Surrounded by beachgrass,
as the sun bares its teeth,
and wind tugs my hair,
we've laid the sea out, swelling
against the skyline.

We are a nest of angled limbs,
blue buntings perch on our legs
for words like what and why
and brine gathers above your lip;
Brace the slick dip between
shoulder and neck,
this swiftly tilting planet has
eyes like yellow fish weaving
circles around us.

Leave yourself up-rooted and
hide the homecoming in your kiss.
On the grass, and the sand, inside of me,
We fall apart slowly.

she writes of the falling days
- knows them well, one can tell

simple things like string
and wrappings
autumn and swallows -
hollow places she has seen
in boxes and photographs

and so it is -  the falling days
the number of birds at my feeder are fewer
no more humming, no painted buntings
-only my homies come now, my vato birds, my mijas

the cardinal, both red and green
the nuthatch and chickadee, the titmouse-
all three
the wrens and finches, too-

and the blues still like to bathe
in the pyrex baking dish sun warmed
on a sunny day-serenaded by the mocking
one hopping from grub to worm below

- my usual feathered friends
not caring about the weather-fair or foul
and in the pale blue, a gull still laughs
at the folly of it all-

leaving goes slowly-
a spiraling, a gust of wind-
days slowly graying
shorter, lightly fading
- friends, they go

the falling days, change and leavings
leave me - well, you know...

i see the simple things
that soothe, like string
and wrappings, swallows -

- autumn, you know?

r ~ 10/6/14

Parable Gerákipolis: “Some Athenian Falcons streaked the harps of King David that had to be triangulated with Patmos from some evening buntings, to assign them to a Gerákis that flew ready from Athens to Patmos. Before leaving the temple of his maiden nurse; she muttered apothegms of some Tetraktys to her, combining the sums and values ​​of the first four goods of her entrusted bird, relating to the identical values ​​of her Adonis, who always muttered at her and clumsily delayed words that she wanted to mention to her before going to the campaign. war saying: "Three campaigns, plus two relays and a short stay outside the courts, I will dare desecrate the six times that I swore to tell Athena that no more than once I would regret receiving her entourages, but only two will be fruitful in the third day I went repeatedly to look for him, without profit, only forming doubts in the return and return in the clutches of my Gerákis that smelled of harps with essences and fables of fortune, that incomings and goings formed plasmas of the Tetraktys, doing the Venusian geometry in the magnitude of the face of my Gerákipolis, becoming a landowner between two straight lines, and then with more points to offer it between the solid forms of its Falangist Hetairoi, right there, there solidifying, defenseless and willful in his inventive poetry "

The pretensions exuded in femininity flew, still with her bephos ruby ​​lips cracked from so much uttering fearful lines, which made her diligent sirens and cyclamen emerge, in contiguous instinctive premonitions of falconry and of her supported Gerákis. The hawk arrived at the buttress shutter with his ungainly temper, leaving his missive on his marble stool, he withdrew and when he was just about to go to his almería to stalk, he observed that another glowing Gerákis was coming in the opposite direction, with his red claws, and on his neck, he wore a missive for the beloved maiden. Then he observes that the hawk rises against the dive, emitting happy yells to the sky that was filled with celestial bouquets of cyclamen swooping down to leave the court, in whose defiance it finely said "it will not be easy to leave you, I am Hetairoi and I bring the stigma of Xyston and his left arm, billing the other tusk of the viper, with the signs of two apothegmatic wastelands that say that nothing will ever separate us ”. The other Gerákis watched everything from afar, seeing that his, another alien to him, fell from great elevation and plummeting, with great prosperity spreading in his Falconiade gene catalog, missioning as an angel so that his yelling would never end.

(Procorus, understood from afar that in his hands they still followed the marks of the Gerákis, which gave him more stories of snakes' fangs, from which two stories emanated from the same one, but from a secondary protagonist for potions of whoever wants to end up adorning themselves in his floating love, and in the hemlock of a vile antagonist, with his dried fruit Aquenio of neology and love that opens even if it is inflated in the bladder of all the loves that lose the filtered blood of the bleeding gods)

lying here waiting to wake
may unconscious streams return me home
as a gentle flow succumbs to riverbank
meandering drift through memories of yore
aromas of sweetest royal fern consume
my days now passed for this night I long
to wrap me around a reed buntings song
so far from this storm of rattling gates
destined to tear through a fragile facade
reality she rides late on a January gale
entrapping my dreams in her deceitful fog
riverbank night heed a compassionate plea
o let sleep announce that I may finally wake

The summer leaves
As autumn leaves
Begin their bronzing change,
And the midday sun
Has now begun
To exit this once idyllic stage.

