Christmas drifts by
under insensate stars,
under a blue scarf
of evening, under
some ether, under
risers of smoke.

Yellow Spot is poured,
& moments begin
to skip away
into the fallaway rain.
Christmas is red fingernails
and a green sweater.

Christmas freights along
in shovels and palms.
It walks the streets.
It drops into parks, silently.
It sips its Yellow Spot,
or something like that.

They buried an elephant
here, in 1922:

White and brown
wet and scattered
branches.

Soon, the bars will all close.
Soon, the restaurants will empty.

Yet this wild archery lawn,
these elephant bones,

this wild strawberry tree,
these rose benches where

we ate our bread and wine -
they will carry on.

Ten days green
in the quarantine,

as the numbers
combed upwards,

always upwards,
enough to make one

invoke Jeffers.
Sitting beside you

at spring tide
at Sandymount -

the sea will carry on.
The canal face,

blushed with swan,
it, too, will carry on.

And now you and I,
on the sunken patio,

in ruined deck chairs
sitting and watching

the sun splash in -
carrying on.

Where is your body
when you text me?

In the searching dark
of the bedroom, where

the drunks and gulls
bear cries against the window?

On the riverwalk
when the clouded gray

syrup leaks through
onto the water face?

By the fresh red trees?
The third floor coffee?

The archery garden,
near the strawberry tree?

I will tell you, darling,
that my hands are busy

filling these lines
3379 miles and 5 hours west

of your river city -
but I wish they were busy,

following the lines of your nape,
your shoulder, your smile.

I am somewhere between
your waiting eye and
the slatish sky that
breaks away easy from
the office of rain that
withholds half a world.

I am something between
the passion of Yeats and
your passionate wait,
given to me across
the five hour sea,
full of firsts.

A branching chime curls
into a hanging chain
of grayish rain.
The neighbors extinguish
all their yellows,
placing the winter
back in a black relief.
I'm leaving tomorrow,
off into the marrow
of the world, to see her,
to step into the unwritten;
nothing can slow me -
on my way to the quay
I'll throw over a river.

Thinking of you -
the night caress,
the black lip flower,
the water hall.

Sleep won't come -
only the quiet wait
until the soft white
hoof of morning.

But I'll mail these
little ponds of thought
to your bed, in case
it softens your eye.