Treasure Hunting

Soon to be a low moon and elsewhere
fire. Lucky mountain shone copper
but not to pocket. Not that kind of angel

between maybe and the blaze. Asked
to hold my baby. Didn't envy gravity
to lug its chubby moon from under.

Dear dire said the radio and oh I was
its girl. Called it a silver un-bridge
a single listing trestle. Someday sounded

the siren of a false all-clear. May I?
My skein all un-spun under fire.
The spider alive in a primrose.

The baby bent to an iris and willing
her face to unfurl. I wanted to watch
the coupling trains. Had never seen

machines in love before. No arrowheads
but among ordinary stones red flint from
which one had maybe once been broken.

The sky streaks with diurnal war paint.
Touches on baby's pulse where
a dream tries to surface. Touches

as the horsemen do (indeed) pass by
the monarch in said spider's web
where struggles spin to filigree.

The Waywiser Press

A Shortcut

A hedgehog shuffles out to take a moment
of the moon. The moon leaves off trying on
cloud after cloud to render for a moment
the frowsy foliage and the nose beneath
in tenebrous strokes, not light and dark,
but light in dark or light in spite of.
Doesn't rinse the brush to touch the lilies'
brief white swash and sticky spots
of seeds and pulp where the karakas bend
and drop their drupes. Sprays of stone-fruit
come to sweet rot underfoot with a stench
that in a warmer, brighter hour would draw
the flies to feed at each smear adhered, here
to the asphalt switchback and there to the stairs
that teeter through the terraces and past
the walls that prop the city up above the sea,
walls studded with snails after a day of rain.
The young snails resemble pearl barley, pale,
scattered as at some strange matrimony,
the old are dark burls grown somehow from brick.
Egalitarian spectrum renders the memory
of the sun's gaudy palette obsolete
here where each edge is a glint and each
hollow, a shadow. Holds at first glance each
as distant and as dear, though an eye that waits
to warm to, lets its iris open into
finds that though both take a glimmer, the shell
knows one way to shine and the body, another.
The former's luster, a crystal ball in which
one sees the muddy future, the latter,
a small brown tongue pronouncing "like" against
a concrete palate, careful. Only the wind hurries
here, and the leaves turn aside to let it pass,
shake disapproval. A spider rests
after mending its nets, sits at the center
of tenuous nebula wound from catkin
to fern frond to the black beaks of the last flax,
an almost-still-life. Here a twitch and there
a shiver and each snail's nacreous wake
belies if not progress then process,
illuminated glyphs, transient text, a glisten
spelling if not here-to-there then
somewhere-to-somewhere
by way of these walls that hold the hills from
their someday certain spill into the harbor
a moment more and then another moment
more for each of our small sakes.

The Waywiser Press