My Love is a Boat in a Bottle

My love is down in a well
out in a country she lost the map to
there was every reason for her not to fall
she had the bucket neatly tied
and yet she grabbed on
as it slid down.

My love is wrapped in a sheet
down in a room she lost the key to
there was every reason for her not stick
so tightly in this rubber sheet
But I can't even say good night
while she's rapt.

My love is out at sea
rocking in a boat with no oars
she did not paddle from the shore
it was tide that snapped her horizon bound
and yet she tried to paddle back
with her hands out
into the salty sea.

My love is stuck in a fox trap
her hand is gnashed in steely teeth
she never meant to attempt the jaws
but there was movement on her part
the spring just moved towards her.

she's a puppet speaking out her part
a sailboat in an immeasurable wind
a dog lead by some insidious owner
down a path that leads to marshy bridges.

my love is a boat in a bottle
she's in there, waiting for someone to sail her
but it's all to small for me
I can't reach in
and shatter it to shards.

Marine Forest

You ask me to see
The lightning in the water.
We're close to the Sound
In this warm marine forest,
Warm like a southern gallery
On the poorer side of town
Not tall and proud
But comfortable in the summer.


There's a million little lights
Like lightning from the footsteps we make
Walking down the sandy path,
And we look at the moon,
And the way it sleeps
On the top of the water
Like a flashlight in a basin of mercury.

The lights are little fishes, little fishes full of
Some interior fire, some natural phosphorescence.
And if we could see ourselves
from a few paces back
So would we be.

Your hair is rustling like the leaves
Sometimes lifting like hymnists
Raising their arms to god,
And it has just now gotten dark,
So that I can hardly see it,
So dark in the near dark.
I walk to the shore lip
where the dirt cakes
With the rich mud of
Of the Sound, that look like
Miniature dramatic cliffs
Over the warm prehistoric water.
I demonstrate what the foot does
Stepping just at the rim
And the water explodes with
The lightning fish
And there is no sound except a
Little seltzer fizzing.

We know nothing about what they are
Standing on the shore
Speculating like mystics
In the hour before science.
We know nothing about the
Night that wraps us round
So that our clothes are relative
To mood instead of measurement.
We step on the shore,
And she asks me to do it again.
I slip into the warm water,
And it tries to steal my shoe,
But I come up with no problems,
While the moons slides across the
Water still as a block of granite,
The Sound a giant bowl
A giant scrying bowl,
Not predicting, or speculating
Or measuring the past, just there.
Lightening flying underneath
Like electricity for nothing.

::
There's so much keeping us
From being there.
The conflict is flashing
And clanging and detracting
Even as we work on being
Who we are right now,
With all the right mindedness
Anyone could ever muster.

These clocks they won't stop.
The marching forward of the entropy,
It waves its parade banners.
All the things that remind us
In our time that we're in it.

Time reminds us that
We are dependent on direction
For any definition of ourselves.

Things speeding by
The atmosphere as it changes
The notes how they fade
Traveling the hallway.

Time and distractions
The big wait, and the grind,
The passing of desires,
The bats of a listless, anxious twitching
That sometimes is the mask of the universe
The moment you could believe
That it is all a twitching.
The contraction of the muscle fiber,
Those bats don't stop
This strength, some power
That defines mighty,
To gives humanity to the
fleshy machine.

The bats that don't stop me.
From telling you.
I said that I would let this be,
That I would tell the truth,
That I would make it as simple as I could.

Tell you a little story about love.

The only chance that I have to do it
Is while standing in the middle of this
Flashing and clanging,
Waking of the winged rats in the gloaming.

::
We are a marine forest,
You and I.
We are absorbers
Of the salt and summer heat.
As improbable as the forest
In the ocean, standing up to the blast,
To sand, and man.
Our roots are as hoary and strong
As a thousand ancient live oaks
Who have drawn their flex and fiber
From summers whose mouth had devoured
All those of lesser strength
And from winters who crushed stones to sand
With fingers only a little less powerful than time.

And flesh is torn off
There are branches holding up the branches
Of those around them.
There is coolness in the hottest day
Underneath our leaves
We are riddled through with lively animals
Whose smallness is belied by constant noise.
The glitter of our leaves is earned.
The beauty of our lithe forms
Changed but standing now
As the strongest unchanging poles
Holding up a sky
Weighted with future.
We hold up nonetheless
We hold up the future with our forms
Our poles, our branches
Our massy, whole, and living strength.

We wonder how we got
To be so many different things.
A system whose life is intertwined
And made from necessity and storms at night
We wonder how our strength
As a whole, from above,
Looks like muscle fibers in the autumn.

::

There comes a day
In the drowsy week
When the heat is bearing down
When she decides that she must
Walk through some part
Of where she's at
That is not entirely dominated
By the pavement
And where the battle against nature
Is being waged a little less.

