My dreams have become waterlogged: floods
and unstable bridges, broken levies and
water leaking into our house
from the crack beneath the screen door.
I see you from the streetcar window,

as the flood climbs the sides of our
city's monuments; its storm-darkened cathedral.
At the far side of the bridge, in your rain jacket
and arrows of wet hair, against the swollen sky,
you stand holding a sign to your chest.

Your eyes like lost pebbles in a stream bed.
I walk to you over the rails, the deluge raging
under my feet, purple storm clouds tinged
with sick yellows raging overhead.
The sign says the end.

and perhaps it is, perhaps it was.

I hate the miracle of my anatomy!
Cried the woman-poet from the
bed

the man slipping silently off her
while in the next room
the dogs howled at a
television nature-show.

That night he had
called her brood-mare,
took her to pasture,
tied her to a post and shot her

and now he reclines
all broad shoulders, white
chest and body hair, smug in animal
satisfaction, one with the dogs
in the living room.

She covers the flood-plains
of her hips with blankets
and prays that his
hooks didn't catch,
feeling like a basin collecting
groundwater as it flows off the
mountain face.

A list was compiled during the
short walk from your neighborhood to mine.

Organized first by duration (in seconds and milliseconds)
beginning with the brush of our fingers
on a beer bottle which passed from me to you.

Then by the thickness (in centimeters)
of the clothing, skin and sinew that
stood between your beating heart and my own.

I fear it will never be rendered to zero.

When we touch my sternum swells
like the muscles of a bird
pushing it into flight.

Every time is a miracle.

Crocus-hearted bloom, in careful ways
he cultivating quiet love inside
that snow-filled part of him. Across I stray
the border of his acres, vast and wide.

Through his field I dragged my hungry bones,
but the landscape holds no place for me.
The gentle gardener has tilled his rows
and through the soil he has spent his seeds.

Somewhere a lady wears her mother's dress
shining  ivory, pale as orchid bulbs.
Her heart it bangs and thunders on his chest
like storms, and in their rain I am dissolved.

Woman, hold him through the night when dreams
of me rise like demons from the angry sea.

he read Brautigan
and thus would say all this is juvenile
and not real
he was real in a ***** brown sweater he wore
every day I knew him that smelled like menthols
and sweat and dope (he called it dope
sometimes because Bukowski did and he
read Bukowski too)

of course
he was real in his Catholic school
sports coat and fresh face once
without the 5-day beard he took to
wearing as a ******* to the system and other
real things like that which he sang
about on his guitar with a hole
in the bottom

the one he found in a
second hand store just like he always dreamed
he would and they would make sweet sad
music (that high and lonesome sound)
together forever he wrote his
poems to the tune of its steel strings
when he would sit at home at night and get
high and lonesome too

and so would I
because he thought I was ugly but didn't know
how to say it so he let me tag along for a few years
and let me sing in my off key death rattle
and lent me Brautigan and Bukowski
so I could know what was real and not real
but I didn’t learn my lesson so well

now did I?

You are walking down the street in an unknown city,
it has no name, so you name is Grey because it was and so it is.
A bus pulls up beside you and stops a few paces ahead,
you didn’t realize you were standing at a bus stop until now.

Out steps a man, a should-have-been lover from your youth,
grown up and smiling and walking towards you. He holds
in one hand a suitcase, and in the other hand, a different suitcase.
He stops in front of you and a cold wind finds your neck.

We should have been lovers, he says to you. What happened,
you ask. Life happened he says, as it is apt to do.
He hands you the first suitcase, inside is a folded love note
written in your hand. You feel a little sick to your stomach.

I don’t want this, you say, it is over, it is already dead.
He hands you the second suitcase, inside is a neatly folded
three-piece suit, several pairs of socks, and an apple,
in case you get hungry on the way, he says.

You don’t want to stay here, do you? He gestures to the city
without color that you both have found yourselves in.
You don’t want to stay here, but you are afraid of what
is over the distant hills. Where should we go? You ask him.

He looks east: a hundred birds rise together from the fat green trees.
He looks west: the sun dips into the ocean, spilling itself everywhere.
He looks north: heaven domes overhead, constellations whirling.
He looks south: black soil blossoming blades of grass, pushing up.

You can go anywhere you like, he says, one might go so far as to
call the world your oyster. Me, you say, are you not coming?
I am not, he closes the first suitcase, your note held inside like
a crumpled moth, but I have something to remember you by.

Just then, a bus pulls up alongside you, and the doors open.
Don’t forget to write, he says, and the apple, in case you get hungry.
You set the suitcase in the empty seat beside you as the bus pulls away,
and the motion of the earth spins you onward, as it was and so it is.