Sestina #1

Braced against the skin of this watery rock

Every single person anybody knows their name

Is here, some apartment, some crowded room

Below our feet all the ground we'll ever hold

All that lives, and all that dies, wrapped in space

Endless space, and swirling suns and galaxies

I send my love to sing the galaxies

The rolling derbies of steel upon the rock

Where new kingdoms will carry our name

Where children of our love will make room

For more children, where the life holds

Warm and clean shelter, fill up this space

When you merely study this dark and space

You will not see just the empty glow of galaxies

Where no signs of life cling to ice and rock

You'll paint mythologies upon the stones by name

Therein pushing history and dreams to make room

For human bodies to rise into the dark and hold

This seedling I carry to our orchard, I hold

so close into my chest, the space

between the lemon tree and the galaxies

Is shaped like the absence of a rock

The absence of a history, of a name

And I stand between these two places, all room

I plant my love and my tree where there's room

For roots to reach and hands to touch and hold

We'll carry all these living things into space

And bring the wild earth to the galaxies

Where seedlings and insects dig into rocks

And make new islands, become new things, new names

I send my love to you signed by name

Will you let me sweetly into your room

Where, together, we may have and hold

And bathe our skin in dappled starlight space

above us sinking into our skin, the light of galaxies

Calling to our children down to our little rock

The universe in a conch shell, names in chaos held in rock

Where geologic time holds deep in our quiet bedroom

The skin of us, the tiniest galaxies of us, to fill all space

Sonnet #192

Be loyal to mother and father and child
Be loyal to god and to the holy wild
Be loyal to all children, all grands and greats
Abandon all loyalty to king and state
Abandon the store that would abandon us
And fill in the factories with slaves of rust
Abandon all loyalty to priests of the mind
Instead of loyalty -- be kind, always kind

For olive trees twist and the vines all falter
And the fig trees ooze sap in the place all bones rattle
Where the roof tops bend and carry no shelter
There is the place where kill comes for cattle

Loyal to only the wind of the stars,
And the shivering Atoms, life, alone, prays

Sonnet #191

And Solomon, what's left of all his glory?
His meticulously described temple is gone
The gold and olive-wood carving is a story
that contains the temple, now. All he has done
as a king, the wars and lovers, all, adrift
like wet books in large oceans, passing
from one wave to another, the slow shift
of rewriting wet pages and back into the tossing
Until the story, itself, only pretends at truth
There was a man, once, who would be king
In his dream, he asked for wisdom from a God
And, when he woke, the babe was brought in
Two women shouting, "It's mine! The child's mine!"
And, his mind burning, he held the sword of time

Sonnet #190

I used to know how to write a poem
Once upon a time I even knew stories
I see these ideas I built like ruined Rome
I have buried more in my worries
Than I have ever been able to keep
Once I thought I could change everything
Build parapets of paragraphs, war weep
To carry sorrow to joyful ignorance bring
Light to undiscovered continents inside
The soul of dreams. I wake up from this
The dust accumulated, buried streets wide
I stumble to work lost to the fabled kiss
Of forces greater than one little soul
I have forgotten more than will ever be whole

Sonnet #189

The castle is no place to be a man,
All that dust and draftiness, narrow stairs
And those tiny slits for windows. Escape plans
And siege equipment, and all those rare
Accumulated things growing mold
or hidden in moldy boxes, and the cracks
in the walls where mice, chewing on old
manuscripts. And there's all those people hack
coughs in the dust and race around the stairs
No, the castle is no place to be a man
The crown is an unnatural invention made for stares
That weighs the mind down. Will you stand?
I've never met a man in a castle - only jesters
Who seem unaware of the jeers of their betters.

Sonnet #188

The day I knew I could never go home

Again, never again, was with a cookie

I knew in childhood, a humble cookie

And the memory of the cookie's grown

a mythology in my desire, a craving

irrational, at best, an addiction to it

Such that I must never permit

the thing to enter the house, and staving

off this desire is a fact I know as truth

If I give in and taste the cookie,

It is not so great in my mouth

As it is as a memory of the cookie

The taste is nothing but a dream

Old rooms in lost houses larger than seem

Sonnet #187

We do not know the world is not an egg
Waiting to hatch when it is warm enough
The inner workings of the magma and rough
stone crust are known only by trembling legs
And layers of sediment, volcanic eruptions
We only know what lies smeared upon the edge
The topsoil layer, the distant crane flight's stretch
and the mumble of the clouds between; excitations
could mean anything. How do we know for sure
Each planet is not a dragon's egg, remember the serpent?
Remember the old tales, how darkness swallows azure
and the land beneath our feet cracks - inadvertant
to this, we make such plans about new myths, a blur
of heavenly angels that will come, for some important

Sonnet #186

There used to be parakeets across this country
They were a splash of color in the corn
The farmers took the musketball and scorn
To drive them to the brink, a stuffed sundry
Along with the carrier pigeon, they all died
And that was supposed to be the end of it
Ask anyone they'll tell you there's no parrot
Native to this country anymore, all died
All died... Except, the pets went wild
And look up into the trees of the city
There the colonies cackle in style
They call them invasive, but they're pretty
And they came here from some emerald isle
The same as any ghosts where we lacked pity