Flecks of sea rust
trailed phantom ships,

their crews (it’s said)
marooned in paradise.

In this crash economy
we had no choice—

fight the fishing fleets,
reflag at sea.

An old fax machine
wired to a car battery

sent our request to join
some landlocked navy.

We lined up behind
flags of convenience

leading us forever
from our green homes.

While sharks & frigates circled,
I reckoned the distance

between two hearts
and almost made the leap.

—

This came from reading a series of articles on piracy in the Naval War College Review (Summer 2009, Vol. 62 No. 3).

there is the matter of slipping below streets
where other worlds lie deeper still

parades of skulls answer boyish dreams
where flashlights’ flames throw question marks

illuminating smiles and bare thighs
(don’t say more before we wake)

the space spins round a radio star
sweat, short skirts and cowboy boots

typical typical a laugh a sigh
he starts by saying more

when less is better
she finishes by saying nothing

there is also the matter of energy
when D.J.’s lock in with the subway rumble

there is also the energy of matter
and dancing the tangle of time and bass

there is also the matter of knowing
when to burn and when to gasp

there is also the matter of morning
when the last one up turns out the lights

—

This is written in response to the latest Big Tent Poetry prompt, which was a list of words and phrases. It also owes much to the recent National Geographic article “Under Paris” (Feb 2011).

Check out what others did with the prompt here.

We were the shadows
that filled the sky while
ten thousand flying foxes
hung sleeping in the trees.
We raced up the street,
tropical sky and a flash
of the South China Sea’s
brightness squinting our eyes.
Barefoot down the hill,
not thinking once about
bamboo vipers the color
of grass to the rope swing
made (we all imagined) from
the same rope they used
to hang Tojo. Running,
we took our lives in hand,
swung out over the houses
in the loop, imagined
we could soar and in airborne
moments learned to love
the risk, the danger,
the sunny disregard for
the bone-shattering distance
to the rooftops down below,
the all-too brief air in your face
seconds when we could have
just let go,
birds learning to fly—
unschooled and unbound
by our parents’ gravity.

—

Chasing Westward

The vultures are heading west, their slow flying
shadow grace just an illusion of the blank sky.

Clock them. They’re racing away fast as thought.
Faster than often-repeated certainties and fears.

They escape with gizzards full, hurtling toward the sun,
shuttling some soul’s nourishing remains westward.

Out there, I hope, they’ll catch the day that never ends,
the place, I believe, night will never fall.

After sunset, I hear the rumbling highway, cars
chasing westward, chasing dreams, the fading light.

—

I wrote the poem the other day in response to some footage I shot a few months back. I was going to try letting the poem grow out of the video to see how that worked (there’s a great discussion on this over at the Moving Poems Forum), but as it turns out the footage I based the poem on is nowhere in this video.

Here’s how this video came about. Yesterday, I was sitting in traffic when my phone rang. After the call, I set the phone on the dash. While I was sitting there looking at it, I thought maybe I could turn the videocamera on and let it just film sky while I was driving. I did and whenever I came to a light, I’d just stop the recording and reset it in a different place, either on the dash or against the window. It never occurred to me until yesterday just how useful it is to have a perfectly flat camera.

By the time, I got home I had the footage and I thought this poem would work well with it.

The birds at the beginning are not vultures. They are grackles, and that was just a lucky shot. I’d love to have more than a few seconds of that, but they just happened to fly over at that moment. I didn’t even realize I had gotten them since I was watching the road. I left them in because I think it’s a cool shot and decided not to change the poem.

The grackles there work on another level for me too since this one feels like both a Highway Sky and a Birds Nobody Loves poem.

This videopoem is posted both at YouTube and Vimeo. Feel free to share it if you like it.

Thrown to Sea

A leopard stalks the high slopes, at home
in a thin-sky world on the blue edge of night.
She pads over a landscape of fossils, old shells
and ancient plastic embedded in stone.
Her tail is a python, pursuing her through the snow,
telling lies and trying to throw her back to sea,
but she maintains her balance, always.
It’s what she does. The sea is just a legend.

The ocean spits out plastic, faded, thin,
but whole. The great-grandchildren
of those who threw it in retrieve the relics,
invent stories and religions for their ancestors,
singing their praises only to go home
and complain bitterly that they didn’t
leave behind something more useful
than just the cast off detritus of their lives.
Not even a boat to get off this rock.
They are prisoners. The sea is the law.

It’s an odd T-shaped island. Flying over
you can’t help but look for other letters,
an alphabet afloat on the Pacific blue,
but it’s just that lone T, and the people,
they are of the sea. They throw their best
plastic in and watch the waves swallow
all the evidence that they had lived.
This is their sacrifice and preparation.
The waves call them. The sea is Heaven.

