After a line by G.C.

Fire and the Morning

Love should be like the days I see all the leaves clearly as separate selves.
Love should be like the bird who travels all night and rests at dawn.
Love should be like the knee that is judged on function not form.
Love should be like the country that stamps your passport and hands it back to you forever changed.
Love should be like the space between molecules of honey.
Love should be like the light in a meditation room.
Love should be like the first feeling of wetness.
Love should be like finding your seat on a plane an hour before sunrise.
Love should be like the glass through which I watch the polar bears swim slowly underwater.
Love should be like my fingers that tell you I love you when my lips won’t.
Love should be like the mask the surgeon wears while he saves your life.
Love should be like the brush-tips of death against your cheek.

VIRTUAL LOCATIONS

VIRTUAL LOCATIONS


1. Atlantic Flyway


you’ve been flying all night
you’ve nearly exhausted your fat reserves
you are desperate for food and especially water
and you see this rectangle of green

the fly-out changes as time goes on
in the winter it’s maybe 5:35
as you approach the summer solstice it’s more like 8:35
you’ve been flying all night

we start in the morning,
we might end at dusk
yellow metal to yellow feathers
we communicate by word-of-mouth and cell phone

there’s a Birding Log in the Boat House
the North Woods are a little less safe
Strawberry Fields is a good place to find
migrant Passerines in the morning

we’ve been walking all day
we’re ready to sleep
birds wait for us in our dreams
with clean quills and notebooks of air




2. Youtube Bedroom

with the purple curtains
and the wallpaper your mother
put up when you were little

your hair like a chestnut waterfall
your chewed-up fingernails
against the neck of your guitar
and your math homework

in studying you I’ll learn me
you’ll solve my nightmares
and set the variables free

it's been a long time

but when you go on a writing retreat, even for a couple days, you forget that you can't write.




ZEN MOUNTAIN MONASTERY


I don’t know who made the mountain
but I know I’m looking at it right now.
Or I was when I wrote this.
See, already it’s complicated.
The simplest thing grows worlds inside
if you tilt your head and look.
Secret terraria, little rooms
of moss and glass
in which a soft green past
rubs its back against a hard clear present.
How can so many rooms of time
exist in one human body?
Stomach, liver, spleen:
each is its own drama, its own reality show.

There’s a Zen monastery a mile down the road.
I want to go there so bad.
And a mile in the other direction, a shooting range.
The shots bother me, they pepper
my view of the mountain with noise.
It’s fall, the leaves are green and orange
and silent. I bet monks must use
those tiny explosions as calls to awareness.
I wonder, do they ever drop by the range?
They are hunters of mindfulness, after all,
and the hunters are monks of survival.
And I’m a leaf on the way down,
I’m spinning fast but I don’t have a gun.

Those bittersweet vines climbing the porch
have a thousand green faces
and a thousand orange hearts.
It’s called bittersweet, I’m not saying that to be lyrical.
No one knows quite why. Perhaps the bark’s taste,
acrid then gentle; or the berries’ droplets of color
like a last kiss before the gray winter comes.
Also, they’re poisonous.

Oh Bittersweet.
Things were beginning to align
the year I wove your vines into a roof for my sukkah.
Each morning I went to work
and taught children what I myself believed.
My face hadn’t started to fall apart yet.
It was actually just a couple hours away
from this mountain, and the house is still there,
but I don’t know the people who live there now.
I’m going down the road to talk to the monks
about time. I’m going to say,
if we’re swimming in the ocean,
why are we sucking on bottles of salt water.
He’s going to say, the mountain doesn’t exist,
but I know you’ve been looking at it all day.

DEAR BROOKLYN

DEAR BROOKLYN


Brooklyn of ample neighborhoods!
I love you!

Your eager bicyclists
Your corner stores
(you outgrew your farms
but people bring you vegetables every day)
I’m ready for you,
Tenuous Brooklyn,
Your hot sidewalks
Kissed brusquely by high heels

Of course I love you for your ideas
but I love you more for your famous friends
Brooklyn you’re a manuscript
about to be accepted by a major publishing house

You’re a full inbox
You’re a record contract
You have millions of rooms
each one with a secret

You take free hours and turn them into coffee
You change your desktop every hour
You are rarely surprised
At sunset you become a wet guitar

You’re hard to get into
You’re hard to get out of
But in between you’re perfect
I’m a perfectly at-home ant
I scurry around doing important things
Brooklyn you make me important

He doesn’t understand you Brooklyn
but I do

IF I WERE A SCIENTIST

oh, it has been a long while. mostly songwriting which is having an odd effect on my writing writing. but im giving a reading tonight and figured id better sit down and write something. so here it is. dedicated to the girl in my dream last night who vomited while trying to remember the word "erhu".


IF I WERE A SCIENTIST


O Lord, the praise on my tongue
has turned to fear.

In your terrarium
the greens that feed us
transmute to become us,
the waste from us transmutes
to feed the greens,
perfect as a moss doily,
but for us it was struggle
after terrible struggle: we struggled
past it: we reached for greater fires,
soot and coal and carbon flakes.

I remember thinking the meaning lay,
as it always has,
just beneath her clothes.

O terrible terrarium,
O sullen morning
that does not invite us
down to breakfast,
that leaves us
in the cross-trees of the mind,
alone with the last red and turquoise bird,
the last brazen beetle,
each with our songs of alarm
and worry.

Oh, but if I were a scientist
I'd marry a woman with long dark hair
and we'd live on a teak riverboat with solar panels

and devote our lives
to searching for a vaccination
for loneliness.

ALLIGATOR LULLABY

ALLIGATOR LULLABY (song lyrics)

rest your eyes, alligator.

the day grows old.

I'll wrap you in a blanket

so you dont catch cold.

rest your eyes, alligator,

and when you wake

we'll drink a cup of coffee

and eat a piece of cake.

THE PEGASUS DANCE

its been for-fucking-ever.

i've been dancing the pegasus dance.

once this essay is done i'll be back, i promise.

jb


THE PEGASUS DANCE


When it comes it will pierce you.

And while it stays it will pierce you.

And when it goes.

Still, lift your wings.

Expose your flank.

The blood that twines

down your leg

is the reason you are here.