because it has been a week and i still haven't called him back

First, there were dreams of crystalline horses in hiking socks

Catching the last train in the blizzard

To a deeper part of the storm--

5^th avenue shut down and blinking red lights highlighting a solitary figure

dragging a shovel behind him in the middle of the white street--

“if I have a bad day I say I deserve a drink and if I have a good day I say I can afford to drink.”

today josh has $100 dollars in savings,

contemplating giving up on josh the sportscaster

newsanchor daily beard trimmings

a learned puckering of the mouth and warm

laughter following everything he does not have

a ready response to.

Like the wind rush of a car, birds overhead

get a late start for winter or spring on this day.

My body lights up in 50 degrees asking to have socks off

And feel something.

Dreams of grandeur and pink sky in

The writer’s row home

Make a stunning set to the silent film,

Each in his room, computer whispering,

And the studio filled with a depressed woman and her lover

Trying to paint what can make it better or

Just paint it at all.

Harry potter was forbidden Josh

But he ended up gay anyway.

And without saying it,

There were no comics in my home on the edge of middle class boston

And my mother, who I love

Fought to change everything,

Not knowing much about what it means

to be an Italian construction worker

with a mortgage in the suburbs.

As the train starts past 52^nd street,

Josh’s head droops towards his phone

And he swipes his thumb right

Once, and then again.

I come home to a menorah by the window

Arcing its waxed back at the setting sun.

Young people are always outweighed.

But the whole future, with months of travel

And sex and snow and homelessness,

And something else is determined

by more odds than that.

The politicians are singing America now,

And the farmers are coming to the empty nest,

And the firestarters at university are hoarding PBR’s

And the dock workers are laying down their arms

And liberty herself is shrugging

As a thousand boats leave and a thousand boats come in

And every day is looking in the mirror saying

“I don’t feel so old as I look,

but I’m proud of what has marked me so.”

My grandmother was married in a letter to Iceland,

And she died in a queen size bed in marblehead, quietly,

With her rugs still white and everyone expecting

The EMT’s, or whoever came, to recognize her and say,

“Barbara, it’s been so long. You were so much then,”

then look at all of us with tears in our eyes

“and look at all you've made.”

Her china set is breaking,

Plate by plate,

Party by party as I grow older.

I had a dream the one who stole my heart first

Sat cross legged over the pieces,

Arranging dinner for us

Before we would take a long journey.

I input Josh’s story to the database late in the evening,

And clasp the duct tape on each end of the screen shut,

Hoping these great fragments will grow

And bond and change each other

Along with something I give

That pushes us towards something new.

Today I woke up and saw the man who drove the trolley

And all the ones who ride the 6:36 trolley

And I thought I caught a glimpse of a former friend

And then I saw the grand hotel Monaco

With its chandeliers spraying light into the snow

and I saw hundreds of people

Storming in for brunch to celebrate this Sunday

And then I saw my life as if from one of the windows way up

In one of the buildings in the city of dreams.

It looked lonely and driven,

And I looked tired and hungry

And had rough hands the size of small towns.

And I don’t know what to do with that.

“man,

but it gets cold quick in Philadelphia.”

1?20?2017

We are breathing heavy over

The bar at 1pm, deep in it,

Changing neon across our faces,

Big bear bartender who refused to put it on tv

Turned with us now, falling on the sword,

Throwing out jabs like bottles from a group of protestors.

Part of this is quiet,

The way we would pass through security at 4am

Sleepy eyed guards ushering us through

With thoughts on their husbands in bed

Or bag lunches crowded into the back of podiums.

He speaks behind a golden eagle,

Wing tips pointed up for freedom carefully,

And interspersed with his wife’s strange garments marching to gold cutlery

Are images of young people in the streets,

Shaking their fists at a row of well trained facelessness.

I am in the stall-less bathroom

Gunmetal showing through the walls

And floor canted down to guide you in.

My ass cheeks are numb and my brows swallow,

As I pass by the mirror, my eyes are low.

My lover is with the miners,

With the nurses in the hills,

An audiobook away, and coming close

To the leatherbound violence soon.

I see a woman clutching herself on tv, hood turned up

And with hand over wrist obviously squeezing

As tightly as she can.

The handing over of power--

A strategically worn bible, casted across the country

Into plains and over mountains, through the hollow parts of cities

And the gullies of the suburbs,

Blotchy white, frozen over pupils,

Calling for blood, the same blood to be shed.

Do not stop, do not stop.

