clenched fists of white-fingered nimbus open. the palms

waft whatever fragrances the sun instilled within; a poet

transcribes the smells into the idiom of Laguna,

constructing possibilty on behalf of anyone who longs to be,

securing the porch as a catwalk where a white shoe model,

clutching at cross-rails, poses against the broad Pacific:

so look, we’re here, we’ve always been Whitman’s travelers,

pining after an American conveyance, breathing in, breathing

out, mounting a gangplank, lusty, under the gull caws, standing

on the aging ferryslip: Walt’s there is here, out west, here where

commuters are scarce and sand dollars and sea pinks dot a gray jumble

where a single cypress forms its own forest, sprouting up a stony rise;

we peer into the dusk where seabirds dart, daring a surf that surrenders

salt to the resurgent earth: for to be is to be saved by a sacred grounding

& sloped on this cliff that spikes & spirits the air with fern.

Puerto Plata

The photo caught only the table on our hotel terrace,

with its magic flounder, surrounded by the lemon globe,

yellow peels, leaking humid seeds. Jagged Caribbean salts

that star the black helix; helix here means

the sad glamour of the lost surface;

surface: how you inspected your black legs after love;

sad: how, under the awning, you hid your sunburned face

balming it with the healing shadow; as for lost? maybe less so

for how this picture’s abscene yields sweet metononmy;

was it this day we carved pineapple for a surf picnic

& had a bad-ass twosome against a storm warning?

Never mind. Or say I do. Once again, my thumb sinks

the silver catch, the camera slips from my grip, botching

the shot; now I see what the image denies, and back

in Puerto Plata, I bask in the candor of your green suns.

Shirred Tunic with Birdsong

the shawl catches wind of what-if,

its fold & furrow essay the original

language of the whole fabric

& translate torque into an open-

flow idiom, as in, the shirred tunic:

her brown eyes follow the singsong double-pitch

which her ears pronounce: the sight of its landing

alights in thick gesso, and breaks through impasto:

red-green wing-spreads, minuscule points

and earth-toned filigrees in wet plaster,

shape the silence as a motmot sings again

Toyen’s Alchemy

 for Marie Čermínová

Within the doorway, green-cuffed

gloves hold hope & tame the wild

cat’s rage: this cat seems secured

by the picture’s calm silhouette,

as if the truer Serengeti

were a painter’s atelier—

the call-of-the-wild triptych

features monarch butterflies,

thin wings casting fat shadows

& an hourglass-avalanche of leopard spots

rises up into her, swells into her chest, rounds

out the breasts & opens into a fantail as

the green figure, finished,

turns the peacock’s art to gold.

Penelope Tuesdae

Annie Leibovitz pulls off a Tintoretto that beatifies Penelope Tuesdae

into the straight-up, fair daemon she is -- her vaudeville legs could pole-

vault a troop of drunken Bushwick cops & her furlined coat borders

taut, evanescent hips, tapered up to where carmine lapels powder

chiaroscuro about her neck; her thumbs tucked under black

that trumps a further black, vanishing far beyond the portrait’s end.

Gustav Klimt’s Truth

is a glossy saint, Veritas, an all-

absorbing, ever-emptying

cipher to a never-ending colure:

she stands like a labial sentinel,

an anti-Eve with a serpent

& blue fog confused round her ankles:

the glassy shock-princess wields

a mirror she doesn’t need

because the truth gives no

confirming reflection and

the authentic lacks any substance

beyond embellishments; and so he paints

flowers into the blonde waterfall to point

our eyes to the strictly-surface & to prove

what a dead stamen the daisy is

without these centrifugal wings

@ Tim Keane, 2007

Next poet