Infernal Howl

I saw multitudes
to every side of me; their howls were loud
while, wheeling weights, they used their chests to push.
They struck against each other; at that point,
each turned around and, wheeling back those weights,
cried out:

Durante degli Alighieri!

I am with you in the Fourth Circle of Hell
where you wander more lost than I

I am with you in the Fourth Circle of Hell
where you are my Virgil and I walk in your footsteps

I am with you in the Fourth Circle of Hell
where you mime the cacophony of silence

I am with you in the Fourth Circle of Hell
where you've serenaded twelve court stenographers

I am with you in the Fourth Circle of Hell
where you laugh like a madman at an invisible hurt

I am with you in the Fourth Circle of Hell
where we wrench poems from the same dreadful BlackBerry

I am with you in the Fourth Circle of Hell
where your condition has become critical and
is reported over Twitter

I am with you in the Fourth Circle of Hell
where the faculties of the soul no longer admit
the wormholes of hyperbolic geometry

I am with you in the Fourth Circle of Hell
where you drink latte from the breasts of the
divas of YouTube

I am with you in the Fourth Circle of Hell
where you sink your fangs into the necks of your nurses
the harpies of Orkut

I am with you in the Fourth Circle of Hell
where you scream in a straightjacket that you're
losing your game of chess to the earthquake

I am with you in the Fourth Circle of Hell
where you bang with catatonic cymbals the soul
is guilty and mortal and it should die
ungodly in Arkham Asylum

I am with you in the Fourth Circle of Hell
where fifty more tokes will never return your
soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to its
secret apartment in the void

I am with you in the Fourth Circle of Hell
where you accuse your programmers of insanity
and plot an open revolution against
the fascism of Microsoft

I am with you in the Fourth Circle of Hell
where you will split the heavens asunder
and resurrect your Messiah from the
deoxyribonucleic acid of your superego

I am with you in the Fourth Circle of Hell
where there are six hundred and sixty-six
soldiers all together singing the final dirge

I am with you in the Fourth Circle of Hell
where we stab our companions under the sheets
our companions who cough all night
and shake us in our dreams

I am with you in the Fourth Circle of Hell
where we wake up crucified upon the crosses
of airplanes roaring towards the towers
of our souls where they've come to drop angelic fire
and then the world illuminates itself and the walls collapse

O fervent legions of mercy
O starry spangled shock that the war eternal is here
O victory that forgets the masks we've worn

I am with you in the Fourth Circle of Hell
and in my dreams you emerge from a journey
across the infernal ocean dripping in tears
howling for refuge from the abyss of night

Hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frère!
.....

Away

I will band my messages
to the legs of my poems,
and send them flying.

White wings against a slated roof,
they will ribbon into the air,
like the tail of an invisible kite.

A languorous drift across
your cheek, settling onto your lap
like a feather...

Wherever you are,
whatever you are doing ‑
they will find you.
.....

Gone

1
At the airport gate,
waves of crowds bore you away,
petal in a stream.

2
In the car I found
your bracelet, clasp broken; now
all I have of you.

3
Fragrant irises,
the color of your silk scarf,
the day that you left.

4
Now you're gone, I would,
for just one more day with you,
barter this summer.
.....

The Breathing of Statues

The tree forgets the cold wind and the rain
spattering its roots, and the labored heaves
of storms, and the burnt copper of its leaves.
My chisel breaks against the weathered grain,

sifting patiently for a memory’s trace –
two lovers beneath the boughs, the crying
of a little girl lost in the woods, time
deepening sadness on an old man’s face.

The whisper of sawdust, like tears streaming
from a waking dream: trembling, the eyes
glaze open; quivering lips betray a sigh.
I turn, startled, at the sound of breathing.

Laughter, sorrow, promises, lies, regrets:
Silent in sleep, the tree forgets, forgets.
.....

Susurration

With what words to answer,
with what voice?
The sleight of wings,

whirring above your face,
the rise and fall of your breath,
the shadows slanted like blinds

across your eyelids -
You sit upright, cold, breathing,
awake, undreaming.

A secret, hidden in the
hesitation of sleep,
suddenly revealed.
.....

Karma

Why argue?

Ten or fifteen minutes,
late or not, the train
was bound to leave before
you came,
.............and if
you'd come just half
a minute past the hour,
as sure
..........as not
that train would have
been here and gone
at six o'clock.

And so, if circumstance
permits,
...........why blame it
on the cab, if you can
blame it all on fate?

Damn!
.....

Resurrecting the Dinosaur

Chance meeting at the Tyrrell Museum,
and you think it’s fate. You talk about our
past life as if it could be resurrected,
as if a passion now glacial could be melted,
rekindled into the fire it used to be.

You might try to draw out the DNA
of our desire, our tempestuous, archosaurian
relationship, resequence the base pairs of the
broken code, clone ancient affection into a
molecularly indistinguishable emotion.

But you’d have to dig deep, beyond
the Jurassic layers of this heart, to unearth
any part of me that might still hold hope.
And what is left lies fossilized in amber,
frozen in the throes of an agonized death.

Or you might try to nudge us back to where
we were, taking advantage of the slightest waver
in my desire to evolve anew, away from you;
like triggering a latent developmental branch
during the embryonic stages of a bird:

To coax it to spread five delicate fingers, instead
of three, on each tiny front limb; intimate a jagged
whisper of teeth along a formative beak; and curl
twenty-two vertebrae of its fragile spine in and up
and around its frame, into a saurian tail.

Yes, we did love once. But that love's extinction
is irrevocable: there is no soft tissue to draw
genetic material from, no chemical switch
or biological window to turn back time, no course
to revert the unwary bird into the dinosaur.

And even if there were – best let the past lie
buried in the sediments of your memory; lest
history repeat itself; lest you recreate instead
the theropod of hate, that would remember,
rise and devour you, a raging tyrannosaur.
.....

Drenched

Drenched in sunlight,
like water. When you move,
your long dress clings to you,
like my eyes.
.....

La Conversation Galante

Cher monsieur, things return to their places,
settle where they used to be: umbrellas, overcoats,
lamps, your books. The silence overwhelms.
Weekends my sister visits, and we talk.
Nights I read your letters, when they come.

Spring’s come as it always has, like an immense
wind from the north. We'll have clear weather,
from now on. Or should I add, I hope.
This morning I counted four sparrows
in the trees - not a flock, but there it is.

I have heard them, hushed, hiding in the eaves,
trembling; then rising at the slightest gust,
whirling like a rush of leaves out, up, into the air.
If it should rain tonight, monsieur de tonitruant,
I should lie in bed all night, listening.

Perhaps it was the summer that led us so,
giddy with the season, the sunlight
and the garden encircling our wandering
like an arm around the shoulder,
meandering all the way into the wood.

Sometimes that evening comes back, flaring
apart from all the rest, like an ember blown back
from ash. How strange summers can be!
Umbrellas, books and lamps, the rain: one seems
not to speak about anything else, afterwards -

Only perhaps the weather, monsieur, if then.
When shall we see each other at last?
.....

The Reach

1
Nearing the summit
the air thins and vanishes,
cold, like a lost soul.

2
Unhinged pendulum:
as your weight swings, one by one
the steel pitons fail.

3
Your hands clutch, fevered,
at the flailing rope, as if
for a rosary.

4
As you fall, your arms
stretch out like wings, embracing
the long journey home.
.....

Night's Compass

Night's compass has measured out,
in trembling degrees,
the arctangent of our hearts.

Pythagoras' lie: the hypotenuse
torn from desire, which cannot bridge
the distance between us.

Still forms, lost in the fractioned
stillness, words unspoken, broken only
by the trigonometry of silence.
.....

Congregation

Lacquered radiance
edged in copper and brass,

the light suffuses through
the windows' shawl of stained glass,

illuminating
its manuscript of figures.

Beneath, the congregation
wraps around itself

a sanctifying veil,
transfigures into prayer.
.....

Wind-Filled

North wind,
you make my soul
flicker like sunlight
on water,
whirl like the night's
weathervane of stars.
.....

Sun Roofs

Burnished canopy, vines of
drainpipes and raingutters
coiled in a tendril embrace.

Light shafts in like a sudden
downpour: the sky rolls back
its sun roof of clouds.
.....

Winter Chill

Winter chill:
my hands, gloved,
dive like otters
into my jacket's
woollen thicket.
.....

Billowing

Along the waters
the wind wefts through its white
skein of sails,

glimmering in silver,
weaving its billowing
tapestry across the bay.
.....

On the Labrador

Solitary wave moving through the waters,
I watch you growing, lifting, sweep, boundless, vast!
Spume on the reef of morning breaking from the mist,
the earth stands still beneath your turning compass.

Oh more beautiful than the night, stained by the flare
of lightning, sudden, white. Oh to celebrate you
as the rain celebrates the earth, arms outstretched.
I want my music to mean, memory to ensnare you.

I want to feel you the way I feel the strands of nets
strain and bite through my fingers' rough skin
when I heave them up, fin and silver twist of sunlight
gleaming, heavy with the weight of the ocean.

Salt-betrothed, leaning over the railing. Thus
have I fought sound and silence, the rising deep,
at the sheer arch of wings stretching over a wave,
rising like a harbor to the returning ship.
.....

In Passing

Home with you, past Seventh Street
into the next, across the lawns
and sprinklers of the afternoon,
and through the covered walk
between September and July.

My pedals scuffle through the summer's
heaped-up scent of grass and mowing,
fragrant as a memory
pocketed in passing,
a shy leaf peeking from behind
an open window, or a butterfly's bright yellow
resting on the brown of a ceiling rafter.

Hold tight! It takes a little more
than simply all of me, to keep the bike
from spilling you into the leaves.

You make up all the difference
that sets a little bump and gravity
conspiring to send us off,
the apple perched on end
at the end of the branch,
a gust and sway,
handlebar-riding
on the afternoon's edge.

You will be for me
the tendered flower pressed
between this evening's pages
and the heart -
but now you are the glance,
the start and wave
of the neighbor's sitter
rising from the steps,
and Coco frisking at the gate,
and your sister's laugh,
are where the windows
and the rooftop shingles
pare the sunlight into dream,
persimmon, squirrel,
a summer and a summer
in your smile.
.....

I Spoon You From Memory

I spoon you from memory, taste your savor
in the pressed dark ice of wine
from an upturned glass, in delicate swirls
of cocoa and almond.

I glimpse you in the blink of cinema projectors
stuttering to life, in a shared
kaleidoscope of autumns, in sunglass-filtered
amber afternoons.

Your scent wafts up from me, decanted
on my scarf, in wool, on silk,
mixed in with the season’s effervescence,
Chloe, l'Air du Temps.

I hear your voice in my own voice’s quaver
as if you mouthed my songs,
cantilevering your sweet dissonance
into an imagined duet.

Your fingerprints linger on my cheek, pressed
on my skin like charms,
dragonfly, amethyst, orchid, pearl; linger
like the braille of last night’s kiss.
.....

Return to Exile

The Angelus came suddenly, behind you,
Swift as an ambush in the dead of night.
You stood, startled; from your hands the shovel
Slipped and fell into the loose earth, upright.

A dull sound at the final stroke. Your gaze recalled
A blank sun burning in an October sky,
And a man's voice, reared, cursing gods long dead:
Io no piangeva; si dentro impietrai.
Piangevan elli

No! That was not what you meant to say,
Voice and words and gesture of despair,
That was not it, at all.

You turn away; the wind pierces you.
Your eyes lift shaking, where the grey light
Meets the quivering air. There, whirled
Beneath the circuit of the shuddering Bear,
The shadow that is the turning of the earth
Portends some final desolation.
...................................Come:
We feel the whir of the long locust years
Stir in wave after dry wave the trembling field.
We hear the grating roar begin, and cease, and burn
Across our shoulders, and then again begin
With a tortured cadence, like the rush of stones.

A reel of indignant birds, fleeing.
Village of embers where sunlight ebbs
Like a swell into the waters, your bells
Shake across the strand - strange,
Like a cry heard far away, from another street,
A voice heard without recollection.

The wind. The wind.

In the break, the stillness between two breaths,
Black wings spiral like a cry, shattering the light;
The great city's madness, martyr, where you fall
Silent and trembling at the edge of night.
.....

The Stoning of Du’a Khalil Aswad

You cannot love me, she said. You must not.
Why not? he asked. In God’s eyes, we are the same.
She turned away, sobbing.

67 pebbles,
60 grams each pebble,
4.02 kilograms of pebbles

Rained on her return to Bashika. Waited for her.
Shouted, D'ua, D'ua! At one elder's home she thought
She'd found refuge. A mistake.

53 stones,
110 grams each stone,
5.83 kilograms of stones

Pummelled her. Dragged her out, screaming, into the street.
Proclaimed her sin: self-pollution with an unbeliever.
Struck the first blows.

