Cup of Gold

The tracks left behind
are more pristine even
than the blanket white
fallen in the perfect,
by chance, empty column
flanked by ever-greens
as the brightly colored
racers soar, glide down
the awkward angled slope
yet remain in the hinterground
unable to grasp focus
even from the simple frame
of twisted twigs and wire
much less the ancient oaken table
that anchors the floor to here,
this house to this mountain,
and even unadorned and barren
spells

The ceiling beams
cross like those below:
only incidentally,
and the muted ballet,
hearth-inspired,
spider-webs into a thousand lives,
muraled across the breadth
of this vastness, natural,
and this forest, unobscured.
The obviousness of
the handmade
and tradition
is no bother,
reaching for a volume

Cat

Another level:
relatively speaking.
You've hardly touched your lunch.
The point is to become

so much
for metaphorically speaking.
Tend to your wounds,
seeping emotionally.
You're not a child.

(Innocent.)
This is repetition,
beyond
the pale.
We waited for the boats,
like anonymous Renoir faces,
but the river is too shallow.
There's a total lack of traffic.
Still.

We could stay here as long as
I wanted to.

Sink

I have written here a message for myself,
to remember the time.
Already the history is evident in the handwriting:
a bold, over-eager stroke giving way to a faltering
Ecclesiastical pessimism: this too is in vain.
For things fail.
The sun is too high, even in the late afternoon,
too blinding in the peripheral.
Seeing only these bony, unsteady knees,
there is so much I am afraid to try.
Psychological determinism,
alluded to in cornered hallways,
pretty much sums up the decade.
And
Christ
are there not
heroes
these days
?

Lacking today

A summer view
(it never rains here),
and how did you
grow up without a mother?

And let's be honest,
if we ever are,
lacking imagery: imagination,
this is not for you
in the way that the ocean
is not for the flocking
tourists,
or for any goddamned one,
inevitably,
and in the crimson (why
can't we just call it
red)
sunset, over the all-too
cliche
waterfront in some nameless Northeastern
town,
I can relax in the comforting thought
that this world is not for us.

Migration

Casting off the habit,
an intrinsic, if beleaguered, talent that
leads to new forms and outlets of human
behavior: namely, the collection of
vice. Slow, over rock and vale,
westward as you know it,
firmly right-brained and without
dialogue, our progress was.
A doctor, good at recovery,
an absolute Dedalus of a healer -
and that's on a good day -
is the part I will play in this
spectacle of rebranded invasion.
(Migration.)
And You,
the teacher,
lead by exemplar,
tall as tails, as
steady we marked
time on barks and faded, torn diary pages,
time on
slow enough.

Work-related

Also
in public parks
enclaved by electrical wires
transmitting,
contented they sat.
Sharing stories
the same
way each time, more-or-less
egalitarian retellings
and audience
interaction,
they formed
a semblance of optimism
about their flawed
insurrection,
using their own language against them.
Some careers do not go gently, rather
against the current, as is Dylan.
And undermining,
a culture built with shovels -
can we call that hollow?
Stray not, students.
The Narrenturm has been burned.
And I am encroached by fear that
I will sit, surely,
progressed
in an uncomfortable chair
seeing academia
as only a torch-bearing mob.
This timeline is flawed
as certain as Focault was whacked-out on LSD
and as the stars that twinkle are airplanes and
satellites
in all their glory.
These are not lies we tell ourselves:
hush, you do not believe in truth.
An archipelago of meaning
and meanings.
We left that park
(Moses has built a parking lot)
and
and
society must be defended.