Freeze-Frame 

 

Brother, 

Remember the trout 

we caught that summer? 

 

I pulled it from 

The South Smith* 

A well-groomed fish that danced 

 

On a blank of new sun 

A flashy Adagio 

Of twisty iridescence 

 

And once it had run 

The gamot of its places 

It froze 

 

In midair, still balanced 

On that solar slash 

Then launched itself 

 

Into an explosion 

Of outrage and fury 

 

To fan  

Its angry fins 

In our astonished faces. 

 

 

 

 

*Bristol, New Hampshire.  

 

 

Night Vision 

 

Are the lands of heaven like those of Earth? 

Do they roam about on subatomic plates 

flung from the center of the universe 

when with a bang space and time did consummate? 

If deep space is rippled with rents and rifts 

that push apart like spreading sea floor trenches 

will our own milky way drift 

into Crab Nebulae’s grasping clenches? 

What if the stars we see aren’t stars at all 

but only the glowing upside-down tips  

at Cosmic mountains free of Newton’s law 

to ungravitate for interstellar trips? 

     And if the sphere’s Masie is just harmonies 

     here is Writ the theory of Astrotectonies. 

 

 

Resolution

 

When the guards in their towers 

Shine their blinding spotlight on us 

The sharp blades 

Of the razor wire 

Glints like stars most malicious. 

The yard bell is ringing 

And the rude bulls are bellowing— 

“Get off the yard, get off the yard now!” … “Now!” 

 

So I Amble Along 

Sheened in handball sweat 

Amid a press of sweating convicts 

all headed toward their respective callbacks 

to their tiers and their own cells. 

When I’m on my tier and in my own cell 

The doors slam shut with a shudder of steel 

And the screws come along and tally up the stock: 

No surprises—we are all here. 

Into a corner and one by one 

I pile all my faces 

Until I get to the one I think I am. 

Cogito, ergo sum, at least I think I am  

 

The bars on my window 

Imprison an oblated moon 

Impression whole constellations. 

 

Shower. Shave. Read. Write. 

I do what I do 

To kill the hard nubbings of the night. 

My eyelids become 

 

thin envelopes of blood 

I squeeze myself into 

And mail my myself off to tomorrow.   

 

I arrive, morning. 

The doors fly open 

Seething with the vengeance of the state. 

None of that matters 

As I step out into 

A long line of men. 

Men with hard faces. 

Men that wear 

The disaffect mask 

Of hard urban dweller. 

Hard men with hard faces 

But none of that matters 

I got a hard face of my own 

And already the visor is drawn.  

 

Little Poem 2 

 

the old man 

whose young hands slit throats 

is tending to his daffodils 

in the prison Flower bed. 

 

Spring has come to the prison! 

 

 

Little Poem 3 

 

Your bow. 

My cello. cello