you exhale; it is the wind through
the forest; the rising of brittle
brown leaves

into a uniform, twisting thing
of color; our lives bounded
along its length

then it rests; the long brush-
stroke reaches canvas’ edge -  
a clearing

(this is not the end, but as if
only to pause for another
breath)

I finished
a bottle and then
opened another
and then
had a glass and then

poured the rest out
and called
a friend, who didn't
care, then another
bottle,  I can't

bring myself to cry but
on the inside violently

I don't feel anybody's
skin beside me

relax the sun is good and see it
come in through the window but
there is another source hidden and
secret is the heat that rises
from your chest and enters mine
and breaks down the walls of
the city inside and heals
all the broken

yesterday with you in
March, the cherry
blossoms - please
don't miss the little
flowers in your
search for a more
giving thing because
my sweetest love,
there is none. only
the children know
this, but I think
we are all children
after the rain.

Green eyes.
Green, yellowish in
the center.
Sunflowers in
the center, and
white skin and
freckles and
everything else is
red

Old myths dying under
the new sun
rising, spilling over
grassy fields dotted
with poppies

The day is unspoiled.

The blooming of the Western
Azalea is
emergence into womanhood!
The inevitable burst of  
color from bud, that
once released-
cannot endure the contrast,
cannot linger in the
putrid air
between us- a film
covers her pink blush.
Everything returns
to a uniform grey.

It is late September
which means
Summer is dead or dying.
And this confirms the rule-
(there is no god- and always
a final descent).
But living is to thirst
for an exception.
This is Love's promise:
that its brilliance will shield it
from its fate.
It is the same promise
that Summer made.

It is not enough
to have known her.
(She was near the ocean).
It is not enough to hold
in the mind each pattern
on each petal
(a Summer flower).
To love is to believe
that Summer persists!
But this is not the order
of living-
She is momentary,
like all things.

This is the loudest the music goes
I have nothing left to drink
still, all around me are the wolves-
circling...
get on with it!
you devoured all
the beautiful things
already.

A body lies in the dirt,
and the vermin circle it
until the flesh submits,
and then it is no longer a man.
He no longer thinks
of the ******* the train
or his mother's sadness.
The rebellion has ended.
He is only earth now,
rotting.

Strange creatures pace
under a fading half-moon
and some people get dressed
get ready to go to work
or school or the cemetery
and on their way in the car
looking east- the terrible Sun!
If only you could delay its
entrance, if you could postpone
the turning of your world
around it...no. We all claw
desperately at something,
half-formed and fleeting,
just out of reach

It is your doing, April.
Your clarity pulls me
to the fields
where grass is wet-
my eyes fix on
pulsing of color in flowers
blooming.
It is April's doing.

I want to hitchhike down
those highways

(the long streaks of color
in your eyes)

past your thoughts and into
our garden

Free now from your books, you
walk the path behind the halls
where a bird completes her
pirouette
and descends onto a branch
shaking its flowers. Petals
are released!
and float down in
increments-
Lowering, degree by
degree in a swaying motion
against the gentle pushing-back
of spring air

They land in a pond.

With night sky
there is usually
a moon there.
Usually.
But not always.
A pale surface
beaten into—
An expression,
as if saying,
"I am tired.
I have seen too much."

So potent was the resemblance,
so rich the imitation,
of meadows of wandering green,
with some red (tulips)
breaking through.

But careful not to chip the paint.
You drunkenly mistook the vivid
for the real. It was not real.
Here is the origin
of your sadness.

You were once enchanted by
the atmosphere we created.

Like emerging from childhood,
the world filling in. Frame by frame.
Into something more miraculous
than you thought possible.

So we laughed at a brittle winter.
The sharp tree branches not to be feared
but to be loved for their nakedness.

There's a song
that forces my memory back
to a train in Chicago.
I watched through the window
the trees passing.

Two days.
The warmth of your body
and the warmth of the fire
indiscernibly bound.
Embraced as we were.
Woven as our hearts were
in the Winter, just west
of Chicago.

The two of us, suspended,
stunned but not questioning,
our ability to feel
the absolute brilliance of things.

We all swing back and forth.
Half the time there is darkness
which we get lost in.
Sleep:
where we again meet the people
who at some point made our hearts bleed.
And again,
they do that.
This time in darkness, but still with the color.

The dawn breaks because the world turns.
I see that the Sun exists.
Which it also did yesterday.

When I remember
pressing my face against your neck
and tucking it under your hair
and kissing your ear,
it's the smell that overwhelms me.

In memory, it's more like a color.
A brand new color.
A more beautiful color.
In delicate hues it comes and goes as I breathe.
I breathe deeply to try to capture it.

But I can't steal the rawest of your beauty.
Although I may, for a moment, remember the joy it gave me.

Sometimes
when you're sleeping and I can't
sleep,
my mind races.
There are things you don't know
about me.

My hand
on your shoulder and traveling
down.
You notice
and turn around and smile
at me.

It's your
half-asleep, eyes-closed smile, those
red
red lips that
will keep me forever
silent.

There are some nights when
the music is a little
sweeter than the wine

Before I go into the cold I want to walk with you through the memories and kiss and drink and dance with you there and point at the stars which are really the lingering sparks that flew in my so many moments with you of anger and love and we’ll be sad but we’ll be happy and we’ll be laughing and we’ll leave when it’s time to leave because those moments happen only once and we'll know that and that's why they're beautiful but we’ll know we saw them and that they lit up the sky and we’ll be brave and we’ll be ready when we go into the cold.

Speak to me
Don't write to me
Don't write to me with those foreign, lifeless
periods that keep your words from dancing
like they used to
when you used to
Speak to me.

What is the difference between love
and a physical sensation?
Between happiness and satisfaction?
Where do they all intersect?
Why are they so different
but so easily confused?
Will someone draw me
a diagram?

the wind picks up the
leaves and they dance in little
spirals and when it slows they
fall like the end of a
puppet show

When you find yourself
wrapped in loneliness
or violently suspended
by a rogue desire,

uncloak yourself.
fight free.
you are always
in control.

It's amazing, the Variety
of feeling in that which
we consider lifeless.

Like how the moon pulls
at the sea, sometimes in anger
and other times in peace.

You are in some ways the same
and in other ways different.
You have the Variety of a landscape
but the steady warmth of a beating heart.

Show me a gap in the trees
where they don't stand
so menacing
on the border

So I can see you
gaze from your window
for something
in the distance.

So I can sit on
my porch and wonder
what your big blue eyes
are searching for.

The key to the lock
to the door to the room
with the chest that encases
your heart

is buried just off
the Nā Pali Coast
in the sands of the
Pacific.

Stop reading this.
You belong with the young and beautiful.

Hello
I am the rock that was thrown at your window
waking you from your dreams
of the boy who threw me

I celebrate the culture of your face
because your face has a culture
with its very own traditions
like when your upper lip
covers your lower lip
when you're upset

Regardless of what the future holds, I know
that no feat of mathematical precision
no combination of zeroes and ones
no mechanical tool, no algorithm
can replicate your face.
In the rise and fall of your eyelids
and the pursing of your lips
there is a lawless radiance.