Returning to the Moon is the key to humanity’s long-term future in space. It is a vertical project, akin to climbing a ladder. Each step has its own name, its own symbol. The symbols are not visual representations of the naming words. Nor are the names descriptive of the activity of the step. There are no milestones, only spaces between the steps. Memory retains them thus, & can produce them to the mind whenever it has occasion to consider them. The first step is called “A control toolbox automatically loading for no reason.” The sea is its avatar.
Archives for August 2016
Suspicious looking Tupperware
Chooses her words care-
fully. Scientific before
descending to the biblical.
Thus hermetic instead
of hermeneutic. Ho-
mophonic prefered to
homophobic. The revo-
lutions of evolution
in place of revelations,
divine or otherwise.
Castor Mound
St. Hubert’s Day
and through frost smoke rising from the creek
a waxing moon
Sunset. Light leaching from a freezing sky. A clear night falling. East, the cold glitter of evening stars, but west beyond the lake, twilight burning out in colors of honey, wood violets and blue vervain.
Right about now that 80 lb. super blanket I spotted last week will be working the castor set just upstream from the den. The chin stick will make him drop a front foot squarely between the jaws of a #4. Tomorrow morning, as sure as I’m standing here, he’ll be at the bottom of the drowning rod. If he’s as big as I think he is, he’ll go at least 70 inches. As long as he isn’t all scarred up, he’ll maybe rate “Select”.
Venus. The Milky Way. The order of things.
The Beaver Moon
At perigee,
biggest and brightest of a lifetime
Skull Percent Off
How to rationalize, face-down, eye makeup and packing
raw meat and eiderdown slideback, the traintrack.
This was the dogeared philosophy pushing contaminate
inside where falseness began.
This was the witch wind the finger-kinged zodiac dip.
Many slid down the slide
of the abandoned pavilion
slipped off her negligee that way.
Prince Gallitzin pedaled the organ
let his hair out the diamond-shaped window.
You had the talent bluesy, unlucky
the runs in your stocking
economic decline.
Papers soaked up pubic ink
closet calculations
the heavy girl gaze.
Let the clouds serve
what sawdust does best wide-eyed and pray.
Bend your head dead above mutant truths
a four-legged nativity.
Go ahead and indulge in popping glass violets
self-deprecation
as cutting your teeth
won’t fix what’s left of decay.
Posing
Mount Cavalry Cemetery was just off Hot Springs Boulevard and it was our go-to spot in eighth grade. We felt cool there, in the dark, wearing our ripped up jeans and flannel shirts. If Kurt Cobain hadn’t died two years prior he might have been proud of our middle-of-nowhere New Mexico grunge crew. I’d dyed my hair eggplant that year and my favorite jeans had patches all over them. My favorite patch was sewn on the back pocket: bright red voluptuous lips with the words “kiss my patch” scrawled across them in white letters. It was as far as I could go. My friend Lynette’s hair was dyed an inky black and she wore it draped around her pale face. Excluding the forest green and black checked flannel tied around her waist every day, her clothes were all black. Her eyes were lined with thick black eyeliner, her eyelashes were heavy with mascara and she wore black lipstick, too. David and Patrick, the tall and hollow-cheeked twins, had “slayer” scratched into their skateboards. Lynette and Angelica took it a step further, carving “slayer” into their wrists and the insides of their soft biceps with dull pocket knives during algebra class. “It makes the pain go away,” they’d explain, referring to a mysterious emotional trauma that I was not privileged to understand.
American Sentences, New Zealand Lens
Sheep surround the airplane door—howdoyoulikeus?
howdoyoulikeus?
The urban myth: Ladies a plate, they said, and she
actually brought one.
I spent three hours in Los Angeles. I know all about
your country.
Howlonghaveyoubeenherehowdoyoulikeithowlonghave
youbeenhow?
We make our own rules. That’s why we need so much
Number 8 fencing wire.
Clean, green and a good place to raise children. Don’t
say what you really think.
What do you mean “insular”? If you don’t like us, you
can always leave.
Now that you’re old and we’ve sucked you dry, when
are you going to go back home?
No more Miss Liberty, no more Golden Gate—
only the Southern Cross.
Torn Light
If the world smells like rain in the morning
and it does not rain.
Nothing latches on to almost everything.
In the morning, the birds settle like soft taps
of erasers on blackboards.
The chalk breaks and skreaks.
Alcoholic
It was 1975. There was a jail cell and a death sentence, a liver barely functioning. There was a coffee filter and a metal tub of shoe polish. There was nothing but time and silence. Her father’s father played chemist, separating the alcohol molecules from the rest of the chemical goo. There was extraction, taste, and, finally, release. He descended from the Goths. They spoiled the land with their presence, their grease, their ilk. They were an underground fracture, a mineral seepage, kudzu and weeds, invasive. Their offspring, poison. Their semen, toxin in the water.
Osage orange
Maclura pomifera, a tree species native to the southern Mississippi valley
one Osage bow was worth
a horse & blanket in trade
it has convoluted grapefruit-sized fruit
on the female trees
formidable thorns on young shoots
yellow-colored bark
its lush foliage
was sheared effectively into impenetrable hedges
the invention of barbed wire
soon made Osage orange hedges less desirable