We are calling out to friends

And hundreding glasses left

With only foam along the edges.

If there is a thing to be said here

I think it must be

Held between fingers dry like a cigarette,

Wet like mud.

And definitely broken. I wrote before, “I am broken speech revived”

But these words, broken over themselves

Like backs over a folding chair,

Mustn’t comport themselves like a bourgeois patio garden

And mustn’t tell themselves they are doing the right thing in the fight

And mustn’t simply sit and get drunk over vinyl.

We are up at 6am, launching through rain spilled streets,

Wheels spitting it contemptuously onto our work pants.

She has two children,

But when she cannot control what floor she is on

She crushes her knuckles in the concrete

So that her finger dangles off her hand

Like a climber at the edge of the world.

And she is crying, slowly.

Then they take her to the hospital.

Some days, my lover’s eyes

Say only “see this,

See this with me.

We are the ones who will not look away

From the fire or the blood

Or any of the poetry bubbling bubbling bubbling.

If not, then who?”

Before the birds come out, I think if there are children

 in that crowd I think they are on fire like the trash,

Block bloc is adding fuel and blocking intersections

And they are hated and they are putting others in danger

And they are making me feel better.

White ladies holding signs are named diane

And they want their voices to be heard.

Rose flies to California Wednesday

To take her kids back from that abusive pastor.

I wish I had not gotten kicked out of her bar

Last night.

Or eaten that cake,

Or burned myself on the stovetop.

She was cool against the wood frame

When she whispered it was not our fault.

When I dreamed, it was very deep in the cavern.

First night of more than 2 hours this week,

And it was packing up for a long journey

Where I could not bring much,

But everything I did not take would be destroyed.

Fire is the one element man can create.

First I packed a bag of sentiment, of black porcelain Scotty dogs

Then I dumped it out on the floor,

Some breaking some not.

Then I packed food and knives.

And dumped.

Then I saw at the back of the room,

A tarp still wet with cold rain.

And I knew exactly what I needed

And exactly what I could not take.

Today flirts with apocalypse

The way the ladies at table 53

Look at me and then undertip.

Today is 2 bottles deep.

We are waking in the same dirty sheets

With the same sleeplessness

Wishing for the same pills we cannot afford to take.

Something about today costs too much to speak of.

You’ve gotten down on yourself

And there ain’t no way out

But through.

And before you can say anything

she is coming

down hard on you.

After, she rolls over herself,

And asks, sadly, where you are.

“Where are you?”

Where are you?

acid trip

life is in itself good. Look, a tangerine is perfect.

Soak it in ransom. Lift weights. Paint on yourself in black ink.

Listen to the river 7 times in a row. Always try to play a game of magic.

Giggle at the outside. Giggle at yourselves. Blast off. Try to play it off as if you—

Stop juggling stories. Work through tough new energy and guilt. Sliver of icicle like a path to openness. A thin layer of glass over everything so it isn’t sharp.

Then space in front of your heart like a turtle shell.

and counting

These grey rays of sun in winter

Sing still-born days to stoops of clutching

Hands and loose rolled bitters. They

Bring with them haunting futures and backs

Hunched against them as if against The Wall.

The future is not a wall. Perhaps it is more like a moon.

We collapse in warm bubbles,

Bathing each other slowly and with great care

As pores open again in safety, and we remind each other,

Like 1999, we are still here. We are still here,

We are whispering with every kiss and cheers

And gyration. We are still here. That is something.

I refuse to say the coming days will bring strange fruit.
it is too dark. And it is too light here.

We are, with eyes open against the cold,

Whipping down chestnut to approach the city like an invading force.

I want to whoop and cry with you, I want to shake my arm up high,

Sword glinting in the sun. We are brandishing courage

In an empty amphitheater. We are mumbling oaths beneath our breath.

We are cleaning our houses and preparing for meetings.

We are still here and we are continuing on.

Our lives are bulwarks against them. But

They must be more. My bed has several blankets,

And when I wake the first things I see are my grandmother’s trinkets

Arrayed across the desk. We are reading poetry together—

It is preparation. And something more.

We are trading massages, we are throwing each other birthday parties.

I am leaving the grey of the fences open. I am refusing

To cut the grass. I am making plans for weddings.

I am strong enough for this.  Fire, security,

Eyes watching. They will continue to take our bread.

They will continue to hunt us to the corners.
We are strong enough for this.

We are still here. the new moon is coming.

on the night of the orlando shooting

On the night of the Orlando shooting[1]

In my new room on the 3^rd floor, I found

A pint glass, mysteriously shattered.

