Poems in Abstract & Surreal

Tonight the telescope grows antlers of green glass
and the nebula undresses into a herd of white deer
grazing on the dark lawn of the sky.
I press my eye to the eyepiece and fall upward
through a corridor of cold copper coins.

Somewhere Cassiopeia is a drowned queen
combing salt from her hair with a whalebone comb,
her crown refracting through the lens
into seven small kitchens where nobody eats.

The stars are not burning. They are remembering.
Each one a held breath, a pocket of wet wool
left on a windowsill in another century.
Orion loses his belt in the tall grass,
kneels, becomes a man searching for his glasses
in a lake of bioluminescent plankton.

I have been counting the vertebrae of the Milky Way
with a jeweler's loupe, and I tell you
the spine is real, it hums like a wet finger
on the rim of a wineglass, it is warm
the way a stone is warm after a long day of sun.

Morning arrives like a moth the size of a cathedral.
It rests its dusty wings on the observatory dome
and the lenses go milky with condensation.
I climb down the ladder of my own skeleton,
one rib at a time, and the sky
folds itself back into a small blue envelope
addressed to no one, sealed with spit and starlight.

Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fring'd legend haunts about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?

'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,'—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow:
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand—
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep—while I weep!
O God! Can I not grasp
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?

First, unplug the sky. Let the wires cool
like eels asleep in a bucket. You will need
a thimble of hydrogen, the left glove
of a dead astronomer, one iron nail
rusted the color of a fox's tongue.

Fold the dark corner toward the light—
no, further, until the crease remembers
a village it burned. The villagers
are still waving. Ignore them; they are only
hydrogen, only the rumor of a bell.

Press the seam flat with your thumb.
This is where the eye of the telescope
begins to water. This is where the moth
drinks from your wrist and mistakes you
for a small, necessary moon.

Now hold the shape against your sternum.
Feel it breathing? That's the nebula
learning your ribs. It will want
to be smaller than it is. It will want
a name you can pronounce. Give it
the name of a river. Give it a spoon.

When it collapses—and it will collapse—
sweep the spill into a paper cone, salt it,
and leave it on the windowsill overnight.
In the morning, if it has rained,
lick your finger. Taste the iron.
That is how you know it was real.

The moon is a sucked-out rind
hung on a nail of salt.
Under the lemon trees
the earth goes soft with wings—
not angels, only moths
knuckling the dark like dice.

Someone has left a guitar
face-down in the wet grass,
its belly full of rainwater
and one string humming
a note no hand has touched.
I press my ear to the wood:
it is the sound of a door
closing in a house I never lived in.

Turquoise lemons, unpeeled suns,
ripening on the branch
like small struck bells.
I bite one. The juice runs
down my chin, cold copper,
and the whole orchard tilts—
each tree a green flame
leaning toward a sea
I can hear but cannot see.

My mother's voice, far off,
calling me in for supper.
But the courtyard keeps its hoard:
a bicycle chain that squeaks
in the dark, going nowhere,
and the moths, the moths,
turning the night's slow pages.