Heaven's Gate

We hate cats!
read the sign
on the dog
park's gate.


Take them to
the cemetery
next door, it
droned to all
who would read.
Let them hunt
mice or die.


Why field mice
love the dead
we don't know:
burrows into
fresh dug soil
perhaps.  There
they breed like
with like, little
mice morsels.


And, should they
die, it read,
we let dogs
run the haunts
at night...


                Dogs
love to sweep
across streets
in the city
of the dead.


...to chase ghosts
"from this world
to the next"
was implied
though it read
from shadows
of their lives.






Dogs eat, of
course, from cats'
unburied
bodies and
bury clean bones
when done.


No cats go,
asserted
the rambling
sign, through
Heaven's gate
alone!


     

Singing Kaddish for Anna

(in memory of my mother, dedicated to my father)

    

All night long, my bedroom glowed
golden with the light of street lamps
through opened window blinds,
through the sash I’d cracked
to let the cool night air flow in
and the deep breathes of sorrow out.
All night long wasted on sleep
that wouldn’t come whilst listening
to thoughts that couldn’t stem
the stream of time into a river
greater than mine . . . A half-state
neither here nor there, beyond
the great windowed wall that once
sieved our lives into moments,
vignettes from the theatre of us,
that history only now defines.
All night confined to one such moment,
hearing the whimpers of the dog
whose fall into sleep has sent him
into a run across imagined fields;
no one else here to sing
the lullabies you once carried
like water: fluid even
within confines of a melody
I can’t quite remember
but don’t want to forget.


     

Vampires

They have put me in a room where
white curtains meet white walls,
where white lights glare down
from ceilings like irradiated flies.


They have strapped me to a bed
that I might take my rest
in waiting while the ventilation moans.
The cries!  It cries.


They have shown me pictures of my lovers
and my lovers as they died;
taken all my memories, twisted them,
and spoken just of lies.


They have caged a cricket
and placed it by my side,
that by it alone I'll know
when day is passing into night.


They feed me enough to keep me
healthy and alive, to prick me
and to bleed me dry through
tubes that wend into another room.


They pretend that they have left me
alone to hear the cricket singing,
but I can feel them sucking,
taking turns on the plastic tubes.




      

Werewolf

(for Paul)


Tonight, driving you home,
I think of the bogs beneath
a full moon.  The werwulf rising
above the mist on two legs,
the corps of a man not fully
human.
              Glancing at the wheel,
my hands, the bony fingers hard-
worked long past dark.   I
think   it could never happen
to me, but already ...


My hands are fur covered.  And,
I know this manhood
                                   will not be
long in coming.     You speak
of animals wiser than men:
You are a fox, a deer, and
you are hunted.  Tonight,
you find no rest, fearing,
I may turn out the lights
and go
              blindly,   able
to see in the dark.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

In 1721, Bailey's Dictionary defined werwulf as being "so named because man should be ware of them."

Dictionarium Britannicum: or a more compleat universal etymological English dictionary than any extant ... Explaining hard and technical Words, or Terms of Art, in all the ARTS, SCIENCES, and MYSTERIES following. 

Bailey's Dictionary rivaled Samuel Johnson's Dictionary in terms of its popularity in England.

     

Mud Man

you say     i won’t
make you


and so     i go to bed
unmade     slept in
unlike a shore
ravished
by flood, retreating


and acceding
to your will     i break
a sweat that will burn


only after
you are gone
in the morning


   

River's Edge

soft: mud fingered
by roots, holding
a treasure of bones
and the flints used
to pare them of their flesh
beside a campfire burned
long into the night, its red
embers to white
ashes: fired up, then
covered stones
with a powder      like snow
no one long remembers –
not even wrenched up
and prodded into shapes
made for tasting water

Reformation of the Cut Makers

Block.     A block.     One
Beside another.     Distracted.
Distracting.     A block.
A block.     One atop
Another.      Oppressing.
Imprinted.     One,
A Monet squinting
At the other.     The Other,
A dot.     Arranged
As a puzzle.     A  photo
Of the mountains
From which another
Descended.     In multiples
Chipped from altars,
Holy men ascended
Whole.     Again,
A block.
A block.     Blocking out
The sun behind
A pyramid.     Always,
A scion to the light.
A render of lime.
A block.    Built
On the back
Of bones.     Encased
In them.     Refined
And reformed.     Else,
Then, is
Nothing but stone.