#npm2016

Ten Thousand to One

The Phoenicians guarded a recipe that required ten thousand murex shells to make an ounce of Tyrian purple.

Scan the surface of Aldebaran with a radio wave; grind lapis lazuli into ultramarine.

Search the summer sky for an Anasazi turkey constellation; see algae under an electron microscope resemble a Magellanic Cloud.

A chemist tried to convert benzene into quinine, but blundered into a violet aniline dye instead.

Have you ever seen maggots feed on a dead rat? Listen to a red-tailed hawk glide over the hushed spruce and

pines in a canyon. Feel a drop of water roll down a pine needle, and glisten, hanging, at the tip.

Orion

Far back when I went zig-zagging through tamarack pastures you were my genius, you my cast-iron Viking, my helmed lion-heart king in prison. Years later now you’re young

my fierce half-brother, staring down from that simplified west your breast open, your belt dragged down by an oldfashioned thing, a sword the last bravado you won’t give over though it weighs you down as you stride

and the stars in it are dim and maybe have stopped burning. But you burn, and I know it; as I throw back my head to take you in and old transfusion happens again: divine astronomy is nothing to it.

Indoors I bruise and blunder break faith, leave ill enough alone, a dead child born in the dark. Night cracks up over the chimney, pieces of time, frozen geodes come showering down in the grate.

A man reaches behind my eyes and finds them empty a woman’s head turns away from my head in the mirror children are dying my death and eating crumbs of my life.

Pity is not your forte. Calmly you ache up there pinned aloft in your crow’s nest, my speechless pirate! You take it all for granted and when I look you back

it’s with a starlike eye shooting its cold and egotistical spear where it can do least damage. Breath deep! No hurt, no pardon out here in the cold with you you with your back to the wall.

On the Difficulty of Drawing Oneself Up

One does not stack. It would be like a mouse on the back of a mouse on a mouse’s back. Courses of mice, layers of shivers and whiskers, a wobbling tower mouse-wide, with nothing more than a mouse inside.

Nothing like doing some #poetry #reading on my day off of work

The precipice is high

Daunting and out of reach.

Will I climb or wait for it to fall?

Years will go by

Who will reamin?

The mountain of my dreams

or me?

Years will go by

And stones will change,

Flesh to dust,

Prognosis: 50-50

—To ride as hard at life as that ten-year-old girl galloping flat-out over the prairie!

Because that’s how hard death is thundering at you, his knuckles white on the black pommel; too late you’ll see the east gate has been shut, spurs glitter on his needle-toed boots.

Guidelines: Writing the Sonnet

It must be quiet: heart’s I am, I am

like a faint purred thrum of insect wing hit

against draped pane. Let each own its rhythm,

but privately, slim breath that’s kept discreet.

Try to picture it as a slattern hemmed

in by a corset, tempered by wisdom,

mulling a solemn dress of green velvet.