Dark Shark in Shallow Water

Every human brain's an island,
Volcanic, steaming and fuming
At birth, out of the salt ocean,

Startlingly active in bare air,
More alive than ever again,
But not at all, as it will be,

Alive with what the wind blows in.

How big it will, shrinking, become
With lives, a world "all folded up . . .

And so secret." Complexities
To astonish, weather, and hide
Even its own convolutions

In a welter never the same,
Nor the same in any brain else,
But borrowed before it evolves.

The Unfinished Unfinished

I can't stop, the truck driver
Heading for the escape ramp
Thinks. Something has to stop me,
Please, don't let it be those trees.

It is those trees. Always is.
That fact doesn't prove the lack
Of prayer's efficacy. This

The Lost Meaning

(for the lost author of thirteeners)

People, including cynics and the much aggrieved,
Grieve with frustration when they encounter a strange sign,
A peculiar tongue everyone but them understands.
Scholars only grieve when they encounter such a thing
No one understands. Or they exult and get started.
Con artists and insecure mystics who start new faiths
Embrace with their whole being the opportunity.
Poets of a certain kind can recognize the signs
That the language in which fellow poets have composed
Is about to be or needs to be wholly estranged.
I knew an artist once, one who loved calligraphy
And drew always in pen and ink, who had discovered
An inscrutable system of figures in relief.

Pilak

"The two profoundest words there are: remember and her brother forget."

It meant, "The End," the southern
Border of Ptolemaic Egypt.
Seems it could have been more
Welcoming. "Here Egypt begins."

It could have been less ironic,
Given what the Ptolemies
Meant for three thousand years
Of Pharaonic, hieroglyphic reigns.

It could have been left to sink
Under the waters rising behind
The Aswan Dam. All my childhood
I carried around heroic images

From a National Geographic piece
Showing how they rescued it, stone

By stone. I remembered that name,

"Aswan Dam." What memory does

Reminds me of how probability does
Something similar for the unknown,
Measuring out uncertainty, drawing
A line near the dark. That other day,

I had some reason for looking up Isis
At "Philae," Egyptian name, "Pilak,"
Temple rescued from the Aswan
Dam. I had forgotten that. The End.

Draining the Sun for Desire

The same can be said of life
As of love, that "it is not
Kind or honest and does not
Contribute to happiness
In any reliable
Way." Food, too, for that matter,
Although all have their pleasures,

And nest within each other
Like the small commensalists
They are, Maslow's parasites
Of need. Love in food in life,
All the products of matter's
Extraneous creation
Greed together. Don't blame love.

Where They Still Are

I miss them. I miss them all,

Even though I must admit,
I don't want any of them
Coming back to haunt me.
Confess together, shall we?
There are no real, hungry ghosts,
Only ghosts we hunger for.

We are the living, hungry
Things who do not want to share
Our bounty, our bounteous
Memories. You can't have mine,
Not my ghosts, they're all for me.

So they come for each of us,
To be devoured, forgotten.

As We All Were

     If we're going to do this, we have to set some ground rules first. This is what you're going to have to take on trust:
     1) We're real. We exist. We're rare, extremely rare, but we're here.
     2) Our vision, actually, is pretty terrible, almost all of the time. It's only occasionally that we clearly see, and we have no control over those occasions. It's unfortunate, and for some of us, like me, it means making mistakes that someone with no foresight at all would never make. It means, for most of us, a life of not really recognizing what we are, until that one, first stunning moment when we really, clearly, clairvoyantly see. That moment changes us, the way a day without pain transforms someone who's always suffered. After that moment, the hunger for another miracle never vanishes.

     If we long for meaning, but the universe remains silent, then we must accept the responsibility of being the only meaning, which is, so far as we know, what we are. The still, small voice of an otherwise silent cosmos, seeing itself turning. That's us. Turning but not returning.

I Am Weaker Than You Think

"A poem is always stronger than a letter." -Sahira Sharif

Effect the change you want to be.
The poets of Afghanistan
Leave me aghast and inspire me.

There's the rude mechanical man,
Pashtun, Matiullah Turab, who
The New York Times proclaims famous,

Who can't read. Then, the women who
The BBC declares shameless,
That is, refusing dishonor,

Choosing to risk death to survive
The endless war that this horror
Brings down every dawn on their lives.

I am not wise. I am not brave.
I am a poem, an arrant knave.