I put my bare foot down, and

Swept the glass onto a scrap of paper

Because I could not find a dustpan.

---

[1] (50 people dead

they paid to get in

 in the dark  gyrating and dreaming

holding nothing in their minds

or some things:

getting laid,

what to have for dinner tomorrow,

their parents,

who made this beat,

how to get ready for work the next day,

how to keep the sweat from sticking to their shirt or

if they smelled good enough for him to be excited or

why the smiling white guys were always the ones to buy them drinks or

where their friends had gone)

Potomac Falling--2013

Maybe it is the time of year, but

Potomac, where are your swans?

Your cold churns dreamily clip

A piece of brain for a slide,

Sliver it across glass,

And it is my hands, which

Without me, hold it to the light.

This is where 8 a year lose their bones.

I will address you

The undress of a lover:

Time after time

Inch after inch

Address after address.

River of swans you draw eyes like Picasso--

Pull them in with the suggestion

of a dangerous line— like a poem.

Above you, bundled couples

Tread the treeline

In some approximation of a ritual

Circle. you spit up like a child at their blindness,

You reach out like the dying.

You rise up shallowly

Like the alcoholics at a thousand points

as if a river of mouths growing desperate

For air runs just beneath your surface.

Where is the air you breathe, river of swans?

Wherefore? Why?

Potomac if I jump,

Will you carry me like a swan?

Will you cherish the whirls in my bones,

read the calligraphy on my skull?

Will you scatter my memories,

Forgive my skin and the contents therein?

Potomac, we mouth the same cold, exultant language—

We lose that bit of foam others need to speak.

Your rocks hold it, hide it.

(If she plays “Chicago” I will cry

and turn my back to her,

and if she asks, I won’t have the words

in her language. The sobs will just collect

like foam in an eddy.)

Potomac, do you recite Hicok, Whitman,

Or something older?

My sadness must seem young to you.

Do you see my life behind me,

Like a stretch of muscled water?

I must seem terribly forgetful.

Potomac, you look like one

Who has never spoken of the end.

Some things are not worth talking about.

No, but that is something learned.

Potomac, you have not learned

Those things you should not learn.

The hardness, the shortsightedness of the road,

The strange numbness of the soft skinned,

To miss the swans who no longer line your shores.

Potomac, I know one.

She plays like a peacock

And speaks like a soul

Of a body larger than her own,

Some great river.

Sometimes we fuck to dispel darkness.

And sometimes we speak dates through

Printed glass: causes of death, single sentence summations

Of each other.

We make poems of only words.

Potomac, I am in love with her

And have learned to forget

The false old histories of those words.

Potomac, I may have just learned the name

that she makes me feel fashioned in the image of.

Potomac, no, she makes me feel fashioned in my own.

Potomac, I will remind you, you are not my first.

I will introduce you.

I was forgetting her when I asked about your swans.

savage detectives

lost breaths turning to smoke

cohabitate with smog and the folds of a new, old

jacket. What’s outside the window?

Dark bar straining over the final pages—

I move close to the medical devices salesman humming

Sinatra by the door, covered in curtains.

On the penultimate, he reaches across the bar,

Taps me on the shoulder, bottles of Amador and dalmore

In the mirror, catching my own eyes brown and leafy,

He asks me “how it is”

Dark sky, dark moon, shake of her thighs,

I am remembering here fever dream wrapping day

In its warm mouth—turning ashamed with mice

Limping barefoot over frozen tiles,

Encountering beth 2 days out of work,

Blurry eyed on speed wanting to talk until the morning—

Here’s a story – pathetic dribbling face on the L with unshaved upper-lip,

Two teenagers obviously skipping school with pink lip gloss slinking

Under the arm on a crowded train, the sound of giggles and the brush

Of nylon on nylon—

I wonder this man’s red cheeks in his corner seat

Into a cloudy present—his money against

the shoes scraping sidewalk salt just outside.

I think of kissing him suddenly,

Feathery hair and 60 year old jaw.

Danny forgets the Guinness he was pouring.

In the house, the co2 tank plinks away

Time, empty like time—

Sean drags out my bedroom window,

Skin singing painfully in January,

Charlotte bunkers down south discovering

The jungles of staying away—coming and coming to

In foreign begs, unromantic at the houses

Of the rich and gay in a city she can’t figure

How to leave.

Paul is holding the last arms back before

Clocking out, hunkering his chin

To the train.

