ILLUMINATIONAL
I. JUNE
My sunflower bag, this June day
on Carmel beach I fill with pink
stones and will go on making
a mosaic of our wet and dry lives.
How the yellow heaven prefers
yellow: palo verde coats the desert
golden and once the bees do
their work, edible fruit beans.
Nothing is hidden, nothing is
prolonged. Green trunks do
as green does: live, expand, die.
And we all want blackberry days.
Because our lives are mid-sting,
consider the sand dollars and
Monterrey glass angels psalming
our fondness into watering lists.
East of the greenhouse, clouds
cast shadows, beckon rain as
magnitude and sudden vanishing.
We are growing reverent in situ.
How twilight fossil beds teach me
to settle grief. A moment of vision:
slates of purple moorland framed
by flattened leaf blades defying wind.
II. COSMOS DREAMING
One day
my own field
sunlight webwork
in the living
room
broken silk spikes
knife through my chest
I am graced
with a million holes
where these lives
vertiginous
have reached through me
flower-chasers
in a time of strange rain
and spring amalgams
of greenness and heatwave
Ray and the wind
I tell him wild sugarcane
volunteers to rise of its own
free will,
as any good weed should.
The same relics of desire:
grain to the knees
I wonder if there will be
children, if we will
bring them here
one day
to know dead of
in windows
of summer
Some desires
can leave us barren
unable to find
a new way
to say the cosmos colors
we hope rise
from the ground
where small feet
glide seed.
III. ABUNDANTIA
In these last days, departments
of every desire.
Glass angels leave their cenotaphs
and I lower my face to the water.
Sorrow: a good reason for our forgetting.
Guests without devotion
congregate
on the balcony
with sunbellies.
Acceptance: a sudden clearing
and splitting what belongs
to us.
Standing in front of the largest organ
in the world, what you will find
is the pipes speaking to you.
How you
define memory
is the butterfly effect.
A wetland sphered is my Ray,
I’ve come to be xeromorph.
A wetland sphered is my Ray,
an opening, a fourth man of fire.
Remember the illuminationals:
berries on the afghan,
Nevada letters to a phantom sister,
grapefruit, binoculars at Fish Lake,
red merle resting in sawgrass.
The life balm of a promise is
comfort in a word that may burn,
a chest of devotions, was it?
A wetland sphered is my Ray,
foundations in abundance nebulaed