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pellucid
night in January: and the mind has its
own shifts in weather: a feel for light
from a star, or for a woman’s voice,
a recognition of the world’s greed,
of a death march on the Philippines, or
of being shot by an arrow dipped in curare.
Drinking tequila, I watch the moon
rise slowly over the black hills; a bird
sings, somewhere, out in the junipers.

Juniper Fires
Juniper
fires burn in the crisp night.
I am inebriated
on juniper smoke. And as my mind clears,
I see a white crane standing, one-legged, in the snow.
And see clearly the
rocks, and shaggy pines, the winter moon, and
creek.

Frost
Notice each windowpane has a different
swirling pattern of frost etched on the glass.
And notice how slowly the sun melts
the glaze. It is indelible: a fossil of a fern,
or a coelacanth, or a derelict who
rummages in his pockets and pulls out a few
apple cores. Notice the peculiar
angle of light in the slow shift of sunrise.
Where is the whir of the helicopter?
The search for escaped convicts in the city?
Be amazed at the shine and the wet.
Simply to live is a joy.

Black Lightning
A blind girl
stares at me,
then types out ten lines
in braille.
The air has a scent
of sandalwood and
arsenic; a night-blooming cereus
blooms on a dark path.
I look at the
short and long flow
of the lines:
and guess at garlic,
the sun, a silver desert rain,
and palms.
Or is it simply
about hands, a river of light,
the ear of a snail,
or rags?
And, stunned, I feel
the nerves of my hand flashing
in the dark, feel
the world as black
lightning.

Piranhas
piranhas
in a wine-dark river.
a radio station on antarctica sends messages
to outer space,
listens to quasars pulsing in the spiral nebula of andromeda.
a banker goes for a drive
in a red mercedes,
smokes black russian sobranie from england.
the sun
rides a red appaloosa to the gold mountains in the west;
then, incognito, shows up in questa:
wearing shades, carrying a geiger counter, and
prospecting for plutonium.
the history of the world
is in a museum in albania;
the price of admission is one dollar.
a kgb agent
has located trotsky’s corpse,
and, under the guise of a gardener, enters his house
and breaks open his casket, and
shatters his cranium with an ice pick.
lepers
in a cathedral are staring up at the rose window.
o window of light:
we are falling
into a bottomless lake full of piranhas—
the piranhas, luminous, opalescent,
in the black water.
o paris, venice, moscow, buenos aires, saigon, kuala lumpur:
we are sailing up the wine-dark
river.