The Quantumverse
A ghost ship washed ashore in Japan
Full of cargo and sailor’s bones.
The Japanese for “endless drifting”
Is “mugen no hyōryū”, which means:
“Dust motes in sunlight
Float like lotus blossoms
On the still pond”
Sure, I just made that up,
As did the sailors
Scrawling haikus of goodbye
On the walls of their bunks.
For The Twiglets
the morning is slipped,
like clay
slicked from rain’s
dreams in your hands,
bringing up water
to shape my skin its dust,
mud, dirt and rock,
your fingers
turn
on morning’s wheel,
pulling new ribs into standing,
your touch of willful, wifely
symmetry
make me a vessel,
a well to hold water
and now a lip
to meet yours
For The Twiglets
The sun, great spectral
obstetrician – yes! –
doctor
of divinity – M.D., M.B.E., A.C.E.
delivering us to morning
in scrubs of light –
and us squalling our birthright
across the broken waters,
our faces squashed with
pillow marks,
anxiously counting our blessings,
our newborn fingers
and toes.
For dVerse Quadrille
And The Twiglets
A lifetime of trawling cod
from the Gulf of Maine –
a fisherman I knew
Would spray WD-40 on his knees.
Even better than motor oil he said –
and rub it in deep into the joints.
Gotta get some swing
back in the
hinges,
He said.
The body not a door
that closes with age,
But a boom that
sweeps and hauls out
over the waves
Year after year.
Close to the salt
but not of it.
For The Twiglets
Noon on the Hudson, helicopters chopping
at the sky like a deli salad –
a bowl of blue tossed with
joggers and stumblers and strollers,
a tattoo of Sinatra in wisps of clouds
whispering New York New York while
dogs from every nation make their embassy,
the river embossed with the whack whack
wake of ferries propelled from shore to skyline
and back again, spinning through
the turnstile and the man punching your ticket
like a prizefighter, the main event, ringside
at the Garden.
For The Twiglets
Need to get to Home Depot
and pick up some tools:
Love screwdrivers
heartache wrenches
heartstring pullers or such
My ticker skips a beat
then stops every damn time
I see you step from the shower
I had a 20 pack of love poems
by Neruda, “Starts the coldest heart!”
but lost the instructions
Any ideas for something more reliable
than this four-valve gizmo of mine?
For April Poem-a-Day
And Twiglets
I ordered an avalanche on-line
There was a website selling them
You could customize the color
From Pearl Whiteout
To Sapphire Blue Death
Free shipping!
So I sent it to your house
Because that’s how much I love you
For The Twiglets
Drag that lazy Sun out of bed
by his whip-fire hair –
SOB sleeping in late
while we’re freezing
our asses off out here.
Hustle up some coffee, light,
with scorched toast and eggs
sunny-side-up –
then get cracking
in that old yellow van.
Remember, he takes a shine
to that bimbo Dawn,
so no stopping off in Daytona
for the wet T-Shirt contest
like yesterday.
For The Twiglets
Is it still stoning out?
Those granite days
when the sky is
so hard
the colors of our eyes
are whetstone
and the birds
sound like flint
across the water.
For The Twiglets
Green is the color that crawls
Green digs and scrapes
Green reeks of green and
Green isn’t for you or me
Green is knee high to a grasshopper
that is greener than green
Green is the color that stumbles from
leaves drunk on sunlight
Green is the color of night
during the day
Green is always grassier
on the other side of the fence
Green was the color of chartreuse
before chartreuse was even a thing
Green waits for no man
Green is the color of my true love’s lies
Green is the password the women knew
Green are the woeful hills
Green is the sound of your fingernails
rending the earth
Green is how you lost your way
in the woods, Green Giant
Green on the way in
Green on the way out
Everything coming up green.
For The Twiglits
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