at the edge of the bed,
thin curtains caught the sunlight,
it was all the silence
one room would hold.
She faced the window, tilted
with her back to me,
her honey comb hair
hanging over the branch of her neck.

She rose,
light filled the room,
it gushed over her books.

All morning, as I sit thinking of you,
the Monarchs are passing.
Yet the moth has trim, and feistiness, and not a drop
of self-pity.
The twenty-winged cloud of yellow butterflies
floats into the field.
The irregular postage stamp of death;
a black moth the size of my left
thumbnail is all I’ve trapped in the damask.
Certainly, we all felt
this vastly hollowed-out distress.

All the night inside of me
is wind turning trees into thunder.

Sweet purple flowers
are like milky sparse carpets,
like when clouds and eyebrows merge
for brief moments of paradise.

My neck rests softly as the night bends,
I see you in the stars when I look up.

If hope is the thing with feathers,
then it holds your face,
holding the dusk,
in the thick
wilderness of love.

In the thick
wilderness of love,
you coil me into
your ***** of one thousand
roses, gushing like smoke
from your lips.

After working out,
I come home.

My sister
my mother
are both asleep,
my father is alone
washing dishes in the kitchen.

Outside in the street,
there is something
about rain-fall I will love forever,
but there is nothing to love when
the sidewalk turns into
suburban everglades.

There in the kitchen I see you
standing at the sink, waiting
for your son to get home.

My father has not caused
the rain to stop and grow humid.
My father is
washing dishes left over by his
family. I am standing
in the hallway and say: “hi.”

Outside in the street, the
rain-fall has stopped
and left clouds of dry heat.

There in the house
I am swallowed up

and I remember my grandmother’s
hands becoming too weak
to make pasteles.

But still she stood there
cleaning those dishes
in her last afternoons,
waiting for
my father to get home.

So there you are,
aching, and worrying,
somewhat like her, but
somewhat more confident
now that I’m here.

you were wounded
in the deep dusk of the forest.
I saw your antlers
and began to weep,
your blood weeping from nine arrows.

At that moment in the clearing,
I finally saw your eyes.
Cupid has clearly been clumsy
and you’ve let me become lousy.

This deer was enormous,
and carried your face.

On nights like these

when the bus exits the highway
onto another highway
with no traffic, the city looks
like a melted snow-globe
in a dream.

And Miami
means something beautiful
for once.