from this day 4 yrs ago, doing July:

         12    

                                  i.m. Tom Fleming*

  
         You would have been glad to be here today
 Fleming   to read the Sunday funnies
 Aaugh!  as Lucy lifts the 12-millionth football
 and Charlie Brown flips   for the 13th time   Bonk!

  
         a little sad too   the way the everlasting ends
 this evening   light   limping so slowly   only lent
 limpid   toward the vague rim of   tonight's Milky
 Way   Sparky's wavery quickness trembling

  
         only lent now   Good grief!   While it's raining the
 Doctor is [IN]   and   you are uncommonly
 weird   like a Red Baron's   flying mach-lemon
 in the mind of a pup   and the rain it raineth

  
         every day   like frogs pummeling our   foolish blind
 shopping carts   ah   for I am sick of love   he
 cried   running down the street in Lisbon
 that twines with a tiny pulse   a nub

  
         like the distant crown of   Shakespeare's head
 a curvature this   pause or sigh   this dome
 between waves or   salient   mud-caked
 seed so small   set adrift   (centuries

  
         surrounded with fire   your burning bones, Tom
 a greenish Copernican   flame in the marrow
 planted   amid the avarice of the pilots   the raw
 and envious violence of Ahab   a mote

  
         that will grow limpid)   you know   there are women
 limping with this   cenacle   (like myrrh   afloat
 upon tears)   (chambered   in the upper tiers)
 (up the stairs)   helical   of their wombs

  
         unknown to us   but only a promise
 when the last full measure is poured out
 beside the shores of great rivers   the trumpet
 sounds into   the depths of that prairie   siempre

       
                                            2.13.2000

*[Tom Fleming, old Minnesota pal since childhood, died of AIDS about 12 yrs ago.]