I watch my love,
almost a mermaid,
standing in the kiss
of shoreline and ocean,
washing sand from
her glistening form.

In the pause
between tides
I tie a hope line,
strong as
my inglorious life,
to her toe.

She swims through it,
hardly noticing my intent,
only her friends
crowding around,
reflecting her noise.

Shadows pass her face,
gravely drip
down her body
as her rising beauty
drifts away from me
and the setting sun.

Losing
a child never known
a mother known

love found
love lost

memories remembered
memories not remembered

old man’s tears
grief in womanly rags


heartbreak

The only choice
                        is blossoming
                                            in  the terra cotta
                                                   let the bright
                         renderings loom          
                                                a bloom
                                 too heavy
              for the stem.

1.

The motherless-fatherless God
orphans the world in His own image,
His experience, His own elevated thoughts.

Yet He is unsatisfied, unhappy for
His creation is not perfect enough.

Even the little man with His breath-spark
is an unfulfilling design, in tun dissatisfied.
  
Everything has weight but
nothing has fullness.

Only the birds achieve effortless flight
and the planets spin easily in space.

2.

Creation shatters in the layers of night
and reforms in the weak rays of dawn.

The moon shows the scars of His longing
and the sun the flame of His abandonment.

In punishment He permanently
orphans the land from the sea
and the earth from the sky.

In scorn He lets His man creation
people the earth and die too soon,

the posthumous orphan left-behinds
of His own abandoned dreams.

His child cries out “Father!”
on his forsaken cross.  

Only the Romans sate
his thirst with vinegar.

He can not listen, only turn away
and resume creating and
spinning far better worlds.

3.

The orphans of God feel the fatal loss,
the doom of the abandoned earth,
and refuse to cringe or weep,

hoping the manner of their death
shall redeem their birth in His hope
even as they lurch toward the grave

Luna moths flutter in the captive night light
of early December, strong, determined
to mate their way to the electric crackle
(invisible as a secret trapped in the soul)
emitting from the machine in the eaves.

Their disintegration illuminates the dark
with ultraviolet pulses and heavy musk
drifting to mouthless, abandoned mates,
antennae feeling their starvation, extinction,
the end of all their brief cycle of lust.

The creatures in rockers spend the night
brushing the remnants of their death
off their cheeks, cuffs and hair—
absorbed in their dark loneliness,
avoiding conversation with each other,

The widows miles away feel the tug
of a mouth and mandible forming,
a dream of a shout and tear evolving,
the rock, rock, rocking waves telling them that
they soon will feast on these creatures clothes.

Note;
    
Luna Moths have no mouths and thus cannot eat.  They exist for only a week, being born to mainly mate or die of starvation.

There is a certain satisfaction that comes
with shrinking language and imagination
to a rectangle, fitting black-and-white
words into a prescribed length and width
given human depth through inscription.

The filled sheet of paper almost
transcends its smoothness and thinness,
its very blank expression and dullness.
It reveals exactly what it is meant to say
and the colors one wants to see in it.

Move the imprinted strokes up and
it becomes the verisimilitude of art;  
move the line down and there exists  
scientific equations in plain view;
give it power- and it becomes money,
an official stamp- and it’s the recorder of
birth/death and everything in between.

All of it can drift away if unbounded and
catch fire with the right or wrong spark.

The lavender skin river
whispered with a maiden’s call.

Bonnet curls kissed her banks
in a flush of forgiving tears
for the trawlers bruising
her mercy and calm,
each departing an oily scar
that dispersed in the flow,

for the water is never mean
this cold season
to those that whip her  
yet never scuttle in her embrace,
for she is an orphan
seeking the lost ocean’s reunion.

She wonders on rivery things,
the searching and sloshing swirl,
the geraniums, irises, lobelias
breaking off in purple sacrifice
to soothe her aching waters.

knowing that endless
Sunday baptisms have made her
sacred to those who
know only the dawn and twilight
of the sun above her
and the watery blessings
below that feed them.

The river flowers tickled her and
the laughter spread on her stream
and she knew what she meant
and what she meant to them.
She moved closely away
to the tiny hands in the grass
waving her goodbye
and the longer, bigger ones
welcoming the trawlers home.