Riverside and Then Some

Time was, told me a woman at the laundromat, artists and jazz musicians could afford living in Riverside, by Harlem...

("Perfection," gold leaf on sanded birch board, 2019)

(Donations help me breathe and sundry...)

The Cell

arms up
hands clasped behind her head

she affects nonchalance

yet squirms...

-- thinned out,
as though flattened
under a plate
on a glass slide.

These are not tears
(Saline agar)

Suspend
phage Doubt --
bacterium of fear.

***

So when we meet the Beast
We shall met him with dignity, with grace --
With voices upraised in song.

(for Ms. Sandra Bland in Heaven)

Eschaton

Slack skin and arthritic hands.
These are the raddled lands

where at the dusk of time
an old man lies,

his head to the wall,
his feet to the door.

I will rest here forever more,
facing the dusty window sill

and the yellow lights outside
running a bent line up the hill until

I find a way to survive.
There is a silence to tell.

Summer, Alive

A jack rabbit, startled,
flies at the barbed-wire fence,

over the dense weeds,
towards the sun, which is rising in the East.

A boar picks acorns
one hundred yards away.

A gray cat stalks by,
feral and stray.

Stonyford 2015

Coyote yelp:
a throat-caught call
from hills
half a mile East.

Man as beast:
pelts clipped to a wire.
Water and ash
in a barrel four feet deep.

Soap hung on a fence
keeps the sheep safe.
Cows low, upset --
they are separated from their calves.  Seek

not so much to be understood
as to understand.
Here is a sandstone mortar and pestle
used to grind acorns in the past.

Fling

Daisies in May
faces bob and sway.

Yellow, white:
he loves me,

he loves me not.
Kiss the spot

under your chin,
then run away.

Controlled Burn

Prescribed by the forestry,
hundreds of square acres
smolder.

__________The smoke
rises and drifts to the South.
Sweat on his brow,

a man bows to the ditch
before him.
_____Flames, orange and wild,

lick the brush.
__________He feels a rush
of blood to his head.

His partner stares,
inferno-led,
_____fixed on a dead

squirrel not five yards
away.
_____The men stay

at a temporary camp.
Tonight they will rest,
but for now the sun

sparks in the sky,
_____a white-hot
__________arc lamp.

Black scraps run up --
_____ashes of burnt prayers --
__________to heaven.