A Benediction

"...we are such stuff as dreams are made on,
and our little life is rounded with a sleep..."
-The Tempest

Skeletons had more color than you.

I watched you die slowly, a 2-hour vigil
to help the part of you still left, 
still retaining memory, still listening
to faint voices in the glass-blown sunlight
leave more peacefully.  We all made it,
those who could, those who meant
something to you, those who could speak
for those who meant just as much to you.

I read you Shakespeare, fitting in the Prospero
speech, as good a thing as can be said
about life coming to the utmost end.
It was quiet and sad, and it was good,
so good to say goodbye, to tremble with you,
to sit as labored breath forced itself
into the collapsing cavity of your chest.

I spoke of your poetry, your peerless cooking,
your love of food and company, of hosting,
of playing.  You went West to find 
spirituality and blessings and found me
my spirit animal, and sat with silence
as you might an old friend.  There is an image:

You, resting on a rock in the humid forest.
Close by, a tree carved into the shape 
of an Aboriginal boy, the spirit 
made flesh.  You smile softly,
look toward the sunlight

and breathe in the morning air.

You were a guiding light in my life,
a temple of my secret contentments,
a benchmark and a strength to swear by.
I carry you with me always,
and star the night with your spirit.

What I Imagine to See when I Die.

When I died,
I saw you first,
painted in golden light
a butterfly, yellow and even,
green bright satisfying
the lumps in my throat
quietly swallowing
gobs of light and swirls of dill
memories, fresh, startled,
misty and unordered,
time dissolving

an eddy of image
crumpled sheets like
hastily frosted cake;
on the third floor,
cowhide smells and driftwood
furniture, my lazy leg
wrapped around your middle
assuming you; bright purple
dresses, a color between
violet and the pink
of lilies in the spring;
green eyes and hazel eyes
and brown eyes
and blue eyes; women
occupying chambers of my heart
the aorta pulsing
their flavors throughout
the grass, my glassy eyes

like dripped-ink negatives
the suffering muscles,
the warmed evenings
the close wide mouths
the wetness and silence
the screams and violence
and wishing for more
more more to give you
and stretch out and leave
time to stay in a bubble
in a bed with you, to extend
the pleasure of our laziness
to maximum and drift off
away from the world
on a cloud of soaking black ink,
my postulations
only dissonant reflections
of the actual and experience.

Little Tales

Promenading round the promenade,
making paper missiles out of the tall
Manhattan buildings, throwing them
back and forth to each other,
apples in an orchard,
the juice running slowly down our chins.
Making the rain jealous and so stopping,
hanging above our very heads threatening
to weep as so many nights since
it has.  Our passing slowing melancholy;
the soft puddles and cool air.
Warm hands waltzing, surely
others did this before us,
but they did not laugh so much,
nor find so lively the silence
of beating before the rain, walking fast
once it finally caught us, driving
the trouble before our feet,
is there anyone yet who could walk
as fast as me?  No, I think not,
but you are quicker down the stairs
in slippery shoes and kick a ball
harder than me, hits me in the chest
before I am ready and you far off
among the grass, smile graceful.

Watching

There it was, that little voice saying,
"To dance and dream and live and die!"

Opening up avenues of possibility
once again, small in-roads to take

me Wherever and Whenever
and whatever happens, the ground

is steady beneath my feet
and my head is steady

beneath the stars.

