A butterfly landed nearby.
It had auburn wings
and azure circles on each,
like a pair of eyes
that looked through me.

“Butterfly, you are beautiful!” I cried.
“You give me pleasure.
I love you.”

“Love is a beautiful thing,” said the butterfly.
“I need food. You have flowers.
Can I drink from them?”

“Of course,” I said.  
“But aren’t you going to love me back?
I am a butterfly just like you.
Tell me that you see it!”

“Nothing that I say,”
she said, “can make you a butterfly.”
“If you want to be a butterfly,
be one.”

1
To suspend
A summer day in glass.
Complaisant green,
This blade of grass.

2
To give away
Grief, unfeel a caress,
Nourish a hunger
For emptiness.

3
To insinuate
to love’s unanswered skin
syllables of desire
pricking in.

4
To build
a terrace of form,
inside the weather of confusion,
a private storm.

5
To wander
through rooms of the mind
searching for enchanted objects.
What do I have to find?

6
To mark
against the slippage
of another year
that we are here.

Last year's version of the mind-body problem:
my mind gives orders that my body won’t obey.
It’s a problem.

The body’s warranty has expired and
spare parts are scarce.  Plastic tubes
To help me drain have become part of my day.
So there’s still a will.  But sometimes no way.

I am now my sister’s age when she died.  
And some nights
as I lie down in darkness
there’s a moment of wondering
could this be the night
of the Great Reckoning
when everything I’ve said and done
goes mute and I am gone.

And crawling over me like a slow stain
is dread that everything important in life
has already happened. I remember some days  
less than my dreams.

But friend, not this tone!
Let us write a history of now.
Body and soul, stand up and shout
“Baseball road trip!”

Car:  check.  Best friend:  check.  Nostalgia for a simpler
time.  We can fake that one.
The red zigzags on our map turn into places:
Six ballparks in a week.
Detroit haze, gasping Chicago wind,
Milwaukee self-serve micro brew
Cincinnati chili and watering eyes,
Cleveland’s defiant self-love,
Pittsburgh’s Primanti brothers monstrosity sandwich—
Burger, coleslaw, and fries on toast.

The American dream tastes like fast food,
But the mystery lives between the lines.
Thwack of fastball into catcher’s glove,
Whock! of line drive into the gap,
Ball rolling free across the green
While the runner speeds for home.
Home.

Let’s keep going, friend.
There’s another bridge up ahead and
a ballpark’s lights shining somewhere in the dusk
of the upper Midwest and the open road
unrolls toward the setting sun.

1.  Lying in the Dark

I stare toward empty heaven
which darkness fills
and I lie down,
become the horizon,
axis for the night to spin.  
The past was worse than you thought,
voices say, and poetry won’t keep us quiet.
I float toward sleep
on a tide of loss,
drifting toward morning,
beached by sunrise,
stranded in the empty skin of another day.

2. The Reappearing World

New light assembles the same objects
and forgives mere longing
in ordinary darkness.
Gloom is porous.
Dawn seeps in.
Things of the world resist
but return to radiance.
There are voices, laughter, faint at first.
Love like laughter comes when it will.
Warm flecks of morning dance in a square of sunlight.

In this place
The air is so dry that water sulks.
The sky is a viscous brown mosaic.
The sulfurous fumes of old suffering linger.

A woman stares as if trying to unsee creation.
Words on a man’s tongue sound
like rhythmic coughing.
At the only stoplight
the crosswalk sign flashes “Don’t waltz.”

Strangers recoil from me
as if from an embarrassing stain.

People stream to the town square
for some indecipherable ritual.
Probably a funeral for the sun
or a snake oil sale.

Welcome to humankind’s true garden.
Not paradise but a place of desolation,
and what comes after is not exile but striving
and getting the hell out.

So long, mom and dad.

A landscape devoid of transparent eyeballs.
When did we all become photographers?
Freeze fleeting things,
filter clouds, endless beauty a simple effect.

Funny how enclosures feel obsolete—
the graves, the houses, three-sided mornings—
when I am a share, a like,
self-simulacrum selfie.
I stand on a fascinating algorithm,
Below that it’s reposts all the way down.

Share, share a like,
share a googol of happy lives
better than yours.

Are we saying yes  
to starting off yet again,
absent this time?

She invited me into her palace of art,
Where everything signified something else.
She wore a silvery gown,
Covered with a million miniature mirrors.
I was badly dressed.

“Beautiful lady, be my love
and heal my soul.
My life is fragments.
Make me whole.”

“I made this place to stand apart,
A window to a world purer, deeply felt.
Everything here is for you but my heart.
Don’t get the idea that it’s going to melt

Later on.”  Music played.
Nirvana. Or maybe it was “Deacon Blues.”
Twisted letters carved
On doorknobs offered clues
To someone else’s mystery.

“Then be my muse,
Teach me the language of clouds
The coded words on the ceiling’s vault.”

A digital river flowed beneath
A winding stair down to an analog sea.
I asked “Are these ‘caverns measureless to man’?”
“Yes,” she said, “But not to woman.”

I wandered through room after room,
One printed, one painted, one sculpted, one
Paneled with friezes like the blazing tomb
Of an epic queen deified by the sun.

I saw a near-empty room with a single chair.
The light defined its form,
its form escaping into light.
“Is this real or a photo?”
“Yes,” she serenely replied.

I came to two doors.  One said Discipline,
One Desire. “How can I possibly choose?”
“They lead to the same place,” she said.

What was real and what wasn’t flowed together
“You’re starting to figure it out.”

The innocence of a woman’s arched back,
And the wisdom of children.  
The solitude of a lonely pier.

I knelt and I thanked her “Was all this for me?”
“I made this to give away. Not just for you.
What have you learned?  Let’s review.

“Art is a shield
Against falling glass. Art healed
My divided mind, which used to devour
Itself, giving away its power.

Art is hunger, a piercing lack.
Art is a ride on a gull’s back.

Art is a dodge, the as of the mirror.
Art destroys, callous clearer
Of old order.  Art is a dance,
a surrender to chance.

Art is not all seduction and fire
Or tethered to your desire
(Except when it is).  
Beyond the dazzle of you and me,
Art is a failing light for learning how to see.”

I said “Now I understand less than before.”
“Then you’re ready.  
Imagine starry ways beyond these walls.
Use an innocent eye.  
Confusion calls.”

I never saw her again.
But it was enough
to start small.  

She tempted me like an empty page.
From this immense vacuum, I write.