The summers come back to you.  A few
more often than others.  Like the one
where you knocked that young blackbird from its
nest on the side of your grandmother's
house, because something in you said it
was arrogant of birds to nest in
branches so low.  And the duck in that
Virginia stream, that you hit - again
with a dirt clod, and were actually

puzzled when it flipped on its back and
its head went under to obtusely
face its more familiar elements -
water, fish, earth.  No.  You did those things
simply because the out-of-reach
fell suddenly, brilliantly, within
grasp.  Maybe it all happened the same
summer that your two-year old brother
swallowed insecticide, and it threw

you into that smothering panic
unshakable for years.  Still, you could
go home to television and watch
bombers on 12 O'clock High - like the
ones your father rode - begin earthward,
their slow departure from controlled flight,
rolling inverted.  Though always the
same scenes, you wished more chutes would blossom.
You wish you could take the dirt clods back.
 

A Doctrine of Deception

To elide the predator
he need only counterfeit
in Time's oblique remembrance
the battle dress of venom,
the calligraphy of death,
this trickster of color
with the skin of empty threats.
 

Ocotillo: An Illusion

Dispersed along astonished canyon slopes
like Time's rear-guard for the sea it withdrew,
the flow having trickled into fool's gold,
your arms plead the damp womb of vanquished mirth
—canes in the current's petrified embrace.

Casting your delusively frail shadows
like the dancers of Herculaneum,
your small leaves conceal an ambush of thorns
recitative of our unreturning Dream.
You remind us: Eden is out of reach.
 

Cleric's Alarm:  How We 
Came To Blame The Woman

On an Arab island the faithful dead
pour visions of Eden through empty eyes
while whispers sweep Earth's ivory breasts
that Eve bed the serpent in the shadows...
just to snare us in our own mother's blood.
 

Reticence Upon The Origin 
of Unnatural Things

Their voices hang like sardonic prophets,
in theft of Levitical warnings.
Denouncing our faithless and whispered tastes,
we collude against the fruit-bearing world,
    recovering Sodom’s alchemy dreams.

Some lamented Age, not our own, returns –
spends us quickly – as lemmings to the sea,
cast from savannas only blood un-ghosts.
For they bid us to fade into distance,
    our deeds a scarlet hush, named forever.