A chance meeting at a bar,
   chatting under pouring pine
& knotted wooden star:
   To new friends and a shared shrine;
   to love aging well, like old port wine.

Kite-flying in late April
is new love:

You take a thin string and run
forward until wind comes

to cast it into the upper reaches,
climbing with new life.

You can try to reel it in,
but mostly it follows

unseen impulses.
You can cut the string

& let the clouds eat it,
or rein it back until

it protests against the hand,
& sometimes a branch will take it,

or another kite will cross,
& give you a new string to deal with...

But while it's aloft, how true,
how just is that small parcel against

the powdered square face of sky,
riding a breath into the free rising?

Afternoon's eclipse
a sea of eager eyeless
reborn to the shade.

Look at them, the rain-spotted Lovers:
hand in hand under lathered moon
as the bars flood out at cold close.
The night grass is April swaying
as they bluely stroll down the road,
unaware of anyone, anything else -

there could never be anything else -
isn't that the rule of all new lovers?
No care for a bright-cheeked road,
no anxious looks at a dartboard moon,
just two pairs of shoulders swaying
closer, closer, closer...

Yet now that the bars are closed,
they must join to something else:
a long laughing file beerily swaying,
a newly louched breed of lovers
under foam-headed moon,
carried down a water-hearted road.

Perhaps they sweeten the sotted road,
these two who veer so close
& share this last garnish of moon,
carpaccio of stars and space and something else.
Cars throw dapples across the Lovers,
shy white coins in spotted sway.

We drunks of course are also swaying
vaguely down the rained road,
but how different our rhythm is; these Lovers
tie spring breath tight as twine, and close
their fingers like mating snakes - no one else
seems tide-locked like earth and stubborn moon:

since this frozen-faced scrap of moon
refuses all requests, it's we who must sway
with them, at least until we find something else
on this cloud-tented tar-sown road
to hold us oh-so-close;
they're home, these Lovers,

& so someone else must follow the lolling moon
to become the newest Lovers who will sway
on wetted road as night closes off behind.

Cool Hand Luke has permafrost eyes
as he smirks down the fiftieth egg.

Lawrence doesn't mind that it hurts,
holds up a match and blows out the sun.

Frank Booth huffs his gas, "now it's dark,"
& new parents replace the old ones.

The lights come up, the professor
steps to the lecture square, underneath

the once-flickering wall's altar wing,
& gathers thoughts like garden stems.

Some of us were baptized into celluloid,
we opened our eyes and were submerged

into a breathless 100 minute night,
a wilderness of grayscale myth.

Charles Foster Kane dies today in Xanadu:
his life shuffled for us, as if it means something.

I am flying over Vietnam
watching night clouds slaughtered
by the sleek plane arm
with engine hands.

My book has become tedious,
my partner is sleeping,
so my thoughts spin awry,
a mad turnstile oiled with grief:

Where did my father go?
Where is his mind now?
& What about the curious pull
of the undertow in his soul?

These questions that have no answers
fall like rain into the night sea;
I, too, am part of the cloud division:
drifting along, severed into air.