NONE OF WHAT WE KNOW

Desire is delay and is painful. Liberties

are worth taking without telling.

What’s missing matters.

And an absence can easily go unseen.

Extend any perplexity into time and you may

end up with a partridge in a pear tree.

Despite the subtle meaning of things,

syllables will still be there to say

and less than scintillating facts about cities and rivers

will continue to pepper the pages of books.

Ungulates will lumber upon the earth and pigeons, 
like always, will make great bombardiers.

And hands, when they gesture,

will only tell part of the story.

The figure approaching out of the oasis

may just be a sailor once lost at sea.

None of what we know is a fait accompli

or an anomaly that can end a primrose conversation.

Regardless of our native tongue

or the lack of spice in our pastor’s homilies

or the puff and predictions

from a detective’s calabash,

there is more mystery

between what we perceive and what we imagine

than any cliché can contrive.

THE REFERENT

dances about architecture, egregiously.

Calls the cause and the consequence

by the same name.

Makes perfect approximations

when trying to quantify the unquantifiable.

Doesn’t dilly when it can dally.

Lives by clock and ruler.

Spills blood and ink.

Carries a pocket thesaurus

under its hair piece

to help it find the right words

for what it isn't feeling.

Could be said to be oxymoronic

and hypochondriacal.

Is fond of spicy pickles.

Hears a chorus of narrators 

in its knuckledheaded noggin

and the scarlet song of the tanager

outside its tinted window.

Believes that believing in pain

is more efficient than actually having it.

And wonders, really wonders

what it must have been to be Ornette Coleman

when he decided to set jazz free.

THE LIGATURE

Often it is the incidentals –

a hinge, a clasp, a bearing –

that make a thing work,

that gives it its sway,

its music,

it movement.

Without it

a door won’t open,

a woodwind won’t blow,

a wheel won’t spin.

And if these elements

aren’t at play,

if, let’s say,

a ligature is lost

somewhere in the night,

what then?

We will have to improvise.

We will have to become the clasp.

We will have to thumb our way onto the stage

from the audience,

and make the slimmest offering possible.

And that will have to do.

And it will.

It does.

It will be the interlude

that no planning

could have composed.

THE CHALICE AND

THE CHIAROSCURO KISS

The abacus does not think

about arithmetic.

The parenthesis does not know

it is qualifying anything.

So do not separate the to

from its verb

by boldly splitting

the infinitive.

Do not take nuts

from a squirrel,

hospitality

from a hostess,

the ticker-tape

from the parade.

Let the falling rock

have its gravity,

the chalice

its chiaroscuro stem.

We are all human.

We make mistakes.

And in the errors we make

is an elegance, a design

we must try to see

like the illusion

that toys with our optics

and our nerve.

Let’s not be

the shrewd politician

that avoids the question

with an obfuscating answer.

Let’s live inside the sentence

we are writing.

Let’s leave later alone

and tomorrow unfurnished.

And just for now,

together,

let’s watch the chalice

disappear

until our faces almost

touch, kiss.

Maybe then we will see

how beautiful we really are

and ourselves

in each other.

PROVERB

Somewhere between

the province of physics

and the quantum leap

of a first step is 

an agoraphobic inside

the straitjacket of his own

skin. He is on a crusade

to tame a tornado.

But he won’t leave the house.

He is like the inventor

who destroys in the afternoon

what he has made in the morning.

Like a river that thirsts its own water,

a tree that hungers its ripening fruit.

He will follow the cues and arrows

of his imagination, circumventing

nothing. Behavior’s misbehaviors,

standard deviations, grievings and shrivings

crowd him like wolves.

Then one morning…

indeterminate as an electron,

at the edge of tolerance,

with nothing left to read

but the scratchings of his own mind,

he will quiver with the knowledge that god is

the dice and the hand that throws them –

and he is that God.

He is a proverb

waking to its own wisdom.