R
Owen
CA
Tail
Pioneer
ca
ne
city

Can't you guess
is the string that make sounds

Phantom Creeper

Can't you guess
is the string that make sounds

Gorse Cat

can't you guess
is the string that make sounds

Blue Vase

can't you guess
is the string that make sounds

Raht Knuckle

can't you guess
gust of belly ocean

mosaic icon
of hearth fire
of bile and banjo
elephant cigaro
stage holdup
thumbs tomorrow

Italian Sonnet One: To Comfort a Sharp Girl

To Comfort a Sharp Girl

You are wandering through England with no one

to worry, wonder if a too-smooth man

might latch his fancy on your child-like hands

that crash Rachmaninoff, then quick, have done

with you. You brushed our city from your pants,

which color splattered and caked with sand,

had once been worn at night by your dead mum

who stayed awake to paint and curse her hands

for standing stubbornly two steps below

mastery. She left you deepened by loss—

seductive, small and violent you hurled

a lamp against a wall, behaved as though

you’d sighed. Wide-eyed I followed you across

your wars, coaxed gentle until fists uncurled.

10/26

nay say nought

of battles frozen

corpses on the ground

dead of winter

there is much of her

in me 

daring to look

behind

not forgetting

remembrances 

membrane members

pillars of salt

neigh i sought

faces familiar

in the oncoming cavalry

ancient shades

stay the words

remain

silence

speaks wisdom

listen

Spring and Lemongrass/ words

Is their more to be said?
The fly stammers
On his Russian mare
And fog
Of sweat
Moon air balloon rises/settles on a spindle

With a great effort…
Rooster rises
Stretches, folds blanket, crosses himself
Caws out a sunny hymn of comfort

1} It goes, CALL and Bang a’doodle
To its lungs
A hum
Instrument, its flesh mass

…Cradling her doll playlessly
Girl carves a path through the underworld
Trips
OH, rock…Oh human dead
Alas, intellect defeated now! Death westerly!

2}The sun makes love to a mop
On the evocation of a phrase
Changed, over time.
Now it means, Freeze together
On a raw mat of love

The gears, the signal
Invisible to human preceptor
To the particles of Atom world
We are invisible, phantom spectable
Impossible to comprehend

…………………………………………

A man walks by in nothing
But a horse blanket and sandals
I envy the cross on his back
The fertility in his smile
The effortlessly bare trudge toward
Spring and lemongrass

3}I whisper through the veins of oceans
Until at last
White whale pounces up!
A shreaking curl for the sky
I make smoke of him


Mariner through sea and glass
Gazes, hurricane winds now…
How truth bended comes to be…
Pulls an apple from the lense
Sweetens his lips on scales of brass

4}Digging ad infinitum
Into the grounds, dogs
Die like locusts, as they sour
These fragile words of age

This small ground
And this small ground
Pigs wander like churls on its surface
And Isis
Pulls from her hip pocket
Not man, not ground,
But fish

Autumn by Guillaume Appolinaire

A bowlegged peasant and his ox receding
Through the mist slowly through the mist of autumn
Which hides the shabby and sordid villages

And out there as he goes the peasant is singing
A song of love and infidelity
About a ring and a heart which someone is breaking

Oh the autumn the autumn has been the death of summer
In the mist there are two gray shapes receding

(translated by W.S. Merwin)

Hi] Grass Lobes (Sprouted Prophesies)

Denver, Sept 09


Oh here we are
Hear the great noise
Splayed out and angelic in
Cister sinsweep deckjaw disaster
Of this day
Give me my whisky
With coffee, I want to think

Disaster, I think
As the grass lobe
Pulled like pinpricked hair follicles
From the earth
His or her father
Time clothed in spectacles

Lady grey sheds
Her dress and she’s Venus
She’s screaming, tortured
5 years old, oh lord save us
Oh me…the clock
Churning like goats
Stomach each morning
Another arduous “tic”
a bloated floating “toc”

Squirming worms of the earth
Relative to the attic
Eaten out
And relative
Lost in the hair of
This queen mole
This plunging goddess of
The ground

My eyes stair between the
Chink in your thighs
Out of the rocks
And I behold a thousand ships
All garbed in red and gold
And fine artillery

When the piper cries
Play, the fox dies
David
Strolls down the desert
Strewn floor
His goatskin canteen
Dripping down his leg
He has just composed
Psalm 23
Now it mercy, heartache, guilt
Oh where are we?

Disaster
Cleophas and the fall of Rome
It fell again and again
With each rub of my hands
Together last night

A fibrous vine
Collecting heart’s satchel
Windfire eyes and
Badly bleeding hands
Connectivity
With the ground
And the rolling snow drifts
Of these sheets

The fiery gyroscope
Your sunglasses
Reflected in
The fissure
In the Swiss alps
And a slowly sinking
Catamaran of lovers

What is this steely community
Of utopians
Who gather round the fire circle
To see me hanged?

The theater
Holds its boney knuckles round
All sprouted prophesies of the voice resound
Then fall in hall of mirrors and sound
Reflected, tumbled, distraught
Backstage