Minneapolis Water Tower Sutra
for Brian James Dever

I hear your laugh in the texture of my own, something I picked up this winter, what a bitch the
     cold was, but we lived through it and learned as they say
to quote carefully and watch each other's backs and yeah, with the laugh shape and suburb jokes
     and frothy daily coffee biz anger
I've also snatched a ray or two of your vision a fleck of aqua-backed eye-amber spinning quiet as
     quartz in a turnip bed, perfect as a plum blossom
the Japanese master's name we can't remember, Sesshu maybe at the MIA, purple on gold once
     you've seen you can't forget

Climbing up the hill nearly midnight closed down the coffee shop wringed out of our minds by
     menial urgent labor condescending tips from SUVed yuppie-oh-kai-yays latte spiking home from
     lonesome work on lonesome prairies
and it happened to us? To US with prissy magna cum laudes from top10 Liberalissimo Arts
     stairways to enlightened uppermiddleclassness,
we, lib-rats prepped to be princes of the earth couldn't pay our rent had to Visa groceries and
     borrow 200 bucks from Mark for the landlord

But here we are hilltop water temple SW Mpls almost to Edina
EEEEE
FUCKING
DINA
you scream at the broke stars falling cigarette cherry
How did we GET here?
I give you a light again and we sit on the busted dusty concrete steps climbing the hill to this
thing, this
What is it, daddy? looks like a stout sandstone grain silo WPA era if not temple sepulchre stupa
     rotunda heelstone prototransdimensional relay beacon
must be a watertower
The upper rim where shaft ends and dome begins is circumfrenced with, no shit, stone eagles and
     stone-helmeted DecoGrecoRoman stone sentries two-handed stone sword wielding
chiselled jawlines and cheekstones like these blokes mean business
Don't screw with our water, Neptune, you got yr own empire lost cities whaleroads pirate
     cargoes mermaid kates leos drowned ladies in whalebone corsets to boot

We shout Ginsberg, breathe smoke at the laced-up neighborhood and vow we'd trade it all what
     little we have for an engine gunned through Wichita, still young, chanting 99 names of sunflower and
     vortex in periastron
Allan, we laugh in your beautiful dead face at your living poembodies with wounds still seeping
     after decades of bleeding
We are partners in small crimes against what we love best to know it better
Learn how it bruises and heals
Tend each other's wounds

We've learned to look each other in the eye and see not provocation or impossibility but parallel
     defiance and Not Closing
lets ride you say though fear of drowning tethers the sloping shore to my feet fear of swimming
     past he prattle of surf losing count where oxygen dissolved in water is useless as foreign currency
let's ride you say with our lines and pockets full of future and after all it is you and I who are
     perfect not the next world on this sleeping neighborhood hilltop water altar dirigable intra-illuminous
     electrifriable multitrack guywired to venus ziplined to silver screen moonset anchored in bedrock
     CONVERGENCE ISLAND where numberless asymptotes lean and ache to touch and spear as one
     tapering searchlight skyward for Orion-here is the crashing the surf edging this tide of artsandcrafts
     bungalows feel the undertow the next world our boards are waxed our nibs are dipped
and we mean business