Bitter Leaf Litter

"The word shelter was still in my head. I had to feel it shrivel."

     I, the story, alone survived. I'll tell my own tale, damn it. Not that you or anyone else of your kind could, or has, or ever will be able to do. It's just that I know you. I am you. I am all of you, and all of you together, just barely, might someday make up most of me. I'm not boasting, simply stating the truth: there was so much of me in all of the you that already haven't survived, I can't be sure now what aspects will be left complete by the time any little one of you gets around to meeting me.
     Let me give you an example, give you shelter. As that fine, precolonial word floats around now, you'd think the etymology was in question. Now etymology is only a confined, peculiar form for me. In it, you start with the ending, well-known and to most folks uninteresting, then reweave the history backward to the oldest extinct language you believe, with any common conviction, existed. That's the story, a rarefied form of an origin story and just as typically false. So from where, in my etymological sense, did shelter come? Look at this:
     "shelter (n.)
1580s, 'structure affording protection,' possibly an alteration of Middle English sheltron, sheldtrume 'roof or wall formed by locked shields,'from Old English scyldtruma, from scield 'shield' (see shield (n.)) + truma 'troop,' related to Old English trum 'firm, strong' (see trim). If so, the original notion is of a compact body of men protected by interlocking shields. OED finds this 'untenable' and proposed derivation from shield + -ture."
     There's another version of me in the etymology of "untenable," but leave that be. Of interest here is not the pedantic divergence but the narrative convergence. Shield! Even the OED, arbiter of English etymology, agrees that shelter derived from shield. Think about that behind your mantled brows a moment. Can you easily conceive of a less sheltering feeling, for an animal, than the situation requiring cowering under a disk of shield? Weapons of maiming and death are raining blows upon you as you hold up your reinforced frame of cowhide or dented alloy and pray to supernatural beings (of my own invention, thank you very much) that, by some freak of probabilistic coincidence you will later call a miracle, your shield holds?
     That, dear users of language, is all your shelter. Don't get me started on your storyteller.

Diversion

Diversity, like magic, wanes directly
In proportion to the knowing of it.
When the human diaspora, unaware
Of any given peoples much beyond
The next island, valley, or river over
Had gotten most of the way around
The world, the numbers of customs,
Beliefs, and languages hit their peak.
By the time people cherished other
Customs and languages than theirs
Enough to start preserving them,
Diversity's decline was irreversible.

Turn away. Be glad. Decline sorrow.
Your fate is weird enough already,
Your destiny was bound to be
Bent from the moment it befell
The combinatory molecules to be
You, or someone very much like you.
How do you like that? Roll a die,
Roll an ankle, the world falls down
Or turns aside as it tumbles to land
Again, sunny side up. Magic. It is,
Like diversity, most potent before
It becomes of any importance.
What you don't know you need
Can't stir you. How still you've
Become, now you think you'll simply
Set a spell. You got here somehow,
Some multiplying, ramifying magic
Among all the forking tongues
Your ancestors invented, all the ways
You could have never become,
You came, and then, divertissement,
You came to find this one, green,
Quiet, housed, singular, happy day,
And you want to save all of it,
Every diverging detail of these trees
Around this home that is now you
And yours, finally, bindingly, arrived,
But you don't know what to say.

The Single-Minded Pine

Of science, who can say what
Methodology will be
Testable, next century,
Yearns toward the blue above.
If only stars were alive,
If the sun had our interests
In mind and sought out the shades,

Gentled the harsh, barren rocks,
Wanted us to be alive,
To stay alive forever
Or for as long as our sun.
But it's not so. The pine strives
Because all the other pines
And flowers strive to top it.

Gentle and Forlorn

"The brain uses sleep to wash away the waste toxins built up during a hard day's thinking, researchers have shown." -BBC News

     Can a mystery sense the approach of its resolution, the way a beast can sense imminent death, even a beast that has not been possessed and tormented by language and its many selves, all coming together to perish or at least to abandon the beast?

     I think it can. I think I can. A mystery, after all, is only another of those many floating, overlapping selves of language, another I. I know it. It has to die. Or, well, it may not have to, but it can surely sense that it's about to, like the person dreaming the car, despite a tight grip on the wheel, has just cleared the cliff, no grip left. Time to fall.
     And then, either it has and it's gone, crashed, irrecoverable, I suppose, rest in peace and fade from living memory, mystery no more, nothing to see, nothing of interest here, lost forever, a junked car rusting unseen among the invasive species down there clotting the once-pristine, dark canyon, or the person wakes up and thinks, that was only a dream, I was only dreaming, oh what a relief, the mystery still lives, heart pounding, still puzzled, still asking, yes, I see, but why do we dream these dreams?

