Haiku for Beth

The buddha is smiling in the temple. No visitors today, no alms.

Impression, Sunset

If you stare long enough at leaden
branches overhead fretting dusk
into drab periwinkle fractals, and pigeons
superimposed drowsily on the gray,
     one twitch
of a retina can rattle the world
out of its habit, sudden as a cuttlefish
rearranging its colors, into pink
paroxysms. For such austerity to flare
  fuschia shocktart--
the essence of flamingo deconstructed--
for such insipid pigeons, leafless angles
and cement to embrighten with a blink
their only catalyst for fission--
I think
must mean there’s value in looking away
after a long time looking at-- in breaking
concentration, but in concentration,
and then saccades both of the eyes
  and the imagination.

Before the Chickens

I am ashamed to have woken
before the chickens, and the now
useless rooster. Uncomposed,
the burbling of their morning
salutations, and formless,
the silhouettes of sound
they will cast on my fence
from the neighbor’s side.
I have no chickens of my own,
so I must wait to delight
in the chickens of others.

People say ungodly
to mean very early or late--
a heresy ironically arisen
from our dismay at impenetrable
umbras, which are a kind
of halo. No, this hour
is merely unchickenly,
hearts like rosebuds gently,
gently pulsing. Life elusive
in alabaster chambers

within chambers. I must wait
to delight in the chickens,
to obtain that buoyancy
of spirit only gleaned
from the babble of things
with feathers. Bathed
in crepuscular blue, like
everything at this hour,
I pace the fence, untimely
and impotently woken,
some Hamlet’s ghost.

In Amherst

We live in a town of larval poets
new-sprung from their collegiate cocoons
weakly wriggling, shedding chapbooks
in messy fascicles, their fingers
impotently poised on black tiles
before the menacing rectangle
of white light. Every coffee shop
in town is infested with these poets
on both sides of the counter. A sad
primordial ooze of the unpublished,
giving sparsely attended readings
at out-of-the-way bookstores. Setting
the bar lower does not interfere
with drinking at it. I’m content. Really.
I’m doing remarkably okay.