Breathless, they

stood dripping wet

from rain, perfect and silver

against the green of Summer

There was paint on

the steps shining under water.

Her banana seat leaned

in toward the wall sharing a

secret with the potted plants.

There were the eyeglasses of his two

black wheels with red

glistening rails, lying on their

side, forgotten on the lawn,

paying court to the cracks and the dandelions.

She moved her face toward him, freckles on her

cheeks, innocent of paint or artifice,

just a small streak of chain grease beside her nose and

a little scratch on her chin.

His arms,brown and skinny,

all of her pale and soft

entwined without a grasping rub

that becomes required later.

There is a kiss.

A kiss that tastes like cinnamon gum

and something like salt

from a summer day.

There is a kiss

that hangs in its own space,

telling its own story,

saying goodbye.

the moving van playing the role of

that Casablanca airplane,

the train, troopship,

gleaming silver cross in a tropic sky

There is nothing before

it,

nothing after but

the feeling that

the feeling that it

was the most perfect kiss of

his life.

Vaudeville

Their world is flat.

The horizons are cheap curtains

poorly painted suggestions,

with the Eiffel tower or singing cowboy from the

last masterpiece hastily obscured

to make way for strip malls, haunted amusement parks,

cubicles, the boudoir with a streak of something dark

on the sheets.

The actors may give out with lines

not knowing what they really mean.

They hold their empty children singing lullabies

may as well be holding a loaf of bread with quicksilver

inside

krasota.

along the veins of rivers

blue on the flat white paper

the cities and towns are

hard, black scorchmarks

printed names that hurt the tongue,

that look out of focus

to American eyes,

From L'vov to

Kursk, Anadyr and

Kazan.

The names are bitter

burnt bread on waves of static.

Here are the words we learn

first

TANK, Rifle, Cannon, Rocket,

pilot, WHORE, Bullet, son of a whore,

it's curtains for you,

PANTS, table, library, ..if you don't know, we show

you, If you don't want to, we make you.

target, I knock down pears with

my prick.....destroyed.

I buy kvass and pirozhiki

from the Babushka, and speak

the soft, light, words like a

smart child, bowing, thanking her

with the long, formal, nicety

that comes from Chekov and Tolstoy.

"clever one" she calls me.

She comes from village, Butyrkovo

"..you know it? They do spoons there from birch....very pretty"

Black ink frankenstein stitches meaning rail lines, north to hash marks

of two runways, pimples of fuel tanks, one

muddy turd of a lake,

"I don't, k sozhaleniyu,

but it sounds nice.

Ritalin

As God sits and pets his Dog

he wonders at the rest of his junk

he's too timid to throw away,

dinosaurs in the basement, trilobites in

his garden pond, the glittering remnants of

galactic whatnot he means to string up

and plug in some time.

There is an ocean of unmeasured time, but

no time to get anything done.

He keeps meaning to get back to us, throws up strands

of probabilities to the kitchen ceiling

seeing if they stick and hang down, al dente, then forgets

he's looking for a colander and finds the

Etruscan crossword puzzle instead which makes him

think about that song

with the flutes and so he goes out to the car, because

he's sure that's where it was last time

he heard it and so becomes entangled in the

fact that he forgot to water the lawn........

Time boils and rolls never leaping over the side

but teasing at the strands inside

while for some reason, in the distance,

the leaf blower starts ringing its heavenly chorus

throughout the empty house.

If you lived here, you'd be home by now!!

Cloth swims through

gasoline and fried chicken air

over broken front teeth,

of a wooden fence

buildings eye each other,

black hole windows

mad dogging

across parking lots

now comes a jester

dressed in red and yellow,

racing wind

stoplight to street sign

to eye bruising slushie pix.

clock work against

Brownian drifts of plastic bag ghosts

and diesel

"why he dancing

daddy?"

Why indeed.

I wish it was only trash.

There was a red paper plate

behind the tree that

must have been there for months

must have been there for years,

so long, in fact that Cleopatra might have

flicked the last crumbs of cake

from her dainty fingers as she

licked the tiny mountain tops

of vanilla frosting off her

lips along with a few dots

of salty perspiration.

Remembering your birthday

that came in the beginning of the Summer

on the green lawn, everything so impossibly,

ludicrously, lush...verdant as a more

educated person like him might say, with the promise of the heat

and our skin touching skin by the pool or

beneath that cast iron fan the one with

faded gold letters and an ancient pedigree, that

smelled sometimes of a blender motor

that reminded you of making cake with your mother, when

you talked about your mother.

