I've been in this play before.
I've heard
and spoken these lines.

Will I speak them to you?
I will. But first, about this fly.

I'll tell you about it being
my reincarnated friend, Smita.
She's back to swim in my ointment.
She's back
to tell me it's okay to be
careless with what you wish for.

Her soul would fly up among my wishes.
As a fly she can't fly anywhere
but around me, so she flies to where
I stand and stays in my hand.

I take her
back to that stage where we began.
With no mouth to speak her lines
she still gives them to me. I would say:

"She never understood.
I only ever wanted to love her."

within the seconds of this,
my second time.

But Smita has me say only
"Love," instead.

I'm the old man who can't tell time any more
what lies ahead.  Any way he tells it,
what he'll tell it is always
how he's become more or less himself,
less the more.  He sits
a broken dish
down, and watches the hours run off
the end of his spoon.  It's the same way,
the exact same way
his medicine slops, when he tries to
stop his palsied hand from pouring it.  Oh, how
he'd like to run
off or away or on and on about it
after learning the moon doesn't turn
blue waiting for her cow.  She turns her face for you
not to see her giggle
at the thought of how a cow might plummet.

This moment
right here (and this one
right after it) is (or it was,
and they are, or were)
big-belly, ready-to-drop-
everything, and
run-the-red-lights
pregnant.

No, not with any oh-
so very vaguely named
possibility (you know,
or don't know, the one),
but with a very real
if possibly uncatchable
beauty – all the impossibly
cerulean lizards, lavender
jays and cobalt butterflies
we never chase.

It's (they're) giving
birth (or gave it) again,
not to anything
we'll possibly notice,
but to all of this (impossible
to name) loveliness –
one plucked chartreuse leaf
fluttering down to the chocolate
ground where it will stay,
whether or not (looking
forward or back) we bother
to see it.

See that tree
looking angry with broad
and black arms
low and at the ready
to barge in?
It's there, but put out your
cigarette
and don't think about it.
What I tell

you not to, you know you'll
do, so think
instead of the black-white
woodpeckers
who hang at bird feeders
upside down
and who sound like squeak toys.
Now don't think
about them, how they might

scar happy
trees with arms raised to blue
and a sense
of distance. While your heel
scuffs the ****
out on the walk, you won't
be thinking
about the angry tree
before you.

I've read the news, and it's red
with painted lip prints, and the stain
of stranger thumbprints. They're not
mine. Neither of them. They belong,
lip and thumb, paint and stranger,
singularly to those others who don't
read or write such things. They may
bleed, them, but the blood isn't red,
or crimson, or cardinal, or scarlet.
Pick a shade of red, and it isn't that,
at least not until it's too, too late
to stanch. The bully's standard is to take
it all, all of it except the fall crisp that led
into this strangely warmer winter. I took it,
and I saved it in my bones to prepare,
but the cold didn't come. Not like we
were used to. I'm told the bully wears
what he takes with a dashing style. See it,
that royal blue that outfits him? The flowing
robes? The gold. I've been robbed. We have
been. Not of things, but of a view. A view
with no room for us in its downside-up
very periscope-unlike perspective.
There's no upside to the up-down
and just around the corner trips
I take. To the grocer. To the bar. To
the five and dime. It's fattened up
to a dollar. And the slimming newsprint
costs more than what I get
without the paper. I don't
get it, not the print, not the paper, not
the red lip prints, not the thumbprints
left by strangers, not the news
I've read and I'm reading.

It’s not an absence
this 2am darkness—
half-dark and half-lit
by its unnatural glows—
grabs hold of,
firmly pulling it—
this thing not
an absence— growling
from the dead
black inside a stray
dog’s too-mouthy head;

not just it, but the voices—
untroubled and present
if not too
many, tucked into
a more deeply darkened night.
It takes them, not to
gobble them
up, but to throw them
off cobble, cement and stone
to open places, voices
won’t normally come.

The beauty of it is
none of this,
and all of its
beauty, not the triumphant blue
of a jay’s bluest coup
unsettling the mature greens
and their younger leaves
to topple one cardinal’s redness
and its calm,
not it or the uplifting, baleful grays
that follow to chase
it and us, with the dense, clear drops
pristine brown soils savor,
no, not one moment of it
or the us who share in it,
will last, can last
any longer or matter more
than that instant
my no longer innocent eyes steal
a glimpse of your smile.