Crepuscular

.

Big clown-faced parallel infinity
you cried into my false twilight
a moon cupped in your creamwhite hands
poured milky awareness over me
more to feed my dream than to drown my fear

your tears blurry with repetitiveness
pearly sand grains scattered over that mandrake
root shaped cloud mass, opening into night
as if out through the motion space
of a two-way mirror, to where those planets

open into that lake

that ocean

Polar mesospheric cloud (bright noctilucent cloud over Lake Saimaa): photo by Mika Yrjölä, 2003
Crepuscular rays and clouds over the Pacific: photo by Mila Zinkova, 2006

False Sunrise

.

The weeks and months spent alone with himself were crowded by clamorous phantoms, speaking in unintelligible tongues, mercilessly badgering and taunting him, making his life miserable, until one day, in hopeless resignation, in helpless submission to their relentless demands, their incomprehensible commands, their obstreperous promptings, he began to compose books in his head, merely to appease them, to observe the offices of their irrational orderings, to come to terms with their gratuitous insistences, even while remaining all the while their vassal and fief, their servant and prisoner in the sleeping world.

The mental books he composed in the dense forests and desert wildernesses of their obscure urgings were mere mechanical compilations of animal lore, tales of the beasts of the wood, there was no lack of these, they had been here forever, waiting to be released from their cages, retrieved from the annals of the memoria, refashioned over and over, incarnated again and again, embodied, disembodied, captured, recaptured, lost and found and lost again in an endless circularity of sequence and pattern, of original and copy, of design and decay, of construction and disrepair.

Then came the morning when golden rays flooded the upper strata of woods around the cabin. The colours of dawn and flame bloomed upon the tufted throats of birds that piped their sweet mindless songs through the upreaching branches. The rustling of a distant stream washed away the chill of the night and life bestirred itself, yawned and stretched, as if the long spell of pensiveness and longing, obscurity and doubt, were finally over. Through a rent in the tall umbrella of trees, a bright beam of light entered the lower realm, exciting friction and conflict in his heart. Within moments a thought would burst forth, and the terror of the false sunrise would begin once again.

Flying mallards (Anas platyrhynchos) and morning fog in Golden Gate Park: photo by Mila Zinkova, 2009
Canada geese (Branta canadensis) and morning fog in Golden Gate Park: photo by Mila Zinkova, 2009

Lough Gur (for Billy Mills)

.

Blick über Lough Gur
The next best thing
to being there

A view a look a sight a vista
I can feel the wind in someone
else's hair

Blick über Lough Gur: photo by Christian1965, 2002
Lough Gur, Ireland: photo by Jon Sullivan, 2000

Colony

.

Wings thinly scaled in postmedian light
appear transparent. The one last
isolated colony is about to die out.
Alighting on a bright patch of reeking mud,
she holds her wings over her back,
turning toward the small patch of sun,
and leans to the side, so that
the shadow she casts is minimized.
In this way she's protected.

Butterfly wingscales: microphoto by Jan Homann, 2000
Brown butterfly on leaf: photo by chung-tung yeh, 2005

Flicker

.

In the poisoned garden
her shattered wings,
long, pointed and discal,
flicker like a delphinium
in a clump of thistles --
the light minimal, the dark scaling
turning a deeper blue ochre
with the dying of the evening
and then a silvery white.

Ground fog in East Frisia: photo by Matthias Süßen, 2003

Delphinium grandiflorum: Sydenham Edwards, from The Botanical Register, 1820
Large Blue (Maculinea arion), underside of wings, Rabestens-de-Bigorre, Hautes Pyrénées, France: photo by PJC&Co, 2009

White Moon

.

A noise would awaken or impersonate Kim.

As if these things were self evident
In her sleep ancient lunar fish enacted,
As if before an underwater window,
A comic mimicry of a sunken world,
The one Kim wished to inhabit -- as if
Wishing were the next best thing to being
There. When the white moon comes up in the black
Cold winter night, the skin of empire drifts off
Like a poison that's evaporated;
Funny, thought Kim, how the film over words
Loses its toxic power in certain lights
Above implication's dowager kingdom.