Maybe I will make $100 today.

There’s a story here, of course,

Wholly dark and rainy eyed, bitter

Like bark and green in small ways

And growing with a bit of sun—

But

a new one seems to start so soon on the last

and that’s ok, hell that’s good.

But

I am looking out the window

1.     at kb raw and something big and far away, seeing her river eyed power

2.     at the slow blood of past loves gathering, shoring nursing schedules against their ruins

3.     at ativan gored pumping and thinking and loving sid, a family ahead and a family behind stretching farther than either of us can see

4.     at who I might have been had the story telling impulse been just a bit weaker.

first snow 2017

Eyes after storm crumbs

Of white brown green chicken and rice

Your body a submerged stone beneath the earth

And bobbing along at times swelling as it takes on water

Then dehydrating in tears over what has been a hard 6 years.

There is a man with a hard life

Carrying it in plastic bags in a shopping cart.

It is cold and the streets are grey.

They are not smooth.

The dark smiles of bars along chestnut

Are tight lipped, smug even.

You may ride past today,

But tomorrow--

I want to see you in every possible light—

From far away, moving closer,

Corners turned up, coy, and hips—

From far away stepping backwards as

If away from first snow, cold on bare feet.

Close, moving, swaying, holding—

Close but not looking, world in another’s world,

Hands stretching and fluttering—

Impossibly close, too close to see definitions other than color

And emotion—

Impossibly close so I am not sure where it all ends—

My jade plant grows thirsty beneath the 2 year construction,

But we have plenty of light.

The ones we love from across the country come

To soak in our 2ams and the warmth between bodies in winter.

At long last there is a sunset skiing down

With parts of me and you and everyone

That I am not afraid of.

Any time possible there is a glass being blown,

And a prayer being written about everything here

From the floorboards and the drafts to the poetry nights

And flailing of arms at nostalgia, from the distance between cedar and warrington

To the way as we walked along on new years day

Hands the only part either of us could feel,

you brought the keys to your place out of your pocket

Handed them to me and said “here.”

Sometimes the lights have to be turned out,

And as cold pours in through the window,

You stand there looking out at all the snow.

You are waiting for something but you don’t know what.

You say “look at all the snow.”

I have seen your muscled shoulders,

The weight of memory you bear not like an ox at all,

But full of familiarity like a laborer at the end of his day,

Walking home in fading heat.

I have heard the tachycardic heartbeat of this city along Washington and federal, along girard and Roosevelt.

I have woken at dawn to ride the 108 as it stalls on the hill at church lane,

And we all worried we would be late for work.

I have shuffled my feet as I walk past men with pistols in their long johns.

He goes so far as to spill his guts in winter.

She collects leaves for collages in spring.

These streets are run by blood,

Its colors changing telling us when to stop and go.

The amount of pain in a day is astounding.

The veins show on its stomach.

And still, bare-chested, dimpled skin pressed together,

 we still laugh as we wait for the suffering which will beautify us.

There is a hard road ahead, a hard one behind.

An excitement grows in me looking across at you.

It sails like an arc, it descends like snow.

thankfulness--3 year 3rd edit

Thankfulness

Enough of sad poems

their walks home in the cold

With wet denim sticking down--

the gritty details of a

Specific situation freezing crystalline

Like just so much (enough) sad prettiness.

We are in the time of year now

When anything you leave outside will freeze.

In my backyard, bordering the vacant lot overgrowing

no fence, is a very hard mug of coffee

Congregating with the stiffened fingers

Of dollar store gardening gloves

(so ready to dig into the warm, labial dirt)

these things (and more)

noone would ever steal.

I see a woman out there

killed by my departure,

the ghost story of whom I like to tell

like an old war story where you do horrible things

made somehow glorious in their grit

and the sterile light let through

by the absence of the shadow of morality.

And more, ambition is a frozen horse—

A no run underground river—

the remains of an unfinished ice rink—

borders ill defined, content murky.

Still more, there is a novel,

beneath a pile of dead leaves

beneath snow which will

 be covered with wheel spatter

and feral cat piss.

The pages, if you could ever read them, would all say

something about how all things end the same, they do,

they never change their faces,

they go and leave you the same.

Those pages bleeding across and rotting unreadable

would’ve been better use for hot, young hands

to tear at in a room with a bed and post-coital detachment

in order to feel some— anything at all.

We are in the time of year when

The rest of the years drags behind

Like the heavy words of a sentence begun

In a language you no longer understand.

