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.