Memories

There it was, walking through the rain:
a signpost, leading me down old avenues
of where We once existed.  I walked close
to the theatre where we did our second show
together; raced out one night to get a cab
to see some music on the waterfront,

where you took the best pictures
we probably have of Us as an Us:
you leaning on me, smiling towards
camera, me gently gazing upon you.
We missed getting in front of the stage
and so stood on the outskirts, quietly

bopping our heads to song after song,
enjoying the slow-tempo-ed southern
rock, which gently rocked us to sleep
later on, quoting beautiful nights
and waterfront sunsets staring
out at Manhattan.  A left turn then,

up 2nd now, St Marks Place, the Tahini
place late one night and your best friend's
love dilemmas.  The small Russian vodka
bar, 2 streets down, you called me from one night
because you knew I would love it and told me,
before it all started, you would take me there

and one day you did and we listened to a foreign
music on an electric piano and drank rainbow-flavored
vodkas, sparkling like rain in the sun.  Rain
through streetlights and a storm on your front
porch, sitting Buddha-like under the eaves,
watching the wind tear apart Astoria;

making love in the night then, underneath the stars,
keeping the toothpaste out of the tent
because of bears, chased by moose
through the dark, canoeing to an old spot,
laying down a towel and making love under the sun,
our small movements echoing the soft wind

around us.  Swimming in a cold northern lake
that took us too long to get to; constant
conversations in wine bars; beer spills
and jazz piano at 4 am; poems and poetry
and music and dancing in midsummer
because we found it all together once;

and like all memory, is now faded
to a sepia-toned idealism that is easier
to miss than the shades of grey reality
of true existence.  Idealism, therefore,
will dictate tonight's memories,
and perhaps tomorrow, they will move on.

Hilltop (From Maine Poems)

The dab of fog on the lake

looked like a chilly ghost

floating just above dawn.

I sipped the morning air,

consciously aware

I had not done this

in a long while.

The hill was impossible.

I did not even attempt

to jog it.  I just walked,

warming my legs up

in the crisp autumn light.

The trailhead was as it

always was, a signboard,

a road, and blue marks

leading me up the mountain.

I knew this was a mistake

when I came up here

after the baby died, when

you were still hidden

in your eggshell of grief,

painting our stainless steel life

a drabber shade of grey.  

I had little pity for that,

though I had plenty of grief

myself and tried so hard 

to share it with you.  

Eventually, you moved

back to your parents' home

and then started therapy there.

But that was later.

Right now, I was heading up the trail,

my lungs beginning to burn,

my mind gasping for reality,

my legs gasping in pain.

Grief, like dawn, broke through

and followed me up the trail,

pushed me as if I were a baby

taking my first steps in an uneven world. 

I raced grief, all 1.5 miles

up the mountain,

and when I got to the top,

I passed out.  

I dreamed our first date,

walking gently through the park, 

holding hands, sharing a kiss

and two secrets,

one from me, 

one from you.

I awoke to a full sun, 

a burn already developing

on my face, where wrinkles

formed around my eyes

from sleepless nights 

watching the empty crib

fade slowly into memory.

I still loved you, though

it was hard to articulate that.

I think we both found it difficult

to believe there was love

in a world where life

becomes a heart valve

developing wrong.

Coming back down the mountain,

I was struck with a cold wind,

and realized winter would soon

find its way here, maybe even today.

I knew this was a mistake

coming up here when the baby died,

but sometimes one must go

to the top of the world

to ask important questions.   

I would head back to New York the next day, 

take the long bus ride home,

and sit next to your bed. 

I would tell you the story

about how I fought grief

on top of a mountain,

how grief knocked me out

and I dreamed of you.

I would ask if you remembered my secret.

Of course,

you would say from between the pillows,

But not right now.  Not now.

A Beautiful Night

"...It's good for everybody

to hurt somebody once in a while.

Things I do to people I love,

shouldn't be allowed..."

-Adam Duritz

I sounded like a first grader,

sobbing into my paper cup

as my snow cone lay spilled

on the ground. It was easier

back then, not knowing

all of the crackerjack philosophy

that makes adults do the things

they do to each other.

I think back on past relationships,

and realize I have photographs

to prove we loved each other.

I'm not sure either of us needed

proof, so we never ended up

taking any.  Perhaps the need

to keep each other's souls' separate,

like wax paper between

chocolate chip cookies,

meant that photographs,

so oft accused of stealing souls,

were an unnecessary addition

to our complicated lives.

