And thanks once more to the earth
for a clear morning
allowing me to bid goodbye to
the mountains

It is as if a have breathed one
great deep breath

Bluegreen complexion taught ‘round listless soul.
I guess you weren’t there to catch me.
Gray is the sky of my mind, blue out my sill.  

Let’s sit down and tell each other the stories,
Omit the part with tears,
Note the laughs and kisses,
Grapple with the time frame.

Nodding off inside boxes of strange gazes
Only for ever, even off the train.
Where to place my eyes today?

Who offered 6-year-old-me deals of a toothbrush or a paddle,
(I took the paddle).
Who would call to say “be there in ten,”
And rang again in forty-five.
Who told me to stop trying to sneak out
And just use the front door.

Who, on every spontaneous trip to Barcelona or Belize
would add another nameless instrument to the stage
of our living room, with nameless band mates to follow,
and would drag me from bed at 2 AM on a Monday
and hand me a guitar.

Who I learned to play guitar for, so I could send to her my
“Wish You Were Here” and she could listen from wherever
her 1970s camper and wanderlust heart had taken her.

Who gave advice of “If you’re gunna be stupid, ya gotta be tough.”

Who yelled at Ashlyn and me the first time she caught
us with a joint- “What the hell are you doing? Don’t you share?”

Who, after I invented master plans of how to get rid of
the smell of cigarette smoke and spilled beer, how to keep
Troy from sleeping in her bed and Jordan from drinking her Captain
And Jeremiah from eating all the food she left me,
always returned from her trips and knew, within minutes,
that her house had been our playground

Who would simply ask, “have fun?”

Who mistook adolescent angst and the silence of my Nirvana daze
for a resentment of struggles past, and
Who thought I felt better off without her around.

Who may have been right,
but was probably wrong.

I

We sit on a tailgate pointed toward
the hills, where life ripples down the slopes
gathers in pools of the creek and begins again
to climb up the peaks and tree trunks on the
other side. It colors the breaths we take
green.
Children run here, learn their legs, as stalks
graze their shoulders and block their
view. They get dizzy as rows rush by.
We rein in our bovine friends here, watch
them jump and kick, see them call in
spring

II

We walk between rows of highly stacked cement and exhale smog that drifts
upwards to
join the cloud of soot.
We walk among so many abrasive shoulders. We get
hung up on abrasive personalities.
A gray wave in a black sea we’re vapidly
drifting. Legs move quickly to stay afloat.
swimming. Swimming always. Swimming further.

III

We sit for pictures with clogged eyes and stuffed chests
We coo at portraits of masks and dummies
We write books for laughs and money and friends
We read a little to find the romance and sorrow
and lay cold on the slab while our own pages turn.

IV

We pass out of porcelain faces with their tightly
drawn eyes that cast gazes over shoulders, homes
of last night’s kisses. We pass out of the electrical
current of youth
numbed and still alive
with eyes that look like stained glass windows of the
Church of Holy Suffering.


V

We wait for Sunday night to turn the dial to the Blues. We keep throwing something for an animal to pick up and return.  We string beads and sell them for redemption.

VI

We think of our friends. They’re draped in a future,
warmed with hot blood rushing through their veins,
slamming fists to tables, pronouncing their minds.
ripping off dresses, sharing their madness.
tossing paint to canvas, showing their hearts.
asking questions to startle, proving their love.

VII

We think of our parents.
dead and gone, dead to us, dead by self-proclamation -
Is their blood cold and still in their withered veins?
Have they their fill of slamming fists and ripped dresses and tossed paint and startling questions?

VIII

We are sad.

Black as black; Gray as gray.
He is burning in hues.

He wraps himself in black,
but it doesn't hide the facts.
Once, he was hung.
Suspended in gray.
Black grime smudged face.
And it turned- faded into the
soft, easy remnants of
people, thoughts, places-
all things the most
loving and generous brains
assign color to.

The eye moves to his wrist.
Rainbow beads washed in wear.
Bandanna bleeding, tied there to its home.
Hang tough on his wrist,
clenched and raised.

As the undulating bodies part
the neon lights catch her face,
and her piercing gaze catches me.

A panorama of nothing but a blur.
But her- sharp.
Thirsty. Blazing.

Her hair is sleek and straight
but the way she throws back her head,
runs her fingers through the strands,
makes a tousled mess as entrancing and as
playfully wild as the club swirling around her.

Her lips are red. A challenging red.
The color of a delicate rose, but also
the color the harlot wears in old films.
The color of sin; of desire.

To unlock those lips
And tousle that hair
And lure out the voice….

To have the power of a man’s gaze now.
To be able to throw at her the force of
a chiseled jaw and stubble across my chin.

To know my role is to chase her
like a brave doe that turned
to look at me in the forest.
Who bounds away gracefully,
Knowing my sights are set
and the target is upon her.

How she would know my adrenaline
surged with every step she made
that took her farther from me.
All the power would lay in my
virile hands, to pull the trigger
on her when I may.

Ha! I laugh at my roots in the world that
imposes a craving for the rule of power.
Your gaze tells me we don’t belong there.



I move through the bodies toward you.
Toward freedom.
Lift me from my roots, darling.
We’ll run together.
Give up the vision of a pointed gun.
How’d they ever make me think
I wanted to be shot?

Oh, what a vision. What a creation!
My long locks twisting around yours,
how my lissome fingers get their
chance with you. And those
supple lips lend me the magnetic red hue.

How different the whole scene becomes
when the both of us are provocative
creatures, two nymphs swimming together
in the water of seduction.

Continue on, Odysseus.
Go conquer Scylla and Charybdis.
Master the seas of half the world.
The Sirens are singing to each other.

I stand on the edge.
I hang in the gap.
I am the mist coughed up
by the ocean.

offered forth from the water,
I am suspended droplets
drifting through the valley.
Hanging between the lushes
of mountain sides

I mingle with the leaves
and they may receive me.
I caress the ancient stones,
this colossus that holds life.
I stick to its edge
give it a shimmer
but cannot break its seal.

I am the mist which
emerged from the sea.
I hang in the gap.
I stand on the edge.




                     -18