Month: August 2020

The bluebottle fly came
To graze on my arm

As I was reading Lorca
She chose a living home

For a moment
I served as her shore

Of Lorca
Inside

There was a place
So ask if nature needs art

Recall the first time
A coin dropped in your palm

You were being tricked
When the moon pretended to be a heart

Yours sometimes but others also
Sunlight’s mineral

So cold and tight
I didn’t understand

Of course I read books
Stupid rock and roll

Amusement park graffiti
All the while

That moon picked my pockets
Parents weren’t helpful

The priests and doctors of the moon
Were just as poor

Ask this moon
Where’s Herakleitos

The dark one?

They Call it Mystic

                --for Sanni Purhonen

When I cross the street
They say its a miracle
(You just can’t get away from it)

Buy a sack of cherries
Blind in the market
Vide et credere…see

And believe
(The blind eating fruit)
Cripples traveling

Hand in hand
Autumn winter
Crazy God lets them out

To stroll with
Sandalwood and incense
And their true bodies

I read only the gloomiest poems
Leave salvation to daisies mystics the apple tree
Finnish poet Lauri Viita–something
About being shoveled under
Still alive, Nordic Poe
That’s for me–just
Over there a thin twisted
Man feeds crows in rain
If I loved myself better…
If I’d a deathless word
Entirely my own…

I knew this much: outside Tallinn
Where the trolley left me
Where I was lost one cold day

I could still raise a hand
So beautiful hitchhiking blind
In a place not mine

Take me back to the fairy tale castle
I told the driver who stopped
Simple dirge black tune

Winter geometrics Baltic
Wonderful to be alive
How to say it….

Do you remember the little outfits you had in childhood? There’s a photo of me somewhere–I was dressed as a grocer. I thought the market was a magical. In another snap shot I’m leaning over a cardboard toilet paper insert (my microphone) pretending to be a news broadcaster.

When we wore those costumes we had no faces. Sometimes when I was very little I’d press my face to the mullioned window. I couldn’t see but the glass was cold. It was possible to be no one and everyone.

The imagination allows us to get around on the tips of our toes. My father bought me a cowboy hat. I was the tippy toe outlaw among the pine trees.

Let us dress up as we once did–not to impress anyone but to admit our hunger.

And without knowing the outcome….

I was on the wrong train
OK let’s see where it goes

I was in the wrong room
OK we don’t get many blind people

Silent stares
Should we tell him?

Maybe he can make something good happen
We don’t get many blind people around here

Irony: academic desperadoes claiming diversity
Worst of all–“his behavior for god sake”

“He should wait his turn…”
“Such a malcontent!”

At least the creaking “literal” train
Was entertaining

How credulous the eyes
Tracking rain and leaves

Seeing Jesus in burnt toast
If they could clap

They’d applaud anything
Dust on dust

Fill themselves
With pilgrim sufferings

Of strangers
Eyes vain as the moon

A rumor pushes
Nerves grow

Little hallelujahs
A memory inventing itself

Fish nosing fish in the dark