rock – other animals

I am a dog walker I am cooking beans I am the misprint in the formula I am heavy snow at night the scrape of the plow I am bored and ashamed of my boredom I am eating cashews pecans sunflower seeds I am a deer of seven tines I am the sluggish pulse I am a new sound in the deep forest just once I am an empty bag of highly flavored corn chips by the off ramp I am the mistake that leads to greatness I am a wave breaking on dark rock I am a wave breaking on sand

it should be more than cotton
candy though I lack
a recipe my hands have just
this tiny pen filled with
latency and the ladder is rotten

how many more nights

the sun bobs up and down
I look the other way that burning
you say it’s the weekend well why
not warp the mirror a little more

I can’t remember
why I entered this race

and I want to go to war with
each slender shadow

my feet must be cut from my shoes as soon

as the sun returns some color to those skulls

from under a rock hear me sing and walk on

riding the hills of Hellas I think of
. The landscape rich with bright
rock parting soil old pines older
mountains. That alphabet’s sounds
and symbols that with a little practice

our tour guide’s tense wanders—
Persephone is going to be taken
the world has been punished
Xerxes again is moving on Athens
Odysseus will have a clever idea

loud and sure sun on white stone
the temple of Zeus here
and in ruins

we find the prized water. Though its song, etched in rock,

Recovered Notes on the New Planet

the sky moves so fast a fragrance like marshmallow

what I thought a purple crystal dissolved in morning dew

evidence of the old civilization if the light is just right on the microscope slide

meters into the crevasse wrongly assumed it was scree

fields like maple syrup over a fresh argument

a language I’ve yet to master sneaks into my notes

returning to a previous marker an acrid smell sunken ground

stuck inside the tent autocorrecting hail

rivers like a laughing bandage to forget the insults of rock

the way forward often loops around in sharpened midday rain

what I wrote on a rock ran away

this mountain like melted gnomes who to name it after

a quiet spot by the river eaten by these mineral teeth

the silicavore’s thought projections jostle the rover’s gyro

a fine web like cotton candy spreads toward the sea by evening

I think there are dogs in the clouds

a dry brown leaf and voices in the wind almost enough like home

burnt candy. A fist in the forest crawls under a rock