Moon, blow your light
my way, but don't cut my time

Let me dream just a little longer
while my eyelids shine
in the dark starlight

Let the ceremony end slow
back in my old home,
not in a cold forest near the sea

I want to see again
those three rivers that flow
together and listen to a woman
singing to a child
in her mild mannered way

But in spite of the night
and my wishes
something keeps creeping
past me in my sleep
like numbers of smoke

It was you, dark woman,
walking across the room bare
footed turning on the air conditioner
in the winter, a pair of scissors
in the folds of your robe.

My soul
is getting older,
the nights are colder

and the soles
of these soft worn out
doe-skin boots are thinner

every day, way too thin
to keep the thought
of a frozen plot at bay.

Two people are sitting at a table
in the afternoon, it is winter
and cold outside, dark in the room

She is dizzy and sad
from sipping the flat beer
of her own voice

He is like a stranger
who just blew in
she knows, if a man is sand
those who walk through
the desert are men

He is thinking of a stone
that flies in the dew
of the moonlight, an easy
thing for a sad man to do

I wonder if it was night
and they left together for separate
beds in different rooms

Would he think of her dress
falling down her waist,
or would she be in the jungle
making plans from the enemy's sleep

In a place like this, together,
looking into a table
wet from its own darkness,

What do they need,
what can they say?

Imagine we are home
and not lonely, imagine
our love which once cut
through strange waters
like longboats through hearts
not slow and heavy
from the moss of fear
we are here and not here
nights in our land are sad
the risings of the moon
are like sores we have given
our women, and we cannot sleep
for what we dream
the enemy will do, like filling
our children's throats with rocks
and place them in shallow swamps
where they will rise up
to tell us of fish with odd shapes
and men with torches
coming in from the sea
up to the beach on a black night
throwing open the gates
to our dying city.

Cold days, dark nights,
yield memories left
like headless corpses
on some ancient field;
seasons and years,
blood, sweat and tears,
the chains and links,
those things that bind;
blinding sharp beak,
black murderous bird,
winging over peaks,
leaving these worldly
lows below behind me;
my dying wish is for
restful bliss in winter's
white sheet stiffly lying.

Somewhere just to the right
of that second star
in the sky

there's a black hole
******* the joy
out of life

Maybe I'll wave at the moon
as I fly by sometime soon

I'm tired of life's knife
skinning and carving,
notching it's time
on my bones

I'll decide the when
and the how, the hour
of flight

somewhere just to the right
of that second star
in the sky

where morning hides
like a thief in the night
biding her time

slowly waiting for the light
to leave these tired dark eyes

But not tonight, for tomorrow
there's still much to do.

Silence
is sound
that comes between
sounds

It moves
upon the waters
between the waves
and is good

Do you hear it?

Left with no last goodbye
tossed by the wayside,
a finished cigarette flicked
out the car window,
sparks bursting apart
like the light of our love
all to pieces by the side
of a dark country road

The burnt flavor of her
still inside my lungs,
riding on my tongue,
in the breathless hesitant
last long goodnight kiss

Loss is what I see
when I look into the sky
tonight, no trees reaching
its leaves up for me

The burn of her words
is in the way that I say
but I loved you,
the way I wait, the way
I hold my breath to listen
for her footsteps in the kitchen.

There is a stranger
you see more and more of
every year, He is silt
in the riverbed,
and the water tables
of your mystery
rise to their final levels,
the spitting image
of your Death

He is selling a bed
that belonged to your father,
coming in low dumping
the boots of your brother
in the high pasture covered
deep in your last winter's snow

Like a flower in the night,
Death drifts over our shoulders
like a boat with no eyes for the oars,
no place for a man's cold hands

The Church has a record of your birth,
but Death keeps its own dossier

When the Moon is pulling blood
from all of its many lovers,
Death is caterwauling with catfish,
a bone in its mouth, shedding
all its skins and secret light,
I, like you, set out a dish
of milk before going to bed.

In my dreams
there is a bird
and it sings
all night long
there is a fish
in a river
who's lost
it's memory
a worn work shirt
that smells strongly
of love
there is a man
and a woman
clocking out at dusk
there is someone
I can never remember
and in the Inn
of night
there's a dead man
a stranger
at the window.

