I Believe in Everything

Meanwhile Xela is full of Quetzaltecos and carnachos and dreams.

Like the paranormal that goes on
forgotten as soon as seen,
the friends you love forget you love
and never wear the king’s attire.

Like jungles swing out from our hearts
and plants that drip onto your kidneys,
The net to keep around a bed -
Your friend the cat on midnight’s sill.

…and what of it Weird Uncle J,
we’ve lost the war, the Secret Service
being us. What El Ijo del Diablo coughed up,
and he’s the captain of us all.

I sell my wears on winds of trade,
but those who need them seem to fade.
The cat’s alert on midnight’s sill,
there is no pane to keep us in.
Our spirits seep while we’re asleep,
and when we wake its rain again.

For when those think back to the past will see us learn
and laugh and dance. And turn away and come right back.
And go inside and close the door, and cry, and sweat
the beer when we of gods hold on for life
the secret being not here to find.

And on must we, must we must go, and forge
what souvenirs we steal, and track more orbits
through the world, a world we map, a map to lose,
whose land this is we do not know, and never will.

Fjords, whose c liffs grew steep
with words. Now peepers
come too soon for
we are still mid-sleep.

Call, forth the peeping tom
to spy the ice’s run, and
last one to the bridge will watch
it melt away, and back to

earth will go, the heart will
beat the soil, and tunnel
all nights through to
daylight every spring,

of bridge there is no more
that age of ice replete.

Call it swimming, an afternoon
like this, and wading:
this warming breeze.

The inner square of Ithaca
swept hush, while at its
shore, the terns make

what they make of spring, so early
and itself alone. Divorced
of frost to usher in

the bleating of this year,
evocative of flower storms
that near. They carry in

this breeze on backs, the terns,
to flood this square, its air, like blood.

No difference now,
this outside and what’s not.

red bowl of pale sun

universe of black, a hole for watching
stars and nothing else

once was, a white pulled from a blue pail,
the gowns of angel’s sky

young woods in snow, the heart of saplings — green.
affairs with grapevine on the sail

the rippling of the sky, a red bowl of pale sun spilled,
on the hill opposing, missing,

the deep den in the bare field.