Hardly can I tell you how music makes me weep
Or how I turn coy at a dancer’s joy
With every beat they keep
Miraculous is motion in the human form
Charade sails cross an ocean or beauty in forlorn
Suddenly, I’m jumping and thumping become my feet
All the guitars strumming on city’s crowded street
Willing my belief that you will find in art
Purging deep psychosis and reckless lives torn part
To me this is magnificent, and truly gifted blessing
For the poet always sees and always keeps you guessing
Hardly art be messing

Once you’ve gone
what more is there
to say about leaving

or, for that matter,
the impermanence
of measured words.

All I can do is stand
alone in the backyard
and listen to the wind.

A late frost killed
the magnolia buds

and the forsythia
never materialized.

And so I wait for the worms
to begin their earthy work.

I wait for the pink moon
to rise above the rooftops.

I wait for the smell of mock orange
and the blue of a broken robin’s egg.

But most of all
I wait for your
words to bloom,

to tell me, finally,
that spring is here—

that the gardens we tend to
have something more to say.

The girl in the black
bathing suit swims
through my dreams;

her orange eyes warn
me that summer
is coming.

An inescapable
swelter of air
threads itself
through the slats
of picket fences,

crisping insects
and terrifying
an army of black birds
bivouacked in the trees.

I hear the soft explosion
of hibiscus, red petals as
bright as belly wounds,

and the heartbeat
of the dog panting,
stupefied by the heat
of a relentless star.

Up and down the street,
abandoned children call
out from the bottom of
empty swimming pools.

I slouch in an aluminum chair,
trying to get black-out drunk
on warm gin and tonics.

The tidy rectangle
of grass around me
ignites in a legion
of slender flames.

I remember the dark room
and my father’s deathbed,
his whispered, final words:
dying is thirsty work.

I strip to my underwear
and fantasize about ice.
I pray for the neighborhood
sprinklers to spring to life.