trees – other animals

I sit and watch the trees
in summer’s sticky green
the cicada hum then
stop suddenly the dog
sighs everything a bit
slow and tired is there some
light from this I really
don’t know but my hands this
evening ached for a prayer

still searching for the new sound for so long that the trees we planted in the wild days have made it to the other side of the desert and at night we hear heavy fruit drop sonorous into still water but this is not enough there is still a hair unreachable in the throat in the morning we find the ruins of another city it must have been spectacular with those stones in the sky

all that gold plucked out and the oldest trees cut down for no and we sing the malls of our vibrant young and walked for miles with pretzels for the cassette that changes everything

in your mouth but only for a minute the moonlit trees

Excerpts from My Autobiography

xxxxx

once the image has life an emptiness says
it will always be so I stare into the distance
blind to trees and flowers
begging to be born but the refrigerator hey
are we doing stream of consciousness
cool and the snow gets sharp in these
huge piles in the back of the lot
days later my handwriting
starts to rot never to recover

xxxx

suicide off the table you start working again
with a miniature saucepan and the clock trying
to rid the mind of all the rules you’ve
made &
feel your hand tight around the thick
rope now only good for that
silly exercise you love

xxxx

away from the neighbor’s dog
across stinging fields we grow
smaller so slowly we don’t
notice until grasshopper parts become
our yard sticks and blades
of grass jostle and topple us in this
dream-familiar landscape we
learn secrets of slow growth, the rootlike
lineages of wormkind and a love
of the sweetness that writhes up from
dark earth and we long to pass
it on to our children who have
grown monstrous in the orange light

the difference between scrap and fragment wind
in the rain in the trees but once I’ve walked up to
this cliff then what maybe later in the day an aching
back full of whisky isn’t the best time to start but
well this is getting too prosaic so get the clipper &
the magnifying glass there’s only one place you or I
can start and that’s with these badly drawn feet
bleeding into the stones of the sharp here & now

Sunday afternoon while light won’t stop streaming past the sudden silence of unbroken bare trees and what apologies to make while the ink dries and the thinking machines reset in the year of our lady redacted

searching for gods in the light of ice-covered trees

trees
bare
the tight fists of sparrows

the short time in which children have ceased to be burnt trees