Would Shakespeare cringe, listening
as meth-dazed kids discuss Hamlet's great sorrow?
With words so battered and grooved, slang so
casual they puzzle over slow revenge and the complexities
of love and madness. It almost does not seem like speech,
but rather the pre-articulate thought process
of some amoeba-cluster still millenia from evolutionary progress.
No, but if the Bard himself sat here,
methinks he would not protest. Rather, with a
small smile above that stiff collar, he would
start writing a new play....
"The upstart youths do tarry, and we call them knaves, but surely they do see the stars of heaven with their eyes...."

for Kasey B.

there is sorrow in the night sky tonight
& i feel you are lost to me.
it should not be so, first
because you are human & in pain,
and next because I am only 238855 miles
from the moon
& so are you.
there is sorrow in the night sky tonight,
& i wish you very close to me
for there is peace in my bed -
also books & sand & a purring cat,
but mostly peace.

oh my hippie-flower child, bewildered & beleaguered by the immense sorrows & immense beauties of life, do not be lost to me. We're 23 million miles from Venus, yet she will guide the morning to earth's doorstep. Do not be afraid, even if the circle breaks & the bird dies & the house burns cold. Do not be afraid.

It will not mean the end of love.

kid sister

sixteen stoplights & a sunset on the windshield
sixteen songs & the cadence of the wind
sixteen streetsigns crooked at the crossings
sixteen summers she's been in love with him

it's no use counting, no use at all
she doesn't see him stumble or hear him fall
she's his stars & sun, breath & bone
but he worships afar & sleeps alone

what's the game here, sister, it doesn't seem fair
what's the deal here, brother, some sort of dare -
it's driving me crazy down this long dark road
nobody's gettin' the love that they're owed

begin a ballad & where will it end?

tremble trees turn and twist
tithe your leaves to breezy mist
grey-shanked clouds roam through the sky
and Harnod Well is frozen dry

heather sway and thatch lie still
this winter's brought a cutting chill
Rosser Dike's beleagured sore
woman, go and latch the door

on nights like this, my da did say
send the travelers on their way
light no lamps and save the bread
for fell things walk abroad, he said.

tarry starry northern wind
bid our sons to make an end
all the chores til morn will keep
and i would have them all asleep

for fell dread walks abroad tonight
it's in my heart not all is right
you heard how Chapman cursed the rood
and faith, the man was of my blood

stream of consciousness

Tremble, Prudence, we are remodeling your house into something lovely; French windows open on the spreading yard where we're replanting the Victory garden with camilla bushes and gracefully weeping willows. Here, we will put in a fountain that the children can splash in, and there, out on the West lawn, we will put in a tennis court where the fathers and their daughters can breathe strenuously wearing pastel-colored summer clothes. We have done away with the high ceilinged nursery and the governesses back bedroom, and I'm afraid the butler's pantry has also been replaced by a breakfast nook and rubber plants.

You see, my dear, once you offer to sell, you cannot control what your new tenants will do.

Burn or be burned

On the rack, the self-same concentrate of arrow-thoughts
and prayers and dark-eyed passion, the same petualance as before;
Another turbulent sowing, yet why should the harvest be any different tonight?
As if a child, half-dressed and illiterate, should be made a prophet,
as if mouse-brown eyebrows launched Helen's armada.
milk it dry, but don't be ridiculous. Cross the sea or stay.

but what shall I do?
"burn or be burned but she must have" - benet wrote that
because when something's not easy, it must be right. give me
a creed, a song, a vinegar litany pressed through swollen lips
and out into this empty silence;
pledge or gentle promise, i don't care, but let it last, and
matter so that I may begin to know the stammering,
low and human voices
that flicker on the edges. To talk with them I need
to find the proper resonance, to barter, I must grasp their same values -
will the crimson glory of autumn do it, or the fine fire in a woman's eye? Are Nature and Love
going to persecute this spreading hollowness?
Darkness...a faint cold outline...like walking trees,
oh it's no use.
Tuesday again, and its all for cold, dark and aloneness - "Aloneness" which is good says a small little puritan voice inside,
but hopefullness has gone the way of Merry England and poor, pretty Jack.
the blood has been proved,
the prophet has been named,
and the wandering goes on
among stars that have a different birth
but the same birth-day.

Blue Springs: after the history tour

Summer was thick upon the Thursby house. Spanish moss dripped motionless from the ponderous live oak by the porch, in whose shade sat a lone man in a rocking chair. His face was as creased as the bark of the tree, and he was quiet.

It was always this way by mid summer in Velusia. The town was enveloped in the July heat like an ant in amber. They say that after God finished laying out the Fifty States, he went back to smooth them over some. Alaska and its kin gave him no end of trouble, and the Carolinas and Virginias had some stubborn creases that wouldn't lay right. He got so all-fired frustrated with Tennessee and parts of Georgia that he went and heated up his iron again--stuck in right up next to the fire and let it set. It got red-hot and he came back. But he couldn't figure where to begin, the whole mess of 'em were so puckered and hillocked. While he was figuring, he done set that iron right flat on Florida and its been hot and steamy ever since.

His heels and the rocker, the infrequent red-throated flair of a basking lizard from the leaves of the camilla bush, the far-off gurgling of the head spring - for Walter, time hung in the air as a dusty haze. In the porch shade he sat and rocked and looked out on the yard, its sandy stretches tremulous with heat and waves of memory.

The freeze of 1895.
the manatee chasing of his childhood.
traveling to Ocala.
the new general store and Uncle Tyler's automobile.

"I've been beginning things all my life."

A mid-March Prayer

It's 5 am & mud-puddles pockmark my path.
I walk
to work & ignore the squelch.
Time makes sunwarmed grass green and all glistens as I amble into class,
my mind chained
to the lonely crocuses outside.

Midterm madness, he borrows my pencil
while I stare at the ceiling, deafened by the spring music suppressed within, and
annoyed by the insistent rows of interoggatives.

Solomon dreamed and asked for wisdom - he petitioned with the
Phoenician word (the Phoenicians: a sea-faring people who sailed boldly with tarry hands)
and recieved the right kind, immediate--the king's cup was emptied of mere knowledge
and instead outflowed rich, directional, To-steer-a-boat wisdom.

That's all I ask for too,
no arrogant desire for glory or ease--i ask no more than a God's gifting.
(i catch an inward glimpse the lilies of the field; my shout disrupts the class)

Perhaps I seek more than ship-handling flair;
I sue for the splendor of spring days
and wet skies and
uncaged joy. I entreat you, O Lord,
for year-old calf joy;
let me kick and cavort on one of your thousand hills!