i find, and i've found the seconds
stay still, and
they move faster as i count them.
i've counted them
slow and fast. i'll slow them down, and settle
in the middle
of them,
slide in right between them.
in their gaps, i was, and
i am, a wish. i can,
and i will, wish me there,
and wish her,
and him, and her again, all of us
wishes. i wished us
as those wishes spelled out in smiles.
we're smiles
meant to wrinkle, and increase
with that wrinkling. we, as wishes creased
the freckled, and the pale, the mahogany
skin on bridges of noses. we are, we'll be
those wishes written
out in sparkling green,
gray, blue, brown, black eyes. i have,
and we have
sparkled. we sparkle being them, whether
those wishes come true, or whether
or not i am and can be,
and they're all now, the seconds, here with me.

The rain bowed, deep, and the sky spoke in strokes of cheap yellow about how its time is short, or shorter. It spoke about how. How's a tall order. It would sort the how out with the clouds who applauded. They're still applauding the rain.

When the coin dropped, it drops
with a clang. Clanging's
a kind of language. A kind coin,
it coins me as phrases. Its careful
words are phrased not to spend me.

If I could still hold your hand in
my eye, I’d turn it over there
and I’d pull it into mine, my hand
and my eye, and I’d use it, no them,
your hand and mine, our two

pointing fingers pointing out like
two small sticks parting from the same
broken branch. We could scratch-
write together our word, one word,
maybe two words, before the fickle white,

and your hand, and mine slip away
again, a foot, a yard and then
a mile falling between and on
us to break that branch’s end.
Our word, or our words, might stay

behind to look out on two new children,
a boy and a girl, well-bundled in blue
and red cottons, by mothers, against
the cold. They might, this boy and girl,
in one afternoon, assemble, then tear

down an icy fort, a fort made of more white.
It, our word, or them, our words, might
stay and pretend other words are
coming, other words to keep it or them
company when the boy and girl go

back to warm suppers. Words
we could write, or could have
written, of the ways we’d live
and love and share in each other’s
tomorrows, and of the way we’d hold

the suns-to-be, the suns of those
tomorrows, up against one light,
the brightness of this white and the one

or two words we’d left in it. There’s no
sun today, there’s just this white, and it
shines instead before it parts with
our two hands, our two sticks, our one
broken branch. I’ll hold them all in

my eye.

A dozen starlings
dozing in the evening sun
doesn't dare the season's end.

It dozen-n't, dare it,
these dozing within warm pinks
to dream up spring's spry bend.

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.

there, come upon a greening once ........................... in ticked and timely woulds
where all footed plantings have danced & swirled, ... he takes a speculative girl
they tip-toe tentative steps of belonging .................. to meet, to part, join fingers & twirl
till they reach an inevitable verge ............................ but with each successive passing
of the will to do & was not true ................................. she grows fainter in his mirrored should &
their shy shadows wobble in recognition that ........... her hands can only feebly grasp at
what's lost is found, but never bound to ................... this fading pane of here

Should stolen silver wings make soft
cutting of glass and steel...

Should thumbs of clouds smudged red and gold
stop watchful gulls mid-dial...

Should broad-shouldered blue shed brave skins,
then feverish crumple...

Should there ever be a morning
when grey snow falls on warm
September sidewalks, and brings us
no damp or cool
relief,
but the burning
silence of five thousand throats... how
could I write that canvas?

The difference isn’t. Askew,
it’s a greasy stain.
To be hidden
and scrubbed clean, they bid me.
I’m staying.
The same, it’s true,
I’ve had the same complaints.
Here or there, they’re buzzing
by me like flies. It’s plain
but comfortable up in this attic’s stew.
The flies are actually staying
below. They won’t go
near me, if there’s no
prize for not sinning, not even
originally. Time’s sly.
Like the flies, It won’t go by
me, not when my having it’s been
done. Long ago. A fly can’t sin
not even unoriginally, and I can’t
tell the difference. Not now. I can’t.

I’ve known
several women with the same simple name,
but this morning she’s the one who came
to mind.
I whispered it softly –
her name – just once
(I wouldn’t repeat it),
and you didn’t –
you couldn’t – know
the same name held clinging
*****-blond curls,
the interrupted curve of a bitten lip,
the upturned twitch of a switched-on nose,
a sparking flame at the center of midnight eyes.
Did I make it all up,
what I saw
when I whispered
this same name...
what I saw
when I whispered it,
your name,
just once?

This coincidence
is only the difference
between paying and stealing attention.
I stole
a glance at a bus. It speaks its destination
in lights, and the lights think
they know where
you are. I don't, but I know
I won't go there.
I know instead
I'll go home and not watch the TV
where actors speak with words
not lights, and they speak one word to me
at the same time,
the exact same moment in time,
one word, a name,
pops into my far-away mind.

There but for now. here, The grace of unknowable gods goes. me a mere trace of what they can be, I don't know them or I can't. but I do, Know they're not. too mighty or merciful with their slightest. hands, Those invisible but not invincible hands. they used to grant me life.

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.

lonesome doesn't move, it clings
to time-tapered tree limbs,
to grey
sidewalks refreshed with a white snow,
and to the blood red brick walls overlooking them,
but not overlooking what went
past, no, not overlooking what passed as a life,
a life that went speeding past them,
with no quiet moments to take a breath
or to sit within them;

the past didn't go
the way she wanted it, the way
we'll see it, not the way
the blood red brick walls wanted to feel it,

but the bricks hold it, with tree limbs,
with walks, and they hold her,
and they offer her, still lonesome,
Hattie, stilled by blood, here to me,

and she comes to me, no, not her,
but the thought of her still blood, and when I take her,
or the thought of her, I take it
away, a little of our lonesomeness, the blood

She stood
thus, I wrapped fleshy
tendrils about scratchy
bark and consoled her
for all the trees I imagined,
rightly or wrongly,
were sacrificed to rusty
notions of progress
neatly packaged in
emporium form;
the saffron leaves
and peppery roots
lost to dusty
reverberations.