Perhaps we realized the limelight

was a treasure of our selves,

and together we discovered how

instead to be comfortable. 

We rediscovered Kevin Costner

one of those comfort nights

and fell asleep to his un-acting.

We cooked and became adept

domestics, finding an ease

and a passion that disguised

our own futile pursuits.

Disguises are dangerous

and like rotting fruit,

eventually show up on the skin,

which is why I remember first

grade and my snow cone,

rainbow-colored like a sunset,

melting slowly on the ground

as dusk settled.  I could smell

autumn in the dry wind kicking up.

The lamps were already lit

for the coming evening. 

It became a beautiful night.

Love Letter #1

She sold me like a river
from under my feet, a long
winding dreaming winding
beat by beat through tall grass
from old mountains, long trails

of old men's beards and young men's
tears, lost little dreamers in the sun
as I watch them all drift and die
and drift and die like the world
around me when I left you for the last time

under February skies.  I slithered away,
quietly undulating over the ocean,
finding no rest in the world of the way
back again, leaving trails of steam in my wake,
little cumulo-nimbus clouds drifting behind me

to rain and catch up to me one summer Saturday
that began with too much and too little
and sleep wouldn't come and you wouldn't leave
and I was left feeling, for the first time,
the hole in my heart where you once lay,

curled around me like a cat,
like your small cat on the memorial Monday
who for some reason didn't seem like he
recognized me and perhaps that was for the best
perhaps I couldn't, like most lovers, come back

to you at some point and say I'm sorry, or at least
I'm not at that point, though I desperately want to be.
I want to forget you, I want get over you, but wanting
and body is something entirely different, and it seems
I put you everywhere, little roadmaps in my joints

to remind  me of you and us in all our happiness
so that when I stub my toe I can think of only
the pool and hot of a Maryland day, when your
grandmother died and I helped you laugh
it all away.  I don't want you back,

I just want it to be ok.

Ghost

The postcard: a picture 

of the Athens Plaka at dawn;

a quiet before the reverie.

Your face then: 

gasping at the Parthenon; 

tasting, for the first time, a real tomato; 

eating too much lamb, the grease 

dripping down your chin.

Teatro Dionysus, 

breathing in the air of the ancients,

your beautiful dark hair flowing in the wind.

Bubbling laughter down the dark streets

of the empty Plaka after midnight, wine flowing.

Your sunbathed loveliness, dancing

in the Greek windows of dawn, 

quietly charming the great old civilization

and painting its pale loveliness

with your summer colors.  

I dream of us somewhere,

kissing in the quiet, slowly falling away

from the world, seeking out Byron's

signature at the Temple of Poseidon;

sharing uzo on a rooftop,

making love in the Mediterranean far into the night.

By the Sea

It was like a cannon on the wind
thrown far and wide by a tornado.
We all ended up in the same space,
the same small patch of ground
to call our own; to live in

as we watched each other grow
and flower and propagate,
becoming inviting to passing bees
and ornate women with lace gloves
on their porcelain hands, drifting

by to pluck us daintily by the elbows
and place us, small though we were,
on bookshelves and canvases adorning
their homes.  We were on a hunger strike
we knew nothing of until we met one another,

and with our hands inside our hearts,
found the cool interior beneath
the hot skin sand, throwing handfuls
of each other into the morning spring sky,
melting into glass, where passing light

might make rainbows of us all.
How small we will be together,
in our colors of happiness,
living life made golden by the sea
and the sand and the salt of each other

thrown lazily into the sky,
dim shadows of what we once were
disappearing into the midday sun.

