Intersection in Pocketville

The scrub jay feels compelled to squawk
From its perch in the cottonwood.
The brook detours around the field.

The flight from LA to Denver
Flies overhead, and a pickup
Rumbles up this rural highway.

All bucolic, if you say so,
Idyllic, if you insist. This
Stubbornness of certain phrases

That refuse to grant your wishes,
Won’t let you articulate them,
Mathematical rules in verse,

Canon problems cast as riddles—
Here’s where the barbed-wire fencing sags.

At Most Depths the Probe Finds Nothing Wicked, Nothing Special

You should go to meet your friend.
You should have a social day
Doesn’t have to to do with work.

Now come the parties
To the coffee shop
To discuss their lives.

Outside, the silver branches
Of leafless late winter trees
Glitter against the blue dome.

They exchange greetings
And family news.
They feel more cheerful.

One metal wind sculpture spins.
Everything only begins.

Literature

Records were kept
In cuneiform
Of kinds of bread
And types of wine

At a banquet
Three thousand years
And more ago,
And so we know

That this, somehow,
Was important
To know, enough
To busy scribes

And temple clerks
With pressing reeds
And filling shelves,
Lifetimes ago.

Old Man with a Brush Mustache, Old Man with a Flowing Beard

You okay? Yeh, sure.
Just parked? Yeh, just parked
And reading. (Lifts phone

As if to prove it.)
Ok. Take care then.
Yeh, you too. (Drives off.)

(Goes back to reading.)
(A long time passes
Until the sun sets.)

Infinite Inequality

The bottomless lust for more,
The well bored through the sea floor
Where all the chthonic fun dwells,

From which evil burbles up,
Not what you were looking for—
No, you were never evil were you,

Only human, wanting more,
And then something poisonous
Started rising from the well.

You never meant to do this,
To release it, you just dove
Down to spear leviathan,

Dove and struck and stabbed some more,
You hero, braving death’s door.

Abandoned by Reference

It is not always like that,
But it is sometimes like that,
And when it is like that, well. . .

Lapis lazuli eyebrows,
Marble face, inlaid eye whites,
Carved hair pleated in black waves,

A heap of seaweed, a spike
Corroded by seawater,
Writing that someone had stamped

Into a large hall tunneled
Out of a salt deposit
Old before the dinosaurs,

What happens to mislaid signs
Of a world long since moved on?