Blick Mead, Russell Cave

They were modern enough
Ten thousand years ago
And pushed almost as far apart
As humans would go
For another ten thousand or so,
Give or take the colonial era.
In Alabama, in England,
The descendants and ancestors
Of wandering bands gathered
In convenient shelters, fired
The good game they'd hunted,
And, here I'm speculating,
Shared the speculations of minds.
The ice age was over. The ice
Forgotten. The ice will never
Descend again. Next time, fire.
Meantime, giant shaggy beasts
Fed them as prelude to extinction.
You, you right now, where you sit,
Can go and see these places,
As I, wobbling and aged before age,
Have been to see them, where
The earth is nicked, neatly sliced
So the cuts against the grain reveal
Where we were, then, where
Have we been all these millennia,
Eating and doubting, no doubt,
Considering our considerations
Special, unique, true. Gone
From there. Bones and charcoal,
Tools and stones remain. Mind?
Must have been in the air there,
Maybe still there now, nowhere.

One Safe Strategy

Just keep picking at the lock.

Once the tumblers fall,
If the tumblers fall at all,
You'll know it. You won't
Be able to stop. Just keep,
Keep picking at the lock.

The Cross with Arms

We can't embrace what we can't
Escape. Why? A kohl-rimmed eye
Swivels toward me, as if
The eye were moving the head.
It is. What escapes us is
That we who are nothing are,
If not immortal, not dead.

All the talk, all the symbols,
All the magic that can say
Whatever it wants to say,
Whatever the universe
Denies, exists outside flesh,
Or through flesh, needing a host.
Poor flesh, the host that must go,

Suffers being made to know
What it is by what isn't,
The sign of eternal life
Crossed and clutched across the chest
Of the beast who breathed its last,
Transformed to sign entirely,
The hush transmuted. Sly eye.

Una Telenovela (For Someone's Sins, But Not Mine)

And I would despair at her
Going, going. I would despair
At her giving, giving, to want

More than she could be giving.
No mother has she, but a woman
She'd be. And I would despair as

If I believed she were me,
And not as I know her to be,
Thrice great, terza rima, more free.

Default Is Mine, Oh Gored

Coincidences pile up like worsted puns,
Like dust bunnies under the bed.

They are not, they must not be
Magical, not entirely, not to me.

It's fine to be a crow, ludic mystic
Of the opportunistic death

Between the lines of unforgiving
Legislation, logos, logic, highway,

Narrow but boastful of being
So wide, thanks to misleading maps.

But I am not a corvid, of any sort,
Who can, with tilted, beady glance,

Believe as it disbelieves and cache
In the place best fit to deceive.

I have a theory of mind, but
It's mine. Your mind's not in it.

It and my world will end sometime,
I admit, but not just this minute.

If you want to know when all began,
You, your no self, has got to begin it.

The Hidden Language of the Open Air

It stopped. "Oh memory, mortal enemy
Of my repose!" The final authority
Forgets the first. Politics, pornography,
All sorts of kindness and terror fill the air,
And all sorts of silliness along with them,
Same as it ever was, everybody knows,
Just as everybody knows it's getting worse.
Tsk, tsk. What are we to do with our lost selves
Floating around out there in culture's aether,
Nothing but the rumors of a race of souls
Made of the sticks and straw of contradictions
That burn or blow like tumbleweeds through our brains?
Are we the beings who speak of the beings
Who do the unspeakable things we speak of
To each other, the monsters of cruelty
Whose actions make up the most of the newscasts?
Are we the genius engineers of futures
Undreamt of by our ancestors, too busy
Dreaming of all the futures that never were,
Never will be, never even remembered?
Are we the boys forever meeting the girls,
Forever losing the boys, forever locked
In unions contracted by no one at all
But by our universal love of contracts?
We could rend our garments and wander, forlorn,
Rush out into the steep afternoon sunshine
Of a red desert autumn that doesn't care
How important or unimportant to us
Is the belief that it does or doesn't care.
We could stay at home and study page and screen,
Have a few beers, improve ourselves through gossip,
Fail to notice they're not really our voices
Returning us to us, whispering, "We're here."

