Hierophany

Right now I’m trying to find out which part.
Somewhere lies a cankered sore,
as on the foot of a bum,
who’s been walking for days with no respite;
offered no help from my brain, my heart, my knees, or my eyes.
My stomach’s a landfill,
through which he rummages parts of last night’s meal,
worn down to bone by the thick, rich stink of unrequited bile.
Upon his surfeited burp, my white cells collapse inward with paranoia,
my lymph nodes hum ever so slightly.
I’m flesh-sick.
My eyes are last night’s cloud-covered moon;
memory beset by dusty moths hungry for old clothes;
heart bubbling up through my neck like a fountain of molten coins;
knees speak only to the weather, ignoring both nerve and vein.
Part of me has gone rotten.
I’m trying to carve out what’s dead without spilling the rest.

This entry posted by J Rand : 22:19

With steps across the field you stride,
despite the calf-deep snow.
What lies on the other side?
I ask but you don’t know.
What field, you say, what snow?
To it you bend and place your plow.

Upon bestowment of this kiss,
a cherry-bearing orchard puts to root.
Not a limb does the lucky sun miss,
nor does water overlook a tender foot.
A woodlet free of serpentine hiss
is your breast, and all its fruit.

This entry posted by J Rand : 08:37

I need morning as the dune does sand.
Everything smooth as a pond
tucked away thick in a woods
no one hikes through.
Until the neighbors,
high on coffee and grits,
take their cute little dog out to piss.
That tree it lifts its leg on
used to be morning.
Now it’s stinking-wet noon.

This entry posted by J Rand : 22:12

Birds of the bureaucracy,
they made the country what it was
but did little for the land.

This entry posted by J Rand : 11:20

A fire hydrant drowns in the sand.
It prays for the waves to reach its feet,
to lubricate its spigot with the shining randomness
of which only ocean is capable—
toy rubber dinosaurs, light bulbs, mismatched shoes,
mismatched socks, chairs missing a leg, saran wrap.
It gave up years ago looking for the perfect shell,
its pipes thick with grit, its undelivered postcard beauty
in no way self-consoling. O, hydrant, wait, wait—
the clouds grow blue with chaos,
the pelicans flee in threes;
your time is coming.

This entry posted by J Rand : 08:22

We conjure a garden of
tendriled and well-leafed
realities.  Deep is the soil
of time when we sprinkle
our plans like crystals of blue
fertilizer.  But most futures die;
we can water and sun only one.

This entry posted by J Rand : 22:47

Their arms swing like windmills,
friction free, disproving grade school
texts which denounce any theory of
perpetual motion.  The surfers cling
to their boards like scholars their books. 
If waves were words, surfers would read
the dictionary from cover to back    and,
upon arriving at Zurich, would stare
at the azimuth horizon, yet dissatisfied,
pressing the ocean for one more walled
utterance—a salted syllable, a wet grunt,
anything working its way back to shore.

This entry posted by J Rand : 11:23

The cumulus clouds hover steady
and low in the evening sky.
They are blue or white. Their choice.
They don’t need to give a reason.
Blue because they want to;
white because they feel like it.
When they’re ready to
roll their own die, they shake
out to sea, join other clouds,
frustrate the surf with rain, and
contemplate the breeze
in another life, as sand.

This entry posted by J Rand : 18:46

I

A cloud, glowing purple
with mischief
puts a hand on my shoulder
and nibbles at my ear.
Its menthol breeze
hastens me to cover.
When the rain comes
—pitter patter—
I ask only that
it leave its hailstones
at the door.


II

The storm went off.
The storm has no lights.
He’ll come back on,
by tomorrow.
The lights went off.
The lights went down.
Rain and thunder,
by tomorrow.


III

Aha, I caught you—!
     —Caught me at what?
It stopped raining—
     —Yes, but it’s still wet.

This entry posted by J Rand : 20:44

I

Easy is the way
but quiet the meaning.
My neighbor will not sell me quiet.
I can buy that only from the land,
only from the maple and the nesting sparrow.
Only from the ant carving a tiny tunnel at my feet.
I tell my neighbor, Sometimes a field is just a field.
But he doesn’t believe me.


II

What are you doing?  Looking out.
What for?  To see.
To see what?  Whatever I can.
What can you see?  Nothing now.
What about now?  Still nothing.
What about then?  Then I saw you and me and the land.
What were we doing?  We were waiting.
Waiting for what?  Now.


III

My grandmother laments.
This was some of the richest
farmland in the country.
Soil black as the stallion’s back
and just as deep.  But she’s coughed up
her last crop now.  And sits
as a circle, the cars working
her contours, the city pipes
standing pregnant with water,
ready to scream,
ready to go hot or cold
at the first sign of drought.

This entry posted by J Rand : 10:25

The sea leads to the cork-board sky
of stars linoleum-like and exam-ready.
Collared necks sweat furiously, sweatered
ships twist and creak—the eighth horseman
projects herself abroad, devoid of subject,
matter, and jurisdiction.  No one knows
her civil breast, which arches nipple-free; bends
to the core beneath; stretches to heaven above.
Water flows one to each folk.  Red ink, red wine.
Everyone is the master of form.  His form.
The form we carve ourselves.

This entry posted by J Rand : 08:56

The sunlight wraps its arms
around the place.
The cats lap milk and
lick themselves clean.
If it is a weekend
time stretches out before you
like a state you've never been in.
Maybe Nebraska, or the Dakotas.
Nothing but rock and wheat and
where you'll be sleeping tonight.
You go to bed old but wake up young.

This entry posted by J Rand : 08:49

The slow ember burn of a cigarette night
lurches its way to the time-safe hamburger stand.
It’s just a little red shack napping on the back road
of a small mom’s-youth town.  Still, its call reaches
out to the bicentennial highway, lapping at the ears
of those trucking visions of hot popping grease
and fries.  Clenched-stomach truckers make
unplanned left-hand turns, beating back the
dirt road, their headlights fanning out
across the once-cut wheat like waves finding
the water-worn beach at midnight.  The goddess
of ground beef, big of hip and thigh, sets
her thick elbow on the counter and asks
for several patties thick and sizzling.
We’ve got hungry goateed mouths to feed,
she says. Bikers and tourists kneel and salivate,
holding out their handlebar hands, looking
askance for ketchup and mustard.  But the
goddess returns no onion.  Her empty-bun
cry repeals all ablutions.  It’s just ice-cream,
she says, going pink and cool at the center.
It’s just ice-cream.

This entry posted by J Rand : 08:44