That seems so long ago, this faded pinkish flake,

because it's autumn now and

this land mine of the relic past

hiding beneath the leaves,

made me think of you when you

are gone, long

gone.

When the rain comes down

with thunder

on a warm sunny day,

they say

"the devil is beating

his wife",

Those ain't tears.

Graceful, latent,

clouds

sheets hung out to dry

almost touching the quiet

room basking in the sunshine and

turning the wooden

floors into a sea of

shade and light

a hot, dark hand touches

the pale skin of a shoulder or a leg,

warming the back of the neck

where the hairs curl a bit

in dark nursing curves

with grinning breath

and tenderly asks if

she wants a glass of

ice water.

Bones

In the grass that looks like

the fur on a lion's back,

(all tawny and moving in

the breeze)

the candy of your bones is

no doubt a cathedral

for the rest of us tiny

creatures.

VULCAN'S DAUGHTER

Her hands are small but strong.

They grasp the hammer's handle.

Dawn to dusk she weaves her song

with the bellows and the anvil.

Sparks fly 'round her coiled locks

and her eyes reflect the fire.

Her lovely skin hides the chiseled rocks

of her muscles spun like wires.

Some men look for fame and gold

to steer them to their bliss,

but these are all too frail and cold

for one who felt her loving kiss.

enchanted rock speaks rain

blue eyes far away

water lays in desert rock

the sky stares downward

dark stabbing shadows

hot dry bowl of dust and rock

black dog in the sun.

Wal Mart and unemployment......

There are always words that

you can say to make it all

better believably less empty

even though the streets end up in the same places

and the walls are really made of the

same atoms that keep following

you everywhere you may care to go

so I say to you

to keep on digging your way down to Babylon

and all the dreams that dreamers dream

because its better than stopping

or turning into something that just sits

there with the wax of sadness gleaming in a puddle around your feet

so what if the world has all the

room of a rusty can of soup..and

you are the BB left there staring at the

sunlit little hole wondering

how you got there.

you must keep going even if there

is no place to go

and look at all the fluorescent toys

in the store, tired of the sick plastic, not able

to look away,

keep looking at all the people around you subtly maimed

by rashes and scrapes on their bulbous luggage

Are you trying to look away?

there is always a bad tattoo

amidst a constellation of pimples

you cannot look away,

you must keep going even

though there is nowhere to

go, and you never had time to

learn anything worth knowing.

Eggplant

Her skin is fog and ivory

rippled by indecision

the delicate wedding cake

frosting crinkled on her

puzzling brow,

hands thin and alabaster, her long

sugary fingers invade the

dark shiny smoothness

first pinching then stroking

holding it up to drink the

shadow with her radiant cheek

she feels the heat and

rubs her straight, thin nose

against the absolute

firmness of it,

and unabashedly, after

her caresses tenderly

lays it slowly

down.

prepositions

Butterfly on a bell

redbird on a cannon

child by the roadside

your face in the window

haiku

grass green,long and soft

white skin and dark hair uncoiled

the berries of her lips.

The next day, he limped down to the thin, pebble beach by the lighthouse dock where he kept the small boat tied to a post. He wore an old, muddy blanket draped over his shoulders. He was still naked and spattered with blood, both his own and of the men he had killed. The side of his face was raw and hurt terribly. He looked and saw that his boat had been taken, the rope cut in haste. He let out a groan of despair and began gingerly washing himself in the cold waves. He finally steeled himself to shamble out into the surf and plunge his matted hair into the sea. When he came up for air, he noticed the half-sunk boat bobbing in the waves just inside the breakers. He swam out to it and grabbed the small stub of the rope, laboriously pulling it to shore.

As soon as he got it close enough to walk it in, he sat down exhausted and began sliding his poor cold butt in the shallows. Finally, he tipped it over and water came pouring out. The scrapes on the inside of the little boat and the bloody waterlogged shirtsleeve stuck to the oar lock gave mute testimony to the events that took place that night. It was most undeniably the squid that had claimed the pirate and dragged him down in the dark ocean. The frigid sea took on an even more chilling aspect for the battered lighthouse keeper.

He repaired the boat and fashioned new oars for it and the days took on their grinding march once again. He fished and scraped the hard,rocky soil for his sustenance. Every night, he tended the great light, heedless of hardship and difficulty. Weeks passed before he spotted the cleverly hidden navy longboat among the rocky coves of the island while he was looking for clams. It was a large and heavy thing, so he left it where it was and spread the thick canvas of its sail over it as a cover.