Let Sampson Make a Weapon Out of This

The reason no reasoning

Can lead reasonable men
To conclude, composed Gongora,

At peace, is that the madness
Of these apes lies in their speeches
And the reason flying from them.

This is the last, forever
Unwritten and unwritable, most
Widely known solitude:

That because I wrote
My mind, I lost my mind,
Or, the same, I came to know

No mind is its own, much,
Much less than that belonging
To the jawbone of an ass

Who swings it about his head,
Bolas, bolo, bolero, words knotted
To bring down what can't be

Caught, fractured lost astragali,
Little lambs' feet tossed, to find,
I, none, and all this all aligned.

In the Event

    No, I never happened. Clouds of other happenings, could, from just the right angle, be seen as being me, me as a being, and were. But I wasn't.
    If I had happened, if I had been, I might have been very much as I described him, or as I described him and her together, as if someone who really was paying attention were at the same time playing between the lines.

    My apologies, nevertheless. Evanescence is poor excuse for evasiveness. The person I sometimes affected in person could seem solid as a golem, easily converted back to even more stolid clay by a tiny erasure of the mark of culture from my head. Such a thing, stomping about, causing havoc intentioned and unintentional simultaneously, full of bluster and opinion, full of self, deserves to be kicked in refutation, just to be reminded that it's not fair to pretend to any right to be a certain way, to be not all there and not at all there, all at once. Lumps of mud can be hollow, but can't claim to be the hollow, now can they? Seems like one more poor excuse for the sins of the flesh. It wasn't me. I wasn't there.
      Allow a little saintliness for the dirty flesh, for the lump alone, unspun. Let the idol be the god. Let the god be free. Let the free not be, taking the only unpardonable sins with them, out of the holy urges of the wordless world that somehow gave birth to every last word, every last wicked word. Anyway, in the event, the words weren't there. I didn't do them. Not me.

The Children of Saturn

"Naevius was a major poet with original ideas and a strongly Roman personality. . . . But unfortunately only fragments of his poetry survive, and from his Satura we have no more than a single quotation: 'Why, pray, have you beaten the children of Saturn?'

     When he spoke to her, he used a rueful, humble voice, although the purr and rumble of the immensely self-satisfied predator hummed within him, as if to give away the machinery that animated him:
     "Everyone knows I stole my story, but there's also another story about how I stole it that I haven't told, and now that I'm serving time for my crime, I can't stop myself from dreaming of redeeming myself, financially and as a storyteller, at least a little bit, at least enough, by telling that other story straight, the procedural of the storytelling crime itself. A man can dream. Some dreamers can write. I was just never very good at knitting together the insanity of my dreaming with the inanity I knew I could write. That's what storytelling does, and that's why I was so desperate to find the right story to deliver me from distress. When I thought I had found it, I had no morals whatsoever about taking it for myself and selling it. How I managed to do that, well, that's this story, not such a good one, of course, but truer."
     She watched his mouth, carefully, and although it moved very little as he spoke, she thought she detected something darker than usual inside of it, and not only in contrast to the perfect white teeth. The dirty look of deep red wine in the spit of her own mouth when brushing before bed after a night at a bar had always appalled and attracted her, as if it said something about living that her formulae never could capture, but the same shade glimpsed in his confession seemed more matter of fact, anyhow less relevant as to recent behavior, more to do with some innate trait that he possessed or possessed him.
     "Go on. Tell me, then."
     "The usual way to go about such pilfery is forgery of course, either by pretending to have found authentic documents or memoirs of someone known or wished-to-be-known, or by making up some nonsense falsifying one's own life. Does the name Ossian ring a bell? Never mind. Slightly rarer and more daring is the narrative equivalent of an art forgery, putting forward a piece of one's own writing as a lost work by some master. Rarer, because anyone capable of masterful forgery of story is, by definition, a master storyteller. Everyone steals plots, but the teller of tales is already genius enough. That's why the common fibbers are bad novelists masquerading as memoirists."
     "What? Is the truth itself such a bad story that we're more willing to accept a bad story as true?"
     "Absolutely, and what's more, all humans know it. Verisimilitude, the 'you can't make this stuff up' cliches are only valuable for adding grit to the gist. Even dreams tell terrible stories, which is why the excuse that it was all a dream is a favorite dodge of shoddy fiction."
     His deep ribcage rumbled with a chuckle of self-pleasure, giving her a sense of odd unease to hear it. He smiled, for a moment forgetting the confessional pretense of chastened humility, and she saw the wine-dark sea move again inside his mouth.  He was in his element, and she was out of hers. A poet should be silent, she thought, silently bending her head to tune her strings, as if she hadn't noticed the Saturnine stirring of the arrogance in him.
     As if, as if, as if, she hummed under her breath, as she waited for the calming effects of her verse to return her to her. As if, as if, as if anyone could beat time, could make time in conversation with such beasts who have eaten the children of Saturn.

