Pathology Of Monday
Stuffed with gift-wrapped breasts
sweat-festered suits
unproofread looks
spiced with brutal body
sighs the train attacks the tracks.
Clackety fractured glass:
street after street of infected
brick: defective truth
a broom pushes its bristles through
sweeping the trash of irrational history
down alleys of contagious reality.
A morning’s sortie to the top
stops where a profit’s toccata forges
a course to force apart its harpsichord.
Does surviving echo’s cacophony
mean counterpoint’s C.E.O.
must master the control of ventriloquy?
If music’s destination is its notes,
what tune will approach its orchestration
to recruit the hero of the uncomposed?
After the Drought
For too long the view’s
been too wide, the eye ranging
too far out—past
desiccated rice fields
and cracked beds thick with
star thistle, clear
to the broken spine
of the Coast Range—when,
that is, the intervening
sky wasn’t cut by
smoke or dust rising from
wind we liked to
think was the stirring
of long-gone herds or kids
kicking a ball around.
Dry clouds appeared
occasionally, teasing from
the northern horizon;
we stopped soon
enough turning our heads.
Today the rain, and
I can’t see beyond
the edge of the train yard.
From habit I hear
in the nearing thunder
a freight rolling through,
shaking the mirror of
water and dazzling
a skunk that’s slipped under
the neighbor’s fence
without asking
to drink at the hole where
a peach tree was.
