Self Portrait

Everyone says
She’s me.
The long haired nude
In the blue
Painting,
Kneeling.
Hands in her lap,
Facing
A strongman,
Also kneeling.
Bald,
His back
A rippled map
Of heaving
Her love and woe
Like sacks
Of dandelion seed.
No one knows
If his eyes are closed,
Or who he is,
Or guesses how
I am both.
Part silent sea
Of fish,
Part dark beach
Of skin.
Wild eater
Of weeds,
Sky-sown,
Root deep.

2012

Venus in Taurus at 3 a.m.

I, too, am a red light
lonely toreador caught dead center
in the horns of the bull

bucked about until my stories drop
until the shapes of beasts tossing gods
are only self-consuming suns

dazzling distant spheres
or better yet, quantum benders
rolled out across a dark bed.

Everything shines.
I’m done picking fights
with the sky.

2012

Living Inside A Hole

Living inside
a hole I have dug
is a red song.
It has been singing
me for eons.
I am surprised
at its bright,
tiny weight.
Cheery lump
not quite heart,
perhaps lower lip
or tongue. I stare.
I cannot bury it.
It is not a prayer
to a tiny god.

2012

with Hafiz

Clear Hand

Surely the fall
light sifting
through locust trees
across me
does not pray
to land here,
does not pray
to stay.
Would my eyes
and light
could land
like that,
a clear hand
sliding warm
away.

2012

Hundreds of Ways to Read Rumi

I have room in my eyes
for your every poetic agenda.
Make me love what you love.
Woo me indiscriminately.
Show me how to cry with you.
When you hide inside being smart,
I will be amused and hold your hand.
Sweet one, we are only filters
for silence to pour through.
Why curse the nets that catch
the fishes of this human heart?
Let’s eat the fish and toss the bones
and nets back to sea.

2012

Auction Night Lullaby

Cattle cry out across
the town like ghosts.
I must fall asleep
in the many pitches
of their panic.
The sighing highway
rips us from our mothers.
A train splits the town
into oblivious crickets.
Only the trucks groan.

2012

Integral Longing

Third Person
Longing is the distance
between two photons
moving apart at the speed of light
casting and receiving states of being
instantaneously.
One’s spin mirrors the other’s new spin.
The quantum physicist says:
it is because everything
was once gathered and senses twins.
Says the neurologist:
it is because people can have ghost limbs.

Second Person
You are a bonfire eating my liver.
My ribs protest.
You make a smoke signal of me.
No planes are overhead.

First Person
I am a photon with telepathy.
I am a brain with a missing hand
holding a missing hand.
I am a coal-bright liver searching
the sky for myself, growing long.
Clouds yawn
and disappear as I darkly approach
whispering rain.

We have nowhere to land.

2012

The Sounds that Mean You

It is hard, this ache.
I slip words
in ache’s pockets.
Ache shuffles them
like quarters to spend
on someone to hold.

2012

The Day He Took in the Refuge Tree Thangka

“The Buddha is strong,”
declares my ten-year-old in amazement.
“He has a whole army of buddhas!”
And I take him in my arms,
my body breaking
into companies of cadence.

2012

with thanks to Samuel Rune

The Horizon is an Impossible Place to Stand

The horizon is an impossible place to stand.
If no one witnesses you, you are not there.
In this world, there must be two.

Let’s say space is the thing that shrinks
between us like a folding sheet,
four hands meeting, matching corners.

Today it happens just like that,
this folding up of distance and days.
One call, one keyed word: we touch.

It is not the touch of our mothers and fathers.
It is not a cache of scribbled love letters for scholars.
Who can study what flies the air between?

When they hear us conspire against mortality,
sculpting gods of one another in one night,
they will know. Love, too, is made of ones and zeros.

Nothing uttered is lost. Looping out
like threads, this fabric only expands.
Whose hands can reach that far?

2012