wears overalls
and drives an old pickup truck

about half the speed
we’ve set our heart to travel

through this dying stretch of Nebraska,
our trail slicing west without end.

Time admires his work, keeping pace with
the changing season, and forcing us to  

follow: windows down, we fill our lungs
with the colors of transition

exhaled by tinged leaves that grow
up and older, matching the rust on the truck.

You finally manage to pass, and we leave
Time and his fields fading behind us.

I feel you slip away
slowly--
like a breath of smoke
from my lungs--
at once foreign and
part of me.

You drift away
from my lips--
parting,
as if to say,
Goodbye?

Sultry smoke dissolves,
Tearing scars into
my lungs,
As you-- you
also burn inside
my chest(my heart)

and I watch,
with stinging eyes,
all the smoke
fades west,
into the wind.

I wish for:
the fall
the transition
the change
of everything,
all that we knew
or thought we knew

of the leaves,
their greenness stretching upward,
in love with the blueness above,
they reach, thinking
they could touch
the sky,

I wish on:
their love
that changes all things
to gold
that yellows all things
in age
(You decide which)

I wish because:
as we descend with them
as we shift toward the tomorrow-place,
away from the beloved,
the sky,
we will finally know
whether we are
golden
or yellow,
brittle, and broken.

A butterfly collided with
my face, today,
as I meandered along that trail.

His wings bruised a kiss
upon my forehead,

echoing another day long ago,
or maybe from a past life
along a different trail.

I can no longer be sure.

And when I blinked
to rediscover myself,
we were both crying, again.

So I brushed him away
toward the dirt road
and kept walking,

My forehead still stinging,
faintly,
marked with a tiny, red heart.

Two words
you paired and stretched to fit
between us
Bitter and beautiful on my tongue:
Más despacio.

More slow-space:
A translation in my mind,
distant and young and heavy
with so much smooth hair knotted-up
to tie off my twisted thoughts
from escaping.

If only my sheer, shiny verbosity
could challenge
all the air
of that slow-space
you so tersely placed
between
us.

Strike the match
for a brighter moment.

The candle glitters through the air thick with
darkness and thoughts and sounds
echoing from the unknown around us.
Power has escaped into the somewhere else
beyond this Nebraska farm house.

Sealed inside, only the whisper of light.
We must wait
in scant illumination of reality and nonreality.
No view in front of us
or behind.

All we can do is hold our gazes to this
flame
between us:
flickering
each moment
we breathe
together
fragile
trying to beat back the darkness.

And you know what?
I bet it can,
I hope it can,

as the wax coats the fingers of
our clasped hands,
and hardens them
together
in a moment.

We part like two songbirds
caught in different breezes,
You’ll drift south til you reach the sea
And I feel the northward wind take me
toward gray, silent light of evening.

Tucked and unsettled in the newest of nests
I see Silence point her finger
at the holes in the air
where your melody has faded
over the curve of so much land
that spreads out between us.

I try to sing by myself—
Our souls sing in the same language,
A song crafted by the Creator—
But tragedy, defined,
Is singing lonely goodbyes
into the heart of the wind at springtime.