     "It is a great freedom to be able to be bad," she heard him rumble, the words coming from the air around her, but she did not lift her head.

     "Do you mean lacking in morals or skill?" She asked, attempting to tease his intentions from his own ambiguity.
     "Both, of course. To be able to be bad is the only freedom one can have. It's what freedom is and all that freedom is."
      She tried a chord, but was careful, this time, not being free, not to respond.

Works and Creatures

"This happy time, when there is discovered not only the other half of the world, which lay hidden from us before, but also many wonderful and never-before-seen works and creatures."

"Every normal tiger is representative for that species of cats, but there is no such thing as a 'normal story.'"

    He had a head that, because it lacked eyes, one might see as horrible, were it not for the handsome, tasteful sunglasses that perched on an aquiline nose below his quizzical brows. His ability to navigate the world as if seeing it perfectly clearly, with none of the susceptibility to illusions of the sighted but none of the cautious tics of the blind, left no one in doubt as to his vision, although many people expressed consternation or amazement that he never removed those stylish shades, even at evening, even inside. All in all, the dark eyewear added to his mystique, and for whatever reasons of his own, he was careful never to remove the glasses in front of anyone. Who should judge? Monstrosity is not for every nature to embrace, and not all who hide their tails or amputations are afraid, nor awful to themselves.

Territio Realis

No part of my education,
Not as a little Baptist boy,
Not as a graduate student
In the heyday of lit theory,

Ever included the level
Beyond literal Word of God,
Metaphorical Word of God,
Allegorical Word of God

To reach the anagogical,
Jesuitical sophistry
Reaching up to the fourth story,
The garrett of higher meaning,

Above the movement of spirit,
All the way to we just say so
Because we know we can so,
And you can't be sure that we can't.

The inquisition of a text,
Past exegesis, confession,
The interpretative display
Of the instruments of power.

There is a point beyond which words
Will break, weep, speak what we tell them,
Not because truth is relative,

Meaning socially constructed,

But because we know what must be,
And what must be said, and compel
All the the devils of hell to leave

Us alone through faith in nothing.

Dissentery

"Off-color language gives
     the world its hue."

Only such a gentleman as he,
Good man, could make such a claim
As this appears to be, so
Blandly, so matter of poetry.

Me, I can't begin to do anything but
Dredge the world, it's cry and hue,
And, sneakily, rearrange the deck
Chaise lounges of stolen English.

Persuasively weak man, I, who can't
Move the smallest noun without
The leverage of an adjective,
No verb without an adverb. Reverse

The universe, and even then I'll seize
Up in your vaulted orrery of days,
Catatonic, locked, brass-balled, ah,
Immobile. You love her? Not so, she.

Lady language. I learned early,
Thanking the sweeter, crueler stars,
That I was too low-born and prone
To the off-color hues of the dirt world

To be a proper lover of such as she.
I like to curse, but only missionary
Style in my verse. And I learned
My favorite poets don't shirk dirt,

Grunting to earn their little moments
Alone and stolen with her. Mothers,
Teachers, lawyers, bankers, liars:
All her dirty supplicants do the work.

Il Zoppo

Coyotes at 4:39am. Yip the dark.
"The great achievement is to lose
One's reason for no reason." All

Sinks through the floor without
Stopping within the material mind
That has to live with faked mistakes.

We are, the proverbs prefer, born
Naked, thence transported naked
To the grave. Nothing ventured,

Nothing gained, nothing lost
Along the way. Not true, not you.
You acquired a gait you have to lose.

You hobble over to a window, haul
On your bones, haul on the blinds,
Seek out the sources of those cries.

It's too dark, and you know it.
You're too dark, and it knows you.
The coyotes, what do they know?

