TheSuitPie

Bob Evans

Coercion

t rasa

She said:
You make me feel stupid.

I asked:
How could anyone make anyone
feel stupid?

She said:
See? You're doing it again.

Lessons

t rasa

My father, the cougar,
came from shadows,
danced with deer and chuckar,
shared kills with magpies,
schooled me in swirls of leaves,
scratched lessons in gravid streams.
To discern white tracks
of snowshoe hare.
To listen for the sparrow.

Taught me life is for the dancing,
not the having danced.
Disappeared when winter
sank to spring.

Red Dance

Bob Evans

Saada Shoe-Fly Pie

Framing Space

t rasa

Giving weight to blade,
an aromatic curl arcs
from cedar planed to join
philosophic changes in a line.

Forgetting from which side
of infinity I took the kerf,
I cut and cut to build a whole
as Pythagoras insists I might.

Reductionist’s knives
snik shavings so damned thin
they’re nearly fit for Occam’s bin
as space is hewn from space.

Four limbs wed in eyeball-perfect
portrait shape, yet still a cleft
so wide a tachyon could enter
and dance in drunken ambits.

I recalculate the angles,
strop laser sharpened blades
but ancient Zeno rasps
he’d sooner take a bus around
these roughly mitered joins.

Prometheus scorns this lack of rigor,
points a pregnant finger at my eye,
cocks and shoots dry lightning
which with luck but singed my psyche.

I shave more cedar, making space
to subtract from space enclosed
in space in another covert try
to verge the heart with mind.