1.And The Hazy Sea
Do you know how many cities had been built
On the mainland and the trains there
How they'd glide over the marshes and the hazy sea
Carrying business men in starched collar shirts
Who peered out windows that would fog
Faster than you could wipe them, man
Why are there mountains
Then the last fire dies
We rebuild with foundations
Set just slightly higher
On compacted ash and bone
Spiralling skyward at the GWB
Will you take the wheel for a while
I'm suddenly real tired
We two running our course
Your summer version
Was so fresh and fertile emerald green
The wind in your hair
Like wind Russian through the canopy
And I was green too with robust fucked envy
And the way suspension bridges shake
When you're stopped behind trucks
Sailing into 1999
2.Some Trees (Merritt Moon)
And now a road connects the cul-de-sac
To the adjacent development
But there used to be trees stretching back
And there was no way through
And I was thankful for the mystery
But by the time that girl had hanged herself
I could have looked out my back window
And watched her neck just snap
Baseball field lights that shine
Over the shedding pine
Each bulb's a blinding sphere
In the secular nation
Unhurried sirens moan
Pitches that glaze my eyes
She's just a pale fleshy typewriter-light advertisement for a
wind chime
that emits rays which resonate in the polluted sky
All entrances to the
Merritt blocked off I mean
I'd love to believe that death's
Just the beginning as the
Shutters fly open and the
Breeze gives me pause
I know what's out there
morning phone calls silence and resentment
and craters a new moon built in a line
3.Indiana
As the descent began I got the distinct impression
Lake Michigan had been frozen for decades
I conducted the warmth from my metronome sternum
To our massive jetting vessel billowing plumes of spent fuel
The tundra under us cracked and ruptured
To reveal palisades
Made of blades of gray, gray bristling grass
And papulose lichen
I was so frightened
As my grip on you tightened
Your skin got slicker
I am a deserted bus depot
Though our approach suggested
An American hazy sea
Like the one I found inside
After driving you home once
Still half high
I-90 through utter desolation
I sense evil at the heart of each far flung well lighted home
I close my eyes and see cellar stairways
Vermiculated with delicate animal bone
Musty rooms house racks of fur jackets
Spattered with plasma
On a bus in Indiana
I called you and screamed
Under ceaseless patterns of weeping light
4.Cold Spring
We drove a hundred miles that day
To see a Halloween parade
Skeletal autumn in Cold Spring
Parents holding hands with Pale Death's infants
Shivering on the courthouse steps in polyester robes
And exposed bone thermals
March them down to riverside square
Your teeth gnash together as you chew an Excedrin
On the way home
The empty parkway wound its way back
through charred black pine
Just like a wormhole
Hickory death rattles into stagnant tracts of sky
Like warnings whispered
Antiphonal stridency that slept for half a century
And where are you
As lives are punctuated by moons
I've never loved you more than when you said
'I'm so scared of all the things I risk with kids I never knew
existed'
Time machine rotors ripping holes over Freehold
Constellations rearrange and orbit 'round the steeple of First
Presbyterian Church
I am Bear Mountain
I am entering orbit oh
I am Bear Mountain
I am entering orbit
On the way home
The empty parkway wound its way back through charred black pine
Just like a wormhole
A bridge becomes an island when the ends are disconnected
Wind is feedback
Antiphonal stridency that slept for half a century
And where are you
5.Share
If I should return like I once did
Animals will mark me with brown infant eyes
The same eyes whose lids I kissed the high grass in which they
sit
Is shoulder length and hanging on your forehead
A week is four years in ancient hive minds
And soon those eyes begin to well up
Your shallow grave concealed by fragrant leaf piles
Black glistening bird eyes averted
6.What Dogs See
7.Wind Phoenix (Proper Name)
Exotic vision
Permanently red-light
Squinting for hours
Natural American spirit doctorate
Make love to inanimate objects
Pasteboard decked out in Ikea finery
Without use of a pole she swings
Her thighs clamped 'round infinity
In the eye of a maelstrom of Marlboro mail-order memorabilia
Rivers, mountains and smoking shirt jackets
I am his liver
I'm gray and decaying
My texture's a sidewalk
And Notre Dame's playing
Afternoon's wristwatch
Deposited in nightstand's drawer
If Jerry knew he'd build a marquee
And charge her silent watchers
And they'd pay in foreign-looking coins
That would turn to dust in his dresser, by morning, yeah
You're gaslighting me
I can see through the dusk beams
Walking with your fingers in splints, yeah
In her last moments I pined for times
When I could never have dreamed of being responsible
For the charred remains presently huffed by the most famous of
The celebrity teenage drug casualties
The wind the wind the wind the wind the wind the wind
8.Living North
I met the first guy
Who said 'I'll always remember this night, Jane'
When I brought cigarettes home on a whim
It was really him
And all of us other guys
Who've said it since then
Well we've been trying to mean it as sincerely as he did
There is a metal divide
Between myself and this lake in New Jersey
Silver seaweed hands reach up and grab
A woman walking dog pulled in
Never heard from again
Focus on shining tension
We're striders on the surface
Of striders on the surface
I found a dog's leash on the shores of the Pacific
It means nothing to me
9.Like Blood Does
Nightly, empty, luminous ballrooms roll back in your skull
I resigned myself to all the disappearance
I was sure the cops would come calling
Some sick shivering morning
I live in Newark now where cars speed away
And weekend freebasers bury their stems
In shaded groves and muted clearings
In Philadelphia, we didn't know
Clammy hands and beaming thresholds
And I'm visited by naked reality
In the higher gloss of the cars that cut in front of me
And depression is nothing compared to what's in store for them
Having hitched across America
Like an itinerant laborer
Or a serial killer on pulsing arterials
I numbly recline
In a filthy slicked lawn chair
As our garage yawns behind me with tunnels
The pinkest sky I'd ever seen
Still pocked with dirigibles
And flying machines that opened up
I thought it'd begun hailing but amethyst and glass
Were raining down from an unmarked aircraft
Covering the cooling tar totally
In manufactured street sheen
I've been finding clipped-off Parliaments everywhere lately
I take it as a sign that you're around
See J passed away
For the first time in June
And the last time last night in the Warren
As a warm, round, mournful sound
Flooded my room
Like blood does from the faucets of pitch-black bathrooms
during adolescent summoning rituals
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