pères morts
mères tristes
threatening nonthreats
and a world instead
“it’s all superheros
and shoot-‘em-ups:
boom! boom!
and scissor fingers.”
burn me up
on the cady way trail
oysters and other refuse
soft trickles
slowly shouldering
whimsy of the moon
beetles may burrow
but signs warn
‘do not touch’
the path ends
in a paved platform
my flute carries a cry
to the cloudless sky
at times, to be cosseted,
things must be forgotten.
slowly builds the midden.
Apollo Beach, April 9th, 2012
explosions on launchpad 34—
I show my years
at the kitchen table
inscribed with early cursive: Miss. Moriah L. Russo.
cardboard rockets
disturb precise formations of gulls;
parachutes suspend from pines
long gone—
deleted to make way for strip malls—
distributed like memories and burdens
I search for in trash heaps,
nail to my walls
as idols to isolation,
and introduce as ancestors
alongside photographs of my father.
Please Let Me Wonder
-The Beach Boys
it’s assumed that I’m an alien from outer space
it’s not necessarily true
Ingmar Bergman, Cries and Whispers (1972)
Saint Augustine Alligator Farm employee, Eleana Link, using gator to power her canoe, 19—?.
"To achieve accurate knowledge of others, if such a thing were possible, we could only ever arrive at it through the slow and unsure recognition of our own initial optical inaccuracies. However, such knowledge is not possible: for, while our vision of others is being adjusted, they, who are not made of mere brute matter, are also changing; we think we have managed to see them more clearly, but they shift; and when we believe we have them fully in focus, it is merely our older images of them that we have clarified, but which are themselves already out of date."
― Marcel Proust, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower
Bill Viola, The Reflecting Pool, 1977