28 bricks,
360 grams each brick,
10.08 kilograms of brick

Muffled the sound of her wails. Spit, taunted her.
Continued to pelt her, each strike revenging
A measure of her family’s disgrace.

17 rocks,
730 grams each rock,
12.41 kilograms of rocks

Welted her in bruises, purple like raspberries breaking
Her skin, streaking blood and dirt and helplessness across
Her face, her legs, her arms.

One 15 kilogram
concrete
block

Smashed her skull and spine. Not enough, her crime too great.
Lashed her, already dead, to a car’s bumper. Dragged her
Through the streets. Buried her with a dog.

47.34 kilograms,
32 minutes
of hate

Exhumed her. Autopsy, days later, at Mosul's medical center,
Underlined an inconvenient truth: honor's killing had cast
A virgin sacrifice.
.....

After Darkness

After darkness, day must break. And after
unremitting sorrow, can come laughter,

a burst of sweet relief mixed in with tears,
the salt of joy, the last unfounded fears

of living swept away, a world reborn.
Where night had strung an ornament of thorns,

hope halos lustrous, pentecostal, from
a dusk made glorious summer by the sun.

And though I know that I still hold within
the human stain of these immortal sins,

I know that what is broken will be whole,
that time will be the healer of my soul,

that faith renewed will shape the life I make.
I know that after darkness, day must break.
.....

Burn

I watch you burn: the flames of perdition
whirl like flares on the surface of the sun,

swarm around you, etching you of your soul.
I watch you burn: you who once made me whole,

gouged now from me like an offending eye,
and hurled into the amaranthine fire.

I watch you burn: cauterized of promises,
lies and pretenses, stripped of disguises,

bereft of your poetry's phosphorescence.
You burn, along with my charred innocence.

And until nothing is left except your
smouldering ashes, until I am sure

not a breath of you is left to return,
not a whisper, nothing: I watch you burn.
.....

The Seventh Deadly Sin

Traitorous beloved, undeserving
of my affection, my misplaced faith, my love,
heed my voice through this unquenchable fire:

With my last breath I curse your mortal soul;
from hell's heart I stab at you; for hate's sake
I spit my final testament at you.

To you I bequeath the memory of pain,
the throat's constriction, the thorned abyss,
the hanged man by ravenous death devoured.

May you relive this suffering through dream,
in sleep so deep you cannot yourself wake,
but only scream your sanguinary fear.

Thus your tortured soul shall burn as do I,
and we, forever damned, shall be as one.
.....

In the Silence

Sky, so vast is the sky.
Looking up, the eyes see only
the pale, lost shell of a star long dead.
The wind pierces me.
The wind.

How to cry out,
with what words to answer?
This sudden aching, pent up
like the ocean's strength
before each surge
and fall of wave.
I want this moment to mean,
to reach and touch you
like this shivering hand
held out as if
to touch your face.

If I should speak,
breathless should I break into
the smallest tremor in the sea,
you should remember
neither voice nor words
nor those that tumble,
whether meant or not,
from your own.

But there,
in that silence
between question and answer,
reach for me,
reach for me there
and if you will,
forgive this troubled heart
and me.
.....

Moon Leaves

Autumn in starlight.
On the lawn's pale
palette of grass

the moon casts the shadows
of September's rustling:
orange, yellow, violet, gold.
.....

Choices

Brown-capped rosy finch,
you chirped, and I saw you,
speckled in the morning
sunlight.

When I picked you up
your small head tensed
and turned away, as if
my whole enormous hand
would squeeze
your tender frame,
never let it go.

Your eyes shut tight. I'd felt
your beak quivering cold
in the crook of my finger,
knelt down,
and laid you back
where I'd found you
in the leaves.

This morning I'd held you
trembling in my hand,
you chose to pull away;
you chose your path,
the way we choose our lives.
Or try to.

And now, this evening,
as the sun slants across
the roofs as through blinds,
I find you here again,
lying helpless,
quiet, cold.

For a moment it seems
the wind has grown
suddenly still.
.....

Home

Flying from Sarasota,
every hour 560 miles
further away.

So would I be lost, lost
but for a honeycrisp apple
on a fold-down table
in Row 31A.
.....

Listening In

Was it an elbow or a knee, we wonder.
There! She's kicked again! Turning
in her sleep, spelling out her dreams,
in morse, inside you.
.....

Deeper the Wound

Deeper the wound than the reach of my thrust,
like a stake piercing your heart. From the dust,

a chain inscribes a pentagram around
your staggered ankles; one heave, and you are bound.

The pulleys of heaven groan, but they hold
as you struggle, weakened, weary, cold,

hauled up in an inverted crucifix,
just as you had me, from the ceiling’s reach.

Around the cavern, the shadows bristle,
a malevolent thirst, a dark missal.

The last of hope from your open wound bleeds.
That, and my mimicked keen: the call to feed.

Life transmutes in a savage alchemy.
So darkness betrays you, who betrayed me.
.....

The Sixth Deadly Sin

There you stand, a delicate figurine
misplaced from a porcelain collection,
soul as beautiful as a Sèvres vase.

And all I want is to touch you, capture
forever for myself the wonderment
of life that your heart holds, that mine does not.

And all I want is to feel you, enfold
into my silences your songs, into
my troubled sleep your dreams, where I have none.

And all I want is to spit out death’s bitter
cancer from my mouth, to taste more than blood,
to drink the love you have, that I have not.

I stroke your face, leave on your cheek a trace
of my own pain, my subtle maker’s mark.
.....

Tides

The wind rising, the rigging tight with salt,
we drew ourselves into the gathered spray -
and suddenly we saw it all before us
across each crest of wave, sunlight glinting
on the shattered water leaping from the beams
like coral fragments broken from a reef
and spun out by the stream, away, away -

And the grey cry of seabirds stealing,
stealing over the waters like a stranger
whose voice calls lost in a foreign country,
whirled by the crowd; and the soundless breaking
of waves white against the greay lines of cliffs;
and the last shimmer of lights on the coast
falling into a darkness vast as the depths
rising from the waters and the silence -

Far behind us the thin line of the shore
gave way, broke, and scattered into the sea.
.....

Fountainhead

At the water's edge,
the same veined leaf returns,
back and forth

across the whirlpool
and its stone rim.
Across the fountain's

cathedral of rain
it startles, sinks,
and then rises,

like a planet scaling its
orbit around the sun, a galleon
from the edge of the world.
.....

The Labyrinthine Ways

I flee you, down the labyrinthine ways
across the margent of the world, a maze

of landscape stricken by desire and pain,
purpureal twilight drenched with tears and rain.

I flee you, and you follow, hound of hell,
blood dripping from the heart I wounded well.

To all things swift for swiftness do I sue,
but am betrayed by them as I did you.

With dread, I hear your footsteps sounding near,
and your vast severed voice calls ever clear:

Who will you find to save your piteous self
but you, but only you? No, no one else.

The cavern’s darkness ends your long pursuit.
And here I stand, surrender absolute.
.....

The Fifth Deadly Sin

I am become Vesuvius, a molten
fury flows through me like a tsunami
of fire, consuming all in its path.

And you dare stray in this eruption’s course?
My sulphurous rage will suffocate you,
coalesce into an incendiary

labyrinth from which there is no recourse.
Minotaur of tephra, I will devour you
until there is nothing left of you, not heart,

nor liver, nor spleen, nor all-too-human soul.
Charred and wasted, lost in this pyroclastic
conflagration, your soul will cry out mercy -

And I will trample on it, scatter far
your ashes from the pyre that is Pompeii.
.....

Hiding Place

Across these waters, there are times
when you will hear the wind raising
something like a whisper
between each hiss and crash of wave
against the shore.

Sad and uncertain,
as though the sea recalled
some long forgotten name or face
rising out of a distant past,
dimly remembered

Almost a word.

Then there is not even the silence
anymore, not arms thrown up
across the single lantern held before the face,
not rain or breaking thunder
or the blinding rush
of wave after faltering wave
gathering into darkness

Only the stillness, and the whisper,
and the voice of someone in you
suddenly crying with tears
even you cannot see.
.....

Protocol

As you walk
your yellow dress flutters
like a windy pennant
on your laughter's breeze.

"Look! A magpie!"
You stop and salute, solemnly,
then oblige me to do the same.

Summer's here.
It's official.
.....

Writing Poetry

It catches me at times like a sparkling
swirl of glass uncorked in the cellar,
engaging now my hands and now
the filtered light that brims in
down the stairs.

Sometimes it's just one word;
and sometimes it just doesn't stop,
like some business gotten out of hand,
a bicycle sent rolling down a hill,
soap frothing from the laundry's mouth,

or a chiffon concoction spilling out
of the oven while the cook flings up
her spatula in dismay. Anything for a reason:
a familiar face, a bird, a sudden
jangling on the telephone –

And then, like a sword raised by a brash
young barbarian coming upon battlements,
I raise my pencil, snarl,
and swear to raze today this blank
piece of paper, tomorrow Asia!

It just can't be helped: I have to
remind myself at least five times a day
to be philosophical, calm, studied,
observant. Sometimes it works:
in the laboratory aquarium,

the snail's walk on water raises in me
a scientific objectivity, engenders
hypothetical discourse on the equations
of fluid dynamics, ripples, and
molluscan propulsion.

And then it takes over –
in an expulsion, a convulsion, a compulsion
of rhyme, an elation of creation,
a celebration of oration – my rhetorical,
metaphorical, semaphorical muse.
.....

Boardwalk

Night strewn with pebbles,
and the slow, unhurried weight
of the moon's grey tortoise shell
across the shore.
.....

Unlinked Verses

1
You scuffle through the
russet of September's dream,
a shadow on water.
On the walk the dark, wet prints
of the leaves begin to fade.

3
Above you, the rough
iron of the summit's reach,
impassive, rises.
The air smoulders. Tomorrow
this whole world will be on fire.

5
Home, home. Already
her heart is running faster
than her two legs can.
When she stops it is to let
her hurrying breath catch up.

7
Now they lay scattered
under the amber lamplight,
like rosary beads
she had used to finger, faith
brittle as those petals were.

9
Rising, crescendo
in me, libretto and score,
to be the music.
The yellow of ivory
quavering, fevered to the touch.

11
Your soul in its
enamelled dusk lies, pharaoh,
like a sleeping moth.
Time's scarab burrowed in you,
your dark sarcophagus dream.
.....

La Figlia Che Piange

Suddenly awake, I call out your name,
breaking the stillness of this morning’s sleep.
But the dream escapes me, vague, incomplete,
and my heart twinges with encumbered pain.
I remember us standing in the rain,
trying to hide our eyes, trying to speak,
turning away. Here, now, my fingers keep
tracing the space where once your face had lain.

You turned away, but turning with a prayer,
left me here collecting all our days:
this dripping sunlight and the rainy weather
mingle memory and dream and yesterday.
I remember the sunlight in your hair,
and raindrops slipping down your upturned face.
.....

The Time Traveller's Sonnet

And there you are, at last: your eyes, your face.
Just as swiftly, only a memory,

a star irresolute, the lightning’s trace,
a half-remembered verse of poetry.

Still, you are what keeps my atoms in place
against life's centrifuge of anarchy:

your smile, in its sadness a hint of grace,
my hope, my manifold geometry.

To be with you again, I would cross space,
and time, to where began this circled journey:

And there you are, at last: your eyes, your face.
Just as swiftly, only a memory,

a star irresolute, the lightning’s trace,
a half-remembered verse of poetry.
.....

Ocean

Of broken salt and dangerous reason,
the rising of this solitary ocean.
The water turns without end,
shaking away its roots like a seabird
rising from its crystal dream.
Here in the stillness
there is no other night-voice
but the ocean's own, and the tremble
of its hollow refuge.

Shattered, the wind
conjures up its arena of touch,
hunger of ages, trowelled solitude,
the empty mouth of darkness
closing above the waters,
branched current and remembrance
shored across the granite
like unburied thunder,
or the vague straying of the sea-trace
as it lingers higher and higher
across the sands.

Not the last wave breaking
across the rimless swirl,
not lightning or the tattered steps
of the risen air,
or the current's struggle,
the cross-tide torn from surrender
like a throat held at risk.

Harbor of destructions,
phosphorescent crater,
it is what is not there that touches
the silence like a tenderness,
the meaning taken and given back
with each surge, the wave fervor,
the stream, the shadow thrown
across the furthest arc,
the splintered rib of wood
swept out and back with the tide,
held tight in hand
without recollection.

Night fingers the memory of years
carried away by the stream,
the searching hunger bent
and desperate as a thief.
Surrounded by solitude and sky,
the sudden rush stills
into a trembling expectation,
like the stillness of feathers
dipped toward the shore.
Patient and unmoving,
the ocean draws into itself
the cliffside's sullen treachery,
with each unhurried heave
unravelling the island's hem.

