DerekΓÇÖs Hammer

is toy-size. Tempered-steel peen: a tiny Shinto temple. Handle: a bulbous hardwood
swell—oiled and inked by a master watchmaker’s palm. Wide-awake for what needs
a tap or pop to tick the improbable into being. Before he died, Derek nearly completed
an exact replica of Greenwich Time’s—the world’s most accurate—mechanical clock.
The month after his death and his daughter’s wedding, Horologist Magazine featured.
his masterpiece—a near-perpetual wristwatch mechanism. Light of heart—and hand—
at the wedding rehearsal, Derek motored his wheelchair through Alpine underbrush.
The digital—winged memory—he captured was a prelude for his own lift off—
after giving his favorite daughter away wearing a butterfly tie.

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Water Buffaloed

The curlicue of time grazes from International House gift shop to windowsill
of a Pennsylvania Dutch farmhouse. The herd boy sleeps. Blissed out from
escorting my uncle and his partner, as they cooked, in the shade of a live oak
rising for 200 years above the spring outside. Are you dreaming bareback one?
Of sun-warm tomatoes in the garden just past eight-foot-tall boxwoods? Perhaps
the icy trickle in the springhouse,cooling milk, eggs and barrels of homemade wine
or maybe the milky way of fireflies along the long knoll to the barn at dusk?

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Geronimo_s Tomahak

Rounded stone quashed Apache enemies for centuries. Steel morphed it
into ornament. Much like Christianity. At least to Geronimo, when he
met my grandfather in jail—a regular stop for pastor Elijah Barksdale
Fincher. With the gift of a symbol of war, Geronimo and his son pledged
peace to Jesus, Son of the great Spirit—a story Apache missionary Barksdale
told his children. The preacher, having been a bareback-riding blood-brother, convinced Geronimo, Jesus’ love outlasts imprisonment—and war.

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Switchblade

Lying-in-wait, ready for action like the poems behind it, is a battered blade of combat steel. Tarnished—open—it jutted up from the mire on the shortcut over a neighbor’s fence. Do you guard or forewarn those of us ignoring the no-trespassing sign along Connecticut saltmarsh, knowing tidal seacoast, like poets cannot be bound by law?

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Olmec Or Not

Inscrutable witness from Central America, are you, as Genesis claims, born like us
from a clay womb? Do your lapped arms portray an astral, mythical father? Do you keep Akashic records of our acts and rejected choices, along with the holographic/protocosmic surround of numberless galaxies? Unite our star-spangled human clay into an unwilling indigenous worldwide kin? Would Wall Street gamblers, fat from the sham miracle
of compounding interest, be our brothers? Even this one—a dashing bi-sexual executive
on the Street, who presented this human spider dream, after his gay officemate/playmate
/hire impugned his authority.

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Burl Hair

for years you’ve winked, fanned tawny earrings below a diadem of curls. Found art, you rose from living tissue at odds with itself—crossways from a tree’s upthrust. Scarred by
a buck scraping his antlers, a woodpecker tracking a grub or a termite gnawing a snapped limb. Filched from sawmill scraps by anonymous sculptor hands, your carved hair strands billow ‘round a Cycladic face. Beside you Lorca pushes, flaunts, flashes—hides—duende in the black, striated hollow, behind your wavy facade.

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