Halloween stayed with you

because you didn't put candy out

Because you thought  the kids might freeze

The way lobster’s boil

in their orange and superman and dresses, football,

Swords, guns, drawn out into the cold like mice to a bit of peanut butter.

Dark, dark, too dark the thoughts that come this time of year

at 3pm when the day freezes and you hunker down

To ponder by seasonally dead trees a dead love, a dead book,

And Where you might go that isn’t outside to get a cup of coffee because

For some reason you cant find your mug anywhere

At this time of year.

Tis the season—

On the first night,

The bar was 2 empty 3 hours before

The first woman came in with

4 piercings in 1 ear,

none in the other—

said, I have 200 dollars.

They rolled in like fog so

I couldn’t even smell

The numberless pieces of warm injeera

carried for miles in total.

One, blonde hair,

Wolf-at-the-door-moon eyes staring up at me,

Waited patiently for her check,

Waited to say a coy phrase,

Put her number on the back of a receipt

With a bad tip

And told me to call her, come over

After work.

My boss, drunk in the corner,

Darkening down into a wrinkled suit,

Catches my eyes in his teeth

When I am trying to close out,

follows me into the kitchen

To shout an incoherent question about my character.

I have learned not to ask what it is.

And when I come home for the holidays,

dazed curls of damp, disheveled hair

lie in wait,

Sizzle as every question

Becomes “How are you?”

(“how”, god how, you don’t have the money

to get a car, so how, on earth, on earth indeed)

And the visible signs of decay

Read right to left on faces

Suddenly red with brown liquor.

In the mornings there,

The whole day aches at the sides

Like it ate too much the day before,

Or like it is still starving,

The hours passing through undigested and unused.

Either way, it never learns.

Enough. Now,

two women ask me

What do you want?

What turns you on?

As if they are the sky on either side of the tree in the backyard

Which for something invisible

Waited until the third story to begin growing branches

Into a wild sky.

The biggest tree in the cemetery,

Whose branches arc over stone to run

Down the grassy knoll of the war memorial,

Delicates in the background of

A winter walk—

The blond mother, nose ring scar tanned

With mittens, wool hat, north face, over-large

Seldom used boots clunking beside the paws

Of a sweatered cockerspaniel.

breathes the law, the one

law, the one about Black Friday

until it disappears to look like air.

Where is the boy who loved her?

It took 6 years out of high school to forget him,

And another 2 to remember

And now 25 beside him to forget again.

I am realizing now, it is tomorrow

I am afraid to climb.

Either the arms of this great brother will break

Spraying graves with sunny chips

Or the houses around will gape

And call the police

At a grown man

Swinging, howling

Like a wounded animal

At the cold face of the suburbs.

Nate is back in the Prius,

Waiting hum-lessly by the corner

Where the great tree which caused accidents

Used to stand. now I can see him

Banging his head against the air

Over the mound of mulch.

For him, every song will always

Be a killer. How long can

The high of childhood last?

In a precious hour we had,

He told me an epic of the grocery store

And how he found ee cummings grave

On the border of Somerville. I don't know

How many times he’s died.

Sometimes I think- far more

than he can come back from.

Years

mean nothing here. Over and over,

Mike will bring a can

to his lips- That's ryan’s, that’s jake’s,

That’s Andy’s PBR Mike,

Frown becoming smile without a move

But now it is about how music

Is past communicating,

Now it is about the days with VPIRG.

His eyes turn in, his neck

Cradling his head

Just above the rim of the glass of Canadian club

Like a swallow skimming the surface of the water

Trying that desperate takeoff as night falls.

It has been six years,

And somehow still

The hand on my thigh excites me

Despite beated entreaties of woe,

Memories of sleepless nights on the floors of strangers’ dormrooms

Waiting for her to come out of the bedroom with a Persian man,

A jewish one, a— Somehow, still, she is on my lap again

Six years later to smile sadly the same,

Tear up the same,

Paw frantically at my zipper the same.

Paris is colder now.

The whole world, I know,

But didn’t you ever think of a lover in a café

Casting about desperately for a foreign man

To give her a story?

Didn’t you think forever

That she was telling a story about you there?

That every kiss on foreign lips

Was a word in a secret language she was learning

Just to keep secrets from you,

 the languages you’d learned 

unable to open that gate by where

the cypress trees pray in whispers.

A thousand languages in and still

You will never learn the one of your own heart.

Not the one I know, dear.

I’ve been there much more than Paris,

Which I remember as very cold.