Following the White Rabbit

Stopped and I wondered on the train
about this girl who sat next to me
because I noticed the dirt from her
shoes rubbed off on her feet

and I wondered, like you, if she might
come home and wash them before bed,
or roll around in dirty sheets till she
awoke new in the morning.  Couldn't

know the answer and walked around
fine gentleman in orange vests,
gorilla echoes in the night to call
them underground, under to a vast

other-city, the one above an iceberg
melting in the moon.  Couldn't
find her tonight, just couldn't
she already passed above and beyond

and I missed her.  Missing you, then,
in foreign scenes, out backdoors, walking
through mild winters on the heath,
breakfast mornings and hot breath

sleeping dead, I'm your Snow White
and you're the apple that kissed me
right before I woke up and loved
all over again, loved the warm

summer sun and wet summer rain
and wild abandonment, quiet music
like I always did and forgot.  Don't
forget me because at one time

I was actually important to you not dirt
of this city on your feet from your shoes.  

A Swing Set in the Sun

I could lie about my age to you
but it wouldn't help anything at all,
it would die off in a little cupboard
away from the sun, and right now,

all I want to do is rise in the sun,
stalk the sun, watch him (because
he is a he) turn corners around
tall buildings and laugh to see

only my face reflected as I walk past.
A year ago it was you too; as if you
needed reminding that a year ago,
it was nearly summer and we were

making plans, like so many couples do
and the summer could not wait
to wrap us in its summer embrace,
throwing us into backyard parties

and dinners and yoga, candlelight
and dimness, hot blanket nights
dreaming of the coolness of autumn
and the separation already working

its inevitability.  I remember a night
when the cat first arrived, how he
slept between us, and that was probably
in indication of a larger truth.

I could lie about my age then,
tell you I was much older and wiser
than my fresh sadness dictated,
but that's all right.  I won't lie

to you tonight.  I'll tell you instead
about walking back through the fields
at my old middle school with my first
girl friend, standing on the bridge

of a playground apparatus, and leaning
our faces up at the sun, finding
comfort in each other's strange
presence.  Swing sets come into view,

as if rocking back and forth through
the air made it all better, as if I
remembered for a moment the pure
simplicity of a swing set in the sun.

As if summer might tempt me back
further than you or her, to a time
when a twinkle in my eye
was the next great leap of imagination

and I knew nothing but that if I jumped
I would eventually come down
and not be hurt, because I knew
how to fall lightly.

In Progress

In a green grocer's near Belsize

I bought you flowers

and brought them home

to surprise you in front of no one

and to say, I actually do 

listen to you, something

I hope you find in someone else

someday.  I suppose we were

like Steve Martin and Gilda Radner

dancing all those years ago,

between themselves nothing 

but a frozen spotlight;

all words reduced to nothing

but a gamboling comickery,

a wonderful mirror-reflection

of a each other in each other.  

I watched that small clip

and thought of you, because

the night I fell in love with you

I played jazz piano, for you, 

drunkenly, and it seemed then 

those wine keys might be enough

to make you stay.  It was true,

there was very little left

for me but fall in love with you

and I did.  Like any frozen moment,

I held onto it longer than it took to thaw,

and the irony of recognition

in the middle of winter is not lost on me.

But it was beautiful, and I hope you

you would agree on that.  I hope you

would agree to dance with me again

someday, perhaps when we are old

and unembarrassed and happier.  

But none of this is really what I had intended

so I will leave it for a while and hope

that it will come back to me

more beautifully in an hour

or a day or a lifetime and maybe by then,

we will have found out what made us so

compatible...and be OK with it.  

Prelude

I wouldn't be surprised if you rejected me, she said, willing him to challenge her jet-black hair, her frozen blue eyes, two pastel ice cubes flashing ominously.  I wouldn't be surprised if I did either, he retorted, arching his back in a feline manner, dovetailing his spine toward a middle ground, this delicate sparring a perfect respite from his stresses. I smelled you happily into the evening, he said, And I hope to smell you well into the dawn.  Her scent, a mix of sand and mountain moss, was as fresh to him as the day he first found his olfactory limitations, the scent of women being the entirety of his talent, and therefore his weakness.  She smelled like trouble, but she smelled clean, a candle still waxy, not burned through, still relatively untouched by the wellspring imaginations of teenage fingertip fantasies.

