At the roadside curb the pretty girl and handsome man grew philosophical and knelt:

“I pledge allegiance to… 

but wait… before we start on that, have we forgotten that they use it against us; its language of gesture and faction? Always we could find our own way home, even from here, shrouded in the knowledge of the long trek back through the washed-up status quo, the scars of the day’s expedition, and those things a person ought to understand. At night we see the searchlights come in from the West; this map of Purgatory folded in our hands…”

They walked across a compound of houses turned to scrub and stands of birch and alder. The barricade was merely show – the real wall was inside – and marked so meaninglessly. Their day was an historic crossroads: a small town with memorials at its edge, weighed against their knowledge of the street; the rites of the shopping district entangled by ideas and merchandise distributed by senseless history.

They stopped and kissed, and soon were on their way. “When you are kissing you cannot smell the rain,” she said.

In a window, a vendor sat, sharpening his wit on tourist dollars.

on Entering Paradise

You enter paradise only once: a city of graceful façades, vast warehouses piled with produce; old weatherboarded hoardings, lampposts, basement railings; cupolas, windows and chimney pots…

a district of garden squares gazes glumly at the cathedral like a dream of the idea of home. Rows of rosebushes make its pavements blossom. Those who leave are rare, having to find other hopes in which to live…

at the worn doorstep, the eyes of the pale concierge – that master of deflation – light up. With the care of a man handling egos, he hands out hard hats and shows us to an upstairs room…

when it is full dark, the silver censers swing like lanterns at the end of a feast. The full moon pops like a light bulb. The glimmer all around us shifts. The fragile and subtle clues smile. Time has caught up with us in our deep nakedness. Sad, mad oddities move in to cover traces of the dead, to the south of the time we have come to inhabit…

and just as it began, suddenly it is over. In the windows, the laughter of angels as white as jasmine; the myth that is just that, a myth: of your human warmth; of the cold wind of your passing; of the stars, and of their unmasking.

My Desert Brother

His land, like his language, is crazed:

its whip-like ocotillos and thorny mesquites

startling in their profusion, casting islands of shade

over desert mariposas; palominos veering

into paloverde trees

kicking ideas aside; disturbing the secrets of air.

His road has tightened to a band of black;

its cinders cascading in every direction –

tail guard of a speeding car.

Sometimes it fails him – this world

and the words to which it is tethered –

though often it is he who fails to notice

that things alone, not words, have led to what

he knows. They come out of nowhere –

things in their homes –

as lightly as shadows: an unnamed animal

dying on the sun-baked earth;

hoof over rock; dust on their wheels;

his own shape vanishing

into unknown territories.

Ring of a shovel on rocks.

My Philosopher Brother

Our autumn nights were given up to talk

of little consequence. I’d offer drinks

and he would tell of things that had occurred

to him:

“Most of the way we have not been alone,

though often it may seem that way. Clues come

we can’t decipher – the data cantering through

the cantata; the voice in the invoice –

so all that’s left to do is pass across

the things we do not make nor can improve,

like visitors who can’t remain, but still

discover that things are valuable.

“But are they guided by the chiming bell

of some calamity; as in the days

when we stood up in front of the ruins

where all sense of belonging lingered;

or are they hiding in the lee of those

crumbling structures others have dismissed

as the idea of a destination?”

So, morning came with no more progress made,

trying to avoid becoming trapped by words

alone.   And, so, we both put on winter.