Moving (II)
This landscape is a chinese screen:
Mountains of mist, the trees as twigs
Soft in autumn distance.
Their shed leaves are the colour of comfort
Where grey-blue pauses on the tongue
Of God, & horizons, steppe-like,
Fleece that profile.
This is the swathe of a cut sleeve,
The kimono silk draping with wrap around
Possibilities the further one drives-----
Boxes, baggage. Furnishings schooner-curved
For the faith of prairies, latter day.
I lean to you, brother homeless pioneer
Housing apartments of transition to match
Our lack of cash, our get-away pluck,
& galaxies entire spin with these wheels,
Pushing the way to be free
Though fear
Like a needle where
We cling to each stitch,
Wind-threaded & tenuous
But moving nonetheless
Grey Moon
Grey lake,
how the choruses which lift from there
must come from sirens encased in tin.
How fluent as sardines must be their language,
& how fresh the water, how gun-metal luminous
Bringing silences as dips.
Love, so your paddles gleam,
Your arms being glaucous, dew-webbed,
The lunar sheen a beard for the lake's face
That shifts to the veils of Salome's.
I know the depths there, passenger here
In a canoe of dissolution-----
What the waves take & reflect,
Spilling over to anoint the night's locket
Twin.
That moon has a string to set sail by,
Gargantuous as Gulliver's silhouette &
Bullwinkle's hide. That moon is plucked
Nylon woven into a big guitar of pristine
Invisibility, & these woods too, they are composed
Of it, as is the traffic towing its distances
To vanishing headlights, fading train whistles,
City noise.
The shades of such gossamer greys, the textures,
The tenderness is stark & compulsory
As love made while drunk.
But how soothing too the necessity of rowing
Towards such shores, the oars their own destination,
As your arms are, becoming guideposts,
I am grateful to feel by
Dalmations
Maybe a new hy-
Brid, we are & far
From mongrel, these dot
To dot spots of distinguishment,
Mediterranean, they say,
The docs, our orgins
Date to & they know best
Being the scientists
Of rockets we're the skin
Satellites of
In our raised purple
Metamorphosis, the royal
Regalia of connect this X
To that strain of denominations'
Whose co-factor's a
Guess except
We've got the marks, arf,
Here we've got the virus
(c) Stephen Mead 2002
Stephen Meade
Stephen Mead is a freelance writer/artist living in Albany, NY. Click here for more of his visual art which has been exhibited both throughout New York state and in Provincetown, Mass. Currently www.scars.tv has title pieces from
several of his web books online at cc & d magazine.
