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Cat Singing Scat to the Old Refrigerator Door


All day you play approach-avoidance with the monsters of flesh
who inhabit your world and hold the key to that chill cupboard
where the bounty lies, cold and conniving
You whine, you wait and look glassy-eyed upward
at the monsters, big-footed, diffuse, erratic, incomprehensible
Land mines going off one direction or another
when the refrigerator door lies open, acutely angled to
the bisection of meow and just plain oww!
You sharpen your claws and wait
Heavy-footed they disturb your quiet repast,
scarfing, small-toothed, the dry salvages of the afternoon feed
which you upend some hours later on the other side of the bed (his!)
which he fails to find, while she in her busyness o'ersteps
and howls!
the hide-beneath-the-bed howl!
where you look for darkness and find nothing to distract
your marvelous night-sight, waiting always
for the creatures whose existence
has escaped you so many generations, millennia,
ages of beast and man,
since you crawled down from the trees,
miniaturized by some dark bargain into cat-chers
of night creatures: sleek, hairy, bearing rat-faced claws,
who fall between your open paws to suffer
bat and play
like dead things, whom you drag to the doorstep,
too dainty to eat such slime and blood yourself,
while you wait, kitty-corner
for the squeak of the refrigerator door.
 
 
 


The Ocean Reviving
 

Once more I give myself to the sea
that gallops wickedly forward to meet me,
the new challenger: Look who's arrived with his battered shield,
and his droopy drawers, and his skinny arms and SK lesioned skin,
and his tubeful of slathered sun screen,
his shiny red favors no weapon to wield
Yet still the white chargers dash forward with mad glee
pounding on the ears, churning the sea bottoms to buttermilk
Wailing with the transmogrified screams of the drowned, the downed aircraft,
sunken sailors of the salted centuries,
the guns of a daft disastrous history blowing itself to smithereens
the raging cacophony of old nightmares, misrepresented feuds,
Old Ahab railing to the gods of unforgiving malicious power,
Leviathan's cadence of inhuman superiority,
god being on god's side before he's on ours
And doing very little to meliorate the pounding battle cry
of the revolutionary wind-surge that topples swimmers
upturns the knights of the fiberglass board
face-plants bravely hapless contestants
to the shell-bitten floor of the hard-driven bottom,  
where all must end who challenge the gale-happy sea
except for me
and those happy few who take themselves back in time
when the wild stallions of the deep
still deign to shake us free
 
 
 
 


Impossible Skies
 

Impossible, I said,
staring at the sky,
deeper here, as if in our own bodies we
ourselves have soared into some new
continent of seeing,
new-grown eyes rising from the crab's back of age
 
That tiny slash of reflecting metal,
glimpsed in a quadrant of heaven
where nothing that breathes can live,
even raindrops must wear hazmat-headdress
to escape the eternal platitudes beyond the visible spectrum...
making all that noise?
 
Search the other moiety, whispered a voice  
of heaven's blue and seemingly unpocked countenance.
Disease free, time-free,
unburdened of all happily, confessedly material souls
save those who escape the gravity of life,
who have grown wings to go where angels picnic without ants,
or other delicacies
or anything else that lives, breathes,
or metabolizes on the periodic table of days and years,
living obligation-free in the
video-sphere of the unimaginably clean,
where, according to reports, the immortals of the Morning Star
throw down their tears
to extinguish the fires of longing and love.
 
And see, there, the other nearer carrier,
the silvered streak of reflected solar surplus,
forged by big-spenders of invisible substances dug from the pliable earth,
ignoring all such forgettable penalties to cleave the element of air and reappear,
time-traveling backwards, first-class and in visible spectra,
bearing sounds unheard for millions of years
news of new worlds breaking unseen on the horizon,
imperceptible beneath the splash of white thunder,
those giant hooves crashing on the spineless jelly-fingers below
... and making all that noise?
Yes, up there, closer to the birth of crystalline creation --
Possibly? Impossible.
But so.