Walking the Winter Mountain with One Dog

for Andrea Spain

Our bearded neighbor said he saw
boot tracks in snow roving through
our land. He put his foot inside a foot
shaped hole, enlarged it, your small
Vibram sole print, ballet toes behind cold
steel, danced about by canine tracks:

one set, one less than last year.

I wonder if you met January spreading
gentle shepherd remains on land who,
unwary, receives our bodies in blood
and ash. If I were large enough, I would
hold you that way, as liquid or dust,
and let the wind do what it does to us.

2008

In the middle

We’re in the middle of everywhere,
circling something circling something else.
Perhaps this is enlightenment, to be aware
of what we circle, what circles we share.
I circle you. You circle me. Though
our hearts live beyond this thin
dichotomy and laugh at the word “hearts,”
at the small strong muscle it suggests,
at the “s.” We love in between
letters and flesh, where love is best.

2009

What the morning brought

The rooster at the edge of town
beat the alarm to the day
so as I lay there waiting to rise
I traveled shadows across eleven hundred miles
under shoulder pebbles and mountain needles
through black strings of streams, beneath sharp
knives of yucca and the twisted love of endless
Joshua trees, into tarred cracks of L.A. streets
that took me to your door. I thinned myself
against the frame, and slid, upright, wraithlike,
on tip toe through. I found you
in your shadow bed, kissed all the darknesses
buoying your sleep. Into the ear of your dream
I breathed: night makes us into morning,
and pressed my sunrise cheek against your head.

2007

When an eight year old boy sobs

I hate my life one hundred and eight times
on his top bunk, refusing touch,
and mother leaves his side after trying
to lie beside him, and father lifts his head
from folded arms to let her climb down the ladder,
the boy eventually sighs himself to sleep
while the parents lie in bed almost holding each other
in the dark, speaking in bed tones of how to best inhale
suffering and exhale relief. She says she wrinkles
her brow, closes her eyes, hunches, feels red heat
when she breathes in; opens her eyes, softens
her expression, straightens her shoulders, sees
cool green when she breathes out, because
it is the body that remembers before the mind,
the body where suffering lodges like a sliver
of glass in the palm. It won’t work its way out.
He nods. You have to break the skin.

2008

Satin Sonnet

We slept on satin midnight blue through wind
and swirling snow though yesterday was warm.
Sleep’s perspiration stubborn on our skin—
a silent echo of the springtime storm.

For satin does not with a body breathe
like cotton with its earthen fibered thread;
it’s made for sliding through and ‘round our need,
not dreaming without reaching ‘cross the bed,

though, we did reach as morning broke the night
and woke dark rivers in our silken arms
instead. We whispered, can this love grow bright,
or does love wane once lovers are disarmed?

No satin can improve our honest love, my love,
just holding on ‘til death says we’re enough.

2007

Because we knew I'd be the one hurt

I want to follow the broken Vs of geese.
I know their awkward hopeful song.
They are flying the wrong way, east,
toward the rising sun. Instead I would go west

where, orange, our hope set. The sun drowned
so beautifully. You snapped a photo and
the night before, the string of possibility,
that white spider’s thread between

hearts and tender intimacy. I resignedly agreed
and bled, not wanting you to see me wrapping
the frayed end around my finger
like a child’s simple reminder

of what to do when the time comes.
Yes, west: I would wade in the place
where the sea once rolled in dark
around my unlawful feet, pulled

ancient sand from a spoiled shore
while you mourned the awful coast
grain by grain out from under me
to help me see.

2008

Were your eyes wet?

I don’t recall.
It was dark
and I was

trying to be
the red cotton
sheet, trying to

move my feet
away from yours
just an inch

where there was
warmth but not
skin. I don’t

recall hearing you
sniff and sniff,
but there was

shaking and I
don’t recall caring
whether you were

cold from the
outside or cold
from far within,

my subzero disappointment
seeping into your
chest between breaths.

I don’t recall
falling asleep but
I did, and

I am still
trying to wake
up from you

or to you
or to fall
deeper into the

cold inside your
tears until you
wake up too.

Speaking of Houses

Your house is your larger body, said the prophet.
And your lover said: the house is no longer yours
when the sign is on the lawn.
And people walk through
who never invited you in.
And the realtor said they scoffed at the nudes on your walls.
They huffed: inappropriate for a home with children!
And the many armed deities of
myriad joyful capabilities became their demons.
And the unadorned Buddha with loose hair
became naked shame, not bliss unbound.
And they murmured on your stairs. So you
take this and other images down, box them
And laugh that, in closets, they will
still be the clothes of your most open spaces.

2009

Through

Handsome, we never
had a chance. It’s true.
You were lonely alone,
I was lonely in a room
full of people. We made do.
We had no future, no past.
We had it all if all

we needed were two times two blue

eyes, times two empty
hands, times two blue
nights: double duet of thighs
growling too much desert sand,
too different lives unable
to stand together, so we lay
and now the lying is through.

2008

morning toast after a night fight

scrape off what is black

with a quick serrated knife

to save what is soft

2009