Behind and within the cloud of musical notes, a thread of line or rhyme
As objective as anything else in the mind.
A gentle tug, look and listen as the manifold multiplies by moon glow
On white of twilit cloud a thunderstorm for some, East,
A passing fancy like tombstone of the West,
Crumbling like the chalk of old bones
To a limitless and useless sand of memories.

It blows as the argument a trumpet might make for beauty on a night highway.
As the sun might make of the crops years passed
Now pressed and dried hard as road.
It’s a hard road you say,
Long and black as Nevada asphalt.
The praise thin as moonlight on smoky clouds.
The world burning and burning again to say so.
Say love so, laugh more, say the comparison over time drops vowels
and syntax from a foreign tongue becomes determinative.

Too soon to swoop and sum up, we linger a while there
By the side of the road where the dark seems to touch things,
Bending its third dimension to a static book world,
A stack of tomes in the story of the rock, wet and tumbled by the stream.
The effortless streams of air and water and night on the mind
Like blankets, sheens of oil, rising dust storms on a red horizon.
Here pluck the flower of your inner light grown fat and sappy
On ignorance like cheap fixes.

The lean one on the road,
Leaning on a corner building,
Budding like broccoli from infinity,
Willing to drive your truck,
Pick your field, sleep in the open.

The hope of her babies,
The backs of the economy
Shining as river stones.
The fabric of dreams
Bright as Guatemala weavings.
The rain from the warm gulf,
The huge ships at port
With their bilge and oily engines
Sidling up to the canal.

Poor old country,
Bereft of the dead.
Poor young people,
Rich with dreams.

On the dock of the present,
The mournful stroke of somber songs,
The timbre of the tune kindled in the heat
By bees at the source of a hive
By a great jungle river
That unfolded time so much
That now it is flat as water,
Barely a wrinkle to disturb our considerations,
Naked as moonlight on the retreating tide,
The silence of the cloud hanging
As it moves luminescence
For some watching,
Gently stroking each other’s cheeks with their hands
To remember love’s way with
Folding the bright colors of the children’s clothes.

Every bird a fledgling, plumage, light,
The flowering within the sing song trickle humming long nights of hunger
Fed on beauty that passed this way.