the weather is perfectly perfect
empty mountain, no one in sight
not a single sound
of a chain saw

a gas engine can turn
three hundred years of history
into a pile of sawdust
in the dancing air

but not today
today there are birds singing
and a sentient bittersweet vine reaching
toward the hanging fuchsia on the balcony

someone once said that dandelions
carrying tiny umbrellas of white down
sow seeds of sorrow
like flying tears

the ringing phone shatters
the perfectly perfect day
like a torn garbage bag
with rotten food spilling out

close-up of a poet:

sitting on a river barge in the mist
toying with a romantic idea
and inviting others to join her on the river
where she pries from them

their most painful or joyful experiences
then lures them to the railing
and drowns them in the river
where the water runs deep

there are so many steps to heaven.  i know this
because so many times i have climbed
up and down the steps of my heart, searching
for your name and a home
i can call my own.

there are mountains there, and every mountain
has a shrine, and every shrine has a cloud above it,
a crane beside it,  and below it there are valleys
ragged with fallen stars.

these days, a lost soul hangs over my sleep
mumbling behind a screen of dreams.
it is his signature that scratches across
my waking days,

his promises that once stamped my midnights
with the seal of the moon.  why are you ignoring me?
i can give you songs of loss and sorrow, faith
and devotion; while the liars tell you
that the past is over and unimportant,
a story best told in a fairy tale,

i will give you a story that is true.

but the truth is often partly bitter:
the truth is a man and woman who
lost their hearts to each other
in a time that was inauspicious.

i will tell you the truth:  no one knows
how this fairytale will end because
there are two halves to this history

and no matter how many times
i paint a pretty ending
on long, loose-folded scrolls,  the happy
ending requires co-operation.

on these lost days in the massachusetts autumn
when the leaves shuffle across my heart
i listen to the mountains sigh and shrug their shoulders

as the wind sweeps the yellow dust from
the red cloisters of my heart and my passions.

meanwhile the moonlight bleeds through
the windows in the kitchen, where it falls
at my feet, spilled and scattered like rice

•  

   

   

   

• 
• i am the butterfly eater
  dining on illusions,
  quandary mechanics and chaos theory;
  it's the difference between determinism
  and indeterminism...is it true that if
  you know everything in the present, you
  can predict the future? for example playing billiards--
  if you feed everything into a computer, such as
  how hard you hit the ball, the angle of the cue,
  it would still be impossible to tell how each ball
  would respond to a collision--a speck of dust
  could throw everything
  out of whack...then there's the butterfly
  effect. ( for every butterfly eaten in tennessee, a woman
  dies in massachusetts. ) Newton's universe was
  a clockwork universe, but the quandary world is not
  deterministic--you can't predict the outcome because
  you can't know both the position and the momentum
  of your lover/ex lover, dead/alive, loving/not loving
  at the same time. things change as you look at them
  when does the wave
  become the particle?

  wave and particle are two aspects
  of a single reality, an unknowable reality--
  wave function defines an area of
  probability-- like being in a certain place at
  a certain moment, loving and not loving at
  the same time, a la Schrödinger's cat.

  here's my quandary: in the absence
  of measurement, is there no reality?
  to measure, must one have to see?  if you have no
  separate reality until i can see you, can measure you--

  and if you are neither separate nor real,
  then you are an illusory part of me,

  so how can i prove the existence
  of that which never goes away
  but does not exist?  how could something
  be true but unprovable?

  it's the liar's paradox.*

   

  * i am a liar

  

  Schrödinger's Cat: A cat, along with a flask containing a poison, is placed in a sealed box shielded against environmentally induced quantum decoherence. If an internal Geiger counter detects radiation, the flask is shattered, releasing the poison that kills the cat. The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics implies that after a while, the cat is simultaneously alive and dead. Yet, when we look in the box, we see the cat either alive ordead, not a mixture of alive and dead.