Monthly Archives: March 2013

A beach house
with new shingles
around two windows
keeps watch with brindled eyes
at what the sea brings
each day.

Some days it’s just wave on wave,
like a furrowed brow.
Some days birds skim the rollers
like penitents walking the breadth
of a watery country.

The sea and the house
tell each other their moods in colors.
Weathered silver on brown means contentment.

A scrim of white rags tearing off
of slate grey mounded water
means I’m out of sorts right now.

New white on clapboard means
I’m trying to impress the neighbors.

A boiling blue black mountain of water
rolling up the beach means
I told you so.

Tender is
the fleet of electric birds
bluing the trees
in their sockets,
wiring the
world with
song–
and how strange
it is that
we hear their words
with the ears
of invalids,
unsteady in
drunken ships
with keels of
calcium and
ribs of sorrow.

Like a deep ocean drift net
Cut loose by the mother ship
Drifting with the carcasses of tuna and hake
Twisted forever into its skeins,
Your poetry haunts me,
Anne Sexton.

Bagel backwards is slegab
which sounds like a town in Wales

Hearsay backwards is yasraeh
which sounds like a seminary in Israel

College backwards is egelloc
which sounds like a Klingon food

Maybe if I make words say their names backwards
they will reveal their secrets to me

like turning a talking stick upside down
and listening to the waterfall of seeds

or breaking a cottonwood twig at a joint
to see the secret star inside

In Madrid
burning like a green stick fracture
all the unemployed indignados

whose grandfathers rolled the Republican cannons
are lighting fires in the squares
to burn in absentia

the corrupt refuse cabal of bankers
and real estate development whores
who have sold their beloved country

for a toxic mess of derivative stew
and a few photo opportunities
with Javier Bardem and Selena Gomez