Solar Atlas

A ciliated Siren

sweeps

wheat wreaths

through silent spheres  

of plasma                                                    

To the iris

of electric chains----

“Quivering folds

seek rootlets”

For gelignite jewels

jazz the Zephyr

into a parish of angel claws

lashing craters

of dynamite sublime

Fire on a heap

of crumbled stars

never spares

the Volcanic Nucleus

When cerise skies

writhe and burst

a Wine-woven Dowry

Undulating through Asia

This amber almond

dappled down

fungus fleshed----

perimetric perspiration

While hydrogen hydras

hiss and ooze

a magma masquerade

blooms    

Lightning coils languid

in the southern Sepulcher

of burnt crystal

polydactyl fractals slumbering

into furnace

From the domes

of crimson cream  

saffron shards drop coral

into Hedonistic Districts.

Atonement

for sap-trapped sunbaths

of halos and highborn...

Celestial lion

thrusts its geode throne

on the nation

an incandescent candor

of the heliocentric court

-----------------------------

His aurelian avalanche

of cinder swans

sets and rises-------------

-inspired by Mina Loy’s “Lunar Baedeker”

The Red Haze of Moon

The Red Haze of Moon


A red haze sweeps across the moon.
The girl’s eyes swallow the disc in wonder,
and she leads her grandmother out, crayons
in hand, from the belly of the warm cabin,
into night, their feet slapping gravel
amid the buzzing of cicadas, their shadows in tune

against the moonlit path. The grandmother whistles her tune
of the man who forgot his pants on the moon;
the girl laughs herself raw against the gravel.
The grandmother smiles down at her wonder,
this red-haired girl who lights up her cabin
with bins of cicadas and towers of crayons.

The girl races ahead to the beach, a trail of crayons
behind her. The grandmother scoops them up, the tune
now whistling of a girl, who, along the journey from her cabin,
forgot her crayons in her haste to meet the moon.
It’s redness reminds the grandmother of another wonder
who in his haste to make the light, met the gravel

and red. The girl waves the grandmother from the gravel
onto beach, and nestles into sand, crayons
behind both ears, eyes on that red-disced wonder.
Eyes closed, the grandmother sighs in tune
to water lapping stone while crayons trace the moon.
The buzzing of cicadas envelop the cabin;

the beeping of a thousand monitors in a cabin
of a room washed white by pale faces, the gravel
of lead sinking inside her, while outside, the moon
murmured red shadows. The girl’s crayon
drawings could not cheer death out of tune,
and the cicadas watched as they buried the wonder.

The grandmother worries if the girl will ever wonder,
one night deep in the belly of their cabin,
why she could not stop the tune
of men in black shoveling gravel,
with those same crayons
which now capture the red-disced moon.

The grandmother’s wonder stills the gravel,
as they return to the cabin, cicadas and crayons
trailing behind them in tune with the red haze of moon.

When Harps Fall Still

When harps fall still on moon-silk beds,

And ice-rich seas plump blue-steamed threads,

The pale-horned peaks reap themselves asunder,

The raven force of diamond quarks scallop into wonder.

Interwoven waves fray the senseless bare,  

Silver strands loot a saluted lair,  

The diametric dew of saints lapis-hewn,

Turquoise coils glaze over in tune.

Snow-flaked dunes sweep ripe-less mist

Into panoramic veins of time-churned bliss,

Star-vapored canopy of tempo-tasseled rhapsody,                           

The ghost song of atoms unchained.

The Redwood Rises

  “For Man is like a tree of the field” (Deuteronomy 20:19)

The Redwood rises, surging up,

Converging where it pierces sky    

Capped by mist and cloud,

At the point

Where He is, a bridge to -    

        

I call up, golden haired,

“I long for you."

Leaves rustle down,

“Climb up, then.”

I wince at barbed branches as wind whips,

Cling at gnarled ridges as lightning quivers,

Burrow beneath canopies as rain slaps,

Blink at the sun splitting out from behind

The Redwood’s trunk.

The yearn to rend the red tower in two,

To quicken time and pull space

Towards me, to bridge -  

But sky nears drip by drip,

My hair now tired silver.

I gasp out, “Where?”

Leaves ripple all around, “I’m here.”

I brush aside the last tendril,

And meet wisps of cloud.
No, one?

Edel - White

Sunlight filters in through dusty blinds,

Dances on a China-blue vase, brimming with edelweiss,

Overshadowing my Bill of Rights homework, abandoned

On the dark-veined table.

My grandmother shuffles in, her gaze

Traces cotton-coated petals. Her eyes,

Envelop me, same gray-blue as mine,

And I fold in -

To a Carpathian valley of sweet gale and rolling pine,

Whistling to the barred warbler’s tale, gray-blue eyes

Of a man, plucking clusters of edelweiss

For his wife to fluff in a China-blue vase -  

Beside my homework, on the dark-veined table,

My grandmother rests a yahrzeit candle

For those who had no Bill of Rights,

Her lips pressed white, edel-white.