Salmon

The streams & up,

being the pushers, being the push

run ragged often but for back to black,

that root of nurturance when the river is African.

Blood of my blood, the porcelain tarnished

by food rummaging in the back of restaurants

called Famished, by warmth diminished

to touch as accommodation, by rampant hunger

as grappling swinging up Dachau hands—–

Friend, what the blood of my blood knows

as whitewashed ethnicity, as the ghettos acidic cleanse,

is also the current of good tenement garden roofs.

Sill after sill, now in Russia, now in Hungary,

now the wild bush in its homeland,

& even malls of suburbia—–

Heavens, we are fish of star-scales on the move,

we the miracle of bread from rock.

---

Heat

The projector I remember had such a sense of it

while slides combed over canvas flesh

where I stood before kneeling.

Freezing time, a good friend clicked her camera

& we joked of television commercials 

& about dybbuks also spoke.

It was mystical business in the blue-white light

& in that too warm spell I felt where I got you.

Funny soul, you devil, transmigrating,

doing Cole Porter’s All of Me under my skin.

How close the smell, the haze.

How dense the jungle deep in my throat,

my eyes wearing their Love For Sale torch

in a streetwise strut and bitches brew.

Who turned the moon on, orange cauldron,

& the room suddenly violet street lamps

of pure hell smoke?  

A gas, that, all the recalled intimacy

welling in those ripple images, the green stalks,

the canyon woods, the deserts exotic,

wavering gardens as I slid & yet kept quite still.

Volcanoes can be so still, volcanoes so nude

under a bald brightness I cannot envy

when so many, for Pele, fell, fell, fell.

---

Atomic Fall

Molecules are glitter glue on the fabric of the air.

Watch the passage of such hues sparkling

through striations of waving petals.

In transcendence senses stick:

now this moment spreading alizarin from lime

by fresh phloem-filled veins.

Here is new growth, a how-to for the learning.

Here too is the visibility of wind.

Its’ solar planes electric,

fire’s element going to sea foam

in the smallest tuft of moss fingers trace.

Lay down in that cool, sun-bathing enough

to smell what is happening all through the night –

a mulch harvest beneath a lunar crescent

& guarding Orion.  

Yes, here is our most natural energy,

the source coursing nocturnes by.

---

Mind Song

Happiness expands, a balloon of sun warming the chest from within.

Veins carry that solar energy right out of fingertips

& soles of feet.  To float so golden is to be saffron-robed

as a Buddhist by the air.

Here, the horizon’s indigo takes on that glory.

Will angels approach re-consecrating themselves

by a ministering of vows to those most open

or those most in the dark?

Arbors are for visionaries, the blessedness which spices waft

as leaves bead sacred water to significant light welling out.

Imagine that devotion in the cells themselves

going forth as flying fish.

They are the lessons to learn on a surfacing whale’s broad back,

an ocean of syllables still in the depths gonging avalanches

of shrine chimes.

These are the lessons singing in sonar & phloem,

but if abandoned to our fates will that resurrection reach

the most needy in time?

Rising, the radiance does not ask, only continues as a sun

some space holds the glowing knowledge of

slowly.