Poem of the Month

There’s the country somewhere outside the car.
The country where the elm fucks the maple
and the elm broods as if auditioning
for a new PBS miniseries.

everything is a circle completing the pages

of history to repaint it

retranscribe the traditional legends

Palace flags and shoot-to-kill orders,
cardboard tanks and well-lit borders,
dungeons and lice, grenades and books,
photos retouched and high-kicking boots,

The archaeologist’s daughter grew up in tombs. She spent her early childhood crawling through the volcanic ash, which preserved time. Her father dug tunnels in the ground, uncovered death masks, stumbled upon bones of winged beasts, while her baby hands clutched the cold earth.

platonic / platinum. I could lick the hair of his arms to smell the sunlight but let the lilac air wheel-speak our sympathies.

Tonight it will rain on the green dunes of limestone.
Wine preserved until now in a dead man’s mouth
will awaken the realm of footbridges, displaced in a bell.
A human tongue will clang courage inside a helmet.

A conversation of ravens, hurled into                the wind as it pushes low across the dry forget-me-not ridges,                the green flats of the Bow,

There in the darkness silence dwells, and the long wait for morning, daylight around the window shade in what’s left of night;

I arrived at the Canada-US border. Flags fluttered though there was no wind. Mine was the sole vehicle at the crossing.

              So it’s a dreary December, the sun a low ember behind ashen snowfall, when you see him bicycle by.               You know this guy! His paintbrush, you’ve seen it fly as watery blues and greys create a feisty pigeon perched atop a tarnished angel’s head.

Taste of tangerine.
Blue as Tuesday.
Wings, the texture of powdered sugar

Novelists are serious about taxonomy–
the blur of color and text on labels
of blue butterfly genera.