Nowhere

It is
Good
To be
Nowhere
When
There is
Someone
To love
In the
Middle
Of it.

2014

It starts as soft breath

It starts as soft breath—
stillness stirred beyond itself to move—
combs grasses back
like the gentlest mother’s brush.

It then begins to hurry, fret,
rocking cars like restless babes,
leans against trees
like the deepest mother fatigue.

Nothing firmly rooted moves.
Boughs break and fall
clinging to new nests.

Birds mourn.
A roar
groans like birth.

Mother funnel delivers dark dust,
rotted cottonwoods,
rusty cadillacs, family photos,
white cribs, pink bathtubs,
precious darlings

into the trembling hands
of a yellow green sky
that cannot hold them
long enough to cry.

2014

Marginalia

You, the even pages,
I, the odds.

All our words
And margins touch

In sleep.
Come dawn,

We shuffle air,
Spread wide

The spine,
Gutter to the sky.

2014

Vampire

A self loathing bed.
The door in the other room closed.
A knack, a loaded weapon
In hand, formidable.
For crissake, post-sex bolt out the door.

Prize getting naked regret.
The expression contradicts a room
For doubt.
“Sex,” under breath. “Over it.”

Stung and grateful for frustration.
Needed.
She couldn’t remember sated.
Vibrated senses.
Higher frequency too tight for her body.

Tangle still-ripe.
Bite drawn blood.
The strange tongue enigmatic.

The fleeting sense ought to be appalled.
Horrified.
But she lay dark, twisted.
Craved.

2014

A found-poem from Lara Adrian’s
novel, Taken by Midnight, p. 174

Embarkation

One year, in the dark, a man thanked a woman for a night. Earlier, below a glowing orange window he had called her over to his side of the table to share, when he reached for the shred of carrot on her blouse, when his eyes shone with father grief, when he nodded to her awful confessions and, later, didn’t order tea, she felt the swell, the choice arise. She chose. An ancient song slipped their bodies over its head like skin, or ocean foam, a low crescendo. It was a song of saving, the body of a major third. Can two people save each other from the ravages of selfhood? Escape? Who carries whom in love’s concert? The song offered itself. A possible ship, an embarkation.

2014

Volunteers

Light revolves us; we have circled
Hidden suns circling a larger one
Back to this beginning place.
Can it already be our first day?

For you, I pulled back thick curtains
On shame-lights making lace of me.
In my lonely white-rooted darkness,
You touched the lace and dreamed.

Limping, porous too, you packed that house.
We buried labeled boxes in the earth.
Homeless, we became a little mountain,
A long drive, fire and water, couriers.

Now a wide plain, we meadowlark the sky.
My old perennials root some other lawn:
That once-bed of my children’s paradise,
That hard packed marriage and divorce,

Sweet garden of my lonely manhood! Once a girl,
Rilke knew that sky-wrought solitude,
The oneness of austere androgyny. I cried too.
But from him I depart that mystic heroism.

I am no manly woman, you, no woman-man
Nor Rilke’s mirror, but tilled space, broken large.
Here shines not the dupe but multiplicity of our hearts,
Cast in cosmic arcs, sour manure where we grow.

My love, this has been a year of sprouting up.
Our new bed resolves the soil. Love springs
Through what wilted yellow-dry, now mulch.
Some volunteers we keep, some, plough.

The old barn fell for light to fall again on ground.
Forgotten beds untilled for years: they give.
The earth slow turns, and we are turning earth.
Seeds in hand, the garden waits, roughed in.

2014

To Unbloom

Lute-sown
Seed too deep to root
Too raw
To be exhumed
Waits for promise
To unbloom
While overhead
A garden swoons.

2014

Man in the Moon

The full moon
Doesn’t ponder
Unpaid bills.

It is no silver dollar,
heavy breast or milk.
Its halo is no silver ring.

Likewise, it is no tumor,
empty pocket,
Zeus’ oculus.

No wish fulfilling jewel,
It doesn’t shrink in poverty
Or play the lottery.

We do.

2014

once his heart

once his heart
was her nest
they murmured
like corn
over broken barn
answers born
in mud and sky
for river light
and quiet cows

2014

How a Book Becomes Lascaux

Mistaken for words,
I am pictures of sound,
and sound— pictures of talking flesh.
I break from the hand.

From ochre spit
to scribbled script to screen, sans serif
Ariel usurping time’s new Roman,
black curled, looped and deaf.

However drawn, my pages get inside,
paint worlds on your rough walls.
If someone lit a fire in you,
prehistory would revolve.

2014