Once we found a solace in our nakedness
And wore our bright bare skins
Like standards held above advancing armies

Gliding and caressing
Until the one of us who had been full was empty
The other brimming like a jeweled bowl

The colors of the spread
The slanted light
The sigh that rushed between us all at once
Then turned to laughter
Rising high above the crickets calling up the night

The way we rose like ghosts
And crept from room to shadowed room
Our bodies long parades of flesh
And how the air itself seemed wet

The tiny house grown smaller in the darkness
How we stood scant feet apart
The blade white stillness of our bodies
Gave the only light

How I spread myself before you like a sail
Reached as far toward heaven as I could
How you touched my chest and said 'Now me'

How you held your heavy ******* up in your hands
They way they gleamed and shimmered
Like globes unearthed from royal tombs
Lit from within by ancient alchemy

Or how your hand reached out

The way I slowly bent my head

There was a solace in our nakedness
Tell me you remember

I know I've been here in this afternoon
4: 10 P.M.
Like lubricated clockworks in a perpetual machine
My life returns to this brown earth blue sky
Pressed in between the distance
And the silence and the cries of crows
Who gather, circle, and grow louder
In the rising dusk.
This is how it has been, is, will always be.

This red clay bank where the road was carved
Has risen here forever.
That old capped well has always dripped and echoed
In the plunging darkness
And the far-off crack that is cicadas breaking from their skins,
These things have always been in motion.

That path that disappears just there between the trees
Leads now, as ever, to a grand but faded house
Drowsing in the humming shade,
Where my father's fathers lived and died,
Lay open eyed and wide awake
Through first bird sounds and whipporwhills
As grey ascended into daylight once again
And just as always far too soon.

A place where lost boys raged
And beat their hands against closed doors,

Is this my road, these shaded woods,
This certain path the only map that I can read?

Sometimes in the small hours even now
I think I hear the pounding of my father's desperate hands
On doors locked, bolted, and immune,
The ringing of his secret wars
Down darkened, pine floored corridors
Where secrets are piled thick upon each other.

The only sound I hear now on this narrow road
Is wind that hisses in the branches
In sharp swift gusts from long ago

Standing now beneath those branches,
Owning no locked door to pound upon,
I wonder why my clenched and aching hands
Are bleeding.

Thunder rolls and rumbles,
Distant in the fading afternoon

Wide eyed and open in astonishment I watch
Those long and curving red nailed fingers
Close around me in the evening,
Sun setting in the windows of the Hudson
Shenandoah or St. Augustine.
You gather yourself down
And hurl your graceful throat against me.

Wide eyed and open in astonishment you rise
Toward long slow strokes
My hands above you in the morning,
Daylight in the windows of New Jersey
Rhinebeck or the Appalachians.
Your belly rises in my hand
My fingers splay inside your shivering.

There have been many places; fields and orchards
Tombs and cenotaphs,
Anthems and arias,
Airports, winter moons and summer winds.
Gasping at some place just newly touched.

Quite often in the night I find I have reached up and out
And wondered why there is no weight above my empty hands.

Then, open and astonished,
I feel that you have come to rest within them.
Close my curving hands around you,
Remember other moons.

Drawn lines amongst the willows dripping,
Shadows of the morning,
Sight set upon the evening star,
He gazes at the solstice moon,
Plots placements of the plinths and altars,
Holds the hearts of sarsens.

Tomorrow all the villagers will come
Expecting messages and blessings.
Tonight he only dances.
Robed arms upraised
Reflect the branches overhead
Now shattered by the starlight,
Recessional of priesthood.

Across the yawning sway of centuries
He smiles.

He knows the fervid moss
A dream much like his own and all those after,
How the generations falling down
Will wonder, touch the giant stones

And breathe

At last
The yawning late night conversation ended.
Silence surged and widened over us like sleep.
Your roommates knew we wished them gone
And yet they could not bring themselves to leave.

How did it feel to them?
The way we clutched them near us
And at the same time
Wished them far away.

Hands clasped,
We shivered at the prospect
Of two distances,
Heard faint goodbyes
Then sat like blocks of marble
In the humming silence,
Shaken children filled with questions.

How will this be?
My God, what now?
And all this strange aloneness.

A narrow breasted, dark eyed lover
Spread her hopeless shadow over us.
The morning pressed in through the windows.
I plunged into you.

All night I'd planned
How soft, how gentle I would be,
The way I'd ease myself inside you
Like a melting, precious metal,
Slip through you in the darkness.
I could not.

The wait had been too long,
The low cloud crying over us
Too vast.

My ****** was sudden, sharp, and deep.
Your breath rushed in.
Your body arced.
Your gasping cry soared up,
Fled down the empty street
And echoed in the dreams of one
Just learning how to sleep alone.

I rose up on my hands,
Looked down upon your startled face
As if I stood high on a deck
And felt an old ship
Sinking under me.

Your thighs below me were a lifeboat.

I closed my eyes and jumped.

Becalmed, the doldrums bear down frowning.
Hull fouled by weeds, persistent barnacles.
The ship is steadfast in her silence,
The light alone enough to shatter us.

Beyond us, off the bow the dolphins plunge
And leap toward home
While we, a company of refugees,
Lie static on this open ocean.

Our eyes are burned by distance.
No breeze to flutter them,
Our tattered flags of truce no longer fly,
But hang like limp, compliant prisoners.

We pray for wind,
The puff-cheeked gods of weather
Drawn upon our useless maps.

A force 10 gale,
The flecks of wave tops on our faces
Rage, determined demons,
In our dreams.

Far off the glacier ice exhales.
The world was so much warmer yesterday.

Leaves blowing all around the town,
Gusts scudding from the polar seas
Hurtle past me like a slighted lover

Last evening from my window
All was green and gold.

Now the trees lunge up like spiders,
Fingers closing after something gone.

Even as the light bends deeper
Every breath pours out more mist.

Leaves that sizzle in their hustling by
Like whispers born of skeletons
Hold chorus with the strongest crickets

Growing quiet.

Waiting for the ferry
I found a piece of Delft, or so I thought,
Blue white and shining on the rock beach at St. John's,
Mixed it in with unfamiliar coins of Canada
Dreaming of a foundering ship,
The dish and how it might have looked
Stacked on all the others in a busy galley
Ages back when it and she were whole.

I walked along the rounded stones made slick with growth
And watched the tide sweep out so fast
It seemed the ocean raced to find its home.

You lingered by the picnic tables.
I saw you check your watch six times,
Wondered at your sharp fixation,
Your sense of past and future,
How it might survive me.

Later in the empty bar,
Amidst the dreaming roar of engines
And the splashing underneath our hull
I thought I heard you laugh but I was wrong.

You were huddled by a table
Peering pious in your half filled glass.
The laugh I heard came from a stranger.
A fisherman I came on later on the deck.

He pointed towards a far direction
Misting emblems of his home.
He said he missed his wife.
I envied him.

I was moving far from mine.
The closest thing to memory,
Those foreign coins
And small white fragments
Jostling close to silence
In my pocket.