The only love I have known is the bird that lives in my ear,
In the wind and cloud tunnel of long ago, with a hot salve
Of sunshine poured into the singing hole, the warm honey
Of wives’ tales, the remedy of home against the world,
Though the song has since flown.

Nothing can be said from the lip of the sun,
To array with full redress the wind-flayed waters
Of the river-run and the naked broomrape of Spring,
Absolve naiads of their blued minstrelsy in venous scream,
Or pour a yellow songbird from the gold-rimmed cup of war.
Nothing is said in the liver-spotted ground of rain-ghosted gardens,
Where love’s monument is a blot of dried flowers and grayed thorns.

What is Christmas but the collected dead to say one last goodbye,
To speak in their fabulous, untranslatable tongues of old furniture
And the lacquered shine from the lighted tree and pablum of candles,
All that seems childhood’s undersong of pine and catch-full solitude of eyes.
Until the feeling past Christmas of unwrapped sunset and having said goodbye.

Her dark hair falls like the lowered trumpets,
Soundless as the eyelid-close of Accursed Gates,
Past the city’s outer walls and alley-clotted throes,
Some shield-hearted soldier sent to his earthen fold,
Her blood-rimmed sky-lids of night foretell the phantom peace
Of Autumn like a head sinking down with the fell-purpled leaf of war.

***
Love, you once guided the black looms of Autumn,
Olive-skinned druid, you are a dark everything,
And a toss of your hair flings to dust all of Rome.

America is an untended urn,
Not filled with wick of candle,
But with eyelashes burned,
Butterfly kisses of slaves to simmering plows,
As the Whigs, Mugwumps, and Know Nothings
Like Senates, praetors, and praefactors of old,
In new form, snare the grasshopper pulse of populace.

If we could once more lay our heads—like the universe
Rests its child’s soul in the lap of its native mother—
In our Indian maiden’s lap, where she once rolled
Maize flour and the dusted cornsilk of our eyelashes,
She could knead our eyes closed, and the stars would walk
Barefoot with summering spirit through our midnight homes.

Love is a left-mouse click, a flashing prompt,
For the cursor cross of a Crusade that never was,
And the knight who is broken on the scroll wheel,
And the lady in waiting who backspaces from the real.

Corded muscles of the neck ferry the voice of sky,
Charon of words adrift in a salivary dislocated sine,
A fracture of breath, the stenciled rowing of a sigh.
Psychopomps of moonlight, past-throated vultures,  
Carrion of clouds even if stripped clean in vulpicide,
Even if our scorched and coining tongues tip at stars.