The quiet mornings
Crowded only with buntings
Become louder and more coarse,
As bescarfed children
who were once at play
Commence their scholarly chores.

And so the memories
Gained during warm days
Fade into a sepia hue,
But what remains
In the shortening days
Is that darling, I love you.

Today at work
I saw:
A box turtle
treading water
while
a three foot long
water snake dozed
on a nearby rock;
two Admiral butterflies
making shameless, passionate
colorful love
in the uncut clover;
four indigo buntings
slicing the air
like Imperial lightening;
six vultures
sailing the thermals
above the berry patch
in an eternal gyre.
What did you see?
-mce

...in all this imperfection i seek the perfect tone the lost chord the forgotten lyrics that call the lord to action when last we made love i built a pyre of your clothes and burned them because i wanted to make an offering and to hold you perfect and naked forever but you were only chilly and distant like god well who knows what successful supplication requires so now i light many candles against the gloom lace my morning coffee with bourbon ply the fire how many shades of gray does the world contain i have tried to count them and failed perhaps you know tell me love what is the spark that sets alight and where is the fire that breaks the night i want to take you violently from behind deep and without remorse like a centaur mounting a greek maiden on a perfect frozen vase i am praying hard for redemption and more whiskey perhaps a smile but darkness swirls in my brain an old friend whispering me toward the abyss saying it's ok just a few more steps and silence shall reign so what is the sound of one synapse firing why did the golden rule tarnish where have the indigo buntings fled the squirrels in my walls are scratching out messages in code if i can decrypt them and expose the international rodent conspiracy will i become famous and rich will lovely women fling their lingerie at me like silken boomerangs and ride me like a trojan horse or will the masters find me first and sequester me and my waterfalls of words in the madhouse of obscurity and is this a chance worth taking that those who care not should know the truth i know i am a river but where am i running the words pour the words rain it is hard to know what all this means and yet it must mean...
  - mce

it’s easy to miss the juncos’ slow, sudden departure in spring;
messengers from colder warming worlds

they arrive a dulling autumn:
peppering notations of life in a landscape encased,
each deep dark demitasse
brewed on increasingly tardy dawns
painting a night sky inverted

standing ankle deep in first snows
searching for leftover springs beneath the detritus

but then they finally emerge with the warblers,
orioles, robins, and buntings

and pointillism fades beneath impressionist palettes
that flash over treetops and underbrush

but the last juncos linger:
quiet familiar trills outside my window each morning
disrupting stillness till it disappears

a flock of buntings
with
their
majestic feathers glowing
red blue green and yellow
swarming through
the
joyful atmosphere
swirling back and forth
direction
like an accordian motion
rendition of Gabriel's Oboe
thus
we give God
all the praises
lord
i extract
all my faith
from thee
for
thy will be done

Lawrence Hall
[email protected]
Dispatches for the Colonial Office

                    An Hour in Which Nothing Much Happened


                                 The country talked quiet;
                       one human voice could drown it out…

                                  Lonesome Dove, p. 26


No real mission; I just wanted a walk
Along the road, with work gloves and loppers in hand
Through the wavery heat on a late-summer day
To clear some windfall blocking much of the lane

Butterflies danced among bright yellow flowers
Mourning doves murmured in the underbrush
Wrens and buntings and sparrows up in the pines
A little snake wriggled for cover and shade

Their beauty and silence – those were their talk
No real mission; I just wanted a walk

The path through the forest
winds in and around the trees,
circling into distance—
going everywhere and nowhere.

Trails veer into singing meadows,
and here and there
a footbridge spans burbling streams
where worries flow away.

A snail migration is its own duration,
a slow unfolding measured by itself.
And the forest snakes you see
conceal what they reveal at length—
like the indigo buntings
who lie to your eye.

You breathe something greater than air
amid all this flourishing.
It’s in the breath of the forest
to be dying into so much life.

Stay longer, and the shadows
gown you in regal attire.
Bees carry a crown to your head—
I am father of the forest.