My Geographical Imagination

Melville took me to the water to show me.
He pointed to the horizon.
Do you see it?
I didn't.

folk lore

Green the apple blaze
outside my remnant door.
I hold this and no more
in the eye like a kind of sea.

Green the going lung
that goes into the sea.
Green beyond the bell
that signals in the rain.

Three times it rings
in ears it brings
from across the bay
its green tonalities.

letter to a murderer

Drifting is difficult because

directly into the face of winds which feel polar,

coming at me from out of the north

where blood is a rare compass.

Driving country roads I pull

onto the gravel shoulders the better to admire barns,

but it is the fallen barns that present themselves
most powerfully to me.

Some quality they possess

in their disintegrating marrow.

Perhaps they conduct themselves out of love. Or lack of love.
Where seas go forth

we know intermittently. As light is in that plasma

of unborder where night ends

and day blah blah blahs.
Crossing these off my list

an actual list scrawled in
the last blank page of some cheap novel

or elsewhere

in the mind existing in the form of a sub-cellular map.
You mean almost nothing to me

in that way that nightmares
about my mouth filling suddenly with broken teeth do.
Here is your palm of cinder.