the rain that gave you words

could you tell which rain it was that gave you words: was it
       the one which knew the ground was as certain as the gash
       of sky from which it fell, or the one tied to the shadow of
       an older rain, or the ground itself turned sorrow turned
rain?

math-bird song

and if the bird knew how to solve differential equations would
        she hurry up & build
        funeraries, motelsarais, warehousings,

or would she find ways to link flower with stone, leafred
        with riverbed & heartsink
        with lamentories, joylings, trepids?

                                       

Indus/Indios

I as earth     singular as plural
                      river
                      indigenous

semblance of a poem

there is a semblance of a poem at the heart
          of where it calls out to new voices
          some of which are 

known to poems of old     the semblance 
         too is known but hides in fear of
         knowing too much
 

color song

white as the perspired block, black
           as tame spiders, red as the
           withered leaf on mooncall,
brown as daybreak tending rivers -

tethered night

to think the night kind is to believe in
      song    say it is kind, but not so loud

in an other song, you can hear it think
      but not as loud    it is kind, this night

with lost dream and lost language    bereft 
       song, lost to kindness and dream -

---

night with its many deaths is a song
       read with the eye of a pen dipped

in unfettered ink  with a hunger leavened
       and fit to taste - remnants of what

I knew but longed to dislodge from
       arid haunts & inarticulate wounds -

---

if the tethering of night to stillness
        were a given, I could believe in

riversand enough to conjure up the
        absence of sky - if imaginings 

of the tether were to roam skysand
        I could believe again in riversong -

the moth of beginnings

the castle, most watered down, shrieks -
          its bottom spared the moth of 
          beginnings, it hums an ancient
bawl

the river, riven in its gutted wear, bends -
          its weave turned in to speak of
          beginnings, it gnaws an ancient
crawl

doors that are voices

see me through doors that are voices
        carrying asphalt when it should be
        loam    -   dream me through doors

that are voices, silting hue  -   when 
        will the sun sit with me, remember
        sunken sky & play with half-lives?

see me through lives that are doors
         that are voices carrying the silt of
         days, banks that are salt & hue -

the burden of ghosts

how much burden do the ghosts of everyday scars
         carry?    the faint smell of their nonpresence is

all it takes to weigh down their mourn     theirs
          is the past and the circle    theirs is the next

day and the next rounding off the circle      the scars
          of nonbeing go about their childlike ways

tracking noons fearing the thought of the coming
          dark and the next     & the weight of it all - 

---

In gorges, dragons voice age-old explanations.
In pools ten hundred feet deep, you hear them.

Cruel waves keep strict accounts, drinking
blood to nurture children and grandchildren,

but without ancient Kao Yao’s gentle justice,
feasting on prison-drowned spirits is empty.

Something there, mystery haunting darkness,
the futile talk of ghosts goes on and ever on,

gorges hearing cascades cry lament, gorges
mourning widowed gibbons. There’s nothing

human in the sound of gorges, gorges where
blades of churning water slice at themselves,

and now, sage hearts all hidden away here,
who marshals these bitter and drowned pleas?

- Meng Chiao, from Laments of the Gorges

The tidyness of verse

The tidyness of verse:
        grain that is smaller than earth's
        witnessing girth     home that is

Larger than the pronouns
         of wasted wish      sound that is
         vice, skin and rupture      this is

The tidyness of verse
       sharp as the smell of knowing
       the birth of grain, home & sound -