the night frosted in silver,
shadows and moons,
iron ghosts stretching
into the darkness,
unravelling the song
of the tide.

I met a genius on the train
today
about 6 years old,
he sat beside me
and as the train
ran down along the coast
we came to the ocean
and then he looked at me
and said,
it's not pretty.

it was the first time I'd
realized
that.

I would have rather been Orpheus,
travelling to various hells for you
and singing songs to save you
even though you couldn't save yourself:
stop looking back. The flames aren't worth it.
Let my eyes burn brighter than the abyss.
Just whatever you do don't turn your face
away Eurydice. Hades will have his Persephone
and you are not her.

It's better this way I guess. I would have looked
back at you and watched you crumble into
a shadowy pillar of salt as did the wife of Lot
when she looked back at *****. I am faithless,
which is why I cannot sing like Orpheus. I am faithless,
which is why I would have watched you melt into
a shadowy memory of the underworld even if I could.

Instead, I was a messenger of these strange myths.

Wings on my feet, I raced against the multitudinous
skylines of the worlds I do not inhabit, skipped across
volumes and volumes of rows and columns of planets and
stars written by dead old men and women. They spoke presently
of the voluminous presence their absence had created, and did so
without having known of the secrets of this absence when
they wrote about their respective presents. Presents conferred
to winged-feet wishful thinkers who spiral uncontrollably with their mouths
to sudden and dangerous depths: Every serious reader remembers
the time they stopped whispering controversies and started shouting them
without knowing that they were shouting them: Ideas are messy things
that don't need loudspeakers: Decibels violently shudder themselves out
of being the moment you mention to your mother that God
might not exist and Camus said so: Existence itself implodes outwards
like how plants produce seeds that make themselves when novels
start at their ends which are really their beginnings: Children
**** their mothers through birth: Boys with wings on their feet
take the library too seriously.

This is
          how
and
          where
I flew towards you without a chariot

and found you in your various hells, one book at a time,
and why I would have rather have been Orpheus
because at least then I could have sang you songs
before you ended up retreating back into your various
selves. It could have been my fault then for looking back.

It could have been,
   could have been,
   could have been
you that was Orpheus. You who looked back.
You being the reason that I crumbled into a pillar of
shadow and salt because, as did Lot's wife, I looked back.

We both did, and watched the whole world invert itself
on its axis, then turn and twist and shift itself
into superimposed images and shapes and dreams
that changed you from muse to poet and
dream to dreamer
and Eurydice to Orpheus
and to Lot then his wife
and to this: which you always were.

              Those wings on your feet: When
the librarians changed the positions of the bookshelves-
and therefore our imaginations: our movements
and stanzas and scenes and days and nights-
               Those wings on your feet: When
that happened they must have stopped fluttering
for a second. I tried flying again and fell.

I haven't been much of a messenger since.

little dark girl with
kind eyes
when it comes time to
use the knife
I won't flinch and
i won't blame
you,
as I drive along the shore alone
as the palms wave,
the ugly heavy palms,
as the living does not arrive
as the dead do not leave,
i won't blame you,
instead
i will remember the kisses
our lips raw with love
and how you gave me
everything you had
and how I
offered you what was left of
me,
and I will remember your small room
the feel of you
the light in the window
your records
your books
our morning coffee
our noons our nights
our bodies spilled together
sleeping
the tiny flowing currents
immediate and forever
your leg my leg
your arm my arm
your smile and the warmth
of you
who made me laugh
again.
little dark girl with kind eyes
you have no
knife. the knife is
mine and i won't use it
yet.

An egg, boiled fresh
a matryeshka doll watches
                                                     somewhere the last train
                                                     makes it's way down the tracks
past the lakes
& the reticent pine trees

                                                          ­            the street lamps
                                                           ­           shine wearily

                                                        ­                                        & again, the rain
                                                            ­                         is starting up once more
she reads Kurt Tucholsky
' Schloss Gripsholm' with a dictionary

                                                     ­                     writing down his odd words  
                                                                ­       daintily as if they were glass,  
not to be handled
except lightly                                                          ­          the city holds her
                                                             ­                              like a child

Moon and stars up high
reflects light on the ocean
Whales move on magnets

"She was carrying a book, and the hand-picked flowers she placed on the bed outweighed even the drag of his dying. We believe it's the silence that's fearful, never the words; and yet whenever she stopped reading to turn the page, he would smile. Perhaps, in that stillness he felt his heart stop searching for instructions on how to live."

Jude ****** - Boys Throwing Baseball

And that is the only thing our heart does without understanding why; it searches.
We are too human to love change, something that is as dangerous as anything we could ever willingly let pass us by, and too human to not look for it anyway.
How some things are so much of themselves that they become their own language, like a bright red silk sliding against the shoulders of a woman, how these things are not made for each other, but made for the moments they are intertwined in.
How silence even weighs from the things that never were, taking from the miracles that were one opened mouth away.
And now, as you remember one specific death the most, you desperately search for the life in everything that passes you by, even the things that you know have nothing to offer.
Even the World, in all It's isolation, gives back to us by pushing us away from It.
Even the small things that we decide to keep for ourselves have come a long way to find us.
A cigarette. A person. A rainfall.
All spend their whole lives waiting to be found.

( for Virginia Woolf)

Light & dark collide
her life is a palimpsest
of butterfly memories
of twisted ills & happiness
viewed through a pin hole
captured in black & white
The Lighthouse still stands
in St Ives where it always was
where she used to go as a child
she writes “ Mrs Dalloway”
& eats conference pears
Occasionally she hears the birds
singing in Greek as they fly by
Death, which will claim her is always waiting.