I love you like I love poetry.

And I love you like I love
poetry. Because you are
complex, a tidy, precise combination
of many words and
memories and meanings.
And I try so meticulously
to pick you to pieces, to slice
your words into halves and quarters,
to dissect you until you are
clean, shining tendons and bones
of meanings, of feelings.
And you seem to come apart
in a heap in my hands. And
you lose some fragment of your beauty
when I pull you apart.

But
there are moments of quick inspection
when i see the fullness of you, when i take it all
in at once -- moments when I see each word,
each bone and meaning, and you are everything
I've ever seen in this world:
and all
I want to see.

I wish I wish that I could be with someone who uncomplicated me. Who stood in focus when I am fuzzy and flustered. Who sees my lines and curves when I cannot. I wish I wish that I could find a sophisticated soul, a like mind, an easy voice, a breath that blows through me like a breeze and sometimes like whirlwind. I wish I wish I had a friend, a man who holds me as friends do, who cups my face and inquires after my days and storms off in fights but rushes back in the end.

I wish I wish for an easy move to eternity from solitude, from emptiness to, bit by bit, being filled and becoming fit. To circled and confined from being free. To being one whole from being just me.

From the Daughter He Abandoned, to the One who Called Him to Sea

You called my father to live like a fisherman
And leave me alone with my mom.
He followed you out on the raging sea
As your cause shook the world like a bomb.
As he followed your path, you spoke love.
You said it was all that he'd need.
But at the end of the day, he fell victim like me
To the Man with the mustard seed.

You say your love for him is stronger
Than his love for his own daughter,
So I wait for my prodigal father
To come home.

I think I may have known you once,
And true I left you once or twice--
I chose to live inside a fish
Instead of taking your advice.
So I slept in his belly and prayed for three days
As from your haggard face I hid
That you would cast your net and catch my fish
But you never did.

You taught him how to fish in water
For the souls of sons and daughters.
I scan the seas and pray my father
Will come home.

As you prayed your last in the garden
With the blood flowing to your knees,
He fell asleep and dreamed of heaven,
Dreamed of passion, dreamed of peace.
When they came for you, he fled from them
And left you embracing a tree.
Now was it worth to steal a father
Who betrayed you as he betrayed me?

Those who leave not son and daughter
For the sake of Me and My Father
Will never taste the eternal waters
Of my home.

There's three of you and only one of me.
So tell me how was I ever supposed to compete?
Your loving call drew my father out to sea,
And that loving call made a bastard out of me.

Lion of Judah

I freeze
As my feet hit the snow-covered floor of the den.
There are lions here,
Waiting to attack.
I feel their breath on my skin,
The pulse of their
Giant lion paws
Padding along the ground
Behind me,
Circling.
There paws that will
Move me
Toward their lion bodies
And their
Great manes.

And I am
Frozen.
Because it is snowing
And there are lions
And there is no place to run.

If I were Samson,
I'd rip you apart
And eat the honey from your side;
Or one of David's mighty men

Who could tear at you

With big bare hands;
And I would pull

Myself from this den
Just like Daniel did.

I
am no Daniel or David, and

I
am no destroyer of columns;
I cannot scale the walls of this den.

I cannot rip through your skin
(As if you had skin)
And eat my fill of the sweetness
From your wounded side.
So I stand here
As you circle me,
Frozen before your
Great padding feet,
And beg you to
Devour me.

"I used to be a poet,"
she says, tapping
a half-empty cigarette
on the edge of the table.
She squints against the gleam of sun
shining through the smoke
of the second cigarette of the morning.
"It all went up in smoke--
like this smoke," she says,
watching the air from her mouth
float up to her eyes
and become part of the atmosphere.

I don't write.
I skim
the surface of
dark waters;
I hover
over a sea,
contained and
bound, that pulses
against my skin.
I imagine a skiff
skimming the sea,
blowing its hair
back in its wake.
But I don't write.

Nothing feels quite beautiful
(like the yellow waves
of early morning on open waters,
free and flowing
like mermaid hair).
Everything here
is driven by an undercurrent
beating against a shrinking shore.

I don't write
because I can't see to.
I see desert
and evaporating salt water
and a dark always evening
and a tiny boat
that will soon be resting
on the floor of a sea
that once was brimming and full
but now is sand.

"Sand is easier
to walk on than water,"
I say.
"No one sinks
in sand anymore."
Better to rest my bones
in the sun
than sink silently
into a quiet black sea.

At My Kitchen Window

From where I sit, Autumn is beautiful:
By every shade, by every scent dappled,
And shrouded in a mystery distinct from every other earthly mystery.
The seasons all stir in jealousy in her presence,
For she encompasses in all of her mysteries all of theirs:
She sings in the citrus flavors of summer,
The oranges hot and sparkling like globed fruit against her gray sky;
And burgundy blossoms fill the air with the scent of new life,
Hanging from the trees and assailing the ground in a shower,
Fallen yet triumphant;
And the brown crunch beneath the feet of all her jubilant children
Prepares the ground for winter.

Nature, all your seasons surround the Autumn thrust:
They crawl before her, stand in awe
And clamor to be nearer to her encompassing mystery.