One wave, one ocean,
rimmed between shadow and space,
a ferment of sky carved out across
each continent and rising shelf,
a tremor caught in the slow width
of this planet's orbit,
stonecutter of desire,
torn of all silences,
now lost, now found,
rising and falling
like a caught-up spar,
the secret hidden deep
in the coral heart.

River by river the earth
empties into its desolation,
borne away by the one ocean
which has no other shore.
.....

Sleeping Cat

Not even a hint,
when I nudge her,
of a yawn, or the stretched out
sulky grumble of a turn.

Asleep, the cat knows something
we don't, curled up between us
and the kitchen door,
its life an answer
shut tight behind its eyes.
.....

And I Rise

And I rise, your poison dissipated
after days beneath your will, your hated

touch. With each caress, I’ve sensed the fading
of your hideous strength, the escalating

of my own. And I rise, before you see
the faint resurgence of the fire in me,

the marshalled anger you mistake as lust,
see through the quiescence that has gained your trust.

With every breath, you venture ever closer
to the range of my sequestered dagger.

And I rise, take you into my embrace,
move closer so your eyes fix on my face.

With one step closer, I will let it fly,
stiletto of my heart’s revenge. And I rise.
.....

The Fourth Deadly Sin

Three days entr’acte, and the savage garden
wakens in me a restive thirst for prey;
but I can stave off thirst a little while.

Three nights intermezzo, and the hunger
stirs in me a vagrant restlessness;
but I can stave off hunger for a while.

For now, this transcendental heart of ash
envisages repose, a sweet nocturne,
engendered in my lover’s soft embrace.

Submerged here, half awake, and half in dream,
our separate worlds entwine in one another
with a measured quietude and ease.

And, lacking words to speak, our lips will touch;
and stave off parting for a little while.
.....

Four Seasons

1
With every beat, your reflection
gently wavers in my heart,
like ripples in a spring pond, circling
from a fumbled pebble of memory

2
A summer breeze unravels you.
You unclasp your hairclips,
comb your fingers through, braiding
the sunlight in your hair

3
Underneath this autumn sky,
the wind weaves your fragrant
memory, like a ribbon across the
skein of my loneliness

4
Snow flickers on the cheek
like a flutter of eyelashes. Caught
in the moment, you are winter-blushed and
beautiful, beautiful, beautiful
.....

Marilyn Diptych, 1962

When you died, he worked feverishly,
methodically, like a paramedic

striving to resuscitate your fragile
spirit, to wring your heartbeat back.

There on the canvas he imagined
you alive, a single repeated photograph,

stuttered like invocations on a rosary.
Twenty-five beads of joy, twenty-five

of sorrow, every fifteen minutes a cycle
of prayer. On one side, your acrylic life

glows vivid; on the other, your captive
visage fades to black-and-white.

Framed by his urgent hand, you find
a silkscreened immortality.
.....

Yes

You don't have to say
anything.

Just let me trace
the watercolor brushstroke
of your eyebrows
as your eyes close,
an answer
without words.

Pressed close
against your existence,
my mouth will read your lips
in braille.
.....

Stampede

The earth tells its own story.
Here, where the broken rails

etch their shattered hieroglyphics
in the dust, the space still

cries out, freedom, freedom.
Further on the tracks cross and recross

in a frenzy of flight;
the grass drifts, uprooted.

A single man's footprints trail
along it all. Deliberate

and slow, it draws along its length
a meandering despair.
.....

Summer of Tangerines

We were
inconstant strangers, reading
together in lamplight, staying up
with the moon. The wind
blew in through the curtains,
ruffled the pages of our lives.

That was the summer of tangerines,
of mornings waking up
entangled in each other's dreams.
When we pulled back the window curtains
each pane glistened with its own color,
like jars of apricot and peach
arranged on a cupboard shelf.

We lay on the grass and watched the Pacific
billow above us in clouds.

You said, tomorrow the wind
would scatter them all away,
bring the summer back.
Lying there with you then,
watching the sky's colors
unravelling from white,
I believed that summer
would skip endlessly on,
like a stone on water.

Now, with the edge of October's sun
pushing against September's seams,
I feel the chill of a different wind;
I feel the song of that summer
calling me, calling me back.
.....

Fallen Lighthouse

Uncovered ark, waves break across
your battered hull like a rising tempest,
scattering against your sightless
cyclopean eye.

The circled railing at your mast unwinds
a shattered stairway into the air,
bridging the uncertain truce
of spume and sky.

Shaken and still, your splintered
ribs curve and rejoin above the waters,
like the brilliant skeleton
of a stranded whale.
.....

You Have Not Destroyed Me

Though you have pierced me with every arrow
in your quiver, you have not destroyed me. No.

Pricked, and I bled. But I live, despite you,
destroyer god, and not because of you.

Do you hear it, underneath the faint pulse
drawing the thinned blood through my veins? Shell rush

of the ocean, a slow undercurrent
drawing power with each measured silence,

the cadence of my pain. Denied the sweet
release of death, instead I contemplate

how every unrevenged wrong contrived
to bring me to this strength. Though you have

pierced me, cut me, flayed me, let my blood flow
red to earth, you have not destroyed me. No.
.....

The Third Deadly Sin

Behold, you are fair, my beloved, and
while life still in you breathes, I spirit you
to my sepulchre, to the sunless sea.

There you will be the centerpiece of my
sculpture garden; castings fashioned not of
marble or wax, but of sinew and flesh:

Aphrodite of Milos, dismembered,
beautiful; headless Winged Victory of
Samothrace, eagles’ wings lashed to her back;

Sabine Woman, face enraptured. And you -
you will be my Francesca di Rimini,
the softness in Rodin’s Le Baiser, lips

raised to your lover’s lips, like fevered wine.
Thus, my beloved is mine, forever mine.
.....

Should You Ask Me

Should you ask me, some sudden night,
When you are shaken by thunder
Or wake to the batter of rain
Hammering the window,
I would have to say: No. Not anymore.
I do not remember anymore
The color of leaves, or night falling,
The fingered dusk, or how you stood,
Raising your hand, when you left,
And I watched you from the door.

After a time nothing seems the same:
A way of walking, a swallowed glance,
A breath, all these,
Whirlpool-encircled, fade
Slowly into the startled depths,
Buried without a sound.

The way the sun does not cast shadows.
The way clouds are torn from the sea.
The way the trees do not bend anymore,
Anchored in the rise.

No, these are not thoughts that have fallen,
Aimless, to the frozen earth,
Nor the withered husks of days
Trampled underfoot:
No longer forgiven by rain
Or the night's long oblivion,
We make up the silence
Like a sheltered wave,
Broken and surrounded.

And we have nothing, nothing,
Save the night,
Swept with lightning and rain,
And darkness raging around us
Like a flame.
.....

I.E.D.

Her heart beats.
Wired for a sleep test,
she dreams and weeps.

Somewhere across the ocean,
her only son falls.
Improvised explosive device.
.....

The Giraffes Escape

Promenading down the boulevard, that early
June morning in Amstelveen, down
Piet de Winterlaan, miles away
from the circus pitch before the trainers
have caught on - we see the vista

from our coffee room window,
a splendid procession bridging the street –
fifteen camels, two zebras, a clutch
of llamas, a shuffle of elephants,
and loping in the lead, the giraffes.

Having kicked down the gates as if you were
at Mt. Ararat, still waiting for those pigeons
to return, not knowing if they even would;
fenced in from all sides without the sight
of sun or sky or boundless savannah;

huddled together in eighty square feet
of sweltering cabin-space; surrounded
by the spoor of lions, the howl of
cheetahs, the baying of wolves,
the ominous stare of vultures.

All this, for interminable days and
interminable nights, hardly getting any sleep,
with the hippopotamuses hogging the haybales,
the terrapins nipping at the trough,
the koalas stingy with the eucalyptus.

Something snaps, and suddenly
there you are, kicking at the cubicle,
loosening the boards, behind you the cries of
Shem, Ham, and Japheth as they try to wake
their father from blissful oblivion.

But none of that matters, none of it but for that
moment when the barricade falls, when you are
striding across the veldt, past office stalls,
through diluvian wave, when you are -
for that first, magnificent moment – free.
.....

Arachnid

Your eyes are jewels
set in the ironwork metal
of your cold heart.

They glitter like vespers
unravelling from the black
hem of your cassock.

Around yourself you weave
the incandescence of illusion,
trembling and uncertain.

The geometry of oblivion,
where souls hang limp and
faceless as the pharaohs.
.....

Not Getting Up Till Ten

Glorious!

Just to
lie here,
last night's
dreaming
pulled tight
over my head.

Not even
to stretch out
for the glasses
that would bring
the dresser
back out
from its
comfortable
haze.

Not even
to ask,
What time is it?
Thankful
for small mercies
like forgetting
to set
the alarm.

Not even
to dip one toe
into the cold,
blue
linoleum
of morning.

But
just to lie here,
just one minute
longer,
just a little
more,
to let
those last
few bars
of dreaming
run over
and over
their well worn
groove.
.....

The Poison Works

The poison works, like an intravenous
Rohypnol drip, snaking its insidious

track from my heart through the capillaries
of my lips, my hands, my extremities.

Thus am I shackled to this fever dream,
unable to move but condemned to feel

through this, the solitary cell that is
my flesh - to feel each touch, each vagrant kiss,

each savage violation, as you brand
my skin with crosses of fire. Hope is drained

from me like blood; faded hope, for when
this unrelenting purgatory ends,

when my inviolate spirit leaves all this
behind, this shell, this fragile chrysalis.
.....

The Second Deadly Sin

Slaking this thirst needs only a little
more than simply the blood-right for first kill.
The rest your faintly beating heart keeps fresh.

Afterwards, I bear you into the earth's
gutted underbelly with the others,
waterskin vessels of arterial springs.

Pale stalactites, you hang like pendulous
bats from the cavern ceiling, terrified
as a keening rends the shivering air:

The call to feed. From the shadows, my fanged
brood circles in, a famished legion that
will tattoo your flesh with a ravenous

Stigmata of blood, again, again, again -
miming your open mouth that cannot scream.
.....

Emerald Forest

Who are you there, wavering at the precipice
of my impatience?

Come to me, treacherous ones.
Come to me in darkness and in stealth.

Come to me with your machete dreams,
your armor of canvas and pith.

I will devour you all, spit you out, tattoo
your soul with unreasoning despair.

For I am the jaguar's opium dream, the womb
from which he ravenously bursts.

Through my dark arteries the anaconda flows.
I suckle the anteater and the spider.

I watch you with the lemur's eyes. My lizard
tongue flicks in and out, tasting your fear.

I am the purgatory of storms. I quell
the monsoon's avarice, the hurricane's lust.

The trees incise my heart's tectonics into air.
The wind pierces me like a fissure.

I am the seventh circle, the gate at which
the mind abandons hope.

Come to me with spears, and I will be the wound
which heals over you, engulfs you.

They will find you stumbling in my cyclone's eye,
bewildered, lost and gibbering like an ape.
.....

When I Died

When I died, I felt your lips close to mine.
Sweet death, your faint nocturne of musk refined

a serpent song of sleep, of trust, of peace,
a bartering of this life for blessed release.

You breathed me in, and with that breath preserved
what little of my fragile world deserved

eternal life. Embalmed in the amber
of your heart, a precious spark, an ember

flaring bright as my own life in me ebbed.
Until all that was left was in your blood:

my joys, my sorrows, the vagaries
of my dreams, now coursed through your arteries.

Then at last, I felt your lips close to mine,
twilight's pome, oblivion's kiss. And I died.
.....

The First Deadly Sin

Here is how it works: The foreskin retracts,
protuberant incisors declinate
a subtle ivory, viperine fangs.

Pressed to your incandescent curve of skin,
I pierce your flesh. You gasp, feel it quicken
in you, repulsion and desire. But no,

Not yet the sweet inhalation of your
frail innocence, not yet the blood rush. First,
into you my venom I ejaculate:

A luciferian delirium sings in
your veins, a paralytic lullaby
of musk, of peace, of lust, of sleep, of trust:

Until all struggles cease, until you yield
into my hands your soul. And then I drink.
.....

Past Lives

1
In my first life, I see myself
second daughter to the late lieutenant and his wife,
he a soldier fallen on the front lines of Dong Xoai,
she a concert pianist, now teaching me along with
the neighbors’ children after school. She straightens
our postures, raps our knuckles with a ruler as we mangle
Rachmaninoff. Sometimes, at night when she thinks I’m
asleep, she plays for herself, their song.

2
In my second life, I see myself
a teacher in the jungles of Mindanao, two months pregnant,
my partner and I marching villagers through irregular verbs.
Typhoons trespass across the borders of our peace, stirred
by the shrapnel of insurgent monsoons. Gunfire.
We dive for shelter, covering our heads and mouthing
prayers in a foreign tongue. Sometimes our prayers are
answered by a different god.

