The Bay and Parked Cars

The walkers by the sea, along the shore,
are broken by the verticals of trees
and diving birds out past the breaking waves.
The forest is transported by these words
though stilted by the swaying of the trees
and the insipid baying of the wind
and dogs, who lost their masters in the woods.
The woods are by the sea, though, running close.
The trees are by the sanitarium
that overlooks the breaking of the waves.
Nature, around here, is rippled by these words,
their coy and repetitious passing by,
as thinking things are crippled by this verse,
you might say. Or you might say the reverse:
that thinging is the thinking of the verse,
that things are thoughts until they’re made as things
and stand in being like a proper thing.
It’s late, too late, my friend, for you and me
to think of things since mostly they’ve been thought,
so thing the thoughts until they resonate
like things, like birds descending on the waves,
like sycamores beneath the sketchy clouds,
brindled things of weight and resonance.
Build and talk at once, and while we build,
we’ll sing the things we’re building by the woods
that back up to the bay and to parked cars.
(These words are standing, in metonymy,
for something bigger, some big mystery.)


Apotheosis of August

Out front of a closed minimart, a lamp
convulsed, delighting its adoring moths.
The night—an empress once, but paupered now,
ragged, reduced by the galvanic whirr
of atoms in a scintillating void—
relished the warmth macadam lots still held.
The hills across the gorge from Palmerton
erupted with the manic drooling of
coyotes.
                Summer. Bubble gum and metal.
My idiot brain awoke, declared the world
boring, and said it craved some kind of madness
as well as salt. And ketchup smeared across
formica countertops. And diesel fumes.

A chill descended, fanged, from ancient hills.