Mars

How wild the stars, eyes ignited with fury

on the high plains.  They seem only recently

corralled, glowing in chestnut, bay or sorrel.

O Mars, keeper of horses, master of the steel’s

forgery, rhetorician of the blade’s grandiloquence.

You are the breaker of bonds that Vulcan

hammered into place, o reddened brow.

He knew how to shoe the horse, but you

know how to ride it.  Tamer of the equinox.

On this night, how did you get so old,

so very old, a Chevy in a junk yard,

fender speckled with rust.  You have become

a sad philosopher, stoic in the best and oldest

sense of the word, bewildered by the violence

of the earth’s fester.  Still you canter across

the night sky.  In your aged loneliness

you have brought yourself close to the earth’s

sex, the smell of it.  We sense your feet

in the pasture, the whinny and snort,

the clank of armour, and through the binoculars’

lens we magnify you seven-fold, pinch your

rocky face firmly between fingers and thumb.

We smell your musk, you are that close.

Suffer the Little Ones

Bring on that horizon, with its filmic infinity and its calculus

tainted with death.  Let us not speak of one sparrow,

for there are always at least two or three, and if I see one,

feather-tarnished and head slumped to pavement,

I can only infer the logic of its fall a posteriori.

I saw my father falling but could not catch him,

the tubes and the breathing mask sustaining life

but also draining it from him, an arrhythmia that words

cannot have.  I understand the original sin of words

and each day I try to write out my punishment on a blackboard.

Chalk and the taste of chalk and the taste of ashes, eat, for this is my bread.

I understand this in concreto and in individuo, for inanimate is the compass

and its measure, one leg in love and the other in argument, so I travel.

Where are you, my love, for it was only an ideal, the circle and the fixed point?

Well, let us not speak of it any further.  The pavement is dry

and we are driving to the periphery on a long straight road

and to either side is canola and its indescribable yellow

for which there is no metaphor, butter and eggs and boyhood,

sunlight through a magnifying glass and the incandescence

just before the paper burns, the ant curls into its crisp inferno.

There is nothing but pavement and canola and beyond that there is nothing

but the limits of nothing receding into the nothing beyond that.

Though why would I think of nothing when everything is before me

on a dinner plate, flowering, blossoming, burgeoning—I sing to the blossoms

and they sing again a second verse.  We sing, for this is what it comes down to,

that such a flowering of yellow is embellishment for the breeze’s chatter.

Or so the philosopher says: organon and dialectic and the earth’s fragile crumble

of soil.  There is a Japanese song for children in praise of canola.

How do we plant ourselves in the thick earth?  We do not,

for we are condemned to movement, to walking, to naming the things of the earth.

Canola, for example, short for Canadian oil, transgenic, genetically modified,

resistant to the soak of pesticides marked for the weeds.

But I’m not walking, I’m driving, both hands on the wheel, cruising.

Out here in the fields someone has named names

and I don’t know who that could be, but I am arrested,

for they are beautiful, each flower a fleck of glory.

Can they catch me in my falling?