7
You dance with me
While the wind gathers
In the portrait where you
Fix your hair in a bun,

Your back arched to the camera,
Your clothes on the floor
Where you dance with me
While the wind gathers.

You watch the sky
As you dance with me
While the gathering wind
Tears holes in the clouds.

We hear something final
In the gathering wind
Rushing through tall trees
As you dance with me.

Wherever you are
The wind gathers
While a dance goes on.
I still hear the music.

Hardened to experience
Like gum beneath a chair,
I cannot explain
This lasting hunger for simple fictions.

Yet prompt me as you tried so long ago
To imitate the joker in the balcony
Who shouts “I’m gonna be sick!”
And launches a bucketful of mushroom soup
Over the railing,
To this day I forget my only line.  
The gestures, too.  
And the sound effects?  
The mind’s ear can’t hear them anymore,
Let alone vibrate to them in Sensurround.

But I’m still slouching down in familiar dark,
Feet stuck to the floor, waiting for the previews to end,
Hoping that a moving picture conjures
Something whose absence has become
So powerful that I begin to think
It’s really the presence of something else.

The aroma of our time together
So many years ago lingers
Like the faint odor of mushroom soup.

6
After the casseroles from anxious neighbors
And the flowers stopped arriving
And a last aging aunt blubbered goodbye,
I left the silent house,
Drove to the foothills
And began to climb.
Atop your favorite peak,
I opened the urn
And gave your ashes to the sky.
Will I ever stop wondering where you’ve gone?
The light was changing
As I descended into
The mountain's immense shadow.

5
Beneath a solitary cloud,
I try to imagine
Its hunger for solid form.
It is trapped in its becoming,
Blown along in a captivity of chaos.
I weigh the blessings of confinement
Inside the body’s slower entropy.

The poet frames the void.
The critic voids the frame.