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.

Dirt Road IV

I urgently shout

I desperately run

I wave my hands

To get a ride to town.

My mothers sick

The broken gate,

The funeral to which

I know I’ll be late.

No matter how mad and disappointed
My black eyes and bowed stance be

You don’t stop,

You never stop for me.

Housing VI

I hear the voice of my mother.

She cries loudly from the temple mount

Of the contentment of stolen water.

Without looking up, I listen, but through my tears

I have no words, no rebuke, no comfort,

Only wisdom, always dressed in black, sits with me.

Among the mountains I hear the call

Of a silent spring, hidden and blue

Under fir and spruce, awaiting the summer

Toll of its feast and unveiling.

Housing V

At first I ground my teeth

When asking myself why I was gone.

Later I would wake up to clenched hands

In the dark, next to me a pillow--lonely.

Do you ever discover fists

When sitting, walking, thinking?

As if this divorce would be over

If I could hold onto her breath’s air.

Left Behind III

As your excitement bubbles

A wrench knots my innards.

With each item you neatly packed in,

Undone is my social sweater.

There is no exaltation without a sundering below.

I am left behind as you are freed.

A sentence of solitary freedom.

As you fly away I’ll take a picture

To touch that assoiling wind

In captured film, my instant shuttering.

Left Behind II

Sounds of an electric toothbrush

Ring at the sight of crusty outlines

On porcelain sink.

Drawers only half empty from packing

Done too slowly, of a broken e-reader,

A family portrait, used paintbrushes.

A colorful collection of permanent markers,

Bottles of empty beer in a line up against the window,

None looking me straight in the eye.

A half drawn plot plan, like the final walk and goodbye,

We rushed to avoid the end by sitting around. Now

The course to come is left to intuition.

It doesn’t take a discerning eye to see

I’ve been left to clean up their mess.

Left Behind I

This place hasn’t changed. 

My space remains constant

While yours has been vacuumed

Formless and void.

I bump into traces drifting around all morning,

Specters of a world forlorn and lost.

If only they weren’t real, horrid reminders.

Birds you named continue to fly about,

The handmade beehive still buzzes,

Fish swim gaily, trusting your hand

To feed them at the dimming of day.

Huddling Pigeons on Warming Tile Roof

Eight, dun grass in mauve setting light,

The trees that exhale by dropping leaves
Having held their breath all summer
Relaxing in the worst of wurthering winds,

Finding a pilgrim's fire in the deepest mountain winter,
A stream whose trickle continues months past rain,

Whispers that the end of life isn’t just being riven

Into cavernous silence, but climbing into a cozy bed—

Dreams that manifest when all things stretch

For spring rays beyond the solstice, bounding in ecstasy,

A  limning of verdure again.

Housing IV

When cracked like a nut

No protection left

In the blinding, drowning world with

Silvery, prying devices,

Make like seeds and let fall

The hard withholdings of your outershell—

Bitter, brittle small—

And sink, sink deep

Into the ground around you—

Soft, cool, satiating—

To the root you will find growing until

Once your legs are strong

You stand up into the sun for the first time

Finding harsh rays the source of your energy

And storms refreshing to the core.

Housing III

Would you feel it

If I told you I wanted to hurt you?

Would you stop

If you heard the wedding had already past?

Would you come back

If you saw my suitcases, ready to leave.

Would you care

If you learned of your grandchildren on graduation day

                        Having excelled with a quarter of your brain

                        Both brilliant eyes.

We’ll never know how the future would have come,

Until death we’ll be apart,

Lunches missed and cancelled,

Letting ashes go to ashes

The dust of loves to settle on the mantle

Of the house I grew up in

Now sold twice over to indifferent markets. 

Housing II

There’s my house.

I’ve just come from out of town.

Finally, a summer at home.

Weeds. Dead branches. Patchy grass.

Did they put a TV in the living room?

Don’t they know it’s for conversation?

Are those Christmas lights still up?

You leave for a year and all has changed.

I wonder how they’ve painted,

And how big my cypress has gotten.

The garage is open.

We did build this house.

It’s alright to invite myself in, right?

13 years we lived here.

You’d think new owners would respect

Instead of pulling—frantically?!—a gun.

I love that color though.

Housing I

A vision:

After years away, coasts and oceans apart,

You will return to the place from which you ran.

Your thoughts have never been far from it

Though the replacements have been spectacular.

You will fall in love, build a home, and take care

Of your parents. Life will be love and all is complete.

As you pull off the covers to turn on the coffee

Sober realizations. Most dreams never come true

And there’s no going home. It no longer exists.

I’m late leaving for the presentation.