More nights ahead

We can put together a hundred or more possibilities,
letting two characters meet, in spite the number
of ways, streets, corners, bars, restaurants, cities.
Did you not once say you will have a hard drink
at the bar at the edge of your sleep? Even though cold,
I have returned to the uncertainty of outdoors now, 
stopping at diners where tired men and tired waitresses
call each other by name. The home fries both nostalgic
and sorry. Something always pulls me back. 

Sometimes I look up and watch flocks of birds, mostly
when flocks of young people pass by. Do they
know how we can devote our entire lives
to a cause truly lost?
How the foolish idealism of our once immortal
sense drove us to where we are now. Here...

And is it wrong to think women like you will always be
less lonely? I have come to deny myself. But 
how it bangs its fists on my door wanting
to be let out, telling me 
I am human, human, human. 
So I try to keep away from the door,
away from the bar at the edge of your sleep.

the seat, the leaves, the squirrel, the flowers

1
From this distance, a handmade paddle and paddle boat,
the sound of waves to the shore in the early evening
while Venus or a waxing moon appears
is almost an imagined thing.
This is what distance does to a finite weathered body.

2
When I was much younger there was a girl with whom
I had wine with at the rooftop of an apartment.
No moon, not even a folding chair, but a clothesline 
of damp clothes behind us. A concrete step of some sort
and there we were -- while I was seated.

Like in the movies, you know, so I now try every time
to substitute the word to love.

3
Do women used to (always) think of "marry"? 
Do they count people they (once) love?

4
I've had a drink a number of nights with the person
one woman slept with, loved with. It was all very well. 
The entire time I could see them in my mind's eye 
and I wanted violence
I held the clear glass, there was lemon, salt, rocks.
And I wiped off the grin on his face.

5
In my thirties, I thought of "marry".

It meant sitting, chair, porch, dusk or early evening
with a woman I am sharing quiet with.

6
She sends a photo of her green garden.
From where I am, the leaves are falling.
The squirrels are brave. Because they do not hibernate.
Flowers know the number of days even though
no one bothers to ask.

7
There is a back pain. There is 
an invitation to read a poem. I wrote 
a poem about a body. A body. A body.

Do not give up on poetry

because sometimes it is so much easier to
start the car and drive it
than walk to the station for the bus.
What are the ways we meet others?

On the street the car is parked by a tree.
There is a squirrel, a tabby can pass by.
I do not think of the deluge 

of work that knows I do not forget.
There is an opera next month
and the leaves are turning.
What moves us?

And does poetry matter when a mother looks
at her son in a real and palpable world?

"And what did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?"






lines from Robert Hayden

should i tell you there are two lemons on the table

Should I tell you there are two lemons on the table, the kind
grown in these regions. Taut and green and sour just enough
sweet to be forgiven. Not that they ask for any, being only
what they are. Unlike other things that need telling

For instance, the green ramekin with an apostle spoon 
beside a custom-made glass half filled with water the way
things should be. The mobile phone beside it, black
is quiet and the pen beside it, black, is still.

Other things need reminding. The clock to keep on running.
The ring around a finger, hers, to mean. The roads are long
and web-like and many. And this, a brief brush of wind.
She is passing and is leaving.

a close kind of distance

What must one feel seeing you, beautiful
the pictures that mean your life in blossom, by sea.
With you the dogs, sun, yukelele. 
You on bare feet singing with the wind
orange skirt catching orange skies.
What must one feel seeing you, beautiful
in love, in life, in blossom, by sea

when one must say nothing
must say nothing
must say nothing.

right across

exes and whys

The programmer I am working with now
knows the landscape and language
I only have the vaguest idea about.
Her algorithmic words she translates
meeting on a plane with my verse 
in an art collaboration we call mad.
On her 13-inch MacAir, 
black on violet Queer. I wonder about
the prompt for such declaration or
the necessity for staking such name.
Or any name for that matter, names
being able and unable to define
at the same time. I understand and not
many familiar names people call
themselves to make more human.
An agender, for instance, refuses any
line, that mark, which maps shapes,
forms, volume, movement, spaces.
The project we are working on
brings abstract spaces into a real.
Something one can hold onto,
participate in. How so many things
I do not fully understand, except,
as the collaboration's theme goes,
we are all children of Eve.

water people

Our psyche calls for water
to float on to submerge in
a way of losing ourselves
into a language of cosmos
where no thinking is
only being...
That we find ourselves
letting go into a one-ness
with universe where all
simply is
We come again and again
insatiable on sea of sheets.

clay

What the clay tells is simple: what is broken from care-less remains broken. 
No amount of shaping, no fire can prepare it for fall. Such things as trust,
Maybe not love.
Or maybe that is why I am wrong. Small heart that I have with not enough 
Room to let in anyone that had, once, been let out. Closed the door.

the angry books

Just this morning while calm 
out with dogs, I thought about
the angry books. The several
I keep where I take turns 
unmasking myself, also
masking self partly from self.

