east is a vector

east is a vector,
on the maps a stubborn serigraph
though two blocks east of here
the gyros are concrete
and the used furniture is nearly abandoned
and a recording studio is dressed like it's abandoned
for safekeeping.

an atlas is the compass-card collage and key.
I can adore a place name
before I meet the landscape.

at a backyard sale were biblical texts, ancient blazers,
and high school primers
for each subject three decades ago,
and an outdated road map, more valuable now.

in western thought, life is directions:
high school is a venue, university an avenue
marriage a journey, and the furniture store
is still two blocks east.

there's no love in a punch card

oyster once a week and morning twice a year,
short fragment of synesthesia and memory
like an old time card, a routine perforation
so my faith is in card stock, correction.

what a visceral road trip! the whole effort
reminds me of catching a fire with fishing line
sleep moves us both, I think, more than anything.

an outline

still above

violent spiral
hot damn hurricane over
satellite image

the crust of a planet - part one

whenever I look down--straight down if that were possible--
I see all we humans have done to the landscape and our infrastructure
we build to make life optimal or efficient or easy or familiar.

but what strikes me
is not that we are tearing up the soil
or ripping off rings of bark

nor is it that we're becoming advanced
or that our civilization's blueprint is spelled out in roads.

what strikes me
is that we're all children
digging holes to China and not getting very far
before we give up and try again a little further along.

and that we're clawing at our planet to make it a reflection
of ourselves, but our fingernails are still only in the varnish.

the crust of a planet - part two

along the wooded hills of the South we carve long corridors
for our power lines, the grassy pencil marks through the geography,
the graphite that links our spaced cultures.

electricity takes the shortest distance, but highways wander
at an engineer's whim and follow hillsides for the view.

between Purcell and Lexington, 77 is a bridge
cleaner than the mud and river it spans, and riding its correct latitude.

and we fight with nature to prove there are four cardinal directions
but water doesn't mind direction, only height and temperature.
we are laying our graph paper over ink blots and wax drops.

the crust of a planet - part three

but I've forgotten two things:

we aren't foreign and our metropolises are spiderwebs or cobwebs,
a creation of nature and in turn part of the natural world.
we like to claim we're apart from it like a tattoo is foreign
to the complex biology underneath

or like the printed word doesn't interact with the cells
that were pulped and dried and bound up underneath.
but life and the inanimate are only a series of steps apart.

the other is that I've only been looking down.

the clouds are a part of our earth's crust,
they have only escaped upward for a turn.
and our engines send plumes, which I contend isn't poison
but oil paint that's difficult to manage.

take time

Take this time for yourself, but to be healed.
I think you are complex with nothing on and nothing on your mind.
You are a colorful universe puzzle like an apartment complex.

For the women of these last years

an outlaw

I sleep fetal, an armadillo

you said