I asked my mind
why it is
you I’ve come to love
A hundred reasons given me
and still was not enough

So I asked
why it is
I fell in love with you
Knowing there’s a difference
between these questions two

My mind took pause, I shook my head,
there was no answer, none
Then revealed my heart, “beloved
“Why it is,” tis enough, that
I need not count past One.”

I remember a time when I
didn't have to remember a time

When butter only came in sticks.
And the trash men came every morning
When a Chevy was just a Chevy...
And my dad parked it for free
and the cops would give us a warning

Memories when freedom smelled like barbecue
and my fingers tasted like Old Bay
we crunched corn on the cob
and sat with lit faces beneath fireworks,
not watching, waiting, miles away

When it wasn't who had the bigger yard,
but which yards could be conjoined to make
the biggest football field
and our parents voices,
not cell phones, called us
to gather around the supper meals

I remember when
lawyers were great
because we hardly ever needed them
When we feared dying more than being poor
When we called them jobs,
not income back then.

I remember when an endless ringing phone
or even a haunting busy tone
required no further investigation...
because at least you knew
she was ... home

...When love meant you don't have to stop looking,
"just keep looking at me."
Because romantic love didn't grow in diversions
like weeds in fertile soils of commiseration
I remember you looking at me

I remember when you could hear me
draw a tranquil breath
between each  spoken rhyme
…rather than me listening alone
to memories tapped
into liquid -
                     crystal -
                                    diode -
                                                  lines.

There is a moment before the sun sets,
just before the top of its crescent
disappears below the farthest edge of the earth.

It is a divine promise of yet another
smoldering spectrum of burnt orange,
crimson and cobalt.

A promise of the days last warmth
before night calls us to dreams...
before we smile,

knowing, with the reminder on our skin,
that tomorrow, the sun will come up again,
only to leave us with this pristine moment
once more.

Such splendid sweet endings to a day…
never to melt into the same horizon...
never to burst with a less spectacular display of Heaven.

This is hope, tumbling over and upon itself...
writhing like eddies, lost in the directionless winds...
this amazement is just God,
sighing into the end of our day.

For Alonso, the day was sinking into dusk
But for Dulcinea, her knight was rising.
Long his lance’s shadow stretched
And thus his stories, picaresque.

He flaunts his tale of espionage,
Purring silent and clandestine
“there I sprung from camouflage
and smote these vile leviathans!”

“Oh, please don’t stop,” the gypsy cries
draining doubt from starlit eyes
From behind her fan of elegant slips
She retracts the rivets to her lips.

Alonso mounts the moment of his concupiscence
to rescue the fair Dulcinea from her diffidence.
But the windmills turn for our quixotic man
Whose delusions are rescued by a chaste heroine.

Years later a man was overheard in Cordoba…
el estaba hablando con unas senoras
“Oye musas, puedo decirte,
he visto algunas cosas.”

“…mi vida se salvo una noche estrellada
por una mujer de gran belleza
que volvio a las tablas de la fortuna
aqui, en mi reino de Iberica…”

Prologue:
                 sitting at my desk,
                 Criss-cross applesauce
                 gasping like a dying child.
                 Dying to flee the corpse of a man.

I, not a child anymore,
Whose imagination is a broad highway
Layered between the wings
Of a dragonfly

Behind me
Stumbling the furrows
Dust from age trails in the eddies
It is I, running like a child

Wagon wheels gargle and giggle
Ungreased, unglued
Another child watches, and watches
******* 99 pebbles in her pocket

Dandelions blink awake
From dust sewn,
Sun pinched wishes

Lost lashes behind me
We, not children,
Chase circles into soil
Tightening the noose
Around the son of the father

Dragonflies sip
Morning reflections
From a pond surface
My highway’s washed away.

Love is a steady wind
that erases what we know of it
as soon as we try to grasp.
It is pre-eternal wisdom,
named by God,
whispered only in the heart.

A feather softly landed.
Let it lie.
Ti’s an attribute of another name.
Eternal light,
Not intermittent flame.
When called through lips
A sound, a kiss became.

When a breath says “love”
It’s lost to winds,
Only to land
if it flies again.
Of this fierce glow
that Love and You
Within my breast inspire,
The Sun is but a spark that flew
And set the heavens afire.

Even shadows choose to whirl
lithely in the beams,
romancing other silhouettes
seeking revelation in their dreams.

Compassion, do not hasten them,
nor wake them from repose
for in the moment two dreams alight
the awoken lover glows.

Stand boldly in love’s mystery
as slings and arrows sail,
through the strident journey
hush, listen for the nightingale,

who’s song seeps through a cloven heart,
mending fragments into one;
seek the source that hides unbroken
in the brilliance of the Beloved’s Sun.