moon in an ocean

Cast in a pallor
draped in grey canvas
twin semi-circles shine,
half-sunken beneath
waves of shadow
another half-drunk
sailor on wine,
bottle bobbing
with a single solitary
message, a will.
The darkness exhales,
light of the moon
the only beacon
stands in the sand
night still and warm
reminder of noon
salty eyes blinking
in the still waiting
barefoot and stranded,
miles from his son.

Found on an English Version of La Monde, September 26th, 2007

Up in arms
High finance — a game of risk
Riches beyond belief
The many battles for Turkey's soul
Who will make our shirts when China is rich?
Shooting the messengers
Israel’s cost to the Arabs
Russia: the polar grab
The Arctic, a sea surrounded by land
Venus from the Poles
Education for sale in the land of the free
Closing the door on the poor
Facts and fees
The summer return
Who lives where
The boats that take the Moroccans home
At the gates of paradise
Françafrique Sarkozy-style

Father of the Poet

What I remember was his silver hair
as he reclined in the supine bed,
the plastic band loose around his wrist.

Eyes surveying the monitors, he told
a story of being tied to the cabin
on a pontoon that skipped the stormy waves.

Once the bonds were cut, the cleat
wrapped up with rope, he collapsed
from the exhaustion of another life lived.

Language

Beyond bilabials 
                 past the rapid 
decay of dentals
                 downtrodden glottus

Your words mean more to me than any analysis

Forward, clean, break

Somewhere south of the river,
I lost my way,
somewhere between
a live oak and a stream,
crossed one too many times.
I found one way back
to where I thought I had been,
looked back,
and in a stream of consciousness,
which burst from some pocket
in my frayed jeans,
gave up all hope of return.

A Drowning

Deep in the shallow trunk
of the esophagus,
an utterance emanates
with gutteral resonance.
Upon a bitter countenance
a bilabial gulley
washes up between two
driftwood logs, rising
with the lofty timbre
of a familiar name.

And you swim toward the shore,
each salty stroke one of luck,
that the waves asunder
up against the rocks
then drags back the undertow,
retracting nouns and vowels
into the the open maw of the sea.
Those bellows echo,
another breath to wind up,
another fellow to expire.

We have no more heroes

We have no more heroes
To carve up the skies of adulthood
Everywhere else, children look up
Out across the horizon,

Run through fields of mysteries.
Once grown, this wonder
Is lost inside a photograph
That bog of the mind.

Canadian Northerlies
Shake mortal flesh,
Shivering down to the bone.
Out of the soil coils a cone

Wrapped up into cyclone,
Cuts through wood and stone
That stood for a hundred years
Left splintered like a dream.

Memories frame the fields
Of visions that foreshorten
As limbs grow limber, topheavy,
And buckle under the timber.

Only the charred frame
Of a barn remains standing,
As men rebuild uphill,
nestled in a gap in the treeline,

Inwards and upwards,
Ever closer to their maker.
Each year they grow taller
Until all at once they falter.

September

Staying up, outlast the dark,
With no alarm or bell to ring.
Our kisses kept back to themselves
as morning glories, too early up.

Autumn lies, awaits in ambush,
Ash trees swaying evening breeze,
Tightly leaves cling hold to branches
At each parting path tells time.

We are lost two miles from our house,
Memories only take us home.
The thorny gloves release their grip
And summer gives way to the wind.

In these minutes, seasons turned
and in each others' gaze of pools,
cast aside the lake's amnesia,
and kissed upon the bridge as fools.

Hill Country Winter

The treeline lopes with a gnawing slope
Down to the lakeline, that icy sheet
Pulled over the eyes in winter.

Then the head comes up and over
Disarming suspense with a lifting motion,
The sky a staircase of stratus.

What underscores the face of every lake,
Every meandering stream that awakes,
A simple reflection that climbs into the dawn,

Burrowing in a bed of delicate moments
Which bloom in the light and wilt by nightfall,
This is the heart of Texas after all.

Rush Hour

He sat in the traffic among the other drivers
Along the wide interstate highway,
Thinking some unique thought
Then someone cut him off
And he raised a fist with such fury
That the shimmering glint off the silver cars
Under the hazy indivisible skyline
Where the buildings are barely visible
In the foreground a surreal image
And a witty quip on a billboard
And he forgot what he had thought.

Lisbon

I

Waves batter the sandy shoreline
In this Golden Gate of Europe,
Where history ebbs and floods.

A statue resembling the Redeemer in Rio
Directs the westward pedestrians,
As streetcars stroll astride cobblestones.

This city still lingers in memory
Of the Age of Discovery,
When diamonds emigrated from Brazil

To the old country, traded in for a language
That frames the Catholic saints.
In São Paulo, those tildes make waves.

II

Then one All Saints Day, an earthquake
Sent tremors and fires through the city,
And tidal waves bounding up from the shore.

The crooked streets of rumors and lies,
Were awoken in the illuminated night,
And rebuilt in a modern grid of boulevards.

Between these ramparts and bulwarks,
Castelo São Jorge shelters the scene,
Survived the flames, beat back the Moors.

That remaining maze of alleys in the old town,
Runs tawny along houses of red clay rooves
Where cadences of fado echo in the night,

Melancholy folk with mandolins
Sing sad shanties of lost loves and fate,
Wield guitars with sauntered Iberian gait.

This is the only city I know of with a lift,
That elevates between eras – the old and the new.
This city that elevated itself out of a dark age.

St. Anthony’s song of what was lost,
An empire of centuries of liquid capital
Overlooking the Tagus and the sea.

Foreword

And what does it mean to be so sure of yourself
That the afternoon light from a window
Cannot illuminate you, that the writing
On the wall does not challenge your countenance?

From one human to another, let me assure you
That you too will know humility,
When the crowds vanish and you are left to prove
Once again that you are alive between two bookends.

Time shelves all words, healing all wounds
But in those forgotten corridors of covers
In tomes that make a maze of memory,
One more book on the shelf never stands by itself.