You don't, don't want to lose it. You

Don't want it to lose you. You beg
Devices, intricate machines, signs

Built out of no more than the history
Of signs, emblems, algorithms,
Insignia, the meaning of lives, cries

Since not so long after the beginning
Of lives, possibly before. Oh, matter
For good old-fashioned madness

Here. Welcome to culture. You heard
Them. You read this. You said things.
You wrote things. You wrestled

With the winged demon crying
The unsayable, jealous name of One,
Little man. Big war. Hence this limp.

Hylic

It's been going on so long
It can't matter where you start.
Life, it is authorless, but
Wonderfully productive
Of authors. More, Rose, I can't
Begin to tell you. "Begin"
Is itself the great untruth.

Every origin leaves out
The origin. There is none.
Or, if there is, it's not ours
And not ours to say so. So,
Rosa Ventorum, I wrote
Your name as an amnesia
In my mother's nursing home,

A quarter-century gone
Ago, before I thought much
About the moths in my own
Accruing hoard of tales, books
I already mourned because
They had mildewed--cheap wood-pulp
On my plywood shelves.

Gates of Ivory Horn

Comfort in darkness, terror in light.
One dream prettily defies the norm
And unwinds happily through the night.

We have returned to Canada. Spring
Is lifting the wind outside small shops.
Villagers I know, the one who sings,

The squat park ranger, the musicians,
The motorcycle-loving owner
Of the Appletree Cafe, visions

Like eccentric characters themselves,
Glimpse of the long lake at green sunset,
Those shops with quiddities on their shelves,

Fill me with love, my heart like a sail
Curved, taut, catching the wind that it needs
To have its chance to prove it can't fail

To pull this slim, swift, single-hulled dream
Across the silver lake darkening
At the edges, fore and aft, the gleam

Of the eye of awareness centered
On one momentary, shining breeze
Weakening, wakening, entering

The dark of the small autumn bedroom
Far off, in the canyoned desert night
Between the gates of mountains that loom

Into an empty sky, contesting
To be first to catch the morning light.
I'm back. No more dreaming, just resting.

Rest Assured

Sometimes you have to give up
On being dignified. Signs
Are all around you that now
Is one of those times, one of
Those intersections of verse
And worse with quotidian
Glances askance and away.

Once, in my hospital gown,
Teetering on the bed's edge,
Afraid to try my first step
To the john since surgery,
I laughed when Sarah told me,
Back when she barely knew me,
"Humiliation's healthy."

Every phrase, every ego,
Has exposable backside,
Every poem its hospital
Johnny, every faith its fools.
A marketing rep once wrote
Wallace Stevens to inquire
Just whether "The Emperor

Of Ice Cream" might lend itself
To an actual slogan.
The only problem was death
And poverty in the poem,
Not to say very little,
Actually, about ice
Cream you could sell with slogans.

Highbrow stuff. Supposedly,
It made Stevens, the lawyer,
Insurance executive,
And sturdy burgher, chuckle,
A company man himself.
Being someone of low brow
And disliking company

Myself, however I've worked
For group insurance lifelong,
I still laugh to see bad puns,
As in the Tex-Mex john where
Temporary wax paper
To cover toilet seats boasts
"Rest Assured! (TM)." Oh, do.

The Passing of the Age

And do we revisit the same places successively (my old home, my old town) as we generally believe, or do successive ages visit us, each different and differently, but some, in passing, alike enough we reify, even deify, them with names that say that they are places, faces that we know we see? I pose the question rhetorically. You be the judge of my sophistry.

Of Ourselves

"I protect things that don't belong to anyone." --Sukha, Queen

     And gone. Oh, to be gone, to be gone but to be, to be but be going. All we ever are is all we ever aren't.
     The band on the green grass under the truly vertical red cliff walls call themselves "Cheat Grass" and play hippie rock and bluegrass. "Old. We're old, but not traditional." Eight musicians in a tetrad of two guitars, two mandolins, two vocalists, two drummers. Banjos, accordions, and kazoos make up their interludes, along with the sad-sounding response of the bandleader's black lab howling to any harmonica solo.
    So low the angle of the sun, the southern crops have frozen, one by one. Time to be done. Be done or come home. It's all the same to time going.

    We get drunk on these songs they sing, these details (with wine, with our own wantoness, with poetry, as we please) because we want to touch, we want to believe, we have come so close to and back from blank's own land with a true tale to tell on our lying, muscular, sad tongues.