A long time ago I tried to write
A love poem to a girl of my dreams.
I was burning and I was burning
For her. Instead, it seems

I wrote something about amnesia
And forgetting how to feel.
I wanted to win a dark mistress’s heart
Only the burning was real.

Or a different story:
The gulf between objects and desire.
Like the soul in Emerson’s tale,
We can never touch our beloved with fire.

Or loss. A long-legged beauty
Disappeared into echoes that I can’t explain.
Still burning with thirst
I wrote about ashes and pain.

Then I met you on a blooming campus path.
You had sinewy curves and a powerful flame
In your eyes that left me burning
To give your pleasure a secret name.

But it turned into a different plot.
You told me I set something inside you free.
It was new and I was still learning.
I told you, “Come burn with me.”

I think I know what the problem was.
I needed to learn a language from you,
The wordless speech that tongue teaches tongue,
Eye glints to eye, that skin lets through.

And our bodies coiled together
And your brown skin and my pale skin
Entangled in the heat of unity.
The burning flowed from outside to in.

There has to be a word for this,
Something enduring, strong.
Come close, I’ll try to whisper it.
Though I might get it wrong.

1.  Learn forgiveness.  Then withhold it from everyone.
2. Avoid making enemies. Leave it to your friends to find you insufferable.
3. There is good in everyone. The trick is not to let it out.
4. Expect the worst. You’ll be right.
5. Never hurt anyone’s feelings.  Unintentionally.
6. Command an audience.  Then who cares if you loathe mankind?
7. Self-sacrifice ennobles the spirit.  But someone still has to clean up the blood.
8. Don’t dance.  Then no one will watch.
9. Don’t envy others’ success.  Intervene more forcefully to prevent it.
10. Life is short, but otherwise lousy.

Dance was the shape her body gave to music.

Staring at the first cup of coffee
Reminded me of my favorite color,
Darkness, where for so long,
Shapeless I grasped after form
Through unending nights.
Adding cream, I see the mocha
Of your skin
And my shape molds against it
As the sun rises.

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.

Seeing someone every day
is not seeing them,
not in the way of knowing
ourselves, marked by a milestone on a rocky trail
or a spring growing back with azaleas and pollen
and a canopy of elms.

Instead the confetti of moments we’ve traveled together
whirl into the patternless vortex of now
and we don’t know where we find ourselves.
  
Yet I thought of you the other day
and a painting you gave to me when we first loved.
It showed a man diving into the ocean toward mermaids
Who sat on an island, watching.

Next to the image were words from a Jerry Butler song,
“Isle of the Sirens,” about a ship’s crewman lured by temptation.  
"The voices got louder
They sing beautiful things in my ear
I must go to that island of women
I must see these creatures I hear
Love is blind and desires have no fear."
The captain warns him that surrendering
to the siren song is a betrayal.
"Keep course, cried the Captain
Ignore them and let them be
Straight ahead, cried the Captain
Set on by and stay free
Remember laws of mutiny"
The man jumps anyway.
"'Old man, you know nothing
Of temptation
And desires are heaven to me.'
And off he leaped into the sea."

When you showed this to me, at first I thought I
was the man, giving in to temptation.
Only later did I understand that you were the man,
A black woman hearing a siren song
from a white man who lured her with desire and love.
We know the fate of those who leap at the sirens’ lure.
You broke the laws of mutiny.  

Something in my daily cogito has kept this memory close,
reminds me that you leapt
And you’re still here.

Here we are now, in the time of COVID-19,
alone together, shut out of the world,
sleeping in each other’s shadow
bored by each other’s demons,
walking past the blank of each other’s  mirrors.
But I still hear that song.  
Can you still hear it, love?  
Would you still make the leap?

The others look at the ground.
They look at the sky.
They watch for a miracle,
Believing that they believe,
Wondering when they will no longer wonder,
Unthinkingly mouthing the New English Bible.

You ignore their designs.
You wait for the moment
When we will forget
The climate in our clothes
And the slaughter on our plates
And the tongues of our elders
And the mystery of what remains
And that light is our order,
Our kingdom is stone
And that love, envy, joy, despair
Are rituals that we cannot unlearn
As we touch and retreat in predictable ways.

The sun burns its vicious circle.
So you lie down to sleep.
You try to go to sleep.
You hope they remember to wake you.
But not too soon.
No, not too soon.

I stood on the landing
Mouthing words to your friend
When you charged up the stairs
Screaming “Then one of you must be dead!”

I looked at him, at you,
At the pallid wonder in your eyes
When I took that first step
Backward and upward and out
Into the thinning air,
Felt the blank relief of weightlessness.

I floated softly onto the stage
Into a play with trumpets.
Only a rehearsal, the theatre empty.
At a signal from a bald man,
The chorus held its final note.
I had arrived.
They relaxed and the purple curtain fell.

We are travelers all our lives.
Like the sun and moon, never come to rest.
When the body stops, the motion survives.

Time twists inside me.  I buried two wives,
their love spent on an endless road.  My quest  
consumed them, traveling all their lives.

Profligate summer mocks my waning drives.
Riddles of the road languish here, unguessed,
where my body stops. The motion survives

In my art’s vigor, you say, derives
force from what now seems the bitter  jest
that we are travelers all our lives.

My friend, before the end arrives
There must be time to seek again the west
beyond the sunset, where motion survives

in the dying sun, blazing, as it revives  
inhuman tongues that said it best
that we are travelers all our lives.
When the body stops, the motion survives.

My skin remembers your fingers.
My calm remembers your care.
I loved once and was loved.
Read this to me when I'm not there.

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.

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.