Full moon from Istanbul: photo by Maderibeyza, 2007
School of Goldband Fusilier (Pterocaesio chrysozona), Papua, New Guinea: photo by Mila Zinkova, 2004

Entertainment Medium

.

Flying through air, hanging upside down,
Tumbling, defying gravity for a lark:

Life going on while containing closure,
What in the world could be more common,

So, human; passing; thus, why requiring pain?
Loss sensed as hurt down through the drab ages;

Why not, one might ask, as freedom from same?
Forlorn the very word is like a bell

Miss Interpretation takes as an alarm
When may hap it might signal a homeward tolling;

Could also sound like a child's toy horn; to a clown
Tones of desolation might trigger laughter

Or tears; from the cheap seats all's equal either
Way; any sort of show brings down the house:

Flying through air, hanging upside down,
Tumbling, defying gravity for a lark.

Trapeze Artists in Circus: Calvert Lithograph Co., 1890 (Library of Congress)

Circus: George Seurat, 1891 (Musée d'Orsay, Paris)

Trust

.

Holding the wide world in the hollow of his
Hand, that role formerly accorded gods,
Yet keeping that hand open as a heart,
The magician king knows the shipwreck
Will happen, hears seas crashing, hysterical
Screams, final splitting of beams, feels victims' tears --
The whole spectacle recapitulated
By Miranda, who's seen it from farther off
Than we, stationed in the conditional mood --
Yet too knows all now not only must be
But will be well, in fact perhaps always was,
For the eyewitness' transfixed iteration
Seemed even at the time to be missing
Something essential, some element of trust.

Shipwreck at Roatán, Honduras: photo by Chris Vaughan, 2007
Shipwreck, Netherlands: photo by Maurice, 2007

White Thought

.

Here's what I love about the slipstream blankness

Of the white page, its ability to
Harbour an illimitable conception.
I'll sail through zero into paradise.
I'll summon white thought streaming through the pale
Veins of the white leaf. I'll watch it sink into
The watermark and insinuate the margins
The way a sailors' girl beckons from the shade of
A lamp, whose illumination also falls
To its knees before the grand fog incoming.

Intentionally blank pages at end of a book: photo by Roke, 2005
New Bridge, Bratislava, Slovakia: temperature inversion, 11 November 2005: photo by Ondrejk, 2005

The Confession

.

Bottled up in the man something old
Bothered and blue you would conclude from
The vows he mouths to his unresponsive
Beer, in its nonjudging container.
Odd how lost you have to get before rescue
Vessels start to pick that signal up,
The anxious beeper of a fear of yourself,
Thought the man, now quietly slobbering,
Revealing his mood to the girl at his side,
His vanguard, prosecutor, agent.

Liquor bottles on a bar wall: photo by DWS-Montag Zen, 2009

De Oude Buis -- interieur (de Bar): photo by Ambertje86, 2006

On Dangerous Ground

.

It's not her inevitable unhappy end

We recall but her ambiguous power.

Her darkness drinks up the hero's gaze

As an ocean draws its feeble tributary

Into itself, to drown in its mirrors.

Which angle is to be trusted with

Secrets that make watchers uncomfortable?

Or does the sneaky camera eye control

Everything, the way night encompasses

Day, aggressor prey, heroine hero

Swaying from her to eternity and back

With his psyche hanging out, and this slack look?

Out of the Past, 1947 (publicity still): image by D.C. Geist, 2007

The Big Combo, 1955 (movie trailer): screenshot by Esun, 2008

Leave of Absence

.

Slim consolation offered -- ticket on jet
Home once the going gets strange and family
Or is it authorities intervene
In what was probably framed in the stars
Or whatever it is blows all this around --
A seedpod in the wind, just another
Random young person lost and asking
With six weeks still to go in the semester
Is this all there is, all there ever was

Hibernaculum sweepings: photo by PixOnTrax, 2006
Salsola tragus (tumbleweed), dry: photo by Forest and Kim Starr, 2005 (USGS)

At Malibu (Prehistory Version)

.

