Did the Romans really pave their roads 
with books? Wrap each brick 
of the Via Appia in papyri odes?
Godspeed to chariots, or such. 

Now, instead, our highways are scorched asphalt – 
hot words dead-snake the country, 
tarred and burnt. Bitumen 
rhymes with bitter.

Or was it Greeks, 
using verse
to hammer closed the lids 
of caskets?

(A poem in my pocket 
for my cousin's funeral, but I had 
the wrong day and missed it. 
I am so sorry.) 

This morning, my toes are grateful 
for cool sand among 
beach plums and 
sawgrass.

At the end of the track, 
gravel and sharp 
stones. 
Are these 

words 
a pebble in my shoe, 
a rock in my heart? 
A nail?   

Or a path, a way.

For Shay’s Word Garden

What could be so urgent,
this pelican outside my window at 3AM
grunting and clacking me awake –

Across the river, news of New York City
dimmed at this hour, building lights 
vague on the apron of water,

But hark – 150 years late –
Lincoln is shot!
Pelicans known for their slow roll,

Messages passed beak to beak
like parents feeding smelt
to their young,

Then off to Australia, riding spars
and rigging of boats, decades 
in the whaling grounds' widening gyre,

Storms – all hands lost – flying ashore
at Pitcairn Island,
listening to Fletcher Christian’s parrots

Squawk mutiny into the headlines.
Now all just white noise
to me, the sound of pelican feathers

taking flight, only blinking red and blue cop cars
transmitting some new violence
in morse code –

What news, what news?
I am as Lear, crazed
with scrambled signal –

I'm sorry if I must pass 
this slip of paper on to you
as you sleep.

For Shay’s Word Garden

You know how it is when you stand in front of 7-Eleven 
in New Jersey, scarfing a jalapeño hot dog for breakfast,
ketchup and relish dripping between your fingers

Don’t you “Eeeew!” me! The Eighth 
Day of Creation was the Lord’s Jalapeño Hot Dog Day
along with Slim Jim and a Mountain Dew Day

I think which comes after Things That Crawl Day, 
which is maybe after Fish, I forget my Bible,
I forget too, how to count pennies with my remaining hand

The one left after my Old Testament punishment – whack! –
for my theft of this beautiful morning, for living by the sword,
for my heresy denying Da Word 

And we don’t really do pennies anymore, do we? Has anyone
told Charon? Is there an App for that? "Go to RiverStyx.com
book your crossing now." SMS charges may apply –

Please respond "Y" if we are all dying, "N" to Opt out.
Instead, I rant like a monk at Matins or Lauds 
in the holy early hours of an ExxonMobil Tiger Mart parking lot –

Cash register bells ringing, incense smell of fuel, 
transubstantiation’s promise in donuts and coffee: 
eat, this is my body, drink, this is my blood

Overdosed on haunted Latin from the Vulgate, St. Jerome 382 A.D.
cruising into the Lincoln Tunnel's cathedral maw before dawn, 
a cop high up in his glass box the celebrant Pope blessing cars,

Healing traffic by laying on of horns –
All together now, under the river, we deprive Charon his due
but pay the toll nonetheless,

Tarmac lifts us back up into the world, we are risen, 
Manhattan split down 42nd street, dripping light,
cross streets hung with thieves.

For Shay’s Word Garden

After Robert Lowell

It's sunset – steel and glass Manhattan towers
clutched in long-thorn rose bouquets, 
pilots waggle tour helicopters
like bees doing flower-find dances

Sniffing pollen-dollars off tourist cash ATM’s
and eyeing skyscraper penthouse stamens,  
a restless insect stutter seeks the city’s
crumbs of neon and noise –

Me, across the river, flotsam,
a shadow cast upon the shore,
I'm an old dog, no new tricks – nothing
up my sleeve, no sleeve in this heat

Salvadoran guy teaches new fish an old trick 
with rod and rubber worms,
Elton John's old/new remix bleats on repeat
Rocket man to the moon boom-or-bust box

The nasty old goose has learned a new trick –
snap-popped my new dog’s nose 
from safety behind iron railings,
beak, a prize-fighter’s jab and cover

The goose has fire and spark in her eyes,
trembles in defense of her young,
sweet feral dog wants to kill the goslings,
no cure for newest fight in oldest struggle

What do we take from this world
by force or guile, by grift, or flight, or fight?
The goose stands her ground, lances again
through the bars, will not scare.