I kneel in a field of wheat grass
catching grasshoppers.

I scoop underhand into my jar, another
at the height of its jump, a third.

I put my jar by the stream, pull one
out and I grab it, force my barbed steel
hook through the belly still trembling.

I cast long loops of line into the drift
below rocks where current
froths and whirls.

I stand mechanically slightly ashamed, uncomfortable on that shaded bank
where trout strike hard.

I let them swim, then hold fast, reeling one, exhausting him, wrenching him
into air, his tail drumming against the sky.

Hanging  from the line
his fat belly flinches.

All his life of riding rapids, hiding
in flats embraced by waters’ fast flow,
by red rainbows in his scales.

I didn’t expect that open mouth,
that whiteness, the gills stop twitching,
the eyes caught in that open stare.

It's Sunday
past Saturday,
past Friday,
past another night,
a sigh,
my father up
in the sky,
the cold,
the question, the who,
the why,
the human blood,
that heavy load
and cold again,
and heaven
in full size,
the cross, the nails,
take care, first
take care
of your crave
and decorate
your room
like a tomb
with low light,
a spoon,
and a stone
with your name.

my eyes:

intrusive,
are remote,

focusing on strangers,
and this neighborhood

isolated, in
their dimsighted faith;

no longer blissful,
which is
my true nature

scary, how blind i am,
how old, how
mortal

She is mathematics,
bare necessity in numbers

Curvature and roundness,
symmetrical circumference
lies in the rise of her hips

A tanned half moon,
a breast

A pose

The fall equinox begins
in the shadow
of the small of her back

Night looms beyond, below
connecting beauty's dots

Her body reclines,
hand resting between waist
and hip, an impasse

Head at rest
held by soft hand.

I'm going to pour me a drink
and wait for the Dark Night
to lace his boots

That old bushwhacker has 7 wives
2 trucks with good tires
1 with a flatbed for hauling

In the morning I know
I'll find crumbs on my table
and mud on the floor

And that pint by my bed
that's mostly full right now
will be a big swig short

Nothing is going right
these days except that low-
down you know who I mean
and he's moving right fast.

I found an old homesite
in the woods,
next to a church, or at least
what looked
like the remains of one

Rocks overgrown with weeds
and vines, a doorway
leading nowhere
in either direction, and

I think
I thought
I was maybe Christ

I think there were birds taking flight
from my open hands

The laughter of children
buried like bones
beneath
the terrible blue sky.

Someone I once knew

and cared for long ago

took the slow ****** train home


a friend arrived alive

home from Iraq

broken, full of static


my father's trail

of caring drew the pancreatic

hound from hell


sadly, but

for the life of me,

I can’t load all that ****


into a broken boat

to shove away

out onto a moonlit sea.

What can I say
about changing places
and the weary night song
piled outside every window?

It can weigh you down
like happiness, like rain,
like the notion of destiny
or an obligatory farewell
that you carry strapped
to your shoulders.

Believe me, if it would help
you see things in a different light
I would only write poems
about love and dream gardens.

The sun and the fresh air
would do you a world of good,
and I would make it rain just enough
to spruce up the flowers.

I would read these in a French dialect
and part my hair accordingly
like a slight, wry smile.

But the truth is
I could never understand
why a single language is not enough.

Breath blown into an empty bottle
and tossed into the nearest stream.

This human need for a philosophy
of words when a howl would do
much better; after all, we are only dogs wearing a fancy leash and a collar
of home we sometimes call a house.

Places change because with the years
we change even less. We’ve spent
too much time in the dirt
and now everything is relative
because it is under our fingernails.

Scrape away rinse and repeat and still
the hounding memory of nights
under the stars, backs to the chill
of dry ground and nothing but a long sigh
for a sheet to pull up to the neck.

How many sighs does it take to make
a death? Just open your eyes
when the night peaks at its most
exotic and serious black.

We’ve been here before, you and I.
Heard sounds that would never
make sense out of context.

But there was no need to ever
translate what the crickets said.
Was there? For us, once, never a need.

