I travel to bathe in healing waters

On a train between Colorado and Utah, 2024

Double crescents across my heart
The moving-pain, tearing-brightness.
Insides bruised. Gentle, ripened in transit
Easily mistaken for steel. Salt-bitten, teeth marks
and saliva stains the mountains bleeding. 
Runoff of chrome and acid clear
Endured but stinging. That brightness again 
and a shuddering, on ancient track. 
Each jostle: a granule of ancestral blood
Remembers red-tailed sunset. 
Stars sung into place over each stone monument,
layer upon layer uncovered like casting wax, carved 
by tectonic knife, 
which has pierced the oily stomach. The great stink 
of sealed-up systems is leveraged and cordoned off. 
Pitched neatly: it’s good for bathing in. 
Mineral miasma shall render us decent. 

Beautiful, ungraceful bodies doing what humans do–
remembering the primordial seas. Ships pass in the steam. 

Melodic call from deck in dolphin cadence! 
A narrow range, but the signal is clear
and I pick it up on the spokes of a
Catherine wheel of desire, impaling my
beautiful ungraceful body. Please! do not illuminate
me any more than necessary.

I dream the limerence of small town lights
underneath desert’s goliath night:
Hadal distance, in our headlights’ 
transient, bioluminescent eye.

Winter Solstice Destination Wedding!

Glenwood Springs, Colorado & Salt Lake City, Utah, 2024

Twice baked croissant in tender mouth, fruits of patience rewarded
Velvet delicate, green needle celebrant, thinness disregarded.
Flesh of beasts in earthen pot 
and wooden spinner stopped.
Bite of pine and glasslike chime
Folded flour,
Salted rime. 
Candied orange strung up high
perfuming home with citrus sigh. 
Week of candles' miracle blue:
Antimony's smudge foreboding sooth.
Pegs click, cat tongue lick, road-slick negotiation
At midnight station by 
dreamlike gear and tooth.
Black card guard lined up to honor 
wedding night's interlude.
Bodies light, altitude mineral sonder,
heated lovely langour
alongside canyon river’s wander.
Stormcloud, homecome, creaking lightning 
Tradition scraped off 
attachment-style fighting.
Brisket, biscuit, Die Hard diskette 
Everybody's favorite seasonal bullshit.
Cat whiskers woven in unsteady wicker,
Valley byway floated by way of
coracle of love.

Blue-eyed Nebraska

On US-18 near Swett, South Dakota, October 2022

Bronze-dust byways arc
the breast of the earth,
which sweats in a golden October rain. The sun tries to upstage.

Grid fields undulate and fly 
underneath her. The humming superengine throbs.
The horsemuscle twitch of her v6 paints a thready line from Illinois,
and I must wonder for how long the land has looked like this. 
In my camera lens, in my rearview. In my sunglass frames. 
Pulling over in a dustcloud, I tie up my horse.
I lay upon the road. 

I set my head down carefully, precisely, in the middle of the tiny gap between yellow lines. Gravel
digs into my scalp beneath my cobweb hair, quilt-square skin.
What's mended will always give, under direct pressure. The blue bowl is placed
over my eyes. 
I close them to better hear the field congregation’s
wordless, breathless, tidal shush. Wind's feathers brush the bridge of my nose. 
The wavering sun does not know whether to charge or retreat–I listen, strain my ears,
but there is no 
trumpet to command her legions forth. 

I can lay here for hours without seeing another. Briefly entertaining the dream of
broken-bottle pour of blood,
grey brain,
my crushed blue eye
ground unrecognizable into the asphalt. If my body became particles
shaken across the earth, would this place so far from the sea recognize me? 
Even vultures would cough up the taste of Atlantic brine.

The road-carried roar of other riders shakes these thoughts out of me.
They settle like so many raindrops, beading perfectly intact upon the ground,
trembling, jellylike;
one million blue-irised eyes. I collect my head. 
Push myself from the ground. Swing a leg over and 
I’ll never ride this road again.

Judas in a painting by Wyeth

Connecticut, 2015

Judas lies immortalized
reaching for home over a dead field–
undeserving even of suffering, for
what was there left to do but forgive? and
allow for reflection. possibly repension–

The supernova heat of heaven’s doors is poorly matched by Yehuda’s small wood stove.
He sits alone mostly; unsurety now lives in his hands.

Gavri’el visits every so often.
Gavri’el smells always of milk and honey and iron, the sweetness of a storm.
The fell consonants of Yehuda’s name
ring through his head when it speaks,
disturbing the dead grass.

Shimon (Peter, they now call him; Yehuda dislikes the sharpness of it)
visits too.
Yehuda wonders why, and does not know whether it is out of sympathy
perhaps nostalgia?
or by way of the bitter road of guilt.
They
sit on the edge of a black ocean
and gaze out at the portal of heaven far above as their tiny, mortal words drift
across the star-freckled waves. They speak of mundane things.
So it would seem.
So it would seem.

Yehuda finds a reflection of himself shimmering and frozen
in Shimon’s gentle eyes. Like fish scales
their memories drift through patches of silence, sunlight.

Poem for Kat Sirico

Becket, Massachusetts, 2025

The text of this poem was found on page 7-13 Section 5.0 “Incident Reporting” of the Handbook of Oceanographic Winch, Wire and Cable Technology, 3rd edition, edited by John F. Bash

Although no one likes to consider
all the things that can go wrong, it is important
that when they do occur
they be fully
and accurately
reported.

The minimization of a problem
or a catastrophic failure
by either refusing to face the problem
or by simple acceptance of such a failure
as a natural occurrence
does
nothing
to eliminate the initial causes of the problem.

By minimizing a problem
all that is accomplished is the 
recreation
of the same set of conditions
that led to the problem
or failure
in the first place
and the probability of another death
in the future
is more or less assured.

I live inside a dark house

Charlton, Massachusetts, 2025

I live inside a dark house
and click the old yellow fluorescent
ON above the sink. Fruit flies, ghosts.
Dog food, stovetop, dark wood, carved in relief.
Golden hour
ends outside.

After I leave,
the house watches the sun set
and sings its whistle-clang
radiator song to itself.

Unseen,
sunlight will fill this house
beaming through the window
they used to pass the coffins through;
plaster walls being an excellent insulator
both at night and in mourning.

The golden light of memory is what
illuminates my dark house.
I knock on my grandmother’s door
and then let myself in through the garden.
Her house is shining brightly inside.

We drive her childhood streets
I hold her hand as I hear her
become a little girl again
describing all the rooms of the house
all the houses on the road.

We are both surrounded by antiques,
her and I.
I put my feet up on the sea-trunk coffee table next to books marked with
century-old letters, postcards.
Great-grandfather’s clock
regards me from the corner. The cabinets he built for my great-grandmother have been
judiciously rearranged.

The old painted harbor scene
keeps me company, with its horse-drawn trolley and sailboat. A sunny day.
Couchside crouches the ancient chess table
inlaid with salt, stars, cracked compass rose.

I imagine its many players:
Ghosts at either end, clicking, whistling their
pieces across the board,
playing until
night falls
inside of
a dark house.