Perhaps, several years from
when I've written them I will 
see them better, see myself
better. Understand blindness.
As when I see my father now.

dear friend

What of the American dream? Now that we all have achieved it.
We find a nomadic part remains. To take so less with us except
What matters in the long journey: feet to carry, body of joy.
Everything else, it seems, merely trappings we have come to
Be accustomed and could not let go. These we have now 
We only dreamed about half a lifetime ago. Something to learn
From the animals we keep: To have nothing else but love

Only so very difficult for us: bearing our simple joys.

conversation without bodies

What the vodka does is ease
boundaries we see called bodies.
The fields: height, colour, hair
style, demeanour etcetera

minds, by habit, label for survival.
Such identification necessary
caution for anyone in bodies

born, breathing, working, living
as we do; how naturally 
equipped we are to know

threats. Every person
a field to survey.
Which must be why hard

drinks are necessary for real
conversations, and darkness
for making love. For when

completely sober, bodies talk
in the language of gauging
petty things made important

such as "there is something wrong
the pipe under sink; the water
bill is erroneous; the doghouse

needs cover from the rain."

On Intimacy

Because in the darkness on a sea of sheets we cannot help 
remember even without remembering to, in the night

to step out of our bodies palming our way back to origins. 
I, blind and hungry, feel the shadows for curves, touching familiar

strange landscapes, the soft places I've always known
long before any knowing. Woman, her entirety

the tangible universe and the only god I could bury myself into.
Because the darkness keeps the secret that I could never 

fully grow apart. Helpless, I nestle on her warmth,
suckle at her breasts 

For a colleague, on his passing

The next day everything else remain in place.
No single death can move a sheet of paper 
held by paperweight on your table, waiting for your signature. 
It is a common enough thing such tangible patience
steady and all of us passing.  We sing anyway 
as much to ourselves as to you who must be amused by now.

feet

The bedsheets are fresh.

After walking the dogs
on a clear windy night,
I prop up my feet
on the couch. Tired.

The dogs fall asleep again.

Tomorrow a long list
of things to do that
do not ever run out.
Sometimes you wonder
if they really 
are as important as 
they appear to be:
the immediate world
to crumble if undone.

Suppose one day I don't

move my exhausted feet 
return phone calls 
or make presences.
See without me
wheels still turn.

a lesser man

I.
the first time i met d* i almost run out of wind, that kind
when you are caught between exhaling and inhaling
so strong the point of shock.  i thought i saw my mother.

a most curious case and i had to remind myself
i was seeing another.  even though there really
was less mistaking in that smile.  
also, those eyes.  the oval face.

of course, mother is older.  with more wear.  a difference
in contexts and years.  although i could not help thinking
seeing d* i am seeing my mother in times much happier.

a lucky man who won her.  although 
i could not say the same for her.


II.
one of my fears is becoming my father.  i look 
at the mirror and see more and more his face.  
some day i am going to write the whole of it.
but not now.  not yet.


III.
there are a moments of most clarity.  
when i see her and wonder
what she sees in this man--
raised to be stubborn, built as 
less.  who meets her halfway 
only under light of day.

what does it take to be a woman.
a man will never know.
he who is always
lesser beside her.

the body under light of day II

Restraint.  One of the first things taught
one of the most enduring things practiced:

never speak too loud, or talk too fast
or eat too much, or want too much.
A golden mean for everything.

In poetry, the practice is not speaking
what you mean to say.  To say it 
in another way.  To let you sense

want and desire, need and a kind of
emptiness to be filled, but does not
speak of it under the light of day.

the body under light of day

Someone takes a photo of the Ganges River.  And only because it tells it is sunrise  do we know.  Otherwise, skies look the same in too many angles and too many ways.  Who can tell.  

India has a lot of things to say.  Too many they carved them in stone.  So that long after the storytellers and instructors are gone, the ways remain:  bodies of labyrinthine desires.  How men and women cannot live in love alone.  

Add desire.  Add hunger for the body.

to arrive

The wind chime hangs under blue summer sky.
Its silvery sounds catching breeze.  
Already the middle of May and the strings

still haven't let me go.  I arrive only to leave again.
How the secretary calls.  Something always urgent.

In the meantime, I resist.  Sitting down
and reading poetry from another place.
Elsewhere, someone walks the courthouse steps.

woman in the morning

she is always a different woman.
changing between tides,
keeping resemblances.

this time her hair is short.
in another, brown.
not a long time ago, so
very very dark.

sometimes i know her,
sometimes i do not.

when i look at her at the light
of morning, i look for the familiar
face a long, long time ago.