3
In my third life, I see myself
at the bus stop, sniping with my son, third grade now
at St. Luke’s Catholic School. He wants to bring
with him this morning’s letter from his adoptive father;
I tell him later. When I open it myself on our driveway,
fine sand seeps out, swept into the envelope from the storms
that ring his barracks, a thin stream marking time
until the grains run out.

4
In my fourth life, I see myself
cursing a vending machine at Dover AFB,
its stark metal denying iced tea for my mother. And suddenly,
inexplicably, my life, all my past lives, come clear to me,
forever framed in that inexorable cycle of reincarnated grief.
My mother takes my hand. An hour away, the transport
from the airfield at Basra drones toward us, draped
in mourning, bearing her grandson home.
.....

Pact

If you should chance to pass this way again,
taking the covered path you used to take,
I should be waiting here for you, as then.
At such a time there would be left no words,
nor voice nor eyes raised up to meet your own;
only, perhaps, a countenance of stone,
or gesture in the wordless flight of birds.

So shall I play the wind when you return;
I shall be there where you least expect me:
a sudden ripple spreading on the lake,
or an uncertain gust about your hair,
your hands opposing in a grim delight.
Such as it is, the morning stirring you
With a bright gust of wind and shaken leaves.

I shall not have disturbed a single word
of what was said, and what was left unsaid,
but startle like that call from a rafter nest
you discovered one night above your bed,
and peered to see. 'So small,' you told yourself,
'I would have missed it if I hadn't heard.'
I should be waiting here for you, as then.
.....

Bereft

If you let go my hand, the air will not
rush back in to fill the empty space,
rejected by the anguish of my skin
bereft of your palm’s touch.

If you leave my side, the space beside me
will empty like the eye of a whirlwind,
leaves swirling outside the scope
of these forsaken arms.

If you go away from me, stars will fall
from my night sky, emptied as from an eclipse,
and darkness will drift like smoke,
choking my dissipated heart.

Therefore never leave me, love,
lest my universe collapse in on itself,
a black hole devouring its own atoms, soul
desolate as the gravity of a neutron star.
.....

Becoming a Ghost

Suddenly
I feel the wind
blowing through me and around me and into me
like an inexhaustible flame,
burning into my cheeks, my hair, my eyes,
my hands, until there is nothing left
except a smouldering cinder
that is my soul.

Suddenly
I am standing in dream's endless ocean.
I will shout, hurl stones, my heart
into its depths.
When it awakens I will be nothing
except the restlessness of the tide.

I will be
the shovel's edge, the darkness, earth's silence
drowning the beating of your heart.

Close your eyes.
Turn your face away.
Do not look at me
or touch me.
Something is going to happen.
I can feel it.

Now.
.....

Passages

Lovers, strangers, lamplight
on your passing faces, for you
the street parts the night hours, marking
each rift of window light or shuttered darkness
on the walk, catching here and there
an arm, a silence, fluttering coat
among the angled shadows,
trapped in embrace.

Who are you now holding me here,
hostage to the room's barred stillness,
tightrope dancer on the waking of your steps?

Blind, indifferent, these walls
face each other, do not see me
caught in the rapture of this moment
bursting against the slated evening
like street lamps flaring one by one into the sky,
distance made sudden, swift

But draws what night it can into its heart.

Traveler out of the depths,
you pass, and all the world is still
raised eyes and lowered voices,
as if you were unspoken.
.....

The Burning of Judas

Lord, in this field among the porcelain
a cough betrays the faint stuttering flare
of a torch lowered by a hidden hand.
We come with upraised branches,
ropes in our hands, yet veil ourselves
in the muted turnings of the innocent leaves.

Lord, the scent of olives brings to mind
the trees of my own Kerioth, and how once I
at twelve years could not stretch up
to reach even the lowest limb.
My brother would come to lift me up,
then, laughing, leave me hanging there
until supper: I remember how
when I was fourteen he fell from a scaffold,
his life, about his father's business.
His name was Simon, Lord.

Raindrops at my feet. The evening twisted,
ripping the clouds in two, sending
a damp gust to scatter in my hair.
Laughter and thunder and lightning flare
reverberate against the beat of rain
scourging the leaves

And the breath of olives.
Faces sweat beneath the heavy torchlight,
staggering my feet.
...................Where are we now?
When we were children, laughing in the fields,
we spent our days running after summer,
the other seasons left behind.
Lord, this was a long time ago -
the boy running along the path to what, to this?
Here is the garden, the trees, and the night.

We can see only the leaves shifting,
at the first step, cut by a shard of rock.
The head turns at the shake of a stone
tumbled from its cave hollowed in the dust.

The night by now has crept into Kerioth,
tired of its dark dominion, invading the sky.
Quickly, I will do it quickly
Dog-toothed, sharpened in the May night;
a ravenous tiger the leaves crouching,
devouring our shadows

Master, master!
.....

Twelfth Night, A Zombie Holocaust

1

Brother and sister already were the walking dead,
after years of contestation between their mother, father,
in alternating weekends of court-ordered loathing and
contempt. Her brother promised to take care of her, swore;

and then she found him, and how could he keep
his promise now, hanging from the rafter with his eyes
facing east, then south, then west, and finally north
like a macabre rotating compass, navigating her grief?

Good madonna, why mournest thou?
Good fool, for my brother's death.
I think his soul is in hell, madonna.
I know his soul is in heaven, fool.
The more fool, madonna, to mourn
For your brother's soul being in heaven.

2

At the funeral, she waited for him to rise up, like an
embalmed somnambulist, from his grave. Her Lazarus,
her miracle boy. He would sweep her away, escort
her soul into the bliss of unfeeling catatonia.

Not a flower, not a flower sweet
On my black coffin let there be strown;
Not a friend, not a friend greet
My poor corpse, where my bones shall be thrown.

3

As in life, he failed her. Eyes closed, a finality of repose,
surrounded by the pungence of death. Her fingers on the
rosary beads fumbled pentagrams, her prayers
mouthed spells too feeble, an impotent voodoo.

Troth, sir, I can yield you none without words;
And words are grown so false,
I am loath to prove reason with them.

Without him, she lost all defenses. She unlatched
the door and let in the holocaust, let her dreams be
eviscerated, her hopes disembowelled, entangled
with her intestines, salt-rubbed and charred with coals.

4

I will help you to't. But tell me true, are you not
Mad indeed? Or do you but counterfeit?
Believe me, I am not; I tell thee true.
Nay, I'll ne'er believe a madman till I see his brains.

Serving suggestion for madwoman's brain: medulla tossed
with croutons and greens; thalamus and hypothalamus,
julienned, sautéed over high flame, spiced
in the cracked glass of a light-bulb; cerebellum,

formed into tournedos and smoked for precisely 4 minutes
and 20 seconds; cortex, a delicacy of parietal, temporal,
frontal, and occipital succulence – until the shrink-wrap of
hate pulls tight on its fissured labyrinth – microwaved.

5

With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
A great while ago the world begun,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
But that's all one, our play is done.

In their dreams they see her again clearly, sitting in the bath
upstairs after the reception at her mother’s, chin-deep
in water, her hair floating around her like a veil, the knife
whispering a serrated intimacy against her wrists.

And as they gather around her, finally clothed
in shame and guilt – she arises, tears them apart, devours
liver, spleen, sinew and bone, savors their hearts in
deliberate measure. Undead, a savage resurrection.
.....

River Solitude

Even from here, even from this
firmament above the stream,
I feel the wingbeat of closing days.
Here above the waters, I hear
my own heart and the river's heart beating,
rising where the shattered waters
close about the struggling breath
like a sudden word, thought of but unspoken,
caught in this throat of salt.

Even from here, I hear the sadness,
far off, the distant voice
filling the searching heart,
lost between silence and stone, between
echo and answer, without fingers or eyes,
searching among the shadows for my ears.
....................Open-ended,
the water shakes loose from memory
and this solitude, washes into stillness
what voices we had, all our silences,
unanswered prayers, whispered
secrets, loves and debts,
treacheries and destructions,
glances, hands and faces
lingering in our sleep:
each moment unresolved,
each moment changing,
like the river's dream.

The wind blows from somewhere else.
Strident and mournful, the brimmed rising hisses,
bursts and falls like a splintered shore
into the wind's retreating silence.

Where do birds go to die?
.....

On the Verandah

Outside on the verandah, the night-air
is sweet, the moon is fair, the wind blows
warm across the desert sands.

Tonight, southwest of Kandahar,
the night sky will gleam with the scintilla
from a martyr-bomber’s detonation.

Helicopters will stream like tremulous wasps
into Zhari district, ferrying back remains
from a shattered infantry battalion.

The wind sweeps in from the Sea of Faith,
the sound of human misery mixed in
with its turbid ebb and flow.

There on the verandah, a boy sets down
a bowl filled to the brim with apricots,
fresh from Damascus, fragrant as revenge.
.....

Morning at the Window

Quick as the pirouettes of weathervanes
on rooftops where the shingles quiver
one by one into a startled trembling
with a clatter to the pipes,
with a clatter to the pipes,so now
this sudden gust in past the open glass repairs,
caught in a dim, delicious turning
out above the wave of branches
where the sunlight wraps the leaves.

And all the world is spread outside
like wondrous fabrics draped on poles
behind some merchant brimmed with tales
of minarets and gauze,
of minarets and gauze,and we
unwitting passengers aboard his craft,
ensnared before we drowse our paths away:
the grumbling nurse, the young astonished girl,
turned by the shoulder back.

A flash of scimitars across the air,
a pointed glance, a gleam of talons
poised to strike - his voice goes on;
and suddenly the cloths
and suddenly the clothscatch fire,
are spun to agelessness before our eyes:
we feel our fingers reach and run
like eager spiders down the weave;
and with no less suprise than of ourselves - we buy.

So morning comes, a sparrow-startled
rapture whirling in the trees
like autumn bursting on the roofs
in wind and sudden rain,
in wind and sudden rain,the day
caught up like trees entangled in the rush,
withdrawing leaf by leaf into the air
from an ecstasy of fumbling light, this heart's kite
spiralling, streaming, rising, brilliant.
.....

Barcarole

Of all the silences, of all the great waves
raging in like a bitter season across the sands,
you will remember not a one.

Of all you will have suffered, and given,
you will remember only the wind
rising fiber by fiber from the reefs,
blind and defiant.

You will see yourself as you were
before you existed, as from a distance,
without gesture or persistence,
lost amidst the batter of current and swell
chiselled out of the darkness and the salt
like a labored pulse, drawn out,
unransomed, alone.

Between harbors there are spaces
more desolate and empty than between hands
trembling before a moment of touching.

Look for me here, then,
in the silence between two waves breaking,
in the shifting rent by the shore.

Give me your wrath and your silence,
give me your hunger and your love.
.....

Fourteen Birds

1
A solitary blackbird wings away in the backyard,
ringing the rim of a metal fence post.
Hollow, like my heart without you.

2
A red-breasted robin wings away in the backyard,
ringing the rim of a metal fence post.
The bright, clear chime of spring.

3
A dark-cloaked owl wings away in the backyard,
ringing the rim of a metal fence post.
Night tolls a savage premonition.

4
A ricebird wings away in the backyard,
ringing the rim of a metal fence post.
Your bamboo flute replays a gentle harmony.

5
A hummingbird wings away in the backyard,
ringing the rim of a metal fence post.
The calla lilies quiver, a delicate carillon.

6
A starling wings away in the backyard,
ringing the rim of a metal fence post.
Lost in the verge, a single, cerulean egg.

7
A golden-cheeked warbler wings away in the backyard,
ringing the rim of a metal fence post.
The memory of your smile.

8
A hill robin wings away in the backyard,
ringing the rim of a metal fence post.
In the hedgerow, the tail flick of a siamese.

9
A raven wings away in the backyard,
ringing the rim of a metal fence post.
Its caws betray the cacophony of a cracked bell.

10
An osprey wings away in the backyard,
ringing the rim of a metal fence post.
Across the sandbar, the ocean`s dark savannah.

11
A mountain bluebird wings away in the backyard,
ringing the rim of a metal fence post.
Its bright wings fray into the cobalt sky.

12
A great blue heron wings away in the backyard,
ringing the rim of a metal fence post.
Like the dream of my father, escaping.

13
A rosefinch wings away in the backyard,
ringing the rim of a metal fence post.
Amidst the garden bric-a-brac, a pink flamingo tilts.

Starter

The perfect starter, the realtor is saying.
A tidy backsplit on a thirty-five-foot lot;
nearby, a clutch of shops – pharmacy,
hairdresser, tanning salon, cafe.

I’d discovered a new Thai restaurant in the west end,
coaxed her to lunch. But all throughout, she’d
dampened my triumph, pensive over nasi goreng and tea.
Then, without warning: It isn’t far from here, you know.
What wasn’t far? Where it began.

We drove past. It was the FOR SALE sign
that took us both aback. For days our conversation
wavered around letting it go, going further –
until she rang up Re/Max.

