The glass isn't half full.
It is
full of apple juice.
And it's standing with other dirty dishes,
waiting
to be
emptied and cleaned.

great cathedrals of bent steel
rusting in river system trickelets like sandslopes on Mars
these sun rains and holy rains have laid the metal bare
I hear echoes, whispered and howling, ghosting about the hall
floating down to me on long twine from Heaven
pulled from their bodies, sucked out by impulses
running stupid like lab rats through a tilting turvy maze
these iron-born beasts fly above me
make me turn my head backwards and up
casting eyes down to the Lord
is the Kingdom dollied at eighty degrees
or a hundred, and should my neck hurt when I find it?
I think about organ lungs pumping me moans
from the museum's other visitors
I am here to crawl these strange environments
but they walk through hardly feeling
the walls' embracing love
do they know? these ones who pass through?
should I be speeding up?
a little girl passes me, going backwards
the other way
I blink, and--
of course,
she's seen the way these metal arms fold in
to enclose the sky, they make the world beneath you
yours
she's taking her new planet in neat, inverted stride
clever (beware of that)
but innocent (be drawn by that)
she's seen these places for what they are
breathing steel; closing some, opening vast other spaces

I like to turn my chin up to the falling snow
and let it settle where it will on my open skin
like butterflies of ice alighting on my face,
and again and again and again,
sitting there stretching their wings
on the bright-lit sides of my lids

I keep my eyes closed so I can see them
more than half-open shows the storm
but even half-closed reveals the stream

My current project
is curing a few warts
by force of will alone.

I’m trying to breathe
in and through them
so they shrink away.

They’re three in-a-row,
a volcano archipelago
along my right palm

above the thick muscle
of my thumb, that swollen
catpad I touch sometimes

just to touch.
It’s so fleshy, so full
of what is supposed

to make me alive,
and with all that,
I’m willing out these warts.

Go away, warts! SHOO!
I don’t dislike you, but
you’ll have to run along

now. Get going, this isn’t
the place for you.
Some other palm or pad

or the bottom of another
‘s foot–maybe you can live
there, but not here.

And I think should you fall
away from the tools
which make me human,

I might never balk again
at warts on another.
They’re beautiful blemishes

if they’re not mine.
I can’t stand to think
my skin might grow

these other living lesions
on it (by God
‘s foot–am I Legion?).

I know this mite
which grows inside me
teems a thousand million

times, spills forth,
like a cup runneth over,
and shadows my systems,

and shatters them, and explodes
what I am or what could
be me–cells, cells..

(Might I want them?
Might I be Legion?
Who else could Jesus

banish by the waterside?
Without his pigs and dirt,
what would he be?

Should I leave these
Golgothas, three thieves
of me, to live

to let me live?)
Well, I have breathed,
and that is birth

and death.

she walked with them then through long woods
and on paths in low newgrowth—the old
had all been cut down a century ago
and had only now begun coming back

once she picked up a rock meaning to throw it,
but held it in her hand a long time its warmth
was so alluring from the sun and it had
rough, just the right, edges and many
the weight, too—oh, the weight—from hand to hand and dry
she held it a long time

they walked a long time
it was a regular walk in the woods,
sun just right blocked and filtered, drinking in at the leaves
the air the bugs the picking them off dirt too
regular walk in the woods, that was good

later, she left the rock on a stone bench
passed on the path one couldn’t say how old it was
but it had a plaque IN MEMORY OF ROBERTA on it in metal
and that was good enough she almost took it
after they stayed there for a moment and moved on
but she left it picked it up once dropped it
and left it

there was a stagnant pond going green—
well, she’d walked here before, it was always stagnant
since she’d seen it
first long ago
she thought for a bit about chucking her rock
in there, but didn’t—she thought it would
kill the mosquito eggs surely growing in there
she held it, she didn’t know where she’d leave it
she thought she’d throw it

or to confess
she’d seen herself fairy-like climbing a tree out over a running stream
diagonal in the air and leaving it there
she’d smile when she turned around at the bottom to see
she’d knocked it off with her moving
on the way down
she’d already knocked it off into the water,
ploop

(they walked the Far Out Loop, they really
walked the Far Out Loop, that was the name
of the trail (and the trial?—Far Out!)

