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Dixie Plate

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Dixie Plate  The Tibetan Buddhist monk bows  his weight against the levers of a yellow  Cub Cadet outside the temple plopped off Highway 27, that asphalt bayonet  piercing through the Chickamauga Battlefield  and a potluck of Baptist, tinfoil towns.  Fall, and late September sun glints off the sweat of his bronzed head as the scooped sleeves of his blood-red robes  catch the breeze that swirls beneath  his twelve foot golden god  staring down the ribboned flag of the neighbor's Rebel one. The air is orange with incense of fresh-cut grass, low  om of motor, mower circling  like a mantra. There’s a pattern t o it all, but the lines are indiscernible from here.  And are we surprised if given  this abundance, and just one trip  through the line, the flavors are bound to rise and spill the binds sectioning the disposable plate of understanding,  edges casseroling into one, indefinable  hallelujah, home...
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The Plot

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The Plot Nothing so expansive as to know  the heavy head of fields on which I stamped my name but cannot mow this month.  Nothing so vast as to yield  each harvest a bumper crop  of envelopes offering to shave a corner off for cash, to seed into the under- growth of all my goings questions of inheritance. Neither so confined where from the center point of porch  I can trace the lines with the compass of my eye, so manageable  to slip into believing the world  spins smooth as a globe and not  the finger-spun acorn jumping  across the ridges of a picnic table. Space to lament how little gas  in this mower, how many gaps in this attempt at a fence, boundaries  enough to do something about it.  Tent, apartment, or ranch,  it's a roughly three-acre life I'm after.
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Beowulf: A New Translation

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  Beowulf: A New Translation A dozen days instead of years,  but who in this feather-flung haze  is counting? Each evening one less  mounting the roost,  tucking wings against a coming sure  as night itself, clucking what wordless things  beg sounding before the door swings shut   and the woods awake. What liquid suns we brood upon, what mornings we warm in the fragile hope of a hatch before it’s time: metallic click of a latch,  masked shadow shaping through a crack we didn't think to fortify. Come morning down-feathers will scuttle silently  across the field like ships on a breeze.  So this, then, Hrothgar, is what brought you     to your knees, another clipped and ruffled king  perched on the promontory, watching the sea.
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What Time Is It?

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What Time Is It?  Now is rocks and sticks to buy a bit of bark, ache no rub can reach from burden no words can, long night of labor to greet in morning light the unbearable weight of cradled  air. Now is prophetic  patch of thinning hair, glob  stuck deep in the chest  or kernel wedged back  a ways between the wisdom teeth, slow wheeze of incessant scratch. Sure, now too  is honeysuckle drop, wild  blackberry thatch, but don't get it twisted: we're still under seige. Best eat the family dog  or bury it out back before they enter  as they please without a knock,  bring it back with a pill  and fill the official larder. Plenty of ways to be a martyr still. But thick, meaty laughter?  If it comes it comes after. 
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New Fixture

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New Fixture The saw is simpler to find  than the courage to cut  a hole in what's forever been shut. Then comes going blind in the downfall of dust. There is a point in all of this when even tender-toeing joists  in the muggy glow of a head- lamp is ground more sure than tracing back  the power source not pulling power  anymore, the shear power  to snip it for good. Drill the box into wood then twist in the new. All this for the same mess, the same living room, but to what lengths of what's coiled in us won't we go for an amber chance at belief in the glow of a different hue?
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Re-homing

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Re-homing What I remember is how in the name of being humane we used a live trap, lured him with a nutty bit  of something delicious where he feasted until his famine tripped the lever and clanged the cage. What I remember next is  the rage, how there in the back of my dad’s suburban he smashed back and forth in elemental tantrum till blood dripped  from the pulp of his nose and he lay panting on his side, unable to stand.  Back then I couldn't understand.  I can’t remember if he lived or died, just that flicker of something like star-fire in the  black hole of his eye. 
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You Are Here, Or Were

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You Are Here, Or Were Days flash and fall like sprinkler  drops, pop like soap bubbles on the sun-warmed hood of a car.  Come morning, dead bodies will line the bottom of a jar unless we let the lightning out.  Someone's daughter turns four tomorrow, and a sparrow cloud graduates  over the pine copse to leave us  grasping at the glimmer of what’s already flickering in further fields.  I believe some can do it, the kind of presence where all supposedly stills and the moment calls eternity its alibi,  but the closet I've come is this   sense that I can almost feel the picture developing, and on it the damning evidence of  thumbprints, matching ours.
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