excavate

It’s like waking from a strange dream

in a strange place, wearing nothing

you ever wore before— how you know

there’s a story whether the world

worked it out, this built in

repetition backwards to ignition,

the mirror therefore it’s me.

No phone, no ID, this sense

that the three-second delay stalls

the signal to the senses, your name

a where, a when, a reasoned reckoning.

Now here comes the marked-up map, 

the dots on the decision tree, 

the presupposed path you spoke aloud.

The crown of stars,

the roots through the rocks—

there you are here we go.

The dogs charge rings around the yard,

flies taste at scratched skin and raw knees,

the radiance of the dusk

another retelling for the recollection.

Oh, the world knows its part

gifting this hollowed here,

scattering labels and receipts.

the wrong birds

Maybe it is the descent 

implicit in the way the symbols

stack, circles turning

inside circles, the wheel at work

as the end in the action eats

away. Something inevitable 

that structure of fitful scripture 

the cadence of water

rain making gutters into falls,

gray skies and dripping eaves,

want laying it on while

the battery runs down. The tree

written so often described unknown

as misnamed passerines,

raptors attached to the explicit 

tithes of divination and 

the divine, owls unseen 

closer than names

come the night. Half allusion 

three quarters vision from within,

the wings that do not pass

world after world, starlight 

and the negative space

a longhand sky leaves,

branch and bird, wind and world

saying everything a little bit off

stirring embers and giving smoke

waiting as the earth comes around.

obsolescence

It’s like a sixth sense

depending on how you count,

the way you feel it in gearbox,

the way you take the tension, you hear

it in the engine, that almost

right smack there in your mouth

organ grinder out of tune

that taste you admit you miss,

the song as it laps itself

a sound like a lonesome light,

the war crackle humming from

some ancient shelf in your mind.

Here it was the dance of dust motes 

the morning window and the bedroom closet,

a Disney train on the wall

that shifted in capered in the dark.

Lightning storms of static

beneath the blue blanket

dragging sparks through my hair.

Hidden reading in secret by flashlight 

because I had to know 

what happened next. Rain and stars

and animals, only a stranger to

every friend. I don’t know 

what stuck with you. I don’t know 

which parts are gone.

It is only over now in the after,

past tenses and wild swings.

Collapsed into antiquity,

apocryphal volumes and ancestral tales,

eras and ages vague islands,

hairstyles and girlfriends and

long dissertations on

why my boss is dumb. 

Over and over the fading lore 

passes through the wounds and

aches of the old ape,

life’s cruel slapstick and

cereal in front of the TV,

something sweet and easy,

cartoons and troubled comforts as

the world forgets me, then 

remembers me too well.