Solo Linked Poetry (dokugin renga)

The lawn boy frees them,
handfuls of dandelions
and a bucket

Waves leave lines on wet sand –
he pokes down pieces of glass

Soaring and diving
gulls hold flight overhead
drop mussels on rock

Walking through bunker ruins
an elderly couple took our picture

Fallen pine needles
between our toes on soft moss –
the orange moonlight

Edible mushrooms
hang from your hammock

Someone asked the time –
in the afterglow
thinking over your letter

When will you believe me when
I say they are only friends

Tender seeds airborne
weeds take root in damp cliffs
loosen slides

Mist harbors the coast for joggers—
a convoy passes on flatcars

Tossing last week’s bread
to wild ducks, after you left
for Bosnia

Mailman crossing the icy street –
out of coffee, I take the back door

Finally a letter
and grainy photograph—
such a nice haircut

Long nights up reading Whitman—
I’ll meet you at the station

Moon beams move over
the gray kitten by my feet—
crack in the window

Waving my flashlight in fog,
a possum sniffing closer

Tacoma billowing
chiaroscuro, turnover—
each breath around town

The smell of pavement after rain,
quietly draining into grass

Whiffleball batted
to the porch, a kid passes
it back down below

Talking with the former nun
a soap bubble floats in my eye

Camping on Sunmoon Lake

He said it was all a test run,
next month friends would come for the real thing.
Our camp neighbored the clamor of cranes
dangling over a future gondola site
facing the hotel the dictator hand-picked long ago.
Guards still keep riffraff like us out except at teatime,
but there is talk of sending his long-interned body back
across the Strait. But talk is talk;
who knows, it might draw crowds,
squeeze a museum of tourists in our pockets.
It's the age-old dilemma—when is a friend driven
by necessity, when part of an automated grid
foisted on a polymorphous terrain
by sheer air power, having no bearing on willpower,
and that is where the others gets bogged down
on the periphery of advertised cities
while small shops with backroom launching pads
vie for a modest piece of the action.
The higher the prices the less convincing—
as if the wrong side had been propped up
and our suspicions turned on us before we knew it,
until...any moral fool could see...we had to get back
not only nature, with its solitary footprints
disappearing into another Green Island,
but to each other. Though hard to listen
with the gumption of paragraphs and connectives
interrupting the usual jingles with a smile—
lost in overrun territory drones seal the fate
of any wandering radar blip.
I tried to explain the humanizing wounds
throwing a wrench into the day,
but it was a script and it wouldn't take “no”—
forced me on a march in silence
on my own or find my own way home.

Poems for You (3) -- Long Summer

Can a couple call it a day over a lack of cuddling, rolling away
and leaving the other end ringing?
Some days I’d like to fall in love again
just to sidestep the roundtable that binds us —
we’re as bad as doubles — get under our skins.
Even if we did roll on off
the push-pull magnetism of each trial run wouldn’t last
as more sheaths of bewilderment would be taken away

while we are down here waiting,
overhead the holiday of hands roams high in the sunshine.
Sure it’s not all silly romance in the sense of bouquets
of roses spiced with baby’s breath and peonies —
those come at an even prettier price away from the outskirts
riddled with dim neon and gravel parking lots announcing lone guests.
So many exile themselves to the orbiting Money-Tree
we all try to avoid, always just paying off another addition
like the neighbor’s Methadone, your McDonald’s, my recovering
seas of sadness. Luckily we reside along ear-to-ear spectrums of sadomasochism
come to interrogate our puttering about in involuntary removal of whatever is blocking
the illusion of a highway leading into a perfectly horizontal horizon
with only a haunted anomaly or signs of visitations to guide us,
towers from a taller earth, before the floods came to clear the slate,
new hope and rainbows that even you might like me,
of a mind, drawing nearer an earful at a time, sneaking up this way
with one of us to blame, leading the way or pushed along like a doggy on the moon.


July 3, 2008

As the Moon Sets

Farmers stopped planting Brussel sprouts high in the new sunshine
and sandstone cliffs give way, a new glitch.
No one believes the current
letting us pass only one at a time
to the not-so-secret clothes-optional beach.
It’s not so sweet as is sounds there.
Near the wooded area, mostly men
drink Coca Cola and litter the logs loggers let drift ashore.
We must watch out for Mounties taking the trail
long into summer evenings
when the sun finally sets on the Pacific,
being part of a larger conglomerate
brought us here by way of the Hudson Bay Trading Co.
The locals left their totems standing on the beachhead deep in the park,
an excuse for long romantic walks.