Sacrament of an autumn park:
yellow wafers on green tongue,
blowsy refrains of early dark.
Head spilling and heart sprung,
I step across these broken shields
to a new-faced evening street
under clouds with bruisy weals
that peel, reveal white meat
of moon, sliced thin to eat
& maybe sate a null that gnaws,
a null that was born when I was:
a branch is incomplete
until the last leaf falls,
transfigured into scrawl.

"It's raining in my skull,"
says the woman who creases

matter-of-factly into sunned chop
of stone beside me on a city corner;

her eyes topple and drop into
her sullied mauvish oval bag

which spills crowds of rag and bone
into her floral fields of lap.

Then: a sudden psithurism
fences us in elm tilt, we sag

into the listen; what strange words
these foredoomed leaf-curls brush

into prose, sericeous speech
that smuggles death lessons

through the ring of afternoon.
It shakes us both: a mouthful

of extermination addressed
to us in the language of night places.

An empire of silence is reinstated
for a lonely tyrant minute until

the bus arrives; she gathers
her handfuls of sparks and solemns,

steps up into the air, and is gone.
Alone, I rescind every mercy I was ever given.

“Foment in the Firmament”


There is a stirring above the stillness,
a slow‑brewed unrest
braiding itself into the blue.

Cloud‑veins thicken,
their edges bruised with light,
and the air tastes of iron and distance.

Somewhere, a wind rehearses its entrance,
curling through the rafters of the sky,
its breath warm with the scent of rain not yet born.

Birds wheel lower,
their wings cutting arcs in the charged flush,
as if tracing the script of what is coming.

The sun, half‑veiled,
becomes a coin passed from palm to palm
in a game no one admits to playing.

And I stand beneath it all,
feeling the pulse of that high conspiracy —
the foment in the firmament —
gathering its syllables,
ready to speak in thunder.




.

She left Reno
in a satin slip
the color of hot coins
pouring from slots,
wearing chewed-up tennis shoes,
mirrors multiplying her,
the marquee burning out
letter by letter,
a hush pressed between her teeth
as if saving the last note.

I followed,
a gangly shadow,
mother’s voice in my ear:
life is not a freeway exit.
But she was the exit.
She drove west
through a glittering throat.

In Tonopah she was a waitress
with red stains on her wrists,
the sleeves tugged low,
coffee pouring thin as blood.
In Barstow she was a sun-bleached Madonna,
halo blistered, mouth lit in stained glass.
At a gas station in Needles
she shimmered into a coyote’s shadow
and slipped behind the pumps.
Everywhere,
a new disguise,
a flicker at the edge of vision.
Not the whole leap,
just rehearsal.

Casinos blinked like electric relics.
Truckers called her sugar,
greedy hands counting her ribs
as if she were a paycheck
sweating in their fist,
but she slipped away each time,
her silhouette already moulting-
a serpent skin, a smoke-trail,
a saint’s shadow burning off the wall.

By Malibu the night
had softened to velvet.
The pier at Zuma
leaned into the Pacific
like a broken rib.

She sang once-
low, cracked, unfinished-
and the slip fell from her
like the last lie.
Her body cut into the dark tide,
this time there was no disguise.

I waded in after her,
ankles bruised by rock.
The sea lit with jellyfish,
not lanterns but wires,
each pulse a warning,
each glow a wound.

Standing at the highway’s end-
no exit left,
just the Pacific’s mouth
closing around her.

deserve
it more than most, more than anyone, indeed, in deed,
your passion drowns me,
overwhelms and even makes me admit
out loudly
over comes

your faceted identities,
delight, charm, provoke,
and evoke
multitudes of moods, desires,
even writings...
but you are too stern,
this thing called love,
is tissue soft, so hard to form,
so easily torn, it requires
time & hard work, many words,
though oft the fewest are supreme,
and I laugh at myself, for the only word
I think that rhymes with supreme
is
dream
which is
just another synonym
for
endless opportunities

and I, we, read each others poems
to each other
quietly,
for that is the only, & the best way.