Notes of rain
on a tin roof
mystify me

I try to put words
to its meaning

As if it is a calling
I listen to its tune

There, sometimes
like a scent of remorse,
a violet storm

Or a flash of a smile
so brilliant it pains

Night stirs the colors
about me with its ladle

But I can’t paint fables
or the whispers that follow

Dreams of love seem so real
for such a short time

I mean to imply something
larger, more inclusive,
grounded and wild

Something that reaches back
into stories we can never tell

Because we are the arc of them,
we are their breathing

Beaching ourselves on lonely shores
wanting only to be saved.

Whitewashed fences mark
the division of shallow lines
of demarcation marring a bitter plain

Truth that too can be seen
as a balance with bruised knees
whispering prayers of bent supplication

Looking for a smile seen in clouds
of judgment and blurred hazes

The drum beats of life and echoes still,
in cracked addicted alleys of fairness
gone awry with a broken wheel
spinning on a loom of time

Native pains and naive indiscretions inexcusable, earth telling a compelling
tale if you can dig your hand in the dirt

Seeking through the mire for truth
and tales long since buried in the sands
of time, which whisk away history,
books burned with lies full of distaste

Imprinted on impressionable minds
like miscreant clones sprung
from fanatical factories

Indoctrinated with false education
and breeding still more hate, echoing,
listening to the heartstrings playing
a concerto of truth, an aria of sad realism

A beating of a drum
that has long since been silenced
by an oppressive, regressive hand

These times give me fear when courage
is what is needed most, post haste

Hate seems to be in such a fury
hurrying at a madman's pace.

I should silence
this troublesome whispering
inside my heart

I've already considered
the plain facts
of absence

Falling headlong
into its gorge
too soon

Not knowing who might
drown in their own eyes
night after night

It's not my wish to punish
or pain another soul
beyond my own.

I dream of white
winds blowing,
like dogwood
petals, or snow.

This is the longest
I’ve been so close
to you on a sheet
of papered dreams.

Like you, death,
these poems
about you, come
as no surprise.

Close to the last page
between the covers,
still I think I’ll need
at least one other.

I hoped before
I could let you go,
before I hoped
the white winds blow.

I do not know whose eyes perceive
my finite movement toward light.

Each letting go, a small cry,
each forward move my life's
migratory assurance of what
none of us can ever know.

The genetic certainty of cells
propels the forebrain
with its stumbling feet,
while a heartache of hope
wins each moment even
as it is lost to the next.

And we must accept
the impermanent flow
that is like air, necessary
and sacred; tears are not
the only salt of sorrow.

I don't know what
the limits are
what impacts fragment
beyond repair, outside the web
of what there are words for,
murderous facts that leave mute
witnesses’ souls brittle
inside their chests,
as the thousandth child starves
somewhere in our inhumane
universe another star grows dark.

To live a life in perspective
I’m told you need to define a horizon
line eye level to the viewer.

From my hill of years the view is fluid
as in watery, but also as in unpredictable.

On the sea’s face a wall of fog moves in
and out like histories remembered
and forgotten.

Sometimes silver striates the sea
with such a glitter of insight
I am bedazzled and cannot look.

Sometimes fogbank and ocean merge
with such blue-gray unity it seems
the horizon rises so that I stand on
the shore, dwarfed by a surf of knowledge
that pounds at my ignorance.

Sometimes the sea becomes invisible,
the white air a questioning emptiness,
a finger-touch of damp against the cheek.

Some call him a dreamer
   quiet, sad and deeper
than water in a river
    after the floods come

    dark like the light
outside a widower's curtains
   when the moon hides
behind clouds gray as yesterday

and the day before
   and whatever sorrow
tomorrow or
  the night has in store.

Tonight, outside the storm
rages while the silence
inside me is as deafening
as a drowning violin,
I am as lonely as a lost feather
floating on a wandering
wind, my thoughts as painful
as a heartache wondering
when the beating will end
and love has turned cold,
passion has left, and when
the wine is all drunk I'll become
the insatiable leviathan
sinking ship after lost ship,
the salmon who drank the river
dry, the sailor who swallowed
the sea, until my forgotten
lover's face is seen in each breath,
and crystals condense
on my heart and my hands,
and the night is as dark
as a stranger’s stark shadow.

In a photograph
without a subject
you, standing
with your back
to my camera.

