Echo

Echo sits on the altar stone
as moonlight walks across here. She kicks
the tip of her feet on the stone
like summer girls do, hums Italian
as she heels mercury sounds into life and death

Like the decadence of apples linger,
like the violins, like the violins and mandolins,
like the sleep and wake of seasons,
this is Echo. She sits between the teeth of a broken collumn,
as moonlight walks its walk across her, and she kicks
the back of her feet on the stone, on the stone
she does not see but never miss. [when you sit on something, and swing your legs, they always hit the same place]
This is what summer girls do.
This is what tigers do, peaches in their mouth. [like pebbles along the banks]
Apricots and more aprictos drum the soil / ground as summer months fade like embers.
Echo fades [Echo does not fade, but her need to wake the sleep of stonework with her feet, lessens.]

Soon, she will lay on the damp grass,
with the voice of yours,
the eyes and strength of hers.

Pride of Botticelli

* Hand to chest engender a magenta solstice.


* Of only breasts, a theory of pearls.


* Aphrodite is of nacre, I was there.


* A whelck will always cant the moment.



* Resurrection of winter blossoms:


* the primrose path in the topography behind her.


* Boticelli paints december feet and midday tide;


* lantanas and lichen in tandem.


* Even the grass grow in the warm winter.

Girls have Milk Feet after Winter

Girls have Milk Feet after Winter

In summer times
there are girls who slick rhubarb and sugar;
milk soles swell on hot pavements of bees.

Winter girls. Forest girls. Moon-spill girls.
Shadow girls. Mist and sun widows:

Comb November,
come. Etch the shade of a saguaro across it,
as faults are signed on a side of a glass plum.
Come, see November O as it lifts
what it lost.

Come, in your frost skin and marigold dress.
Come, in your mercury legs long as moonspill on grass.
Come, in tongues that speak Capella Vega, stars in colder season as close as candles.
On your plum dresses November is written in frost, cold as love.

Telltale Signs

The Telltale Signs

You murmur the omens
in a leopard's ear, too tired
to know of sanity, too careless to care
of notions and rumors spoken in the dark.

You murmur the telltale signs never told,
always known: always the swans
examining their reflections in the lake;
always your bronze-gowned maid absorbed

with her face in your parlor mirror; the lords
whose promenade relents, suspended
like solstice in June, like the porcelain vases
in windows, eyes

tethered on their Japanese appearance.
Say you murmur 'all of this' until the waters
are as dark as the evening,
until the waters are as dark as the leopard.

II.

Say a course of sendal
wavers behind you then off you, hovering
over fields lying fallow where trees
drip tangerines.

Arcadia

Why not start with the man and the snow
confettiing the lawn, and how light glows;

why not start with footfalls or the bumble
bee with wings too thin for its hairy body

not heavy, but slick with honeysuckle splutter;
why not start with the sun that swells,

unswells, in a rainbow’s wet transparency;
or the fog we see as thinner,

more transparent – unraveling till
it seems dappled in blue in good light;

why not start with the boughs that droop
fraught with fruit; or the seven magnolias

in the yard, breathing out. Why not end
with what coats the shallow body

beside the magnolias; or the beaver - that
slammer - slapping its tail on water.