Castleberry Page 2

I watch high-striking jets dissect the compass
      rose.

I burn phone minutes with long distance
     directions,
gauging Santa Fe, Canberra, Berlin as
     destinations.
I've lost the sense of this ragged touring.
I drain each day like a river through the delta
and sleep in four hour blocks,
dreaming beneath a hobo moon.


An Arrangement of Necessities

I write at home
and the war is somewhere else.

***

I make a dry martini.
I take a drier tone and ready for the day.
As I deconstruct the fable of the Chinese mare
it becomes a metaphor of melancholy --
a merging of damaged wire and mathematics;
it becomes the needful, sighing guide
inside the minutes of every myth.

I draw no line between my needs
and someone else's goods.
The dimes I steal are pooled
as red coins of dispensation.
"Give me the $20 suffering,"
I say at Sunday criticism.
Irony is my favorite emotion.
It is my center as my voice.
I worship at a tree of crows.
I marvel at the stammering
as I view the words of God.