Fine

She would beg:
Press your cool coin
Here and here and here—

If water faring were a game.

But she once paid
For smuggled lips
With children’s years

The same sad way
Her gold-lost fathers did—
A toll nine decades dear.

This swell is no child’s play.

Her only claim:
Scrawled treasure maps and
Deep sea dreams of a pirate’s beard.

2012

Map of Sorrows

Unfold your map.
Soft as clothes,
thin as Mother’s eyelids.

You’ve read the bloody roads
and made the signs for sisters.
The map is older than Alone.

This town called Grief:
the morning’s carrion crow.
Let it fly before you wake them.

Its arc is closer than they know.
Breathe wider in the river Skin.
Break the sky’s dark wish bones.

2012

Breaking One Rule

I will make rhymes
and measured lines

of myself inside
the poem of us.

Wait for the turn.
Watch the couplet burn.

2012

Today the World is the Way they Dreamed Together

White drapes trees, cathedrals, valleys.
Plump branches threaten heads the way death does.
Erases then expands the view.

He dreams the gate of her orange hair.
Snow cannot outline her anymore.
She would lay her head down everywhere.

Remember her beneath the blue umbrellas?
On the north side of the running fence that fell into the sea?
Blazing under wrapped trees?

Sometimes he would drape her in all the shadows of his body.
His own white hair an umbrella.
The sky some shade of blue above him.

Each time he lifted from her, she was new.
And when she stood, the earth, in her shape, grew greener.
Eventually everything took her name.

The world is just like this.
Revealed by what stays awhile.
Then moves.

2012

for Christo and Jean Claude

With a Full Moon in Each Eye

With a full moon in each eye
I wander Denver by car
looking for the moon.
Driven off by street lights and brick,
the moon is sipping beer at Ziggies bar.

Of course I love you,
swears the moon, pissed I’m so thick.
Then whispers, amused,
Crushed angel, come here,
and sways me all night in the blues.

Boom, boom, boom, boom
Boom, boom, boom, boom
Boom, boom, boom, boom
Boom, boom, boom, boom
Huh, huh, huh, huh

Firm hands remind my hips
of the body’s lonely shape
before spinning me out,
arms milk stars
spilling through Hooker’s refrain.

The moon laughs in my hair:
My dear, you have not danced so badly,
trying to kiss the Beautiful One.
You are not so hard to follow, I say,
even when you are drunk.

2012

with Hafiz and John Lee Hooker

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