I long for a face,
your eyes, a soft smile,
or even just a pair of hands.

I remember us being
so lonely for each other,
and there on the shelf
a girl standing by herself.

Not just the empty cottage
dilapidated, all alone, my love,
you left three months ago
and the old house behind the dunes
now a photographic manipulation.

A wonder of the modern age,
complete with cuts and splices
where you used to sit, an empty
place in the bed, a gaping hole
somewhere above my navel.

There's a storm
rolling in
from the east
off of the sea,
salty rain on
my skin,
if you could only
taste me,
darling, take
and shake me
until you hear
the thunder
under the wind,
and we both see
the lightning
out on the horizon
lighting a fire
all through
the night hours,
until our tired eyes
ride out the tide,
and we wake
on the waves
of a new day.

Today I watched
a lump of rock
swallow the fire
of the sun
and tonight I saw
someone somewhere
toss a box
of diamonds high
into the sky
I swear
it's enough to make
a grown man cry.

What if love was like the sun
and the moon was the essence
of heartache, a darkness
passing by every now and then
like a coldness that makes us lonely
on a long Monday afternoon,
would it be forever or only, hopefully,
for just an hour or maybe two?

You carry your memories
shaped in sadness, and the glad
yellows of suns setting
into seas of blue thought.

The ache of the weight
of your life, the bareness
of fatigue, the soft depression
left by sorrow, a soul embossed
with a notary’s seal, the truth
that can be sworn then lost,
a kiss in front of a stranger.

Sad that you have forgotten
the what, or when, or where
of Neruda’s beauty of a sonnet.

Yet you know the dark
space between the shadow
and the soul, the slowing
of eyelids closing.

You who build hopeful temples
to possibility, mirrors of light
to warm yourself by the flame
of offering, a dance born in sweet
smoke, the incense of conciliation, supplication, the medication of desire.

Rest my friend, wherever you are
and don't forget to remember
when you get older and colder,
it is only the winter of a new world.

Tonight poets will find the words
to color their life and dip their pens
in wounds that aren’t even their own
and some will stare at the moon
seeing an empty plate, hungering
for something without a name
or a clock with no numbers knowing
time carries a dagger and a sword
for the hours that wound and nights
that cut throats, arrows that pierce
hearts fiercely until they lie still,
cold and bled out on a bed all alone.

When love comes to visit
she only stays a few days
at a time; her work in the city
is important she says, so
she brings her satchel of books

I wait at the crossroads
where the bus lets her off

Then we go to bed to dream
where she sings and hums
before morning comes

When she gets up
and pulls on her jeans
and goes out on the porch
it's so early you can see the moon
and the sun; I go to work
while she lays around
to read and do what she does

The days go so slow
and when I get home
she's baked some apples
and painted my bedroom blue

The next morning
I take her up the road
to the bus; we say so long

She never talks about her job,
so I leave her  alone.

At dusk I hang up
a worn blue work
shirt that smells
strongly of love
of dirt of the earth
melancholy, sweat
yesterday's brews
the blues, regret
twenty cigarettes
black breath
of the bone moth
old blood, moon dust
spring pollen, summer
grass, Autumnal ****
winter's cold blast
sea salt and pine needles
mountain laurel, desert air
my dog's hair, I swear
I can't bear the thought
of washing or throwing away
all the stains, the growing pains
the laughter, the sorrows
these history lessons I need
to get me through tomorrow.

Love can be like
trapped light
existing like dusk
the likes of which we can't see
physical but not optical
gravesites for stars
a waystation for dreamers
a delta to cruise through
paradise on Sunday
cold as ice on Monday
a hundred pound block on tongs
with a butterfly at its center
your temple of madness
or the Egypt of your ***
lands of mystery
an island of death
proven theories of sorrow
your lineage, children, tomorrows.

I take off my boots
and throw one at the moon
tonight, the starlight is mute
after listening to the news
watching politicians kissing
the President's *** like it
was a ruby on the Pope's ring
while the people weep
in the streets, crying out about
all the orders from above,
no more doves or butterflies,
no gardens, no dreaming, no
poets, no brooms, no hope
for the sick and weary, only
last straws, executive actions,
anti-immigrant policies.

