life is spectacle
and motion: the silt

solution settles in
the bath between

work and exposes
what was before.

nodes and portents
of events, when
the crackpots

and charlatans count
sidereal time
and turn

lead into gold.
It’s a traditional
know-how like

art, acquired
by habit or traditional
rules, of which

composers compose
the nomenclature
of the planets

in any order:
saturnine, lunatic,
martial, jovial:

small dots
in their sketches
like notes on a staff,

the head above
a lyric of disquiet
and legality, slight

contrafacts of fluency
and chords
are community property.

on a wax tablet.
A bone style
flat, broad

smoothes
what is written.
A graver can bend

a legend,
settle or balk,
in such a manner

legal & slow
like time kept
with shadow

or signed
with a stylus
on straw paper.

With style
the drummer whisks
and wipes

his snare
like butter,
the shadow

still
should melt
under stage lights.

in nomine Patris
who begets
a settled mind

its own occasion
without predicate,
grammar,

and a period.
Time compounded
fastens the difference

with a lick.
A gummy envelope
holds heaven

and earth,
a note
and a song.

of this bridge, that stalk fixed in rivermud, was different
than the bascule or draw bridges of the east or northwest,
those obstinate counterpoints, courses and singularities.
For example, stand in place and turn with work

and possibility. You are the sunflower ashore and
the image of a sunflower photographed when
the proximity of tenderness and the color of discipline
and courage is exposed with time, overnight or winter.

Your face follows the sunlight, a slanted
autumn short but slowed and tired to dusk.
Soon the harvest will lurch to a halt like the MKT.

But, like older times, leeway trumps darkness and you
sense direction and image in the black, latent moment
like a native, explorer with no grid or track, only
the earth and the sky before your next step forward.

fairly high, in and out, to a couplet
of elderberries across her chest, maybe; my

sense isn’t what it was. But even his song
smears over stops and starts
as a reminder:
territory wasn’t marked, land-
locked, but woven in a style.

He’d turn stories,
aphetic for histories,
genteel and curt:
the Trail of Tears
and the swampland
of the Southeast

as sure as succession,
significant as skin,
hide and bark.

old, defensive and patient. Nature
spends herself in this way too,

a territory that precedes her map,
an eternal copy without an original,

a composite and complicate intercourse
of lost Geneses dispersed with wind.

Inspire, Reverend, God’s word,
original or not. Say something

specific or current maybe that returns
upon itself. We love cycles.

Make His Word perennial.
Sow and continue to reap.