Red ink and spilt milk
on a shirt of blue.
Coups are a bit like death. They wipe out everything.
The tree in the wood
should fall
but did it?
All we know is supposed.
On a warm day, the birds sing, bring in ten o'clock,
summoned, assembled, inflamed .
Precipitation is humidity, wind, mixes
with skin, and water,
alters lives.
Are we to remain silent?
The Connellsville Seam is exhausted.
Nearly pure soft coal,
stolen from the earth,
births steel, watched water
wash away Johnstown.
Frick's Tintoretto
Procurator of San Marco,
the second most prestigious life appointment in the Republic of Venice,
gazes into a dark interior, away from the blue sky above a blue sea.
Johnstown's brown drowning,
near dark miners digging shoals of coal.
Save the town, if we can keep it. No.
Lake's gone, along with the fish.
Sense of debt to the dead?
Frick bought Tintoretto instead.
Dreaming of blue faces underwater,
her brothers drowning,Karolina Olsson of Oknö
slept for 32 years and 42 days,
drank daily 2 glasses of sweetened milk.
In America, she might have been found drowned too.
those who've crossed from one country to another,
in slave ships, steerage.
Sometimes, it spits us out,
shares us with fish.
Not so rare a dish for fish,
before or after arrival,
the slave, the immigrant.
The noon siren sounds.
Warm flats smell of cooking.
From the window, rough waves
and a tree, split in two.
Beyond the breakwater,
something's blinking
red, death-pale,
and blue.
