riddle     repeated  as

   streams of ordinary difference   & a shelter

breaks into integers of sight      into cusps  into amulets  or

love seeking harbors of intention     holy in aspect     holy in garb

as if this were permeable  and so        allow the leak to soak thru

dark beliefs populated by the ordinary as by the kindness of strangers.

2.

A cold incentive brackets the invading squad.  It’s been an age

since the prerequisites were matched,

since angels ascended into the ever more, drifting

along the lines history mistakenly drew

so none of us can recall what actually happened.

Signal for help. Crickets are elaborating silence

as drones rupture elsewhere. We are never elsewhere.

      Distance shapes itself into trees.

Go elsewhere, said the turbulent clause, go where the present

has vacated the stream, taking its livid toxins along

in the flood. Let the birds fly up and away

into an azure sky’s color of the month,

available in cashmere and silk, all transitional bliss.

Sooner or later you will learn

the message of the proverb and recall  the word for joy

in another’s misfortune, when the dark commons

has seized up its panoply of digits, and no one can

recall a penny.  Something is as something does.

3.

Maybe Krazy glue would help, said the clause.

You could mend the partition.

Try not to inhale. The screen of intention,

moldering in the corner, woven panels frayed.

The flies will be next, iridescent brackish green,

little brutes of the underworld, little assassins.

The mood is not floral, not much sense

of the petty bouquets of spring, the thick scent of lilac.

Please do not refer to these tired nominals,

said the clause, they are no use to us, here in

the never then, never to come, never ever after.

(Image: Ansel Adams’s Aspens, Dawn, Dolores River Canyon, 1937)