like us,
take comfort in the soft golden September.
The season for falling asleep,
as the shadows fuzz their way towards the center
from the edges of dawn and dusk.

For those with thin skin blanketing their veins
who feel the wind shift on the retreating edge of the storm.
As the north creeps in like a sigh,
take comfort in the growing silences of

paper lantern stars; watch them rise flickering
towards the fat orange moon bloom in autumnal constellations.
Fade pinpricks in ink as the leaves melt into the crow-cries
the smell of the coming night like smoke with no fire.

You know of it, it makes you lonely
for blankets and the flushed warmth of another.

Take comfort as the wind howls through the night hours
to remind you that no one is ever all alone.
Pull on your thickest wool sweater like a winter undercoat;
like armor for the coming night.

For those with light eyes, thin skin, sore heart
which slows its beat keeping time with the shortened day,

take comfort, and let it sing you to sleep.

When he hears orchestra he wraps his body around it entirely,
As if the crescendos and decrescendos spread out in a vast horizon

around which he can loose and find himself in cycles like the moon.
As if the vibrato could resonate at a frequency that would dislodge

him from this life, from this crippled city, from this traffic on I-81.
As if, like an oyster nursing a sand grain, he could snap shut on a swelling

of violins, or on the ghost of sound that follows the cellos out, the last breath,
as if he could compress it inside himself,  down into something he can keep.

He hands it to me like a ring that doesn’t fit on my finger, and I pretend
as if I understand but the meaning's unclear, and he says it’s okay, listen again,
                                                                ­                                                      listen again,
                                                          ­                                                            liste­n again,

I dreamed that I met your mother.
Not the women that you called by their first names
as a child; not the women your father carefully
introduced to you as you stared down at your knees.
Not the women who crouched to look you in the eye
and said, my aren't you a handsome little man just like
your daddy?
and you, still shy, always shy said nothing but looked into
their brown green gray eyes and saw someone else’s
mother, but not your own.

I met your mother. She who pressed you into being,
who molded you against herself, between her muscles.
The woman who fed you lifeblood
before spilling you out screaming for her.
The woman who looked into your eyes for the first
time in a hospital and saw her eyes and was scared
and packed a suitcase and left before
you grew into a half-version of herself.
I dreamed that I met your mother, and she gently reminded
me that I touch her womb every time I touch you.


She was wearing a long housedress, red with white peonies
and vines blooming and connecting like veins.
She was washing dishes and watching November birds
rise from the fields through her well-water eyes.
My son is a good man, she said and I agreed and the birds
took to the sky in lonely circles and disappeared.
In a dream I pressed my knee into the hollow behind your knee
and your mother smiled and said it was okay,
and all the not-mothers your father introduced to you
disappeared like November birds rising from the fields.

Derailed, and the bridge folds inwards, it came to bury the
moonlight, all sound cuts out. A hundred tons of dust
from beasts of metal tear the summer river dusk to
silence, the moment after the coals met the tributary.

When the flickering dome of heaven collapsed to marry
itself to the earth, to the river bed, to the parking lot,
the bridge, a frail arabesque, snapped like a gunshot in the
silence, the moment after the coals met the tributary.

What strange coincidence, come to pass, come to carry
away long childhood afternoons; her and her final hours.
Whose plans were these, man-made towers that break in
silence, the moment after the coals met the tributary?

Derailed, the bridge folds inwards, it came to bury itself in the
silence of its own weight, as the coals meet the tributary.

I know of the creases in his shoes
but not the color of his eyes,
how utterly meaningless, romanticized
faults of man.

to be taken by the random
coming together of chromosome,
chance and missed chance,

In a dream he came to me;
he spoke to me in rhymed couplets

And my heart of sinew and muscle,
romanticized into something of feeling,
tuned for one moment to the sound of his
end rhyme

then sinks
to the bottom of my belly where it
pulls like a diver’s weight.
exerting itself against my body’s
own timid buoyancy

Open up the sky, come fall electricity
lift each blade of grass to yearn for heaven.
The churning leaves, pounding cataracts come fall,
beat us back into our ancestors, into the earth.

Lift each blade of grass to yearn for heaven
all reflected, caught in the water of our eyes.
Beat us back into our ancestors, into the earth
where words are rendered indigestible as stones

all reflected, caught in the water of our eyes.
Come, thirsty, choke on rhyme and water
where words are rendered indigestible as stones
In the grey and green wash, the last storm of summer.

Come, thirsty, choke on rhyme and water as
The sky breaks, sun behind its gauze of clouds, breaks
In the rose and gold wash, the last storm of summer
and this is that fairy land, the kingdom of heaven.

He and I are the same:
umbrellas on sunny days, nothing in the rain and
shivering, slightly, in the warmth of sunny rooms.

His gentle face watches me walk through the door
and he paces the floor looking for a rhyme
that will hold me, neat like the sonnet he’s folding

                    my quiet dear, who walked in shadowed rooms
                    forever, noticed slightly dimming lights
                    and slighter changes in the weather, afternoons
                    with showers, clear and starry nights.

                    she smelled like air and puddles on the street
                    The rosy blush of clouds after a storm--
                    the pinkish blush of clouds after a storm--
                    the white and empty sky after a storm--

He admits defeat, and again we are the same,
afraid to speak each other’s names, waiting
for rhymes that would’t come, or never came.

But we could slink back into the mountainsides,
coastlines, deep tree recessions and rain-filled
nights, you and I.  Be brave and build a home,

a bed and a desk, fill up our books with poems
about the weather, the curves of our necks, lay
our words in the soil of the cold, careful northwest.