“When I focus on my pupils in the bath mirror, the oval frame, in my peripheral vision, appears crooked.”
—from a meditation manual
mirrored clouds now
virtual glitter their
idyll the first person
how is it wind patterns
homeward the dry shine
barbarous hung up
rounded out to climb
beyond small self’s ovoid
interplanetary rock?
*
the mirror’s bone light
mimes a witchcrafted
blue dust ill-luck
broken seven times why
a guest asks once upon
a time the sphinx answers:
humanity! your mind
experiments in swamp slime
moss bracken briars
*
a skeletal tall
man’s silhouette breaks
the enchantment confess!
strange attractor of self-
sense sun-silvered basin
faint perfume of shavers
blood-warmed a gilt
compass lost an oval
framed colossal hardwood
*
a sparky bottomless
frisson dust devils
blurred blued sediment
the trials of years
gliding through filaments
gestalts’ artifice
an absence without
light bends blinkered
spinning casts of gradients
*
bubbles touch universes
spooky hunches one
bursts horizons above
rubbed reflections a
hand slams a cabinet
rattles the bath drips
Never wish for much a spy-
glass ten thousand things a
dragon’s isle chimera
Quartz Crystal
*
Catch it if you can! a cold
white world we were in
reckoning never miss
detached the angels
of snow men shearing half
the sticks westerly
the wind hits you like a
“yellow bitch” folkname for
sun’s seven-mile wallop
wind-catcher! that aura
a strange fit of
passion in its innards
*
smeared glass the bottle
broken with messages
in gravel its short spits
iced water trammeling
once upon a be-
ginning sun-glimpsed
granite islands an under-
tow of cobalt known
parallels white holes
the dead know the worlds
outside black sparrows
the shortest path by stone
lost cities of crystal
lives a previous calling
once upon a time
often I thought who
comes into oneself
just doing nothing?
blue sol its one
moment rises
whether or not
ponderable the
one only of
each small ultimate
Failing at Easy Origami
this crepe paper origami
kit I construct myself
a startled resurrection
puncturing mind’s eye-
let pressing on jingles
sifting down to dust
studied still whether
rarified or not
the childhood cumulus
folded in short cuts
of clips nose-to
dirt the woodlands … *
mummified the bird
spells travesty choosing
the one-legged frog
the pond it jumps in
nevermore its
burial in red mud
gravity-spun circuits
of words writ large
burning in earthworks
a birth song dawn
shut within a
lisp touchless lost
ocher frog dove
from grunge rock window-
sill sun scissoring on
the problem not being
of rock or surface
solids they crept on
a frog’s lily just
pleats crimps now
eyeless creaturely
beginning as if
paper trailed secret
folds of tethered feet
*
the windowsill cleaves
the mist deepening
valleys a homecoming
the alcove its far end
along what creases
the wings, feet all of them
the lighted sill’s antiques
dust traces dead
flies but with real wings