He occasionally had nightmares as he lay down in his rough bed at dawn. He dreamt of that terrible night. He dreamt that it was he who was dragged down by the giant squid as he stabbed at the horrid tentacles with a broken chisel.

The ship finally came with his replacement, a young poet with fine clothes and a chest of books. The young man looked at him and tried to pry from him, some sign of good spirits or any deep insight. Although he was only a year or two older, the lighthouse keeper just looked at him like he was a babbling child.

He told the captain about the missing longboat and told them how to find it. It was, after all, the King's property. The sailors had heard about how the boat was taken by the fierce pirate/convicts from other crews who had been combing the seas for these murderous thugs who managed to kill the marines and officers who were on guard when they escaped.

The sailors also began to notice how sullen and rough their formerly bubbly charge had become. He submitted his closed report to the Captain, who scarcely read it at first, simply noting the missing provisions with little interest. It was when the events of that terrible,stormy night were recounted that the Captain stopped drinking his glass of port. It was a remarkable story made all the more singular by the clipped, matter-of-fact way in which it was written.

Silence followed the man on his voyage home. The sailors kept their distance, making note of the long knife in his belt. When he returned, he scarcely spoke, and when he did it was always direct and with a purpose. He saw the world and the people in it as ugly and possibly dangerous.

By all accounts in the village, he was much improved.

As they always say in these things, it was a dark and stormy night. The man worked diligently trying to keep the beam of the lighthouse as bright as possible. As he was heading downstairs after making adjustments to the lens, he heard a banging sound coming from one of the shutters. He simply assumed that it had come open from the wind, a thing which happened from time to time.

He ambled toward the noise, thinking of tools he might employ to keep this from happening again. He stopped by the little niche in the stairway where he kept his tools and put a hammer , some nails, and a chisel in a small canvas bag. As he reached the ground floor near the shutter, he noticed a rank, fetid odor and heard a half stifled bellow as one of the pirates hit him with a club right on the side of his head near his right eye. He fell with a sickening thud.

Much later in the night, in the dark , dark hours when all was still, he awoke. More precisely the cold drops of sluggish rain water coming through the open window brought him to his senses. He was in terrible pain. His right eye was shut with blood and the thin bones on the side of his face were crushed. He was naked, having been stripped by the convicts the canvas bag with the hammer had rolled into a corner when it fell from his stunned grip.

He could hear them cursing and arguing in the kitchen down the hall. They were angry at the sad condition of the provisions. Finally, the leader said "We'll have that dead bugger by the stairs". There awoke in the man a primal force, an anger so profound and strong that all the sunday school lessonss and nursery rhymes about forgiveness and kindness could not hold it back. He burst into the room, with his hammer in one hand and his chisel in the other. He let out a horrible scream as he crushed in the skull of the nearest intruder with his hammer. He stabbed the second one as the pirate tried to lift himself out of a chair. Blood spattered in huge stripes and the chisel broke off its handle lodging itself in the mans chest. One pirate had managed to pull a knife out of his belt, but it did him no good. He was felled by the thrown hammer. The last pirate fled into the night where he clawed his way into the small lighthouse boat and blindly rowed out into the dark sea as far away from the light as he could.

The man heard a shuffling noise as the wounded pirate was getting up with his knife. He turned and jumped on him. The pirate's will to live was strong and his feet drummed hard on the floor as he was held down and strangled. The pirates knife hand was firmly pressed against the floor with one grimy knee. Blood from the lighthouse keeper's red, raw eye socket spattered on the pirates face as was slowly choked to death.

Thus, he met the horrible giant squid. From that point on, he was always fearful of being pulled down into the dark depths and ripped to shreds by this brutal creature. The squid had sharp, hooked claws embedded in the suckers of its mighty tentacles. The thought of having his skin shredded as he was pulled down into the abyss kept him away from the sea for a few days, but starvation began to make him seek fish in the shallow cove on the island. There was a blue-black ribbon of deep water, a bottomless ravine that marked the beginning of the monster's territory. He avoided it, with a shudder and sometimes envisioned it in his nightmares.

The most horrible trial did not come from beneath the waves though. It came one dark night in the form of four escaped convicts. They had been pirates, vile and murderous men, who had been captured and were on their way to the home country to be hanged. They had killed several of their captors and stole the longboat from the navy frigate, making their way to the lonely island for provisions and water.