For Shay’s Word Garden

We named the constellation west of Ursa Major The Camero
because we could feel its starry-eyed engine humming 
in the dark, freeway between Boulder and the Big Dipper
wide open, no limit other than the speed of light

Where else could we go, we were children really
the sky costing us nothing, our thumbs out to hitch a ride
on the next comet or Sputnik or beater 2-door 
heading back down the mountain to our one-room whirling galaxy

Where ball-lightning shot down the wall and scorched the floor,
no surprise to us really, only to be expected 
from the fire we shaped in our hands, ragged flash and bang 
bridging the earth and sky, your skin smelled like creosote

And still does, our returning so many years later all roads beginning 
and leading back here, all starlight sparked and bending
through the universe back here, gravity, every stroke of lightning
every storm leaving rainwater where I swing you over pools 

Of light and dark, every 
time we hear that 
engine rumble
overhead

For Shay’s Word Garden

It was early, but my day 
was in the can –
shiny and sealed and ready to be shelved –

when the world 
punched through 
its tin

The ground began
	to gear and turn,
		the floor pry open –

Earthquake in New Jersey –
where all the heartbreak 
and forbidden highs 

have festered, dormant,
a tectonic release 
of waitresses in diners,

sloppy love in the parking lot
of the Vince Lombardi 
Truck Stop.

Our dogs blasé, Jersey girls
after all. I open my phone to Spam,
its potted meat of memes

But nothing that can contain
our release, our moment –
our Dinty-Moore botulism

Swelling past the point of explosion –
enough fracked hair 
to fissure rock,

more attitude 
than even the earth
can bear.

For Shay’s Word Garden

My old mercury tooth-fillings
are antennae the exact radio frequency of Howdy Doody 
and Home on the Range cowboy stations 
out of Durango, signals bouncing 
madness from the ionosphere into my jaw.

The Science Lady tells us bull elephant tusks 
and buffalo horns
resonate with satellites,
GPS sending them howling  
in stampede Sputnik frenzies.

Blue whale ribs 
channel Fipper reruns – 
that chortling song on deep sea recordings
are laugh tracks sounding 
until all is darkness in the Mariana Trench.

Creatures with drowsy engines upside down
playing trombone bones, playing the bones bones,
nuclear test TV patterns spread their
Hiroshima wings –
I dream of Jeannie.

Yet remember our awe at that flight of the gannets?  
Thousands-upon-thousands wireline seabirds horizon-to-horizon, 
returning to their single rock in Novia Scotia –
a nanometer silica of longitude & latitude 
nesting between the waves.

What God do they know that I do not?
I who stumble home, not by Creation's let there be light,
but by a tin voice in my pocket – 
"You have arrived at your destination."
when nothing could be further from the truth.

For Shay’s Word Garden

What else could we do that night when the Dog Star was rabid 
in the sky over France? After the Louvre where
Mona Lisa pulled a revolver from her lap,
Gauloise dangling from her lips, crying «Vive la résistance!»

Our brains abandoned by laughter
slamming through countries without repercussion,
air brakes on trains not powerful enough to stop us
from our hero’s journey, our youth unloaded 

and stacked with backpacks on the platform, American
pancakes, milk and cookies food fighting with croissants snapping open 
switchblades of butter. Nothing more important. 
Chanson du ricochet: Song of stones, skipping over water.

For Shay’s Word Garden