.
Sometimes the body is contagion
To the soul.  Stars in their mission fall
To seed the fertile flesh, ignite
Blue waters of sulfureous hearts,
And so the flash is set to cancel
In the flood.  

Sometimes the lip of soul onto seal
Will not hold, before he first knocked
And let flesh enter, thorny pegs
Pricked nerve and pierced bone on his climb
To the rose, yea, some stars odd as
Meteors crash.

In the swan-sea, song-sangy-frame of crib,
Rough hewn words bent mold to scrape, like
Blasted coral, stood half-submerged
Amid sea and sky, for between the leaves,
Behind the eye, there are little stars
Shining like existence.

In a circle world he fashioned green
Blazons about the darkling day,
Fostered by celestial navigation,
Wrote a language for music, on a map of love
And charted the force of green in a wind-
Rose of discovery.

Sometimes the soul is not contained, it
Bursts in silent sound like well water
From the source.  And of men in streets
He saw the pennies in their grumble
Eyes, and of love and its course he rubbed,
Tickling dim stars.

It was his thirty ninth year in that fall
To heaven when the steeping cell,
Refused to push in its tide.  Homeless
And free on scaffold of bone the middling
Man retracted from sun to sink
With the moon, turn-tiding-toward sea
Like a changeling.

And as ever, nor often, unwavering eyes
Sprout through shifting grains.  And as he spoke
Quite rimless, Dylan Thomas was petrified
In undying light, and solid set within a rill
Of reef sparkling in concert betwixt gas
And sea, so becoming in purple sleeves,
This constellation of mute singers all,
Dried five-fingered-fish, bright embryos
Returned to the shell, they burn between the leaves,
Beset the grounded skies and show sprite flashes
In the dark where He has left his imprints, burning
Above and plastered below.  The first rock stars!

Who knows what stops the heart of a song
I take note

of tiny thud—
robin in the wheel well of my car

the limp head
of a cat’s prey

sigh of wings
defrocked by power lines

baby starling’s fledgling flight
falling short of a pond’s edge

The slate morsel unearthed
by the tines of my rake

…and the world is vacant for a moment

Grief ***** a womb of air
but how it lives— I cannot say
Upended creature of us

Stops the throbs that herald life

We took a drive. I had things to say.
My heart was aching, shattered.
I rehearsed the words throughout the day,
Believing that it mattered.

I met you then but I only saw,
The mask you chose to show.
If you were suffering underneath,
Then how was I to know?

I said,
" Your grey facade hides worlds so vast,
Naked flesh of fruit, beneath the rind.
Your future's informed by its turbulent past,
Full understanding; when you look behind."

You said,
" You try too hard, you think too much.
You never live for now.
Wrapping words around the wrong ideas,
You miss the point somehow."
"Stuck in place, because it's safe,
You're too afraid to grow.
If you had begun to change your fate,
Then how was I to know?"

You saw me within a grey facade.
I saw you within a grey facade.

We could not say more, it seemed sufficient,
That love is patient.
Love is kind.
Love is ignoring all that came before,
Loving only the moment.
That coin of the realm: elusive, bright.
Your grey facade hides
Such a beautiful light.
Love has many names.
Call any one aloud and I will answer.
I will come.
You will see.
You'll see me clearly, even behind this grey facade.

She wore a windbreaker as red
as her parents voting habits,
and smoked American Spirits
as rough as the next-door
skateboarder's hands.

At 18, she was bored by
teen-aged touch,
and looked towards the
thirty-five year-old avant-garde
painter, who meandered in his
sun room, like a soul
pretending to be lost.

At 20, her parents told her
to go to college, to go to
'some place other than here'.
So, she went and had skinny,
Greek fingers with chipped nail-polish,
dip down and inside of her, without
judgement, without thought, and,
with this touch, she felt free.

At 24, she was an undergrad with
an apartment and a guy named 'Blake',
and Blake said Brown and she said State.
And when Blake left, she felt complete
despite losing something meaningful.

And when her story started to go on forever,
her body spread across the pavement like
seeded jam on burnt toast, scraped thin,
without image and without future, lost
inside crevices and cracks, a memory
or thought, wandering nothingness.