My heart delights in your embrace,
Your cover for the multitude--
Insistence on a sacred place,
Where souls resurge in gratitude,
Accepting my outrageous mind
As easily as picture shows
That light the night as they unwind,
Amid the settling of crows.

Still learning what I should have learned
In nursery school,  where hearts get broke
And mended at the first recess,
Where nothing's ever what it seems
And no one thinks the day will end,
Or Christmas will indeed arrive,
With boxes full of promises--
The star stuck on the inside tree.
Consider how long you've been gone--
I can't imagine time that long,
Or where the **** the future fled.
You may return.  We might unite.
The trees are tall in my backyard.
I've watched them grow, not seeing them.

With no more thought than lovers give
To morning or the rising tide,
The future of the universe,
Or what it takes to tell the time,
The spectre covers all our bets--
The coins unseen, cash for the boat.
I'll not insist on innocence,
The taste of something not foretold.
Your wilderness has my regard,
Less charted than the deepest floor
Of any ocean riverfed,
Where rain is born again, again.
The beautiful need not delay
Such unrepentant leaves and wind.

My thoughts of you as I awake
Are not as pure as angels' dreams,
Unless they spent their night on earth,
Carousing at some roadside inn,
Leg wrestling on an unmade bed
To learn the mortal ways of man,
Which gods themselves scarce understand,
Except at certain festivals,
Or on a mission comically
Disguised as fowl or serpentry,
Beguiling those less innocent
Than you, my love, could ever be.
Small wonder that I'm losing sleep,
Imagining myself in deep.

at seventeen i couldn't wait
to blow this town discover more
the world itself an open door
my innocence an unlocked gate
how anyone explains the time
since then is fine with me tonight
it shouldn't take this long or quite
so many failures underlined
what's done is done the world goes on
its seasons full of reckonings
too powerful for knaves or kings
whose plots are often ****** upon
rock solid etchings stood in rows
as all ambition ebbs and flows

the sixties ended with a folded flag
handed to my mother's sister
in a family cemetery not far
from where we lived
just down the road
from the baptist church
site of the wedding
six months earlier
the merry month before danny left
for training and his first real job
a full year after walter
gave us news
that this fight
was one that lies
sustained
while boys just out of school
married and shipped out
and came back in pieces

if I would move out of your way
small good things oddly would appear
as I have ever less to say
and you could quell the late night fear
this mortal blanket tossed aside
quick ending of the fever dream
collapsing all our foolish pride
that separates us at the seam
sing now what you remember well
an old song of Kalliope
who shares the stories poets tell
born crying out of memory
i've cleared the space now find my head
so something better may be said