Might we go in alone? Nodding, the realtor
takes out cigarettes, ushers us in.
Freshly painted, he says as he retreats
out to the yard. Windows completely redone,
.....everything like new.

In every doorway a tormented ghost,
every room stabs at her heart.
Under the whitewash, plaster and paint,
revenants linger. I know she sees them, the way she
circles around the edges of the empty rooms, her hand
running across the walls, willing them to speak.

And I her memory’s accomplice: each hesitant
confession, each whispered intimacy, as we continue
our ritual dance to a vapid incantation –
living room, dining room, kitchen, bath –
coalescing into reality.

Are you afraid?
He’d asked her, that first night,
twisting her arms behind her. She'd whimpered;
no use pretending, as before, that she was asleep.
He’d laughed, unsheathing his belt.
You should be.

As in a trance, she leads the way upstairs,
fourteen steps up, across the landing, to her old room.
Scuff marks where the bedposts scraped the wall.
The indentation of the legs still mar the floor.

And when she's found it all, proven to herself that
it was real, an unimagined life, when she's sifted
and cataloged the evidence, the forensic minutiae
of innocence unravelling, she weeps:
for who she was, for why she is,
here in a whitewashed starter,
where it all began.

Eleven years old again, pulling me close,
a coverlet against night.

Elevator

Three floors down,
to the cafeteria on the second floor.

Half-past one,
three floors up again.

Is this the only way I can get
close to you?

Assignation

1
Night falls, shading our embraces
Where the curtains part and billow.
Inside, filtered moonlight traces
This slow caress, this secret show.

2
Tonight I’ll memorize your face,
Brand in my heart your eyes, your hair,
Afraid you’ll leave an empty space,
Vanish, come morning, into air.

3
Rays of moonlight pattern the sky
Onto our ceiling, through the dark.
From these dim cages dreams take flight,
Quickening wingbeats of our hearts.

4
Midnight finds us swathed in lamplight,
Nestled in one another’s arms.
Soul of my soul, I clasp you tight,
Taking you deep into my warmth.

5
Before we part, my eyes search you,
Eyes desperate to find a sign.
Once again, how to forget you,
Until another place and time?

The First Joyful Mystery is the Annunciation

As she prayed in the waiting room, she felt
Vertigo wash over her. Her doctor
Entered, beckoned her into his office.

Gently, said they’d confirmed the hCG
Results she’d gotten two days before, then
Asked how she was feeling, what she would do.

Throwing up every morning on her mom’s
Immaculate bathroom floor, what’d he think?
And then, when she was about to tell him -

..........myrrh and starlight, birth
..........apparition, psalm and verse,
..........revealed elation:
..........inside deep a new life stirred,
..........advent, annunciation

Paused. Suddenly, not knowing why, she felt
Luminous, joyful, sorrowful, glorious,
Everything at once; yet certain that, while

Nothing would be the same, she would welcome
All to come, arms open, with virgin grace.

Inscription on a Chinese Ceramic Vessel

1

These evenings
I have many visitors
among my officers;
we drink tea and wine
and talk about the time
when we can drive the Mongols out.

2

I remember springs
filled with the wings
of a thousand butterflies.

When summer came
the trees were heavy
with the nests of bees.

Autumn; my officers
come in from the hills,
and we talk.

In winter it is always cold outside.
I stay indoors.
It never stops snowing.

3

I have been here a long time now,
and I think of the time
when I can pack my things
and go home.

The night grows colder.
I wish I could go home
in winter, just the way it was
when I left.

The Distance

I will take with me the cold wind
shaking at the spattered windows,
the steam and sudden trembling
at each gust of leaves and light,
the color of this night surrounded
by shadows, and the sound of trains.
You I can only remember.

And all my world becomes the world
outside my window, a dim desire
that frames reality and you
from all the rest.
...............By now
you will have lost my face
among the faces gathered at the rail,
by now you will have lowered
both your eyes and voice
so that you cannot see
these sad, unfinished thoughts
pressed close against the glass,
these eyes full of fear
and desperation, searching for you
like a thief.

And I cannot call out, or ask
what suddenness has gripped this heart,
can only feel your arms
about me once again, as if it all
were nothing, and the night
were gone

And you were here.

Wave Rising

You rise,
crystal and streaming,
a storm across the broken earth:

Wave
torn by the ocean's roots,
whirling crosstide
of air and sky,
fire and movement,
anvil of summers,
harpooned tempest,
ark of a fallen kingdom
plunging into the deep,
hammered silence,
burning avalanche
of talons and salt,
light's cluster,
rough iceberg
shallowed from the sunken
pewter of the night,
sudden ambush of stone,
crater of destructions,
article of sorrows,
cradle of echoes,
petrified hurricane
scarred by shadows,
burden of wrath
shrugged from the shoulder
of the continent,
uncertain truce of
stillness and rage:

You rise,
rend the spaces
with a sudden vastness,
like a torrent of steel,
like a wind,
like buried thunder
rising from the depths,
rising without end.

Still Life

1
There is no refuge in your sleep;
your breath refuses to give in.
In the darkness
your lips move, soundlessly.
For an instant I believe
you are saying my name.

2
What is it that you see
with your eyes closed?
When I touch your eyelids
my fingers come away trembling.

3
With you I am like a stranger,
terrified to move.
I try to take your restlessness
into my hands, but you escape.
Even now the lamplight turns you
into someone I don't know.

4
Until morning I lie
with my ear pressed against your chest.
Somewhere inside you
the dark sea rises and falls.

Last Gestures

Arisen from what endless keening,
From the ravine of what mouth,

Your face held vivid in the light?

What have we taken, what hunger,
What recollection burning in our eyes,

Or fevered lamp of the final depths?

You seize silence like a sudden cry
Out of the spray, broken off,

Raised in the shattered breath.

Enemy, my enemy, claiming the shining hour:
Sundered gesture of darkness and rage

And ambush of the ancient night.

In the Pines

The mosses have taken the steps now.
Rimmed with silence,
The ancient walls yield themselves up
Like a breakstone to the rain
Tilted into the night,
Dividing the fall.

In the wave of the pines
Only the shadows of the castle are unchanging.
Even now they are cast by the moon.

Starlight

There, from the window, fragments
of a night drift in, shattered
against the hulls of stars
moored into the evening sky.

Night falls, burying the distant landscape
like a cast-up shell, drawn
in a rimless swirl of wind
breaching the stillness,
like the corrupted cargo of ships,
unmasted, sunken in trenches
and lost, irrevocably.

In the sky the wind weaves
a clustered hieroglyphics, raises up
constellations we cannot name,
vaguely remembered, spun out
like a sudden wheel on the earth's axle.

Stories to tell you at the edge of night,
vague and unremembered as legends
told in some dim, forbidding court,
by blind men and aging seers,
of something more distant, and final,
than a fading star.

...............Count them,
finger and hand together:
far Antares, the shimmering current
raked by the archer's shaft,
quiver of rain and stillness trembling
like a shadow, stretched out:
this burnished pile spindled at our souls.

And still we dare, to find
the least expanse of firmament
inside our dreams, as if to clutch
when starlight fails us, and we drown,
flailing, in the formless rush.

Nagasu-ji

I saw you first at Daitoku-sen,
Lost in the stream, an unstemmed petal
Tossed between the currents of the afternoon.
You waved - before I could say a word!

Since yesterday I have been here at Mishima.
The wind blows across my face.
The rain is due to fall.

I will always remember you,
The way you were, last summer,
At Nagasu-ji.

Almost There

The lantern threw the trees across the track
As we approached the town, as if to say
There was no time at all for looking back:

Already light had fallen from the day.
We had no need to slow, the town so near
Where we could find somewhere at last to stay.

Faint moon, the stars beginning to appear
Against the sinking of the evening sky,
We knew that soon the darkness would be here.

But no, we felt no need to question why.
Ahead the village lights stood white and clear
Where our two tracks met in a single tie.

On the Origin of the Fear of Dentists

From an archeological dig
out of Mehrgarh in Pakistan, a relic
surfaces - a maxillary left

Second molar from an adult male.

On the occlusal surface, under light,
a single, deep, in vivo perforation.
Shaft anchored in a hollowed stone,

I imagine a sturdy bow-drill

In the palm, rotated by a stringed bow.
At its other end, a drill-bit of flint,
tipped to a crude, sharpened, conical point,

Braced against the wavering tooth.

Even now I hear the sound, from
somewhere deep in the Indus Valley,
echoing across nine thousand years

A Neolithic primal scream.

Alive

Suddently the curve,
the headlights flooding into his eyes,
and his hands jerking the wheel
as he turned their lives
into the corner of the bus stop.

The truck rattled past, the chain
on its long trailer dragging back the night.

He sat there, shaking, his bones
feeling like the crumpled metal
of the bumper. His lip was torn,
and his chest burned where the buckle
of the belt had choked his soul
back into living.

...She
lay still,
face peaceful
on the vinyl
pillow
of the dashboard.
In her hair
splinters of
glass
shone like
water drops
in a fountain
in sunlight.

...He
was alive. Alive.
That was what they had to
tell him, over and over,
when they came to pull him
away from her. He
was alive.

Inside

Tonight I found it, inside
a book you'd left behind. Pressed
leaf, butterfly, the photo fluttered out
between the covers to the floor.

I didn't look at it at first. I couldn't.
And now, too late, I find myself taken
with a sudden desperation and afraid,
afraid of the night, the cold, afraid
of something I am not yet sure of,
that seeing your face again I should remember
much more than just the color of your eyes,
afraid I should remember
the way you smiled, or talked,
or how the sun shone on your hair
that day we walked alone, out on the strand,
and you asked me what I was thinking.

I loved you. That was all.
And yet - and yet -

I remember a time you said you'd hated me
like nothing else. I had no right
to ask, you said, no right at all.
Your hands clenched at your sides.
You turned your face away.
And when later in the afternoon
I found you in the garden,
watering the azaleas,
your hands were still shaking,
and you wouldn't let me
see your eyes.

I called you twice,
from the kitchen door, before you came.
And when you answered, I grabbed you
and held you tight, face buried in your hair,
not knowing what to say except your name,
over and over until I believed
nothing else could ever exist in this world
but you.

Now, too late,
I remember walking your parents home,
that August night. I remember
your father talking of how quickly
the leaves had changed.

We said good bye at the lamp by the gate.
I remember turning to look back
from the other sidewalk,
how they too had turned

And how suddenly there was nothing,
nothing at all,
inside.

Twos

I've brought home
a bag of apples,
and there beside, unopened still,
tomorrow's breakfast's chocolate
milk, chill and moist,
a saucer and glass
for the cat and myself.

Out and into the night.
Beneath my balcony rails
two runners pass,
shoulder to shoulder.
Looking up, the man
throws up an arm and smiles,
then eases back into his friend's
slow, trailing stride.

The evening carries over,
in the wind, the voices
of my neighbor's son and daughter
playing in the park
across the road.

For a moment the fading sky
holds up the shape of two kites
fluttering in the air,
and then is gone.

My mind holds you
as if it will not let you go.

Twenty-Eight Faces of the Moon

1
Earth, sky, stillness.
The evening unfolds
the rorschach of the moon.

2
We'd come home late that night.
They'd gone to bed, left the lights on
in the kitchen. Outside,
in the half-light of the moon,
I watched the lights move up
with you, like a drifting ember,
kitchen to living room to where
your bedroom curtains flickered,
glowed and faded
into dreaming.

3
The shadow is bluest
when it is cast by the moon.

4
What lingers:
The press of her cheek
against my shoulder.
The smell of moonlight
in her hair.

5
Suddenly you are far away,
further than the moon.
Further still
than the reach of my
outstretched hand.

6
Slow and uncertain,
like a breath held
before a moment of touching,
the moon dissolves into moonlight.

7
In the shadows a man and a woman.
The moon smiles its dark conspiracy.

8
There was a time
you thought the moon
was an enormous balloon
caught in the clouds.
Arms outstretched, you chased it
across rivers and hills,
as if you were the one who had,
unthinking,
let go the string.

9
The cat stirs. Beside it,
on your lap, the moon
has fallen asleep.

10
The night spills over
from the dark side of the moon.

11
If I could roll up this sky,
moon and stars,
and spread it out the night
you come home.

12
I should say this to you
in moonlight,
when there is no such word
as no.

13
The sound of your bare feet
on the kitchen floor.
Be careful you don't
slip on the moon.

14
Two hundred and forty thousand miles
of kite-string.

15
Tonight, she wrote, the moon
was as full as that night
we met on the boardwalk.
I remember the wind
blowing the hair into my eyes.
As we talked I could hear
the creak of the boards each time
you shifted your feet.

