lifting into moonlight, the jet stream

blowing through my hair, the earth curving below;

rising over the cold waters of the Atlantic

to 30,000 feet, I begin to sense the imminent

descent toward the Red Lights of Amsterdam,

the clock reversing itself to the spring of 2004,

where I lie with a woman who knows

I’m a man heading back to war,

and I want her to whisper in my ear,

even in a language I’ve never heard before,

just to hear another human voice, just to breathe in the dark.

The Whale

It is 1970

and the summer of love is over.

I am three years old, barefoot,

running along the surf

near Florence, Oregon,

where an eight-ton sperm whale

beached itself and died, the carcass

rotting now,

an entrance carved into its massive flank

for cases of dynamite, 500 pounds of explosives

necessary to rend open the interior

so scavengers can pick the skeleton clean –

but for me, it is the doorway to another world,

the body of the sacred I might enter into,

its eyes drained of all but a giant benevolence,

flukes wide as the tailfins of bombers

overhead, my mother

hoisting me to her hip as engineers argue

blasting caps and stand-off distance,

equations to undo the intricate puzzle

of muscle and bone –

the way life waits for us all

with great patience, the electrons orbiting

in their shells like distant planets we never see,

the constellations which bind the universe

undone this day, at least for this one body

beached on the sand as we witness the blast

from the sawgrass dunes,

the sudden

jolt of nerves as the body absorbs

the shockwave, beach-sand shot upward

in jets of tissue and meat,

the local news reporter dropping to his knees

to cover his head with a clipboard

while the cameraman does the same,

my mother shielding me with her torso

turned away from the blast

and I remember everyone smiling

afterward, laughing, each of us amazed

the day a god was blown to pieces on the beach

and we all walked away from it, unscathed.

Chinese Ink Brush Painting

There are days when the mallards

slip under the oily surface

the way the eye’s glossy circle

welcomes light, the weapon’s reticle

burned onto your retinas

in a false negative

so that now you view everything

with hash marks denoting elevation,

lines superimposed over the nipple’s

aureole, the scapula with its play

of bone-articulated shadow.

It is how heavyweight paper

absorbs the fluid, the animal

shape, if not the animal itself.

Slender beaks stretch the skin

as you sleep. You open one eye, twist

the brush to disturb the trance, catch birds

shaking the cold from their feathers –

these larger birds of the shoreline,

bony knees above the water’s

surface, koi brushing shins

with curious whiskers, cat-like

insouciance, though the herons’ eyes

dart furtive into the cage-work of reeds,

where insurgents row a fishing boat