I love my laptop,

But it has given me lullaby deficiency.

Today, I am remembering lullabies

to friends. Yesterday,

It was the salvation army man,

Ringing in the cold

Out in the cold, his ears red

And aching with want

For that comforting hand

To pat out the melody

As he fades out of consciousness.

We heard it the same,

Coming from a tv just beyond the mall’s entrance

“with ro-ses,, a-round you.

Close your eyes,” that was something.

All my friends melt when I sing

The me nobody knows

My mother taught me in my hospital bed.

It’s as if for a second, again,

nothing will ever be cold again.

it is thick with wet grey

outside. Father is driving.

He turns my seat warmer on—

Like always.

Ahead, cars drive to a blurry precipice,

bleary red eyes blinking

anxiously with the pumping of breaks.

The old bricks of boston lean

Over, crumbling for a view in.

My father is a man who has learned my mother’s song.

He will never cut down an apple tree.

He tills with memories of week long bicycle wheels,

And she waters with tears.

The heat on my ass feels like an argument:

Come home, it says.

I’m on the squeaky dark wood beneath

The wood beams in

The old house a walk from

The screeching ocean,

My ass red and bare.

“Don't. be. So . wild.”

I am the only quiet thing.

Slap, creek, swoosh, slap,

Father breathing heavily,

Almost laughing.

Even when I take a bus here,

Eat here, sleep here,

It is a place

I will never come back to;

It is a word in a language

My tongue has grown

Too large to tongue.

The warmth is uncomfortable.

Glancing over with his hands

At the road he reminds me,

You can always turn it off.

How long in a school of sales

Did he spend learning to make

The ones he loves comfortable?

How long until it was common sense

That to take care

is to provide:

Shelter, warmth. everything.

This whole damn town has got its act together.

I see the eyes of past lovers hanging out of mailboxes

Like bleeding letters, leaning like wounded birds.

Consummate, unconsummated, this one leaving,

This one left, all sharing a rainslick beauty

Which, seen from the outside,

Makes me sick out of a window,

One of my first nights drinking, I nearly died beneath

The wheels of my mother’s van,pulling out

To search for me, huddled with asphalt,

drunkenly crying,“why

is the universe doing this to me?”

When the world feels like a coordinated attack,

The first thing I always do is my breathing exercises.

I am in this moment. This moment is perfect.

I am in this moment. This moment—

You alright, bud- He asks

And his point, well taken, is this:

                                    Why would you torture yourself

With discomfort when you could put that overactive mind

In a vat of use, get a car, get the house, get the wife, the life?

Last night, Molly was

Not kissing me at all,

Not making love to me

At all, just whispering:

Stay stay stay stay,

Why wouldn’t you?

Afterwards, 3 am,

15 degrees in the suburbs,

nothing felt it had to move,

even the earth was convinced,

stars frozen,

so I ran up and down the street and shouted

until I saw a light come on.

There are times when I am desperate for just an inch.

The windows fog

And father defrosts.

I take my hat off.

He drives me to the bus

To my ratty apt.

From his big house.

He offers still

To pay for a plane ticket down the coast.

Stepping out, a cold rain

Punches my face—

No open hand.

For a moment, the blood

Rushes to my cheeks, lights flash,

And the street runs with rain—

Everything in motion.

The hug lingers, his ll bean clinging to my wet jean.

I say: thanks for spoiling me,

And he says: come home so

I can do it more.

And I turn around already cold,

Hungry, in a rush

To make the bus, smiling and

Walking in time

With the forest of rain

Which is rapidly soaking my ass.

Thank you cold, thank you for the pain.

Thank you lovers, thank you for tongue.
Thank you old house, thank you for memory.

Thank you cemetery tree, thank you for forgiveness

And hands.

Thank you cold, thank you for the cold.

to the loons

To the loons who live on lake kezar

Out there, in the brush of water and sky

you glide, just out there on evening’s purple.

Beyond the dock, you call in elegy

a sonorous om which keeps you burnished.

In the deep hours I’d sneak past the guard,

wade through forming dew to the grey sleeping

snapshot of your home. I’d swallow my breath

and listen for you, step out of my clothes

into the water, softly diffusing

myself into the rippling darkness.

My strokes in night, natural as your long hues;

seeking communion with those indistinct

                                                                        blacks and blues.

God’s hand cups your calls and lets them fall like

                                                                        paint drops

but I emerge, dripping blues from nude limbs

                                                                        the whole way home