Memory, led by the hand,
that comes as the sun drifts
beyond a locked door
toward omen and eagle.

Wine dark seas urge
clear notes from a dream
far out past the lands
memory, a burning flame

still alight in mind,
as dark mists cloak
body became thought
memory, grains of sand.

I lie with you and with our memories
Playing like butterflies in soft wavering light
As a taut melody, from mornings coming song
Broods against the restless horizon.
From the first bloom of light
You embodied, certain fictions in my mind
As you compressed, your hopeful dreams within mine.
Buttressed, we thought, to withstand the appetite of time.
Yet we’re so easily winnowed from the past,
We are not now capable of locating our dreams,
Pallidly flickering beneath the constant stars.
Enchantment is fleeting, yet its memory is potent,
And I confess, my love, for a long time
I became stuck down in that cave,
Looking back out over burnished days.
“Be careful you don’t become lost there”
Yet I pressed on, until your voice became thin.

Orpheus had to look back, but he returned to the world.
As night passes on into triumphant morning,
We too have come back, but a shade remains
The shadow that turns, looks back, and listens.
Lyrics change, but the tone remains constant
True meaning lays beyond language
As time weights the scales, they're removed from our eyes.
Rhythm is established in waves breaking over us
Grey overlays gold, but its never subsumed
Your hair shimmers, in the quiet light of the ruins
The aureate thread that led us home.
For we are still here on this morning, the eternal morning
Where love sings all things to itself, across time.

Do I shake myself from sleep? Awake,
I see you there, or do I dream
of that swift peck swooping in
as you pack a sandwich, and shoo me out a door:
'Mustn't be late for school!'
The triteness of finality still frames you,
standing once more on the threshold
altogether, like something meant to last.

What is that sound, when water meets water.
Sometimes far off, like fine down drifting
then close by, giving everything in hard metallic bursts.
A man and a girl like you, once met in the half-wind -
half-water, as night fell upon the wood.
As the trees exhaled, they saw how to be ****;
how to retrace a moon from vague beginnings.
Tonight, it groans sideways across iron roofs
that seem to bend double, even as they hold their own shape.
Somewhere far off, the wind speaks the name,
that whistles bird-like, across the deep water.
And the unfathomable that rest, undisturbed,
murmur fluent lyrics to instinctive melodies,
which become lost, in the hour and the light.

Angry faces wish for sun
As they scurry through the rain
But stop to listen to the constant thrum
And you may hear your origin.

If at the end we become strangers, one last time
and collapse in on ourselves like a dying star.
Try to remember, how the light from morning
once stretched out over a sky, to settle in on our crowns.
A fleeting city, a monument to ghosts and moments,
paused to anoint us.  It allowed us to be,
who we had dreamt we could be
when we used to play in front of a mirror.
I try to imagine if day never ended,
and had the light not burned itself out
could we have remained in a city of memories?
And yet, even as we return to our darkness
I am aware of the horizon surrounding everything,
which has not yet disappeared.

water at dawn
runs by fingertips
onto cold stone
as a robin intones
ripe throated
staccatos
that bounce
along walls
that have seen it all

should I
be happy
wasting days
plotting the gap
between taste
and ability
under giddy sun
that announces all
with just a few
spare syllables

I made a song
to enchant the night
like Scheherazade
striving to hold off
the encroachment
of decree
but I come apart
at the seams
snagged
on the narcissism
of nostalgia

those bright
waterfalls of dust
continue to gather
in fine heaps
by the curtain
and a brown river
smokes on
eddying
inscrutably
in the deep

we are
migratory animals
who never
really move
I won’t live
this day again
though I
live it again
a thousand times

Upon reflection, it is always so
The brightest lights die out first.
But thankful for memories of intensity
I'll never forget, the timbre of the summers afternoon
That I first lay with you.
How the hum of a lawnmower
Playing out across static calm
Captured the infinite space between
Like a blood-drunk mosquito, detained in amber
All sense of ourselves was overwhelmed in sensuality.
When I dream again, I drown in those dissipated glimpses
Dead days that break over me, in vague fragments
Seem less real than this memory.
It remains held there, beyond the reach of time
Shining up above, like a pure moon
To look back upon, and in obscure unguarded moments
Reawaken to the strange bygone strains of an afternoon in summer.
Or as you may happen to remember it, a placid evening in late spring.

The sea speaks of longing
Songs from lost navigators
Echo in the cadence of dreams
Stowed half-known within.

Perhaps the rain has made it so;
Slanting across vague light
Recalling a memory of itself
Having fallen there before.

Desire is that wind somewhere
Blowing the hair from your eyes
Agitating damp leaves away
From a child's tree-house.

Only the dreamless forgo
The pain of things that will never be
As stars give out their grave glitter
In otherwise boundless dark.