—

This is something of a mash-up. I’m rereading David Mitchell’s brilliant Cloud Atlas. The opening takes place in the Chatham Islands. I know nothing about them, but I read the Wikipedia entry where Chatham is described as a “t-shaped island.” The snow leopard business and the description of his tail as python-like came from a National G article and many nights observing my own cat and wondering what he makes of the gray snake that follows him everywhere he goes. It must lie to him because sometimes it needs to be bitten.

Old teeth still talk. Shards of bone and flint
blades found in Spanish caves, scraps
of DNA unravel the edges of a story—
a sentence from which to divine an epic.

What tales did these other humans tell
when their cousins came north, surrounded
them and built a new world full of strangers?

Did they know their time had come? Did they
dance with ghosts and worry about decline?
Did they imagine other isolated outposts of their kind
lonely and encircled also by these wise interlopers?

I would like to have known them, and I wonder
how the world would be if there were still
mirror humans, living in a shadow world,
hunters stalking slopes alongside us,
mysterious as strange footprints in the snow.

The sun must still have risen and set, ice receded
as the world shrank down to just a range,
a hill, a cave. Is this the way of age, this shrinking
of the landscape until we wander no farther
than the yard, puttering around our piece of earth,
no longer wondering (and just a little afraid of)
what lies beyond the blue gray mountains?

—

Inspired by the National Geographic article “Last of the Neanderthals” (Oct 2008).

Train in Round Rock

We Talk of Trains

Road signs, riddled with bullet holes,
executed for the mathematical precision
with which they spell out isolation,
define and witness the desert loneliness.

We talk of oceans, beaches beyond horizons,
valleys hidden in the mountains, extinct volcanoes,
ruins and the railroad tracks following the highway.

A crumpled taco wrapper flutters up from the backseat.
Someone grabs it before it escapes out the window.
Dust devils swirl outside, wrestling earth and sky,
spinning proof that everything only wants to escape.

We talk our dreams in circles, always
winding up at the same rest stop, a teepee-shaped
gas station, the movie we’ll make when we get home.

A train rumbles alongside us; sharp-edged
graffiti decorates boxcars. We wonder about people
who painted their anger on a train in Saint Louis
only to watch it disappear into the desert.

—

“We Talk of Trains” and the accompanying photo “Train in Round Rock” were first published together in ouroboros review #3 (July 2009).

—

Perhaps remixing your old posts is the lowest for of blogging, but I saw this old post from 4 years ago listed in the “On This Day In” section of the sidebar and realized that my small stone for the day was to be found right here in the blog archives.

My old feet are pinprick cold these days.

I sleep in socks and dream of stars
and wear slippers all day long.

I ruined these beat old stompers
when security had me marched
down from the moon.

(Hand me that Epsom salt, would you, hon?)

It was a long road down,
and I wore lousy shoes.
The way was cold, strewn with debris,
the Earth just bluing then.

I stumbled over gravity, kicked back
the comet curtain and saw you,
so beautiful by the pale light
of my old waning moon.

I lost track of the steps I took, then.
Eventually, I quit counting all the miles.

In the end, though, they forgot all about me,
but then that’s just how it goes
for us used-up old goddesses, isn’t it?

(Oh, baby, these dogs’re barking.)

—

This is for Big Tent Poetry’s latest prompt, which suggests we write about feet. That’s where this started but then it walked off (har-har, oh I slay me) in a surprising direction when I found myself writing the line about walking down from the moon.

There are just a few gnarled oak chapbooks left. It’s a collection of my favorite micro-poems from 2010 previously tweeted, ‘dented or otherwise shared. Let me know if you want one. They’re free and I’ll ship them anywhere.

Read more feet poems here.

I’m participating this new month in Fiona Robyn and Kaspa’s River of Stones, the international small stones writing month. A small stone “is a polished moment of paying proper attention.” Fiona has been kind enough to publish a few of my stones over the past few years at her small stone journal a handful of stones, and you can go there for some examples. Or better yet, visit the River of Stones and follow the links on the blogroll to see some of the stones people are writing this month.

I’m posting my stones over at a gnarled oak, where I publish my micro-poems. They’re also cross-posted at Twitter, Identi.ca and Facebook. Additionally, I’ll probably post a weekly summary of them here. Maybe.

My stones typically show up as haiku, though not always. Here’s today’s:

The great blue heron
stands in the still creekside grass.
Patient as stone.

Also, I made another gnarled oak chapbook of my favorite micro-poems from 2010. It’s a holiday gift I make for family and friends, and I save a few for blog readers. If you’d like one, use the contact page to let me know and tell me where to send it. I’ve got 10 to give away here. They’re free and I’ll mail them anywhere. Go here to have a look at the digital version of last year’s.