GHOST BIRD

What does the ghost bird want?
It speaks in chirp and riddles and Spain,
in gray of gray so streets and houses are
barely there in branching hallways with low
doorknobs like tricks of mist and pipe rattle.

We go through night's deconstruction,
defamiliarization, dislocation and fog—
the ghost bird in the bare tree, a million
miles from fingertips to every drop of rain
that contains everything you've ever seen.

These aren't miracles, mathematical equations,
fever dreams or magical thinking, another way
to count your blessings—the ghost bird eats
original fire and brings you the twig of life.

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ELECTRIC UNIVERSE 

It might come as a shock to know the impulse
to skip a stone connects to the heartbeat you still
feel boarding a flight to England—torque of blades,
air concussing as military transports pass overhead.
There's a myth about—maybe the right-hand rule
up to the sun—why else does a World War pilot
ask to board alphabetically in a desert that was
a hilltop of bodies in motion like dust clouds?

But pointing at the moon is not the moon,
as people on their porches look up at the sky,
down at their navels when the parade goes by.
The invisible hand nudges you out of bed,
out of a vehicle stuck at the edge of the world,
wheels spinning over empty air—you want
to review news in columns straight as rafters,
straight as the teeth of the grinning moon—

I feel you all the way to this street by the sea,
waves out there meeting waves in your mind,
behind your back, cats of the world stampeding,
fire eyes, your hands and face tilted to night,
an itch in your thumb as a shooting star goes by.

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MAGIC FACTORY

One of those courtyards like a chess board
hooded figure in the archway I imagine is
another version of you with notebooks of secrets
written in letters so small you need mad science
or big medicine to get down there and read it
a microdot as a mole on Marie Antoinette's cheek
with not only recollections scattered dream moments
ideas for a movie and details on the big events
but a map to the treasure with those hungry misfits
sitting round a campfire because someone's got to fall
asleep eventually then all hell breaks loose and we go
off in all directions and someone says hey over here
and leans back so you can put your eye to the hole
in the iron cover plate and look down underground
at gas lights and ladders and insulated steam pipes
horse columns and soldiers marching up and down
like sugar ants as someone else says look over here
at this cut of air like a door open just a little so
you can peek into the next room where someone
like you bends over a desk and writes it all down.

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The Ghost Bird might be an emissary out of the matter-forming kitchens of the Electric Universe. See? The notion is old but renewing. Electricity is all around us, mysterious in its casings. And in the Magic Factory you might catch a glimpse of the raw ingredients, a cauldron full of objects bubbling to the surface.