If I dissembled myself before you, I doubt you'd say that, she offered.

He turned away, without an answer, and ran his eyes around the darkly paletted room.  He recognized Van Gogh then, the sublime painting of the cafe at night, juxtaposing light and darkness as if these two could only be appreciated if the other stood watch.  His eyes lit upon her, her soft milk-white flesh stretching time backwards to his childhood, to primal sensations that would undo him if he lived them again.  He thought about his first kiss, in a square lit by fairy lights, strong smells of cinnamon and eucalyptus, a cool breeze; speaking one moment and then, as if by a knockout punch, the world exploding in tiny light particles before his closed eyes, and all he could think was, Is this it?

She saw a far-off look come into his eyes then, the corners of his mouth rounding slightly to enjoy this film about ghosts.  He was wandering away from her to a happy place, but she liked that.  She enjoyed seeing this private moment that often occurs right before sleep, or in her case, when she bathed weekly, sloughing the dead skin of city air down the drain and remaking herself.  She dreamed then of men who made her palms sweaty, who found the place below her jawline where sensation meant she had to close her eyes, who loved her for these tender chinks in her well-made armor.  She glanced down at her hands then, found them rising to his jaw, caressing its definition.  He returned to her.

She kissed him tentatively on the lips, her skin brushing his courtly stubble, sensing the pheromone awakenings drifting between them as they breathed.  He was startled, a little taken aback by the proximity of body to body, of slight fabric tensings, as if he were on a bicycle riding past a fence where she swam naked and he caught a film-slide glimpse of her through the thin wooden slats.  Glorious moments have time signatures all their own and this was languid, glistening, like Miles Davis at midnight.  She caught her breath, the vocal folds loosening enough to emit a throaty warble from the depth of her abdomen.  Her eyes closed, lengthening the moment with their ignorance.  Trembling like washed children air-drying in the twilight, they exhaled and found they were clutching each other, demanding a crutch's responsibility from their opposite, their own supports failing them.

It came then, all at once: a realization that this would be different, that this was a flood the stilts and barred windows they built could not withstand and for better or worse, they were tied together by a sense of the other as part of their own skin.  Soon waking together would become a necessity, just as eating, breathing, making love.  Their futures twined in that moment like DNA.   A cab was called, the drinks were paid, he held the door as she exited and her body pulled him to her in the doorway of her building, desperate already again for that first moment, the anticipation, the fetal groping for ground after being deposited firmly into a new life.

Blue Roses Falling

The sound of you

retreated dimly

to another part of me

and these ukelele strings,

so melancholy in their

summer notes, danced

back through me 

like a thunderstorm,

big wet heavy drops,

blue roses falling

in a perfect 

recollection

of the night

you pulled me 

into the rain

and kissed me,

and I lost all

hope of inspiration

in anything but you.

Battle

Three thousand men in full armor
galloping headlong into some distant battle;
the trembling hearts, the straining muscles,
the pitch and silence of time strung out
like fairy lights along a moment.

The dream of it, the violence.

The aching hearts reaching back across
the wave of motion for any time
before now, any time where simplicity
reigned as simply as it did now,
without the vigilance, without the threat,
without water and blood and mud
and screaming shouts of souls escaping
in mystery streams of echoing dead men,
each dead, each alive, each mustering
within that space

within that time

as if it were nothing but a blade of grass
divided 10,000 by 10,000 times.

Then stop

and then

Shock.

Cycles

When we learn to live a little,
we also learn about dying:
those whom we live with
eventually leave, and we must mourn
them as if they were dead.

