Where Ends

Before the ends end,
There is the black tower
Ending, the flowers

In the big city
Extending, ropy
Resilient embrace.

No less focused, filled
With love and safety,
Careful mother care.

Two rats are laughing
In the gutter, not
At the mother’s concern,

But from their joy, her
Secret power to hold her
Own in her protection..

These lines hang off ends
Of tattooed twigs of
Spring cherry blossoms.!

Surrealism, Sort of

You almost hate to surface
For a few weeks from thick clouds—
The simplest language stumbles

Between the arts, no longer
Content to name moth or bird,
Then spot a cat in the grass—

Sophistication matters
Again, and Greek forsaken
For the production of forms

That are error, error raw
Til the next elaborate
Exercise in memory

That may not rescue you
By some hopeful thing you glimpsed
In a corner of the world

Someone’s brittle scholarship,
Someone’s fierce revolution
Someone’s sophistication,

Which now you have to muster
In clever comparison
To keep your poems in the game

Instead of simply writing,
There was a midnight-colored
Dove in the afternoon sun

Doing nothing much tempting
But being the wrong color
For a dark dove in the sun.

Clothes for Twelve People and One Velvet Ant

A jacket for you and for
All your dozen giant friends
For no good reason but fun—

This is not an honest poem,
Not a work of anything,
Slam! Slam!  After flexes so what?

After flexes, then there’s this,
And this is here to show off
What you can do with a light

Touch steering the wheel of life,
Known for a heavy hand at life.
Didn’t you enumerate a dozen,
No number enumerated?

Like the Sound of a Cat

If there are shapes, there should be
Shadows to accompany
Them, then, it feels like, the saints,
And their shapes matching shadows—
The same thing, matching shadows,
The intensity for you,
That a bump must be a cat.