there were jokes about the green carpet
under the oldgrowth, the Man coming in
to cut the wall-to-wall marijuana carpet in your living room
(why is it always that?)—but
really they cut down the oldgrowth,
domesticated the green carpet and tall grasses
in a visual representation of their landed wealth…
man

anyway…

meanwhile, on other trails…)

they couldn’t understand a mowed area,
kept and clean of sticks, with islands
of thick thorns you couldn’t even see through
(imagine rabbits under there)
and two beautiful old black trees, twisted,
with a hand-dug brick-laid
cistern nearby

two deer caught bathing in a break in the trees
and around the edges the leaves a yellow in the light,
it might have been that lime-green sour lemon yellow
but it felt more cadmium, rich and warm and deep
over the scene and they went when they saw
they were seen under the most incredible dead tree
(it was photogenic definition of the word) one of them
whipped out a digital camera she turned away
it was shameful she looked at the sky
while he did it wishing a real camera was here
so the soul-stealing would actually catch

there was a third hiding off in the woods

there was a fallen log, a small one,
next to the path
covered in shelves of fungus
grey yellow and dried dark green
they looked at for a while
closely

(And Lord!, have you ever witnessed the glory
of a fallen tree trunk?)
awash there in the dry riverbed in a lightbath
with many others
the land there was rocky in the light,
all round rocks left by ancient glaciers,
many stones and many fallen trees,
baking, baking away in the light,
bleached, with all their roots out
but they were a ways from the path,
and they walked by without stopping

she tripped on a root and her friends teased her
she didn’t say earlier
she’d stepped on something of a small log in the way
which waffled, fvnking her feet—
but she corrected, fell soundlessly,
landed almost perfectly,
and her friends never noticed,
she said nothing cuz she thought they’d make fun,
she thought years from now when she forgot this it never would have
happened—
strange ghosts looming up even in the day
(It is a Sunday, be at rest!
Is it a Special Sunday where the opposite happens?)

they talked about the magic of three,
that seemed to make sense there were three of them,
she and the two others
and the power of two there’s
two things in life they said
boys falling in love and ****ing girls
and eating and shitting—but what about feeling?

she pushed over a small rock building with her foot
without building a new one normally she did

they hit a wooden bench, this one with a back—
into it was etched John Denver lyrics,
his name, his dates—effacing alone in the woods,
unreadable, defaced by weather
(there were harsh comments then about Denver,
not the state, ungraceful—the sacrament
was hardly holy)
they moved on

they came
eventually
to
a stream running this time, plenty
they two were throwing stones, skipping them off the bubbling water,
hoping to shatter them
on the shale shelf exposed in the hillside across the way

(does anyone love the plunk of big rocks
in deep water instead of skipping?, the glurp
and the dirt it kicks up, the swallowing hole—
ploop!, like poop with an l,
which is a palindrome, back and forth, thrown off—
okay, last interruption…)

while she sat off to the side on a lonely table
there by the riverside for no reason they’d passed another
earlier on another path but not a third
so sitting there on that table as it straddled the dry earth
something didn’t add up

so many black spots, spindle-legged
against eight by one steel-drawn spaces

emptiness in coffin dimensions

gaps in the railing of a bridge over a river
a thousand nestled relations a web
tying itself over the world and holding through it
(Preposterous prepositions suggest interweaving relationships
we can barely–or probably just can’t–comprehend.)
somehow these holes are whole worlds
where spiders have built almost endless nests
they’re struggling on a vertical plane,
ropes to God,
ninety degrees from nowhere
(–A drop out!–)
and really, they’re in nearly every opening
along that railing,
waving and dancing
in the gusts coughing up from the cars,
they’re flourishing on this long stretch of transition architecture,
(Being is being is
being is being.)
against a backdrop of asphalt and an apparently healthy chaos
of churned air, roiling around
in great invisible swirls,

or the din!noise!assault,

maybe, or the constant turbulence
attracts lots of flies

Lo!, there's a soul inside of me which yearns to learn real poetry,
not metric music, crude mouth-sound, or Sybil-crafted finery;
no hopeful study of the art of language-loom's large verse
or wonders weaved from thread-songs burst from Heaven and from Earth,
all thirsty with vivacity and juicy jubilees,
brave desp'rate strains and veins of truth and beastly panoplies.
O!, human living sings profound and founders in itself!
And who am I?, and what are words?, but trinkets on a shelf?
So gather dust, you wayward words, and think not of yourselves!
For you are you, and what are you, but dust on dusty shelves?