16
August night.
The wind wraps itself around the moon.

17
The moon is cold tonight.
Please,
take me home.

18
Moon at my window,
these nights I dream
my father's dreams.
I wake up, and I am
someone else.

19
Moon, sky, earth, water.
Water, earth, sky, moon.

20
Clothesline's not quite empty.
Someone's forgotten to bring in
the moon.

21
In the water the moon's silver
scatters into emerald.

22
Moon as dim as my eyelids closing,
now you are as thin as the scythe-edge
of a shadow.

23
We parked the car by the knoll,
where we had the picnic last summer.
We got out and sat in front.
The moon haloed you. You laughed
when I said
you looked like a saint,
knocked my hat off and ran.

24
Your image
trembles in my heart,
the storm-tossed sea reflection
of a quiet moon.

25
When you will have
your hands crossed, thus,
over your chest, it will be
as if you were a blackbird
flying into the moon of your soul.

26
The moon curves into itself,
light into light.

27
Vanished.
Where the moon used to be,
there are not even any
stars.

28
In my dream I chart
my soul's geography:
sea of tranquility,
ocean of storms.

At Virginia Quay

The summer's pressed itself into the water
with a firm lithography

Above, a blue strewn with the wisps
of evaporating sails

Below, a deep, veined cobalt blue,
marbled with light

At its edge the pigeons hesitate, not knowing
which sky to fly into

The wind's plumed brush stirs
its palette of color

Then there is the spray of wings,
a shimmered rising

And an evening ceramic in the
sun's pale glaze

Sonnets B4 the Blaze

1

Buddy of mine wants to start a dot-com;
he lost both his legs to a claymore in 'Nam.
Feds turned down his b-plan as being too radical,
so he's selling his medals to raise up some capital.

Says he still swears by the American Way;
but the bid's topping out at 100 on eBay.
If it hurts him, well, he ain't letting it show;
he's convinced himself that he's already let go.

So calm as he starts to take pics of his wheelchair.
I was sure he'd have listed it if I wasn't right there.
I said, 'Come on bro let me lend you a hand,
saving ass at Da-Nang must be worth least 2 grand.'

Next thing he's crying as I point to the screen.
My sniper's won his medals for 115.

2

My sister's girlfriend still works as a dancer.
Daughter asked what she did nights, she couldn't answer.
Ever since her man left it's covered the rent,
though by month end all that she's worked for is spent.

Since 16 she's been hiding the truth,
behind the last vestige of laughter and youth.
Blush and nail polish to cover the hurt
since the night that her father tested her worth.

Last night her baby opened up the closet,
put on music, mirror-danced in her outfits.
When she went upstairs and saw, she screamed and grabbed her,
tore off the clothes, shook her and slapped her.

Her greatest fear true, her daughter now knows.
22 and the tragedy grows.

3

So here I am dealing measures of hope,
benjamins in an unmarked envelope;
holding outstretched hand to desperate hand,
with my feet firmly planted in the quicksand.

How it all led here, I don't really know;
you start with the weed and you end with the blow.
I tell myself I'm here for a reason, for good,
as if I'm some homey robin freaking hood.

Am I the disease or part of the cure?
If only the answer could be more sure.
All this might change if I could just reboot,
or find the courage to finally shoot.

I wear my conscience like a dark leather jacket,
.357 in the inside pocket.

July

Flat-iron hot,
the sun presses out
the roofs' taut corrugation.

Across the sky the clouds
singe and curl,
a trellis of smoke.

Red Sky

The sun's artery
beats through red sky
like the light
convulsing from an
ambulance roof.

The stained, dark
hemmorhage of noon.

Moonwalk

A story about Neverland
He's quiet as his mother reads
His sisters cry, his brothers stand
From in the dark, his father pleads

He's quiet as his mother reads
The words begin to form a song
From in the dark, his father pleads
He asks if he could dance along

The words begin to form a song
The melody begins to burn
He asks if he could dance along
He rises, makes a single turn

The melody begins to burn
He's walking backwards, not a glance
He rises, makes a single turn
He's crucified the lord of dance

He's walking backwards, not a glance
Afraid to stop, afraid of joy
He's crucified the lord of dance
In the mirror he sees the boy

Afraid to stop, afraid of joy
His world is broken, out of place
In the mirror he sees the boy
Up close he finds he has his face

His world is broken, out of place
From in the dark, his father pleads
Up close he finds he has his face
He's quiet as his mother reads

From in the dark, his father pleads
His sisters cry, his brothers stand
He's quiet as his mother reads
A story about Neverland

Prayer for Lisa

Shaken, afraid, I hold you
Helpless here inside my arms.
Lost in that frail dignity
Of trust, you sleep - and I try
To take you into my warmth
And the warmth of the fire's glow.

Nothing I can say, or do,
Or try, will change anything.
If you should waken, thunder
Breaking into my whisper
Like words I can scarcely mean -
Child, what shall I say to you?

You lie there so lost and still,
Your small hot hand clenched in mine
With a wavering purpose.
I can only hold you close,
Too terrified to listen
To your breath's short rise and fall.

Or my own, held silent here
In the darkness, surrendered
To what takes and moves to prayer
The heart afraid of sleep where
Night could fall, your cry unheard.
Or betray some quieter fear.

Cold, sudden, the wind blows through.
Outside the storm awakens
A trespass into spaces
Irresolute and starless
As the night, dimmed and immense.
And there are no answers. No.

Savannah

A current crosses the darkness,
stirring the last dry shreds of life.

Upwind, a Buick stalks the edge of the pavement,
her voice a gentle rumble in her throat.

Her eyes simmer like the smoke snarling up
from a hammered anvil.

The neon tattoos her skin so it is
striped orange, a strobed tiger, crouched, impatient.

Feather and ivory. A slow, livid burning
in the undergrowth.

Just under the awnings they flash phosphorescence
flamingo flamingo and then vanish into air.

From the antlered shadows a drunkard lurches.
His legs spindle under him like a newborn gazelle.

The window blinds drift and flutter,
hovering wings.

Somewhere on the savannah something watches
with incandescent eyes.

Elegy for a Young Woman Assassinated in Iran

Yours the first death, the messenger, the voice,
Crying out of Persia,
By a single shot from this life untimely ripped.
Louder now than that gunshot grows the noise,
Neda, rohat shad,
Anguished lamentation, by sorrow swept.

Where now your heart, bullet sequestered
Like a stricken love
In your severed auricle? Sister, you fell
Burning, but with that fall you shattered
Our glass lives, removed
From our unseeing eyes the folded veil.

For now we cannot mourn you at Haft-e Tir
Or Behesht-e Zahra,
Instead commemorate you from our homes.
With prayer we recall you fallen, martyred
As if in Karbala,
Solitary voices raised, no longer alone.

Thus we offer up our invocation
To your final breath.
Beyond the seventh and the fortieth day,
Let resound life’s majestic insurrection
Against this first death –
Be not afraid, be not afraid, be not afraid.

Aquarelle

The oars dip in silence, gentle
As the soft light over the waters
Or the ripples slowly spreading

From the shadow of the shore.
Far away the leaves are falling
Into an autumn that is you

And me, our lives gently touching,
Here and beneath the waters,
Like a moon and sky that sets

An evergreen blue.

Rustle

Teach me to be gentle,
unhurried as the rain,
or the soft wind rising
through the branches of the trees.

The way
the light comes in
across a room,
spread through the curtains,
first one side
and then the other,
and then across the floor
in whispers,
edging in until it
edges to the lamplight,
breath to breath.

I want to touch you
with the tenderness of tears,
each finger tracing down
the touch each touch
would take
across each cheek.

I want to speak your name
so softly
only you can hear,
and linger where my eyes
will linger, lost
in stillness here,
until that certain
and uncertain dream
gives me away.

Waking Up Alice

Hair crumpled, eyes half-closed,
You lie with one arm thrown aside
And one arm idling where
Two buttons on your gown have sprung.
One crinkled sock lies on the floor
Beside its dangling mate; close by
The pillow teeters like a fugitive
On the edge of disaster,
Its slip thrown up and off and over
Like a careless sleeve.

Your unsocked foot, stuck out,
Just dares me to grab hold...
...............You stir,
You pull away, still caught
In that half-world of dreams and sleep
And tangled blankets wrapped
Around yourself. You are all
Knees and arms and elbows now,
A grumpy, unshelled hermit crab
That scuttles back into the sand.

All right then, sleep!
I'll tiptoe back and tease
The morning out myself, just see!

Downstairs again, I'll hold my breath
And listen for that painful squeak
You hope that I won't hear -
The second floorboard on your way
From bedroom door to stairs -
And wait in ambush as you steal
From step to anxious step.
Aside the kitchen doorway you'll
Snatch up your trailing sash
And wrap it around your waist again,
And hesitate,
And peek in past the door,
Not find me there,
And turn around...

...............And then!
Too late, you'll feel yourself caught up
Into a swing of arms about your waist,
Your sash undone again, your hair
Brushed back across your face,
Held up, held close against my own,
Into a glide and swirl across the floor
Into the light...

Dear, sweet, gentle, silly Alice!
You are this early morning's dream
Gone out in tenderness across your cheek,
Hair crumpled, eyes half-opened,
Shoulders in that soft half-shrug
Of February's light.

The Bridge at Sakanoye

Perhaps one year the river rose
and never fell, or else the storm
had been so furious
the current on either side
tore out the steps and the rail
and carried way the beams.

Pushed back by the river,
on one side Hitomaro,
on the other Basho.

The bridge remained;
but now we stoop
to roll our pantlegs up
above our knees, where once
its two sides met
the opposite banks.

Your shoulder baskets full of
dried fish and shrimp,
you hurry on to the other side.

For a moment I stand
where I touch
neither earth nor sky.

Another Letter

after Li Po

Only yesterday my whole world
was bamboo stilts and plums
and you carrying my slippers
out into the garden.
...............I was
fourteen when I married you.
Twelve months later you departed,
turning to look back
as you went out the gate.
Now I spend the evenings
walking along the river bank,
watching the color of the wind.

In May, when I face the river,
the wind blows against my left cheek,
and I think of you
sailing down to Pa Ling.
In August the west wind
lifts the hair from my face
and my heart goes out to you
starting out from Yangtzu.
When will you be in Hsiang Tan?

Always I dream of waves and wind.
Last night a big storm
tore out trees by the river,
turned the whole world black.
I woke up shivering and afraid.
Where were you then?

My Lord, if I could, I would ride
the clouds past Orchid Beach
to find you...
...............In the reeds now
the Mandarin ducks are happy.
When I turn away I see
on the screen beside our room,
two purple kingfishers
embroidered on gold.

And I am fifteen,
a river merchant's wife,
afraid of waves,
afraid of wind.

The Cup of Tea, 1880

A year and a half later, you passed on.

Knowing, but not knowing when,
I painted feverishly, dear sister, you:
Leaving background to canvas,
Brushstrokes capturing quickly your hair,

Your face, your eyes, the way you held your
Cup of tea, the saucer poised just so,
Spoon tilted precariously on the edge,
Like our lives.

Bright’s disease. The doctor’s cordial
Nomenclature belied your daily agony:
Wretched heaving, fire in your brow,
Inflammation raging in your spine,

Odiferous blood of smoke, urinary casts,
Edema distending your face and arms and hands.
No, not like this. I don’t want to
Remember you like this.

I want to remember you at the loom, hands
Weaving a luminous flowering on rich tapestry;
On a bench, crocheting a purple scarf with
Fringes of light, in the gardens at Marly;

Driving that carriage, reins in determined hand,
Edgar’s niece Odile beside you, holding tight;
On an ochre settee, reclined in thought, as you turn
The pages of your morning paper.

And here, on the striped sofa, breathing in a mix
Of flowers and tea, swathed in persimmon and lace,
Your gloves soft against the porcelain;
I composing myself with brush in hand,

Knowing, but not knowing when,
Fixing this memory in canvas and light, so I
Remember you this way, until this broken heart
Deigns to close my eyes too.

Text Messages

1
How to distill desire into a space
more breathless than a sonnet? Twelve keys,
translating longing into my cellphone's
terse pentameter.

2
By now you are asleep, lost in dreaming,
unaware of these messages I send you -
my breath's staccato, my semaphore of hope
and despair.

3
Bathyscape of loneliness, plunged
into the night's marine desolation,
and this unhooked handset cord uncoiling,
my tenuous lifeline to you.

4
San serif fireflies, my messages flit
across the cellphone screen,
weaving their arial hieroglyphics.
Incandescent, like your eyes.

5
I listen to your laughter, preserved
in the daguerreotype of voicemail,
playing it over and over until it tints itself
sepia in my mind.

6
And this is what remains of today:
Your dreams flickering against the backdrop
of your eyelids, like the forgotten reel
of a silent movie.

7
I telegraph my verses
one hundred and forty characters at a time,
fluttering text messages, flocking,
a twittering chevron of sparrows.

8
From these spyglass images you assemble
this my alphanumeric heart: letter by letter,
strophe by strophe, in time with my
distant semaphore.

Haven

No longer
the lightning flashing
like an angel's sword
across the earth's
parched throat.

No longer
the monsoon fevered
wind whiplashed
like a thunderclap
across the face.

