Trees I

Words come out

Affirmation. They send to you

Confirmation to the way,

Yet you know not my true play.

It’s enough for you to allow me

To walk beside you for hours,

Talk and drive and solve—

Not my heart’s dilemma—

Together in kindness with a smile,

Joke and laugh,

Eyes meeting in friendship

Without doubt—For you—

While I sit next to you

Sitting back on the porch

Hoping for, hating, enjoying

The moments of us staying in, staring at the pines.

Point of the Sea IV

What is it that lies before us

Just outside the finger’s contact

The reflection of light to an eye?

What is it in his face that I have to see again and again?

When you started liking photos

I liked yours back with equal intention

And urgency, until I saw the other

Tagged with you and yours.

Drawing back was all I could do.

What was beyond touch was left aside,

Afar, out of sight without attempting glance,

Beyond, without knowing where to look.

The kisses we had on the edge of the sea

Would be the Thirty-year anniversary that never came,

Your lips at the airport would be death’s separation,

An eternal departure where you never look back.

Housing VIII

Where am I?

I don’t know.

Am I trapped in an apartment, bound and gay?

Am I wandering the woods without compass, orientation?

Am I flying away quickly, never to know man’s kind more than I know myself?

Am I tilling the field, seeds thrust into, plowed?

Am I loading large bails of hay, tossing balls?

Or Am I lying on my couch, besotted and being sodomized?
That’s where I must be, hiding in a closet, passed out under the table, 
Vomiting out the window, sick to the stomach in bed, 
Desperate for life beyond the malaise of metaphors. 

Point of the Sea III

I knew I couldn’t see.

I walked over the broken glass anyway,

The nerves having been dead since the first time.

The quick impression became blueprint, the world went dark,

Routine the death of a thousand rods and cones.

Then there was a sign in my retarded vision

I never saw in the dearest light. After months

Of thinking there was no recycling, no rebirth from life’s darkness, there

In my twilit eyes was a shadowy indication

Missed a dozen times over in the best days’ pitched attentiveness.

How it would take a late night and long nap to see

Through encrusted lashes that the glass needs

Not shattered uselessness but opportune flame,

New-found viscosity a miracle,
Transparently ecstatic, galvanizingly illuminated, a glittering anxiety—vision.

Point of the Sea II

In trembling and wrenching hard the gut

The truth exploded like lava—

Searing, shocking, a splattering mess.

From the ejecta run multicolored fears,

Melting together to a viscous stream

Of purest white, parching water to all

Who fear for the dynamic range of wavelengths—

Energetically passing to another distant planet—
Traveling the darkness alone.

Point of the Sea I

Your smile is near me but you are not.

Your hands are far away but I feel your caress.

What was it we had, could we have it again?

You look not toward the Atlantic,

The voyages sought for are at too great a price.

No amount of months before hand,

No higher rates of savings will make up

The dividends you’re invested in another.

While I see your teeth through gladdened lips

And imagine fingers on areas shaved

I try to avert my eyes from yonder ocean because
My love knows no price too great to say no.

Housing VII

A word to come,

Irresponsible hospitality,

A week of gestures,

Focused eyes, attentive ears,

Accosting cops, cool drinks unsafe.

Pleasant walks bring poor choices near,

Bloody, beaten she falls on his neighbor's eye,

Making her spill her summer lemonade,

Almost a liter, a little at a time.

You only realize you’re a guest too
When your family turns against you.

Iced Over

And useless is the air conditioner.

Sweat rolls down my brow

Before I even turn it off to thaw.

Maybe with time off it will return

To its cooling purpose and save

Our mutual dripping.

Both of us are guilty of running

So consistently despite limitations

That we cause ourselves to fail,

The call to cooling turned to a freezing up.

Here is found a miracle, that by purposed pauses

We never come to emergency. To stop

And rest is not sloth, it is Sabbath.

Blue Jasmine

I used to know all the words

But now they’re all a jumble. They ran

Away so long ago, vanishing into paragraphs

And pages too sprawling and small to track or read.

Then it seemed the hieroglyphics exploded,

Leaving no syllables, no compound sounds—no meaning—

Just consonants and vowels, an alphabet where as pieces

From different puzzles no two could be

Tied, jointed, paired. In the end all one could do

Is make piles of them, a pre-adamic sorting

Based on size, color, character, awaiting the day

When language returns, the day God walks with us again

Through the garden, blessing an inflorescence of speech

And a fruitfulness of poetry by which we no longer stammer,

Gape, hungry for the well-spoken breath, but are sated,

Glutted with penetrating, uttered love,

A healing that soothes the soul’s desperation. Such

Longed-for and long-awaited messages are never

Negative but imbibed with peaceful potency that could last

A thousand years’ drought.

I am still in the desert.

I have been here a thousand years.

I have labored; piles stand.

I will wait another millennium for just one more word to come.

That word will be my last.