She comes to desire
A portal, a place, a moment
When the thing that she remembers
from being there before,
Something primal like a tree
Glittering ineffable in the sun
Something whole and angry and alive
Like the memory of a dream, symbolic.
Like an indelible memory
Could be lived again, so her bones know.

Then she begins to drive towards
A forest on a little strip of land
Or a walkway down a broken path
With turtles and curling clouds of
The worlds remaining insects.
Or the dune that is a furnace
And you know it, tall and glittering
And too big for life under roof.
Even with the other cars.
Even with the pounds of sand
In the floorboards, stamped with
Days and sweat and sealed with salt.
Even with the stripes of sunburn
Where you missed
And the rasping flavor
Your mouth has taken
Even when you speak the patient word.

We passed it in a hot jeep
Saw a sign through the pavement mirage
Didn't plan it, just grasped through the context
Well we'll take it, the path by the trees

She breaks through the border
Between the parking lot and the trees.
The sad, warped silhouettes
Take on a mask of hope.
They might relieve the heat in the high day
And keep us active during the otherwise
Enforced siesta.
Nothing moves in the trees
Except we do, she does, our children do.
Following us, or running fast around
The quickest bend to break sight
And limitations, and to catch
The iron rays that break through
The canopy like a metal comb
Paused before the part.

She stops to observe
Her hazel green
Pierce the hazel and green
all around us. To catch enough
fire from what wilderness is there.
To inform the wildness that
she holds taloned inside her.
A tree bends, older than our houses,
with shoots of branches lithe
and protected like a sunny daughter

I imagine the moon on the shrubs
and marshes and
What the night removes from
the nocturnal traveler
the roots in the dark beneath
the fragile crystalline soil that
bear up strength and branch
And I know we are the forest.

I imagine the whip of lash
and branch of tearing
When the ocean hurls it's heat at the land in storm.
The fractal lightning seen
through the bay leaves by
small mammalian eyes.
What the clouds of insects
do before their time has come.
How easily it would be to stray
not far from the dusted path
and lose shoes, be trapped in the
Sandy pits of swamp like mouth
that the forest encompasses as a
gesture of largesse in hardship.

I see her lean and strong
with a strength she relies on
but does not know, pick her steps
with competence and trust.
Before the children complain about
Thirst or want or waves of sandy days
they see the monolithic nature
of the marine wood and are
encompassed in the details too.
It impresses itself upon you like
an emotional metaphor,
but you would not know it.

It is small, like a good orange,
and persistent, like feet who've walked.
It is tangled like us sons of context.
It is thoughtful, like young professors,
and clothed unassuming until you look.
It is more than a myth, like lovers
and it's children grow in strength.
It is honest because it is raw
And natural because of limited curation,
Methodical with no plan
And rooted in shallow waters and deep.
It changes the fields around it.
It is courageous, you can see
the storms it has weathered in the tracery
of it's skin.
It is less a combination of single things
than a pattern in a cloth.
It is fragile.
It must have protection
It may be easily destroyed
It is gossamer, so you may miss it,
But a gossamer stronger than a spiders web.
Underneath the beauty and flowering things
It has the strength of what is alive
It is living more than notion
It is stronger than the thoughts of man.
It is bigger than a consciousness
and follows the holy pattern
to which all great things dance
by which all atoms turn to molecules
and


Our love
Follows the exalted pattern
by which all great things dance
by which all atoms turn to molecules
and they in turn, to life.
Our love is the mirror, the essence
of all good life and is the very
flower of the universe.
It is the door to
It is the door to
And outpouring of faith and hope
The reason, and the light.

::

There is a light
just one
Dancing crazily
across the little water
we can see in the deepness
of the night.
One little light
a phosphorescent softness
dancing under
the pane of glass
that is the sound,
and you are standing
beside me.

The Real Objectivity

There's a palm tree outside the hotel
Sitting in the middle of the parking lot
Ringed with an absence of pavement
Swaying in a chill breeze
Dragging salt from the ocean
Not a block away.
I'm watching the sunset
And her taillights.

Alcohol, oxycontin, weed
Cigarettes, the bends, and meditation
Oxygen loss
The gain of music
A falling star on a beach lit walk
The damned are clawing the surf
In a terrible dream I had
The night she left.

If there was a moment to stop
A pill you could take
That would turn it off,
For an hour, just a brief time
To not feel the weight of
The dead pulling on your feet.

Here's what I want
A pill, or some kind of substance
That would turn off emotion for exactly one hour
That had limited side effects
Would that be too much to ask of science
I’d keep three in my pocket at all times
I’d be assured of responding to any situation
With three hours of reason at least.

The broken glasses on the floor
A crisp of splintered window
A bruise on my shinbone
A suitcase mostly packed
She left it by the front door.

What would it do to a human animal
To turn off one of the fruits of thousands of years of evolution
Would we all be sexy killers?
Or machines of grace and kindness?
Or something deeply wrong
mental patients trapped for hours at a time?