I Saw a Plastic Bag after The Mall

There's so much beauty in a plastic bag,
I can't stop looking at it, any more
than I can stop tasting sugar or sugar
cubs, pancakes with honey, as if the way
it carves circles into the air when it traces
its own impossible-to-tell-next pattern
is a way that, inevitably, binds you:
in the wind, it rises
and it swirls, is swelling with shape
now, now not, as if having a life of its own
where it falls, where it rises, where it brushes the ground;
hand-shakes the sky. There's so much beauty
in the plastic bag, I can't stop looking at it
without feeling I let go of what we for
so long, but never truly, have called beauty.
I can't turn away as if it never happened,
as if it never happened to me.

The Ordinary Tending of a Garden

She rake smooth again her orchard
yard. Weed must go: clover and bluebells.
Here, in rows in flowerbeds, gazanias, dendrobium
orchids. Chrysanthemums. Acacias
and lobelas, whose blue petals
form a crown over the earth,
which is tended, which she
now waters, carefully,
deliberately, hunching on her heels.
Now she rise; now she stamp
the earth as if the raking
depends on it.

On Leda and the Swan

i. Leda: introduction



Below you below it, this is how she parades on each heat-
crippled field dappled not in shadow, but in sun:
as if a swan, whose wings ascend,
descend,

come away and away in ledaean white,
her feet going, oh how her feet goes
brush/ fail brush/fail in the wind.



ii. Zeus: watching


You watch her from above, already having decided
how fair a swan-form would be. (How lovely still
she is.) What she is, who she is, what does that matter
before seduction?


iii. Leda and the Swan: yearning


Here, on all-dappled field, she in unmoving as a sound
(can it be: wings unbroken, soft, in the air?) severs
the silence. She looks up, she tilts her head to the sky.
How she stare
at you in swan-form, all-white descending

from sky and from them, from all things expected,
half-expected. Part of your point to find,

to damp on someone else your hunger.

How her body shake when you land beside her.

Two Parts of the Very Same Story: Fragments

How the tip of a wing
splits us apart at sunrise;
we are where reality
and illusion meet


¤


How the light of a street lamp
spreads as only itself does;
the man who steps into, now out of
a light we call

Sacred,

sacred
star.

Seaspray

Arcs,
arcs after water against rocks,
creates crescents
in the moonlight;
all left behind
to prove it

is the shapelessness
of broken lines
in air.

If

If the trees' green needles were spikes, if spikes
were melting icicles, I'd be a chariot, I'd be
the one riding the horse like no one else;
if I'd be a chariot, you'd be a fish,
you'd be the iridiscent scale
outside of it.

God

What about God


God as redolent,
God as what is remembered,
how once he shook and shook
the earth with his hands,
molded it, then cried
to make the Flood. Is that believable?
There is wind, is heat, humid-like,
right now it gives shape
to my linen clothing. Is this
God breathing, you say?
If I thread the earth, do I thread
his feet? If through the sky,
if I fly through it, is it God's
mouth? What about the sea?
Is it his stomach?