That's when
the crow came,
glowing eyes above
fierce wings, his caw
hinting at mockery:
"Don't flinch,
I'm here to help,
and you'll not get far
imposing such
improper intentions."

"The trick," he went on
reassuring me,
"is to always
stand apart.

"Yesterday's sigh becomes
tomorrow's squall
unless today's kept
at a distance.

"Fly up,
but not too fast, or
the only thing you'll feel
is dizzy."

And that,
without another word,
is just what
he did.

said isn't told. said
isn't telling. i've told
the hours to slow.
i've told
minutes. i've told the moon
to hold
its blue in deeper. what's soon
unheard is saying. i know,
i said.

Wherever you start, there's a beginning,
it said,
beginning to lure me into its crystalline
blue, dotted
not by dots but by blurs of a deeper blue.
You knew
all along, as long as you could, it couldn't, you
couldn't, keep you
in the where there where you were. It did, not long,
but long
enough to learn. I followed it then, not wanting
to stop. Long,
it stopped and turned and smiled back at me, us,
a grin
tall at both ends. It wouldn't end till mine was just
beginning.

And the bay, not purple
but purple
in this light, addresses
all who pass by it
with its uncountable,
jelloing tongues. "You
didn't come here to stay. You
came to put on calcite
layers. To let what's inside
grow, or change,
or become, what you'll become
when you no longer come
here."

Most don't listen, they watch
the wind
make a dead leaf hop.

From down here, it feels
there's nothing
there, but when you're in it
up there, lit
bright blue or a shadowed navy,
the air lets you feel it,
and how it could let you
go, if it didn't love you

so. It will let you pick through
its pockets. They're yours.
All of its is in you,
and it's yours. You're its too,
when you're up there, or down here.
You'll forget this, but not the way
you forget which shirt you wore
after sitting too long in the dark. No,

you'l forget it the way you've forgotten
how gorgeous a stand of trees can be until
you've seen them again from above, them
down here standing in their grassy, mossy,
rolling places. And it's then, you'll forget
you were just telling yourself
how useless and tedious though true
this life can be. Not when you're in it.

My religion says,
all this lively life is
precious,
not just the human kind.

It says,
there are no heavenly ups or hellish downs,
there's is,
and it's all around us.

It says,
there's not one way for love to love,
unless
it's without even this condition.

It says,
all we know is
so much less
than what we can imagine,

and it imagines
a universe of expanding beauty,
one or many
in a one that's universally beautiful

and never wasted,
not the tiniest bit of it,
even as we slip
away then back into it.

From isn't always. To is,
and it comes with a blue
bucket sporting red letters.
It comes in a blue bucket hung
upon a wing. OD is an ending,
the ending of that red,
and of that reading,
but I don't know
what it ends. It's not

ODD. That's a beginning.
Even odder, it's not
where I'll keep this secret.
I'll leave it, not in a bucket,
but where I always do, where
I left it before, in the internal
ear you'll listen to it with
while you read it. It's not
really a secret. Have I
told you? Have I ever

told you, each time
the plane's wheels lift up,
it feels only slightly,
only slightly less
miraculous
than the beating of your heart.
Then the beating of your heart
lifts me. It takes me
from and to.

Sometimes-things, they aren’t
drawn clearly enough. Sometimes-things aren’t
meant to stand out. Black sits on black,
then it moves around to white. Come lie back
down with me here, I’ll tell you about them.
They’re most times things, but sometimes I see them
and they feel much closer to something living.
It’s not that they speak or move, it’s something
in the way they lie so still but are still shaking
within. Are you shaking now too? No it’s not shaking,
it’s a hum. A string continues to play its song,
much later than, long after, we’ve stopped listening. Long
after we’ve stopped. Can they be, when I know they’re not?
I can’t see them seeing me or being, and they’re not
like me. They’re more and they’re not, but it’s just then,
when they are just things to me. It’s then--
are you still listening-- sometimes
I know I disappoint myself by thinking it. Sometimes
I know they mean to have more meaning than I can find
in them. In the blank somewhere spaces where I lag behind
them, sometimes I crave to catch up. The wind can
make such a pretty knocking sound if the tree’s hands
will play along. No don’t get up. I’m almost done.
I’m trying to tell you I want to be that someone
who’s willing to live sometimes like them, and when
not, not frightened of some place where I’ll lie down by them.

this dark-proud night doesn't fall, its partner light
leaves. i did fall, falling into a night
that was hidden. i fell, and i'm falling
toward a too shy infallibility. the failing
light is where sleep loves, but love can't sleep,
not when there's night to break, and light's promise to keep.

The fly on the wall
stalled, its small
head pointed
n
w
o
d
,
not to listen in
but to black glisten in
the reflected light,
the wall's, and then fly

I don't like it
repeating myself
I do like it
repeating others' sounds

This hissing fits
the night's shut eyes
it fits, the hiss,  
its missing ears

I won't miss it,
the hiss. Where does the air
slip, when it stops
repeating after me?

A winter fly,
not yet dead in this dead of winter,
flies. It flies
in the face of flies not facing winter's
little white deaths.
Not yet.