Tonight we burn dry willows and jump
the ring of fire, we drink cheap beer and
watch dying sparks dance in fitful breezes
across the river’s waters. We listen to
the rush of rapids and churning whirlpools
gnawing breaks in shallow banks. Later
in the night, when laughter turns to dust,
when the Brazos sings ancient songs and
the scent of stale smoke lingers, we
listen fearfully and wait for a warming sun
to return, we tremble and feel ourselves
slipping downstream toward the great,
all consuming,
sea.

A temple bell tangles with a warbler.
Dipping my blueberry Poptart in
last night’s martini, I enjoy
a malleable feast. The blue-eyed olive
I wrap in grape leaves for Julia.

Strapping on my Nukies,
I pause before the hallway mirror.
The eyes are red and the lips look gray.
There are cracks in the pukka face
And the nose is beaten crooked.

The portable scanner is crackling
with static from the Wheaties’ bunch.
As I chill the pad and clear the cave,
I am reminded of Beardsley’s remains.
Four ounces of plastique in a green whanger…

An enlightened driver listens to Silent Radio.
Along my way to Reno I pass a jogger with
a walkman and a khaki backpack. He sloshes
through puddles of roadside dust like a
one-hump camel running in a swamp.
Silent Radio crackles with the best talk shows;
WSEX is the most popular on the charts, they say.
Who says? WDWI in Pawhuska, Oklahoma.

Not everyone appreciates Silent Radio;
Politicians still listen to imitations.
The reality of Silent Radio is so compelling,
the fidelity so complete, the sound so immediate,
the signal so strong, everywhere…
I don’t see how anyone could think that the old fashioned existential media
has a chance in hell of surviving.

Oklahoma, 1958.
Over a fragile nightflower open soon,
fireflies soared in June and tangled
with her hair tumbling in sweetgrass;
and on belly white to moonlight, he did
Humpty, Humpty falling down, down,
to break exhausted, sucking hot lips,
two heat shimmers, late moon spinners
exchanging happy earthseed under stars.

New Orleans, 1982 .
How thang mumpus hang?
Incautious inflate, gnarly frawlic.
He smelled Urjuices running
with unconscious porpoise.
He seeded her gangly like a child and growdup new.
Loved her now, truwoman,
while comes his glue
to womankindness dew.

Epistle.
Such things that fly through mind
are not unblind as simple human hungers;
Daniel Dumpty, odd old cod, is close
with his God, but closer still
with tarots and mummers.

“Narty, guy bressed,” the old man insisted, putting
a dirty finger in his mouth and smacking his lips.
when winter rains hit Nashville, and fat drops
Trickle down the back of your mind.

Pictures of Polly leaning against the tree,
And one she took of me

Leaning.

Funny man with felt hat clutching wet cat, seen turning
like a child on a playground, brickyard, clown spinning down
the way a wobbly top keeps tipping, slipping, sliding, until
one shoe on gutterlip found air and flew out, dropping Daniel
into an entrée with floaters heading out to Old Man.

Lips parting the waters battering his upturned face, grace
for the descending, too tired for bending, unkneeled yet peeled
like an apple without seeds to be planted, Daniel sang using
words unmentioned, a vocabulary without audience, sending him
timespinning backwards to Kate and the loin’s den.

Thoughts unsought, but taught in the manner of life manifesting
a sense of hope, though dense in despair, unrepaired, uncared,
but never unpaired (and in this way ironic), paused him to taste
one spark of love, ark of his blood remembered, but dismembered
in far off moments of darkness unparted and spaces unstarted.

What a bitter patter, Daniel thought, unmattered as he arose
from his bath; laughter heard after bitter breathing flooded
from open doorways into streets; laminated conversations
with the tone of struggles teary, sobs eerie, and ending wearily
as flesh knows the rush of untimed sendings and begins again.

Laughter not allowed, aloud, echoing through sparks of fallings rain,
lost in natal thoughts and fatal faults and stirring hungers, he whirls
slowly, face upturned in wonder, hands outstretched, burning brightly,
seeing crowds of faces blurring in broken panes,
a panoply of mirrors and dark and tearful flames.

Rue Alley stew, a bitches brew stoppered in bottle blue,
anagramatically true, guaranteed to work for you
When just nothing else will do.

loosed the grip of a hard and dirty winter. I caught up my camera
and walked to Centennial Park, where a copy of the Parthenon
stood with many columned legs upon a field and
waited for Athena to arrive on the West End bus.

