Animals
know long chants
we have forgotten.

Our Mothers
learned of singing
from animals,
turned it inside out,
joined them in harmony.

The long memories of animals…

a black coated figure
walks out of memory,
out of the forest, the desert.
Stands on a beach
among waves dissolving.

A black coated figure
singing with animals.
Their music is soft,
persistent, threatens
crescendo, then swells
and drowns all.

A black coated figure
transforms before you
into its long-concealed song.

Will you join in? Raise
a voice from ancient silence?
Do you genetically recall
where you fit and
how it should go?

my morning flock
on my freshened feeders.

my starlings, my grackles,
my mated downies, my bully jays,
my seldom seen but much longed-for
goldfinches and cardinals.

I call them “mine”
though they flee me 
whenever I approach

as my family does,
as my friends do,

as my city
and country do.

Muted as joy is for me
in this now of gray day
and shit-dark news, still
I can see how for others
there is still some hope
that there are paths to it
for their children and those
beyond them in some future
they trust will exist. I see them
holding out their hands
urging these kids to stand, 
to walk, to run toward light
and purpose and whatever
may come after, while all the time
I sit alone, empty on that front,
thinking of what we all will endure
along the way to this Magic Time
assumed to be ahead, thanking 
my genes and my body for holding back
the small desperations and little angers
I would have unleashed upon this world.

If only a city
could magic into
tunnelled space
above ground,
tree light as found
under leaves;

every street
greenshaded glow,

walkers holding
themselves sacred
as they flow.

A city that could be this
could feel like
a true home and not
temporal temporary.
Forever forest 
of somehow eternal.

Life and death
mix, turn synonym, 
demand new names

in the language 
of this new city.

When your ghosts 
put their guns 
to your head
as you wake,
chanting your faults,
grinning your fears,
how you slept
the night before
might save you.

Get yourself coffee.
Get yourself breakfast.
Get settled in
upon the couch,

close your eyes,
chant SHUT UP
SHUT UP until
at last, silence.

Still, their guns
press your temples
so don’t relax.
Take heart. Breathe.
Sleep will return
with dead comfort
later. Hold on.

On nights when
sleep fails you
and the ghosts
await you after?
Hell days, those.

You itch and 
nod and snarl
back at them,
or you hide,
head buried away,
if you can. 

You’ll sleep hard
when sleep returns.

You hate them,
those armed ghosts.
They define you,
limit you, exist
because of you.
You lose sleep 
because of them.

Whenever you don’t,
they smile broader,
cock those pistols,
take their time
taking your time
until it’s time
for dead sleep.

Long distance view:
everything we know
is a blip
on a screen. Every

frog, bird’s nest,
painting. 

Smooth-lined
automobile, vintage guitar,
handsome face, tender hand
soothing a rough wound.

Up close
our own enthusiasms
loom. We loom back.

They offer us
dominion of our preferences
but long distance view,
cliff top perspective view?

We loom like ants loom
over sand-specks.

Blip.
Blip.

Then we
vanish

with our things,
our loves, our
artifacts. We

blip into
smoke and 

go.

Sometimes blue,
always thick. Takes
a while to get it;
not everything sticks.

Dark in voice,
light impact, gray
as dusk or dawn —
full-on night and day

mean nothing here.
Stands alone when
together might be 
sweeter, clumps

with others when
solitary would better
suit the moment. 
Low importance,

soft puncher, soft
speaker, really quite inaudible
and numb to consequence.
Any name offered

to mark this one
would be superfluous;
just one of many
out of place. One of too many. 

1.
the public thinking 
that he was 
one of the good ones

opposed
his own idea of himself as
snapped bone

and his face at perpetual
war
with his faith

his doubt
busting out all over as if he
had become

movie musical month of June
as if he 
could be sanitized through

the magic
of popular art bestowing genius
upon monsters

in part because they
expect
monstrosity in their geniuses

because it keeps 
all the people who aren’t monsters 
from uncovering

their own genius

2.
when his ghost
was laid away at last
and the myth
of who he’d been
was permanently
supplanted
with the truth

when they filed
his work away at last
in a locked drawer
reserved for what was once
thought genius and now
was forensically reviewed
for sinister clues

though he could not breathe 
any longer 
he held what little vapor he still had 
tight within
and told himself it was long past time
to set this right
fade away to reincarnate perhaps
at some better time