A relationship dies; it flutters out,
like the sun between summer leaves
eventually setting and leaving
nothing but the evening
and the stars, a reminder

of all those who are dead
and gone, a simple metaphor
to remember as we gaze upon
the stars and their remnants.
We are all made of stars,

to the stars we will return,
or perhaps we will become
part of an earthworm's digestion,
part of a plant's molecular makeup,
something poetic like that.

Perhaps my salad today
was Albert Einstein's part
of the brain that theorized
relativity.  But you realize
what a genius he was

when he said, "It's all relative,"
because a death to someone
may mean a new life for someone else,
and that is always what I try
to remember, or maybe try not to forget;

that love is an ever-fixed mark.
We spin like clockwork around it,
ticking our gears, locking into each other
for brief minutes, hours, days, years.
But we are nothing without birth

and without death, and each fresh
revolution brings us closer to the truth
about ourselves: that we are all eventually
a plant stem rising high to the sunlight
in early summer, beginning again

in some new-found life.

Echoes

Let me play a little music
in my stricken heart
that sounds a lot
like the chords
we used to beat
out together at odd
times of night; as if we
were creating a new language
that, when discovered all those
years later by humans digging
through the remains
of our lost civilization,
will deliver shots of beauty
throughout a world painted
by chaos and misdirection.

A Moment

If I could write
a moment perfectly
I would fill her up
with incandescence,
as if her soul,
for one fleeting moment
shone brightly
through her
smiling cheeks
and poked holes
in the still fabric
of my heart.

(Cont.)

Are these entities

identifiers?  Do we know

who we are in the middle 

of expectation, especially

our own?  Is our heart 

that willing to change us

for the satisfaction of itself?

Or should we take the lesson

and move on to the next 

existential question,

not of who we are

but who are we to become

with no one to reflect back

what is right

and what is wrong...

Gems Washed in Dirty Dishwater

"Isn't it strange 
we move our lives for another day,
like skipping a beat..."

I suppose in the laundry list
of my convocations of the past,
a relationship was always
something I thought would last

Forever.  Like the tide
that comes in and out
in some fairy tale
island shore,

my interest is always piqued
by those that have come before
and succeeded.  My passion,
my idealism, my neologistic

search for something unique;
as if love was my own creation,
my satisfaction, my abomination,
like Frankenstein and his creature's

horrific transformation
from reason to madness
to reasonable destruction
in the face of disturbed madness

by those deemed un-mad
diagnosing him un-sane.
But a flower is a flower
which are petals to be plucked

and played the old game with:
He loves her, she loves him not,
and there we are struck
with an inability to see

the forest for the trees,
to believe in nothing
but the happiness,
to hear bees buzzing

amongst the tall grass
and lean back and laugh
at all the wild inequity
of this most devastating life.

To grasp at dandelion seeds
thrown wildly into the air
by a passionate breeze
and let them fall wherever

they might, as if life had a plan
of its own and you were just a part of it
this whole time, just a weak-kneed
supper attendant seeking

beauty in each fresh course
brought before you, and, testing
your tongue, find little difference
between dessert and the main

and trusting your taste-buds
has become a just a game
because everything up till now
felt like a dream

and if this is real life
then what happened
in the past eighteen months
that made me fall asleep?

Like, a Self-Affirmation or something...

Somewhere, in the dark distance beyond all the sad endings that have been, I write a fiction in my head of a way for all of this to work. I write the small scenes of intimate moments playing out between us. I write the big goodbye scenes and the big hello scenes.  I write the longing of letters back and forth. Somewhere, this truth exists.  If I am heartbroken tonight, then please let me be heartbroken tonight because tomorrow I will be better and it's not to make you feel guilty, it's to make me feel better, to make me feel something in order to feel something greater in a long little while.  Yes, I still love you.  Yes, I still think of you, but mainly in pain, which is why I write these stupid phrases of my feverish brain to extol the virtue of my pain, to wreathe myself in the fire of it, to bathe in the melancholy, to itch out malcontent, because I know it will only help me in the end, it will only allow me to be myself quicker and stronger and faster than I was before and pretty soon you find that love is just one aspect of you, that love is in fact ok to send out on the wings of a dove, to maybe come back with an olive branch someday, but that day is not tomorrow nor the next day and those days are my days, not to wait, but to percolate, to obfuscate my demons and speak pseudo-genius words to drunk bar patrons and prepare the next great part while I breathe in and someday, when I'm successful, when that dove comes back to me, I'll be ready to accept it and move on, to become greater in the eyes of whatever, because I deserve as much as that whole ocean out there can give, but the dove is not a hunting bird and I'm not interested in fishing for affection, just a will to live.

