Woodshavings

Hibernian in Hibernation

 I have to fashion a machine

to get outside earth's atmosphere 

to see the hard knobs of the universe

unadorned, as they really are

so my own signal is clear

to all exogenous worlds

Sea chest with polar bear pelt

launched as an escape craft

milky way spills into it

narwhals sawing logs, asleep

the root-embroidered paths

through the darkening wood

towards a place lost to memory

all the poems I wrote

went up in smoke

some got trapped in the stove pipe

the ghost of one poem

comes back down

and sits in a chair

at midnight the poem is still there

in the morning

it's back up nowhere

skittering gulls

vigorous over the wet rooves

rain clouds at last

white gulls in sunlight

before gray cloud past

a mansion of ashes

 blood-stained trees shoulder

the glen of distant children

saturation-green field

Keepsakes

November was a haunted calendar of fraught objects I returned to with an ellipsis to indicate that all obsessive objectification stretches off infinitely so why elaborate? It is enough to see and acknowledge the possibility of becoming obsessed in such a manner, to the see the availability of the fetish is be made fetishistic. Who goes there now? Few alive could conceivably remember the the personalities and circumstances. Why stir the ashes? The dignified importance of formal photographs of people long-buried and no longer recalled, the pains taken to create small monuments at the grave site, landscapes devoted to obsolescent reliquaries of the formerly important and now firmly forgotten, is mere vanity, is all vanity indeed.

When a dish has meat in it, no matter how good it may be,

it still has a smear of the charnel house about it

dark clouds Hindenburg the hills

a plane flies slow and low over the ghetto

hoovering up powdered phone calls

November 2015