Calf Foot Blues

Bone marrow
boiling in this
pot black, hissing
gas ring hot night,
a slow reduction to
the elemental in
the fan-stirred
simmer of this
gelatin evening.

**

Bukowski’s Bluebird

Not only words in his mouth
but what look like feathers,
clamped tight in his teeth
like an anxious gambler’s cigarette.
Cat eyed and smiling at the bar
he caught beauty perched on a stool
and swallowed it in one bite.
Now odd notes issue from his throat.
His words come out as songs.

**

After the End of the World

Its after the end of the world.
Don’t you know that yet?
—Sun Ra

The city is still littered with stopped clocks.
Water swollen calendars watch over
kitchens frozen forever in August.
The chapters run backwards: first the flood
and then the journey to the land of Nod.
Noah’s begotten, our only ark is
what we make with our own hands, taking scraps
washed up around us and fashioning the new,
with our own arms stretch out the new cubits
on the other side of time and the flood.
We reconvene on saw-dusted porches
smelling of wet paint, swirl the old cocktail
tinkling in new glasses, chilled and dripping.
We watch the rock doves build a new nest,
twigs of fragrant sweet olive in their beaks.
Here in the forever after we live
by secret clocks kept close like scapulars.
We mark new calendars from blank pages
with an old pen rescued from a high shelf,
familiar, untouched by the flood waters.