Hard Lesson to Learn

She wrote the rules on the bottoms of her shoes
on how her feet should tread,
and then followed them,
stepping one foot in front of the other,
finding how hard it is to go
when one follows the rules.

So she tried skipping, and hopping,
tried to run, tried to jump,
tried dancing, cartwheeling,
shuffling and high-stepping,
but nothing rid her of those
rules on her shoes.  One day,
she found sand, and felt

the slog of it, the painful drudge through miles of slough.
Then it occurred to her, if I take off my shoes,
perhaps my toes will grip better
and my legs will feel stronger
and body lighter.  And it was true,
she left her shoes with their rules
and felt sand between her toes,

felt sun on her face, listened to the waves crash
over the beach, and turned her eyes upward,
toward the light, as her feet felt happy
without those rules or those shoes,
and she learned to walk barefoot
throughout her life, lifting toes to arches
to heels and happily humming as she walked along.

Dreaming

We make love in closets full of overcoats,
whose owners rich discardings provide
a pillow for our lust.  I dream of centaurs
gleaming through the wild sun
and pause to take them in:
so vivid, masculine, so alarmingly
beautiful, in a way that is not handsome.

I see you then, underneath me, the coda
of our physic humming softly, waiting
for the alabaster end of our evening,
but enjoying too much the repeat
of the last simple phrase to continue
on to the end, and light up our night
with an allegretti finish.

I'm dreaming, I know, and pretty soon
I will awake to find you are not there,
a simple symbol of something unfulfilled.
You are like my Odyssey; a journey beginning
where another has left off and I know not
which path to take, or who to listen to,
but I do know that dark caves

and labyrinths will be explored
in order to broker a peaceful way back.
I will drift into the future, at the mercy
of those waves, and those sirens
whose island songs lull me deeper
into a drudging sleep, and one day
I will awake to find me no longer there

and all will be a foreign place around me.
So I stake a flag around myself, claim
myself for me, and strive to see, past
one-eyed monsters, and cooing women,
the dream of home, the place of comfort,
the saturnine ellipsis of all the stars in the sky
and waves quietly rushing the shore,

finally applauding my efforts to dream.

Lemongrass Sundays

It was as if she glided on lemongrass sundays,
her hair, golden, thrown past her face,

like she was riding in a convertible
toward a perpetual movie-ending sunset.

She stopped briefly to scent a mourning flower,
drooping effortlessly, parched in the sun;

an image to conjure magic from the delight
of all around, to suffer sweetly the stings

of bumblebees lazily rolling past the flower,
to rest the tips of her fingers lightly on the tulip buds,

and close her eyes in a sensual embrace
of oval thoughts; of a spectacular man

who once gave her a flower like this one,
who is gone now, but lives in the sweat

of her palms, in the heat of a midsummer night,
her lying, almost naked, half-covered by satin sheets

and breathing deeply the warm siesta air,
swathed in moonlight and the warm blue

of a star-ridden sky.  It sets the pulse racing,
then dives in eager anticipation toward

this unsettled loveliness and she stands up,
and walks on in her white flower print dress,

sunglasses already flashing toward
her next obsession.  It was as if she floated

from dreams and I smelled lemongrass
one Sunday as she passed by.