Voluptuous


the scent of a first few drops of summer rain
on a world of hot pavement

the nexus of medieval voices
in universes of hollow stone

a stranglehold on a wire fence
by a herd of hungry runner beans

hibiscus, yellow-gold plateware,
insects sucking on butterfly bush blooms
purple as kings

the harvest-time betrayal 
of the bee who stung me
and made me sing with pain




The World Below
(at Tyringham Cobble)

Down below, in the cemetery, the churchyard, 
nothing moves
All things small
and silent and permanent

We ascend for the view 
The rocks that lift us survive from worlds
too old for questioning
Unprecedented: they are the precedents

We have climbed here before
Our standing unchanged, the season perfected
Each year leaning further to the edge
the steeple higher, the cemetery closer



​

What Color is the Sky in Your World?


Funny you should ask.
But did you mean today,
this monochrome afternoon
when neither the shape of cloud nor light can distinguish itself 
from the dull metal of rusting hills?
Or some other day when the blue of 
an ancient warrior's helmet, glimpsed 
in the museum of hereafter
sits on an ocean 
from rim to rim the hue of imagination?

Or red with anger? 
Or perhaps merely some broken vessel
in the eye of the world bleeding 
from the sleep of bellicose afternoons
spent hurling curses at the menials 
who do not deserve reproach,
but merely carry on the bread and circuses
for the smart money players who insure 
that skies appear only in regulation hues.

Or black? when I wake, having not slept
truly, but run, panting, from a desperate desire
to preserve the painful color of experience
in a world that can be shared, 
exploited, yes, for some shared gain
even with the likes of those who insist 
that all must go on exactly as before, 
lest they accrue some unanticipated loss.

Or green, when I stand on my head,
waiting for the gods of delicate, undying things 
to splay their toes 
and walk from earth to heaven, heaven to earth,
where they do not recall the authors 
who chew their bit of itty-bitty byte 
in worlds of dreary convenience and well-born men.