HIC NON SED ETIAM (This Not Only But Also)

It’s as if I painted you.
but these knowings were clipped
from growing. 
Like fresh daffodils,
cut to bloom on the mantle.  
You were not then even a shadow of a whisper.
Only the image you cast yourself 
as a goat on top a glittering garbage heap. 
Mysterious, like the ficus.
The shadows cast shifting shapes
like unconscious weavings ―The possible harm to my person...  

Dreary days with a pirate can render you quiet,
ill at ease. 
He with repose 
and you with reprieve.
Time now grows more quickly to Spring.
I imagine a stage and kissing an actor’s earlobes in such a manner 
that it leaves the audience silent, speechless.
It’s not that I know the difficulty in kissing fire, but what mostly I consider…   
I guess I have forgotten.
I guess I was only kidding. 
And somewhere lost there are words for these primordial assertions,
a stream of glistening words.
But why wonder. 
We have everything we need,silly, 
a mandolin harmonium. 
The universe harkins the future in dreams.
It seems like we’ve been here before and should try harder to understand 
the I Ching.The future ― vast and hazy. 
Jupiter will never tell you where you are going.

And what does any of this have to do with you?
Quite a lot in some ways, and then nothing at all.
Mandala drawings map the Universe.
Poems written on the bottom of the ocean floor.

“Circles are extremely powerful,” he said.  “The center is everywhere and the circumference is nowhere,”and then he skipped away.   

by Melody Montgomery

ANIMALS OF THE SAFARI

are migrating
under water.  
Starfish. Sea stars.
Sea of horses. Sea of stars.

Moving up,
under water.
Herds of oxen,
caribou, giraffes
migrate through a blue, manmade channel.
No riverbed.
A concrete, square canal.

Tigers swim upstream,   
underwater, in a jaguar dance.
They become tiger people,
one white, one striped,
and crest up into sky,
toss a tiny mouse,
dangling it
by a thin tail
over a fanged mouth.

Tigers fly above tree-springing ocelots.  
Egrets tip-toe, treading over tree-blue,
blur flying macaws. 
A cave-dark blanket of hyper-shifting bats.
Zebras shift,
an illusion in the pack.

People fly over,
dodging tigers,
in an open arboretum.
A contained biome,
a tiled vestibule,
arched open to skylights.

The water should not be so clear.
The walls are much too clean.
Rubber trees are flourishing quite nicely. 

At the end of the jungle canal
a ladder leads out
to the boundless carnival ―

The driveway full of people
covered in beads and candy-coated jewels.

In the kitchen, someone has put
vegetables
in the dishwasher. 

In the yard,
someone has parked   
a pickup truck

on the roof.