One poem debuts in Pirene’s Fountain.  Click here.

Ravens play in snow. I deserve a some inner sanctum time.

A school kid, I’d press hard into my paper,

sometimes engraving

the soft wood beneath. Not much

has changed. Clock above the cabinets.

Smell of burnt wood splints. Bunsen

burners. Mr. Williams rubbing his fingers

over his forehead. Carcass of a dissected

mink. The smell. Sun a communion disk

through winter clouds. I’d walk home

swinging my black cornet case crammed

with evening’s homework. Folder

full of sheet music. I’d stop for a bottle

of green soda or, Thursdays, my lesson

at Southtown, canyon

of amplifiers, Gibson SG’s: hanged men.

Played “My-Mama-a-Told-Me,”

theme from “The Godfather”

for Louie Cattarucci, maestro and former

drummer for Captain Beefheart. The Ravens

visit Thailand, look at each other quizzically.

Tower of London, The Ravens wear blue

bands on their legs. Julie

looks at the television through her yellow

Ranger Rick binoculars. Sunday evening,

work tomorrow, and I don’t know what pain

reliever to take. A life rich in detail—

dirty snow, worn rubber, oil, exhaust

and ice, a cocktail the bullies loved to wash

one’s face in, cornet case thrown in a slushy

drift, traffic crowing and Louie smoking

calmly, watching from his storefront window.

Ululations among the “close your eyes” light across the snows.  When I was

Cricket harvest in the vales and made it go away, of tundra, 13, I landed

At summer’s end in 1961.  Your body feels a hundred loons whose laughter

The world was ending like a building half built.  Lulls death into life on,

But it wasn’t done or half decayed, childhood on the tongue, my hands

Grown clouds as the sky tipped away, a wren fused from a fall.

They have enveloped until evening to the quivering tongue from a rope

Like goose gowns, the stars and gravel tilt, of a sparrow flaring ice

Of kings in winter into the graves, the lush brain quivers the salt of me.

Like some babies, poisons that fern have been lost to the gibberish,

Have the bluest of blue eyes, the fresh-purpled veins, designs of various spells.

She smelled of talcum powder, of dying, the electric hysterias which swept,

And baby spit, purple lips, the globe at the time, nectar of not knowing,

And liked to hug, kiss no panties, raised true in her baby blondness

A rubber giraffe in an upper berth among wheat fields

Which became her first, or in a room bilged high, of seven unconscious states,

True friend and confidant, with sighs howled her first unintelligible

Through the record of our conversations and aromas of perspiration.

Breeze coming down with the watercolor paints, each one of us

From Canada and a drawer full of junk food, found his room again,

We a herd of bachelors when we behaved awfully and wrote wistful letters

In corduroy three-piece suits and drank packs home describing the day,

Wandering with boutonnieres for when we were angels, sealing wax

And dry little smirks and we studied the nutrition, signet rings

Like we had just been kicked from steak and potatoes, sets of fancy calligraphy pens,

Out of the funkiest prom and got an eyeful of spelling purchased from the bookstore

In the universe.  Eventually, math and hygiene reminded us of our significant exiles.

Couldn’t remember.  Walked the county line.  She’d grown luminous, wood’s rotting odor.

Her name: another atom, wheat grass promontory, drown in happiness.

At first, forgetting near the small window, the final gasp, don’t.

She couldn’t.  I don’t know its juice sending the sound of light, love.

Remember mine, how much an electric shock under the morphine, me.

I used to sit.  I hear across, my palate a warm place, the one point.

In her dorm room, living and dead, through my brain, black dirt of interest,

Talking.  She didn’t.  Eyes sinking red and down my spine, the voice in this,

Like my long poems, my head in Corvallis, music dissolves me, places.

In second grade, I put my paste-stiffened mitts on Donna Owen’s

Shoulders, then choked on my saliva.  Going to school with some

Vague ache in my legs.  If hungry or bothered enough,

I believed.  The world diminished three shades over my eyes.

Strung in the receptionist’s window, by floss, blood hue,

Brass dolphins.  And for a moment the ball floated.  The whole

Tree quivered as it swallowed it down.  The goddess walked flowing

In silk.  She would take her chances.  The cool air shattered and sang.

A room bilged high with sighs and aromas of perspiration.

The eastern border of smelly burdock.  Mildred the toaster sang.

Where the wedding of 1852 was to take place, a woman fainted:

The banana leaf upon which the dahl is spread.  In our studio

I ran across this small, clear plastic box full of letters.

Grandfather stood on a limestone bridge, a ghost of early morning.

The air smelled of dust, and many people were afraid

Of the end of the world.  He did a magic trick with white doves

During the vows.  The seas became shallow, dried layer upon layer,

Ocean sediment, millions of years turned to stone.