I stepped off the graveled path to cut through
a sculptured forest that bordered a shallow pool.
A drifting smog of onion breath from the Crystal Burger
lingered in my lungs. I stopped to breathe deeply
of sun spiced bark and dampened lichen.

Distant traffic tumbled like water over rocks.
Under the supple branches of a wax myrtle,
half in the shadow where snow still clung and
half flung across a sunny patch of greening earth,
a ballroom gown lay full displayed upon the ground.

The myrtle’s roots, like veins under thin skin, led my eyes
to the water’s edge where a woman floated, drowned,
unrequited from some intent I could not know,
and now face down in the ice skimmed pond,
light brown against the fallen snow.

I could not help her, so I took her picture.
Now, thirty years later, I hold in my hand
this three by five memory, listen to
traffic scumbling distant bricks,
and feel the frost forming.

Our conversation is a parsed string
strung between loud pauses.
On the stage, a comic is poised
in suspended imitation, scattered laughter
reflects a chill of human kindness.

Regret is a powerful fixative.
I pour myself a measured quart of fate
and remember when divine intervention
was the only form of birth control.
Polly smiles at me from miles away, when

in Pawhuska, lying on warm stone at dewfall,
our microphone captured a Precambrian language
of clicks, whistles, and zithering sounds.
We were lost in the illation of being,
ourselves as suspended emanations of God.

So here I am at the Electric Avocado,
bonded with a pixilated crowd,
a wreath of smoke over all, thoughts
of Pall Malls and pall bearers, and
really, there is no Polly, now.

Posed like a wilted flower, heavy breathed in still life,
but believed to be alive after the fashion of art, Daniel
slept lightly with face to the flight of fireflies, soothed
with gentle drafts of laughter and buzzy rites of June bugs.
Honeysuckle and stale beet whirled wheezy in his lungs, air
pulled uneasy through bitter tars in Swiss cheese.

Uncradled, Daniel felt the pulse of existence,
a throbbing insistence which compelled him to overturn
himself from the cardboard box in which he dwelled.
He prepared his toilet with a page from Life; he thrust
his burled fingers through snarls of wild hair and
scratched his beard for something moving there.

Meanwhile, having run the night deeply, the Companion
surfaced to inhale the fleshy air.
The spirit had returned from its casting,
a passage uncertain for a man in a box,
an orthodox notion which Old Man soon
cloaked in motion with his waking message.

A canopy of weeping willows sweeping down from
a high crown of green vines shattered the early sun
into sparkling flakes of dancing motes where twirled
fuzzy gnats, sticky dots of falling saps, and
one sleepy jay chasing a late returning moth
from clover blossoms to stalks of wild onion grass.

A distant rumble scumbled the world, rattled teacups,
caused dogs to lookup, cats to shutup, seagulls to sail
up into a bright white alley between two thunder heads.
Scuds of dusty devils flew across the park,
a spark of lightening struck the Ark, and street lamps
just dimmed, came back on, blue again,.

Daniel huddled under a tattered brown tarp
wrinkled and rough as rhino skin as rain pattered
in splatterings of bold drops, each smelling fresh
with ozone, sweet with the breath of salt air, cold as ice
and sparkling, hanging on the brim of his world
before dripping like sweat into damp earth.

The Elohim might have described him as unseen.
A woman walking within this scene thought of
unclean and hurried on in another life, yet carried
the image of Daniel kneeling, part of a vision
with a meaning which would visit her again
at the end of a long day’s journey into night.

Bigboat has a crusty grill and a two pan oven;
There are beer taps, baseball caps, coffee urns,
Pots buffed, a parrot stuffed, cup racks, plate stacks,
A photo of Callipso, and green plastic ferns.

Six trestle tables and seven booths
Make thirteen pools of girls and boys
Waiting under Mothymoose’s one glass eye
For icecream cake and plastic toys.

Lines of mothers, sometimes fathers, wind
Serpentine from serving counter to their party
Like corridors of servitors, laden, with trays,
With eyes glassy, laughs brassy, smiles hearty.

On Saturday morning in any month, to find
The place with the smiling face, pause before
The looking glass, behind the buzzing LiteBeer sign,
At Smalltown’s Bigboat Pizza store.