Kowabunga! The amoeba was
mountainous.
Venusian burgers were sailing out
of broken windows
onto my plate. The Fantastic
Baggys were playing. Down on the corner

of Tubular Boulevard
and Transistor-in-the-Back-of-the-Head Avenue,
near the approach
to the Gaping Maw Freeway,
the 6-to-8-plus
foot waves
were coming in like gangbusters
out back
of the Bar-B-Q Shack. Jan & Dean
and the Rip Chords
were playing on portables
in the All-Nite Board Shoppe;

chill were the shakes

and flat the tops.

A blue Merc cooked out of the light.

The cars were lined up
like igloos
in front of the Tastee Freeze.

Greasy smoke was
rising from the Taco
Bell, much as from

the La Brea Tar Pits.

Voices bubbled from
The ambient fumes.

"I'm bugged at my old man."

"Trig pisses me off."

They were listening to
Danny & the Juniors

on incredible car radios

that picked up 1962.

Beyond the row of cars
three scraggly
condors perched
alert upon the branch
of McNabb's Cypress.

One sloth trapped
in the pits
by the advancing Sabretooth;

two others watching his back.

Unable to escape from the asphalt,
wipe out, bones
of the unfortunate sloth
encased in the pit
to await the Perfect Wave.

Going for the tube: photo by Gargoylepeni, 2006
1970 Mercury Cougar: photo by Bull-Doser, 2008
Tar bubble at La Brea Tar Pits, Los Angeles: photo by Daniel Schwen, 2004
Making the drop: photo by Ljsurf, 2006
Rancho La Brea Tar Pool with fauna: Charles R. Knight, mural in the Hall of Man, American Museum, New York, 1921 (Jesse Earl Hyde Collection, Case Western Reserve University Dept. of Geological Sciences)
Wreck of the American Star (ex SS America), Aug. 21, 2007: photo by Michael Wünsch, 2007

Honey Badger

.

The most fearless Animal in the world
Has a sweet tooth

And the acutest sense of smell
On the savannah

The honey badger
So courageous nothing
Dares prey upon it

Degree of difficulty
In attacking a honey badger
Extreme
Reward minimal

The honey badger is skilled with tools
A honey badger will log-roll
And stand delicately balancing
On its hind legs
On the spinning log
To patiently extricate
With its scimitar claws
A kingfisher fledgling
From the dark ceiling
Of a subterranean cave

To the honey badger
The world is an hors d'oeuvre

Solitary and nomadic
Roaming a 300 mile radius
Thinking
Eat

Intelligent and playful
Loved by some
Dreaded and feared by others

The honey badger has a curious idea of fun

In Basra it is known
A honey badger will kill you
Not in order to eat you
But in order to tear
Off your testicles

Honey badger: photo by Jaganath, 2006

Mellivora capensis (Prague Zoo): photos by Matej Bat'ha, 2007

Binturong

.

The Binturong

or bearcat

is neither bear nor cat

It dwells

in the trees

of the rainforest canopy

Eats fruit eggs

shoots leaves

birds and small animals

Its only natural enemy

man

who cuts down the rainforest

Not many Binturong left

when cornered vicious

when happy emits

Chuckling sounds

Bushy prehensile tail

like a fifth hand

Fully as long as its body

Swings along by it

through the trees

Leaping from branch

to branch

Rotates its head backwards

So that claws grip

as it climbs down a tree

head first

Scent of Binturong musk

reminiscent of cornbread

and hot buttered popcorn

Brushes its great tail against trees

and howls

to announce its presence

To other Binturong

It's been here all along

Maybe not much longer

A young bear cat kept as a pet by Orang Asli in Taman Negara (Malaysia): photo by Bart Van den Bosch, 2004

Head of a binturong (arcticts binturong), Jardin des Plantes, Paris: photo by Jastrow, 2006