Arcana

Fan your bad hand
palm down before you—

hard yellow demons
displace the tarot

and tell uncertain chances:
tea leaf bruises,

the tale of the Empress
inverted like a bat

ill-dignified
by no fault of her own,

swallowed
but scaling the tongue.

Update After An Absence

Just to let everyone know (who might be interested) I have not vanished. In fact, I've begun drawing again, and will try to start posting my efforts here for your viewing pleasure. Tonight I'm working on a poetry assignment of sorts--my good, good friend SaraEve and I exchanged three photographs each to be used as prompts. It feels good to be creative again.

Check out my newest link under "In The Forest", called Auld Manhattoe. I found this blog when I was looking for information about an old tale I read back in elementary school, about a fisherman's daughter tasked with appearing before the king under a set of paradoxical requirements--neither riding nor walking, neither clothed nor nude, etc. I don't think it has any single title that everyone would know it by, but the story is sort of archetypical.

While On The Warm And Faraway

Enough of absence becomes a presence.
The void of your voiceless days
Becomes a pulse in the wrist, after a time
A throb in the wind in a bottleneck.
Broken green glass in chiming chips on the blacktop
Settles into the imagination
Like rain upon a parched garden,
And all the little million wriggling
Words surface to fit themselves together.

Photo Albums

Our ghosts are biding
in the photo albums of strangers.
We are background to life:
Douglas fir, canyon rail,
a concession stand,
your face or mine.
Somewhere I am holding a soda
staring off into the distance
while in the fore a beautiful man
is kissing a beautiful unknowable woman.

Job

It could be one cold interview at the end
And maybe that is why we get buried in suits
A gin and tonic and a sinner’s cigar
Dry-cleaning ticket taped to a security deposit

My uncle gave me Elvis, “now I’m dead, now I’m dead”
And I made an excuse for that rhythm
It could be one chair and a stern fatherly stare
At the end, or it could be sex with someone’s mother

Better list all your strengths and boyhood pranks
In the margins where a careful heart could see them
On the cover, dead center, an olive branch
And a decent guess of your worth