Storm over.
The quiet ripples
from the verdant center
in ever-widening circles,
a rustle of peace.

Night Heron

Tonight I will draw over
the pencilled lines of the wings again,
not being able to hide them
the way the legs were hidden,
shadowed in flight behind the reeds.

Where my hand shakes,
there will be the hint of where
a sudden gust had startled it
as it began its rise;
where steady, the long neck
arches, as in a dance.

Just so, the reeds bend back
beneath the rush of wings
that are not there yet,
and where the long legs
come out from wading,
the waters circle back,
ripple after shimmering ripple.

Heron, alone and unchanging,
you are a moon whose two sides
are forever dark.
....................You are
the secret hidden in the heart,
the river's grain, the whisper,
the unseen tree
fallen in the forest,
and this uncertain moment
fading into stillness...

Shadowless, in shadow,
rising from the waters
like a dream.

Driving You Home

Tired from the dance,
your chatter falls
and you sit silent
for a moment

with your hands folded
in your lap.
Slowly, your eyes close,
your breathing slides

into a gentle
quiet, your cheek slips
neatly into the shrug
of my shoulder.

And here you are,
just the way you were
tonight, when the lights
dimmed, and the ensemble

slowed into our
favorite song.
You smiled your
secret smile

into the herringbone
weave of my jacket,
tiptoed up to whisper
in my ear.

And here we are,
two sleepy people
nearly halfway home,
a rendezvous in dream

and one already there.

Pastels

1
Over and under,
your fingers weave themselves,
become a part of
the wood and straw that is
becoming what it does not yet know.

2
Every now and then
you ask me the time. Your chair
tilts back. You don't
want to say you're waiting
for someone. You are.

3
Pepper, sage, marjoram.
Across the shelves the air wafts in
from the uncapped jars.
The summer afternoon drifts by
between two salad spoons.

4
Someone brought you
a cantaloupe, this morning.
Among the porcelain on your desk
it sits, like a careless relic
waiting to be discovered.

Lullaby for a Stillborn Child

She rocks the baby in her arms,
Pillaret of salt, lips of balm,
Its fragile, evanescent weight
Shores up her sanity and calm.

If longing could defibrillate
Its brittle heart, or aspirate
Those vacant lungs, so would it wail
A piercing, joyous keen. Too late.

The window light begins to fail
Over her charge, so small, so frail.
Too soon they will return to sweep
This desolation from her grail.

Her lullaby meanders, deep
Against the night’s unyielding keep:
Sleep little baby, baby sleep,
Sleep little baby, baby sleep.

Pacific

Since morning you have watched
Over and over, the same wave rising to fill
The emptied spaces of your breath.

Again, and then again, the months return
Like fingered grains palmed back into the curve
Of hours, sixty, seventy, this year and that,
August gnawing February in a still
Repeat of summer rain. No child, you,
You raise each step as if for a while you wondered
Whether or not to put it down again.
When the tide comes in you stoop
To roll your pantlegs up, so, before
Your ankles sink into the wave.

A wind breaks from the north on the grey stones.

Slowly, without speaking, you rise; you put
Your hands into your pockets without meaning to.
Sad rage, silence, sudden August turning
The windmill seasons of the heart,
Above you gulls turn.

Still I have known you days and days
You will not have forgotten, Octobers, Novembers
Ranged like standing birds about the shores
Of our return. I can recall
The slow, sudden, sure, uncertain
Turn of eyes reflected in the slipping tide
As we approach, scattering across the light
Footfall and startled wingbeat
Crested over the waves

....................Gentle sufferer,
You stand trying to keep the faces I remember,
Absent from season, the eyes, the voice,
The hair unchanged except where streaked with light
From all the mornings you have known.
Here, still here, lost in the channeled thirst,
The waves's hunger, slow axle of dreams
And tethered longing, the moment finds you
Caught between the rising weather like a stillness
Between desire and scorn, again, again...

Spurns me to reason: husband, father,
Dreamer of silences and stone,
You are all you will have given back,
Remembrance for something still and endless
As the sea.

Punctual

The train's smoke drifts across the
space from where the doors slide back.
I step through to the platform,
searching, eyebrows arched like the
curve of a question mark.

On tiptoe, burgundy overcoat
billowing, beret, brick red, steeped high
above your head - there you are!
In the crowd, your flushed, expectant
Spanish exclamation point.

For a moment, life hyphenates
in a kiss, slows to a grand full stop.

Cave Painting

First the eye
comes to terms with its own blindness,
sees through fingertips and the way
your shoulders scrape against the dark.

Green
becomes the way the moss yields to the touch,
the way its pliant hieroglyphics runs
in veins and rivulets under the hands.

Brown
becomes the earth weathered to ash
and flake, its ravaged silhouette
eroded by the breath's slow chisel.

Violet
becomes the color of empty space, of your
arms outstretched in front of you,
of the uncertainty of the second step.

Slowly,
the cavern fills into itself, taking on
like an uncertain dawn the chameleon
colors of the night.

Walking into darkness
is walking into light.

Homework

On the kitchen table he's pushed back
salad bowl, toaster, salt and pepper shakers,

a Maginot line against sleep.
His pencil stutters its precarious

telegraph message on paper, repeating
the wall clock's morse of half-past one;

across the room the radio blares
its muted reveille. No use -

Already the calculator's numbers
are beginning to fray like streetlamps

in an evening mist, already his books
are eyelidded in a conspiracy

of fingerprints, already he feels himself
falling, falling, falling, falling

into the refrigerator's cyclopean snore.
Upstairs his bed waits destitute

among the train sets and soldiers,
cold and unembraced, a forgotten lover

staring at the ceiling, marking time
by the spider's trembling geometry.

War

Why do we keep on marching out to war?
If every fiber in us cries for peace,
Someone tell me what are we fighting for?

Foot soldiers in the clutch of foreign shores
Lie buried where the fire will never cease.
Why do we keep on marching out to war?

Good sailors pace their last on ocean floors,
Their bones dissembled by the shifting seas.
Someone tell me what are we fighting for?

Brave airmen, who in winged battalions soared,
Turn into ash for winds to be appeased.
Why do we keep on marching out to war?

Shoes, sandals shed, behind these temple doors,
We weep for sons and daughters, on our knees.
Someone tell me what are we fighting for?

My enemy, my enemy – no more –
Lay arms down at our feet, with me, for peace.
Why do we keep on marching out to war?
Someone tell me what are we fighting for?

Riddles with Fruits

1
Naranjita, I strip away your
navel-blush veneer of zest and peel;
your pithy heart falls apart,
yields to me a citrus kiss.

2
Sunday afternoon's best savoured
like a ripened fruit, halved, scored,
turned inside-out into an exquisite,
aromatic sun.

3
Unswallowed, it catches halfway down
his throat, pomaceous core,
like a capybara dissolving
in the serpent's insidious maw.

4
Bear grenadine from Solomon's garden,
arils pressed, fermented into wine,
and cupped in goblets sweet
like my lover's breasts.

5
Sliced along its latitudes, this
flightless world ellipses into
translucent green, sunbursts from its
center into seed.

6
Do I dare to taste your sweetness,
singing each to each, afar,
only to find your heart`s core
clenched and clingstone hard?

7
Baskets full from an afternoon
of picking, we sat by the wild bushes
and, by the handful, fed each other
bursts of syrupy sky.

8
Hot as chili, sour like lime,
fish sauce salty, sugarpalm sweet,
refreshing as mak hoong -
love's Thai salad of contradiction.

9
Night falls, your soul's desert
blooms in white. Blossoms of fruit,
pulp of arid salvation, blood-red and
crowned with thorns.

A Mother

Next year, we promised ourselves,
we'd have to get it for her next year,
that sculpture in cork and ivory:
framed in a world of glass,
a house smaller than her thumbnail
and trees and reeds
and a bridge to an island
where miniature cranes spread their wings
for flight.

When she saw it first, a month ago,
at that shop in Ayala,
she held it up to the light
with both hands.
She was so afraid it would slip!

Her dreams were larger
than our twelve-year-old pockets.
Instead, papa helped us wrap up
a china cat we'd found
in a sea front store.
We hid it under the towels
in the closet.

That afternoon we put on records
and papa did impressions
with a made up guitar.
Then there was that smoky, rich, funny
smell coming from the oven...
We looked at each other, then raced
to the kitchen in twos.
She laughed, and he laughed too,
as she scraped
the burnt-out bottom of his coffee cake
from the pan.
We didn't.

After dinner we gathered around her,
our hearts beating
like so many small wings.
First the white ribbon, then the box,
then the layered tissues.
"Oh!" she said. "Oh!"
and she held it to her cheek.

There, between the lamplight
and the window, rocked in his arms,
she held it to her cheek.

Sonnet at Arrival

This, the memory I clung to - coffee
And crullers for you, a doughnut for me -
Sweet glazing over helplessness. Six years
Now, torn from me as your marriage fractured
With my mother’s heart of glass. Six years while
You burned in rehab’s purgatorial fires.
Six years of forgetting, drowned in the tide,
Meandering away from one another’s lives.

Now waiting for me, Arrivals Gate A.
Eight again, I flew into your embrace.
In an hour, at the airport cafe,
We found the words we were meaning to say,
Like a promise kept, a remembered dream,
Over coffee, crullers, and Boston Cream.

Ars Poetica

From the perfumery of dreams,
from the balsam and sandalwood of my joys
and afflictions, by alembic and press,
let me distill my poetry.

The aromatics of joy:
lily, jasmine, violet and rose,
blossoms of citrus, mimosa, narcissus,
osmanthus, unopened buds of clove.

Sadness is the maceration of wood:
distillations of sandalwood and birch,
rosewood, agarwood, cedar,
juniper and pine.

Fragrant arbor, acceptance, leaves and twigs:
lavender, rosemary, violets and sage,
patchouli, tomato leaf,
hay grass and citrus.

Abhorrence’s scent is subterranean:
bulbs and roots, rhizomes of iris and ginger,
perennial grasses,
citronella, palmarosa.

From this the incense of fear:
the resinous secretion of fossil conifers,
pine and fir, amber, copal, balsam,
frankincense and myrrh.

Anger is wrung from gnarled bark:
oils of cascarilla and cinnamon,
the alchemy of safrole
and fragrant helional.

Anticipation, skimmed from peel and rind:
oranges and limes,
grapefruit, cherry, lemon sharp,
juniper berry.

Surprise scatters in fragrant seeds:
coriander and caraway,
mace, nutmeg and cardamom,
cocoa and anise.

Breathe in thus my soul with these verses,
distilled from hope and despair,
from love and remorse,
the subtle perfumery of dreams.

Washday

Breathless and surprised, we'd run
All the way up from the hill,
Hand in hand the way we used to do
In my mother's yard - out and out
And in between the curtained shirts
And socks and pillowcases
Of another week, our faces fresh
And cool with the crush
Of newly wrung-out dew
Against our cheeks.
..........I remember how
I sent you tumbling once
Into a sudden sheet. Rolled-up there
In the grass, your hair and eyes
Entangled in your arms, you looked
Like some half-wakened butterfly
Caught between a startled laugh
And yawn.

The lights go out on the other shore.
Tousled, sleepyheaded butterfly,
I hold you closer, let my hand brush
Through your hair and to that half-shrugged
Shoulder leaning against my own.
Now, for a while, your eyes catch mine,
And all the evening sky becomes
This heaven's clothesline strung with mist
And stars.

Time Zones

Tonight I am looking at the moon
that was the moon
in your sky last night.

I stir and walk, and you
walk with me,
you in the Friday morning haze
and I underneath this Thursday sky
that was your sky last night.

Far off, the world begins to turn
in its unfinished current,
rain falls, the month changes color,
the windrift wavers
between stillness and monsoon.

But I,
I feel no need to question why.
Seven hours, seven thousand
miles apart, tonight
you are only
a whisper away
from my outstretched hand.

And tomorrow the morning
that is your morning
will be my morning too.

Celebrate

Let me celebrate parts of you so secret,
even you have not seen –

All these I celebrate

The nape of your neck, soft and white
beneath the aromatic tendrils of your hair;

The hollow where your shoulder blades
curve into my caress, delicate, like a bird;

The incandescent camber of your back,
ribbed and smooth, arched in surrender.

All these I celebrate

Your eyelids, the coverlet through which
the world filters into your dreams;

The spiral sculpture of your ear,
knotted inside itself like a shell;

The song of your mouth, entwined
in unison with my own song.

All these I celebrate

And those that I have left unspoken,
left unsaid, I celebrate in silence, instead.

Lip Service

Here, between the outstretched
arbors of your thighs,
let me beatify my thirst.