Who is that man
in my doorway

his shadow
smelling like grave soil

face cold as a dead star
dark as a pond full of oil

his hair floating like weeds
eyes blank as a book of good deeds

turning slowly with grace
like a boot tied to the end of a lace.

I am drawing water and a ship
to carry me away, a black
ship with good timber
and no rotten planks, a ship
everyone will have a turn
at the wheel, a ship that never hears
the sad song of oars sang
where the only prayer is the wind
to carry you through the leagues
of loneliness, a ship to guide you
down sleeping rivers through
passages of lost swords, the songs
of the graveyard, oh sweet Jesus,
a blessed ship bearing his wounds,
a ship of dreams sighted by the blind
riders that put out light and darkness,
sailing constellations named for the broken-
hearted, the artists, and poets writing deep
blue poetry for the Captain and the crew.

When I am the guest of my brother
sleep watching shooting stars
in a black dog's eyes
asleep in a star drift, dreaming
of tides and spiral galaxies,
I am an ice sword dipped in wine,
death ringing in your ears
like the darkest shadow of night,
a lost sailor drifting through
the centuries in a black ship,
a man standing vigil over a grave
cleaning mud off of his boots
with a knife.

Night I call you
portal of silence

the true divided light
of the moon through
my window leaving

shadows like crosses
of time, that old bandit

on my wall, the panes
stained, broken and sharp.

Some mornings I wake up tired
before the fire of the sun eats
the mist covering the dust
on the long road my feet travel
each day wishing I was asleep still
just like a snake in an old tire
dreaming of young boys rolling
me over and over down a steep hill
again, forever and ever, amen.

Life's not so bad
until just before morning
when I see a dark man
driving a black Cadillac
take a cigarette from his lips
and throw it out the window
watching it go all to pieces
all over the road.

The mist in the collard greens
is moving like an old woman
in dusty lingerie making sparks
with a *** where it lays tired
and the moon looks right odd
like an albino hawk in a dead
tree -  branches of solemnity
and worn out blue guitar strings -
while that old locomotive
of darkness  blows its steam
through my back porch screen.

Now I am tranquil-
ized with the low light
of a fairly good star
planted serenely
in my Atlantic
and out there where
a lonely gull cries
dipping a wing
to the sea singing
a sleepy lullaby
in a language that Vargas
and I know so well
so, goodnight my angels
tomorrow will bring us
something akin to
a new day we can say
in one voice, Hallelujah
I am alive.

This unnatural light
like the last summer
before the last winter
sends the grackles
into the cedars
rattling their wings
in the evergreens
making a sound like Ishmael
casting his bones
on the deck of Ahab's ship.

Do not look sadly
at days gone by
days below days
like a river
running under stars

do not listen to priests, the blues
or that bitter veteran fool
of some past war claiming to miss
a piece of his soul, his only disease
is the rotting of an *******

the poet that forgets
in remembrance of you
is a lunatic's left hand man
a gun in the hands of a fool

on Sundays he is the acolyte
of the moon, night following
other nights, the eyes of the blind
the stranger who  lusts after wives

his tool the bitter root of a persimmon tree
and every time he draws his pen
like a knife and drawls his soliloquy
I say forget him, let us drink again

for poets do not cut their fingers
at cheap joints like ******
toasting one another's death

they do not eat the cheese or hoard
the rich black bread of their poetry;
the true poet gives it kindly to the poor.

I saw a girl in a wheelchair on her porch
and wasps were swarming in the cornice

She had just washed her hair
taken it down and combed it

She could see
just like me

That one star under the rafter
shining like a knife in the creek

She was thin as the hereafter
and made me think

Of music singing to itself
like someone putting a violin in a case

And walking off with a stranger
to lie down and drink in the dark by the lake.

I feel fine, now
that stoical ice
grows within me
like a tangled vine
wrapping around
inside, and outside
I'm a laughing smiling
clown upside down
on my house, and
my life, you see
this frown painted
by Courbet, realistic
as Pushkin's finest
piece of poetry.

Must we only dream
   of wise kings who know
that rivers must flow
   peacefully
so a woman can sing
   her children to sleep
and fathers not weep
   holding them
in grief too heartbroken
   to rage
at the violence men bring
    in this age
that should be long left
   behind us?