I had dreams of Utah or Minnesota, though
I've never been anywhere close to either.
I dreamt of the endless fields and their
waving grains and the tendrils of tree limbs
aching outward, towards the sun, when it
bothers slipping by.
I dreamt of women
in black shirts tending bars, and escaping
from the seventy-dollar buses hiding
behind green blocks all corrugated and spry,
when she'd take strangers to bed in
abhorrence of the quiet of sleeping to the
sound of no other's breath. For all
her strength she still lay meekly, wondering
when completion would creep by and slip
between the bedsheets with her; he did,
and she smiled.
Her own heart, swollen,
still questions, however, if she should have
taken the lover who'd found light the
first second he met her. But she's no
clue of the words in his head, 'cept
hazy glimmers in late-night rendezvous when
they once were lonely, out on the driveway where
life stirs once per millenium, where love
lies sleeping under the clarity of stars
some nights when I wish I'd not gone
and left your island, your
pocket of silent faith
waiting to happen,
but I held the seeds under ground
within the winter of my heart.
My toepads glide along crushed glass
in mysteries as the dawn breaks upon
the horizonline, the twisting of orange-lit
pale gold salmonflesh torn cirrus,
sprayed across the sky and
over the sea's edge
I yearn for
so late in the distance.
And it all just keeps coming back to
this:
When we lay in breath harmonics as
humanforged dust found its way through
your eyelids, I was screaming of words, never
even muttered, in mine; the straight gaze and
your slipping eyelashes made morse signals that
I would never decode. Downstairs in the kitchen
in a haze
you said tiny words;
the ones I could never champion,
and for once I believed it
and so left
for your sweet smile's sake.
I'm sorry.