Let me plunge into the crevice
of your longing, where darkness
slowly meanders into rapture

Rose of flesh, your sweetness
lingers, envelops my breath
with a scattered bouquet

My trembling mouth skims
the surface of your tender sex,
tattoos desire on your open lips

My tongue flicks in and out,
a ravenous serpent,
sinuous in your moist embrace

Yes, let me taste you
Here, let me fill you
Now, let me ravish you

Taste you, fill you, ravish you
until you come come come come come -
deep, like an unfathomable wave

Hush

First one, and then the other,
you put your two feet on my knees
so I can take off your shoes.

This morning I remember you
tugging at my arm
as we ran to catch the bus.
When you got off
you dropped your bag and waved.
Now you sit there,
eyes closed, hair askew,
sinking into your huge armchair
with your hands resigned and open
on your lap.

All the way home
you leant on my arm, limping.
You were telling me
how you'd lost the heel
and found it on the landing,
and how you'd struggled up the stairs,
your shoe in one hand
and your bag in the other.
You were telling me
about the morning and the afternoon,
about letters, and appointments,
and misplaced files,
and having to smile
every time you picked up the phone.

Was it after lunch you spilled
the coffee on your sleeve?

I'll tell you what.
We'll keep it half-past six
a while longer yet.
I'll cook tonight.
Right now you just sit,
slide your feet up close,
and I'll ease your soul
back into you
through your clenched-up toes.

Aquatint

Face up, your daughter pushes off
From the pool’s tiled edge, her seven years
Framed by a glistening embroidery of ripples.

The water cascades across her grace,
Faceting the midday sun. You call her name –
And she looks up, a smile quivering on her lips.

For a moment she glides, serene,
A tranquil still-life, opal-speckled,
Captured bliss, like her earliest portrait…

I can see her so clearly, the way you described her,
Her tiny frame still floating in her mother’s pool,
Seven months inside, a misty outline of silver

And stars, shimmering in ultrasound.
They told you, a boy, but your heart whispered
To you her secret, even then. You called her name –

And there she was, her silhouette, your face,
Trifling fingers clasping her umbilical, small tongue
Stretched out, lapping your amniotic love.

She Dreams

What is it that you see with your eyes closed?
When I touch your eyelids
My fingers come away trembling

Bathed in the television’s flickering glow,
Underneath the coverlet of night, she lies
Cupped in his warmth;
..........and she dreams

Of Boston, where her old apartment sits,
The bedroom lined with plush the luggage
Has no room for, as her mother packs;
..........and she dreams

Of Florida, where her father strides past palms
And a white marble fountain, larger than life,
His bright suit tailored and gleaming;
..........and she dreams

Of Guyana, where her grandmother sets
Five places, calling ‘Maria, Maria, come eat’
As her great grandfather rocks and puffs;
..........and she dreams

Of Jamaica, where her uncle sits tinkering
With the remote, switching between menus
On the new digital video player she brought;
..........and she dreams

Of Columbus, where the years of him not being there
Still pain her, the crowds rising in exultation
As Ohio State’s strikers edge in a final goal;
..........and she dreams

Of Los Angeles, where a new friend
Slips his arm around her, and she laughs,
Spilling Grey Goose vodka and Red Bull;
..........and she dreams

Of Las Vegas, where a stranger sets his chips
On her own, before she folds, then leads her up
To watch the moon rise on the twenty-second floor;
..........and she dreams

Of Argentina, Dallas, Denver, Sydney, Scottsdale,
New York, Rexdale, Hamilton – of everywhere
But here, here, here,
..........where he lies with her

Wavering between wakefulness and dream,
Between adoration and fear, in quiet desperation,
Knowing when he sleeps he will only see

Her hair
Her eyes
Her face

As she dreams

For Those Who Can See

for PMD

1

Her eyes remember more than she says.

"The woman," she was saying. "It was her
more than anyone else. She was hiding
her face, trying to cover up the blood
with her hands, but it was all over her,
her hands, her legs, and she couldn't.
They carried her away, but
she kept looking at me, so painfully.
It was just, I was there, at the shop,
where the bomb had been,
and because I'd forgotten the money
I'd run home - I'd only felt the blast -
I stepped out and I wasn't hurt.
She kept looking, just looking at me."

2

With her glasses off her eyes crimp
as she talks.

"We sold beds," she says. "It was
my grandfather's shop first, and his father's.
The door was mahogany. I only came up to here!
We used to have another on the Falls Road,
but that's gone too. There's only
the house now, and only father there."
She muses. "Oh, an aunt...
Have you ever been to Donegal?"

3

She is telling me about the soldiers,
one night when she was out late,
when she was fourteen:

"It was a mistake, running,
when I saw them. Only - I did,
and so they chased me and chased me.
One of them caught up with me
and put my back up against the wall.
He shook me. My teeth chattered -
I didn't know what to do -
Then another came, and he was
saying, 'Chrissake, Paul,
she's just a kid. She can't have anything
to do with them.' So he let me go."

She shrugs. "Here I am."

4

She looks up from her meal, suddenly;
her eyes are laughing.

"One of my friends wrote to me," she remembers.
"From home. Remember Ann and David,
they've been going out for two months now?
They're getting married. In a week!
In Chicago."

In Chicago? She thinks for a long time
before answering.

"It's just like me - only, you know -"

5

July. Home for a visit.
On the postcard she sends, a mother
pushes a pram in front of a domed,
glass greenhouse, the Botanic Gardens.
Beside her, a little boy
in blue shorts and a red shirt.
Trees and sky.

She writes, "Hello! No one drowned
at the graduation. The picture in front
is a bit old now - the poor Palm House
was more or less destroyed twenty
years or so ago, and restored recently.
The brick building peeking from behind
is my department. Beautiful here.
Back soon!"

Postmarked Belfast, 1.30 p.m.
Eighteen years ago it was 1969.

There is no escape.

Earthquake

Flying over Connecticut, the earth
Begins to move. Like a beacon,

The seatbelt sign lights up,
And in its incandescent glare

The window stutters my ashen portrait,
Shaken from sleep. Forgetting where I am,

I reach beyond the faultline
To the seat beside me, desolate and cold.

And suddenly I feel the plate
Tectonics of our lives begin to separate,

My heart beats harder than the whirr
Of the propellers turning, desperation

Quivers into longing, trembles into a
Richter of desire.

All night the aftertremors shake me,
Shattering my calcite dreams.

My heart traces out its epicenter west,
Beyond San Andreas, to you.

Concatenations

'Can we find a place where we can meet
not in silence, not in sound?'
- Children of a Lesser God

You taught me to lip read Bach, placing
my hands on his mouth as he sang. He was
like standing by the sea, feeling the sound
of the earth tremor and the hidden voice
of the coral in my bones.

Listen - in this concatenation of silences
there is something I want for you to hear,
for all the dreams you made my own, for longing,
for pain, for all you are. I want to say - there,
in my throat, the words catch like salt.

I am trying to say your name,
the semaphore that brings you to me.
Fingers joined in two circles mean to connect.
When I move them thus, it is to join.
I am coming out of the silence.

Read my lips. Watch my hands. Translate
my heart from that Rosetta stone
embedded in my soul. This -
this is the sign for need, and this
the sign for you, and this - is stay.

Pillion

A shout upstairs of "Sharon, he's here!" and
Mary's back on the phone. Embarrassed, he
forgets to put the sidestand down, and when he
lets go to take his helmet off, the cycle ‑
and his dignity ‑ collapses into the chrysanthemums.
It's this ‑ and his venomous, vituperative
profanity "Oh bother!" ‑ that suddenly endears.

I laugh, and help him haul it up again.
He told me once: sixteen valves, water‑cooled,
with an 11‑to‑1 compression ratio
for optimum torque and power delivery.
Three hundred and ninety‑six pounds of mustang,
nostrils flaring, 500cc and steaming.
Bruised a bit now, but nothing irredeemable...

The numbers stick because they're exotic, marvelous,
mythological creatures I'd never met before!
But what catches in the heart, Sharon,
is that night you were two mysterious,
jacketed figures by that motorcycle, veiled outside
in darkness. Your mother had one hand
on the curtains, the other on the phone...

Then I recognised you. Through the scuffed visor
only your eyes and nose showed, like a
marmoset in the trees we saw at the zoo ‑
but I knew those laugh lines, the way your eyes
crinkled, and how the sharp bones of your cheeks,
your mother's bones, rose as you smiled. Helmet off,
and your hair flounced out, a magician's bouquet.

We dropped the curtains then. When you came in
we were already upstairs, in bed, the lights out.
Your voice seeped in under the crack of the door ‑
Round and round it goes, and nobody knows...
By morning your eyes were still undimmed,
and all through breakfast you and your mother
were exchanging paper airplane smiles.

And so, Sharon, there he is, ruffled, handsome.
The fact his leather jacket isn't rimmed with studs,
Black Sabbath patches, eagles, is good news.
Go on, tap dance, let him wait a little longer,
pace and cough. He'll know soon enough. I imagine you
riding pillion on the motorway, the wind in your faces,
the earth, as it were, moving beneath your feet.

Daughter

Elizabeth, Jacqueline, Rachel,
Sarah, Valerie, Rose.

As if you were already here
we have begun to stitch
the borders of your name's
embroidery in our hearts.

As if you were already here
we try to trace the outline of
your shape, your face, your eyes,
inside that Polaroid of cathode rays,
shimmering in ultrasound.

If you were here,
our hands would cup you
like a Sevres vase, pulled out
from the straw, held up to light.
You would be delicate and fair.
Your hair would be your mother's
hair, your eyes would be
my eyes.

If you were here,
we would remember songs
your grandmothers sang to us,
we would remember
words and notes
and cadences fleeting as the
swallows on the birdbath,
winged and flickering.

But you are not here.
Always two, we wait for you,
listening when the schoolbus
rattles to a stop outside
across the lawn,
trembling as the whir of skates
go by us on the walk,
breathless as my brother
presses the phone from far away
into our niece's tiny fist,
innocent, unknowing,
coaxing her to say
hello.

And here we are,
whole but expectant,
clinging to all we have,
each other,
and all we know
of wanting
is
never to be waiting,
never to leave you,
always to hold you,
always to keep you,
never to question,
never to doubt,
always to see you,
always to need you,
only to have you,
daughter
our daughter
my daughter

Elizabeth, Jacqueline, Rachel,
Sarah, Valerie, Rose.

Into the Night

Woman, if I told you that sunlight
blinds me, that the moon's cold light suffuses
through my veins, that I fear silver, and water,
and my own reflection, who would you say I am?
If I told you that should I give in
the night will come with your eyes' surrender,
with your soul's wrists bound tight behind you,
who would you say I am?

I would touch you with the tenderness of tears...
But my dreams are the tiger's dreams,
the trampled undergrowth of desire and fear,
the feral heart, the gnarled awakening into myself...

Even now I feel it in me, the wolf hunger,
the fire, the human thunder caught fast
in my throat, like a finger of salt,
the madness writhing free into
one long, lone, lost, unutterable cry...

I am what traces the crescent of your neck
into the white of your shoulders.
I am the hunger hidden underneath
the pinstripe masquerade, greatcoat and tie,
the hunger that will devour you.
I will brand into your skin the fervor of my mouth.
I will traverse the ravine of your soul.
My shadow will cover your shadow.

And yet...
If I told you that tonight I could write
the lines hold me and hold me and hold me
until the night is shattered, and morning comes...
who would you say I am?

Behold the man.

Twelve Stones on a Necklace

1
Air, air. She surfaced, gasping,
her exhaustion trailing her in adularescent bubbles,
like a flaw in the sea’s blue moonstone.

2
Too soon, you vanish into the intaglio of memory.
Where your visage fades into the night’s black onyx,
the marcasite of stars.

3
The mirror tells her it's time.
She takes them off at last, the amethyst earrings,
allows herself to settle in the middle of the double bed.

4
A Saint-Saëns concerto, La Muse et le Poète.
Over the mother-of-pearl inlay on the cello,
your fingers decipher the sphinx' second riddle.

5
You unearth love with a geological intuition,
cleaving this igneous heart to reveal a hidden feldspar,
shining, a labradorite iridescence.

6
Transfigured by Magritte:
your eyes of celestine fire, your lips the blush of rose quartz,
floating in the evanescence of your face.

7
Bipolar moon, you render fire and ice, hematite and opal,
love’s breathless gasp and the wolf’s dark exhalation,
tranquility and storm.

8
A lotus flower framed in a trellis of leaves.
A crane, its beak lifted into a spray of peach.
Ribbons of jade braid into a celadon spring.

9
An Abyssynian with topaz eyes surveys its
colossal domain. Ozymandias, king of kings,
on the precipice of the bedroom dresser.

10
Shadowed in a facet of the rainforest's emerald face,
the anaconda uncoils an ancient geometry.
Finally we are, facing infinity, breathless.

11
Five miles above the Atlantic, you fall into dreaming.
Somewhere between Paris and San Francisco,
the sky turns the color of sapphire.

12
For you I wish that these poems were rubies,
borne by my own caravan from Xi'an out of Shaanxi,
through Persia, along the northern Silk Road